Popular Reviews
The Killer
There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots. I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit. Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the … Read more
28 July 2014-07-28
Out in the UK This Week Noah (Paramount, cert 12, Blu-ray/DVD) Director Darren Aronofsky, having temporarily revived the career of Mickey Rourke with The Wrestler and then an entire genre – the tween ballet thriller – with Black Swan, goes for another challenge, the biblical epic. The story: a big flood. The man: Russell Crowe as a fundamentalist Noah. The tone: old school epic, with the odd arthouse break to remind us that Aronofsky once directed films like the overwrought Pi. Jennifer Connelly plays Mrs Noah in British Heroic voice, in what must be the least demanding role of her career. Surprisingly, bizarrely, very very little is made of the ark, the animals, the flood, … Read more
Killer Joe
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 18 August Lolita published, 1958 If you’re looking for a start date for the 1960s, you could do a lot worse than this: 18 August 1958, when Vladimir Nabokov’s novel was first published in the USA. Detailing the love of a middle aged literature professor for a 12-year-old girl, whom he has nicknamed Lolita, it had first been finished in 1953, but was turned down for publication by a string of publishing houses, finally seeing light of day only after Olympia Press in France, a publisher of pornography, printed it in 1955. In spite of its low key debut, it sold … Read more
Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea
OK, deep breath for the title alone. Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (or Zítra vstanu a oparím se cajem in the original Czech) is also conceptually the sort of film that requires a super-oxygenation session before diving in. It’s made in the 1970s but set in the 1990s, where time travel is a leisure activity that’s part of everyday life. Here, a bunch of aged Nazis who have been kept relatively youthful by the regular swallowing of anti-ageing pills plan to return to 1944, taking with them a hydrogen bomb that will allow Hitler to win the war. Got that? To that concept another one. Of two twin brothers … Read more
Candy
Though there’s plenty of people who take drugs for entirely recreational purposes and never go to hell in any sort of handcart, there’s not much drama to be had from making movies about them. So instead drugs movies tend to be about people hitting the buffers. Candy does at least do it with a roster of good Australian actors, who are required to pull out most of the thespian organ stops as they make the familiar journey – from “we’re just fooling around” to “oops, someone’s dead”, calling in between at all the usual stations on the degradation line. And luckily for us, it’s Heath Ledger and Abbie Cornish who brighten up the journey on … Read more
Headhunters
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 26 October Norway becomes independent, 1905 On this day in 1905, Norway became independent from Sweden. An independent country during the Viking and post-Viking era, Norway’s power declined after 1265, with the Black Death and competition from the North European trading and economic union the Hanseatic League forcing it out of its eminent position. In 1380 it was absorbed into a union with Denmark which stayed in place for four centuries (the country was formally dissolved in 1536, then re-established in 1660, though it continued to recognise itself as being Norwegian, and had standalone institutions and laws). Remarkably, this union was … Read more
Forty Shades of Blue
An oblique drama which appears to be about a retired Memphis music producer and ends up being more about his much younger Russian, possibly cash-up-front, wife. Rip Torn plays Alan, the legend, blustering egomaniac and serial boozer whom everyone appears to idolise, on the surface at least. The remarkable Dina Korzun is Laura, the Russian import whose eyes tells us she’s dealt with far worse than Alan, but even so she wishes he’d treat her with a bit more respect. The film does little more than observe them as they go about their muted life… until Alan’s son, Michael (Darren Burrows) turns up to throw a metaphorical hand grenade into the mix. There’s … Read more
The Adventures of Robin Hood
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 15 June King John “signs” Magna Carta, 1215 On this day in 1215, the king of England put his seal to Magna Carta (the Great Charter) at Runnymede, near Windsor, England. It is in effect a bill of rights, one forced on the king by feudal barons unhappy with the levels of taxation, John’s abysmal record when it came to fighting wars and his supine relationship to the Pope. Designed as part of a powerplay to unseat the king, it proposes limits to the power of the king, making that power more contractual in nature, and denies the king the power … Read more
I Care a Lot
You used to see plenty of films like I Care a Lot in 1990s. In the slipstream of Quentin Tarantino’s first burst of success there was a glut of movies with a “who’s zooming who” plot playing out in an “only in the movies” universe of smart talk, skull-cracking violence, hot women, cool men, gunplay and cars. Joe Carnahan – one of the best of the bunch of writer/directors working the territory – summed it up well in the title of his 1998 debut, Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane. There was a real sense of writers and directors having a lot of fun. Sometimes more than the audience. I Care a Lot’s writer/director … Read more
Charade
It’s the early Sixties, and the high artifice of the Hollywood studio system is suddenly being challenged by the supposedly more believable movie-making styles of a younger, hipper generation, among them the French Nouvelle Vague. Does Stanley Donen, an arch exponent of pure Hollywood artifice (he directed Singin’ in the Rain, for proof), take this sort of thing lying down? He does not. Instead he heads right into the heart of enemy territory, Paris, and makes a romantic suspense film that is stylistically and thematically all about artifice. The plot is, or appears to be, about the hunt for stolen money. Audrey Hepburn may or may not be a doe-eyed grieving widow. Cary Grant, who … Read more
Sharp Corner
Beta-male-goes-mad time with Sharp Corner, borrowing the arc of The Shining and starring Ben Foster as a Jack Nicholson stand-in. There is no Overlook Hotel or supernatural stuff. Instead the action takes place in a “mansion” outside the city where Foster’s Josh McCall has moved his family, not once wondering why this great big house in the middle of nowhere could be bought at a price they could afford. The reason becomes obvious on their first night in the place when, as Josh and wife Rachel (Cobie Smulders) christen their new home by having sex on living room floor, they are rudely interrupted by a car wheel flying through their picture window. Sharp … Read more
The Tango Lesson
Sally Potter took quite a chance with her 1997 movie The Tango Lesson, by casting herself as herself in a lightly fictionalised version of her relationship with tango dancer Pablo Verón. Potter does like taking risks, though. Her previous film, Orlando, was an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s story about a character (Tilda Swinton) who travels through history changing gender as he/she goes, and cast a man, Quentin Crisp (the self-confessed “stately homo of England”), as Queen Elizabeth I. After The Tango Lesson came Yes, in which all the dialogue was in iambic pentameter. In comparison The Tango Lesson is a restrained affair, about a film director between projects who is entranced by a … Read more
