I'll cut straight to the chase. It's not since Ong-Bak that a film has so wowed me with its (ha!) furious action. I have seen reviews comparing this movie with The Raid and The Night Comes for Us. The latter I remember seeing some of on Netflix, but after a point I just switched off because it seemed to me just full of sadism and mean-spiritedness posing as entertainment. The Raid comparison is more appropriate, especially since a major action sequence is when an army of thugs enters a multi-story building our heroes are trapped in, and they have to fight their way through. But The Raid itself was butt-ugly, shot on a Handycam level camera with no thought for lighting and contrast.
If we say that The Furious is defined by its action, then to me it owes more to the classic Hong Kong martial arts crime movies than anything else. While brutal, the action is also extremely balletic; 'beat' poetry at its finest (apologies, Mr. Ginsberg). In The Furious' world, duels are rare. Most fights are threesomes, foursomes, in general multi-somes. The bodies of combatants in flow are pressed together like a sandwich, twisted into a pretzel, piled up in a meat pyramid.
Director Tanigaki knows how to film his action sequences well - eschewing the frequent modern tendency for rapid cutting, he favors long takes in which we can appreciate the beauty of the choreography and the precision of the actors. It makes the fights easy to follow as a dance of deadly movements. The interesting thing is that in most fights, there are no 'fodder' extras, stuntmen who fall down after just a couple of blows to show how powerful the heroes are. No, almost every battle here is hard-won.
The best part of the film was the climactic 5-way showdown, which for me equals, and (sacrilege!) maybe even surpasses the final fight between the Peking Opera brothers (Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Yuen Biao) and Dick Wei in Project A. Without any spoilers, it features an actor/fighter who is part acrobat and part wrecking ball. He is basically Donkey Kong in live action. Lead actors Miao Xie and Joe Taslim have great action chops, and analogous to Angela Mao in Enter the Dragon there is a pivotal cameo at the start from Chocolate star (Jeeja) Yanin Vismitananda.
So yeah, if watching brilliantly choreographed bruising ballets is your idea of a good time, then The Furious will make you happy indeed.
In Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point, Harry Morgan (John Garfield) is a married sailor that leases out his boat for fishing trips. He is aided by his first (and only) mate Wesley (Juano Hernandez), a colored man with whom he and his family share the sort of friendly bond that would surely have raised audience eyebrows at the time. On one fishing trip, he meets the provocative Leona (Patricia Neal), who is accompanying her sugar daddy. Leona throws him strong feelers but he doesn't bite. He also turns down a proposal from sleazy broker Duncan (Wallace Ford) to carry some illegal human cargo for cash. But fate does not side with our honest family (sea)man. The sugar daddy defaults on his payment (and dumps his mistress), and there are bills that need paying. So Harry has no choice but to take on the job.
Unfortunately things go further wrong and he ends up accidentally killing a man. Harry throws him overboard, and after dropping Leona ashore, goes back to his wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter, who I only knew previously as Superman's foster mum, Martha Kent) and two kids. Now the coast guard impounds Harry's boat on suspicion and he still needs to provide for the family. Lucy well-meaningly nags him to give up on the boat and move to her father's farm. Harry loves his wife and daughters, and wants to do his best by them, but he wants none of the farming business: The sea is his lifeblood. He's in the pressure cooker and now it's getting hotter.
Desperate for a paying job, once Harry gets the boat back, he gives into Duncan's new job offer, which actually involves him being the getaway boat for a gang of bank-robbers. Does he actually go through with this? Will he get out alive, and if so, can he face his family again? These are the questions raised in this steamy noir drama.
Early on the film emphasizes the strong romance between Harry and Lucy's married couple. It's the backbone of the drama and one makes believable his actions, be it his rejection of Leona's repeated advances or his resistance to the temptation to make a shady buck. Harry's not a boy-scout but there are lines he will not cross. The threat to his family life is what raises the stakes in how the film plays out. The characters are beautifully written - while Lucy is the 'good wife' pitted against Leona's provocateur, neither of them are archetype 2D cutouts. You completely empathize with Harry's recognition of his fallibility and his resolve to keep certain ties sacred; his monogamy is not a cliche. Leona is also not the archetype 'whore with a heart of gold'; she understands why Harry is committed to Lucy, but does not let that stop her from trying to pull down his defenses. This nuanced struggle between faith and temptation is the powerful engine propelling Breaking Point's drama.
The boiling pot screenplay eventually explodes in the climax with a shootout on the boat. Without spoilers, the end is not a happy return to status quo. But apart from the haunting final image, it is mostly hopeful, and we are glad for that. Shot mostly on real locations, the film carries verisimilitude; Ernest Hemingway, who wrote the story To Have and Have Not, upon which it is based, is supposed to have declared it the best film adaptation of his works.
Coming off a 2k restoration by Warner Bros, the transfer is a solid one, with good detail and excellent contrasts that do justice to the visuals by Ted McCord (The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Sound of Music). The mono track is good enough to get the job done. Extras include a 20-min video essay by critic Alan Rode, a shorter piece by the people behind the popular cinephile Youtube channel Every Frame a Painting and a featurette with John Garfield's daughter Julia talking about her father, his rise and fall in Hollywood, and his work in The Breaking Point.
I'd first seen 10 to Midnight (10tM) on a pan-and-scan VHS tape in the mid-80's. I always remembered the image of the slasher, naked except for a pair of surgical gloves; effectively scary especially if, like me, you were well below the rating age at the time. Having the film on blu-ray gives me a chance to revisit and see how well it holds up now.
This is another in the long run of movies leading man Charles Bronson made with J Lee Thompson. J Lee had at one point had made celebrated war films Ice Cold in Alex, Guns of Navarone etc. But he was at a different phase of his career when he took up 10tM - the projects smaller in scope and lower in budget. 10tM is lower-tier for both him and Bronson, but not without its points of interest.
Bronson plays the tough old detective Kessler, on the trail of a murderer of multiple young women. Early on, the killer is revealed to the audience. He is Stacey (Gene Davis), a creepy young man with sexual dysfunction / fragile ego issues who takes violent vengeance on the women that reject his advances. The film is mainly a cat and mouse game between crafty killer and dogged cop. The interest comes from the cop's willingness to plant evidence to lock up Stacey, purely based on his conviction that Stacey is the murderer (Of course, since this is Bronson, he confesses before the trial to the judge, leading to Stacey's acquittal). Later Kessler copies the killer's stalking MO, humiliating him at his workplace. This is referred to in the climax where Stacey, after he is captured, screams about how Kessler's illegal actions forced him into a further massacre that leads to the death of at least 3 women when he goes after Kessler's daughter. The film ends on a note of vigilante justice in which it is left for the audience to wonder if the rule of law works both ways.
10tM is pervaded by a sleazy mean-spirited tone - I can't wholly disagree with Roger Ebert's review in which he says, "What is [Bronson] doing in a garbage disposal like this?". I think Gene Davis does reasonably well as the psycho-killer even though the script and Thompson's direction do not ask for any nuance from him. Bronson coasts along as he did in a million of his latter-day tough guy movies. The supporting cast is either workmanlike or outright pedestrian. The potentially interesting aspect of the the cop's ethics are never seriously called into question. This is a Cannon Films production, and very likely, the budget was not a generous one. Apart from the climax featuring a major police hunt with squad cars and a helicopter, there are no 'big' scenes, and it has a distinct DTV feel.
88's release sources its feature presentation from the same 4K restoration that was used on Shout Factory's North American release and also licenses the extras from that one. The widescreen 1.85:1 image is healthy looking and nicely presents Adam 'Terminator 1&2' Greenberg's cinematography. The DTS-HDMA dual mono track is good enough for the film's modest thrills and Robert Ragland's interesting synth score. Extras include a commentary track by Bronson biographer Charles Talbot and several featurettes, all borrowed from the Shout release.
And Soon the Darkness from writer-producer Brian Clemens and director Robert Fuest (the Dr. Philbes movies) is an effective 'missing person' mystery thriller. Clemens, famous for the vintage Avengers TV series (nothing to do with the MCU, kids), also directed the Hammer flick Kronos - The Vampire Hunter, which featured a James Bond-ish protagonist as opposed to their traditional puritanical heroes.
Pamela Franklin (The Innocents, Legend of Hell House) and Michele Dotrice (who I mainly remember as the long-suffering wife of doofus Frank in Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em) are two English lasses on a cycling holiday through rural France. With their comely looks and short shorts, the girls catch the eye of the local male population. Michele is getting bored of the lonely pedaling and not averse to a little attention, but Pamela is determined to (erm) carry on. This leads to a spat between the two friends when Michele decides to stay put in a lonely spot by the road, hoping for that young man on the motorcycle trailing them to make an appearance.
After hearing stories from the locals, a worried Pamela turns back for her friend only to find her missing. The man on the bike pops up again, behaving mighty suspiciously. Actually the whole neighborhood behaves suspiciously. While restrained in its depiction of violence or oppression, the film is a precursor to what would be known as the Backwoods Brutality genre. It helps that the girls are nicely rounded as characters; we do care when bad shit starts to happen to them in a foreign land. The film maintains the tension for a large part of the running time, even if it asks some of the red herring characters to behave in an unnecessarily cryptic/hostile manner. The climax isn't quite as explosive as one would have liked, but this was on the whole a good suspense flick.
Visually the blu-ray is a marvel. During the opening credits, things are not so great, but immediately after, there is a remarkable jump in clarity, saturation and detail. The film might have been shot yesterday if not for the fashions, attitudes and the lack of teal filters. The lossless PCM 2.0 audio is fine too, easily supporting the modest requirements of the dialog and music score. Extras include two commentary tracks (one with the writer and director, and the other from film historian Troy Howarth) and a video piece by horror reliable Kim Newman. Newman gives his customary cheerful burble, trying to present the film as a 2nd generation British take on French inspirations from British film-makers like Hitchcock. He also goes briefly into the careers of writer Clemens, director Fuest and the two leads.
Based on a story by the famous Russian author Alexander Pushkin, 1949's The Queen of Spades (QoS) is a fabulist melodrama on the themes of want and greed. When the Russian captain Suvorin (Anton Walbrook) visits the clubs where women and wine are aplenty, and games of chance are played, he himself refrains from gambling. Unlike his rich royalty-descended fellow-soldiers, he must scrimp and save for his future. In his own words he cannot afford to 'risk the necessary for the lure of the superfluous'.
In a tome purchased from a rather sinister (one could say Mephistophilean) bookseller, he learns the story of a certain countess Ranevskaya (Dame Edith Evans), who after selling her soul to the devil, obtains the secret of winning at cards. He becomes obsessed with extracting the secret from the Countess, now aged and crippled, yet still a strong-willed dominating woman (and looking rather like a Queen of Spades). He decides to make his way to the Countess by seducing her ward Lizaveta (Yvonne Mitchell). Liza is an innocent, bullied by the Countess who uses her as a lady's maid, and not wise to the ways of wily men. She succumbs to Suvorin's (copied) passionate love messages and secretively admits him into the house.
Suvorin instead makes his way to the Countess' room, to beg her to tell him the secret. He first offers to take her sin upon his head, then threatens her with his pistol. The countess falls dead from fear, and a frazzled Suvorin runs to Liza's room where he confesses all. Disgusted to learn the true motives for his 'passion' and his role in the Countess' death, Liza asks him to get out of the house and her life.
Later, Suvorin gets (or imagines?) a visitation from the dead Countess, who gives him the secret of the winning cards (Three...Seven...Ace), on condition that he marry her ward. He tries desperately to mollify Liza but is soundly rejected. Armed with the Countess' secret, he draws out his life's savings and enters the club. In a febrile humor, he plays a succession of games, each time betting the total of his previous winnings. In the third and last game, when he thinks he has the winning ace, he reveals his card, only to find that it is the Queen of Spades. He has been damned.
QoS is less a horror film than The Innocents (1961), more a fevered melodrama with supernatural underpinnings. Incidentally, Jack Clayton who directed that one was associate producer here. Director Thorold Dickinson (who was apparently hired only a few days before shooting began) generates, through deep focus and shadowy corners (DoP Otto Heller), an atmosphere of eerie unease that surely inspired Clayton (as does the impressive production design, contrasting the Countess' overbearingly lavish homestead with Suvorin's bare quarters). Anton Walbrook and Edith Evans are the two main cornerstones in the cast, and they are terrific in their respective parts. I also love that Suvorin's greed comes from his hatred of his circumstances and the derision he faces from his more prosperous fellowmen at the cards table. If I have any complaint, it is only that in the quest for a more cheerful final image, the film focuses on its least interesting characters.
But if B&W gothic melodramas are your thing, then you definitely need to deal yourself this hand.
The disc boasts a terrific transfer, equaling Criterion's work on The Innocents, if we're talking B&W masterpieces. Comparing with screenshots of the earlier Kino Lorber release, I'd say the image is appreciably refined with better contrast and grain resolution. The lossless mono audio is clear, both dialog and the evocative audio effects (the scene where Suvorin hears the thump of the ghostly Countess' walking stick and the swish of her gown approaching his room is a sterling example). Extras include a commentary track, multiple featurettes, and archival audio interviews with the director. There is also a slim booklet included in the case. The slipcover is useless for me as it's the same front and back image as the inside cover.
In Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown, actor Tomas Milian played a character nicknamed 'Cuchillo' aka 'The Knife', who is chased by Lee Van Cleef's lawman. Cuchillo's a vulgar and shifty bastard, loud mouthed and slippery, amenable to all kinds of dirty tricks. The character was obviously a hit with audiences, because Sollima and Milian return to Cuchillo in Run, Man, Run (RMR). Here his braggadocio is a little tamped down and he is a touch more openly heroic. Cuchillo gets mixed up in an adventure pertaining to the Mexican revolution when an imprisoned poet he helps to break out of jail confides to him in a dying moment, the location of hidden gold in Texas meant to fund the rebellion.
But several other parties are interested in the gold, and perhaps for less altruistic reasons. There's former sheriff Cassidy (Donald O'Brien), a pair of French mercenaries, the Texan mayor (Gianni Rizzi, who frequently played oily villains) and his daughter, and the bandit Riza. Cuchillo's quest leads him to tight spots on several occasions: he is beaten, shot at, strung up, tied to a windmill. To survive, he must rely on his wits and his knife skills, and occasionally, the help of some unlikely allies.
While the political angle has a place in RMR, it is secondary to Cuchillo's adventure. There are even some moments of black comedy, like when Cuchillo steals food from a house and walks out the front door only to find himself facing a firing squad. Milian is a delight in the lead, conveying as much through shrugs, grins and glances as through dialog. There are some strong actors in the supporting cast. The action scenes are ambitious and fun. I know Leone is a bigger name, but I find Corbucci and Sollima's less pompous western tales more easily watchable.
A few words on the blu-ray release from Eureka:
Video-wise, the Eureka transfer is pretty fine. Detail is not always the greatest, but the colors look pretty good. In general, it resembles how I'd expect a low-budget Italian western of that period to look like. The Italian mono track I used (overdubbed, of course) sounded good. Bruno Nicolai's score has some nice moments (my favorite is a nighttime ambush where Cuchillo has to take on a gang of fellows with his knives, while an ally takes up sniper duty). The English subtitles are generally fine, although there is the occasional typo like when the rebel leader tells his henchman to "...get the keys to the 'panty' and double the men's rations". There is also an English audio track (with optional SDH subs).
Extras include a feature commentary with (who else!) Kim Newman, a 20-min video essay by Stephen Thrower, alternate English credits sequence and a lengthy trailer. The booklet has 2 essays by critic Howard Hughes, one on the film, and an exhaustive rundown of films featuring the Mexican revolution. The now OOP first run of this movie had a bonus disc with a 85-min badly truncated US cut (and its own commentary).
RMR is another fine specimen of the spaghetti western genre, and even if you didn't get the LE, the standard release has enough good stuff in it to warrant the purchase.
It's general acclaim notwithstanding, many Mad Max fanboys were not pleased that the franchise's last installment Fury Road was less a Max showcase and more a film about its female protagonist Furiosa (Charlize Theron). Now 9 years later, this prequel goes even further in that direction, focusing entirely on the origins of the renegade woman warrior. Max is seen only in a single shot, replicating the one at the beginning of Fury Road.
We first meet Furiosa as a little girl from an unmapped oasis, kidnapped by raiders when she goes foraging. Her brave mother embarks on a rescue mission, but is killed by the horde of bad guy Dementus (Chris Hemsworth). Dementus imprisons little Furiosa to know the location of her oasis, but is soon forced to give her up to Citadel ruler Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme filling in for the late Hugh Keays-Byrne). To escape the fate of joining Joe's harem, Furiosa shaves her head to disguise herself as a boy, and works for the Citadel garage. Later as an adult (Anya Taylor-Joy from The Menu), she shows her mettle in an astounding vehicle combat sequence that demonstrates helmer George Miller's continued mastery of the craft. This earns her the respect of Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the Citadel's 'War Rig' driver, who then furthers her education in survival.
An aging Dementus reappears on the scene, engineering treachery to take over the citadel. Amidst the battle between the different factions in the wasteland, Furiosa must obtain her revenge and her release. As you may expect, there is a good amount of combat here, both on vehicles and off. Anya Taylor-Joy gives a decent account of herself as the taciturn constantly wary warrior, and she is certainly up for the physical demands of the role, which I had not expected from seeing her as the cigarette-huffing stick-figured girl in The Menu. But it is Chris Hemsworth who seems to be having the most fun. His Dementus is by turns a blusterer, a comic, a megalomaniac, a traitor...yet in the end he almost wins our sympathy with a superbly delivered monologue about how vengeance never takes away the pain. It finally leads to the point where Furiosa's mission in Fury Road begins.
At nearly 2.5 hours, the prequel is significantly longer than Fury Road. A lot of the time is spent on identifying the different factions and their politics. It's not Shakespearean drama, and some of it more in the vein of video game cut-scenes. Thankfully these proceedings (marked by portentous chapter stops) are sufficiently punctuated with enough blistering action to make the whole dish palatable. Once again, Miller shows how to conduct scenes of battle which are palpable and have a clear flow that makes them easy to follow.
While I would have liked for a more crisp adventure, I still had a good time at the cinema, which is really where you should be catching this spectacle.
55 years ago Haskell Wexler, known primarily as a cinematographer (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest), made a film called Medium Cool. Wexler's film was an auteur-driven enterprise, written, photographed edited, co-produced and directed by him. In it, a young Robert Forster (Jackie Brown) played a Chicago TV news cameraman dispassionately capturing sensationalist stories with his 16 mm in the period leading up to the rioting at the Democratic National Convention. While not a period of actual civil war, there was a strong element of unrest among the American people on account of opposition to the Vietnam War and the assassination of Equal Rights activist Martin Luther King. With its nouvelle vague inspired freewheeling journey, Medium Cool captured the zeitgeist of that period in a manner few films have. As critic Vincent Canby says in his review, it portrays "...a picture of America in the process of exploding into fragmented bits of hostility, suspicion, fear and violence."
Alex Garland's Civil War is set in an even more chaotic dystopian near-future, with the White House a fortress occupied by a Fascist dictator and the country torn apart by violent secession. Veteran combat photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her comrade Joel (Elite Squad and Narcos fame Wagner Moura) plan to travel from Brooklyn to DC to interview the president. Tagging along is their mentor Sammy (Stephen Henderson). Sammy has played the game a long time, but now he's "too old and fat to run", even to save his life. They have another fellow traveler in Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) a wet-behind-the-ears novice lugging around her father's film camera. Having seen her lose it at a riot event they previously met at, Lee is reluctant to take the girl on board, but Sammy and Joel convince her.
In their road journey to the capital, the group see violence in multiple forms, including armed assault, cruel vigilantism and even mass civilian murder by militia groups. Garland dishes out some mordant humor: The once-almighty US dollar is shown to be hugely devalued ($300 can only buy a ham / cheese sandwich). In a shootout between two bands of snipers, one of the men mockingly answers Joel's question about which faction they are fighting with "The guys trying to shoot us".
While Garland originated as a writer, the most gripping parts of Civil War are the visuals (DoP Rob Hardy, who handled cinematography for Garland's previous features Ex Machina, Annihilation and Men). The scenes of rioting and armed conflict are captured with veritable intensity. Garland also uses the full height of the IMAX screen, especially noticeable in the scenes where helicopters glide over troubled vistas or during the large scale climactic battle in the capital. The format also gives tremendous depth of field and a 'window effect' into the happenings on screen.
The visuals are sadly undercut by the predictability of the narrative. Where Medium Cool or Oliver Stone's Salvador (also about an American journalist caught in a civil war) echoed the chaos and desperation of unrest and gave it a personal edge, Civil War mostly follows a conventional coming of age drama - Lee is the aging camera-slinger that takes a maternal interest in Jessie (even Joel who is said to be hitting on her never crosses any line) and the youngster in the course of her adventures wises up to emulate her idol (this is contrasted with Lee suddenly losing her nerve during the final conflict). A certain "circle of life" metaphor hinted at early in the narrative is given a groaning realization in the climax.
Don't get me wrong here, Civil War is admirable for its technical audacity - Garland achieves the kind of spectacle that would normally require 2 or 3 times the budget, and he does not trivialize his material with fake heroism. The actors are fine too, adjusting to the physical and emotional needs of their characters. But the rote writing reduces the film's power as a statement on the brutality of civil war.
P.S. If you are seeing the film, make sure to catch it on the largest screen format.
I have to confess I was never a big Patrick Swayze fan during his heyday. His romantic leading man style was not a huge draw for my schoolboy self, who was more interested in slashers and bullet-buffets. It didn't help that his biggest hit Ghost was a movie I loathed for being a piece of garbage. So while I had heard of Road House at the time, the idea of Swayze as an action star did not (ha!) sway me and so I'd never actually watched it before. It was the release of the 2024 remake on Amazon Prime that made me reconsider.
The '89 Road House has over the years become something of a cult classic. Swayze plays Dalton, a tough guy with a feared name, who is hired by bar owner Kevin Tighe to handle the violent elements that are ruining his business. With sheer presence and the occasional takedown he starts to bring order into the place. Then Dalton comes up against local big-shot Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara), an extortionist and shady businessman who rules the town with an iron hand.
Very rightly it has been pointed out that Road House, while clothed in 80's garb, is really a 'Western' - Swayze is the taciturn new gunslinger in town and Gazzara is the evil big rancher that's been squeezing out the small farmers, store-owners, and heck, even the saloon guy. A large part of the film runs on Swayze's charm. He has excellent chemistry with the supporting cast including the sultry Kelly Lynch. Gazzara can be a wonderful actor when he wants - check out his work with John Cassavettes or his pivotal part in Anatomy of a Murder. Here he's slumming it in a caricature "evull" role, still he gives this joint a bit of class. As I later learned, Swayze had studied some martial arts and this comes in handy for the several nicely choreographed action scenes. The fist-pumping soundtrack is provided by the enthusiastic Jeff Healey Band.
Apart from the nudity, most of Road House is a solid PG-rated adventure. The climax however decides to go very violent, what with throat-rippings and shotgun massacres. It's a startling change of tone, and I wonder if it was influenced by the trend of the violent spectacles from Stallone, Schwarzenegger & Co (even the way houses explode is hugely exaggerated, like they were filled with dynamite and kerosene). It is an absurd kind of film (as Roger Ebert's review very rightly points out), but there's a charm to it, courtesy the likable cast (a hot Sam Elliot appears as Dalton's buddy), the action and the rousing rock score.
Road House (2024) is a remake led by a ridiculously shredded Jake Gyllenhaal. This film's Dalton is a retired UFC champion who apparently has such a reputation his opponents prefer to surrender without a fight. Now making a living in illicit fight clubs, he soon lands up to protect the titular bar (In the original film the place was called the Double Deuce).
While Swayze's character radiated a taciturn "Don't fuck with me" menace, Gylenhaal's Dalton is more chatty and affable; he even drives down his opponents to the local hospital after he has broken their bones. I appreciate that Dalton is not another sullen asshole, but it makes the dark side of his persona a lot less believable - Then again, it's a very cliched "I once killed a guy in the ring" dark side, which John Wayne did much better in The Quiet Man.
The bar in the remake is apparently such a good deal they have a different act performing every night. This dilutes the more cozy feeling of the original and makes the performance aspect more anonymous. The bad guys are now dealing in drugs and real estate. The action is amped up with boat chases and bigger explosions. Real-life UFC champion Conor McGregor makes a huge impression as Knox, a crazy tattooed mob enforcer up against Gyllenhaal - McGregor's performance is not necessarily in tone with the rest of the film, but he livens up every scene he is in. He shows the potential to become a big movie player, if he can keep out of jail.
Road House (2024) is more self-aware and a precocious young girl in the cast makes smirky remarks about it being a Western narrative. Director Doug Liman (who previously did the surprisingly enjoyable Edge of Tomorrow and American Made with Tom Cruise) has a certain felicity with humor, but this remake is more passable than memorable.
Included in Cushing Curiosities, the lavish Peter Cushing centered blu-ray box-set from Severin Films, Cone of Silence (aka Trouble in the Sky) is a legal drama set in the aviation world. Despite his third billing after Michael Craig and Peter Cushing, Bernard 'M' Lee's experienced pilot is actually the film's lead. Known to go wholly by the rulebook, Lee at the beginning is subject to an inquiry after a botched takeoff on the new 'Phoenix' plane. He is sure he has done nothing wrong. The aircraft company and the Phoenix's designer (Noel Willman from Hammer's The Reptile displaying a palpable sensitivity here) are equally adamant that there was no mechanical failure or design flaw.
After he is docked for 'pilot error' Lee finds reprieve when flight trainer Michael Craig clears him after a rigorous examination in which he flies blindfolded. The rakish Craig is also developing feelings for Lee's dad idolizing daughter Elizabeth Seal. But where is Peter Cushing, you ask? Cushing makes an appearance shortly after as another pilot placed rival to Lee. Cushing's character has in some reviews of this film been described as a villain, but that's not so - he is merely a biased individual. He doesn't like the idea of Lee being allowed to resume flying the Phoenix aircraft and allows his prejudices to guide his assessment. It's a small but solid supporting character and Dear Peter gives it his customary good show.
After more takeoff scenes - the film tries to generate a "will-it-won't-it-crash" scenario each time Lee takes the wheel - there is another accident, and this time it's fatal. What remains is for Craig to go over the incident and reassess if Lee was at fault or there was another reason. The exact details were fuzzy to me, but the film seems to suggest that the pilot's rule book did not account for some specific conditions of weather and load, and pilots that followed it to the letter would actually end up botching the takeoff.
This stiff upper lip drama is a fairly mundane "programmer", but it's aided by a dependable cast of British actors - besides the aforementioned, there's Andre Morell, George Sanders and Marne Maitand. There are several shots of actual aircraft takeoffs that don't appear to be random stock footage. It's not the most exciting movie but it a pleasing solidity.
Severin's blu-ray transfer shows some amount of source print damage (lines, scratches), but has good contrast and looks organic. The audio in the dialog sounded to me distractingly boxy and clipped. Extras specific to the movie include a commentary track with genre film historian Jonathan Rigby and a short conversation with the now old Michael Craig (the movie was a routine job for the contract player, but he seems to have pleasant memories of the cast).
The bigger bonus on this disc is the trove of audio interviews with Peter Cushing at various points - The Guardian interview (which I think is the same one that was on Severin's 2011 release of Horror Express) is played over the film, while others are played over selected images / video. The most touching one for me was where he is talking about his home in Whitstable and about his life with and after his beloved wife Helen. If you were looking to these interviews to learn something previously unknown about Mr. Cushing or unlock any secrets about his character and method, you may be disappointed. But I found a certain satisfaction in the confirmation of my image of him as a dedicated professional, and a simple, kindhearted GENTLEMAN.
I first came to experience the work of Budd Boetticher through the wonderful Ranown Westerns set Indicator put out some years ago. With that series of movies, Boetticher did for Westerns what Val Lewton did for horror - use the genre to tell thoughtful stories with layered characterization, and avoid being just cliched B-budget matinee fodder. So of course, when I heard that Boetticher was a fan of bullfighting as a sport and that he regarded The Bullfighter and the Lady as one of his most personal pictures, I was naturally eager to see it. My viewing was with the reconstructed 124 min Director's Cut (DC).
While American Johnny Regan (Robert Stack) is visiting Mexico with friends, he is taken up with the local bullfighting scene and meets with champion matador Manolo Estrada (Gilbert Roland aka Luis Antonio Damaso). He also locks eyes with the alluring Anita (Joy Page), engaged to one of the assistant bullfighters in Manolo's team. Possibly as a way to continue meeting with Anita, Johnny asks Manolo to teach him the art of bullfighting.
Thus begins a lengthy process of training and trials, during which Johnny develops his skill and also a meaningful friendship with Manolo and his wife Chelo (the queenly Katy Jurado, who has a showstopper scene when she tells off a drunk spectator that jeers Manolo into competing with an injured hand). The film's biggest strength is its commitment to showcasing the various aspects of the sport and not make it just a heroism gimmick. You don't see Johnny become a showboat expert after two lessons - he makes a mistake, learns, stumbles over something else, learns again. It is not dull repetition, but the thoughtful depiction of a sportsman's growth...and I mean sportsman in the best sense of the term. For it is not just technical skill that Johnny acquires, he also absorbs the patience, understanding and camaraderie that separates the great sportsman from the petty competitor. In parallel we follow his pursuit of Anita, including a misunderstanding that makes her reject him, and how they eventually reconcile. This is all one organic narrative, and the film is essentially one of deep human feeling.
Of course, this does not address the elephant in the room, or in this case the bull. In its loving documentation of the sport, the film talks about the selection of bulls for their 'bravery', and the admiration the matadors have for the beasts. All the same it does depict a form of bullfighting in which the animal is pierced with lances (that cause it pain and increase its aggression) and eventually killed by a sword. You could argue against the 'gentlemanliness' of a sport that involves such actions, but the film focuses on the art and skill involved in the sport and confers upon it a nobility of spirit.
The 87-min Theatrical cut I understand radically alters the film, chopping off many scenes of bullfighting and of Johnny's friendship with Manolo, making it a simple romantic tale of his pursuit of Anita. These cuts were apparently made to make the film more palatable for audiences by John Ford after he was invited by the film's producer, his buddy John Wayne. It will make for an interesting curiosity when I get to it.
Video quality on the DC is variable. Most sequences appear solid enough, with a veneer of grain, but several shots have a softer look with blown out whites, density fluctuations and even a bit of wobble. These shots may be exclusive to what was used for the reconstruction of the DC, I'm not sure. The quality of the film itself is good enough to justify any deficiencies in the source. The (mostly) English mono audio is fine. The Spanish characters speak to each other in Spanish and these lines are not translated (but they are transcribed in full when you turn on the subs).
Extras-wise, I have not gone through them as yet but Indicator seems to have done another sterling job of compiling lengthy featurettes on Boetticher's life and movies, and the special place this film has in his career, and my copy includes the chunky booklet which I assume is packed with interesting content (the LE is still available for a very reasonable sum, and even without this booklet this can be regarded as a packed release and highly recommended).
Harold Becker's The Black Marble - adapted by author and former LAPD detective Joseph Wambaugh from his own novel - is an odd movie experience in terms of tonal consistency. Sometimes it wants to be a screwball comedy, and at other times it steps into significantly bleaker territory. That said, the film has charms that keep you engaged even through its issues.
Robert Foxworth is AA Valnikov, a Hollywood precinct cop with Russian roots. At the beginning of the film, he staggers drunk into a church service and ends up snapping his cuffs on his own crotch. His previous partner is dead and he has recurring nightmares of a skinned rabbit; clearly, Valnikov is a man with problems.
This being 1980, the police department doesn't believe in recommending him for psychiatric counseling (hey, a burnt out cop with a service firearm - what could go wrong?). Instead they think it'd be a great idea to saddle Valnikov with a new partner, hard-nosed career policewoman Natalie Zimmerman (Paula Prentiss, channeling Margot Kidder's Lois Lane brassiness). Zimmerman's objections are pooh-poohed away with disturbing insensitivity, and even the script treats her as a bit of a joke. Apparently, all Mr. Valniknov needs to get over what's eating him inside is to pow-wow with the new colleague and introduce her to his borscht-serving family, until they inevitably fall in love, courtesy an extended nightcap session. It's a problematic concept for me, although Foxworth's performance and his chemistry with Prentiss are persuasive. He has a nuanced take on Valnikov - even in his frequently drunk state V is always polite, not the renegade asshole Dirty Harry stereotype.
Then we have everyone's favorite character actor Harry Dean Stanton as Skinner (a reference to the rabbit in V's nightmare?). Skinner is a pet store / shelter veterinarian who schemes to kidnap a rich girl's miniature Schnauzer for ransom to pay his massive gambling debts. Only, it turns out his victim Madeline (Barbara Babcock) may not be so rich as he imagines - she just happens to live in a large Hollywood home, and struggles to pay her bills. There's an engaging banter between the two, as Skinner tries to assert a tough guy demeanor he cannot truly embody, and she pleads her financial woes to him. It's funny till the dog loses an ear, and then I couldn't laugh at it anymore (even though the injury is only implied, and we later see the animal unharmed, apart from a bandage covering the ear).
In a meeting where the intimacy certainly crosses the line for a professional interview, softhearted Valnikov vows to find Madeline's dog. Zimmerman's jealousy is aroused by his show of concern, even if she has a steady boyfriend, as she frequently reminds V...and herself. She gives vent to it by rolling her eyes and emitting disparaging remarks to the victim about the fuss raised for a dog. You can tell that sensitivity training wasn't big for the Hollywood PD, at least in 1980.
But if there are significant tonal discrepancies, the film also has some endearing quirks. Stanton's Skinner is a layered character - he's not an evil man, he's just desperate. The climax where Valnikov goes after Skinner is probably one of the more unique action movie showdowns, taking place in the pet shelter. Skinner's comeuppance in a way mirrors Valnikov's handcuff accident at the start.
A young James Woods has a two-scene appearance as a street musician.
A few words on the blu-ray from Kino Lorber:
The transfer comes off a recent 4K restoration and the bulk of it looks very strong, with robust colors and fine grain resolution. Some shots are softer, but it may be a product of the original shoot. The dialog and Maurice Jarre's romantic score have decent presence in the DTS-HDMA 2.0 track, but I still had to use the optional subs to get some of the slang and Foxworth's mumbled dialog. The not quite plentiful extras consist mainly of a director's commentary and the feature trailer.
After I saw the trailer for The Pope's Exorcist (TPE), I was expecting a campy knockoff of William Friedkin's influential possession shocker The Exorcist - In short, I wasn't in for the scares, I was in for the laughs. This turned out true in most aspects. Star Russel Crowe complements his stocky frame with a heavy Italian accent to play the titular clergyman Gabriele Amorth. The character is based on an actual person, himself a colorful character with such charming opinions as, “Practising yoga is Satanic, it leads to evil just like reading Harry Potter”. Amorth was chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome, whose Bishop is the Pope himself. As per his own statements, Amorth performed tens of thousands of exorcisms, a claim that has been disputed. I'm thinking it might have been more interesting to see a biopic of the man himself (Friedkin, no less, covered an exorcism by Amorth in 2017, in a documentary called The Devil and Father Amorth, which received very tepid reviews). But TPE takes the same route as The Conjuring series did with Ed and Lorraine Warren, assuming Amorth's claims to be (ha!) gospel truth.
In a hilarious prologue, Amorth draws a demon inside a pig, whose head is then blown off with a shotgun. He is presented as a kind of papal James Bond, traveling across countries on missions (pun unintended): Of course, instead of an Ashton Matin our padre rides a swishy Lambretta and his choice of poison is a doppio espresso, stirred not shaken. Amorth is called in by M...erm, the Pope (Franco 'Django' Nero) to deal with a dangerous new case. This time it's an American family in which the widowed mother (Alex Essoe) with her kids travels to her husband's sole legacy, which is - you can't top this for absurdity - a disused Abbey in Spain.
The kids (Laurel Marsden and Peter DeSouza-Feighoney) are sulky smart-asses to start with, but things get worse when the young son starts to looks funny, talk in other voices and (naughty, naughty) cops a feel of mommy's boobs. Perfunctory visits to neurologists and counselors serve no purpose (they never do in these films). The local priest (Daniel Zovatto), after he is sent crashing out the boy's door, manages to hotline Rome, and Amorth rides in.
The rest of the film is a back and forth between Amorth and the demon (with Zovatto's priest taking the Jason Miller part from The Exorcist). It mixes the standard exorcism circus show with preposterous allusions to how the Spanish Inquisition (which in reality led to the death of thousands of people, and torture/incarceration of scores more) was basically the brainchild of a possessed priest, giving the church a clean chit. Still, the real Amorth professed that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were the product of demonic possession, so this might be "true to source".
While not as much of a LOL-fest as I had hoped, TPE has sufficient hilariously absurd material to be a decent time-pass watch for a weekend movie night. Crowe seems aware of the camp quotient and his performance reflects the tongue-in-cheek. I did wish Franco Nero had also got in some of the action. Maybe Pope Django could have come in at the climax with a demon-slaying gatling gun quipping at the demon "Go back to Hell!"
You don't actually need the 3-episode Netflix documentary mini-series to understand the psyche of Arnold Schwarzenegger. This less-than-5min interview clip taken from the time he was filming Conan the Barbarian (1982) will suffice:
Remember here, this is before Conan had been released and made his name as a major league Hollywood star that could crush box-office records across the world. Arnold's primary reputation then was as a star bodybuilder, who had worked in a few small movies, and none as the leading man. But he is unironically comparing himself to Clint Eastwood and Robert Redford. With regards to his pathway towards stardom, he rates himself an "8 out of 10, with only 2 more points to cover".
Anyone that saw this footage at the time would have laughed his butt off at the man's audacity. Arnold's hulking frame, unmistakably Teutonic face and thick Austrian accent were considered liabilities in the Hollywood of that period. The only opportunities for bodybuilders to get leading roles had been in low-budget Italian "sword and sandal" movies (his idol Reg Park had done a string of Hercules movies in Rome in the early 60's before returning to the bodybuilding business).
But Arnold, from an early time in life, had a staggering level of belief in himself - what in some other man would have been vainglorious boasting, he set out to make truth. This is echoed in the documentarywhen he says [paraphrasing], "If I can visualize something clearly, then I know 100% that I can get there." In its 3 defined chapters - Athlete, Actor and American - Arnold sets out to demonstrate its subject's determination to "get there" in each of his chosen endeavors. It goes without saying that the treatment is glossy with more than a little dash of hagiography. It would have been essential of course, to obtain the kind of access they get to Arnold, the superstar for whom "Too big is not big enough".
So we get the familiar story of how young Schwarzenegger took up bodybuilding as a means of making his mark and getting away from the hard life in Austria with the aim of making it big in the USA. Once he had conquered the bodybuilding world (he held the Mr. Olympia trophy undefeated from 1970-75), he shifted gears to movies. Along with main box-office rival Sylvester Stallone, Arnold went on to personify the hyper-masculine gun and muscle toting 80's action hero, an icon that transcended language and culture. Over the next 2 decades, his films dominated global mainstream cinema and he became one of the highest paid actors in the world. In 2003, Arnold jumped into active politics and served as Governor of California for 2 terms.
Many of the details in Arnold are supposedly from his autobiography Total Recall. For people like me that haven't read it, there are some new details of Schwarzenegger's life: His upbringing in post-WW2 Austria where, in his words, a lot of men suffered from depression and PTSD, and this reflected on their families. Gustav Schwarzenegger had been a member of the military police in the Nazi-occupied country before being discharged in 1944 on account of medical illness. Subsequently he married and raised 2 children, Meinhard and Arnold. Arnold talks about a disciplinarian upbringing interspersed with drunk beatings from his father. Meinhard died in his 20's in a DUI accident in 1971, a year before their father passed away from a stroke. At the time Arnold was busy with his bodybuilding career in the US; he did not go for either of their funerals, attributing it to being so
focused on his goals that he suppressed all emotion in the process. He also talks about how the difficult childhood toughened him up (quoting Nietzsche's famous "What doesn't kill me makes me stronger") while his brother, who he says had a more "fragile" persona, cracked under the strain. Again, there is almost no emotion when he says this, no sense of a bond between them, and no sorrow or guilt over the brother's fate.
While I am aware of his film career trajectory, it was a revelation to know that he was a millionaire well before embarking on his movie career, having invested his earnings from bodybuilding into real estate and other business. Thus, he had the luxury of working on carefully chosen projects, never for rent money. The same shrewdness and self-possession that had served him as an athlete now guided his path towards the top of Hollywood. Having been lucky enough to work with creative powerhouses like John Milius (Conan) and James Cameron (The Terminator) in his early days, Schwarzenegger quickly translated his box-office currency into clout over the projects he worked on. He wanted to expand his range and appeal, and deliberately courted directors like Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) and Ivan Reitman (Twins, Junior) who designed projects around him.
His political career is the least interesting aspect of Arnold's life for me, since it had no direct impact on my life. But it was also around this time that the cracks in his personal life appeared. He was accused by several women of having groped and/or misbehaved with them in the past (his sleazy on-camera behavior as a celebrity ambassador in this early Brazil tourism video makes it easy to believe those accusations). He expresses regret over the incidents in an empirical, grudging manner, more in the vein of a man who acknowledges their inconvenience to his reputation than a genuine reappraisal of his attitude.
More damagingly, his wife Maria Shriver divorced him over an affair he'd carried on with their housekeeper, fathering an illegitimate child in the process. In these issues, we are only privy to Schwarzenegger's perspective. We do not learn what Shriver or their children feel about his behavior. Most telling is that we see Arnold living alone in a sprawling house, with farm animals for company. While telling his story, he fondly pores over his own pictures over the course of his career(s). But the depiction of his interactions with family is restricted to still images taken years ago.
But Arnold is no depressed loner asking for your sympathy. Even at 70+, the alpha male in him loves oversized vehicle toys and machismo camaraderie. He believes in "work and fun", and exhorts people to channel their time to "being useful" instead of brooding over "What am I feeling today?" Advocates of empathy for mental health syndromes might balk at this mocking dismissal of depression, but for better or worse, this is just a reflection of the man's supreme self-focus and conquering attitude. It is the formula he has made to work for him.
I realize I'm rather late to the appreciation party for Children of Men (CoM), the Alfonso Cuaron film that was released and generated a fair buzz in 2006. There were two reasons for this: I'd read and loved PD James' source novel. When I read that the shy middle-aged academic protagonist of the story had been transformed into some kind of action hero played by Clive Owen, I was dismayed. Secondly, Clive Owen himself. I'd only seen the man in Shoot 'Em Up, a film I didn't care for at all, in which his constantly sullen presence irritated me greatly. Even though I had bagged the Arrow Video blu-ray of CoM in 2021 during one of their site sales, it took me all this while to actually sit down to watch it.
Once willing to see the film as one that takes the bones of PDJ's story but does its own thing, I found CoM quite engaging. Clive Owen is Theo Faron, a depressed alcoholic British bureaucrat in a world with a bleak future. Human females have become sterile, so there are no new children. The last born human beings are treated like royalty and it is a national tragedy when one of them is killed by an angry fan for refusing an autograph. The Britain shown here is a totalitarian regime, a cross between George Orwell's 1984 and Pink Floyd's Animals (referenced with a floating pig balloon straight from the album cover). But it is apparently still better off than other countries in the world, and therefore constantly besieged by refugees of all races, who are rounded up and sent off to camps. The memory of James' novel is very hazy now, but I think the focus on the plight of refugees is of a significantly greater concern in the film (likely an offshoot of Cuaron himself being an immigrant to the US?).
When we first meet Theo, he steps out of a coffee shop where people are glued to TV reports of the murder of a celebrity youth, only for a bomb to go off inside moments later. This act is attributed to a militant group called the Fishes. They are led by Theo's former wife Julian (Julianne Moore), who contacts Theo to arrange transit papers for a woman. Theo later discovers that the woman is a pregnant refugee Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), who Julian wants to escort to The Human Project, a secret organization working to reverse the infertility phenomenon.
Early on in this mission, Julian is killed in an attack, an audacious scene brilliantly orchestrated by Cuaron and DoP Emmanuel Lubezki. Theo helps to take Kee to the Fishes' hideout in the country, but there he realizes that instead of ferrying her to The Human Project, they plan to hold Kee hostage and use her baby as a prize to negotiate with the government. He gathers Kee and escapes, with the Fishes in hot pursuit. Theo must now protect Kee from both the militants and government forces, and escort her to her destination.
CoM is an action film, but like few others you have seen. After the initial setup in London, a good part of the film is set in the bleak, muddy English countryside, and later in a refugee camp set amidst disused partially broken down buildings. The visuals have a drained out quality to them, similar to Michael Radford's celebrated adaptation of 1984. The script is not afraid to have quiet, off-beat moments, like when Theo hangs out with his pot-smoking hippie friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a former political cartoonist with a catatonic wife. Theo is not your typical action hero, either. After the coffee shop bombing at the film's start he is thoroughly shaken. Later in the several skirmishes, he's no suave and fearless brawler, but a vulnerable man, whose best weapon is his determination to do what he thinks is right. While Julianne Moore's part is a short one, she makes a major impact and you can imagine how the spirit of Julian guides Theo in his actions further on. Michael Caine relishes the rare opportunity to do a laid-back, irreverent character (Apparently John Lennon was the inspiration for his approach).
The contribution of DoP Lubezki cannot be appreciated enough. Several of the film's key sequences are shot as long, seemingly unbroken takes, with the camera taking on the role of a mobile observer, following our characters as they make their way through intense conflict zones. The production design team's creation of a near-future dystopian Britain is also immersive.
It is remarkable that Cuaron and his team convinced Universal Studios to pump $76 million into a British dystopian adventure with a not necessarily happy ending, and no major Hollywood stars apart from Moore, who is offed very early in the film. Sadly, they were not rewarded in terms of box-office success. Still, it is a film that continues to be relevant and deserves to be revisited multiple times.
Arrow's transfer, based on an HD master supplied by Universal Studios, gives a strong presentation of the film, which should at least equal Universal's own disc from 2009. The deliberate decision to have a gritty documentary feel with drained out color has a major impact on how the film looks, but there appear to be no encode related anomalies, and grain pattern is tight. The 5.1 lossless DTS-HDMA sound is not as bombastic as some other tentpole films, but several action sequences, like the assault on the car and the escape run through the refugee camp under attack deliver sufficient bass oomph and surround action. Extras on the disc include an audio commentary, meaty video appreciations by noted film writers Philip Kemp and Kat Ellinger, and likely all the extras from the Universal blu (which include a half hour analysis of the film and several featurettes with the cast and crew). My 2021 copy of this 2018 didn't have the first pressing booklet (expected). The reversible cover has original poster art on the other side.
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