Movies seen recently

People keep emailing me and saying that I should update my blog more often. I swear, I keep meaning to. I have some lengthy posts in preparation. But in the meantime, here are some movies I have seen recently.

A Single Man (2009)

This movie was flat-out brilliant. Anchored by a sublime lead performance from Colin Firth, it tells the story of a man who, eight months after the death of the love of his life, has decided to end it all. Which sounds like the movie should be downbeat and depressing, but in fact it is exactly the opposite. A Single Man celebrates life in its every frame. It's based on a novel by Christopher Isherwood, which I am going to have to read.

It was very hard to believe that this was co-writer/director Tom Ford's first movie. Almost everything about it is confident and assured. I've never been particularly impressed by Firth in the past, but he is just spectacular here. It's amazing how deep inside the lead character's head we get - something that's very difficult to do in film. Ford and Firth deserve major awards for their accomplishments here. The supporting cast (including Julianne Moore, Nicholas Hoult and Matthew Goode) are uniformly excellent, the movie looks gorgeous, the music is swooning and beautiful. You should see this movie, and someone should fund Tom Ford to make more (he apparently paid for this one out of his own pocket).



Slipstream (2007)

Anthony Hopkins wrote, directed, scored and starred in this movie. It is baffling. It involves a scriptwriter whose movie seems to be taking on a life of its own. Or maybe he's dead and the whole movie is his life flashing past his eyes. Or maybe he's come "unstuck in time" like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5. Or maybe something else - I don't know.

It's nightmarish, funny, clever, and completely weird. If this is a peek into Hopkins's mind, then he is clearly a very strange man.



Kingdom of Heaven - director's cut (2004)

Ridley Scott's movie about the Crusades is very nearly a masterpiece. It's only significant flaw is the miscasting of its lead character; Orlando Bloom is just not convincing as a charismatic leader. It's easy to see why, as Robert Fisk reported, this movie was cheered in Lebanon; this is far from the sort of jingoistic racist crap you'd probably expect from a Hollywood Christians vs. Muslims movie made in the wake of 9/11. A superb supporting cast, rousing battle scenes and plenty of Ridley Scott's trademark gorgeous visuals are the icing on the cake.

This is a movie where surrender can be noble, and people are more important than ideals. If only it had starred someone more impressive - Edward Norton, in a small role as the King of Jerusalem, manages to be a far more inspiring presence despite playing a character with leprosy who is swathed in bandages and keeps a silver mask over his face.



Blade Runner - the final cut (1982)

Ah, Blade Runner. This movie is a bastardisation of a great book, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In some ways it is the complete inverse of the book.

And yet, it's a masterpiece. I have much to say about this, and currently no time in which to say it.



Lupin III: the Secret of Mamo

This is the first movie featuring the character Arsène Lupin III, the Japanese grandson of the fictional French gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. Lupin III had previously featured in a series of manga and two seasons of an animated series. This movie features Lupin, his sidekicks Jigen and Goemon Ishikawa XIII, nemesis Zenigata, and love interest/rival Fujiko as they are all entangled with a seemingly immortal criminal mastermind known as Mamo.

The last time I watched this movie, I had problems with how obnoxious and unlikable the lead character is. I had previously seen the second Lupin III movie, The Castle of Cagliostro, which was written & directed by Hayao Miyazaki and which softened the character considerably. In the meantime I have seen the first season of the tv show (also largely directed by Miyazaki) and came to realise that Lupin was much more fun when he was self-centred and randy than when he was altruistic.

The Secret of Mamo is weirdly paced and a bit too long, but it has a great psychedelic design sense, and is very much a tribute to such European anti-heroes as Diabolik, Fantomas, Raffles and Irma Vep. I enjoyed it.

The Duellists (1977)

The Duellists is based on a short story by Joseph Conrad, but the movie is all about the visuals. Ridley Scott was making his feature debut, but had actually directed a number of tv series and thousands of commercials.

The story involves two French officers in the Napoleonic Wars who become involved in a series of abortive duels over an obscure matter of honour. Armand d'Hubert (Keith Carradine) finds himself having to constantly look over his shoulder in case Gabriel Féraud (Harvey Keitel) is around. Féraud seems to want to kill d'Hubert just for the sake of killing him; d'Hubert goes to every length to keep his distance, but Féraud keeps popping up regardless. The movie looks like an historical epic, but it feels like a Western.

I'm a big fan of Westerns that are not set in the American Old West, from No Country for Old Men to Mad Max 2, and as it turns out I am a big fan of The Duellists as well. Its appeal is almost entirely in the way that Scott uses his amazing powers as a designer and a camera operator. The Duellists looks amazing from start to finish. Almost any frame of the movie could be printed up and hung on the wall.













The cast fares less well. Keith Carradine is wooden, as he almost always is. (The only notable exception I can think of is his Wild Bill Hickock in Deadwood.) Harvey Keitel would later develop into one of the best actors os his generation, but he was not there yet. Diana Quick and Christina Raines are there as set decoration, and are unable to do much with their underwritten roles. Albert Finney is fun as Joseph Fouché, but he's only in one scene.

However, the actors all look marvellous and the authentic-seeming duels are magnificently staged. Despite the acting deficiencies, the thin script and the jarring voice-over (nicely delivered by Stacey Keach but as unnecessary as that later foisted onto Ridley Scott's third - and best - film Blade Runner) I was enthralled throughout.

Scott was never an intellectual director, despite Blade Runner, and The Duellists is not an intellectual movie. It is sensual and sensuous, exciting and entertaining, and utterly beautiful from start to finish.

I liked it.

Review: Centurion (2010)

This movie follows the misadventures of the Ninth Legion as they invade Scotland in 117AD. Although inspired by real events, it is a work of complete fiction. It is also a work of complete shit.




I won't bother getting into historical inaccuracies or "Roman soldiers didn't fight like that" trainspotting nonsense. You don't care about that, and neither do I most of the time. Unless it's a particularly glaring mistake, that sort of thing does not spoil a movie for anyone who is not being a dick about terms.

Centurion could have been a good movie. The disappearance of the Ninth Legion could certainly be spun into a fascinating story, and writer/director Neil Marshall is definitely interested in making the story morally ambiguous. The protagonists are the Romans, who are out for dominion; the villains are the Picts, who are fighting off invaders who plunder their lands, enslave and kill them, and (in the course of the story) murder their children. Marshall himself is Scottish and there is a clear, intentional irony in his depiction of the Picts as savage and dehumanised proponents of guerilla warfare, and also in the way that the Romans speak Latin as English with pronounced English accent, while Pict is guttural and inhuman (and Picts speaking Latin do so in a Scottish brogue).

Unfortunately, Neil Marshall is the director of Dog Soldiers, The Descent and Doomsday, all pulp horror/action movies. If Dog Soldiers was "Aliens with werewolves" then Centurion is "Dog Soldiers with Scottish people" with all of the third-hand self-referential problems that suggests.

The movie is packed with good actors (Michael Fessbinder, Liam Cunningham, Davic Morrissey, Dominic West) but you wouldn't know that they were good just from watching this. It's filled with violent action scenes that are completely unexciting. It doesn't trust the audience to have a clue; every plot and thematic point is hammered home with expository dialogue and endless amounts of voice-over narration. Both the dialogue and narration are head-slappingly obvious, so predictable that I was able to mouth along with the actors at many points.

This movie casts a model as a cliché mute "woman warrior" - presumably to safeguard against non-acting. The only major female character to have any dialogue may as well have "love interest" carved into her forehead. (And if she's exiled to live alone, why does she wear so much modern-looking makeup?)

The battle scenes are filled with heads and limbs being lopped off and CGI blood spraying everywhere, in almost a textbook case of "more is less". Compare them with the battle scenes in Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight for a lesson in the difference between mere excess and genuine impact. These battles are clearly influenced by those in Chimes, though I would wager that the influence is actually via intermediary movies such as Braveheart.

In summary, this is a terrible movie that isn't even a guilty pleasure. It's a shame, as The Descent seemed to mark Marshall as a filmmaker to watch.

Movies seen recently

I've seen a few, at the movies and on DVD. Here are some of them.

Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee's American movie is great fun, although the fight scenes are not as well-staged or well-filmed as the ones in his best complete movie Fist of Fury or in the the footage released from the incomplete original version of Game of Death. Enter the Dragon functions better as an American exploitation movie (poor Jim Kelly doesn't fare as well as he would have in a real blaxploitation movie though). John Saxon is miscast as a kung-fu expert; I would much rather have seen Rod taylor in his role.

But Bruce Lee's charisma saves the day, and although the ending is a straight copy of the superior ending of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai it still works here.




There Will Be Blood

A bona-fide masterpiece. Daniel Day Lewis is superb, and the movie earns its two and a half hour length. Worthy of an entire post, so it'll get one.



The Haunted Palace

Roger Corman directs Vincent Price from a Charles Beaumont script based on H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It was shoehorned into the Corman/Price Edgar Allan Poe series with a retitling and some brief readings of Poe's titular poem. Great fun, and with the next one will be an entire future post.



The Resurrected

Dan O'Bannon's early '90s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was mangled by its producers in post-production, leading to some obviously-truncated scenes and unnecessary voice-over. What remains takes a while to warm up, but emerges as a superior Lovecraft adaptation in its final act. Chris Sarandon actually tops Price as Charles Ward and, er, another character, and the two movies contrast in a fascinating way. A whole post will soon compare both movies with the original story.



Robocop

An old favourite, this action-packed satire of the Reagan era is still hilarious. Superstar Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's best American movie; packed to the gills with great scenes.



Piranha

John Sayles's first script is far from his best, but director Joe Dante and a great cast (including Kevin McCarthy - who just died aged 96, '60s Italian horror queen Barbara Steele, Sterling Hayden, Paul Bartel, and of course Dick Miller) make it all fun.



Piranha 3D

Hilarious intentional-comedy makes great use of 3D effects, and even of Jerry O'Connell! Big, dumb, silly fun with a great in-joke cameo in the opening scene. Recommended to people who loved Gremlins and Mars Attacks.



I'm sure there were more. I'll remember later. It was a good weekend.

Darker Than Amber

It's a crime that Darker Than Amber is impossible to get hold of without resorting to bootlegs. It closes with one of the best fight scenes ever captured on film, in which Rod Taylor and William Smith go at it. The video quality is terrible, but just check this out.

Vincent Price

In my opinion, the most fun horror star of all time was Vincent Price. In real life he was a charming bon vivant with a deep knowledge of cuisine and fine art; in the movies he had the face of a villain, a great fruity voice and a flair for being both sinister and funny. Only one of his roles - the lead in Witchfinder General - is still genuinely frightening, but if you want a fun time you can do a lot worse than just picking a random Vincent Price vehicle from the 1960s. Especially if you happen across any of the Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he starred in for director Roger Corman.

In a comment attached to an earlier post, my friend Sonia (who I wish would update her blog a little more often) referred to Price as "man-candy". Here is the image that prompted this outburst.



When Price guest-starred on The Muppet Show, he delivered a memorable performance of the song "You've Got A Friend". Unfortunately this was cut from the DVD release because Disney cheaped out on music rights.

Fortuately, we have YouTube.



Price's distinctive voice was a natural for radio, and he made many appearances on many different shows. Perhaps his most memorable was "Three Skeleton Key" on Suspense, which he starred in on several occasions. Here is an mp3 of what is supposed to be the best version of this, from March 17 1950, three years before Price's horror movie career took off with House of Wax.

A very cool late Vincent Price appearance was Tim Burton's wonderful stop-motion short film Vincent, which he narrated. This is available on the DVD of The Nightmare Before Christmas, but again it's on YouTube. Price went on to appear as the father/inventor of the title character of Burton's movie Edward Scissorhands, which proved to be a fitting end to his long career.



Many horror movies today seem to me to be too concerned with torture, gore and cruelty. I don't mind any of those things and have enjoyed some of these movies, but I think it's a shame that the naive and innocent fun of the old-style horror villains are all but forgotten. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and Peter Cushing were better actors, but for me there are very few movie stars of any kind who are as much fun to watch as Vincent Price.

Here is a sample of his distinctively spooky laugh, from the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller. Use it wisely.

Combust In Unity

My friend Billy made a documentary! It's about Kiwiburn, the NZ equivalent of Burning Man.

Here's the trailer: