On the Waterfront (1954)

Posted on March 30, 2014 by badblokebob

2013 #104
Elia Kazan | 103 mins | DVD | 1.33:1 | USA / English | PG

So much more than one famous scene, On the Waterfront is a movie about a magic jacket, which causes anyone who owns it to stand up for what’s morally right even in the face of oppression, but also to suffer badly when they do.

OK, that’s not what it’s about. But you keep your eyes on that jacket and, I tell you, it may as well be.

The story, based on a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles, is actually about corruption in the dock worker union of New Jersey, with Marlon Brando witnessing what happens to those who attempt to blow the whistle, but deciding to do so himself anyway. Rather than a hollow issue-driven morality play, it becomes a tense and engrossing character drama in the hands of director Elia Kazan, screenwriter Budd Schulberg, and a capable cast. The latter includes Karl Malden as an initially quiet priest who resolves to stand up and fight the system too, even if he can’t persuade many workers to do the same; Lee J. Cobb as the self-serving man at the top, bitterly clinging to power ’til the last; Rod Steiger as Brando’s brother, part of the corrupt union architecture, but driven to protect his family at the sharp end of the wedge; and Eva Marie Saint, making her screen debut as the potential love interest, whose brothers was murdered doing the right thing but nonetheless persuades Brando to do the same.

The only potential downside to this comes if you dig behind the scenes. Kazan was one of those who testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during its 1940s and ’50s witchhunt for Communists in Hollywood, naming eight men who were later blacklisted. If you consider the film to be Kazan’s answer to critics of his actions (as it “widely” is, according to Wikipedia), then presumably Brando is meant to be Kazan, calling out those who are doing ill to good hardworking Americans. But many a great film has been made with poor motive — just because Kazan thinks what Brando’s character does and what he did are the same thing doesn’t mean we have to. Even then, the issue of Kazan’s testimony is not so straightforward: a former Communist himself, he faced the end of his career if he didn’t testify, and the names he gave up were already known to the committee. The controversy dogged him for the rest of his career, though: when he received an honorary Oscar in 1999, several notable audience members refused to applaud.

While subtext is undoubtedly a meaningful thing, and using one situation to comment on another is a tried and true way of presenting an argument or criticism, I’m not a proponent of offhandedly dismissing work(s) just because we don’t agree with the actions or beliefs of the person who made it. On the Waterfront is a powerful film, exemplarily made by skilled craftsmen. Whatever Kazan was trying to atone for with its message about standing up to bullies in defence of what’s right, the sentiment is true. And you don’t need a magic coat to do it either.

On the Waterfront is on TCM UK tomorrow at 10:45am.

It was viewed as part of my What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…? 12 for 2013 project, which you can read more about here.

Fast Five (2011)

Posted on March 28, 2014 by badblokebob

aka Fast & Furious Five / Fast & Furious 5: Rio Heist

2014 #3
Justin Lin | 125 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | USA / English | 12 / PG-13

Like a Doctor Who anniversary special, the fifth film in the Fast and the Furious franchise brings together its previous eras in an attempt to reach new heights of… something. Box office, most likely. Which worked. Fortunately, it also paid off as perhaps the most entertaining film in the series to date.

In hiding following the events of the last film, Paul Walker, Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster end up sucked into a bit more criminal activity, which goes wrong — in the process drawing the ire of a local crime boss (24 season three’s Joaquim de Almeida) and an FBI super-squad, led by Dwayne Johnson. Cue an audacious heist plan and more action than you can shake a (gear)stick at.

Although it started out as a series about street racing, with some light criminal activity on the side, the fourth film tried to move F&F on a bit — but failed, thanks to being distinctly crap. Five is what that film wanted to be. It’s still not clever, but it is big — a big, somewhat daft, perhaps too long in the middle, but ultimately fun, Action Movie. It contains as much fisticuffs, shoot-outs and foot chasing as it does bits with cars, though naturally the climax is one huge motor-based action sequence.

The plot is essentially “Ocean’s Eleven with cars”, which is a surprisingly good concept. It also facilitates both the “getting the band back together” tone and a drip-feed of adrenaline. The notion of bringing in characters from every previous film serves its (presumed) purpose of making this feel like a bigger movie, a kind of celebration of the series to date. Whether it deserves such a party is beside the point — it ties together an increasingly disparate run of movies, in the process creating a surprisingly likeable team dynamic.

The oddest thing is that, between the “one last hurrah” tying-together and an ending that I won’t reveal but is tidy, the whole thing feels very conclusive — and I say that’s “odd” because it was never intended to be the final one: the foreshortened title was meant to be an indication that there was a ‘second half’ to come (hence why the next film is sort-of called Furious 6), and there is indeed a last-minute cliffhanger (depending on your point of view, it’s either a good twist or a tiresome comic-book-y move).

The Fast & Furious series has no right to have survived as long as it has, nor as successfully — it seemed destined for failure as its recognisable cast slowly abandoned it and the box office faltered. Yet somehow it came back fighting, with both this and last year’s sequel proving huge hits, and a seventh instalment rushed into production so quickly it lost its director. Even though the series’ longevity to this point was largely unmerited, if the makers can continue to produce films as unpretentiously entertaining as Fast Five, it earns its current place in the cinematic landscape.

Fast Five is on Film4 HD tonight at 9pm. Fast & Furious 6 is currently available on Sky Movies and Now TV.

World War Z: Extended Action Cut (2013)

Posted on March 21, 2014 by badblokebob

In the weeks leading up to its theatrical release, it was already known that World War Z was going to be an almighty flop. An unscrupulous movie studio had taken a cult novel and thrown away everything but the title, alienating its existing fanbase. They’d spent a fortune making a movie in a traditionally R-rated genre that, if released at R, could never make its money back, and if released at PG-13 would never attract an audience. Then they reshot the entire third act, pushing the budget through the roof and ensuring the resultant film would get critically mauled. A fanbase snubbed, an impossibly huge budget, a genre/rating disconnect, and unavoidably poor reviews to come — World War Z was going to flop, and it was going to flop hard.

Then it came out, and became the highest-grossing film to star Movie Star™ Brad Pitt, and the highest-grossing original film of Summer 2013, and made nearly triple its budget worldwide, and even got fairly good reviews. Maybe I was reading the wrong sources in the run up to its release, or maybe it really was that rarest of things, perhaps even unique: a movie hype-resurrection that was less zombie and more phoenix.

The film sees Pitt’s retired UN investigator called back to duty when a rapidly-spreading plague, which turns people into zombie-like rabid creatures, breaks out around the globe. With his family in tow, he escapes an over-run Philadelphia and ends up with what’s left of the US population on a small fleet of ships, before jetting off around the world on a hunt for answers and, hopefully, a vaccine. Cue large-scale action sequences as director Marc Forster aims for an apocalyptic sci-fi/action epic rather than the zombie genre’s usual stomping ground of claustrophobic supernatural scares.

That, at least, is something different. The first half-hour races through stuff we’ve seen time and again: zombie attacks, humans turning on humans as they loot supermarkets, etc. Here the zombies are of the 28 Days Later-style speedy variety, all the better for creating blockbuster action sequences, such as a huge chase through crowded streets, or a running fight up the stairways of an apartment building. This is where the PG-13 certificate shows through (even though this cut is technically unrated in the US, the fact both versions received a 15 over here is telling): there’s little focus on violence or gore; which is fine, but won’t satisfy the more blood-hungry genre fans.

It’s after this that things, as noted, turn from claustrophobic to post-apocalyptic. The storyline feels moderately fresh, showing us the global scope of such an outbreak, rather than how a global event impacts a small group of people. I believe this is the closest the film gets to the spirit of the novel (which I’ve not read, so take that comparison with a pinch of salt). However, what’s new to the zombie genre isn’t necessarily new in any other respect, and by the time we get to Jerusalem and the characters are again being chased through crowded streets, it begins to feel a tad repetitive. Some of the sequences work well though, particularly a zombie outbreak on a passenger plane.

The re-shot final act is a breath of fresh air. Apparently the originally-filmed version was yet another epic battle, which has been switched for a more tense creep around a semi-abandoned research facility in… Wales. Yep, a big budget Hollywood action movie climaxes in the middle-of-nowhere in Wales. I quite like that. It’s a Wales populated by a Londoner, a Scotsman and a Spaniard, but still. I say “more tense” because this is far from the most nail-biting zombie film you could see. The finale is a nice change of pace, and does work as a climax in spite of the bombast that precedes it, but these are zombies as teen-friendly action movie menace, not adult scare-inducers, so don’t except to feel much fear or surprise.

As to the extended cut, it adds only about seven minutes… but there are 121 differences. I can’t even be bothered to read that properly, never mind recount it. There seem to be myriad tiny extensions to all the action sequences, many of them literally lasting a fraction of a second — someone watched this really closely! I can only presume this is actually the original cut, which was then trimmed for the sake of the MPAA to create a theatrical version, because who would consciously go back to add so many little bits? Some are even described as “very unnecessary extension”s by that summary. Other moments do expand on character, though in a subtle fashion (looks like the attempted rape of our hero’s wife, and the murder of one of the wannabe rapists, previously got the snip), or do add to the gore — clearly, it’s too much for a PG-13, but certainly within the realms of a 15. I can’t imagine any of it makes a great deal of difference to the overall experience, however.

Generally, World War Z is a competently entertaining blockbuster. It moves pleasingly fast, with characters quickly and lightly sketched rather than lingered on — not to everyone’s taste, and I imagine some will find it emotionally cold in the way so many recent spectacle movies are. There’s perhaps room for more, particularly from Daniella Kertesz’s Israeli soldier, who is nonetheless somehow the film’s most appealing character; but I don’t think it was the filmmakers’ aim to make us feel the characters’ plight, but instead to show the scope of a worldwide disaster. It does that pretty well, even if the occasionally-CGI zombies prove to be an I Am Legend-style plasticky distraction, especially when coupled with impossible swooping camera shots — it’s better and more effective in the sections where there’s a grittier feel to the camerawork and practical zombie make-up.

As it lacks the social subtext or extreme gore that the two branches of zombie fandom most value, I don’t think WWZ will find an enduring place in genre-fans’ hearts. As an epic summer action blockbuster, however, it largely passes muster.

World War Z is on Sky Movies Premiere this week, starting today at 4pm and 8pm. It’s also available on Now TV, where the running time suggests it’s the extended cut.

North by Northwest (1959)

Posted on March 9, 2014 by badblokebob

Alfred Hitchcock is famous for a good many movies — I wager most people would jump to Psycho if asked to name one, but that’s not to ignore Rear Window, Vertigo, Rebecca, Dial M for Murder, Strangers on a Train, Notorious, Rope… And those are just the others on the IMDb Top 250 — what about The Birds, or The 39 Steps, or… so many more. But of them all, North by Northwest is so packed with his trademark plots, characters, and style, that it is perhaps the ultimate Hitchcock movie.

A ‘wrong man’ spy thriller, it starts with Cary Grant’s New York exec, Roger Thornhill, being mistakenly snatched by some hoods. Quizzed by their boss, he can’t answer any of his kidnapper’s questions because he doesn’t have a clue who they think he is. Before long he finds himself on the run from the police, and on the tail of the mysterious criminals, desperate for the truth and to clear his name. Along the way we’re treated to a blend of suspense, humour and action that could be a tonal mess but, under such a sure guiding hand, feels more like all-out entertainment.

The big set pieces (the crop duster; Mount Rushmore) may be well known now, but being aware of them isn’t the same as seeing them play out in full in context, and they remain fabulous. The direction is as glorious as you’d expect, not just in those big action sequences but in any given scene, be it a simple conversation or an auction room face-off. Throughout there’s gorgeous cinematography by Robert Burks, which looks utterly stunning on Blu-ray. There’s great special effects work too — not something you commonly call on in a ’50s thriller, but it helps to create some especially memorable imagery.

Grant is as wonderful as ever, a perfect ‘everyman’ to guide us through the crazy turns of events, but also finding the appropriate level of humorous edge where it exists. Eva Marie Saint is a textbook ‘Hitchcock Blonde’, attractive but duplicitous — women, eh? James Mason makes for an excellent English-accented villain — today it may be a terrible cliché to use Brits as villains in Hollywood movies, but we’re so damn good at it. That said, Martin Landau makes for a deliciously creepy henchman, so there’s no monopoly. There’s also Leo G. Carroll, who to me will always be best known from Science Fiction/Double Feature, but is equally memorable here as the apparent head of US intelligence.

Perfection is a rare — perhaps impossible — thing to achieved in film… and far be it from me to criticise Hitch, but I’m going go. I think it’s revealed far too early that (spoilers!) George Kaplan doesn’t really exist. Wouldn’t it be more effective as an ‘end of act two’ twist, when Thornhill himself finds out? He’s our figure of identification after all. Still, in the grand scheme of things this is a minor complaint: though it may’ve been even more effective if we didn’t find out until much later, the story and excitement still work regardless of the audience having that knowledge.

While Psycho may stand out from Hitchcock’s filmography for the common man, it’s not particularly typical of his oeuvre as a whole. For that, it’s difficult to imagine a film that is a better summation, distillation, and celebration of his work than North by Northwest.

North by Northwest was viewed as part of my What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…? 12 for 2013 project, which you can read more about here.

It also placed 4th on my list of The Ten Best Films I Saw For the First Time in 2013, which can be read in full here.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)

Posted on March 5, 2014 by badblokebob

Based on a novel by Morton Freedgood (writing as John Godey), previously adapted into a classic ’70s thriller (and a forgotten ’90s TV movie), The Taking of Pelham 123 (aka 1 2 3, aka One Two Three) concerns the hijacking of the titular New York Subway train (that being the 1:23pm from Pelham) by a mysterious gang of men (led here by John Travolta) who begin negotiating with a regular-joe train controller (played here by Denzel Washington) for money in exchange for the lives of their hostages.

As with most remakes, the need for this film to exist is questionable. Reportedly the original novel tells the story from the perspective of more than 30 characters, “keeping readers off balance because it is unknown which characters the writer might suddenly discard”, but the 1974 film focused in on the relationship between the hostage taker and the de facto lead negotiator. This film emulates that dynamic. While Denzel Washington and John Travolta are both actors who veer between competent and great, and so could theoretically match the performances of Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw in the earlier film, unfortunately they just don’t. Compared to the memorable characters created before, here the acting is crushingly adequate.

The writing doesn’t help, with stapled-on backstory additions that promise development and twists but ultimately go nowhere. Even the minor part played by the hostages is lesser here. In my review of the ’70s version I commented that I didn’t think they had enough to do, but that film did have a pleasing element of the hostages being more unlikeable than their captors. None of that here, where the captives are either even more unnoticeable, or heroic off-duty military types. So far so standard.

Otherwise, the film can be characterised as Tony Scott’s extraordinarily expensive take on a relatively straightforward story. Believe it or not, they pumped $100 million into this movie. Watching the disc’s making-of material, it becomes apparent how they managed to spend so much, but it remains strikingly needless. There was a tonne of research into how something like this might go down for real, including hiring former gang members for some of the supporting roles. Such attention to detail doesn’t come over on screen, the film still feeling like a Movie-Land thriller rather than a real-world drama. There was also a lot of Doing It For Real, including much filming in active subway tunnels. A headache to organise, and I’m sure an authentic experience for the cast and crew, but is the result on screen any better than they would’ve got from doing it on a soundstage? The makers clearly think so. I’m not convinced.

If those behind-the-scenes decisions are lost in the final film, then you can’t miss Scott’s whizz-bang direction. It’s the same grab-bag of visual tricks and ticks that dominated the latter stages of his career — jerky cutting, weird saturation, step printing, anything that makes the film look like it’s been massively over-processed. For me this extreme style sometimes worked (Man on Fire, Beat the Devil, even the unloved Domino), but, on balance, he probably went too far with it too often. Applied here to such a meat-and-potatoes tale, it feels like they’re trying to jazz it up because it can’t sustain itself otherwise.

Thing is, it can. Just about. There’s nothing special here; nothing to make modern audiences look back on it fondly in decades to come, as many do to the ’70s version. For fans of the genre, though, this is a solidly adequate experience.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is on Film4 tonight at 9pm.

February 2014 + something to do with the Oscars

Posted on March 1, 2014 by badblokebob

As one-sixth of the year passes, things are not going as planned…

What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?

Well, some things are — those things being WDYMYHS. Though only just, in the dying minutes of the month — just like the good ol’ days of 2013, then.

February’s choice is a film I’ve been meaning to watch for years, and the desire to get it included in this year’s 12 films was one of the guiding principles behind the selection criteria. It is, simply, Up. Which was also an Oscar winner and Best Picture nominee, making it highly appropriate right now.

Elsewhere, however, things were less rosy…

February’s films in full

#8 Zero Dark Thirty (2012)
#9 The Next Three Days (2010)
#10 Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
#11 The House of Fear (1945)
#12 Up (2009)

Analysis

With only five films watched, this is the worst February since before Up was released. It’s less than half what I managed last year, and that was down slightly on the three years preceding it too. Not only that, but it’s a full three films off the amount I should watch in any given month; add that to the single film shortfall of January and I’m a full four films behind — which, at this stage, amounts to a quarter of my intended viewing. Oh dear.

On the bright side… um…

Yeah. Must try harder.

With this year’s Oscars tomorrow, I thought I’d see how my WDYMYHS films for 2014 fared at that esteemed event. Turns out, only seven of them were even nominated — so this week’s top 5 is a top… well, 6. You’ll see why.

5 7 6 (kinda) WDYMYHS Films With Oscar Nominations

Braveheart
With five wins from ten nominations, Mel Gibson’s Braveheart is the most successful film here both in terms of “number of wins” and “percentage of nominations to wins”. Perhaps that’s apt, with the forthcoming Scottish referendum frequently dominating the news at the moment; perhaps it just says something about the level of film appreciation the Academy work at.

Up
Pixar were once known for releasing a critically-acclaimed non-sequel every year. Up will be five years old soon, but it’s their last non-sequel to score over 80% on Rotten Tomatoes (and the same but with “over 70%” on Metacritic). It also bagged five Oscar nominations, including a Best Picture consideration, taking home gongs for Animated Feature and Original Song.

Amélie
Although it scored a total of five nominations across the board, with particularly notable categories like Original Screenplay and Cinematography among them, this French film didn’t even manage to win the Best Foreign Feature award. That honour instead went to Bosnian war drama No Man’s Land. No, I don’t remember it either.

Rear Window
Hitchcock infamously never won an Oscar. I don’t know how his films fared generally speaking, but Rear Window certainly didn’t nab any. It did get four nominations though, including a Best Director nod for Hitch. He lost to Elia Kazan, whose On the Waterfront dominated that year (though three different pictures bested Rear Window in its other three categories).

12 Angry Men
There were three nominations for this jury room thriller from director Sidney Lumet — a Best Director consideration among them. He lost that to David Lean for The Bridge on the River Kwai, which similarly triumphed over the Angry Men in the contests for both the Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay trophies.

Blue Velvet and Requiem for a Dream
Just one nom apiece for these two. David Lynch secured his second Best Director nomination for the former, but lost to Oliver Stone for Platoon. Meanwhile, Requiem for a Dream appeared in the Best Leading Actress group with a nod for Ellen Burstyn, but she was defeated by Julia Roberts as Erin Brockovich in Erin Brockovich.

None of the others even merited a nomination, apparently… though one did even worse…

The Shining

The Blue Lagoon

Xanadu

And remember that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences consider all of those films to be infinitely better than The Big Lebowski, Modern Times, Oldboy, and The Searchers. I’ve only seen two so I couldn’t possibly comment… but you can, here. (Ooh, that was smoothly mentioned, wasn’t it?)

TV plug

It’s the UK network TV premiere of The Lincoln Lawyer on Channel 4 tonight at 10pm. My four-star review is here, and you can also read about the film when it placed eighth on my list of the 10 best films I saw in 2012.

As you can see, it comes recommended.

Next month on 100 Films in a Year…

By the end of March I should be at the quarter-way point, aka 25 films. Only 13 to go, then — a higher number than I’ve managed so far this year, true… but also the same amount (or less) that I managed in three of the last four Marches and three of the last four Februarys.

There is hope for me yet.

100Films.co.uk

100% movies. Except when it's about TV.

Monthly Archives: March 2014