Shivers (1975)

Posted on September 10, 2015 by badblokebob

2015 #116
David Cronenberg | 87 mins | TV | 4:3 | Canada / English | 18 / R

The first commercial (i.e. non-student) feature by horror maestro-to-be David Cronenberg, Shivers depicts the sexually-charged chaos that erupts after the spread of a man-made sexually-transmitted parasite in an isolated hyper-modern tower block.

The film contains all the requisite titillation of cheap schlock (nudity! gore!), but a handful of interesting, potential-laden ideas indicate the filmmaking promise that Cronenberg would later fulfil. Unfortunately, the execution here is hindered by dirt cheap production values and unfocused, undisciplined storytelling.

The most horrific part for fans is the mere mention of a sometimes-mooted remake, but I don’t think that would necessarily be a bad idea.

The Sugarland Express (1974)

Posted on April 27, 2015 by badblokebob

Steven Spielberg’s second feature (or “first” if you’re American) is based, loosely, on a true story. The fictionalised version sees Lou Jean (Goldie Hawn) breaking her husband (William Atherton) out of prison so they can travel cross state to liberate their baby from foster care. Everything goes smoothly until they accidentally kidnap a police officer (Michael Sacks), hundreds of police cars begin to follow them, and a multi-day slow-paced chase ensues.

It’s probably not obvious from the whole prison break/kidnap/true story thing, but The Sugarland Express is more of a comedy than a thriller. The ludicrousness of the situation is ramped up, though Spielberg keeps it grounded enough that you can believe it was real, and with an undercurrent of potential violence from the police that suggests a tragic ending may be unavoidable. Credit also to the cast for maintaining this balance, in particular Hawn, for who this was a breakout role. She’s naïve and optimistic without being too annoying, her comedic airheadedness weighed against an earnest belief that she’s doing the right thing for her child and that it’s all going to work out in the end.

Spielberg makes full use of the 2.35:1 frame’s width, which means that, viewed on broadcast TV at 16:9, it’s often noticeably cropped (this having been made before the time when filmmakers became contractually obliged to keep their compositions “TV safe”). The camerawork is frequently extraordinary, including at least one unbroken shot where the camera moves around inside and outside the car, like something out of Children of Men — only done for real in a moving vehicle, unlike Alfonso Cuarón’s soundstage-based hidden-cuts version.

Largely overlooked these days, I guess because it doesn’t obviously fit with Spielberg’s renowned sci-fi, adventure, and worthy-historical pictures, The Sugarland Express merits more attention. Tonally, and in terms of the level of directorial skill it exhibits, it fits right amongst the pack of his better-remembered works. Not his best picture, but able to stand confidently alongside his numerous very-good ones.

The Sugarland Express is released on standalone Blu-ray (as are the three other films previously available exclusively in the Steven Spielberg Director’s Collection box set) next Monday, May 4th.

Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow (1978)

Posted on January 16, 2015 by badblokebob

aka Se ying diu sau

2014 #98
Yuen Woo-ping | 92 mins | TV | 2.35:1 | Hong Kong / Cantonese | 18 / PG*

Jackie Chan’s breakout hit sees him as Chien Fu, the floor-scrubber-cum-punch-bag at a martial arts school where he bumps into Pai Cheng Tien (Yuen Siu Tien), one of the last two proponents of the Snake Fist style after its other students were murdered by their old enemies, the Eagle Claw clan. The old man trains Chan so he can overcome his bullying schoolmasters, while the Eagle Claw grand master (Hwang Jang Lee) hunts for his last remaining rival…

The first film from director Yuen Woo-ping (he went on to helm Jackie Chan’s other defining film, Drunken Master, later the same year, and is best known to us Westerners for his action choreography work on The Matrix, Crouching Tiger, and Kill Bill) presents quite a slight story, but that’s OK: we’re here for the action, and it delivers that in droves. There are more fights than you can shake a stick at; and not just minor skirmishes littered between two or three headline bouts: regular highly-choreographed duels make up the bulk of the running time. The skill on display is as high as you’d expect, and while I know nothing of the technicalities of martial arts, the speed and dexterity of the performers has to be admired.

There’s some of the comedy Chan would become known for, but it’s not outright comedic most of the time; more straight kung fu with a regularly-displayed wry edge. Those who prefer their action po-faced may still find it palatable, though the campiness of the era that has been much parodied since is present and correct.

Also striking is the music score, a strange mix of weird, cheap, dated, electronic stuff… and yet, it’s so odd I kind of warmed to it. It’s all poached from elsewhere, which was apparently the way things were done in Hong Kong at the time. Stand-out tracks are Magic Fly by Space and Oxygene Part II by Jean Michel Jarre, though bits of famous scores are in there too, most recognisably (for me) You Only Live Twice. I don’t really know what this bizarre juke-box-esque system adds for the viewer, other than some spot-the-tune fun and an appreciable level of bizarreness.

Not the most “Jackie Chan” of Jackie Chan films, and dated in a way that will put some off, Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow is nonetheless good fun for those who like their action movies to be properly action-centric.

* Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? But that’s what IMDb and filmRatings.com say. I suppose the US do have silly-lax views on violence in film… ^

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)

Posted on September 12, 2014 by badblokebob

Disney attempted to replicate the success of Mary Poppins with this, another musical adaptation of a fantastical British novel set in Britain with British people in it — including some kids who, based on their accents, must be from the same part of London as Dick Van Dyke’s Bert. A childhood staple for others, it somehow passed me by ’til now.

Set during World War Two, it follows a gaggle of evacuated siblings who are placed with Angela Lansbury’s white witch. Or, rather, white-witch-in-training — via a correspondence course, which has stopped just before the end. So off they pop to find the course’s director, after which hijinks ensue, culminating in a stealth invasion of Britain that can only be thwarted with magic.

Tonally, it’s every inch Mary Poppins 2, helped no doubt by having the same director, screenwriters and songwriters. There’s the bemused-but-game kids, the quirky magic-performing woman, a male adult to round out the gender-coverage; the story is a series of loosely-connected vignettes, many of them featuring songs, and one that’s mostly animated with our live-action heroes integrated; plus a climax where the good guys defeat one of the world’s great evils, with Poppins’ bankers here switched for the almost-as-bad Nazis. The magical special effects in that final sequence won an Oscar — and well deserved it was too. They look great, definitely holding up today, and it’s actually hard to be sure how they were all achieved.

As a whole, it’s good fun, though lacks the je ne sais quoi that has made Mary Poppins so beloved across the generations. Not being quite as good as one of the all-time-great children’s movies is hardly something to be sniffed at, however, rendering Bedknobs and Broomsticks a perhaps-underrated success.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976/1978)

Posted on June 30, 2014 by badblokebob

aka The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (Short Version)

Ever since I read the blurb for Masters of Cinema’s DVD of Maurice Pialat’s Police, I’ve been casually enticed by The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Said blurb asserts that “Police is a genre-defying excursion rivaled only by John Cassavetes’ The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in the pantheon of cinema’s most idiosyncratic thrillers”, which is both a nice turn of phrase and an intriguing one. The thriller is very much a Genre — that is to say, it’s a label loaded with rules and expectations, and to be idiosyncratic within such a form is an interesting notion. Both “thriller” and “idiosyncratic” are pretty accurate labels for Chinese Bookie, though, even in its re-cut (by the director) ‘short version’.

The plot sees strip club owner Cosmo Vittelli (Ben Gazzara) lured in to killing the titular bookie as payment for his gambling debts to some gangsters. The title kind of gives away whether he does it or not (though an ever-doubtful Cassavetes reportedly considered having him not go through with it), but nonetheless the film doesn’t lack the genre’s requisite tension and suspense. However, it’s more of a character study. How aware is Cosmo of the mess he’s getting himself in to, and how far is he prepared to go? What drives the man? There are no easy answers, unsurprisingly, but that doesn’t make the questions unworthy of consideration.

According to the notes accompanying the BFI’s Blu-ray release, the ‘short version’ — which Cassavetes created after his original cut was “almost universally panned [and] yanked from the theatres within days” — not only makes the film shorter, but also more focused, clarifying various plot points. The style of much independent ’70s cinema — naturalistic to the point of being almost documentarian, with half-caught snatches of dialogue and sequences that seem trimmed to (almost) the relevant moments from much longer filming — still begs that you pay attention, but it seems this cut gives you more of a hand: it gets to the killing quicker (“63 vs 82 minutes”), a meeting with gangsters is “longer, more coherent and explicit”, and so on.

Perhaps the biggest change is early on: the short version implies Cosmo takes his girls out to celebrate (then gets into debt); the original cut implies he’s been invited to the gambling den so he can be set up. That’s quite a shift in emphasis, turning the lead character from a picked-on ‘mark’ in the long version to a sort-of-coincidental brought-about-his-own-downfall type in the re-edit. In his 1980 review (included in the BFI booklet), John Pym asserts that Cosmo is “clearly” a patsy, a fact obscured in the short cut by the removal of that scene where he’s invited to gamble. Is he an easily-lulled patsy, then, as the gangsters think? Or is it more as I interpreted: here’s a man who acts the fool, who pretends to be easily tricked, in order to keep people happy; but who is actually much more competent and aware of what’s going on? Look at his speech near the end about being what others want. This is a man determined to keep others happy and thinking well of him; not in a superficial way, but as some fundamental character trait. Is that how he gets lured into the killing, then — purely because they asked nicely? But then later, when he escapes and gets some kind of revenge or freedom… well, that’s not so friendly. Is he finally doing something for himself? Or was he selfish all along — not much of a leap, especially considering the world he operates in.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie is not a neat little thriller in any respect. As Tom Charity puts it (in the BFI booklet again), “if the scenario sounds generic, the film is something else”. It reminded me of Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, a film I didn’t particularly like (but which did inspire Cassavetes), but I had more time for this. Perhaps that’s just me ageing (it’s the best part of seven years since I saw Mean Streets) and becoming more attuned to this kind of movie; the kind that uses “hesitations, repetitions, and longueurs as tools of disruption and misdirection”, by a director so “mistrustful of anything that smacked of tidy resolution, he regularly turned his movies around in the editing to more ambiguous and purposefully aggravating effect.”

That’s the kind of movie Chinese Bookie is: ambiguous, purposefully aggravating, without a tidy resolution. It requires the audience to work a bit. Is it worth the effort? You know, I’m never quite sure (see Bicycle Thieves for another example), and whether I appreciate it or not probably depends as much on the mood a particular film catches me in as much as its inherent quality (see also Rage). This one, while as awkward as any, engaged me just enough.

Mad Max (1979)

Posted on May 29, 2014 by badblokebob

The man who would go on to helm Babe: Pig in the City and Happy Feet here delivers the best-known Ozploitation movie, an occasionally scrappy B-level production that’s primarily concerned with violent gang antics and road chases. It stars everyone’s favourite Hollywood madman Mel Gibson as Max Rockatansky, a road cop in what might be a slightly dystopian post-apocalyptic Australia or might just be a bleakly-considered version of ‘now’, where he and his colleagues are targeted by a biker gang after one of their members is killed during a pursuit.

Said pursuit opens the film in style. It’s a surprisingly-lengthy white-knuckle sequence that introduces us not only to Max, but to what director George Miller is capable of. Even 35 years on it remains a mightily effective set piece, with more punch than the average over-choreographed CGI-addled chases of the last decade-and-a-half of moviemaking.

Unfortunately it’s so good that the rest of the film struggles to match its adrenaline-pumping level, which must leave some viewers particularly underwhelmed. After meandering through something approaching a plot, the film really comes alive again when Max takes a holiday. No, really. Even though Miller can’t again match the excitement of his opening salvo, he at least offers sequences of tension and shock, including the pivotal moment where Max is driven Mad.

The film’s finale is surprisingly fast, a brief explosion of revenge that doesn’t provide your standard Action Movie thrills, but can muster some memorable stunts and lines. It’s here Max goes from average super-cop to full on movie hero. In reading up on the film, a few pieces analyse the ending as Max going to the dark side — becoming as bad as those he was fighting against; or, at the very least, becoming an anti-hero. I didn’t see it that way at first, which I think is the difference between 1979 and what’s happened in movies since. Now we routinely have heroes who do bad things: look at Jack Bauer’s love of torture in 24, or everything Liam Neeson does in Taken. Those characters are never presented as anything other than the good guy; there’s no (or very little) question that what they’re doing is right, and that we should root for them. Maybe we should be questioning Max’s actions at the end, and considering the possibility that he may have become a villain himself. Maybe people did that, once. Now, I think the majority of viewers (especially for this genre) would uncomplicatedly cheer him on.

On the bright side, such moral considerations at least lend some extra depth. Even without it, Mad Max delivers a fitfully exciting car-action movie. It’s probably best known today thanks to its sequels, but still has much to offer those who like, or would like to discover, the almost-grindhouse-esque gritty thrills of ’70s independent exploitation movies.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Posted on October 29, 2013 by badblokebob

Dawn of the Dead is the Citizen Kane of zombie movies.* And yet, in the same way new viewers arrive at Kane laden with the baggage of its acclaim, and thus come away with a lesser opinion of it, it would seem from user reviews on various websites that Dawn is a less beloved proposition for many a modern zombie acolyte.

Thanks to a shifting timeline, it’s now the late ’70s, but only a few weeks have passed since the zombie outbreak we witnessed in Night of the Living Dead. Society is going to hell: the US public are sentimentally avoiding government orders to burn the dead and abandon their homes. The outbreak, apparently controllable, is getting worse. Four loose acquaintances — a TV producer, her weather ‘copter pilot boyfriend, and a pair of police SWAT officers — escape the madness in the chopper, setting up camp in a deserted mall. Deserted, that is, except for the hordes of undead, flocking to a place that used to be so important to them…

It used to be that people were Clever for spotting the subtext that Dawn is really a critique of mass consumerism. Romero expressed his surprise at this: he didn’t think that theme was subtle, he thought it was blatantly the point. Heck, he even has his characters all but say it two or three times. Today, it’s depressing to see the number of user reviews online that criticise such analysis for being “pretentious”. It’s not pretentious, it’s what the film is about. Those reviews, and so many more like them, focus on the gore and make-up being old-fashioned and unrealistic, or the film not being scary, or there being too little action. Point — thoroughly missed.

Romero has said he considers his zombie movies to be about the time they were made; a little snapshot of the world (or the US, at least) at the time. Thus consumerism is only one of Dawn’s targets, albeit the easiest to spot. Romero was ahead of his time here: gigantic out-of-town malls of this type were, apparently, new propositions at the time the film was made, and the one that stars here was amongst the country’s largest (it still exists, I believe, but now it’s considered a little’un). It’s not just the zombies who are critiqued either. Our protagonists choose to stay in the mall because it apparently has everything they could ever need, even though it also has the constant threat of the undead. On their first trip out for supplies, they’re as interested in expensive watches as food and tools. As time goes on it only gets worse: they turn their little attic apartment bit into a chic pad, with stylish chairs and all the mod-cons. In a world where the apocalypse has happened, they’re not fighting for their very survival, they’re living the high life. They even ‘rob’ the mall’s bank, “just in case” money is still worth something.

As with Romero’s previous zombie outing, characters are as important as anything, and its through them further social analysis is developed. For instance, there’s Fran, the only woman in the group. A deliberate counterpoint to criticisms of Night…, she’s a capable person, who insists on being involved when the men cut her out. She’s the only one who thinks setting up camp in a place overrun with zombies might be a bad idea; she’s the one who insists on learning to fly the helicopter in case something happens to the one other person who knows how. She doesn’t scream once, a touch added by actress Gaylen Ross: when Romero asked her to scream, she refused, and he never asked again.

The men, meanwhile, help shape a commentary on society’s desensitisation to violence. There’s disgust early on at having to shoot these human-like creatures in the head to get rid of them, but so unrelenting is such a task that it becomes everyday. This and the consumerism thread come together in the final act, when a gang of bikers invade the mall: declaring that the place is their possession, one of our ‘heroes’ has become so used to killing the living dead that he now has no trouble opening fire on the plain ol’ living.

The film is rich with such analogy and symbolism for them that wants it (there’s even more than I’ve gone into here, including perspectives on immigration and US intervention in overseas conflicts); what’s kind of depressing is that so many viewers today don’t. I’m a fan of a well-constructed largely-mindless action movie as much as the next Bloke, on the right occasion, but that’s not what Romero was purporting to construct. It’s not “pretentious” to see these themes, because that’s why he made the film. Romero didn’t set out to produce a shoot ’em up and accidentally created some social commentary for chin-stroking cineasts to pontificate over — the zombie action is what’s almost incidental; it’s a prism through which to discuss the world.

All that said, it’s not as if the film stints on action. But this is the ’70s — they didn’t build an entire film from back-to-back action sequences then as we do now. These scenes can be suitably tense and exciting when needed, though, as with almost all ‘old’ action movies, they aren’t going to deliver the same hyper-choreographed visceral thrill as their modern-day counterparts. But they are there, and they are what they are.

I also don’t hold much truck with that “the effects are bad” waffle. I mean, really, what do you expect? The film’s 35 years old! And y’know what, it’s not that bad. OK, the zombie’s skin tone is a little blatant — special effects maestro Tom Savini has said he was aiming for grey but it registered as rather blue on film. Then the blood is a vibrant red — well, loads of older films have that garish red blood, what of it? In fact, it was specifically requested by Romero, who wanted a comic-book-y colour to match what he saw as a comic-book tone to the violence. Then there’s all the flesh-eating gore, which is by turns heightened to the point of silliness and gorily realistic — the stuff with the guts towards the end… Savini was a war photographer in Vietnam and that in part inspired his effects work. You want to argue with a guy who’s seen the real thing that his work doesn’t look as ‘realistic’ as some post-millennial computer nerd’s hyper-CG version of things?

Aside from thematic weight and violent frivolity, Romero also crafts a character drama. Whereas Night put some archetypes in a situation and stressed them out, to sketch-like effect, Dawn takes its time to explore its characters. In some cases their arcs are clear — likeable but cocky copper Roger gets over-confident and pays for it — while others are barely noticeable. The burgeoning friendship/relationship between Fran and policeman Peter, the most level-headed of all the film’s male characters, is so subtle as to hardly register, but it’s there, in part created by the actors getting on well. They earn (spoilers!) the happy(-ish) ending, an alternate to the fatalistic double suicide Romero planned, tested, but ultimately didn’t even shoot.

I have to say, the more I think and write about Dawn, the more I come to like it. It’s not really perfect — the biker climax comes almost out of nowhere, and I’m not convinced they were the most effective way to explore an ending. Perhaps this is where the “snapshot of the times” idea begins to fall down: distanced from the time in question, how resonant are those themes? Is that why modern viewers, coming to the film for the first time, miss them? (That’s not to discount the fact that most modern genre film viewers aren’t looking for grown-up viewing, but kids’ movie-style brightly-coloured action — with added gore and swearing to prove it’s actually for adults, despite the lack of adult thought or consideration required. Ironically, these once-B-movie cheap horror/thrillers are now, thanks to their political undertones, more suited to the art house crowd. I see why so many venerate ’70s cinema.) But (to get back to this paragraph’s point) there’s so much in Dawn, so much more than either a zombie kill-fest or a criticism of consumerism, that thoughtful reflection — and, I’m sure, future re-watches — are only to its benefit.

With all these words spent, I’ve not even discussed the throbbing score from Goblin and Dario Argento; or the use of quirky funny stock music to highlight the Comedy of some sequences (including tunes from/also used by Monty Python, which only seems to emphasise the point); or the criticism of religion (which I somehow missed until reading Calum Waddell’s essay in the booklet of Arrow’s Blu-ray! How remiss of me); or the movie’s length — this is definitely an epic! And at times it feels it. Though the methodical way it goes about outlining how you’d set up a new life in a mall is, actually, exactly what I’d want to see from this storyline. You can’t just plonk yourself down there and live, can you? You’ve got to think about where you live, how you stock up, and, in the case of a zombie apocalypse, how you keep the undead at bay… and how you prepare for looters.

Immediately after viewing, I’d say I didn’t like Dawn as much as Night. Though it has many qualities I admire, it also felt a little less focused and more sprawling. The first I found tense and chilling — a Horror movie, albeit one with observable dramatic and thriller-ish elements. Dawn is, at heart, a Drama — it’s about the people in this situation, that situation happening to be an extreme horror one. But on reflection, the bits I was less sure of pale behind the things it does right.

One thing you can’t doubt is that this inspired the zombie genre even more than Night: the gore, the violence, and so on. It’s just a shame that the filmmakers who have followed in Romero’s footsteps concentrate on those aspects rather than the humour, characterisation, and social critique that are actually what make his films classics.

Part of Week of the Living Dead for Halloween 2013.

A quick note on versions: thanks to international cuts and whatnot, there are numerous variations on Dawn of the Dead. Three key ones are included on Arrow’s UK Blu-ray: the theatrical cut (the only one in HD), the longer Director’s Cut, and the shorter Argento cut. The latter, produced for the Italian market, apparently focuses on action, to the detriment of the dramatic elements. The Director’s Cut is reportedly more of an “initial director’s cut” — a longer version before Romero honed it down to his final, preferred version, which is the theatrical cut. Various people swear by various versions; I just went for the one in HD.

* or should that now be “the Vertigo of zombie movies”? ^

And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)

Posted on May 30, 2013 by badblokebob

The first Monty Python theatrical release (four more would follow; five if you count last year’s A Liar’s Autobiography) is a compilation of re-shot sketches from the first two series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Designed to launch the sextet to a US audience who wouldn’t have seen the TV series, And Now For… contains around 40 sketches, including two of their most famous: the Dead Parrot sketch and The Lumberjack Song. I have to confess, I’m really a Python neophyte — to be precise, I’ve seen Holy Grail twice, Life of Brian once, and only stray sketches in documentaries and clip shows and the like. As such, almost the entire film was new to me (the only exceptions being the aforementioned pair), so I can’t tell whether the re-shoot impaired or enhanced the quality. (In fact, I say “re-shoot”, but the film was shot between series one and two of Flying Circus, so this is actually the first performance of the series two sketches.)

The Dead Parrot sketch clearly isn’t as good — it feels like Palin and Cleese re-enacting past glories, robbed of much energy by not being shot as-live in a single take. The Lumberjack Song, on the other hand, seems to survive fine. The rest is as much of a mixed bag as sketch shows ever are — it’s become a cliché to call them “hit and miss”, but it’s true. Over 40 years on, the Pythons’ style is still so leftfield, experimental, absurdist and irreverent that one man’s hilarity will easily be another’s bafflement. For my money, it becomes a bit tiring watching sketches for so long, even with the attempts made to link them together — it doesn’t form a narrative, so much as a series of casual crossovers that would make re-arrangement in an edit impossible. In and of themselves, however, many of the skits hit their mark.

Director Ian MacNaughton also helmed the TV series but, freed of the constraints of BBC studio filming, he mercifully does more than point-and-shoot. Sometimes this doesn’t work (an early sketch, “Marriage Guidance Counsellor”, is initially shot from bizarrely high angles followed by some very flat compositions), but other times it comes off beautifully: a long track-and-pan throughout “Nudge Nudge” is flawless.

Perhaps this is showing my Python inexperience again, but, considering how everyone goes on about the brilliance of Graham Chapman, he’s far from foregrounded here. Cleese, Idle and Palin seem to get the most material; Chapman is often a kind of straight man (in fairness, often among the rest of the troupe acting this role for the benefit of a lead); Jones doesn’t do much at all, which is perhaps why he later moved toward directing. Of course, this perception could just be the result of the sketches chosen; or, for all I know, he was more talented as a writer than performer; or perhaps he came into his own later (he’s the lead character in both Holy Grail and Brian, of course). But, on this evidence alone, I don’t think Chapman would be the one to draw anyone’s attention. In fact, the thing that most struck me about the cast is that, while most of them look familiarly young, Eric Idle looks about 15.

Reportedly the Pythons didn’t consider the film a success, hampered by interfering higher-ups and a ludicrously low budget (according to Wikipedia, this was “so low that some effects which were performed in the television series could not be repeated in the film”!) Ironically, US reviews were mixed and the film did little business at the box office (a 1974 re-release, after the TV series had turned up on PBS, was a greater success), while in the UK it was popular enough to turn a profit, despite the fact it contained nothing new for British fans — “indeed many were disappointed that the film seemed to belie its title.” Indeed.

It’s difficult to know what And Now for Something Completely Different offers fans today. With the TV series readily available on DVD, I imagine it more often pays to re-watch the original versions. Equally, as noted, this is technically the first outing for some. Perhaps it’s just a curio; a different perspective on familiar material. For newcomers… well, as one, it’s difficult to say how much it offers a grounding in the Pythons’ material. Is it a best-of? Some of their most famous stuff isn’t here (presumably it came in the latter two series), and almost an hour-and-a-half of sketches gets a bit much. Indeed, it’d probably work better in more bite-size chunks; say, 30 minutes at a time.

Serpico (1973)

Posted on October 29, 2012 by badblokebob

2012 #30
Sidney Lumet | 125 mins | TV | 1.85:1 | Italy & USA / English | 18 / R

Before Murder on the Orient Express or Dog Day Afternoon, Sidney Lumet directed this true story about a New York cop battling corruption.

Noting it’s a true story, it certainly has a biographical feel. That came as a bit of a surprise, to me at least — I was expecting a thriller about a good cop exposing the corrupt ones, but instead got Frank Serpico’s life story from the time he left training on. It’s not as if it just deals with his professional career — say, showing how his early days formed his moral compass, or something — there’s lots of screen time devoted to his personal relationships too, which may or may not have been relevant to his work. More than a corrupt cop thriller, it’s a biopic about someone involved in that world.

This focus on reality begs one question: just how much is it based in the truth? It makes an uncommonly high claim to reality by including all this near-extraneous detail, but typically “true life” stories, especially those made quickly after the real events, fictionalise things for one reason or another. It wouldn’t matter if it didn’t effect the quality of the film, but I think it does: it feels a bit sloppy at times; kind of disjointed. The timeline jumps forward almost at random; things occasionally seem to go by half explained; there’s no clear throughline… This all plays into the feeling of it being like real life, where nothing — certainly not a police investigation — is as simple or straightforward as it’s usually made out to be for the movies. Which has its pros and its cons.

As the titular copper, it’s a typically strong performance from Al Pacino. Not his best work — I don’t think the part really gives him enough to deliver that — but he’s more often than not the most engaging element of the film. This was his fifth film; considering The Godfather was just his third, and he followed this up with Part II and Dog Day Afternoon, it’s easy to see why he’s long been regarded as a Great Actor.

I feel like Serpico used to come up fairly often as a minor classic; the kind of film not a lot of people have seen these days but many more should have; but I don’t feel like I hear it mentioned any more. Obviously this is just a perception and maybe it’s a load of rubbish, but I’m afraid I side a little more with the latter-day less-mentioned side of things.

I would say it feels rather worthy, at least in part for the things I’ve mentioned about its claims to truth. It’s an interesting, sometimes compelling film, but I wouldn’t say I enjoyed or liked it. “Enjoy” is an awkward word — you wouldn’t typically say you “enjoy” Schindler’s List, but you do (you could say) enjoy its greatness. I didn’t enjoy Serpico in the way you would typically say you enjoyed something; nor did I enjoy it in a Schindler’s List way; nor did I really admire it, again for the reasons levelled above. But it has elements of interest nonetheless.

The Alien Series

Posted on June 16, 2012 by badblokebob

With Ridley Scott’s not-an-Alien-prequel-honest Alien prequel Prometheus currently doing solid-if-unspectacular business in the wake of largely positive critical reviews and a more mixed reception from the general public (everyone I’ve seen comment on it has been unsure or hated it, anyway), I thought now would be as good a time as any to bring my reviews of the six previous films in the franchise over to my new blog. Plus my review from last year of the Alien³ Special Edition.

Check them out below. They’re in chronological order, if the pictures aren’t clear enough.