It’s a bumper crop of things to discuss in this month’s update!
It’s only the biggest*, bestest** 100 Films update ever!
So, as Graham Norton might say, jump on it!
No, er, I mean — let’s start the show post!
[Imagine a 100 Films title sequence here. Or don’t, whatever.]
What Do You Mean You Haven’t Seen…?
The path to not-quite-making-it-to-100-films is paved with good intentions (as is the path to making-it-to-100-films-or-more, but the failure path has more paves), and my plan to watch two WDYMYHS films this month is now another slab in said path. So I bump that idea to next month, because, hey, I did watch one. And that one was…
Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, aka Det sjunde inseglet if you speak Swedish or want to be one of those people who always uses the original title regardless.
Despite owning Tartan’s impressive Bergman Collection DVD set for a number of years, this is actually my first experience of Bergman. Once, I noted how many significant directors have been new to me in the course of 100 Films. I thought I’d done it on an individual year, but it was in my review of The Great Dictator. I don’t believe I’ve ever done the former, probably because it’s never actually been noteworthy. However, it’s felt like there have been a few this year, so that’s something I may add to the end-of-year stats.
But that’s still seven months away. You want to know what I’ve been watching in the past 31 days, right? Right?
#44 The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)
#45 The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
#45a Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
#46 Tintin and the Mystery of the Golden Fleece, aka Tintin et le mystère de la Toison d’Or (1961)
#47 The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
#47a Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)
#48 Django Unchained (2012)
#48a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)
#49 On Dangerous Ground (1952)
#50 Les Misérables (2012)
#51 And Now for Something Completely Different (1971)
#52 Shane (1953)
#52a Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)
#53 Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2012)
#54 The Seventh Seal, aka Det sjunde inseglet (1957)
This month’s tally of new films rests at 11, more than double what I achieved last year and drawing equal with May of 2011.
It’s also an anniversary, because May 2010 was my first of these regular monthly progress reports. Three years! My my, time flies. Back then I managed 16 new films, at the time my joint-second highest month ever. Show off month.
Back in 2013, May is my joint second highest of the year — behind March (which is the current second highest month ever) and tied with February. That’s a pretty solid start to the year — more so than last year, and while 2011 and 2010 show a similar shape (double-figure Januarys, Februarys, Marchs and Mays with a relatively weak April), I’ve reached #54 this year, while in 2011 it was… oh, #58. Well, in 2010 it was… oh, #57.
Hey, you can’t win ’em all.
In terms of the films themselves, there’s an uncommonly high number from the ’50s this month — three, whereas my year-to-date only featured one other. There’s no particular reason for that, it’s just one of those coincidences. There’s also four films from 2012 alone, which is more to be expected as I continue to catch up on last year’s cinematic releases. There’ll definitely be more of that next month.
For most of this month I’ve been running a poll on readers’ favourite Harry Potter films (you may have noticed it — it’s sat on the left of the front page). It’s been interesting to see how many votes I’d attract, especially with near-relentless badgering about it on Twitter at some points. As it turned out, better than I’d feared. That’s what bombarding Twitter can do.
Well, I’m not closing the poll, but as it hasn’t received any new votes in weeks, let’s look at what my tiny sample thought.
The clear victor is the Alfonso Cuarón-helmed franchise-revitalising third film, Prisoner of Azkaban, which scooped exactly 50% of the vote. Its supremacy in this poll was never in doubt, lingering around that percentage throughout. There’s a three-way tie for second, though, the result of low voter numbers. Mike Newell’s pivotal and well-liked Goblet of Fire is an unsurprising feature so high, but the incessant climax-readying info-dump of David Yates’ Half-Blood Prince is more uncommon; as is the series’ opener, Philosopher’s Stone, as the Chris Columbus films are often held in the lowest regard.
That said, there’s also a three-way tie for last place, and the other Columbus film — sophomore entry Chamber of Secrets — finds itself among them. It’s not that bad, but it’s never been widely loved. More surprising are its two companions: both halves of Deathly Hallows. Considering the unrelenting acclaim that the latter half in particular received on its theatrical release, I was a little surprised to see these pick up 0 votes. That said, Part 2 is almost all climax, so perhaps they would fare better if taken as a single four-and-a-half-hour film?
That just leaves Yates’ debut film, Order of the Phoenix, sitting almost slap-bang in the middle, on its lonesome in fifth place. Each to their own.
So that’s that. As you can see from the links scattered above, I’ve already reviewed all eight films, but (as promised) I’ll have something to say about Yates’ four films when considered as a job lot, to be posted in the next week or two.
5 Greatest Car Chases
Inspired by watching Tokyo Drift, and the most recent Fast & Furious storming cinemas. And by “car chase” I really mean “action sequence involving a road vehicle”.
- Tomorrow Never Dies
You can’t have a list of great car chases without including at least one Bond. Indeed, I could easily fill this top five with that series alone. TND wins because of two stand-out sequences: Bond driving a BMW saloon around a car park in Germany, which sounds dull as dishwater… except he does it via remote control and the car is stacked with gadgets; and a motorbike vs helicopter chase on the streets — and rooftops — of Saigon. - Ronin
To bring extra swish and excitement, the Fast & Furious films often use CGI in their car chases. Ronin, however, does it all for real — often with the actual actors in the cars. There are several chases in Ronin, but the extended climax through the tunnels of Paris is of course the best. The film used 300 stunt drivers and they wrecked 80 cars, but the exhilaration provided is entirely worth it. - The Bourne Identity
Many times, a great sequence is born out of an idea to innovate or do something different (to go back to Tomorrow Never Dies, the bike chase was a deliberate counterpoint to GoldenEye’s tank chase), and the first Jason Bourne film is no exception: he’s in a Mini! Americans always find small cars striking (see also: Da Vinci Code’s Smart car), but at least it’s put to good use — he drives it down some stairs! - The Matrix Reloaded
For sheer throw-everything-at-the-screen bombast, you can’t beat the car sequence in the first Matrix sequel — it was so big, they had to build their own stretch of freeway! Of course, it’s as much about the fighting going on in and around the cars as it is the chase, and there are bikes and lorries and stuff involved too — including a spectacular head-on collision — but it’s all road-based, so it counts. - Quantum of Solace
I wanted to avoid having two Bond films, and I tried, but I couldn’t think of anything significantly better than the opening minutes of 2008’s widely maligned Bond adventure. Cut like lightning, almost intuitive and impressionistic rather than classically clear, and viscerally destructive throughout, it demands your attention — and indicates the kind of pace the rest of the film will move at. Then the reveal at the end makes it all the sweeter.
And two I’ve never seen…
- Bullitt & The French Connection
Read most lists of the greatest car chases and one of these will be at the top, usually with the other in second place. They’re iconic for different reasons: there’s The French Connection’s frantic illicitly-filmed chase between Gene Hackman and Brooklyn’s elevated railway; and there’s Bullitt’s eleven-minute pursuit around the streets of San Francisco, with Steve McQueen and co gaining plenty of in-car air-time on those famous stepped hills. So iconic, I know this much without having seen either.Those are a few of my favourites, but what have I missed? And are there are any so bad I should’ve made room to decry them?
Next month on 100 Films in a Year…
It’s June! It’s halfway! But I’ve already passed 50!
Will June’s total, doubled, indicate my final tally? Well, it hasn’t yet, so probably not. But a man can dream…
The first Monty Python theatrical release (four more would follow; five if you count last year’s 
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.
Reportedly the Pythons didn’t consider the film a success, hampered by interfering higher-ups and a ludicrously low budget (
Directed by the inestimable Billy Wilder, winner of the Grand Prix (forerunner to the Palme d’Or) at the first Cannes, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 1946, and also Best Actor, Director, and Screenplay, it’s a wonder that The Lost Weekend isn’t better known. I don’t think I’d even heard of it until Masters of Cinema announced their Blu-ray release 
all of them thwarted at the last possible moment, when victory seems assured. The film isn’t preachy, but if it does teach us a lesson then this is how it does it.
Milland is astounding. The film rides on him and he really carries it. It’s easy to play a comic drunk, but Milland doesn’t sink to that. Indeed he doesn’t do one type of drunk at all, swaying back and forth across various levels of inebriation as required. I often find films of this era contain performances we assess as great, but if you put them in a film today no one would buy it; they’d find it stagey and fake. Milland’s transcends that — it fits the era, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find it would play just as potently today. I think it’s fair to say that Milland is not widely known today, but with every film of his I become more convinced that history has been unkind.
There’s also able support from Howard Da Silva as barman Nat and Doris Dowling as Gloria (is she a whore of some kind? Just an escort? A bar-crawler? Did I miss something?), whose slang is oddly infectious. No offence to Jane Wyman, but her lovelorn-but-strong girlfriend character only seems to really come alive in the closing minutes, when she considers abandoning Birnam to his fate.
but from what I do know of other conditions of addiction and mental health, this feels as if it’s still thoroughly relevant.
Bruce Willis stars as a down-on-his-luck PI who stumbles into a sport/politics conspiracy in this early-’90s action-thriller from screenwriter Shane Black (
— pitch black frames punctuated by glowing coloured lights. On the whole, it looks gorgeous.
2001’s car racing actioner 
If I sound dismissive, it’s slightly affected: Tokyo Drift is surprisingly decent. Surprisingly decent for a Fast and Furious film, that is. In 
Quentin Tarantino made his name in the ’90s with a series of dialogue-heavy gangster thrillers that provoked a storm of imitators. Since the turn of the millennium, however, he’s contented himself with a series of extravagant hyper-cinephilic genre homage/parodies. After tackling Japanese action movies in 
It’s fair to say Django Unchained sprawls. But, unlike the chapterised character-flitting antics of Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds, it has a straight throughline it follows from beginning to end, with only a few asides. In terms of length and scope, it’s perhaps not too much of a reach to evoke 
Or how about those action sequences? Months of work training real horses to do things never before seen pays off (and Tarantino proudly displays the “no animals were harmed” notice right at the top of the credits), while the blood-drenched Candyland shoot-out is arguably one of the best pure action scenes in years. Those are amongst myriad other sequences, from the small and transitory to the epic and vital.
Still, best served — and, perhaps, more deserving of the Supporting Actor nod — are villainous duo Leonardo DiCaprio and Samuel L. Jackson. For starters, has Leo ever played a villain before? He’s on stonking form here as Southern gent Monsieur Candie (who can’t speak French), a sinisterly welcoming fellow with a dark side that’s on constant display. He’s all smiles and all lingering threat and menace. Indeed, scenes are often at their most tense when he’s at his nicest. I think there’s an argument for him to go down as one of the great screen villains — he even has the obligatory cool dispatch. “I couldn’t resist” indeed.
It does make you wonder if some of these people had bigger roles that got cut… or maybe there are just 
Tosh and piffle, I say. One of the best ways to skewer many an evil institution is to make them a laughing-stock, to take the piss out of them, and that’s exactly what Tarantino is doing. These aren’t likeable, funny people who are Klan members; they’re incompetent fools because they’re Klan members. The resulting scene is hilarious and deservedly one of the movie’s most memorable moments.
After 
“Hype” has to be one of the biggest factors in how we view films these days. Technically it’s defined as “extravagant or intensive publicity”, I suppose thereby meaning something to “positive expectation”, but I think it also works the other way: if you’ve heard nothing but awful things about a film, its weakness has been ‘hyped’. It’s this latter point that applies to Green Lantern, which has an almost insurmountable degree of negative expectation attached. To summarise the headline points, it’s got a woeful rating of 
But I digress. Cocky jocky Hal is whisked off to the other side of the galaxy to learn how to be a Hero and use his ‘magic’ ring, which can conjure stuff up, then returns to Earth to save it from some menace(s). As superhero origin stories go, at least it’s got a couple of differences.
There are positives. The action sequences are good, which is a definite plus in this kind of film. The inventiveness with what the ring can do is fun. There’s a lack of relation to the sketchily-drawn characters that stands in the way of us truly engaging with them, and there’s a certain brevity and lack of scale that undersells the alleged threat to Earth (it’s a giant evil space-cloud that can barely cover a few city blocks, let alone the entire planet) — but, that aside, they’re entertaining enough. That said, much as the film pulls its punches with characterisation and threat, so it does with awe and spectacle. The Lanterns’ planet Oa doesn’t have the same impact as Asgard in 
Indeed, I’d say the Extended Cut doesn’t go far enough, with some of the disc’s deleted scenes meriting inclusion. However, the main one occurs on Oa, meaning an effects-heavy scene that hasn’t had CG work done or all the voices recorded, so couldn’t just be dropped back into the finished film as-is. I imagine that’s why it wasn’t. That said, even if they’d done such work, those scenes are minor points, not game-changers.
Still, I think there’s a better film lurking in Green Lantern, and it’s a shame it didn’t get the screenwriter(s) or director(s) required to bring it out. It’s even more of a shame that worse films than this have received a kinder critical consensus or huge box office. That leaves some suit feeling vindicated and churning out the same rubbish again, whereas with a bit more effort Green Lantern 2 could’ve been worthwhile.
The fourth Harry Potter film is the pivot around which the series revolves, in oh so many ways. Most obviously, it’s book 4 of 7 — the halfway point. It’s also where the books switch from short ‘children’s novel’ lengths to the huge tomes they eventually became. More importantly, it’s the instalment on which the overarching plot of the entire series hangs. Although each previous entry in the Potter canon contributed something to the mythology (even if sometimes its significance wouldn’t become apparent until much later), they’re still viewable as discrete adventures. So too is Goblet of Fire, for the most part — the exception being its final act, which kicks off the story that will consume the rest of the series.
It makes sense: at this point the series was moving beyond your stock franchise length of “trilogy” and into less frequently charted waters, amid speculation that the leads would be recast. With Goblet of Fire being the last point you could reasonably pull that off, I imagine it paid to emphasise that these were the same kids — that we see a cast age in more-or-less real time throughout their childhood, including many small supporting roles as well as the leads, is one of the Potter films’ more unique highlights.
I can’t remember if Diggory’s meant to be a nice guy or an irritating jock, but here he’s played by Robert Pattinson, proving it’s not only his involvement with 
but her Quick-Quotes Quill — which, essentially, just makes stuff up — is present and correct. The next tale, 
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