The second gif made me think: does Obi-Wan not finish off Anakin because on some level he still believes he is the one?
And then juxtapose Obi-Wan’s feelings with Yoda’s comment that maybe they have been reading the prophecy incorrectly.
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Without Anakin the emperor would have killed Luke, so…
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Great review @MrKiddWint and great viewpoints everyone! There is some hope on the original cut being released soon!
I was watching clips of Revenge of the Sith at my movie theater, and I do have some positive viewpoints of it.
First, above all, Ian McDiarmid owns the role of Emperor Palpatine. He’s so charmingly evil, he’s always a joy to watch. However, his best performance is here. The character development for him is one the reasons that ROTS is more positively remembered among the prequels. Even though The Rise of Skywalker shouldn’t have brought him back, there was NOTHING wrong with Ian McDiarmid’s performance. He fits the role as much as any of the original trilogy cast does with their iconic roles.
The lightsaber fights are at their best here. The opening fight with Count Dooku and the Jedi alone is better than any of the lightsaber fights in the Sequels. Plus, it has Sir Christopher Lee, in a great cameo and story foreshadowing. Sure, the General Grievous fight is over the top in CGI, but it helped push movie tech forward. Also, while the Obi-Wan vs Anakin goes on for a bit too long, remember this was going to be the last SW movie at the time. I hope the lightsaber fights can come back to this style in future SW movies.
John Williams never disappoints with his music. ROTS is one of his best, in my opinion. It’s hard to pick a favorite for me. It saddens me that he won’t compose more SW music anymore, for various (but fair reasons).
The prequel trilogy leads (Obi-Wan, Anakin and Padme) are at their best acting here. The dialogue is a bit off at times. However, George Lucas has self-admitted that he isn’t the best at writing dialogue. He does however, know how to world-build (pun intended) for others to follow off of him. And make better stories and characters than even he has, at times.
The Chewbacca cameo is great fan service, and actually makes sense in the plot.
So, to make a long story short, ROTS is still great in many ways 20 years later. Hopefully this successful re-release will give us a Force Awakens re-release later this year.
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SALEM’S LOT (2024)
In spite of having to size down the material, large chunks of characterisation and development ending up on the cutting room floor, as a film this works quite well. Yes, it leaves out the gradual descent, the vignettes of small-town-life or the ominous presence of the Marsden house as the infamous spot any community has and tries to ignore. But it’s doing a good job of delivering the story beats and does its own thing with the finale.
As an adaptation it’s not ‘definite’ (few King adaptations are), but it’s entertaining, and for those who may come to King through this there’s a wealth of undiscovered territory to be explored if they pick up the book. Recommended.
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On the Beach.
Not abundant with laughs. Terrifying, though.
Nevil Shute seems to have dropped out of fashion, which seems a pity since he had a lot to say.
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THE SEA WOLVES (1980, dir. Andrew V McLaglen)
Oh dear, is this a pedestrian affair. This film tells the true story of Operation Creek, a secret attack on a covert German radio station aboard a merchant vessel in some Goa harbour. They transmitted vital information to a network of German submarines operating in the Indian Ocean and were instrumental in the sinking of a great number of Allied merchant ships.
The film largely follows actual events such as they happened in late 1942 and up until March 1943. Some of the backstory of the German spies feeding the information to their radio station was changed to make it a bit more spy vs spy and add an element of Bond into the mix. But the main storyline of the British Raj old geezers taking up Schmeisser SMGs to trade their gin-tonic war with some crucial action only they as civilians could undertake remains intact.
There’s plenty of adventurous derring do in this tale, no doubt about it. But the whole story is told overlong, winding, even downright boring. The cast is too big, the names are too big for characters who feel flat and leave us in effect largely cold. Storywise this should have been told a lot trimmer.
For a production that uses actual locations extensively, there’s comparatively little to actually see here, much less to marvel about. Yes, this is India, not some backlot. But it might as well have been. Production values seem very hit-and-miss and the action itself is staged positively dull. The majority of close quarters fighting goes to Moore and rarely was he put in scene less convincingly. Only the one fight Peck had to deliver - dealing with two types half his age - was even worse.
The whole film suffers from an unfocused plot that cannot concentrate on a few important characters. Instead, it tries to portray the whole operation as a kind of tribute, tries to be documentary and entertainment. And hits neither tone.
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Ditto for Stanley Kramer.
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I remember seeing the poster at my favourite cinema and definitely wishing to see it after enjoying THE WILD GEESE so much.
But the movie was gone after one or two weeks. Many decades later, in 2019, I saw it was on offer as a digital copy for 3,99 Euros, so I bought it. And watched it. And had the same experience as you.
I still like the poster, though. The power of good marketing.
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I did actually see this - part of it - in some butchered-to-death version back in the 90s or early 00s on RTL, if memory serves. Didn’t get the entire film, so I thought it unfair to judge. But had I spent my pocket money on this in 1980 I’d have been deeply disappointed. Which happened rarely in the cinema in those days.
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It was aired at the BBC in the nineties if I remember correctly, but I already saw it on vcr when I rented it in the eighties, because… well… it had my movie hero Roger in it, but like all movies where he was one of a bigger cast his part was always a little dissapointing and he always seem to miss the final climax (Escape to Athena, The Wild Geese, The Sea Wolves) where he isn’t anywere to see (this probalby is not good English sorry about that, but you know what I mean).
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Discussion De Palma
A piece I think is helpful:
From the above:
I would argue that the intense appeal his films hold for us goes beyond visual voluptuousness or camp—though such matters are not incidental—and into a deeper, subconscious realm that rejects fixed identities, embraces marginalization, and acknowledges the integrity, even the necessity of social performance.
De Palma’s films are about surface/performance, and not about creating nuanced/in-depth psychological portraits (leave that to Bergman and Cassavetes). But De Palma’s staying on the surface is not an objectification of his characters. He is showing the fluidity of their surfaces as they interact with different people and situations, and how narrative-making and role-playing occur in (and often govern) life.
More later–have to get back to work. But look forward to your and everyone else’s thoughts.
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I have a love/hate relation with De Palma and his movies.
Most of the time the movies have a great beginning and middle, they are beautiful shot and full of exciting scene’s and suspense, thinking now for example of the museum scene from Dressed to Kill it’s fantastic, but almost all movies end for me with a anti climax and that leaves me don’t liking his movies as much as I would have liked. It’s than such a dissapointment that the rest of the movie isn’t much liked either by me. I can almost mention every movie where this happens for me. And stealing to much ideas from other movies, especially from Hitchcock, so that you can often guess the outcome, kind of.
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That is a very interesting observation, and I understand your perspective on this. In the case of FEMME FATALE it definitely works to receive the film that way.
Maybe my perspective on De Palma is too heavily influenced by the critical opinion during the 80´s at least here in Germany. De Palma was seen as two things: a gifted director mostly stealing from Hitchcock and a terrible misogynist. Both labels made it difficult for me as a teenager to enjoy De Palma or even defend him; on the one hand his films had that intriguing forbidden mix of nudity and violence (especially for teenagers who barely were allowed to buy a ticket at the box office - most of his films were only allowed from 16 years onwards) , on the other hand they also left one troubled and saddened (mostly) due to the disturbing images and often unhappy endings.
My first De Palma was “Dressed to kill”, and I do remember that my friends and I went to see it because of - you guessed it - the shower scene. That ends terribly, of course, so all the arousal it offered suddenly turned into shock; one felt punished for enjoying Dickinson (or better her double) soaping herself. The murder then was so disturbingly brutal (we did not know about this before attending the cinema) that from that point onwards we steeled ourselves and tried to pride ourselves with being so tough that we could stomach this film. I remember leaving the cinema with my friends, joking and feeling so above it - but secretly being terrified and getting nightmares. Still the fascination remained, and I bought the Donaggio score which naturally also has the wonderful and sweet melancholy pared with frightening dissonance. Just listening to it could scare me. And I was 16 years old at that time! But the fear also was kind of delicious. Especially when I got used to it and felt more powerful because I, well, could stand it.
I did not watch BODY DOUBLE, however, when it was released because the driller murder was heavily criticized in the German media back then, and I did not think I could stomach that.
The next De Palma I saw was THE UNTOUCHABLES, and that was a true crowd pleaser - somehow everybody I knew could get on board with that. Hey, the good guys won and it got a happy ending. Morricone´s score was uplifting. And it had CONNERY (even if he died, which was a shame). All in all, what a good time at the movies.
Then I watched CASUALTIES OF WAR, mainly because I was a fan of Michael J. Fox and thought he was such an underrated actor. I liked the film but I was again disturbed by it (a quality of movies I only later on could appreciate, when I got older and more cinema experienced).
My next De Palmas were BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (which has its moments amidst many flaws), CARLITO´S WAY (which I mainly loved for its final 20 minutes), RAISING CAIN (which left me kind of cold) and SNAKE EYES (which I still find extremely exciting, due to Cage and my personal love for stories taking place within strongly confined settings - which also explains my John Carpenter love).
Only then I started to seek out the earlier De Palma movies. While I did not really like many of them - apart from his masterpiece BLOW OUT (still my favorite De Palma) - I always enjoyed his, shall I call it operatic style, the heightened visuals married to a dominating score (I love melodic scores which turn to eleven). And at his best De Palma gives his movies that dangerous feeling of “anything could happen and you’re not safe” which often haunted me even hours after having watched them.
But returning to the “sex and identity as performances”-interpretation: I am aware of that, now that you and the Film Comment article mentioned this much more so, but I still feel a bit guilty whenever I see a De Palma movie showing women as pleasure objects.
Maybe because my impression of De Palma, the man, makes me think he really is one of the dirty old white men who only like women to be pleasure objects.
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First, thanks for your great response.
That is the way he was seen here as well. Critics slowly began to see and argue that he was doing more than merely stealing from Hitchcock–that he was actually developing AH’s themes in new directions.
As for the misogyny–it is always going to be an issue. Even De Palma has said that he could not make DRESSED TO KILL today. He is glad queer viewers like his work, but is aware of its problems.
BODY DOUBLE is interesting. Like MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, it is the story of one man scripting a narrative for another man to follow, therein becoming the first man’s scapegoat. The film also looks at the issues of fantasy/reality, and Hollywood filmmaking versus porn filmmaking (both centered in Southern California at the time of the fim).
A good take:
Its conclusion:
And then De Palma pulls the entire rug out from underneath the film’s reality and turns everything we’ve just seen into a prolonged Brechtian shaggy-dog joke, only to then pull the rug out from under that joke and halfheartedly reaffirm the film’s reality as a mystery-thriller. By the end of this masterpiece, one of the great and most uniquely American films of the 1980s, we only trust surfaces, which are as fleeting and illusory as anything else.
If a viewer is not in the mood for meta- cinema, they should avoid De Palma like a vampire avoids daylight.
Beautiful observation, and exactly what I believe De Palma wants a viewer to feel–uncertain, shaken. Another good review:
Again great. De Palma at his best arouses complicated, contradictory feelings and ideas in his viewers. He is not a tidy director, nor, as the first article states, a polemical one (which would have helped him with his critics). He is an artist of ideas, surfaces, and meta- everything. He is also deeply engaged with the world in which he is making films.
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Thanks back to you, great sources to study!
What do you think about CASUALTIES OF WAR (regarding surfaces, it seems to really be a scathing critique of the US military, with the only decent character played by someone who looks like a little boy, unable to uphold the America he naively believes in) and BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES (again with a main character looking boyish instead of the mega-WASP Master of the Universe of the novel, fooling around and ending up in the NY circle of hell)?
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I appreciated and respected Casualties of War. (Trying to think of a better way to express that. “Liked” or “enjoyed” aren’t really appropriate for such a violent film.)
IMO, other than in the Back to the Future trilogy, Michael J. Fox never got a fair shake as an actor. He was typecast in the Alex P. Keaton mold and had to fight for roles that would challenge others’ perception of him.
When I read Stephen King’s “Apt Pupil” (part of the Different Seasons novella collection), I thought Fox would have been brilliant in a film adaptation. I also always wished he could’ve played James Cagney in a biopic. 'Twas not to be.
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That would have been very interesting!
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Have not seen it since its opening weekend. Will have to watch it again.
Great description. De Palma movies are full of impotent men/boys who cannot live up to/defend their ideals. He is the most political filmmaker of his cohort.
Again, have not seen it since it opened.
This discussion has already caused my to buy BODY DOUBLE in 4K, and I suspect there will be more in the future.
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Same here. Also added the Arrow edition of OBSESSION.
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And he really named it COLOSSUS.
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