Re: Odd Man Out, Eddie Muller said that James Mason was not the first choice for the lead role. When Farley Granger got the script, he skimmed through it, saw how few lines his character had and turned it down. Apparently he regretted this mistake for the rest of his life.
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A glorious hoot, indeed. BEAT THE DEVIL is THE MALTESE FALCON played as farce. Huston on location with pals, drinking and gambling, and making a film along the way.
A wonderful cast orbiting around a lost-looking Bogart (who sunk money into the production), the standout for me is Jennifer Jones, who was never freer nor more charming.
“An unqualified liar?”
“Well, let’s say she uses her imagination rather than her memory.”
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The Menu (2022)
A strange horror/black comedy film about a jaded celebrity chef played by our favorite, terrible at his job M, Ralph Fiennes, who invites a bunch of rich, snobbish, narcissists to his private island to be a part of his special menu. It bizarrely ends up being a great commentary on rich vs poor, entitlement, and treating those that serve you (and those that are getting served) with respect. Anya Taylor-Joy is also fantastic.
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Together (2025)
Not really sure what to say about this one. It’s a rather strange little horror film that stars Dave Franco and Allison Brie that doesn’t really do as much with its concept as I think that it could have. It’s a film that’s both about a couple that is having a great deal of doubt about moving away together and where they’re headed as a couple in addition to being about something strange that they find in a cave shortly upon moving into their new home.
It really seems to me as though this is a film that started with the concept of its climactic scene, a wild moment of special effects set to a Spice Girls tune, and then reverse engineered from there. Franco and Brie, who are married in real life, are very good, even if they’re not necessarily the best written characters you might find out there.
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MI: FALLOUT (Christopher McQuarrie, 2018)
The Mission Impossible franchise is often accused of being too formulaic, a series of stunts and set pieces revolving around a flimsy storyline, distinctive mostly for the different directors and the varying stunts Cruise does himself. Bond fans know all about it…
When McQuarrie took over the series in ROGUE NATION that entry promised to be so successful the sequel FALLOUT went immediately into pre-production and the storyline picked up several elements directly from the former film. For the first time there’s a feeling this franchise is going somewhere.
I rewatched this one for the first time since 2018. There was a lot I had already forgotten, the plots of MI tend to morph into one another. What I distinctly remembered though - and what this rewatch confirmed - is the spectacular extended stunt driving segment set in Paris. SPECTRE’s nighttime Rome chase pales in scope, choreography and practically everything else. Not just because Cruise does lots himself, every element here is quite outstanding.
The final act moves the action to Kashmir and even though I thought the script overdid the piling up of one ludicrously impossible stunt onto the next in the final battle, the idea to frame it in a helicopter duel with Hunt having nothing but his machine to ram the enemy while they are shooting hell out of his vehicle is quite brilliant. Once again, if we compare this to SPECTRE the Bond film doesn’t come out first place.
Finally, the budget. SPECTRE’s is rumoured between $ 250m - 300m. And nobody would say SPECTRE looks cheap, far from. But when FALLOUT three years later cost a lean $ 180m, with all the extensive stunt work, and looks at least as impressive - in the last act a lot more so even - one wonders how a Bond production with all its merchandise partners can burn almost double the FALLOUT budget. Of course, the MI flicks don’t keep their own car manufacturer as a sideline hobby. But Cruise got his helicopter license just for this production which also cannot have been exactly cheap.
FALLOUT itself: It’s quite a treat, actually a lot more engaging than I remembered. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel or the spy-themed action thriller. It doesn’t even reinvent MI as a franchise. But it’s a spectacular, spectacularly well-made blockbuster on the highest level of the genre.
Okay, it traditionally doesn’t use the same amount of impressive soundstage sets or crash half the annual output of a luxury car manufacturer. And instead of extended fight sequences we get a running Tom Cruise and a running commentary by Simon Pegg. But these are not huge shortcomings. It’s a feature not a bug here.
Liked it quite a bit.
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Bob Roberts.
Predictive text. Predictive subtext.
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16 Blocks
Bruce Willis plays a cop who must bring a witness to a court hearing while corrupt cops are trying to kill both.
Sounds like a high concept thriller, Die Hard in the streets of New York. And it partly is.
But Richard Donner directs this so vividly and realistically that I never stopped to think about the construction of this film. And Bruce Willis gives one of his best performances as a cop who is a physical and emotional wreck, having even more at stake than meets the eye at first. Mos Def also is magnificent as the small time crook full of hope for a better life, trying to do the right thing and being targeted for it.
Such an underrated gem. Absolutely terrific.
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Zootopia 2 (2025)
Took the kiddos to see this one (first time I’d been to the movie theater in years). Sharply written, with great animation, and great voice acting, it is a worthy sequel to the original that can also stand on its own merits.
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Got the Pink Panther movies on 4K today and watched Revenge of the Pink Panther and A shot in the Dark this afternoon. Last weekend I got my favorite The Pink Panther Strikes Again.
They all look and sound great and better than the blu rays from the Shout! box, only Revenge of the Pink Panther looks not as good as the others. The image is often very grainy and sometimes blury, but maybe this is due to the original negative. I remember that this was also the case with the blu ray which was even more grainy. Next is the original Pink Panther movie. Return is released later this year on 4K.
Watching these movies is a lot of fun, I love this kind of physical humor with a lot of “destruction” jokes.
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Deliver Me from Nowhere
This rocked. What a beautiful looking film. I really enjoyed it.
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Primal Fear
Yes, that 90´s thriller which put Edward Norton on the map and starred Richard Gere during his big comeback phase.
I remember seeing the trailer for months in almost every cinema I went to - and I kind of got bored by it, just because it appeared constantly. Then, watching the movie finally, I thought: yeah, nothing special. A twist at the end. But just the usual courtroom thriller, very tv-like.
And I never watched it again. Until now.
What a perfect thriller this is. So well crafted, such effective NOT TV-LIKE filmmaking, but not in a show-off-y kind of way, just a subtle combination of the right camera angles and movements, edited seamlessly. This is the kind of movie which has a terrific story told to maximum effect without announcing its first rate craft. The whole casting is perfect, down to the smallest role. And the writing - so poignant, so precise, the plot, the dialogue. This should be taught in film schools.
And aside from Norton who really is a revelation in his first major film role, Richard Gere shines and delivers probably the best performance of his shamelessly underrated impressive career. He is never afraid to portray unsympathetic and arrogant characters, but here he goes even one step further and shows so many layers it´s criminal that he never got the acclaim he deserved. Laura Linney also is superb, in a role which defies every cliché that usually courtroom dramas rely on. And James Newton Howard’s score adds a wonderfully driving, unobtrusively rhythmic atmosphere to the unease the cinematography captures in every location and set.
Yes. One of my favorite films now. I could even watch the trailer again.
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Chef
One of those movies that found me at just the right time. A warm embrace in the bitter cold of this winter.
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FLAMINGO ROAD (1949)
A discussion in another group created a hankering for Michael Curtiz, and didn’t TCM have the movie to satisfy the hunger.
FLAMINGO ROAD comes late in the noir cycle, and shows another variation of the genre. If MILDRED PIERCE’s femme fatale was the heroine’s daughter, there is no femme fatale whatsoever in FR. In fact, the female characters are the ones who evince the small amounts of integrity in the movie’s landscape.
Lane Bellamy (Joan Crawford) works in a carnival, and wants to stop running. Though older than her character, Crawford is excellent as a woman who wants to settle down, and have some stability in her life. She is tough, secretive/protective, and uncertain of her feelings when it comes to the men she might love. Crawford is able to play all sides of Lane, and make them seem compatible.
The assorted males run the gamut from weak/compliant to evil. Sydney Greenstreet and Zachary Scott are particularly fine, being evil and weak respectively.
Fassbinder loved this movie, and included it on the last 10 Best List he compiled. It is not difficult to see Lane Bellamy as a precursor to Maria Braun, Lola, and other of his heroines.
FLAMINGO ROAD is playing for five more days on TCM from the date of this post.
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To be complete, here is Fassbinder’s final list:
- “The Damned” (1969, Dir: Luchino Visconti)
2. “The Naked And The Dead” (1958, Dir: Raoul Walsh)
3. “Lola Montes” (1955, Dir: Max Ophuls)
4. “Flamingo Road” (1949, Dir: Michael Curtiz)
5. “Salo, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom” (1975, Dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini)
6. “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” (1953, Dir: Howard Hawks)
7. “Dishonored” (1931, Dir: Josef von Sternberg)
8. “The Night Of The Hunter” (1955, Dir: Charles Laughton)
9. “Johnny Guitar” (1954, Dir: Nicholas Ray)
10. “The Red Snowball Tree” (1973, Dir: Vasili Shukshin)
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One way Passage 1932
Honestly one of the best filmed love stories of all-time, the sublime One Way Passage also manages to be surprisingly atypical. There’s no romantic rivals, no heavy baggage, save for a pair of inescapable fates for the lovers. Dan killed someone– a bad someone, naturally– and was finally caught in Hong Kong by the bullheaded and persistent Burke. Burke’s taking Dan back to San Francisco, and the gallows, by way of a 30-day ocean liner journey. His Lover on the same journey is terminally ill.
The ending made me tear up a little.
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I think when it came out it was pretty novel and not all that predictive. But to each her/his own. For me, what was truly creative was the character: a politician who was a right wing Bob Dylan. The parody of the Subterranean Homesick Blues was just wonderful. I found the plot took some unexpected turns, especially regarding the assassination plot and the devotee realizing it was all fake and being happy about it. To me what made the movie work was it was fun. While it was making some serious points, it did so in a very humorous way and avoided being just a movie length Saturday Night Live skit IMHO. I have not seen the movie in ages. Need to watch it again. I saw it back in the theatre when it came out based on a newspaper review. Bob Nixon (he was the former Treasurer of Ontario and former leader of the Ontario Liberal Party) was going in at the same time and I had a quick pleasant chat with him. That said; we all have different tastes and opinions.
I look back fondly on three 90s films almost as though they were cousins: Bob Roberts, Primary Colours (the book was better) and Wag the Dog. Haven’t seen the last one in at least 20 years and always loved Dustin Hoffman’s character who I understand was a parody of Robert Evans. I have seen some people online say Evans had told Hoffman he did not like it but no source. The quote that gets more play is Evans reportedly saying of Hoffman’s portrayal: “I’m magnificent in this film!”
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Beautiful
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The Long Walk (2025)
Not really sure what to think about this one. On the one hand, it’s a very impressive feat to craft an engrossing film where the majority of the run time is spent with two characters in frame walking towards the camera while having various conversations. That is an impressive feat and hats off to Francis Lawrence for that achievement.
On the other hand, though, I’m not sure that the film is really as strong in its social commentary as many make it out to be. It feels as though it’s meant to be a look at where we currently are as a society and, perhaps more so, where we’re headed, but it doesn’t ever feel as though it has the teeth to really tear into what it really wants to say. It’s a cruel film, but often times it feels cruel just for the sake of featuring cruelty, with the filmmakers hoping that we’ll substitute the current real life villains that we see all around us into the place of the considerably weak, not particularly subtle stand-in villain played by Mark Hamill. The film wants the current horrors of the world to do the heavy lifting for it, showing us a country that is clearly in the aftermath of some kind of political and economic collapse, but the film doesn’t even pay lip service in terms of telling us what that might be, instead it seems to just rely on the sense of anger and contempt that currently plagues the discourse in real life to set the table for its fictional world, which then has the unintended effect of really removing the fangs from any biting social commentary that it might be trying to make. It’s a film that feels like it really wants to make a statement but never finds the courage of its convictions to actually make the statement.
This is especially true once we get to the ending of the film, which is about as limp of an ending as I can remember, yet also makes it a nearly perfect Stephen King adaptation because of it, although I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the adaptation here because I’ve never read Bachman/King’s novel. Still, the ending falls flat, essentially doing away with a lot of the goodwill that had been built up over the previous 100 minutes or so.
The Long Walk is a good film, far more so than one would think it would be considering it spends the bulk of its time in walking simulator mode, but it’s the toothless social commentary and limp ending that really keeps this from being an all-time classic horror film and Stephen King adaptation.
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Tim Robbins did indeed see the mechanics of politics adapting to fringe movements, turning things on their head - hence the total idiocy of a right wing Bob Dylan, and the followers lapping it up without ever questioning the sheer lunacy of it, but embracing someone, thinking he is an idealist while he is just a brutal cynic.
Fun fact: BOB ROBERTS is not available to stream. Only on expensive DVDs from secondary markets.
Also fun fact (well, opinion): Jack Black with his stunned excitement for Roberts delivers his best performance here.
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