I didn’t care for The World’s End. I felt it was just Shaun of the Dead with robots.
I identified with the 40 somethings reliving their youthful days and the early 90s British soundtrack…
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I agree with you, as much as I wanted to like The World’s End. It is easily the weakest of the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy. I still particularly like Hot Fuzz with the villainous Timothy Dalton.
7500 (2020)
A horror/thriller film set on a plane during a terrorist hijacking. This film is strange. It creates great tension with its claustrophobic setting (the majority of the film takes place in the plane’s cockpit). Joseph Gordon-Levitt gives a great performance. However, the film is just another in a long line of works perpetuating the Islamic terrorist stereotype as the hijackers are German-born Muslims conducting a 9/11 style terrorist attack. I would likely have enjoyed this film more had the terrorists been non-Islamic fundamentalists. Many times, when tv shows and/or movies have resorted to this plotline, it has been when I have dumped those shows or movies. I remember the last episode I ever watched of the Hawaii Five-0 reboot dealt with 20-something Americans who converted to Islam and became radicalized. The overall message of the episode became about Americans beating Islamic terrorism, instead of showing how America and Islam are not enemies. From that moment on, I never watched Hawaii Five-0 again. This film does the same thing, although Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Tobias, was dating a Muslim woman and had a child with her. He does form a connection with one of the hijackers who prevents the plane from crashing and tries to save him at the end of the film. But the idea that Islam is not our enemy is never presented. Overall, it would be a good film if it weren’t let down and ultimately overshadowed by its ethnic stereotypes.
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IT - Chapter 2
Deadpool…again.
Just so much fun.
IMPERIUM (2016)
The premise of this thriller seems like stretching credibility beyond the limit: Daniel Radcliffe as FBI agent infiltrating a Nazi terrorist plot. In different hands, say, Cruise/McQuarrie you could almost bet on how many fights and set pieces we’d see. By minute five Cruise would beat up the first three swastika tattooed cattle-sized skins, by minute 15 we’d hear how his motivation stems from having lost a brother/friend/girlfriend/other close relative to Nazi machinations (or Dunkirk!). And the last few minutes would show a deadly countdown before Cruise manages to defuse the nuclear device. So far, so unsurprising.
Instead, we get something completely different, almost a documentary in minor keys, while we follow Radcliffe doing a cross-section into the smelly brown underbelly of American suburbia: skins, Nazis, triple-K-stubble-goatee White supremacy neighbours, sly radio hosts washing their dirty hands with the blood of the innocent. And while they all walk and talk - and probably smell - like you’d expect them to, they are practically to the last extra* astonishingly ordinary. Some pompous, some stupid, some despicable - but most of them by and far average.
Had the film been shot a few years later there would have featured a couple of QAnon imbeciles and likely the weedy trash from a Russian troll farm. And they too would have been, like the skins and the other assorted personnel from the racist right wing spectrum, ordinary. Ordinary monsters.
This quality of staying close to the characters, of depicting them without betraying them by hyperbole, starts with Radcliffe’s Nate Foster. He’s a young and still eager agent, but a far cry from being overambitious. His motivation is to make a difference with the abilities he has, not playing the super hero. He’s a loner and intellectual and both traits make him an outsider in the quasi-religious brotherhood of the FBI. Which makes him the ideal penetration agent into that other quasi-religious underworld. Not because he shares their hatred and murderous will for destruction, but because he never succumbed to the role of the pseudo-victim. Although that’s what they will see in him, a guy seeking shelter in the camaraderie of the Nazis and whose expertise and connections they can use.
The plot itself doesn’t invent the infiltration thriller anew. There’s a red herring and we’re fairly early aware how the thing, roughly, will play out. The bad guy sticks out even among all the other bad ones. But we know how it will end anyway, see above. The trick is how we arrive there. And here IMPERIUM underplays it’s hand maybe a bit too much. But IMPERIUM isn’t about thrills and suspense.
At the heart of it, IMPERIUM is about the banality of evil. And if you want to learn more about it you can do so here.
*Only Burn Gorman is here miscast as the typically insufferable bit player. Not his fault, he’s doing his usual thing with what little they gave him.
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Splendidly written. A pleasure to read.
Cheque’s in the post…
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Hot Tub Time Machine does that for me, only with 80s rock. At World’s End also makes a nice double bill with This is The End, the Seth Rogen spoof of armageddon.
Do you mean THE World’s End? Because At World’s End is the lame conclusion to the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.
I watched “13 Cameras”.
I liked it. It was pretty eerie and kept me interested all the way through. A bit obvious in places, but well acted (by unknown actors) and cleverly directed with an ominous atmosphere. I enjoyed the fact that it built slowly.
MELVIN AND HOWARD (1980) on blu-ray
For those keeping score, I am old enough to have seen MELVIN AND HOWARD as the Opening Night selection of the New York Film Festival–Jonathan Demme wore a camouflage-print tuxedo to the event. I recall a cheerful and lyrical comedy that pleased both audiences and critics.
Revisiting the film 40 years later, I still find the film cheerful and lyrical, but its darker elements are now more apparent to me. The performances are vivid and carefully etched, with Paul Le Mat, Mary Steenburgen, and Jason Robards especially brilliant. Le Mat’s Melvin is a character one can cheer for and deplore all at the same time. As hard as he works, Melvin sabotages his own success and happiness, but never in an evil way. He is beset by a benign, well-meaning haplessness.
What is apparent to me now is that both Hughes and Dummar live on the edge of society–Hughes by choice and Dummar by circumstance (which he desperately wants to change). Demme understands the traps of being working class in America, and the penultimate 360-pan in the Nevada courtroom sublimely conveys the forces arrayed against Melvin as he pursues his inheritance.
I looked forward with pleasure to seeing again the scene I most cherished from that viewing long ago: Melvin proudly asserting that Howard Hughes rode in his truck and sang his song. Le Mat’s delivery of the line and Demme’s mise en scene did not disappoint–the pleasure was greater than ever. Either I or the movie has aged very well.
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And you’re saying this on an international James Bond forum. I think you are the only one here capable to do that due to geography and/or age.
Any other middle aged New Yorkers do correct me.
Just wait until you young whippersnappers get old. You will be telling stories about the time you went to see NTTD during the coronavirus pandemic: “You kids have it easy! We had to wear masks, forgo popcorn, and walk three miles in the snow to the multiplex and back.”
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You mean that mysterious Bond film which was supposed to have been filmed before the world changed?
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Doh! Gotta blame that one on age as I hadn’t had a martini yet.
Or maybe there’s a “This Is At The World’s End” trilogy where Captain Jack Sparrow searches for the three flavors of cornetto ice cream before the Devil melts it all? 
You’re onto something there. Actually, I have it on good authority that all this coronavirus pandemic thing has been masterfully plotted by the Bond producers.
I mentioned it before, it all started with SPECTRE’s car chase in the empty streets of Rome. First off, Eon needed to show the world that a situation with two cars racing through the streets of one of the capitals of the world at breakneck speed with barely any other cars or even people around can happen. Check.
Second, we all know that the movie is doomed, but we didn’t know how bad it really was. There wasn’t even remotely a finished script when the so-called shooting started, but this had to be kept a secret (for reasons which are too complex to explain here). They just started staged shootings all over the world, with random scenes that don’t really make any sense but gave the fans enough food for discussions. Nothing was actually filmed, just a few scenes to get enough for a trailer. They knew before that they wouldn’t need any material by the time of the scheduled premiere because they had “Operation Corona” up their sleeves. All the other incidents and accidents that gave the movie the reputation of being doomed were all fabricated to add a bit more panache (the red tops are in this, too).
Also, they found it increasingly difficult with so much spectators coming to the locations, so they decided to first get the script properly done and then secretly shoot the movie on the empty streets and places all around the world (thus further retconing the Rome scenes). The real movie will feature a foot chase in Madrid and a car chase in the empty streets of Paris. Leaked footage:
(I’ve heard worse conspiracy theories in which some people actually do believe.)
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“…wait a sec…cinemas didn’t exist by the time No Time To Die was released! You’re confusing Citizen Kane for actual events…perhaps it’s time to talk about that care home Grandad”
Now here’s the real truth.
It was all Purvis & Wade. After being ridiculed for not being able to construct a believable plot they orchestrated this virus-thingee and even took revenge on EON for having them rewritten, by making sure the final film would never be seen. Then Bill Gates offered MGM to install a streaming platform for NTTD - but as a one time event only. P&W now are furious, of course, and will return to write the next Bond.
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L’ECLISSE (1962) – streamed Criterion version on You Tube
First:
I am on the waiting list for the home. Thanks for checking.
Second: like Scottie, I am going into the past once more. I first viewed L’ECLISSE as a teenager during summer break one year. While other youth were out swimming, hiking, and engaging in other reindeer games, I was cultivating summer pallor watching foreign films on my local public television station, which showed movies from Janus Films every weekday afternoon. This was the way I was first introduced to Antonioni, Bergman, and other stalwarts of art house cinema.
One Friday (somehow I remember it was a Friday) the selection was L’ECLISSE, and what fascinated me at first was that the film was shown letterboxed–there were black bands across the top and the bottom of the screen. I had never seen a film broadcast this way before. L’ECLISSE was my introduction to Antonioni, and initiated my love for his work. A Saturday night viewing on the same station of L’AVVENTURA was my next encounter, and then BLOW-UP on the late show (cut to ribbons, of course, but I had read the script. I also have no idea why I remember the days I first saw these particular movies). When I first saw IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN, I found it one of the most erotic movies I had ever seen–which is amazing since it is so female-centric in its sexuality.
My love for his films waned over the years, but was never extinguished. I would revisit them from time to time to see if the romance could be rekindled. I have come to regard BLOW-UP as both a pinnacle of modernist cinema, and, simultaneously, Antonioni’s admission of the cul-de-sac into which modernism had driven itself. ZABRISKIE POINT, THE PASSENGER, AND IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN seem to me attempts to move past modernism, but modernism seems so thoroughly ingrained in Antonioni’s aesthetic that moving completely beyond it is impossible (I have the same sense with Visconti).
I was pleased to find last night that I loved L’ECLISSE as much as ever. Jonathan Rosenbaum in an essay on the film noted that with this movie, Antonioni began to move away from the concept of sick Eros that had characterized his earlier films. My burgeoning queerness and interest in sexuality and sex positivity, probably had a great deal to do with my drift away from Antonioni (and Bergman and others as well). Sex was just not the minefield/swamp/battlefield they depicted in their films. Angst was more appealing to my teenage, coming-out-of-the-closet self than to the queer adult who emerged. Fassbinder became my artistic idol.
With L’ECLISSE, Antonioni moves in a more political direction (continued in RED DESERT and other films), and sex becomes less problematized. The malaise people suffer from now seems less a consequence of their sick desires and psychologies, and more the result of living in the culture they inhabit.
L’ECLISSE also marks an advance in terms of script, mise-en-scene, and direction of actors from previous films. Monica Vitti and Alain Delon work together brilliantly, and the dialogue–never the main focus with Antonioni–is paired down and mostly functional, with the occasional Antonioniesque head scratcher thrown in to keep everyone honest.
Best of all, Antonioni’s framing of shots, editing, and camera work reach new levels of sublimity. The film feels like a revival of silent cinema, with an incredible aural soundscape added to accompany the rebirth. The relationship between Vittoria and Piero advances through elliptical editing–clearly time elapses between their scenes, but exactly how much is left unstated. It is wonderful how the actors are able to convey a sense of progress (however tentative) in a non-traditional way.
I also had the sensation that the film was a work of science fiction–L’ECLISSE anticipates Godard’s ALPHAVILLE in setting a futuristic story in the undisguised present moment of filming (Fassbinder will take this same approach in WORLD ON A WIRE in 1973). The empty EUR suburb feels otherworldly–the perfect setting for a futuristic tale.
Lastly, Antonioni reaches back to his neorealist roots in L’ECLISSE. Only one set was constructed for the entire film, and the scenes in the Borsa are especially documentary-like (Antonioni used actual stockbrokers as extras for the scenes set there).
In the world of L’ECLISSE commitment is impossible, not because of psychological weakness or sickness, but rather, because of the toxic world in which the characters exist. When The Girl in THE PASSENGER urges Locke to keep Robertson’s appointments because he (Robertson) was committed to something, Antonioni is suggesting a way out of the sterile world he depicted earlier in L’ECLISSE.
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