Watched Dunkirk whilst on holiday. Been meaning to watch it for ages as I'm a Nolan fanboy. I thought it was bloody great. Loved the minimal dialogue, performances all around superb but I loved Tom Hardy and Ken Branagh (geez he's an absolute gem).
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Decision to Leave - Park Chan-wook's latest had promises of Hitchcock (particularly Vertigo) and Verhoeven (Basic Instinct) influences ... in a story of a detective investigating a suspicious suicide and particularly, the wife of the deceased. Sounds awesome. But it kind of isn't. It's technically brilliant. The way the characters walk among each others scenes and memories and theories is fantastic, conversations bleeding from one scene to another, from the current to the past. It's really well made. But it's a tad too long and the ending, from me, felt a bit like oh, is that it? Disappointing.Comment
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Plane
The plot is as simple as the trailer suggests it is but the film is better than I expected. Despite its premise that I've seen amusingly described as Fly Hard, the film takes a very 'grounded' approach and that works in its favour. There's no action movie Hollywood OTTness to it, it's a world where a fight with one person is an actual effort and injury is common etc. Nice little film.Comment
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So I watched the 4K remaster of Fright Night I bought from the UK on BluRay. Fantastic and still holds up. Found out there's a Part 2 which I never knew about but there it was on YouTube. Oh my God, how the mighty have fallen. Roddy McDowall is great in it but that's about it. The story is awful. The ideas pathetic and the production values way below the original.
I wish I never knew this existed now.Last edited by Yakumo; 04-02-2023, 12:46.Comment
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Watched JoJo Rabbit on C4 earlier.
Can not say it entertained me as much as I hoped from the trailers they've been running during the week. It was uncertain in tone and not as outrageous funny, or funny at all TBH, as it could have been. Only time I really laughed was the grenade incident early on in the film, the similar Panzershrek accident that was included in the trailer and when the boy finally dumps his imaginary 'friend' near the end.
The only thing really worthy of note were to two young leads whose developing relationship was well imagined, well written and well played.Comment
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Dial M For Murder
Similar single room set up as Rear Window but nowhere near as well done. It's mostly down to how it's a bit wooden, characters just reel off exposition and don't converse naturally at all which - for a film reliant entirely on conversation - is the issue.Comment
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Casablanca
Never seen it before, just familiar with all the bits everyone is. Wasn't sold by the first half entirely but the second half is stronger and even better made as well. "This could be the start of a beautiful friendship" - Don't do it! The guys a massive creep! An amusing one but a sex predator regardless. Sam got screwed also.Comment
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Casablanca is still one to tick off for me.
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011 via DVD, but I think they're all currently on Prime).
This was great to watch as I rewatch the series and show them to my son for the first time.
M:I 3 was great and the start of the upturn of the series, but this was brilliant.
I'd forgotten how great the Burj Khalifa sequence is and how vertigo-inducing it is!
Disc was pretty vanilla with a couple of "making-of" featurettes, rather than a Brad Bird commentary, which would have been interesting.Comment
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I watched Mission Impossible the other day too, the first one.
I watched this as a kid and I could barely remember any of it, so it basically felt new to me. Rogue Nation and Fallout are still relatively fresh in the memory, and this is a very different kettle of fish. It's very much a De Palma film, and it's immediately obvious how much more stylistic it is than McQuarrie's efforts. The inherent goofiness of the 'Impossible Mission Force', with their self-destructing messages and latex masks, lends itself perfectly to his exaggerated, pulpy style. And it's a delight to see his sort of grindhouse Hitchcock vibe be combined with Cruise's clean cut earnestness.
Really cool. Like it a lot. According to the Wikipedia entry, it was Cruise's idea to get De Palma onboard, but they didn't get on during production, hence not working together again. A shame, because they're a combo that almost shouldn't work, but deffo does.Comment
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I liked the Dutch angles in it! Corny, but then Mission Impossible - especially in this first transitional stage from its 1960s TV origins - IS corny. Lent the scene in the aquarium restaurant in particular a paranoid, destabilising feel.Comment
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To clarify, I didn't think he really had a wonky tripod!
Agreed, it was a good technique to subtly ratchet up the tension as the viewer is made uneasy by the angles.
I really enjoyed it, but my main issue was it did the opposite of what made the show work so well - teamwork.
In the first five minutes, they (SPOILER) the whole team and (SPOILER) is a baddie.Comment
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Silent Running - There's a lot of nostalgia here but only based vague memories from seeing it as a kid (I always loved the lush green domes and the awesome robots. And the space buggies
). It's about a small crew aboard a huge commercial space ship with Earth's last surviving flora and fauna in domes attached to it. It is implied that humans have basically paved over planet Earth and destroyed anything natural. Tending the domes is Lowell, the only crew member that cares about what's inside them and a bit of a loner because of that. Watching it now it's a strange one. Lowell is pretty ott ... like fanatical to the point of being unsuitable for space-based career. And
And so begins the loneliness and then companionships with the three drones: Hewy, Dewy and Louie. It has its imperfections and he's a hard protagonist to root for but the film follows its vision true, delivering a final scene that really stays in the mind. And for an old film it feels even more timely now.Last edited by Atticus; 10-02-2023, 06:27.Comment
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I really like Silent Running. Like you say, it's far from perfect, but it's a very distinctive vision. And Lowell is an extremely unusual protagonist.
Haha ah don't worry I didn't think that. Dutch angles can be a pretty horrible technique when deployed badly (e.g. Battlefield Earth) so it wouldn't be untoward to have knocked them anyway.Originally posted by QualityChimp View PostTo clarify, I didn't think he really had a wonky tripod!
Agreed, it was a good technique to subtly ratchet up the tension as the viewer is made uneasy by the angles.
I really enjoyed it, but my main issue was it did the opposite of what made the show work so well - teamwork.
In the first five minutes, they (SPOILER) the whole team and (SPOILER) is a baddie.
Yeah, I know what you mean. I've only seen bits and pieces of the TV show so I've no relationship with it. For that reason I kind of just judge the film as a standalone thing, and I actually really like how much it wrongfoots you throughout.
I just watched Mission Impossible 2.
This one is brand new to me as I've never seen it before whatsoever. I knew it was John Woo and had a poor reputation, that's all.
My views on it are kind of mixed. On the one hand, it's kind of an insanely bad film. It has some of the worst dialogue ever committed to celluloid - 'We just threw a snowball into hell. Now we're going to see what chance it has.' - and a plot that manages to be both childishly simple and yet weirdly confusing.
There's plenty of stuff that just doesn't make sense, like how the bad guy knows exactly how Hunt will break into the pharmaceutical company, yet still doesn't manage to make it there before Hunt's practically been and gone.
And then there's also the much-commented on slo-mo, best exemplified in a sequence where Woo extends a shot of Thandie Newton walking 10 feet and having her scarf blow lightly into the wind into a mini music video, for no apparent reason whatsoever.
And yet, it does have something about it. It's frequently visually arresting, for one. The bit where Hunt is rock climbing is just awesome, for example. And there's almost something gonzo about its naffness at times, like when Hunt and the bad guy pop wheelies at each other in the final showdown, or how it's genuinely entirely coincidental that Thandie Newton is an internationally wanted master thief and the only actual reason they need her involved is because she's the baddie's girlfriend.
I can't make my mind up about it. I love Hard Target, and that's brilliantly naff. And if I think about MI2 in the same way, I do like it. But at the same time, De Palma's vision in the first film is a much better interpretation of the MI concept overall for me. And the MI2 script really is unforgivably atrocious.Last edited by wakka; 08-02-2023, 17:23.Comment
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I think the trouble with MI2 is that of all the entries it's the one that's most a product of the time it was made. Whilst MI1 was a success the film was still seen as being a shadowed impression of the Bond franchise. Cruise was still very keen at the time on the idea that each Mission Impossible should be visually distinct from the next, reflecting its directors style and they honed in on John Woo because he was coming off the back of Face/Off. The film is OTT in so many stylistic ways but it was also made in the era when the biggest action film hits coming out were Fast and Furious and Die Another Day. It makes a ton of sense on context of the year it released and I always kind of liked the simplicity of it. MI3 did so much heavy lifting on resetting the tone of the franchise moving forward but I always struggled to overall enjoy that entry as much, the fourth film though was fire - the point where everything just clickedComment
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