Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Rotten Tomatoes gives this unholy mess of a film 96%, which suggests either that their algorithm has been corrupted by The Entity, or most critics were watching a different film to me. Where to start? Well, the way Ilsa is killed off here is nothing short of a scandal.  She is a major reason why the previous two films were so great, yet here she is killed midway through the film in a somewhat meaningless fight with a bad guy she should be able to eat for breakfast.  Which brings me to the underwhelming villain Gabriel, who doesn't bring much to the table as far as I could see, other than an irritating smugness. Time will tell whether this story needed to be split into two films.  Judging by the amount of padding here, and the absence of any memorable stunts, I'm sceptical. By padding, I mean the stuff in the desert at the start, the ludicrous business with the nuclear bomb at the airport, the seemingly endless car chases in Rome, or the fight on the train roof.  Yet ...

Just to show how far I am from the target audience for this film, this was my first exposure to either Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson. Nor am I turned on by fast cars, so for example the ludicrous and unnecessary sequence where four characters steal police cars and then race them through the streets of Rio didn't do anything for me.   I watched this film because this is supposed to be the best of the franchise, and I was in the mood for an action film where I didn’t need to engage brain. Unfortunately when I did engage brain it would ask awkward questions.  Why did those guys remove part of the wall in a police station toilet, or why was a lot of time spent showing us the team practising driving so as to evade security cameras, when both turned out to be irrelevant to the final heist. Admittedly that heist and the ensuing chase are cool and fun, and the opening set piece is OK, but pretty much everything in between left me bored. I like action in films where I am emotionall...

I love a good submarine film, so once I got past Sean Connery as a Soviet submarine commander with a Scottish accent I was swept along happily enough by this adaptation of a Tom Clancy bestseller.  It helps that it has a strong cast, headed up by Alec Baldwin as Jack Ryan, and was directed by John McTiernan, two years after 'Die Hard', who once again demonstrates his ability to build dramatic tension and to handle action scenes. The plot centres on Connery going rogue with a new stealth submarine, and for a while it is an open question whether he is a madman trying to start WW3, or a defector.  It soon becomes clear, perhaps rather disappointingly, that it is the latter. Of course, if he was a madman then we would have a film more akin to the superior 'Crimson Tide' released five years later.  Which is not to downplay the considerable virtues of this outing, which is tense and entertaining throughout. RATING :  ✓ Cheers

This film is a delightful journey back to a more innocent time (I guess), the 1930s, where good Christian folk can just hand a 9-year old girl over to a complete stranger, trusting him to deliver her to a distant relative, now that her mother has just died. The stranger (Moze, played by Ryan O'Neal), is probably her father given that he had had some sort of relationship with the mother, but he is quite keen to just put her on a train.  She (Addie, played by Tatum O'Neal) has other ideas and is pretty darned good at getting her way, so she joins him as he travels the country, plying his "trade", mainly conning recently deceased widows.  Addie is a chip off the old block, quickly proving herself to be as good a con artist as Moze.   Then Moze picks up "Miss Trixie", played delightfully as always by Madeline Kahn, much to Addie's displeasure, so Addie has to find a way to get rid of her, which of course she manages.   Things then take a turn for the worse, ...

My bible for any film of this era ("The Sunday Times Guide to Movies on TV") is surprisingly lukewarm about this 1953 crime film directed by Fritz Lang, not liking the 'gratuitous violence'. Well, a lot of blood has flowed since that review was written.  Sure, there are a couple of moments here of shocking violence, but they are integral to the story. And what a taut, well-plotted story it is, more than capably performed and directed, with not a moment wasted. Glenn Ford is fine as an honest homicide detective, trying to do his job despite the corruption all around him.  He eventually triumphs, but at a huge personal cost, and only with the help of the splendid Gloria Grahame, as a gangster's moll.  The gangster in question is the psychopathic Lee Marvin, having a whale of a time. Unusually for a film of this period it seems that Ford's happy relationship with his wife might extend to the bedroom as well as the kitchen and living room, or maybe I am reading to...

This film is another case of me being late to the party.  I was reluctant to watch this critically acclaimed film, directed by Guillermo del Toro, for no good reason other than my aversion to any film (such as 'The Elephant Man') which involves cruelty to someone based on their physical otherness.  And a relationship between a weird sea creature and a mute girl was unappealing.  And an Oscar is no guarantee of quality. Anyhow I have now seen it, and of course the critics were right, it's terrific. I didn't buy the physical relationship between Elisa and The Creature for one moment, but it didn't matter, given the fairy tale quality of the film, created at the start by the voice-over. I loved the visual quality of this film.  It's different from say a film like 'Last Night in Soho' where the colours are vibrant to the point of being garish.  Here they are muted and fuzzy.  And very green.  I'll leave it to cleverer people than me to work out the thema...

I guess it's a measure of how much I enjoyed this epic that I was barely conscious of its length, and I even managed to watch it without going to the loo once, which must mean something. Mind you, my heart did sink a tad during the rather clunky opening scenes which feature the usual tropes to signal we are in the presence of Genius.  But once the Manhattan Project starts to take off I was fully on board for the ride.  One of the reasons I was swept along was the combination of the time-hopping structure and the relentless pace.  Yet despite the pace, and the absence of quiet scenes, I didn't feel exhausted by the end.  Credit for this must go to Nolan, and to the score. I went into the film knowing very little about Oppenheimer the person, so I enjoyed finding out about his left-wing connections in his youth on the one hand, and his fall from grace in the 1950s on the other.  One thing I certainly didn't expect were the couple of erotic scenes, or moments, a fi...

About an hour into this film I realised that my attention was beginning to wander, which was a bit odd given that it was lively and that there was an intriguing story that was developing. But maybe I can easily find Edgar Wright's aesthetic wearing, or maybe I feel that the 1950s/1960s Soho scene has been done to death.  And maybe I doubted whether this story was going anywhere special. On the last point, I guess I was half-wrong. The last act contained a surprise (for me, at least) and was spectacular enough to leave me feeling happy enough to have stuck with the film until the end. But when all is said and done the film has only one message, which is that many men are happy to exploit women given half a chance. Sure, that's an important message but for all this film's energy and visual inventiveness, and of course the lovingly curated soundtrack, I would have liked more substance. RATING : x Curb Your Enthusiasm 

There really is no point in this sequel, other than to make loads of money, which it did. Having tried something a bit different with 'Ocean's 12' Soderbergh reverts to Plan A, except the heist here is scarcely worthy of the name, and without Julia Roberts or Catherine Zeta-Jones  there's no romance either.  Which leaves us with Clooney and Pitt et al exposed, having nothing much in the way of substance or characterisation to fall back on.  I love a good heist movie, and there was pleasure in the first film in seeing the components of the heist coming together, plus the denouement when Garcia's relationship with Roberts is skewered. Replicating any of that was always going to be a tall order, but the writers don't even try. There's so little at stake - are we really supposed to care about Reuben, and whether Pacino's character gets his comeuppance?  Most of the efforts at comedy fall flat, for example the goings-on in the Mexican factory.  There's on...

What an entertaining but odd Western this is, directed by the German  émigr é Fritz Lang, and starring Marlene Dietrich. The eponymous ranch is named Chuck-a-Luck, which was the original title of the film until the studio boss Howard Hughes objected - one of his better decisions.  Apparently Chuck-a-Luck is a real thing, a game using dice and a form of roulette wheel.  With the help of Frenchie (Mel Ferrer), Altar Crane (Dietrich) wins enough money at the game to set up the ranch as a refuge for outlaws, who in return give her 10% of their ill-gotten gains. Into this happy setup comes Vern (played by Arthur Kennedy) seeking revenge on the guy, Kinch, who raped and murdered his fiancée at the beginning of the film, the only problem being he doesn't know what his quarry looks like, or indeed anything about him.  Things rapidly escalate what with Vern romancing Altar in order to extract information (who responds enough to make Frenchie jealous), a bank robbery, and Kin...

With a story as big as this, a scandal that brought down a US President, did the studio really need to cast such big stars as Redford and Hoffman to play the inquisitive reporters, Woodford and Bernstein? Well yes, because we necessarily only get part of the story here since it's all from the viewpoint of The Washington Post, and it all could be a bit dull and stodgy, so to have the charisma of Redford and Hoffman on tap is no bad thing.   Thankfully we're in good hands, with Alan J Pakula directing, the third in his 'paranoia trilogy', and a screenplay by William Goldman, so that a scene where all Redford is doing is frantically looking through some telephone directories is gripping as hell. Even Hoffman, an actor who can irritate with his mannerisms if he's allowed to, is focussed and convincing as the more experienced but yet more volatile of the pair.   Judging from this film the worlds of journalism and of politics in the 1970s were male-dominated in the extrem...