Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

The critics weren't much taken with George Clooney's fourth outing as a director, and sadly neither was I. The subject of the film is the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section Unit, which was a program set up during World War II.  It comprised about 400 service members and civilians who worked with military forces to protect historic and cultural monuments from war damage, and towards the end of the war to find and return works of art etc. This program had a noble aim, but from the above description it's obviously not going to be easy to find a satisfying way to dramatise its work.  On the evidence of this film it may be an impossible challenge. Clooney and his co-writer tackle it by firstly making the program into a race against time - can art works be recovered from the Nazis before they are destroyed? - and secondly by reducing the program to a small gang - not so much the Dirty Dozen as the Arty Eight. For this approach to work, the viewer has to care about their m...

OK, the big problem with this 1988 drama set in 1964 Mississippi, based on real events, is that it is telling a story about racism from an all-white perspective and with none of the black characters having any agency. If you can get past that (I could) then there's a lot to enjoy.  And to be fair to the makers of the film, although it can be criticised as a white-saviour narrative, the saviours here ( two FBI investigators, Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) are not romanticised, and there is no triumphalism at the end.  Justice gets done but there's been too much hate and ugliness before then to leave the viewer with a feel-good feeling.   Although US black-white relations are in many ways much better now, we know that there's still a lot more to be done. There's a KKK meeting here, where we see white folks happily absorbing racist bile, that brought to mind  the MAGA movement. To make the story more commercial the informant who helps the FBI, after three civil rig...

This cult film by Brian De Palma has been one I've wanted to see for a very long time, and at long last I managed to do so. And I was not disappointed!  Although I wouldn't go as far as Tarantino and say it is one of my three all-time favourite films, it is well-nigh unimpeachable (other than the odd plot improbability) and it would certainly be one of the great 1970s paranoia films but for the fact it was released in 1981. It also has a wonderfully bleak ending which probably damaged its box office performance. I was surprised that John Travolta is the lead in a low budget film like this given that he was a superstar by this time.  He is totally convincing as Jack, a sound engineer who stumbles upon a conspiracy whereby the state governor (and likely future President) dies in mysterious circumstances which are reminiscent of the Chappaquiddick incident. Despite the political backdrop the film is more interested in Jack's past - whilst a cop he was traumatised when an unde...

The critics gave the thumbs up to this weird film, especially Nicholas Cage's performance. If I was being unkind I might attribute this to what I call Prodigal Son Syndrome i.e. critics going overboard if a director or actor turns in a half-decent performance after a series of duds. But you have to hand it to Cage, it's hard to imagine anyone else being able to make this slight but ridiculous story anywhere near believable, let alone get you to be emotionally invested. Cage is Robin, a magnificent chef, once the toast of Portland, who for many years has lived as a recluse in the woods following the death of his wife Lori.  His only companion is a pig who hunts out the best truffles, which are sold to a young guy called Amir. Unfortunately the pig is stolen, which drives Robin to the desperate act (for him) of returning to Portland to try to retrieve his pig, with Amir reluctantly in tow.  We then get some rather odd encounters, the strangest of which involves some kind of figh...

This is Eddie Murphy's film debut, in 1982, having barely turned 20.  I remember it fondly, along with 'Trading Places' and 'Beverly Hills Cop' which quickly followed and which made him a superstar.   Strangely though I've since seen only one other film of Murphy's, 'Bowfinger'.  Maybe I've been too easily put off by the poor reviews his films often attract, or maybe when it comes down to it I'm not that big a Murphy fan?  The director Walter Hill was on the face of it an unlikely choice for an action comedy, his forte at that point being uncompromising action films, including the remarkable 'The Warriors'.   But he had been involved in developing the storyline of a police detective and a convict working together, and apparently it was Hill who hit on the idea of a black comic playing the latter.  At first the studio were unimpressed, but once Richard Pryor became a movie star they gave the idea the green light, although Pryor himself...

Here Director Howard Hawks in 1966 reworks the plot of his 1959 film 'Rio Bravo', again using the idea of a sheriff defending his office from outlaws with only the help of various misfits.  In the earlier film the sheriff under siege is aided by a drunk and a lame old-timer.  Plus a young gunslinger who may or may not decide to get involved. In 'El Dorado' it's the sheriff (Robert Mitchum) who has an alcohol problem, aided by a veteran gunslinger (John Wayne), a young guy who is handy with a knife (a young James Caan) and an old-timer. 'Rio Bravo' is very highly regarded but I think I prefer this film (although I wouldn't count either as among my favourite Westerns), the main reason being that Robert Mitchum is a significant upgrade compared with Dean Martin in the earlier film.  The scene where Mitchum manages to pull himself together sufficiently to enter the town's saloon and make an arrest is a memorable one. I also enjoyed the performance of Chr...

OK, this remake was likely pointless but it has a  good cast and I wanted to see what changes had been made to the original 1976 cult classic.  I expected it to stick fairly closely to the basic plot but that the action sequences might be an improvement, given a bigger budget. One change is that we've moved from LA in the summer to Detroit in a snowstorm on New Year's Eve.  A snow storm is a good way of creating a siege-like atmosphere even before you're under siege, so a good change I would say. Another big change is that the attackers are no longer gang members but are corrupt cops.  It's an interesting idea but unfortunately it does stretch credulity that so many cops have gone to the Dark Side, so much so that by the end they are prepared to kill fellow officers and civilians.  And they are absurdly well kitted out, to the point that by the end they are calling up a helicopter. They are attacking the rundown police station because inside is a gangster, Bisho...

What a pleasant surprise this is - a 1994 film directed by Woody Allen, which is genuinely comic, but with some substance, and which is delivered by a terrific ensemble cast. There's also a theme, maybe too overtly stated at times, about whether it is better to be an Artist or just a normal common-or-garden schmuck.  Or as someone asks, if you had to choose between saving a random person or the last copy of Shakespeare's works, which would you choose? Thankfully this is handled with a lightness of touch for which maybe we should thank Allen's co-writer here, Douglas McGrath. The film looks great thanks to Carlo di Palma, who worked with Allen on eleven films. All the cast are spot-on.  I especially enjoyed John Cusack's performance as a playwright, David,  who discovers over the course of the film that he has no talent.  Recently I've seen several Cusack films which I didn't much enjoy so it was nice to be reminded here of how good he can be with the right mater...

This 1987 Kevin Costner vehicle is an adaptation of a 1946 novel 'The Big Clock', written by Kenneth Fearing. The clever plot-device Fearing came up with was to have the protagonist given the job of investigating a murder, with the catch being that he has been framed for the murder by the real murderer, who has set up the investigation.  Thus there is a race against time (hinted at by the title) whereby the protagonist has to uncover the murderer before the investigation closes in on him. Here the hapless fall guy is a US Naval Intelligence Officer, Tom Farrell (Costner) who is in a relationship with Susan Atwell (Sean Young).  The complication is that she is also having an affair with Farrell's boss, US Secretary of Defence David Brice (Gene Hackman).  Things take a bad turn when Brice accidentally kills Susan in a jealous fit of rage. Fortunately his resourceful righthand man Scott comes up with the idea of side-lining the police by setting up a special investigation (w...

Watching this Alexander Payne comedy-drama was like going back in time to the 1970s (in a good way).  It is not just that it is set in the winter of 1970-71.  The cinematography, music and editing style are all old-school (again, in a good way) so that I could easily have been watching a film from that era.  For me, it was pure catnip. But strangely the trailer for this film had really put me off.  It looked as though it had a very familiar structure - let's throw some characters together who don't have much in common and who don't much like each other, and guess what, by the end of the film they'll all know each other much better, and respect each other, and along the way there'll be some predictable laughs and some predictable character moments. Well, what actually happens in this film is that three c haracters are thrown together who don't have much in common and who don't much like each other, and by the end of the film they all know each other much bett...

At the risk (again) of sounding like a Boring Old F***, if this is what constitutes a high quality romantic comedy these days, then how far have we fallen!  90% on Rotten Tomatoes!  Good grief. Not that it's bad, it's just about passable.  Although if you took away the Keanu Reeves section that is crowbarred into the film then my reaction would be distinctly 'meh'. The basic storyline is not much to look at: a couple who were childhood friends, who once had sex in the back of a car, catch up with each other years later.  She, Sasha, is now a big success in the upmarket restaurant business; he, Marcus, is still in their hometown, performing in an unsuccessful band.  Of course they end up together, but how we get to this inevitable conclusion is not very interesting.  In fact having seen this film a couple of weeks ago I'm already struggling to remember any memorable scenes, or lines, excepting of course the two scenes involving Keanu Reeves (sending himself ...