Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

This 1997 Disney animation was a failure at the box office, and although  I found it passably entertaining it sure has some problems. Take the romance between Hercules and Meg.  According to Wikipedia she was written as a 1940s screwball comedienne.  Even if that idea is a good one it's not executed very well - she came across to me as more of an older woman who has been around the block a few too many times, and therefore her romance with Hercules always made me uncomfortable given how young and naïve he is.  The quality of the animation is very basic at times, and the songs aren't especially memorable although I did appreciate the jazz, gospel and R&B aspects of the music. Then there's Danny DeVito voicing Phil, a satyr who is Hercules' trainer.  He's meant to provide comedy but I rapidly found him quite tedious. The film therefore has to lean heavily on James Woods' voice-performance as Hades, the villain of the piece, to spark the film into life.  N...

This film is based on a real event in which a freight train went out of control with no driver on board.  Naturally the freight includes some highly toxic and flammable chemicals and it is only a matter of a couple of hours before the hurtling train will come off the rails in a heavily populated area (where else?), endangering many lives. It’s a straightforward story which Tony Scott directs capably, without too much embellishment. He is assisted by a decent screenplay which keeps things moving, and by Denzel Washington and Chris Pine enjoying themselves as a driver and conductor who end up as the heroes.  The supporting cast is solid as well. To add some drama Washington’s character has been served with redundancy papers a few weeks previously, and Pine’s character is having marital problems.  Thankfully these issues don’t get in the way of the unfolding excitement. The screenplay neatly uses the media coverage to fill us in on various expository details without the pace...

You've got to love a film that takes big swings. Here the eponymous character is Manitas, the head of a Mexican drug cartel, who wishes to disappear and transition to a woman.  If that wasn't wild enough, the film, although not quite a musical, features many musical interludes in which the characters express their inner emotions or thoughts. For the first half of the film I was fully on board, even for the song 'La Vaginoplastia'. In the second half, four years after Manitas has faked his death and disappeared, things start promisingly.   Emilia wishes to be near her children and so she is introduced to Jessi (her wife in her previous life as Manitas)  as a distant, wealthy cousin of Manitas who has volunteered to help raise the children.     The person doing the introduction is the third protagonist, a lawyer Rita who assisted Manitas in his disappearance and transition.  The relationship between Jessi and Emilia is potentially an explosive one - how ...

Although having recently watched 'The Exorcist' and being a bit underwhelmed I thought why not give this film, made a couple of years later in a similar vein, a go? It turns out to be a competently made piece of tosh but not especially memorable. Gregory Peck is Thorn, a wealthy US diplomat who hopes to be US President one day.  We are introduced to him in a Rome hospital, making a fateful decision - to go along with a Catholic priest's suggestion to replace his dead new-born son with another baby born at the same time.  And not to tell his wife Kathy (Lee Remick).  And to name the boy Damien. (At the start of the film, there is a caption telling us the time and date: 6am on 6 June - I totally failed to clock the significance of this). We fast forward 5 years, with the Thorn family ensconced in London, Thorn now being US ambassador to the UK. At Damien's birthday party his nanny commits suicide in spectacular fashion.  What drives her to this is never explained ...

So, in 1992 Abel Ferrara directed a film called 'Bad Lieutenant', starring Harvey Keitel as a corrupt and depraved police officer. Then in 2009 Werner Herzog makes this film, starring Nicholas Cage, about a police officer with some personal issues, let us say, and with a similar title. This annoyed Ferrara, at least initially, and caused a certain amount of confusion as to the relationship of this film to the earlier one. Given that the 1992 film is a completely uncompromising depiction of someone with drug and gambling addictions whose life is spiralling out of control, I wondered whether the Herzog-Cage combo could produce anything more gross. Turns out the answer is 'no', for the simple reason that there is no meaningful connection between the two films, and that this film is aiming for something quite different, a kind of deranged black comedy. In comparison to the 1992 film this one is almost a feel-good popcorn movie.  Well OK, that may be overstating it, because ...

This, the sixth film in the Terminator franchise, wants to have its cake and eat it.   On the one hand it tries to recapture the glory of T1 and T2 by bringing back both Arnie and Linda Hamilton, and by pretending that the three immediately preceding films never happened. But it also reboots the whole franchise with a storyline that comes perilously close to saying that everything that happened in T1 and T2 counted for nothing. We're off to a bad start when John Connor is killed off in the very first scene, in an offensively casual way considering how important he is to the franchise. But never mind, we’ve got two new characters! There’s young Dani who is a kind of replacement for John in this reboot in that she will play a crucial role in the new resistance in a new future where humanity yet again is under threat from AI, only in this new timeline the AI is called Legion rather than Skynet. And there’s Grace, an enhanced human sent from the future to protect Dani. And of  cou...

This legal thriller from 2007 came along a few years after the heyday for this sort of thing, which might explain why it passed under my radar at the time. It’s a highly entertaining piece of hokum: it has a neat (if ridiculous) plot, it's competently directed, and it has a high quality cast headed up by Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling. Hopkins plays a rich guy with a younger wife who is cheating on him with a police detective. Hopkins kills his wife in a way that inevitably means he is charged with her murder, but it's all part of a mad scheme he has to get away with it, and at the same time inflict maximum pain on the detective. Gosling plays a cocky (but brilliant, of course) young lawyer who is on the point of leaving the DA’s office for a lucrative job with a top legal firm, working for Rosamund Pike. Naturally a romance ensues between them.  Gosling takes on the job of prosecuting Hopkins before he leaves the DA’s office because he thinks it will be a walk in the park. B...