Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

Despite the critical acclaim and the Oscars it received (Best Picture and Best Director) this isn't the best Vietnam film (obviously) but it can claim to offer the best account of what it was like to be an ordinary soldier caught up in the middle of this conflict.   This is down to the writer and director Oliver Stone being a decorated veteran of the war who wanted to make a film based on his combat experience. The film is told from the point of view of a newly arrived volunteer, Taylor (played by Charlie Sheen) who clearly represents Stone to some extent.   The other two main characters are Sergeants Barnes and Elias (Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe respectively).   Barnes comes across initially as just your bog standard no-nonsense military type who doesn't put up with anything that might be construed as weakness, because when all's said and done  you do need to be tough to survive, but as the film progresses it becomes more and more apparent that he has we...

This 1951 adaptation of a Joseph Conrad novel is a real mess.  That being said it does have a few admirers, and I derived some pleasure in trying to work out why none of it was working. Maybe the source novel is unfilmable, or perhaps it just isn't very good - it certainly comes across here as second-rate Graham Greene. Exotic location?  Check. Flawed protagonist?  Absolutely. The protagonist, Willems, is a big problem because as played here by Trevor Howard he is a scoundrel with no redeeming features - he is lazy, selfish, bad-tempered, boorish, and self-pitying. The other main characters don't offer much either. Ralph Richardson plays Captain Lingard who befriended Willems when he was a boy, and who is prepared to help Willems when he has to flee Singapore having been caught stealing money from his employer.   The bulk of the film takes place at a trading post which Lingard owns.  The sea captain is the only one who knows how to navigate the approac...

This is a Japanese comedy, set in a ryokan or inn, where the staff and guests get trapped in an endlessly repeating time loop that is precisely two minutes long. The main character is a young woman, Mikoto, who works at the inn.  She and the other staff adjust to the idea that they are in a time loop remarkably quickly, their top priority being to reassure the guests. These too adjust surprisingly well to their new situation.  A writer is pleased he no longer has to worry about his deadline for the novel he is writing.  A couple of young guys are happy to hear that the beer they drink will replenish itself every two minutes, and they won't get drunk. So there's plenty of fun in the early iterations of the loop.  Fortunately memories are not erased when the loop resets, so that the characters can progress.   Mikoto is in love with Taku who works in the kitchen.  She confesses to him that she is responsible for the loop because she prayed to one of the g...

I was a little surprised to learn that this film picked up some Oscar nominations, for a couple of reasons. Although by 1969 the sexual revolution was well under way I would have thought that the rather conservative Academy might have been put off by the explicit way in which sexual relations both inside and outside marriage are discussed here.  Not to mention the idea of partner-swapping.  And I would guess that this was the first mainstream picture in which the word 'vagina' is uttered. And then there's the fact that this film is rather difficult to pigeonhole.  Although labelled as a comedy I can't say that I found it laugh out loud funny, maybe because I felt uncomfortable throughout as to where it might be leading. It is undoubtedly the case that the cowriter and director Paul Mazursky is aiming for some satire and social commentary rather than simple laughs. In particular his target is the couple of Bob and Carol (played by Robert Culp and Natalie Wood) who after ...

It seems as though great Gregory Peck Westerns are like buses - you wait ages for one, then two come along at once.  After recently watching a neglected classic, 'The Gunfighter', I was pleasantly surprised at how good this 1948 obscurity, directed by William Wellman, is. Peck plays Stretch, the leader of a gang of bank robbers soon after the end of the Civil War.  To escape the US Army after a robbery they are forced to cross some salt flats in Death Valley.  Barely surviving this ordeal the film proper starts when they reach a ghost town, Yellow Sky, which was once the base for gold prospecting.  The only inhabitants are a young girl, Mike (played by Anne Baxter) and her grandfather, who have hung around after everyone else has left.  It transpires that they've got oodles of gold stashed away in one of the mine shafts, which has collapsed. A deal is reached between Stretch and Grandpa to split the gold 50/50.  There's plenty to go around so that everyone ...

Given that this is John Carpenter directing a science fiction film starring Jeff Bridges it's a real mystery as to why it has taken me so long to see it.  Perhaps the fact that it was a commercial flop put me off? Anyway it turns out those critics who liked it (the majority) were right. The story is uncomplicated enough. Bridges is an alien who crash-lands on Earth, takes the form of Scott, the dead husband of Jenny (Karen Allen), and then needs to rendezvous with a rescue ship in Arizona in three days time in order not to die. To add further jeopardy the US military are trying to capture him. The essence of the film, rather surprisingly for a Carpenter film perhaps, is both a road movie and a love story that develops between Scott and Jenny as they travel across country.  Bridges and Allen are a perfect match for each other, and Bridges in particular gives a remarkable performance in what is potentially a very difficult act to pull off, for which he  garnered a well-dese...

This 1975 Western is so obscure that even an addict of the genre such as I had never heard of it, but it's written and directed by Richard Brooks and stars Gene Hackman and James Coburn so it had to be worth a view. It's an offbeat but beautifully crafted film which I had a great time with. Unusually for this genre it's set in the early part of the twentieth century and revolves around a 700-mile endurance race for horses and riders, which apparently was a thing. There's not a lot of action, and the only thing at stake is who wins the race, which Brooks isn't much interested in.   There's some talk early on of the race being fixed, given the amount being bet on it, but that comes to nothing.  And there's no real villain as such - other than a cocksure young kid who's a bit annoying, but even he turns out OK once he's been taught a lesson or two. So it's a hangout movie, and if you don't want to spend time with the characters Brooks has assemb...

This 1950 Western starring Gregory Peck really deserves more love;  it's at least as good as the much more acclaimed 'High Noon' with which it bears some similarities. It's about Jimmy Ringo, a gunslinger who would like to put his past behind him, but finds that to be impossible given his celebrity status as maybe the fastest gun in the West.   In the opening scene, a young kid is keen to get into an argument with Ringo just to prove how tough he is.  When he's foolish enough to draw on Ringo that's the end of him. The young punk has three older brothers so now Ringo has to skedaddle.   The next day he ambushes the three brothers and removes their horses, before moving on to Cayenne.  It will take the brothers some three hours to get there, so Ringo reckons, which creates a ticking clock for the rest of the film. The Marshal in Cayenne is a former partner-in-crime of Ringo's, but even so he wants Ringo to leave town because he's the sort of guy that tr...

This film (directed by Zoltán Korda) is one of several adaptations of the famous novel by AEW Mason, set against the backdrop of the British army's tribulations in the Sudan in the 1880s and 1890s, and is (according to Wikipedia) the best of them. I dare say each adaptation plays around with the story, but the essentials are firstly, that Harry Faversham is accused of cowardice by three erstwhile army comrades for resigning his commission just before his regiment ships out to Egypt, and secondly, he redeems himself by going out to Egypt, disguising himself as a native, and rescuing said ex-comrades.  The four feathers of the title refers to white feathers that are sent to Faversham by those ex-comrades as a symbol of his cowardice, as they see it, plus for good measure one from his fiancée, Ethne, prior to breaking off their engagement. To add some more colour to the story, one of the three, Durrance (here played by Ralph Richardson) goes blind with sunstroke, and upon being i...

T his film has so much going for it.   Richard Roundtŕee is compelling as black private detective John Shaft - unflappable,  sardonic,  simmering with anger, sexy, and cool as hell.     There are some great supporting characters as well, such as white police Lieutenant Vic Androzzi and black mobster Bumpy Jonas. Shaft has antagonistic relationships with both, and indeed with most of the guys he comes across.  With women it's a different story of course. There is the iconic score by Isaac Hayes, which contributes in no small measure to the overall vibe.  What I wasn't expecting was how gorgeous the cinematography makes gritty 1970s New York look, like a series of Edward Hopper paintings brought to life.  There's a brief sex scene early on which is shot in a very subtle and artful way, for example. The director Gordon Parks first made his name as a photographer and photojournalist so perhaps it's no great surprise that the look of this film is ...

This 1940 romantic comedy is an adaptation of a play by one Miklos Laszlo.  Hats off to him for coming up with a brilliant concept that has gone on to be used in several films and musicals. Anyone who has seen 'You've Got Mail' will know the basic idea: two people falling in love with each other through correspondence, all the while not realising that the object of their affection is someone they know and think they  dislike. In the case of the play and this film, the setting is turn-of-the-century Budapest.  It takes a little while to get used to the idea of James Stewart as an Hungarian shop assistant but once I was over that small hurdle this confection was a delight from start to finish. And who better to serve it up than Ernst Lubitsch, a master of this type of light sophisticated material? Stewart is Mr Kralik, who works in a leather goods shop owned by Mr Matuschek.  Besides the romance plot there is a secondary storyline in which Mr Matuschek suspects Kralik ...

Is this 1975 film, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, a masterpiece or an empty piece of pretentious tosh? More to the point, is it worth two hours of your time? For me, definitely yes, but then again I can happily watch any Nicholson film from this era, even when his character is as elusive as in this picture. He plays David Locke, a journalist on an assignment in an African country (Chad, according to Wikipedia) where there is an ongoing conflict between the government and a rebel force.  At his hotel when he discovers that a fellow guest David Robertson has died of a heart attack, Locke takes on Robertson's identity, and fools the hotel management and therefore the outside world into believing that it is Locke who has died. The rest of the film, set mainly in Spain, consists of Locke trying to evade various people.  Firstly there is his boss, Martin, and subsequently his estranged wife, Rachel, who simply want to meet Robertson because he was on...

I had high hopes of this French adaptation of the Harlan Coben thriller given that it won several prestigious awards.  Alas, it failed to deliver. Coben is a writer who is deft at pacing his novels so that each plot turn or revelation adds to a momentum that usually leads to an exciting conclusion.  Sadly, this film didn't manage to do this, and instead of being gripped I became progressively less engaged so that by the time we get to a prolonged unwrapping of the mystery I had tuned out. It starts off as an intriguing mystery to be sure. Dr Beck is a widower whose wife was murdered in strange circumstances eight years previously yet now he starts getting messages that seem to be from her. Can she be alive? If so, where's she been in the interim?  Who was murdered in her place? If this wasn't mystery enough some other dead bodies turn up, and there are some very bad people keeping tabs on Beck in the hope he will lead them to his wife.  And the police seem determined...

I had vague memories of this as a decent action film set in World War II, mainly set on the eponymous train, with Frank Sinatra as the lead actor.  Turns out I had completely forgotten that it starts off in an Italian POW camp, and that Trevor Howard is also a major character in it. Not that the POW camp scenes amount to much, the main interest being the conflict between recently arrived US Colonel Ryan (Sinatra) on the one hand and Major Fincham (Howard) on the other.   The Brits are in a bad way, because as punishment for constantly trying to escape they have been deprived of food and medicines.   Ryan, now the highest ranking officer at the camp, quite reasonably points out that since the Allies will soon reach them (we're in 1943) there's not much point in trying to escape. Anyway this conflict soon gets overtaken by events as Italy surrenders and the camp guards skedaddle.  Unfortunately before the POW inmates can get far they are captured by the Germa...

The critics back in 2003 really gave this erotic thriller from Jane Campion a thumbs down - a wretched 35% on Rotten Tomatoes tells its own story. Whilst there was acknowledgement of the superb cinematography by Dion Beebe, the story came in for a lot of flak.  And there was widespread disapproval of ‘America’s Sweetheart’ Meg Ryan trying to move out of her romcom lane and indulging herself (so it was seen) in graphic sex scenes.  Plus it was too arty and pretentious, which is certainly true in places - Meg Ryan's character, Frannie, reading aloud bits of poetry off posters on the subway for example did nothing for me. The film (for whatever reason) is clearly intended to evoke the 1971 classic ‘Klute'.  Both are psychological thrillers set in New York about a woman who is at risk from a murderer and who gets herself involved with a police detective. 'Klute' was a commercial and critical success, and Jane Fonda picked up an Oscar, even though her playing a prostitute at...

This film about a real-life serial killer (from the 1960s) suffers from a huge handicap in that it is bound to suffer in comparison with the masterpiece that is 'Zodiac', also about a real-life serial killer of a similar vintage. On the other hand I figured it should have a couple of things going for it. Firstly, whereas the Zodiac killer was never caught, the Boston Strangler was, so at least there should be a satisfying conclusion to the police investigation (spoiler alert, I was completely wrong in thinking this) Secondly, the hunt for the Strangler is shown here from the viewpoint of a woman journalist, so we get the added dimension of the misogyny she suffers in trying to pursue the story, because (shock horror) women weren't meant to do that sort of thing then.   The journalist in question is Loretta MacLaughlin, played by Keira Knightley.  For some reason I always struggle to lose myself in any of her performances, which is certainly the case here because throughou...