Reviews

TFOTGG may float your boat if you're interested in seeing late 1960's movie hack work. A rehash of the film noir 'T-Men', with added homophobia, marijuana parties and British film stalwarts camping it up with marked lack of enthusiasm. An expert umbrella thrower, ffs.

An 'Indiana Jones' style chase structure which might just lead you on to the end, and a shot of Yul, with the shoulder he wasn't shot in bandaged up, looking like he's cringeing at what he's just put us and the audience through.

Of no interest except to see the strange script, character and direction choices which a loosely controlled budget enabled in 1969.

'The Fence' is a gangsterish drama with a comic touch set in 1980s Bristol, which is the city in western England where they pulled that slaver's statue down a while back.

Two brothers; one is on a suspended sentence for assault (again), which means he'll go back inside if he gets done, the other is trying to to get by as a butcher's boy, but Bristol lowlife keeps dragging him down.

It's nice and brisk, and the cast are having fun, and the music shows exactly why nobody remembers 80's music any more, and i thought it was building up to something.

Billy Wilder said, 'if there's a problem in the third act, the problem is in the first act'. The problem here is that the older brother becomes the main character, his story becomes more important, especially as we've been hearing about him long before he appears. The local gangster Mr. Big (Gibbs, geddit) expects a favour from him, and oh well, never mind. Meanwhile the two smalltime villains are about as convincing as vegetarian bacon.

The ending will make you think, 'Oh, right, I see'. Or 'Oy see', if you're pretending to be from Brizzle. It's not awful, just OK.

The Man and the Boy trek across the cold, dark, ruined country, trying to avoid 'the bad guys', who are gangs of marauding cannibals because humans are the only living thing left on a dying Earth several years after an unspecified catastrophe. I'll come back to this premise.

I read the book and then watched the film the same day, because the book is a powerful, almost philosophical thriller. It has fewer mawkish flashbacks (Nick Cave's dreary soundtrack) to the Man's idyllic marriage too.

The film tries to avoid becoming a zombie flick, not entirely successfully, but it's a good, understated zombie flick. Towards the end the book's narrative is severely chopped. It may have been filmed, but was edited out if it was.

Now the premise: 'Do you eat people?' the Boy says to the Other Man. 'No, we don't', is the reply. For the boy to ask 'Well what DO you eat then?' is a really stupid omission, which may be in the book - I might check. Are there no insects? Are there no reptiles? Are there no rats? It strikes me that whatever disaster befell Gaia was incredibly selective for allowing humans to survive and not have birth defects, etc. Incredibly, which is the point.

In MacCarthy's book your disbelief is suspended because of his sparse writing; in this movie the whole thing collapses on this dialog turn. If you liked this you might enjoy 'The Swimmer'.

Philip Glenister revisits his 'Life On Mars' part - which may well cause a serious rift in the space-time continuum - to play the 2002 version of a good old Welsh detective put in charge of a (real) cold case from 1973 in which he was a rookie. You need a bit of adjustment to realise which old actors are being played by which young actors, but once you're there, It's um, watchable if nothing else is on, and the Welsh accents are soothing. The music isn't, it's overwrought and ridiculous.

Very heavy on period atmosphere, established mainly by the use of leather jerkins, turquoise Triumph Dolomites, grey Ford Cortinas, blue Morris 1100s (UK car industry - ha!), smoky lens filters and an all-consuming brown palette, with 'car coats', dubious facial hair and kipper ties.

Thing is, there's more to write about the amusing period depiction than there is to write about the actual story or the characters, which seem to have been cut-and-pasted from any police drama of the past fifty, nay seventy, years. Amusing period detail is not enough to hang a four-hour drama on, which hasn't stopped a plethora of similar mediocre period police dramas, by the way.

The only suspense is in finding out 'how they found out whodunnit', rather like one of those freeview Forensic Detective shows drawn out to four long, long double episodes without a demented voiceover. Of course, in those shows the villain is never a copper, is it. This may be a spoiler, I don't know, as I'm only on episode 2 and I'm losing the will to live, but if it isn't one of the coppers, it's going to be an anticlimax, as opposed to a cliche.

Perfectly good, not cheap production, but plot, characters and concept = total deja vu. There's even a bit where somebody says. 'The boss wants to know what's going on'. That's incredibly desperate scriptwriting. Music? Unsubtle, overdone and obtrusive.

OK, since as I'm going to mark this as 'contains spoilers', I'm waiting till the end to see if I was close. That feeling when you know the ending in advance? - deja vu, if you like.

Nah, too boring and music too gonzo; went to Wikipedia. I was wrong. Anticlimax - and murder nostalgia is sick. You wait: 'Fred and Rose- The House of Horrors' before very long.

Pardon the lengthy review, there was a rift in the space-time continuum.

Your Honor (YH) is a slickly put together, addictively watchable - for the wrong 'Arabian Nights'-type reasons - courtroom melodrama, with a pivotal plot turn borrowed from 'Bonfire Of The Vanities'; ie middleclass goof covers up a hit-and-run in the bad end of town. You watch it to see the privileged get their desserts, while racial conflict is addressed from the establishment viewpoint exclusively. You won't see Black lives matter very much here. Stereotypes abound, and the white people are all very, very comfortable. The Black people are either class traitors or lowlife: no inbetween.

Bryan Cranston, looking uncannily like a cross between William Shatner in a Harrison Ford wig (or vice versa), navigates the choppy waters of moral turpitude to reignite memories of 'The Wire', 'Breaking Bad', 'The Sopranos', etc etc. They write a love affair between the son and daughter of the blood-opposed families, for crying out loud. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, let alone BB it isn't, because:

Where are the jokes? That's the funny parts that counterpoint the graphic violence, the morbid social issues, and the demise of the angry, angry mediocrities that populate this version of New Orleans. There are none. No jokes. New Orleans is NO fun, apparently.

Nor is YH, except that you may have fun figuring out which of the multiple plot threads is a red herring. Most of them are, actually: that old, old, cliffhanger device. Breaking Bad made the discovery of a poetry book in a bathroom the driver of a whole season: YH needs a new plot device every twenty minutes.

Copsoap masquerading as social comment. Not unwatchable, but by no means unmissable.

Gregory Peck is Marshal McKenna, who manages to memorise a tourist treasure map. Shortly before he burns it, Prairie Dog the elderly Apache warns him that he'ii 'wish he'd never laid eyes on it'. I wish I'd never laid eyes on this movie, I'll tell you that.

A group of about 200 people, led by Arabic/Hispanic bandit Omar Sharif (not a sheriff by the way) set off for a canyon that McKenna insists doesn't exist. It seems that the production team decided that there were too many Western character tropes (played by the all-faded-star cast) in the posse so it gets radically thinned out after about 45 minutes. In the dark. So that's 45 minutes establishing cliche characters that all get killed off.

The surviving gold-hunters stop at a luxury water hole shortly before entering the desert, then there's an extended set of horseback chases through the desert forest, and across the desert river. It's almost like watching horse racing, except the endings of horse races are rarely so confusing.

After 90 minutes of this nonsense, the location of the glittering gold stash is revealed by the shadow cast by a needle rock. More horse racing ensues, during which Julie Newmar attempts to push Camilla Sparv off her horse into the ravine. (Not really, you can easily tell it's faked, thank goodness).

At this point the editor appears to have suffered a seizure. It passes, happily. A kind of sub-Treasure of the Sierra Madre sequence follows where the baddies start killing whoever wasn't killed in the dreadful day-for-night sequence earlier on.

McKenna and Colorado (Sharif) have a level-boss fight at the edge of a badly painted cliff. McKenna is winning, then more horse racing sets off the complete collapse of the canyon. Or an obvious model canyon, that is. Deus ex earthquake, dreadful.

A special mention for Quincy Jones's score, which is so generic, you'll get deja entendu.

Only for those missing the horse races during the off season. A clue might be that Julie Newmar and Burgess Meredith were both in the far superior original Batman series - would that this were that camp.

The made-for-TV remake of the Lewis Milestone classic film of Remarque's pretty well immortal book. John-Boy Walton is fine as the (spoiler) doomed hero, and Ernest Borgnine does a great turn, the grizzled old campaigner, not impossibly a man of 62 at the front line.

What's very noticeable, in spite of some fine stunt work and non-CGI explosion-lite battle scenes, is the limitations of the cameras and lenses used in this production. These days we're used to high-rez long and wide shots with minimal, naturalistic lighting and perspectives full of detail. In this film, it's clear that every scene had to be very brightly lit for the cameras to cope. One of those where the indoor shots have the actors sweating buckets.

Donald Pleasance and Ian Holm are also quite convincing as movie-trope Germans, for a change.

Surprisingly faithful to the book, unlike the recent remake which almost seemed to be aiming for a sequel. That was WWII, wasn't it?

It seems I need a few more characters, not unlike the WWI German war effort. I shall mobilize every available...

'The Browning Version' refers to the rendition of Aeschylus' Agamemnon into English verse, of which, it transpires, old 'Crock', or 'Himmler', the soon-to-retire-cuckolded-by Nigel-Patrick-classics master at one of those movie English public (ie expensive) schools, did a much better job than Browning. Michael Redgrave plays a repressed, henpecked, pedantic, petulant, priggish, unpopular schoolmaster; the antithesis of Mr. Chips, which was surely Rattigan's intention.

That said, as a writer who knew his job, Rattigan had to provide suspense, surprise, and redemption - and in this movie succeeds in all three. Jean Kent as Crocker-Harris' thoroughly nasty - but randy - wife nails the character; Redgrave here put me so much in mind of Clifford Rose's Nazi Kessler in 'Secret Army', I wondered if Rose hadn't based his portrayal on the Crock.

Plenty to write about in this film, most of it 100% positive.

"What can go wrong, will go wrong"

Richard Widmark is a US Air Force Policeman (Sgt Joe Lawrence) with all the angles in post-WWII Berlin (interesting footage) who, for the love of Mai Zetterling (German orphans' schoolmistress, can't get more worthy than that), decides to go in with George Cole (as a British MP sergeant - doing a RADA McScots accent) to steal a USAF DC-3 or 4 carrying NAZI GOLD back to England (more interesting footage).

The setup of Sgt Lawrence as being so desperate to rescue Mai Zetterling he goes rogue for all the right reasons is very laboured. The actual caper itself, and the unexpected variations of the original plan are pretty good, considering Nigel Patrick's (always best as a baddie) getaway is thwarted by a United Dairies milk float.. The ending is mercifully light on trying to make any sense, and the title of the film was devised to fit the theme song, hence its being (again) very laboured.

Not as bad as all that, but the only character worth your empathy is Mai Zetterling's, and she disappears for most of the movie.

Best watched with subtitles and the sound off, as the musical director appears to have been.

Hepburn plays - surprise, surprise - a spinsterish Daddy's girl who marries post-WWII industrialist Robert Taylor, who seems to lie for no reason she can fathom.

SPOILER In the end Robert Taylor attempts to murder her by forcing her horse off a cliff path; luckily his own horse has other ideas. As so often happens, Katharine marries her psychopathic husband's brother instead. Fade on them playing Brahms together.

At one point in Undercurrent, the atmosphere of mystery is quite powerful for five minutes. The rest of the time, the atmosphere is of people who didn't care about the story going through the motions. There are at least three characters who disappear after delivering their revelation/rant/rubric. Ans as for Mitchum - he might as well have been kept in a closet, juast to be revealed as and when appropriate.