Director: William Compton
Star: Oliver Reed
The Ransom goes by many names, which is never a good thing for a movie. Chandler Cinemas screened it under its original title but it's also known as The Town That Cried Terror, Assault on Paradise or, subtlest of all, Maniac! It's an Oliver Reed film with other recognisable faces like Stuart Whitman and John Ireland, along with Robert Mitchum's eldest son Jim. The best reason for me to watch it though was the location: it was shot locally in the Phoenix metropolitan area, and while this happened in 1977 when I was precisely six years old and I wouldn't move to this ever growing metropolis for another 24 years, I could still recognise some locations.
This sort of thing would make an awesome set of films to put together for Chandler Cinemas. I know many people even remember some of the films shot here and would love to revisit the memories. It could even be restricted to genre movies. Eight Legged Freaks used the same mall in Glendale that was burned down in Carrie II: The Rage. That Circle K at which strange things were afoot in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was in Phoenix and of course that's where Psycho began. The stunning Electra Glide in Blue was shot mostly in Arizona, including Phoenix and Scottsdale.
This one is a very seventies thriller, opening with a bunch of murders. A guy in a clown mask kills a necking couple; a sniper takes out some cops, a sniper who shoots arrows from a bow with a telescopic lens. Cue lots of floundering around until the message is found on a wall. The killer wants one million dollars (insert Dr Evil joke here) because the rich will pay or the rich will die. The reasons behind this setup are never made precisely clear but our protagonist would appear to be an Indian, his grievances seem to tie to land and people in this town are making a lot of money that perhaps they shouldn't be making.
Here's plot problem number one. Apparently Phoenix is full of millionaires, more per capita than anywhere else in the country. Now I'm not saying we don't have any but more than everyone else? Not in my neck of the woods, that's for sure, and not anywhere else in this metropolis. Perhaps the United States we're watching in The Ransom doesn't include California, who must have seceded from the union. These millionaires are everywhere, they're shady as all get out and they're filthy rich, so much so that they can afford black butlers with eyepatches. Perhaps this was Nick Fury working undercover.
Of course, these shady millionaires have precisely no clue how to deal with this mysterious killer, so they call in a professional: Oliver Reed. Now, not being a shady millionaire myself, I'm not on familiar territory and have no idea what I should look for when hiring a professional to save me from this sort of terror, but I'm guessing that someone who hasn't spent the last thirty years inside a bottle would be high on the list. And sure enough, the first thing Olly's character, Nick McCormick, does is to hit a bar. There's nothing like playing it in character.
Now officially McCormick and his assistant, Wolf Heller, are supposed to just catch the guy, but secret orders from William Whitaker, who's paying the bill, are to take the man down with extreme prejudice. So, we're talking secret and serious illegal stuff, to keep very quiet indeed. So our professional hitman promptly talks with the press, in the form of Cindy Simmons. He chats her up over a Tequila Sunrise and points a gun at her in a crowded bar. Naturally they end up in bed together, because what else would this dynamic two minutes of time possibly lead to? I'm sure you're as confused reading this as I am writing it and I watched the movie!
Anyway we do end up back on the plot at some point. McCormick has help from the cops, given that one of the rich guys he's working for is the chief, and he also gets to hire the unnamed tracker played by Jim Mitchum, who gets released from the drunk tank specifically to be deputised. What's most amazing about the film is that these talented guys get to do next to nothing, even McCormick himself. While the film is never boring, it's amazing to see so little actually happening. Sure enough, the bad guy gets caught; sure enough, it takes a full hour and half to get there; and sure enough there are more casualties to deal with before we do. Best of all is when the mayor gets taken out on Main St in the middle of a parade. Talk about getting your point across! But next to nothing really happens and the main characters don't actually do much of anything.
Obviously, this isn't a great film but it's far from a bad one. What impressed most was the inventive use of CCTV, which was probably rather innovative in 1977. The chases aren't all out there in the desert, recreating old western setups with helicopters and sniper rifles. The best ones are indoors, in the houses of the rich and infamous, with some great cat and mouse work where you're never sure who's chasing who. There's probably a lot of depth in the script that didn't make it into the movie, because the whole thing feels like it's supposed to be deep and meaningful but never actually attempts it. I wondered about picking up a DVD copy to just watch the outtakes. Perhaps they'd have made a better film stuck together than the film itself.
And who was the clown?
Saturday, 12 July 2008
Friday, 11 July 2008
The Gate II: Trespassers (1992)
Director: Tibor Takács
Star: Louis Tripp
Back in the mid to late eighties I began to have money in my pocket, which was a damn fine feeling for the few minutes it lasted. I wasn't earning much but what I did earn got spent. Quickly. I scoured the markets and charity shops of northern England for cheap second hand horror novels. I picked up every issue of the horror magazines: Fear, Skeleton Crew and The Dark Side, as well as many of the fanzines and small press publications they advertised. When finance allowed and the newsagent had them, I even got hold of some of the American imports like Fangoria, Gore Zone and Toxic Horror. And I started actually going to the movies. Without my parents.
Back when I was a kid, going to the movies meant it was birthday time and birthdays meant two things: a Chinese takeaway and a movie at an actual cinema instead of taped off the TV. This way I got to see a lot of the early eighties science fiction movies at the small Odeon in Halifax: Star Trek movies, Star Wars movies, The Black Hole... and, erm, The Tales of Beatrix Potter. I'm not sure how that last one came about, but I blotted the memory of that hour and a half from my mind quickly enough. But now I had money, at least a little bit of money, I could go to see horror movies when they came out. I didn't have to rely on parents and birthdays.
One of the earliest I saw was The Gate, mostly because it was rated 15 in England instead of the usual 18 (even with the inevitable cuts decreed by the all powerful BBFC, arch nemesis of all true horror fans of the era) and in 1987 I'd just turned not so sweet sixteen. The Gate will always stay with me, partly because it was a fun movie and partly because it underlined just how naive I still was back then. I actually believed some of what I saw on the screen. Now I don't mean the cynical marketing ploy crap, because I could see through that since I was as tall as one of the demons that Glen and Terry conjured up from Hell in their backyard in The Gate. I mean the stuff that should have been cynical marketing ploy crap but somehow wasn't because it was utterly fictional.
You see, in The Gate, Terry, the dorky kid with the denim jacket and the glasses, was a huge fan of a European metal band called Sacrifyx, who sounded like a glam band but had much more in common with bands like Venom who formed the link between old school heavy metal and all the extreme stuff that came later. In particular, Sacrifyx were hardcore demonologists who only made one album before dying in a plane crash. The album was called The Dark Book, which was 'like the bible for demons', taking its lyrics from the real book of the same name. It came in a cool gatefold sleeve with pages of explanatory notes with pictures of demons on them.
And it was all frickin' awesome to a sixteen year old metalhead and horror nut. Bands like Venom were seriously scary in the early '80s, in the precise way Slipknot would love to be but can't because they were a decade and a half too late. And by the mid '80s, there were a number of bands like Sacrifyx who used scary monologues and backward messages and demonic or outright satanic imagery. This sort of thing scared the crap out of mainstream culture. This is why Judas Priest ended up in court for allegedly asking their fans to kill themselves through backwards messages on their albums; satanic abuse scandals proliferated through hysteria, which always trumps evidence to the contrary; and talk show hosts ranted about how this subculture was doing the Devil's bidding.
And I remember it well. Even though I was a server at Barkisland Parish Church and member of the Parochial Church Council, I was a still a long haired kid buying albums that scared the salespeople who took my money. I remember the sort of looks I got when buying albums like Megadeth's Killing is My Business... and Business is Good! or Bloodcum's Death By a Clothes Hanger from mainstream stores like W H Smith's or Boots the Chemist because I'd got vouchers for those places for Christmas. And I loved it!
So off I went to Groove Records, where Geoff the proprietor could get anything from anywhere, and I asked him to track down this band called Sacrifyx, utterly sure that this was a real band who were somehow obscure even though they were being profiled in a Hollywood film. I'm not sure what logic brought me to that conclusion; I think it was just so many levels of coolness all at once that made me want to believe that it was real. Of course they weren't and I looked like an idiot, but that's what being sixteen is all about, right?
And so I had to see The Gate II when I saw that Chandler Cinemas were screening it. It was a must. I didn't even know there was a sequel but I just had to revisit something that connected me back to the innocence and idiocy of youth. And it was fun, but it wasn't the original, even accounting for the fact that it never could be because I wasn't sixteen any more and somehow willing to believe that outrageous fictional metal bands were real. This time out, it played dumb from moment one.
In The Gate everything was accidental. Terry and Glen didn't mean to raise the Old Ones out of a mysterious hole in the back yard by playing a metal album backwards and spilling some blood. It just happened. In The Gate II it's all deliberate and that would have crossed a line, if writer Michael Nankin and director Tibor Takács hadn't changed the focus. Now Terry isn't a metalhead any more, which might be an insulting suggestion that it was just a fad that he went through as a kid or might be something more clever like suggesting that it's really the 'normal folks' who really do this stuff that the panicmongers are so afraid of.
So this time out, our young hero is normal, though still a geek, and he attempts to summon up the sentinels by sacrificing his hamster. Yeah, his hamster. At least he has a cool sacrificial dagger to do the deed with but he's still using it on his hamster. Now I grew up watching Hammer horrors on TV where the sacrificial victims were always gorgeous young ladies who gradually lost more and more clothing during the rituals as the years went by and the censors allowed it. But this guy had a pet hamster. Oh well. And now he's a poser too: he's into demonology because Satanism is for pussies. By being a demonologist he's showing the world that he isn't screwing around, even though he's hiding it from everyone. He's touching the infinite!
Louis Tripp reprises his role as Terry Chandler, the only character to return from the first film. His buddy Glen isn't here because he was played by Stephen Dorff in his film debut so was probably too expensive by the time the sequel came along. And Terry's life now sucks. His mother has committed suicide, his dad is an unemployed drunk, and so he's desperately searching for meaning. Which leads him to the old boarded up house from film one that had the hole in the garden that led directly to the Old Ones and our hamster snuffing ritual. Because he's worked out that instead of releasing the hordes of Hell to run amok across our fair green planet, he can conjure up a Minion, one of those little stop motion demons from the first movie, then just kill something small and get his wishes granted.
Given that he's the only person to set foot in this deserted building in two years, naturally it gets overrun on the night in question. Three other kids decide to show up so that we can have a plot and they're not too fond of dorks killing hamsters and conjuring up demons. But hey, if they can get their wishes granted, they're happy to play along. John wants to be king of the world, because he's your typical '80s teen asshole. His girlfriend Liz wants to meet her true love, making us wonder why she's hanging round John if she has such confidence in him. Their idiot friend Moe wants to meet aliens. And Terry just wants his dad to get a job and keep it for more than five minutes before getting fired for being drunk.
Now anyone with any background in horror stories knows that you can't get something for nothing. You can sell your soul to get the world, but there's always a delivery date on the debt. You can get what you wish for but it won't turn out quite how you expect. You can run the show but there's always someone above who's running you. One of the most famous versions of this is The Monkey's Paw, originally published in 1902, but it probably dates back to The Arabian Nights or something just as old. And here our leading characters get their tickets to Paris and their 1962 cherry red Corvettes but everything turns to crap in the morning.
So Terry has to send the Minion back, which he spends the whole running time of the film trying to do. Luckily he has the assistance of Liz, who has somehow noticed that her boyfriend's an idiot and so wants to hang out with Terry. Perhaps it's fallout from the wishing game, perhaps she's just channelling the Harry Potter vibe and realising that geeks in glasses can be sexy. Unluckily he has to deal with John and Moe, his idiot sidekick who does precisely nothing in this entire film except stand around and laugh like one of the hyenas in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And I'm trying to forget the rest, especially the awesomely disappointing happy ending, which rates among the worst endings of all time.
The cast are unspectacular, our sympathies going more to the Minion who Terry traps under a bucket and stuffs in a cage. The waste of space Moe was played by Simon Reynolds, who I've seen recently in Saw IV without recognising him. He seems to be best known for a TV show called Instant Star, something that certainly didn't happen here. John is played by James Villemaire, who seems to be working consistently but not in anything I've noticed. This film apparently killed off Louis Tripp's career, as after two Gate films, he's managed only one other film credit, as an uncredited nerdy kid in Detroit Rock City, and a few TV credits. The real future star here is Pamela Segall, who plays Liz. She'd done a few films before this one but was still a little way away from fame as a voice actor, keeping very busy indeed. Anyone who watches anime in dubbed form will have heard her, as a regular on Disney's Hayao Miyazaki dubs, and most of America knows her as Bobby on King of the Hill.
Star: Louis Tripp
Back in the mid to late eighties I began to have money in my pocket, which was a damn fine feeling for the few minutes it lasted. I wasn't earning much but what I did earn got spent. Quickly. I scoured the markets and charity shops of northern England for cheap second hand horror novels. I picked up every issue of the horror magazines: Fear, Skeleton Crew and The Dark Side, as well as many of the fanzines and small press publications they advertised. When finance allowed and the newsagent had them, I even got hold of some of the American imports like Fangoria, Gore Zone and Toxic Horror. And I started actually going to the movies. Without my parents.
Back when I was a kid, going to the movies meant it was birthday time and birthdays meant two things: a Chinese takeaway and a movie at an actual cinema instead of taped off the TV. This way I got to see a lot of the early eighties science fiction movies at the small Odeon in Halifax: Star Trek movies, Star Wars movies, The Black Hole... and, erm, The Tales of Beatrix Potter. I'm not sure how that last one came about, but I blotted the memory of that hour and a half from my mind quickly enough. But now I had money, at least a little bit of money, I could go to see horror movies when they came out. I didn't have to rely on parents and birthdays.
One of the earliest I saw was The Gate, mostly because it was rated 15 in England instead of the usual 18 (even with the inevitable cuts decreed by the all powerful BBFC, arch nemesis of all true horror fans of the era) and in 1987 I'd just turned not so sweet sixteen. The Gate will always stay with me, partly because it was a fun movie and partly because it underlined just how naive I still was back then. I actually believed some of what I saw on the screen. Now I don't mean the cynical marketing ploy crap, because I could see through that since I was as tall as one of the demons that Glen and Terry conjured up from Hell in their backyard in The Gate. I mean the stuff that should have been cynical marketing ploy crap but somehow wasn't because it was utterly fictional.
You see, in The Gate, Terry, the dorky kid with the denim jacket and the glasses, was a huge fan of a European metal band called Sacrifyx, who sounded like a glam band but had much more in common with bands like Venom who formed the link between old school heavy metal and all the extreme stuff that came later. In particular, Sacrifyx were hardcore demonologists who only made one album before dying in a plane crash. The album was called The Dark Book, which was 'like the bible for demons', taking its lyrics from the real book of the same name. It came in a cool gatefold sleeve with pages of explanatory notes with pictures of demons on them.
And it was all frickin' awesome to a sixteen year old metalhead and horror nut. Bands like Venom were seriously scary in the early '80s, in the precise way Slipknot would love to be but can't because they were a decade and a half too late. And by the mid '80s, there were a number of bands like Sacrifyx who used scary monologues and backward messages and demonic or outright satanic imagery. This sort of thing scared the crap out of mainstream culture. This is why Judas Priest ended up in court for allegedly asking their fans to kill themselves through backwards messages on their albums; satanic abuse scandals proliferated through hysteria, which always trumps evidence to the contrary; and talk show hosts ranted about how this subculture was doing the Devil's bidding.
And I remember it well. Even though I was a server at Barkisland Parish Church and member of the Parochial Church Council, I was a still a long haired kid buying albums that scared the salespeople who took my money. I remember the sort of looks I got when buying albums like Megadeth's Killing is My Business... and Business is Good! or Bloodcum's Death By a Clothes Hanger from mainstream stores like W H Smith's or Boots the Chemist because I'd got vouchers for those places for Christmas. And I loved it!
So off I went to Groove Records, where Geoff the proprietor could get anything from anywhere, and I asked him to track down this band called Sacrifyx, utterly sure that this was a real band who were somehow obscure even though they were being profiled in a Hollywood film. I'm not sure what logic brought me to that conclusion; I think it was just so many levels of coolness all at once that made me want to believe that it was real. Of course they weren't and I looked like an idiot, but that's what being sixteen is all about, right?
And so I had to see The Gate II when I saw that Chandler Cinemas were screening it. It was a must. I didn't even know there was a sequel but I just had to revisit something that connected me back to the innocence and idiocy of youth. And it was fun, but it wasn't the original, even accounting for the fact that it never could be because I wasn't sixteen any more and somehow willing to believe that outrageous fictional metal bands were real. This time out, it played dumb from moment one.
In The Gate everything was accidental. Terry and Glen didn't mean to raise the Old Ones out of a mysterious hole in the back yard by playing a metal album backwards and spilling some blood. It just happened. In The Gate II it's all deliberate and that would have crossed a line, if writer Michael Nankin and director Tibor Takács hadn't changed the focus. Now Terry isn't a metalhead any more, which might be an insulting suggestion that it was just a fad that he went through as a kid or might be something more clever like suggesting that it's really the 'normal folks' who really do this stuff that the panicmongers are so afraid of.
So this time out, our young hero is normal, though still a geek, and he attempts to summon up the sentinels by sacrificing his hamster. Yeah, his hamster. At least he has a cool sacrificial dagger to do the deed with but he's still using it on his hamster. Now I grew up watching Hammer horrors on TV where the sacrificial victims were always gorgeous young ladies who gradually lost more and more clothing during the rituals as the years went by and the censors allowed it. But this guy had a pet hamster. Oh well. And now he's a poser too: he's into demonology because Satanism is for pussies. By being a demonologist he's showing the world that he isn't screwing around, even though he's hiding it from everyone. He's touching the infinite!
Louis Tripp reprises his role as Terry Chandler, the only character to return from the first film. His buddy Glen isn't here because he was played by Stephen Dorff in his film debut so was probably too expensive by the time the sequel came along. And Terry's life now sucks. His mother has committed suicide, his dad is an unemployed drunk, and so he's desperately searching for meaning. Which leads him to the old boarded up house from film one that had the hole in the garden that led directly to the Old Ones and our hamster snuffing ritual. Because he's worked out that instead of releasing the hordes of Hell to run amok across our fair green planet, he can conjure up a Minion, one of those little stop motion demons from the first movie, then just kill something small and get his wishes granted.
Given that he's the only person to set foot in this deserted building in two years, naturally it gets overrun on the night in question. Three other kids decide to show up so that we can have a plot and they're not too fond of dorks killing hamsters and conjuring up demons. But hey, if they can get their wishes granted, they're happy to play along. John wants to be king of the world, because he's your typical '80s teen asshole. His girlfriend Liz wants to meet her true love, making us wonder why she's hanging round John if she has such confidence in him. Their idiot friend Moe wants to meet aliens. And Terry just wants his dad to get a job and keep it for more than five minutes before getting fired for being drunk.
Now anyone with any background in horror stories knows that you can't get something for nothing. You can sell your soul to get the world, but there's always a delivery date on the debt. You can get what you wish for but it won't turn out quite how you expect. You can run the show but there's always someone above who's running you. One of the most famous versions of this is The Monkey's Paw, originally published in 1902, but it probably dates back to The Arabian Nights or something just as old. And here our leading characters get their tickets to Paris and their 1962 cherry red Corvettes but everything turns to crap in the morning.
So Terry has to send the Minion back, which he spends the whole running time of the film trying to do. Luckily he has the assistance of Liz, who has somehow noticed that her boyfriend's an idiot and so wants to hang out with Terry. Perhaps it's fallout from the wishing game, perhaps she's just channelling the Harry Potter vibe and realising that geeks in glasses can be sexy. Unluckily he has to deal with John and Moe, his idiot sidekick who does precisely nothing in this entire film except stand around and laugh like one of the hyenas in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And I'm trying to forget the rest, especially the awesomely disappointing happy ending, which rates among the worst endings of all time.
The cast are unspectacular, our sympathies going more to the Minion who Terry traps under a bucket and stuffs in a cage. The waste of space Moe was played by Simon Reynolds, who I've seen recently in Saw IV without recognising him. He seems to be best known for a TV show called Instant Star, something that certainly didn't happen here. John is played by James Villemaire, who seems to be working consistently but not in anything I've noticed. This film apparently killed off Louis Tripp's career, as after two Gate films, he's managed only one other film credit, as an uncredited nerdy kid in Detroit Rock City, and a few TV credits. The real future star here is Pamela Segall, who plays Liz. She'd done a few films before this one but was still a little way away from fame as a voice actor, keeping very busy indeed. Anyone who watches anime in dubbed form will have heard her, as a regular on Disney's Hayao Miyazaki dubs, and most of America knows her as Bobby on King of the Hill.
Thursday, 10 July 2008
Bunny Lake is Missing (1965)
Ann Lake, an American, arrives in England on the Queen Mary and promptly loses her daughter Bunny. She leaves her in the First Day Room at the Little Peoples Garden School, because the teachers are busy teaching and she has to get back to let the moving men into her new flat. She leaves Bunny effectively in the care of the German cook, who is the only adult she can find, but when she comes to pick her up, she's not there. What's more, she isn't just missing, nobody seems to be able to vouch for her ever being there at all.
The cook has quit and isn't easily found. None of the teachers ever saw her. When they go to get her passport from the apartment to show her picture to the police they find that all of Bunny's things have been stolen: all of Bunny's things and nothing else. We're even treated to the suggestion that Bunny never existed, given that Ann had an imaginary friend as a child who she called Bunny, Stephen Lake is rather overly protective of and overly close to his sister and, whenever he get caught in an impasse begins threatening the police with his powers as an international journalist.
This is an intriguing psychological thriller, firmly rooted in the sixties, not just in the setting (northwest London) and the culture (such as the way that the police are careful when commenting on Ann's lack of a husband), but in the way the film is constructed. It's very cleverly done indeed and makes us walk the same balancing act that the Superintendent in charge of the case has to walk: is Bunny Lake really missing or is she a figment of the Lakes' imagination? Just like the various characters in the story, we don't see Bunny either so can't be sure if she's real either.
While the story is the key to this film, it's well shot and directed too, and the cast is impeccable. The Lakes are Keir Dullea and Carol Lynley and I'm very glad director Otto Preminger stuck to his guns on that casting choice because the studio wanted Jane Fonda instead. Superintendent Newhouse is no less an acting talent than Laurence Olivier and he's subtle and powerful here. The supporting cast includes such names as Clive Revill and Anna Massey, along with two inveterate scene stealers: Martita Hunt and Noel Coward.
Hunt is Ada Ford, the retired founder of the school from which Bunny disappears, and she's a great example of the sort of elderly lady who has lost her health but not her wits and would be fascinating company. This sort of character is an English institution and Hunt does the job very well indeed. Coward is Mr Wilson, the Lake's landlord, and he's an eloquent pervert, another English institution. He apparently works for the BBC who love his melodious voice, though I loved Olivier's description of it as 'like a Welsh parson gargling in molasses'.
It's due to be remade in 2009 with an unknown cast, now that Reese Witherspoon has dropped out. I'm not sure how well it would fit a culture of over forty years on, especially one that has so many ways to see everyone. Or maybe that's what would make it work: how could Bunny Lake exist, given that she doesn't appear on any security camera footage in a week. Anyone who can do that in London is either a professional terrorist or someone who's a figment of the imagination, right? I'll stick to Preminger's version and pay a little bit more attention to him. I've only seen one of his films previously: Anatomy of a Murder, another excellent thriller, though another, Laura, is high on my must see list. And I love the subtext here that in a city of Englishmen, it's the Americans who are hysterical, violent and insane.
The cook has quit and isn't easily found. None of the teachers ever saw her. When they go to get her passport from the apartment to show her picture to the police they find that all of Bunny's things have been stolen: all of Bunny's things and nothing else. We're even treated to the suggestion that Bunny never existed, given that Ann had an imaginary friend as a child who she called Bunny, Stephen Lake is rather overly protective of and overly close to his sister and, whenever he get caught in an impasse begins threatening the police with his powers as an international journalist.
This is an intriguing psychological thriller, firmly rooted in the sixties, not just in the setting (northwest London) and the culture (such as the way that the police are careful when commenting on Ann's lack of a husband), but in the way the film is constructed. It's very cleverly done indeed and makes us walk the same balancing act that the Superintendent in charge of the case has to walk: is Bunny Lake really missing or is she a figment of the Lakes' imagination? Just like the various characters in the story, we don't see Bunny either so can't be sure if she's real either.
While the story is the key to this film, it's well shot and directed too, and the cast is impeccable. The Lakes are Keir Dullea and Carol Lynley and I'm very glad director Otto Preminger stuck to his guns on that casting choice because the studio wanted Jane Fonda instead. Superintendent Newhouse is no less an acting talent than Laurence Olivier and he's subtle and powerful here. The supporting cast includes such names as Clive Revill and Anna Massey, along with two inveterate scene stealers: Martita Hunt and Noel Coward.
Hunt is Ada Ford, the retired founder of the school from which Bunny disappears, and she's a great example of the sort of elderly lady who has lost her health but not her wits and would be fascinating company. This sort of character is an English institution and Hunt does the job very well indeed. Coward is Mr Wilson, the Lake's landlord, and he's an eloquent pervert, another English institution. He apparently works for the BBC who love his melodious voice, though I loved Olivier's description of it as 'like a Welsh parson gargling in molasses'.
It's due to be remade in 2009 with an unknown cast, now that Reese Witherspoon has dropped out. I'm not sure how well it would fit a culture of over forty years on, especially one that has so many ways to see everyone. Or maybe that's what would make it work: how could Bunny Lake exist, given that she doesn't appear on any security camera footage in a week. Anyone who can do that in London is either a professional terrorist or someone who's a figment of the imagination, right? I'll stick to Preminger's version and pay a little bit more attention to him. I've only seen one of his films previously: Anatomy of a Murder, another excellent thriller, though another, Laura, is high on my must see list. And I love the subtext here that in a city of Englishmen, it's the Americans who are hysterical, violent and insane.
Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round (1966)
James Coburn's character, Eli Kotch, used to work as a bellhop in a hotel and learned how to tell how big a tip he could from the smell of the guest's cologne. He's telling this to a prison psychiatrist as part of some session or other, but it isn't long at all before he's on parole and in bed with her. She's a cute blonde, naturally, and just as naturally he breaks parole on day one. Soon he's in LA, where they're preparing for a high profile visit from the Russian premier, and he'll be back here for the main thrust of the film.
In the meantime he goes everywhere else it would seem. The first trip to Denver sees him pose as a Swiss shoe salesman, as whom he picks up Frieda Schmid, a fascinating character played by Nina Wayne. In no time flat she's gone though, along with plenty of her possessions. He's a conman and thief who really has a way with the women, it would seem, as he quickly collects enough keys surreptiously to rob three apartments in one night. Then it's off to Texas to be an termite exterminator who writes on the side to romance a Swedish lady, who he marries. And then it's here and there and back again to pull off a bank heist under the nose of the entire police department who are monitoring the Russian visit.
James Coburn is a chameleon here, and he has a ridiculous amount of fun juggling accents, occupations and personalities at heartbreak speed. He has a different name every time we see him and a different girlfriend to and the suggestion is that he has more fun being a chameleon than actually stealing stuff. He plays so many parts that even he must have lost track of which one was which, and which the real Eli Kotch was. The film cleverly gives us hints and lets us make sense of it all. We see what Eli does in the same way his victims do: now they see him, now they don't. Maybe we never see the real Eli Kotch. Maybe Eli Kotch was just another fake name and personality. And the ending proves that he's too clever for his own good.
The strange thing here is that James Coburn, who is so all over this film that it's hard to even believe there's anyone else in it, is not the biggest star in it, and no, I'm not talking about Aldo Ray, who would have been the other obvious name in 1966. No, the biggest star in it wasn't a star at the time. Harrison Ford got paid $150 for his uncredited role as a Texas bellhop in his debut movie, though he does get a few lines. He's very recognisable, both by his face and his voice, but there's not a huge amount to suggest at a future anywhere near the level he achieved.
Then again there's a great story that attaches to the performance. Apparently a Columbia executive told him that he didn't have that indefinable 'it'. When they saw Tony Curtis in his debut role delivering groceries, they knew he was a star. When they saw Harrison Ford trying to deliver a message in this film, they didn't know any such thing. Reportedly Ford leaned over the desk and replied to the suggestion that he go back to school and study with a typical Harrison Ford quip: 'I thought you were supposed to look at him and say, 'There's the grocery boy'.'
In the meantime he goes everywhere else it would seem. The first trip to Denver sees him pose as a Swiss shoe salesman, as whom he picks up Frieda Schmid, a fascinating character played by Nina Wayne. In no time flat she's gone though, along with plenty of her possessions. He's a conman and thief who really has a way with the women, it would seem, as he quickly collects enough keys surreptiously to rob three apartments in one night. Then it's off to Texas to be an termite exterminator who writes on the side to romance a Swedish lady, who he marries. And then it's here and there and back again to pull off a bank heist under the nose of the entire police department who are monitoring the Russian visit.
James Coburn is a chameleon here, and he has a ridiculous amount of fun juggling accents, occupations and personalities at heartbreak speed. He has a different name every time we see him and a different girlfriend to and the suggestion is that he has more fun being a chameleon than actually stealing stuff. He plays so many parts that even he must have lost track of which one was which, and which the real Eli Kotch was. The film cleverly gives us hints and lets us make sense of it all. We see what Eli does in the same way his victims do: now they see him, now they don't. Maybe we never see the real Eli Kotch. Maybe Eli Kotch was just another fake name and personality. And the ending proves that he's too clever for his own good.
The strange thing here is that James Coburn, who is so all over this film that it's hard to even believe there's anyone else in it, is not the biggest star in it, and no, I'm not talking about Aldo Ray, who would have been the other obvious name in 1966. No, the biggest star in it wasn't a star at the time. Harrison Ford got paid $150 for his uncredited role as a Texas bellhop in his debut movie, though he does get a few lines. He's very recognisable, both by his face and his voice, but there's not a huge amount to suggest at a future anywhere near the level he achieved.
Then again there's a great story that attaches to the performance. Apparently a Columbia executive told him that he didn't have that indefinable 'it'. When they saw Tony Curtis in his debut role delivering groceries, they knew he was a star. When they saw Harrison Ford trying to deliver a message in this film, they didn't know any such thing. Reportedly Ford leaned over the desk and replied to the suggestion that he go back to school and study with a typical Harrison Ford quip: 'I thought you were supposed to look at him and say, 'There's the grocery boy'.'
Wednesday, 9 July 2008
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
The kingdom of Thessaly falls to Pelias, as prophecied and decreed by Zeus. However Pelias spends twenty years waiting for the next part of the prophecy, that he will lose the throne to a child of the king he slew. That child is Jason and before he can reclaim that throne he must travel to Colchis and bring back the golden fleece that is hanging in a tree at the end of the world. It's a difficult journey, naturally, full of the sort of challenges that call for the handywork of Ray Harryhausen, but Hera, queen of the gods, has pledged to help him five times.
Of course it doesn't take long for those five times to be up. Jason holds a great games to select his crew from the brightest and the best, including the legendary Hercules who doesn't even have to compete. He also commissions a new ship which he calls the Argo, after its builder. Unfortunately Hercules manages to get the ship severely damaged at their first port of call, by disobeying the will of the gods and bringing Talos to life. And as much as the cast and crew do their best, this is what Jason and the Argonauts is all about: state of the art stop motion animation, because Talos is a giant bronze statue of a Titan.
Todd Armstrong is fine as Jason and Nigel Green is fine as Hercules, but they have no way of competing with Talos as far as star power, whether they win or not. Patrick Troughton, the best Doctor that Doctor Who ever had, is fine as the blind man Phineas, but the stop motion harpies are going to kick his ass every day, whether Jason and his crew come to turn the tables or not. The clashing rocks don't do much but there's a cool sea god to hold them back. The golden fleece is decent enough but it's protected by a wicked seven headed hydra for Jason to fight. So it's all about the stop motion animation, though Medea's red outfit in the temple of Hecate comes a close second.
Best of all, hydra teeth mean wicked stop motion Ray Harryhausen skeletons climbing out of the earth with spears and shields and an attack scream. Admittedly these effects have dated too, unsurprisingly given that this is 1963, but the saddest thing of all is that they still look way better than a lot of supposedly great CGI work that has been done over the last few years, in the 21st century no less. There's something to be said for analogue work, which takes a lot longer to become dated and tends to look a lot more natural. This is 45 year old stop analogue work but it still does its job palatably.
Beyond the effects there are some people to watch out for. Zeus and Hera are Niall MacGinnis and Honor Blackman, hardly minor names. There's Laurence Naismith, Jack Gwillim and Patrick Troughton. The leads, though, are far less known: Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovack. Armstrong plays Jason, of course, and he only made eight films, this being number three. I'll see him again shortly in the intriguingly named Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round but it was Jason that he'll always be remembered for. Kovack is Medea, high priestess in Colchis, and her screen time hardly warrants a costarring credit, but hey, she's cute, as she was the same year playing opposite Vincent Price in Diary of a Madman. She made 15 films all told, ending with Marooned in 1969.
Of course it doesn't take long for those five times to be up. Jason holds a great games to select his crew from the brightest and the best, including the legendary Hercules who doesn't even have to compete. He also commissions a new ship which he calls the Argo, after its builder. Unfortunately Hercules manages to get the ship severely damaged at their first port of call, by disobeying the will of the gods and bringing Talos to life. And as much as the cast and crew do their best, this is what Jason and the Argonauts is all about: state of the art stop motion animation, because Talos is a giant bronze statue of a Titan.
Todd Armstrong is fine as Jason and Nigel Green is fine as Hercules, but they have no way of competing with Talos as far as star power, whether they win or not. Patrick Troughton, the best Doctor that Doctor Who ever had, is fine as the blind man Phineas, but the stop motion harpies are going to kick his ass every day, whether Jason and his crew come to turn the tables or not. The clashing rocks don't do much but there's a cool sea god to hold them back. The golden fleece is decent enough but it's protected by a wicked seven headed hydra for Jason to fight. So it's all about the stop motion animation, though Medea's red outfit in the temple of Hecate comes a close second.
Best of all, hydra teeth mean wicked stop motion Ray Harryhausen skeletons climbing out of the earth with spears and shields and an attack scream. Admittedly these effects have dated too, unsurprisingly given that this is 1963, but the saddest thing of all is that they still look way better than a lot of supposedly great CGI work that has been done over the last few years, in the 21st century no less. There's something to be said for analogue work, which takes a lot longer to become dated and tends to look a lot more natural. This is 45 year old stop analogue work but it still does its job palatably.
Beyond the effects there are some people to watch out for. Zeus and Hera are Niall MacGinnis and Honor Blackman, hardly minor names. There's Laurence Naismith, Jack Gwillim and Patrick Troughton. The leads, though, are far less known: Todd Armstrong and Nancy Kovack. Armstrong plays Jason, of course, and he only made eight films, this being number three. I'll see him again shortly in the intriguingly named Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round but it was Jason that he'll always be remembered for. Kovack is Medea, high priestess in Colchis, and her screen time hardly warrants a costarring credit, but hey, she's cute, as she was the same year playing opposite Vincent Price in Diary of a Madman. She made 15 films all told, ending with Marooned in 1969.
Monday, 7 July 2008
Face (2004)
Lee Hyun-min resigns from the National Institute of Science Investigation to care for his young daughter Jin who has had a heart transplant, made more problematic by the fact that she's beta-allergic. However he's a talented facial reconstruction expert and with a serial killer melting down bodies using some form of medical benzene, he's needed to assist with the hunt. Another young reconstructor named Jung Sun-yeong brings him the fourth skull and they work together to reconstruct it.
Our story has to do with how various paths gradually cross. Lee is naturally concerned about his daughter and has been trying to obtain the name of the donor of her new heart because he has doubts about the efficacy of the treament being given her. Meanwhile the detectives working the serial killer case come to the realisation that there's a reason for the melting of the bodies. When they work from the assumption that the killer is trying to hide something, they discover that the victims were beta-allergic and suddenly all roads point towards one man: Dr Joon, the only successful doctor working with beta-allergic transplants.
This film combines a combination of genres, which helps to keep us on our toes as to our expectations. You wouldn't guess it from the synopsis above but this has a solid supernatural element to it. From the earliest scenes in the hospital, Lee begins to see visions and hear strange high pitched noises, which eventually lead him to another skull. There are some creepy moments here in the standard jurei way but mostly it's a lot more subtle. It's also a police thriller, with the hunt for a serial killer as a background, and a medical thriller too. It's even an unconventional romance, but romances are always better for being unconventional.
The two leads are Yun-ah Song and Hyeon-jun Shin. Song is a beautiful young lady who suckered me in on this one by playing her part superbly. Shin is a capable actor who juggles scientific drive with dedication and care for his daughter very well indeed. What surprises me most is that with all the Korean films I'm watching lately, I haven't seen either of these actors in anything else, even though they have solid filmographies. Shin in particular has 27 films to his name dating back to a trilogy called Son of a General between 1990 and 1992. The titles suggest versatility. Song only has seven film credits but again I'm missing all of them.
Freshest to the party is writer/director Sang-Gon Yoo, who came to this with only one other film, a 1997 short called Kilmok, and a segment of the Yellow Flower erotic anthology to his credit. He's written a clever story here and one that plays a lot more subtly than most of the extreme Asian films I've been watching lately. It doesn't feel as solid as far as plot goes and maybe could have benefitted from more length and fleshing out of background subplots, but it reminds a little of M Night Shyamalan and it beats his work without even trying.
Our story has to do with how various paths gradually cross. Lee is naturally concerned about his daughter and has been trying to obtain the name of the donor of her new heart because he has doubts about the efficacy of the treament being given her. Meanwhile the detectives working the serial killer case come to the realisation that there's a reason for the melting of the bodies. When they work from the assumption that the killer is trying to hide something, they discover that the victims were beta-allergic and suddenly all roads point towards one man: Dr Joon, the only successful doctor working with beta-allergic transplants.
This film combines a combination of genres, which helps to keep us on our toes as to our expectations. You wouldn't guess it from the synopsis above but this has a solid supernatural element to it. From the earliest scenes in the hospital, Lee begins to see visions and hear strange high pitched noises, which eventually lead him to another skull. There are some creepy moments here in the standard jurei way but mostly it's a lot more subtle. It's also a police thriller, with the hunt for a serial killer as a background, and a medical thriller too. It's even an unconventional romance, but romances are always better for being unconventional.
The two leads are Yun-ah Song and Hyeon-jun Shin. Song is a beautiful young lady who suckered me in on this one by playing her part superbly. Shin is a capable actor who juggles scientific drive with dedication and care for his daughter very well indeed. What surprises me most is that with all the Korean films I'm watching lately, I haven't seen either of these actors in anything else, even though they have solid filmographies. Shin in particular has 27 films to his name dating back to a trilogy called Son of a General between 1990 and 1992. The titles suggest versatility. Song only has seven film credits but again I'm missing all of them.
Freshest to the party is writer/director Sang-Gon Yoo, who came to this with only one other film, a 1997 short called Kilmok, and a segment of the Yellow Flower erotic anthology to his credit. He's written a clever story here and one that plays a lot more subtly than most of the extreme Asian films I've been watching lately. It doesn't feel as solid as far as plot goes and maybe could have benefitted from more length and fleshing out of background subplots, but it reminds a little of M Night Shyamalan and it beats his work without even trying.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Bunshinsaba (2004)
When a film is made by a company called Toilet Pictures, I'm not sure what to expect. No, this is not a Johnny Knoxville movie, it's a Korean horror/ghost story made by Byeong-ki Ahn, who seems to specialise in such things, both writing and directing them. His most popular is a film called Phone, which seems to rate as one of the most successful post-Ringu films that are prevalent throughout the eastern countries. Most feature a horrific and resonating incident, lots of Asian schoolgirls and some sort of device to tie them all together. I've only seen one: his first, called Nightmare, which was OK.
This time out we have three Korean schoolgirls at a school in the country who are getting picked on by their classmates. Led by Lee Yoo-Jin, a girl with awesome eyes who has come from Seoul, they use a ouija board (a bunshinsaba) to pray to the spirits to curse four girls whose names are on a sheet of paper they bring with them. Being a yurei movie, it can't come as too much of a surprise to find that these tormentors suddenly begin committing suicide by putting plastic bags over their heads, dousing themselves in gasoline and setting themselves on fire.
The catalyst seems to be Kim In Sook, a student at the same school thirty years earlier who sat in what has become known as the cursed seat number 29, and naturally there are a number of connections to her. Some of the staff were there at the school thirty years ago, along with the father of the girls' home room teacher and even Yoo-Jin's mother. In fact the entire village soon believes that Yin Joo has somehow channeled Kim In Sook and her mother Chun Hee, and a big nasty dark collective secret is getting resurrected.
What stuns me about all these yurei movies is how the girls who get picked on for being different are always so cute. Yoo-Jin is played here by 24 year old Se-eun Lee who had previously made a slasher movie, Bloody Beach, and would return in a romance, Once in a Summer. I'm surprised she hasn't made more movies. Kim In Suk is played by another young actor who has made surprisingly few movies, Yu-ri Lee. In fact she's only made one more, a drama called Friendly and Harmonious. Many of the other cast members seem to be Byeong-ki Ahn regulars, including Gyu-ri Kim who appeared in Nightmare, along with Whispering Corridors, one of the key Korean horror movies thus made.
A yurei film can be judged in a few ways. Obviously there's the standard question of how good the story is and how well it's acted and directed and so on. There's the surprise factor, because all should keep us guessing at what discovery is going to come late in the film. Then there's the quality of the creepiness, and how effectively it's shown to us. In fact it's this creepiness factor that makes modern Asian horror so fascinating to me, because it's everywhere, often in the way characters move, yet is notably absent from almost all western horror films nowadays. We just go for big bad monsters nowadays without any attempt at being creepy.
Bunshinsaba is a mix of good and bad when judged on these lines. The story is good and it's effectively told. It's good enough to keep us guessing throughout though the surprises are not particularly surprising when they come. What surprises most are the surprises that come after the surprises we expect, if that makes sense. The creepiness is definitely there though, if a little less demonstrably so than in other such films I've seen lately. There are some very effective scenes on the creepiness front. All in all it works out to be a decent if not oustanding little horror film, as many of the Korean horror films I've been watching lately seem to be. It's better than Nightmare or Acacia, but not up to Memento Mori or Wishing Stairs standards.
This time out we have three Korean schoolgirls at a school in the country who are getting picked on by their classmates. Led by Lee Yoo-Jin, a girl with awesome eyes who has come from Seoul, they use a ouija board (a bunshinsaba) to pray to the spirits to curse four girls whose names are on a sheet of paper they bring with them. Being a yurei movie, it can't come as too much of a surprise to find that these tormentors suddenly begin committing suicide by putting plastic bags over their heads, dousing themselves in gasoline and setting themselves on fire.
The catalyst seems to be Kim In Sook, a student at the same school thirty years earlier who sat in what has become known as the cursed seat number 29, and naturally there are a number of connections to her. Some of the staff were there at the school thirty years ago, along with the father of the girls' home room teacher and even Yoo-Jin's mother. In fact the entire village soon believes that Yin Joo has somehow channeled Kim In Sook and her mother Chun Hee, and a big nasty dark collective secret is getting resurrected.
What stuns me about all these yurei movies is how the girls who get picked on for being different are always so cute. Yoo-Jin is played here by 24 year old Se-eun Lee who had previously made a slasher movie, Bloody Beach, and would return in a romance, Once in a Summer. I'm surprised she hasn't made more movies. Kim In Suk is played by another young actor who has made surprisingly few movies, Yu-ri Lee. In fact she's only made one more, a drama called Friendly and Harmonious. Many of the other cast members seem to be Byeong-ki Ahn regulars, including Gyu-ri Kim who appeared in Nightmare, along with Whispering Corridors, one of the key Korean horror movies thus made.
A yurei film can be judged in a few ways. Obviously there's the standard question of how good the story is and how well it's acted and directed and so on. There's the surprise factor, because all should keep us guessing at what discovery is going to come late in the film. Then there's the quality of the creepiness, and how effectively it's shown to us. In fact it's this creepiness factor that makes modern Asian horror so fascinating to me, because it's everywhere, often in the way characters move, yet is notably absent from almost all western horror films nowadays. We just go for big bad monsters nowadays without any attempt at being creepy.
Bunshinsaba is a mix of good and bad when judged on these lines. The story is good and it's effectively told. It's good enough to keep us guessing throughout though the surprises are not particularly surprising when they come. What surprises most are the surprises that come after the surprises we expect, if that makes sense. The creepiness is definitely there though, if a little less demonstrably so than in other such films I've seen lately. There are some very effective scenes on the creepiness front. All in all it works out to be a decent if not oustanding little horror film, as many of the Korean horror films I've been watching lately seem to be. It's better than Nightmare or Acacia, but not up to Memento Mori or Wishing Stairs standards.
Breaking News (2004)
Back in the late eighties when the Made in Hong Kong video label started releasing quality copies of Hong Kong movies as they should be released: in the original widescreen format, with decent subtitles and liner notes, director Johnny To was a key name on a number of releases. The Heroic Trio films were fun and intriguing, though they could hardly have gone wrong with the title roles going to Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui and Michelle Yeoh. Best of all though was The Barefoot Kid, which I've been trying to track down on DVD ever since, with Maggie Cheung again and Aaron Kwok.
We open with a bust gone bad. Two cops on the beat unwittingly interrupt an operation that leaves cops dead and wounded, passersby dead and wounded and the bad guys free and gone. It isn't a complete whitewash but it makes the police force look like complete idiots, and as it happens, the media was right there on the scene covering a traffic accident. Naturally police ineptitude makes for a great news broadcast, and the press have a field day. To counter such an impact to their image, Commissioner Rebecca Fong begins to prepare a counterattack, the object being primarily to restore the image of the force and only secondarily to catch the bad guys.
Very shortly she has an opportunity to stage a good show for the six million citizens of Hong Kong. The crooks are tracked to a block of flats and what seems like half the force descends to make the impression she wants. However there's already a police presence on site, in the form of Insp Cheung, who has been trying to track them down himself, and of course his trying to catch the bad guys conflicts with Fong's attempts to spin the story while it's unfolding. Worst of all, there are other criminals in the same building, a couple of hitmen who think that the cops are after them.
Soon we end up with a dynamic game of wits. Cheung catch the bad guys, spin doctors trying to make everything seem like everything else, and two sets of bad guys in the same apartment with hostages, spinning everything in return. The only idiot in the whole situation is Mr Yip, the cab driver who owns the apartment. The cops are bright, especially the one who's just trying to get the job done. The crooks are bright too, and Yuen, their leader, is not just an expert with explosives but counters the spin. Fong feeds news every half hour to the reporters with footage carefully edited by professionals and spun every which way but loose. Yuen uses mobile phone footage and Mr Yip's kid's computer to counter it. As one cop points out, 'communications technology has its pros and cons'.
This film is very cool. The camerawork is excellent with a very fluid and versatile camera. The opening battle scene is especially notable because it's almost entirely one shot. The camera moves around all over the place, circles entirely around, moves up in the air, tracks this way and that, yet keeps the shot running. The choreography needed to make this work is intricate but whoever runs it here does the job amazingly. The rest of the film follows suit, making this an intelligent and incisive drama. Johnny To is definitely a name I need to continue searching out.
The leads are solid. Richie Ren is a great bad guy, very tough and intelligent and characterful. I've never seen him in anything before but he seems to have been a busy man with 19 films in the last ten years. Nick Cheung is even more prolific and makes for a very persistent Insp Cheung. He's a worthy wildcard. The real adversary though is Rebecca Fong, played by Kelly Chen from Infernal Affairs. She's driven here, totally dedicated to her belief in how things should work and that dedication gets to be scary. In many ways, she has even more balls than the other two lead characters. Backing them up is regular Johnny To actor Simon Yam and a number of other capable actors. The Yip family are most obviously fun though, played by Suet Lam and a couple of unknown child actors.
We open with a bust gone bad. Two cops on the beat unwittingly interrupt an operation that leaves cops dead and wounded, passersby dead and wounded and the bad guys free and gone. It isn't a complete whitewash but it makes the police force look like complete idiots, and as it happens, the media was right there on the scene covering a traffic accident. Naturally police ineptitude makes for a great news broadcast, and the press have a field day. To counter such an impact to their image, Commissioner Rebecca Fong begins to prepare a counterattack, the object being primarily to restore the image of the force and only secondarily to catch the bad guys.
Very shortly she has an opportunity to stage a good show for the six million citizens of Hong Kong. The crooks are tracked to a block of flats and what seems like half the force descends to make the impression she wants. However there's already a police presence on site, in the form of Insp Cheung, who has been trying to track them down himself, and of course his trying to catch the bad guys conflicts with Fong's attempts to spin the story while it's unfolding. Worst of all, there are other criminals in the same building, a couple of hitmen who think that the cops are after them.
Soon we end up with a dynamic game of wits. Cheung catch the bad guys, spin doctors trying to make everything seem like everything else, and two sets of bad guys in the same apartment with hostages, spinning everything in return. The only idiot in the whole situation is Mr Yip, the cab driver who owns the apartment. The cops are bright, especially the one who's just trying to get the job done. The crooks are bright too, and Yuen, their leader, is not just an expert with explosives but counters the spin. Fong feeds news every half hour to the reporters with footage carefully edited by professionals and spun every which way but loose. Yuen uses mobile phone footage and Mr Yip's kid's computer to counter it. As one cop points out, 'communications technology has its pros and cons'.
This film is very cool. The camerawork is excellent with a very fluid and versatile camera. The opening battle scene is especially notable because it's almost entirely one shot. The camera moves around all over the place, circles entirely around, moves up in the air, tracks this way and that, yet keeps the shot running. The choreography needed to make this work is intricate but whoever runs it here does the job amazingly. The rest of the film follows suit, making this an intelligent and incisive drama. Johnny To is definitely a name I need to continue searching out.
The leads are solid. Richie Ren is a great bad guy, very tough and intelligent and characterful. I've never seen him in anything before but he seems to have been a busy man with 19 films in the last ten years. Nick Cheung is even more prolific and makes for a very persistent Insp Cheung. He's a worthy wildcard. The real adversary though is Rebecca Fong, played by Kelly Chen from Infernal Affairs. She's driven here, totally dedicated to her belief in how things should work and that dedication gets to be scary. In many ways, she has even more balls than the other two lead characters. Backing them up is regular Johnny To actor Simon Yam and a number of other capable actors. The Yip family are most obviously fun though, played by Suet Lam and a couple of unknown child actors.
Witness to Murder (1954)
Unable to sleep, Cheryl Draper witnesses a murder through her bedroom window. Albert Richter, across the way, has strangled a woman to death while neatly framed by his window panes. Naturally she rings the police but when they check Richter's apartment, there's no corpse and Richter is clever about hiding the odd bits of evidence that he realises are still hanging around. The police therefore believe that Draper, a single middle aged woman, was dreaming, and that the respected historian and author, Albert Richter, isn't guilty of anything. Given that this is 1954 and we have capable names involved, though, this becomes a real game of cat and mouse.
Draper investigates on her own and immediately comes up with circumstantial evidence to take to the police, but Richter heads her off at every step. Not only does he counter every accusation she makes, before she even makes them, but begins to fashion a case against her stalking him! The cleverest has to be the way he sends a threatening letter to himself, then confronts her with it to obtain a way to get into her apartment, which he revisits to type a string of them to take to the police to prove her insanity. The only real benefit she has on her side is a sympathetic cop, who believes that she dreamed the crime but wants to help.
This is the sort of clever film noir that we haven't seen for decades. The talent is palpable: the leads are Barbara Stanwyck and George Sanders, with Gary Merrill as the cop, Lt Mathews. This is late Stanwyck, so she could bring elements of things like Sorry, Wrong Number to the part. Sanders was on familiar territory too, having played suave and sophisticated villains for a couple of decades and he could do that sort of thing in his sleep. Both are excellent. Merrill's is the face I don't know, though I know his name. He met Bette Davis when making All About Eve and spent the next decade married to her.
There's much to admire here, not least from the three leads, and humorous support from Jesse White, who was for 21 years the Maytag repairman. The story is strong and intelligent, the direction is solid and the music by Herschel Burke Gilbert is striking, outrageously so during the early credits. There are certainly flaws: the finale seems a little deliberately cinematic, for want of a better term, the clincher that changes Lt Mathew's mind is a little weak and the fact that he seems quite happy to effectively date a woman who he suspects of being mentally ill is a little difficult to take, but the vast swathe of the plot is interesting and insightful, maybe more so today when broad suppositions are easy.
I couldn't help but look up some connections, given that the opening sequence screams Rear Window. Was this a cheap and quick ripoff of the Hitchcock classic? Well no. It was actually released a few months beforehand (April 1954 for Witness to Murder, August 1954 for Rear Window) and while the opening is strikingly similar, the film develops on completely different lines and follows a different purpose. However, there is a predecessor to both: The Window, made in 1949, that features Bobby Driscoll as a nine year old boy who cries wolf, who is unable to convince anyone that he actually saw his neighbours commit a murder.
The link is Cornell Woolrich, who wrote a number of stories that became films, including The Boy Cried Murder, which became The Window, and It Had to Be Murder, which became Rear Window. It would seem that Woolrich, a talented and successful writer, knew what worked. If this film is successful on the basis that in the fifties women were both less believable than men because of their inherently emotional outlook and more vulnerable because of the weakness of their sex, how successful should The Window be, with a nine year old boy known for his tall tale telling? Nobody's going to believe him from moment one and he's as vulnerable as can be.
Draper investigates on her own and immediately comes up with circumstantial evidence to take to the police, but Richter heads her off at every step. Not only does he counter every accusation she makes, before she even makes them, but begins to fashion a case against her stalking him! The cleverest has to be the way he sends a threatening letter to himself, then confronts her with it to obtain a way to get into her apartment, which he revisits to type a string of them to take to the police to prove her insanity. The only real benefit she has on her side is a sympathetic cop, who believes that she dreamed the crime but wants to help.
This is the sort of clever film noir that we haven't seen for decades. The talent is palpable: the leads are Barbara Stanwyck and George Sanders, with Gary Merrill as the cop, Lt Mathews. This is late Stanwyck, so she could bring elements of things like Sorry, Wrong Number to the part. Sanders was on familiar territory too, having played suave and sophisticated villains for a couple of decades and he could do that sort of thing in his sleep. Both are excellent. Merrill's is the face I don't know, though I know his name. He met Bette Davis when making All About Eve and spent the next decade married to her.
There's much to admire here, not least from the three leads, and humorous support from Jesse White, who was for 21 years the Maytag repairman. The story is strong and intelligent, the direction is solid and the music by Herschel Burke Gilbert is striking, outrageously so during the early credits. There are certainly flaws: the finale seems a little deliberately cinematic, for want of a better term, the clincher that changes Lt Mathew's mind is a little weak and the fact that he seems quite happy to effectively date a woman who he suspects of being mentally ill is a little difficult to take, but the vast swathe of the plot is interesting and insightful, maybe more so today when broad suppositions are easy.
I couldn't help but look up some connections, given that the opening sequence screams Rear Window. Was this a cheap and quick ripoff of the Hitchcock classic? Well no. It was actually released a few months beforehand (April 1954 for Witness to Murder, August 1954 for Rear Window) and while the opening is strikingly similar, the film develops on completely different lines and follows a different purpose. However, there is a predecessor to both: The Window, made in 1949, that features Bobby Driscoll as a nine year old boy who cries wolf, who is unable to convince anyone that he actually saw his neighbours commit a murder.
The link is Cornell Woolrich, who wrote a number of stories that became films, including The Boy Cried Murder, which became The Window, and It Had to Be Murder, which became Rear Window. It would seem that Woolrich, a talented and successful writer, knew what worked. If this film is successful on the basis that in the fifties women were both less believable than men because of their inherently emotional outlook and more vulnerable because of the weakness of their sex, how successful should The Window be, with a nine year old boy known for his tall tale telling? Nobody's going to believe him from moment one and he's as vulnerable as can be.
Saturday, 5 July 2008
The Terminal (2004)
In comes flight 935 from Beijing to New York and with it comes Viktor Navorski from Krakozhia who is promptly caught up in a very bizarre situation. While he was in the air his country underwent a military coup, thus leaving him a citizen of a country that technically doesn't exist any more. The New York immigration people can't allow him into the US because his visa is no longer valid but they can't let him go home either. Therefore he's a free man who can go anywhere he likes, as long as it's within the International Transit Lounge of the airport.
Frank Dixon, from Customs and Immigration Services, tells him that he's sure that Uncle Sam will have this sorted out by tomorrow, but naturally the speed of government prohibits that, and if it was that easy we wouldn't have a film. Viktor Navorski is naturally stuck in the International Transit Lounge for a long time and we get to watch him discover a way to earn money, learn the language, make friends and effectively find a life while Dixon tries to find a way to make him someone else's problem. He even finds time to romance Catherine Zeta Jones.
Steven Spielberg hit on a winner here. I've long had a problem with Tom Hanks being serious because he's just so funny I'm conditioned to not seeing him any other way. He's made me laugh in so many comedies that I find myself laughing whenever I see him. The fact that he's so damn good at it can only help. When he tries to do a serious film about say, someone dying of AIDS, I end up laughing my ass off and that's not good. What makes this film genius is that he gets to be a serious character in a serious situation and deal with serious issues, but be completely hilarious in the process. And I don't have to feel like I'm doing a bad thing.
Hanks is awesome here. Unlike most characters in comedy films, even most lead characters in comedy films, he has depth and purpose and meaning. In fact he has more of those things than most lead characters in most serious dramas who are supposed to be full of them. He's one of those characters who makes a difference to everyone around him and it's impossible not to care about him. He really ought to resonate well beyond the two hours plus that we see him on screen, and no I don't mean in a sequel.
The supporting cast is full of faces that we know but names that we don't. Catherine Zeta-Jones is recognisable of course, and she fleshes out the other half of the unconventional romance very well indeed. Stanley Tucci does a great job as a very capable prick. People like Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Kumar Pallana and Zoe Saldana provide depth to their own supporting characters. Pallana in particular gets an awesome moment to shine when he needs to delay a flight.
Everything hinges on the story though, and this joyfully doesn't play like a Hollywood story at all, mostly in how situations find or don't find resolution. The story is by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi, with a screenplay by Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson. Because it feels so much like a European film, I checked up the movie connections expecting to find that it was a remake, merely one that wasn't massacred in the way that most such things are. It isn't a remake, but it is inspired by the same real life story as a French film from 1993 called Tombés du ciel. The source may be the same but the story appears to be very different, written by Michel Ganz and the director Phillipe Lioret. It would be fascinating to find that film, which from the synopsis sounds like a cross between this film and Luc Besson's Subway.
The real story that both films are inspired by belongs to Merhan Nasseri, who was a refugee from Iran whose passport and UN refugee certificate had apparenty been stolen thus causing difficulty in officially identifying him. He ended up staying in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, initially because Kafkaesque bureacracy provided no other option, but finally left in 2006 when he was hospitalised. There are major differences to the stories of Nasseri and Navorski though, that go way beyond only one of them romancing Catherine Zeta Jones. Nasseri was eventually granted permission both to enter France or to return home to Belgium, where he had previously been living, but he simply chose not to do so, remaining in Terminal One and telling his story to anyone who would listen. He even signed autographs for people when a book of his diaries was published and sold at a newsstand next to his 'home'.
This isn't a perfect film by any means. There are plot holes, there's dubious logic and there are instances where the thing is overdone, but it's by and large a fascinating character study that tugs at the heartstrings while firing the imagination. While a sequel would not be a good idea, there's huge room for all sorts of further material inspired by the same source story. It would seem that others fall into the same bureaucratic nightmares and I can well believe it. I was detained once by US immigration, albeit for about ten minutes, because the visa clerk couldn't believe that I could work somewhere that would allow me three months off to travel round the States. I could see a lot of short stories that use this sort of setting as another subculture to mix with others.
Frank Dixon, from Customs and Immigration Services, tells him that he's sure that Uncle Sam will have this sorted out by tomorrow, but naturally the speed of government prohibits that, and if it was that easy we wouldn't have a film. Viktor Navorski is naturally stuck in the International Transit Lounge for a long time and we get to watch him discover a way to earn money, learn the language, make friends and effectively find a life while Dixon tries to find a way to make him someone else's problem. He even finds time to romance Catherine Zeta Jones.
Steven Spielberg hit on a winner here. I've long had a problem with Tom Hanks being serious because he's just so funny I'm conditioned to not seeing him any other way. He's made me laugh in so many comedies that I find myself laughing whenever I see him. The fact that he's so damn good at it can only help. When he tries to do a serious film about say, someone dying of AIDS, I end up laughing my ass off and that's not good. What makes this film genius is that he gets to be a serious character in a serious situation and deal with serious issues, but be completely hilarious in the process. And I don't have to feel like I'm doing a bad thing.
Hanks is awesome here. Unlike most characters in comedy films, even most lead characters in comedy films, he has depth and purpose and meaning. In fact he has more of those things than most lead characters in most serious dramas who are supposed to be full of them. He's one of those characters who makes a difference to everyone around him and it's impossible not to care about him. He really ought to resonate well beyond the two hours plus that we see him on screen, and no I don't mean in a sequel.
The supporting cast is full of faces that we know but names that we don't. Catherine Zeta-Jones is recognisable of course, and she fleshes out the other half of the unconventional romance very well indeed. Stanley Tucci does a great job as a very capable prick. People like Chi McBride, Diego Luna, Kumar Pallana and Zoe Saldana provide depth to their own supporting characters. Pallana in particular gets an awesome moment to shine when he needs to delay a flight.
Everything hinges on the story though, and this joyfully doesn't play like a Hollywood story at all, mostly in how situations find or don't find resolution. The story is by Andrew Niccol and Sacha Gervasi, with a screenplay by Gervasi and Jeff Nathanson. Because it feels so much like a European film, I checked up the movie connections expecting to find that it was a remake, merely one that wasn't massacred in the way that most such things are. It isn't a remake, but it is inspired by the same real life story as a French film from 1993 called Tombés du ciel. The source may be the same but the story appears to be very different, written by Michel Ganz and the director Phillipe Lioret. It would be fascinating to find that film, which from the synopsis sounds like a cross between this film and Luc Besson's Subway.
The real story that both films are inspired by belongs to Merhan Nasseri, who was a refugee from Iran whose passport and UN refugee certificate had apparenty been stolen thus causing difficulty in officially identifying him. He ended up staying in Terminal One at Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years, initially because Kafkaesque bureacracy provided no other option, but finally left in 2006 when he was hospitalised. There are major differences to the stories of Nasseri and Navorski though, that go way beyond only one of them romancing Catherine Zeta Jones. Nasseri was eventually granted permission both to enter France or to return home to Belgium, where he had previously been living, but he simply chose not to do so, remaining in Terminal One and telling his story to anyone who would listen. He even signed autographs for people when a book of his diaries was published and sold at a newsstand next to his 'home'.
This isn't a perfect film by any means. There are plot holes, there's dubious logic and there are instances where the thing is overdone, but it's by and large a fascinating character study that tugs at the heartstrings while firing the imagination. While a sequel would not be a good idea, there's huge room for all sorts of further material inspired by the same source story. It would seem that others fall into the same bureaucratic nightmares and I can well believe it. I was detained once by US immigration, albeit for about ten minutes, because the visa clerk couldn't believe that I could work somewhere that would allow me three months off to travel round the States. I could see a lot of short stories that use this sort of setting as another subculture to mix with others.
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