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The Great Escape (1963)
A good film
From what I have heard from actual POWs, this is a reasonably accurate portrayal of what it was like to be held in a POW camp run by the Luftwaffe. "Firm but fair" on the whole. And far better than the alternative, i.e. being held captive by the Gestapo or SS. The Great Escape is a true story that has been doctored for Hollywood. There was an escape from Sagan camp, and 76 did get away. Of these, 3 made it to freedom. The rest were recaptured and fifty of them were shot by the SS on Hitler's orders; in groups of 2 and 3 though, not in the more dramatic mass-shooting we see in the film. Big X (Attenborough) was named Bushell, not Bartlett, and in fact there were no Americans in the camp. Garner and McQueen were included for box office appeal. Also, all the prisoners in the movie are in their late 30s and upwards in reality almost all of them would have been closer to 20 than 30. But, once you acknowledge that the movie is not a 100% accurate depiction of what happened, but simply an enjoyable film based on the true story, with some invented motorcycle stunt work thrown in for good measure, you can sit back and enjoy, and feel admiration for all those who fought on the winning side in that cataclysmic war for the survival of freedom.
Bad Company (2002)
Awful
Spoilers ahead!
Sometimes a movie looks interesting when you see the trailers, but when you get round to renting the video you find a bit of junk the insults your intelligence. Like this one.
Anyone who has seen the trailers for this film, or has read the other reviews, will know the basic premise. That the CIA, in an attempt to foil an unscrupulous arms dealer who is selling atom bombs for twenty million bucks, have to recruit and train Chris Rock in a mere nine days to replace the twin brother he never knew he had, who was a CIA undercover officer of many years' experience. Yeah, right! `So I have a twin brother. Big deal!' Yes, I think we would all react that way if we heard that news. Very realistic.
Okay, so it's a bit of hokey fun. But it's perfectly possible to make improbable dramas without treating the audience with contempt. In this case, the holes in the plot were so huge, and the makers couldn't even be bothered to pretend that the audience would have a mental age above about twelve. I'll only give a few examples: The CIA and the terrorists have a shoot out in a luxury hotel in Prague, complete with machine guns burping out long bursts of fire. Apart from hitting several terrorists, the bullets do no damage whatsoever. The wall, furnishings etc remain totally unscathed. Even the dead terrorists somehow manage not to bleed onto the carpet. What's more, the shooting, as all good gunfights are, tends to be rather noisy. But with all the noise and killing, the local police don't even show up. We are led to believe that the CIA can go anywhere it likes, shoot whoever it wants, and no one else even notices. In an earlier scene, a man (terrorist) has fallen screaming from the roof of a Manhattan skyscraper. Next scene our heroes are in the street and passersby are going about their business normally. No one has even noticed!
Maybe a few very young children or people who have lived in caves were taken in, but I think that all the rest of us knew immediately the atom bomb started ticking down to zero that it would NOT explode, that Chris Rock WOULD manage to disarm it, but of course he wouldn't manage to do it until absolutely the last moment, preferably with just a few seconds to go. And lo and behold, it all happened just like that! Gosh! By the way, wasn't it considerate of the terrorists to use a bomb that had a convenient digital display on it to tell you just how long you had before it was supposed to explode! But then I expect all bombs are like that.
This movie was just plain bad. Don't bother with it.
A Very Brady Sequel (1996)
Was it really like that?
I never saw the original tv show or the first movie, so I don't know how accurate a satire this lightweight bit of amusing fluff was. But if it was in any way a realistic representation of the tv show from the seventies, it stands as a testament to how the tv networks must have had a dismissive contempt for their audiences, to show the antics of what was apparently a nauseating, saccharine sweet family.
Evil Under the Sun (1982)
Peter Ustinov, Mediterranean sunshine, a dead body -- all this and Cole Porter too!
Peter Ustinov recreates the role of Poirot, following the wonderful Death On The Nile. This is not the story as Agatha Christie wrote it, but here we have a rare example of the movie being better than the book. In fact it would be more accurate to say that here we have a murder mystery based on an idea by Miss Christie. We are presented with is a cast of characters, a murder victim, and just about everyone has a motive. Poirot of course, deduces who did it. The sun in question, under which this evil takes place, shines down on a privately owned island in the Mediterranean, giving us a warm and exotic location.
There isn't one bad performance among the cast, several of whom have appeared before in at least one other Poirot story. Maggie Smith and Jane Birkin in Evil Under The Sun; Dennis Quilley and Colin Blakely in Murder On The Orient Express. Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith almost steal the show as two women who smile sweetly at each other as they spit venom! But every bit as good are Blakely, Quilley, Mason, McDowall and the rest. And while all this is going on, the soundtrack is solid gold Cole Porter, which has been orchestrated perfectly to fit the story.
This movie is pure fun. Make yourself comfortable, suspend disbelief and allow yourself to be transported to another era and location for a couple of hours of enjoyment.
Jack the Ripper (1988)
As entertainment, ok. But that's about all.
Yet another version of the Ripper murders. It's fun to sit through, but of course to anyone who has read about the Whitechapel murders, it has nothing to do with the facts of the case. Since the early 1970s there has been a tendency to accuse prominent personalities of the time of the murders. All good pulp fiction stuff, but no serious crime historian subscribes to those theories. The real murderer was in all probability a non-entity, living locally, and most likely insane. Stories of government plots, cover-ups etc are entertaining but just twaddle.
Michael Caine and company do their best with this hokum, and if you just sit back and enjoy it for what it is, then you won't be wasting your time. And once you've seen it, you can move on to something better.
Iris (2001)
Excellent
Don't see this film if you want to see explosions, special effects, wizards, swordplay, heroic deeds, flag-waving soldiers blowing away terrorists or any of the spectacles so beloved by the post-pubescents who make up the majority of the cinema going masses these days.
If you want to see excellent acting, though, this is well worth a couple of hours out of your life. IRIS is a sensitive study of the end of a long, and by and large successful and loving marriage between Iris Murdoch, the novelist, and her husband John Bayley. After a long career as a novelist, Iris Murdoch dies the slow death that Alzheimer's disease brings, robbing its victim of life long before death appears. We see Iris and John as young adults, he slightly puzzled by the self-assured, hedonistic young writer with whom he has fallen in love. And after several affairs she chooses to marry him. By contrast we see John as an old man, as puzzled and unsure of himself as before, now forced to take charge of and look after the wife whose mind is wasting away. In spite of John's forced good cheer and optimism, we all know how the story will end. As the doctor sad, when Iris's disease is diagnosed, `It will win.'
It is not surprising that three out of the four principals were nominated for Oscars. Judi Dench and Jim Broadbent play Iris and John. Kate Winslett and Hugh Bonneville play the young Iris and John. Bonneville is so perfect as a younger version of Broadbent that some people might think that it was the same actor with brilliant make-up. A well-deserved Oscar to Broadbent for best male supporting actor. But then everyone in this film was excellent. Well-crafted performances as Iris inevitably fell into the abyss that is Alzheimer's, and we watch with compassion. A touching, true-life story, in which the only villain is the disease.
Mosley (1998)
Excellent. But a couple of questions....
Possible spoilers
I knew about Mosley, or at least I thought I did. I knew he was leader of the British Union of Fascists before the war, and I knew he was interned when the war broke out as a potential traitor. I had no idea he had been such a high profile politician in Parlaiment before he became a fascist, nor that he had been a radical socialist.
This TV movie was an excellent dramtisation of his life from the end of WW1 to the start of WW2. For someone who ended up leading a fascist party, he comes across as a very sympathetic character in the first half. It is with an effort that one remembers what he turned into. The decline into intolerance, and fascism comes in the final thirty minutes or so. Johnathan Cake gives a fine performance, as do all the rest of the cast. I can't think of anyone who gave a bad one.
The writers, Marks and Gran, give a very balanced view of the man, but there are a couple of points I wish they had explored more deeply. When he was in Berlin, we see him meeting Hitler. The two men obviously thought little of each other. I could have done with a bit more information about this. And there is a scene where Mosely witnesses Nazi brownshirts bullying an old Jewish woman. He looks at the scene with horror. What does this signify? I wish the writers had elaborated.
That said, this makes excellent viewing. Worth an evening of your time.
War and Remembrance (1988)
Very worthwhile miniseries
For the most part this miniseries stuck to the novel by Herman Wouk. It covered the whole of WW2 from the time the US entered the war until after the surrender of Japan. I wouldn't be surprised if it cost more than the actual war itself!
There are several plot threads, but the main ones are the Jane Seymour/John Gielgud one, as Aaron Jastrow and his niece Natalie try to evade capture by the Germans in Europe, and the Robert Mitchum one, following the life and career of Admiral Victor Henry. This period of course includes the Holocaust and the movie does not flinch from depicting some very disturbing scenes from that tragedy. And this of course id the significance of the title -- Remembrance. Herman Wouk obviously intended that people should not forget what happened in the middle of the twentieth century. And he is right. People must be reminded.
That aside, this is a well made and enjoyable yarn, the fiction interwoven with the fact. John Gielgud is the best, IMHO, but there are excellent performances from many others. It is a long miniseries and there's no need to try to see it all in one go, assuming you have the time.
Vanilla Sky (2001)
enjoyable but irritating
Possible spoilers throughout.
I watched this movie with first great enjoyment, then simply enjoyment and as it went past the two-hour mark an increasing sense of impatience. The opening scenes, Tom Cruise's dream of being alone in New York, was extremely effective. Being alone when you don't want to be is everyone's nightmare, so finding yourself alone in a deserted city, and a futuristic version of your hometown at that, would be twice as scary.
That out of the way, we were introduced to character A (Cruise), the pleasure seeking, rich, handsome publishing executive who runs a multi-million dollar company while getting as much enjoyment out of life as he can. Are we supposed to like him less because he inherited the company, rather than having to work for it? Is there any nobility in being handed riches on a plate? We also meet character B, hero's best friend, and character C, hero's girlfriend. Or rather, she thinks she is his girlfriend but he thinks she is just his friend with whom he can sleep from time to time. At Cruise's birthday party (was that Stephen Spielberg as himself giving Cruise a hug and wishing him happy birthday?) we meet character D, a female friend of character B. A decides he wants D, takes it slowly for the sake of enjoying the chase but as we all know he will, he gets her in the end. This is not to character C's liking, so she deliberately crashed her car off a bridge while character A is in the passenger seat, killing herself and injuring A so that he survives with disfiguring injuries and has to wear a mask.
All very straightforward. The twists come as a series of incidents unfold during which we wonder about Cruise's grip on reality. Yes, we see into his dreams sometimes, but then we are left wondering when the dreams stop and reality begins. And all is eventually revealed. But by that time I was impatient with the movie and getting to the stage of wanting it to end and not caring as much as I did half an hour earlier what happened to the characters.
An interesting movie, with several twists. Tom Cruise gives and excellent performance, though don't you ever get the feeling that he has it written into his contract that the camera must spend a predetermined number of minutes worshiping his looks? Full marks to him, though, for playing half the movie in a mask or showing dreadful scars. I found Penelope Cruz (character D) singularly unprepossessing and couldn't see what Cruise saw in her (in fact or fiction). In character A's place I would have chosen C (Cameron Diaz) any day of the week. She is far more attractive and gave a far better performance.
This is a good enough movie but you may prefer to forego seeing it at a theatre and wait until it is available on DVD or video.
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
Nice scenery
The one thing that everyone learns from this movie is that New Zealand is apparently a beautiful place. No wonder the NZ tourist board is so pleased with the end result. I came out wanting to book a flight there, and I suspect I wasn't the only one.
What I did not come out of the theater with was any sense of having enjoyed myself. For almost three hours I sat through it and at the end all I could think was: What was that all about? I have never read the books, so I had no idea at all what the story was. Maybe in order to drool over this movie you have to have read the books first. That way you can understand it.
At the very start we got a couple of minutes of voice-over narration, telling us in hurried tones that there were these rings, see, and so-and-so got one, and then another lot went to a bunch of people with white beards, and some other rings were given out to other people whose names you don't catch. No one bothers to tell you why, if these rings are so troublesome, anyone went to the bother of making them in the first place. Anyway, some monsters fought each other (why?) and one ring ended up in a river or a field or something, and Ian Holm found it and that was when things rally got bad.
A jolly little scene with Ian McKellern and Ian Holm ensues but then Holm decides he has to leave his home (why?) and we find ourselves cast into what the rest of the movie consists of -- a bunch of people trekking from A to B to C and having to fight various monsters and mutants in a series of almost identical battles. In most of these they are heavily outnumbered but they always win. It may have been allegorical, it may have been full of significance, but by God it was dull! Sean Bean shows up after a while, but his character is as sombre as the rest. Cate Blanchett appears near the end, but she has very little screen time and what she says makes little sense anyway.
And just when you think it has to be over soon, that they couldn't possibly string it out any further, it ends with nothing accomplished, nothing decided, and in order to see how it ends you have to sit through two more episodes, which will probably be just more of the same: walking, fighting, beautiful scenery, joyless acting.
People who have read the books will love this film, because of course they will relive the pleasure they got from the books as the movie unfolds. That will not be much of a reflection of the movie itself. For those who have not read the books it will be an overlong fantasy tale, best viewed in a few years when it comes out on TV.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Disappointing
I have read the book by James Jones at least three times since I bought it in the seventies and each time I was rivetted by this engrossing, straightforward story of a company of men involved in a battle in a particularly brutal theatre of war in WW2. When the movie came out with all the usual ballyhoo of a big production I decided to see it but never actually got round to doing so until I rented it on video a few days ago.
Movies are seldom as good as the books they are based on, but I was hoping that this would at least approach the book. I was very disappointed. There were, at various points during the three hours of the film, some exciting battle scenes, but there was far too much time taken up with self indulgent photography, long boring sequences during which nothing much happened, and muttered pretentious pseudo-philosophical monologues, none of which contributed to the enjoyment of the movie. The US Army and Marines fought a particularly hard battle in the Pacific in WW2 but it had to be done, and they did it as efficiently as they knew how. All that "what is war for?" drivel should be reserved for movies about Vietnam, which was a different war altogether.
This movie was a waste of a good story.
'night, Mother (1986)
Excellent
I didn't think this was my sort of film at all, but from the start I was captivated. You can always depend on Bancroft and Spacek for first class performances, and you won't be disappointed. This was obviously a stage play before it was a movie, and it doesn't need more than the one set. What could be a claustraphobic experience turns into a brilliant tour-de-force from both actresses.
SPOILER... The ending is unexpected, however much it may have been anticipated and discussed by the characters. Very sad, but refreshing that there isn't in this case a Hollywood cop-out and a sweetness and life ending.
The Man Who Knew Too Little (1997)
Just plain fun
What an utter delight this film is! Never mind subtlety or an underlying message; this farce is just plain fun, with laughs from start to finish. Bill Murray is perfect as the inoffensive man out of his depth but not realizing it, surrounded by a dependable cast of British actors (Richard Wilson, Alfred Molina etc). Rent this video if you want to spend a couple of undemanding hours having a good laugh.
Barton Fink (1991)
A very dull movie.
Do long periods of inactivity make a good film? I sat in front of the tv screen waiting for something to happen, but all I got was John Turturro sitting in a hotel room staring at either a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter or an irrelevant picture on the wall of his room.
John Goodman turned up, and at least we actually had people speaking to each other for more than a few moments, but his appearances were separated by more dull periods of nothing. The brief cameos by John Mahoney and Judy Davis promised to add a bit of life to the story but neither appeared for long enough. The denouement, such as it was, made no sense and almost immediately afterwards we found ourselves on the beach with Turturro for more silence, waves breaking on a rock, and a completely meaningless ending.
I found this movie in the Comedy section of the video store. Strange, since there wasn't a single laugh in it. Just one long yawn.
The Big Chill (1983)
Ok, I've seen it at last. Now what?
When I said I had never seen this film, people gasped and told me they couldn't belive it. They said it was a ground-breaking film, a cinematic landmark etc etc. Worth seeing for the soundtrack alone. So I rented it and watched it.
What I saw was a group of unpleasant, self-obsessed, angst-ridden yuppies whom I liked not at all and cared about even less. We get a little light-relief once or twice with the Tom Beringer character but apart from that we are expected to spend a weekend with these people as they mull over the fact that one of the college friends has killed himself. A little sex thrown in for variety and Glenn Close chooses to have her hissy-fit in the shower so while we watch her acting we can also see her breasts. The piece ends suddenly, with little changed, nothing concluded and the audience thinking "So what?" We never find out why Alex killed himself but my theory is he realized that these people were the best he could do for friends so he threw in the towel.
As for the soundtrack, a selection of fifteen or so different numbers of roughly the same period, well K-Tel have been doing that sort of thing for years. No need to put yourself through a movie like this to hear it.