A spaghetti western on steroids with a ridiculously high body count, copyist and yet distinctive enough to set it apart from the pack, Franco Nero looks amazing and the western set so lovingly created that you can almost smell it, just check out the streets of mud. Surprisingly there is a decent enough plot lurking behind the frequent and copious splashings of the tomato sauce, and thankfully nobody is wearing sunglasses. Django comes to town dragging his coffin behind, and when Django opens his coffin his enemies are swatted away like pesky flies. But when he gets involved with Mexican revolutionaries and they liberate a chest full of gold coins, Django finds that he cannot always come out on top.

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As in 'Don't shoot the messenger'.

Ben Foster plays a young soldier (recovering from combat injuries and hailed as a hero) given the unwanted task of informing the next of kin of soldiers killed on duty. His mentor is Captain Tony Stone played with suitable intensity by Woody Harrelson who approaches the task as if he were going into combat.

I really enjoyed this film. Nearly every character is 'broken' in some way, in denial and trying to keep up appearances. This applies to the civilian characters just as much as the military. It's nice to see such an understated film dealing with the aftermath of warfare. No crazy plot, no action (the one fist fight happens off-screen) - it relies purely on good acting and the drama of human lives.

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Saw it, loved it!

All the parts are well-played and portrayed. All the action sequences rock!

I don't know the Paddington area well so I couldn't say Ooh, bin there!, which I like to do 'cos I'm sad.

Yes, much darker and more intense than the latest Bonds with virtually no humour. :happy:

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Val Lewton is a deeply respected hero of American cinema, but his works are best appreciated without scholars telling you why Lewton's contributions are so important. To begin with, it's disrespectful to the directors of Lewton's films to have film historians waxing on about every detail and crediting Lewton almost exclusively, as if he was the director. In the event that you never noticed before, Hollywood is collectively its own biggest fan. Watching Turner Classic Movies on a regular basis will expose you to film experts and movie people gushing over past works as if they were God himself, or perhaps interim Dr. Frankensteins acting as proxy creators. Martin Scorsese is almost as well known for his embellishments on the topic as he is for his own pictures.

Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows is a library of prose praising the visual style, the dialog, the lighting, the mood -- attributes normally credited to the director, as if the actual directors of these films were merely showing up and collecting a check while Lewton commandeered every job on and off the set. The fault is, as noted before, the self-referential adoration from the industry itself of its own offspring. Imagine for a moment having to hear such praise of one's work from carpenters, mechanics, teachers, civil servants, construction crews...it would be appalling to be subjected to poetic essays on the greatness of their jobs which are, truth be known, of much greater significance to society as a whole.

The moral of the story: the entertainment industry needs to get over itself, do its job and go home. The single benefit of this production is that the films highlighted can be looked at as more detailed trailers, even though the films represented are quite a bit overstated. Let movies entertain you and forget the idea that experts need to teach you how to enjoy them.

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The trials and tribulations of a leftfield band of misfits fronted by a singer who permanently wears a Frank Sidebottom Papier-mâché head. When this came out in the cinemas I thought it looked like a terrible idea. It looked far too wacky and annoying for my liking so I chose not to go and see it.

Since then friends have recommended it and possibly my expectations went from too low to too high as I found it a bit of a let down. I did enjoy Maggie Gyllenhaal as Clara, the angry electronics wizard....

'Don't touch my f**king Theramin!!!'

Despite being slightly underwhelmed I think I could watch this film again and get a bit more out of it. It could be a grower!

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IMDb have this down as a comedy and although there are some laughs it really is a black comedy in more ways than one. The plot echoes another notable black cinema work - The Harder They Come with a naive country boy arriving in the big city and getting ripped off right, left and centre.

I have no idea if this film represents an accurate view of Brixton in 1977 but even if it doesn't it provides an amazing contrast with the Brixton of 2016 (average price of a flat £439,843)

Norman Beaton plays Dave King, an absolute snake of a man but played with such manic energy that you can't help but love him a little. The energy of his character pretty much runs through the entire film. In that way the title makes a lot of sense. Bad sh*t happens in this film but the characters find a way of making the best of a crap hand. Black Joy indeed.

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Perhaps the best war film i have ever seen and certainly the best film about the war in Indochine.
There is no bloody message or hysterics in here, only a down-to-earth and vivid approach from the progress of a column of local section suppletive Laotian soldiers, French officer and non-commissioned officers through the jungle surrounded and confronted with Vietmin forces.

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A simple and very charming short film made by The National Film Board Of Canada. It opens with a boy rowing his little wooden boat across a Canadian lake with his trusty dog on board. It then zooms in and out to show that this boy is simultaneously virtually nothing and virtually everything in this universe of ours. It does have 'Cosmic' in the title after all.

You could do all this with computers now but it just wouldn't be the same. The animation is wonderful and the accompanying music fits perfectly.

Worth 8 minutes of anyone's time.

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Absolutely brilliant, one of my all-time favourite films!

I simply had to add the actor "Marius Goring as Conductor 71" as his part is one of the most important aspects of the film!

Another great example of how the simple trick of showing one world in colour and another in black and white (cc The Wizard Of Oz) can be so profound.

David Niven is just simply brilliant here; Kim Hunter (later of Planet Of The Apes fame) is just adorable; Marius Goring is hilariously camp but also charming in his own way.

The story is simple - it is not a spoiler to say that Niven's character is supposed to be killed when his Spitfire crashes on the way back from a sortie. Due to a clerical mix-up in Heaven, he doesn't die and Goring is dispatched to sort it out. Niven realises he doesn't want to die and decides to plead his case, saying that he is now in love with Hunter's radio girl.

Wondrous film-making!

:happy:

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Once seen, never forgotten! It's hard to picture it now but the film's (oft-imitated) genius was to show the monster in gradual reveal, so that we saw only a very little of it at the start and then more and more, until the denouement, when HR Giger's awesome creation could be seen in full. Stunning piece of film-making! :happy:

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I've enjoyed the soundtrack LP to this film for many a year but having finally watched the film I can sadly report that it doesn't live up to the music.

There are some great shots and imagery (the scorpion in particular) but overall it's somewhat inept. Some of the tracking shots are so shaky that even budget restraints can't be an altogether convincing excuse. The worst thing is that even though the film only lasts 90 minutes it seems to last much much longer. I actually fell asleep on my first attempt watching it!

Soledad Miranda is of course beautiful and her tragic story along with the excellent Psychedelic soundtrack will forever make this film a 'Cult Classic' but really it's probably better projected onto a nightclub wall as background entertainment rather than actually watched in a cinema.

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Saw this a coupla days ago :happy:

Definitely not as bad as the reviews I read would have it.

Yes, some of the dialogue is execrable; yes, some of the effects are rudimentary; yes, it is not explained how such a situation arose...

However, it is the proverbial entertaining slice of hokum. There are enough thrills and spills to keep oiks like me happy, so I enjoyed switching off for an hour or two.

Also, London was used well although the end credits implied some of the scenes were filmed in Bulgaria (must be a suburb, probably south of the river...).

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Apparently this is the 4th biggest (homegrown) box office hit in the Netherlands but I wonder if anyone remembers it fondly? To me it seemed to have dated poorly and the slapstick elements jarred badly with the serious themes of domestic abuse and prostitution.

The extras on the DVD claimed that Verhoeven didn't want to just make a cheeky sexploitation caper and instead interviewed many working prostitutes with a view to showing what their lives were really like. I have to say that to me it seems like he failed and it is indeed a cheeky sexploitation caper (with subtitles).

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Ollie Reed and his gang work the summer season in the fictional seaside town Roxham and have a "System" for picking up girls. They drive around in an open top Rolls Royce and Ollie is the King of the pack.

The film is very much a product of it's time and features quintessential English pastimes such as taking the piss out of German tourists and complaining about trains running late. Not the most progressive of 60s movies. Reed is stuck between a rock and a hard place, he feels superior to the holidaymakers he mocks and calls grocks but he feels inferior and awkward with the upper class holidaymakers who also frequent the resort.

An interesting timepiece and well worth a watch for Oliver Reed's terrible dancing if nothing else.

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Above-average, non-indulgent Depp movie! :thumbsup:

I like this kind of thing, albeit this one is more Da Vinci-lite. Depp is convincing as an academic trying to unravel what might be a Satanic-inspired mystery, concerning an old book.

This harks back to classic tales a la The (original) Omen but has a disappointing, cop-out ending, IMHO.

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Hailed at the time as Shane Meadows big breakthrough film this actually turned out to be a major disappointment. Perhaps the pressure got to him or perhaps it just couldn't live up to the title. Whatever the case this is certainly my least favourite Meadows film and I think his too!

Thankfully things got back on track with his next feature Dead Man's Shoes

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I'm not going to review the story here, but other aspects of this film have bugged me since it's release.

This is a really interesting movie for film students, and a cautionary tale.

In a nutshell, this is the very definition a potentially great movie stuck inside a mess.

...It could have been a ground-breaking film-noir sci-fi graphic novel style movie which people would speak of with reverence for decades as a benchmark for this style of movie.

But instead, it does something to the viewer I've never actually experienced before:

It is actually physically painful to watch it!

And believe me, I've tried... as I wanted so much to like it. It was greatly anticipated by me and my friends when it came out at the cinema, for all it promised, but I recall us al feeling uneasy and let down when we came out of the cinema. I've tried to watch three times since, as I know there's a great film in there somewhere, and one of these times was to try and analyse exactly what it was that ruins it.

And it can be boiled down to just one word:

Editing.


This is an object lesson in how not to edit a movie together...

Having got a fantastic idea, great script, brilliant actors in the cast, sumptuous set design, and exceptional cinematography, why let a monkey edit the results?

The reason it is so hard a watch, is because there is not two seconds together in the entire film where the camera rests on a single scene. Not one.

I actually counted the seconds for each shot in one attempt... and no shot lasts longer than a second. The effect this creates on the viewer is in not letting the eye - and therefore, the mind - come to rest on what they are watching for a moment, it actually strains the eye over such a long period, and exhausts the concentration after only a few minutes.

This really does give a genuine, physical headache, and eye-strain if you try to watch it all the way through.

I can handle scenes or sequences which are a bit choppy, or quickly paced if that's what the story calls for, but here, it's every second, and for absolutely no reason.

I think the reason may actually lie in the fact that the visuals are so impressive - the sets, effects etc. that someone made the odd decision to have many times more camera angles than were necessary. It must have been a forest of cameras on set when they were shooting it!
And so each scene, even simple dialogue between two people, has a close up of each of their faces (from two or more distances and angles, a couple each of them together, and other assorted views and aspects... and they decided, having got all of these reams of footage (mileage is probably a better description), they had to use it all... or as much as they could cram into as short a space as possible.

So maybe it's not the editor's fault exactly, but the pressure to use as much material as he/she could, in order to justify all of these tins of film being used.

Somewhere there is a warehouse jammed full of cans of this raw material, from which you could probably re-cut the entire movie a hundred times over, and makes thousands of new versions of it....

...I wish they would, as this metronomic nightmare torpedoes the entire film at a stroke.

Just make one decent version, where occasionally the camera can come to rest on something, and not make the audience feel like they are being jabbed repeatedly, and relentlessly in the face with a stick, and let the thing breathe, then this will be all it can be.

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Delivered in Euro arthouse style, you'd almost get the impression that the film may draw too much attention to its own visual and verbal styles. But dammit, it works. If Anne Bancroft's breathtaking performance stops amazing you (how?), switch gears and study the magnificent black & white cinematography with it's perfect setups and lighting embellishments. This could have been a bog standard Elizabeth Taylor oater in less capable hands, but I never felt that director Jack Clayton overplayed his hand.

For certain this depressing drama is not for everybody and every mood, but one cannot deny that it stands as a piece of art. For better or worse, essential viewing for any serious student of film or acting.

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Love this film!

The chemistry between Steiger and Coburn is just amazing. There is so much going on in this film, from Coburn's wise-cracks to Steiger's enthusiasm for his cause.

Oh and there's that great Morricone "shom-shom" theme tune as well!

:happy:

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After seeing a few clips from this I was put off watching this due to Sally Hawkins hugely irritating character Poppy. Being a Mike Leigh fan and the fact that huge chunks of it were shot in my old neighbourhood in North London I couldn't avoid watching it forever and so it has come to pass that I gritted my teeth and sat through it. I can report that Poppy is just as annoying as I'd feared and if you combine that with Eddie Marsan playing a simmering racist it's really not an easy watch.

I watched the extras and was amazed to hear that Poppy is a character who you are supposed to fall in love with, her eternal optimism shining through. Perhaps my East coast of Scotland dourness made me immune as I found Poppy excruciating from start to finish. It gets a respectable 7/10 on IMDb so maybe it's just me?!

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This documentary comes across as a missed opportunity though I suspect having read a biography of GnR that to have the film made at all was probably an ordeal. It certainly tells us nothing new about the band and if it wasn't for the excellent archive footage then there would be very little reason to watch it. The 'talking heads' quotes are on the whole pretty tame, I suspect everyone involved was wary of an Axl Rose lawsuit hitting them if they really started dishing the dirt.

The film starts and finishes with fantasy sequences themed around Alice In Wonderland. I personally thought they were dreadful and Youtube comments would suggest I'm not alone in this. Even more annoying for me is that the film failed to mention the tortuous process leading up to the (massively anti-climatic) release of the last GnR LP 'Chinese Democracy' : 10 years of recording and re-recording with an estimated $13million budget. It's a fascinating train wreck story that hopefully will be told properly some day in the future........

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Very much an effects-driven movie.

Always great to see Scarlett in a movie - not just because of her looks but she is, actually, an actress capable of lifting an otherwise average movie like this a coupla notches.

As in the Notes, she gets caught up in a drug deal which goes south. The bad guys surgically placed pouches of drugs in intestines for her and others to transport against their will. When she is later kicked in stomach, the pouch breaks releasing drug into her system.

Cue loads of CGI in a climactic romp to make the "trip" scene in 2001 seems like a mild diversion! Overdone but an entertaining slice of hokum. :happy:

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This is how to make a brilliant sci-fi movie.

It's all in the script...

...You don't need a huge budget and flashing lights and gizmos and what-not, just start with a very strong idea, get a couple of great actors, and then film it.

The strong idea at the heart of this is Sam Rockwell's character being a lone miner on the moon (assisted by the artificial intelligence/ robot GERTY (Voiced by Kevin Spacey) , serving out the remainder of his contract for a commercial mining company, overseeing the automated process of drones harvesting from the surface, then shooting it back to earth in a rocket.

Until one day, alerted to a glitch, he goes out to fix it and discovers another person on the moon... himself.

I won't offer spoilers, but this is essentially a one-man sci-fi stage play on a small budget, but brilliantly crafted and with a great idea.

I wish there was more of this kind of film about these days.

[YouTube Video]

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Saw this in the cinema (must have been 7) and loved it!

It's the story of a spacecraft breaking down in orbit - can NASA launch another one to get the crew back? There's bad weather (a hurricane?)! Beautifully filmed, great cast, superb acting... what's not to love? :thumbsup:

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Hammer Films' followup to One Million Years BC. More clay animation dinosaurs, very well done by American Jim Danforth. This one really comes thru as a good movie as well as a dinosaur pic. Worth noting that Danforth's animation was superior to Ray Harryhausen's because the motion was perfectly smooth.
But Hammer found the process expensive and did not do more with him.
In the uncut edition Victoria Vetri appears fully nude in the swimming pond scene.

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Brilliant! Just brilliant! :thumbsup:

This was amazing film-naking for its time and Im sure the corporation would love to be able to go back to that level of pure storytelling! Anyone who doesn't feel a lump in the throat when Dumbo is talking to his mother when she is locked up is dead from the neck up!

The Pink Elephants On Parade piece is psychedelia 25 years before anyone else caught up!

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Although Stanley Baker's performance is amazing as the intense (King of the jail) Johnny Bannion, I found a few of the prison scenes a little bit cheesy and unrealistic which spoiled the overall enjoyment of the film. Still worth a watch though.

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'I want the one I can't have
and it's driving me mad
it's written all over my face' - Morrissey 1985.

In this case it's handsome, rich and successful author Tyvian Jones (Stanley Baker) reduced to a pathetic pile of human rubble by the cold hearted and manipulating Eve Olivier (Jeanne Moreau). In one of the most striking scenes his beautiful and neglected wife Francesca Ferrara (Virna Lisi) turns up to find him sleeping on the floor having been forbidden to enter Olivier's bedroom. Stanley Baker was very much a 'leading man' of his day so it's a still a real shocker to see him curled up and looking so weak and pitiful. A not entirely believable but still very entertaining tale of sexual obsession.

Moreau's character cares only about money and when asked what she would do with the money answers 'buy records' - chilling stuff! ; )

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in my opinion, the dumbest of the "Vacation" movies. whatever wasn't covered in the other movies is presented here and National Lampoon's didn't have a hand in this one. Wayne Newton appears in this in the casino.

National Lampoon's created one other "Vacation" movie "Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie's Island Adventure" (2003), with the original actress that played "Audrey Griswold" which was made for television and was awful.

The 2015 movie wasn't National Lampoon, and was simply titled, "Vacation".

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Based on the 1957 novel The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham

Another superior British 60s Sci-Fi/horror film. God, we were good at this back then, weren't we! The story-telling, acting, direction, lighting... superb! And what a simple storyline (oft-copied since, see the Extant TV series for one!) about children appearing to apparently barren, or even virgin women, with... consequences!

The matter-of-factness about the way the children talk, their unspoken communication and synchronisation of action... shudder!

Wonderful! :happy:

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