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Magic Marmalade

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Half record collector... half druid... complete unit.

More human than human.

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Member	Item		Review/Comment
Magic Marmalade 24th Jan 2025		Cinema K-PAX (2001)	Rated 7/10 In the nut-house again. (It gives me pause to reflect on how many movies I like deal with mental illness: The Fisher King, Benny And Joon, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, As Good As It Gets....etc. Purely coincidental, I'm sure! (twitch twitch :) When I watched it first time round, all those years ago, I remember feeling it was a bit of a vanity project... indulgence, and vehicle / excuse to shoehorn Kevin Spacey onto our screens, off the back of a plethora of memorable performances elsewhere, and I remember it feeling a very...slight movie - a little too economical, sparse, and cold feeling. I think the production design has a lot to do with, as it looks a little less than cinematic, and more like TV... like an episode of NCIS or something, with that kind of aesthetic. Watching again now, a lot of that hasn't changed for me, but I do find I've warmed to the story a characters a little more, and the cool look and feel is appreciated in how it conveys a sense of the ethereal, and otherworldly, consistent with the theme of a man (Spacey) who apparently arrives from out of thin air, declares himself to be from another planet, and is immediately taken to a psychiatric ward of the hospital, to be investigated and assessed by Jeff Bridges' psychiatrist. Prot(e) (Spacey) begins to rub off on, and have an effect on, not only the other patients, but the doctors, and Bridges himself, due to the enduring enigma the movie works off of: *Is he actually nuts, or is he really from another planet?!?* >Your Kevin Spacey joke here< (...er, or perhaps... best not!) It is, despite it's economy, and fragile surface beauty, actually quite a touching, tragic, yet warm and engaging movie nevertheless, and still worth watching. 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
Magic Marmalade 24th Jan 2025		Cinema Fear City (1984)	Rated 7/10 Neon-Noir. This neon-drenched, quasi-serial killer, semi-skin-flick feels like a bleed over from the seventies, as in both look and feel, if you didn't know the date of release, you'd swear it was a seventies movie. Although, more accurately, this feels like a 30s to 50's film-noir packed inside the clothes of the seventies, an presented in the eighties. (The only thing that gave it away is a scene in the street with a telephone box, where a cinema in the background is showing: Blue Thunder, An Officer And a Gentleman, and Flashdance!) It reeks of a kind of pulp noir novel that might have been bought back in the day from a cigarette stand: Lonesome ex-boxer, haunted by his last fight, in which he killed his opponent, now runs an agency for strip club dancers, who suddenly start getting serially attacked in the street by pre-Se7en style nut job, and the boxer's mob connections, as well as the hard-bitten, no-nonsense (and slightly shady) Detective who is always getting his face are all over him to try and bring the nutter to book. It's great as just that... A piece of pulpy schlock, but there are a couple of gripes for me: Firstly, it seems there is precisely zero detective work going on in the entire movie regarding catching this guy, which, although the movie's centre is about the effect on the people it's happening to, rather than who is doing it, the "serial killer" is essentially a tacked on plot device, and is only wrapped up conveniently at the end. Then there is the odd choice of having the serial killer be a puritanical Martial arts obsessive, which in real world situations seems a little bit whacky, and goofy... but I put this down to the attempt to make the movie appeal to the popularity of martial arts movies of the time. And finally, it's the fact that the only people who seem to be in the titular "fear" are the characters in the movie, as opposed to laying a palpable blanket of fear over an entire city,in the manner of, say: Summer of Sam, or Zodiac killers... so a bit of misnomer. But otherwise pretty groovy, with a strong performance by Tom Berenger, and plenty of scenes of a nude Melanie Griffith (See, I knew that'd get your attention! :) .... and so did the film-makers, I suspect.) 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
Magic Marmalade 20th Jan 2025		Cinema The Replacement Killers (1998)	Rated 7/10 Wow, this is a short movie! 1hr, 24mins. And after the opening scene, which seems to just drop you straight into the action from the off, it threatens to slow down to a crawl, and I wondered how it was going to pack a whole movie into the time remaining... but in the end, it does pretty good job. It's one of those that is generally not well regarded, and I think it's because of this absence of character establishment / exposition form the off, which is a little bemusing, and made me wonder for a few more minutes than I'd liked: What the hell is going on! ...But that's because it's also one of those that just drops little bits of key info and back-story as it goes, rather than swamp you with story from the outset. Basic plot: Cop kills cirme boss' son, so crime boss wants hired killer to kill cop's son... he can't so now hired killer needs to get the FO.O.D in order to escape crime boss coming after him, which he attempts to do with the help of passport forger, who then gets embroiled in the whole thing. This has more than a whiff of Leon about it, especially in the score, and reminded me a lot of the later Kiss Of The Dragon (which I like a lot)... And while this has has some truly stunning photography / cinematography, which is beautifully lit, and shot, I can see where the criticism of it over the years as being more style than substance. But given how enjoyable it is, and how short, I think this can be forgiven. A couple of other facts which may serve to both explain it, and perhaps recommend it: Produced by (among others): John Woo. Mira Sorvino does a pretty damn impressive job as not only turning out to be pretty bad ass, but fairly hard ass when she wants to be, and on the strength of this, makes me wonder why she didn't do more of this kind of thing in her career - she seems to have an untapped talent for it! It has Michael Rooker. ...........It has Danny Trejo. Legends both. 2 people found this review helpful. ✔︎ Helpful Review?
Magic Marmalade 20th Jan 2025		Cinema Jing Wu Men (Fist Of Fury) (1972)	(Also, incidentally learned something about Kung-Fu Panda from this, having watched in original language with English subtitles: Shifu means: Master...so: Master Shifu should rightly be: "master master" (a bit like Chai Tea, isn't it?)
Magic Marmalade 20th Jan 2025		Cinema Jing Wu Men (Fist Of Fury) (1972)	Rated 7/10 Wasn't sure if I'd seen this one, or one of the others... (That isn't Enter The Dragon... as I know that one by heart, having seen it over and over since I was a small weeble) ...Turns out, I'd not. But it's pretty darn good, albeit a bit shonky in places, and what with the very strong anti-Japanese theme throughout, a blacked-up Chinese actor as an Indian (with turban), and the generally broad depictions of anyone who isn't heroic, yet victimised Chinese... But hey, everyone did this kind of thing at sometime or other didn't they? >"It was a different time then!!!"< (chuckle) ...Nevertheless, although it's a pretty stock revenge movie, whereby "hero" has to and wade through stacks of minions to kick bog boss' ass, it does a great job in telling that story, and does some subtlety and nuance to the plot, in that it seems to proceed from the principle that s%&t gets out of hand very quickly when you pursue this kind of revenge thing, and in the end, nobody really wins. But let's park our brains for a moment here... It's a Bruce Lee kung-fu movie, and that's all you want it to be, and it is. Opening title cards and music very suggestive of Sergio Leone Scetti westerns, and the finale is in the pantheon of ultimate iconic kung-fu scenes, and includes the beyond iconic shot of Bruce's slow-mo mutli-exposure, hypnotising mutli-trance-arms. Only real gripe is that at least half the people in the fight scenes don't really seem to have much of a clue about kung-fu (about as much as I do!) I can only imagine what Bruce himself thought of some of them gently waving their arms about aimlessly, which is only highlighted by the other half, who clearly do know something! The problem here is that a lot of main bad guys fall into this fist category - being somewhat portly middle aged chaps which I'm fairly sure even I could take. Bruce looks like another species of human entirely in the face of these guys... which doesn't help to sell the idea that he'd have any problem whatsoever with them. There is also a great sort of James Bond theme going, where Bruce has to go to ground, and by means of disguises and such, infiltrate the bad guys, which added something to the movie. Enter The Dragon, it ain't, but certainly heading in that direction impressively. ✔︎ Helpful Review?