Caligula

Avoid Roman Charges

Caligula
Directed by Tinto Brass
Additional scenes by Bob Guccione
1979 Italy/USA
Penthouse Films

Warning: I guess this technically has spoilers.

So the first question you may ask yourself is... why am I reviewing a film like Caligula?

I have to confess, I never had much interest in seeing this particular movie, for sure. The thing is, Severin released a wonderful little boxed edition of two Caligsploitation movies a while back and, although I wasn’t that much interested in the subject matter, the way it had been packaged appealed to the graphic designer in me. A nice sturdy box with an inset Roman coin bearing Caligula’s head on one side and, on the other (once gently prized from the box), the Severin Films logo (apparently the packaging of this set was nominated for an award, at time of writing, which I’m guessing it probably won). So I wanted this but then figured, before I watched the actual exploitation films inside, perhaps I should finally get around to taking a look at the film which these were trying to bandwagon. So here we are...

Caligula is perhaps one of the top four or five most notorious movies ever made. Initially directed by the great, erotic movie director Tinto Brass, the film does not apparently represent his vision of it and he was effectively shut out from the editing process (quite literally locked out, from what I can tell) and the film was recut by Bob Guccione with new hardcore scenes inserted, fairly seamlessly it has to be said, within the re-ordered assembly of footage. Despite this, it’s not as much of a mess as you might think... just incredibly dull.

Many people have tried to distance themselves from this movie right from even before it got released. Famous writer Gore Vidal, for example, who made large contributions to the script and original screenplay, wanted his name removed (before he was given a princely sum for keeping it on there). The film stars various actors and actresses, the most notable being Malcolm McDowell as the titular roman, Peter O’ Toole as his grandfather Tiberius, Sir John Gielgud as Nerva (both he and O’Toole’s characters are dead way before the first hour is up) and Dame Helen Mirren as Caesonia, the most promiscuous woman in Rome and wife of Caligula. I think of them all, the only one who doesn’t really mind being associated with this movie is Helen Mirren (good for her). In fact, all the actors refused to loop their dialogue until the various hardcore sex scenes (and they are seriously, proper hardcore... I know because I imported the full length cut from Italy for this review*) had been excised. Guccione obliged and the actors re-recorded their lines... not realising Guccione would just reinsert the scenes back into the cut soon after.

The film follows the rise and eventual downfall of the famously mad Roman Emperor and it was a big hit in the playground when I was at school when I was 12. All the kids talked about it and described the scenes they remembered from watching illegal video pirates of the movie. I was never much interested but famous sequences such as the Roman guard being forced to drink huge amounts of wine only to have his bladder punctured by Tiberius’ sword, the lady getting a massage with freshly ejaculated semen, the various Romans buried up to their neck in sand while a slow moving platform consisting of whirling blades comes along to chop their heads off, the castration scene and copious amounts of male and female nudity etc... were all well known to me from my school days so, I think it would be safe to say there were no real surprises left for me when I finally came to watch this, rather disappointing movie, truth be told.

What I will say is that it’s not a terrible film on a technical level. In fact, it looks quite splendid. Tinto Brass knows how to design a movie and the cinematography combined with the surrealistic sets is very much like a constant dose of eye candy throughout. So, yeah, Caligula is nothing, if not a spectacular film.

And that extends to the acting too. Everyone does a fantastic job in this. McDowell is especially good as Caligula and seems to be almost channeling his Alex role from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange for this... in a ‘highly stylised, grand sense of thuggery’ kind of way although, it has to be said, this film is not nearly as ‘Monty Python’ as Kubrick’s opus, for sure. Plus, the styles of acting on display by some of the cream of the UK’s talent does, bizarrely, give this Italian/American co-production a distinctly British flavour too.

On most other levels though, the film seems to fail and, unexpectedly, also fails to be in any way erotic, despite exactly what (and who) is on show here. 

Take the music for example. Most of the movie is left unscored, even though it had two composers write two different scores for it, which were both rejected. Instead, on the opening, pre-credits scene of Caligula frolicking and fornicating in the woods with his sister, Khatchaturian’s famous Spartacus music is heard loud and, profoundly out of place, on the score (indeed, the scene itself was chopped in half and relocated here, contrary to the use Tinto Brass filmed it for). Then a credits sequence follows with a background of a mashed Caligula coin (bleeding from the eye), which obviously inspired the Severin packaging for their beautiful ‘knock offs’ box set and, as the distinguished cast are heralded, the famous balcony music from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet plays. Then, when any music is needed during the rest of the film (not that often deemed worthy of music, it would seem), the Khatchaturian music keeps swelling up in the foreground... again, completely inappropriately. I can’t help but think that if the producers had stuck with a commissioned score, the film would be a lot more watchable... or at least considerably less yawn inducing.

And that’s more or less all I have to say about Caligula other than, the movie is still quite successful and popular and I’ve no idea why. I remember, as a schoolboy, walking past the poster for the movie at my local cinema for a considerable number of weeks. Also, it was quite influential right out the gate. The comic 2000AD loved to beat upcoming movies to the punch and this one, with all its hype and publicity, was a target... so they managed to get their fantastic (and much cooler) Caligula homage out in 1978-1979, in a long multi-part Judge Dredd serial entitled The Day The Law Died, which depicted the crumbling of the hierarchy of the Hall Of Justice after mad Judge Cal rose to power (even making his pet goldfish a Judge, Judge Fish, in one issue... I believe Caligula made his horse a high up ranking Roman at one point in his reign). Another thing influenced by the movie, I suspect, is Frank Miller’s comic 300, specifically in the scenes where the mutated, freakish humans are depicted (and in the subsequent movie adaptation), which seem almost ripped from the Tinto Brass film.

So, yeah, that’s me done on Caligula. I wouldn’t recommend this to pretty much anyone. It’s not a terrible movie and there’s a lot of talent behind it... it’s just not very good and, perhaps, doesn’t even quite live up to its notoriety. A bit meh!

 *Please note, this is not the new Director's Cut which was released in cinemas yesterday (and already disowned by said director, it seems, who had nothing to do with it).

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods

Nicked Fury

Shazam! Fury Of The Gods
USA 2023 Directed by David F. Sandberg
Warner Bros
UK cinema release print

Warning: Very minor spoilers but there’s no way I’m giving away the ending or the really important cameo in this review.

Wow. This film is awesome. And if you want to take that as my final, less detailed verdict of the film so you don’t feel like you need to read to the end, please do so.

And it’s not just the awesome cameo towards the end of the movie where an amazing character restores a semblance of the status quo to things here... although that scene was so brilliant it had me crying by the finish. Nope... the whole film is a great, fun and respectful sequel to the first movie, which was a little better than this but... this being only slightly less better than absolutely brilliant is still pretty good, I reckon.

Okay, there are a few negative criticisms I have to make about this one and I’ll get those out of the way first because, yeah, they don’t even begin to make a negative dent in the movie and I can’t wait to get this thing on Blu Ray (partially because I saw this at Cineworld and I’m guessing the physical copy will be more in focus than how they projected it there).

So, okay, I was disappointed that the big dramatic beat from the first one of Mary Bromfield (still not yet revealed in this iteration as really being Mary Batson, Billy’s sister he didn’t even know he had) getting into college is sidelined to a throwaway scene explaining why she didn’t go. I thought the emotional investment in this character set up in the first film wasn’t given it’s due, to be honest.

Another negative thing was... I didn’t quite understand the physics of the big dome utilised by the villains in this one. It has certain physical properties in one scene which are completely forgotten about in a later scene but, yeah, I guess anything is possible when you’re dealing with magic.

Thirdly, but not so much of a big deal... one of the best lines in the trailers for the movie, about throwing a truck at a dragon, didn’t make final cut... which is a shame. However, the pacing of the scene in question is such that it would have slowed things down unnecessarily and been less credible so I suspect it was better out than in, in this instance.

That’s it. Those are my only negative things about the film. The rest is absolutely brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The cast from the original film, including stand up performances by Asher Angel as Billy Batson, Zachary Levi as Captain Marvel (because, two fingers up at Marvel who ‘legally acquired the name for one of their own characters... luckily, many audience members past a certain age can still remember what the name of the Worlds Mightiest Mortal is), Jack Dylan Grazer as Freddy Freeman (like the first movie, he’s basically the lead kid in this film), Grace Caroline Currey as Mary Bromfield (and Mary Marvel... again, lets call her by her real character name for the purposes of this review) and a load of other returners are all great here. And, by golly they sure fooled me in the first film because, apparently, this is Grace Caroline Currey’s first time playing her super hero alter ego. The girl they had in the first film (which I reviewed here) looked so much like her I just assumed it was the same actress playing both roles in that one so... yeah, don’t know why they bothered with someone else in the original.

And this lot are joined by some nice additions including a couple of super villains played by Dame Helen Mirren and Lucy Liu and, also, a nice turn from Rachel Zegler (in her second film, after playing Maria in Spielberg’s quite good remake of West Side Story). Plus a couple of cameos but, seriously, that one towards the end of the picture... absolutely gave me a huge rush of emotion (while simultaneously keeping me angry at James Gunn... more on that anger in a little while). One thing I did miss was the sequel set up from the post credits of the previous movie but... the final post credits scenes here (there are two of them) is very much a sequel to the post credits of the first. So, yeah, if the direction of DC hadn’t suddenly changed then that talking earth worm ‘Mr. Mind and the Society Of Evil’ adaptation story may well have been coming along at some point.

I’m not covering the plot here but the film is full of great little references both to other comic book characters (including little digs at rival company Marvel) and also some great pop culture references in general. Such as the ‘pediatrician’ scene from the trailer... I’d already spotted the haunted doll from The Conjuring movies in the shot in the previews but I’m happy to say Annabelle remains in the finished movie here. And a nice moment where a guy on the street calls the main character Captain Marvel... and he’s not only played by Michael Gray, who used to play Billy Batson in the Shazam TV series in the 1970s but he’s even wearing the same t-shirt costume he wore in it. And, wow, I love the symmetry of having a character originally co-created for Fawcett Comics (before DC bought the rights years later) by C. C. Beck, get a score by composer Christophe Beck. I mean, I doubt they’re related but, even so.

Oh... and I’m not even going to say anything about the wonderful Unicorns or the fact that the makers of Skittles must have paid a fair amount of money for their quite prominent plot point of a product placement... but I don’t care because, even if it will date the movie some years from now, it was just delightfully done.

And, well, it’s such a good movie with a brilliant, post bad gal defeat denouement scene that, in light of the first of the post-credits scenes here, you just have to hate James Gunn’s new DCU ending policy even more. After Blue Beetle, The Flash and the second Aquaman movie have played out in cinemas later this year, the decision has been made to pull the plug on the current movie DC universe with even their most highly anticipated movie originally on the slate, Wonder Woman 3, completely cancelled. So no more Henry Cavill as Superman (as set up at the end of Black Adam) and no more Justice Society (not to mention the Justice League). The whole thing sucks but these movies are teasing and building towards a series of event movies that will now, unless DC does an about turn sometime very soon, won’t happen. So yeah, while I’d like to see another Wonder Woman and a Justice League/Justice Society team up movie where they take on Black Adam before becoming his ally to ward off some greater evil... it doesn’t look like it’s going to happen now. Which is a huge pity, especially after DC have finally seemed to have been gaining traction after their earlier cinematic efforts didn’t quite get things right, it all seems to have been scuppered... unnecessarily, it seems to me.

But don’t let that sourness put you off going to see what is probably the best superhero movie that’s going to be in cinemas this year. I suspect Shazam! Fury Of The Gods might well make my top ten movies of 2023, by the end of it... time will tell, I guess.

2010 - Odyssey Two

 
To HAL And Back

2010 - Odyssey Two
(aka 2010 - The Year We Make Contact)
USA 1984 Directed by Peter Hyams
MGM  Blu Ray Zone B

2010 - Odyssey Two is the movie adaptation based on Arthur C. Clarke’s novel of the same name... being a sequel to both the first full length novel (originally a short story) and, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s amazing masterpiece of the cinema, 2001 - A Space Odyssey (reviewed by me here). I remember seeing this when it finally came to the UK in cinemas in 1985 and, even though it’s very different in atmosphere to Kubrick’s milestone, I remember enjoying it a lot.

This one follows character Dr. Heywood Floyd who, with two other American specialists... Dr. Chandra (played here by Bob Balaban) who invented the HAL 9000 computer (voiced again by Douglas Rain) and Dr. Walter Curnow (played by John Lithgow)... accompanies a Russian expedition to the original Discovery, still stranded in orbit above Jupiter by the monolith but with that orbit decaying, which kind of forces the collaboration between the USA and USSR. So the film has a couple of objectives... find out why the HAL 9000 computer malfunctioned and killed all those people; find out what the heck happened to David Bowman (played once again here by Kier Dullea); find out what is going on with the monolith... all the while keeping up good relations with the Russians (led by a young Helen Mirren) who are particularly icy due to the downward spiral with relations between their two respective governments back on Earth.

Floyd is played here by Roy Scheider, who was played by William Sylvester in the original movie and I’m not sure why Sylvester didn’t reprise his role here. Perhaps because of the 16 year time difference between the first film and the sequel but, even so, Roy Scheider is actually 10 years younger than Sylvester in real life... playing a version of Floyd who is obviously supposed to be ten years older than the character as depicted in Kubrick’s odyssey. However, the casting was certainly a good choice because Scheider does wonders with the role, managing to deliver an electrifying performance where not a lot of physical action is required... just talk.

The director makes great use of a variety of shots to give us some great staging and although there is some camera movement, I noticed very early on that the film is primarily made from cutting around static shots but Hyams still manages to get a lot of movement out of it... from scenes which might be very boringly handled by other directors. The beautifully shot opening sequence, for example, where a Russian scientist goes to tell Floyd about the decaying orbit of the Discovery and proposing a joint venture is absolutely electrifying as presented here, when it really is just a bit of, admittedly well written, dialogue between two men talking science and politics.

Similarly, when there are more visually dynamic scenes in the movie such as a spacewalk, Hyams concentrates on the way the characters interact by showing the nervous American being helped through the spacewalk by the Russian, which is followed by a scene where the Russian panics onboard the Discovery. So the approach is reversed by having something visually more interesting pulled back to an emotional sequence of character interactions, which also helps build up a quick relationship with this particular Russian so that, later on in the story, when this Russian character is ‘lost’, it means more to the audience. Again, when the whole set is shaking as the crew of the Russian craft are attempting a possibly perilous way of getting to their destination, Hyams makes it about characters again as one of the young female Russians gets into Scheider’s bed/cabin area with him out of fear... again concentrating on emotion in what is, like the movie before it, a film about a very sterile set of events.

Added to this, the film has some very nice, almost casually introduced shot set ups which, like that opening sequence of the conversation, add the interest to the story where it isn’t necessarily in the main text. For instance, a meeting scene around a table in one shot has one guy with his back to us in silhouette making up a big, vertically blocked area in the centre of the screen with the opposite side of the table on either side of him... Floyd on the left of screen and two Russians on the right... which also serves as a way to keep the ‘them vs us’ international divide as a constant reminder in a visual fashion, to help maintain the underlying sense of tension within the narrative.

Actually, the idea of using static shots works a treat with one of the film’s less scientifically grounded scenes. There’s a wonderful moment where HAL9000 is delivering a message to Floyd and after a while, when HAL is unable to identify the other person relaying the messages, Floyd is asked by HAL to turn his head and look behind him. It’s a great moment as he sees Kier Dullea as David Bowman manifested before him. He follows him to the pod bay room and has a conversation with him but, as he talks to him, Bowman shifts through multiple appearances taken from his final scenes in 2001 - A Space Odyssey. All the transformations are revealed, however, via Scheider’s face reacting to something off screen and then we have a static cut back to Bowman where he’s changed appearance again. If this had been simply tracked with a camera and some computer effects work (which weren’t really available at that scale when this movie was made anyway), then it would have looked incredibly unconvincing. Here, because Hyams has been using a lot of cuts from one shot to another rather than move the camera around, he manages to sell the transformations of this sequence with the aid of the lead actor’s reactions. Well... mostly. There’s a corny bit where ‘the star child’ from the end of the first movie is manifested and... that moment has dated a bit, I think and just seems a little over the top now. But it worked at the time and it’s kinda charming now when you look back on it.

Also, the musical score is quite sparse... and also quite rare still, from what I remember. I have an old Japanese import CD of the score which I bought back in the 1980s that had somehow made its way into Tower Records but I don’t think it’s ever been properly commercially released in either the US or the UK. The score is basically a synth score by David Shire and, it’s used very sparsely and it’s not bad but I think this was ultimately the wrong kind of scoring to have for this film (the first score by another composer had already been rejected). So it’s kind of good that it’s not used that often.

The film opens with a recap following David Bowman’s final transmitted words... “My God... it’s full of stars.” which is a static reminder of the events of 2001 and this is scored with Ligeti music which, as far as I’m concerned, makes any visual accompaniment sound interesting. After this, there is no music until a good ten or more minutes into the film, as David Shire’s score kicks in when Floyd tells his wife that he’s going up into space for a few years. After that, as I say, it’s very sparsely spotted with occasional hits of Shire’s score plus one more (I think) very brief use of Ligeti and a quick nod to the famous Thus Spake Zarathustra in the film’s closing scenes.

I remember loving the ending of this when it was released but looking back on it now, although it’s still a great, if different, kind of film to 2001, I think the ending of this could now maybe have used a little more gravitas and less ‘wonder’ in its end game. It does feel a bit anticlimactic to me now but, then again, I’m much more older and jaded by these things than I used to be so... yeah, that might not be true for a vast majority of the audience.

Asides from the odd ‘things of note’ then, there’s not much more I have to add to this one. Those things to note, though, would be the appearance of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick as illustrations on an issue of time magazine a nurse is holding, Clarke’s cameo as ‘man on bench’ in front of the White House and, just maybe, the interesting fact that Kubrick destroyed all the models and blueprints of the spaceships from the first film to stop anyone ever being tempted to make a sequel (I think, ultimately, I’m with him in terms of not making a sequel but not in destroying models) and so the Discovery had to be rebuilt from looking at the original movie... which must have been a pain.

At the end of the day, if you liked the first movie and don’t mind the less clinical atmosphere of the sequel, 2010 - Odyssey Two is probably something you might quite like and, while in no way comparable to Kubrick’s masterpiece, it’s actually quite a good movie which holds the interest of the subject matter in a very different way to the previous one. Definitely one I will revisit again some day. If you, like me, live in the UK, you won’t be able to get a Blu Ray of this from the likes of Amazon. If you want one, go to either Fopp or HMV where the Blu Ray can be purchased as an HMV chain exclusive. Like a few other films which should be made more widely available in this country.

Anna

Model Behaviour

Anna
France/USA 2019
Directed by Luc Besson
UK cinema release print

Anna is a new action picture written and directed by Luc Besson. Someone who I used to trust a fair amount to get stuff like this mostly right although I have, it has to be said, been disappointed by a lot of his output of recent years.

I remember seeing his film Nikita with my best friend (no longer with me, alas) at the once great Lumiere cinema (also no longer with us) back in 1990. I think we went back more or less every week it was playing there to have another look at it. I saw it five times on their massive screen, if memory serves. The trailer for Anna looked very much like it was a differently dressed up revisiting of the themes and style of action of Nikita and, now I’ve got a look at it in my local, it has to be said, that’s exactly what it is... more or less.

It also has a lot less of an edge to it, it seems to me, than not only the glowingly brilliant original film but also of many of the retreads of the same material, some self-admittedly remakes and some not, by other director and writing teams. Films like The Villainess (reviewed here) have a lot more going for them than this. I don’t know why but the action sequences in this are just... okay... and the pauses between them seem a little less interesting than they could be. Films like Atomic Blonde and the John Wick series, for example, have a lot more kinetic brutality to their set sequences and, although Besson almost invented this hyper-stylised action world himself... by way of influence on other film-makers at the very least... you get the feeling that the action in this could be a lot more in your face than what we have here.

Besson has tried to compensate, somewhat, for the clichés inherent in this tale of a government created assassin in the way he’s given her a background incorporating a love of Matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, which in turn defines the narrative structure of the piece (which almost lost me at the start because one of the timeline placements didn’t quite make sense to me as I was trying to do the maths in my brain). So what he does is he will have a sequence with what I am assuming is supposed to be a surprising ending, followed by a flashback from some years earlier which shows you how you got to that point in the narrative. And he keeps doing this all the way through and, although it’s a clever way of presenting the story, it does get quite old rather quickly and, much worse, tips you off before any real surprises or revelations about the state or allegiances of various characters are revealed. There’s a bit near the end, for example, when I couldn’t believe that Besson was being arrogant enough to try and fool his audience with the death of one of the characters when it was obvious it was going to be revealed as a staged moment a little later on in the narrative. I did feel quite insulted, in a way, that the director would think people would fall for this stuff.

Okay, so there are some nice things in this film too and a big plus is the strength of the performances. Sasha Luss is brilliant in the title role and she is doing very well holding her own against such strong actors as Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy and Luke Evans. Actually, this really is a good role for Murphy and I’m convinced, by the way he plays this one here, that he would be an absolutely perfect fit for the straw haired Felix Leiter of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels, next time they need to change the current actor portraying him in the movies. There’s also a wonderful performance by first time actress Lera Abova as one of Anna’s many lovers but, alas, as wonderful as she is in this movie, the character is somewhat poorly treated throughout and definitely underused, it has to be said. An epilogue to the main narrative giving us some closure about her would have helped, I think.

The other good thing here is the return of Eric Serra as the composer of the film’s score. This is a nicely appropriate piece of scoring with the exact same kind of soundscape you would expect from him... which is handy if you’re doing a ‘less than honest’ remake of Nikita, I guess. I hope this score gets a proper CD release at some point rather than just a stupidly flattened out electronic download affair as I really want to hear this one away from the visuals. This composer certainly hasn’t lost his touch over the decades, that’s for sure.

Ultimately, Anna is a fairly fun time at the pictures but it's hampered by a clever but somewhat impractical structure which, I suspect, dictated how some of the dramatic beats were allowed to fall and sacrificed a possibly more fulfilling experience in the pursuit of its own narrative experiment. It’s still, however, a very competent, polished piece of action cinema but I can’t help but be reminded of one of the earliest and most commonly found pieces of negative criticism of Luc Besson’s work back in the 1980s and 90s when his masterpieces such as Subway, The Big Blue and Nikita were first doing the rounds. It was said that he was a champion of ‘style over substance’ in his movies and, although none of us teenage kids saw this as a problem at the time... and in hindsight I’d still reject that proposition of a summation of his early works... I would say that his recent films such as the terrible Lucy (reviewed here), the so so Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (reviewed here) and this one are seeming to me more like films that totally justify that criticism but, in the worst way. Style over substance can be fine in my book but it needs to show us something either very beautiful or very different to make an impression in these media heavy, visually saturated times and, although Anna feels like it’s almost getting there, it wouldn’t be one I’d recommend to fans of Besson’s earlier works, I’m sad to say.

Winchester

Hell On Mirren

Winchester
2018 Australia/USA
Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig
UK cinema release print.

Winchester is a new film based on the unusual, perpetually built and rebuilt house constructed by Sarah Winchester, the widow of the man behind the Winchester rifle. It is best known as one of the most haunted houses ever... at least that’s the modern myth surrounding the ‘Winchester Mystery House’, as it’s more popularly known... and that might explain why it has been the subject of many different art forms over the years including other films, books, comics, TV shows and video games.

Indeed, the last movie I saw based on this particular urban myth (if you prefer to see it as such) was the utterly dreadful beyond belief (sliding into incompetency, I thought) The Haunting Of Winchester House... which I reviewed here. I can, quite honestly, say that this current cinema release is a way more positive viewing experience than what that previous film turned out to be.

Winchester stars Helen Mirren as Sarah Winchester, Sarah Snook and Jason Clarke as the central protagonist Dr. Eric Price. Dr. Price is a psychiatrist who is hired by the Winchester company to stay in the house with the remaining family for a period, carry out an observation and declare Sarah Winchester ‘unfit’ to remain in power there. However, as the film runs it’s course and we find out just who has cherry picked him for this job and, more importantly... why, then the real agenda behind the job offer becomes clearer.

Dr. Price takes the job as he is heavily in debt... when we first see him he is entertaining three escorts at his large house while they are all tripped out on Laudanum... and the job will pay double what he owes to various establishments. We also learn, through the course of the film that he is carrying on like this to try and get over the violent death of his wife and, although he doesn’t know it yet, he will certainly find some kind of solution at the famous, constantly shifting mansion.

I have to say that this film surprised me in that it was quite effective. The reason that surprised me was because the plot of the film is completely cliché ridden and the dialogue is so awful that you certainly need actors of the kind of calibre of Mirren, Clarke and Snook to help give it some kind of life and make it all sound credible for the few moments when said dialogue hangs in the air out of their mouths. However, the film is so well directed and so great at the timing of the scares that it turns out the execution completely saves this movie and is very entertaining/terrifying in certain places.

One of those clichés, of course, is to throw in the good doctor’s fondness for abusing his little bottle of Laudanum as it’s so obviously a trick to allow the character to play along with the scares in the early stages of the film without feeling the need to affect any change in his circumstances. That is to say, the man is subject to all kinds of terrifying happenings but, because he knows his perceptions of things must be somewhat changed by his poison of choice (literally poison), then he is able to pass of the various supernatural attacks as just hallucinations brought on by his drug habit and thus allow the audience more ‘horror movie foreplay’ before he realises something  a little bit ‘out there’ is going on.

Now, I saw through all this charade at audience manipulation as the cliché it was, right when I first spied the Laudanum bottle but, I have to say, that you can’t really criticize the cast and crew for falling back on this kind of writing crutch, to be honest, as the scares come thick and fast at you. Indeed, the first big jump scare, which involves a shifting mirror and which deliberately makes you complacent in the expectation of such a moment before coming out of left field where your mind was not focused... really got to the audience, I can tell you (and to me too, I’m happy to say).

So, yeah, the film does all the expected stuff you would expect from this kind of movie... the dark shadows, the POV camera work as the ghostly spirits observe the living, the locked doors and the various large furniture placed in front of the protagonists field of vision... it’s all here and it’s all quite shamelessly trotted out but... it’s also to be admired in the context of this movie, I think. It does prove to be rather effective and the directors, actors and editor all prove to be consummate professionals in their work.

The (sadly unavailable on CD at time of writing) score by Peter Spierig is also pretty much 'on the mark'. Yes, it's the usual, slow moving with added atonalism moments you might expect but, again, like the composer’s skill at directing this movie, it’s all very appropriate and effective to the job in hand.

And there’s not much more I can tell you about this one, I think. Winchester is a first class shocker and very much an old style B-movie with an A-movie cast list. If you like horror movies then you’ll probably want to check this one out. Yes, you’ve seen it all before but, rarely I suspect, have you seen it handled just so well. Certainly the best of the art pieces I’ve seen covering this phenomenon and a real treat for genre fans. Not one to miss.

Eye In The Sky

Bird’s Eye View To A Kill

Eye In The Sky
2016 UK Directed by Gavin Hood
UK cinema release print.

Okay then... as I said on Twitter the other day, Eye In The Sky is not to be confused with the famous Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. This production is nothing to do with that. There seems to be so many movies made these days which have exactly the same title as a previously made film or a novel that I wonder why the distributors don’t realise that a lot of the people, on hearing about their product, just assume it’s either a remake or an adaptation of something that has come before.

That being said, I’m glad I mentioned PKD briefly because, as I was watching this movie, I realised that if this had been made even 30 years ago, that it would have been a science fiction story. And by that I mean, it explores themes which, if it had been written a few decades ago, would have been dipping into exactly the same issues of morality and sacrifice in a totally invented setting, which could have been fairly similar to the real life situations being dramatised right here and now in this movie as a reflection of our times.



If an old sci-fi writer of the 1950s had wished to explore the moral dilemma of the one life cut short to prevent the loss of many more, he might well have invented this exact kind of scenario to be able to expand the exploration of that issue to something which he wouldn’t have been able to arrive at in a conventional narrative form at that point in time. The fact that we are now living in an era where we can snoop and kill from a distance, with just the press of a button, means we are able to explore exactly the same themes in much the same way... that is to say, quite intently.... without having to create a whole new fictional world for the characters to live in and ask their questions. Which is kinda scary, actually, if you think about it.

The film is mostly set in rooms with groups of people watching the outside action, some of which we are also pulled into, on multiple screens. Helen Mirren stars as Colonel Katherine Powell, who is leading a surveillance and capture operation via military drone, to detain a specific terrorist. However, as the ground zero of the operation shifts and it becomes apparent that two terrorists will soon be leaving a house wearing armed suicide bomb jackets, she needs the clearance to order an airstrike before the terrorists leave the dwelling and kill many innocent people. However, the person on the end of a phone actually firing the drone doesn’t want to kill an innocent young girl selling bread outside by the target. So the film becomes about the ever increasing tension as Mirren has to liaise with her superior Lieutenant General Frank Benson, played in his last film role by the late, great Alan Rickman, and he has to then liaise with his superiors... with each set of people ascending in rank looking to pass the buck up to the next person in charge, leading up to the Prime Minister, because nobody can make a decision to injure and possibly kill the little girl.... among other issues in the complex, shades of grey moral dilemma which the film depicts.

Everyone is good in this. Mirren and Rickman are superb, obviously, but pretty much everyone in this movie is stand up and they keep the atmosphere quite compelling throughout the running time. There are some especially taut scenes with one of the two electronic surveillance people who uses fake birds and flying, ersatz insects as camera eyes... something which the aforementioned Philip K. Dick might certainly have used himself in this kind of scenario... only to him it would still have been speculative science fiction. Anyway, the sequence where the agent in question tries to buy all of the bread to get the little girl out of the area before the air strike happens is quite fraught and suspenseful in its own right and it’s really, almost unbearable to watch some of the sequences with the amount of suspense the writers are pouring on here. Great stuff.

The film takes place mostly in just four or five rooms and also the streets outside the target area... with parts of the interior of the target being relayed via a flying surveillance bug at certain key points in the movie. Therefore, I would have to say that, while it’s not the most cinematic of movies in terms of the way the visual content adds to the understanding of the situation, it would certainly make an excellent stage show, I reckon. All you would need is the pre-recorded video footage... I understand the movie takes place in real time... and the interior sets compartmentalised and lit up when required for the various sets of dialogue. Somebody really should have a go at this sometime.

Nevertheless, whether it’s a stage play or not, the adaptability of it as such and the secondary nature of the visuals doesn’t take away from the fact that this is still good cinema, fraught with tension, which will have you hanging on the edge of your seat. And I’m happy to say that the score by Paul Hepker and Mark Kilian, mixing cold and sinister electronic music with occasional ethnic undertones, is doing an absolutely brilliant job throughout the movie. It’s not something I expected to either like or to be so outstanding but it fits the film like a glove, supporting and enhancing the emotions, sometimes informing them, in every way you would hope. I’m looking forward to the CD release in May so I can have a better listen to it away from the movie, I can tell you.

But whether you like the score or not, Eye In The Sky is a movie which points the audience to a moral dilemma and doesn’t glibly try to solve the issue in a simple manner. Each set of actions has their own repercussions as the drama unfolds and the film doesn’t spoon feed you the answers to those problems... mainly because there really aren't any clear cut solutions if you let emotions get in the way. That’s not to say that the film cops out at the end... this one has a very definite finishing point and it won’t leave you hanging. That being said, it won’t go out of its way to make much of a judgement either... these are big issues and the movie is not silly enough to take sides too easily. The point of the drama, I believe, is to make you think about these issues of collateral damage and take the questions home with you. It’s not an easy issue to resolve and it doesn’t want to try. However, what this film may do, if enough people see it, is remind us that these issues exist in real life and maybe help us reflect on how the hell humanity got into this kind of mess in the first place. Not exactly a feel good movie, to be sure, but one which has a certain resonance and I can only recommend this one as something which will certainly keep your brain occupied. Don’t miss out on this one... it’s pretty great.

RED 2

Mirren Image

RED 2
2013 USA/France/Canada
Directed by Dean Parisot
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Yeah, there’ll be some slightly retired 
spoilers resurfacing here and coming up for action.

The original RED from two years ago is one of those movies that, at the time, pretty much charmed the pants off of everyone with it’s mixture of bullet spitting mayhem and senior citizens kicking all the fine young assassins’ and agents’ collective backsides all over the place. It’s the kind of film that begs a sequel but, since the movie really hit the mark and did mostly everything right, it's not necessarily something you want them to really produce, just in case they manage to screw it up the second time around.

Well, I’m here to tell you now... they didn’t screw it up.

In case you didn’t know, the acronym R.E.D stands for “Retired Extremely Dangerous” and it tells the story of a bunch of ex-government killing machines who are trying to enjoy their retirement (for the most part) but who find themselves accidentally embroiled in extremely sensitive, extremely dangerous missions... with the young “civilian” girlfriend of the character played by Bruce Willis tagging along and having a blast in the process. It’s based on a DC comic written by Warren Ellis, one of the better writers in the field, and this gives the first film, at least, a real sense of strong story mixed in with the action and the comedy.

I don’t know if RED 2 is actually based on any of the comics but, I have to say, that the second movie continues to add a lot of fun and, more importantly, heart warming moments in between the various fast-paced and, quite spectacular (if ludicrous in some cases... do people really just walk away from a helicopter crash?) action sequences and, I’m happy to say that most of the characters are back from the first film. Notable exceptions are Morgan Freeman (and if you’ve seen the first movie you’ll know why), Karl Urban (who was brilliant in the first one as the “bad guy’s killer pawn redeems himself” character) and, sadly, Ernest Borgnine. Now Ernest Borgnine is a real shame because I know he loved appearing in his brief role in the first movie and I remember reading an interview with him around the time of the first film’s release a couple of years ago where he said he really wanted to do another one and have a bigger part in it. Well, apparently, a slightly more prominent part was written for him for a scene in this second one but, alas, he died a few weeks before he came to shoot it. Which is a great pity... I’m sure he would have had a blast.

However, most the main actors from the first movie are all back. So the line up for this one is Bruce Willis, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox. Also along for the ride this time around are Catherine Zeta Jones, Anthony Hopkins (yeah, that’s right... this movie has two actors who have played Hannibal Lektor in it), David Thewlis (who is a sadly neglected genius of an actor) and Byung-hun Lee (who I’ve seen in a fair few Asian films over the last few years).

And guess what? It’s a cliché perhaps but, with a cast this good, it’s going to be hard to fail with this kind of ensemble unless the writing is really bad... and the writing is really quite good, for the most part, so you’re in good hands. Oh, okay, yeah... it has some cheap sci-fi inventions made up just to annhilate certain plot weaknesses (hello, I’m looking at you “red mercury”) but what film doesn’t these days. And it doesn’t matter too much because this film is one where, yes the action sequences are typical modern Hollywood spectacle... but the plot and dialogue which glue these little set pieces together are just as inspired and fun to watch and it feels like an appropriate mix, for the most part.

There’s a kind of twist which, I suspect, most people will see coming (even from the trailer and casting if they think things through) but it doesn’t really matter because, as well as being about a team of not-so-past-it wrinklies kicking ass, it’s also got the brilliant chemistry between Willis, Parker and Malkovich which helped make the first film such a blast. And of course, everyone is getting in on the act of advising Willis on his love life and how to not be so controlling with his girlfriend etc... it’s really humorous stuff. Oh and, yeah, it has the big thing which made the first movie such compulsive viewing...

Helen Mirren firing off machine guns.

All kinds of guns and weapons of lethal destruction, in fact, in what amounts to a slight expansion of her role and importance in the film compared to the first, I think. Which means, of course, you have a few moments where the relationship between Mirren and Brian Cox is, well, hilarious (He likes the way her toes curl up just before she pulls the trigger when she’s on sniper duty, it would seem). Unfortunately, my one criticism of the first movie (as reviewed here), still stands in this one. We want to see a “naked” Helen Mirren shooting off her machine guns... oh well... maybe they’ll do that for the third one which, I understand, has just been assigned writers.

The film does try to repeat, somewhat, the formula of the first film, it’s true... there’s even a “character realises he’s wrong and decides to help the team instead of killing them” moment again from one of the ensemble cast... you’ll probably see that one coming way before it happens too, I suspect. But it really doesn’t matter too much because the formula of the first movie was just perfect and this one really doesn’t drop the ball with it either.

It’s one up on a few fair modern action films too, in that the editing is pretty good and you won’t suddenly find yourself getting lost in the action like you might have in... um... I dunno... Pacific Rim maybe (reviewed here), as an example. This is good and the action and humour/drama of the thing is ably supported with a strong score by Alan Silvestri, who I find a bit hit an miss but he does a terrific job here. It also continues the inventive “comic book” location transitions from the first movie... and this movie does a lot of globe hopping I can tell you. Sometimes back to the same countries (which makes shooting these things out of sequence a good way to save money and add value by changing locales at frequent intervals) but that’s okay... it all serves the story and these transitions are funky.

And that’s my short review of RED 2 done, I believe. If you liked the first one and want to see a sequel which, remarkably, wont sour the sweet taste of the original (as so many of them can) then go see this movie. And if you haven’t seen the first one... well, having the background of the first one is better but you can pretty much gather the relationships between the characters as it goes along... and besides, it has Helen Mirren causing mass destruction... so go see it anyway!

Dawn of the Red

Red 2010 US

Directed by Robert Schwentke

Playing at all good cinemas now!

When I went to see this movie called Red at the weekend I was fully expecting it to be a bit of a roller-coaster, at least in terms of it’s pacing, but I was also kinda expecting to be disappointed by it. It seems to be a universally well liked film and my response to those kind of “event movies” rarely cross-pollinate well with the opinions of the larger audience. I have to say, I was pleasantly proved wrong on my latter assumptions... but then Red has a secret weapon up it’s sleeve which I wasn’t aware of.

Things I knew about Red before I went:

1. It has a bunch of great actors - Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Brian Cox and Ernest Borgnine - and they are all playing their own age. This is about a bunch of retired hit-men/CIA agents.

2. It has a terrible poster and a terrible title.

3. It has Helen Mirren firing off a big machine gun.

Now quite frankly, the last item in that list kinda sold it to me. In fact the only way that this film could have appealed to me anymore than with that last proposition would have been if that last point had read... It has a naked Helen Mirren firing off a machine gun. Sadly, however, Helen keeps her kit on in this one but even so, this last thing is what got me into the cinema... that and the fact that I also like Bruce, Morgan, John, Brian and Ernest as actors.

What I didn’t know, however, was that this movie had a secret weapon of extra appeal and it’s a double whammy. Point 1... it’s based on a comic book. Point 2... it’s based on a comic book that was originally written by Warren Ellis. Now this second point is important because Warren Ellis was responsible for writing one of the best comics I’ve ever read... not the best, but certainly in the top 10 of all time great comic literature. It was a comic which ran for about 60 issues called Transmetropolitan and if you ever get the chance to check it out you should maybe peruse the pages of this because his slick, clever dialogue coupled with an absolutely amazing and innovative future world is pure artistry. And great art is good so go have a look. As it turns out, the wit of his words doesn’t quite translate as well as it might (is my guess not having read the comic on which this is based) but with a sound template to base your screenplay on... some of it has got to rub off on the writers, surely?

But, back to what should be my main point here... I think just recently, in the last ten years or so, Hollywood has really begun to wake up to the truly rich seam that comic books can offer them as basis for on-screen adventures. The comic book movie has been around since, pretty much, the dawn of film, but it’s only recently that US filmmakers have really given it a proper workout. I’ve been arguing for years now that comics have been so much more subtle and much more willing to push boundaries than movies and it’s not hard to see why (and if you’ve not read a comic book in the last 30 years, do yourself a favour and go and seek out something like Alan Moore’s truly sublime The Ballad of Halo Jones and find out how much of a brilliant literary experience you’ve been missing out on all these years). Comic books don’t have a budget of millions to lose, they are worked on by far less people and the good ones are usually creator led (as far as I can tell) and so these people can afford to take a few risks and push the envelope and talk about and explore subjects and taboos that movies will just shy away from as being suicidally uncommercial.

And even in action titles like Red they can be a good basis for narrative. These things are presented in a visual manner already, after all. Lot’s of mini “frames” of composition which are there to grab your attention. They an translate very well into movie frames (see Sin City, Watchmen, 300 etc). And the thing about comics is that they know action is not always about action. It’s about the build up and come down from the action. It’s not about the moment of the strike - you would not want to read a comic of endless consecutive panels of people firing machine guns endlessly (even if they are Helen Mirren naked) without being peppered with interesting characterisations and situations. And I think that’s what Hollywood is just beginning to pick up from “action” comics (and it’s something that Masters of Cinema like Kurosawa have known from their directorial birth - check out Yojimbo and others of that ilk... it’s all about what comes before and after the moment - not the bloody act of violence itself). It gives them an interesting framework and because the format of comics make them narrative heavy, that’s beginning (I think) to be taken up as an inspiration by the American film-makers whose films make up such a large percentage of the fodder dumped into our multiplexes.

Red has this awareness in spades and the location changes even echo a comic book sensibility - they are somewhat reminiscent of the spirit of the scene wipes in old TV shows like Batman and The Man From UNCLE and they fit in well with the fast pacing of the picture and the general sense of fun which comes across from the actors. And kudos to the few young people in it... Mary Louise Parker is just fantastic and as for Karl Urban (the new Doctor McCoy and Judge Dredd)... he’s just awesome and I’m really going to have to keep an eye on this guy.

Fast paced, funny and as slick a Hollywood action fest as you’re likely to see, Red is a lot of fun and though at least one issue covered is really quite terrible, the deftness with which it is handled is enough to distract you from it long enough that you won’t worry about it until the movie has ended.

If you like action and dialogue heavy humour, take a look at Red.

It’s got a fully clothed Helen Mirren shooting off all kinds of automatic weaponry!