Ronin

Masterless Masterclass

Ronin
USA/UK 1998 
Directed by John Frankenheimer 
United Artists Blu Ray Zone B

I haven’t revisited Ronin for years and so it was time for a Blu Ray upgrade of one of my all time favourite Frankenheimer films. John Frankenheimer will always be best remembered for some of the classic Hollywood films such as Seconds, Grand Prix and French Connection II but this one, made just four years before he died, is the one which I think is his most clever and compelling watch. 

The title of the film is a metaphor for a bunch of ex-secret service/military individuals who are brought together by Natascha McElhone’s Diedre... who you assume is working for the IRA, to steal (with deadly force) a case containing something which you never find out. Yeah, that’s right, the case is a classic Hitchcockian McGuffin and is unimportant in itself, other than it completely drives the action of the movie relentlessly forward. So, the team she puts in place is almost iconic... we have Robert DeNiro, Jean Reno, Sean Bean, Stellan Skarsgård and Skipp Sudduth. And they, almost, could all be the Ronin of the title... a term which, in ancient Japan, meant a masterless samurai who would often pick up jobs from various sources... apart from one character but, to reveal who that character is would be a spoiler. You don’t find out until the end anyway. 

And there is action, betrayal, unexpected deaths and one of, to my mind, the best car chases in cinema history (the second one of the two in this film). It moves along at a fair lick with the first half an hour setting up the characters and revealing all you need to know about them, as they plan their method of attack and then, of course, we have ‘the heist gone wrong’ trope which leads to all the shenanigans of the rest of the movie. That’s all I’m saying about the plot. 

The film is up there with The Quiller Memorandum almost (reviewed here), in terms of how clever the various characters are written and, I reckon a lot of that must be due to the uncredited script doctoring by David Mamet. So highlights in that regard would be the opening, where DeNiro hides a gun behind a cafe he is supposed to be meeting up in and then, making a point of going to the toilet so he can ensure the back door is open so he can get out if the going gets tough. By the way, that scene switches from the streets of France to a studio replica of the same cafe by use of a travelling matte shot which is, I think, impossible to spot unless you know it’s there (the old DVD version of this had a commentary track by Frankenheimer, revealing things like this). 

Other things of interest are DeNiro’s use of a cup of coffee to first deliberately spill to test the reflexes of Skarsgård’s character and, later, to ‘ambush’ Sean Bean’s character to prove a point to the people he’s working for. And there’s one scene where DeNiro is talking to an old colleague where they are using coded dialogue, pretending to be strangers, so DeNiro can get some information. It’s not until the end of the movie until you realise that the conversation was also deliberately ‘loose’ to an extent and serving as a kind of ‘double blind’ should any of his new colleagues be listening. 

Another interesting thing is that the film has three James Bond villains in it but, bizarrely, they never appear in any scene together. So we have Sean Bean who was the villain in Goldeneye (reviewed here), Jonathan Pryce who was the bad guy in Tomorrow Never Dies (reviewed here) and, in a wonderful scene following on from a really well done bullet removal sequence, Michael Lonsdale, who played the villain in Moonraker (reviewed here). Lonsdale has an especially important scene with DeNiro as he is working on a model of a scene from the famous story of The 47 Ronin, explaining things to DeNiro and pushing certain metaphors home. 

This is still one of the great ‘caper’ action movies by my book and I would love to see this in a cinema again because I remember it looked great on a big screen. And especially for how it sounds... the car chases are noisy and everything is really spot on and intense during certain scenes. Also... and I don’t see this in a lot of films, to be honest... there are a lot of civilians being killed or injured during the various shoot outs and car chases on the streets of whatever country the central characters happen to be in at the time. Not to mention the spectacular ice dance death fall of world champion ice skater Katarina Witt, as the inadvertent girlfriend of one of the bad guys of the movie. 

All this and a knock out score by Elia Cmiral which really serves the film well and is also a great listen as a stand alone CD. Honestly, I can’t say enough good things about Ronin and, I’m surprised there aren’t a load of books written about this particular movie. I also wonder, since their chemistry is just so good in this, why DeNiro and Reno were not put in any more movies together... they both knock it out of the park here and play off each other really well. Definitely add this one to your hit list if you’ve never seen this marvellous gem before. 

Successive Slidings Of Pleasure

Tether Report

Successive Slidings Of Pleasure
France 1974 Directed by  Alain Robbe-Grillet
BFI DVD Region 2

I’ve already reviewed two films by Alain Robbe-Grillet on this site... Eden And After (here) and Gradiva (here). He also wrote the wonderful movie Last Year In Marienbad but that one didn’t highlight his themes of sexual fetish as much as those two above, at least not as overtly as he does in films like this one.

I do find the films he directs himself a bit wearing on the brain and hard going at times, in spite of his content and this one is similarly hard to penetrate. It’s interesting to note, actually that he’s considered one of the French New Wave these days (as opposed to when I used to read about him) because the tactics he uses in this film to make the viewer aware all the time that he is watching a man made piece of art as opposed to something which one should immerse oneself in absolutely fits in with the aesthetic of the man who I think of as being the absolute father figure of the Nouvelle Vague, Jean-Luc Godard. Indeed, the very few pieces of Michel Fano’s score in the movie are mostly used to heighten the viewers awareness in contrast to the images and reminded me of the use of music in Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris).

So the opening credits sequence of Successive Slidings Of Pleasure, where dislocated shots which are, it transpires, excerpted from the main feature are assembled almost hap-hazardly with mismatching sounds such as shattered glass, gun shots and images of actors looking directly into the screen from different situations, cross cut with images of things like spilled egg yolks, really pushes home the fact that, as an audience member, you are not going to be in for a passive time here. Nor indeed a totally coherent one, it has to be said, because there is no real story development or logic to the film, although it hangs around the plot frame of a woman called Nora (played by Olga Georges-Picot) tied to a bed naked by her girlfriend and main protagonist/antagonist Alice (played by Anicée Alvina), who then paints patterns on her. Nora is then found with Alice, with scissors impaling her heart after her death 'in situ' and Alice is then locked in a convent (which includes a handy dungeon) and interrogated by various ‘visitors’ who, as she unfolds events in an almost but, not quite, entirely illogical manner, seduces each of her visitors in one way or another and enacts various sexy things such as painting her own naked body.

What you have to understand though is that the minimalistic, inappropriate sets and the complete non-sequitur responses sometimes of the people who are, on the surface, trying to get to the bottom of the events of this young, alleged murderess are huge indicators that this is just the directors game. No realism is intended. Indeed, the heightened, stylised form of acting (reminiscent sometimes of Hal Hartley’s movies) and the carefree attitude of the two lovers in flashback, as they cut up and bloody a mannequin on the beach when they are not being prostitutes and murdering clients, gives the film a slightly surreal attitude which undermines any attempt to decode the main text in any way other than as a redundant part of the narrative thread, such as it is.

It’s simply not believable as something to be taken that seriously and scenes where, for instance, Alice breaks eggs over Nora’s nude body for a bit before covering her in wine and investigating her crotch with her foot certainly push the film into an almost erotic mood... which is often killed by the absurdity of the responses from various characters... many of whom are taking their ‘story arc’ very seriously. If you want to see Michael Lonsdale, who played Bond villain Hugo Drax in Moonraker, doing something totally different to what you’d expect from him... as his character slowly seems to go insane with obsession to ‘crack the case’ after he’s sucked Alice’s foot 'to remove blood from it'... then you might want to check this one out. Other famous actors in this are Jean-Louis Trintignant and a very young Isabelle Huppert (who, even though I knew she was in it, I still couldn’t recognise).

One thing that is present in the movie is the director’s eye for a good shot. I’ve already said that the majority of the sets are quite simplistic, with barely any set dressing and I believe this is a deliberate play to emphasise the fake nature of the so called plot but he does make things look visually attractive throughout... in addition to the obvious enhancement of several naked women draped over the sets in various scenes of course. So quite often he will be sectioning areas of space for characters to balance against but, in this one, he often has two styles of sectioning combined into the same shot...

So he might have vertical sections on the right part of the screen offset with the chequered frame of a window dominating the left of the screen. or he’ll have different levels of rooms manifesting as open doorways (an old Roger Corman trick) or as an angular look down and across to a spiral stairway adding a different depth to that part of the frame. Indeed, he even has one shot with a curly, iron bed head with Alice peering through different parts of it in front of the camera and constantly shifting so her eyes are perfectly framed in the twirly bits (a technical term). It all looks splendid and, indeed, if it does get just a little pretentious and dull in places, the visual splendour of the shot design often more than makes up for it.

And that’s me done on Successive Slidings Of Pleasure I think. I bought this as one of those ‘add on at the counter’ DVDs when I was in Fopp and got this for just £3. I don’t regret it and I may, I guess, even watch it again some day. It’s not something I would lightly recommend to most casual film viewers but if you have a passion for decoding visual and textual layers which appear to support each other but are really saying contrasting things then you might want to give this one a go. I might try another one of his in another year or two, I think.

47 Ronin

Ronin On Empty

47 Ronin
2013 USA
Directed by Carl Rinsch
Playing now at cinemas in the UK.

Warning: There are spoilers here but it’s such a classic tale that’s 
been corrupted, you probably already know how it ends anyway.



Michael Lonsdale:  
“The 47 ronin, do you know it? 47 samurai whose master was betrayed and killed by another lord. They became ronin, masterless samurai, disgraced by another man's treachery. For three years they plotted, pretending to be thieves, mercenaries, even madmen...”

Robert DeNiro: 
“That l didn't have time to do.”

Michael Lonsdale:  
“... And then one night they struck, slipping into the castle of their lord's betrayer, killing him.”

Robert DeNiro: 
“Nice. l like that. My kind of job.”

Michael Lonsdale:  
“There's something more. All of them committed seppuku, ritual suicide, in the courtyard of the castle.”
Ronin, written by J.D. Zeik and David Mamet (uncredited and writing as Richard Weisz)

There’s even a word for it in the Japanese language... Chūshingura. Chūshingura is a tale based on the real historical incident of 47 Ronin who plotted revenge for the death of their master and... well, you can read the summarised tale as it is told in John Frankenheimer’s excellent action thriller Ronin above.

There have been numerous versions of this story in literature, film, TV, opera and ballet etc throughout the history of Japanese culture... I wouldn’t be surprised if the final tally, should anyone be brave enough to try to research it, is in triple figures. It’s a simple but epic tale of the force of will of a united group of people teamed together and my only regret, though I really was trying to claw back some time, is that I didn’t get to watch the Takashi Shimura version I bought to watch before Christmas so I could at least compare that version to this new one. Alas, time ran out on me so it’s on a bit of a back burner now... but hopefully that will make it into this year’s reviews at some point.

Anyway, what we have here in this new “American” interpretation of Chūshingura, 47 Ronin, is what happens when an American company tries to do an adaptation. Instead of just the simple tale of 47 men banded together to exact revenge and then commit ritual suicide... we have some kind of bizarre corruption of the story involving magical creatures and demons and shapeshifters and the like.

Not very clever, Hollywood, are you? When it comes to treating a treasured story of Japanese history and then raping it for something that will make it more “box office”. The very idea of this complete lack of respect for the original material does leave a bad taste in my mouth, to be honest, and I really can’t review this movie in terms of where it fits in within previous Chūshingura because, well, because it’s like some kind of ill-judged Frankenstein’s monster when it comes to actually turning in an honest adaptation.

What I can do, however, is tell you just how the film is as a stand alone, typically Hollywood entertainment spectacle, divorced from the pretence of adaptation and, surprisingly... it doesn’t fare any better.

And I really regret having to write that.

A lot of the way this movie falls down is in the editing to be honest. It’s really aggressive and I’m not just talking about the action sequences here which, to be fair, are at least comprehensible in terms of decoding the fight scenes into something that all makes sense... unlike some modern movies these days. No, I’m actually talking about the whole movie being aggressively cut together to the point where it’s quite distracting, even from the very beginning. It can’t keep still. I didn’t notice any shots lasting for longer than seven seconds when I was counting them at various intervals in the movie and, to be honest, the fact that I even was counting them shows you how distracted I was by this MTV style of shot pacing. Dreadful stuff. The movie might... might... have had some good cinematography and some well designed shots in there somewhere... but I’ve got no idea whether it did or it didn’t because of the fact that my eye was being thrown about all over the place to match the pace of the editing.

Now other stuff in the movie was mostly fine. The performances were all pretty convincing... nothing which felt all that great but it was more than serviceable... and the score was okay... what I could hear of it in the mix. Again, a nice support... I’m not sure how it would work as a stand alone listen though.

But when we come to the poor decision of the mythical, hocus pocus elements coming into play....

Well it was a big mistake. It could have worked as an organic whole... but the whole of this element, plus the Keanu Reeves character even (and I’m not knocking Reeves, he’s a solid actor) all seems somehow... well... uncomfortably plugged in at certain points throughout the course of the movie. I reckon this film could easily be recut from the same footage to exclude both the Reeves character and the magical elements and still make perfect sense as a narrative which would, I’m sure, leave the basic story as what it should be. However, it looks like its been added in as an afterthought a little way into production by a bunch of Hollywood number crunchers and, horrible as that sounds, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it someday transpired that this was, indeed, the case.

The ending of the movie seems, at first glance, to be a little braver than you would expect from a big budget American made film but, all the way through while I was sitting watching this sequence and the little “afterword” at the end of the movie, it just felt like this was the producers trying to “get the first defensive punch in” and kinda apologise/justify what they have done here. It just didn’t feel genuine. In fact, to paraphrase a character Mr. Reeves plays in another movie... it felt downright bogus and that’s a shame.

It was also rather bloodless when it came to the violence and that’s a classic case of a studio trying to slip past the censors and, unfortunately, it still seems to be a tactic that works. You can violently chop as many heads off as you like, and they do in this one, as long as you don’t see any blood anywhere. It’s really bad that they are allowed to get away with this because one of the things it teaches the kids who are able to see these movies because of the lower rating, is that violence has no consequence. Personally I think it would be better to let them in and scare them with the consequences of violence than glorify it at this level... but that’s another argument for another time and I believe I’ve probably made my point on this in past reviews.

I went to this movie expecting full well to denounce it as a bad adaptation but, it has to be said, I was hoping to be able to recommend it as a movie in its own right, when you strip it away from the actual piece of history it purports to represent. However, I can’t even do that. 47 Ronin, at least this version of it, is one of the least entertaining movies to have giant dragons and demons in it that I’ve seen for some time. If you do want to see this, see it cheap. The 3D is pretty poor anyway.

Moonraker

Drax Inspector

Moonraker
1979 UK/France
Directed by Lewis Gilbert
EON Blu Ray Region A/B/C

Moonraker is the third and final Bond film to be directed by Lewis Gilbert. His previous film, The Spy Who Loved Me, had continued the tradition of the “James Bond will return in” caption at the finish of the end credits sequence but falsely, as it turned out, named the next film to be For Your Eyes Only. The reason for this is very simple actually and it’s also the reason why this Bond film in particular is sometimes thought of as a bit of an anomaly to the series when, really it isn’t.

The Spy Who Loved Me was released in 1977 but something else happened later that same year which not only changed the course this next Bond film would take, but changed the course of cinema as a whole (something we are still feeling the after effects of today at all kinds of levels, actually). And that something was this...

George Lucas released a little film which he didn’t think was going to do all that well at the box office called Star Wars. Not including the obvious stylistic influences or the fact that it repopularised the orchestra as a valid option in musical scoring for a movie, this blockbuster of “all blockbusters ever conceived” and the scale and success of its merchandising significantly changed the values and expectations of producers and studios world wide... strongly influencing the way that movies were designed and the way the deals for those movies are being put together, even 36 years later. Every studio wanted a science fiction clone to cash in on the success, preferably several a year if it brought in the kind of figures they were seeing on Lucas’ budding epic.

Consequently, pretty much all the younger audiences for these kinds of movies were being subjected to from 1977 to at least 1986 were cash ins, traditional TV or comic book heroes brought to a larger venue or, frankly, some very cheap rip offs... desperately trying to keep up and ride the Star Wars bandwagon. But that’s okay, because after we’d all seen Star Wars a hundred gazillion times at the cinema... we all wanted more of the same anyway.

And we saw them all... Battlestar Galactica, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, The Black Hole, Superman The Movie, Star Trek The Motion Picture, Star Crash, Battle Beyond The Stars, Alien and, yes, even The Humanoid (which starred Bond villain Richard Kiel in a lead role... remember that?). We lapped it up and so the producers of the Bond franchise realised, I think, that they needed something vaguely reminiscent of space and with a fistful of laserguns in it to hold the public’s interest at the time.

Now I know they’ve been criticised for stuttering the Bond franchise into this area for a film but, you know what? I think they were right. I was eleven years old at the time and it was highly unlikely I was going to sit still for just another Bond adventure around this time... but the trailer, posters and magazine covers showing Bond in a silver spacesuit with a laser gun promised something truly special and we fell for it hook, line and sinker. What could have turned out to be a Bond that was forgotten against the constant barrage of cinematic space armageddon, triumphed and made a big splash when it might easily have been overlooked if the content and, more importantly, the marketing for it... had hit a wrong note.

Fortunately for Cubby Broccoli and co, Fleming had written a book which had a title one could use perfectly to suggest a science fiction theme. Unfortunately, the story in the novel was jettisoned in the process, if you’ll pardon the expression, but it’s just as well on some level because the low key story in the book would never had been accepted in the canon of what had, by then, become the powerful Bond action franchise.

Released in 1955, the novel is actually, for this humble scribe at least, one of the greatest of the Bond novels (up there with Live And Let Die, From Russia With Love and The Spy Who Loved Me) and it’s entirely set in England. The first half concerns Bond who, at M’s request, goes with him to M’s “Gentleman’s Club” to ascertain if, and then how, a multimillion national hero and bridge player, is cheating at cards and Bond has to go up against him, card for card. The second half is Bond successful attempt to stop Drax from launching a nuclear missile on London. It’s all very British and is also very reminiscent in places of Bond’s first novel (2 books earlier), Casino Royale.

The movie ditches almost all of the plot elements of the novel and goes for all out Bond carnage in the usual manner, bringing back various characters from previous films including Jaws and a slightly more brief appearance from General Gogol. It’s Moore at his cheesiest but it works maybe a little bit better than the previous film, perhaps aided a little by John Barry’s return as composer. It all hangs together a bit better, I reckon, than The Spy Who Loved Me but it doesn’t get any better in terms of the sheer lack of intelligence in terms of the plot... with each encounter leading link by flimsy link to the next set piece with no real detection involved.

There are some really nice things about it though so let me focus on those for a moment...

Well, Jaws is back and this time, instead of treating him totally like a cartoon villain, they also give him some comical love interest, a spoken line and a big shot of redemption at the end of the movie where he teams up with Bond to take out the bad guys.

The script also has some choice lines which are quite often “groaners” like Qs final line “I believe he’s attempting re-entry sir” (not realising Bond is having zero gravity sex with Moore’s co star, Lois Chiles, at the time) and it might be said that what it lacks in story drivers it makes up for in dialogue. French actor Michael Lonsdale (who had also worked with the likes of Bunuel) plays the lead villain, Hugo Drax, and it’s an absolute pinnacle of Bond villain performance... it’s just such a shame he’s not doing it in a better Bond film. His delivery of the line “Show Mr. Bond around. See some harm comes to him.” is absolutely pitch perfect and he steals pretty much all the scenes he’s in.

Lois Chiles seems a strong but also strangely “easy” Bond girl, although I liked her when I was a kid and first saw it and her performance works fine contrasted against Moore (she had interestingly turned down the role of the leading lady Anya in the previous Bond movie). And Richard Kiel really plays the hell out of Jaws this time around, fleshing out a comically unlucky assassin pretty much as well as anyone could expect and even giving the role a certain amount of gravitas in some scenes... which is helpful when contrasted against some of the other elements of this movie... which have zero gravitas in zero gravity.

And that leads me onto the zero gravity space battle which, quite honestly, tries to do for Moonraker what the underwater harpoon gun battle in Thunderball did for that film... but with laser guns instead of harpoons. The trouble with this though, is it looks and sounds a bit rubbish when compared to the pinnacle that this kind of film effect had reached just two years before in Star Wars. And in George Lucas’ epic, at least the weapons had a bit of recoil to them. The only good thing to come out of this was that I got to own a toy replica of the Moonraker laser gun to play with and, it has to be said, it was a real beauty. Of course, it didn’t shoot blue laser death upon an unsuspecting playmate but you could put caps in the thing so if you couldn’t exactly laser your friends off this mortal coil, you could at least give those of a nervous disposition a playful heart attack. It was a toy weapon to be cherished and loved.

There are also some other quite dreadful things in the movie.

The musical joke of incorporating Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence Of Arabia theme into the soundtrack at one point in the previous instalment, continues in this film with Roger Moore riding into town dressed like Clint Eastwood. Considering the character he’s dressed like, it’s a mystery why none of Morricone’s epic spaghetti western music was used to accompany this scene, the producers instead plumping for a rendition of Elmer Bernstein’s score for The Magnificent Seven (perhaps there were some copyright issues). Yet another musical joke in the movie is the use of the famous, five note Johnny Williams motif from Spielberg’s Close Encounters Of The Third Kind... and that’s about the only one that brings a smile to the face now in all honesty (there’s also a computer sound effect from ALIEN used in the movie but I suspect this is a case of accidentally picking the same sound sample from an effects library rather than intending it to be an actual homage to Ridley Scott’s masterpiece).

The music in this one seems quite sluggish and is certainly a John Barry of 'a different time' returning to score this. I personally think of it as his worst Bond score, even though something quite special happens in the scoring at one point. That something special is the return of Barry’s 007 melody, which he first composed for the Bond film From Russia With Love. This was the only time that Roger Moore’s version of Bond was scored with this theme and it’s the fifth and final film that this melody is used in. A shame, then, that in this incarnation the theme is slowed down to treacle setting and reorchestrated to the dreariest you’ve ever heard it. It’s supposed to be scoring a fast and furious boat chase but it feels like it’s scoring a game of “Pooh Sticks” to be honest with you. It’s a theme which I still wish they’d re-use in Bond films today but its inclusion in Moonraker is a very dull affair.

And that just about covers it, I think. Other than to mention that this marks the last film that Bernard Lee played M in, before his death in 1981 (just before he was due to start shooting the next one).

Moonraker is not a great Bond film but it is, at least, a livelier affair than the previous film in the series. Moore’s Bond character is totally toned down to “inoffensive and probably quite harmless” again but the next film in the series would put a little edge back into the character. And with Moonraker, they once again got it right in the end credits. James Bond would, indeed, return... in For Your Eyes Only.

EON James Bond Movie Reviews on NUTS4R2

Dr. No

From Russia With Love

Goldfinger

Thunderball

You Only Live Twice  

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service

Diamonds Are Forever

Live And Let Die

The Man With The Golden Gun  

The Spy Who Loved Me

Moonraker

For Your Eyes Only

Octopussy

A View To A Kill 

The LIving Daylights 

Licence To Kill  

GoldenEye

Tomorrow Never Dies

The World Is Not Enough  

Die Another Day 

Casino Royale

Quantum Of Solace

Skyfall
S.P.E.C.T.R.E