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oliver9184 · 12-18-2010, 09:01 AM

44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out (2003) (TVM) 5/10. It's a totally pedestrian account of the most massive shoot-out the cops have ever had with the robbers. In 1997 two guys robbed a bank and came out shooting AKs. At first the cops' bullets just bounced off of the bad guys because they had very strong armour. Then the cops stopped by at a local gun store and borrowed some bigger guns like M16s. The bad guys ended up dead and everyone else lived, just like in the movies.

The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) 7/10 is about Che Guevara and someone else riding around Argentina, Chile and all the rest in the 1940s. Their journey is only sometimes interesting but there are some wonderful landscapes.

Downfall (2004) 7/10 is a film about what happened in and around Hitler's bunker right at the end of WWII as the Russian forces massed at Berlin's doorstep before eventually bashing the door in with their huge shoulders and boots. All the performances (all German), especially Bruno Ganz as Hitler, are good and Ulrich Matthes, playing Joseph Goebbles, is on the one hand particularly odious and malignant in a way that immediately suggests OTT pantomime Nazis, but on the other is very credible and belivable. Maybe Nazis really were like that but because they were real, it wasn't such a joke. The top Nazis gradually coming round to the fact that they've definately lost - or else denying it almost to the end as Hitler does - isn't as fulfilling as I had hoped. Germans fuming and shouting at each other for hours gets wearing and grates on the ears; there's no relief, and you know everything's doomed anyway. The most memorable part of this film and the most galling scene I've seen all year was when Goebbles and his wife kill their six children so they won't have to grow up in a world without Nazis.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) 8/10. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman star for director John Schlesinger in the only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture. Voight is instantly likeable as Joe Buck, the naive happy-go-lucky Texan trying to make it as a gigolo in New York; Hoffman is instantly dislikeable as Ratso Rizzo, the degenerate heel Buck reluctantly shacks up with. The pair have good banter and both perform well but, as with so many of his other films, the earnestness and whining tone of Hoffman's delivery grates. There is a brilliant hippy party scene.

Apocalypse Now (1979) 7/10. People say this is the best war film so far. What a crock of shit. I only watched it again because I'm really in Saigon now and... shit. I'm still only in Saigon. It's an exercise in gross indulgence on the part of its director, Francis Ford Coppola, and its 'star', Marlon Brando. I can identify with weary, pissed-off Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) going on his bullshit mission because I'm equally weary and pissed-off trying to watch this film. I didn't even watch the extended Redux version yet there are still huge periods of time when nothing at all happens to drive the plot forwards. All of the characters are the merest sketches of characters with no backstory or reason for you to care about them. Dour and cranky Capt. Willard is the only link between the audience and the madness of the Vietnam War but you can scarcely identify with a man you know nothing about. Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper both give pretty ripe performances in the first and last parts of the film respectively - Duvall comes off OK, Hopper comes off as a horrible man. He's not supposed to be a villain but he totally is one. But the worst is Brando. Look: this is what happens when you indulge such an ego as his. You end up with a huge empty box of nothing. Time seems to stand still during the last 30 minutes or so of this film - and I remember thinking exactly the same thing the other times I watched it. Apart from anything else it's completely uncinematic. Brando mumbling nonsense in the dark - well done everyone. Thanks. And yet it's all for nothing. Some people kill a cow? Good. If that's relevant or a metaphor I have no idea why or for what. I've seen this film, Redux and not, at least four times now and even still I don't know whether or not Brando gets killed by the end. I fucking hope so but I know I'm not ever going to watch it again to find out.

The Blue Max (1966) 8/10 is a WWI film on the side of the Germans starring George Peppard, stiff as a board, James Mason - unctuous! - and Ursula Andress (slinky). It's 1918 and the war is not going well for Germany. New fighter pilot and former infantryman Bruno Stachel (Peppard) is aggressively ambitious and cares only about winning the Pour le Mérite (AKA the Blue Max) - Germany's highest military order. His route to the medal is by shooting down twenty Allied planes. Things are complicated by devious General Count von Klugerman (Mason), his hot young wife (Andress) and his nephew, Bruno's main rival Willi von Klugerman (acted with excellent venom by Jeremy Kemp). I first watched this film by accident on TV one day when I had nothing to do and liked it for two reasons. Firstly its plot, which is a sort of rags to riches fantasy story about a naive young man realising his most heady dreams - but at the same time being manipulated by invisible forces. And the flying sequences totally blew me away. Before I watched it just now I hadn't seen it in a couple of years; watching it again, now I'm familiar with the plot, I found it a lot less engaging. Peppard's such a dull actor in this he cannot come close to making me really care about him so all that's left is Kemp and Mason - superbly realised but in the end they're two dimensional villains. (Even so, Mason is quite brilliant in the last scenes of the film.) The flying sequences are all brilliant - and they won't stop being brilliant even if you see this film a hundred times. There are no tricks: everything is real. Real pilots are flying those real bi-planes under really low bridges. Real sheep were placed in one scene purely to prove that there was no trickery: the plane really went under that bridge causing the sheep to scatter. Peppard's hollow acting and a rickety 1960s war film plot are a fair price to pay for some rousing arieal action and stunts, and brilliant villany by James Mason.

Home Alone (1990) 8/10. Kevin's mum (Katherine O'Hara) is an awful bitch. I hate the way she grabs the phone off of the French woman in Paris and shoves her away. "What? Why? Because you have a child at home in America that you forgot? Oh shit no, you go ahead and take the phone." And I think there are French cops standing by who do nothing. No wonder Americans have such a bad reputation overseas. In any real life situation she should shut up sit down and bite her thumb, and wait her turn for a flight back to Chicago on -Christmas Eve-, to go and see if Kevin's OK. Remember she doesn't know what's happened with Kevin. What happens only happens because it's a movie called Home Alone. She doesn't know it's a movie. BUT what happens is worse than her worse fears of what might happen to Kevin. After Kevin and the audience have had their fun in a torture-porn-tastic half hour of burnings, bruisings, maimings, spikings, crackings and bashings, beleagurered burglars Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci eventually catch up with Kevin, of course, and threaten him with the exact same damage he already did to them. An eye for an eye, etc. Pesci even wants to bite off every one of Kevin's fingers! UH-OH! I don't think Buzz's tarantula will save you from the biting, Kevin! OOUGH!

12-18-2010, 09:01 AM	#3912 (permalink)
oliver9184 Psycho	44 Minutes: The North Hollywood Shoot-Out (2003) (TVM) 5/10. It's a totally pedestrian account of the most massive shoot-out the cops have ever had with the robbers. In 1997 two guys robbed a bank and came out shooting AKs. At first the cops' bullets just bounced off of the bad guys because they had very strong armour. Then the cops stopped by at a local gun store and borrowed some bigger guns like M16s. The bad guys ended up dead and everyone else lived, just like in the movies. The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) 7/10 is about Che Guevara and someone else riding around Argentina, Chile and all the rest in the 1940s. Their journey is only sometimes interesting but there are some wonderful landscapes. Downfall (2004) 7/10 is a film about what happened in and around Hitler's bunker right at the end of WWII as the Russian forces massed at Berlin's doorstep before eventually bashing the door in with their huge shoulders and boots. All the performances (all German), especially Bruno Ganz as Hitler, are good and Ulrich Matthes, playing Joseph Goebbles, is on the one hand particularly odious and malignant in a way that immediately suggests OTT pantomime Nazis, but on the other is very credible and belivable. Maybe Nazis really were like that but because they were real, it wasn't such a joke. The top Nazis gradually coming round to the fact that they've definately lost - or else denying it almost to the end as Hitler does - isn't as fulfilling as I had hoped. Germans fuming and shouting at each other for hours gets wearing and grates on the ears; there's no relief, and you know everything's doomed anyway. The most memorable part of this film and the most galling scene I've seen all year was when Goebbles and his wife kill their six children so they won't have to grow up in a world without Nazis. Midnight Cowboy (1969) 8/10. Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman star for director John Schlesinger in the only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture. Voight is instantly likeable as Joe Buck, the naive happy-go-lucky Texan trying to make it as a gigolo in New York; Hoffman is instantly dislikeable as Ratso Rizzo, the degenerate heel Buck reluctantly shacks up with. The pair have good banter and both perform well but, as with so many of his other films, the earnestness and whining tone of Hoffman's delivery grates. There is a brilliant hippy party scene. Apocalypse Now (1979) 7/10. People say this is the best war film so far. What a crock of shit. I only watched it again because I'm really in Saigon now and... shit. I'm still only in Saigon. It's an exercise in gross indulgence on the part of its director, Francis Ford Coppola, and its 'star', Marlon Brando. I can identify with weary, pissed-off Martin Sheen (Captain Willard) going on his bullshit mission because I'm equally weary and pissed-off trying to watch this film. I didn't even watch the extended Redux version yet there are still huge periods of time when nothing at all happens to drive the plot forwards. All of the characters are the merest sketches of characters with no backstory or reason for you to care about them. Dour and cranky Capt. Willard is the only link between the audience and the madness of the Vietnam War but you can scarcely identify with a man you know nothing about. Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper both give pretty ripe performances in the first and last parts of the film respectively - Duvall comes off OK, Hopper comes off as a horrible man. He's not supposed to be a villain but he totally is one. But the worst is Brando. Look: this is what happens when you indulge such an ego as his. You end up with a huge empty box of nothing. Time seems to stand still during the last 30 minutes or so of this film - and I remember thinking exactly the same thing the other times I watched it. Apart from anything else it's completely uncinematic. Brando mumbling nonsense in the dark - well done everyone. Thanks. And yet it's all for nothing. Some people kill a cow? Good. If that's relevant or a metaphor I have no idea why or for what. I've seen this film, Redux and not, at least four times now and even still I don't know whether or not Brando gets killed by the end. I fucking hope so but I know I'm not ever going to watch it again to find out. The Blue Max (1966) 8/10 is a WWI film on the side of the Germans starring George Peppard, stiff as a board, James Mason - unctuous! - and Ursula Andress (slinky). It's 1918 and the war is not going well for Germany. New fighter pilot and former infantryman Bruno Stachel (Peppard) is aggressively ambitious and cares only about winning the Pour le Mérite (AKA the Blue Max) - Germany's highest military order. His route to the medal is by shooting down twenty Allied planes. Things are complicated by devious General Count von Klugerman (Mason), his hot young wife (Andress) and his nephew, Bruno's main rival Willi von Klugerman (acted with excellent venom by Jeremy Kemp). I first watched this film by accident on TV one day when I had nothing to do and liked it for two reasons. Firstly its plot, which is a sort of rags to riches fantasy story about a naive young man realising his most heady dreams - but at the same time being manipulated by invisible forces. And the flying sequences totally blew me away. Before I watched it just now I hadn't seen it in a couple of years; watching it again, now I'm familiar with the plot, I found it a lot less engaging. Peppard's such a dull actor in this he cannot come close to making me really care about him so all that's left is Kemp and Mason - superbly realised but in the end they're two dimensional villains. (Even so, Mason is quite brilliant in the last scenes of the film.) The flying sequences are all brilliant - and they won't stop being brilliant even if you see this film a hundred times. There are no tricks: everything is real. Real pilots are flying those real bi-planes under really low bridges. Real sheep were placed in one scene purely to prove that there was no trickery: the plane really went under that bridge causing the sheep to scatter. Peppard's hollow acting and a rickety 1960s war film plot are a fair price to pay for some rousing arieal action and stunts, and brilliant villany by James Mason. Home Alone (1990) 8/10. Kevin's mum (Katherine O'Hara) is an awful bitch. I hate the way she grabs the phone off of the French woman in Paris and shoves her away. "What? Why? Because you have a child at home in America that you forgot? Oh shit no, you go ahead and take the phone." And I think there are French cops standing by who do nothing. No wonder Americans have such a bad reputation overseas. In any real life situation she should shut up sit down and bite her thumb, and wait her turn for a flight back to Chicago on -Christmas Eve-, to go and see if Kevin's OK. Remember she doesn't know what's happened with Kevin. What happens only happens because it's a movie called Home Alone. She doesn't know it's a movie. BUT what happens is worse than her worse fears of what might happen to Kevin. After Kevin and the audience have had their fun in a torture-porn-tastic half hour of burnings, bruisings, maimings, spikings, crackings and bashings, beleagurered burglars Daniel Stern and Joe Pesci eventually catch up with Kevin, of course, and threaten him with the exact same damage he already did to them. An eye for an eye, etc. Pesci even wants to bite off every one of Kevin's fingers! UH-OH! I don't think Buzz's tarantula will save you from the biting, Kevin! OOUGH!