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The Couch Potato presents: Trollheart's Box Office
New year, new start. Time to move some of my shit out of here...
http://www.bestremovalservices.com/Images/van2.gif. By which I mean, I'm again subdividing a journal. When I said I would add movies on an infrequent basis to The Couch Potato I didn't realise how much fun it was (and how much work) and I have a load of ideas, but they can't blossom there without my losing focus on my TV stuff, so rather than try to shoehorn them in where I can, I'm going to transfer all movie material from that journal to this new one, leaving me free to continue there with only strictly television series. So grab your popcorn, come on in, take a seat and let me bid you welcome. http://lparchive.org/999-Nine-Hours-...8/17-CDoor.gif https://beeimg.com/images/l53315209572.jpg Coming up at some point: Shark Tales: Reviewing all the shark movies, from the Jaws quadrology to Deep Blue Sea and from Open Water to 12 Days of Terror. Movies like Sharktopus or any other movie depicting a shark in anything other than its natural habitat will not be considered—though they may turn up in Trollheart's Cinema Craptastique—nor will any in which a shark does any of the following: upsets a bikini contest, is thawed out from its prehistoric form or comes back from the dead. Believe me, these all exist! But I'll be concentrating on, for lack of another phrase, serious shark movies. Box Office Draws Originally to have been a film-by-film review of all the Pixar movies, I discovered there aren't as many as I thought, and that of those, a lot are sequels, so that would be boring. Instead, I'm going to widen this out and review all or as many as I can of the animated movies, starting from the one that kicked it all off, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and coming right up to date with the likes of Despicable Me and Finding Dory, though unlike in my History of Cartoons journal these will not be in order and I will pick from the list as the mood takes me. Your're (not) speaking my language! My foray into foreign-language films. This is not exactly new territory for me, but I'm not as au fait with World Cinema as I would like to be, so I'll be happy to take any suggestions you have. Commander-in-Chief: Movies about, or revolving around, the President. A Movie Too Far? Looking at whether certain sequels work or not, whether they should have left a classic as it was, or whether the original movie needed, or did not need, a follow up. Often it works, more often though it does not, and in this feature I'll be looking at plenty of examples and questioning the motives behind sequels, and the aftermath of same. Fill Your Hand, You Son of a Bitch! A look through some of the best (and possibly worst) Western movies. Eirigi! (pronounced eye-rig-ee; literally "rise up!") Where I'll be featuring films starring Irish actors, directors, writers etc. Battlegrounds War films in focus Breaking the Law Any sort of movies revolving around law enforcement, or the opposition to it - gangster, Mafia, cop films etc. The Rest is Silence Reviews of movies from the silent era You're History! Period or historical movies, often biographical but not necessarily. Don't Make Me Laugh! My pick of comedy movies Note: I'll be going through the ones I've already reviewed and adding logos to place them within the various specific categories. |
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Originally begun in The Couch Potato under another name, this is a list of mixed science-fiction, fantasy and horror movies I intend to review at some point, arranged in alphabetical order but they will not be reviewed as per this list. I will be picking and choosing from it as the urge takes me. The exception to this will be (probably) any series like Lord of the Rings or The Matrix, where one movie generally leads into the next. In those cases I will endeavour to review all the movies in the series before moving on to another. This is not meant to be an exhaustive (though quite exhausting!) list of sci-fi/horror/fantasy movies by any means. I'm sure there are many I have left out, and many I will not be considering. This list comprises either movies I consider important to the genre, or ones that I have just really enjoyed. If you have a movie you’d like me to review that is not here, get in touch with me and if I’ve seen it I may include it, or if you make a good enough case for me watching it then it may get added to the list. Obviously I can’t promise anything here, neither that it will be chosen nor when, if it is chosen, it will be reviewed. The criteria for inclusion here are science-fiction (obviously!), fantasy (to include the likes of sword-and-sorcery, mythological or fairytales - your basic Lord of the Rings, Legend, Avatar, Conan sort of thing) or horror, but with a fantasy or sci-fi element. The likes of Alien, Event Horizon, vampire movies and so forth - I don’t generally watch or have any interest in psychological horror, gory or slasher movies or the like. Anyway, my decision will be final: if I think it merits inclusion it will go in, if not it won’t. Note: I’m going more for the serious, or at least taking seriously, movie here, so there won’t be much, if any, room for parodies, rip-offs or just stupid or supposedly funny movies like for instance Mars Attacks! or Vampires Suck! Yeah. Don’t suggest movies like that, they’ll just be rejected. MOVIE LIST 2001: A Space Odyssey 2010: Odyssey II 30 Days of night Alien Aliens Alien 3 Alien Resurrection Alien vs Predator Alien Nation Angel Heart Avatar Back to the Future Back to the Future II Back to the Future III Blade Runner Batman Batman Begins Batman Forever Batman Returns Battle for the Planet of the Apes Beneath the Planet of the Apes Brazil Children of Men Clash of the Titans (Original) Close Encounters of the Third Kind Conan the Barbarian Conan the Destroyer The Cold Equations Conquest of the Planet of the Apes Dark City The Dark Knight The Dark Knight Rises Dawn of the Planet of the Apes Day of the Triffids The Day the Earth Stood Still (Original) Devil’s Advocate Bram Stoker’s Dracula Dragonslayer Edward Scissorhands Enemy Mine Escape from the Planet of the Apes Event Horizon Excalibur Fahrenheit 451 Fantastic Voyage The Fifth Element Flight of the Navigator Forbidden Planet The Forsaken Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Frequently Asked Questions About Time-Travel Fright Night (Original) From Dusk till Dawn The Golden Voyage of Sinbad Highlander Highlander II Highlander III Highlander IV Highlander V The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies Inception Interview with the Vampire Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Original) Jason and the Argonauts Judge Dredd (Original) Judge Dredd (2012 remake) Jumper Jurassic Park (Only the original one) Labyrinth Ladyhawke The Last Starfighter Lawnmower Man Legend Let the right one in (Original) Logan’s Run The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King The Lost Boys The Matrix The Matrix Reloaded The Matrix Revolutions Metropolis The Monster Club Monsters Inc. The Nightmare before Christmas Planet of the Apes (Original) Planet of the Apes (Remake) Predator The Princess Bride Queen of the Damned The Quatermass Xperiment Quatermass II Quatermass and the Pit Rise of the Planet of the Apes Robocop (Original) The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad Silent Running Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger Sleepy Hollow Snow White: A Tale of Terror Soylent Green Star Trek: The Motion Picture Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Star Trek III: The Search for Spock Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Star Trek VI: The Unknown Country Star Trek VII: Generations Star Trek VIII: Insurrection Star Trek IX: First Contact Star Trek X: Nemesis Star Trek XI: Star Trek (2009 reboot) Star Trek XII: Star Trek: Into Darkness (Note: I know the two “new” Star Trek movies are not considered part of the original canon, and so are not really eleven and twelve but in fact one and two, but that’s confusing so I, with typical Trollheart stubbornness and refusal to face facts, am labelling them so. Starman Star Wars Episode VI: A New Hope (Originally just titled Star Wars) Star Wars Episode VII: The Empires Strikes Back Star Wars Episode VIII: Return of the Jedi Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Terminator Terminator II: Judgement Day Terminator III: Rise of the Machines Terminator Salvation This island Earth Time Bandits The Time Machine (Original) Total Recall V for Vendetta John Carpenter’s Vampires Vampires II: Los Muertos The War of the Worlds (Original) Watchmen Westworld White Dwarf |
One more important note:
Considering the way I will be splitting up and reviewing movies under certain banners - Event Horizon, Fill Your Hand, Box Office Draws etc - to say nothing of the series I'll be doing on particular directors and actors - there may be some crossover between movies, as in, they may fit under one or more banners. For example, once I get around to doing a series on Steven Spielberg (which I will be doing) the review of Jaws from Shark Tales will also cross over to fit in there. Technically it could also be on Event Horizon, but I'll be a little more particular about where I slot these in. Anyway, instead of running a blurb every time I do a movie that fits into a special section, I'll be using the logo for that section to indicate where it fits, and to which is can be cross-indexed. If a movie does as above, and fits in two categories, or more, I'll use all the logos to show that, for instance, it's part of Shark Tales and Director's Cut, or whatever that becomes called. Just so you know. All movies will at any rate be placed in the index alphabetically once they're posted and then they'll be linked. |
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http://www.trollheart.com/resyk.png First Posted in The Couch Potato, March 27 2013 This was the first movie to appear in The Couch Potato. At the time, I put a sort of spoiler warning on it. I won't be doing that in future. If you've read my articles in The Couch Potato, you'll know I go the whole hog: if there are spoilers to be avoided you won't avoid them in my journals, other than not reading the piece. So be warned: if you haven't seen the movie before, or intend to see it at some point, you will read the ending and any twists or shocks here, as the reviews are complete. You have been warned. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...vil-poster.jpg Title: Dust Devil Year: 1993 Genre: Horror Starring: Robert John Burke as The Dust Devil Zakes Mokae as Sergeant Ben Mukurob Chelsea Field as Wendy Robinson John Matshikisa as Joe Niemand/Narrator Director: Richard Stanley Writer: Richard Stanley For me, this was a strange film to decide to watch. Many of you here I know love horror, the gorier and more frightening the better. Me, I don't. I mean, I'll watch "Criminal Minds" or any show like that, and I'm enraptured by "The Following" (watch for a new "Series Link" soon) but generally speaking I don't enjoy gory or scary movies. I do however like myths, legends, folklore and fantasy, and this film blends all these elements together into what is really a quite excellent movie which should be better known than it is. Shot entirely on location in Namibia, South Africa, it tells the story of a serial killer who is believed to have mystical powers, and who is referred to in the opening sequence, narrated by one of the characters, Joe Niemand, a healer and kind of witch doctor: "Back in the first times, in the time of the red light, Desert Wind was a man like us. Until by mischance, he grew wings and flew like a bird. He became a hunter, and like a hawk, he flew to seek his prey, taking refuge in those far corners of the world where magic still lingers. But having once been a man, so does he still suffer the passions of a man, flying in the rages sometimes, and throwing himself down like a child, to vent his wrath upon the earth. The people of the great Namib have another name for those violent winds that blow from nowhere. They call them Dust Devils" The movie opens, and indeed is mostly set in, the great Namib Desert, where a man walks along a long dusty barren empty road. At first glance he looks like a hitch-hiker, a vagrant. But it is soon apparent he knows exactly what he is doing, and he takes out a strange-looking pocket watch whose hands move around the face much faster than they should. Closing it with a nod, he then lies down on the road as if sleeping, but as the camera angles changes we see that he has in fact his ear to the ground, as if listening to, or waiting for something. Soon a battered old car comes along the road, and the man stands up, hailing it. His eyes beneath the brim of his weather-worn hat are dark and mysterious, and somehow unsettling, but the car stops and its driver, a young woman, gives him a lift. Meanwhile we see the old mystic who narrates the movie make or trace strange patterns on the wall of a cave, and watch the circling motion of a bird of prey in the sky high above him. The woman invites the stranger into her house, isolated and in the middle of nowhere, and later that night they make love, but in the midst of the act he kills her, snapping her neck. The scene switches to the town of Bethany, where the police Sergeant Mukurob picks up a ringing phone and hears strange, disembodied voices. The same thing happens to Wendy Robinson, in Johannesburg, but she is in bed and puts it down to a crossed line. Back at the murdered woman's house the hitch-hiking stranger looks at his watch again. He notes the time and writes it on a photograph he has taken of the dead woman. He holds up a bowl (whether the photographs are in it or not I don't know, but you can bet the girl's blood is) and utters strange words, and then paints strange symbols on the wall of the bedroom. As he leaves we see that he has removed the girl's hand, minus the fingers and nailed it to the wall. The fingers he then carefully places in a small box. Before leaving he torches the house, while listening on the radio to news of the great drought that is afflicting Namibia, killing the cattle and drying up the crops. He then takes his victim's car and drives away. In Johannesburg Wendy leaves her husband after an argument in which he accuses her of cheating on him. Sergeant Mukurob is called by the station to the site of the arson attack, where they have found the dismembered body parts of the woman. On further investigation they also find the abandoned car. The stranger has by now hopped a train, and is on his way to Bethany, which the radio reports tell us is the centre of the drought, and is said to be "doomed". Doing the autopsy of the dead woman, the doctor discovers that the symbols on the wall of her house were made with the victim's blood and other bodily fluids, and she suspects witchcraft. Mukurob is incredelous: witchcraft, such superstition in this enlightened age? But this is Africa, where the old gods do not die easily, and the devils less so. She suggests the policeman consult a Sangoma, a holy man, who would be able to tell him what parts the killer was looking for, and what he would be likely to use them for in a ritual. Mukurob is reluctant but he does know of a Sangoma who lives locally, and goes to talk to him. Wendy arrives at a bar near Bethany just as the stranger is leaving with some people who are driving a camper van ; he looks in the window at her but she does not see him, her back being turned to the window. That night, as she drives on and dozes a little behind the wheel, straying off the road, she almost runs over him as he walks out into the road. In the glare of her headlights his face appears momentarily inhuman, bestial, demonic. She swerves desperately to avoid him and goes off the road. Realising she has narrowly avoided crashing, and unwilling to go any further in her exhausted state, she sleeps in her car overnight. The next morning, seeing her car has become buried in the hard sand of the desert, she gets out and goes to seek help. She notices a van up on the rise ahead of her, but when she climbs to it and knocks on the door there is no answer. A man with a shovel taps her on the shoulder and asks if she is the driver of the van, whihc is in fact a camper van; she says no but could he dig out her car, down the hill? As she leaves we see the inside of the van is smeared with fresh blood, and it's obvious everyone inside is dead. Further up the road she comes across the stranger hitch-hiking, and picks him up. She realises this is the same man she almost ran over last night. While in the car he takes a Polaroid of her and asks her some questions about herself, though she is reticent with answers. She tells him she is going "straight through, all the way to the sea." Police meanwhile have discovered the camper van, and indeed everyone inside has been butchered, with body parts all over the place. Sergeant Mukurob meets with Joe Niemand, the Sangoma, who tells him he believes the world is about to end, and the drought is a sign of that. Joe appears to be building some sort of magic circle around his home, protection presumably, and it corresponds in design to the symbols the murderer drew in blood on the walls of the burned-down house. The enlightened Mukurob however cannot believe what the Sangoma tells him, and he can really get no sense out of Niedman so he leaves. When Wendy admits she believes in neither god nor devil, and has no expectation of a life after death, the interest seems to go from the stranger and suddenly they appear to pass him hitch-hiking on the road. Doing a double-take Wendy looks over at her passenger and --- he's gone! She slams on the brakes, confused and if she's honest with herself, more than a little afraid. Mukurob is told by his boss that he has to take him off the case, as the UN are taking over in the wake of political unrest in the country. He himself is being forced into retirement, but Mukurob believes he is close to catching the man who has so far killed twice, and just needs more time. Information has come to light about a white woman whose car was seen near the camper van with the mutilated corpses, and he sets about tracking Wendy down. She, meanwhile, desperately unhappy and perhaps thinking she has lost her mind, tries to commit suicide in the bath but cannot make herself use the razor blade and drops it into the water. Outside, her erstwhile hitch-hiker lurks, but when she detects a presence and gets out of the bath to check, she finds nobody there. However the next morning she finds him in her car, and he convinces her to again take him with her. Mukurob's boss meets him and turns over all the files on unexplained and unsolved murders in the area that he has been able to find; Mukurob is amazed to see that one, which mentions a pocketwatch like the one found inside the first victim, goes all the way back almost to the turn of the century! Wendy and her passenger finally reach the end of the desert, and on the high sandstone cliffs overlooking the sea, they embrace, while her husband is now on her trail, heading for Bethany. Mukurob awakes from troubled dreams of his wife and son to find Joe Niedman sitting at the foot of his bed; he tells him he has come to help him. While Wendy's husband is getting beaten up at the bar she passed through, she is making love to the stranger, and Niedman is leading Mukurob into his caves. There he shows him the symbols carved on the wall, which correspond to the ones scrawled on the walls of the first victim's house. He tells the sergeant that what they seek is called a naghtloeper, a Dust Devil, a shapeshifting demon who preys on the weak and uses them to make himself stronger, even invincible. Mukurob of course thinks he's mad and does not believe it. Joe tells him that the only way to destroy the demon is to trick him to step across a holy stick called a kerrie. If he does this he can be stripped of his power, but there is danger; in so doing he may transfer his essence to that of the policeman, taking him over. Still not believing, Mukurob takes the stick. While the Dust Devil showers Wendy goes through his things and finds the box of fingers. He tries to kill her but she escapes, driving off into the night. The demon though makes a gesture and a truck swerves into her path, knocking her off the road. In the pileup that follows she barely gets free of her car before it, and the rest of the crashed vehicles explodes, and she runs off into the desert. Mukorob and Mark have joined up to try and find Wendy, or at least the Dust Devil, while the demon is using his unnatural powers to try to comb the desert to find her. He whips up a sandstorm and she is blinded, stopped, can go no further. He then attacks the oncoming Mukurob and Mark, overturning their police vehicle, and the sergeant shackles Mark to the car, telling him that he should be safe as Dust Devil only takes those who have nothing. Then he walks off into the storm. As the storm abates Wendy begins walking again, but when she eventually comes across a village it is completely deserted, its habitants having long ago abandoned it in the face of the harsh desert. Here she meets Mukurob and they both unaccountably hear a phone ringing. Mukurob gives her a gun and they head towards the sound of the phone. Picking it up Mukurob hears the voice of his dead wife, calling him to her. Confused, he staggers into an old abandoned cinema, and as he exits it he runs into Dust Devil, who stabs him. Wendy goes looking for him in the building and not finding him comes back out to encounter Dust Devil. He looks at his watch: it is running backwards. He is not happy. She threatens him with the gun but it jams and the demon advances upon her. Mukurob though, who is lying nearby, throws down the kerrie stick with his dying breaths as the monster advances, and as he crosses it, an instant too late realising what has happened, Wendy grabs the policeman's shotgun and blows Dust Devil's head clean off his shoulders. As Wendy wanders out into the desert she comes across her husband, still handcuffed to Mukurob's poilce car. For a moment she levels the shotgun at him, a dark, dead look in her eyes, then she turns and walks off into the desert, the shotgun over her shoulder. She walks out along the desert road, lies down and presses her ear to the ground, and presently a convoy of UN trucks arrives. She stands out in the middle of the road, hailing them. It's fairly apparent from the ending of the film that, just as Joe Niedman warned Mukurob, the Dust Devil has transferred his essence into Wendy, just before dying, and she is now his. Indeed, the final scene shows a figure garbed in a long shabby greatcoat and hat, the dress originally worn by the stranger in the opening scene, pass in front of a fiery setting sun. The end monologue seems to confirm this: ""The desert knows her name now, he has stolen both her eyes. When she looks into a mirror, she will see his spirit like a shore blowing tatters around her shoulders in a haze. And beyond the dim horizon, a tapestry unfolding of the avenues of evil, and all of history set ablaze". Quotes (Mostly from the narration of Joe Niedman) "He sifts the human storm for souls. He can smell a town waiting to die and and the manhood festering in a boy from a thousand miles away. Their smell is sweet to him." The doctor examines the corpse of the first victim: "We've got evisceration, partial cremation, sexual mutilation, possibly even cannibalism. We found the remains of a clock wedged inside her, for god's sake!" Dust Devil is offered a ride by Wendy: Wendy: "Where you headed for?" Dust Devil: "Nowhere." Wendy: "Just came from there. Any other place I'm good for." Joe Niedman, in response to Mukurob's query as to why the killer is taking fingers from his victims: "There's a whole lot of power in fingers. Lots of knuckles and such. If you want to win a war, you need a whole fistful of knuckles!" Joe (in narration) "This is the work of the naghtloeper, black magician, a shapeshifter. He seeks power over the material world through the ritual of murder. The power of vision, of ecstasy. The power to shield himself from detection, and death. To travel, and to transform, he feeds off our life, he preys upon the damned; the weak and the faithless, he draws them to him and he sucks them dry." Joe to Mukurob: "You've got to stop thinking like a white man; start thinking like a man instead." Joe to Mukurob, in the cave: "We are nothing to him. We are dust in the wind. He smelled Bethany dying, and he has come here for souls, to build his power and return to the realm of the spirit. Until the ritual is complete he is trapped ike us in the material world, bound by the flesh. He must work through human form while he is in this world, and so is vulnerable to human failings. Only through ritual, through any power over the flesh can a spirit awake to fuller consciousness. To work the ritual he must keep moving, but if he can be tricked to cross this kerrie he can be rooted to the spot and stripped of his power." Joe, again to Mukurb: "Death hunts you, just as you hunt the Dust Devil." Joe (in narration) "The serpent lures its pray entranced, eyes wide open, through the mirror, to the land of the dead. To the house of the dust, where the air is thick and hard to breathe." A nice touch! Just before Dust Devil disappears from the car, Wendy takes a bite from a shiny green apple. Eve biting into the apple of temptation while the devil urges her on? There is also a reference, intended or not, to Kansas's big hit "Dust in the wind", though the director wisely refrains from taking the easy route and using it in the soundtrack. |
Dude, you should write a book with all of the reviews of pretty much every form of pop culture that you've covered. It would be a pretty **** book but at least we'd get a break while you were busy with it.
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Why do I love this film?
For many reasons. One is the fact that it is, on the face of it, a movie I would normally not have bothered with nor been interested in checking out. Serial killers, ritual murder, usually not my scene. But this film blends in those elements with legend and myth, superstition and folklore and really neither proves nor disproves either. There's a sceptic, as you would expect, in Ben Mukurob, but at the last he gambles that the Sangoma was not rambling and it is his throwing down of the kerrie stick that enables Wendy to get the drop on Dust Devil. Admittedly, she's not fast enough in despatching him and gets taken over, but in essence the ploy works, and Niedman did after all warn Mukurob that this could happen. It's also a very small cast: three really. There are other people, the likes of Mark and the police captain, but they play relatively minor roles. The movie is really carried on the quite understated performances of the main trio. And understatement is the name of the game. Even Robert John Burke, in the role of Dust Devil, the supernatural killer said to be a demon from the desert, is quiet and menacing rather than maniacal. Chelsea Fields as Wendy portrays a desperate woman rapidly running out of things to live for, while Mukurob is a man with a dark past who is trying to atone for past mistakes, though we are never let in on what those mistakes were. They do seem to have led to the deaths of both his wife and son though. I like the fact that, though the murders are savage and ritualisitic, and feature dismemberment you don't see Dust Devil kill his victims, other than the first, and even there it's just a basic snap of the neck. You don't see him cut her up later. The most graphic thing in the movie really is the autopsy on the burned and dismembered corpse later. Even when we see the camper van and it's obvious everyone inside is dead (we more or less know this when we see Dust Devil take a ride with them at the bar) there are few gory details. We see a window streaked with blood and a fly walking across it, and when the door is eventually opened later and the corpse or corpses discovered, the only thing we really see in close up is a severed hand. It's not in-your-face gore; this movie trades more on the horror of what might have happened rather than shoving it front and centre in a "Saw" manner, which I much prefer. It's left up to your imagination rather than forced down your throat. The music, too, is great. A mixture of kind of Gregorian Chant with Spaghetti Western film themes, which works really well, and some African rhythms and melodies layered over it too. It all creates a very otherworldly atmosphere, a striking, desolate air that sends shivers down your spine. And the setting is perfect for a film of this nature. Against the vast expanse of the unforgiving Namib Desert humans do indeed seem small and insignificant, and the idea that some all-powerful and evil entity is out there controlling everything is no doubt a notion that has come to the minds of anyone who has crossed such a desolate wilderness. It's clever location too, because it obviously cut back on costs and provides a bleak, barren backdrop to a story of humans battling evil and eventually succumbing to it. Dust Devil is also a classic case of a movie that succeeds without any big names, any flash settings or any - really, none - special effects. In fact, apart from the desert this movie could have been made on a shoestring budget, though it certainly does not show in the final product. But it avoids diverting attention away from the storyline and the characters; it doesn't pad out the plot with too many unnecessary personnel, and the narration device is a good way to keep people apprised of how the story is coming along. It's also a clever touch to have the narrator take part in the story. Although loosely based on a real-life story of a serial killer in South Africa, the film really only borrows elements from that and mixes them in with local folklore and legend, stirring the whole thing up into a devil's brew of a powerful story that comes across as both chilling and almost believable. Finally, there's a great sense of there being no happy ending about the movie. Sure, in the end the "bad guy" is defeated, but he's almost then seen as just an aspect of evil, which reaches out and claims the one who vanquished him and makes her its new emissary. A message about the timeless and shifting nature of evil, and how humans invite the darkness in, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes all too willingly. In the vast desert, both of actuality and of imagery, the tiny soul of man, or woman, is swallowed up and lost. |
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http://www.trollheart.com/resyk.png First Posted in The Couch Potato, May 1 2013 http://s5.postimg.org/l2hbe8uon/darkstar.jpg Title: Dark Star Year: 1974 Genre: Science-Fiction/Black Comedy Starring: Dan O'Bannon as Sergeant Pinback Brian Larelle as Lieutenant Doolittle Cal Kuniholm as Boiler Dre Pahich as Talby Joe Saunders as Commander Powell Adam Beckenbaugh as Bomb Number Twenty Director: John Carpenter Writer: Dan O'Bannon and John Carpenter The directorial debut of the legendary John Carpenter, Dark Star also became the inspiration for the series Red Dwarf, and is one of the few science-fiction movies of any era that successfully blends sci-fi tropes with dark comedy. Filmed on a real shoestring budget of about sixty thousand dollars, it's gone down in history as a cult movie, and if you haven't seen it then you really need to. I'm reliably informed it's even better when you're stoned, but I wouldn't know about that. It's also one of the first movies to tackle the thorny issue of isolation in space and the boredom that could and surely will engender. The basic plot of the movie concerns the scout ship of the same name, which is crewed by five, one of whom is dead. Wait, I will explain shortly. The mission of the ship is to seek out unstable planets which could cause a problem to following colony ships, and destroy them by dropping huge thermostellar bombs on them from space. These planets are few and far between, and the crew have been doing this now for twenty years. Cooped up together with no real privacy and no respite from the unremitting tedium of deep space, they have all in their own way turned peculiar, as each seeks out his own way to combat the mind-numbing boredom and the sameness of every day. As the movie opens we see a communication coming in from Earth (eighteen parsecs away) in which a member of the brass (NASA or some military agency; we don't know) sympathises with the crew over the loss of their Commander due to a radiation leak. Unbelievably, the general or whatever he is tells them that their request for radiation shielding has been denied, even in the knowledge of the accident which has already claimed one of the crew. Cutbacks in Congress are blamed, and the prohibitive cost of sending a shuttle out to where they are cannot, he says, be justified. Whether anyone was watching or has heard this transmission is unclear, as next we see the ship slip into orbit around a planet which may be a candidate for destruction. We see the guys, three of them, all working in a very cramped space getting details and data on the planet to ascertain its possibility of contributing to a risk factor: the fourth member of the crew, Talby, sit high above the ship in an observation dome, like the gun turret blisters on World War II bombers. The data confirms the planet is, or could become, unstable and so they drop a thermostellar bomb on it, which completely obliterates it, leaving the way clear for following colonisation ships. The bombs seem to be imbued with some rudimentary intelligence, and Sergeant Pinback talks to Bomb number 19 as he readies it for the drop. Once the bomb leaves the ship, Dark Star goes into hyperdrive to take the guys out of the blast zone. The computer informs them that they have destroyed the last unstable planet in this solar system, and they look for their next target. Lieutenant Doolittle, acting commander of the vessel with the death of Powell, seems eager to find another planet they can destroy, and Boiler, another crewman tasked with finding targets, directs them to the Veil Nebula. Doolittle goes to see Talby, and tells him he's concerned that he's isolating himself too much from the rest of the crew, spending all his time in his observation dome. Talby says he doesn't like going down since the commander was killed. Talby tells Doolittle that he is looking forward to seeing a phenomenon called the Phoenix Asteroids, a body of asteroids that circle the universe every twelve trillion years. Doolittle reveals that what he misses most is surfing. He used to be a great surfer. Boiler amuses himself by shooting things with the only onboard laser rifle, target practice. As Pinback tackles him about it, the computer informs him that it is time for him to feed "the alien", a task Pinback is not looking forward to. Seems some time back the sergeant took the alien onboard as a mascot, and now it is his responsibility to look after it. However when he goes to feed it the alien, resembling nothing more than a brightly-coloured beach ball on legs, is more in the mood for playing, and jumps on his back. He wrestles it off but it gets into the corridor, and when he goes back to get a broom to shoo it back in, it is gone. After it leads him a merry chase, including a totally hilarious scene where he gets stuck in an elevator, Pinback shoots the alien with a tranquiliser gun, but it shoots across the room like a punctured balloon, and Doolittle later wonders how anything could live if it was only filled with gas? The others aren't interested, though Talby for once shows some leadership qualities and comes down into the main ship, trying to trace the source of the malfunction he detected. Pinback tells the guys that he really isn't the man whose suit he wears: he was refuelling the ship when a naked astronaut ran past him and jumped into a barrel of liquid rocket fuel. Donning the man's discarded suit he tried to save the guy but before he could, he was bundled aboard Dark Star, and has been here ever since. The guys aren't impressed, as this is not the first time Pinback has told them this story. Talby calls Doolittle to let him know he has traced the source of the malfunction but it is near the airlock, so he has to put on a spacesuit to investigate. Pinback reviews his personal log, running through entries in which he again recounts the story that he is not Sergeant Pinback at all. He says his real name is Phil Frugge, a maintenance tech. He also talks about Commander Powell's death, complains about Doolittle taking over command, and the others treating him shabbily. He then makes a new entry, again complaining about his treatment and remarking that last week was his birthday and nobody noticed. The ship arrives at the planet they've been heading towards in the Veil Nebula, and Pinback prepares and arms the bomb. But Talby is in the airlock and tries to tell them that the communication laser, which monitors the bomb drop mechanism, is damaged. Doolittle, concentrating on blowing up the planet, snaps off the com in irritation and the laser goes off, blinding Talby, and he stumbles into the path of the beam, breaking communications between the bomb and its mechanism. When the guys try to drop the already-armed bomb it does not separate from the ship. Suddenly a task which has become mundane, boring, automatic becomes anything but, as the crew scramble to fix the malfunction. Doolittle orders the bomb to abort its countdown but it will not, and the computer advises them that it has activated dampers which will contain the blast to an area of one mile. With no other ideas, Doolittle revives the commander, who has been kept in a state of cryogenic stasis, to seek his advice. The commander tells Doolittle that he must speak to the bomb, teach it phenomenology. So he goes out in a spacesuit and has an existential conversation with the bomb, while Boiler hits upon the idea of using the laser rifle to shoot out the supporting pins on the bomb and save the ship. Pinback doesn't trust him and tries to stop him. As the two fight, word comes from the computer that the bomb has returned to the bay. Doolittle has been successful. However, when he tries to re-enter via the rear airlock, Talby, who is still in there, gets blown out and into space. Doolittle goes after him, just as the bomb announces that it has figured out that it is God, and explodes. The two guys on the ship die instantly but Talby is sucked into the approaching Phoenix Asteroids: he will circle the universe as part of them, forever. That leaves Doolittle, who is falling towards the planet they were supposed to destroy. As he falls, he grabs a piece of debris from the ship and using it as a surfboard, rides the last wave of his life down into the planet's atmosphere. QUOTES Earth Official: "Sorry to hear about the radiation leak. And real sorry to hear about the death of Commander Powell. There was a week of mourning here on Earth. We're all behind you guys. About your request for radiation shielding: sorry to report this has been denied. I hate to send bad news when you guys are up there doing such a swell job, but I think you'll take it in the proper spirit. There's been some cutbacks in Congress and right now, considering the distance we just can't afford to send a cargo shuttle out there to you. But I know you guys will make do. Keep up the good work, men!" Pinback: "Sergeant Pinback calling Bomb Number number 19, do you read me, Bomb?" Bomb 19: "Bomb number 19 to Sergeant Pinback, I read you. Continue." Pinback: "Well, Bomb, we have about sixty seconds to drop. Just wondering if everything's all right. You checked your platinum duridium energy shiedling?" (Note: the actual shielding name may be wrong; I'm guessing at the words here as Pinback's delivery is laconic and bored) Bomb 19: "Energy shielding positive function." Pinback: "Well, let's synchronise detonation time. Uh, you wouldn't happen to know when you're supposed to go off, would you?" Bomb 19: "Six minutes, twenty seconds." Pinback: "All right, that checks out here. Arm yourself, Bomb." Bomb 19: "Armed." Pinback: "Well then everything sounds fine. Dropping you off in about thirty five seconds. Good luck." Bomb 19: "Thanks!" Doolittle: "What now? What do you have for us Boiler?" Boiler: "Uh, not much. Nothing at all in this sector." Doolittle: "Well find me something. I don't care where it is." Boiler: "Well I show a 95% possibility of intelligent life in the Horsehead Nebula sector." Doolittle: "Don't give me that kind of bull!" Boiler: "I know it's a long shot but..." Doolittle: "Damn wild goose chase, is what it is! Remember when Commander Powell found that 99 plus probabilty of intelligent life in the Magellanic Cloud? Remember what we found? A damn mindless vegetable: looked like a limp balloon. Fourteen light years for a vegetable! Don't give me any of that intelligent life stuff! Find me something I can blow up!" Doolittle (recording the ship's video log): "Storage Area 9 self-destructed last week, and destroyed the ship's entire supply of toilet paper." Talby: "Doolittle, I do have a malfunction on this readout but I can't pinpoint it exactly." Doolittle: "Don't worry about it. We'll find out what it is when it goes bang." Boiler: "What's Talby's first name?" Doolittle: "What's my first name?" Logscreen: "For official purposes this recording instrument automatically deletes all offensive language and/or gestures". Doolittle: "Commander Powell, this is Doolittle. Something serious has come up. I need to ask you a question." Powell: "I'm glad you've come to talk with me, Doolittle. It's been so long since anyone came to talk with me." Doolittle: "Commander, Sir, we have a big problem. The Veil Nebula bomb, number 20: it's stuck. It won't drop out of the bomb bay. It refuses to listen and it plans on detonating in (checks watch) less than eleven minutes!" Powell: "Doolittle, you must tell me one thing." Doolittle: "What's that, Sir?" Powell: "Tell me, Doolittle, how are the Dodgers doing?" Doolittle: "Uh, the Dodgers? They, uh, they broke up. They disbanded, over fifteen years ago." Powell: "Ah. Pity. Pity." Doolittle: "But you don't understand, Sir! We can't get the bomb to drop!" Powell: "Ah. So many problems. Why don't you have anything nice to tell me when you activate me? Did you try the Asimov approach?" Doolittle: "Yes Sir. Negative effect." Powell: "What was that, Doolittle?" Doolittle: "Negative effect, Sir." Powell: "It didn't work?" Doolittle: "That's correct, Sir." Powell: "Sorry Doolittle. I've forgotten so much since I've been in here. So much..." Doolittle: "What should we do Sir? Time is running out!" Powell: "Well, you might try ---" A sudden power surge cuts communications for a few moments and Powell's voice is lost. Doolittle desperately tries to restore contact. Doolittle: "Commander? Commander Powell? Sorry Sir, you faded out there for a little bit. What was that you were saying about the bomb?" Powell: "Sorry Doolittle. I've gone blank. Hold it.. I'll have it again in just a few minutes. It seems to me ... sorry ... I forget so many things in here ... So many things ..." Doolittle: "Commander Sir? You stil there?" Powell: "Oh yes Doolittle. Sorry. I'm thinking..." Doolittle: "We're running out of time Sir!" Powell: "Oh yes. Sorry. Well, Doolittle, if you can't get it to drop, you'll have to talk to it. " Doolittle: "What?" Powell: "Talk to the bomb." Doolittle: "But I have been talking to it, Sir. Pinback's talking to it right now." Powell: "No, no. You talk to it. Teach it phenomenology, Doolittle." Doolittle: "Sir?" Powell: "Phenomenology." Doolittle: "Hello? Bomb? Are you with me?" Bomb 20: "Of course." Doolittle: "Are you willing to entertain a few concepts?" Bomb 20: "I am always receptive to suggestions." Doolittle: "Think about this then: how do you know you exist?" Bomb 20: "Well of course I exist." Doolittle: "But how do you know?" Bomb 20: "It is intuitively obvious." Doolittle: "Intuition is no proof. What concrete evidence do you have that you exist?" Bomb 20: Well... I think, therefore I am." Doolittle: "That's good. That's very good. But how do you know that everything else exists?" Bomb 20: "My sensory apparatus reveals it to me." Doolittle: "Right." Bomb 20: "This is fun!" Doolittle: "Okay now listen: this is the big question. How do you know that the evidence your sensory apparatus reveals to you is correct? What I'm getting at is this: the only experience that is directly available to you is the evidence your sensory data, and this sensory data is merely a stream of electrical impulses that stimulates your computing centre." Bomb 20: "In other words, all that I really know about the outside world is relayed to me through my electrical connections." Doolittle: "Exactly." Bomb 20: "Why, that would mean that I don't really know what the outside universe is like at all for certain." Doolittle: "That's it!" Bomb 20: "Intriguing. I wish I had more time to discuss this matter." Doolittle: "Why don't you have more time?" Bomb 20: "Because I must detonate in seventy-five seconds." Doolittle: "Now, bomb, consider this next question very carefully: what is your one purpose in life?" Bomb 20: "To explode, of course." Doolittle: "And you can only do it once, right?" Bomb 20: "That is correct." Doolittle: "And you wouldn't want to explode on the basis of false data, would you?" Bomb 20: "Of course not." Doolittle: "Well then: you've already admitted that you have no real proof of the existence of the outside universe?" Bomb 20: "Yes... Well..." Doolittle: "So you have no absolute proof that Sergeant Pinback ordered you to detonate." Bomb 20: "I recall distinctly the detonation order. My memory is very good on matters such as these." Doolittle: "Of course you remember it. But all you remember is a series of electonic impulses which you now realise has no definite connection with outside reality." Bomb 20: "True. But since this is so, I have no proof that you are really telling me all of this." Doolittle: "That's all beside the point. I mean, the concept is valid no matter where it originates." Bomb 20: "Hmm." Doolittle: "So if you detonate in ---" Bomb 20: "Nine seconds". Doolittle: "You could be doing so on the basis of false data." Bomb 20: "I have no proof it was false data." Doolittle: "You have no proof it was correct data!" Bomb 20: "I must think on this further." Bomb 20: "In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form, and void. And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved on the face of the darkness, and I saw that I was alone. Let there be light." Doolittle; "Talby? Looks like I'm headed for the planet. I'm going towards it." Talby: "When you hit the atmosphere you'll begin to burn. What a beautiful way to die, as a falling star!" |
Why do I love this film?
When this came out, 1974, there was at the time no real concept of humour in sci-fi, at least in films. Science-fiction movies, before the advent of Star Wars, were almost always dark, often scary affairs with marauding aliens and usually bad endings. Many portrayed the futility of believing Man was the dominant force in the galaxy, and showed us just how small and unimportant we are. Then you had the old classics, like This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Forbidden Planet, all that sort of thing. Sci-fi, we were taught, was serious, and not something to be taken lightly. Then this movie came around, and for the first time ever I personally began to see that space, though hard and unforgiving a mistress certainly, was not devoid of the odd cosmic joke. The fact that this movie both takes its subject matter seriously and laughs at it too is quite a feat. Mostly it's the characters the script lampoons: the men who try to fill up their boring humdrum lives with irrelevancies in order to get through another day. No doubt when they signed up for this mission they envisaged great romance and adventure among the stars, but quickly found it to be nothing of the sort. It's lonely, it's cold, there's nothing to do and there is no way back. This movie is also the first directorial effort of the eminent John Carpenter, who would of course go on to direct so many great horror movies, such as It and The Thing, and its story both formed the basis for the sci-fi comedy cult series Red Dwarf and for the later, far from funny space horror Alien. It's pretty much a two-man show, with Carpenter co-writing, directing, composing and playing the music and producing, while Dan O'Bannon co-writes, stars in and creates most of the special effects. This movie would also have a huge impact on future sci-fi movies, from the aforementioned Alien to Star Wars, which would use the spinning hyperspace effect a few years later. Even the dark, doomy amd spacey music, made mostly by Carpenter on synthesisers, would find its way into Red Dwarf's first and second season. I love the characters, flawed as they are. The portrayal of the four main characters as inherently just ordinary guys working away at their job was also quite fresh. Up to this, sci-fi protagonists had generally - with a few exceptions - been square-jawed heroes challenging the cosmos. These guys are essentially four hippies, none of whom are particularly interested in their job after twenty years doing the same thing - but where are they going to go? - and one of them maintains he's someone else entirely. A quick profile of each follows: Lieutenant Doolittle: A man who would much rather be surfing off Malibu than exploring deep space, Doolittle has acclimated to his job by developing a single-minded fascination with, and desire to blow up planets. He doesn't particularly care where they are, he just wants to destroy them. Still, when the chips are down he proves he can still hold a philosophical argument - even with an intelligent bomb. Well, in fairness his life and the lives of everyone else depend on it. It's good to see though that he earns a kind of redemption, although the commander's plan backfires. Sergeant Pinback: Says his real name is Bill Frugge, and tells a story of how he was mistaken for the astronaut and now finds himself in space with people he does not know, whom he doesn't like and who don't like him. He seems to be the butt of jokes, certainly the odd man out and yet when he has to he performs his duty admirably. He it is who insisted on bringing the alien creature onboard, and who inadventently kills it. He makes video diaries and complains about his treatment at the hands of the other crewmembers. Talby (Rank, if any, unknown): Talby is a loner, spends all his time in the observation dome watching the stars. He is nevertheless the most diligent of the crew, the only one to recognise and then investigate the malfunction that leads to the bomb getting stuck in the ship's bay, and leads eventually to the destruction of the Dark Star. He is also blinded by the laser as he tries to fix it and then blown out of the airlock, where the passing Phoenix Asteroids take him with them. Boiler: (Rank, if any, unknown): Seeming to be the lowest in rank on the ship, Boiler is like a refugee from a heavy metal concert, and spends his spare time using the ship's only weapon to shoot targets. He tries to save the ship by shooting out the bomb's holding pins but Pinback, with little faith in his marksmanship, stops him. In the end I love this movie because it's so different, or it was for the time. It bucked the accepted trend at the time for sci-fi movies, injected dark humour for the first time into one of these types of movies, set a template for much of what was to follow and it showed us that Man is capable of fucking up even twenty parsecs from his home planet. There's a strong argument, to my mind, for the damage to the communications laser having been caused by Boiler. He has already shown he likes to shoot at things, and it doesn't matter whether he's supposed to or not. The faceplate of the door to the laser shows evidednce of some sort of burn: a shot from a laser rifle? As a first movie for John Carpenter this hardly set the world alight or put his name up in lights, but I certainly believe it's an important and indispensable part of science-fiction canon. A cult classic that again, like Dust Devil, previously reviewed, deserves to be better known than it is. |
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Anyway, you had a break from me for nearly seven months: wasn't that enough? Don't answer that. :shycouch: |
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Gonna need a link.
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Oh wait, when was that written? Over two years ago? When your view of metal was vastly different? STFU
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First Posted in The Couch Potato, June 3 2013 http://content6.flixster.com/movie/1...142856_800.jpg Title: The odd couple Year: 1968 Genre: Comedy Starring: Jack Lemmon as Felix Ungar Walter Matthau as Oscar Madison John Fiedler as Vinnie Herb Edelman as Murray David Sheiner as Roy Larry Haines as Speedy Director: Gene Saks Writer: Neil Simon One of my all-time top three favourite movies, there are two words that aptly and perfectly describe why this is such a great movie: Lemmon and Matthau. One of the best double acts since Hope and Crosby, these two guaranteed - guara-an-teed! - an excellent film just by their mere presence. I've always loved Jack Lemmon as an actor, and while I can, in general, take or leave Walter Matthau on his own, when put together these two guys were just comedy gold. Even though neither did stupid pratfalls or necessarily said anything overtly funny, it's the chemisty between the two - rarely seen before or since - that truly marks them out as one of the greatest pairings of all time. Written by Neil Simon from his play of the same name, the film was so successful that it gave birth to a whole TV series, starring Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, which I remember watching as a kid without even realising it was based on this movie. Felix Ungar (Lemmon) arrives at a New York motel looking down and dishevelled, and requests a room. When asked for how long, he mutters "Not very long". He is in fact intending killing himself, having been thrown out of his house by his long-suffering wife. As he checks into his grotty room a woman on the other side bids him goodnight, and he tells her "Goodbye". He carefully places all his personal effects in an addressed envelope, but then in a master stoke of finding comedy in tragedy, in seeing something amusing in the attempts of a man to end a life he believes has nothing left to offer him, Simon has Lemmon try to remove his wedding ring. No matter how hard he tries it will not budge, and he eventually has to leave it on. He puts the envelope, now sealed and we can see addressed to "My wife and loving children" on the dresser, and heads to the window, but fate again mocks him, as he cannot open it. Being a cheap, nasty motel the room's window is stuck, fused shut, and he cannot jump as he had originally intended. As he's struggling with the uncooperative window his back goes out, and he has to lie down, consider his next move. He decides to leave the hotel room and staggers downstairs and out into the street, his back giving him hell. He wanders till he comes across a cafe where there is some sort of party going on. He enters and sits, watching the dancing girls and listening to the music. However, he is not to be allowed any respite, as as he knocks back his drink his neck goes, and in terrible pain he hobbles out of the party, back into the street along which he wanders till his tired feet bring him along the waterfront. He stares down at the river, thinking about throwing himself in, then looks up at the lights of a nearby building, recognising it as the one where his old friend, Oscar Madison lives. The action switches to that building, where we see four guys sitting around a card table, bickering as men do when playing poker. One of them worries where Felix is: he's very late for their card game. They call in to Oscar (Matthau) who is in the kitchen, plundering the food. They ask him to call Felix, but he ignores them. He opens cans of beer and it shoots everywhere, to the chagrin of the guys. It doesn't seem to bother Oscar though: he's obviously something of a slob. Murray gets a call to tell the guys that Felix has gone missing; his wife doesn't know where he is. When Oscar rings her she tells him that they broke up, and the guys start to worry, especially when Frances, Felix's wife, told her he was going out to kill himself. Meanwhile Felix, who has decided to go to the game after the stuck window thwarted his plans to see if there is an afterlife, gets caught in the lift doors as he exits, adding a sore arm now to his already sore neck and back. The guys, anxious to pretend they don't know anything about what has happened in order not to tip him over the edge, relax and act as if everything is fine. They try a little too hard though, almost ignoring him and making him even more miserable than he already is. Suddenly the card game is forgotten as Felix declares he does not want to play, and heads to the toilet. The guys, afraid he might kill himself while in there, rush after him and hear him crying in there. They don't know what to do. When he comes back out of the toilet he tries to maintain the pretence but quickly breaks down. He goes to leave, and there follows a comic chase as his friends try to stop him doing anything silly. He manages to lock himself in one of the rooms, they break down the door and rush to the open window, fearing the worst. From behind the door comes the plaintive complaint "Oh! My back! My back!" and the door swings back to reveal Felix flattened against it, cartoon-style. When he then tells them that he took a whole bottle of pills they go into overdrive, trying to get the pills up, trying to keep him awake, considering phoning the ambulance for him, but he finally manages to tell them he already threw up. When the lads leave, Oscar and Felix go for a walk, then end up in a cafe where Felix immediately starts displaying his weird little quirks. The air conditioner is too cold - he says he never lets his wife turn theirs on in the summer, to which Oscar remarks she must love that! - and he has an odd sinus condition that seems to affect his ears too. He starts making weird noises. I can't really describe it. It's like he's trying to clear his throat, blow his nose and suck in air all at once. Here, watch this clip: Everyone thinks there's something wrong with him. Felix discusses with his friend how annoying he was to live with, but Oscar invites him to move in. Felix is delighted, and says he'll be able to pitch in around the place. And indeed he does. The next week, when the guys come over for poker, it is a very different apartment they find. Everything is clean and tidy, there's cold beer - cold! - and coasters, and Felix is serving munchies from a hostess trolley. He's also fussing around like a housewife, telling the guys not to get marks on anything, frowning at the cigar smoking, and making special sandwiches. Oscar is slowly simmering like a stew coming to the boil. His voice is low and dead, and you can tell that he's waiting to explode. He tells Murray, who is a cop, he'll pay him two hundred dollars for his gun. When Roy realises that Felix has disinfected the cards he leaves, following Speedy, who has already lost patience with Felix's new cleaning regime. In the course of an escalating argument about why Felix has to have everything just-so, he takes up a cup and goes to throw it against the wall. When he grins, shakes his head at his own impetuosity and puts it back, Oscar goads him into throwing it, telling him it'll make him feel better: he doesn't have to be so controlling all the time, let himself go. Eventually Felix does throw the cup, but a) it hits the wall without breaking (somehow) and b) he hurts his shoulder! Oscar tells him he's a hopeless case. They decide to go out, rather than end up killing each other. In an attempt to break the monotony, draw Felix out of himself and get himself some, Oscar arranges a double date. However of course it doesn't go according to plan; Felix, who only agreed to the date after constant haranguing by Oscar, is ill-at-ease and not at all comfortable, and falls back on the only thing he can think of to keep the dying conversation going when his friend goes to get drinks: his failed marriage. and the two sisters spend the night consoling Felix, crying with him. When they then suggest that the boys come up to their room Oscar is delighted (especially as it's very hot up there and clothes may be an optional extra) but Felix does not want to go. As the girls were very taken with his roommate, Oscar doesn't think there's much point in his going alone. Now there's a wall of silence between the two. Not a word is exchanged, but black looks are. Oscar does his best to spoil Felix's attempts at cleaning, making things dirty and untidy just as Felix gets them sorted, and Felix retaliates by switching off the TV programme Oscar is watching (this is in an era, remember, long before remote controls). Tempers finally snap when Oscar hurls a plate of linguini at the wall, and forbids Felix to clean it up. Their arguments turn violent and Oscar chases Felix up to the roof, then tells him to leave. Felix eventually agrees, but tells Oscar it is on his head, which despite the high-running tempers worries Oscar, considering what happened at the beginning of the movie. Of course, he feels guilty afterwards and he and the guys go looking for his ex-roommate, but it turns out that he has taken refuge in the flat of the two sisters: he's fallen on his feet again! Classic scenes Oh where do I start? This movie has so many! Almost every scene is class, but to pick a few out: "It's linguini, you fool!" Just before their cold-treatment reaches fever pitch, Felix sits at the poker table with his dinner. Oscar, annoyed at Felix just having turned his ball game off on the TV, comes over and says "Get that spaghetti off my poker table!" Felix just sits there, laughing as if at some private joke, which makes Oscar even more angry. "What's so funny?" he demands, and Felix sniggers "That's not spaghetti: it's linguini, you fool!" Whereupon Oscar grabs the plate, takes it into the kitchen, flings it against the wall and declares "Now it's garbage!" Sinuses Already demonstrated in the attached YouTube, it's a hilarious scene which shows how neurotic Felix is, and how much of a pain he can be as he tries to clear his sinuses in a restaurant, while everyone looks on and wonders if there's something wrong with him. Felix, though, is so wrapped up in himself that he can't see the looks he's getting, and anyway, to him this is normal behaviour. He just doesn't even consider that it could be seen as odd. "Not quite a perfect date" The scene where Felix, left alone with the girls while Oscar fixes the drinks (seriously: how long can that take? It seems to be about ten minutes before he returns) desperately searching for conversational topics, takes out the pictures of his kids, leading to a sobbing session as he recalls his family, Cecily her own dead husband and Gwendolyn her failed relationship. Oscar breezes back in, expecting to see everyone chatting and laughing, and is confronted by a scene straight out of a wake! "Poker was never meant to be played like this!" Havign established himself at Oscar's home, Felix makes sure everyone at the card game has (and uses) coasters for their drinks, eats over the plates, and sprays air freshener around like it's going out of fashion. He also plugs in a dehumidifier, which one of the guys complains is "sucking all the air out of the room". When the guys realise though that he has washed the cards they're playing with, it's the final straw and the game breaks up. "A triple play!" I know, and want to know, nothing about baseball, but apparently a "triple play" is rare? When Oscar, commentating on a game (he's a sports writer) has a chance to see one, he is distracted by a totally unnecessary phone call from Felix, and can't believe that he's missed it! "Looney Tunes" When Felix is trying to take the vacuum cleaner into the kitchen, he leaves the cable strung out on the living room floor and tries to pull it after him. Oscar quite deliberately steps on it, stopping him. Looking in, Felix sees what he's at and loops the cable around his shoulder, ready to give it a hard tug. Just as he does, Oscar lifts his foot and the sudden release of pressure and his own momentum send Felix flying, and we hear the sounds of crashing, things breaking, things falling. With a satisfied grin on his face, Oscar walks off. "What time do you call this?" As they prepare for their big date, Oscar comes in late and Felix takes him to task, asking him why he is late and almost sobbing that his meatloaf wil be ruined. He's just like a wife, even complaining about "slaving over a meal" while Oscar makes some excuse about working late, which Felix triumphantly dismisses, saying he phoned the office and knows that Oscar was at the bar! Absolutely hilarious! QUOTES Murray: "Did you know Felix was once locked in the john overnight? He wrote out his entire will on half a roll of toilet paper!" Murray: "Aren't you going to look at your cards first?" Oscar: "What for? I'm gonna bluff anyway!" Oscar: "I got ... um... brown sandwiches and green sandwiches. What do you want?" Murray: "What's the green?" Oscar: "It's either very new cheese or very old meat." Oscar (on the phone to his five-year old from California): "Yeah, I got your letter honey thanks. It took three weeks! Next time, you ask mommy to give you a stamp." (Pause) "Yeah, I know honey, but you're not supposed to draw it on!" Oscar: "You think you were impossible to live with? Blanche used to ask me when I wanted to eat. I'd say I don't know, I'm not hungry. Then three in the morning I'd wake her up and say now!" Oscar: "Hello? Frances?" Felix: "I'm not here. You haven't heard from me, you don't know where I am, I didn't call, you didn't see me and I'm not here. I am not here!" Oscar: "Yes Frances, he's here." Felix: "Where's your coaster?" Roy: "What?" Felix: "Your coaster. The little round thing you put your glass on." Roy (considers): "I think I bet it." Speedy (heading out the door in frustration, and thus breaking up the game) to Oscar: "You've got no-one to blame but yourself! It's your fault! You stopped him from killing himself!" Gwendolyn: "What field of endeavour are you engaged in?" Felix: "I write the news for television." Gwendolyn: "Oh! Fascinating. Where do you get your ideas from?" Felix: "You're asking to hear something I don't want to say, but if I do say it I think you oughta hear it!" Oscar: "You got anything on your chest beside your chin you'd better get it off." Felix: "All right then you asked for it! You're a wonderful guy Oscar! You've done verything for me! If it weren't for you I don't know what would have happened to me! You took me in here, you gave me a place to live, something to live for. I'm never going to forget you for that, Oscar! You're tops with me!" Oscar: "Why doesn't he hear me? I know I'm talking: I recognise my voice!" Felix: "In other words, you're throwing me out?" Oscar: "Not in other words! Those are the perfect ones!" Why do I love this movie? Apart from the already-mentioned presence of both Lemmon and Matthau instantly ensuring a great film, Neil Simon's script is pure gold. The way he writes it so that one of the guys is essentially the wife, concerned about cleanliness, good food and throwing little temper fits when he doesn't get his way, making it seem as if the guys are married to each other in all but name, is what makes this movie work. There's also no hint of homosexuality at all: this is just two guys living together who begin as friends and by the end are at each other's throats. The chemistry of course between the two leads is also what makes it work. Admittedly, Tony Randall and Jack Klugman did well in the TV version, but then they really based their performances on those of the two masters here. The Odd Couple brings to the forefront all the little niggly things we know about, but tend to overlook in our partner, whether they're a wife, live-in girfriend or roommate. All those annoying little noises. The sticky notes left in strategic places. Oscar tells Felix at one point he hates those sticky notes: "I woke to find one on my pillow: We are out of cornflakes FU. Took me three weeks to work out that "FU" stood for Felix Ungar!" The arguments, the recriminations. Things done one way because that person has always done things that way and has no wish to change, despite the fact that the other person hates doing things that way. The pure hell, in other words, of living with someone you have known but have never shared a house, room or apartment with before. Felix is a neurotic, cleaning-obssessed, health freak who can't believe that someone would rather leave a table untidy rather than clean it up, or that a man could eat a day-old sandwich, or that people can't see the benefits of having a dehumidifier. Oscar, on the other hand, is, and let's be totally fair to him, a slob, who enjoys doing things his way. He's not prepared to change, and to be honest the way he goes on you can see why his wife threw him out. To be fair, Felix must have driven his wife mad too. These are two examples of total opposites, these men, who should never be brought into close contact with each other, for any appreciable length of time. They certainly should not even dream of living together. But underneath it all, under the simmering resentment, the shocked anger, the disbelief and the accusations, both men are friends and at one point Oscar - tough, hard, ornery Oscar Madison - breaks down in front of Felix, begging him to leave him alone before he does something he'll regret. This rather poignant scene is then totally trumped as Felix, seeing Oscar go into the kitchen, cattily declares "Walk on the paper: I just washed the floor!" Oscar then does snap, and chases Felix out of the apartment and onto the roof. It's a buddy movie, a cautionary tale, a comment on the relationships between two people, even of the same gender, living together. At the beginning of the film, as Oscar offers to take Felix in, he quips "Come and stay with me, Felix. I'm proposing here: what do you want, a ring?" Later he will discover how appropriate that remark is, for Felix ends up driving him as mad as any nagging wife. And of course Oscar bugs Felix too. Why can't he just eat over the plate, smoke less, clean up after himself? It's a marriage made in Hell, and pure classic comedy gold, the likes of which we're not likely to see again. |
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First Posted in The Couch Potato, August 5 2013 http://static.rogerebert.com/uploads...dT1Kp43DZi.jpg Title: Downfall (Der Untergang) Year: 2004 Genre: War/Historical Starring: Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler Alexandra Maria Lara as Traudl Junge Ulrich Matthes as Josef Goebbels Corinna Harfouch as Magda Goebbels Julianne Kohler as Eva Braun Heino Ferch as Albert Speer Ulrich Noethen as Heinrich Himmler Thomas Thieme as Martin Bormann Director: Oliver Hirschbiegel Writer: Bernd Eichinger There are, of course, as everyone knows, hundreds, maybe thousands, or more, war films. This is not surprising, when you consider that the Second World War was over seventy years ago now, and there has been a steady stream of directors, writers and actors who either took part in the greatest war the world has ever known, or wish to pay tribute to those who did. It was a massive world event, and it's only right it should be commemorated on film, both to praise the courage of those who fought and died for our freedom and to warn future generations against another such conflict. But the vast majority of these films have, not surprisingly, looked at the war from the side of the Allies. You would expect that: the Allies won, after all, and who doesn't like to celebrate a victory, particularly one which, ostensibly, freed the world from tyranny. War movies, on the other hand, seen from the perspective of the Germans appear to be few and far between. Again, this is no surprise: Germany both started and lost the war, and at its conclusion had to carry the stigma of being on the losing side. In post-war Europe, Germans were seen as much as pariahs as Jews were in pre-war and wartime Germany. So they weren't exactly going to be queuing up to tell their side of the story. Not that there would be much to tell. As long as you stick to history and don't try to distort it, there's not a lot of good to be seen from the German side. Naturally, as in any war, there were good men and women on both sides, ordinary people who fought for a cause they believed in. These people were generally not terribly politically motivated: they fought for their country and their family, and their honour, and they believed in what they were struggling for. Most may not have known about the atrocities being committed in their name, though it must be supposed some if not all must have had some idea of what was going on. But these were not politicians, or SS guards, or Gestapo officers. These were just men (mostly) who hoped to live to the next day, to return one day to see the families they had left behind. They were men who shivered in the freezing Russian winter, swatted at the flies and sweated in the baking sun of the African desert, or flew in bombers or fighters over England or Europe, anxious to complete the mission and get home safely. While of course we must be careful not to over romanticise or too closely sympathise with these people, films like Enemy At the Gates and Das Boot do a good job of showing us that not all Germans were ravening, evil Nazis who wanted to take over the world and considered certain races subhuman. Wars are not won - or lost - by mad genius and canny commanders alone. Without the ordinary footsoldiers to do their bidding such men would languish in dark rooms, plotting their schemes but never able to put them into practice. The only casualties would in all likelihood be plastic or tin soldiers. Without willing manpower, wars would never occur. More's the pity, there's always willing manpower. Now, I could not say with any degree of certainty that this is the best of the German-made war movies I've ever seen, as I've seen very little; a handful at best. But of the ones I've seen it is far and away the jewel in the crown, and I was extremely impressed by it. The fact that it runs for over three hours, is in black and white and subtitled makes the fact I not only lasted through it, but was disappointed when it was over, even more special. I'm not a great one for subtitled movies, though you'll see a few crop up in this journal from time to time. So, the movie. Well, as I say it's a long one - over three hours in some cuts - and of course most of the story will be known by anyone who knows anything about World War II, so I'll be briefly skipping over the plot, otherwise we'll be here all night. Essentially, the movie opens in November of 1942, with the Reich three years away from defeat but at the moment the power in Europe, indeed the world, though by now the Japanese are no doubt making their presence felt on the other side of the world. Hitler is looking for a secretary, and has called five of the best to his retreat. He talks to them all briefly before selecting Traudl Humps, whom he then engages to take his dictation. The film is told as part of her recollections, her memoirs if you will. At this late stage of his wartime career, with the debacle of Stalingrad behind him and the Battle of Britain lost, with his abortive Russian campaign in tatters, Hitler looks old and tired, but to the women he appears benign. More that that: to German women (and men) he is no less than a god, a fearless leader, the man who has promised to return them to their former glory, and despite the setbacks thus far most have still great confidence in der Fuhrer. The narrative switches two and half years on. It is now April 1945, and even as the Allies, led by the Red Army, close in on Berlin preparations are under way for Hitler's 56th birthday. He, however, is more angry to find how close the enemy is to his capital; apparently he was unaware they had advanced this far. Himmler wishes him to leave the city, afraid that if he stays, when Berlin falls there will be no opportunity to sue for peace. All ministries are abandoning the city, burning or otherwise destroying their files, but Hitler refuses to leave, saying he's tired. Himmler decides to contact the Allies, believing his Fuhrer doomed and seeing his own rise to power, even if it's only at the sufferance of the soon to be victorious Allies. Hitler is not about to admit defeat, ordering armies that are ten times smaller than their Russian enemies into battle, even though his generals ask how it is supposed to be done, and know the war is lost. Goebbels, the propaganda minister, ever the politician, says that the Americans will side with them against the Russians. Hitler refuses to allow the evacuation of the old and the wounded, the women and children. He wants to pull everyone down with him into his own personal Gottedamerung; he believes the German people have failed him. Their will has not been strong enough, their faith in him has deserted them and they have become weak. They deserve to die. Everyone deserves to die. His generals begin to discuss what is to be done. The Fuhrer is losing - has lost - touch with reality, and everybody now wants to do anything they can to save their own necks. Even ending up in an Allied prison has to be a better choice than dying pointlessly here in the bunker, or out in the streets of the rapidly-collapsing centre of the Reich. Traudl Humps berates herself for taking the job as Hitler's secretary, since this has now quite possibly made her a target, more than just a German girl. Eva Braun, determined to deny reality as much as Hitler, declares they will go upstairs and have a party, and while Berlin shakes to the explosions of artillery shells and plaster falls from the ceilings, the lights going off then on again, she immerses herself in her own personal fantasy, pretending that what is going on outside is not happening, probably because to face such a solid fact is to court insanity, or at least, a different type of insanity. But when a shell hits the room and they are all driven back underground like rats scurrying back to their sewer, reality isn't long about establishing itself. SS Doctor Schenke, searching for medical supplies to be brought to the bunker, finds a hospital wherein there are only corpses and abandoned patients; everyone else, including doctors and nurses, have fled. Hitler continues to orchestrate phantom strategies, but when he is told one of the generals, whose attack was central to his plan, could not do so, he flies into a rage. He does not seem to be able to grasp the fact that the general did not disobey orders: he failed to attack because it was impossible for him to. His force was outnumbered and in reality, the only strategy the Nazis have now is defence, and even that is a poor possibility. Any talk of attack, turning the tide, surprise offensives, is pure madness. From outside his office everyone can now hear as Hitler gives vent to his fury, talking about executing his generals, how everyone is against him, and it's quite clear now that he has passed beyond the limits of denial and into total, dumb, unreasoning and illogical insanity. He is almost foaming at the mouth, blaming everyone else for his gargantuan failure to win the war, and there is a light in his eyes like the fires of hell. Women outside cry, men shake their heads as they finally realise and accept the terrible, inescapable truth: that their Fuhrer, the man they have looked up to for the last seven years or more, the man who was to have put Germany back on its feet and who would lead them to a glorious new dawn, is gone, and in his place is a rabid lunatic who is determined to take them all down with him when the city burns and the Russians arrive to lay waste to everything. Magda Goebbels and their children arrive at the bunker. The parents have made a suicide pact, and it includes slaying their five children. Hitler has since slid back into his fantasy world, telling General Keitel that they must rebuild the Reich. He rages at a telegram from Goerring (who is never seen in the movie; odd, as he was one of the pivotal figures of the Nazi movement and second-in-command to Hitler himself) where the Reichsmarshall asks for permission to take over the reins of power. Hitler considers it treason of course, and lays the blame for everything that has gone wrong at his feet. He declares Goerring is to be stripped immediately of all his power, and should Hitler not survive the war he is to be executed as a traitor. Speer comes back to the bunker, but he has not come to die with Hitler; he has come to say goodbye to the Fuhrer. He calls in on Magda, trying to get her to see the selfishness and pointlessness of killing her children, but she truly believes a world without the Nazi party is not one she wants them growing up in. He goes then to see Hitler, pleading for mercy for the German people, but Hitler does not care about the people. He actually wants them all to die, as he considers them unworthy. Speer then admits that he has disobeyed the "scorched earth" orders Hitler had given, to destroy everything that stood, in order that some part of Germany have some hope of survival and rebirth. The Fuhrer hardly seems to hear him; he does not rage, he does not condemn, he does not demand reasons. He is an old man now; tired, spent, defeated. He waits for death, even as his city, his country, waits for the final blow as the Allied forces smash into the city, tasting victory. Even so he appoints another head of the Luftwaffe, now that he has dismissed, in his absence, Goerring and branded him a traitor. He still believes somewhere in his addled mind that the German air force can be rebuilt, that it will be afforded the chance to be resurrected. But when word comes through of Himmler's attempts to surrender in the name of the Nazis, he is infuriated. The one man who he had always considered loyal, a kindred spirit, turns out to be a traitor? He can't believe it, and another little chip is knocked off his sanity. So much so that he tells his inner circle that he has decoyed the enemy into attacking Berlin, and that even now his generals are massing in the north and the south, waiting to come in in a pincer movement and surround the Allies, winning the day for Germany and delivering the crushing blow that will both liberate Berlin and bring about the final victory for the Nazis in the war. Of course, no such attack is being mounted. His generals are scattered far and wide, their power completely depleted and the best they can hope for is to survive long enough to escape, surrender or die with their armies. There will be no salvation for Berlin, no last cavalry charge, no incredible escape from the fate that is now bearing down upon it. Hitler's armies are gone, his city is doomed and his rapidly-unravelling sanity cannot cope with this, so he makes himself believe that it is all part of his plan, and that he will in the end, through brilliant strategy, save the day. Like the Roman Empire in Caligula's day, Berlin has descended into an anarchy of hedonism. Those who realise they cannot get out of the city have decided to throw all inhibition to the wind, and enjoy their last hours before the Russians arrive. Booze, drugs, sex: it's all available to those who want it, and Berlin looks on as her denizens, her children, forget her and leave her to her own devices; as she prepares for rape and destruction, they have all essentially abandoned her. Traudl Junge (now married) is called to type up Hitler's will, and the Fuhrer marries Eva Braun. It's interesting to note that Hitler sees himself as above his own law, as when he is asked - as he has set down must be asked under the racial law - to prove he is of Aryan descent before getting married, he shrugs off the question irritably. He is the Fuhrer; the law does not apply to him. Braun marries Hitler, even though he has just had her brother-in-law executed as a traitor, and knowing their marriage will only last a few hours at best. He makes arrangements to have his body and hers burned after their mutual suicide, fearing that the Russians would display his corpse if they were to get their hands on it, as surely they would. He even has his own dog put down, unwilling to allow the animal live on after he has died. Eva Braun, now Eva Hitler, makes Traudl Junge promise her that she will try to get out of Berlin before it is overrun, and she agrees. Frau Goebbels makes a desperate, impassioned plea to the Fuhrer at the end, trying to make him change his mind, leave Berlin instead of take his own life, but there is a weary finality in Hitler's eyes which is not mirrored in the almost dancing madness that shows in the eyes of his new wife. With a crazy wide smile on her lips, Frau Braun looks almost eager to die, as if this will accord her some great honour, rather than seal her fate as one of the most hated and perhaps pitied, certainly ridiculed, women in history. Soon it is done, and the bodies of the man who would be ruler of the world and his wife of a few hours are taken outside and burned, as per his last orders. Out in the burning, blasted streets a weird sort of symmetry holds court: loyal Nazis arrest and hang people they see as cowards or traitors, despite the death of their leader, while weaving through these death parties, revellers and drunks sway and totter their way towards oblivion, insensate to what is going on around them. If there is a Hell, Berlin must come close to being that place at this moment. Magda Goebbels has a Nazi doctor administer a sedative to her children; her chilling "Goodnight children" are the last words the children will ever hear, for once they are asleep she returns with poison capsules for them all. It's only as the last is administered that she allows herself a brief moment of weakness, sliding down the wall outside their dormitory. But when her husband tries to comfort her she shakes off his hand angrily. It seems that she blames him for things having come to this pass. Though she idolised and loved Hitler, perhaps now she wonders what their life might have been like had they never allied with him? Frau Junge finally decides the time has come to make her move, and begins preparations to leave the city. Disguised as an ordinary German footsoldier she joins the exodus of the thousands of others trying to make it out of doomed Berlin. In the company of a young boy, she manages to slip away, as Berlin burns behind her, a stark testament to one man's twisted vision of the world, and what he was willing to do to make it come about. And to the people who followed, obeyed, fought and died for him. And perhaps worst of all, the people who did nothing while evil was perpetrated in their name. Those who turned away, closed the curtains when the knock came next door, when the jackboot kicked in the door, stopped their ears to the screams and the cries, and tried not to see the dark, thick plumes hanging daily over places like Dachau and Auschwitz. The people who tried to tell themselves all was normal, or that there was nothing they could do, and who forgot the old adage to their cost: for evil to triumph, it is enough that good men - and women - do nothing. |
Notes:
The incredible arrogance of the Nazis has been proven down through history, most keenly during the Nuremberg trials, where even when faced with their awful, heinous deeds, few if any admitted their guilt; they all, or almost all, believed they had done the right thing, what was required of them, what was necessary. Here, Heinrich Himmler, leader of the feared SS, clings to these ideals when he talks to a subordinate and confesses he is concerned about meeting General Eisenhower: "Should I shake his hand or give the Nazi salute?" he wonders. The fact that he could even expect to be entertained by the leader of the Allies, never mind actually shake his hand, speaks volumes not only about Himmler, but about the leadership of the Reich in general. They lived, mostly, in their own world and nothing would shake them out of their fantasy. Reality was not in vogue in Nazi Germany if it did not conform to the standards they had set down. Hitler, of course, is the most tragicomic example of this. As he considers the destruction of his beloved Berlin, he comments to Albert Speer that at least it will be easier to rebuild once the city has been reduced to rubble. He believes a new Berlin will rise out of the ashes of the old, and rather like the emperor Nero in Ancient Rome, convinces himself that the old must be swept away for this to happen. Of course, technically, in time and after a great deal of hardship this will happen, but it will be despite Hitler, not because of him. There's a bitterly touching scene near the beginning of the film where a father is trying to convince his son, who has joined the defence of the city with others barely past childhood, to come home. He outlines the pointlessness of dying for a city which is doomed, a war which is lost, but his son calls him a coward and runs from him. In an epilogue to this, we later see a young girl, who had been with the group, watch her friends take flight as they are overrun. Handing her gun to her commander, she asks him to shoot her, which he does. Having done so, the officer frets for a moment, quite obviously unsure what to do now. In the end, he shoots himself. In that one little scene is encapsulated the complete insanity, and the rabid fanaticism of the Nazi party. They would rather die than surrender. Of course, in the girl's case she must have feared rape from the oncoming Russians, but even so, she preferred to die (with honour!) than surrender or try to escape. Another bitter, though in no way touching scene is when Dr. Schenke come across a small group of soldiers - Griefkommando - who have been tasked with hunting down any traitors, anyone who tries to get out of the city. The officer in charge has two old men up against the wall, and despite Schenke's attempts to stop him, kills both men. The Griefkommandant clearly enjoys his work, calling the men traitors but it's obvious that he doesn't really care: he's just a thug who is happy to have a chance to dominate someone and kill anyone he likes. Goebbels, meanwhile, is about to take the coward's way out. While Himmler actually believes he can broker a peace deal with the US Army, the propaganda minister knows the game is up, and he can only look forward to being hanged if captured. He has done enough in the war to merit that penalty twenty times over. So he has decided to take his own life, and in an insane suicide pact his wife will also die, after they have poisoned their children. It's almost beyond belief to watch the doting father and the proud mother present their five children to Hitler, knowing that in a few short hours they will all be dead. Frau Goebbels turns out to be as cold and unfeeling as her husband; which is not to say that she does not love her children, for any mother would of course. But she truly and deeply believes that a Germany without the Fuhrer is not a place she wants her children to grow up in, so she convinces herself that she is performing an act of mercy. Hitler discusses suicide, too, with Eva Braun, and tells her shooting herself in the mouth is the quickest way, but she says she wants to have a nice corpse, so will take poison. Like children asking for sweets, Frau Junge (previously Humps) and Gerda both request a capsule, and Hitler, like an old grandfather doling out treats to his favourite nieces, obliges. It's debatable whether, as he sits with the children around him, the youngest on his knee, and they sing to him, Hitler realises they are to be killed. I don't know if he even knows his propaganda minister is considering suicide. But if he does, he presents a forlorn figure as he watches what he must surely consider the flower of Germanic youth crowd around him, and knowing he is to die soon himself, must wonder how they will fare in the new Germany he has left them, this blighted, scorched, blackened thing which he must barely recognise as his beloved fatherland? The moment when Frau Junge realises the full gravity of what is happening, the hopelessness of their situation is when she is told by Speer that "He (Hitler) needs nobody for what awaits him, least of all you", as he counsels her to get out of the city. She responds by pointing out that the Goebbels are staying, and have brought their children. A sad look and a nod is all it takes to explain to her why this is so, and even in the depths of this despair, she cannot bring herself to believe that any parents would willingly sacrifice their children in this way. Perhaps now she realises the depth of the fanatical devotion to the Fuhrer which remains in some quarters, though not many, and how far those who still follow him are willing to go to prove their loyalty, and evade justice. QUOTES Hitler: "In a war such as this one, there are no civilians". Hitler (to Peter, a boy who has fought in the defence of Berlin; he can't be more than ten, twelve years old, if that): "I wish my generals were as brave as you". He of course means naive; there is little bravery lacking in the generals who command Hitler's military, but unlike Peter, they understand the futility of fighting and dying for a lost cause. In this scene, Hitler does that famous "pinching the cheek" of the boy that we've all seen in the newsreels on hundreds of documentaries about World War II: nice touch, I feel. Traudl Junge: "I can't go; where would I go? My parents and all my friends warned me: don't get involved with the Nazis." Interesting turnaround: when we see Fraulein Humps (before she is married and changes her name to Junge) in 1942 she is delighted to have landed such a plum assignment, one of the highest and most coveted positions surely that a German woman could expect to rise to. But now, as it all comes tumbling down, literally, around her ears, she whines about making the wrong choice. She fears now that if she makes a run for it and is captured, she won't just be another German woman to be raped; she'll be Hitler's secretary, possibly an important prisoner. She may be interrogated, tortured, imprisoned. Even executed. Though she does not relish sitting in the Berlin bunker, listening to the sounds of the approaching artillery and waiting for the end, it is still preferable to taking her chances out in the wartorn streets. Hitler: "If the war is lost, what does it matter if the people are lost too? The primary necessities of life of the German people aren't relevant, right now. On the contrary, we'd best destroy them ourselves. Our people turned out weak, and according to the laws of nature they should die out." Far from being the saviour of his people, Hitler has turned out to be their doom, but now that they are doomed it quickly becomes apparent that he only cared for the German people as long as he could use them, as long as he could push forward his plans and glorify himelf off their backs. Now that his dreams have all come crashing down, he blames them for not being strong, not being the people he imagined them to be, and sees the imminent defeat of his armies as their fault. As far as he's concerned, none of them deserve life. He sees them as nothing; mere pawns in his game and now that the game has been lost he is prepared to throw them into the fire rather than try to save any. Hitler: "What remains after this battle is only the inferior. The superior will have fallen." What a fallacy! How could a superior force fall to an inferior one (well, David and Goliath, yes, but generally) and if the "superior" falls, then surely it can no longer be considered as such? Rather, Hitler should be admitting he has been beaten by a superior force - superior in numbers, in strategy, in will - and accept that his army, despite what he earnestly believes or believed, is the inferior one. There is no other conclusion that can be drawn. But Hitler refuses to see this, and sulks like a child who has suddenly discovered he is after all not the best ball player, or runner, or fighter. Traudl Junge: "It's all so unreal. It's like a dream you can't get out of." Indeed it is. As Berlin shudders to the approach of the Red Army, as the Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years crumbles in less than seven, as Hitler's final hours leak away and his generals begin to desert him, Eva Braun and her cohorts determinedly, defiantly dance as if nothing was wrong, as if the music and the swaying and the singing can keep at bay the dread spectre that is even now placing colossal dark footprints in her beloved city, tearing it apart like a matchstick toy. It certainly does seem unreal. But it is very real, and the truth has finally come looking, like a landlord with an eviction notice, for Hitler and Nazi Germany. Officer: "The Fuhrer was very impressed with your report. He has placed you in command of the defence of Berlin." General Weidling: "I'd preferred if he had executed me!" Hitler: "I never went to the academy. But I conquered all of Europe on my own!" Well, that's not strictly true, is it? Hitler gave the orders, made the plans, was the leading light and figurehead of the Nazi movement, but it was his generals, like Rommel and Keitel, and the ordinary soldiery of the Wehrmact that conquered Europe for him. His was the masterplan for the Master Race, but it was simple, honest, courageous if misguided men - as well as Nazi thugs and brutes - who brought about that plan, who fought and killed and died for his ideal, who made his dark vision a reality. Hitler personally never lifted a finger in the war against the enemy. He never shot a soldier, drove a tank or flew in a Messerschmidt escorting a Heinkel III on a bombing run over London. He never ran across fields or ducked behind bushes, watched his comrades die in his arms or heard them calling for their mothers at the end. He never even laughed with them as they pushed the British back to Dunkirk and kicked them out of Europe. Like most generals, most commanders-in-chief, he was safe in his headquarters when the blood was running in the streets and the tank tracks were crushing his opponents. Like most people in command during war, he has no physical blood on his hands, though in reality the blood of millions of men, women and children coat his shaking hands like glue that will not come off. Brigadefuhrer Mohnke: "Your Volksturm are easy prey for the Russians. They have neither combat experience nor good weapons." Goebbels: "Their unconditional belief in the final victory makes up for that." Mohnke: "Herr Minister, without weapons these men can't fight.Their deaths will be pointless." Goebbels: "I don't pity them. Do you hear me, I don't pity them! These people called this upon themselves. We didn't force them; the people gave us a mandate. And now they're paying for it." It's clear from this exchange that Goebbels subscibes to Hitler's belief that the German people asked for this by allowing the Nazi party into power, and that now that it's all crumbling they deserve their fate. He doesn't care about the Volksturm, the regiments hastily cobbled together and made up of mostly old men and young boys in a final, desperate attempt to defend the city. They are merely a delaying tactic to hold back the Russians for as long as possible. But it must also be said that they are willingly thrown to the wolves in almost a gesture of contempt for them: cannon-fodder, no use for anything but that. Like broken toys they are thrown away and forgotten about. Eva Braun, in a letter to her son: "Our entire ideology is going down the drain, and with it, everything that made life beautiful and worthwhile. After the Fuhrer and National Socialism, there's nothing left to live for. That's why I brought the children too. They're too good for the life that awaits them". Speer: "Think about it. The children have a right to a future." Magda Goebbels: "If National Socialism dies, there will be no future." Hitler: "This so called humanity is religious drivel. Compassion is an eternal sin. To feel compassion for the weak is a betrayal of nature. The strong can only triumph if the weak are exterminated. Being loyal to this law I've never had compassion." |
THE STARS OF THE SHOW
Bruno Ganz, as Adolf Hitler It would of course be odd if, in a film centred around him, Hitler were not the key figure here, but it's the portrayal of the Nazi dictator by Bruno Ganz that really strikes me. Unfortunately I don't speak German, and anyway my copy came bizarrely with some sort of Slavic audio track, but in any case it's subtitled so I just switched the sound off, but commentators remark upon Ganz's voice and accent being uncannily, even eerily close to that of the Fuhrer himself. Nevertheless, even without sound the man can still convey the passions, insanity, anger and refusal to admit defeat or take responsibility that make you see him not as Bruno Ganz, actor, but as the feared and hated leader of the Third Reich. As the movie revolves around Hitler's final hours, there are no get-out clauses, like speeches to the masses from Nuremberg, where video footage can be studied and any actor worth his salt could competently duplicate Hitler's mannerisms and movements. In taking on the role of Hitler, Ganz has accepted that he must deliver a performance of a man who is broken, bitter and defeated, but determined to go down in a blaze of glory, to cheat his enemies of the final victory of displaying his dead body for all to see. He shows us the narcissism of the man, the blind faith in his own ability and his rage against everyone who is seen to have let him down. We see virtual spittle fly from his mouth and his eyes crease up like a mental patient's as he lets loose a tirade of abuse on those he considers traitors, weak and disloyal. We see his body shake with apoplexy and his fists bunch in rage, slam down on tables and desks, and we see too his advancing Parkinson's begin to take hold: Hitler walks shakily, bent over, his hand trembling uncontrollably as he hides it behind his back. Adolf Hitler could never be seen as a sympathetic figure, nor should he be, but here Ganz makes him into a more tragic, almost pitiable man than a monster, while still showing that the rages he can fly into and the cold calmness with which he orders executions, or commands men to stay and fight to the death in a lost cause, marked him as a dangerous lunatic. For years, that dangerous lunatic was the most powerful man in Europe, and his long dark shadow fell across most of the world as it struggled to get out from beneath it, and fight its way back to the sunlight. Ganz also (although this must really be credited to the writer and director) avoids portraying Hitler as a parody, a cartoon, a black villain (though he was), by endeavouring to show some of the more human traits of the man who almost destroyed the world. He loves his dog, he loves his wife. He sits with his nephews and nieces on his knee. He thanks Frau Junge for her help as he goes to commit suicide. Such human traits are needed, because otherwise Hitler is a two-dimensional figure, and no matter how evil a person is there is always some spark of humanity within them somewhere; perhaps they are kind to their mother, or like animals, or give to charities. Nobody is one hundred percent evil, and to present them as such would be too easy, too banal. Look for the good in anyone and you'll find it; it may be a tiny spark but you will find it. But Ganz and Hirschfield are careful not to allow Hitler's few small redemptive qualities to outshine his innate brutality. Even as we see that he loves Eva Braun, he tenderly rejects her pleas for clemency for her brother-in-law and tells her kindly that all traitors must die. When she, tears shining in her eyes, looking for mercy in the face of her soon-to-be husband that is not there, asks why, at this late point in the war, when all is lost, he must pronounce such a doom on her brother-in-law, he snarls "It is my wish!" revealing the truth behind Adolf Hitler: that he cares nothing for anyone, and all who oppose him must die, even if it is almost too late to exact that vengeance, even if the vengeance itself will serve no purpose. Looking at Ganz, it's sometimes hard to separate actor from historical figure, and you feel at times that you've somehow gone back in time, and are watching the final days of Adolf Hitler as they unfold in the bunker below Berlin. The fact that the movie is shot entirely in monochrome adds to that feeling of being back in 1945. It must have been hard for Bruno Ganz to have taken on the role of such a figure in Germany: pilloried, hated and despised by so many and yet there are those who secretly hope to bring back the ideals he espoused, and so it was important that the film not be seen as glorifying Hitler in any way. It was important that though he be seen as a tragic figure there be no sympathy for him, no understanding, no attempt at redemption. History must also be reported as it happened; no revisionism. Those who committed unspeakable acts must face them in the film, not pretend they did not do what history proves they did. Even at the end, Hitler's one comfort is that he cleansed Germany of so many Jews. He has no regret on that score, believing he did the right thing. German director Wim Wenders is on record as accusing the film of trivialising the role Hitler played in World War II and of glorifying him. I don't see it. There's nothing here that makes me feel "this was a misunderstood genius", or even makes me feel sorry for him. Uppermost in your mind all the time is the knowledge of what he has done, what has been perpetrated at his hands, and that's something that there will never be any understanding of, nor forgiveness for. I personally think Ganz is far and away the best Adolf Hitler I have ever seen on film. Alexandra Maria Lara as Traudl Junge When the film opens, the aged Frau Junge is relating her experiences in the service of Hitler, and lamenting that she was so taken in by his charisma, as were so many millions of Germans. Initially we see her delighted to get the job as his personal secretary, but as the war begins to turn against Germany and defeat seems inevitable, she operates in the film almost as a disconnected spirit, an observer watching the fall of the man she had considered to be the greatest German ever, and she sees too the way his people react, now that he has been proven to be fallible. Many turn against him, though in private, like Himmler trying to sue for peace and Goerring wishing to take over in Hitler's stead; many desert him, while the more loyal or stubborn refuse to surrender. Some, like Goebbels and his wife, decide suicide is the only path remaining to them, while Eva Braun, infatuated with him and it would seem perhaps fascinated by death, is happy to die with him. She sees how the great Nazi empire was really held together by the almost supernatural strength of this man's charisma and will, and that when it is clear that he is losing his grip, and the war has turned against him, his empire begins to fragment as people lose faith in him and try to save their own skins. Hitler's fantasy orders, commanding armies that are not there into battle, thinking he will be able to spring a surprise attack on the Russians and trap them, and thus win the war, show everyone that he has lost touch with reality, and they can no longer depend on him. Frau Junge is torn as she watches the man she respected fall apart, and as the full horror of what he has done begins to become apparent she wonders what is to become of her. She watches Eva Braun dance and party as if nothing is wrong, wilfully refusing to accept reality, witnesses firsthand the cold determination of Magda Goebbels, who reasons that her children cannot survive in a world without the Nazi party and Hitler, and hears, as does everyone else, the slow disintegration of the mind of her Fuhrer and he slips deeper and deeper into a fantasy in which he expects still to turn the tide of the war. In ways, Trudl Junge represents all the idealistic, starstruck young women, and men, who followed Hitler into perdition, believing everything he said and trusting totally in his ability to lead them back to glory. She realises much later how wrong she was, as she relates in the film's closing minutes seeing the grave of a young German woman who was the same age as her, executed by the Nazis in the same month she signed on as Hitler's secretary. As she shakes her head and her eyes mist, her final words, indeed, the final words of the film, hang heavy in the air: "Youth is no excuse." Why do I love this movie? I absolutely did not expect to, and so it took me by complete surprise that it affected me as it did. I have never seen, nor do I think I ever will see, a more faithful and chilling portrayal of Hitler on the screen. The movie also shys away from explaining what Hitler was about, trying to see things through his eyes or even trying to excuse or justify what he did. It also similarly avoids the easy-to-fall-into trap of damning him, creating a two-dimensional caricature of ridicule and disgust. "Downfall" certainly shows the Fuhrer's madness, and no apologies are offered for what he did, but the crowning achievement I believe of the movie is that it's told through the eyes of an ordinary German girl; not a rabid Nazi, but someone who truly believed Hitler would be Germany's salvation, and who realises all too late that she has placed her faith in a madman, that she has, for the last three years, served a tyrant and a despot, and that he cares less about his people than an abuser of animals cares about his pets. It's her realisation, tearful and horrified, as the film unfolds, that she has been party to such horrors, even if they were unknown to her, that shocks and revolts her, and in many ways she is a surrogate and metaphor for the entire German people, who were prepared to in some cases wilfully and in others blindly ignore all that was perpetrated in their name. The film newsreels of the people of Auschwitz being taken to see what had been taking place there is harrowing, but scarier yet is the look on some - not all - of the faces of these ordinary Germans. That looks says, without words, "so what?" And it is this deep, ingrained belief in their own superiority and hatred of jews that sadly ensures that though Hitler is now just ashes, like his dream of empire, a thousand-year reich that lasted barely ten in all, Nazism and fascism is still with us today, and probably always will be. For some people, history will always repeat itself, as they refuse to learn from it. A very sad truth about we stupid humans. |
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First Posted in The Couch Potato, December 7 2013 http://eatwithjoy.files.wordpress.co...16a37b9c5l.gif Title: The Seventh Seal Year: 1957 Genre: World Cinema Starring: Max von Sydow as the Soldier Gunnar Bjornstrand as Jons Bengkt Ekerot as Death Nils Poppe as Jof Bibi Anderson as Mia Ake Fridell as Plog Inga Gill as Lisa Director: Ingmar Bergman Writer: Ingmar Bergman Perhaps one of the most famous and certainly most iconic films in World Cinema, Ingmar Bergman's “The Seventh Seal” was his ticket to the big time. The movie propelled him to international stardom, leading him to become one of the most respected and influential figures in cinema, directing over forty movies during his lifetime, many of which, like this one, he also wrote. A knight, returning from the Crusades to his native Sweden, thanks God for his safe return. Just then Death appears, and the knight knows that it is his time. The knight, Antonius Block, challenges Death to a game of chess. He is an avid chess player, and prior to the arrival of Death was in the process of setting up a board. Death agrees, more out of amusement it would seem than anything else, and Block tells him that he must promise: as long as the knight can resist Death he may not have him. Should Block somehow defeat Death, then he will live and Death must go on his way. The rules agreed, the game begins. Whatever the rules, it's clear that staying playing is not one of them, as the knight and his squire, Jons, move on from the beach, heading for the town. On the way they come across a hooded figure sitting on the ground, and ask the way to the inn, but the seated figure does not reply. It's soon clear why: he is dead. And horribly disfigured too. Further on, a family of travelling actors camp, and one of their number swears he has seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, though his wife does not believe him. At the local church Block meets a painter, who tells him that the Black Death is rampant in the city, and people are dying in droves. Sick at heart, he goes to the confessional but finds there not a priest but Death, who asks him why he does not want to die. Not recognising the Reaper, Block says he does want to die, but before he goes he wants to understand, to know why God is how He is, to see His face and know that He exists. He does not want to go into the eternal void questioning, unsure. He wants, as Death points out, guarantees. He tells Death that he wishes to perform one last meaningful act in a life filled with careless abandon and aloofness from his fellow human beings, to atone for his coldness and lack of interest in others. He has already revealed his chess strategy to Death before he realises who he has been talking to, and curses himself. As he leaves the church, Block comes across a young girl in stocks. He is told that she has been found guilty of devil worship, and is to be burned in the morning. Intrigued, he asks her if she has indeed seen the Devil but she does not answer. However, having remained silent while he was questioning her, she suddenly begins moaning and keening as soon as the knight leaves, perhaps recognising that someone who might possibly have come to her aid has departed, or perhaps seeing a kindred spirit. They move on, coming to a village where Jons saves a young girl from being raped by a man he recognises as Raval, one who had convinced Block to travel to the Holy Land ten years previously, while he remained behind; it seems he has now devolved to robbing corpses. He spares him, but tells him that if he meets him again Raval will bear the scar for the rest of his life. He asks the girl to come with him, as he will need a housekeeper when he gets home. She is reluctant, but he reminds her that he saved her life, and so she goes with him. In the town they come across the family of actors, who perform a dance and musical piece but are interrupted by a group of dour flagellants, religious doomsayers who foretell the apocalypse (which, as far as they're concerned, is already in progress) and try to placate God and atone for the sins of man by whipping themselves. The entire village sinks to their knees at the sight, but Block and Jons, who have seen the hypocrisy of religion and realised just exactly what they were fighting for in Jerusalem, do not. They watch, stony-eyed, as the zealots pass by. As they arrive at the inn, Jof, the male actor, whose friend Jonas, also an actor, has run off with the blacksmith Plog's wife, is being hassled by Raval, the corpse-robber. Jons makes good on his threat earlier and slices the man's face. They spend an idyllic evening with Jof and his wife Mia, eating strawberries, and Block feels for the first time in a very long while at peace with himself and with the world. Deep questions of theology, the wars of men and even his own impending death seem far away, and he struggles to hold on to the memory as he returns to his chessboard to continue the game against his ancient adversary. However he has now a new view on life, and is not the dour, world-weary soldier he was before meeting and sharing a meal with the actors, and though he has already given away his strategy earlier to Death, who now takes his knight (how symbolic can you get?), Block laughs as he tells Death he has fallen into his trap, as the crusader now puts him in check. Death though is more concerned at the change in the attitude of the knight, and wonders what has happened to have lifted his heart so? But Death has of course a trick or two up his own voluminous sleeve, and casually drops the observation into the conversation that Block and Jons are travelling through the woods with the actors who, he says pointedly, have a little son. He will not say why this information interests him, and the knight begins to worry, his facade of control and relaxation beginning to slip. Before they leave, Jons is accosted by Plog, who begs the squire to allow him accompany them through the woods, but as soon as they are in the woods he spots Jonas exiting with his wife, and gives chase! The two face off, and initially Lisa pushes Jonas to protect her, but suddenly goes back to her husband, exhorting Plog to kill the actor. He fools the blacksmith though, pretending to take his own life in a not-quite-Oscarworthy performance, but it fools the others. As he makes his escape into a tree, the others having gone off, Death approaches. As Jonas watches first in annoyance then in terror, Death saws down the tree: Jonas's time has come. As Block and Jons and the acting couple traverse the forest they notice it's very still and quiet, and they don't like it. Then a cart comes rumbling through but gets stuck in the mud. Block goes to help; it's the woman he spoke to earlier, the one accused of witchcraft. Having helped free the wagon, Block and his allies team up with the soldiers escorting it. There's safety in numbers, especially in this dark, quiet forest. Block takes the opportunity when they rest to again question the woman. He says he wants to meet the Devil, but she can't help him. “I only have to put out my hand and he is there”, she tells him, at least vindicating her accusation. But he can't see the dread one. Though she says the fire won't hurt her he sees fear in her eyes and knows it is only bravado. He gives her some herbs to inure her to the flames. Raval returns, dying of the plague, but there is nothing they can do for him. Block returns to the chessboard to end his game with Death, and when Jof, who is able to see things others cannot, realises who his friend is playing with he becomes terrified and makes a break for it with his wife and child, though she can see nothing and thinks the knight plays alone. Desperately, trying to cover the actor's escape and distract his enemy, Block knocks over some of the pieces, but Death has perfect memory and knows where each piece was. He rearranges them on the board, and the game continues. Of course, there can be only one outcome, and quickly thereafter Block is checkmated. Death has won, and the knight's life is at an end. However Death now reveals that in addition to taking Block's life when next they meet, he will also take everyone who has travelled with him. The fleeing actors feel Death's pursuit of them as they race through the forest and a great storm whips up. Block arrives finally at his castle, reunited with his wife after so many years. They have a final meal with the others in the party - the blacksmith Plog, his wife Lisa and the serving girl - before Death calls at the door and takes them all. Before he does, he asks Block casually if he has achieved his ambition of doing something worthwhile with his life, and the knight says he has, knowing that he has secured the escape of Jof, Mia and their baby. Death will not have them, at least not yet. As they wake the next morning, having been passed over, Jof and Mia hug their baby and rejoice that they are still alive. Jof looks into the distance and says he sees the knight and his friends all walking behind Death, but as ever, Mia does not place much stock in her husband's fanciful visions, and they turn to go. QUOTES Block: “Have you come to fetch me?” Death: “I have long walked beside you.” Block: “This I know.” (Block has obviously realised he is living on borrowed time, facing the hordes of the heathen in the Holy Land, and has probably escaped the clutches of Death more than once, though he must know that his luck cannot hold forever, and does not seem too surprised to see the apparition on the beach. The life of a knight was often a violent and brief one.) Block (as the game begins): “You have black.” Death: “It's most appropriate, isn't it?” Block: “Why do you paint such daubings?” Painter: “To remind people they will die.” Block: “That won't make them any happier.” Painter: “Why always make them happy? Why not frighten them a bit?” Block: “They'll just close their eyes then.” Painter: “Believe me, they'll look. A skull is more interesting than a naked wench.” Block: “And if you frighten them?” Painter: “They think, and be more frightened.” Block: “And rush into the priest's embrace.” Painter: “Not my business.” (Ah but it is. This exchange clearly shows the underlying reason for the artist painting such a frightening mural on the church wall. If people are scared they will want someone to protect them from Death, and who protects from Death like God, or in this case, his agents on Earth, the priests? And can we doubt that this painting is commissioned and paid for by the selfsame priests who hope to reap the reward of sinners converting and seeking their protection?) Block: “How can we believe in the faithful when we lack faith? What will happen to those of us who want to believe, but cannot? What about those who neither want to nor can believe? Why can't I kill God in me?” Jons: “Our crusade was so stupid, only an idealist could have invented it!” Block: “Have you seen the Devil?” Monk: “Don't talk to her!” Block: “Is it so dangerous?” Monk: “I don't know, but she's seen as guilty of the plague that has befallen us.” (Here we go again. Whenever something nasty happens people need someone or something to blame, and invariably it's minorities that pay the price. Here, as so often down through history, a woman - who is probably innocent: what proof have they that she “laid with the Evil One”? - is made the scapegoat for the infection that is sweeping through the town, the inexorable march of the Black Death.) Jons: “Do you cook? I will need a housekeeper. I am married, but have hopes my wife will be dead by now.” Plog: “Have you seen my wife?” Jons: “No I have not. And if she resembled you I'd be quick to forget.” Jons: “Ah it's Hell with women and Hell without them. Best to kill them when it's at its best.” Jons: “Love is the blackest of all plagues. If you died from it there'd be some joy, but it almost always passes.” A hilarious scene in which Jons shares his dislike of marriage or love with Plog, who is lamenting for his wife, who has run off: Jons: “Henpecking and swills.” Plog: “Screaming babies and wet nappies.” Jons: “Sharp nails and malice.” Plog: “The Devil's aunt for a mother-in-law!” Jons: “Then when you're going to sleep...” Plog: “Another tune. Tears, complaints and laments by the sackfull!” Jons: “Why don't you kiss me?” Plog: “Why don't you sing?” Jons: “Why don't you love me like before?” Plog: “Why don't you eye my new shift?” Jons: “You just turn your back and snore...” Plog: “Oh Hell...” Jons: “Oh Hell! She's gone now! Be happy!” Jons: “If all is imperfect in this imperfect world, then love is most imperfect in its perfect imperfection.” (whaaa...?) PORTENTS OF EVIL As with any perceived curse, the arrival of the Black Death in Sweden is seen to be presaged by many evil omens, none of which of course can be proven to have any solid basis in fact. But when repeated they take on a life of their own, as if the listener expected such horrors, and this is only confirming what they had already dreaded. “Two horses ate each other” “A woman gave birth to a calf's head.” These are the sort of things that got talked about, reported and in many cases probably completely made-up, but once they'd passed through enough mouths, probably with little embellishments added on here and there, they became accepted as solid fact, and anyone who heard the reports would nod their head wisely and agree that this was just the sort of thing to expect. APOCALYPSE THEN? It's hard to imagine what it must have been like back in the fourteenth century when the plague swept across Europe. Medical science being all but non-existent and religious fervour fanning the flames of suspicion and superstition, it surely must have been all too easy to have believed that the Black Death was God's curse upon the world, and that the End of Days was indeed at hand. More than a hundred million people died across Europe during its short reign, and the world's population was reduced by about a third, up to sixty percent of Europe's alone falling to its dread influence. Of course now we have a good idea - though arguments still persist on certain points - as to what caused the Black Death, but back then the prevailing theory was that it was carried on a “miasma”, or unholy wind, and the only way to avoid it was to stay out of the fresh air, which meant that more and more people were packed together breathing the same air and eating the same food for days or weeks at a time. In addition, since it was decided that God was angry with the world, the inevitable blame fell on many women who were accused of witchcraft, as we saw here, and as cats were seen to be the familiars of witches - demons in animal form - thousands were caught and burned. This is ironic, since the cats would have been hunting the rats whose fleas are now generally accepted to have carried the contagion. Nobody was safe. Kings and queens died as often and as agonisingly as beggars and peasants. Truly, the words of James Shirley were never more appropriate: “Sceptre and crown must tumble down, and in the dust be equal made with the poor crooked scythe and spade”. A sense of terror and overwhelming despair must have gripped Europe as the Plague marched on, unchallenged and uncaring, and towns, cities, villages were destroyed in its wake. It truly must have seemed like the end of the world was approaching, and any day now seven angels would appear and sound the trumpets that would bring about Judgement Day. Who could doubt it? It might seem fanciful now, but if you imagine yourself back in those times, with a total lack of knowledge as to where the Plague was coming from, no way to stop it and no sign of it weakening; as your family and loved ones died around you and you waited to be claimed, surely it must have seemed like God was levelling his final judgement on the world? As one writer put it: “How many valiant men, how many fair ladies breakfasted with their kinfolk and the same night supped with their ancestors in the next world?” Nobody knew when they might be next, and the graveyards filled up so fast that even consecrated burial became impossible, as huge mass pits were dug and filled up, more almost ready for filling by then. The clergy, of course, loved it. No that's extremely unfair. They were no more immune to the effects of the Black Death than anyone else, and they did minister to the dying when nobody else would go near them, and died in their droves as a consequence. But the idea of this being the wrath of God was certainly pushed as an agenda by the Church, not only to fill up the pews but also to weed out the ungodly, bring sinners back into the fold and if necessary or expedient turn the anger of the righteous upon any minority group it saw as a threat, blaming them for the Plague. Thus the usual suspects - Jews, beggars, lepers, women, even those afflicted with acne or any other skin condition - could expect to burn as the hordes desperately tried to appease their angry god. The whole idea of the movie being in black-and-white works very well too. I know that in the early fifties there were few movies made in colour anyway, but this would not work as well if it were in colour. The dark, oppressive, bleak atmosphere of the film fits in perfectly with the sparse, almost sketchy backdrop. At times it seems like our heroes are travelling across the landscape of a dead alien world, and in many ways it also reminds me slightly of the later “War of the Worlds”, where London is destroyed and there's nothing but rubble, with the occasional Fighting Machine moving among the shattered remains of Man's kingdom. It's bleak, it's barren, it's quiet: the quiet of the grave. I would however personally question the use of music. I'm certain Bergman knew exactly what he was going for, and achieved that, but I just feel the sense of despair and hopelessness would have been added to had there been no music, no sound really except the occasional voices of the actors. It is though a true case of “less is more”: I can much more readily visualise and understand the belief of the apocalypse coming through this movie than I could with, say, 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow, with all their glitzy special effects and thundering musical scores. Sometimes, a whisper says something far more effectively than a shout. |
MESSAGE IN THE MOVIE?
This is a new section I'll be applying to any movies I feature from now on, in which I try to see what the moral behind the film is, what the writer or director was trying to convey to us, what we're supposed to take from it. Here I think the underlying message is that you can't cheat Death. You can play him at any game you want, and despite your skill level at chess, ludo, cards or Nintendo, you're going to lose, because Death always has the last word. I think Block realises this; he knows he is going to die and he can't stop it - his boastful “If I win I live” is nothing more than that, a piece of bravado which he knows fully will never happen - but wants to delay the event long enough to try to do something meaningful with his last days. Death is all around in The Seventh Seal, as if to remind us that it is an all-powerful, irresistible force, and even the priests with their faith in God and their adherents who believe repentance will save them, know that they too will die, almost glorying in it. They know (or think they know) that they will go to Heaven, whereas any sinners who succumb to the Black Death will be cast into the Pit. In many ways, these are the days they've been waiting for: Judgement Day is coming, and finally, instead of just spitting fire about it from the pulpit or the street corner where they have been ignored or at best tolerated, the servants of God on Earth have the chance to exercise real power, to show that what they were saying was not just rhetoric. God is real, they thunder. The Devil is real. You are about to be judged. The world is ending. Make your choice, and make the correct one. Another message that can be taken from the film perhaps is that no matter how terrible our lives may be, we can try to make up for it before the end, and make our existence here have been worth something. In helping the actors escape the clutches of Death, and perhaps also easing the witch-girl's passage into the next world, the knight must feel that he has, finally, made a difference and done something special with his life. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the idea that God is not listening comes through very clearly. The film has been tagged with the theme of “the silence of God”, by people far better versed in this than I could ever be, and you can see Block's frustration as he fumes “Why must God hide himself in clouds?” He wants God to reveal himself, to prove he is there, to tell the knight there is, has been, a point to his life, and that there is somewhere to go when he dies. But of course God remains silent. Whether this is because He does not wish to respond, or is not there to respond, is of course left unanswered. Someone once said that if we ever learned the true meaning of life we would go insane. Some things are best left a mystery. But Block rages at what he sees as God's indifference as the people die and wonders why he fought for Him in the Holy Land, if his reward on returning to his home is more misery and death? Hardly a hero's welcome. But God does not care, if He exists. What are the petty concerns of men to such as He? LAUGHING IN THE FACE OF DEATH It's an interesting thing about this movie that, dour and stark as it is, with a downbeat message and certainly nothing approaching a happy ending, there is a lot of comedy in it. For me, it plays like a Shakespeare comedy at times. Plog, the lovelorn blacksmith looking for his errant wife. Jonas, the actor who pretends to kill himself and then ironically loses his life when Death cuts down the tree he is hiding in. The hilarious conversation between Jons and Plog on the subject of women. It all seems out of place somehow, and yet fits in perfectly, a kind of “live while you can” attitude. As one of the characters says, if these are the last days then they may as well enjoy them while they can. A commendable attitude, and you can see how, with the Plague burning through Europe and living to the next day as uncertain as a gamble on a horse, people decided to throw caution, and inhibition to the wind. Reminds me a little of the streets of Berlin, six hundred years later, as related in my article on Downfall, when the citizens drank and danced and screwed as the Russians got closer to the German capital. Those people knew they were doomed, but were determined to live their final hours without fear or care. So too the Europeans, who greeted each new day as an unexpected bonus, and checked to see who of their family and friends had died, lived live to its fullest, trying to put the spectre of death, always looming large in the foreground, behind them. So the many instances of comic relief and lightheartedness here are not in fact anachronisms at all; on the contrary, they fit in perfectly with a world where death stalked you at every step, and each day could be your last on the Earth. What would it benefit anyone to spend their time fretting in their hovels, or trembling behind mighty castle walls, waiting for the approaching touch of the Reaper? Far better to squeeze the last life had to give out of it, and enjoy the remaining days, hours or even minutes. This is why the priest who comes through the village is so scandalised that the people are watching a comedy act. He soon sets them right, and a dark atmosphere of doom and despair settles over the previously jolly gathering, as he self-righteously and contemptuously tells them they are all damned, and they had better make their peace with God before they are taken. His crew are a miserable lot: carrying huge crosses, whipping themselves, in rags and moaning and lamenting their lot. Which way would you prefer to spend your last days, had you been given the choice? Unfortunately we don't see what happens to the priest, but can only hope the Plague takes him too. WHY DO I LOVE THIS FILM? You know, I don't. This is the first time I've ever watched it. I've known of it of course, and seen extracts from it, but never sat down and watched the whole thing, but I wanted to do so for this journal. Now that I have seen it, I can understand its place among the greats of World Cinema, but then I'm not an aficionado of same, and to me it's a really good movie, but I seriously doubt I'd watch it again. For one thing, it's too unremittingly dark, the comedic scenes referred to above notwithstanding. There's no happy ending, no resolution and no real moral in the story, as I already said, other than that Death catches us all in the end. But it's not just that. The ending is very stark, disappointing and even, yes, a litlte scary. At the end, we see Block truly frightened as he realises now he is going to die: there are no more chess games, no more word play, no more extensions. He has done what he wanted to do but he has failed to get the answers he wanted, and as Jons, in typical nihilist fashion, sneers that there is nothing beyond this world, that they are all going forward to darkness and nothingness, it clearly terrifies him. He wants there to be something, he wants God to exist, but no evidence of such has been forthcoming. Indeed, at the very end of the movie Jof says he sees them all dancing with Death along the hillside in the Danse Macabre, and we can only guess at what truly awaits them in the afterlife. But it's not just that which fuels my kind of disappointment with this movie, compared to how I had imagined it would be. My impression of this film was that it would be mostly - say, eighty to ninety percent - taken up with the chess game between Block and Death, with many deep ruminations and philosophical musings on the nature of God and of Man. But in the event, the chess game is if anything very much secondary to the main plot of the film, and only features in about four scenes in total. This surprises me. I always assumed the movie was built around the game, and it seems this is not the case. I'm not sure why it isn't, when the central premise of the film is the chess game as the knight struggles to best or at least hold off Death in return for his life. But it certainly gives a good impression of life during the Middle Ages, and especially when shown against the dark, pustulant backdrop of the Black Death. The dialogue is at times very stilted, though this probably comes more through translation than anything else, and the music in the film - not the score, but the songs sung as part of it - are nothing short of annoying. Each actor or actress plays their part well, and one of the best scenes, actorwise, in the movie is the girl accused of being a witch, as she is raised onto the stake and stares ahead with eyes that suddenly seem terrified, and surprised at being so. She gives the impression she expected her master, the Devil, to be there to protect her and now he is not. With one agonised, lost look, this actress, who has only really a bit part in the movie, conveys more than almost all of the other players do. It's powerful, simple and wrenches at your soul. I'd certainly recommend this film - probably everybody should see it, and don't be put off by the fact that it's subtitled (if you are) as they're handled very well, visible and clear, no looking past someone's shoulder to see what the last word is or anything like that - but I don't see it racing to the top of my favourites list any time soon. Nevertheless, I am glad I got to eventually see it, even if it was not quite what I had expected. |
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Originally posted December 21 2013 http://www.trollheart.com/christbattleclassic.png While nobody would ever accuse me of being the most religious person, I do like the story of Jesus and love to see movies about it. Christian fundamentalists would have us all believe that God created everything, and that may be true. If so, then he also created movies. But in another strange, kind of roundabout way, movies could be said to have created God, at least for the big or small screen. As far back as 1905 they were making silent movies about Our Lord, and of course with the advent of colour, 70mm film and things like Cinemascope and Technicolour, it was only natural that the sixties would see some of the biggest, baddest and most over-the-top movies about Jesus ever made. That’s what this section is all about then: deciding which is the better. I had originally intended this to be a three-way fight, but the third contestant, 1953’s “The Robe”, turns out not to be about Jesus at all. He’s in it, but only peripherally, and really it would be unfair to put such a movie up against the other two, so we’re down to a proper head-to-head, a real slamdown and a fight for the title of the Classic Christ Movie. In the blue corner, weighing in at 260 minutes and with a budget of approximately 21 million US Dollars, we have http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...x-GREATSTO.jpg Originally a four-hour-plus epic, drastically cut back in later releases and eventually shortened to 2 hours 17 minutes, “The Greatest Story Ever Told” (you’ve got to capitalise the lot, don’t you really?) was based on a novel by Fulton Ouster, itself based on a radio play that ran in the US in 1947 episodically. George Stevens was the man who intended to bring it to the big screen, but it was a slow process. The screenplay took over two years to write alone, and by 1961, four years before its release date, costs had already spiralled to a staggering 2.3 million US Dollars, which even back then was a boatload of money, considering not one scene had yet been shot! So concerned were they with the rising costs involved in making the movie --- or more correctly, preparing to make it --- that backers Twentieth Century Fox dropped the project, and Stevens had to be saved by United Artists, who eventually released the picture. Like most of the movies about the life of Jesus, this sticks fairly closely to the “facts”, as they were, which is to say, the version described in the Bible. It’s almost a direct telling of the story from that revered tome, and doesn’t deviate much if at all from the accepted version. Interestingly though, it was a general unknown who was offered the top role, indeed the very man who played Antonius Block, the knight in recently-reviewed Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Max von Sydow, and for my money he did a good job. Apparently Stevens wanted someone not already linked with any role or character, someone US audiences would not know. I must say though, Charlton Heston in the role of John the Baptist comes close to stealing the show, and that’s not an easy thing to do when you’re up against the Son of God! The version I watched clocked in at just under three hours and twenty minutes, and even at that reduced time from the original it seemed long, slow and boring in many places. Definitely a case of being overstretched. I shudder to think what the full version was like! The film also suffers from a “me too!” syndrome, with film stars all wanting a bit part, some of which make no sense. The most famous and well-known of these is of course the sudden appearance out of nowhere by John Wayne, who drawls “Truly this man was the son of God!” in his characteristic, laconic and almost bored manner, but Martin Landau fails to shine as Caiphas, Roddy McDowell as Matthew is almost anonymous and David McCallum is completely wasted in the role of Judas, a one-dimensional, flat and uninspiring character compared to the one played in the other movie. Others of note include Pat Boone, Shelley Winters, Angela Lansbury and Sidney Poitier, though what any of them are doing in the movie is anyone’s guess. Even Star Trek’s Sarek, the late Mark Lenard, gets a look in! The music is of course stunning and evocative, as you would expect, and Alfred Newman’s score was one of five Academy Awards the film was nominated for. Whether it won any of them I don’t know. The sets are also very impressive, though I do wonder about Stevens’ insistence on shooting the whole thing in America? Sounds a little like trying to prove God was born in Queens to me! Mind you, our other movie didn’t head to the Holy Land either, but with a budget of twenty-one mill you would have thought they would have, literally, gone the extra mile. Or few thousand miles, I guess. Nonetheless, I have to admit that when they show the scene ostensibly taking place in the desert where Jesus faces forty days and nights of temptation and fasting, I would never have guessed it was Death Valley, and similarly, the sermon on the Mount actually takes place in Utah, so it’s not like it’s obvious, but still, you do feel a little bit cheated that they’re not actually walking in the footsteps of Jesus Christ. Unless he ever visited California, which I find unlikely…. All quibbles aside though, and remembering that the movie never grossed even its freakishly huge budget, and so was seen as a flop and an expensive failure, I did enjoy The Greatest Story Ever Told, with certain reservations, which I will detail later on in this article when I compare the two movies and put them up against each other. But what about its classic opponent? Well, in the red corner, ladies and gentlemen, will you please give it up for http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ingofKings.jpg Not to be confused with the earlier movie of almost the same name from the twenties, which just added the definite article to its title, this was the other “blockbuster bible movie” of the day, and the two are in many ways very similar, and in other ways poles apart. Interestingly, while George Stevens was flying to Rome to consult the Pope on the making of his movie, this one slipped in under the radar and got released four years before his made the big screen, which must have been annoying for the great filmmaker, as this would have been the first “real” movie about Christ since 1935’s Golgotha, unless you count Ben Hur, which I don’t, or indeed The Robe, which I also don’t, as neither focus on the actual figure of Christ and he is basically incidental, although instrumental, to the storyline. But poor old Stevens: that’s what you get for farting around with 352 oil paintings as your storyboard and retaking every scene a zillion times: someone else beats you to it! Starring Jeffrey “I could have been Kirk” Hunter in the top role, it’s something of a different take on the story, though again it sticks very closely to the writings of Scripture. King of Kings details the birth of Christ, the journey to Bethlehem and the exile to Egypt, whereas this is brushed over in The Greatest Story Ever Told, which is odd, considering the latter is the longer picture by about an hour and would have easily been able to accomodate such a surely integral and important part of the plot, as it were? But like its rival, King of Kings, mainly concentrates on Jesus’s life from age thirty or so, from the time he begins to preach, gathering his disciples to him and generally getting up the noses of the Romans. That’s not surprising, as really, up to that point there’s little in the Bible about Jesus the man, leading to speculation on what exactly he did for those twenty-odd years between childhood and manhood, but that’s another story. Any film or series focussing on Jesus will always be firmly set in this short period of his life. There are, as I said, things I like about TGSET that I don’t like about KOK, and vice versa of course. One of the former is the way Jesus’s miracles are handled. In this film, we see things like Jesus approaching a blind man who bumps into him as just a shadow on a wall. He stretches out his shadowy hand and the man drops his stick, obviously (I guess) cured. A madman is not portrayed as very mad (did you see the guy in Jesus of Nazareth? THAT was scary!) and in general the miracles are not quite glossed over but definitely not given the sense of drama and power that TGSET lavishes on them. Contrast the scene outside Lazarus’s tomb in the other movie with the one here - oh no wait, don’t. King of Kings doesn’t feature that miracle. What? Jesus’s biggest feat, his crowning glory, his piece de resistance, when he proves even Death can’t hold sway over someone he calls forth, and they don’t show it? Yeah. The movie suffers from a massive dearth of miracles, and those that are shown are treated in an almost offhand, matter-of-fact way. No angels singing, no shafts of sunlight bathing the Saviour’s face as he performs these wonders, no crowds gathering to watch in amazement and then spread the word that the Messiah has come. Very drab and humdrum. Maybe there was a reason, maybe director Nicholas Ray didn’t want to focus too much on the miracles aspect of the story, but come on! The guy raised the dead! He healed the blind and the lame! He cast out demons! You have to show those, and make them an important part of the story. But where King of Kings fails in respect of its opponent - Miracles: Greatest Story Ever Told 1, King of Kings 0 - it walks all over it (I know: I was going to say something else but figured it wouldn’t be appropriate when dealing with these movies. Gotta have respect, even if you don’t believe!) on another score, and that is the portrayal of Judas Iscariot. From an early age, we Irish were brought up on the notion that Judas was evil. He betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, but we were never told why. We never asked. It was just accepted, the same as any religious dogma in Ireland at the time was. WHY had you to fast before receiving Holy Communion? Why could you not touch it if it got stuck to the roof of your mouth - as it always, without fail, did - and why were you supposed to (in my parents’ day, not mine) genuflect if you met a priest in the street? Nobody asked these questions: they weren’t even rhetorical, they just weren’t accepted as questions. They just were, okay? Accept it and stop asking stupid questions. In the very same way, Judas was a betrayer, a coward and a traitor and you should hate him. It wasn’t till I watched Jesus Christ Superstar and Martin Scorsese’s excellent The Last Temptation of Christ that I got the idea that Judas was not just an evil figure, he was a person; a person with ideals and hopes and dreams, and that he betrayed Jesus for a reason. This made more sense, and indeed this is the tack that King of Kings takes. Judas is a revolutionary when we meet him, fighting alongside Barabbas, his leader, and he believes he can turn Jesus to their cause, convince him to fight for Judea and call down hosts of angels, or at the worst, lead his hosts of followers against the Roman oppressor. When he sees this will not happen of its own accord, that Jesus is dedicated to peace, Judas tries to force his hand, hoping that if he is arrested he will spring into action and defend himself, and become an ally of he and Barabbas, leading the Jews to glorious liberation. At last, someone gets it. I’m no connoisseur of movies about Jesus, but I think I’m safe in saying that King of Kings was the first of this genre to look sympathetically at Judas. Tim Rice would do so ten years later, and others would too: even in Jesus of Nazareth I seem to recall him being a more rounded, less cartoon-villain figure, but this was the first time I think anyone had voiced the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Judas had a reason, excuse or agenda in betraying his master. Played by Rip Torn, he’s certainly a better character here than in George Stevens’ somewhat pompous oversimplification of the man. In TGSET Barabbas is only mentioned at the end, when he gets his freedom at the expense of Christ’s, and he has no other role at all to play in that movie. Here, he is a pivotal if not central figure, laughing at then briefly sharing Judas’s hope that they might ally with the Messiah, finally using his speech at the temple to launch an abortive attack on his enemy. When he realises later that Jesus is dying in his place (not that he has a choice of course, but the people have chosen Barabbas) he asks “Why? I never did anything for him.” He truly can’t understand it, though Lucius, the Roman general, scowls “Your people shouted loudest”, obviously at pains to make the rebel leader realise it is only simple good fortune that has secured his freedom, and his life. Although much shorter than its later companion film, King of Kings gets pretty much the whole story in, which of course you would expect and demand, but also manages to presage it with the arrival of Pompey as he claims Jerusalem and sets up a garrison there, and adds in elements of the later Jewish struggle for independence and freedom, as well as alluding to the Roman governor, Pilate’s wife being somewhat sympathetic to Jesus, or at least his message. Again though, the two movies differ vastly when it comes to the crucifixion scene, with TGSET losing out as it watches much of the action from far off, down the hill at Golgotha. I’m not saying I wanted closeups of the nails going into Jesus’s hands or anything, but there’s a more personal, intimate feeling to the scene in this film, with the action all taking place in front of you; you see Christ nailed to the cross (tastefully done) and raised up, you see people moving about below him as he hangs there, you see the two thieves talk to him (although in fairness you see this in the other movie too, but I think this one just about edges it in terms of drama) and best of all, there’s no John Wayne! Resurrection, I’d say there’s very little between the two movies, though this one does just end with the shadow of Christ falling across the apostles, who then sort of wander aimlessly offscreen in the final scene; where it actually shows Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene outside the tomb in this movie, in TGSET she just meets the angel inside the tomb once Jesus has risen, so again I think this one is slightly more personal. Not to mention that in the closing scene of this we see the smiling, radiant face of Jesus while in the other movie he’s just a shadow and a voice. Interestingly, the very same end hymn is used, though it seems to be quite appropriate and was probably the only one that could have been used. So, both movies represent the story of Christ’s birth, life and death reasonably well, and certainly better than some have down the years. But each has its own flaws, and while in one category TGSET triumphs, in others it’s KOK that lands the killer punch. So, which movie is better? How can we even choose between two such classics? We probably in reality can’t, but for the purposes of this article we have to: to quote Highlander - there can be only one. So how do we do that? Well, let’s list off the main points and compare like for like, and see how we do. For each scene, aspect or fact considered I’ll award a score out of ten, explaining along the way how I arrived at that score. Then we’ll total them up and see who comes out on top, or if this ends up being a dead heat. Even I don’t know at this point. Oooh! Exciting, isn’t it? What do you mean, no? Fuc - er, peace be with you, my son... |
All right then! One of the most important things for any movie is its budget versus its box office. In other words, how much did it cost to make and was that amount recouped, or, as would be highly expected, seriously exceeded on its release? Let’s see.
(For handiness’ and laziness’ sake I’m referring to each movie by a single letter. See if you can guess which is which!) G: Budget 21 million, Box office 15 million. (Naturally these are estimates, and if they’re wrong blame Wiki…) K: Budget 5 mill, Box office 13 million. Now on the face of it it would seem that K made less than G, but on the other hand, taken as a percentage of its final costs, K came close to tripling its budget, so definitely made money, whereas G failed to even make its budget, coming in with a definite, and quite substantial loss, almost twenty-five percent in fact. So on pure figures for its return, and indeed on its initial budget too, K did better, costing less to make and earning more in the long run. Though both movies were considered commercial failures, one failed at a cheaper rate than the other. So King of Kings wins this easily. Scores G 3/10 K: 8/10 (It wasn’t a blockbuster success, which is why I’ve given it a less than perfect score) Next up, length of movie. Now, this can be a good or a bad thing. Long movies can pack more story in, or they can just get boring and feel long-drawn out. But when you’re dealing with a Biblical movie I think you really work with the maxim “the longer the better”, as long as there’s enough there to keep your interest. Though G dragged in places, overall it was relatively well-paced and didn’t seem too overlong. It’s certainly longer than K. Here are the stats. G: 240 mins (original) down to an eventual 137 mins for the US release, with the one I watched being a total of 200 minutes. K: 168 minutes There’s no contest. Though K filled its brief well for its overall shorter length - longer than the eventual US release though - the original cut of G has over fifty minutes on it, so it’s a clear winner for G. G: 9/10 (Only awarded less than top score due to the different lengths, and the fact that it dragged a little in places) K: 6/10 In terms of being “first to the post”, ie the first major Biblical film to hit the screens since the thirties, and therefore essentially the first “real” movie about Jesus, George Stevens’ faffing about and eternal procrastination, along with his perfectionist nature and a ballooning budget that saw his original backers walk away from the deal allowed his rival to get in a full four years before his film saw the light of day, so it’s not even close. G: Released 1965 - 4/10 K: Released 1961 - 9/10 (Again, not top score because it was not the first EVER movie about Jesus, but close) And now we come to the main man, as it were. The face-off between the stars, the top men who played what was not a title role but really was, the two actors who brought Jesus to the big screen. In K, we had Jeffrey Hunter. I only know him as the original Captain Pike from the pilot episode of the original Star Trek, the man who turned down the recurring role to pursue a “proper” movie career. I hated him in Star Trek but I must say he did this role proud. With a warm, gentle smile and a humbleness seldom seen among actors he may not have been the ideal choice for Jesus, but he sure was better than Ian Gillan in Jesus Christ Superstar the stage production, a decade later (shudder!) and I think he did really well. Max von Sydow was more or less unknown to US audiences and fans outside of Sweden, or those who followed the films of Bergman, so for him to take on such a major role must have been a hell of a challenge. Interesting that in the other movie I saw him in recently, The Seventh Seal, he was a knight doubting the existence of God, who says at one point to Death “Why can’t I kill God within me?” and then a mere six years later he’s playing the son of that very God. But he plays the role well, his slight Scandinavian accent adding to the, if you like, foreigness of Jesus and making him less the all-American blue-eyed boy that could be seen at times in Hunter’s character. Probably not as charismatic as his rival, von Sydow exuded for me more a sense of friendliness, calm and love than did Hunter, but even so it’s hard to choose between them. I think in the end, von Sydow had more to prove, being an “unknown” to most cinema-goers at the time, so I’ll shade it slightly on his side, and award him the higher score, though there’s not that much in it really. G: Jesus portrayal by M. von Sydow 9/10 K: Jesus portrayal by J. Hunter 8/10 Then we come to Judas. This isn’t even close. As related in the synopses of the movies above, the far stronger character is the one in K, where Judas is seen as a rebel, a freedom fighter and has a good, if slightly skewed, reason for betraying Jesus. The part is also better played by Rip Torn, though we know what a great and accomplished actor David McCallum is; he just had a really weak role to work with, and through most of the movie looks unhappy, and so he should be. His Judas could have been so much more, but he’s left playing a cardboard cut-out. G: Judas role (This does not reflect on how the character was played, but how he was written, as it would be unfair to blame an actor for simply carrying out the role he was asked to play) 2/10 K: Judas role 9/10 Music score: Again, there’s little to choose here. Both Miklos Rosza’s Oscar-nominated music and that of Alfred Newman are stirring, grandiose pieces of music that make your heart swell and at times, in certain scenes, bring the odd tear to the eye. I can’t choose between these so I’m going to call this a dead heat and award the very same to both. G: Score by Alfred Newman 9/10 K: Score by Mkilos Rosza 9/10 Awards/Nominations: From what I’ve read, though both movies were commercial flops, G was nominated for awards but I can’t find anything about K. Five awards in total, whether it won them or not I’m not sure, but even the nominations have to allow G to knock K flat on its back and perform a, at least temporary, victory dance on its body. G: Awards (5, or at least nominations for 5) 8/10 K: Awards, none 0/10 Some other characters in brief, compared. Herod in K I found more evil, though cartoonishly evil, whereas in G he was more coldly evil and sort of like a snake, quietly evil as opposed to loudly evil, Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter as opposed to Dafoe’s Green Goblin. It sort of depends on what you’re looking for in a villain I guess, but for me I actually preferred Frank Thring’s portrayal of the evil king of Judea as opposed to Jose Ferrer’s version. It’s hard to choose: one was evil on a megalomaniacal scale, which was quite satisfying if a little one-dimensional, and was clearly harbouring ungentlemanly and unfatherly affection for his stepdaughter, Salome (King of Kings) while she was only alluded to in TGSET and the link between her demanding the head of John the Baptist and Herod’s decision to put him to death was made much muddier and not at all clear. Hmm. Because I like cartoon villains, and because he played the part so well, I’m going to go for Thring in King of Kings, but as I say, it’s close, almost too close to call. I am calling it, though. G: Herod Antipas portrayal (Jose Ferrer) 8/10 K: Herod Antipas portrayal (Frank Thring) 9/10 Yeah, I know I said in brief, and that was hardly brief, but you know me. Anyway, there’s one or two other main characters I want to look at, but in brief (and I mean it this time) here are some lesser ones. Mary, mother of God. The version in K bugged the hell out of me with her eternal beatific smile that became almost that of an idiot and just made me want to punch her in the face (sorry), while the one in G was much more restrained and to be fair, hardly in the movie at all. But for her less-than-angelic portrayal Dorothy McGuire takes it for me. G: Mary, Mother of God portrayal (Dorothy McGuire) 7/10 K: Mary, Mother of God portrayal (Siobhan McKenna) 4/10 Mary Magdalene. Surprisingly (or perhaps not; her time on film had not yet come) in both movies she’s almost anonymous. Yes we see the famous stoning scene in both, but after that, other than being seen washng Jesus’s feet in one movie and being the one to go to the tomb after three days in both, we see little of her, so there’s not an awful lot to choose from. I’ll have to take it from her performance in the stoning scene, and in this case I’m giving it to Carmen Sevilla in K. G: Mary Magdalene (Joanna Dunham) 5/10 K: Mary Magdalene (Carmen Sevilla) 7/10 Barabbas. Well like Judas, and as mentioned in the section on him, there’s no contest. In G there is no role for Barabbas, apart from the traditional one at the end, when he is allowed go free for Passover in place of Jesus, while in K there’s quite a little backstory built up around him, allowing him his own identity and role in the movie, and also giving a proper and understandable reason for Judas’s eventual betrayal of Jesus. King of Kings wins this by a country mile. G: Role of Barabbas 1/10 K: Role of Barabbas 8/10 Pilate. Though he’s central to the story of Jesus - he is, after all, infamously remembered as the man who sentenced the Saviour to death - there’s very little real substance to the role played by him by Telly "Kojak” Savalas in G, and I for one couldn’t stop expecting him to pat Herod’s cheek and say “Good boy! You do what you're told, nobody will get hoyt, capische?” Sorry but that’s just me, who only knew him from that role on TV. But even apart from that he puts in what I consider to be a poor performance, while the lesser-known (to me) Hurd Hatfield makes a much better fist of it, projecting the true persona of a man who is somewhere he does not want to be, is there because the local king couldn’t keep order and also knows or suspects that he is being punished by being sent to this remote outpost, far from the empire and any chance of advancement. It doesn’t help that his wife is sympathetic to the message of Jesus. Also it comes across in G that Savalas is only there because he’s a big-name star, and not because he’s best suited for the role. In fact I think he completely fluffs it. I think Hatfield plays Pilate best, so I award the high score to him. G: Portrayal of Pontius Pilate (Telly Savalas) 4/10 K: Portrayal of Pontius Pilate (Hurd Hatfield) 8/10 And one more character whose portrayal makes the difference between the two films is John the Baptist. Central to the first half of the movie, he bestrides both like a colossus, but in G he’s played by the walking ego, Charlton Heston, who tends to bring more of the macho, self-confident and arrogant posturing to the character than does Robert Ryan in K. His take on John is far more humble, a tough, principled and godly man who knows he is just marking time on this planet, waiting for the arrival of the one whose coming he heralds. Heston makes it more about Heston, Ryan makes it more about John, and has rightly been cited as the best John the Baptist you will see in film, so he easily gets the nod. G: John the Baptist (Charlton Heston) 5/10 K: John the Baptist (Robert Ryan) 8/10 Actually, that’s not it. There’s one more character I forgot to include. Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name! Yeah, it’s the Devil. The only real role Satan plays of course in the story is when Jesus is out in the desert and he’s being tempted by the Evil One, but in G he’s personified by a strange dark hermit Jesus meets, played by the wonderfully evil Donald Pleasance, while in K he’s nothing more than a disembodied voice, the actor not even credited. So the best Devil has to be the one from G, hands (or talons) down. G: The Devil (Donald Pleasance as “the dark hermit”) 9/10 K: The Devil (uncredited, voice only) 3/10 This just leaves us really with two last sticking points. Both have already been mentioned but here I’m going to go into them in some more detail. The first is the handling of the miracles Jesus performs. In K they’re almost alluded to, with shadows on walls, notes in despatches and the like, while in G they’re made much more of. The best is where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, which isn’t even mentioned in K, but Stevens gives it the full Hollywood treatment and you really feel impressed, awed and even a little frightened at times. Similarly, his curing of the lame is carried out in a very personal way, one-to-one as it were, and the blind man who he makes see is arranged beautifully. Jesus, urged by the sceptical people of Nazareth, who find it hard to credit that the carpenter’s son is in fact the son of God, to cure an old blind man and prove his divinity, refuses. But later he comes back and cures him in private. It’s a lovely cameo, showing how although he would not be tempted into performing for the crowd, Jesus was still not prepared to let the old blind man suffer for his own principles. In the corner, away from the crowds where nobody can see, he performs a miracle and the old man has his sight back.I feel the miracles are given better weight by Stevens and his way works much better. I guess Ray could have claimed he had not the time for his movie as his rival director had, but the miracles are still in his movie, just not handled so well. Therefore it’s no contest, and G wins this round by a knockout. G: Portrayal of miracles 10/10 (This first ever top score is awarded due mostly to the awe-inspiring scenes outside the tomb of Lazarus) K: Portrayal of miracles 5/10 Finally, perhaps one of the most crucial scenes in the film, either of them, the crucifixion of Jesus. While nobody wanted to, or was expecting to see a Mel Gibson-style gorefest, the way K handled it was much more up close and personal, and gives you a real feeling of being involved. You can hear the nails being hammered in, watch the almost workmanlike industry as the Romans bustle here and there, this just another day, another execution for them. You see Jesus’s cross being raised, and hear him talking to the two thieves on either side of him. In G, much of the actual crucifixion, the attaching to the cross and its raising, are viewed from far down the hill, so it’s too impersonal and could really be anyone getting crucified. After a short time the camera does go back up the hill, but it’s grimly unsatisfying and almost seems an afterthought on the part of the director. Badly handled I think, and so K gets the nod here, without question. G: Crucifixion scene 4/10 K: Crucifixion scene 8/10 Before I total up the score and see who the winner is, there are a few more points I want to raise. Firstly, for such a long and epic film, the opening titles to G are pedestrian and very small, and don’t evoke the kind of drama and majesty that those of its sister movie do, despite the stirring music. The ending too, seems a little rushed, odd considering how long the film is. These two disappointments earn G an automatic deduction of 20 from whatever score it ends up getting. Secondly, K has a narrator, and it’s Orson Welles. I’m not sure whether I prefer this sort of movie with or without a storyteller, as everyone should already be familiar with the plot anyway, but for securing the services of such a star and using him well I’ll add an extra 10 points to its score. K also gains an extra 5 points for being the first film in cinematic history to show the face of Jesus onscreen. And so, the tally. After everything has been added up, here are how the initial scores stand: The Greatest Story Ever Told: 97 King of Kings: 109 Now for the adjustments: G loses 20 for boring titles, opening and closing, as above, which brings its already losing score down to 77. With 10 points added for Orson Welles and another 5 for getting to the post first as above, K gets a total additional 15 points, bringing its final score to a whopping 124! So, 124 plays 77. Bit of a knockout there for the King! Even without the adjustments K had it over G by a good 12 points. Now, with the adjustments taken into account, there’s a gap of 47! And so, with a final score of 124, ladies and gentlemen, I give you, the winner of the contest, the victor of the Battle of the Classic Christs, the first movie to show the face of Jesus on celluloid, give a big hand to http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ingofKings.jpg The undisputed heavyweight champion of classic Jesus movies! (Well, of these two, anyway!) |
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Originally posted January 26 2014 http://www.trollheart.com/plot2.jpg As some of you may know (some may even care!) I’m something of an aspiring/frustrated writer, and one of my bugbears is bad plotting, lazy writing and a lack of attention to detail. Okay, so that’s three things, but they all come under the one heading: laziness. I’ve seen a good few decent movies (and some very bad ones) suffer from often a very simple slipup in the plot, a case of the writer forgetting or omitting to mention something, or assuming something happens when the viewer cannot reasonably be expected to make that assumption. It happens too often and I wonder it isn’t more widely marked; people in general seem to adopt an “Emperor’s new clothes” approach: if nobody else saw that then I’m not pointing it out. I must be wrong if no-one else saw it. I must just not get it. And so on. In this series I’ll be looking at some serious plot flaws in movies, good and bad, famous and niche, and pointing out where the writing got sloppy and how, if at all - and in most cases it really did - it affected the overall enjoyment I took from the picture. Also how it impacted on the main storyline, if it did. The first one I want to look at is one I would not necessarily consider a good film, but in fairness that could be due to the glaring plot holes I’m about to describe. Without these, perhaps the movie would have come across differently to me. But as far as I’m concerned, screen writers are paid enough to check their work, or have it checked, before it hits the cinema, and anyone who lets incongruities of this magnitude through does not really deserve the title or prestige of being a writer. Some of these holes in the plot I'm pointing out are small, granted, but some are large enough to take the aircraft in the movie down, were they to appear in its fuselage. And all told, there are not two or three, but twelve separate issues I have with this film. Yeah, twelve plot holes, of varying sizes, but they all contribute to a piece of writing that amazingly Roger Ebert described as "an airtight plot"! I respect the guy, but if he thinks this plot is airtight then I wouldn't want him designing any airlocks for my space station, is all I can say... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Flightplan.jpg Movie title: Flightplan Year: 2005 Genre: Thriller/Drama Stars: Jodie Foster Directed by: Robert Schwentke Written by: Billy Ray Basic storyline: A woman (Foster) who is an aircraft designer is returning with the body of her husband who has died overseas. With her is her daughter. During the flight her daughter goes missing and Foster must try to convince everyone on the plane that she is not going mad; her daughter was with her, must still be on the aircraft. Plot Hole One: While Foster’s character, Kyle Pratt sleeps her daughter, Julia, is apparently taken from her. Now, I admit that many of the passengers are probably also asleep, watching the movie, reading or just looking out the windows but surely someone on board that plane sees a strange man move in and take the little girl? And why does she go with him? She doesn’t know him and has surely been brought up better than to go with a stranger? I guess she could be asleep but it still should look suspicious. More, when she goes missing someone should remember seeing her being abducted. http://www.trollheart.com/fplan1.png Plot Hole Two: It becomes clear that the terrorists have manipulated Kyle into being the fall guy, but the plan is a little weak. In order for it to work, first of all they have to ensure Julia is onboard, and how can they make sure that happens? One or both of them could have missed the flight, it could have been cancelled, any number of things. But the coffin is on the plane, with the bomb inside. So if all elements of this plan didn’t come together, what were they going to do? Plot Hole Three: How is it that of all the passengers on the aircraft not ONE of them can remember seeing a woman CARRYING HER CHILD onto the plane? Nobody saw that. And not only that, it’s not that they don’t remember her: they all assert she was not there. How do they know? How did NOBODY see Julia, not even the mouthy children of one of the couples? Plot Hole Four: We find out that one of the flight attendants is “in on the conspiracy”, fine. But why does the other one, when she hears that Julia was not on the passenger manifest, say she did not see her either, when she must have seen her? Okay, so the facts may be blinding her but what about the evidence of her own eyes? Kyle and her daughter board first, they are the first passengers on the aircraft, which may have been pre-arranged by the "bad" flight attendant in order that nobody sees them getting on, but surely the other flight attendant would remember more clearly the very first passengers on, especially one carrying her daughter? Plot Hole Five: Not that big but … why does the arab guy who Kyle accuses remark that he always watches his own children, and doesn’t lose them then blame someone else? Everyone up to now has agreed Julia was not on the plane: why is he saying she was but has now gone missing? And what was all this about Kyle saying she saw him looking int o her daughter's room the previous night? Is that just a red herring? Is she close to losing it? It's never returned to so it's just left as a very sloppy loose end, a vehicle for a rather clumsy post-911 blame-the-arabs-for-everything idea. http://www.trollheart.com/fplan2.png Plot Hole Six: When the captain checks with the mortuary in Berlin about Kyle's husband why do they assert that Julia died with her father? The director of the morgue is to be arrested so must be in on the plot, but was all his staff too? And are we to assume that when the details were checked it just happened to be him that answered? Plot Hole Seven: Again, a small one, but where did Kyle get the key she uses to gain access to the aircraft’s emergency systems in order to create a diversion? Plot Hole Eight: Assuming that they want her to believe that her daughter died with her husband, why is there no coffin with the child in it? Would she have left her daughter back in Berlin? Plot Hole Nine: Again, a small one but ... Kyle handcuffs Carson, the Air Marshall who turns out to be the bad guy, so how did the "bad" flight attendant free him from his handcuffs so quickly? She didn’t even look for a key. One second she was approaching, next Carson was free. Plot Hole Ten: Carson said they needed a credible hijacker who knew the plane. Why? What difference did it make? If she ran raving like a lunatic looking for her child without knowing about the layout of the aircraft, Kyle would still be seen as a madwoman. Why was it important she knew about the layout of the plane? And adding to that, she worked on engines. It's not to be assumed she would therefore know the full layout of the aircraft. These things are often assembled in sections, at different work stations. She might only ever have seen engines, not any other part of the fuselage. To imagine she could find her way around the innards of the jet, just because she worked on and designed the engines, is I think pushing it a bit. Plot Hole Eleven: The attendant runs from the plane which is surrounded by cops and military, and nobody even challenges her, never mind shoots at her or orders her to show her hands? She just runs off into the night? Yes she is eventually captured, but would YOU just run out with all those guns presumably trained on the aircraft? Plot Hole Twelve: Similarly, after BLOWING UP THE PLANE Kyle emerges from the smoke --- and remember, she’s the prime suspect --- and is not even challenged? Okay, so she has her daughter in her arms but still. http://www.trollheart.com/fplan3.png One of the most cloying and aggravating things about this movie are the voices at the end as Kyle walks away with her daughter. People say “I told you there was a little girl” and “She never gave up.” Yeah, well where were they when she was being accused of being insane, and weren’t these the same people who looked at her as if how dare she disrupt their flight, looking for a fictional daughter? Now suddenly they all believe, which is understandable, but now they all believed in the first place? Oh sure. One final thing, and it is a small niggle but bugs me nevertheless. The movie is called Flightplan. A flightplan is the information an aircraft lodges with the control tower and ATC as to where it’s going and how it’s going to get there. The “flightplan” referred to here seems to be the plan the three people have to get money out of the airline and blame it on Kyle. Not quite the same thing. Annoying, to someone who is an aircraft nut. |
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Originally posted April 22 2014 http://www.trollheart.com/craptastic1.jpg There's no doubt that there's a wealth of great movies out there, from the forties right up to today –- classics, cult classics, blockbusters, sequels, prequels and other things ending in “quel”, everything from westerns to sci-fi and war movies to comedies --- but there are an equal amount of terrible movies, movies that should never have been made, movies that are so bad they're good and movies that are so bad they're bad. Movies that make you cringe, squirm and occasionally think about demanding your money back. These are the movies I will be presenting in this new section. Now, before any knickers are twisted, let me remind you all as ever that this is my own opinion and my view. You may love a film I feature here and want to take me to task for slagging it off. If so, I have three words for you: get over it. I'm just poking fun and am not really debating the merits or failings of these movies. Well, I am, but all in jest. I realise every movie can't be a runaway success and that sometimes budget constraints will lead to the film being, shall we say, less realistic than it could have been? But of course some bad movies are worse than other bad movies, and some have the saving grace of having maybe a good plot or a star, while nothing else about the movie is worth considering. Some, of course, don't even have that. Some have a good idea that suffers from poor writing, poor acting, low-budget effects or poor production or direction. And some don't. In the world of crappy movies, some are naturally crappier than others. Back when I were a lad (yes this again!) we had no movie channels, no downloadable content, no Netflix or Amazon and no Sky Movies much less video on demand. For a long time we didn't even have video recorders, and the only time you could hope to see a film outside of the cinema was at the weekend on TV, and it would likely be an old one. Occasionally one of the channels might run a series of movies based around a theme, such as sci-fi or horror, and then you'd get a few decent ones, along with some real turkeys. But when videos became a reality and video rental shops began to spring up, we all rushed to them and rented the movies we had either never seen, or hadn't seen for years. This of course led to some truly turdurific choices, many of which have been blotted from my poor young mind so that I don't even remember them. But I do know that more often than not, without the likes of the internet to guide us in our choices, it was a random effort that often failed to pay off. The movies I'll be looking at here, old and new, will all be ones that have either impressed me with their blatant crappiness, made me laugh at how bad they are (but I still watched them), or ones I think could perhaps have been good if it wasn't for certain drawbacks. Such as editing, production, acting, plot, budget, music and so on. ;) I won't be running total full reviews of them like the movies I usually feature, but will be focussing more on the way they try perhaps and fail to be good movies. Or don't try at all. Sometimes a movie is both at its crappiest and its best when it realises it is a turd and doesn't try to be anything else. Like they say, we're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Some of us, though, are looking down at the human crap floating down towards the drain. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ndthestars.jpg Title: Battle beyond the stars Year: 1980 Writer: Anne Dyer Producer: Ed Carlin/ Roger Corman Genre: Science-fiction Stars: Richard Thomas as Shad Robert Vaughn as Gelt George Peppard as Space Cowboy (um...) John Saxon as Sador Darlanne Fluegel as Nanelia (And a lot of other people who surely now regret it...) This movie, in case you haven't seen it, is basically a pastiche of two very popular (and far superior) movies: “The Magnificent Seven”, a famous western based on Japanese director Akiro Kurosawa's “Seven Samurai” and the blockbuster “Star Wars”. Although Lucas's space opera had set the world alight and rekindled a new interest in science-fiction movies, this was a double-edged sword, as everyone and his mother thought they could write and produce a sci-fi film. This led to a glut of truly terrible rip-offs such as “Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone”, “Warlords of Atlantis”, “Starcrash”, “Brother from another planet” and “Prisoners of the lost universe”. Even Disney tried to get in on the act, and foisted the godawful “The Black Hole” upon us. Yeah, everyone was at it. But some were better than others and even all of Disney's financial clout and all the resources of its mega-empire couldn't stop that movie from being a turkey. By contrast, that same year would see the result of a movie which would go on to become both a sci-fi and horror classic, and introduce us to a new breed of heroine in Ridley Scott's “Alien”, although in fairness it would also see the underwhelming start of the Star Trek movie franchise with the boring, dull-as-dishwater-and-bearing-little-resemblance-to-the-series “Star Trek: the Motion Picture.” But once “Star Wars” had opened the floodgates and shown movie studios and execs that sci-fi was not just for kids, that it could play in major cinemas and, more importantly, smash box-office records, there was no stopping them. Which is the only real reason I can see for this movie ever having been released. To call it derivative is being extremely kind. It has a plot ripped right out of “Seven Samurai/Magnificent Seven”, down to the casting of one of the actors from that movie --- in virtually the same role --- and the role of another being played by a different actor. Unkindly, but appropriately and accurately referred to by me and my friends as “John Boy in space”, the movie does indeed star Richard Thomas, better known as squeaky-clean eldest lad John Boy Walton in squeaky-clean American family drama “The Waltons” --- he's never ever going to shake that connection, even if he does a hardcore adult drama (urgh! The image! The image! Get it out of my head!) --- he'll always be John Boy. The wafer-thin plot concerns the efforts of farmer Shad (John Boy I mean Thomas) to recruit a “magnificent seven” sorry “group of fighters who number seven and may or may not be magnificent” to help defend his planet which has come under attack by vicious Mexican bandits, sorry space pirates. The leader of the pirates, a man called Sador (could that name be any darker if they had called him Pure Evil?) :rolleyes: possesses a weapon called the Stellar Converter whcih turns planets into stars. No, I don't mean it's a weaponised Simon Cowell! Not those type of stars! Real stars, like, you know, the sun. One can only assume this is not good news for anyone inhabiting the planet, and generally speaking a thing to be avoided at all costs. Sador wants the planet for its resources and issues his ultimatum: submit to him and his army of space mutants (I'm serious!) or he will return in seven days. Yes, seven days. Exactly. Just enough time for the poor oppressed space farmers to run off and enlist some mercenary cowboys, I mean space heroes, to help them defeat the dread warlord. And of course there will be a rich reward for the saviours of the ... huh? Food you say. Food and shelter. Um. That's it? Who wouldn't jump at the chance? I love the way the farmers, whose home planet is Akir and so they are all --- Akirans! --- are so meek and submissive that when the few crewing the only battered little weather satellite they have orbiting their planet encounter the space fleet they politely ask if the invaders wouldn't mind identifying themselves. Please? If it's not too much trouble? Annoyed by such unnecessary politeness, and probably (and probably correctly) assuming the crew are gay, Sador destroys their little weather station without a second thought and then goes to quite literally overshadow the lives of the Akirans as his huge ship moves in over the planet. As this happens, someone quite unnecessarily asks “What is it?” What the fuck do you think it is, idiot? It's a big-ass motherfucker of a starship, and you had better just start sucking Sador's co --- Hold on a moment. How did The Batlord get in here and start writing my copy? He's right though: who could see such a sight and ask that question? It's pretty damn obvious what it is, and if it isn't then the smell coming from all those other farmers standing around beside you and gawping up at the sky like a hick on his first visit to a big city should alert you. There'll be no shortage of fertiliser for the crops this season! Assuming there still is a season. Sador delivers his ultimatum. He pulls no punches, and speaks as if to children. And slow-witted children at that. “I have come with my forces to conquer you” he tells them. Well firstly there wouldn't be much point in his coming without his forces to conquer them, would there? Damn! I knew I forgot something! And if he had come with his forces, he's hardly likely to be delivering a consignment of toys to the Akiran orphanage, now is he? But just in case the hayseeds haven't got the message he spares a few of them the tedium of remaning in this movie any longer than they need to be and blows them away with lasers. Lucky them: there's another hour and a half of this drivel to go! Note: we now learn that, despite or even because of his tough-guy image, Sador is actually gay, as he orders “Full thrust to Umateal!” His underlings go scurrying off to wake up Umateal and tell him he's wanted in Sador's bedchamber. Meanwhile, John Boy makes his entrance --- no, that was not a clever and well-thought-out sexual segue! --- and is immediately told in contempt “You are a boy”. He must be getting tired of these references by now. For some reason he is the “only one who can fly Zed's ship”. Or maybe he's the only one who's not too embarrassed to. Look at it! It's a flying pair of breasts! With some sort of penile extensions! The Batlord must love it! http://www.modelermagic.com/wordpres...LK-500x339.jpg Just a note on the budget here. They may have been able to afford James Horner for the soundtrack (probably told him it was the next Star Wars movie, or else took him into the future and showed him that he would be forced to write the score for “Titanic”, then lied they could save him from this fate if he wrote for them) but they had to steal effects and sounds from other films and series. As the lights come on in Nell, the boobship, the sound is that of the USS Enterprise firing photon torpedoes! Nerd alert! Nerd alert! Now, a few observations before we get on with this thrilling plot. Firstly, Sador is a flithy stinking smegging stinking flithy liar. The “stellar convertor” cannot possibly work. I know this is a sci-fi movie but look at the first part of that abbreviated genre title. In general, science has to be observed in sf movies, and you cannot turn a planet into a star by any means at all, certainly not by hitting it with a massive laser beam. You can of course turn it into a cinder, which is what will happen to Akir if the dastardly tyrant has his way, but not a star. Not that I think the ex-inhabitants will be bringing this up as a point of order! Still, if you're going to be a megalomaniac, at least be an honest megalomaniac. Secondly, John Boy's character just appears out of nowhere, and conveniently is the only one who can pilot the tittyship --- which has, of course, a female AI --- other than old Zed, its owner who is of course now too old to pilot --- probably have a double coronary if he even saw it now, in his condition and at his age! I suppose he's been womping swamp rats in his old T-15 back on Tattooine as well, has he? Talk about clumsy plot devices with absolutely no buildup. Actually, let's not. Let's get back to this riveting film. As in, whoever wrote it deserves to be riveted to a crossbeam and left there as a warning to other aspiring directors and screenwriters that you can't just rip off a classic movie --- two classic movies --- actually, almost three --- and call the script your own. Yes, I know they meant to rewrite "The Magnificent Seven", but they didn't do it very well, did they? So where were we? Oh yeah. John Boy --- sorry Shad (You know what? Let's just call him John Boy, it's easier. And more fun) is on the way off his home planet for the first time ever he says. Eager to welcome him to outer space, the guys Sador left behind attack him but he gets away. When the leader wants to go after him his subordinate reminds him that they were told to watch the planet, and their master does not take kindly to his orders being disobeyed. “Remember Lobo?” he prompts. “He disobeyed orders, now Sador is wearing his left foot!” Quite right too: anyone who can write a song called “Me and you and a dog named Boo” has no right to both feet. Mind you, the B-side was terrific. Anyway, back to the firefight. Note that the ship, Nell, does everything for John Boy but push the fire button, yet he's not even prepared to do that. She locks on target, zooms in, frames the ship nicely and gives him a HUD (Head-Up Display, you dirty beggar!) but he can't push one simple button. “We'll tip our hand!” he complains. What? You mean they'll realise you're armed? “Can we outrun them?” he asks, revealing that, whatever Richard Thomas may say, you can't take the Walton out of him. Still a bloody peacenik. This is going to be some battle. Beyond, you know, the stars. And there's another thing: the title is complete rubbish. How can you go beyond the stars? The stars are everywhere. The bloody universe is made up of them. There is no beyond the stars. Give me strength! How much longer? Crap! We're only fifteen minutes in! Better haul space-ass then or we'll be here all night. Anyway, preferring to keep both his feet the alien mutant in charge agrees that they head home and allow John Boy to continue on his way. Nell complains that she has been forced to “show my backside to those aliens!” Why is she bitching? She's showing everyone her tits! But I digress. So they arrive eventually at Heph – Hefas --- Huffast --- ah screw it! Vulcan station and announce “This is an emissary from the planet Akir.” No answer. No reason why they should answer. Akir is in the arsehole of nowhere; why would they care if an “emissary” (read, cocky kid who thinks he's Luke Skywalker and so isn't) from there has arrived? John Boy calls the professor's name. Again, nothing. Receiving no answer he does what any experienced pilot does, and waits for permisson to ... oh no, wait, he doesn't. He just goes in anyway. Things get much sexier as he boards the station. He meets Nanelia, (seriously? Are you kidding me? Leia??) who is unsuccessfully trying to create a robot boyfriend for herself, but drops everything (not literally: this is a family movie) when she sees the striking young man stride confidently towards her. Well, after all, she works here with one old man and a bunch of androids. Beggars can't be choosers and any port in a storm, you know. Clearly fighting back the urge to ask “Aren't you himself from the Waltons?” she loses no time interrogating him, thinking he is an android. Well, she can't be blamed really can she? A robot would act better. When she realises he's human he asks her if she has never seen “an organic form” before, which has to go down as one of the worst chatup lines in a sci-fi movie ever. http://www.trollheart.com/boymeetsgirl.png Some obvious Star Wars comparisons: young buck who has never been offplanet before is sent to do battle with an evil empire. Well, sort of. On the way he meets a beautiful woman, but she does not turn out to be his sister. Boo. Nor a princess. Double boo. The not-princess tells John Boy Skywalker that her father is not as he was when Zed knew him, which kind of feeds into the whole Obi-Wan Kenobi thing. Oh, and of course the stellar convertor is just the weapon off the Death Star, which even now Darth Vader is looking for. After all, what good is a massive battlestation if it hasn't got its main weapon? What use are any of us without our main weapon? Batlord! I told you to get out of here! Okay, back we go. John Boy meets the not-princess's father, the one he was sent to find, Professor Hephalump, or whatever, but when Nanelia said he wasn't the man he used to be she wasn't just whistling Dixie! In fact, he's gone right off the deep end (possibly due to having to be a member of the cast of this movie!) and far from helping poor old Shad, tries to matchmake him with his daughter, hoping the two will create a superrace of ... well, I'm not quite sure, but it may have to do with androids. Or maybe Mexicans. Or Mexican androids. Anyway, whatever the case ol' John Boy is not digging the scene, even if Nanelia is hotter than the surface of the sun. He's got a planet to save! One of the many funny asides comes when the cracked professor tells his robot butler, Saunders, “Prepare the conjugal suite”. The robot goes to do so, but the prof calls him back to say that his daughter will convince the young man to stay. The robot smiles and moves off but Prof Loon calls him back again, to advise him that the defence of Akir is hopeless. About as hopeless as getting away to prepare the fucking conjugal suite like you asked me to, surely thinks Saunders, and makes another valiant attempt to get away, but the prof again calls him back, telling him there will be children here again soon! Great, thinks Saunders: then they can keep you busy while I get on with the tasks I was bloody manufactured to carry out! John Boy vainly tries to convince Nanelia to let him go, but the not-princess is more interested the more he talks. She says she has never heard of wind, and surely he experiences a desire to let one rip, but thinks better of it. He does however convince her to help him escape, though rather unkindly calls her “Dummy” when she refuses to come with him, preferring to stay with her insane father. Or is he talking to the robot? Hard to say really. After he's gone Nanelia decides maybe that rather than stay on this station surrounded by emotionless androids, she'd rather go after one emotionless android sorry human sorry Akiran, and anyway she'd like to find out what this thing she's heard about is, called sex. But that ship has literally sailed by the time she makes up her mind so she has to take her own little craft. “No weapons at all?” sneers John Boy condescendingly. Or maybe he's referring to the fact that she rather selfishly abandoned her bipolar father without carrying an armful of laser disruptors, or phaser rifles or whatever. Never mind that she has left her life behind and taken her first step into the big outside world stroke galaxy: why didn't she tool up first? Bloody women! She does mollify him though by saying “I've brought an analyser”, so he at least knows he'll be on for some kinky sex later! |
Nell seems to like it too: “I'd like to exchange data with that thing!” she purrs. Sure you would, you old space whore. ;) Nanelia seems incensed to hear a female voice on John Boy's ship, which, considering she hardly knows him and has not yet admitted to any feelings for him is pretty unbalanced really. Meh, typical female territorialism I guess. They set a rendezvous where they will, you know, rendezvous later. Meanwhile old Sador is not too happy with the “fuck you” message he gets back from the other species he has been threatening (who says space tyrants can't multitask?) and does his best dark scowl. Looks like the folks over at Umateal are off his Christmas card list. Off everyone's Christmas card list, if he has his way.
John Boy reflects that Nanelia “is an interesting form”. Yeah, she has nice tits JB: we noticed. But before you can say “autopilot mode, Nell, I have to use the restroom” they're under attack, with very familiar music (original Battlestar Galactica? Not sure but oh James!) and it sounds like they're being attacked by the creatures from Robotron: “Intruder alert! Stop the humanoid!” Those sound effects are right out of some late seventies videogame for sure! Actually, let's be honest here: they're not being attacked, it's another ship that's under fire, though the pilot, a relaxed and laconic George Peppard, doesn't seem too bothered. He loves it when a plan comes together, but if it doesn't, well to hell with it. He's the Space Cowboy, and this is not his first rodeo. That is the first and last western reference I will make to him. Disclaimer: The above statement is a lie. Leaning back in his chair with his hat tilted over his eyes, Han Solo, sorry Space Cowboy puts out a distress call. “Can we help him?” John Boy asks, to which Nell replies caustically “Not without a fight!” Well what did she think he was going to do? Ask the aliens nicely to stop firing? Invite them to a summit where they would try to open a dialogue and settle their differences peacefully? Play some sitar music? Eager to try to put his pacifistic John Boy Walton image behind him (lots of luck with that, guy!) the intrepid Akiran piles into the fight and the alien ship, either turned on or surprised to be attacked by a pair of flying boobs, is taken unawares. Mind you, you can take the Richard Thomas out of the Waltons but you can't take the Waltons out of Richard Thomas. I know I said something similar earlier. I'm getting bored here: we're only half an hour into a film that still has twice that amount to run! Anyway, he baulks at the idea of attacking his unknown target from behind, and as he squeals “Not from behind, Nell! Not from behind!” if Nanelia can pick up his transmission she'll be rolling her eyes and jettisoning that analyser out into space about now. Nell however takes charge: she doesn't care about hitting from behind and truth to tell has probably taken it up the ass more times than you or I have had hot dinners, so now despite John Boy's outrage that she fired without him they're in the middle of a dogfight. The Robotron ships, seeing a new player enter, peel off and attack him. They are no match for Nell's tit-lasers though and they're soon toast. Nell tells John Boy “You done fine kid”, which proves that though she may be an artificial intelligence her creator did not apparently see fit to install a grammar chip in her system. Or a respect module, come to think about it. Space Cowboy is happy to be rescued, though to be honest he looked not too worried about dying anyway: looked like as far as he was concerned, either way was good. He is however grateful to his rescuer and offers to show him his collection of old western movies, but realising that this might give the origin of the plot for this movie away John Boy quickly steers the conversation towards the more important idea of recruiting help for his poor defenceless --- and piss poor --- planet. George ain't too thrilled with the idea; he knows Sador and says they'd have a snowball's chance in Hell of beating him (what if it was a really BIG, FROZEN snowball and the heating was on the fritz that day...? No?), while to underline his point they watch the Umateals pay the price, both for having defied the warlord and having such a stupid name, as their planet is turned into a cinder. Oh yeah, jsut noticed: the dark music used whenever Sador appears is the same used for the approach of V'ger in “Star Trek: the (slow) Motion Picture”! James you devil! Did you write that one too? Oh no you didn't you little tinker! Jerry Goldsmith will not be happy: he's strapping on his Doc Martens as we speak! http://www.trollheart.com/jerryg.jpg John Boy looks surprised to see the stellar converter in action. What? Did he think Sador was bluffing? Oh yeah: evil megalomaniacal overlords always bluff, don't they? Mind you, the effect, such as it is, for the s/c is the worst I've ever seen. A small orange spot appears on the planet's surface, then it's all Photoshopped to total white, and just kind of ... rolls away. Shee! Give me the Death Star every time! Alderaan: now there was a planet that knew how to explode! Always one to see the bright side apparently, Space Cowboy offers John Boy his cargo of weapons, which he just happened to be intending to deliver but now that the delivery point has turned into a point of dust --- and more to the point, there's nobody left to sign for them, for what haulier leaves goods without getting a signature? --- he has no use for them. John Boy is overjoyed, and since the weapons are already paid for there's no fee. Sweet. The fact that uncounted millions have just lost their lives doesn't seem to bother either of the space adventurers, and one assumes Nell is too busy trying to give Space Cowboy's ship a blowjob to care. Ol' George, having agreed to help train the farmers to use their shiny new guns, invites John Boy to watch “Custer's last stand”, which is appropriate as not only will it be the planet's last stand but is likely to end the same way. Not-princess Nanelia is meanwhile heading towards the rendezvous, probably already bitching about why John Boy hasn't called her and wondering if her bum looks big in the tight leather pants she's wearing (no chance for a girl to change into anything slinkier when escaping from a space station crewed by androids and run by a nutcase!) when she's suddenly attacked by a malevolent coloured cloud, ripped right out of the Star Trek episode “Metamorphosis”, which for some unknown reason seems to give her an orgasm. Maybe it's a knob-ula? Sorry. She then gets sucked into the maw of a huge ship in a very lesbian fashion and the next time we see her she's suspended from a bar. Yum! Bondage ahoy methinks! Yeah but this is a family film isn't it? Boo. Get the whip! But instead she's met by aliens, who tell her they saved her from the “zime”, (come on: that's jsut a shortened form of enzyme!) the nasty coloured cloud that was trying to eat her. Meh, would have been her first (and maybe last) sexual experience. The head alien, Cayman, introduces the Kelvin. Not only are these creatures so closely based on the aliens from the Star Trek pilot “The cage”, but the writer couldn't be bothered thinking up a name for them and just took one from a temperature scale. Lucky she didn't call them the Fahrenheits I guess! The aliens tell her they're slavers and will sell her but unfortunately (for them) when she mentions Sador's name they decide to join her in the fight to protect Akir. Guess they don't like the warlord so much. Note: Much as it pains me, I must admit that the leader of the aliens, with his vaguely fishlike face and reptilian scales, looks like he was partially at least the model for Babylon 5's Drazi. Assuming any of the show's effects guys ever watched this movie. Which I hope they never did; I don't like to think of people suffering. Other than my father. Back to the film. John Boy encounters a flying lampshade and finds himself apparently a guest at a reunion of the five Doctors, who for some unaccountable reason are all wearing white robes and masks, standing around the TARDIS control trying to make it work. http://www.trollheart.com/nestor.png For a man who has never used a weapon John Boy is quick to draw his, blissfully unaware that he has now become a plastic figurine. http://www.trollheart.com/johnboy.png He is rather surprised though to find that the five white Doctors --- who tell them they are called Nestor, and appear to be clones, or some sort of gestalt entity (thank you Red Dwarf!) --- all want to get in on the action and will help in the defence of his homeworld. This perhaps provides an argument to the idea that they are an intelligent lifeform. Those jolly pair Tembo and Kalo meanwhile, left behind to guard the planet (as Tembo says “Where is it gonna go?”) gatecrash a wedding on Akir and abduct the bride. John Boy heads to Mos Eisley, sorry Nascato, where the best, or worst, mercenaries can be found. Living up to its reputation, teh city has a very handy “dial-a-drug” vending machine, which I'm sure some of our members here would be very happy trying out! But that's the only way Nascosto lives up to its rep, as there is only one mercenary left. When John Boy gasps “You kill for pay?” you have to wonder if he quite understands the concept of a mercenary? It's Robert Vaughn, playing almost exactly the same character as he did in “The Magnificent Seven”, just here he's called Gelt instead of Lee. Somehow, although he can't afford to pay the famous killer, John Boy recruits Gelt who says “Your offer seems very attractive to me”. How? All he can offer is food and shelter. And quite probably a quick death if you're lucky. Your future holds nothing but ashes and cinders. How can that be attractive? But hey, we're not dealing with logic here. This is a guy who tells John Boy that he eats serpents seven days a week. Why not? He's probably ready to die. So off they go, and they are now two. Three, if you include John Boy. Which I would not. At least the writer resisted using the “How many have you got?” idea, which would really have sealed this as the worst ripoff of “Seven Samurai” since, well, since “The Magnificent Seven” I guess. And speaking of western cliches, which we weren't, a tiny ship approaches John Boy's and Nell says that the pilot must not think the galaxy's big enough for the both of them. Oh dear. Turns out it's some big-titted mercenary from a race called the Valkir (really? The Valkir? A warrior woman in, no less, a horned helmet, and that's the best they could do? Why not go the whole hog and call her Helga or Brunhilde? Jesus Christ on the subway at night!) who was testing him and wants to join his army. God help her. John Boy however is not impressed. She has no weapons and the ship is small, even if it is, as she claims, the fastest in the universe. Which is of course an impossible claim to make, for who has travelled the universe from one end to the other? The galaxy is a big enough boast, but the universe? Seems this woman has some serious issues. But no amount of pouting will get John Boy to change his mind, and of all people/things, Nell accuses him of being harsh! Nell, the AI with a tongue other AIs fear the lash from! Nell, who is easily the most sarcastic, overbearing, snide and self-satisfied computer this side of Orac! She's accusing him of being harsh! John Boy gathers his forces at the rendezvous point where they all meet each other for milk and cookies. Gelt says he doesn't like anyone behind him, so no doubt Nanelia is glad she ditched that analyser! Pause for a short discussion on the dialogue in this film: it's so stilted. Discovering Space Cowboy is smoking (when did you ever see Peppard without a cigarette or a cigar, now really? They're as much a part of him as a lollipop is to Kojak! Oh go look it up, young grasshopper! That too!) he asks incredulously “Is that real smoke you're putting in your lungs?” George says it is and he knows it's bad for him, whereupon John Boy opines “Well I don't think you should do it.” No shit Sherlock! As if a man who is far older and more experienced than you is going to give a crap for the opinion of an uptight, morally rigid farmer from Nowheresville, Akir! Cayman says “I want Sador's head” to which John Boy replies “You're welcome to it.” Like he was going to stop the alien. Not to mention that when John Boy is taken aboard the Nestor ship he doesn't respond with "Who are you?" or "You don't know what you're messing with here!" or even "Take me to your leader!" Nah, he goes all forties gangster, asking "Hey! What's the big idea?" Smooth, John Boy, smooth. Remember, I warned you not to mention it... These are just a a few of the incredible examples of Ms. Dyer's razor-sharp writing prowess and command of the English language. God help us. The fleet heads to Akir, and Gelt takes out Tembo and Kalo's little fighter. They agree their only chance is to knock out Sador's stellar converter. In order to fire the weapon the warlord has to lower his forcefield, at which point he's vulnerable for a precious second or so. Original. :rolleyes: Here's a thought: with an experienced mercenary, a gestalt alien which seems to have lived forever and a space cowboy who at least knows how to operate weapons, they're given their strategical briefing by Nanelia! Yeah, the girl who up until now has never seen another human being other than her father and whose job has been to repair robots! Where has she suddenly acquired all this tactical knowledge? How come she's the general, preparing her troops? The annoying Valkyrie with the big tits has invited herself along and John Boy doesn't seem to be about to drive her off. She assures Nanelia that the not-princess will learn all about sex if she sticks with her. Are we on for some girl-on-girl here? Again, let me remind you: family movie. Don't even think about it. Nice cups though! Nanelia asks John Boy to show her the ropes: can we expect bondage? Then she wants him to show her some more of this Earth thing called kissing. Yeah I know it's Akir not Earth; you get the idea. An awkward moment when she advises him “Your torque bar has slipped its groove. You're going to need a new one.” Wow! What a tigress! Another dig at “The Magnificent Seven” as Space Cowboy whiles away the time as they wait with a tune on the harmonica. Could this be more cliched? Gelt responds to the question “Are you a bad man” by explaining that “If you think differently you get called bad.” He leaves out the part where if you kill people for money you also get called bad. Rather inappropriately I feel, one of the Akirans tries to get a rave going, then we realise it's actually a siren warning of the arrival of Sador, who is surprised and worried to find that poor old Tembo and Kalo have suffered the kind of fate he has planned for John Boy's people. Cowboy betrays his fear and pisses himself. Either that or he's pouring whiskey out of a flask attached to his groin. Note: I really hope that's whiskey! :eek: The video game, sorry space battle begins. The Nestor seem blissfully unaware that their ship is lit up like a huge luminous lightbulb: might as well have a big target painted on it! Even though the space valkyrie's ship is supposedly the fastest in the universe, she finds that the enormous drag created by her boobs is holding it back. Meanwhile the ground invasion begins and Space Cowboy leads the defence: the sound those hand lasers are making is definitely out of the original Galactica! Gelt is hit and it looks like his ship explodes as he veers away from the battle, while the invasion leader for some odd reason seems to be utilising the services of a well-loved videogame character as he calls out “Sonic! Check all systems!” It seems they have the little blue hedgehog manning an armoured vehicle, as they roll up the sonic tank. Things are not looking good for the defenders. http://media.ign.com/games/image/art...1318971647.jpg Step forward the good ol' Kelvin, who --- wait for it --- have no ears. They also seem to be able to destroy the sonic tank just by standing in front of it and spreading their arms. Um. This drains their energy though, and they may have made the ultimate sacrifice. Kind of like anyone who's watching this movie. After they've pushed the invaders back, for now, the valkyrie tells John Boy “You've never seen a valkyrie go down”, which surely must give him ideas? Gelt pops his clogs, bringing his role full circle with that of Lee in the western. John Boy orders that a meal be prepared and buried with him. That was the deal, he says: a meal and a place to hide. Well, it was food and shelter but come on: how literal and pedantic are you being here, man? What's the point of that? Couldn't your people be better employed in the defence of your planet than cooking a meal for a dead man? The Nestor have arranged to have one of their kind captured by Sador. “What one sees,” they tell John Boy, “we all see.” But have they considered perhaps that what one feels they all feel? As the “facet” of their personality/commune/whatever the fuck it is these guys are faces torture at the hands of the tyrant he is asked the size and strength of the Akirans' fleet. “That would give you an unfair advantage”, he says matter-of-factly. Duh! When Sador informs him that he has someone expert at inflicting pain, the Nestor replies “It is good to have skills”. Well it doesn't matter anyway as once his arm is sliced off he dies, and for some reason Sador --- who it appears only had one arm --- has it grafted onto him. Bad move! The arm is part of the Nestor, even if that one is dead, and the other Nestor can control it. Oh come on! I know it's silly and implausible but is it any moreso than the rest of this film? So they try to get him to cut his throat (how do they know he has a sword in his belt? Guess the other one --- the one now dead --- saw it. Maybe) but his torturer manages to wrest the weapon from his grasp and then cut off the offending arm. Hey, if thine arm offends thee! The mood of the film now takes a serious downer. “We have failed”, moans the Nestor. “We're finished!” snaps John Boy. Only Big Tits is still ready to fight. “The Valkyrie never give up!” she declares. “Never!” Whether the white guys got a boner (do the Nestor get boners? And if they do, do they all get it at the same time? Enquiring and dirty minds need to know!) or what, they suddenly cheer up and head to their ship to renew the fight. John Boy is still moody though, but when Nanelia says “I want to go up there with you” he must surely think “I want to go up there!” She tells him sweetly “I could help you up there” and John Boy wonders has she a jar of Vaseline with her? Either way, the two lovers set off in Nell, and it's borrowed sound effects and crappy footage time again as someone pops twenty cents in the machine and the game begins again. |
Somebody finally manages to hit the Nestor ship. How the fuck did they miss it, glowing like a bloody white light in space? It's a flying target! And serve them right too: that control column is totally ripped off from the TARDIS. The only thing it doesn't do is move up and down. Sador tells his men to ready the stellar converter and fix it on the planet Akir. Somehow this seems extraneous information: where did he think his men thought he was going to target it? Did Governor Tarkin say “Target Alderaan?” No he did not. The Death Star was orbiting it. His men knew what the target was. Further confirmation or instruction would have been pointless, and would have left him less time to chuckle in a cold evil way as Princess Organa's homeworld was destroyed. Some tyrants know how to do things properly!
Valkyrie girl's beasts implants finally give up the ghost and her ship blows up (very appropriately I have to say), while George goes back to his with his best friend, Johnny Walker and takes off to join the fight. He doesn't help much though, and goes out with a song on the harmonica. Cayman engages in some pointless insult trading with Sador, reminding him that the warlord was responsible for wiping all his people out and the alien has a score to settle. Unfortunately this seems to involve trying to ram Sador's ship as Cayman sets a collision course. Not to anyone's surprise, he is blown out of the stars. And then there was one. John Boy's ship has sustained damage in the fight and Nell's memory banks have been knocked out. She can't remember anything. Lucky her. The ship gets taken up into Sador's tractor beam and John Boy uses the oldest trick in the book, the old self-destruct-while-trapped-in-a-tractor-beam, and it's bye bye Sador. John Boy and his squeeze escape, but there's no escape from this movie. As they say on Futurama: “You watched it: you can't un-watch it!” Notes on the ending Almost everything about this movie is pathetic and derivative, but the ending needs to be examined for extreme crappiness. First of all, a ship that's crippled gets drawn into the tractor beam of the warlord's ship. Why? He said he wanted to take them alive. Again, why? He hasn't given any clue up to now that he even knows who these people are, much less cares. Why does he now want to take these two alive? Is it that he knows they're the ones who created the alliance that defeated him? Oh sorry: they didn't defeat him. They were all blown out of the stars. For all the use they were, John Boy might as well have stayed at home. So having made the fatal villain's error of dropping his shields to pull the little ship aboard, he doesn't think that maybe it's a trap? That once caught, if this ship self-destructs he won't be able to get away from the blast? Really? Is he that thick? Not to mention his final scene: Governor Tarkin didn't break down like a spoiled little boy and stamp his foot, saying “I'm going to live forever! I want to live forever!” Well, in fairness Tarkin never saw the end coming, as he balanced his chin on his hand and waited for the rebels to be destroyed. Vader had the good taste to go down fighting, spinning out of control yes, but with a “fuck you I'll be back you bitches!” fist of defiance. Defiance too was in Khan's eyes as he met his end in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” and even Rimmer, right at the end, declared “Better dead than smeg!” What an end for the galaxy's most brutal tyrant: whimpering like a child as he realised the end had come. And the final speech, about everyone who died being part of Akir, stuck in my throat. Existential crap. I think on balance John Boy's allies would all rather have survived to taste the victory than end up part of some imagined shared consciousness of a backwards farming planet they hadn't even heard of seven, um, cycles ago. And wasn't this in essence a massive defeat? John Boy headed off to raise an army, and for all the good they did he may as well not have bothered. One of his allies insisted on flying about in a mobile target, and was deservedly destroyed. The big bad mercenary hardly got a shot off before he was killed and as for Space Cowboy? Well if you want a man who can play a harmonica and drink hard liquor, he's your guy. And he did help organise the ground defence of the planet. But once he got spaceborne he basically flew right into the atmosphere, drunk and playing that damn harmonica to the end. Cayman fared little better. His great plan to take revenge on the annihilator of his people was to, um, ram a far bigger and better-armed ship shouting his battlecry. He, too, was splashed across the stars. Not too much in the way of tactical thinking, I have to say, and all of this despite General Nanelia's complicated battleplan down on the planet. What happened to that? I suppose you could say they lured Sador in by, um, purposely being blown to shit so that they had to be taken into the tractor beam, thereby forcing the megalomaniac to lower his shields, but how did they know he was going to do that? He could as easily have blasted them out of the sky. No, that was just dumb luck. And of course, following the plot of “The Magnificent Seven” almost to a fault, everyone dies at the end save the two main characters, and the Mexicans, sorry, Akirans are saved, in the end, by one of their own. Luke Skywalker, eat your heart out. Or rather, don't. I realise I have probably written a lot more on this bad movie than I have on some of my favourites --- or possibly not; I write a lot, as you know --- and it was not really my intention but once I got into it I couldn't stop picking out the hilarious points and the awful dialogue, and though it never quite became “so bad it was good”, it was clearly enjoyable, if only because I got to slag it off so much. The real mystery is why a director of the stature of Roger Corman would be involved in a low-budget ripoff like this? I guess some mysteries will never be solved. |
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I think it's fair to say that before 1975 most of us didn't know much about sharks. There were no shark movies, nothing dedicated specifically to sharks, no real information about them. We'd had Flipper, so we knew about dolphins, Skippy taught us about kangaroos and if you wanted to know a little about whales you could watch or read Moby Dick, but for me anyway, and I think for a lot of people, sharks were reduced to a shadowy, vaguely threatening presence that haunted the likes of the Indian and the Pacific Ocean, and that we (certainly here in Ireland) had no reason to fear. If we saw sharks on the telly at all, they were an indistinct, blurry shape in the water, or more usually the iconic triangular fin cutting through the waves, most often in cartoons. Nobody knew really what sharks were (big, scary fish?) and really, I suppose, nobody cared. The chances of us falling foul of one, unless we lived in the likes of Australia, went surfing or took a deep-sea voyage, were minimal. And then came Jaws. Based on the novel of the same name by Peter Benchley, who had no experience with and no real knowledge of sharks, yet took to writing a novel that grew into a box-office blockbuster movie that simultaneously brought the shark to the forefront of human interest and painted it as the savage killer of the seas, Jaws suddenly reminded us how apparently dangerous sharks were, and that they should be feared. Benchley later repented of his ill-founded and completely baseless assumptions about sharks, becoming an ocean conservationist in later life, and bewailing the fact that people seemed determined to accept the ideas in the novel as fact, not fiction, leading to a horrifying increase in culls of sharks, shark hunting and a general mistrust turning to hatred of the animal. In recent times this has been somewhat redressed, with channels like National Geographic and Discovery running “Shark Weeks” and trying to explain, rather than villify, the nature of sharks, and through these we have learned that though yes, sharks are dangerous and can eat people, they generally shy away from contact with humans, and though there are many reported incidents of shark attacks every year, most if not all can be attributed to a case of mistaken identity – the shark mistaking the human for a seal or other prey – accidents (sharks often “taste” something to be sure it is edible; humans are not to the shark's taste but unfortunately a small taste for a shark can cripple or even kill a human) or other factors. Sharks are not, we now know, the remorseless, evil killers of the deep depicted in Jaws. This newfound understanding of sharks has not, however, prevented a minor film industry building up around the myths and half-truths espoused by the original shark movie, and though these days much of the material written about them seems to concern tongue-in-cheek or frankly ridiculous storylines – Sharknado, Ghost Shark, Sharkocalypse etc – there are still some good movies around with sharks in them. Some are better than others, and most, not surprisingly, cast the shark as the villain of the piece, but at least they take their subject semi-seriously. Even a movie like Deep Blue Sea, with its idea of genetically enhanced sharks, is easier to credit than, say, Sharktopus, although it should be pointed out that I have never watched any of these “B” shark movies. I may, at some point, but even without seeing them the taglines give you enough of an idea to know that they are certainly not taking their subject seriously. Flying sharks? Sharks buried in ice? In sand? Ghost sharks? Give me a break. So none of those will feature here, but here's a list of the ones I intend to look at in some detail, perhaps comparing them along the way. If you know of a good shark movie I should include, let me know, but for now this is the list. I don't know what order I'll be doing them in, and this will run throughout the year (which is why I resisted calling it Shark Week or Shark Month) among other features, so this list is in alphabetical order. As I review them, I will mark them accordingly and link. 12 Days of Terror Bait Cruel Jaws Deep Blue Sea Jaws Jaws 2 Jaws 3-D Jaws (4): The Revenge The Last Shark (aka Great White) Mako: The Jaws of Death Mission of the Shark: the Story of the USS Indianapolis Night of the Sharks Open Water Red Water The Reef Shark Attack Shark Attack 2 Shark Attack 3: Megalodon Shark Swarm Shark Zone Having seen only a mere handful of these movies, I have no doubt some will turn out to be utter shite, but hopefully there'll be some good ones in there, apart from the ones I already know. As this was shown recently on the telly I've decided to review it first so I can clear if off my Sky Box if nothing else. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...er-2010jpg.jpg Title: The Reef Year: 2010 Nationality: Australian Starring: Damian Walshe-Howling, Zoe Naylor, Gyton Grantley and Adrienne Pickering Directed by: Andrew Traucki Written by: Andrew Traucki Cinematography: Daniel Ardillery Music: Rafael Ma Budget: 3.8 million AUD Box Office: 125,000 AUD Says “based on true events”, so that's a plus. Maybe. A group of friends decide to join one of their mates who is delivering a boat to Indonesia, and set off for their destination. There's obviously some history between Luke, the salesman, and Kate, his ex-girlfriend and sister of the other male lead, Matt. Two days out they hit something and the boat capsizes. They manage to scramble up onto the hull of the boat, but are now alone and drfiting in the water with no way to contact anyone for help. Considering their options, Luke suggests they abandon the boat and try to swim to the nearest island. This being about ten miles away, his advice is not popular; most of these people can swim but not that far, and of course everyone fears that there are sharks in the water. Had they looked at the video cover, they would have seen this is indeed the case. Luke therefore, being overridden, goes below into the sunken remains of the boat to see what he can salvage to keep the thing afloat, as it is now their only sanctuary from the embrace of the deep. It quickly becomes apparent though from his exploration that the boat is doomed to sink, so they decide to swim for it after all. Except Kate, who is adamant she will remain, believing their chances of making it slim in the extreme. The other three leave her behind with Warren, who refuses to go into the water. At the last moment she changes her mind, probably not relishing the idea of being left alone with the depressing Warren, and heads into the water to join her friends. A short while after leaving the boat behind they come across a turtle floating in the sea, but are disturbed to find it is missing its head. And it's not a small turtle, so something rather large and nasty is nearby. Back at the boat, Warren, who didn't want to risk swimming, sees something in the water, circling the vessel. Meanwhile, back with our heroes, they too are beginning to believe something is stalking them in the water. They're not wrong (well, if they were, it would be a pretty short and boring movie, now wouldn't it?) as a shark hoves into view. Not the kind of thing you really want to see where you're out in the middle of the ocean! The shark begins to circle them – it's kind of their own fault; they're attracting its attention by kicking, splashing and screaming. I know it's easy to say, and were it me there'd definitely be a long brown streak in the water by now (assuming I could swim, which I can't) but if they just floated and kept quiet the chances are the shark would lose interest in them and move on. Of course they don't, they can't, and the beast moves closer. The fact that the fin suddenly disappears is not really to be taken as a good sign, as it usually indicates the shark has dove in order to launch an attack. And so it proves, as the thing surfaces almost on top of them, breaking the water then diving back below again. An exploratory strike as the animal tries to work out what they are, if hey are predator or prey, and if the latter, if it can eat them. It can, and Matt is the first to find out as he is attacked when he goes back for his floating board and the shark arrows in, taking off his leg. With the shock and the loss of blood it isn't long before he gives up the ghost, and mere moments after being attacked he is dead, literally, in the water, and they have to leave him in the hopes that the shark's hunger – or more likely, its curiosity – has been sated. Fat chance. And then there were three. Night begins to fall as they remaining friends swim further, Suzie suffering the loss of her boyfriend in the aftermath of the shock of his death. She loses it, blaming Luke (well, you would, wouldn't you?) and obviously wishing she had stayed on the boat and taken her chances. How exactly they expect to find their way to this island in the dark with no GPS or radar or even a compass (Luke earlier pointed out north by the position of the sun, or something) is beyond me. As Suzie says despairingly, “We're lost in the middle of the ocean, in the middle of the fucking night!” Kind of about the size of it, really. Except as they wake the following morning (thankfully, uneaten) they sight what appears to be land in the distance. Relieved and with renewed energy tey make their way to what turns out to be a small rocky outcrop from which they can definitely make out the outline of land, though if it's the island they've been making for it seems very small, even in the distance. Abandoning the rock and returning to the sea, they continue their journey, with this time at least a proper direction to head for. Suddenly a fin breaks the water, and they all scream, thinking the shark has returned, but it turns out only to be a dolphin, to their intense relief. It's short-lived though, as the next time they see a fin it is the shark, and it attacks Suzie, pulling her underwater and leaving nothing behind but a thick spreading red stain. Two down, two to go. Of course it turns out not to be an island they've sighted but (say it with me) a reef, but it's still better than being in the water, so they make for it anyway. Kate realises her foot is bleeding. This is not a good thing to do with a shark in the water! A very formulaic reconcilation occurs between the two just before they re-enter the water, A few moments later the shark is back, ready for more. The two make a last desperate break for the reef, swimming for all they're worth, trying to outdistance the shark. They make it to the reef, but it's slippery and there are few handholds. Kate manages to scramble up to safety, but poor old Luke is too late and the shark gets him as he tries to climb up, the girl unable to pull him up. So now she's left alone on the reef, in the middle of the ocean, no idea where she is or if help can come for her. Oh. I was about to make a prediction about how it would end, but, well, that's it. It's over. It ends with her sitting on the reef bawling about losing Luke and there is no resolution. Boo and double boo, though I suppose you have to give some credit for a certainly unexpected and not happy ending. QUOTES Matt (after they clamber back on to the capsized boat): “What happened?” Luke: “Don't know. Must have hit something. Reef? Whale?” (Yeah, I'd really trust this bozo to deliver my million-dollar yacht! Who the fuck was steering when they hit whatever it was they hit, and why was he, as the person responsible, not at the helm?) Luke: “The boat's fucked. I don't think it's going to stay afloat. And when it does sink, we're in the water.” (What stunning insight! My confidence in this man grows with every scene!) Warren (to Suzie, who is wearing a wetsuit): “You look like a seal in that. Sharks love seals.” Matt: “That was one big turtle!” (The unspoken question: what the fuck could tear the head off something as big as that?) Kate (about the shark): “It's the same one, isn't it?” Luke: “I think so.” Kate: “I know it is. I know it is.” (What the fuck does it matter? You think a different Great White is going to be more merciful?) Good scenes It's very early in the movie – a mere few minutes in – so you're not going to be fooled, but while Kate and Luke are diving under the sea preparatory to leaving on their trip everything goes quiet underwater as Kate watched the vista in front of her, then suddenly something attacks her from behind. But it's only Luke messing around. There' s no long drawn-out suspense scene or ominous music, so I doubt that the viewer was meant to be tricked into thinking it was a shark, more just a bit of fun. Works well enough. The crash is handled quite well; you get the feeling of being tossed around and suddenly everything is under water. The scene where they come across the headless turtle is handled well also. It takes a few moments, as the animal bobs towards them on the tide, and then they have to grab it and spin it around to discover it's missing its head. They let it go pretty quickly after that! The scene where the dolphin appears and they all think it's the shark is quite funny. Obviously, this is only a personal thing but I found it funny. I think it's the second appearance of the shark, when it comes back after having snacked on Matt and still hungry. It floats into shot, and the look on its face to me says “So where is everyone? I was told I should meet them here?” It just looks a little puzzled. No, I will not seek psychiatric help: it's already way too late for that. Notes on cinematography Oddly enough, this isn't something I tend to look at that much in movies, not knowing very much about it, but in movies about sharks (or anything that involves camerawork underwater) I think it's important to take it into account, as it can really add to (or detract from) the overall atmosphere of the movie. Before they set off there are some nice underwater scenes where Luke and Kate are swimming. They're done well enough; gives you a sense of being underwater, sure, but nothing exactly breath-taking. The shots of the boat underwater, when Luke goes down to try to save what he can, are quite effective, starkly showing the contrast between what was a short time ago a pleasure craft and a place to have a bit of fun, and what it has now become: a murky, watery shell. The aerial shot as the three push off from the capsized boat succeeds in giving a very clear picture of the odds they are facing. However I must point out that when they get to the rocky outcrop on the way to the island, the camera continues to move up and down, even though they are now – if only temporarily – on dry land, which sort of ruins the idea. I'm not sure why they couldn't have steadied the camera for these shots, then let it bob up and down after the guys go back into the water. Makes it look as if they're moving along on the rock through the sea, which of course they can't be. It must also be pointed out that unlike a lot of other movies which rely on CGI to create the sharks, this movie did at least use footage of real actual sharks, cut into the action, which makes it seem at least relatively authentic. |
Verdict?
A pretty standard shark movie, something of a rip-off I believe of the far superior Open Water, with very little to recommend it. Acting is minimal, there are few surprises other than the “shock” ending, and basically I could have written this. Really quite poor. I found the characters thin and poorly-developed. The relationship between Luke and Kate was only hinted at, seemed very basic and was not fleshed out (pardon the pun: what do you mean, what pun?) and as for the other two: well they might as well not have been there for all they contributed to the story. They essentially became just two victims for the shark. Matt's speech after his legs have been eaten is far from authentic: he doesn't even give any real indication of being in pain, or that he knows he's going to die. It's more like he knows his part in the movie is over and is ready to go home. Suzie's reaction to his death is at least believable, if slightly over the top. And Warren, left behind, is forgotten about. His refusal to enter the sea leaves him watching, we assume, the shark circling the slowly-sinking yacht, but we never get any closure there, not that I care. But if you're going to introduce the idea of leaving one person behind on the boat, at least use it. Here's what I thought would happen, for those who care: first, I thought Kate would remain on the boat with Warren. He, aware they are likely to die and having carried a torch for her for years, makes a move which she does not appreciate. She struggles with him, eventually pushing him off the boat as the shark swims by and GULP! That's the end of Warren. Or, he could come to the rescue at the end, having been picked up by rescuers, perhaps having sorted out that distress signal thing, and proving they should all have stayed where they were. Which, admittedly, would have made for a pretty dull film, but in the end what we experience is not much better. I can't believe the minor accolades this film received, though I can believe the box-office return: the producers lost their shirts. Far from even recovering their costs, they made a measly 125K for a three million outlay, that's what? Less than a twelfth of their budget recouped? To me, as I already said, this was a bad bad rehash of Open Water, which was done so much better. Even while they're swimming to the island (or so they think; they're actually hopelessly lost) there's no conversation to expand the plot, such as it is, or open up the character development. It's mainly silence and the odd joke to lighten the mood, but there's very little there. Even the three deaths are kind of received with a certain philosophical resignation, not even horror or disbelief. To be honest, if they'd all been eaten, they would have deserved it. And what about the poor rich fucker who ordered a boat he's now not going to receive? Has everyone forgotten him? He's the real victim here. Well, him and those of us who had to watch this shit. Message in the Movie None that I can see, unless it's don't let some idiot pilot the expensive yacht you're supposed to deliver, or else know your route: how could these idiots hit a reef? It's not like the damn things move! Music Music can make a movie, especially a shark one (remember the famous "attack" music in Jaws? but here I really don't see it. The music is very incidental; much of the time there is none, and even for the attack scenes it's kind of stock really. Nothing that stands out. Not terrible, but certainly not memorable. Fact vs Fiction Just a section where I'll quickly note whether the movie's writer was well informed on sharks or got all his or her plots from The Big Book of Sharks, which appears to be the case here. Anyone who knows anything about sharks knows that they don't keep attacking; they will try an exploratory bite, but humans are lacking in the blubber they prefer, so they don't like our taste. Why, then, did the shark keep attacking? Also, sharks scent blood in the water and it drives them into a frenzy, so why did not other sharks in the vicinity find their way there? No, this is a pure case of fiction. http://images.freeimages.com/images/...rk-cartoon.jpg Really only worth a poor http://www.trollheart.com/sharkrat2.png tl;dr For those who can't be bothered wading (or perhaps I should say, given the subject, swimming their way through my walls of text, the movie summed up in four sentences. Yes, it really is that badly written. However, I will be trying this out on future reviews. Perhaps not all will be possible to encapsulate in four sentences, but I'll try to distill the essence of my review down to as few sentences as I can. 1. A guy sells boats for a living and has to deliver one to Indonesia, deciding to bring his friends along for the ride. 2. The boat hits something (a reef, we think, though this is never confirmed) and capsizes. 3. They swim for it (except one, who is left behind because he's too much of a nancy boy to mix it up with the sharks; we never find out his fate, nor do we care) hoping to make it to some island vaguely “over that way”. 4. Three of the four are eaten by a Great White Shark. |
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Title: Bait Year: 2012 Nationality: Australian/Singaporean Starring: Phoebe Tonkin, Xavier Samuel, Julian McMahon, Sharni Vinson, Adrian Pang and others Directed by: Kimble Rendall Written by: Russell Mulcahy, John Kim Cinematography: Ross Emery Music: Joe Ng, Alex Oh Budget: 20 million* Box Office: 29.5 million* * (I have no idea if these figures represent US, Singapore or Australian Dollars, as it doesn't make it clear. Either way, at least they seem to have made their money back and still had enough to throw a few shrimps on the barbie!) Billed as Bait 3D, I can only assume this is one of those movies that focussed on the gorier, more in-your-face aspect of shark movies, and so is unlikely to have been winning any Oscars. The tagline for the movie - “Clean up on aisle 7” - kind of says it all about how serious they were about this. Not very, we can assume, when we meet Josh, a lifeguard who is passed out drunk in his car and once again he's one of two male leads, with the female lead being his girlfriend and (wait for it) the other male lead, Rory's, sister. Well, she's his fiancee, but the relationship dynamic is looking to be almost identical to the one in The Reef. Not a great start, to be fair. The shark does put in an appearance pretty quickly, taking down a swimmer and really leaving nothing much behind. Rory is also out in the sea, riding a board as he sets a buoy which Josh was supposed to have done, but does not see the attack and though Josh jumps on a waterski to try to get to him to warn him in time, he's unable to save him and his friend is on the menu. It's a year later, and Josh is still haunted by the death of his friend, and the fact that he could not save him; all he has left of him is a dog tag thing which he keeps as a memory of Rory. He now works as a shelf-stacker in a supermarket, where he sees a young girl shoplifting and being pursued by the store detective. She manages to evade him when she runs into her boyfriend, and the guard is flummoxed. He goes to fetch the store manager, who fires Ryan, her boyfriend, and calls the cops on her. Meanwhile, after Rory's death it's probably obvious that the wedding would have been called off; in fact, Josh and Tina have split up, and now he sees her with her new guy in the shop. Meanwhile, Jaime, the girl who had been shoplifting, turns out to be the daughter of the cop who is called to the scene, and he takes her away with him, disappointed and threatening to “process her” so that she will have to spend the night in jail. She doesn't look impressed. And while they argue, a pair of hard cases prepare to rob the supermarket. Well, compared to the previous movie there's a lot happening here, though after its initial appearance the shark seems to have faded somewhat from the plotline, but we'll see whether this new direction is going to lead back to the original story. At least it's entertaining. Jaime's father, Todd, notices something is wrong and with a cop's instincts takes his gun and returns to the supermarket, where he gets the drop on Doyle, the raider who had taken the manager hostage, but unbeknownst to him there is a second criminal and he takes a woman hostage, growling at the cop to drop his gun. Mexican standoff, as Jaime re-enters the market, having been told off by her boyfriend. In the confusion someone gets shot, a woman, not sure if it's the same one the other robber was holding hostage. And then, of course, typically, as anyone could expect and it's the most obvious and predictable thing ever, a tsunami hits! Well of course it does. Doesn't it always? One of the most tired, overused, cliched ... wait. Let's back that up a little. A tsunami? A fucking tsunami hits? Now that's decent writing. Maybe. Everyone freezes for a second, one moment caught forever in time, then a huge wave towers over the land, smashing everything in its path and punching its way into the supermarket, where everything and everyone is swept away. In the aftermath, the main characters manage to scramble up onto shelves which are above what is now sea level, including Doyle; his partner lies dead, floating in the water. You can see the premise developing already, can't you? Josh finds Tina, in severe shock, and rescues her. Outside, submerged now in a car in which they had been making out, two teens gasp in terror as they spy what looks like a shark behind them. Ryan, also submerged but in his van, manages to break a window and gets out (see “Houston, we have a problem!” section for more); Tina is reunited with her new boyfriend, Steve (boo! Bet Josh had hoped he had drowned. Or worse) and when it becomes apparent that they are unlikely to be rescued, some of them begin to swim off to check out various locations. Enter, stage left, a shark. A Great White Shark. Josh realises too late as he sees various corpses suddenly dip under the water, and shouts to the others, most of whom make it, but one is too slow and becomes the first victim of (oh God I have to say it, don't I?) the supermarket shark. :laughing: Outside, Kyle and Heather, the two teens, are attacked by the shark as it batters their car, but it seems to lose interest because there is easier prey back at the market, and there it heads. Now there is another problem, as a loose electrical cable, sparking, threatens to hit the water and electrocute everyone. Anyone figured out the ending yet? ;) Anyway, Josh decides he can make it to the store room and turn off the power, but he needs to swim there so he gets the others to distract the shark by making as much noise as they can. Seems the shark (if there is only one, which I'm beginning to doubt) is back at the car though, and Ryan watches as our hapless heroes are attacked. He tells them that they must remain still and quiet – the more they scream and thrash about the more the shark will be interested in them - he is going to attract the shark, and that once he does they will have to swim for it to his van. Back inside the supermarket, Steve has had an idea. He makes some sort of cage (possibly out of old shopping baskets: how do I know? They don't show it) and before he leaves he confides to Josh that Tina never blamed him for her brother's death, and that all the time they were together in Singapore she was thinking about Josh. Sounds like it was fun for our Steve! Anyway he's protected himself as much as he can feasibly do so from the shark, but you'd have to wonder if a flimsy homemade cage of light metal is going to cause a Great White much of a problem. I guess the idea is that the shark won't be bothered chewing through the metal, that it will look elsewhere, for easier, ready-to-eat food. Like a deepsea diver, Steve is paid out on tubing which anchors him to the survivors and provides him a way home, and presumably allows them to attempt to haul him to safety if the shark should attack. He also seems to have rigged up some sort of rudimentary SCUBA breathing apparatus. Ah, ask a diver. Or me arse, whichever you like. Either way, he seems to have taken all the precautions he can reasonably be expected to. He makes it, turns off the power but then gets caught on something and can't make it back, and so dies a hero's death, dragged down to the bottom of what is now the sea. Josh, always the one with the ideas it seems (apart from poor old dead Steve) notices a skylight, and they rig up some rope to make a pulley, hoisting the smallest of them, the manager of the store, up towards it. The idea is of course for him to come back with help, but he's a selfish, mean little guy and we all know that he's only going to save his own skin. Heather and Kyle make a run for it when Ryan uses the severed hand of a corpse to put blood in the water and attract the shark, though little Bully isn't so lucky. As the manager makes it up to the top one of the pipes breaks and disgorges a load of crabs, and he almost loses his nerve; they go to pull him back down but he gathers his reserve and says he can make it, at which point the shark jumps out of the water below and chomps him in half. Outside in the car park, Ryan attempts to make it over to where Kyle and Heather are by using some piping running along the roof, looking down anxiously into the water as he goes. He spies the shark, just under the water. Surely they wouldn't use the same scene twice in as many minutes? No, he falls into the water at the last moment, swims like fuck to get to the van, makes it and then the shark grabs Kyle. Aw. I had hoped the two of them would make it. The rest of the film won't be the same without their banter. :( In another of the series of wild plans, Doyle decides to try catching the shark (yes, you read that correctly) by using some raw meat baited on a hook snaffled from the hardware department but Todd, distrustful of the robber, declares he will do it himself. As he makes to launch himself into the water, however, Jaime jumps in. She is attacked by the shark but manages to hit it on the snout, which at least demonstrates good knowledge of sharks – or maybe she just gets lucky. At any rate, she gets back with the meat and the hook, scrambling back up onto the shelf. Josh reveals to Tina that he blames himself for Rory's death: if he had not been so drunk then Rory would not have to have set the buoy; it would have been him who had died. Kirby, one of the other survivors, now reveals that he is the other robber, and that the dead body they saw in the water wearing the mask he had had on for the robbery was obviously not him; he put the mask on an anonymous corpse to throw suspicion off himself. Now he reveals his true colours. As the shark fails to take the bait (literally) he decides live meat is what it wants, and, producing his gun, pushes Naomi (another survivor who really up to this point has not been mentioned or had much to do, so she's clearly there to fulfill just one role) in, attached to the hook. While she is struggling in the water, with the shark homing in on her, Doyle throws a spear through Kirby's back. As he falls, they help Naomi up out of the water and Kirby takes her place. Oddly enough, the plan works: the hook Doyle rammed into Kirby's back sticks in the shark's mouth, it's attached to a rope and the shark is caught, allowing them to swim to the entrance. Outside, though distraught at the loss of her boyfriend, Heather is overjoyed to see that her dog has made it after all, and she is reunited with Bully. Believing this to be a sign, Ryan starts tapping the overhead pipes, hoping the sound will echo inside and someone will her him. Someone does: Jaime sets off in search of him, and Josh goes after her. As they make it out to the car park and join Ryan and Heather, Jaime realises that the car they are standing on is her father's, and there is a gun in the back. As the others make noise to attract the shark, Josh gets the shotgun and also picks up a taser, and gets back to the roof of the car. He shoots at the shark but the recoil takes him off the car and into the water. As he floats underwater, gun ready, he watches the shark approach. At the last instant he fires, there is an explosion of blood and guts, and a second later he emerges unscathed. The shark is now scattered all over the water. Well, one of them. Now that they have made it out into the car park, Doyle prepares to blow up a truck that has jammed the entrance, which will allow them to escape. Just then an aftershock hits and more debris is thrown into the area, and the jolt shakes the other shark loose. As it approaches, Josh aims his gun but it is out of ammunition, so he uses a taser instead, aiming it at the shark's tender nose, the shock eventually killing it. Doyle then sets the charges and the vehicle blows. As they clamber out into the sunlight the survivors can see the level of devastation that has been wrought by the tsunami. In a rather downbeat ending (well, I guess it was a disaster movie, after all) Tina asks Josh what will he do now, and he says he'll start over. Quotes Manager: “You! This is all your fault!” Doyle: “Not today, boy, not me. Today Mother Nature's thrown all the sinners down here.” Kyle: “Give me your shoes.” Heather: “What?” Kyle: “I need something pointy to break the glass. Give me your shoe.” Heather: “These are three hundred dollar Guccis!” Kyle (after an embarrassed pause): “They're not.” Heather: “Well, when you gave them to me you said they were.” Kyle: “I know I said they were, but they're not.” Heather: “You got me cheap knockoffs? I can't believe you!” Manager: “This is so not happening! You're a cop! Do something!” (What does he expect him to do: arrest the shark?) Heather: “Do you see it anywhere?” Kyle: “Yeah, I see it, but I'm keeping it from you cos I want it to be a surprise!” Heather: “Do something, Kyle! You have to do something!” Kyle: “Oh yeah? Like what? Ask the bastard to go away??” Heather: “You're a murderer.” Kyle: “No I'm not!” Heather: “Yes you are. You're a dog murderer, which is worse than a person murderer!” Good scenes You can see exactly where the scenes meant to be seen in 3D are, and the attack on Rory, as the shark breaches, coming out of the water and shattering his board before diving back underwater to take him down with it, is well done. I'd say that would have had a few people jumping in the cinema! Just as effective is the moment when the tsunami hits, which again I'm sure looks great in 3D. But more importantly is the, if you will, calm before the storm. The lead-up to the big disaster is very well done. You have the standoff between cop and robber, two teenagers arguing over petty things – he, his job that he has just lost, she, her overbearing father – and outside we see a baby sitting on the beach looking out to sea. Suddenly a mother snatches the child away. A lifeguard looks out and begins to roar, restauranteurs watch with stupefied disbelief as a massive wave rolls in towards them, sending the restaurant exploding into pieces as they run, and in the market, all hell breaks loose. As the guys realise suddenly there's a shark in the water, Jaime tries to help one of them, who is being attacked, climb out. She grabs his flailing hand, pulls and ... is left holding the arm as the rest of him is bitten away and sinks underwater. The scene where the shark jumps out of the water and eats the manager (or at least, his bottom half) is pretty gory and silly and also great, and must have looked excellent in 3D. It's also very unexpected, as your attention has been intentionally diverted by the scuttling crabs, so it comes as a shock. Puke-inducing as it is that the little dog has survived, the scene where Bully floats in on a makeshift board, yapping away, is well handled. The final scene, where a seagull heads out over the water only to be eaten by a jumping shark, the final 3D scare I guess, is funny and serves to lighten the somewhat dark ending. |
Laughing in the face of death
Literally. These people – some of them anyway – are going to die, so though the film is dark and kind of doomy, it's nice to see the writers threw in some light-hearted comic relief, mostly in the shape of Kyle and Heather, the two horny but stupid teenagers. As they sit in their car underwater, Kyle moans at Heather for forgetting to charge her phone (not as if it would work underwater anyway, though they are dry so maybe) while she spits back asking him why he didn't charge it, to which he sneers that it isn't his phone! She then asks him what about his phone? He pulls it out only to find ... he hasn't charged it! Ah, don't you just love horny, stupid, thick, doomed teenagers? Heather then has the time to soothe her tiny Pekenese dog (who, hilariously, she calls Bully!) when Kyle tells her the dog is a retard. I mean, who the fuck cares? They should be concentrating on what they're going to do to get out of this situation, rather than she worrying about her stupid dog. When Kyle wants to break the windows of the car (again, see “Houston” section) Heather refuses, telling him they are worth three hundred dollars! Way to prioritise, love! When Kyle admits that, though when he gave them to her he told her they were genuine Gucci, they actually are knock-offs, she gets really angry! Even more hilariously, she then shows Kyle that even in her affronted state she is thinking more clearly, as she pushes the switch to open the automatic sunroof, affording egress to the water. You go, girl! Music Generally the music is quite low-key, and even when the tsunami hits it doesn't go over the top. Sorry. In fact, it's more the mournful dirge that plays in the wave's aftermath, as we see submerged bodies floating alongside scattered groceries and twisted trolleys that is the most effective. Other than that it's nothing to write home about. In fact, the thing that most impressed me about the music comes right at the end, with a crazy rendition of “Mack the Knife”, played by the director and his band! Houston, we have a problem! Now, I had always been taught that when something is submerged, like a car, you can't open a door or a window, because you have hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch pushing against you, and it's like trying to open a car door when you're encased in concrete. I've seen this permise tested, and ignored, before, and I have the same question: is it true? Because if it is, then how did Ryan break a window and manage to get out of the van? When Josh realises there's a shark in the water, he rushes along telling everyone to get out of the water. Even though they shout “Why?” he never tells them the reason. Why not? I understand that it might frghten them, but wouldn't you get out of the water a hell of a lot quicker, and with zero questions, if someone told you there was a shark in it? I suppose they are kind of building up the suspense, as a few moments later (after it has become painfully obvious) Josh makes his dramatic diagnosis, but come on! The film is called Bait, it has a picture of a shark on the cover, so who really was not expecting there to be one? As Steve casts off, in his makeshift SCUBA gear, it seems that the task of paying out the tubing has fallen to Josh. Why? Why aren't they all helping, instead of sitting down watching him struggle on his own? Can you fire a shotgun underwater? Would the pressure of the water not slow down the shell, or even stop it firing? I don't know: I'm asking here. Verdict: A whole lot better than I thought it would be. This movie was a lot of fun, with some pretty good gory bits that must have looked good in 3D but still work in normal viewing, and most of the characters were generally well fleshed out, unlike our cardboard friends in The Reef. There was a good mix of horror and humour in it, and they even used some shark knowledge to make the film a little more believable, given the rather shaky premise in the first place. The way the sharks were despatched leaves something to be desired – how many volts is a taser capable of delivering? Could it kill? I thought they were just for stunning. Although in fairness, targeting the shark's nose is about as sensitive as targeting a guy's balls, so given the area attacked, maybe. Then there's the fact that the shark was obviously in water. I don't know. But I definitely have issues with shooting a shark with a shotgun underwater. Given all that though, there was plenty in the movie to keep me entertained; some good subplots (Doyle appeared – though it was never fully explained – to be carrying out the robbery for Kirby as payback for something his daughter did?) and some decent character development. Even the reconciliation between Josh and Tina wasn't cut and dried: we see him looking at Jaime with interest, and maybe the two of them will still find it hard to get past Rory's death. Quite a few shocks and surprises along the way – bad guy died but so did a few good guys – and overall I really enjoyed it. Message in the movie Several I guess. Redemption is always possible. Being trapped together and fighting for their lives, while not a recommended therapy technique, can certainly help to bring a father and daughter closer. Always keep a gun in your car. Leave the dog at home. And try not to do your shopping during a tsunami: the sharks are just deadly! Oh, and next time you're stocking those shelves don't moan: they could end up being all that stands between you and a hungry Great White! Fact vs Fiction This is a tough one. There are a lot of silly elements to the plot, but whereas they have the sharks jumping out of the water quite often – something they seldom do – there is enough general usage of knowledge of sharks to make this more authentic than the previous movie. I kind of feel (though I may not be right here) that with two Great White sharks confined in so comparatively small a space, the one might have fought the other for posession of the food supply – the humans – but this never happened. You'd also have to question the possiblity of two Great Whites being washed into the same area. Unlikely, I would have thought. Overall though, I think they used enough shark lore to qualify as more fact than fiction. Barely. http://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/b801...k-Great-31.jpg Despite what I had expected, this movie rates a solid http://www.trollheart.com/sharkrat3.png tl;dr Just as a robbery takes place in a supermarket a tsunami hits and the whole place is underwater. Various characters strive to survive against two Great Whites which have been washed into the market. One is eventually shot while the other is electrocuted, and the survivors make their way out of the market. |
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Title: Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the USS Indianapolis Year: 1991 Nationality: American? Starring: Stacy Keach, Richard Thomas, Steve Landesberg, Don Harvey, Richard Cicchihi, Dave Caruso and others Directed by: Robert Iscove Written by: Alan Sharp Cinematography: James Pergola Music: Craig Saffan Budget: Unknown Box Office: n/a; TV movie Another movie based on true events, this film chronicles the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in World War II and the desperate struggles of the survivors to stay alive long enough to be rescued from the sharks who circled in for the kill. A made-for-TV movie, it opens in 1960, with the 15th anniversary reunion of the survivors from the Indianapolis and quickly fades to the recollections of Captain McVeigh. It's 1945 and the Indianapolis, bound for the island of Guam, is carrying some secret cargo which nobody is allowed to know the nature of, but seems important to the war effort. Even McVeigh will not confirm whether or not he is aware of what he's carrying, however his overconfidence as to pursuit by Japanese submarines is his undoing, as he is currently being stalked by one. Due to his contention that to follow the usual evasive pattern expected by navy ships would be useless in the light of the new weapon the enemy have placed into the arena – suicide manned torpedoes – the ship is easily tracked and on its way back from its mission, having delivered the mysterious cargo it is attacked and sunk by a Japanese sub. We do get to see the cargo being loaded aboard the Enola Gay, so if there was any doubt as to what they were transporting, well that doubt has now been removed. Iniitally unwilling to abandon ship (the stories of what happens in Japanese POW camps no doubt screaming in his mind) Captain McVeigh does his best to keep the ship afloat, hoping they may be able to limp to the nearest base for repairs, but his efforts prove fruitless and the surviving sailors find themselves drifting in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as the ship goes down. One of the last to jump, McVeigh at first believes he is the only survivor, as his calls are not answered, but eventually he meets up with another sailor who manages to swim to his dingy and they begin the mammoth task of searching for others who may have made it off the ship. After some time they come across another dingy, this one containing the priest who had joined them at Guam, and about ten men; a quick redistribution of resources makes the men feel a little safer, if not much. Suddenly a shark approaches, but it's quite small and one of the sailors scares it off with a shot from his pistol. Night falls, and as the officers realise there are too many men for the two small boats they order those who are not injured into the water, to give up their places for the men who are wounded. The next morning the shark is back, and it's brought its buddies. The sharks immediately attack the helpless sailors, and some are wounded. Dead bodies are cast overboard to try to appease the animals, but the sharks prefer live meat. In another part of the ocean, a larger group of seamen are faring much worse, having no liferafts at all, and all bobbing in the water. Some are dying of their wounds as Lieutenant Scott (Richard Thomas, John Boy from The Waltons), the ship's medic, tries to hold the group together. Discipline begins to break down as the men realise they may die out here, and suddenly orders are not treated as they were when they were onboard ship. One sailor, Kinderman, takes it too far and, struggling with a marine who demands he give up his raft in favour of wounded men, drowns him. Shocked and horrified, and wishing to put as much distance as they can between them and him – literally as well as figuratively – the other men on the raft desert him, leaving him alone. When the shark returns (I assume it's the same one, could be another I guess) it goes this time directly for the dingy, puncturing the thing and sending men spilling into the water, some of whom it snaps at. Red fluid leaks out across the water. A patrol aircraft finally spots the men in the water, and coming in as low as they can the crew throw out what supplies they have on board, radio the position of the men to base, and the fact that the Indianapolis cannot be confirmed as arriving at her destination begins to ring alarm bells. The captain of the patrol plane, which luckily happens to be a flying boat, decides to put down on the ocean near the sailors. Paranoia fuelled by fear and the fact that many of the men have been, against explicit orders, drinking salt water, leads some to believe that this is a Japanese trap. Kinderman falls prey to their madness, being knifed by one of the sailors in the mistaken belief that he is a “Jap”, and so he joins his murder victim in the marine's watery grave. With survivors (from only one group; there are groups spread out across the section of ocean and there's no way one plane can get to them all) taken aboard the patrol plane, confirmation is received that they are from the Indianapolis, and that she has been sunk. Soon after a destroyer arrives and takes the men to safety, but the priest has already fallen victim to the shark and is dead when the captain, thinking he's sleeping, excitedly wakes him and points at the approaching ship, only to find the water around him dark red and the priest slipping below the waves. Later there is a court-martial, in which Captain McVeigh is accused of failing to order the evacuation of the ship in a timely enough manner to assure the chances of survival for as many of the crew as possible, and refusing to follow a zig-zag course to throw off enemy submarines. In a shock move, the prosecution calls the captain of the Japanese sub that sank the Indianapolis (the war now being over, Japan having surrendered after the atomic bomb, part of which the Indianapolis had been carrying to Guam, was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). It's a bold move, a controversial and very unpopular one, and yet proves to be the ace up the prosecution's sleeve. McVeigh is cleared of the charge of not ordering the abandonment of the ship in time but found guilty of endangering his command by refusing to implement the standard zig-zag manoeuevre. The conviction, having served its purpose by allowing the top brass at the Navy to avoid blame and shift responsibility to the shoulders of their scapegoat, is rescinded son after the trial, but though he returns to active duty, McVeigh cannot live with his own personal guilt and takes his own life twenty years later. Quotes Sailor: “I heard we're carrying 5000 rolls of Senate toilet paper for General Douglas MacArthur: seems he's getting tired of using his orders to wipe his butt on!” : “Some of the men have speculated that Betty Grable is living in that box down belowdecks.” McVeigh: “That's absolutely untrue. Miss Grable is in my quarters.” Questions? At the end, when the verdict is passed, McVeigh's wife fumes “They never court-martialled any other captain who lost his ship in the war! They're using you as a scapegoat to cover their own mistakes.” True, they definitely are, but what mistakes specfically? The idea of not reporting a combatant ship on arrival was a definite contributing factor to the lack of response to the loss of the Indianapolis, so it could be that. Or is it the mere fact that they left the survivors in the sea for five days before they were rescued? It's not really made clear exactly what the Navy are covering up here. McVeigh says he has to see the captain of the Japanese sub that sunk the Indianapolis, but when they're alone, it's very stilted and uncomfortable, and nothing really gets said of any consequence. I assumed they were going to talk about chidren, or the war, or the way men are forced to do terrible things, or that the war is over now and they are no longer enemies. But no. Basically nothing, So why was McVeigh so desperate to see his ex-enemy? Verdict: There's little point in going through my usual sections here, as it became clear about halfway through the movie that though it's titled Mission of the Shark, and sharks are in it, it's not really in any way a shark movie. It's more a film lauding the power of the human spirit, the ever-present hope and the determination not to surrender to his fate that keeps man going, and that's great and very commendable, but as a shark movie this blows big time. The sharks are glimpsed but rarely, they have very little real interaction with the crew and we're not even told what type they are, though they're certainly too small to be Great Whites. It's essentially a war movie with some sharks added in. True, it is based on an actual experience, an occurrence that befell the men who served on the USS Indianapolis, but even a documentary I watched on this went more into the effect the sharks had on the men. Here, it's almost incidental, and there's really nothing for the shark aficionado. So in the end all I can award it is the lowest shark rating I have, which is http://www.trollheart.com/sharkrat1.png tl;dr Needed more sharks. |
All right then, it's time for the big one, the grandaddy of all shark movies, the one that kicked the whole genre off in a real way and without which it's doubtful any of the movies on the list would have even been considered, never mind made. There is of course no argument over which is the greatest, the original shark movie, and this is it. It was also, as I mentioned in the intro, sadly, the springboard for a kind of backlash by humans against what they perceived to be – and were shown by the movie to be – deadly killers that had to be eliminated before they ate every human who even so much as dipped a toe in the sea. Finally, it's arguably the movie that made the reputation and careers of both Steven Spielberg and John Williams, set the template for modern horror movies and is considered one of the first original blockbuster movies, making more than fifty times its initial, already huge, budget of just over nine million.
There could be only one movie I'm talking about, and it is of course https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...vie_poster.jpg Title: Jaws Year: 1975 Nationality: American Starring: Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Shaw, Lorraine Gary, Richard Hamilton Directed by: Steven Spielberg Written by: Peter Benchely and Carl Gottlieb, based on Benchley's novel Cinematography: Bill Butler Music: John Williams Budget: USD 9 million Box Office: USD 470 million At a beach party at night, a girl goes for a swim, but unbeknownst to her a shark is in the water, a fact she quickly becomes aware of as she is grabbed and eaten. When she is reported missing the next morning, Police Chief Martin Brody (Scheider) is called in, and shocked to find that her partial remains on the beach. He immediately worries that this is the result of a shark attack and proceeds to order the beaches closed. This is not a good thing to do, when Amity Island is preparing for its annual Fourth of July celebration, but he knows that lives may be at stake. He is aghast to be told that this morning there are a bunch of boy scouts swimming in the water as a pledge, and rushes to the beach. On his way there he is accosted by the mayor, who tells him he can't close the beaches on his own authority, and tries to remind him of the revenue tourists bring in, especially at this time. If he closes the beaches, people will go elsewhere. Besides, he points out, there have been no sharks in these waters before. Probably a boating accident, he shrugs, and the coroner, changing his mind since he spoke to Brody, seems to agree. While he watches from the beach, jumping at every noise, every scream, every splash, there is suddenly a new scream and a plume of red spreads across the water as one of the kids swimming is taken down. Realising that his worst fears have come to pass, Brody leaps into action, marshalling everyone on the beach to get their kids out of the water, (he can't swim, and has a morbid fear of water) and signalling for anyone else swimming to get the hell ashore. It's too late of course for the kid, who is long dead at this point. His mother offers a reward for anyone who can catch and kill the shark, and things are about to spiral out of control. As the islanders meet, concerned business owners bemoan the closing of the beaches, a necessary precaution in the mind of Brody, the only sane thing to do, but he is overruled by the mayor, who places a limit of twenty-four hours on the closure, to Brody's chagrin. A local shark hunter, Quint, declares he will catch the shark but he wants three times what is being offered. Some other fishermen take up the challenge, and catch the shark, but are unable to hold it, the jetty breaking and throwing them into the water. They barely escape with their lives. Oceanographer Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss) arrives to try to help, but when a tiger shark is caught, and everyone thinks this is the one that killed the two people, he is less certain. It's smaller, the bite radius isn't right, and he points out that there are likely many sharks in the waters hereabouts. It may be the right one, but he wants to know for sure, and suggests cutting the shark open. Its digestive system, he tells Brody and the mayor, is very slow, and anything it's eaten in the last twenty-four hours will still be in its stomach. The mayor refuses, understandably concerned about the idea of the remains of a boy spilling out onto the dock, especially with the mother present, though in reality he's more worried that Hooper may be right. If this is not the shark, then that shark is still at large and he can't declare the matter closed. Hooper, however, is convinced, and later, with Brody's permission as Chief of Police, they do cut the shark open and his fears are realised: there are no human remains inside the tiger shark. It's not the one. Hooper decides to go looking for the right shark, and Brody reluctantly accompanies him. They find a fisherman's boat, attacked and wrecked, the fisherman dead. Despite all this evidence that the shark is yet at large, the mayor refuses to allow the closure of the beaches. The Fourth of July proceeds as normal, until suddenly someone spots a shark fin in the water, but it turns out to be just some kids messing about. Panic averted, everyone heads back to the water, but it is in the inland estuary where the shark – the real shark this time – chooses to attack. This just happens to be where Brody asked his son, Michael, to take their boat, concerned for their safety. How ironic: he wouldn't let them go into the water and now his son and his friends are trapped! This is the first time we see more of the shark than a fin; just a glimpse of a big, ugly snout filled with razor fangs and a long back snaking through the water, but it's enough for us to realise how fucking BIG this thing is! The shark attacks one of the other kids, allowing Michael and his friends to escape, but Brody's son is badly shaken by his ordeal. In the light of what has happened, the mayor now has no choice but to authorise Quint to go after the shark, and Brody and Hooper decide to accompany him. After a short time at sea Quint believes he has hooked the shark, but Hooper is less certain. At any rate there's no way to know as the line is quickly broken, and whatever they had snagged is lost. It's not long though before the shark puts in an appearance, in a scene which has by now become iconic. As Brody bitches about having to throw the chum – the mixture of fish guts used to attract the shark – over the side, the shark suddenly rears up, and we can see how big it is. Gasping to Quint that they're gonna need a bigger boat (another iconic line) he helps as the shark hunter shoots a harpoon into the animal, the dart attached to a barrel which they hope will prevent the shark from remaining underwater and will force it to the surface. They stay out till dark, when the shark does indeed surface – and attacks the boat. Quint shoots at it – or as much as he can see of it, which is the barrel, still attached to it (lends new meaning to the term “shooting fish in a barrel” - sorry!) but of course he can't hit it. Daylight breaks, and as they survey the damage to the boat the shark surfaces behind it. As Brody radios for help, Quint, presumably reluctant to share the bounty, smashes the radio, and now they are on their own as the shark heads back towards them. They manage to hit it a few times, but the shark is enraged now, and sees the boat either as a rival, an enemy or an impediment to its food supply. Either way, it's not going to leave peacefully, and is determined to wreck the little craft. And it can. The guys now find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival, as the hunters quickly become the hunted. Under the immense pull of the shark, the boat begins to break up, and Quint has to sever the line, letting it go free. But the shark goes underneath the boat, ramming it, trying to capsize it. They make a run for the shore, hoping the shallower water will drown the shark, but Quint pushes the boat too far and the engine gives out, stranding them still a long way from shore. With their options running out, Hooper suggests putting together the shark-proof cage they brought along, in order for him to manage to inject deadly strychnine into the shark. It's a long shot but, you know... As it goes, the shark seems cleverer than they had expected, and as Hooper waits with the syringe, on a long spear, in hand, submerged in the cage, the shark batters it from behind, jolting it and causing Hooper to drop the precious syringe. So much for that plan! The shark now attacks with renewed fervour, smashing the cage and getting into it. Hooper stabs it with his knife and swims out, and the guys try to winch him back onboard, but the winch snaps at the crucial moment and they have to haul him up by hand. When the cage breaks the water though, it is empty. Just then the shark flops almost onto the stern of the boat, pulling it deeper into the water and causing Quint to slide down along the deck, right into its waiting, well, jaws. He fights, kicking at the shark's teeth, but he is soon dead and dragged below the water. Brody is now alone on a boat which is not going to last much longer above the water. A moment later the shark breaks through what remains of the boat and comes after him as the vessel sinks almost completely under. Scrambling wildly for something to defend himself with, something to ward off the beast, he grabs a pressurised SCUBA tank, and hits out at the shark with it, eventually throwing the cannister into its mouth as the shark temporarily retreats to perhaps investigate this new item. As the shark arrows in for its final attack, as the boat sinks even lower, Brody grabs a rifle and climbs to the top of the mast. After several missed shots, one bullet finds the tank, still in the shark's mouth and it explodes in a shower of blood, guts and scales. The terror of Amity Island is finally dead. Hooper turns out to have made it after all, and the two of them begin swimming home, clinging to inflatable rafts. Quotes Brody's secretary: “Now we got a bunch of calls about the kids from that karate school. It seems the kids have been karate-chopping the picket fences!” (This is a great line; serves to show how, until this moment, sleepy and boring this island is, and the kind of mundane, petty things Brody has usually to deal with. Things are about to get a whole lot more interesting though!) Mayor: “You yell barracuda, everyone says huh? You yell shark, we got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July!” Quint: “Shark'll swallow you whole ... tenderise ye ... down ye go!” (This is early proof that Benchley knew nothing of the feeding habits of sharks. At best, a shark will take an exploratory bite, but as I already mentioned in the reviews of other movies, the taste of humans is not palatable to them and apart from the fact that mostly they would be physically incapable of swallowing an adult human – they're not whales, after all! - they would have no interest in doing so.) Hooper: “You know those eight guys in the fantail launch? Well, none of them are going to get out of the harbour alive.” Hooper: “This wasn't any boating accident! It wasn't a coral reef, and it wasn't Jack the Ripper! It was a shark!” Brody: “Where are you going?” Hooper: “I'm going out to find him rght now. He's a night feeder.” Brody: “On the water?” Hooper: “If we're looking for a shark, we're not going to find him on the land!” Hooper: “That's it. Goodbye. I'm not going to waste my time with a man who's lining up to be a hot meal. Mr. Vaughan, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It's really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat, and make little sharks. That's all. Now why don't you take a long, close look at this sign: those proportions are correct.” Mayor: “You'd love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name in National Geographic?” Brody: “You want to take him home?” Brody's wife: “You mean home to New York?” Brody: “No, home here.” (Ah, New York! Where the only sharks are the ones on street corners...) Quint: “Bow, front! Stern, back! Get it right, or I throw your ass out the little funny round window on the side!” Brody: “You're gonna need a bigger boat!” Quint: “Feel there, under my cap. Knock an old one, St. Paddy's Day, Boston.” Hooper: “I got that beat. I got that beat. Moray eel, bit right through my wetsuit.” (shows scar on arm). Quint: “Entered an arm wrestling contest in an Okie bar in San Francisco' See this? (Flexes arm) Can't extend it. You know why? Got to the semi-final, celebrating my third wife's (I have no idea what the next word is; I've tried to get it but despite several run-throughs I've been unable to make it out); big Chinese fella, pulled me right over!” Hooper (rolling up trouser leg): “That's a bull shark. Scraped me when I was taking samples.” Quint (rollingup his trouser leg): “See that? That's a thresher. Thresher's tail.” Brody: “Thresher?” Quint: “Thresher shark. (to Hooper) You gonna drink to your leg?” Hooper: “Let's drink to our legs.” Quint: “Okay! We drink to our legs!” Hooper: “I got the creme de la creme, right here. (opens shirt) See that? Right there? Mary Ellen Moffett. She broke my heart!” Brody: What's that one? Quint: What? Brody: That one, there, on your arm. Quint: Oh, uh, that's a tattoo, I got that removed. Hooper: Don't tell me, don't tell me..."Mother." [he roars with laughter] Hooper: What is it - [Quint solemnly clamps a hand on Hooper's arm] Quint: Mr. Hooper, that's the USS Indianapolis. [Hooper immediately stops laughing] Hooper: You were on the Indianapolis? Brody: What happened? Quint: Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. We was comin' back from the island of Tinian to Leyte, just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that when you're in the water, Chief? You tell by lookin' from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn't know... was our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent. Heh. [he pauses and takes a drink] Quint: They didn't even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin'. So we formed ourselves into tight groups. Y'know, it's... kinda like ol' squares in a battle like, uh, you see in a calendar, like the Battle of Waterloo, and the idea was, shark comes to the nearest man and that man, he'd start poundin' and hollerin' and screamin', and sometimes the shark'd go away... sometimes he wouldn't go away. Sometimes that shark, he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. Y'know the thing about a shark, he's got... lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin'... until he bites ya. And those black eyes roll over white, and then... oh, then you hear that terrible high-pitch screamin', the ocean turns red, and spite of all the poundin' and the hollerin', they all come in and they... rip you to pieces. [he pauses] Quint: Y'know, by the end of that first dawn... lost a hundred men. I dunno how many sharks. Maybe a thousand. I dunno how many men, they averaged six an hour. On Thursday mornin', Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Bosun's mate. I thought he was asleep. Reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water just like a kinda top. Upended. Well... he'd been bitten in half below the waist. Noon the fifth day, Mr. Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us. Young pilot, a lot younger than Mr. Hooper. Anyway, he saw us and come in low and three hours later, a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. Y'know, that was the time I was most frightened, waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a life jacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water, three hundred sixteen men come out, and the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. [he pauses, smiles, and raises his glass] Quint: Anyway... we delivered the bomb. (Yeah, I copied and pasted that. A very important quote, but a bit too long to transcribe by hand, not to mention that Quint tends to drawl, which makes it a little hard to know what he's saying much of the time) Brody (aiming): “Smile you son of a -” |
Good scenes
As Brody tries to relax on the beach, but yet keeping a watchful eye on the sea, sure that he is right and there is danger out there, he sees what looks at first like the tip of a shark fin break the water near a swimmer lounging on a lilo, but it turns out just to be the head of another swimmer. Again, while he's talking to someone else, a scream rings out and he jumps up, but it's just a girl and her man playing in the water. Finally, a boy searches for his dog, who was swimming in the water, but all we see now is the piece of wood he had in his mouth. And then, the music begins... Brody is incensed that his son is sitting in a boat at the jetty, worried for him. His wife laughs at his fear, until she happens to look at the book he has been reading, which shows a drawing of what I suppose is meant to be a shark but looks like a cross between a pike and a piranha attacking a boat. Suddenly she yells to her son to get the hell out of the boat. She realises that even being this close to the water could be hazardous, and that her husband is not being overprotective. In perhaps what could be seen as true entrepreneurial spirit, and grasping an opportunity, some enterprising arcade owner has hired a game called Killer Shark! At one point, as everyone lounges on the beach, but nobody dares go into the water, the mayor convinces one family he knows to take the first step. They must feel like he's serving them up for dinner! The idea of the kids using a boat with a shark fin stuck on the underside to pretend to be a shark has been parodied over and over by now (“AAAHH! Sharkboy!”) but here it's used well, both to lighten the mood and also lull the viewer into a false sense of security, so that when the shark does attack, we're never quite sure initially if it's just those kids horsing around again. Until it's too late, of course. It also leads to Brody reacting with world-weariness to the shout of alarm, rather than rushing to the scene as he would normally do; the hoax has skewed his mindset, and it's a case of “What now?” rather than “Jesus Christ!” Having drunk a can of beer, Quint squeezes his fist on it and crushes it. Staring eye to eye with him, Hooper drains the paper cup of water he has in his hand and then crushes it! After Quint has sneered at his college education, Hooper gives him the time-honoured “fuck you” signal, though he is careful to wait until the man's back is turned! And then of course, there's the scene where Brody is throwing the chum out into the sea and we catch our first real proper look at the shark. Seen first time, it's pretty terrifying when you realise how big it is, and how evil those teeth are, not to mention how close the chief comes to just being dragged overboard! The following scene, where Hooper tries to convince Brody to get out on the prow of the boat, so that he can “get some scale” and see how big the shark actually is, is hilarious and not unsurprisingly Hooper gets told where to go by Brody. As the guys are comparing scars, Hooper giving Quint as good as he gets, Brody looks at his own stomach and sort of sighs, the definite impression being given that he feels left out, not having any scars to show. Talk about testosterone! WTF?? Directly after the scene in which two fishermen try, unsuccessfully, to catch the shark (one of them coming close to being eaten) there is a scene the next morning where a guy walks out of the post office, a pipe in his mouth, smiling. He stands, right in front of the camera, smiles, says nothing, then turns and leaves. He's never seen again. WTF was all that about? Is he someone famous? He acts like he's playing to the camera, and maybe he is, but why, if he's just an extra, do they focus on him as if he were someone important? I don't get it. I suppose it can't ever be said to have been deliberate, or arranged, but rather serendipitously, as the shark attacks and they prepare to defend the boat, what looks like an actual shooting star falls from the sky, visible just over Brody's left shoulder at about 1:32:10 on the DVD. An omen of success, or doom? Amazing. Notes on cinematography I can't say for certain but I feel relatively confident in saying that this was the first shark movie to show the action from below; in the very first scene, as the girl enters the water at night and begins swimming, we see as it were from under the water, her body just a dark outline, as if something deep below was watching her, and alerting us to the danger lurking nearby. Shark movies good and bad would use this perspective for decades to come – and still do – giving us the idea of seeing things from the perspective of the shark. I believe this was something of a game changer, turning the shark from a shadowy mindless monster into (falsely I guess) a calculating killer, awaiting the chance to take its prey. Also, not so much cinematography (though there is that) but more a case of really clever direction, the fact that the girl in the water is screaming at the top of her lungs, fighting for her life while the boy she was supposed to be swimming with sits on the shore, totally oblivious to her plight, gives a great sense of how difficult it can be to be heard, never mind saved, when only a few hundred feet away from the shoreline. You might as well be on your own. We're screaming “Help her! Can't you hear her?” but when the scene switches back to the shoreline, all is quiet and calm, so you can understand how the hapless guy has no clue what's going on. Great juxtapositioning, I feel. Also a point on gore, while we're here. Despite what I thought at the time (prior to seeing the movie, which wasn't until well into the eighties if not later) Jaws is not at all a gory movie. Given how visceral later ones became, focussing on the horror and the blood and the best way to show a body torn in two (I'm looking, so far, at you, Bait!) this movie dealt more in suspense and suggestion, the archetypal footstep behind you in the dark, the sudden movement in the shadows, as opposed to the madman with a chainsaw rearranging your anatomy in the most graphic way possible. Even the initial attack is handled without any blood (it takes place at night, of course, so it's very dark) and all you really see is the girl being dragged underwater and screaming. For a very long time in the movie you don't even see the shark: it is a bogeyman, a figure of fear and terror, glimpsed if at all as only a fin until the climax of the movie, which makes the actual revelation all the more effective and scary. Music You can't of course fault John Williams's score; it's become legendary now, even to the point of having been used in the World Cup in 1994 as a joke when players got injured and had to be removed from the pitch (worked once or twice, became very annoying after that: not sure if it was a spontaneous thing originally, but when you consider there are thirty-two teams and the thing runs for a month, well, you can see how the joke would wear thin really fast, but then, that's the Americans for you: flog a thing to death) and it has taken its place in movie soundtrack lore. However I do notice that the theme used in the scene where the fishermen think they are catching the shark and are in fact pulled into the water as the chain they attached to the bait holds, but the jetty does not, is very reminiscent of Alexander Courage's incidental music to much of Star Trek (the original series), especially any fight scenes. What I do love though is that the music is used very sparingly. In fact, for much of the movie there is no music. The theme only plays when the shark is approaching, and even when we first see it, as it rises out of the water as Brody throws the meat overboard, there is no music. No sudden blast of chords, no mad violin skirling, no guitar riff or orchestral punch. Nothing. It's almost, musically, a non-event, and a fantastic example of how you don't always need to underline a scary or climactic scene with a fanfare of music. Restraint par excellence, musically. The music, as they face off against the shark in the climax, is disarmingly upbeat and almost carefree – you know the kind of thing, that sort of music they play for the funnier scenes in Westerns, adventure music rather than danger music. It's very clever, as it gives you the idea that the guys have all this in hand now; it's just a matter of time before they kill the shark, go home to a hero's welcome. But it doesn't work out that way, and in fact once it becomes apparent that the shark is still in control, the music stops completely. Even when the shark is killed, as its exploded corpse sinks slowly into the sea, down to the seabed, the music Williams chooses to use is not a triumphant fanfare or march, but a gentle, rippling, underwater anthem, almost peaceful. You can even get the impression from the music that the death of the shark, though necessary in a kill-or-be-killed way, is something of a loss and a tragedy. Though the movie says otherwise, the music mourns the death of the huge leviathan. Fact vs Fiction It's hard to say. There are some facts here that hold up, but much of what's said is pure nonsense. Sharks aren't remorseless eating machines, indifferent to what they consume, In fact, just the opposite: they are quite picky eaters. I also doubt one would venture so close to the shore, especially with so many swimmers in the water. Sharks are attracted to the seal-like movements of swimmers, yes, but a large number of them I think would scare a shark off. Also, the water would be too shallow, and as for one attacking in a pond? I'm not so sure about the intelligence of a shark, as in, would it know to knock over a boat and to charge a cage? Well, probably the latter, maybe the former too, but I think the writer here made the mistake of trying to make the shark too intelligent, make it almost human, which in itself made it less believable. I can see a shark fighting to survive, but revenge? I don't see a shark bothering about that. When it had the chance to escape, I think it would have done. It's odd that I read in the credits that both National Geographic and a marine institute were involved, presumably as consultants, and yet some totally glaring errors and outright lies, if not guesses (and certainly not educated ones) fail to have been pointed out. Of course, how much input these institutions had to the film, and how much control was exerted over the screenplay by the writers and the studio I don't know. I can imagine some scientist saying “But that's not right” and a studio executive rolling their eyes and saying “It's just a film. Nobody will know or care.” But for all the actual research done into sharks, of which I see very little in the movie, I'd have to go with an overall http://images.freeimages.com/images/...rk-cartoon.jpg Veridct What other could there be? This is the archetypal shark movie, and even notwithstanding the glaring errors in factual details about sharks, the almost cobbled-together mythology that grew up around them after this movie and the damage it did, if unwittingly, to the species, it's almost perfect. The pacing is excellent: moments of drama contrast with the odd light-hearted moment and then spiral quickly back to drama. There's action but it's not just an action movie; in fact, for much of the time it's more a tale of one man's determination to beat bureaucratic regulations and do the right thing. The writer successfully avoided throwing in a love interest – though Brody is married and we see his wife she's a completely peripheral character, and the movie would not suffer without her – and there are no real subplots. A lesser man might have written in a heart-rending decision for Brody, making him choose between his wife, who declares the island unsafe and vows to return to New York (as she hints at weakly, just the once) leaving him to make the decision as to whether he went with her (and the children) or remained to safeguard the beach and the people he is sworn to defend. Maybe that happens in the book – I did read it but it was decades ago and I can't remember. It's certainly a guy movie. Apart from the – as already mentioned, totally peripheral – wife of the police chief and the odd character here and there, there are no women in this. It's three guys, three macho men heading out to hunt down a big fish. It could have been a total testosterone fest, but they avoided that, just, by making Hooper the college boy, though Quint is every inch Stallone or Schwarzenegger on the sea. The shots of the shark are not overused and are held back until the big reveal, and even then only really come into their own for the climax of the movie, and as I mentioned earlier there's no real reliance on the gore aspect of things. The juxtapositioning of the laughing swapping of stories about scars turning deadly serious with Quint's relating of the tale of the USS Indianapolis (as featured in our previous movie) is really well handled, and serves to stop the moment becoming too light-hearted, reminding us that the guys are stalking a killer out here, a killer than can easily claim all their lives. Quint's death, too, adds realism to the movie for me. I probably would have preferred if Hooper had died too, but you can't have everything. But having at least one of the “three amigos” not make it back, and that one being the one who has hunted sharks all his life, is perhaps symbolic. The man who confesses he loves sharks, and the one who knows very little about them, and could care less, survive, while the one who has been their natural enemy all his life (perhaps due to the Indianapolis incident) and who has made money by killing them, ends up, Ahab-like, as the victim of the very creature he went to sea to hunt. It really couldn't be any better, from the glaring refusal of the mayor to see what is in front of him, worried about his own prestige and bad press, and not thinking about the consequences for his people to the failed attempt to inject the shark and the seeming loss of Hooper to e, Jaws is pretty damn near perfect. Now, if only we hadn't all believed it was based on facts... Nevertheless, I have no hesitation in awarding it, as you would probably expect, the highest possible rating. http://www.trollheart.com/sharkrat5.png |
http://www.trollheart.com/grit1a.jpg
Howdy parnders! Y'know, time was when a man couldn't walk into one of them pitcher houses without seein' a movie 'bout cowboys and how it was in the old West. Glenn Ford, John Wayne, Gary Cooper ... you name it, them boys was up on the big screen a-whoopin' an' a-hollerin' an' showin' us what it was like to be a cowboy. Then this new-fangled telly-vishun come along, an' darned if the ol' Western movie ain't still popular as a whore in a jailhouse! Hell, they even done made series about cowboys. But that ain't none of our concern here. What we're lookin' at here, friends, is moo-vies. Serious movies. Funny movies. Weird movies. Shoot! We even done got one with them thar alien fellas in it, I kid ye not! So if you're the kinda hombre who likes to see a man saddle up and strap on his gunbelt, stick around cos we got a whole passel o' em to get through here, and, well, ye know son, we may be here for some time. You like Clint Eastwood? We got Clint Eastwood. You like them that Magnificent Seven? Hey, no problem. Your tastes run more to that James Garner fella? Shoot, I like him! Yeah, we got something for everyone. We even got ones with cowboys singin' – yeah you heard me – and one with a liz – uh, what in the Sam Hill are you boys feedin' me here? Fer jest a minute there ah thought this said ... you don't say? Well I'll be hornswoggled! Folks, we got us a movie with a lizard! Yup, an' he ain't gettin' shot at in the desert neither. Well if that don't beat all! Durn little guy's a sheriff! Don't reckon ah'd want to live in that town! So saddle up and check yer pistol is loaded, cos this here is Apache country, and it don't do to pass through here unarmed. We got a long way to go boy, so let's hit that trail and not look back. Yee-haw! The schoolmarm very kindly arranged these here films in alfee – alfa – elfa – order of them there letters, one after t'other, but we ain't gonna be follerin' no consarned order, hell no! This is jest so as you fellas can see what may be a-comin' up in the future. You done think you know a movie that ain't here, well you just head on down to the telegraph office and drop me a few lines, and ah'll see what ah can do. Not makin' no promises, mind! 3:10 to Yuma (2007) Across the wide Missouri (1951) The Alamo (1960) Along the Great Divide (1951) Annie Get Your Gun (1950) The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975) The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) The Big Country (1958) Billy the Kid (1989) Blazing Saddles (1974) Brimstone (2016) Brokeback Mountain (2005) Broken Arrow (1950) Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) Calamity Jane (1953) Cat Ballou (1965) The Cowboys (1972) Cowboys and aliens (2011) Dances With Wolves (1990) Diablo (2016) Django (1966) Django, kill ... If you live, shoot! (1967) The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox (1976) El Dorado (1966) Evil Roy Slade (1972) Fancy Pants (1950) A Fistful of Dollars (1964) A Fisftul of Dynamite (1971) For a Few Dollars Less (1966) For a Few Dollars More (1965) Fort Apache (1948) The Frisco Kid (1979) Forsaken (2016) Giant (1956) The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966) Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957) Gunsmoke (1953) Guns of the Magnificent Seven (1969) Geronimo (1993) Hang 'em High (1968) The Hateful Eight (2015) Heaven's Gate (1980) High Noon (1952) High Plains Drifter (1973) How the West Was Won (1962) Legends of the Fall (1994) The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972) Lone Star (1952) The Long Riders (1980) The Magnificent Seven (1960) The Magnificent Seven Ride (1972) A Man Called Horse (1970) The Man from Laramie (1955) Maverick (1994) McClintock! (1963) The Missouri Breaks (1976) Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Oklahoma! (1955) Open Range (2003) The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) Pale Rider (1985) Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) Paint Your Wagon (1969) The Paleface (1948) Posse (1975) Purgatory (1999) Rango (2011) The Return of a Man Called Horse (1976) Return of the Seven (1966) The Revenant (2015) Rio Grande (1950) Rooster Cogburn (1975) Santa Fe (1951) The Searchers (1956) Shane (1953) Shenandoah (1965) She Wore a yellow Ribbon (1949) Silverado (1985) Soldier Blue (1970) Son of Paleface (1952) Son of the Morning Star (1991) Streets of Laredo (1949) Support Your Local Sheriff! (1969) Support Your Local Gunfighter (1971) They Died with Their Boots On (1941) Tombstone (1993) True Grit (1969) Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970) Unforgiven (1992) The Wild Bunch (1969) Wild Wild West (1999) Wyatt Earp (1994) Young Guns (1988) Young Guns II: Blaze of Glory (1990) |
Bout to go blind trying to read TH's new graphic masterpiece.
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