Skip to main content

Archive - T



FEATURING:

Tales of Hoffmann
30 Days of Night
36
Three Days of the Condor
Thunderball
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
Transsiberian

The Tales of Hoffmann
(1951)

Powell and Pressburger's adaptation of the opera. I'm not an aficionado of opera, but its stylistically winning and Moira Shearer is very lithe.

***
30 Days of Night
(2007)

This has its moments, but for a movie with such a strong premise, it never really seems to get going. And it's all so starchy and po-faced, you're dying for Kurt Russell or someone to show up and kick some arse. Danny Huston and Ben Foster give better performances than the film deserves, and Melissa Gilbert looks pretty, but Josh Hartnett just looks on blankly grim-faced throughout.

**1/2 


36
(2004)

Not nearly nuanced enough to deserve it's "French Heat" publicity. Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu are as accomplished as you'd expect, but the plotting and character beats are as clunky and daft as your average Hollywood police thriller.

**


Three Days of the Condor
(1975)

Never approaching the gripping nihilism of the previous year's The Parallax View, there's still much to enjoy in this glossy Redford paranoia thriller. If you can get past Dunaway's redundant love interest and Dave Grusin's frequently inappropriate score, that is. 

 When we eventually learn the root cause of the events that transpired there’s a sense of relevancy to today’s world. Max Von Sydow's shadowy hit man gets to classily soliloquise at the end.

****
Thunderball
(1965)

I probably end up slating this Bond usually because the last 30 minutes are so utterly dull (okay, it all looks very nice if you like underwater photography) but that's a bit unfair. It's definitely got the feel of the first Bond-by-numbers but there are compensations, mostly in the areas that appear to be Terence Young's forte (character-based action - certainly, given how good From Russia With Love is, and how both this and Dr No come unstuck when called on to deliver big explosions and hardware-orientated set pieces).

It's ironic that the film sets up a ticking clock early on and then proceeds to be very leisurely, almost a travelogue. I like that Bond's lounging around a health spa for the first 30 minutes (with Guy Doleman, who was great in The Ipcress File the same year but a bit short-changed here). And Luciana Paluzzi is so engaging and plays off Connery so well that I'm a little ashamed to admit I've only really thought of Claudine Auger in relation the Bond girls.

The two proto-Kidd and Wint characters leave an impression too, apparently intent on something very nasty we don't see with a girl and the more disturbing for their absence of humour. Felix Leiter is utterly rubbish. And I kept noticing how much of this score ended up used by Barry's for Dances with Wolves. Also, much as I enjoy the recurring riffs of M and Q, I find Moneypenny really irritating.

***
Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon
(2011)

Pretty much the same as the last two. Big robots, silly robots, stupid plotting, Le Beouf. No whatserface this time. The only real bright spots are incredibly OTT turns by John Turturro and Alan Tudyk.

**
Transsiberian
(2008)

Ben Kingsley phones in a Russian and Woody Harrelson does overly naive nice guy, leaving Emily Mortimer to really impress, particularly in an unsettling scene at a deserted church. 

 This is a weirdly structured, nasty little thriller that takes ages to pick up steam (ahem) but keeps the attention because you can't really get a handle on where it's headed. Which is kind of good, but it ends up being much less outré than it seemed to have the potential for.

***

Labels:

Comments

Post a comment

Popular posts from this blog

We live in a twilight world.

Tenet (2020)
(SPOILERS) I’ve endured a fair few confusingly-executed action sequences in movies – more than enough, actually – but I don’t think I’ve previously had the odd experience of being on the edge of my seat during one while simultaneously failing to understand its objectives and how those objectives are being attempted. Which happened a few times during Tenet. If I stroll over to the Wiki page and read the plot synopsis, it is fairly explicable (fairly) but as a first dive into this Christopher Nolan film, I frequently found it, if not impenetrable, then most definitely opaque.
Post a comment
Read more

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.
Post a comment
Read more

You can’t climb a ladder, no. But you can skip like a goat into a bar.

Juno and the Paycock (1930)
(SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s second sound feature. Such was the lustre of this technological advance that a wordy play was picked. By Sean O’Casey, upon whom Hitchcock based the prophet of doom at the end of The Birds. Juno and the Paycock, set in 1922 during the Irish Civil War, begins as a broad comedy of domestic manners, but by the end has descended into full-blown Greek (or Catholic) tragedy. As such, it’s an uneven but still watchable affair, even if Hitch does nothing to disguise its stage origins.
Post a comment
Read more

Anything can happen in Little Storping. Anything at all.

The Avengers 2.22: Murdersville
Brian Clemens' witty take on village life gone bad is one of the highlights of the fifth season. Inspired by Bad Day at Black Rock, one wonders how much Murdersville's premise of unsettling impulses lurking beneath an idyllic surface were set to influence both Straw Dogs and The Wicker Mana few years later (one could also suggest it premeditates the brand of backwoods horrors soon to be found in American cinema from the likes of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper).
Post a comment
Read more

James Bond. You appear with the tedious inevitability of an unloved season.

Moonraker (1979)
Depending upon your disposition, and quite possibly age, Moonraker is either the Bond film that finally jumped the shark or the one that is most gloriously redolent of Roger Moore’s knowing take on the character. Many Bond aficionados will no doubt utter its name with thinly disguised contempt, just as they will extol with gravity how Timothy Dalton represented a masterful return to the core values of the series. If you regard For Your Eyes Only as a refreshing return to basics after the excesses of the previous two entries, and particularly the space opera grandstanding of this one, it’s probably fair to say you don’t much like Roger Moore’s take on Bond.

Post a comment
Read more

He tasks me. He tasks me, and I shall have him.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
(1982)
(SPOILERS) I don’t love Star Trek, but I do love Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. That probably isn’t just me, but a common refrain of many a non-devotee of the series. Although, it used to apply to The Voyage Home (the funny one, with the whales, the Star Trek even the target audience for Three Men and a Baby could enjoy). Unfortunately, its high regard has also become the desperate, self-destructive, song-and-verse, be-all-and-end-all of the overlords of the franchise itself, in whichever iteration, it seems. This is understandable to an extent, as Khan is that rare movie sequel made to transcendent effect on almost every level, and one that stands the test of time every bit as well (better, even) as when it was first unveiled.
Post a comment
Read more

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…
Post a comment
Read more

My dear, sweet brother Numsie!

The Golden Child (1986)
Post-Beverly Hills Cop, Eddie Murphy could have filmed himself washing the dishes and it would have been a huge hit. Which might not have been a bad idea, since he chose to make this misconceived stinker.
Post a comment
Read more

Twenty dwarves took turns doing handstands on the carpet.

Bugsy (1991)
(SPOILERS) Bugsy is very much a Warren Beatty vanity project (aren’t they all, even the ones that don’t seem that way on the surface?), to the extent of his playing a title character a decade and a half younger than him. As such, it makes sense that producer Warren’s choice of director wouldn’t be inclined to overshadow star Warren, but the effect is to end up with a movie that, for all its considerable merits (including a script from James Toback chock full of incident), never really feels quite focussed, that it’s destined to lead anywhere, even if we know where it’s going.
Post a comment
Read more

When I barked, I was enormous.

Dean Spanley (2008)
(SPOILERS) There is such a profusion of average, respectable – but immaculately made – British period drama held up for instant adulation, it’s hardly surprising that, when something truly worthy of acclaim comes along, it should be singularly ignored. To be fair, Dean Spanleywas well liked by critics upon its release, but its subsequent impact has proved disappointingly slight. Based on Lord Dunsany’s 1939 novella, My Talks with Dean Spanley, our narrator relates how the titular Dean’s imbibification of a moderate quantity of Imperial Tokay (“too syrupy”, is the conclusion reached by both members of the Fisk family regarding this Hungarian wine) precludes his recollection of a past life as a dog. 

Inevitably, reviews pounced on the chance to reference Dean Spanley as a literal shaggy dog story, so I shall get that out of the way now. While the phrase is more than fitting, it serves to underrepresent how affecting the picture is when it has cause to be, as does any re…
Post a comment
Read more