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

I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.
Post a Comment
Read more

Dude. You’re my hero and shit.

El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)
(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.
Post a Comment
Read more

The past is a statement. The future is a question.

Justified Season Six
(SPOILERS) There have been more than enough damp squib or so-so show finales of late to have greeted the demise of Justified with some trepidation. Thankfully it avoids almost every pitfall it might have succumbed to and gives us a satisfying send-off that feels fitting for its characters. This is a series that, even at its weakest (the previous season) is leagues ahead of most fare in an increasingly saturated sphere, so it’s a relief – even if there was never much doubt on past form – that it doesn’t drop the ball.

And of those character fates? In a show that often pulls back from giving Raylan Givens the great hero moments (despite his maintaining a veneer of ultra-cool, and getting “supporting hero” moments as he does in the finale, 6.13 The Promise), it feels appropriate that his entire (stated) motivation for the season should be undermined. He doesn’t get to take down Boyd Crowder, except in an incarcerating sense, but as always he is sanguine about it. After…
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…
1 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

It’s not every day you see a guy get his ass kicked on two continents – by himself.

Gemini Man (2019)
(SPOILERS) Ang Lee seems hellbent on sloughing down a technological cul-de-sac to the point of creative obscurity, in much the same way Robert Zemeckis enmired himself in the mirage of motion capture for a decade. Lee previously experimented with higher frame rates on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, to the general aversion of those who saw it in its intended form – 48, 60 or 120 fps have generally gone down like a bag of cold sick, just ask Peter Jackson – and the complete indifference of most of the remaining audience, for whom the material held little lustre. Now he pretty much repeats that trick with Gemini Man. At best, it’s merely an “okay” film – not quite the bomb its Rotten Tomatoes score suggests – which, (as I saw it) stripped of its distracting frame rate and 3D, reveals itself as just about serviceable but afflicted by several insurmountable drawbacks.
Post a Comment
Read more

You’re only seeing what’s in front of you. You’re not seeing what’s above you.

Mr. Robot Season 2
(SPOILERS) I suspect my problem with Mr. Robot may be that I want it to be something it isn’t, which would entail it being a much better show than it is. And that’s its own fault, really, or rather creator and writer-director of umpteen episodes Sam Esmail’s, who has intentionally and provocatively lured his audience into thinking this really is an up-to-the-minute, pertinent, relevant, zeitgeisty show, one that not only has a huge amount to say about the illusory nature of our socio-economic system, and consequently the bedrock of our collective paradigm, but also the thorny subject of reality itself, both of which have been variably enticing dramatic fodder since the Wachowski siblings and David Fincher released a one-two punch at the end of the previous millennium.

In that sense, Mr. Robot’s thematic conceit is very much of a piece with its narrative form; it’s a conjuring act, a series of sleights of hand designed to dazzle the viewer into going with the flow, rath…
Post a Comment
Read more

What you do is very baller. You're very anarchist.

Lady Bird (2017)
(SPOILERS) You can see the Noah Baumbach influence on Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig’s directorial debut, with whom she collaborated on Frances Ha; an intimate, lo-fi, post-Woody Allen (as in, post-feted, respected Woody Allen) dramedy canvas that has traditionally been the New Yorker’s milieu. But as an adopted, spiritual New Yorker, I suspect Gerwig honourably qualifies, even as Lady Bird is a love letter/ nostalgia trip to her home city of Sacramento.
Post a Comment
Read more

Poor Easy Breezy.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.
Post a Comment
Read more

You’ll just have to face it, Steed. You’re completely compromised.

The Avengers Season 6 Ranked – Worst to Best
The final run, and an oft-maligned one. It’s doubtful anyone could have filled Emma Peel’s kinky boots, but it didn’t help Linda Thorson that Tara King was frequently earmarked to moon over Steed while very evidentlynot being the equal Emma and Cathy were; the generation gap was never less than unflatteringly evident. Nevertheless, despite this imbalance, and the early hiccups of the John Bryce-produced episodes, Season Six arguably offers a superior selection of episodes to its predecessor, in which everyone became perhaps a little too relaxed.
Post a Comment
Read more