These are the guys that have been killing you.

12:01

(1993)

(SPOILERS) 12:01, a Fox Network TV movie, was first shown the same year as Groundhog Day, that much feted classic of the one-day-repeated micro-genre that also includes the recent Edge of Tomorrow/Live. Die. Repeat., The X-Files’ Monday and Source Code. It had previously been made as a short three years earlier, with Kurtwood Smith. Indeed, Richard Lupoff, Jonathan Heap and Philip Morton, the writers, sued the Groundhog Day people, claiming plagiarism. 12:01 is a serviceable little movie, engagingly told, but it’s easy to see why it hasn’t entered into the annals like its more illustrious companions.

Indeed, even The X-Files’ Monday (from the recharged sixth season), is superior, telling its story effectively and punchily in half the time. Like Edge of Tomorrow and Source Code, 12:01 attempts an explanation behind its conceit, rather than it all just being magic to cause a shift in its wayward protagonist’s outlook. This forms the underpinning of events and the murder narrative, but like Groundhog Day it’s driven by a love story.

Barry (Jonathan Silverman, a more affable Judd Nelson) is a bored and put-upon personnel department employee of a company conducting experiments into particle physics. He moons from afar over scientist Lisa (Helen Slater) and ritually gets drunk with buddy and practical joker Howard (Jeremy Piven, basically setting out the store for his entire career). Lisa is shot dead, and that night Barry suffers an electric shock from a lightning strike at the same time (unbeknownst to anyone else, since the device is supposed to have been shut down) that a faster than light particle experiment is being conducted.

Barry awakes the next morning to find himself reliving his previous day. As you can probably guess, his main endeavours, once he gets the measure of his predicament, is to woo/save the life of Lisa, which inevitably leads to working out just who is responsible for her (attempted) murder and for continuing the (banned) experiment. Along the way there are a series of quirky little signatures (the collapsing office chair is effectively the same as Ned Ryerson and the puddle in Groundhog Day) and amusement resulting from learnt behaviours and observations of others (in particular, Barry’s reactions to his overbearing boss Robin Bartlett have something of Office Space’s relishable contempt for to all things oppressively officious).

Silverman’s solid, Slater’s incredibly likeable, Piven’s Piven, and Martin Landau as head of the project Dr Moxley is as reliable as you’d expect. There’s also a decent Danny Trejo cameo.

12:01 isn’t quite able to grasp the same giddy mettle as some of its stable mates, however. Jack Sholder (Freddy’s Revenge, cult classic The Hidden) does an effective and pacey job, but the final act reduces to efficient-but-bland straight thriller antics. There’s also only one instance where the go-for-it side of repetition is fully embraced for humorous effect; Barry awakes, galvanised, heads out to work, only to be hit head on by a car, killed, and awakes again; that kind of shorthand gag could have been used to knock the movie out of the park (as both Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow exploited). As it is, Barry is only caught in his loop for about four days, by the looks of things.

The moral of the piece is much more effective, if still glib, than the meal The Age of Adaline makes, only coming from a different angle; “That’s why life is so precious. Because time passes”. Worth a look then, if a lesser entry in the repeated day cycle, and 12:01 can currently be seen on YouTube.

Your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!

Enemy Mine (1985) (SPOILERS) The essential dynamic of Enemy Mine – sworn enemies overcome their differences to become firm friends – was a well-ploughed one when it was made, such that it led to TV Tropes assuming, since edited, that it took its title from an existing phrase (Barry Longyear, author of the 1979 novella, made it up, inspired by the 1961 David Niven film The Best of Enemies ). The Film Yearbook Volume 5 opined that that Wolfgang Petersen’s picture “ lacks the gritty sauciness of Hell in the Pacific”; John Boorman’s WWII film stranded Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune on a desert island and had them first duking it out before becoming reluctant bedfellows. Perhaps germanely, both movies were box office flops.

If I do nothing else, I will convince them that Herbert Stempel knows what won the goddam Academy Award for Best goddam Picture of 1955. That’s what I’m going to accomplish.

Quiz Show (1994) (SPOILERS) Quiz Show perfectly encapsulates a certain brand of Best Picture nominee: the staid, respectable, diligent historical episode, a morality tale in response to which the Academy can nod their heads approvingly and discerningly, feeding as it does their own vainglorious self-image about how times and attitudes have changed, in part thanks to their own virtuousness. Robert Redford’s film about the 1950s Twenty-One quiz show scandals is immaculately made, boasts a notable cast and is guided by a strong screenplay from Paul Attanasio (who, on television, had just created the seminal Homicide: Life on the Streets ), but it lacks that something extra that pushes it into truly memorable territory.

Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.

The Forgiven (2021) (SPOILERS) By this point, the differences between filmmaker John Michael McDonagh and his younger brother, filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, are fairly clearly established. Both wear badges of irreverence and provocation in their writing, and a willingness to tackle – or take pot-shots – at bigger issues, ones that may find them dangling their toes in hot water. But Martin receives the lion’s share of the critical attention, while John is generally recognised as the slightly lesser light. Sure, some might mistake Seven Psychopaths for a John movie, and Calvary for a Martin one, but there’s a more flagrant sense of attention seeking in John’s work, and concomitantly less substance. The Forgiven is clearly aiming more in the expressly substantial vein of John’s earlier Calvary, but it ultimately bears the same kind of issues in delivery.

No one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.

The Matrix (1999) (SPOILERS) Twenty years on, and the articles are on the defining nature of The Matrix are piling up, most of them touching on how its world has become a reality, or maybe always was one. At the time, its premise was engaging enough, but it was the sum total of the package that cast a spell – the bullet time, the fashions, the soundtrack, the comic book-as-live-action framing and styling – not to mention it being probably the first movie to embrace and reflect the burgeoning Internet ( Hackers doesn’t really count), and subsequently to really ride the crest of the DVD boom wave. And now? Now it’s still really, really good.

Haven’t you ever heard of the healing power of laughter?

Batman (1989) (SPOILERS) There’s Jaws , there’s Star Wars , and then there’s Batman in terms of defining the modern blockbuster. Jaws ’ success was so profound, it changed the way movies were made and marketed. Batman’s marketing was so profound, it changed the way tentpoles would be perceived: as cash cows. Disney tried to reproduce the effect the following year with Dick Tracy , to markedly less enthusiastic response. None of this places Batman in the company of Jaws as a classic movie sold well, far from it. It just so happened to hit the spot. As Tim Burton put it, it was “ more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie ”. It’s difficult to disagree with his verdict that the finished product (for that is what it is) is “ mainly boring ”. Now, of course, the Burton bat has been usurped by the Nolan incarnation (and soon the Snyder). They have some things in common. Both take the character seriously and favour a sombre tone, which was much more of shock to the

In a few moments, you will have an experience that will seem completely real. It will be the result of your subconscious fears transformed into your conscious awareness.

Brainstorm (1983) (SPOILERS) Might Brainstorm have been the next big thing – a ground-breaking, game-changing cinematic spectacle that had as far reaching consequences as Star Wars (special effects) or Avatar (3D) – if only Douglas Trumbull had been allowed to persevere with his patented “Showscan” process (70mm film photographed and projected at 60 frames per second)? I suspect not; one only has to look at the not-so-far-removed experiment of Ang Lee with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk , and how that went down like a bag of cold sick, to doubt that any innovation will necessarily catch on (although Trumbull at least had a narrative hinge on which to turn his “more real than real” imagery, whereas Lee’s pretty much boiled down to “because it was there”). Brainstorm ’s story is, though, like its title, possibly too cerebral, too much concerned with the consciousness and touting too little of the cloyingly affirmative that Bruce Rubin inevitably brings to his screenplays. T

Other monks will meet their deaths here. And they too will have blackened fingers. And blackened tongues.

The Name of the Rose (1986) (SPOILERS) Umberto Eco wasn’t awfully impressed by Jean Jacques-Annaud’s adaptation of his novel – or “ palimpsest of Umberto Eco’s novel ” as the opening titles announce – to the extent that he nixed further movie versions of his work. Later, he amended that view, calling it “ a nice movie ”. He also, for balance, labelled The Name of the Rose his worst novel – “ I hate this book and I hope you hate it too ”. Essentially, he was begrudging its renown at the expense of his later “ superior ” novels. I didn’t hate the novel, although I do prefer the movie, probably because I saw it first and it was everything I wanted from a medieval Sherlock Holmes movie set in a monastery and devoted to forbidden books, knowledge and opinions.

You ever heard the saying, “Don’t rob the bank across from the diner that has the best donuts in three counties”?

2 Guns (2013) (SPOILERS) Denzel Washington is such a reliable performer, that it can get a bit boring. You end up knowing every gesture or inflection in advance, whether he’s playing a good guy or a bad guy. And his films are generally at least half decent, so you end up seeing them. Even in Flight (or perhaps especially in Flight ; just watch him chugging down that vodka) where he’s giving it his Oscar-nominatable best, he seems too familiar. I think it may be because he’s an actor who is more effective the less he does. In 2 Guns he’s not doing less, but sometimes it seems like it. That’s because the last person I’d ever expect blows him off the screen; Mark Wahlberg.

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.

Say hello to the Scream Extractor.

Monsters, Inc. (2001) (SPOILERS) I was never the greatest fan of Monsters, Inc. , even before charges began to be levelled regarding its “true” subtext. I didn’t much care for the characters, and I particularly didn’t like the way Pixar’s directors injected their own parenting/ childhood nostalgia into their plots. Something that just seems to go on with their fare ad infinitum. Which means the Pixars I preferred tended to be the Brad Bird ones. You know, the alleged objectivist. Now, though, we learn Pixar has always been about the adrenochrome, so there’s no going back…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog