You were the people's one true god, for a moment.

Ben-Hur

(1959)

(SPOILERS) Ben-Hur has the fairly unchallenged virtue of being a biblical epic that, if not quite as astounding as its unparalleled 11 Oscars would suggest, is actually really good. The number of kids foisted into watching it during a Religious Studies class only to be very pleasantly surprised (I can’t say my response was similar when Pink Floyd: The Wall got an unlikely airing), and its status as a Bank Holiday weekend fixture, has given it a well-earned reputation, even if nothing in the rest of its 3 hours 32 minutes comes close to matching the nine-minute chariot race.

Notably, like Titanic (which isn’t nearly as good, but also gleaned 11 statuettes), Ben-Hur failed to bag snag the Best Screenplay, but at least it was nominated in the first place (unlike Jimbo’s doomed romance). Karl Tunberg took the final credit, but there were a number of cooks involved, including Gore Vidal, very vocal in later years about how he persuaded Stephen Boyd to play Messala as the spurned lover of Chuck’s Judah Ben-Hur. How true this anecdote is is a source of debate, particularly given Vidal seemed to be (successfully) attempting to wind up Charlton Heston as much as anything, but there’s no denying the unbridled joy Judah takes in seeing his old pal again (“We were friends as boys. We were like brothers”).

Boyd didn’t get nominated, although he deserves credit for attempting to infuse Messala’s Machiavellian machinations with a touch of substance beyond mere villainy – he might have been lent more of a hand by the writers, as in the telling there’s usually too much of the polar opposites to make the dynamic between Judah and Messala really interesting; we aren’t really buying Judah being accused by Esther (Haya Harareet) of becoming just like him, and Heston’s rock of rectitude is a little too impermeable to express anything very deep, certainly to the extent of deserving the Best Actor Oscar. I mean, he’s fine, and he does what’s required of him, which is to bring star wattage to an epic, something that’s no small feat in itself – others have been much more disparaging, including director William Wyler – but it takes a different class of actor to add layers to such a basic outline (this may be a thinking person’s epic, but that only stretches so far). Like Russell Crowe in Gladiator, for instance, which riffs on Ben-Hur shamelessly, and also attained Oscar glory as a consequence.

As personified by Chuck, Judah is just your everyday, blonde(-ish) haired, blue-eyed Aryan Jew, and it’s difficult not to see America’s support of the recently-established State of Israel in his pronouncements and resistance to Roman rule. There’s also a light veneer of McCarthyism critique during the early stages (“Tell me the name of the criminals” demands Messala, asking his old friend to inform on his countrymen; which is about when Messala is required to start twirling his moustache – “What do the lives of a few Jews mean to you?”)

Wyler proudly declared that it took a Jew to make a decent film about Christ, but I’m not sure it’s quite that. The Jesus episodes are closer to Forrest Gump-encounters with Judah, who just happens to stumble by at divine moments (a cup of water here, a Sermon on the Mount there), and the picture very significantly reduces the impact of Ben-Hur’s conversion. He never actually pronounces himself as a Christian, but rather confesses “And I felt his voice take the sword out of my hand”, much preferable to the cold dead ones Heston intoned to the NRA that time as well as being an implicit rejection of the wrathful Old Testament God.

Generally, there’s a sense of stuffiness and earnest, classical Hollywood reverence to the “Tale of the Christ” parts, superbly mimicked by the Coen Brothers and George Clooney in Hail, Caesar!, that has you longing to get back to a slave galley or the arena. Of the former, jolly Jack Warner does offer some comparative theology (“Your God has forsaken you. He has no more power than the images I pray to”). Of course, Arrius only goes and adopts Judah, putting a spoke in what is turning into a Job story. Arrius is the exception to the general disdain shown towards the hissable Romans, which takes in Judah’s audience with Pilate (the superbly surnamed Frank Thring).

There’s a warm view given to the Arab of the piece, albeit a blacked-up Arab in the shape of Sheikh Ilderim (Welshman Hugh Griffith, who won Best Supporting Actor), showing solidarity with the Jew and backing him against Messala. That scene, as Messala, surrounded by fellow Roman soldiers, insults him, finds Ilderim in the mode of marvellously casual sarcasm: “Bravely spoken”.

The chariot race needs no commentary. If the Christ passages are old Hollywood, this is the ushering in of the new; it remains an enthralling piece of filmmaking, a clear influence on the likes of Spielberg (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and Lucas (The Phantom Menace), with Miklos Rozsa’s otherwise marbled score (John Williams evidently picked up a few cues from him) dropping away to allow for the furore of hooves and whips and Messala’s death-dealing “Greek chariot” (presumably all that nation’s chariots chopped the wheels from under you that season). Wyler really didn’t like widescreen, finding it next to impossible to fill the expanse of image, or exclude elements from it, but you wouldn’t know it from his and cinematographer’s Robert Surtees’ staggering efforts.

The trouble is, after the chariot race is over, and Messala’s toast (John Le Mesurier can’t save him) there’s still more than forty minutes to go, and interminable attempt by Chuck to bring relief to his leprosy-ravaged mother and sister. Very fortunately, it appears everyone within a twenty-mile radius received healing when Jesus died, something I didn’t read about in The Bible.

Despite this inflexibility when it counts, Ben-Hur generally makes the whole sword-and-sandals/ religious epic thing look easy, deceptively so when so much in the genre is such indigestible stodge that there’s no chance of replicating it as formula (look what happened to Ridley Scott when he tried to go back to the well, twice). If you needed convincing, another remake would be along in almost sixty years to prove the point…

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

You were this amazing occidental samurai.

Ricochet (1991) (SPOILERS) You have to wonder at Denzel Washington’s agent at this point in the actor’s career. He’d recently won his first Oscar for Glory , yet followed it with less-than-glorious heart-transplant ghost comedy Heart Condition (Bob Hoskins’ racist cop receives Washington’s dead lawyer’s ticker; a recipe for hijinks!) Not long after, he dipped his tentative toe in the action arena with this Joel Silver production; Denzel has made his share of action fare since, of course, most of it serviceable if unremarkable, but none of it comes near to delivering the schlocky excesses of Ricochet , a movie at once ingenious and risible in its plot permutations, performances and production profligacy.

The Krishna died of a broken finger? I mean, is that a homicide?

Miami Blues (1990) (SPOILERS) If the ‘90s crime movie formally set out its stall in 1992 with Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs , another movie very quietly got in there first at the beginning of the decade. Miami Blues picked up admiring reviews but went otherwise unnoticed on release, and even now remains under-recognised. The tale of “blithe psychopath” Federick J. Frenger, Jr., the girl whose heart he breaks and the detetive sergeant on his trail, director George Armitage’s adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel wears a pitch black sense of humour and manages the difficult juggling act of being genuinely touching with it. It’s a little gem of a movie, perfectly formed and concisely told, one that more than deserves to rub shoulders with the better-known entries in its genre. One of the defining characteristics of Willeford’s work, it has been suggested , is that it doesn’t really fit into the crime genre; he comes from an angle of character rather than plot or h

Well, something’s broke on your daddy’s spaceship.

Apollo 13 (1995) (SPOILERS) The NASA propaganda movie to end all NASA propaganda movies. Their original conception of the perilous Apollo 13 mission deserves due credit in itself; what better way to bolster waning interest in slightly naff perambulations around a TV studio than to manufacture a crisis event, one emphasising the absurd fragility of the alleged non-terrestrial excursions and the indomitable force that is “science” in achieving them? Apollo 13 the lunar mission was tailor made for Apollo 13 the movie version – make believe the make-believe – and who could have been better to lead this fantasy ride than Guantanamo Hanks at his all-American popularity peak?

The Illumi-what-i?

Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) (SPOILERS) In which Sam Raimi proves that he can stand proudly with the best – or worst – of them as a good little foot soldier of the woke apocalypse. You’d expect the wilfully anarchic – and Republican – Raimi to choke on the woke, but instead, he’s sucked it up, grinned and bore it. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is so slavishly a production-line Marvel movie, both in plotting and character, and in nu-Feige progressive sensibilities, there was no chance of Sam staggering out from beneath its suffocating demands with anything more than a few scraps of stylistic flourish intact.

People still talk about Pandapocalypse 2002.

Turning Red (2022) (SPOILERS) Those wags at Pixar, eh? Yes, the most – actually, the only – impressive thing about Turning Red is the four-tiered wordplay of its title. Thirteen-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang) finds herself turning into a large red panda at emotive moments. She is also, simultaneously, riding the crimson wave for the first time. Further, as a teenager, she characteristically suffers from acute embarrassment (mostly due to the actions of her domineering mother Ming Lee, voiced by Sandra Oh). And finally, of course, Turning Red can be seen diligently spreading communist doctrine left, right and centre. To any political sensibility tuning in to Disney+, basically (so ones with either considerable or zero resistance to woke). Take a guess which of these isn’t getting press in reference to the movie? And by a process of elimination is probably what it it’s really about (you know in the same way most Pixars, as far back as Toy Story and Monsters, Inc . can be given an insi

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.

You tampered with the universe, my friend.

The Music of Chance (1993) (SPOILERS) You won’t find many adaptations of Paul Auster’s novels. Original screenplays, yes, a couple of which he has directed himself. Terry Gilliam has occasionally mentioned Mr. Vertigo as in development. It was in development in 1995 too, when Philip Haas and Auster intended to bring it to the screen. Which means Auster presumably approved of Haas’ work on The Music of Chance (he also cameos). That would be understandable, as it makes for a fine, ambiguous movie, pregnant with meaning yet offering no unequivocal answers, and one that makes several key departures from the book yet crucially maintains a mesmerising, slow-burn lure.

I only know what I’ve been programmed to believe. But, of course, the same goes for you.

Raised by Wolves Season One (SPOILERS) Ridley Scott’s latest transhumanist tract is so stuffed with required lore, markers and programming, it’s a miracle it manages to tell a half-engaging story along the way. Aaron Guzikowski ( Prisoners ) is the credited creator, but it has the Ridders stamp of dour dystopia all over it, complete with Darius Wolski ( Prometheus ) cinematography setting the tone. Which means bleak grey skies, augmented by South Africa this time, rather than Iceland. Raised by Wolves is a reliable mix of wacko twist plotting and clumsy, slack-jawed messaging; like the Alien prequels, it will surely never be seen through to a conclusion, but as an agenda platform it’s never less than engaging (and also frequently, for the same reasons, exasperating).

You’re like a human mummy!

The Lost City (2022) (SPOILERS) Perhaps the most distressing part of The Lost City , a Romancing the Stone riff that appears to have been packaged by the Hollywood equivalent of a processed cheese plant lacking its primary ingredient (that would be additives), is the possibility that Daniel Radcliffe is the only viable actor left standing in Tinseltown. That’s if the suggestions at least two of the performers here – Sandra Bullock and Brad Pitt – are deep faked in some way, shape or form, and the other name – Channing Tatum – is serving hard atonement time. If the latter’s choices generally weren’t so abysmal and his talent in arears, I’d assume that was the only explanation for him showing up in this dreck.

Okay, just jump right into my nightmare, the water is warm.

Jerry Maguire (1996) (SPOILERS) I didn’t much like Jerry Maguire at the time, which I suspect is intrinsically linked to the fact that I didn’t much like Tom Cruise at the time. I’m still not really a massive fan of either, but the latter at least made an effort to rein in his most irksome traits subsequently. Jerry Maguire , however, finds him drawing on the same “bag of tricks” that mystifyingly transfixed his fan base a decade before in Top Gun . Bonnie Hunt suggested the toughest part of the role was “ playing a character that doesn’t like Tom Cruise ”. I wouldn’t have had that problem. I do not like Tom and Jerry.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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