Cross of Iron - 9/10 My favourite Peckinpah film (sorry, Wild Bunch fans) thanks to sympathetic turns from Coburn, Mason, Schell, Warner, Berger and in fact everyone else. Great score by Ernest Gold, could have used more of the main theme throughout the film.
I also love it, but for me, it's third behind The Wild Bunch & Pat Garrett in the Peckinpah chart. I can't stand the look of the Blu-ray, all flat & greeny. I know Peckinpah wanted a desaturated look, but surely he didn't want it looking like this.
The Shining. 9/10, the whole cast was masterful there's no greater film to start the 80s, films/director's couldn't up there game after this master piece in a dreary pop worn 80s. a-ha.
Baby Driver 7/10 A couple of very good car chases and a fair bit of nonsense in between. Harmless enough with a couple of appealing leads and Jamie Foxx as a right scary scumbag, and Kevin Spacey in one of those roles that needs a Kevin Spacey or a Brian Cox.
Wheelman 8/10 Where Baby Driver is bright colours and expansive direction, Wheelman is close up, dark and claustrophobic. A convoluted suspense plot largely played out on mobile phones is a little hard to follow in places but it’s a gripping thriller that actually hasn’t got a huge amount of motorised action in the traditional sense.
The Dilemma - 0.5/10 Deeply unfunny. I was initially surprised that i'd not heard of this Ron Howard film starring Vince Vaughan, Jennifer Connolly and Kevin James. Then i suffered it with liberal use of fast forwarding, which was a necessary evil. It has that appalling American comedy problem (also seen in every Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler film) of needing to include famous people or sports teams and being an obvious ad for various products.
For the first half i kept forgetting it was a Sam Raimi film as it looked and felt like one of the more recent underwhelming heavy effects Tim Burton films. In places there were a couple of signature Raimi camera moves straight out of his Evil Dead films and at one stage there were parallels in the plot and character of the Wizard with Army of Darkness.
I saw this in 2D and the biggest problem was that it felt like it was made for 3D and only works in 3D. Really, it felt like it should have been an animated film. The effects might have been good but with a real actor there, everything looked very fake and unconvincing. The actors looked out of place and never really felt like they were in the various background environments.
The acting was generally decent and James Franco played the huckster well. Michelle Williams was rather great as the Good Witch.
The most bizarre and distracting decision of the film was by Danny Elfman and his use of the Canadian national anthem in a major theme. At first i thought it was just the first four notes but then later it's almost the rest of it.
Did he think no one would notice? I'd genuinely like to know the idea behind his thinking on this one. It's a really weird thing to do and a very distracting musical choice that does the film no favours.
The film ends better than it begins but will probably be forgotten in a few hours.
Christian Mingle 0.5/10 Neither as unintentionally funny or terrifying as i was hoping. Takes the odd angle of showing Christians as unforgiving, humourless people who are quick to judge but, nonetheless, get what they want.
Suburbicon 2.5/10 Really disappointed in this. The script was pretty bad and the direction wasn't great. The acting was good though. The film briefly came alive when Oscar Isaac turned up and they had a really decent child actor too. The music, which i like away from the film, didn't really work for me to picture. There was too much of it and apart from a couple of scenes it seemed off in various ways. There's a black family in it that you never ever get to know. The sole reason they're there is for heavy-handed social commentary and so a crowd covers the sound of a murder. That's it. Would like to hear a commentary to see what they were actually going for.
Horns 5/10 Better than i expected and more brutal than i thought it would be. It looks like a YA film but isn't, which i should have realised. Some decent effects and okay enough mystery. Daniel Radcliffe is decent as the lead. It's okay, worth a watch.
Deadly Pursuit minus-50/10 or 7/10 for unintentional laughs NOT the Sydney Poitier thriller, but a 2008 no-budget British "indie" from 2008. Russ Diaper stars, directs, holds the camera, musics the entire thing. It's set in America but filmed in Southampton. Sometimes they try American accents. It's hilariously awful in all aspects but never funnier than when our "hero" is seen running, something he cannot do without looking like a bizarre hobbit. It's like watching kids playing at being "badass cops". A boxing club doubles as a police station. It's mind-boggling in its awfulness. It's sincerity makes it worth laughing it. It's abysmal. Even better, if you buy it, it comes with a director's commentary. Talk about delusional. Good lord. It's not a movie, as he keep insisting, it's a very painful video.
Crimson Peak 4.5/10 Some really quite lovely visuals and production design and entertaining enough without being very interesting or memorable. CGI ghosts aren't scary at all, and i never felt any sense of dread or creeping danger, even when a dismembered ghost is screaming at you, which is a bit of an issue. Some brief but gruesome violence that's effectively realised. Nice score. Jim Beaver was as great as always, Hiddleston and Chastain were good in their roles, Mia Wasakowska was a sympathetic lead. Maybe worth a watch if you want to kill some time or you scare very easily.
Hah, i know i've said that before about something else and been corrected.
WARNING!!!The character ghost at the end of the clip is a bit of a spoiler! Onscreen that ghost was obviously an actor in make-up with a touch of CGI added and looked good in a traditional ghost way.
The other stuff on screen looked mostly CGI to me, even the red stuff that wasn't. I think it's when there's parts at the beginning there's lots of this fluid CGI stuff they add leaking everywhere surrounding them. There's a leaking red clay motif running through the film.
At the start there's a black ghost that appears through a door in a very CGI way and it appears a few times.When it says to the kid "When the time comes, beware of Crimson Peak" then if it is real they've added so much CGI to it any practical effects are almost negated (like in that 2011 The Thing).
Anyway, it wasn't scary at all, which was a shame. That stuff looked nice when he was directing them.
Thanks for that, Mr Jack, interesting making of snippet.
Fun heist film. Not sure how accurate the American accents are but i can say that Seth McFarlane's "English" accent via Australia and some unknown and yet to be discovered parts of southern England is absolute fucking garbage. He kills the film dead and is just awful in his role, which is small but not small enough. Horrible, horrible mis-casting. Luckily, i enjoyed mostly everything around it.
Derren Brown tries to push a member of the public to kill a stranger in one set up evening event. Entertaining and a bit frightening and creepy. Worth a watch.
Guillermo is one of my favorite filmmakers working today, but Crimson Peak, with all its beautiful photography, set design, production values, etc, was one big bust of a film. Non scary in every element and I am surprised that given the amount of work done for these ghosts, including using live actors and real prosthetics, the end result looked so much like typical CGI effects. Sad to say, for me, after all of those hours creating, fitting, shooting and editing, resulted in more or less a boring drama.
This B-western is not available on any home video format, so I was forced to watch it On Demand in a pan-and-scan version. The film concerns two pioneer families who meet on the trek west to make new land claims. Will Rogers, Jr. is top billed as a frontier judge, but he actually plays a minor role in the proceedings. Most interesting is Rod McKuen, as the elder son in the "Breslin" family, headed by Maureen O'Sullivan. McKuen had a few straight acting roles in the late 1950's, and this is probably his largest and best part.
Other interesting performers include Troy Donahue, in one of his last films for Universal before signing with Warner Bros. the next year. Also on hand, as the youngest Breslin son, is George "Foghorn" Winslow, a child actor who came to the attention of Hollywood because of his froggy bass voice. He appeared in a spate of films during the 1950s, but by the time of WILD HERITAGE, he had lost the distinctive voice, and at age 12, WILD HERITAGE was his final film.
WILD HERITAGE is more of a family film than an action western, although one conflict needs to be resolved by gunfire before the happy fade-out. Primarily, though, the film chronicles the hardships faced by pioneer families, in this case two families where both wives lose their husbands early on and have to survive alone with their children on the frontier.
The Universal film has the usual team score that the studio provided for most of its lower-budgeted films in the 1950s, with Hans J. Salter and Henry Vars contributing, among others.
