The wife and I are big fans of cozy murder mysteries. There is just something nice about sitting down after a long day and watching interesting people solve a murder. I never watched Murder, She Wrote when it originally aired, but we’ve recently started watching it, and I just love it. I think that officially makes me an old man now.
You can read about it and all the other interesting releases coming out this week here.
I wrote about this for a Now Watching segment but since it is a war movie I wanted to expand upon those thoughts here.
I’m usually a big fan of these men-on-a-mission type films. You know, the ones where a disparate group of men come together to perform a nearly impossible task. Movies like The Dirty Dozen or The Guns of Navarone are great fun, but The Wild Geese fails at nearly every turn. It isn’t the fault of the cast, which is pretty well stacked, featuring Richard Burton, Roger Moore, and Richard Harris amongst others. But I found it interminably dull.
Burton plays Allen Faulkner, a retired British Army Colonel turned mercenary. He’s tasked with rescuing Julius Limbani (Winston Ntshona), an imprisoned African President who is set to be executed by the military leaders who arrested him during a coup. Faulkner recruits Captain Rafer Janders (Harris), Lieutenant Shawn Fynn (Moore), and a host of others.
The men receive some training from a hard drill sergeant, and then are flown to the prison location and parachute in. They attack the base, rescue Limbani, but have trouble escaping. Later, there will be a (completely) obvious twist.
The plot is so basic, I knew pretty much what was going to happen once it began. You know exactly which of the main cast will die from their introductions. The script plods. There are lots of action sequences, but they are so dully directed that one hardly notices.
The film makes faint nods towards anti-colonial, anti-racist sentiments, but they are poorly done. One of the men is an out-and-out racist, throwing around the N-word and making sarcastic remarks towards the Limbani. But then he gets a scene in which he sits and talks to Limbani, and the President’s calm manner and reasonable discussions miraculously turn the racist around.
Limbani is regularly described as a great man, but as a character, he’s given very little to do and very few lines to say. He’s just someone these kind, white, British people have to rescue, not a real character.
You could almost forgive that if the action was any good. Or if you actually cared about any of these characters. Instead I just scratched my head at it all and hoped it would soon come to an end.
Drug War (2012)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Louis Koo, Honglei Sun, and Huang Yi
Synopsis: A drug cartel boss who is arrested in a raid is coerced into betraying his former accomplices as part of an undercover operation.
Rating: 8/10
This is the type of film that will keep bringing me back to Johnnie To. The plot is convoluted and a little crazy, but also endlessly interesting with cops, informants, and bad guys switching allegiances and sides like a roulette table. The action is fierce, chaotic, and meticulously staged.
There is a scene late in the film where a cop handcuffs himself to a guy’s leg. Then the cop gets killed, so the bad guy has to run around dragging the cop’s corpse along with him. If that doesn’t make you want to watch this film, I don’t know what will.
Breaking News (2004)
Directed by Johnnie To
Starring: Richie Jen, Kelly Chen, and Nick Cheung
Synopsis: After a disastrous failure to stop a robber gang, the police attempt to redeem themselves through a series of publicity stunts and shootouts.
Rating: 7/10
I’m quite behind on these. They are easy to write and I always mean to write them right after I watch, but then something comes up and I forget. I watched this one five days ago. I’ll try to play catch-up this weekend.
Johnnie is a Hong Kong director whose name gets tossed around quite a bit in my circles, but I’d never seen one of his films until now. The Criterion Channel is running a whole bunch of them, and I chose this one pretty much at random. It was good enough to make me watch another one the very next day and then a third a couple of days later.
It begins with an incredible 7-minute-long one-take shot. It follows a man into a building (the camera cranes to a top floor and into a building, then back out again), followed by a shootout with the cops. This goes poorly for the cops, and they decide they need to put on a “show” for the media. Basically, they start using their own PR department to create videos to send to the news to indicate how awesome they are.
The action scenes (and there are quite a lot of them) are all staged really well. The media stuff feels very dated and has not aged particularly well. But as I said, there is enough to love here that I immediately watched another film from To.
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)
Directed by Merlin Crossingham & Nick Park
Starring: Ben Whitehead, Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Reece Shearsmith, and Diane Morgan
Synopsis: Top dog Gromit springs into action to save his master when Wallace’s high-tech invention goes rogue and he is framed for a series of suspicious crimes.
Rating: 8/10
We’re big fans of Wallace & Gromit here at The Midnight Cafe. They have this wonderful blend of nostalgic conservatism and modern progress. The claymation is all handmade, which makes it both not quite exactly perfect and absolutely beautiful.
The setting of all these films and short films is intentionally opaque, with much of it feeling like the 1960s but with plenty of modern technology. Wallace seems like an old-fashioned, traditional conservative, while Gromit, his dog, is much more modern. I’m making it sound like these are political films, and they are decidedly not. It’s more like an updating of a British Norman Rockwell, but with anthropomorphic animals, Rube Goldberg machines, and lots of cheese. Anyway, if you’ve never seen a Wallace & Gromit film, I highly recommend them.
This one finds Wallace inventing a robot gnome that can do your household chores. When one of them gets switched to “Evil” mode by a malevolent penguin, things get a little bit crazy.
It is wonderfully funny, boisterous, and filled with loads of action. I have a hard time ranking any of these films because I just lovely them so wholeheartedly.
Apologies for getting this out late. My daughter had a sleepover last night, and I decided to stay up late watching a French adaptation of an Agatha Christie story with my wife rather than write this. I think you will understand.
Baron Blood was directed by the great Italian genre director Mario Bava. It was made late in his career (he’d only direct three more films before his death) when he was having trouble getting financing for any film. Beloved as he is now, Bava’s films rarely made much money when they were released.
As such, the film has plenty of style and looks amazing, but falls fairly flat in the storytelling department.
Peter Kleist (Antonio Cantafora), an American university student, comes to Austria to visit his ancestral castle. While there, he learns that his Great-Grandfather was a notorious sadist who tortured and killed hundreds of villagers, earning him the nickname Baron Blood. Legend says that the Baron burned a witch at the stake, but before she died, she cursed him with a spell that would allow him to rise again from the grave only to be eternally tortured by her.
Naturally, our hero, along with his friend Eva Arnold (Elke Sommer) enacts the curse and raises the baron from the grave.
But first, Joseph Cotton.
Although he is top billed, the legendary actor doesn’t appear until at least half an hour into this 90-minute film. He plays Alfred Becker, an eccentric millionaire who buys the castle at auction.
Actually, no, my timeline is off. Peter and Eve do use an incantation to raise the Baron from the grave before Becker shows up. They do it at midnight, but the clock strikes 2 ( the exact time when the Baron was murdered), and blood runs under the door, but they don’t actually see the Baron. Before they can read the recantation, a wind knocks the scroll into a fire, and it is lost.
Although they do not know it, the Baron has risen, and he kills the previous owner of the castle, hence the auction, hence the showing up of Alfred Becker.
He kills a few more people, and our heroes try to find a way to lift the curse. Etc. The plot follows a pretty standard path from there.
Cotton feels out of place here, like he’s not quite sure what he’s doing in this film. He was in his late 60s at the time, making a string of low-budget horror movies, which I can only assume was a low point in his career. Sommer seems to be the only one having any real fun, and she’s a delight.
What makes it worth watching is the setting and Bava’s usual fantastic use of color, light, and shadow. Shot on the grounds of a real castle, he makes great use of the gothic setting, complete with a tower, torture chamber, and lots of enormous chambers that give the director plenty of interesting angles to shoot from.
It is far from Bava’s best work, but even average films from him are well worth watching.
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
Directed by Wes Anderson
Starring: Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow, Owen Wilson, Ben Stiller, Luke Wilson, Bill Murray, and Danny Glover
Synopsis: The eccentric members of a dysfunctional family reluctantly gather under the same roof for various reasons.
Rating: 10/10
I remember watching this movie in the theater, having no idea what to expect. I can’t remember if I’d seen Rushmore more this or not, but if I had, I hadn’t really connected it to Wes Anderson. He’s one of the most famous auteurs these days, but this was just his third film, and he wasn’t so well known outside of cinephile circles.
I was completely knocked out by it. I loved every minute of it. The film is so assured in its style, its rhythms, and its own sense of existence. I never wanted to leave the theatre.
Anderson is now beloved for his signature visual style, but this is the first film that truly perfected it (Rushmore got close, but isn’t quite there). Every inch of the screen is filled with interesting things to look at, and their placement is well thought out and conceived. The music is exquisite and I’d argue this is the best script he’s ever written (it was co-written by Owen Wilson).
The entire cast is brilliant. Every single actor does some of his/her finest work. I’ve seen it half a dozen times since that initial theatrical viewing and it remains a personal favorite.
My new Five Cool Things is out over at Cinema Sentries. This time I’m talking about The Eternaut, a new Netflix series about apocalyptic snow, Age of Defense, my favorite Tower Defense game, David Byrne’s wonderful new song “Everybody Laughs,” a podcast about the Satanic Panic, Whistable Pearl, a cozy British mystery show, and the life of Brian Wilson.
You can read all about it here.
I review a lot of movies for Cinema Sentries. Sometimes I get stacks of them, and I have to push out reviews fairly quickly. Once in a while, I decide it is easier to bundle my reviews up, reviewing two or three movies in a single post and letting them bounce off each other a little bit.
So was the case with these two film noirs from Jules Dassin. Brute Force is a down-and-dirty little prison escape film, while The Naked City is the precursor to a lot of by-the-books procedurals like Dragnet and even Law & Order. You can read my reviews here.
Well, it is the 10th of June, and this is my first post for this month’s theme. It is only the third war movie I’ve watched this month (and technically I watched this one at the end of May). Hopefully, I’ll get a few more in before the month is out.
I love me some John Wayne. The dude had some questionable politics and his views on race relations (amongst other things) were pretty horrid, but damn if he wasn’t a great movie star. He had a screen presence like few others. I’ve mostly seen him in westerns, but he made lots of other movies, including a good number of war films.
I’ve always heard his World War II films were not very good, and if Flying Leathernecks is any indication, I heard right.
Directed by the great Nicholas Ray, Flying Leathernecks finds Wayne playing Major Dan Kirby, who, as the film begins, is assigned command of a group of Marine Aviators on the island of Guadalcanal. This is a surprise to everyone, as Captain Carl “Grif” Griffin (Robert Ryan) was the presumed next in command.
The two have very different leadership styles. Kirby is gruff and tough; he takes no stuff from anyone and demands a lot from his men. Grif is friendlier, kinder. He has a genuine concern for the welfare of his men and is willing to let a little discipline slide to boost morale.
The film is clearly on Kirby’s side. He’s more than willing to sacrifice his men for the greater good. The whole middle section of the film finds him pushing his men to the brink. They go on mission after mission, well after they are completely exhausted. Grif argues they need a break, that maybe some of the reserves can take on some missions. But Kirby is unrelenting.
Seen through my modern (and very much non-military eyes,) I found myself agreeing with Grif. Yes, war is hell, and sacrifices must be made. A commander does have to make tough choices. But also, burned-out soldiers don’t make good fighters. Drive them to the breaking point, and sooner or later, they are going to break.
But that isn’t this movie, and by the end, he learns to be more like Kirby.
Honestly, that argument would be more interesting if this were a good movie, but it isn’t. Wayne and Ryan do their best, but the script lets them down at just about every moment. The actual battle scenes don’t help much. There are a lot of shots with our pilots sitting in model aircraft with fake-looking backgrounds spliced into actual war footage that doesn’t really match.
The whole thing is rather dull, and the fact that I could never buy into the argument it was making just made it worse.
themidnightcafe.org 