Altman directs Elliot Gould as a professional gambler. Perhaps this is how it is. In any case Gould free-associates and Segal ultimately wins at poker, craps, roulette, etc. Not sure there's more to it than that.
The predecessor to Smiley's People. (Apparently Le Carre wrote a less filmable middle child, The Honorable Schoolboy.) It is a quite similar made-for-TV BBC production, again featuring Alec Guinness in the lead with able support from other British actors. If you see it, go in cold.
Dubious early-GFC-sociopath flick. The cast is strong and the tension ramps up like Hollywood knows how but unfortunately it never sails from the shore. To me the most interesting relation is between Demi Moore and Simon Baker — it struck me that she had enough leverage to get pretty much whatever she wanted, and to get to that level of the corp (any corp) she can't have been too compunctious. Spacey is in essence his dead dog; we're all waiting for another The Usual Suspects and instead we get this over-emoted boss who must realise he hasn't done an honest day's work in 34 years. Paul Bettany was fortunate to have most of a (loutish) character to inhabit. Ultimately the rigid hierarchy plays out and there are no allies, just the co-opted.
Love and human remains during the Russian Revolution. Omar Sharif, Julie Christie (looking very much like Peter O'Toole in the other revolutionary epic of the day, Lawrence of Arabia, also directed by David Lean). Alec Guinness has the job of preventing the Reds from liquidating Zhivago before the credits roll. I can't say I got all of the plot, which comes in small dense waves every 15 minutes or so.
I'd got it into my head that this movie was rubbish, despite the general robustness of Clint Eastwood's recent output, and because Angelina Jolie is generally the worst part of any movie she's in. Given that, it (and she) was better than I expected.
I liked how Eastwood shipped some iconic imagery from his career into more settled contexts: digging in a boneyard, a noose around a neck (but less the hanging itself), and (in contrast) justice coming from a lawyer. The cops are totally bankrupt, little more than punching bags. It takes me pretty much the whole movie to believe that Malkovitch is not a psycho, though he is on the edge for most of it; his character may have been more sympathatic than he managed to portray. The bloke playing the crim got a raw deal: his character is stock nuts and gutless. Is Clint trying to distinguish moral absolutism and absolution here?
As observed by Dana Stevens, the movie's biggest weakness is the unidimensional characters that don't develop much, though Angelina does get a bit steelier towards the end. It is entirely unsubtle throughout. I guess it's a bit Million Dollar Baby (strong female lead and resulting moral issue) with still-open M.I.A. themes that might link it to Letters From Iwo Jima and Flags of our Fathers. Clint's trip to Cuckoo land is as completely humourless as everything else.
James Coburn as a German corporal/sergeant on the eastern front in 1943; war at its most ludicrous, looking back from 1977 through a German soldier's account. I would have traded a lot of those explosions for further plot developments. This is something like Paths of Glory with bombs.
A Scorcese automaton flick. The Ritz is only showing it at kid-friendly times, so I fronted the nominally-cheap Tuesday 2pm session with my 3D glasses in my pocket; $12 for an experience I can't yet have at home. They've gotten savvy to the turn-offs of cinema patrons with their STFU advice to hipsters at the start of the feature, but as always this only applies to other people. Two kids turned up a fair way into the film and sat just in front of me, with one answering his phone after a bit — "I'm in the cinema!" — and noisily taking regular hits from some sort of aerosol. They left with five minutes to go, so I expect they came for the aircon and relative privacy, or perhaps 3D without glasses looks awesome when you're high. The older couple sitting behind me thought they were in a cafe. In contrast the supervised children were quite well behaved.
Anyway, what is Scorcese trying to say here but that cinema is bereft of new ideas? This film starts out with some shock-and-awe camera work but soon degenerates into an art movie history lesson. The characters have that kind of brittleness that Hollywood thinks is deep enough for us to engage with; Kingsley is a twat just long enough so we know his scars to be those of the slighted auteur. The child actors fair somewhat better, as we can take their shallowness for callowness. Jude Law got five seconds to lift the mood, and Sacha Baron Cohen garnered some laughs for I don't know what beyond the crowd's shock of recognising Borat. The narrative is essentially teleological.
The promised mechanical aesthetic is a pale imitation of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's, similarly set in a quaint Paris but not as quirky.
Dana Stevens is right to say this is a hollow sort of thing. Stephanie Zacharek talks it up in a media studies sort of way.
The cream of Hong Kong actors and actresses of 1998 decamp to the brothels of 1880s Shanghai. Depicting a flower garden without intimate relations only leaves the bitchiness and intrigue, somewhat like Raise the Red Lantern but not as scenic. This was a bum steer from Tony Leung, though the cinematti reckon the director Hsiao-hsien Hou to be the future of the medium.
Combodia and the coming of the Khmer Rouge. It kicks up a gear in the final hour, giving some nuance to a regime that remains incomprehensible and impenetrable to Westerners. The acting is mostly solid — though Malkovitch has a tough gig as a post-Hopper war photographer — and Haing S. Ngor worked hard for his Oscar. I hadn't heard of the journalist Sydney Schanberg, who won a Pulitzer for his work in Cambodia and yet doesn't have the notoriety of Halberstam and Hersch (etc); I identify John Pilger with this reportage. While it was "Morning in America" it was "Year Zero" in Indochina.
Some days I need to remember I'm not in the same demographic as Dana Stevens. This one is some kind of chick flick, with Juliette Binoche flouncing around Tuscany with a bloke who oozes banality. I can't fault her review though, it was what she promised.
An Alec Guinness segue, on the strength of a lengthy article by Anthony Lane prompted by the current release of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Of course I started with the second story and now have to go back and see the first.
The direction here is fantastic with some great framing shots; this is British TV production at its peak. Guinness is tired and worn out, not at all like he was in Havana, which is just right for this role. The source material is by Le Carré who I only know for his stoush with Rushdie. The cold war, almost as much of a gift to filmmakers as the Nazis.
Richard Burton's meddlesome priest joins Peter O'Toole's note-perfect petulant king (Henry II) for some man love in the kingdom of England in 1066 as imaged in 1964. This flick is a lot better than one might expect from the premise.
A Paul Newman classic, black-and-white 1963. Patricia Neal plays an excellent foil and her Oscar was well deserved. It is something of a morality fable set somewhere in Texas; the old rancher's cattle contract foot-and-mouth and their liquidation kills him too. Hud is the ne'er-do-well who ends up alone, shrugging and in charge of a diminished kingdom.
A Graham Greene confection, directed by Carol Reed. Alec Guinness leads, with Maureen O'Hara his too-late love interest. As far as colonial espionage fiascos go, Cuba circa 1959 is not a bad setting for it. The MI5/6/whatever angle is suitably Yes, Minister.
A Graham Greene short story and script, directed by Carol Reed. Murder or accident at the French Embassy in London? I found this one a bit too stodgy to consider it a crime of passion.
Bogey and Kate Hepburn head down the river in pursuit of some kind of Kurtz in 1915... this has been on the list for a long time. Kate is not as screwy here as she was in Bringing Up Baby.
Audrey Hepburn, Peter O'Toole (pre Lawrence), Eli Wallach (pre Ugly but still nervy) in a Parisian rom com heist. It would've made a passable date movie in its day.
Burton, Taylor, Ustinov, Alec Guinness in the Haiti of Papa Doc, written by Graham Greene. How could it be so tedious? Seeds of his superior A Quiet American: the taciturn Englishman who's seen the corruption (etc) before.
The Nazis, the gift that kept giving to Hollywood for many a decade. Peter O'Toole is probably the worst of the actors but is still magnetic; he overdoes it as a German General, a character with no need for bolted on antipathy. Omar Sharif is solid, Donald Pleasence keeps himself amused. Operation Valkyrie looks the same as when Tom Cruise didn't manage to pull it off. Joanna Pettet is great as Ulrike, the Queen of Poland. It seems she did little else. As far as WWII movies go, this one still has something to say.
John Huston directs Michael Caine and Sean Connery in a Kipling classic. Christopher Plummer is the suitably stunned Kipling character. This is the British colonial experience in India writ small: freemasonry, avarice, pre-John Howard mateship. It is expansive in a way that would take CGI now. The plot is a tad stodgy but everything else makes up for that.
