As the Lord is my witness I am a wrong man. Texas cowboy Lincoln Costain (James Garner) gets ‘shanghaied’ in San Francisco, then jumps ship and washes ashore on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, right into the arms of widow Henrietta MacAvoy (Vera Miles) and her son Booten (Eric Shea) who are struggling to make a living as farmers. A lot of wild cattle often trample their crops, so Costain gets the idea to start cattle ranching instead. The Hawaiian farm hands don’t readily take to the American cowboy culture. You’re making yourself the laughing stock of the island. Costain explains to Henrietta that they need more equipment, unaware that she has to take out a credit note with banker Calvin Bryson (Robert Culp) who has eyes on her land (and her too) while Costain tries to make the locals useful but they make zero progress. He has to deal with a hothead Marrujo (Gregory Sierra) who tries to kill him and who then casts a spell on the farm’s head of staff Kimo (Manu Tupou). Then Bryson decides something has to be done to stop Henrietta making a go of the ranch … You just can’t expect to change a whole culture overnight. Written by Don Tait from a story by Tait, Richard M. Bluel & Hugh Benson, this Disney western is designed to appeal to the kiddies with the customary outstanding performance by child actor Shea, one of their occasional star roster). It also takes advantage of Garner’s amiable trickster persona, established in the back to back Support comedy westerns and which would be plundered to great effect in the longrunning TheRockford Files TV series airing for the first time one month after this was released, securing Garner’s fame and making him a household name. It’s toned down here to suit the tone of the family-oriented drama. TV star (I Spy) Culp makes for a smoothly persuasive villain while Miles is a lovely, trusting mother, just hovering on the edge of worry and hope. They call it death by sorcery. Managing the locals is one thing, Booten desperately wants a father figure and is permanently annoyed that Costain refuses to learn his name and that running gag offsets plenty of slapstick as Costain attempts to train pineapple cowboys. It’s attractively made and according to his memoir Garner for one enjoyed the surroundings of Kauai, the fourth largest of the Hawaiian islands which also served as a location for South Pacific, the 1977 remake of King Kong and Jurassic Park. Essentially a B western transferred to a tropical setting, replete with genre conventions – a stampede, a fistfight – included to build the tension towards an ingenious method of getting the cattle of the island to California, this is playfully done with a great deal of charm. And – Garner sings! Directed by Disney specialist Vincent McEveety. I wouldn’t bet against that man
To start inventing you need something real first. Grenoble, France. In an isolated mountain chalet novelist Sandra Voyter (Sandra Huller) decides to reschedule her interview with a female literature student Zoe Solidor (Camille Rutherford) because her husband, university lecturer and aspiring author Samuel Maleski (Samuel Theis) plays music loudly on a loop in their attic, disrupting the interview, making recording impossible. After the student drives away from the chalet, Samuel and Sandra’s visually impaired son, Daniel (Milo Machado-Graner) takes a walk outside with his guide dog Snoop (Messi). When they return home, Daniel finds Samuel dead in the snow from an apparent fall. Sandra insists that the fall must have been accidental. Her old friend and lawyer Vincent Renzi (Swann Arlaud) suggests the possibility of suicide while Sandra recalls her husband’s attempt to overdose on aspirin six months earlier after going off antidepressants. After an investigation, Daniel’s conflicting accounts of what happened shortly before his father’s death, combined with the revelation that Samuel sustained a head wound before his body hit the ground and an audio recording of a fight by Samuel and Sandra the previous day, Sandra is indicted on charges of homicide. A year later, during the trial, Sandra’s defence team claims Samuel fell from the attic window and hit his head on a shed below; the prosecution suggests that Sandra hit him with a blunt object, pushing him from the second-floor balcony. During a courtroom argument with Samuel’s psychiatrist Jammal (Wajdi Mouawad) Sandra admits she resented Samuel due to his partial responsibility for the accident that led to Daniel’s impaired vision: he should have collected him from school but called a babysitter instead so he could stay home and writer. In the recorded fight, Samuel accuses Sandra of plagiarism, infidelity and exerting control over his life before their argument turns physically violent. The prosecution claims that all the violence came from Sandra but she points out that they’d been having conversations and disagreements that he’d recorded for six months as a substitute for writing and his transcriptions when presented by him were not accepted by a publisher in lieu of a novel … I don’t believe in the the notion of reciprocity in a couple. Written by the married couple Justine Triet & Arthur Harari (who appears as a literary critic) during the COVID lockdown, director Triet’s film sustains its mysterious premise right until the conclusion which may prove disappointing – perhaps a European take on the customary bittersweet Hollywood ending. it’s a Choose Your Own iteration of the murder procedural with flashes of Hitchcockian wit throughout. There is a re-enactment and a single flashback but the eccentric courtroom presentation is very different to the Anglo-Saxon convention with witnesses for the prosecution and defence talking over each other, a low threshold for evidence and an equally bizarre concept of the burden of proof (opinion-led, apparently). Sandra’s bisexuality and her affairs are brought up as a reason for her husband’s violent arguments with her, his use of anti-depressants rooted perhaps at her contempt for him when their young son was blinded because he should have been picking up from school, her relentless output still not sufficient to pay the bills while he is at home, renovating, homeschooling Daniel, having no time to write outside of his teaching job. At the heart of the story is a blame game between husband and wife – an accident that caused Daniel’s sight loss and a burning envy of a wife’s success whose latest plot is largely ‘borrowed’ from a passage in a novel Samuel abandoned, a writer wannabe now reduced to transcribing daily home life as a form of autofiction. As the USB recording from Samuel’s keyring is re-enacted he accuses Sandra of stealing his time and ‘imposing’ her worldview upon him despite his having forced the family to relocate to his hometown where she speaks English and the use of language becomes an issue in this French-German union where nuance, suggestion and meaning are potentially lost in translation – English is the no-man’s land resort of communication. Sometimes a couple is a kind of a chaos. The discursiveness masks the fact that it is their blind son and his dog who are the sole witnesses to the accident, spicing up the issue of court appearances and compounding the ambiguous nature of the crime and the lack of compelling evidence. Triet and Harari wrote this with Huller in mind (following an earlier collaboration) and she is a very modern heroine, word-smart, intellectually able, psychologically penetrating and completely at ease with herself to the point of lying easily. She is superb as this take no prisoners character, taking nonsense from nobody and while profoundly concerned with her son’s well-being she also boasts a terrifically charismatic nonchalance. Nevertheless, she is obviously unnerved by the courtroom experience in a language not her own. A sidebar to the exposition is the frank admission by Vincent that he has long thought highly of her. This is of course about writers and what happens when one half of a couple is more accomplished and successful than the other and how envy can eat like a cancer through a relationship. Samuel is destroyed by what he has done to his son, Sandra has dealt with it through adultery while also cheerfully churning out novels and doing translations on the side. She is pragmatic above all. Does Samuel commit suicide and are the recordings made in order to frame Sandra for his alleged murder? Maybe. Did he fall or was he pushed? Is the flashback from the visually impaired son true? Does Daniel lie? Why did he make a mistake in his first account? Rage does not exclude will! Guilt, jealousy, blame, language, meaning, all suffuse this tension-filled narrative which asks questions about how writers make their work and how much it plunders their private lives. How and why the story turns unexpectedly marks out the forensic narrative style. Rightly lauded, the exceptional screenplay was awarded at the Golden Globes, the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards among others and the film won Cannes’ Palme d’Or with the Palm Dog going to Messi! The first 9 minutes of the film are dominated by that appalling music which frankly would drive anyone to murder, if you want to know the truth. We won’t even name it such is its earworm potential for homicidal triggering. Gripping. A novel is not life! An author is not her characters!#700daysstraightofmondomovies! MM#4547
Didn’t you once tell me a shock might kill her? When three robbers including Nicholas Conway (Kieron Moore) rob and murder her jeweller father Talbot (Ian Fleming) who is en route to the apartment of a wealthy client Farnborough (Martin Benson), Talbot’s daughter Jean (Elizabeth Sellars) arrives on the scene and gets a good look at Nicholas who has given her father the deadly blow. The police chase the men through London and the thieves’ car crashes and bursts into flames. Nicholas manages to get away and makes his way to his doctor brother Michael (Edward Underdown) who patches him up. He agrees to give him an alibi and conceal the situation from their mother without knowing what’s happened. When the police led by Inspector Trubridge (John Horsley) and Inspector Perkins (Robert Raglan) fail to get enough evidence to charge Nicholas, whose day job is in an insurance office, Jean resolves to get it herself. She takes up lodging with Michael and the men’s elderly mother (Ethel O’Shea) over his surgery. Then Nicholas sees her without realising who she is and Jean allows a relationship to progress to the point that he gives her a key to his flat while he continues his criminal ways and several robberies are carried out by his gang across London. However Farnborough wants his jewellery from the Talbot theft … If ever I see that man again I shall recognise him. Written and directed by the prolific and reliable John Gilling, this British B has some cool credentials with a score by Stanley Black and editing by Sid Hayers who would go on to make some decidedly nifty horrors (Night of the Eagle is a Mondo favourite). Sellars gives one of her best performances in the lead, swarthy Moore is an agreeable villain, a chancer with occasionally odd diction as if he’s a refugee from somewhere vaguely Eastern European, while Underdown is an entirely unlikely romantic anti-hero. He comments of his louche little brother, Nicholas is a more natural product of this miracle age. When Jean makes out with Nicholas they have some nicely cutting moments particularly when he thinks he’s about to conquer her: I’ve got a hunch about you. I’d like to get a glimpse of what’s under that armour plating – an iceberg or a volcano. Ooh er missus! Happily the screenplay is filled with these kinds of exchanges while the tension ramps up and the dressing-gowned gentleman crook gathers the thugs to get his booty back. O’Shea has a good supporting role as the concerned Irish mother of the Cain and Abel sons. Expressive Scotswoman Sellars was such an interesting performer, initially training in law but then switching to RADA and the theatre with terrific roles at the RSC and getting some decent parts in B movies like this plus a lead opposite Dirk Bogarde in the previous year’s The Gentle Gunman. The year after this she had roles in two big Hollywood productions, The Barefoot Contessa and Desiree and she had a terrific role in The Shiralee (1957). Later she would be reunited with Moore in The Day They Robbed The Bank of England (1960) and with the director in The Mummy’s Shroud (1967). She died in France at the great age of 98 in 2019. Moore coincidentally also lived in France where he died in 2007. What a well educated pair they were – Moore’s medical studies at University College Dublin were disrupted by his film career. Shot by Monty Berman around St Paul’s and Chelsea and at Alliance Studios in Twickenham with some quite thrilling tracking shots during the car chase. Watch out for Sam Kydd as a ticket collector. A thief can always tell a thief
Wait till you see what I’ve found! The son of American war widow Elsa Jenner (Lizabeth Scott), young Erik (Jon Whiteley) and his friends are playing in the rubble of bombed-out post-war London’s buildings at Aldersgate when they locate a handgun buried in a brick. The gun goes off and one of the boys is shot and wounded. Erik goes on the run, believing he has killed his friend. A policeman relates the events to his mother and explains the boy who was shot is alive but in hospital. Efforts to locate Erik are aided by US Army Captain Mark Andrews (Steve Cochran) drafted into the investigation by Supt. Mackenzie (Herbert Marshall) of the Yard after it is discovered that the gun which Erik found was used in a murder of an American serviceman during the war. So a dangerous criminal currently unknown is potentially pursuing the boy. Erik goes to the cafe where his mother usually works but she is not there and leaves before he can eat food her colleague is getting for him when a man sees the gun in his pocket. He runs off again just before Elsa arrives with Cpt Andrews. As he gets closer to finding Erik, Andrews encounters Vivienne Pascal (Nicole Maurey) a dance-hall hostess with a connection to the gun’s original owner. But she has all but lost her faith in all things good, declaring I am dead. As Captain Andrews interviews her she is shot through the window by Henry. Andrews pursues him but is overpowered in an empty factory. Disturbed by a policeman Henry jumps out of a window into the Thames. As Andrews continues his investigation into the gun’s whereabouts, Erik’s mother Elsa finally locates her son with the helpful assistance of relative stranger Joshua Henry. He falsely alleges that Erik had stolen a bottle of milk from him. Henry starts wooing Elsa. Meanwhile, Erik sees his photo in the newspapers and continues his way across the city, trying to get food and pick up work as the hunt continues … We abide by their institutions and their methods. Who said the fatalistic world of noir couldn’t have children? This is one of the rare genre entries to break that rule. Children represent hope, an emotion that has no place in the rain slicked streets and smoky clubs with their tough gangsters, private eyes, molls and femmes fatales. And here the same kind of story told in The Yellow Balloon is dramatised with verve and energy. From Blackfriars Bridge to Covent Garden, all around St Paul’s Cathedral and Lambeth, the city is shot schematically and expressively, tracking different characters as the quest story unfolds. Hard man Cochran gets a good role – both detective and romancer, even if at the conclusion he’s late to the party. To be a detective you must by silent and secret. You can’t give anything away. Cole is a true villain, a deceitful crim with murder on his mind, a step away from the hilarity of the jolly spiv he usually essays with the St Trinians girls. The kids here have met a properly evil man who tries to have his way with Elsa to get to Erik. Maurey has a nice sequence in which she gets to utter the truly grim sentiments of the genre, the polar opposite to the mothering instincts of Scott in one of a couple of British films she took at the time. Whiteley is impressive in another of the exceptional child characters he played in his brief career. There’s a tremendously compelling sensibility at work here: the nasty depths of human behaviour represented across the geography of London when it was still murky and foggy, wet and damp, replete with double decker buses, curious onlookers, in the process of rebuilding itself after the War and not quite at one with modernity, filled with the detritus of war for kids to get killed. Incredibly exciting, vividly staged and shot, this is an unusual and excellent film noir, shot around London’s East End and at Nettlefold Studios by Reginald H. Wyer with production design by John Stoll. Thanks to the ever excellent Talking Pictures for screening it. Directed by Val Guest with uncredited work by producer Hal E. Chester who co-wrote with Fred Freiberger. Why don’t you stop working so hard at being tough?
Aka Tout s’est bien passé. This is our story. Novelist Emmanuèle Bernheim aka Manue (Sophie Marceau) receives a call from her sister Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) informing her that their retired businessman and art collector father André (André Dussollier) has suffered a stroke. She rushes to the hospital in Paris where she sees the ill effects of this cardiac event: his face is horribly stricken, falling to one side, his speech is affected. She looks at the catscan of his brain on her computer at home. Manue is a devoted visitor despite the cruelties inflicted upon her in her childhood when he called her ugly, constantly berating her for her huge appetite (she is patently beautiful and thin). She used to fantasise about killing him. She is stunned when he asks her to help him die. It’s still illegal so Manue debates the situation with Pascale and then pays a discreet visit to a lawyer for advice and contacts a Swiss clinic run by a woman doctor (Hanna Schygulla). Their mother, his ex-wife (Charlotte Rampling) is a sculptress in the throes of arthritis, Parkinson’s and depression who doesn’t care a fig for him. She is already devastated by her own loss. She reminds her daughters that her parents didn’t attend their wedding because they warned her she was marrying a homosexual. His lover Gérard (Grégory Gadebois) creates a row in the hospital and the women have to stop him visiting. He says he’s getting the great watch he was promised by their father. As Andre gets better Manue is convinced he has forgotten about the whole idea but he tells several people including a cousin and regularly reminds her to make the arrangements. Then someone rats the women out to the police ... I want you to help me end it. Adapted from the titular autobiographical novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim by writer/director François Ozon, who regularly collaborated with the late novelist (she died in 2017), this difficult and highly emotive subject is treated in such a matter of fact realistic way and yet with a sure lightness of touch it becomes a remarkable viewing experience, decorated with stunning acting that nonetheless doesn’t feel like competitive performance. The unsentimental approach to a fraught scenario, dripfeeding backstory into the well managed narrative, subverts any potential for melodrama. Don’t tell your sister, but this story would be great for one of her novels! By turns desperate, petulant, pleading, sorrowful, distressed, enthusiastic, Dussollier is majestic as the playful monster, the gay dad whose bonkers lover has to be banned from visiting – until Manue sees them in a tender moment and eventually Gérard gets the Patek Philippe watch and it is clear the end is nigh. Manue is the daughter whom he treated disgracefully but whom he secretly adores as her sister clearly realises. Everything’s coming together. He wonders randomly when informed of the cost of the Swiss solution how poor people do it. They wait to die, shrugs Manue. This wealthy industrialist reminds her to get his Legion of Honour ribbon. We are in the world of the superannuated bourgeoisie for whom money is no issue but ill-health is the great leveller and financial comfort cannot stop the indignities of the loss of bowel control and the need for 24/7 care. As the moment nears and subterfuge is required the only person keeping a truly clear head is the man who sees only one option rather than succumb to the dreadful infirmities that will encroach upon him as further incidents will surely occur given his prognosis. He recognises his great life, his entitlement, his privilege and now his destruction. Amid all the superbly constructed tension there is great humour, telling detail, laughter, tears. A rich and timely drama, fair in every possible way. Mesmerising. You know, he’s a bad father. But I love him
Why can’t we simulate a girl? Nerdy social outcast Shermer High School students Gary Wallace (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt Donnelly (Ilan Mitchell Smith) are humiliated by senior jocks Ian (Robert Downey Jr.) and Max (Robert Rusler) for swooning over their cheerleader girlfriends Deb (Suzanne Snyder) and Hilly (Judie Aronson). Humiliated and disappointed at their direction in life and wanting more than being shamed in the school gymnasium, Gary convinces the uptight Wyatt that they need a boost of popularity in order to get their crushes away from Ian and Max. Alone for the weekend with Wyatt’s parents gone for a couple of days, Gary is inspired by watching the 1931 classic Frankenstein on TV to create a virtual woman using Wyatt’s computer, infusing her with everything they can conceive to make the perfect dream woman. After hooking electrodes to a doll and hacking into a Government computer system for more power, a power surge creates Lisa (Kelly LeBrock) an astonishingly beautiful and intelligent woman with the power to transmogrify. She quickly procures a pink 1959 Cadillac Eldorado convertible to take the boys to a Blues bar in Chicago where she uses her powers to get fake IDs for Gary and Wyatt. They return home drunk where Chet (Bill Paxton) Wyatt’s mean older brother, extorts $175 for his silence. Lisa agrees to keep herself hidden away from him but realises that Gary and Wyatt are very uptight and need to seriously unwind. After another humiliating experience at the mall where Ian and Max pour a cherry Icee on Gary and Wyatt in front of a crowd, Lisa tells the bullies about a party at Wyatt’s house, before driving off in a Porsche 928 she conjured for Gary. Despite Wyatt’s protests, Lisa insists that the party happens in order to loosen the boys up. She meet Gary’s parents, Al (Britt Leach) and Lucy (Barbara Lang) are shocked and dismayed at the things she says and her frank manner. Gary explains her away as an exchange student. After she pulls a gun on Al and Lucy (which is later revealed to be a water pistol) she alters their memories so Lucy forgets about the conflict but Al forgets that they had a son altogether. At the Donnelly house, the party has spun out of control while Gary and Wyatt take refuge in the bathroom, where they resolve to have a good time, despite having embarrassed themselves in front of Deb and Hilly. Then the house is invaded … We can deal with shame. Death is a much deeper issue. Bizarre even in the annals of Eighties comedy, this outlier in the John Hughes universe is remarkably charmless, tasteless and crude. What begins as a teen high school comedy descends quickly into a sex fantasy that is an equal opportunities offender despite the sweetness of the woman of many a man’s dreams driving the story. Adapted from a Fifties magazine story Made of the Future by Al Feldstein, Hughes’ screenplay makes these boys grow up way too fast and Hall’s take on black language proves embarrassing forty years on (and even back then). This battle of the sexes is really just a trawl through sexist tropes which makes watching these kids grow up overnight a lot harder to tolerate. Hughes was so good at the proclivities and sensitivities of teens – clearly the boys have lousy parents and Smith even has Paxton as a vicious older brother so friendship and mutual victimhood unites them. How can two people have the same dream? However none of the ideas clicks. Even the minor presence of Robert Downey (as he’s billed) in the ensemble doesn’t assist the plot or tone. The film’s final half hour effectively renders the entire premise redundant and the Risky Business conclusion is the closest this gets to decency. So inexplicable they even use a colorised clip of Frankenstein and the jukebox soundtrack is hardly up to Hughes’ usual standards. Horror fans will get a kick out of Michael Berryman as a mutant biker though and the clothes are great! Lisa is everything I wanted in a girl before I knew what I wanted
Rape. Murder. Death Row. Very intelligent guy. David Gale Kevin Spacey) is a former philosophy professor on death row in Texas. With only a few days until his execution, his lawyer negotiates a half-million dollar fee to tell his story to Bitsey Bloom (Kate Winslet), a journalist from a major news network. She has a reputation of keeping secrets and protecting her sources and has herself served a jail term for just such an infringement in defence of someone producing kiddie porn. With four days before his presumed execution Bitsey arrives at his prison and his lawyer Braxton Belyeu (Leon Rippy) diverts her intern Zack Slemmons (Gabriel Mann) and Gale tells her his story in a series of flashbacks: In 1994, Gale is a successful public intellectual and the head of the philosophy department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is an active member of DeathWatch, an advocacy group campaigning against capital punishment. At a graduation party, he encounters Berlin (Rhona Mitra) a graduate student who has been expelled from the school that afternoon and who earlier asked him to up her grades in exchange for sex. When Gale gets drunk, she seduces him and they have rough sex. She then falsely accuses Gale of rape. The next day, he loses a televised debate with the Governor of Texas when he is unable to name any innocent people executed during the governor’s term. Gale is arrested, but the charge is dropped when Berlin disappears. However, his marriage, career and reputation are all destroyed, his home is sold and he struggles with alcoholism after his wife Sharon (Elizabeth Gast) takes their little son Jamie (Noah Truesdale) with her to Spain and disallows contact. Constance Harraway (Laura Linney) a fellow DeathWatch activist is a close friend of Gale who consoles him after his life falls apart. However, Harraway is discovered raped and murdered, suffocated by a plastic bag taped over her head. An autopsy reveals Gale’s semen in her body and that she had been forced to swallow the key to the handcuffs, a torture technique known as the secure top method which Gale previously wrote about in a journal article. The physical evidence at the crime scene points to Gale, who is convicted of rape and murder and is sentenced to death. Now Bloom investigates the case in between her visits with Gale. Gale maintains his innocence, claiming he and Harraway had consensual sex the night before her murder. Bitsey comes to believe that the apparent evidence against Gale does not add up. She is tailed several times in her car by Dusty Wright (Matt Craven) an alleged one-time lover and colleague of Harraway, whom she suspects was the real killer and who has been trailing Bitsey and Zack. Wright slips evidence to Bloom that suggests Gale has been framed, implying that the actual murderer videotaped the crime. Bitsey pursues this lead until she finds a videotape revealing that Harraway, who was suffering from terminal leukaemia had committed an elaborate suicide made to look like murder. Wright is seen on the videotape, acting as her accomplice, implying that they framed Gale as part of a plan to discredit the death penalty by conspiring to execute an innocent person and in its aftermath ultimately releasing evidence of the actual circumstances. Once Bitsey and Zack find this evidence, only hours remain until Gale’s scheduled execution and they enlist Nico the Goth Girl (Melissa McCarthy) who now resides at Constance’s old home to restage her death … Name one innocent man that Texas has executed during my tenure. Urgency is inscribed from the first frame when Bitsey is running down a country road. After a series of flashbacks and contemporary interview scenes we rejoin that particular scene at 114 minutes in and the finale unspools. The screenplay by Charles Randolph resulted in a uniquely polarising critical reception for what transpired to be the late and lamented Alan Parker’s final production. Hate’s no fun if you keep it to her she just wanted to help other people avoid it. It’s a cunningly contrived drama, giving Gale a fully established private life and then turning his choices in a very different direction on the basis of one bad decision at a party with a sexpot which throws his life into disarray. You’re not here to save me, you’re here to save my son’s memory of his father. In this race against time narrative, the plot construction necessarily revolves Bitsey chasing her tail a little – we are to some degree in Silence of the Lambs territory when she talks to David in prison so that the ultimate manipulation of this conscientious journalist makes more sense in retrospect. Part of the dramatic problem is Winslet’s performance – it doesn’t ring entirely true: yes, she’s been carefully selected for the job of ‘saving’ David Gale on the basis of her fearsome reputation for journalistic ethics but somehow she doesn’t seem entirely serious in her profession as it’s presented here. Winslet overacts somewhat particularly in the more emotive setups. Where this should perhaps have engaged more with the idea of the role of journalists in promoting a point of view and the machinery of the news industry in shifting or controlling social perspective on crime and the death penalty becomes a more personalised tale about the lengths activists go to in order to make meaningful change – and in the State of Texas, which has a very high annual body count when it comes to Death Row. The final twist is probably a move too far in a film which thrives on every kind of sensation, good and bad. It is however very interesting on several levels, including performance. Ironically, in view of the criticism, this was allegedly inspired by a true story. Co-produced by Parker and Nicolas Cage. Let’s not throw a pity party and sit around reading Kafka
I’m the beekeeper. I protect the hive. Rural Massachusetts. Retired schoolteacher Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad) lives by herself on an isolated property but she has a tenant in her barn, Adam Clay (Jason Statham) who lives a quiet life as a beekeeper. Eloise falls for an online phishing scam and is robbed of over $2 million, the majority of which belongs to an educational charity she manages. Devastated, she dies by gunshot. Clay finds her body and is immediately arrested by FBI Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), Eloise’s daughter. After her mother’s death is ruled a suicide, Clay is released. Verona tells him the group that robbed Eloise has been on the FBI’s radar for a while but is difficult to track. Wanting justice for Eloise, Clay contacts the Beekeepers, a mysterious group, to find the scammers responsible. Clay receives an address for the scammers: a call centre run by Mickey Garnett (David Witts). Clay scares off the employees and destroys the building. Garnett informs his boss, technology executive Derek Danforth (Josh Hutcherson), who sends Garnett to kill Clay. A violent confrontation ensues where Clay kills Garnett’s men and severs Garnett’s fingers. Garnett calls Danforth while stopped at a bridge, informing him that Clay is a Beekeeper. Having followed Garnett, Clay drags him off the bridge with a truck to his death and warns Danforth that he is coming after him. Danforth informs former CIA director Wallace Westwyld (Jeremy Irons), who is currently running security for Danforth Enterprises at the request of Derek’s mother, Jessica, about Clay. Concerned, Wallace contacts the current CIA director Janet Harward (Minnie Driver) hoping to stope Clay. She contacts the Beekeepers and learns that Clay has retired from the organisation. The Beekeepers subsequently declare neutrality after Clay kills the current Beekeeper Anisette Landress (Megan Le) sent to kill him at a gas station. Meanwhile, Verona and her partner, Agent Matt Wiley (Bobby Naderi), figure that Clay will assault the Nine Star United Centre in Boston, which oversees all of Derek’s global scam call centers. After informing FBI Deputy Director Prigg (Don Gilet) that Clay is a Beekeeper, they are shocked to get all the support they ask for. Wallace coordinates a group of ex-special forces personnel, revealing to them that the Beekeepers are a highly skilled and dangerous secret human intelligence organisation tasked with protecting the United States, operating above and beyond governmental jurisdiction. To improve their chances at stopping Clay, Wallace orders the group to secure the inside of the Nine Star Building, while the FBI places their own SWAT team around the perimeter. Danforth’s decision to not evacuate the employees enables Clay to quickly defeat the FBI SWAT team and infiltrate the building. After wiping out all of Wallace’s ex-Special Forces group, Clay proceeds to interrogate the manager, who reveals that Danforth is his boss. Verona informs Prigg that Danforth runs both companies, which several US government agencies use. Verona also brings up the point that not only will Clay try to kill Derek but he may also kill Jessica (Jemma Redgrave), the president of the United States, due to her association with the scam … Beekeepers keep working until they die. The Stath is back! And he’s in pursuit of righteous vengeance in this entertaining and well motivated thriller albeit this probably has the highest body count since the last John Wick entry with added fingers for electronic passes. Was it Aristotle that said character is action?! Literal to the nth degree, we have someone acting out his nominatively determined hobby, and killing his honey bees is just the worst thing you could do to the masked one. I taught CIA software to hunt money and not terrorists. The opening sequence is clear and concise – then we’re brought into a world where a very unlikely character (a very different looking Hutcherson as Derek) turns out to be the son of someone very important indeed – and while Redgrave is clearly powerful the big reveal doesn’t happen until c74 minutes into the running time – at which point many, many people have rued their crossing the Beekeeper. I will never steal from the weak and the vulnerable again! Then the action unspools at a supposedly impenetrable venue followed by a party at a coastal estate where Clay has to contend with a comic book South African mercenary Lazarus (Taylor James) who got unlucky the last time he met a Beekeeper and has the prosthetic leg to prove it. Obviously, this has to be the ultimate encounter. Throughout there are gnomic nods on the one hand to bees (what else) but on the other to the offspring of US Presidents with winks at the ethics of campaign fundraising, a fun set of references in election year. And this will not dissuade anyone of the justifiable fear that technology is theft. At the end of the day Mr Clay disappears just like the man with Black Magic chocolates – or James Bond. What a guy! He’s absolutely fucking terrifying! Truly the strong mostly silent killing machine. The well-hewn screenplay is written by Kurt Wimmer with tongue firmly in cheek and directed by David Ayer with stunning cinematography from Gabriel Beristain. Sometimes when the hive is out of balance you have to replace the queen
Pretty much the bottom line is if you are in Iraq you are dead. The second year of the Iraq War. A U.S. Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team with Bravo Company led by Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) identifies and attempts to destroy an IED (improvised explosive device) with a robot but the wagon carrying the trigger charge breaks. Team leader Staff Sergeant Matthew Thompson (Guy Pearce) places the charge by hand, but is killed when an Iraqi insurgent in a nearby shop uses a mobile phone to detonate the charge. Squad mate Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) feels guilty for failing to kill the man with the phone. Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner) replaces Staff Sergeant Thompson. He is often at odds with Sergeant J. T. Sanborn because he prefers to defuse devices by hand and does not communicate his plans, removing his headset to prevent communications. He blocks Sanborn’s view with smoke grenades as he approaches an IED and defuses it only moments before an Iraqi insurgent attempts to detonate it with a 9-volt battery. In another incident, James insists on disarming a complex car bomb despite Sanborn’s protests that it is taking too long; James responds by taking off his uniform headset and ‘flipping off’ Sanborn, saying if he’s going to die he might as well be comfortable. Sanborn is so worried by his conduct that he openly suggests killing James to Eldridge while they are exploding unused ordnance outside of base. On their return to base, they encounter five armed men in Iraqi garb by an SUV which has a flat tyre. After a tense encounter, James learns they are friendly British mercenaries (aka ‘private military contractors’) led by a handsome supposed crack shot (Ralph Fiennes). While fixing the tyre, they come under sniper fire. Three of the contractors are killed before James and Sanborn take over counter-sniping, killing three insurgents. Eldridge kills the fourth who attempts to flank their position. During a raid on a warehouse, James discovers a ‘body bomb’ he believes is Beckham (Christopher Sayegh), the Iraqi boy who sells him porn DVDs and plays soccer outside of base. During the evacuation, Lt. Colonel John Cambridge (Christian Camargo), the camp’s psychiatrist and Eldridge’s counsellor, is killed in an explosion; Eldridge is more deeply traumatised. James sneaks off base with Beckham’s apparent DVD sales associate at gunpoint in his truck, telling him to take him to Beckham’s home. He is left at the home of an unrelated Iraqi professor who tells him in English he is pleased to meet someone in the CIA and when his wife attacks James he flees. Called to a petrol tanker detonation, James decides to hunt for the insurgents responsible nearby. Sanborn protests but when James begins a pursuit, he and Eldridge follow. After they split up, insurgents capture Eldridge. James and Sanborn rescue him, although Eldridge gets shot in the leg … You are now in the kill zone. Independently directed and produced by Kathryn Bigelow with a screenplay by freelance writer Mark Boal who had been embedded in the war zone in 2004, this is a relentless, fully immersive trawl through a parched, sunblasted bombscape with three men whose differing takes on their shocking reality lend this an unparalleled realism. The management of the narrative is supreme. Episodic by nature, with six roughly fifteen-minute scene-sequences demarcated by alternating forms of action and different kinds of explosive and disposal style, the contrast between the characters and their various predilections or weaknesses exhibited in their dealings with each other and situations are heightened by the escalating violence, repetition and juxtaposition. Killing off a major star is an appropriately Hitchcockian start in a story that is structurally suspenseful. In comes Renner as James, a wild man who earns the admiration of a vicious commander Colonel Reed (David Morse in one of a number of notable cameos) who sees a guy after his own take-no-injured-prisoners (literally) heart. Sanborn’s ire is juxtaposed with Eldridge’s increasing fear, handled maladroitly by a Yalie shrink whom he inadvertently invites to finally see some action – and boy does he get his after engaging in a dumb talkshow with the local terrorists. This is what we think of psychology/psychiatry – we are in a film where the right wrench is more useful than trying to rationalise the unspeakable violence of modern warfare. When the scene changes and the guys encounter the mercenaries led by Fiennes out in the desert they form a tight trio – right after Sanborn has been conspiring with Eldridge to kill James, who invariably calms things and they are rewarded with a sunset after an exhausting thirsty day of picking off the Iraqis. That happens at 65 minutes and they finally let rip back at base where Eldridge finds James’s memory box of bomb parts that didn’t kill him under his bed. It’s a bonding experience which culminates in a bout of roughhousing between James and Sanborn in which the latter comes off much worse. They discover that James has a wife and son (he’s not sure if he’s divorced) and Sanborn wants that for himself. The scene shifts and another element is finally introduced – water: on the floor of a building where they find a dead boy rigged up with a body bomb and James exhibits emotion believing him to be Beckham, the teen chancer who sells him porn outside the base. A really good bad guy hides out in the dark. Then there’s a massive explosion which results in a cauldron of fire with James believing that it was done remotely and the bomber is likely just beyond the kill zone. So he and Sanborn and Eldridge set off into the nighttime streets in uniform – a difference to the preceding evening when he went out looking for Beckham’s home as a civilian and getting beaten up by that Iraqi woman for his trouble. He shoots Eldridge – accidentally? He’s the one who’s been keeping him sane, now Eldridge has a reason to go home, falling apart physically with a busted femur just as he’s been falling apart mentally with a broken mind. Sanborn stands in a shower and does it in his uniform, collapsing in grief, adrenaline rushing out of him. Then there’s a different kind of bomb – and another variety of conflagration. Back home, shopping in the supermarket, playing with his baby, cleaning the gutters, James tells his wife Connie (Evangeline Lilly) the military needs more bomb techs. And there’s a circular conclusion, like a hero’s journey tale. Bigelow says it’s about the psychology behind the type of soldier who volunteers for this particular conflict and then, because of [their] aptitude, is chosen and given the opportunity to go into bomb disarmament and goes toward what everybody else is running from. Unfailingly tense and suspenseful, this is never less than subjective. And there goes Renner, like an astronaut in his dirtbound bombsuit, walking alone, into a moral void. This was shot by Barry Ackroyd using four 16mm cameras at a time, in Jordan and Kuwait. Two hundred hours of material were edited by Chris Innis and Bob Murawski with a score by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders. Simply stunning filmmaking, rivetting storytelling, anxiety-inducing, utterly compelling. Bigelow became the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director while the film got Picture, Original Screenplay, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing and Film Editing. A modern masterpiece. Going to war is a once in a lifetime experience. It could be fun!
You only wear makeup if you’re going out or you’ve been crying. Rome in the 1970s, Clara (Penelope Cruz) is a nonconformist Spanish expatriate trapped in a loveless marriage to Felice (Vincenzo Amato) an unfaithful and abusive businessman, with whom she has three children: twelve-year old Adriana aka Adri (Luana Giuliani), Gino (Patrizio Francioni) and Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti). Adriana experiences gender dysphoria. Adriana rejects girlhood and instead identifies as a boy, wearing boys’ clothes and adopting the masculine name Andrea. One day, Andrea befriends Sara (Penelope Nieto Conti), a Romani girl who knows him as a boy. Upon a shared sense of being outsiders, Andrea and Clara grow closer. During the summer holidays Clara and the children go to a villa with her sisters- and mother-in-law (Alvia Reale) and all the young cousins. Adri is the ringleader when they explore a well and gets everyone into trouble, confronting Clara and taunting her into hitting her. After fantasising that a church service becomes a variety performance like the black and white TV shows she watches with Clara, Adri witnesses her father’s very young mistress Maria (India Santella) arriving at their apartment and she hears the woman declare that she is pregnant with Felice’s illegitimate child. Clara finally falls apart … You and Dad made me wrong. Is it too late to say that Cruz has come into her own and is a towering acting force in world cinema? She’s a powerhouse here yet her performance is not overwhelming – she shares the screen with a very cool kid who frankly could easily be male or female – and this is written so carefully that we understand Clara’s understanding of an eccentric child who declares she is the offspring of an alien and wants to spend her life in the sky. It only becomes problematic when Adri befriends and deceives Sara in the guise of ‘Andrea’ and becomes embroiled in a tentative pre-pubescent romance. Thankfully a deus ex machina prevents it from becoming the devastating betrayal that is threatened. The underlying tensions in the marriage are not openly discussed, they’re introduced subtly because almost everything here is from the children’s perspective as they try to navigate a wonderful mother and a distant disciplinarian father who makes her sad. Clara dresses in bright colours and pops off the screen whereas Adri is forced to wear white like the other girls in the Catholic school where the boys were black surplices. When Clara is hassled by guys following them on the street Adri protest to Clara, You are too beautiful. I am ugly. Both are outsiders, they have that in common. There is a remarkable balancing act performed here – the troubles of both mother and daughter are never overstated, both are fragile yet when Clara can no longer even talk about the cuckolding and the prospect of her husband’s bastard offspring, Adri bangs at the door of the bathroom where Clara has locked herself in and shouts, We’re the kids! You’re the grown up! It is the admission that Clara can’t cope after putting on the show of shows for her children. When she wants to play with the kids it’s Adri who tells her she can’t. Then, of course, Felice takes charge and does to Clara what all husbands do when they’re found out. Immaculately staged and performed, this is a joy for anyone interested in Italian interiors circa 1972 with wonderful use of space and light, geometric patterns and amazing wallpaper in a developing suburb that if it were in an American movie would become a location for poltergeists. Everything is heightened by the marvellous costume design by Massimo Cantini Parrini and the performances of contemporary singers, including the title song and Adriano Celentano’s nonsense song Prisencolinensinainciusol. Above all, this is a beguiling family drama about people and a place in transition and sensibly offers no easy answers. Directed by Emanuele Crialese, who co-wrote the semi-autobiographical screenplay with Francesca Manieri and Vittorio Moroni. Inside everything another thing is always hiding
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