Category Archives: Movies

Movie Review: The Gentlemen

Guy Ritchie movies do not always hit for me but more often than not when his films do work it is the ones centered on London and its criminal elements such as The Gentlemen.

The Gentlemen focuses on Mickey Pearson (Matthew McConaughey) an American crime boss whose has built an empire selling marijuana who now wants to retire. Pearson is looking to sell his operation to a fellow American coming into the UK’s criminal world, Matthew (Jeremy Strong.) Partnered with Pearson in his drug empire and operating a high-end automotive garage of her own his Pearson’s wife Rosalind (Michelle Dockery) and Pearson’s right-hand man Ray (Charlie Hunnan.) Things are complicated by a local and rival drug kingpin known as Lord George (Tom Wu) and his young protégé Dry Eye (Henry Golding.) the vast majority of the film occurs in flashback as told by the devilishly impish and overly greedy investigative reporter Fletcher (Hugh Grant.) Stray secondary characters including a powerful tabloid editor and various young thugs add further complications making it likely that Pearson’s retirement may be in the form a long cold dirt nap.

This film is much more like Ritchey at best such as Lock Stock, and Two Smoking barrels or Snatch than his more recent fare Aladdin or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and we are all the better for it. This movie moves along at a fast clip never slowing down and risking audience boredom. The characters are lively, fascinating, and nearly impossible to ignore. This performance by Hugh grant is hands down my favorite and gives Grant more to do than a mere display of bumbling charm. Michele Dockery giver a performance that is utterly controlled and yet full of passion while Colin Farrell steals scenes with another talented accented turn.

Production design never forgot to be stylish but without ever letting style overshadow the story being told and while some of the music was not to my tastes it all fit the film perfectly.

Sunday Morning watching this film with my sweetie-wife was a perfect end to the weekend. While there is violence in this movie, it’s not overly graphic and shouldn’t be a reason for you to miss this gem.

The Trouble with Screenplay Credits

If you watch movie made in the united states you know that right before the Director’s Credit, contractually the final credit displayed before the film plays, you will see the credit for the writer of the screenplay. You may see a single person credited, or several. If there’s an ampersand between two names it means those people are a team and if there’s an and it means one person wrote and then the other came along and also wrote but they did not work together. This is all well and good but in the end it seems like it’s not really the whole truth of the matter.

The writer is employed at the whim and dictates of the producer and in the film that has such a large impact that it makes it very difficult for anyone outside of the process that made that particular film to know just what elements of the screenplay are the result of the writer and which are elements that were forced into the work by some other agency. The writer may be against have a giant mutant worm sexually assault a female character but if the producer insists on the scene then it will be written and shot and for the rest of time the writer will be the one carrying the credit and the blame for the exploitive sequence. The director may be a hired gun for the production with little interest in the material who throws out the final act and writes his own ending, but it will be the credited screenwriters who are blamed for ripping off Aliens for their script.

When you watch a movie it can be nearly impossible to know who is actually responsible for both the great and terrible elements of the story and that’s a problem in my book. I wish I had some solution, but I don’t. The truth of the matter is that the final product is what it is and the credits may give you a clue as to how it came to be and its potential quality but only a clue.

A New Social Media Time Waster

Listening to the Shockwaves and Pure Cinema podcasts I discovered a social media site for cinephiles, Letterboxd. (No, the ‘e’ is not missing that is the site’s name.)

It’s a site dedicated to films. People post lists of movies that they have seen, reviews, and movies that they want to see. It seems like it might be a good way to get heads up on films that interest me that aren’t part of the main cycle of releases.

I spent some time yesterday figuring out how I could export the information from my database of films I own into a format that would allow me to import them into Letterboxd. I did eventually work it out and now I have a listing of over 400 movies that I have seen, since everything in my library is something I have seen. I have very rarely purchased a movie without having watched it. Now I will spend time her and there for the next few weeks rating the movies and adding to list movies I have seen but do not own. Luckily my AMC movie app keeps a full history of all the movies I see at my local AMC theater. Of course, I am happy to have another place to post my opinion and reviews of films. This should be fun.

Things to Watch

So recently I discovered the Shockwaves Podcast, a weekly shows about horror and things going on in the world of media horror with a principle focus on film. Near the end of last month they did a show looking back on what they felt were the 10 best horror movies of the 2010s. Now since there were 4 hosts and each had their own top ten list that was a potential 40 films. Given that they did not coordinate their lists there were duplicates so I think the total come sin closed to the top 26 horror film in their opinions. They did not publish the listings in the show notes and so I had to compile it myself so I cannot attribute the listing to the host that gave them, but here’s their opinion.

10. It Follows

10. Bone Tomahawk

10. Dream Home

10. Detention (2011)

9. I Saw the Devil

9.Starry Eyes

9. Train to Busan

9. Annihilation

8. Sinister

8. Demon

8. The Final Girls

8. What we do in the Shadows

7. Train to Busan

7. A Dark Song

7. The Witch

7. Attack the Block

6. Insidious

6. Evil Dead

6. Sinister

6. Green Room

5. What we do in the Shadows

5. Autopsy of Jane Doe

5. It Follows

5. Train to Busan

4. Mandy

4. Get Out

4. Hereditary

4. Autopsy of Jane Doe

3. Cabin in the Woods

3. Blackcoats Daughter

3. Get Out

3. Kill List

2. Get Out

2. Kill List

2. Cabin in the Woods

2. The Babadook

1. The Conjuring

1. It Follows

1. Evil Dead (remake)

1. Black Swan

The only list I can positively identify is the 4^th and final entry in each column which are the selections by Dr Rebekah McKendry. As the only woman on the podcast her voice was easy to track. I have seen several of these films and agree with some of the listings. Entries in bold I have seen both Bold and Italics I own. The rest I have more to track down and watch.

Weekend Horror Film: The Vault

Saturday night after the close of the current session of the Space Opera game I run for friends, yes, Space Opera the RPG system from Fantasy Games Unlimited we’re doing throwback to the 80’s for our RPG’s this time around, I watched the horror movie The Vault.

The film came up on Netflix as a recommendation and I was intrigued enough to add it to my growing queue. The premise is that a gang of bank robbers having taken customers and employees hostage during a robbery are suddenly faced with a supernatural threat from the bank’s haunted vault. Starring Francesca Eastwood and James Franco The Vault is a modest to low budget movie that tries the make the most of it limited setting. Overall, I wasn’t bored during the film’s brief 90-minute run time, which fit perfectly with my tired and ready to do nothing mindset after an evening of gamemastering. Ms. Eastwood was perfectly fine as the leader of the small gang who have been driven by desperation, circumstance, and greed into that crime. Mr. Franco plays the bank’s assistance manager who, in a bid to keep the robbers who are edgy and not fully in control of themselves, assists the robbers with vital codes and information about a large score in the bank’s old secret vault.

Haunted is the right word because The Vault is a ghost story and as with most ghost stories there is a secret that must be unraveled before the circumstances of the plot can be fully understood. There was one set-up involving a robbery from 1982 and a masked killer that was never captured or unmasked that caused me to guess wrong about one of the twists and I actually liked that. The twist that was revealed worked and played fair. The greatest fault in the movie is that the director or editor showed too much too soon. There’s a sequence where some of the robbers have been separated and one is confronted by spectral figures while others watch on the bank’s security monitors. The characters watching on the monitors do not see the ghosts and I think the film would have had great tension if the audience had not seen them yet either. If like the witnessing characters, we couldn’t understand of fully hear the attack but frequent cuts to the action and the supernatural violence stripped the sequence of all tension.

Still for a late-night brain mostly off evening The Vault was perfectly serviceable. It is not overly graphic but there is blood and effect work that may disturb some.

Sunday Night Movie: 1973s Westworld

The Criterion Channel this month added a number of films as part of their spotlight on 70s science fiction. There is a pretty good representation of the pre-Star Wars genre in the selection. Worries about the population bomb with Z.P.G., environmentalism with No Blade of Grass, Corporate control before cyberpunk made it trendy with Rollerball and societal collapse with both The Ultimate Warrior and Mad Max. Sunday night I watched Michael Crichton’s Westworld, which of course served as the basis for HBO’s current series.

The set-up is straight forward, the company Delos runs three theme parks, Roman World, Medieval World, and Westworld where guests for the sum of a thousand dollars per day, just north of 5 grand in today’s money, can live out their fantasies amid a park filled with robots that are nearly indistinguishable from human. Being a Michael Crichton SF story, the technology goes wrong and the robots in the last act of the film go violent and begin killing all the guests leaving our hero Richard Benjamin being hunted by a gunslinger robot player by Yul Brynner.

With a brief running time of just 88 minuets you would think there there’s no room for exposition and yet this movie drags with scene after scene of nothing but exposition. There’s an attempt to explain how the park is safe because the guns detect human body temperature and will not fire at a living person but utterly disregards the concept of ricochets. I was surprised just how dull this movie was. I had not watched it since perhaps the 80s and truly this is an exercise in watching someone else play a game. It isn’t until very late in the movie that the threat rears its head and then there is very little but chase and escape.

There are a lot of SF films from the 70s that hold up today, but boy this is not one of them.

Streaming Review: Panique (1947)

A French noir produced right after the war in 1946 Panique is film about suspicion and mob injustice. Michel Simon plays Monsieur Hire, an aloof reclusive man who lives in a hotel where the residents of the neighborhood dislike him for the solitary and unfriendly manner. Life in the neighborhood is upended when as a carnival is setting up a woman is found murdered in a nearby field. The murderer, Capoulade, played by Max Dalban, and his girlfriend, Alice, played by Viviane Romance, a woman Monsieur Hire had become infatuated with, manipulate the neighborhood’s distrust of Hire, attempting to place the blame for the murder on him.

Panique, though it never mentions or deals with the war or France’s occupation under Nazi rule, is seen by many as a statement about the behavior of people during the war. The fact that Hire is Jewish gives credence to this interpretation as mob mentality and the neighborhood rumor filled imaginations turn violent against a man whose only crime is being socially different.

With a brief running time of 91 minutes the film doesn’t waste footage with needlessly complex backstory or set-ups. The mystery of the murderer’s identity is for the audience quickly dispatched allowing the story of Hire, Alice, and the mob to progress without undue burdens.

Filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Nicholas Hayer, Panique doesn’t not draw on the heritage of German expressionism like most classical noir films, but rather presents the movie’s subjects in stark realism rather then with exaggerated and stylized photography. The film was based on a novel and remade as Monsieur Hire in 1989.

An enjoyable excursion into noir from the country that coined the genre’s name, Panique is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

First Movie of 2020: The Ultimate Warrior

I had planned to start my year off with the 1980 Musical Fantasy Xanadu, a flawed film but an emotional favorite, but before I slipped the Blu-ray into the player I surfed the Criterion Channel and discovered a mid 70s SF film I had not only not seen but had never heard of, The Ultimate Warrior.

The Ultimate Warrior from 1975 and set it the far distant future of 2012 is about competing bands of survivalists in a world that had been devastated by viral plagues. The Plague apparently killed off an enormous number of people as New York City is desolate and deserted, and destroyed the several species of plants, ending cultivated farming. It is suggested in the movie that some form of economic collapse occurred shortly before the plagues swept across the earth as we are told that 1981 was the last year automobiles were produced and the plagues came later. The film is light on explaining the backstory giving the audience just enough to feel that it is a world with history that has been thought out and not simply bludgeoned with that information.

Baron, played by the unequaled Max Von Sydow, leads the ‘good’ commune/compound of survivors. Their numbers have been dwindling and the scavenged food is beginning to run out. A rival compound led by Carrot, William Smith, survives through force and theft and threatens the survival of Baron’s community. Into this mix comes the mysterious Carson, Yul Brynner. Carlson is a hired warrior and Baron manages to in his services. In Baron’s commune is Cal, it is never explained if Cal is a farmer or a botanist, but either way he had cross bred another of plants to produce food bearing crops that are immune to the plagues. Knowing that the decaying city is no place to reestablish cultivated farming, Baron has hopes of using Carson’s tremendous gifts as a warrior to get Cal, Baron’s Daughter Melinda, and the precious seeds, out of New York to someplace suitable, but Carrot’s murderous goons growing stronger, time is running out.

Directed and written by Robert Clouse, The Ultimate Warrior, capture the mood of mid-70s cinematic science fiction, dark, cynical, and if there are ‘happy endings’ the price if terribly high. This atmosphere dominated 70s cinema and culture until the release of 1977s Star Wars, when light escapist fare displaced the dark dreary movies with adventure of Campbellian heroes.

Produced on a modest budget the film still manages to portray a dying world and a dead culture. Baron is striving to do what is best but is not immune from mistakes with terrible consequences. Carrot and his gang are not characterized at all, but are presented as simply violent, greedy, a force of the world out to destroy and then be destroyed. There is never any reveal for Carson’s extraordinary skills. He is not presented as a product of science or breeding, and it is never even hinted as having a particularly interesting backstory, or any backstory at all. He simply arrives and upsets the delicate balance with his presences.

The Ultimate Warrior was an enjoyable movie and for those who did not live through the decade of malaise it could be instructive to see the tone that so many did experience in nearly every aspect of the culture.

My Personal Year in Review

Well we’re about to start another arbitrary cycle around our local star and that means it’s time to look back at what we’ve and answer for it. Wait, that didn’t come out right, it’s time for personal reflection and growth. Yeah, that sounds better.

Anyway, I have to say that this year has been a pretty good year for me.

Naturally, the biggest writing news is that Flame Tree Press purchased my novel Vulcan’s Forge with the publication set for March 28^th, 2020. This was a joy and a surprise. Vulcan’s Forge, which languished on my former agent’s desk for a year unread, was a book I wrote entirely for myself. It was an experiment to see if I could sustain a cynical tone for an entire novel, and a labor for my love of film and the genre film noir in particular. Blending it with science fiction and making constant references to movies throughout the book Vulcan’s Forge is in one manner my most personal work.

In other aspects of my writing life I managed a few interesting short stories and one of my previously published works A Canvas Dark and Deep has been selected for reprint in the anthology Twilight Words coming in spring 2020.

My goal for 2020 is to have my next novel, Do We Not Bleed?, written by my birthday in mid-May. A detailed outline is already produced, and I have high hopes for this piece.

2019 was also the year I fully committed to listening to Podcasts. I have a number of fun, informative, and challenging podcasts on regular rotation. One that has been most surprising in just how fully engaged I have become with it is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters.

Clearly with my love of movies screenwriting has always been a fascination with me. John August and Craig Mazin each week discus the business, craft, and art of screenwriting with many of the topics applicable to other forms of writing as well. They are also gamers, puzzle solvers, and entreatingly amusing people.

My day job continues to be good. I am so happy to be part of a vibrant strong union. Too many times before in my life I have been chewed up by petty bosses and it feels great having an organization at my back instead of being stabbed there.

IN gaming my sweetie-wife and I added Lords of Waterdeep to the regular rotation of our board and card game nights and it’s become very popular. In role play gaming I took a massive step into the past and began running a campaign of FGU’s Space Opera a game system I ran quite successfully for many years during the 1980s, PDFs of the rules are available at a quite reasonable price and it’s been fun, challenging, and amusing to engaged with the typo filled rulebook.

Here’s to looking to 2020 with hope, optimism, and confidence.

Streaming Review: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Utilizing a 14 day free trial period of the streaming service The Criterion Channel I have spent a few days watching in segments the Best Picture Oscar winner for 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives a drama about the troubles of three services men reintegrating into civilian life after returning home from combat in Word War II. The film is on the long side, two hours and 15 minutes but that is because it does try to take a deeper dive into each of its three main characters’ lives rather than focused on a single protagonists with two possible side kicks.

Dana Andrews plays Fred Derry, a captain in the Army Air Forces who served as a bombardier aboard B-17s over the European theater. Married is a party girl, Virginia Mayo Fred’s marriage is one the rocks and he is unable to find gainful employment while struggling with what we now diagnose as PTSD.

Frederick March plays Al Stephenson a platoon sergeant who finds that his children are more adult that he remembers and he struggles with alcoholism. Al is supported by his wife, Myrna Loy as he finds deep conflict between his job as a banker and sympathies for returning servicemen.

Harold Russel plays Homer Parrish a young man who while serving in the U.S. Navy was grievously injured and had both of his hands amputated. Harold’s amputations are not the product of special effects but reality since the actors lost both hands in a training accident. Homer finds it nearly impossible to return to his old life has be perceives everyone around him focusing on his injuries and he’s unable to emotionally open up to his fiancé played by Cathy O’Donnell.

The film is filled with secondary characters, Al’s daughter Peggy, player by Theresa Wright, who develops strong feelings for married Fred. I think in the movie Peggy is suppose to be 21 or so but the actress was 28 the film was released so that threw me off a bit. Homer has his friends at a local watering hole and Fred’s parents give a glimpse at the life Fred came from before the Army made him an officer.

William Wyler, one of classic Hollywood’s most talented director and also a war veteran, directs the film. He used smaller constructed sets, less suited to sweeping camera movements to help capture the feeling of finding home smaller and more constrained for the returning men.

I found it fascinating how some concepts had already pierced the public as early as 1946. In this movie people express the idea that the next war will be atomic and over in a day and that perhaps the US should have waged war against Communism instead of Fascism, two concepts that I would have taken longer to develop in the post war environment.

Overall this was a gripping story, slightly hampered by the production code, about the struggles people live with after experiencing the horror of war.

Robert Mitchell Evans

Literary Saboteur