Glengarry Glen Ross

Posted on April 3, 2011 by jaycluitt

Glengarry Glen Ross has an excellent ensemble cast that cannot be ignored, featuring Al Pacino, Ed Harris, Kevin Spacey, Alan Arkin, Alec Baldwin, Jonathan Pryce and the great Jack Lemmon, all sharing the screen and delivering award-worthy performances. In particular, I was very impressed by the mesmerising cameo from Baldwin as corporate ball-breaker Blake, brought in to motivate the employees of the real estate firm (or make them feel about 2 inches tall, whatever works) and Kevin Spacey’s weasel-like manager Williamson, knowing he has no right to his job and sticking firmly to the rules and regulations to make sure he keeps it. I was reminded of 12 Angry Men whilst watching, with the confined locations, all-male cast and stage origins of the story, as well as the heightening tensions, hot and wet climates and outbursts of anger from its central cast. Harris and Arkin, as the angry Moss and deflated Aaronow respectively, seemed a little one-note, but their characters were still vital to the story, and each had their highlights.

Choose film 8/10

Pixar Day

Posted on March 28, 2011 by jaycluitt

Had a bit of an accident this morning, got knocked off my bike on the way to work. I’m fine, but my bike’s wrecked, and I was confined to the sofa for the day, and couldn’t think of a better way to cheer myself up than watching nothing but Pixar films, and all off the list!
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The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Posted on March 27, 2011 by jaycluitt

Benjamin Button is stuck in the shadow of Forrest Gump, a film that has cornered the market on tales of the highlights of a man’s life, and how the world’s history has at times affected it. Button does not do much for itself to help this matter, mirroring Gump on many factors, such as a stint on a boat, involvement in a military conflict, a long lost love. The main difference, and it is one that should have separated Button far more than it did, is that the main character is born an old man, and grows progressively younger, the curious case from the title. Being in the title of the film would lead you to believe that it is this case that the tale would be about, yet it is retained to simply being a plot device, driving the plot rather than being the centre of it. Also, the characters lack of interest in Button’s extraordinary affliction annoyed me intensely, as did the lack of any real explanation as to how such a condition could arise.

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Battleship Potemkin

Posted on March 26, 2011 by jaycluitt

Famous for the pram rolling down a staircase, famously ‘homaged’ (stolen?) by Brian de Palma in the Untouchables and parodied in the Naked Gun series, Battleship Potemkin is a silent film about the crew of a Russian battleship who mutiny over the poor food, ultimately causing a mass revolution. There are certain images from the film that are more well known than the film itself – the meat crawling with maggots, the hordes of people mourning the death of a man “killed for a plate of soup” and of course the Odessa staircase scene, that the rest of the film is lost between these set pieces. I think that there are supposed to be parallels between the plot and the Russian revolution, but I’m afraid I don’t know my Russian history as well as is required to appreciate these, so this went over my head a little.

Choose Life. 5/10

The Terminator

Posted on March 26, 2011 by jaycluitt

Film night strikes again with the Terminator. This is a film that is so deeply ingrained within popular culture that I cannot remember the first time that I saw it, and probably did not even realise it was my first time then, as the character is so well known, from the way he moves to his handful of lines of dialogue, but I tried to watch it afresh, as though it was 1984 and I’d wandered blindly into a cinema and sat down. The most surprising thing I found was that there is no indication that Schwarzenegger is a cyborg until about 45 minutes into the films, though it is now the most famous aspect of the film. Up until Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) tells Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) that he is a robot sent from the future to kill her, preventing the birth of her son and therefore the revolution against the cyborgs that he will eventually cause, we only assume that Schwarzenegger is just a specially trained, seemingly unstoppable killer, possibly a soldier or hitman of some kind. Yes there are some hints; his stiff-legged walking and even stiffer speech mannerisms, but at the time no-one would have been expecting anything more acting-wise from the former bodybuilder.

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Un Chien Andalou

Posted on March 26, 2011 by jaycluitt

Alas, another Luis Bunuel film, however this time thankfully much shorter than L’Age d’Or.
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Unbreakable

Posted on March 26, 2011 by jaycluitt

Unbreakable is essentially an anti-superhero movie, taking many of the genres staples and applying them to a real-life thriller, years before Christopher Nolan rebooted the Batman franchise with his realistic and plausible worldview. The hero, David Dunn (Bruce Willis) has alliterative initials (Bruce Banner/Peter Parker/Clark Kent), wears a hooded cloak and has a penchant for posing in the rain with a bright light behind him, illuminating a stark silhouette on the screen, yet unlike most comic book heroes, when he tries to chat up a girl (after slyly removing his wedding ring) the attempt fails. That never happened to Tony Stark. The film is even shot like a comic book, with the aforementioned chat up routine swaying from person to person between seats on a train, and many scenes utilising one bright colour, such a bright orange boiler suit, contrasting against the surrounding dreary muted blacks, browns and greys.
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The Pianist

Posted on March 19, 2011 by jaycluitt

The Pianist tells the story of Wladyslaw Spzilman (Adrien Brody), a Polish Jewish pianist during the years of the Nazi regime. He and his family are forced to move to a small flat in a poor area behind a wall, forced to walk in the street and dance for the amusement of the Nazis. When his family are taken away to a concentration camp, Spzilman manages to escape and must live as a fugitive in a society refusing to accept Jews as real people.
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L’Age d’Or

Posted on March 17, 2011 by jaycluitt

You know the feeling, you’re trying to plan a party, deciding whether to have six singers in front of a microphone or 60 singers 10 kilometres away, when you go upstairs and there’s a cow in your bed. Just an everyday occurrence, I know, but still a little annoying. And then during your party, the man you so desperately want to be with (seemingly John Lithgow doing a Dick Dastardly impersonation) is prevented from being with you, by a woman who spills his drink of him and a man shooting a small boy several times outside. Finally, the two of you are able to sneak off and suck each other’s hand whilst rolling around in the gravel, but all he seems interested in is a statue’s foot, so obviously when he’s called away to scream at the Minister of the Interior, you suck said stony appendage until he returns, when you rejoice about having killed your children. And of course, when the orchestra conductor interrupts you while clutching at his head, your man storms off to shred your pillows, and throw them, along with a burning tree, various items of furniture including a full scale wooden giraffe, and possibly the Pope out of a window.
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The Great Train Robbery (1903!)

Posted on March 17, 2011 by jaycluitt

I had a productive lunch break at work today, managed to find The Great Train Robbery on Google Video. Although it was silent, juddery and of poor production quality, I was very impressed with what was capable of being produced 108 years ago, as the film involved explosives, gun fights, stunts on a moving train, a large crowd scene, horseriding, and a gun fight on horseback, all in the space of 12 minutes. That’s more action than a modern day Mike Leigh film. Some of the acting, especially when people were shot, was unintentionally hilarious, with their over-the-top melodramatic deaths. I was also unsure of the final shot, of a man looking into the camera and firing his gun several times. I thought it might have been a scare tactic, trying to emulate the supposed reaction to the first film ever shown in a cinema, Arrival of Train at Station, when apparently the audience were so concerned that the footage of a train arriving at a station was in fact a real train coming towards them that they fled the cinema in terror.

Choose film 7/10