Straight after Christmas, I got quite awfully ill, which meant that I spent a fair bit of time just watching films I had just received. Worst ways to spend one’s time I suppose…
First off, I viewed The Black Hole, a Disney sci-fi film made to cash in on the Star Wars craze. The effects are stunning, but the dialogue is poor a lot of the times, only Roddy McDowall as the voice of the robot of V.I.N.C.E.N.T. is given anything to work with. The director Gary Nelson, who also made the original Freaky Friday, mostly worked in television and consequently the movie is staid. The ending though, has to be seen to be believed. It’s as if the screenwriters just gave up.
I re-watched my new R1 disc of Citizen Kane; still the best movie ever made for me. Directing, scripting, acting, cinematography, editing… all pretty much ineffable. Later on in the week I also saw the Oscar-nominated feature length documentary on the second disc, The Battle over Citizen Kane. It start’s out bumpily, gathers steams, but while it’s contextualising of the events is very interesting, it doesn’t leave much time for the actual “battle” itself. Almost inevitably too, it is stronger on Hearst than it is on Welles. Worth a look, but it needed to be much, much longer.
I then saw my first Warner Archive film: Dark of the Sun. I got it after a discussion about the movie on the forum last year perked my interest. A really fun action adventure in the mould of The Dirty Dozen, but this is harder-hitting, with a genuine undercurrent of nastiness. The Congolese’s’ Civil War is one of the worst, most barbaric conflicts ever and this film, although it only scratches the surface, helps give a feeling for it. Rod Taylor plays the hard-hewn mercenary character well too, and, befitting the fact that director Jack Cardiff was a famed cinematographer as well, the film looks great. It’s truly a great shame that this film has never, ever been released uncut on VHS or DVD.
Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York was next up. Critically, it isn’t one of his most popular films, this musical with Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli, neither was it successful financially. However, I was absoloutly blown away by it. I was shocked at how much I liked it. The photography from László Kovács, the production design by Boris Leven and the songs by Kander and Ebb (including the classic title song) are all amazing. Best of all though, is the acting and directing. Scorsese effectively creates the style of old time Hollywood musicals, but keeps the characters real and believable. Liza Minnelli is surprisingly very good, even holding up against De Niro at the height of his acting powers. A film just waiting to be re-discovered.
So what was my last film of 2012, you cry? Surely it was some timeless masterpiece? Well, no alas, it was not. For it was Nimród Antal’s Predators. The original film in the series is, in truth, not that great, and trades heavily on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s charisma. Here we don’t have even that. I like Adrian Brody as an actor and he’s the best thing in this bland, generic action movie that telegraphs everything in advanced and has dialogue written by someone copy-and-pasting lines from other equally derivative movies from the past decade or so. It excites in a few places, but this totally by the numbers filmmaking.
Since then, I have seen Force 10 from Navarone. Director by former Bond director Guy Hamilton and with another former Bond girl in the cast, the delicious Barbara Bach, it’s easy to label it a “Bond in uniform” saga as the dismissive Time Out review did. It’s also true that this is one of those breed of war films that treats the entire World War II as a great big adventure (in the same year as Apocalypse Now was releases too!). Thus we don’t have any of that “War-is-Hell” message here, which means this genuinely is a “they don’t make’em like this any more” type of picture. So any marks for accuracy are out of the window then. It coasts along on star power with a very young looking, post-Star Wars but pre-Raiders of the Lost Ark, Harrison Ford, with Robert Shaw and Edward Fox as well as Django himself, Franco Nero. The connection with the original The Guns of Navarone is tenuous at best, the film taking place in German-occupied Yugoslavia. Still, I enjoyed it. It’s fun and a good enough example of movies like this, these international productions with all-star casts.
, impressive junkyard locations, average special effects and screenplay by David Webb Peoples (yes, Unforgiven), which is nothing special - all in all this is one of Anderson’s better efforts