Three Films Make A Post: Freedom always comes with a price.

A Prayer for the Dying (1987): This one’s not exactly one of Mike Hodges’s great achievements as a director. It tonally wavers between his rather different masterpieces already out at the time, Get Carter and Flash Gordon. So some of the film’s gangster/IRA business is more than just bordering on the camp (take nearly every single scene with Alan Bates’s gangster boss/mortician and much of the overdone Catholic imagery), while other parts of the film have the grey nihilism you’d probably expect from Hodges doing this specific plot. The film’s major problem is that these two sides of the film don’t actually seem to belong together at all, as if the director had used a coin toss before shooting any given scene to come up with its tone. It’s still an interesting film, and never a boring one, mind you, it’s just not terribly good. Though Mickey Rourke’s Irish accent is never less than hilarious.

The Closet aka 클로젯 (keul-lo-jet) (2018 or 2020, depending on the source): Kim Kwang-bin’s South Korean horror film about the disappearance of a daughter thanks to a creature that uses closet doors as dimension doors and the father (Ha Jung-woo) who is trying to rescue her with the help of a somewhat untrustworthy exorcist (Kim Nam-gil) is certainly not going to go down in my books as one of the great horror films from the country. It starts strong, connecting the shared trauma of father and daughter caused by the death of the mother in an accident nicely with the supernatural elements, but once the kid’s gone, things turn into a certainly fast and furious but also not terribly creepy or scary series of jump scares and okay horror set pieces, keeping everything that’s going on too much on the surface and too focussed on cheap and easy shocks. As a carnival ride, it’s still a fair piece of work.

The Big Swindle aka 범죄의 재구성 (2003): Also from South Korea but made a decade earlier, Choi Dong-hoon’s heist movie mixes broad and subtle comedy and silly and clever ideas to excellent effect, using the complicated flashback structure beloved by South Korean cinema at the time to make its series of heists, betrayals, revenges, secrets and lies rather more complicated than it actually is. Complicated, not confusing, though, for Choi has a clear eye for character motivation (even when these motives are hidden or confused), and while the characters’ various plans only make sense in a movie world, they absolutely make sense for these characters to have.


The film presents this with great verve, a love for visual gags, and a game cast consisting of people like Park Shin-yang, Baek Yoon-sik and Yum Jung-ah.

In short: Mona Lisa (1986)

Small time gangster George (Bob Hoskins) is released from prison. His stay has - apart from years of his life - cost him the relationship with his daughter. His marriage was already broken before. Mortwell (Michael Caine in full-on delightful scenery chewing mode), the man for whom George went to prison, didn’t hold up his part of the usual bargain either, so no money and protection went to George or his family.

Now that George is released and asking to get what is his, Mortwell – not in person, mind you, he’s now clearly to posh to personally talk to the Georges of this world, unless he wants something from them, of course – does apparently try to make up for his failings a little by arranging a job for him. George is going to drive and protect high class independent call-girl Simone (Cathy Tyson) on her job working the West End hotels. At first, the two don’t exactly hit it off, clashing in class, race and personality, but they do develop a rapport and a degree of trust. Or at least, George falls in love with Simone while she asks him to help her out with the trouble that really drives her – finding a girl she was working with when she was still a street prostitute, and, perhaps rescuing her.

In my experience, Neil Jordan’s movies are either brilliant or completely unwatchable, and the relation seems to be about sixty to forty for the brilliance. The man’s work is certainly not predictable. Mona Lisa is definitely one of the brilliant ones, mixing elements and structure of British crime film with a sharp look at the way sexual exploitation is embedded in class structures, and adds an examination of the anxieties and blind spots coming with a particular kind of working class maleness, particularly when confronted with a woman like Simone who doesn’t fit quite so easily into any of the roles anyone wants to ascribe to her.

Instead of treating these things in as abstract a way as this sounds, though, Jordan truly looks at them through his characters. These, he treats with a compassionate gaze that doesn’t excuse the characters’ failings or absolve them of responsibility for their actions but understands how much of what they do follows the roads society has prescribed for them, and precisely how their life experiences shape their reactions, too. At the same time, Mona Lisa is also a cracking good crime film, one which deeply and intelligently argues with/against the noir idea of the femme fatale, a film about the vagaries of love, a stylish prime example of late 80s filmmaking that swings between the gritty, the slick and even the mildly whimsical, as well as an acting showcase for Bob Hoskins and Cathy Tyson who both give highly nuanced – and not at all showy - performances that are career highlights in careers rich in those.


I generally don’t like to use words like “masterpiece” at all (owing to my general dislike for the canon as a concept as well as for the idea of objectivity when thinking about art) but then, how else should one call a film that does everything perfectly right?

In short: The Lost World (2001)

For my tastes, this BBC version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel is an exemplary adaptation of a novel with many a problematic aspect (at least from the view of contemporary racial and romantic politics) that would make an unchanged adaption awkward to unpleasant.

So Stuart Orme’s film keeps the general shape of Doyle’s book – in fact, it hews much closer to it than a lot of other adaptations – but changes motivations, details, and characters to something more approachable to contemporary ethics while keeping the charms of old-fashioned adventure, romance, dinosaurs and ape men intact. At the same time, the film never falls into the trap of changing things up for change’s sake, keeping many details of Doyle’s novel intact, and rejigging others in a way that doesn’t so much suggest deconstruction as loving and knowing critique. Many of the changes are of course obvious: what if we look at the hidden plateau’s native human population as if they were actual human beings? Why not have romantic politics not quite as constrained by the horrors of Victorian sexual and emotional values? Why not make Challenger (embodied with a most excellent mix of grouchiness and enthusiasm by Bob Hoskins) slightly more personable (less random hitting of journalists here), and express ambiguity towards Lord Roxton’s (Tom Ward) Great White Hunter-dom? And so on, and so forth.

Personally, in an intellectual climate right now that on all sides tends heavily towards the black and white views of shouty bullies, I also found its pleasant to encounter a movie that does express ambiguity towards Roxton or Victorian values instead of plain loathing, actually trying to understand (perhaps even respect, where possible) the differences instead of going the easy way of total condemnation of everything; there’s quite a bit about the times and their morals that deserve little more than condemnation of course, but going to the effort of actually putting things in context to decide which do and which don’t still is worthwhile.

All this does for the most part work in the film’s background – apart from a kitschy yet likeable bit of ecological and/or anti-colonialist business right at the end – while Orme takes great pleasure in realizing most of the great set pieces of Doyle’s novel and adding various adventure movie standards to boot. Add to that a lively acting ensemble (also including Elaine Cassidy, Matthew Rhys, James Fox and Peter Falk), tolerable to excellent effects, and very pretty photography, and it’s very difficult for me to argue against this version of The Lost World.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,british tv,stuart orme,bob hoskins,james fox,tom ward,matthew rhys,elaine cassidy,peter falk,adventure,fantasy

In short: Lassiter (1984)

London, 1939. Cat burglar Lassiter (Tom “I’m bored” Selleck) is pressed into the joined service of his and the British government by mild-mannered FBI agent Breeze (Joe Regalbuto), and irascible London copper Becker (Bob Hoskins). He is to steal a bunch of diamonds from the German embassy or he’ll land in jail on trumped up charges.

Well, in truth, Becker has such an irrational hate-on for Lassiter, he’s planning on locking him up in any case once the thief has gotten hold of the jewels; clearly, nobody involved explained to him the story Lassiter would tell during his process might get a wee bit embarrassing for the UK or their American friends who haven’t actually even joined the war at this point. But before he needs to solve that problem, Lassiter has to commit sexspionage on crazy German diamond courier Kari von Fürsten (Lauren Hutton), survive the ire of his girlfriend Sara (Jane Seymour), and plan and execute his jewel heist. Oh, and of course there will be The Sting-like caper movie tricks involved, just much dumber.

And there’s one of the main problems of Roger Young’s Lassiter right there: if you attempt to make a movie that’s playing on the field of movies like The Sting and the caper movies of the 30s and 40s, you really need to make sure you are actually on the same level and not a tired, erratically paced mess that seems to believe in its own cleverness too much to ever be even the slightest bit clever. And what use is all the fine, showy production design recreating 1939 if there’s not much of interest happening in it anyhow because your film is only ever dragging its feet in it, with large parts of the film consisting of an incredibly bored looking lead actor doing nothing of import or interest?

Which promptly leads us to the next problem, namely the fact that Tom Selleck isn’t just no Cary Grant, but tries to get by on his good looks alone, never showing any interest or spark of life at all, neither when he’s actually getting around to some thievery, nor when he’s half-unwillingly getting seduced by a Lauren Hutton whose crazy overacting could have used a foil willing or able to play along (the same goes for Hoskins or Seymour, by the way). I have gotten used to supposedly charming rogues in movies in truth being unpleasant arseholes, but Selleck’s performance here is so disinterested it’s impossible to get any feeling at all that suggests whatever he thinks he’s doing on screen. Selleck’s a void in the centre of a film that desperately needed the kind of actor able to take control of scenes, or sparkle.

This lifelessness seems to infect many aspects of the film, be it the stop and start plotting that never goes anywhere, the way the film builds Hutton’s character as menacing and dangerous but then just forgets about doing anything with that, and the tiresome and tedious attempts at plot twists. I’m getting as bored as Selleck looks throughout Lassiter just writing about it again.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,crime,roger young,tom selleck,bob hoskins,jane seymour,lauren hutton