Three Films Make A Post: The Best Loved Bandit Of All Time!

On the Rocks (2020): This is another one of those films where I seem to have seen a very different movie than most other people. After comparisons with classic screwball comedies, praises for its New York-ness and with Rashida Jones and Bill Murray in front of the camera and Sofia Coppola behind it, I was pumped for a bit of light yet fun entertainment. What I actually got was a rich people’s problems film where poor people only exist as waiters, waitresses and drivers to serve as a background for some of the least interesting marital and daddy issues imaginable. Most of the film may take place in New York, but it’s certainly no part of New York anyone but the upper class twats inhabiting it would ever want to see. It’s all just very dull to look at, and that dullness runs through most of the film – it’s slow, the emotional stakes for this viewer are very low, and when it comes to light charm, humour and hidden depths, you won’t want to throw out your Nora Ephron movies.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938): So let’s get back eight decades into the past to find something more lively. Michael Curtiz’s Hollywood version of elements of British folklore is of course one of the best swashbucklers every made, and a film that still plays rather wonderfully. Sure, as always, there are elements very much of its time especially when it comes to characterisation, and I’m always flabbergasted by the Richard the Lionheart love (a guy who clearly didn’t give a crap about the country he was supposed to rule, what with him always gallivanting off to a crusade or two, or finding other business to be away on), but otherwise, this is a flawless movie, from Errol Flynn’s ability to play a smug bastard but still make him charming and likeable, over the eye-popping colour palette, to an astonishing amount of clever and playful little touches and ideas in the script. There’s never a dull moment here, that’s for sure.

The Green Room aka La chambre verte (1978): I have to admit that I’ve never been a particular admirer of Henry James, not even of his visits in the realms of the supernatural and the borderline weird, but the man’s body of work certainly has resulted in quite a few great movies. Case in point is this one, where François Truffaut mixes James’s story “The Altar of the Dead” with elements of a couple of other short stories that apparently connected with the director’s own haunted thoughts about the people in his life he lost. The result is an emotionally and intellectually complex meditation on what we owe the dead, how the memory of the dead can dramatically overshadow the ability to live life itself.

So it is very much a ghost story, though one without any ghosts but the ones the protagonist, as well played by Truffaut in his last stint as an actor, creates through his inability to let go of the love as well as his grudges against the dead. I don’t really want to pretend it’s a horror film in anything but the broadest sense, yet it does at the very least tell of a haunted man and incorporates some finely wrought gothic imagery. Beside being brilliant.

Three Films Make A Post: They Say No One Can Save The World. Meet No One.

6 Underground (2019): Obviously, not being named Rex Reed, I usually talk about movies here I have stayed awake watching throughout, and seen all the way through to the bitter end. However, given the clear disrespect – if not even outright hatred - Michael Bay shows for us poor idiots watching this particular thing, and having inflicted half of it on myself, I think I do deserve at least a little compensation (like a couple of months of free Netflix, the other party responsible for this roaring garbage fire). So, even having only seen half of the film, I can most certainly say that Bay is still completely unable to stage and film action sequences, he’s even worse than he was when he shot the unparsable car chase in The Rock. Today, his action isn’t just over-edited and makes no structural sense, it has also learned to shake and strobe like a Tony Scott movie, adding the epilepsy to the headache. The “script” was written by the guys who brought us Deadpool, Zombieland and Life, so you know it was going to be some smug meta-masturbation at best, but is just probably cocaine-addled and deeply mean-spirited nonsense by writers who are so much less clever than they obviously think they are. Screw, Michael Bay, seriously.

Dog Eat Dog (2016): This Paul Schrader film with Nicolas Cage, Willem Dafoe and Christopher Matthew Cook as luckless and pretty stupid small time crooks getting themselves killed over their inability to kidnap a baby sort of fits 6 Underground. Not because it’s also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen but because it is pretty damn mean-spirited and excessive, too, Schrader apparently trying to very belatedly make the kind of black comedy which feels heavily influenced by all those would-be Tarantinos that cropped up after Pulp Fiction. The characters are your typical Schrader troubled males with violent tendencies (or in the case of Dafoe’s aptly named “Mad Dog” more than just tendencies) but drawn with a meanness that turns them into nasty caricatures, something the film, as well as the actors clearly revels in. It’s what you call an “interesting effort” while stroking your chin thoughtfully. Also features Nicolas Cage doing a Bogart imitation, it you’re into that.


Scrooged (1988): I know, Christmas is over, but Richard Donner’s version of the old Dickens number with added media critique that still seems rather fitting today, with Bill Murray despite being in a very bad mood during production actually giving a fantastic performance, fits these other two films rather well in its often very mean-spirited vibe. Unlike the other movies in this post, it is an actual artistic success, though, and does its very best to use said mean-spiritedness to say something to, as well as do something with the audience. Even if it is only to upset us pretty terribly about humanity (our Scrooge stand-in isn’t even the worst person in the movie) and then make up for it by having Murray give a “be kind to one another” speech where he seems to be teetering at the edge of an actual breakdown. Which, I’d argue, is exactly the right way to go here, for what the more polite versions of the material tend to gloss over is that we witness a man whose every belief (nasty as those may be) has just been curb-stomped and who is trying to recreate himself as a human being live on camera.

In short: The Dead Don’t Die (2019)

Centerville, an American small town populated by Jim Jarmusch characters played by Jim Jarmusch’s actor and musician friends (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Chloë Sevigny, Steve Buscemi, Eszter Balint, Danny Glover, Tom Waits, Zombie Iggy Pop, Caleb Landry Jones, RZA, Larry Fessenden, Selena Gomez and so on and so forth), suffers under the results of slight changes in the Earth’s axial rotation certainly not at all caused by polar cap fracking, no sir. Namely, some ever so slight troubles with electronic devices, the day night cycle, Sturgill Simpson’s theme song to the film, and the return of the deceased as flesh eating zombies. Needless to say, things are going to end badly.

Even among fans of the great Jim Jarmusch’s late-ish – the kind of late that makes a boy hope the director’s gonna live long enough this will actually turn out to be the mid-period of his career – period, this expedition into the realm of the horror comedy (or really, the realm of what a horror comedy would look like when made by Jarmusch), has a bit of a marmite effect. Also, there’s the “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson. It’s great.

It’s no surprise, really, for here, Jarmusch’s typical love for the laconic and the dead-pan turns even deader (which seems curiously appropriate for a zombie movie), exclusively featuring humour so dry, it’s situated in one of the world’s great deserts. This extra dry approach feels pretty hilarious in itself, like an attempt to really dance on the edge where something can actually still be called humour and not just the in-jokey product of a bunch of friends who somehow got paid for farting around in front of a camera. Me, I found myself amused by this approach more often than not, chuckling quite regularly about some of the running gags, even finding myself snorting about the many, many scenes of Murray and Driver trying to out-dead-pan each other (Murray’s winning, of course, because he’s not been moving his face or his voice much for a few more decades than driver), the throw-away side gags, and of course, Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”.

Plus, how many other films do you know in which Tilda Swinton is playing a perhaps somewhat weird Scottish coroner with an old school samurai thing and turns out to be…something spoilerish? Or whose theme song is Sturgill Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die”?


Seriously, I love the film dearly, but I can’t really blame anyone coming out of this with a puzzled and mildly annoyed expression on their face, because that’s just the kind of horror comedy The Dead Don’t Die is.