Three Films Make A Post: World War Two was just ending. World War Murphy is about to begin.

Murphy’s War (1971): When he was on, Peter Yates could be a great director; when he was off he did tend to make at the very least interesting failures. Murphy’s War, a film about an Irish airplane mechanic with an improbable accent despite being played by Peter O’Toole who makes increasingly insane attempts at taking vengeance on a German U-Boat crew right at the end of World War II, lands somewhere in the middle. There are some riveting set pieces, some excellent tender or hard character moments, but the film is also full of scenes that go on far longer than they need to or should. Worse, it never manages to convince me of Murphy’s increasing derangement, never really finds an angle to show his inner life in a way that makes sense. It doesn’t help that the ending jumps gleefully over the line between the heightened intensity and absurdity of an action movie ending and sheer, goofy nonsense.

La muerte del chacal (1984): This mixture of Mexican action cinema standards and giallo and slasher tropes directed by Pedro Galindo III and starring the dynamic facial hair of brother duo Mario and Fernando Almada is not a perfect film by far – it does tend to drag rather a lot in its first half – but it certainly has a couple of really neat ideas. Particularly the way the mid-act plot twist runs against all audience expectations is rather a thing to behold, especially in a film where you’d never expect any such thing to happen.

After this, the film turns full-on slasher, with still a bit too much feet-dragging for its own good, but also some genuinely cool suspense scenes and stylish kills, as well as an awesomely goofy scene in which one Almeda kills a Doberman with his bare hands in a manner so ridiculous, even a dog person might laugh.

Incantation (2022): I know, quite a few people go really nuts about Kevin Ko’s Taiwanese POV horror movie. It is certainly a film made with the highest competence, full of well-timed shocks, with some creepy ideas, but I also find it nearly aggressively derivative of the traditions of J-Horror and creepypasta (its big, obvious plot twist is taken directly from the latter realm). Which does not make it a bad movie, or even an unenjoyable one, but one that’s a bit too much like a clockwork made out of stolen and borrowed parts to truly do something for me.

Three Films Make A Post: The Price Is Blood

Climax (2018): Leave it to very French director Gaspar Noé to make a film about a group of dancers getting dosed with LSD and going on a shared trip of dance, sex, violence and death that can feel excessive and abstract at the same time, breaking taboos without getting smug about it. Stylistically, it goes through the sort of intensities of colour, movement and behaviour a viewer will by now expect of the director – an audience not okay with strobe lights and a lot of shrieking need not apply – yet the film never feels to be the wrong kind of self-indulgent, Noé always getting to a point eventually even if his films seem to be meandering. Style in this director’s case is still an important part of the substance of his movies.

Under the Silver Lake (2018): This, the film writer/director David Robert Mitchell made after the brilliant It Follows, on the other hand is very self-indulgent indeed. It’s yet another one of those LA movies apparently made explicitly so that filmmakers existing in their LA bubble can wink and smile smugly at the other inhabitants of said bubble watching, full of in-jokes only the LA-obsessed will tolerate and apparently vacant of any wish to communicate with the rest of the world. Add to this general air of group masturbation a pie made out of badly digested Pynchon and Lynch, and you have a film I want to punch in the face rather badly, even though I’ve only got a tiny non-punching guy’s fist available, and am not into punching on general principle anyway.

There’s certainly a lot of technically excellent filmmaking on display here, but I’ll wait for that to be applied to something other than a bloated, 140 minute in-joke, thank you very much. Though, given how different this one is from Mitchell’s other two features, and those from one another, I might not have too long to wait; at least, one can’t blame the man for simply repeating himself.

Breaking Away (1979): Rather better at using an actual place – in this case the somewhat unglamorous and therefor infinite more interesting Bloomington, Indiana – to actually speak about something of interest to people not living there is this coming-of-age comedy by Peter Yates (also a man of very different films). It treats the feelings of young working class men of not belonging into the world of their parents but also being blocked from participating in the world the people born rich or richer seem to enjoy so much with delicacy, dignity, and a sense of whimsy, not going the poverty porn route of painting everyone and everything in the bleakest possible way yet also not looking away from shit.


Yates’s treatment of the material is so clear-eyed and even-handed, he even sells a climactic cycling event as meaningful and exciting to a guy like me who could care less about people riding bikes in circles (even though it’s a nice metaphor for the human condition). There’s also brilliant, idiosyncratic use of classical music in a context where most movies would go for Springsteen or would-be Springsteen, and great performances by Dennis Christopher, Dennis Quaid, Daniel Stern, a tiny Jackie Earle Haley, Barbara Barrie and Paul Dooley.

Three Films Make A Post: Ruthless invaders. A defenseless planet. And a daring band of space adventurers fighting to save it.

Eyewitness (1981): This film by Peter Yates is a weird one: part thriller, part dubious romance, full of fantastic actors being fantastic (William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, Christopher Plummer and James Woods in their prime are certainly nothing to sneeze at), there’s also text and subtext about the way the personal and the political intermingle that never quite comes together coherently, and a load of scenes of stuff that seems completely incidental to plot, characters or theme and just hangs there dragging things down.

When the film is good, it is brilliant: the first attempts of Hurt’s character to get closer to his long-time crush TV news reporter Weaver are pathetic, creepy and even sweet in equal measures; some of the suspense scenes are taken right out of the Hitchcock handbook in the best possible way; and an American film actually talking about class is always to be praised.

Too bad that the bizarrely sugary ending seems to forget everything that was ambiguous, creepy or actually difficult in the proposed relationship between Hurt and Weaver, and that the film again and again stops in its tracks to run off in perfectly useless directions.

Shoot ‘Em Up (2007): Made in the same spirit as the Crank movies, but less annoying and with an actor (Clive Owen) instead of a persona in the lead, this one holds itself exactly to what its title promises. Then it adds an obsession with carrots (you will believe you can kill a man with a carrot), eye mutilation (also eye mutilation by carrot), a Monica Bellucci who is totally wasted in her role as lactating prostitute (hey, I didn’t write the movie, so don’t look at me) yet still awesome, Paul Giamatti eating all of the scenery (yes, even yours), and action scenes that reach from the absurd to the hilariously insane. Oh, and the right kind of rock music, too, because every act of cartoon violence is improved by adding “Ace of Spades” to it.
It’s stupid fun in the best way, says this carrot.

Sing Street (2016): This John Carney film about a young guy  growing up poor in 1980s Dublin finding self respect and love, talent and hope when he founds a band to impress a girl does sound a bit too friendly and nice on paper, but in practice, Carney is a sharp observer of human ambiguities who can show the lies his characters tell themselves without looking down on them. Not looking down at his characters is one of Carney’s strengths in general: this is a director who lets his young characters say youthfully pretentious stuff, knows it is youthfully pretentious, but neither makes fun of them nor nods at them from a distance, taking their dreams seriously even though they aren’t his dreams anymore. Carney’s a bit of a music specialist, so it’ll come as no surprise that the music’s great too (and this is a musical in anything but name, and not just in the music video daydream scene) while also being the sort of music these characters in this time would believably make.


There’s so much genuine sympathy and warmth on screen here, only the most cynical will not to moved and charmed.

Year of the Comet (1992)

Her father, a big trader in wine as a collector’s item, and not one in visible affection, finally allows wine expert Margaret Harwood (Penelope Ann Miller) to go out and catalogue her first wine cellar out on the Isle of Man. This first outing turns out to be quite the coup, for Maggie finds buried among the dross a humungous and very, very valuable bottle of wine bottled in the year of the Great Comet (therefore the title) for Napoleon’s personal use. How Nappy planned to survive drinking his body weight in wine, we never learn. Maggie’s father sells the bottle right when he hears of it to his favourite customer, who in turn sends out his all-around trouble-shooting macho man assistant Oliver Plexico (Tim “The ‘stache” Daly) to get the bottle home safely.

Alas, there are a few problems for Maggie and Oliver. It’s not just that they are clearly involved in one of those Hollywood romances of people first loudly professing how much they loathe one another to finally fall in just as loud love, for there are several groups after the bottle. There’s the elderly landlady (Julia McCarthy) and her murderous son who just like the sound of one million dollars, one Philippe (Louis Jourdan) and his men who think one former associate has hidden some mysterious formula in or around the bottle, as well as the henchpeople of another wine collector who has been sold the very same bottle by Maggie’s mildly evil half-brother. Looks like the road to true love is paved with adventures through Europe for our heroine and hero.

Year of the Comet’s Peter Yates is one of these directors it is pretty difficult to get a handle on. In the early part of his career he sure knew how to do brilliant crime films and car chases, yet only a handful – and generally the best – of the films he made throughout his career actually fit these talents, while a lot of them are pretty characterless mid-level mainstream Hollywood (and British would-be-Hollywood) affairs of the completely forgettable sort, or Krull.

Once you’ve seen enough of his lesser films (that make a most of his filmography, really), you just might start to notice a pattern with them, though. Yates was clearly an admirer of classic, pre-70s Hollywood style films, and some of his body of work seems to me an attempt to keep the values and the style of these films alive during the 80s and 90s, just generally not with too much artistic success. Classic Hollywood is difficult, even for the talented. The William Goldman-scripted film at hand fits very well into this theory, though it does work much better than many other of Yates’s films of this type, perhaps because it wears its heart and its influences rather obviously on its sleeve.

So, this is one of these adventurous romances you might imagine seeing Cary Grant or Errol Flynn in, with a plot that is light, fluffy,  and quite nonsensical yet also a really fun set-up made to keep the romance moving and the audience entertained with some stunts, some action, some comedy, and so on. Of course, Tim Daly sure is no Cary Grant; on the other hand, Penelope Ann Miller is allowed to be much more fun than she would have been in the olden times (at least after World War II), and is really charming enough to sell Daly too.

There’s really not terribly much else to say about the film, I’m afraid: if you’re in the market for a slightly updated (with the good stuff of less icky romance and a more present female lead) old-style Hollywood adventure romance, with sometimes silly, sometimes witty humour, little depth but a truly polished surface, then this is going to be a lot of fun (remember that?) for you; if not, you’re probably dead inside, say stuff about films like “it’s fun and endearing but there’s just no true depth to it”, and probably don’t even appreciate that sometimes a piece of fluff can save lives, or at least souls.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,adventure,romance,peter yates,penelope ann miller,tim daly,louis jourdan

Krull (1983)

The Beast, evil ruler of the galaxy, is aiming to add the low-tech, still clinging to the tenets of monarchism, world of Krull to his domain (and probably to push an old, vague prophecy into going his way, which, as pop culture tells us, never ends well). To achieve this lofty goal, our Beast has transported himself and his mobile teleporting fortress of Evil to Krull, and, for all we know, is kicking the planet’s ass.

The planet’s only chance to escape beastly domination is the unification of two – one presumes the biggest? – kingdoms via the marriage of strapping young Prince Colwyn (Ken Marshall) of Whatever and Princess Lyssa (Lysette Anthony) of the other Whatever. Of course, the Beast’s soldiers interrupt the couple’s wedding, kill most everyone except for Colwyn, and abduct Lyssa so the Beast can marry her, and we don’t have to suffer from the possibility of a) an un-kidnapped princess and b) a woman potentially doing anything of import.

You know the rest: older guy instructing our hero, ragtag band of misfits (including Alun Armstrung and Robbie Coltrane and Liam Neeson before they were famous but doing pretty hilarious death scenes), various dangers, triumph of Good over Evil thanks to the actual flamethrower-like powers of Love.

Ah, for the heady days of the early 80s, when everyone and their mother was trying to follow the success of the first two Star Wars movies by trying their luck at various doomed big budget Science Fantasy productions in the spirit of the kind of tale you’d have found in Planet Stories decades earlier. Now, unlike that gentleman around the corner who’d poo-poo this choice of spiritual source because he only likes serious Science Fiction (don’t ask him about Stalker), I think that’s a perfectly reasonable approach to the genre if you have money to burn for spectacle. Unfortunately, most of the producers, writers and directors making these movies really had no business making them, showing little to no sense of what’s important in this sort of film, what’s bound to be successful, and what’s just stupid.

Case in point is the UK-lead Krull, directed by Peter Yates who made some fine crime films in the 70s but shows no flair for Krull’s material at all, leading to a film that often gets surprisingly little out of pretty awesome set-ups, and drags terribly in between. Of course, Stanford Sherman’s script doesn’t help there either, confusing the quest approach to a plot the film probably is supposed to take - you know the sort, where every seemingly disconnected encounter on the road actually leads the hero to wisdom and/or talks to us about the thematic concerns of a story and the world it takes place in – with a one damned thing after another approach that could only be really effective when directed with a sense of fun and swashbuckling flair. Both not things Yates shows here at all.

It’s a bit of a shame for Krull, too, because the production’s random and slightly confused approach to science fantasy and all things fantastic also leads to quite a bit of the sort of Weirdness I’d usually be all over. And it’s true, if you take some of the film’s random assemblages of episodes independently, there are worthwhile moments in it at least on the level of a very entertaining and dream-like peplum, like the Changeling attack or the Widow of the Web sequence. Unfortunately, they are also, even when they are supposedly the culmination of character arcs, never used with an eye on their connection to the rest of the film, and stay interesting but isolated from everything else that’s going on here. How badly is Krull disconnected? Why, it doesn’t even get the Evil conquered by the Power of Love stuff right, not because the Love as an actual lance of flame shooting out of somebody’s hand is inherently ridiculous (though it most certainly is) but because the film couldn’t be bothered to even establish the love between the Corwyn and Lyssa properly, in part because these two are as lacking in personality as the romantic leads in a classic Hammer horror film, in part because it just doesn’t seem to do the work necessary. See also Corwyn’s super weapon, the Glaive (confusingly enough, not an actual glaive but a star fish shaped throwing weapon), that is of use for about thirty seconds.

The production design in the spirit of European comics and a bit of the inevitable H.R. Giger when it comes to the Beast’s fortress is worth a look though, and when you’re in the mood for two hours of disconnected, sometimes weird, sometimes boring quest science fantasy that never coheres into an actual movie, you might not be too annoyed by Krull. Plus, if you have a bad memory like me, you’ll watch this thing every five years or so because you remembered the film’s weirdness but not how little it does with it.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,fantasy,peter yates,ken marshall,lysette anthony,alun armstrong,liam neeson,robbie coltrane

In short: The Hot Rock (1972)

At the time this was made, director Peter Yates was on something of a roll with various types of crime films, all rather great in one way or the other, and all absolutely typical of 70s filmmaking in all the best ways. The Hot Rock is an adaptation of one of Donald E. Westlakes’s comedic crime novels about the perpetually unlucky thief Dortmunder (here played by Robert Redford who, whatever you may think of the casting for this particular character is a really great actor for this kind of comedic heist/caper movie), who is basically Westlake’s Stark without the murderous intentions and the sociopathy. Here, Dortmunder and co (George Segal, Ron Leibman, Paul Sand) are attempting to steal a very special diamond for the UN representative of an African nation (done with perfect deadpan by Moses Gunn), and then have to steal it again, and again, and etc, while double-crosses and various inopportune events destroy their best laid plans. Repeatedly.

While the film becomes increasingly funny and bizarre in excellent style, Yates also gets at the other core of many of Westlake’s comedic novels: these are books – and a film - about characters stumbling through a universe as set against – or at best uncaring of - humanity as that of Lovecraft’s stories or the Parker novels, just that this particular uncaring or cruel universe doesn’t crush its victims but instead prefers to play cruel jokes on them, and that in the Dortmunder universe, some of the characters have the ability to play the tricks right back.

Of course, it’s not all the universe’s fault here, for the characters here, comedy or not, are quite fine with doing unpleasant things to one another quite without help and don’t exactly need it to ruin their respective days; it’s just funnier when their bad intentions and those of the universe meet.

Technorati-Markierungen: in short,american movies,crime,comedy,peter yates,robert redford,george segal,ron leibman,paul sand,moses gunn