Three Films Make A Post: For justice. For loyalty. For friendship.

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005): I am really rather fond of the handful of films Tommy Lee Jones directed. While also centred around Jones as an actor, these films are prime examples of a quiet and collected post-New Hollywood filmmaking style, never stylistically showy, but always shot in such a way as to help keep actors and their characters at the centre. This one also recommends itself through a really peculiar sense of humour, the willingness to leave questions unanswered, as well as a what feels like a the conviction to meet characters on their own terms, and follow the lines of inquiry that leads to. Curiously enough, given how Jones is supposed to be on set, these lines tend to lead to compassion (not an uncritical one, mind you) and understanding, not the kitschy idea of these concepts, but the sort of thing that’s actual work for everyone involved.

Alone on the Pacific aka Taiheiyô hitoribotchi (1963): Kenichie (Yujiro Ishihara) makes it his young life’s goal to cross the Pacific to the USA in a one person sailboat. For much of its running time, the film cuts between our hero’s misadventures at sea and his growing up disaffected, eventually planning his trip. Director Kon Ichikawa doesn’t really lean into the adventure elements of the tale too hard – though he is perfectly willing and able to portray some of Kenichie’s troubles at sea, he is more interested in a meticulous portrayal of the state of mind a body at the borders of its endurance can reach, touching the surreal and the stylistically theatrical because these seem to be closest to the state of mind Kenichie gets into. There’s also quite a bit of social commentary towards post war Japan and the way it treats its youth, but I’m not terribly sure I’m the right audience for that part of the film.

At Close Range (1986): James Foley’s version of a true crime story is a deeply frustrating movie. The cast, with a young Sean Penn, Christopher Walken, Mary Stuart Masterson, Chris Penn and so on is brilliant. Foley even seems to realize this and provides them with a lot of big scenes to do big actor things in. The problem is that most of these scenes are utterly wrong-headed, never giving the actors the material to be people instead of characters in a movie built out of clichés from other movies. The script (by Elliott Lewitt and Nicholas Kazan) makes the impression of being written by people who have never met one of the small town and rural poor before, portraying people, their motivations and actions in ways that never feel anything but wrong. On the direction side, Foley polishes everything to a sheen that often works against the story he is trying to tell, making poverty and the world rural noir tales are made of look like an overdirected 80s ad, making it impossible to believe in these characters and the places they are supposed to inhabit.

Three Films Make A Post: Take The Trip

Stone (1974): This Australian bikie (thanks for that term, Australia) exploitation movie is a weird thing. It starts out as a paranoid acid trip (that is to say, pretty awesome), turns into a nearly anthropological look at its version of bikie culture - with some added fun violence in between, of course – and ends with the sort of 70s downer business that really puts all that talk about honour in the scenes before into a rather brutal perspective.

One-time feature director and occasional actor Sandy Harbutt has quite the eye for going from 70s psychedelia, through the scenes that feel documentary, to the cheap and fun action, dropping some acerbic bits about class, and getting back to the bad trip quality while making things feel natural.

Hell Drivers (1957): There’s also quite a bit of class commentary in Cy Endfield’s curious mix of melodrama, truck action, and noir tropes. Unlike in many a 50s British movie, one can even imagine the director having met working class people before. The film also shows for its time surprising sympathy for its Italian “Gastarbeiter” character (though he is played by the decidedly not Italian Herbert Lom), and generally seems to have a good working idea of how a certain type of working class pride can easily be exploited to destructive ends.

On a less theoretical level, for my tastes, the film comes down a bit too hard on the side of the melodrama, putting the action and the noir elements sometimes too far in the back. The cast is pretty amazing however, not only featuring Lom, Patrick McGoohan, Stanley Baker and Peggy Cummins in the leads, but having pop up William Hartnell, David McCallum, Gordon Jackson, and even Sean Connery in small before they were famous parts.

The Comeback Trail (2020): George Gallo’s remake of the Harry Hurwitz movie is one of those comedies that sometimes go out of their way to repeat a joke for the slow audience members, likes to mistime perfectly fine punchlines, and often shows surprisingly little talent for staging its jokes as best as it could. Frome time to time, the script’s very funny indeed (particularly if you like your low budget movies), but just as often, it seems to coast on some basic ideas in it being funny without actually bothering with turning them into funny scenes.

That the resulting film is still watchable and entertaining enough (in an undemanding manner) is mostly the responsibility of the actors, well, really mostly Tommy Lee Jones, Robert De Niro and Morgan Freeman (a trio frankly much too good for the film), who put quite a bit of effort into classing up the joint. As an addendum for your nightmares, please appreciate how much Emile Hirsch looks like a young, thin, Jack Black in this one.

In short: Ad Astra (2019)

A relatively near future where everyone is heavily tranquilized (or all actors are drugged, who knows for sure?). Energy surges apparently coming from Neptune blast through our solar system. Astronaut Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) and his daddy issues very slowly make their way towards the planet to perhaps do something about the situation as well as said issues.

I’m not one to blame a science fiction movie for not being a colourful adventure full of talking trees and raccoons with PTSD (though, actually…), but if you want to make a less adventuresome science fiction movie, please don’t end up like James Gray’s po-faced epic here, telling a tiny, clichéd story over two hours that feel more like years.

The film’s main problem is that it is desperately trying to be a movie about human psychology but clearly has no clue how to go about it. So we get stuff like the ridiculous scene in which Pitt’s character is attacked by a monkey (in space, nobody can hear you fling poo), quickly followed by another one of his endless “psych evaluations” in which he talks about his unexpressed anger. It’s as if the monkey is some kind of…metaphor!? Whoa. This is symptomatic for a film that clearly can’t imagine an audience that has Pitt’s character arc from the white middle-aged dude who is repressing his feelings to the white middle-aged dude who isn’t anymore because he wrestled his father (in space!) figured out after the first ten minutes or so, and so dooms us to twiddle our thumbs watching Pitt not express feelings until the film gets up to speed too. And if you still don’t get it, let’s add a mumbled, pointless, and monotone monologue by Pitt that tells us exclusively things we either already understand or that the film should show us instead of mumble at us, as per the cinematic rule of “show, don’t mumble!”.


All of which is a particular problem since that’s all there is to the film: its world building is perfunctory and vague, the acting is bland and impersonal (with Pitt, usually a guy who works well within the parameters of his limited abilities, clearly out of his depth), and it consciously rejects all visionary elements and concepts of science fiction (what I’d call the good and important stuff), aiming for a philosophy of tending one’s own garden instead, perhaps mumbling of awe and wonder but certainly never showing them.

Eyes of Laura Mars (1978)

Lately, fashion photographer with aspirations towards art Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway), has been running on fumes. It’s no wonder, since her latest and controversial period of work – consisting of tacky and slick “tasteful” sex and violence photos that were in reality shot by the inexplicably respected Helmut Newton – is inspired by visions and nightmares, in which, as she will soon enough learn, sees actual crimes she then feels drawn to restage in her photos. Now, things are getting worse for her when she starts to witness murders apparently live through the Vaseline-smeared eyes of a killer; most of these victims will belong to her associates and hangers-on.

Even before she goes and tells the cops of her visions, the relation to her earlier photos and actual crimes scenes has drawn the interest of one Lieutenant John Neville (Tommy Lee Jones). Neville is understandably sceptical of Laura’s tales of telepathy, as well as of her art, but he is also clearly smitten by her. Plus, given the identity of the new batch of victims, it stands to reason the killer is someone from her entourage too. And really, there are some good candidates there, like her irascible manager/assistant Donald (René Auberjonois), her driver Tommy (Brad Dourif) with his criminal record, and her sleazy parasite of an ex-husband (Raúl Juliá).

Today, Irvin Kershner’s Eyes of Laura Mars is mostly, if at all, mentioned as a footnote in the career of John Carpenter, who wrote the original treatment and script, and then got his first taste of the Hollywood rewriting machine, leaving him typically disgruntled. Given most of Carpenter’s work, I don’t think he’s responsible for the badly dragging middle part of the film that tries to distract the audience from the near total absence of any actual plot development by adding a few more murders.

The film’s not all dragging middle, though, and the first and last act both seem to put this plainly into the realm of American thrillers trying to adopt elements of the giallo. The setting at the borders between fashion industry and art world and the instant glamour this theoretically provides – in practice Mars’s work is ass-ugly – is very typical, as is the film’s focus on visual aesthetics as a way to clue an audience in on characters and theme through mood instead of narrative motion, an approach the more mainstream areas of US genre cinema are often not terribly comfortable with. There are certainly some good moments in this regard in the film - particularly the repeated use of mirror motifs is very effective not just visually but also thematically in its blurring of the line between the seen and the seeing. It also repeatedly suggests the very specific mental illness the killer will turn out to suffer from without clueing this so hard as to be too obvious. Still, the film is never quite consistent in this approach, wavering between Italian stylization and late 70s US grubbiness in rather unproductive ways.

The fine cast are also doing their best to play through and around the often very bland dialogue (the romance scenes between Dunaway and Jones, though for once actually necessary for the narrative to work, are a particularly egregious example), and sinking their teeth into the film’s grittier moments.


Eyes of Laura Mars simply doesn’t come quite together as a movie, not ending up as any real disappointment but promising more than it can actually deliver.

The Package (1989)

In what now looks like an alternative version of 1989, the USA and the USSR have decided on complete nuclear disarmament and an official end to the Cold War. Veteran Green Beret Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Gene Hackman) belongs to the mass of soldiers running security at the final negotiations concerning the matter. Or in his case, securing an outer perimeter.

After he and his men stumble into the assassination of a US officer by what the audience already knows is a conspiracy between Soviet and US hardliners to stop the peace process at any cost, he is very suddenly ordered to transport a military prisoner, one supposed Walter Henke (Tommy Lee Jones), to the US. Once arrived on US soil, Gallagher is attacked and knocked out while his charge absconds. Gallagher, being old, stubborn, and Gene Hackman, is smelling bullshit, and soon teams up with his also military ex-wife (Joanna Cassidy), and later a Chicago vice cop (Dennis Franz) to find his prisoner. Since he quickly realizes the man he brought to the US isn’t actually Walter Henke, and finds himself framed for murder to boot, Gallagher’s soon concentrating on finding out what the hell’s actually going on, perhaps saving world peace in the process. That’ll teach conspirators to screw with old school sergeants, I suppose.

The plot of Andrew Davis’s conspiracy/action thriller The Package is actually a bit more complicated than that, but thanks to a clear presentation by Davis and a script by John Bishop that usually focuses on providing the audience with the right information at the right time, it actually feels rather straightforward, in a good way. Now, you might argue that the conspiracy seems needlessly complicated, actually includes too many people who need to get killed for it to work, and really stops working as a plan at all once the public shoot-outs start, but its execution on screen works fine and never feels terribly preposterous even when it should.

The film’s plausibility is certainly increased by the resonances it has with the greatest hits of violent US politics like the Kennedy assassination and the nasty stuff US intelligence services have gotten up to throughout their existence. The cast helps there, too, with Hackman probably playing this sort of thing in his sleep yet still providing Gallagher with enough personality and sheer stubbornness to absolutely make him the guy to root for here; it’s also fascinating to watch a late 80s action movie whose hero isn’t a violent asshole but only ever kills in absolutely self-defence. The rest of the actors are as dependable and convincing as expected, with Cassidy, Jones, Franz, John Heard and Pam Grier in a way too small role all fleshing out what are at their core pretty plot functional roles.

From time to time, the film does look a little like an enhanced TV movie. As a rule – and for my tastes – Davis is a competent and effective but also somewhat too functional kind of director, absolutely able to direct this sort of thing effectively but keeping things a bit too tidy and controlled when a bit more chaos might make things more exciting or simply more interesting.


Still, The Package is a well done film that moves through its particular genre space with a degree of intelligence while providing a healthy dose of excitement. Which may sound like me damning with faint praise again, but is actually me complimenting a movie on a job well done.

Three Films Make A Post: Stay Alive Or Die Trying

The Furies (2019): Women are kidnapped and then trapped in a picturesque patch of Australian wilderness, together with a bunch of beefy guys in creepy masks who go about murdering them. But there’s something slightly more going on, for this is all part of some sort of live stream game for rich perverts, so there are a couple of rules for the women to find out.

So yeah, Tony D’Aquino’s film does mix a couple of popular sub-genres in not terribly original but also definitely not boring ways, throws some decent acting by Airlie Dodds, Linda Ngo and the rest of the cast in, provides some nice practical gore (if you’re a fan of eye mutilation, you will have a hell of a time), and adds the usual stuff about how people in extreme situations pretty much suck. It looks pretty good, and is well paced and competently written in any case, so there’s ninety minutes of good, icky fun to be had.

Peppermint (2018): One morning, a Hollywood studio executive stumbled upon a script about a vengeance seeking urban vigilante in the Punisher style meant for Liam Neeson, and found Taken director Pierre Morel tied to a radiator too. The only problem: Neeson had just given another one of those interviews where he says he’s not making action films anymore for at least the next couple of weeks. Fortunately, the exec’s favourite intern had an idea, so they hired Jennifer Garner for the Neeson role. Well, at least that’s what I imagine the origin story of Morel’s film to be, and it is pretty much the film you’ll imagine it to be. The set-up in this one feels particularly cartoonish, but otherwise, it’s a professional, competently done entry into this sub-genre, with a lead actress who is usually good with the more physical stuff, and a totally by the numbers script by Chad St. John that still manages to be entertaining enough, if one is in the mood for this dubious kind of revenge fantasy.


The Fugitive (1993): But let’s finish on a blast from the just as competent past, when Harrison Ford was an action star, people wanted to work with Tommy Lee Jones, and director Andrew Davis was semi-hot as an action and action thriller director. The script by David Twohy and Jeb Stuart is – despite a running time of over two hours – efficient and economical, which does provide the film with a breathless pace that’s exactly right for Davis’s particular talents. However, the writing is so stripped down that what little actual plot there is feels rather undercooked, the identity of the killer’s boss obvious simply by that character being the only one on screen who has enough lines to be a traitor to Harrison-Ford kind, and while everything’s certainly very exciting, it’s never surprising or particularly interesting. Though, to be fair, if you’re looking for an ultra-efficient rollercoaster without any ambition apart from that, this is pretty much your perfect film.

Under Siege (1992)

The US Missouri – a battleship carrying nuclear armaments – is on its final trip before being decommissioned. A bunch of evildoers under the leadership of one William Strannix (Tommy Lee Jones dressed like Bruce Springsteen circa 1985) has decided this is the best moment to hijack the ship, steal the missiles and sell them to the highest bidder. Because they have the ship’s XO Commander Krill (Gary Busey) – yes, that’s really his name – on their side, the pirates manage to get on board posing as entertainers for the Captain’s surprise birthday party and are so able to ambush the ship’s crew completely unawares and lock them up quite well.

All of the crew, that is, but chief cook Casey Ryback (Steven Seagal). As it happens, Ryback is not just an apparently great cook and a smug bastard but also a badass marine, so before anyone can say “Die Hard on a battleship”, he’s already teaming up with the playmate (Erika Eleniak) the bad guys brought with them for no good reason whatsoever, and starts to solve the little situation.

Ah, the times when some people in Hollywood thought they could turn Steven Seagal into a big budget action movie carrying star instead of the guy not even cutting it in direct to home video films he turned out to be. The positive side of this foolhardy endeavour for Under Siege is that Seagal is teamed with a whole bunch of people who are actually good at their jobs. While repeat-Seagal director Andrew Davis surely will never be confused with a great artist, he was at the time a more than decent director for this sort of bread and potatoes studio action movie, able to stage convincing and fun action sequences, keeping the explosions in focus, and certainly knowledgeable of enough of the tricks of his trade to make a highly entertaining bit of action cinema that looks and feels slick and flows well.

Add to that Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey apparently trying to outdo each other with their expressions of cheesy action movie villainy, as well as the horrors the costume department comes up for them - Busey outdoing Jones’s Boss-style with a bit of cross-dressing that isn’t embarrassing and uncomfortable to watch at all, oh no - and the fun factor heightens considerably.

Topping off the good parts of the film is an absolutely shameless script whose silliness only begins with having the villains act as undercover entertainers like the good guys in a 70s Bollywood masala infiltrating a villain’s lair. There is also many an absurd dialogue scene to witness (Wallace’s bizarre phone conversations with the prospective buyers of the missiles need to be heard to be believed), more ridiculous plotting than one could reasonably expect from a single movie, and bonus scenes supposedly taking place in the Pentagon so hokey, the 50s are embarrassed.


The film’s only problem is Seagal. He is, as we all know, a terrible actor with a tendency to exclusively project unfounded smugness, his martial arts skills look worse than anything the actors in the film who don’t pretend they have a martial arts background present, and his line delivery is so wooden as to make Chuck Norris look like an actor. He’s even out-thesped by Eleniak, and the poor woman’s really only in the movie to show off her implants. Seagal just doesn’t work as an actor, an action hero or even just a plain heroic figure, but thanks to the efforts of everyone else involved, he’s not as painful to watch as in most of his other films. Which, given that he’s the nominal lead of the piece, is quite an achievement by Davis and co.

In short: Jason Bourne (2016)

Well, this is certainly an improvement over the fourth, Bourne-less, Bourne movie. However, it doesn’t reach the heights of the original trilogy of films (particularly not of the last two films). In part, this is certainly because this one is coasting on established virtues where the original films were a shot in the arm of an ailing film genre; others in blockbuster land have taken the best the original Bourne films have to offer and expanded on it, where this doesn’t really take anything much further.

Paul Greengrass’s film is still a more than decent big budget spy thriller, with dependable performances by Matt Damon, Tommy Lee Wallace and particularly Alicia Vikander, with more than a few fine action sequences and expertly created forward momentum.

I’m not particularly happy with the film’s somewhat limp ending – you don’t leave a plot element like “the biggest social networking platform is spying for the CIA” unresolved in the way the film does. This particular part might have to do with Jason Bourne’s general dithering about the rights and wrongs of the surveillance state that leaves the impression of a film that is too cowardly to tread on anyone’s toes politically, rather than of a film that’s actually trying to think through the ethics of something and not quite coming to a conclusion. It’s a very mainstream big budget film, after all, and political courage is something this part of the movie business generally lacks. I should probably be thankful it doesn’t go the all out flag waving route, but we do live in a world where films featuring a guy actually dressing up in said flag aren’t doing that either (perfectly keeping with what said character is actually about) – and are arguably more complex.


Anyway, while this wasn’t exactly the Bourne film I have dreamed of, and most certainly isn’t one the world strictly needed, it’s an entertaining enough film.

Criminal (2016)

Coming from the minds responsible (I choose that word carefully) for the script to The Rock and directed by one Ariel Vromen, this bizarre mess of a would-be Taken movie “with a twist” sees low functioning sociopath with brain damage Jericho Stewart (Kevin Costner) abducted by the CIA and imprinted – in a highly illegal human experiment but don’t tell that to the film – by kindly scientist Dr. Franks (Tommy Lee Jones) via what I can only assume to be brain laser printing with parts of the brain of heroic, totally morally upright yet alas rather dead CIA agent Bill Pope (Ryan Reynolds). CIA bigwig Quaker Wells (Gary Oldman) needs Pope’s brain, because he is the only one who knows how and where to contact a hacker generally known as The Dutchman (Michael Pitt) who has managed to install “a wormhole” in the US rocket system. Since crazy Spanish anarchist Xavier Heimdahl (Jordi Mollà) as well as “The Russians” are after The Dutchman too, the matter is somewhat pressing.

So pressing indeed that Wells is throwing a patented Gary Oldman hissy fit when Jericho can’t deliver the information he wants about thirty seconds after he comes to from anaesthesia; a minute and some hilarious business about pain killers later, Wells already has Jericho carted off to be murdered somewhere else while Franks looks on with the same mildly embarrassed facial expression Tommy Lee Wallace most probably held on his face ever since he read the script. Of course, Jericho escapes, and of course he starts to hover around Pope’s family, beginning to develop curious stuff he never had before like “feelings”, and involves himself in the hunt for the Dutchman thanks to his newly developed conscience courtesy of a CIA agent. And nope, I don’t think the film actually sees the irony in that.

Obviously, Criminal is a wild concoction of stupid nonsense full of people with hilarious names (there’s also Scott Adkins wasted in a minor non-fighting role as one “Pete Greensleeves”) - at times hilarious, at times more than just a little annoying, stupid throughout. The older actors understandably go for all sorts of scenery-chewing, Costner perhaps hoping for an Oscar as some sort of ultra-violent Rain Man, Wallace looking as if he would really rather like to be elsewhere, and Oldman and Mollà just going all out crazy. It is, after all, pretty difficult to be subtle when your character is called Quaker Wells, and the narrative takes place in a world where everyone is really good at murdering people yet also monumentally stupid. Things are made even more hilarious by the script’s very earnest attempts at that human emotion stuff Jericho as well as his writers don’t get, with many a scene that thinks it does some “Flowers for Algernon” kind of clever tear-jerking when all it actually does is spit out clichés without ever earning any emotional involvement from the audience. It’s pretty funny, really, and made even more so by the writers’ obvious difficulty to understand the differences between various kinds of brain damage, sociopathy and the autistic spectrum. If only Pete Greensleeves had been there to explain.

While this is all really funny in a way that must make Luc Besson quite grumpy he didn’t have the idea, the film really lets its audience down with the action scenes. Vromen’s staging here is barely coherent, not terribly competent and lacking in all sorts of impact, making the action look not like the too-stylized nonsense someone like Olivier Megaton had delivered, nor like something a competent director had down, but rather like random jittery shots strung vaguely together after what someone in the editing room must have heard action scenes are supposed to look like years ago.

But hey, we’ll always have Quaker Wells.

In the Electric Mist (2009)

(This short write-up is based on the shorter US cut of the film. I haven’t seen the longer European one, so I can’t possibly comment on the differences between the two versions.)

Former New Orleans, now rural Louisiana police detective Dave Robicheaux (Tommy Lee Jones) is drawn into two separate cases: a serial killing of prostitutes, and the discovery of the body of a murdered African American who must have died during the 60s in what looks a lot like a lynching. In both cases, Dave searches and ponders and might just find some hints pointing him towards the truth of the matters. Somebody seems to think so, at least, because even before the hints and the hunches Dave follows can cohere into a concrete picture, he finds himself first drugged with LSD that induces a series of visions of talks with a very dead confederate General (Levon Helm), and later implicated in a wrongful shooting. Even worse things are still to come.

As members of various secret societies all around the world know, every major (or at least somewhat bigger) French director is promised by law the right to make at least one US film, preferably some kind of genre movie. That film, the US audience will then ignore while a handful of - predominantly French – critics  will praise it to the high heavens. If you have my blessed taste, you’ll probably rather want to agree with the latter than the former. In the case of Bertrand Tavernier’s adaptation of James Lee Burke’s sixth Dave Robicheaux crime novel, agreeing with the French is not a particular difficult proposition to me, for it is a pretty brilliant mystery, though one that will need very specific sensibilities to appreciate, exactly the kind of sensibilities that tend to not make a film much of a hit with a larger audience.

For In the Electric Mist is a film that trusts its audience to work with it, and persevere with it, to accept its calm, unhurried yet involved tone as the mirror of the way its central character tries to approach the world, to understand the film’s crime plot without it ever explaining anything in a detailed way. After all, we have experienced what Dave experienced, we witness his reactions to it, we see the conclusions he draws, so – in Tavernier’s mind as well as in mine – there’s no need to have the characters then explicitly tell us what’s going on.

For me, this approach to crime film and mystery seems pretty natural, but going by various online reactions I’ve seen, it’s also one quite a few people just seem to loathe, so what I think is one of In the Electric Mist’s greatest strengths to them make it nigh unwatchable and certainly impenetrable. It certainly isn’t an easy film to grasp in all details, with its philosophical approach to the world, and it’s ambiguous way to present its characters. In particular the way Tavernier never shows Dave’s emotional turmoil all that directly or dramatically beyond through the sheer, quietly sad presence of Tommy Lee Jones (who gives another wonderful performance in a late career full of these performances) might not be too easy to relate to for everyone, though I felt it carries quite an emotional heft more outward emotional explosions might not have produced. And it’s not as if Dave doesn’t get violent and does some morally highly doubtful things, he just does them in ways lacking outward signs of melodrama. This is of course quite fitting for a character who keeps much of what is going on inside him closed up deep inside, and finds a kind of philosophical clarity in talks with the vision/hallucination/ghost of a dead confederate general.

Despite the film’s basically heady and earnest nature, Tavernier does include some lighter elements too, so there are the not always so tiny roles for musicians like Levon Helm and Buddy Guy, or great US independent director and writer John Sayles (of course playing a director), as well as a lot of little strange details – particularly surrounding John Goodman’s mafioso Julie “Baby Feet” Balboni – that break up things a little without breaking them. I’m actually somewhat tempted to call the film’s tone magical realist – at least, the way the naturalistic, the poetic and the philosophical meet one another here seems to come from a kindred direction to the genre, as does our dead confederate general.

Speaking of poetry, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Bruno de Keyzer’s cinematography, the way he and Tavernier shoot beautiful landscape after beautiful (and possibly meaningful) landscape without ever overindulging in it so it would get in the way of their movie. There’s a love on display here, for a place and its people, that doesn’t come as a complete surprise from Tavernier, whose interest in the American South goes back quite some time, yet which can’t be taken for granted either. Even though I’m sure the South of In the Electric Mist isn’t a documentarian depiction (though how could I know from Germany?), in the film it’s as real and as unreal as any place you might inhabit, and what more could I ask of a movie to create?

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,french movies,reviews,crime,mystery,bertrand tavernier,tommy lee jones,john goodman

Three Films Make A Post: They found the missing link..... and it's not friendly.

Ghost Sweepers (2012): Director Sin Jeong-won manages the seemingly impossible and – after Chaw – directs another horror comedy I actually enjoyed watching. Reasons for this enjoyment the film contains enough. A fine and very funny cast, a script that actually knows how to place jokes during dramatic sequences as well as how important sentiment is when you’re making a non-cruel comedy, and Sin’s excellent pacing all come together to form a film easily likeable and fun.

Nate and Hayes (1983): One of the reasons why attempts during the 80s to revive the adventure movie genre in its swashbuckling guise never took off were godawful productions like this, an adventure movie without any sense for adventure, directed by a man (Ferdinand Fairfax) with not much of an idea of how to stage an adventure movie, a script that drags and drags and drags and never stops laughing about its own unfunny jokes, and with about as much of a sense of romance as Police-Bot-3546/15a.

Because that’s not bad enough, the film also manages the seemingly impossible and gets a bad performance out of Tommy Lee Jones. Well, and out of everybody else on screen, too, which suggests it’s fair to blame the director more than the actors for that one, too. The only positive thing I can report is that the film does put some effort in giving its female lead – as played by Jenny Seagrove, last seen here having relations with a tree – actual agency even though the whole plot (once it actually starts after half an hour or so of dithering) is based on her kidnapping. Alas, the rest of the film is much too unenjoyable for it to pay off.

Into the Mirror (2003): Kim Seong-ho’s film is far from being a favourite among South Korean films from the height of the last Asian horror boom, even though it is often very stylishly shot and generally atmospheric. The film suffers from a script that never manages to really use its supernatural menace for all that it’s worth, nor manages to connect the psychological plight of its main character with the undercurrents of said menace. Instead, it feels like a horror movie grafted onto a movie about an ex-cop melodramatically suffering from the repercussions of a very bad shooting, where one half of the film and the other don’t actually seem to interact with each other all that much.

I can’t say I’m too keen about all the suffering ex-cop stuff at all: I’ve been there, done that, and seen it done much better than here more than once.

Technorati-Markierungen: south korean movies,american movies,in short,comedy,horror,adventure,sin jeong-won,ferdinand fairfax,tommy lee jones,jenny seagrove,kim seong-ho

Three Films Make A Post: Things happen that have never been seen by human beings. The blood flows like vintage wine.

And The Crows Will Dig Your Grave aka Los Buitres cavaran tu fosa (1972): Despite its being graced with an awesome title, routine Spanish Western director Juan Bosch's film is a wee bit too generic to warrant me writing anything long about it. It's the usual mess of people (Craig Hill, Angel Aranda and Fernando Sancho among them) of variable nastiness doing nasty things to each other for monetary reasons - not much vengeance going around here - with some light political allegory thrown in. While I've seen it all before, I can't really complain about Bosch's execution of the story: the cruelty is cruel, the action is tight, the dialogue scenes have a certain amount of bite. Add decent acting by people with excellent facial hair and a generic yet fine soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai, and you get a Spaghetti (Paella?) Western that might be totally forgettable, but is also pretty entertaining.

My Horse, My Gun, Your Widow (1972): Again directed by Bosch, again made in 1972 (and still not the last film the director shot in that year), again a Spaghetti Western, again featuring Craig Hill, a Bruno Nicolai soundtrack and an awesome title. Alas, I wasn't as happy with this one, for this is one of those dreaded "comedic" films that suffer from not being funny at all. There are of course some good Spaghetti Western comedies, but those films usually know if there in it for the jokes, want to be parodies of the genre their working in, or hide more complex things behind their humour. My Horse etc doesn't seem to have much of a plan at all, and ends up being one of those films that are just kind of there without ever amounting to much.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): After the rather disappointing Thor, Joe Johnston (the guy responsible for the horrible Wolfman remake) of all people pulls the Marvel superhero films out of the druthers again with what is as fine a piece of blockbuster cinema as you're likely to encounter. The film not only gets the core of the character it is about right, but also realizes which elements of the original's serial/pulp origins will work under these particular circumstances and which won't, and then proceeds to dial up the useful elements to awesome. Add that the film has an actual heart, and find me a very happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,american movies,juan bosch,craig hill,joe johnston,chris evans,hayley atwell,stanley tucci,tommy lee jones,hugo weaving,spaghetti western,comedy,superheroes,in short