Films Catch Up 2

Ten films I watched earlier this year that I have now got around to writing up.

1. Nope

Haywood’s Hollywood Horses supplies horses for TV and films and adverts. Metal objects fall from the sky, a coin killing Otis Heywood senior. After this his children OJ and Em struggle keeping the ranch after a horse panics on set from seeing a reflection.

OJ has sold some of the horses to Jupe, the owner of Jupiter’s Claim, a western styled theme park up the valley. Jupe is a former child actor, notorious for an incident on sitcom Gordy’s Home where the chimpanzee co-star went on a rampage and he was the only one unharmed. He uses this to his advantage, having a just-barely not ghoulish room of memorabilia, also some repressed trauma.

There’s something out there in the valley, something that stops the power, that sucks up and drops metal, that hides in a cloud that doesn’t move. Em decides to try and film it, firstly bringing in Angel from the electronics store, then using her film industry contacts to get Antlers Holst, eccentric documentary maker and cinematographer. They think it’s a UFO. No, they think it’s flying saucer, an alien spacecraft. In any case it will be a sensation.

This is a horror film, as well as a western, and as well as a science fiction film. So the thing flying about is nasty, and we see what it does to people. It also has a twist and has a wonderous transformation and slightly sadly they’re not the same. The Heywoods are black, and Jupe is Asian, and this is important (if perhaps not vital) to the film’s framing of the West and westerns and horses and shows and filming. Similarly one of the problems they’re having is that OJ isn’t good with people, and perhaps is on the autistic spectrum.

It's a very good looking film and if not all the elements come together neatly that’s not a bad thing. Mismatched people, ideas and situations perhaps shouldn’t fit together well.

Watch This: A gorgeous looking horror-western aware of itself and the world around it
Don’t Watch This: Horses and a chimp get killed, also you don’t care about horse wranglers in California

2. The French Connection

Criminals in Marseille intend to smuggle heroin into New York with a slightly convoluted plan. They start by murdering a French detective who is the only one close to them so they manage to get away fairly easily.

It turns out their timing is good as heroin is scarce in New York. NYPD detective “Popeye” Doyle (Gene Hackman winning one of the film’s five Oscars) spots a couple entertaining drug dealers and tails them, discovering them meeting a dodgy lawyer. He gets phone taps and starts an investigation. There are meetings between the French smuggler and the lawyer and the lawyer and the couple, and in the midst of this they spot Doyle, and try various entertaining ways to shake him. This culminates with an attempt to kill Doyle, which fails, and he chases the assassin, who is in an elevated train, in a commandeered car, one of several iconic setpieces.

It's a gritty crime film, with several clever twists and turns and a bit of detective work. It feels very 70s, which is interesting for a film from 1971 before the 1970s had really got started. Of course a reason for that is this film was very influential on the crime films that followed.

Watch This: A dark, sometimes funny, iconic crime film
Don’t Watch This: The cops are as violent and weird as the criminals

3. 3000 Years Of Longing

Alithea is a scholar of myth, legend and story at a conference in Istanbul. She has occasional visions of legendary beings. At a shop in the Grand Bazaar she buys a bottle. Within is a Djinn.

The Djinn offers her three wishes. He demands three wishes from her. He insists and when she refuses it becomes clear that this will be disaster, breaking the rules of the world. Unwilling, she tries to finesse it, but the wishes must be her heart's desire, or a true desire anyway.

The Djinn tells the stories of how he ended in the bottle. How Solomon came to court the Djinn’s cousin, Sheba, and cursed him. How he was found by a concubine in the Ottoman court, and she did not manage to complete the wishes. How he wandered invisible, until he was seen by one with Djinn-blood. And then how he was banished again, found again. By a woman whose first love was science, and whose second was the Djinn, and how her wishes caught him up in the bottle again.

Alithea falls in love with the Djinn. A Djinn is a being of subtle fire, of electromagnetic waves. So getting him back to London means putting him through an x-ray machine. Love between an immortal and a mortal is always fraught.

Watch This: A beautiful film about love, magic and the interface between legend and history
Don’t Watch This: It’s just a weird story about a woman and a djinn inevitably falling in love

4. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse

Tom Clancy’s main series of books are sometimes referred to as the Ryan-verse, named after main character Jack Ryan, a Maryland Irish-American Catholic, US Marine, CIA Analyst, Historian, Wall Street Financier, National Security Adviser, (briefly) Vice-President and President of the USA*. The whole thing about Ryan is he’s an analyst who keep having to become a man of action (either literally or later, politically). But sometimes Clancy wanted a man of action who was a man of action, the guy who didn’t play by the rules, and so he had John Clark**, occasionally a main character (Rainbow Six, Without Remorse) and more often a secondary one doing the things that had to be done.

No longer a Maryland Irish-American Catholic***, this John Kelly**** is a Navy SEAL introduced arriving in Syria. They’re there to rescue a CIA operative from a militia group, but it turns out the captors are actually Russian military. CIA contact Ritter is smarmily unconcerned.

Back in America several members of the SEAL team are murdered by a hit squad. In John’s house they kill his pregnant wife, meanwhile he manages to kill all but one of them. Actually all but two of them because they were leaving one of their number dead there already when John interrupts.

He spends a lot of time brooding while recovering from his wounds. His commanding officer slips him some information about the Russian diplomat who arranged for their passports. He disguises himself as a homeless man by pouring alcohol on himself and urinating on his clothes, and goes after him. He rams the diplomat's car outside an airport, covers it in petrol and sets fire to it before entering the car and interrogating him.

This is pretty much how the film goes, mostly generic violence and plotting and revenge with occasional moments where it goes off the rails in an entertaining way.

Anyway, he goes to a jail full of Russian mobsters, manages to survive, passes on the name the diplomat gave him, picks the guy out of a line up, gets some ideology (the guy who attacked the SEALs is an extremist in Russian Special Forces who advocates for attacking America on her home turf), then they put together a team to capture him in Russia. They’re shot down, escalating tensions, and the team manage to escape and in a spectacular moving and flooding set John gets the equipment. Then they head into Russia for several violent setpieces and a couple of twists.

The film is not as smart as it wants you to believe it is, the convolutions of plot not making sense from scene to scene. The action setpieces range from interesting and imaginative to… a bunch of guys shooting at each other in dark corridors. And the dark corridors are the long ones. Michael B Jordan is pretty good. Everyone else kind of fills their role.

Watch This: For an amusing action thriller
Don’t Watch This: It’s a bad and silly action film wrapped up in a better but still silly action film that thinks it’s pretty smart

* Played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine in various films.
** Played by Willem Dafoe, Liev Schreiber and now, in this one, Michael B Jordan.
*** It’s possible he’s in Maryland, but he’s now African-American and as they seem to be members of Pastor West’s congregation, I’m going to suggest he’s a protestant.
**** He becomes John Clark during this film.

5. The Tomorrow War

After being turned down from a research job former special forces soldier Dan Forester (and the world) is taken by surprise when time travellers from 2051 interrupt the World Cup in Qatar. It seems they are under attack by aliens, and losing, and want help.

A year later, for some reason Dan still hasn’t been given a research job because the world is reacting irrationally. There are riots and apocalyptic cults. Still, the draft is working, where they send people to the future for one week to fight (there are horrific casualties). To avoid panic they don’t show pictures of the “Whitespikes”. One day a week they stop fighting and retreat to underground burrows.

Dan’s drafted, the reason for this being that records from the future tell him he’ll die in seven years time. In the training facility Dan and new pal Charlie, an Earth and Atmospheric Scientist notice that everyone from the future is young, born after the time hole opened, while the draftees tend older (and due to die before the time hole opens on the other end*).

There’s an emergency and they jump early, and it’s miscalibrated and they find themselves high over Miami. Luckily Dan and every other character we’re introduced to land in a pool and try to carry out the mission. The lab they’re trying to reach has been overrun but they manage to get the research out.

There’s an effort to create a toxin that will kill the whitespikes. There’s things Dan learns about his future – one that now won’t happen. There’s a raid on a whitespike base that goes wrong. There’s a desperate final battle as the whitespikes** overrun the last base humanity holds.

And Dan and a couple of pals make it back to 2023 to discover chaos, and maybe they can figure out how to stop it all happening. And along the way finish their character arcs, do some family stuff, cool stunts, show up the bureaucrats more interested in covering their backsides etc.

A generally solid action film that goes out of its way to flag up how its hiding its scary aliens (we’ve seen things like this before). One that glosses over the most interesting and nearly-novel parts to concentrate on the predictable bits. Several actors I like to see doing their job well (J K Simmons, Edwin Hodge, Yvonne Strahovski), also Chris Pratt.

Watch This: Humans fighting against the odds (CGI monsters) with a few fun bits
Don’t Watch This: It doesn’t bother to explain or explore the most interesting bits

* Their speculation that this is to stop people meeting themselves is interesting, but hardly makes sense in sending people to the future, where it is established that there are only hundreds of thousands of humans surviving; essentially everyone is dead already.

** Okay, I kept hearing this as The White Stripes, a missed soundtrack opportunity

6. The Final Countdown

It’s 1980 and the USS Nimitz is heading out to patrol the Pacific Ocean. On board is a civilian analyst (Martin Sheen) sent on behalf of the Department of Defence and Mr Tideman, a powerful military contractor.

Things go wrong, a strange storm brews up. They manage to recover the planes in flight but have lost all communications. The captain (Kirk Douglas) sends out reconnaissance flights, but discovers that there’s something strange about Pearl Harbour. There’s a whole bunch of battleships tied up there.

It’s 6 December 1941, the day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. After spotting two Japanese Zeroes destroying an American yacht (to prevent them spotting it) the Americans engage them and rescue the survivors. These include a US Senator, his assistant/speechwriter and her dog; also a Japanese pilot.

They’re back in time and have to decide what to do.

[SPOILERS] Rather interestingly they take the opportunity to return to 1980 rather than attack and presumably defeat the Japanese attack; thanks to circumstances they haven’t altered the timeline at all. The idea of going to all the trouble of filming on board the USS Nimitz, getting some period aircraft, a solid cast… then just giving up before the spectacular battle we’ve been promised, and instead having an Outer Limits style ending for a big budget film is something that probably wouldn’t get made today.

Watch This: Some carrier operations, a touch of history, manly men trying to determine what to do
Don’t Watch This: It’s a spectacular version of a “what about this idea” science fiction TV show

7. Jane And The Lost City

Jane – Diary Of A Bright Young Thing was a comic strip in the Daily Mirror in which Jane would have various zany adventures often involving losing her clothes. During WW2 it was very popular, combining a half- and un-dressed young woman with fighting Nazis.

Thirty years after the comic ended they made this film. Both the British and the Nazis have found clues to a lost city, called The Lost City, in Africa, and want the diamonds there for the war effort. The Nazi expedition is led by Lola Pagola (Maud Adams) supported by Carl, who’s big and been living in Africa and Heinrich (Jasper Carrott) a sadistic torturer with two incompetent assassin brothers (also played by Carrott).

The first targets are Jane and her boss the Colonel who make up the British expedition, along with Jane’s dachshund Fritz and the Colonel’s valet Tombs. Jane manages to lose her top and so be interviewed by Winston Churchill in her bra; after this she manages to lose her outer clothes at least five times. In several scenes she has to bend over, revealing her stocking tops, sometimes just for the camera, sometimes to the delight of male characters watching.

Both expeditions head for Africa, Jane’s is sabotaged and they’re captured by locals, and rescued by “Jungle Jack,” (Sam Jones) an American. There’s a certain amount of ridiculous plotting and shenanigans, with a vital clue being on a large painting; in one of the better jokes they take this big picture in a frame with them when they head out into the bush. (The film was made in Mauritius, the locations all look good).

Finding The Lost City it turns out it’s not that lost, as it’s run by The Leopard Queen and her followers. After an initial confrontation in which Jane loses her dress, she and the Leopard Queen hit it off as they both went to British boarding schools. Not the same one, and it seems they didn’t actually meet, but you know. There’s some sub-Indiana Jones nonsense.

There are a few good jokes, and they display some creativity in finding ways for Jane to be stripped, though after the first couple of times you see a ladder or whatever and go “Yeah, Jane’s dress is going to get caught on it”. A curiosity, it almost feels as though the film’s script could have been written for 1940 rather than 1987.

Watch This: A curious adaption of a classic comic strip
Don’t Watch This: The film leaves colonialism, a rich vein of comedy and tragedy, unexplored, comic Nazis have not aged as well as might be hoped and a woman being stripped to her bra and pants might have been daring and titillating in the Daily Mirror in 1940, but it’s not especially novel today

8. Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)

Precinct 13 is a police station in the crime-infested Los Angeles neighbourhood of Anderson. A gang in Anderson recently got hold of assault weapons, and six of them were killed when the police raided them. Precinct 13 is due to be closed down and newly promoted Lieutenant Bishop has the skeleton last night watch there.

Some of the gang are shaking down an ice cream man, and kill him and a little girl. The girl’s father shoots one of the gang then flees, heading for the police station. Meanwhile a prison bus diverts to Precinct 13 after a prisoner on board falls ill.

The stage is set, as the gang cuts the telephone wire and power lines. No one is expecting to hear from Precinct 13 tonight. When an officer goes out to try and radio for backup he’s ambushed. They are under siege, and, because we’ve seen the title of the film, we know what will happen next. Prisoners, secretary, telephone operator, and cops, they will have to work together to survive.

Watch This: A tense, taut action film, using the cramped, deserted police station to atmospheric effect
Don’t Watch This: It’s unpleasant violence on irrational violence on gratuitous violence

9. Spy Kids

Gregorio and Ingrid were spies, then they fell in love, married and had two children, Carmen and Juni. They hide their old spy life from them, only doing consultancy work. However they also train their children.

Children’s TV host Fegan Floop has a cast of Fooglies, grotesque humanoid creatures, and also Thumb-Thumbs, which are vaguely-human-shaped robots where each limb and the head are thumbs. He has a psychedelic virtual reality space where he makes his shows. OSS, the spy agency, suspect he is mutating people to make them Fooglies, and the robots are part of some plan to take over the world. Bizarrely this is correct, though it’s being run mostly by Alexander Minion, Floop’s assistant who likes making robots and mutants, and Mr Lisp, who want to buy robot doppelgangers of world leader's children.

The parents go on one last mission to investigate the castle leaving the kids in charge of their uncle. The parents are captured; Thumb-Thumb ninjas attack the kids and their uncle reveals he’s not an uncle, but instead an agent, and gets them to their safehouse.

The whole thing is like this. There are buddypacks (jetpacks), submarines, a long lost brother of Gregorio who makes gadgets, betrayal and it’s all about the “Third Brain” which contains all the knowledge of every OSS agent, and will perfect the robots. Oh, and Carmen and Juni have to fight robot doppelgangers of themselves and reunite their family.

It's a kids film about gadgets and weird monsters. There’s a city called San Diabolo; the film is somewhat vague about geography. It’s somewhat vague about everything but getting to the next setpiece, which is fine I guess.

Watch This: A kid’s action thriller with lots of zany sets and gadgets
Don’t Watch This: The plot just about hangs together but requires you to make a whole bunch of wild leaps to keep up

10. The Saint

Notorious thief “The Saint” (so called for his habit of using saint’s names) steals a microchip in Russia. It belongs to Ivan Tretiak, billionaire oligarch and rival to the President of Russia. “The Saint” escapes, but not before being identified by Tretiak’s son Ilya.

They hire “The Saint” to steal the secret of cold fusion from Emma Russell, an American scientist at Oxford University. She keeps her notes in her bra so he seduces her to get it. (He’s a master of disguise, we see him practicing voices and putting on make up etc.)

There’s an energy crisis in Moscow, and Tretiak intends to use the cold fusion to fix it. But they can’t get it to work, the order of the notes is vital and needs Emma to figure out. They try to kill “The Saint”; he escapes and disguises himself as Tretiak to get his payment.

Tretiak figures out a way to discredit the president by making it seem as if he’s spent billions on cold fusion that doesn’t work. Meanwhile Emma is in Moscow having figured out where the cold fusion is and then tracking saints' names. Tretiak has them arrested but they escape and “The Saint” must perform his greatest theft, stealing a country out from under the man who is trying to steal it.

Based very loosely on the Leslie Chateris character “The Saint,” this film tries to bring him into the present day (1997), which is interesting as the stories kept being published into the 80s. This techno-thriller version fits a little better with the Roger Moore spy-fi TV series from the 60s than the stories I’ve read, although those were from the 30s so maybe not? I wasn’t looking to see if they were cutting edge technologically in the way that this one sort-of is. Anyway the characters Val Kilmer (for it is he) plays as "The Saint" are generally fun, the plot is nonsense and it’s a bit silly.

Watch This: An entertaining action thriller with some fun disguises and cons
Don’t Watch This: It’s aged poorly and “The Saint’s” turn to good seems very contrived