Film Review Catch Up July

Ten films I watched earlier this year.

****

1. The Talented Mr Ripley

Mistaken for a Princeton classmate of Dickie Greenleaf (Jude law), Tom Ripley (Matt Damon) is hired by Dickie’s father to go to Italy and convince his son to come home and go to work in the family shipping business. He finds out all he can to ingratiate himself, especially learning about jazz (he’s more of a classical music man). Meeting and finding Dickie and his fiancée Marge he makes himself useful and agreeable, becoming part of the society of rich Americans abroad in Europe.

Ripley’s living large on the Greenleaf money for a while, though every friend of Dickie he meets makes things less comfortable, and Dickie is cheating on Marge, their perfect Italian idyll spoiled. Dickie discovers Ripley wearing his clothes, and then a local girl Dickie got pregnant kills herself.

In their final confrontation on a boat Dickie says he’s going to marry Marge and Ripley should leave, and Ripley says that Dickie is afraid of his feelings for him; they struggle and Ripley kills Dickie with an oar. Already mistaken for Dickie at the hotel, Ripley pretends to be him, fakes a letter to Marge splitting up with her. He goes to Rome and checks into one hotel as Dickie, another as Ripley, maintaining access to Dickie’s accounts.

Tom having insinuated into Dickie’s life tries to steal it, succeeds in confusing the trail. But at some point he’s going to have to actually come up with answers. With a consistent story. With something.

A gloriously shot picture of people hiding from each other and themselves, Ripley, the liar, cheat, cuckoo and murderer. Of privilege and deceit. A lot of fun.

Watch This: Gloriously dark film about becoming someone else so hard you find yourself killing people
Don’t Watch This: None of these people are good, none of them care about anything real

2. Snatch

There is a diamond robbery in Antwerp; Franky Four-Fingers takes the diamonds to London to fence them to Doug The Head, a diamond dealer. One of the other robbers suggests to Frankie that if he wants a gun, to get it from his brother Boris The Blade, an ex-KGB agent. Then he calls Boris to plan to steal (re-steal?) the diamonds.

In London arcade owner and unlicensed boxing promoter Turkish has a fight set up between his bare-knuckle boxer Gorgeous George and a fighter promoted by Brick Top, a dangerous gangster. However when Turkish sends his partner Tommy and George to buy a caravan from some Irish Travellers, George is knocked out by Mickey and unable to fight. Brick Top famously is unhappy when people fail him, so Turkish convinces Mickey to fight for him.

Boris gives Franky a gun in return for a favour of putting a bet on for him; he then hires some small time criminals to hold up the betting office and steal the diamonds, they'll keep the money and he gets the diamonds. Arriving they accidentally run into Franky’s van, trapping him inside. They rob the betting office, which belongs to Brick Top. Meanwhile knowing that Franky has a betting problem, his family send Doug to try and find him.

These loosely connected events twist and turn around each other, often violently, sometimes hilariously, revealing a complex ecosystem of crime of various levels. Every time someone tries to accomplish something it goes wrong, wether by their incompetence or by colliding with another storyline. A masterpiece of ridiculous crime film-making.

Watch This: Very funny, interlocking set of crime stories where everything goes wrong
Don’t Watch This: Various bad people fail to make their bad plans work

3. Mission: Impossible: Dead Reckoning: Part One

There’s an Artificial Intelligence called The Entity that’s controlled from aboard a Russian stealth submarine, and also controlled by a two part cruciform key. The AI convinced the crew they were under attack, then took control of a torpedo so that it was sunk, the AI now hidden underwater.

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) got one key part from Ilsa Faust, a rogue British agent, faking her death. Sneaking into a high level intelligence briefing he learns that The Entity has taken over global computer systems, including military ones, it’s also sentient and it’s objectives are unknown. Whoever gets the key can control it, and also control the world.

(There’s a good scene of pre-internet communications and equipment being used to circumvent The Entity).

Kittridge, the CIA director, thinks that destroying The Entity is the best option, and he’s probably right though to be honest if you are in charge of the CIA you don’t really need an all-seeing all-controlling AI to get things done. This would prevent anyone from having control, and there’s already a race between secret agencies to get the key parts. Kittridge has been told to get hold of the key, so his orders show he’s gone rogue from his nation, and the Mission Impossible team will have to use a ghost protocol to avoid the fallout.

The team go to Abu Dhabi airport to intercept the other part of the key, but American agents are after them and also as this setpiece goes on The Entity starts messing with electronic communication and data. Two new characters emerge; Grace (Hayley Atwell), a professional thief, who has been hired to get hold of the key part, and Gabriel, working for The Entity, who Hunt knew and tangled with in the past, who may not be there, may be a data ghost. When they discover a (hoax) nuclear bomb everything falls apart and Grace escapes to Rome with her key part.

But she’s caught by Italian police. Hunt gets her out and they have a giant car chase through Rome, with the Italian police, American agents and also Entity agents. A good joke is that Grace is not good at pursuit driving, unlike everyone else in these kinds of films whether professional agents or not; as she’s handcuffed to Hunt on the side that makes sense for her to drive it’s tricky.

The film cycles through some more action setpieces and confrontations. The Entity can simulate (“predict”) the future, and thinks that Hunt may be the only one who can stop it. It offers him choices that will require him to sacrifice people. It’s agents are imperfect though and things don’t go quite to anyone’s plan. The final sequence is on a train, which may hark back to Mission: Impossible (1996) but I haven’t seen that since it came out in the cinema, so don’t ask me. It does have a new iteration on the Mission: Impossible thing of creating a fake reality, indeed the whole world is threatened with a fake reality. As a Part One it ends on a cliffhanger; annoying after a fairly satisfying series of stunts and high-pressure discussions.

Watch This: High energy action film with one of those world-destroying techno-thriller menaces that manages to be scary when they slow down enough to show what it can do
Don’t Watch This: Ridiculous chases, fights and image manipulation, plus the whole AI thing has become fraught as an idea

4. Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes

A squad of priests enter the Amityville Horror House (possibly real) to try and exorcise the evil being possessing it. One of them is knocked unconscious by an evil lamp, but they think they managed to get rid of the evil being. Believing it no longer evil, there’s a sale of the house contents. A woman buys the evil lamp for her sister in California; they have a joke where they buy each other ugly presents. She cuts herself, thinks it’s nothing, later it’s revealed she dies of tetanus.

In California the sister, Alice Leacock, lives in a large isolated house, and her widowed daughter Nancy, along with grandchildren Amanda, Brian and Jessica are moving in; Nancy unable to cope on her own. The evil lamp makes Alice’s parrot and cat act up. While the rest of them including the housekeeper ignore the evil lamp, Jessica is fascinated by it.

Things start to go wrong in the house, mostly electric but also other inexplicable things. The parrot is found dead in the toaster oven. Jessica’s room is vandalised. The garbage disposal doesn’t work, and when the electrician’s apprentice tries to fix it, it comes on, mutilating his hand, though he sensibly disconnected it first. When the plumber comes, he has to check the pipes under the house and he’s drowned in sewage and then his van drives away by itself (the evil lamp does seem hard on workmen).

Jessica thinks her deceased father is speaking to her through the evil lamp. One of the priests gets a phone call from the evil lamp, and then his phone smokes and melts so he flies out to California*. Their efforts to confront the evil lamp are thwarted as Jessica refuses to let them exorcise it.

Evil Lamp

The film is on the one hand crippled by the ridiculous idea of an evil lamp, but on the other hand the lamp does look remarkably evil. It might have been even better if they didn’t superimpose evil faces on it, just left it as an evil lamp. The bit about shipping a possessed item across country by accident is pretty good.

Watch This: Evil lamp tears apart a fragile family
Don’t Watch This: An evil lamp is a ludicrous conceit

* Initially I thought, what, the Catholic Church doesn’t have anyone on the west coast who can deal with it, but on the other hand investigating an evil lamp is a bit of tough thing to explain on the phone, even if the phone hasn't melted first

5. The Fifth Floor

Kelly, a disco dancer, is drugged by accident and collapses. When the hospital thinks she made a suicide attempt they send her to the psychiatric ward, on the fifth floor. She thinks someone must have drugged her, so they diagnose her as paranoid.

Everyone thinks she’s had a break down because there’s no reason why anyone would want to drug her. This works in favour of Carl, an orderly who sexually assault patients. When she accuses him they think her paranoid; telling Carl to keep his distance doesn’t work as they accept his excuses.

Eventually she manages to escape. It turns out she picked up the wrong drink; there was in fact no reason for anyone to poison her, but there was a motive for someone to attack the woman she was talking to at the time!

A lurid look into frankly poorly monitored psychiatric care, more interested in how it can be used for fright and disgust than any real interest in mental disorders or incorrect diagnoses.

Watch This: Psychiatric ward horror meets disco culture
Don’t Watch This: Unpleasant and sensational

6. Things To Come (1936)

In 1940 John Cabal lives in Everytown somewhere in England. On Christmas Day there’s rumours of war. The war comes, the town bombed. Cabal joins the RAF; the war continues including him trying to save an enemy pilot he’s shot down, only for that pilot to sacrifice himself giving his gasmask to a child.

By the 1960s cities are ruined, there is a new dark age. There are plagues, spread by the war. The Boss rules Everytown and is trying to conquer the hill people to get supplies of oil so he can fuel his hoarded handful of aeroplanes. Then a sleek advanced new plane arrives, flown by John Cabal. Based out of Basra, an organisation called Wings Over The World is trying to bring peace and enlightenment, and have now managed to get this far. The Boss refuses the chance to join, and reunites Cabal with his old friends to get his planes working. They contact Wings Over The World who use the Gas Of Peace to subdue everyone and take over; The Boss dies while asleep.

Wings Over The World unite the world in peace; by 2036 a new age of technology in underground cities has begun. Things have got, perhaps, a little authoritarian, imposing “scientific” principles on society. When there’s an uprising against Oswald Cabal, grandson of John Cabal and in charge of the world, it’s led by a sculptor who wants an end to progress, claiming this causes unhappiness and war. In the climax they attempt to storm a space gun launching a manned (also womanned, the future world lets women by astronauts*); it’s launched and Oswald declares that either humanity must seek our destiny out in the universe or seize fleeting happiness as “little animals,” (the description his interlocuter uses when faced with the immensity of time and space) and fade away to nothing.

Startlingly prescient, taking the dangers and benefits of technology seriously, the film is clever and good-looking for something from the 1930s, the various transformations of Everytown very nice. Written by H G Wells it reflects on several of his themes. The bitty nature of it, and the change in scene and story in time periods is unusual and bold; films usually hang together on plot and character. Here the characters change (though the actors return as their descendants) and the throughline cannot really be called a plot. Indeed we might almost consider this a portmanteau or anthology film.

Watch This: A classic, serious piece of early twentieth century science fiction
Don’t Watch This: As time moves forward and it gets off track, Wells vision of a good, sane world is almost as terrible as his bad one – or the real history

* Though Roxana states “I don't suppose any man has ever understood any woman since the beginning of things. You don't understand our imaginations.”

7. The Man In The Iron Mask (1977)

Phillipe (Richard Chamberlain) is an obscure French nobleman who has an extraordinary resemblance to Louis XIV, king of France (also Richard Chamberlian). Mysteriously arrested, this is noticed by court lady Louise de La Vallière (Jenny Agutter), whose father has been imprisoned. To get him out she agrees to be Louis’s mistress.

Louis is entirely uninterested in ruling, preferring games, sports, clothes, banquets, balls and philandering. This leaves France in the hands of corrupt and evil minster Fouquet (Patrick McGoohan). Opposed to him is slightly less evil minister Colbert, and his sidekick, the captain of musketeers D’Artagnan.

D’Artagnan trains Phillipe, who is revealed to be the secret elder twin, to be king. Then Fourquet gets wind of the plot, kidnaps Phillipe (Louis refuses to let him be killed as he is after all royal, and maybe hurting one twin will effect the other maybe?) Cue some swashbuckling shenanigans.

The court of Louis is sufficiently extravagant, and as might be hoped for story whose plot turns on clothing, the costuming is pretty good. The rather silly convoluted plot is streamlined from the Dumas original, and the cast is pretty good; meanwhile the horrors or prison and the iron mask are a little overwrought.

Watch This: Fun if slight swashbuckling action
Don’t Watch This: Makes little sense and even less so if you know about the history of the perio

8. Asteroid City

The film is framed by a TV documentary about the making of a play, that play being called Asteroid City. The documentary is in black and white and a narrower format, the play itself, which though stylised does not appear to be on a stage, in bright colours and widescreen. Documentary, play and the making of the play are all set in America in the 1950s.

The play is set in Asteroid City, a fictional desert town built near a meteorite crater. The Junior Stargazers convention is happening, honouring teenagers who have invented various retro-futuristic gadgets. Amongst them are Woodrow, brought by his father Augie, a photojournalist who takes war photos, who has also brought his three young daughters. Their car breaks down and he calls for his father-in-law, who encourages him to reveal the truth to his children, that their mother died two weeks ago.

Another junior stargazer is Dinah, whose mother Midge is a famous actress, somewhat world-weary and disillusioned. Midge and Augie start a romance; as do Woodrow and Dinah in a very different way.

How long does the convention go on for a romance to develop? It is extended as at the ceremony for the junior stargazers, in the crater, a UFO arrives and an alien takes the meteorite. This leads the army to quarantine the town. The junior stargazers use their equipment to contact the alien, they also get a call out to a friend who runs their school newspaper and breaks the news, eventually forcing the quarantine to be lifted.

There are about a dozen other characters each of whom have their own story, including one of them being a singer with a band for musical interludes. Whenever the film seems to be slightly dragging, we return to the frame of how the play was written, cast and staged. There’s a lot going on in other words, and describing it through any one frame or method edits out important factors.

So, a complicated film, and a stylish one, and an unusual one. The director Wes Anderson has assembled a magnificent cast and gives them lots of interesting things to do. Yet the film is about the unknown and unknowable, and so refuses to offer answers, we don’t see the climax of the play, that takes place while the actor is filmed talking to another actor about a scene that has been cut. We do get the epilogue, so it’s not completely unsatisfying. The frame story has a conclusion, but it doesn’t tell us much about the impact or reception of the play.

Watch This: Interesting idiosyncratically stylish film unlike anything else
Don’t Watch This: All this is self-indulgent not adding up to anything more

9. Visiting Hours (1982)

Deborah Bailin (Lee Grant) is a feminist* news reporter, trying to present serious issues on the TV rather than the fashion and entertainment fluff she used to do. She talks about abusive men and so attracts a stalker who attacks her. She goes into hospital where the stalker follows.

Deborah makes a friend in the hospital, a nurse Sheila who admires what she does on TV. The stalker kills a patient and another nurse. He then goes off to attack more women**. When he visits his father we learn that the father was burned with hot oil by his wife when he attacked her; our stalker has a hatred for women who stand up for themselves.

Learning about the missing patient and nurse Deborah tells her boss Gary (William Shatner) that the stalker is after her. He thinks her paranoid. The hospital is described as “locked up tighter than the Vatican***. Then the stalker tries to get in, but is turned away by security.

The stalker lures Sheila away, stabbing her. Gary, following up on a clue, finds the stalker’s apartment, photos of his victims and also of Sheila and Deborah. Going to Sheila’s, they find her and send her to hospital. The stalker deliberately injures himself, and so gets past security into the hospital as a patient, to stalk Deobrah for the final sequence.

The film delivers better on scares than ideas, though it does at least attempt to engage with them. A horror film can be a vehicle for considering abuse and the repercussions on the next generation, sadly this one doesn’t do a good job of it.

Watch This: Grim, tense thriller
Don’t Watch This: Can’t express it’s ideas through the cliched plot of a slasher film

* Also pacifist, something the film fumbles when it comes up, either because it doesn’t understand what it’s talking about or because a man talks over her; but I suspect the former

** He doesn’t rape them, unable to

*** Interestingly the public parts of the Vatican, though thoroughly patrolled, are easy to access. The non-public ones are well guarded.

10. The Power (1984)

An ancient and small Aztec statue is cursed but also has power. Those who are innocent (children) can handle it safely as we see in the prologue, but a man who wants it comes and steals it.

He’s lecturing at a college* when another man comes to try and get the statue. He dies, and three students end up with it. They try a séance in a graveyard and things happen, leading to the caretaker dying. They take it to a local newspaper reporter who does weird crime; she’s sceptical, not linking this to the strange death of the teacher.

Her boyfriend thinks this isn’t just a “Mexican salt shaker,” does some research and tries to harness the power himself. After a strong start and a meandering middle section, the power takes control of him, transforming into a monster to attack the remaining characters.

The effects work pretty well, even if the limitations (presumably on budget) keep them to a minimum. The idea of the statue is fine, unexplored, and does not bother to be culturally specific, the Aztec demon just for exoticism. Fairly mediocre.

Watch This: A few good scenes of monsters and a slightly hazy thesis of corruption
Don’t Watch This: Very slow to introduce our main characters who do little of interest for the middle section

* Or maybe a high school? This seems unusual for a high school, though perhaps they’re taking college classes, I don’t think this is an especially faithful representation of the American education system.