This was in August, but here goes.

Apoc. Now Redux
****/****

I loved the original but this one just puts it to shame. After watching the redux, I rented and watched the original. There are so many problems, and holes, and cuts(due to a wanting to pander to the audience back in the day), that the Redux is the only way to go now. The Redux is the film Apoc Now tried to be. Wihtout a doubt, the Redux is one of the best films ever made.

quote:

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Originally posted by Graham Watt:
Back by popular demand: "What have you seen in..?"

SO, what have you seen?

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I saw Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. I am not proud that I saw it, nor that I laughed a lot, but oh well, I did!

I am not usually a Kevin Smith fan at all. I don't think he writes very good characters, especially women characters. JASBSB is somewhat sexist, and there are one too many gay jokes, but Jason Mewes was really, really funny.

Directed by John Irvin
Screenplay by Scott Cherry
Photography by Mike Molloy
Music by Paul Grabowsky

Main Cast: Michael Caine, Martin Landau

London boxing promoter wideboy gets up to his neck in trouble in London boxing promoter wideboy-land (fixed fights, gang warfare, broken arms, death).

It was quite refreshing in a way to see dreary old London back on the big screen, the way it used to be shot for old 60s second features. Shiner is something of a throwback to that kind of thriller, with updated violence and the addition of some Minder-type humour. Actually the humour was way off target I felt, in fact the tone is very unsure at the start. It does settle down into a watchable thriller in the second half, with Michael Caine going off the rails in his lust for revenge, and it all ends on a darkly nihilistic note.

Michael Caine looks the part, but Martin Landau it must be said looks hellish, cadaverous and heavily made up, and topped with a Dan O'Herlihy wig. Or am I thinking of Criswell? Whatever, I hope he's not ill or anything.

Paul Grabowsky took some stick from some quarters for his score for TV's Noah's Ark. I quite liked his music here though, with a whistled jazzy, somewhat mournful theme (with the composer himself on keyboards). The rest of the score covers a lot of ground, including even Pino Donaggio-esque chopping strings. Quite good, but a bit all over the shop, and perhaps even slightly overscored.

Here are the credits, so sit still and read them, without any of that getting up and walking out nonsense I see in cinemas as soon as people think the moving pictures are about over:

American Beauty (USA 1999)

Directed by Sam Mendes
Screenplay by Alan Ball
Photography by Conrad L Hall (he of OUTER LIMITS!)
Music by Thomas Newman

Things start off quite well, with a strangely antiseptic looking opening, a kind of throwback to a 1960s idea of the future as seen in Fantastic Voyage etc, surely the very antithesis of Tim Burton imagery. It's not long though before we're on the planet of the apes itself and the darkly baroque clutter rears its (ugly?) head. And although it seems that we're not allowed to compare this new "reworking" (or whatever they want it to be known as) with the original, there are enough enjoyable homages once things get underway that it's impossible NOT to make the connection.

But my interest soon waned. Instead of cutting political satire we now have wishy-washy feminism and messages of racial equality, plus the occasional nod at half-hearted religious symbolism. And why do all films of the genre nowadays have to have an annoying comic relief character? Here, Jar Jar Blinks is known as Limbo.

And the lapses of logic are irritating to say the least. I won't detail them all because you probably know what I'm talking about. I mean, poetic justice or artistic license or whatever is fine by me, but you'll really be shaking your head at some of the plot developments here. And beyond all that there is an absolutely unforgivable ending.

As far as the characters go, there is some seriously unfleshed-out stuff going on. Was that supposed to be some sort of emotional triangle between Mark Wahlberg, Helena Bonham Carter and Estella Warren? If so, it barely registers.

Let's give full marks to effort for the make-up, although I think it's only semi- successful. The female simians are very odd indeed, and the Bonham Carter face is just too similar to Michael Jackson to allow for any suspension of disbelief. Tim Roth comes across best, but even so, with all that heavy breathing and sneering it looked like he was doing a Jack Palance impersonation.

I loved that Danny Elfman music in the title credits. With just a hint of a homage to Goldsmith's original (brass doing slide whistle bit), this opening is pretty compelling. Good clicking percussion too and hints of Silvestri's great Predator score. The rest of it didn't make too much of an impression, and may have been too consistently thunderous, but I'll still consider getting it on CD.

So, not brilliant I fear, but despite everything I still quite enjoyed it.
File under "watchable" (though some may disagree).

That was me being brief, it seems. Oh, and I haven't finished yet!

Planet Of The Apes (USA 2001)

Directed by Tim Burton
Screenplay by William Broyles Jr, Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal
Photography by Philippe Rousselot
Music by Danny Elfman

Directed by Terence Fisher
Screenplay by Jimmy Sangster, with additional dialogue by Hurford Janes
Photography by Jack Asher
Music by Leonard Salzedo

Main Cast: Peter Cushing, Michael Gwynn, Francis Matthews, Eunice Gayson

Dr Frankenstein does a favour to a cripple by transplanting his brain into a healthy body. Not such a favour after all it turns out, as the new creature begins to adopt the cripple's form AND turns into some kind of cannibal.

Taking over directly from where Curse Of Frankenstein left off, this is one championed by the Cahiers crowd for its intelligence and complexity. However, for me it is sadly bland and its weak ideas are insufficiently developed, one of Hammer's least distinctive additions to its impressive cycle.

The finer scientific points are glossed over in the extreme, and even the occasional touches of typical Fisher irony go for nothing when so much is left unexplained, whilst Leonard Salzedo's score warbles away in the background to little effect. File under "half-baked."

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
Screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil
Photography by Hans Burmann
Music by Alejandro Amenábar and Mariano Marin

Main Cast: Eduardo Noriega, Penélope Cruz, Najwa Nimri, Fele Martínez, Chete Lera

Young confident good-looking stud gets horribly disfigured in a car crash. That much we can be sure of I think.

After that, the film moves on to address questions of identity, reality, dreams, physical attraction and parallel lives, before revealing itself to be actually a fiendishly clever science fiction thriller. And even if you're not convinced that all the pieces of the jigsaw actually fit it doesn't really matter, because it's so dazzlingly well done overall.

The hype will soon be on for the Hollywood remake Vanilla Sky, but I urge everyone to try to see Abre Los Ojos. Nothing's to say the new Tom Cruise film will be bad, but it's unlikely to be as good as this.

Directed by Michael Carreras
Screenplay by Henry Younger
Photography by Otto Heller
Music by Carlo Martelli

Main Cast: Ronald Howard, Terence Morgan, Fred Clark, Jeanne Roland, Dickie Owen

An American showman wants to make a quick buck by putting the mummy on show.

That idea really does take up an inordinate amount of time in this dismal Hammer horror. What producer/director Michael Carreras presumably wanted was to get hoards of Americans flocking to see his boring movie, which, if nothing else, shows that as a director he was a pretty good producer.

The script is on the level of comic book speech bubbles and even the cast is below par, whilst stocky stuntman Dickie Owen makes a most unimpressive mummy. He's fat, and his crotch is too low-slung, like he was wearing baggy jeans under his bandages. Poor makeup too for the face, just a hurriedly applied mask by the looks of things.

I saw THE OTHERS yesterday. Again, I'd tried to keep myself isolated from reviews etc, although I couldn't avoid hearing that it had been "acclaimed" in the States. But I still went in semi-blind.

This is Alejandro Amenábar's third film, after the pretty good Tesis and the very good Abre Los Ojos, and for me it maintains the level. Actually I DID read Andy Dursin's review on the FSM page, in which he says that the film only exists in order to hit us with the final "turn of the screw" (music by Henry James, ha ha). I disagree. There's much more to it than that. I mean, knowing the twist to The Sixth Sense (for example, and picking that title out of a hat...ho ho) doesn't preclude us from watching and enjoying that film again, does it?

Anyway, I found THE OTHERS to be solid and genuinely spooky, with some extremely well-orchestrated scares. Even if it's a bit slow to start (call that European paced), Amenábar clearly knows his stuff.

His good taste extends to the music too, which is credited to him en solitario. If in Abre Los Ojos he referenced the Basic Instinct orgasm music, here he gives a nod to the more subtle moments of The Omen (those high repeating piano notes and a chilling upward glissando). And the rest of the score is very effective and multi-textured.

A fine performance too from Nicole Kidman (and she looks great here), and amazing handling of the children.

Oh, by the way, try to see it in a cinema with good sound! SCARY!

The Others (Spain/ USA 2001)

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
Screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar
Photography by Javier Aguirresarobe
Music by Alejandro Amenábar

Directed by Roger Corman
Screenplay by Charles Griffith and Mark Hanna
Photography by William Sickner
Music by Ronald Stein

Main Cast: Pamela Duncan, Richard Garland, Allison Hayes

Scientists hypnotise a prostitute, who then relives a previous life in medieval times as a witch about to get the chop. Can her present incarnation intervene and stop her past incarnation's execution? And if so, will history be changed, thus oblitering her subsequent incarnations (etc) from existence?

Despite the synopsis, the SF concept soon takes a back seat to the ensuing sword and sorcery, in fact The Undead ends up looking little more than a fanciful semi-improvised pantomime, peopled by too many story-book characters (good witches, bad witches, elfs or maybe elves, even the Devil himself).

Miniscule budget and sometimes awe-inpiringly bad script guarantee a few howlers. The incredible cod-Shakespeare of the medieval scenes reminded me of the court jester sketch in Woody Allen's Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex ("M'lady, methinks I have the hots for thee.")

Here's more good lines: Present prostitute incarnation manages to get in touch with past witch incarnation- "What voice is that I hear?" "It is me, it is you, it is both of us!" "Yes, spirit of myself!" Or what about the following exchange between the two scientists before the initial experiment- "But where will you find a subject weak and impressionable enough?" Second scientist brings in prostitute, explaining "Her type is the most easily influenced of basic character groups, almost devoid of will-power."

Ronald Stein did some great stuff in other later movies, but here I get the impression that, well, his heart just wasn't in it, hardly surprisingly.

Roger Corman of course went on to direct a handful of truly excellent Poe movies, in fact I fished out an old video of The Fall Of The House Of Usher from the back of a cupboard after I'd watched The Undead. I wanted to see how it stood up in comparison. I soon discovered that the tape itself had deteriorated and was almost unwatchable, but it STILL looked like a magnificent film, and Les Baxter's score was shouting out for the Percepto treatment...

Roger Corman, hell of a guy.

I still thought it was a brilliant film, but it must be a sign of getting old when one gets nit-picky about possible plot holes and, what is even sadder, when the benevolent mysticism fails to engage as before. I used to almost cry as a young teen when the wee alien did his hand signals at the end. It was like meeting God! This time I was more bemused than anything else, which I despise myself for.

And John Williams' music was rubbish (this time I'm joking!)

Close Encounters Of The Third Kind (USA 1977)

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Screenplay by Steven Spielberg
Photography by Vilmos Zsigmond
Music by John Williams