Saturday, 31 August 2024

BITE-SIZED: Firestorm (Dean Semler, 1998)

When a sadistic criminal (William Forsythe) breaks out of jail during a forest fire, it falls to a veteran smoke jumper (Howie Long) to stop him.



I had seen this movie as a kid, and was curious to check back in with it.


This movie is not great, but in its lunkheaded way it is a solid action programmer.


It makes a lot out of its $19 million budget, and runs less than 90 minutes.


William Forsythe is a great bad guy, and Long is not bad in the lead - he is clearly charismatic, but in the way that an athlete is. But he does not have the kind of screen presence that draws you in.


Still, the movie does not make the mistake of burdening him with anything too emotionally nuanced. 


He spends most of the movie running or improvising fire-based solutions like MacGyver.


While there is some action, most of the movie’s mileage comes from trying to avoid the fire.


In this respect, Firestorm is reminiscent of a Desmond Bagley novel, in how it combines an action thriller plot with some kind of natural hazard.


Not great, but it gets the job done.


If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour

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OUT NOW: Alien Romulus (Fede Álvarez)

When a derelict space wreck enters orbit, a group of desperate workers from the harsh mining colony below sneak onboard.


They see the wreck as an opportunity, a way to upgrade their ship to make the nine year journey to a planet far beyond the clutches of the company.


Too bad…





My relationship with the Alien movies is weird.


I first discovered them as a kid, through their novelisations by the great Alan Dean Foster.


I did not watch the movies until years later, by which time they had been spoiled and somewhat superseded by my imagined versions from the books.


Bizarre, I know.


So the movies have never really hit for me.

I can certainly appreciate them, but my ass-backwards introduction to them has always kept them at a distance.


It is tough not to reach for the AI-assisted facsimile of Ian Holm when trying to encapsulate this movie, but there is not much to it.


Alien Romulus is the perfect example of the Disney approach to franchise relaunches - take what worked before and repeat it.


If that includes recreating the face and voice of an actor who died years before the movie began production, so be it.


Alien Romulus has things to recommend it: it is the first film since the second to capture the idea of working stiffs getting screwed by the company.


There is some decent world building at the start, with our heroine trapped in a never-ending contract, always in debt to the company.


The catalyst for the film’s action is desperation.


In that respect it broadly follows the set up of director Fede Álvarez’s Don’t Breathe, but it is effective.


And the filmmakers do have some good ideas once the action shifts to the abandoned space station.


There is a decent slow walk through a corridor of facehuggers and an inspired beat involving zero g and acid blood.


But the overriding sense with this movie is of a checklist being ticked off: we get repetitions of famous lines, some familiar music cues, and even a third act that manages to combine Prometheus and Alien Resurrection


Heck even not-Ian Holm (a combination of puppetry and AI-assisted CGI) is a reprise of the scene from Alien 3 where Ripley talks to a puppet of Lance Henrikson’s Bishop.


Of course in that film, they had a flesh and blood actor on hand to provide the voice and soul.


The cast are fine, particularly David Jonsson as compromised android Andy. But the film is closer to a slasher with a group of vaguely likeable heroes who are meant to be dispatched.


Even on that level, the picture falls short - despite some touches of gore, it never feels that scary. It is not even that tense.


It feels like the diet version of Alien - all the familiar tropes, but there is nothing new or unique to this iteration. All the previous films had something new to add to the mix, whether it was additional concepts like the queen or a prison planet, or changes to the tone or genre. This movie plays it safe.


And the film’s theme of a soulless corporation treating desperate plebs as experiments feels almost like self-parody when the film is exploiting the facsimile of a dead human being to play a facsimile of a human being whose prime directive is “For the good of the company”.


Indeed.


If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thursday, 29 August 2024

Yojimbo (Akira Kurosawa, 1961)

 Two warring gangs.


One town.


And one stranger (Toshiro Mifune) who is going to tip the scales…



The progenitor of so many action, thriller and western plots, Yojimbo is a key cinematic text of world cinema.


So of course I only got around to watching it this year.


I had read Red Harvest, the book this film was inspired by, years ago, but I could barely remember anything. I have not watched A Fistful of Dollars in over a decade either so this was practically a fresh watch.


I have finally come around to the understanding that if a classic movie is playing on a big screen near me, I should go. It is not so much sanctity of the movie theatre at this point but the fact that I won’t have to worry about getting distracted by my phone or (if I’m on a computer) watching YouTube.


Anyway, back to the main event.


This movie is so effortless. The way it balances tension with humour is unbelievable.


And Mifune is the ur-text for every silent badass character to stroll into an action movie: everybody from Eastwood’s Man with No Name (for the one reader who does not know, Fistful of Dollars is a remake of this movie) to Jack Reacher.


The star is so gloriously minimal - you just watch him evaluating the people around him, giving away nothing within the story, but you can track every move that character is making.


And when he snaps into action, it is beautiful.


The most special aspect of his character to me is how he appears to be almost superhuman to everyone around him.


Yet thanks to Mifune’s performance, that facade is always presented as such to the audience.


He is a capable fighter, but he is still only one man.


He is very aware of the odds against him, and avoids direct confrontation as much as possible.


The one time he drops the facade is after he rescues the family. After disguising his massacre of the villains, he leaves their hideout to find the family waiting for him.


Terrified, he explodes and basically threatens them into finally escaping.


The film is packed with moments of humour such as this (the way the rival gangs advance and retreat, trying to avoid starting the fight is inspired), and they are so well-judged they never work against the stakes.


Just a great movie. If you have not seen it, rectify that now.


If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.


Monday, 19 August 2024

No Escape AKA Escape from Absolom (Martin Campbell, 1994)

In this season of The James Bond Cocktail Hour podcast, we are covering the six year gap between Licence to Kill and GoldenEye, covering everything James Bond-related, from books to comics to video games, to non-Bond properties which tried to fill the gap.


Before he was tapped to resurrect Bond, Martin Campbell assembled the team (editor Terry Rawlings and cinematographer Phil Meheux) who would help him bring the spy back to life, to craft another kind of adventure, 1994's No Escape!

Check out the episode at the link below:



























Edge of Darkness: Compassionate Leave

Edge of Darkness: Into the Shadows

Edge of Darkness: Burden of Proof

Edge of Darkness: Breakthrough

Edge of Darkness: Northmoor 

Edge of Darkness: Fusion



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Sunday, 11 August 2024

Longlegs (Osgood Perkins, 2023)

A young FBI agent (Maika Monroe) is on the trail of a mysterious figure known as Longlegs. 


She has no idea who this person is - just that it is a name on a series of notes left at a series of murder-suicides.


As she draws closer to the truth, the investigator finds herself unravelling the mysteries of her own past.



I have never seen any of Osgood Perkins’ previous movies.


I remember some film critic on a podcast I cannot remember bringing up his work - and because of his lineage - I caught his name coming up on new projects, and this one was the first of his films I could see.


My first observation about the film is that it is set in a pre-internet age - starts in the Seventies, with most of the contemporary action taking place in the mid-nineties.


I have to put this down to the film’s increasingly religious and supernatural bent. It deprives the characters and the viewer of an easy out.


The film ratchets up the tension, and becomes increasingly surreal as the film moves from being a straightforward(ish) thriller to something untethered from empiricism and tangible reality.


I was exhausted watching it and I think I might have dozed midway as our heroine is searching through her belongings - I know it was this scene because when she finds the information she was looking for I jumped fully awake.


Consider this a review with a footnote.


There is some wonderful imagery - Alicia Witt’s reappearance through the car rear window, and then appearing to float up to the front window.


The ending felt underwhelming - simultaneously not definitive and not ambiguous enough to remain unnerving.


I did not have time to digest the movie because my phone went off with news about the assassination attempt on Trump.


Longlegs went on the backburner. Who cares about satanism when real life fascism is working its real magic?


A few weeks later, the film still lingers.


Opening within a limited 1:1 frame, the film immediately shows its credentials as a thriller (the filmmaker’s control of what you can see and when) and one of the film’s underlying themes: the limits of perception and experience, and the effect of time on memory.


That frame-with-a-frame and the way story information is shown or withheld immediately creates a tension that the film maintains throughout.


What is impressive is that the film’s revelations only add to the tension and create more questions.


Longlegs himself remains a powerful figure on and offscreen.


The plot vaguely follows the form of a mystery - but it never loses that foreboding, that almost cosmic level of dread. The fact that film takes place in the mid-nineties, before the internet replaced the unknown with TMI, feels especially pertinent to the film’s particular brand of uncanny hijinks.


It might have taken a few days, but the movie is sticking with me. I am keen to watch it again - and check out Perkins’ other directorial efforts.


If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.