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Film reviews by Canadian writer Alex BoydThe Lonely Man (1957)
A remarkably under-appreciated Western — it isn’t even in my handy-dandy 1570 page movie guide — I was originally attracted to this film for the simplicity of the title as well as the cast. It features Jack Palance as a reformed gunfighter and Anthony Perkins as his son. Palance plays Jacob Wade, interested to start a new life with a son he didn’t raise, provided former enemies will stay away, and a town somewhere will actually let them stay. Palance is both understated and excellent, and Anthony Perkins so mellow as his bitter, abandoned son it seemed a little like he was just proving he’d memorized his lines. But in a stark, beautifully shot, black and white film understated performances work better than overblown ones so as not to distract from a quiet, simple and beautifully told story.
There’s even a fairly obvious, beautiful but elusive symbol for happiness quite literally charging through the film infrequently, along with great shots of actors (or possibly stunt people) galloping at full-speed through the landscape with such rousing music it made me want to buy a flippin’ horse.
Watch Jacob Wade make contact with his son again here. The movement Perkins brings to the scene is so languid it manages to be slightly puzzling even as it suggests he’s drunk, and depressed.
I’ve been given the impression a lot of Westerns were produced in the fifties, but this one deserves to be among those remembered — it may have the kind of closure you predicted from the early moments, but it’s still a remarkably satisfying and well-crafted film. Unforgiven (1992) with Clint Eastwood won four Academy Awards, telling the story of a man who leaves a peaceful life of retirement to become a gunslinger again, for reasons that don’t seem terribly valid by the end of the film. The Lonely Man did it first, though it tells the story the other way around.
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Moon (2009)
Not to be confused with New Moon (or The Twilight Saga: New Moon), somewhat irritatingly released in the same year, Moon is a low budget but remarkably well made science-fiction film directed and co-written by Duncan Jones.
The premise is quite simple: one lonely, slightly disturbed man (Sam Rockwell, in a great performance) is the sole employee stationed on the moon, key to supplying the earth with most of its power, even as he begins to hallucinate and finally runs into someone else who may or may not be there. There’s no way to explain more without ruining the film, but it’s safe to say solid direction, interesting ideas, a great score and central performance keep it from playing out like an overly long Twilight Zone episode, so that a simple story justifies the 97 minutes. Between the strange, magnetic images director Jones conjures for the hallucination scenes and the music by Clint Mansell, there are some captivating moments — and that’s only the beginning of this intelligent film. The style does borrow from films like Outland (1981) and 2001 (1968), but if the end result is something original, who cares?
Moon is worth the trip, and even manages to look impressive despite a budget of five million dollars. My one complaint is that the score by Mansell (who did an amazing job on The Fountain) isn’t available.
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Death Rides a Horse (1967) and Shalako (1968)
So intense-looking he played intimidating characters even as an elderly actor, Lee Van Cleef is among my favourite actors in the Western genre. He has small parts in impressive Westerns like High Noon (1952) with Gary Cooper, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, and The Tin Star (1957) with Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins. Finally, he had much larger roles in most of the Sergio Leone trilogy with Clint Eastwood, appearing in For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966). As far as I’m aware Death Rides a Horse is the only Western with him as a hero, so I was a little dismayed when it began with a long, unclear shot of rain and horses and opening credits that looked as though a college student had done them. But the film finds its way, and while a little slow it’s an extremely satisfying Western, if a little typical of the spaghetti Western revenge story.
Shalako stars Sean Connery, having turned down Bond for the first time, and apparently interested to do a Western as a fan of the genre. The film is interesting for the cast — Brigitte Bardot, Stephen Boyd as a villain, and Connery is reunited with his costar Honor Blackman from Goldfinger (1964), certainly one of the better Bond films ever made. Unfortunately, Shalako doesn’t ever really feel like it gets off the ground. The plot concerns an aristocratic hunting party that couldn’t care less they’re on an Apache reservation. When they’re brought clear proof the Apache are upset but prove too pompous and stupid to simply ride off the reservation before daybreak, the viewer begins to wonder why Shalako (Connery) helps them at all, except for the vaguely implied suggestion you’re supposed to help your own ethnic group, no matter what. Most of the dialogue involves characters grumbling at each other, and most of the action involves characters shooting wildly at each other across long distances. Sadly, Shalako is a passable Western and not the film it should have been considering the cast.
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Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)
Spencer Tracy received an Oscar nomination for this short, eighty minute, fairly slow and quiet film where he plays John J. Macreedy, arriving by train to a small town where the train hasn’t stopped in four years — a small town with something to hide. “What do you want?” is among the first things said to him at the station.
It’s the sort of town that would have maybe been a frontier town once, but the frontier has been conquered and now there’s a lot of sitting around to do. Without much happening, the arrival of a stranger causes a stir. It’s almost as though there are casual chases in the film, with characters sauntering around, sizing each other up. Despite taking place a few months after the close of the Second World War, the film has elements of a Western. The sheriff and doctor seem like they have the potential to be decent men, but they share the same secret as the rest of the town, and having been “consumed by apathy,” they’re reduced to meek conformity unless Macreedy can prod them into action. The town is run by Reno Smith (Robert Ryan) and his muscle comes in the form of two men, played by Lee Marvin and Ernest Borgnine. Between very few action sequences, the pressure begins to build again, with the Tracy character given lines like “You’re not only wrong, you’re wrong at the top of your voice.” In fact, there’s quite a bit of good dialogue here, as well as impressive direction and a striking, if slightly overdone score.
I wouldn’t want to give away the end of the film, or too much more about it, except to say it’s a pleasure to watch such a carefully made film that takes its time saying what it wants to say, including subtle statements about the evils of conformity versus the dangers involved with active indivduality. Tracy is remarkable at playing a character that seems the personification of calm and intelligence.
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Star Trek (2009)
Star Trek is the cockroach of science-fiction. I don’t mean for that to sound negative, I’m actually something of a fan. It’s just that if any science-fiction franchise is guaranteed to emerge again even if it hasn’t been seen for a while, it’s Trek, and the results over the years have been quite mixed.
As a child, I was so excited one of my favourite, very colourful shows was coming to the big screen with Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) that I typed up some details about it, glued on a photo of William Shatner, and stuck it to the fridge, compelled to make my own small contribution to marketing. Star Trek hadn’t been seen in ten years, since the cancellation of the original TV series, and the entire cast was reuniting for the film. I was a little confused by what I eventually saw, a film that looked great, had an impressive soundtrack, but told a slow-moving, carefully crafted story about growth. The invading entity wasn’t destroyed at the end, as much as helped along an evolutionary path, and Spock finds himself, finally balancing his two conflicting human and Vulcan sides, even going so far as to press Kirk’s hand and state “logic and knowledge are not enough.” The man from a culture that finds displays of emotion distasteful finally learns that it isn’t about repression, it’s about balance, and there are appropriate and logical times to be expressive. During the TV series, Nimoy had portrayed the character as barely able to speak about personal matters, but in the next Trek film he’d portray the character as much more comfortable in his own skin.
The film has a five minute sequence of Kirk admiring the newly redesigned Enterprise, as well as several long sequences of the Enterprise pushing through the invading entity, yet remains one of the higher grossing Trek films, because people were so curious to see Trek reborn, and that’s a tremendous advantage. It’s a good film if you accept that it unfolds like some kind space opera: it looks and sounds great, but is also fairly static.
Stop reading here if you don’t want any spoilers or plot details on the new Trek film.
Thirty years later in 2009 (and of course, after various spin-offs to original Trek have all exhausted themselves), a 78 year old Leonard Nimoy is the only original cast member who returns in the reboot of the franchise. The casting choices are excellent, the action sequences and effects impressive, but I do think the old characters are tossed out the airlock in favour of the high-powered entertainment on offer here. The young Spock beats the living daylights out of not one but two people, and doesn’t seem to mind kissing Uhura in front of at least three others. Kirk is confidence personified, when a frontier commander would undoubtedly require other qualities like diplomacy. Scotty is relentlessly chipper, and hangs out with something left over from a Star Wars film that’s fond of crouching on the equipment. Oddly, only a couple of the minor characters who traditionally had little to do emerge as more interesting: Sulu is both smart and capable, and Uhura seems like a remarkable woman who is smart, capable and compassionate. It’s all so relentlessly entertaining it’s easy to forget it isn’t actually about anything — the plot involves a Romulan from the future who rewrites history in his quest for vengeance, so that Kirk doesn’t need to be a character who quickly moves up through the ranks in a variety of assignments, he just needs to kick ass his first time out in space. Even the bridge of the Enterprise is as white as a tennis shoe, as if to emphasize the fresh new start.
I know what you’re thinking — it’s a summer film, and I’m missing the point. Probably true. I’m actually sincerely glad it has been a success, because we’ll get to see more, and hopefully something with a little more substance (I can almost see Leonard Nimoy watching this first film and saying “Well, this is what the kids want these days”), but I do wonder how successful the next film will be with that curiousity factor gone (everyone has already seen what these new actors are like in the roles) and I wonder what they’ll do, given that they’ve provided the two main characters with tidy new origin stories that don’t seem to require a whole lot more. Spock is a tortured and lonely character — no wait, he’s smooching with Uhura! Finally, the next film will have to actually be about something, or it’s simply more of the same. This is probably the irreverent, smashingly exciting rebirth the franchise needed, and I enjoyed seeing these beloved characters given a new lease on life — I just hope it’s a reborn franchise that manages to eventually have something to say.
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[REC] (2007)
[REC] is short for record in this fairly brief, seventy-five minute Spanish horror film, a film that manages to be remarkably entertaining (even if it’s also fairly bloody) borrowing the device of a hand-held camera’s point of view. A two-person crew from a reality show called “While You’re Asleep” follows a few firefighters late at night into a building where an old woman on the top floor seems strangely afflicted, all her neighbours huddling at the bottom of the long, ornate stairwell, complaining of wild screams. Within minutes, the situation starts to escalate out of control and the building is quarantined, ominous figures outside every door and window hanging plastic and making threats through a bullhorn.
To call this the stuff of nightmares is something of an understatement — I watched it during the day and I’m glad I did, because I can only imagine how the relentless build-up of suspense would feel otherwise. Cleverly, the film begins with absolutely nothing happening — the host of the show sneaks around a quiet firehouse looking for something interesting and wishing there’d be an alarm. The pace feels a little like sitting at the top of a hill in a go-kart and starting off at a crawl, but finally regretting giving yourself the shove that has you careening wildly out of control by the end.
The word zombie isn’t actually used, in favour of talk of a virus spread through saliva. And, it has to be said the film becomes a trifle predictable, with a couple of those moments when someone creeps slowly into a room to have the inevitable zombie jump on his or her back as soon as they get far enough. But ultimately, the film has a relentless grip on the viewer.
I’m not sure I see the appeal of the zombie genre. I know the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) had a few characters who were alive, but seemed quite dead, emotionally. At the same time there seemed to be a clear divide between older and younger people, with older zombies consuming and converting the younger people. Night of the Living Dead also has a brilliant final moment that almost certainly sets it above every zombie flick made since then. Maybe it’s fair to say zombie flicks are about a lack of compassion in the world, or maybe it’s just fair to say walking dead people gives us the creeps as something fundamentally wrong, aside from playing on our fears of a modern epidemic. Possibly, we don’t like the idea of the dead coming back and being supremely pissed off because it addresses a necessary disloyalty to previous generations — we all need to go our own way, after all. What I can tell you for sure is that this film will scare the living daylights out of you, and that it was remade as an apparently inferior film called Quarantine, in the United States. Subtitles? Bah, we’ll just remake the film!
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Our Man Flint (1966)
If something is immensely successful, parody never takes long to arrive, and original actor Sean Connery was still playing Bond in 1966 when James Coburn starred as Derek Flint. Flint doesn’t work for the government and has to be talked into a mission to stop a powerful organization from controlling the climate and threatening destruction on a global scale (and, never mind how that has an eerie ring to it over forty years later). Flint knows everything, is followed by women wherever he goes, but declines the briefcase with a hidden knife in favour of his lighter, which has 82 functions — 83 if you actually want to light a cigar. In an amusing twist, he isn’t just a Bond caricature, but a guy that’s even cooler, who’d rather be teaching ballet in Russia than saving the world, which always manages to sort itself out, after all. He even meets “triple-oh-eight” along the way (a Connery lookalike, but with an American accent) and pretty much pummels him and chucks him out the door.
By twenty-first century standards the film is a little slow, but Coburn is a great choice for Flint, and wisely manages to avoid sending it up or winking at the camera. And, unlike the Austin Powers films, Flint actually has some impressive stunts and entertaining (if not too suspenseful) action sequences along the way in addition to a good score by Jerry Goldsmith, probably one of the best film composers who ever lived. There’s nothing utterly memorable here, but it’s a little hard not to enjoy a film that’s both a successful parody and colourful entertainment by itself.
Watch a few clips of the film with the Goldsmith score here, and if you haven’t seen them, check out Coburn in a great Western called The Magnificent Seven (1960) as well as A Fistful of Dynamite (also known as Duck You Sucker), a later Sergio Leone film from 1971.
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Dracula A.D. 1972
Some notes for Hammer Horror, over thirty years too late:
Don’t have the great grand-daughter of Van Helsing faint on the jukebox, this is supposed to be a more progressive century. Don’t have all the men turn out to be power hungry wankers eager to become vampires, this is supposed to be a more progressive century. Be advised Dracula doesn’t look dignified biting into hippies. Don’t have Peter Cushing, as the twentieth-century descendant of Van Helsing, sit around in an office for the first hour. When he does do something, don’t have him run around in the streets helplessly, and leave out the scene where he stops and looks at a mannequin. Be advised a satanic ritual rarely begins with “Dig the music, kids!” Don’t have a woman as attractive as Caroline Munro be the first one to disappear. Have a powerful orchestral score or have the funky seventies music, but pick one and stick to it. Don’t have the overacting vampire disciple of Dracula run into the bathroom in agony, throw himself into the shower and turn it on to die there for no particular reason. And I think you can just call your film Dracula 1972, the rest makes the title clunky — and try not to inspire Dracula 2000, but it’s already too late.
I did like the beginning battle between Van Helsing and Dracula, followed by the sudden transition to the twentieth-century with the shot of the plane in the sky. Good choice to have Peter Cushing return as Van Helsing (or, his descendent this time around) along with Christopher Lee once again as Dracula, both lending the film some class. And to their credit, neither of them phone in a performance, though Cushing will be far better and much more touching the same year in one part of an five story anthology film, Tales from the Crypt — he plays a kindly old man targeted by a nasty neighbour. Playing Dracula for the sixth time, Lee will later comment that it got to the point where he was emotionally pressured into it, with the suggestion that people need the work. Please note, Horror of Dracula (1959) was a fun, colourful and classy update of the legend. A classic, really. But this is your seventh vampire film, and your sixth one with Dracula. You might have stopped somewhere along the way. It’s a film that’s easy enough to forgive, but also easy enough to forget.
Oh, and thanks for keeping Michael Kitchen employed as one of the young punks, he’ll be subtle and brilliant decades later in the TV series Foyle’s War, as a quietly competent police officer during wartime.
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Night of the Lepus (1972)
I’m telling you, if you need to class up a B-movie about killer rabbits the size of wolves, use the latin word for rabbit. It also doesn’t hurt to have fairly recognizable actors like Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh (best known for Psycho in 1960) and DeForest Kelley, best known as Dr. McCoy in the original run of Star Trek, from 1966 to 1969. Someone should do an article on Trek actors dabbling in seventies horror after the cancellation of the original show and before Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) and the revival of Trek made all that unnecessary. Aside from DeForest Kelley in this film, Shatner made Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) and Leonard Nimoy had a prominent role in an impressive update of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).
I watched this mainly for Kelley, and he seems to have tackled this in a relaxed but professional manner, sporting a moustache and chatting about what to do (and, there’s a lot of dull chatter here), or wearing a funky brown leather jacket and blasting away at a rabbit (sorry, a lepus) with a shotgun. The special effects are limited to actors reacting to close-ups of rabbits, quick shots of guys in bunny suits pretending to maul someone, or actual rabbits bumping their way through a model farm. To be fair, there are also a few effects shots where people are briefly in the same scene as a giant rabbit, but however seriously the film runs with this, there’s simply no way to make rabbits frightening. It goes without saying it’s a film to see with a few friends and a few drinks, unless like me you’re a fan of Kelley.
A few scenes are devoted to the genetic tampering that helped create the problem. I sometimes wonder about the collective impact of so many science-fiction / horror films like this — as often as they suggest we’re a little too free and loose with science and in danger of making horrible mistakes, they also always seem to suggest we’ll improvise some sort of solution. My favourite scene actually comes near the end, when it’s finally time to create a corridor and try and herd the rabbits over the electrified train tracks. An officer pulls up to the front of a drive-in film, gets on the bullhorn and announces the following:
“Attention, attention — ladies and gentlemen, attention! There’s a herd of killer rabbits headed this way and we desperately need your help. Roll up your windows, turn on your lights and follow the police car at the entrance to the theatre. Please keep calm and cooperate with the authorities. Do you read me?”
And everyone immediately honks their horn and starts up their car. Because you know, this is the sort of thing that happens, right?
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Watchmen (2009)
For the uninitiated, Watchmen presents an alternate but oddly familiar 1985 where superheroes are real, but are largely people who were loopy or determined enough to simply put on a mask. It’s a world where Nixon is still the president and the cold war threatens nuclear annihilation. There’s one truly powerful, nearly godlike superhero, who goes by Dr. Manhattan. And somehow, despite his helping America win the Vietnam war, America is spiritually running on empty and masked vigilantes of all kinds are outlawed, so they either retired or became hunted and bitter. And it’s all based on a graphic novel, which was a mini-series of comics published in 1986 / 1987.
So, got all that? Now here’s what to expect: film noir with superheroes. Rorschach (a man with a constantly changing Rorschach blot on his mask) narrates much of the first two-thirds of the film while skulking through back alleys and rain, finally taking the audience on a tour of some memories that make The Dark Knight seem fairly mild. Eventually, even some of the more supposedly well adjusted heroes slowly reveal that they drink too much, are guilty of rape, or whatever else. Meanwhile, Dr Manhattan is powerful and serene, but increasingly distant, and becoming some kind of cosmic Buddha.
Is there a point to all this? There is, and without going into the ending, it’s something about the slow, faulty movements in the direction of progress and the tremendous costs, both in terms of wasted energy and lives lost. For a comic book (or graphic novel, depending on how much respect you’re willing to award the whole genre) Watchmen does have something to say about the larger struggle, and something it thankfully doesn’t want to spell out too much, either.
The film has a tidy bundle of interesting moments, as well as a pile of entertaining ones, though I think this particular story ultimately works better as a graphic novel. Been a while since I read it, but as a comic it isn’t quite so obvious it borrows from film noir, even as a comic made in the late eighties is just that, even if it happens to have been reprinted later. A movie made for 2009 seems a little out of place in an era where climate change and lack of bio-diversity are bigger concerns than nuclear war, and a time when a lot of people would say the president seems like a pretty decent guy. It works well that there’s a cast of relative unknowns here, but the whole idea that they’re regular folks (and in addition to that, regular folks who haven’t suited up in years) is hurt by the eventual Matrix-like action scenes that don’t even seem to leave them winded. At other times, the faithfulness to the comic appears to have been a little too strong — it’s fine to have shots designed to reproduce specific frames or art, but there’s one sex scene that’s broken down into a series of disjointed, fairly typical moments, and between that and the cheesy music, people actually laughed.
I did find myself personally wishing the film was a little more balanced. Part of the appeal with costumed heroes is their duality: Bruce Wayne chats pleasantly at parties but Batman descends into alleys to beat up sleazeballs. In subtle ways, I think it comments on the duality of the real world. After all, we need both warm family homes and cold warehouses. Watchmen is strong on dismal material, and only offers a few glimmers of hope at the end. And forget Bruce Wayne aching for his lost parents, there’s a lot of domestic hostility in occasional flashbacks. At one point, Dr Manhattan sits on Mars contemplating if he’ll help mankind, looking out over the pristine landscape to ask how it would be improved by an oil pipeline or a shopping mall. It’s really an irrefutable and devastating argument. He comes up with a few lines about beauty managing to emerge out of chaos, but nobody states the only possible reply to his original question: certainly, it isn’t worth it for an oil pipeline or a shopping mall, but it might be worth it for a symphony or an act of kindness. Both as a comic and a deeply faithful translation into film, Watchmen takes the view that we may need to endure any number of irredeemable moments to fluke into one progressive step forward. It may not be my cup of tea as a world-view, but I certainly can’t fault the film for declining to make a statement.
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