Film Culture - Cowboy Dreams and Futuristic Nightmares

New Year new look! I decided that I needed to split film and TV blogs up this year. I watch more TV than film, so an irregular movie column is quite easier to achieve. So while my TV ramblings will continue in the regular blog spot, this film one will probably be on an as and when schedule, especially if there's not a lot of new films to be reviewed and most of the reviews will be older films from the now legendary Flash Drive of Doom...

Legal Alien?

The wife was quite clear about this - the book is even better than the film and I think the film is a solid gold masterpiece and I can say that again now that Kevin Spacey has been exonerated from all the damaging accusations that almost destroyed his brilliant career.

K-PAX is one of those films that is simply superb and I can't believe it's been so long since I last watched it because it really is one of the best films I've ever seen. It makes me smile, it makes my eyes leak and I think the reason the wife thinks I should read the book is because it's even more ambiguous than the film, which does try to offer a logical explanation to at least part of the story. Kevin Spacey plays Prot, allegedly from the planet K-PAX, who is 'arrested' in Grand Central Station for helping a woman who was mugged but says the wrong things to the police who don't care he was just helping, they stick him in cuffs and ship him off to the looney bin, where he eventually ends up being treated by Jeff Bridge's psychiatrist Dr Mark Powell. From that point on it's about how Prot interacts with the mentally ill patients, how he astounds astrophysicists and leaves Bridges feeling there's more to the man in front of him that meets the eye, that is until he hypnotises him and starts to dig into who Prot might really be. 

I think everyone who watches this movie and enjoys it for what it is will always believe that the ending was put there because the film was a serious look at mental health and you couldn't really have an alien in a Manhattan mental health hospital, either that or the director wasn't going to make a sci-fi film, but the patients knew it and I think anyone who loves this kind of film knows it as well, even if the sly smile at the end suggests something else entirely. There's more to this than meets the eye and it will always be one of my favourite films of all time. Now, I must read the book(s). 

With Hindsight

An occasional entry on either blog that examines something already talked about...

The Guardian newspaper [which has become something of a target in my house for being a gaslighting centre right middle class rag] spent an entire The Week in Geek column after New Year raging about how 'successful' the Netflix/Zack Snyder Rebel Moon, Part One: A Child of Fire has been and essentially slagging off people who dared to claim they liked it. This newspaper has form with reviews, such as when Lucy Mangan reviewed Clarkson's Farm without seeing it and claimed it was so bad it should be cancelled before anyone got to see it. When it became clear she hadn't actually watched the series, the paper got Stuart Heritage to review it again - positively - given the backlash the newspaper received.

Then just four months or so ago, the paper reviewed the brilliant Lessons in Chemistry and made allegations about the series that were clearly based on the reviewer not having watched the show and taking the review from a synopsis of the book it was based on. Subsequently the eight-episode Apple TV+ show made the paper's Top 50 of the year (although not as high as it deserved). Then about four weeks before Christmas it reviewed There's Something in the Barn, gave it three stars and declared it "a fun festive film in the vein of Gremlins," when it actually was one of the worst films released in the 21st century. 

But anyhow, back to the Zack Snyder film which garnered enough agreement with the Guardian's opinion to allow the comments section to run riot with defamation and nastiness, allowing trolls who would usually have been banned by the paper to attack anyone who dared suggest it was a lot of fun and shouldn't be taken so seriously. I can't emphasise enough how people should a) not take any Guardian review seriously and b) if they still read the Guardian they should stop and either find a different paper to read or a different web site to get their biased news from. The latter should be a resolution for everybody - coupled with helping kill off this worthless newspaper and consign it to the same history as the News of the World (which at least was honest about how shit it was). Yet to dedicate an entire column to slagging off people who liked something its reviewer despised is really a low bar for a newspaper that, at times, does good investigative journalism. It makes you wonder if the newspaper's editorial staff are all about 15.

Old Western's Never Die

38 years after it came out and 37 years since we watched the VHS video release, we decided to give Silverado another spin. I remembered enjoying it, especially as it was unusual for a western to be made in the 1980s - an era for flash comedies, crass cop movies, big hair and seminal sci-fi. It was a western that tried to be cutting edge and a bit more modern and it was over two hours long, however while it was enjoyable in a 'you don't see things like this much anymore' kind of way and it had a bunch of famous actors in it who either disappeared from view or went onto become huge stars, it was also just a western. It also had John Cleese as a sort of bad ass sheriff and seemed to spend an awful lot of time getting to where it wanted to be and then not a lot of time when it got there. It was interesting to see a film with the likes of Scott Glen, Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, Jeff Goldblum, Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Patricia Arquette (why she was in this is anybody's guess) and Linda Smith in it, but I seem to recall the man who made it, Lawrence Kasdan, saw it as a reboot of the classic western and as we've all probably noticed, that still hasn't happened. It offered much but kind of dribbled a climax. 

Nightmare Scenario

I finally bit the bullet and watched the latest Nicholas Cage film, despite my better judgement and the knowledge that I have been misled in the past by people telling me, 'No, this Nick Cage film is really good, he's stopped making shit films...' only to discover he hadn't and it wasn't. However, Dream Scenario is actually one of the best, if not the best Nick Cage film I have ever seen. It is quite superb, very tragic and ultimately one of the saddest things I have seen in a long time.

Paul Matthews is a mild-mannered, slightly boring college professor specialising in biology who, without explanation, starts popping up in peoples dreams, which ultimately turns him into an overnight sensation and one of the most interesting people on the planet. Everyone knows him and as a result he starts to attract attention he and his family don't want. He turns up in almost everyone's dreams but does very little apart from just being in them, almost like an innocent bystander. Then after a series of rather strange things, the dreams turn nasty and Paul becomes a kind of modern day Freddy Kreuger as he wanders through peoples dreams slashing and killing people indiscriminately and this has almost the opposite effect with people no longer wanting to know him and he starts to attract problems and bad luck. It's from this point in the story that you start to feel desperately unhappy and profound sadness for him because it doesn't matter what he does things just get worse for him and he can't even plead for pity without people thinking he's just making things worse. Cage is quite brilliant as a man driven to the brink of his own sanity by the events unfolding around him and unable to fathom how his life is systematically being destroyed by something that really has nothing to do with him. There is more to it than that but to delve too deeply would spoil what is essentially a very good film, albeit one that you can't help but feel great sadness about.

It's Still Not A Tumour!

I found myself watching Film4 and possibly the most unlikely film comedy of 1990 was being shown. Kindergarten Cop shouldn't be a classic movie, but somehow it manages to be, despite its best efforts. Arnie had discovered comedies by this point in his career and this seemed like the perfect vehicle to prove he could make people laugh. I don't know if it was rest of the cast that facilitated this or if he genuinely did come across as a funny guy.

He plays John Kimble, a cop trying to get a bad man put away for bad things and through some contrived reasoning, Kimble and his partner have to go to some obscure west coast community, where he has to pose as a kindergarten teacher when his partner gets a severe case of the shits; from this point on it's just a number of set pieces with under six year olds, interspersed with lots of footage that could have been used in that old TV show Kids Say the Funniest Things. The thing is the longer I watched it, the more I found myself ignoring the (remember this was filmed in 1989 but not released until 1990) bad hairstyles, questionable acting, lame action sequences and double entendres and just enjoying it for a bit of nostalgia. And Arnie looked so young (and Linda Hunt so old considering she was just 44) and no one knew he was going to be a Republican at this point, even if he was originally from Austria, like someone else from history...

In Elysium Fields

We finally got around to watching Neill Blomkamp's Elysium and one wonders why this director fell from grace so quickly after this and District 9 as his most recent films would have gone 'straight to video' in bygone times.

Elysium wasn't really the film I expected it to be from the promo posters and trailers I'd seen, over ten years ago now. I can also see why it flopped at the box office, despite being a taught sci-fi film with relatable heroes and a couple of proper piece of shit villains - namely Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley, whose Kruger really was as mad as a box of rabid bats and seemingly kept coming back for more. He was the main antagonist opposing Matt Damon's Max, who just wants a normal life but gets butt-fucked by 2154 too often. The film is essentially about overthrowing the elite, who live on a space station, while Earth chokes to death in pollution and violence - policed by robots with zero tolerance - and where illness, injury and disease can be cured but the people in charge are happy to let the people [read: cattle] die as long as profits are maintained. It could be allegorical for the 2020s but with a little more compassion. 

The wife found it a bit too slow and struggled to stay awake in the opening scenes, but I thought it was considerably better than I expected - but, that said, you don't often see Matt Damon in anything that isn't at least half good. There's good support from Alice Braga, Diego Luna and William Fichtner, the sets were realistic and in many ways it fits in perfectly with Blomkamp's alien film - District 9 - with it's feeling of hopelessness and dystopia, however I'm still struggling to understand why Foster, who by this point was making fewer and fewer movies, would want to be in it. It's still worth a view if you get the chance. 

Next time...

This is a redundant component because I could list all the films on the Flash Drive of Doom, but there's no guarantee we'll watch them. The wife fancies having a Harry Potter marathon at some point; I still haven't watched Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse and we're looking for a window of opportunity to view Killers of the Flower Moon which at 3½ hours needs to be a good film or I'll feel cheated. We have stuff I want to watch but she doesn't and vice versa and that's before we even get onto what's stored on the Freeview set top box we've 'taped' from TV. Whatever we watch, you can guarantee I'll have an opinion about it...