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2009 Films XXXV-XXXVIII
XXXV: Che Part Two - Guerilla (Steven Soderbergh, 2008)
The second part to Che Part One - The Argentine, although Part One appears to have been a prequel to provide a context for Che's Bolivian campaign. This is curious, as this did feel rather contextless and divorced from history and politics. Skipping over the Congo period, Guevara (Benecio Del Toro) tries to aid an uprising in Bolivia, to face indifference and suspicion from local campaigners, hostility from the Bolivia forces and covert opposition from the US. It's a much more linear film, leading up to the inevitable stand-off, and I was reminded of Terernce Malick's The Thin Red Line - which is curious since I see the original idea was Malick's, but failed thanks to a lack of funding.
It's not a bad film - but the individuals are lost with their camouflage, and I never felt I got to know the inner Guevara.
XXXVI: Red Riding - Nighteen Eighty-Three (Anand Tucker, 2009)
The fourth book but the third film (after Nineteen Seventy-Four and Nineteen Eighty) which is tasked with tying the threads togethers and finally revealing whodunnit. Sadly the answer is a mixture of the obvious and the ludicrously conspiratorial - although reading some of the accounts of how the police dealt with Hillsborough and the miners' strike it may be more authentic than it feels.
John Piggott (Mark Addy), a lawyer, returns home to his father's funeral (like Eddie in the first film), as another girl is kidnapped; Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays) is in prison for the earlier non-Ripper killings, Piggott is invited to launch an appeal. Initially he is not convinced, but as he learns more about the past, he is convinced that the wrong man is locked up. Meanwhile, police officer Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) is feeling increasingly guilty about the times he has looked the other way over the past decades.
This film makes more use of flashback than the other two, and whilst the confusion is probably deliberate, I wish they'd found a way to distinguish the streams more effectively - like Traffik/Traffic or Damages in series one. The books are rather more modernist than the films, but on the page it's easier to reread. There's also the problem of how to provide resolution in a narrative which has left downbeat and ambiguous closures. It's certainly the happiest of the three endings - although the personal implications to Piggott are hanging in the air; Jobson is perhaps spared more than he deserves, and only retirement seems likely to sort out his colleagues' misdemeanors.
An impressive trilogy - good to see there can be serious, contemporary adaptations, and a tragedy that there is an unfilmed volume.
Blakes 7 doesn't count as I don't count tv seasons - but a spoilersome commentary here. I ended up rewatching Get Carter on Sunday night - but I missed a large chunk of the start so it won't count. I suspect it's in the top five British movies ever made - with A Cottage on Dartmoor, The Thirty Nine Steps, The Third Man, Brazil and Confessions of a Milkman.
XXXVII: THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971)
Lucas's dystopian depiction of a world where sex is banned, everyone is doped up and everyone is encouraged to consume, I don't know, Jar Jar Binks lunchboxes. Well, I don't get the consumption bit, as THX doesn't seem to own anything aside from a, ahem, milking machine. He's coming off the meds as his mate LUH is repalcing them with placebos and they rediscover sex. Meanwhile he shops SEN, who inexplicably wants to share a room with him. Both end up in the same cell - LUH being sidelined - and attempt to escape.
The white on white visuals have stayed with me in the twenty years since I last saw this, and Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance do sterling service with a script co-written by someone whose expertise was to lay in sound editing and layered voices - Walter Murch. The ending is suitably ambiguous - leaving more questions than it answers.
XXXVIII: Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
Part of Paul Merton's Silent Comedians, although Steamboat Willie had been billed. Jimmy Shannon (Keaton) can't pluck up courage to declare his love for Mary (Ruth Dwyer) and has gone into business with T. Billy Meekin (Roy Barnes). Unfortunately the business is on the verge of ruin - but it all might be saved when a lawyer (Snitz Edwards) arrives with a will leaving him seven million dollars, as long as he marries by 7 pm on his 27th birthday. Shannon has only a few hours left.
Initially this feels atypical - there are a minimum of pratfalls and leaping around, and the opening, in faded Technicolor, is more Harold Lloyd. In a sense his energy is saved for the climactic chase across the town and environs, complete with hundreds of brides and dozens of giant boulders. Very funny indeed.
Totals: 38 - Cinema: 12; DVD: 23; Television: 3
The second part to Che Part One - The Argentine, although Part One appears to have been a prequel to provide a context for Che's Bolivian campaign. This is curious, as this did feel rather contextless and divorced from history and politics. Skipping over the Congo period, Guevara (Benecio Del Toro) tries to aid an uprising in Bolivia, to face indifference and suspicion from local campaigners, hostility from the Bolivia forces and covert opposition from the US. It's a much more linear film, leading up to the inevitable stand-off, and I was reminded of Terernce Malick's The Thin Red Line - which is curious since I see the original idea was Malick's, but failed thanks to a lack of funding.
It's not a bad film - but the individuals are lost with their camouflage, and I never felt I got to know the inner Guevara.
XXXVI: Red Riding - Nighteen Eighty-Three (Anand Tucker, 2009)
The fourth book but the third film (after Nineteen Seventy-Four and Nineteen Eighty) which is tasked with tying the threads togethers and finally revealing whodunnit. Sadly the answer is a mixture of the obvious and the ludicrously conspiratorial - although reading some of the accounts of how the police dealt with Hillsborough and the miners' strike it may be more authentic than it feels.
John Piggott (Mark Addy), a lawyer, returns home to his father's funeral (like Eddie in the first film), as another girl is kidnapped; Michael Myshkin (Daniel Mays) is in prison for the earlier non-Ripper killings, Piggott is invited to launch an appeal. Initially he is not convinced, but as he learns more about the past, he is convinced that the wrong man is locked up. Meanwhile, police officer Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey) is feeling increasingly guilty about the times he has looked the other way over the past decades.
This film makes more use of flashback than the other two, and whilst the confusion is probably deliberate, I wish they'd found a way to distinguish the streams more effectively - like Traffik/Traffic or Damages in series one. The books are rather more modernist than the films, but on the page it's easier to reread. There's also the problem of how to provide resolution in a narrative which has left downbeat and ambiguous closures. It's certainly the happiest of the three endings - although the personal implications to Piggott are hanging in the air; Jobson is perhaps spared more than he deserves, and only retirement seems likely to sort out his colleagues' misdemeanors.
An impressive trilogy - good to see there can be serious, contemporary adaptations, and a tragedy that there is an unfilmed volume.
Blakes 7 doesn't count as I don't count tv seasons - but a spoilersome commentary here. I ended up rewatching Get Carter on Sunday night - but I missed a large chunk of the start so it won't count. I suspect it's in the top five British movies ever made - with A Cottage on Dartmoor, The Thirty Nine Steps, The Third Man, Brazil and Confessions of a Milkman.
XXXVII: THX 1138 (George Lucas, 1971)
Lucas's dystopian depiction of a world where sex is banned, everyone is doped up and everyone is encouraged to consume, I don't know, Jar Jar Binks lunchboxes. Well, I don't get the consumption bit, as THX doesn't seem to own anything aside from a, ahem, milking machine. He's coming off the meds as his mate LUH is repalcing them with placebos and they rediscover sex. Meanwhile he shops SEN, who inexplicably wants to share a room with him. Both end up in the same cell - LUH being sidelined - and attempt to escape.
The white on white visuals have stayed with me in the twenty years since I last saw this, and Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasance do sterling service with a script co-written by someone whose expertise was to lay in sound editing and layered voices - Walter Murch. The ending is suitably ambiguous - leaving more questions than it answers.
XXXVIII: Seven Chances (Buster Keaton, 1925)
Part of Paul Merton's Silent Comedians, although Steamboat Willie had been billed. Jimmy Shannon (Keaton) can't pluck up courage to declare his love for Mary (Ruth Dwyer) and has gone into business with T. Billy Meekin (Roy Barnes). Unfortunately the business is on the verge of ruin - but it all might be saved when a lawyer (Snitz Edwards) arrives with a will leaving him seven million dollars, as long as he marries by 7 pm on his 27th birthday. Shannon has only a few hours left.
Initially this feels atypical - there are a minimum of pratfalls and leaping around, and the opening, in faded Technicolor, is more Harold Lloyd. In a sense his energy is saved for the climactic chase across the town and environs, complete with hundreds of brides and dozens of giant boulders. Very funny indeed.
Totals: 38 - Cinema: 12; DVD: 23; Television: 3