One of many 60-minute B-movie horrors that Universal churned out in the 1940's, House of Horrors remains one of the most fondly remembered due to the hulking presence of Rondo Hatton. Originally a journalist and apparently a handsome man, he developed acromegaly which began to disfigure him in adulthood. He started getting extra work and bit-parts as faceless thugs until he appeared as 'The Creeper' in the Sherlock Holmes film The Pearl of Death (1944). Universal planned a series of films starring Hatton as The Creeper, but after this and it's sequel The Brute Man (1946), he sadly died of a heart attack brought on by his disease. He was far from a good actor - he does little but grunt and talk in child-like speech - but his presence is undeniable, and probably saves House of Horrors from obscurity.
Living alone in his rotting studio, sculptor Marcel De Lange (Martin Kosleck) is on the verge of selling his best work to a high-rolling collector. Unfortunately, the potential purchaser brings along notorious art critic F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier), who dismisses Marcel's work as a travesty, causing the sale to fall through. Penniless and on the verge of suicide, he spots a body wash ashore one night. The body is that of the Creeper, a known serial killer with the face of "the perfect Neanderthal," (as Marcel dubs him), so Marcel brings him home and nurses him back to health. Fascinating with his appearance, Marcel begins to sculpt the Creeper and exploit his blood-lust by setting him up to murder his enemies.
At just 65 minutes, House of Horrors, also known as Murder Mansion and Joan Medford is Missing, doesn't demand much at all. This is a formulaic genre picture that manages to squeeze an extraordinary amount into it's slender running time, and remains suitably entertaining throughout. Kosleck, for all his ham-fisting, manages to inject a tragic quality into his character, at first humble and optimistic, and later hateful and blood-thirsty. But it's Hando that steals the film - his Creeper snaps a woman's spine just for screaming in a scene that more than hints at rape (a big no-no in the 40's). Though there's no background or personality given to the character, that lurch-like appearance more than compensates. A forgettable genre film that is certainly worth an hour of your time.
Not a lot hinges on whether you know the outcome of Captain Richard Phillips' true-life run-in with a small crew of Somali pirates in 2009, as, like director Paul Greengrass's other tale of real-life heroism in the face of a terrorist threat, United 93 (2006), the film gathers up enough tension to keep you on the edge of your seat. It's not as good as United 93, as the film often struggles to keep things exciting in the long moments between the action, but Tom Hanks has more than enough presence to carry the film, and here gives possibly his best ever performance. Which makes it all the more surprising that Hanks - usually a darling with the Oscars with sentimental drivel such as Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994) - has missed out this year.
Captain Phillips (Hanks) is waved off at the airport by his wife Andrea (Catherine Keener in a one-scene cameo) as he flies to Oman to take command of the Maersk Alabama, that he soon realises will take him around the Somali Peninsula. Sure enough, on the Somali coast, they are chased by ambitious pirate Muse (Barkhad Abdi) in a skiff, with a crew consisting of hot-head Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman), nervous Najee (Faysal Ahmed) and young first-timer Elmi (Mahat M. Ali). They protect the ship for as long as they can, but the pirates are soon on board demanding payment. Phillips offers them $30,000, but it won't be enough for the ruthless warlords who employ Muse, so they take Phillips for ransom.
One of the main reasons why Captain Phillips works so well is that Phillips himself comes across as a true hero. Not a gun-toting, vest-wearing action hero, but an everyday guy who probably enjoys a comfortable suburban lifestyle with his family when he's not at sea. He's over middle-aged, slightly portly and not particularly handsome, but most importantly he's real, and a underdog to truly root for. In the time spent in the lifeboat as Muse and his crew head back to Somalia with their prize - with Navy SEALS in tow - allows Phillips and Muse time to slowly share experiences. Muse, fabulously portrayed by the Oscar-nominated Abdi, is a simple guy as well. It's just that in his country, poverty doesn't allow for any legal trades to be a wise option, so rather than plundering the sea for the fish that American ships have already hoovered up, they steal and kidnap.
But Greengrass is wise enough not to over-egg these scenes, or even allow us to sympathise too much with the pirates. But he allows us to understand them, to see things from their perspective. What they do is wrong and evil, yes, but when your country is governed by violent warlords and your life depended on coming back with something of real value, it's no surprise that they do what they do. And as the gravity of the situation dawns on the pirates, the film becomes a treadmill of heart-pounding small moments, where every second could either offer up a small opportunity for Phillips to escape or fight, or it could mean that he will never see his family again. Muse and his crew have done this before, but they are ill-equipped, desperate and twitchy.
As exciting as all those moments are, the film's most powerful scene is at the end, as Phillips breaks down whilst being medically treated by the American military. Up to this point, Phillips is kept at a distance, seeing very little of his true character before the pirates arrive. Hanks gives a devastating, improvised performance in this moment, as he struggles to process and comprehend the ordeal he has just been through. For an action film especially, this is an immensely powerful scene, and it re-enforces the human tragedy of the story. A riveting film overall, and proves again that Greengrass can't be matched in portraying a real-life incident with such heart, realism, and thrills.
Fritz Lang's last American film before he returned to Germany, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt suffers from the director's clear lack of interest. Lang was reportedly dismayed by the lack of visual creativity allowed by American producers (which was also clear in his penultimate American noir, While the City Sleeps (1956)), and so shortly after returned to his homeland to make the visually lavish double-bill Tiger of Bengal and The Indian Tomb (1959), dubbed the 'Indian Epic'. Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, an intriguing little noir starring Dana Andrews, is by no means a bad film, but is clearly the work of a man handicapped by the system and a film that is pessimistic in its execution.
Tom (Andrews), a novelist in search of inspiration for his second book, is approached by his newspaper publisher father-in-law Austin Spencer (Sidney Blackmer) to help aide his opposition of state capital punishment. The plan is to plant circumstantial evidence of Tom's fake involvement in the recent unsolved murder of nightclub stripper Patty Gray. Naturally, during the trial, an incident prevents Austin from delivering the evidence and testimony that will prove Tom's innocence, so Tom's disgruntled fiancée Susan (Joan Fontaine) races against time to prevent Tom getting executed on Death Row.
Lang had already exposed the fragility of the justice system in his German masterpiece M (1931), and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt begins in suitably grim fashion with the silent execution of an inmate. The plot is a great idea (to think what Hitchcock would have made of it) but the execution is plain and predictable. Although Andrews' performance is solid and the movie sometimes threatens to push the boundaries set by the censors at the time, it simply goes through the motions until a twist reveal in the last 15 minutes livens things up a bit. You most likely won't see it coming, but it ends the film with plenty of plot-holes to pick at and left me scratching my head at exactly what point the movie was trying to make. A rather flat end to a solid period of film noir for the German master.
American Hustle is all about large characters, outlandish fashion and awful hair. It may tease you into thinking it's some kind of smart con-artist movie with it's (very loosely) based-on-real-events premise ("some of this actually happened", the opening credits inform us) and snappy trailer. But for all visual pizazz, this is in fact a very small movie, focusing on a small set of unique and frequently bizarre characters that just happen to cross paths amidst the ABSCAM operation in the late 70's and early 80's. Imagine if the characters from I Heart Huckabees (2004) were in fact the people who took part in the operation covered in Argo (2012), and you'll have something akin to American Hustle.
Paunchy con-artist and loan-shark Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) hooks up with the beautiful Sydney (Amy Adams), an intelligent and ambitious American girl who improves Irving's scams by pretending to be an English aristocrat. When they are busted by creepy FBI agent Richie DiMaso (Bradley Cooper), they are promised leniency if they assist the Bureau in making four additional arrests. The plan is to entrap popular Mayor Carmine Polito (Jeremy Renner), who is looking to inject funds into gambling in Atlantic City, by having a friend pose as an Arab sheik looking for potential investments in America. As Irving, Richie and Sydney delve further into the sting, things start to spiral wildly out of control, as Irving's loud-mouth wife Rosalyn (Jennifer Lawrence) can't seem to keep her mouth shut, and Richie develops feelings for Sydney.
As said before, the plot plays second-fiddle to director David O. Russell's obvious fascination with this ensemble of weirdo's. Surprisingly, it's the slimy swindler at the centre of it all, Irving, that comes out of it the most recognisably human. In the opening scene, we see a shockingly bloated Bale, slapping his awful toupee across his head to cover up an embarrassing hairline. Is this the American Dream at work, a petty criminal posing as a sophisticated, honest guy? Well, no, American Hustle doesn't need to try and touch those metaphorical heights, but this is the type of person we're to spend the next two-plus hours with. An apparently successful sort of guy, covered in gold and eyes covered by tinted sunglasses, but hiding something fragile or dangerous that may soon reveal itself.
The performances are spectacular, as one would expect. Bale manages to make you actually root for his slimeball character, and Jennifer Lawrence shows that she seems able to tackle any role or character with aplomb. Cooper does a job similar to his previous work with Russell, Silver Linings Playbook (2012), but even betters that. He seems to have the uncanny ability to make you instantly know there's just something wrong with his character, and when we see him at dinner with the fiancee he clearly doesn't love or respect, his hair bunched up in tiny little rollers, there's something simply tragic about him. And Amy Adams, let loose here to reveal an unseen feistiness, wins the award for Side-Boob of the Year.
The whole thing is a rather strange experience, never really falling into a recognisable genre or taking a conventional approach to storytelling. It could only really come from the mind of David O. Russell, the only director that seems able to combine a mixture of mainstream commercial success, nominations and awards a-plenty, and independent sensibilities, never really moving away from his own vision. It's not a total success of course - Irving's admiration from the 'moral' Mayor Polito, who just wants to rejuvenate Atlantic City, seems a bit of a sympathy quick-fix, and no-one can out-Scorsese Martin Scorsese. Well, maybe Paul Thomas Anderson can. But American Hustle is a big dose of strangely endearing entertainment, that even when it outstays it's welcome towards the end still made me want to spend more time with the characters.
Boasting the fifth collaboration between lauded director Martin Scorsese and can-do-no-wrong A-lister Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street signals the moment the two finally took the step over the brink. Their previous films together - Gangs of New York (2002), The Aviator (2004), The Departed (2006) and Shutter Island (2010) - were all solid, if hardly groundbreaking works. With The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese seems to have let go of his reservations and embraced the daring, X-rated innovations of his 70's and early 80's work, and DiCaprio deserves to look smug after giving his finest performance to date. From the opening shot of DiCaprio snorting cocaine from between a prostitute's open legs, this is 3 hours of utter depravity. And it's hilarious.
Shortly after being taught the ways of excess and cocaine by his Wall Street boss Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey), young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) finds himself out of work following Black Monday. When he takes a boiler room job at a stockbroker's dealing in penny stocks, he learns that commission for these stocks are 50%. Soon enough he is making money hand over fist, setting up his own company, Stratton Oakmont, along with his dentally-challenged follower Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill). He recruits some of Donnie's marijuana-dealing friends and teaches them a script designed to sell, but ultimately the operation is a pump and dump scam. He is labelled The Wolf of Wall Street in a negative magazine article, yet this propels him to cult fame, and soon has flocks of eager young Gordon Gekko's begging for a piece of the pie.
At one minute shy of 3 hours, the film could certainly do with a trim. Yet Scorsese and DiCaprio's obvious fascination with this anti-hero means that we are treated to experiencing every juvenile and ridiculous second of Belfort's rise to Wall Street superstardom. We get flights with on-board orgies and drug taking, Jonah Hill masturbating in the middle of a crowded party at the sight of Belfort's future wife Naomi (the stunning Margot Robbie), dwarf-tossing, and Belfort taking helicopter lessons whilst drugged off his face. This is certainly dangerous territory - the film could easily slip into a celebration of frat-house antics, which is kind of does, but Scorsese keep the insanity levels at such a height that it's hard not to just laugh and shake your head.
A lot of it is down to the performances of DiCaprio and Hill, the latter of whom is proving to be a damn fine actor beneath that Jew-fro and obnoxious mannerisms. The film's highlight focuses on a botched scheme to smuggle $2 million dollars via Brad (Jon Bernthal) to reptilian French banker Jean (Jean Dujardin). Having learned that FBI agent Denham (Kyle Chandler) has his phones tapped, Belfort must get home to warn Donnie to get off the phone. The only problem is, they've taken a large quantity of Qualuudes. Thinking that years of indulgence have caused a tolerance to build up, the expired best before date have simply lead to a delayed reaction. Belfort suffers from what he describes as 'the cerebral palsy stage', flailing around on the floor without control of his limbs or his speech. His long journey home is the most laugh-out-loud example of drug-fuelled ineptitude since the ether scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998).
Of course, the film's morals are questionable, and Scorsese has suffered the same narrow-minded criticism he did from his 'glamorisation' of the mob in Goodfellas (1990). Yet I like to think that Scorsese trusts and respects his audience enough to allow them to think for themselves, to get a laugh from the on-screen antics whilst understanding that this is not the behaviour of a sane or ethical individual. Refreshingly, the movie stays away from any moral preaching or underlying messages, and simply tells a story because it's entertaining. Although it doesn't quite justify it's 3 hour running time, this is the most fun I've had watching a comedy for a long time, and proves that there's plenty of life in Scorsese yet.
As Asif Kapadia's gripping and extremely moving 2010 documentary Senna proved, cinema audiences have a thirst for the larger-than-life characters that inhabit the Formula One track. The sport itself is frightfully dull (although I'm sure plenty will disagree with that), but the sportsmen willing to lay down their life for a kick and a trophy are infinitely more fascinating, especially in the days of lax safety rules. The sport nowadays is little more than advertising on wheels, but when the likes of James Hunt and Niki Lauda battled it out on the track, epic rivalries were created, and no matter how talented these men were at driving these "coffins on wheels", every race could spell out death.
Rush portrays the clash of two opposing personalities. The long-haired, dashing Englishman James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) was all about the adrenaline, embracing the post-race parties and lying with the many women that would throw themselves at him. He was reckless, willing to risk his life and others in order to win, but, as described in the film, there was no better driver in the world in terms of raw talent. His rival, Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Bruhl), was focused, clinical, and even helped design the cars he would drive. He was the early-night type, 'rat-faced' and cold. In every sense, he's the perfect villain.
But where Rush succeeds the most is challenging our early conceptions of these two characters. There's little fun to be had with Lauda, but played by Bruhl, he evolves into the underdog of the movie, perhaps the only one that actually gives a damn about his own life and the life of his opponents. This, naturally, leads to tragedy and a particularly wince-inducing scene in which Lauda requires having his lungs vacuumed, but it's at this point that we realise just what these two drivers mean to each other. As Lauda watches Hunt claw back some points in the 1976 Formula One season, it becomes clear that these two need each other to survive. Their hatred of one another only serves to fuel the flames, and leads to Lauda's defiant early return to the driver's seat, scarred and bandaged.
Fast cars, beautiful women and exotic locations hardly sounds like a recognisable workload for Ron Howard, one of the most play-it-easy directors out there. His past films have been unjustifiably successful, critically and commercially, never stamping a recognisable directorial trait onto his work. Yet here, although the bright sheen of the 70's initially takes some getting used to, he has managed to create a world that is very much alive, using snappy editing, a pumping soundtrack and some growling sound design to re-create this world for petrol-heads. But he doesn't neglect his characters, and evokes the great work done on Frost/Nixon (2008), which was also a study of two giant, clashing personalities coming together on the world stage.
Rush is an exhilarating experience, able to distinguish each race from the next and literally putting us in the driver's seat with the use of digital cameras. Although it occasionally drifts into formulaic territory with the introduction of the 'wives' (played by Oivia Wilde and Alexandra Maria Lara, respectively), Howard cleverly uses this as an insight into Hunt and Lauda's personalities. Hemsworth is very good in his first 'proper' post-Thor role, but it is Bruhl that you take away from the film. How he gets you to initially loath him, only to be cheering him on at the climax is the work of a great actor, and it's a crime that he has been snubbed by the Academy this year. Hopefully this will inspire a host of decent sports movies, as Rush proves that you can mix character study and even existential musings with the thrill of sport.
Practically neglected entirely by cinema, it seems that America is finally holding its hands up in the air; ready to face its utterly barbaric history surrounding the kidnapping of black Africans and the introduction of slavery. Last year saw Quentin Tarantino deliver a sporadically entertaining yet hardly historically accurate depiction of slavery and plantation owners in Django Unchained, but British director Steve McQueen has delivered an unflinching, heartbreaking true story in 12 Years a Slave, an account of the experiences of Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a freeman living in American who is kidnapped, taken from his wife and children, and sold into slavery.
After a conflict with a sadistic overseer (Paul Dano), Northup is passed on by gentle plantation owner Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), into the hands of the cruel Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender). There he finds himself caught up in a conflict between Epps' wife (Sarah Paulson) and fellow slave Patsey (Lupita Nyong'o). Patsey is treated cruelly by Mistress Epps simply because her husband desires her sexually, and Patsey pleads with Northup to end her life. Although coming from an educated background, and being especially skilled with a violin, Northup keeps his past a freeman quiet. But when chance leads to an encounter with Canadian abolitionist Bass (Brad Pitt), Northup sees a chance to communicate with his family back in New York.
For anyone familiar with the work of Steve McQueen, there is no doubting that 12 Years a Slave is distinctly his. His previous films Hunger (2008) and Shame (2011) can be described as works of high art, and while 12 Years a Slave features the long, haunting takes and moments of stillness that McQueen is known for, it is more recognisable as a mainstream film. I certainly don't mean that as a negative, as, given the subject matter, McQueen has to be extremely delicate with not allowing his own artistic preferences to overshadow the gravity of the story. But the film is surprisingly, yet thankfully, unsentimental. There's no big chest-beating moment of defiance or Oscar-grabbing monologues, and in fact we don't really get to know Northup as much as we really should.
Northup plays the role of protagonist (the film is based on his written account), but this is just one man. His story was one of a precious few to come out of slavery with a 'happy' ending, and 12 Years A Slave extends its focus to the experiences of the majority of slaves, giving the audience a first-hand experience of what it was like to live in this time. In a key scene, Northup stands silent as the other workers sing, and as the realisation of his situation hits home, he defiantly joins in. Patsey's story, if anything, is the more heartbreaking, caught between a drunken, lusty maniac and his contemptuous, jealous wife. In the film's most powerful scene, Epps catches her on the way back from another plantation. When he asks where she has been, she holds up a bar of soap. Mistress Epps won't let her wash. So with his wife encouraging him, he whips Patsey until her back is near unrecognisable. It's one of the most horrendous moments I've ever seen on screen, and it's all caught in one unflinching take.
The performances are universally excellent. Fassbender gets the easier role as the scowling sadist, but it is his character's Christian justification for slavery that most disturbs. Ejiofor is quietly effective in an unshowy role, but it is Nyong'o and Paulson that stand out as two women on completely opposite sides of the social spectrum. When the movie ends, although it climaxes with Northup uniting with his family, I had a strange feeling of dissatisfaction. I realised that this is why 12 Years a Slave is so powerful, as although it offers a kind resolution to a character that suffers an awful amount throughout, there's still the knowledge that this is one man amongst millions, that there has been no real justice for the perpetrators of this barbarism. As the footnotes inform us, Northup's capturers were never punished either, as it wasn't law for Northup to testify against them. It's a lot to stomach, but this is devastating, important cinema.
It's hard to imagine a time when the words 'starring Matthew McConaughey' spelled bad news. Two years of wise choices, good films and career-redefining performances have turned the actor into one of the hottest actors around. Killer Joe (2011) and Mud (2012) showed his ability to play dangerous, mysterious and unpleasant characters while maintained that Texas charm and charisma. It seems like they were not much more than a warm up for Dallas Buyers Club, where he plays the skeletal Ron Woodroof, a boozy, cocaine-addled, womanising redneck electrician and part-time rodeo rider, who finds out that he has AIDS and just 30 days to live.
Initially, he reacts angrily, threatening the doctors (Denis O'Hare and Jennifer Garner) after they ask him if he has engaged in homosexual activity. With the knowledge of his impending death, Ron studies the disease. He cannot wait for trial testing of an experimental drug named AZT, and so pays a Mexican janitor to smuggle it out of the hospital for him. When he travels to Mexico for more AZT, Dr. Vass (Griffin Dunne), an American doctor who has had his license revoked, informs Ron that the AZT is killing him. He instead prescribes him drugs unapproved in the US, and soon enough, Ron's health has improved and he has lived way beyond his initial 30 days. With the drugs unavailable in his home country, Ron smuggles them across the border, setting up a buyers club for AIDS patients that soon becomes extremely popular for its terrified patients.
McConaughey's performance isn't the only one that impresses. Jared Leto, near unrecognisable as transvestite Rayon, injects a remarkable subtlety into his performance. Rayon didn't exist in the real-life story, and would normally come across as the token larger-than-life character that the Oscars seem to love so dearly. Yet the delicate tragedy of Rayon's heroin-addicted character combined with Leto's performance, is the foundation for Ron's fresh outlook. There's no moment of realisation where Ron has a U-turn on his homophobia, but his reluctant friendship with Rayon - and Rayon's ability to bring in the gay market on the buyers club - speaks louder that a close-up with sentimental music.
Jennifer Garner's Eve is also a fictional addition, and her role is one of the main negative aspects of the film. Not that she's bad, it's just that her character is overwhelmingly unbelievable. The film includes her to add a pointless romantic angle to the story, bowing to the familiar characteristics of the biopic. But Dallas Buyers Club doesn't try to tug on your heart-strings by blaring out a score or making it's protagonist reverse his personality. Ron starts out as a mumbling, racist redneck and ends a mumbling, racist redneck. But the energy he put into living hard, having threesomes with whores in coke-fuelled trailer parties is soon channelled into something positive, and his personality and sheer stubbornness manages to achieve things that most people could not. And that is a more powerful sentiment than telling us that life is like a box of chocolates.
In 1860's Bengal, wealthy, powerful, yet mentally fragile landowner Kalikinkar (Chhabi Biswas) dreams that his daughter-in-law Doyamoyee (Sharmila Tagore) is the avatar of the Goddess of destruction, Kali. He falls to his knees in front of her, claiming that she embodies the living spirit of the much-feared deity. When his son Umaprasad (Soumitra Chatterjee) returns from Calcutta after his school exams, he is horrified to see that his wife is being worshipped by floods of people that have travelled to pray. He is unable to convince his father of his folly, and Kalikinkar's influence eventually manages to convince Doya herself.
Bengali director Satyajit Ray's sterling film shows the danger of idol worship, and how easy this influence can spread to people in need of escapism. When a dying child is brought to her, the small boy miraculously awakens apparently healed, convincing everyone apart from her husband and the women of the household of Doya's power. The women remain unconvinced, but as Kalikinkar is head of the household, they have no choice but to worship, exposing Indian's heavily matriarchal society, and women's role as the 'Mother'. Kalikinkar refers to Doya as 'mother' before his dream, and a beautiful song is heard from outside, singing of adoration for the mother.
The standout scene of Devi (meaning 'The Goddess') captures Umaprasad's utter horror at the sight of Doya, fitted out like a deity and confused at the new role flung upon her. There is little to no dialogue in the scene, but Ray understands the power of silence in film. As Doya, Tagore is so beautiful that you could almost mistake her for a goddess, and she carries her performance (at aged just 14 at time of filming) with remarkable maturity. As Umaprasad enters the room and sees her for the first time, they converse with their eyes, and Doya gives a simple and subtle shake of the head. With fundamentalism so commonplace amongst most religions these days, Devi is perhaps more relevant than ever, and with that heartbreaking and memorable final shot, still as powerful as it ever was.
During one of the many thrilling montage sequences littered throughout one of Martin Scorsese's most revered films, gangster Henry Hill arrives home at Christmas time with a giant white and tacky Christmas tree and announces "I got the most expensive tree they had!". This sums up the colourful characters that inhabit Goodfellas, cheap, trashy thugs who hold more value to material possessions with hefty price-tags than human life. It has been criticised for glamorising these criminal types, all sharp, shiny suits, slick hair and big cars, and it's easy to get lost amongst the glitz and lifestyle. But although Scorsese alludes to the appeal of this live-fast way of life, he doesn't have much sympathy for its characters, and rightly so. Henry Hill may be the protagonist, our window into this world of high-rolling mafioso, but when he's stripped of his 'friends' and cash, he's not much more than a coke-addled rat.
Ever since he was a little kid, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) always wanted to be a gangster. In his blue-collar, Irish Brooklyn neighbourhood, he begins by parking cadillacs for local gangsters, and eventually starts to work for Jimmy 'The Gent' Conway (Robert De Niro). As the years go by, Henry, Jimmy and Italian-American loose-canon Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) form a small crew hijacking trucks and carrying out heists. Henry marries a wild and beautiful Jewish girl named Karen (Lorraine Bracco), and things seem peachy under the watch of boss Paulie (Paul Sorvino). But when Henry starts selling cocaine under the disapproving Paulie's nose, his world begins to crumble and he can no longer trust his friend, and the ugly side of the gangster business rears its head.
Looking back at his early works such as Mean Streets (1973) and his documentary short Italianamerican (1974), there was always a sense of authenticity in Scorsese's Italian-American-focused work. All the talk now so clearly associated with Italian-Americans was practically invented by the director, and became so influential it now seems cliché and stereotyping. But Scorsese came from these types of neighbourhoods, and this rubs off on Goodfellas. This world seems so unreal - a world where a character can be beating money out of someone one minute, and then being sent champagne by a famous crooner the next - yet it comes alive in Scorsese's hands. The much-celebrated Steadicam sequence has been much imitated, but it still retains its crown. You get washed away amongst it all just like Karen.
The film simply catapults you through it's story, showing snippets of gangster life through some breathtaking montages with voiceover narration. One minute Henry is enjoying new found love, sipping champagne while the glorious soundtrack plays in the background, the next he's on a paranoid and ill-fated drug deal. At the end I felt exhausted, like I'd just lived an entire life within 2 hours, and I've seen this film many times. But still, 24 years after it was made, it still feels fresh, energetic and innovative. Perhaps The Sopranos took its mantle when it took the gangster genre and made it a metaphor for American consumption, but it owes Goodfellas an overwhelming dose of gratitude. It also make it all the more tragic that Joe Pesci has retired from film, as his Oscar-winning performance and the final shot of him shooting at the camera a la The Great Train Robbery (1903) will linger long after the credits have rolled.
When we finally get to meet the magnificent dragon Smaug, voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch, at the climax of Peter Jackson's second instalment of his The Hobbit trilogy, we find him curled up beneath an enormous stash of gold coins and jewels, blissfully in the land of nod. After sitting through over two hours of this slog of a film, it's precisely where I wished I was. The Desolation of Smaug is yet further evidence that 9 hours worth of movies is not needed for Tolkien's delightful - and slim - novel. It feels like - to quote Ian Holm's Bilbo Baggins from The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) - thin, like butter scraped over too much bread.
The story picks up as the dwarves evade capture from the orc general Azog (Manu Bennett) and seek refuge in the home of Beorn (Mikael Persbrandt), a skin-changer who often takes the form of a giant bear. Setting of again towards Erebor to reclaim the dwarves homeland, Bilbo (Martin Freeman), Thorin (Richard Armitage), Gandalf (Ian McKellen) et al reach the Elven forest of Mirkwood. Gandalf departs to further investigate the strange goings-on at Dol Gondur, where the mysterious necromancer (Benedict Cumberbatch) seems to be building an army of sorts. In Mirkwood, the dwarves meet the Elvenking Thranduil (Lee Pace) and his son Legolas (Orlando Bloom), who imprison the dwarves following an altercation.
The Desolation of Smaug is simply a collection of things that happen - not much has a relevant impact on the story, nor does it develop any of the characters or make much of the film particularly interesting to watch. It's a near-3 hour film that barely has any time for its characters, preferring instead to repeatedly throw them into situations that apparently call for an extended, CGI-laden action sequence. It felt very much like a Middle Earth Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) - vacant and almost soulless. The Lord of the Rings trilogy used CGI when it had to, and chose instead to welcome the natural beauty of the New Zealand landscape. And thanks to some gorgeous set design for the interiors, it felt like you could reach out and touch Middle Earth. Here, everything feels digital.
There's also too much padding. When the dwarves arrive in Lake Town, smuggled in by the revolutionary-type Bard (Luke Evans), it develops a strange love-triangle between dwarf Kili (Aidan Turner), elf-warrior Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly) and Legolas. This can be argued as character development for one of the much underdeveloped dwarves, but its portrayed so blandly that it's nothing more of a distraction to Bilbo and Thorin finally encountering Smaug. Bard himself is also relatively one-dimensional, not much more than a rugged face that has been spawned by destiny - a reluctant hero that has chosen a different path to the one that seems lined up for him. Sound familiar?
It's not all bad of course, so although Peter Jackson has been caught up in the special-effects machine, he still shows his talent for the spectacle with one action scene that sees the dwarves escape Mirkwood and a micro army of rampant orcs in barrels down a river. It is a silly, overblown set-piece, but it proves funny and thrilling, a genuinely exciting highlight within one of the film's most drawn-out chapters. Also, Smaug himself doesn't disappoint. Although he's entirely CGI, the giant beast is entirely real and, thanks to Benedict Cumberbatch, uncomfortably menacing. His exchanges with Bilbo are the movie's best moments, as they both try and outsmart each other with words and tricks. Which makes it all the more disappointing when the film movies into yet another overwrought action scene.
I'm sure the obvious lack of heart and storytelling quality won't worry the producers (the film is already the 49th highest-grossing film of all time), nor will it Peter Jackson. This adaptation is now so far removed from the book's original vision that I don't think the sounds of Tolkien shouting "Fool of a Took!" in his grave will be giving Jackson sleepless nights. I remember in 2003, when The Return of the King (2003) was reaching its first climax at three hours, my bum was glued to the seat and my palms were sweaty, hit with the tragic realisation that this film trilogy would soon be over and all I had to look forward to was the Extended Edition DVD. At the 2 hour mark of The Desolation of Smaug, my bum was numb, I was shifting in my seat, and I was wondering what food I had in the fridge for later. Says it all really.
Brian De Palma has never denied that his main influence is the work of Alfred Hitchcock, yet, his early movies especially, have often been unfairly dismissed as rip-off's. This, of course, is simply not true, and I argue that De Palma allow his films to flourish with his own sense of style and intrigue, while closely following themes that the great master observed himself. Of all his more Hitchcockian productions, Obsession is one his least remembered when compared to the likes of Dressed to Kill (1980) or Body Double (1984). It's certainly one of De Palma's more ludicrous and often outright barmy films, but there is much to enjoy here in a guilty sort of way.
In 1959, wealthy real estate developer Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) receives a ransom note demanding $500,000 in cash for the return of his wife and daughter. The police are notified, and following a botched arrest, his wife and daughter are killed in a getaway car. Fifteen years later, Michael, who seems to exist in a state of reserved grief, arrives in Florence with his friend and business colleague Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow) to tie up a land deal. While visiting the church he met his wife years before, he meets a young painter named Sandra (Genevieve Bujold) who is the exact doppelgänger of his dead wife.
For all its frequently ridiculous and quite predictable twists and turns and overwrought melodrama, Obsession succeeds thanks to some stylish direction from De Palma and Bernard Herrmann's lavish, Oscar-nominated score. You can see the ending a mile away, but it does include a nice twist that borders on the repulsive, and with Robertson's subdued performance and Lithgow's reliable charismatic sidekick, the film never becomes quite as silly as it really should be. The main influence here is obviously Vertigo (1958), but retains none of the psychological mystery of Hitchcock's masterpiece, taking a more direct thriller route instead. Don't expect any plausibility (even the most absent-minded viewer could pick apart the plot), but if you can put this aside - or even welcome it - Obsession is a memorable little thriller that is surely due a small revival.
As difficult as some Japanese films can be, Akira Kurosawa was always welcomed by Western audiences due to the director's embracing of the cinematic, as opposed to, say, the static, conversation-heavy work of Yasujiro Ozu. Still known primarily for his samurai action films and his film noir homages, Kurosawa's movies were action-packed and grandiose, shot beautifully through a lens that brings to mind the great American westerns or the shadowy mise-en-scene of Orson Welles, making them almost Western in tone. Ikiru, one of Kurosawa's most spiritual and tonally dark films, took a few years to make it across Pacific Ocean, and it's not hard to see why. Although, in my opinion, this is probably Kurosawa's greatest achievement, the subject matter is sobering, it's satire alarming and it's story-telling techniques unconventional.
The film opens with an X-ray of our protagonist, Watanabe (Takashi Shimura). The narrator tells us he has stomach cancer, but he does not yet know this, and so we join him, reluctantly, as he goes about stamping his papers in his stagnating job as a bureaucrat. Quiet and eternally hunched, Watanabe is an introverted man, spending little of what he earns to the frustration of his selfish son. When he learns that he has only about a year to live, Watanabe goes through the familiar stages of acceptance as he drinks, parties, fails to turn up for work, becomes involved with a much younger woman and angers his family. But he soon turns his attention to building a children's playground, a project he has seen passed around by the many pencil-pushers in the various departments within the council he works for, which has frustrated the residents of the decaying area.
It's with this shift of focus that comes the true masterstroke of Ikiru. Up to this point, we have been with Watanabe every step of the way, but suddenly, as the narrator informs us, he's dead. We no longer get the first-person perspective, but the third-person perspective, as various colleagues and political players gather for Watanabe's funeral. The film becomes less a human drama, and more of a social-political statement, as the other dead-eyed civil servant's in his office slowly come to realise the greatness of the man. The deputy mayor is there, claiming Watanabe's work was within the confines of his job and proving the bureaucratic machine works. This, of course, is simple electioneering, but the others reminisce and the truth begins to slowly reveal itself in the final months of Watanabe's life.
A lot of the film relies on the performance of Shimura, a long-time collaborator with Kurosawa. He is utterly magnetic here, remaining a hushed presence and developing his persona into a weapon to ensure his work gets done before he bites the bullet. In a heart-breaking moment, he croaks a quiet song in a packed bar for it to fall silent. The young hipsters slowly move away, while Watanabe's companion, a booze-addled writer, looks emotional. Kurosawa, only 40 at the time, was also making a comment on the post-war social outcasting of the elderly, embodied in the aforementioned bar scene and in Watanabe's success and money-drive son. Ikiru is many things, but it's the humanity of the story that will linger on in your mind after the credits have rolled, and it ends with one of the finest closing shots in history.
Living alone in his rotting studio, sculptor Marcel De Lange (Martin Kosleck) is on the verge of selling his best work to a high-rolling collector. Unfortunately, the potential purchaser brings along notorious art critic F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier), who dismisses Marcel's work as a travesty, causing the sale to fall through. Penniless and on the verge of suicide, he spots a body wash ashore one night. The body is that of the Creeper, a known serial killer with the face of "the perfect Neanderthal," (as Marcel dubs him), so Marcel brings him home and nurses him back to health. Fascinating with his appearance, Marcel begins to sculpt the Creeper and exploit his blood-lust by setting him up to murder his enemies.
