films we just saw

Bearded Avenger · Post by **Bearded Avenger** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 12:12 pm

Melvin Junko wrote:Ijust watched phantasm 4, finished off the box set and felt a bit unsatisfied. I thought the ending was too open to finish of a series of 4 movies. I hope the disc of exta's brings some clarity

It's not over yet.... Phantasm 5 is in pre-production (ie they're trying to get concrete funding).

jonbly · Post by **jonbly** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 12:28 pm

Melvin Junko wrote:just watched phantasm 4, finished off the box set and felt a bit unsatisfied. I thought the ending was too open to finish of a series of 4 movies.

The script for "Phantasm 1999" was big and apocalyptic and violent... and no-one would stump up the money to make it. So Phantasm IV happened instead...

http://phantasm.com/secrets/?page_id=97

Meanwhile, on another plane of reality...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054679/

EDIT: Nuts. Ninja'd.

Davo · Post by **Davo** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 2:35 pm

[quote="giles edwards"]
I though I'd brought a crappy VHS of The Big Gundown from ebay but it turned out to be The Big Showdown, aka The Grand Duel. Still, looks like great stuff (and I bought Day Of Anger at the same time.

Giles man, you've got a good un' there, dont fret.
IL GRANDE DUELLO isn't quite Sollima standard but it's helmed effectively enough by Leone cohort Giancarlo Santi. Cleef is present and correct (and even catches bullets in his teeth!)

There are some nasty b*stards in it too, not quite the gleeful bad boy nutters of the Tommy Millan vintage but good value nonetheless. And QT cribbed the EXCELLENT title theme for Kill Bill 1...

Ahh Italian westerns and Polizi....might have to dig some of those badass cop flicks out this weekend!!

giles edwards · Post by **giles edwards** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:16 pm

I'd dearly love someone to organize a QT-style Grindhouse event with a couple weeks of all of those pictures in copious double bills at The Prince Charles or somesuch...but I fear that there just aren't enough of us to put down coin and make it worthwhile.

I have those two, A Man Called Blade, Companeros, Bullet For The General and a couple others I think. Time to dive in...

voor · Post by **voor** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 4:24 pm

I think the closest ever came to that dream of 'Grindhouseing' was two years ago when the Tate had a The Italian B's season - which was entirely free!

it opened with Fernando Di Leo's 'Milano Calibre 9' introduced by Alex Cox and also one of the best parties I ever had the luck to attend and then continue with films such as 'Your Vice Is A Locked Room and Only I Have The Key' and Mario Bava's excellent 'Planet Of The Vampires'. There was also 'The Cursed Medallion' and 'Dr. Goldfoot and The Girl Bombs' in italian!

It would be so good if someone else did an event of that calibre. God know I'd love to see some of these on the big screen.
Luckily NFT showed The Great Silence on NFT3 two months ago and it was a total joy seeing it on the big screen.

Sincerely yours

Voor

giles edwards · Post by **giles edwards** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:14 pm

An I managed to miss all of that fcuking season at the Tate! Gah.

Perhaps when FF gets big enough to have offshoot events...

Davo · Post by **Davo** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:35 pm

Yeah, good shout.

That Tate Italian Bs season was magnificent, truly exceptional. They were showing stuff like Di Leo's Mister Scarface with Jack Palance, Solange and the other gems you mention. Unbeleivable !!

The fact that it was free was even more remarkable..

The always insightful Mr Cox has always been a great champion of the more esoteric strain of Western of course (I'm sure there are posters out there who will join me in celebrating his ill fated but fascinating WALKER and its superb soundtrack).

It was watching Moviedrome (ahhhh) back in the late 80s that I first saw such gems as Bullet for the General (great shout Giles) and - of course - Il Grande Silenzio.

Milano calibro 9 is an absolute powerhouse of a movie isn't it? and reminds me, on the Grindhousing tip, of the ICAs splendid Di Leo season a couple of years back. I wasn't that long in London, having moved here in 2003 from oop North and I simply couldn't believe the array of stuff I could see in the Capital. It still amazes me to this day..!!

Thank God, now that any films pre-1990 appear to have been systematically taken off the schedules..

Melvin Junko · Post by **Melvin Junko** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 5:43 pm

jonbly wrote:
Melvin Junko wrote:just watched phantasm 4, finished off the box set and felt a bit unsatisfied. I thought the ending was too open to finish of a series of 4 movies.
The script for "Phantasm 1999" was big and apocalyptic and violent... and no-one would stump up the money to make it. So Phantasm IV happened instead...

http://phantasm.com/secrets/?page_id=97

Meanwhile, on another plane of reality...

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1054679/

EDIT: Nuts. Ninja'd.

interesting.... I read about that script of phantasm 1999 in the leaflet that came with the box set. Would be cool if they're actually gonna make that one! I really like the weirdness of the series, leaves a lot to the imagination.

xLeft For Deadx · Post by **xLeft For Deadx** » Wed Jan 23, 2008 6:04 pm

Bearded Avenger wrote:
Melvin Junko wrote:Ijust watched phantasm 4, finished off the box set and felt a bit unsatisfied. I thought the ending was too open to finish of a series of 4 movies. I hope the disc of exta's brings some clarity
It's not over yet.... Phantasm 5 is in pre-production (ie they're trying to get concrete funding).

Isn't Angus Scrimm over 80 now? I thought The Tall Man wasn't supposed to age

Melvin Junko · Post by **Melvin Junko** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 7:23 pm

yeah looks like he's 82 now. They should call him the Old man instead of the tall man.

Satans Puppy · Post by **Satans Puppy** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 10:07 pm

Just saw Sweeney Todd and I'm on the edge... from the reviews I was expecting Buckets of Blood and for an OPERA the vocals were pretty weak, suppose it doesn't help that I'm a fan of the stage show, remember seeing throats being slit on stage at the age of 12... Julia McKenzie was Mrs Lovat.

I felt Carter was too weak for the role of lovat and because of her vocal inadequacy, the comedic value of some of the lines was lost. "What I call, enterprise, Poppin Pussys into pies, wouldn't do in my shop, The thoughts enough to make you sick, and I'm tellin you, them pussy cats is quick...."

Depp on the other hand, some times he was off and other times he was just on the case...

nice try... the direction totally saved this for me, there were just some shots and scenes that I thought... wooooooooow.

And why was sailor boy more girlie then the lady he was trying to woo?!?!

voor · Post by **voor** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 10:20 pm

I don't think you could classify Sweeney Todd as an opera, it's actually a musical...

But that's an asides thought -

I saw the film twice this week - once on Monday and once yesterday and I have to say although there are problems with it, it's still one of the best musical adaptations around.

I defiintely think you have to see it with the sounds up - Monday's preview at Cineworld did not have the oomph whereas the screening at Warner yesterdat , the walls shook when the organ kicks in at the beginning! that's the way to go.
The fact that dialogue constitue maybe %10 of the film is lovely, Depp is like a beautiful Boris Karloff/Bela Lugosi, Yes carter might be a little weak on the vocals but her passion comes through so beautifully that it's hard not to like her.

Especially 'Have A Little Priest' and 'My Friends' end up being some of the best numbers.

However on the disappointment front there are the close-ups - verything's a bloody close-up, I don't know how Burton caught the disease but it's there and also why remove 30 seconds of 'Alms, Alms' which is still on the original soundtrack of Sweeney Todd: Demon Barber Of Fleet Street and the subplot?

Sincerely yours

Voor

Satans Puppy · Post by **Satans Puppy** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 10:30 pm

I did wonder where the begger ladys dirty lyrics got to

And on the stage it was an opera of sorts... in the way leads were chosen (excluding Landsbury way back when). The male lead has always be a strong deep baratone type...

I just wish for the credits Burton had put the whole Sweeney Todd Naration, you know "I sing the tale of sweeney todd..." or however it goes...

Reanimator · Post by **Reanimator** » Thu Jan 24, 2008 10:41 pm

I saw National Treasure: Book of Secrets - more of the same sort of stuff from the first film - pretty good if you liked the original

Also caught Eagle vs Shark on DVD - a quirky love story which really works!

streetrw · Post by **streetrw** » Sat Jan 26, 2008 3:05 am

Been watching a whole bunch of stuff recently, because that's how I get my jollies.

I rather liked The Page Turner, a French revenge movie with a lot of classical piano music. A concert pianist thoughtlessly disrupts a young girl's piano exam; the girl extracts vengeance. Elegant, but it's a bit slow.

Mammoth is the sort of monumentally dumb CGI monster flick that floats around the cheaper cable channels at 3 in the morning, in which a frozen mammoth is brought back to life and goes on the rampage. It's features Summer Glau and Tom Skerritt, and has a few laughs but nothing that special.

Good though Robert Harmon's original The Hitcher was, he didn't really come up to that standard with another good-looking car chase/duel epic, Highwaymen, in which Jim Caviezel squares off against a maniac causing spectacular car smashes. It's okay, and some of the action sequences are quite good, but it's all a bit silly.

Occasionally quite spooky but ultimately nothing earth-shattering is Apartment 1303, another Japanese ghost movie and in all honesty I'm starting to get a little weary of them now.

Never Die Alone is a black urban gangster drama intercutting the recent life of a drug dealer with what happens after he's murdered by his former rivals. Violent, sweary, pretty depressing, with David Arquette as the white guy trapped in the middle of a gang war.

Mysteriously I never managed to catch Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix at the cinema last year - I don't know why, it was there for long enough. (I'm delighted that no less a man than Guillermo del Toro has expressed an interest in doing the Deathly Hallows one.) Anyway I cught up with it on DVD and it's well up to the series standard, though maybe not as much fun. The effects are terrific, but so they should be; it's always good to see Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman et al doing their five minute party pieces (neither of them are in this one very much) andthey do seem to be getting progressively darker and scarier as they go on.

I also finally caught Flood which played a few of the West End's smallest auditoria for a few days in 2007; it's a disaster movie in which a giant tidal surge heads for London and only Robert Carlyle and his dad (and the military, the Metropolitan Police and London Underground) can stop it. With TV's Hercule Poirot as the Deputy Prime Minister. The CG water effects aren't that great, but it's good to see somewhere other than New York getting trashed by bad weather and stomping monsters for once.

I believe I've mentioned Michael Haneke before: I sort of half-appreciated and half-disliked Hidden and I don't think I got the point of Funny Games, but The Piano Teacher is genuinely terrible. Frumpy, frustrated, piano teacher embarks on bonkers odyssey of emotional and s3xual discovery with one of her students. It gets steadily sillier as it progresses (very slowly) peaking with a ludicrous scene as our heroine sneaks around a drive-in cinema looking for couples making out in the back seats - and is compelled to wet herself while watching them. I laughed. She writes a long, detailed account of her frankly unhinged s3xual fantasies for her wannabe lover to act out with her. Like the other Haneke movies, it's madeup of long, static takes in which very oftemn nothing's happening, until eventually it stops not happening andthe credits roll.

Much more fun was Hollow Man II; we didn't really need a sequel to Hollow Man but they did one anyway. It's not a fraction as violent or nasty as HM1, with only a few bits of bloody mayhem to get its 15 certificate. Most of the plot has a cop trying to protect a woman from the invisible man (Christian Slater this time out). And the music seems to try and echo the late Jerry Goldsmith's score to the original. But ultimately it's late-night video fodder, nothing more.

I saw the first two minutes of Unknown in one of Cineworld's London palaces last year but walked out because they botched the projection and it took five minutes to find someone to fix it. I've now seen the rest of it on DVD and it's not too bad - five amnesiacs wake up in a warehouse and none of them know which of them are the good guys and which are the bad. It pulls a couple of nice twists in the final reels though.

Now for Miami Vice. I never saw the original show at the time though I caught a couple of episodes on one of ITV's Freeview channels sometime ago. The Michael Mann version only has the title, some character names and a cover of a Phil Collins song to connect it; this is a rather humourless undercover cop thriller whose main asset is the fabulous night photography. As with Collateral, Mann has shot it on digital because that can pick up things that just merge into blackness on film; and he's one of the few people who can shoot on video without it looking like a cheap home movie.

There are times when I realise it was probably a mistake to try and add every weirdo horror DVD to the LoveFilm queue, which is probably how I ended up with The Watcher In The Attic, a Japanese nutbag movie from 1976 in which a voyeur in a 1920s Tokyo boardinghouse spies from the attic on the guests below, especially a rich woman who meets with her lovers (one in a pierrot outfit, the other disguised as an armchair I kid thee not). She gets off on being watched, and kills the pierrot guy - the voyeur gets off on the idea of killing. The ending is atrocious and it drags even at 76 minutes.

And what has happened to Steven Seagal? Renegade Justice (aka Urban Justice) is bloody awful. Tubby Steve's cop son gets murdered in the worst area of L.A., and he waddles into town to find the man who did it. Or, more accurately, to find the mother****er who did it, as "mother****er" and "mother****ing" are the two words on which the whole script hangs - pretty much every sentence has at least one of either, presumably to get the running time up to 97 minutes. The action stuff is pretty perfunctory (he's 57 this year) and his voice seems to have lost its distinctive sound. It's a long, long way down from the delirious stupidity of Marked For Death and Out For Justice.

I think that's everything.