I know England in the 80s looked post-apocalyptic but holy shit Alan Clarke really pushes it in Road, turning it into a Beckettian primal scream of working-class rage. Lesley Sharp’s monologue is heartbreaking and the obvious highlight of the film but the real genius is the camera: unflinching and constantly moving, refusing to give us comforting edit breaks. I don’t think a fourth wall break has ever made me as uncomfortable as they did here.
Recommended.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Microsoft, Bill Gates has released this really terrific memoir of how they got started, including the source code for the original Microsoft Basic, which he claims is “the coolest code I’ve ever written”. It’s such a great artifact and the presentation is chef-kiss perfect.
When I was 15, it felt like everyone in my all-boys school discovered Full Metal Jacket at the same time. And it’s impossible to overstate what an impact it had on us at that age. We thought it was the ne plus ultra of hardcore, grown-up filmmaking and we made sure we could recite pretty much every line from scratch. God, we were insufferable.
Watching it now, it’s hard to be completely objective because of the oversize impact it had on me/us at that age. But the thing that stands out is just how much it feels like it was specifically designed to appeal to teenage boys. But being teenage boys, we completely missed the ironic detachment of the film and so we just saw the whole thing as a big macho act. We missed the fact that the scenes, each iconic on its own, never really cohere into a truly effective whole, especially with the bifurcated structure of the story.
A flawed masterpiece.
A masterpiece of breathless “just then” storytelling. Vienna goes to the bank and JUST THEN the gang decide to rob it and JUST THEN one of them kisses Vienna and JUST THEN etc etc. It’s extremely shallow stuff, but that’s not what makes this film stand out. It’s the performances that are the real draw here. Okay so Sterling Hayden is extremely wooden but the female leads are crushing it. Crawford is fiery, and McCambridge is electric as the malevolent Emma Small whipping the town into a frenzy. The McCarthyism allegory is interesting but also reflects our current political situation, which is more than just a little heartbreaking.
Painterly in its composition. That final shot is as gorgeous as anything ever put on screen. But its reach exceeds its grasp, as Scott struggles to inject any emotionality into the film and Carradine struggles with the material in general.
It’s a bold and audacious debut that represents the best and the worst we’d see from its director over the next 50-odd years..
Somehow I got it into my head that this was going to be a romp in the vein of Brewster McCloud ‐ a film I appreciated more than liked ‐ but this film has so much more wit, so much more heart. Not the words I was expecting to be using to describe such a toxic story. Matthau and May are perfect foils for each other. Matthau’s hangdog face and dour demeanor against May’s innocent ditziness and I could watch this potent combination for hours.
Wonderful.
Tony Scott could take even the messiest script and make it extremely watchable. In Days of Thunder, the flop sweat is almost literally oozing off the screen, and the editing is nothing short of chaotic but Tony Scott somehow pulls it all together. Nowhere near as entertaining as Top Gun but, then again, few things are.
Disjointed, baggy and I’m not sure it actually has anything new to say. Barely anything more than just a collection of stock military vignettes. Emotional states fluctuate from scene to scene, making the whole film feel incredible schizophrenic which on the one hand is possibly intentional but on the other hand, has the effect of making it really difficult to engage with the characters or the story.
All this being said, it’s interesting to see how much this film almost single-handedly influenced the aesthetics of war movies and video games for at least a decade.
I can’t overemphasise what a big deal this film was in my family when I was growing up. I was too young to get most of the jokes (loved the pratfalls though!), but it was nearly constantly on in the background every weekend, embedding itself in my DNA through osmosis. So watching it now, this film I haven’t thought about in 30 years, is a really strange experience. All of the lines and even the delivery of the lines are bubbling up from my subconscious ahead of time. I’m finally old enough to get the jokes and there are some top-class bangers, but the film never once made me laugh because I knew the lines by rote. Very strange!
Even stranger was the wave of nostalgia that washed over me while watching this was unreal. It was like finding my childhood comfort blanket again. The feeling of safety and warmth. That was really unexpected from a film with a close-up of a half-naked Swedish woman dancing in an office. Wild stuff.
The wheels have come fully off the bus here. It doesn’t feel so much like Fuqua and Washington have forgotten what brings people to an Equalizer film, but more that they just aren’t interested in making that film any more. There are still occasional flashes of greatness here, like the brief first-person perspective of the assult whose aftermath we’re introduced to at the beginning, but for the most part this is more The Talented Mr McCall than badass action film.
Massively disappointing.