Tag: movies

Horton Hears a Who

The Lake House

Heartbeat Detector

Overlong but interesting French film that draws parallels between the fascism of Nazi Germany and modern corporations particularly in the language used to describe human beings. Music is offered as a counterbalance to the dehumanizing nature of corporate culture.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

I’m in two minds about the fourth Indiana Jones movie I have to say that I enjoyed the hell out of it, but it is flawed. Harrison Ford has proved that he’s still got it as Indy which ironically feeds into one of the film’s flaws and that is that there is too little of him doing what he’s good at in the final act of the movie.

It is a kind of best of album featuring callbacks or references to scenes and events from the previous three films and yet being set in the fifties it’s very much it’s own beast in a lot of ways. I’m not sure the Soviets make as good as a villain as the Nazis did and their characters are curiously underdeveloped. I recognised Andrew Divoff and Pavel Lychnikoff as Russian soldiers but in the film they are merely extras with little to no lines as far as I can recall which makes me wonder if they had fuller parts at one point that were cut in the edit.

I think the major flaw of the movie is that it feels bloated with cast and this impacts on other aspects of the film. I think Ray Winstone’s character could have been excised completely from the film or at least after the first act. Similarly with John Hurt’s character if he’d been killed by the Russians in the camp then that would have both given Indy a chance to be the brains of the operation in the final expedition and given a little more motivation to the trio of Indy, Mutt and Marion to beat the Russians.

I think that if like me you loved the first three Indiana Jones movies then you’ll most likely love this one too.

The Magic Christian

The Magic Christian is: antiestablishmentarian, antibellum, antitrust, antiseptic, antibiotic, antisocial & antipasto.

This 1969 Peter Sellers film is a zany madcap satire of greed. Sellers stars as Sir Guy Grand, eccentric and extremely wealthy, who believes that everyone has their price and sets out to prove that in a series of elaborate practical jokes. He brings with him on this adventure a vagrant (played by Ringo Starr) whom he adopts at the begnning of the movie and names Youngman Grand.

The most elaborate of Grand’s schemes involves the luxury liner the SS Magic Christian which features cameos of Christopher Lee as a vampiric ship’s porter, Yul Brynner as a transvestite cabaret singer and finally a wonderful engine room scene that reveals in fact that the ship is propelled by hordes of topless rowing slaves, under the Priestess of the Whip’s (Raquel Welch) command.

The Bucket List

In Bruges

Garage

Conspiracy