Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Pulp Fiction
(Dir. Quentin Tarantino) (1994) It’s flashy, it’s funny, it’s overly literate. Styled after comics and melodrama magazines, it hops about a series of vaguely interconnected vignettes. The thugs trade Tom Stoppard-like wit…a portmanteau potboiler unravels, and whilst everyone self-consciously shoots from the hip, no-one’s hip when they shoot. This film is great fun, don’t get us wrong, it has some memorable scenes, some top rank stars thoroughly enjoying themselves, and it dumps all over 90% of films made by man, but actually, it shows more talent than brains. No one talks like that in real life and few act that way. To put it another way, in a more…
Continue Reading →Killer Film Quotes – The Classics
No CGI, often in glorious black-and-white, but here’s a bunch of reminders why the old films can still be music to the ears: Q (Peter Lorre): “You despise me, don’t you?” A (Humphrey Bogart): “If I gave you any thought, I probably would.” [Casablanca] (see our link for more quotes from the typewriters of the Brothers Epstein and Howard Koch) “The Children of the night…what music they make!” [Dracula] Rufus T. Firefly: “Go, and never darken my towels again!” [Duck Soup] “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” [Gone With the Wind] Private Eye Sam Spade to gunsel Wilmer:…
Continue Reading →Stations of the Cross
(by Hans Holbein)
‘We quiver here for fear, a badly shaven lot, Leaderless and clear in fractured polyglot, Take a very long line and see it moves apace; It is the time of fishes, ticket punched another place. Sun-treader, comb your morning hair, sweep this private road in anger. What of other highways? Go tell King Mwanga, The royal house is empty, the servants all abroad, Scattered to the corners, a tuneless monochord. Their hearts a lute for strumming, diseased the ebb and flow, Sad cypress and unfulfilled watercress, What do you know?’
Continue Reading →Stuck in the Middle with You
Reservoir Dogs (Dir. Quentin Tarantino) (1991) Pound for pound, Tarantino’s first film is easily his best, a tight, hip and brutal slice of underworld life, as a diamond robbery goes awry and the question is whether there’s a rat in the ranks. Full of flash-backs and flash-forwards, it fills out the back stories with real wit and fervour. And the performances crackle. Lawrence Tierney as the crime boss is scotch over gravel. Harvey Keitel, stoic as Mr White, is perhaps the central character, along with rookie Mr. Orange (Tim Roth). Steve Buscemi as the snakey Mr. Pink is terrific – so is…
Continue Reading →Vietnam / Iraq
South Vietnamese forces follow after terrified children, including 9-year-old Kim Phuc, center, as they run down Route 1 near Trang Bang after an aerial napalm attack on suspected Viet Cong hiding places, June 8, 1972. A South Vietnamese plane accidentally dropped its flaming napalm on South Vietnamese troops and civilians. The terrified girl had ripped off her burning clothes while fleeing. The children from left to right are: Phan Thanh Tam, younger brother of Kim Phuc, who lost an eye, Phan Thanh Phouc, youngest brother of Kim Phuc, Kim Phuc, and Kim's cousins Ho Van Bon, and Ho Thi Ting. Behind them are soldiers of the Vietnam Army 25th Division. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
While recently reviewing The Deer Hunter, we strayed In Country, a tangled thicket where the eternal skirmish over Vietnam carries on. Now it is held-up as a mirror to military madness, and as a parable for the incursion / invasion of Iraq. But whereas the strategic argument for Gulf War II remains opaque to this day despite inquiry after inquiry, I suggest that the escalation in Vietnam, as at 1965, is different to the events of 2003 by a substantial degree, rendering most modern comparisons between the two erroneous. The late 1950s, 1960s and 1970s formed the middle age of the Cold War (a…
Continue Reading →