Category Archive: FILM
Hot Air
(Directed by Frank Coraci) (2019) Steve Coogan revels in his image as a hard-edged playboy. But he also want us to think that there’s a soulful, sentimental man in there somewhere. The footloose, cynical womanising Steve Coogan character in the ‘tour’ movies with Rob Brydon is leavened with wistful moments of loneliness. Alan Partridge is a wishy washy, desperate side of the same man. Unfortunately, when Coogan steps out of one of his alter egos, his desire to make us love him turns into an absolute puddle of gel. Witness the ghastly soppiness of his Martin Sixsmith in Stephen Frear’s…
Continue Reading →This is a Robbery
(The World’s Biggest Art Heist) (Directed by Colin Barnicle) (Netflix, 2021) The documentary tells (at Dickensian length) an intriguing story: how in 1990 two men dressed as Boston police officers were admitted to the elegant and boutique Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in dead of night, tied up the two slipshod guards and stuck them in a basement area, and helped themselves, in a leisurely fashion, to 13 artworks, several of them priceless (to use an old cliché). SPOILER ALERT: We have to plough through 4 episodes to learn that, $10m reward notwithstanding, the works have not been recovered, nor anyone…
Continue Reading →Two For the Road
(Directed by Stanley Donen) (1967) Boy meets girl; boy detests girl (“If there’s one thing I really despise, it’s an indispensable woman”); boy changes his mind; they fall in love and then spoil it all by getting married. Then they compound the error by having a kid (breaking Philip Larkin’s dictum in This Be the Verse). Two For the Road, for all its self-conscious charm, relentless male chauvinism and fey hipness, is something of a breakthrough – a love story that deconstructs what happens when the love fades, or more accurately, transforms from its first flushes into a more mature…
Continue Reading →À bout de souffle (Breathless)
(Directed by Jean-Luc Godard) (1960) (Adelaide French Film Festival, 25 March 2021) “Roughly speaking, the subject will be the story of a boy who thinks of death and of a girl who doesn’t.” So said the Director, and that is not a bad summary of a shallow but hip tale of ne’er-do-well Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), a Humphrey Bogart wannabe who is more like James Dean, acting like the poor kid In the Ghetto (of Marseilles): he borrows a gun, and steals a car, [and shoots a cop], and he tries to run but he don’t get far…Needing cash to fund…
Continue Reading →Out of the Past
(Directed by Jacques Tourneur) (1947) (Script by Daniel Mainwaring (“Geoffrey Homes”) from his 1946 novel Build My Gallows High, with uncredited revisions by Frank Fenton and James M. Cain.) Before we review this complicated, compelling film, first allow us to modestly refer you to our discussion: what is Film Noir? Furthermore, in the spirit of commercial DVDs, can we clear away some preliminaries? Don’t you hate it when, having purchased a film with your hard-earned, you then have to suffer some minutes of being lectured against pirating and illegal downloads? Or trying to disable the o-so-welcome options of surtitles (in…
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