goldgreen Reviews

Black Mirror: Mazey Day (2023) Season 6, Episode 4

The critics and most of the public are wrong

[9/10 · 23 October 2023]

Loved this episode for the way it confounds stereotypes in casting and plot. Our hero is a black, female papparazzi who has some scruples unlike those she works with. The plot and editing move fast and place her quickly in her final stake out of a reclusive Hollywood actress. The use at this point of a classic horror theme is a typical Black Mirror twist, but the piece de resistance is the ending. It is funny, morally questionable and completely irreverent. Personally, I love to see the story-telling cliches of cinema subverted. I also loved that the lead actress is morally ambivalent - if this was the BBC or Disney she would be used to embody female and black empowerment - instead she is a real person with good and bad sides. Bravo!

Belfast (2021)

Too much syrup

[5/10 · 4 November 2022]

Branagh's 'Belfast' works well in depicting how until the unrest of 1969, the city was a working class idyll for some. It is well acted, edited and filmed. Its weakness are the relentless scenes of people displaying their love for friends, community and family at the expense of much of a plot. Branagh also is far too self-conscious a director (and actor) for the film to ever suspend disbelief; he is always looking sideways at the audience and checking in with them to make sure nothing ever gets too intense. Above all, the film fails to say very little that is new about the Troubles and largely seems a vanity project for Mr Branagh in giving his life story the Hollywood treatment.

This Is a Robbery: The World's Greatest Art Heist (2021)

Netflix stretches flimsy documentary to breaking point

[2/10 · 5 June 2021]

Netflix is home to some welcome documentaries, but too often, such as on 'This is a Robbery' their desire for a money spinner overcomes the best rules of documentary making. Here the formula is to take a decent premise - an unsolved art theft - and then to use every minute of eye-witness testimony and multiple uses of the same drone camera footage and cheapo scene recreations over and over to fill out as many full episodes as possible. The producers' desire for money is paramount. The audience's desire to learn, to be entertained comes last. I, dear reader, switched off mid-way through the third episode when the producers' ruse became crystal clear. Avoid at all costs.

Army of the Dead (2021)

More low quality control from Netflix

[3/10 · 5 June 2021]

The plot is intriguing - Las Vegas has been taken over by zombies and has a wall around it to stop them getting out. A gender diverse bunch of chancers try their luck to break in and take cash from a bank vault. However, that is as good as it gets. It fails each step of the way as the plotting never manages to suspend the audiences disbelief. A recurring theme is the troop's inability to ever shut a door they have come through to prevent zombies attacking them from behind. A lack of logic is indeed found each step of the plot. Equally bad is the feeble back stories for the characters - Hollywood tradition is that a character's back story helps the audience know how to feel about them and gives some logic on who dies and who survives - there is no such logic here at all. It feels rushed and careless. Above all by the end I did not care if anyone died or survived.

'71 (2014)

Low budget money spinner with no illusions of being art

[5/10 · 20 March 2021]

The plot for 1971 is brilliant. An ordinary, inexperienced British squaddie gets separated from his unit in a tense and riot strewn Catholic region of Belfast over a period of 24 hours and is chased by the IRA. Will he get out alive? The film delivers on the excitement of this plot by offering two hours of fairly good entertainment. Its weaknesses is that it could have been a chance for so much more than that. It would seem that the film's producers key goal was to make the film quickly, efficiently and cheaply with an unknown cast to turn a profit with no pretensions of making great art. Its biggest weakness is that its lead actor, Jack O'Connell (in almost every scene) is given very few lines and so little emotional scope that we never get to find out much about what makes him tick or really get to care for him. He is largely a non-entity for the whole film. In addition, the film takes virtually no opportunities to have fun as a period piece, so there is no music from that era (presumably outside of the budget), plus there is no attempt to address issues such as the blatant sexism and racism of that era. Not a bad film, but an unambitious one.

Miami Blues (1990)

Oddball film noir

[9/10 · 6 March 2021]

One of Hollywood's oddest mainstream films. On paper its plot is vanilla: a pretty guy, a pretty girl, a gun, a flashy car and a grizzled cop. What the studio executives got instead was an attempt to mess around with Hollywood cliches.

Alec Baldwin is scarily believable as the psychopath in a hurry. What is disturbing is the way he relishes this role and the contempt his character has for the American dream loved by his co-star's character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. Convention says that the handsome leading man saves the day, but there is no redemption for Baldwin's character.

Leigh brilliantly plays the dumb prostitute with a heart of gold. Cinema cliche is that we laugh at or despise the dumb blonde, but her sweet vulnerability means we want nothing bad to happen to her. Curiously, her hair is even shorter than Baldwin's - whose idea was that? How did the producer feel about that? Her relationship with Baldwin is built on food and cooking - I can think of few crime films where food plays such a big and unusual role with no bearing on the main cops and robbers plot.

Lastly, we have the grizzled cop who we see removing and replacing his false teeth in nearly every scene he appears in and again for whom we learn a little too much about his favourite recipes.

Of course, there are gun fights, murder and foot and car chases, but its the oddness of the characters that leaves a lasting impression.

The film is a delight and repays repeated watching.

Emily in Paris (2020– )

Great fun in first few episodes but then it wanes

[7/10 · 8 November 2020]

The premise of Emily in Paris is so strong its a wonder why others have not used it before. The clash of cultures between the PC, social media literate Emily and the old world, un-PC, refined, sophisticated France is comedy gold. Filming Paris at its absolute prettiest helps too. The first few episodes are an absolute hoot as Emily gets to grip with the culture shock and her Parisienne colleagues adapt to her. Around half-way through some of the plotting becomes over contrived and the novelty of Emily having some brilliant social media response to every problem becomes a yawn. The chemistry between Mindy and Emily is not convincing, while Gabriel is frankly a bit dull. By contrast, the three key figures from Savoir the marketing agency are all solid characters. Overall, a fun series, but I would hope for new characters if they do a second series.

Wings of Desire (1987)

Beautiful film/ pretentious script

[7/10 · 24 October 2020]

The premise for this film is a great one. Angels hover over Berlin listening into people's thoughts, occasionally putting an arm around the most depressed to cheer them up. One of the angels decides they want to become human to interact more completely. Wim Wenders depicts this sensitively and beautifully and the ending is sweet. The use of black and white film forces us to focus on the human emotions by stripping away the distraction of colour. However, like quite a few other Wim Wenders film, the words he gives his characters is too often written in code or poetry. One can't help thinking that he has done this because he feels art-house films should always be deep and slightly incomprehensible. So, an enjoyable film but also a pretentious one.

Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020)

The critics got it wrong

[9/10 · 25 September 2020]

More a homage to the silliness and the occasional moments of magic that is Eurovision than a laugh out loud comedy. The film's best moments are about human warmth and love, plus one brilliant song and one funny song. Will Ferrell brings a genuine love of the contest to the film and it is the highs and lows of the contest and getting there that holds the film together, not the laughs in-between. The other great recommendation is that Rachel McAdams reveals herself to be a brilliant comic actor. She plays the ditzy, naive but loving partner in Will Ferrell's musical duo perfectly. The location shots in Iceland are quite beautiful and Edinburgh does not look to bad too. I finished this film feeling truly uplifted. You feel that some of these critics who lambasted it would rather be watching Tarantino.

Da 5 Bloods (2020)

Message papers over cracks

[6/10 · 25 June 2020]

Delroy Lindo is due an Oscar for his performance as Paul, the angriest of the 'Da 5 Bloods'. This means the film is much better than some of the low rankings I have seen on this site. Its strength is its allegory about black men who came of age in the 1960s and the lessons it can teach a younger generation. Paul (Lindo) has anger management issues and is ill-informed, of the three other Vietnam vets one takes opiods, one is a drunk and one a businessman who lost his fortune from spending foolishly. Spike Lee gives each of them redemption, but the redemption he offers Paul is off the charts, a truly moving scene (I think his name is a nod to St Paul). The film's weaknesses are well documented on this site; Lee suspends incredulity again and again with simplistic plot devices and cardboard cut-out side characters. But, Delroy Lindo (and Spike Lee's direction of him) saves the film.

Scandal (1950)

Christmas Turkey

[2/10 · 7 November 2019]

As much as I love Kurosawa, this is awful. It veers queasily between high sentimentality and a serious morality tale. The scene where Toshiro Mifune plays the organ, while Shirley Yamaguchi sings Silent Night to the sick girl is pure schlock and serves to undermine the credibility of the film's two lead characters. Kurosawa was trying too many things. He wanted to make a message about scurrilous journalists, corruption in Japan generally, while contrasting this with three saintly figures (Toshiro, Shirley and the sick girl), plus the pathetic lawyer character (is this Takashi Shimura's worst ever role?) who gets a chance of redemption. Avoid.

Grand Slam (1978 TV Movie)

I loved the 70s but this has dated badly

[5/10 · 21 July 2019]

Saw most of those play for today TV films on British TV in the late 70s, but missed out on this, so was looking forward to a bit of nostalgia by watching this highly rated comedy. In its favour, it captures a time when British society had more that united us than divided us - I enjoyed that, but it also shows what was wrong with us too. Glorifying men getting drunk, having a punch up and falling over just looks pathetic now.

Piccadilly (1929)

Bold film that did not herald new age

[9/10 · 13 January 2019]

Fascinating film for its progressive view of race relations and of course for the photogenic Anna May Wong. The plot is a simplistic tale of two dancing girl's fight for supremacy in a nightclub and of no real merit, but the statement about how society should lighten up about love between people of different skin colour is quite profound. The scene in the West End bar where the white night club owner takes ShoSho is key to the whole film IMHO. Their doomed relationship is foretold in the bar by the sight of the white woman being publicly humiliated for dancing with a black man. I cannot think of a single British film that tackled race for another 30 years after this. I would be interested to know the history of censorship in British cinema, as it seems likely that after Piccadilly was made, a new code came in saying that the topic of interracial romance was to be ignored. It was only in the 1960s that true radicalism returned to British film making, but fascinating to see it existed in 1929.

The Ploughman's Lunch (1983)

A Dog's Dinner rather than a Ploughman's Lunch

[6/10 · 21 September 2018]

Always intelligent, but hardly cinematic, this is certainly an interesting film, but not fully entertaining. I saw it on release and again for the second time this week and the lasting impression is a dog's dinner of ideas. At the centre there is a doomed romance, overlaid with a smorgasbord of messages inter-weaved in the script. I shall attempt to list these message here. a) The long term decline of Britain's importance in the world, b) the folly of the Suez expedition and a sort of oblique parallel with the Falklands War which doesn't work - Suez was a disaster, the Falklands campaign successful, c) the emotional toughness/nastiness of the Thatcher government, d) the Greenham Common anti-nuclear encampment (not sure what this is doing in the film), e) the lies sold by advertising, f) the bias inherent in the way we rewrite history, g) the English class system, h) the emotional coldness of journalists. Phew! Added on to this, we have the conundrum of our hard to like hero James Penfield who wants love, but does not show it to those who love him. Crucially, he is foolishly chasing a snooty, upper (ruling) class girl whose own frivolous behaviour seems to be a comment on Britain's decline. The real shame is that there are some fantastic parts to the film. Rosemary Harris is just perfect as the love seeking historian. And, then there is the cinema magic of filming the denouement to the central romance within the real-life setting of the Conservative Party Conference. With a few changes this film could have been up there with Performance and Brief Encounter, instead of an obscure curio of British cinema.

I, Daniel Blake (2016)

Good film, but no subtlety

[6/10 · 7 April 2018]

The benefits system grinds you down. It can put you off claiming if you think you are only going to be out of work for a month or so, which is probably the intention of some people in government. So this is a worthy film to make, but the story here is heavily exaggerated. In the first half of the film every single misfortune, setback and inconvenience happens to Daniel, one after the other in a way that does not appear believe-able. He is portrayed solely as honest, warm and wholesome while the people who stand in his way are all mean, curt and heartless. Many of the characters seem artificially created or they talk in stitled dialogue to get a political message across rather than give an honest or credible account of being out of work. The film and the plot really picks up as the relationship between Daniel and Kate develops - the last 15 minutes shows how good the film could have been.

I, Tonya (2017)

Tonya Harding's sweet revenge

[7/10 · 1 March 2018]

I am glad this film got made. I always smelled a rat in the media coverage of the Kerrigan/ Harding spat in 1994. Kerrigan was not so sweet and Harding not so nasty. Margot Robbie does a fair job as Harding and the staging of the big incident is well carried out. The film is ultimately not as powerful as it could be, as Robbie is too good looking, too magnificent looking. Harding was small, tough and put upon - we do not get that sense from seeing Robbie on screen. Also the mockumentary style falls flat in parts as the jokes are not funny enough; the cutesy girl/ dainty mum being foul mouthed is overused and never really as funny as the film thinks it is. The dialogue often meanders and is only pulled together by the use of the 70s early 80s rock tracks. Still very glad this film got made. Go girl, Tonya.

Johnny Guitar (1954)

Inspiration for Rocky Horror Show

[8/10 · 14 January 2018]

I would be very surprised if Richard O'Brien did not see this film several times, as there appear to be so many ways in which the Rocky Horror Show is inspired by the full on weirdness of Johnny Guitar. Firstly, we have a straight, square jawed male character who pulls into a big house in the middle of a storm. There he is met by a simplistic handyman, before he meets the powerful Vienna who is standing at the top of a flight of stairs. The square jawed man, typically the Hollywood hero is made to look weak and ineffectual by cross dressing Vienna - as do other men in the film. Vienna is an odd name for a woman, but then so is Columbia. And Frank'n'Furter is an odd name for a man, but so is Turkey Ralston. There is a dull and safe expert in Johnny Guitar 'Mr Andrews' and there is the Criminologist in Rocky Horror. I am sure it is not the only influence for Rocky Horror, but it is a clear starting place.

The Damned: Don't You Wish That We Were Dead (2015)

First class documentary

[8/10 · 28 September 2017]

I watched this as a fan of punk and a fan of rock documentaries. I was never completely sold on the Damned, more of a Pistols fan, but I was interested in the people behind the publicity photos, behind the rock image, the stories they had to tell. This film delivers all of that a little too powerfully at times, as while it makes its director look good, it makes the group look a little sorry. Brian James and Rat Scabies come across as broken old men, even if they have a great story to tell. Dave Vanian comes across as a good and loyal singer for the group who lacks the big personality to sell the group as well as Johnny Rotten and Joe Strummer. Only Captain Sensible really seems to have improved with age. We see him as cheerful, personable with fans, a better front man than Dave Vanian, a great guitarist. Again, you wonder at his loyalty to the group. As a viewer you want the film to have a happy ending, for the group to get their million dollar cheque, but it never arrives.

The Killing$ of Tony Blair (2016)

Sobering documentary

[7/10 · 12 May 2017]

For someone who was taken in by a lot of what Tony Blair said while he was prime minister this is a sobering film. Clearly, any documentary hosted and produced by George Galloway is going to be biased, but the use of a range of right wing politicians, journalists, business and establishment figures as talking heads is a smart move that helps give balance and credibility to the story. The odious Ken Livingstone is only used once.

The credible case against Tony Blair is that the premise for the Iraq war was not there (as if we did not already know that), that he was deeply compromised with the deals struck with Rupert Murdoch, and that his post-political career as a business fixer and adviser to despots has stretched the bounds of avarice and conflicts of interest.

Ultimately, this is an important film whose strengths and weaknesses are both to do with George Galloway. Galloway has the mischievousness and ambition to make the film happen, but his own creepy relationship with Saddam Hussein and his sons, who attempted genocide of the Kurds in Iraq, makes him an unpalatable prosecutor of Tony Blair.

Kidulthood (2006)

A good film despite the fuss

[7/10 · 8 November 2016]

As a film buff I rate this as a well edited, pacey, incident filled and coherent 90 minutes that is deservedly a commercial success. As a Londoner I recognise that it provides a welcome break from the light comedy romance featuring toffs in very nice houses style of cinema we have seen too much of. Some of the characters and the situations reminds me of my own days at an inner-London comp. The film works and justifies itself by this alone, but I could not help wishing for more. The main characters are either victims, psychos, bastards, saps or stupid. Its the same for its sequel Adulthood. The audience this film is aimed at (the same ones in the film) could do with something a little more aspirational, a little more ambitious. Noel Clarke after having written and starred in the film has escaped the dead end lives of the people he writes about, so he should offer the audience some hope too.

The Idiot (1951)

Less than the sum of its parts

[7/10 · 28 March 2016]

Described as 'the most overlooked Kurosawa film', this statement should be taken at face value, not with the romantic idea it is unfairly overlooked. There is much that is brilliant here, but overall it is lesser and not greater than the sum of its parts. There are many brilliant scenes, where the film's many warring personalities are skilfully juxtaposed in individual frames; any aspiring film director would do well do study this. The ice skating scene from the ice festival where skaters wear ghoul masks is something Fellini appears to have lifted for the carnival scene in I Vitelloni. Also in one of her best ever roles (better than Tokyo Story), Satusko Hara is fantastic as the scorned ex-concubine who is in turns melancholy at her situation and vengeful. The Wicked Witch of the East from the Wizard of Oz was surely an inspiration here. Most at fault is the role of Masayuki Mori as the idiot Kameda, his long silences, lack of gesticulation and slowly spoken lines only serve to kill the viewer's attention. We never get to feel much sympathy with his infirmity; perhaps his best bits were cut by the studio from the four hour version that Kurosawa created? There is no resolution or epiphany as in the end to Ikiru. Plus Toshiro Mifune's character is basically little different to the unruly warrior from The Seven Samurai, where it really belongs. This is worth watching for some of its parts, but this is not and has never been a successful film. My personal favourites from Kurosawa are Stray Dog, Seven Samurai and Ikiru.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)

Masterful technique, silly plot

[7/10 · 30 January 2016]

This tale of a middle class American couple who turn sleuths on holiday to get back their kidnapped son is technically good, but it gets ignored by the film critics because, frankly, the plot and the characters are too silly. The camera angles, the pacing of certain scenes are as masterful and laden with portent and meaning as Hitchcock at his best - any budding film director could learn from this. For this reason, Hitchcock favoured this version over his 1935 original, but the original with its liberal use of humour (the chair fight in the chapel is a hoot) never takes itself that seriously and thus the viewer is forgiving of the sillier parts of the plot. Here, there is far less humour and over reliant on a creaky plot about a couple of squares up against an unlikely bunch of crooks attempting to assassinate the leader of a fictional country. A saving grace is where Hitchcock indulges in his lifelong dislike of the British police, by having two of the most pompous and ineffective police officers you could imagine utterly fail the US couple.

The American Friend (1977)

Self conscious art house

[4/10 · 20 August 2015]

Wim Wenders' film has all the hallmarks of having been concocted deliberately for lovers of European art house, but it is not convincing. The plot is straight out of Hitchcock, an ordinary family man (Bruno Ganz) meets a mysterious, menacing enigma (Dennis Hopper) who leads him out of his safe world on a series of dangerous missions in Paris and Munich. There is a sub-plot around the use of frames and perception, that plays on the Ganz's characters job in a picture framer/ restorer, but I would have been oblivious if not for the notes that came with my DVD. The problem is that Bruno Ganz treats the role seriously and puts some convincing angst into the ghastly situation he is put in, but Dennis Hopper clearly does not take the film seriously. Reportedly he came to blows with Ganz for his refusal to learn his lines and his mumbling, mock-mad acting kills the impact of his dialogue. Either Hopper felt a European film was beneath him or he knew that Wenders plans were too pretentious to be taken seriously. Wenders is also apparently incapable of shooting a single attractive scene. He makes Hamburg bleak, New York uninteresting and even manages to make Paris ugly.

The Year of Living Dangerously (1982)

Flawed, miscast, unconvincing

[2/10 · 26 January 2014]

Writing a two star review for a film that has an IMDb rating of 7.1 must look like spite, but let me make my case. Firstly, the plot line is confusing, quickly ticking off events from the book, without the viewer getting to understand their full significance. So we do not get to understand Billy's love of the Sigourney Weaver character, his bitterness as someone who has not had love reciprocated and thus his spiral out of control. We do not really get to understand Mel Gibson's motivation as a journalist either, only his romance with Sigourney Weaver. So, we do not really understand why he deliberately loses the swimming race with the British military attaché - (this was done to befriend him and get more scoops). This messes with the dramatic impact, meaning that we not only do not get to know the characters, nor the complexity of the political backdrop of Indonesia under a dictatorship with communist revolutionaries and Muslim generals. My second problem is with the casting. Mel Gibson and Siguourney Weaver are the fabulous looking Hollywood stars brought into attract an audience, but Gibson is wooden and wholly unbelievable as a foreign journalist. He overuses a cigarette as a prop as if that is the main characteristic of a journalist. He only comes alive when offended and given a chance for violence, (which explains his future casting in Braveheart/Lethal Weapon). Weaver gives a reasonable English accent, but the role calls for someone with a cut glass voice to emphasise how foreign her posting in Jakarta is. Similarly Linda Hunt does well as Billy Kwan, but why bother? With a billion Chinese on this earth why opt for a white female to play a male half-Chinese man?

Rush (I) (2013)

Nicki Lauda's struggle and successes brought to life

[8/10 · 10 January 2014]

The full personalities of F1 racing drivers were never really revealed back in the 1970s. It was all about the vicarious thrills of speeding of the cars, crashes, shunts and the chequered flag. We saw the drivers spraying large bottles of champagne around, but we did not get to care what they were really like or much about the technique of racing. So the full enormity of Nicki Lauda's quick recovery from his burns to getting back into the driver's seat did not get properly examined at the time. Ron Howard's film redresses this by revealing the brilliant mind of Lauda, his crises, his struggles and his professionalism. It also, of course, shows the swashbuckling bravado of James Hunt and the glamour he brought to F1. The only criticism I would make was the film's budget could have been used to better bring alive some of the exotic locations, such as the final 1976 race off next to Mount Fuji, which heavily relies on computer graphics.