Archive
PETER RABBIT 2: THE RUNAWAY – Dominic Lewis
Original Review by Christopher Garner
Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway sees the titular rabbit leave his rural home for the big city, fall in with the wrong animal crowd, begin a life of crime, get all of his animal friends and family captured by a pet store (that apparently just takes whatever animals it can find and sells them), and then save all his friends from their new owners with the help of his human caretakers, Bea and Thomas. The computer animated animal characters in the film are allegedly based on the classic children’s books by Beatrix Potter, though I doubt the plot and tone of this film are anything like those books. The film is directed by Will Gluck, who also helmed the first film, stars Rose Byrne and Domhnall Gleeson as the human characters, and has James Corden, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki, Hayley Atwell, David Wenham, and Sam Neill voicing the animal characters. It received mixed reviews from critics, but has made over $150 million, which is very respectable given its release during the pandemic. Read more…
THE FISHER KING – George Fenton
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Fisher King is a redemption drama with a fantasy edge, written by Richard La Gravenese and directed by Terry Gilliam. Jeff Bridges stars as Jack Lucas, a New York radio shock jock who inadvertently provokes a listener to commit a mass murder in a restaurant. Years later, his career in tatters, Jack is about to commit suicide by jumping into the Hudson River when he is saved by Parry (Robin Williams), a mentally ill homeless man whose life was destroyed when his wife was killed in that very murder spree years previously. Parry is obsessed with the the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King, and he convinces Jack to help him find ‘the holy grail’; Jack sees this as a chance for personal redemption, and hopes that – by helping Parry get his life back – he will be able to bury his own demons, just as the fisher king of legend was able to have his injuries healed by helping others. The film co-stars Amanda Plummer, Mercedes Ruehl, and Michael Jeter, and was a critical success, ultimately receiving five Oscar nominations, with Ruehl winning for Best Supporting Actress. Read more…
SHANG-CHI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS – Joel P. West
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There have now been 25 films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it’s getting to the point where they are making films about superheroes that are incredibly niche, from way deep down in comic book lore. Such is the case with their latest film, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton. The film stars Chinese-Canadian actor Simu Liu as the eponymous Shang-Chi; Shang is the son of Xu Wenwu (Tony Leung), a fearsome warrior who has been granted immortality due to his possession of the legendary Ten Rings, and now controls a powerful army of assassins and fighters who have been loyal to him for centuries. However, Shang has been estranged from his father for years, and now lives now an intentionally uneventful life in San Francisco’s Chinatown, working as a parking valet, and hanging out with his best friend Katy (Awkwafina). Everything changes for Shang when his father’s minions come looking for him, and he is reluctantly drawn back into his old life when he learns that his father is searching for the gateway to the mythical realm of Ta Lo – and that, if he finds it, the entire Earth could be in jeopardy. Read more…
SINBAD THE SAILOR – Roy Webb
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
In March of 1944 RKO Studios producer William Pereira proposed to studio executives to follow-up on the success of their swashbuckler film The Spanish Main (1945) with a new effort in the genre. Douglas Fairbanks Jr., who had just returned from a five-year WWII stint in the US Navy, would star in the titular role. Stephen Ames who produced “The Spanish Main” was assigned to produce the film, and he hired John Twist and George Worthing Yates to write an original screenplay based on the eighth voyage of Sinbad. A budget of $2.5 million dollars was provided and Richard Wallace was tasked with directing. A fine cast was assembled to join Fairbanks including Maureen O’Hara as Shireen, Walter Slezak as the villain Melik, Anthony Quinn as the Emir of Daibul, George Tobias as Abbu, and Mike Mazurki as Yusuf. The story draws inspiration from the 8th Voyage of Sinbad, which is set in the early 9th century C.E. and involves the search for the lost treasure of Alexander the Great. Sinbad secures a ship but must forge an uneasy alliance of convenience with villainous Melik who stole his map, memorized it, and then burnt it. After many adventures and overcoming Melik’s tracheary, Sinbad succeeds with his quest to secure the treasure, and wins the hand of the beautiful Shireen. The film was a modest success earning a profit of $300,000. critical success was tepid and it secured no Academy Award nominations. The film’s poor performance pretty much ended the viability of the swashbuckling genre. Read more…
CANDYMAN – Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The 1992 horror film Candyman, directed by Bernard Rose and based on a short story by Clive Barker, was an interesting exploration of urban legends, societal decay, and racism, dressed up with plenty of blood and gore, and featuring an iconic lead performance by Tony Todd as the hook-handed monster seeking revenge on his murderers from beyond the grave. It spawned a fairly decent first sequel – Farewell to the Flesh from 1995 – and a rather risible second sequel in 1999, but this new film is essentially a direct sequel to the original. The film is directed by Nia DaCosta and stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Teyonah Parris as Anthony and Brianna, a wealthy young couple, both serious artists, who live in the newly-gentrified Cabrini Green neighborhood of Chicago, formerly the site of the ‘projects’ where the first film took place. Seeking inspiration for his latest collection, Anthony ventures into a dilapidated part of the neighborhood, where he learns of the urban legend where, if somebody says the name “Candyman” five times while looking into a mirror, a spirit will appear and kill the summoner. However, as Anthony digs deeper into Candyman lore, and creates art based on what he finds, he discovers some terrible truths about his own past. Read more…
BEASTMASTER 2: THROUGH THE PORTAL OF TIME – Robert Folk
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A belated sequel to the 1982 original, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time sees Marc Singer returning to the role of Dar, a barbarian warrior who can communicate with and control animals, and who in the first film uses this power to defeat an evil wizard. In the sequel, Dar learns that his previously-unknown half-brother Arklon (Wings Hauser) plans to conquer the world with the help of a sorceress named Lyranna (Sarah Douglas). Arklon and Lyranna use a trans-dimensional portal – the eponymous portal of time – to travel to contemporary Los Angeles, where they intend to steal a nuclear bomb and bring it back to their world with them; Dar and his animal companions also travel through the portal to stop them, teaming up with a local woman named Jackie (Kari Wührer) along the way. The film was not well-received by critics at the time, but there is a fun and campy time to be had with it, and although allegedly director Sylvio Tabet stole the film out from underneath the original director Jim Wynorski, resulting in lawsuits and acrimony, he nevertheless keeps the action moving at a decent clip in what would prove to be his only effort behind the camera. Read more…
Under-the-Radar Round Up 2021, Part 3A
2021 is already more than half way done and, as the world of mainstream blockbuster cinema and film music continues to recover from the COVID-19 Coronavirus, we must again look to smaller international features not as reliant on massive theatrical releases to discover the best new soundtracks. As such I am very pleased to present the third installment (for this calendar year) in my ongoing series of articles looking at the best “under the radar” scores from around the world.
The six titles included here are a mixed bag of styles, genres, and national origins, and include a powerful drama from Palestine, a German fantasy adventure, an Egyptian action TV series, a children’s adventure film from Finland, a light French comedy-drama, and a beautiful nature documentary score from China. Read more…
THE HURRICANE – Alfred Newman
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Actor James Hall’s uncle James Norman Hall co-wrote the 1936 novel The Hurricane, which he felt would provide an exiting romantic adventure set in the South Seas. He sold director John Ford on the idea, and financial backing for production was provided by Samuel Goldwyn Productions. A massive $2.0 million budget was provided with $450,000 allocated to special effects specialist James Basevi, who spent $150,000 building a native village and lagoon, and $250,000 destroying it! Screenwriters Dudley Nichols and Oliver H. P. Garrett were hired to adapt Hall’s novel, and Ford assembled a stellar cast, which included Dorothy Lamour as Marama, John Hall as Terangi, Mary Astor as Madame Germaine De Laage, Raymond Massey as Governor Eugene De Laage, C. Aubrey Smith as Father Paul, John Carradine as the Warden, Thomas Mitchell as Dr. Kersaint, and Jerome Cowan as Captain Nagle. Read more…
REMINISCENCE – Ramin Djawadi
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Reminiscence is a fascinating but somewhat flawed neo-noir sci-fi thriller written and directed by Lisa Joy, one of the co-creators of the hit HBO TV series Westworld. The film is set in Miami many years in the future; global warming caused seawater to engulf large parts of the city, resulting in a damaging civil war. During the war a type of sensory-deprivation technology was developed that could make people journey backwards into their own memories, and then have those memories emerge as visual projections so they could be examined in three dimensions by observers. It was initially used as an interrogation technique, but now Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman) uses them as his business – entertainment for those who want to escape from the present and briefly revisit their past. Nick is world-weary and perpetually depressed, but his life changes when he meets Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), a sultry night club singer, and they embark on a passionate relationship. When Mae suddenly disappears without a trace, Nick resolves to find out what happened to her, using his memory technology as a guide. However, the more Nick searches, the more he gets drawn into a murky world of organized crime, political corruption, and violence around every corner. The film co-stars Thandie Newton and Cliff Curtis, and was released simultaneously into theaters and on HBO Max; unfortunately, the film was a box office disaster, a combination of audience apathy, poor reviews, and COVID hesitancy driving it to the all-time worst opening weekend of a film playing in over 3,000 theaters. Read more…
DEAD AGAIN – Patrick Doyle
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
After director Kenneth Branagh wowed Hollywood with his brash, compelling take on Shakespeare’s Henry V in 1989, many people expected that he would continue to drink deeply from the well of the Bard for his follow-up effort. Surprisingly, his sophomore effort was not a classic adaptation but was this film: Dead Again, a neo-noir thriller set in contemporary Los Angeles. Branagh plays private detective Mike Church, who is drawn into a mysterious case involving Grace, a woman with amnesia, played by Emma Thompson. In an attempt to discover her identity, he turns to antiques dealer and hypnotist Franklyn Madson (Derek Jacobi), who he believes can help her. While under hypnosis, Grace comes to believe that she is the reincarnation of Margaret, a socialite who was murdered by her composer husband Roman Strauss in 1949. Roman – who also bears an uncanny physical resemblance to Mike – took the secret of Margaret’s murder to his grave, and the more Mike digs into the events of the past, the more he and Grace find their lives in peril in the present. The movie is a fun, melodramatic romp filled with intentional homages to Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles, and features a terrific, bold score by Patrick Doyle. Read more…
FREE GUY – Christophe Beck
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Have you ever felt like your life wasn’t real? Like you were somehow a background character in someone else’s story? That you were destined to be the hero, but no-one ever noticed? This is the basic premise of Free Guy, a new action-comedy from director Shawn Levy. The film stars Ryan Reynolds as Guy, a cheerful bank teller from Free City. He goes to work each day with his best friend, Buddy the security guard, and just seems to accept the fact that every day his bank is robbed, and murder and mayhem seems to continually happen around him. Guy’s life changes forever when he meets ‘Molotov Girl,’ who eventually reveals to him the truth: that Guy is an NPC (non-player character) in an open world video game called Free City, and that she is trying to stop Guy’s entire world from being destroyed. Read more…
THE LOST WEEKEND – Miklós Rózsa
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
The genesis of the film arose as director Billy Wilder was directing his previous movie, Double Indemnity. His screenwriter Raymond Chandler was a recovering alcoholic, who returned to drinking during the stress of collaborating with Wilder. Wilder related that he made the film, in part, as an attempt to better understand Chandler. Wilder sold his story idea to Paramount executives who assigned production to Charles Brackett with a budget of $1.25 million. Brackett and Wilder collaborated in writing the screenplay, by adapting the novel The Lost Weekend by Charles R. Jackson. Notable was their excising of the novel’s homosexual overtones, which portrayed Don Birnam as a closeted homosexual. Wilder himself would direct and he assembled a fine cast, which included Ray Milland as Don Birnam, Jane Wyman as Helen St. James and Phillip Terry as Wick Brinam. Controversy arose from the liquor industry, which was willing to offer $5 million to kill the project as they feared it would reignite political efforts to restore prohibition. Most interesting is that Wilder later related that he would have accepted the offer and burned the negatives himself had they presented it to him personally. Groundbreaking is film’s uncompromising depiction of the pathos of personal destruction precipitated by alcoholism. Today the film is seen as catalyzing a paradigmal change in how Hollywood portrayed drunks, which up to this film had always been portrayed them comedically. Read more…
THE LAST LETTER FROM YOUR LOVER – Daniel Hart
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Last Letter from Your Lover is a British period romantic drama directed by Augustine Frizzell, adapted from the popular novel by Jojo Moyes. The film stars Felicity Jones as Ellie, a journalist tasked with writing an obituary for her recently-deceased editor. Having recently been involved in a painful romantic breakup, Ellie is fascinated when she discovers a series of passionate love letters in her newspaper’s archive, and decides to try to track down the letter writers and find out what happened to them. Ellie discovers that the letter writers were Jennifer (Shailene Woodley), a 1960s socialite, and Anthony (Callum Turner), a journalist, and that they met when Anthony came to write an article about Jennifer’s husband Laurence, a wealthy but emotionally distant industrialist. As Ellie uncovers details about their affair, and their powerful connection, she is also inspired to try to rekindle her own romantic life, and begins a hesitant relationship with Rory (Nabhaan Rizwan), the newspaper’s archivist. The story is a familiar one – it is essentially the same as A.S. Byatt’s Possession from 2002, and the Spanish film El Verano Que Vivimos from last year – but it is splendidly told, with lush period production values and an earnest Englishness to offset the sentimentality. Read more…
BARTON FINK – Carter Burwell
THROWBACK THIRTY
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Perhaps the best film ever made about writer’s block, Barton Fink is a nearly unclassifiable combination of drama, comedy, horror, romance, and existential philosophy, written and directed by Joel Coen and Ethan Coen. John Turturro plays the eponymous Fink, a New York playwright who moves to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, having been offered a job writing for the movies. Unable to find inspiration for his screenplay, he bonds with Charlie Meadows (John Goodman), an amiable salesman who lives next door to him in his rundown apartment building, and then tries to solicit advice from various writers and directors around Hollywood. However, an unexpected and shocking murder sends Fink into a spiral of surrealism, chaos, and death, as he tries to finish his debut script despite his world collapsing around him. The film co-stars Michael Lerner, Judy Davis, and John Mahoney among others, and was the darling of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, eventually winning the coveted Palme d’Or; unfortunately, it was a box office disaster, its unusual genre and offbeat characters failing to connect with mainstream audiences in any meaningful way. Read more…
MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE: REVELATION – Bear McCreary
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I am Adam, Prince of Eternia, defender of the secrets of Castle Grayskull. This is Cringer, my fearless friend. Fabulous secret powers were revealed to me the day I held aloft my magic sword and said… by the power of Grayskull!
When I was a kid growing up in the 1980s, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe was one of my favorite cartoon shows. It was, of course, created as a vehicle to sell action figures by the global toy company Mattel, and it was exceptionally preachy, with an obvious ‘moral of the story’ coda at the end of each episode, but 8-year-old me didn’t care. I couldn’t get enough of the noble warrior Adam and his muscular alter-ego, saving his home planet from the evil Skeletor with the help of his friends – an ever-changing cast that usually included the heroic man-at-arms Duncan, his trusty steed Cringer aka Battle Cat, the magical Orko, and the warrior princess Teela. Looking back at it now with more adult eyes, it was incredibly cheesy and repetitive, badly animated, and somewhat crudely written; despite this, I have fond nostalgic memories of the show, which have stayed with me over the years. Read more…
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