Film Snippets
Not really in the mood for big reviews (and beginning to realise that I tend to say only good things about most films, which will get very dull very quickly), but I watched a number of new [to me] films over the weekend. The number being 4.
For a Few Dollars More was a good way to spend the bulk of a Saturday afternoon, having seen A Fistful of Dollars the previous week. Likewise, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a good way of spending a Sunday afternoon.
Saturday evening was carefully whiled away enjoying the first half of a Michael Caine double bill that my Mother sent on to me (having got it free in the Mail on Sunday), namely The Eagle has Landed.. The second half of that double bill had been The Fourth Protocol, which I watched last week and thought I'd told you about, but since it seems not, I'll find a few words.
Not such a good plan for a Sunday evening was JFK, since I realised partway through I had a pencilled-in plan to meet some people online, and had to come back to it a couple of hours later. Although it's Monday, so clearly I survived, and can even remember a little of what went on in the film.
Spoilers for all follow.
First the Leone westerns (A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in that order). They're good, sure, but I had trouble considering them the classics that everyone claims. The intricacy of plot in the first is impressive, with the sheer cunning of the main character making his antics a joy to follow. It's also in the first that he's at his most enigmatic and threatening, a quality that really makes the film, with Eastwood to thank for it.
The second is the one that many people consider the best. Maybe it is, all round, but while the journeying nature of the plot appealed a little, I felt it lost something by not keeping the grit of the first one. Lee Van Cleef is great though, both in this one and the last (albeit with a different character in each).
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the only one to be on the Top 100 that I'm chasing, but in my opinion was a little disappointing, having seen the others and heard this one billed as the best western ever. Van Cleef is excellent again, although while Eastwood is good, he doesn't have that little something that made his performance in Fistful so impressive.
In fact, the setup of the trilogy is a little confusing. The third film was introduced to me as a prequel to the others, which would fit with Eastwood gaining his trademark poncho at the end, but the characterisation just doesn't fit that: if the first is really in the middle chronologically, then it's a low point in Eastwood's character that - while not inconsistent - does suggest a lot of story that we aren't made a party to. Besides which the assumption at the beginning of Fistful - and throughout More - is that he is skint, but at the end of G/B/U he makes off with more money than he makes in the other two put together.
The Fourth Protocol I really enjoyed. It's relatively low budget, and has something of an endearing quality about it, as far as I'm concerned at least. Most interesting to me was the fact that not only did the Acting DG of the Security Service have an office in my old College, but that Pierce Brosnan was out to blow up an airbase not all that far from where I now live. It's well worth a look, especially if you enjoy cold war spy stories.
The only shame is that, having been made in 1987 as it was, it has virtually an entirely western cast, without a decent Russian accent in sight. Easy to ignore after a while (mainly because once they get to the UK they're all undercover), but still a disappointment, even if it couldn't be helped.
The Eagle Has Landed has Michael Caine as a German special forces Colonel sent into England to kidnap Churchill. It's unlikely, but surprisingly convincing once it gets going, albeit with a few big blunders required (including a token stupid American, this time apparently included entirely deliberately).
Besides the fact that I spent the whole film trying to remember what rank Oberst was equivalent to (that I knew there was an Oberst-Leutnant position just beneath it wasn't enough to jog my memory), there were very few of those big 'what's that meant to be' moments with this film. I have to wonder whether a platoon of Polish soldiers on exercise would simply be accepted in a sleepy Norfolk town, but I don't know what the UK was like in the latter stages of the war, so I can't argue against it. Likewise, while I have to be mildly annoyed that it's the Americans that more or less save the day, there were an awful lot of US troops stationed here at that time, and perhaps they would have been closer than our own people.
There were a few moments I particularly liked, such as Caine demanding that his men have their own uniforms on under the Polish disguise, because they are soldiers, not spies. The operation they are mounting is just the kind that would blur the line, and the modern tendency is to have films with lots of men with no identifying features running around in a plausibly deniable way; to have a character turn round and tell his CO (in effect) that his men will fight and die as soldiers if it should be necessary and that they will do so in their own uniforms was nice, I felt. Particularly since it's when one of the germans dies saving a little girl from a watermill wheel that they are uncovered, as the corpse - still lodged on the blades of the wheel - shows off some blue...
See both of those if you get the chance. Don't go and hunt them down, but they should turn up sooner or later: while the Fourth Protocol is mildly obscure, the Eagle Has Landed is typical Christmas/Easter television fare.
Finally then, JFK. It's a dramatisation that is based on actual events, presumably somewhat loosely, in a way that was clearly quite heartfelt by Costner and perhaps also Stone. Yes, the President was assassinated, yes it brought about a U-turn in US foreign policy, and yes it was very suspicious, but the film - especially if you get to the end credits (which is no mean feat) - is in danger of becoming a soapbox for getting people to waste their lives looking for a truth that, should it exist, would be a very dangerous thing to know.
It's paced relatively well, considering how long it is - yes, there is actually that much stuff in it - but while it holds up most of the way, there's a point when it suddenly falls into a courtroom and just turns into a continuous drudgery of a scene that no doubt has breaks in it as far as the characters are concerned, but is a relentless slog for the viewer.
The thing that annoyed me most about that trial was that Costner as DA had brought a shoddy case against a particular person who had a vague involvement in the assassination (assuming the consipracy theory was right), and he proceeded to use it as a vehicle to try the state. It doesn't work like that. Bring a case against a representative of the state, by all means, but trying to lean on the government by prosecuting an alleged CIA agent with only a weak tie to the crime the Costner character weakened his case, and the film lost credibility.
Now, normally a TV/film courtroom scene will have one or other counsel going round the houses with some brilliant explanation that will prove everything. Their opposite number will shout 'Objection: irrelevant' or suchlike, and the judge will say 'Overruled, for the moment, but this had better be going somewhere, Counsel'. This is because courtrooms probably aren't actually all that dramatic, and to make the drama you have to cut some corners. The prosecuting DA took his conspiracy theory and ran with it, explaining it at length and labouring various points in the name of 'proving that there was a conspiracy', while the film shows no real effort to tie it to the case in hand. His exposition is more and more centred around shocking the jury and those in the visitor's gallery, but inevitably (I felt, at least), his case collapsed, and as far as I was concerned, so did the film.
I wouldn't recommend it; it's very long, and while the first two thirds are pretty good, it's all build-up for a huge anticlimax.
For a Few Dollars More was a good way to spend the bulk of a Saturday afternoon, having seen A Fistful of Dollars the previous week. Likewise, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was a good way of spending a Sunday afternoon.
Saturday evening was carefully whiled away enjoying the first half of a Michael Caine double bill that my Mother sent on to me (having got it free in the Mail on Sunday), namely The Eagle has Landed.. The second half of that double bill had been The Fourth Protocol, which I watched last week and thought I'd told you about, but since it seems not, I'll find a few words.
Not such a good plan for a Sunday evening was JFK, since I realised partway through I had a pencilled-in plan to meet some people online, and had to come back to it a couple of hours later. Although it's Monday, so clearly I survived, and can even remember a little of what went on in the film.
Spoilers for all follow.
First the Leone westerns (A Fistful of Dollars; For a Few Dollars More; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, in that order). They're good, sure, but I had trouble considering them the classics that everyone claims. The intricacy of plot in the first is impressive, with the sheer cunning of the main character making his antics a joy to follow. It's also in the first that he's at his most enigmatic and threatening, a quality that really makes the film, with Eastwood to thank for it.
The second is the one that many people consider the best. Maybe it is, all round, but while the journeying nature of the plot appealed a little, I felt it lost something by not keeping the grit of the first one. Lee Van Cleef is great though, both in this one and the last (albeit with a different character in each).
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is the only one to be on the Top 100 that I'm chasing, but in my opinion was a little disappointing, having seen the others and heard this one billed as the best western ever. Van Cleef is excellent again, although while Eastwood is good, he doesn't have that little something that made his performance in Fistful so impressive.
In fact, the setup of the trilogy is a little confusing. The third film was introduced to me as a prequel to the others, which would fit with Eastwood gaining his trademark poncho at the end, but the characterisation just doesn't fit that: if the first is really in the middle chronologically, then it's a low point in Eastwood's character that - while not inconsistent - does suggest a lot of story that we aren't made a party to. Besides which the assumption at the beginning of Fistful - and throughout More - is that he is skint, but at the end of G/B/U he makes off with more money than he makes in the other two put together.
The Fourth Protocol I really enjoyed. It's relatively low budget, and has something of an endearing quality about it, as far as I'm concerned at least. Most interesting to me was the fact that not only did the Acting DG of the Security Service have an office in my old College, but that Pierce Brosnan was out to blow up an airbase not all that far from where I now live. It's well worth a look, especially if you enjoy cold war spy stories.
The only shame is that, having been made in 1987 as it was, it has virtually an entirely western cast, without a decent Russian accent in sight. Easy to ignore after a while (mainly because once they get to the UK they're all undercover), but still a disappointment, even if it couldn't be helped.
The Eagle Has Landed has Michael Caine as a German special forces Colonel sent into England to kidnap Churchill. It's unlikely, but surprisingly convincing once it gets going, albeit with a few big blunders required (including a token stupid American, this time apparently included entirely deliberately).
Besides the fact that I spent the whole film trying to remember what rank Oberst was equivalent to (that I knew there was an Oberst-Leutnant position just beneath it wasn't enough to jog my memory), there were very few of those big 'what's that meant to be' moments with this film. I have to wonder whether a platoon of Polish soldiers on exercise would simply be accepted in a sleepy Norfolk town, but I don't know what the UK was like in the latter stages of the war, so I can't argue against it. Likewise, while I have to be mildly annoyed that it's the Americans that more or less save the day, there were an awful lot of US troops stationed here at that time, and perhaps they would have been closer than our own people.
There were a few moments I particularly liked, such as Caine demanding that his men have their own uniforms on under the Polish disguise, because they are soldiers, not spies. The operation they are mounting is just the kind that would blur the line, and the modern tendency is to have films with lots of men with no identifying features running around in a plausibly deniable way; to have a character turn round and tell his CO (in effect) that his men will fight and die as soldiers if it should be necessary and that they will do so in their own uniforms was nice, I felt. Particularly since it's when one of the germans dies saving a little girl from a watermill wheel that they are uncovered, as the corpse - still lodged on the blades of the wheel - shows off some blue...
See both of those if you get the chance. Don't go and hunt them down, but they should turn up sooner or later: while the Fourth Protocol is mildly obscure, the Eagle Has Landed is typical Christmas/Easter television fare.
Finally then, JFK. It's a dramatisation that is based on actual events, presumably somewhat loosely, in a way that was clearly quite heartfelt by Costner and perhaps also Stone. Yes, the President was assassinated, yes it brought about a U-turn in US foreign policy, and yes it was very suspicious, but the film - especially if you get to the end credits (which is no mean feat) - is in danger of becoming a soapbox for getting people to waste their lives looking for a truth that, should it exist, would be a very dangerous thing to know.
It's paced relatively well, considering how long it is - yes, there is actually that much stuff in it - but while it holds up most of the way, there's a point when it suddenly falls into a courtroom and just turns into a continuous drudgery of a scene that no doubt has breaks in it as far as the characters are concerned, but is a relentless slog for the viewer.
The thing that annoyed me most about that trial was that Costner as DA had brought a shoddy case against a particular person who had a vague involvement in the assassination (assuming the consipracy theory was right), and he proceeded to use it as a vehicle to try the state. It doesn't work like that. Bring a case against a representative of the state, by all means, but trying to lean on the government by prosecuting an alleged CIA agent with only a weak tie to the crime the Costner character weakened his case, and the film lost credibility.
Now, normally a TV/film courtroom scene will have one or other counsel going round the houses with some brilliant explanation that will prove everything. Their opposite number will shout 'Objection: irrelevant' or suchlike, and the judge will say 'Overruled, for the moment, but this had better be going somewhere, Counsel'. This is because courtrooms probably aren't actually all that dramatic, and to make the drama you have to cut some corners. The prosecuting DA took his conspiracy theory and ran with it, explaining it at length and labouring various points in the name of 'proving that there was a conspiracy', while the film shows no real effort to tie it to the case in hand. His exposition is more and more centred around shocking the jury and those in the visitor's gallery, but inevitably (I felt, at least), his case collapsed, and as far as I was concerned, so did the film.
I wouldn't recommend it; it's very long, and while the first two thirds are pretty good, it's all build-up for a huge anticlimax.
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