Resilient Little Muscle
Cinematic rumination and reviews, with a pronounced weakness for Classic Hollywood
Sunday 21 February 2016
Pat and Mike (1952)
Dir.: George Cukor
Plot: A talented lady golfer with an unusual performance issue falls in with a shrewd sports agent
If you’re the sort of person who hears about Katharine Hepburn’s real-life sporting prowess and immediately says “Oh yeah? I’ll believe it when I see it!” then this is certainly the film for you. Screenwriters Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, friends of Hepburn’s, were inspired by her talent for athletics as the basis for her fifth cinematic outing with Tracy.
Monday 16 September 2013
The Long Voyage Home (1940)
Dir.: John Ford
Plot: A crew of merchant sailors try to stay sane and alive in dangerous waters, while personal catastrophe plagues their ranks.
The Long Voyage Home
may sound like pleasantly forgettable studio fare – a troop of rowdy merchant
sailors played by a familiar array of folksy character actors and a plot
revolving around suspected spies, enemy-infested waters and the occasional mass
brawl. In reality, it strives for a higher plane, thanks to original author
Eugene O’Neill’s poignant examination of the loneliness of the seafaring life
and the inner demons that drive a man to seek such an existence and prevent him
from leaving it.
Friday 9 August 2013
Yasujiro Ozu Special: The Only Son (1936)/An Autumn Afternoon (1962)
A couple of weeks back, I
was lucky enough to catch a mini Ozu retrospective at the Filmothéque du Quartier Latin, one of Paris’ many terrific little arthouse cinemas in the
district around the Sorbonne. Even better, alongside two of Ozu’s best-known
films - Tokyo Story and An Autumn Afternoon -the management had decided to
include one of the director’s lesser-known works: his first talkie, The Only
Son. Having seen Tokyo Story fairly recently, I skipped it this time round to
focus on the other films in the series, which I was watching for the first
time, and in doing so gained a fresh appreciation of an auteur who only seems
to get better with age. Nonetheless, although one of Ozu’s hallmarks is the
consistency and continuity which links all of his films together, by
juxtaposing his first talking picture and his last we can clearly see that a
journey of tremendous aesthetic and an emotional refinement separates the early
effort and the final masterpiece.
Wednesday 26 June 2013
Rio Grande (1950)
Dir.: John Ford
Plot: A cavalry officer's dangerous task of protecting settlers from rebellious Apache is made more complicated by the arrival of his estranged wife and son.
Sunday 30 September 2012
Lawless (2012)
Dir: John Hillcoat
Plot: Three moonshining brothers in 1920s Virginia find their activities disturbed by the arrival of a ruthless lawman determined to wipe them out.
Lawless isn't a very good name for a movie, is it? A bit generic.
A better name for this would be The Beverly Killbillies. Excuse the corny
wordplay, because it serves a higher purpose. Not only does it sum up the plot
of the Nick Cave-penned bootlegging drama, it also sums up its fundamental flaw
- it isn't sure whether it's a bloodsoaked thriller or a good ol' boy yuk-fest
and it never tries probing deep enough to find out.
Tuesday 18 September 2012
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (1945)
(This review originally appeared on Kubrick On The Guillotine, a great film site that you should check out)
Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.
Dir.: Elia Kazan
Plot: A bright young girl comes of age in a turn-of-the-century Brooklyn tenement, witnessing the tensions and struggles of her family.
Rarely does a young director’s first feature film contain such striking beauty and power as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. But then again, rarely is that director Elia Kazan. And the young auteur had hardly set himself an easy task: coming off the back of nothing more than a short film about coal mining in Tennessee, Kazan was to condense an enormously popular 500-page novel by Betty Smith into a 2-hour studio production. The result is an astonishingly assured mini-epic which dampened handkerchiefs across the nation, and launched Kazan into a career that would change American film.
Tuesday 24 July 2012
The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Dir.: Christopher Nolan
Plot: A reclusive Bruce Wayne is forced to reassume his alter ego Batman to protect Gotham from a ruthless terrorist with designs on Gotham.
SPOILERS ABOUND
You can’t have your cake and eat it. This is a fundamental
rule of many things in life, and movie making is one of them. The Dark Knight
Rises tries to straddle the line between bleak psychological drama and
extremely fast motorbikes and doesn’t quite manage it. The result is a
frustratingly uneven epic - bolstered with good performances, excellent
direction and some memorable set pieces but ultimately overlong, turgid and weighed
down with questionable subplots and 2D characterisations.
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