An archive of blog entries about films and film production.
Just in case you missed The Power of Nightmares on the BBC last year, Salon is offering a handy summary so that Americans get to know what it was all about. The review’s mainly positive and clarifies the many distortions of Curtis’ arguments that have appeared in the media.
Work on a movie of The Equalizer is back on course. For those who forget, The Equalizer was an occasionally good 80s show starring Edward Woodward as the hardest OAP in New York (okay, he was in his 50s at the time). If there was an injustice, he would right it with his CIA training and skills, usually violently. Not sure how much resonance it will have nowadays, given the plummeting crime rates in New York for the last decade: maybe they’ll shift it to Los Angeles, although changing the plot to “rich, white, English guy cleans up the violence of South Central” would make it walk a very thin tightrope, I reckon.
Woodward got the job as The Equalizer after the producers saw a few old episodes of Callan, one of the best British television shows ever made. I caught the first episode in a double bill with an episode of Danger Man at the NFT last Friday. Typical NFT audience (stop chatting, you scrotes: save it till the end) but everyone was quiet for Callan, the story of a former British government assassin blackmailed into working for his ex-employers again. Callan remains one of the most bleakly realistic shows ever made – only The Sandbaggers exceeds it as a realistic depiction of espionage. It paved the way for even grittier shows such as The Sweeney and Special Branch. Only the third and four seasons are available on DVD, although most of the first two black and white seasons do still exist and if you ever get a chance to see them, grab it. They make 24 look like the unrealistic cartoon it is, while pre-empting its theme that the “good guys” will often use the same ruthless techniques as the “bad guys”.
Danger Man, incidentally, was a slightly cartoony episode itself, improved only by the impressive Patrick McGoohan and its failure to use that tried and tested method of 60s spies dramas “everyone foreign speaks English, even when they’re by themselves”. Some of the Swiss German accents were iffy, but for the most part, the pronunciation was pretty good, giving the otherwise outlandish plot some grounding in reality, as McGoohan tries to infiltrate a dastardly plot without speaking the language of the locals.
Scary fact: Ian Hendry and Colin Blakely were identical twins during the 60s. Check it out and you’ll see that I’m right.
I went to the NFT to watch Ace in the Hole on Friday. What can I say? A movie about a cynical reporter – how could I resist, even if it did had the most implausible scissor-wound in movie history? But there’s something I want to share with you.
The NFT audience is filled with some strange people. Sure, it’s mostly packed with perfectly innocent cinephiles. But there was a different kind of person there as well…
The chattering classes were there. I’m talking about:
During this particular movie, said chattering classes laughed uproariously at every single joke, no matter how slight. I’m not talking about regular laughs, either. These were odd. “Ha, ha, ha, ha!” I’m not being onomatopoeic here. You could hear every letter. And for people who object to “youths” talking during movies, they weren’t half a bunch of gasbags.
They irritated me something chronic and ruined a perfectly good cinema experience. Is there some way to get them banned? Surely there must be.
Fooled by all that pre-launch guff, I naively believed that ITV4 was in fact going to have the programmes and American imports it claimed. I’ve just checked the listings and discovered something incredible. None of that is true. In fact…
ITV4 is exactly the same as Bravo. But more than that, it’s Bravo circa 1996.
Here’s what I mean:
That’s practically the entire ITC output of the 60s and 70s there. They’re short of Danger Man, The Avengers and The Prisoner, but hell, they’ve got The Champions so I don’t care. I’d watch The Persuaders for the theme tune, but it’s never been the same since I stopped watching the dubbed French version: Tony Curtis sounded so much better en fran?ɬ�ais.
To cap it all, they have First Wave, Andromeda and Alien Nation, as well as Alex Cox of Sid and Nancy and Repo Man fame essentially repeating his Moviedrome gig from the late 80s.
ITV4? Why not just call it “The Cult TV channel” and get it over with? If they ever broke Street Hawk out of the mothballs, I’d watch nothing else.
I found the longest 10 minutes of my life tonight. They were hidden between 6.40pm and 6.50pm at Greenwich filmworks. Who’d have thought it?
I’d gone to see Serenity but found anything but (do you like what I did there?). Serenity itself was nice enough, although I felt like I’d walked in during act three of a play and all the good stuff had already happened. The first two acts must have been good, because the audience at the back were snivelling away like nobody’s business by the end. Clearly, they knew something I didn’t.
No, the particular problem I had was with an advert: H&M’s Romeo & Juliet. Not only was it awful, a “romantic”, musical jeans advert based around drive-by shootings (!), it just went on forever. A few minutes in, people were gnawing their own legs off for relief. When it finished, there were audible sighs of relief and bemusement something that bad had been foisted on us.
A Google search reveals that not only is this ad reviled around the world, it has been hastily dropped in Canada. It’s even caused people who previously liked the company, to despise them.
Yes, friends, it really is that bad. If you go to see Serenity, sneak in after the ads if you can.
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