What have you watched recently? 3D!

thanks, volume II is behind it. Volume I elsewhere in the room.

but I didn’t realise how much of a freaky looking dude he was. His eyebrows are mental.

Terry Molloy was a middleweight boxer, so Brando had his eyes made up to look like he'd taken a beating around the face. There's eyelid swelling and scars on his brows as a result, even though he's washed up in the movie.

Brando in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'

…and in 'On the Waterfront'

I’ve only ever seen Lee J. Cobb in this and 12 Angry Men, but he has a
presence about him that makes you feel like you’ve known him all your
life. What a guy. 

Agreed. He's one of those actors that can bring a certain something to any movie he's in. He's great in 'The Exorcist' too.

'The Grapes of Wrath'

John Ford's 1940 film was based on the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about the Great Depression of the 30's, a period after the 1929 Wall Street Crash that devastated American families and forced many of them onto the road to try and seek out any work that they could find in order to keep from falling into further destitution. One such family were the Joads, sharecroppers from Oklahoma who after the loss of their livelihood must make their way to California and the promise of a better life.

John Ford is widely considered to be one of the greatest American directors of all time (although I must admit that I am not that much of a fan) and John Steinbeck is regarded as one of the premier American novelists. So it should come as no surprise that 'The Grapes of Wrath' ends up being a marvelous picture and one that is itself very highly regarded. This is deservedly so and I consider it to be the best picture of its year and one of the greatest of the 1940's.

Ford, who would become more famous for his westerns, crafts a very believable tale of a family that's beset by a misfortune that's completely out of their hands and a result that they cannot be faulted for. Modern mechanisation has rendered their old fashioned methods of farm work redundant and with the economic strife that resulted in the wake of 1929 their landlords have ousted them from their place of work and more importantly their home. The Joad's road journey is one that sees their hardship reach even deeper levels of despair as family members die and they are forced into migrant labour camps.

It's very difficult to fault Ford's movie, but if I have a complaint it's with the changes he makes (or perhaps was forced to make by the studio) to Steinbeck's original story. While Ford's ending to his picture is a relatively upbeat one, Steinbeck leaves the reader utterly depressed at the end with the Joad's fate. A number of very harsh scenes from the book are absent and Steinbeck's more strident Socialist political commentary is also left out of the movie. Again, whether that was at the behest of Ford or producer Daryl F. Zanuck is unclear, although Ford at the time was quite in favour of Labour unions and supported Roosevelt's New Deal. He was also a man who wound up supporting Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon in the late 60's so his own politics was rather hard to pin down and defies the simplistic labels that are often applied. There are those that suggest, though, that it was Zanuck who feared a backlash and insisted that political aspects of Steinbeck's story be toned down.

Frankly I think that the story of the Joads transcends any basic political allegiances and is more about the hardships that can fall upon ordinary people that suddenly find themselves without the means of support that they relied upon. That's a situation that can happen to the majority of folk regardless of what political positions they hold.

Irrespective of such things 'The Grapes of Wrath' is a must see picture for anyone who's interested in cinema or a good story and despite its age and changes to a great literary work it remains one of the finest Hollywood pictures ever made.

9/10

Empire Of The Ants (Bert I Gordon, 1977)

Just released on BD yesterday from Eureka. This was auteur Gordon's final insect film - he had a great run in the 1950s with The Amazing Colossal Man and War Of The Colossal Beast. Good cast and a mix of nice and nasty with the bad 'uns getting their just desserts. Joan Collins is an oily land developer while Pamela Shoop plays the alluring Coreen. The premise is mutant ants who got that way after ingesting radioactive goo. Albert Salmi turns up as a Pied Piper-type sheriff. Nice feature on Gordon by Kim Newman as an extra - I still think his best film is 1972's The Police Connection AKA The Mad Bomber (check out the Code Red BD from 2016). 3 stars

Aye, that's the blu I own too.

Haven't seen either of the Murphy movies. So, thanks for putting them my way.

As an aside, I find it remarkable that we can now get blu rays of movies that we had to go out of our way to obtain on crappy VHS back in the day. I still find it bizarre that something like 'Zombie Flesh Eaters' is on a 4K blu.

How times have changed!

Those VHS's in that shop off Talbot street….He had a room upstairs, with almost every film ever made, running a 24 hour pirate copying operation!

I won't tell you how much time I wasted in the 90's looking for an uncut copy of 'Zombie Flesh Eaters'. Ended up getting a third or fourth generation copy from some lad in Belfast, who's name I got in the back of a horror mag. Then I went to New York and could buy pretty much any movie I wanted.

Which, brings me to another ramble about the what I watched recently…

'Kim's Video'

A mildly interesting documentary, if a little bit bumpy and rough, that details the bizarre story of what happened to an NYC video rental store's stock of movies after the business had closed down. The owner of the store Yongman Kim, a Korean/American businessman, had decided to give the entire collection to a small town in Sicily called Salemi with the idea that the collection would act as some sort of artistic installation at some point in the future. Once it was delivered to Salemi it would be stored in a facility and essentially that was the last that was heard of it.

'Kim's Video' follows film maker David Redmon as he travels to Salemi to find out what happened to the Kim's collection. There he finds out that it is under lock and key and also that there's some very dubious characters involved in the whole nonsensical episode. Over the course of his investigation, Redmon decides to see if it's possible to try and take the collection back to New York.

When I visited New York City for the first time in the mid 90's I asked a friend of mine where I could go to get movies that weren't available in my country. Titles such as 'Zombie Flesh Eaters', 'The Exorcist', 'The Texas Chain Saw Massacre' and even Michael Winner's 'Death Wish' had disappeared from the shelves of video shops over here years before, but were readily available in America in any Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. But my astonished friend, who couldn't believe that those movies weren't available to either rent or buy back in my home town, said that I could go down the street and get those movies. "But", he said, "there's a store that you should go to" and he gave me an address. 6 St. Mark's Place was where I was to go. "You'll love it" he said.

So off I went with my little backpack and a pocket full of dollars to see if I could obtain these movies that I remembered as being readily available during my childhood in the 80's and then suddenly disappearing in Ireland shortly after the video nasties moral panic in the UK, the fallout of which affected us across the pond.

The store I was directed to turned out to be a Mecca for me. A space that was stuffed full of VHS video cases with all sorts of crazy titles (DVD wasn't yet a thing really). Within minutes I had found the titles I wanted to buy and take home with me, but then over the course of an hour or two I was transfixed with sheer amount of titles that I'd only read of in magazines. Other titles were so obscure, I hadn't heard of them before or since, for that matter. There were also the standard titles that would have been available anywhere else, too. But alongside movies like 'Seven', there was 'Rats, Night of Terror'. Next to 'The Terminator' was 'The Shadow of Chikara'. There were even more obscure titles to be found like 'Strike Commando' or 'The Ghastly Ones' and if you dug a little deeper you'd find the dubious delights of pure trash like 'Princess Warrior' or 'For Y'ur Height Only'. Thousands of others were knocking around the shelves too.

This was Kim's. A place that held 55,000 videos that provided the movie geeks of NYC with their movie fix since the mid 80's. Primarily a rental shop, Kim's also did sell through and when it was time for me to head home I had to buy more luggage so I could ship all of these new movies back to Ireland. Every time I was in NYC, Kim's would be an obligatory stop off, even when I could buy pretty much any DVD title on the internet by the time the noughties came around.

Kim's sadly shut its doors in 2008, a victim of the fact that rental was being obliterated by streaming sites such as Netflix, who put many video rental shops out of business in short order all around the world, ushering in an end of an era. Gone was that special ritual of going to a video shop, looking through a sea of movie titles and selecting what to watch that evening. Something that streaming will never, ever, be able replicate.

The 'Kim's Video' documentary will probably appeal most to those who have some sort of memory or experience with the various Kim's NYC shops. Outside of that, however, I think that most viewers may end up losing interest at some point. But for those that remember Kim's or even remember video rental shops in general, it might be worth a look.

6/10

Dead Sleep (Alec Mills, 1990)

Ozploitation thriller set in a psychiatric ward. Linda Blair does a good job and the treatment of the patients is rough. Good performances all round. 3.5 stars

We've gone to see two of those NT Live showings in the past week…

The Playboy Of The Western World
One of my favourite plays. Saw a very good version with Aaron Monaghan as Christy a few years ago, but this is exceptional, as you would expect from The National Theatre. Nicola Coughlan is a great Pegeen Mike, a strong intelligent young woman with wasted potential seeing little future beyond her life helping to run the family shebeen in rural Mayo. Éanna Hardwicke as Christy Mahon comes into her life, on the run after believing he has killed is father in a domestic row. Siobhán McSweeney is the schemeing Widow Quinn. All the above and the supporting cast give it socks and bring out all the humour of the situation and all the pathos of the dashed hopes and dreams in the conclusion. Marty Rea is excellent as the fawning Sean Keogh and Lorcan Cranich as Pegeen's Da almost steals it with an hilarious scene towards the end.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

I knew very little about this but my wife likes Aiden Turner from Rivals, so we took a punt. Aiden Turner and Lesley Manville are great in this tale of sexual ingrigue and Machiavellian plots among the nobility in pre-revolution France. At first I found it dragged but got into it after a while. Some great acting, especially in the second half, when some of the support cast get to flex their acting muscles. Some great choreography beteen scenes help to tell the story and the set is lined by mirrors, emphasising the duplicity of the characters. Monica Barbaro and Hannah van der Westhuysen are excellent as the initially unknowing pawns in the game and Darragh Hand puts in a good shift as the manipulated music teacher.

The Last Movie

Dennis Hopper directed and starred in this entirely unconventional and perhaps self-indulgent film that was a financial and critical flop and apparently exiled him from Hollywood for much of the 70’s.

He plays a horse wrangler called Kansas on the set of a Western movie being filmed in Peru by Sam Fuller. The first part of The Last Movie is great. We see Fuller directing his film which is constant shootouts and action scenes.

The movie wraps and Kansas decides to stay and live in the village with a local woman. Then the locals start ‘shooting’ their own movie with fake cameras. Kansas gives them advice on how to make a film but they don’t really listen to him but cast him in their film and basically abuse him for the duration.

It’s hard to know what’s real and what’s occurring in Kansas’s drug addled brain. There’s not much of a narrative and lots of improvisation. People like Kris Kristofferson and Michelle Phillips show up like extras in the background. The whole thing plays out like some weird dream sequence.

But it’s never dull and is a fascinating document of a time in Hollywood when studios gave carte blanche to film stars and directors to create what they wanted to.

Pacific Heights on DVD (yes, a DVD!). 1990 tenant from hell thriller that I have a soft spot for even with a bit of a dislike for Melanie Griffth. Also starring Matthew Modine, Laurie Metcalf, and an uncredited Beverly D’Angelo, the real star is the absolutely psychotic Michael Keaton, who I feel really should have leaned into the bad guy role more after this. If you’ve ever had a bad tenant, this is one for you. For personal reasons dating back to my first watch in the cinema, and for the bad tenant experience I had, I’d give it an 7.5/10.

Obsession in the cinema. Considering the budget it’s pretty amazing they shot this like this and deserve enormous praise for that. The budget shows on occasion, most notably in the car scene, but I’d give it a pass on that one. I don’t see anyone making the comparison but it has strong “Single White Female” (early 90s movie) vibes for me, as well as classic Blumhouse scares. The two leads and the supporting female were quite good, the second male not so much.
I did enjoy it, just don’t think it’s deserving of the over the top hype. I’d give it a 6.5/10.

Scary Movie in the cinema….don’t judge me, sometimes we need some dumb stuff (I’m also going to Jackass later this week so there!). Some hits, some misses. Despite the misses, I for one welcome the fact that this is not PC or woke and is an attempt at least at a proper parody complete with inappropriate/gross-out comedy. If you like Wayan’s brothers stuff, you’ll like it. It’s not even the best Scary Movie film, but I’d give it a 5/10.

Dear You in Cineworld this past weekend. A surprise Chinese breakout hit apparently, I saw it in a packed Screen 16 which is a little surreal in itself as half the seats have been removed and the back of the room is just empty. I was also the only white person there having been brought by my Asian American (she’s as keen to point the latter part out as she is the Asian part) other half which was mildly amusing in itself. It’s essentially a tale of people who in different past times went to work in other countries and sent monies home – something Irish people can relate to I guess. It weaves a somewhat intricate tale of love, misunderstanding, tragedy, and hope into a slow 2 hour watch (not a criticism btw). It was moving in a way, though clearly more to the audience than me (naturally I guess as I’m not Chinese) as most were in tears at various stages. There’s a lot of emotional manipulation at play here, and it plays the hits in a World Cinema Emotional Drama way, but I did enjoy it. If you like World Cinema and/or Arthouse styles then it’s a definite go-see. If you like Marvel etc., I’d imagine this sin’t for you. 8.5/10.

Evil Dead Burn - Kermode did not like it but his main criticism was that it no longer feels like "Evil Dead", gone is the Bruce Campbell-driven slapstick and comedic lines.

While he's right, I don't think any of the recent "Evil Dead reboots" had this either.

This is not light or funny or slapstick in the slightest, it's quite a grim gorey watch.

However, the middle 45 minutes is extremely good fun - directed with tight tense framing and excellent cinematography during fight scenes.

Shame about the opening and closing 20 minutes which definitely takes the shine off it.

Probably 6/10 is fair.