A respectful sequel - picks up immediately after the events in Aliens versus Predator with the ship crashing and the escape of a predator-alien hybrid which isn't bad. It has the guts to kill off a kid in the opening sequence.
The cast is full of really not well know people. Couldn't they afford one more than Robert Joy? I guess John Oritz has been in a few things.
The most incomptent soldiers ever? Stealing boats, losing maps, going nutty, yelling, lighting fires, counting chickens before hatched... It feels very real. Magnificently shot and acted. I love the relationship between Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine.
Great fun and style. Love the differentiation in the warriors - the gay artist (well, coded gay), the dumb big white guy, cocky Ajax, taciturn Swan, the whimpy white guy who gets knocked out. Spooky sequences like the baseball furies and the Lizzies though I have a soft spot for the Orphans, desperate to prove they're cool.
Am reading Barry Diller’s excellent memoirs which discuss his time running Paramount in the 1970s which made me decide to compare his regime with the fabled Robert Evans regime that proceeded it. (These lists below attribute films to various regimes as well as I can... it's entirely possible some started development under other regimes)
So films from the Evans regime which film bros (deservedly) always bang on about...
Love Story, The Godfather Part 1 and 2, Harold and Maude, A New Leaf, Willy Wonka, Play It Again Sam, Lady Sings the Blues, Paper Moon, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Serpico, The Conversation, Daisy Miller, The Parallax View, Chinatown, Death Wish, The Longest Yard, Three Days of the Condor, Hustle, Italian Job, Medium Cool, True Grit, Goodbye Columbus, Rosemary’s Baby, The Odd Couple, Romeo and Juliet, Barbrella, if..., Oh what a Lovely War, Downhill Racer.
Great stuff.
But films from Evans regime which film bros forget he made (or blame on Charlie Bludhorn)...
The Molly Maguires, The Adventurers, Darling Lili, Friends, Little Fauss and Big Haley, Norwood, a weirdly large number of flop Neil Simon adaptations (Plaza Suite, Last of the Red Hot Lovers, Star Spangled Bannered Girl), Murphy’s Law, TR Baskin, Such Good Friends, Bad Company, The N***** Charley Films, Save the Children, Sterile Cuckoo, Hello Down There, My Side of the Mountain, Where’s Jack, Blue, No Way to Treat a Lady, 5 Card Stud, Skidoo, The Brotherhood, A Talent for Loving, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Scalawag, The White Dawn, Paint Your Wagon.
Not so great stuff. You just don't hear Peter Bart go one about these as much.
Films from the Diller regime which film bros go on about:
Saturday Night Fever, Bad News Bears, Marthon Man, King Kong, Mikey and Nicky (in its own way), Looking for Mr Goodbar, Saturday Night Fever, Pretty Baby, Grease 1 and 2, Heaven Can Wait, Foul Play, Days of Heaven, Up in Smoke, The Warriors, Escape from Alcatraz, Meatballs, North Dallas Forty, Star Trek 1 and 2, American Gigolo, Friday the 13th series, Urban Cowboy, Flying High 1 and 2, Ordinary People, Popeye, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, Mommie Dearest, An Officer and.a Gentleman, 48 Hours, White Dog, Flashdance, Trading Places, Terms of Endearment, Uncommon Valor, The Keep, Footloose, Top Secret, Beverly Hills Cop, Witness.
Again, a great line up of films.
But there are films from the Diller regime which seem to be forgotten:
Won Ton Ton the Dog That Saved Hollywood, Lifeguard, Handle with Care, First Love, The One and Only, Going South, Oliver's Story, An Almost Perfect Affair, Prophecy, Bloodline, Sunburn, French Postcards, Nijinsky, Rough Cut, The Hunter, Coast to Coast, Going Ape, Dragonslayer, First Monday in October, Paternity, Ragtime, I’m Dancing as Far as I Can, Some Kind of Hero, Partners, Jekyll and Hyde Together Again, It Came from Hollywood, Ladies and Gentlemen the Fabulous Stains, The Man Who Wasn’t There, Racing with the Moon, Best Defence, River Rat, Thief of Hearts, Falling in Love, King David, Rustlers Rhapsody, Compromising Positions.
Don't forget the flops, that's all I'm saying.
The first decent Alien film in a long time - made by a director who clearly knows what he's doing. Sets up a strong world, and flows it through logically. The Easter eggs for fans are a little annoying. Some excellent acting.
My opinion of this film hasn't really changed over the years - it's episodic, a film of vignettes rather than a cohesive whole. But the pleasures remain. It looks terrific, wonderful production design and locations. Some superb performances - David Carradine is electric, Keith and Robert very good, Stacy Keach a superb Frank James, the Guest brothers are fun as are the Quaids. James Keach is a little stiff as Jesse. Pamela Reed is splendid as Belle Starr as are James Remar and James Whitmore.
In honour of the new Brat pack doco here is my top ten films that wrecked the Brat Pack
Ah, look, fine. An action movie with some comedy rather than a comedy, which is why I didn't like it as a kid. Full of tropes that became very very familiar - mismatched partners, huffy police captain, psycho villains. I don't think this film invented them but did help popularise them.
Nick Nolte and Eddie Murphy are electric, particularly Murphy. They seem like a cop and a crook, have gravtias. Murphy's debut is amazing. Nolte matches him well.
Annette O'Toole is lovely, warm, can act and is completely wasted. Why have her in the film? Would've been more fun to have a Murphy romance. Why doesn't she get kidnapped? Why doesn't Murphy meet her? Why doesn't she perform at the bar where they go to?
I didn't find a lot of it funny - Murphy in the redneck bar. Jokes about watermelon and use of the n word from Nolte, I know the arguments behind this. Still didn't feel fun.
Movie felt made up as it went along. That's not a compliment.
Two fantastic villains - Sonny Landham and James Remar - who both feel genuinely dangerous.
Looks beautiful. New Orleans, period detail, photography. The script is simple but effective. It's very easy for Charles Bronson, maybe. He beats everyone he fights, does get dumped by Jill Ireland but he's not that in to her. A greater threat may have helped.
Lovely acting. A family feel oddly - Bronson, James Coburn, Strother Martin, even Ireland.
Maybe the baddies needed to kill Ireland. Or Martin. That might've given it more kick.
But a good movie.
Paul W.S. Anderson wrote and directed this cheerful video game style cross over which does everything it needs to do. It's set in the Antarctic, a team financed by a rich dying billionaire (Lance Henriksen) pokes around and discovers a crypt and there's predators and aliens etc.
I thought it was quite sweet (and believable) that the predators generally had it over the aliens. But it feels silly somehow that the predators used humans to breed aliens to chase and would blow up civilisation that didn't work out. That doesn't ring true. That's a lot of effort. Can't aliens survive without humans?
The film gives people what they want on a base level - face hugging, eggs, predators tracking and killing people. A bit more suspense/creepiness wouldn't have gone astray.
The two leads aren't terribly charismatic. Sigourney and Arnie are missed.
Loved it. Full of genuinely fresh takes, fascinating autobiographical insights, so much love for cinema. In depth pieces on filmmakers like Brian de Palma, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah. Tobe Hooper. Jim Brown. Kenneth Thomas of the LA Times (who he attributes a lot of the success of the Corman school to - he'd give them a good review and they'd get an agent out of it.) Very seventies. I could read books by him on every decade.
Good to see Walter Hill back in the saddle. This is a tight, unpretentious riff on The Professionals with Chris Waltz a bounty hunter hired to retrieve the wife, Rachel Brosnahan, of a wealthy man who has run off with a black man to south of the border. He's accompanied by another black man, a Buffalo soldier.
This gets off to a strong start but becomes bogged down in the middle has they hang around a town. But picks up towards the end with plenty of gun play - including some by Brosnahan who looks as though she's having fun. So too do Willem Dafoe as a horse thief and Benjamin Bratt as a Mexican baddy.
I missed Ry Cooder and this being shot on film but it's a decent tale.
Always worth checking out again. Wonderful look - photography, locations, etc. The acting very fine. It's a love story in a way between Keith Carradine and Powers Booth - the scene between them around the campfire is positively romantic. A lot of the plot involves the soldiers being stupid - stealing canoes, firing at locals, splitting up, leaving safety - but you can't say that sort of stuff doesn't happen. Wonderful last act.
Directed by Michelle Manning, who got her break after helping out with teen films, though if this movie has an auteur it's more likely Walter Hill, who co wrote (from a Ross MacDonald novel) and co produced: the tough clipped dialogue, the southern setting, the Ry Cooder score, even the opening credits which go credit-vision-credit-vision.
I've read the original - it's a perfectly decent pulp about a young men investigating his dad's death. The thing is in the novel the young man was a war veteran, which gave him weight and experience with guns and killing. Here Judd Nelson is just a flake which makes him lightweight - critics who went after Nelson should have pointed that out.
It falls down in key areas: Nelson hearing about his father's death. And Nelson being tough with a bar tender asking questions is just laughable. So too is he when threatening Scott Wilson, declaring war with a molotov cocktail.
Michael Pare could've pulled it off - if his character had been given a military background. Ditto Val Kilmer. I'm not sure other brat packers could, like Rob, Andy or Emilio. Matt Dillon yes.
Ally Sheedy seems out of place too. She's nice and engaging... but doesn't fit this world, despite quite a racy sex scene with Nelson where if I'm not mistaken she's topless. Their courting feels perfunctory. Surely they could've gotten more juice out of that. It is fun to see her undercover as a go go dancer but really she doesn't do much - they could've and probably should've cut the Sheedy character and had the female lead be the other dancer in the club.
Some of the cast are perfect: Paul Winfield is a great dodgy cop, David Caruso a terrific shifty friend. Anita Morris goes a little OTT as the grieving widow, ditto Scott Wilson as the baddy. The music is good.
But it's just silly. Nelson and Caruso running around robbing banks and stuff. Are we meant to care when Caruso dies? They are running around committing crimes!
A fantastic idea, brilliant music, decent cast but it doesn't quite work. It takes too long to get going - why not just have Joe Seneca admit who he is so they go on a roadtrip. Annoying little things like if Seneca is so poor why is he in such a nice nursing home? We probably should've seen Ralph Macchio's mother to give his life more context.
Macchio's skinny arms are distracting. I appreciate he obviously tried to learn how to play the guitar. Jami Gertz is a bit too young - she's 17 being this sort of hooker runaway. I wish she'd been black too. The film had the whiff of cultural appropriation about it. I guess that's the plot. And how else to fund it?
It never seems to click - the Macchio-Seneca relationship. It is better when Gertz is around; I missed her when she was gone. Maybe she should've sold her soul to the devil, that would've worked. Love the final duel with Steve Vai - though his life seems pretty good, hanging in a bar and playing guitar all the time. That's hell?
I'm of the movie going generation for whom Warren Beatty really doesn't mean that much. Sorry, just being blunt. When Ishtar and this came out it wasn't as though there was Beatty fever.
There's much to admire here. The gorgeous production design. The tone. The story is effective. The colourful characters. The world. The costumes. The acting. The music.
Warren Beatty's direction is maybe a little off. Or it could be him. Or maybe me. I felt it needed someone harder - Beatty had soft elements about him. It should have been Clint Eastwood (who turned it down) or maybe Robert de Niro. I bought Beatty as a shy lover not so much the tough guy.
I agree with the screenwriter who worked on this who said John Landis would've been a more suitable director. I agree. Walter Hill's version would've been interesting - a Warriors style take.
Al Pacino's haminess suits it. Fun to see people like Dick Van Dyke, Dustin Hoffman and James Caan. Sondheim's tunes are perfect.
