Welcome to St. Paul’s

Normal service will be resumed

I’ve said it before, but this time I mean it – no, honestly, I really do.

I know, I know, I’ve been really slack in posting stuff up, and I know that this ails you, even though you pretend that you don’t really like all the puke and piss and poo pics.

A combination of recession woes and real life getting in the way has meant I’ve got out of the habit of blogging. But fear not, dear reader, I have stacks and stacks of pointless stuff to post up for your wearied delight! And hopefully my recent goggle-eyed screen binges should mean I have finally fulfilled my fantasy of notching up a film a week over an entire year, just in time for the first anniversary of A Week In Film. You lucky, lucky people…

Oh, and there should be some *serious* posts in the pipeline too.

Stay tuned.

Sorry, that sounds rubbish.

A Week In Film #050: Taking a breather

Class Action
xxx

A Week In Film #049: Slowing down

LA Takedown
xx

[Chopper title screen]

Chopper
xx

[The Long Good Friday title screen]

The Long Good Friday
xx

[The History Boys title screen]

The History Boys
xx

A Week In Film #048: Science fiction and political faction

Death Machine

Riverworld

Beautiful Creatures

Defence Of The Realm

A Sense Of Freedom

Omagh

Veronica Guerin

Hidden Agenda

Inglourious Basterds

Mystery Pic #030

You have not a hope in hell, but if you fancy your chances, stick a guess in the comments…

HonkWatch #112: Bongwater

Serena (Alicia Witt) gets spiked by creepy music biz entrepreneur Tobo (Christian Meoli) in the so-so Frat Pack flick Bongwater.

HonkWatch #111: Shakes The Clown

Bobcat Goldthwait freshens up after too many tighteners in Shakes The Clown

A Week In Film #047: Getting spooked

Philby, Burgess And Maclean

Blunt: The Fourth Man

A Question Of Attribution

Mona Lisa

A Week In Film #046: Catching up

A Dry White Season

Bronson

Slipstream

Omega Doom

Fortress

Rollerball

A Week In Film #045: Medical Experimentation

10 Rillington Place

Traitor

City Rats

Borstal Boy

Severance

Assault On Precinct 13

[The Incredible Hulk title screen]

The Incredible Hulk

Beautiful Thing

A Room For Romeo Brass

Escape From LA

A Week In Film #044: Building up steam

United 93

[Munich title screen]

Munich

Cry Freedom

In Bruges

wΔz

Once Upon A Time In The Midlands

In The Valley Of Elah

The Great Ecstasy Of Robert Carmichael

Blackball

High Heels And Low Lifes

The Cottage

Bedrooms And Hallways

The Super Silver Screen Mystery Picture Quiz leader board pie chart

Just thought I’d let you all know what’s been going on with the Mystery Pic scores…

Out of 32 competitions, 23 have ended, with eleven films correctly identified.

Phil C is the runaway leader, with four rounds under his belt, whilst Eugene Byrne, Eva, James Barlow, John Serpico, Mat D, Nigel and Scunnert share the crowded second place rostrum with a single win each.

In addition there are nine other games still open (#023-028, #030-032).

A Week In Film #043: Time on my hands

[The Crazies title screen]

The Crazies
George Romero’s pre-Dawn zombie-style horror – where lots of the elements that later defined his Dead films can be seen being tried out, not always succesfully – about a military bioweapon accidentally dropped on a nondescript northeastern American town. Acting is generally not award-winning, but the story shifts at a lick, there’s some interesting storytelling, and it’s enjoyably downbeat.

Napoli Spara
A Mario Caiano-directed poliziotteschi which Nigel put me onto. A decent, fast-paced story of brutal robbers against a Neapolitan backdrop. Leonard Mann and Henry Silva face off against each other as hard-as-nails cop and bloodthirsty gangster respectively, whilst in the background unfold numerous seemingly random, unrelated incidents, all of which connect together by the end.

Bandits
Bank robbers Bruce Willis and Billy Bob Thornton steal their way across the States, pick up a hostage-cum-hanger-on (Cate Blanchett), and much fun is had by all. Barry Levinson directs with charm.

2019 – Dopo La Caduta Di New York
Silly, camp Italian nonsense, ripping off *takes breath* Escape From New York, Mad Max 2, Escape From Thunderdome, Planet Of The Apes and a whole lot more.

Shichinin No Samurai
Some days you just want to kick back with an old friend, so, Kurosawa and Seven Samurai here I come.

[500 Days title pic]

(500) Days Of Summer
The LLF fancied seeing summat at the De Luxe, and this was what she wanted to see. And it was pretty good. Joseph Gordon-Levitt (the kid from Third Rock) is Tom, a slightly gawky, underachieving architect who’s ended up grinding out greetings card messages for a living. He falls for Summer (Zooey Deschanel, in less k-fuelled mode than in The Happening), and the film tells the story of the birth, death and all points in between of their relationship, in disjointed and reflective style. Marc Webb directs with some interesting, just-this-side-of-flashy stylistic effects thrown in to keep things moving along.

Mystery Pic #029

Decode the picture and identify the film – place your answer in the comments.

ETA:

PhilC nailed it with the second guess – it’s Nick Love’s 80s Costa Del Crime flashback The Business.

Polltastic: Favourite film studio production logo

HonkWatch #110: Runaway Jury

Vanessa Lembeck (Jennifer Beals) is found unconscious and in a pile of her own mess in actually-not-too-bad Grisham adaptation Runaway Jury.

Mystery Pic #028

If you know what film this, kudos to you… Place your bets below.

Mystery Pic #027

Recognise the smile? If you know the film, add a comment below…

ETA:

Phil just nailed it – it’s Joseph L Mankiewicz’s screen version of Anthony Shaffer’s cuckold mind game play Sleuth (that’s Michael Caine behind the mask).

HonkWatch #109: The Long Kiss Goodnight

One of down-at-hell gumshoe Mitch Hennessy’s (Samuel L Jackson) junkie cohorts throws up during a shakedown in The Long Kiss Goodnight.

Framed Documents #100: Die Hard

NSN

NOM. GUIDED MISSILE…

INTERCEPT – AERIAL…

SERIAL NO.

Them SWAT guys is going to get fried…

HOSTAGE TERRORIST

TERRORIST HOSTAGE

A STUDY IN DUALITY

Supermarket psychology bestseller of some tabloid TV pundit hauled in to comment on the Nakatomi siege (remember the ‘Helsinki Syndrome’ blooper?).

MAKE

EVERY DAY A

SAFE NO-FRY DAY

Poster on the side of the power guy’s van as the FBI stick their Johnsons in the mix.

NESTLE CRUNCH

Ulli enjoys some baby-murdering candy whilst waiting for the hostage crisis playbook to be thrown into operation.

TeRRY

Random graffiti near the elevator access space.

CLAY WM 29

Hmmm… Bill Clay, you say?

That’s a good quality fake driver’s license, right John?

NAKATOMI PLAZA

2121 AVENUE OF THE STARS

LOS ANGELES. CA 90213

EMERGENCY CONTACTS:

SECURITY OFFICE (213) 203-3723

BLDG. MANAGER (213) 203-3733

FIRE ALARM CODE 2134480

Handy numbers in case you ever need to contact Nakatomi.

IIII
I
Hans
Karl

John McClane’s aide memoire.

NOW I HAVE

A MACHINE GUN

HO HO HO

Merry Christmas, NYC cop-style.

C4

I love all the internet chatter around how the C4 explosives in the film are apparently sporting inauthentically coloured wrappers.

A bumper crop of Die Hard screengrabs to celebrate the centenary post of Framed Documents.

HonkWatch #108: Bad Influence

Mouse-that-roared yuppie Michael (James Spader) heaves after discovering the body of his girlfriend Claire (Lisa Zane) in the bathroom, murdered by his sociopathic mentor Alex (Rob Lowe), in Bad Influence. (This Bad Influence scene was, incidentally, was one of the moments of cinematic vomiting mentioned in the September 1991 Empire article which inspired this feature. I must get round to scanning it in.)

Framed Documents #099: Scanners

Uh-oh! Ominous cine footage of psywarrior-gone-rogue Darryl Revok looms in Scanners.

Screen Surgery & Film First Aid #002: Shooter

Last time we were looking at Shooter, ex-Marine sniper Bob Lee Swagger (Mark Wahlberg) had been shot whilst being framed for an attempted assassination. He stole an FBI car, escaped, and raided the first aid kit for QuikClot, which helped staunch his wounds. That’s where we now pick things up.

Swagger goes to a regular convenience store and buys a few provisions: sugar, salt, bottled water, some big-arse needles, Biros, rubber tubing of some description, an icing injector. He holes up in some crappy garage somewhere, and starts making himself a DIY drip…

First, the sugar and salt go into one of the water bottles:

A little shake…

Next he tightly inserts the tubing into the mouth of the bottle…

…Sterilises a big-arse needle with a lighter…

…Which is then stuck into the other end of the tubing, and inserted into his arm, with the bottle positioned above him. Voilà! Homemade drip! (Can’t for the life of me figure out what the icing injector was for – maybe he planned on baking cakes if it all panned out okay?)

Disclaimer: If you choose to rig this shit up yourself – having followed the instructions on some random blog, half-remembered from a crappy Hollywood movie – and give yourself an embolism or septicæmia or some other nastiness, then it’s your own fault, moron. No liability accepted, except for thinning out the gene pool to the benefit of the rest of us.

Mystery Pic #026

A great film – but do you know it? Stick your guess below.

Mystery Pic #025

Recognise the film? Stick your answer in the comments below.

ETA:

UsedUniverse nailed it – it’s Von Ryan’s Express.

Mystery Pic #024

And another… Answers in the comments below, ta.

ETA:

UU guessed correctly – this is Ian McKellen getting a Tron-like taste of supernatural juice in Michael Mann’s ghosts-and-Nazis horror feature The Keep.

Mystery Pic #023

It’s been too long, chaps; I’ve been neglecting the blog and the pics – please accept my humbles!

So, back in the saddle once more, and I’m almost confident enough to put money on this one… As ever, place your guesses in the comments below

A Week In Film #042: Big plans

Strange Days
Kathryn Bigelow’s back in favour at the moment, with lots of hubbub over The Hurt Locker. For me this is her best work – fin de siècle near future cyber-gubbins, with Ralph FIennes as a sleazy purveyor of illegal memory videos getting caught up in seven shades of badness. Angela Bassett is aces as his best bud, an asskicking chauffeuse, and there’s an excellent supporting cast – Michael Wincott, Tom Sizemore, William Fichtner and Vincent D’Onofrio as rogue cops, Richard Edson, Nicky Katt, even Juliette Lewis gives a good performance.

Stander
One of my favourite movies of recent years, based on a real-life tale of an Apartheid era South African cop-turned-bank robber, Andre Stander.

The central cast – Thomas Jane, Dexter Fletcher and David O’ Hara – is splendid, and director Bronwen Hughes balances light and shade well. The action scenes are magnificent. Deborah Kara Unger gives perhaps the strongest performance in the film as Bekkie, Stander’s wife.

Cashback
A fine little film, imaginative in its approach, ambitious in its style. is a young student whose heart has been broken and struck down with some serious insomnia; to try and help him get through the long sleepless nights, he takes on a job at the local supermarket working the graveyard shift.

Sean Ellis writes and directs, and there’s a good cast working together – Emilia Fox, Sean Bickerstaff, Stuart Goodwin, Michelle Ryan, Shaun Evans, Michael Dixon, Michael Lambourne and Marc Pickering. Definitely worth your time.

Land Of The Dead
George Romero returns to his zombie world, and it’s not great – just that little bit too much money, and definitely too many recognisable faces. Supposedly it’s a satire on The War Against Terror.

On the plus side: Asia Argento. On the negative side: pedestrian blocking/editing/photography/whatever means that you never get any sense of scale or geography – it just always looks like a cheesy soundstage.

A Week In Film #041: Kracow one off

GoldenEye
Pierce Brosnan makes his Bond debut, with a memorable pre-credits dam bungee jump, and Famke Janssen as a delicious villain, Xenia Onatopp. Sean Bean unsuccessfully tries an RP accent yet again.

Swingers
Writer-actor Jon Favreau teams up with real-life friends Vince Vaughn, Ron Livingston and Patrick Van Horn in this tight little Doug Liman film about a band of struggling wannabes in Hollywoood. Funnier than that sounds. Heather Graham is good as a woman who helps Favreau get over a broken heart.

Crank: High Voltage
Neveldine & Taylor return with another high energy, high concept, tongue-in-cheek, videogame-style actioner about the unfortunate Chev Chelios. This time Chev (The Stath) has had his heart removed after the fall from the helicopter that closed the first picture – and he wants it back.

Far superior and definitely more fun than other similarly pitched movies like Shoot ‘Em Up and Wanted. Amy Smart is enjoyable as Chev’s girlfriend Eve, and there are decent new characters like Efren Ramirez as Venus, and Bai Ling as Ria, the foul-mouthed hooker who latches onto Chev despite his best efforts to ditch her.

Green Street 2: Hold Your Ground
Okay, so this was a sequel I really didn’t need to see, following up from a hooligan film I really should have avoided. Ludicrous. Counsellor Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation turns up as an evil screw in a Deep South-styled prison, where our lovable bunch of Irons-affiliated football thugs, led by Ross McCall from Band Of Brothers, get into some kind of turf war with a larger band of Millwall lumps. Manages to regurgitate half-remembered bits of Scum and Cool Hand Luke in the manner of the remade Mean Machine.