Noirvember: Snake Eyes (1998)

Brian De Palma is a director not really known for his subtlety, which makes it all the more surprising that he has only made the one film starring the also-notably-unsubtle Nicolas Cage. Let's not mourn the films we haven't been given though. Instead, let's celebrate what we got. Snake Eyes is quite ridiculous, but I'll argue strenuously against anybody who tries to deny that it is also a hell of a lot of fun.

Cage is Rick Santoro, a dodgy cop who ends up with a chance to become a celebrity when he's attending a boxing match that is interrupted by the assassination of a major political figure. Working alongside a friend, Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), Santoro needs to figure out what boxer Lincoln Tyler (Stan Shaw) has to do with the plot as he also tries to track down a mystery woman (Carla Gugino). And he does all this while being watched by some typically smooth and lively De Palma shot choices.

You know what you're in for almost as soon as Snake Eyes starts, quickly moving to a sequence that allows Cage to be as over the top and exuberant as usual while the camera seems to track through the onscreen environment with hidden edits that make it all seem like one huge tracking shot. De Palma wants viewers to have fun, but he also knows how to expertly ratchet up the tension in one or two key sequences. The screenplay by David Koepp (who developed the story with De Palma) is playful and energetic, despite the action mainly taking place in the one location, and there's a nice mix of subversion and tradition running through all of the key elements.

While he is always a divisive figure, Cage does his part to help make this as propulsive and energised as it is, delivering a typically robust turn that allows him to show a number of different facets of his character. Sinise isn't as well-rounded, but he does well with what he's given, particularly in the second half of the movie when things start to twist and turn more. Shaw convinces as a championship boxer, he certainly has the physique for it, and Gugino convinces as the kind of character who could be either a "damsel in distress" or a femme fatale. There are also moments for Kevin Dunn (a sports reporter who ends up in the middle of a big news story), Luis Guzman (the kind of guy who is forced to pay some money over to Santoro for a bit of peace), Mike Starr (working the security cameras), and John Heard (in a role that just feels like it was marked "get John Heard").

The score by Ryûichi Sakamoto, the work from D.P. Stephen H. Burum, the editing by Bill Pankow, everything comes together here to elevate a wonderfully pulpy bit of neo-noir into something eminently watchable and satisfying, from the audacious opening to a darkly comedic footnote. It might never deliver a knockout blow, and it's not quite top-tier De Palma, but Snake Eyes is a loud and dazzling spectacle for most of the 98-minute runtime.

7/10

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Mubi Monday: Variety (1983)

I'm not quite sure how much I enjoyed Variety, but I guess there's a clue in how much I hope to now check out other movies from director Bette Gordon (who also came up with the story idea, which was then shaped into full film form by Kathy Acker, Jerry Delamater, and Peter Koper, with Nancy Reilly also contributing). There's something about her style, although it's maybe just the time period and setting, that calls to mind the excellent work of Lizzie Borden, who delivered some of her best work in the early 1980s.

This is the story of Christine (Sandy McLeod), a young woman who ends up taking a job in the ticket kiosk of a porn theatre. She is looked after by her manager, Jose (Luis Guzman), and initially does a fine job, but it's not long until she starts to become more and more curious about the content being shown on the screen, and she starts to become equally curious about a customer (Louie, played by Richard M. Davidson) she believes may be connected to some major criminal organisation. 

Deftly mixing explorations of personal economics with a little bit of paranoia and a lot of sexual exploration, Variety is one of those movies that also works as a great time capsule. There's not really that much going on, the stakes never feel very high, but it becomes something intriguing and thrilling because of the journey that Christine goes on. Gordon doesn't necessarily decide to take things in any one specific direction (this could be darker, it could be sexier, it could be turned into an outright comedy, etc.), but the strangely loose and seemingly wandering nature of the whole thing makes it feel more grounded in reality.

McLeod isn't bad in the lead role, although it's not a surprise to see that she didn't go on to do much in front of the camera after this, and the same can be said of Davidson, who has the easier job of simply being a bit suave and mysterious for a few scenes. There's more fun to be had in seeing Guzman in an early role, as well as spotting the likes of Will Patton and Mark Boone Junior enjoying some screentime.

Although it's about a very specific kind of cinema, Variety is still about cinema. It's about what is on the big screen affecting the thoughts and narratives we create in our own minds, and it's about the loyal fans who choose to spend their time in a dark room connecting with fictional characters, even if they cannot always easily connect with anyone around them. Yes, it's also about sex, and there's a mystery element at the heart of things, but . . . a lot of cinema is about sex, even when it doesn't appear to be about sex.

8/10

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Dead By Dawn 2018: Innocent Blood (1992)

A horror comedy about a vampire from the director of An American Werewolf In London? It's fair to say that I had some pretty high expectations when I first watched Innocent Blood. Those expectations weren't met, and I didn't ever revisit the film over the next couple of decades. I'm not sure whether that is a good or bad thing, because this long overdue rewatch has made me realise that there's a lot here to enjoy.

Anne Parillaud plays a vampire named Marie who heads out into the night to feed. She feels like Italian, leading to her feeding on one of the many mobsters who populate the city. Once done with her meal, Marie usually takes care of the body to stop anyone returning as a vampire, but she is interrupted when she starts to feed on a boss man named Sallie (Robert Loggia). That leads to Sal rising up again, hungry and out of sorts, which leads to bewilderment from his crew and problems for an undercover cop named Joe (Anthony LaPaglia).

Written by Michael Wolk, Innocent Blood is a fun vampire movie that uses the supermatural powers associated with the beasts to play around with the buddy cop film template and provide some fun set-pieces. There's a decent amount of bloody moments, and the script has a lot of fun lines as the vampire threat and mobster activity builds.

John Landis directs competently enough, working within his means to deliver a vision that requres some enjoyable practical effects and stunt work to fully show the deveoping situation. There are some surprisingly solid action beats, some playing around with vampire tropes, the usual selection of cameos,and one main sequence in which Frank Oz plays a coroner bemused by the liveliness of the corpse wheeled in for him is a highlight.

Cast-wise, Parillaud is decent enough in the main role. She doesn't always convince when in full vamp-predator mode, but does much better in the scenes that have her fooling people with her attempts to look innocent. LaPaglia is also decent, stuck with the more straightfoward role - the cop on the case who is seeing things that nobody else will believe. But it's the cast of criminals that make the film more fun than it otherwise would be. Loggia is a blast as the powerful criminal who starts to realise just how much more power he has gained, Don Rickles is wonderful as his legal counsel, Chazz Palminteri has a small role (but is always good to see), and Tony Sirico, Kim Coates, and some other familiar faces are a lot of fun as they watch Loggia evolving. Angela Bassett and Luis Guzman also appear in small roles, both on the side of the police.

Despite some issues, such as a few dated effects and the pacing issues, Innocent Blood is a fun time. The biggest thing working against it when it was released back in 1992 was that it wasn't another An American Werewolf In London. But what is?

7/10

This LOOKS like a decent disc for those wanting the film, but maybe another release could be on the horizon?

Noir November: Out Of Sight (1998)

George Clooney has a lot to thank Steven Soderbergh for. The two have had a successful working relationship for some years now, but Out Of Sight seems to be where it all began. Adapting the novel by Elmore Leonard, it really feels like this film had the benefit of great timing. Any closer to the releases of Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty and this could have been lost among the tidal wave of imitators that came along. Any later and it might have all felt irrelevant. At the very least, the full cast might not have been available, and this is a movie that gets some major brownie points thanks to the casting.

Clooney is Jack Foley, a bank robber who can do more with his brains and charm than many others could do with guns and violence. But it's not so easy being a career criminal when you're currently behind bars. When he finds out about a potential big score, one that won't wait around forever, he engineers a prison break. The bad news is that he breaks out of the prison just as U.S. Marshall Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) pulls up in her car. Jack then has to take her hostage, the two of them stuck in the boot of a car while his main accomplice (Buddy, played by Ving Rhames) drives them to a safe spot. The good news is that the two seem to immediately feel something between them. But will it be enough to make Sisco forget her duty as a Marshall?

Scott Frank takes the source material and transfers it all to the screen in a way that nicely balances out the humour and violence, while never once losing a single drop of cool. Soderbergh helps, obviously, with his filming style, shot choices (kudos to editor Anne V. Coates), and the brilliant decision to let David Holmes create an appropriate score, mixed with some classic choices (Dean Martin, The Isley Brothers, and Herbie Hancock all make an appearance - well, not an "appearance" but you know what I mean).

Clooney and Lopez are both fantastic, generating the kind of heat between them that seems to emanate off the screen in waves. Okay, so the former can make that happen with many a co-star, but let's not take anything away from a real highlight in the career of Lopez. She's sexy, strong (apart from her bad choice in men), and feels very much like an equal to her male co-star. Rhames is a constant delight as Buddy, a criminal who always has to confess his misdeeds to his sister, Don Cheadle is suitably menacing as the kind of criminal Foley and Buddy would never want to work with, and Steve Zahn is very funny as a hapless crook who thinks he can run with the big boys. There's also some great support from Dennis Farina (playing Sisco's father), Albert Brooks (the mark), Michael Keaton (revisiting the character he played in Jackie Brown), Luis Guzman, Isaiah Washington, Catherine Keener, Nancy Allen, and Samuel L. Jackson.

Funky, funny, and pretty damn sexy too, Out Of Sight occupies a space nicely in between the two other Leonard adaptations mentioned here. It's neither as funny as Get Short, nor as rich in characterisation as Tarantino's film, but it mixes those two main ingredients together to create an end result that easily ranks alongside those movies.

9/10

http://www.amazon.com/Out-Sight-Collectors-George-Clooney/dp/0783229402/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1416847022&sr=1-2&keywords=out+of+sight

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Ani-MAY-tion Month: Turbo (2013)

After being unexpectedly entertained by The Croods, I now have to say that Turbo is another film ignored by many that I'll be highly recommending to lovers of fun animated movies. Both came from DreamWorks Animation, both feature Ryan Reynolds in a main role, and both were unfairly (in my view) dismissed last year. The Croods actually managed to do decent box office, so I guess I just missed out on any of the positive comments made about it, but Turbo didn't do that well at all, despite being just as good.

Theo (voiced by Reynolds) is a little snail who dreams of big things, hence the name that he gives to himself - Turbo. He wants to be fast, he wants more to his life than just helping to deal with over-ripe tomatoes. His brother, Chet (Paul Giamatti), just wants them to stay safe and do their part alongside the other snails. While looking out over a motorway, Theo ends up blown away from his sightseeing position by a passing vehicle. He passes through a motor, somehow surviving as he is moved through the engine. Once out the other side, Theo heads home and soon finds that the experience has changed him. He's a snail transformed, and might just have enough speed under his shell to achieve his dream - a shot at the Indy 500.

With a fantastic cast lending their voices to the characters, and some gorgeous CG animation, Turbo is always doing enough to keep people entertained, at the very least. There aren't any surprises, there rarely are in animated movies aimed at kids, but a lot of the gags work and the whole thing has a sweetness to it that shows how much it aims to please without tipping all the way over into saccharin territory.

Reynolds has a voice that lends itself well to animated characters, and Giamatti is always recognisable, but Luis Guzman and Michael Pena also do well in their roles, Bill Hader is a lot of fun as Guy Gagne (the champion driver who views Turbo as an amusing trier, as opposed to any real competition), and Samuel L. Jackson, Snoop Dogg, Maya Rudolph, Ben Schwartz and Mike Bell are all entertaining snails who feel the need for speed. Ken Jeong, Michelle Rodriguez and Richard Jenkins also pop up, as well as Kurtwood Smith and even racing superstar Mario Andretti.

Director David Soren (who co-wrote the screenplay with Darren Lemke and Robert D. Siegel) does a great job of mixing the fun with the heart. I seem to be in the minority of people who really like it, but I hope that others give it a chance. If I can convince just one person to watch it, and if that person ends up liking it almost as much as I did, then my work here is done.

8/10

http://www.amazon.com/Turbo-Blu-ray-DVD-Combo-Pack/dp/B00E00P5JC/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1398291394&sr=1-1&keywords=turbo

Arthur (2011)

A remake of the much-loved 1981 movie, this time around drunken, childish Arthur is played by Russell Brand, Hobson is played by Helen Mirren and the love interest has become Naomi (played by Greta Gerwig). Luis Guzman is the chauffeur, Jennifer Garner is Susan Johnson and Nick Nolte is her scary father.

A quick reminder of the plot. Arthur is a drunk but a very, VERY rich drunk so that’s fine. The fact that he’s always in the news isn’t so fine and so his mother (played by Geraldine James) tells him that he must marry Susan Johnson or be cut off from the money. This happens, annoyingly enough, just as he meets and falls for the lovely Naomi.

Written by Peter Baynham (with plenty of lines and spirit, pun intended, lifted from the original) and directed by Jason Winer, Arthur could have been something really enjoyable. Russell Brand can do an eccentric drunk in his sleep so everything else should have fallen into place, right? Wrong. For some reason it was decided to make Arthur less of a staggering drunkard (though he’s drunk a lot of the time) and more of an outright man-child in this version, meaning that we have to suffer through an appalling performance from Brand that has him putting on a very childish voice and acting just like someone who’s been doped up with drugs. I’m sure this choice was made so that the film wouldn’t be seen to be deriving fun from alcoholism in these PC-infested times but it’s a bad choice and throws off the whole film. 

Everyone else is good and that’s a great shame because it simply highlights the poor performance from Brand, someone who I have so far always enjoyed in movie roles. Mirren makes a more than adequate replacement for John Gielgud and the bond between Arthur and Hobson is more obvious and easier to understand this time around. Gerwig does just fine as Naomi and Garner certainly does well as Susan Johnson, who is a colder and more calculating character in the remake than she was in either of the 80s movies. Guzman is very funny and Nolte is believably fear-inducing.

There are individual moments of fun, and a nice selection of movie cars, and the main character eventually gains your sympathy as the movie winds towards a predictable finale but this is inferior to the original and inferior to many other comedies released this year. 

5/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Arthur-Triple-Blu-ray-Digital-Region/dp/B004Q9SYYA/ref=sr_1_8?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1371664113&sr=1-8&keywords=arthur

Dreamer (2005)

Dreamer is a standard live-action Disney movie that just happens not to actually come from Disney. There isn't one unpredictable moment in it, the music from John Debney keeps reminding viewers that it's all meaningful and life-affirming, and many scenes are shot with an added, warming glow suffusing each frame. Despite these marks against it, I ended up enjoying Dreamer, thanks mainly to a great cast giving decent performances. Sometimes familiarity doesn't breed contempt, sometimes it's just comfortable. Dreamer is just that, a comfort movie. I may not rush to revisit it, but I admit that I enjoyed it while it was on.

Inspired by a true story, Dreamer is all about a horse named Sonador that falls during a big race and sustains what should be a career-ending injury. Horse trainer Ben Crane (Kurt Russell) is angry at the employer (David Morse) who ignored his advice not to race the horse. With his daughter, Cale (Dakota Fanning), by his side, he ends up leaving the stables with the horse, a reduced cash amount for his work and no job. He also has his assistants, Balon (Luis Guzman) and ex-jockey Manolin (Freddy Rodriguez), and a plan to help Sondaor get well enough so that she can at least be used for breeding, even if she will never race again. But Sonador has a strong spirit, as does young Cale, and looks like she may want to race. That will take hard work and money. The hard work isn't a problem, but the money just might not be available.

Written and directed by John Gatins, Dreamer doesn't really have any major flaws apart from the sentimentality and predictability of it all. It's a nice film, probably too nice for many people to be able to stomach.

The big plus point for the film is the cast. Russell puts in another great performance as a decent everyman, Fanning does her usual good work in another film made during the peak of her "wide-eyed years" and the ever-dependable David Morse is as dependable as ever, despite being saddled with (no pun intended) the role of main villain. Guzman and Rodriguez are both a lot of fun, Elizabeth Shue is fine as Ben's wife/Cale's mother and Kris Kristofferson hangs about to be Ben's grumpy father, who may or may not help out and reforge a bond with his son. And then there's Oded Fehr, appearing about 70 minutes into the movie and getting a few minutes of screentime as a character who may as well have been named "plot device #3".

Cynical people should look for hundreds of films that they will prefer to watch before this one, but anyone who can handle the sugar content should find this moderately enjoyable. It's certainly a decent enough family movie so maybe keep it on standby for any time you may have a 7-12 year old in your home.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreamer-DVD-Dakota-Fanning/dp/B000CSTIIA/ref=sr_1_1?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1368707710&sr=1-1&keywords=dreamer