Change Your Image
allen-conway-1
Reviews
Wekande Walauwa (2002)
not Chekhov by a mile
This is about as undramatic a film as it's possible to make.
I didn't see it in the cinema but instead watched a DVD. The sound effects are pretty terrible - lots of clinking of keys and plod by plod descending of stairs. The actors put nothing into the film, and with a script that plods along too, providing no drama, whether it be in the sub-story of the political activist - a sub-story that doesn't seem to me to serve any useful purpose - or in the main story, the search of a way out of the family's financial problems. The English sub-titles too are very poor grammatically, and often quite poor as far as English goes. That, however, is the least of this film's problems. Not a film I would ever wish to watch again.
The Italian Job (1969)
Appallingly bad from start to almost finish
Unfunny all the way through. Only the ballet of the minis driving through the streets of Turin is worth watching - 10 minutes or so. The rest is pure drivel. The jokes, coming in the first part of the film, are an embarrassment. There is no acting of any kind. The plot is a featureless Siberian landscape. Noel Coward shows just how bad an actor he was - he recites. Michael Cane is hardly any better. There are a few mini skirts and dolly birds cavorting about in an attempt to keep alive the image of swinging, trendy Britain. The script is lousy. The director is talentless. The actors are lacklustre. Only Benny Hill shows his talent in his chosen field of dirty old men - cringe worthy to the core.
This really is about as bad a film as it's possible to make. First time viewers would be advised to look at the first scene, which is faintly reminiscent of Orson Welles' A Touch of Evil (ha! ha!) and the car chase through Turin. The rest is just a waste of time.
The History Boys (2006)
gay utopian anachronistic make-believe
The "pupils" are completely unbelievable, as is their behaviour. The goings-on seem to represent an attempt by a gay author to invent some kind of gay utopia where groping testicles and the other bits and pieces constitutes a perfectly reasonable after-school activity for a teacher.
There are quite a few history boys in the story but only a few are catered for in the script, except to ram in some stupid point or other. There is some class warfare - universities are of course all, and only, about class. Most of the boys combine crass behaviour and crass teenager-type mindsets with superior intelligence, or so we are meant to believe. The headmaster is a caricature, as is the overweight, gay teacher. The only sympathetic character is the female history teacher, and we of course don't see much of her.
It's hard to know what this film is about. A criticism of class attitudes to education? A criticism of our still heterosexual-oriented society? It's not about the pupils or about truth and lies, I don't think. All in all I would say it's just 2 hours of glibness written by someone who can do much better.
The Eagle Has Landed (1976)
bloody awful with comic moments
/SPOILER/ Is this comedy or drama? Comedy perhaps... Donald Sutherland's attempt to speak now and again with an Irish accent is so bad and the fact that he plays some kind of Latin lover capable of winning a young girl's heart and her mind - she is willing to betray her country for him after all - must make him a comic figure. Then there are the Good Germans who are not Nazis and who are willing to die to save the life of a Polish Jew... very believable. Good Germans and stupid Americans. Comic relief perhaps. Strange how the Germans can't miss when they are killing the blundering first attack and they can't hit when it's the turn of the Good Americans to attack. No one ever reloads either, but that, I suppose, is a constant in war films, be they good or ridiculous.
Characters appear then disappear for no apparent reason. People betray or seem to change their minds at the first opportunity. Stoic Germans die rather than surrender. A German commando plays Bach and dies at the keyboard of the organ - what a comic moment that is! Oh, I almost forgot the Good German played by Robert Duvall. He comes complete with an eye patch and perhaps a missing left arm. /SPOILER/
All in all, then, as bad a film as you could possibly imagine, perhaps worse even than that. Now if Tarantino were to remake it...
Legends of the Fall (1994)
A ridiculous concoction of clichés
From the very start you know what is going to happen. It's just a case of when.
The start is a bit alarming with the old Indian - could this be Little Big Man's son at the age of 153? But the Indians in this film are lovely as are, for a while, our American family, even if Anthony Hopkins' alarming attempts at an Irish accent are a little upsetting. However Brad Pitt's long hair and his incarnation as a kind of American romantic hero, and Julia Ormond's beauty, make it clear from the outset which way this film is going to go.
Part 2: the War!! The historical detail is apparent when you remark that the brave soldiers are not wearing tin helmets, but nonetheless the director has the good idea to give us a laughable, unrealistic, grotesque, attack sequence masquerading as a game of football. Then Brad Pitt goes completely feral. The film has become completely ridiculous without ever being sublime.
Part 3: Brad Pitt has to come to terms with things. Of course! War can be traumatic after all. Our romantic hero goes through a Lord Jim phase - nice images of the sea and Brad Pitt trading with the cannibals.
Anthony Hopkins, meanwhile, fed up at not having been able to show off his sporadic Irish accent decides to demonstrate his acting qualities by method acting his way through the sequels of a stroke - one half of his face refuses to move, an arm and a leg too, language is difficult, an Irish accent especially so.
But the film is not finished yet, with bootlegging and politics and drama a-plenty still to come.
The culmination is when everyone has to choose a Wyatt Earp character and take their places at the OK corral. But even that is eclipsed by our native American going native in a fitting final scene. By this time the audience has either left or is laughing all the way to the toilet.
1 point for the lovely mountains. 1 point for the lovely Julia Ormond.