Paths of Glory

Year of Release:  1957
Director:  Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay:  Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson, based on the novel Paths of Glory by Humphrey Cobb
Starring:  Kirk Douglas, Ralph Meeker, Adolphe Menjou, George Macready, Wayne Morris, Richard Anderson
Running Time:  88 minutes
Genre:  War

The film is set in France, 1916, during the First World War, and tells the story of Colonel Dax (Douglas), whose ambitious superior, General Mireau (Macready), orders him to send his men to take a well-defended German position, despite the fact that it is a suicide mission.  When the attack proves to be hopeless, many of the men refuse to continue, even when an enraged Mireau orders the artillery commander to open fire on his own men to force them out on the battlefield, which the commander refuses to do.  In an effort to save face, Mireau deflects the blame for the failure of the attack on to the men, and orders Dax to choose three men to be court-martialed for cowardice, to set an example.

This is one of the greatest war films ever made.  The generals sit in palatial chateaus drinking fine wines and  eating good food, calmly ordering the slaughter of thousands, while the soldiers are forced to live in squalid trenches and to lay down their lives on a whim.  There's a scene early in the film where Mireau tours a trench, making forced, rote banter with the soldiers and cruelly berating one soldier suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (or "Shell shock" as it was known at the time).  Mireau dismisses the existence of shell shock and says the man is a coward.  Kirk Douglas' Colonel Dax has a foot in each camp.  He lives and fights with the men in the trenches, but also visits the chateau and works directly with the generals.  The film also has elements of a courtroom drama, although it becomes apparent that the court-martial is just a show trial.  Visually the film is impressive, with the camera gliding in through the trenches in front of the soldiers, and every scene in the film perfectly composed.  Kubrick has a reputation for making cold, emotionless films, but this is anything but, it's powerful and devastating.
By the way, Susanne Christian, who plays the German singer at the end of the film, went on to marry Stanley Kubrick.     

Kirk Douglas and troops in Paths of Glory

 

2001: A Space Odyssey

Year of Release:  1968
Director:  Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay:  Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke
Starring:  Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood
Running Time:  142 minutes
Genre:  Science-fiction

This is one of the greatest, most influential, and daring films ever made.  It deals with how a mysterious, unseen, alien race influences human development, from prehistoric hominids to the space age and possibly to the next stage in human evolution.

It largely eschews conventional film narrative, telling it's story through images, and music, rather than dialogue, in fact there are only about forty minutes of dialogue in the nearly two and a half hour film.  The film allows itself to remain ambiguous, there is a lot that is unexplained, and open to interpretation.  The film appears to be a very cold work, with it's cosmic scope, pristine spaceship interiors and bland characters, as well as Kubrick's clinical style, but it is surprisingly emotional, in the film's most conventional passage involving murderous computer HAL 9000.  The sequence where it pleads for it's life, as an astronaut methodically dismantles it's brain, is genuinely moving, particularly it's plaintive rendition of the song "Daisy Bell" as it expires.

The film's visual effects are still striking to this day, the scenes where the fragile looking spacecraft float in the void to the strains of "Blue Danube" is memorable, and so is the extended sequence where an astronaut travels through a "Star Gate". 

I first saw this film as a young child, expecting it to be an action-packed sci-fi adventure about a rampaging computer, and I didn't get that at all, of course.  What I got, on that rainy Sunday afternoon at my Gran's house, was something far better, which I didn't understand at all, but I fell in love with the film, and I have come back to it many times since.  It's a powerful, beautiful, frustrating, mesmerising film, and ultimately, in it's final image, strangely hopeful.

Keir Dullea goes through the Star Gate in 2001: A Space Odyssey     

Avengers: Endgame

Year of Release:  2019
Directors: Anthony Russo and Joe Russo
Screenplay:  Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, based on the comic book The Avengers created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby
Starring:  Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johnasson, Jeremy Renner, Don Cheadle, Paul Rudd, Brie Larson, Karen Gillan, Danai Gurai, Bradley Cooper, Josh Brolin
Running Time:  181 minutes
Genre: Science-fiction, action, superhero

This film is the 22nd entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe film series, which began with Iron Man (2008) and is pretty much the culmination of the whole series, and more directly concludes the story that began in Avengers: Infinity War (2018).  Note:  In reviewing this there will be spoilers for Infinity War, so consider yourself warned.  I would also definitely advise that you see Infinity War before you see this.

Alien superbeing Thanos (Brolin) has wiped out half of all life in the universe.  When he is confronted by the surviving Avengers, Thanos reveals that he has destroyed the Infinity Stones, which were key to the genocide, and the only things that could undo what he had done.  Five years later, Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, (Rudd) escapes after being trapped in the Quantum Realm for five years.  He believes that the Quantum Realm could be used to travel in time.  The Avengers decide to travel to various points in time and space and retrieve the Infinity Stones, before Thanos can get his massive purple paws on them.

This is a truly epic film, epic in scale and in length, with a large cast of characters, that takes in almost all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  It's funny, exciting, spectacular and surprisingly emotional.  It's a fitting conclusion to this incredible eleven year project.  It's easy to dismiss and be pretty cynical about the Marvel films, due to their immense popularity, as well as how many of them there have been, but it is an amazing achievement and one of the few really successful shared universes in cinema, tying in so many disparate characters and storylines.  This film manages to balance a huge cast, and multiple plotlines, working in numerous fan-pleasing references.  For the most part it works well, even if the final battle feels a little confusing due to the sheer number of characters in play.  The performances are good, with each of the main cast having their time to shine, and Josh Brolin managing to find depths to Thanos beneath the prosthetics and CGI.   If you have never seen any of the Marvel films before, this is not the one to start with, and, of course, if your a fan already you wont need me to recommend it to you.

The Avengers assemble for the Endgame       

          

Rocky II

Year of Release:  1979
Director:  Sylvester Stallone
Screenplay:  Sylvester Stallone
Starring:  Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith 
Running Time:  119 minutes
Genre:  Drama, sports

Sequels are sometimes seen as shameless attempts to grab more cash from the fans of an already successful film, and while plenty are like that, there are many sequels which are as good, if not better, than the original. Rocky II is certainly as good as it's predecessor, and in some ways it is better.  It picks up straight from where the first film ends, with boxers Rocky Balboa (Stallone) and Apollo Creed (Weathers) recovering from their championship fight.  Despite having technically won the fight, Apollo has lost face due to how close the match was, and is determined to have a rematch with Rocky to salvage his pride.  However, Rocky has retired from boxing, and having married his girlfriend Adrian (Shire), and with a large payday from the fight, newfound fame and sponsorship and endorsement deals, the future is looking pretty rosy.  However, Rocky is not very good with money, and soon fritters it all away, and his fame and endorsement deals soon dry up.  With a growing family to support, Apollo's insistent demands for a rematch become hard to ignore.

The film retains all the things that fans of the first film enjoyed, including the triumphant training montage and climatic boxing match, which is bigger and better this time round.  It also retains the gritty, working class feel of the first film, even if it lacks some of it's edge.  Stallone is good as ever as Rocky, the tough bruiser with a gentle heart, Talia Shire is good, if underused as Rocky's new wife Adrian, and Burgess Meredith is great as Mickey, the broken down old pug who trains Rocky.  Carl Weathers is good as ever as Apollo Creed, and it's a pity that the film doesn't have more of him.  The character has an edge that he didn't have in the first film, now that he has something to prove.  While the film has it's soap opera elements, it has a lot of heart and humour.  We care what happens to these people.  It also works as a sequel, because it continues and expands on the story of the first film.

Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) and Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) duke it out in Rocky II     

The Wizard of Gore

Year of Release:  1970
Director:  Herschell Gordon Lewis
Screenplay:  Allen Kahn
Starring:  Ray Sager, Judy Cler, Wayne Ratay
Running Time:  95 minutes
Genre:  Horror

In the early 1960s producer and director Herschell Gordon Lewis was searching for a profitable niche in the film world.  He settled on graphic gore, which wasn't really featured at all in movies of the time, and could not be shown on television.  His film, Blood Feast (1963) which is widely regarded as the first "splatter" film, was a huge success, and cemented his subsequent career.  The Wizard of Gore is one of his later films and is actually quite accomplished by Lewis standards, although those standards were pretty low. 

The storyline revolves around Montag the Magnificent (Sager) a stage magician who, as the "highlight" of his act, would gruesomely mutilate hypnotised female "volunteers" from the audience.  The women are seemingly unharmed by Montag's trick, only to die a short time later, seemingly mutilated in the exact manner of Montag's tricks.  TV chat show host, Sherry (Cler), and her journalist boyfriend (Ratay) become suspicious of Montag and set out to investigate him and his act.

This film is incredibly gory, but is so ineptly made it is impossible to really be offended by it.  The story has quite a good premise, but it's baldy written and is riddled with plot holes, which are brought up and then promptly dismissed in the frankly nonsensical twist ending, which seemed as if it was dashed off in someone's lunchbreak. The performances are amateurish at best, although as the hissable villain Ray Sager (obviously heavily made up to look much older than he actually was) gives a hilariously pantomime-like performance, practically leaving teeth marks in the scenery.  It's badly edited with character being covered in gore and blood, and then the next second being completely spotless.  Even the film's gore effects, which really are it's sole purpose for existing, are ropey, no matter how many gallons of fake blood and animal offal they throw around.  If you enjoy bad cinema, then it is fun, in a so bad it's good way, if you're in the right frame of mind.  The worst thing about the film is that it becomes quite dull.  Probably the best way to watch this film is with a group of like-minded friends ready to rip on it.

Ray Sager is The Wizard of Gore

Shazam!

Year of Release:  2019
Director:  David F. Sandberg
Screenplay:  Henry Gayden, from a story by Henry Gayden and Darren Lemke, based on a character created by Bill Parker and C. C. Beck for DC Comics
Starring:  Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Jack Dylan Grazer, Djimon Hounsou
Running Time:  130 minutes
Genre:  Fantasy, action adventure, comedy, superhero

In present day Philadelphia, 14 year old foster kid Billy Batson (Angel) runs into trouble with the law while searching for his birth mother.  He is placed in a group foster home, run by kindly Victor (Cooper Andrews) and Rosa Vasquez (Marta Milans).  Billy reluctantly befriends nerdy superhero fan Freddy (Grazer), although he is wary about getting close to anyone.  One day, while on the subway, Billy is transported to a strange temple run bay an ancient wizard named Shazam (Hounsou), who has been searching for one truly good person who is "pure of heart" and who can become his champion and defeat the powerful Seven Deadly Sins.  When Billy says the name "Shazam" he is transformed into an adult superhero (Levi). 

This is an enjoyable superhero film, which comes across at times as a superpowered remake of Big (1988), which is referenced in one scene.   It adopts a lighter, more comedic, tone than most of the other recent movies based on DC Comics.  However it is darker and more gritty than it initially appears, and has surprising emotional heft at times.  There is a lot of fun in the scenes where Billy is testing out his new superpowers, and the story is enjoyable and satisfying.  The performances are good, and the child actors really work well together, with Asher Angel and Jack Dylan Grazer being particularly good.  Zachary Levi is fun and charismatic as Billy's superhero form, and Mark Storng makes a suitably menacing villain.  Djimon Hounsou provides the appropriate gravitas as the ancient mystic. 
With a running time of over two hours, the film does feel stretched, and the climax does fall into the almost inevitable trap of superhero films of feeling like an extended special effects showreel.  It also has the problem of being a superhero origin story and having to hit the prerequisite beats to establish the characters, their powers and their world.  Another thing that I liked about the film was that, while it is set in the shared DC Comics Universe, and there are references to the other characters, the film is pretty much self-contained.  You don't need to have seen any other films in order to enjoy this.   
Just a note:  There are two post credit sequences.  One in the middle of the credits and one at the very end.

Jack Dylan Grazer and Zachary Levi in Shazam!

Cat's Eye

Year of Release: 1985
Director:  Lewis Teague
Screenplay:  Stephen King, based on the short stories "Quitters, Inc." and "The Ledge" by Stephen King
Starring:  Drew Barrymore, James Woods, Alan King, Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays, Candy Clark 
Running Time:  94 minutes
Genre:  Horror, anthology

Personally I am a huge fan of anthology films.  It's a fun idea having a selection of short stories instead of one long narrative, almost like a cinematic buffet.  However, like a buffet, the results can be wildly uneven, although if one segment is bad then you don't have to wait too long for something else to appear. 

Cat's Eye has the unique, as far as I know, framing device of following the adventures of a plucky cat who is haunted by visions of a girl (Barrymore) begging for help. On his way, however he is captured by an organisation that will go extreme lengths to stop an annoying yuppie (Woods) from smoking, and by an Atlantic City mobster (McMillan) who forces his wife's lover (Hays) to accept a deadly wager: to walk all the way around the narrow ledge outside the mobster's penthouse apartment at the top of a skyscraper.  Eventually the cat makes it to the girl and finds himself forced into nightly combat to defend the girl form a tiny monster living in her wall.

This is a fun, lighthearted movie.  The first two segments are based on short stories published in King's Night Shift collection (which also supplied the source material for such deathless cinema classics as Children of the Corn (1984), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Graveyard Shift (1990), The Lawnmower Man (1992) and The Mangler (1995)), the third segment was written specifically for the film.  "Quitters, Inc." is kind of like a weird dark comedy, which has some fun bits, such as a weird nightmare sequence set to the Police song "Every Breath You Take", and James Woods is pretty good as the jittery would-be ex-smoker.  "The Ledge" is a pretty fun, short thriller in the style of Alfred Hitchcock Presents.  The third story is the only one that features any supernatural elements, and is probably the most typically Stephen King.  The monster effects are good, and Drew Barrymore is very good as the little girl.

Cat's Eye is kind of underrated, I think because it doesn't really feature much of the horror that Stephen King is best known for, but there is something here for pretty much anyone.  It's suspenseful, creepy at times and at times very funny.

Drew Barrymore and friend in Cat's Eye

Pet Sematary

Year of Release:  2019
Director:  Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyr
Screenplay:  Jeff Buhler, from a story by Matt Greenberg, based on the novel Pet Sematary by Stephen King
Starring:  Jason Clarke, Amy Seimetz, John Lithgow, Jete Laurence
Running Time:  101 minutes
Genre:  Horror  

Following the huge success of It (2017) it was almost inevitable that filmmakers would start raiding the extensive Stephen King back catalogue.  The novel Pet Sematary was first published in 1983, and it was previously filmed by Mary Lambert in 1989, from a script written by King.  Stephen King has rated the novel as the scariest thing he has ever written, and it is definitely one of his darkest works.  Given his phenomenal popularity, it's easy to see Stephen King as a comforting, safe spook-meister, something like Rod Serling crossed with the Crypt Keeper, forgetting how dark and genuinely disturbing a lot of his work is.

Pet Sematary follows the misadventures of the Creed family: Louis (Clarke), Rachel (Seimetz), 8 year old Ellie (Laurence) and toddler Gage (Hugo Lavoie and Lucas Lavoie), who move from the big city to rural Maine (natch) with their pet cat, Church.  However, the peace and quiet of the countryside is periodically broken by massive trucks that roar down the road next to their property day and night.  If you think it might be a little unwise to be right next to a very dangerous road with a cat and very young children, then you would be right.  This is proven by the cemetery for pets made by the local children in the woods, marked by the misspelled sign "PET SEMATARY".  When Church meets an unfortunate accident on the road, the Creed's elderly neighbour, Jud Crandall (Lithgow), introduces Louis to another burial ground beyond the Pet Sematary, with the power to resurrect the dead, however they return horribly changed.

This film does make a very big change to the novel and previous film, which is nevertheless quite effective, and while the ending, again changed from the book, doesn't entirely work, the final sequence is chilling.

It's slickly made, the performances are good, and it is a good enough Stephen King, but really it's solid and not much more than that.  There are many worse King adaptations out there, but there are better ones as well.  It is a fun scary movie, with some genuine chilling scenes in it, and it will be a great watch for Halloween, but it is unlikely to cause many sleepless nights 

The cat came back the very next day... Pet Sematary

What We Do in the Shadows

Year of Release:  2014
Director:  Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Screenplay:  Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi
Starring:  Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer, Stu Rutherford, Jackie van Beek, Rhys Darby
Running Time:  85 minutes
Genre:  Horror, comedy

Wellington, New Zealand:  A documentary film crew follow several months in the afterlife of four vampires who all share the same house: uptight 369 year old Viago (Waititi) who vainly tries to maintain some kind of order, 879 year old former tyrant Vladislav (Clement), 183 year old young rebel Deacon (Brugh) and savage 8,000 year old Petyr (Fransham).  Aided by Deacon's "familiar" Jackie (van Beek), who aspires to become a vampire herself, the gang spend their time hunting victims and trying to avoid sunlight and occasional scuffles with the local werewolf gang led by "alpha male" Anton (Darby).     

Horror comedies are very difficult to make work, because there is the risk of the comedy overshadowing the horror, meaning there is no edge or drama to it, or the horror overshadows the comedy and makes it just bleak.  This however really works well.  It's filmed in the "mockumentary" style familiar from movies such as This is Spinal Tap (1983), or TV shows such as The Office or Parks and Recreation.  It pokes fun at various vampire tropes:  Vladislav is like a parody of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and Petyr, the most brutal and least human looking of the group, is obviously based on the vampire in Nosferatu (1926).  Much of the humour comes from how vampires would function in the modern day, and the problems of living with vampire powers (how do you look stylish when you can't see yourself in the mirror?, where do you go when you can't enter a building without being invited?)  The film is never really scary, but it is quite dark, there is no getting away from the fact that the vampires are killers.  The film is irreverent but celebratory of the vampire genre, and is fresher and more imaginative than any vampire movie for a long time.  Most of all it is genuinely and consistently funny.

The Fang Gang:  From left to right: Jemaine Clement, Jonathan Brugh, Ben Fransham, Taka Waititi, Cori Gonzalez-Macuer and St Rutherford in What We Do in the Shadows   

"All Quiet on the Western Front" by Erich Maria Remarque

Year of Publication:  1929

Number of Pages:  200 pages

In 1914 a class of idealistic German schoolboys are goaded by their teacher to join the Army and fight in the "Glorious War".  After ten weeks of brutal basic training, and faced with the horrific realities of trench warfare, their youthful innocence and idealism is soon stripped away.  

This is one of the classic war novels.  It's seen through the eyes of teenage soldier Paul Baumer who, by the time we meet him is already a hardened soldier.  It moves from accounts of life in the trenches swimming in filth and swarming with rats and lice, and existing on a practically starvation level diet, to graphic and chilling accounts of battles, to lyrical descriptions of Baumer's impressions and emotions and dreams beyond just survival.  The book is more than just a parade of horrors though, it also describes the friendship and camaraderie among the soldiers, who do what they can to make life just a little more bearable for themselves, making the most of their time away from the trenches.  It also comments on the psychological effects of the war.  At one point Baumer goes home on leave, and finds himself completely cut off from his old life and his family, because they have no idea what he has been through and he can't connect with them at all.  The incidents in the novel are described purely as Baumer experiences them and there is no context of  the war as a whole, in fact the soldiers rarely discuss the war itself.  They don't even seem to care much about whether their side wins or loses, they just want it to be over.

It's a powerful and moving war novel.  

The book was banned by the Nazis and copies were publicly burned, which is yet another good reason to read it.