movies – Page 3 – espresso coco

K is for Kung Fu Panda

Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.

The second animated film of the A-Z (it won’t be the last). Kung Fu Panda came out in 2008, scores a respectable 7.6 stars on IMDb and was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Feature, though that went to the wonderful Wall-E.

DreamWorks Animation had always been in second place to Pixar when it came to making great movies. They’d produced some great films – Shrek, Madagascar are the standouts – and some good films, but the majority of their output was firmly in the ‘fine’ category.

Kung Fu Panda belongs firmly in the ‘great’ category. When I first heard about it, the idea of animals doing kung fu didn’t really inspire me, but I found myself in the cinema one rainy saturday afternoon with the kids and walked out at the end with a huge grin on my face.

What they’d done was not make a film about CG animals that did kung fu, but make a kung fu movie which happened to feature CG animals. There’s a crucial difference between the two, something which co-director John Stephenson understood:

“Let’s really make sure that our kung fu is as cool as any kung fu ever done, so that we can take our place in that canon and make sure it’s a beautiful movie, because great martial arts movies are really beautiful-looking movies and then let’s seen if we can imbue it with real heart and emotion. We kind of hoped that maybe when people see the movie, they’ll be surprised that they get a bit more movie than they may be expecting from the title.”

And the kung fu is really really good.

The story itself is a classic hero’s journey – bumbling noodle chef and kung fu fanatic Po (voiced by Jack Black on fine form) finds himself fulfilling an ancient prophecy when he’s chosen as the Dragon Warrior by Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), much to the consternation of the legendary Furious Five — Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Crane (David Cross), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu) and Monkey (Jackie Chan) and especially Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), who is given the job of training the lazy panda…
Chaos ensues. Evil snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane) escapes from prison and comes to seek the Dragon Warrior. Can Po, Master Shifu and the Furious Five save the day?

The look of the film is simply gorgeous. It’s easily one of the most beautiful films which DreamWorks Animation have ever produced, and is on par with Pixar’s output. It’s a great story, with some wonderful set pieces – Tai Lung’s escape from the seemingly escape-proof prison is gorgeously done, as are all the fight scenes and the interactions between all the main characters.

It’s just a lovely little kung fu film. Highly recommended.

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club
C is for Catching Fire
D is for Die Hard
E is for The Empire Strikes Bank
F is for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off
G is for Goldfinger (and GoldenEye)
H is for Howl’s Moving Castle
I is for Inception
J is for Jurassic Park

J is for Jurassic Park

1993, a solid 8 stars on IMDb and Jurassic Park squeaks into the IMDb Top 250 at #250.

Hammond: All major theme parks have delays. When they opened Disneyland in 1956, nothing worked!
Malcolm: Yeah, but, John, if The Pirates of the Caribbean breaks down, the pirates don’t eat the tourists.

Glorious fun. I remember going to a preview showing at the Lounge Cinema in Headingley on a bit of a whim. I was wandering past, noticed they were doing a preview that evening so popped in, fully expecting it to be sold out. Luckily for me it wasn’t, so I got to see one of the most talked-about movies of the year a day early. Woo!

The plot is fairly simple. Dr John Hammond (Dickie Attenborough) has built a dinosaur theme park – featuring actual dinosaurs which he’s managed to clone from DNA extracted from mosquitos trapped in amber. Hijinks, naturally, ensue. Bad Things happen, Jeff Goldblum gets to be, well, Jeff Goldblum. Sam Neill and Laura Dern wander round looking amazed by everything, and two cute kids tag along mainly so they can fall into peril every now and again.

Two things fascinate me about this movie. The first of which can be summed up by this picture.

Mr Bob Peck as Muldoon, game warden for Jurassic Park. Look at those thighs! Our Bob must have put in some serious work on them – if you watch the movie again you’ll notice that he keeps stopping and putting one foot up on something wherever possible. You can just hear him thinking “yesss, check out these thighs. Check them out. *flexes quads*”

I really wanted to get hold of a copy of the movie before I posted this so I could get some screencaps of him doing this, but time got the better of me.

The second thing is something I refer to as The Sam Neill Hair Theory. Again, time got away from me so I’ve not got the evidence I need to back it up, so perhaps I’ll save that for another day. I’m such a tease, I know…

I is for Inception

Inception matches The Empire Strikes Back on 8.8 stars on IMDb, but with *four* Oscar wins (Best Cinematography, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing and Visual Effects) and at #13 on the IMDb Top 250 it squeaks in directly behind Empire. It’s a close-fought thing.

At a colossal 148 minutes, it’s a full 24 minutes longer though. For all my usual grumbling about long films, Inception is one I’d make an Exception for. Haha. And the running time of 2 hours and 28 minutes is itself a direct nod to the running time of the Edith Piaf song used as the film’s central motif, “Non, je ne regrette rien” which lasts 2 minutes and 28 seconds…

Directed by Christopher Nolan, Inception features a stellar cast headed up by Leonardo DiCaprio (who I never used to rate but who I think is really growing into himself as an actor and just keeps getting better and better). Admirable support from the likes of Michael Caine, Tom Hardy, Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and not forgetting Cillian Murphy, Ken Watanabe, Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, the list and talent on display is astonishing.

The story is wonderfully convoluted – Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) heads up a team attempting to plant an idea in the head of Robert Fischer (Murphy). This they do by going inside dreams, and dreams within dreams… It’s probably best not to think too hard about it and just let it wash over you. It’s visually stunning, with buildings folding on each other, Penrose staircases climbing forever and other weird and wonderful things going on as the dreamers dream and external effects cause internal shenanigans – people float in zero-g or get soaked as events in the real world impinge on the dreams. Time slows the deeper you go, just don’t go too far or you’ll never get back.

Every rewatch turns up something new & different. Wally Pfister’s cinematography is lush and gorgeous, with each level of dream new and distinct, giving the viewer a visual hook to locate them, even if the characters themselves are sometimes confused…

Ariadne: Wait, whose subconscious are we going into exactly?

Set-pieces are wonderfully realised – a fight between Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and the bad guys in the hotel starts to play with gravity as the corridor starts to tumble and roll. Nolan ended up building a full-scale corridor set on a giant gimbal which allowed him to rotate it with the actors inside, minimising the need for CG and giving the film a better sense of realism. A Bond-esque final assault on a snowy fortress. Folding buildings in Paris. Mazes within mazes within dreams.

And the ending! Ah, the ending. It seems to utterly polarise opinions – some say it’s genius whilst others feel it’s a cop-out, leaving the audience to decide whether Cobb is dreaming or not.

Me? I think it’s one of the most perfect endings of a movie – the ambiguity leaves it up to the audience to decide. Have we been watching a man in a dream the whole time? Or has he finally woken up? Will the totem topple?

Nolan isn’t saying:

“The real point of the scene—and this is what I tell people—is that Cobb isn’t looking at the top. He’s looking at his kids. He’s left it behind. That’s the emotional significance of the thing.”

Only you can decide. Interestingly, Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” plays again at the end, and during the film that usually indicates it’s time to wake up…

H is for Howl’s Moving Castle

It’s about time we got to Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. And here we have it. The utterly sublime Howl’s Moving Castle.

8.2 stars on IMDb and released in 2004, Howl’s Moving Castle clocks in at #156 in the Top 250 movies. Nominated for Best Animated Feature, it lost out to Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit – a worthy enough film, but for my money, Howl should have taken it.

Directed by the master himself, Hayao Miyazaki, he also wrote the script (based on the original novel by Diana Wynne Jones). The novel and the film are two different beasts though, and both wonderful in their own right. If you’ve seen (or read) one and not read (or seen) the other, I must insist that you read or see the one you haven’t. Chop chop.

As you’d expect from a Studio Ghibli film, the animation is simply gorgeous. It’s a proper feast for the eyes and offers something new on each rewatch.

The story centres around a young girl, Sophie who is cursed into an old body by the Witch of the Waste. Sophie sets off to find a cure in the Wastes, but comes across the moving castle belonging to the wizard Howl. There she meets Calcifer, a fire demon trapped by Howl to power his castle. Calcifer offers to free Sophie from her curse if she in return will free him from his bond. What follows is nigh-on two hours of simply the most beautiful animation, with a walking, sighing, creaking castle (complete with magical doors which open into different towns), a scarecrow with a turnip head, war, a fallen star, true love…

With foreign films I usually prefer to watch the subtitled version, but for those who prefer the English language dub, Pixar’s Peter Docter (director of Monster’s Inc. and Up) did a cracking job and assembled an all-star cast. It features Christian Bale as Howl (after watching Spirited Away he immediately agreed to lend his voice to this film), Jean Simmons as the older Sophie (Emily Mortimer played the younger Sophie), Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste and Billy Crystal as Calcifer.

If you enjoyed Howl’s Moving Castle, might I recommend two other of my favourite Studio Ghibli films, My Neighbour Totoro and Spirited Away? Both directed by Miyazaki, they’re wonderful movies, and you may just see them cropping up later this month…

G is for Goldfinger (and GoldenEye)

Yes, dear reader. Today we’re talking Bond. James Bond. I thought it’d be interesting to compare and contrast Goldfinger with GoldenEye.

Crunchy stats first.

Goldfinger. 1964,7.8 stars on IMDb. Oscar for Best Sound Effects. Connery’s third outing as Bond, with a bigger budget (more than the first two films combined).

GoldenEye, 1995, 7.2 stars on IMDb, nominated for a couple of Baftas, but didn’t win either. We’re introduced to a new Bond, Pierce ‘Remington Steele’ Brosnan.

Let’s start with Goldfinger then. Connery’s Bond is sent to investigate bullion magnate Auric Goldfinger (and what a brilliant name that is) and to find out how he smuggles his beloved gold out of the country. Jill Masterson gets a rather suffocating paint job, Bond gets cross, hijinks ensue and he teams up with Pussy Galore (the lovely Honor Blackman) to thwart Goldfinger’s plans to irradiate the contents of Fort Knox.

Goldfinger is quite rightly regarded as one of the better (some say the best) Bond movies. It has all the requisite components – a dastardly villain, played with panache by Gert Fröbe, who is obsessed with gold. The henchman – the incomparable Harold Sakata as Korean manservant Oddjob (also rightly regarded as one of the best Bond villains) with his killer bowler hat. The daftly-named Bond girl, Pussy Galore (how they manage to keep a straight face is beyond me). Bond gets his Aston Martin – the DB5, replete with a wonderful array of gadgets including the ejector seat. The DB5 went on to feature in five other Bond movies: Thunderball, GoldenEye (which we’ll come to later), Tomorrow Never Dies, Casino Royale and most recently, Skyfall.

It also has some wonderful lines, most famous of which is of course

Bond: Do you expect me to talk?
Goldfinger: No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!

Apparently this was also the first time a laser appeared in a movie – they hadn’t been invented when Fleming wrote the original book – in the novel it’s a buzz-saw.

Bond also gets to start to play with more gadgets, and we get a lighter rapport with Desmond Llewelyn’s Q. In fact it’s the first time we get to see Q’s workshop.

Of the Connery-era Bond movies, it’s a close call between From Russia With Love and Goldfinger, but I think Goldfinger edges it. Throw in one of the best (if not the best) Bond theme songs, with Shirley Bassey letting rip with the title track, and you’ve got a belter of a movie.

Let’s turn our attention now to GoldenEye – the 17th Bond movie and this time introducing a new Bond. Pierce Brosnan followed Timothy Dalton’s rather dour Bond after a six-year hiatus. I rather liked Dalton’s Bond and would have liked to seen him given more of a chance. Pierce, by comparison, felt a bit… glossy at the time. We also got a new M in the form of Judi Dench, who immediately made the role her own.

M: You don’t like me, Bond. You don’t like my methods. You think I’m an accountant, a bean counter more interested in my numbers than your instincts.
Bond: The thought had occurred to me.
M: Good, because I think you’re a sexist, misogynist dinosaur. A relic of the Cold War, whose boyish charms, though wasted on me, obviously appealed to that young woman I sent out to evaluate you.
Bond: Point taken.

Various other big names show up – Sean Bean as Alec ‘006’ Trevelyan, Robbie Coltrane as Valentin Zukovsky and Alan Cumming (sporting a terrible accent, gawd love ‘im) as Boris Grishenko. The ladies are represented by Izabella Scorupco as Natalya Simonova and Famke Janssen as the implausibly named Xenia Onatopp.

Moneypenny: M authorizes you to observe Miss Onatopp but stipulates no… contact without prior approval. End transmission, Moneypenny. Good night, James. I trust you’ll stay… Onatopp of things?

The plot is rather more convoluted than Goldfinger, and I do rather hark back to the simpler days. Here we have a murky tale of a wronged Lienz Cossack, satellite weapons, hackers, and a mysterious crime syndicate known as Janus.

It does have some splendid moments. The opening bungee jump off the dam (at 220 metres it set a record for a bungee jump off a fixed structure) is utterly spectacular, only to be topped minutes later by Bond chasing a pilotless plane off a runway on a motorbike, free-falling alongside it and, of course, escaping as the base explodes and the titles roll…
There’s also a rather implausible car chase between the iconic DB5 (there it is again) and a Ferrari F355. Fun while it lasts, but don’t think too hard about the practicalities of it. Famke Janssen did her own driving stunts in the Ferrari though. Kudos.
Then there’s more motorised fun with a tank chase in and around (and sometimes through) St Petersburg.

Tina Turner puts in a sterling effort with the U2-penned title track, but was never going to best Bassey’s Goldfinger.

Overall, it’s a fun outing – Brosnan puts in a solid turn as Bond, and it’s probably the best of his four movies. He made an excellent Bond, but as with Dalton, was let down by some sub-par scripts.

So, that’s Bond – Goldfinger and GoldenEye. Which is your favourite?

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club
C is for Catching Fire
D is for Die Hard
E is for The Empire Strikes Bank
F is for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

F is for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. 1986. A slightly baffling 7.9 stars on IMDb.

Another of John Hughes’ movies, coming after The Breakfast Club and cementing his place in my favourite directors list.

Ferris Bueller, you’re my hero.
~ Cameron

I love this film so much. I’m pretty sure my VHS copy was worn thin with constant replays. I could (and do) watch it again at the drop of a hat and still absolutely adore it, and can probably quote 90% of it verbatim.

As with all of John Hughes’s films, the characters are wonderful. Cameron Frye (Alan Ruck) as Ferris’s buddy the world-weary teenager. Matthew Broderick as Ferris the smart-arse, wise-cracking kid who everyone should hate for being such a cocky little so-and-so, but who everyone loves. And of course the lovely Mia Sara as Sloane (who I must confess to a MAJOR crush on. Who didn’t?)

But all the others are brilliant too, from the utterly slimy, creepy Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones on top form) and Ferris’s sister Jeanie (Jennifer Grey before she hit the big time with Dirty Dancing a year later), and even Charlie Sheen in a lovely little cameo.

It’s Matthew Broderick who steals the show as Ferris, of course. Frequently turning to camera to break the fourth wall, he takes us through his day off, from perusading his parents that he’s really sick:

The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands. It’s a good non-specific symptom; I’m a big believer in it. A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a dead lock, but, uh… you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor’s office. That’s worse than school. You fake a stomach cramp, and when you’re bent over, moaning and wailing, you lick your palms. It’s a little childish and stupid, but then, so is high school.

to persuading Cameron to let them borrow his father’s beloved 1961 Ferrari 250GT California. Less than a hundred were ever made, you know?
(The interior shots of the Ferrari were all done in a real 250 GT California, but all the others were replicas.)

Cameron: My father spent three years restoring this car. It is his love, it is his passion.
Ferris: It is his fault he didn’t lock the garage.

Hijinks, naturally, ensue as Ferris, Cameron and Sloane take to the streets of Chicago in Hughes’ homage to his favourite city, Chicago. The trio take in a ball game at Wrigley Field, have a fancy lunch, visit the Sears Tower, the Art Institute (a lovely scene where the three of them are engrossed in Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte) and finish up with Ferris taking centre stage in a performance of Twist & Shout as part of a parade. Ferris and the gang return home, Bad Things happen to that beautiful car, Cameron stands up to his dad and we have a happy ending. All that is, apart from Ed. Poor Ed.

It’s utterly bonkers, but utterly wonderful. To paraphrase Ferris, I highly recommend picking it up.

Right, time for some trivia. Tom Skerrit (Dallas in Alien) and Paul Gleason (Mr Vernon from The Breakfast Club) were considered for the role of Ed Rooney – see? I told you I like to link these things up!

I’ll leave you with one final thought – something I came across recently deep in the murky depths of the interwebs. Could Ferris Bueller be a figment of Cameron’s imagination? This would turn Ferris Bueller into a Brat-pack version of Fight Club…

One day while he’s lying sick in bed, Cameron lets “Ferris” steal his father’s car and take the day off, and as Cameron wanders around the city, all of his interactions with Ferris and Sloane, and all the impossible hijinks, are all just played out in his head. This is part of the reason why the “three” characters can see so much of Chicago in less than one day — Cameron is alone, just imagining it all.

It isn’t until he destroys the front of the car in a fugue state does he finally get a grip and decide to confront his father, after which he imagines a final, impossible escape for Ferris and a storybook happy ending for Sloane (“He’s gonna marry me!”), the girl that Cameron knows he can never have.

Mind. Blown. I need to go rewatch the movie. And so do you. After all:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club
C is for Catching Fire
D is for Die Hard
E is for The Empire Strikes Bank

E is for Empire Strikes Back

Of course it’s also just an excuse for me to ramble on (probably at some length) about Star Wars in general.

If you need a recap, here’s the original Star Wars trilogy in two minutes. And in Lego. Awesome.

We pause briefly to bring you the stats. Mmm, crunchy stats.

1980. To give it its full title, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back arrives. I’d seen Episode IV at the cinema three years ealier – school was closed due to heavy snow and my dad took me to the cinema to see a film which would shape my future film-watching forever. I’d never seen anything quite like it (to be fair, I was six). My life was taken over by the action figures, reading and re-reading the novelisation (this was before the days of VHS, remember), and pretending to be Luke Skywalker whenever possible. Three years later, Empire arrived and I was there.

Clocking it at 8.8 stars on IMDb, it won the Oscar for best sound, and a special achievement award for best visual effects. Number 12 in the IMDb Top 250, six places ahead of Episode IV, and a full 66 places ahead of Return of the Jedi. The three prequels (quite rightly) don’t even feature on that list.

It’s widely regarded as the best of the Star Wars movies and definitely the darkest.

We pick up events three years after the first Death Star has been destroyed by Luke and his chums. The Empire is on the move and tracks the rebels down to the frozen world of Hoth. Luke wanders off to go become a Jedi in a swamp whilst the rest of the gang escape in the Millennium Falcon. Fun & hijinks ensue on an asteroid.

Sir, it’s quite possible this asteroid is not entirely stable.
~ C3PO

Han, Chewie, Leia and the ‘droids rock up at Cloud City, meet up with Han’s old buddy Lando Calrissian before things take a turn for the worse. Vader! Fett! Carbonite! Han and Leia share a moment

Leia: I love you.
Han: I know.

Smooth-talker, that Solo. Luke turns up just too late, ends up having an epic lightsaber duel with Darth, then…[spoilers]

I’ll talk about [spoilers] in a minute. If you’ve not seen the film by now (seriously, it’s been 34 years, what *have* you been doing with your time?) go watch it.

Actually, now is a perfect time to discuss running order. Before Episode I turned up in 1999, there was one way to watch Star Wars (albeit in various different incarnations – original, special editions etc). A New Hope > Empire > Jedi. Done, done and done.

Then Lucas decided he wasn’t finished and released Episodes I, II and III. We were left with a quandary. What’s the best order of watching the films?

Purists like myself argued that you watched A New Hope, Empire and then Jedi and tried very hard to ignore the prequels. If pressed, we’d grudgingly admit that if you *had* to, you’d go for release order, that is:

A New Hope
Empire
Jedi
Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith

Some would argue (they’d be wrong) that the best order was chronological order. Episodes 1 through 6, in that order.

The trouble with that is that it becomes an entirely different story.

Release order is Luke’s story, with the Anakin backstory. Chronological order is Anakin’s story all the way. It would rob you entirely of that moment in Empire where Darth Vader leans towards Luke and says:

Vader: Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.
Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!
Vader: No. *I* am your father.

WHAT? IS THIS TRUE? COULD IT BE? The audience were totally wrong-footed by this. Is it true? O.M.G. The cinema went bananas at that point.

If you go chronological, you’d be like ‘err, yeah. We totally knew that. Why is everyone looking so surprised?’

So, release order it is.

Or is it?

Let me introduce you to something I heard a while back called the Machete Order – the perfect way to enjoy the movies. Check out the link – it’s long but worth it. Before we get to that, there’s something called the Ernst Rister order.

In a nutshell, you put the prequels in to the middle:

A New Hope
Empire
Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
Jedi

This means the story is still Luke’s. We get the bit at the end of Empire where everything is totally bleak – Han’s frozen & dragged off to Jabba, Luke’s just found out that Vader is dear ol’ dad and we, the audience, are still looking at each other going OMG! WHAT? DID THAT JUST HAPPEN??

Then we cut back to Anakin’s backstory, where we find out how he ended up turning to the dark side, and we end up with the climactic Return of the Jedi. Happy ending, it’s all good.

But it’s not perfect. The Machete Order, however, is. Here we go:

A New Hope
Empire
Phantom Menace
Attack of the Clones
Revenge of the Sith
Jedi

See what he did there? No Phantom Menace. There are several good reasons. Over to Rod Hilton, originator of the Machete Order:

Every character established in Episode I is either killed or removed before it ends (Darth Maul, Qui-Gon, Chancellor Valorum), unimportant (Nute Gunray, Watto), or established better in a later episode (Mace Windu, Darth Sidious). Does it ever matter that Palpatine had an apprentice before Count Dooku? Nope, Darth Maul is killed by the end of Episode I and never referenced again. You may as well just start with the assumption that Dooku was the only apprentice. Does it ever matter that Obi-Wan was being trained by Qui-Gon? Nope, Obi-Wan is well into training Anakin at the start of Episode II, Qui-Gon is completely irrelevant.

Bonuses for this – virtually no Jar-Jar (huzzah!), no Jake Lloyd (sorry kid, you were terrible), you don’t get the slightly uncomfortable bit where Padme gets off with someone she met when he was ten – you just assume they knew each other as kids, none of that taxation of trade routes malarkey. Everything you need to know is set up better in Episode II. No more midichlorian nonsense. Obi Wan is always the master. Hayden Christiansen is always annoying, just like Luke was in the first movie.

You end up with two films setting up Luke, two setting up Anakin, then a nice rounded ending with Return of the Jedi.

Genius. Give it a try.

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club
C is for Catching Fire
D is for Die Hard

D is for Die Hard

Of course it is. Die Hard is, as everyone knows, the perfect Christmas movie. I don’t really want to go into the sequels (for once) – they’re fine and have their moments, but the first is quite definitely the best.

Comes in at #114 on the IMDb Top 250, and scores a very healthy 8.3 stars. Every one of them deserved. Die Hard is, from the opening scene to the very last, a joy to watch. Did you know it was nominated for four Oscars?

“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs…”
~ McClane

You know the story. World-weary New York cop John McClane turns up at his wife’s office christmas party when Alan Rickman turns up with a ropey German accent, some wonderfully mulleted friends and a whole host of explosives and weaponry. Hijinks ensue.

This is arguably the film that made Bruce Willis into the movie star we all know and love. Fresh from his role as the wisecracking David Addison in Moonlighting, Willis got $5 million for Die Hard, a huge sum of money for someone so new to the movie business.

Apparently Schwarzenegger, Harrison Ford, Don Johnson, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson, Burt Reynolds and Stallone *all* turned it down. Fools. Though can you imagine Die Hard with Arnie? Clash of the accents… Interestingly it was also Alan Rickman’s first starring role, and look where *he* ended up! And, of course, it featured Paul Gleason who played Mister Vernon in The Breakfast Club.

I don’t just do these things randomly, you know? 🙂

It’s fair to say that Bruce earned his fee. Die Hard was hugely successful, spawning a number (some would argue too high a number) of sequels, becoming a money-making machine.

It’s a cracking film which, once it gets going, doesn’t let up. Bruce (and his vest) get shot at, blown up, chased, shot at some more, jump off an exploding building and even come up with his immortal catchphrase

“Yippee-ki-yay, motherf…”

I love it.

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club
C is for Catching Fire

C is for Catching Fire

Yes, I know it’s technically The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. Shoot me.

As with yesterday’s Breakfast Club, Catching Fire gets a very respectable 7.9 stars on IMDb. Nominated for a Golden Globe (albeit only for Best Original Song). At nearly two and half hours, it’s overlong (according to my perfect movie theory), but to be fair, the story trundles along nicely.

After the events of The Hunger Games, we catch up with Katniss and Peeta as they undertake the Victor’s Tour of the districts. Their… somewhat unusual win in the 74th Hunger Games has led to unrest and President Snow is keen to quash the imminent rebellion.

Cue the 75th Hunger Games and a twist on proceedings known as the Quarter Quell, in which Snow decides to hold a Hunger Games where previous winners will compete again… Ooh, you dastardly dastard, you.

I must confess that I’d not read the second book in the trilogy before seeing this movie. I read the first book some years ago and utterly lost myself in the story, devouring it almost in a single sitting. Not sure why I didn’t read the others (something shiny came up, no doubt), but I was keen to see what happened in the movie.

It’s more of the same, really. It takes an inordinately long time for President Snow (Donald Sutherland on splendid form) to decide that dear old Katniss needs to be brought to heel, so engages the talents of Plutarch Heavensbee (the late and much missed Philip Seymour Hoffman – more of him in later posts, no doubt) to concoct a devious scheme to see her off.

The leads crack on with the job in hand. J-Law is on fine form and is always eminently watchable, as are Josh Hutcherson as Peeta and Woody Harrelson as Haymitch. Stanley Tucci positively glows as Caesar Flickerman – please please can we have a spin-off TV series of what he does between the annual Hunger Games? I would *love* to see that. Perhaps he and Effie (Elizabeth Banks almost as unrecognisable under almost as much makeup as Tucci) could co-host something?

Along with Tucci and Banks, I *loved* Amanda Plummer’s and Jeffrey Wright’s characters. At first glance, against the bigger and stronger teams, you think they’ll be the first to go. But they’ve got cunning and smarts on their side…

The story itself is fine, but for me the first is better. That said, there are weird things in both which have always bothered me about the actual Hunger Games themselves – why do the kids gang up together? There’s only ever going to be one winner, so surely it’s everyone for themselves. It kind of makes more sense in this one once we work out what the big plan is, I suppose. But in the first film there are bits where you’re just left wondering why on earth you’d go to sleep next to four or five other people who ultimately want to see you dead.

Towards the end I found myself paying more attention to Katniss’s quiver of arrows than the action. It seemed to magically refill itself on several occasions. Look! Attacked by monkeys! Arrows gone. Back on the beach five minutes later? All back. Fire some more, down to three. Five minutes later? All back. And the lightning striking the tree – big boom as the lightning strikes. But the tree is *way* over there. Sound travels slower so it should be lightning *then* the noise, surely?

I’m being overly picky, I know. The ending caught me entirely off-guard, having not read the books, and it’s always fun when that happens. I’m looking forward to Mockingjay, though heaved a sigh when I found out they’re splitting it into two movies.

Perhaps I should go read the books.

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien
B is for The Breakfast Club

B is for The Breakfast Club

Day 2 of the A to Z Challenge and we’re (obviously) on B.

B is for The Breakfast Club.

It gets a very creditable 7.9 stars on IMDb and, at 97 minutes, almost the perfect length for a movie.

This is one of those films that I never tire of watching. I’m a huge fan of John Hughes’ movies anyway (keep an eye out for Ferris Bueller later!). He had a real ear for dialogue and helped inspire the ‘Brat Pack’ movement in the eighties. Hugely influential.

Five students meet in detention one saturday morning and over the course of the day, learn more about each other and themselves.

It is now 7:06. You have exactly 8 hours and 54 minutes to think about why you are here – to ponder the error of your ways. You will not talk… you will not move… from these seats.
~ Mr Vernon

I remember being horrified and fascinated that these kids were in detention at 7am on a Saturday morning. Saturday! 7am! Two things which, at that time in the mid-eighties, were largely unknown to me.

But at school they were. A brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. The Breakfast Club. Each a stereotype of a clique in the school. Each in detention for a different reason.

It’s one of those eminently quotable films – find a fellow fan and you’ll inevitably start riffing on the dialogue. We’ve all got our favourites, but Judd Nelson’s John Bender gets the lion’s share of the best lines. From his “Eat… my… shorts”, the deadpan “Impossible, sir. It’s in Johnson’s underwear.” to his curtailed joke about the naked blonde who walks into a bar with a poodle under one arm, and a two-foot salami under the other…

By the way, if you know the punchline to that joke, I’d love to hear it. I’ve spent nearly 30 years wondering what it is.

Damn. The Breakfast Club will be thirty years old next year. Man, I feel old.

Speaking of old, most of the cast were much older than the characters they played. Judd Nelson was the oldest of the ‘kids’, at 26. Ally Sheedy and Emilio Estevez 23, and Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall at 17 were closest to being high school students.

Did you know that Bender’s character was nearly played by Nicolas Cage (too expensive) and John Cusack, before Judd Nelson was cast?

I’m sure I’m not alone in having a *huge* crush on Ally Sheedy in this movie, and much preferred her before Claire (Molly Ringwald) got to work on ‘all that black shit under your eyes.’

Over the course of the day the students are asked to each complete a thousand word essay on who they think they are. They spend the day talking instead, and find out they have a lot more in common than they originally thought. They ask Brian (the brain) to write the essay for them – instead we get the classic letter to the assistant principal.

Dear Mr. Vernon, we accept the fact that we had to sacrifice a whole Saturday in detention for whatever it was we did wrong. But we think you’re crazy to make an essay telling you who we think we are. You see us as you want to see us – in the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain…
Andrew: …and an athlete…
Allison: …and a basket case…
Claire: …a princess…
Bender: …and a criminal…
Brian: Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.

Utterly wonderful.

That’s my ‘B’ movie. Tune in tomorrow for C!

previously, on The A-Z Challenge
A is for Alien

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