Water for Elephants (2011 Francis Lawrence)

When Christoph Waltz attacks the elephant, I could have killed him then and there. Actually, I think also the elephant would have fought back and trampled him. And, as we all know, elephants have great memories, so the next time he saw Woltz he would have gone berserk. You can tell that I'm taking Richard LaGravenese's screenplay (adapted from Sara Gruen's novel) rather seriously, but then I am an elephant nut. Anyway, the elephant, played by Tai, does get her own back in the end, so that's OK. She was 43 at the time, not her only feature film by any means.

It's the Depression, and this ain't no cosy circus flick, especially with the owner throwing unwanted workers out of moving trains all over the place, and one of the labourers paralysing himself with booze that isn't booze. And in the middle, not quite qualified vet Robert Pattinson is falling for the circus owner's ex-foster home wife Reece Witherspoon. All this is told by the now older vet Hal Holbrook to modern day circus man Paul Schneider, who provide a rather pleasing ending (which knowing him may well have been LaGravenese's invention).

Glossily filmed by Rodrigo Prieto, score by James Newton Howard, editing Alan Edward Bell, production design Jack Fisk.

Um, I dunno. It had been 13 years since we last watched it, when my only comment was 'James Newton Howard's music sounds like it's from a million other Hollywood films'. I'd watch both Reece and Waltz in anything - not sure about Pattinson. I don't really get the title either. 'Whisky for the Elephant' maybe?

Clint Eastwood Double Bill: Bronco Billy (1980 Clint Eastwood) / True Crime (1999 Clint Eastwood)

Two we hadn't seen before.

Bronco Billy I imagine is usually filed under 'quirky misfire' but although the writing sometimes isn't great (Locke's 'conversion', for example), I thoroughly enjoyed this (what seems to me) screwball type comedy, an amusing and affectionate film about a man who only wants to go his own way, and a group of misfits who follow him. It seems so 30s - the spoiled heiress being brought down to earth by a common rough type - what is it - Carole Lombard and Clark Gable? Yes, it definitely has that sort of vibe to me. Loved Clint's rages.

Looks like Clint is even doing some of the stunt horse riding himself.

Sondra Locke, Scatman Crothers (Clint loves working with black characters), Geoffrey Lewis, Bill McKinney, Sam Bottoms. Photographed by Eastwood irregular David Worth, written by Dennis Hackin. Yes, does feature young Alison and Kyle Eastwood as orphans. Edited by Ferris Webster and Joel Cox (so almost the changing of the guard). Clint is credited as co-author of the C&W song 'Barroom Buddies'.

True Crime was well written by Larry Gross, Paul Brickman and Stephen Schiff, from Andrew Klavan's novel - everything's set up so well. Isaiah Washington (Grey's Anatomy) is the man on death row who we know is innocent, washed out alcoholic hack Clint Eastwood follows his nose. It's an anti corporal punishment film, also a commentary about perception of blacks and crime. But not without its humour too - notably speed trip to zoo with his daughter (obviously) Francesca Eastwood.

Also, the parallels - Clint and the inmate both have little daughters, both smoke excessively. 

With LisaGay Hamilton (prisoner's wife), James Woods, Denis Leary, Bernard Hill, Diane Venora, Michael McKean, Hattie Winston, Anthony Zerbe (funnily enough, I was only thinking about the Omega Man that morning).

Once again Clint is the outsider going his own way. It's very tense.

Something interesting about the way the prison cell scenes are shot:

This is photographed by Clint regular Jack Green, with Tom Stern acting as 'lighting consultant'. Great editing noticeable in jail sequences - Joel Cox (with Gary Roach, Michael Cipriano, Don Roth). Music by Lennie Niehaus, production design Henry Bumstead.

With Lucy Liu and Dina Eastwood in smaller roles.

High Country (2024 Marcia Gardner)

Leah Pucell is a city detective somehow relegated to the Alps in the North-East of Victoria, with her wife Sara Wiseman and daughter Pez Warner. People keep going missing.

With ex-Inspector Ian McElhinney (The Outlaws, The Split etc.), Aaron Pedersen, Linda Cropper, Geoff Morrell, Henry Nixon (the suspected paedophile).

There were a couple of bits where I went 'What???' Like when the biker and his boss kidnap the detective and then are going to kill her - why?? That would bring a ton of shit down on them, to no end. And same at the end where the other stupid bad guys kidnap the girlfriend and daughter for no purpose other than to bring the law down on them hard (when surely just fleeing would be the thing to do).

Easy A (2010 Will Gluck)

Ojai is a district in California, so we're not talking Bible Belt or anything. So in this real district of California there's what seems like a reasonably liberal and sensible high school, a high school in which pupils are shocked to discover (a) one of the girls has had sex and (b) one of them is gay. Really? I think that premise is completely faulty, and so the whole plot falls down. (Also a model student gets in trouble for saying 'Twat', and then is threatened with expulsion on her next offence? I don't think so.)

So marks off, Bert V. Royal (who's now a TV writer of things I've not heard of).

But who cares much when Emma Stone gives such a fabulous performance, e.g. scene at beginning where she hates the singing birthday card but then is totally hooked on the song. A montage that's funny? Good Wilder, whatever next?

And Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are just the best film parents ever.

I know, I got almost the same shot last time

Steelyard Blues (1973 Alan Myerson)

"Stupid idiots" Q kept saying about the characters in this movie, but it equally applies to the creative team behind it, particularly writer David Ward, director Myerson  and producers Michael & Julia Phillips. (Sutherland himself was an executive producer.)

The crux of the story is really about the relationship between brothers - one is a free-thinking demolition derby nut who steals to fund his 'career', Donald Sutherland, the other is an up-and-coming politician, who's something of a bastard, Howard Hesseman. Sutherland bands with a group of misfits - prostitute (again?) Jane Fonda, eccentric Peter Boyle, Garry Goodrow and John Savage - to patch up and fly away in an ex army bomber.

The tone is uncertain - it doesn't know what it is. Sometimes it's a fairly bitter relationship drama, sometimes it's like a slapstick film. Perhaps everyone associated was really stoned. (Having said that it was 1973 and that probably applied to most of the creatives in Hollywood.) Altogether it's something of an ordeal to watch. The main problem may be that the Sutherland character - apart from being independent minded - isn't one you care about.

This uncertainty of tone is well caught in the scene in which Boyle impersonates (quite well) Brando in The Wild One and it turns into a knife fight between him and Sutherland, and the latter ends up apologising as Boyle takes a lock of hair as a 'scalp', Is it funny or serious?

The ending is something of a cop-out. Boyle rescues them from the police with horses and says there's 'a helicopter over behind those trees' and they all race towards it to fade out. But over the end credits, there's the sound of a helicopter. Now my gut instinct is that the film was supposed to end on that fade out and with the suspicion that there's no helicopter there (where would he have got it?) and therefore it was one of those downbeat endings favoured in the seventies - but someone chickened out and added the helicopter sound over the end.

To add to the confusion it has two cinematographers - the great Laszlo Kovacs and the totally unknown Stevan Larner - apparently because of reshoots following the initial filming in 1971 directly after Klute.

"How did I get myself into this again?"

These were heady days at Warners. The previous years had seen the studio release Woodstock, Performance, The Devils, Klute, Dirty Harry, A Clockwork Orange, McCabe and Mrs Miller and Deliverance.

Piglets (2024 Victoria Pile & d)

Q recognised the Green Wing style within about 90 seconds. 6 x 30 minute episodes.

Callie Cook, Sukh Kaur Ojla, Ukwell Roach, Sam Pote, Jalema Hussain, Abdul Sessay, Jamie Bisping are the new recruits being trained by Sarah Parish and Mark Heap

Klute (1971 Alan Pakula & prod)

Alan Pakula was the producer of To Kill a Mocking Bird, which couldn't be a more different film. This is a murky thriller in the seventies style (photographed by 'the Prince of Darkness' Gordon Willis) which is also a matter-of-fact dissection of the life of a prostitute. Jane Fonda won an Oscar for her performance, Andy and David Lewis were nominated for their screenplay. And Donald Sutherland is the out of his depth investigator who gets sucked in.

Most interesting for its use of sound. Surveillance tapes are seen being listened back to, but then the audio starts being dropped in all over the place, so we're not sure who's listening to them (which is effective as we don't know who the murderer is) and for the complex style of the piece; this becomes even more complex when bits of Fonda's therapy sessions also start popping up displaced to the action. I bet Dede Allen saw this and was very interested, as she started doing interesting stuff like this soon after. The editor is Carl Lerner, who cut The Swimmer and 12 Angry Men. He also quite rightly often favours Ms Fonda in conversations.

The therapist stuff is also great in getting into the mind of Bree Daniels.

Willis's lighting is just incredible. Michael Chapman is the operator.

I mean, is this scene below literally just lit with two lights - the practical behind them and the light source from behind the door?

- or is there some very subtle front lighting? And is this lit entirely by the torch?

(I would say I don't think so.) It's about top lighting, apparently, more evident in the Godfather films.

Michael Small's music adds to the tension. With Roy Scheider, Charles Cioffi, Dorothy Tristan.

Yes, very good, very interesting. A big hit for Warner Bros.

It was quite the decade for Donald Sutherland. He had already appeared in Kelly's Heroes and MASH, then starred in Don't Look Now, Day of the Locust, Bertolucci's 1900, The Eagle Has Landed, Chabrol's Blood Relatives, National Lampoon's Animal House and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Find Me Falling (2024 Stelana Kliris & scr, prod)

Stelana's screenplay is so packed with unbelievably freakish coincidences that it would stagger a horse.

Down on luck rock star buys house on Cyprus unaware (really??) that his former lover lives there.

With Harry Connick Jr, Agni Scott, Ali Fumiko Whitney, Tony Demetriou.

The first feature for this Cypriot film maker is pretty crap really.

Slaughter on 10th Avenue (1957 Arnold Laven)

Based on the real case that broke the corruption that hung over the New York docks, the killing of Andy Hintz in 1947. The longshoremen, primarily Irish, had to pay kick-backs to the hiring bosses and loan sharks, who themselves were paying out to mobsters who ran all the West Street docks. Because of a strict D&D ('Deaf and dumb') code it was almost impossible to bring any prosecutions, but assistant DA William Keating (played in the film by Richard Egan) was finally able to secure convictions in this case. (Information derived from John Strausbaugh's excellent book 'The Village'.)

Mickey Shaughnessy is the victim, and initially neither he nor his wife Jan Sterling will name the attackers, but as it seems unlikely he will survive, they finally do so. Then, it's a question of the court case in which Egan has to fight it out with Defence lawyer Dan Duryea. 

The mob boss in charge of the pier, Walter Matthau on good form, is also connected higher up, but ultimately the longshoreman have had enough and strike, leading to a pitched battle the police finally shut down.

It's a tough and worthy film, also featuring Julie Adams, Charles MacGraw, Sam Levene, Harry Bellaver, Nick Dennis ('midget'). Written by Lawrence Roman from the non-fiction book Keating co-wrote. Interesting music from Richard Rogers, who wrote it for the ballet 'Slaughter on Tenth Avenue', arranged by Herschel Burke Gilbert under Joseph Gershenson's supervision.

Another interesting Albert Zugsmith production, for Universal. Photographed by Fred Jackman Jr.

And 'garlic on the slugs' is not some French recipe, but the practice of some Italian mobsters that thought if the bullet didn't kill you, the infection from the garlic would.

Blood Work (2002 Clint Eastwood & prod)

Um. Michael Connelly wrote the novel, which is already batty in its central story, which Brian Helgeland adapted, though whose idea it was to make the serial killer the goofy dope on the boat I can't say. Overall, it beggars belief. But is enjoyable. Certain absurdities are funny: shot killer has tourniquet on arm to stop bleeding out - next minute is prancing around with a machine gun; Clint sends woman and boy off on boat, when he should have just jumped aboard himself.

Clint Eastwood, Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Wanda de Jesus, Tina Lifford (Catch and Release, TV's Parenthood), Paul Rodriguez (unpleasant detective).

Tom Stern's photography doesn't show much evidence of his work under Conrad Hall - not yet. Lennie Niehaus composed the music, Joel Cox edited, assisted by Gary Roach and Michael Cipriano (assistant editor on Clint's films from 1986 Heartbreak Ridge through to Changeling  in 2008).

I like the tone of this scene...

...but the composition here is uncomfortable.

Pickup on South Street (1953 Sam Fuller & scr)

Jean Peters is a tough nut who gets mixed up in stuff over her head and pays the price - particularly in really nasty assault scene in hotel. All cast good: Richard Kiley is the assaulter, Richard Widmark is the pickpocket who starts all the trouble in the first place, Thelma Ritter was Oscar nominated for her role as a snitch (who ends up in Potter's Field, a generic term for a common grave) and Murvyn Vye is the vengeful police captain. But Peters is just memorably good - it's probably her best performance (even though I've seen hardly any of her films!)

Fuller somehow disguised downtown LA on a low budget so it looked like Manhattan and Brooklyn. Because Fuller is so specific about Manhattan locations in the script, he tricks you into thinking you are there (the ex journalist at work).

I agree with myself, it does end too happily for a noir, but is a tough and exciting thriller in which the commies are ultimately the bad guys (not that Widmark really cares). Memorable moments, like the way the guy is eating his Chow Fun, fight in subway tunnel, Widmark's shoreside hut. Joe MacDonald good behind camera.

Ritter's character is like the glue that holds it all together. It's through her we realised Widmark isn't quite the bad guy we think he is. Fuller himself said 'What I got a kick out of in the picture - the idea of having a pickpocket, a police informer and a half-assed hooker as the three main characters.'

Trainwreck (2015 Judd Apatow)

In his wonderful series Every Frame a Painting Tony Zhou once described some of contemporary American comedy as 'lightly edited improv' and he was so right, and Judd Apatow is probably the prime offender. This is like a long string of improv with a bit of (quite old fashioned) plot hammered on, and one or two decent jokes. The apparent switching of sexual stereotypes (strong, sexually active female, less dominant, empathic males) is totally subverted in the ending in which she joins a group of cheerleaders.

The scene where Bill Hader tries to reason with Amy Schumer, and she totally rejects him, is brutally honest and authentic sounding. Look out, also, for terrific performance from Brie Larson.

Maverick (1994 Richard Donner)

I was looking for something fun and distracting for a Sunday afternoon, but I couldn't find The Sorrow and the Pity, so this had to do. William Goldman continually subverts expectation - for example, the scene in which Mel Gibson seems to chicken out to gunslinger (Max Perlich) he realises he's playing poker with - but then turns out to be a much better shot. And this sort of thing goes right on up until the very ending, so it's a lot of fun. Perhaps drags a bit with stuff about Indian Graham Greene (The Green Mile, Dances with Wolves), but its general playfulness evokes The Princess Bride.

The Monument Valley sequence does indeed pay homage to that amazing piece of stunt horsework from Stagecoach.

Jodie Foster, James Garner, Alfred Molina, James Coburn, Geoffrey Lewis. Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond is also in it! (as Albert Bierstadt). Edited by Stuart Baird and Michael Kelly.

La Caza (1966 Carlos Saura & co-scr)

I was expecting a more primitive film, somehow - but not at all. It's more reminiscent in style of an Antonioni or low-key Fellini of the period. Luis Cuadrado (Sprit of the Beehive) and his team (Teo Escamilla is the camera operator) are remarkably swift and sharp not just in the hunt scenes but everything - rifle preparation, putting out the fire, underground ferret / rabbit -  sweeping and catching in precise and fast detail the action, so there's that feeling of movement in camera acting like editing. Though the editing, by Pablo del Arno, is good too.

Four men - three old friends, one younger - go hunting rabbits - end up hunting each other. Much interesting use of voiceover to convey inner feelings of them all, including bizarre stuff in siesta sequence, where the camera tracks so closely over bodies. They are: Ismael Merlo, Alfredo Mayo, José Maria Prada and Emilio Gutiérrez Caba. With Fernando Sanchez Polack as the local help and Violeta Garcia (her only film) his niece. The ending is quite powerful (though I also found it quite funny, in a black way).

It can be read to be about the socio-political divisions within Spain, of the Civil War, as the three older ones all fought - we think on Franco's side. It's not explicit because of the censorship that still existed, through was beginning to relax.

Saura - who wrote it with Angelino Fons - was best known for Peppermint Frappé (1967), Cria Cuervos (1976), Blood Wedding (1981) and Carmen (1983), but most of his films are well rated. La Prima Angelica (1974) is notable again for Cuadrado's cinematography. (You can buy it with English subtitles here.)

It's interesting (girly mags, Japanese camera, Spanish pop music) and well made. Music by Luis de Pable. Filmed around Aranjuez, Madrid.

Between Two Worlds (1944 Edward A Blatt)

The 1923 play by Sutton Vane was filmed before, in 1930 - this update factors in WWII. A group of people on a liner don't realise they're dead, and are on their way to the next world - except Paul Henreid and Eleanor Parker, who killed themselves. Edmund Gwenn is their ghostly steward. The other passengers are some rotten journalist John Garfield, his ex Faye Emerson, horrible businessman George Coulouris, vicar Dennis King, Sara Allgood and Isobel Elsom and Gilbert Emery. With Sydney Greenstreet as The Examiner.

According to The Warner Bros Story, Garfield was miscast; "Lacking directorial control (and confidence in the whole project), he overacted badly - as he was apt to do on such occasions." I'm not sure he's overacting so much, myself, but some of his dialogue is nuts, and you don't really understand the character or what he's trying to achieve, so that's a big problem right there.

Overall I found it lacklustre and boring. The best thing about it is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's music. Mark Hellinger produced, Carl Guthrie is on camera. Daniel Fuchs was the screen writer

The Jetty (2024 Cat Jones)

Jenna Coleman, Amelia Bullmore, Ruby Stokes, Tom Glynn-Carney, Matthew McNulty, Clare Calbraith, Archie Renaux, Bo Bragason (the annoying slutty teenager).

It's kind of Broadchurch again as detective looking into disappeared girl 17 years ago begins to suspect her (now dead) husband may have had something to do with it. Pretties of lake and surrounding nature don't add anything.

...Though I was certainly missing something. I didn't realise until Q pointed it out - in episode four of four - that we were seeing flashbacks to the time of the girl's disappearance, and the one with the silly name 'Malachy' was her husband 'Mac'.

The ending is somewhat bizarre and far-fetched, but then, so am I.

They Drive By Night (1940 Raoul Walsh)

From A.I. Bezzerides novel, written by Jerry Wald and Richard Macauley. Packed with atmosphere of the dirty and unforgiving but comradely world of truckers, with George Raft, Ida Lupino (oozing femme fatale), Ann Sheridan (always great), Humphrey Bogart, Alan Hale, Roscoe Karns, Charles Halton (uncredited).

The stuff with the automatic doors is very sophisticated, and funny at the same time. She cracks up a bit too easily.

Produced by Mark Hellinger for Hal B. Wallis. Music by Adolph Deutsch, photographed by Arthur Edeson. It was a big hit.

Ann Sheridan was certainly worked hard by her initial studio Paramount, which put her in 13 films in 1934 and 12 in 1935 (under her real name Clara Lou Sheridan)! It was in 1936, when she moved to Warners, that she really got going.

Invictus (2009 Clint Eastwood & prod)

Based on John Carlin's book 'Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Made a Nation', screenplay by Anthony Peckham.

It's has a very skilful set-up. Early morning - the President / 'Madiba' wants to take a run, accompanied by two security guards, cross cut to a speeding van. When the van catches up to the three there's a moment of tension - an assassination attempt? But no, they're delivering newspapers. But that then sets you up with (a) the security guys are people, characters, but there to protect the chief and (b) when will the assassination attempt come?

Mandela shrewdly recognises that his new administration must support the Springboks rugby team to be seen to be on the side of the country, makes contact with captain Matt Damon. There's of course initial reluctance on everybody's part, like the uneasy alliance of Mandela's security officers and the former white security team. 

Freeman interviewed here:  "I felt destined to do something about Mandela. I don't know whether you know that in 1992, when he published his autobiography, he was asked who he would want to play him, if the book ever became a movie. And he named me. So, I was sort of the chosen one, as it were. Therefore, I expected that eventually I would play him, but we always thought it would be in a movie version of "Long Walk to Freedom."  It didn't turn out that way, however."

Clint can make a film well, and there's no down moments in the two hours. Highlights include the team visit to Mandela's prison, their training session at a township, the little kid who's trying to hear the game on the police radio, and the airplane over the stadium.

Tony Kgaroge is the security head, Adjoa Andoh (president's no. 2), Bonnie Mbuli, Langley Kirkwood (security). London based Fiona Weir was responsible for casting South Africans wherever possible, and commented "There's always a great pressure these days to cast well-known people very often, and he's a director who isn't concerned about that sort of thing at all. He just loves looking at an actor for what they bring to the part." Scott Eastwood is one of the rugby team,, as well as writing the score, with Michael Stevens.

Tom Stern shot it (Bill Coe assistant) and it's edited by Joel Cox and Gary Roach, with Blu Murray assisting. James Murakami is the production designer. VFX supervisor Michael Owens, who had also worked on the Iwo Jima films and Changeling, was responsible for making stadiums look like they were full of cheering fans.

Mandela's humanity - we must forgive our former enemies - shines strongly through.

The Voice of the Turtle (1947 Irving Rapper)

Woody Allen: "I liked The Voice of the Turtle very much. That was the kind of thing I grew up on, that kind of sophisticated comedy. I don't consider it a great play, by any means but it is the kind of thing that molded my image of the theatre and New York, of a kind of Upper East Side apartment that had a restaurant downstairs that you'd go to right near it, go back upstairs, and sophisticated women wanting to be actresses in this case and a guy who was on leave from the army, and who was going to bed with whom. It just played right into my fantasy of what life in New York would be. I was impressed with it because Eve Arden was in it and I always loved Eve Arden." (She was cast for the Countess part in Purple Rose of Cairo but her husband died and she pulled out.) 

Yes, in this adaptation of John Van Druten's play, we find ourselves on 63rd and Lexington, the Upper East Side, indeed. Actress Eve Arden finds herself double-booked and dumps her boyfriend Ronald Reagan on her friend and fellow actress Eleanor Parker (good; Detective Story, Caged, Between Two Worlds), who is getting over a bad break-up and has promised herself she won't fall in love again. They hang out, he sleeps over, they have dinner, she calls and he doesn't answer the phone, she has to make sure their glasses are exactly even, falls out of her dress - you know, just a typical weekend. It's great fun.

There's some of that priceless waiter dialogue from a diner - 'diner lingo' it's called. I think I heard 'one wimpy, and make it cry' ('make it cry' is authentic - it means 'add onions'), 'two eggs, looking up' and 'cheese on rye with a side of shoes' (possibly misheard).

And Arden's character is actually that of a selfish bitch, and as such, it's a more than usually meaty role for her. With Wayne Morris, Kent Smith, John Emery, Erskine Sanford and John Holland. Lit by Sol Polito, playful music from Max Steiner. Produced by Charles Hoffman for Warners.

John Emery and Eleanor Parker, with Katharine Cornell and John Barrymore behind