My name is Douglas and I am a movie fan.Yes, that will come as a surprise to many of you, as it’s not something I talk about very often.
(If I could put one of those wink emoji things in here I would.)
Where do you think Dominic Queste’s obsessions came from?
The thing is, I’m finding it harder and harder to find any movies of interest in modern day cinema. I buy Empire magazine every month and tend to flick over page and pages of features on the two dozen super hero flicks about to be released. Sorry, but they no longer interest me – I find most of them overblown and full of self importance. And not a little pretention.
There are few, if any, comedies made today that I actually find funny.
Thrillers appear to have been subsumed by cgi-heavy action flicks. Not that I don’t enjoy these now and again, though. I did like two Dwayne Johnson films recently, ‘Rampage’ and ‘Skyscraper’, even though they were everything I should have hated.
I worry that I’m becoming not so much a movie fan as a movie fart, someone who merely breaks wind in the direction of any given film and is happy to let anyone know why their view is the only one which should be heard.
Example one:
Two guys in FOPP a few weeks ago, standing at the horror section extolling the virtues of this film or that film. At the top of their voices, just so everyone around could hear how learned they were.
Example two:
Many years ago, when I was young and could handle audiences in cinemas. Standing in a queue for a late night premiere of ‘Far and Away’. Two of your actual film critics behind me, talking about movies at the top of their voices, just so everyone around them knew who they were and how important and cine literate they were.
I worry I’m becoming just like them. I hope not.
Yet, I flick through the Sky Movie channel and often the only films that interest me are the older films. And by older, anything made before the millennium.
This week I’ve gone even further back, on blu ray (thank you the aforementioned FOPP, which is a treasure trove for the likes of me, and HMV).
I’ve had a 1970s mini festival of action heroes. The first two were from Clint Eastwood. The first was ‘Joe Kidd’, one of his so-called ‘minor’ westerns, even though it was written by Elmore Leonard and directed by John Sturges, who made ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and other classics. Lalo Schifrin’s theme tune was stuck in my head for days.
The other was ‘The Eiger Sanction’, a spy thriller about mountain-climbing, if you can imagine such a thing. And bloody good it was, too. Eastwood directed, John Williams provided a fabulous score, and the mountain climbing sequences – sans computer enhancement or jiggery-pokery (yes, that’s a technical term) – were breathtaking. The story is a little confused and Eastwood is perhaps miscast in the central role but I loved it nonetheless.
Last night it was Charles Bronson’s chance to get in on the action. He’s got a bad rep these days, thanks to a string of Death Wish movies (although I still insist the first is a classic) and some iffy straight to video releases from Golan-Globus productions. I insist that Bronson was a better actor than he was given credit for – or that his choice of film role might suggest.
But ‘Mr Majestyk’ is one of his best. Another original screenplay from Elmore Leonard, this time directed by experienced old hand Richard Fleischer (The Vikings, The Boston Strangler among many others), it’s a lean thriller about a melon farmer taking on a brutal mobster. Yup, a melon farmer. You couldn’t make it up. Even though Elmore Leonard did.
No cgi, no outrageous stunts, no flying through the air with guns in both hands (although Bronson does do a blinding leap through a window with a shotgun). No wire work, no carefully choreographed fight scenes where one person takes on an army, no spandex, no delusions of grandeur or pretentions to social comment.
Just decent scripts, good stunt work (although one climber did die in the making of The Eiger Sanction, which is very sad) and real, honest-to-goodness star power.
Hollywood – could we please get back to that? Can you give us stories, decent thrillers, where real people – or as real as they can be given the level of stardom of the cast – do real things (ie not flying about and throwing each other through walls)?
If not, thank God for DVD and blu ray. And HMV, FOPP and – yes, I’m sorry – Amazon.
