Anybody can type

A Howard Hawks & Cary Grant double bill today with Only Angels Have Wings and Monkey Business. Both are among my favorite directors/actors and both are in great form here. Wings portrays one of Hawks' small groups of professionals doing a difficult job, this time airmail pilots flying a dangerous route over South American mountains. Jean Arthur was great as the female lead; I definitely need to get more of her movies.

Monkey Business has Ginger Rogers, Marilyn Monroe, and funny chimps. I was smiling pretty much all the time. Charles Coburn utters an absolute killer, deadpan line when he and Grant watch punctuation-challenged Monroe sashay (the only word that seems to fit) out of his office. The men look at each other. "Anybody can type."

The richest director ever

I have no source to back up that title, but I'd be rather surprised if anyone beats Howard Hughes. Tonight I watched both films he directed, Hell's Angels and The Outlaw.

The best parts of Angels happen in the air, no doubt about that. It's thrilling to see two dozen or so biplane fighters swirling in the sky and know that it's real footage, not CGI. Hughes assembled a small fleet of WWI warplanes and pilots and shot a lot of film, which made the movie the most expensive ever made at the time. There's also some fine model work, used in the nighttime Zeppelin mission over London and the bombing of a German munitions depot. The rest of the film is uneven, to put it kindly, but Jean Harlow is good - good at being a bad girl, that is. Only a few years later the Hays Code prevented this kind of racy material being shown.

The Outlaw is famous for showcasing Jane Russell's breasts and being censored because of that, and her chest is indeed the most memorable element of the movie (her acting, sadly, less so). It's a retelling of the Billy the Kid legend that inserts Doc Holliday in the events, and not a terribly good one at that. There are some good scenes, but more ridiculous ones. At least Walter Huston, father of John, appears as Pat Garrett.

Very different action movies

Green Zone could almost be a prequel to the Bourne series, showing what David Webb was like before he volunteered to become Jason Bourne. Paul Greengrass' direction is similar, Matt Damon plays the protagonist again, and they even got John Powell to score it and Christopher Rouse to edit it. It's a solid action thriller even though the idea of there being no WMDs to be found is hardly surprising in 2010. Some of the characters are based on real people and many members of Bourne's... I mean Roy Miller's team are actual veterans, not actors.

The Warriors is anything but realistic, but highly entertaining. Somehow I had avoided seeing it until now. It's an urban fantasy about one heroic gang versus a hundred others, populated by a cast of (mostly) unknowns, and executed perfectly to this specification.

Apocalypse Australia

A couple of days ago I watched two films set in Australia after a nuclear war: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior and On the Beach. I was slightly sad to discover that either Max or I have changed since my youth, as I found that film only average, with some great stunt work. I think this BD is not a keeper.

On the Beach I had not seen but knew the basic story, not from the novel but a Finnish song. It proved to be one of the most chilling films I've seen. I wonder how it got made in 1959.

Word is Bond

I think I need a new label to show when I watch BD movies instead of DVDs. Luckily they are cheap!

Tonight's programming was two versions of James Bond: Dr. No and Casino Royale, the first cinema screen 007 and the first with the current actor. Dr. No is the first actual Blu-ray disc I've watched, and it immediately convinced me that this technology was money well spent. The restoration work was done from the original camera negatives, scanned at 4K resolution, and the film now looks astoundingly vibrant. I find the film one of the better Bonds, as it's not overladen with gadgets and corny jokes and Sean Connery is in fine form from the get-go.

Casino Royale was a very promising start for the latest incarnation. Daniel Craig is a proper blunt instrument, Eva Green is stunning and actually has a character to play, and the supporting cast is fine. Implausible gadgets and jokes are in mercifully short supply. My only major complaint is the end of the film: I found the last big fight scene entirely unnecessary. Without it, the film could've been shorter and they could've used something more akin to the novel's ending. My copy is "just" a DVD, but it looked fine, if not mind-blowing like its predecessor.

Mind: off

I went to see The Expendables with some friends. It was what I was looking for: brainless old school action with entertaining stars, although some of the action was cut too fast and close - the bane of many a modern film - and the script was uneven, certainly not on par with the best 80s action movies. Also the loudest film I've seen in a long time.

Back home I felt like some brain cells were still stirring, so I searched my TV recordings for a cure. I found Stealth, which was as dumb as they come. It had lots of CGI dogfights, lots of things blowing up, and Jessica Biel. Director Cohen is the auteur behind The Fast and the Furious, which I love dearly and which is a deep character study compared to Stealth.

All in all, a highly successful mind-numbing exercise on both counts.

A beginning and an end

On tonight's menu: Stagecoach and The Man from Laramie. Being the beginning of the long collaboration between John Ford and John Wayne, and the last western Anthony Mann and James Stewart made together, in other words.

Everyone raves about The Searchers, but I think I prefer Stagecoach. It transformed John Wayne from a B-movie actor (it was his 80th film according to the IMDb!) into a star, and his entrance is certainly iconic. When Ringo Kid appears, spinning that Winchester with the large loop lever, you can almost hear the movie switching gears. The ensemble cast is faultless and Monument Valley is, well, a monumental backdrop. It's a pity the European DVD release is so bare-bones - the Americans have two different special editions.

Stewart was an all-American hero onscreen and in real life (he was a decorated bomber pilot in World War II). But he wasn't always such a clear-cut nice guy in his post-war films. Laramie is one example of this. Will Lockhart is obsessed with revenge ("I came a thousand miles to kill you," he says) and doesn't let minor problems such as a crippling injury to stop him. The story feels like a majestic theater play which could be adapted to almost any era in history. The epic New Mexico terrain and the endless, vast sky are beautifully photographed. I have now seen two out of five Mann-Stewart westerns; the rest are waiting their turn on the shelf.

Is it already obvious that I like westerns?

Private parts destroyed: 2

Next up was a sleazy 70s day with the triple bill of Chato's Land, Coffy, and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.

Chato's Land is the first film where Charles Bronson and director Michael Winner worked together - later they would do Death Wish. Bronson was middle-aged before he got famous, and in this movie he was 51 but still extremely buff. It has a simple revenge plot: half-breed Chato kills in self-defense, runs from the posse, and when this posse kills his friend and rapes his woman Chato kills every motherfucker in the desert. One rapist gets his balls burned and does not survive the experience. Jack Palance plays the morally ambiguous leader of the posse.

Coffy is a blaxploitation classic. Voluptuous knockout Pam Grier is a nurse whose young sister is ruined by drugs, so it's revenge time again by any means necessary. This is the film which teaches you to hide razorblades in your afro, just in case. All sympathetic characters get hurt (not that there are many) and all bad guys are colorful stereotypes and suitably rotten. This time the genital destruction is carried out with a shotgun.

Alfredo Garcia features a tremendous performance by Warren Oates as Bennie, who goes looking for the titular head. Everything is dirty and sweaty, and occasional moments of peace are guaranteed to not last. Bennie gets truly deranged towards the film's conclusion and bad people meet bad ends. Some good people also meet bad ends. Sam Peckinpah delivers again. I don't remember any nuts getting specifically smashed, although it might have happened in one hail of bullets or another.

Good times throughout!

80s Day II: Electric Boogaloo

This time I got distracted by something or other and only managed two movies: Gremlins and The Living Daylights, both previously unseen. Both worked well.

Gremlins was funny and had groovy creature effects, and Timothy Dalton was a fine 007, kind of foreshadowing the grittier approach of Daniel Craig. It feels silly to say that Maryam d'Abo was a believable Bond girl, but I'll say it anyway. The film was fairly faithful to the short story, even though it only offered enough material for the Bratislava defection scene. This was the last Bond in the (very loose) Cold War continuity, with General Gogol making a brief appearance.

It started with a red dawn

This whole idea originated a couple of weeks ago when my summer holiday was ending and I decided to watch movies that were somehow thematically linked. The first batch was an 80s day, during which I saw Red Dawn, Highlander, Romancing the Stone, and Sixteen Candles (which I actually had never seen and enjoyed greatly).

Red Dawn had some pretty nice replica Soviet vehicles, including a T-72 that looked so good the CIA got interested. Physical effects, models, and actual moving vehicles always have more charm than CGI. And the Finnish Jatimatic SMG made an appearance; I guess it was more popular in Hollywood than in real life. Highlander had unconvincing swordfights, wooden Christopher Lambert, flamboyant Sean Connery, and Queen. Somehow it still more or less worked. Romancing the Stone was no Raiders of the Lost Ark then or now, but mostly entertaining nevertheless and Kathleen Turner was smoking hot.

As I said at the time: truly, a decade among decades!