You're a nice guy but I'm going to trash your lights

Nice guy Christian Bale is recorded laying into Terminator Salvation's director of photography for apparently dancing into the background of one of his scenes.

Eastwood’s dumbest character – The Gauntlet

If I was to give any credit to Clint Eastwood’s action-thriller “The Gauntlet” it would be for its poster. One of those cartoon-like depictions of a very un-cartoon-like film. Designed by the late artist Frank Fazetta, the poster depicts heroic alpha male Clint Eastwood protecting pretty blonde prostitute Sandra Locke from a haze of bullets. Fazetta’s artistry is amongst my favourite film artwork along with famed poster designer Drew Struzan.


But other than the poster there isn’t a lot to recommend about Eastwood’s 1977 film. He’s not yet the accomplished director of “Unforgiven”, or later “Million Dollar Baby” and “Gran Torino”, and he’s lumbered with Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack’s imbecilic script that beggars belief with every gun shot – and there’s A LOT of gun shots!

It’s a fun movie – fast-paced, humorous here and there; Sandra Locke is fittingly vivacious, Clint Eastwood is assuredly macho. But it all feels like a collection of ideas without a ‘whole’ to bring it all together. And it’s decidedly stupid.

For starters, the first half of the film has Locke hiding facts from Eastwood even though there is absolutely no reason to. Even more stoopidly Eastwood keeps ringing his boss to tell him his exact whereabouts even though he knows he’s being set-up. And, for some reason, even though everyone else knows it, Eastwood can’t work out it’s his boss that’s stabbing him in the back until someone explains it to him. Could this be Eastwood’s dumbest character ever?

When the two main characters are on the run, Eastwood hands Locke his gun. She looks at it for a second. She looks at the handle, the gun barrel, the hole at the end where bullets come out and says: “What’s that?” Yes, she really asks Clint Eastwood, while staring at the gun he’s handing to her: “What’s that?” With no hint of irony, Eastwood explains: “It’s a gun.” He is explaining this to a woman who later calls him a “.45 calibre fruit”, a telling remark that alludes to the fact she not only has knowledge of what a gun is, but also recognises the different types of ammunition they use. Hey there screenwriters Butler and Shryack – you’ve got a plot hole…and it’s not the only one!

Within seconds of this moment with the gun, a car trailing the pair shoots at them, cracking the rear window. Guess what Locke says? You got it! “What’s that,” she asks, like she’s just exited the womb. A bullet has just left a BULLET HOLE in the rear window. She is holding a gun. She knows they are being pursued by very bad guys – she posed naked for one of them for goodness sake! Yet, she can’t comprehend a gun shot in anger. Blimey!

Can it get worse?

…of course it can!

Eastwood and Locke run the gauntlet in a bus they have attached steel plates to in order to protect them from bullets. The steel is cocooned around the driver’s seat where they are situated. I wondered why they hadn’t also covered the tyres since these would be easy prey for a wily cop. Then I realised why they hadn’t bothered. It’s because the stupid cops in this stupid movie don’t shoot at tyres to stop a vehicle. They shoot every other part of a bus, apart from the tyres. They also shoot the middle and back of the bus where they can plainly see no one resides.

What’s even worse is how the cops are situated at either side of the road, presumably to offer an impenetrable defensive line. It doesn’t work but yet what is more disturbing is how these ‘intelligent’ officers of the law will fire bullets into a bus without a thought about the bullets either missing or shooting straight through the bus and hitting their fellow police officers on the other side. Stupid, stupid, stupid!

…and that’s not going into the whole helicopter-sniper-motorbike escape fiasco. How our intrepid protagonists survive this little encounter is beyond me. There’s a moment when Eastwood goes off-road to escape the helicopter when doing so will undoubtedly slow the bike down on uneven and unpredictable desert land But never mind – it’s only a movie (with no concept of plot logic).

The film is literally littered with improbable plot points, a complete lack of logic, and holes the size of the Grand Canyon. But I can’t say I disliked it. If trashy B-movies won Oscars, this would be a Best Film contender. With scenes like the silly but suitably overplayed stealing of the chopper from the wild hogs and Locke’s brilliantly sadistic retort to being hounded by a cop about being a prostitute, the film has enough moments of simple delight to merit a viewing…or even two.

Strange Conversation says: 5/10

Is Sideways the best film of the last ten years...?

...yes!

After much deliberation and many arguments (which took place in my head between my alternate personalities and my imaginary friend) I can finally reveal my top 50 films of the last decade.

It was difficult to leave some films off the list, and even harder to order the films into what I think are placings that they deserve.

Please head on over to Top10Films and check out the Top 50. Don't leave without a comment - let me know what your favourite film of the decade was.

Alfie - the unsung hero of Serpico

What keeps the passion burning in Serpico? The man who wants to clean up the streets, who thinks it'll be straight forward if only he could get rid of the corrupt cops taking bribes off all these bad guys?

It isn't the women in his life that keep him going. They don't even clean the house while his slugging his guts at work all day. All he wants to do is come home to a CLEAN HOUSE!

Who keeps him going? ALFIE of course! His four-legged friend!


The meet and greet

Growing up: Out on the town

Who is with him in the end? Who does director Sidney Lumet have at the centre of his camera lens in the final shot? Who keeps Serpico's passion burning? ALFIE!

The many faces of Kristen Stewart

Public announcement: I am actually quite fond of Miss Stewart...

...but she sure does need some happy pills!


With that vampire guy. She looks...erm...preoccupied




Go on, Kristen, give us a smile!

Oh...this might help!

David S. Goyer takes another step towards the worst Hollywood director award with The Unborn

Oh dear. Poor Odette Yustman has only gone and killed her twin brother with her own umbilical cord. The dead foetus has now come back from the dead as the reincarnated spirit of some other dead twin, and is now hell bent on making Odette’s life miserable. Can Rabbi Gary Oldman save her life, Father Karras-style, with a much needed exorcism? I think that’s the story. It’s something along those lines anyway. It doesn’t matter, you will have switched it off long before Oldman makes it to the screen. Don’t worry, he looks as miserable to be there as you’ll be feeling after watching this piece of crap.

The weirdest thing about David S. Goyer’s “The Unborn” is not its supernatural subject matter or that it calls the Regan character a dybbuk, it’s the fact it isn’t based on a east-Asian original. Unfortunately for an unsuspecting audience, Goyer has simply based it on his favourite American horror movies. “The Unborn” is basically two well-known and much better movies. It’s firstly Stephen King’s “The Dark Half” and secondly William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist”. You’ll be hurtling popcorn at the screen when the film simply rips scenes straight out of these movies. The silly spider walk may cause those who haven’t seen the longer cut of “The Exorcist” to just laugh at the stupidity of it. Everyone else will sign deeply at the total lack of originality.

“The Unborn” has only one saving grace – a scantily clad Odette Yustman prancing about the place in between attacks from the ‘other side’ - and it’s hardly something to recommend the film with.

Strange Conversation says: 1/10

Tom Cruise is the American English-speaking German in Bryan Singer's Valkyrie

It must be hard making a tension-filled thriller when the audience knows what’s going to happen in the end. That was the task given to the once wonder-child Bryan Singer (the guy that gave us the brilliant “Usual Suspects”) whose career has, in this reviewer’s eyes, tailed off into commerciality over quality. A string of Superhero hits has gone to the head of Singer, and while talented writer and friend Christopher McQuarrie pens new film “Valkyrie”, Singer’s endeavour into the true story of Claus von Stauffenberg’s attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler is a laboured and dull affair.

The film follows the exploits of Stauffenberg’s disillusioned army lieutenant who has reservations (to say the least) about Hitler’s Germany. After losing his right hand, his left eye, and several fingers on his left hand in a bombing raid by allied fighter planes, he joins an underground resistance movement made up of high-level army personnel and civilians. They decide they must assassinate Hitler and assume control of the government. They can then enter into a truce with the allies and end the war.

The first thing that must be said is these conspirators were brave souls who put their lives on the line to end the war and Hitler’s regime. It is also an important historical story, just as it is an example of human courage. But it is also an American movie made for western audiences. It stinks of hypocrisy. It takes its audience as an ignorant mass, incapable of believing Germany’s population during World War II could harbour any thoughts beyond Nazi doctrine and a hatred for all non-Aryans. That’s the film’s central conceit: it says – did you know, believe it or not, there were some people in Germany who didn’t throw stones at the Jews.

I was constantly thrown out of the movie by the chosen language and accents of the actors. Fair enough, telling the film entirely in German with either little known German actors or American/British actors speaking the native tongue of the country, isn’t commercially viable. But, Singer has his actors speaking English in what appears to be their own accent. What we get are Americans and Brits, dressed up in Nazi uniform, speaking English in American and British accents, telling the story of one of Germany’s most powerful anti-Nazi uprisings. It threw me out of the movie. Christian Berkel, a German by birth who plays Quirnheim in the film, does give us something of his roots in his English diction, but again, it gives the story a false sense of insecurity. There’s a congregation of different accents that neither place you here or there. Are we in Germany (as the uniforms would suggest), or are we in a Cornish English town or the American mid-west?

The film starts sluggishly but its best moments occur in the first half when the conspirators are building their army and deciding on the course of action. Tom Cruise is serviceable in the role of Stauffenberg but it’s only a version of his Ethan Hunt character from “Mission: Impossible”. Singer’s control of the main assassination attempt is good – it’s fast paced and hectic – but little additions such as Cruise nearly being caught at the guard post after delivering the bomb remind you that you are watching a piece of Hollywood entertainment.

“Valkyrie” has an important story to tell. It’s a story of courage and pro-action. But it’s a hypocritical film that gives its audience little respect. These brave men (and women) should be remembered, but for the right reasons. We don’t need a glossy, Hollywood product to tell us not all of Germany was ‘bad’ during the war. Or perhaps, more saddening, Hollywood has cottoned on to the fact we do.

Strange Conversation says: 3/10