Monday, June 11, 2012

A pair '80's movies I missed back in the day

I remember vividly when this film came out in the early 1980's:
It was hailed as a great film with a superb cast.  It rightfully made a star out of Bob Hoskins.  And it brought even more acclaim to Helen Mirren.  And having finally seen it for the first time yesterday, I can say it's a pretty good film and Mirren and Hoskins are pretty great in it.

The film tells the story of how a London mobster, played by Hoskins, who calls his gang 'The Corporation,' loses it all on one fateful Good Friday.   It's pretty tame by today's standards and it's leisurely paced, but in spite of that it's still a good well told gangster story.  The clothes are a hoot, the guys wear these crazy tight high waisted pants and some of Helen Mirren's hairdos are just plain crazy, but those things only add to the charm.  The only problem I had with the film was they portrayed the gay character as sexually voracious and out for only one thing, sex.  I was kind of surprised that they included a gay character at all, which is why it disappointed me greatly when they made him so one dimensional.

I recommend this film.

The same can't be said of this piece of cinematic shit:

I remember when this turkey came out as well.  It was written about rapturously and highly regarded by film journalists, especially those who wrote for Film Comment and other like minded film mags.  I was single at the time and the only 'woman' I had any sexual dealings with was Rosie Palmer so I felt like I needed to see this because I was in the same boat as the film maker, a guy looking for love and sex.

The film is documentary that is supposed to be about General Sherman's march to the sea during the Civil war.  But because the film maker is such a whiny needy twat struck jackass, it's really about his pathetic search for a hot girlfriend.  He wants you to think he's a good guy who gets jilted by women and will be alone forever, but in reality, he was surrounded by women and he was having loads of sex with some of them.  What he really wanted, aside from attention, was a hot woman, a woman he could show off, one that made him look like a huge stud.  And his neuroses about nuclear war, give me a fucking break.  He has dreams about nuclear war, after seeing this film I have dreams about him living in a house that gets hit when they do drop a nuke.

I hate this film.  HATED IT.  I had no female companionship through most of the '80's, I however didn't make a misleading film about it.  I lived under the threat of nuclear war, I however didn't obsess over, and in fact, I never worried all that much about it because I knew we'd never be stupid enough to launch our missiles.  I knew I'd find someone and I knew the Russians weren't the people our propaganda made them out to be.  In addition to hating this film and the guy who made it, I hated most of the women he was with, except for the would be actress in the first part of the film and the woman who lives on the island off the coast of Georgia who dumped him during the making of this film, they both had the right idea, get as far away from the film maker as they can get.

Avoid this one, it needs to stay back where it came from, the mid '80's.

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