Japanese Story (Fri 7 845P) is an Australian landscape movie starring Toni Collette. The film builds good momentum but doesn’t quite finish with quite the impact that I’m sure the filmmakers were hoping for.
“Play it again Sam” and so they have : Casablanca (Sat 9 130P). “Last night we said a great many things. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. Little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
Proof of Life (Sat 9 930P) is okay as far as action plots go where hostage-release expert (Russell Crowe) comes to the aid of damsel in distress (Meg Ryan) after her husband (David Morse) is kidnapped by South American guerillas. Not one of Rusty’s better roles frankly and the spark between him and Ryan hardly lights the heart of your cockles.
I saw the first half of Jarmusch’s Night On Earth (Wed SBS 10P) at La Trobe Uni. many years ago and didn’t see the second half because it bored me stupid. Hardly a ringing endorsement is it ? Conversations between five taxi drivers and their rides across five cities in one night. Following through on my commitment to this Jarmusch experiment I will saddle up and report back in due course.
Movie of the week is without doubt Jackie Chan’s Project A Part II (Thu SBS 1030P). Part I was on two weeks ago and this was full of Chan’s cheek, physical humour and acrobatics. From one review source : “Part II follows the dictum [with respect to Part I] of being ‘the same, only bigger,’ and it is here that one finds Chan at the peak of his powers as a filmmaker, a choreographer, and a martial artist, when he was still young, fast and agile.”
2 comments:
I actually quite enjoyed Proof of Life, not a bad movie. Once again GG has nailed it - the chemistry between Rusty and Ryan is pretty bad. But it didn't ruin my enjoyment of the movie at all.
Project A Part II is Jackie Chan at his absolute best. If you've seen any of Jackie's US movies (sorry, all of them completely suck), watch this one and see why he's so famous. The jokes, plot, acting and action are all great! I even own the thing on VCD :) Some of the best bits are sadly lost in translation - there's quite a few jokes where he puts on a stupid accent, but of course it's pretty difficult to tell by just reading the subtitles. Pay attention to the plot otherwise you might get a bit lost !
I just wanted to critique Japanese Story for the benefit of your loyal audience. It was terrible. Terrible. Really terrible. It has an inane title for starters. Why Japanese Story? And the clichéd Japanese stereotypes! My goodness me. You know, I have met some real live Japanese people and they are nothing like that in real life. I think the Iron Chef is more realistic. The direction was boring- it looked like a cut-price tele-movie made in the early 1980s. The product placement for BHP Billiton and Hertz rent-a-car was almost as distracting as the shameless Pepsi promotion in T2. It was schmaltzy, melodramatic, unbelievable and, worst of all, dreary. If this is the sort of soporific claptrap that wins truckloads of AFI awards then I eagerly await the return of Yahoo Serious to the arena of Australian filmmaking. And, in a cheap shot I admit, the only things uglier than Toni Collete's face are her breasts.
Oh, and did I say it was terrible?
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