Junior Bonner
3 out of 5



Still recovering from being thrown from a bull called Sunshine, Junior Bonner is on his way home to join his family for the annual Frontier Days Rodeo. However, when he arrives, he finds his house abandoned and his father, Ace (Robert Preston) in hospital. Determined to prove that he still has all the makings of a champion, Junior challenges Sunshine once again but this time he is determined to beat the bull so that his father's dream of building a ranch in Australia can become a reality.

Junior Bonner is an uneven film that by the end might seem inconsequential, but you have to appreciate its considerable style, especially with some of the awesome touches Peckinpah brings and the great cast. On the other hand, the director did surprise me with occasional clumsiness, including the dated split screen titles that make it look like a TV movie and a cheesy freeze frame montage at the end.

But let’s focus on the good. Steve McQueen is great in this Autumnal, melancholy role and the chemistry with Robert Preston as his rebellious dad, Ace, is just wonderful. If you don’t know Preston, he looks like Joel McCrea and sounds like Burt Lancaster, with cheek to match either of them.

The dialogue is probably the best part of the production. It’s full of zingers, perfectly styled to the characters, yet has an understated realistic pitch. The whole thing has a laid back style; I liked how McQueen has rivals on the rodeo circuit, but they treat each other as casual friends. There’s no silly, predictable “villain” that McQueen has to beat. Oh, hold on. That is, apart from Sunshine. He’s the BFB...

Spoiler (hover to show)

Big Fucking Bull!

The rodeo scenes are fantastic. Peckinpah’s use of slow motion and edits is peerless. While it started like a cheap TV film and might have descended into a pseudo documentary where the second unit just wandered around a real event getting stock footage, the tournament scenes have breathtaking power and lift it up a notch. Plus the lighter hearted “Milking” event is both very funny and impressively staged. Add in a classy cowboy barroom brawl, a lively cast, a poignant story and you have a passable couple of hours. And the film might keep coming back to you, despite its humble nature. Another overview I read claimed this was Peckinpah's favourite film of his own. While I think it is far from his best, I can well believe it. It has a good heart.

The Road
4 out of 5



Academy Award® nominee Viggo Mortensen leads an all star cast including Guy Pearce, Academy Award® winners Robert Duvall and Charlize Theron and an incredible debut performance from Kodi Smit-McPhee. THE ROAD is a thrilling and deeply moving tale of survival as a father and his young son journey across a barren, post apocalyptic America. Respectfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy's hallowed novel, THE ROAD boldly imagines a future in which men are pushed to the worst and the best that they are capable of — a future in which a father and his son are sustained by love.

As post-apocalyptic stories go, there are no films quite like The Road. For one thing, we have no idea what caused the apocalypse or why it was so devastating. The world is completely dead and broken and there is no infrastructure at all. It doesn’t seem remotely retrievable. Survivors are just that and nothing more. There are no aliens to regroup against and fight; no Nirvana of a hippy commune to get to where a crude society is rebuilding. The man and his son keep moving (heading for the coast is their loose aim), scavenging for food wherever they can and avoiding the gangs of cannibals who are brutal and ruthless.

John Hillcoat, directing an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s bestseller (as he did for McCarthy’s The Proposition), delivers a relentlessly bleak looking film that is brought to life by the performances of a dedicated cast. It’s a strong realisation of a dying world...

[Please read the rest of the review at Find-DVD.co.uk]

Thanks, KC. Well worth seeing.

When Mark Kermode reviewed Precious, they had a quick chat with the director about depressing movies and seemed to conclude, there is no such thing. If you think about it, you'd have to be one screwed up bastard to go to the trouble of telling a story for two hours, just so your audience is as miserable as you! There is always something to learn and if you get to the end of a film and all you feel depressed, it's worth thinking it through and considering why. May be something you missed.

With The Road, so long as you go into it not expecting a plot and you concentrate on the central pair, it becomes clear. From the start, the fact there is no apocalypse shown or explained, just the peripheral effect, is very important. It's a story about survival, not rebuilding.

The Untouchables
5 out of 5



The critics and public agree Brian De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES is a must see masterpiece - a glorious, fierce larger-than-life depiction of the mob warlord who ruled Prohibition-era Chicago...and the law enforcer who vowed to bring him down. This classic confrontation between good and evil stars Kevin Costner as federal agent Eliot Ness, Robert De Niro as gangland kingpin Al Capone and Sean Connery as Malone, the cop who teaches Ness how to beat the mob: shoot fast and shoot first.


If The Untouchables was released today, chances are you’d ask what comic it was based on. A serious historical story, played with an exuberant panache for audacious entertainment, it is possibly Brian De Palma’s finest work, with him channelling cinema heritage to produce a modern Gangster movie, in the way L.A. Confidential would do for Film Noir ten or so years later.

You might accuse it of naivety, which would be fair in several respects, but it’s played so smoothly and without a shred of shame that you get swept up in the enthusiasm of setting a Western in Chicago and there are moments that are truly magnificent. This is old school cinema.

De Palma is being rude, really. He has at least three iconic moments in one film, which is just greedy! Not least the baby’s pram and the train station steps, which prove the magic of unpredictability in film. That scene was supposed to be a big train crash, but running low on cash, they needed a quick replacement. One tribute to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin later and we have an exhilarating lesson in action cinema.

Everyone is well cast, with Kevin Costner finding a perfect role for his movie star image in Elliot Ness, Andy Garcia with the world at his feet before Godfather Part III (oops) and Charles Martin Smith having great fun as Wallace. He said to De Palma that he wanted to embody the audience. As a shotgun wielding accountant, whooping as he rides horseback into a gunfight on a bridge, he definitely did that! Sean Connery rounds out Ness’ Untouchables in his most memorable non-Bond role. He is fantastic and the best of the lot, despite his wavering accent! Of course, Robert De Niro was born to play Capone. The “baseball” scene at dinner is just incredible.

It is sporadically violent throughout and I miss this sort of Brian De Palma film because he demonstrates such old fashioned skill in building these set-pieces that the violence is never gratuitous. He balances the brutality with suspense to make Hitchcock proud. The station steps, again, are a perfect example of this. The way the pram wheels squeak, pulling our attention during Costner’s slow-mo gauntlet run is very clever.

The whole production is brought together by the brilliant Morricone score. Brilliant though the film is, the music is half the winning formula. The four Untouchables, striding into a post office on a liquor raid, brandishing shotguns, while the music swells like a fifth member of the team, is an abiding memory.

I wouldn't give Untouchables a perfect score either. The biggest detractor for me was Kevin Costner who churned out another movie from his 'pretentious' phase where he felt it incumbent upon himself to grace us all with portrayals of people with historical significance... Wyatt Earp, Robin Hood, Jim Garrison, Elliot Ness et al. His acting in those films, while good, was delivered with a certain amount of arrogance that just rubs me the wrong way.

I thought Andy Garcia was rather subdued in Untouchables when compared to many of his later films. De Niro was more of a ham, whooping it up as Capone in a role that I think was a bit of a guilty pleasure for him. Sean Connery was solid, likable and deserving of the Oscar he received. For me the star was Charles Martin Smith as the cherubic accountant who suddenly has a shotgun thrust in his hand and swells in confidence tenfold. 

I'd give it 4 out of 5... just.

Interesting. You seem to have all focused your faults of The Untouchables on the actors, yet in a film like this they hardly matter. It's so broad, they merely have to turn up, hit their marks and be efficient. Hence my comments it was "well cast" and "naive" (in a good way).

But to take your points:


Garcia: agreed; De Niro: agreed. Why does that detract from their characters? The Untouchables was the first film I saw either of them in. Garcia was a cocky gunman, but he played it quiet so he fit in, and De Niro was just scary as hell. Even now that explosion of violence is astonishing. He is definitely a caricature, but that was what was intended and it fit the story and the reasons I wanted to watch it. If he has failed to find his Godfather II/Taxi Driver mojo since, that is a problem worth criticising, but right then, it was a perfect choice.

I like Scarface, but find it overrated. It doesn't have this films enthusiasm.


I agree with your last point absolutely, but I will never understand the level of criticism Costner got. I don't find him remotely pretentious or arrogant. Off-camera, yes, but never on. He's no Steve McQueen, but I enjoy his movies and always felt sorry for him. Some people decided they didn't like him from act one and were waiting for 'inevitable' failure. Waterworld/The Postman happened and they have been used to bury him. Most actors are afforded one cock-up or two, but he's been considered untouchable (see what I did there? ) by the studios ever since. Shame. He didn't deserve that. As it is, he's fine as Ness. Nothing special that someone else couldn't have done, but... good enough.

...

In any film I rate 5/5, I am not looking for perfection (which is incredibly rare), I'm looking at a four star film that didn't put a foot wrong and did that little bit extra to make it unique. 5/5 simply means it did what it set out to do, can't be repeated and a niggling sense that everyone involved kind of realised and upped their game. You've all talked about things you don't like in the film (mainly the actors), but should they be judged mistakes? I think not. Plus just as you use personal preference to mark it down, I use it to mark it up. I think I've justified it, but the bottom line is, I could watch it again right now.

In other words, every film I have ever rated 5/5 at some point was good enough to make me forget I was simply watching any old film, cause a goosebump or two, and never made me groan in disappointment.

So what is the little bit of extra push? Why can't it be repeated? Costner, Garcia... good enough. But there's only one Sean Connery and he isn't rushing to make a film like this again. And how many times can a film convince us that an accountant is a shotgun cowboy? That role was a one-off.

It was made in a certain style that nowadays is only handled so well by comics. To pull off a film like that in the 80s was special. Some of De Palma's other work fits that bill too, but doesn't have the pace and confidence of The Untouchables. Plus you have unnecessary touches he always uses. He could get away with less, but the Orson Welles depth of field trick or his regular uses of the "Creeper" or top down shots add to the craft. Actually, he's overdone them since, probably why we see so little of him.

The movie peaks several times: the lift scene, the stairs sequence and Connery's apartment ("you Dago bastard!"). In between there are several more worthy of mention. This is action cinema not only at its best, but setting the bar very high. There have been other films since with arguably better staged set-pieces, but films with three or four of that standard in one? Nah. The last truly great pure action movie was The Bourne Ultimatum, but that has a relentless style that doesn't afford contrast like De Palma uses.

An then there's the score. You could get away with using anything and it might be considered good enough. But Morricone is a huge contribution. Again, a special something.

Let's try and put it in perspective. This is the only film of De Palma's I would rate so high. This is one of two, maybe at a push, three, Costner films I would rate so high.

Remember, I consider films an optimistic art form so I don't look for faults, they have to find me. And a good portion of why I watch films at all is down to film-makers who simply want to entertain. That's what gets me to films like Bicycle Thieves or Vertigo or There Will Be Blood (review coming soon!) or anything you might consider more worthy.

I understand why you rate that way. I guess it all boils down to this...

I respect your opinion when it comes to film, but I feel that you do yourself a disservice by rating films in this manner. If someone joins this forum or reads your blog and you rate a film such as this (a film I would be hard pressed to rate above 4) with the same rating as Ikiru, Casablanca or M, and they watch and it doesn't live up to the quality of the films I've mentioned, then you lose credibility with that person in any further review you write.

I spend a lot of time reading reviews all around the web, (Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic) but I find most of the reviewers to be either condescending or pretentious. You on the other hand, are like me, a person who watches films purely for entertainment value. I enjoy reading your opinions on a film, and place a lot of stock into what you see, but it disappoints me when the prose is well written, but the rating has no sense of balance when compared to other films in that particular genre or other exceptional films in cinematic history.

I know that I could easily name 10 films in the gangster genre, and probably an additional 5 more that are better than this film. There has to be balance when someone is going to put the effort into writing film reviews, so that the reader has some way of discerning what is the cream of the crop or something good that doesn't quite reach that strata.

Maybe we write reviews for a different purpose, but foremost in my mind when I write one, is to have a person who reads it and watches the film say...He's right, I'll trust his judgment on further films.