Three Films Make A Post: No man left behind.

Life After Fighting (2024): Lead actor/martial artist/director/producer Bren Foster’s directorial debut climaxes in forty minutes or so of incredibly impressive martial arts madness of the naturalistic, bone-crunching style, presented in a direct and visceral way. To get there, you have to work your way through eighty minutes or so of much too slow build-up, pointless side-plots, and scenes that – in classic indie tradition - never seem to want to end when they really should have ended minutes ago.

I do appreciate Foster’s willingness to go slow and actually ground his character emotionally – this certainly beats the “egomaniac martial arts asshole” you always fear in this kind of project – but there’s providing the ground for things, and then there’s scenes crawling by at a snail’s pace for no good reason.

The Heroin Busters aka La via della droga (1977): This Enzo G. Castellari joint with Fabio Testi (playing a character named Fabio in case he forgets) and David Hemmings as cops (well, Hemmings is playing an Interpol agent) on a rampage starts out pretty slow as well, but it doesn’t take more than half of its running time to gather its speed. Once it dies get going, there’s no holding its series of probably highly dangerous to stunt people action sequences back for even a second. There’s a manic, dangerous energy to Castellari’s action at its best, and here, he holds that level for the whole last act of the film, while doing much less feet-dragging than Foster’s movie before.

Land of Bad (2024): Despite the military-based version of the action film being my least favourite type – I dislike some of the sub-genre’s inherent assumptions even less so than those of vigilante films – it is difficult to find fault with the way William Eubank and a game bunch of actors (several Hemsworths, Ricky Whittle and Milo Ventimiglia in an actually good performance, as well Russell Crowe chewing scenery delightfully as the Man in the Chair) present a series of theoretically tired old clichés. In a style I find by now typical of Eubank, he leaves no cent of the budget not visible on screen, so there’s an always entertaining series of gunplay, explosions, unarmed combat and more explosions shown off in the most effective manner possible.

The character bits are clichéd but also just work, so there’s enough emotional backing to the violence. If you squint and look at the film in the right light, you might also see it as a mild critique of the detached ways of modern technological warfare in some scenes, of course in between the film milking modern technological warfare for the funnest possible action.

Past Misdeeds: The Squeeze (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Not to be confused with the surprising number of other films called The Squeeze.

Former Scotland Yard inspector Jim Naboth (Stacy Keach) has just gotten out of what clearly wasn't the first rehab stay after a drunken binge, taken his first drink again, and returned home to his two kids who inexplicably are still in his custody, when he learns from her second husband Foreman (Edward Fox) that his ex-wife Jill (Carol White) and her and Foreman's little daughter Christine (Alison Portes) have disappeared.

Both have been kidnapped by Keith (David Hemmings) and other henchmen of Irish would-be upper class gangster Vic (Stephen Boyd) to use them to blackmail Foreman. Foreman, you see, owns a bank (I think, he may also just own the security business), and Vic and his men are planning to use him to get into one of his security vans that should be loaded with about a million pound sterling, which is nothing to sneeze at by late 70s standards.

Accompanied by his thief friend Teddy (Freddie Starr) - who attempts to keep the ex-cop sober and out of trouble with particular enthusiasm - Naboth drunkenly stumbles through the seedy parts of London looking for Jill and Christine. Naboth's always just one step from one kind of humiliation or the other, but also a surprisingly effective investigator when the alcohol haze gets a bit thinner.

If you ask me, then Michael Apted's The Squeeze is one of the unsung greats of British crime cinema of the 70s. It's not quite on the level of Get Carter or The Long Good Friday, but not quite being one of the best films of its era and genre doesn't mean it's not pretty fantastic.

At this point in his career, before a curious and rough Hollywood career that contains a Bond movie as well as Oscar-baiting melodramas, Apted had predominantly worked for British television with quite a few TV movies under his belt, and one can't help but suspect that he enjoyed going all out with the grime and the violence for the cinema in The Squeeze. Stylistically, Apted's film opts for grainy hyper-realism, showing London as a cesspool of ugliness and poverty that is from time to time lit up by acts of random human kindness. There's a lot of nervy hand camera work (that still is steadier than most of the footage you'd find in a POV horror film from our decade), grain, and locations of a particular shade of grey - with a bit of cheaply garish colour from time to time - on display that make the mood of seediness particularly thick. On the other hand, Apted doesn't lay it on too thick: The Squeeze is a film taking place in locations that are ugly and quite unpleasant yet still feel believably lived in.

It seems like a somewhat curious casting decision to find someone as American as Stacy Keach playing a former London copper, and Keach's ropey accent that seems to come and go as it pleases sure doesn't help there, but once you've watched his performance here for a quarter of an hour or so, you start to ignore the accent, and become impressed by the raw truthfulness of Keach's performance. The actor is clearly channelling some of his own experiences here, and portrays Naboth's vulnerability, his loss of dignity, his lack of responsibility in all their ugliness without ever turning him into a caricature. Paradoxically, Keach's portrayal of Naboth's lack of dignity is so strong it effectively returns that dignity to the character.

The rest of the cast is equally strong, particularly comedian Freddie Starr in a not at all comical role, and Carol White going through some of the film's theoretically most exploitative moments and turning them into the exact opposite.

There is - obviously - a strong gay undercurrent in the relationship between Starr's Teddy and Keach's Naboth (just look at the scenes of Teddy interrupting Keach and his nurse girlfriend during sex), yet the film resists either turning Teddy into a tragic gay or making fun of him. I read this as a deeply ingrained respect for human difference you don't generally expect to find in a violent crime movie, or at least as an expression of the film's disinterest in judging its characters.

That unwillingness of judging characters for anything is particularly interesting and uncommon in a film that pulls as few punches as The Squeeze does. This is a film where violence is inelegant, undignified, and disgusting, and that doesn't flinch from showing even a seemingly sane gangster like Hemmings's Keith having no trouble at all being cruel to children, pressing a woman into a forced striptease with following rape (or at least non-consensual sex, depending on your interpretation of the word), nor with anything else that helps him keep his feeling of control. Consequently, the "bad guys" should be really easy to hate, but Apted's direction doesn't seem interested at all in making the audience hate them or anyone else, really. At the same time, the director clearly has just as little interest in wallowing in the characters' base actions as he in excusing them. He shows them but he sure as hell does neither enjoy them nor want his audience to (and the film's main sympathies in these scenes are always with the victims). It's just that not showing the disgusting details would be dishonest, and The Squeeze is a film all about being truthful to its audience, at least as far as it understands the truth.


At the same time, Apted also avoids the feeling of nihilism that could very easily follow this approach. There's simply too much compassion in every shot and every scene of The Squeeze to call it a nihilist film.

On Exploder Button: The Squeeze (1977)

Did you know Michael Apted once was one hell of a director who made one of the hidden gems of UK 70s crime movies? I sure didn't until a few weeks ago, when I watched The Squeeze, and found myself confronted with a great and gritty crime movie that somehow still manages to be humanist.

I go into more detail in my column over on Exploder Button.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,michael apted,crime,stacy keach,david hemmings,edward fox,stephen boyd,carol white,freddie starr

Three Films Make A Post: A HORROR HORDE OF CRAWL-AND-CRUSH GIANTS CLAWING OUT OF THE EARTH FROM MILE-DEEP CATACOMBS!

The Hunger Games (2012): As someone who hasn't read the book (YA in general is not meant for me, what with me being older than time and liking writers who use complex language), I don't have an opinion on the quality of Gary Ross's film as an adaptation of it. But I do recognize a confidently clever piece of dystopian SF when I see it, appreciate a film that's tighter directed than it seems to be on first look (seldom has blockbuster Hollywood been less showy while using the untold millions in its budget for production design good), and respect how script and film transform everyday experiences of its main target audience into action and drama on screen without having to betray that element for the SF, nor the SF for that element. Add to that another great (and appropriately physical) performance by Jennifer Lawrence and you'll see me all aflutter about a film.

The Survivor (1981): The IMDB (not the most trustworthy of sources, of course) says there exists a twenty minutes longer version of David Hemmings's film, which - if true - may just be the version that makes good on all the film's promises, as made by the often moody direction and a very good cast including Robert Powell, Jenny Agutter, and a ridiculously unnecessary Joseph Cotten. Unfortunately, the version I've seen is just terribly undercooked with no characterization to speak of and a plot that seems too fragmentary for words; it really does feel as if all the connecting tissue of the story were missing, with characters appearing and disappearing from the plot at random, and no sense of progression. That sort of thing can work if a film is so weird the lack of normal narrative connectivity actually feels more fitting, but in The Survivor's case, it just leaves a hole where the film's core should be.

Paprika (2006): Generally, I'm not as excited about the body of work of anime director/writer Satoshi Kon as many of my peers are. The high aesthetic and technical standards of the man's films are of course out of the question. However, I've always felt uncomfortable with the way the Kon uses pop culture to express his loathing of popular culture, even more so with the cloying nostalgia for a stagnant past that seems to underlie most of his films, even if the result is as difficult to resist as anime giallo Perfect Blue. Basically, Kon put his incredible talent in service of a conservatism that makes it impossible for me to get too excited about his films. Ironically and sadly, Kon's final finished movie sees the director changing his tune. Here, the film's designated bad guy is sprouting exactly the sort of ideology usually underlying the director's films; here, the possibility of change and a humanism in Kon's earlier works have become core values. This change of mind is packed into a SF story in techno thriller mode about the manipulation of dreams, the mutability of identity and dream-images as striking as one could wish for, always hinting at a richness and depth the Kon is actually willing and able to provide.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,australian movies,japanese movies,sf,horror,anime,jennifer lawrence,gary ross,satoshi kon,david hemmings,jenny agutter