Favourite Films #5: Casablanca

I'm a history buff. Of course I'm going to have one of the greatest films ever made on this list. And it still holds up even today.

The film takes place in 1941, mere days before the attack on Pearl Harbour. The city of Casablanca is filled with refugees from all over Europe, hoping to escape to the still-neutral United States, while trying to avoid the Vichy French authorities and their German masters, along with the numerous criminals and con artists who prey on them. Amongst all this, we follow Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, a cynical American expatriate who runs an upscale gambling den and nightclub, but chooses to remain neutral in any conflicts. This all changes with the arrival of Ilsa Lund, played by Ingrid Bergman, the woman who broke Rick's heart. She's with her husband Victor Laszlo, an important leader in the resistance movement played by Paul Henreid, who's looking to escape to America to continue his work. Major Heinrich Strasser, played by Conrad Veidt, has arrived to ensure he doesn't escape, enlisting the aid of Casablanca's corrupt police chief Captain Louis Renault, played by Claude Rains.

All the main stars are excellent, with some of best dialogue in cinema - especially the snarky conversations between Rick and Louis. I think my favourite scene is the part where Strasser and a group of officers are singing Die Wacht am Rhein, and Victor orders the house band to play La Marseillaises, prompting all the patrons to out-sing the Germans. I actually get teary-eyed every time I see it - most of the actors and extras were actual refugees who had escaped the Nazis.

Great setting, great characters, great dialogue, and a truly poignant ending.

Favourite Films #6: The Grand Budapest Hotel

This is one of the most recent films on the list, but I feel that it's one which will endure. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a bizarre comedy directed by Wes Anderson, based on the writing of Austrian author Stefan Zweig.

Taking place in the fictional Central European state of Zubrowka, we follow Tony Revolori as Zero Moustapha, the new lobby boy at the eponymous hotel where he is taken under the wing of the legendary M. Gustave, the hotel's flamboyant concierge played spectacularly by Ralph Fiennes. After the sudden death of one of Gustave's wealthy "clients", Gustave inherits a valuable painting but is later implicated in her death, and must team up with Zero to prove his innocence.

I really enjoy the ensemble cast the film has, including Jeff Goldblum, Adrian Brody, Willem Dafoe, and many of Wes Anderson's regulars. They're all suitably quirky, but it's Ralph Fiennes who steals the show as Gustave. His dialogue can range from poetic and flowery to crude and foul-mouthed. As a writer, I understand that profanity loses its impact if used liberally, but Gustave is an example of someone who uses it well, especially as it contrasts his normal persona.

The story itself is rife with twists and turns, but I don't want to give away too much here. Not to mention that it can get pretty dark at times. This is supposed to be a comedy, right?

Granted, the characters are really over-the-top, but I think that works to the film's advantage. It's one I fully recommend.

Favourite Films #7: The Blues Brothers

I have a special understanding regarding musicals; they need good songs, but they also need something else to back that up. So far, the only musicals that fulfil this are Singing in the Rain and Cabaret, both of which provide interesting social commentaries and insights, and The Blues Brothers.

Based on an act from Saturday Night Live, we follow Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as the eponymous Blues Brothers, Elwood and 'Joliet' Jake - named because he is released from Joliet Prison at the beginning of the movie. Upon his release, he learns that the Catholic orphanage where both he and his brother were raised is facing closure. In order to legitimately raise the funds, the brothers embark on a "Mission from God" to resurrect their old rhythm and blues band. Unfortunately, their quest brings with it an increasing number of enemies - including the police, a neo-Nazi movement, a country/western bar owner, and a mystery woman played by Carrie Fisher.

The film has a great soundtrack, performed not just by the Blues Brothers Band themselves, but other R&B, soul, and blues musicians like Cab Calloway, Ray Charles, James Brown, and Aretha Franklin. So, we can check the box on good songs, but what else does it have? Destruction, and plenty of it. Two epic car chases (including one through a shopping mall), with additional property damage from Carrie Fisher's attempts on the brothers' lives. There's also some great chemistry between Elwood and Jake, with their bickering producing a ton of great lines.

Oh, and I did I mention that all the cars that were written off by this movie were real? No CGI here.

Favourite Films #8: Life of Brian

I would probably put The Empire Strikes Back in the #8 spot. But I've already discussed the original Star Wars trilogy on this blog. My review of The Empire Strikes Back can be found here. So, I've decided to appoint a stand in; Monty Python's Life of Brian.

This is the third feature length film to exhibit Monty Python's anarchic and surreal humour. Their first film, And Now For Something Completely Different, was simply a compilation of their best sketches from their TV show - remade with better production value. Feature number two, Monty Python and the Holy Grail was a collection of new sketches based on the Arthurian legend. However, Life of Brian is more of a single story following Graham Chapman as Brian Cohen, a Jewish boy born on Christmas Day next door to Jesus. In his adulthood, Brian joins one of the (many) (bickering) resistance groups opposed to the Roman occupation of Judea. This results in a series of misadventures culminating in Brian being mistaken for a Messiah.

When the film came out, the religious satire caused quite a stir and resulted in many religious groups condemning it as 'blasphemous'. Now, I'm not a religious man, although I attended two Church of England primary schools growing up, and my writing often takes place in settings where religion played a more prominent and important role in society. The film isn't making fun of Jesus, but rather the concept of organised religion in general.

Blasphemy aside, the film never fails to produce some great laughs, especially with the satire of left-wing British politics, personified through the resistance groups who spend more time fighting each other than the Romans.

Not to mention the opening and closing songs are hilarious and somewhat epic.

Favourite Films #9: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Anyone who has heard me read out my work or seen me at a convention knows that I have to put Indiana Jones on this list. The real difficulty was deciding whether to choose Raiders or The Last Crusade. I think my favourite's the first one.

After the successes of Star Wars and Jaws, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas put together two visions: A tribute to the old pulp serials of the 1930s and 40s, combined with the high-flying action of James Bond - no coincidence they cast Sean Connery as Indy's father in Last Crusade.

Anyway, Raiders of the Lost Ark stars Harrison Ford as the globe-trotting adventurer archaeologist Indiana Jones, who embarks on a quest to find the fabled Ark of the Covenant. Aiding him is his former love interest Marion Ravenwood, played by Karen Allen, and old friend and skilled excavator Sallah, played by John Rhys Davies. Unfortunately, the Nazis are also looking for the Ark, and have enlisted the aid of Indy's nemesis Rene Belloq, played by Paul Freeman.

What follows is some of the best action set pieces in cinema - including the iconic boulder chase at the beginning of the film. And John Williams delivers a fantastic score, ranging from eerie and atmospheric to bombastic and triumphant.

Well, since I'm here, I might as well discuss the sequels. Temple of Doom follows Indy, the club singer Willie Scott, and street urchin Short Round as they try and rescue the children of an Indian village from an ancient cult. It's not the best sequel around, as Willie is a very screamy damsel in distress and Short Round can be quite annoying sometimes. However, there is still some great action and some of the darkest moments of peril in the franchise. I can't really fault the filmmakers for wanting to make the characters a little darker and edgier, but it could have been done better in my opinion.

Last Crusade takes a softer and more lighthearted route, with Indy going after the Holy Grail while patching up his distant relationship with his father. It's a far superior sequel, for pretty much the same reasons as the first one. Harrison Ford and Sean Connery work off each other really well, especially when they're bickering.

As for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? I didn't hate it.

Favourite Films #10: Kelly's Heroes

To start the countdown, I'll go for Brian G Hutton's war film and caper, Kelly's Heroes.

Taking place in the Second World War, Clint Eastwood stars as Private Kelly, a disgraced officer serving in a motorised reconnaissance platoon. After capturing a German intelligence officer, Kelly embarks on a private mission behind enemy lines to rob a bank in a German-held town, recruiting the other members of his platoon - including Master Sergeant Big Joe, played by Telly Savalas. Also starring is Don Rickles as Staff Sergeant Crapgame, who "bankrolls" the caper with weapons and supplies, along with Donald Sutherland as Sergeant Oddball, a beatnik tank commander who invites himself into the scheme by offering armour support.

Some of the more conservative readers might take issue at a group of soldiers abandoning their sworn duties to get rich quick. Lighten up, it's a comedy. But that said, the platoon members are likeable characters and also sympathetic; The film opens with them sitting in a barn on a stormy night, facing a German counter-attack while being shelled by their own mortars. They're constantly denied decent rest periods, and their commanding officer Captain Maitland is constantly neglecting them while stealing yachts and going on shopping trips in Paris - hypocritically warning them about penalties for looting. Meanwhile, Carroll O'Connor plays Major General Colt, a gung-ho glory seeker who is hopelessly incompetent: he listens to radio reports while acting like it's sports commentary, and when he learns of the caper, he assumes it's a breakthrough.

However, it's Oddball who steals the show. Everything he says is pure comedic gold, especially when he's telling his mechanic to "knock it off with them negative waves".

The story's great, the characters are great, the action's great, and I really love the song Burning Bridges.

Anyway, I'll see you soon for my next pick.

Favourite Films

Yeah, I'm procrastinating again. But blogging still counts as writing, doesn't it? And this is The Writer's Block after all.

Back in December I did a countdown of my top ten favourite TV shows, which are among the most read posts on this blog to date. So, I figured I'd do the same thing with films over the next week or so.

This isn't an easy thing to do, as it's hard to pick films out and order them, especially because tastes change. But enough about hardships, I'll see you shortly with my first pick.

Time-wasting - Emperor

Five day working weeks can really numb a creative mind sometimes. I recently signed up to Good Old Games - where you can buy old games which have been patched to run on newer computers, and am planning to indulge in some kind of quarter-life crisis by picking up a couple of nostalgic gems.

To start it off, I picked up Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom, a city-building management game brought to us by BreakAway Games and Impression Games. The developers are apparently quite fond of historical city builders, providing similar titles like Caesar and Pharaoh, set in Ancient Rome and Ancient Egypt respectively.

Anyway, Emperor is essentially SimCity but in Ancient China. There are seven campaigns spanning from the time of the prehistoric Xia Dynasty to the medieval Song Jin Dynasty, with missions which involve building up a city, keeping your houses supplied with goods, establishing trade with other cities, and fending off whatever barbarians are looking for a fight. While these barbarians can be a problem, the game is more about managing the infrastructure of your own city rather than conquering others. Oh, but make sure you pay regular tributes to the Ancestral gods. If they get angry, bad stuff will happen.

The game can get very frustrating at times. There's nothing worse than having levelled up all your houses, only for a hemp shortage to drop them down all those levels and cause everybody to leave. Or having a trading post full of silk and carved jade collapse because a salamander wandered into the road and killed the building inspector.

Yeah, there's a lot of micromanagement involved, but that's what makes the game immersive. You can grind away so many hours on just one mission - especially if there's a monument involved. And despite the game's age, the visuals are stunning.

Now maybe I can resist the temptation to start the next campaign.

Western Weekends - The Searchers

It was only a matter of time before John Wayne was going to be mentioned. Mainly because I've only seen two of his films: Stagecoach and The Searchers. And The Searchers is definitely an impressive one, based on a book by Alan LeMay.

John Wayne plays Ethan Edwards, a former Confederate soldier who unexpectedly shows up at his brother's homestead in west Texas with a large quantity of freshly-minted gold coins and a Mexican campaign medal, leaving everyone to speculate about what he got up to in the three years since the Civil War ended. After he's recruited by the Texas Rangers to hunt rustlers, a band of Comanches burn the farm, killing Ethan's family and abducting his niece Debbie. Soon, Ethan becomes determined to go after them, accompanied only by his part-Cherokee adopted nephew Martin Pawley, played by Jeffrey Hunter. However, it's clear that both men have conflicting goals; Martin wants to save Debbie while Ethan just wants to kill some Comanches.

Yeah, you heard me right. I believe that this is one of the first westerns to explore the racism against Native Americans which went on at that time. Not to mention that Ethan is certainly no heroic figure. He shoots retreating foes in the back, he desecrates corpses in the hopes he can hurt them in the afterlife, and enjoys killing bison in the hopes it will deprive his enemies of food supplies. For 1956, that's quite impressive.

People regard this film as a masterpiece, and I suppose they're right. Edwards isn't likeable, but he's nonetheless compelling. You have to wonder what can drive someone to become so jaded that he tries to abandon his humanity. It's implied that he has strong feelings for his brother's wife, but there's nothing concrete. And some of the scenes have a lasting impact - such as when he returns to the homestead to find it in flames. One of these days I'm going to pay a visit to Monument Valley.

If you're only going to watch one film with John Wayne, then I'd recommend this one.

Wallace and Gromit: A Look Back

Nostalgia is a strange thing.

If you haven't heard already, actor Peter Sallis died last week. I've never seen The Last of the Summer Wine, but most of my generation will know him for his voice work in Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit - Four short films and a feature-length movie following the wacky adventures of the eccentric inventor Wallace and his silent but intelligent dog Gromit.

I've been watching the original shorts for as long as I can remember, with their stop-motion animation, surreal stories, subtle movie references, and Wallace's bizarre contraptions combined with his love of cheese - especially Wensleydale.

The plasticine duo's debut was in 1989's A Grand Day Out, in which a bank holiday cheese shortage prompts Wallace to build a rocket so they can head to the moon - because everyone knows the moon is made of cheese. While there, they are confronted by a coin-operated robot who wants to go skiing. Apparently this was Nick Park's thesis, and it wasn't finished when Aardman Studios picked it up. Sallis accepted £50 for the voice role, and was quite surprised when he received a call six years later to say the film was finished.

Anyway, the short was so successful that it warranted a follow-up with The Wrong Trousers in 1993 - Wallace is having financial problems after buying Gromit a pair of automated "techno-trousers", and lets out a spare room. Their lodger is a silent and menacing penguin who proceeds to drive Gromit out, intending to utilise the techno-trousers and his landlord for a nefarious scheme.

Following on, we have 1995's A Close Shave. The duo have established a window-cleaning service, and Wallace becomes attracted to the wool-shop owner Wendolene, who may be a suspect in a sheep-rustling scheme that's plaguing the town.

As stated above, I saw these shorts many times growing up, and they still hold up to this day - although I think The Wrong Trousers is the best one by far. They're all funny, sometimes poignant, and even quite dark at times. What's not to like?

It was a rare treat to hear that they would be returning in 2005's The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. This Hammer Horror tribute has the pair running a humane pest control business in the run-up to the annual vegetable growing competition. Unfortunately, Wallace's latest experiment unleashes the title monster on the town's allotments. The film also featured a larger cast, including Helena Bonham-Carter  as Wallace's love interest Lady Tottington, and Ralph Fiennes as her big game-hunting suitor Victor Quartermaine. Stand-up comedian Peter Kay also has a role as the local police officer. I saw this one in the cinema when it came out, and I did laugh a lot. It's still great, but probably not one for new audiences to start with.

And last but not least, there was 2008's A Matter of Loaf and Death, where the pair are now bakers, and Wallace becomes romantically involved with a former bread mascot and Gromit investigates a cereal...sorry, serial killer who is targeting bakers. I only saw this recently, and they really go over the top with the bread puns. But the characters are still great and there's plenty to laugh at.

If you fancy a nostalgia trip, the shorts are available on Amazon Instant Video if you're a Prime member, while the film can be found on Netflix.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a nice bit of cheese.

A Tribute to Roger Moore

Well, it was only a matter of time before I discussed this here: Sir Roger Moore passed away last week. And since I spent the October of 2015 reviewing all the James Bond films, I figured I'd do my own informal tribute.

The Roger Moore-era films didn't always deliver, but Roger himself did. Looking back over his tenure, I think he did a great job with his deadpan delivery of the witty one-liners that contributed to his distinct tongue-in-cheek style. I'd be bold enough to say that this style has influenced some of my own writing - especially the dialogue.

As for the films, I've been watching a couple of them lately. I'd say that his best films are The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only. The overall winner depends on my mood. For Your Eyes Only is certainly darker and edgier than his usual fare, but the more down-to-earth story in a series of formulaic world domination plots makes it one of my favourite films in the franchise after From Russia with Love and Goldeneye. I highly rate The Spy Who Loved Me as well, although I must admit that it plays things safe and takes fewer risks. Nonetheless, it's a great escapist action flick that Moore does well. While we're on the subject, I also watched Octopussy again last night, and found it also holds up surprisingly well - an interesting mix of goofy scenes with some incredibly tense moments.

I guess I might leave it on a song, and I'll go with the theme from The Spy Who Loved Me. Because even though the franchise stumbles through many pitfalls, nobody does it better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at7xLnfubFY

So, goodbye Sir Roger. We'll miss you.