Chariddy Shop Cinema #6 - A Bigger Splash

Chariddy Shop Cinema #6 : A Bigger Splash Not strictly speaking a charridy shop purchase, as I obtained this (the Salvation version) from Farnborough library, but it was only a pound, and I’d been provided with that money so technically it cost me nowt. I’d seen Hazan and Mingaye’s Rude Boy a number of times in my youth, and was aware of this. I’d never been fussed about David Hockney’s paintings, they always struck me as being of what Galton and Simpson would no doubt refer to as the Infantile school. IMDB moans about excessive homosexuality and abject boredom involving (horror!) fast-forwarding had me girding my loins, so to speak. A literal art film, a fascinating glimpse into Hockney’s world and working practices (nice work if you can get it – I don’t know how all these 60s-70s bohos funded their lifestyles but Dave’s biggest worry seemed to be whether he should stay in London or go to Paris/New York/California to work). The best form of escapism – a completely different world to the one you’re in. Crits jeering DH’s associates for being dull? These were non-actors and presumably unused to being in front of the camera. Hazan artfully (sorry) restages some Hockney canvasses (such as Beverley Hills Housewife), there’s mucho weirdness, many swimming pools and a lot of male nudity, but I came away with a different outlook on what it takes to be that kind of artist. I can’t get the scene where Dave just seems to march into Patrick Procter’s flat, and examine his own portrait of PP up close via Zippolight. Hazan tracks back to reveal PP in the same pose as the portrait, out of my mind. It’s just odd.

Chariddy Shop Cinema #5 : The Enforcer (1976)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #5 : The Enforcer (1976) The only one of the five Dirty Harry movies that I failed to see at the cinema, hence the one that kind of leaves me a tad non-plussed. The original took the crowd pleasing, Nixon’s silent majority pandering view that, with all these lawyers, pen-pushers and do-gooders favouring the perpetrators of crime rather than victims, we needed an anti-hero who could descend to the crims level whilst just barely remaining behind the line of acceptability. He might be as vicious, violent and contemptuous of the rules as his opposite numbers, but he could get the job done with justice prevailing (albeit at a price.) That didn’t stop some critics crying ‘Fascist’! and with Dirty Harry being a box-office success, it was time to forget the ambivalent ending of that first feature and have Harry superseded by a new generation of cops (played by soon to be famous young actors) who also decided to forget the rules (such as they are) and take things a step further by executing criminals without trial in Magnum Force. Harry’s unimpressed. “Pretty soon you’ll be executing your neighbour because his dog pisses on your lawn.” That put things into perspective. So where to go with the third film? Women! Women’s lib! The ‘Frisco mayor is vote-catching via introducing the politically-correct method of quotas. Neanderthal Harry’s ended up on the Personnel Review Board as a result of destroying a restaurant, the villains within and sending innocent bystanders to hospital or the psychiatrist’s couch at great cost to the city. Even perky Tyne Daly fails to raise his enthusiasm. Once a group of nutty psychopaths, masquerading as the People’s Revolutionary Strike Force but actually only really interested in blackmailing San Francisco for millions of dollars, manage to steal a host of weapons and murder Harry’s partner DiGeorgio, he’s whisked back to homicide but has a new sidekick in newly-promoted Ms Daly. The counter-culture lefty loons have kidnapped Mr Mayor and bunked off to Alcatraz for a showdown with Callahan, our lone hope against this kind of ersatz terrorism. Although the film feels a bit second hand (and it takes you a while to dial in to that 1970s sensibility) once you’re there it’s a passable 98 minutes. Clint ambles through it all, but manages to show a softer side in his scenes with Tyne, who also manages to keep her character afloat, not quite the bumbling idiot she might be taken for. There’s a couple of odd swipes at religion, Harry gets on well with the blacks, even if his boss sees them as troublemakers. It’s a stacked deck, but worth a hand or two.

Chariddy Shop Cinema #4 - Rising Damp "The Movie"

Chariddy Shop Cinema #4 - Rising Damp “The Movie” Good Lord. I did actually see this one at t’cinema. Roundly dissed by so-called fans as a lazy re-cycling of TV scripts, sans the late Richard Beckinsale, leaving a no-win Christopher Strauli to be called in off the subs bench via writer Eric Chappell’s other sit-com Only When I Laugh, dodgily unpolitically correct and limping in at the fag-end of the initial British Sit-com big screen fad, Rising Damp wouldn’t seem to have a great deal going for it. Don’t you believe it. Like the Carry Ons, James Bond and Hammer Horror, like every other Sit-Com film (which with the likes of The Inbetweeners and Mrs Brown is still ongoing despite occasional lulls) this is a quintessential look into the lives of the British. Class obsessed, sex obsessed, race obsessed, constantly bemoaning their lot, given to jumping to conclusions, it’s all here. Leonard Rossiter (who I was fortunate enough to see on stage as Inspector Truscott in a production of Joe Orton’s Loot) and Frances De La Tour carry the thing with ease, and (especially if you’re not over familiar with the set bound TV series) the opening out of the claustrophobic seediness is like a breath of (almost) fresh air. There are laughs. The great tragedy is the direction of Joe McGrath, who excelled at lunatic surrealism, and only gets a couple of very brief dream sequences, one with Rossiter Noel Cowarding with Miss Jones in a 1920s ballroom, and another a flash of Grease. Nostalgia supreme, if you’re in the right mood.

Charridy Shop Cinema #3 - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #3: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990) Saddled with the epithet “The Movie”, this live-action evocation of a comic book phenomenon is actually quite a hoot. I’m glad I waited until now to see it, because, back in the day, apparently it suffered from Head Brit Censor James Ferman’s nanchuk-phobia and had a lot of cuts. Allegedly he even removed a few frames from the 1980s big-screen version of Dragnet because there was a poster for Enter The Dragon displaying the offending martial arts weapons visible in the background of a scene. Mr Strict! So I got to see the ETD homage, and poor old Splinter being tortured. The whole thing is quite violent for a kids film, I thought, and then remembered the bits of Home Alone I’d seen, or even rolling around, helpless with laughter at Laurel and Hardy suffering all manner of undignified injuries when I was a pre-teen. This farrago includes all kinds of weirdness - nods to film noir, Humphrey Bogart, kung-fu cinema (I was a bit stunned to see Golden Harvest films logo come up at the start), there’s loads. The New York being a hotbed of crime at the start suggests not only Batman but also Death Wish, there’s a jeer at Critters, but what’s with the negative image of punks? Huh! Utterly ridiculous but a whole lot of fun. Anything that celebrates junk culture is fine by me.

Chariddy Shop Cinema #2 : Assault On Precinct 13 (1976)

Chariddy Shop Cinema #2 : Assault On Precinct 13 (1976) What a result! Thank you Age Concern (nee Help The Aged) of Fleet High Street. I didn’t expect to pick up John Carpenter’s second corker, but I’m so glad I was able to. My brother had been to stay with a school pal of his and came back raving about an oddball sci-fi comedy they’d seen called Dark Star. I got a call from one of my school pals who’d obtained a dodge vid copy of a smash hit horror called Hallowe’en. And then our local electrical shop turned itself into a video library and allowed me to rent a top-loading piano-key VCR (via my dad’s signature) and we could actually watch films on our front-room telly years before they’d be shown, and then they’d be cut - and the library had The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Straw Dogs and The Exorcist and they’d never, ever be shown on the television. Fired up by Dark Star and Hallowe’en it was time to rent the middle one, the one that had got away - Assault On Precinct 13. What a wonderful, strange, violent film it was. And so odd to be able to watch it on a Sunday morning, even if we had to suffer my dad tutting behind his News Of The World at the bloodletting. Cops gunning down gang members in a welter of gore. Los Angeles - palm trees. Black people acting and being treated the same as whites. Silenced rifles. Pump action shotguns. A gurl who could shoot and didn’t go into hysterics when the action started. Convicted murderers joining forces with the cops. A character called Napoleon Wilson who didn’t look all that be seemed to have a fearsome rep. Utter madness. I’m delighted to say it still holds up today. Perhaps I’ll check out the remake. Had to smirk at an interview I found with JC in which he said he wouldn’t do something like having the little girl gunned down now, but he was young then (John Waters’ excuse for the ending of Pink Flamingos). That sequence (an ice-cream van!) was (pardon the pun) the killer bit of the film for us (we were young!) - it was so unexpected. The outrage we experienced when ITV screened the film and cut that bit out. Thank goodness the Beeb restored it for Moviedrome, and thanks to Alex Cox for pointing out the homages. I’m still not over fussed about Howard Hawks, but I must admit I’d watch some of his stuff to see where Carpenter got it from.

Chariddy Shop Cinema #1 - Out Of Sight

Chariddy Shop Cinema #1 : Out Of Sight It’s great that all the up to date hipsters are now downloading or streaming their fillums ‘cos that means that hordes of unbelievable stuff on DVD turns up in charity shops which make up around half of Britain’s high streets, the other half being coffee shops or restaurants. Of course it’s a bit of a lottery, you can’t really go out shopping for anything specific, but you never know... I first became interested in seeing Steven Soderbergh’s Out Of Sight when I was reading up about Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown, and there’s a little bit of trivia that tells you Michael Keaton plays a character called Ray Nicolet in both films. Both films are based upon novels by Elmore Leonard. I first came across Leonard’s writing when pal at school lent me a paperback copy of Valdez Is Coming, a western. Later I obtained Mr Majestyk. I’ve always believed in the power of imagination, and I’ve seen both film versions (once) and they came up short compared to the books. When I used to go out, I always read Time Out as I was less than an hour from London, and that seemed to be the place to be. Their book section used to rave about Leonard, and I ended up reading quite a few of his novels. They were excellent entertainment, but I never could figure out just why some people thought they were something more. Most of the reviews would rave about how cinematic his writing was and why oh why would no-one film his stories? Or if they did, why did they get it wrong? The only film I can remember from after his 70s film screenplay heyday was a Burt Reynolds vehicle called Stick which I enjoyed but the intelligentsia was not happy with. Anyways, it seems the late 90s proved fertile for decent Leonard adaptations with Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty proving successful, and then Quent following up Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. Soderbergh had, after boffo indie success with sex, lies & videotape, retreated to low budget experimental stuff, and surprisingly got the call to do Out Of Sight. (Sonnenfeld and Danny De Vito from Get Shorty were involved in the producing) Soderbergh got gorgeous George Clooney who, despite ER popularity, was not making the best big screen choices (Batman & Robin - oh dear). They would go on to work several times together. George always seems a good guy (even when playing a villain) and can segue effortlessly between suave and tough. The rest of the cast are spot on too. J-Lo as the cop, Dennis Farina as her dad, the brilliant brilliant Ving Rhames - my grandfather used to cheer every time he saw Trevor Howard in a film as he swore that TH meant he knew the film would be good - I feel the same way about Ving. Sure the film is full of coincidences (what are the odds of a bank robber and an FBI agent falling in love, eh?) but it’s so much fun - and it’s not just brainless entertainment either - there’s a strange twisting of time, which means you have to concentrate. The actors bring out the quirky believability of Elmore’s odd characters, and there’s a lot of laughs thrown in too.