Shameless Self Expression

As the title suggests, a film depicting the goings on at an airport, with airport manager Burt Lancaster having to contend with snowstorms, a neglected wife at home (Dana Wynter), and eventually a mad bomber (Van Heflin) on a plane. Dean Martin plays the pilot of said plane, whose girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) is an air hostess on board and recently pregnant. Helen Hayes plays an elderly stowaway, Jean Seberg is Lancaster’s assistant and mistress, Maureen Stapleton is Heflin’s wife, and George Kennedy plays plane engineer Joe Patroni. If you see only one “Airport” movie in your life, make it “Airport ‘77” . It’s cheesy, overlong, but a lot of fun and the cast is terrific. Today though, I’m gonna talk about the first “Airport” from 1970. It’s not as much fun, I’m afraid. Some of the cast in this flick from director George Seaton ( “Miracle on 34 th Street” ) are good, and the music score by Alfred Newman ( “The Grapes of Wrath” , “The Greatest Story Ever Told” ) is excelle...

Set in Sweetwater maximum security prison in California, we follow two boxers; Wesley Snipes’ Monroe Hutchens (all cool, detached arrogance) and Ving Rhames’ ‘Iceman’ Chambers (all swagger and intimidating badass arrogance) as they are set to collide and determine who is the undisputed champ. The former has spent the last ten years honing his skills behind bars and has a 67-0 record in prison-sanctioned fights to go with his life sentence for a moment of uncontrolled anger. Meanwhile, ‘Iceman’ was still the Heavyweight Champion of the world before being convicted and incarcerated for rape (he says he’s innocent of course), and has now been sent to Sweetwater in disgrace. The two try their best to downplay any feelings of being threatened by one another, with the supremely arrogant ‘Iceman’ not really taking the prison boxer all that seriously, whilst Hutchens sits alone in his cell making complicated structures out of toothpicks and looking all Zen-like. Observing it all is foul-mo...

The forces of evil (Lord Voldermort, Bellatrix Lestrange, and the Malfoys’ among them) are conspiring against boy wizard Harry Potter and have taken over the Ministry of Magic to begin a reign of terror, after the death of the Minister of Magic (Bill Nighy). Our wizard protagonists Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) have protected their families from danger, whilst they flee Hogwarts and spend time in the woods searching for Horcruxes, which hold pieces of the soul of evil Lord Voldermort (Ralph Fiennes) and once all have been collected, will make him vulnerable. One such Horcrux has Ron start to act all jealous, irrational and Gollum-like, alienating himself from his two friends before running off on his own. Eventually they reunite for a plan to get inside the Ministry of Magic in disguise. I haven’t read the books and I can’t really claim to be a Harry Potter fan. The film series started out well, especially the second film “The Chambe...

Set in Derry, Maine in the late 80s, young Georgie Denbrough is outside playing with his paper boat in the rain when he is viciously dragged down into the sewers by Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skarsgard). A year later, Georgie’s older brother Bill (Jaeden Lieberher) hasn’t recovered from losing his little brother, and is being haunted by visions of Pennywise. Talking to six other 11 year-old outcasts who eventually become ‘The Loser’s Club’, Bill realises that Pennywise is no mere man in clown makeup, an age-old menace who feeds off children’s fears, and kills them. Jeremy Ray Taylor plays chubby Ben Hanscomb, Sophia Lillis is abused tomboy Beverly Marsh, Jake Dylan Grazer is resident scaredy-cat Eddie, Finn Wolfhard is smart arse Richie Tozier, Wyatt Oleff plays rabbi’s son Stan Uris, and Chosen Jacobs plays home-schooled African-American kid Mike Hanlon. As is often the case, I’ll be coming to this adaptation of the popular Stephen King novel from director Andy Muschi...

Josh Brolin (looking a little like a young, dark-haired Nick Nolte) plays a pretty regular Texan guy (the film is set in the 1980s, for who knows what reason) who one night stumbles upon the remains of a drug deal gone wrong. Dead bodies, a truck-full of drugs, and a suitcase full of cash. He stupidly and impulsively takes the latter but finds himself paranoid in anticipation of the original owners coming after him. Meanwhile, hulking Javier Bardem (with big dead eyes) plays Anton Chigurh, a soulless killer (‘unstoppable force of nature’ might be more exact) who wanders around Texas killing anyone (with a tank of compressed air as a weapon!) who fails to win a coin toss. Tommy Lee Jones is the local sheriff whose jurisdiction both of these cases falls under, and who is laconically lamenting the increasingly unseemly state of the world. Woody Harrelson has a minor part as a bounty hunter who thinks he’s a badass and thinks he knows Chigurh better than anyone, and Kelly MacDonald is ...