But I recommend this movie...

[Neil W]

To Sir, With Love

England's take on The Blackboard Jungle benefits immeasurably from Sidney Poitier's dignified performance as Mark Thackeray, an unemployed black engineer who takes a position as a teacher of underprivileged kids in a run-down London school in order to make ends meet until something better comes along.

I enjoyed this film enormously as a 16 year old when it first came out. Revisiting it years later shows that the rough and ready disadvantaged working class kids (downright scary to this white rural middle class 16 year old back in 1968) are fairly obvious stage school alumni, and pretty un-scary, all things told. In particular, Christian Roberts, who made something of a career out of playing bad boys at the time, comes across as a nice middle class lad putting on a "Lor' lumme!" accent and bigging it up fairly unconvincingly.

For all that, the film still has lessons to be taught, and a warm and loving heart, and a central performance of quiet strength from Poitier (even though he dances worse than I do, and I dance REALLY badly!).

 

[Neil W]

Still Crazy

Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais have a solid hit rate as far as their UK TV work is concerned. However, their film work has been much more chequered (2008's The Bank Job was fine, the previous year's Across The Universe decidedly weak, for instance).

Still Crazy, fortunately, is a solid success. It has a great story – 70s rock group reforms to jump aboard the nostalgia circuit, only to discover that the factors which drove them apart are still there - excellent performances, a lot of humour, fabulous music and, above everything else, real heart.

I tend to savour selected "moments" in movies, and this film has one of them - just when everything is going pear-shaped at the festival reunion performance...

Hugely enjoyable.

 

[Neil W]

Murder Loves Killers Too

This cheap little teen slasher victims in the woods movie deserves a pat on the back. There's no-one in it who is anyone, and it is all too apparent that the budget was minimal, and it is very much a generic movie - you know what you are expecting to get, and that is exactly what you do get.

Yet it is attractively shot, it is adequately performed within the limitations of its genre, and it has a number of moments where what you expect to happen is not what happens and, as a result you are genuinely surprised. There is a strong element of suspense running through it which is very effectively maintained, and I absolutely loved the last 10 minutes or so, when it appeared to turn into a completely different movie.

Every now and then a film delivers appreciably more than you expect it to, and this is one of them.

 

[Neil W]

Furîzu mî (English: Freeze Me)

Freeze Me is primarily a suspense thriller, deriving from rape.

Chihiro (Harumi Inoue) moves to Tokyo in the aftermath of being raped by three men. They find her, invade her apartment, and rape her again, making it clear that she will never escape them. One by one she invites them back, under the pretext of having been "converted", murders them, and stores their bodies in freezers. She also murders her boyfriend, and the ending is somewhat non-specific.

The film has a number of qualities. Although the rapes are not very explicit, they are nonetheless disturbing and Inoue, who spends some time naked, does an excellent job of conveying the mindset of a rape victim whose actions follow on from having had it made clear to her that she will never escape.

Her Tokyo apartment is very claustrophobic, and this adds immeasurably to the suspense which starts to build, particularly following the first murder.

There is also black humour - the more bodies she freezes, the greater the electricity consumption, and she has to start rotating the electricity supply to her freezers so as not to blow fuses.

Overall, a highly unusual, and gripping movie.

 

[Neil W]

The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953)

This delightful piece of 1950s English whimsy portrays not so much a time and place gone by as a time and place which perhaps never quite existed.

Visually, it is a colourful picture of rural England at its most beautiful, forming a backdrop for a gentle story of "big" business trying to prevent the small village of Titfield from re-establishing its branch line.

The story, which feels like nothing so much as several episodes from the earliest of the Thomas The Tank Engine books, though flimsy, nonetheless has sufficient charm to hold the interest throughout. The cast, drawn from England's finest post-war talent, is absolutely fine. The action is well directed (but do watch out for the rubber engine during the night-time run through the streets of Titfield!), and the geography is always well conveyed.

But, more than anything else, this is a film which could only ever have been made in England in the 1950s.

 

[Neil W]

The Lair Of The White Worm

Ken Russell meets Bram Stoker. And the result is a Victorian horror story, adapted to be played as "Carry On White Worm".

While it has a nice period feel in terms of look, it is absolutely over the top in delivery. Amanda Donohoe, in particular (during her "If the money is right, I will consider keeping my clothes on in this film" phase), has her tongue so firmly in her cheek she can barely utter her lines. While there are undoubtedly some valid horror movie moments, there are considerably more moments which are hysterically funny.

It is interesting to see Hugh Grant, pre Four Weddings, playing pretty much the same character he has played in every film since, albeit his straight playing suits the piece - there is something endearing about at least one of the characters taking everything seriously at face value, albeit with an air of slight bemusement at having seemingly wandered into something from a parallel universe. Peter Capaldi, long before Doctor Who beckoned, also gives sterling service.

This is one of the daftest, most extravagantly enjoyable horror films out there, and is well worth catching. Just don't take it seriously, and you won't be disappointed.

 

[Neil W]

Four Lions

I knew that Four Lions was about an Islamic terrorist cell made up of "home grown" UK terrorists, I knew that it was a comedy, and I knew that the man behind it was Chris Morris, a man whose TV satire can sometimes be a bit too savage for its own good.

And this film is a bit savage, too. But, let's be fair, it is very, very funny.

The film takes the form of a fly on the wall style documentary, following a mismatched group of Muslims - sincere family man Omar, medium-grade idiot Fessal, complete idiot Waj, diffident Hassan, and psychotic idiot firebrand convert Barry. Barry's master plan is to inflict jihad on a mosque so that Muslims will rise up because they think Jews did it.

This film is uncomfortably close to home. It never mocks Islam, although it does mock the way extremists interpret Islam for their own ends. But it also mocks the police and the establishment. And, with the exception of Omar, who has a clear vision of what he wants to accomplish and why (one may not agree with him, but he is sincere and devout about his intentions), all the others are deluded to a lesser or (usually) greater degree.

What happens in this film isn't funny in the slightest but, often, the way it happens is very funny indeed. I laughed out loud a lot, to my great surprise.

But it is very, very, dark.

 

[Neil W]

More tomorrow?

Hopefully some of them are helpful and/or entertaining, but I'm conscious of the fact that this is me sticking up a large quantity of non-SK stuff, and the last thing I want to do is overstay my welcome.

 

[no bounce no play]

The Lair Of The White Worm

Ken Russell meets Bram Stoker. And the result is a Victorian horror story, adapted to be played as "Carry On White Worm".

While it has a nice period feel in terms of look, it is absolutely over the top in delivery. Amanda Donohoe, in particular (during her "If the money is right, I will consider keeping my clothes on in this film" phase), has her tongue so firmly in her cheek she can barely utter her lines. While there are undoubtedly some valid horror movie moments, there are considerably more moments which are hysterically funny.

It is interesting to see Hugh Grant, pre Four Weddings, playing pretty much the same character he has played in every film since, albeit his straight playing suits the piece - there is something endearing about at least one of the characters taking everything seriously at face value, albeit with an air of slight bemusement at having seemingly wandered into something from a parallel universe. Peter Capaldi, long before Doctor Who beckoned, also gives sterling service.

This is one of the daftest, most extravagantly enjoyable horror films out there, and is well worth catching. Just don't take it seriously, and you won't be disappointed.

I might have to catch this one just to see Peter Capaldi. I love seeing the Doctors in non-Doctor Who roles. I watched an old movie titled Brighton Rock starring a young William Hartnell a few weeks ago

 

[Neil W]

Clearly a bit of burnout here! (or else everyone is busy typing titles into Netflix) OK, just the one for now:

School For Scoundrels (1960)

Stephen Potter wrote a series of humorous "self-help" books at around the turn of the 1950s which purported to teach life's losers how to become winners without actually cheating (although manipulating the rules was perfectly permissible).

Some years later those books formed the basis of School For Scoundrels, in which the fictitious Yeovil Academy (principal S. Potter, played by Alistair Sim) teaches the easily intimidated Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael) how to turn the tables on rotter and cad Raymond Delauney (Terry-Thomas) and win back the lovely April Smith (Janette Scott).

The script, by Peter Ustinov, turns the spoof techniques of the book into maguffins driving a coherent narrative. The story, and the developments in it, are pleasing and funny, the performances are all excellent and, notwithstanding the fact that the film is clearly rooted in the 1950s, there is a freshness and timelessness about it.

And it is fair to say that it is the beneficiary of a beautifully crisp transfer of the monochrome original to DVD.

This film is as enjoyable as any of the Ealing comedies.

It goes without saying that I am NOT writing about the US remake.