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Profiles, Trivia and Talking Crap - Old Movies

Top 5 Films

December 1st 2006 10:25
Withnail and I


I'm going away for a few days so I'm just doing a short post on each of my blogs today.

What are your top five films of all time?

Now I've thought long and hard about this one. It's a top 5 that has been with me for at least 3 years now and hasn't changed as yet. Apologies for the large amount of Robert De Niro films.


Taxi Driver
Withnail and I
The Godfathers 1 and 2 (a bit of a cheat, I know)
Raging Bull
Boogie Nights

I can safely say that 'Taxi Driver' is the best film I have ever seen and that it is 99.999999% likely that I will never see a film that is better. Very few films are as perfect as Taxi Driver.


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Jack Palance... Another hardman dead!

November 12th 2006 09:59


Yes, it appears that Jack Palance - the quintessential craggy-faced tough cunt of American cinema - has passed away at the distinguised age of 87.

Palance won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his turn in 'City Slickers' (1994), a role that paid homage to his various celebrated turns in the Western films of yesteryear, and provided more than a few laughs.


Jack Palance was born as Volodymyr Palanyuk, the son of a Polish-American coal miner. Originally he set out to make his career as a boxer but World War II called and he ended up getting shot down in a B-24 bomber. The wreck left his face severly disfigured and burnt and he had to have extensive facial reconstruction.



After being discharged from service, he decided to study acting (method) and got back to back to Oscar nominations in early supporting turns as villainous types (Sudden Fear [1952] and Shane [1953]). Palance would get somewhat typecast as villains due to his distinctive and menacing facial features, and he acted in many westerns and war films.

I think my favourite performance of his is in the film 'Attack!' - a 50s war film where Palance plays a platoon leader abandoned and betrayed by his cowardly commanding officer. Palance escapes the Nazis and vows revenge... it's a great lead performance and shows Palance at his best.

When he finally won an Academy Award (at the age of 75) he made headlines by doing some impromptu one-armed pushups on stage, proving to the world that he was indeed still a tough cunt. The following year it was rumoured that he misread the Supporting Actress award-winner card when he announced that Marisa Tomei had won for 'My Cousin Vinny'.



Jack Palance was awesome. It's sad to see the passing of another Hollywood legend.
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Top 10 Anti-Heroes in Film

October 30th 2006 01:33
Continuing from the recent blogs on Top 10 Villains and Top 10 Heroes, I've decided to venture on into the curious and highly-entertaining middle ground between the two... the Anti-Hero.

Just a quick run down... the way I perceive a character to be an anti-hero is that he (yeah, 'he' - couldn't really think of any decent female ones... Sarah O'Connor comes close but got nudged out by my Top 10) must match these criteria...

1. They must be the protagonist of the film.

That's pretty much it. A villainous character like Tony Montana can be seen as an anti-hero simply due to the fact that the film focuses on him. If a character like this is put up on the screen as a protagonist, and the audience isn't really given an opposing character they can identify with as the 'hero', then it takes away the whole 'hero/villain' duality. The villain becomes an anti-hero. A hero who doesn't actually do anything heroic. Likewise, if the 'hero' of the piece engages in acts that would normally be viewed as villainous, he loses his 'hero' status and goes into the same grey zone. So here are ten of my favourite anti-heroes.


Travis Bickle Robert De Niro, "Taxi Driver" (1976)
Travis is the archetypal anti-hero. We initially sympathise with him, but as his motives remain so unknowable and it becomes clear that he's not all there in the smarts department it becomes kind of hard to accept him as a heroic figure. At one point he tries to assassinate a political candidate for no good reason... he eventually 'redeems' himself by saving a child prostitute from the mafia but by this stage he's so fucked up that you don't really know where he's coming from.


Max Rockatansky Mel Gibson, 'Mad Max' (1979)
Max is probably the protagonist most easily identified with in this list, but the extent of his rage nudges him out of the 'hero' league. Max breaks away from his life and sanity to embark on a furious quest of unchecked revenge against a gang of bikers that murdered his wife and child. By the time of the third 'Mad Max' movie Max seems to have become a near-empty shell, just trying to get by in a post-apocalyptic hell of a future.


Jack Carter Michael Caine, "Get Carter" (1971)
The 70s were the age of the anti-hero. Carter represents a new wave of cinema, with Caine playing one of the coldest and most heartless heroes of British film. Like most anti-heroes, Carter is on a quest of revenge. However, unlike Mad Max and Paul Kersey (Death Wish), Carter was a cruel and harsh man before he set out for vengeance. He threatens and murders his way to the information he wants, at one point even callously letting a woman drown to death.


Ethan Edwards John Wayne, "The Searchers" (1957)
John Wayne was never more interesting than when he broke outside of his usual tough-as-nails old west hero screen persona. Director John Ford would utilise Wayne's charisma to unique affect in 'The Searchers', casting the straight-laced icon in a somewhat less-sympathetic role than what audiences were used to seeing him in. Ethan is very much the hero of the film, dedicating seven years of his life to tracking down his niece (who has been kidnapped by Indians). But he is also a man so twisted by racism that he intends to kill the wayward girl should she have turned native in the time she has been gone. At one point Wayne's character desecrates the graves of dead indians just out of spite, and whilst the film is deliberately enigmatic in regards to Ethan's background it's patently clear that underneath his appearingly heroic actions he is not a very nice individual.


Frank White Christopher Walken, "King of New York" (1990)
Where would this list be without Christopher Walken and his own brand of bad-arsed coolness? Walken's Frank White is an ex-con returning to gangland New York to reassert his place in the criminal underworld. He quickly sets about consolidating his power and gives no quarter to anyone who gets in his way - be they rival ganglord or police. What seperates Frank White from the usual high-flying American gangster is that he intends to re-distribute all his profits of his drug trade to the poor and needy of New York... it doesn't exactly make sense, but Walken has that edge of cheerful insanity and resolution that helps him see it through. A classy and underrated film with a classy and entertaining protagonist.


Blondie/The Man With No Name Clint Eastwood, "A Fistful of Dollars" (1964), "For a Few Dollars More" (1965), "The Good, The Bad and the Ugly" (1966).
It's never exactly made clear if Eastwood's character from these three films is the one and the same, but that the films are often collected together as 'The Dollars trilogy' and that Eastwood's character is often credited as 'The Man With No Name', I think it's pretty clear that this is the case. Eastwood's character here is the antithesis of the typical hero usually shown in American westerns... he cares very little for anyone but himself and often acts purely out of self-interest, he is usually motivated solely by money, and he isn't afraid to kill his opposition in cold blood. The comical end scene of 'For a Few Dollars More' sees him counting the stack of dead bodies on his wagon, calculating how much money they will bring him, and it pretty much sums up the modus operandi of the steely-eyed, wry gunslinger. This character is every bit as much an icon as Eastwood himself, and hence I couldn't write this list without mentioning him.


Alex de Large Malcolm McDowell, "A Clockwork Orange" (1971)
Another character it would be impossible to ignore in this list is young Alex from Kubrick's controversial masterpiece 'A Clockwork Orange'. Along with Travis, Alex is pretty much the definitive anti-hero. He rapes, he kills, he listens to classical music, and yet - I couldn't help but feel sorry for him as he struggles against the cruel brainwashing he is subjected to. He'd be the villain of the film if he wasn't so charismaticly brought to life by Malcolm McDowell, and the lack of any other sympathetic characters doesn't exactly negate it either.


Henry Hill Ray Liotta, "Goodfellas" (1990)
Henry Hill is every bit the typical working gangster of modern America. In 'Goodfellas' we get his story via Ray Liotta, writer Nicholas Pileggi and director Martin Scorcese. Nothing is sugarcoated, we get his drug addiction, his philandering, his involvement in murders and heists... he wouldn't be that nice a chap to meet up with on the street. But by the time of the film's end, with all his friends either dead or aiming to kill him, you can't help but feel sorry for the broken hoodlum. Like most protagonists in gangster films, Hill is a man brought down by his own flaws rather than the law itself, and at times he comes across a pretty likeable guy.


Randle Patrick McMurphy Jack Nicholson, "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1985)
It would be quite easy to simply view McMurphy as the hero of this film. Like Lucas Jackson in 'Cool Hand Luke', he is an anti-hero in the sense that he stands in defiance of a system that goes unchallenged in the real world. McMurphy is a common criminal who manages to skip gaol by faking mental illness, aiming to rest it up in a mental hospital instead. His nemesis there is Nurse Ratchett, a continuing representation of the authority McMurphy rallies against for the rest of the film. The fact that we cheer for McMurphy as he incites riots and rebellion throughout the hospital is testemant to Nicholson's charismatic performance and society's growing disdain for authoritarian institutions.


Popeye Doyle Gene Hackman, "The French Connection" (1971)
Hackman won the Academy Award for his portrayal of the real-life cop Jimmy 'Popeye' Doyle in this story of a rogue cop busting open a heroin-smuggling ring. Previously, in this genre, the cop would be the unquestioned hero of the piece. However, the changing mood of the outside world (see McMurphy vs. the authorities above, as well as fledgling anti-heroes such as Steve McQueen's 'Bullitt' in 1968) brought about a new era in filmmaking that would see a growing ambiguity in it's portrayal of 'heroes' and 'villains'. Doyle is one such ambiguous character. He's single-minded and hellbent on cracking open the drug trade, but has no qualms about beating up innocent people to get there, or driving his car into oncoming traffic! Cop heroes don't come much more racist, arrogant and borderline-criminal than Doyle, he even shoots a crook in the back at one point - something previously unheard of in film back in the 70s. And if the viewer has any remaining doubts regarding how they should be perceiving Doyle in the film, well, the ending will clear that right up!

Well, that's ten. As usual, I'm sure I've left a bunch out. Let me know who I missed!




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Top 10 Heroes in Film

October 22nd 2006 05:50
Well, following up on last Monday's 'Top 10 Villains in Film', here is a list of 10 Great Film Heroes (thanks to Lilla for the suggestion). I had a lot more trouble with this list as I usually find the villain more interesting than the hero, so I didn't really have any favourites (besides one or two) that have always sat in my head (waiting for me to collate them into a list - like the Villains blog!). To help myself out I gave myself some criteria...

1. No characters based on real life figures... I think I did this as the line between fiction and fact tends to become blurred. I was going to include Ron Kovic (Born on the 4th of July), Gandhi (Ganhi), Karen Silkwood (Silkwood) and Paul Rusesabagina (Hotel Rwanda) in my list but then I began to question whether I was including them because of the heroic deeds of the real-life figures they are based on or because of the way they were portrayed. Likewise, I think the actors in question already have half their work done for them too (in terms of appearing heroic) if the character happens to be a hero to begin with. So, I thought it was simpler to just disqualify these altogether


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Top 10 Villains in Film

October 15th 2006 01:09
Villains are almost always the most interesting thing in a good movie. The good guy, well, he's good - sometimes there's not much you can do with that unless he's flawed in some way. But the villain... well, you've got a whole range of fucked up and evil stuff you can explore. They always say it's more fun to play a villain.

So in no particular order, here are 10 great villains from the movies


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Films you probably won't be seeing anytime soon.

October 1st 2006 11:04
The following eight films are all real movies that have been made only to become subsequently unavailable. Three of them are films that have never been released, the others are notable films that have been buried after their initial releases. Obviously, I haven’t seen any of these. I’m not sure how many of them I would’ve seen either, had they been made available to me. Just the fact that they’re unavailable makes them more interesting I think. Anyways…


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Is Robert De Niro insane?

September 25th 2006 06:56
When the words 'method' and 'actor' get put together the man most likely to be mentioned in the same sentence is Robert De Niro. The guy is a deadset lunatic... I love him and want to have his babies when it finally becomes possible for two men to procreate, he's a legend. But check out some of the lengths he has gone to in the name of researching or playing some of his film roles...


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Weight Loss in Films

September 18th 2006 03:11
Last week I did a blog on actors packing on the pounds to gain credibility, so I thought I would continue the theme with this blog on actors who have lost weight for roles. Usually it's for pretty much it's for the same reason as those who've gained weight... it helps get them recognition, shows their dedication to their craft, etc, etc. Some of these guys have even lost weight for roles that only amount to a few minutes of screentime in a desperate bid for attention. Often, they dice with severe medical trauma due to the speed at which they shed weight - and probably also due to the fact that many of these actors aren't really all that heavy to begin with.

Unlike last week, there aren't any women featured here. I just couldn't think of any... most Hollywood starlets are already painfully thin to begin with, and any added weight loss is hardly impressive to film critics and the like when so many actresses are already saddled with eating disorders and inappropriate media attention in regards to their weight


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Get Fat = Get Recognition

September 11th 2006 12:03
It's become a bit of a tradition now... if you want to gain recognition for your 'acting' and how far you'll take your talent then all you have to do is gain weight. It could be your breakthrough. If you're already famous, it could even be your ticket to an Oscar. Here are some of the actors and actresses who have gorged themselves to success...


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