#102: DIGGER

 

STARRING: Tom Cruise, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Sandra Huller, Michael Stuhlbarg and Jesse Plemons. Screenplay by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Nicolas Giacobone and Sabina Berman. Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Budget $180 million. Running time 129 minutes. 

Digger, Digger, Digger. You magnificent, outrageous, deranged, bi-polar bastard. You teased and played with my emotions for over two hours, you had me loving you, delighted by your outlandish antics, then bewildered by your coquettish teasing, then frustrated and then ultimately bemused and emotionally sated by your final trick. 

I can't really synopsise this without spoiling it for you, kind and lovely reader. So, in broad strokes, tycoon Digger (Tom Cruise) the richest man in the world, beloved by President Compson, (John Goodman) and his entourage of lackys and boot lickers who agree with everything he says and demands. Digger is an elderly oil man, like his daddy and his daddy's daddy before him. He's utterly greed obsessed and orientated, he knows everything about everything, he's always right and if he's wrong it's someone else's mistake. He lives in a magnificent and insanely opulent stately home, which might be in Scotland, or not. The only object of love in his life is Maggie, his, barely alive,  30 year-old cat, who he spoon feeds with tinned fish from the tip of his pinky fingernail. We meet him as he awakens on the worst day of his life, indeed the worst day of the entire world's life as we're about to discover. You see, Digger's men are drilling for oil in Greenland and pulling out a million barrels of oil out of it every day, that is until a huge undersea pocket of methane gas explodes severing an ice shelf the size of Maryland and sending it careering  towards Norway. Rather than warning the world, Digger warns the President and initiates an information firewall which scrubs any mention of the impending disaster from the internet. Then despite the advice of Digger's Environmental safety officer, Dr. Nirav Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) the President, who's dying from 'arsehole cancer', decides to do nothing, hoping the berg will somehow avoid Northern Europe and instead head-off into the Atlantic Ocean where it'll melt. But it doesn't, instead it, the iceberg, smashes into Northern Europe causing a huge tidal wave that floods Europe causing the worst environmental disaster of all times. And then the shit really hits the fan. 

And that's the plot, without spoiling anything.

Although, there's more at play here and the film pulls the rug on you in the most unexpected way and reveals itself to be something altogether different. For a while there was a rumour that this was a musical, well rest assured, kind reader, it most certainly isn't a musical, but it is playing a trick that will either ultimately win you over or utterly alienate you. For me, I was mostly won over, but also a little disappointed because it left me with more questions than answers.

For the first 30 minutes I was utterly onboard for this remarkable film, it was funny, intense, and Tom Cruise was simply mesmerising! He's in every scene and goddam can that boy act! Weighed down by kilos of make-up and an old-man fat suit, Cruise dominates this film, but not to the detriment of the other actors. Likewise the acting from everybody is top notch, John Goodman channeling little-handed Donald Dump. Riz Ahmed, the only nice character in the whole thing, Sandra Huller playing Digger's daughter and right down to the lowliest bit part character, and yet there's something strange going on, the actors all 'act', and don't seem to mind if we notice. Although there are clues littered throughout as to what the bigger picture here might be. 

Then there's soundtrack that grates and niggles with its strangely discordant tonal sounds, which helps to enhance the experience. Alejandro G. Iñárritu directs this with vision and guile, he has a vision and he knows what he wants to say and boy does he say it. I've only seen two of his other films, The Revenant, which I found hard work and deeply exhausting and Birdman which I loved, in fact, this shares a lot of the same DNA with that. 

Most of the reviews for this film berate it for its gargantuan budget of $180 million, with reviewers complaining that it shouldn't have cost that much, that somehow that's obscene. Well, I disagree them, where were those wanky little tossers when the likes of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Tedium with it's budget of $387 million, or Glad He Ate Her Too at $310 million, or Jurassic World: Deterioration with $465 million, when those clunking, awful films waddled our way, now that's obscene.

This is a film that is impossible to promote or market properly without spoiling it, it's a film that's at one point a grim environmental warning, the next a broad satirical farce, then a comedy and a disaster movie. It's a film I started off loving, delighted and enthralled by both Cruise and Goodman and the outrageousness of the it all, but then my delight dipped dramatically, mostly thanks to the reveal, before I found myself slowly regaining my love for it. Overall, it's fantastically well made, it's well written and it looks great but it's too long and that 'twist' is hard work and it's really going to polarise the audience; in fact already has. In the States its opening weekend haul was just $8 million dollars, so that's already sealed its fate as one of the biggest flops of the year. Also, I don't think audiences are quite ready yet for old man Cruise with his potbelly and receding hairline. 

I would suggest that much like Blade Runner, The Thing, Brazil and many other wonderfully misunderstood films this will ultimately come to be seen as something really rather special in years to come. It's a film I find myself still thinking about a week later and when I talk to people about it I realise it resonated with me far more than I at first realised. Part black comedy, part political satire, part environmental warning and part post apocalyptic science fiction disaster film.

For me this started out as a strong 8/10, but when the 'twist' arrives, the film lost its momentum and dipped to a 6. But, then it started to win me back, thanks to its vision, style, its direction, its passion and ultimately its sheer audacity. You'll never see another film like this, a film so unique and challenging and it ended up scoring, what's sure to be a hotly contended 8/10.

#101: CASINO ROYALE (2006)

 

STARRING: Daniel Craig, Eva Green, Mads Mikkelsen, Jeffrey Wright, Judi Dench, Giancarlo Giannini, Simon Abkarian, Caterina Murino and Jesper Christensen. Screenplay by Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Paul Haggis. Produced by Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli. Music by David Arnold. Directed by Martin Campbell. Running time: 144 minutes. Budget $150 million. Worldwide box office haul $606 million. Originally released in 2006.

The 21st official Eon Production movie in the franchise, the first to feature Daniel Craig as James Bond, the third adaptation of the original source book after the 1967 movie production starring Woody Allen and David Niven and the original TV movie, which featured Barry Nelson as Jimmy Bond - an American P.I. working in Las Vegas - and the second movie to be directed by Martin Campbell. This also heralded in the most financially successful period of Bond movie franchise with the Craig era generating a staggering worldwide box office haul of over $3,957 billion. Casino Royale held the record for highest grossing Bond film until the release of Skyfall six years later, which shattered the record with takings of over a billion dollars.

With a new Bond, Eon decided to something new with the franchise and present him as if he was new to the world of the Double O and just starting out his career as a hired killer for the British Government. Eon decided to bring back Martin Campbell to handle the direction as he'd also launched the Pierce Bronson era back in 1995 with Goldeneye the 17th in the Bond series.

The film sees Bond, pre-credits confirm his status as a Double-O agent by killing two targets before teaming up with MI6 accountant Vespa (Eva Green) and heading off to play poker against international terrorist banker Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), his mission is to bankrupt Le Chiffre, who's using his customers money to bankroll the game. Naturally the film's far more complicated than that, but I'm guessing you've probably already seen this and if you haven't then stop reading this and get yourself down to your nearest Cineworld to see it! It's an absolute hoot and one of the best of the series.

Seen writ large on the big screen gives you a chance to thoroughly enjoy one of the best James Bond films of the series. Daniel Craig is superb in the role, his steely blue eyes nail you to your seat, everything he does is sharp and angry, every move, even the smallest of actions and it gives his performance a power and edge. The dialogue sparks, with not a single cliche or soundbite spoken, you can see, or hear, this has been polished to within an inch of its life, as witnessed by the conversation between him and the excellent Eva Green on the train where he admits his lamb has been skewered and that he sympathises. A Bond film needs a strong villain, and Mads Mikkelsen is simply superb, bringing real threat and menace to the role, that wicker chair torture sequence is brilliant. But what makes this film so good is that we see Bond working as a detective, investigating a series of clues that lead him from a fantastic Parkour race through an African building site to a breath-taking airport chase through Miami airport, he's not just an action man, he's cunning, clever and to see him working like this is the true joy of the film.

I've watched each and every Bond film multiple times and this one ranks as one of my absolute favourites, and I'm not afraid to admit that Daniel Craig is my joint Number One favourite Bond actor alongside Sean Connery and Roger Moore.

A magnificent masterpiece. 10/10

 

#100: FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD A.K.A. FRANKENSTEIN VS BARAGON

 

STARRING: Nick Adams, Kumi Mizuno and Tadao Takashima. Screenplay by Takeshi Kimura. Story by Reuben Bercovitch and Jerry Soh. Based on Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Directed by Ishiro Honda. Running time 89 minutes. Originally released in 1965

As long suffering readers of this blog will know I am a committed and passionate Godzilla fan, damn I love him and the reason for that is this, Frankenstein Conquers the World, or as it's also known, Frankenstein Vs. Baragon. I first fell in love with this movie thanks to one picture featured in  Alan G. Frank's fantastic book, Horror Movies published by Octopus in 1974. I was 11 when I was given it one Christmas and this single image utterly captivated my young imagination and introduced me to the worlds of giant monsters or Kaiju as I later learned they were called and ultimately to Godzilla, who was only mentioned but not shown in the book. When back in August of this year the Barbican announced that Frankenstein Conquers the World was being screened, for the first time in the UK - EV-VER!, as part of their superb Kaiju: All Out Monster Attack season, I couldn't resist. I have been waiting 51 years to see it and my expectations could not have been higher. 

The story starts at the tail end of the war in Europe, when Nazis storm Frankenstein's castle and steal the still-beating heart of his monster and then set off, by submarine to Japan, where they hand it over a waiting Japanese submarine who then transport the chest containing the organ to a research hospital in Hiroshima, on the very day the American drops the world's first atomic bomb. Decades later, research scienitist (Nick Adams) and his attractive assistant (Kumi Mizuno) find a huge fore-headed feral 'waif' feeding off domestic pets and befriend him, alerting the media and shackling him up in a cage. He promptly grows to gigantic proportions and escapes his cage to rampage through the streets of a superb scale model Tokyo before heading off into the wilderness. BUT he's not the only huge monster on the loose, there's also a bat-eared, horn-nosed burrowing beastie by the name of Baragon wrecking havoc too, he's much more destructive and seemingly oblivious to the human lives he ends, not so old Frankie who, despite his rage and size seems to go out of his way not to injure humans, although they don't seem to see the lengths he's going to. Through an amazing series of circumstances these two behemoths finally knock heads in the forests outside Tokyo triggering a massive forest fire and so begins a fight to the death. And that's the plot to this awesome, wonderful, ridiculous and utterly silly film. 

Featuring some genuinely superb model work of Tokyo, the obligatory strange plot jumps and devices only ever seen in Japanese movies, a funky soundtrack mixed with bombastic orchestration, and wonderful 60s fashions and designs. But be warned, this was a deadly serious Toho monster movie, which thanks to its 1960s sensibilities render the film exceedingly funny to today's 'cinema savy post millennial crowd'. The cast, lead by American Nick Adams (who would go on to perfect the pulling up your trousers by the belt school of acting) spends his time in this, pouring chemicals into bottles while frowning, staring into a microscope, while frowning, dating his attractive assistant, while frowning and wearing small hats at a jaunty angle, while frowning. Mostly famous for acting along James Dean and of being Elvis Presley's 'best' friend, Adams went off to Japan to make three movies for Toho, of which Frankenstein was his first, his second and my personal favourite was the Godzilla starring Invasion of The Astro-Monster, and his third and final film Killing Bottle all for Toho and he's simply wonderful in all three, mostly because his American style of acting is in complete contrast to the pantomine of his Japanese co-stars and as such he stands out like a huge wonderful sore thumb, his own over-acting in delightful contrast to his co-stars exaggerated acting styles, imagine a Am-Dram Indiana Jones without the whip.

What made this so wonderful wasn't the American version of the film, which featured a truncated conclusion that ends with a dead Baragon being lifted up triumphantly above his head by Frankie before being thrown into a fiery pit that suddenly opens up at the base of a nearby volcano, before Franky too falls into the inferno seemingly dying in the process.

In complete contrast, the Japanese version ended so spectacularly different and wholly unexpected that I wager you'd not be able to guess what it was in a million years. You see, this time round, after Frankenstein has picked up the dead body of Baragon and hurdled him into the pit of fire that opened up at the base of the volcano a new blood-curdling shriek of rage cries out and Frankenstein turns round to watch as a gigantic octopus lumbers into view and proceeds to launch an all-out, unprovoked, attack on our Frankie. The two tussle violently, with Frank helpfully wrapping the monsters limbs around himself before he's finally pulled off the clifftop and into the sea below far below where the octopus, now in his element, finally overwhelms the giant boy and drags him below the surface to seemingly drown. 

And it's this arrival of this new monster, introduced literally in the final 5 minutes of the film which elevated this from a rather mediocre 2nd tier monster movie barely worthy of a 7/10 into something quite sublime. With no explanation, no introduction, just a shriek and a bang - a new monstrous, un-named, multi-limbed aquatic kaiju just attacks our hero and kills him. The audience who had politely clapped through the Americanized version ending just erupted in sheer delight, and the cheering, laughter and clapping and I among them, thus elevating this to be nothing short of a stone cold classic. 

8/10