Although Vol 1 delivered gloriously demented energy, crazy-paving style and a skyscraper body count, Tarantino purists lamented the lack of wordy dialogue and funky gristle that would have made it a full Quentinburger with cheese. Well, here it all is in Vol 2. Sure, Uma'n'Keith (Carradine) share enough sassy lines and high-kicking homicides to hold you, but the conclusion still whimpers when it should bang.
In 1968, Raybert productions—a Hollywood hotbed of drugged-out '60s fornication—saw fit to hand would-be-Fellini Bob Rafelson The Monkees as a vehicle for his auteurist debut. This was the result.
The memory of Dennis Potter is not well-served by this inferior feature version of the fine '80s BBC TV series that confirmed Potter as one of Britain's most original and daring screenwriting talents. Here, Robert Downey Jr takes the Michael Gambon role of Dan Dark, the chronically ill pulp fiction writer who, delirious in hospital, finds reality merging with the fantasy world of his novels.
"I'm not sure if it's a comedy or a tragedy," shrugs actor Jean-Claude Brialy in Une Femme Est Une Femme, "but it's a masterpiece." Not wrong there. This hyperactive 1961 ground-breaker, even more than the mesmerising Alphaville, is everything that's wonderful about early Godard. Later, he became obsessed with semiotics, deconstructing to the point where only the fanatical could go with him. But here, in the post-Breathless era, high on success and confidence, he's brushing excess flecks of genius off his coat.
Part of the BFI's intriguing "A History Of The Avant-Garde" series, this is 66 minutes of decaying, nitrate-film archive footage, an artful collage in which figures deteriorate as we watch. Obviously, it's heavily symbolic: nuns, children, boxers go about their endeavours unaware (or are they?) of the oblivion that looms. The dissonant score's a drag, but this is nothing if not haunting.
Recorded at the LA Troubadour in 2000—and gaps like that never bode well. Though it covers moments when the band were at their defiant best—"Olympian", "For The Dead", "Fighting Fit"—it still feels like they're going through the motions. And that's a shame as Gene always had a lot more to them than their ill-deserved reputation as Britpop fops. Worth seeing for what could have been.
Following last year's release of his earlier work, this is an artfully presented set of Polanski's commercial breakthrough movies—Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown and The Tenant. Given a ready-made yarn with a thread, he could concentrate on brewing his own unique, dislocating atmospheres and obsessions, and did so brilliantly.
In 1980, one year before Anthony Burgess composed a whole new language for Quest For Fire, the producers of this dumbass Neanderthal comedy achieved much the same effect by just having actors go "oog". Insanely, Ringo Starr plays a horny caveman who forms his own tribe of losers (a young Dennis Quaid among them) and gets into scrapes. A must-have for Beatles completists; for everyone else, the animated dinosaurs are sweet. (DL)
DVD EXTRAS: None.
It's 1967 and Terry meets Julie under a Wessex downpour as opposed to a Waterloo sunset. John Schlesinger addresses Thomas Hardy's torrid melodrama of love, betrayal and sheep farming with the epic cinematographic sweep it deserves, while the tension between Christie and her three suitors-the doomed Peter Finch, the stoical Alan Bates and, of course, the dastardly Terence Stamp is spellbinding.
