Untitled

- i am always right -

Nobody knows anything. William Goldman's famous number one rule of filmmaking is now inscribed firmly on the brains of everyone working in the industry, because it is absolutely, 100%, true. Nobody knows anything.

The Last Action Hero was a flop, despite the No 1 box office star, a grade A director and a "hot" script. The screenplay for Four Weddings and a Funeral. the second highest grossing film in the UK ever, was rejected by every studio in the country. Someone greenlighted Waterworld, which eventually cost almost $1.5 million dollars a minute, a budget very nearly impossible to break even on, yet Titanic cost more and made everyone kazillions of dollars. Nobody knows anything.

After months or years beavering away over a movie, dotting every visual "i" and crossing every verbal "t", it's a well known fact that most directors become almost clueless about whether their baby is a Mother Theresa or an Adolf Hitler. Mike Newell, director of Four Weddings, has said that he was seriously considering leaving the country before the reviews and premiere of the film, he was convinced it was so bad, and rumours abound that the studio didn't know how to sell it, so convinced were they that it was a turkey.

Eventually a kind of consensus settles in about a film, after both reviews and box office are spent. Die Hard 1 is a classic, and the best of the series. Pretty Woman is a great film, but the only good one Julia Roberts has done. So I Married An Axe Murderer is a lot better than anyone expected, though no-one is quite sure why. Pierce Brosnan IS James Bond.

Most people fall in step most of the time, but everyone also has their quirks - someone probably even loved Speed 2. The fact is even the greatest movies have their attackers, and the worst have their defenders - a persons reaction to a movie is so unique it is amazing people ever agree on anything. It's a Wonderful Life? I've heard people rubbish it. Citizen Kane? Technically proficient and tedious. Schindler's List? A whitewash (apparently). Toys? A work of art.

So here are some of the movies where I am right, and the rest of the world is clearly, obviously, unambigulously wrong.

North.

This is a wonderful, surrealist and charming comedy, brilliantly sending up conventional cutesy-kid films. Not that it's particularly hard-edged - it affirms that kids need love, and families - but it is at least wonderfully bizarre. With a jarring shift in tone from one scene to the next, its a rollercoaster ride through comedy, and definitely not a naff cute lapse in judgment from normally reliable director Rob Reiner.

Raging Bull.

Raging bore. A spectacularly tedious examination of a worthless boxer who shouts a lot. Why is anybody interested in this, for heaven's sake?

War Games.

This isn't the juvenile, silly kiddie picture you may have an image of, but a chillingly realistic examination into the dangers of - and faith in - computers in the early eighties. It's also very funny, with brilliant performances and a script far better than the authors' later, and much more implausible, Sneakers. A belter.

Top Gun.

The epitome of brainless, soullessly manipulative and embarrassingly macho eighties movies. Particularly loathsome in almost every regard - even the famed aerial sequences seem tame now.

Toys.

Really don't understand this one - a charming, funny and bizarre tale of endearing insanity. From the opening scene - featuring the toy company boss wearing a propeller hat wired to his pacemaker as an early warning detector - this is top stuff, with military mad Michael Gambon and son LL Cool J simply hysterical.

Almost Anything Directed By Martin Scorsese.

America's most over-rated director, Scorsese combines endless repetition of lowlife themes with a visual style which reeks, of all things, of a just-out-of-film-school overindulgence. Seems a nice chap, though.

Braveheart.

Didn't anyone else notice that the film was over an hour too long? Endleesly repetitive battles and tedious bleating about "Freedom".

And there's no point in arguing about any of these. It's quite simple - I am always right.

- home - news - recent additions - site index -