Make Inishturk Great Again

I guess Inishturk can be expecting some new arrivals any day now.

Endearing (not to mention prescient) short from MEL Films.

Cannes 2013: Out of competition

Featuring Tara Reid, who was, in another life, directed by the Coen brothers, and Derek Jacobi, who should know better.

Pictures from The Guardian, via Broadsheet.

Beautiful Stills from Beautiful Films: Boogie Nights

Film-grab.com, a website that showcases 'beautiful stills from beautiful films', has just published a post on 'Boogie Nights', El Tarangu's second favourite film of all time. One of the images is a little NSFW (is a single female nipple still classified as NSFW these days?), but no spoilers.

All images belong to Paul Thomas Anderson/Robert Elswit, via film-grab.com

Tony Scott 1944 - 2012

Sorrows come not in single spies, but in battalions...

El Tarangu was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of Tony Scott. We've always had a soft-spot for his unashamedly populist, slickly-produced films.

Movies.com have this nice little tribute, featuring the first short film Scott ever directed, a more recent short film (Clive Owen playing opposite James Brown - how odd), and an interview with the man himself.

We would be remiss in not mentioning Tony Scott's most famous work. Top Gun, a film that caused a generation of self-assured, red-blooded men to rethink some basic principles with this scene:

You can be my wing-man any time, Tony.

Photo from People.com

Movies.com link via @scottEweinberg 

The Dark Knight Rises - Deleted Scene

Well... it will do wonders for our SEO.

The Day of the Triffids (film)

Steve Sekley’s 1962 film adaptation opens in much the same way as the source novel: Bill Masen, the film’s brawny hero, convalescing in hospital following surgery on his eyes. With his eyes temporarily out of commission, Masen is unable to witness the spectacular meteor shower that lights up the night sky the world over. And when everyone discovers that they have gone blind the next day, Bill is one of the few people in London who are still able to see. Bill witnesses the chaos that grips central London, and resolves to return to his ship (he’s a sailor), picking up Susan, a child who can still see, along the way.

Aside from rendering the vast majority of the world’s population blind, the meteor shower has another sinister effect: triffids, gargantuan extra-terrestial plants deposited on earth by an earlier meteor, have become ambulatory, and are attacking and devouring the defenceless population.

The Day of the Triffids features some genuinely unsettling scenes. After leaving the hospital, Bill Masen crosses an eerily-deserted Westminster Bridge (so we now know where Danny Boyle borrowed that idea from). A train, the driver blind, crashes into the station; the panicked passengers fall over one another as they attempt to disembark. A passenger ship, its crew and travellers sightless, drifts aimlessly in the middle of the ocean. The crew on an airliner fruitlessly radio for a ground crew to assist them in landing; the terrified passengers, suspecting correctly that the plane will soon run out of fuel, begin to riot, trampling an airhostess (this viewer was reminded of United 93).

The scenes described above all take place within the first 45 minutes of the film’s running time; during the film’s second half, the film loses focus and the plot meanders a bit. The action shifts to France, and then on to Spain, for no good reason that El Tarangu could discern. Aside from the Bill Masen storyline, there is also a secondary storyline concerning the Goodwins. Tom and Karen Goodwin are two marine biologists, their marriage on the rocks, who were conducting research in a lighthouse off the coast of Cornwall the meteor shower occurred. Stranded in the lighthouse, and with triffids roaming about outside, the Goodwins are engaged in a race against time to discover a chemical substance to combat the triffids.

El Tarangu kept expecting the two disparate story threads to come together at some point (particularly when Bill Masen’s character starts sailing around in a boat), but they never do. The Goodwins’s storyline had no bearing whatsoever on the film’s plot; sure, Janette Scott looks great and screams at the requisite times as Karen Goodwin, but the lighthouse storyline could have been dispensed with altogether.

Some of the special effects look a little bit hinky by today’s standards (at some points, the triffids move in exactly the same manner as a prop shoved along on a dolly would), and the plot careers all over the place during the film’s second half, but there are some pretty spooky scenes, and the triffids themselves look pretty awesome; The Day of the Triffids is good fun. But for heaven’s sake, if you intend on watching the film, don’t ruin the book for yourselves by watching the film first. Whatever about the uneven quality of the film adaptation, El Tarangu unreservedly recommends John Wyndham’s excellent novel.

Buy the novel The Day of the Triffids from Amazon; only then should you buy the film.

Image from and Passenger Films.

For a slightly more in-depth analysis of the similarities between The Day of the Triffids and Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, see Deadly Movies' post on the topic.

Animated Tribute to Drive

Just like it says in the description (warning: here be spoilers).

Directed by Tom Haugomat & Bruno Mangyoku; via Department M2.

My Little Pony as Pop Culture Icons

Edward Scissorhands

Alien

The Joker

Princess Leia

Images from The Guardian (where there are a number of other My Little Ponies dressed as Star Wars characters - both franchises having a large common fan base, it seems). 

5 Card Stud

5 Card Stud opens on an after-hours poker game. A tinhorn (card cheat) is caught palming cards. An argument ensues, and the rest of the card players, with the exception of Dean Martin’s character, Van Morgan, take the tinhorn off for lynching.

Dean Martin, who was in the commode at the time of the kerfuffle, rides out in an attempt to stop the lynching party. He gets a bop on the head for his troubles (courtesy of Roddy McDowell, the ringleader of the lynch mob), and the tinhorn is hanged anyway.

Pretty soon afterward, the card game’s players begin to turn up dead – each the victim of a form of strangulation. Unsurprisingly, suspicions arise amongst the remaining card players as to which of them is responsible for the killings. And who is this gun-toting preacher who has lately shown up in town?

El Tarangu remembers really liking 5 Card Stud. For years, it was one of our favourite westerns, and one of the main reasons that we liked director Henry Hathaway. So it was quite saddening when we watched the film again recently and discovered that, in fact, it actually isn’t that great at all.

By the late 60s, the western genre was on the wane, and 5 Card Stud has the aura of a film from a genre in decline. From the opening credits, the chintzy theme song (sung by a double-jobbing Dino) gives the film an awfully dated feel. Dean Martin, who at 51 was getting a little long in the tooth for playing romantic male leads, puts in a decent performance as Van Morgan, the dissolute anti-hero gambler. Robert Mitchum is quite good as the psychopathic, trigger-happy preacher (if this sounds familiar, it’s almost the exact same role that Mitchum played in Night of the Hunter, only with a gun instead of a knife). Roddy McDowell puts in the most enjoyable performance in his sneering, weaselly turn as Nick Evers, the lynch mob ringleader. McDowell chews the scenery, with undisguised English accent, in a most delightful manner.

5 Card Stud boasts some enjoyable set pieces. There is a big shoot-out involving half the town, some fist fights, some inventive murder scenes, and a decent showdown at the end. Hathaway uses the nice device of having all the surviving participants of the game meeting up at the card table after each murder; at every meeting, there’s a newly vacant chair.

The film remains less than the sum of its parts, however, and overall, 5 Card Stud has a somewhat half-baked feel. The relationship between Dean Martin and Inger Stevens feels like it was thrown in as an afterthought, and the identity of the killer is disclosed too early, rendering the ending a bit of a damp squib in tension terms.

5 Card Stud is actually not bad; it’s just that the film failed to live up to El T’s rose-tinted recollections on our most recent viewing.

Buy 5 Card Stud from Amazon.

Image from Hollywood Classics Reviews.

Sammy Davis Jr. – Sandwiches and Satanism

While searching for the above video clip, El Tarangu began to type “sammy davis jr sandwiches” into Google. We got as far as “sammy davis jr sa...”, which Google autocompleted as “sammy davis jr satanist”.

Oy vey.

Merry Christmas, and goodwill to all

The Junky’s Christmas by William Burroughs, from the collection Interzone. A text version of the story to supplement Burroughs’s croaky narration, if required, is available here.

Buy William Burroughs books on Amazon.

Paranmanjang

This passed El Tarangu by completely when it came out in January, but South Korean film director Park Chan Wook (he of Oldboy fame) has shot a short film entirely using the iPhone 4.

No English subtitles, unfortunately, but insofar as the Internet tells us, Paranmanjang is about a family consulting a shaman to find out the circumstances of the death of a relative (the fisherman gentleman).

Nice poster, too.

Buy Park Chan Wook films on Amazon.