Golligow Reviews

Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Beyond Preposterous

[2/10 · 22 January 2016]

For no other reason than the film-makers completely bottled it and changed the obvious terror threat to the USA, at least in the scale portrayed here, from Islamist terrorists into North Korean terrorists. You can just imagine the script meetings, where the originator was probably screaming blue murder how it just didn't make sense to do that, then the producers saying, it's my way or the highway, either change the terrorists into something we can justify to the liberal censors or no green light. Islamist terror attacks on USA in past fifteen years - numerous. North Korean terror attacks on USA in past fifteen years - NONE. Go figure.

Anna Karenina (I) (2012)

A 10/10 Masterpiece

[10/10 · 28 January 2013]

You just can't make films better than this. It compares a little with Moulin Rouge which too was a masterpiece, a 9 out of 10 masterpiece, and last year's Hugo, a 1/10 rotten egg - it has all of Hugo's style plus spadefuls more, but none of Hugo's manifold failings: essentially a plot and characters you'd have to be a dormouse to engage with. The plot and characters here are right out of the top drawer, it's Anna Karenina by TOLSTOY! The source material is the real deal, and Tom Stoppard is a past master at getting the best out of these old stories. So, all good, then you watch the first ten minutes and it is very annoying, just (it felt) too stylized and self conscious (as a lot of pseuds here have levelled). But I gradually got it, bought into the style, and then it was just unrelenting in its beauty, it frankly has to be the most beautiful film I've ever laid my eyes on, think Doctor Zhivago crossed with Age of Innocence (both great films)and you're half way there to getting in the clothes of this film. I can't believe Joe Wright isn't in there for best director at the Baftas and the film isn't up for best film - I've seen all this year's contenders, Django Unchained (9/10) Lincoln (8/10) Zero Dark Thirty (7/10) Silver Linings Playbook (6.5/10) Life of Pi (8/10) etc etc, but this is the only one that get's the big 10, it is in a different league creatively to those others, yes, even Lincoln with its Stellar cast and director (wasn't it just a bit dull, really?) But not this, this is not dull, it sparkles beautifully, is unforgettable. I wanted to have a little gripe about the casting of Keira Knightly, but I've changed my mind, I can forgive even that.

The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

Bloated Shallow Rubbish

[4/10 · 19 December 2012]

This film is expensive bloated nonsense. Watch out for a gut churning funny performance from Michael Caine - he kills (as in ruins) every scene he's in, his lines are terrible and his delivery just risible, and why use these actors who've had that surgery that keeps their eyes open and makes them look so conspicuously Hollywood rather than anything like the type of character they're trying to portray? The story swivels on a conceit revealed far too late in the day for it resonate, it just leaves you feeling cheated, and it is silly anyway, and the whole thing is just overblown and for low IQ boys, silly fights, silly toys, not genre defining but clichéd and hackneyed. Just a franchise and director going through the motions using pyrotechnics to obscure the shallow truth.

Melancholia (2011)

Beautiful in Form and Content

[9/10 · 22 May 2012]

I watched this film last night on DVD and I haven't been able to stop thinking (or talking) about it all day. I still feel sort of spooked out in a "am I still in that magically imagined world created by Trier" sort of way. For some reason I hadn't seen anything by him before but knew he was wacky, clever, arcane, challenging etc etc. Well, he is all those things in this film, plus spades on top, adjectives like magical and beautiful and thought-provoking and intelligent and quite frankly, genius (n) are all relevant here. If you like Bergman and Samuel Beckett and Hieronymus Bosch and symbolism and all those earnest elements of culture, you'll love this. It is serious,but it's beautiful in spades, beautifully intelligent, visually beautiful, beautifully rewarding.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

Book 10/10 - Film 8/10

[8/10 · 10 December 2008]

I went to see this at an advanced screener in Leicester Square last night. Kate Winslett chatted about the film on stage afterward. I went as one of those people who'd read the book and consider that source material to be amongst the best literature I'd ever read. I was wondering if and how the film could match up. My prior concerns were about how accurate the film would be. Well, there's nothing to worry about there. Mendes has created a near carbon copy of the book, the locations, characters and scenes are all exactly as I 'saw' them on the page. Nothing (as far as I could tell) is portrayed out of order, no extra characters are introduced, and no primary characters are dropped or altered. The acting is 100% perfect. The mies-en-scene is perfect. Absolutely nothing could or should have been done differently. So why not 10/10? The problem lies in the fact that Yates' novel is a literary one, much of the essence of the experience of the story is realized by Yates with just the right turn of phrase or choice of word. How does a director set about depicting or capturing this visually? I don't think he really can, he needs to use cinematic tricks and devices to inject resonance, the same resonance Yates achieves with that turn of phrase. But in being so (probably rightly) concerned about being true to the source material, the film somehow comes up a little flat as a film going experience, a sort of American Beauty without the crucial stylistic bells and whistles. Kate Winslett said afterward that (interestingly) it was she who had brought the book and the project to her husband, not vice versa and that it took some consideration for Sam Mendes to convince himself that he hadn't already told this story before, and by the final credits, I too was thinking just that, it felt like I'd watched a prequel to American Beauty, but without the pizazz and the rapture and the delight. So, the book, 10/10, the film, 8/10.

The Rotters' Club (2005)

So it's based on a successful book. So what?

[5/10 · 9 February 2005]

So it's based on a successful book. So what? Shallow, hollow and one-dimensional. If you knew this generation of three day working weeks and unions and shop stewards and immigration and racism and IRA bombs etc etc etc, all well and good - all this series does is cast a glib, politically correct eye at those times, rendering the issues essentially as sound-bites that never really develop further than the histo-montage credits. This could have been done so much better - could have been grittier and more potent concerning the issues of the day. Instead, it was like a twee, picture postcard, empty homage to what was essentially an amazing decade.