The Magnificent Seven (1960)

This is another case where I own the Western remake of an Akira Kurosawa film, but not the original movie.  Though in my defence, Seven Samurai is approximately 85 hours long.

For those of you who somehow don't know, the premise of the film is simple.  A village of poor farmers is regularly raided by bandits.  The brigands carry off most of the food, leaving just enough for the farmers to scrape through until the next time they are robbed.  Tiring of this never-ending cycle, the villagers gather together what few items of value they have and go to a border town to buy guns.  But weapons are expensive (not to mention they don't really know how to use them).  The advice they get is "Hire men.  Men are cheaper than guns, these days."

And so that's what they do: seven men in all, as you might have guessed from the title.  The pay they offer is meagre, and the risks great, but each of the seven has his own motives for taking the job.  For most, an inability or unwillingness to earn a living any other way plays a significant factor.

So we've got a pretty iconic set-up: a small band of heroes (for want of a better word) trying to fend off a much larger group of marauders.  And we have a very strong cast assembled here: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson and - the cream of the crop in my estimation - Eli Wallach.  There's a whole lot of charisma on screen and it mostly - mostly - compensates for a jarring misstep in the script about 90 minutes into the film.  You'll know it when you get to it.

The Magnificent Seven is a film that starts stronger than it ends, but it is worth seeing for the opening act alone, which does a great job of introducing a large cast of characters and giving them all unique identities.  It's a great object lesson in cinematic efficiency.

The Witches' Mountain (1972)

A woman returns home to find her cat murdered.  She is understandably upset.  A young girl appears and demands they search for her pet, which is afraid the cat.  As they search, the girl mentions the woman's name (Carla) and also reveals mentions that she was the one who killed the cat.  Eventually they find the pet - a snake - in the garage.

At which point Carla sets the garage, the snake, and the kid on fire.

Roll opening credits.

We next meet Mario, a photojournalist, as he returns home from a long assignment to find Carla waiting for him.  To say that he's not pleased to see her would be understating things: he clearly wants nothing to do with her, to the point of refusing the offer of a plane ticket to Brazil in her company.  Instead he phones his editor and says he will take an assignment anywhere in the world.

Soon after arriving for his new assignment, Mario meets an attractive young writer named Delia.  And by "meets", I mean "takes photos of her while she's changing her swimming costume".  Seemingly unperturbed by this rather intrusive behaviour, Delia agrees to Mario's suggestion that she accompany him on his journey up into the mountains.

And then we get sixty minutes of them puttering around while nominally "spooky" things occasionally happen.  Mario hears loud, chant-like music.  Delia goes sleep walking.  There are photos on Mario's camera that he never took.  Oooooooooooh.

Frankly, it's all rather dull stuff, and you'll probably be very glad when the witches from the title turn up to do ... well, whatever it is they are planning to do.  The movie doesn't bother to explain little details like that.

You may notice that none of the last three paragraphs mention Carla the Child Murderer.  That's because she effectively doesn't feature.  She's revealed to be one of the witches right at the end, but how and why and what the opening scene was all about are also things the film doesn't bother to explain.

Skip.

Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure (2009)

Every year, the fairies of Pixie Hollow celebrate the Autumn Revelry.  Every eighth year, the revelry is marked by a Blue Harvest Moon.  The light of this moon, when refracted through the fairies' moonstone sceptre, produces blue fairy dust that is essential to the continued health and well-being of their community.

Given the moonstone's importance to them, the fairies create a new, ornately-decorated sceptre for it each time it is to be used.  And this year, with another Blue Harvest Moon due to arrive, the job of constructing that sceptre is given to Tinker Bell.  As you can imagine, it's a great honour.  But it is also a rather nerve-wracking one, because in addition to being incredibly important, the moonstone that goes in said sceptre is incredibly fragile.

Yeah.  I bet you can guess what happens next.

So now Tink needs to find some way to replace or repair the moonstone, which is a pretty darn major problem, all without letting anyone know that there is a problem at all.  Oh, and she'll probably Learn An Important Life Lesson in the process.  That's the way these things tend to work.

This is another well-crafted "girl's adventure" film with a dash of comedy thrown in.  The title relates to the plot on a couple of different levels, and I like the film's solution to Tinker Bell's problem.  It's nicely thematic and ties in well with her established strengths and abilities.

Good stuff.

Primeval Season 3 (2009)

At 10 episodes, series 3 of Primeval is almost half again as long as any other season.  At least if one goes by the official count.  I think an argument could be made (and possibly will be, in a future review) that series 4 and series 5 are really just one season that got broadcast in two parts.

I've never seen any official word about the reasons for the extra length of this series, but I suspect it stemmed largely from the need to farewell old characters and introduce new ones.  If you look at the cast picture from this DVD and compare to the one from my review of last series, you'll notice 60% turnover.  That's a pretty rough thing to juggle for any series, especially one that also saw the need to introduce new human adversaries over and above the group's existing nemesis and all the beasties that once were the focus of the show.

That 'were the focus' part is one reason for why I haven't given this season a recommendation.  Series 3 of Primeval just doesn't deliver on the creature feature stakes, in my opinion.  It too often plays the monster incursions for laughs (even the ones where the dialogue is all about how dangerous they are), and/or embellishes them with goofy additions, such as the episode where a Dracorex is pursued into the modern day by a medieval knight.  Much more focus is given to the ongoing antics of Helen Cutter (which are pretty meh) and the new human adversaries (who show initial promise, but their arc gets hijacked by Helen's stuff).

The second reason I haven't given this season a recommendation is front and centre in the picture of the DVD.  I find Danny Quinn (he of the cocked eyebrow and silly hair) to be thoroughly annoying, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the writers so clearly intend us to see him as a charming rogue.  As far as I am concerned, he's not charming in the slightest, and the narrative cartwheels the scripts do to make him the central figure in the show are like fingernails on a chalkboard for me.

On the plus side, this was the series I liked least when I watched the show on TV, so maybe things are going to look up again now that it is over.

Doomsday Book (2012)

This South Korean production is actually an anthology of three short films.  Not in a Pulp Fiction "we've got several more or less standalone narratives that nonetheless intertwine with each other", but in a straight up "hey here are three short films that we've stuck on one DVD".  There are no shared characters and the events of each film are basically incompatible with those of the others so you can't even imagine them as sharing a world.  They do have a thematic link - they all deal with situations which may mean the end of humanity as we know it (though they're wildly different in their details) - but each is a self-contained unit.  There isn't even a framing narrative for them.

With that in mind, I'm going to judge this "film" based on its constituent parts, rather than as a whole package.

'A Brave New World' is a zombie contagion scenario where the gimmick is that it's told from the perspective of the first people to become infected, rather than from that of survivors attempting to remain alive.  It's considerably stronger at the start than at the end.  This is a common trait of all three films to some extent, but it is most pronounced here.  A quick warning: this film contains graphic abattoir scenes.

'The Heavenly Creature' examines the question of 'what if a machine became self-aware?" through a Buddhist lens.  It's the most effects-heavy section of the film, since it features a humanoid robot as a major character, but it is definitely not a spectacle-based film.  The effects are frequent but low-key and prosaic, and the focus is very much on the philosophical ramifications of the situation: what does it mean for humanity as a whole and Buddhists in particular if a machine can think like we do?  It's definitely a section of the film I can see myself re-watching one day to try and unpack everything it is saying.

Finally we have 'Happy Birthday', in which a 10-kilometer wide asteroid is 12 hours from a cataclysmic collision with Earth.  Despite the apocalyptic scenario, it's actually the funniest of the three films; albeit in a rather "gallows humour" kind of way; both in terms of why disaster is looming and in terms of how people respond to it.

While I don't think that any of these films is an automatic "home run" in its own right, I do appreciate that all three try to do something more than just "action films with aliens" (and I say that as someone who thoroughly enjoys action films with aliens).  If you want some SF that's not from the Space Opera playbook, you might like it.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

There's a weight hanging over the first ten minutes of this film.  The heavy, bittersweet presence of a man who died before the film even began.  Senator Ransom Stoddard and his wife have travelled for two full days from Washington to attend his funeral, even though the dead man's name is barely known to the people of the town where he will be buried.

It's obvious that the deceased was particularly significant to Mrs Stoddard, as we see in a scene where renowned comic actor Andy Devine shows that he had some dramatic chops, as well.

Eventually of course, the weight of the presence has to be lifted, and it comes when Senator Stoddard agrees to tell the tale of Tom Doniphon, and why the deceased means so much to them.

The problem with this, of course, is that the cost of that early gravitas is a movie that is 90% flashback.  It's difficult to be too worried over the fate of a character you know is alive and well to tell the tale twenty-five years later.  I do think it's a significant flaw with the film, not just because it robs the film's events of some immediacy, but because it delays the first appearance of John Wayne - who plays Doniphon - for nearly twenty minutes.

At the time when the majority of the film is set, the Senator was just a young lawyer, looking to establish himself in a wild frontier territory.  Things are just a little wilder than he expected, though. He's badly beaten by bandits when the stagecoach he's on is robbed, and his outspoken ways attract the attention of bad men: in particular, one named Liberty Valance.  Doniphon warns Stoddard that the only way to defend the law in the West is with a gun, but Stoddard is reluctant to take that step.  The film is however, called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, not "the man who successfully prosecuted Liberty Valance before a jury of his peers", so I bet you can guess how that ends up.

This film has a great cast, and some fine use of light and shadow.  It's filmed in black and white, most likely as a cost-cutting measure, but director John Ford makes a virtue of necessity, especially in the titular gunfight.

On the other hand, the script is a little undercooked, to my thinking.  I don't know if it would be better without the framing story or not.  It would certainly have more immediacy without it, but it would also lose some of the melancholy that we see at the start and end.  Of course, for a significant part of the audience "less melancholy" is probably a good thing.  More problematically, some of the later plot developments of the film definitely feel a bit handwaved and perfunctory, like they were running out of time to hit all the plot points they needed to make.  Cutting those 15-20 minutes of framing would definitely have helped with that.

Despite those issues though, there are some fine performances to enjoy here.

War of the Robots (1978)

The success of Star Wars prompted a host of cheap Italian imitations.  None of them were any good, of course.  That's not how cheap Italian imitations work.  The best you could hope for is that they'd manage to be endearingly stupid in some way, like Starcrash.

This is no Starcrash.

Alien robots stage an attack on a scientist's home and abduct him and his female assistant.  Said assistant is also the scientist's lover, but she's secretly two-timing him with a starship captain.

No prizes for guessing who gets the job to chase after the abductees.

It's imperative that the scientist be recovered within eight days, because he left a nuclear experiment running at his home (as you do) and without his assistance to shut it down, it will go critical and destroy the nearby city.  The authorities are less worried about the assistant, but obviously our space captain has a personal interest there.

Naturally there are some misadventures during the chase itself, but the film's real shenanigans begin when the pursuers reach the alien planet.  The scientist doesn't want to leave, because the aliens desperately need his research and willingly give him all the resources he struggled to get on Earth.  Oh, and for reasons the film will never give, the assistant is now Empress of the alien planet.

Now of course, the sensible thing for the space captain to do in this situation is accept the scientist's decision - on the proviso he give instructions for shutting down the experiment - then settle down to become Mr Empress of the Aliens.  But if he did that, how would we get our fill of poorly staged "light sword" fights and even more poorly staged "space battles"?

With the exception of one shining moment of utterly stupid, right near the end (hint to the characters in this film, if someone asks you "Should I kill her, or let her kill you?", you should probably say "Kill her!" not "That has to be your choice."), this is banal stuff.