September 2019 film review

YIELD TO THE NIGHT (1956) D- J. Lee Thompson
A pretty young thing (Diana Dors) falls for a smooth-talking git, but then he snags an heiress. In her mind, there’s only one thing to do: shoot the heiress.  Immediately apprehended, she admits her guilt and is sentenced to hang. End of. Pretty much. But no. Because actually the strength of this film, and what proves that Diana Dors was much more than a pneumatic British version of Jayne Mansfield, are the scenes inside her cell on Death Row, as she struggles to come to terms with the terrible fate that awaits her. Here we find that Diana Dors can really act, as we are totally persuaded by her reaction to her terrible plight.

The screenplay was apparently written before the story of Ruth Ellis broke, though the parallels are obvious. She, as you will recall, was the last woman in England to hang, following the murder of her errant boyfriend. The case hurried the long overdue removal of the death penalty in Britain. The death penalty didn’t deter her reckless act of pure emotion, just as it doesn’t deter the thousands of murderers every year in the U.S. But there they still hang on to the deterrence principle, just as they hang on to other outdated concepts of social policy, like allowing anyone to own AR15s or AK47s. But I digress...

AQUAMAN (2018) D- James Wan
In a hypothetical world, Aquaman (played by an excessively gorgeous Jason Momoa), a kind of well-toned merman, is the leader of the Ocean people in their struggle against the evil ones of the land (that’s us). In his quest for justice and freedom for starfish and so on, he is ably assisted by other equally gorgeous mermaids (Amber Heard, Nicole Kidman etc) and 143 minutes and a hell of a lot of CGI later the aqua-people emerge... well you wouldn’t want me to spoil it for you, so I won’t. Suffice it to say I was slightly underwhelmed by this effort, despite facing the opprobrium of millions who did, voting it 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and making it a profit of a cool quarter of a billion dollars.

But I will say the players look great on screen, and you can certainly see where the money went, when it wasn’t paying the salaries of the leads. If you like this sort of thing, you know, Avengers type stuff, then I guess this is for you. Enjoy.

LITTLE MAN TATE (1991) D- Jodie Foster
A trailer-trash girl in the boondocks has a son who has an IQ of 180 or so, making him one of the cleverest children in America. But she (Jodie Foster, for whom this film marked her directorial debut) isn’t really that interested. She’s more concerned about making an honest buck, and even when teacher Dianne Wiest implores her to take the proper steps to nurture his massive brain, she takes a bit of persuading. Finally she relents and allows him to go to a school for gifted children. Even there it isn’t that easy for our kid, who finds that a having a high IQ doesn’t mean you won’t get bullied by someone just as bright as you, only bigger.

I have to say I got a lot out of this movie, which demonstrated that Foster could direct as well as act. The difficulties of being brilliant are skilfully illustrated, and I loved the closing moment, when our hero, Fred, voices over:
“I was a bit overawed by all the attention at school, but then a six-year old kid joined us who’s going to law school and now nobody’s really interested in me anymore.”
Priceless.

HOTEL MUMBAI (2019) D- Anthony Maras
In 2008, trained and financed by a particularly evil jihadi group in Pakistan, a group of killers select various luxury locations in Mumbai, India, to carry out their dread mission: to wipe out as many rich people as they can.

Recording events in an almost drama-doc style, this film takes us very close to feeling the kind of fear the people exposed to it must have experienced. Although I know what happened, I still felt my knuckles going white as I watched to see who would escape the bombs and bullets, and who would not. And although the film has received some criticism for lack of character development, I found the whole package pretty worthwhile. There was a nasty Russian mafia type guy (played rather well by Jason Isaacs) who they could have done more with, and others they dwelled on a bit too much, but as I say, in the end it was a gripping, and, at times, extremely harrowing movie. This film was a ‘Sky Original’, which is something of a departure for them, because they tend to focus more on TV series, but it isn’t a bad attempt to break into the streaming platform movie production realm. Let’s see what they do next.