Film Reviews by BN

Series 1. Discs 1 & 2

Oh man. What is this awful mania currently for filming IN THE DARK? (Well ok, it was back in 2010 but as I haven't watched any TV for @6years with luck maybe it's no longer the trend... and hallelujah to that) Especially if it's all in dreary industrial locations and interiors, giving you the idea the electricity's been cut off? I've got very good vision but how the heck are we to interpret what's going on if we can't even make out faces or locations, nor even what city we're in from the outset???

The first episode started with Luther and some unknown man for some minutes having a standoff but honestly, I could barely make out

who was who, where they were...and crucially, why? Nearly switched off right then & there but persevered as I was sure I'd seen a Luther episode on TV years before and because Idris Elba in tweed has a presence and strength (and a cuteness!) as the character, thought I'd revisit the series. The story consequently got better but I never really got the gist of the backstory as they promptly moved on to the crisis with Alice (Ruth Wilson), a strong-willed manipulator of DCI Luther's character. It then morphed into another gruesome murder story until you finally realise that they are interwined - by episodes 4-6 on Disc 2 even a few of the policemen are implicated.

The costume and set designers in the small Extras feature attached in disc 2 admitted they tried to mute all colours to grey-green, grey-brown, grey-EVERYTHING. Frankly that just produces MUD and even when under slightly more normal lighting in a police station it looked like the place was full of smog!! Again impossible to SEE details and so, so dreary! Why can't they film it naturally, so you could actually SEE the scenery and the clues, it really wouldn't have ruined anything, in fact I might have been more transfixed by the story and the horror of the atrocities (thankfully briefly shown) and you'd have been rooting for the police to catch the perps - but after a while quite frankly I was lost and didn't care so much. They must think they're being incredibly clever but it backfires.

Whether I get the discs to the next series remains to be seen. I just hate peering at my screen shouting WTF's going on ???

Really not sure why I added this to my CP list but actually it wasn't a bad mystery. I know nothing about football; this I think has real newsreel shots of playing; it was the first British film to be made with a central soccer theme. Was surprised it was 1939 as the suits and hairstyles looked much earlier '30s to me. In B&W (which apart from the girls in their hats, curly hairstyles and huge shouldered suits) made it somewhat difficult to identify the men, who all looked the same to me, so by the end I was getting totally mixed up who was who, along with the character names being quite unusual. Real commentators and football luminaries of the time appear as themselves.

Leslie Banks is Scotland Yard's Inspector Slade and at times looks a complete bumbler, as is his sidekick (didn't catch who that was). Banks has quite a few very funny moments, but he's sharp and the mystery unravels so he gets his man in the end.

Never knew anything about this. Remarkable 45min story about two Australians enjoying swinging London in the 60s who buy a lion cub on a whim from Harrods - which extraordinarily sold exotic animals at the time. Christian the lion bonds with the pair, behaves and is treated like a pussycat but as it steadily grows they realise that no matter how benign its character it's still a wild animal that will ultimately get too large for them to handle and will need a larger exercise area than the kindly leant Moravian church yard they use. Via an entirely chance meeting with Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna famous after the Born Free film, Christian starts on the road to being patriated to the wild on George Adamson's reserve in Kenya. The boys visit on a trip one year later and there's a tentative then exuberant reunion. Christian had joined a pride with a larger male but due to misadventure he soon becomes the alpha male and there is the inference right at the end that he fathers cubs but curiously no further information is revealed of his fate or offspring after that, which struck me as odd.

Luckily there is plenty of home movie type footage of Christian in the 70s, but it wasn't until recently with the work of an American university student that the story was put together into this documentary type film and a book.

Definitely worth a watch. Quite sweet.

Lots of footage of Travers, McKenna and Adamson.

The transfer of original has suffered, the copy and colours are faded and muddy. Soundtrack on the DVD I got is muffled and sadly it had no subtitles for the Afrikaans and other local dialogue. That really gets my goat when none of this is translated as it may well be germane to the plot but you're never given a chance. Many dvds do the same thesedays. I think it's the height of arrogance to dismiss what characters say, so often it's just described as "Speaks in French, German or Russian..." etc. or even the laziest of lazies "Speaks in Foreign Language" !!! You can't even be bothered to find out WHAT language it is nor feel it's important ??? Sheesh.

I did wonder how Vic Morrow got involved in this, it's an ok part and he plays...well, Vic Morrow! Peter vanDissel is the good-looking driven detective risking his job chasing a wily assassin bent on eliminating the people who put him in prison.

I like watching these older films to get a taste of the times and locations, this being steadfast apartheid S.Africa. And the cars!

OK, it's a long time since I watched this film, but certain films do stay in the mind. I thought at the start it had good potential, the plot seemed interesting on the CP blurb. Ok it was a bit slow but I don't mind that with beautiful landscapes to look at.

One reviewer here says they needed subtitles, they're not the only ones! I frequently need them on American films because modern actors seem to mumble or have difficulty enunciating their words and use mountains of slang. Sometimes, too, as also highlighted here, unnecessary soundtracks obscure dialogue. I have excellent hearing but often miss a lot due to ALL these factors, so I really NEED those subtitles to wind back (thank goodness for DVDs & subtitles) to see what I've missed, even more so when it's something important to the plot.

The characters all seemed unnecessarily hostile. Jeremy Renner seemed to fit his character but why would the FBI send a gorgeous female out unprepared to a reservation where women who disappear are never reported? All it shows too is Native Americans seem to have a 200+ year old chip on their shoulders & bleat on about racism & how badly they're perceived to have been treated yet their women are not important enough and are treated as chattels?? That really grated on me. Plus the scene in which there's a circle of people with guns seemed totally ludicrous to me. The idiots brandishing those guns didn't think if everyone fired they wouldn't hit each other? Instant bloodbath. Sheesh. Maybe that's what filmmakers assume moviegoers crave. Violence and blood everywhere?

Anyway, the film's still worth a look. Assess for yourself.

OK it's supposed to be a classic from a 1944 play by Tennessee Williams. Several film versions have been made, the one here made in 1973, one in 1950 with Gertrude Lawrence and Jane Wyman as mother and daughter, and 1966 with Shirley Booth and Barbara Loden as same, then a newer version directed by Paul Newman in 1987 with his own wife Joanne Woodward and Karen Allen.

Kate Hepburn here is the lace hanky totin' , grande old dame somewhere in the south, never shutting up as she spouts well out of date gentilities to two adult children in the household. I never bothered to find out why the son was there, but honestly I switched off halfway as I could no longer stand KH's screeching voice with its fake southern accent slipping every now and again. Maybe I'm missing something profound here, it's supposed to be a story about an angst ridden mother desperate to marry off her painfully shy (& sexually repressed) crippled daughter to A Man Who Came To Dinner, but she's stuck in a time warp, trying to maintain stiff moral codes through her ingrained southern gentility whilst shouldering the shame of being abandoned long before by her husband, but for me eventually the dialogue was like nails clawing down a blackboard.

I even have a Poundstore copy of the romantic comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Kate and the always excellent Cary Grant and although the storyline is kooky and frenetic, I realise it's the same - Kate spends the whole movie screeching in the same way even thought she's at least 30 years younger in that one. I always thought she was wonderful and the snappy dialogue in it clever and witty, but gradually I'm realising in most of her films, she's pretty well always the same...a bit of a whiner or a Moaning Minnie.

No offense Kate, but I may give yours a bit more of a wide berth in future. Luckily on Cinema Paradiso I can just package it up, send it back, and get the next one.

I got this, thinking the blurb on it here on CP described a quirky and interesting series, although the filming and content was just bizarre and terribly confusing. It's described as a comedy and one or two funny moments lighten it but the rest is quite frankly cringeworthy.

Not worth anyone's time to watch except to see how much odder in subjects a programme can go.

Madcap story of Holden the scriptwriter tasked with delivering a script to exacting producer Noel Coward in 19 weeks but he's been goofing off, boozing mainly, until a critical 48 hours before Coward appears in Paris on Quatorze Juillet (Bastille Day) expecting a completed screenplay. Hepburn is the secretarial temp who helps writer Richard Benson (Holden) to imagine loads of different scenarios for his script ranging from spies to vampires to costume balls to international safecrackers & the Mafia, to virtually....anything! All supposedly under the title of the Girl Who Stole The Eiffel Tower.

Frank Sinatra sings a short intro theme song and Marlene Dietrich does a beautifully coiffed tiny cameo getting out of a Rolls and going into the Dior Boutique, although costumes in this were provided by Givenchy. A young suave Tony Curtis has quite a big role, yet is uncredited.

Had never heard of, or seen it before, but it's sorta fun and worth a gander.

Good TV series but first disc I got (from Cin Para) only comes with Episode 1 and some special features. I thought I'd at least get a

couple of episodes per disc !!

The inimitable Martin Shaw stars as George who considers retiring from the Metropolitan Police in 1964 after a personal tragedy but encounters Sgt John Bacchus (Lee Ingleby) on an external investigation and decides to take him under his wing and stay working.

A focussed copper, honest and intent on finding proper evidence in his cases but meanwhile fighting the endemic police corruption of the time.

Capital punishment did not cease until 1965 in England.

Initially as no reviews were available, I rather naively thought from the cover picture and title that this would be an interesting drama about sisters in British law, having just watched a couple of UK legal dramas so was surprised to find that this was not only a documentary film but took place in the West African country of Cameroon.

I was under the impression Cameroon was French speaking but in this apparently Muslim dominant state they seem to use English and pidgeon English. Definitely needed the subtitles!

The sisters are a hard-hitting judge-prosecuter and a lawyer doing their best against entrenched ideas of male superiority and features several real cases mostly relating to children and women woefully abused by both males and females. Gripping stuff.

Surprises me that the sisters as a formidable force don't get a lot of retaliation as they tend to state very feminist views (good for them!) but the like of which would be bound to piss the local men off - and is Cameroonian law so advanced that it affords inherent governmental legal protection for defenceless women against centuries of Islamic codes of conduct and the still commonly held views that women are simply chattels and objects for sexual gratification, both in or OUT of marriage?

What is not explained is either of the sisters' backgrounds - where were they were trained, or their reasons for why have they taken on the local establishment ? An interesting eye-opener nevertheless.