NAME: HERCULES IN NEW YORKRATING: PGRELEASED: 1970WRITTEN BY: AUBREY WISBERGDIRECTED BY: AUTHUR ALLAN SEIDELMANSTARRING: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER (AKA ARNOLD STRONG "MR UNIVERSE"), ARNOLD STANG, ERNEST GRAVES, DEBORAH LOOMIS, TAMMY MCDONALDGENRE: COMEDYBOUGHT FROM: A BOOTSALEPRICE: £1.00
Okay, that took longer than I thought it would. As did this. The upshot being that this review is going up six days late. A new record. Don't worry, I'm aware this is bullshit and intend to use this week to set it right by getting two reviews up, including the landmark (HA!) 25th edition.
What I'm about to say here is 100% legit my opinion. It's not intended to be humourous or sarcastic, and here's no irony in it whatsoever... I believe Arnold Schwarzenegger (or Arnie, or Ahnold, or The Governator, whatever you want to call him) is an inspiration. Some of you may not like his movies, some of you may not like his politics, but the fact remains that he's a living, breathing embodiment of The American Dream, the ultimate immigrant story of a man coming to the US from a far away land and making all his dreams come true. Infact, he probably ran out of dreams some time ago and just started making up new ones for shits and giggles. "Hmmm, today ah think ah shall become governah ov califooorniah." (Christ, even typed out my Austrian accent is offensive. I apologise). And for those of you who believe he's just a talentless chancer who got lucky, well, I don't care if he is, because if I'm honest I think that makes it a little bit better. And I don't think he is talentless. I mean, look at the people that most would consider his peers- Lundgren? Nowhere. Seagal? A cautionary tale that is currently being covered by my friend Redunbeck on his blog. Van Dam? Straight-to-video Hell, with even his big comeback movie "JCVD" bypassing cinemas over here. Stallone? Making up for lost time by shamelessly plundering his past. And this was a man who wrote and starred in a movie that won Best Picture at The Oscars. The only person I'd even put anywhere near Arnold's level is Bruce Willis, but he was always more than just an action star anyway. I get the feeling that happened to him almost by accident. So with all that carnage behind him, there has to be a reason why he was the last one standing, why even his stinkers like "End of Days," "The 6th Day" and "Eraser" (has anybody actually seen this movie? I've never spoken to a person who has, or at least will admit to it) got the red carpet treatment and were presented as big deals when released. There had to have been something about him that set him apart and made special, that made him... Arnie. And as with most things in life, the best way of understanding something is to go back and see how it began. Which brings me to this, his first movie filmed nearly fourty years ago (and that fact alone nearly sent my head spinning).
But first, BOX REVIEW! It's a Boulevard Entertainment release, so I have to, really. Well, at first glance, nothing really jumps out at you. It looks really cheap, but that's par for the course with these guys. The layout's fairly standard, there's no silliness in the credits box. They even managed to spell "Schwarzenegger" right, which makes me want to give them a medal. However, when I looked closer, I spotted something... odd. Not a mistake really, just... odd. On the front cover is a little red oval box thing with text inside it that reads, "FEATURING ARNOLD'S REAL VOICE FOR THE FIRST TIME." This is in reference to the fact that, when it was first released, Arnold's voice was dubbed throughout the movie, and now that has been removed. Alright, fine. Nothing odd about that. What is odd, though, is the fact that the text in the box ends in a full stop.
Look.
That's not usually how these things are done. Usually, when you're trying to alert people to things this way, you either just let the words hang there without punctuation, or use punctuation to imply this is something to get excited about. "FEATURING ARNOLD'S REAL VOICE FOR THE FIRST TIME!" See how an exclamation point changes that whole sentence? Isn't that an improvement? If I didn't know better, I'd say it almost looks like the person in charge of putting together the box art for this thing was subtly making fun of the movie. "Watch this. It's got Arnold's real voice in it. Yay."
The actual box itself is worth mentioning too, as it's one of those super-thin ones.
Now, I both like and dislike these. I like them simply because they're easy to store. I did a little comparison once and found that, were all my DVD boxes this thin, I could have got roughly three times as many of them on one shelf. Which is great. But they're not, which is why I hate them, because when I see them sitting alongside all my regular-sized boxes, looking all skinny and different, it makes my OCD want to cry. I just don't like it. I'm the kind of man who has his books on a shelf in height order, there's nothing I can do about this.
The film opens with stock footage of some snowy mountains, and a voice tells us the following- "Far in the dim past, when myth and history merged into mystery (I don't know what this means), and the Gods of fable, and the primitive beliefs of man dwelt on ancient Mount Olympus in antique Greece, a legendary hero walked God-like upon the Earth... sometimes." We're then taken to Olympus, which looks like some hippy commune (there's even a girl skipping around waving what looks like a white scarf), and as the box trumpeted, we here Arnold's voice. And by Christ, it's nearly incomprehensible. If you think he accent is thick now, you'd think you were listening to an alien if you watched this. Throughout this entire movie, there were lines I didn't understand, rewound back several times to have another go at, still didn't get, so eventually just said fuck it and moved on. His delivery is also so stilted, and his expression so blank, that most of the time it looks like he doesn't really understand what he's saying. Maybe he didn't, I'm not sure how great his grasp of the English language was at this point. I completely understand why they felt the need to dub him, I'll just say that. I also can't remember seeing him this big on film before, not even in the "Pumping Iron" documentary. He's huge, like uncomfortably huge (that's what she said), which I guess works for the role, but it was probably for the best that he later dropped alot of that mass.
I'll also address this before I go any further- yes, I'm aware that the movie totally fucks up the mythology it presents, confusing characters from Greek and Roman religions. For instance, when he appears later, Pluto is obviously supposed to be Hades, ruler of the Greek version of Hell, and Hercules himself should be called Heracles. They even briefly throw in Sampson from The Bible at one point. I know I should probably get all hot and bothered about this, but I can't be arsed, simply because I'm watching a movie called "Hercules in New York." It's not meant to be taken that seriously, so I'm not going to. The only place I wish they'd been a bit stricter is with the naming of Zeus' wife, calling her Hera instead of Juno, because the only thing I can associate that name with now is heavily-pregnant jailbait.
He's talking to his father, Zeus (Ernest Graves, who seems to be attempting to make up for the supposed stars lack of presence by being panto-levels of broad with every line he utters), trying to talk him into letting him go to Earth, as he's bored with Olympus and "tired of the same old faces, the same old things." This angers Zeus, and he decides to punish his wayward Demi-God son by... sending him to Earth. Okay then. The way he does this is to strike him with lightening (brilliantly represented by a small metal spear that's been shaped to look all wavy) and teleport him to to Earth in a puff of rubbish fireworks. When I say "to Earth," I mean the basic vicinity around the planet, because the first person who sees him is an old lady on an plane as he falls past her window, waving and smiling (and Arnold's smile is so goofy as he goes past that I couldn't help burst out laughing). She starts to freak out, yelling about what she's just seen, in the manner of somebody trying to impersonate a stereotypical gay man, all high-pitched screeching and exaggerated hand gestures. She's eventually subdued by an oxygen mask, and we move on.
Hercules lands in the ocean and is seemingly about to drown. We don't see any of this, it'd be far too expensive to film, but rather we're told this by Zeus and those around him who are watching the action in a big crystal ball thing. They beg Zeus to save Hercules, and he reluctantly does so by having a ship find him and bring him on-board. We don't get to see this, either, the next time we see Herc he's already on the ship towelling off in a manner that allows him to flex his muscles. There's a brief scene of them questioning where he comes from and how he got to be in the middle of the ocean, before we get our first evidence that Herc is, well, a bit of a dick- the Captain insists that he refer to him as "Sir" when he speaks to him, which prompts Herc to tell him that "No men are superior to Hercules." Then in the next scene we join a fight in progress as Herc is beating up the entire crew. What have they done to anger him so, you're wondering? They asked him to do some work. At first it's assumed that because he's a foreigner maybe he didn't understand what was being asked of him, but he himself soon clears things up by saying, "I understood him. He is most disagreeable, and he has irritated me." At least I think that's what he says, this s one of those lines I had to rewind. Either way, what a jerk. The fight scene is laughable as well, like all of them in this movie are, consisting of Arnie chucking men around and throwing lame punches.
After that you'd think they'd want him off their ship as soon as possible, but once they dock and Herc tries to leave, they try to put a stop to this, leading to another fight scene where Herc fends off several men with a large piece of wood. It's here the first inconsistancy emerges, as it's established moments later that Herc has superhuman strength when he stops a forklift moving with his bare hands, yet here he has genuine trouble wrestling five men pushing against the wood he brandishes. He's a Demi-God, he should be able to throw them into the sun if he wanted to. It's somewhat redeemed though by the bit where Arnold seems to be having so much fun that he breaks character and starts smiling. He flees the scene with Pretzie (Arnold Stang), so called because he sells pretzels, who gets him into a cab and immediately becomes his best friend. There's so much I want to say about both the man and the character that if I allow myself free reign I may still be sitting here next week, so I'm going to to try and keep this brief. First, his appearance. God bless him, I'm sure he is (or was, I'm not altogether sure about his... living status) a nice guy, but the fact remains, he looks like a cartoon turtle, appropriate for a man who provided the voice for several animated characters (including TOP CAT!). And what a voice. I've been trying to come up with a way to describe his voice that won't offend anybody, and this is the best I could come up with- it is like every neurotic thought and emotion that has every been had or ever will be had has been squeezed into one tiny body. He's like a living panic attack, even when he's happy.
In the cab, introductions are made, they make small talk, Pretzie mentions another Greek guy he knew named Apollo, who Herc assumes must have been the Apollo, before they get out and Pretzie asks Herc to pay for the cab. Of course, Herc has no money, has very little knowledge of the concept, and anyway, the man driving the "chariot" should be satisfied with the fact that he's ferrying Hercules around, shouldn't he? As anyone who's ever been to New York will tell you, this was never gonna fly, so Pretzie resigns himself to the cabbie calling the cops, which he says he will, once he's pounded on them some himself. I swear, at this point it's starting to look like Herc's face is magnetic and everybody's fists are are made of metal. The fight doesn't last long, Herc just throws the guy into a bush and then turns his taxi over. I love how the hero of this movie is remorselessly raining down pain and destruction upon the city.
As they run away from yet another person Hercles has managed to piss off, he and Pretzie stumble across a bunch of college kids training at baseball and other various athletic events, being watched by Professor Camden (James Karen) and his daughter Helen (Deborah Loomis). Of course Herc once again acts like a total douche to the coach, saying he could do better then all of them, as he competed in the first Olympics in Greece, and instead of just calling him a loony and telling him to fuck off, as would happen in real life, because this is a movie he's invited to compete against his best students in discus throwing, javelling and long jump, trouncing them all and getting the attention of the Professor and Helen. At this point I thought I had the plot figured out- they're going to get Herc into the college so that he can compete in all these sports for them, and along the way he'll fall in love with Helen. Suffice to say, that isn't what happens. All that really comes out of this is Herc and Helen become friends, and that really is all they become. There's a hint of romance at the beginning, but it never goes anywhere, there's no kissing, just a bit of arms around the shoulders action.
Their friendship gets off to a rocky start though, due to the fact that Hercules makes a fool of himself (what a surprise!) when invited round the Professor's house. It doesn't start off well, when in the previous scene the Professor invites them round for tea, and Pretzie instantly assumes they want to do drugs (it was the seventies), and continues to degenerate the second they arrive. First Herc tells Helen she reminds him of a God, which is quite a nice thing to tell someone, but only after you've known them for a while. And even then, it's not just something you'd just blurt out. But Herc does and this of course makes Helen uncomfortable. Then Rod shows up. Herc asks if they're "lovers," insisting that it's "unnatural" for a man and a woman to be friends and not be lovers. Didn't Billy Crystal say something similar to that in "When Harry Met Sally?" Anyway, another fight breaks out, ending with Hercules picking up Rod in bodyslam position and just holding him there as he squirms, as Pretzie and Helen practically beg him to put him down. We then cut back to Zeus in Olympus still watching all of this, who uses alot of words to basically say, "Kids, who'd fucking have 'em?" Timejump to the next day, where the Professor and Helen are sitting at their dining table discussing yesterday's "amusing situation," with the doctor finding Herc "original" and "refreshing," wanting to study him further. Helen initially doesn't seem to find it amusing at all, saying how this "crazy," "primitive" man injured her friend... boyfriend... whatever, and then thought nothing of inviting her out on a date. "Well of course you told him..." the Professor says, Helen completing the sentence with "... I would." Yes, he assaulted an... associate of hers, and she found this manly and irrisistable. Dames, eh? She then sits there with a moronic grin on her face as the Professor drinks his tea.
And then the movie peaks. It achieves a level of greatness it had no hope of getting anywhere near again. And it does this by having Arnold wrestle a man in a bear costume. It goes like this- whilst Herc and Helen are out on their date, which seems to mostly consist of them riding around on a horse and cart, we cut away to see a zoo keeper discover that one of his cages open, then hear on the radio that a bear is on the loose. This is followed by a shot of the "bear" runnning. Even though it was running away from the camera and thus we could only see it from behind, it was obviously a guy in a suit, and I thought to myself, "There's no way they'll go with that alone. Not even a production like this. They'll save it for close-ups of the two of them fighting, then use stock footage of a real bear roaring and stuff like that."
Oh how wrong I was.
They have no shame about how shitty this looked. The first time we see the costume from the front and it's revealed just how Mickey Mouse it looks (I once wore a bear costume to school for charity, and I think the costume I wore looked infinitely better than the one they have here), the dude gets up on a rock and appears to start doing The Robot. He then runs in front of the carriage, inciting the wrath of Hercules, who leaps to the ground and proceeds to wrestle it, even managing to work in a Judo chop to the skull, as Helen sheriks and at one point exclaims, "BEAT 'EM UP!" I never thought the day would come when I would bare witness to the Governor of California grappling with a man in a bad fancy dress costume. What a strange and wonderful world we live in. Herc eventually wins the day, the next morning's paper proclaiming him a hero, bringing him to the attention of a local wrestling promoter who wants him to fight for him. It's revealed that Herc and Pretzie have been staying in a hotel, and need make some money in order to pay the bill they've been running up, so they're really in no position to say no. Like before, I assumed I had what would happen next figured out from this point- Herc would become a wrestler, and the rest of the movie would follow his adventures in that profession. As it turns out, I was wrong again. We don't even see him do any wrestling, we see one shot of him with a guy on his shoulders, and that's it. It's like anything vaguely interesting has to happen off-screen (bear fight excluded). This brings Hercules to the attention of some gangsters, who... they're just making this up as they go along now, aren't they? Almost none of the scenes in this movie up to this point really connect with each other in any way you could call a story, they're just random happenings that either feature or are about Hercules in some way. Anyway, the Gangsters (one of whom I was convinced was a young Vincent Pastore, but I can find no evidence of this anywhere), strong-arm Pretzie into signing a contract meaning they pretty much own Herc and make money off his wrestling career. And once again I thought I knew where this was going, that Herc would discover this and go on a rampage (well, as big a rampage as the budget would allow), finding the Gangsters and tearing up the contract. But nope, nothing really comes of this until the very end, and I can assume Herc either doesn't know he's now generating revenue for organised crime, or he just doesn't care. Pretzie becomes depressed due to this, hits the bottle, and... OH MY GOD IT'S A PLOT!
Well, a bit of one. Zeus, growing increasingly displeased by Hercules making a fool of himself down below, at first dispatches Nemesis to go after him and punish him by sending him to The Underworld for 100 years, but stays his hand when Mercury pleads with him not to be so harsh with his half-brother, calling him "simple and a bit childish" (that's right, the movie just outright stated it's hero is slow), and that he should go instead and attempt to talk him into returning. After everyone except Juno agrees this would be the better thing to do, Zeus agrees, and Mercury travels to New York, via Helecopter, wearing a pretty damn nice suit. They meet up in Herc's hotel room after he arrves home from another day out with Helen (where the filmmakers find another excuse for him to take his shirt off and start flexing), and Mercury does his best make him come round to their father's way of thinking, only to be totally brushed-off. As far as acting goes, this may be Arnold's worst scene in the entire movie. It's definitely the most dialogue that's been asked of him so far, and he's totally out of his element. I was going to wait until the end of the review to talk about this, but this scene seems like the perfect place to address it... I think I've figured out why Arnold had more of a career that the rest of the action movie old-guard- he was willing to put in the work. Whereas the rest of them found ther level and pretty much stayed there, Arnold actually wanted to improve. He made better contacts, which lead to him making better movies, and even got better as an actor. The whole time I was watching this, I had so much trouble reconciling this hulking, scared-looking lump of wood in front of me with the what he would later become. He was never going to win any awards, but at least he figured out how to bring a little personality to the roles he played.
Getting back on track, Mercury reluctantly leaves, flying out the window after telling Herc to be careful. This entire exchange happened in front of a very drunk Pretzie, who had been reading up on Greek myths the last time we saw him, and had pretty much had the fact that his friend is the real Hercules confirmed right in front of him. Of course the fact that he was drunk means means nobody he tells the next day believes him (the scene going on before this is awesome, by the way- it consists of the Professor, Helen and Rod sitting around talking about how there's obviously something psychologically wrong with Herc, but that in spite of that they all like him, even Rod, who claims to do so "even if he did crack two of my ribs." HE LIKES HIM EVEN THOUGH HE CRACKED TWO OF HIS RIBS). Back in Olympus, it's on now, as Zeus has had enough and sends Nemesis on her mission. However, before she can go, she secretly meets with Juno, who gives her a new mission- drug Hercules with a powder that temporarily takes away his divinity, rendering him a normal man, and thus able to die. She does this, slipping the powder into Herc's drinks at a bar, then travels to The Underworld (which is represented by some smoke, a red light and a black metal gate) to speak with Pluto (Michael Lipton), telling him about Juno's plan, and asking him to find a creative way of killing Hercules so that his soul can be condemned. And the plan he comes up with is pretty ingenius, I'll give him that- he travels to Earth from The Underworld (and his arrival is pretty creatively done- he emerges from the the New York subway system and causes a mass blackout), and meets up with the Gangsters who own Hercules, putting an obscene amount of money on him losing an upcoming televised weightlifting contest, knowing that these men would suspect Herc of purpously losing if he did so.
So the day of the contest comes, and Herc, due to the fact that he's lost his God powers, loses. I did like the fact that they realised that even though he's no longer superhuman, he's still a big strong guy, and he managed to make two successful lifts before failing. But he still fails, and as Pluto had hoped, the Gangsters suspect a double-cross, and a chase is now on, with them following Helen and the Professor in their car, and Herc and Pretzie in hot persuit of the both of them on a chariot they stole from a man dressed in a tiger-print singlet buying a hot dog (it's New York, I've seen stranger things than that there, believe me). The final stand takes place in an abandoned warehouse, where the Gangster's overwhelm Herc and start putting the boots into him. Everything seems to be going to shit, until up in Olympus Zeus sees what is happening and asks why this has been done to Hercules when it was clearly not what he asked (because y'know, sending your son to Hell for 100 years is a much nicer punishment than making him a mortal). It comes out that this was all Juno's doing, and the Gods then save Herc and his friends, first by sending down two of their own to act as back-up, then with Zeus himself granting Herc back his divinity, just in time for him to be able to push some big but not terribly heavy looking cardboard tubes onto the Gangsters. And that's that.
Following this, Herc returns to Olympus without any good reason after defying is father's wishes for the entire film. He doesn't even say goodbye to Pretzie, he just disappears, although he later communicates with his friend through his radio, saying he'll always be there for him. The voice coming out of the radio clearly doesn't belong to Arnold, it's probably the voice of the guy they originally got to do the dub. Pretzie sits for a second, whistfully thinking about all the strange things he and Herc got up to, before suddenly declaring, "I think I'll eat an apple." He then gets up and walks out of shot, presumably to go get an apple. The film ends with Hercules telling his father all about his time on Earth, and his father deciding it might be fun to visit the place himself, which he does dressed in a suit and a bowler hat, scaring a plane full of people as he floats down.
I have to be totally honest with you here- I have no idea what to do with this movie. On the one hand, it's clearly not very good. It's amateurishly shot even when you take into account the time it was made and the fact they clearly weren't working with alot of money, the script makes no sense, literally all the fights are terrile, and most of the acting is awful, especially Arnold's contribution. But on the other hand it's got a certain goofy charm, there are a couple of fun turn amongst the dross (most notably Graves, Stang and Michael Lipton, wo makes the most of his brief screen-time), and I got to see The Terminator wrestle a guy dressed as a bear. Plus, the fact that it's Arnold's first movie is a big mark in its favour straight away, as it's worth owning for historic reason if nothing else.
I don't know what to do. I'm at a total loss.
...
... Fuck it, I'm tossing a coin. I am going to let this movie's fate rest on the toss of a coin. I have a 20p piece sitting next to my laptop right now, and as soon as I'm done typing this, I'm going to flip it. Heads I keep the movie, tails I bin it. Okay, here I go.
IT FELL DOWN THE BACK OF MY FUCKING BED! Not ever The Fates themselves know what to do with this movie. Right, I'm going to go get another coin out of my jeans, be right back.
Okay, got it. One more time. Heads, kept. Tails, binned.
Heads.
FINAL VERDICT
KEPT!
LOOK AT IT! LOOK HOW WRONG IT LOOKS NEXT TO MY OTHER MOVIES! IT'S SO SMALL I CAN BARELY SEE IT! AND IT'LL LOOK WEIRD SANDWICHED BETWEEN OTHER BOXES! I DON'T LIKE IT!
Lastly, some notes. As most of you will probably be reading this on the Wednesday (I'm still considering this Tuesday due to my rule that the day isn't over until I've gone to sleep), my first proper review should be up on Killer Film. It's a reprint of the second review I ever did, with some slight rewriting and re-editing. I know some of you have already read it, but I knw there's a god chance quite a few of you haven't, so please feel free to go over there and take a look at it. I have to say, rereading it whilst editing it was a strange experience.
Finally, I don't usually give clues to what the next movie I'm going to review will be, but I have to say, the review that's going up over there tomorrow is very... fitting, considering what I'll be covering on Friday or Saturday.
Until Friday or Saturday, I'm The Cheap-Arse Film Critic, and there is no "us," you psychopathic bitch!
NAME: NORTH BY NORTHWESTRATED: PGRELEASED: 1959WRITTEN BY: ERNEST LEHMANDIRECTED BY: ALFRED HITCHCOCKSTARRING: CARY GRANT, JAMES MASON, EVA MARIE SAINT, MARTIN LANDAUGENRE: SPY THRILLERBOUGHT FROM: CEXPRICE: £1:00
At this point, there are certain words in the English language that mean absolutely nothing. "genius," for a start, used to be a word that summed up people who were at the very forefront of their chosen field and continuously coming up with things that changed both it and in some cases the very world around us. Now it's used to describe a man in a guerilla suit playing the drums (I'm not hating on the guerilla here, I just want to make sure everybody knows that). "Nazi?" Pfft. The second kids started calling their school dinner ladies this it may as well have been the name of a Care Bear. I have had friends who have been going out with women less than a month before they start introducing them to people as their "fiancee." That one really rubs me the wrong way for some reason. I think it's because is seems like something a child pretending to be an adult would say, which would be fine if we weren't all in at least our early twenties at this point. You planning on marrying her? Got even a rough date in mind? Does she have a ring? No? Then she's not you Fiancee, she's your girlfriend. Shut up.
Those are a few of the famous ones that get mentioned whenever this subject is brought up, but I'd like to throw "ashamed," and variations there of, into the ring. Because think about it, how many times in your life have you ever said you were "ashamed" of something when in reality you weren't? You felt bad about something, don't get me wrong, or you felt that something was really letting the side down, but you were never really ashamed. I don't think alot of people really know what being ashamed actually feels like. I didn't, not until the day I was at a family gathering and heard a relative, who has had a long battle with Cancer that has resulted in several surgeries, talk about how she redecorated two rooms in her house from scratch completely on her own, as I sat there thinking about how there are days I can't even be bothered to make the bed.
So I'm not going to say I'm ashamed of myself for not having seen more Alfred Hitchcock movies, but I will I'm... surprised at myself. I can't even be vague about the number, I know exactly how many I've seen- I've seen "Psycho," I've seen "The Birds," I've seen some of "Rear Window," and that's it. Worst of all, I can't really give a decent reason why. There's a chance it could be my contrary nature. Everytime somebody tells me I have to see something, or that I'll love this or that, I suddenly lose all desire to see it. It's probably a layover from me teenaged years when I had to be the first person to discover something, otherwise it was meaningless (yes, we've been over this before, I'm well aware I was a wanker). But I think it might also be because I feel like I've already seen so many of them. I've read about them and heard them talked about and seen clips of them and parodies of them on various TV shows that it's like I've seen them almost throught osmosis. It's not a Hitchcock movie, but take "Citizen Kane." I've not seen that movie... but I have, I really have. But for a pound (and I'm still amazed I was able to find this for that price, but the sticker doesn't lie), there was absolutely no way I was passing this up.
When people are asked to describe the kind of movies Hitchcock made, the word that comes up time and again is "crowd-pleasers." I love how this meant something completely different back in Hitchcock's time. Today, if you say this about a director's work, you're accusing them of pandering to the lowest common denominator and producing work of little artistic merit. Back in the fifties and sixties though, when he produced much of his classic work, crowds had grown so bored with the the same old shit that was being presented to them and craved something a bit different. And he gave them that- fascinating and occasionally unhinged characters, complex, thrilling and risque plots, shot in ways that pretty much changed the language of cinema forever. He understood that audiences no longer wanted to be held by the hand and taken on a gentle stroll, they wanted to be shot in the face. They were ready for something a bit more exciting.
Before I get onto the film, I'm going to indulge myself with a quick BOX REVIEW! This was released back in 2001, back when DVD was just starting to overshadow VHS, and it's got the same design as most of the boxes from that time, being made entirely from cardboard with the exception of where the disc sits and a little hinge-like lock that you had unclasp to open it. For some reason I've always liked these boxes. I think it's the clasp, and the chunky "CLICK" it make whenever you open or close it. The closing "CLICK" is more satisfying though. MMMMMMM. The one downside is these boxes get damaged alot easier than the plastic ones. It can't double-up as a coaster for instance, at least not without a ring ending up over Cary Grant's face (I literally just spent five minutes trying to come up with a decent gay joke and couldn't think of one. Obviously I'm not that creative tonight).
When the movie first started, I thought it was broken, because the MGM logo looked defective. For a start, the background was neon green, and the logo and lion themselves looked a bit like the negative of a photo. Fortunately this was by design, as the logo faded away, leaving just the background, giving way to one hell of a stylish credits sequence. It's really simple, just a bunch of black lines that look like the side of a building that the credits slide up that eventually fades away to reveal an actual building, but it looks so fucking cool. It sounds cool as well, thanks in part to the brilliant score by Bernard Hermann. I really don't talk enough about music in these things. I've said that before and made promises to change that, but the truth is I probably won't, which is weird because I love music and even collect movie soundtracks. The score here though is good enough for me to want to draw special attention to it, just as the disc itself does by ofering a music-only audio track. It's superb throughout, and this opening piece sums it up perfectly by managing to be creepy, exciting and almost whimsical all at once. Following this, we meet the film's main character, Roger Thornhill, played by Cary Grant. Grant's the kind of guy you get the feeling is always playing himself in everything, but like any good movie star, he gets away with it on a mixture of good looks (he's still quite a handsome man here despite his advancing years), charisma and a way with words, even those not his own. And he has a real vitality about him in this movie, you really believe he wouldn't just stand back and let the things that happened to him happen, that he would see them through to the very end. We discover very quickly (and one of the things I like about this script is that it's quite good with exposition and tells us just what we need to know when we need to know it) that he works in advertising, as he leaves a building with his assistant, rattling off a bunch of things for her to do (which includes sending a woman he's seeing a box of chocolates wrapped in gold paper and a not that reads, "Something for your sweet tooth baby, and all your other sweet parts." I may steal this) as they get into a cab that he scams off someone by claiming she's gravely ill. As he gets out to attend a meeting in what looks to be a hotel bar, he tells her to call his mother, only for him to then remember that she's out playing bridge tonight just as the cab pulls away. Feeling bad about his mistake, he calls over the waiter to ask if it's possible for him to seen a telegram to her, with the waiter saying he personally can't, but Thornhill can, pointing him in the direction of where to go.
And this proves to be the decision that turns Thorhill's life upside down, because he summoned the waiter at the exact time he's asking if a Mr. George Caplin is in the bar, making it look like he's responding to the waiter calling his name. This leads to two obvious goons, one wearing a hat straight ot of a "Dick Tracy" comic strip, the other with a fantastically square head, assuming he is Caplin. I want to mention how subtly this is all done. The first time I watched this,I didn't notice the waiter asking if Caplin was present, and found the two goons thinking Thornhill was him to be a little bit wacky. But now I'm just in awe of how masterfully done it was. It makes sense that you wouldn't notice it, because Thornhill himself doesn't. This moment is never mentioned again. I do feel a little bit sorry for the people who first watched this 50 years ago. In this day and age, if you missed an important plot point like that, such as I did, you can easily go back an rewatch it to see what passed you by. Back then, if you weren't on the ball, you were fucked, basically.
Thornhill gets up to send the telegram and immediately finds himself escorted into the back of a car at gun-point. This is less than six minutes into a two hour movie. Absolutely no fucking around, let's just get into this thing. He's driven to a large house owned by a man called Lester Townsend, and introduced to someone who claims to be this person, although we later find out he's really called Philip Vandamm and is just using this place whilst the real owner is away. Vandamm is played by James Mason, an actor I find it almost impossible to take seriously whenever I watch him. And I'll tell you why, it's because of that one bloody Eddie Izzard gag where he impersonated him. Eddie totally obliterated him, to the point that now whenever he's on-screen, even here, I keep waiting for him to say, "It is my duty as a cockney man," in that strange voice of his. Another example of an actor destroyed by comedy. I will say that he's good here though, suitably oily and unpleasent, and that voice actually works in this role. He should have been a Bond villain, really. Vandamm and Thornhill have a stalemate of a conversation, with Vandamm insisting that Thornhill is Caplin and that he tell him what he wants to know if he's to live, and Thornhill being absolutely adamant that he is infact not this man and doesn't know what he's talking about. This doesn't go down very well, and ends with Vandamm attempting to follow through with his theat to end Thornhill's life. He doesn't do it himself though, he has his goons, lead by Leonard (played by an almost unrecognisably young Martin Landau) do the dirty work, which they go about doing in a very creative way- rather than just blow his brains out, they force Thornhill to drink an entire bottle or Bourbon, then attempt to drive a car into the ocean with him in it to make it look like an accident. It's a decent plan, but it would seem they didn't count on him regaining conciousness at the last minute, as he does, kicking the goon doing the driving out of his car and attemting to drive away. "Attempting" being the word, as he's drunk as a Lord and nearly does their work for them by almost driving off the road himself. He survives though, and a chase ensues, and I think it's safe to say it's not exactly comparable to the one from "Bullitt." A decent job is done of showing that Thornhill is as much a danger to himself as the people chasing him are though, and Hitchcock also comes up with a very creative way of showing the confusion that must occur when driving drunk (and I can only assume, since I don't have a licence and can't even legally drive sober), by super-imposing two roads over each other.
It ends with a crash, as these things often do, only Thornhill is unlucky enough to crash into a police car and get dragged to the local court house to spend the night in a cell. Grant is hilarious as a drunk in this scene, being harmlessly belligerant, making wild claims about men trying to kill him with "a gun, some Bourbon and a sports car", and demanding to call his mother, who seems to offer him little sympathy. We actually meet her in the next scene, that being the court hearing the next day when Thornhill makes his admittedly wild claim to the Judge, and she's brilliant, this acerbic, sarcastic woman who's very quick to write her own son off as a lunatic. She briefly teams up with him following this, and their scenes together are enough to make me wish she was in the whole movie. In order to prove he's telling the truth, Frank takes the Judge, his Mother and some other people from the court to the Townsend place, and as you'd expect, he's completely stiched-up. All the physical evidence of his story is gone- there's no Bourbon stains on the couch where it was spilt, there's not even any booze in the little bar, only books. Then things get worse when a woman shows up claiming to be Townsend's wife, who says there'd been a party there last night and that Thornhill had made quite a spectacle of himself. The final nail in the coffin is hammered in when she says Thornhill is a key note speaker of the United Nations that day, leading everybody to now completely write-off Thornhil's story, which none of them were really buying to begin with.
But thornhill's not taking this lying down, oh no. The day before in "his" office, Vandamm had read off a list of places Caplin had stayed recently in an attempt to show that they'd had him monitored and knew he was lying when he claimed not to be him. Using this to his advantage, he and his mother get a key to the room (after Thornhill bribes his own mother to sweet-talk the clerk, which is something I find both hilarious and disturbing) and go investigate. Their, they bump into a couple of hotel employees who just assume Thornhill is Caplin because, as they reveal when pressed, none of them have actually seen Caplin in the flesh, even though he has them do things like clean his suit regularly. This is getting curiouser and curiouser, but sadly they don't get alot of time to mull things over, as Thornhil is both silly enough to answer the phone and unlucky enough to have the man on the other end of the line be Vandamm, who's now more convinced that Thornhill is Caplin than ever (he continues to claim otherwise, but Vandamm's all like, "You're in his hotel room, dickhead") and has dispatched two of his goons to take him out (see? Revealing his plan ahead of his time. Total Bond villain). Realising they have to get out of their, Thornhill and his mother hurry, but aren't fast enough to avoid the goons, who get in the same crowded elevator car. He motion towards them for his mother in a "They're the guys!" manner, and due to the fact that she's still not really buying any of this, she brilliantly comes straight out and asks them, "You're not really trying to kill my son, are you?" They start laughing. We'll, what else is there to do? Then she starts laughing, and soon everybody in the elevator is laughing except Thornhill, who dashes out and into the back of a cab the second the door opens, his mother yelling, "WILL YOU BE HOME FOR DINNER!?" after him. This is sadly the last we see of her, although I don't think she could have had a more perfect last line.
Deciding to confront the bull head-on, Thornhill goes to the United Nations intent on speaking to the man he believed is Townsend, now armed with a photo of what he thinks is him that he found in Caplin's hotel room. He even goes by the name of Caplin, so he'd have no doubt who it is. In a twist that leaves him completely bamboozled however, the Townsend that responds to the page isn't the man he met the previous evening. He tries to make sense of all that's happening, asking if he's aware if anybody's staying at his house at this time, with him saying only his gardener and his gardener's wife (which we assume is Vandamm, since we see him doing some gardening when Thornhill and the court showed up at the house), and he's about to be shown the picture Thronhill has on him when, BAM! Knife outta nowhere to the back, thrown by one of the goons Thornhill thought he'd lost. This assassination scene is done incredible well. It would have been very easy to have had the two men in shot close enough that all we'd see is Townsend react to the knife and then keel over, but Hitchcock set it up in such a way that you actually see the knife fly in from the right side of the screen and seemingly land in the actor's back. It's a fairly shocking moment that actually go a reaction out of me. Not a massive one, just a little "wow," but a reactions all the same. There would be bigger reactions to come though. So the real Townsend is now dead, and this all happened so fast that all people now see is Thornhill standing over the guy's body with the knife in his hands (why he took the knife out of the poor man, I don't know. I think this was known to be absolutely the wrong thing to do even 50 years ago). You'd think with this being one of the most important buildings in the world security would be all over him, but no, all he does is wave the knife about a bit, scream "GET BACK!" and then leg it out the front door into a cab. This is one of those moments where logic has been thrown out of the window in order to advance the plot, and bless him, but not even Hitchcock was immune to it.
We then finally get our first hint to what might be going on when we're taken to the the meeting room where a group of people, who we later find out are part of the FBI, are discussing the Thornhill/Caplin situation, as it and a picture of him has made the front page of every paper in America. It's here we find out the reason nobody has seen Caplin is because there is no Caplin- he's a decoy agent they made up and went to the trouble of establishing patterns of behaviour for in order to draw the heat off the real agent they have within Vandamm's organisation. Rather than come up with a way to help this poor man out, they decide to do nothing, because as The Professor (Leo G. Carroll) puts it, "... we could congratulate ourselves on a mavelous piece of good fortune, our non-existant decoy George Caplin, created to divert attention from our actual agent, has fortuitously become a live decoy." It may seem callus, as one of the women in the room puts it, but I can see where they're coming from here, as they're trying to fight for what they believe is the greater good, and this man is entirely expendable. Not that this helps Thornhill himself though, as when we return to him he's about to attempt boarding a train to Chicago to continue his hunt for Caplin, whom he believes to have travelled there that morning, following one last call to his mother. I thought it might be revealed that she still severely doubted him and was tipping off the police about his whereabouts (which I think would have been hilarious), but the film doesn't go down this road. Instead, the next scene is another example of how Hitchcock loves to try and build tension, turning the walk the now sunglasses-clad Thornhill (that'll fool 'em) has to make across the train station to the ticket booth into something comparible to crossing a minefield- everywhere you look people are reading and holding papers, there are police swarming around, and the place is just packed. It seems impossible that Thornhll should be able to get on this train undetected. And he doesn't, getting placed by the clerk who immediately puts in a call to the police. Having the sense to realise he's been rumbled, Thornhill runs off whilst the clerk is on the phone. Unfortunately in doing this he draws even more attention to himself by attempting to get on the train without a ticket. So now he has not only two police officers after him but an angry ticket collector, too. Things look bleak.
Enter Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint). She helps Thornhill evade the cops (simply by stashing him in her room and telling the guys after him, "He went that-a-way!" making them look like sub-Keystone Cops buffoons), and then spend the entire journey trying to fuck him. No, really, that's what she does. During some downtime in Thornhill's hide-a-seek with the ticket collectors on-board, he ends up sitting at the same table as her in the dining car, and they spend almost the entire conversation talking about boning. Choice excerpts- Thornhill: "The moment I meet an attractive woman I have to start pretending I have no desire to make love to her." Eve: "I never discuss love on an empty stomach" (note: she originally said "sex," not "love," but the censors made Hitchcock dub over that line). Eve: "It's going to be a long night... and I don't particularly like the book I've started... y'know what I mean?" I love putting myself in the shoes of the people from the time the movie I'm watching was originally released. I can only imagine how shocking all this must have been, and also laugh at the fact that today all it warrants is a PG rating. Eva Marie Saint is so fucking sexy as well. The first time I watched this I thought she was a bit blank and unexciting, but upon second viewing I realised what she brought to the table. She has these amazing eyes and a purring voice that makes you feel like you're being gently stroked by very fine sandpaper (this feels very nice, trush me). They manage to squeeze in a few other topics as well, such as how she knows who he really is and what he's been accused of, but assures him she won't tell anybody because he has, "a nice face." She even hides him again, this time from the cops who board the tran looking for him, and they finally get down to it in her room. This is left to our imaginations.
So, as you've probably figured out right now, Eve is, or at the very least appears to be in league with Vandamm, who is also on the train, and whom she slips a note asking what she should do with Thornhill tomorrow. Now, later the film wants us to feel bad for Thornhill and this betrayal, but the truth is he comes across as a bit of a horny moron for falling for it in the first place. I mean, I don't care how beautiful the woman is, at some point you'd think somebody would stop and say to themselves, "Hang on a second here- weird shit is happening in my life, and this is just another example of it. Could it be that these things are related?" But Thornhill doesn't, and as such pretty much walks into a trap crotch-first. The next day, once they've snuck him off the train dressed as a baggage handler, Eve gives him a piece of paper with the time and the place where he can supposedly meet Caplin. This turns out to be a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by crop fields, and...
... oh shit, I know what happens next. I know exactly what happens next, because I've seen it parodied on "Family Guy." See? See what I mean about having seen movies I haven't seen? SEE?! Anyway, one of the things I loved about this particular scene is how slow it is. Most directors would have been itching to get into the excitement, but Hitchcock understood that it was all in the build and the delay. So we see Thornhill standing by the side of this road waiting, a car passes, still waiting, another car passes, still waiting, another car passes, and yep, still waiting, as a plane flies around in the background dusting the crops. Finally a car pulls over and a man gets out, standing at the bus stop on the other side of the road. Of course, we know there's no chance this is Caplin, because we know Caplin doesn't exist, but Thornhill doesn't know this, so he ventures over to him to have a conversation, only to be disappointed to discover this isn't his man. Before the gentleman gets on the bus, he looks over at the plane, and remarks how strange it it is that it appears to be dusting where there are no crops. He departs, and then the plane suddenly changes course and heads straigh for Thornhill, buzzing him, the pilot even shooting at him. And we know just how completely Thornhill is screwed, because at the beginning Hitchcock had seen fit to give us a wide shot establishing just how open and remote this place is. There's really nowhere to run to (baby), nowhere to hide. Well, almost nowhere, as Thornhill thinks on his feet and hides amongst some dead corn crops, making it difficult for the pilot to spot him. This only works momentarily, as the plane smokes him out by dropping the chemicals it was previously using to dust crops onto him. Desperate, he tries to flag down a passing gas truck, only for it to nearly hit him. It stops so the driver can see if he's alright, then the plane comes hurtling towards them, hits the truck and (this was my genuine reaction to what happened next) HOLY SHIT THE PLANE JUST EXPLODED! I really wasn't expecting that, and due to that fact, for a few seconds I thought this was the greatest special effect I'd ever seen. Some cars pull over to see what's happened, and in the chaos, Thornhill steals one of them and makes off to safety. That was a scene worthy of parody. Awesome.
Thornhill reaches the hotel that Caplin is supposed to be staying in, only to be told that he's moved on again, this time to South Dakota, and before he can resume the chase, he see Eve walking through the lobby and gets that squinty, "The Plot Thickens" look on his face. Getting her room number from the clerk (and really, why are the clerks in this film so free and easy with their guest's information? Was it just a different time back then?), he goes up to see her, and after she hugs him in a manner that implies she's relieved he's alive, what follows on the surface is a continuation of their meeting on the trai, only now the delivery of the dialogue and the underlining subtext makes it appear more sinister- he insists on her not leaving his sight, outwardly because he doesn't want to be away with her but inwardly because he no longer trusts her, and she very bluntly tells him to leave, trying to seem like what happened between them meant nothing to her, but in reality probably trying to save his life. In the end she appears to relent, getting him to have his suit cleaned (subtext- so he won't be able to follow her wherever she's going) and taking a note on the phone as he appears tp be in the shower, before leaving. He then does the old "scribbling a pencil over a piece of paper that was under a sheet that's just been written on" trick that all good school children know, and when his suit's clean, he goes to find her and whoever she's with at their place of meeting.
Ths turns out to be an auction for fine art, where he finds her sitting with Vandamm. Outraged, he confronts the pair of them, saying such things about Eve as, "Isn't everybody?" when Leonard asks her if he spent the night in her room, reducing her to tears and causing her to attempt to slap him. "Who are you kidding," he says to her, "you have no feeling to hurt." Ouch. Growing tired of this, Vandamm leaves with Eve, leaving Leonard and the goons covering all the exits, ready to pounce on Thornhill the second he attempts to leave. Showing some shrewdness however, he realises the only way he's going to get out of this room alive is in police custody, so he sets about making a mockery of te proceeding, bidding backwards, bidding against himself, claiming the art is fake and finally getting into a fist fight. The police drag him away, and he gleefully informs them that they've hit the jackpot, having nabbed the United Nations killer. They call this in, but instead of being told to take him to the station, they're told instead to take him to the nearest airport, which displeases Thornhill, since he believes the safest place for him right now is in a cell.
Of course he's soon told otherwise when at the airport he's met with The Professor, who was in the crowd at the auction, and who fills him in finally on what's been happening in his life, why it's been all but destroyed, and what exactly Vandamm does- turns out he's a Russian spy selling government secrets. He then asks him to come with him to Mount Rushmore and be Caplin one more time to ensure the safety of their agent, who they now believe Vandamm suspects. Thornhill of course at first tells them to get bent, but his attitude soon changes when he's told that (DUN DUN DUUUUUUUN!)(do I do that too much?) Eve is the double agent, and in having her nearly slap him, he showed to Vandamm that she had feelings for him, which now makes him doubt her. So, off they go to Mount Rushmore, where a very elaborate plan is set in motion- Thornhill meets with Vandamm and tells him he knows he's flying out of the country that night, and that he'll see to it nothing stops the plane as long as he leave Eve with him, so he an pin everything on her and make her pay for betraying him. There's some confusion, and the plan seems to go horrible wrong when Eve pulls a gun on Thornhill and shoots him (yeah, I think that classifies as "horribly wrong"). She flees, and he's taken away in an ambulance...
... only for them to later meet up in the woods. As it turns out, this was their big plan, their way of stopping Vandamm suspecting her whilst also conveniently killing off Caplin at the same time. The Professor arranges for them to meet up so that they can explain themselves to each other, with Thornhill immediately forgiving her. "All in the line of duty," he says, which I suppose is true, even if she did pretty much sell him down the river to save herself. They kiss, he talks about them being together when this is all over, and then it comes out that she's going away with Vandamm to continue keeping tabs on him. Thornhill goes into a rage, saying how it's not fair they ask her to "bed down" with men like Vandamm in order to win The Cold War, and when he tries to stop her driving away, gets knocked the fuck out by The Professor's driver. We next see him pacing up and down his hotel room in just a towel (steady, ladies...), listening to the radio report on "Caplin's" shooting, before he has some new clothes brought to him by The Professor. He play acts (and even in-character it's obvious that's what he's doing) that he's calmed down and no longer has any interest in saving Eve, but the second he's alone he escapes, climbng out the window, shimmying across the ledge, and climbing through another window to a room that doesn't have a locked door, but does have a woman in it that seems to... instantly fall in love with him. "STOP!" she yells, then puts her glasses on, gets a good look at him and, as he's about to leave, huskily says, "stop." O... kay then.
He goes up to Vandamm's place, which appears to be situated on top of Mount Rushmore, and spies on he and Leonard having a conversation about Eve, and how Leonard still doesn't trust her, calling it "women's intuition" (um...). He then pulls out a gun and seems to shoot Vandamm, only for him to reveal that he found it in Eve's bag, and it's full of blanks, meaning she couldn't have shot Thornhill/Caplin. Vandamm responds to his friend making him believe he was about to murder him by PUNCHING HIM IN THE FACE! Most realistic part of the movie, folks. Followed swiftly by perhaps the least realistic moment, when Eve enters the room and asks if anybody heard that noice. Oh come on, a gun just went off in the next room. You're telling me you could only just hear that? Anyway, they decide to take care of her on the flight over, leaving Thornhill with not much time to warn her. He gets into her room by scaling the wall (is he now just a secret agent? Can he do all this stuff because they simply think he can?), but just misses her. He then writes her a warning on the box of matches he owns with his initials stencilled on them that she'd noticed during their first meeting on the train, and throws it at her from upstairs. He misses her though, and there's a tense moment when Leonard sees the box (that really did have me on the edge of my seat), before just casually tossing it onto the table. She sees it, reads the message, and they have a brief meeting upstairs, where he tells her they're going to kill her on the flight, saying he'll help her escape. She leaves with Vandamm and Leonard, and Thornhill makes to be in hot persuit, until the housekeeper spots him in the reflection of thetelevisin and pulls a gun on him.
So Eve keeps looking back at the house for him, waiting for him to appear, they're at the plane, he's not arrived, she's about to get on... when two shots ring out and Thornhill runs out of the house, steals a car and whisks Eve away, saying he realised that the gun the housekeeper had on him was the gun with the blanks in it. They drive until they have to abandon the car, and... fuck me, I know this bit too! This is the chase down Mount Rushmore! This was parodied on "Family Guy" as well! Infact, I think it may have been the same episode, the one where Mel Gibson was trying to get back the only existing copy of "Passion of the Christ 2: Crucify This" (which incidently makes my top five list of fake movie I wish were real) from Peter. Sigh. Anyway, for what it's worth, and surprisingly for a Hitchcock movie, there isn't much suspense here. I think it might have something to do with the fact that it's almost too realistic, in that it's slow and features people carefully trying not to lose their footing. The set also looks quite fake, which doesn't help. Anyway, it ends with Eve hanging onto Thornhill's hand for dear life, as he hangs onto the rock face (I suppose there's no other kind of rock at Mount Rushmore, is there?)(geddit?)(because they're faces... carved into rocks). Leonard starts to tread on his hand, it looks like they're both about to fall, until a shot rings out, being fired by the police and The Professor, who have showed up to save the day. Then Thornhill pulls Eve up, then their in a room on a train in their pajamas, he calls her "Mrs. Thornhill," then the movies ends. I'm serious, that abruptly. I know I've reviewed film before where the ending seem to come out of nowhere, but the one doesn't so much end as just... stop. In a way it was hilarious, because it came so suddenly I just burst out laughing. I suppose it fits with the whole "no bullshit" thing I mentioned earlier though, so I guess it makes sense in that regard.
I tell you, after the last movie I covered, this one has totally refilled my soul and made me believe in cinema again. It's a great example of a blockbuster, really- it suspenseful, it looks and sounds amazing, it's funny (the best line is when Thornhill's hanging off Mount Rushmore and says to Eve that his previous two wives left him because he lived "too dull a life"), it's populated by a hero you care about, a "boo-hiss" baddie who you want to see taken down, and a beautiful love interest. Shit even blows up! I'm telling you now, this year I will go to see a supposed action movie in cinemas and be able to say that it can't hold a candle to this. At least one. Not "Transformers" though, that's going to be amazing.
FINAL VERDICTKEPT!
Alfred Hitchcock, ladies and gentlemen. Genius.
Before I leave, a couple of things. Firstly, a heads up straight away- there's a very good chance next week's review will be late. I'm going ot try for it not to be, believe me, but the fact is, writing-wise I have alot on my plate at the moment, ncluding something that's very near-and-dear to my heart (anybody reading this who knows me probably knows what I'm talking about), and if anything takes priority, that does at least for a week. It won't be massively late if indeed it is at all, just a couple of days, but since I've been a bit of a prick with my time-keeping over the last few weeks, I thought it only fair that I give a warning if I even know the engine might break down.
Secondly, and on a much happier note, a couple of reviews ago, I made mention of some kind of announcment that I had to make. Well, I put off saying anything until it was really official, but as of today I can start talking- I have joined the writing team over at killerfilm.com. Don't worry, I'm not abondoning Blogger or anything like that, but in two weeks time they'll start republishing my old reviews every fortnight, and hopefully expose me to a whole new audience. Until that starts, I have a brand new introduction to myself and what I do up here, so if you want you can go over there and take a look at it. And whilst you're there, please take a look at some of the other content. The people there seem really nice, and I'd like to see them continue to grow and also be a part of that growth. It's all rather exciting, really.
Until next week, I'm The Cheap-Arse Film Critic, and when one is in Egypt, one should delve deeply into its treasures.
NAME: THE SOCIAL CLIMBER
RATED: 12
RELEASED: 2005WRITTEN BY: ERIC C. CHARMELO & NICOLE SNYDER, BASED ON THE NOVEL "CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATHIC SOCIAL CLIMBER," WRITTEN BY ADELE LANGDIRECTED BY: DANA LUSTIGSTARRING: JENNIFER LOVE HEWITT, COLIN FERGUSONGENRE: ROMANTIC COMEDY, SUPPOSEDLYBOUGHT FROM: WOOLWORTHSPRICE: £1.00
(Late again. Three days so, just as before. Been ill, but really that's no excuse. I throw myself at your feet and beg you for forgivness, whilst also promising, promising, that next week's review will be up on Wednesday. I know I said that before. Yes... yes I know my word doesn't mean what it once did, but please baby, just give me one last chance. I can change. Please don't give up on me. Remember Rome.)
I'm not going to do a big introduction this week. I had one planned. I was going to talk about Jennifer Love Hewitt, and the fickle nature of making the transition from TV to film, and how it works perfectly well one way, but there's still a stigma attached to the other. I was going to talk about how she probably could have made it if she'd just stuck to horror movies, but like so many of her generation she wanted to prove she had range and, sadly, she failed. I was going to mention the fact that she's probably better off on television, and that as research I watched an episode of her new (well, new to me) show, "The Ghost Whisperer," and thought it was... alright. It's not "Buffy," but if you ask me, neither was "Buffy" towards the end. And, yes, I was going to make a few jokes about her breasts. I was even going to call her, "Jennifer Lovely Jubblies" at one point, which I was far too proud of myself for having come up with.
I was going to go into all that, in my trademark manner (meaning it was going to be fucking long). But I've decided not to now.
Why?
I'm going to be totally honest with you folks- I hated this movie. With a seething passion. And I don't want to spend any longer writing this than I absolutely have to. Which, if we're going by my logic, probably means this will end up the longest review I've ever done.
It's not even so much the actual movie really, but rather one character in it. Sadly that character happens to be the main one, Katya Livingston, played by the lovely Ms. Hewitt. In many ways, I think she's comparable to Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho," which I suppose is apt due to the fact this is an adaptation of a book called "Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber." The only difference is that, within the world he inhabited, Patrick was normal enough to go along undetected, whereas this woman is just... you would believe she was capable of murder. Infact, she does kill thing! I mean, she...
... actually I'm going to handle this within the context of the review, because this is coming dangerously close to an introduction.
We open at a wedding as the group picture is about to be taken. The bride, Dove Greenstein (Stefanie von Pfetten, who looks a bit like an older version of the twins from "Sweet Valley High"), is wondering where her husband is, as of course he's supposed to be in it. We then cut to Katya, talking on her phone whilst talking to her accountant in prison about his fears that she's about to be audited (which allows them to use her keeping an expenses journal as the voiceover framing device, and also allows them go for that old classic visual gag of seeing the accountant being lovingly caressed by a big bald man with a beard in the only other scene we see him in, because remember kids, prison rape is funny), whilst occasionally giving off little moans. Dove, the other guests and the photogaphers all burst in, and it's revealed that there's a man up Katya's dress, and yep, you guessed it, he's the groom. So a pretty socialite was talking on the phone in a disnterested manner whilst recieving oral sex. Gee, I wonder where they got that one from? Surprisingly, the movie goes out of its way here to try and make this horrible thing she's done seem less awful by having her explain that she missed the ceromony and thought she was copping off with the Best Man. And I say surprising because, as you will soon see, she does alot of other really horrible things throughout this movie, and no excuse is given for them other than the fact that she's just a horrible person.
After the credit sequence (JLH dancing around to some music and getting dressed, which is enough to make it one of the best things in this movie), we move forward in time a little bit to see Katya walking to work, getting accousted by a man in a rabbit suit she says she has a restraining order against (Frank, how far you've fallen...), and buying a cheap knock-off of some expensive bag that a dude is just selling on the side of the street (isn't that supposed to be illegal?), who she's also a jerk to by way of bartering him down to way below the price he was asking on the basis of, "every socialite in San Francisco is going to see me with that bag," like the guy selling illegal forgeries really wants to draw that much attention to himself. "Honestly," she continues," you should be paying me." Oh fuck off. She finally arrives at work, where we're told she the star creative player of an advertising firm, and we meet her co-workers- Eliza (Sonja Bennett), a cute strawbery-blonde hippy who wants Katya to sponsor a little African boy; her bosses secretary, known only as Gatekeeper (Jennifer Clement), who I think we're supposed to think is strange and a bit of a bitch, although she's outdone in that regard by Katya within seconds when she in not-so-many words tells her that her clothes look ugly and cheap; Sebastian (James Kirk)(yes, really), a young, seemingly sweet-natured guy who's been brought in to act as her second in command, only for her to treat him like a personal assistant and constantly makes fun of his age despite not looking all that much older than him (amazing but true- Jennifer Love Hewitt turned 30 last month); and finally her boss, Alex (Daniel Roebuck), who seemingly has no authority over Katya whatsoever and sits back as she kills his pets (accidently, it's fair to add, as she feeds them the healthy snacks Eliza keeps giving her, but the fact remains that by the end of the film she's responsible for the deaths of several fish and an Iguana, and she barely seems to care. She even tells the lizard he'd make a nice pair of shoes).
We've seemingly jumped forward in time again to see Eliza and Katya enjoying a little liquid lunch, where amongst other things Katya finds the time to moan that none of the men she date appreciate he "Inner Goddess," (oh fuck off) that's going to sponsor the little boy in Africa (even though she keeps sayin she's adopting him, which means either the character or the writers themselves don't now the difference between these two things), although she neglects to mention she's only doing it to get on the good side of the IRS, and since the scene wouldn't be complete without her making someone feel bad, she proclaims Eliza's headscarf to be a little too, "Aunt Jamima." I'm sort of with her on that one, if I'm honest. Back at the office, following her completely immasculating Sebastian again just because he dared ask to be allowed to do the job he was hired for, Katya goes on a break once again (at first I thought this must be a different day, but nope, she's wearing the same clothes as in the previous scene), and clasps eyes on a ruggedly handsome man she christens Thor, but it's eventually discovered is called Charles (Colin Ferguson, who my fellow sci-fi nerds my recognise as Sherrif Jack Carter from "Eureka"). She starts drooling all over herself like a dog left in a hot car, imagines him walking straight over to her, and he's about to kiss her when... Sebastian suddenly appears in front of her hold a box of Tampax she asked him to buy, except it's a huge box of maxi-sized ones. HA! Okay, it's a stupid joke, but I enjoyed it. I also got a kick out of seeing Katya embarrassed in front of someone she likes. Yes, I hate this character so much I derive pleasure from her failures, which is the polar opposite of how you're supposed to feel about a main character.
Katya is now back at her appartment after a long day standing around sucking on unlit cigarettes, watching an E! Television-style show presented by Melissa Rivers (and it shold tell you something about the target audience for this movie that she's the big celebrity cameo) talking about a big party being thrown by Dove that you need key-shaped invitations to be able to attend, proclaiming it bigger than Oprah's 50th (side note- this movie was first broadcast on the Oxygen! Channel in America, a chanel that Oprah pretty much owns) and Puffy's White Party (and I'm ashamed to admit I know what that is...). When Katya hears she's not invited, she's appalled (yes, that's right, she expects an invitation to a party being thrown by a woman who caught her husband of an hour tops GOING DOWN ON HER), and calls her best friends Frangipani (who I'm just going to call Fran from now on) and Ferguson so they can take her out. Now, the guy playing Ferguson looks really familiar to me, but for the life of me, I can't place him. As much as I've tried to forget this movie, and will attempt to wipe it from my mind once I'm through with this second viewing, I've actually been trying hard to figure out who he is. I fucking hate this, when you're watching something and you know you know the person on-screen from somewhere else, but you just caOH MY GOD IT'S JOEY LAWRENCE FROM "BLOSSOM!" IT HAS LITERALLY JUST COME TO ME! I SWEAR, I DIDN'T LOOK IT UP ON THE INTERNET OR ANYTHING! I WAS JUST WATCHING THIS SCENE, AND I JUST YELLED "WOAH!" AT MY TELEVISION! JOEY LAWRENCE IS IN THIS, AND HE'S PLAYING A BALD HOMOSEXUAL PROSTITUTE WHO FALLS IN LOVE WITH HIS CLIENTS AND THEN TRIES TO KILL HIMSELF WHEN THEY SPURN HIS ADVANCES! Well, this movie just got a little more awesome.
I can't believe I've referenced both "Blossom" and "Sweet Valley High" in the same review. I am a man, I just... want to put that out there.
As well as existing to give us some exposition we already know, this scene also kicks off a little sub-plot where one of the waiters gives Katya a book he's written to read so she'll give him her opinion on it before he enters it into some contest where the winner gets $25,000. Of course, she just throws it away, telling him she's already entered it for him when infact she's entered something she's written, and over the course of bumping into him at several different locations where he's now working, she feeds him an endless stram of bullshit whilst also bribing him for free drinks. Oh, and she ends up winning the contest, so the lesson there is if you screw over people who trust you, you'll go far in life (the sad thing is that, for all my snark, history has proven that there's an element of truth to that last statement). Her friends then half-heartedly try to make Katya feel better, only for Fran to produce an invite out of her bag for little more reason than to rub the fact that she's going in her face. Up until now, this movie was suffering from the same problem most like this do, which is the morally-questionable main character is surrounded by friends that are miles too nice to want to hang out with her, so it was good to see at least one of her friend be the kind of person you'd expect her to be friends with.
Following this, we find ourselves back at Katya's apartment as she wanders sleepily around listening to her voicemail messages. She's wearing pajamas, specifically what looks to be a pink version on the pajamas worm by Calista Flockhart on "Aly McBeal" (I swear to you, I really do have a penis. I've got people who can vouch for me and everything). I have a thing for women in pajamas. Just thought I'd throw that out there. Just as she's about to casually fall asleep at her work desk (why doesn't she just, I dunno, go to bed?), she suddenly remembers she's supposed to have come up with a campaign for a shoe soles company to present the next day, and works through the night to come up with something. I get the feeling this little sequence is supposed to show us that regardless of her personality, she's good at her job. The only problem is, the idea she comes up with seems a bit, well... shit. It consists of her making an Angel costume for herself and proclaiming the product as, "Heaven for your feet." It looks and sounds like something a child would come up with if they were asked to make an ad for a school project. And we're expected to believe she's the best there is at what she does. But the clients like it and she's proclaimed a genius and some kind of hero. Fortunately for me, her high doesn't last long, as she discovers Alex also has an invite to the ball. She moans to Eliza about the situation, and like the stereotypical happy-clappy hippy she is, Eliza suggests she work the party like she. "EW!" Katya exclaims, "Working the event is worse than not attending at all." Oh fuck off. And as she storms off, Eliza just smiles at her and shakes her head, as if to say, "Oh, you!" WHY ARE YOU FRIENDS WITH THIS WOMAN?! SHE TREATS YOU LIKE SHIT! And then she goes back to her office and yells at Sebastian for doing what his boss has asked him to! Yes, how dare he go to work to actually work! Dear God I'm fucking losing it with this movie.
Anyway, she leaves work without permission again, but at least this time she has a halfway decent reason to, that being Ferguson has had his heart broken by another client and is threatening to kill himself again. She finds him with his head in his oven, which she quickly points out won't work because it's electric. She wouldn't be Katya if she didn't have an alterior motive for being there though, as she needs him to play the role of, to quote Ferguson himself, "her gay assistant," and call Dove's people to see why she's not got her invite yet. Oh my God, she still thinks she should be invited! This woman operates on a different level of reality to every other person that's ever lived. Even within the context of her own movie! She's really the only person who doesn't get why she's not invited! Dove finally gets on the phone, and following some catty back-and-forth, tells Katya to fuck off. Right, that should be the end of that, shouldn't it? Movie over? Please? Oh, who am I kidding, there's over an hour to go. Hewitt is wearing nice shoes in this scene, I'll give her that (wow, I'll say one thing about this movie, it's just laying all my fetishes out on the table, isn't it?). The scene ends with her putting her own head in the oven. HAHAHAH! IT'S FUNNY BECAUSE SHE KNOWS IT'S ELECTRIC!
Only an hour to go...
Following this, the movie breaks off into two main plots which eventually converge, and one sub-plot. The sub-plot can be summed up very quickly- Sebastian suddenly stops being a good-goody boy scout and literally turns into a Dark Lord of the Sith- he's wearing black clothes, his hair's all slicked back, and he's now constantly has an evil smile on his face and isn't afraid to tell Katya to get stuffed. While I'll admit I got a kick out of seeing him telling her off, the fact that this transformation comes out of nowhere is just bad storytelling. The closest we get to an explaination is him now claiming this is the "real Sebastian." Um, okay, whatever you say, just place don't crush my throat with your mind. It's an example of a lazy script that has no interest in explaining anything, it just has things happen because we're at the point in the story (and I use that word in its loosest possible sense) where it should. This also fails because I think we're now supposed to think of him as a bad guy, and if you haven't figured out why that doesn't work and you're this far into this, I really don't know what to tell you.
The first of the two main plots involve Katya scrambling desperately to get an invitation to the party, as it becomes obvious that everybody she knows is going to this thing except here (this becomes frankly ludicrous when it's revealed later that Ferguson has an invite. I can buy Alex and Fran getting invites, but the emotionally screwed-up rent boy?). Her first plan is to take advanage of Bobby, her ex-boyfriend who we last saw at the beginning of the movie dressed like a giant rabbit, because the last time she checked he was Dove's drug dealer. She walks up to who she thinks is Bobby in the suit in the street, asks him if he wants to "hump like bunnies," and when he nods in the affirmative, waves a giant carrot in his face. How many rabbit-based jokes are they going to squeeze out of this? Well, one more it would seem, as the next scene taes place in Katya's apartment, where Bobby's grinding up against she from behind as she's wearing a Playboy Bunny Girl outfit. But guess what? IT'S NOT BOBBY! It's a new guy in the suit that presumably came straight from work still wearing his costume and just started rubbing against her without so much as a word being exchanged between them. Makes perfect sense. Anyway, Katya manages to get in contact with the real Bobby, and dear God is this guy a mess, a nervous fawn of a man who is reluctant to hook up with Katya because his shrink say she's bad for his "mental wellbeing." She proves too tempting to resist though, and after a sex scene that's pathetic even by TV movie standards (NOBODY IS MOVING!), Bobby drops the bombshell that he's recently come out of rehab, cleaned up his life and doesn't deal anymore, meaning he's not invited to the party. Having slept with this guy for no other reason than to get an invite (and this has dawned on me- if these invites are "plus one," why doesn't she just go with one of her friends?), Katya is undersandably disappointed at hearing this news. So disappointed, infact, that she has the police drag Bobby yelling and screaming out of her apartment, siting the restraining order she mentioned earlier. Poor Bobby.
Her second plan is good, old-fashioned blackmail, as she hears that Dove is something of a sasquatch (as a man with hairy shoulders, she has my complete sympathy), and schemes to get a picture of her getting waxed that she'll release to the gossip press if she doesn't get an invite. After both she and Ferguson both fail to use their charms on the male receptionist, she slips the guy a bill, and like that, they're both in. Also the receptionist, who'd previously informed Ferguson, "you're not my type either," now seems to want him. What a ho. After some more scheming, Katya gets upstares and gets a picture of Dove on the waxing table. They're about to do a trade-off, picture for invitation (which Dove just conveniently has in her bag), before Dove changes her mind, saying that the picture is useless for blackmail because her face isn't in it. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! AWESOME! WHAT A FUCKINGING MORON! AND THEN KATYA'S DRAGGED OUT BY SECURITY! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Which I guess brings us to the second main plot, that being Katya's infatuation with Charles, and the complications that arise from that. Throughout the film, Eliza tries to hook Katya up with a lawyer friend of hers, only to have Katya constantly blowing her off because she just assumes he'll be horrendous. Eliza even goes so far as to give him her number, which he uses to leave an answering machine message, her mocking him the entire tim he's talking. However, we then cut to the other side of the call, and see that the lawyer Eliza's trying to hook her up with is infact... CHARLES! So Katya's judgemental attitude is fucking her in the arse and preventing her from meeting up with guy she's decided on-sight is the man of her dreams. Her attitude changes pretty quickly however when she's informed by Eliza that he has an invite to the party, leading to her returning his call and agreeing to go on a date with him. So, I suppose you think you've got what happens next figured out, haven't you? She'll meet him, realise he's the guy she's in love with, they'll get on great, he'll find out she was only after him for his invite, and so on and so on. Well, strap yourself in folks, because amazingly I'm going to offer this movie some minor praise, because it takes a twist that actually quite creative- the pair meet up in an elevator after having bumped into each other a couple of times during the movie, usually with Katya accidentally humiliating herself. Charles stops the elevator again and says he'll only start it again if she agrees to go out on a date with him (it's far less creepy then it reads here, trust me). She agrees, and the spend the evening together. Katya is at first put out when he takes her to the park to have a Hotdog, saying she thought he was a five-star restaurant kind of guy. I should be calling her an ungrateful bitch here but I actually don't mind this, because it's been established that this is how her character would initially react, and presenting her any other way would be dishonest. Still, he wins her over as the sit on a nearby fountain, talking about their live and such. Colin Ferguson gives one of the best performances in this movie, which I'll admit is the faintest of faint praise, but it bares pointing out. It's already been established that he's a good looking guy (I find it quite apt that he was originally referred to as Thor, because he's handsome in a manly enough way that I think Marvel could make much worse choices to play The God of Thunder himself), and he's just got this really honest natural likability to him. He's in the wrong movie, basically. So things go so good, they end up dancing in the fountain in their underwear (I did this once)(only I was alone)(and I was drunk)(and it wasn't a pond, it was a kiddies paddling pool), and after he walks her back to her apartment, Charles asks if they can do all this again next week. Katya says yes, but also says first she has to break off a date with some guy she only agreed to see in order to get into some party, that guy of course being Charles and... oh God now he's unhappy to hear this! It's that movie logic again! Dude, you've won! She likes you and wants to se you for you now! What, do you think she just magically fel in love with your voice when you left that message? At best she was going out with you because Eliza was bugging her to! That's how blind dates work! Christ I can't believe I'm defending this woman, but you're annoying me almost as much as she does right now!
Actually that's a lie.
Katya returns to her apartment riding a wave of happiness, unaware that she's accidentally crushed the man of her dreams until she plays the messages on her phone. See, during the date, Charles left a message on her phone, telling her he's the same guy she's supposed to go out on a date with next week (incidently I found it strange that she didn't recognise him from voice alone, as I think it's fair to say that his tone is fairly distinctive). Realising that she's pissed him off, she slams her fist on the table, hurts herself, and exclaimed, "I DESERVED THAT!" I can't believe I'm about to say this, but no, I don't think you did. We now enter the "downer" section of the movie where everything starts to go wrong for her- Charles won't speak to her because he thinks she's more interested in the invite than him (and I will say she doesn't help herself in this regard when he waves the invite in front of her and she goes to snatch it), everyone's going to this thing except her, and what's more she completely forgets to come up with a campaign idea for the Rice-Roni people. She attempts to quickly throw something together using a globe and a really cheesy catchphrase ("RICE-RONI: AMERICA'S FAVOURITE TREAT!") that no company in the 21st century would take in any way seriously. And thankfully the film realises this, having the company execs virtually laugh her out of the room. Enter Darth Sebastian with an idea of his own. To be honest, his idea's only slightly better than hers, but it's still better, so they decide to go with it. Cue Katya getting chewed out by alex about her poor performance and attitude (and I love how he grows a pair and starts calling on all the shit he was letting her get away with when she was of some use to him), before firing her, just like that.
The movie's sort of going in fast forward at this point, as Katya is now lazing around her apartment in the dress she bought for the party (bought with the money she won from the book contest, I might point out), before her friends show up and decide that Ciderella will go to the ball. Getting her in is a mini adverture in itself, as it involves a boat and having to climb a wall, but they succeed. And after a brief meeting with Eliza, her new boyfriend, and Bobby (who's decided he's now gay and in love with Ferguson)(is this another prison sex joke?), she's discovered by Dove, and the pair have a public slanging match based totally around the pair of them point out how awful they are. And that's a very good point, actually- we're about ten minutes away from the end, and Katya hasn't grown as a person even marginally. Normally when the main character in a movie has to learn something, the seeds start to be sown at least by the middle of the second act. Here she's exactly the same person she was at the start of the movie. She hasn't changed or shown any desire to change at all. She's not even at the party to try and apologise to Charles, she's just there because she wants to be there! So I kept wondering when and how they were suddenly going to make her a "good" person, because you know it's coming.
And sadly, the writers handle this the same way they handled Sebastian going over to The Dark Side, which is to have it come out of nowhere after a video of the boy in Africa she's "adopted is shown on the screen. This sensitive subject that's still relevent to this day, that being the plight of children in the Third World, is treated as little more than a running gag throughout the entire movie, with Katya sending him letters telling him how great her life is, and he responding telling her how much he's been inspired by her. The video shows he and his family/tribe living like kings off the Rice-Roni Katya mailed to him after she'd been fired, as he proudly proclaims, "WE'VE ALL GAINED TWO POUNDS!" For a start these people don't look anywhere near like they were starving to death to begin with, and secondly no charity would applaud this behaviour, as they insist that they're not giving out charity, but they're helping people help themselves. But still, she's a hero, and she's carried up on-stage by security just after they'd been told to throw her out. And it is here that she suddenly has her big realisation and starts apologising to everyone in the crowd she's wronged. Waiter Guy? Sorry for throwing away your book. Eliza? I fucked your boyfriend. But hey, we're still friends, right. Ex-Bossman? Killed your pets. There's tears and pleas for Charles to forgive her even as he's marching out of the party, which is just delaying the inevitable, as you know they're going to get together in the end. And indeed they do, sitting on the same fountain from their first date, after Charles lists all the bad things about her, then proclaims, "She's everything I didn't want, everything that's not on my list... and I can't stop thinking about her." You deserve a life of misery. Can this get any worse? She's got the man, it's hinted that she'll get her job back after she bumps into the Rice-Roni people at the party (IS THE ENTIRE WORLD AT THIS THING?!) and they tell her that the focus group loved her boring idea. Is there any other way this movie would like to dance on my groin. How about the last line, huh? Can you enspire rage from me?
"Cab fare from castle: $35. Rip in gown: $85. Finding happiness that has nothing to do with money, parties or designer clothing: waddayaknow, priceless."
OH, FUCK OFF!!!!!!
This is the point where I would usually do a sort of "final thought" and give my verdict on the film I've just watched, but I'm not sure it's needed here. I was totaly up-front about what I thought of this from the word go, and I think we all know what I'll be doing with this movie, so I can't think of anything I could put here that wouldn't be needless padding (and Lord knows my reviews need to be longer). Um... AHA! This is a Boulevard Entertainment DVD, so there must be somthing amusing about the packaging, so... BOX REVIEW! Well, to be honest, in one regard I'm a little bit disappointed, because thre's no spelling mistakes or anything like that, so I suppose I have to say yay pompetancy and knowing hw all your actors names are spelt. There is however something really cheap and thrown-together about the whole layout- the pictures are all grainy and the text is smooshed into really small and strange little boxes. It looks like something I could throw together on my computer. Infact, I'd be tempted to say this was a bootleg, were it not from the fact that I bought it from Woolworths.
Anyway, let's stop delaying the inevitable.
FINAL VERDICTBINNED!
If this is Woolworths' legacy, then maybe its best that it's dead.
Until next week, I'm The Cheap-Arse Film Critic, and I just had to kill alot of people!
NAME: HERCULES IN NEW YORK
That's not usually how these things are done. Usually, when you're trying to alert people to things this way, you either just let the words hang there without punctuation, or use punctuation to imply this is something to get excited about. "FEATURING ARNOLD'S REAL VOICE FOR THE FIRST TIME!" See how an exclamation point changes that whole sentence? Isn't that an improvement? If I didn't know better, I'd say it almost looks like the person in charge of putting together the box art for this thing was subtly making fun of the movie. "Watch this. It's got Arnold's real voice in it. Yay."
Now, I both like and dislike these. I like them simply because they're easy to store. I did a little comparison once and found that, were all my DVD boxes this thin, I could have got roughly three times as many of them on one shelf. Which is great. But they're not, which is why I hate them, because when I see them sitting alongside all my regular-sized boxes, looking all skinny and different, it makes my OCD want to cry. I just don't like it. I'm the kind of man who has his books on a shelf in height order, there's nothing I can do about this.
LOOK AT IT! LOOK HOW WRONG IT LOOKS NEXT TO MY OTHER MOVIES! IT'S SO SMALL I CAN BARELY SEE IT! AND IT'LL LOOK WEIRD SANDWICHED BETWEEN OTHER BOXES! I DON'T LIKE IT!
