Less than halfway through 2021, and I’ve already seen as many movies as I did in all of 2019–although, sadly, none of them have been seen on airplanes.
Robin Hood (1991)
Cable, original English
Not the Costner blockbuster from the same year, but a British release, starring Uma Thurman, Jürgen Prochnow sporting a terrible fake French accent, and several men from Midsomer County, including the one who was also Beethoven’s solicitor in the Gary Oldman biopic. One of the better rounds of “Where Do I Know That Guy” I’ve played recently! “No, the poacher was from Sherlock!”
Anyway. Decent period flick–followed the same story as the Errol Flynn and Disney versions with a cheerful helpful Robin, none of that brooding Turkish prison nonsense–although Thurman’s gender-bending “90-lb teenage girl is a bigger badass than professional soldiers” schtick grates (was it fresh in 1991? I can’t remember). Nice costumes. Not too much scenery. Mr Radish started playing a game on his phone about halfway through, but I thought it wasn’t a bad way to spend a rainy evening in lockdown.
Communion (1989)
We have never been alone.
Plex, original English
I probably should have just read the book (I may have read it in high school, I don’t remember), but I like Frances Sternhagen and Andreas Katsulas, so I thought, what the heck.
As far as the movie goes, it was a weird and confusing script, made more so by seeing Streiber himself listed in the opening credits as a writer and producer–the character played by Christopher Walken was a violent asshole, loud and abusive toward his family and neighbors, and why would someone choose to portray themselves that way in their own biopic? (OTOH, maybe rich NYCers of the 80s read “loud abusive asshole” as a positive thing. Hard to know.)
During a foggy dream sequence I noticed the mood music was crazy-cool wailing 80s electric guitar, and later learned it was composed and performed by Eric Clapton.
Plex is a new thing; I downloaded the app to watch Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (the good one, the Murnau one, not the Herzog one) and most of the movies look really bad. Some old Westerns pique my interest. The advertising is annoyingly timed, but not worse than YouTube and actually better than German non-public TV. So there’s that.
Where Eagles Dare (1968)
Arte, Deutsch mit Untertiteln
Tagline: “Not bad for a weekend’s work in Bavaria!” Very action-y English WWII action movie, explosions all over the place, with spies and double spies. Lots of military hardware gets crunched and lots of baddies bite it.
The women’s costumes are terrible. The hair, make-up, clothes, and shoes are all from the 1960s. In one particularly egregious anachronism, one of the lady spies is wearing pants. Pants! Absolute no-go for German women until sometime after the film was made…and the other lady spy wears go-go boots. No. No. No. Nazis with machine guns shoot at Clint Eastwood for fifteen full minutes and he doesn’t get a scratch…and that feels less fake than German women wearing pants and go-go boots in 1944. Nazi officers chopper in with an American helicopter from the Korean War era, and that feels less wrong than pants and go-go boots. Ach.
Costumes aside, it was a decent–if perhaps over-the-top–popcorn movie.
Of course, I’ve already found the castle used for filming. It doesn’t have a cable car; that sequence was filmed elsewhere.
