Double Bill #09: Apocalypto & Mad Max: Fury Road

Posted on 22 april 2024 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

Apocalypto (2006) opens with a little quiet before the storm; a tribe of Indians hunting a tapir, capturing it and having a pleasant night around the campfire. Then an evil tribe attacks and their harmonious lives soon descend into violent madness. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) immediately throws you into the action and doesn’t give you a breather for at least 45 minutes. Both movies explore culture gone bad. The Indian tribes are working on destroying their culture from within, but their environment is still beautiful and rich with life. In Fury Road, civilization has already collapsed and all that is left is a desolate wasteland (it was filmed in the Namibian desert). They are both great settings for some of the most spectacular chase scenes ever committed to celluloid. In Apocalypto, it is a grueling foot chase through the deadly jungle (filmed in Mexico’s Catemaco rain forest) and a fight to the death. Mad Max throws in spectacular war machines and a stunningly visualized ride to mayhem. Both feature outrageous custom design, kinetic editing and ‘die hard’ violence along the way. Thematically, the films are very similar. In both stories, the men are the insane ones, and the (pregnant) women carry the greatest hope for humanity in these desperate times. But in both stories, at least one man is sane enough to take on the crazies and help the women, and their offspring, towards a better future. A connection between the two classics you may have missed at this point, is that Apocalypto is directed by none other than Mel Gibson, the original road warrior, who was too old to play Max in 2015. I must admit I enjoyed Apocalypto more than Mad Max: Fury Road. The latter features shots that are just mind boggling, but I didn’t feel much for the characters. In Apocalypto, I did. As a Double Bill, this works fantastically.

Double Bill #08: Die Hard & Die Hard 2

Posted on 25 december 2023 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

The greatest Christmas Double Bill in history! Bruce Willis stars in the role that made him a super star: John McClane is an old style hero: smoking cigarettes, cracking jokes and killing bad guys. The first Die Hard (1988) is considered the greatest action film of all time. Why is that so? I tried to analyze it and came up with this. First of all; it is really, really tense. John McClane (Willis) is locked up in a building with a bunch of heavily armed and completely ruthless German terrorists. What are the odds of survival? Minimal. This is survival action optimally done. It is fun to watch a guy – who is not really scared of death, but definitely no narcissistic psychopath either – face impossible odds. Secondly, the screenplay is intelligent and the casting is terrifically done. Part 2 is off course (this is the sequel after all) BIGGER! It takes place at an airport, which is taken over by terrorists who want to free a South American dictator (Franco Nero) who is landing soon. Groovy! In a magazine article on an airplane read by one of the characters, a picture is shown of Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) and Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) in Lethal Weapon 2. This is a sequel that was indeed even better than the original. Die Hard 2 is not, although you could argue for it. Film critic Roger Ebert thought so and wrote a terrific review about the sequel (he curiously gave the first movie only two stars out of four). I understand his point of view about the sequel, although the story is even more unbelievable than the first, Finish director Renny Harlin, who took over from John McTiernan from the first, did a great job. It misses the claustrophobia of the first one, taking place at an airport rather than a high-rise office building. However, this creates new tense situations as the terrorists can take down airplanes and do so. The horror of a plane crash is captured perfectly in the second one as the terrorists purposefully let a passenger airplane crash. Thereby, they make the main baddie – William Sadler – even worse than Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman) in the first one. Still, Die Hard 2 loses momentum a little bit during the second half (especially after the clever plot twist) and therefore I still think the first movie is superior. The endings of both movies give you this very warm Christmas feeling indeed. In part 1, John meets his pal Al for the first time, and then Al kills Karl and proves he is ready again for joining the force (he got a desk job after accidentally shooting a thirteen-year old kid with a fake gun). In the second movie, John blows up the plane with terrorists and thereby creates landing lights for all the other planes that were close to crashing, including the one that carries his wife. Then he tells her he loves her so much and they carry off in a modern sledge accompanied by Frank Sinatra’s ‘Let It Snow’. It makes me all warm inside and the same goes for the fantastic first part ending.Therefore, Die Hard is just the greatest Christmas movie ever. Die Hard 2 adds to the fun.

Double Bill #07: Seven Samurai & The Magnificent Seven

Posted on 25 oktober 2023 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

The Japanese classic and its American Western remake. Akira Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) – about a farming village in 16th century Japan which is about to be robbed by bandits and the honorable men who choose to protect it – can be considered as the birth of action cinema. It is very nearly a perfect film: a fantastic cast, brilliantly executed shots, kinetic editing, and a real sense of adventure. These samurai, farmers and even bandits are living on the edge. Every day could very well be their last. This tense clash of opposing forces is never done better and inspired countless other movies. Seven Samurai established many action cinema traditions, such as the assembly of a team of heroes, including a character for comic relief (Toshiro Mifune). And although Mifune steals many scenes, he doesn’t outshine the other characters who equally come to their right. The Magnificent Seven (1960) is not as great a Western remake as A Fistful of Dollars (1964) is of Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), but it is still a pretty solid Western by director John Sturges (The Great Escape). The plot is exactly the same. Seven gunslingers vow to protect a farming village against a pack of thirty or so bandits, led by Eli Wallach (‘Ugly’ from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly). Yul Brunner and Steve McQueen, two major movie stars at the time, lead the posse, which also includes a young Charles Bronson and James Coburn. The script has less dramatic beats than its Japanse predecessor, but the moments are still there: that feeling that everything is at stake for these characters. An unexpected plot twist that is not in the original, raises the odds even higher. A great move surely. The finale, though, cannot hold a candle to the virtuoso finale of Seven Samurai. Much of the action looks extremely unconvincing with one death scene in particular being an embarrassment. Of course, you might ask yourself: why a remake at all? But that is just Hollywood. And seeing these great American actors doing their hero thing is not so bad at all.

Double Bill #06: Angel Heart & The Devil’s Advocate

Posted on 6 juni 2023 by Jeppe Kleijngeld

What these two movies have in common is quite a lot actually. Most importantly, they have the world’s heavyweight champions in acting – Robert De Niro and Al Pacino – playing Satan, The Dark Prince, Beelzebub, or in the case of Angel Heart Louis Cyphre (as in ‘Lucifer’). Both movies are based on novels (by William Hjortsberg and Andrew Neiderman respectively) and both involve a handsome lead (Mickey Rourke and Keanu Reeves) and equally handsome female co-star (Lisa Bonet and Charlize Theron). And in both cases, the couple falls prey to the evil machinations of the Dark One, because the man sold his soul to the devil. Both movies also involve seductive, violent and frightening sex scenes. So far what they have in common, because the movies are very different beasts. Angel Heart is a slow, dark and moody film, a psychological horror that takes place in the voodoo and jazz scene of New Orleans, and has a few shocking moments of bloody death in store. The Devil’s Advocate, which was made ten years later in 1997, is big time Hollywood entertainment with terrific production design and the corporate world of New York as its main setting. The way Satan is portrayed is quite different as well. De Niro plays him small; he’s only in a few scenes, working on collecting a debt (singer Johnny Favorite sold his soul to him to become famous and then he disappeared). Pacino, as always, is the definite lead of the film, and goes all the way in his fierce and memorable performance. Final coincidental connection; the movie’s directors – Alan Parker and Taylor Hackford – made a few iconic hits in the eighties and nineties, but both disappeared from mainstream Hollywood cinema in the zeroes. Both Angel Heart and The Devil’s Advocate are definitely amongst the finest films they made.