Sam Peckinpah, as immortalised on IMDb

IMDb biographies can be expected to be formally worded and loaded (or overloaded) with praise.  Consider, then, the bio of Sam Peckinpah, which starts with this unconventional introduction:

“If they move”, commands stern-eyed William Holden, “kill ’em”. So begins The Wild Bunch (1969), Sam Peckinpah’s bloody, high-body-count eulogy to the mythologized Old West. “Pouring new wine into the bottle of the Western, Peckinpah explodes the bottle”, observed critic Pauline Kael. That exploding bottle also christened the director with the nickname that would forever define his films and reputation: “Bloody Sam”.

And this is how it concludes:

Peckinpah lived life to its fullest. He drank hard and abused drugs, producers and collaborators. At the end of his life he was considering a number of projects including the Stephen King-scripted “The Shotgunners”. He was returning from Mexico in December 1984 when he died from heart failure in a hospital in Inglewood, California, at age 59. At a standing-room-only gathering that held at the Directors Guild the following month, [James] Coburn remembered the director as a man “who pushed me over the abyss and then jumped in after me. He took me on some great adventures”. To which Robert Culp added that what is surprising is not that Sam only made fourteen pictures, but that given the way he went about it, he managed to make any at all.

If Jurassic Park had reliable wi-fi…

That’s the setup for a new spot for Xfinity that brings back some of the key cast of the 1993 movie along with a more pleasant outcome and some cleverly reimagined dialogue.

Link to video

The Guardian corrects its ‘Melania’ rating… to zero stars

It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality.

By any standard,The Guardian’s review of the documentary was scathing.  That fact has now been overshadowed by this clarification, three days later:

The star rating for this film was corrected on 2 February 2026. A formatting issue led an earlier version to be awarded one star, when the reviewer’s intention was zero.

RIP Brigitte Bardot

From Bosley Crowther’s 1957 review of …And God Created Woman in The New York Times:

This round and voluptuous little French miss is put on spectacular display and is rather brazenly ogled from every allowable point of view. She is looked at in slacks and sweaters, in shorts and Bikini bathing suits. She wears a bedsheet on two or three occasions, and, once, she shows behind a thin screen in the nude. What's more, she moves herself in a fashion that fully accentuates her charms. She is undeniably a creation of superlative craftsmanship.

The location is the quaint town of St. Tropez, with its mellow, pastel-colored houses against the blue of the Mediterranean Sea. And the outstanding feature of the scenery is invariably Mlle. Bardot. She is a thing of mobile contours—a phenomenon you have to see to believe.

From Peter Bradshaw’s tribute, published yesterday, in The Guardian:

In the 1950s, before the sexual revolution, before the New Wave, before feminism, there was Bardot: she was sex, she was youth, and, more to the point, Bardot was modernity. She was the unacknowledged zeitgeist force that stirred cinema’s young lions such as François Truffaut against the old order. Bardot was the country’s most sensational cultural export; she was in effect the French Beatles, a liberated, deliciously shameless screen siren who made male American moviegoers gulp and goggle with desire in that puritan land where sex on screen was still not commonplace, and in which sexiness had to be presented in a demure solvent of comedy. Bardot may not have had the comedy skills of a Marilyn Monroe, but she had ingenuous charm and real charisma, a gentleness and sweetness, largely overlooked in the avalanche of prurience and sexist condescension.

RIP Claudia Cardinale

From The Guardian: A Life in Pictures

RIP Roger Corman

An incredible list of accomplishments — producing and/or directing an estimated 400+ movies, shaping the marketing and distribution of foreign-language arthouse films in the seventies, giving early career breaks to A-listers including Robert De Niro, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, and Peter Bogdanovich, and much more.

My favourite bit of Corman trivia (per The New York Times):

Among the others Mr. Corman nurtured was Jack Nicholson, who was 21 when Mr. Corman gave him his first movie role, the lead in “The Cry Baby Killer” (1958), and 23 when he had a small part as a masochistic dental patient in “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Before he went on to stardom, Mr. Nicholson acted in eight Corman movies and wrote three of them, including “The Trip,” an uncautionary tale about LSD.

Jesper Christensen, in his own words

IMDb biographies are generally formal, bland and, all too often, loaded with unnecessary praise, as well as an emphasis on the person’s ancestry.  The IMDb bio of Jesper Christensen is a refreshing exception to all of that.  Maybe that’s because it was written by the actor himself (or so it appears).  Notably, it is infused with a touch of humour, and steers clear of mentioning his role in the Bond franchise.

Note: IMDb guidelines stipulate that bios be written in the third person. 

Born 1948 in central Copenhagen. Lived there ever since. Did 25 years of theatre, - like Alceste in the Misanthropist, Richard in Richard lll (solo), Faust in Faust, Astrov in Vanja, a lot of worried men,- stopped doing it in 1998. Since then only worried men on film. Worked on more than 100 films by Per Fly, Marc Forster, John Madden, Lone Scherfig, Sydney Pollack, Jan Troell, Martin Campbell, Anette K Olesen, Pernille Fischer Christensen, and others. Since 2000 lives with Tove Bornhoeft, wonderful Danish theatre manager/director/actress. Two grown up daughters. No animals. Dogs, pigs, chickens, cats, birds, horses, fish, rabbits - all gone now.

RIP Louise Fletcher

From her standout Oscars acceptance speech:

I’d like to thank… …Jack Nicholson and a cast of actors whose professionalism, humour, and capacity for getting into their roles, made being in a mental institution, like being in a mental institution.

Link to video

Gucci reimagines Kubrick

I think it’s safe to say that at the very least, you have to be a cinephile to relate to this new spot from Gucci in which it has painstakingly recreated scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s movies, while fitting in its latest collection.

Link to video

Shrek at 20

An extract from an opinion piece in The Guardian by someone who thinks it was “a terrible movie”.

Shrek has an outhouse with a working toilet.

It is not part of the film’s cynical brand of “irreverence” that an ogre’s latrine is supported by modern plumbing. And it’s certainly not consistent with the hygiene of a swamp-dwelling beast who bathes in mud, brushes his teeth in slime and boasts of a killer weed rat stew. But after our lime-green hero literally wipes his ass with a fairytale ending, it was apparently decided that the film needed that emphatic flushing sound before the Smash Mouth single All Star kicked in and the introductory montage could commence.

Wild Mountain Thyme- Trailer

It isn’t often that a movie trailer gets this sort of attention.  As one reviewer put it:

Despite the PG-13 rating, the trailer also features the bloody, grisly and gratuitous murder of the Irish accent.

Here’s a link to the trailer.

Lessons from Contagion (2011)

Thanks to the coronavirus outbreak, Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 film is receiving a lot of attention and, by some accounts, has become one of the most watched movies of 2020.  As I was trying to make more sense of its popularity, I came across this one line review from a user on IMDb:

Forever changed the way I view hand washing and touching my face.

Live and Let Die- Crocodile Jump

Here’s the scene from the movie.

Here’s the footage of the outtakes.  Notice how, after the second jump, the crocodiles were more prepared, so to speak, for the subsequent jumps.

Fun facts:

• The ‘stuntman’, Ross Kananga, was the owner of the crocodile farm where the scene was shot.
• During location scouting, the film crew chanced upon the farm after noticing a sign that said ‘TRESPASSERS WILL BE EATEN’. 
• Kananga inspired the screenwriter, Tom Mankiewicz, to name the villain of the movie after him. 
• Kananga suggested the stunt of jumping on the crocodiles.
• The crocodile jump took weeks of preparation and involved tying down the legs of the crocodiles. 
• In the words of the director, Guy Hamilton, Kananga was “an absolutely marvellous man, a complete lunatic”.