Prison stuff. In prison movies.
Why is it that I have less difficulty with an absurd action flick out of Hong Kong – replete with series of extraordinary coincidences, implausible plot twists, and heroes and villains alike being shot, stabbed and pounded to little or no effect – than a similarly ludicrous movie out of Hollywood? I have no idea. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on March 5th, 2016 at 7:36 pm. Updated on April 27th, 2016 at 8:31 pm.
It’s the underpinning socio-ethical positions here that I find even harder to fathom than the whole action-movie-implausibility thing. Which is saying something. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 22nd, 2016 at 2:02 pm. Updated on February 22nd, 2016 at 2:02 pm.
Seen Stoic (2009)? Don’t bother seeing this one. Seen neither? Good for you. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 18th, 2016 at 10:14 am. Updated on March 3rd, 2016 at 6:26 pm.
A warden with a past he’d rather forget. An idealistic psychiatrist running a new psycho-support program for prisoners. A prison not fit to house prisoners. A wrathful ghost of a former warden. And a film that mixes comedy and horror, but misses the mark on both counts… while remaining sort of amiable. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 15th, 2016 at 1:12 pm. Updated on February 15th, 2016 at 1:25 pm.
“Comic icons Pat Morita (The Karate Kid) and Demond Wilson (Sanford and Son) star in this hilarious tale of bumbling prison guards, who on their first day let two dim-witted bank robbers escape during a jail transfer.” So says the blurb on the back of my DVD – so staggeringly wrong that you have to marvel at its audacity. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 9th, 2016 at 8:35 pm. Updated on April 18th, 2017 at 8:57 pm.
I remember reading Soledad Brother in the 1970s. Or bits of it. Black August paints a different sort of picture of its author, imprisoned African-American activist George Jackson, to the one I vaguely remember from all those years ago. He’s more poet, less revolutionary; more the artist, less the polemicist… even as he is advocating violence as the only means by which his goals might be achieved. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on February 2nd, 2016 at 8:04 pm. Updated on February 2nd, 2016 at 8:08 pm.
There were several disappointments in this for me. The first (bearing no reflection on the film), was that the disc I watched skipped and stumbled and distorted and froze for much of the second half, so I think I may have missed a few key moments. Thankfully, there were too few prison scenes to make that a major disaster. That there were too few prison scenes to make that a major disaster was a disappointment. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 25th, 2016 at 8:54 pm. Updated on July 9th, 2020 at 4:14 pm.
It’s been said before that the idea of being thrown into a Turkish prison is so much more evocative than being banged up any other country’s prisons. But just as a foreigner, perhaps, and maybe ignoring a lot of other serious and exotic contenders. Pardon, a farce said to be based on a true story, shows a different sort of terrible experience in a Turkish prison for three locals. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 18th, 2016 at 8:42 pm. Updated on January 18th, 2016 at 8:48 pm.
This is a tricky movie. You might be forgiven for thinking it’s a solid prison movie by its title, but more than three-quarters of it comprises flashbacks about the path to prison of one man. It is marketed as a triad movie. Now, I’m not an authority on triads, but the bad guys seem more garden-variety street hoodlum than triad. And to make things really tricky, scenes run non-sequentially, so when the man whom we understand to be a novice prisoner observes that he’ll be OK because he’s been in prison before, it doesn’t make much sense. These are not good trickinesses.
Posted on January 9th, 2016 at 9:30 pm. Updated on January 9th, 2016 at 9:39 pm.
Bruno Vinclert (Richard Berry) is not so much an innocent man in prison; he is more of an accidental prisoner. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 2nd, 2016 at 8:49 pm. Updated on January 25th, 2016 at 9:47 pm.