I don’t know what possessed me to watch this movie. Made in 2008, it is set years into the future (2012), at a time when the US economy has collapsed, all prisons are run for profit and cage fights in prison have become so passé that they are no longer guaranteed to make money. With just a handful of days to go in 2012, I may well have been curious to see just what advances in correctional management I had missed. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 24th, 2012 at 4:17 pm. Updated on December 24th, 2012 at 4:18 pm.
The Executioner is one of those rare prison officer-centred films, as opposed to prisoner-centred. It traces the fledgling career of Oh Jae Gyeong (Yun Gye Sang), a raw, immature young officer whom we follow through trials both at his work and in his personal life. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 22nd, 2012 at 7:29 pm. Updated on February 16th, 2013 at 7:56 pm.
This is one of several films loosely based on the Judith Miller case from 2005 – in which Miller, a journalist, was jailed for 85 days for not revealing sources of information regarding the outing of CIA-operative Valerie Plame (even though she didn’t disclose the information herself). This parallel story (‘inspired by actual events’) takes a simpler, less murky path: all the better to polemicise, it seems.
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Posted on December 17th, 2012 at 9:27 pm. Updated on December 17th, 2012 at 9:30 pm.
Who would have thought? You go into this movie expecting a good old-fashioned piece of racial hurly burly, with the bigot realising the error of his ways in the end – a sort of Unshackled (2000), played for laughs. That’s how it’s promoted. Instead, it turns out to be a romantic comedy, of all things. Mind you, it’s not so radical that the romance is between the two cellmates. And of course it still ends with the bigot realising the error of his ways.
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Posted on December 10th, 2012 at 8:59 pm. Updated on December 10th, 2012 at 8:59 pm.
This is one of those stories that would quickly be dismissed as ridiculous… were it not based on a true story. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 9th, 2012 at 5:51 pm. Updated on December 9th, 2012 at 5:51 pm.
Made by some of the same people who brought you Police Academy I and II. That’s as much as you need to know, really. Or if it’s not, the fact that it has yet to make its way to a DVD release probably tells you much the same thing. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 2nd, 2012 at 7:08 pm. Updated on December 19th, 2013 at 7:57 pm.
One can imagine Ronnie Barker, not much more than an extra in this movie, sitting back and watching Charlie Drake play a too-eager-to-please prisoner in a delightful old British nick and thinking, “If I just made him gruffer, more of a rogue, less honest… it’d be funnier.” And then going away and making Porridge 10 or so years later, to so much more acclaim than this ever achieved. Which isn’t to say that The Cracksman has no merit. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 27th, 2012 at 8:38 pm. Updated on November 27th, 2012 at 8:38 pm.
You know what you’re getting with the Naked Gun series, and questions like, “Is it sensible to select a high-profile cop to go undercover in a large maximum-security prison?” are happily irrelevant. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 20th, 2012 at 8:15 pm. Updated on November 20th, 2012 at 8:15 pm.
In some ways this is the antithesis of an action movie; an accidental political prisoner becomes a celebrated revolutionary leader, also by accident, after he invents a board game in prison. If there is such a thing, it is quite possibly an inaction movie, and all the better for it. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 2nd, 2012 at 9:20 pm. Updated on January 1st, 2017 at 9:04 am.
Late in 1927 The Jazz Singer was released, becoming the first ‘talkie’ blockbuster – and condemning this silent epic to a much smaller audience than it perhaps deserved. It was a decidedly international co-production, with the director (Norman Dawn) and the principal actors all American, but the story a quintessentially Australian one. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 1st, 2012 at 7:42 pm. Updated on November 1st, 2012 at 7:52 pm.