I think I breathed a sigh of relief on coming to the end of H3: “Thankfully, that might be the last of these that I have to watch.” Which is a bit bewildering, because I’ve found other films dealing with the dirty protests and hunger strikes by republican prisoners in Northern Ireland in the early 80s [such as Silent Grace (2001) and Hunger (2008)] very watchable. It wasn’t any aspect of the conflict that troubled me, and it certainly wasn’t the repetition in the storyline; I can’t recall having a similar reaction after seeing my 67th escape movie or innocent-man-in-prison movie. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 11th, 2013 at 9:37 pm. Updated on January 11th, 2013 at 9:37 pm.
My problem with this movie is this: When you show a succession of unexceptional hoods scheming, thugging, racketeering and mowing down rivals in cold blood, why would you expect anyone to care what happens to them? Even when they turn on their former colleagues, as is the case in this long and rather tedious film. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on January 6th, 2013 at 7:22 pm. Updated on January 6th, 2013 at 7:22 pm.
Internet synopses aren’t exactly at their most reliable on this one. “A tough street kid takes the rap for a burglary committed by the son of his foster family and is sent to a boys’ reformatory, where the inmates are under the thumb of corrupt guards and a brutal prison doctor,” they say. Well, firstly, the kid talks tough but he’s not a street kid. And the guards aren’t corrupt, the inmates aren’t under the thumb and the doctor is far, far from brutal. Otherwise, it’s spot on. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on December 30th, 2012 at 8:55 pm. Updated on December 30th, 2012 at 8:58 pm.
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.