The fog - 1979

It was still good. The credits say 1979 but the story is supposed to take place in 1980, 100 years after 1880.  It sure shows its age, but it’s in no way boring, it builts up to the end. I liked it. Not something I’d watch again and again, but I enjoyed it this one time.
It starts with a ghost-story around the fire, for a group of children camping. Mr Machen (John Houseman) tells them of a ship that sank right there 100 years before. A strange fog appeared and they couldn’t see a thing so they followed the only light they saw but it turned out to be the light of a campfire, and they hit the rocks and they all died. The old man tells the children that now, at midnight, the ghosts of that crew, of the “Elizabeth Dane”, search everywhere to find the campers that lead them to their death.
It was rather atmospheric but I thought, that’s not fair, maybe those campers had no idea they would cause such damage, it may not be their fault at all. Later my objection finds its answer.
Immediately after the story we meet, and hear, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) with her smooth sexy voice. She owns a radio station inside the lighthouse, and every night she’s on, at least from midnight to 1am, it’s not clear to me if anything goes on when she’s not there... 
We meet the other characters: Nick (Tom Atkins) who picks up a hitchhiker, Elizabeth (Jamie Lee Curtis). Mrs Williams (Janet Leigh) who is organizing the town celebration, 100 years of Antonio Bay, and her assistant Sandy (Nancy Loomis), and Father Malone (Hal Holbrook).
The first night at the beginning of the movie the fog comes and out of it come some ghost-zombies that kill three men on a boat. During that same hour strange things happen in town, things moving by themselves, car alarms going off, dogs barking at the sea, car windows smashing... the zombies arrive at Nick’s house and one of them knocks, but luckily for Nick 1am strikes before he opens the door so he’s safe. 
During the day they search for the boat and its crew, and only find one corpse. At the morgue, it rises the time necessary to scratch the number three on the floor. We easily assume it’s the number of dead people so far. 
Father Malone finds a journal hidden in the wall in the church: it was written by his great-grandfather, another father Malone, and it tells the true story of the Elizabeth Dane. A wealthy man, Blake, a leper, wanted to use his money to build a colony nearby, and Malone felt pity for him but also horror at the idea that they’d have a leper colony so close. With other five people they planned to stop him, to lure Blake and his crew to their deaths, by lighting a fire that would lead them the wrong way. It worked, helped by some kind of strange fog, and the ship sank and they all died and the colony was never built. The town people took hold of Blake’s gold and used it to build Antonio Bay apparently.
When night comes and the fog rises again, Stevie monitors the situation from the lighthouse; she can hear on the phone her weather-man-friend getting killed by ‘something in the fog’ - yes, never listen to the woman, don’t mind the fog, go answer the door, why not...
She can see the fog moving towards her house and warns her son and the babysitter to run away but they don’t have the radio on, lights are out, so they don’t hear her, and the old woman opens the door because she heard a knock and is killed too - yes, don’t bother asking who it is, alone at home with a child at night with a strange deep fog all around you, you hear a sinister knock at the door you go and open it of course...
Nick and Elizabeth are in the car and listen to Stevie and hurry to her house to save her little son. The fog moves further into the town, and she warns everyone who listens to stay inside or run to the old church. Nick drives there, and also Mrs Williams and Sandy, after leaving the celebration because of the dark. Father Malone tells them all about his ancestor and the story of the six conspirators, and reading on they learn that the priest-conspirator stole the money found in the ship and hid it from the others, thinking that he’d give it back to Blake if he came for vengeance. Also, it appears that ‘only six will die’, because six were the conspirators. The gold was used to make a big gold cross then hidden in the wall, and now Father Malone wants to give it to Blake, offering himself as the sixth. Blake takes the gold, and it shines, but Nick pulls Malone away at the last moment so Blake vanishes with the gold but without him. All of the sudden the fog goes away along with the zombie that were trying to kill Stevie at the lighthouse. 
Everything’s over, it seems, but Malone wonders why Blake didn’t take the sixth, when the fog comes again in the church and Blake kills him. The end.
While watching it it was interesting and thrilling enough, but after it’s over I can’t help wondering: five had died already (three on the boat, the weather-man and the old babysitter) so if the zombies had killed the child or Stevie, everything would be over anyway, or would they still be looking for the gold? If only six must die, why attack everyone at the same time? Let’s not even start on the fact that all the townspeople reunited in the open for the celebration were never concerned by it. 
Thinking about it afterwards it doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it was still a nice watch.
ITA fog-nebbia assassina

Maigret: night at the crossroads - 2017

I liked it. Another good one, I hope there will be many more. I like the whole thing, the actors, the setting, how it’s made. I really enjoy these Maigret movies, and the fact that ALL the actors are well chosen and good.
Maigret is called by an old colleague, Grandjean, because a murder suspect has fled to Paris. Maigret’s men get him, but Maigret is intrigued by the character and rather believes him when he says that he knows nothing about the murder, that he didn’t kill anyone and that he doesn’t know how the body ended up in his garage.The suspect is a strange man, a Danish man called Carl Andersen, who keeps by himself and leaves alone with his sister, and he keeps her locked in her room at night.
Maigret takes the lead of the investigation. Mrs Grandjean confides in Mrs Maigret that she’s worried he may want to leave her, she’s sure he has another woman, he’s had other women in the past but this time she thinks it’s different and he may leave her. 
Mrs Maigret tells everything to her husband. She also says that she knows he’s different but she understands the difficulty of being married to a policeman and never knowing if he’ll get home safe.
Carl’s sister Elsa is rather provoking, I think as a sort of test for the kind of man Maigret is, but he keeps it professional. Towards the end, he calls his two men to his house to discuss in private the case. His wife had fallen asleep on the chair while waiting for him, and he says “I didn’t want to wake you” which is the only nonsense he’s ever told. Of course he intended to wake her up, he certainly couldn’t talk to his men with her asleep in the next chair. Maybe it was intended to mean that he rather hoped she might be asleep in the bedroom, in which case he wouldn’t have had to wake her... yeah maybe that’s it. Anyway, he takes out four bottles of beer. When Janvier and Lapointe arrive, she says that she’ll go and leave them alone to discuss their business but Maigret says “no please stay” and hands her a beer. That’s why he took four bottles. One was always for her.
Maigret need privacy because he suspects Grandjean to be involved in the case, maybe to be himself the murderer, so they must talk over a way to get him and his accomplices. 
I so loved this scene, which more than any other scene explains the relationship between the Maigrets. He’s not an expansive man, but he values her and appreciates her, he includes her in his life and he listens to her opinions and what she has to say. I loved it, and wish there could be more space for Mrs Maigret in these films.
Back to the plot: Andersen wasn’t his real name, and he was reluctant to give his real one because he was the son of the Danish ambassador who had promised to never reveal his real identity. His sister had died and he was now living with a prostitute that he loves and wants to save. She was rather tired of being kept captive and had an affair with Grandjean. It’s not really that any of them loved the other, but Grandjean stole the jewels that the dead man tried to sell to him to afford a ticket to America for him and his wife, plus he had come to hate his wife Claire.
He had killed the jeweller, his constable had killed his wife who could have revealed his name, and two other men helped him in covering it all. One was arrested and the other got killed by a truck, I think.

Maigret-Rowan Atkinson
Janvier-Shaun Dingwall
Lapointe-Leo Staar
Carl Andersen-Tom Wlaschiha
Elsa-Mia Jexen
Grandjean-Kevin McNally
Mrs Maigret-Lucy Cohu
Ambassador-Jonathan Newth
ITA Maigret: il crocevia delle tre vedove

America's sweethearts - 2001

It wasn’t bad and the first time I saw it years ago I rather enjoyed it, but now it mostly annoyed me. The best part was Christopher Walken’s scene towards the end :-) He played Al, the eccentric director with the crazy hair :-p  Billy Crystal was also funny, although I didn’t like the silly scenes with the dog, so cheap. He was Lee the press agent, the one who tried to convince the actors to do what basically was their job, to promote the movie, while secretly setting them up for pictures that he wanted to appear in the papers, again a publicity stunt. I liked him and his role.
Catherine Zeta-Jones played the actress Gwen, a beautiful spoiled arrogant self-centered woman, indeed an actor, what do you know. She played it well, I liked her.
Now, for the “romantic” part of the movie, the ‘good couple’, aka the annoying part. 
Julia Roberts played Kiki, Gwen’s sister/slave, the ‘normal girl’, the ‘good girl’ who does whatever her sisters asks her to do and who is secretly in love with Gwen’s husband, actor Eddie. John Cusack played Eddie, a character so over-the-line it was absurd and unbelievable; a famous actor who fell in love with his co-star Gwen and who had a nervous breakdown when he saw her with another actor and who rode his motorbike into the restaurant and onto their table: I don’t really know if he really wanted to kill her or what he wanted to do, but that wasn’t a normal thing to do :-/ Despite that, since Gwen is the one who left the other, he moves through the film like a victim, obsessively thinking of her and unsure in his fantasies if he wants her back or if he wants her dead...
Kiki also has ‘victim’ written all over her face every time she has to prepare Gwen’s food, Gwen’s clothes, every time she has to convince her sister to do what she has to do, everytime she agrees to do whatever Gwen asks her to do... but we learn from one scene that their relationship has always been the same since they were girls, Kiki says that she was despised at school because Gwen always sent her to break up with her boyfriends, and Kiki blames her sister for the fact that everybody hated her back then. Why did she do it then? Because she loved her sister is not an acceptable answer, because loving somebody and blindly doing whatever they ask are not inevitable cause and effect. If you love your children you must not say yes to whatever they ask for, that’s not the way to go. She chose the easier path, to blindly obey her sister and live in her shadow.
Her love for Eddie is also annoying, the way she adores him is humiliating. 
Eddie is such a wreck that he inspires exasperation more than sympathy, still playing victim after one and a half year simply because his wife left him; he says himself that he fell in love with her image on the screen but doesn’t like the real Gwen, so basically he was nothing more than a teenage fan who can’t separate the actor from the character, and believes the actors to be the perfect image they want to give of themselves. At the end he was all ‘on the screen you are sexy and sweet and that’s the woman I fell for’ ... :-/ meanwhile he never noticed her overweight sister. Or rather, like Gwen he noticed her when it was convenient for him, oh what a good person she was and what a good friend she was, but now that she’s lost 30 pounds he suddenly falls for her... :-/ he replaced the sister who only thought about herself with the sister who only thought about him :-/  Kiki went from following Gwen around to following Eddie around :-/
At the end they spend a night together and she thinks she got him but then he goes to talk to Gwen and Kiki very wisely tells him that it can’t work because he’ll always think about Gwen and she’ll always wonder if he’s thinking about Gwen, but then as soon as she leaves he’s all ‘I love her I can’t lose her’, just like that, and when he tells her she forgets all her reservations and goes with him.
I didn’t like these two characters at all.
The whole movie was like a mockery of fans' obsessions and credulity: the belief that an actor is the image given to the public, the belief that two actors playing two characters in love must certainly be in love for real (guess what, people, acting is pretending!), the belief in everything one reads about celebrities on the papers... in this movie we see Lee carefully planning for a photographer to be present whenever he wants him, and Gwen makes a mother-scene in which declares that the only important thing for her is the happiness of her sister only because she was in a room full of people and journalists...
Other actors in this movie: Seth Green played Danny who works with Lee or for Lee, but the character is quite plain. Eric Balfour played one of the two security guards who wanted to arrest Eddie thinking that he was masturbating outside Gwen’s cottage when actually he was taking away cactus spines after he had fallen on one. 
Stanley Tucci played the producer who only thought about scheming and money. I liked him, he was funny, he’s always good :-) 
I liked the bit when he talked about Senor Wences, although I didn’t understand the line and had to look it up on the internet. I didn’t understand it probably because I had never heard of the guy, so it was interesting to learn about him. He’s described in the movie as the only real genius in the entertainment industry because he only used lipstick and his hand and had a long career, and after reading about him I now understand what it means: he was a ventriloquist and one of his act consisted in using his hand with lipstick on as a puppet. Wow. 
Hank Azaria played Hector, Gwen’s new boyfriend, and he was funny.
Rainn Wilson played Dave, a journalist I think. This actor is the one that I always recognize but can never remember his name, I usually think of him as the one who reminds me of Alan Carr..

ITA I perfetti innamorati

Once upon a time in Mexico - 2003

Not too bad, but Desperado was something else, much better. Desperado was cool, while this movie desperately tries to be cool. This movie can be fun, a lot of shooting and explosions and bizarre characters, but it also tries a complicated plot that doesn’t really work.
Its good points are: Antonio Banderas, again playing the same character from Desperado, and Johnny Depp, playing a crazy CIA agent.  
Let’s try the plot:
The president is a good man who wants to fight the criminals. Barrillo is a dangerous drug lord, very powerful. Barrillo wants to assassinate the president using corrupt general Marquez as the hitman. Marquez is the one who killed El’s wife and daughter. 
Sands puts a retired FBI agent on Barrillo’s track, to try find evidence against him. Sands also gives El Mariachi a task, to kill Marquez after he’s killed the president. He walks around plotting and planning, and not everything makes real sense if you ask me; he sometimes kills regular people for no apparent reason. One thing that does make sense is that his secret plan is to take all the money promised to Marquez for the assassination and run away with FBI girl Eva Mendez (AFN is written on the jacket, what is AFN??). Sands may be a US agent but is not a good guy: he sent Trejo to find El Mariachi, and in order to lure him out Trejo killed an innocent man. Not only that, but he killed a cook and a waitress for no reason. 
El calls his band, his two friends, to help him in this mission. Ramirez talks to Billy, a thug working for Barrillo, and Billy tells him right away that he’s willing to be on his side, that he’s sick of that life and is prepared to face the charges against him if the FBI takes him out of there and back to the United States. 
Sands is betrayed by his girl who reveals to be Barrillo’s daughter, and they cut off his eyes saying he saw too much, and after that they let him go.. 
There’s a revolution on the streets and El comes in time to save the president’s life. Ramirez is taken prisoner but Billy frees him. When they both confront Barrillo, Billy is shot but Ramirez is saved by El.
El also kills Marquez, avenging his wife’s death. Marquez was late because he didn’t expect the revolution, the people turning against his soldiers.
Sands needs the help of a child in a yellow shirt because now he can’t see; he manages to kill quite a few before being shot in the knees. When the girl Mendes sees him face down in the street she goes to him for no clear reason, other than to play with him, and he kills her. 
The president is saved, El’s friends go away with lots of money, all the bad guys are dead. Trejo is also dead, killed by Barrillo after he revealed to him Sands plan and gave him El. 
At the end we see the boy with the yellow shirt approaching the bodies and seeing Sands’ hand raising from there. The boy smiles, probably because the man is still alive, although is not clear what will be of him, I mean shot in both legs and with no eyes.. and he should have died too anyway, he wasn’t a good man at all. Badge or no badge.
El Mariachi gives his share of the money to the people of his village before going away.

The plot was too intricate for this kind of movie, it was really unnecessary and proved to be a point against it. Mendes is her usual self, very beautiful but a terrible actress. Depp was good, the best part of the movie. Hayek has a very very little part, only shown in flashback bits to show us how Marquez killed her. That was a shame, I like her a lot.
Enrique is definitely a better singer than he is an actor. Mickey Rourke was in an in-between phase, half-way through between what he looked like once and what he will look like after his face exploded.
El Mariachi, also called simply El - Antonio Banderas
Carolina - Salma Hayek
Sands - Johnny Depp
Barillo - Willem Defoe
Billy - Mickey Rourke
Ajedrez, the FBI agent who’s actually Barillo’s daughter - Eva Mendes
Cucuy - Danny Trejo
Lorenzp - Enrique Iglesias
Fideo - Marco Leonardi
Belini - Cheech Marin
Retired FBI agent Ramirez - Rubén Blades
ITA c’era una volta in Messico

Maigret's dead man - 2016

I enjoyed this one even more than the first; I was more comfortable seeing Atkinson as Maigret, and his detectives were now familiar faces, and I quite enjoyed this one. Again, I read the Maigret’s stories so long ago I remember nothing at all, I’ll read them again one day. For now, I can only judge the film, and the film was good, well made and well acted, I liked them all.
The story was interesting although very evil. It starts with the case of entire families killed in their farms: that case is not Maigret’s. We also see a man trying to outrun someone dangerous: he tries calling Maigret telling him that he knows his wife Nina, and that night a disfigured body is dumped in the streets. The chief of police wants Maigret to close the case considering it unworthy of their time because he thinks the dead man was “underground” but Maigret doesn’t think so and he also feels personally involved since the man called him personally. 
When all his men are assigned to work on the murdered families case, he keeps investigating this one with his loyal inspectors Janvier and Lapointe. 
Not surprisingly the two cases end up being related. They discover some Slovaks, drug-addict thugs who followed the orders of Jean (I think) a “gent”, meaning someone with money and good clothes and nothing more, he was definitely not a gentle man. 
The guy would tell the gang which family had money and jewels and they would go and kill everyone and steal everything and give it all to him. He made a lot of money and they got their drugs. 
The last family left a survivor though, so Maigret has a witness, a young girl who can identify a woman as the one who killed her mother. She’s arrested and taken to a hospital to give birth; the other two man die, one killed by the ‘gent’ and the other killed by Javier when he tried to kill the woman in custody. 
They also killed Albert, Maigret’s dead man, because he had somehow understood what they were and what they had done and could set the police on them. He was a good man, trying to start a family with his wife. At the end, Maigret promises Nina that he’ll try his best to have her allowed to adopt the murderess’ baby. 

 I really liked the last we saw of Jean, when Maigret went to talk to him, to tell him Albert’s name and life. Jean’s words were full of contempt and disgust for such a little man, and Maigret tells him that “for all his little bets and his little winnings, his life was more successful than yours, because he didn’t end up in a cage like an animal, despised by everyone, with nothing to look forward except his execution” and since this is a film and not real life and therefore we are absolutely sure that the guy and that woman are guilty of something horrible and of irredeemable cruelty, I’d say the guillotine sounds good for them. 

ITA l'uomo morto di Maigret

Maigret sets a trap - 2016

I really liked it but I admit it was really hard to see Atkinson is such a dramatic role, 100% serious without even the hint of a joke. It’s not just that I’m not used to it, it’s the fact that the man has been so much identified with his character Mr Bean that he basically ‘is’ Mr Bean.. I know he’s not, mind you, but I’m saying that he’s very much identified with it. I have seen him doing other things other than Mr Bean of course, and he was always a good actor, but in each role there was from time to time at least a little bit of comedy, of irony... and so against my will I kept expecting him to make a face or something, knowing very well that it wouldn’t happen of course.  It was rather hard to concentrate on him being Maigret.. and this is unfair because he did a very good job. I’m sure it’ll become easier with more Maigret films, because I liked it and want to see more.
This story sees a serial killer in Paris, women walking alone in Montmartre are in danger; five have been killed already and the police have no clue whatsoever. The media and the people blame Maigret for not having solved the case yet. They keep saying, even to his face, that the police don’t do their job, and when he tries to explain that they are working on it, they add “then why haven’t you caught him?” ...
Desperate to find some clue Maigret sets a trap: he calls for volunteer female officers to work as baits, basically trying to act normal while also trying to put themselves in a position to be targeted. He asks for female officers trained in self-defence, and promises them that they won’t let anything happen to them. They walk the streets of Montmartre until one girl is actually attacked. Unlike those poor women she was kind of expecting it and although she was surprised from behind she tried to fight him and she screamed. Policemen arrived and tried to chase after him, but they lost him. She’s well enough, and Maigret finally has something to work on; she didn’t see him well and she doesn’t remember much, but she can tell him something and she even tore a button off the guy’s jacket.. it may not seem much, but it’s still a lot more than he had before. From the cloth and the button they get a list of those who bought it. Lapointe thinks he found the right one, everything seems right, and they go to his house. They have no proof against this Marcel, but Maigret is sure that it’s him, and he keeps him in jail. When another girl is murdered, Maigret has no doubt that either Marcel’s wife or mother did it to protect him, because they keep smothering him, they are overwhelming, and of course he was right. 
Maigret warns Marcel of what one of them has done in order to free him and be able to suffocate him some more, and then the mother confesses in front of Marcel’s cell, declaring that she’d do anything for him, but she can’t describe the girl’s dress. With some pride the wife answers that question to prove to Marcel that she did it for him, but he tells her what he had already told his mother “I killed them because I hate you”. Couldn’t he find the courage to say that earlier so that six women would still be alive? Tsk, pathetic little man.
Maigret-Rowan Atkinson
Lapointe-Leo Staar
Janvier-Shaun Dingwall
Maigret’s wife-Lucy Cohu
Marcel Moncin-David Dawson

ITA la trappola di Maigret

A neighbor's deception - 2017

Not a very good movie, no. Not the worst either, mind you, because there is an element of thrill that is exactly what this movie promises, but it is never really convincing and also the story and the character become very soon rather unreasonable. The actors are barely acceptable, only Tom Amandes is a bit above the rest. No prize winners in this movie that’s for sure. 
The story is simple: a couple moves to a new house and meets their new neighbors, the Dixons. They seem very lovely and sociable, but since this is a thriller-movie you already know that they’re not.
There are no surprises at all, here, not one. (Well, the only surprise for me was finding out in the credits that a doctor, Connie, was played by Gates McFadden. I still can’t believe it, I could not recognize her at all, I remember Beverly Crusher very well, loved her, and this woman seemed to me completely different..)
I absolutely do not recommend to watch this movie a second time. At least the first time there’s the little element of surprise, but the second time it would be extremely boring, I’m sure.
It starts with a close up shot of feet moving slowly around a house, until we see a terrified woman hiding. The intent is to throw you right away into the atmosphere of the movie, but it also seemed to me an exaggerated attempt at doing something artistic without... well, being an artist.
We see the woman reaching the door and opening it, but something keeps her inside... and we should start unravelling the mystery, but we also soon realize that there is no real mystery. At one side we have Chloe, a fragile woman recovering from a breakdown whose busy busy husband leaves her always home alone, and at the other side we have their neighbors: Gerard is a psychiatrist who immediately sees that she has problems and offers to help her for free, and his wife Cheryl who worries that people (meaning women I guess) might take advantage of him and his big big heart... it’s all there, so very clear, that these two will bring trouble to the little wife who will go looking for it.
Chloe still has panic attacks and accepts Gerard’s offer to talk to him (... really? all your secrets revealed to your neighbor that you just met?? seriously??) but then James, the husband of the poor woman we saw at the beginning of the movie, calls her and plants in her suspicious about Gerard, and she starts investigating on her own.. I mean, she felt confident in him enough to be his patient and yet she immediately believes that there might be something suspicious in him?? This shows that she’s either really stupid or that she’d go far for something free...
She goes to his old school, she talks to a doctor that was a teacher back then, and even sneaks into his house when the Dixons are out to spy around... honestly at this point in the story it seemed a bit too far... after all she didn’t know that James had been murdered, what reason did she have to be that suspicious? Simply because a strange man approached saying that he was a murderer? Anyway, she finds an address and investigating further she learns that Cheryl is Gerard’s crazy sister so she storms into her husband’s office to tell him that it wasn’t Gerard, it was his sister Cheryl the crazy murderer!! Of course he thinks she’s crazy. 
She goes home and Cheryl attacks her but doesn’t kill her right away. Chloe wakes up tied to a chair and talks to Gerard and understands that he knows about Cheryl and he’s part of it, but it looks like this time Gerard doesn’t want Cheryl to kill her, he’d like to let her go but Cheryl thinks otherwise. Chloe’s husband comes home to apologize and doesn’t find her but sees signs of struggle and gets worried. He finds her almost dead in the chair and rushes to free her, and when Cheryl attacks him all screaming he turns around with a knife in his hand and she gets stabbed. Now, let me understand, were they still in Chloe’s home and nobody heard him entering or did he break into Gerard’s house? How come he had a big knife on his hands? Should I believe that he suddenly believed all her words and before going looking for her he went to the kitchen to get a big knife just in case?? 
Moving on, Chloe wakes up at the hospital: she had been beaten, almost strangled and almost suffocated and yet she was now fine, but Cheryl didn’t make it. Gerard has gone away and we see him somewhere with another woman saying the same words he told Chloe.. I guess that should be the scary ending, knowing that he’s out there ready to start it all over again, but that would imply that it was him doing the killing, and yet we saw that Cheryl was the one who attacked Chloe and wanted to kill her, he had tried to stop her (not very hard admittedly). 
It doesn’t make a lot of sense. 
Chloe-Ashley Bell
Gerard-Tom Amandes
Cheryl-Isabella Hoffmann

ITA la strana vita dei miei vicini