John Hurt Archives - Parallax View

by Robert Horton, Contributors, Film Reviews

Review: Love and Death on Long Island

Written by Robert Horton November 12, 2018

[Originally written for The Herald in 1998]

Set the wayback machine to 1998. Parallax View presents reviews of films released 20 years ago, written by our contributors for various papers and websites. Most of these have not been available for years.

Its title and subject matter may suggest a heavy arthouse experience. But make no mistake: Love and Death on Long Island is one of the most thoroughly entertaining movies of the year.

This funny, graceful British film features a marvelous central character and one of the best scenes of revelation in years. We spend the first reel of the film meeting Giles De’Ath (he takes some pains to pronounce his name correctly: Day-awth). As played by the splendid John Hurt, De’Ath is a brainy academic writer, a man of large reputation even if nobody actually reads his books. Widowed and isolated in his regimented life, he has quite happily ignored the modern world for his entire adult life. He’s heard the vague rumor that some of E.M. Forster’s novels have been made into films, and one day he tries to see one of these respectable pictures. The confusions of the multiplex result in his buying a ticket for something called Hotpants College 2, an insipid teen sex comedy.

by Robert Horton, Contributors

Film Review: ‘Snowpiercer’

Written by Robert Horton June 26, 2014

Alfred Hitchcock called them the “plausibilists”—those nitpickers who can’t suspend disbelief long enough to swallow a movie’s colorful premise and just enjoy the thing. If you are a member of this army, you might have a problem with Snowpiercer. This futuristic picture has a whopper of a concept.

Let me state that I have no factual basis for believing that a train would be able to stay in continuous motion across a globe-girdling circuit of track for almost two decades, nor that the people on board could sustain themselves and their brutal caste system under such circumstances. But for 124 minutes of loco-motion, I had no problem buying it all.

Continue reading at Seattle Weekly

by Richard T. Jameson, Contributors, Directors, Essays, Sam Peckinpah

Lost “Weekend”

Written by Richard T. Jameson July 2, 2010

[Originally published in Film Comment Volume 20 Number 2, March-April 1984]

Mandeville Canyon is a quiet, curvy stretch of road a good ten miles from Hollywood, lined with well-appointed homes generously separated by shrub and woodland. Where the grade begins to increase, as if the road aspired to eventually climbing out of the surrounding high hills, one’s eyes cast leftward toward a graciously imposing bluff. Ranks of white fence dominate the near horizon and reappear brokenly through the trees on the hillside beyond. From the road they’re the only visible sign of “Robert Taylor’s little cabin where he used to ride horses—in point of fact, a sprawling ranch house replete with baronial dining rooms, parlors, studies, bedrooms, and enough bars to keep the clientele of a metropolitan watering hole happy.

This particular late-afternoon in December 1982, the peace of Mandeville Canyon is not secure. As we park along the roadside and climb out for the walk up the long lane, an abrupt burst of light-machine-gun fire rips the twilight. We are undismayed; indeed, the effect is reassuring, even charming. Someone is tuning up for another night’s shooting on The Osterman Weekend, the first theatrical-movie version of a Robert Ludlum bestseller and the first film Sam Peckinpah has directed in five years.

Review: Alien

Written by Tom Keogh November 10, 2009June 9, 2020

[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980]

As a horror movie, Alien is appropriately concerned with collective nightmares (being chased and caught; the monster is below us, now above us; someone we know is, in fact, not human), and lustfully derivative of the genre’s white-middle-class fears that give rise to the nightmares (loss of order, familiarity, and domination; community goes to hell). But the film has something more, at least in the first half: a developing narrative with an exclusive, integral logic of its own, built on ostensible collisions in logical flow. In other words, in its auspicious beginnings, Alien reminds one of more expressly surreal films. The difference is that Alien has an intentionally simple storyline derived from consistency in character types and motivations, including all nonhumans, machines, distant organizations, and the dead.