Last few nights:
A FISTFUL OF DYNAMITE aka Duck You Sucker - Sergio Leone's last great movie in my view - as playful and nuts as the Clint Eastwood trilogy and without the portentous auteur qualities of the Once Upon A Time things - Rod Steiger hams it up brilliantly as a villainous Mexican, James Coburn is an even unlikelier Irishman, every problem in the film is solved by blowing things up and Ennio Morricone's score is deranged and very jarring. Also a political message about the importance of keeping your head down during revolutions.
COP KILLER - aka Order Of Death, Corrupt - wtf Italian melodrama starring Harvey Keitel and John Lydon locked into low-budget homo-erotic violence and power play. No doubt both of them are wondering as much as the small audience it's had over the years how or why this was ever made. Actually highly entertaining and deeply strange.
DAS BOOT - the word overwrought was made for this. I watched the three and a half hour directors cut but I believe there was some kind of five hour TV series version out there. War is grim and men lose the plot together in a submarine and camp it up going up the periscope to get splashed in water. Silly and dated really, although funny how most of the actors in their late teens with beards look like young hipsters of the present day. And anyone who has been in a band travelling a long way between gigs may be able to relate.
INTERVIEW - Hollywood/arthouse crossover actor Steve Buscemi co-writes and directs a movie. What does he want in it? Him in the leading role flirting for the entire length of it with an attractive woman half his age. See also Steve Martin in Shopgirl. Absurd and pretty funny, some decent acting from him and Sienna Miller, some very uncomfortable scenes for men of a certain age, but a layer of cheese all over it with his dead daughter and her dead dad too bolted on in case you didn't get the subtext.
EDIT: oh and a rewatch of GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS - super intense salesmen movie where the real gem is Jack Lemmon's performance as a struggling old failing-to-close real estate rip-off artist, he has the sweet personality of Jack Lemmon's character in The Apartment when he's faking it for customers then lapses into vile and ugly and foul-mouthed, bumptious and self-serving, and it's sort of heartbreaking to watch him like that, and he has inspired the even worse and more obnoxious younger salesman Al Pacino, and all these guys in the movie are ugly and desperate and horribly flawed - I know there are essays about this thing calling it the ultimate critique of capitalism's failings - hell of a depressing film that gets better every watch.
