Playing with various versions of Transformers continuity to craft something new, Transformers One gives us the rise of both Optimus Prime and Megatron… eventually. The lack of recognizable characters may have played a role in the film’s box office struggles, but fans missed out on what is easily the best Transformers movie in decades.
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1964’s Topkapi is an odd film. Starting with a psychedelic opening in which a character breaks the fourth wall to talk directly to the audience, a device which is never seen again, the film then vacillates between a heist film and a farce before finally settling in as a serious heist film (with an admittedly farcical epilogue). The story involves a thief (Melina Mercouri) who recruits an old partner and lover (Maximilian Schell) and a collection of amateurs for a risky heist in Istanbul. Their plan relies, in part, on smuggling the tools needed into the country through the use of unaware small-time hustler Arthur Simpson (Peter Ustinov).
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Widely regarded as on of the finest, and most influential, films in the history of cinema, the Criterion Collection releases this new 4K/Blu-ray combo featuring the extras of previous releases and the film available in 4K for the first time. Akira Kurosawa‘s classic about a group of ronin hired to protect a village provided a template that would be reused, repurposed, and remade countless times over the years from The Magnificent Seven to Three Amigos to “The Magnificent Ferengi” while specific scenes from the film have inspired sequences in everything from Blade Runner to Mad Max: Fury Road.
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Sometimes movies just don’t quite work. Wayback Wednesday takes us back to a film that fits that category. 1997’s adaptation of The Day of the Jackal has a talented cast in Bruce Willis as the infamous assassin, Richard Gere as an IRA terrorist let out of prison to help hunt him down alongside Sidney Poitier and Diane Venora, and smaller roles from the likes of Mathilda May, J.K. Simmons, Jack Black all of which helped propel the film to box office success. But despite that talent on-screen, the story of hunting down the world’s greatest assassin just can’t hit the bullseye.
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Released to mixed reactions from adults, and bombing at the box office, 1987’s The Monster Squad did strike a chord with kids, eventually earning cult classic status on cable and home video. The film’s strength is in how real the young protagonists feel, speaking and acting like kids who have discovered that monsters are real. Our main characters are a self-named Monster Squad of preteens (Andre Gower, Robby Kiger, and Ryan Lambert, Brent Chalem, and Ashley Bank who begs her older brother to join the group and eventually earns her spot in the film’s climax) who already know a bit about monsters which comes in handy when they start popping up all over town.
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