#StokerScore Rewound: The Outsiders (1983)

#StokerScore 6/10 

The problem with adapting books into films would appear to be disappointment. Disappointment in that you always seem to disappoint someone. This then becomes a matter of who you don't want to disappoint the most and who the least.

But why disappoint anyone at all?.... it comes down to impressions. Here are a couple of personal examples.

When I was a kid I would read the Garfileld comic strip in the daily newspaper we had delivered to our house. For years I thought that Garfiled spoke with a Yorkshire accent because I didn't realise the strip was American. My mind filled in the missing pieces.

"eh up, Odie"

In 1977, the BBC tried for the most faithful adaptation of Dracula. A novel that because it is written in the form of diary extracts is really difficult to film. It was amazingly atmospheric and Louis Jordan was a great casting choice. But this was the BBC not a movie studio, and 1977 and whilst still my favourite filmed version of the story they took some huge liberties with it. Combining characters, changing relationships, even hair colour. As a reader your imagination runs riot, creating the images from the authors words. Does a movie or tv version of a book ever live up to expectations? I guess that's for you to decide.

Francis Ford Coppola, legendary American film maker and director of classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now had made both of those movies by the time he got to The Outsiders in 1983. Having read the book, he decided not only to write the screenplay, but to direct it as well. The outcome? Well, it left me, unsurprisingly, disappointed.

The film is fairly close to the story in that it captures most of the key events of gang life, boy/girl interactions and social attitudes, but that isn't necessarily what the reader of the book wants in the movie. They want, unrealistically in truth, to see every scene played out the way it was written. The second issue is that the actors are not really that good...or maybe it's the dialogue they were given. When Coppola made his own version of Dracula a decade later, he insisted that the three friends fighting the vampire spent time together, taking part in bonding activities like hot-air ballooning. The result was that Quincy P. Morris, Arthur Holmwood and Doctor Seward genuinely seemed to know each other...the chemistry came across even if Keanu's accent, a Californian Jonathan Harker, was laughable .

In contrast this doesn't appear to be true of The Outsiders. In a film that relies heavily on the audiences belief that they will dies for each other, maybe instead of choosing up-and-coming movie stars the film would have been better served by employing people who could act. Then again, maybe viewing the movie in 2017 shows these famous faces in a different light. Swayze was always quite wooden, Cruise has become better, Emilio Estevez was much better in The Breakfast Club. But the main leads, Ralph Macchio as Johnny, C. Thomas Howell as Ponyboy, and Matt Dillon as Dally, struggle. Dillon is the best by far and the problem with Howell and Macchio is that they may have been better swapping parts as Johnny comes across as much younger than Ponyboy. Still, Macchio does capture some of the nervousness in his character and Howell does capture the yearning for something different from his lot in life as Ponyboy.

The relationships in the book are the central part of the story. The need for family and a sense of belonging, yet these are amazingly disregarded. The Curtis brothers love for each other in the absence of their parents is an essential part to the story. That Rob Lowe's Sodapop is hardly even seen is telling. There is also no real understanding of Johnny's home life which forms his need for bonding with Dally and Ponyboy. The Greasers and the Socs are easily identified but the sense of camararderie is missing. You would get a better example of what Coppola and author S. E. Hinton could do together by reading and watching Rumble Fish, an adaptation of another of Hinton's novels filmed back-to-back with The Outsiders and using many of the same cast and crew. Maybe the two of them learned something from the Outsiders experience...

Independantly, I love the book of The Outsiders for it's realistic portrayal of life at the time and the need for support, and I can enjoy the movie for showing some of the same things, but it is very difficult to reconcile the two.

#Stokerscore: 47 Metres Down

#StokerScore: 2/10

This is going to be a very short review. 

You have a 1 in 63 chance of dying of the flu and a 1 on 218 chance of dying from a fall. You have a 1 in 3,700,000 chance of being bitten by a shark. Obviously these odds are influenced the more you put yourself in harms way, and these sisters go out of their way to find harm...even when harm appears to be trying to get away from them.

The 2 points I have given this boring movie are brought about from my irrational fear of Great White sharks thanks to Steven Spielberg. I have scuba dived with reef sharks but Great Whites are a differtent bag altogether.

This movie could have been a 15 minute segment of an anthology movie but it has been unnecessarily dragged out to 89 minutes where the characters and their actions, motivations and dialogue are z-grade to the point I would rather see a Sharknado movie. 

I get the whole "what-would-you-do-if" thing but this is so silly it hurts. Oh, and the ending is just unfair. The director should have had the balls to make this a Brothers Grimm-style cautionary tale.

#StokerScore Rewound: Berry Gordy's The Last Dragon

#StokerScore (Head 5/10, Heart 10/10)

Due to current work commitments being low I find myself with time on my hands and, considering we are still three days away from me not going to see the latest Bay-splosion, I thought I would continue to re-watch some of my favourite movies and try to give them a realistic review....turns out that that is harder than I imagined.

In The Last Dragon, (I always drop the Berry Gordy tag) we have a movie that I love to its core. I remember watching this on rented videotape shortly after its release and have watched it repeatedly since. To me, this is as quotable as The Princess Bride, has music that brings a smile to your face and makes you cringe at the same time, and references classic Bruce Lee films throughout.

But back to Berry Gordy. The founder of the Motown music label is the man responsible for this

seeing the light of day, with the names that it has attached. In essence it's a feature length MTV spot with a plot that ties the musical performances together but to stop there would be to miss the fact that as far as movies that reflect the time, this is just about top of the pile. The problem is that it is so politically incorrect, only the fact that it is Berry Gordy's property stops it from being sent to the sacrificial PC altar and when you watch it you'll see what I mean.

Everyone is stereo-typed, and I do mean everyone. Or maybe its just that after fifty years I've lived long enough to be that cynical. Perhaps people watching this for the first time might see something that I'm missing. But this movie is so damned enjoyable, you tell me at the end you're not rooting for the good guy in the final fight, that you don't laugh at the training montage, that you don't get your feet tapping to the disco/R&B soundtrack that includes the likes of Stevie Wonder, Rockwell and Smokey Robinson!

The story involves Bruce Leeroy (yes), a coolie hat-wearing martial art devotee training with his Asian coach to reach the mystical Final Level, at which point practitioners will be enveloped by a 'glow'. On his journey, Leeroy meets a Fortune Cookie company staffed by Asians who wished they were Black, a Video Jockey-cum-presenter in the form of the gorgeous Vanity, a mobster and his moll as well as the rest of Leeroy's family. Into the mix walks the ominious Sho-Nuff, the self-styled Shogun of Harlem. Complete with extravagant costume, Sho Nuff wants to be the only Master in the neighbourhood so finds opportunities to challenge Leeroy. There is an awesome scene where the mobster refers to Harlem's Shogun as Mister Nuff and the look on actor Julius Clary III's face is perfect.

This movie has a lot of faults; the plot, the acting, the dialogue...and yet I DON'T CARE, all of these are completely irrelevant (I know!). Please, take some time, gather some friends, get a bit drunk if

you choose, but sit down and receive the Power of the Glow from The Last Dragon.

I dedicate this review to my Brother-From-Another-Mother, Mr. Sammy Cox for reminding me that there is one place that you have not looked and it is there, only there that you shall find the master.

Oh I nearly forgot....William H. Macey is in it, too

#StokerScore Rewound: Streets of Fire

#StokerScore 7/10

The year is 1984. It was a time of Madonna and Band Aid, legwarmers and shoulder pads. It was a bleak time for coal miners who were embroiled in a strike that grew to be more about Margaret

FAME, I'm gonna live forever

Thatcher's desire to crush the concept of unions. while at the cinema James Cameron's Terminator arrived, Ghostbusters made wearing overalls cool and a boy caught a fly with chopsticks

he's holding them all wrong

Movies in 1984 were pretty huge. As well as Arnie promising to be back,
we also saw A Nightmare on Elm Street and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom plus, just to prove that musical cinema still had power, Footloose. Whilst I understand that Footloose isn't technically a musical as no one sings, the amount of dancing has always put it into that genre for me. I know that's weird, like saying Flashdance or Saturday Night Fever are musicals, to me they are as the soundtrack is, in effect, another character....and no, I don't think Guardians of The Galaxy or its sequel are musicals, I guess its just a personal classification.

As a genre, musicals are associated with a more sedate time. You think musicals and you might think West Side Story, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory or Camelot. More recently they're having a

renaissance with the likes of La La Land and Into The Woods but in 1973 came The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the concept was rejuvenated. Rock Music was epic; Led Zeppelin were singing about Vikings, Meat Loaf was singing about a Bat Out of Hell and cinema was playing along with the likes of Brian De Palma's truly excellent Phantom of The Paradise showcasing the talents of Paul Williams as the Faustian producer Swan.

Then came Grease, a musical because people sing in it, Fame, too is a musical because people sing in it, but 1984's Streets of Fire is the reason that I blur movies with great soundtracks into sometimes being musicals. In this Walter Hill movie, subtitled A Rock and Roll Fable, two singing acts are a significant part of the plot. There is the beautiful Ellen Aim played by Diane Lane and the doo-wop group The Sorels, but both of these acts are dubbed by

no one believes I'm only 18

other performers so is it still a musical? I think that it is. And the songs? well a couple of them were written by Meat Loaf's songwriter, Jim Steinman and one of them, Tonight Is What It Means To Be Young, is awesome. Then there is the Sorels doing Dan Hartman's I Can Dream About You which reached number 6 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Other songs in the film are Rockabilly stomps that I defy you not to tap your foot along to.

good practice for Spider-Man

So yeah, it's a musical, but it's also an action movie too. The story involves Michael Par's character returning to his home town after receiving a telegram from his sister. His ex girlfriend, who is now shacked up with the slimy Billy Fish played here by Rick Moranis, has been kidnapped by a local gang and he has to set about rescuing her. Along the way he picks up another ex soldier played by Amy Madigan, a part that
was originally written for a male actor. The movie even has the great Bill Paxton as a barman. But the standout actor in the movie is Willem Dafoe. He is just head and shoulders above the rest of the cast, partly because of his acting ability and partly because his lines aren't as dumb as everyone else's.

The biggest letdown to this movie is the dialogue and script. The visuals seem to have gone for a 1980's feel in 1950's settings and the whole thing has the overall feel of a western to it with Pare's Pare's is now. Yep, the acting from all of the leads except Dafoe and Deborah Van Valkenberg as Cody's sister is woeful. But it's the delivery of the poor dialogue that somehow also adds to the charm of this mess.

style over substance?

Tom Cody filling in for Clint Eastwood. Interestingly, his role was supposed to have gone to Tom Cruise and I think if Cruise had taken it his career might be where


click here to listen to the closing song and watch the trailer  tonight is what it means to be young


Despite some huge flaws this movie is a personal favourite of mine. It has a score by Ry Cooder, Hill has directed some great movies like 48 Hours, Sothern Comfort and Last Man Standing and the music is really excellent. Ignore the acting by many who would go on to much better things and just enjoy the ride.

The Mummy (2017)

#StokerScore 7/10

Let me start by saying that I have a problem with the concept of PG-13 horror movies. I think it is a contradiction in terms because how can an adult audience be horrified by something that struggles to scare a thirteen year old? And there it is, the core issue with these movies. But not for the reason you may think.

Just stop for a minute and consider what horrifies you....I guess we all have our own ideas but in cinematic terms it's the scares, the jumps, the feeling of impending doom, the make-up, the characters behaving against expectations, not knowing what's coming next, and yet it's possible to find those in PG-13 movies.

The fact is that Universal are not using the term 'horror', instead it is a Dark Universe and this allows them to approach their characters with the hope of appealing to a wider audience and therefore potentially more money taken. This is why Warner Bros. are looking at the supernatural side of comics with Justice League Dark, although it doesn't get much darker than Batman vs Superman. Still, recent discoveries that audiences do like to watch R-rated films have been discarded in favour of selling zombie mummy and God of Death plushies. Seemingly, where the monster movies of the thirties and forties, or the Hammer revivals in the sixties and seventies aimed to scare their adult audiences, Universal is now happy to try to scare/wow everyone.

It's fair to say, then, that I approached this movie with low expectations for horror and high expectations for a Tom Cruise movie whose recent choices have seen some excellent results; The Jack Reacher films, Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow and the last two Mission Impossibles have been good movies and so it was that in these respects I was respectively surprised and contented. 

There are more horror elements than I expected, inspired in no small way by American Werewolf in

London and for those of you who know the John Landis classic you'll spot them immediately. Sofia Boutella is very good as Princess Ahmanet, convincingly devious, and Cruise is in Edge of Tomorrow mode with his level of disbelief at what is going on around him as he slowly figures out what is patently obvious to the audience, even without the signposting from the trailer. Then again, better to enjoy the theme park ride and not wonder how it works.

The failures in the movie are in the character of Dr Henry Jekyll and Prodigium, the organisation for which he works? It's not explained anywhere near clearly enough what role the organisation plays, why it exists or why, given the levels of tech they seemingly have available to them, that Jekyll can't more effectively control his change into Edward Hyde who, by the way, may have arrived via dialect coaching from some of the 1930's Universal horror movie support cast. The only thing missing was a deep, East End fog that could have been referred to in his cock-er-ney accent as a "cor blimey, right old pea-souper and no mistake".

Visually the movie owes debts to Jeepers Creepers, Alien: Resurrection, Lifeforce, Brendan Fraser's Mummy, and the aforementioned American Werewolf in London, among others. The dialogue is decidedly dodgy at times, too and I couldn't help but grimace at Annabelle Wallace's shouting of "Get her, Nick!" which she immediately repeated.

Overall I enjoyed it. I didn't mind the references to future movies, Creature from the Black Lagoon's hand and vampire skull were two that I noticed, I liked skipping between Egypt, Iraq and London, but the key difference between these and the thirties movies were that they took themselves and their source material more seriously, it wasn't until the advent of Abbott and Costello that barrels could be heard being scraped. I'd prefer them to dial back the comedy and focus more on filling the audience with more unease but looking at some of the future movies lined up, which I hope they get the chance to make, I'm not convinced that will happen.

PS In case you're wondering, yes, Tom does a lot of running too.

Wonder Woman

#StokerScore: 9/10

Rivalries. Competition. Winners. Losers. For as long as man has existed, these things have been around. Over the millennia, mankind has found opportunity to cultivate the necessary skills to be able to be a part of the game. Naivete encourages us to believe that win/win situations are the best. Where everyone involved walks away with something. Why is this naive? Well, how often do we see win/win scenarios?

Take commerce and business. Coca Cola do not want to see Pepsi have a significant market share, I prefer to believe that they want to destroy their competition wherever possible and therefore provide more dividends to share holders. The same could be said of Apple and Samsung, Ford and General Motors, heck we could even try Nikolai Tesla's rivalry with Thomas Edison.

In sport, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, the world loves to see these rivalries played out.

There is a darker side to rivalry too. Criminals evading capture, con artists and their 'marks', our conditioning in morals and ethics encourages us to decide which is right and which is wrong. Or maybe we follow the likes of philosopher Walter Benjamin who stated that "History is written by the victors" because Ad Victorem Spolias (To the victor, the spoils)

Wonder Woman has rivalry at its core; the continuing struggle of women to rightfully take their place alongside men, without fear from either gender; the arrogant paranoia displayed by certain Greek Gods; the need for one or two generals to win World War One by any means necessary. This is a superhero movie that needs to follow its roots and dispaly the classic rivalry between Good and Evil and, for the first time since the creation of the DC Extended Universe, Warner Brothers/DC have shown that they might be able to compete with Marvel.

Gal Gadot is about as perfect a casting choice as there is ever likely to be. Throwing off a brief cameo in Batman vs Superman, here she shows exactly what she can do and you can't help but feel what her Amazonian Princess is feeling as she confronts a world that shatters her naivete at every opportunity. She is that good.

In support, we have fine performances from Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Lucy Davis and Elena Anaya (who I haven't seen since Van Helsing). But my favourites were Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright, as Diana's Mother and Aunt respectively, for the growing-up/training montages.

Yet the time on Themiscyra, before Diana's journey to battle Ares, is also where the movie lets itself down. It's not the acting, no it's the writing that suggests that a voyage of self-discovery is a much better idea than being told a few facts of life. Facts that could determine her very own life or death and subsequently that of the entire human race. Superman's family were not so much dead as erased so he had to rely on holographic images and a huge library to find out what he was capable of, Batman's dead parents were no help either but he did have the trusty Alfred to help explain. Diana on the other hand could be given every opportunity to prepare but is seemingly, deliberately, not told the truth to protect her from the impending destiny that she tells her mother she is going to face anyway.

Apart from this relatively small gripe I enjoyed the movie. I liked the touches of comedy, the costumes, the fish-out-of-water, and Chris Pines opposite of whatever a damsel in distress is....and yet he wasn't. At no point did this movie make out that men were inferior. You could argue that next to a woman made of clay and imbued with life by Zeus that most people would appear tame by comparison but instead Pine is a constant reminder of teamwork between the sexes.

It is still a dark movie so is in keeping with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, but it appears to be a huge improvement on those two movies and provides hope that the Justice League, Aquaman and Flash movies have potential to impress rather than shake your head while looking forward to the next Marvel movie. And with that we must now wait to see who is the supreme heroine when Brie Larson's Captain Marvel reaches the screens in 2019...could it be win/win for Marvel and DC?