This is another Temple vehicle desperately light on story. I’d say the songs were nice, especially the main “Codfish Ball” but 2 minutes after the end credits all I had stuck in my head was the awkwardly similar “Lambeth Walk”, lol. There’s an interesting surreal sequence with Shirley as a tiny nurse tending to a man dressed as a baby in an oversized highchair, complete with oversized props and a staircase for Shirley to reach him by. I’d raise the creepy card again, but it’s at least a little visual creativity amidst 75 minutes of bland nothingness.

Again, I probably made an error watching more than one of these in one sitting and this was the one that suffered but all I can do is write what I can about it. This struck me almost immediately as a little too much like Annie, everything that didn’t resemble it only making me wish I was watching Alicia Morton or even Aileen Quinn rather than Shirley Temple. Really nothing special unless you’re crazy for Shirley. It’s 75-minutes of everything going relatively smoothly, with songs liberally sprinkled to pass the time; this doesn’t do a lot for me.

Maybe it was the roll on effect of watching these three in one sitting, but by the time I got to this one, I really found it hard to endure. Once again Miss Temple is placed in questionable adult care, a criminal and his girl trying their best to go straight. It has a lot more in the way of story than the other two I watched this night; and for an early-30s production it’s perhaps surprising how harshly it confronts reality.

But again, it’s just not a Shirley Temple movie … whatever that is. Aside from Stand Up and Cheer, which as I’ve already said was entertaining for many reasons other than Shirley, I’ve not yet seen anything to change my view of her as really quite far from talented. She’s adorable, it’s true; and she hits her marks and notes etc like a seasoned pro. But there’s absolutely nothing natural about her performances, and it’s frequently so controlled and choreographed as to be frankly unsettling. In a stylised musical like Stand Up it works perfectly … but in a “real” movie like this, alongside Carole Lombard and Gary Cooper? It really jars, I’m afraid. The whole movie is just a real downer.

I should’ve mentioned in my Stand Up and Cheer! review when I said “it’s a lot more than just a Shirley Temple movie” that I pointed that out because that was probably the one thing I could pinpoint which made the movie so much better than I feared. Despite being crazy about young actresses, I’ve really never been too interested in Miss Temple; but it’s always been based on fairly limited experience of her work, being the reason why I’m beginning to make an attempt to catch up on the evidence. I watched this, Stand Up and Now and Forever in one sitting – I’m not sure if this was wise, but they’re short movies and it made sense at the time. They were also all released in 1934, Shirley’s first year of feature acting.

The “marker” of the title here refers to the fact that we meet Shirley this time around as her father uses her for collateral on a gambling ticket. Shortly thereafter she’s the center of another wager over her weight – old men gather round as they determine the winner on a set of scales. There’s a weird bedtime scene – and when I find such things weird you’ve gotta wonder – where she has one of these men help her with her underwear …

It sounds so innocuous and it should be, but honestly I’m with Graham Greene on this so far. On the one hand, Shirley Temple was a lot more like a “real little girl” than any of the starlets we’ve seen since – she didn’t have a hint of precocity about her and all she really ever did was laugh, cry, and sing. But there’s something about certain moments of her – it really comes over as deliberately sensual, and like I said, when I’m finding things like this unsettling … I think it’s the contrast or something. Precocious and sexual never phases me – but this gawkish, squeaky thing barely an ex-toddler gasps and says, “they button up the back!” out of the blue … it gives me the heeby-jeebies or something. I’ve probably said too much. But like I said: Graham Greene … I’m in good company. I’m assuming I can’t be sued as he was for speaking my mind.

Anyway now you’ll know why it’s taken me a day since the Stand Up review to post this even though they were watched side-by-side … I kept wanting to include this paragraph but I couldn’t believe that I’d written such a thing just days after finding this article so risible. I guess we all have our funny lines.

I just found it odd in general. I find it odder that I can’t find a single review out there that questions the whole set-up, lol. Maybe I just wasn’t in the mood.

The Tobe Hooper remake of the ‘78 “classic” immediately hits the highest level of interest that the original stirred in me by the mere presence of Angela Bettis, who I could happily watch for two hours waiting for a bus. That we see her early on doing her laundry, deliberately or not invoking memories of May, only pulls me in more. But that’s pretty much where the draw for me ends here, and it’s unlikely I’ll watch it again even for her.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with the movie – in fact, there are some really nice ideas. For one, the manner in which they use the source material – clinging to sketchy details but most importantly using the Bettis character as an outsider who witnesses the whole thing through the walls of her apartment in a spooky old Hollywood hotel. The first time she hears scary noises and reports them, it turns out to be some actors rehearsing, which makes the nailgun scene that follows, which I loved so much in the original, particularly riveting.

Unfortunately, it runs out of steam too quickly, and rather shoots itself in the foot in the end with occult nonsense the likes of which you’d expect to find in a dire 80s TV movie. The gore has nothing on the Seventies version, and really aside from Bettis there’s little reason to recommend it over the more haunting original.

I feel like I missed something with this one. I guess I should mention again that I haven’t seen Le Grand Chemin on which it’s based, though that movie is in the watch queue. I had to resist writing a review as the movie played because I hoped and expected that something would happen in the end that pulled it all together … but nada. The story here is so thin it’s practically non-existent – one kid (Elijah Wood) is sent away to new parents (Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith) who have problems and meets another kid (Thora Birch) and between them they kind of fix them, then the first kid goes home. Johnson and Griffith are (perhaps unsurprisingly) flat as pancakes, though Griffith does have a couple of impressive moments, and Wood and Birch are never much more than cute young shadows of who they are now. A total pass for me, I’m afraid.

Again (sorry, I’m gonna have to say this on all 5 of these, some people might be coming to the individual review page …), it’s about a week since I saw this now so it won’t be the best of reviews, though most of it I wrote at the time.

I don’t know quite what to say of this because, yes, I won’t deny it made me laugh out loud a number of times. I think it’s more the unquestioning acceptance it seems to have gotten across the board (Total Film apparently called it a “labour of love” ... huh?) which made me feel somewhat cheated in the end. I probably love Jennifer Ellison more than anybody on the planet and hers are some of the lines that really gave me a kick; I’ll watch anything with one of the League of Gentlemen in and Reece Sheersmith doesn’t disappoint either; Andy Serkis is the icing on the cake and Doug Bradley’s name in the credits should really have me on the verge of climax.

But this is really about the most convoluted, unoriginal production I’ve seen in years, made even worse by the fact it feels at all turns as though the director really thought he had something unique, and somehow managed to convey that excitement to the cast to get them involved. I’ve been putting off watching the director’s debut London to Brighton for too long. I’m inclined after this to put it off even longer but I think actually I might have to watch it ASAP in the hope it’s as good as “they” say and might take the bad taste of this one out of my head. If it is that good, then truly, this is as bad a waste of British talent as the industry has seen these past 2 decades …

I have some catching up to do so the next reviews might seem rushed, sorry bout that … I’m just gonna tidy up what I’ve already written and post.

Score 3 for the “movies I almost saw on my birthday this year but didn’t, thank god!” field lol. And this is the one that I really thought couldn’t fail for me. A movie like this should have my eyes unable to look away at all times, and frankly, this one didn’t achieve that at all. It rarely rises above its basic concept – War of the Worlds meets Blair Witch (or “there’s a visual effect loose in Manhattan and all I have is this lousy handycam!”). The only moderate surprise was Lizzy Caplan (Janis Ian from Mean Girls), who at first I thought was Zooey Deschanel’s sister. I was expecting a movie where if we saw the monster at all it would only be at the end; I think (ed.: hmm, I don’t know what I think, I left that sentence unfinished when I left off writing a week ago and I don’t know how it was gonna end LOL).

Its technical qualities lift it above most of what’s been released so far this year, though of course that isn’t saying much. The “wiping the tape” subplot is kind of as cute as it is hokey and leads to an ending that can’t fail to tug at the heartstrings. The whole message of the movie is clearly appreciate what you’ve got because it could all be gone tomorrow but I can’t help but think it could’ve been delivered better – dare I say it even, without the whole video gimmick that makes it remotely unique. I’d be amazed and depressed by the audience member who relates or so much as gives a damn about the characters here; and even if you were to start out with the blindest faith in them, the writer breaks the fourth wall horribly with misplaced humour like the Superman/Garfield dialogue, it’s just beyond hideously done. Even the second port of call, the visuals, isn’t really a department you can get too excited in – the monster itself is quite embarassingly reminiscent of the devil thing that appeared in the Season One finale of Torchwood. It’s probably cool to watch with a frenzied audience … but you know my feelings on that way of judging a movie’s true quality.