Night on Earth review

 Number 478 on the top 1000 films of all time is Jim Jarmusch's comedy-drama anthology 'Night on Earth.'

Night on Earth tells five vignettes of five taxi drivers and their relationships with their passengers all on the same night across five different cities: Los Angeles, New York City, Paris, Rome and Helsinki.

Night on Earth was a charming film that deftly navigated a number of themes including heartbreak, connection and comedy all while getting you to care about its characters in a limited space of time. Across five different short films with all different casts, we get to see what makes us different, but more importantly the same.

The first vignette focusses on LA taxi driver Corky (Wionna Ryder.) Corky is a tomboy and has no great aspirations in life beyond being a taxi driver and a mechanic. This is in contrast with her upper-class passenger, casting director Victoria Snelling (Gena Rowlands.) Despite their differences, they form a certain rapport and understanding by the end of their journey together. Victoria even wants to cast Corky in her latest film, but Corky is happy with her current direction in life. It was a nice little insight into how we work as people. Not everybody has lofty aspirations. Some people are happy with whatever they have and that's okay.

The second vignette is probably the funniest. It follows the relationship between East German immigrant Helmut's (Armin Mueller-Stahl's) first night as a taxi driver in New York. His passenger is the loud-mouthed and obnoxious Yo-Yo (Giancarlo Esposito) who startled at Helmut's seeming incompetence decides to drive the taxi instead. The two characters could not have been more different from each other yet they embodied a brilliant odd-couple relationship. Helmut was endearing and although Yo-Yo was a bit annoying at first, he ended up being likeable too.

Our third vignette takes us to Paris where after an unnamed Ivorian taxi driver (Isaach de Bankole) abruptly turfs out two rude passengers, he accepts a new fare of a blind woman (Beatrice Dalle.) It was a pleasant enough story but largely forgettable compared to the others. Although there were a few moments of humour.

The fourth story set in Rome was probably my least favourite. It focussed on eccentric taxi driver Gino (Roberto Benigni) who after picking up a priest (Paolo Bonecelli,) proceeds to make a toe-curling confession which is almost too much for the priest to bear. Although this story was played for laughs with Benigni largely improvising, I did find it far too zany and over-the-top for my tastes. Benigni was so over-the-top, he became rather annoying.

Thankfully, we had the final Helsinki storyline as a touching palate cleanser. It focusses on Finnish taxi driver Mika (Matti Pellonpaa) who relates his tragic personal history to his drunk passengers. It was bittersweet way of ending the film, but also helped to offset some of the Night on Earth's zanier storylines. It was one of my favourite stories of the five.

Being an anthology film, naturally some of the vignettes were better than others. However, I think the film worked both as a whole and individually. I definitely recommend it.

Do the Right Thing review

 Number 409 on the top 1000 films of all time is Spike Lee's coming-of-age comedy-drama 'Do the Right Thing.'

Mookie (Spike Lee) is an African-American living in a rough Brooklyn neighbourhood. All he wants from life is to make enough money from his pizza delivery job at Sal's pizzeria so he can support his family. However, on an excruciatingly hot day, racial tensions between Sal (Danny Aiello,) and his sons Pino (John Turturro) and Vito (Richard Edson) and the other African-Americans in the neighbourhood including Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) and Buggin' Out (Giancarlo Esposito) a man who fancies himself the next Malcom X. As a race riot threatens to break out, Mookie is forced to pick a side.

Do the Right Thing is just another film in a long list tackling one of the US' most pertinent issues: race relations. The US is known as the greatest melting pot playing home to people from all over the world. It's only natural that some of those people might not like each other as is the case here.

The deeply racist Vito resent working in an African-American neighbourhood and believes they should be with their own kind. Meanwhile, the African-American community doesn't like that white-owned businesses at the heart of their town. They believe there should be black businesses instead. It's a powder keg waiting to blow.

Another theme that Lee is explores is police brutality - another issue that has plagued the US for decades. Do the Right Thing was dedicated to Eleanor Bumpers, Arthur Miller Jr, Edmund Perry, Yvonne Smallwood, Michael Stewart and Michael Griffith - with the former five having been killed by police and the sixth by a white mob. Only a few years later, Rodney King was beaten and I do not have the necessary computer memory to write the name of every single black person who has been killed by the police in the last twenty-five years, except for one of the most notable: George Floyd.

Spike Lee tackles both of these subjects with his stylistic flair - think bold colours, razor-sharp dialogue and all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Sure you can argue that he was exploring themes too important not to tackle head-on, but this exploration was incredibly on the nose. One scene has the different characters speaking directly to the camera, as they monologue racist insults about different groups of people. Sure this racism might be accurate, but its depiction was heavy-handed.

This isn't to denigrate the acting of those involved - least of all from Spike Lee as the lead Mookie. Giancarlo Esposito was also good as the political cognizant Buggin Out - it was amazing to think this was the same man who wowed audiences in Breaking Bad. But the standout star had to be Danny Aiello who received a well-earned Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. Initially, Sal is nothing more than hard-working Italian-American who often plays the mediator between his deeply racist son Pino and the black customers. However, not even the good-natured Sal can only keep his demons at bay for so long before he is driven too far on an excruciatingly hot day. Unlike Pino who overly hates blacks, I think Sal was a lot more level-headed, but, like the other characters, he fell victim to the simmering racial tension.

John Turturro was also very good as Vito. He gave a multi-layered performance, as one of the more openly racist characters of the film. It would have been all too easy to have written/portrayed him as a one-dimensional Italian-American "moolie" hating greaseball, but he was more three-dimensional than his.

But I would like to say one thing quickly. Why in these films do you always have the black characters being racist to the East Asian, or in this case, Korean characters? The local supermarket is ran by a Korean couple who are often the subject of racist taunting by the black characters. It was something similar to Menace II Society. Perhaps it was Lee's commitment to realism, but it didn't make his characters very endearing.

However, 'Do the Right Thing,' was a memorable and stylised, if heavy-handed, exploration of two issues that have plagued American society for decades. What was the right thing that Sal and Mookie should have done? Who knows?  

Megalopolis review

 Having been released in 2024, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis is too young to feature on the top 1000 films of all time. It is unlikely to feature on any future editions of this list either.

Cesar Cantilina (Adam Driver) is a famous and influential architect in New Rome - an alternate, futuristic New York City. His creation of the element Megalon has proven revolutionary in constructing buildings. It has also brought him fame and fortune. He has visions of building a new utopic city called Megalopolis, but these plans bring him into conflict with New Rome's mayor Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito.) The huge supporting cast includes Nathalie Emmanuel, Aubrey Plaza, Shia Laboeuf, Jon Voight, Talia Shire, Grace Vanderwaal and Dustin Hoffman.

Megalopolis has long been Coppola's passion project. After decades in development hell, he finally raised the money to self-finance the film by selling off part of his wine-making business. Yet it was not smooth-sailing from here.

Megalopolis had a troubled production from filming delays caused by the pandemic to Coppola's experimental style where he encouraged his cast to improvise scenes in theatre-style workshops. The visual effects and arts departments were either fired or resigned during production too.

All of this had a negative knock-on effect on Megalopolis. It was a pretentious, bloated, incomprehensible jumble of scenes with little to no plot. Coppola certainly wasn't short of ambition, but he couldn't convert that into a cohesive film. 

Inspired by the Catilinarian Conspiracy and the transition of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire, Coppola tried modernising the story by transplanting it into a futuristic, science-fiction setting, but all this did was confuse things further. As well as being a trail-blazing architect, Cesar also had the power to stop time. Why? Because ... reasons.

I mentioned earlier that the visual effects and art departments were either fired or quit during the production. You could definitely see the end-result of that in the finished product, as the film looked incredibly inconsistent. Some parts like the cityscape from the top of Metropolis, but other parts looked like they were out of the worst acid trip ever. Did we really need to see Aubrey Plaza's face in a cup of tea? And as for the weird circus/gladitorial/Grace Vanderwaal show, that was just poor chaos. Not chaos in the good sense either. It was a confusing, overwhelming mess.

As for the acting, this matched the larger-than-life nature of the film. Driver, Esposito, Voight, Plaza and, especially, Laboeuf were dreadfully over-the-top. Granted the dialogue wasn't great - case-in-point, Voight talking about having a boner - but their performances were still so campy that it was difficult to take them seriously.

I really wanted to like Metropolis. The Godfather is one of my favourite films. Coppola is a titan of the film industry having also having also directed classics like Apocalypse Now. Yet he couldn't replicate that same success here. At eighty-years-old, this could very well be one of his last films. What a disappointing swansong. Never mind, Megalopolis. This was Megaflopolis.