john_cberry

The Deadly Companions was Sam Peckinpah's directorial debut. It's a western filmed in Arizona. Clearly he was no master of his medium when he made it, but it contains most of the dominant themes. Here we find the chase/quest which creates conflicts for the main character. Here too the connection of violence to children shown in his great movie, The Wild Bunch. And themes of loyalty/betrayal are also touched on. As in The Getaway, the heroine is a tough dangerous woman not afraid to kill to achieve her goal, but also capable of love even under horrendous conditions. Peckinpah's begins his celebration of violence in The Deadly Companions, but does not do it well yet. Some of the acting and much of the plot is laughable, but a fan of Peckinpah's work will want to see The Deadly Companions.

Open Water is one of those rare movies that tells a straightforward story in a straightforward way because that it is the only way it can be told. I rate it excellent because the film-makers have understood this and done their level best to get out of the way. The movie contains what it needs to contain. We hear film-makers talk about how they achieved this effect or suggested that emotion. There is no need for any of that in this movie and, to the credit of the film-makers, there is none of it.This movie is a true horror movie because it describes events that not only could happen but actually do happen practically every day. Because of this, this is a movie everybody should see once. Entertainment has nothing to do with it.

Margaret Atwood novels have not fared well as movies because she is far more interested in ideas than stories. The Handmaid's Tale had such powerful ideas it wasn't surprising the movie version disappointed. I'm not sure if Atwood was trying to write a comic novel when she wrote Robber Bride or trying to get as close as she could to a mystery novel. As with so many of her efforts, she wasn't successful at either, but the quality of her work makes reading her worthwhile anyway. CBC was pretty daring even to try to turn the novel into a TV movie. They chose the easy way out and turned it into a comic thriller. It works as well as other comic thrillers, better than the recent CTV adaptations of detective novels. It is the acting by Mary-Louise Parker, Amanda Root and others which earned it an above-average rating for me. Maybe with more money they could have turned it into a good cinema film.