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Jon Savage recommended Quadrophenia (1979) in Movies (curated)

 
Quadrophenia (1979)
Quadrophenia (1979)
1979 | Drama, Musical, Mystery
7.6 (5 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"This annoyed me at the time - like Animal House - because it was not historical. It was smearing late seventies ideas of street credibility over sixties mod. I thought it very doubtful that a top face would be working at a scrap yard, for instance. But who cares? I've seen it many times since and it's an excellent teen movie: a great soundtrack, strong cast - a new generation of actors like Ray Winstone, Phil Davies, Mark Wingett and Phil Daniels, who would go on to have lustrous careers - and an archetypal loner-vs-the-gang storyline. It's noticeable that as Jimmy gets weirder, he gets more androgynous. As the film goes on, the activities of the gang get so tiresome you don't blame him for breaking away."

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Awix (3310 KP) rated Edge of Darkness (2010) in Movies

May 5, 2020 (Updated May 6, 2020)  
Edge of Darkness (2010)
Edge of Darkness (2010)
2010 | Drama, Mystery, Thriller
The legendary TV mini-series is retooled for the big screen as a bog-standard Mel Gibson revenge thriller. A detective's daughter is killed, and his investigations lead him to discover she was a target of forces within the military-industrial complex operating above the law.

As well as two-thirds of the running time and most of the plot, the movie version of Edge of Darkness also cheerfully dispenses with virtually everything that made the TV show so memorable: theoretically a fiendishly convoluted thriller, it also contained an environmentalist subtext, an incest subtext, a subtext about Anglo-US relations, even some borderline SF & fantasy elements. All of this is gone and just replaced with Mel Gibson looking intense and beating people up. As a result it is very hard to care about what's happening, although the illogicality of much of it does manage to cut through (someone poisoning someone else and then deciding to shoot them as well is practically a motif). Ray Winstone is not bad as Jedburgh, but given the source material the rest of it is unforgivably lousy.