The Osterman Weekend (1983)
Country: US
Technical: col 102m
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cast: John Hurt, Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon, Dennis Hopper, Helen Shaver, Meg Foster
Synopsis:
The host of a TV exposé-style interview show is approached by the CIA, who believe the three friends he has coming to his house that weekend to be Soviet-controlled operatives.
Review:
What ought to have been an astute thriller, in the final reckoning ends up a qualified disaster, a directorial swansong with only one or two sequences in his best style, and others nudging into self-parody (the protagonists running away from sputtering - and poorly aimed - automatic gunfire in slow-mo). Supposedly satirising the mediatisation of reality in an age when practically anything can be caught, recorded and viewed on a monitor, it makes a nonsense of its surveillance aesthetic from the off, with a murder edited from impossibly multiple angles; thereafter the recurrence of voyeuristic action that is mediated through CCTV grain makes a mockery of the film's closing exhortation that viewers just 'switch off' (one presumes this was not meant to apply to itself; if so, it comes a little late). The story's technological paraphernalia looks embarrassingly old hat, though this was one of the first films to feature weapons with a lazer sighting eye which 'lights' its victims before 'shooting' them, neatly extending the televisual analogy. For a director who most famously upheld frontier values over technological progress, the picture is not with its felicities: at one point, unforseeably caught on a TV monitor in the house, Hurt resorts to improvising a weather forecast and closes with the line: ' State-of-the-art shit!' However, it is hard to ignore the glibly unexplained denouement, or the scene in which a CIA shooter holds Hauer and Nelson at bay in a blazing swimming pool, before succumbing to a toy crossbow.
Country: US
Technical: col 102m
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cast: John Hurt, Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon, Dennis Hopper, Helen Shaver, Meg Foster
Synopsis:
The host of a TV exposé-style interview show is approached by the CIA, who believe the three friends he has coming to his house that weekend to be Soviet-controlled operatives.
Review:
What ought to have been an astute thriller, in the final reckoning ends up a qualified disaster, a directorial swansong with only one or two sequences in his best style, and others nudging into self-parody (the protagonists running away from sputtering - and poorly aimed - automatic gunfire in slow-mo). Supposedly satirising the mediatisation of reality in an age when practically anything can be caught, recorded and viewed on a monitor, it makes a nonsense of its surveillance aesthetic from the off, with a murder edited from impossibly multiple angles; thereafter the recurrence of voyeuristic action that is mediated through CCTV grain makes a mockery of the film's closing exhortation that viewers just 'switch off' (one presumes this was not meant to apply to itself; if so, it comes a little late). The story's technological paraphernalia looks embarrassingly old hat, though this was one of the first films to feature weapons with a lazer sighting eye which 'lights' its victims before 'shooting' them, neatly extending the televisual analogy. For a director who most famously upheld frontier values over technological progress, the picture is not with its felicities: at one point, unforseeably caught on a TV monitor in the house, Hurt resorts to improvising a weather forecast and closes with the line: ' State-of-the-art shit!' However, it is hard to ignore the glibly unexplained denouement, or the scene in which a CIA shooter holds Hauer and Nelson at bay in a blazing swimming pool, before succumbing to a toy crossbow.
Country: US
Technical: col 102m
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cast: John Hurt, Rutger Hauer, Burt Lancaster, Craig T. Nelson, Chris Sarandon, Dennis Hopper, Helen Shaver, Meg Foster
Synopsis:
The host of a TV exposé-style interview show is approached by the CIA, who believe the three friends he has coming to his house that weekend to be Soviet-controlled operatives.
Review:
What ought to have been an astute thriller, in the final reckoning ends up a qualified disaster, a directorial swansong with only one or two sequences in his best style, and others nudging into self-parody (the protagonists running away from sputtering - and poorly aimed - automatic gunfire in slow-mo). Supposedly satirising the mediatisation of reality in an age when practically anything can be caught, recorded and viewed on a monitor, it makes a nonsense of its surveillance aesthetic from the off, with a murder edited from impossibly multiple angles; thereafter the recurrence of voyeuristic action that is mediated through CCTV grain makes a mockery of the film's closing exhortation that viewers just 'switch off' (one presumes this was not meant to apply to itself; if so, it comes a little late). The story's technological paraphernalia looks embarrassingly old hat, though this was one of the first films to feature weapons with a lazer sighting eye which 'lights' its victims before 'shooting' them, neatly extending the televisual analogy. For a director who most famously upheld frontier values over technological progress, the picture is not with its felicities: at one point, unforseeably caught on a TV monitor in the house, Hurt resorts to improvising a weather forecast and closes with the line: ' State-of-the-art shit!' However, it is hard to ignore the glibly unexplained denouement, or the scene in which a CIA shooter holds Hauer and Nelson at bay in a blazing swimming pool, before succumbing to a toy crossbow.