Audience Member
Love this movie, could not stop thinking about it for weeks!!!!!
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Having loved the original movie and paid to see it 13 times, I was excited to hear of Midnight Return, and anxious to know the real story. Fortuitously for me, there was a one-week screening event in Toronto where I live, last week. I attended 3 screenings as the director was present for Q&A afterwards.
Kudos to the film-maker. Midnight Return is an enlightening look at truth in cinema, and tells the background story of one of pop-culture's greatest events, succinctly, clearly and with humor... not an easy feat. I found this movie cathartic, very human, and I was genuinely touched by the innocence of everyone involved in the original movie. If Midnight Express touched your life in any way, you must see Midnight Return. This full-circle story is told beautifully, with wit and character.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
01/16/23
Full Review
Audience Member
In a perfect world, Sally Sussman and Anthony Morina, the creative team behind this often-astonishing non-fiction festival hit, would be under contract to HBO, Netflix, Amazon Video or another cool cable channel or movie-streaming service and be paid buckets of money to choose well-known films based on real people and events in modern history as launchpads for a series of documentaries exactly like MIDNIGHT RETURN. I'd eagerly gobble up every single one.
As a huge fan of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, the 1978 Alan Parker blockbuster about a young American, Billy Hayes, notoriously tossed into a hellish Turkish prison when he's caught wearing corset of hashish-bricks taped to his body while trying to board a flight home, I've seen the movie many times since its initial release -- when my Vietnam vet dad, a much more successful early 70's ex-international narcotics courier, rocked my 11-year-old world by driving us almost a full half-hour to Waterville, Maine, on a school-night, to see it on the big screen. Yet until a few days ago, when a friend's lucky invitation to MIDNIGHT RETURN's premiere theatrical run at Beverly Hills' Music Hall (it's next big-screen engagement is Palm Springs, and is obviously the better way to catch it),I had no clue Parker's brutal, electrifying, nerve-shredding suspense classic was just the opening act of an outrageous and controversial saga that stretched over 40 years.
I don't want to give away any of the surprises Sussman and Morina weave into the doc so liberally, and the tale of what REALLY happened to Hayes before. during and after Parker's adaptation of his bestselling memoir is so fascinating and expertly structured, it's not until after viewing MIDNIGHT RETURN does one realize what a feat of storytelling Sussman and Morina have pulled off, juxtaposing vintage news clips, scenes from MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, and a slew of jaw-droppingly candid new original interviews with Hayes, Parker, producer David Puttnam, composer Giorgio Moroder, Oliver Stone (who won an Oscar for his EXPRESS screenplay and is a priceless part of the story) -- and a well-chosen sample representing the apparent millions of Turks (and Turkish-Americans) for whom Hayes has been a living Satan and MIDNIGHT EXPRESS is likewise apparently the greatest scourge ever committed against Turkey!
This bizarrely fervent controversy began with Parker and Hayes bringing the film to Cannes for an incendiary love-it-or-hate-it sneak-premiere in 1978 and continues to this day because of its "overwhelmingly negative" portrait of Turkey and Turks, in other words the country that actually sentenced Hayes to an appallingly severe incarceration, and the people at the prisons who indisputably abused him to the brink of madness and death. Did anyone really expect a different portrayal... in the film version of the non-fiction book... written by the guy who (barely) lived through it all? Oh, just you wait...!
Without relying on the tempting crutch of spoken narration, Sussman and Morina spin out this epic story, spanning five decades and many personal and sociopolitical viewpoints, with total clarity, sophisticated wit and a driving pace that manages to match the legendary nail-biter that inspired it. It's one of the more compelling movies of any genre I've seen in the last ten years.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
In a perfect world, Sally Sussman and Anthony Morina, the creative team behind this often-astonishing non-fiction festival hit, would be under contract to HBO, Netflix, Amazon Video or another cool cable channel or movie-streaming service and be paid buckets of money to choose well-known films based on real people and events in modern history as launchpads for a series of documentaries exactly like MIDNIGHT RETURN. I'd eagerly gobble up every single one.
As a huge fan of MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, the 1978 Alan Parker blockbuster about a young American, Billy Hayes, notoriously tossed into a hellish Turkish prison when he's caught wearing corset of hashish-bricks taped to his body while trying to board a flight home, I've seen the movie many times since its initial release -- when my Vietnam vet dad, a much more successful early 70's ex-international narcotics courier, rocked my 11-year-old world by driving us almost a full half-hour to Waterville, Maine, on a school-night, to see it on the big screen. Yet until a few days ago, when a friend's lucky invitation to MIDNIGHT RETURN's premiere theatrical run at Beverly Hills' Music Hall (it's next big-screen engagement is Palm Springs, and is obviously the better way to catch it),I had no clue Parker's brutal, electrifying, nerve-shredding suspense classic was just the opening act of an outrageous and controversial saga that stretched over 40 years.
I don't want to give away any of the surprises Sussman and Morina weave into the doc so liberally, and the tale of what REALLY happened to Hayes before. during and after Parker's adaptation of his bestselling memoir is so fascinating and expertly structured, it's not until after viewing MIDNIGHT RETURN does one realize what a feat of storytelling Sussman and Morina have pulled off, juxtaposing vintage news clips, scenes from MIDNIGHT EXPRESS, and a slew of jaw-droppingly candid new original interviews with Hayes, Parker, producer David Puttnam, composer Giorgio Moroder, Oliver Stone (who won an Oscar for his EXPRESS screenplay and is a priceless part of the story) -- and a well-chosen sample representing the apparent millions of Turks (and Turkish-Americans) for whom Hayes has been a living Satan and MIDNIGHT EXPRESS is likewise apparently the greatest scourge ever committed against Turkey!
This bizarrely fervent controversy began with Parker and Hayes bringing the film to Cannes for an incendiary love-it-or-hate-it sneak-premiere in 1978 and continues to this day because of its "overwhelmingly negative" portrait of Turkey and Turks, in other words the country that actually sentenced Hayes to an appallingly severe incarceration, and the people at the prisons who indisputably abused him to the brink of madness and death. Did anyone really expect a different portrayal... in the film version of the non-fiction book... written by the guy who (barely) lived through it all? Oh, just you wait...!
Without relying on the tempting crutch of spoken narration, Sussman and Morina spin out this epic story, spanning five decades and many personal and sociopolitical viewpoints, with total clarity, sophisticated wit and a driving pace that manages to match the legendary nail-biter that inspired it. It's one of the more compelling movies of any genre I've seen in the last ten years.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
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