The Wolf of Wall Street - not Goodfellas

Leonardo DiCaprio has for some time been atop the pile of American film actors.  The question that still vexes is who to compare him to from Hollywood's prior eras.  I always saw his visceral facial range as comparable to Jack Nicholson, though obviously (obviously) Leo far outscores Nicholson on looks.  Martin Scorsese though seems determined to turn him into the successor to Robert De Niro, such is the relationship that has developed between director and actor since the turn of the millennium.  If Scorsese's films until 1999 were dominated by De Niro's unflappable control, his films since are built around DiCaprio's boundless physical energy.

It's physical energy that comes through strongest when watching DiCaprio's performance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese's 2013 film that documents the rise and rise of Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio).  Belfort was a cocaine-addicted rouge trader on Wall Street during the late 80s / early 90s who made his fortunes by miss-selling mostly worthless stocks to small-time investors.  At 3 hours of run-time, I had shied away from seeing it for some time.  The film's themes of the American Dream, capitalism going wrong (or working as intended - you decide) and toxic masculinity are as relevant today as ever.  DiCaprio plays Belfort as a wild-eyed prophet of greed-is-good hyper capitalism, full of energy, anger and drive to be the richest, most aggressive rule-breaker in New York.

I'm obviously going to compare with Goodfellas.  Why?  Well more than them both simply being films by Martin Scorsese, they're both films that focus on quintessentially American aspects of American life, and crucially the American Dream.  Both document a rise from humble beginnings at the expense of others into a dubious world that promises much to youth but many older hands have found to be ultimately hollow.  Both are critiquing the American Dream.  Goodfellas is one of the best American films made in the last 40 years, and Wolf of Wall Street isn't.  Goodfellas succeeds where Wolf fails in two areas, both in the arc of the main character and in the pacing of its final act.

Where Henry Hill eventually finds the hollowness at the heart of the dream he has been sold by his Mafia friends, Jordan Belfort never does.  And while Hill's world is falling apart, the pace and editing in Goodfellas speeds up, driving home the rapidity of the fall.  The long slow rise through youth quickly until Hill is left holding the morning paper describing himself as a 'shnook'.  Neither of these happen in Wolf, and while it may be true that to stay true to the story of the real like Jordan Belfort, the script cannot have fall in the same way as Hill, a similar tone could have been found without anything so dramatic.  An early Matthew McConaughey scene in Wolf has McConaughey embody a coked-up elder statesmen of the stock broker trade, left with nothing but vodka, money, masturbation and the adulation of Belfort.  The scene appears to foreshadow Belfort's potential downward trajectory into a similar tragi-comic figure.  The script writes itself.

But it doesn't happen, we end on a fall of sort for Belfort, but the assumptions underlying everything he has done are still in place.  Without the fall the film's pace stays fairly static.  In fact some of the longer, questionable sequences happen towards the end (Jonah Hill's choking, the entire portion dedicated to a Mediterranean cruise).  It amounts to a feeling that Belfort is a lucky, smart guy who gets to write his own path, in spite of all the people he's hoodwinked out of their investments.  There are no consequences for what he has done.  Of course one can reasonably argue that this is a real reflection of American society, often the rich and powerful don't answer for crimes.  And an audience is perfectly capable of making up its own mind on what they should think about Jordan Belfort.  But tone in a film matters, and the tone of Wolf of Wall Street is one of celebration of Belfort, of what he did, and of what he stood for.

The film succeeds is in its performances and energy of editing (especially sequences involving Belfort sweeping through his offices geeing up his troops).  The film doesn't work so well in the tone of its morality and choice of edit with respect to entire scenes that could have been cut.  Definitely recommended though.  It is Scorsese after all.

Sound of Metal - More Amazon releases!

Another Amazon release and this time starring Riz Ahmed, who has slowly but surely wangled his way into the mainstream of American cinema.  Sound of Metal (crucially not The Sound of Metal) is a deep dive into addiction and the pain of loss.  Ahmed plays Ruben, a once drug-addict and now drummer who is one half of metal duo Blackgammon.  Ruben's partner (certainly in the band, possibly in life - it's complicated) is Lou, who's heavily hinted-at influence over Ruben has brought him away from the edge of his addiction.  The pair now tour the US playing their acerbic brand of metal to small venues.  That is until Ruben begins to lose his ability to hear.

Ruben's descent towards total hearing loss is rapid and by the end of act 1 Lou has convinced him to reside at a retreat for deaf people - where we presume Lou hopes he will be able to either learn sign language and / or come to understand what is happening to him.  What follows is a treatment of a subject and a community that is seldom seen on film, that subject being deafness.  Given the history of silent cinema it may seem strange the subject doesn't get wider treatment, but even silent cinema isn't really silent.  The 'silent' cinema of the 1920s was accompanied by a piano player after all.  When Buffy the Vampire Slayer did a 'silent' episode it was only the characters who were silenced, the sound effects and musical cues are alive and well.  A true treatise on a descent into deafness suffers from the same issues that all 1st-person film-making does; it's just really hard to make a film from the 1st person.  How to tell a story about deafness and silence through the medium of film, a medium so reliant on sound?  Well that's what Sound of Metal does.  And it does it well enough to be recently awarded the Oscar for Best Sound.  Creating dead silence and engaging discordance is a lot LOT harder than you might think.

But Sound of Metal is really about addiction.  Yes it's about the literal addiction that Ruben has suffered and the crutch that music and Lou are to him.  But it's also about the less literal addiction that we each have to our own way of life and our ability to sense the world.  When Ruben is told he has to leave loud noise behind, he can't do it.  When he is offered a choice between hard work and an expensive quick fix, the fix is his new addiction.  Ruben's only kicked his addiction because he was able to focus on Lou and the music.  So the loss of the music terrifies him, but how much is the music an addiction in itself?  How to live without something you've always known?  It's a terrifying prospect.

When I started watching the film I was expecting music to be the saviour.  But the title has a double meaning; at first it's Ruben's saviour, later a grating cacophony keeping him from changing and growing.  The film almost ends where it starts, with Ruben fixated on something and trying to keep his addiction at bay.  Great performances from Ahmed and the supporting cast, and a superb treatment of a delicate and scary subject.  Definitely worth 2 hours of anyone's time.

Tenet - it's the same forward and backward. Is your mind blown yet?

Tenet was supposed to be last year's blockbuster, but here I am paying £4.99 to watch on Amazon Prime rather than 5 mins up the road at Cineworld.  As to if the Covid pandemic has changed cinema forever - the jury is still out.  The distribution company behind the new James Bond film are holding on to their product until crowds are allowed back at the big screen.  There's a chance that'll soon look like the last throw of the dice of an outdated era, as home cinema distribution becomes the new normal.  Only time will tell.

Time eh?  He segues neatly into the film.  Tenet probably works better the less you know about it, but I want to do a bit of a deep dive into it here so following this paragraph I'm going to liberally drop the spoilers.  Suffice to say that time is a big component.  John David Washington plays The Protagonist (literally - that's all we get) in Chris Nolan's latest epic exploration of shifting time, reference frames and non-linear story-telling.  Go in with an open mind, and expect to have a conversation afterwards.

Spoiler time.  We are dropped into the middle of a storyline, but from the point of view of us and The Protagonist this is the start.  The drama unfolds as The Protagonist slowly comes to understand that he in the central actor in a potential apocalypse playing out both forwards and backwards in time.  This is titillatingly interesting; but though Tenet is very clearly smart, it has no heart. The film constantly tells its audience about its drama, rather than showing it.  The biggest example of this is probably that we are introduced to the central antagonist - a Russian-accented Kenneth Branagh who is a bad man.  But we never see why he is bad.  We are told he is terminally ill and so wants to end the world, but we never see any visualisation of it.  We are told, not shown.

With no heart to it, one is drawn into picking at the threads of the multi-directional storytelling.  Nolan has proven himself an expert at using this sort of temporal multi-layering in much of his other work, but Tenet tends towards technobabble and far too often resorts to explaining its own smartness to the audience.  There are reams of material online nit-picking the film's internal logic to death.  I have had a go myself but I don't want to get into that here.  I'm happy to accept an extremely high level of internal illogic if it works in service of the story, but the primary purpose of Tenet is to be smart - and only then tell a story.  This is the biggest criticism I can lay at the film, as it actually makes it boring.  It must have taken a lot of smarts to construct 10-minute battle sequence in which half of the combatants are actually travelling backwards in time - kudos to the production team.  But I just didn't care what was happening.  No heart.

So how could the film be better?  For a start whoever was mixing the sound could get off their elitist high horse and mix a version that's suitable for home-viewing.  An easy win would be to fix the sexual politics.  Cat (Ken Branagh's wife) exists to be saved and delivers a cringing "won't someone please think of the children" line.  The Indian lady who tells us all about the future apocalypse war could have been revealed as the actual scientist from the future who invented all this crap that's going to kill us.  Maybe she could have been on a mission to come back and save us?  Mostly though just take out all the technobabble that Robert Patinson delivers, and show-don't-tell.  It's maddening that a part-time film blogger with zero followers should need to point this out to one of the most successful film-makers of the last 20 years.  Whatever.

Ultimately Tenet is Cowboys and Indians with time travel.  It's trying to be clever more than it's trying to tell a story; and it suffers hugely as a result.  If you want a real arthouse time travel film - watch Primer.

Saturday Night Fever - the 1970s were a very different era!

You know there are those films that you assume you've seen because you're aware of all the cultural baggage that comes with them, but then you realise in your 40s you've somehow missed them?  No?  Well for me Saturday Night Fever was until recently exactly that film.  John Travolta was already a star of stage and small screen when in 1977 his movie career was launched into the big time when he starred as Tony Manero, a young, cocksure Brooklyn lad who lives for disco.  Who amongst us can't see in our minds eye images of a white-suited Travolta throwing shapes to the sounds of the Bee Gees in primary coloured shirts with huge lapels?  Is it any wonder I'd assumed I must have seen Saturday Night Fever?

It is of course the film that launched the popularity of the disco movement into the mainstream.  With an iconic soundtrack supplied by none other than the Bee Gees themselves, it's a coming of age tale in which starry-eyed Tony Manero (Travolta) is exposed to more of the real world than he would ever want to see, confronts his prejudices and has to grow up.  Plus of course all the dancing.  There's a lot of dancing.

Though I was alive in the 1970s I was in no position to remember it, so I am happy to stand corrected as to the accuracy of the fashions and societal norms of the time.  If Saturday Night Fever does tell it as it was, then the world has changed a lot in the intervening 40 years.  New York was grittier.  Brooklyn was full of racists and husbands assaulting their wives.  Men were rapists, and the women who went with them trod a fine line between getting noticed and getting noticed too much.  The world was a dead-end place.  Saturday Night Fever is sometimes tough to watch for these reasons.  What was harmless & playful banter back then is a sexual assault in 2021.

Of course the Overton Window shifts through the years and with enough time something will always look dated.  For this I can't fault Saturday Night Fever.  Where the production team did drop the ball though is in a fundamental misunderstanding of the structure of their story.  The events of the film happen in roughly the following order - 1) Moreno is young and carefree 2) Morena falls for lady dancer Stephanie 3) a series of bad things happen 4) Moreno wins a rigged dance-off, causing him to question everything 5) reconciliation with Stephanie 6) the future is an unwritten story.  What the film needed was for #4 to be at the end.  After the reconciliation with Stephanie, they should then compete in the dance, and end on a big dance number.  They don't need to win the competition, they just need the final shot to be Moreno triumphantly living his dream on the neon-lit floor.  This isn't rocket science, Bollywood has been doing this for decades!

With the structure as it is, Moreno's final promise to Stephanie to grow up implicitly comes with a promise to give up dancing.  The understanding is that disco is a childish fascination holding Moreno back.  Only by giving up the thing that gives him a boyish glint in his eye can he grow and become a real man.  How depressing.  Much better would be to put the bad events earlier in the film, give Moreno a chance to stew in his nadir before the reconciliation with Stephanie in her Manhattan apartment and then send them both back to Brooklyn for the triumphant finale.  This is a film that's supposed to be celebrating disco; why can't we grow up and have a boogie?

Where the film is timeless is in Travolta's performance.  It doesn't matter how many years pass or societal norms change, that man can move.  From the opening strut (Stayin' Alive) to his solo performance (You Should Be Dancing) to the final dance off (More Than A Woman) - Travolta has it all.  I recommend Saturday Night Fever.  Travolta's performance is one for the ages, and in spite of a huge structural flaw in the story, the film's faults are easily covered for be the sheer joy in watching a man in a white suit single-handedly define a genre.

One Cut of the Dead - A genuinely novel experience

Low-budget Japanese zombie horror / spoof / comedy One Cut of the Dead isn't the film you're expecting.  Is doesn't matter what you're expecting or what you've been told or what preconceptions of the genre you have - this film isn't it.  Nominally a story about a film crew filming a zombie movie who get attacked by actual zombies, the opening 35 minutes is a single take in and around a warehouse with grainy footage that drops us directly into the genre-laden action without any fanfare or introduction.  Then everything shifts in a way that's not really describable without spoilering a hefty chunk of what makes the film enjoyable.

Enjoyably meta without ever coming across as smug, the film feeds you a slice of delicious cake, shows you how it was made, then lets you eat another slice, before finally giving you the recipe.  Something of the magic is lost in knowing how it's done, and you're probably never going to make it yourself - but it's nice to know how to do it none-the-less.

Limiting myself to a spoiler-free review makes it difficult to say anything specific.  What I can say is that anyone interested in the film-making process will likely enjoy it.  And it's not just film, anyone involved with a performative art that requires hitting cues, dealing with on-set problems and primadonas will recognise something familiar here.  One Cut of the Dead is an enjoyable curio I wholeheartedly recommend.

Back to the Future - reassuringly very (very) good

 Nostalgia isn't what is used to be.

Not my line - but Bill Bailey's.  It conveys a good point though, which is the nature of nostalgia has changed.  Even in my lifetime I've seen it.  I'm sure nostalgia used to be far less all-consuming.  Sure there were always people who loved Star Wars, but they didn't seem to be everywhere all the time.  Possibly it's the rise of the internet allowing disparate dedicated groups of followers to congregate and achieve a greater volume than they otherwise would have?  Perhaps the rise of all-access media has made it easier than ever for people to relive childhood memories (if you wanted to re-watch your favourite film when I was 10, you had to wait for it to be broadcast on TV - no Amazon Prime!).

I only realised that Back to the Future was a serious player in the plethora of field of nostalgic throw-backery when Secret Cinema put on a show and people lost their shit.  I remember Back to the Future, as a nerdy kid growing up in the 1980s, being interested in physics and wondering in awe about the possibilities of time travel, I loved it.  And the second one, and the third.  I still remember going to see Back to the Future 2 at Ilford Odeon, it's a wonderful memory.  The power of nostalgia is strong.  But the question always remains - was it actually any good?  Like - actually?

I always have a temptation to look dimly upon the cultural works that have been marked out for the platinum standard nostalgia treatment.  But having watched the film again 2 weekends ago for the first time in more than a decade - Back to the Future is very (very) good.  It's actually fairly difficult to find anything bad to say about it.

You will of course know the plot.  Michael J Fox is Marty McFly, who is accidentally sent 30 years into the past after his crazy scientist friend Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) is shot by terrorists.  McFly must then work with the younger Doc Brown to work out how to send himself back to the future, while at the same time trying to ward off the affections of his own mother (presently a teenager) and convincing her to check out the nerdy guy in the corner (who happens to be his dad).

It's tightly-scripted, full of attention to detail, well-scored and snappily edited with hardly one scene out of place.  Fox and Lloyd are perfectly cast, and though much has been made of Fox's non-teen age when making the film, he was only 23 at the time - hardly outside of the usual bell curve for portrayal of teenage roles on screen.  There are multiple escalating and overlapping plot threads, but they never get tied up or step on each others' toes. The plots then come together seamlessly with a prom night will-the-wont-they, leading straight into a nail-biting race against the clock to send Marty home and then a joyous denouement as all the things Marty got up to in 1955 feed into and subtly alter the present.  Aside from the usual 1980s issue of terribly-aged outfits and awful hair (so awful), there is nothing bad to say.  Prove me wrong.  I dare you.

And we haven't even talked about the DeLorean.  Chosen to be the vehicle for Doc Brown's time machine precisely because it was such an instantly recognisably flop, the cultural impact of Back to the Future is now such that it's a classic car with a following all around the world.  Culture innit!

So I take my hat off and tip it with respect - Back to the Future is a film fully-deserving of its place at the forefront of the world's nostalgiagasm.  Well played Robert Zemeckis; well played.    

The Lighthouse - HARK!

The Lighthouse utterly blew me away.  One scene in particular I realised at the end of it that I had a tear in my eye and was literally sitting on the edge of my seat.  As soon as it ended I wound the DVD back and watched it again; I was drawn in just as much as before, the camera slowly focusing into Willem Dafoe's starkly contrasting features as he calls down nautical curses from the depth of his soul.

Just enjoy.  Enjoy (blogger wont let me embed this).

HAAAAARRK!