Dunkirk - Bit of a slog

Though Mark Kermode was very clear in his advice that one really must see Dunkirk on the big screen, once again I fell foul of the common thread on this blog these days - that I simply don't have the time.  Christopher Nolan's portrayal of the evacuation of the British army from France after defeat in the Battle of France at the start of World War Two was it seems so epic that to experience it in any other way would fail to do it justice.  And it certainly sets itself epic goals, telling its story in 3 interweaving acts on different time scales.  We see events on Dunkirk's beaches over a week, follow a civilian rescue boat in the English Channel over one day, and also a group of fighter pilots over a single hour.  Nolan received praise by bringing dynamic and non-linear narratives to mainstream cinema with Inception, and he attempts something similar here.

The goal is to tell a story that's epic in scope by focusing on personal stories, and it's a technique that's mostly successful.  It allows intimate storytelling about a historical event so huge one can easily forget that real people were involved.  Stealing the show at every turn is Mark Rylance, an actor who's lack of cinematic output meant I only discovered him relatively recently.  Here he plays a man piloting one of the 'small boats'.  His grim determination to do the right thing tempered we assume by the memories of horrors of wars past.  The fact that the script allows such personal story-telling and performances that carry weight is impressive in a film that requires expansive shows of hundreds of men cowering on a vast empty beach.

However, the film's scope is a little too large.  No matter how great Rylance's command of the camera when he is on screen, it is very much an ensemble cast.  The fact that we flit between the timescales with only a cursory opportunity for character development does harm the flow.  I applaud the final film for its production, effects, editing, sound, attention to detail and script; but it really is a slog to watch as we know how the story ends, and it becomes a 2 hour churn of survival and boredom and escape and return for the characters involved.  I feel like you need something to break up the flow and let the story breath.  I'm not suggesting that's easy as the story truly is epic, and telling it piecemeal from different angles / time-frames necessitates tough choices.  Essentially it's amazing, but a serious slog to actually watch.  Probably best enjoyed in two sittings.

So, all films are political.  What are Dunkirk's politics?  The right wing subtexts Christopher Nolan's cinematic output are well-documented, so is Dunkirk is a film that plays into the narrative of English exceptionalism?  Its release in the year after the Brexit vote saw it being adopted by well-known Brexit supporters as somehow channelling an anti-European sentiment.  All those deceitful French and frightened Dutch running from the German behemoth - leave it to the Brits to sort it all out.  So went 1940, so goes 2017.  If that is what Nolan intended then it is sad indeed.  But I doubt his motives were quite so nakedly political in playing to the UKIP crowd.  The British soldiers on the beach are hardly portrayed as paragons of heroic intent, rather as men and boys who are caught in a historical moment and just want to see another day.  I am prepared to give Nolan the benefit of the doubt here, and hand responsibility for nationalistic tub-thumping to the Faragists.

I suppose it would had been nice to have a couple of non-white Brits on the beach (there are black French soldiers shown), but the honest truth is I have no idea what the ethnic mix of the British Expeditionary Force was in 1941.  For all I know the film is completely realistic in its casting.  I don't feel I have enough information to judge.

Well that was a bit of a slog wasn't it?

Four Weddings and Funeral - about love, but not in the way you'd think

What to do on a Friday night in when your girlfriend is deeply uninterested in the stack of 'good film' DVDs?  Well you go on Netflix and discover that Four Weddings and a Funeral has appeared.  It is 24 years since the release of Four Weddings and Funeral, and as such 23 years since I saw it.  Surprisingly little arm-twisting was required to get me to watch it.  Yes - surprisingly little.

There are a lot of people out there for whom the film will require no introduction, such was its absolute domination in British popular culture in the mid-90s.  It made a star out of Hugh Grant and raised Wet Wet Wet to the status of pop gods after the film's sound track included 'Love is all around' - which then spent the whole of the summer of 1994 at position #1 in the UK singles charts.  The film's title explains its structure.  We follow Hugh Grant and his lower / middle / upper London society friends as they free-load their way through 4 weddings and 1 funeral.  It's a series of 5 short vignettes, each beginning shortly before the event with Hugh Grant (playing Charles) swearing merrily as he struggles to arrive on time.  At each event we see a little more about the connections between the characters, and learn that Charles worries he will never find the woman of his dreams, that he will never have his 'thunderbolt' moment when he falls in love.  At wedding 1, Charles meets the mysterious American Carrie (Andie MacDowell), after wedding 4 doesn't pan out as planned, Charles and Carrie have their 'thunderbolt' moment.  The end.

This film is seminal for many people - but not for me.  Far too many head-scratching oddities about the story.  It is never clear why this group of people of different ages and backgrounds are friends.  Perhaps it's meant to reflect the political rhetoric of 90's Britain in which John Major called for a post-class society?  It's hardly representative of British society though.  Why did they include a mute character as Charles brother?  He brings much needed heart to the story, but having conversations in sign language slows the pace of the film down at crucial moments.  It certainly nails the film as one that wants all-inclusive Britain in the modern age ensuring everyone is represented.  But doing this to the detriment of your story-telling is extraordinarily careless.

The most glaring oddity is the final 5 minutes.  There are 3 specific things that happen in the final 5 minutes that undercut much of any prior enjoyment.  The first is Charles and Carrie kissing in the rain - Andie MacDowell's line "I hadn't noticed it was raining" is one of the most jarringly poor moments of acting I've ever seen in a major motion picture.  Perhaps the line itself is the issue, and MacDowell's problem is that she's trying to work out how to deliver it without sounding like she's reading the script.  Whatever - it takes you out of the drama immediately.  The second is the literal thunderbolt we hear when Charles and Carrie declare their love in the rain.  I know that we have been told Charles has been searching for his 'thunderbolt' moment all his life - but seriously: if you look up the meaning of weather in fiction 1-0-1, it says thunder = bad.  If someone says something and then thunder and / or lightening happens, it means THIS IS BAD.  This casual misuse of the language of storytelling is perhaps more jarring even than Andie MacDowell's inability to deliver bad dialogue.  The third thing is that the most sympathetic character in the film, played by the best actor in the film (Kristin Scott Thomas as Fiona), is revealed in the closing montage as the only character who ends up with no one despite previously declaring her life-long love for Charles.  So we have bad acting, bad use of audio effects and a bad epilogue.  What hope for love Richard Curtis?

So the message of the film is that people who demonstrate heartfelt love are doomed to live a single life?  Or perhaps the thunderbolt that accompanies Charles and Carrie kissing really should be taken as a bad omen.  After all Carrie spends the night with Charles after wedding 2, when she is already with her future husband of wedding 3 - perhaps she's not as loyal as Charles imagines.  Perhaps their time together will be as short-lived like all Charles' other relationships?  Perhaps the message is that pining for your 'thunderbolt' moment stops you seeing what's in front of your eyes?  Perhaps the film's not quite as superficially about love as most of its fans in the 1990s imagined?

Or maybe it's simply a feel-good movie that reflected the cultural dynamics of the era, put its handsome young leading man in a series of good suits at weddings, didn't think very hard about its plot / structure and came out on top by rinsing a pop track until everyone was sick to death of hearing it.  Anyway, I wouldn't go too far out of your way to watch it.  Watch Black Mirror instead.  Seriously.

A Simple Favour - random tone

Get this - I went to the cinema the other weekend!  It has been a very, very long time since I actually passed through a real life movie theatre - close to 9 months in fact.  Since February I've lived within walking distance of Aldershot Cineworld, and as such this omission is even more sharply brought into light.  With the internet on temporary blink and shitty weather in the outdoors, the cinema was a-calling.

Choices then - what was the least-bad-looking thing on at midday on a Saturday?  Anna Kendrick in some sort of dark comedy I suppose.  Why not.  The reviews told me it was a bit mad but good for entertainment - which is pretty much an assessment I agreed with having watched 2 hours of tonally shifting film that does its best to defy easy pigeon-holing.

Anna Kendrick plays Stephanie, a single mother who does home video blogs and is about as close to middle-of-the-road suburban niceness as it is possible to get.  Blake Lively is Emily, a city-working, high-heel-wearing, hard drinking, liberally swearing complete opposite of Stephanie.  Emily is introduced to us stiletto-first, baffling Stephanie with her assurance, her face covered over with a huge umbrella.  Foreshadowing innit.  Emily and Stephanie somehow become friends, Emily asks Stephanie to look after her son for a bit, Emily disappears.  Cue mystery.

At its heart the film contains a mystery that's easily intriguing enough for 2 hours of your life.  Lively and Kendrick excel, and when the plot swerves into unexpected territory it's done with pace and enough commitment to its own sense of bonkersness that it just works.  Just.  This is a film that contains a lot of swerves of plot direction, and crucially of tone.  In one moment the film is a Mrs Marple mystery, then its secondary characters are giving it mmm hmm, then it's Gone Girl, and then back to slapstick silliness.  Tone is the most important thing in a film.  To paraphrase RedLetterMedia - there is a reason there isn't a pie-in-the-face gag at the start of Citizen Kane.  Mess with the tone and you mess with everything in the film.  The script and the performances carry A Simple Favour, which is no bad thing of course.  But it ain't no Gone Girl.

I first saw Anna Kendrick alongside George Clooney in Up in the Air and I thought she would have a big career eventually.  I suppose that is what's happening now, what with starring as the lead here and fronting the Pitch Perfect series.  I would like someone to convince her to take on some more serious roles soon.  The things she's most famous for are mostly rather silly.  She ain't going to get no Oscar nominations for starring in the nth iteration of a wildly popular a capella sing-a-thon.

The Shape of Water - science fiction never felt so wondeous

It feels like it is harder and harder to do these days, but I do try to make a point of watching the films that succeed at the Oscars in the year of the Oscar ceremony when they win.  Only took me 6 months - but last weekend finally watched The Shape of Water.

Guillermo del Toro is a wonderful film-maker who's work has always been rooted in the science fiction / fantasy genre.  Pan's Labyrinth is a work of heart-felt art.  Pacific Rim is absolutely everything you would want from a classic East Asian monster movie - with Idris Elba.  He knows how science fiction works.  He knows you can tell stories about the human condition, childhood crises and love equally as well as you can create an insane world populated with container-ship wielding Godzilla rip-offs.  It's all good.  What a joy that this man was awarded the Oscar for best director this year.

If there is a story that science fiction excels at, it is the story of The Outsider.  It's The man who fell to Earth, Silent Running, Wall-E, Spock and Data in Star Trek, every character in Buffy - you name some good science fiction, I guarantee you there's an outsider.  All the characters we sympathise with in The Shape of Water are outsiders in 1950's America.  Be they a monster, black, gay, mute or a foreigner, they are all rejected by the characters representative of white, middle class, middle aged, middle of the road, male America.  All look to each other for comfort and companionship.  It is here that we see the developing love story between the mute Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and the monster from the deep being experimented upon by government researcher in the secret facility where she cleans.  Lost in a world that either doesn't see them or doesn't want them, they find each other, before rescuing each other from a world shunning them.
 
The colour and lighting in the film are astonishing, so much so that I am even more upset to have not seen it in the cinema.  Blues, greens and greys are used throughout, but the lighting pierces through the potentially drab underwater palate and infuses everything with a magical hue.  When we finally do get reds they stand out and reflect the emotional point the film has reached.  The final sequence had us both in tears.  It isn't just the stellar performance from Sally Hawkins that did that - it was everything.  Script, lighting, set design, art design, colour, editing - every element of film-making worked perfectly in unison to create a wonderful touching story with layers upon layers of emotion and depth.

It's a film that is 100% inflected by science fiction.  The tone is part steam punk, part magical realism and part McCarthyite allegory.  There are elements of body horror, government conspiracy and obviously creatures from the deep.  Science fiction wins the best film Oscar - at last.  This wasn't no sympathy award because the Academy wanted to prove it was able to give its highest honour to a genre that's different but ever popular.  This was absolutely deserved.  A true achievement in film.

The Ghoul - not quite David Lynch

With my girlfriend away this evening I made the most of the chance to watch a film she would be unlikely to give the time of day simply because of its title.  The Ghoul is a dark and twisted psycho-criminal drama that wants very much to be a part of David Lynch's canon.  From the recurring highway motifs to the constant shifting of motivations and perspectives, the film strives for a twisted Lynchian tone that disorientates the viewer.  This shit is hard to pull off successfully, and here is it seldom effective.

Tom Meeten plays Chris, a cop who is in London for a few days from the North to help his old forces friends solve a strange crime, a crime in which it appears victims of a shooting have carried on coming at their shooter after they should have died.  But the mystery quickly veers away from how these victims came to be, shifting jarringly on to Chris himself as he attends a psychotherapist ostensibly to inveigle into the world of the victims.  We quickly question Chris' mental health, his motivations, and even if he is a police officer at all.  Fantasy and reality bleed into one as the reality of Chris' life and the life of the persona he has taken on come together.  Eventually they are indistinguishable and we are lead on a circular path in which pretty much anything could be true.

I don't know precisely what it is that David Lynch and Shane Carruth do to make films like this that don't suck.  It is something to do with the tone, and to do with establishing a world in which the rules of that world might not be the same as the rules in our world, but they are self-consistent none-the-less.  I think that writer / director Gareth Tunley is trying to have it both ways here.  He wants a film that's completely set in the real world, but with jarring shifts of character and motivation that just sit awkwardly.  It's also very dark in places, which make it even harder to get under the skin of the main character and feel like you care what's happening to him.  Compare that to the way that Lynch lights Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive.  It's a fine effort and interesting enough to watch, but in addition to needing something to help me care more, I wanted a tiny bit more resolution at the end.  There's circular story telling, and then there's circular story telling.  This is the latter, and it's fairly unsatisfying.

Was great to see Alice Lowe in something else, shame that she's not apparently writing anything at the moment (according to IMDB).  I remain eagerly awaiting a follow-up to Prevenge.

When Harry met Sally - the perfect romcom

Given all the critical acclaim that this film has garnered over the decades, it was a surprise to myself when I realised earlier this summer that I hadn't actually seen it.  Given the familiarity everyone has with modern rom-coms and that scene where Meg Ryan's vocal demonstration made a landmark out of a real life New York deli, I think I had decided I didn't need to actually watch When Harry met Sally.  I had probably decided it was the first in a long line of modern rom-coms, in which the conventions have been re-armed and re-used to many times there was nothing to be gained in going back and seeing how it was done in the late 1980s.  I can tell you now reader - I was wrong.

When Harry met Sally charts the growing relationship over several years of the eponymous characters, played with wonderful comic aplomb by Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan.  The film cuts between the years from when they first meet and annoy each other, to years later when the meet and annoy each other again before striking a weird friendship, and then years later still when they wonder if friends can ever really be lovers.  The whole film is barely longer than 90 minutes, but effortlessly charts the emotional and personal journey that each of these characters goes on as they work out in their own way what it is they want from life.  It's a wonderful screenplay that shows us their relationship grow organically, does it efficiently and with heartfelt humour.

The elements of romcom are all there.  Harry and Sally each have a best bud they get to offload their thoughts to as they work out where they need to be.  The funny bits are funny and the emotional bits are - well also funny, but funny in the way you want them to be.  And of course we get the big finish when the guy and the girl realise they do actually after all that want to be together.  And rightly so, and other ending is wrong.

I wonder how many people born after a certain year have actually seen When Harry met Sally.  Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan are actors who's stock fell off dramatically during the mid / late 1990s and so I doubt many born after 1990 have even heard of them.  I was born in the late 1970s and even I had decided I could safely ignore it.  The film works because it is about people realising if they are in love, what that means and what they should do about it.  That's the human condition.  It has been happening for 1000s of years and (with luck) it'll still be happening 1000s of years from now.  Its themes are universal and mean as much today as they did in the 1980s with Meg Ryan's dated hair stylings.  Billy Crystal's concluding monologue says it all.  Watch it and see for yourself if you don't end up with a tear in your eye too.  I dares you.

Molly's Game - Fighting to be treated normally

If there exists one major issue with watching films on planes, it is the fact that the screen is at best something like 8 inches across.  It might be wide screen, and it might be in HD - but it is still only 8 inches.  One of the primary consequences of this is that films emphasising spectacle don't work anywhere near as well as they would on a huge silver screen.  A film needs a story to work on a plane.  A film needs character and heart to work in this format.

Step forward Molly's Game.  Step forward an engaging character study that charts the rise of Molly Bloom, who inveigled herself into the world of high stakes poker games after her dreams of making the Olympic ski jumping team were dashed by injury.  The story is real, and the real life Bloom really did start work as a cocktail waitress before stealing players away from her employer and living the American Dream on her own terms.  She then really did get busted by the authorities who ultimately couldn't find anything she had done wrong, other than be a woman trying to do in American society what men have been doing for decades.

Jessica Chastain looks amazing in an ever-changing procession of expensive cocktail dresses and designer shoes.  I'm very sure that Idris Elba (playing her lawyer) also looks great in his perfectly-turned out suits, but I wasn't really paying attention to that.  She is an actress with extra-ordinary charisma who I hope continues to be cast is roles that require as much.

Ultimately the story is about a woman who just wanted to be given the same opportunities as everyone else, and then be treated the same regardless of if it went right or wrong.  But of course society gets in the way, a society that cannot accept how an attractive well-dressed woman can succeed without somehow being either on the take or sleeping her way to the top.  It's a story that happens every day in our world, a story of a woman having to answer questions, make decisions and take chances that a man would never have to deal with.  With Hollywood having experienced something of a self-reflexive moment recently in the light of the Harvey Weinstein revelations, it is a story that certainly hits a contemporary nerve in the industry.

The only criticism I have of the story is after all Molly's independence and fight to ensure her place in the world on her own terms, her redemption is handed down to her by a courtroom judge - a man.  But then I suppose in doing this the film remains rooted in the real world, a world that remains run by men.  We've come a long way, but there's still a long road ahead.

I Tonya - Class warfare

Intercontinental flights mean on one hand going for your holidays.  On the other hand though they mean movie time.  My recent British Airways flights to and from the USA each came equiped with some very modern entertainment systems.  The flight back in particular had an interactive 3D mapping system that killed more time than you might think possible by giving me a plethora of angles from which to view the virtual position of the plane on a globe.  This is all great.  But what we really want are the films.

I Tonya was my first film on the way out to Vegas.  As an Oscar winner from earlier this year that I hadn't yet seen, there was no contest when deciding what to watch first.  The story of Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan is one that will likely be unfamiliar to everyone under the age of 30, but to anyone who was watching the Olympics in the early 1990s these are names that will immediately recall the insane controversy of the time.  The story is retold here, and the film is clear in that it is doing the telling from Harding's point of view.  Both were world class figure skaters on the US Winter Olympics team.  Kerrigan was attacked at a training session and a conspiracy involving associates of Harding was quickly revealed to have had a hand in the attack.  The attack left her unable to compete in upcoming competitions, but still able to take part in the Olympics.  The subsequent media circus that whipped itself up around the pair stunted any and all interest in the actual skating competition, the personal drama behind the scenes appeared much more interesting for all involved.  Harding always denied involvement, but the world couldn't believe that she had nothing to do with it.

Margot Robbie plays Harding, in a performance that appears to involve a fair amount of physical endurance on her part and CGI effects allowing her to perform the manoeuvres on ice that are worthy of a Olympian.  The sequences of her on the ice are masterfully crafted.  The story is really one of an ordinary girl-turned-woman who simply loved dancing on ice, and of all the idiots, chancers and hangers-on around her who tried to interfere for reasons of jealousy, ignorance or self-promotion.  Allison Janney rightly got an Oscar for her portrayal as Tonya's mother - a foul-mouthed control freak who wants to get her daughter ready for the 'real world' by showing her no love at all.  Equally well-observed are Tonya's simpleton of an on-off-on boyfriend / husband and his self-aggrandising mate.  It isn't clear which is mean to be more ridiculous; the later's claim to be able to carry out covert ops, the former's willingness to believe him or the pair of them being so inept at carrying any part of their plan out.  It is their bungled attempt to injure Kerrigan that causes the entire controversy.

Ultimately the film is a story of a working class girl who was better than the establishment at something the establishment had decided no one beneath them had any right to be better than them at.  Harding is shown losing competitions because she won't dress the way the judges want.  Because she won't conduct herself 'like a lady'.  Because she won't abide by a set of rules designed to prove to people like her that she's trash.  If the establishment won't accept a 'white trash' girl beating them at their own sport, then it certainly won't accept her thumbing her nose at them while she does it.  When she is shown to be connected to the attack on Kerrigan, the sport's establishment quickly seizes the chance to deny her the only thing she has ever had to show her self-worth - her skating.

Ultimately the only crime Tonya Harding ever committed was to be working class and challenge the established order.  As with so much in society, the only real conspiracy was the one no one ever wants to talk about - class.

The Thing - The blood test scene

A review of The Thing appeared in my YouTube subscription feeds recently.  Made me realise how remiss I had been in failing to share here one of the most effective single horror sequences in the genre.  The story is that a group of scientists and engineers are trapped in the Antarctic with something.  They have worked out that the something is capable of transforming itself into any organic creature, and now they suspect that it has taken the form of one of them.

Kurt Russel is MacReady, who has appointed himself (through acquisition of firepower) a judge who will determine which of his fellows is real and which a shapeshifting demon.  His theory - that the thing will feel pain if even a bit of it is scolded, even some siphoned blood will still be part of the monster, thus revealing itself.  Cue tension, machismo, one of the best jump-scares you will ever witness and animatronic horror of the finest order:



The Thing is an almost perfect horror movie.

The Death of Stalin - A can a comedy with this much death still be funny?

Armando Iannucci is the satirical prophet of the post modern age.  Ever since he co-penned The Day Today in the 1990s his work has been at the cutting edge of political satire in the UK.  His work has always flourished by taking what is really happening and pushing it just beyond the edges of something we might expect.

Iannucci's real gift has always been creating characters that remind us how everyone is fallible.  In the same way that the Coen Brothers did with The Big Lebowski (got the Coens in the mind at present), there is great joy to be had in presenting big stars, big cheeses and big wigs as laughable, vainglorious people who are no more masters of the universe than the common man.  See Alan Partridge.  See every character in The Thick of It who wasn't Malcolm Tucker.  It makes sense to apply this logic to any era of celebrity or politics - after all there's nothing new under the sun and nothing especially dim about the political try-hards of our era in comparison to other times.  As such I presume the idea behind this film was born - what if the members of the all-powerful Soviet Central Committee at the time of the death of Joseph Stalin were in fact all rather idiotic careerists?  Could that be funny too?

Well it turns out the answer is yes and no.  There are universal themes when satirising politics, but for specifics to work the audience needs to be familiar with the players and the important issues of the times.  The Death of Stalin is a film that does well to introduce the central characters and tries hard to put us into an era of mass intellectual pogroms and disappeared people, but it starts to falter when one realises that this stuff really did happen and isn't actually that funny.  When we satirise the uselessness of the UK government it can be funny as they really are useless.  They're not busy executing random proportions of London's population at the same time as being useless.  If they were then I think Iannucci would be making a very different film (or more likely he wouldn't be making films at all).

As a result the film adopts a very distracting tone, one which shifts between extra-judicial executions and hi-jinx over which potential successor to Stalin gets to greet his daughter first.  The opening sequence provides a blueprint for the tone they should have adopted throughout.  Here we see a concert being recreated so that it can be recorded and delivered to a barely-interested Stalin.  Everyone is terrified of displeasing the leader - who turns out to be rather deadbeat and not the least bit interested on exacting vengeance upon anyone when the recording is delivered late.  It works as a satire of the Soviet cult around Stalin, of Stalin's perceived status, it's funny, and crucially no one gets shot in the face - which usually isn't funny.

The film could even have kept its rather brutal ending if it had adopted this approach - the final bloody move by one faction in the central committee against the other would be effective and jarring if it was the first time we had seen any real violence.  The reality of the era could have been highlighted after the audience had been disarmed by the comic idiocies inherent in it.  But by littering violence throughout the audience is protected from any shock, as well as being unable to get immersed in the satire.

Having said all this, Iannucci has a really good go at making a film I would suspect no one else would even attempt (probably for the reasons outlined here).  The casting of Jason Issacs as Marshal Zhukov is a particular highlight, showing a revered 'hero' of the Soviet Union as a Tucker-esque foul-mouthed brute interested only in punching his opponents in the face.  Iannucci completionists and those interested in Soviet history have no reason to avoid this film, but I suspect most people will be left rather cold.

The Coen Brothers - a list!

Recently my girlfriend and I have watched a few Coen brothers films.  We have made a tentative pact that this will be our new film project - to see all the Coen brothers films.  Well - to be more specific the project is to get her to watch all the Coen brothers films, as I've seen them all.  And since everyone loves a list, here's my top 5 Coen brothers films.  In order!

5 - Blood Simple

Twisted, dark, funny, brutal - and a debut from Frances McDormand.  Blood Simple is a small story in small town America about people getting swept up in a twisted endeavour they hardly understand.  The Coen Brothers' first feature film is filled with set pieces and a searing attention to detail that marked them out as potential starts in the modern wave of independent American cinema.

4 - The Big Lebowski

A lot of people love The Big Lebowski.  My first encounter with the film left me thinking it little more than an entertaining foray in to the general weirdness of a nation, but a recent reappraisal has left me thinking much more highly of it.  The film is a celebration of slacker culture, reminding the world to stop taking itself seriously and poke fun at its self-proclaimed movers and shakers.  The Dude wears a gown, drinks vodka & milk, doesn't care about the money or the art or the sex lives of the glitterati - he just wants his rug back.  The Dude is the hero for our times.  The Dude abides.

3 - No Country for Old Men

The film that finally scored the Coens the Oscar win they should have got with Fargo (though Fargo did win them a statue for best screenplay), No Country for Old Men is a desolate tale of crime and circumstance set in deepest hottest Texas.  With much in common with Fargo, the film is carried by two performances - Javier Bardem is brutally deadpan as the classic Western highwayman for the modern era, Tommy Lee Jones his match as the gruff and tired sheriff struggling to keep up with the brutality of the criminal element he now faces.  Bleak and brilliant in equal measures.

2 - A Serious Man

This is a film too often overlooked.  A Serious Man is a straightforward biblical tale told in a very non-straightforward offbeat way.  It's a retelling of the story of Job in 1960s America, an America the Coens probably grew up in, an America they have constantly idolised in their work.  The story weaves together a love of a time and a place with a the confusion felt by a character who cannot work out where he is meant to be and what he is meant to be doing.  When the world tells you to be sober and serious to be considered important, but society will not allow it - where can you turn?  The film poses many questions, and offers few dangling threads of answers.

1 - Fargo

Fargo is deceptively simple in its characters, plot, setting and resolution.  The Coens make expert use of the snowscapes to frame everything that happens, creating a world in which the small time criminal dealings of Jerry Lundegaard stretch out to fill the empty tundras of North Dakota.  The characterisation of Marge Gunderson is peerless; her touching relationship with her husband highlights the pettiness of the criminals and liars in the film, her ability to see joy in the world without being a sucker is an inspiration to anyone watching.  It is probably the best film made in the 1990s and as such a clear winner on this list.

Mother! - Mental!

Darren Aronofsky has something of a reputation for the weird.  And weird I like.  As such it is hardly a surprise that I very much enjoyed several films in his canon - with Black Swan and Pi being particular highlights of mine.  Common themes running through his work are body horror, psychological confusion and chaotic mystery.  Fun times.

And so it is here in Mother!.  Jennifer Lawrence is the titular character, with a strong supporting cast who play characters named in the credits only by their roles.  We experience Lawrence's character's world via carefully-constructed pov directorial choices.  For the first third of the film she suffers from confusing memory lapses as her husband tries to deal with a variety of visitors to the house who appear to know her.  By the middle of the film the visitations have grown stranger and stranger to the point of absolute chaos.  The entire landscape of the house changes from shot to shot as violence and debauchery break out around her.  Throughout there is a visual metaphor that hints at blood, loss and a broken heart.  Eventually she gives birth to a child and it gets stolen and eaten by a crowd.  Then everything falls to dust before the world appears to reset and we sort of cut back to where we were at the start.  And then it ends.

The film is an attempt to create a motion picture artwork installation in mainstream cinemas.  Doubtless Aronofsky has done extremely well to film in a way that emphasises the 1st person perspective, in some ways this remains the holy grail of cinema as an art form and so recognition deserves to go his way.  This plus the set design and editing have to be applauded for seamlessly switching between the nightmarish visions that encroach changeably on the house.  But - and this is the question we do love to level at abstract art - what does it mean?

My interpretation of events is the main protagonist is someone who has undergone a deep psychological trauma as a result of either a failed childbirth, or the loss of a child.  We are seeing various events from her viewpoint, inside the mind of someone who has gone insane but who's mind is still trying to rationalise the world.  As such events happen without cause, people arrive in the house who know her but she doesn't appear to know, the walls of her home appear to fall apart around her sanity crumbles away.  Eventually the memory of the death of her child resurfaces in the film's bloody concluding scenes.

Subsequent investigations online have led me to discover that my interpretation isn't what the director intended at all.  Aronofsky has stated that the film is a retelling of the garden of eden story in which Jennifer Lawrence is mother earth, Javier Bardem is god, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are Adam and Eve and all the mental stuff that happens are bible stories.  All the other characters in the book are people raping and pillaging the earth while mother earth looks on in utter despair and an unintervening god is more interested in the collecting adulation of his human creations.  The house is the garden of eden and the presence of the people is slowly destroying it.  One supposes that the baby is Jesus, and everyone eating him is the sacrifice on the cross.  This is what happens when you don't go to Sunday school - you don't see this shit before it's pointed out.

Anyway, if you don't want to worry too much about all this then Mother! is enjoyably dizzying and terrifying in equal measure.  Watching it is like experiencing someone else's nightmare, and in that sense it is worth checking out.  Just don't tell me I didn't warn you if you emerge from the experience feeling like you've woken up from a very (very) bad dream.

Days of Thunder - All films are worth watching right?

I'm sure that eventually my girlfriend's DVD collection (regularly claimed by her to contain only films that I have seen and / or are too terrible for us to watch) will finally become as advertised.  It transpired on Sunday evening past that her copy of Top Gun is in fact a double bill DVD containing a copy of Days of Thunder.  Note though that she made no attempt to pretend that Days of Thunder is in any way a good film, rather that it is was worth a watch to be able to appreciate Top Gun.  I don't need much convincing in these matters, after all - all films are worth watching.

Days of Thunder then.  One hesitates to describe a plot for fear of giving the film more credence than it permits itself.  It's a shame as the opening 25 minutes are an above average example of how to set up a simple, exciting action film.  We are introduced to our main characters, see some fast cars, work out who the bad guy is and who the good guy is, get told what everyone wants and teased as to why they want it, and then we're dumped into the middle of an excitingly-shot Nascar race with Tom Cruise (aka Cole Trickle here) proving his yankee heritage won't hold him back in the land of the redneck.  So far so simple.  Simple but effective.

It's what happens next and for the rest of the film that baffles me, because a plot never emerges from this.  We get a hint that Trickle's race engineer (Robert Duval) might have been complicit in a previous racer's death, a racer who's son now works for him.  We find out that Trickle has Daddy issues after his father sacked him.  Trickle is involved in a huge accident with his big rival (Michael Rooker) and his briefly hospitalised.  Trickle begins a romantic liaison with his doctor (Nicole Kidman).  Trickle convinces his big bad rival to get medical treatment.  Trickle decides to race in and win the Daytona 500 in his rival's place.

That's a series of events in the life of a racing driver we know only a little about.  But is it a plot?  If it wasn't for the actual racing scenes (Tony Scott directs - so it is no surprise these are the highlight of the film) then Days of Thunder would be extraordinarily boring.  I'm not usually minded to praise the Fast and the Furious series of films - but at least they keep it simple, keep it fast-paced and keep the action coming.  Days of Thunder only works at all when we're on the race track - the moment we step away it instantly becomes as dull as a post.

I am not as familiar with Top Gun as many are, but people tell me that Days of Thunder is a remake of Top Gun in cars.  One assumes that Tom Cruise was eager to build upon his successes in Top Gun and so went back to the original director and asked to do something similar again.  The fact that Cruise actually co-wrote the script is worrying.  The man can act, but he cannot write.

And what are the 'days' of 'thunder' anyway?  Is thunder the noise of the Nascars?  So then the 'days' of thunder would be the times of our lives when we race Nascars?  Or maybe those carefree days of our lives when we do what we want without consequences?  But the film's message can't be to do what you want when you're young without worry, because of the hospital parts and the brain injuries.  Or maybe that is the message - to make hay when the sun shines in your youth cos when you're older and you can't hack it anymore you're going to get sent to the pits and replaced by someone younger.  I can't decide what would be more depressing - this being the film's message, or that it is so haphazardly-written that it has no message.

All films are worth watching right?

Free Fire - a student film

I cannot remember what entity commended to me that I give Free Fire a go, which is a huge shame as I am not able to delete their recommendations from my life.

I suppose that left to my own devices I might have watched Free Fire even in the absence of the mysterious unknown recommendation.  After all, director Ben Wheatley scored high marks with the darkly comic Sightseers and darkly dark Kill List.  So the film reviewers of YouTube can relax - no one is getting unsubscribed after all.

Free Fire is the story of a gun sale gone wrong.  Two gangs (one with guns, one with money who want to buy the guns) meet in a warehouse and try to carry out the sale.  Except that something goes wrong, someone recognises someone else, someone fires a gun, and before you know it everyone is scattered to the 4 corners of the warehouse wildly firing their guns around mouthing off.

The reason this isn't all over in 30 seconds is that everyone has a terrible aim.  In fact it takes the remaining 70 minutes of the film for everyone to get shot (aside from the last man standing of course).  The entire final 3/4 of the film takes place inside this bloody warehouse.  I don't care if you're Martin Scorsese, but there are only so many ways you can direct a hectic scene with people wildly shooting in the general direction of each other and exchanging insults before it gets boring.  And Ben Wheatley is not Martin Scorsese.

The plus points here are that Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley are in it - a couple of actors I really like.  Also Brie Larson is our token female - which is quite amusing as she won an Oscar at around the time it was filmed, one wonders if had a sudden rush of regret at being involved.  Some of the banter before the gunfight breaks out is kind of amusing.  But really, that is all.

More than anything it feels like a slightly duff student film.  I say this as the location is static, effects easy to create, has a small cast that can all be contained in a single interior venue and seems to exist more to prove a point about film-making rather than do anything else.  It would be ok if it was funny.  Failing that at least make the action scenes exciting?  Failing that at least end on a spectacular set piece?  Failing that at least fill the film with interesting characters?  This last point it almost does by creating a playful tension at the start of the film, but that falls apart as soon as everyone runs for cover and spends the rest of the film yelling at each other from distance.  At times is becomes very confusing, which is impressive given that everything is happening in one place!

Sorry Ben Wheatley - I have really enjoyed much of your work to date, but this fails completely.

Annihilation - I read it first!

I do not read as much as I used to.  As such, there are increasingly fewer films-based-on-books that come out where I can say "I read that".  Annihilation is part of a rarer and rarer breed for me.

Based on Jeff VanderMeer's opaque and terrifying novel of the same name, Annihilation follow a group of scientists who enter an area of the Earth's surface that has been afflicted by some unknown event, causing it to be 'different' somehow.  In the novel this is Area X.  Here it is The Shimmer.  Whichever government of the near future is in charge has attempted to understand The Shimmer, sending in expeditions and messages, yet nothing returns.  Its mystery remains as impenetrable as the first day it appeared.

Starring Natalie Portman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the film puts us into the point of view of the explorers trying to survive and understand something that defies comprehension.  The story is told in mysterious retrospective as Portman is questioned after the event by hazard-suit-adorned men with confused and concerned looks on their faces.  What happened in there?  How long did it take?  How did she get back?  What is The Shimmer?  What does it want?  Her responses to questions are either to pose more questions or admit that she simply doesn't know.

We cannot understand what is happening in The Shimmer, even when it is happening in terrifying detail right in front of us we can hardly know what it means.  Inside The Shimmer we see a mixing of genetics as plant and animal life forms appear to be merging into new forms.  Time and distance occasionally seem to stretch or compress without meaning or explanation.  There is a strong implication that the people of the previous expeditions into The Shimmer have been subsumed into its own matter.  To ask what The Shimmer wants is like asking what a disease wants.  It just does its own thing blind to the organism it is destroying in the process.

There may be differences in character, event and motivation, but Annihilation is an excellent example of a hard science fiction novel being transferred on to the big screen thematically intact.  Themes of climate change and terminal illness are tightly woven into a plot that expertly remains mysterious all the way to the final scene.  I wasn't a huge fan of Alex Garland's Ex Machina, but here he has created a wonderful adaptation of a deeply confounding and mysterious story.  This should hardly be a surprise since he wrote Sunshine and 28 Days Later - more like these please Mr Garland!

Lastly - why was this on Netflix?  RedLetterMedia provided a very interesting analysis of this as part of their review.  They remark on how bemusing it is that in the era of #MeToo and a greater focus on the depiction of women in film, that a film with 5 female scientists doing science gets so quickly brushed under the carpet by the mainstream.  This really should be the film that the studio is shouting from the rafters about to prove how sexist they aren't.  But instead they've used an under-performance at US cinemas to panic about its wider release, and dumped it on to Netflix.  It's an interesting point that possibly says something about the way that film releases are heading in the near future.  Are we heading for a world where more thoughtful movies that are expected to attract a smaller art-house audience are released on to streaming services as standard?  Will the big screen eventually be reserved for the huge blockbusters designed to draw in the massive crowd with their spectacle?

Wherever the future takes us - at present I recommend everyone check out Annihilation.

Shakespeare in Love - Half a great idea

So I need to be careful about what I write here.  My girlfriend is quite the Shakespeare aficionado and showed much affection towards this film when we put it on the other night (currently on Netflix), so I shall tread lightly.

Shakespeare in Love was showered with praise and awards at the Oscars in 1999, beating Saving Private Ryan no less to the Best Picture prize.  The story follows Joseph Fiennes as The Bard himself, a struggling writer in 16th century London with a proto-script for a love story called "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter".  Real life actors and writers from Shakespeare's era abound as The Bard slowly refines his story into Romeo and Juliet.  Eventually the film conspires to have Shakespeare play Romeo and his secret love Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow) play Juliet on stage.  A woman on stage?  In the 16th century?  The scandal!

There is a huge amount here to love if you're into your Shakespeare.  Even someone with vague knowledge of his plays will appreciate the parallels with Romeo and Juliet, but anyone with a greater knowledge will pick up on the many references to not only Shakespeare's contemporaries, but also events, characters and entire scenes from the plays themselves.  There are three consecutive scenes where Shakespeare tries to meet Viola that exactly parallel the opening scenes of Romeo and Juliet.  Of course I didn't realise this as I was watching and I expect few regular punters would either, but it's clever attention to detail that demonstrates the love the film's writers have for Shakespeare's plays.

The film is a who's who of British famous faces from the late 1990s, and there are a lot of laughs where the ensemble are used to poke fun at theatre productions in general.  In particular Ben Affleck puts on an enjoyable performance as the over-achieving try-hard actor who has to be gently coaxed into accepting a non-lead role.  Everyone who has ever done theatre will know this person.  Praise must also be given for the way the film depicts with reasonable accuracy the creative process of theatre troupes in Shakespeare's days.  The writing of productions was a collaborative process.  Boys played the parts of women on stage.  Scripts were written and edited as rehearsals progressed.  People really can watch Shakespeare in Love and learn about how theatre worked 400 years ago.

The major issue the film has is that it suffers from an extremely unsatisfying Deux Ex Machina ending.  The drama peaks as the production of Romeo and Juliet reaches its conclusion, Viola's performance has the crowd captivated and we wait to find out what will happen between her and Lord Wessex.  Will the tale of true love on the stage sway Wessex to end his pursuit of Viola?  Will Viola's stunning performance convince the crowd that yes in fact women can be actors?  No.  Instead of any of that, Queen Elizabeth (played by who else but Judi Dench) turns up and tells everyone what they have to do.  And of course they have to do it cos she's the queen.  The end.

Way to undercut your drama.

Because of this I was unsurprised to hear that the script had originally been rejected and received heavy re-writes before going into production.  There's a moment early on when it looks like the driving force for the plot will be Shakespeare not knowing that the Viola he meets at the mansion in London is the same person as the 'man' playing Romeo in his theatre.  But they reveal their true selves almost immediately - no drama there.  So you need something else to drive the plot.  And the something else never concretely materialises.  Ultimately the film is enjoyable enough, but because of its final 10 minutes it feels like half a story without a real conclusion.  Yes of course it is extremely clever to allude to the plot of Twelfth Night arising from Viola's departure to the new world, but 'extremely clever' doesn't make for a satisfying end to a love story.

Bond films - the awards

With the epic year-long trawl through the Bond franchise coming to an end last Sunday evening it is high time that I made use of my time to make a list of my highlights and lowlights of the series.  And so with almost no further introduction - I present the winners of my awards for the Bond film franchise.

Best Bond:

Sean Connery.  It could so easily have been Roger Moore, but the raised eyebrows and super-hammy performances of his latter years in the role underlined how well Connery did to keep things away from cliche for so long.  Connery defined the role, Connery is the benchmark against whom all others are tested.  Connery wins.  No one can beat Connery at this - suave factor 10.

Best film:

A very hard category to call.  Re-watching them all again has given me a new appreciation of a series I thought I thoroughly knew.  I used to think Live and Let Die was great - now I'm not so sure.  Goldeneye was my first Bond experience - but now I've realised the plot makes little sense.  On the other hand I used to think The Man with the Golden Gun was trite, I've found a new appreciation of its straightforward plot and tense finale.

A few years ago I probably would have put You Only Live Twice in consideration - its quintessential Bond-ness defines the series and was the blueprint for Mike Myer's excellent parody Austin Powers.  But 50 years have aged it badly.  Its misogyny and casual racism would play very poorly to a modern audience I suspect.

As such the winner is... Octopussy.  I doubt that many Bond purists would quickly agree, but on a pure film level it is superb.  The plot is tense and has real danger to it.  The opening sequence is horrifying and the whole sequence culminating in Roger Moore's sad clown diffusing the atomic bomb is brilliantly paced - you almost let yourself believe that Bond could fail.  Maud Adams is one of the least meek Bond girls there ever was, and the bad guys are actually believable in their motives and actions (surprisingly rare for a Bond film).  Set aside the pointless and distracting references to tennis and brace for an occasional 'British Empire' moment - but aside from this Octopussy is one of the best scripted films in the series that gives Roger Moore a final hurrah before his reign as Bond quickly crashed downhill.  It's today's winner.  Tomorrow?  Who knows...

Best theme tune:

Goldfinger



It's almost impossible to look past Shirley Bassey's finest hour.  Sure, Live and Let Die is probably a better song, but every Bond theme song that's ever been written is and will always be compared against Bassey's gravely high notes layered against that wailing eerie brass section.  Tina Turner giving it both barrels in Goldeneye is probably the closest we've seen in more recent years, and Tom Jones does his best with Thunderball - but nobody does it better than Shirley.  Goldfinger, hands down.

Best Bond girl:

This is a very tough category, as it depends what you want from a Bond girl.  If you want a character who's Bond's match then you can't really look beyond Michelle Yeoh as Wai Lin in Tomorrow Never Dies or Maud Adams as Octopussy.  If you want someone who's going to be a witty sassy sidekick then it's probably Honor Blackman as Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.  If you want a femme fatale, then it's clearly Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale.

Having said all that, maybe you're just looking for someone who's straight-up gorgeous.  So I'm going for Rosamund Pike as Miranda Frost in the otherwise utterly awful Die Another Day.  So sue me.

Best Bond Moment:

So much to choose from, but in spite all the love I've handed out to the classic films of the 1960s and 1970s here so far - I'm going to plump for a moment from Skyfall.  After the awfulness of Quantum of Solace, the makers of Skyfall seemed in conciliatory mood and so after holding back for most of the film finally revealed a classic of Bond-gone-by, pulled out the steel strings and gave us Monty Norman's classic.  Oh how the cinema I was in did sigh with approval!

Low point:

Doubtlessly the nadir of the entire series is the moment in Moonraker when Bond is chased around Venice in a gondola - and some pigeons are so surprised that they do a double take.  After that point I'm surprised they made any more.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri - a fable for an America lost

The start of a new year is always an inspirational time to remember that one can go to the cinema on a lazy Saturday afternoon.  With the awards seasons in swing and the Oscars around the corner, it is traditional for the 'good' films to be released at this time of year.

I would image that writer / Director Martin McDonagh is confident his latest film is worthy of such consideration.  Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (yes, that really is its name) is a story of right v wrong, forgiveness v revenge, light v dark and death v rebirth set against the foreground of post industrial rural America adrift in a world that has left previous certainties behind.  Frances McDormand plays Mildred Hayes, a woman who's daughter was raped and murdered less than a year prior to the film's opening.  The town's police have made almost no progress in investigating the murder, and have a better reputation for assaulting prisoners than solving crimes, so Mildred resolves to hire three disused billboards outside the town and express her frustration publicly.

In Trump's America this act takes on a political dimension mirroring the election of the 45th president, overwhelmingly voted for by disenfranchised post-industrial communities in the 'fly-over' states.  The vote felt like a scream of pain into the abyss.  Without any real policy or plan, Trump offered himself up as the anti-establishment candidate, a vote for him was billed as a cathartic vote against the Washington elites.  Like Trump, will Midred's billboards actually make any difference to those who so eagerly put them in place?  Probably not - but she doesn't seem to care.  To her, the act of defiance in the face of the establishment is an end in itself.

The establishment here are personified by the police, played with no small amount of swagger by Woody Harrelson and Sam Rockwell.  Harrelson is police chief Willoughby, initially the antagonist identified as the bad guy of the piece by Maldred's billboards, Rockwell is Dixon - the redneck racist who drinks, fights and lives with his oppressive mother.  Each seem trapped by the hopelessness of an America fallen into ruin.  Even though Harrelson's character is the more likeable and seems genuinely crestfallen at his own inability to find a killer, an illness allows him no peace or escape from Ebbing's terminal decline.

Like McDonagh's superb In Bruges, Three Billboards plays out like a modern fable.  Characters are possessed of great wisdom when required, characters are possessed of great stupidity when needed too.  Vengeance is shown to be something that's an incredibly strong force, but ultimately hollow and only part of a cycle that leads to more violence.  Each of Hayes, Willoughby and Dixon try to get vengeance over someone or something they perceive to have wronged them - each fail.  Each of those characters are reborn in a sense, perhaps seeing the world in a new way.  When the final scene fades to black with our our anti-heroes heading towards an uncertain future, the fact that they're questioning their motives at all shows how far they've come.  Three Billboards is a wonderful fairy tale that channels a lot about what has gone wrong in America in the 21st century.  It's a deeply moving on an emotional level, but never stops being blackly humourous as we are encouraged to laugh into the face of the abyss along with its characters.  An excellent start to the year in cinema.