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.