Midsommar - Fairytale meets Nightmare meets MeToo

In one sense Midsommar is a subtle & labyrinthine film, in another sense though it really isn't.

Dani (Florence Pugh) is a young woman who suffers a tragedy when her sister vanishes, committing suicide and killing their parents at the same time.  She decides to go with her unloving boyfriend and his douchebag mates on a Eurotrip to rural Sweden, where one of the guys hopes to encounter a traditional people he is studying for his masters thesis.  Their friend Pelle is Swedish and has agreed to take them to the traditional Midsommar festival, which will celebrate life or some such.  Sounds like a great time.  But of course this is an Ari Astor film, so insanity, deception and a bonkers final act are only 90 minutes of film away - you have been warned.

Initially the film's descent towards a magical nightmare in its final act appears at odds with the very real drug-induced crazy of the previous 2 hours, but the visuals place us clearly in the space of a fairy tale.  Nothing is really real here.  There are a lot of messages lurking in the fairy tale, but somewhere between castigating know-it-all Americans for imposing their world view on the planet and creating a physical manifestation of one woman's loss, the real moral is about the tyranny of self-centred men.  All the men who come with Dani to Sweden are self-obsessed man-children caring either about sex or careers, pursuing self-immolation in the name of a higher power or simply being unable to notice any worldview or culture out side their own.  They are multiple manifestations of the most negative traits present in a certain type of young, privileged man.  With Midsommar, Ari Astor is calling them out; he has made the first fairytale / horror of the MeToo movement.

So far so fine.  Midsommar may be a film that has its moral compass switched on, but does it succeed beyond that?  It's certainly too long, with one or too many tripping out sequences that could have been cut without consequence.  I find it hard to get beyond thinking that it's trying too hard to be too mystical.  The film opens with a mural shot that I presumed probably tells the story to come (it does - I went back and checked), but of course we don't see it long enough to really internalise.  Early shots of Dani and company often show paintings of animals or bleak natural landscapes hung conveniently above their heads - foreshadowing their eventual fate.  Though these elements serve to underscore that this is a fairy tale (i.e. Ari Astor doesn't really think we should kill off annoying privileged young American men!), it's a touch heavy-handed.  It's these elements that make the film feel a lot more complex than it really is.  For all that messaging and psychedellic shifts of tone and shock moments, it actually has quite a straight message.  Guys - it isn't all about you.

Bad Boys 2 - My apologies to the world

It would be going too far to say that I enjoyed watching Bad Boys last week, but suffice to say that I now understand the guilty pleasure of that who do.  Paper thin plot, casual misogyny, guns-all-balzing buddy cop movies have been a staple of a certain cinematic genre for decades.  Bad Boys brought the charismatic Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to the genre, and 'livened' everything up through Michael Bay's insane directorial style.  It was the cinematic equivalent of the sidebar on the Daily Mail website - we might not like it, but there's a reason it gets so many clicks.

Just what was it that Bay / Bruckheimer thought it was about Bad Boys that made it a success and that they needed to replicate in the sequel?  The original was silly and littered with light-touch misogyny, but was silly fun and had nothing of the overt crassness and desperation of part 2.  Never was a film more in need of an editor - or even someone ready to point out that some things simply aren't funny.  An animatronic pair of rats having sex - not funny.  A scene where dead bodies tumble out of a coroner's van and get run over - not funny.  Martin Lawrence accidentally takes Ecstasy - funny for 1 minute, not funny after 5!

In a normal review I might apologise for having skipped on too far at this point.  How about a quick overview of the plot?  What even is Bad Boys 2?  Well this isn't a normal review.  Bad Boys 2 only has a plot in the same way that Russian dashcam footage on youtube has a 'plot' - you're just waiting for the next crash.  Imagine everything that's wrong with society, every prurient politician who turns out to be a sex pest, every preacher who is revealed as a kiddy-fiddler, every union official on the take from organised crime, every Daily Express article lambasting the crass sexualisation of youth that shares the same front page as a photo expose of the newest youngest 16 year old starlet, every article in The Sun demonising immigrants and at the same time asking why football fans are racists.  All of that.  Imagine all of that distilled into 150 minutes of film.  That is Bad Boys 2.  It's encapsulated by a long montage near the start - probably intended to show us that drugs are bad (the bad guy is a drug king pin).  The montage takes us through a neon & florescent lit night club.  The guys and the girls are drinking, popping pills and having a great time.  The camera tracks and pans around dozens of party-goers, up-skirting all the girls and moving with the beat.  The montage then ends on one guy who appears to be over-dosing, and is thrown out on to the streets.  This is Daily Mail moralising; happy to titillate its readers with the saucy details and take their money for the privilege, but then ending on a moral downturn, expecting everyone to believe that the message is "drugs are bad" and claiming to not understand when some of its readers took them seriously.  With this one montage Michael Bay did more than some of his contemporaries will do in their entire careers to capture the hypocritical pseudo-morality of our age.  If only it was done with any satire.  Sadly Bay is playing it entirely for the titillation.  Bollocks to him, and bollocks to his film.

At 2 hours and 30 minutes, even the glimmers of hope (and they do exist) are overshadowed by the running time and the relentless drive to turn the dial on every action scene up to 11.  The film ends with what should be a breathtaking pinnacle, as Smith and Lawrence are chased in Humvees through a Cuban shanty town.  It looks like the production crew built a shanty town on a hillside and drive a load of cars through it, set off a bunch of explosions and trashed the whole thing.  This probably cost an enourmous amount of money, time and manpower to produce.  But rather than allow the stunts space to breathe on screen, we are treated to a series of jarring cuts that make this indistinguishable from the half dozen other cgi & effects-driven chases earlier in the movie.  Even when the film has the potential to be good, Bay doesn't seem to realise it and just fucks it up.

The one upside?  I now understand more of the references in Hot Fuzz.

Bad Boys - Opening scene analysis

The film watching year got off to an interesting start recently.  In the last few months since I posted on here I have watched several 'good' films, but I am drawn towards a bit of film analysis after watching Bad Boys.  All films are worth watching, even this 1995 action comedy that Michael Bay used to introduced the world to his unique paparazzi style of film making.  Everything is dialled up as high as possible, everything is as crass as possible.  Everything is Bay:

The opening precredits scene of Bad Boys provides a wealth of detail about Bay's style and tells us much about the film to come.  We open with heavily-filtered shots of a steaming hot afternoon on the Miami coast, the camera flies over the clouds and sea before switching between close up and telephoto shots of a speeding sports car.  Electronic music pounds and begins to rise.

Quickly we are inside the car listening to the Tarantino-like dialogue of two characters talking shit.  Except these guys aren't chatting about what the French call a Big Mac, they're telling us two things 1) they sleep with beautiful woman, 2) this is a very expensive car (exact price tag provided).  They pull over.  A pretty woman with no lines is introduced with an upskirt shot and used as a distraction.  Pounding music continues to rise in volume.  Our two wise-cracking leads overcome being car-jacked by cracking wisely.  Cut to credits.

As far as film openings go, absolutely everything you need to know about Bad Boys is clear from this scene.  This will be a film about two wise cracking bad-asses who will beat the bad guys by cracking wiser and smarter than anyone around them.  They value money, sex, beautiful women and chatting shit.  Female characters will be defined by their clothes and attractiveness to men.  The audience will be distracted from any flaws in the movie by 1) girls 2) sass 3) cars and 4) all of the above.

Every Frame a Painting produced an excellent dissection of Bay's style several years ago, and everything he talks about is present in Bad Boys.  Bays style is reflective of a style that's immediate, over-produced and stylish at the expense of any substance.  His work has influenced and come to be influenced by commodification of our times, of people defining themselves by their relationships with money & wealth, and of the desire to get the most 'likes' - where in the crowded online space only the most extreme gets any airtime.  If ever there was a film-maker who's work defines our era - for good or ill one can make a strong case for Michael Bay.

Better films to be reviewed later I promise!