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.