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.