Parasite - A masterwork

I went into Aldershot Cineworld 4 weeks ago with some trepidation.  With the cinematic world in an absolute gush over Parasite, what if I didn't like it?  The awkward conversations with friends of mine would be just the tip of the iceberg.  Imagine having to go through your life defending a position against overwhelming consensus - the absolute hard work of it.  Just so much hard work.

Parasite - luckily - is a masterwork.  Rarely upon watching a film is it so clear so quickly that such a description isn't an overstatement.  Rarely does it become even more apparent the more one thinks about what one has seen.  Parasite is the first non-English language film to win best picture at the Oscars.  It is that rarest of rare things - the Academy getting it right.

At its simplest level Parasite is a deconstruction of the madness of our capitalist system.  Through smart characterisation and story-telling, it rips apart the contradictions of class in that system by setting two families against each other.  The Kims are poor.  The Parks are wealthy.  By the end of the first act the Kims have inveigled themselves into the Parks' lives by posing as various hired help.  Mother Kim the housekeeper, father Kim the chauffeur, son Kim the teacher, daughter Kim the therapist.  Are these lies created to prey on the upper-middle class fears of the Park family and quietly pocket their cash?  Or perhaps they're the actions of smart entrepreneurial underdogs doing nothing less than spotting a market for society's latest panacea?  Or neither?  Or both?  Capitalism much?

This story is rich enough in itself to merit your attention.  However it is myriad of other details that turn this film into the masterwork it has already been lauded.  Smart use of camerawork and set / setting convey visually the difference between the Kims and Parks.  A character ascends and is blinded by the sun as he emerges into the golden pastures of the Parks' garden.  The Kim family manifest as cockroaches under the Parks' furniture.  The families' respective houses each have a window looking out on to a jarringly different view of the world.  These and many, many others demonstrate an attention to detail in the creation of this film that elevates it far beyond its basic story.  The apex of the first act is as flawless a sequence of cinematic storytelling as I have ever seen.  The more I think about it, the more analysis I absorb of its visual breadth, the more I am in awe.

The film naturally asks us to consider the meaning of its title.  Who or what is the parasite?  The Kims naturally prey on the Parks, but then the Parks treat their help with inhuman disdain.  Then there is the underclass, leaching from everyone else.  The final message either condemns everyone or gives them all a pass as mere pawns in capitalism's great never-ending game.  In years to come A-Level film studies students will write essays on this exact question - and it feels an honour to have been there when it first came out.  Parasite is a masterpiece.

Mary Queen of Scots - a modern re-framing

The machinations of the British royal family eh?  As it was 450 years ago so it is today.  Someone is in favour and someone is on the wane.  Someone thinks someone else should abdicate the throne.  People who don't fit the bill are hounded out by a whispering campaign of the chattering classes.  England and Scotland are uneasy bedfellows.  Some things never change.

In the mid 16th century Elizabeth I sat on the English throne, the only remaining offspring of Henry VIII.  Her distant cousin Mary sat on the Scottish throne, but claimed the throne of England too through her heritage to Henry VII.  That was only a problem because Mary was a catholic and that was very important for some reason.  What the courtiers of England really wanted was Elizabeth to birth an heir so they could put their eggs in this future basket and cast both women aside.  But Elizabeth was having none of it, had no children and refused to name an heir.  Eventually Mary gave birth to a boy who would unite the kingdoms as King James I of England / VI of Scotland, and then she was killed for the privilege.  Spoiler alert.

When a creative force decides to retell a story that has been told a dozen times before in a dozen different ways, one expects there to be a reason for doing so.  In this retelling of the intertwined lives of Mary and Elizabeth, the intention is to rebrand it as a struggle of women against the glass ceiling and male domination.  Here - at its most basic level - Elizabeth succeeds because she shuns her own femininity and rules as a man; whereas Mary fails because she wants to rule as a woman, rather than in spite of it.  Elizabeth refuses to make herself obsolete, as she would be in the eyes of her courtiers were she to create / name an heir.  As soon as Mary has her son and heir, she is doomed - the men around her lose interest in pretending they're loyal to her, discarding her in favour of the male heir.  The choice is clear; act like woman and be condemned for it, or act like a man and be commended for that too.  This is an interesting slant for a contemporary audience familiar with such themes and how they play out in the modern work environment, where there are often vastly different behavioural expectations for men and women.

It is a shame then that the actual film feels incredibly flat.  There are a number of directorial misteps that are scene-breaking.  The worst being at the concluding meeting between the two queens.  The space where they meet is draped with silk demi-curtains that cramp the space and get in the way of several shots.  We spend a very long time with Mary, but far less with Elizabeth, an editing decision that gives Elizabeth much less sympathy than her distant cousin.  It isn't clear if that was intended.  If so then it's odd as this is meant to be about two woman each fighting in their own way to survive in a male-dominated world.  Equal sympathy is deserved surely?  The narrative occasionally jumps periods of time without it being completely clear why other than to maintain historical accuracy.  Finally, there is a short battle sequence in act 2 that is mostly incomprehensible.  What with all participants dressed in similar leather jerkins and slugging it out on a river bank it's messy to the point where I just wanted it to end so we could get on with the story.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are great actresses.  Ronan will be rewarded by the Academy eventually, but it was the film's make up and design that was fairly nominated at the 2019 Oscars.  This isn't the only way it was edged out at those awards, since The Favourite was given awards for Olivier Coleman and nominated in multiple technical categories.  That it went head-to-head with The Favourite is prescient and unfortunate, because it meant that not only was Mary Queen of Scots not the best period British monarchy film at the Oscars that year, it was also not the best period British monarchy film that specifically re-examined historical events through the lens of 21st century gender politics.  The Favourite is more engaging scene-to-scene, is superbly-directed & lit, contains beautiful production design and costars Rachel Weisz - an actress too-often under-appreciated by the Academy who was righted nominated for her performance.  I may not have been as blown away by The Favourite as I was hoping, but its treatment of this subject is a level above Mary Queen of Scots.  Save for Ronan and Robbie themselves, I can't find many reasons to recommend this film.  Watch The Favourite.

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!

Fiddler on the Roof - Sunrise Sunset

Just finished watching Fiddler on the Roof.  Wonderful storytelling.  Felt the need to share the film's centrepiece song Sunrise Sunset.  Sung during the wedding of Tzeitel and Motel, the sung is sweet, moving and beautifully performed here with an Oscar-winning arrangement.  Tear-jerking for all the right reasons.

The Favourite - not quite my favourite

Earlier this year Olivia Coleman won an Oscar for her performance as Queen Anne in The Favourite.  She has been a stalwart of British TV and transatlantic film for years, and rightfully was honoured for the work she has been involved in.  It feels like there is a limit number of female actors who are allowed to be big stars as they age, Coleman is only 45, but the industry appears to be grooming her as the next Judi Dench.  Why else would she be cast as two versions of the British monarch in two years (she has since been cast as our very own Liz in the 4th series of The Crown)?  Watching The Favourite reveals why she was the Academy's choice this year, her character swings from the regal to the mad, from isolation to outrageous expressiveness, and crucially goes through a decent into weakness and madness that bares her inner self.  It's a classic Oscar-bait role.

The Favourite puts a 17th century spin on both the class and gender differences that lie at the heart of Western society.  Starring alongside Coleman is an actress who matches her step for step - Rachel Weisz is outstanding as Anne's confidant, secret lover and #1 adviser Sarah Churchill.  It's a story about how throughout history there have been women as powerful, driven and Machiavellian as any men in the modern era, and men as vain and love-stricken as any doting 1950s wife was expected to be.  The plot focuses on intrigue at court as Queen Anne's health fails and war in France comes to its final stages.  Churchill attempts to run the country and military over the lesser-qualified heads of the simpering men of parliament.  Into this lands Churchill's cousin Abigail Marsham (Emma Stone) - vying to regain influence in the only way a woman in the 17th century could rely, through the favour of a man (or perhaps woman) of power and wealth.

Filmed on site at Hatfield house in Hertfordshire, the production team have gone to extraordinary lengths to capture the location on screen.  The cinematography makes liberal use of a fish eye lens, often sitting in one locations and pivoting around to follow movement - bringing to the attention of the viewer the fact this is very much not a set.  Extensive use of candle light necessitates expert lighting to keep everything as dark as possible while picking out facial detail - perfectly executed here.  The film rightly won Oscars for both production design and costume.  Black and white costumes feature strongly amongst its female protagonists, emphasising their role as central power-brokers as opposed to simpering extras.

All this praise, and yet The Favourite didn't completely grip me.  Perhaps it was the niggling feeling that the use of the fish eye lens was mostly to show off Hatfield House rather than an artistic decision?  Perhaps 'intrigue at court' plot lines featuring British monarchs have become so commonplace that they bore me?  Perhaps there's a subconscious part of my brain getting discombobulated by the lack of patriarchy (all those simpering make-up-wearing idiots chasing adoringly after partially-interested women - is this what it is like to watch most films as a woman?).  Whatever it is, I'm sure it will recede upon a second viewing - there are simply too many good things to say about this film.  The Favourite is obviously a film I will recommend.