Asteroid City
Wes A’s back again
Whimsy among stargazers
Wes, come back to earth?
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
Gunn leaves MCU
Vol. 2 left a sour taste
Will parting be sweet?
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
Um, who asked for this?
80s icon now icon in…
Can Mangold save it?
No Hard Feelings
J-Law does raunchy;
Cameron Diaz retired.
So… can this be wise?
Killers of the Flower Moon
Leo and Marty!
Gangsters again! Not excess.
(A three hour epic…)
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
Henry Czerny’s back!
Soft-spoken threats in between
Death or glory stunts
Oppenheimer
C Murphy the lead
Atomic guilt is the theme
Will time bend again?
Dune: Part II
Paul A returns
To see the future jihad
Will he make it rain?
Scream VI
Bright lights, big city
Ghostface escapes Woodsboro
Who will survive? Gail??
The Killer
Fincher does hitman
Fassbender does many takes
Exacting thrill ride?
As the title suggests, so forth.
The Way of All Flesh
It’s been thirteen years since Avatar was released, and here comes the sequel. That is a preposterous delay, but one of the most interesting things for me is that it pinpoints a seachange that I missed because of my general checking out of the MCU. At one point in the 2010s it seemed like 3-D was the defaut mode for blockbusters. Not real properly planned and photographed 3-D of course, just post-production conversion. There was a time when I had to carefully scan the cinema listings so I could boycott 3-D, and its outrageous surcharge, and just see films in glorious 2-D. And, because I stopped going to see the increasingly bland Marvel movies and their ilk, I didn’t notice when it happened but clearly that situation flipped, and suddenly most screenings were 2-D again, and it was 3-D screenings you had to seek out. I would like to think that some of this was simply people voting with their feet, but equally with Disney’s monopoly/monopsony power it could simply be that they dropped 3-D conversion because with their increasing affinity for last-minute CGI VFX there simply was no finished product to convert. And so everybody had to adjust to that, studios and audiences alike. In the same way that the 2010s have seen audiences inured to sloppy fight editing, vague and incomprehensible action sequences, with frankly embarrassing CGI blighting all. But for a whole generation that’s normal; cinema is CGI capes that look crap.
Unseen & Unheard
Talking of things that are frankly embarrassing, ahem, my first reaction to seeing Vertigo toppled in the Sight & Sound poll because of incredibly obvious vote-rigging was to laugh out loud. I don’t have much time for the Sight & Sound poll, so I’m not hugely invested in defending its integrity. I genuinely feel it’s sheer good luck that Vertigo ever got the accolade. Back in 2012 I was just nonplussed by the results. I felt that people weren’t genuinely voting on what they thought were the greatest films of all time after much thought and prayer. They weren’t even voting for their own personal favourite films in a spirit of adorable idiosyncracy. They were not voting for anything they actually liked or thought good, but voting with an eye to impressing other people, to try and outdo other critics with their obscure choices in a spirit of too cool for film school. At the time I said the amount of silent films that had popped up was akin to someone saying I love the theatre but it’s all been downhill since they stopped wearing the masks. A statement that would not make it immediately obvious that this person actually does love the theatre. And this time round the process has been even more transparently absurd. But who cares? Whatever the intention was, it has surely backfired.
Hallowe’en is coming. And for the first time since 2019 it is a Hallowe’en capable of having hijinks be plotted for it. Great! And yet…
The Lighthouse is showing The Shining and The Thing on the big screen over the Hallowe’en Bank Holiday Weekend. I am interested to see both on the big screen. Interested, but not enthused. I still find the return to normality while COVID still swirls about … unnerving. Especially as my private fear with which I have freaked out numerous people remains a twindemic of a nasty flu season coupled with a resurgence of COVID in a new variation that combines the original’s lethality with Omicron’s transmissibility, forcing everyone to stay indoors just as a second Beast from the East descends upon us that stays for weeks not days this time round, and rolling blackouts plunge us into teeth-chattering frozen hell. But I digress.
As much as I find the universal pretence that COVID is done weird, I am also wary of cinema audiences for another reason. 2018’s 40th anniversary screening of Halloween at the Lighthouse. Sure, I can think of films that were pretty miserable viewing experiences for me; Crawl, The Monk; but usually that was one or two people going out of their way to be obnoxious. 2018 was the first time I was party to an entire cinema going out of its way to be obnoxious. And feeling very old, and also very disconnected from the baffling attitude on display. Which leads me to think that by studying English at college, I was part of a bubble. One that may not exist any longer, even within that rarefied field.
As the title suggests, so forth.
Totally Censored Movies
I was watching Ocean’s Eleven on TCM recently, when I had the disconcerting sensation that something had skipped, like a vinyl problem but visually. And then waiting for a line that never came, and another one I particularly treasured that also never came, I realised that the skips were very real and were in fact obnoxious censorious cuts in the movie. Somehow, this was playing after the watershed but was still censored. And then it dawned on me, this might very well be the American TV edit version of the movie. God help us. I don’t know why TCM has suddenly decided to start doing this for an audience outside America. But the mind boggles about how this could play out. Will we finally get to see for ourselves the wildly disconcerting spectacle of Cameron shouting at Ferris Bueller ‘Pardon my French but you’re an aardvark!’ or might we get the infamous Dadaist moment in The Big Lebowski when someone is told ‘This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!’ Who knows. And who knows, why after all these years TCM has chosen to do this.
I fell over a quote in the Atlantic the other week to the effect that nobody is the same person now that they were before the pandemic. Is it true?
Well, maybe… Certainly as things have opened up I have found myself… unwilling to return to 2019. Not unable, though also that to a degree, but more unwilling. I cannot rouse myself to excitement at scanning cinema listings for the new Mia Hansen-Love, try I ever so hard. I find to my surprise that the Gate theatre has a new artistic director, but scarcely shrug. Barry Douglas performs the Beethoven Triple Concerto at the NCH, and I am not there. It may not even be a question of will, so much as a fundamental disconnect – I know I should be excited by these things, I have the memory of being enthused by their predecessors in the past, and yet it seems like everything in that sphere happened to someone else, not to me. One sympathises, but it has nothing to do with me. Maybe this is only a temporary aberration. Maybe it is a permanent seachange. But, having initially scoffed at the idea that everybody is no longer themselves, I now think- yes, that’s true.
In some senses I find myself doing a somewhat baffled personal inventory akin to Kate McKinnon’s post-6/1/21 ‘What Still Works?’ SNL sketch. It’s rather like standing dazed in a room full of disassembled building blocks, and seeing which ones I can still get to glom to form a Lego statue recognisable as me. I still like listening to Lykke Li, the bard of heartbreak and unrequited love. I still like watching The Avengers, and savouring John Steed and Emma Peel being debonair and romantic. I still like walking in Marlay Park, and hearing the strange sound made by the wind whistling thru tall trees. I still like ruining both coffee and ice cream in restaurants, by pouring one over the other. I still like the inimitable sound of Sorkin speeches and Gershwin glissandos, the thrill of Mondrian lines and Van Gogh swirls. But on many fronts I feel psychically unsteady when my hollowed out sense of self clashes with the 2019 self remembered by others; who are disconcerted to find my ‘passions’ extinguished.
And so I ask myself Bogart’s Casablanca question to Bergman in the mirror, and unnervingly I don’t know the answer.
Best Actor
Dan Stevens (I’m Your Man & Blithe Spirit)
Michael Keaton (Worth)
Jude Law (The Nest)
Best Actress
Melanie Laurent (Oxygen)
Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Kate)
Carrie Coon (The Nest)
Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place: Part II)
Best Supporting Actor
Christopher Lloyd (Nobody)
Cillian Murphy (A Quiet Place: Part II)
Stanley Tucci (Worth)
Mathieu Amalric (Oxygen)
Best Supporting Actress
Garance Marillier (Madame Claude)
Amy Ryan (Worth)
Cate Blanchett (Don’t Look Up)
As the title suggests, so forth.
Lynch After Lynch
A strange thought came to mind the other week as I was listening to the sound of the wind whistling thru tall trees, a favourite sound of David Lynch. Is Lynch, like 1990s Tarantino, a dead-end, or, more accurately, such a singular creative explosion that while he at first might appear liberating and invite people to join him in his explorations he actually leaves a Tunguska-like blast radius around him which nobody else can ever enter. Can you make a film that has surreal elements and escape being called Lynchian? Can you use dream logic or corny dialogue mixed with extreme violence and weird sexuality and not have everyone start writing up their Lynchian comparisons? Can David Lynch even escape his own shadow at this point? I’m not comparing The Nice Guys to the work of David Lynch, but Lynch’s description of how to write a screenplay; hoard ideas like a squirrel collecting acorns, and when you have forty conceits that’s the guts of an eighty minut movie; seems to be oddly applicable to Shane Black’s screenplay.
As the title suggests, so forth.
Why must Eon always burn the other cheek?
I was initially hostile to complaints about the new Bond film featuring ‘yet another’ scarred villain, until I realised the defence was complete nonsense. Facially scarred villains have not been nearly such a Bond staple as Eon would make out. Dr No has no hands certainly, but it is not until we meet Largo in the fourth film that we meet a character with a maimed visage. Blofeld is scarred in You Only Live Twice, but then he is not scarred in the next two movies. Hook hands, third nipples, megalomania, all these are present and correct, but scarred villains really cease to be a thing with Bond … until Goldeneye. And thereafter the quotient of scarred villains gets completely out of control: Sean Bean, Robert Carlyle, Rick Yune, Mads Mikkelsen, Javier Bardem, Christoph Waltz, Rami Malek. It seems almost as if the new generation at Eon was so worried about living up to the legacy that they became fixated on one element of the past and magnified it out of all proportion as some way of proving their rights to the property.
Wes Anderson, you are locked in a prison of your own devise
It was dispiriting but unsurprising to read an interview with Robert Yeoman in which he talked about how a warehouse had to be used to shoot both The Grand Budapest Hotel and The French Dispatch because Wes Anderson’s camera movements had become so outre that real locations could no longer accommodate them. For years Paul Fennessy and I have had a flight of fancy which finds Wes and Jason Schwartzman or Roman Coppola or Owen Wilson seated at a diner in Austin; furiously scribbling dialogue and scene ideas in yellow legal pads, and beaming at each other happily, until a shadow crosses Wes’ face, and he asks in horror and disappointment, “But wait, can we do that as a tracking shot or a series of whip-pans?” Because if not, well, there’s no place for it in the cathedral of conventions that Wes Anderson has imprisoned himself within. Now it seems the reality of physical space itself has to be shot down in order to shoot the Wes Anderson way. I think this may be why since The Darjeeling Limited I have responded more positively to his animations (Fantastic Mr Fox, Isle of Dogs) than to his live-action efforts (Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The French Dispatch). The necessity for artificiality to achieve the necessary artificial camera moves grates less when all concerned are made of felt. In his own demented way you could say the presence of live human beings not to mention the built human environment is now getting in the way of the Wes Anderson aesthetic.
It took 25 years for me to finally watch Kingpin, and I nearly stopped at the point which had been the reason I had been avoiding it for quarter of a century.
I had always been wary of a dumb comedy that treated losing a hand as a comic plot point. But the actual sequence was beyond anything I could have imagined. It put me in mind of another film I only recently caught, 1981’s slasher The Burning. The prank that leaves Cropsey hideously scarred and bent on revenge is not a million miles away from the punishment meted out to Woody Harrelson’s bowler in Kingpin, with two differences – in one this maiming is obviously a motive for obsessive revenge, and in the other it is a deliberate act of staggering sadistic malice. Paul Newman gets his fingers broken in The Hustler, not chopped off. That Woody’s bowler has his bowling hand fed into the machine and the directors cut to a woodchipper …
I paused the movie, for about two hours. And then we returned to Woody smashing an alarm clock with his hook hand. His hook hand is played for laughs over and over again. And then lo and behold it turns out that Woody can bowl just fine with his rubber hand, which has also been played for laughs. I could only think of Angel, where Wolfram & Hart lawyer Lindsay is written out with an episode devoted to his new evil hand, a mystical transplant for the one Angel cut off in the gruesome season 1 finale. And so we see Lindsay, with his stump where his hand used to be. Looking at the guitar, which he can no longer play because Angel cut his hand off. And pulling one of a number of pre-knotted ties off his rack, because he can no longer knot a tie because Angel cut his hand off. Not quite the approach of the Brothers Farrelly to a bowler having his bowling hand ripped to ribbons.
Talking Movies 