Tenet

Christopher Nolan’s much anticipated new film is an intricate and satisfying puzzle piece housed in a less satisfying blockbuster frame.

John David Washington is the protagonist who has a mysterious close shave with a bullet that seems to whip out of woodwork and away from him during a terrorist siege of the Kiev Opera House. Shortly thereafter Martin Donovan informs him that he has been recruited for an international mission involving Robert Pattinson’s British agent that will take them from Mumbai to London, Oslo to Tallin, and deep into the cold heart of Siberia trying to unravel the secrets of Kenneth Branagh’s vicious Russian oligarch arms dealer. An uneasy alliance forms with Branagh’s estranged wife Elizabeth Debicki, as Washington and Pattinson try to understand why an arms dealer is able to anticipate all their moves as if he already knew them, and why ‘inverted’ bullets may be the least of their worries as a wider more sinister conspiracy unfurls itself.

And so to ‘inversion’… Time travel, but not really time travel. If you liked cult Ethan Hawke flick Predestination then you will like this. If talk of closed loops, grandfather paradoxes, and the like makes your nose bleed then you will not like this. Nolan’s script features the same deeply satisfying feeling as Interstellar and Dunkirk when a piece of the puzzle slots into place and you understand that there was more going on than you apprehended first time around. But this satisfying feeling is surrounded by the scaffolding of a blockbuster that doesn’t truly stand tall when the scaffolding is kicked away. Crashing a large airplane into a building for real is great fun to watch, and the chase with cars driving inversely on a freeway is also entertaining, but there is no true knockout punch of a sequence.

Some of this is because this is less fun than Inception, almost as if Tom Hardy and JGL’s roles had been collapsed into one and Robert Pattinson (rediscovering his inner Cedric Diggory) couldn’t possibly deliver both those notes at once. Some of it is because this has less heart than Interstellar, with the Debicki/Branagh dynamic not humming as it ideally should as the emotional motor of the movie. Nolan regulars Hoyte van Hoytema and Nathan Crowley are present and correct but the largely Northern European settings are neither as crisply shot as one might expect nor as intriguingly designed; indeed the finale recalls the crumbling Russian industrial hellscape from Hobbs & Shaw. Jeffrey Kurland provides some notably sharp suits and elegant dresses for the ensemble, but Hans Zimmer’s replacement Ludwig Goransson struggles to impose himself with any truly memorable motifs.

Tenet does not reach the hoped for heights, but it is devilishly clever and always absorbing; one wonders if perhaps making it on a smaller scale, more noirish, less blockbusting, might have been wiser.

3.5/5

Miscellaneous Movie Musings: Part XXXV

As the title suggests, so forth.

I tell you R-Patz, I just can’t stop washing my hands lately. You’d think I’d been reading Heidegger or something.

The End of Cinema, or at least American-led cinema

And so Tenet is here. Eventually. The most anticipated summer blockbuster of 2020 might also be the only summer (or autumn or winter) blockbuster of 2020 that actually gets released in cinemas. But not in America. I am still tentative about venturing to a cinema for the first time since the coronavirus arrived, but it’s a dilemma. There is no such dilemma Stateside, because Tenet is not being released in America. In some senses this merely makes painfully obvious what was already to be gleaned from statistical analysis of say Transformers or Fast and Furious: major American movies make more money overseas than in America. But the risk, to simply cut off the American market and throw it away as unnecessary, is still breathtaking on the part of Christopher Nolan and Warner Bros. And it seems, in this week of make-believe by Donald Trump that everything is rosy in the Rose Garden, that the pandemic has been defeated by his amazing leadership, that the roaring economy is now roaring again in a V shaped recovery, to take on an almost mythic cultural and political heft. The free world has given up on America providing any sort of leadership, and now even America’s own dream factory has given up on America. Americana still sells overseas, but the country itself is no longer a viable market.

There is an idea of a United States of America, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real country, only an entity, something illusory, and though it can hide its cold heart and you can see its flag-waving and hear its anthem deafening your ears and maybe you can even sense its values are probably comparable: it simply is not there.

Tarantino misreads 1960s television

When I returned home last August from watching Quentin Tarantino make shameful pigswill of reality with his nonsense version of the Manson Family Murders I watched the end of Kill Bill: Volume 2 randomly playing on TV and then turned on True Movies for their late night re-runs of The Man from UNCLE, and this only increased my annoyance with QT for also shamefully calumning late 1960s TV. Cinematographer Robert Richardson has noted that Tarantino deliberately included camera moves in the Western pilot that our hero Rick Dalton appears in that would have been utterly impractical for the era. Taken beside how he presents Rick’s appearance in the real show The FBI as a bad joke, you’d be hard put not to think that Tarantino is implying 1960s television was a waste of time. Which is odd given how he’s been perpetually circling a movie based on a 1960s TV show – Star Trek. The truth is that 1960s television was actually pretty good: The Prisoner, The Avengers, The Fugitive, The Man from UNCLE, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Thunderbirds, Mission: Impossible, Hawaii Five-O, The Monkees, Batman, The Invaders, Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel, Doctor Who, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, Rawhide, The Champions,  Land of the Giants, Gilligan’s Island, Get Smart, The Munsters, My Favourite Martian, The Addams Family, Flipper, The Flinstones, Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, Dad’s Army, Steptoe and Son. Ask yourself why pop culture would still be in thrall to so many of these shows if they were all a bad joke…

Notes on Yesterday

Richard Curtis’ Beatles rom-com Yesterday was the film of the week much earlier today on Sunday Breakfast with Patrick Doyle.

Danny Boyle may be the director but this is a Richard Curtis film, and it would be much better if it weren’t. A world in which The Beatles have been erased from existence save for the memory of one struggling musician is a high concept comedy, but Curtis insists on making it a ho-hum rom-com. Kevin Willmott’s CSA showed that you have to rein in the butterfly effect for alternate history because everything would become unfamiliar. Would the Beach Boys be as important without Pet Sounds, their riposte to the Beatles? Curtis displays no such interest, save an Oasis joke, in exploring the butterfly effect of his own bloody high concept. Kate McKinnon is the most reliably comic element of this film, and she is lip-smackingly playing a caricature record executive – Hunter S Thompson’s famous jibe mixed with notes of her SNL Hillary Clinton. But then all the characters in this film are caricatures. This poses a problem when Curtis wants you to care about the romance as if it involved characters with some humanity.

The romance is already scuppered by Jack (Himesh Patel) and Elly (Lily James) patently having the chemistry of hopeless dreamer and dutiful girlfriend in the opening scenes, until it’s bafflingly revealed they’re just friends. They do not hold themselves as fast platonic friends like Holmes and Watson in Elementary. When she complains she always wanted more, and Curtis writes improbable scenes doggedly making this fetch happen he, like Nick Hornby in Juliet, Naked, defies the felt experience of human nature. But this aggravating drive to the grand romantic gesture reaches a new low for Curtis. GK Chesterton once quipped that art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. I draw the line at Curtis; in the vein of his Doctor Who episode in which he shamefully zipped Van Gogh to the future to hear Bill Nighy valorise him then returned him to the past to kill himself to general hand-wringing; resurrecting the murdered John Lennon as septuagenarian sage giving Jack a pep talk to make the finale’s grand romantic gesture. No… No. No. No!

Listen here:

Any Other Business: Part XXV

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a blog post proper? Why round them up and turn them into a twenty-fifth pormanteau post on matters of course!

Reruns receiving runaround

I’ve previously lamented the attitude of millenials who veritably trashed a screening of Halloween in the Lighthouse with their stunning contempt for anything dating from before last Tuesday never mind anything dating from before they were born. I had a sudden realisation the other day; perhaps their attitude is born of ignorance in more ways than one – to wit, they were never exposed to anything from the past when they were children. The rise of reality TV has filled acres of airtime with witless trash in the mornings, afternoons, and evenings. (And night too sometimes). Look at the location location location of someone coming to dine in an escape to a new home abroad while flogging antiques on an Alaskan trip from a survivalist farm to the lobster pots. All those hours used to be filled with reruns. That is where as a child I soaked up the culture of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s: The Phil Silvers Show, The Twilight Zone, Rawhide, Hogan’s Heroes, Star Trek, The Man from UNCLE, The Champions, The Avengers, Land of the Giants, The Prisoner, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, Batman, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, The Munsters, My Favourite Martian, Lost in Space, The Addams Family, The Brady Bunch, Flipper, Mission: Impossible, The Flinstones, The Invaders, The Time Tunnel, Gentle Ben, Thunderbirds, Joe 90, Stingray, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, The Fugitive, Dad’s Army, Columbo, The Incredible Hulk, Happy Days, Fawlty Towers, Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em, The Two Ronnies, Shoestring, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Minder, Benny Hill, Citizen Smith, Three’s Company, The Bionic Woman, Mork and Mindy, Battlestar Galactica, Diff’rent Strokes, Grizzly Adams, The New Avengers, Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Muppets, Tales of the Unexpected, Wonder Woman, and later Hancock’s Half Hour, Steptoe and Son, The Prisoner, The Rockford Files, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Sykes, Kojak, and Starsky and Hutch. By the contemptible logic of ‘Ugh, I wasn’t born then’ I shouldn’t have bothered watching any of those shows. But those shows informed me to a huge degree: I remained aloof from general hysteria about The X-Files because I saw Mulder and Scully investigating bizarre murders as an American reworking with less suavity and more seriousness of Steed and Mrs Peel investigating bizarre murders. And I don’t think possessing a mite of historical objectivity to avoid passing moments of total hysteria is a bad thing to absorb from TV.

What ho, Clive Exton!

Well knock me down with a feather but I’ve just discovered that Clive Exton more or less decided what I was going to read for a good chunk of the 1990s and I never even knew. It turns out this Exton chappie was not only the scribbler who adapted PG Wodehouse all by his lonesome for all 23 spiffing episodes of Jeeves & Wooster starring Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry, but before that he also was the main writer for David Suchet’s celebrated Poirot. Blimey! I mean once one knows the connections jump at one, don’t you know? The absurd moments of physical comedy with Hastings, the mischievous poking fun at Poirot’s vanity, above all the double act of the man about town who hasn’t a clue and the fussy man behind him who knows everything. You could almost view some of the funnier episodes of Hastings being a nitwit while Poirot solves everything as a dry run for Exton’s next series. And I lapped up both those shows as they ran simultaneously, without ever noticing it was the same Johnnie behind them both! Well, I mean to say, what? I might as well have taken Exton’s correspondence course on what to read for five years as just plunge in to Christie and Wodehouse as I did.

Any Other Business: Part XVI

What is one to do with thoughts that are far too long for Twitter but not nearly long enough for a proper blog post? Why round them up and turn them into a sixteenth portmanteau post on television of course!

To Be Young, Gifted and Bad

FX’s Legion came in for some harsh criticism here recently so here’s some cheerleading of a show that is actually telling a story with minor characters in the X-Men universe, Fox’s The Gifted. The Gifted reminds me both of Heroes (the powerless but still commanding father of teenage mutant girl) and Dark Angel (relentless pursuit by shady government agency, a decrepit building that looks like the Pulse hit it), so even while it was still in its first season it felt like the return of a long lost friend. The most interesting element of the show has probably been Polaris being tempted by the dark side, as it were. The stunning finale in which she gave vent to her fury was a masterstroke in developing a villain from hugely misguided good intentions. But there were plenty of other interesting elements in the show, a highlight being 3 x 1: the cloned daughters of Emma Frost, who entice mutants to join the Hellfire Club. The perfectly synchronised movements, the identical dresses, the sharing of sentences between all three sisters, the telepathic mind-games – all were touches both chilling and exciting.

Stop. Sip. Sleep. Wait, what?

Another Any Other Business, another gripe at government-funded nonsense… From the very first time I saw this short advertisement by the Road Safety Authority it has bothered me, because it offended my sense of logic. Why would you drink the coffee and then attempt to get a 15 minute nap?! If you were fatigued, wouldn’t you have the nap first, then drink the coffee to energise yourself anew? I mean, don’t many people stop drinking coffee a certain amount of time before they go to bed because otherwise they won’t be able to sleep? Who approved this?

Uneasy lies the studio head that pays The Crown

Claire Foy says she feels naive she didn’t ask for the same pay as Matt Smith for The Crown. Except, as the producers initially made plain, and which was the truth, she didn’t get paid less because she was a woman and he was a man, she got paid less because she was Little Dorritt and he was Doctor Who. I thought Foy was great in Little Dorritt and followed her career with interest, but I suggest most people would have recognised Matt Smith when they saw trailers for The Crown, and not known who she was. The bigger star gets paid more, just as the bigger star gets billed first; unless they get billed last – witness bizarre fights like Dunkirk’s scramble to be the last ‘And…’. Jennifer Lawrence got paid more for Passengers than Chris Pratt. She also got first billing, despite the fact that structurally his character was the lead, and as a result he had more screen-time. Pratt got paid 8 million dollars less for doing more work than Lawrence, but nobody cried foul. Why weren’t they paid the same? If your answer is the truth; J-Law is a bigger deal than CP; why doesn’t that apply to The Crown too? Foy is as big a deal as Smith now, probably bigger – look at the forthcoming Lisbeth Salander reboot sequel. But she wasn’t then, so giving her ‘back pay’ seems very odd, and merely, par Bret Easton Ellis, a corporate gesture to just make the internet noise stop.

Getting Back to Back to the Future

Watching the Back to the Future trilogy yesterday for ‘Back to the Future Day’ made me think again about the Films You’d Love Your Kids To See season in the Lighthouse cinema this past summer.

Back to the Future of course featured in that season. Time travel has never, ever been as much fun as 1980s teenager Marty McFly’s jaunt back to 1950s Hill Valley where he must ensure his teenage parents meet and fall in love to ensure his own future existence. Watching all three films you realised anew what a great double-act Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd were as Marty and Doc Brown, how stirring Alan Silvestri’s score was, the incredible 1980s-ness of everything, and just how sharp a script Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote. Watching the waves of nostalgia washing over ITV 2 yesterday you also wondered if the 1980s really was a golden age for kid’s films or if it’s just the generation that grew up with them wallowing in nostalgia for their own childhood rather than the films.

Back in the summer I wrote about the paradox of the Lighthouse encouraging adults to take their children to see films they had enjoyed as children. Your children cannot have the same childhood you had because films are part of a cultural matrix. You can’t separate them from the culture surrounding them. Observe Huey Lewis, Ronald Reagan, Michael Jackson, Clint Eastwood, Star Wars, Star Trek and Japanese corporations in the Back to the Future trilogy. These are films of the 1980s, with all that means for politics, music, fashion, television, and on and on and on… To remember originally experiencing Back to the Future involves comics and annuals that accompanied it, which tied it together with a whole complex of movies; Ghostbusters, Short Circuit, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Star Trek, The Goonies, E.T., The Karate Kid, Roger Moore’s Bonds; and television; Doctor Who, The Real Ghostbusters, Thundercats, Transformers, Mask, ALF, Family Ties, MacGyver, The A-Team, Knightrider. That’s some fearsome nostalgia.

But in a smartphone age there is something retro not just about making children experience movies with hundreds of people who have all ditched their phones to unite as an audience and groan as one at Indy being served monkey brains but also in showing them movies shot in such an old-fashioned way as Back to the Future. Robert Zemeckis recently said vis a vis The Walk that spectacle doesn’t just mean CGI. A close-up is cinematic spectacle, because close-ups don’t happen in reality. Look at all the moments in Back to the Future when Silvestri’s score tells you how to read a scene while Zemeckis moves the camera as outrageously as Hitchcock to draw your attention to something, convey importance, or just dazzle you. When Zemeckis unleashes the train pushing a DeLorean finale of Back to the Future: Part III it shames today’s blockbusters. This summer saw many action sequences that were neither choreographed nor legible, but simply CGI edited in a frenzy to create an impression of thrilling action. Zemeckis’ train finale by contrast, is so perfectly constructed, shot by shot, that a 1910s audience would comprehend it and thrill to it as Guido Silvestri hammered his piano.

Twitter went crazy because Back to the Future: Part II’s future day had arrived, but watching that 2015 sequence yesterday it was striking just how much of its vista of hoverboards and flying cars was realised practically. To say nothing of how the earliest cinema pioneers would have smiled approvingly at the lo-fi trick Zemeckis employed in the sequels to have multiple versions of Fox and Lloyd interacting with each other onscreen. And watching Zemeckis’ inspired writing partner Bob Gale effortlessly handle the parallel timelines chaos of Back to the Future: Part II’s time-travel antics you couldn’t help but sigh, remembering just how insultingly nonsensical Terminator: Genisys was. Zemeckis and Gale are no doubt appreciative of how beloved their work is, but Zemeckis probably wishes people would go see the movie he released last month instead of hyping one he made thirty years ago. Perhaps the takeaway from ‘Back to the Future Day’ is we get the movies we deserve.

Zemeckis & Gale had a horrible time getting their script greenlighted in the 1980s. But the idea that anybody would touch it with a bargepole now is fantasy. It’s not a sequel, it’s not based on a comic book, or a toy, or a TV show, or a YA novel, it is simply an original idea that happens to be cinematic lightning in a bottle. If we want films now that will be as beloved in 2045 as Back to the Future is now then we need to put our foot down: we want sharp scripts and properly choreographed action.

Six Years, what a surprise

Previous milestones on this blog have been marked by features on Michael Fassbender and a vainglorious, if requested, list (plays to see before you die). But as today marks exactly six years since Talking Movies kicked off in earnest on Tuesday September 1^st 2009 with a review of (500) Days of Summer I’ve rummaged thru the archives for some lists covering the various aspects of the blog’s expanded cultural brief.

Top 6 Films

There’s been a lot of films given a write-up and a star rating hereabouts. So many films. Some fell in my estimation on re-watching, others steadily increased in my esteem, and many stayed exactly as they were.

 

Here are my favourites of the films I’ve reviewed over the past six years:

 

Inception

X-Men: First Class

Shame

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Skyfall

Mud

 

And that’s a selection from this list…

Iron Man, Indiana Jones 4, Wolverine, (500) Days of Summer, Creation, Pandorum, Love Happens, The Goods, Fantastic Mr Fox, Jennifer’s Body, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Bright Star, Glorious 39, The Box, Youth in Revolt, A Single Man, Whip It!, The Bad Lieutenant, Eclipse, Inception, The Runaways, The Hole 3-D, Buried, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Let Me In, The Way Back, Never Let Me Go, Cave of Forgotten Dreams 3-D, Win Win, X-Men: First Class, The Beaver, A Better Life, Project Nim, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Glee: The 3-D Concert Movie, The Art of Getting By, Troll Hunter, Drive, Demons Never Die, The Ides of March, In Time, Justice, Breaking Dawn: Part I, The Big Year, Shame, The Darkest Hour 3-D, The Descendants, Man on a Ledge, Martha Marcy May Marlene, A Dangerous Method, The Woman in Black, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance 3-D, Margaret, This Means War, Stella Days, Act of Valour, The Hunger Games, Titanic 3-D, The Cabin in the Woods, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Lockout, Albert Nobbs, Damsels in Distress, Prometheus, Red Tails, Red Lights, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter 3-D, Ice Age 4, Killer Joe, Magic Mike, The Dark Knight Rises, The Expendables 2, My Brothers, The Watch, Lawless, The Sweeney, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Liberal Arts, Sinister, Hit and Run, Ruby Sparks, On the Road, Stitches, Skyfall, The Sapphires, Gambit, Seven Psychopaths, Lincoln, Men at Lunch – Lon sa Speir, Warm Bodies, A Good Day to Die Hard, Safe Haven, Arbitrage, Stoker, Robot and Frank, Parker, Side Effects, Iron Man 3, 21 and Over, Dead Man Down, Mud, The Moth Diaries, Populaire, Behind the Candelabra, Man of Steel 3-D, The East, The Internship, The Frozen Ground, The Wolverine, The Heat, RED 2, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Diana, Blue Jasmine, How I Live Now, Thanks for Sharing, Escape Plan, Like Father, Like Son, Ender’s Game, Philomena, The Counsellor, Catching Fire, Black Nativity, Delivery Man, 12 Years a Slave, Devil’s Due, Inside Llewyn Davis, Mr Peabody & Sherman 3-D, Dallas Buyers Club, The Monuments Men, Bastards, The Stag, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Calvary, Magic Magic, Tracks, Hill Street, X-Men: Days of Future Past 3-D, Benny & Jolene, The Fault in Our Stars, 3 Days to Kill, Boyhood, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes 3-D, SuperMensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon, God’s Pocket, Hector and the Search for Happiness, The Expendables 3, What If, Sin City 2, Let’s Be Cops, The Guest, A Most Wanted Man, Wish I Was Here, Noble, Maps to the Stars, Life After Beth, Gone Girl, Northern Soul, The Babadook, Interstellar, The Drop, Mockingjay – Part I, Electricity, Birdman, Taken 3, Wild, Testament of Youth, A Most Violent Year, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Son of a Gun, Patrick’s Day, Selma, It Follows, Paper Souls, Home 3-D, While We’re Young, John Wick, A Little Chaos, The Good Lie, Let Us Prey, The Legend of Barney Thomson, Hitman: Agent 47.

Top 6 Film Features

There’s been a lot of film features, from me obsessing over ignored inflation at the box-office and omnipresent CGI on the screen to the twaddle of Oscar ceremonies and thoroughly bogus critical narratives of New Hollywood.

 

Here are my favourite film features from the last six years:

 

A Proof – Keanu Can Act

Snyder’s Sensibility

What the Hell is … Method Acting?

Terrence Malick’s Upas Tree

5 Reasons to love Tom at the Farm

A Million Ways to Screw up a Western

 

Top 6 TV Features

There’s been quite a bit of musing about TV here, usually in short-form howls about The Blacklist or other such popcorn irritants, but sometimes in longer format, like two disquisitions on Laurence Fishburne’s stint in CSI.

 

Here are my favourite TV features from the last six years:

 

TARDIS: Time And Relative Dimensions In Smartness

Double Exposure: Cutter’s Way/House M.D.

Medium’s Realism    

2ThirteenB Baker Street, Princeton

Funny Bones

An Arrow of a different colour

 

Top 6 Plays

Since I decided to start reviewing plays in summer 2010 there’s been a steady stream of reviews from the Dublin Theatre Festival and regular productions at the Gate, the Abbey, the Olympia, the Gaiety, and Smock Alley.

 

Here are my favourites of the plays I’ve reviewed over the last six years:

 

John Gabriel Borkman

The Silver Tassie

Pygmalion

Juno and the Paycock

The Select: The Sun Also Rises

A Whistle in the Dark

 

And that’s a selection from this list:

Death of a Salesman, Arcadia, Phaedra, John Gabriel Borkman, Enron, The Silver Tassie, The Field, The Cripple of Inishmaan, Attempts on Her Life, Pygmalion, Translations, Hay Fever, Juno and the Paycock, Peer Gynt, Slattery’s Sago Saga, Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer, Big Maggie, Hamlet, Improbable Frequency, Alice in Funderland, Glengarry Glen Ross, Travesties, The House, The Plough and the Stars, The Lark, Dubliners, The Select: The Sun Also Rises, A Whistle in the Dark, Conversations on a Homecoming, The Talk of the Town, King Lear, Major Barbara, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, The Critic, Desire Under the Elms, Neutral Hero, Macbeth, A Skull in Connemara, The Vortex, An Ideal Husband, Twelfth Night, Aristocrats, Ballyturk, Heartbreak House, The Actor’s Lament, Our Few and Evil Days, Bailegangaire, Spinning, She Stoops to Conquer, The Walworth Farce, The Caretaker, The Man in Two Pieces, Hedda Gabler, The Gigli Concert, A Month in the Country, The Shadow of a Gunman, The Importance of Being Earnest, Bob & Judy, By the Bog of Cats.

 

Top 6 Colour Pieces

It must be admitted that I’ve written fewer colour pieces for the blog than I would have liked, but I’ve greatly enjoyed the occasional adventures of Hollywood insider Micawber-Mycroft; a homage to PG Wodehouse’s Mr Mulliner.

 

Here are my favourite colour pieces from the last six years:

 

How to Watch 300

Mark Pellegrino gets ambitious

Great Production Disasters of Our Time: Apocalypse Now

Micawber-Mycroft explains nervous action directing

Alfred & Bane: Brothers in Arms

Kristen Bell, Book and Candle

 

Six years, my brain hurts a lot…

X-Men: Days of Future Past 3-D

Director Bryan Singer triumphantly returns to the franchise he launched in 2000 to link two ensembles together for one of the classic Claremont/Byrne comics stories.

Professor X (Patrick Stewart) narrates a Terminator 2 cold open as dead bodies are piled amidst rubble while machines hunt down and kill mutants and humans. Can this war of extinction be won by changing the past? X, Magneto (Ian McKellen), Storm (Halle Berry), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) travel to a Chinese monastery where mutants familiar [Iceman (Shawn Ashmore), Colossus (Daniel Cudmore)] and strange [Blink (Fan BingBing), whose portal-creating power is visually intricate] are kept one step ahead of Sentinels by Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page), who uses her powers to send the consciousness of Bishop (Omar Sy) back thru time. Defeating the Sentinels means preventing Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) assassinating Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage) at the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, then being captured by Major Stryker (Josh Helman); actions which kick-start the program and see her DNA make the Sentinels unstoppable. Only Wolverine can physically survive the time-shift, but in 1973 he is reliant on the broken men Charles (James McAvoy) and Beast (Nicholas Hoult) patching up their differences with the imprisoned Erik (Michael Fassbender). But might the past be immutable?

The X-movies are a farrago of continuity, and this instalment ignores that (Wolverine has adamantium claws? Professor X has his own body?). It’s a sequel toFirst Class, with Charles and Erik rejoining battle for Mystique’s soul; as a wonderful exchange has it – “You got inside her head.” “That’s not my power, Charles.” The future, with Sentinels attacking like The Matrix’s squiddies, is mostly a glorified framing device; but its startling killing of characters in the prologue establishes the stakes. The past is a foreign country; where Singer displays X-2 vim. Beast acts as Q in freeing Erik, Wolverine gets two wonderful sight gags, and there’s a delightful nod to the parentage of Quicksilver (Evan Peters). The fast-talking Quicksilver’s mischievous liberation of Erik is the outstanding action sequence; it’s like watching Seth Cohen wielding superpowers. Erik’s curving of a bullet at the Paris summit is thrilling, as is the idea that time is course-correcting their meddling. But Page has precious little to do, and the great Fassbender is overshadowed by McAvoy and Jackman as they get all the best lines.

This lands somewhere around X-2 and First Class, but I preferred First Class because Erik was less muddled. The future comes into play in the finale, and Magneto battling future sentinels while Erik manipulates old sentinels is a brilliant cross-cutting of action sequences to interrogate character; questioning the ability of people to change even as the future characters hope their younger selves will change. Lawrence (more recognisable as Mystique than Rebecca Romijn ever was) is a world of swagger away from First Class; Mystique is a driven and accomplished spy. She wants to kill Bolivar for murdering her friends just like Erik wanted to vengefully kill Shaw. Charles once again is opposed to such motives. But in First Class Erik flung missiles back at people, here his villainy becomes incomprehensibly pre-emptive; as if the Singer special sequence where he retrieves his helmet unleashes a need for flair; the option of silent sabotage of the Sentinel programme doesn’t cut it, when you can (undoubtedly quite counter-productively) stage a stadium-sized spectacle of terrorism. But this is quibbling about what is only the third superb X-movie in the series: an intricate, thoughtful adventure in which Singer returns from the wilderness with surprising confidence.

The ending made me think of the Doctor’s emphatic lines at the end of Moffat’s Doctor Who Blitz story in 2005. And after suffering thru X-3 we surely all deserve that calibre of resolution.

4/5

Mr Peabody & Sherman 3-D

Rob Minkoff, director of Stuart Little, finally helms a movie adaptation of Rocky & Bullwinkle’s segment about an intelligent dog and his adopted human son.

Mr. Peabody (Ty Burrell) is a business titan, trailblazing inventor, gourmet chef, two-time Olympic medallist and universally recognised and beloved genius. And a dog. Using his most ingenious invention, the WABAC machine (cunningly pronounced Way Back), Mr. Peabody takes his adopted human son Sherman (Max Charles) to experience the French Revolution, and hang out with good friend Leo Da Vinci (Stanley Tucci), as a demented form of home-schooling to prepare him for the horrors of the American public school system. And what horrors they are. Viciously bullied on his first day, Sherman fights back and so Mrs Grunion (Allison Janney) threatens to remove him from Peabody’s care. Peabody invites the bully and her parents to dinner to smooth things over, but more taunts see Sherman use the WABAC to prove a point – and so kinda loses her in Ancient Egypt…

Mr Peabody & Sherman begins as sort of the ultimate Steven Moffat outing, with Whovian larking about in time and space, and Sherlockian calculation of surroundings to evade capture by utilising environment – not least an escape from the guillotine far more convincing than any of the explanations proffered for Sherlock’s equivalent magic trick. Sadly, apart from a nice moment in Troy and some mucking about in Luxor (featuring the greatest ‘Oy!’ you will hear in 2014), this joyous aspect fades away. Instead the great Patrick Warburton voices Agamemnon as a dim jock, and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is plagiarised. If you watch Modern Family you’ll recognise Ty Burrell is using the voice he reserves for formal comic interaction with his on-screen dad. But at least he finally gets to be smarter than on-screen daughter Ariel Winter, voicing Penny Petersen.

Penny is a huge problem as this movie begins and ends with Peabody & Sherman’s relationship being a pointed metaphor for gay adoption, with Mrs Grunion in the ‘conservative’ corner as saying it’s just unnatural that a dog should adopt a boy. It’s hard to believe Craig Wright, who created the glorious Dirty Sexy Money, didn’t intend that obvious reading, and this makes it all the more baffling why we’re supposed to root for a romance between Sherman and Penny when she begins the movie as an obnoxious bully who issues a slur of what must be considered coded homophobic slurs at the inoffensive Sherman. Aside from the logic of placing such subtle agit-prop over children’s heads, at what point does continually depicting vicious bullying as how schools are help perpetuate vicious bullying in schools as just how schools are?

Mr Peabody & Sherman is reasonably entertaining, but you can’t help feel a version composed solely of madcap escapades without any dutiful, plodding story beats would’ve been more fun.

2.5/5

The Heat

Director Paul Feig reunites with his Bridesmaids star Melissa McCarthy for a female buddy-cop movie that’s short on laughs but still better than The Internship.

Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is a prim and proper FBI Agent who specialises in humiliating her co-workers with displays of her deductive genius. Her despairing boss Hale (Demian Bichir) sends her to a knotty case in Boston as a test. If she can manage to not alienate her co-workers while cracking the case he’ll consider her for a plum promotion, otherwise… Unfortunately for Ashburn the first Boston suspect she wants to interrogate, drug-lord Julian (Michael McDonald), brings with him an obnoxious arresting officer Mullins (Melissa McCarthy). The foul-mouthed Mullins volubly prefers brute force and ignorance to Ashburn’s Quantico-honed subtlety and reconnaissance. She also brings to the case a possible inside man, her deadbeat brother Jason (Michael Rapaport), recently released from prison and being recruited by Julian’s associate Adam (Taran Killam). Can Ashburn and Mullins work together and overcome their personal issues?

Bridesmaids was a curiously depressing film that relentlessly showed Kristen Wiig’s character defeated by life and yet expected audience cheers for the Little Miss Sunshine-aping end which solved only one of her many problems. Thankfully The Heat isn’t that infuriating, as, despite being written by Parks & Rec’s Katie Dippold, it feels like a thriller retouched as a comedy. Tony Hale and Kaitlin Olson pop up for lengthy and meandering scenes that completely waste their comedic talents. It’s hard not to notice that the comedy steps up a notch when Bill Burr and Nate Corddry appear as yet more Mullins siblings; and you suspect they improvised some of their cross-talking madness. Indeed the very deliberate delivery of the initially incomprehensible line “Ah you or ah you not a nahc?” to Ashburn is hands-down the funniest moment in the entire film.

Marlon Wayans is decent as Ashburn’s subordinate Levy, but the great Bichir is shockingly underused. Dan Bakkedahl’s albino DEA Agent Craig is the butt of an uncomfortable vein of crude humour, and that’s before the finale employs the wrong note of 21 Jump Street’s finale without its saving absurdity. Russell T Davies gave Billie Piper the line ‘Ooh, can you smell the testosterone in here?’ in Doctor Who, and that sexism has popped up endlessly and tiresomely in discussions of banking culture. I’ve longed for a character to rant about oestrogen in the same manner to expose the sexism of the trope, so it’s infuriating that Dippold has Agent Craig do just that; but by making him a deeply unsympathetic character subtly justify the corresponding sexist trope. It’s hard to know what to say about a central pairing whose bond is based on Ashburn learning to curse. I watched McCarthy play Sookie for 7 seasons of Gilmore Girls; she’s better than this, but this apparently is where the career is.

The Heat suggests that there’s a true gulf opening up in American comedy between the school of Rogen & Hill and unfunny people.