Oscars 2025: The Wild Robot and Flow

Posted on February 17th, 2025 in At the cinema | No Comments »

I’m also trying to see all the nominees for Best Animated Feature. Inside Out 2 is wonderful entertainment despite not being a patch on the original, which just emphasises what a tremendously strong piece of work the original is. Vengeance Most Fowl is Wallace and Gromit at very nearly their best, and one barely notices the absence of Peter Sallis. I’m very excited about Memoir of a Snail, having been knocked out by the same team’s Mary and Max some years ago. That leaves The Wild Robot and Flow.

In their different ways, these are both painterly CG animations about the collision between nature and the modern world, with a largely animal cast and driven by a singular creative talent. But despite these superficial similarities they function in very different ways, although I’m pleased to say I think they’re both terrific.

The Wild Robot is the latest offering from mad genius Chris Sanders, who was let off the leash back when Disney was earning All Of The Money to make Lilo & Stitch, possibly my favourite post-renaissance 2D Disney movie. After a period in the wilderness, he came back with How to Train Your Dragon, and also has (sigh) a live action Lilo & Stitch coming out soon. Meanwhile, he’s cast Lupita Nyong’o as “Roz”, a silicon help-meet who mysteriously washes up on the shore of an uninhabited island. With echoes of both WALL-E and The Iron Giant, Roz grapples with what her purpose is, and (having spent days learning their language) turns to various animal friends for help.

This is pretty breezy, family-friendly, crowd-pleasing stuff, but an exceptional voice cast (including Pedro Pascal as a wily fox, Catherine O’Hara as a hilarious possum, Matt Berry as a neurotic beaver and Mark Hamill as a grizzly bear) and some absolutely gorgeous animation elevate this to classic status, and the script knows just when to go for the gag and when to pluck on your heart strings.

It reportedly cost around $80m which is cheap for a major CG movie. Flow was made for less than a tenth of that, and it’s almost impossible to tell. This Latvian animation was created by a tiny Latvian/Parisian team on consumer-grade equipment and tells the entirely worldless story of a tiny grey cat making friends (secretarybird, golden retriever and capybara mainly) in order to escape mysteriously rising flood waters. Again, the CG images have been given a painterly sheen, and whereas in the American movie, I’m convinced this is entirely for artistic reasons, here I think it may have been in part to conceal the relative simplicity of the digital models. But when the animation is so simultaneously characterful and accurate to the natural world, this seems like a pointless thing to quibble about.

My taste for magical realism, which at points strays in to surrealism, isn’t quite as well developed as that of director Gints Zilbalodis, but for the most part, this is a gorgeous, enthralling, sweetly beguiling story of friendship and adventure which never for a moment feels like dialogue would have added anything at all.

Oscars 2025: September 5 and The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Posted on February 17th, 2025 in At the cinema | No Comments »

September 5

Tim Fehlbaum’s account of the Munich Massacre from the point of view of the ABC Sports team covering the Olympics makes an amazing trailer but only a pretty good film. Of course, it’s not the film’s fault that it’s been sold as something slightly other than what it is, but the differences between the white-knuckle, morally-queasy trailer and the rather more by-the-numbers actual movie raises questions in my mind about the wisdom of this approach.

It’s certainly an interesting piece of history, as has already been proven by Steven Spielberg who took a very different approach in his film Munich. In 1972, terrorists took nine members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage. By the early hours of the next morning, most of the terrorists and all of the hostages were dead. We follow the television crew who are used to talking over footage of swimming, long jumping and javelin events as they grapple with the reality that the are the only people able to tell the world what’s happening.

The pressure cooker environment is effective, and – as Billy Wilder observed – “audiences love ‘how’” so the stuff about having to smuggle film cans in and out of the Olympic Village, strapped to the body of a cameraman posing as a coach is fascinating. And there is tension, and there are interesting debates about whether the ABC coverage is influencing events for better or for worse, and whether ABC Sports president Roone Arledge is thinking more about innocent lives or about his own career.

The problem is that, of necessity, we only get access to either the plight of the hostages, or the actions of the German authorities, in fragments. So, we’re presented with a story in which innocent lives are at stake and a terrifying stand-off is taking place, but the film is trying to wring tension and excitement out of whether or not ABC will get access to the “bird” (satellite) or what form of words the anchor should use to (wrongly) announce that the hostages are alive and free.

It’s a decent TV movie, but I’m a bit disappointed and rather surprised to see it nominated for its screenplay. Still, in a world in which The Imitation Game wins a screenplay Oscar, anything is possible.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Also taking an unusual angle on events of global importance, but succeeding rather better is The Seed of the Sacred Fig, up for Best International Feature. The story of the making of this film by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof could be movie in itself, as the raw footage had to be smuggled out of the country and the director had to flee before he could be arrested. Thus, this film about Iran, shot in Iran, by Iranians and entirely in Persian ends up as Germany official selection for the Academy Awards.

Missagh Zareh is Iman, newly promoted within the Revolutionary Court, but beginning to have misgivings about the nature of his role. His daughters meanwhile have an even more rebellious streak to them, amplified by protests surrounding the death in custody of a young woman (not named as but clearly meant to be Mahsa Amini), leaving his wife caught in the middle. Where September 5 is constrained by its narrative framework, the effect of the shifting political sands on this ordinary family is very much the point, and as such the family drama and the huge global story reflect on each other in fascinating, disturbing and moving ways – no more so than when Rasoulof includes real footage of Iranian protests and police actions.

While the whole cast is excellent, I must make special mention of Soheila Golestani as Iman’s wife Najmeh who fiercely attempts to steer a clear path between her own morality, her love for her family and her practical need to survive and thrive. She’s constantly trying to give nothing away, but there’s always something going on behind her eyes.

Normally it’s easy to spot which film will take the Best International Feature award – it’s the one also nominated in one or more other categories. But this year, we have both Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here nominated for Best Picture, and Flow nominated for Best Animated Feature, leaving only this and The Girl with the Needle without additional nominations elsewhere. But of the films in the Oscar conversation, I liked this more than pretty much anything else outside of The Substance and Anora.

Oscars 2025: Hard Truths and Here

Posted on February 6th, 2025 in At the cinema, Culture, Technology | No Comments »

Mysteriously not nominated for a single Oscar, despite its star walking home with a clutch of awards all over town, Hard Truths finds Mike Leigh back in Naked territory, giving us a portrait of a thoroughly unlikeable motormouth anti-hero and daring us not to fall in love. Marianne Jean-Baptiste does incredible work as Pansy, whose brittle Karen-ish behaviour to everyone around her barely conceals an inner core of deep pain and loneliness. This drives her husband and son into a near-silent fugue state of incomprehending stoicism, and contrasts strongly with her two nieces who won’t let a little thing like Sam Spiro being loathesomely patronising put a spoke in the wheels of their plans for a Mother’s Day brunch. Sitting in the middle is Pansy’s sister Chantelle, where Michele Austin is much less showy than Jean-Baptiste but who navigates a tricky path between optimism and despair.

As usual, Mike Leigh’s improvisatory and exploratory script-writing delivers complex and truthful characters and wonderful performances, but as sometimes happens doesn’t provide us with a neat structure or much in the way of climactic catharsis. That Mother’s Day brunch looks to be the scene where all the narrative threads come together, but it passes and leads to a faintly irrelevant coda, centring David Webber’s Curtley almost as much as Pansy, and sidelining Chantelle. For the first four-fifths, however, this is epic, often hilarious, frequently heartbreaking stuff and I can only hope it does better at the BAFTAs than it did in Hollywood.

Of rather less interest is Robert Zemeckis’s slickly experimental single-camera-angle movie Here, based on the graphic novel by Richard McGuire, and which reunited the director with his Forrest Gump team of screenwriter Eric Roth and lead actors Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. At least I think it’s them. For most of the running time they’re concealed behind a smear of de-aging (or up-aging) pixels, and it’s deeply to their credit that something resembling a performance manages to emerge from underneath all the digital shenanigans. This is especially true given that Roth hasn’t thought of anything remotely novel, insightful or even interesting for them or any of the other characters to say, so they just mouth Hallmark platitudes about how time flies or the future is coming as the narrative hyperactively pings from decade-to-decade seemingly at random. A couple of times, the juxtaposition of events from different periods in history brushes past something like wit, such as when a leaky roof is overlaid with a woman’s waters breaking, but these moments are the exceptions rather than the norm.

To facilitate the artifice of both the permanently locked-off camera and the huge time jumps, the whole thing was shot at Pinewood, hence the slightly disconcerting presence of so many familiar British TV faces from Michelle Dockery to Nikki Amuka-Bird to Kelly Reilly to Angus Wright to Ophelia Lovibond. All do decent accents (except possibly for Paul Bettany who seems permanently constipated) but it’s yet more artifice for a film that wants to be telling a sweet simple story about family, but which hasn’t figured out what the story is, or why we should care, or why it’s better to shoot it this way.

Oscars 2025: Nickel Boys and Saturday Night

Posted on February 3rd, 2025 in At the cinema | No Comments »

Nickel Boys is the first drama film from experimental documentarian RaMell Ross and it takes a grim story (from the novel by Colson Whitehead) and presents it in a very striking way which doesn’t always help. This is a very choppy, piecemeal film, in which short scenes end with hard cuts and material from other sources (and sometimes timeframes) is cut in unexpectedly. This I could have coped with, although some of the metaphors from the Apollo 8 mission and the Martin Luther King marches was a bit heavy-handed for my taste.

What I had a harder time with was the decision to shoot almost everything first person. Ross is smart enough not to be wedded to this technique, but he doesn’t stray from it often, and the idea presumably is to place us directly in the shoes of the main protagonist Elwood. We look out through his eyes and see the world that he sees. But drama is watching one person changed by another, and if we can’t see our protagonist’s face, we have to guess how he might be reacting. Near the middle of the film, Elwood’s friend Turner is also given the power of the point-of-view shot which means we can finally cut between two people having a conversation – but these conversations tend not to be the crucial ones, so we’re still stuck with only half the story.

In a second strand, taking place years after the boys’ incarceration, adult Elwood is shot over his own shoulder, so again we can’t see his face but now it’s harder to frame shots so that we can see who he’s talking to. A bit life Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, this struck me as an interesting formal experiment, but ultimately one which didn’t have the effect of immersing me more fully in the story – in fact just the opposite, it held me at a distance. That’s a shame as there’s much to appreciate here. This isn’t a true story, but it was inspired by ghastly places like the Dozier School which deserve to be exposed, and the Jim Crow era is a horrendous stain on American history, which some Americans seem only too happy to forget about.

I do have a nasty suspicion that the camerawork is designed at least in part to facilitate a final rug-pull which struck me as confusing and unlikely. Other people have found more thematic resonance in this, and maybe if I watched it again, knowing what was coming, I’d see that too, but I was too busy trying to work out the crossword puzzle which the film had set me to be truly moved or to appreciate the themes. There’s great work here from Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson and especially Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, but I didn’t get as much out of this as I expected or wanted to. I seem to be in the minority, though, so the failing may well be mine.

Sautday Night, Jason Reitman’s account of the final ninety minutes before the first episode of “NBC’s Saturday Night” went on the air is a work of obvious artifice, but it’s greatly to Reitman and co-writer Gil Kenan’s credit that most of the backstory about events taking place outside of this very narrow window goes down very easily. There’s even a nice visual metaphor in one of the aspects of the film which I’d be prepared to bet never happened. This succeeds very nicely in making a somewhat trivial event seem of momentous importance, and the cast is having an absolute ball, anchored by Gabrielle LaBelle as the earnest, almost unflappable Lorne Michaels – but shout outs too to Tommy Dewey as Michael O’Donoghue, Matthew Rhys unrecognisable as George Carlin, Nicholas Braun in a remarkable dual role and most deliciously of all JK Simmons as a revoltingly vulgar evocation of Milton Berle. Good fun and buoyed by an appropriately demented score from Jon Batiste.

Oscars 2025: Conclave and A Complete Unknown

Posted on January 27th, 2025 in At the cinema, Culture | No Comments »

There’s a lot to enjoy in Conclave – no, not enjoy: savour. It looks magnificent and Edward Berger continues his productively discordant partnership with composer Volker Bertelmann whose strident foghorning helped make All Quiet on the Western Front so evocative. We have some of this generation’s finest Old Men of Acting giving it everything they’ve got. And who wouldn’t want to peek behind the curtain of decision making at the Vatican? Decision making is one of the keystones of storytelling, whether it’s Chaplin being forced to eat his own shoe, Michael realising only he can take out McClusky or Han Solo coming back to save Luke Skywalker.

But this time, Berger isn’t adapting a classic German novel born out of the pain of a generation-defining conflict. This time, his source text is a Robert Harris page-turner – maybe not quite an airport thriller, but definitely aiming to build suspense and pass the time rather than leaving the reader pondering great questions about the nature of humanity and goodness. And if the characters in Conclave spend any time at all pondering such questions, they do it off-screen, as when they’re in front of the camera, they’re scheming and plotting in a way much more befitting Francis Urquhart or Malcolm Tucker. We know Ralph Fiennes’s earnest and studious Cardinal Lawrence is experiencing a mild crisis of faith because he tells us so – not because it’s dramatised in any particularly interesting way.

Yes, the plot did keep me guessing, but this is also sometimes to the film’s detriment, as the rules of the thriller to which it’s so wedded mean that the clearly-telegraphed penultimate twist must needs be topped by a final somewhat ludicrous twist. To be clear, this is partly the fun of what is a very entertaining and engaging film. It’s endlessly charming and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny to see these pompous clerics in their ornate robes sneaking a crafty ciggie, fiddling with an iPhone or hacking into someone else’s email. But the actual storytelling couldn’t be less interested in the philosophical debates about the future of the Catholic church, and is only just interested enough in the personalities of the main players to make the plot work.

That leaves us with the actors, and here Isabella Rossellini is effortlessly commanding, Fiennes and Tucci elevate the thin material they’re given and Lucian Msamati – whose Cardinal Adeyemi actually is given a little bit of depth and nuance – is very impressive. What baffles me slightly is why John Lithgow took the gig. I’m certain he doesn’t need the work and his character exists solely to wax his moustache and cackle evilly. A missed opportunity.

In terms of character depth, A Complete Unknown is sort of the opposite. Monica Barbaro manages to mine the flimsy screenplay and comes up with a complete character with a rich interior life seemingly from nowhere. Everyone else seems satisfied with doing impersonations and moving through the relevant Wikipedia entries until 140 minutes is up. Maybe that’s because Elle Fanning looks so completely lost – because her character is the only one that’s invented.

I came to this knowing nothing much at all about Bob Dylan, which meant on the one hand that I wouldn’t be huffing and fuming and nit picking as the inevitable artistic licenses were taken. On the other hand, that means things need to be explained to me to make the story work, and various things seemed to happen which were given profound significance without paying off in any meaningful way. Dylan’s first album is all covers. Why? Did they sell? How did he persuade the record company to let him record originals? Who are these two different round men who smoke cigars both of whom seem to be something to do with his management but neither of whom is ever introduced or seen to be making decisions which impact his life or career. Who’s this guy bullying his way into the recording session and ending up playing the organ? What, to be blunt, is the point of any of this, other than to check off events in the life of a famous asshole?

But I could have stood a bit of confusion about the finer points of the music industry if the character work had been stronger. Timothee Chalamet is a fine talent and has clearly worked incredibly hard to summon up Dylan’s manner and musical abilities. But if we aren’t given any insight into who he was and what he wanted, then the entire exercise seems futile. Early on, I appreciated the measured pace and there were some nice moments between Chalamet’s puppy-dog 20-year-old Dylan and Edward Norton’s avuncular Pete Seeger. But after the first half hour, this turns into Folk Hard: The Bobby Dylan Story with a dedication that seems almost demented.

Eight down, two to go.

Pre-Oscars 2025: The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, Nosferatu

Posted on January 20th, 2025 in At the cinema | No Comments »

The Brutalist is a long movie, and that tends to please Oscar voters. Shot on VistaVision (35mm film passing through the camera sideways), with heavyweight themes, a powerhouse cast, a rumbling score, an interval and an overture, it is seemingly hand-milled, weapons-grade Oscar bait. This would be far more frustrating if it was a less interesting film. In fact, my chief complaint after 200 minutes of screentime is that it ends abruptly.

It does teeter on the brink of wilful obscurity towards the end, as the actions of powerful tycoon Harrison van Buren (Guy Pearce, seemingly cos-playing as Brad Pitt) make less and less sense and the respective fates of László Tóth and his family are barely sketched in during the coda. But for much of the running time, this is engrossing powerful stuff with a great sense of place and character, and a detailed and sensitive portrayal of loss and ego from Adrien Brody.

The choice of VistaVision is interesting too. On a big screen, this doesn’t gleam. The oppressive Philadelphia weather combines with the grainy film stock to create an image which glimmers and glooms, but that only adds to the constant eerie threat of potential danger, as this once-feted architect tries to claw his way up from the bottom of the heap in which he finds himself. Adding to the disquiet is the use of sound, with odd phrases, noises and rumblings often drifting in from the edges of the screen, adding to the feeling that we aren’t being shown something, we’re peering in on it.

Felicity Jones doesn’t get much to do alas – third billed but she only really appears in the second half, and there are disquieting rumours about AI being used to autotune her accent and Brody’s, but what shocks me most is that someone let sitcom actor Brady Corbet loose with $10m to make this epic. Don’t get me wrong, on the whole I’m very glad they did, I just can’t understand what the pitch would have been like.

And I could say similar things about Emilia Perez, Jacques Audiard’s film about which I’m going to be circumspect as I knew very little about it going in and I’d love you to be as surprised as I am. It’s a startling combination of some incredible fresh and original material, wrapped in some equally incredibly clichéd plot twists. Zoe Saldaña is absolutely electric as under-appreciated lawyer Rita Mora Castro, whose dealings with the mysterious Emilia Pérez gradually lead her to become embroiled in Mexican cartels, politics, corruption and eventually violence.

Selina Gomez shows a little more range here than she typically does on Only Murders in the Building, but this is Saldaña’s show, especially during the musical numbers. Look out for her rendition of “El Mal” at all the awards shows. The last half hour is by far the least interesting, as the plot can only be resolved by means of overfamiliar gangster and action movie tropes, but the journey that got us there is a real shot of cinematic adrenaline.

Also filling up a big screen and making terrific use of sound is the third screen version of Nosferatu, originally shot by Murnau in the silent era as a way of ripping off Dracula without having to pay any royalties. I hadn’t seen this or the Klaus Kinski version, so I felt a little as if I hadn’t done my homework. Following a little subsequent research, it seems as if writer-director Robert Eggers’s chief concern was to shore up plot holes in the existing iterations. This leads to a very handsomely mounted production, full of committed performances (Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily Rose-Depp, Willem Dafoe and especially Emma Corrin) but it ended up not feeling very much. Rather as if I’d played through a really atmospheric and well-done computer game rather than been told a deeply personal story. Extra points for Simon McBurney as Herr Knock who knows that this part has no top for him to go over and goes absolutely for broke.

So… what did I think of Joy to the World?

Posted on December 26th, 2024 in Culture | No Comments »

It’s hard to remember now, but the Doctor Who Christmas special is a relatively recent invention – by which I mean it didn’t happen in the first 26 years of the show’s existence. The revived show is now getting on for twenty years old, which feels profoundly unlikely, but when the first series was a success, news rapidly came that we were getting two more series and a Christmas special. The Christmas Invasion saw new incumbent David Tennant take on the Sycorax and it had a lot to accomplish if it was going to succeed, but it did so brilliantly.

Now, for whatever reason, fandom is divided and disgruntled, as culture wars and general internet-led entitlement lead to furiously toxic pronouncements across all parts of social media. After the mixed reception that the rebooted reboot got earlier this year, Joy to the World needed to do almost as much as the 2005 special in order to be even a qualified success.

I haven’t seen an awful lot of general chatter about this one, but I’ll tell you what I thought. I thought it was excellent. Ncuti Gatwa, who made a very bold debut, now seems to be brimming with confidence, giving us a lonely, isolated Doctor who hasn’t even noticed that the TARDIS doesn’t have any chairs. He’s joined by a cracking guest cast headed by luminous Nicola Coughlan, but let’s not forget Joel Fry, Stephanie de Whalley, Jonathan Aris and many more. The opening is almost Moffat parodying himself, but explanations are quickly forthcoming and the Time Hotel is a lovely concept, both fresh and instantly-graspable.

Joy’s self-sacrifice isn’t a huge surprise, but that means it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and Coughlan sells the hell out of it, but my favourite bit was the entirely self-contained sojourn in that grim hotel. Structurally, this is not needed at all – it’s the kind of “closed loop” plotting which Terrance Dicks admitted to falling back on to pad The War Games out to ten episodes, which is what allowed Benjamin Cook to prune it back to 90 minutes without significant injury. But it’s the clearest expression of the episode’s theme. Sit down. And play a game with someone you like. Amen to that.

Strongly plotted with lots of good twists and turns and a resolution that actually makes sense, it looks gorgeous (even if there wasn’t quite enough cash left for a really good T-Rex) and Alex Sanjiv Pillai keeps it all moving. I was rapt throughout and can’t wait to watch it again.

5 out of 5 stars

Days of the Jackal (plus Wicked, Blake’s 7)

Posted on December 24th, 2024 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

My eye was caught by the new glossy Day of the Jackal with Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch but I felt the need to watch the earlier versions first. The 1973 original  with Edward Fox is absolutely brilliant, with Fox’s icy charm perfectly evoking Frederick Forsyth’s meticulous assassin. Ranged against him is pretty much every British male character actor who graduated since the turn of the century, and a few European ones as well, notably Michael Lonsdale who’d go on to be one of James Bond’s most impressive opponents (albeit in a film which few people rate highly).

What’s especially fascinating about this version is how stripped down it is. Fox is going to bump off Charles de Gaulle. Lonsdale has to stop him. There are no subplots, there are no detours, and very notably nobody gets in Lonsdale’s way. He gets every scrap of support available to him, through official and unofficial channels, nobody tells him he’s “on thin ice”, or “he’s becoming obsessed” or he’s got “48 hours to wrap this thing up.” And even with that, he only just manages to stop Fox in time – Fox even manages to get a shot off but misses. So far from robbing us of tension, this lean, streamlined approach makes the Jackal seem like a far more formidable foe.

The plot was revisited in 1997 with Michael Caton-Jones behind the camera, replacing Fred Zinnemann, Bruce Willis slightly miscast as the Jackal and Richard Gere hopelessly miscast as ex-IRA sniper Declan Mulqueen. All the hysterical personal dramas I didn’t miss in 1973 are back here and this is pretty much all by-the-numbers nineties thriller cliches which would have gone straight to DVD if it hadn’t been for the star power of the cast. One famous scene in which Willis offs a young Jack Black is the only noteworthy thing. Forsyth hated it and it was just called “The Jackal” to acknowledge that this wasn’t really much to do with his novel.

And now we have a ten part series which moves the action to the present day, moves the target to a Musk style tech billionaire and greatly expands the narrative. Redmayne finds a deep seam of ruthlessness which is rather disturbing and Lynch – who I wasn’t convinced by in No Time to Die but who I thought was amazing in Matilda – is stunning as Bianca, by turns friend to the fallen, hard-bitten meeting room warrior, and bad ass machine gun toting bitch. Expanding such a slender storyline comes with risks, but the 1973 film exemplifies the motto “audiences love how” and the new team, led by showrunner Ronan Bennett have taken that to heart, with a whole other mission for the Jackal which is just as thrilling as the main hit, a subplot which digs into the Jackal’s own emotions without undermining his impact as a force for evil, and a surprisingly open-ended conclusion. Recommended.

Also coming at the tale end of a series of iterations of the same narrative comes Wicked Part One – the musical film of the stage musical of the novel inspired by the musical film of the novel. I adore the 1939 Judy Garland film and sat down to watch the musical with some trepidation, but I greatly appreciated the cleverness of the story as well as the soaring songs. Now Jon M Chu (In the Heights) has directed a movie version which takes about as long as the stage show without the interval to deliver just the first half of the story – but fuck me I’ve never had 160 minutes whip by so quickly.

All of the the things which are assumed to have taken place off-stage, all the gaps we the audience have to fill in between the songs, all the emotional beats which aren’t quite fully illuminated come into crisp sharp focus here, and those amazing songs land perfectly, thanks to the gorgeous staging, perfect pacing and astonishing lead performances from Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. Shout out too to the hilarious Jonathan Bailey who has a damn good go at stealing a film which the two stars already have completely locked down.

And I just have time to mention that I’ve now finished watching the first series of Blake’s 7 thanks to the recently released Blu-ray box set. I have only vague memories of watching this when it was first on, chiefly involving Paul Darrow swaggering around in a slightly absurd fashion. In this first series, his calculating, self-centred Avon makes the perfect foil for Gareth Thomas’s passionate and idealistic Blake, and the best episodes combine wonderful character work with tight plotting and a real attempt to summon up a science fiction world. Yes, there is a lot of plastic and tinfoil in the sets and costumes, no not all the guest cast are up to snuff, but I was absolutely engrossed for all 13 episodes nevertheless.

Dr Strangelove on stage

Posted on November 2nd, 2024 in Culture | No Comments »

Note – spoilers throughout.

I always said it was a bad idea.

To be fair, I also said if anyone had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sean Foley, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, so I was prepared to give Dr Strangelove a chance. Plenty of beloved properties have been successfully reinvented over the years. The stage version can’t be the movie, arguably shouldn’t be the movie. Could it be successful on its own terms?

Ehhh… not really.

It’s not a failure, not by any means and Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George’s plot is still absolutely bomb-proof (pun intended) so if you’ve never been told this story before, there’s a good chance you’ll be in its spell, have a good time with the ripe performances and admire the bravura staging. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the original – or possibly even if you don’t – it’s hard to look past a series of surprising shortcomings. I think of these as forced errors, unforced errors and tonal blunders.

On screen, Peter Sellers plays three roles. Neurotic about his ability to summon up the Texan accent for Major Kong, he got himself signed off the picture after a minor accident on his first day in the cockpit, and Slim Pickens magnificently took over. That leaves one Peter Sellers on the air force base and two in the war room, which Kubrick achieves entirely with cutting and body doubles, never even trying to show both faces in the same frame. That luxury isn’t available to the stage team, and so various holes are introduced in the war room scenes where Coogan has to nip off stage, replaced on a spurious pretext and the change covered by a fairly unconvincing stand-in.

These pretexts distract from the action, the scenes lose momentum, and the fact that two key characters can’t talk to each other in the story’s final moments is a huge problem, but these are all forced errors. I don’t have any better solutions, and it wouldn’t make commercial sense to have another actor play the president, the least showy but most central of the Sellers parts.

We actually first see Strangelove via an early 1960s Zoom call, and when the Germanic scientist agrees to come and join him in person, Coogan as the president comments that that would make life easier “in some ways”. That’s a lovely joke, pressingly lightly on the fourth wall where others might have stampeded through it. It’s a rare moment of restraint, in a script which elsewhere feels like a child has gone through the movie screenplay, scribbling silly comments in the margins. In the movie, Mandrake bristles at Keenan Wynn, clocking his name badge and tartly observing “Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name.” Here Coogan just goes ahead and says “Guano? Like bird shit?” It’s such a good joke that we get Turgidson repeating the exact same words some moments later.

Now, stage and screen are very different animals, and there is an argument that the gag rate needs to be higher and the jokes need to be broader if the audience is there in person. And if the whole room had been rocking with laughter, I would have to admit that even though the vulgarity doesn’t seem to me to be an improvement on the elegant wit of the original screenplay, the piece was doing the job it set out to do. But only about one joke in five ever really landed the night I was there, with most punchlines met with soft chuckles, or total silence. If you’re committing to making this a wall-to-wall gagfest, then it needs to be Book of Morman funny, not middling student revue funny.

And these tonal lapses extend to the performances too. Coogan is quite bad as Mandrake, the part where you’d imagine he’d be most at home, playing him as a rubbery cross between Prince Charles and Alan Partridge, the script decorated with sub-PG Wodehouse British-ism like “Bally bingo bollocks” and other such drivel. That’s a shame as John Hopkins’s General Ripper is one of the highlights of the play, with just a little Donald Trump mixed into Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chomping lunacy. Coogan also struggles with Merkin Muffley, which is a better performance, but the comedy value in the president’s egg-headed earnestness seems to elude him and he badly muffs the hilarious phone call with Moscow, such a highlight of the original movie.

Once again, he’s paired with a brilliant performance from one of the supporting actors. Giles Terera, the original UK Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is terrific as Turgidson, effortlessly finding the tone which seems to be eluding so many others. Tony Jayawardena is pretty good as Ambassador Bakov too (but what was wrong with de Sadski?). Coogan is best by far as Strangelove himself, and here for once all of the pieces seem to come together, as the actor’s performance is neither a rendition of what Sellers did, nor a reaction against it, the new backstory adds rather than detracts, and Iannucci and Foley find a new way for this character to be funny.

If this was where we ended up, with some tonal lapses and some forced errors, I’d be happier to recommend this, but the unforced errors are completely confounding. Chief among these is the stuff on the B52. This is the least successful element of the whole evening. The projections are pretty, but by presenting the whole plane onstage, the production never puts us inside the cockpit, so there’s never a feeling of claustrophobia. And the two other pilots are woefully underwritten. But far more damaging are the plot changes introduced here.

A good screenplay is a piece of architecture and it’s hard to make one change without introducing problems elsewhere, and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get lost. Here, the function and the purpose of the doomsday device is muddled, with the first half making it clear that the machine has to be triggered manually, and the possibility existing of a deal to be struck whereby America destroys one of its own cities to stay the Premier’s hand (shades of Fail Safe). Only in the second half is it made clear that the whole purpose of the device is that it triggers itself automatically. And for no good reason, they cut the line “The Premier loves surprises.” This introduces confusion and gains us nothing.

But worse is to come, as the role of the OPE/POE “recall code” also gets garbled during the interval. In the first half, we’re told, in lines repeated verbatim from the movie, that the plane’s radios won’t receive at all unless messages are preceded by the appropriate three-letter-sequence (known only to the pilots and General Ripper). However, when we’re in the cockpit, this is changed to the sequence “POE” is a coded order to turn back, and rather than have the CRM discriminator destroyed when the plane is hit by the missile, it’s working fine, but Major Kong elects to ignore the order. And that change is fatal.

The American military was so worried by what the movie might do to American morale that they insisted a disclaimer be placed at the beginning. In my eyes, that only makes what follows more convincing. The nuclear deterrent is vulnerable to a single person making one bad decision and the weapons at our disposal are so devastating that the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.

Except here, where is takes two people to make bad decisions. And that isn’t as potent. Not by half.

Elsewhere, the character of Faceman adds very little, and Mark Hadfield is working way too hard. A laborious and relentlessly unfunny subplot about the Ambassador wanting fish does eventually lead us to a pretty great visual punchline, and – as noted – the production design is amazing. Most effective are probably the scenes between Ripper and Mandrake, as the physical effects and sound design really do summon up the bullets flying and Hopkins and Coogan play off each other very well. But time and again, the changes made to the script detract rather than add, sometimes in minor irritating ways, sometimes in major fatal ways.

I think the real missed opportunity here is the original ending. As written and initially shot, when the bombs began falling, the war room was to break into an enormous custard pie fight. Kubrick cut this (and destroyed the footage), feeling that it didn’t quite work to escalate from nuclear annihilation to prat falls – and he was very likely right. But onstage, the calculus is different. The bombs don’t feel as viscerally real – but the custard pies would. The actual ending isn’t bad, as a ghostly Vera Lynn transports us to a musical afterlife, but I can’t help but imagine what a more slapstick finale might have looked like. A little bit of sweaty messiness might have helped this very slick but often sterile production gain a bit more intensity.

Megalopolis and The Substance

Posted on October 22nd, 2024 in At the cinema | No Comments »

Megalopolis need not detain us for very long. The story behind the story is vastly more interesting than what is on the screen. Genius filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, who once had a clear vision for how to turn Mario Puzo’s pulpy best-seller into a towering work of cinematic iconography, who had already bankrupted himself once trying to reimaging how Hollywood worked in the 1980s, now liquidates a small fortune in order to make his dream project which has been gestating for decades. Sadly, the money men who refused to finance this one were dead right, as it isn’t so much a story as an incredibly lengthy music video, in which random images are juxtaposed in the hope that something of meaning will emerge, but sadly it never does. Busily acting in at least five different films are Adam Driver (fine), Aubrey Plaza (dazzling), Shia LaBeouf (I mean, you know), Nathalie Emmanuel (vacant), Chloe Fineman (huh?) and Dustin Hoffman – who is not so much wasted as carelessly discarded. Avoid.

Of far more interest is The Substance which gives us Demi Moore (able to play a stunning-looking 50-year-old at the age of 60, which is quite remarkable in itself) as fired TV aerobics star and one-time movie actor Elisabeth Sparkle. Desperate to cling on to youth, beauty and all the opportunities those allow, she experiments with The Substance, and with a suitably flagrant disregard for such trivialities as the conservation of mass, she splits open along her spine to reveal a younger, hotter, more Margaret Qualley-ish her. However, The Substance has rules, chiefly that Elisabeth’s consciousness must switch from body-to-body every seven days – no exceptions. But Qualley has far more fun than Moore, so this isn’t easy to sustain.

It’s vital to understand what writer/director Coralie Fargeat cares about and what she doesn’t to appreciate this film. Qualley reinvents herself as “Sue” and strolls back into her old job, which Dennis Quaid’s revolting producer is only too happy to give her. Consider that she has no references, no agent, no bank account, no social security number, not even a last name. Even given that we swallow the magical powers of The Substance (and Elisabeth’s ease with following the very skimpy instructions), what follows is completely impossible. But who could give two shits about any of that when we have the gleeful fun of watching the older Elisabeth’s body progressively falling to pieces as the younger version saps more and more of her life essence away – to say nothing of that completely preposterous grand guignol ending?

What Fargeat does care about is tactility. Everything in this movie, from clothing to medical equipment to flesh to food – especially food – squishes and oozes and rustles and scrapes. From the opening shots, her camera comes right into pore level on the actors’ faces, and the early scene of Quaid slurping down shrimp does something to prepare the ground for the body horror that’s to come – although nothing can really prepare you for the onslaught of the film’s final act.

Moore and Qualley are tremendous, but amongst all of this bravura splatter-gore, it’s two quieter moments that stick with me. The opening overhead shot is a masterpiece of visual storytelling, and the extended sequence of Moore being unable to leave her apartment for her date with an old school friend is utterly devastating. Although both this and Megalopolis look like films of which you could say similar things – crazy, bonkers, you’ve never seen anything like it, etc. – the difference is that Coppola’s film feels like wild horses rode through the screenplay destroying everything in their path, whereas for all its batshit excesses, Fargeat’s film always knows exactly what it wants to be and exactly what it’s doing.

My only criticism is shouldn’t “Elisa-sue” have been “Eli-sue-beth” instead?