Tag: film

No Time To Die

by admin, posted in film reviews

The American director Cary Joji Fukunaga faced an exacting and unenviable task when chosen to helm the 25th instalment of cinema’s most enduring franchise, James Bond. The film entitled  No Time to Die, (courtesy apparently of the random title/word generator used on these occasions) is the latest, long (pandemic) delayed, and the fifth and last to feature Daniel Craig in the eponymous role. As a filmmaker (and co-writer with Neal Purvis, Robert Wade and Phoebe Waller-Bridge), Fukunaga had to pay due homage to the franchises’ six decades of history, studded with some of the most familiar (dare one say overused) cliches in cinema) to avoid alienating the franchise’s long-established fan base. He also faced the competing demand to somehow strike out and find fresh territory in such a perennial and familiar film universe. His efforts in this regard centred on Bond’s accumulation of emotional baggage through his five-film journey. Prior to Craig’s tenure in the 007 tuxedo, every portrayal of Bond, even those featuring the same actor, began each film as essentially a blank slate, carrying no physical or psychological scars forward from the various traumas he negotiated in the previous film. Craig’s Bond is supposed to be different.

As a result, Fukunaga’s film is a rather patchy compromise. There are the all-too familiar large scale action sequences, which are staged expertly and are never less than extremely watchable but nonetheless highly improbable. Bond as ever manages to defy death, serious injury and logic in these sequences (at least until the film’s climax, when Fukunaga’s film does find genuinely new territory). But the film’s unsatisfying compromise is always apparent.  The entire Bond franchise has never really recovered from the damage incurred in the 1990s when the Austin Powers films so effectively demolished its cliches (with an honourable mention going to “You Only Move Twice”, the 1996 Simpsons ‘Bond spoof’ episode which featured the wonderfully named Hank Scorpio (pictured), a moniker which would sit easily in the rogue’s gallery of Bond villains.) Many of these cliches are still on show in the latest film; the chief villain of the piece (Rami Malek) rejoices in the first name Lucifer, and a last name, Safin, that evokes the indeterminate Eastern European origins of many of Bond’s Cold War era nemeses.  Safin even devises his dastardly plot in a remote island lair (yes, really) protected by a loyal yet somewhat incompetent private army. Which, like so many previous Bond adventures, provokes the obvious yet unanswered question: how exactly does the average supervillain source and recruit an army of skilled henchpeople? Is there a website named Goons R Us or somesuch?

His name and choice of hideout location are not the only implausible aspects of Safin’s villainy. In a plot twist that stretches credulity to breaking point, Safin’s motivation metastasizes from a quest for personal revenge to a vastly more ambitious goal of widespread genocide. It as if the screenplay’s writers felt an imperative to raise the stakes, to produce a climax worthy of Craig’s 007 swansong. It is a gambit that might have succeeded if Safin’s character were more developed, but Malek’s performance in the role is uncertain at best.  There are similar problems with Bond’s grand romance with Dr Madeline Swann (Lea Seydoux). The latter enjoys the extraordinary privilege of being the first female protagonist (it is probably high time to formally retire the outdated, misogynistic term “Bond girl“)  Seydoux seems an odd choice for such a distinction, if only because her performance is so thoroughly anodyne and uninvolving, and there is so little chemistry between them, that she seems an unlikely object of Bond’s grand passion, which supposedly provides the rationale for his ultimate act of self-sacrifice. Their supposed mutual devotion suffers by comparison with the much spikier and engaging interplay between Bond and his doomed former flame Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) in Casino Royale (2006). And Bond in return seemingly has little to offer such a relationship. Many critics have written approvingly of the greater insight we are given into Bond’s emotional hinterland, but this character evolution seems to me only marginal at best; at his core, the Bond of No Time to Die appears to be largely unreconstructed from the “blunt instrument” to quote the memorable early assessment offered by M (Judi Dench) in Casino Royale. For all the greater willingness to exhibit his emotional side, he is still the stern-visaged, unsmiling assassin familiar from virtually every Bond incarnation, who spends much of the film casually despatching a large array of faceless henchpeople without the merest sign of remorse or even hesitation.

Despite the oversold and overhyped attempts to project greater emotional sophistication in the leading character’s persona, the formula for success in a Bond film hasn’t really changed that much over the years. You need at least a plausible chemistry to exist with the main female protagonist, and a singular villain who is both believably mendacious and charismatic without lapsing into a “Doctor Evil” style caricature.  Without these crucial elements, No Time to Die is left to rely on the essential silliness of the plot which makes just too many demands on the audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief.

No Time To Die’s shortcomings are by no means unique to this particular film. Other long-running cinematic series have fallen victim to the exact same syndrome of ”franchise fatigue”; certainly Star Wars ,Star Trek, Mission: Impossible and the ironically interminable Terminator series, among many others, have similar problems. No Time To Die remains a very watchable and engaging film, and its surprising and quite spectacular denouement does pack a wholly unexpected emotional punch. But regrettably it is not a patch on Casino Royale, and the energy and sheer chutzpah with which Craig revitalised the franchise in that film have largely dissipated over his five-film tenure behind the wheel the 007 Aston Martin. It is unquestionably the right time for him to depart.

Vice

by admin, posted in film reviews

In The Dark Knight (2008), the second instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, there is a telling scene where Batman locks himself in a room with the Joker and bars the entrance to prevent any intervention from the law enforcement officials in the next room.  The inference in the scene is clear; the self-appointed vigilante Batman is prepared to use whatever methods necessary to interrogate the villainous Joker, unlike the public officials who are hidebound by laws, codes of practice and the niceties of those pesky constitutional rights.  The film, and this scene in particular, was embraced by many right-wing pundits and commentators as a cinematic endorsement of the Bush Administration’s post 9/11 outlook and philosophy.  This was a philosophy that sought to radically redefine the strategy of the “War on Terror” with a willingness to shed the long-established conventions and pieties of international relations, and resort to extreme methods as a necessary means of engaging and defeating extremism.

The political figure most associated with this policy approach, even more so more than President Bush himself, was his enigmatic Vice-President, Dick Cheney; how ironic is it that the actor who portrayed Batman in Nolan’s film, Christian Bale, is the same actor who now plays Cheney in Vice, Adam McKay’s biopic of the former vice-president and left-liberal bogeyman.  Bale’s is far and away the film’s standout performance; as Cheney, he physically disappears into Cheney’s familiar impassive, humourless, hunched, shuffling presence, including his nuances such as his distinctive clipped, brusque manner of speech. Bale’s is by far the stand-out performance, and a bravura turn in a large and mostly underused ensemble cast, although Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney does well in a thankless role, although she struggles to rise above a screenplay that seeks to portray her as a Lady Macbeth-type accomplice to her husband. Less impressive are Sam Rockwell as George W Bush and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld.

Overall, however, the efforts of Bale and his castmates are not done justice but what seems an underdeveloped and unfocussed script which hovers uncertainly between outright satire and serious character study.  There are many moments when McKay’s screenplay seems to betray his origins and as a comedy skit writer on Saturday Night Live. Indeed, Bush and Rumsfeld seem more like broad caricatures in one of that show’s politically-themed sequences than fully realised characters in a screenplay with serious things to say.   In large measure, McKay’s film appears to share its DNA , along with is political outlook, with a Michael Moore film, particularly in its scattergun approach and its gimmicky digressions designed to convey weighty abstract concepts in more digestible form. These gimmicks include a scene in an imaginary restaurant, where Cheney, Rumsfeld and their fellow travellers are invited by an unctuous, fictional waiter (Alfred Molina) to select from a menu that includes ‘rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’ amongst other dubious options (Cheney’s triumphant declaration is, of course, “We’ll take them all!”) and a scene where Dick and Lynne mull over the wisdom of joining George W Bush’s ticket in a pseudo Shakespearean exchange.  The forced and contrived nature of the transitions between a conventional narrative and these heavy-handed flights of fancy tends to undermine and confuse the film’s impact, especially the mock Shakespearean scene which takes the viewer out of the film and only serves to highlight the comparative paucity of the script.

Perhaps these defects are in some form unavoidable.  Cheney was, and remains, a deliberately obscure and imperviously opaque figure who defies most attempts to gain meaningful insight into his mind or character.  McKay attempts to deal with this challenge by spotlighting a couple of famous public episodes; his invitation to veteran senator and foe Patrick Leahy to, ahem, ‘go forth and multiply’ on the floor of the Senate and the incident where Cheney accidentally shot a friend, Harry Whittington, during a quail hunting expedition.   The latter is seen as a significant indicator of the power and aura that Cheney had managed to gather around himself, so much so that the victim, Whittington, felt compelled to apologize to Cheney, one assumes for the inconvenience he caused by placing his body in the way of the Vice-Presidential bullet.  Another of McKay’s rare attempts to convey some light and shade is his portrayal of Cheney’s somewhat unexpected, albeit understated support of same sex marriage inspired by his daughter Mary’s lesbianism, a stance which caused no small measure of confusion and distress with his conservative support base.

But these interludes offer little insight into Cheney’s character or motivations, beyond the familiar, predictable left-liberal characterisation.  It invites the conclusion that Cheney, despite occupying a privileged and massively influential position at the very heart of power, remains a largely unknown, and seemingly unknowable enigma. Vice, despite a being a watchable and engaging retelling of recent history, really falls between two stools and fails in its aspirations to shed any new light on its subject. It is too heavy-handed and obvious to succeed as satire, using a sledgehammer as its weapon of choice when a scalpel would have served better. But ultimately it is also too indulgent, undisciplined and eager to confirm the bias of its target audience to serve any real serious intent.

Perhaps there is a good film to be made about the controversial life and career of Richard Bruce Cheney. But, unfortunately despite its best attempts and some fine performances, Vice is not that film.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

by admin, posted in film reviews

Much attention has been lavished on Melissa McCarthy’s performance as the celebrity biographer (and notorious forger) Lee Israel. It has been widely seen as a dramatic and serious role, and hence a radical departure from the customary broad comic persona which first propelled her to prominence in mainstream fare such as Bridesmaids. But the departure, it appears to me, is not so great as it might initially appear. Israel, in McCarthy’s hands, is still essentially a comic creation, as profane and as caustically and savagely witty as any of her previous out-and-out comic roles. But it would seem that the discipline imposed by the portrayal of a real-life character and a nuanced and subtle screenplay drawn from Israel’s own memoir, serves to curb McCarthy’s trademark excesses and allows her the time and freedom to explore her character’s more complex inner depths and motivation.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? is that most rare cinematic beast: a film which has at its heart a portrait of a friendship between two lonely, middle-aged outsiders. We first meet McCarthy’s Israel as a down-on-her-luck celebrity biographer, attempting to eke out a diminishing living as a fringe-dweller in New York’s 1980s literary set, living in a ramshackle apartment, unable to enthuse her long-suffering publisher (Jane Curtin) about the marketing prospects for her latest subject, Fanny Brice, and so impecunious that she cannot afford medication for her elderly ailing cat, seemingly the only relationship in her life that she has any genuine investment in. When she happens accidentally across, and impulsively purloins, a letter from the aforementioned Brice, she discovers a pathway not only out of her desperate circumstances but a means of avenging herself on the literary world that had snubbed and ignored her. The key to both her short-term success, and hence her ultimate downfall, lies in her realization that she can make these literary artifacts more marketable by “juicing” them up with her own fabricated additions. It is a small step from this happenstance to her to creating and selling outright forgeries of supposed correspondence from such luminaries as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.

In this enterprise Israel is aided, firstly as confidante and then as accomplice, by Jack Hock, another disreputable, somewhat dissolute reprobate played with a winning self-assurance by Richard E Grant. They seem to be drawn to each other by a mutual misanthropic world-weariness, but where Israel is by nature solitary and withdrawn, Hock is sociable and voluble, perhaps dangerously so for the sake of their joint criminal endeavour.

It does great credit to the skill of both McCarthy and Grant that they manage to invest their essentially unlikable, morally dubious characters with considerable pathos and a certain rumpled dignity. This achievement is all the more noteworthy given the fact, as made clear by Israel’s statement to the court near the end, that she feels no regret in a moral sense for her deception, but her regret lies mainly in the fact that she was caught. The film does hint at one other source of regret for her, however; one of the victims of Israel’s deception is an impressionable bookseller, Anna, played by Dolly Wells, with whom Israel had made halting and diffident attempts at forming a relationship prior to the exposure of her scheme. This provides one of the true moments of pathos, when Israel appears to realise that Anna could have potentially provided an alternative path to redemption, a pathway she had squandered, like so much else, through her own mendacity.

All told, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, despite being one of the more unlikely subjects for a mainstream biopic, is an original and assured one, distinguished by a keen directorial evocation of time and place by Marielle Heller, a witty and nuanced screenplay by Nicole Hofcener and Jeff Whitty based on Israel’s own memoir, and note-perfect performances from its principals.

Fahrenheit 11/9

by admin, posted in film reviews

Anyone remotely familiar with American film-maker Michael Moore’s filmography would not be surprised by the undisguised, unambiguous slant of his latest venture. Fahrenheit 11/9, his cinematic polemic directed at the Donald Trump era in American politics.  Indeed, Moore nails his colours to the mast in the film’s title: the deliberate juxtaposition of the numbers 9 and 11 is a nod to Moore’s renowned 2004 film, Fahrenheit 9/11, his inquisition of the then Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath. 11/9 is intended to refer to the date November 9 2016, the day after Trump’s surprise election victory; the inference is far from subtle, in Moore’s customary style, and unmistakable: Trump’s unexpected elevation to the White House is a disaster equivalent to the events of September 11, 2001.

However, the film’s devotes little running time to a familiar excoriation of Trump’s various outrages and misdemeanours; Trump himself is almost an incidental character in Moore’s version of events.  For him, the true villains of the piece are his enablers, those who by their complacency or malfeasance made the unlikely Trump presidency possible.  The culprits are numerous: Hilary Clinton and her inept, tone-deaf campaign, Clinton’s sponsors in the Democratic Party who allegedly rigged the primary process to bestow the nomination on her rather than Bernie Sanders (clearly Moore’s preferred candidate), and the generation of Democrat politicians, up to and certainly including Barack Obama,  who had, through their compromise and lack of conviction, betrayed and disenfranchised their progressive, working-class constituency.  And, preeminently, much of the blame for the Trump ascendancy is laid at the feet of the mainstream media who, dazzled by Trump’s ‘celebrity’ status and the colour and shade he brought to an otherwise insipid election year, gave him  an enormous amount of non-critical coverage in the early stages of what was widely assumed to be an unserious ‘vanity’ candidacy. And Moore, to his credit, does not exempt himself from the (dis)honour roll of Trump’s inadvertent media enablers.

Unfortunately, the central message of Moore’s film is somewhat undercut by his trademark scatter-gun approach.  The laundry list of grievance is long and runs the gamut from Democratic political corruption, the water lead poisoning scandal in Michigan, family separation in immigrant families, gun violence in schools, exploitation of low-paid workers in Virginia, and much more besides. At the end of the day, Moore’s attempt to cover so much ground only dissipates and dilutes the passion and urgency of his message.   In particular, Moore can’t seem to help himself from indulging in his familiar stunts; spraying the garden belonging to Michigan Governor Rick Snyder with tainted water, and attempting to place the self-same Snyder under citizen’s arrest in person. The comedic impact of these episodes is minimal at best; they feel forced and contrived and could have been left on the cutting room floor without detracting in any way from the finished product. On the contrary, these sequences seem more than a little obligatory and under-graduate, and give the impression of Moore straining to satisfy the expectations of his loyal audience. The overall effect, it seems to me, is to undercut and trivialise the gravity of the very serious allegations that Moore is making: in Snyder’s case, no less than willful manslaughter.

The same could be said about one of the film’s final sequences, where historical footage of Nazi rallies and Hitler’s oratory is spliced and overlaid on audio from Trump’s speeches.  This, too, seems obvious, heavy-handed and arbitrary. and rather sells the audience short.  History (and one might dare hope, the US electorate) may well deliver a very negative judgment on the Trump presidency, but the US has had plenty of venal, corrupt and incompetent presidents in its history.  You don’t need to draw a false, somewhat overblown equivalency with Hitler to prosecute this case against Trump, and to do so verges on an insult to the viewer’s intelligence.

Moore’s lapse into over-inflated hyperbole is a shame, because Fahrenheit 11/9, at its best, makes many telling and salient points about the existential crisis of American democracy in the age of Trump.  Perhaps most salient is Moore’s insistence, counter to at least one prevalent view, that Trump is no mere aberration who fell out of a clear blue sky, but instead the most recent culmination of an anti-democratic trend whose origins predate Trump, and seems likely to outlast him.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that Moore’s earlier film, evoked in the title of this one, Fahrenheit 9/11, was clearly intended to contribute  to the defeat of George W Bush in the 2004 presidential election. Instead, history tells us that, in 2004, the Republicans secured a majority of the popular vote for the only time in the last seven presidential elections.  It would be unfair to blame Moore for this outcome, but his film obviously did little in the end to prevent it. He does his best to find a hopeful note in the apparent, reinvigorated progressive activism of a younger generation, and, like him, one can but hope.  But the lasting impression left by Moore’s film is still most likely to be a distinct chill running down the spine.

First Man

by admin, posted in film reviews

Our first meeting with the main subject of “First Man”, Damian Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic is revelatory; Armstrong, played in a taciturn, restrained, understated key by Ryan Gosling, is flirting with disaster after a potentially disastrous test flight of the X-15 aircraft leaves him skipping along the upper edge of the earth’s atmosphere without navigation control.  As with much of the film, our experience of manned flight in both the atmosphere and above is very much the perspective of the pilot.  Chazelle’s film eschews many of the usual space travel or sci-fi “blockbuster” norms. There are no Kubrickesque big-screen panoramas of the earth (or moon) from space accompanied by swelling, symphonic chords on the soundtrack.
(In fact, the film’s climactic sequence, the first moon landing, plays out in total silence.) Also, there are no obvious, elaborate CGI sequences design to elicit awestruck wonder and no exhaustive exposition of the technical wizardry that made manned spaceflight possible.

On the contrary, the Gemini and Apollo missions, for all their mythology and veneer of well-nigh superhuman sophistication, are often portrayed in the film as somewhat makeshift, seat-of-the-pants, Jerry-built endeavours.  The astronauts really are loaded, sardine-like, into cramped canisters atop vast, volatile solid fuel boosters. Karen Armstrong, Neil’s wife(Claire Foy), a model of stoic, at times barely-repressed anger, gives voice to this anxiety when she confronts her husband’s NASA colleagues:

“You’re just a bunch of boys. You don’t have anything under control!”

It is tempting to interpret Armstrong’s/Gosling’s closed-mouth reticence, and his immersion in engineering minutia, as a coping mechanism deployed in response to the various existential crises that he confronted, from his various near-death encounters as a test pilot and astronaut to his bereavement following the death of his infant daughter.  But it should be remembered that Armstrong and his fellow space pioneers were products of a wartime generation that came of age with the expectation that they, like their fathers, might be called upon to offer up their lives in military service, and this expectation must have informed his perception of his possible role in history.  The film is tightly focused on the lifespan of  the Apollo mission, and we are only afforded brief glimpses of the wider, roiling turbulence of 1960’s American society.  But Armstrong was a Naval aviator during the Korean War, and the film’s time frame incorporates the Vietnam War, JFK’s assassination and the Cuban missile crisis. Mortality, and the fear of mortality, is an ever-present character in the film, dealt with most poignantly with the death of three of Armstrong’s Apollo colleagues, including his close friend and neighbour Ed White,  in the Apollo 1 launchpad fire in February 1967.

Chazelle defies the expectations that one might have of a contemporary Hollywood crowd-pleasing spaceflight blockbuster, and his film instead delivers an intimate, interior, domestic portrayal of the this epic landmark moment in scientific and human history. And his film is so much the richer, and more compelling, for it.