So we draw to a close on another year, and with it, another decade, as people with a smart-arsed sense of humour are very keen to point out. No, sir, I'm only throwing the one stone, the glass walls should hold. To be honest, I felt 2019 was a strangely underwhelming year for film; where normally most of the year's top five is pretty straightforward, and usually, at least one film becomes a new favourite of mine, 2019 comparatively hasn't delivered as much.
Now as always, the defence is that the cream of 2019's crop, things like Parasite or The Lighthouse or 1917 will probably come to define the year in retrospect, but I've decided this is a game I am finally sick of playing. I'm not indulging a load of films that feel they're too good to bother releasing in the UK in the year they claim to hail from, and would rather show up fashionably late just to show that they can get away with it, whilst still being judged alongside all the good films that actually did come out on time. The one student who's always tardy shouldn't be absolved from punishment just because his homework was really good; in the real world, punctuality is everything. They won't hold down a job long if they don't show up when they say they will.
Nick, are you trying to punish Hollywood release schedules like they're trouble-making scoundrels and you're some kind of matronly school teacher again? Lose the wig and the riding crop and get on with the blog.
OK, well how about this. From now on, I don't care if you've been on general release in America for months, I am from this point on only counting films that have had a general UK release within 2019 as 2019 films. Film festivals don't count, so yes, even though a lot of these films get shown at the London Film Festival which is open to the public, that's still not general release so it will not count. For anyone who follows my Letterboxd, I have updated my previous years' ranked lists to allow for this new rule, which has caused some shakeups in the 2015 list, if nothing else.
And if it turns out Parasite is the greatest thing since marmite toast, then brilliant, well done. Good for it. We can hear all about in the top five of 2020 list, but this year's list will not be touched. You're a 2020 release now, Parasite. Well, you should have thought about that before you stapled an arbitrary number of months onto your release date. Why we're being forced to wait this long for a film that's already been translated and is months into its general run in America is ridiculous. And they wonder why pirating is on the rise.
Anyway. It's New Year's Eve, now. Warmth and love and celebration and alcohol poisoning. Hurrah. Top five of 2019. Go!
5. Ad Astra - James Gray
One of this year's surprise gems, I went in pretty much expecting a run-of-the-mill space exploration with Brad Pitt's nice, big marketable face slapped all over it, but what I wasn't expecting was an artful and meditative retelling of Apocalypse Now with some stellar visuals and atmosphere to boot. It's definitely far from perfect, though: it feels like the studio hands have been meddling at certain points in fear that a mainstream audience won't get it. A moon buggy chase sequence feels particularly out of place, and there's a tacked-on happy ending as well as plenty of voice-overs from the main character, explaining exactly what he's thinking, which remind me of the original cut of Blade Runner. Like that film, I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of years down the line we get a director's cut of Ad Astra with all the strange additions trimmed off, lifting this to become a new cult classic. Another one of these oddities is an ongoing device about Brad Pitt's heartbeat never rising above 70bpm, which is apparently supposed to show he's depressed, but is such a laughably mechanical approach to showing depression it sounds like it was written by a robot. But ultimately, underneath all the dodgier elements and creative decisions, there is a heart of classic hard sci-fi, which beats with ideas of existentialism and the human condition. The further Pitt travels from Earth into space, the weaker the signs of human life become, our attempts to commercialise space thwarted by the sheer scale of it, and its these kinds of emotions and images where the film really shines. I hope Gray turns his hand to sci-fi again soon, because I can see real potential and passion in this, and with just a few improvements, we could be onto something great here. 8/10, Medium Recommendation
4. The Favourite - Yorgos Lanthimos
"But that's a 2018 film, Nick". No, it's a 2019 film now. It may claim it's a 2018 film, but that's because it's a liar. UK general release was on the 1st January 2019, therefore it's a 2019 film. Maybe if it had come out a day earlier I would have let it keep the 2018 title, but then it wouldn't have made my top five last year, so maybe coming out this year was advantageous after all. Sorry, I'm supposed to be talking about how much I like this film, aren't I? It's not you, The Favourite: it's Parasite that's pissed me off. I'm still as sore as I was at the time about The Favourite's poor performance at the Oscars, besides its one Best Actress win which it completely deserved, because this film seemed far and away one of the better of the main contenders this year. Lanthimos' films are generally pretty weird, with a particular idiosyncratic edge, and The Favourite is no different, translating his bizarre stylings into the stately homes and frivolities of 18th-century royals. The performances and style, as well as the surprising amount of humour, are what really makes this film work so well, and elevate it above the usual period drama ranks into something special. Not to mention Horatio, the fastest duck in the City. Move over Colman, he's the real MVP of this film. 8/10, Medium Recommendation
3. Joker - Todd Phillips
Yes, I'm putting it this high on the list. No, I still wouldn't call it a masterpiece, and in a more interesting year this probably wouldn't have made the top five either, but as I said in my review, it's still a good film, and it's definitely left an impression. Whether you agree with the film's message or even on what the message is, it's difficult to deny that it's a very well made film, and I don't think people would be reacting as strongly to it if it weren't so thoroughly absorbing and atmospheric. 8/10, High Recommendation
2. Midsommar - Ari Aster
Ari Aster is definitely one of the directors whose career I'm currently watching with keen interest, along with Chazelle and Villeneuve among others. A comparison with last year's Hereditary is pretty much inevitable, and while Midsommar is more consistent, I think Hereditary still had a deeper effect on me. There's a level of micromanaged perfection in this film that reminds me of Refn, where every shot seems to have been meticulously polished and tightened, right down to the steadiness of the camera as it glides through the environment. It's not an easy film to get fully on board with: its plot I feel is meant to be interpreted more metaphorically than literally, which isn't unusual for horror, and I think it'll be one of those films that starts to click into place a bit more on rewatches, but if nothing else this film has an absolutely suffocating atmosphere. It captures an overpowering sense of isolation, despite the characters being trapped in a field and surrounded by apparently helpful villagers. It creates a horror of boundaries, about a clash of cultures where the monsters aren't acting out of malice but merely enforcing their own traditions and practices, ones that are so alien to our own culture as to seem inhuman entirely. It almost seems like a comment on how Americans seem to perceive other cultures and the outside world, as creatures to be feared that are plotting against us, when they're the ones being intruded upon, and they're just trying to welcome you to their custom. I wouldn't say it's a scary film, as such, more intimidating and at points uncomfortable, but in a good way. Aster seems to have found a new spin on horror that works for the modern age, and as we enter the new decade, I cannot wait to see where it takes him next. 8/10, High Recommendation
1. Knives Out - Rian Johnson
Another film that I was not expecting to be anywhere near as good as it was, Johnson's Agatha Christie-inspired whodunnit is an excellently written romp. As a lot of people have already said, it's kinda difficult to talk about without going into detail on the plot, and this is not the kind of film you want spoiled for you. What I will say is that not an inch of this script is wasted, and every little moment has some significance later on, in a way that I found very satisfying as a writer. It's a film that's very self-aware and is able to throw even the smartest of viewers off the scent incredibly early on, so while you're distracted with what seems like the solution, you don't even notice all the other clues being established that point towards the true answer, even when some of them are staring you right in the face. It's an all-star cast, and there's this brilliant sense that each of them are loving every second of it, chewing the scenery and each getting their moment to shine in their malicious brilliance. Not all the jokes land, and there are definitely characters that I wish got a bit more to do, but overall this was a really slick and enjoyable thriller, and the final shot had me beaming ear-to-ear, which has historically been a good sign. 9/10, High Recommendation
And there we go, end of a decade. A shining sea of possibility stretches out before us as we enter the 2020s. What sights will this decade bring? First man on Mars? First woman on Mars? Hell, first everyone on Mars, as we all flee our doomed planet and let the politicians fight over what's left.
"Don't feel sad, Timmy. Yes, the Earth got destroyed by global warming, but we have Mars now, and it's got blackjack and hookers... and we even had time on the way over to collect every single copy of Cats and jettison them into space where they fucking belong."
Happy new year.
NB: For those interested, you can see my full 2019 ranking here
Tuesday 31 December 2019
Monday 23 December 2019
Cats (2019) - Off of the Stage and Into the Litter Tray
Don't worry, you'll still be getting the annual top five, but consider this a Christmas treat: a bonus review. Since it's the opening weekend and thus still very much the hot topic, I was gonna talk about Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker, then I remembered it's Star Wars, which historically has a fanbase best likened to a honey badger trapped in a washing machine, and not only that, I'm one of those freaks who still loves The Last Jedi, and so I decided it might be wiser to avoid getting my eyes gouged out at an eco-friendly thirty-degree heat and turn my sights on the other, more agreeably bad film opening this weekend, Cats. Because frankly, I couldn't think when else I was gonna get a chance to talk about it and I can't let this travesty go uncommented on.
Now as a disclaimer, I'm well aware of the stage musical that this is adapted from, and from what I've researched the stage version is just as problematic story-wise as the film is, so the film has been effectively shot in the knee before it even left the gate. But here's the thing: a big part of adaptation is changing a story so that it will work in a new medium. A loose, barely existent plot might work on stage, where the musical is, in reality, closer to a ballet than anything, but on screen where story is a lot more crucial, you need to add something more for it to work, especially if you're trying to make a mainstream crowd-pleaser for all the family to enjoy.
With all that in mind, Cats is a film almost entirely devoid of plot, protagonists, character development or motivations. The closest thing that resembles a story is that a gang of London cats called the Jellicles have an annual talent show, the winner of which ascends to 'the Heaviside layer'. On stage, this is supposed to mean being reborn as a Jellicle but the film doesn't clarify that very well to my memory, so the Jellicles are essentially the cat equivalents of either a sacrificial pagan cult or Born Again Christians.
In practice, a nearly silent protagonist cat named Victoria is dropped off in some back alley and the Jellicles gang up on her and basically just sing and dance at her for about an hour like she's some kind of talent scout, while she vacantly stares back at them, presumably waiting for an opportunity to run away. Most of the songs consist of her being introduced to random cats like Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) and Bustopher Jones (James Corden) with no real suggestion of why we should care about any of them. And yes those are their real names. Wilson and Corden, in particular, are quite obnoxious, although this is probably just down to them as actors rather than their characters. It might just be me, but I've never really been particularly fond of Corden's comedy, there's a level of smugness to him where he thinks he's a lot funnier than he actually is and it makes him quite punchable. During his song, he gets a "wacky" fourth wall break moment which, to be honest, sounds more like Corden had some kind of breakdown mid-take and they just left it in, like he suddenly just realised he's in fucking Cats. In fact, his line at the end of this moment, delivered with a character breaking level of exasperation, ends with the sentence "you're all......cats!", spoken in such a way that it sounds like the word 'fucking' should be occupying the gap.
You know, that's probably a good a time as any to talk about the elephant in the room: the CGI. This film is somehow rated U, and yet the character design on the cats is child traumatisingly awful. Much has already been said about this when the trailer dropped, and supposedly improvements have been made since then, but I honestly don't know how any of this made it past inspection. For one thing, I don't know any human that would see an extended shot of Rebel Wilson as an anthropomorphic cat scratching away at her cat pussy, and say: "Yes, this is fine. No problems here. Children will love this." But hey, I guess if you're a degenerate, this film has you covered. In fact, that might as well be the tagline.
The character design is just flat out disturbing, in fact a lot of them remind me of Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat, and trust me, no one wants to be reminded of The Cat in the Hat. The cats' appearance not only makes it hard to relate to them, but it's also just really distracting. They've made them anthropomorphic and yet rendered them with fur in a somewhat photorealistic way, but anthropomorphism doesn't really look very pleasing when it's live-action and certainly not when they still have human faces and hands, sticking them in this weird fur-lined uncanny valley that just triggers some primal discomfort. Genuinely, if they'd gone all the way and just given them cat faces too, I think the film would have been so much better for it, and people would probably not be slating the CG nearly as much as they have been.
There's also something almost sexual about the way they're designed, and while I'm sure it wasn't intentional, there's this kind of uncomfortable atmosphere where you just know someone somewhere is getting off to it. If the cats had more of a humans-in-a-costume vibe like in the stage show, it would probably be OK, but because they've tried to commit to the cat aspect, there's a lot of attention drawn to the fact that most of them while of human shape and proportion are not wearing clothes, and those that are do not have underwear. So now you're sat watching a film that's seems clearly aimed at kids, or at least families with relatively young children, with a load of essentially naked, although at least genital-less, humans slinking around, lapping up milk, nuzzling each other and just generally acting cat-like in a frankly fetishistic way. Luckily no-one goes uwu.
As far as I'm aware, the film is relatively faithful to the stage version, not that there's much plot to be faithful to, but there is one strange area where the film deviates. Idris Elba, who's clearly accepted the shit he's in and is just rolling with it and enjoying every second, plays Macavity, a villain cat who wants to win the talent show. Again, why this means so much to him is never explained, considering the only reward seemingly of becoming an Evanjellicle is official membership, which doesn't seem like something that would interest him. On stage, he occasionally shows up to abduct his competition, presumably by means of hessian sack or Fulton recovery system or another classic kidnap method. In the film, however, he just sorta vanishes them. He'll tap someone on the shoulder and POOF! Evaporated. Then they reappear on a barge in the middle of the Thames. It's a nitpicky detail I'll admit but it's just kinda baffling; call me cynical but I somehow don't buy that this is a world where magical teleportation exists, let alone a world where it's just shrugged off as something that happens.
It gets weirder though. Eventually, he disappears Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judi Dench, who definitely seems to have an air of 'I need to fire my agent' to her performance), leaving the Jellicles to wonder what to do next. "Maybe we can just magic her back", says Victoria, in one of the only lines she seems to have, and yes that's more or less a direct quote. And so cue Mister Mistoffelees' number, cause he's a magician, and despite him clearly not knowing how to magic Old Deuteronomy back, somehow he fuckin does it! Without any explanation outside of "iT's MaGiC", she's just back, problem solved and the "plot" continues. It's one of the most egregious deus ex machinas I've seen in ages, and the film barely even cares. Not to mention, we then see all the other kidnapees who've been chained on the barge all this time, and since I guess someone told them they need to wrap this trainwreck up, they just conveniently pull off their chains and escape with minimal effort. How did any of this get past quality assurance?!
Speaking of which, the editing is also pretty messy. There are reports that Hooper was still editing the film right up towards the deadline on Wednesday night, which first of all, I feel that. That was me editing my second-year uni film, knowing what a mess it was and desperately tweaking ANYTHING in an attempt to make it better. And second of all, it kinda shows. The moment that stuck in my mind was during Rum Tum Tugger's song, there's a shot of Rebel Wilson delivering a characteristically unfunny quip, and the shot awkwardly lingers on her for way too long, presumably waiting for the audience to recover from their paroxysms of laughter, but even accounting for that it's uncomfortably long. It feels like an editing error more than anything, you can actually see Wilson's character start to break a bit as she presumably waits for Hooper to call cut. In a broader sense, the film is just a bit of a drag. The lack of any real plot definitely doesn't help, but considering it's only about an hour and fifty minutes long, Cats feels about twice that. I genuinely fell asleep probably around the hour mark for about ten minutes, and when I woke up it honestly felt like I had missed nothing at all.
Cats is a bafflingly bad film, but in a way I do feel sorry for it. The idea of adapting the plot-less stage musical to screen in the first place is basically a massive handicap on the film's part, but the character design sealed its fate, and there's no amount of directorial magic that could have probably saved it. That being said, it's not like the film tries its absolute hardest to overcome its issues, and there were definitely a lot of dodgy choices made in the adaptation, casting and direction. I'd almost consider recommending it, not as a film, but as some kind of exhibition piece. Roll up, roll up one and all! Come and see the freak. Marvel at how James Corden gets smacked in the crotch and feels pain, despite visibly having no genitals!
You're right, you probably didn't want to think about James Corden's cat bollocks ever in your life, but this film made me think about them for multiple seconds and that is a crime that I will never forgive it for!
Cats - 2019 - Tom Hooper - USA
Score: 4
Recommendation: Low
Now as a disclaimer, I'm well aware of the stage musical that this is adapted from, and from what I've researched the stage version is just as problematic story-wise as the film is, so the film has been effectively shot in the knee before it even left the gate. But here's the thing: a big part of adaptation is changing a story so that it will work in a new medium. A loose, barely existent plot might work on stage, where the musical is, in reality, closer to a ballet than anything, but on screen where story is a lot more crucial, you need to add something more for it to work, especially if you're trying to make a mainstream crowd-pleaser for all the family to enjoy.
With all that in mind, Cats is a film almost entirely devoid of plot, protagonists, character development or motivations. The closest thing that resembles a story is that a gang of London cats called the Jellicles have an annual talent show, the winner of which ascends to 'the Heaviside layer'. On stage, this is supposed to mean being reborn as a Jellicle but the film doesn't clarify that very well to my memory, so the Jellicles are essentially the cat equivalents of either a sacrificial pagan cult or Born Again Christians.
In practice, a nearly silent protagonist cat named Victoria is dropped off in some back alley and the Jellicles gang up on her and basically just sing and dance at her for about an hour like she's some kind of talent scout, while she vacantly stares back at them, presumably waiting for an opportunity to run away. Most of the songs consist of her being introduced to random cats like Jennyanydots (Rebel Wilson), Rum Tum Tugger (Jason Derulo) and Bustopher Jones (James Corden) with no real suggestion of why we should care about any of them. And yes those are their real names. Wilson and Corden, in particular, are quite obnoxious, although this is probably just down to them as actors rather than their characters. It might just be me, but I've never really been particularly fond of Corden's comedy, there's a level of smugness to him where he thinks he's a lot funnier than he actually is and it makes him quite punchable. During his song, he gets a "wacky" fourth wall break moment which, to be honest, sounds more like Corden had some kind of breakdown mid-take and they just left it in, like he suddenly just realised he's in fucking Cats. In fact, his line at the end of this moment, delivered with a character breaking level of exasperation, ends with the sentence "you're all......cats!", spoken in such a way that it sounds like the word 'fucking' should be occupying the gap.
You know, that's probably a good a time as any to talk about the elephant in the room: the CGI. This film is somehow rated U, and yet the character design on the cats is child traumatisingly awful. Much has already been said about this when the trailer dropped, and supposedly improvements have been made since then, but I honestly don't know how any of this made it past inspection. For one thing, I don't know any human that would see an extended shot of Rebel Wilson as an anthropomorphic cat scratching away at her cat pussy, and say: "Yes, this is fine. No problems here. Children will love this." But hey, I guess if you're a degenerate, this film has you covered. In fact, that might as well be the tagline.
The character design is just flat out disturbing, in fact a lot of them remind me of Mike Myers in The Cat in the Hat, and trust me, no one wants to be reminded of The Cat in the Hat. The cats' appearance not only makes it hard to relate to them, but it's also just really distracting. They've made them anthropomorphic and yet rendered them with fur in a somewhat photorealistic way, but anthropomorphism doesn't really look very pleasing when it's live-action and certainly not when they still have human faces and hands, sticking them in this weird fur-lined uncanny valley that just triggers some primal discomfort. Genuinely, if they'd gone all the way and just given them cat faces too, I think the film would have been so much better for it, and people would probably not be slating the CG nearly as much as they have been.
There's also something almost sexual about the way they're designed, and while I'm sure it wasn't intentional, there's this kind of uncomfortable atmosphere where you just know someone somewhere is getting off to it. If the cats had more of a humans-in-a-costume vibe like in the stage show, it would probably be OK, but because they've tried to commit to the cat aspect, there's a lot of attention drawn to the fact that most of them while of human shape and proportion are not wearing clothes, and those that are do not have underwear. So now you're sat watching a film that's seems clearly aimed at kids, or at least families with relatively young children, with a load of essentially naked, although at least genital-less, humans slinking around, lapping up milk, nuzzling each other and just generally acting cat-like in a frankly fetishistic way. Luckily no-one goes uwu.
As far as I'm aware, the film is relatively faithful to the stage version, not that there's much plot to be faithful to, but there is one strange area where the film deviates. Idris Elba, who's clearly accepted the shit he's in and is just rolling with it and enjoying every second, plays Macavity, a villain cat who wants to win the talent show. Again, why this means so much to him is never explained, considering the only reward seemingly of becoming an Evanjellicle is official membership, which doesn't seem like something that would interest him. On stage, he occasionally shows up to abduct his competition, presumably by means of hessian sack or Fulton recovery system or another classic kidnap method. In the film, however, he just sorta vanishes them. He'll tap someone on the shoulder and POOF! Evaporated. Then they reappear on a barge in the middle of the Thames. It's a nitpicky detail I'll admit but it's just kinda baffling; call me cynical but I somehow don't buy that this is a world where magical teleportation exists, let alone a world where it's just shrugged off as something that happens.
It gets weirder though. Eventually, he disappears Old Deuteronomy (Dame Judi Dench, who definitely seems to have an air of 'I need to fire my agent' to her performance), leaving the Jellicles to wonder what to do next. "Maybe we can just magic her back", says Victoria, in one of the only lines she seems to have, and yes that's more or less a direct quote. And so cue Mister Mistoffelees' number, cause he's a magician, and despite him clearly not knowing how to magic Old Deuteronomy back, somehow he fuckin does it! Without any explanation outside of "iT's MaGiC", she's just back, problem solved and the "plot" continues. It's one of the most egregious deus ex machinas I've seen in ages, and the film barely even cares. Not to mention, we then see all the other kidnapees who've been chained on the barge all this time, and since I guess someone told them they need to wrap this trainwreck up, they just conveniently pull off their chains and escape with minimal effort. How did any of this get past quality assurance?!
Speaking of which, the editing is also pretty messy. There are reports that Hooper was still editing the film right up towards the deadline on Wednesday night, which first of all, I feel that. That was me editing my second-year uni film, knowing what a mess it was and desperately tweaking ANYTHING in an attempt to make it better. And second of all, it kinda shows. The moment that stuck in my mind was during Rum Tum Tugger's song, there's a shot of Rebel Wilson delivering a characteristically unfunny quip, and the shot awkwardly lingers on her for way too long, presumably waiting for the audience to recover from their paroxysms of laughter, but even accounting for that it's uncomfortably long. It feels like an editing error more than anything, you can actually see Wilson's character start to break a bit as she presumably waits for Hooper to call cut. In a broader sense, the film is just a bit of a drag. The lack of any real plot definitely doesn't help, but considering it's only about an hour and fifty minutes long, Cats feels about twice that. I genuinely fell asleep probably around the hour mark for about ten minutes, and when I woke up it honestly felt like I had missed nothing at all.
Cats is a bafflingly bad film, but in a way I do feel sorry for it. The idea of adapting the plot-less stage musical to screen in the first place is basically a massive handicap on the film's part, but the character design sealed its fate, and there's no amount of directorial magic that could have probably saved it. That being said, it's not like the film tries its absolute hardest to overcome its issues, and there were definitely a lot of dodgy choices made in the adaptation, casting and direction. I'd almost consider recommending it, not as a film, but as some kind of exhibition piece. Roll up, roll up one and all! Come and see the freak. Marvel at how James Corden gets smacked in the crotch and feels pain, despite visibly having no genitals!
You're right, you probably didn't want to think about James Corden's cat bollocks ever in your life, but this film made me think about them for multiple seconds and that is a crime that I will never forgive it for!
Cats - 2019 - Tom Hooper - USA
Score: 4
Recommendation: Low
Saturday 14 December 2019
Extra Rambles: The Hidden Message in Ford v Ferrari
This year saw the beginning of a new endeavour on my part, one that had been floating around the back of my mind for a while as a potential idea, that I've now finally put into effect. A boycott against Disney films. Now, the complete list of reasons behind this decision could probably fill multiple blog posts, and any long-time readers or close friends of mine are probably aware of some of them, so for sake of brevity, this key reason is that I feel Disney are gradually moving towards a monopolisation of the film industry, homogenising and perpetuating their intellectual properties until every penny has been wrung out of them, and basically, I don't want to support that.
Annoyingly for me, this is a surprisingly difficult protest to totally abide by, with Disney's constant acquisition of other companies and properties. I took my dad to see Ford v Ferrari the other week (known by the slightly weaker title of Le Mans '66 over here) since it has been getting decent reviews and my dad is very much a petrolhead. Not to mention, modern motorsport films in general have been reliably pretty excellent, with the likes of Senna and Rush both impressing me.
And while I imagine based on the timescale and the type of production Ford v Ferrari is that Disney's input on it was negligible, that still didn't comfort me much as I saw the 20th Century Fox logo blaring on the screen and the little critic voice in the back of my head couldn't help but exclaim, "ah, fuck."
Strangely though, with Disney occupying my thoughts in the background as I watched the film, this knowledge started to reframe my perception of the story and became suddenly aware of a deeper message lurking behind the film, one that seems incredibly apt in the year that Fox was bought out by Disney, and, with James Mangold in the directing chair, the same man who bought us Logan, a superhero film that revelled in its deviance from the other cookie-cutter Marvel films that preceded it, a message that I feel can't be completely accidental.
So without wishing to sound like a stuck record, here's my reading of the film.
For those who haven't seen it, the film revolves around the Ford motor company, in the midst of a sales slump and eager to find a new edge to regain their popularity. They approach Ferrari with a proposal to forge a joint racing team, but after a brutal rejection, they decide to build their own car instead to beat Ferrari at the next Le Mans race.
And thus begins the construction of the Ford GT40, spearheaded by car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) with loose cannon Ken Miles (Christian Bale) down as the driver. However, the duo are faced not only with overcoming the engineering obstacles but political ones too, as the Ford executives constantly meddle to maintain what they feel is right for the Ford brand, rather than what will get the job done.
Some of you may have worked out where I'm going with this.
The driving philosophy of the film (no, that wasn't deliberate but it's fucking staying in) seems to be that auteurism is essential for creating a product with a clear intention or ambition and that achieves it. A product is better and stronger as one cohesive vision rather than fiddled and tampered with by lots of grubby hands thinking they know what's best for the brand. Just because something might be better received from a publicity standpoint doesn't mean it's what's best for the product, and in fact, what might look better for marketing and what will actually work are often completely different from each other. A message that I can't help but feel is made in protest of Disney and their approach to their film franchises, if not the company as a whole.
Here's one of the most prominent examples from the film. After finishing the first prototype of the GT40, Ford decides to test it at one of the upcoming races, but the executives make the decision that Ken Miles cannot drive the car, as he is far too abrasive and unpredictable to represent Ford, and might damage their image. Shelby protests, but they won't listen. Unsurprisingly, without Miles's maverick attitude or passion behind the wheel, Ford lose the race, and Shelby is able to convince them to rehire Miles, provided he can win Daytona, which of course he does.
Now I'm not saying it's a perfect comparison, but to me at least this seems more than a little reminiscent of the debacle Disney and Marvel have had over the firing of more visionary directors, such as Edgar Wright from Ant-Man and Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: A Star Wars Story, in both cases being booted for supposed creative differences. These are writer-directors known for their ability to deviate from genre norms and a self-aware approach to their comedy, so it's not a huge leap to think that Disney took one look at what these guys had achieved so far, got frightened that the films were deviating just a bit too much from the regime to nicely represent the Disney brand, and promptly booted Wright, Lord and Miller and brought in directors who will do it how they're fucking told to and we'll have a little less of that lip, young man.
When it really boils down to it, Disney seems to be a company far more concerned with brand than content, making films seemingly more out of obligation than any actual artistic or creative drive. If the film isn't a smooth inoffensive slurry that can be easily poured down an audience's throat, then how will people ever bring themselves to buy up all the merchandise? And this is pretty much the indictment at the heart of Ford v Ferrari, as even in the film Ford's motivation for building the GT40 and competing in Le Mans is to inject more life into the Ford brand and get more people to buy their mass-produced factory cars rather than any real passion for racing, while the GT40 represents what can happen when a product is made with heart and passion and artistic vision. A final protest as Fox is swallowed by the amorphous mass of the Disney corporation.
And to clarify, I'm not saying that every Disney film is automatically terrible: there are always people involved with these projects that are at least trying to make quality cinema and they do often succeed. Love it or hate it, The Last Jedi was one of the more visionary tentpole Disney films of recent years and while there undoubtedly was studio meddling, the sheer divisiveness of it suggests that Rian Johnson probably had a fair amount of creative control and was able to do things how he wanted.
After all, this is only my interpretation of Ford v Ferrari; I'm just relaying what the film seemed to be saying. So if you've got a problem, take it up with James Mangold. Although, ya know, he ain't wrong.
There's also probably a lot more to this reading than I've been able to cover in this post, but I'll leave that for you to discover for yourselves. This is only Extra Rambles, after all: these are supposed to be shorter than the main posts...
Annoyingly for me, this is a surprisingly difficult protest to totally abide by, with Disney's constant acquisition of other companies and properties. I took my dad to see Ford v Ferrari the other week (known by the slightly weaker title of Le Mans '66 over here) since it has been getting decent reviews and my dad is very much a petrolhead. Not to mention, modern motorsport films in general have been reliably pretty excellent, with the likes of Senna and Rush both impressing me.
And while I imagine based on the timescale and the type of production Ford v Ferrari is that Disney's input on it was negligible, that still didn't comfort me much as I saw the 20th Century Fox logo blaring on the screen and the little critic voice in the back of my head couldn't help but exclaim, "ah, fuck."
Strangely though, with Disney occupying my thoughts in the background as I watched the film, this knowledge started to reframe my perception of the story and became suddenly aware of a deeper message lurking behind the film, one that seems incredibly apt in the year that Fox was bought out by Disney, and, with James Mangold in the directing chair, the same man who bought us Logan, a superhero film that revelled in its deviance from the other cookie-cutter Marvel films that preceded it, a message that I feel can't be completely accidental.
So without wishing to sound like a stuck record, here's my reading of the film.
For those who haven't seen it, the film revolves around the Ford motor company, in the midst of a sales slump and eager to find a new edge to regain their popularity. They approach Ferrari with a proposal to forge a joint racing team, but after a brutal rejection, they decide to build their own car instead to beat Ferrari at the next Le Mans race.
And thus begins the construction of the Ford GT40, spearheaded by car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) with loose cannon Ken Miles (Christian Bale) down as the driver. However, the duo are faced not only with overcoming the engineering obstacles but political ones too, as the Ford executives constantly meddle to maintain what they feel is right for the Ford brand, rather than what will get the job done.
Some of you may have worked out where I'm going with this.
The driving philosophy of the film (no, that wasn't deliberate but it's fucking staying in) seems to be that auteurism is essential for creating a product with a clear intention or ambition and that achieves it. A product is better and stronger as one cohesive vision rather than fiddled and tampered with by lots of grubby hands thinking they know what's best for the brand. Just because something might be better received from a publicity standpoint doesn't mean it's what's best for the product, and in fact, what might look better for marketing and what will actually work are often completely different from each other. A message that I can't help but feel is made in protest of Disney and their approach to their film franchises, if not the company as a whole.
Here's one of the most prominent examples from the film. After finishing the first prototype of the GT40, Ford decides to test it at one of the upcoming races, but the executives make the decision that Ken Miles cannot drive the car, as he is far too abrasive and unpredictable to represent Ford, and might damage their image. Shelby protests, but they won't listen. Unsurprisingly, without Miles's maverick attitude or passion behind the wheel, Ford lose the race, and Shelby is able to convince them to rehire Miles, provided he can win Daytona, which of course he does.
Now I'm not saying it's a perfect comparison, but to me at least this seems more than a little reminiscent of the debacle Disney and Marvel have had over the firing of more visionary directors, such as Edgar Wright from Ant-Man and Phil Lord and Chris Miller from Solo: A Star Wars Story, in both cases being booted for supposed creative differences. These are writer-directors known for their ability to deviate from genre norms and a self-aware approach to their comedy, so it's not a huge leap to think that Disney took one look at what these guys had achieved so far, got frightened that the films were deviating just a bit too much from the regime to nicely represent the Disney brand, and promptly booted Wright, Lord and Miller and brought in directors who will do it how they're fucking told to and we'll have a little less of that lip, young man.
When it really boils down to it, Disney seems to be a company far more concerned with brand than content, making films seemingly more out of obligation than any actual artistic or creative drive. If the film isn't a smooth inoffensive slurry that can be easily poured down an audience's throat, then how will people ever bring themselves to buy up all the merchandise? And this is pretty much the indictment at the heart of Ford v Ferrari, as even in the film Ford's motivation for building the GT40 and competing in Le Mans is to inject more life into the Ford brand and get more people to buy their mass-produced factory cars rather than any real passion for racing, while the GT40 represents what can happen when a product is made with heart and passion and artistic vision. A final protest as Fox is swallowed by the amorphous mass of the Disney corporation.
And to clarify, I'm not saying that every Disney film is automatically terrible: there are always people involved with these projects that are at least trying to make quality cinema and they do often succeed. Love it or hate it, The Last Jedi was one of the more visionary tentpole Disney films of recent years and while there undoubtedly was studio meddling, the sheer divisiveness of it suggests that Rian Johnson probably had a fair amount of creative control and was able to do things how he wanted.
After all, this is only my interpretation of Ford v Ferrari; I'm just relaying what the film seemed to be saying. So if you've got a problem, take it up with James Mangold. Although, ya know, he ain't wrong.
There's also probably a lot more to this reading than I've been able to cover in this post, but I'll leave that for you to discover for yourselves. This is only Extra Rambles, after all: these are supposed to be shorter than the main posts...
Saturday 30 November 2019
Joker (2019) - Glorification or Condemnation?
It's been about two months now since Joker came out, and I think the red mist has descended enough that we can approach this subject with a little more objectivity, unclouded by either the initial release hype or the backlash. To recap, Phillips' origin story about the titular clown prince of crime generated a pretty explosive reaction on its general release, with some people crowning it as a masterpiece, whilst others (an arguably more vocal proportion) despised it, claiming it to be some kind of incel rallying cry that encouraged and condoned the idea of alienated men violently retaliating against society.
Either way, this is certainly not a film that's skittered by unnoticed, and love it or hate it, a lot of people have strong opinions of it. I'll be honest, I put off seeing Joker for a while, partially because this is the same conversation that crops up every time any vaguely controversial media comes out, especially when violence is the subject, and also because while the controversy is at its hottest, trying to form a genuine opinion of a film based on its own isolated merits can be pretty tricky when all you can think about is spotting the points of contention and trying to work out who's side you're going to be setting up camp in. So I gave it a few weeks. I reviewed El Camino, watched some other stuff, tried not to read too much more about it. And by the time I went to see it, my expectations were about as neutral as I could get them: I didn't go in expecting anything more than just to be entertained.
Ok, so let's get to the point. Is Joker good?
Yes.
Is it a masterpiece?
No.
Is it r/gamersriseup: The Movie?
Not really.
Kinda anticlimactic, to be honest. My first impressions were good, but as it started into its second act and I became less sure about where it was headed, I became less sure of myself. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I was somewhere in the middle of the debate, but the more I've let the film sit with me, the more I've grown to respect it. And when it came to actually writing this post, I realised I actually liked the film a lot more than I'd initially realised.
In fact, and this is probably going to be quite a concerning statement considering the supposed philosophy of the film, but I felt like the film had a definite impact on me. I wasn't quite the same person once it finished, and it had this kinda lingering presence in my head for days to follow, which I would generally say is a good sign. A film's got to be doing something right if it continues to dwell and ferment in your mind long after seeing it like a fine wine.
Having said all that, and I want to stress this, it's not the second coming of Christ. There's nothing here that's particularly groundbreaking, it's really just an old idea well-executed. For one thing, if anyone's seen Taxi Driver recently, then conceptually Joker might ring a few bells. In fact, Joker essentially is a reimagining of Taxi Driver, only with a more generalised, less sexually-focused theme of emasculation. I've heard that The King of Comedy is a more fitting comparison but, having not seen it, I can't personally comment. Regardless, the Scorsese influence is clearly present, made more tangible with the knowledge that Scorsese was originally on board to direct.
Let's get some of the more 'reviewy' bits out of the way. Firstly, and this will probably come as a shock to no one, but Joaquin Phoenix is fantastic as the Joker. There's a kind of eeriness to his performance, a constant sense of something lurking underneath the surface. It's genuinely disquieting and even though we do (initially) sympathise with him when things go wrong for him, we never feel totally comfortable around him either. Honestly, Phoenix's performance is the film's MVP, and without him, I don't think the film would have had nearly the same impact on me. The film's atmosphere has a very oppressive quality to it, and the world of the story feels very distinct and tangible, and I found it all quite absorbing. Aesthetically and technically, everything's on good form, but there was nothing that really stood out besides maybe the sort of muted 80's production design, which went a long way towards establishing the kinda grimy, seedy environment that's essential for a story like this.
I also think it's important to note that I don't think Joker should be treated as a comic book movie. Even though, yes, technically this is a supervillain origin story and presumably counted as part of the DC cinematic universe, I don't think either of those contexts really match the film and what it's trying to achieve. Joker feels very much like its own one-off, self-contained entity, really more of an art-house film that just happens to feature a popular comic book character than anything else, and anyone going in expecting a Batman flick, even something Nolan-esque, I think will be disappointed.
Now, it feels like there's a billion and one things I could say about Joker, and it's definitely a film that warrants discussion and analysis. While writing this post, I've found it almost impossible to write about everything in the film I feel worthy of comment, or at least to enough extent as to do every topic justice, while still keeping this thing focused. So for the time being, I'm just going to concentrate on the key issue that seems to be at the core of all this controversy: whether the film's intention is to glorify or condemn the views and actions of its protagonist.
Personally, I believe it's the latter.
My reading of the film revolves mainly around the way in which the audience is positioned to view the narrative, or in other words, from whose perspective we are seeing the events. Furthermore, I believe the way this perspective changes as the film progresses tells us everything about how the film wants us to judge Joker. Now to talk about this properly, we've got to head into spoiler territory, so if you are still hoping to see Joker for yourself, skip ahead to the end for my conclusion.
At the start of the film, the audience is squarely positioned with Arthur Fleck, our protagonist. We see the world how he sees it, sometimes quite literally, as we are occasionally shown fantasy sequences, where we see how Arthur wishes to be seen or how he has convinced himself he is seen. Most notably of these is one where we see him as an audience member on Robert De Niro's TV show (I know he has a character name, but, ya know, it's Robert fuckin' De Niro), where he is picked to come out from the audience and is garnered with almost fatherly praise and support from De Niro, along with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Now, a fantasy sequence is about as subjective a view as you can get, so subjective it didn't happen, so it is clear that we are positioned quite intimately in Arthur's perspective, where we are invited to sympathise with him as our protagonist.
Reaching what is roughly the midpoint of the film, it is suddenly revealed that the romantic relationship established between Arthur and his neighbour was also a fantasy. And it does this by cutting to earlier shots from the film where the neighbour was present, then showing them again, only now she's completely absent. Not only are we seeing that Fleck's version of reality is untrustworthy, but the way this sequence is edited suggests a transition away from Fleck's subjective point of view towards a more objective, third-person perspective, where we are now invited to regard Fleck from an emotional distance, instead of directly sympathising with him like before.
Scribble forwards to the end. Fleck, now insisting on the moniker Joker, has done some pretty fucked up things, and as his actions become increasingly mean spirited and unjustified, naturally we begin feeling more and more uncomfortable and are withdrawing what sympathies we might have felt towards him.
Crucially, we get to the television interview, and I think there are two things really worth pointing out in the lead up to this scene. Firstly, we see Joker interacting with comparatively normal people, people who haven't met him before, and whose comments and interactions now provide us with a fresh set of eyes with which to look at Joker and see what he looks like to everyone else. A second opinion that kinda makes you reevaluate and think "oh shit yeah this guy's a nutter", in case you hadn't already clocked it. Secondly, Joker has been unpainted for the majority of the film, and only at the end does he dye his hair and put on his makeup (with the exception of his work scenes in the first act) and once it's on, he stays this way for the remainder of the film. Now, surface-level analysis, this marks his final transformation from poor Arthur Fleck to criminal maniac Joker and the end of his arc. Hmm, yes, very insightful. "His eye paint is blue because he's depressed, give me my GCSE, sir". But also, there's something inherently disassociative about disguising one's face. The face is the broadcaster of emotions, so when a face is obscured it becomes harder for an observer to read and thus there's a kinda primal mistrust we have towards masked or painted faces. And regardless of how much effect that has on you personally, there is still a subconscious link present, and so when we see Joker amongst a group of normal people, not only does he obviously stick out as the freak amongst them, but he becomes this kinda inscrutable threat, an interloper amongst humankind who doesn't fit in and should be feared. Again, yes, this seems obvious considering the conceit of the film, but the crucial point is that now our perspective has been shifted to that of an outsider looking in on the Joker, and thus we too begin to see Joker as they do, no longer a protagonist we support and understand, but a threat that we fear. That's audience positioning.
We get to the interview, and Joker begins his 'we-live-in-a-society-esque' speech, that I know some of my friends have ridiculed, and from a certain perspective, rightly so, because the film also ridicules it. And here's kinda the crux of my argument: if Joker was a film that glorified its protagonist and his actions, then this speech would be a perfectly executed monologue, scathingly criticising the world of both the film and reality, leaving every other character speechless in its wake, like some demented alternate-universe Atticus Finch. As Joker finishes, there's a pause before De Niro's character begins clapping. Then some others join in and the room descends into rapturous applause. Or, in other words, pretty much what happened in Fleck's fantasy at the beginning.
But no, now we are seeing things from an outsider's perspective, and resultingly, Joker's speech rightly comes off as the ravings of a maniac. Not only is his point almost incoherent, but he is constantly interrupted by De Niro's character, who criticises his argument, and essentially becomes an audience surrogate that says all the things that we're thinking. Joker is humiliated and verbally defeated, and by a character no less that Joker, or Fleck at least, looked up to and trusted the opinion of, practically idolising him.
Not only does this juxtaposition with the first fantasy highlight how much the audience positioning has shifted over the course of the film, but it also shows how far Fleck's character has decayed, how far he's fallen and that this is not the same character we were rooting for in the beginning, and absolutely should not be rooting for now.
And that, to me, is how this film condemns the actions of the Joker. This sequence is instrumental in understanding how the Joker should be interpreted, and my reading is that he is a joke, ridiculed by those he is trying to intimidate and completely unable to defend his ideology against even light scrutiny.
Now, conversely, one could argue this scene the other way, with Joker being publicly ridiculed by those who can't understand his point of view, and when he finally snaps and shoots De Niro dead, he sort of comes out on top, as if resorting to violence is an adequate solution when someone emasculates or in some way threatens your ego, and that kind of justification is more or less where the controversy is coming from. Not helped by the fact that Joker is then regarded as a hero and a king by the crowds of oppressed thugs tearing the city apart. My only answer to that really is that we see Bruce Wayne's parents gunned down (for like the twelve hundredth time on screen) by one of the thugs inspired by the Joker, and that kinda recentres the moral compass and reminds us "hey, these are the bad guys, by the way."
And about this idea that the film, or any film or media for that matter, is going to justify mass shootings and other terrorist acts is just as flawed and fear-mongering as it's always been. It happened in the nineties with Mortal Kombat and Doom and Natural Born Killers and the counter-argument still hasn't changed in twenty-five years: the people who commit these acts are sick in the head and media is not the thing that pushes them over the edge to become killers. The media is always labelled as an easy scapegoat for politicians to blame so that suburban mothers have something meaningless to protest to make them feel like they're doing something proactive, while the true root causes of the problem like gun control and inadequate mental health care go ignored and the cycle repeats again.
Interestingly, the only moment in Joker that really gave me the school shooter vibe was when Joker tells Gary that he won't kill him because "you were always kind to me", which is such a memey cliché that I'm not entirely sure it wasn't intended as a joke. And I think that about sums up my verdict on the depiction of Joker, there's a sort of knowing cynicism to the way he's presented that makes it seem like we're supposed to be ridiculing him, and certainly not taking him, his actions or his ideologies seriously.
End of Spoilers
Ultimately, there's definitely room for debate as to what extent we are being invited to sympathise with Joker and to what the film is trying to say. While I definitely have my own clear reading of the film, my conclusion is that Joker is a film that can be whatever you want it to be. Those looking for an absorbing and disturbing portrait of a criminal maniac will find it, and those looking for a condoning of incel fantasies will find that too. People will find whatever they expect to find in Joker, and that to me is why the film has been so divisive. When people argue about films, a common phrase that gets uttered is "did we watch the same film?" And maybe through our own subjectivity, perhaps we don't all see the same. It's a cinematic Rorschach test which is simultaneously all and none of its readings and instead positions itself somewhere between all these different ideas, allowing its audience to join the dots in whatever way makes sense to them.
My final word is thus: love it or hate it, Joker is undeniably a work of art. It's admittedly quite a tricky thing to define, but I believe art is, at its centre, about deriving meaning through interpretation. And the fact that so many people have seen this film and yet come away from it with such distinctly different interpretations, along with the fierce discussion it has provoked as to its intent, proves to me that this is a film of artistic merit, and one that I think has certainly left its mark on society.
...Goddamn it, of all the words to end on.
Joker - 2019 - Todd Phillips - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High
Either way, this is certainly not a film that's skittered by unnoticed, and love it or hate it, a lot of people have strong opinions of it. I'll be honest, I put off seeing Joker for a while, partially because this is the same conversation that crops up every time any vaguely controversial media comes out, especially when violence is the subject, and also because while the controversy is at its hottest, trying to form a genuine opinion of a film based on its own isolated merits can be pretty tricky when all you can think about is spotting the points of contention and trying to work out who's side you're going to be setting up camp in. So I gave it a few weeks. I reviewed El Camino, watched some other stuff, tried not to read too much more about it. And by the time I went to see it, my expectations were about as neutral as I could get them: I didn't go in expecting anything more than just to be entertained.
Ok, so let's get to the point. Is Joker good?
Yes.
Is it a masterpiece?
No.
Is it r/gamersriseup: The Movie?
Not really.
Kinda anticlimactic, to be honest. My first impressions were good, but as it started into its second act and I became less sure about where it was headed, I became less sure of myself. By the time the credits rolled, I felt like I was somewhere in the middle of the debate, but the more I've let the film sit with me, the more I've grown to respect it. And when it came to actually writing this post, I realised I actually liked the film a lot more than I'd initially realised.
In fact, and this is probably going to be quite a concerning statement considering the supposed philosophy of the film, but I felt like the film had a definite impact on me. I wasn't quite the same person once it finished, and it had this kinda lingering presence in my head for days to follow, which I would generally say is a good sign. A film's got to be doing something right if it continues to dwell and ferment in your mind long after seeing it like a fine wine.
Having said all that, and I want to stress this, it's not the second coming of Christ. There's nothing here that's particularly groundbreaking, it's really just an old idea well-executed. For one thing, if anyone's seen Taxi Driver recently, then conceptually Joker might ring a few bells. In fact, Joker essentially is a reimagining of Taxi Driver, only with a more generalised, less sexually-focused theme of emasculation. I've heard that The King of Comedy is a more fitting comparison but, having not seen it, I can't personally comment. Regardless, the Scorsese influence is clearly present, made more tangible with the knowledge that Scorsese was originally on board to direct.
Let's get some of the more 'reviewy' bits out of the way. Firstly, and this will probably come as a shock to no one, but Joaquin Phoenix is fantastic as the Joker. There's a kind of eeriness to his performance, a constant sense of something lurking underneath the surface. It's genuinely disquieting and even though we do (initially) sympathise with him when things go wrong for him, we never feel totally comfortable around him either. Honestly, Phoenix's performance is the film's MVP, and without him, I don't think the film would have had nearly the same impact on me. The film's atmosphere has a very oppressive quality to it, and the world of the story feels very distinct and tangible, and I found it all quite absorbing. Aesthetically and technically, everything's on good form, but there was nothing that really stood out besides maybe the sort of muted 80's production design, which went a long way towards establishing the kinda grimy, seedy environment that's essential for a story like this.
I also think it's important to note that I don't think Joker should be treated as a comic book movie. Even though, yes, technically this is a supervillain origin story and presumably counted as part of the DC cinematic universe, I don't think either of those contexts really match the film and what it's trying to achieve. Joker feels very much like its own one-off, self-contained entity, really more of an art-house film that just happens to feature a popular comic book character than anything else, and anyone going in expecting a Batman flick, even something Nolan-esque, I think will be disappointed.
Now, it feels like there's a billion and one things I could say about Joker, and it's definitely a film that warrants discussion and analysis. While writing this post, I've found it almost impossible to write about everything in the film I feel worthy of comment, or at least to enough extent as to do every topic justice, while still keeping this thing focused. So for the time being, I'm just going to concentrate on the key issue that seems to be at the core of all this controversy: whether the film's intention is to glorify or condemn the views and actions of its protagonist.
Personally, I believe it's the latter.
My reading of the film revolves mainly around the way in which the audience is positioned to view the narrative, or in other words, from whose perspective we are seeing the events. Furthermore, I believe the way this perspective changes as the film progresses tells us everything about how the film wants us to judge Joker. Now to talk about this properly, we've got to head into spoiler territory, so if you are still hoping to see Joker for yourself, skip ahead to the end for my conclusion.
At the start of the film, the audience is squarely positioned with Arthur Fleck, our protagonist. We see the world how he sees it, sometimes quite literally, as we are occasionally shown fantasy sequences, where we see how Arthur wishes to be seen or how he has convinced himself he is seen. Most notably of these is one where we see him as an audience member on Robert De Niro's TV show (I know he has a character name, but, ya know, it's Robert fuckin' De Niro), where he is picked to come out from the audience and is garnered with almost fatherly praise and support from De Niro, along with an enthusiastic round of applause from the audience. Now, a fantasy sequence is about as subjective a view as you can get, so subjective it didn't happen, so it is clear that we are positioned quite intimately in Arthur's perspective, where we are invited to sympathise with him as our protagonist.
Reaching what is roughly the midpoint of the film, it is suddenly revealed that the romantic relationship established between Arthur and his neighbour was also a fantasy. And it does this by cutting to earlier shots from the film where the neighbour was present, then showing them again, only now she's completely absent. Not only are we seeing that Fleck's version of reality is untrustworthy, but the way this sequence is edited suggests a transition away from Fleck's subjective point of view towards a more objective, third-person perspective, where we are now invited to regard Fleck from an emotional distance, instead of directly sympathising with him like before.
Scribble forwards to the end. Fleck, now insisting on the moniker Joker, has done some pretty fucked up things, and as his actions become increasingly mean spirited and unjustified, naturally we begin feeling more and more uncomfortable and are withdrawing what sympathies we might have felt towards him.
Crucially, we get to the television interview, and I think there are two things really worth pointing out in the lead up to this scene. Firstly, we see Joker interacting with comparatively normal people, people who haven't met him before, and whose comments and interactions now provide us with a fresh set of eyes with which to look at Joker and see what he looks like to everyone else. A second opinion that kinda makes you reevaluate and think "oh shit yeah this guy's a nutter", in case you hadn't already clocked it. Secondly, Joker has been unpainted for the majority of the film, and only at the end does he dye his hair and put on his makeup (with the exception of his work scenes in the first act) and once it's on, he stays this way for the remainder of the film. Now, surface-level analysis, this marks his final transformation from poor Arthur Fleck to criminal maniac Joker and the end of his arc. Hmm, yes, very insightful. "His eye paint is blue because he's depressed, give me my GCSE, sir". But also, there's something inherently disassociative about disguising one's face. The face is the broadcaster of emotions, so when a face is obscured it becomes harder for an observer to read and thus there's a kinda primal mistrust we have towards masked or painted faces. And regardless of how much effect that has on you personally, there is still a subconscious link present, and so when we see Joker amongst a group of normal people, not only does he obviously stick out as the freak amongst them, but he becomes this kinda inscrutable threat, an interloper amongst humankind who doesn't fit in and should be feared. Again, yes, this seems obvious considering the conceit of the film, but the crucial point is that now our perspective has been shifted to that of an outsider looking in on the Joker, and thus we too begin to see Joker as they do, no longer a protagonist we support and understand, but a threat that we fear. That's audience positioning.
We get to the interview, and Joker begins his 'we-live-in-a-society-esque' speech, that I know some of my friends have ridiculed, and from a certain perspective, rightly so, because the film also ridicules it. And here's kinda the crux of my argument: if Joker was a film that glorified its protagonist and his actions, then this speech would be a perfectly executed monologue, scathingly criticising the world of both the film and reality, leaving every other character speechless in its wake, like some demented alternate-universe Atticus Finch. As Joker finishes, there's a pause before De Niro's character begins clapping. Then some others join in and the room descends into rapturous applause. Or, in other words, pretty much what happened in Fleck's fantasy at the beginning.
But no, now we are seeing things from an outsider's perspective, and resultingly, Joker's speech rightly comes off as the ravings of a maniac. Not only is his point almost incoherent, but he is constantly interrupted by De Niro's character, who criticises his argument, and essentially becomes an audience surrogate that says all the things that we're thinking. Joker is humiliated and verbally defeated, and by a character no less that Joker, or Fleck at least, looked up to and trusted the opinion of, practically idolising him.
Not only does this juxtaposition with the first fantasy highlight how much the audience positioning has shifted over the course of the film, but it also shows how far Fleck's character has decayed, how far he's fallen and that this is not the same character we were rooting for in the beginning, and absolutely should not be rooting for now.
And that, to me, is how this film condemns the actions of the Joker. This sequence is instrumental in understanding how the Joker should be interpreted, and my reading is that he is a joke, ridiculed by those he is trying to intimidate and completely unable to defend his ideology against even light scrutiny.
Now, conversely, one could argue this scene the other way, with Joker being publicly ridiculed by those who can't understand his point of view, and when he finally snaps and shoots De Niro dead, he sort of comes out on top, as if resorting to violence is an adequate solution when someone emasculates or in some way threatens your ego, and that kind of justification is more or less where the controversy is coming from. Not helped by the fact that Joker is then regarded as a hero and a king by the crowds of oppressed thugs tearing the city apart. My only answer to that really is that we see Bruce Wayne's parents gunned down (for like the twelve hundredth time on screen) by one of the thugs inspired by the Joker, and that kinda recentres the moral compass and reminds us "hey, these are the bad guys, by the way."
And about this idea that the film, or any film or media for that matter, is going to justify mass shootings and other terrorist acts is just as flawed and fear-mongering as it's always been. It happened in the nineties with Mortal Kombat and Doom and Natural Born Killers and the counter-argument still hasn't changed in twenty-five years: the people who commit these acts are sick in the head and media is not the thing that pushes them over the edge to become killers. The media is always labelled as an easy scapegoat for politicians to blame so that suburban mothers have something meaningless to protest to make them feel like they're doing something proactive, while the true root causes of the problem like gun control and inadequate mental health care go ignored and the cycle repeats again.
Interestingly, the only moment in Joker that really gave me the school shooter vibe was when Joker tells Gary that he won't kill him because "you were always kind to me", which is such a memey cliché that I'm not entirely sure it wasn't intended as a joke. And I think that about sums up my verdict on the depiction of Joker, there's a sort of knowing cynicism to the way he's presented that makes it seem like we're supposed to be ridiculing him, and certainly not taking him, his actions or his ideologies seriously.
End of Spoilers
Ultimately, there's definitely room for debate as to what extent we are being invited to sympathise with Joker and to what the film is trying to say. While I definitely have my own clear reading of the film, my conclusion is that Joker is a film that can be whatever you want it to be. Those looking for an absorbing and disturbing portrait of a criminal maniac will find it, and those looking for a condoning of incel fantasies will find that too. People will find whatever they expect to find in Joker, and that to me is why the film has been so divisive. When people argue about films, a common phrase that gets uttered is "did we watch the same film?" And maybe through our own subjectivity, perhaps we don't all see the same. It's a cinematic Rorschach test which is simultaneously all and none of its readings and instead positions itself somewhere between all these different ideas, allowing its audience to join the dots in whatever way makes sense to them.
My final word is thus: love it or hate it, Joker is undeniably a work of art. It's admittedly quite a tricky thing to define, but I believe art is, at its centre, about deriving meaning through interpretation. And the fact that so many people have seen this film and yet come away from it with such distinctly different interpretations, along with the fierce discussion it has provoked as to its intent, proves to me that this is a film of artistic merit, and one that I think has certainly left its mark on society.
...Goddamn it, of all the words to end on.
Joker - 2019 - Todd Phillips - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High
Tuesday 12 November 2019
Extra Rambles: When Does Context Matter?
Anyone who's ever studied screenwriting knows that character is key. Knowing who a character is, their background, who they care for and why they're doing what they're doing, are all essential for telling an engaging story. Right?
Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.
So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.
Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.
The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.
It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.
In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?
While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.
It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.
The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?
Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.
I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.
So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?
Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.
Recently, I watched The Shallows, a shark-based survival thriller from a couple of years back that threw this entire concept into a new light for me, by having a character's backstory and context feel unnecessary. Every scene that attempted to establish details about who the protagonist was and why they're here came off as incredibly uninteresting, and for once I don't think it's just bad writing. It's bad writing and something else. And I think that 'something else' is worth exploring to see whether there is some hidden intricacy of screenwriting here or if I'm just trying to over-analyse a mid-tier Jaws ripoff that the writer couldn't be arsed to redraft.
So here's the premise of The Shallows: a girl goes surfing on a hidden beach and is attacked by a shark, leaving her stranded on a rock a short distance from the shore. With her injuries worsening, the tides rising and no sign of the shark giving up the hunt, she must find a way to get back to safety before it's too late. That's it. Simple right? Could practically be a short, an interesting supposition considering how the story is structured: in a film that's under ninety minutes already, it takes the best part of half an hour before our protagonist even ends up in the above scenario.
Instead, the film opens with a flash-forward that hints at how the film will end, followed by a lengthy sequence where our protagonist reveals key details of who she is and why she's going to this beach and what familial connections she has as she speaks to a nice local who's driving her there. Albeit he, at least, is sort of important later. Then when she reaches the beach there's another long scene as she video calls her sister only for her dad to join and start lecturing her about her studies, and very unsubtly telling the audience most of her life story. This is what's called an exposition dump and it's generally agreed to be the worst possible form of explaining anything to an audience; the dialogue equivalent of just handing someone a textbook and instructing them to read it. But not only were these scenes lazy, and actually pretty laughable too, for all the wrong reasons, but they were also almost entirely superfluous.
The only things we actually need to know are thus: the beach is secret and thus mainly empty of potential help, and our protagonist is a medical student who surfs. That's it. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant to the scenario. We don't need to know she has a sister who's back at the hotel, we don't need to know she's got a dead mother who told them about the beach, we don't need to know this is a pilgrimage and we don't need to know her dad is concerned. None of these characters are involved in the plot or have any effect on the outcome of Nancy's plight (oh yeah, the protagonist's name is Nancy, by the way), and consequently could be comfortably deleted from the film with no repercussions.
It feels like they've attempted to make Nancy a more fleshed-out character by adding a load of extra character relationships, but these really don't tell us anything about her. We learn so much more about the kind of person she is from her interactions with an injured seagull than we ever do from her family. In fact, the only real addition offered by knowing about Nancy's family is that she has a motivation to live, but I assumed that much from the fact that she's trying to get back to the shore in the first place! She's not like Padme Amidala, losing her will to live as one loses a contact lens in a crowded locker room. You don't have to explain the motivation for something as inbuilt and universal as basic survival needs, and those are pretty much as complex as The Shallows' character motivations ever need. It just isn't the kind of story that requires in-depth character context.
In something that's more character-focused, like a romance or a drama, then this kind of extended backstory is more relevant since the story is pretty much pivotal on the very essence of these characters and their backgrounds and social relations. If we don't know anything about this hunky charming man or what he stands for, how can we empathise with the leading lady who falls for him?
While something like a horror film doesn't really need this because their stories operate on a more primal level. Here's a human, here's a nasty monster who wants to eat the human. Who will win? It doesn't matter if the human's from Stoke-on-Trent or if they prefer jam to marmalade because we already automatically sympathise with their desire not to be eaten by the nasty monster (I mean, unless you're into vore, I guess. No, don't look that one up, it's not worth it). The desire to not be killed is just naturally hardwired into our species and so as a character motivation, it not only transcends boundaries of race, class and taste in fruit preserves in terms of relatability but by the same metric, also transcends the need for an explanation since every human on the planet naturally understands it.
It's pretty much the same concept as Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs: the closer your protagonist's motivation is to the bottom of the pyramid, where all the universal needs like food, water and air are, the less you need to explain them. While if their motivations are higher up the pyramid, focusing on more complex things like self-actualisation or self-esteem, then the need to explain the motivation is much more pressing.
The ultimate question then is, is this a matter of genre or merely the format of the story? Is The Shallows' attempt at character context misplaced because of its horror-y trappings or because the story itself is just too straightforward to require it?
Midsommar, for example, is a horror film that's also incredibly character-focused, so even though its characters are still motivated by a desire to survive, they also have way more complex, personalised struggles which drives a lot of the horror they're put through. And so while it, too, spends a while establishing it's main characters' backgrounds, it is entirely necessary for the rest of the film to work, unlike The Shallows.
I imagine format is more likely the culprit, since The Shallows could have very easily been a thirty or forty minute short if it had skipped its waffly intro and started on the shark attack, and probably would have been stronger for it. "Arrive late, leave early", as the old adage goes. This issue of context could be as simple as trying to over-explain a story that has nothing to hide. But then while short films tend to gravitate towards simple characters to fit the restraints of the format, that doesn't make character context mutually exclusive: not all short films focus on inherent universal needs, and some will inevitably need to establish their character's background.
So what is the answer? I don't think there is one, or at least, not one that can easily be rationalised in a post of this length. Consider this instead, a starting point for a wider discussion: Is there a correlation between genres and character complexity? Can a story have too much context? Or is all this just the ravings of a lunatic who got bored during an exposition scene?
Yeah, that sounds a lot more plausible now that I've written it out.
Saturday 26 October 2019
El Camino (2019) - AKA 'Breaking Bad: The End of Breaking Bad'
I'm trying to make more of an effort with this new run of blog posts to be topical and review newer, zeitgeistier releases. So originally I planned to review Joker this month, which had a nice timely October release and was promising to cause a real stir in the film buff community. "Oh good," thought I, "a nice ol' bit of controversy will make plenty of meat to dig into in the slanderous essays that I attempt to pass off as film reviews."
Fucking hell, Joker. I thought you were going to cause a stir, not a fucking tsunami. It's been a while since I've seen a film release with this divisive a reception, with people on one side showering it with praise as an artistic masterpiece and a refreshing representation of mental illness, while others decree it as incel hate porn just waiting to inspire a killing spree. Even The Last Jedi had a more agreeable reception than this! To write a review would be a brave, but surely polarising move, guaranteed to set someone off no matter what side I come down on and opening the door to fierce and chaotic debate.
...
ahem
...
...
ahem
...
So did anyone else catch El Camino this month? You know, the feature-length supplement to Breaking Bad that Vince Gilligan's been threatening to make for a couple of years. Breaking Bad, the high-emperor of TV drama, a series often lauded as one of the most expertly-crafted television shows of all time with a solid ending with just the right amount of ambiguity sprinkled in. So how best to disturb the peace than to tack on an extra ending that tries to remove some of that ambiguity. This is like building a worryingly holey but nonetheless stable Jenga tower and seeing if you can balance your pint on top.
El Camino picks up where the series finale Felina left off, with Jesse fleeing the scene of Walt's last stand in the titular car, his goal now to escape from his old life before the law can catch up with him. Breaking Bad was very much the story of Walter White, and so while it's not unreasonable that Felina focused almost entirely on closing his story, Jesse was still the series deuteragonist with an arc arguably just as important as Walt's, and yet on reflection he never really got quite the same closure as he deserved. So in that respect, El Camino is a surprisingly welcome addition to the series, that aims and nicely succeeds at giving Jesse his equivalent ending.
What I like about El Camino is it isn't too ambitious, in no way does it try to overwrite the ending of Breaking Bad, only build upon it. El Camino mainly sticks to filling in the gaps between the final two episodes during Walt's exile, with interesting details that nicely flesh out a bit more of Jesse's time in slavery without retconning anything. In that way, the film is kinda inconsequential, none of the plot has any real grand effect on the ending of Breaking Bad, and only offers additional character insight and world-building, but at the same time that's why the film still works, by deliberately not trying to tread on Felina's toes, it neatly slots in with the series.
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to make a sequel like this without it having any impact on the original, and while El Camino does a good job of avoiding that kind of conflict, we do have to inevitably sacrifice the ambiguity of Felina's ending. Jesse's ultimate fate was left somewhat up to interpretation in the series, and Heisenberg's was pretty strongly implied, but El Camino clarifies both quite indisputably, which might offer some closure to those desperate for it, but I think ambiguity often makes an ending stronger and invites a sense of audience interactivity that can help ensure the longevity of a good story. People still talk about the whispered words in Lost in Translation, and yet a sequel dedicated to revealing them would be ill-advised, to say the least.
And while Breaking Bad's ending wasn't that reliant on ambiguity, El Camino takes away what little it did have. The upshot to this is that since El Camino is really more of an appendix rather than an essential new chapter to the story, a story that has fared perfectly well without it for six years, the viewer can essentially decide how they like their ending. Leaving it at Felina gives them a juicy, open-ended medium-rare while adding El Camino turns it into a complete well-done. And I guess for maximum ambiguity, just stop watching at Granite State and have yourself a rare.
Unfortunately, I've got to put away the Breaking Bad fan hat now and don the curmudgeonly old film critic hat, because really a film judged on its own merits should stand alone, and this is a stand-alone film, not just a bonus episode. It's right there in the rather unimpressive title; El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. A weak blow I'll concede, what's in a name after all, and I suppose it doesn't really matter what they called it, everyone knows exactly what this film is. They could have called it 'Jesse Pinkman's Fantastic Journey' and it wouldn't have made much difference. I guess it's the smugness I object to, the attitude of "yeah, you guys are going to be allll over this no matter what so why even try coming up with a better title".
It's difficult to say exactly, being well familiarised with the series already, but it figures that to a fresh viewer, a lot of El Camino won't make much sense without any prior knowledge of Breaking Bad. Netflix helpfully offers an optional recap before you play the film for those who haven't revisited it in a while, but those who haven't seen it at all will still probably be confused by characters such as Todd, Badger and a couple of other spoilery ones who appear or are mentioned without any real reintroduction. Ultimately, this is a film made especially for Breaking Bad fans and doesn't have much scope to entertain outside of that audience.
"Really, Nick? A Breaking Bad spin-off movie won't appeal to people who haven't seen Breaking Bad? What an insightful observation, is this you flaunting your film education to it's fullest extent? Do go on."
Alright smartarse, my point is that unlike other TV spin-offs like the Star Trek movies or even something like Better Call Saul, El Camino can't really be enjoyed as it's own entity, and flat-out requires knowledge of the series to understand what's going on to any significant degree, best watched back to back with Felina, while other spin-offs can often be enjoyed in isolation, being a potential entry point for new fans that may eventually be directed back to the original series, whereas El Camino would just confuse them. And while that is usually a frownable offence for a film, I suppose that's asking El Camino to be something it's not, and no-one's really going to be stumbling upon this out of the blue with no concept of what it is. And I mean really, who hasn't seen Breaking Bad in this day and age? Still, it would be remiss of me not to at least mention it, and I suppose the bottom line is I can't see people re-watching this film much outside of the context of a whole series binge.
There's honestly not that much else to say about El Camino. Essentially a double-length episode of the series, it doesn't stand alone but then it's not really trying to. Vince Gilligan' writing is just as good as it's always been, the acting, especially from Aaron Paul, is top-notch, the cinematography has the same ingenuity and beauty the series is known for, and despite what was a longer runtime than I expected for this kind of thing, it's nicely paced and doesn't overstay it's welcome. If you liked the show, it's well worth checking this one out, but if you're not that bothered you're not missing out on anything groundbreaking.
While I was dubious about the premise of a Breaking Bad sequel, Gilligan has pulled it off nicely, but I would advise him to quit now while he's ahead. A series as lauded as Breaking Bad is a dangerous thing to try and make a sequel to. Better Call Saul worked as a prequel, and El Camino was arguably a fluke but I'm not convinced another sequel will work out as well. Let's stop now before this becomes another Star Wars, a bloated franchise with spin-offs and sequels pouring out of every orifice to the point that the original is almost indistinguishable underneath. It would be terribly ironic for a series about greed to be done in by its own, and I'd take no pleasure in having to point out that irony if such an eventuality occurred.
Ha! What am I saying? The day I stop enjoying my own smugness is the day I stop reviewing!
El Camino - 2019 - Vince Gilligan - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: Medium
El Camino picks up where the series finale Felina left off, with Jesse fleeing the scene of Walt's last stand in the titular car, his goal now to escape from his old life before the law can catch up with him. Breaking Bad was very much the story of Walter White, and so while it's not unreasonable that Felina focused almost entirely on closing his story, Jesse was still the series deuteragonist with an arc arguably just as important as Walt's, and yet on reflection he never really got quite the same closure as he deserved. So in that respect, El Camino is a surprisingly welcome addition to the series, that aims and nicely succeeds at giving Jesse his equivalent ending.
What I like about El Camino is it isn't too ambitious, in no way does it try to overwrite the ending of Breaking Bad, only build upon it. El Camino mainly sticks to filling in the gaps between the final two episodes during Walt's exile, with interesting details that nicely flesh out a bit more of Jesse's time in slavery without retconning anything. In that way, the film is kinda inconsequential, none of the plot has any real grand effect on the ending of Breaking Bad, and only offers additional character insight and world-building, but at the same time that's why the film still works, by deliberately not trying to tread on Felina's toes, it neatly slots in with the series.
Of course, it's pretty much impossible to make a sequel like this without it having any impact on the original, and while El Camino does a good job of avoiding that kind of conflict, we do have to inevitably sacrifice the ambiguity of Felina's ending. Jesse's ultimate fate was left somewhat up to interpretation in the series, and Heisenberg's was pretty strongly implied, but El Camino clarifies both quite indisputably, which might offer some closure to those desperate for it, but I think ambiguity often makes an ending stronger and invites a sense of audience interactivity that can help ensure the longevity of a good story. People still talk about the whispered words in Lost in Translation, and yet a sequel dedicated to revealing them would be ill-advised, to say the least.
And while Breaking Bad's ending wasn't that reliant on ambiguity, El Camino takes away what little it did have. The upshot to this is that since El Camino is really more of an appendix rather than an essential new chapter to the story, a story that has fared perfectly well without it for six years, the viewer can essentially decide how they like their ending. Leaving it at Felina gives them a juicy, open-ended medium-rare while adding El Camino turns it into a complete well-done. And I guess for maximum ambiguity, just stop watching at Granite State and have yourself a rare.
Unfortunately, I've got to put away the Breaking Bad fan hat now and don the curmudgeonly old film critic hat, because really a film judged on its own merits should stand alone, and this is a stand-alone film, not just a bonus episode. It's right there in the rather unimpressive title; El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie. A weak blow I'll concede, what's in a name after all, and I suppose it doesn't really matter what they called it, everyone knows exactly what this film is. They could have called it 'Jesse Pinkman's Fantastic Journey' and it wouldn't have made much difference. I guess it's the smugness I object to, the attitude of "yeah, you guys are going to be allll over this no matter what so why even try coming up with a better title".
It's difficult to say exactly, being well familiarised with the series already, but it figures that to a fresh viewer, a lot of El Camino won't make much sense without any prior knowledge of Breaking Bad. Netflix helpfully offers an optional recap before you play the film for those who haven't revisited it in a while, but those who haven't seen it at all will still probably be confused by characters such as Todd, Badger and a couple of other spoilery ones who appear or are mentioned without any real reintroduction. Ultimately, this is a film made especially for Breaking Bad fans and doesn't have much scope to entertain outside of that audience.
"Really, Nick? A Breaking Bad spin-off movie won't appeal to people who haven't seen Breaking Bad? What an insightful observation, is this you flaunting your film education to it's fullest extent? Do go on."
Alright smartarse, my point is that unlike other TV spin-offs like the Star Trek movies or even something like Better Call Saul, El Camino can't really be enjoyed as it's own entity, and flat-out requires knowledge of the series to understand what's going on to any significant degree, best watched back to back with Felina, while other spin-offs can often be enjoyed in isolation, being a potential entry point for new fans that may eventually be directed back to the original series, whereas El Camino would just confuse them. And while that is usually a frownable offence for a film, I suppose that's asking El Camino to be something it's not, and no-one's really going to be stumbling upon this out of the blue with no concept of what it is. And I mean really, who hasn't seen Breaking Bad in this day and age? Still, it would be remiss of me not to at least mention it, and I suppose the bottom line is I can't see people re-watching this film much outside of the context of a whole series binge.
There's honestly not that much else to say about El Camino. Essentially a double-length episode of the series, it doesn't stand alone but then it's not really trying to. Vince Gilligan' writing is just as good as it's always been, the acting, especially from Aaron Paul, is top-notch, the cinematography has the same ingenuity and beauty the series is known for, and despite what was a longer runtime than I expected for this kind of thing, it's nicely paced and doesn't overstay it's welcome. If you liked the show, it's well worth checking this one out, but if you're not that bothered you're not missing out on anything groundbreaking.
While I was dubious about the premise of a Breaking Bad sequel, Gilligan has pulled it off nicely, but I would advise him to quit now while he's ahead. A series as lauded as Breaking Bad is a dangerous thing to try and make a sequel to. Better Call Saul worked as a prequel, and El Camino was arguably a fluke but I'm not convinced another sequel will work out as well. Let's stop now before this becomes another Star Wars, a bloated franchise with spin-offs and sequels pouring out of every orifice to the point that the original is almost indistinguishable underneath. It would be terribly ironic for a series about greed to be done in by its own, and I'd take no pleasure in having to point out that irony if such an eventuality occurred.
Ha! What am I saying? The day I stop enjoying my own smugness is the day I stop reviewing!
El Camino - 2019 - Vince Gilligan - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: Medium
Wednesday 18 September 2019
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019) - Tarantino's Nostalgia Wank
It's not that I don't like any of his films; on the contrary, I like most of them, and none of them are truly bad films. I'd even consider Inglourious Basterds one of my all-time faves. I just do not understand the pedestal people put him on. I mean, I get why people love his films so much: they're slick, stylish and bathed in gratuitous violence and swearing, appealing to the lizard brain in all us younger film nerds, whilst still being competent enough and packed with references to classic cinema to make us feel like we're watching something worthwhile and of artistic merit.
And there's nothing wrong with that as an auteur style, it clearly appeals and has produced some good films. But come on now, Pulp Fiction's not that good.
Regardless of your thoughts on the Tarantino catalogue, every artist can and does make mistakes, and I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his first true misstep. As mentioned above, Tarantino's work is constantly referencing and calling back to the classic era of Hollywood, so why not cut out the middleman and make a film explicitly set in and concerning the period? Not a bad concept on paper, but when one is in love with the setting to the extent that Tarantino is, it's quite easy to overlook things like plot when you're enthusiastically *ahem* reminiscing about how things used to be.
The biggest issue with the plot is that it's almost non-existent. DiCaprio plays a washed-up actor, with Pitt as his close friend and stunt-double. DiCaprio is the main protagonist and has the most to do, his story ostensibly being the re-birth of his film career after having faded from public perception, trading up the classic TV western for the then-new spaghetti western. There's a hint of conflict with him trying to assimilate back into the world of acting after spending so many years doing nothing but drinking, as well as the realisation that the best years of his career are behind him and he must make way for the new generation, but other than that there's really not much to his story. He pretty much just wants to be in a film, is offered a role, does it well and then he's set. End of arc.
Still, more than Pitt has to do, who basically just bums around doing stuff, most notably getting involved with a bunch of young girls living in a sort of commune on the outskirts of LA. And while this sequence has some nice horror-movie-esque tension to it, it doesn't really have much to do with anything, and the rest of Pitt's scenes are equally inconsequential, if not more so.
The last character of note, though I hesitate to call her a protagonist, is Margot Robbie playing real-life film star Sharon Tate, a fact I did not realise until researching the film afterwards. Not that it matters too much though, since the only thing she really does is watch a film she's in at the cinema, and every time we cut back to her, she's just sitting there, grinning and enjoying herself. But then that's it: nothing else happens, and there's no payoff to her character whatsoever despite just simply establishing her existence for the sake of the ending. We'll get to that.
And that's really about it in terms of plot, it's just a load of characters doing stuff in 60's Hollywood, there's no real overarching story or conflict, it's a surprisingly sedate movie for Tarantino, playing out like a romanticised stroll down memory lane. There's nothing wrong with slow cinema, but there's got to be something driving it and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood just feels like someone stalling for time until they can think of a story that never comes to them.
Then, (Spoiler time!) just past the two-hour mark, as what passes as the story is wrapping itself up, with DiCaprio enjoying his newfound success and everything feeling like it's coming to a close, Tarantino smacks himself in the head and shouts "Shit! I forgot the gratuitous violence!" And so the last sequence of the film becomes a home invasion sequence, where drugged up DiCaprio and Pitt viciously defend themselves against a group of murderers. At the time, this felt incredibly out of the blue, but having since done my research, it turns out that this is Basterds-esque historic revisionism, in reference to Sharon Tate's murder by followers of Charles Manson. So that at least checks out, but what it doesn't fix, and the more pressing of the issues, is that this is an incredibly jarring tonal shift. From the relatively calm and laid-back atmosphere the film had been going for, we suddenly jump to A Clockwork Orange as envisioned by Nicolas Winding Refn. And while the gore is handled as tongue-in-cheek and cathartically as usual for a Tarantino picture, it still feels like we've just watched two entirely different films.
This sequence is also the closest thing to a resolution for the Sharon Tate 'plotline', in that she's introduced just so we know who she is when she is saved by Pitt and DiCaprio in the end. And since the film effectively wrapped up its main plot prior to the home invasion sequence, the Sharon Tate plot in total becomes utterly superfluous. I get the impression Sharon Tate and her being rescued from the Manson murders may have been Tarantino's main interest in the story, and unfortunately, this somehow got displaced from the focal point of the film as it was produced. Basterds shows that when fully embraced, the ultraviolent historical revisionism can work really well, and I feel if the film had stuck more closely to this concept we would have ended up with a much tighter, focused and generally more entertaining product. As it is, this ending sticks out like a sore thumb, and almost reads like a last-ditch effort to make sure the audience is still awake and that the Tarantino fanboys have gotten their fix of gratuitous violence so they don't throw a hissy fit.
End of Spoilers
Ultimately, I think this is Tarantino's weakest film to date, and once that new film buzz starts to die down, I doubt Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will be remembered in the top tier of his work. Not so much a story as an old man aimlessly rambling about the good old days whilst gently masturbating.
Tarantino plans to make one last film before he retires, but with the way this one went, I wonder whether he'll be going out with a bang or a whimper. Odds aren't looking good, but maybe next time he'll at least remember to finish writing his story before shooting it.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - 2019 - USA - Quentin Tarantino
Score: 5
Recommendation: Low
Monday 19 August 2019
Ciné Rambles 5th Anniversary Special - The Lost Aliens Review
Five years ago, I watched Fritz Lang's German classic, M, and was left with a desire to yell my thoughts about the ending at someone or something. After getting it all off of my chest and onto a Word document, rather than, say, write an IMDb review like a normal person, it occurred to me there were actually quite a few films that I could potentially scream my opinion on into the void. So I threw together a Blogger page and decided I was going to start writing on the Internet, as an infant would scrawl their own shit on the wall, maybe under the pretence that this would improve my writing ability.
Well, here we are. Five years later, and I'm still scrawling, and yet have still never covered half the films I originally intended to. And I still haven't rewatched M either, which has been on the frankly daunting list for, well, five years now. I would say my writing ability has improved though, so at least that's a tick.
So how does one commemorate the five year anniversary of a blog? The obvious answer is review my favourite films of all time. But that seems almost too easy an answer, plus I'm honestly not sure what to write about half of them. There are only so many ways you can write "it's good", ya know. Not to mention I'm not even sure where I'd draw the line on favourite films. I certainly couldn't pick one. Would I pick five? Ten? That's the tradition. There's about seventy-odd films I would consider favourites in some capacity, am I going to talk about all of them?
No, I thought. Let's save that for the tenth anniversary (that way I might not even have to do it!)
Instead, let's go back to that whole 'writing' thing. If my writing has improved in the space of five years, let's see what it's done in seven.
A long time ago, I had the idea to start doing movie reviews on my now-dead YouTube channel, starting with one of my favourite films of the time, Alien. You can still watch it to this day. It's utter shit but it's a humble beginning. And while I started work on a review for Aliens, I kinda got bored and figured that me just talking at the viewer all clinically while putting on a slideshow of screencaps from the film wasn't setting the world on fire. And so I canned the project, despite having promised to have it out within the month. But I did at least finish the script.
Digging through some old hard drives recently, I found the original script for the review, last edited 28th April 2012. Yikes. And even then, my reviews were still over the 1000 word mark. Some things never change. So I thought, what better way to commemorate the fifth year of the blog than with a shitty seven-year-old review?
So, I guess I am going to be talking about a favourite film of mine after all. Ladies and gents, please enjoy in all its unedited splendour, my long-awaited review of Aliens! God help you all...
"The original Alien was a great success when it first came out, grossing around $3,527, 88 in the US (for all you Americans out there) and won an Oscar and many other awards. It is still to this day one of the most famous and successful Sci-Fi Horror films of all time. So a sequel was almost inevitable. And sure enough, seven years later, director James Cameron made Aliens in 1986. Originally, Sigourney Weaver was reluctant to star in any sequels, but when she read James Cameron’s script, she agreed to do it. And so, Sigourney Weaver returned to her trademark role of Ellen Ripley. So, on to the plot. But first, spoiler warning. In order for me to explain the plot, I’m going to have to spoil the end of the first movie, Alien. So if you still haven’t seen that yet, click the annotation somewhere on the screen to skip ahead.
Hope you're happy, Andrew.
Well, here we are. Five years later, and I'm still scrawling, and yet have still never covered half the films I originally intended to. And I still haven't rewatched M either, which has been on the frankly daunting list for, well, five years now. I would say my writing ability has improved though, so at least that's a tick.
So how does one commemorate the five year anniversary of a blog? The obvious answer is review my favourite films of all time. But that seems almost too easy an answer, plus I'm honestly not sure what to write about half of them. There are only so many ways you can write "it's good", ya know. Not to mention I'm not even sure where I'd draw the line on favourite films. I certainly couldn't pick one. Would I pick five? Ten? That's the tradition. There's about seventy-odd films I would consider favourites in some capacity, am I going to talk about all of them?
No, I thought. Let's save that for the tenth anniversary (that way I might not even have to do it!)
Instead, let's go back to that whole 'writing' thing. If my writing has improved in the space of five years, let's see what it's done in seven.
A long time ago, I had the idea to start doing movie reviews on my now-dead YouTube channel, starting with one of my favourite films of the time, Alien. You can still watch it to this day. It's utter shit but it's a humble beginning. And while I started work on a review for Aliens, I kinda got bored and figured that me just talking at the viewer all clinically while putting on a slideshow of screencaps from the film wasn't setting the world on fire. And so I canned the project, despite having promised to have it out within the month. But I did at least finish the script.
Digging through some old hard drives recently, I found the original script for the review, last edited 28th April 2012. Yikes. And even then, my reviews were still over the 1000 word mark. Some things never change. So I thought, what better way to commemorate the fifth year of the blog than with a shitty seven-year-old review?
So, I guess I am going to be talking about a favourite film of mine after all. Ladies and gents, please enjoy in all its unedited splendour, my long-awaited review of Aliens! God help you all...
"The original Alien was a great success when it first came out, grossing around $3,527, 88 in the US (for all you Americans out there) and won an Oscar and many other awards. It is still to this day one of the most famous and successful Sci-Fi Horror films of all time. So a sequel was almost inevitable. And sure enough, seven years later, director James Cameron made Aliens in 1986. Originally, Sigourney Weaver was reluctant to star in any sequels, but when she read James Cameron’s script, she agreed to do it. And so, Sigourney Weaver returned to her trademark role of Ellen Ripley. So, on to the plot. But first, spoiler warning. In order for me to explain the plot, I’m going to have to spoil the end of the first movie, Alien. So if you still haven’t seen that yet, click the annotation somewhere on the screen to skip ahead.
At the end of the first movie, Ripley, having successfully
flushed the alien into outer space, sets up for hyper sleep and goes into
suspended animation. 57 years later, she is picked up by a salvage team who
bring her back to ‘the company’ aka Weyland Utani. She is then held responsible
for the destruction of the Nostromo. Although she did blow it up, obviously,
she explains about the alien and how she had to do it. The company don’t
believe her, saying that her description of the alien doesn’t match any life
forms they’ve ever encountered and that if there was a crashed ship on LV-426,
it would have been discovered by the colony who has settled there. Therefore,
Ripley’s pilot license is revoked, making her unable to fly anywhere. The
company then lose contact with the colony on LV-426. Suspecting Ripley might be
telling the truth, they try to persuade her to go with a bunch of colonial
marines as an advisor, even offering her pilot license back. Ripley eventually
agrees, wanting to face her fear of the aliens and knowing that the company
want to destroy the aliens, not take them back and study them. When the marines
and Ripley get to LV-426, they discover the whole complex is over-run with
aliens, now known as ‘xenomorphs’. The only human left besides some impregnated
people who are stuck to the wall and die very quickly anyway, is a 10 year old
girl called Rebecca, or ‘Newt’ as she prefers to be called. Ripley takes her
under her care and the rest of the film consists of the marines, Ripley and
Newt trying to work out how to kill the xenomorphs, and escape with their lives
intact.
Out of all the sequels in the world, Aliens is in that small handful that are actually better than their
predecessor, in my opinion at least. There does seem to be a bit of a war over
which is better, Alien or Aliens. Personally, I think Aliens is better for its action and
fast-pace, but there isn’t a whole lot in it. Either way, both films work
perfectly together and complement each other well. The first one is a perfect
horror film and the second is a perfect blend of horror and action. It just
proves that a sequel that has an almost completely different style to the first
one can still be a masterpiece. And that’s the best word to describe Aliens, a masterpiece. There was never a
dull moment, not even in the special edition that’s 2 and a half hours long,
there’s always something going on to keep you entertained. Even at the start,
there’s action as Ripley hallucinates having an alien burst out of her stomach
and the film never lets up to take a break for a single moment. And then, by
the end, the peaceful music starts playing, you sit back off of the edge of
your seat and relax content with what you have just seen. In terms of horror,
this film does an equally good job as the first one. There are a couple of jump
moments, but otherwise, Aliens goes
for something completely different. One of the big contributors are the motion
detectors on the side of the guns. Similar to the ones used in the first movie,
they track anything that moves, and their rapid beeping, slowly increasing in
speed is probably the scariest part of the movie, in one scene near the end,
the marines detect a huge amount of aliens moving towards them, they seal
themselves in the room and stand back from the door, the motion detector still
beeping they then look slowly up at the ceiling and Hicks decides to go check
above the ceiling. The pace slows right down to a halt and the tension builds
as he slowly pushes up the panel and takes a look. Also, closer to the
beginning, the marines have a head mounted camera that links back to the
control room thing in the APC. And here, Ripley and Lieutenant Gorman watch
what they’re doing through these cameras. These also provide a lot of tension,
as you see them being attacked from their perspective and gives a real sense of
danger as you just see the bank of TV’s slowly black out. The fore-mentioned
action scenes are also incredible. The initial raid on the alien’s den where
the aliens first attacked is incredible because it leaves a strong impact on
the viewer, to see all these tough soldiers who are the best of the best slowly
picked off by the aliens is really quite intriguing to watch. And the
previously mentioned scene where they are locked in the room with the aliens
coming through the ceiling is brilliant as well. The aliens had cut the power,
meaning that the whole room is illuminated by a red backup light and just
seeing all the guns blazing and the screeching of aliens and the constant shouts
of the marines is so exhilarating to watch.
In short, Aliens
is an excellent film and if you love films like The Terminator or Avatar,
also by James Cameron, or 80’s action, sci-fi, horror or just good films in
general, this is the film for you. It is an incredible film and would go really
well with a back-to-back viewing with Alien.
The horror and action elements blend perfectly and the fast pace promises not
to let up for a second. I know I say this a lot, but you owe it to yourself to
see this film. So get some mates round on a Saturday night, really late, turn
on the surround sound and prepare to be entertained. I give it a 9.5/10 and a high
recommendation. See it now."
Hope you're happy, Andrew.
Sunday 7 July 2019
Hereditary (2018) - The Real vs the Supernatural
Some of you may remember back in December I listed Hereditary in my top 5 films of 2018 but was reluctant to go into any significant detail, as I wanted to save it up for its own post. Some of you may also remember in the second half of my Oscars double bill that I said I would have such a post ready in March or April. If I should be so lucky.
Who'd have thought things would actually get quite busy for me during the final months of my university degree, and while I would have loved to work on my blog, my final assessments had to take precedent, as per. On the bright side, this is officially the last time I can ever use this excuse because, as of May, I have officially finished my degree in Film and Television Production! Hurrah! While I've been studying for the past three years, the blog has been lying nearly dormant so now I've got a bit more free time on my hands, I'm hoping to give it a bit of a revival. I can't promise regular posts, but certainly more frequent than they have been.
So, with Ari Aster's new horror film Midsommar releasing this week, now seems like a very appropriate time to look back on his debut from last year. Maybe, one could argue, more appropriate than if I were to have just randomly reviewed it out of the blue in the middle of spring. So, ultimately, I see this three-month delay as a deliberate rescheduling in the name of theming that I totally had planned from the get-go. Yes, that's the official story and I'll hear no more questions on the matter.
Now, before we get stuck in (but, you know, after my signature long waffly intro), I need to make a quick PSA. Normally, I try to keep spoilers in my posts to an absolute minimum, but for me to even begin to discuss this film to any major degree, I'm basically going to have to spoil everything. So, this entire post is basically going to be non-stop spoilers. For all of its flaws, Hereditary is still very much worth a watch and I highly recommend it, but to experience its full impact you need to know as little about the film as possible going in. Therefore, if you have not seen this film yet, PLEASE stop reading, go give it a watch (it's on Amazon Prime at the moment) and then return here. This is your point of no return.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We all good? Everyone seen it? Ok, let's get to work.
Hereditary could have been, and for the most part was shaping up to be, one of the greatest, most powerful and even dare-I-say revolutionary horror films of the decade, and even a new personal favourite of mine. The film falls down however upon reaching its ending. And by fall down, I mean it trips over the last hurdle so hard that it smashes its face on the ground and shatters its teeth beyond the recovery of even the most skilled of dentists. What I'm trying to say is, it sucks.
It's not impossible for a film to recover from a bad ending, though. Some films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are fantastic throughout and then soil themselves in their final ten minutes. However, both of these films still work because there's enough closure before the fuck-up that you could theoretically just switch the film off at the right moment and be satisfied, and merely omit the real ending. The problem with Hereditary and the reason it frustrates me so much is that it does not have such closure.
The best way to really explain what's wrong with it is to pretty much start at the beginning and just explain my way through the film and my reaction to it. Hence the spoilers. So, with that in mind...
The film starts off with some familiar generic horror tropes: we've got a recently deceased grandma who liked to have control over the family, there's a creepy little outcast daughter who's obsessed with the macabre, there's a stressed mother who's hobby is crafting dioramas, including of her own house and family, and just overall there's a vague foreboding sense that some supernatural shit will eventually go down, presumably in an Exorcist kinda direction. So far, so standard. Until...
About thirty minutes into the film, out of absolutely nowhere, the girl gets brutally decapitated in a car crash. And, I have to say, the presentation of this moment was masterfully horrifying. The impact is barely on screen: just flash cuts, a sickening crunch and then quiet. The camera lingers on the driver for what feels like an eternity, the back seat of the car cropped from view as he stares in empty horror. He comes home, he lies on his bed, the same expression on his face, still we are denied the information. Deep down, we know what's happened, but waiting for the confirmation is torture. Then, from out of shot, the mother screams, discovering the girl. We still don't get to see. The shot lingers on the boy just long enough before, finally, we see the head.
It's shocking, it's unexpected, and the build-up to the reveal is deliciously uncomfortable. The generic, supernatural horror plot crashes to a screeching halt and is replaced by genuine, real-world human horror. It's nothing less than an emotional sucker punch that left me feeling completely drained, with a dark pit in my stomach, like no other horror film had ever made me feel before. Hereditary took all the overdone, supernatural jump-scare-ridden bollocks that is currently choking the genre in titles like The Nun and Annabelle and threw it back in our faces, instead turning its dark mirror towards the cruel and unforgiving nature of reality and the seemingly insignificant choices we make and the unpredictable accidents that spiral out from them through the relentless Rube-Goldberg machine of life.
The fears of boogeymen, ghostly occurrences and bumps in the night are all very well, but there's still a certain distance with which we regard them, as however frightened we might get we know it can never really happen to us in real life. The beauty of Hereditary comes from its ability to craft just as scary and unpleasant a horror out of tangible, real-life tragedy that any one of us can and probably even will experience at some point in our lives, confronting us with the idea that we or our loved ones can be taken in an instant, without reason and without mercy, and what's even worse is we can be unknowingly responsible for it.
And so the film continues, now focusing on the grieving family as they try to cope with the aftermath of their actions. The mother and brother suffer from their intolerable guilt as they try to pass the blame between them, while the father does his best to hold the family together. This culminates in a dinner scene that may be one of the most uncomfortable scenes in all of cinema as the mother and brother viciously argue, topped with a truly gut-wrenching monologue from the mother. Did I mention, the mother is played by Toni Collette? Did I also mention that she deserves a fucking Oscar, for this scene alone, let alone the entire movie?
It was at about this point that I was ready to crown this as my film of the year. One of the most harrowing cinema experiences I'd ever had, not only was the apparent concept of this film so strong and so unlike anything I'd really seen in the horror genre up until that point, but its execution was mesmerising, emanating an oppressive atmosphere of dread that seemed to completely smother me on an emotional level.
I remember the excitement I felt in the cinema as I considered all of this, that thrill you feel when you know you've found something really special. I remember thinking about composing this very review, what I would say, how I would say it, and genuinely got excited by the prospect of telling the world how great this film was. I repeatedly thought to myself 'they just have to get the ending right'...
I actually don't mind this section at all, as it still nicely fits the theme of grief and refusing to move past death, and especially with the denying of the other family members, the supernatural results can be chalked up to the mother's deteriorating mental state. 'Great,' I thought, 'another point in the film's favour. I wonder how they're going to end it.'
'I really had you for a minute there,' the film seems to crow. 'You thought I'd ceremoniously chucked out all the overused generic horror bullshit in exchange for a more unique and powerful story, didn't you? Let's see what I've got here....oh look! It's overused generic horror bullshit!'
The dead grandma, after basically not being mentioned for about ninety minutes, is back all of a sudden with powers from beyond the grave. Out of the blue, corpses float and possessed family members crawl up the walls like spiders, chasing after the brother.
A cult of headless corpses show up, apparently worshipping the girl's severed head as some kind of new queen of the underworld. And then the film just kinda ends, in a sticky clusterfuck of seen-before horror imagery.
I was in shock. I don't think I've ever seen a film subvert it's genre expectations only to unironically revert them at the end, certainly not to this extent. The chilling, genuine horror of loss had been undermined by spoopy ghosts and some ancient mystical evil, so utterly divorced from the reality that the rest of the film's horror seemed to be placed in.
Now, before I get any angry backlash about how I missed something and have completely misinterpreted the film, I am already pretty certain that I have. I'm sure this film is too good and too smart to misjudge an ending that badly. I'm sure when I give this film a rewatch I'll notice things I didn't before and more of it will fall into place and maybe the ending might make more sense.
In the meantime, this post exists as my initial reaction, how I saw things on the first viewing and from that stance, I was disappointed. What worries me most is if this film really is supposed to be about possession and supernatural meddling all the way through, then that leaves us with an accidentally fantastic horror film stuck within a much less interesting one, and frankly, I don't really know what to make of that.
If that is the case, that does at least leave the criticism that the supernatural element takes way too much of a backseat during the second act. Maybe the horror film I thought I saw and loved never really existed there in the first place: a subjective analysis that picked up on and ignored elements I wasn't supposed to.
Ultimately, I guess that's kinda the beauty of cinema, that different audiences can have such wildly different experiences with a film and find their own meanings within the work, even if they weren't necessarily supposed to be there. Intentional or not, this film certainly had some effect on me, and quite a strong one at that, so does that really make this interpretation any less valid?
END SPOILERS
At the end of the day, Hereditary has some truly outstanding sequences of horror, however intentional they may have been, and Aster and his crew demonstrate a wealth of talent and potential. Even if this didn't entirely come together, it's still one hell of a debut and blows most other horror films out of the water.
Midsommar already seems to be receiving a lot of praise, even so early into its cinema run, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing it this weekend. While I try my best not to get too hyped before going to see any film, I'd be lying if I said I don't expect Midsommar to be one of the standout films of the year. We just have to hope that Aster can stick the landing.
Hereditary - 2018 - Ari Aster - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High
Who'd have thought things would actually get quite busy for me during the final months of my university degree, and while I would have loved to work on my blog, my final assessments had to take precedent, as per. On the bright side, this is officially the last time I can ever use this excuse because, as of May, I have officially finished my degree in Film and Television Production! Hurrah! While I've been studying for the past three years, the blog has been lying nearly dormant so now I've got a bit more free time on my hands, I'm hoping to give it a bit of a revival. I can't promise regular posts, but certainly more frequent than they have been.
So, with Ari Aster's new horror film Midsommar releasing this week, now seems like a very appropriate time to look back on his debut from last year. Maybe, one could argue, more appropriate than if I were to have just randomly reviewed it out of the blue in the middle of spring. So, ultimately, I see this three-month delay as a deliberate rescheduling in the name of theming that I totally had planned from the get-go. Yes, that's the official story and I'll hear no more questions on the matter.
Now, before we get stuck in (but, you know, after my signature long waffly intro), I need to make a quick PSA. Normally, I try to keep spoilers in my posts to an absolute minimum, but for me to even begin to discuss this film to any major degree, I'm basically going to have to spoil everything. So, this entire post is basically going to be non-stop spoilers. For all of its flaws, Hereditary is still very much worth a watch and I highly recommend it, but to experience its full impact you need to know as little about the film as possible going in. Therefore, if you have not seen this film yet, PLEASE stop reading, go give it a watch (it's on Amazon Prime at the moment) and then return here. This is your point of no return.
SPOILERS AHEAD
We all good? Everyone seen it? Ok, let's get to work.
Hereditary could have been, and for the most part was shaping up to be, one of the greatest, most powerful and even dare-I-say revolutionary horror films of the decade, and even a new personal favourite of mine. The film falls down however upon reaching its ending. And by fall down, I mean it trips over the last hurdle so hard that it smashes its face on the ground and shatters its teeth beyond the recovery of even the most skilled of dentists. What I'm trying to say is, it sucks.
It's not impossible for a film to recover from a bad ending, though. Some films like 10 Cloverfield Lane and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are fantastic throughout and then soil themselves in their final ten minutes. However, both of these films still work because there's enough closure before the fuck-up that you could theoretically just switch the film off at the right moment and be satisfied, and merely omit the real ending. The problem with Hereditary and the reason it frustrates me so much is that it does not have such closure.
The best way to really explain what's wrong with it is to pretty much start at the beginning and just explain my way through the film and my reaction to it. Hence the spoilers. So, with that in mind...
The film starts off with some familiar generic horror tropes: we've got a recently deceased grandma who liked to have control over the family, there's a creepy little outcast daughter who's obsessed with the macabre, there's a stressed mother who's hobby is crafting dioramas, including of her own house and family, and just overall there's a vague foreboding sense that some supernatural shit will eventually go down, presumably in an Exorcist kinda direction. So far, so standard. Until...
About thirty minutes into the film, out of absolutely nowhere, the girl gets brutally decapitated in a car crash. And, I have to say, the presentation of this moment was masterfully horrifying. The impact is barely on screen: just flash cuts, a sickening crunch and then quiet. The camera lingers on the driver for what feels like an eternity, the back seat of the car cropped from view as he stares in empty horror. He comes home, he lies on his bed, the same expression on his face, still we are denied the information. Deep down, we know what's happened, but waiting for the confirmation is torture. Then, from out of shot, the mother screams, discovering the girl. We still don't get to see. The shot lingers on the boy just long enough before, finally, we see the head.
It's shocking, it's unexpected, and the build-up to the reveal is deliciously uncomfortable. The generic, supernatural horror plot crashes to a screeching halt and is replaced by genuine, real-world human horror. It's nothing less than an emotional sucker punch that left me feeling completely drained, with a dark pit in my stomach, like no other horror film had ever made me feel before. Hereditary took all the overdone, supernatural jump-scare-ridden bollocks that is currently choking the genre in titles like The Nun and Annabelle and threw it back in our faces, instead turning its dark mirror towards the cruel and unforgiving nature of reality and the seemingly insignificant choices we make and the unpredictable accidents that spiral out from them through the relentless Rube-Goldberg machine of life.
The fears of boogeymen, ghostly occurrences and bumps in the night are all very well, but there's still a certain distance with which we regard them, as however frightened we might get we know it can never really happen to us in real life. The beauty of Hereditary comes from its ability to craft just as scary and unpleasant a horror out of tangible, real-life tragedy that any one of us can and probably even will experience at some point in our lives, confronting us with the idea that we or our loved ones can be taken in an instant, without reason and without mercy, and what's even worse is we can be unknowingly responsible for it.
And so the film continues, now focusing on the grieving family as they try to cope with the aftermath of their actions. The mother and brother suffer from their intolerable guilt as they try to pass the blame between them, while the father does his best to hold the family together. This culminates in a dinner scene that may be one of the most uncomfortable scenes in all of cinema as the mother and brother viciously argue, topped with a truly gut-wrenching monologue from the mother. Did I mention, the mother is played by Toni Collette? Did I also mention that she deserves a fucking Oscar, for this scene alone, let alone the entire movie?
It was at about this point that I was ready to crown this as my film of the year. One of the most harrowing cinema experiences I'd ever had, not only was the apparent concept of this film so strong and so unlike anything I'd really seen in the horror genre up until that point, but its execution was mesmerising, emanating an oppressive atmosphere of dread that seemed to completely smother me on an emotional level.
I remember the excitement I felt in the cinema as I considered all of this, that thrill you feel when you know you've found something really special. I remember thinking about composing this very review, what I would say, how I would say it, and genuinely got excited by the prospect of telling the world how great this film was. I repeatedly thought to myself 'they just have to get the ending right'...
The warning signs started to appear when the supernatural shit started to creep back into the picture. The mother starts looking into séance and has a couple of mild supernatural experiences, nothing above magic-show level. She even tries to get her family involved, but the father and brother try to convince her that it's all in her head.
I actually don't mind this section at all, as it still nicely fits the theme of grief and refusing to move past death, and especially with the denying of the other family members, the supernatural results can be chalked up to the mother's deteriorating mental state. 'Great,' I thought, 'another point in the film's favour. I wonder how they're going to end it.'
'I really had you for a minute there,' the film seems to crow. 'You thought I'd ceremoniously chucked out all the overused generic horror bullshit in exchange for a more unique and powerful story, didn't you? Let's see what I've got here....oh look! It's overused generic horror bullshit!'
The dead grandma, after basically not being mentioned for about ninety minutes, is back all of a sudden with powers from beyond the grave. Out of the blue, corpses float and possessed family members crawl up the walls like spiders, chasing after the brother.
A cult of headless corpses show up, apparently worshipping the girl's severed head as some kind of new queen of the underworld. And then the film just kinda ends, in a sticky clusterfuck of seen-before horror imagery.
I was in shock. I don't think I've ever seen a film subvert it's genre expectations only to unironically revert them at the end, certainly not to this extent. The chilling, genuine horror of loss had been undermined by spoopy ghosts and some ancient mystical evil, so utterly divorced from the reality that the rest of the film's horror seemed to be placed in.
Now, before I get any angry backlash about how I missed something and have completely misinterpreted the film, I am already pretty certain that I have. I'm sure this film is too good and too smart to misjudge an ending that badly. I'm sure when I give this film a rewatch I'll notice things I didn't before and more of it will fall into place and maybe the ending might make more sense.
In the meantime, this post exists as my initial reaction, how I saw things on the first viewing and from that stance, I was disappointed. What worries me most is if this film really is supposed to be about possession and supernatural meddling all the way through, then that leaves us with an accidentally fantastic horror film stuck within a much less interesting one, and frankly, I don't really know what to make of that.
If that is the case, that does at least leave the criticism that the supernatural element takes way too much of a backseat during the second act. Maybe the horror film I thought I saw and loved never really existed there in the first place: a subjective analysis that picked up on and ignored elements I wasn't supposed to.
Ultimately, I guess that's kinda the beauty of cinema, that different audiences can have such wildly different experiences with a film and find their own meanings within the work, even if they weren't necessarily supposed to be there. Intentional or not, this film certainly had some effect on me, and quite a strong one at that, so does that really make this interpretation any less valid?
END SPOILERS
At the end of the day, Hereditary has some truly outstanding sequences of horror, however intentional they may have been, and Aster and his crew demonstrate a wealth of talent and potential. Even if this didn't entirely come together, it's still one hell of a debut and blows most other horror films out of the water.
Midsommar already seems to be receiving a lot of praise, even so early into its cinema run, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing it this weekend. While I try my best not to get too hyped before going to see any film, I'd be lying if I said I don't expect Midsommar to be one of the standout films of the year. We just have to hope that Aster can stick the landing.
Hereditary - 2018 - Ari Aster - USA
Score: 8
Recommendation: High
Monday 25 February 2019
The Fifth Annual Double Oscar Spectacular: Part Two (Electric Boogaloo)
We're doing things a little different this year. For once, thanks to a very helpful friend with access to Sky, I'm going to be watching the ceremony this year, rather than refreshing IMDb's homepage every few minutes for the entire night.
Not only that, but I've also assembled a couple of fellow film students to watch it with, and I'm going to be live blogging our reactions throughout the evening. So if you're pulling an all-nighter to follow the ceremony, stay tuned to this page for the latest awards and our reactions. It's gonna be a long 'un this year, but it's going to be a wild ride.
Pre Ceremony
It's currently quarter past twelve. Our leftover cheesy garlic bread has just come out the oven, the Haribos and flapjacks are plentiful, and the red carpet is in full swing.
I'm joined by my friends Cameron and Liam, both studying film up at York. "I don't care for the fashion," says Cameron, "but the presenter is very nice." That's Ryan Seacrest presenting, and at last the BoJack Horseman jokes are starting to make sense. And yeah, he's doing a pretty decent job, although a lot of these interviews and constant advert breaks do feel like we're really just killing time until the ceremony begins proper.
Upon asking Liam for his thoughts, he sat in silence for close to ten seconds, grasping at his face, as if considering the atrocities of war. At last, he answers "I think Willem Dafoe looks scary." That's the kinda guy Liam is.
Nothing to report yet, but we have gone through the nominations again and placed our predictions. Some we all agree on, some we're split on, including most notably Best Picture. More about our predictions later into the ceremony.
I haven't watched any more of the contenders since my last post: I was pretty proud that I'd seen six out of eight, which by proportion at least was a new record for me for pre-nomination viewing, I'm pretty sure. I decided against seeing Green Book in the end: I found that I couldn't really be arsed right now, but maybe I'll get to it another time. Cameron, my flatmate, has seen it and loved it, and it's even his pick for Best Picture, so I'm sure it can't be too bad.
Best Supporting Actress
Cameron: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Liam: Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Nick: Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Well, the show has started, as promised, with a performance by Queen, featuring Adam Lambert. And already we're laughing.
"How do we keep the Oscars relevant? Let's get an 80's band in!"
"If another Queen member dies, do they replace them too? At what point do they stop being Queen?"
Well, it's coming up to the first award, our predictions are above. I'm still stuck between Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz for the winner, but I've sided instead for Rachel in the end. We'll see how it turns out.
And wow, we're only a few minutes into the presenting, and it's already as unfunny as the legends foretold. I mean, by Christ, there was a joke about Mexico paying for the wall. That joke's two years old! It feels so painfully forced.
"The Oscars feel rushed this year without the host. It's like sex without the foreplay!" cries Cameron. At any rate, at least we're getting straight into the awards more or less. Maybe the ceremony will finish on time this year, to keep the metaphor going...
Winner: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Already, Cameron's acting smug: it's 1-0-0 to him. It's hard for me to comment since I haven't seen Beale Street yet, but from what I've heard about it, this doesn't seem like a controversial choice. While I love Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz's performances, I'm not too torn up about their loss, especially as they already have an Oscar each. A shame that Amy Adams still hasn't received any recognition for her amazing work yet though. Oh well. At least there's been no Meryl Streep this year.
"Aww, they're all crying." woos Liam, as the camera cuts to all the other nominees, tearing up at King's moving acceptance speech. "Only because they lost!" quips Cameron.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Cameron: Vice
Liam: Mary Queen of Scots
Nick: Vice
Winner: Vice
Not a surprise, although Liam and Cameron were umming and erring back and forth between Vice and Mary Queen of Scots, but in the end, it's now 2-0-1. The acceptance speech was an absolute clusterfuck, though. It's like they had no idea what they were doing, and was painfully awkward to watch. It was only made funnier when they started to play music over them to hurry them off stage, and then cut them off entirely. "They shouldn't have cut the awards, just the speeches" sighs Cameron, as the winners keep passing their notes back and forth like a couple of Year 7s doing a group presentation.
Best Costume Design
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
Winner: Black Panther
An interesting choice, but one that I can sort of see the logic behind: the design was one of Black Panther's few strengths. Cameron's getting mad with power now, 3-0-1 to him. The warm response to the award, as well as the noticeably diverse audience, is making Cameron start to believe that Black Panther might win the big one. I remain sceptical.
Best Production Design
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
"Sky just knows how to make everything look tacky, don't they?" says Liam, as the cheap-looking animated VT brings us back from the advert break.
Winner: Black Panther
4-0-1. Cameron would also like to point out he correctly predicted Best Documentary Feature, even though we didn't officially vote on it, so 5-0-1. Cameron's getting surer in his new prediction, but I'm resolute. Panther might sweep some of the technical and design awards, but it cannot win Best Picture.
Best Cinematography
Cameron: Roma
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: Roma
It's a done deal. For sure.
Winner: Roma
I'm sorry, but, no contest. 6-0-2.
L: "I'm not going with the ones I think will win, but the ones I want to win."
N: "How's that working out for you?"
C: "It's not the Oscars, it's the Liams."
And apparently, Cuarón's recycling his BAFTA acceptance speech, but I hardly think that's a crime.
N: "Did we decide on a prize for the winner?"
C: "Of our predictions? No. You're quite far behind though, how about £1000?"
N: "I'm not doing as badly as Liam."
L: "...at least I kept my morals..."
Best Sound Editing
Cameron: A Quiet Place
Liam: First Man
Nick: A Quiet Place
Liam has gone home for the night, by the way, but I'll add in his scores after the ceremony to see how well he did.
A Quiet Place surely will get the award, a film so uniquely about sound and its presence should be a clear winner.
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
N: "Oh fuck, really?!"
C: "Oh fuck, really?!"
(simultaneously)
Welp, guess A Quiet Place is getting nothing. "Don't you dare mention Bryan Singer" Cameron snarls, as the acceptance speech is given. Also, we're convinced the guy said 'Birmingham Rhapsody' by accident.
Best Sound Mixing
Cameron: Bohemian Rhapsody
Liam: First Man
Nick: Bohemian Rhapsody
I did say First Man originally but seeing as Rhapsody took sound editing, it's going to get mixing too...
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
QED. 7-0-3.
(Discussing Best Picture during the ad break)
C: "It'll be funny if Black Panther wins."
N: "It'll fucking piss me off if it does."
C: *chuckles*
Best Foreign Film
Cameron: Capernaum
Liam: Roma
Nick: Roma
For the record, Cameron doesn't think Capernaum will win, but he's so adamant that it should, that he's pulling a Liam.
Winner: Roma
7-1-4. Cameron grunts, "well, it ain't winning best picture then, is it." I imagine it's the case, I'm even more confident now in The Favourite's victory.
C: "Did he just compare Roma to Jaws?"
N: "Both feature scenes at a beach with kids in peril."
C: "Would be a better film if they'd been eaten by a shark."
Best Editing
Cameron: The Favourite
Liam: Vice
Nick: BlackKklansman
"Vice shouldn't get it," laments Cameron, "but it might because it was 'stylised' and 'cool'."
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
Really. Really? Are you kidding? Cameron wishes Vice had got it now.
Best Supporting Actor
Cameron: Richard E Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Liam: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Nick: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
N: "How do you spell his name again?"
C: "M-A-H-E-R-S-H-A-L-A, then Ali. Can you spell Ali?"
N: "Yeah, alright alright."
Daniel Craig walks on stage, arm-in-arm with Charlize Theron. "Oh look, he's found the next Bond girl!", quips Cameron. He now realises he's dug himself a hole and wishes to retract his statement.
Winner: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Cameron nearly changed his mind moments before the announcement and is now kicking himself for not switching. Tough luck. 7-2-5.
(suggesting Green Book might win Best Picture)
C: "Emma Stone won Best Actress but La La Land never won."
N: "You can't base it off that."
C: "I think you'll find I can."
Best Animated Feature
Cameron: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
Liam: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
Nick: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
I'd like to also clarify I prefer Isle of Dogs, but I think Spider-Man will get it.
C: "Pharrell Williams looks happy"
N: "I'm not putting that in."
C: "You never let me put it in."
(both smirk)
Winner: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
"My Spidey senses predicted correctly", smiles Cameron. Yeah, I think it was clear it was going to win, considering the overwhelming audience and critical reaction. And I do love it, but I still feel sorry for Isle of Dogs. 8-3-6.
Best Animated Short
Cameron: Bao
Nick: Bao
(I'm poised at my laptop ready to write, Awkwafina is rambling on, wasting time)
N: "Tell me what [award] you're presenting, I need to write it down!"
C: "Mediocrity, by the looks of things"
Winner: Bao
It's Disney, of course it was going to win. Probably the first time a film about vore of all things has won an Oscar, though. 9-3-7.
Best Visual Effects
Cameron: Avengers: Infinity War
Liam: Avengers: Infinity War
Nick: First Man
It's now 3am. Cameron has descended into madness, quietly singing Shallow to himself, before
moving onto singing Alan Partridge quotes.
When asked about his prediction, Cameron said; "Infinity War, purely because of Josh Brolin's chin." I still think First Man is the more likely winner, thinking from the Academy's point of view.
Winner: First Man
Well, what d'ya know? 9-3-8.
Cameron was horrified to realise upon checking his phone that he originally put down First Man, but since he responded Infinity War when I asked him, I have to take his final answer. Cause if we stick to what we put on the sheet originally, we're both gonna lose a few points. That's final.
N: "It's not what you said in the moment!"
C: "A lot of bad decisions were made in the moment! That's how Brexit happened!!"
Best Original Screenplay
Cameron: The Favourite
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
N: *smugly* "Are you checking the sheet this time?"
C: *glares* "Yes, I'm checking the sheet."
We're all in agreement for this one. Let's see if the Academy is too...
Winner: Green Book
Welp, never mind.
C: "I shoulda put it."
N: "Well, ya didn't"
Best Adapted Screenplay
Cameron: If Beale Street Could Talk
Liam: If Beale Street Could Talk
Nick: BlackKklansman
I'm thinking, since BlackKklansman is the most creatively transformed, considering the original book was essentially a quite dry non-fiction work from what I understand, turning it into the quirky stylish film that it was seems like it might make it the most deserving.
Winner: BlackKklansman
Back of the net! And now it's everything to play for: 9-3-9.
According to Cameron, a lot of male Academy members haven't been voting for The Favourite because they didn't 'get it', for which reason he reckons Best Picture is going to be between Green Book and BlackKklansman. While I was sceptical of this, considering The Favourite has been snubbed for everything so far, despite its ten nominations, I'm starting to get a little concerned. But I'm sticking with my gut and standing by all of my The Favourite-related predictions. For now.
Best Original Score
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: Mary Poppins Returns
Nick: Black Panther
Considering there was a lot of hubbub at the time about Black Panther's score, and I think Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar contributed to it, this seems like a sure-fire win to me.
Winner: Black Panther
See, sometimes sticking to my gut works out for the best. 10-3-10.
Best Original Song
Cameron: A Star Is Born
Liam: A Star Is Born
Nick: A Star Is Born
Winner: A Star Is Born
It seemed a lot of the reason people liked this film was exclusively for its soundtrack. I didn't think much of it, but I could smell the whiff of Oscar from the way people talked about it. Also the fact that they played the song live during the ceremony. I think that helps. 11-4-11
C: "Mark Ronson's used to working with singers who overdose and have addictions"
N: "It's the In Memoriam section now, you can't say anything funny."
C: "Of course I can!"
…
C: "He's Hitler!"
N: "You can't say that, he's dead!"
C: "No, he literally was. In Downfall."
N: "Oh, I see."
Best Actor
Cameron: Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
Liam: Christian Bale (Vice)
Nick: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
C: "Are we tied?"
N: "Yeah, 11 for 11."
C: "You're going to pull ahead with Malek."
N: "You can change if you want."
C: "No! I'm pulling a Liam."
Winner: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
Yeah, could see this coming a mile off. It always seems to be the transformative performances that grab it, especially into non-fiction characters. On that note, Vice could have snagged this, and I wouldn't have been surprised if it did. Cameron is not a happy bunny. 11-4-12.
Best Actress
Cameron: Yalitza Aparicio (Roma)
Liam: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Nick: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Come on, The Favourite, you can do it!
Winner: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Ok, finally some attention for The Favourite. I'm so glad she's won, after the sheer multitude of roles she's done over the years, with such a range of characters she's performed, it's high time she got such prestigious recognition. Let's just hope this isn't The Favourite's last Oscar of the evening...
11-5-13
Best Director
Cameron: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Liam: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Nick: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
So, we've realised that Cameron can't actually win at this point since we're all on the same wavelength for Best Director, so there's no way he can make up the two-point difference.
Winner: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
No surprises here. 12-6-14. Now, the bit we've all been waiting for...
Best Picture
Cameron: Green Book
Liam: Roma
Nick: The Favourite
I'm feeling a little conflicted about this now, but I'm still sticking with it. I can't see Black Panther, BlackKklansman, Bohemian Rhapsody or Vice winning. Green Book seems like too much of a low-hanging fruit, too safe a pick for the Academy. A Star is Born hasn't been getting the attention I thought it would, and Roma got Foreign Film instead, and I can't see it getting both. Which just leaves The Favourite, but I can't deny it's not been doing well this evening. And Lanthimos' films haven't exactly won over the Academy in the past. But I just don't know what else could win?
I'll be honest, I don't know which way this is going to go, it could go either way. I think we can all agree, as long as Black Panther doesn't get it, it's not a complete loss...
Winner: Green Book
There we go. Deep inside, I think a voice shouted it at me moments before they opened the envelope (although that may have just been Cameron, who is overjoyed at the result). I can kinda see why, the Oscars remit here seemed to be laser focused on racial representation, and Green Book ticks that theme perfectly, without them having to resort to giving the award to the more popular, mainstream films of Black Panther and BlackKklansman.
I'm still majorly ticked off that The Favourite didn't win, and if what Cameron's said is true about the Academy voters, then that bias makes the blow sting even more. Oh well, it wouldn't be the Oscars without some kind of disappointment.
And so the final score is:
Cameron: 13
Liam: 6
Nick: 14
It was close, and while Cameron took an early lead, I did manage to pull through towards the end. Liam, well, he didn't do as well.
I asked Cameron for his closing statements, and he responded thus;
"I knew Green Book was going to win; even though The Favourite was the better film, it's too progressive for the Academy, they're not ready for it yet. Green Book was like a baby-step; just enough progression to make it seem like the Academy cares, whilst still remaining in their comfort zone."
And with that, we close out another year of Oscars. I've had a really fun night, and while it has been exhausting writing non-stop for about five hours, I've really enjoyed this new format and I might try and do this again next year. I can't make any promises though.
I hope you've all enjoyed reading these ramblings, and that you'll join me again next year. Until then, I promised y'all a Hereditary review early this year, so join me in March or April where I'll be diving into my thoughts on that. See you then.
NOTE: The content of this blog was written and posted in real time as the ceremony unfolded. Edits have been made after the ceremony only for grammar and formatting; our original predictions and opinions remain unaltered from what was said at the time.
Not only that, but I've also assembled a couple of fellow film students to watch it with, and I'm going to be live blogging our reactions throughout the evening. So if you're pulling an all-nighter to follow the ceremony, stay tuned to this page for the latest awards and our reactions. It's gonna be a long 'un this year, but it's going to be a wild ride.
Pre Ceremony
It's currently quarter past twelve. Our leftover cheesy garlic bread has just come out the oven, the Haribos and flapjacks are plentiful, and the red carpet is in full swing.
I'm joined by my friends Cameron and Liam, both studying film up at York. "I don't care for the fashion," says Cameron, "but the presenter is very nice." That's Ryan Seacrest presenting, and at last the BoJack Horseman jokes are starting to make sense. And yeah, he's doing a pretty decent job, although a lot of these interviews and constant advert breaks do feel like we're really just killing time until the ceremony begins proper.
Upon asking Liam for his thoughts, he sat in silence for close to ten seconds, grasping at his face, as if considering the atrocities of war. At last, he answers "I think Willem Dafoe looks scary." That's the kinda guy Liam is.
Nothing to report yet, but we have gone through the nominations again and placed our predictions. Some we all agree on, some we're split on, including most notably Best Picture. More about our predictions later into the ceremony.
I haven't watched any more of the contenders since my last post: I was pretty proud that I'd seen six out of eight, which by proportion at least was a new record for me for pre-nomination viewing, I'm pretty sure. I decided against seeing Green Book in the end: I found that I couldn't really be arsed right now, but maybe I'll get to it another time. Cameron, my flatmate, has seen it and loved it, and it's even his pick for Best Picture, so I'm sure it can't be too bad.
Best Supporting Actress
Cameron: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Liam: Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Nick: Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Well, the show has started, as promised, with a performance by Queen, featuring Adam Lambert. And already we're laughing.
"How do we keep the Oscars relevant? Let's get an 80's band in!"
"If another Queen member dies, do they replace them too? At what point do they stop being Queen?"
Well, it's coming up to the first award, our predictions are above. I'm still stuck between Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz for the winner, but I've sided instead for Rachel in the end. We'll see how it turns out.
And wow, we're only a few minutes into the presenting, and it's already as unfunny as the legends foretold. I mean, by Christ, there was a joke about Mexico paying for the wall. That joke's two years old! It feels so painfully forced.
"The Oscars feel rushed this year without the host. It's like sex without the foreplay!" cries Cameron. At any rate, at least we're getting straight into the awards more or less. Maybe the ceremony will finish on time this year, to keep the metaphor going...
Winner: Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk)
Already, Cameron's acting smug: it's 1-0-0 to him. It's hard for me to comment since I haven't seen Beale Street yet, but from what I've heard about it, this doesn't seem like a controversial choice. While I love Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz's performances, I'm not too torn up about their loss, especially as they already have an Oscar each. A shame that Amy Adams still hasn't received any recognition for her amazing work yet though. Oh well. At least there's been no Meryl Streep this year.
"Aww, they're all crying." woos Liam, as the camera cuts to all the other nominees, tearing up at King's moving acceptance speech. "Only because they lost!" quips Cameron.
Best Makeup and Hairstyling
Cameron: Vice
Liam: Mary Queen of Scots
Nick: Vice
Winner: Vice
Not a surprise, although Liam and Cameron were umming and erring back and forth between Vice and Mary Queen of Scots, but in the end, it's now 2-0-1. The acceptance speech was an absolute clusterfuck, though. It's like they had no idea what they were doing, and was painfully awkward to watch. It was only made funnier when they started to play music over them to hurry them off stage, and then cut them off entirely. "They shouldn't have cut the awards, just the speeches" sighs Cameron, as the winners keep passing their notes back and forth like a couple of Year 7s doing a group presentation.
Best Costume Design
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
Winner: Black Panther
An interesting choice, but one that I can sort of see the logic behind: the design was one of Black Panther's few strengths. Cameron's getting mad with power now, 3-0-1 to him. The warm response to the award, as well as the noticeably diverse audience, is making Cameron start to believe that Black Panther might win the big one. I remain sceptical.
Best Production Design
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
"Sky just knows how to make everything look tacky, don't they?" says Liam, as the cheap-looking animated VT brings us back from the advert break.
Winner: Black Panther
4-0-1. Cameron would also like to point out he correctly predicted Best Documentary Feature, even though we didn't officially vote on it, so 5-0-1. Cameron's getting surer in his new prediction, but I'm resolute. Panther might sweep some of the technical and design awards, but it cannot win Best Picture.
Best Cinematography
Cameron: Roma
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: Roma
It's a done deal. For sure.
Winner: Roma
I'm sorry, but, no contest. 6-0-2.
L: "I'm not going with the ones I think will win, but the ones I want to win."
N: "How's that working out for you?"
C: "It's not the Oscars, it's the Liams."
And apparently, Cuarón's recycling his BAFTA acceptance speech, but I hardly think that's a crime.
N: "Did we decide on a prize for the winner?"
C: "Of our predictions? No. You're quite far behind though, how about £1000?"
N: "I'm not doing as badly as Liam."
L: "...at least I kept my morals..."
Best Sound Editing
Cameron: A Quiet Place
Liam: First Man
Nick: A Quiet Place
Liam has gone home for the night, by the way, but I'll add in his scores after the ceremony to see how well he did.
A Quiet Place surely will get the award, a film so uniquely about sound and its presence should be a clear winner.
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
N: "Oh fuck, really?!"
C: "Oh fuck, really?!"
(simultaneously)
Welp, guess A Quiet Place is getting nothing. "Don't you dare mention Bryan Singer" Cameron snarls, as the acceptance speech is given. Also, we're convinced the guy said 'Birmingham Rhapsody' by accident.
Best Sound Mixing
Cameron: Bohemian Rhapsody
Liam: First Man
Nick: Bohemian Rhapsody
I did say First Man originally but seeing as Rhapsody took sound editing, it's going to get mixing too...
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
QED. 7-0-3.
(Discussing Best Picture during the ad break)
C: "It'll be funny if Black Panther wins."
N: "It'll fucking piss me off if it does."
C: *chuckles*
Best Foreign Film
Cameron: Capernaum
Liam: Roma
Nick: Roma
For the record, Cameron doesn't think Capernaum will win, but he's so adamant that it should, that he's pulling a Liam.
Winner: Roma
7-1-4. Cameron grunts, "well, it ain't winning best picture then, is it." I imagine it's the case, I'm even more confident now in The Favourite's victory.
C: "Did he just compare Roma to Jaws?"
N: "Both feature scenes at a beach with kids in peril."
C: "Would be a better film if they'd been eaten by a shark."
Best Editing
Cameron: The Favourite
Liam: Vice
Nick: BlackKklansman
"Vice shouldn't get it," laments Cameron, "but it might because it was 'stylised' and 'cool'."
Winner: Bohemian Rhapsody
Really. Really? Are you kidding? Cameron wishes Vice had got it now.
Best Supporting Actor
Cameron: Richard E Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Liam: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Nick: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
N: "How do you spell his name again?"
C: "M-A-H-E-R-S-H-A-L-A, then Ali. Can you spell Ali?"
N: "Yeah, alright alright."
Daniel Craig walks on stage, arm-in-arm with Charlize Theron. "Oh look, he's found the next Bond girl!", quips Cameron. He now realises he's dug himself a hole and wishes to retract his statement.
Winner: Mahershala Ali (Green Book)
Cameron nearly changed his mind moments before the announcement and is now kicking himself for not switching. Tough luck. 7-2-5.
(suggesting Green Book might win Best Picture)
C: "Emma Stone won Best Actress but La La Land never won."
N: "You can't base it off that."
C: "I think you'll find I can."
Best Animated Feature
Cameron: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
Liam: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
Nick: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
I'd like to also clarify I prefer Isle of Dogs, but I think Spider-Man will get it.
C: "Pharrell Williams looks happy"
N: "I'm not putting that in."
C: "You never let me put it in."
(both smirk)
Winner: Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse
"My Spidey senses predicted correctly", smiles Cameron. Yeah, I think it was clear it was going to win, considering the overwhelming audience and critical reaction. And I do love it, but I still feel sorry for Isle of Dogs. 8-3-6.
Best Animated Short
Cameron: Bao
Nick: Bao
(I'm poised at my laptop ready to write, Awkwafina is rambling on, wasting time)
N: "Tell me what [award] you're presenting, I need to write it down!"
C: "Mediocrity, by the looks of things"
Winner: Bao
It's Disney, of course it was going to win. Probably the first time a film about vore of all things has won an Oscar, though. 9-3-7.
Best Visual Effects
Cameron: Avengers: Infinity War
Liam: Avengers: Infinity War
Nick: First Man
It's now 3am. Cameron has descended into madness, quietly singing Shallow to himself, before
moving onto singing Alan Partridge quotes.
When asked about his prediction, Cameron said; "Infinity War, purely because of Josh Brolin's chin." I still think First Man is the more likely winner, thinking from the Academy's point of view.
Winner: First Man
Well, what d'ya know? 9-3-8.
Cameron was horrified to realise upon checking his phone that he originally put down First Man, but since he responded Infinity War when I asked him, I have to take his final answer. Cause if we stick to what we put on the sheet originally, we're both gonna lose a few points. That's final.
N: "It's not what you said in the moment!"
C: "A lot of bad decisions were made in the moment! That's how Brexit happened!!"
Best Original Screenplay
Cameron: The Favourite
Liam: The Favourite
Nick: The Favourite
N: *smugly* "Are you checking the sheet this time?"
C: *glares* "Yes, I'm checking the sheet."
We're all in agreement for this one. Let's see if the Academy is too...
Winner: Green Book
Welp, never mind.
C: "I shoulda put it."
N: "Well, ya didn't"
Best Adapted Screenplay
Cameron: If Beale Street Could Talk
Liam: If Beale Street Could Talk
Nick: BlackKklansman
I'm thinking, since BlackKklansman is the most creatively transformed, considering the original book was essentially a quite dry non-fiction work from what I understand, turning it into the quirky stylish film that it was seems like it might make it the most deserving.
Winner: BlackKklansman
Back of the net! And now it's everything to play for: 9-3-9.
According to Cameron, a lot of male Academy members haven't been voting for The Favourite because they didn't 'get it', for which reason he reckons Best Picture is going to be between Green Book and BlackKklansman. While I was sceptical of this, considering The Favourite has been snubbed for everything so far, despite its ten nominations, I'm starting to get a little concerned. But I'm sticking with my gut and standing by all of my The Favourite-related predictions. For now.
Best Original Score
Cameron: Black Panther
Liam: Mary Poppins Returns
Nick: Black Panther
Considering there was a lot of hubbub at the time about Black Panther's score, and I think Childish Gambino and Kendrick Lamar contributed to it, this seems like a sure-fire win to me.
Winner: Black Panther
See, sometimes sticking to my gut works out for the best. 10-3-10.
Best Original Song
Cameron: A Star Is Born
Liam: A Star Is Born
Nick: A Star Is Born
Winner: A Star Is Born
It seemed a lot of the reason people liked this film was exclusively for its soundtrack. I didn't think much of it, but I could smell the whiff of Oscar from the way people talked about it. Also the fact that they played the song live during the ceremony. I think that helps. 11-4-11
C: "Mark Ronson's used to working with singers who overdose and have addictions"
N: "It's the In Memoriam section now, you can't say anything funny."
C: "Of course I can!"
…
C: "He's Hitler!"
N: "You can't say that, he's dead!"
C: "No, he literally was. In Downfall."
N: "Oh, I see."
Best Actor
Cameron: Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
Liam: Christian Bale (Vice)
Nick: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
C: "Are we tied?"
N: "Yeah, 11 for 11."
C: "You're going to pull ahead with Malek."
N: "You can change if you want."
C: "No! I'm pulling a Liam."
Winner: Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)
Yeah, could see this coming a mile off. It always seems to be the transformative performances that grab it, especially into non-fiction characters. On that note, Vice could have snagged this, and I wouldn't have been surprised if it did. Cameron is not a happy bunny. 11-4-12.
Best Actress
Cameron: Yalitza Aparicio (Roma)
Liam: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Nick: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Come on, The Favourite, you can do it!
Winner: Olivia Colman (The Favourite)
Ok, finally some attention for The Favourite. I'm so glad she's won, after the sheer multitude of roles she's done over the years, with such a range of characters she's performed, it's high time she got such prestigious recognition. Let's just hope this isn't The Favourite's last Oscar of the evening...
11-5-13
Best Director
Cameron: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Liam: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
Nick: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
So, we've realised that Cameron can't actually win at this point since we're all on the same wavelength for Best Director, so there's no way he can make up the two-point difference.
Winner: Alfonso Cuarón (Roma)
No surprises here. 12-6-14. Now, the bit we've all been waiting for...
Best Picture
Cameron: Green Book
Liam: Roma
Nick: The Favourite
I'm feeling a little conflicted about this now, but I'm still sticking with it. I can't see Black Panther, BlackKklansman, Bohemian Rhapsody or Vice winning. Green Book seems like too much of a low-hanging fruit, too safe a pick for the Academy. A Star is Born hasn't been getting the attention I thought it would, and Roma got Foreign Film instead, and I can't see it getting both. Which just leaves The Favourite, but I can't deny it's not been doing well this evening. And Lanthimos' films haven't exactly won over the Academy in the past. But I just don't know what else could win?
I'll be honest, I don't know which way this is going to go, it could go either way. I think we can all agree, as long as Black Panther doesn't get it, it's not a complete loss...
Winner: Green Book
There we go. Deep inside, I think a voice shouted it at me moments before they opened the envelope (although that may have just been Cameron, who is overjoyed at the result). I can kinda see why, the Oscars remit here seemed to be laser focused on racial representation, and Green Book ticks that theme perfectly, without them having to resort to giving the award to the more popular, mainstream films of Black Panther and BlackKklansman.
I'm still majorly ticked off that The Favourite didn't win, and if what Cameron's said is true about the Academy voters, then that bias makes the blow sting even more. Oh well, it wouldn't be the Oscars without some kind of disappointment.
And so the final score is:
Cameron: 13
Liam: 6
Nick: 14
It was close, and while Cameron took an early lead, I did manage to pull through towards the end. Liam, well, he didn't do as well.
I asked Cameron for his closing statements, and he responded thus;
"I knew Green Book was going to win; even though The Favourite was the better film, it's too progressive for the Academy, they're not ready for it yet. Green Book was like a baby-step; just enough progression to make it seem like the Academy cares, whilst still remaining in their comfort zone."
And with that, we close out another year of Oscars. I've had a really fun night, and while it has been exhausting writing non-stop for about five hours, I've really enjoyed this new format and I might try and do this again next year. I can't make any promises though.
I hope you've all enjoyed reading these ramblings, and that you'll join me again next year. Until then, I promised y'all a Hereditary review early this year, so join me in March or April where I'll be diving into my thoughts on that. See you then.
NOTE: The content of this blog was written and posted in real time as the ceremony unfolded. Edits have been made after the ceremony only for grammar and formatting; our original predictions and opinions remain unaltered from what was said at the time.
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