My Cousin Rachel; it's the quiet ones you have to watch

My Cousin Rachel is another one of those movies which exposes my abysmal ignorance of older pop culture. Daphne Du Maurier used to be medium big in the world of novels, straddling literature and popular fiction well enough that grown up people read her, but punks like me also snapped up each novel as it came out. So I ought to have at least a passing familiarity with her books, and be sitting through the movie adaptations knowing just what’s coming, and simply grading them on how well they get to a destination I already know.

Which is what John was doing, having seen a stage adaptation - which he preferred - a couple of years back. I was sitting there completely unequipped by comparison. Was Rachel going to make it? Were the police going to pounce? When was this thing even set? I still don’t know the answer to that last question. The costumes could be anything from the Regency to early Victorian, depending on the extent to which you want to believe that people in rural Cornwall just kept wearing clothes long past their sell by date. But thinking about it, it seems to me that even the latest time zone would still be before there was such a thing as police even to pounce. Not that they do.

Rachel Weisz makes a pretty good Rachel - at least to my mind - but she’s hampered by the fact that Phillip is both an arsehole and a character whose motivation is all over the place. There ought to be a tension in the movie between the possibility that Rachel is a manipulative demon and the possibility that she’s a misunderstood woman trying to make her way in a man’s world. But twenty minutes in Philip’s company is enough to make you side with Rachel either way. If she’s a harpy, great. Philip needs harpy-ing something wicked. Which makes it all the more bewildering that the other female character in the piece seems so taken with him. Clearly Louise doesn’t get out much. It sits oddly with her clearheadedness about absolutely everything else. Louise is sorted. You’d think that would make her smart enough to run a mile from Philip’s man-child. Still, I see that Holliday Granger is going to be playing Robin Ellacott in the upcoming BBC adapation of the Cormoran Strike books, and that fills me with not so much excitement as the calm reassurance that Robin’s got someone who can do the part properly.

The Mummy; who's your daddy?

There’s a moment, about fifteen or twenty minutes into The Mummy when people who’re tired on Marvel movies might say to themselves “Well, they’ve got the origin story out of the way quickly enough.” Nope. The whole movie is the origin story for how Tom Cruise gets to be The Mummy, because heaven forbid that we could have two superhero style movies in one year where there’s a strong woman character with the movie named after her. Poor old Ahmanet is just the catalyst for Tom Cruise to become the title character. Which short changes Sofia Boutella, a performer who could own the screen without any dialogue in Kingsman and makes as good a fist as anyone could of the stupid dialogue in The Mummy. You could have made a perfectly decent Mummy movie for half the price by letting her do ALL the heavy lifting.

Easily the best thing about the movie they DID make is the decision to make Tom Cruise play a jerk. Tom Cruise is at his best when he plays self-absorbed dickheads, because there’s something in his face which somehow makes it easy for him to play shiftiness. Inevitably he insists on getting a reforming arc, but it’s fun til he gets there. They had a trailer before The Mummy for his other 2017 movie and it looks like he’s going to be even more of a dirtbag in that. One advantage of making Cruise a jerk is that it becomes less difficult to understand his epic lack of chemistry with female co-stars. Annabelle Wallis is, for all I know, a brilliant actress, but Cruise brings out her inner tree-stump every time they’re on screen together. It’s easier to understand when he’s being annoying.

Other weird bits; clearly the writing team shared my undying love for American Werewolf in London, since there’s a running gag through the middle of the movie where Tom Cruise is haunted by the buddy he took for a suicidal walk in the Iraqi countryside and indirectly turned into one of the living dead.

And finally, just as in the credits, Russell Crowe as both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Hyde may have involved less actual acting for Crowe, but it was weird to watch him set up as the middle aged avuncular foil to Tom Cruise’s young gun when Cruise is a year older than him. Possibly Cruise is being kept in a vault full of frozen mercury in between movies.

Wonder Woman; it's eh, good, I guess

On balance, it’s a good thing that DC’s first non-awful movie is also their first one with a woman superhero and a woman director. It’s still a bit depressing that it doesn’t rise far above non-awful.

There’s a load of pointless quibbling to be had over whether Wonder Woman is a feminist icon, or just the same old superhero male crap, except in a skirt, and I’m not ready to wear myself out trying to make sense of which way that argument ought to go, or which side of it Wonder Woman the movie lands. In my opinion it makes its best points either way in the middle stretch. Themyscira does not make a huge amount of sense in any terms, and Wonder Woman visits Flanders rapidly degenerates into interchangeable super heroism and property damage. There’s a nice quiet bit in the middle where Wonder Woman - or Princess Diana - is trying to make sense of Edwardian London and the place a woman can have in it. It’s played for laughs - which makes a nice change in a DC movie all on its own - but still, it’s got some point to it which might even resonate today. I particularly liked the subtext for the first moment she hits London and says “It’s awful”. Yup, says Chris Pine’s character “It’s not for everyone.” Which would have made a pretty good UKIP slogan.

One of my least favorite things about Fast and Furious Six was that it casually schwacked Gal Gadot’s character. She wasn’t really adding very much, but there’s a certain zing to Gadot that made her character pop out a bit from the usual background of cars and stripperiffic costumes, and it was upsetting to see her chucked fatally off an aeroplane apparently to make one of the other characters distracted for the post credits scene. I wasn’t sure if she could act, but I thought she probably had enough in the tank for Wonder Woman. And at some points she does; at others it doesn’t quite land. There’s a moment near the end where she just gets cross and then gets serious about bouncing Ares’ head off the pavement, and I think it was supposed to land like this moment. But it doesn’t, because we haven’t had enough time to buy into the character in the same way, and Gal Gadot is simply not in Millie Bobby Brown’s class.

The thing which bugged me the whole way through is the incoherent attitude to war. The Amazons hate war, but spend their whole time preparing for it. Diana angsts constantly about how war is killing people, but she kills more people than anyone else in the movie. The Amazons on Themyscira are cut off entirely from the world, but somehow speak ALL the languages. And yet don’t have the same knowledge of anything else that the world is getting up to, such as machine guns. Nope, if war comes back, it better come back old school, with spears and bows, because that’s what the Amazons have planned for. Never in the history of conflict has anyone been quite so deeply prepared to fight the last war instead of the next one. Mind you, I can’t fault the preparation; it’s pointless, but elegant. In the few setpiece old-school fights we see, the Amazons are magnificent.

Other fun things; all the Amazons trying to do Israeli accents with varying degrees of success, because it was apparently easier to try to sync everyone else up to Gal Gadot’s accent than to get her a dialect coach who could get Gal Gadot to do an accent everyone else could match easily. The spectacle of a whole paradisical island cut off from reality and full of Israeli-sounding people getting ready for a war that’s never going to happen is a subtext all of its own, but I am so not going there.

Best fun thing of all; Chris Pine naked and embarassed, trying to explain what a wristwatch is and how it makes it easy to know when to do things, and Diana asking “And you let that little thing tell you what to do?” as if we’re still talking about a wristwatch.