The Favourite

This thing is going to get a lot of awards, because it’s a costume drama, and it’s weird, and it has knock-out performances from Olivia Colman and Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, but I sat through the whole thing trying to figure out how accurate it was.

Which is missing the point. This is a movie which has a bit in the middle where Tories are pelting a naked man with pomegranates. No explanation is ever offered for this; it’s just something which is happening, and Emma Stone runs around the edge of it, and that’s it. Weird stuff happened in the court of Queen Anne. Maybe they didn’t have TV or Facebook and it was just a matter of passing the time. Or maybe Yorgos Lanthimos is just nuts. That would fit with what I know about his prior art.

Anyhow, sweating the details of whether the Marlborough campaigns were planned and supported that way, or whether the British Prime Minister really was inseparable from his racing duck, is kind of missing the point. The Favourite is a movie about people being selfish and beastly to each other and how little good it does in the end. As I type this I find myself thinking that Yorgos Lanthimos could have done an interesting job of The Death of Stalin. The movie works because the characters pull you in. Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne is pathetic and yet subtly monstrous. Rachel Weisz’ Sarah Churchill is ruthless but somehow the only sane person in the palace, and Emma Stone’s Abigail is whatever she needs to be in the moment if that’s what will get her long term security and a place in society.

They’re all great; not great people, but great characters, and somehow more lively and compelling than the fops which otherwise populate the Court and make the decisions which wind up in the history books. As you watch the cabinet wheel and deal, it’s hard to resist the feeling that Sarah Churchill’s doing the only right thing by browbeating and manipulating them. It’s another one of those movies which reminds you that most decisions in history were made by people who were either drunk or hungover, because until recently, booze was safer to drink than water and no-one had invented aspirin.

Just don’t read the real story, because it will leave you a bit annoyed that the script simplified and telescoped a long game in which the players were even more closely related to each other than the movie suggests. 

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Band was already together

There’s a whole lot of might-have-been in Bohemian Rhapsody. What would it have been like if they’d gone with plan A, and Sacha Baron Cohen had played Freddie Mercury? What would it have been like if Bryan Singer hadn’t been chucked off the set before it was all in the can? What would it have been like if Brian May and Roger Taylor had been told they could take their chances with history - but that’s just another version of what if they’d stuck with Sacha Baron Cohen.
We got what we got, and it says something about the movie that the two characters I was rooting for were Jim “Miami” Beach and John Deacon, as Queen’s lawyer and bass player respectively. They were not very rock and roll, and their quiet determination to look after their friends and get the job done struck a chord with me. There’s moment - blink and you’ll miss it - at the Wembley set where Joe Mazzello is standing there waiting for everything else to start. He’s stoically resting both arms along the top of his bass, and there’s something in that stance which recalls generations of soldiers leaning on their weapons, just daring the horde out there to come and get it. I liked Mazzello’s version of John Deacon.

Of course, these are not the big deal. The big deal is Rami Malek doing Freddie Mercury, and the recreation of the Live Aid set.

First off, thanks to Mr Robot, I’ll take a shot at anything which Rami Malek tries; he’s just an interesting actor with an awful lot of presence. And his Freddie is unsurprisingly good, especially when you consider he had to do every scene with a set of comedy teeth to get his overbite to match Freddie. I realised I’ve never heard Freddie Mercury do anything but sing, so I couldn’t just whether that ripe upper class drawl was spot on, but it’s hard to believe that it wasn’t given the trouble Malek went to to get everything else right.

And the Live Aid remake is very very good. It’s not seamless, but it works, and it catches a mood. It’s the best thing in the movie, and it ruins everything else.

It doesn’t ruin everything else by comparison; it’s not that it makes everything else look terrible. It’s that the movie needs the Live Aid set to be a catharsis for the band, a moment of reunion. It needs to be Freddie getting the band back together, in one last ditch squeeze into the Live Aid line-up which will make them give everything they’ve got. Except that it really wasn’t. Pretty much like he did with every other headliner, Bob Geldof bounced Queen into the show by announcing that they’d agreed before he’d even asked them; he dared half the pop stars in the world to call him a liar and themselves a bunch of goons who didn’t care about famine, and no-one called his bluff.

And Queen weren’t broken up at this point; they were still touring and working together, though at a much slower tempo than they had been. They weren’t getting on any worse than they had been, and Live Aid was just another job of work, even if was one they knocked out of the park. In a way, that’s a much more interesting story to tell, but it doesn’t hit Hollywood story beats, so the script just makes stuff up.

There’s been any amount of blowback about the way that the movie handles Freddie’s sexuality, and I’m way underqualified to pick that apart. The one thing I will say is that I find it pretty hard to believe that Freddie Mercury didn’t have a lot more fun than the movie lets us see. It’s fun to be rich and do what you want. You can go on all you like about how empty fame can be, and what it feels like when the party’s over, but while it’s happening, it’s fun. It’s almost like they decided that showing Freddie having one wouldn’t be tragic enough, or might have been too pro-drugs or pro-something else. I dunno. But talk about making decadence look dreary ...


Finally, for the pointless cameo spotters, check out Mike Myers putting in a couple of minutes as composite clueless record producer refusing to greenlight Bohemian Rhapsody as a single because it’s not the kind of song kids will bang their heads to in their cars. If you’re going to do that, the least you can do is have him do this face straight to camera:

Mortal Engines: Hester, I AM your father

I blogged on the books some time ago, and couldn’t stop myself commenting on Philip Reeve throwing some shade on Philip Pullman, who is either his drinking buddy or his evil nemesis, and I don’t want to find out which. But they’re drawing level now in a way I didn’t expect, since Mortal Engines looks like being another one shot frachise fizzle just the same way that The Golden Compass sank the notion of a franchise built on the Dark Materials trilogy.

I remember seeing the first trailer for Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Lord of the Rings and feeling a chill; could it be that someone was going to make those books into a movie which would do them justice? Yup. Against the odds, Jackson did just that. Then he made The Hobbit and the less said about that the better. So there I was some months back seeing the trailers for a Peter Jackson production of Mortal Engines and feeling that same hopeful chill. Because once again, he’d got the look right, which is all you can really judge from a trailer.

You have to picture me going into the movie house, muttering “please don’t screw it up, please don’t screw it up” under my breath. Well, you don’t always get what you want.

Mortal Engines looks like 100 million dollars, to the extent that anything can really be said to look like that kind of money. It’s all up there on the screen, for better and for worse. And it runs along efficiently enough as a movie in which things happen. They happen one after another in a logical kind of way, stringing the big CGI setpieces together from the beginning to the middle to the big fight at the end and then the coda.

What it’s not is a GOOD story, or a new story, or a faithful adaptation of the book. It catches some of the look and feel of the world which Reeve created, but then it carves back a more complex story to something that winds up feeling like a shot by shot remake of Star Wars. The rebels are holding out in a fortress. A vast machine is bringing a death ray to blow them up. A rag tag fleet of aircraft have to try to stop it. There’s a key point of vulnerability in the vast machine which has to be flown into by a novice who has weirdly great talent. Gah. There’s even a moment when the big bad is standing on a gantry over a huge drop and tells a key character that he’s her father, and then she’s rescued by a passing aircraft. That was the point when I cracked and said “Hester, I AM your father.” 

What’s vexing about this is that most of the action had to be run in CGI, which means that they could have literally made the action whatever the hell they wanted it to be. It wasn’t one of those deals where the original book had come up with stuff you couldn’t match in the real world. None of this was happening in the real world anyhow. So what they chose to put on the screen is just what they thought would work dramatically as a reflection of the book. I can’t quite see how they could get it that wrong. They had to cut things from the text, obviously, because there’s a lot of incident in the book and there’s only so much of that which you can fit in. But they didn’t have to get the back half of the narrative so jarringly off, and they didn’t have to drop the ball so damn hard in serving the characters. Hester Shaw is a remarkable character in the books, but in the movie they’ve taken all the rough edges off her face and her character. Tom Natsworthy is an idiot in the books, and Robert Sheehan can’t quite sell Tom as an idiot, because he’s not given enough space to do it properly. There’s all that CGI world building to show off, and the running in between the action bits, and then the action bits, and there just isn’t the room for, you know, acting. Perhaps the poorest served character is Anna Fang, who has a great arc in the books for all that she’s often a plot engine, but here she’s just a kick ass martial arts wizard who has two expressions; sunglasses on, and sunglasses off.

So, there could have been three more movies, but somehow I don’t think it’s going to happen. Maybe Netflix will take a run at it in five years time.

Ralph Breaks the Internet

I saw Ralph Breaks the Internet a couple of weeks back, on the back of good internet buzz and the fact that I liked the cut of Vanellope’s jib in the trailers. And it was fun, I guess, but it didn’t exactly drive me to the keyboard to try to set my impressions down.

A couple of weeks on, I’m not sure what to say about it as a movie. It passes the time well. Vanellope is fun. The bit with all the Disney Princesses is smart and doesn’t wear out its welcome. The Easter egg in the middle of the credits...

Actually, that’s probably the bit which stuck with me. That little bit is simple, perfect, and silly. Ralph just keeps stuffing pancakes into a helpless rabbit until things go horribly wrong. It’s weightless and funny and reckless, and I found myself wishing the whole movie had been that way, even though it would probably have been just like wishing that I could have a movie which was all about the minions from Despicable Me.

Instead, it’s another one of those movies for kids in which an awkward doofus messes things up and then learns a valuable life lesson from all the things which went wrong. Which is - I think - also what happened in Wreck-It Ralph, the first movie. That might be why I didn’t bother with it at the time. 

And that’s somehow all I have to say after only a few days have gone by. It’s fun while it’s happening, but I’m struggling to think of anything I’d say to a friend to get them fired up to go and see it.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

I am not a fan of the Millennium Trilogy, largely because it has two characters who - for completely different reasons - infuriate me. So what was I doing at the movie adaptation of the fourth, gun-for-hire, Lisbeth Salander novel?

Claire Foy, that’s why. I was prepared to give it a shot for Claire Foy, another of the new generation of performers who just hypnotise me; Foy, Kiernan Shipka, Millie Bobby Brown, the one and only Chloe Grace Moretz. There’s something in the way they look at a camera which makes me want to look back. Plus, the trailer had some cool stuff in it. Death by airbag. Motorbikes on ice floes. Hand-of-god sniper fire.

Well, it’s all there. Except Claire Foy, who appears to have been given very simple direction. “Claire” the director said “You’re the only native English speaker in the cast. Don’t upstage the Swedes. They’re doing their best.” Claire duly dials everything way down. Way, way down. The poor old Swedes are not blasted off the screen. Heaven help them. I’m not saying they took Lagercrantz’s novel and ran the dialogue through Google translate to get the script, but I’m going to need proof that they didn’t. At one level, fair enough for Claire Foy. She’s playing someone with either autism or some kind of emotional development disorder, depending on exactly what you choose to believe Lisbeth Salander’s damage is. This was always going to be a role with not much talking and even less emoting. That just left the poor old Swedes having to explain the plot using whatever they’re given by the scriptwriter. God help them.

And yet it’s a surprisingly OK movie. The plot is straight up stupid hacker McGuffin nonsense like I thought they’d stopped making any more, but it hangs together and stuff happens in a logical sequence. If you want to believe that it’s possible to write a programme that can control the world’s nuclear missiles remotely and that it will fit into 2528 bytes of code, this is your movie. If you think we need a female James Bond, this could be right up your street; whoever did the title sequence seems to have thought this was a Bond movie, and Lisbeth Salander still has that screw anything, hurt anything, break anything, do anything, unstoppable by anything, balagan that Bond movies run on.

In that sense, nothing has changed. Salander can do whatever the plot needs her to do, and Blomkvist is still every woman’s dream date. Heaven help us, they held back two or three minutes of run time just to hammer home that his editor Erika is still splitting hr time between her husband and Blomkvist, easily my least favourite bit of the first three books. If none of that took the enamel off your molars ten years ago, you’re going to lean right in on this movie and eat it all up.

And stuff can kind of work, if you’re ready to suspend all disbelief. One of the best setpieces in the movie is Salander running down the guys what have kidnapped the moppet who lies at the heart of all the McGuffinage. She’s just been injected with god only knows what after losing a fistfight hard. She walks it off by grinding up and snorting random drugs that fell out of the bathroom cabinet, then staggers out in the open air, kicks a dead cop out of an unmarked Volvo, and chases down the BMW getaway car, dividing her time between driving the car, shaking off the drugs, programming the in car navigation system to track her target and using her smartphone to hack the BMW so that she can trigger the airbags and run it off the road that way. At sixty miles an hour. On drugs. It’s ridiculous, but Foy kind of sells it. It’s a pretty cool chase scene. It’s just - well read that description back.

Salander is not like the other children, is what I’m saying. So not like them that it’s best to think of it all happening by magic. Which is cool and all, but it does take the suspense out of things. No matter how battered she might get in the moment, she’s still going to overcome all opposition by laser guided planning, improbabl computer skills and concentrated essence of bad ass.

And Claire Foy is genuinely good enough to sell the idea, at least some of the time. Weirdly a lot of it is in the walk. She’s absolutely tiny, and she walks like she just washed out of ballet school, but something in that stride conveys absolute determination. Pity no-one else is keeping up with her.

 

Overlord; where zombies dare

Overlord is very like itself, in that something which ought to have been dead years ago has lurched to life because people are meddling with things they don’t understand. This is not something which ought to work, and yet, rather crazily it does. Mostly, it’s because it’s not messing around. The Allied characters are walking cliches but the actors lean right into it and make them work. The Nazis have no redeeming features, which jars in today’s world of antiheroes and shades of grey, and then you think to yourself; hang on, these are actual Nazis doing hideous experiments on innocent people. By this stage, anyone with a higher impulse would have shot himself out of sheer embarassment. 

And yes, you’re going to sit there in the early going thinking things like “Hang on, there weren’t any racially integrated units in the 1944 US Army.” or “How would an aircraft be flying in daylight over the Allied invasion fleet ahead of doing a night paradrop?” Snap out of it. We’re about to watch Nazi zombies. If ever there was a time to remind yourself it’s just a movie, this is it.

And yes, you’re going to be reminded that this is a job where JJ Abrams had an input. The McGuffin involves red goop, just as damn near everything in JJ Abrams' world seems to do. What are you going to do? JJ gonna JJ.

The important question is, does it work? Well, the projector threw a rod at my showing, which pretty much wrecked the last act; we kept seeing bits of the ending out of sequence as the projectionist gamely wrestled with the software and tried to get things back on the rails. But that didn’t ruin anything which went before, and I’d say if you got a straight run at it, it would just be simple fun from one end to the other. Shane Black could do a lot worse than take a look at Overlord and see how you can throw together a “motley crew of military screw-ups take on monsters” movie. The paratroop platoon gets cut down to a manageable number of stereotypes in jig time until there’s just four soldiers struggling to figure out how they’re going to blow up a radio jamming station before the sun comes up. 

It’s not gonna be easy, and that’s before they realise that the radio jamming station’s on top of a hell-mouth and they’ve got to deal with Nazis and Nazi zombies just to get to the station. Good thing they’ve got luck, a plucky French villager and a corporal who’s killed half of Italy to tell them what to do. Corporal Ford’s the best thing in the movie, 100 proof cool from the moment he tells the platoon photographer to get out of his face til the moment that he throws the head Nazi’s SS cigarette lighter back in his face. Everyone else on the Allied side is likeable, but Ford is the size the movie really needs.

So, there you go. Things can still surprise you. I wouldn’t have said you could make a cross between Where Eagles Dare and Frankenstein as anything other than a spoof, but Overlord showed me that you can drag those things out of the 1970s and play them straight, and it will still work. Just keep it simple, hire a cast that respects the tone, and get on with it.

Widows; with men like this, why would you want to be anything else?

The key insight in Widows is that men are just the worst, though I’m not sure anyone was still on the fence about that one. If you just watched the trailer, you’d think it’s a movie about four women carrying on where their villainous husbands left off. Well, yes, there are women in it, and they’re planning a robbery. But the camera spends a lot of time checking out what the men of the world are up to. The robbery plan is tangled up in political infighting in Chicago, and we spend as much time listening in to the two horrible sides of that fight as we spend with Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriquez and Elizabeth Debicki and eventually Cynthia Erivo (Cynthia’s on a roll; she was the most surprising thing in Bad Times at the El Royale and she’s holding her own here against her three co-robbers).

And what an awful bunch of men we’ve got. The robbers which made the widows are no great loss to the world when they get themselves shot to pieces and blown up in a botched robbery; their destruction is such a “no-one could walk away from that moment” that as soon as it happened, I started a clock in my head for the moment when at least one of them would turn out to have just done that. Well, a stately jog, as it turns out, but I didn’t let that make me think I was wrong. Then there’s the two sides of the political race; Colin Farrell’s ghastly white sixth generation ward heeler pitted against Brian Tyree Henry’s crime-boss who’s decided politics is the logical next move to a life of criminal ease and unlimited money. Daniel Kaluuya gets to wipe out all the “Awww” he got from Get Out by playing Henry’s brother as such a walking blemish that when he finally gets got, your main reaction will be that it didn’t hurt anything like as much as it should have. Over on the white and privileged side of things, Colin Farrell has an equally ghastly family member in the shape of Robert Duvall’s grisly fifth generation ward heeler, all rage against minorities and disappointment that his son isn’t an entirely shameless monster.

Because, own this; Colin Farrell’s whiny privileged political manipulator - and part time murder plot organiser - is probably the most likeable man in the movie, apart from Viola Davis’ driver. For #MeToo players, check out the queasy undercurrents in Lukas Haas’ character, who rents Elizabeth Debicki for sex when it suits him, and gives an all too convincing performance of a creep who thinks that he’s a nice guy because he doesn’t actually threaten women into giving him sex. I sat there fuming, because in such a uniformly horrible male cast, there was a real risk that there would be people in the audience who’d think that Haas was playing a relatively nice guy. Tragically, he doesn’t get hit by a bus. I like to imagine it happened off screen.

Thank goodness for the women. They’re not written as great people either, but at least they don’t leave a slime trail wherever they go. And they have spirit. I wanted them to win; not just to make it out alive, but to win. And the movie needs that angle to work at all. The robbery takes a matter of minutes. The planning is occasionally fun, but it’s not often tense. So it will work only if you buy the characters and want to see what happens to them. That, above all, is what McQueen gets right in directing the movie. He has a great cast, and you want to know what’s going to happen to them. And even the small victories are glorious in their way. When Debicki goes out to buy guns without a clue, and figures out how to borrow a clue from someone else, you share her glee at carrying it off. Of course, equally when she’s being used by Lukas Haas, your heart’s in your boots as you look for an exit. Somehow, the stakes feel highest for Debicki’s character, and it’s not just because there’s something so frail and ethereal about her; it’s that she’s coming into the game with the least of all the players and has so few options. Every victory counts.

And I can’t tell you if she wins or not; the movie leaves me guessing. In her last scene, she has an absolutely perfect coat, but I’ve no idea how she got it, or where she’s going next. Probably not a sequel; this is not that kind of movie.