The Indefensibles - Year 2

I knew I remembered doing this last year, but apparently I did so at the end of October, to close off the original 31 Days Challenge. Oh well; probably makes more sense to do it at the end of the year, when everybody else is rounding everything else up, too. 

Here, then, is a quick rundown of the best and worst of my viewing year - I hope you've had as much fun as I have.

PRESENTING... THE INDEFENSIBLES!

Best Actor (gender neutral)

Nominees: Ralph Fiennes (Grand Budapest Hotel), JK Simmons (Whiplash), Alicia Vikander (Ex Machina), Kristen Wiig (Welcome to Me) Sharlto Copley (Chappie)
Winner: Kristen Wiig, for a stunningly brave performance that actively avoids courting audience sympathy.

Worst Actor (gender neutral)

Nominees: James Marsden (Hop), Mike Jittlov (The Wizard of Speed and Time), Jack Black (Nacho Libre), Steve Martin (Looney Tunes: Back in Action)
Winner: Jack Black, because while James Marsden can't help the configuration of his facial features, Black can sure as shit help that abysmal accent.

Best Movie

Nominees: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Kingsman: The Secret Service, Peeping Tom
Winner:  Peeping Tom, for being so very clever on so very many levels. NB: This was an exceptionally hard category to judge. I had about a dozen nominees longlisted and on a different day, any one of the other three films listed above might have taken the honours.

Worst Movie

Nominees: Real Steel, Hop, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Tomorrowland
Winner: Hop, for its complete absence of any even remotely redeeming feature.

Best Soundtrack

Nominees: Hairspray (2007), I Heart Huckabees, Whiplash
Winner: I Heart Huckabees, which combines inventive instrumentation and on-point lyrics to create an experience that weaves itself into the movie's very fabric.

Worst Soundtrack

Nominees: How to be a Serial Killer, The Lorax, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
Winner: The Lorax. All of these were bad, but The Lorax was the most offensively loudly bad.

Best Visuals

Nominees: Boxtrolls, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Mad Max: Fury Road
Winner: Mad Max: Fury Road. Endlessly inventive and lyrically beautiful - not bad for an action flick.

Worst Visuals 

Nominees: The Polar Express, Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, Titan A.E.
Winner: The Polar Express - as big and bleak and barren as the space in Robert Zemeckis' heart where his creative spirit should be.

Pleasantest Surprise

Nominees: The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rollercoaster, Kingsman: The Secret Service
Winner: Kingsman: The Secret Service. Takes what could be a dodgy concept and turns it into an enjoyable and implausibly big-hearted romp.

Biggest Disappointment

Nominees: The Voices, Titan A.E, Crimson Peak
Winner: Crimson Peak, which managed to make incest seem even more embarrassing than in Game of Thrones.

Guiltiest Pleasure 

Nominees: Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Megamind, Death to Smoochy
Winner: Megamind, a kids' cartoon with properly adult emotional literacy. True, there's not that much to be ashamed of here, but Will Ferrell voices the lead role so that will have to do.

Greatest Waste of a Cool Concept

Nominees: Death Becomes her, Toys, Quartet
Winner: Toys. Granted, Small Soldiers subsequently filled the same hole, but this could have been something darker, artsier and altogether classier.

Greatest Waste of Actorly Talent

Nominees: Meryl Streep (Death Becomes her), Michael Gambon (Toys), George Clooney (Tomorrowland)
Winner: Meryl Streep. We all know La Streep isn't averse to slumming it, but here director Robert Zemeckis (again) has done her wrong and should be ashamed of himself.

Most Misunderstood Work of Genius

Nominees: Con Air, Chappie, Funny Bones
Winner: Funny Bones. Whoever marketed this dark and slightly surreal little drama as a comedy has a lot to answer for.

Happiest Ending

Nominees: Hairspray (2007), Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, Chappie
Winner: Chappie. Warmed my cockles to toasty perfection.

That's all for 2015, folks - see you next year!

Chappie (2015)

So, I have a confession to make: I never much liked Neill Blomkamp's 2009 fable District 9. There are those who'd argue that this makes me a racist; me, I think that anybody who requires that level of heavy-handed preaching to appreciate the fact that apartheid was a Very Bad Thing might want to examine their own prejudices before they go condemning others. I was left feeling as though Blomkamp had definitely wanted to make some grubbily violent sci-fi but had accidentally picked up the script for a pre-school TV programme about the importance of being nice to people and walking a mile in their shoes, and while it all seemed to make sense at first it soon became patronising on a level that started out as irritating but eventually landed up outright surreal.

This, then, along with some moderately shocking reviews, is why I wasn't in any great hurry to see Chappie. I've not been having much luck with films this Christmas, though (possibly because I've been having such great luck at falling asleep) and after the opening ten minutes of Open Season I knew I couldn't rely on the TV to bring me what I needed. At this time of year, I like my movies sentimental but subversive, and nasty without being too unremittingly bleak. At a pinch, however, I'll cheerfully settle for anything that 1) isn't a cartoon and 2) doesn't feature actors that look as though they've been airbrushed. 

The characters in Chappie definitely don't look as though they've been airbrushed, although they might conceivably have taken a few shots from a passing sandblaster. There's a few faces you might recognise, in any case - Slumdog Millionaire's Dev Patel as a kindly young scientist, and Hugh Jackman as the sort of sadistically violent bastard that comes as standard with every film that centres around an amiable robot. 

Said robot, the titular Chappie, is played - in vocal and motion capture form - by Sharlto Copley, in what has to be one of the strongest performances I've seen all year. There's nothing new about the trope of a powerful robot with the mind of a child, but Copley is given the space to lay himself bare and display a vulnerability that's always endearing and occasionally flat-out heartbreaking. He receives able support in this from South African rappers Ninja and Yo-Landi as a couple of low-rent gangsters, each of whom have very distinct ideas about how their robotic child should be reared and for what eventual purpose. Despite the guns and the bluster, however, they prove almost as naive as Chappie himself, and things inevitably start to go very badly wrong.

It's at this point that you'd assume that the film would eventually culminate in a Tarantinoesque bloodbath, but you'd only be partly right. Blomkamp has far too much faith in his characters to blow it all by going all Shakespearean in the final act. He manages to find a real humanity in his grubby, scarred protagonists, and I'm not sure I can remember the last time I found myself rooting so hard for a bunch of figments of somebody else's imagination*. What we're left with instead, in fact (spoiler) is something more positive and tender than I could ever have hoped for.

People may tell you that Chappie fails to see the bigger picture, and they're probably right - it doesn't pose many questions about the kind of leadership that results in the sort of near-future dystopia in which the movie is set, and doesn't confront the sort of issues Blomkamp dealt with in District 9 and Elysium. That said, it's an absolutely cracking character piece with charm in spades and a surprising amount of emotional heft - could anybody really ask for a better Christmas present than that?


_{*Okay, I can, it was yesterday, it was The Doctor and River Song and I'd have given half my Christmas dinner if it would've guaranteed them the happy ending they both so richly deserve.}

 

Black Mirror: White Christmas (2014)

Taking a bit of a break from the movies today and covering a TV special instead. It's the season for it, after all - we all have our holiday favourites that worm their way into our lives and become part of our festive consciousness. In twenty minutes or so, I'll be taking a break from writing to watch Famous Fred, Joanna Quinn's glorious adaptation of Posy Simmonds' book, and later today I'll be pulling out my copy of the adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather and eagerly scanning the schedules to see what day I have to get up at stupid o'clock so as not to miss Olive, the Other Reindeer. 

None of these, it has to be said, have a lot in common with the near-future techno-horror that is Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror. There's been a couple of series of this so far, each containing three self-contained stories linked by the central theme of modern life being lived via electronic screens. These are the black mirrors of the title, and they seldom reflect much that we can like about ourselves. Some episodes are darkly funny, some are just dark, and together, they represent what for my money has to be some of the most disturbing material ever to reach the small screen.

When I heard last year that they were making a Christmas special, therefore, my first thought was How on earth are they going to top the one about the Prime Minister fucking the pig? A year later and unwillingly wiser, I now find myself thinking Bloody Hell, I hope this one doesn't come true as well.

Black Mirror: White Christmas starts inside a cottage in the middle of a snowy wasteland, where smooth-talking  Matt (Jon Hamm) and sullen, shell-shocked Potter (Rafe Spall) are preparing to spend Christmas in isolation. Craving conversation that Potter is reluctant to provide, Matt attempts to initiate dialogue by telling him about the days when he used to work as a pick-up artist. 

What follows is an anthology of sorts, with three short stories linked by segments set within the cottage with our two main protagonists. This sounds a little bit Twilight Zone: The Movie, I guess, and the first section, a hokey and predictable cautionary tale, led me to worry that this might be exactly what I was getting. However, as the rest of the story (and the stories-within-a-story) unfolds, it becomes increasingly obvious that Black Mirror: White Christmas is puzzlebox storytelling of the highest order, every bit as accomplished as the superb Cabin In The Woods, albeit several orders of magnitude nastier. This is world-class knife-twisting, absolutely relentless in the way that each deliciously repellent surprise expands into the next like some sort of glorious fractal of existential terror. Every time, you think it can't possibly get any worse. Every time, it does, and if you're brave enough to turn the lights off while the end credits are still playing you're made of sterner stuff than I am.

It would be easy to conclude that Brooker is, bluntly put, something of a sick fuck. Maybe he is. Maybe surrendering ourselves to the inevitable bulldozing of our private selves by communications technology is the route to a brighter future. Maybe, just maybe, everything really will be okay.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Now FUCK OFF.

 

Death to Smoochy (2002)

We haven't had anything festive yet this year, have we? As I get older and more cynical, even the more subversive Christmas flicks seem to have lost a lot of their appeal. It's funny, really; I never thought I'd ever get bored with The Muppet Christmas Carol, but when I saw it last year I was struck by quite how preachy it was. I doubt it'll stop me watching it again if I see it on the schedules, but another little piece of the magic has gone. Never mind, though; one of the joys of approaching 40 is the realisation that while some of the joys of Christmas may fade, new ones will always come through to replace them.

Technically, Death to Smoochy isn't a Christmas movie. It's set in winter, though, and has its climax at an ice rink, so it always shows up that way on my head. Oh, and it's an absolute blast.

Directed by Danny De Vito, this bleak little comedy has charm in spades and boasts three killer lead performances by Robin Williams, Edward Norton and Catherine Keener. Williams plays Rainbow Randolph, a sleazy, greasy kids' TV star who finds himself suddenly out of work when he gets caught accepting a suitcase full of cash in exchange for giving a young audience member a prominent place on his show. A replacement is found in the form of Smoochy the Rhino, whose creator, squeaky-clean vegan Sheldon Mopes (Norton), can be relied upon not to scare the horses or disgrace the network. Mopes soon finds himself at loggerheads with producer Nora Wells (Keener), however, when his principles collide with her fundamental cynicism. Sounds like the setup for a sweet romcom, doesn't it? Randolph, however, has other ideas...

The reason Death to Smoochy works, I think, has a lot to do with the character of Sheldon Mopes - not sure whether it's the writing or the performance, although I suspect it's probably a bit of both. It would have been easy to make Mopes a bland, saccharine innocent, but instead, we're given a simmering powder keg of a man who struggles with anger issues and values his integrity above all else. It's his honesty that we remember and that the other characters instinctively respond to, and whether picking fake fur for a new costume or teaching kids to howl their frustration to the moon, he's a joy to watch whenever he's on screen. Williams, meanwhile, gets to really cut loose, light-footed and demented but ultimately sympathetic as the desperate Rainbow Randolph. In the middle, meanwhile, is Keener's Nora, whose gradual change of heart provides the film with much of its considerable warmth.

The real reason I love Death to Smoochy, though, is that it's another one of those glorious movies that forgives its fucked-up characters without asking that they change in order to allow those around them to accept them. 

This then brings me, briefly, to Trainwreck, which I saw a week ago and hadn't been planning on covering, but which has stayed with me for longer than I thought it would and for all the wrong reasons. For the vast majority of its runtime it was genuinely brilliant, filthy and unapologetic and the funniest thing I'd seen in years. What a shame, then, to tack on a deeply conservative ending that (spoiler) was basically stolen straight from Grease and felt trite even then, and even within a movie musical. All the goodwill I'd been feeling was destroyed, and then some. Ladies and gents, if you have to change your fundamental nature to make your partner accept you, then it was never you they loved in the first place and you're better off running while you can. #Christmaswisdom


 

Best in Show (2000)

I don't think I've covered a Christopher Guest mockumentary yet, so let's have one now. Not Spinal Tap because we all know all the words already, and not Waiting for Guffman or For your consideration because they're both kind of rubbish. A Mighty Wind isn't; it's well worth a watch and I'll probably write about it another day, but I've seen it a few times before and wasn't in that huge a hurry to revisit. By a process of elimination, then, this leaves us with 2000's Best in Show.

Most of the usual Guest crew are there - Catherine O'Hara, Jane Lynch, Eugene Levy and Michael McKean, to name but a few - this time as participants in an important national dog show. We follow the characters and their dogs through their journeys to the venue and then the finals ring, witnessing interviews and judging sessions as well as occasional candid moments.

Nothing here is particularly surprising; the characters veer towards the grotesque and there's a few killer lines, mostly coming from Fred Willard as a show commentator or, not unexpectedly, from Guest himself. He plays one Harlan Pepper, a folksy type with a sweet-natured bloodhound and an ability to name every kind of nut from pistachio to red pistachio.

Funnier than A Mighty Wind but not so amusing as Spinal Tap, Best in Show unfortunately lacks the warmth of either. It has a certain meanness of spirit that makes me feel uncomfortable from time to time, particularly when it comes to the gay and lesbian characters - Jane Lynch has seldom been so loveable, but she's still playing an old-fashioned cliche, while John Michael Higgins' gay dog handler Scott is an offensive stereotype straight out of the 1970s.

Would I recommend Best in Show? Certainly. It's a consistently funny look at a world that I'd guess is almost certainly every bit as weird as Guest portrays it. If you're looking for something properly endearing, though, I'd advise you to give this one a miss and go for one of his musically-themed titles instead.

Crimson Peak (2015)

I would like to give you an early Christmas present.

So here is a review of Guillermo Del Toro's film, Crimson Peak,

featuring Sweeney (above) and Arthur (below).

 Arthur would like to start by making a joke.

The joke is about Crimson Peak being a period drama.

This is because it has lots of people in fancy historic dresses, but also because it has lots of messy red splodgy stuff.

Seriously, though, it isn't, it's a horror movie. We think.

Sweeney isn't entirely convinced it's not a comedy, albeit a really, really boring one.

 The movie features Mia Wasikowska dressing like a small child,

And Tom Hiddleston looking very, very thin and quite troubled.

He has sex with his sister, played by Jessica Chastain, but I didn't want to look for a cat picture to illustrate that.

 Arthur thinks the whole thing plays out like a cross between Jane Eyre and the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Sweeney, however, would like to point out that this analogy makes the movie sound a whole lot more awesome than it actually is.

And that despite being sporadically (presumably unintentionally) amusing, it's actually pretty bloody stupid.

 Sorry, Arthur.

Goosebumps (2015)

Not sure why I'd been looking forward to this one so much, given that I was just a shade too old for the Goosebumps books when they came out in the mid-90s. I have a soft spot for kiddie horror, though, and also, thanks to the likes of School of Rock, for Jack Black (which is pretty horrifying in and of itself), so the movie sounded as though it might be an honest-to-goodness good time.

Goosebumps starts with teen Zach (Dylan Minnette) moving from New York to Madison, Delaware and meeting the beautiful Hannah (Odeya Rush). Hannah's father, Mr. Shivers, (Jack Black) is a nervous recluse with some serious anger management issues, and it becomes increasingly obvious that he's hiding something big. It's only when Zach stumbles upon a library of books, however, and notices that each of them are individually locked shut, that he realises how much trouble he might be in.

It all plays out like a holiday special, fast-paced, low-budget and jolly. The two younger leads get the best of the deal, with smart, snappy dialogue that makes them genuinely likeable, if half a decade too old for the source material. Black, meanwhile, is less lucky, getting saddled with a bunch of clunky exposition and then digging himself deeper with one of his truly dreadful comedy accents. 

The effects are passable and the sets are nice, particularly the implausible but gorgeous abandoned funfair. The monsters themselves, meanwhile, are comfortingly nonconvincing, with even Slappy the malevolent ventriloquist's dummy only becoming plausibly threatening in one gorgeous shot that reveals him as the alter ego of author R.L. Stine.

Harmless fun, but if you hate Jack Black (and I wouldn't blame you) you might want to stay away.

 

Tomorrowland (2015)

So, let's have a think about the grand old tradition of movies based on Disney attractions. The first one that comes to mind would probably be Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Forget about all the godawful sequels, if you can, and you might just find yourself remembering a superior action flick with fun performances, clever visuals and a suitably swashbuckling storyline. Face it: you might hate the company, but the movie itself is actually pretty damned good.

Of course, for every Pirates, there's a Country Bears (haven't seen it), a Haunted Mansion (impossibly stupid even when viewed through the haze of hallucination-grade flu) and, inevitably, about a million overlong, overly smug Pirates sequels.

So, where does Brad Bird's Tomorrowland fit in? I've read review after review praising its overwhelming optimism, its positive messages and its engaging characters. I'm all about the positivity and, honestly, I'm also all about the sort of slick visuals you get with an enthusiastic team of creatives and a healthy budget. The movie looked as though it might deliver a healthy dose of cute retrofuturism, and while I'm always going to maintain at least a slight degree of cynicism about anything from the House of Mouse, I held high hopes that it was going to be a blast.

...I suppose I'd better start by saying that I don't hold the cast responsible. Of the three leads, George Clooney and Raffey Cassidy are both great, whilst as main protagonist Casey Newton, Britt Robertson displayed an effortless, artless charm that won me over during the opening scene while she was still only present in voiceover form. Looking at the supporting players, meanwhile, Hugh Laurie manages to entertain as the nominal villain of the piece despite being woefully underwritten, whilst Thomas Robinson lends the younger version of Clooney's jaded inventor a fire and a sweetness that initially seems to set the tone for the entire movie.

The art direction is spot-on, too, as you'd expect from Bird, with his track record for successful animation. It's sleek but colourful, the sets all soaring, curved spires that seem to embody the endless, hopeful reaching of the optimists and dreamers that the film suggests will inherit the earth.

You're probably sensing a but coming, but I'm not going to bother with even that degree of subtlety. 

Bluntly put, Tomorrowland made me feel the sort of deep, existential queasiness that I find difficult to adequately pin down in words. It champions society's elite without even really acknowledging that the rest of the world exists, much less matters. 

Bird posits that the world should belong to the optimists without taking into account that large chunks of society don't have anything to be optimistic about. Sure, Casey always sees the bright side - it's made plain from the film's earliest scenes that she's a genius who succeeds at everything she tries. What reason would she have not to feel confident about her own future? The general suggestion by the end of the movie is that the rest of the world just needs to pull its socks up, an argument that's inevitably made by the people on top when they're trying to justify their position by blaming those underneath. 

This in itself is unpleasant enough, but it's also underpinned by levels of graphic (albeit bloodless) violence that exceeded those in the more overtly action-oriented Avengers: Age of Ultron. It felt almost like a streak of sadism to me, a joy in maiming and destruction that seemed like a confirmation of my gloomier suspicions about the movie in general and its director in particular. If Tomorrowland is a film about our societal and intellectual superiors, shouldn't the climax have involved something a little loftier than punching and explosions?

I could rant at length about the story being a confusing mess, too, but honestly, that's the least of the movie's problems, or the viewer's. Think about it: would you really have wanted Brad Bird to provide a coherent manifesto for the future he clearly dreams of?

Better to be thankful for small mercies, I guess.

 

Inside Out (2015)

I know I said I wasn't going to watch Pixar's Inside Out, but I was having a brave day on Sunday and those don't come along often enough that I can afford to ignore them. I reminded myself that I was free to switch off, therefore, grabbed a cushion to weep into, ignored my misgivings and settled in for the duration.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past year you'll know that this one is something of a high-concept job, centred around the emotions who reside in the brain of eleven-year-old Riley and take control of her body and speech according to outside circumstance. Amy Poehler voices the effervescent and ever-so-slightly annoying Joy, who frequently gets frustrated with her opposite number Sadness (voiced by Phyllis Smith). When they get locked out of the control area, however, other emotions Fear, Anger and Disgust are left in control, and Riley's very identity comes under threat.

It's poignant, of course, and I won't deny that I shed a few tears at the end. What struck me more, however, was how remarkably clever it was, and quite how comforting it might be to somebody of Riley's age. I absolutely loved the central message that nobody can be expected to be happy all the time, and that trying to enforce a state of happiness can actually be unhealthy. I've always preferred to embrace my sadness, so... yeah, I'm right. Good.

It looks great, too - the real world looks drab and clunky compared to Riley's inner life, but that kind of feels like an accurate representation of the way things are. I loved the bright colours and the clever visual flourishes, such as when Joy and Sadness enter the realm of abstraction and then lose their physical dimensions one at a time. It's cute, it's witty and it felt more playful than anything Pixar have done since, well, ever.

No real criticism for this one, except perhaps for some sub-sitcom characterisation when it comes to Riley's parents and most particularly their inner lives. There's a time and a place for stereotyping, though, and with the focus on Riley's complex emotions I can see why Pete Docter didn't want to muddy the waters further.

Anyhow, my honesty island is apparently intact so I won't tell a lie: Inside Out didn't particularly rock my world. I'm not eleven, nor do I have a daughter, so it was never going to pack the devastating emotional punch I've been told it has for people in the target demographic. I was charmed, though, and impressed, and pretty solidly entertained. I really hope that Pixar can maintain this welcome return to form.

Ant-Man (2015)

Rumours of the death of this blog area greatly exaggerated - the spirit was willing on Tuesday but the technology was, unfortunately, weak. Even today you're only getting a quickie before I head into town to sell sparkly stuff around10 hours after I stopped selling it last night, but alas, such is life. More will hopefully be forthcoming next week, when I'm not busy trying to neck as much caffeine as I can before my hands grow too shaky to hold my pliers.

...Anyway, Ant-Man.  Mr. B asked what film I wanted to watch yesterday, I said something undemanding and this is what he threw at me.  

But ants, I said, I don't like ants, especially not the winged ones.

Superhero movies turned you into a fan of weapons magnates, said Mr. B, So why not winged ants?

Because, I said, Multiple Robert Downey Juniors have never flown into my face and got stuck in my hair.

Although, I didn't say, I do still live in hope.

Seriously, though, I've found myself burning out a little bit on Marvel Movies lately. The trailer for Captain America 3: The Civil War hasn't helped any, ludicrously portentous as it is; it's not that it necessarily looks bad (although it kind of does), it just doesn't look as though it'll be any fun whatsoever. 

I like fun, especially in my superhero flicks, and when Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish abandoned Ant-Man partway through development I figured that that was when the fun would end. Reviews were mixed, and I didn't want to waste my hard-earned cash on something I wasn't going to enjoy. Friends, though, were largely positive about it, and when you're trying not to waste valuable braincells in the narrow gap between the professional job and the semi-pro one, you take what you can get.

What I got, in the end, was a damned good time. Marvel haven't come out with anything this lighthearted since the original Iron Man, and so Ant Man, with its likeable characters and marked lack of people being imperilled by the tens of thousands, felt like a breath of fresh air. Oh, and as well as being a superhero movie? It's also the cutest heist flick I've seen in, hm, about a decade, with my only real criticisms relating to the heavy product placement and some slightly implausible kid-in-danger stuff in the third act.

All in all, though? Ant-Man is a fantastic time. Highly recommended, and not just because the ants were kind of adorable (even the winged ones).

 

I Heart Huckabees (2004)

I like watching films on Friday mornings. The weekend beckons temptingly without me having been worn down by the afternoon grind, which means that I can afford to look at the sort of thing that allows me to engage my brain rather than simply soothing it.

Honestly, though, I Heart Huckabees is a joy any time, anywhere. I first saw it shortly after its release and I was blown away by its sheer joyous weirdness - here was a film that was both intelligent and absurd, a thoughtful, good-hearted, good-looking piece that posed a bunch of interesting questions and managed to provide a satisfying conclusion whilst leaving me with plenty to mull over in the years that followed.

The film begins by introducing one Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman), an idealistic young environmentalist troubled by the kind of life questions that can keep you awake half the night if you let them - is existence truly meaningless, or is there some kind of bigger picture that he simply isn't seeing. He has found, we learn, a mysterious business card in his jacket pocket, one which has led him to the office of existentialist detectives Vivian and Bernard Jaffey (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman respectively). By tracking every detail of his life, they claim that they will eventually be able to conclusively tell him what everything is all about.

Most of Albert's concerns, it turns out, centre around his cause and his job security, as Brad Stand (Jude Law) tries to force him out of his role as leader of the Open Spaces coalition. Brad works for Huckabees, a Walmart-esque corporation with about as much concern for the environment as you'd think. He's dating the beautiful, perky Dawn (Naomi Watts), the face of the company and the star of some truly iconic adverts. Before long, Brad is also trying the Jaffeys' unique brand of existentialist therapy. Meanwhile, Albert runs into French nihilist Caterine Vauban (Isabelle Huppert), who offers him an entirely new perspective on life's trials and tribulations.

It's all done with a light, deft touch and a certain playful faith in humanity - the cast are mostly excellent, with Schwartzman as implausibly adorable as ever. Naomi Watts, meanwhile, hits just the right note of barely-concealed desperation as a woman in the throes of realising that her entire role in life is to be pretty. The sole sour note comes in the form of Jude Law, who hams it up just a little too much as antagonist Brad. This is the sort of movie where performances require a certain level of pantomime, but Law turns it up to eleven and lands up making Brad slappable in all the wrong ways. This is only one small gripe, however, about a film that makes me feel better about the world in general and my place within it in particular.

Note: The above would probably be a decent point to stop, but before I do I just need to slip in a quickie mention for Jon Brion's genuinely brilliant soundtrack, a thoughtful but mischievous affair. It's worth taking a listen even after you've viewed the movie, because this is where you get the full-length songs, whose lyrics summarise the subject matter more wittily and concisely than I could ever dream of.

Titan A.E. (2000)

I've been wanting to see Don Bluth's Titan A.E. since its release over fifteen years ago, but somehow, I never got around to it. Life kept on getting in the way, and then eventually cartoons became less of a lifestyle and more of an occasional indulgence. I'd turn the TV on during holiday periods every now and again, though, and find I'd just missed it, and the frustration was hard to shake.

At the time, it seemed pretty revolutionary, mixing state-of-the-art computer animation with traditional hand-drawn characters, in a story which owed more to Star Wars than the western tradition of female-oriented full-length animated features. I wasn't quite so knowledgeable then as I am now, though, so while Don Bluth's name meant something to me I didn't really notice Matt Damon voicing Cale, the lead, or (more interestingly) Joss Whedon's screenplay credit.

Y'know when I said the story owed a lot to Star Wars? Yeah, fifteen years on I'd say that's probably all you need to know, plotwise. There's a sassy blond orphan who holds the key to humanity's survival; he has an older mentor and a beautiful love interest (both human) plus a supporting cast of wacky alien sidekicks, and they're fighting an implacable and largely faceless interplanetary menace. These last are the Drej, shimmery blue things that look a little like the more predatory of the bugs from Starship Troopers, although they're more into shooting than recreational disembowelment. It's a simple enough tale and it isn't badly told - Whedon hasn't quite hit his stride yet, but the dialogue does occasionally fizz and crackle like it does in his better work.

So, why was I so disappointed?

I'd love to say it was because Akima, the love interest, was drawn Asian but voiced by Drew Barrymore. Certainly, that did set my teeth on edge.

Truth is, though? Titan A.E. is just flat-out ugly. Ugly can be good sometimes - it worked a treat for Super, for instance - but if I'm watching an animated fantasy I want it to look amazing. Look, these things are aimed at kids (or in this case, worse, teenage boys); if there's a good script it's a bonus but I'd be an idiot if I wanted the writing to be the main attraction.

I've seen the traditional/CGI combination work nicely in the past - I loved Brad Bird's The Iron Giant even if I'm in no hurry to return to it - but then, that film used the neat trick of drawing on top of the CGI to keep things looking relatively harmonious. In any given frame of Titan A.E, the various elements look to have been taken from completely different movies, creating a cognitive dissonance that was drastic enough to make me feel physically queasy. Again, in a different movie, this might have worked, but I can't help thinking I'd have found this one a much easier watch if they'd just decided on one style and kept to it. Certain scenes are impressive - I loved the cat-and-mouse chase through the ice crystals surrounding a ringed planet - but the minute the characters appear on screen it all starts looking like something from the late 70s again. I've never much liked the way Bluth and his team draw faces, and his alien designs aren't so much grotesque as painfully biologically implausible.

Bluntly put, the ugliness was a distraction that took me away from what was probably a fairly reasonable little space opera. Unlikely, I know, but here's hoping that at some point somebody tries for a live-action re-make, preferably with Whedon scripting again.

Funny Bones (1995)

Apparently, Peter Chelsom's Funny Bones is meant to be a comedy. I only found this out two minutes ago when I brought up its details on the IMDB and saw the poster for it, complete with the tagline A zany look at two comedians who'll do anything for a laugh. This wasn't what I signed on for when I decided to watch it yesterday, and for the most part, it wasn't what I got. It's a film about comedians, after all, and why comedy itself might be funny, once you look a little closer, comedians often aren't.

Tommy Fawkes (Oliver Platt) isn't funny no matter how you look at him - at least, that's what we're told. We only see a couple of snippets of his routine as he bombs on his first big Vegas night, and while I really enjoyed the dark desperation of it, the audience are less impressed and it's up to his legendary father George (Jerry Lewis) to save the day. Consumed by self-disgust, Tommy flees the city and the country, flying back to the English seaside resort of Blackpool where he spent the first six halcyon years of his life. Here, he hopes to find material he can buy so that he can finally make it big. Instead, however, he encounters the transcendently funny Jack Parker (Lee Evans). Parker and his family are something of an enigma, and in trying to find out what makes them tick, Tommy lands up getting a lot more than he bargained for.

I liked this one, really I did. Sure, it's tonally consistent - maybe Chelsom really was trying to make a comedy rather than a dark drama about clowns - but there's a certain gloom and lyricism about it that really appealed. Maybe it's Blackpool, a town I love with all my heart but also one which might just possibly be the saddest place on earth, using sleaze and sequins to cover some of the highest levels of deprivation in the country. Once, Blackpool could attract the likes of Sinatra; these days, it's a living graveyard for the sort of variety acts that have no place in modern society. It's a fitting setting for a film that dips the tip of a toe into surrealism, with one really cute chase sequence set in the workings of the fairground ghost train.

Performances vary from good to great, with Platt and Lewis solid but Evans and Leslie Caron (as his mother, Katie) positively luminous. I've never been a huge fan of Lee Evans' standup, but here he displays a complexity and sincerity that put a lot of more experienced actors to shame. The cinematography is beautifully queasy, too, with characters often filmed on the slant to emphasise their fundamental oddness.

With all that said? It's still a mess, unfortunately. There's a few too many plot threads with only nominal relevance to the central story, and even the subplot that opens the movie could, I think, have been lost to create a tidier, more elegant piece. My other gripe would be a thematic one, with the film's insistence that clowning is the funniest form of comedy. While I really do admire clever physical comedy, it's not something that makes me laugh out loud, and it all just felt a little too close to anti-intellectualism for my personal taste.

In the end, though, I had a thoroughly good time with this dark little drama, which was a definite step away from the cutesy fluff that passes for British dramedy these days. If you like a little old-fashioned weird, then give this one a shot - I think you'll find it a thoroughly rewarding couple of hours.

Minions (2015)

It feels as though I had to wait forever for Minions to come out on Sky. Ironically, I don't even particularly know why I was waiting so eagerly - sure, the other parts of the Despicable Me franchise were cute, but they carried about as much substance as a wet fart. Even then, I was never as sold on the dungaree-clad Minion characters as a lot of people - I always thought they were a low-rent rip-off of the genuinely hilarious aliens from Toy Story. Still, times are tough, and I suppose lately I've been feeling as though I need all the cute I can get in my life.

Let's start by stating the obvious: your enjoyment of this one is going to be predicated upon your enjoyment of the Minions themselves. If they annoyed you in their previous movie appearances, this isn't going to convert you - heck, even if you're a confirmed fan, 91 minutes is an awful lot of time to spend in their company. It passes briskly enough for the most part, especially in the early stages when we watch Minion evolution from single-cell organisms to their present form. Unfortunately, however, once the main plot arc kicks in, it all rather slows down, with the likes of Jon Hamm, Sandra Bullock and Michael Keaton doing what they can with a script that feels ludicrous even by the franchise's own low standards.

There were cute touches, though, and I smiled a lot even if I don't recall laughing out loud. I liked the 1960s setting and music, and as Mr. Beaupepys pointed out, it was refreshing to see cars that looked distinctively recognisable as well as merely period-appropriate. The Minions themselves were also tooth-achingly sweet, but I know some people find their babbling insufferably smug and on a different day, I might have been one of them.

On the whole, I'd say this was one for the kids. Make sure you stick around for the opening titles, however, which are the funniest part of the whole film.

 

 

Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Inspired naughtiness today, courtesy of Jason Reitman. Thank You for Smoking was his first full-length feature and it's a little slice of genius, as gleefully subversive as you could hope for. Based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, it stars the brilliant Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor, top spokesman for the tobacco lobby. Square-jawed and utterly unrepentant, he meets for regular drinking sessions with his equivalents from the tobacco and gun industry - they call themselves the Mod Squad (Merchants of Death) and indulge in occasional pissing contests as to whose cause kills the most Americans per year.

Eckhart narrates events covering a few months in Naylor's life, as his star rises and he tries to connect with his young son. There's not a huge amount of plot, and what there is doesn't really kick in until around halfway through. It doesn't matter, though - as monsters go, Naylor is a delicious one and I thoroughly enjoyed every second I spent in his company. He encounters a variety of horrifying but compelling characters (J.K. Simmons is great as his boss, while William H. Macy swaps his usual slightly pathetic everyman persona for a similar role as a slightly pathetic Vermont senator), and it's left to the audience to watch in appalled but enthralled incredulity. In an elegant touch, none of the cast are ever seen smoking no matter how eloquently they speak for the habit.

There's more I could say about this, I'm sure, but sometimes a light touch is best. This is 92 minutes of solid, smart entertainment, and I'm not sure I can offer any higher recommendation than that.



 

Megamind (2010)

Looking down Wikipedia's helpful list of Dreamworks' animated features. I can in fact see that they've done plenty I haven't particularly liked, as well as a fair few I haven't fancied enough to watch. I was never that taken with Shark Tale, for instance, or Madagascar, whilst Turbo sounded far too much like an answer to Pixar's Cars, which in itself was a question that never needed asking.

I think that in terms of sheer quality, though, they've scored more hits than misses. Arguably they're not always as brave or as creative as Pixar, but then Pixar movies tend to leave me annoyingly underwhelmed (A Bug's Life, Wall E), a sobbing wreck of mangled emotions (Inside Out, when I get around to watching it, I bloody guarantee it) or both (Up, one of the least enjoyable movies I've ever had the misfortune to watch). If I fancy a spot of animation and I settle down in front of something by Dreamworks, I do so in the (reasonably) certain knowledge that I'll be able to enjoy something visually appealing voiced by big name talent, neither of which are necessarily a guarantee of a good time, but both of which definitely help.

That said? Before viewing, my expectations of Megamind weren't particularly high - blame it on Will Ferrell's name at the top of the poster, perhaps, or the fact that the animation in the trailers just looked that little bit too crude and lazy. Still, I've had a rough couple of days and was in the mood for some cute cartoons, and when I thought about Dreamworks animations I hadn't yet seen it sounded like the best of a mediocre bunch.

It's a shame, really, that Megamind and Despicable Me were released in the same year - given that they were both CGI animations with supervillains as the main protagonists, one of the pair was inevitably going to be an also-ran. Despicable Me was more kid-friendly and, thanks to the Minion characters, infinitely more marketable, which is presumably why it took the laurels. Having watched them both, though, I think Megamind might just about squeak it as my favourite of the two.

I liked a lot of things about Megamind, but my favourite thing about it  its surprisingly mature take on romance - no love at first sight here for Ferrell's blue-skinned alien menace and intrepid reporter Roxanne Ritchie (voiced by Tina Fey), just a slow-growing mutual respect. Roxanne wasn't shy about calling out her geeky cameraman, either, when he grew too pushy. It was wonderful to see the creepy manchild not only fail to get the girl, but also to be called on his bs and bested by somebody with far better manners.

On a more superficial level, meanwhile, I really enjoyed the cheerfully ludicrous hair metal soundtrack and matching visuals; the opening few seconds of the climactic battle left me grinning like an idiot at our antihero's sheer showmanship. I might not enjoy listening to AC/DC, but they sent me to the moon a few scenes into Megamind just like they did when they opened Iron Man.

Way more fun than Avengers: Age of Ultron. 

 

Day 31: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

I've been planning on skewering The Nightmare Before Christmas for weeks now, but you know what? My heart's just not in it today. Blame it on burnout, blame it on sleep deprivation, or (most likely) blame it on the fact that I just finished watching the damned thing and I've lost the will to live.

I just don't get what it is about this film that turns grown and otherwise perfectly reasonable women into squealing infants. Sometimes, with films like Mamma Mia! or Titanic, this fills me with a warm glow of smug self-righteousness. When it comes to TNBC,  however, it just leaves me feeling drained and depressed.

Look, it's just an appalling film on pretty much every level, okay? Certain shots are nicely composed, granted, and I have a certain grudging admiration for anybody who chooses to create a full-length stop motion feature, but other than that, I'm honestly not sure I can find a good word to say about it.

So, where do I start? I'll keep things tidy, I think, and divide my objections into two categories: the ethical and the aesthetic.

Looking at the film from an ethical standpoint, it's still hard to know where to begin. The best place is probably the basics, I guess, in that it's about a privileged white manchild who feels misunderstood despite being in charge of an entire world that caters to his every whim. There are precisely two named female characters, one of whom is hopelessly devoted to the good guy and the other of whom is equally hopelessly devoted to the big bad who, I couldn't help but notice, has the only distinctively black voice in the entire production. Oh, and don't get me started on the character of the Mayor, a cowardly type who, at one point, states that he can't be expected to make decisions because he's only an elected official. Do I really need to point out how many shades of wrong that is?

Honestly, though, I could probably forgive TNBC all of this if it wasn't for, well, how do I put this? Pretty much every other damned thing about it. Listen, I know it's a kids' movie, okay? I know that it's generally accepted that subtlety will be lost on the little darlings. I also know that it's a Hallowe'en-themed piece and that certain conventions are meant to be observed. None of this, however, alters the fact that the songs in this piece of dreck make my eardrums want to commit ritual suicide. The music is okay, I suppose, barring the fact that it's largely composed of a few themes repeated and tweaked ad nauseam, but the lyrics are atrocious doggerel residing on a level somewhere beneath those you find in the movie versions of 80's toy tie-in cartoons, and the sense of burning embarrassment I feel on Danny Elfman's behalf colours my feelings towards every other aspect of the piece.

I can see how kids might like the film, with its sanitised spookiness and cutesy clichés, but I think it says something sad about our society when we're prepared to ignore our critical faculties (or not to engage them) for the sake of a hit of nostalgia. Yes, adult life is hard and it sucks sometimes, but even on my worst days, the thought of remaining in a state of permanent semi-infantilisation terrifies me even more.

Day 30: Casino Royale (1967)

With guns, and knives... We're fighting for our lives!

James Bond is a very important part of the UK's cinematic heritage, boys and girls, and I've neglected him for far too long. Mr. B raised this point back in early September when I was starting to draw up a list of films to write about, and he's right, really he is, but I just haven't been able to face it.

I can pinpoint fairly accurately the moment when I lost my taste for Bondage. It was the autumn of 1995 and I was a first year at Durham University, studying French, German, and Russian whilst trying to find a nice boy so I could dispose of my virginity, whose continuing existence was rapidly becoming something of an embarrassment . The first potential candidate was K, whose down-to-earth Blackburn vowels led me to believe (mistakenly) that he was a commoner like me, despite his ability to spend £50 on a necktie without batting an eyelash. He was a bit of an arsehole and I was slightly psychotic, so it was probably for the best that my hymen was the one thing that didn't eventually implode.

While it lasted, though, we made frequent trips to the student film club, which consisted of a screen erected in the college assembly hall and offered newish movies at a reasonable price. I'd always been a fairly avid 007 fan, but as I watched this sequence from Goldeneye and the entire room erupted in derisory laughter, something inside me died and I've never been able to summon up a single iota of enthusiasm for the character since.

When I think about it, I'd actually quite like to go back and watch a bunch of old-school Bond, just not right at the tail end of a marathon month. Mr. B, therefore, ever the pragmatist, suggested I compromised with the 1967 incarnation of Casino Royale, which spoofs spy movies with more grace and dignity than Mike Myers could manage in his wildest dreams. Boasting a stellar cast and crew but also some surprisingly sound politics, it's a joy from the opening titles to the closing credits.

The story bears only minimal relation to the original novel, with David Niven starring as the retired James Bond who's bitterly disappointed by the guns, girls and gadgets ethos that seems to have overtaken the spying game. With rumours of a new band of supervillains back on the loose, however, he's reluctantly forced back onto the job along with a group of accomplices that include the likes of Ursula Andress and Terence Cooper along with Peter Sellers' baccarat book author and Joanna Pettet as Bond's love child from an affair with the Mata Hari. On the opposite side, meanwhile, we have (among others) Deborah Kerr, Orson Welles and Woody Allen.

It's all backed up by a soundtrack written by Burt Bacharach and performed by Herb Alpert, not to mention some truly epic set design. Everything is cheerfully implausible but also implausibly cheerful, with the climactic battle featuring dodgem cars, bubbles, native Americans in warpaint and the French foreign legion.

You'll probably have worked out from that last paragraph whether or not this one's for you; if it's not, I hope you'll forgive me for pitying your joyless existence. Casino Royale is female-friendly, family friendly and generally well-disposed towards anybody who doesn't have a taste for macho prickery. It's also ludicrously over the top, but honestly, that's half the charm (the other half is pure David Niven).

Just be sure to stick around for the end credits in order to enjoy the greatest earworm of your life. 

Day 29: Nacho Libre (2006)

Regular readers may wonder why I'm reviewing a Jack Black comedy today; the answer is that it was on top of the DVD pile when I got in from work yesterday. In truth, I don't loathe Mr. Black as much as some people seem to; he was excellent in School of Rock and I've heard good things about his work in the just-released Goosebumps adaptation.

That said, Nacho Libre definitely isn't one of his best. Apparently based on a true story about a Mexican priest who took up Lucha Libre (Mexican wrestling) to support the orphanage where he worked. 

First things first: I have absolutely nothing against professional wrestling. Quite the opposite, in fact - some of my happiest memories are of watching oily naked guys getting grippy with one another in the ring. Regardless of whether the outcome is decided in advance or not, the athleticism remains the same and I have nothing but respect for these guys who take such ridiculous risks for my entertainment.

None of this, however, alters the fact that Nacho Libre is fundamentally a bit shit.

We'll start with the most obvious thing: Jack Black's accent. I don't care if his character is supposedly only half Mexican; he's lived in the country amongst the locals all his life, so he shouldn't be talking like Speedy Gonzales, end of. It made me cringe every time he was on screen - in other words, 80 percent of the movie.

The film also suffers from that patented variety of Jack Black fatphobia where it's fine to be big so long as you're not a woman of Black's own approximate age. Fat kids? Fine. Fat men? Also fine (take a look at your leading man). Fat, female and otherwise fuckable? Might as well paint a target on your ample backside. I find this to be a particularly disgusting form of objectification, in that it basically designates adult female characters as existing solely to meet Black's standards of physical perfection - standards, I repeat, that he in no way lives up to himself.

And the rest? The alleged comedy is broad, coming from a combination of pratfalls and Mexican accents both real and fake. Basically, if Inspector Clouseau doesn't do it for you then Nacho Libre certainly won't. It was fun to see a handful of real luchadors plying their trade, granted, but Black even ruined that for me by going for a vanity climax that involved some heavy-duty wirework and was an insult to the real professionals involved.

I really wish I'd managed to sleep through the film so that I could've remained awake for episode 4 of The Apprentice, and if that doesn't convey the depths of my distaste then I don't know what else will.
 

Day 28: The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000)

I've been trying to cover all the bases this month but there's one thing I've been woefully short on: movies with no discernible target audience. These tend to be some of my favourites, if only because they carry a particular flavour of weird that you just don't find if somebody's thought to aim a movie at a specific demographic.

Step forward, then, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, because isn't pretty much everybody going to be queueing up to see a live-action remake of a cartoon whose last episode aired in 1964? Oh. Right. Nobody. The film cost a reputed $76 million to make and currently scores 4.1 on the imdb.

Is it really as bad as all that, though?

Probably not, actually. Certainly, I enjoyed TAORAB far more than Looney Tunes: Back in Action - it wasn't half so loud or, crucially, so eager to please. Instead, it stays true to the roots of the original, which people occasionally compared to a radio serial with added animation. Keith Scott's narrator, therefore, provides a nonstop commentary on the onscreen action, constantly pointing out the inherent lunacy of a cartoon moose (voice: also Keith Scott) and flying squirrel (voiced by June Foray; 83 by the time the film was released) trying to save the world from a bunch of generically Slavic spies led by Robert de Niro's Fearless Leader.

It's all good-natured silliness, with the jokes coming as thick and fast as in an Aardman movie, if not quite as funnily. I didn't laugh much, but I certainly smiled a lot. It's smarter than the average family flick, too, and not afraid to wear its intellect on its sleeve.

The main problem, really, is that I just couldn't quite bring myself to care. The original animated series was long before my time; I remember repeats, but only vaguely, and chiefly for the appalling quality of the animation. There may be bigger fans out there - especially on the other side of the Atlantic - but that's still a fairly small market, especially given that the movie is a little too exposition-heavy to make it truly kid-friendly.

I'm not surprised that it bombed, nor am I particularly disappointed. If you ever find yourself bored enough to hunt this one down, however, you might conceivably also be bored enough to enjoy it.

Day 27: Tabloid (2010)

I cannot tell a lie; the daily blog thing is starting to burn me out, just a little. It'd be wonderful to go a day without having to watch any films at all. Still, not long to go now.

In the meantime, yesterday I went for something of a palate cleanser in the form of Errol Morris' Tabloid. It's another documentary, but  a very different beast indeed from the likes of the two I've already covered. Instead, Tabloid does exactly what it says in the title, providing an hour and a half of cheap and dirty thrills for the price of a small sliver of your self-respect.

Back in 1977, the UK was cheerfully scandalised by coverage of the manacled Mormon. The story was media catnip - a former American beauty queen had kidnapped her Mormon ex from his mission and stolen him away to a cottage in darkest Devon, where she shackled him to a bed and apparently did her damnedest to get him to impregnate her, allegedly against his will.

Tabloid is the story of that beauty queen, told in her own words and backed up by interviews with newspapermen who covered the tale. It's a breezy, sleazy tale that delights me every time I watch, chiefly because of the singular charisma of its subject, one Joyce McKinney, who combines the eloquence of a born storyteller with a truly astonishing lack of self-awareness. In her eyes, she's very much the misunderstood heroine of her own life story, and she wants us all to know.

Where it starts getting complicated is that it would be easy to dismiss McKinney as an entertaining fruit loop. To do so, however, would be to label Tabloid a modern incarnation of the Victorian freak show  - conceivably, it might be, although that levels some fairly hefty accusations at both Morris and the viewing audience. When McKinney claims she was simply rescuing her lover from the dangerous cult that had brainwashed him, though, rational thought dictates that we have to have at least some sympathy with her plight. There can be no doubt, either, that she was treated appallingly by the British press, who were even more misogynistic forty years ago than they are now.

Just because somebody is deluded and self-serving, does this make it acceptable for us to point and laugh? I'm honestly not sure. Actually, no, that's untrue; I know the answer, it's just that to state it out loud would be to condemn myself - watching Tabloid as a sad expose of the exploitation of a damaged woman wouldn't be half so viscerally enjoyable.

Thought-provoking stuff...
 

Day 26: The adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)

I originally intended to write about Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen last October, back when I didn't know that the blog was going to become a permanent feature and I was trying to write primarily about notorious flops. It didn't make the grade, however, because people just didn't seem to hate it enough. Sure, it was big and expensive, and sure, the box office take wasn't great, but I actually had trouble finding somebody who didn't like it in a quiet sort of way.

Just so we're all on the same page, this would be because Baron Munchausen is absolutely bloody brilliant. 

Gilliam is one of those directors I always feel I should enjoy more than I actually do, possibly because most of his films aren't actually that enjoyable. At his best, he's a visionary; Brazil was an astounding piece of cinema. It was also, however, painfully bleak, a film I was glad to watch once and set aside forever. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus and The Brothers Grimm were both messy to the point of being embarrassing, with only Time Bandits capturing the manic zest of his work with Monty Python.

Munchausen, however, is a joy from the first shot to the last, every frame packed full of the sort of glorious intricacy that can only be achieved with old-school physical effects. True, it's long, and it rambles sometimes, but that's half the pleasure of it - the loosely episodic structure means that if one setting or group of minor characters doesn't appeal to you, another will be along within ten minutes or so. There's an appearance from a young Uma Thurman, while the even younger Sarah Polley shines as one of the least annoying child characters in cinematic history.

In the end, however, it all revolves around the character of the Baron himself, a legendary teller of tall tales. At the start of the film he appears within a city under siege, unwittingly intruding on a play about his own life. Of course, the players have the facts all wrong, and of course, he has to correct them. What follows is a layered narrative where the audience is never sure what is real and what is story, as the Baron fights the Turks, the Angel of Death, and (as embodied by Jonathan Pryce) the forces of logic and bureaucracy. As played by veteran actor John Neville, the Baron is a roguish figure, charmingly irascible and utterly irresistible to women of all ages. It is the Baron's stories that give the city's inhabitants the courage to question authority, and in an ending of heartbreaking poignancy, to discover that the enemy outside the gates might not be what they had thought.

I could go on, of course, but I'd rather not, not when the film contains so many hidden delights. Instead, watch it yourselves, and be transported.

 

Day 25: Super (2010)

Super is another film that's only ever on in the We need to talk about Kevin slot. Time after time I'd see it on the schedules starting at 11pm, which is right when I normally fall asleep. I've been endlessly frustrated by this over the past couple of years, because any film about an inept DIY superhero is a film I absolutely need to see.

The more I read up, the more interesting it all got. Director James Gunn, for instance, had a name I recalled seeing elsewhere, although I couldn't quite place it - turned out it was on the posters for Guardians of the Galaxy. A little wider reading revealed him to be a Troma alumnus, suggesting a career trajectory roughly parallel to that of Peter Jackson. Might Super have been his Heavenly Creatures, the sweet spot between zero-budget splatter and slick studio blockbuster?

Having finally got around to watching the film, my response to this would have to be a conclusive no.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Super, but it was as gruelling a piece of cinema as I've seen in a very long time. It takes all those tricky moral questions that swirl around costumed vigilantes and forces the audience to confront them head-on. While we might cheer at the idea of lonely schizophrenic Frank (Rainn Wilson) donning the mask and tights to rescue his ex-addict wife from the drug dealers who hold her in thrall, when he takes a pipe wrench to a man who fails to observe proper queueing etiquette, things get messier in every sense of the word.

It's a messy film in general, in fact, funny and shocking by turns in a way that makes it deeply uncomfortable to watch. I'm not sure this is a bad thing - honestly, it's probably about time we started thinking more seriously about whether unconventional dress sense entitles a person to become judge, jury and executioner - but the tonal inconsistency isn't enjoyable in anything but the broadest intellectual sense. The levels of gore and violence on display are on a par with anything Tarantino has ever done, but lack the visual artistry that makes Tarantino's work such a delight. Again, perhaps this is a deliberate decision, and perhaps this is a good thing. The problem is that while it might be interesting, it's also repellent, such as where two separate rape scenes are juxtaposed, each with the gender roles reversed.

None of this is unforgivable, with the possible exception of an ending which I can only surmise was tacked on at the request of the (possibly terrified) studio bosses. After well over an hour of brutality, we're given a trite, sentimental resolution that completely fails to address any of the questions that have so pointedly been raised. It's deeply patronising, and utterly undermines the moral complexity of the rest of the film.

Still, it's an interesting watch. I'm a longstanding superhero fan and also an enthusiastic carnivore; Super felt, to me, like an educational visit to an abattoir, leaving me thinking hard about my tastes and whether they could really be justified.

Day 24: Coraline (2009)

Is Coraline really only six years old? It feels as though it's been around for much, much longer, lurking on the edge of my consciousness like a statue in a darkened room.

I was fascinated with it from the moment I heard it was in production. Neil Gaiman, the author of the original novella, isn't always my precise cup of tea but when he's on form, few can match his work for intelligence or charm. His intricate stories, which weave a tapestry of modern life shot through with threads of ancient myth, seemed to mesh perfectly with the stop-motion models I saw in early stills.

With all this established, however, I have to admit that it's only been a couple of years since I saw Coraline for the first time, and that this is because I had to wait until I was having a brave day. I'm skittish around horror movies at the best of times, and somehow, horror movies about and/or intended for kids often feel like the scariest ones of all.

Make no mistake, Coraline is a proper horror film - specifically, an old-school creepfest. We spend probably the majority of the movie establishing the character of Coraline Jones, freshly uprooted from her Michigan home and moved, protesting, to an apartment within a remote elderly house with shades of the Overlook Hotel. 

Benignly neglected by her parents and too smart for her own good, Coraline seeks her own amusement. The neighbours are too weird, though, and the landlord's grandson talks too much. When, therefore, Coraline discovers a tiny door in a remote room, a brief moment of excitement ensues until she finds out that nothing lurks behind it but bricks.

That night, however, when she checks again, she finds a tunnel to an alternate world, with alternate parents and neighbours whose sole aim in life, seemingly, is to find new ways to delight her. Over the nights that follow, Coraline spends more and time at the other end of the tunnel, until her Other Mother finally invites her to stay permanently. All she has to do is sew two black buttons over her eyes...

From hereon out, things get seriously creepy, and if you're squeamish about eyes then you'd best steer clear. For the rest of us, though, there's delicious nastiness, a neat false ending and one or two truly visceral shocks on the way.

None of which goes even halfway to explaining why I love this movie so much. There's no day or week it can't brighten, no matter how burned out I might be on films in general and writing about them in particular. Obviously, the look of it has a major part to play - it's done in production company Laika's house style, with delicate models heavily enhanced by painterly CGI. Nothing else looks like a Laika film, not even another Laika film. Director Henry Selick's work is also highly distinctive, albeit in a more consistent fashion, and it's easy to trace Coraline's lineage back to the likes of The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach.

My absolute favourite thing about this one, though, the single quality that raises it to the rank of greatness, is its pacing. It's a beautiful film with a beautiful soundtrack, and the best thing about all of this is that it gives the audience the time to appreciate all that beauty on their own terms. The camera lingers perfectly happily and pans over the gardens or track's Coraline's progress through the house, inviting the audience to savour the staggering amount of hard work that must have gone into creating it all. By immersing us so deeply in Coraline's world, Selick intensifies the horror we feel when it all starts to come apart at the seams. 

According to the imdb, Selick hasn't directed another film since Coraline. I haven't always enjoyed his work in the past, but if this is what he can do when he's on top form, I really hope we'll be seeing more from him soon.

 

Day 23: Matinee (1993)

On a different day, I think I might have rather liked Joe Dante's Matinée, a sweet little comedy set in Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. It's nicely shot, nicely acted and tells its fundamentally endearing story with understated narrative flair. It felt to me like an intensely personal piece, too -  a quick check reveals that during the period when the movie takes place, Dante would have been approximately the same age as the film's main protagonist who, coincidentally, is obsessed with creature features and monster comics.

As I say, on a different day...

Yesterday, however, I cricked my neck, and neck pain always brings out the asshole in me. What should have been cute, therefore, seemed saccharine, and John Goodman's avuncular performance as a B-movie producer came across as way too cuddly and nowhere near sleazy enough.

There's not a lot I feel sure about saying about Matinée, though, because - and I'm guessing here - it belongs to a cinematic idiom of which I have no experience. I suspect it shares DNA with the likes of Explorers, The Goonies and, most recently, Super-8, where (apparently) a group of cutely cinematic boys and the odd token female have excitingly PG-rated adventures and everything resolves at the end in a warm golden sunset of pure nostalgia. It's all good clean fun for small boys and sad middle-aged men, but I just don't get the romance of it and I suspect I never will. 

Matinée spends way too long establishing time, place and mood, and by the time we finally get a sniff of Dante's trademark mischief, it all feels too little, too late. I'd been hoping for some proper anarchy, but when, midway through, the cat fell asleep on my notebook it was all I could do not to follow his excellent example.