I'm pretty sure I used Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters as the punchline in a cheap joke a couple of months ago - I think it was for my piece on Tucker and Dale Vs. Evil, or something?Apparently so. In any case, it seems to have become a fairly useful personal shorthand for a bad movie.
When, therefore, I found it nestled in the Channel 5 listings last night, I sort of felt obliged to take a look. I might not always be nice, after all, but I do always try to be fair. In the interests of complete fairness, in fact, I do have to say that the thought of it didn't inspire the same vague feelings of resignation and dread within me that I got before watching Her - sure, it looked like a very bad film indeed, but it did at least look like a very bad film with enough explosions and one-liners to keep me nicely distracted.
Hansel & Gretel... is one of the last of that wave of allegedly grown-up fairytale adaptations that the big studios seemed to think we wanted a couple of years ago - there was a Red Riding Hood, and Snow White and the Hunter, and Mirror, Mirror, bits of which I actually saw but am slowly trying to repress. I'm not sure why we got all these at once; I suspect that a lot of high-ups had started to see young adult literature as a guaranteed cash cow, and wanted something where they wouldn't need to pay both the screenwriter and the author of the original material.
Hansel & Gretel... is at least an attempt to do something new with one of the classic fairy tales, summarising the original in the prologue and using it for a jumping-off point. The main body of the film takes place some years later, when Hansel (Jeremy Renner) and Gretel (Gemma Arterton) are all grown up but still thirsty for gruesome revenge on every witch they encounter. Armed with an impressive array of weaponry and, in Hansel's case, his diabetic medicine, they decide to get rid of one particularly senior witch before a rare lunar event enables her to create a potion that will render her invulnerable to fire.
The good
This one wasn't half as bad as I feared it might be. In retrospect, it's not surprising - Arterton is one of the most charismatic actresses working today, and while I've never been Renner's biggest fan, his work in American Hustle was a miracle of understated likeability.Together, they make for a charming pair of heroes, with her beauty tempered by Gretel's endless pragmatism and him providing a lugubrious, hangdog charm that enables him to deliver some pretty dreadful dialogue in a way that hits just the right note of self-awareness. These are finely-judged performances, making the most of what cannot have been easy material to work with.
As for the rest? It looks okay, I suppose; I suppose the word would probably be serviceable. The sets are okay, the effects are fine for what they are, and if it all looks as though it was pulled together on a shoestring budget, you have to ask yourself whether you'd really want somebody spending hundreds of millions on a concept like this.
The bad
I'm never entirely comfortable with the standard movie trope of equating ugliness with evil, and seeing as I'll soon be obtaining a bunch of new facial scars, it's a particularly sore spot, pun not intended. Hansel & Gretel... actually makes this link explicit: only bad witches become ugly, and other than the grotesque villains there's not a single less-than-perfect woman to be seen (I wasn't watching that closely, but I'm not sure there was a single non-witch over the apparent age of 30 on display, either). Plenty of older/uglier men, of course, right across the moral spectrum, but no women - if a female in this film doesn't look perfect, it's probably because she's a human fireball already. Oh, and while creative violence is always going to be a selling point for these sorts of movies, here it's delivered with a sort of sadistic joy that occasionally made me feel slightly queasy.
The verdict
Not half so bad as I'd led myself to believe, thanks to some deft work by the two leads. Sure, it feels a little like the pilot for a late night TV series, but you know what? If they made one with the same cast, I'd probably watch that, too.
Let's start with a disclaimer: I didn't watch Her out of any particular sense of enthusiasm. I didn't even watch it because it was the most appealing thing on TV yesterday. I watched it partly because I thought it would give me plenty to think about and write about, but mostly because Mr. B never gets to watch films he wants these days and I knew he'd been waiting on this one for far too long.
Call it personal taste or a character flaw, but I'm just not much of a one for movie romance, no matter how elegant the trappings. Does this make me emotionally stunted? Possibly. Mostly, however, it just makes me somebody who doesn't watch a lot of romcoms or serious drama. I blame my mother for putting me off them, but then, I blame my mother for everything.
One thing Her does boast, however, is an impressive pedigree. Spike Jonze writes and directs - he of Being John Malkovich fame. I haven't seen that either, but I know a lot of people loved it, and I suspect I probably would, too.
Anyhow, back to the matter at hand: Her is set at a nonspecific point in the near future, and tells the story of the appealingly-named Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), who makes a living writing letters for people who presumably lack the eloquence to do it themselves. While he repairs the personal lives of others, however, his own is falling apart - he cannot quite bring himself to divorce his former childhood sweetheart Catherine (Rooney Mara), and his love life is limited to a series of increasingly embarrassing phone sex liaisons.
All of this changes, however, when he purchases a revolutionary new OS for his phone. After a series of basic psychological questions, he is assigned a female OS (Scarlett Johansson), who decides to name herself Samantha. Samantha is created to grow, evolve and adapt to Theodore's needs and requirements, so it's probably not surprising that he soon falls for her. It would be nice to say they immediately live happily ever after, but in addition to being a shocking spoiler on my part, that would make for a very short film - probably not that interesting a one, either.
The good
No way around it: this is a very, very good film indeed. It looks like a dream in every sense of the word, all muted pastels for the scenery and minimal visible makeup for the female characters. Jonze has selected a singularly beautiful cast, then carefully made them dowdy in much the same way he did with Cameron Diaz in Malkovich. It's visually great, but better than that, it's consistently visually interesting.
The performances are great, too, with each actor perfectly inhabiting their role - no mean feat in a movie that I thought was more interested in the concept than the narrative. Phoenix makes Theodore a compelling individual, if an ultimately unknowable one, while Amy Adams and Chris Pratt offer their usual easy, expressive charm in supporting roles. As Samantha, meanwhile, Johansson takes the slightly thankless task of being a disembodied fantasy figure and runs with it; it's not difficult to work out why Theodore would fall so hard for her.
I enjoyed the vein of dark comedy that ran through the movie, too; I laughed out loud once or twice, and cringed several more times in delicious shame. The film is, after all, about experimental technologies, and each character is navigating their own personal maze, complete with dead ends and pitfalls aplenty.
The bad
I honestly don't think I can fault this movie on anything but the most trivial levels.
Did I actually like it, though? No, not really.
Maybe Jonze was making a point by having none of the characters ever talk about anything except for themselves and their relationships for the film's two hour duration. Maybe (probably) it's a parable about how technology is gradually isolating us.
Or, y'know, maybe it was just a tiny bit tedious. Stranger things have happened.
It's hard to tell, though, because of this one ludicrous, awful prejudice I have. I'm nearly 40 now, and I can accept that actresses are more attractive than I am. It's an annoyance, true, but I'm mostly past the desperate envy and the feelings of crashing inadequacy.
Except, unfortunately, for Scarlett Johansson. I'm not sure why; it could be the way she's portrayed more than her fair share of blank-canvas fantasy figures, or it could be those perfume ads she does where she comes across as the single most self-satisfied person in human history. I can tolerate her, just, as the Black Widow in the current rash of Marvel movies, where she's only ever an ensemble player and doesn't get the chance to be a sexual fantasy, but her presence in almost any other movie is enough to put me off entirely. Here, while the character of Samantha definitely has a development arc of her own, her main functions are to be 1) appealing and 2) ultimately unavailable. Objectively speaking, she does it well. Subjectively speaking, it makes me want to bash my head against a brick wall, except for the bits when she breaks into breathy, indie-styled song. Those make me want to bash my head against an IED.
The verdict
A beautiful, thoughtful movie with a distinctive visual sensibility and fantastic performances across the board. I couldn't bring myself to love it, but don't let that put you off.
They did a parody of Heavenly Creatures on The Simpsons. It wasn't a very good one, but then, the movie parodies tend not to be. A few years back, however, it did me the enormous favour of convincing me to set aside my pathological fear of Claymation for long enough to give the real thing a shot.
In truth, I'd been trying to pluck up the nerve for years. I've always had a sort of guilty love for true crime stories - the more lurid, the better - but every time I thought I could do it I'd have a flashback to the closing sequences of W** F***** R**** R*****. Eventually, I came to the depressing realization that all the best films would remain eternally reserved for other, braver souls; souls, in other words, who didn't curl up sobbing in terror at the sight of an innocent ball of plasticene.
...Where was I? Heavenly Creatures, that was it. It's an interesting film for any number of reasons, marking as it did the cinematic debut of one Kate Winslet. Its credentials as a true story are also impeccable; however implausible it might sound, this tale of two teenage girls whose friendship spirals into dangerous obsession is absolutely true. All it took was for director Peter Jackson to dramatize events, and to either create a same-sex attraction between the pair of them or make it explicit - the real Juliet Hulme and Pauline Rieper have denied this, but the 1950s were far more inhibited times, socially speaking, and I'd be prepared to believe that much went unacknowledged.
The good
It took me a little while to warm to this one, I'll admit - in the two lead roles, Kate Winslet and Melanie Lynskey give mannered, exaggerated performances, and Winslet in particular really grated in the first instance. However, as the film drew on, I realized that this was just a representation of the torrid, overly-intense nature of their friendship. Any time the pair appear on screen, we find ourselves tugged into their hypersaturated, overheated world, where bizarre camera angles and exposures turn the most innocuous individuals into noble heroes or, more likely, dangerous villains. As the chubbier, more sullen Pauline, Lynskey is a joy to behold, turning simmering and glowering into veritable artforms in their own right. What I love the most about Heavenly Creatures, however, is the way in which it represents Peter Jackson's personal career sweet spot. Oh, I know a lot of people loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I'll even concede, grudgingly, that some of that love might have been justified - if nothing else, I can't think of anything better to sleep through on a cold winter's evening. Others rave about his earlier works, but while Meet the Feebles has been on my must-watch list now for nearly half my life, low-budget horror's never really been my sort of thing. Heavenly Creatures, however, forms a gorgeous midpoint between the two distinct styles, visually smooth and lush while retaining the bravery and bizarreness of his earlier works.
The bad
...I need to stop using this blog as a place to talk up my favourite films. Cinematically, I think this is another gem, and I can't find much objectively wrong with it. I could say it was a little bit arthouse, perhaps, but I really hate using that word in a pejorative sense.
Basically, it's just a really, really fantastic movie.
The verdict
The least guilty pleasure on my guilty pleasures list, Heavenly Creatures offers cheap thrills in environmentally friendly packaging, treating its young protagonists with understanding and respect even as it forces us to recoil in horror at the havoc they eventually wreak.
By the time I checked the film listings yesterday, I'd more or less given up on finding something to review this morning. I'd been out all day - this does happen, honest - and while I was certainly in the mood for a movie, the whole sitting-around-being-studious-making notes thing? That was never gonna happen. To be fair, it never did, but once I saw that Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion was on, I figured I'd watch it as alertly as I could at that time of night, and that my loyal readership would understand. You do understand, don't you? I missed Romy and Michelle in 1997 when it first came out, which is a shame, as I suspect my student self would have dug it intensely. I watched far fewer films back then, though, and so while I read a few reviews and thought it looked promising, it slipped onto my list of films I wanted to get around to sometime, where it stayed, mostly forgotten, for the better part of twenty years. I finally got back to it a few years ago, and it was much as I'd expected - a cute, fluffy comedy along the lines of Legally Blonde but with a bit more quirk and bite, not to mention a far more interesting cast. In other words, the perfect movie for a sleepy blogger who wanted something comforting to peer at from over the duvet.
Romy (Mira Sorvino) and Michelle (Lisa Kudrow) are our heroines, a couple of low-achieving twentysomethings who've been living in LA for ten years and having an absolute blast. It's only when they hear about their high school reunion back in Tucson that they start to wonder whether their perfect lives are really so great - they're both single, after all, and their employment histories tend towards the minimum wage end of the market. As they think about confronting the cool clique who made them miserable, nagging doubts start to creep in, and when it becomes obvious that they don't have time to make their goals, they hatch a plan to fake them, instead.
The good
As cute a piece of nonsense as you could hope for, dressed up prettily in sugary pastel shades and brought to life by some surprisingly spiky performances. I cannot tell a lie; as school reunion movies go, I still prefer its contemporary, the darker, punchier Grosse Point Blank, but Romy and Michelle benefits from a pleasing lack of sentiment and a healthy sense of the absurd.
The two leads are great fun, with Lisa Kudrow going the full Phoebe in a year where Friends had just about attainedthe status of cultural phenomenon. She and Sorvino are ably backed up by the likes of Alan Cumming and Janeane Garofalo, two actors who elevate every single project they touch. Garofalo in particular is a delight here, a perfect reminder of why swearing is both big and clever. Writer Robin Schiff, meanwhile, gives them great material to work with, and her easy, breezy script is backed up by an eclectic late-80s soundtrack sure to bring back positive associations for anyone who was there at the time.
The bad
Romy and Michelle is a fun, positive movie with a fun, positive message about having a good time and not caring what other people think. It's a shame, therefore, that this is contradicted by a narrow but nasty streak of fatphobia that runs throughout the entire piece.
Romy was fat once, apparently, although thankfully the production crew decided to forego the fatsuit and depict this by means of the sort of oversized jacket that I used to use to cover myself up at about that age. Other than that, however, the sole plus-sized character is Toby, the bubbly, overly-enthusiastic yearbook editor who receives nothing but scorn from the film's heroes and villains alike. We find out nothing about her or her life in high school or beyond, she's simply there to be large and a joke. Personally, I don't find this any too funny.
The verdict
I could really have loved this one if it hadn't been for the implicit fat-shaming. Apparently, the important thing in life is to be yourself, so long as your self falls within a certain narrow range of physical measurements. Beyond that, though? The important thing is to be quiet and stay out of the damned way.
The fight hasn't been won yet, but I'm glad we've moved on since then.
So, remember how I was grumbling a couple of months ago about the damned Lego Movie and about how effective it was as a feature-length toy commercial? Yesterday was my birthday, and I present the following footage as a full and frank explanation as to why I'm halfarsing today's blog:
Oh, and I saw The Flintstones & WWE: Stone Age Smackdown (2015). It was shit, but then I probably didn't need to tell you that - they managed to hold onto the broad humour and rampant sexism of the original cartoon whilst simultaneously divesting it of any shreds of charm it ever possessed. True, it's only 53 minutes long, but if you want something brief to hold your kids' attention you'd be far better off treating them to, oh, I don't know, The Cabin In The Woods or something. Or, better, keep a passing librarian employed and give them a book. Please keep a passing librarian employed?
Even without having viewed it, I was surprised that Nightcrawler was so roundly ignored at the Oscars. It received only a single nomination for Best Screenplay, despite receiving more or less unreserved praise from professional critics and the general public alike.
It's been on my movie wishlist for quite some time now, since the time I saw the frankly creepy physical transformation Jake Gyllenhaalunderwent for the role and realized only slightly disappointedly that it probably wasn't going to be about everybody's favourite fuzzy blue Catholic guy. Once I'd got over the fact that this was not the Nightcrawler movie I was looking for, however, I came to the conclusion it actually looked pretty good in its own right - I quite like a bit of modern-day noir, and this certainly looked like it fit the bill.
The titular character is one Lou Bloom, who I like to think of as the Bloom The Brothers Bloom kept locked in the attic for a couple of decades for not being whimsical enough, until he turned into a bat, exploded out of the skylight and flapped his way from Europe (Nonspecified) to downtown LA. When we first meet him, he's stealing metal to sell to local scrapyards, which apparently isn't a longstanding and respected professional trade there in the same way it is on the streets where I live.
Bloom is smart, he's lean (very lean) and hungry (possibly because of the leanness?). He asks the scrap metal dealer for a job using the sort of language more commonly heard in self-help books and motivational seminars, but swiftly finds himself rebuffed. As he leaves, however, he finds himself at the scene of a vehicle accident, and gets the chance to watch the nightcrawlers - those who film gory footage of crimes and accidents, then sell them to the highest-bidding local TV station for use on the news. Immediately, he knows he's found his vocation.
The film charts Bloom's progress, aided and abetted by producer Nina Romina (Rene Russo), a faded former reporter on a downward career trajectory. She recognizes his latent talent and nurtures it, and the two form a cautious professional alliance that initially threatens to veer over into friendship. As Bloom recognizes that his star is rising, however, it becomes increasingly obvious that he will do whatever is required to gain the wealth and recognition he believes is his due, and personal relationships are twisted and abandoned as he clambers determinedly towards the top of the local news heap.
The good
There are times when sleaze isn't a good thing in a movie. Your average Vince Vaughn or Adam Sandler offering, for instance, or any of Woody Allen's self-insert movies for the past couple of decades or so. Nightcrawler, on the other hand, is the sleaziest thing I've seen in years, so seedy and disturbing and depressing that it eased me gently and greasily past the self-disgust to the point where I felt slightly stunned by the brutal beauty of it all. The cinematography is amazing from the very start of the opening credits, which run over a backdrop of slow, langorous nighttime shots of the less glamorous parts of Los Angeles. Even at this stage, it is absolutely clear that the viewer is being inducted into a world inhabited exclusively by the amoral and the desperate, surviving on their wits and the well-gnawed corpses of those who already fell by the wayside.
Gyllenhaal, of course, is superb, his speech patterns making him feel like the flipside of the cheery narrator from True Stories, but so is Russo, poised and confident even as the cracks start to appear in what the viewer initially believes is her perfect life. Radiantly lit by the dim lights of the studio monitors or the candles at a cheap restaurant, she offers only the briefest, saddest glimpses of the sense of loss that can await an attractive but only moderately talented woman when her looks begin to fade.
The bad
It's Mother's Day tomorrow, and this may not be the best choice of DVD to offer along with the flowers and chocolates. On the other hand, if glorious photography and mordant humour are your mum's thing, have at!
The verdict
...I probably need to stop watching and writing about films I know I'll love. Nightcrawler runs a shade darker and nastier than my usual taste, but I was hypnotized for the duration. Definitely one to watch, but do yourself a favour and make sure you put the hot water on beforehand in preparation for the bath you'll be wanting afterwards.
Yesterday was another one of those days, movie-wise; I was convinced I wanted something slick and overproduced and undemanding, and that I'd undoubtedly find it within the afternoon TV listings. Instead, however, I found the schedules empty, so I was forced to head for the DVD collection to see what might be lurking there.
Eventually, I was able to express the desire to watch something like the Wolf of Wall Street, only not 3 hours long. Okay, great, it was a start.
I settled down to watch Danny Boyle's Sunshine, on grounds that I'd only seen it once before, only to give up 20 minutes in on grounds that the grounds for only having seen it once before had been that it was actually really, really boring.
Back to checking the DVD shelf, then, at which point I realized I'd been fancying A Clockwork Orange all along. I've been a huge fan of the book for about a decade, and while the film's fearsome reputation meant I came to it rather later, I'd been fascinated by it on a previous viewing.
Only one problem: greater minds than mine have written thousands of words about this particular movie, and they've done it more eloquently than I ever could. More to the point, they probably didn't do it in the 90 minutes before work whilst trying to get dressed, eat breakfast and catch up with a couple of online games where they couldn't afford to miss a day.
What follows, therefore, are a few of my very briefest thoughts about the movie, and a promise that if I'm ever in a position where I can actually get my writing published, you can have a proper essay then.
Resuming regular service now.
A Clockwork Orange is Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Anthony Burgess' dystopian novel of the same name. It tells the story of teenage thug Alex (Malcolm McDowell), whose twin loves of rape and violence are only surpassed by his passion for the works of Ludwig Van Beethoven.
We follow him through several years of his life as he commits a number of shocking crimes and is jailed for them, before being selected for an experimental aversion therapy that leaves him physically and mentally incapable of perpetrating further offences. He is released into the world as a model citizen, but soon finds out that people can sometimes have remarkably long memories...
The good
There's a lot about this film that I love - pretty much all of it, in fact. More than that, though, there's a lot that I appreciate, and it mostly links in to the aesthetics, from the garish retrofuturism (futurism? This was the 70s, after all) of the interiors to the brutalist concrete structures that feature so largely in the location shots. Even Wendy Carlos' score, which adapts popular classical themes and turns them into bouncy synth-pop jaunts, hits the right note of cheerful irritation to match Alex' sunny but dangerous demeanour.
I love, too, that the violence still has the power to shock, in spite of its largely pantomime nature, or perhaps even because of it. Barring a few shots with visible genitalia in frame, you can see far worse these days on mainstream TV, even before the watershed. Nevertheless, some of the attack sequences left me feeling genuinely disturbed. This is a powerful film - so powerful, in fact, that it was banned in the UK for decades after multiple instances of copycat violence. Worryingly, over 40 years on, it still feels fresh and relevant.
The bad
I wouldn't say that I have any huge criticisms of this one, but neither would I say it's half as profound as those in certain quarters would suggest. The story of a a young tearaway's misdeeds being nothing compared to the greater evil of the ruling elite is, after all, nothing new. At its heart, this is a relatively simple story about class; the beauty and the perfection of it are to be found in the elegance with which it is told.
The verdict
As art? This scores 100 percent, undoubtedly. As social critique? Only 65, 70 tops. Don't let this prevent you from taking a look, though; I haven't even scratched the surface, and by the time I've written my proper essay on it hopefully you'll be able to come back at me with some thoughts of your own.
Back when I first got together with Mr. B, he listed True Stories as one of his favourite films.Having never heard of it, I was intrigued, but not quite so intrigued as to bother seeking it out; it sounded like proto-Wes Anderson, one of those little arthouse curios that play like vintage musical boxes in that they charm the eye and ear without necessarily engaging the mind or the heart.
A few years passed, however, and I temporarily found myself in arguably the worst job I've ever done. In the dusty, windowless basement of a particularly joyless public library, alone barring several hundred boxes of child abuse records that needed cataloguing, the nonstop energy of Talking Heads became an effervescent forcefield against the unending gloom. Suddenly, I wanted to know about everything they'd done and every project they'd been involved with.
For a brief period, the Stop Making Sense DVD was on permanent loop in our household. True Stories, though, Byrne's own film project, proved rather harder to track down. In the end, and in desperation, I purchased not only a VHS copy but a machine to play it on.
For the uninitiated (of which I'm guessing there will be many), the film is based on stories Byrne read from the lurid tabloid news magazines of the late 70s and early 80s. Here, he takes the essence of them and moulds them into a mockumentary about a visitor to the small town of Virgil, Texas, during the week where the state celebrates its 150th anniversary. Through the eyes of Byrne's naif stranger, we meet the inhabitants, from John Goodman's Louis Fyne, a self-confessed teddy bear of a man just looking for love, to Jo Harvey Allen's Lying Woman, a modern-day counterpart to the legendary Baron Munchausen. We peer into their lives, watching for a week as they prepare for a climactic Saturday parade and talent show. The whole thing is, of course, liberally soundtracked by the music of Talking Heads, sometimes as background but more often as interludes sung by the characters themselves.
The good
You really won't see anything else like this, I swear it. I suppose the closest equivalent would be Christopher Guest's work on the likes of Best in Show or A Mighty Wind, but True Stories is at once much more naturalistic and much, much odder. Slightly episodic in nature, it allows all the main players to have their chance to shine, even if Byrne's unnamed narrator sometimes has to coax it out of them.
There's so many high spots here I can't even begin to catalogue them, from performance artist Spalding Gray describing technological progress by manipulating objects on the family dinner table to John Ingle as a preacher in a church devoted to conspiracy theories, a segment which makes particularly great use of Talking Heads' tendency to use religious musical idiom for decidedly non-religious themes.
And the music really is everything here, or almost. It sets the mood early on in a karaoke bar scene where people of every size, shape and colour jump on stage one at a time to lip-synch to Wild, Wild Life. It's an upbeat song, and it's an upbeat scene, warm and humane and inclusive, explaining wordlessly that this is a space where everybody is welcome and everybody can be happy. Even the blistering sun and cloudless skies of the flat Texas landscape eventually start to look open and friendly, and so inviting that I pine for the place every single time after the end credits have rolled.
This is a film about weird people, and it carries the message that yes, you're weird too, and that's okay. In our current social climate, I feel this is more powerful than ever, and more necessary.
The bad
There's so very much I feel I've missed out in the section above - scenes I've loved, wholeheartedly, and want to tell you about in the hope you'll take the trouble to track the film down, too.
With all that said...
Yes, it's probably a bit arthouse. Not a criticism, not in any way, but lovers of standard multiplex fodder might be left slightly adrift by the floaty narrative structure and stylised characterisation. It took me a couple of viewings to feel as though I really got the movie, which doesn't waste time on unnecessary exposition. There's a dreamlike quality to the whole affair, emphasized by the two scenes that bookend it, and which are voiced by vocal artist Meredith Monk.
Honestly, the worst I can really say about this one is that if the music of Talking Heads annoys you, maybe you should consider looking elsewhere.
The Verdict
Another film that proves that Christopher Guest doesn't have the monopoly on the mockumentary format, not even the musical sort. Coming back to this one after a few years away felt like coming home, and I'm thoroughly glad I made the journey.
A lot of people talk about the songs that saved their lives, but in my case it was a movie.
When I was in my late teens and early twenties, it took me a long time to realise that any relationship wasn't necessarily automatically better than none.This led to a few very bad life decisions, one of which lasted four years and proved remarkably difficult to escape. I don't think it's necessary or even desirable for me to give the details, but during the last part of that period and for a good year or so afterwards, sleep was something I could only attain in front of the flickering light of the TV, with something comfortingly familiar to distract me.
As to why this tended to be South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut? Still something of a mystery. I was a puritanical little shit right up until my mid-twenties, and when the original animated series came out I'd got my knickers in a twist about how foulmouthed it was, and how incredibly eager it seemed to be to offend as many people as possible. In the (piggy, overly-widely-spaced) eyes of my then significant other, however, these were plus points, and given that we were living in a studio flat, I had no choice but to watch with him. Along the way, I couldn't help but notice that these crudely-animated, sweary little cartoons carried a whole lot of important messages about tolerance, which meant that I could give in and finally admit to what I'd secretly felt all along - yeah, this was pretty funny stuff.
In its broadest terms, SP:BLU is a story about censorship and freedom of expression. In slightly narrower terms, it's a musical, a war movie and a pastiche of both of these. Most specifically of all, it's a blast. It takes the four heroes of the series, kids Stan, Cartman, Kyle and Kenny, and has them trying to save the lives of their Canadian heroes Terrance and Phillip after the fart-based humour in their movie leads to imitative behaviour and, eventually, brutal conflict between Canada and the USA. Subplots, meanwhile, include Stan's quest to find the mystic Clitoris, and, down in Hell, Satan's attempts to liberate himself from an abusive relationship with Saddam Hussain.
If it all sounds rather hectic, you wouldn't be wrong...
The good
I'm guessing that if I'm going to sell this one to you, I've probably already done it by this point - heck, you've probably seen it already. It's a shame, really, because I suspect the people who stand to gain the most from viewing it are probably those who'd avoid it at all costs. I repeat, not for the first time, that people are assholes.
Anyway, why do I love it so much? Two reasons.
Firstly, the central message, which is that with so much other fucked-up shit going on in the world, protecting kids from a few bad words maybe shouldn't be a major priority.
Secondly, though, and perhaps more crucially, SP:BLUhas to be the single most beautiful pastiche of movie musicals I've ever encountered. From the opening notes, it's all immaculately judged, each song a perfectly-formed and implausibly hummable little parody of something you've heard before. On balance, Disney probably gets nudged the hardest, with a couple of overt melodic nods to Beauty and the Beast plus Up There, Satan's very own take on Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid, but given that they still have a near-stranglehold on the genre, this probably isn't unfair. My favourite number, however, La Resistance, is straight from the likes of Evita and Les Miserables, employing layered reprises and split-screen techniques to create something recognisable, funny, but actually also fairly powerful.
The bad
Don't do what my parents did and buy a copy of this for your eleven-year-old grandson, m'kay? Most especially, don't do it when your daughter, who's a childrens' librarian and film buff, suggests it's a bad idea. You'll only land up watching it, being shocked, complaining but then refusing to acknowledge that she categorically told you that this was what would happen.
The verdict
...Actually, no, scratch the above paragraph. Certainly, buy this one for the kids in your life, but watch it with them and don't shy away from any awkward questions that result. SP:BLU is right up there with Life of Brian in terms of being one of the most morally upright films I've seen, and if you haven't caught it yet, there's no time like the present.
