I'm yet to meet anybody who hasn't loved Mad Max: Fury Road. Actually, no, that's only partially true - I haven't met anybody who hasn't loved it, but I've heard about a bunch of men's rights activists who don't believe a movie about cars and post-apocalyptic wastelands should have strong female characters who (spoiler) frequently get one over on their male oppressors. This is the point, however, where I ask myself whether people like this actually count as human, and come to the conclusion that the jury's probably out.
Personally, I thought it was great long before I actually saw it. I was enthralled from the first time I viewed the trailer, dazzled by the sheer excess and the fact that the stuntwork appeared to have been created on-set instead of in a computer. I thought about going to see it at the cinema, even, but that was when I was still hopeful that the newest Fantastic Four iteration wasn't going to stink, and so I decided to save my cash in the hope I'd get to see something frothy and silly in a year when I've really, really needed it.
It wasn't to be, though, so we'll add that to the list of reasons that Fantastic Four sucks ass: It prevented me from seeing a pedal to the metal, old-school blockbuster in the full-size glory it deserves.
So, how do I love thee, Mad Max: Fury Road? Let me count the ways...
- The cars. Oh, god, the cars. They look like the results of a Scrapheap Challenge special that got bitten by a werewolf.
- The people. I love how George Miller isn't afraid to give screentime to people of every gender and size and colour, and how he doesn't measure a woman's character by her appearance.
- The fact that Max (Tom Hardy) spends a significant chunk of the first part of the movie as a human hood ornament. Not sure whether this is fundamentally hilarious or whether I'm a little bit strange.
- Nicholas Hoult as Nux. By all accounts, Hoult himself seems to be a bit of a twat, but he has a real knack for taking damaged characters and turning them into heart-stealers. Here he's the brainwashed acolyte of the tyrannical Immortan Joe, and the screen lights up a little whenever he's around.
- The refreshing lack of gore. Oh, there's a bit of blood splashed around, but Miller keeps it brief and while various characters meet horrible ends, he trusts the audience to know what's happened without being all pornographic about it.
- Speaking of trusting the audience, another refreshing thing here is the lack of exposition. No gratuitous information dumps, therefore, from characters who explain only what's necessary to whichever other character they happen to be speaking to at the time.
- The casting. I love that Miller brought back Hugh Keays-Byrne, the villain in the original Mad Max, to play the evil Immortan Joe.
- The casting. I reall, really love that Miller didn't let Mel Gibson anywhere near the damned project.
As for the film's much discussed feminist subtext? Yes, it's there, and no, I don't think it's in the least bit overstated. In the end, the film is the story of Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa, with Max himself nothing more than a helpful tagalong. Furiosa and the women she allies herself with along the journey are brave and resourceful, natural improvists in a world that requires people to do what they can with whatever's closest to hand.
You'll notice that I haven't really discussed the plot. This isn't because there isn't one, or even because it's particularly irrelevant. Fury Road is far more about evoking a world than telling a story, however - in essence, it's a two-hour chase sequence that only rarely pauses for breath. In other hands (and, arguably, without such solidly coherent stunt work), this might be exhausting or even flat-out boring. Here, however, it's immersive and exhilarating, joining Kingsman on the short but happy list of truly great action movies I've seen this year.
...As opposed to the 2005 or 2015 versions. Not that I have anything against the former, I hasten to add, I've just heard repeatedly that the earliest screen incarnation of Marvel's oldest superhero team is the best of a bad bunch. I was also under the mistaken impression that it was directed by Roger Corman, which piqued my interest - checking the imdb I now see that he just has a production credit, but still, it's an interesting name to have attached to a project like this.
To explain: some superheroes are fundamentally cool. Batman is the classic example, of course, but the likes of Spider-Man and Iron Man still have a certain style and drama that work well on the big screen. All of these have mass market appeal. Now, imagine these as points at one end of a line. Moving further down said line, you have Wolverine, and, quite a bit further down, the rest of the X-Men. Travelling still further, we're getting to the point where mainstream audiences just ain't that interested. Superman was marketable once, but now he's just too goody-goody, and I doubt that even Mark Ruffalo could rescue another solo Hulk outing. Are you with me so far? Good. Now, hop into a cab and give the driver your large-denomination note of choice. Climb out, and you'll be right next to the Fantastic Four.
I'm sorry if this sounds uncharitable, but it's just how it is. Stretchy superheroes like Reed Richards are inherently ludicrous, and once you install him at the head of a team, you've basically declared your intent to make either a comedy or a kids' movie. Frankly, trying to make a dark and gritty origin story like whatsisname from Chronicle did this year was always going to be a bit stupid.
To cut a long story short, this is why I think Oley Sassone deserves a little credit for handling such difficult material in such a tonally-appropriate manner. His interpretation of The Fantastic Four is cheap, cheerful and incredibly cheesy, but y'know what? It comes closer to the spirit of the comic than any other film or TV adaptation I've seen. Alex Hyde-White (so stilted and annoying in Biggles: Adventures In Time) makes the perfect Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic, with just the right mixture of bravery and geekiness. The other characters aren't quite so successful, unfortunately - Rebecca Staab's Sue Storm is, almost inevitably, severely underwritten, and Jay Underwood's Johnny Storm (a character intended as a natural irritant) is the wrong shade of annoying. As Ben Grimm, Michael Bailey Smith spends large chunks of the film hidden beneath a pretty effective rubber rock suit; as with most of the leads he's a diabolical actor, but I've always had a thing for the Thing and so I was sort of charmed anyway.
The plot is pretty much what you'd expect, with the four friends gaining their superpowers and defeating their arch-nemesis, Dr. Doom. It's shored up by effects that were hokey by 1994 standards - by 1984 standards, too, for that matter - and honestly, if you don't enjoy rubbish superhero movies, then there'll be nothing for you to see here and you'd be better off moving on. Me, though? I generally prefer rubbish superhero movies, especially to the dark and glossy sadism that Christopher Nolan's using the genre to peddle these days. The Fantastic Four is cheap, lightweight entertainment, but it has spirit and heart - it felt to me like a natural precursor to the likes of Guardians of the Galaxy. So here's to the guys at the far end of the cool continuum; I'll continue hopping that cab and travelling to see you at every opportunity.
Finally! This one's been on my cinematic bucket list for absolutely years, but various factors have always got in the way. My own innate cowardice in the face of scary stories, for one thing, not to mention the fact that it's only been readily available since relatively recently. After yesterday, though, I felt as though I could handle anything so long as it didn't come dressed up in ruffles and singing happy tunes.
It's hard to know where to begin with Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, to be honest, such is the extent to which its reputation precedes it. Certain facts are on the record, of course - that on release, it was so reviled that it effectively killed the career of one of the UK's most talented and distinctive directors - but despite having read everything I could find about the film, I still felt as though I was going in blind, with generally high expectations as my general expectation.
Okay, that's not strictly true; I knew the basics - that Peeping Tom was about a voyeuristic killer who filmed each murder, and that he had become this way thanks to his father, an experimental psychologist studying fear in childhood and using his own son as a guinea pig. I knew that the killer's boyhood self was played by Powell's son, and the father was played by Powell himself, although I kind of wished I didn't because even before watching, I found this staggeringly bloody creepy.
This is the thing about Peeping Tom, though; it's more interactive than a film has any right to be. Not in a gadgetry or bells and whistles way, but in the way it forces audience complicity and sends your mind down shady alleyways into some very dark places indeed. Largish chunks of it are viewed through the lens of the killer himself, one Mark Lewis, a softly-spoken and nervously twitchy individual played by Karlheinz Boehm. Lewis is a pitiable figure, certainly, and he tends to incite sympathy in those around him, who know nothing of his murderous secret.
There is no pleasure for Lewis in killing; instead, it's a compulsion, and when his downstairs neighbour Helen (Anna Massey) is kindly and flirtatious, he seems to want to do everything he can to protect her. Helen's blind mother, meanwhile, played by Maxine Audley, knows that Lewis is an unquiet soul - in one of the film's most powerful scenes, she confronts him in his darkroom and for a short while, it looks as though the tables might be turned. Peeping Tom is not a gentle enough film to use narrative convention to let us off the hook, however, and instead, we are forced to watch as the tragedy unfolds in front of our shocked but fascinated eyes.
Which, I think, is why the critics hated it. The line between fascination and revulsion is a thin one; it's easily blurred, and sometimes it can be improbably hard to tell the one emotion from the other. Film critics watch more films than almost anybody, and so, faced with a piece that implicates the viewer so soundly, perhaps it's natural that they should be the ones to judge it the most harshly. What probably compounds this, too, is that Peeping Tom is so very, very good, with Powell's trademark gorgeous cinematography. The film tells a simple story with expressionistic grace, and uncomfortable as it is to admit as much, I found the viewing experience a thoroughly enjoyable one. There are good or great films that have left me feeling drained and exhausted - Alien, for instance, or Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but this wasn't one of them; and even as the last images faded I found myself planning a repeat viewing in a month or so.
Humans, let's be blunt about this, like to watch. Horror films, traffic accidents, politically-motivated hostage murders. No matter what, where there is spectacle, there will always be an interested audience. I'm not sure what this says about us as a species, other than that we've evolved with our eyesight as our primary sense and that as a survival trait, we're biologically programmed to keep a close eye on anything out of the ordinary. Perhaps this is an uncomfortable truth for some - I honestly don't know. What I'm sure of, however, is that I yearn to see the films Powell might have gone on to make if the mores of the time hadn't left the powers that be so ill-at-ease with their own animal nature.
One of the most important things I've learned since starting this blog over a year ago is that Disney aren't always evil. Well, their films aren't always evil, in any case - I'm reserving judgement as to the company itself. Whilst watching and writing, I've been quietly charmed by the likes of Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, Into the Woods and The Sorcerer's Apprentice - heck, in some cases I was quite vocally charmed, even.
One of my first thoughts when planning this month's viewing, therefore, was that I wanted to return to Enchanted. Granted, I loathed it on first viewing, but part of the joy of writing this thing is going back to films I haven't enjoyed and finding I was wrong. With my anti-Disney bias weakened, I figured now would be a really good time to revisit a film that an awful lot of people really liked.
Enchanted was meant to be Disney's attempt at gentle self-parody, starring Amy Adams as the all-singing, all-sewing, hyper-girlified princess-in-training Giselle, brought through from the animated land of Andalasia to modern-day New York on the day she's supposed to be marrying a prince (James Marsden) she's known for only one day.
Baffled and distressed, she's brought home by a hard-bitten and newly-engaged divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) at the insistence of his daughter, and soon begins bringing magic into their lives even as they inject a little urban reality into hers. Meanwhile, the Prince and his evil stepmother, queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon) have also travelled across from Andalasia to try and find her, albeit with two very different ends in mind.
The concept itself is cute - Disney have long been accused of promoting poor female role models, and of creating characters that are two-dimensional in every sense. In some ways, Enchanted was crying out to be made, if only so the corporation could show at least a modicum of self-awareness. It could have worked - heck, with casting like that it really should have.
The first time I saw the movie, however, I was so intensely irritated by Giselle, the Prince and the walking clichés who surrounded them I could hardly make it through to the end. And, well, unfortunately, my second viewing experience was much the same. It baffles me, because Amy Adams is a talented performer with a bravery and sweetness that raises the tone of almost everything I've ever seen her in. Put her in something that's already cheerful and family-friendly, though, like this or the recent Muppet movie, and she's just way too much, all eyes and teeth and the sort of weapons-grade niceness that you can't help thinking must mask a black belt in passive aggression. Here, perhaps, it's meant to be parodic, or at least a pastiche, but there can be no doubting that audience sympathies are meant to remain firmly on Giselle's side.
As the Prince, meanwhile, we have James Marsden, no slouch himself on the eyes and teeth front. I've enjoyed his work before, once, in the recent Hairspray remake, where he played a smarmy TV presenter, but I find it hard to recall seeing him in any other setting without cringing. Granted, he raised a smile or two towards the end of the film, as the pace slowed and my red mist began to dissipate, and granted, the role was a thankless one, but did he really have to enjoy himself so much?
Quality performers Timothy Spall and Susan Sarandon, meanwhile, were hopelessly hobbled, in the former case by a variety of slightly politically incorrect accents and disguises, and in the latter, by next to no screen time. The wicked queen is supposed to be our main antagonist, but by the time she finally begins to make her presence felt we've only got about fifteen minutes left to go. She's a bloodless villain, too, never radiating the necessary sense of menace.
In the end, I think Enchanted falls prey to the very pitfalls it tries to parody: namely, it's all flash and sparkles, with nary a thought in its pretty, sweet-natured little head. By the end of the film, we don't know any more about Giselle than we did at the beginning, and love interest Robert is just another dark-haired stranger, albeit one with a small daughter and a low-grade cynical streak. Giselle does, inevitably, bring magic into the lives of those around her, and the climactic scene takes place at a charity ball. Question, by the way: do they send out moves lists for the dances beforehand or have rehearsals or something, and if not, why is every dancer perfectly synchronised, including, for that matter, those who come from entirely different universes?
I don't even think Enchanted is a noble failure - to be honest, I think it's as cynical a piece of marketing as I've seen in a while. Leaving aside the heavy product placement and the constant callbacks to other Disney movies, it still peddles the usual pernicious bullshit about real women spending their lives cooking, sewing and singing, all with a smile on their face and a waistline smaller than their neck circumference. Little girls don't need this in their lives, and their mothers certainly bloody don't.
...If you're looking for a role model for your small daughter, however, you could do a lot worse than Summer Hathaway, from Richard Linklater's excellent School of Rock, which I watched yesterday afternoon to wash the Enchanted out of my mouth. Granted, Ms. Hathaway, were she real, would likely be in training right now to be either leader of the Republican party or dictator of a small South American republic, but at least she emphatically cannot sing.
Didn't fancy anything I had prepared yesterday, so I decided I'd raid iPlayer instead. This hasn't been terribly fruitful lately, admittedly, but iPlayer tends to be like a charity shop - nine times out of ten the contents will be boring and/or slightly embarrassing, but the tenth time makes it worth the effort. Which is how I found My Talks With Dean Spanley, which was listed as being a tale of an Edwardian father and son brought closer by a mutual interest in spiritualism. I'm not normally a fan of period drama and I'm certainly not a fan of spiritualists (or anybody who chooses to make a profit by deceiving the bereaved, for that matter) but the whole thing sounded just close enough to an early tale of stage magic to pique my curiosity, so I'd decided to give it a shot.
The entire thing was far weirder than I could have imagined, and unfortunately it's one of those cases where spoilers would be a crime. Here, therefore, are the basics: the late Peter O'Toole plays Fisk Senior an elderly father and seeming emotional cripple, unable to register any emotion at all at either the death of his youngest son in the Boer war or his wife's subsequent passing. Jeremy Northam is his son, Fisk Junior, whose weekly visits only end in mind games and verbal abuse. Junior isn't particularly fond of his father, but as an idealised Edwardian man he is determined to do his duty. It is this that leads him to a spiritualist meeting at the house of cricketer Nawab of Ranjiput, which in turn permits him to make the acquaintance of one Dean Spanley, a member of the Catholic clergy who, when plied with expensive Tokay wine, demonstrates a unique and bizarre party trick.
As slight and strange a piece of cinema as you're ever likely to see, Dean Spanley took well over half it's 90-odd minute runtime to win me over. The performances tend towards the stagey; Peter O'Toole basically plays himself, and as the titular character Sam Neill is happy to indulge his predilection for ham. Oh, and speaking of pork, with only one named female character, the piece is something of a sausage fest, too.
On balance, though, I didn't mind any of this, because I'll forgive most things when there's a little honest-to-goodness weird involved. Besides, the cinematography is elegant in its restraint, lent zest by a wry, dry soundtrack that's not afraid to stir a little mischief. And when, in the end, it all came together in a climax that left me openly weeping, I didn't begrudge this as much as I usually do.
Well worth a look, even if this isn't normally your sort of thing.
October is here, which means the schedules on the minor channels are starting to fill up with Christmas movies and I get to bathe in that warm, soothing glow that comes from knowing I've reviewed The Polar Express already and so don't have to go anywhere near it this year round. Worry not, though, I've made sure to sprinkle this month's list of films with plenty of titles that give me the shudders.
Titles like Carry on Screaming, in fact, one of a long series of bawdy British comedies that ran between 1958 and 1992. When I was a small child, I knew for a fact that these were the funniest films ever made, chiefly because the posters told me so but also because they made my parents laugh a lot. You'd think that this would make me nostalgic for them, but would anybody ever really want to return to that sort of sociopolitical climate?
Carry on Screaming marked something of a watershed for the series, being the last to be made by Anglo Amalgamated before they moved to the Rank Organisation. It featured relatively few of the regular cast members, with only Kenneth Williams, Joan Sims, Charles Hawtrey and Jim Dale, and marks Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett's only appearance. Visually, however, it's broadly similar to the rest of the films, made on the sort of shoestring budget that would later see the lower slopes of Mount Snowdon standing in for the Khyber Pass.
As is traditional within the series, the female actors in Carry on Screaming are all required to be conventionally attractive, while the male actors are - charitably put - not. Nevertheless, any married female character must be portrayed as being the stuff of nightmares, a brutal harridan whose sole purpose in life is to chastise her poor hapless husband while his friends and companions sympathise. Yes, the men's rights movement was going strong long before the little darlings even they realized they needed one.
I could rant at length about the misogyny on display here, but would you really want me to? I'd much rather forget the whole sorry fucking mess and get on with my life. I've promised to write about the damned film, though, and so I suppose I'd better give at least a thumbnail sketch of what goes on. Kenneth Williams plays a mad doctor who abducts women and turns them into mannequins which he sells to dress shops, while Fenella Fielding is his Elvira-esque and seemingly insatiable sister. Up against them are a couple of cops (Harry Corbett, Peter Butterworth) and Jim Dale as the boyfriend of an abductee.
The humour's all a bit end-of-the-pier in a way that veers between sleazy and merely cringeworthy, although the cast are seasoned pros and the slapstick elements and some of the wordplay are nicely done. The creators clearly know what the audience want, and are prepared to offer it up to them in spades.
I'm really glad we've moved on since then, though.
...Or, How I stopped worrying and learned to love the bluegrass.
It took me longer than I should to warm to the Coen Brothers. Maybe I shouldn't have started with The Big Lebowski, but everybody seemed to love it so much and I suppose I wanted in on the action. Instead, it left me baffled and nervous, feeling like an idiot because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't work out exactly what was happening and why. I've watched it again on a few occasions since that first time and it's always been the same, until three or four months ago when I had the revelation that maybe I wasn't stupid and maybe not knowing was the point. Perhaps this should have been some sort of great cosmic epiphany, but honestly? It mostly feels like the excuse I've needed to finally give up and move on. In the meantime, I've become acquainted with many of the Coens' other movies, and in a lot of cases it was love at first viewing - The Hudsucker Proxy in particular took my breath away, although I'll never quite understand why their remake of True Grit didn't clean up at the Oscars in its year.
I didn't fall for O Brother, Where Art Thou? on first watch, but that would have been because of the ex-boyfriend who talked loudly and continuously over it because he really wanted to be watching Oliver and Company instead. I ditched the jerk in fairly short order, met and married a real man, and before long I was able to give O Brother the attention it so clearly merited.
You have to wonder what made the Coens dream up a musical reworking of Homer's Odyssey set in 1930s Mississippi. I mean, the concept isn't ludicrous, not exactly, just, well... outside the box, I guess. In most other respects we're in typical Coens territory, though, inasmuch as there ever is such a thing - stylised dialogue, forthright female characters and unobtrusively gorgeous cinematography that lingers far longer in the memory than it ought.
While the Coens tend not to cast quite so incestuously as the likes of, say, Wes Anderson, there's no denying that they have their favourites. George Clooney, for instance, who's never made a bad movie that he hasn't directed. Here he's one Ulysses Everett McGill, ringleader of a group of three chain gang fugitives on the run from a lawman who wants to see them burn. McGill is a resourceful sort, which is handy, given that his two companions (John Turturro as Pete and Tim Blake Nelson as Delmar) are the sorts of people who might easily confuse their age and their IQ. McGill, though? He has an urgent reason to escape and go straight, in the form of a gaggle of daughters and their frankly terrifying mother Penny (Holly Hunter), who's already told them that daddy was hit by a train.
A chance encounter with black musician Tommy Thompson (Chris Thomas King) leads them to become hit recording artists The Soggy Bottom Boys, but they're too busy fleeing from an increasing number of pursuers to be able to notice.
It's all pretty much the dictionary definition of picaresque (I know this because I just looked it up), and far more about the journey than the destination. Our heroes meet a host of colourful characters along the way - John Goodman was never more terrifying, and as a baby-faced bank robber, Michael Badalucco damned nearly steals the entire show.
In the end, though, the real star of O Brother is the music. I'd always avoided bluegrass like the plague before this, sitting as it does on the unpleasantly jagged line that divides country music from full-on religious propaganda. The soundtrack here, however, is a revelation, with some of the most beautiful vocals I've ever heard. It was here, in fact, that I had my epiphany; that life in those times was painfully, dreadfully hard, and that the hope of an afterlife might have been all these people had. The voices in O Brother seem to encompass whole lifetimes of suffering, with all artifice flayed away until all that remains is the red-raw emotion underneath. It's heartbreaking and strangely comforting all at once, a beautiful counterpoint to the film's broad, farcical comedy.
Full of visual and narrative invention, O Brother, Where Art Thou is that rarest of beasts, a film that engages the heart and mind in equal measure, as much of a joy on a bored Sunday morning as a dog-tired midweek evening. Treat yourself - you probably deserve it.
