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.