LFF 2019: Knives Out

If Kenneth Branagh's do-over of Agatha Christie's Murder On The Orient Express has ushered in a new age of whodunnits, then all power to him. I haven't seen that film, because despite somehow avoiding spoilers for an 83-year-old story for my entire life, someone who shall remain nameless ruined the end for me in the kitchen at work, yeah thanks CATHY. Fortunately even she couldn't spoil Knives Out for me because she wasn't at the LFF screening of it this week, but I was, so guess who's going to have a fun, movie-ruining chat in the kitchen next week? That's right, better bring your fucking earplugs on Monday Cathy, my chatty friend!

Anyway. Cathy excluded, most of you should be able to make it to Knives Out without some twat spoiling it for you, what with it being an original story by its director Rian Johnson. Turns out Johnson's talents range all the way from triggering Star Wars incels to crafting sharply-observed, brain-twisting murder-mysteries with a killer cast including one Daniel Wroughton Craig, who hasn't had this much fun on screen since he played a stormtrooper in The Force Awakens. For this alone, we must thank Johnson with all our hearts.

Craig plays master detective and "last of the gentleman sleuths" (it's such a shame that one so rarely gets the chance to use the word 'sleuth' in everyday conversation) Benoit Blanc, hired to ferret out the killer of Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer), an 85-year-old multi-millionaire crime novelist and head of the dysfunctional Thrombey family. DC is having a ruddy ball here, losing himself in an accent you could coat chicken with and serve at a Cajun restaurant. I find it fascinating that in all of Craig's non-Bond film roles since Skyfall (to be fair, there've only been four, including The Force Awakens), he's gone for American accents, and two of those have been from the southern states. It's almost as if he's trying to push himself as far away from Bond as possible for some reason.

But Johnson has also assembled an incredible roster of suspects for Blanc to Poirot at until they blab. Jamie Lee Curtis is the hard-ass matriarch, Don Johnson her philandering husband, Chris Evans their arrogant son. Michael Shannon plays against type as Thrombey's pitiful youngest child, Toni Collette is his hippy-dippy sister-in-law and Lakeith Stanfield is an easy-going but none-too-effective cop. Meanwhile Ana de Armas, almost certainly destined to be one of Bond's cock-warmers in the forthcoming 007 film, whatever it's called, plays Thrombey's immigrant nurse. Even M Emmett Walsh rocks up at one point, providing the film's biggest surprise: he's still alive! It's a star-studded cast in keeping with the Agatha Christie adaptations of old - and new, thanks to Ken - and it's a delight to watch them play off each other.

Naturally every character has a potential motive for bumping off the old man, and these are explored in a slickly-written and edited opening barrage of interviews between Stanfield's plod and the family. Johnson twists and weaves back and forth through his story's timeline, sometimes slipping the audience a little more information than the characters, sometimes vice versa. It's enough to keep you on your toes, and enough to make you boggle at what the wall of Post-It notes in his writer's room must have looked like. And Johnson remembers to slip plenty of gags into his film's cracks, not least of which is Blanc's baffling "doughnut hole" speech, which I could happily listen to on a loop for days.

There's a welcome, if a little thin, seam of political commentary running through proceedings: one scene sees a family discussion stop just short of them all donning MAGA caps, and it's enough to make you realise that what's going on here is a mild critique of inherited wealth, white privilege and anti-immigration sentiment. It's a grace note more than anything, never threatening to overwhelm the entertainment, but a little more of that kind of thing wouldn't have gone amiss. What we get instead is hard to complain about: two hours of solidly crafted, cleverly plotted fun. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed by the big reveal, but that's fine because I'm sure Knives Out is merely the first in a series of Benoit Blanc mysteries. After all, surely Daniel Craig is looking for a new franchise right about now?

Midnight Special

It must be the season for movies about people with potentially catastrophic superpowers being seen as either a saviour or a weapon depending on your point of view; fortunately for Midnight Special, it's directed by Jeff Nichols instead of Zack Snyder, thereby rendering it several million percent more watchable than Batman v Superman. It doesn't have Hans Zimmer's Wonder Woman theme in it though, so I guess you can't have everything.

Despite those superficial similarities, Midnight Special is nothing like a superhero film. It's a fairly self-contained and muted affair about Alton, a boy with initially unspecified but frankly alarming issues, who's been held captive by a mad religious sect until his pop Roy (Michael Shannon) breaks him out. The clock's ticking though: for reasons best not divulged here, there are just four days for the cult to snatch Alton back, and the same amount of time for Roy to get him to safety, before... well. Before something.

Nichols' film is a low-key mood piece, in a similar vein to the bits of Looper set at Emily Blunt's farm. In fact if Looper had been told entirely from that scary little brat's POV, the result wouldn't be far from Midnight Special. But it's not Rian Johnson that Nichols is channeling the most here: there's another huge presence looming over proceedings, and that presence has a beard and wears a baseball cap and is married to Kate Capshaw. OK fine, it's Spielberg. I'm talking about Steven Spielberg.

Specifically, though quite possibly coincidentally, Nichols appears to be homaging The Berg's early career: the cross-country chase evokes The Sugarland Express, there's an otherworldly Close Encounters vibe going on, and E.T.'s military pursuit of that which they do not fully understand also figures strongly. It's a darker shade of Amblinism for the most part, unshowy and stripped of its trademark sentimentality, although Nichols can't resist throwing in dazzling shafts of white light and dysfunctional parents just to be sure of a full house in his game of Spielbingo.

The danger of evoking these kind of touchstones, as was also apparent in JJ Abrams' Super 8, is that if the end product doesn't turn out to be one for the ages then you probably shouldn't have made the tributes so obvious. And while Midnight Special is definitely worth your while, it never quite fulfils the promise of its best scenes, in which Alton's troubling powers are revealed. The otherworldly elements here play second fiddle to a road movie which takes in Kirsten Dunst (in a fairly thankless and inconsequential role as Alton's mother) and Adam Driver as The One Good Government Guy, and while I'm all for character-based sci-fi I prefer it when the characters aren't quite as thin as they are here.

All credit to Jeff Nichols, whose output is consistently varied (if you don't count the ubiquitous Michael Shannon) and interesting; he's a director well worth watching and almost certainly has a masterpiece in him somewhere. Midnight Special isn't it, but it'll do for now.

The Brothers Bloom

Before I start, I just need to get this off my chest:

So there's that.

In 2005, director Rian Johnson made his debut film, Brick, which was overcomplicated and slightly self-rectally-ascending but undeniably interesting. At least, interesting enough to get The Incredible Suit curious about his follow-up, The Brothers Bloom. What with Bloom screening at the 2008 London Film Festival, I didn't expect to have to wait long for a wider release. I was wrong:

Was it worth the wait? Of course not. The Brothers Bloom isn't dreadful, but it is quite rubbish. The cast fail to make likeable any of the characters from the GCSE-standard script, and after the stylish noir of Brick, the boring direction just makes you feel cheated. There's some snappy editing which jolts you awake every now and again but it's not enough to stop you drooling into your popcorn after half an hour or so.

The Brothers Bloom's biggest problem is that it's a comedy about con artists, which immediately brings to mind The Sting and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (both of which are referenced here), so it's only ever going to be compared to its overbearingly better predecessors. And when the bluffs, double-bluffs and double-reverse-counterbluffs you're expecting never arrive (apart from a nonsensical and unengaging final twist), you just feel, well, conned.

Furthermore, while foregrounding its own inadequacies by referring back to better films, you also can't help but think of the other stuff the cast have done which is so much better. E, and indeed, G:

Nora Zehetner, better in Brick

Mark Ruffalo, better in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind

Rinko Kikuchi, better in this photo:

And Adrien Brody, who will never, ever do anything in the rest of his career as planet-shatteringly amazing as this:

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