LFF 2019: Jojo Rabbit

Got to be honest guys, Taika Waititi has never really set my world on fire. I like where he's coming from, and I enjoy most of his stuff (the best of it is still Flight Of The Conchords), but I've always felt that some of the jokes have been flubbed, or the storytelling has lacked a little complexity. Jojo Rabbit suffers from the same issues, but to a lesser extent, and while it's not flawless it is my favourite of Waititi's movies, and also the film I've enjoyed the most out of all the films I've seen at the London Film Festival so far (I have seen four).

It's the arse end of WWII and 10-year-old Johannes "Jojo" Betzler (Roman Griffin Davies, adorable) is a new recruit in the Hitler Youth. The cult of Hitler (compared smartly with Beatlemania under the title sequence) has indoctrinated Jojo so deeply that the Führer is his imaginary friend, played as an avuncular manchild by Waititi himself. Jojo's mum Rosie (Scarlett Johansson, adorable), however, is less keen on the whole genocide of the Jews thing, and when Jojo discovers that she's Anne Franked a 17-year-old girl (Thomasin McKenzie, adorable) inside their house, his tiny mind is addled by conflicting loyalties.

And that's it really: you can probably guess how it all ends up, so it's left to Waititi to spin his own brand of comedy out of what could, quite easily, be a straight-faced drama. It probably takes a good hour for his film to get to the point where it fulfils its potential, spending a lot of time expecting you to laugh at people like Rebel Wilson and Stephen Merchant simply because they are Rebel Wilson and Stephen Merchant. Fortunately Davies is engaging enough to carry the film without becoming annoying, and Johansson and McKenzie ground the drama while Sam Rockwell effortlessly provides the laughs in his few short scenes.

Waititi sets his film in a picture-postcard version of 1940s Germany, and characters talk in a decidedly 21st century vernacular for the most part. The obvious artifice renders the comedy fairly light and inoffensive, despite the claims that it's an "anti-hate satire"; there's not much in the way of satire going on, but there are still plenty of lols and a small amount of getting something in your eye to be had. It could do better at the whole "don't hate people just because they're different, you DICK" thing, and it could poke the "Nazis really are fucking idiots" hornets' nest a little more viciously, but Jojo Rabbit is well-intentioned and likeable enough to provide a solid 108 minutes' entertainment.

Lucy

For a few minutes towards the beginning of Lucy, you might start asking some questions. Like, as Scarlett Johansson's helpless heroine is drawn into a trap that will result in her unwillingly smuggling a pouch of drugs inside her guts, why does director Luc Besson keep cutting away to shots of gazelles being stalked by leopards? I mean, the parallels are obvious, but really, why? What motivates a director to do something like that? What's the point?

Ninety minutes later you'll piss yourself at the thought that you ever questioned something so insignificant, because as Lucy barrels towards its brain-liquifying climax, the last thing you should be doing is asking questions. Besson requires you to let go of the armrests of your comfy cinema seat and allow yourself to be sucked into the maddest final act in mainstream cinema this summer, and if it doesn't make a jot of sense then you're not really entering into the spirit of things.

Don't worry about it. It's all fine.

As the unfortunate student who finds herself miraculously accessing the previously dormant 90% of her brainpower after the aforementioned narcotics leak into her system, Johansson gets her money's worth out of her Under The Skin performance. She becomes a stone cold killer, blowing away gangsters and trashing cars in Paris streets with the same emotionless demeanour with which she cruised Glasgow in Jonathan Glazer's equally crackers (but for different reasons) sci-fi horror. It's actually a bit of a shame she couldn't have been allowed to have more fun with the role, because it really is completely fucking ludicrous.

As her powers increase exponentially, she goes from ex-drug mule to X-Man, then all of the X-Men in one, then she's Neo from The Matrix, no hang on Bradley Cooper in Limitless, erm Arnold Rimmer in that episode of Red Dwarf where he downloads a genius into his mind and operates two computers at once wait a minute now she's Akira's Tetsuo no I mean Dave Bowman at the end of 2001 no now she's God and even Morgan Freeman can't get his head round it. And to think you actually gave a shit about those wildlife cutaways.

"Sorry, can you... can you start again? I lost you

when you grew an extra hand for some reason."

Considering all the madness on display, Lucy is occasionally a little po-faced, and it suffers from the invincibility of its heroine; where's the threat against someone who can manipulate space and time without getting a hair out of place? And considering her powers are apparently limitless, Lucy often fails to do the bleeding obvious simply because it's not convenient for the plot at that point. Still, by the time you get to the space-spunk and the dinosaurs it's absolutely futile to argue with what you're seeing. You're better off just devoting what's left of your mental capacity to soaking up the bonkers and praying they never make Lucy Reloaded.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

There's a moment in Captain America: The Winter Soldier in which Nick Fury (Samuel L Jackson) has to ask his boss, Alexander Pierce (Robert Redford) for a favour. Pierce agrees to the favour, but only if Fury arranges for Iron Man to visit Pierce's young niece on her birthday. It's a throwaway moment, designed for a chuckle and to remind us of the wider world of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but what it actually does, very swiftly and brutally, is make the point that even in his own film, Cap is nobody's first choice for a fun time. And on the basis of his second dedicated feature, it's not hard to see why.

Without its prequel's knockabout novelty value of being set in ye olde 1940s, CA:TWS is left adrift in the MCU without a USP. Seriously, what's it got to offer that the rest of The Avengers' stories haven't? A hero whose superpower is that he's quite strong? Come on. The only interesting thing about Steve Rogers is that he's a fish out of water; a man out of time, with different values and an outsider's view of the modern world. All of which worked well for him in The First Avenger and Marvel Avengers Assemble, but that arc was pretty much complete once he took part in a technologically advanced assault on an alien army from another dimension. The Winter Soldier gets Cap's diminishing confusion with the 21st century out of the way in the first twenty minutes and never refers to it again, rendering him as exciting and unique as magnolia-painted walls.

Spot the difference

In an attempt to inject some kind of socio-political message into a popcorn blockbuster, writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely display all the incisive wit of a school assembly about how war is bad and governments are evil. There's a vague attempt to examine the well-worn irony of keeping massive fuck-off weapons as a means of peacekeeping, with Rogers mournfully complaining that "this isn't freedom, this is fear", but I'm fairly sure the same point was made in Marvel Avengers Assemble, and everyone forgot about it there too once the awesome pyrotechnics began. And if you thought the casting of Robert Redford and the Washington setting might lead to some seventies-era political paranoia, think again: Redford's sole purpose here is to chat to a hologrammatic Jim Robinson from Neighbours in what looks suspiciously like the Star Wars prequels' Jedi Council.

But, like the film itself, let's ignore the interesting stuff and get on with its failings as entertainment. With a hero who's already the least interesting person in the room, Captain America: The Winter Soldier's job is to empty that room and refill it with people even less interesting in order to make sure you notice him. And so, as well as the criminally wasted Redford - who said so much more with near-silence in All Is Lost than he does with all the inconsequential waffle he's given here - we have Scarlett Johansson's Black Widow, who's ill-advisedly been given a major role despite being a character so lacking in character that she's incapable of sustaining more than a few scenes per film. Then there's Anthony Mackie, a charismatic actor lumbered with the black sidekick role that worked so well in Iron Man Three that it may as well be replicated here, right? (If you can name Mackie's character after you leave the cinema without being a fan of the comics, bravo.)

It's not Rhodey, you massive racist.

And then there's the titular Winter Soldier (not to be confused with the titular Captain America, who is not The Winter Soldier despite the title clumsily suggesting otherwise). Winty, as everyone should call him in order to diminish his menace, starts out mysterious but dull, and before long he's not even mysterious. An uninspired villain with a faux-tragic backstory, his mission is twofold: to sit awkwardly alongside the story's core without getting involved too much in the plot, and to extend every fight and shootout to interminable lengths. Prepare to facepalm as Winty, after a long and messy assault on one of our hero's vehicles, simply unleashes a gadget which flips the car over. Could have saved quite a lot of bother if you'd done that ten minutes earlier, Winty old fruit.

But it can't be all bad, right? Well, no, although boy does it try. Cap hanging out in museums to remember the old days is a nice touch, what with him being a museum piece himself, and there are some witty moments and lines - although for every "I'm 95, I'm not dead", there's an exchange like "It's a tough way to live..." "But it's a good way not to die". NOBODY talks like that. Not even superheroes. And Samuel L Jackson is always good value, but again he's hamstrung by the script: one moment affords him the perfect chance to deliver a world-class SLJ line with great vengeance and furious anger, but nobody's written one for him. That sound you can hear is a million fanboys being brought to the brink of orgasm before suddenly having a bucket of ice dumped over their nethers. Even the film's big reveal, an admirably brave plot turn which affects the past, present and future of the entire MCU, is explained at length in a ridiculous exposition scene by a "character" who has absolutely no reason to do so.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier's problems are perhaps encapsulated in one gag towards the end which I won't spoil here, but suffice to say that at the exact point when you think they've pulled off at least one brilliant, funny, surprising moment, it's immediately undone by a dumb - and worse, unnecessary - punchline. It's the kind of thing Joss Whedon or Drew Pearce would have nailed in their sleep, and it leaves the whole exercise reeking of what could have been. If Marvel want to keep making superhero films for the ages, they need to invest in writers and directors with vision and characters worth watching. Guardians Of The Galaxy and Ant-Man look bonkers enough to be worthwhile, but given the choice between Captain America 3 and Iron Man 4, on this evidence, I'm with Robert Redford's niece.

Under The Skin

As an image, the sight of Scarlett Johansson prowling the streets of Glasgow at the wheel of a Ford Transit isn't just incongruous, it's downright weird. But within the singular netherworld of Jonathan Glazer's filmed nightmare, it's just about the least strange thing you'll witness for its entire duration. To attempt to describe any of the freakier visual episodes Glazer has spawned for Under The Skin would be futile, but if you've ever woken up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat because of some unbidden, indefinable terror, you'll have a vague idea of what to expect.

That's not to say that Under The Skin is unwatchably terrifying; in fact the reputation it's already attracted as fuel for a lifetime of mental trauma may well have been overstated. But it is undeniably fascinating, chin-strokingly thought-provoking and wilfully, intrinsically alien. As some kind of un-person, harvesting unwitting souls for a disturbing purpose, Johansson is remarkable in a role from which you genuinely have no idea what to expect next - and if you think you do, you'll be wrong. She's front (and full-frontal) and centre in a tale which requires her to barely hint at a universe of emotions without any exposition, and your slender grasp on proceedings is entirely at her mercy.

Boosting the bonkers is Mica Levi's deeply unsettling score, with a three-note motif for Johansson's subcutaneous succubus which rivals any superhero theme of recent times for character identification. If you never heard it again for another ten years, the moment you did you'd be transported right back to an unremarkable Scottish cottage with an unconventional floor and the darkest secrets in the basement.

As you'd expect of a film this obscure, interpretations of Under The Skin's intent are entirely down to you. Its potential themes are boundless but universal, and while it isn't about to hold your hand and guide you through its haunted forest of ideas, it would be a shame not to take anything away from it. It's not perfect, but it's wholly original, and these days that's rarer than a Hollywood starlet cruising Sauchiehall Street in a white van.

Her

Stories about people having relationships with technology are nothing new (I could tell you a few unprintable ones about teenage me and my 128K Spectrum +2); nor are stories about the blurring of lines between artificial intelligence and human emotions - look at such cultural milestones as Blade Runner, A.I. or D.A.R.Y.L. for proof. So the tale of a man in love with his computer's operating system is hardly going to be groundbreaking in a time when you're never more than six feet away from another Philip K Dick adaptation. Unless, of course, you put that tale in the hands of someone like Spike Jonze. As you might expect from a man who refuses to even spell his name conventionally, Jonze has gone and made a film about our relationship with tech which isn't about our relationship with tech at all. It's about our relationship with each other, and nothing less than the nature of love itself.

Her stars Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore: a divorced, lonely man who whose floppy drive is hardened by his new OS, which names itself Samantha and is voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Imagine a breathy, sexy, less murderous HAL from 2001 and you're kind of there. The concept appears, on the surface, to be a self-righteous snark at those of us who spend more time gazing at and fondling our phones rather than other people, but it soon transforms into something else entirely: a genuine, heartfelt love story, and one far more convincing than most of cinema's current romantic pish.

Look how fucking hot ScarJo is in this.

Effortlessly conveying the core problem with human interaction - that humans are confusing, complicated, terrifying fuckers - Her deftly renders the notion that someone might want to have it off with their PC completely non-ridiculous. Theodore and Samantha's affair is entirely convincing in context; after all, the concept of falling in love is bonkers enough - how much crazier can it be just because it's with a software package? The film even approaches the long-in-the-tooth question about whether an artificial intelligence is capable of genuine emotions with refreshing intimacy, honesty and tenderness.

But it's Jonze's smart, witty script's ability to make us look at ourselves and how we treat, respect, upset and deceive each other that's at the heart of his film. I don't want to get all Dear Deidre on your asses but Her might be the best film for couples to go and see to help them understand each other a bit better. Releasing it on Valentine's Day is a masterstroke; it's the perfect date movie to take either your partner or your iPad to.

It's a little overlong and won't win over detractors of a certain whimsical style of indie filmmaking of which Jonze is occasionally guilty, but Her is a clever, sweet, unpredictable and often surprisingly funny love story which could easily have come across as mean-spirited satire in less skilled hands. And, if nothing else, it's finally proved that there was nothing wrong with me that time I stuck my dick in the tape deck of my Spectrum +2.

Captain America 2 vs Close Encounters: Spot the difference

Me neither.

The Iron Man 2 Manifesto

Hi! I'm Iron Man. Of all the films coming up in the blockbuster season of 2010, I'm here to tell you why you should watch Iron Man 2 rather than anything else, with my 7-point Iron Manifesto:

1. I pledge to get rid of my friend Rhodey from the first film because he was too interesting and a bit fat. My new Rhodey will be a slimline version who can easily fit into one of my spare suits, will immediately know how to operate the suit even though it took me about an hour of screen time in the first film, and will be entirely devoid of character so as not to show me up.

2. In fact I pledge that all my fellow characters will be as weak as possible so that I'm the only one anybody remembers. I'll waste Mickey Rourke and Sam Rockwell as rubbish one-dimensional villains, I'll give Scarlett Johansson a figure-hugging suit and one fight scene but nothing else and I promise to use the mighty Samuel L Jackson to turn up, deliver expository dialogue and bugger off again.

3. Despite having the most technologically advanced and downright incredible suit ever made, I pledge to resort to punch-ups in most of my fight scenes. If I do suddenly reveal a very cool laser that you've never seen before as - inexplicably - a last resort, I pledge to explain why I don't just use it all the time by muttering something about how it can only be used once. I also promise not to bore you with why that's the case.

4. I pledge to introduce an irrelevant subplot about how that thing on my chest that keeps me alive is also killing me, and furthermore I pledge to solve this problem with a further pointless subplot about my Dad which will be one of the most ridiculous contrivances in modern cinema.

5. Remember that cute scene from the trailer where Pepper Potts kisses my helmet (fnerk) and I jump out of a plane saying "you complete me"? Well I pledge not to include that in the film. I do, however, pledge to kiss her in a scene that is supposed to carry some emotional weight but is in fact about as emotionally charged as a tin can kissing a stick can be.

6. I pledge to include an obligatory final scene after the credits that means nothing to anyone except the most hardcore Marvel Comics fan.

7. Finally, I pledge to do absolutely nothing for the superhero genre, despite recent envelope-pushers like The Dark Knight and Kick-Ass, and I promise to do it with as vague a story and script as possible so as not to confuse the kiddlywinks.

So that's the Iron Man 2 Manifesto. I hope you'll choose my film as the one to spend a tenner on because we need all the cash we can to parp out another one of these in a couple of years.

Thanks!
Iron Man
x

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Adventureland On An Aeroplane

Mrs The Incredible Suit and I recently went on one of those new-fangled ‘aero-planes’, which are like flying cinemas, and are quite confusing because when you walk in you’re in London and when you walk out you’re somewhere else entirely, like Havana.

Actually I can’t recommend going to an aeroplane to watch a film, because it’s just about the worst possible way to do so. It’s the polar opposite of having a projector and a surround sound setup in your lounge where you can crank the central heating up to volcanic levels and sit in your pants, drinking beer straight from the can while staring at the opening titles of Lost In Translation on pause for hours on end. Fans of Scarlett Johansson’s bottom know exactly what I’m talking about.

Instead you have to contend with a screen the size of a postage stamp displaying sub-VHS quality pictures of a film you can’t pause unless the captain decides to tell you you’re all about to die, or to set your watch to local time.

As for the sound, you’re given the most ineffectual headphones ever made, which are in no way capable of carrying any dialogue quieter than a thunderous bellow over the noise of four Pratt & Whitney JT9D high-bypass turbofan engines* and an air-con system that sounds like Brian Blessed snoring into your earholes for the duration of the flight. Of course the solution would be to bring along a pair of noise-cancelling headphones, but you would also have to make sure your travelling partner didn’t borrow them to watch G-Force.

Anyway I watched Adventureland, which is available to rent or buy NOW, but don't bother because it was rubbish even though I couldn’t hear all the whiny teenage dialogue. Boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back, boy gets repeatedly punched in the testicles. Zeds. It even has a meaningful rain-drenched reconciliation, as if it hadn’t quite hit its cliché quota by the end. The only up-side was that, according to Mrs The Incredible Suit, G-Force was equally awful.

Still, at least this didn’t happen:



*If you know anything about plane engines, please don’t correct me. I know I’m wrong.

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