Like many children of the '80s, my life was nudged in a specific direction by Bob Zemeckis and his little film about the boy whose mum tried to fuck him in the past. Zemeckis channelled 1.21 gigawatts of power into my interest in cinema, and I repaid him by watching everything else he made, up to and including Beowulf. But his forays into motion capture left me as cold as CG Tom Hanks' dead doll's eyes, and forgive me father, for I have forsaken Bob this past decade; not one of his post-2007 films have passed mine eyes.
But then along came Welcome To Marwen, with its intriguing blend of motion capture and live action, and its bizarre claim to be based on a true story despite having a trailer full of scenes that appeared to be from a spectacularly violent, war-movie version of Toy Story, and like Doc Brown I figured: what the hell.
Steve Carell engages Serious Steve Mode for his role as Mark Hogancamp, a lonely and apparently eccentric man who takes photos of dolls posed in WWII costumes and situations, and who has a thing for women's shoes. Hogancamp's true story was told - reasonably well, by all accounts (I haven't seen it) - in Marwencol, a 2010 documentary that provided the inspiration for Zemeckis' film. The reasons for Hogancamp's model behaviour are undeniably fascinating and tragic, but the first problem with Welcome To Marwen is that it takes two hours to explain them when they could have been dealt with in a ten-minute prologue. This has two immediate effects: firstly, to summarise the premise here would count as a spoiler for the whole film; secondly, Zemeckis needs to pad out the running time somehow. And if there's one thing Hogancamp's story doesn't have that Bob Zemeckis can add, it's a metric fucktonne of motion capture action sequences.
And so about half of Welcome To Marwen consists of those war-movie Toy Story scenes, in which 'Hogie', a heroic GI action figure in 1940s Belgium (who looks suspiciously like Steve Carell) is repeatedly captured by Nazi action figures, then rescued by a collection of sexy female action figures who kill the Nazis in increasingly violent fashion. Hogancamp merely photographed these imagined stories; Zemeckis splashes them on the screen in stunningly-realised fantasy sequences that are undeniably fun to watch, but which add little to the film's emotional core that the photographs don't. In fact these sequences unbalance the story, creating a weird tonal mixture of effects-driven action comedy and weighty drama that is going to be a nightmare to sell to audiences. Here's a film that wants to cover transvestism, Neo-Nazism, hate crime, violence as a solution, substance abuse, PTSD and other assorted mental health issues, but at the same time foregrounds cutting-edge CG action and visual gags. It's certainly not boring, but it is a little uncomfortable.
There's a truly original and inspiring film in here somewhere, but you can't help thinking it's the one that somebody else made eight years ago. Hogancamp deserves to be acknowledged for his art and the events that led him to create it, but he probably didn't deserve to have those events diminished by embellishing them with button-pushing melodrama and a side order of mega-budget kids' holiday filler. Welcome To Marwen isn't a total failure while you're watching it, and if more people look up Mark Hogancamp as a result then all well and good. But I'm fairly sure Bob Zemeckis can do better than this, and I hope it's not another ten years before I can be arsed to find out.
It's end-of-year list time guys, a tradition for which I usually spend 365 days planning (366 in some cases) with feverish anticipation. However, having spent this year continuously adjusting and amending my ranking of all the films I saw in 2018 (which you can find here), I've come to the conclusion that it's very very boring. I stand by my opinion that all the ones at the top end deserve their place in a list of Films I Thought Were Really Very Good, but I've given hardly any of them a second thought since I saw them.
So this year - the latest in a series of years designed to break the human spirit and batter us all into wearily accepting a succession of apocalypses not of our choosing - here's something a bit less worthy. The following are not the films I thought were 2018's best (OK, some of them are), but rather the ones that made me smile, laugh, cry, cry-laugh, go "ooh", "aah", "holy shit" and "wheee!" the most, and which generally reminded me of cinema's power to cheer me the fuck up.
So here, in order of release, are my Ten Films From 2018 That I Will Almost Certainly Watch Several More Times, Probably On A Saturday Night, In My Pants And With A Little Bit Too Much Gin Inside Me!
COCOTragically all but forgotten in most Best Of 2018 lists due to its release in the year's infancy, Pixar's first original story since 2015 is a kaleidoscope of eye candy, emotional manipulation and narrative rug-pulling. An odyssey through the great beyond stuffed with gags, great songs, intrigue, amusing skeletons and a wonky dog, it deserves an afterlife as long and fun as the one it depicts. And it all takes place within the pre-title sequence of Spectre! Amazing.
BLACK PANTHER I missed the first five minutes of this at the cinema because I had to go outside and complain that the fucking lights were still up, so that put me in a bad mood and I didn't enjoy myself. Pretty sure it was OK though and it's one of those "MCU" things that are all the rage these days so I'll definitely watch it again when Cineworld Enfield eventually send me the Blu-ray as compensation for yet another sub-par cinematic experience.
AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR Long, dumb and full of fun: as much as these things are starting to look more and more like Pixar films, and as much as they're increasingly uninterested in what it means to be superhuman (or, indeed, human), I can't help but have a good time with them. It's just a blast to spend time with all these characters, and almost everyone gets a satisfyingly balanced amount of screentime here without it feeling like an exercise in scriptwriting box-ticking. Not sure how worthwhile it is to complain that this one just isn't very clever; I guess all the payoff will be in Endgame.
SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY Smashing into my official Best Of 2018 list at (*checks notes*) number 33, Solo is so hamstrung by the needlessness of its own existence that it fights an uphill battle from the beginning and never feels like it makes much ground in that fight. Alden Ehrenreich has about 3.8% of the personality required to match Harrison Ford, Emilia Clarke is, as always, terrible, Paul Bettany is a limp villain and Bradford Young's cinematography is like watching the film being projected onto the bottom of a puddle. BUT its title contains the words "Star Wars", so fuck you. Yes I am aware that I am part of the problem.
INCREDIBLES 2 In truth the fourteen-year wait has dulled the sheen of this franchise a little (especially as the sequel isn't a giant leap on from the original) but Incredibles 2: 2 Fast 2 Cred makes up for it by boasting the most retina-pleasing Pixar visuals yet, electrifying set-pieces, another swaggering Michael Giacchino score, some canny commentary on parenting and - most crucially - Elastigirl, Pixar's sexiest sprite. I mean what a woman. Those curves... the lycra... the... uh, sorry, excuse me a sec
MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN I can take or leave Cher (sorry Twitter), but for everything else in Mamma Mia 2: 2 Mamma 2 Mia I just throw my hands in the air and surrender to the cheese. Nothing else this year gave my emotions as thorough a workout as this merciless bastard of a film: I did 94% of all my laughing and crying for 2018 in its 113 minutes. All I ask for now is a Godfather cut of both films so I can watch them in chronological order.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT So good of Christopher McQuarrie to personally apologise to me for Rogue Nation by taking action directing to the kind of levels that literally scare off Bond directors. Helped in no small part by Lorne Balfe's occasionally Zimmeresque score, McQuarrie hewed eerily close to Christopher Nolan with this relentless thrillgasm, his shot choices and editing taking this franchise way beyond anything it had ever previously promised. This is an ankle-smashing leap forward in blockbuster filmmaking that evokes Buster Keaton at his most inventive, and that is about the highest compliment I can pay it.
BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY There's a really good film at war with a really bad one in here, but the really good one wins because it brings out the ruddy artillery right at the end. Despite valiant attempts to sink itself with a general sense of superficiality, some truly hackneyed bits of writing and a plodding insistence on hitting all the expected beats of the rock biopic, all that cringing guff is washed away by the tidal wave of awesomeness that is those final 20 minutes. A three star film but a five star experience that I fully expect to watch many, many more times than Phantom fucking Thread.
THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (specifically, THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS) The Coens' album of mini-westerns is fine, obviously, but the title track would have been my film of the year if only those pencil-pushers at City Hall would just let me include specific seventeen-and-a-half-minute segments of films rather than the whole shebang. Thank God for Netflix, then, who let me watch as much or as little of whatever I want whenever I want like I'm some kind of entitled millennial. (Don't "at" me, kids)
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE I literally just finished banging on about how astonishing, amazing, spectacular etc this is, don't make me repeat myself.
If there's one thing I bloody love, it's a good hard kick up the bum. Not literally you understand, and also not aimed in the direction of my own bum, but rather the kind that someone gives to a flagging movie franchise every now and again. I've wanged on about it a thousand million times but see Dynamite Comics' James Bond stories for a classic example of cracking the mould while remaining respectful to the source, or The LEGO Batman Movie for a triumphant and hilarious cape caper that never forgot what made its hero unique.
Superheroes, of course, are massively ripe for this kind of bum-kicking, and while Spider-Man got a decent enough reboot last year when the MCU finally got its hands on him, there was still a sense of the same beats being followed that have been the Spidey road map for five preceding films. So thank the lord (or, more accurately, Phil Lord) for Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, a film as unconventional as its embarrassing-to-say-out-loud title.
"Two for Spider-Man Into The Spider-Verse
In Theaters Christmas In 3D And Real D 3D please"
Jerking us sideways into the universe of the Spidey comics, Into The Spider-Verse is set in an alternate dimension not entirely dissimilar to - but significantly different from - the one that the Spidey we know and love occupies, thereby immediately sidestepping tedious "BUT IS IT CANON?" questions. They've got their own webslinger, but they've also got Miles Morales, an ordinary schoolkid facing similar bother to that which Peter Parker experienced before his encounter with a nuclear arachnid. When Miles gets bitten by a similar bug, becoming New York's second Spider-Man, he finds himself up against exaggerated villains and aided by - for reasons way too bonkers to explain here - a handful of Spider-guys from other dimensions, including two Spider-women, one Spider-pig and one Spider-Nicolas-Cage.
As you have no doubt deduced, all of this turns out to be absolutely batshit crazy. It's the kind of plot and execution that live-action super-films are usually terrified to go near, and when you walk out of the Spider-Verse, anything Sony or Marvel ever did with the character on screen before suddenly seems about as cutting edge as the Nicholas Hammond-starring late '70s TV series in comparison. There are so many unfeasibly ginormous monsters, truly mental set-pieces and white-hot meta references to previous incarnations of the character that every cinemagoer should be issued with a coffee-table book of every frame of the film to get the most out of it.
But all that would be pointless if it weren't carried off with the love, humour and storytelling skills on display here. With Phil Lord writing and Chris Miller also tinkering in a producing capacity, the frothing excess of ideas that characterised The LEGO Movie spill out of the frame and into your incredulous, gaping facehole. Despite detailing about half a dozen origin stories (usually the curse of the modern superhero flick), Into The Spider-Verse is almost comically efficient, setting up its own cinematic universe of characters in the time it takes most franchises to stretch out one character's backstory. The assorted Spider-people are like the Avengers, if the Avengers were all slightly different versions of the same character, and each gets their own USP and moment in the sun without losing sight of the core plot.
"Is anyone else's NikNak sense tingling?"
That plot, of course, is Miles' journey from paint-spraying delinquent to web-shooting legend, and Lord peppers that story with a perfect balance of knowing nods to the Spidey mythology (uncles play as crucial a role here as ever, and familiar scenes from the past are given hilarious twists) while entirely surprising tangents come so thick and fast they give you thwiplash. And while Miles Morales isn't Lord's creation, the decision to use a half Puerto Rican, half African-American kid as the lead in a superhero movie (a youth- and diversity-celebrating choice reflected in the hip-hop soundtrack that left me scratching my old, white head) is only to be applauded.
The one thing I haven't mentioned yet is the thing that gives Into The Spider-Verse its licence to flip out and take all these liberties: it's animated. But this is nothing like any animation I've seen before; what's being fired into your eyeballs at a thousand miles an hour here can only be described as Spectacular Spider-Manimation. It's a mash up of comic-book dots and lines and bleeding-edge CGI that takes some getting used to (for at least half an hour I was convinced the cinema had forgotten to dish out the 3D goggles), but it's innovative, retina-popping and staggeringly beautiful at times. In all honesty it's also occasionally too much, especially in busy action scenes that overloaded my optic nerves a few times and, for me, could have been dialled just a notch below supermassively megafrantic. But I'm an old man who doesn't get hip hop, so what do I know.
Hold me
Bravo, then, to this mad, anarchic bastard of a film and the hurricane force blast of fresh air it aims at its overstuffed genre. What looked like it might have once been a straight-to-Netflix, kid-oriented time-passer for restless toddlers is in fact as game-changing a cinematic experience as any cape film we've seen since Superman: The Movie. It also makes a strong case for all superhero films from now on to be made like this, and with Nicolas Cage playing a monochrome, 1930s detective version of Spider-Man in each of them. If you ask me that's exactly the kick up the bum they all need.
Yorgos Lanthimos is back back back, and he's brought the triple threat of Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone with him for this sumptuous and irreverent telling of the true rivalry between Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz) and Abigail Hill (Stone) for the affections of Queen Anne (Colman). The often-troublingly idiosyncratic director clearly enjoys throwing together a relatively straightforward comedy for a change (albeit in full Restoration costume), but anyone hoping for the pitch black absurdism of Lanthimos at his Lanthimost might leave disappointed.
There is much to love here: Colman's dotty, temperamental and ailing monarch, Weisz's ruthless confidante and lover, and Stone's Machiavellian usurper are all more than we deserve, and all three leads make the most of the offbeat humour in Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara's script (Emma Stone in particular has a great line in falling over that endears her even more than ever). Working from someone else's screenplay for the first time since his debut, Lanthimos turns out an uncharacteristically warm film full of human beings with relatable emotions - love, fear, jealousy, ambition - which is slightly at odds with his Kubrickian shooting style (fish-eye lenses and long, deliberate tracking shots are still the order of the day). And there are some proper belters waiting to leap off the page: I don't know if this is the first use of the word "cuntstruck", but it's certainly the best so far.
If the chilling lack of humanity Lanthimos usually favours has turned you off him in the past, then this may be the film that finally lets you just enjoy yourself without that gnawing sensation of futility and discomfort that The Lobster and The Killing Of A Sacred Deer had in spades. Personally though, I miss not feeling like I've spent a hundred minutes trapped in a room with a psychopath. If anyone else had made The Favourite I feel like I'd be celebrating it a little more; as it is, I'm just hoping that Lanthimos' impressive work rate means we'll be seeing something original and faintly bonkers from him again very soon.
Stan & Ollie
dir. Jon S Baird, UK, 2018
The TV series Feud, about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford's epically antagonistic relationship, set a high standard for dramatisations of the truth behind Hollywood's thin veneer of glamour. It showed what you can do with a terrific double act, a pair of talented actors and a small amount of dramatic licence, although it did absolutely no harm that there was plenty of juicy drama to work with in the first place. Stan & Ollie, another biopic about an iconic couple from cinema's heady heyday, also has a terrific double act, a pair of talented actors and a small amount of dramatic licence, but crucially it has a total absence of juicy drama to work with. Laurel & Hardy neither hated each other's guts nor unquestionably loved each other, they were just two colleagues who had the odd disagreement here and there. This film, then, is an excellent portrait of two colleagues who had the odd disagreement here and there; it's just that... well, that's just not very interesting, is it?
To be fair, Stan & Ollie is a much sweeter, gentler proposition than Feud, and was never going to be an exercise in muck-raking as much as a fond look at a world-famous cultural phenomenon that fizzled out in its later years, as pretty much all world-famous cultural phenomena do. Steve Coogan is great as Stan, nailing that elastic brow and weird America-via-Lancashire accent (although you can see him trying a little hard with the stooping gait), but he's eclipsed - literally and figuratively - by John C Reilly's Ollie, transformed under layers of prosthetics into a wholly convincing Hardy. A last-ditch attempt to rekindle the old magic nearly two decades after their popularity peak sees them touring the music halls of the UK: Coogan's involvement invites you to think of it as The Trip To Britain, but there's far less entertainment value in these two hours than in a single episode of his razor-sharp verbal jousts with Rob Brydon.
The lack of any real drama isn't helped by the bland supporting cast: a handful of cutout characters given nothing much of interest to do (except for Nina Arianda as Mrs Laurel, who effortlessly steals every scene from under her co-stars' noses). But in their place are a selection of delightful moments, usually involving one or both of the duo performing a mini routine for an audience of one, as if they just couldn't help themselves. Director Jon S Baird makes more of Jeff Pope's script than it probably deserves, lending real pathos to the general mood of melancholia and reluctant acceptance of mortality, and allowing his leads the time and space to truly assume the physicality of their parts. Inoffensive and undemanding, this is pleasant but forgettable stuff.
Ground floor, perfumery, homicidal evening gowns, mannequins with pubic hair, masturbating boss. Going up! Peter Strickland's own brand of movie Marmite hits new heights of oddballery with his fourth and maddest feature, a freaky mash-up of Are You Being Served? and Tales Of The Unexpected, as directed by Mike Leigh after fourteen straight days without sleep. Personally I'm on board for every second of it, but I wasn't the least bit surprised to see a couple of walkouts at the press screening. Essentially a film about a killer dress that curses everyone who wears it, Strickland's film touches on the evils of consumerism and wonders what would happen if clothes treated us the way we treat clothes, to be discarded or recycled once tastes change. However, this is the sultan of modern British surrealism we're talking about, so the literal fashion victims of this phantom thread are the last things we're expected to care about.
Instead, In Fabric is all about its avant-garde form, whose influences stretch as far and wide as the light-hearted social realism of Leigh, the dark side of Roald Dahl and the Claret-splashing nonsense of giallo, all stuffed into a dangerously faulty washing machine and put through a spin cycle. The result is entirely unique, though, and it's a pleasure to be around while Peter Strickland's Loopy Laundry is open for business. Yes, much of it is absolutely bananas, but it makes perfect sense within the (admittedly blurred) boundaries of the film, and that's what counts. Challenging, surprisingly funny and never for a second predictable, this is where you come to see what cinema can really be.
Suspiria
dir. Luca Guadagnino, Italy, 2018
Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's giallo standard is set in Berlin in 1977, so the first thing you expect to see is David Bowie sitting in the Dschungel, on Nürnberger Strasse, composing Heroes in his head. Sadly that doesn't come to pass, but we do get Tilda Swinton dressed as a man, which is pretty much the same thing. Swinton's not-quite-surprise turn as an octogenarian male makes sense in a film where about 98% of the actors are women, and the uncanny nature of his/her appearance - you can just about sense that something's not quite right - sets the tone for the weirdness to come.
Inserting subtext into the shallow schlock of the original, Suspiria '18 is a necessarily richer affair, taking in global power struggles and gender politics to bolster its undeniably daft core of witches seeking a sexy young Dakota Johnson type to assume the spirit of their chief crone. And while that's all very well, it does stretch out the first two hours to such an extent that when the inevitable last-act grand guignol sloshes in, it feels like a tonal shift too far. There's a terrific early scene of gruesome horror (if you ever thought Strictly was torture via the medium of dance, you ain't seen nothing yet) which suggests a new and genuinely creepy experience, but any tension is dissipated by the pacing, and that finale never horrifies as much as it should.
Alfonso Cuarón's semi-autobiographical love letter to the women he grew up with in Mexico in the early 1970s will hit your TV screens, courtesy of Netflix, very soon. I feel it's only fair to warn you that if you watch it on your telly, unless your telly is sixty feet wide and there isn't a single thing in the room to distract you, then I will come round there and slap you with a cold chimichanga. Get thee to a cinema to see this while you can, because it is one of the most beautiful things created by mankind since the chord of A minor and deserves better than you watching it with the lights on and looking at Twitter every six seconds.
Shot by Cuarón himself in luscious, pin-sharp monochrome, Roma tells the story of Chloe, a maid and all-round skivvy to a slowly-disintegrating middle class family in Mexico City. It's slow and without much in the way of incident until the incredible final act, but it's packed with beautifully observed tiny details that leave you in no doubt about how deep Cuarón has reached into his memories. His camera moves at the same unhurried pace no matter how prosaic or extraordinary the onscreen events, as if he's going over them in his mind in a comfortable armchair with a glass of port and a cigar, and the effect is hypnotic.
A story of strong women beaten down by weak, flawed men, but rising up to answer a natural instinct to protect and nurture, Roma could so easily have been a mawkish, melodramatic, button-pushing weepie in lesser hands. But Cuarón is a master storyteller, as he's repeatedly proven - most recently in Gravity, which gets an unexpected but fun nod here. And while the quietly gritty urban reality of Roma couldn't be further from the noise and spectacle of Gravity, it's infinitely more fulfilling, finding poetic symmetry in the sluicing of a driveway and the cleansing power of the sea, and suggesting unattainable relief from a thankless existence in the distant passing of an overhead aeroplane. So treat it with the respect it deserves, and buy yourself a 60-foot-wide telly.
The Green Fog
dir. Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson, USA, 2017
Every year by law, the London Film Festival must show an Alfred Hitchcock-referencing curio of some kind, and 2018 is no exception. This time it's Guy Maddin's quite bonkers collage movie The Green Fog, which is both a loose remake of Vertigo and an ode to San Francisco's long and varied history on film. Using only existing footage, Maddin and co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson stitch together clips from dozens of movies and TV shows set in Frisco to retell the story of an acrophobic detective and the lols he has forcing a woman to look like another woman who is in fact the same woman but not the woman he thought she was.
As Maddin hops between films, actors and characters chop and change identities (look closely, you can see what he's done there) while the story unfolds with all the structural discombobulation of a cheese-fuelled dream. There's very little dialogue; in fact most scenes literally cut out all the dialogue, leaving a staccato series of facial expressions that tell the story visually, as Hitchcock himself did so often and so well. It's all very weird, for sure, but not without a sense of humour: Scottie and Madeleine's day trip to Muir Woods is represented by NSYNC's similarly-set video for This I Promise You, while a clip from The Streets Of San Francisco sees Michael Douglas commenting on his own buttocks in a scene from Basic Instinct.
Maddin could've taken the easy route and built his film entirely from clips of Brian De Palma films (he does allow himself a couple of shots from High Anxiety, which is surely cheating), but perhaps he's saving that for another time. For now this is a loving, original and - at 63 minutes - blissfully short tribute to Hitchcock. And like any curated selection of film clips it's fun to spot the ones you recognise (drink a shot every time you see A View To A Kill pop up), but it's just as enjoyable to lose yourself in The Green Fog's brand of oddness, which is derived straight from the source material's own uniquely unsettling atmosphere.
For the first twenty minutes or so of The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs - the Coen brothers' anthology film of six tales of the American frontier (with colour plates) - I was in absolute heaven. Tim Blake Nelson's titular cowboy, as adept at singin' as he is at gunslingin', rattles off the kind of classic Coens dialogue that makes your ears melt, while providing some of the most violence-derived lols I've had in a cinema since I don't know when. But this is just the first story: an amuse-bouche to whet the appetite for a tasting menu of considerably darker shaggy dog stories. For me, nothing else matched up to that opening blast of blood-spattered fun, but there's still plenty of beautifully grim western wonder here to wrap your undeserving eyes around.
Largely fixated on the wavering value of human life in the formative era of the United States (and therefore inextricably linked to the current era of the United States), The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs also takes in such themes as art vs commerce, the natural beauty of the untouched land (and its destruction for the sake of financial gain) and the good old futility of humanity against unpredictable cosmic machinations that drives some of the Coens' best work. Some of it is, I'm afraid, quite dull, but there's always the stunning cinematography of Bruno Delbonnel to admire, not to mention the shock and awe you may experience if, like me, you had no idea that that one character was played by Dudley Dursley from Harry Potter until you looked it up later when you were in Sainsbury's and nearly passed out from disbelief. Anyway I gave each story a star rating out of five and divided the total by six, and the result was 3.66 recurring, so make of that what you will.
As Redford's career criminal looks back on a life spent doing jobs for no other reason than he simply enjoyed doing them - it just so happens they also brought him buckets of cash - the parallels with the actor's own life are unavoidable. But director David Lowery never lets his script get too clever-clever or his star too knowing, and the result is a low-key but fitting epilogue for Redford that would make a good double bill with Widows as another, albeit gentler, twist on the crime-caper-heist-movie.
Sorry To Bother You is rapper Boots Riley's first film, and you have to wonder if he thought it might also be his last, because it feels like he's lobbed every idea he ever had at the screen in case he never gets the chance to use any of them again. It's a wild ride, and much of the madness lands, but it really needs to calm down a bit and decide what it is. Lakeith Stanfield stars as a call centre drone desperate to improve his lot, but when he's offered a promotion he finds himself torn between solo success and sticking up for his downtrodden cold-calling comrades. That synopsis, however, is like describing Donald Trump as the President of the United States: the actual thing is a thousand times less predictable than that suggests, and considerably more insane.
It seems safe to describe Sorry To Bother You as a freewheeling satirical comedy about capitalism and solidarity, but Riley's voice feels too unique to spend all that time and effort on a message as banal as "capitalism is bad". Entwined within that are a wealth of observations about the modern black experience too, and I can't speak to how successful that is, but it doesn't have anything like the laser-guided effect on this painfully white dude that another Stanfield-starring film, Get Out, did. Riley's approach, however, is admirable, in that there isn't really anything else to compare it to (the closest I can think of is Gregg Araki's brand of casual weirdness), and God knows we need more loud voices like that to yell us out of our cultural torpor.
Happy New Year, Colin Burstead
dir. Ben Wheatley, UK, 2018
I approach Ben Wheatley's films with an increasing sense of trepidation these days, having come to the conclusion that the emperor's clothes might just be, if not totally non-existent, considerably threadbare at the least. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that, although this one goes to the same place that most of his films do - i.e. nowhere - the journey was a lot more fun than usual.
Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is set entirely at a New Year's Eve party where a single, extended family and a handful of friends gather to annoy the absolute tits off each other, as families are wont to do. And that's really about it, except that Wheatley and his cast nail the simmering tension of enforced family festivities with an uncomfortable accuracy. The power politics of familial hierarchies on display are almost Shakespearean, which makes perfect sense when you know that the film's original title was Colin, You Anus, because it's loosely based on old bardy chops' Coriolanus.
If Wheatley's film has a USP, it's the incredible cross-cutting that he and his editor (one Ben Wheatley) use to hop impatiently between no fewer than eighteen characters of more-or-less equal importance, lending a hugely cinematic rhythm to an almost comically prosaic story. The success of that nimble-footed dancing between a diverse cast and their intertwining narrative threads means that Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is basically the Avengers: Infinity War of 21st century British social realism, only with the added bonus of Charles Dance in a twinset and pleated skirt.
The very first shot of Widows sees Viola Davis and Liam Neeson in a moment so intimate that it's almost uncomfortably intrusive to watch. So it comes as some relief when director Steve McQueen cuts away, throwing us instead into the back of a getaway van being driven at high speed and shot at by persons unknown. It's a pulsating, stress-inducing, noisy, tense scene, but frankly anything's better than seeing quite so much of the Neeson tonguing technique.
It's a gloriously efficient opening, introducing us to Neeson (driving the getaway van) and his cronies, then swiftly dispatching them seconds later, allowing their widows to step into the frame and pull off both an improbable heist and the rest of the film like it ain't no thing. (It also introduces us to the long, unbroken shot technique that McQueen frequently deploys throughout the movie, which is both technically impressive and dramatically absorbing.)
McQueen, popping his thriller hat on for the first time, proves himself a master of the genre with almost comical ease. From cinematography, through editing, to an uncharacteristically restrained Hans Zimmer score, McQueen pushes all the right technical buttons at the right time and in the right order. But even that isn't enough: a century of male-dominated action cinema has rendered us sceptical that a bunch of women could do what this bunch of women do (even Ocean's Eight didn't help), so perhaps the trickiest part of getting Widows right is to make us believe in their motivation. And this is where McQueen's script - co-written with Gone Girl's Gillian Flynn - impresses on a more subtle level.
There isn't a ton of characterisation going on here, but then this is a genre film with a lot of characters, so it hardly matters. What there is a lot of - although it's rarely in your face - is an underlying social commentary that teases out all the reasons why these people are what they are and do what they do. Financial, sexual and racial inequality, gentrification, domestic violence, parental failings, gun culture and - most pointedly - political corruption are all put forward as contributing factors towards a desperate situation that might seem far-fetched, but think of it as a metaphor for empowerment of minorities and it all falls into place.
Away from all that boring subtext, there are some truly great performances to relish here. Davis, obviously, is flawless, the stoic leader who emotionally seals herself up for most of the film but can't help but show more chinks in her armour the deeper she gets in. Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debicki are more than able support, while Daniel Kaluuya proves he can be as terrifying as he can be charming, and Robert Duvall adds some impeccable old school class. Only Colin Farrell gets the short straw, finding little to do with the cardboard cutout character he's given.
The whole idea of Widows feels a little trivial for a director whose previous work has been dark, serious and verging on arthouse, but this is Steve McQueen stepping outside his comfort zone and proving he can probably turn his hand to anything, such is his natural talent. I'd say it would be fascinating to see what he does next, but that's been the case since he took up directing in the first place.
You're not going to believe this but they've only gone and made another London Film Festival. In a world of never-ending franchises, Episode 62 of the BFI's tentpole event is the 2018est yet, although whether you'll get the most out of it without having seen the first 61 remains to be seen. Fear not though, dear reader, I'll be on hand to mutter inconsequentially about a tiny percentage of the fest's content, and the first of those inconsequential mutterings follows this undeniably introductory paragraph. Ready? Let's festivate!
Mandy
dir. Panos Cosmatos, USA / Belgium, 2017
Even by Nicolas Cage's elevated standards of lunacy, Mandy is some weapons-grade mentalism. An arthouse revenge thriller that's also a terrifying study of grief via trippy lighting effects, unbridled carnage and Jóhann Jóhannsson's final (and possibly maddest) score, it's less a film than a voyage through Hell, with Cage as your unhinged, blood-spattered, rictus-grinning pilot. When a half-baked cult led by a failed rock star kidnap his wife (the disappointingly fridged Andrea Riseborough), Cage - he's a lumberjack, but he is not OK - embarks on a roaring rampage of revenge that takes in such highlights as a chainsaw duel, an astonishing scene in a bathroom that has him howling in his pants, and a mac 'n' cheese-spewing cheddar goblin.
It's a slow burner for the first hour, but the literal raging inferno of the back half makes up for it, throwing beautifully-lit gore and incongruous laughs at you with breakneck ferocity. To describe Mandy as all style and no substance would be accurate but also kind of missing the point: director Panos Cosmatos wants you to focus on Cage's character's pain and suffer with him, and makes sure you do so with a big box of visual and aural sorcery the likes of which you probably haven't seen since Dario Argento's ketchup-splashing heyday. If you saw Brawl In Cell Bock 99 at last year's LFF and enjoyed it but thought it would be better if it was on fire, then hoo boy it's Christmas for you, you fucking psycho.
Border
dir. Ali Abbasi, Sweden, 2018
Themes of otherness and belonging are given a Nordic tweak in this mildly bonkers adaptation of Let The Right One In author John Ajvide Lindqvist's short story. Tina is an unusual woman, pronounced of brow and with a supernatural sense of smell that's a massive help in her job as a customs officer. A born outsider, she begins to learn some surprising truths when the equally neanderthal-looking Vore rocks up with a surprise or two between his legs - and it turns out he's not the only one.
There's an uneasy air to this timely fable about fluid bodies and notions of identification, and while that enhances the surreal, folk-tale vibe, it might also prove problematic in its representation of diversity as monstrous. But Tina's unique situation gives her - and us - the advantage of seeing shades of grey where others only see black and white, and the drama is richer for it. The script (co-written by Lindqvist) gets a little exposition-heavy at times, which dulls the mystery and belies its short story origins on occasion, but there's a lot to love in its poignant portrayal of the pain and pleasure involved in not fitting in. And with its pair of unorthodox-looking protagonists struggling to make sense of their place in humanity, it also works as an ultra-dark, feature length, Scandinavian-flavoured Edward and Tubbs sketch.
If you're a) a fan of James Bond and/or Ian Fleming, b) are nurturing or have fully developed an expensive dependence on obscure alcoholic drinks, and c) can read, then good news: the mixologists at London's sexy booze dungeon Bar Swift have only gone and compiled a book of Bond-based cocktail recipes just for you! It's called Shaken: Drinking with James Bond & Ian Fleming, and while it should probably have added the disclaimer "(not literally)" to its title, it is nevertheless a fine-looking addition to your library / bar / downstairs toilet.
Endorsed by Ian Fleming Publications (which is about as official as you can get without Barbara Broccoli coming round and licking it), Shaken is the first book to seriously investigate James Bond's crippling booze habit in such an entertaining, thirst-inducing way. Its major selling point is the forty original recipes conjured up by the Swift guys, but its cheeky twist is the way it ties these recipes into Ian Fleming's world. Each drink is followed by a selection of relevant quotes from the Bond books and other assorted bits of Fleming's writing, with a garnish of trivia that begs to be picked apart by awful Bond pedants (don't look at page 23 if glaring errors in Bond lore make you do a shit).
As you'd hope, there's some stunning photography and delightful illustrations accompanying all those boozy, Bondy words, and a cursory flick through in the Food & Drink section of Waterstones will be enough to send you straight to the nearest 'spoons for their approximation of a Vesper (good luck). But this is, first and foremost, a cocktail recipe book, so let's talk cocktail recipes.
Side note: among the many, many ways in which I am exactly like James Bond is my health-threatening relationship with fancy grog. My sideboard groans under the weight of fifty-odd bottles of random spirits I've picked up over the years in the misguided belief that I won't drink two shots of each and then decide I don't like it. So it was with a justifiable sense of preparedness that I parted this book's pages, ready and willing to whip up as many of its recipes as I could with my unnecessarily large selection of boozy booty. And this is where Shaken gets a bit shaky.
"You know, that's not half bad. I'm gonna have to think up a name for that.
I know! I shall call it SEXY FUCKJUICE"
As well as the forty original recipes, there are ten more for some of the "standard" cocktails that feature heavily in Fleming's books: the Martini, the Negroni, the Daiquiri, the Old Fashioned, blah blah blah. I've mixed a million of these. If you haven't, you can google those recipes in seconds. But of the forty new drinks, I was visibly distressed to discover that my extensive collection of weird and wonderful alcohol allowed me to make... four. (Of those four, I've so far made three, and to be fair they were all delicious - in fact there is a Blofeld just to my left, sheeing me through writing thish posht.) So unless you work behind the bar at the Savoy or are Gerry from Gerry's of Soho, the chances of you getting much practical use out of Shaken as a cocktail recipe book are slimmer than a straw full of slimline tonic water.
Maybe I'm being presumptuous. Maybe you've got loads of mastiha liqueur, yellow chartreuse, velvet falernum or Branca Menta knocking about next to your Aldi gin and that Smirnoff you picked up on the way back from Corfu, in which case great, enjoy this book! But even you can probably forget knocking out a round of Kissy Suzukis unless you've got plenty of Unkai Nayuta No Toki buckwheat shochu and Akashi-Tai Shiraume Ginjo Umeshu in. In its defence, Shaken does tell you how to make some of its peculiar ingredients at home, but I'm just not sure how many of us have the time or the inclination to throw together a batch of rooibos syrup in order to mix a Dr No (assuming you've also got some kind of gentian liqueur handy, which the recipe also calls for).
So it's hard to wholeheartedly recommend this book, even as a 007 fan who loves a cocktail or three while rambling on the internet of a Wednesday evening. It's certainly a lovely thing, curated with an obvious passion for Bond and with due deference to fans, especially those who love the books as much as the films: the inspirations for some of the drinks (the Trueblood, the Dreamy Pines) are hugely rewarding for the most devoted among us. And if you don't mind not being able to make most of the drinks on offer, it's still a fun read and a classy piece of Bondiana. But a good cocktail book shouldn't feel exclusive to its audience, and if you're not a patholigical collector of pretentiously-packaged liquid intoxicants then it's difficult not to see Shaken as a somewhat mis-marketed product.
A lot has happened in the 28 months since our last voyage into the world of Roger Moore films, not least the enormously unwelcome death of Sir Rog himself. It saddens me that I can no longer refer to him as The Greatest Living Englishman, as I have on so many previous occasions, so I suppose I will just have to call him The Greatest Englishman Ever from now on and hope the hyperbole police are off duty.
Anyway one of the things that hasn't happened since I put myself through Bullseye! back in early 2016 is me watching any more Roger Moore films, which is something I imagine a lot of people who have seen Bullseye! have experienced. Well it's time to get back on the horse, because here comes Rog in a deerstalker cap, Ulster coat and Inverness cape, which means he's either hunting deer in the north of the island of Ireland and/or a city in the Scottish Highlands, or - and this is by far the more likely reason - he's playing Sherlock ruddy Holmes.
"What do you call a deer with no eyes, Watson?"
"Dashed if I know, Holmes"
"No idea"
"Nope, none whatsoever"
"No, I mean... oh forget it"
Produced for US TV by NBC in 1976, Sherlock Holmes In New York was the fourth film Roger Moore squeezed in during the Broccoli/Saltzman wars which took place after 1974's The Man With The Golden Gun and delayed The Spy Who Loved Me until 1977. (It's quite something to realise that he played Holmes and Bond concurrently; for context, the modern equivalent would have been the BBC's Sherlock series kicking off in 2010 with Daniel Craig - at that time also sitting through a lengthy inter-Bond hiatus after two films in the tux - filling Holmes' shoes.) Shot at the Fox studios in LA, Rog's film is a lavish production with a cracking cast that's considerably better than I expected, but maybe that's just because I can still smell Bullseye!.
The 1901-set story (an original idea, not based on any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books) concerns a plot by Sherlock's own Blofeld, Professor Moriarty, to nobble a shitload of gold from a Manhattan bank vault, using the then-under-construction subway tunnels as a getaway (weird how no film critics ever mention Sherlock Holmes In New York as inspiration for Die Hard With A Vengeance). In a cheeky twist, Moriarty blackmails Holmes into refusing to help the clueless NYPD in solving the crime by kidnapping and threatening the life of a young boy who, it is strongly hinted, is the illegitimate son of old Sherl himself.
While it's hardly the pinnacle of Holmes on screen, SHINY - as I was delighted to discover is the film's acronym - is an entirely adequate addition to the canon. It benefits enormously from expecting a basic grasp in Sherlology of its audience: Holmes, Watson, Mrs Hudson, Moriarty, Irene Adler and even Colonel Moran all feature without the faintest whiff of any tedious origin stories. The dialogue is faithful to Conan Doyle's style, the plot is a rewarding puzzle and there's a reasonably exciting horse-and-cart chase at the end. And the supporting cast are top-notch: Patrick Macnee bumbles about as Nigel Bruce's version of Watson, eternally bewildered and ending every sentence with "hoho, eh?"; Charlotte Rampling is appropriately gorgeous and mysterious as 'the woman', Irene Adler, and John Huston's growly Moriarty constantly looks like he's trying to suppress a violent shart.
Co-starring John Pooston as Morifarty
But at the centre of it all is Rog, who - with typical self-deprecation - said of the part: "Another fictional character - I'm going to play them all the same, so it doesn't matter whether I'm going to be called Simon [Templar], Sherlock or Mr Bond." Normally I'd agree with him, but this is a rare Roger role where 007 is nowhere to be seen. Moore's Holmes is a logic machine with a quick temper and a deadly serious manner; Bond's charm and propensity for knob jokes have, for once, been kept in storage at Pinewood for the time being.
Ideal Holmes
Rog delivers his lines with the rapid-fire impatience of classic Holmes, and enhances potentially whiffy dialogue like "Watson, there is devilry afoot! I feel it in my very marrow" with his own naturally mellifluous tones and a deep furrowing of that normally-elevated brow. He also clearly relishes the mischief of the detective's frequent disguises, getting to grips with Irish, Italian and New York accents with varying degrees of success. There are little grace notes, too, that give away how much he's enjoying himself: witness the triumphant cape-toss over his shoulder after he fools Moriarty with what is frankly one of the least convincing disguises in Sherlockian lore. And as a gift for Rogerwatchers throughout history, there's a splendid montage of Holmes mulling over a four-pipe problem which is essentially the same shot of him frowning and smoking, shot from three different angles.
All of which amounts to an unspectacular but worth-your-while Sherlock Holmes film but an excellent Rogerformance, thoroughly deserving of a Rogerating of four Rogers, only the second time such an honour has been bestowed in the long and sad history of That's Rogertainment!.
If the two-year-plus gap between now and the last time I Rogered has left you baffled as to just what the chuff is going on, you can catch up here. See you in December 2020 for Rogisode 11!
There's a new Mission: Impossible film out in a minute, which is good because the stench of the last one has just about left cinemas. I do love this franchise (well, three-fifths of it so far), but there's no getting away from the fact that 2015's Rogue Nation effortlessly stole the crown of rubbishest Missiossible from 2000's M:I-2, which was a $125 million shampoo ad directed by a psychopath. But that's fine, because it forced us to look for redeeming features in John Woo's batshit sequel that set it above Christopher McQuarrie's snooze-inducing quinquel. And the most obvious of those redeeming features is its utterly insane score, composed by Hansel Florian Zimmer, the only man who literally makes music nervous when it sees him coming.
Twenty seconds of threatening bass and none-more-Y2K drum loops give way to a stirring guitar motif perching atop the kind of electronic samples that pervaded most action film scores of the time (cf. David Arnold's The World Is Not Enough). Just over a minute in, a Russian male choir quietly and briefly announce their arrival, as if politely waiting to be asked to join the party. They head for the bar and start drinking, and will return when they are jolly well good and ready. Everything is going smoothly until, at 2'35", a furious crunching drum-and-guitar shaped monster stomps all over everything for a few bars, followed by the kind of hilariously overblown axe solo that makes you think of ill-advised perms and gigantic wind machines. If you don't love this score at its worst then you don't deserve it at its best.
Track 2: Iko Iko
Zap Mama's cover version of The Dixie Cups' delightful original is fine I guess, but I'm just glad somebody chose to include it on this album over Limp Bizkit's "official" theme Take A Look Around, because that song is a fucking war crime. Fear not, musical masochists, for the Biscuits' steaming heap of noise is on the other M:I-2 album of music "from and inspired by" the film, and if you bought that then you deserved everything you got. Anyway none of this has anything to do with Hans Zimmer's score so why are you going on about it?
Track 3: Seville
Music website allmusic.com dismisses the entire M:I-2 soundtrack as "an uneven score that ranges from successful eclecticism to bombastic predictability", as if that's somehow a bad thing. Who wants even? Who wants unsuccessful eclecticism? Who wants bombastic unpredictability? OK maybe that last one sounds fun. But when they spat out that invective, they were just bitter that they'd never thought of following millennial beats and angry electric guitars with an achingly beautiful flamenco heartbreaker named after an orange, as Zimmer does here. Handclaps, footstomps and hugely evocative Spanish guitars lay the groundwork for the voice of Lisa Gerrard, hot off her Zimmer-assisted work on Gladiator, to drift in like a ghost doomed to an eternity of anguished and incomprehensible wailing, sounding much like I did about an hour into Rogue Nation.
Track 4: Nyah
Zimmer regular Heitor Pereira glides in with his Spanish guitar and makes string-based love to everyone in the room simultaneously. Nyah is the exact sound of Thandie Newton wafting around Seville in slow motion, i.e. it is absolutely, life-enhancingly beautiful. It's a tender lament that evokes a serenity and poise rarely achieved in modern film music; a hymn to grace and elegance that HOLY FUCKING SHITBALLS HANS WHAT IN THE FUCKEST OF FUCK IS THAT?!
Track 5: Mission: Impossible Theme
"WHY IT'S THE MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE THEME, WHICH I HAVE CARVED OUT OF GRANITE WITH MY BARE HANDS AND DROPPED ON YOUR FOOT WHEN YOU WERE LEAST EXPECTING IT!! HAHAHAHAHA, I'M ABSOLUTELY MENTAL, SOMEBODY STOP ME BEFORE I KILL AGAIN, PLEASE I'M BEGGING YOU"
"Nothing limp about THIS bizkit bro"
Track 6: The Heist
More flamenco and handclaps introduce a funksplosion of jazz bass jamming, because Zimmer hasn't covered enough musical genres yet. I can't remember what happens at this point in the film (some kind of heist, presumably) but imagine that bit in Spider-Man 3 when emo Peter Parker struts down the street firing finger-guns at people, only it's Tom Cruise and his tectonic plate-sized grin doing the strutting, and that's what this sounds like.
Track 7: Ambrose
Suddenly remembering that this is a film score rather than a neurotoxin-induced psychotropic episode, Zimmer digs out an actual orchestra from behind the sofa and immediately sets the string section to work on this theme for Dougray Scott's entirely forgettable villain. If a low, menacing cello didn't yell "BAD GUY!" loudly enough, then guess what? The Russian male choir from Track 1 are tanked up and ready to go, solemnly grumbling the kind of noises that your brain makes when you wake up hungover and unsure if you're in the same continent you fell asleep in.
Track 8: Bio-Techno
In a moment of uncertainty regarding how one might score a John Woo-directed shootout, Hans Zimmer drops a tab of acid, stares at the faulty fluorescent strip light in his kitchen for four hours and decides the best thing to do is to use three late-'90s techno tracks all at once because his cat, who is a floating cloud of liquid energy, told him to. John Woo drowns it out with gunshots in the final mix, much to everyone's relief.
Track 9: Injection
Lisa Gerrard is back, and so is the string section, and so are the drum loops, and so are the electric guitars, and so is the Spanish guitar, and because that's all a bit sparse Hans casually lobs in a massive fuckoff timpani beat. Zimmer gonna Zim.
Mad as eggs.
Track 10: Bare Island
In the M:I-2 score's standout track, the male choir suddenly produce from beneath their choral robes an entire female choir, and they all get naked and start an absolute orgy of vocal harmonies that sounds like Carmina Burana if, well, Hans Zimmer had composed it. It is quite literally all going Orff, building to an orgasmic climax which ejaculates nothing less than the most histrionically macho rendition of the Mission: Impossible theme on electric guitars. But the guitars have still got more axe-spunk in reserve, so they pump away at that motif from Track 1 for a bit before slowing to a gentle finish, over which Lisa Gerrard sighs the most satisfied sound you'll ever hear. Anyone got a cigarette?
Track 11: Chimera
Everyone is utterly exhausted by the exertions of the previous track so they just lie there moaning for a couple of minutes, gently leaking musical fluid onto the film's best satin bedsheets.
Track 12: The Bait
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "you said this score had 'fucking EVERYTHING', but we've yet to hear, for example, a bongo drum introduction to the Mission: Impossible theme, you tedious smartarse". Well Track 12 is here to McConaughey that thought right back in your stupid face.
Track 13: Mano a Mano
A largely percussive piece, this is the sound of Zimmer banging his head against a wall trying to think of an instrument he hasn't used yet. Midway through, the answer comes to him: sleigh bells! Of course! The only downside is that it all goes a bit Éric Serra's GoldenEye score for a bit, but frankly we're in such a state by now that Hans could play Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face on a rhino's scrotum and nobody would bat an eyelid.
Cheer up love, it'll only be the worst one for another fifteen years
Track 14: Mission: Accomplished
The title of this track is a bit of a spoiler if you've never seen M:I-2, or indeed any Hollywood blockbuster, so look away now. Oh wait it's too late, sorry. The haunting melody of Nyah returns in a gorgeous wave of strings and, because the penultimate track is never too late to introduce one more new instrument, woodwind. It's almost lovely enough to make you stop thinking about the baffling physics of the climactic motorbike-based fight scene that just punched you in the brain. But not quite.
Track 15: Nyah and Ethan
More soothing Spanish guitars attempt to calm you down after the glorious punishment your ears have just taken, and it's a slow and sexy way to end what has been quite the adventure in sound. Naturally the film ends with Fred Durst grunting at full volume over the credits, but the album has better taste than that.
*
So there you have it: the soundtrack about which filmtracks.com said: "avoid if you suffer from psoriasis or eczema, for Hans Zimmer's insultingly simplistic action music for synthesizers and electric guitars could make your lymph nodes swell up and cause a nasty skin rash." Well I am here to tell you that not only is that verdict medically questionable, it is also weapons-grade poppycock. Hans Zimmer's score for M:I-2 is the work of a mad genius; a fearless piece of art that deserved so much better than the film it graced with its musical preposterousness. I mean yes, I have developed a nasty skin rash after listening to it for the umpteenth time, but I'm sure that's just coincidence.
