#62: LOVE ACTUALLY

 

Starring Hugh Grant, Liam Nesson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon, Bill Nighy and Rowan Atkinson. Written and directed by Richard Curtis. Budget $45 million. Running time 136 minutes.

Taking place in the three week run up to Christmas, Love Actually follows 11 separate stories of love as they barrel towards a violent, blood-soaked slaughter in an airport when a young boy is cut down by police men's machine guns as he races through security to illegally board an aircraft. 

Ranging from down right sweet stories of love, like the Prime Minister of England  (Hugh Grant) falling for a Downing Street tea girl (Martine McCutcheon) or the platonic love between aging rockstar Billy Max (Bill Nighy) and his manager Joe (Gregor Fisher) to the downright despicable like Alan Rickman cheating on his wife, Emma Thompson and the truly appalling story of a sex obsessed Englishman going to the States to shag any woman he can find. 

This film now 20 years old is starting to show its age, with some exceedingly uncomfortable bits of humour, like fat-shaming, some awkward attitudes towards sex and nudity, and the truly creepy stalking antics of photographer/artist Mark who rocks up to his best friend's house on Christmas Eve with hand written notes professing his obsessive lust for his friends new wife. 

Luckily, Hugh Grant's charm and Emma Thompson's acting chops save the day, just.

7/10   

#61: NAPOLEON

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby. Written by David Scarpa. Directed by Ridley Scott. Budge $130-200 million. Running time 157 minutes long.

Unlike the film this review will be blissfully short. 

The life-story of history's shortest historical figure, Napoleon, or Nappy as his mates called him, from the time he lead an assault to take a fort in the Seige of Toulon to the bit when he was exiled on a Caribbean island and died.

Gotta say I was well pissed off by this, expecting, as I was, a bio pic of Abba's breakthrough Euorvision song entry of 1974, Waterloo! Imagine my disappointment then that rather than watching the rise of the greatest Eurovision Song band of all time I had to watch the rise and fall a grumpy little megalomaniac in a funny hat.

Racing through 28 years of the diminutive one's life at breakneck speed you don't get time to breathe as key events are ticked off the unseen checklist of the director. Battles are staged, beautiful costumes are worn and bits of history are dispensed with the rapidity of candy pellets fired from a Pez head.

Ridley Scott directs with all the uninterested passion of a bloke just checking off one more item from his bucket list. He famously quipped that in the time it took Martin Scorsese to make Killers of a Harvest Moon he'd bashed out four films. Ridley, that's not something to be proud of, maybe you should consider slowing down and tightening up the scripts a bit more before filming. 

Anyway, it looks good, the acting is okay, although Vanessa Kirby is royally wasted in her role as the apple of Boney's eye, and Joquain Phoenix does what he always does, mope around and look very earnest. And the film becomes unintentionally hilarious at several points during this film, never more so than the sex scenes which are hysterical.

Ultimately all this does is make you wish that Stanley Kubrick had got to make his version of Boney's life rather than Ridley Scott who pays homage to Stan by trying to mimic the wonderful candle light cinematography of Barry Lydon, although all he manages to do is make a murky and gloomy looking film. Although the battle scenes are extremely well done and fantastically well mounted.

I think I'll stick to infinitely better 1970 movie Waterloo starring Rod Steiger and directed by Sergei Bondarchuk.

7/10

#60: SALTBURN

 

Starring Barry Keoghan, Jacob Elordi, Rosamund Pike, Richard E. Grant, Alison Oliver, Archie Madekwe and Carey Mulligan. Produced, written and directed by Emerald Fennell. Running time: 131 minutes.

Feeling like a 21st Century reworking of Evelyn Waugh's classic Brideshead Revisited, Saltburn finds 'fish-out-of-water' working-class scholarship boy Oliver Quick, Barry Keoghan, arriving in Oxford and slowly drawn into the posh set by the seductive charms of super-rich Felix Elspeth, Jacob Elordi. With the summer holidays looming and Oliver grieving over the sudden death of his father, Felix invites him to stay with him and his eccentric family lead by Sir James and Lady Elspeth, Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike at the family pile of Saltburn, a staggering opulent and sprawling stately home in Buckinghamshire.

What follows is a slow and unsettling decent into deception, seduction and ultimately murder most foul as truths are revealed and lies discovered.

Featuring a superb cast perfectly headed by Barry Keoghan who totally powns this film, but that's not to take anything away from the rest of the cast who are all superb in their respective roles.

Darkly funny, sinister and refreshingly nasty, this is a good looking film with some lovely flourishes including a very impressive naked dance.

Very satisfying. 8/10

#59: HUNGER GAMES: THE BALLAD OF SONGBIRDS AND SNAKES

 

Starring Tom Blyth Rachel Zegler, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman, Hunter Schafer, Josh Andres Rivera and Viola Davis. Written by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt, directed by Francis Lawrence. Budget $100 mill. Running time 157 minutes.

The prequel to the Hunger Games movies starring Jenifer Lawrence is set at the time of the 10th Hunger Games, so 64 years earlier, and gives us the origin story of President Snow played by Donald Sutherland.

In this we watch the rise and partial fall, before rising of Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) from insanely handsome University kid studying, I think, The Hunger Games to rookie in the army before head game designer of the Hunger Games, before striding off into the sunset to one day become President. The film sees Snow and a bunch of other University students forced to become Mentors to this year's crop of Hunger Game tributes and he's given someone from District 12 who turns out to be Rachel Zegler's travelling bard, Lucy Gray Baird. Somehow he and her manage to survive while putting up with some serious heckling, bullying and sabotage from Professor Casca Highbottom, Peter Dinklage who used to be Snow's dad's best friend and seems to bear a serious grudge against the Snow family. Overseeing everything is the truly demented Dr. Volumnia Gaul, Viola Davis head game designer and all-out psychotic. And to bring some much need shits and giggles we have the fantastic Lucretius 'Lucky' Flicherman, Jason Schwatzman who's the TV host and the best thing in this film. 

It's long and rather tedious. Despite a good looking cast headed up by Tom Blyth, Peter Dinklage, Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis, this can't save the film from being exceedingly one note and I'm sorry to say rather dull. 

For a bleak, dystopic, exceedingly nihilistic movie about a gladiatorial fight-to-the-death, I'm happy to report it's a totally blood free experience, despite the copious amounts of throat cuts, head smashes, stabbing, poisonings, public executions and machine gunning going on, so you'll be happy to bring your 12 year-old and under children in the knowledge that no one dies, they're just sleeping.

The actual 'Hunger Games' part of the film is the most thrilling and when it ends awkwardly two thirds of the way into the movie, we're then subjected to a protracted pre-prologue sequence as we watch our 'hero', Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blyth) sent to District 12 to plot his rise to top again. 

Offset by a lot of bleakness this film strangely marries 1950 design aesthetic with grunge and violence and then throws in some frankly cringey good-ole America folk songs as sung by Rachel Zegler's Lucy Gray Baird, who's a bard about things like her ex boyfriend getting hung and you have the year's funniest non comedy since Fast and Furious X.

When the Hunger Games part ends you quickly realise you have no interest in the rest of the film and with well over half an hour left to run, you sort of resign yourself to watching it all, because, well you've made it this far. 

Looks good, Tom Blyth, Jason Schwartzman and Viola Davis make it just about worthwhile and at least it's not another superhero movie.

6/10