#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.

6/10

#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

#58: KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, Jessie Plemons and an impressive ensemble cast that includes John Lithgow and Brendan Fraiser. Written by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Budget $200 million. Running time 206 minutes.

Based on the Oklahoma murders that occurred in the Osage Nation during the 1920s when oil was discovered on tribal land and the Osage nation became incredibly wealthy which in turn drew an endless army of greedy white bastards, like a moths to flame, eager to exploit the first nation people even if it means murdering entire families to realise that ambition. DiCaprio plays Ernest Burkhart, a WWI veteran who returns to Oklahoma to work for his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) as a taxi driver who seemingly falls in love with Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone). The film follows Ernest, for the most part, and a vast cast of unique-faced delinquents as they murder their way through scores of innocent Osage people all in the pursuit of wealth before the fledgling FBI arrive to investigate the murders and bring some of the killers and masterminds to justice.

Beautiful to look at, an amazing cast, brilliantly directed and acted, and art-directed to perfection. This is an impressively mounted film that is nevertheless emotionally flatter than a Findus Crispy Pancake. With no dramatic highs, or lows, no satisfying emotional core or even a gripping plot or structure like Casino or Goodfellas. It's a film that just methodically plods from plot A to plot B with nothing intriguing or exhilarating to spice things up. Banal crimes and murders are committed without drama or fanfare, like in previous Scorsese films, they just happen. Characters go through no dramatic arcs, unless being alive one minute and then dead the next can be seen as an arc.  

This film is planted firmly in the Gangs of New York territory in terms of being a fantastically researched and mounted film, but lacking anything resembling a satisfying dramatic arc. While both DiCaprio and DeNiro are superb, with the later bringing a power to his performance that's not been seen for a very long time, you find yourself stumbling out of the cinema, bleary eyed, three hours and 26 minutes later feeling subdued and a little deflated, wishing this had just been been a bit better and a lot shorter. 

The trailer for this presents the film in an entirely different way from the finished film, subtly implying that Leo's character is the hero of the film desperately trying to save his wife from the murderous intentions of his evil uncle by going full vengeful vigilante. That might have been a more interesting, or at least more exciting film that this, and sadly I can't imagine myself wanting to return to this in years to come. 

That said, considering that this film was written and directed by a man almost in his 82nd year is deeply impressive, Scorsese has lost none of his scope and ambition, just, perhaps, his bite.

8/10

#57: THE GREAT ESCAPER

Starring Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson, with a supporting cast that includes John Standing, Danielle Vitalis, Brennan Reece, Judith Clune and Wolf Kahler. Written by William Ivory and directed by Oliver Parker. Running time 96 minutes.

Based on the true story of WWII veteran, 89-year old Bernard Jordan who escaped from his nursing home in 2014 to attend the 70th Anniversary D-Day commemorations in France. The film follows Michael Caine as Jordan as he leaves the love of his wife, Irene (Glenda Jackson) to make his own way to France. Along the way meeting up with fellow ex solider, John Standing's Arthur, meeting a group of veteran German soldiers and trying to lay some of his own ghosts to rest. The film flashes back to D-Day itself and also the meeting of Irene and Jordan and shows the duo stories of both Irene and Jordan across this deeply emotional weekend. 

This is a very heart-warming film that packs a fantastically powerful punch, it's entirely powered by two utterly extraordinary performances from Caine and Jackson, in her last role. They are both superb and bring such depth and truth to their roles it elevates the film to a whole new level. Last year I was deeply moved by the film, Living and this year it's this. 

Moving and touching it brought many tears to my eyes and I sat emotionally punched by and thoroughly overwhelmed by it. 

That said, it's not perfect, at several points it seems to be leading you down one route, teasing at something dramatic and mawkish about to happen, only to suddenly blindside you by NOT taking the bait and sticking to the basic story and not feeling the need to squeeze in any virtue posturing or statement making, and then seems to mock you for being duped in the first place into thinking this was a standard Hollywood movie. 

Somehow this film, directed by the man responsible for the wretched Dad's Army, doesn't ever become a button pusher of a movie, it's not sentimental and it's not overly melodramatic, the script is moving and sincere, and very satisfying and I was still a tad overwhelmed by this several hours after watching it.

I hope that both Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson not only get nominated for this film but also win some awards because they bloody deserve it and it makes you wish Glenda had made more movies in her later years, because she's utterly extraordinary.

8/10

#56: CHRISTINE

 

Starring Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Robert Prosky and Harry Dean Stanton. Written by Bill Phillips based on the novel by Stephen King. Directed by John Carpenter. Music by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth. Budget $10 million. Running time 110 minutes. Originally released in 1983.

Cards on the table, this was the first time I've ever seen this movie, a film now 40 years old. I don't know what I was thinking back then, but obviously there was something about going to see a haunted car movie that just didn't resonate with me. 

Well, I've seen it now and I'm pleased to say it's not bad, that said it's not a note perfect 10/10 either. If you've read a Stephen King book you'll realise that much of the subtlety and narrative drive of the novel had to be dumped to fit into the 110 minute run time and what we're left with is a fairly straight-forward tale about a possessed car and a bullied teenager corrupted by his car. With a disappointingly low body count, and a by-the-numbers plot it's an okay film without any real shocks or horrors, but with some fantastic special effects, and a great sound track. All-in-all, it's an okay film, not perhaps the world's greatest but still, good enough and the addition of Harry Dean Stanton is a welcome addition and adds a nice cherry on the cake.

However, when it comes to John Carpenter films, I'd happily take the previous year's The Thing over this any day! But would, by the same measure also happily rewatch this then rather than nearly all the other films Carpenter would go on to produce from this point on in his career other than Starman.

7/10