and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Macbeth (2015) is not Michael Fassbender’s chameleon-like performance, in which his face alternates, depending on the line and the lighting, with those of Christian Bale, Ralph Fiennes, Jamie Dornan, Eddie Izzard and others, nor is it the decision to have everyone mumble the dialogue in Scottish accents broad to the point of caricature, even the actors with actual Scottish accents, nor the instruction from the tourist board to film in some of the most beautiful places north of the border but in a bleak way so as simultaneously to attract wealthy tourists and discourage the other kind who used to go on cheap and sunny European holidays before Brexit, no, the best thing about Macbeth is the way in which it relentlessly trolls the audience with bad audio-visual puns – from rethinking how to get Birnam woods to Dunsinane (the clue is in the name of the woods), to repeatedly standing Macbeth’s best friend (Paddy Considine) next to a goat, to always shooting Duncan’s son (Jack Reynor) in between two other people – but then sneaking into the background of Lady Macbeth’s (Marion Cottilard) hand-washing scene a black and white dog – who is piebald and never at any point dismissed…
Category: One-sentence reviews
The Girl on the Train (Tate Taylor 2016)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Girl on the Train (2016) is not the way Tate Taylor translates this gaslight melodrama hokum, mixed with a bit of Rear Window and The 4.50 from Paddington, not merely into a contemporary setting but also into a work of significance through a brilliant central performance by Emily Blunt, made all the more endearing when, in the first scene she shares with Luke Evans, both of them temporarily forget their American accents (although his oddly slips back into English rather than Welsh), through studied pacing, through a narrative and temporal slipperiness that makes the plot holes look like enigmas rather than plot holes, and through serious-looking but trivialising invocations of trauma, addiction and therapy, no, the best thing about The Girl on the Train is the way in which, in an era in which political correctness has not only gone mad but is rampaging like a berserker through American culture, as we can see from the current Presidential election, it has has the balls-to-the-wall guts to base its narrative in the scientific truths of sociobiology: that men are driven by the swashbuckling need to put their dicks in every woman they meet, especially if in doing so they can dominate a) other women that a sick society forces them into providing for financially even when they cannot produce offspring or are not always available for penetration, and b) other men, particularly if they live next door; and that the only goal, drive and desire of women is to reproduce – and possibly to be blonde, since things seem to go better for blondes than brunettes, at least for a while…
The Walk (Robert Zemeckis 2015)
And so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Walk (2015) – Robert Zemeckis’s attempt to turn thirty-five million dollars, the full cutting-edge apparatus of digital and 3D filmmaking, a talented cast and a thrilling story of a daring Gallic tightrope-walker who is also something of a dick, into a tin-eared, lumbering hodgepodge of edge-of-the-seat thrills and ballyhoo-dressed-up-as-self-reflexivity – is not the conjuration of a lost Paris that aims for the joyfulness of early Godard, would settle for the psychotic whimsy of Amélie (2001), falls short of Bertolucci’s genuinely godawful The Dreamers (2003) but just about achieves Team America: World Police (2004), nor is it the fabulously ridiculous haircut the as-always adorable Joseph Gordon-Levitt is forced to sport, nor is it the ominous appearance of The Dread Red-Eyed Seagull of Doom, here manifesting as a badly drawn cartoon, no, the best thing about The Walk is the way it distracts from the otherwise and as-always excellent JGL’s woeful French accent by the cunning – nay, bravura – casting of Ben Kingsley, who can do neither a Czech nor a French accent, as a Czech with a French accent…
Tomorrowland (Brad Bird 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Tomorrowland (2015) is not the way it squeezes in an extra two or three acts in between the second and third act, nor is it the way the mathematics of it all make no sense if you have even the vaguest sense of how old George Clooney is, or the way in which he doubles down on his inability to spend time with women his own age – underscored a couple of years earlier by the extremes to which he went to get away from Sandra Bullock in Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón 2013) – by sharing some only slightly creepy emotional scenes with the one-fifth-his-age love of his life, but the way in which they left in the naff Indiana Jones jokes from the draft of the script before they decided Harrison Ford was too old for the maths of the film to make sense or to be having big emotional scenes about thwarted love with girls one-seventh his age cos that would be, y’know, slightly creepy…
Andy Weir’s The Martian
and so anyway it turns out that reading The Martian – Andy Weir’s nostalgic utopia about a world in which when things are broken you can just pop the hood, roll up your sleeves and fix them – is a lot like reading someone else’s to-do lists, with none of the how will I ever get all of this done? thrills and suspense of your own to-do lists and without any of the satisfaction of being able to cross things off…
Not so much science fiction as checklist fiction.
Things I have learned from the movies: The Gift (Edgerton 2015)
That any two guys, no matter how big the differences between them – say, decades ago, back in high school, one of them lied about the other being gay, which resulted in endless bullying and the poor kid nearly being killed by his own father – can learn to get along. Even if the former victim must drug, rape and impregnate the wife of his former tormentor to make him confront the truth about the past and the flaws within himself.[1]
A heart-warming tale of two men learning to forgive each other and move on with their lives.
Notes
[1] But did he actually rape and impregnate her? Whooo-oooo, you’ll never actually know for sure. Which I guess makes it okay. Sort of. As long as, either way, the wife is always merely the mere terrain on which the two guys work out their conflict. Anything more would be political correctness gone mad!
Things I have learned from the movies: The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (Lawrence 2015)
When you have led a successful revolution and deposed a tyrant, you should not unnecessarily reveal that you intend merely to replace the tyrant and keep his system of state terror in place, nor, when subsequently presiding over the public execution of the former tyrant, should you elect to do so from a platform that, however elevated, is nonetheless in front of the firing squad, even if the firing squad is just a girl with a bow and arrow…
(Also, if you want to get the girl you can probably get away with using a second bomb to target rescue workers as they go to the aid of those injured by the first bomb. But you need to make sure her kid sister is not one of the rescue workers, you lunkhead. That’s Friendzone 101, Gale, Friendzone 101.)
Things I have learned from the movies: Contagion (Soderbergh 2011)
that we are all at risk from capitalist-globalisation, from world-spanning connections of commercial networks, over-extended food supply chains and international jet travel, from Jude Law’s teeth, bananas, vampire bats, vampire piglets and asian cuisine, but not as much at risk as we are from Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina – even though at the time she was married to Chris Martin, and Coldplay surely pose an immeasurably greater threat to us all…
Apocalypto (Mel Gibson 2006)
and so anyway it turns out the best thing about Apocalypto (2006) is not the sensitive, respectful and not-at-all-made-up way Mel Gibson, the mullet-toting Donald Trump of 80s action cinema,[1] depicts an ancient indigenous civilisation, nor is it his bizarre failure to cast white actors in the lead roles (perhaps Tom Cruise, given how much running there is – although surprisingly there is a Stephen Yardley lookalike among Jaguar Paw’s Mayan pursuers), nor is it the way in which catholic cultist Mel Gibson depicts indigenous people as being so obsessed with having nine or ten kids each that they might just as well be catholics, nor is it the way he depicts them as already having violence, disease and slavery so that they might just as well have Europeans around to run all that shit for them, nor is it the way he crams in pretty much every cliché of colonial adventure fiction you can imagine (human sacrifice, escape from sacrifice courtesy of a well-timed solar eclipse, jumping off a waterfall, running into quicksand, pan pipes over slow-motion action, and so on and so on, though sadly there are no rivers full of ‘devil fish’ and no one gets their foot trapped in a giant clam as the tide rises or walks backwards into a giant spider’s web – or escapes from an erupting volcano in a balloon), nor is it the way the to-be-sacrificed captives get painted blue, thus inspiring James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), no, the best thing about Apocalypto is that this DVD jacket is so badly printed that on the back the film seems to be described as a ‘THRILLING FUCK’…
Notes
[1] Steven Seagal, of course, is the lardy, pony-tail toting Donald Trump of 90s action cinema.
Mad Max Fury Road (George Miller 2015)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Mad Max Fury Road (2015), George Miller’s hilariously overblown and rather sandy remake of Waterworld (1995), is not the way it captures with uncanny precision the realities of the post-Brexit British utopia, nor the way Max is captured by a Duran Duran-worshipping cult led by Simon LeBon, who, frankly, has let himself go a bit (see above), nor the way Max’s straggly mullet is promptly shaved off so he looks less like Mel Gibson and more like the love child of Daniel Craig and Kenneth Cranham, nor the way Imperator Furiosa persuades Immortan Joe’s brides to escape with her in a big lorry to Tom Hardy’s myspace or something, but the way in which if you think about the film’s style and themes alongside Babe: Pig in the City (1998) and Happy Feet (2006) you finally have utterly incontrovertible evidence that auteurism is a genuine thing that explains films…
Mark Bould 