A Year In (lack of) Review
How long does it take to break a habit? 21 days? 66 days? 254? It's no secret that I've tried, albeit unsuccessfully, on several occasions to cut down on the number of posts here at World Of Blackout. Since beginning film reviews in 2011, they quickly became a hobby that turned into a dedication, and from there into a passion and at times a habit. A time-draining obligation, rather than something to be enjoyed for the hell of it. Because if I don't watch everything (within reason), how can I find unexpected gems hidden among the filler?
As noted at some length previously, the past-time which was intended to make me look at film differently had done just that, but the flipside of the coin is that a movie left not analysed can feel like it hasn't been seen at all. Because I watch(ed) far too many to be able to remember the minute details of why the bad ones were so unenjoyable. That's where the blog comes in handy*1. Very much a written version of 'pics or it didn't happen'.
FLURRY
Anyway. 2020. After my usual flurry of cinema visits in the first quarter and amid rising concern about The Unpleasantness, I sat in screen five of my local on March 17th to watch a screening of The Mandalorian. I didn't return to my second-favourite building in Didcot until August 2nd. 139 days later. The cinema had been closed for most of the intervening time, of course, but even so. And it was Star Wars which pulled me back, rather than the raft of archive programming Warner Bros had supplied to cinemas in lieu of July's 'new' content. I watched a few movies there after that, largely in almost-deserted auditoria*2, but have to admit that under the circumstances didn't feel entirely comfortable there. Don't get me wrong, Cineworld were doing everything they damned well could to keep the doors open while keeping their customers as safe as possible but y'know: a virus is still a virus, no matter how well intentioned the hazard tape and perspex screens are. Because you can't safeguard against people, as we've found out. I visited the cinema 44 times in 2020, the lowest since this reviewing-project began. It turns out, all that was needed to change my cycle was a global pandemic and its associated teetering economic collapse. Not exactly what I'd have wished for, but that's what we got.
Nonetheless, after over fourth months away, the habit was broken.
And properly broken. Because I wasn't really writing about movies I watched at home, either. The cinema itself has always been my focus for the blog; the time-specific event nature of being in that big room at 8pm as the lights go down and no one's allowed to talk to each other or look at their phones or ask where they know that actor from*3 or press pause to go to the toilet*4. The bottom line is that I don't have the concentration or self-discipline to sit down in the house at X o'clock and watch a film and concentrate entirely on it. That's what I use the cinema for. I need the routine, the ritual, of cinema to get the most out of a movie. It seems if I can flop down in the house and watch one at any time then I just won't.
As the first lockdown took hold, the more macabre side of my personality saw me opening the pages of H.P. Lovecraft*5 and managing a mini viewing-season of movies inspired by his works. Alas, what remained of a release schedule during the year felt largely uninspiring, and did not prompt more small-screen forays.
HUM
And so, what else of this poster-boy for the dictionary entry of annus horribilis? Well, with the lockdown leading to a sort of background hum of anxiety resulting in no extended periods of concentration on artistic pursuits; being lucky enough to have a job which means I could work from home 90% of the time and spend the other 10% in the office when it's deserted at the weekends; and my brain replacing one 'get me out of the house' addiction for another in the form of a frankly-insane-sounding fitness challenge (because if I'm not at the pictures, the time's got to go somewhere), it's been fairly quiet around Blackout Towers. Other family-based factors came into play in the middle of the year (non Pandemic-related, but made all the more complicated by that situation) to ensure that 2020 will be a year best forgotten, as soon as we're able. Oh, there is also my podcast.
Actually, under the circumstances I don't think that one hyperlink is fanfare enough. The podcast is called THE PEGGY MOUNT CALAMITY HOUR, and while there's a review 'aspect' to it, it's basically me and the magnificent Doctor Velvet taking the piss out of TV programmes from the 1970s and 1980s. I'd struggle to label it as Comedy™, but there is laughter (and booze) throughout. As of New Year's Eve we'll have cranked out 27 episodes in 2020, and we're very proud of it. You can listen/subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Mixcloud, Stitcher, TuneIn, YouTube, or even just bellow at your smart-speak and it'll play it (apparently). I should also point out that the podcast isn't intended to replace this blog, it just sort of has so far. It's definitely a different thing, though.
But hey, you came here because this is a review-site and I promised what little there was of a year to review. As in movies, not the year itself. And I did see some, although it feels like a lifetime ago. So let's have a look at what happened in the first two-and-a-bit months of 2020...
THE GOOD
The year kicked off with a much-anticipated outing which I appeared to give a relatively lukewarm reception, yet it's one I'd revisit another two times at the cinema (as well as going on a location-hunting pub-crawl!), then watch countless times after its release on DVD*6. The Gentlemen is far from perfect, but it's bloody good fun in an outlandish, self-contained way.
On a more unearthly bent, The Lighthouse is a stark, surreal and symbolistic masterpiece of art at the top of its game. Just under two hours of monochrome madness in an almost square aspect ratio, it's a film which is probably best appreciated than outright enjoyed, but every single frame is precisely what director Robert Eggers intended, and there's a purity to that which can't be beaten. Similarly, Saint Maud is a razor-tight slice of absolute paranoid perfection for fans of full-blown psychological horror.
And coming back to reality with a muted claustrophobic bump, Nick Rowland's Calm With Horses is an indie-drama set in rural Ireland which features performances worthy of the best intense city-centric crime thrillers. Barry Keogh and Niamh Algar play intricate, understated to support to the masterful Cosmo Jarvis, with the rest of the cast turning in roles which feel like Twin Town has been relocated to Craggy Island. It's beautifully bleak and not to be approached lightly.
But to put a real smile on your face, Armando Iannucci's The Personal History Of David Copperfield is, frankly, an absolute fucking joy. It's the film 2020 needed before it realised it was going to be 2020.
Other flicks which were Better-Than-Expected include the almost-inexplicably fun Sonic The Hedgehog, canine frontier-adventure The Call Of The Wild, Blumhouse's very (and very welcome) 21st century take on The Invisible Man, and the same studio's balls-to-the-wall revision of that old trope, The Hunt.
THE BAD
In the wise words of our friend Tanya, let's not fuck around. There was enough crap in the first quarter of 2020 to do us for the rest of the year; God alone knows what it would have been like if plague hadn't intervened. Michael Winterbottom's continuing collaboration with Steve Coogan went the full gleeful-self-indulgence in Greed, picking the broadest target that even early 2020 had to offer, and still managing to miss on account of Sony not actually wanting to slag off the retail industry, presumably on account of them having such a heavy stake in that as well. A lack of direction, narrative coherence and character-building make this one of the very worst films of even a limited bunch.
I say 'one of' because if anyone's going to fling glitter-strewn shit at a blanket and hope that enough sticks to be recognisable as a picture, it's going to be our friends at DC. Yes, Harley Quinn And The Fundamentally Unmarketable Title careered into our cinemas in February looking like a run down Ford Fiesta that had been smeared in glue and then used to ram-raid Claire's Accessories. With a story as aimless as the 'writer's room ADHD mood-board' which spawned it, this hastily assembled bolt-on to Suicide Squad set out on a mission to just have Fun™ but didn't even possess the basic organisation to achieve that. I went lightly on it at the time, but the taste it's left in my mouth over the intervening months demonstrates the full power of The Battleship Curve to chilling effect.
And speaking of effects, the year wouldn't be complete without a CGI migraine, punted out by Sony once more, and fronted by what convention dictates must be termed An Actor if only because he moves so he can't be proper wooden scenery. I refer, of course, to Dame Vin Diesel in Bloodshot, the crap movie's crap movie, a two-hour seizure-inducing screensaver, a constipated-faced girlfriend-fridging microcosm of everything that's wrong with the sausage-machine production of action cinema hoping to coast on the ticket-buying audience's goodwill. "Oh, this might be good!". It fucking isn't. Bloodshot is actively and unapologetically A Bad Film, and I feel no remorse in singling it out for abuse. No one forced me to watch it true, but no one forced Sony to make the fucking thing either. We play the hands we're dealt and we live with those choices. Vin Diesel chose to do this.
Oh and Dolittle. Christ.
Humanity deserves an asteroid, never mind a virus.
...AND THE INDIFFERENT
Okay, these are the tricky ones. The movies which make reviewing movies more difficult. There are usually some passable things to find within them, but the overall product is so insubstantial or mediocre than you know that you couldn't truthfully recommend anyone go out of their way to pay to watch them at a cinema. In fact, these are the movies which would also make for an absolute non-event of an evening indoors as well. There's not much to gush about but they're not atrocious enough for a good old-fashioned hate-watch. It's films like these which wear down my enthusiasm for cinema. 2020 was no different.
The year kicks off with awards-baiting season of course, and Bombshell, Just Mercy, Richard Jewell and Dark Waters all brought the most lacklustre methodology to highly emotive and morally righteous real-life stories. Basically, they're cinema for people who are interested in current affairs but not enough to watch the news.
Over in the land of make-believe, Spies In Disguise was a straight-to-video animated sequel which managed to land in theatres without the benefit of a much-stronger forebear, relying instead on Will Smith's name adorning the poster in what must have been an intense "one day in a recording studio" on his part. The Rhythm Section featured Blake Lively doing far better than Jude Law in an espionage procedural that's the equivalent of a roll of beige wallpaper, while everyone's favourite cardboard cutout Kristen Stewart leads a no-star cast through the grindingly adequate Aliens Underwater For People Who Haven't Already Seen Aliens Or The Abyss Or The Two Dozen Movies Exactly Like Them. At least Dave Bautista was precisely as one-note as he was always going to be in My Spy. I suppose I can't complain about that.
As for the rest of the year, with its mix of limited theatrical and straight-to-streaming releases as studios struggled to find a way, well lets just say that 2020 was great for burying things as Bang Average as Unhinged and Bill & Ted Face The Music*7 and The New Mutants - Fox's X-Menverse swansong that is every bit as woefully muddled as that troubled franchise deserves.
I've had enough of 2020 cinema and I was only there for about a quarter of it.
THE FUTURE?
I have no fucking clue, in all honesty. How would I? This year has burned me out and obviously the worst of it isn't over just because the calendar changes. With the UK currently in Tier 3/4 restrictions and on the verge of another full lockdown, it will be some time before my local cinema re-opens its doors*8. And when that happens, I want to be there. Or more accurately, I want to want to be there. But that's not ready for happening just yet, which is just as well because neither am I. DC's Wonder Woman 1984 and Pixar's Soul are currently doing the release-rounds, and I have little interest in even watching either, let alone writing about them.
World Of Blackout still stands of course, and I have at least two themed movie seasons of home-viewing literally sitting on the shelf waiting to go. I just don't currently have the mental bandwidth to give those the scrutiny they deserve. Despite me sporadically looking for 'an out' from movie reviewing, and despite this shit-show of a year then providing me with one, I'm not done yet. Like Cthulhu, I'm just resting. Waiting. It's all cyclical, and soon enough it will begin again in all its monstrous glory, no doubt*9.
Until then (and to use the phrase that's become the vacuously retooled Keep Calm And Carry On poster for 2020), stay fucking safe, yeah?
B.
Oxford, 2020.
So, instead of any cinematic content I can be arsed to actually write about, here's my seven question round-up of the year itself, instead...
1665.
Absolutely not.
Even the 2020 end-of-year clip show from Channel 5 will be unwatchable in its entirety. And not just because it's from Channel 5.
No, it is an exercise best left alone, as and when we can do so safely.
2020 is like a collaboration between Steven Soderbergh, Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay and Elizabeth Banks, brought to terrible life.
The one saving grace of 2020 is that I think we can all agree on how fucking dreadful it was.
There's been a faint screaming pretty much every day in the back of my head since around mid-February if that counts?
Level 0: I saw The Rise Of Skywalker, The Empire Strikes Back and even The Mandalorian in the cinema in 2020.
And that's being fucking generous, frankly.
*1 People who've met me in what we'll laughingly refer to as 'real life' will attest to the fact that while I can (indeed will) talk for hours on end about movies, conversations on cinematic stinkers are frequently punctuated with me going "right, let me just get my notes up" then going through a laundry-list of complaints I posted masquerading as a review at some point. No apologies for this. Pointing out that a film is crap is a tweet; pointing out why it's crap is a review. [ BACK ]
*2 The comparatively solitary nature of this was absolutely fucking fine by me of course, as that's how I prefer my screenings at the best of times. But it's no good when that attendance level applies to most performances and you're trying to keep a business afloat with re-runs of movies that people have either on the shelf at home, or one press of a Netflix/Amazon-shaped button away. I can hardly blame people for staying at home during a global pandemic, I was one of them. [ BACK ]
*3 Doesn't stop them of course. In the same way that signs stating "Customers must wear face coverings at all times, unless eating or drinking" are apparently translated as "Yeah, just buy a bag of popcorn and sit with it on your lap in the belief that this means you don't have to wear a mask even though you stopped eating it ten minutes into the film, you germy fuck.". Did I mention that I didn't feel entirely comfortable being back in the cinema? Because people? Tenet was busy to the point where I basically didn't dare breathe for two and half hours. [ BACK ]
*4 Although I'm sure that's in development somewhere. Built-in voting buttons on the seats where enough punters can get the film paused at any point so they can chat about the bits they don't understand while they sit with their shoes off. Did I mention that I'm not really missing the cinema at the moment? Because people? [ BACK ]
*5 An author of whom it's fair to say I like the idea of, rather than the actuality. Even leaving aside the more problematic elements of the man and how those infused his works, I've always found Lovecraft's prose somewhat inaccessible. While dripping dread antiquarian atmosphere, his inefficient paragraphs are far too long and feature way too many adjectives; the very epitome of style over content. Although it's become even more apparent over the years that this is now almost exactly how I myself am prone to writing. If only old Howard Phillips had employed sarcastic footnotes rather than xenophobia, we'd basically be on the same shelf, I'm sure. Yes, I'm saying I'm as good as H.P. Lovecraft. I told you this year had broken my brain. [ BACK ]
*6 Y'see, this is my brain. I've got Guy Ritchie's other gangster-flicks on DVD, so The Gentlemen has to be on DVD as well. I'm not going to re-buy them all on BluRay because I think they're perfectly enjoyable at standard-def on my laptop or the smaller telly in the spare room. My entire DVD/BluRay collection is split along these lines, until you get to Star Wars where I've got them on all formats. [ BACK ]
*7 I have to say I'm particularly impressed with the critical omertà surrounding Bill & Ted 3, joining the likes of Anchorman 2 and Zombieland: Double-Tap in being sequels to much-loved forebears which aren't particularly egregious, but that really have no fucking right existing. The world is precisely no better nor worse off for these movies existing, and it's easier to just politely not talk about them. [ BACK ]
*8 If, indeed, it's even able to do so. I mean I really don't want to be overly negative, but fans of cinema - even lapsed ones like me - are keeping an eye on this shit. [ BACK ]
*9 I mean here's me giving it all "Oh I'm not writing, I've got nothing to say!" - this blog post was only going to be three paragraphs, maybe four. And now look at it. And yeah you're right, I haven't mentioned 'those important films', 1917, Parasite or Tenet. Well, 1917 is very good but just doesn't seem to warrant mentioning above somehow, the relentless horror of war overshadowed by the rest of 2020. Parasite is basically fine. I can see it's great on a technical and intellectual level, it just didn't connect with me on an emotional one. And as for Tenet, let's just say it's not what a burned-out brain needs in a year like this. Mind you, Flash Gordon probably is and I still maintain that film is wilfully dreadful. I am however delighted that other people have fun with it after all these years.
Anyway, thank you for reading these footnotes. You've missed them this year, haven't you? The footnotes? I know I have.
[ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
