The A-word.
It's the bane of cinephiles, everywhere.
That book you love; the comic you remember; the show you used to watch; the game you lost an entire summer playing? Oh, someone's adapted it and it's getting made into a movie! Whether a cause for pre-emptive celebration or foreboding caution, it leads to only one thing: expectation. And expectation is the death of the 'clean' movie-viewing experience; no matter how closely the film sticks to its source material, or how much it tries to distance itself, it will be faced with the hurdle of comparison.
And while the movie industry loves the pre-built marketing buzz of 'now a major motion picture!', they loathe the comparative references which will be made from the first review onwards. Because many punters will expect to get exactly the same reaction from a completely different medium, to a story they already know. And therein lies the problem.
In this monthly series, we'll look back at some of the most respected and best-loved properties which have made the perilous journey to the big screen; often with some controversy, and almost always with far too much hype. This isn't so much a review of the films themselves, more an appraisal of their suitability as an adaptation.
And so, Adaptation-season jumps through the smaller screen for its televisual-phase, beginning with the 1960s. An expertly crafted mix of espionage, action and wry humour, ITV's The Avengers*1 was a mainstay on British TV screens throughout the decade. The show quickly elevated its supporting star Patrick Macnee to leading-man status as John Steed, then paired him up with a succession of more-than-capable female counterparts. Of the 161 episodes made, only 139 are known to survive intact to this day. Even so I'm not made of time, so I took in a sampling from the Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) era of the show, watching nine episodes from 1965, '66 and '67 (series 4 and 5)*2.
The first thing that strikes you is how effortlessly charming the series is, despite being inescapably cheesy. When Steed and Peel aren't discussing plot-based matters, they're zinging off each other with almost every line, their flourishes and quips working in tandem rather than competition. Both Macnee and Rigg carry this off perfectly. What's particularly nice for a 'vintage' show is that Emma Peel's character is treated as an equal (narratively at least), rather than an ornamental sidekick who's there for the dads. That said, there does seem to be a concerted effort to have her in a form-fitting black leather jumpsuit by the time of the inevitable melee at each episode's climax. And while there's the occasional mild flirting going on between the leads, there's never any suggestion that it's anything other than verbal sparring, which is kind of sweetly refreshing.
That said, these episodes were never made to be viewed back to back, and in the age of binge-watching the show's structural mainstays and callbacks quickly begin to look… formulaic. From each installment's prelude showing some nefarious force at large, to Steed calling round at Peel's house to brief her on the case, to the bit where they split up and arrive at the villain's lair separately pretending not to know each other like an episode of Hustle, all the way through to the impactless gunshots, shonky fight-choreography, and a coda of the pair driving calmly victorious down the road; you get the feeling each script more or less wrote itself, bar the initial setting and the antagonists' character names.
Once we get into series 5 the presentation moves from black and white into colour (a big deal at the time, I assure you youngsters). With it, the production budget seems to have been raised, too. There are far more exterior location scenes (these were used largely as establishing shots in the earlier episodes), and Emma Peel's wardrobe goes from suave sophistication to full on swinging sixties (which helps accentuate the shows's colour, to be fair). But something seems to have been lost in the transition, with the more formal feel of the monochrome days behind it. By this point, the James Bond series was four movies into its stride and providing stiff competition in mixing spies, stunts and satire. While the Avengers episodes I watched from series 5 were still entertaining enough, there's the feeling that the writers were starting to feel constrained by hour-long, standalone stories. The programme was far from over of course, and went on for another thirty-three entries for its sixth and final series, before being rebooted as The New Avengers in 1976 (which lasted for a comparably short twenty-six episodes over two series).
All in all though, The Avengers is great, stylish fun, and proof that if the premise is strong and your leading characters have enough personality, the rest of the show will fall into place around them. It makes absolute sense that a big-screen adaptation would be on the cards at some point. I imagine this is why the film was commissioned, at least.
One thing which isn't addressed in the episodes I watched though, is who are the Avengers working for? Although we see a couple of his informants, Steed isn't shown having any contact with superiors or managing organisation. Who's alerting them to these injustices that they find with alarming regularity? Who are they accountable to if they mess up or even fail completely? Week in week out, people are dying here, and there doesn't seem to be any sort of handover or cleanup operation. Again, I suppose it's refreshing in the 21st century to watch a spy franchise which isn't bogged down with procedural bureaucracy, but still. Apart from anything else, who's bankrolling Emma Peel's wardrobe? She wears a lot of white in the early episodes, and that blood isn't going to come out, mark my words…
My favourite line comes from 1967's A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Station. Steed is having a face-off with the evil genius he's unmasked as being behind a mysterious series of deaths on a train line running into King's Cross:
Villain: You see, I am going to blow up your Prime Minister!
Steed: Oh… how do you know which way I voted?
I saw this film upon its cinematic release at Dreamland Cinema, Margate. I have vague memories of vaguely enjoying it, although not to the point of a) renting or buying the domestic-release or b) actually seeing it again, at all. I certainly didn't pan it to the point of most critics, otherwise it wouldn't have been chosen for Adaptation. Of course, I watched films differently in 1998. So a revisit after nineteen years should prove interesting...
Yeah, it's not great is it? Alarm bells start to ring when you notice the run-time is only 86 minutes, which isn't usually a great sign with live-action movies. And if writer Don MacPherson*3 and director Jeremiah Chechik are scaling up 50-minute TV episodes but can't break the hour-and-a-half mark? Well, it does not set the mind at ease for the journey to come...
And what a meandering and turbulent ride that is. The very dictionary-definition of British™, Ralph Fiennes dons the mantle of Steed, while his opposite number Mrs Peel is portrayed by Uma Thurman, who was at that time hot off the back of Pulp Fiction, Gattaca and Batman & Robin. Well, quite. Sean Connery and Jim Broadbent have been employed to play themselves (as per), and there's a bit of textbook stunt-casting in the form of Eddie Izzard and Shaun Ryder as evil henchmen. Well. Quite.
So what went wrong? The core idea of the film, that a crazed scientist is holding world leaders to ransom with engineered lethal weather patterns, is perfectly apt for the Avengers. The series was never about hard espionage, but the movie version borrows as much from the feel of 1996's Mission: Impossible as it does the James Bond pantheon. We're at least introduced more properly to Steed's employer this time, in the form of 'The Ministry', and it's interesting how much foreshadowing of Kingsman this entails*4. But the problem here is in the execution, not the concept...
No matter the genre or method of delivery, some titles feature the cast emoting, interacting and… well, acting, whereas others just feel like the performers are standing in a room waiting to deliver each line. The Avengers is the second one. A leaden script weighs down proceedings all round, but never moreso than the leading pair; Steed and Peel quip and snipe as usual but there's an uncharacteristic level of actual flirting here, while Fiennes and Thurman paradoxically share absolutely no screen-chemistry. They're also not entirely suitable for the parts they're playing. Thurman manages the British™ accent well enough, but that's about it. Fiennes meanwhile is far too posh for this role. Patrick Macnee's Steed (the actual definitive version, remember) was well-spoken and unfailingly polite, but not 'posh'. This means when it comes to getting his hands dirty, the 1998 iteration of the hero carries a look of disgust, rather than determination.
Dragging along the other end, Connery is neither good nor bad, of course; he is just Connery; an act which either works for a film or does not. Funnily enough, this outing makes an interesting viewing companion to his appearance in last month's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I think the fundamental problem is setting this film in 'the present day'. Had it been a period-piece in the 1960s (a la Man From U.N.C.L.E.), it might have retained some of its innate charm. Unlike Bond and M:I, the primary-phase Avengers didn't try to move beyond their era, they embraced it and bowed out gracefully. As opposed to being booed off the stage.
I'm very aware that my pre-amble at the top states that this wouldn't be a review of the film, but its suitability as an adaptation. Unfortunately, the manifold problems with 1998's Avengers are precisely why it fails to carry on the legacy of Macnee and RIgg. Had this been an unbranded spy-caper it would have disappeared without trace, and certainly without the malice it attracted (or earned, depending on your point-of-view).
Misguided, certainly, but quite not a total failure, the oversize teddy bear costumes and CGI hornets of The Avengers aren't even the most painful part. Bad writing and terrible casting conspire to hobble what could (should) have been a fun, disposable cinematic romp. A lesson for us all, Chechik's film at least serves as evidence that Steed and Peel belong on the small screen...
Hell, yeah.
Hell, no.
The early one as a televisual history lesson; the latter out of morbid curiosity.
Not in the TV episodes I watched, and I didn't hear one in the film.
Level 1: The TV series featured, across its considerable run, appearances from Christopher 'Dooku' Lee, Peter 'Tarkin' Cushing, Julian 'Veers' Glover, Caroline 'Mothma' Blakiston, Brian 'Nass' Blessed, Michael 'Needa' Culver, Bruce 'Rieekan' Boa, Drewe 'Red Leader' Henley and Peter 'All Of The Stunts Throughout The OT' Diamond.
The movie version features Christopher 'voice-work on Battlefront and The Old Republic' Godwin. Outside of the iconic Laurie Johnson TV theme, scoring duties are handled by Joel 'Shadows of the Empire' McNeely. Not quite as impressive but you do what you can, I suppose.
*1 Arriving on our TV screens on 1961, the show pre-dated Marvel's famous comic-title by two years. And even though the ill-fated 1998 film had been subconsciously blanked-out by most movie-goers for over a decade, when it came to the 2012 MCU teamup, the decision was made to amend the UK title to 'Avengers Assemble' to avoid confusion between the two properties. No, seriously. After all, you wouldn't want a punter looking at a poster of Captain America, Iron Man and The Hulk while saying to their partner "let's not bother with this Avengers film, it's obviously a continuation of that misguided Ralph Fiennes outing from the last century and clearly nothing to do with the concentrated marketing blitz of Marvel/Paramount that's being going on for four years now…"[ BACK ]
*2 If you want an indication of how society in general has changed, the show's leading actor Patrick Macnee was born in 1922. So at the time of the 1966 episode of The Avengers, The Danger Makers, he was forty-four years old. While he's obviously dressed 'in character' for his part, the man is nonetheless perfectly suited to his level of sartorial maturity and accompanying deportment. I only mention this because while I was admiring his suits during watching, it really hit home that there was a comparison to be made. See if you can guess which one of these is me…
I am minded once more of the words of vampire and raconteur, Louis de Pointe du Lac:
"But times were different then. I was a man at your age…"[ BACK ]
*3 And sorry to go leaping in here right off the bat, but for the script's inclusion, mangling and butchering of a Blade Runner "time to die" reference, it can fuck right off. [ BACK ]
*4 Bizarrely, there's also an unintentional foreshadowing of 1999's Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, with a road-chase between Steed/Peel and a horde of giant mechanical hornets. The pursuit takes place on narrow, unmarked country roads - typical of the famous British countryside. But there are also intercut shots clearly produced in post-production pickup filming, with different colour-timing, where the road is twice as wide as the UK standard, and is divided by a central, unbroken white-line.
I am minded once more of the words of Mr Austin Danger Powers:
"You know what's remarkable? How much England looks in no way like Southern California...."[ 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.
I'm a fickle cinemagoer, I'll freely admit. We're smack in the middle of 'silly season' with a studio tent-pole movie landing almost every week, the knock-on result of which being that my local five-screener is taken up for months on end with a relatively small quantity of movies, all petering out of rotation with the next release hot on its heels. And then, when we do get something a little different, I stare blankly at the listings web-page grumbling "well what the hell is this that I've seen neither a trailer nor poster for in my cinema?". It's 47 Metres Down and it's a shark movie. Or, to put it more accurately, A Shark Movie™.
When friends Kate (Claire Holt) and Lisa (Mandy Moore) go on holiday to Mexico together, they decide to forego another day by the hotel pool and see some of the local wildlife, taking in an unregistered shark-spotting cruise to get up close and personal with their finned friends from the safety of a submerged cage. And for obvious reasons, this film wasn't made to chronicle thirty minutes of ooh-ing, a few photos for the album and cocktails back at the bar by sundown…
Now by this point, you'll have two questions. 1) Who needs a shark-based flick at the cinema when Asylum are doing such a sterling job of shovelling them all straight to VOD, albeit with additional gunships, zombies, nazis etc? And 2) But how does all this compare to Blake Lively becoming increasingly fraught and decreasingly clothed as she tries to get back to shore? The answer to the first of those is a noncommittal shrug. The second, I'll come back to later.
No please, tell us again in the first ten minutes how the shark-cage will only be lowered 5 metres into the water, on the off-chance that the seated audience has forgotten what the film is called…
The problem is how staggeringly pedestrian the whole thing is. Because unless you're following the aforementioned Asylum model, the general rule is: in water = danger, not in water = safe. And since that movie in 1975 both kickstarted and nullified the genre in a single stroke, countless others have tried to do The Same Thing But Different, and to mixed results. It gives me no great pleasure to report that 47 Metres Down is a film of mixed results.
On the plus-side, it's quite nice to see A Shark Movie™ where the hungry sea-dwellers aren't actually demonised as being a bunch of subaqueous bastards. For obvious reasons they're a threat in this movie, but it's also evident that's because the tour organisers are throwing buckets of chum into the water, followed by live-bait in the form of two hapless holidaymakers. Tonally, this is like the first ten minutes of an episode of Casualty, stretched out for an hour and a half. Indeed, from snapped winch-cables to trapped limbs and grabbing a harpoon by the business end, Kate and Lisa are dogged so relentlessly by bad maritime luck, I swear to god there's a deleted scene where they kill and eat an albatross the previous night…
Director Johannes Roberts conjures a good sense of agoraphobia once the main thrust of the film kicks in (after around ten minutes, this isn't a long movie so has little time to mess around), but with the requisite mood-lighting and dramatic score, it'd be hard not to. The underwater choreography is nice, although the cinematography comes off as murky, especially given that the characters start by saying "you can see for miles down here!" when the camera is pointing back up to the surface, so the audience can't (hazards of filming in a tank, I suppose.). Then again, a short orchestral silence followed immediately by a shark suddenly appearing out of the murk is the film's primary weapon, so this is to be expected. It's a solidly constructed tale, but in the pantheon of shark movies that just means it's predictable. Doesn't have to be, just is.
No please, explain nitrogen-narcosis induced hallucinations for the third time in five minutes, just so that everybody in the audience knows exactly what's you've got in mind for the third act…
The two lead characters are sketched in at the beginning, but only as much as the plot actually requires. Claire Holt's Kate blithely spills her best friend's glass of red wine in an opening-scene foreshadowing, and cares so little about the wastage of hotel-priced alcohol that I'd happily have thrown her into a shark-tank for that alone. Kate, on the other hand, seems to have been written in as the film's Captain Obvious, narrating developments for the hard-of-thinking and wasting precious oxygen with shrill observations like "I'm so scared!", "You're going to run out of air!", "We're going to die down here!" and "There are sharks everywhere!". I'm fully aware that real people say stupid things in dangerous situations, but that's not why I go to the cinema.
And speaking of speaking, the film jumps its obvious communication-hurdle by having radio-sets in the characters' scuba masks. Which is fine, except their ears are visibly outside the seal of the masks, and they don't appear to be wearing corresponding earpieces. Even assuming the receiver-speaker is on the inside, their ears are still insulated by the water outside, so it'd have to be loud enough to vibrate through their eyeballs, surely? I'm sure a lot of you lovely readers are scuba divers and will set me straight on this in the comments-section. I thank you in advance.
No, please, go ahead and homage 'the head shot' from Jaws. Since you're now demonstrably out of ideas, I shall expect the film to end imminently...
So, whereas The Shallows had a heavy subtext about grief, this movie features two young American women on holiday in Mexico, where they're talked into going on an illegal shark-spotting cruise by a pair of dodgy blokes in a bar and naturally everything goes wrong because they trusted the foreigners. Is this Trump's Hollywood?*2 Is this what we can expect for the next three and a half years? Dear lord.
But on the plus-side, if you're 15 and haven't seen any shark movies before, you're going to fucking love this…
Predictable disaster movies featuring protagonists with poor decision-making skills, bleeding onto everything in sight.
Not particularly, although it might as well be BIG, if anything.
…probably / maybe / sometimes / no?
To be honest, I have absolutely no idea.
And that's the way I like it.
Probably not. Try me.
There isn't.
Level 2: Matthew Modine's in this, and he was in that Full Metal Jacket with Bruce 'Rieekan' Boa.
*1 That's 47 Meters Down if you're in the US. Or 135ft, 2 inches Down if you're in the UK and still clinging to some misguided notion of imperialism despite decimalisation being a system which makes far more sense to actual humans in the 21st century. Oh yeah, I went there. Seriously though, talk about fucking up the marketing hashtags for an international audience. But in all fairness, the registered BBFC listing says "Metres", as does the poster up there, as does the film's title-card, which I was quite impressed by. I mean, only impressed in that someone went to the trouble of changing it as if that was going to be the clincher between 'gripping thriller' and 'emotionally illiterate, mechanical sharkathon'. [ 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.
Well it's not every day I'm pleasantly surprised by a film that's essentially a mashup of Weird Science and a 1986 Viz character. Not least when it deftly borrows the freeze-frame fourth-wall-breaking of Deadpool, the evil genius with a shrink/enlarge weapon from Ant-Man and the mass-mutation beam of the X-Men movies, and manages to clock in with a U certificate, to boot.
Dreamworks' Captain Underpants is the big-screen debut of Dav Pilkey's books by the same name (and alas clocking in too late for this year's Adaptation series) and follows school-friends Harold and George as they unwittingly bring to life their own cartoon creation, the eponymous captain.
First things first, this is a silly film. Delightfully, masterfully silly, in fact. Don't let the BBFC rating make you think it's been unduly sanitised on its journey to the cinema, although there's comparatively little in the way of double-entendres*1 'for the parents'. If you're going to enjoy this with your youngsters, it'll be because you're on the same level*2. Which is, in all honesty, the best way anyhow. While the film isn't entirely devoid of 'message', comedy is the foundation here. And if the grown-ups can have movies like that, why shouldn't the kids? The bottom line is, I laughed more in the first five minutes of this film than I did in the entirety of Cars 3.
Although it dips in and out of various animation styles for small set-pieces, the majority of presentation is in smooth CGI models (thankfully in the artwork style of the source-text). Personally I'd have preferred something which felt like it held a little more weight, ie stop-motion style, even if that was simulated. But at the end of the day, this is Dreamworks, not Laika. And speaking of such matters, the two lead characters would probably be better if they'd been voiced by kids instead of 'enthusiastic sounding men', but it's not like this pulled me out of the fun at all.
At 89 minutes this is a lean show, but the runtime fits the story that's being told and the film ends just before it runs out of narrative steam (there's a mid-credits scene if you're so-inclined). Sure, in the long-term maybe it's a little forgettable, but as some animated features are forgettable while you're watching them, it's ridiculously entertaining throughout. And in the Summer-holidays, that counts for a lot.
The cleanest toilet-humour you'll see this year, and all the better for it. If you don't laugh during this film, you were probably never a child.
Minions, Weird Science, things containing fart-jokes.
If you have padawans you'll probably be dragged along to it anyway.
That's no bad thing.
Yep.
Well, I think Kevin Hart has found his natural cinematic home…
Nope.
No.
Which, in a film like this, is frankly ridiculous.
Level 1: This film features the work of Thomas 'additional voices in The Old Republic' Middleditch.
*1 That said, the 'uranus' joke is mined on more than one occasion and like a Stewart Lee routine, just gets funnier each time. [ BACK ]
*2 Because y'know, not every building in a movie that's numbered '213' is a reference to Jeffrey Dahmer/Slayer. I accept that now. [ 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.
Now, being a snob is a terrible thing of course. That said, one of the best things about this terrible thing is knowing full well you're a snob and just rolling with it. And so I found myself in screen 2 of my local on Monday night, rolling my eyes at the sound of an audience laughing out of pre-programmed obligation, determined to find something audibly amusing here since they'd been told they were coming to see A Comedy Film™.
I am a comedy snob. The Big Sick isn't funny*1.
There, I said it.
The story follows Chicago stand-up comedian Kumail (Kumail Nanjiani) as he falls for Emily (Zoe Kazan), a girl he meets at one of his shows*2. But Kumail's Pakistani heritage clashes with Emily's commitment issues and awkwardly-white parents, and things come to a sudden head when Emily falls seriously ill and has to be placed into a coma…
And so, the film industry continues to re-invent itself. We've seen the dawn and development of Post-Horror, now comes Post-RomCom; a genre where both the traditional Rom and the Com have been replaced with meandering, melodramatic, mawkishness, overlaid with underwritten characters and forced awkwardness in lieu of jokes. It's not even that the central premise - a layering of cultural integration and life-threatening illness - is an 'unsuitable' subject for comedy, just that the film isn't as deft, incisive or challenging as it would like to be.
As if the (perceived) lack of humour wasn't enough to annoy me, the structure and pacing of the film are all over the place, too. Usually for this sort of thing*3, there's about 30-40 minutes of gags at the start, before things take a more ponderous, plot-progressing tone. The only concession that writers Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon seem to have made to this end, is to include a swathe of brick wall stand-up club comedians as supporting characters*4. Although naturally as they aren't the lead players, they're not allowed to be as funny as stand-up comedian Kumail. Who also isn't funny. But don't worry, this doesn't drag on for too long, as in fairly short order we're into Emily being coma-induced and the introduction of her sketchily-written mildly-xenophobic parents. The initial romance between the leads doesn't have the time it needs to bed in, Kumail crosses the cultural bridge with Emily's folks far too quickly and with no real feeling of resolution, and the emotional conflict he has with his own parents feels like it's been wrapped up with a day's pick-up filming. Marketed as A Rom-Com, the best thing I can say about the film is while it fails in its primary objectives, it's nothing less than the advertised run-time. And even then, the film feels about 30 minutes too long. Although at times it felt like it was going to be about 120 minutes too long, so every cloud…
In terms of (acting) performance, Nanjiani and Kazan are on relatively good form; just relatively good at being borderline unlikeable characters, which is a problem in a vehicle such as this. It's no great spoiler to say that the film has A Happy Ending™, you're just left with the feeling that neither lead character really deserves it. Still, The Big Sick appears to be at least semi-autobiographical, with Kumail both co-writing and starring in a lead role (nice of him to shoulder the burden), plus a smattering of 'hey, some of these people are real!!' photos over the closing credits. You get the impression that our hero wasn't excruciated enough having to live through this the first time and he's now trapped in some kind of behavioural loop as a penance*5.
I wanted to like The Big Sick on general principle, but it turned out that my reservations from watching the trailer were borne out in full. I don't doubt the good intentions of the film for a second, but it's patronising and self-indulgent beyond belief. Like throwing a party for yourself and only inviting strangers so they won't know you're bullshitting when you make your thank you speech. And as much as I've moaned about the film, I got home from the cinema, typed up the points I wanted to make in my review, went to bed and had been awake for about two hours the next day before I even remembered that I'd been to watch it. That's the impact it had.
Obviously The Big Sick is not as flat-out appalling as The House, but that should go without saying.
.
£3 DVD, tops.
Be a lazy get-out for Kumail and Emily's kids/grandkids when they ask 'how did you meet?' and they can just slap a DVD on? Yeah.
No.
Oh, probably not.
There isn't.
Level 2: This film stars Zoe Kazan, who was in What If along side Adam 'Kylo' Driver, and which had a remarkably similar poster to this movie…
*1 Credit where it's due, the punchline to the "You've never talked to people about 9/11?" gag from the trailer is good (punchline not in trailer); that's it. In two full hours, that is it. [ BACK ]
*2 Kumail is a stand-up comedian and Uber-driver (his day-job). I'm not exactly sure what Emily 'does'. Kumail gets two jobs; Emily gets fitness-aerobics once a week as a plot-device. Her vocation is evidently so inconsequential that it's either mentioned fleetingly or not-at-all in the script. If it is brought up, then it makes so little difference to the outcome of the film that I've forgotten it completely and the film's own Wiki page doesn't bother to mention it, either. Basically, she's The Girl One™. And in any other film that'd be bad enough, but remember that the actual, real-life Emily co-wrote this film. Insert thumbs-up emoji here, indeed.
[ BACK ]
*3 Assuming the Producer-role for this outing, Judd Apatow seems to be positioning himself as the Richard Linklater of studio-comedy. I've got news pal, he's self-centeredly crap as well... [ BACK ]
*5 Oh, I almost forgot the film's other joke. As seen in the trailer, the girl whom Kumail's parents have invited to dinner awkwardly notes that Kumail likes the X-Files and then twenty minutes later his mobile rings and it plays the X-Files theme music. This is a callback. It's just not a funny one. It's also not a particularly relevant one in 2017, unless you're still an X-Files geek (fair enough), and you think that hearing the theme music to your favourite show is clever and/or amusing (unlikely). I imagine the reaction of most members of the applicable demographic to be much the same as my own when someone makes an "I am your father" gag in my presence and I want to cave their head in with a housebrick shouting "YOUR CULTURAL REFERENCE IS THIRTY SEVEN YEARS OLD AND NO LONGER RELEVANT UNLESS YOU'RE ALSO WORKING IN SOME CONTEMPORARY ASPECT OR RELEVANT COMEDIC INVERSION: WHICH YOU ARE NOT."[ 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.
Dunkirk Cert: 12A / 106 mins / Dir. Christopher Nolan / Trailer
Well it's hard for me to absolutely rave over Dunkirk, not least since all I've seen for the last fortnight is pull-quotes telling me how life-altering an experience it would be, setting the bar unreasonably high. It's not. It's very good and certainly a unique film, but while he thankfully steers clear of the open-goal mawkishness of the genre, Nolan's project almost feels held back by its run-time and Certificate 12A compliance*1. This is a beautiful looking piece of work, with Hoyte Van Hoytema's cinematography and the outstanding sound design stealing the show from the on-screen performers*2 (Hans Bjnerno's aerial camerawork is particularly balletic).
The film follows three groups of people (beginning separately one week, one day and one hour before the Dunkirk evacuation) as their story threads gradually intertwine in the heat of battle. A British soldier desperately trying to leave the beach before attacking enemy aircraft kill him and his comrades, a small pleasure cruiser which sets off from Weymouth to assist in the rescue mission, and a trio of Spitfire pilots headed across the English Channel to help take out the attacking Nazi forces. Chronologically it's not a 'regular' film, and I felt a little resistance from the audience I was seated with*3, particularly since once the timelines begin to converge it briefly makes less sense, not more. Overall, while the period-detail is exquisite here*4, the story is more about feeling and tension, and the realising (of course) that the people who lived through those moments didn't know how it would all turn out.
But I particularly liked that a film of this scale only ever tells its stories from an individual (or small group) perspective. The grandiose morale-boosting and general flag-waving of most war epics is all but absent. If anything, the film succeeds thoroughly in presenting the misery and confusion of armed conflict. Dunkirk is to the war-movie genre what It Comes At Night is to horror; eschewing the tradition of self-contained narratives to be more of a visual tone-poem.
Unusually for Nolan's work, I'd have preferred the film to be about half an hour longer, or at least more tightly knit, to do more justice to the individual unfolding stories.
Although if we'd had that extra screen-time, I'm pretty sure it would have gone towards an extension of Sugary-Tom's Scenic Sky-Tours…
[ Spoilery-bit: highlight to read ]
Seriously though, not withstanding the question of 'could a Spitfire glide for that long after its engine has cut out?', what's Tom's game here? I'd assumed he was trying to keep the plane in one piece and land it for repair and re-use, since it had only ran out of fuel. But then he gently lands on the far end of the beach, torches it and awaits capture by Ze Germans. If he's trying to keep the machinery out of enemy hands, why not just parachute out earlier and let it crash? Plus, if he'd bailed out by the pier, Commander Branagh could have picked him up instead of an armed Nazi escort. Because there's no fucking way they're letting him live after his antics up there.
Difficult to say as I've not really seen anything like this, tonally.
For the big screen and big sound, absolutely.
I have absolutely no doubt that this is the film Christopher Nolan wanted to make, and that is a great thing.
Nope; Inception.
Nope.
Not that I heard.
Poor show.
Level 2: Not including a plethora of level-1 stunt performers, this film stars that Mark Rylance, and he's in the upcoming Ready Player One alongside Ben 'Krennic' Mendelsohn, Hannah 'First Order Officer' John-Kamen and Simon 'Plutt' Pegg.
*1 Is it wrong of me to want a 15-rated version of this film? To really ramp up the carnage? I wasn't expecting Hacksaw Ridge, but there's a film that doesn't flinch from the terror of warfare. [ BACK ]
*2 While the ensemble cast are on generally fine form here (even Tom 'The Mumbler' Hardy who - naturally - is given a flight-mask to talk through), I can't not say that Mark Rylance plays civilian rescuer Mr Dawson like it's the first time he's read his lines, and Barry Keoghan plays his young charge George like he hasn't been given a script. Both are far better than this and the film succeeds in spite of them, not because.
There. I said it. [ BACK ]
*3 Bless them though, I've moaned about the cinema-etiquette of senior audiences in the past, but this lot were on best behaviour. Not a rustling wrapper or mid-movie conversation to be heard. [ BACK ]
*4 Although as I was leaving, I overheard one patron saying to her friends "the only thing was, the seats on that train in the end looked too modern!", referencing a post-evacuation scene back in Blighty. It was all I could to to keep myself from interjecting 'That's probably because you've sat on them. Train companies were still running that same stock (albeit refurbished) in and out of London until the late 1990s'. I'm not even a train geek, I just used to commute on the rattly bastards… [ BACK ]
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• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
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The Avengers
The Avengers
