Sweet Nothings

So the latest Marvel blockbuster looks set to bomb at the box office, while the rumblings of discontent about Marvel Studios’ output grow ever more ominous. Seems like a good time to take stock of the MCU. The Marvels: not bad 😐 Re The Marvels itself: C haracter overload? The MCU has so many characters now that this is no surprise. Brie Larson may well have been miffed to be sharing top billing, but when you choose to make a character so powerful, how else are you going to create jeopardy other than giving them weaker companions to look after? It’s more or less the whole premise of Doctor Who. Production troubles? Director Nia DaCosta has played down rumours of friction, maintaining that the movie was designed to last 105 minutes (super-brisk for a modern blockbuster). But a definite lack of coherence and skimpy character motivations suggest that several scenes have been cut. It was hardly worth Samuel L Jackson turning up. But: despite all this, it’s still enjoyable enough. If Marv...

It’s fun, obviously. Not everything works - a sub-plot with evil Mattel CEO Will Ferrell and his boardroom of male cronies goes nowhere, Helen Mirren’s narration gets mislaid for long periods. But considering the sheer weirdness of the marriage of IP and director, it’s an achievement for this movie to exist at all. Many have bemoaned the likes of Marvel hiring indie directors and subsuming them into their meat grinder formula. If only they were given (mostly) carte blanche! (Edgar Wright’s Ant Man is the Great Lost Movie in this regard). Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is the actual answer. But is it really as radical as you might think? Yes, Gerwig and partner Noah Baumbach are to be congratulated for making a subversive feminist parable about a plastic doll into a billion dollar movie. But the megalithic toy corporation who gave them full backing will be even more ecstatic. Rather than being damaged by this spotlighting of their flaws, Mattel and Barbie’s stocks have rarely been higher. The Ba...

Update: Oh dear, no new posts since I got back from my honeymoon. In my defence, I’ve been trying to write a novel, a process which mostly involves finding new ways to procrastinate from actually sitting down to write a novel. I’ve found that buying a house, moving house and decorating a new house work quite well in that regard. Anyway, free movie preview time! There is so much depressing stuff on the internet (or at least the parts of the internet that men tend to visit) about how women aren’t funny, and how dare these silly tarts be starring in comedy films when there are more than enough male comics to do the job. One of the leaders of the fightback, ironically, is Paul Feig, who directed arguably the best mainstream comedy of recent years in Bridesmaids, and who always features women in promenant roles, including his upcoming all-girl Ghostbusters remake (which would blatantly be SO much better with Sandler or Ferrell in it, right lads?). Melissa McCarthy seems to b...

It was the internet that did it for me. I’d been watching the Tour de France every year since the early 90s, but I was hardly a cycling devotee. So whilst I didn’t exactly enjoy watching Lance Armstrong dominate the Tour for seven long years, that was because he always won it so easily with very little in the way of competition rather than due to doping-based doubts. I used to read the Sunday Times during that period too, and I remember reading pieces by David Walsh, one of my favourite sports writers, questioning the legitimacy of Armstrong’s accomplishments. But his was a lone voice at that point. The rest of the media and wider world had chosen, wrongly, to believe in miracles. Then a few years later, in the wake of innumerable doping scandals, I began to read a couple of cycling forums, where the equation was put quite simply. Given that all Lance’s rivals were subsequently busted for or implicated in doping, with EPO and blood transfusions pervading the peloton throu...

American Hustle has been nominated for ten Oscars and Baftas, as well as seven Golden Globes (three wins), two Screen Actors Guild awards (winning best ensemble) and a host of others. It’s still not entirely clear why. Maybe because of its look? The film begins with a dishevelled Christian Bale painstakingly glueing on a hairpiece, and fashion-wise it boldly continues in this vein with all manner of alarming coiffures, ill-fitting suits, optimistic dresses and many other aesthetic atrocities. David O Russell and his production designers have clearly had a ball recreating the Seventies in all its shambolic glory and the actors lap it up too. But it surely can’t just be down to spectacle or else all manner of terrible films would be up for gongs too. Perhaps it’s the story. Con artist capers are a Hollywood mainstay and usually guarantee audience engagement thanks to the twists and turns. Hustle’s plot keeps expanding as Bale and Amy Adams’s small-time swindlers, once they...

It felt like Disney were almost daring me to take against Saving Mr Banks . A film celebrating the making of one of their own beloved classics, with all-round-nice-guy Tom Hanks on board to ensure Uncle Walt comes across as cuddly as possible, plus the highly imaginative casting of Emma Thompson alongside him as a brittle English lady? Self-indulgent don’t even begin to cover it. And yet, the fulsome praise in the aftermath of the initial previews suggested that my cynicism was entirely unfounded. Had Disney pulled off the audacious trick of making a great movie out of such transparently cynical ingredients? The story has Mary Poppins's author (PL) Travers-ing across the Atlantic to do battle with Disney and his minions over her creation’s soul. Too protective of Mary to let her go and too proud to admit she needs the Mouse’s money, she represents a spin on the stock fish-out-of-water character – someone who ought to be completely out of her depth, but who exerts h...

I had reservations about Gravity going in, as it has been compared to (amongst other things) 2001, which for me is a tediously dry art piece rather than an actual film. I needn’t have worried, as Alfonso Cuaron’s film is far more concerned with the fates of actual characters than pretentious esoteric musings on the nature of humanity. No monkey suits, either. It starts off with Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) and some other guy – who, if this were Star Trek, would be sporting a really red shirt – on a spacewalk. Sandra is nervy and inexperienced, whilst George is all smooth and Clooneyish. Some technobabble later and sundry space junk is flying at them at alarming speeds. Let the thrills begin. The BBFC now quite often warns viewers, tongue often in cheek, when films contain ‘mild peril’. Gravity boasts sustained sequences of genuine jeopardy, of the type that’s conspicuously absent in, say, Superman and General Zod smashing up an entire city of...

Three very different films that can be described as romantic comedies to varying degrees, all seen ahead of their UK release dates (in the States or at the LFF) - this is almost like being a proper reviewer! The buzz for Enough Said , which came out on Friday (oh), is mostly around what has sadly turned out to be James Gandolfini’s final performance. Writer/director Nicole Holofcener’s film is a lot more than that, and certainly deserves better than its tediously generic ladies-only poster campaign. Julia Louis-Dreyfus plays Eva, a single middle-aged massage therapist whose daughter is about to leave for college. She meets Gandolfini’s aimiable schlub Albert at a party and they slowly, hesitantly fall in love, until the inevitable spanner hits the works. Most synopses and reviews have spoilerifically revealed the exact nature of said spanner, which won’t ruin the film for you by any means, but I’m glad I didn’t know what was coming. And although some of the plot po...

One thing that’s really hit home this year is that expectations can be a real killer for movies. Take The Social Network   I adore The West Wing and most of Aaron Sorkin’s other work (stepping gingerly around Studio 60), and therefore I was almost indecently excited when I heard he’d written a tale about the creation of Facebook and even more so when I heard early reviews. It’s a highly accomplished film for sure, but I found myself constantly thinking “this isn't quite as good as the West Wing”, or “not sure about that sequence”, or “this cinematography is too darn dark!”, thereby ensuring that my colossal expectations were never likely to be met. Conversely, I went to see Toy Story 3 in Durban after a month in South Africa during which I’d been largely cut off from movie hype. Even though I expected it to be good, there was always a feeling that surely Pixar were milking the franchise slightly, as the third film of any series is wont to do (assuming a trilogy wasn’t the ...

Three movie previews in as many days! When will this breakneck excitement ever end? Firstly, to the Empire Leicester Square on Sunday morning. A new cinema for me, and I quickly discovered that Screen 2’s screen begins at ground level, thereby ensuring that the heads of everyone in front of you will be visible throughout the film. Meanwhile, the pre-film easy listening soundtrack abruptly turned into Ice Cube’s Check Yo’Self without warning. What a curious place. The film was a Brit-flick called The Be-All and End-All . What starts off as a standard-issue coming of age comedy with Robbie and Ziggy, two 15 year-old Scousers, holidaying at a seaside caravan park quickly turns into something very different when Robbie collapses and - in time - finds out he has a terminal illness. From this point it becomes more of a romp wherein they try and arrange for Robbie to lose his virginity before he expires. As you might suspect from that synopsis, tonally the film is all over the place - f...

We’re currently in the middle of the BFI London Film Festival, and I thought I’d better make an effort this year and catch a couple of films. This is trickier for someone who holds great stock in reviews, as I’m reluctant to pay to see anything that I know nothing about. And of course the really high-profile movies sell out instantly.  Still, I managed to nab tickets to the gala screening of Miral , Julian Schnabel’s new film centered around the Israel-Palestine conflict. This being from the director of the astonishing Diving Bell and the Butterfly and starring Freida Pinto, currently “hot”, as I believe they say in Hollywood parlance, after the success of Slumdog, I had quite high hopes. Not to mention that at £17.50 a pop, this gala screening would surely include a swanky drinks reception and the chance to mingle with slebs and that. Well, there certainly was a drinks reception, but not one to which the hoi polloi were invited. Furthermore, there were two screenings in ...

I've never been a huge fan of horror films. Due to chronic lack of popularity, I didn't spend lots of evenings in darkened rooms full of friends trying to prove how hard and unshockable they were in the face of the latest gore-fest (obtained via dubious means from the Bewdley's sole video store). Still, I understand the attraction of being scared - despite being something of a coward, I enjoy the adreneline rush of rollercoasters, particularly the palpable relief when the ride is over that it didn't get stuck upside-down on that big loop, or collapse, or explode, etc. In the last few years, the much-discussed Torture Porn genre seems to have become the norm for mainstream horror. My experience of this sort of thing only extends to the first Saw movie, which I actually found fairly clever and tense. Despite this, though, I've had no great desire to see anything else, especially the seemingly endless conveyor belt of Saw-quels . Meanwhile, there are smaller films be...

Saw a preview of Scott Pilgrim vs the World last night. Yes that’s right - a review of a film BEFORE it’s properly released! TREMBLE at the novelty of my opinions. So? Meh. It’s alright . Nothing wrong with that per se, lots of films are perfectly enjoyable without coming close to greatness. Unfortunately, the buzz and trailer for this, combined with Edgar Wright’s track record, very much suggested this would be an eye-popping game-changer of a movie. Depending on whether I bought into the concept or not, I was expecting it to be a film I’d either fall in love with or absolutely hate. The fact is, I enjoyed bits of it and appreciated some of the one-liners without ever being able to immerse myself. One reason for this would be unfamiliarity with the source material - adaptations always lose something in translation and I’d guess the comic books go into more detail about the backstories of Scott, Ramona and the Seven Evil Exes, something which Wright understandably sacrifices in o...

Hur hur hur From hearing and reading some of the reviews of Inception I was half expecting a David Lynch-esque piece of free-form art madness. "Don't go for a piss or you'll never keep up!" they warned. For the record, and this is not an attempt to show off, I performed my increasingly regular trick of nodding off for a while in the darkened cinema, thereby missing a whole chunk of action where they dropped down another Dream Level (or something) and yet I still managed to follow what was going on. This is not to say that Christopher Nolan has not made another very fine film, it's perhaps more a comment on just how vacuous the average blockbuster has now become. When one does come along that forces the viewer's brain to engage (and, unlike the rebooted Batman movies, isn't part of an helpfully established franchise), it can come across as far more complicated than it actually is. Nolan's work have never been overly arty - even the mind-melting Me...

On the ball as always, the Oscars have just happened so here is a personal roundup of this year’s main contenders (plus one that surprisingly wasn’t). Not that I’ve seen all the Best Picture nominees, of course. I really can’t be bothered with Avatar , no matter how pretty it may be. Precious promised to be such heavy going that I shied away from it, leaving the whole “grief porn” debate aside. And I somehow managed to miss out on The Hurt Locker , which is unfortunate seeing as it won. Hey, if someone paid me to write these things then I’d clearly make more of an effort. Sorry about that. Anyways, I had the chance to see a preview screening of Sandra Bullock’s Best Actress turn in The Blind Side this evening. For the uninitiated, this is the real life story of a southern belle who decides to take in a poor, uneducated black kid named Michael who has become an NFL offensive tackle. The feelgood cliches come pretty thick and fast, with ripe “Honey you’re changing his life!” “No, he’s...