On demand: "Tangerine"

2015's Tangerine was one of the writer-director Sean Baker's first studies of figures on the fringes of contemporary American life, in this case two transgender sex workers dealing with a spiralling situation. It's Christmas Eve in North Hollywood, and for Sin-Dee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor), there's none of the usual pre-festive winding down. Instead, we bear witness to a sudden and dramatic winding-up: Sin-Dee learns her beloved has been cheating on her while she's been serving a 30-day sentence for soliciting, and - adding insult to injury - cheating on her with a cisgender white girl. Off she tears to extract confessions from (and possibly exact revenge on) all parties, her pal in tow whenever Alexandra can keep up, pursued by the ingenious and resourceful Baker, shooting the action on an iPhone (with certain image-correcting lenses) so as to keep costs down and generate greater immediacy. (Some scenes accordingly resemble those shopfront confrontations that occasionally go viral on social media.) What follows proceeds not along the straight lines of the Hollywood mainstream - ain't nothin' straight here, hun - but in a frenetic zigzag under an unseasonal sun, heading late into the night. Along the way, we're even offered something of a narrative puzzle, invited to consider what our heroines' haphazard progress has to do with an Armenian cab driver (Karren Karagulian) - a more conventional portrait of an L.A. working stiff - to whom Baker sporadically cuts.

The thrill of Tangerine is tied up with that iPhone, and how it seems to liberate the action: you feel Baker and his excellently named cinematographer Radium Cheung could go anywhere and shoot anything, could veer off down any one of the side streets they pass and alight upon a comparable brouhaha. (As for the taxi driver business: well, why not? Easier to sit in the backseat for a few blocks than hare after the female leads on foot - and such mobile focus worked for Jafar Panahi in his time, though Panahi never went as far, and was never allowed to go as far, as Baker does here. One quietly funny running gag: how delighted all the working girls are to see the cabbie. You'll see why.) This does seem a production governed by the girls' mantra-like cry of "fuck it": it does what it does for the story, or for shits and giggles, and that spontaneity is a large part of its charm. Tangerine has a freshness beyond bigger American movies, busy tying themselves in knots to no good end. With no budget for effects or chases, Baker is obliged to fall back on that old favourite human interest, and both Rodriguez and Taylor light up the screen, trash-talking whirlwinds who were never going to hit their marks and often seem more inclined to hit one another, thereby laying waste to several city blocks. Baker has proven especially adept at sourcing such personalities and then allowing them to be, flourish, shine, but here he also demonstrates a marked sympathy for those around them, most notably the Chinese woman stuck doing a solo shift at the donut shop where the film's primary troublemakers gather to thrash out their differences. The subsequent The Florida Project would refine the technique and massage in a little more of the emotional subtlety that arrives late here, but Tangerine retains the forceful impact of citrus to the face: it's a movie that grabs you by the weave, whether you like it rough or not.

Tangerine is available to stream via Prime Video and MUBI, and to rent via the BFI Player and YouTube.

Back in the ring: "Gladiator"

At the turn of the millennium, Gladiator was a seductive conjunction of the old and the new, of craft and flash. The fledgling DreamWorks studio had witnessed Hollywood raise the Titanic with dazzling visual effects, and now wondered whether it couldn't resurrect the Roman epics of fifty years before with a comparable creative guile and muscle. Ridley Scott was duly appointed to return us to and around the Colosseum, the backdrop of an earlier era's multiplex cinema, here reframed as the multiplex of an earlier era. And we were returned there in the company of the kind of heavyweight cast it was still possible to gather in the year 2000 A.D. The newly crowned Russell Crowe, the erstwhile soap star who'd just outpunched the A-listers in 1997's L.A. Confidential, made for a convincing bruiser in a way you worry even a gym-honed Paul Mescal, himself altogether rapidly promoted to serve as the star of this autumn's belated sequel, may not be. The then-emergent talent Joaquin Phoenix, scion of an acting dynasty, was pitted against him as Commodus, the louche, lisping Emperor we all love to hate. And they would be surrounded and supported by veterans who seemed almost to date from that earlier era, now taking the applause of the crowd for one last time: Oliver Reed (d. 1999, prompting some post-production jiggery-pokery), Richard Harris (d. 2002), David Hemmings (d. 2003), his eyebrows pointing towards the infinite as a ring announcer whose unmiked voice surely couldn't have carried to all corners of this especially colossal Colosseum. It would be one of those logistically grand and tricky projects you still thrill to see Hollywood make, and make this well, studio money spent wisely: Scott could show the carnage Cecil B. DeMille couldn't, fully stir our bloodlust and satiate our desire for catharsis, and there was human and historical interest to ground the technological wizardry. Audiences, and the Academy, could hardly resist. Are you not entertained?, as the cry went up.

In retrospect, we might in fact have Gladiator's success to blame for one or two things - Mel Gibson's subsequent The Passion of the Christ and the Star Wars prequels' over-reliance on CGI, to cite the most immediate and dire consequences. Yet in and of itself it continues to work handsomely: you will see no more thumping entertainment in the Odeon or Cineworld this week. What I hadn't grasped at the time, yet what's become more apparent with the years, is the extent to which the movie also functions as a golden-glowing self-portrait of Scott himself - or at least a portrait of someone you sense Scott would easily identify with: the self-made proletarian scrapper, adrift in a world of nepo babies and scheming, snivelling functionaries deemed unworthy of a man's time, handshake and mercy. (Beyond historical verisimilitude, there has to be a reason for naming your antagonist after a toilet.) Maximus Decimus Meridius is from the off an obvious commander of men - someone you'd follow into the breach, if called upon - but Scott and Crowe equally conspire to make him a details guy, smiling ruefully at a robin who drifts into the opening battle, rubbing dirt onto his hands to get a better feel for the terrain that lies ahead of him, only then leading a vast army into battle. "At my command, unleash hell" is just a long-winded way of shouting "action"; Maximus's vow "I will win the crowd... I will give them something they have never seen before" is straight from a pitch meeting, no translation from the Latin required. Yet this storied commander is caught at a transitional moment, forever yearning for the tranquillity of home, even as circumstances conspire to loose him from the safety of empire (for which we might read the perks, privileges and protections of the studio system) and force him to fight his own battles, huffily, grumpily, dourly.

Certain elements here date very much from the late 20th century, which is where Scott seems to have got stuck creatively: there are naggingly negligible roles for Djimon Hounsou as the slave who nurses our white hero back to health and Omid Djalili as the trader who sold Reed his "queer giraffes". (Hounsou, at least, recurs amid the stirring coda, involving one of many small details this script troubles to pay off.) As a filmmaker, Scott remains a singular mix of insensitivity and insecurity: a born entertainer - Robbie Williams, say - doesn't need to ask whether we're entertained or not, nor so bluntly state their methods. Commodus's observation of his sister's dozing child ("He sleeps so well because he's loved") meshes intriguingly here with Maximus's battle to earn the crowd's respect. (That he does is down to a mix of potent backstory, resilience, skill and flair, all transferrable skills for the modern creative.) Were Scott's battles to come worth fighting? In the new century, the veteran would get increasingly prolific and increasingly unreliable; he's that rare director who's made more films the older he's got, proof of his ability to talk a good game in the boardroom. Gladiator found the director, aged 63, turning his thoughts towards legacy and how a man is remembered - it was the beginning of late-period Scott - but were A Good Year (again: Crowe as Scott surrogate, this time furrowing his brow over bottles of wine), the various Alien footnotes and last year's Napoleon (with Phoenix as the anti-Scott) worth remembering? Wouldn't Scott have been better staying at home with the missus and kids, touching grass? At what point does the fight become a wearying compulsion? Born of Hollywood's ongoing inability to imagine a viable future - the auguries are not good - Gladiator II is almost upon us: the fear, shared by Crowe himself, is that Scott will overwrite this Champions League entertainment with something more akin to the Nations League, falling somewhere on a scale between timekilling and timewasting. Maybe there's some fight in the old dog yet. But the Elysian fields are calling.

Gladiator is now showing in cinemas nationwide, and available to stream via ITVX; Gladiator 2 opens November 15.

On demand: "Meantime"

From the early days of the Mike Leigh Film Project, an often riotous comedy about deeply dissatisfied people. Fashioned (believe it or not) for Central Television, home of darts-based Sunday teatime favourite Bullseye, 1983's Meantime feels like Leigh's update of the old Tolstoy dictum that insisted each family is unhappy in their own way. It opens with a directorial feint: a check-in with upwardly mobile suburban couple Alfred Molina and Marion Bailey, caught doing up their two-bed semi as a means of filling what otherwise seems a terribly empty petit-bourgeois existence. Yet for the most part, we're embedded - bogged down may be the better phrase - with the couple's pungently named relatives the Pollocks: unemployed dad Jeff Robert, mum Pam Ferris trying to keep the household afloat on bingo winnings, and two late-teenage sons (perma-aggro Steve Wright-alike Phil Daniels and gormless mouthbreather Tim Roth), neither of whom forms the greatest argument for procreation. Even if you disagree vehemently, you can see how the argument Leigh doesn't much care for his characters came about. (One early exchange between Daniels and skinhead mate Gary Oldman goes as follows: "You're really thick, you are." "I ain't as thick as you." "No-one's as thick as me.") Yet as embodied by a forceful new generation and style of actors, these characters remain enormously fun to watch and listen to, drilled into sulky, sarky, slangy rhythms that suggested Leigh had kept his ears open during his years of apprenticeship, and was now attempting something as revolutionary in film acting as the Method had been thirty years before. You can still feel how thrilling Meantime must have been in 1983: no Merchant-Ivory, this, no Chariots of Fire. Adios stuffed shirts and stiff upper lips, hello thick ears and lashings of tongue and cheek.

If Leigh really loathed the Pollocks, he a) wouldn't have turned these 100 minutes over to them in the way he does, b) wouldn't so closely hang on their every spit and cough, and c) wouldn't so clearly be making a case that their wayward meanderings - linked in passing to the inertia then being fostered within the working classes by Thatcherism - merited the most attentive study. Meantime remains political only in passing: though Roth's Colin is unexpectedly, nay miraculously offered a chance to improve his lot (and blows it), practically everyone else on screen has nothing to do and little to hope for. So they bicker with and snipe at one another, the rumbling getting nasty whenever a character of colour walks on, though arguably no nastier than it would have been on the streets of the real Britain circa 1983. Leigh isn't interested in pointmaking or point-scoring, however, instead diligently observing who these people are and why they've turned out like this: petty, sad, bored, depressive or passive-aggressive. Rather than dismissing these grumps and muppets out of hand, the director demonstrates a commendable generosity of spirit in centralising small lives and spotting within them the potential for at least a narrow form of growth. It's loudly, even rudely British, bristling with familiar faces, locations (pissy towerblock lifts, concrete precincts overrun with plastic bags, Chigwell Tube station), insults ("he's a jammy bastard", "Kojak", "nosy bloody Parker", "oi, prat!"), ad jingles, and lines that come out of nowhere to summarise the British experience ("I just had a really horrible hamburger", "Of course I'm not sure"). Better still, Leigh was starting to develop a sly visual sense: the whole movie seems to exist just to showcase the image of an anoraked Roth shambling past a statue of Churchill, but also don't overlook the (frankly hilarious) late revelation that Oldman's prize dunderhead Coxy has somehow started a fight with himself in an overturned bin. The core of the Leigh filmography - dating back to 1971's Bleak Moments and passing through High Hopes and Life is Sweet to Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and points beyond - would be variations on the theme of daily drudgery. Some would be more engaging and successful than others, but Meantime now looks like the first time Leigh realised this technique could not only sustain a feature but prove wholly enveloping in its description of phrases, routines and textures. We ought to quote it just as often as people quote from Abigail's Party and Nuts in May.

Meantime is available on a Special Edition DVD through ITV Studios Home Entertainment, to stream via YouTube, and to rent via the BFI Player.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 4-6, 2024):

1 (new) Joker: Folie à Deux (15) **

2 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

3 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****

4 (5) The Substance (18) **

5 (3) The Outrun (15)

6 (8) Despicable Me 4 (U)

7 (6) Lee (15)

8 (11) 200% Wolf (U)

9 (re) Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi (PG) ***

10 (new) A Different Man (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Gladiator

2. Young Frankenstein 

3. Paddington 2

4. Paddington 

5. A Different Man

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Deadpool & Wolverine (15) *

2 (re) Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (12)

3 (4) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

4 (14) Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire (12)

5 (2) Despicable Me 4 (U)

6 (12) Joker (15) **

7 (new) The Hitcher (15) 

8 (5) Twisters (12) ***

9 (7) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

10 (1) The Bikeriders (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. Twisters

5. A Quiet Place: Day One

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man [above] (Sunday, BBC2, 11.55pm)

2. Us (Saturday, BBC1, 10.30pm)

3. Hope (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

4. Zootropolis (Sunday, BBC1, 2.15pm)

5. The Square (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.45am)

In memoriam: John Amos (Telegraph 09/10/24)

John Amos, who has died aged 84, was a versatile stage and screen actor revered for his roles in two major US TV hits: James Evans, the proud yet put-upon father in the groundbreaking sitcom Good Times (1974-79), and the adult incarnation of Kunta Kinte, the enslaved hero in ABC’s adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel Roots (1977).

Spun off from progressively minded writer-producer Norman Lear’s earlier successes All in the Family (1971-79) and Maude (1972-78), Good Times – the first network show overseen by Black creatives, centred on a family getting by in Chicago’s housing projects – blended social themes with crowdpleasing comedy, paving the way for such later hits as The Jeffersons (1975-85) and The Cosby Show (1984-92).

Years after the show passed into television history, Amos discovered the eternally job-seeking James had been a demographic-spanning model of fatherhood: “Young men in their thirties and forties, of every ethnicity imaginable, come up to me and say, ‘You’re the dad I never had’.” Yet behind the scenes, there had been unrest. 

Over the show’s first three seasons, the comedy grew ever broader, prompting Amos to object to what he deemed stereotypical writing: “I wasn’t the most diplomatic guy in those days, and [the producers] got tired of having their lives threatened over jokes. So they said, ‘Tell you what, why don’t we kill him off? We can get on with our lives!’ That taught me a lesson – I wasn’t as important as I thought I was to the show.”

James Evans was duly dispatched – in an offscreen car accident after the character finally landed employment – as Good Times’ fourth season began. Yet Amos’s popularity with the viewing public proved crucial to his casting in Roots, a cannily packaged confrontation of slavery and its legacy that became appointment television – and then something of a small-screen phenomenon – as the Seventies played out.

An estimated 130 million people, half the US population in 1977, tuned in on the miniseries’ initial run; the concluding instalment remains the second most watched series finale in US TV history, after M*A*S*H’s 1983 signoff. For Amos, who spent months in Liberia researching the role, the show’s success was “a revelation… because I saw my country [had] finally reached a point where it’s ready to look at its past and say, yes, we did this, and some of these things were terrible.”

Roots went on to win a Peabody Award, a Golden Globe, and nine Emmys from a total of 37 nominations, including a reaffirming nomination for Amos himself: “It was just what I needed. It took the bad taste of Good Times out of my mouth… I realise that a lot of it I brought on myself. I was not the easiest guy in the world to get along with, or to direct. I challenged any and everybody. [But Roots] was a vindication, a tremendous feeling of satisfaction.”

John Allen Amos Jr. was born in Newark, New Jersey on December 27, 1939 to mechanic John Amos Sr. and his housekeeper wife Annabelle. As a boy, he attended East Orange High School; he subsequently studied sociology at Colorado State University. A keen athlete, he boxed to Golden Gloves level and signed a contract with gridiron’s Kansas City Chiefs before pivoting to entertainment.

After trying stand-up in L.A., Amos got his first break as a writer for The Leslie Uggams Show (1969) before landing a recurring onscreen role as the weatherman Gordy in The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-77). Early movie credits included cult classics Vanishing Point (1971) and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971).

Further film work followed, most memorably Cleo McDowell, the renegade burger shack manager in Coming to America (1988). Yet Amos’s strongest roles were on stage and TV: he won an NAACP Award for his role as a retired cop in Dennis McIntyre’s play Split Second and was alternately genial and combative as Percy Fitzwallace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in The West Wing (1999-2006).

He spoofed Good Times – with a talking dog – in a 2010 episode of 30 Rock and continued working until his death: one of his final appearances will be in the upcoming legal spin-off Suits: L.A. (2024-). Yet he remained level-headed about the actor’s life, telling one journalist: “There are three stages in an actor’s career: ‘who is John Amos?’, ‘get me John Amos’ [and] ‘get me a young John Amos.’”

He married three times, to Noel Mickelson, Lillian Lehman and Elisabete de Sousa; all three marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his two children with Mickelson.

John Amos, born December 27, 1939, died August 21, 2024.

Altered states: "My Old Ass"

When men talk, think and write about time and time travel, their thoughts tend to stray in the direction of assassinating the baby Hitler: a quest for heroism, or maybe just vengeance and carnage. When women do likewise, we end up with Freaky Friday and 13 Going on 30: searches for greater wisdom and understanding. (In very rare cases, such as Alice Lowe's current release Timestalker, the movies occasion a quest for wisdom and carnage, suggesting the two need not be mutually exclusive.) In the readymade comfort movie My Old Ass, cranberry farmer's daughter Elliott (Maisy Stella) celebrates her 18th birthday by sneaking off from her family to trip balls on an island with friends, only for this particular trip to wind up with Elliott's 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her on a log, telling her - in no uncertain terms - to do everything within her powers to avoid a boy called Chad. It's pure fantasy (if you could go back in time to tell your younger self one thing, what would it be?) and pure movie set-up, but in this initial encounter, writer-director Megan Park establishes the mode of address of the film entire: not the cranked-up, farce-adjacent jabber of the slicker studio movies in this vein, but that of a casual fireside or dormroom chat. The title, characteristically, is the name under which Elliott saves her older self's phone number, arming herself with an advice line that becomes doubly handy when Percy Hynes White's Chad - long hair, sandals, surprising depths - shows up at the lake.

My Old Ass is mostly repeating old wisdoms: value your leisure time and loved ones, be careful around Chads, gather ye rosebuds (or cranberries) while ye may. (One novelty: an acknowledgement we might only be able to steer our younger selves so far, or that there might only be so long our younger selves could bear to listen to our old asses. There's life to be lived, and there are mistakes to be made that are part of the process.) What's cheering is that Park is saying all this the way a friend might: unforced, relaxed, with obvious and abundant affection. She's recruited a major ally and selling point in Stella, hitherto unknown but here revealed as a star by name and nature, possessed of that same X factor that dazzled when we first fell head over heels for Julia Stiles or Emma Stone. She makes a convincing teenager: witness how she expands an exclamatory "Jesus!" from two syllables into three, and the previously gay Elliott's cringing upon realising she might also like boys like Chad now. Yet this is also demonstrably an actress who knows what she's doing, the genre she's working in, and what elevates the best teen movie heroines over and above the rest. (Judging on Park's aerial shots, Stella also knows how to handle a motorboat, one deftness of touch among many here.) The production around her is a small one, content to gather a cast of funny faces who visibly vibed with one another on the shores of the one, sunny location. Park permits herself one flourish: a Justin Bieber homage that really will make anybody over the age of 21 feel antiquated. (Never heard the song before, no idea of its cultural significance. Sorry.) And she's pushing for feels over funnies, sobs rather than setpieces: despite prominent billing, Plaza is only present in person for a couple of scenes, leaving us downstream from The Notebook, The Lake House and Nicholas Sparks-land. (Perhaps you can only get out this way by boat: all the tears shed have left the terrain waterlogged.) Yet the sobs are well-earned, and you come away from My Old Ass feeling more movies should be assembled like a summer camp rather than a mid-range family car or military campaign. If the Elliott-Chad story gets you - as, I must confess, it got me - it's for one reason: it's been told with a sweetness you may have thought had been all but purged from American movies in the era of Deadpool & Wolverine. (Again: when men talk, think and write about time and time travel...)

My Old Ass is now showing in selected cinemas. 

Who's laughing now?: "Joker: Folie à Deux"

The indifferent response to Joker: Folie à Deux over the past week suggests the mass audience has come around to the (correct) point of view that - despite the initial praise, box office and awards - 2019's Joker was garbage, and spending any additional time in the world it set up would do no good whatsoever for anybody's mental health. (I know I bang on about the dysfunction of modern multiplex cinema, but - seriously - Joaquin Phoenix does the work he's done for the past fifteen years, and winds up winning the Oscar for that? C'mon c'mon.) To Todd Phillips' credit, he's used the first film's success not to double down exactly, but to experiment or mix up his meds. Where Joker bore out the suicidal tendencies of latter-day studio filmmaking, resembling the endpoint of a decades-long downward spiral, Folie à Deux is altogether more schizophrenic, which is to say it still requires approaching with caution. It opens with an animated recap of the story so far, drawn in a flat, ugly impersonation of the Looney Tunes house style (by the long-lost Sylvain Chomet, no less), then catches up with Phoenix's newly skeletal Arthur Fleck as he endures the institutional indignities of Arkham Asylum. As this Joker awaits trial for the events of film one, Phillips floats a love story, nudging the reticent Fleck into a nurturing relationship with some variant of the character known as Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga); and, as you've doubtless already heard, this bad romance has also been couched as a musical of some description, presumably as Phillips believed this was the wildest and most extreme thing he could do with these characters at this juncture. By now, you may have puzzled out why Folie à Deux has underperformed as it has. Having courted the incel crowd first time out, who just want confirmed what they already presume to know, Phillips has returned with exactly the last sort of film that demographic might get enthused about: the auteurist art movie. One of the few truly funny aspects of Joker 2 is how it encourages you to imagine the successive waves of outrage and revulsion passing through certain message boards as details of the new film emerge. Joker doesn't go apeshit on anyone for ninety minutes (and then only in a dream sequence)? You're kidding me. Arthur Fleck kisses a male fellow inmate? Ugh, gross. His lady love interest is played by the ultra-woke Gaga? Go jump off a tall building, or words to that effect.

Those of us who didn't need the first film, let alone a sequel - who felt all along that this franchise was only ever the dregs of a bad idea, namely turning the movie mainstream over to superheroes and the whims of sadolescents - might begrudgingly admire this search for variation. There is, certainly, a smidgen of novelty in hearing Phoenix, with his cracked, Silk Cut Sinatra voice, sing his heart out rather than merely smiling and murdering as he smiles. The prevailing idea is that these vintage standards ("Get Happy", "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" et al.) offer us deeper access to Arthur Fleck, that they render him more human, even vulnerable than the stand-up's patter of film one. But, really, how much depth is there to be found in a void? We're mostly watching another over-extended study of a sociopathic miseryguts whose uppermost characteristic is a mopey self-pity; you may as well centre a franchise on Morrissey, for heaven's sake. Desiccated and drained of any obvious charisma, Phoenix is once more afforded plentiful opportunity to showboat, yet Folie à Deux makes for a stodgy, stopstart musical. An early nod to Cherbourg's colourful umbrellas is soon eclipsed by the blue-grey filters of superhero stock; nothing here has the vim and verve of Jack Nicholson conducting an art heist to the throbs of a Prince bassline. It's weird that Phillips' characters keep referring disparagingly to a TV movie of Fleck's life, when that's what this sequel most often recalls, right through to its climactic courtroom non-drama. Gaga can at least hold a tune, but any chemistry between the leads is minimal: there's no indication of why she might be attracted to this slumpy chump, beyond the assertion this is all long-established DC lore. This Harley Quinn duly takes her place among a roster of flatly defined secondary characters. Brendan Gleeson, apparently morphing into Charles Durning, is the asylum guard who might have been a weight-throwing antagonist in an earlier draft; Catherine Keener, as Fleck's lawyer, gets early release for good behaviour as her client commandeers proceedings; 34th pick Harry Lawtey (of TV's Industry) wears a suit as Harvey "Zero Personality" Dent; and Steve Coogan (whose American accent may finally be the best thing here) turns up as a tabloid TV interviewer whose presence hints that Phillips saw Folie à Deux as his Natural Born Killers. (It's one of several ideas - Joker pregnancies! A Joker Liberation Front! - dropped almost as soon as they're taken up.) Even at the time, the first movie seemed a weird sort of entertainment for a Hollywood studio to be peddling, but then those were the Trump years: generally pretty weird. The sequel arrives at some awareness that this is a weird sort of entertainment - but the audience, being broadly smarter than the movies credit, have clearly sussed this and stayed away in droves. The residual fear is that an already lamentably risk-averse system uses Folie à Deux's failure as an excuse to throw the remains of the baby out with the stagnant bathwater. Yet the trick is not to stop making auteurist art movies. The trick is to ensure the Todd Phillipses of this world don't get to make auteurist art movies.

Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Face off: "A Different Man"

With 2019's Chained for Life, their blackly comic tale of a low-budget art film beset by interpersonal woes, the American writer-director Aaron Schimberg and Croydon-born actor Adam Pearson initiated a smart and useful new screen partnership. I say useful, because Pearson - hitherto best known as the most memorable of the sorry suckers lured to their grave by Scarlett Johansson's succubus in 2013's Under the Skin - was diagnosed as a child with neurofibromatosis, a disfiguring disorder that causes non-cancerous tumours to flourish in the nervous system. Whenever a camera is pointed in Pearson's direction, then, it offers an opportunity to re-examine, arguably a century too late, how we look at movies, and the people in movies, and more generally how we look at humankind. The pair's latest collaboration A Different Man, a canny refinement of that earlier film with an A24 budget and an MCU-approved star attached to it, has just shown up at your local multiplex, which would suggest the Schimberg-Pearson project is taking root; again, the aim here is to challenge viewer assumptions around physical beauty in ways that are playful and stealthy, and several leagues above the in-yer-face obviousness of last month's The Substance.

The new film describes a bizarre love triangle, centred on Edward (Sebastian Stan), a defensive, shrugging, facially disfigured actor who makes a desultory living in corporate training videos preaching workplace inclusivity. With latex grafting the very specific contours of Pearson's face onto Stan's more conventionally chiselled features, we are invited to view Edward as a downtrodden bizarro-world version of Pearson himself. It takes because this is, from the off, a bizarro world. There's a version of A Different Man that would have insisted on being squeaky clean and unimpeachably PC, careful not to alienate or offend the mass audience - something akin to what we're shown of those corporate training videos. Resolutely unsuperficial, Schimberg instead leans into strangeness and grot. His is a non-aspirational, ever-anxious New York, troubled by sudden bangs and crashes, torrential downpours, swelling damp patches and suicidal neighbours. (When the ambulance arrives to carry one such off to the morgue, the paramedics row with the driver of a passing party bus the vehicle has blocked in.) Yes, a revolutionary new medical treatment permits Edward to slough off his excess of skin, revealing sleek Stan the aspirant A-lister, and this version of the character gets both the girl - Renate Reinsve, a model of upright Nordic perfection as a maneating playwright - and the acting gigs. Yet there's also a problem: he also finds himself being stalked by a doppelganger of his former self, Oswald - and here, finally, is Pearson as he is, lumps, bumps and all, having wicked fun as a reminder of the man Edward used to be, not just a different man but a better man, all cheery banter and yoga classes, where our notional hero continues to tie himself in knots.

Beneath its baroque carapace of self-referentiality and off-kilter authorial style, A Different Man is actually making pretty simple points: that some people would be the same no matter what they looked like, that some people can't past the surfaces of this world, and that this toplayer is less than interesting and revealing. (They're the sort of lessons we might all have learned sooner had the movies not been so busy trying to make us tumble for folks who look like Annie Hathaway and Alain Delon.) Yet Schimberg keeps finding ways to destabilise the drama and thereby unsettle the viewer; as a result, the film becomes thrillingly unpredictable, maybe even the least predictable of 2024. You could stop it an hour in, and no-one in the room would have the least idea of how this matter was going to resolve itself; you could pause it with ten minutes to go, and have even less of an idea. Partly this is due to idiosyncratic pacing. A higher-concept film would doubtless cut far more quickly to the transformation - in part, to liberate Stan's cheekbones for commercial purposes - yet the extra time allows Schimberg to almost surgically reconstruct a wackadoodle idea of New York through his consciously chaotic, Safdiean blocking and framing of bodies. A signature set-up: two characters trying to have a fraught conversation in a doorway while a third attempts to move paints and stepladders between them. In a New York this cramped and curled-up on itself, it's hardly surprising Edward and Oswald should come to cross paths again and again. Physically and otherwise, there's no easy escaping.

There isn't an interaction that isn't intrusive, indelicate or in some other way awkward, and there's something very weird going on in the use of Presidents as a running motif: a living statue of Lincoln, some dive bar toilet graffiti ("BLOBBY KENNEDY "[sic]), the fact Oswald is called, well, Oswald. In places, A Different Man has the feel less of Hollywood storytime than a conspiracy we're being ushered into - maybe the conspiracy Edward has running through his head 24/7. The result is that rare beast, a comedy that is formally hilarious, blessed with both an odd shape and deeply funny bones; the great triumph of Schimberg's direction is how it gets us not just comfortable with this, but actively embracing it. Game performers, keen to throw off some of the usual niceties and pieties, assist the film's cause immensely. You wonder how many A-listers turned this script down - either not getting the joke, or realising the joke would be on them - before it trickled down to Stan, but the actor's exasperated expression, something like Mark Hamill having a really bad day, is a gag that gets only funnier scene by scene, a mask of unhappiness Edward cannot set aside. Reinsve remains amusingly unflustered by it all, serving as a yardstick of normie privilege; and whether donning a mumu or chasing a balloon through a park, Pearson is just full of the joys of spring. (His karaoke-night rendition of an original song, "I Wanna Get Next to You", is more subversive than anything The Substance lobbed at us, the type of nightclub number the movies have never thought to film.) One notes the actor had to travel to the US to make these films: I'm surely answering my own question here, but why couldn't something this curious and adventurous be made closer to home?

A Different Man is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 27-29, 2024):

1 (1) Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (12A)

2 (2) Speak No Evil (15) ****

3 (new) The Outrun (15)

4 (new) Devara: Part 1 (15) **

5 (3) The Substance (18) **

6 (4) Lee (15)

7 (new) Megalopolis (15)

8 (6) Despicable Me 4 (U)

9 (re) Shaun of the Dead (15) ***

10 (new) Never Let Go (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Young Frankenstein [above]

2. A Different Man

3. My Old Ass

4. Shaun of the Dead

5. Mean Girls

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) The Bikeriders (15)

2 (3) Despicable Me 4 (U)

3 (29) The Boy and the Heron (12) ***

4 (2) Inside Out 2 (U) ****

5 (4) Twisters (12) ***

6 (7) The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (PG) ***

7 (1) Bad Boys: Ride or Die (15)

8 (9) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (12) ****

9 (8) Dune: Part Two (12) **

10 (new) Borderlands (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Inside Out 2

2. Furiosa: a Mad Max Saga

3. Hundreds of Beavers

4. A Quiet Place: Day One

5. Blur: To The End

 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. My Darling Clementine (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.25pm)

2. Till (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Hellboy (Sunday, ITV1, 10.15pm and Friday, ITV1, 10.45pm)

4. A Quiet Place (Friday, Channel 4, 12.35am)

5. Carmen Jones (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.15am)

The old men and the sea: "Devara: Part 1"

Another season, another swaggering pan-Indian blockbuster: a full three hours in the cinema, stacked with talent, so byzantine in its design it can't possibly be paid off in one go, even if it might be best for all parties if it were. The Telugu-derived Devara: Part 1 shares other features with its immediate predecessors in this field. A beardy wannabe-Baahubali of a hero, oft observed striking a power stance on some tall vantage point; songs that sound like battle cries or death rattles; a dust-up of some description every ten minutes. It's forever too loud to get too close, but watching this cinema of abundant spectacles has felt like a return to the cinema of the 1910s and 1920s: narrative by the yard, story for story's sake, the serial form redeployed to hook those whose attention may have wandered elsewhere during the pandemic. This new wave of pan-Indian filmmaking - lavishly well-appointed, maximal to the max - is clearly a Covid-era phenomenon, although it already appears a touch wheezing, if not entirely spent. There's been no sign as yet of a Part 2 for either the one about the descendant of mythological figures (Brahmāstra) or the one about illegal sandalwood smuggling (Pushpa). Devara, written and directed by Koratala Siva, risks a certain familiarity, in that it, too, is about smuggling, albeit of a considerably damper variety.

We open in the Bombay of 1996, with a police task force being set on the trail of sibling gangsters who at this stage seem a directorial feint or red herring. The investigation instead leads to the backwaters of Tamil Nadu, where the discovery of myriad bodies on the ocean floor cues an extended flashback to 1984 that is, as far as D1 is concerned, the main event. It involves our old friend NT Rama Rao Jr. from RRR, a title to which Siva, in the spirit of oneupmanship that governs these behemoth-movies, has effectively prefixed a very large capital G. Peering out from beneath a tight, period-appropriate bubbleperm that recalls Lionel Richie in the "All Night Long" video, the star's eponymous hero is introduced running a swashbuckling criminal operation - raiding passing cargo ships to support his impoverished coastal community - which will unravel into bloody chaos as his right-hand man Bhaira (Bollywood's own Saif Ali Khan, as jacked as the movie itself beneath a dorky pageboy haircut) succumbs to greed. Siva, we quickly twig, is doing some smuggling of his own. D1 is a business story (a management story, even) nestled inside the traditionally sleek lines of the police procedural. At least two films for the price of one ticket, then: say what you like about the pan-Indian model, you rarely leave the cinema feeling shortchanged for narrative.

More likely, I think - and especially here - we start to feel bludgeoned by it. For a while, during D1's stronger first half, Siva is telling a small, instructional, conceivably relatable tale on the theme of how best to run a company: ethically (or as ethically as any pirate can), if you're a Devara, ruthlessly, if you're a Bhaira. This pair could be Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg, if those whey-faced striplings had ever felt compelled to get their feet wet and compete at some sort of regional Royal Rumble where wrestlers bind themselves with cloth and go at it until dawn. (At which point, some of the audience may be thinking: dudes, just fuck already.) The story of their severance has been expanded via the type of grand gesture that has always played well on the big screen: Devara singlehandedly pushing four shipping containers packed with explosives off a cliff, and then walking away in slo-mo as the illegal cargo detonates behind him, or late-night smuggling missions on the high seas, made only more fraught when one faction is trying to bump off another. (And that's before anyone factors in the sharks in these waters.) Siva is capable of choice pulpy delicacies. During a midfilm beach massacre, which starts with an army of scuttling ambushers emerging from the sands like crabs, an arc of blood from our hero's D-shaped sickle flies up and completes the crescent moon above. Increasingly, though, we find this filmmaker hammering away on the same notes with the same tools. The trouble with D1 isn't that it's cranked up to 11; it's that it gets stuck there from an early stage.

Other variations on the theme of Big must be permissible, but it's clear these would-be universal crowdpullers still have absolutely no idea what to do with the women in their midst. This cycle has already wasted performers as queenly as Alia Bhatt (RRR) and Deepika Padukone (this summer's Kalki 2898 A.D.), instead centralising literally and figuratively bristling men; it's yet to engineer a single female character comparable to any of the short-fused Hulks stomping around waving metaphorical willies. D1, for its part, puts up Janhvi Kapoor, introduced at bath in what looks terribly like a shampoo commercial, in the impossible role of simpering boatbuilder who just wants herself a manly man. Kapoor's introduction, at the start of the second half, is the point at which Siva's film noticeably starts to sputter; having had a nice sit down during the intermission, the movie struggles to get up and running again, and restarting from something like scratch, with NTR in the far less compelling role of Devara's hapless offspring, feels like a step in the wrong direction. Kapoor's Thangam gets the one and only musical number that doesn't feel like a guttural howl into the abyss, but even this turns out, lyrically, to be all about our guy. For all that they might appear new, these pan-Indian films strike me as more than ever old man's tales: repetitive or otherwise rambling, prone to distraction, overstretched for being so simplistic, thus exhausting, and stuck on a musty model of heroism, dependent to the last on who can take and inflict the most pain. (I suspect you'd have to be quite the masochist to exit feeling buzzed rather than wiped out.) This latest example, a blood feud in an elephants' graveyard, shows flashes of lead in its pencil, but you'll almost certainly have forgotten who's pursuing whom (and why) by the time Devara: Part 2 lumbers into view.

Devara: Part 1 is now playing in selected cinemas.