Please like: "Eighth Grade"

In his directorial debut Eighth Grade, the 28-year-old stand-up comedian Bo Burnham sets himself the challenge of both contributing something fresh to the long-crowded coming-of-age field, and saying something he couldn't just as easily say as part of his routines. He aces the second part of this assignment by making the film almost entirely about a girl, and then a girl who is by no means as articulate as her creator, by virtue of her being a mere thirteen years old. Nevertheless, Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) has the tech at her disposal to keep up a near-constant flow of communication. We first join her fluffing and yammering her way through the latest vlog she's posted to her undersubscribed YouTube channel, generating the first gigabytes of the free-floating digital imagery with which Burnham dots his frames. As Kayla's desperate pleas to her followers to hit the like and share buttons make blindingly clear, she too is putting herself out there into a crowded marketplace, one where it's become ever trickier to catch the eye. What makes Eighth Grade stand out - what ultimately positions it as a valuable contribution to our post-Social Network iCinema - is its diagnosis of a new and next-level status anxiety, one from which even our cooler kids might suffer. What's bugging our teenagers, Burnham proposes, is no longer the question of whether they're popular; it's whether they're popular enough.

The film's appeal is twofold: it sees what teens do, and it expresses a sincere older brother's concern for what teens do. Burnham's not here for "the world's going to hell in a handcart, and the damn kids are standing around playing Candy Crush" fingerwagging, although he'll make anyone over thirty feel truly glad they didn't have to spend their formative years curating an online brand for themselves. From his day job, the writer-director retains the transferable skill of close, revealing observation. Kayla and pals balance marker pens one atop the other and kick their backpacks down the corridor; they have crazy in-jokes and crazier panic attacks; and they feel even more self-conscious than usual when in their swimsuits. Burnham nails what's absurdly funny about this moment, with its needlessly dabbing teachers and its yearning souls attempting to strike up and sustain conversations with contemporaries who only have eyes for their screens. Yet he refuses to take their worries lightly, which accounts for the film's gently concerned tone. He gets that generational lines are being drawn up either side of certain apps - which is why everybody's mum is on Facebook, and your correspondent still hasn't a clue what a TikTok is - and he's the first filmmaker, as far as I'm aware, to dramatise a school shooting drill, which is where we are in 2019. It's a mad world, the movie acknowledges, and we're all trying to make sense of it - while holding our loved ones close - as best we can.

What's fresh about Eighth Grade is the way Burnham consciously backs away from plot in favour of generating a chronological flow of information about its heroine's life, and as it scrolls out before us, we realise that this may now be how youngsters (and perhaps many of the rest of us) see the world: as a stream of potentially Instagrammable moments (one fleeting visual grace note: a row of chicken nugget sauces lined up in rainbow formation) that could also prove epic fails. There's a definite progression to be witnessed in Kayla's passage from naive fumbling to late-teen self-awareness; from cursory analogue interactions with her hopelessly single father (Josh Hamilton, in Paul Reiser mode) to a genuinely touching fireside chat that reminds you how few convincing father-daughter moments modern movies have given us. Yet that progress remains as haphazard and tentative as dial-up Internet. What really connects these episodes is the insight of a young writer-director who cares to notice that Kayla's vlogs, which punctuate and comment upon these adolescent ups-and-downs, are his heroine's own way of recording change and growth, the 21st century equivalent of marking a child's height against a doorframe.

Anna Meredith's electronic score positions us at the heart of this brave new digital world, bombarding the viewer with more or less the same pulses that leave Kayla so jittery, yet Burnham couples this cutting-edge technical moxie to older, pre-digital forms of craft. For one thing, Eighth Grade is a film of notably good delivery - again, the advantage of having a director who doubles as a stand-up is clear - be that the unparsable noise that emerges from Kayla's mouth when approached by her crush at a party, or the hesitant "yes" dad offers when his daughter asks for help burning something in the backyard. (Such a clever contrast here: Hamilton is seen engrossed in the contents of his Kindle, quietly using tech for his own enjoyment.) Its focal point, however, is the remarkable Fisher, a real find, giving the most heroically unvarnished debut performance since Heather Matarazzo as Dawn Wiener in Todd Solondz's far less kindly Welcome to the Dollhouse. The camera forever takes this girl as she is. Unlike so many online influencers, Burnham refuses to Photoshop out his subject's acne, thrown into even sharper relief by the light of the screen being held to her nose, yet the actress spins a form of poetry out of Kayla's "like"s, "y'know"s and "ahm"s, as only a really skilled performer could. That, however, may matter less to most viewers emerging from Eighth Grade than the feeling of having encountered a new friend - one who just so happens to embody the hopes, dreams and fears of a generation.

Eighth Grade is now playing in selected cinemas.

From the archive: "Belle"

Maybe, in this post-12 Years a Slave moment, the time is right for Amma Asante’s new period drama Belle; maybe it will prove doubly wrong the Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom scribe William Nicholson’s recent contention that the guilt white audiences feel over the black experience has by now been exhausted.

The film itself could certainly do with a leg-up and a helping hand: Asante and screenwriter Misan Sagay have taken a notable true story – that of a mixed-race girl brought from Africa to 18th century Hampstead, and raised in a manner befitting an heiress – and done it only a fitful, cursory sort of justice. Steve McQueen may have opened a window, but he also raised the bar.

In the exclusively white preserve of London high society, Dido Elizabeth Belle (played here first by Lauren Julien-Box, then by Gugu Mbatha-Raw) took on the peculiar status of a freakshow attraction, referred to as variously “an exotic flower” and “the infamous mulatto”. Even within the broadly liberal and welcoming household of High Court judge Lord Mansfield (Tom Wilkinson), Dido was evidently considered a problem: she’s quickly stitched into corsets and offered up to potential suitors she has scant interest in, the idea perhaps being that she might thereafter be hidden away.

It is, then, a wholly admirable aim to rescue this young woman from dusty, under-read history books, and bestow upon her a renewed visibility and agency. Yet Belle is only Asante’s second film – after 2004’s notably gritty council-estate drama A Way of Life – and that inexperience manifests itself in clunky close-ups and some wayward junior performances: the boys, in particular, rarely rise above the status of vaguely handsome planks, which renders all Sagay’s romantic gestures as so much dead narrative weight.

Where Belle truly differs from 12 Years is in its (frightfully English, frightfully costume drama) determination to hold the atrocities of its world at some remove. The Mansfield household is ablaze with talk of the Zong massacre – an actual event in which shackled slaves were tossed overboard by a shipping company in order to initiate an insurance claim – yet here it is only ever talk; even that noted softie Steven Spielberg didn’t back away from dramatising such a scene for 1997’s Amistad, though he was presumably operating at a budgetary level far beyond Asante’s modest means.

Yet as Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights revealed, there can be advantages to letting a filmmaker who isn’t entirely schooled in (or interested in upholding) costume drama etiquette loose on the form. Rather than seeking to bury it under satin and taffeta, Asante preserves a certain onscreen prickliness around not just race, but sex and money; she picks out such telling details as the portraits that show black cherubs gathering at the feet of blanched muses. (As Dido observes of one tavern sign: “As in life, we are no better in paintings.”)

The scenes in which Dido tears at her skin, and struggles to comb out her hair, will presumably resonate with 21st century Belles. And Asante constructs one deeply clever sequence, in which Dido and her white half-cousin Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) occupy the same space in the frame while being told which one of them will be attending debutante season – further underlining how these two girls are equal yet, in the eyes of their world, very different. (Far less clever: the scene that unites the two at the piano. You fear they’re going to bash out “Ebony and Ivory”.)

At the very least, Asante has provided a belated coming-out role for Mbatha-Raw after several years of acclaimed theatre work: with her striking, thoughtful, ever-responsive features, she holds the film together through even its patchier stretches. As with 12 Years’ Lupita Nyong’o, one suspects we’ll be seeing a good deal more of this actress in the years to come; for anyone championing greater diversity in cinema, this can only be a step in the right direction.

(MovieMail, June 2014)

Belle screens on Channel 4 tonight at 1.05am.

On demand: "Odd Thomas"

The Dean Koontz adaptation Odd Thomas is the kind of offbeam item that a major studio might, in the pre-MCU era, have fashioned into something more than just a niche festival favourite, stumbled across on a streaming service. Had it been a hit upon its initial release back in 2013, it might have inspired sequels (as, indeed, Koontz has published), or perhaps a TV spin-off in the jovial comic-horror vein of Reaper or Ash vs. Evil Dead; as a standalone watch, it's the closest this century has given us to Peter Jackson's The Frighteners, another curio that wasn't seen by as many people as it perhaps should have been. Stephen Sommers, who once had a career at the heart of the mainstream (The Mummy, Van Helsing), directs Anton Yelchin as the eponymous Tom, a small-town short order cook plagued by visitations from spirits who either need pointing towards the light or offer warnings of dire carnage to come; this being one of Yelchin's final screen credits before his tragically early death in 2016, there's an unexpected poignancy to an early scene in which he attempts to console one of his otherworldly visitors ("I'm sorry your life was so short"). These swarming spectres allow Sommers to indulge that fondness for VFX that sunk several of his higher-profile assignments, yet crucially they're not the whole picture here.

Odd Thomas stutters in setting up its unusual premise - Yelchin's voiceover speaks to tricky sessions in the edit suite - but Koontz's novel gives the film a narrative backbone in a countdown to Doomsday cued by the arrival of a shambling outsider, even odder than Thomas, going under the name Fungus Bob (Shuler Hensley, in a role that would once have been the preserve of Vincent d'Onofrio). The supernatural murder-mystery that follows - a pre-emptive quest for the one who's gonna do it - is a little cursory but characterful, with a fun mishmash cast suggesting a community under threat: Willem Dafoe is the relaxed chief of police who finds Thomas's intuitions interrupting his altogether active sex life; Addison Timlin the ice cream parlour waitress who takes her sweetheart's visions in commendable stride; a pre-fame Gugu Mbatha-Raw the single mom who runs the town diner; and Yelchin is appealingly puppyish as a put-upon boy-next-door trying to give everyone around him some peace. It doesn't all work, but it builds towards a genuinely risky mass-panic finale that would presumably have left it unreleasable in certain weeks (you'll see why), and emerges as the first Sommers film you might conceivably be interested in seeing in director's-cut form.

Odd Thomas is now streaming on Amazon Prime.

"The Corrupted" (Guardian 10/05/19)

The Corrupted **

Dir: Ron Scalpello. With: Sam Claflin, Timothy Spall, Naomi Ackie, Hugh Bonneville. 103 mins. Cert: 18

Slipped into cinemas on the quiet, Ron Scalpello’s starry, busy British crime drama proves to be one of those semi-entertaining mixed bags. It has a measure of ambition, strong dramatic scenes and grabby performances, not least from Timothy Spall as a property magnate looming over East London like some doubly malevolent reincarnation of Bob Hoskins’ Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday. Yet the storytelling connecting its disparate elements starts to feel dashed-off, as if somebody involved couldn’t wait for it to occupy the 10pm slot on London Live that may be its destiny. That here-today-gone-tomorrow approach shortsells both cinematographer Richard Mott’s striking framing of the capital’s moneyed hotspots and the spiky idea at the heart of Nick Moorcroft’s script: that the great triumph of the 2012 Olympiad was built on the shakiest of foundations.

The generic title hides a dual meaning. The backdrop is that once-toxic scrap of Stratford forcibly reclaimed by fatcat developers like Spall’s Clifford Cullen, introduced setting murderous muscle on a mechanic holding out on him in the run-up to the Games. Yet it also refers to the biddable entourage of the mechanic’s son Liam (a newly sturdy Sam Claflin), attempting to go straight in the present-day on these very same streets. Upstanding pawns in the populous supporting cast include a sympathetic Naomi Ackie as Liam’s clangingly named ex Grace, and Noel Clarke as the detective investigating the greasy depths of Cullen’s pockets. Question marks, however, linger over David Hayman’s gruff DCI, who has a nicely chilly moment beside an open grave, and Hugh Bonneville as a vaguely Cameronian Westminster bigwig.

There’s enough activity for a miniseries, in other words, and though Scalpello casts well and pulls stretches into cinematic shape, he’s caught garbling key plot points to get to the saleable gunplay and fisticuffs. Some of that action pops, like the tagteam clash in which Clarke, Claflin and Ackie subdue former bareknuckler and all-round hefty unit Decca Heggie with unlikely domestic items. Yet the hardman dialogue is generally as unpersuasive as you’d expect from the writer of Fisherman’s Friends: only Spall, slyly holding court on where his character stands in relation to Europe, has the chops to make any of it stick. Dexter Fletcher’s similarly underpromoted Wild Bill will remain the definitive movie time-capsule of our now-fading Olympian glories – but Scalpello’s film is livelier pulp than the absence of advance fanfare would suggest. 

The Corrupted is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of May 3-5, 2019:

1 (1) Avengers: Endgame (12A) **
2 (new) Long Shot (15) ***
3 (new) The Curse of La Llorona (15)
4 (new) Tolkien (12A)
5 (2) Dumbo (PG) **
6 (3) Wonder Park (PG) **
7 (4) Red Joan (12A)
8 (6) Captain Marvel (12A) ***
9 (5) Shazam! (12A) **
10 (10) Eighth Grade (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five: 
1. Eighth Grade
2. Ash is Purest White
3. Styx
4. Madeline's Madeline
5. Dead Good


Home entertainment Top Ten (DVD/Blu-Ray/Download): 

1 (new) Bumblebee (PG) ***
2 (2) Mary Poppins Returns (U) ***
3 (3) Avengers: Infinity War (12) ***
4 (1) Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (PG) ***
5 (6) Bohemian Rhapsody (12)
6 (5) Aquaman (12)
7 (8) The Favourite (15) ***
8 (7) Ant-Man and the Wasp (12)
9 (4) Mortal Engines (12)
10 (11) Thor: Ragnarok (12) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. An Impossible Love
2. Minding the Gap
3. The House by the Sea
4. Colette
5. Bumblebee


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. Boyz N The Hood [above] (Saturday, BBC2, 11.45pm)
2. The Happiest Days of Your Life (Saturday, BBC2, 1pm)
3. Shrek 2 (Saturday, BBC1, 5.25pm)
4. Drive Angry (Monday, five, 11.05pm)
5. Belle (Wednesday, C4, 1.05am)

"Dead Good" (Guardian 10/05/19)

Dead Good ***

Dir: Rehana Rose. Documentary with Cara Mair, Sarah Clarke-Kent. 78 mins. Cert: PG

There will be no better tagline this year: “Several people died during the making of this film.” It’s true to the spirit of a documentary attempting to loosen up the centuries-old strictures set in place around the grave business of saying a final goodbye to loved ones. We’re introduced to Cara and Sarah, two heroically relaxed funeral directors, far from the death industry’s usual terse image; to their clients, who arrive looking for something more than the standard combination of hymns and tears; and, in passing, to Peter, a sage parish priest clad in shorts and beanie hat, who confesses to keeping his own funeral plans in a file marked with a skull-and-crossbones. It may come as little-to-no surprise to some that director Rehana Rose encountered her freethinking subjects in and around Brighton.

Which is only to note how Rose leads us gently, and with obvious directorial empathy, into surprising and enlightening areas. Take Cara and Sarah’s enviably airy office, for one, more redolent of a web start-up than anywhere traditionally associated with laying out the dead, or the unexpected briefing Cara offers there on the ins-and-outs of embalming. Rose fashions one visual highlight from the diverse caskets her undertakers carry out of camper vans and double-decker buses: you may not personally want to take your leave in the leopardprint coffin that suggests the final resting place of Birds of a Feather’s Dorian, but the point would be that there’s no reason why such options shouldn’t be available to you. It is, after all, your funeral.

Levering open several doors within a previously closed shop, Rose’s respectfully framed scenes of the living communing with the dead aren't trampling on taboos so much as turning them over in search of some new line of approach. If there’s a limitation, it’s that these feel like highly localised case studies: most consumers will still be popping down the Co-Op when the bell tolls, and a more direct contrast between one set of arrangements and another could have been instructive. Still, as Cara insists: “People look at us as freaks – but the tide is turning.” Considerable human interest here – and adventurous programmers should be alerted: it’d make an apt double-bill with Almost Heaven, Carol Salter’s excellent 2017 doc on the time-honoured formality of Chinese funeral rites.

Dead Good opens in selected cinemas from today.

On DVD: "Fahrenheit 11/9"

We maybe forget that 2004's Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore's attempt to take the American national temperature in the wake of the Twin Towers attack, was A Very Big Thing Indeed in its moment: a politically charged provocation - handed the Cannes Palme d'Or by Quentin Tarantino's jury - which also surpassed In Bed with Madonna at the global box-office to reposition the documentary as potential summer blockbuster. We may also have forgotten that, however superlative Moore's rabblerousing was there, Fahrenheit 9/11 failed in its director's stated aim to stop then-President George W. Bush from winning a second term in office. After a brief flirtation with ObamaHope™, we've all come out the other side; and political stunts designed to overturn the status quo have given way to a moment when stunt politics - big red buses, bright red caps - have become the status quo. So Moore flips the title of his previous film for the sequel Fahrenheit 11/9, the better to reflect the date Donald Trump became President, and to represent our suddenly through-the-looking-glass reality. No surprise that he should find himself with an even bigger fight on his hands. 

Bush, as targets for satire go, constituted a representative of the old guard - the kind of "politics as usual" subsequent incumbents would explicitly define themselves against. Trump, by contrast, represents new money, that new, toxic strain of late capitalism that has succeeded in poisoning the political water table - literally so in Moore's native Flint, where the switching of the town's water supply has left its mostly black residents without amenities for the best part of the past three years. There is much in the new film that qualifies as discomforting or angering: Trump's relationship with his daughter, the sight of children in Flint developing pronounced, preventable skin rashes, or at the border being snatched away from their parents, thugs in MAGA hats accosting and assaulting black protesters. The difference between the old corruption and the new, Moore argues, is that it's no longer a covert backroom matter but out there in plain sight, visible at the rallies and in the streets, as apparent to the neutral observer as turning on a tap in Flint. What, then, to do about it?

That American citizens voted for Trump - as they have done for any number of tacky reality-TV "characters" - suggests a failure of multiple systems (the media, in failing to counter fake news; education, in failing to foster critical thinking; democracy, in failing to stave off outside influences), and we find Moore, like so many of us, struggling to get his head around it all; he's like a surgeon faced with a patient bleeding from multiple orifices simultaneously. He still has some wickedly mischievous tricks to fall back on, if blowing raspberries at a tumour is likely to have any effect. He's enough of an editor to venture a newly despairing, even chilling recap of election night itself, as Hillary's anthemic "Fight Song" begins to sound hopelessly empty, and Trump's witching-hour march to victory gets cut to Satanic murmurations. The Flint sections - marking a homecoming of sorts, three decades after Roger & Me - do a diligent job of rounding up useful-to-damning info that hasn't been widely shared inside the US, let alone beyond it; and the student walkouts in the wake of the Parkland massacre chime with Moore's youthful (his critics would doubtless insist childish) love of rebellion. When pushed, this filmmaker is capable of lucid social analysis: the film senses the dire need on the Left for a voice that can articulate the progressive cause with the unequivocal forcefulness of those on the Right. Those students are centred as one such beacon of hope; the suddenly ubiquitous Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez another; the Corbyn-like figure of Bernie Sanders, evidently a Moore favourite, another still. Viewers will have to pick and choose, as we still can in a democracy.

The trouble is that the sudden spread of rot through the American political system forces Moore to move around a lot; Fahrenheit 11/9 is an engaging watch, but it's also an essay-film that demonstrates how the centre has shifted/eroded by having no real centre of its own. One of the problems with our current rolling news cycle is that as one fact is introduced into the public domain, an older one recedes in or disappears from the memory altogether. (Could this be why polls suggest some people are starting to forget the Holocaust? It's hard enough remembering what our own tyrants got up to last week.) For long stretches in Fahrenheit 11/9 where Moore is off pursuing some new line of thought, Trump is allowed to vanish from one's mind and gaze, which isn't an entirely unpleasant phenomenon, but this dude's bad enough on camera; you dread to think what he's doing when nobody's looking. After the sequel's relative commercial disappointment (it took a twentieth of its predecessor's haul at the US box office), Moore announced that his next project would be a revival of his groundbreaking magazine series TV Nation, an acknowledgement that the playing fields have changed, much as Alex Gibney - the cooler head who took over as American cinema's most prominent political documentarian - made upon signing with Netflix to produce last year's excellent Dirty Money. That revival now looks to have been put on ice indefinitely, which strikes me as disappointing. It's far from fashionable to admit it, but we still need filmmakers like Moore to organise the morass of information (and misinformation) being thrown at us on a daily basis; serial television might have allowed him the time to thin out this material and go at the burning issues with greater precision and depth. Trump, for his part, is going nowhere for the time being.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is now available on DVD through Vertigo Releasing.