Fade to grey: "Doctor Strange"

The problem with year-round blockbusters is that their wows are wearing off faster than ever. The problem with the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that its myriad origin stories can only work minor variations on the same basic set-ups and scenes: if you're drawn to the movies for their storytelling properties, you can't help but feel as though you've seen and heard some-to-most of it before, whether in this universe or another. Doctor Strange opens with malevolent monk Mads Mikkelsen swiping some MacGuffiny Book of Nonsense from its ancient resting place before fleeing through a wormhole to present-day London, where he sees his robed minions knocked around by a space-warping, bald-pated Buddhist played by - you guessed it - Tilda Swinton. It's meant to be jawdropping, and on some superficial level it is, watching sidestreets being folded upwards until they stand at right angles to the ground. Wow, we go: ain't that something? And then the little sceptical man patrolling our memory banks clears his throat, and we go: oh, isn't this a bit like Inception?

This is - like Guardians of the Galaxy and Ant-Man before it - meant to be one of Marvel's larkier, more expressionistic outings, such trippy visual flourishes being overseen by the pulp-inclined Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister). And yet its focal point feels uncannily familiar: successful yet spiritually lost neurosurgeon Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) who will find himself on several levels after emerging from a career-ending car crash and passing into a mystic underworld-otherworld. As this snarky alpha begins to use his privilege for good, the nature of that familiarity becomes clear. Doctor Strange is Iron Man turned 90° to the ground: it enters into the same universe (sorry, Universe), only it comes at it from a slightly different angle. (The Radio Times might list it as "a sideways look at the Marvel origin story".) Early sequences in Kathmandu, where the broken Strange is rebuilt and reschooled by Swinton's Ancient One and her joshing apprentice Mordo (Chiwetel Ejiofor), rebuke the abject humourlessness of Chris Nolan's Batman Begins: it's the same old hokum, now with a knowing smirk. 

Occasionally, Derrickson gestures towards something a touch more serious and interesting: a thesis on the relationship between the body and the landscape. An early conversation between Swinton and Cumberbatch establishes that cells can only be put together in a certain way, like jigsaw pieces; the same could be said of pixels. As Doc heals himself physically and spiritually - becoming a master of the universe the minute he accepts everything matters - so too the world reconstructs itself around him in increasingly elaborate ways. Mikkelsen's Caecilius, by contrast, unfolds the walls and roof of a centuries-old chapel as though it were origami; he tears skyscrapers in two lengthways, as though they were cheese strings. All of this makes for passable distraction - and makes Doctor Strange a virtual shoo-in for next year's effects Oscars - but ultimately they amount to no more than gestures, joshing pastiches of Nolan's unsmiling cosmic philosophy. It seems telling that the second "c" in Caecilius is pronounced soft, not hard (as the Latin textbooks of yore advised): the silly is built in here.

At some point after the initial wave of cheerleading for the MCU subsides, fully-grown critics are going to have to face up to the fact these films are not just fantastical, but fundamentally ridiculous and flimsy - at least as ridiculous and flimsy as, say, the openly derided Gods of Egypt. (Strange just has better PR, that's all.) Swinton and Cumberbatch's floating astral selves swap increasingly portentous pronouncements; Mikkelsen's eye shadow is, one presumes, intended to lend him a toehold alongside Heath Ledger's Joker in the pantheon of modern supervillains, but he mostly resembles a bassist in a Sweet tribute band. The flimsiness begets uncommon levels of thespwaste, an overriding sensation that everyone on screen is underemployed, underengaged, turned solely towards cranking up another franchise-within-the-franchise, banging out more product.

While it's nice that these films have made global stars of such likable white chaps as Messrs. Cumberbatch, Downey Jr., Pratt and Rudd, the adherence to a very particular, narrow story arc leaves no time or space for anybody on screen to defy the easy categorisations of "baddie", "sidekick", "love interest" or "expositional tool". Michael Stuhlbarg gets by with two meek scenes as a rival surgeon, a character who'll presumably go to the dark side somewhere down the line - but if you can't see how these movies routinely shortsell their actors' own powers, see what Stuhlbarg accomplished in roughly the same screen time in one astonishing flashback as a homophobic father in the most recent season of the Amazon series Transparent. Rachel McAdams, following up Spotlight, is stuck in the Pepper Potts role of perpetual helpmeet/potential squeeze, nursing our hero back to functionality before getting forgotten about because she's a girl; even Swinton, less an actor these days than a presence, twinkles only briefly before petering out.

As for the main attraction, well, after all Cumberbatch's commendable work to reinvigorate Sherlock Holmes, Stephen Strange emerges from this first introduction as a second-string, stop-gap sort of hero: no more, in total, than a beard, a cape and a handful of pop trivia. (On a performance level, the actor's natural self-effacement seems markedly less effective than Downey Jr.'s calculatedly vulgar screenhogging - we never forget which asshole is inside Iron Man's suit, but Cumberbatch gets lost amid the bigger bangs.) My big problem with Doctor Strange, in the end, is that for all Derrickson's doodling around him, the central figure is never quite strange or unique enough to merit sustained interest - to power one movie, let alone the two or three we're doubtless going to have to sit through over the years to come. If a furrowed brow, facial hair and a passing knowledge of late Seventies one-hit wonders are all that's required to become a superhero these days, there are at least six regulars down my local pub quiz who should have been handed their own Marvel spin-off by now.

Doctor Strange is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "Bad Santa"

Of the many truths scattered throughout the Half Man Half Biscuit back catalogue, perhaps the truest would be the title of their millennial festive anthem "It's Clichéd to be Cynical at Christmas". That said, if the Hollywood studios are going to release Yuletide-themed movies this early in November, far better Bad Santa, a clever, snarky comedy from Crumb and Ghost World director Terry Zwigoff, than the saccharine candyfloss of last year's Elf. The timing of Bad Santa's UK release also ensures it benefits from the aftershock of an American election in which the Christian right's insistence that some things are sacred extended to voting back in an administration that had spent much of the past four years lying to, cheating, and stealing from the world. Whatever nasty taste Tuesday night's result left in the mouth can be comprehensively spat out here, in a bilious, moral majority-baiting satire that more often than not hits you like a movie equivalent of hair-of-the-dog.

Its hero Willie (Billy Bob Thornton) is an unshaven, self-loathing drunk and incorrigible tea leaf who each year takes a menial gig as Santa in a different shopping mall in order to spend extensive time casing the joint. Having claimed the perks of the job - being rude to small children, screwing their moms in the changing rooms - Willie and his elf sidekick Marcus (Tony Cox) lock themselves in on Christmas Eve and make off with whatever cash they can get their grubby hands on. This holiday season, however, is somewhat different: not just because our Santa has reached an absolute nadir of suicidal despair, but since Willie has also attracted the attentions of a portly, put-upon child (Brett Kelly), a relationship that - beneath Zwigoff's gaze - keeps threatening to tip over into Hallmark-movie sentiment without ever quite doing so; its signature moment comes when Willie uses the contents of a whisky bottle to sterilise a cut in the kid's hand, pouring it on neat before taking a swig for himself.

Around Ghost World's strip malls, Zwigoff and his collaborators found literally rich territory for satire. Offered a markedly bigger budget here, he gets shopping malls to make merry and mischief within. The result feels as though the filmmaker had asked his old friend Robert Crumb to "enhance" a festive Norman Rockwell tableau: each scabrous, scatological scene craps on conventional family values while, in its own way, thumbing its nose at the present situation - better a bad Santa than a godly President. You'd think the compulsion to flick fag ash rather than fake snow over everything would lead to a certain greying of vision, a monotonous misanthropy, but Zwigoff strings up performances like fairy lights. Cox is a busy, hectoring Sancho Panza; John Ritter a fey liberal whose political correctness keeps getting the better of him; Lauren Graham a sweet, sexy barmaid with a Santa fetish. Even the cameos, a Ghost World strength, are valuable, taking in Ajay Naidu as a character with the once-in-a-lifetime billing of "Hindustani troublemaker". Nothing, however, detracts from the career-defining platform the film provides for Thornton, itching, scratching and grouching his way through proceedings as this year's most recognisably human American hero.

(November 2004)

Bad Santa is available on DVD through Sony; a sequel, Bad Santa 2, opens this Friday.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   

for the weekend of November 11-13, 2016:
   

1 (new) Arrival (12A)
2 (1) Doctor Strange (12A) **
3 (2) Trolls (U)
4 (3) The Accountant (15)
5 (4) A Street Cat Named Bob (12A) **
6 (5) Nocturnal Animals (15) **
7 (7) The Girl on the Train (15) *
8 (9) Storks (U)
9 (8) Jack Reacher: Never Go Back (12A)
10 (6) The Light Between Oceans (12A)

(source: theguardian.com)

My top five:   

1. Indignation [above]
2. Dog Eat Dog
3. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
4. Panic
5. United States of Love 


Top Ten DVD rentals:  

   

1 (3) Now You See Me 2 (12)
2 (1) Supersonic (15)
3 (new) The Angry Birds Movie (U)
4 (4) Alice Through the Looking Glass (PG)
5 (2) Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (12) **
6 (5) Gods of Egypt (12)
7 (9) The Take (15)
8 (10) Mother's Day (12)
9 (8) The Guv'nor (15)
10 (7) The Nice Guys (15) ****

(source: lovefilm.com)

                                   

My top five:  

1. Things to Come
2. The Lovers and the Despot
3. Chevalier
4. Courted
5. The Wait
 

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   

1. Boyz N The Hood (Saturday, BBC2, 10.45pm)
2. The Aristocats (Sunday, C4, 5.05pm)
3. Once (Sunday, BBC1, 12.05am)
4. Silver Linings Playbook (Friday, C4, 12.35am)
5. Dirty Pretty Things (Saturday, BBC2, 12.30am)

"Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them" (RD 18/11/16)

Heaven knows we could do with some magic right now. Back in 2001, when J.K. Rowling first sketched out her textbook spin-off from the Harry Potter series, she could scarcely have foreseen what forces would be at play in the Western world come the end of 2016. Then again, some threats remain eternal. Fifteen years on, the film version of Fantastic Beasts – directed by David Yates, from a screenplay by Rowling herself – emerges at the exact right moment to snaffle hearts and pocket money alike: here are two-and-a-bit hours of first-rate distraction-cum-bedazzlement that nevertheless run close enough to current events as to feel like some pop-cultural pep rally.

Rowling, Yates and super-savvy producer David Hayman here expand the Potterverse to the US via the sort of migrant’s tale that moved us in 2014’s Paddington and last year’s Brooklyn. The traveller here is Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander, a fantasyland Attenborough (and purported author of that textbook) who arrives in 20s New York clutching a single suitcase containing the many rare creatures he’s collected upon his travels. Little does he know it, but he’s stepped into the epicentre of a cosmic tussle between good and evil.

It takes a while to establish who’s who, but broadly, the forces of liberation – operating out of a prototypical UN – encompass Carmen Ejogo as the West’s first female president of colour, Colin Farrell as her unsmiling second-in-command, and a sparkling Katherine Waterston, seemingly styled after Olive Oyl, as the loose-cannon cop who becomes Newt’s guardian angel. The forces of oppression count among their number Samantha Morton as a hate preacher keen to initiate a new Salem, Ezra Miller (We Need to Talk About Kevin’s demon seed) as her resentful adopted son, and Jon Voight as a newspaper magnate whipping up anti-wizard sentiment. Already, you can see why FB might chime with the reality of late 2016.

What’s immediately noticeable is that this is Rowling on a bigger canvas, both rebooting and upgrading that universe the movies first began constructing back in 2001 (and which may now look a touch dated to 21^st century consumers). Yates, who steered home the Potter franchise, has the budget this time to go beyond Hogwarts and sweep over a meticulously recreated period New York, while his VFX team have a field day, amusing themselves (and us) in cramming every frame with funny in-jokes and Easter eggs. I suspect the self-operating iron will be on many Christmas lists this year; but you’ll also coo at the characterful menagerie – giant dung beetles, clingy stick insects et al. – bursting forth from Newt’s carry-on luggage, and chuckle heartily at the moving illustrations adorning the covers of the books these characters take to bed with them. (At last, accompanying adults may say: a blockbuster that promotes reading.)

These throwaway pixellations admittedly prove more playful and striking than the smash-up-the-city finale by which Fantastic Beasts fits the modern event-movie template, but generally Yates strikes a satisfying balance between the human and the virtual. If Redmayne’s twitching and eyelash-fluttering seems a leftover from The Danish Girl – and his rump-shaking before a horny CG rhino is flatly demeaning – this performance grows on you, and Newt is that species of naïf youngsters will likely adore. And while Yates doesn’t have RADA’s finest with which to bulk out his supporting cast this time, he displays a sharp eye and ear for enjoyable American types. He has a real boon in Dan Fogler as the muggle baker who gives good, uncomprehending cutaway whenever events get too fantastical, while Alison Sudol offers a better quality of flapper than Baz Luhrmann’s Gatsby provided; the closing moments also give rise to an unusually effective star cameo.

It would work just as well as a standalone for kids who’ve never heard of Ron Weasley, but retaining the steady Yates’s services ensures the new film coheres with the Potterverse’s best qualities – not least Rowling’s ongoing interest in the fight for a kinder, more caring world. Her creative philanthropy here extends to imagining a humane form of execution by the state, although elsewhere her Britishness shines through: an entire setpiece is built around the safekeeping of a teapot, and there’s a restorative final-reel rainstorm. It’s typical of a major motion picture event that delivers its spectacle while keeping an eye on the small stuff and out for the little guy – high-quality, high-reward product that those of us in the cheap seats probably needed from the dream factory at a point where reality was getting a touch hard to take.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

"Your Name" (Guardian 18/11/16)

Your Name ***

Dir: Matoko Shinkai. Animation with the voices of: Ryunosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi, Ryo Narita, Aoi Yūki. 106 mins. Cert: 12A
 
Matoko Shinkai is the Japanese animator many are tipping as heir apparent to the revered Hayao Miyazaki. This thoroughly emo bodyswap fantasia, a sizeable hit on home turf, demonstrates that he’s inherited much of his predecessor’s artistry and charm, but not yet his narrative mastery – nor, crucially, that magic that distinguishes lasting artworks from well-drawn ‘toons for teens. Shinkai ties this tale of a bored small-town girl who finds herself inhabiting the form of an inner-city male contemporary in photorealistic bows and ribbons, proving as attentive to everyday objects (smartphones, sliding train doors) as Miyazaki is to flora and fauna. Yet after a fluffily enjoyable first half, the attempt to dramatise and thereby process Japan’s recent run of natural disasters feels perilously jejune: as the spectacle expands, the film becomes less engaging and affecting. (Sensitive rockers Radwimps’ song-score suggests Fall Out Boy playing live at the Apocalypse.) Nice enough – just not quite the knockout advance word promised. 

Your Name is now playing in selected cinemas.

Lost souls: "Dog Eat Dog"

The last time Paul Schrader teamed up with Nicolas Cage, it resulted in 2014's Dying of the Light, a potentially interesting character study - centred on a battle-scarred surveillance operative - that found itself recut by hit-seeking producers into a straightforward shoot-'em-up, leading to a very public and vocal slanging match between everybody concerned. Cage and Schrader stuck together as shit hit fan, however, and evidently resolved to do their own thing the next time they found themselves working together. Cut to: this week's Dog Eat Dog, Schrader's new movie starring Cage, which indeed has the look of one of those "fuck it", filter-off projects creatives often thrash out whenever they're pissed off with the ways of the world, or the state of the industry.

Adapted by Matthew Wilder from an Eddie Bunker novel, Dog is ripe for claiming as another of Schrader's ongoing portraits of flawed-to-toxic masculinity (think Taxi Driver, Light Sleeper or Affliction), but also delights in the kind of tough-talking and gunplay that gets crime thrillers sold to video-on-demand platforms and occasionally secures their directors a hit. So here are a pair of washed-up, middle-aged crims, reunited after a stretch in prison with the not-so-bright idea of shaking down a rich divorce lawyer by kidnapping his kid. Cage's Troy, a wannabe high-roller who fancies himself a latter-day Bogart, is notionally the brains of the operation, though he's prone to peacocking in suits loud enough to set off any police radar; his partner is Mad Dog (Willem Dafoe), a terminal no-hoper with severe anger management issues, first witnessed stabbing his girlfriend to death.

These are almost certainly not guys whose company you'd willingly seek out, nor indeed whom you'd trust with the safekeeping of a kid. Schrader catches them in their natural habitat, the stripjoint, tossing the N-word around, talking big, and yet all available evidence points to them being men hopelessly out of time, in both senses of the expression. They're not on Facebook; they have no clue who Taylor Swift is; they are utterly lost at sea with the opposite sex. Crime is all they've known, and the one thing they still vaguely know how to do - though even in this field, they come to find themselves outmuscled by the young punks who've moved into the projects during their spell behind bars.

Gradually, Dog Eat Dog expands beyond its genre confines to present as another in the recent run of Trump-age cultural artefacts in which white male characters of a certain age - surrogates, perhaps, for the ageing Caucasians behind the camera - strive to make peace with the fact the world is no longer theirs. Schrader being Schrader, Dog Eat Dog is inevitably several degrees saltier and scuzzier than, say, Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino or Woody Allen's recent Amazon series Crisis in Six Scenes: we see more of the assembled cocktail waitresses' behinds than we ever do of their faces, although in mitigation, Schrader's making the point this may be a consequence of these women turning their backs on his characters.

There's shadier material here than the post-Tarantino crime flick has traditionally accommodated, certainly - Troy's beatdown at the hands (and feet) of two cops is transformed into another of Schrader's occasional mortifications of the flesh - yet overall, we're witnessing a filmmaker whose up-down career has generated plentiful sturm-und-drang both before and behind the scenes actively enjoying himself. Though beyond redemption in many respects, these clowns remain pretty funny to look at; while every bit as damned as the lost and lonely souls who haunted this director's earlier works, they have unexpected, colourful-colloquial means of expressing themselves. (They, too, are raging against the dying of the light - but they're doing so with squirt guns and custard pies.)

It's some measure of how much fun Schrader is having that he, too, comes to appear in front of the camera, playing "The Greek", his crooks' contact with the underworld; he's literally giving the orders here, and you sense him working closely with two favourite actors in the margins to which they've all been exiled. In a spot of counterintuitive casting, Dafoe is handed the stock Cage role of off-the-hook livewire, and he revels in it in a way this actor hasn't been allowed to since Wild at Heart: Mad Dog is established from the word go as a grotesque buffoon, the kind of blowhard blabbermouth who won't shut up even after he's fallen several floors onto a concrete floor during a botched shot at corpse-concealing.

Cage, for his part, appears a little more modulated - crafty, even - than he has in his recent vehicles: for once, his sudden, wild flourishes serve to speak less to an actor's tics than a character's abject desperation to make an impression on an indifferent universe, and there's something touching, if not transcendent, in the way Schrader finally permits Troy to play Bogart - to cling to his white-knight fantasies, even as reality dooms him to a different fate. Like Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead - one of the past decade's least heralded masterpieces - this is an unusually energised film for a man of pensionable age to have put together, one that suggests something you'd have thought inconceivable as the credits rolled on Schrader's last few films: that this is a director in rude health, who might still have a career if he stuck at it.

Dog Eat Dog opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on January 2.

In a lonely place: "Panic"

The brooding Brit thriller Panic begins in a place most freelance journos will surely recognise, with a hack hero sat in his North London highrise flat and becoming increasingly distracted from his heavyhitting 1,000-word piece on politics in music by the world outside his window. More specifically: by a growing fascination with the young Chinese woman who lives in the apartment across the way. It's clear from the off that Andrew (David Gyasi) is a born observer, detached in that way journalists are often accused of being, yet there's a yearning and a loneliness in his watching that sets up Sean Spencer's film as another of the 21st century Rear Window variants. There are twists on the basic template, for all that: it's not Andrew but the married gallery owner he occasionally hooks up with who spies the object of his attentions being carried off by thugs; and our hero is hobbled not by anything so old-school as a broken leg, but very contemporary panic attacks that make it hard for him to leave his apartment. His subsequent reaching out in the direction of the woman's disappearance is a bid for reconnection with a world he feels disconnected from; and yet - in true noir style - this intervention will only further underline his essential isolation.

As this cherchez la femme narrative unfolds, Panic catches a troubling mood specific to city dwellers, namely that you might be simultaneously alone and yet caught up in some vast conspiracy or power game you cannot possibly fathom out. Spencer has two major assets in this regard. Carl Burke's shadowy, nocturnal photography again underlines just how well our filmmakers are now shooting London (and an idea of London): here is a recognisably cold, hard, lonely place, where cramped and antiseptic living spaces are dwarfed by spooky corporate towers, separated by soot-stained back avenues that somehow haven't fallen subject to the inevitable regeneration; a nexus into which a man or woman might well disappear. We are, nevertheless, drawn in by Gyasi's tersely expressive performance, with its inbuilt sense of helplessness whenever darkness falls. (Spencer appears alert indeed to the irony of casting a black British actor as an agonised white knight.) Several blocks removed from the average Lahndan crime caper, the film is low-key, minimal - finally closer to neo-noir like Night Moves (in either its Penn or Reichardt iterations) than the jovial-jokey Hitch, which perhaps explains the tentative release strategy, two years after completion, without the advance fanfare of a press screening. (You'll have to seek Panic out down one of those same backstreets.) Yet it's carefully sustained and insinuating: a calling-card feature that seizes the attention with minimum fuss, before sliding right under the skin.

Panic opens in selected cinemas from today.