Haywire: "Ron's Gone Wrong"

As you may have already spotted, it's been a rare bad week for Disney at the domestic box office. The illustrious underperformance of Ridley Scott's The Last Duel (too long? too medieval? too rape-based?) has made the biggest industry headlines, but looking beyond that, when was the last time a new Disney-distributed animation opened at number five? (And behind the universally shrugged-off The Addams Family 2, at that.) Ron's Gone Wrong was never going to have the might of the Pixar marketing machine behind it: it hails from a new UK animation studio, Locksmith, and it's ended up with Disney via the megacorp's new minions 20th Century Studios (formerly Fox). That we're witnessing a new animation model is evident onscreen from the decision to run credits for key creatives upfront, rather than in the closing moments - including one for the unexpected exec-prod alliance of Elisabeth Murdoch and writer-directors Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham (yes, that Peter Baynham). All parties may well be confident that the film will claw its way back to financial parity over the half-term rollout: if the marketplace has taught us anything, it's that kids' films, which can hold onto matinee slots several months after first release, are possessed of a longer tail than almost anything else around, such that a Croods 2 - a film to which no adult has willingly travelled - can presently stand among the year's biggest successes.

One factor in Ron's Gone Wrong going commercially wrong (at least as things stand) may be the old story of two studios landing upon the same idea simultaneously: our communal tech fetish has already been lampooned by Netflix's Sony buy-in The Mitchells vs. the Machines. Smith and Baynham have boiled down mounting parental concerns over screen time and poured them into the vessel of a single must-have item: the BubbleBot, a sleek, wipeclean hybrid of Alexa and the Nintendo character Kirby who promises children a best friend "right out of the box". The film's first funny idea is that poor Barney Pudowski (voiced by Jack Dylan Glazer) - son of a single father, from Slavic immigrant stock - should wind up with what's effectively a BubbleBot knockoff, found in a skip, lacking the requisite software updates, and apparently on the verge of some terrible malfunction, a feeling only enhanced by Zach Galifianakis's voice work. This somehow feels like an innately British idea, arrived at by creatives who spent their formative years sat before Tomorrow's World watching America's cool kids get their hands on the shiniest bits of kit, and who then had to wait forever for the technology to cross the Atlantic or make do with the cheaper market own-brand variant.

There's an identifiable tension within these frames, and it stems from a difference of outlook high up within the chain of command, possibly even between Murdoch, Smith and Baynham; it's what happens when you invite silly Brits into an environment as solemnly businesslike as the modern American boardroom. (Smith and Baynham's last collaboration - on Arthur Christmas, an Aardman production released under the Sony banner - had much the same issue, torn between making something idiosyncratic and making something for easy global export.) The new film unfolds in a generic American Everytown, complete with generic junior-high corridors containing generic school bullies. But its funnier lines are funnier than the animation average - the kind of out-there suggestions that would likely be suppressed at the committee stage of bigger studio productions. Most of these go to Barney's exuberantly Russian grandmother Donka, voiced by Olivia Colman (who continues to bear out the new Spitting Images: she really is in everything nowadays). Informed there's a three-month waiting list for a brand-new BubbleBot, she's heard to mutter "what is this, Stalinist Russia?"; later, we learn she fixed her own hernia "with only a bread knife and vodka". The relationship between boy and toy develops goofily, too. There are traces of the enduring E.T. here, underlined when Barney and Ron (named for the first letters of his barcode) flee BubbleCorp heavies on a scooter; and the pair's rapport occasionally resembles that of toddler and older brother trying to stop sibling from running into traffic. 

But for the longest while, that central bond operates on the level of pure chaos; the childproof locks are well and truly ripped off, and for 45 minutes at its centre, the film becomes properly entertaining and surprising. Here again, Smith and Baynham look to be working with a far freer hand: there's a gag about babysnatching that I suspect the tightly regimented Pixar crew would have nixed on the grounds it might trigger onlooking guardians. Pity that the finale should revert to the generic: an overextended raid on BubbleCorp HQ that ditches the gags in favour of sub-Brad Bird action, and makes off with only sappy homilies on friendship. Locksmith are still in their R&D phase: they're testing how far they can deviate from the multiplex animation template, and how far they want to deviate from the multiplex animation template. That this is still, bottom line, studio product can be seen from the time, thought and energy expended on the broadly insignificant matter of who's running BubbleCorp - an entirely corporate subplot that's only here because the creative team want to please everyone, including their paymasters. There have been worse ambitions, but the best sequences in Ron's Gone Wrong - the scenes where Smith and Baynham really do seem to get it right - are those that take place beyond this bubble, in its digitised real world. It's here that the film spots the advantage of switching off the algorithms, recalibrating one's commercial expectations, and generally loosening up. These things can be daft inflatable lilos rather than machine-tooled juggernauts! And that's OK!

Ron's Gone Wrong is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of October 8-10, 2021):

1 (1) No Time To Die (12A) ***

2 (new) The Addams Family 2 (PG)

3 (2) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (12A) ***

4 (4) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

5 (5) The Many Saints of Newark (15) ***

6 (3) Free Guy (12A)

7 (8) Candyman (15)

8 (6) Chal Mera Putt 3 (12A)

9 (new) Deadly Cuts (15)

10 (9) Respect (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Scream

2. Gagarine

3. The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão

4. Ron's Gone Wrong

5. Freshman Year

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Jungle Cruise (12)

2 (1) Free Guy (12)

3 (4) SPECTRE (12) ***

4 (3) Fast & Furious 9 (12)

5 (2) Black Widow (12) ***

6 (new) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

7 (7) Skyfall (12) ****

8 (6) Casino Royale (12) ***

9 (11) Quantum of Solace (12) **

10 (9) Luca (U)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Deerskin

2. Nowhere Special

3. Supernova

4. The Reason I Jump

5. The Fever

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. An Impossible Love (Saturday, BBC2, 1.10am)

2. The Death of Stalin (Sunday, BBC2, 10.45pm)

3. The Guilty (Monday, C4, 1.55am)

4. The Hate U Give (Sunday, C4, 11.35pm)

5. A Time to Kill [above] (Friday, BBC1, 11.25pm)

Be cool: "Freshman Year"

Freshman Year's UK title is pegged to a particular nostalgic moment: the young scholar's first time away from home, when your life finally seems to be your own, and the adult pleasures of drink, drugs and fellow horndogs fall within suddenly easy reach. The film's US title may be in closer touch with collegiate reality: Shithouse. The central gag in this SXSW favourite of 2020, all but a one-man-show for writer-director-star Cooper Raiff, is that a rite-of-passage the movies have traditionally painted as just the wildest time is more often than not a squirmingly awkward mess, a maze of bad choices from which even the sharpest Fulbright contender would do well to extricate themselves. Raiff throws his emotionally dependent mother's boy Alex right in at the deep end. The homesickness and contemptuous wannabe stand-up dormmate would be plenty for any young man to have to negotiate in the first weeks of term, but then there's a drunken hook-up with the whipsmart Maggie (Dylan Gelula), which our boy comprehensively mishandles, because nobody's yet taught him how to handle such affairs. The movie gives this kid what teen movie lore would normally define as one perfect night, then spends its next hour cutting him down at the knees. Much has been made of Raiff's own youthfulness - he's currently 23, so makes one of the American cinema's more credible freshmen - but it may just be that he's just young enough to remember these humiliations more vividly than those filmmakers who make their breakthrough college comedy in their thirties or forties.

The rest of us will have to bear in mind that this is an indie production, and therefore not expect the buoying gloss of those American Pie movies that defined the college experience for a generation. (Those kids must have been so disappointed when they finally arrived on campus.) There are no comic setpieces involving eccentric or exasperated professors; instead, Raiff shepherds his characters between dorms and around the fringes of an anonymous university town, rightly sensing it's those off-campus aspects that tend to stay with you from your first year at uni, rather than anything nailed down on the curriculum itself. The scene is notionally set for a romantic self-portrait, but Raiff plays Alex as slow on the uptake - unworldly would be the kind word for the twit. Not only does he not clock that Maggie has her eye on him, he scarcely knows how to react once she leaps atop him. (The "The Time Is Now" T-shirt he reveals once Maggie asks him to remove his protective hoodie will likely endure as the most ironic item of wardrobe in any movie this year.) Gelula is a good foil in these scenes, but really comes through once Maggie - a year older, in a film that recognises how critical 12 extra months of life experience are at this stage - starts pushing back against this clueless young man's adolescent bullshit. She even gets the funniest line, telling the sappy Alex he's "like the girl from 13 Going on 30", a point of reference destined to make anyone over and above those ages feel ancient indeed.

Raiff notes and nurtures the pair's connection - even after a disastrously curtailed dryhumping session, their early interactions generate the mellow warmth of late-night conversations with a good pal - but he's also painfully aware of the hesitancy and difficulty that stems from any attempt to convert initial sparks into something more lasting besides. And that's why Freshman Year's closing moments are quietly special: in the face of the copious evidence this century has thrown up suggesting men and women really would be better off if they left one another alone, here's a filmmaker who remains guardedly optimistic. Were it not for the fact that, you know, the planet is set to become a blazing fireball inside fifty years and we keep electing the exact worst people to manage that or any other crisis, one might envy the youth of today. A film such as this, or a show like Netflix's Sex Education, unpicking the decades of misinformation movies and TV have instilled around matters of intimacy, could prove properly instructive, and spare some poor soul a grave embarrassment at a formative moment. If you were looking down the barrel of a UCAS form, and if you were able to watch Freshman Year's entire second half (through fingers, if necessary), I dare say you'd learn more about the extracurricular aspects of higher ed here than you would watching Seann William Scott chug down another man's semen from a red solo cup.

Freshman Year is now available to rent via YouTube and Prime Video.

The urban spaceman: "Gagarine"

Once again, the French cinema finds an entirely new angle on the inner city. An expansion on a 2015 short of the same name, Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh's Gagarine proceeds from an inspired juxtaposition: it sets memories of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut and image of stratospherically high aspiration, against the latter-day reality of the Cité Gagarine, the Ivry-sur-Seine housing estate that was named for the astronaut in 1963 (by the then-ascendant Communist Party) and subsequently run down by a half-century of municipal neglect. It's there we find our teenage hero, also called Yuri (Alseni Bathily), a mournfully eccentric amateur astronomer of African descent who lives apparently alone in one of the estate's flats, sleeping under a homemade diorama of the solar system and with a telescope at his window that allows him to keep an eye on his fellow residents. In the absence of any parental oversight, Yuri devotes himself to pottering about the estate's corridors, repairing whatever he can in an vain attempt to stave off the developers' wrecking ball. (One early improvement: replacing a lift's flickering fluorescents with disco lights.) The old place retains traces of its former futurism: during the opening credits, the pointed corner of one of its roofs pierces the frame like the 2001 monolith. Yet its days are numbered. As his neighbours are gradually rehoused, Yuri finds himself broadly as alone as his Soviet namesake, with only a fellow dreamer, Diana (Lyra Khoudri), the Tereshkova to his Gagarin, swinging by to provide sporadic company. A Romany girl who's secured some kind of future for herself as a trainee operator on the cranes knocking down such relics as Yuri's home, she confesses a desire to get out and live the life she really wants elsewhere. The question is whether an estate such as this is a launchpad or merely a scrapyard, and one of Liatard and Trouilh's triumphs is to set us to thinking seriously about a question residents of estates like the Gagarine must ponder every day.

That's partly down to the unique way these filmmakers set about visualising their characters' inner lives. We're travelling through similar territory to last year's British success Rocks: like that film's eponymous heroine, Yuri finds himself abandoned by wayward guardians who bequeath him with only a sorry note of leavetaking and a scattering of currency. Yet the British film was tethered to some degree by social-realist tradition, and our expectations of what a film about the inner city should look like. Liatard and Trouilh take an extra imaginative leap in establishing the estate as its own galaxy and setting out to explore its furthest reaches; they film Yuri's flat, with its put-through parallel walls, as Ridley Scott and Alfonso Cuarón filmed intergalactic space stations. With the camera circling, in a mirror of the zero-G footage Yuri watches at night, the second half delights in Marion Burger's production design and some charmingly handturned effects as Yuri transforms his immediate environment into an airlock in a last-ditch bid to keep the world below at bay. Yet it's still out there, in the sound of the construction workers' hammers and boots getting closer by the scene, and in the sight of Diana's caravan site being brutally dismantled. That's the impressive balance Liatard and Trouilh strike here. Gagarine is, bottom line, a movie about displacement and dispossession, the destruction of a community (we see the real Gagarine being torn down in the closing credits), all of which prevents it from toppling over into Michel Gondry-style whimsy. But even as it keeps one foot firmly on the ground, it never stops looking up, and its flights of fancy beam back big, bold, ever-resonant images. Curled up inside a tent in the capsule this most practical of urban spacemen constructs for himself, Yuri really could be a 21st century starchild: floating in the ether of modern multicultural France, barely seen, yet no less full of potential.

Gagarine is now playing in selected London cinemas, and available to stream via Curzon Home Cinema.

Callbacks: "The Guilty"

2018's The Guilty was a notably well-marshalled Danish suspenser that suggested the movies had started to take notes from TV's better bottle episodes: it boiled down to a man alone in a room, desperately trying to put the world to rights over the telephone, even as his certainties came crashing down around him. That film remains a great night's entertainment, but now we have a second, English-language The Guilty, adapted by True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto, directed by the never knowingly understated Antoine Fuqua, and starring a jacked-up Jake Gyllenhaal as the burnt-out 911 operator who fields a fateful call from a damsel in distress. Amazingly, given Netflix's involvement, the running time is roughly comparable - 91 minutes, set against the original's lean 85, one early sign that the source couldn't really be improved upon, and that everybody's working with much the same material. Yet elements here have clearly been buffed and upscaled. The new film opens with a panorama of L.A. at the height of wildfire season - helicopters cutting through smoke and infernal-red skies - which recalls nothing less than the Vietnam of Apocalypse Now. Gyllenhaal's Joe Baylor operates out of the kind of coolly low-lit yet extravagantly open-plan office space that has become familiar to viewers of American TV forensics dramas. And towards the end of these 91 minutes, just before the last caller hangs up, an extended coda carefully tidies away those ambiguities the original was perfectly content to leave hanging, the better to keep its viewers up past their bedtime.

If the Fuqua variation serves any real purpose beyond IP appropriation, it's that it once more highlights a difference between European and American storytelling norms. The Danish movie was all in your head and all the stronger for it, being the best radio play this century to have taken a left turn and ended up on cinema screens. The remake is mostly in your head, because its maker can't quite help himself: rendered a shade redundant by the project's medium-high concept, Fuqua sporadically takes to doodling little vignettes, not quite scenes, in the corners of the frame to hint at what might be unfolding out there on the road Joe's caller (voiced now by Riley Keough) is tearfully travelling. Furthermore, he sets his hero down in front of a towering bank of monitors showing the world (or at least this sprawling Californian part of it) burning up, as close as the filmmaker gets to his trademark pyrotechnics. Throughout the first act, there's rather too much visual noise: your eyes are too busy for your ears to take in critical details. (The original avoided that problem by being Scandinavian-sober from first frame to last.) It improves once it yanks the protagonist into a darkened sideroom, tightening the focus and removing Joe from the nightshift herd to prey more forcefully on his vulnerabilities. Gyllenhaal begins to lose it in sweaty close-up, and the narrative starts to exert a measure of the original's pull, even if those of us who've already seen this tale told will know exactly where we're all headed.

Second time around, the big narrative twist struck me as even more cynical-bordering-on-reactionary: the kind of fiendishly prickly provocation Danish filmmakers have felt liberated to trade in post-Lars von Trier, snickering wickedly as it overturns those assumptions we've been advised to make upon hearing stories such as that Joe hears coming down the line. Still, it's engineered and executed with flashes of Fuqua's usual expressive flair: in the pause that follows in this revelation's immediate wake, the gaping space in the frame around Gyllenhaal appears to reformulate itself into one giant, slack-jawed holler of "FUUUCCCCKKKKK!". That's sorta fun, but too much else here feels like an exercise. A wise musician once said the only point in covering a song is to do something radically different with it, make it new all over again. Judged on those terms, this version of The Guilty is a failure, no more than world cinema karaoke. One sad thing about modern Hollywood is that it's had far worse ideas than world cinema karaoke over the past thirty years - and many worse stabs at world cinema karaoke. (The heart sinks upon being reminded of George Sluizer's 1993 redo of his own 1988 film The Vanishing starring Jeff Bridges and a pre-fame Sandra Bullock, so disastrous that it not only sank without trace but buried the excellent original beneath a slew of complex rights issues.) Yet there surely have to be better ideas hidden towards the bottom of William Morris's daily maildrop. Don't there?

The Guilty is now playing at the Everyman Broadgate and the Rio Dalston, and is available to stream via Netflix; the 2018 original screens on Channel 4 this Monday at 1.55am.

Girl erased: "The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão"

The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão finds Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian writer-director fêted on the festival circuit for his subversively queer romances, going epically long with an adaptation of a Martha Batalha novel; in doing so, he moves himself a little closer to the movie centreground. (The film was Brazil's official submission for the Academy Awards in 2020.) Told via a series of letters that never reach their intended recipient, this is a tale of two sisters raised within a reasonably well-to-do family in the Rio of the 1950s. Aïnouz's first triumph lies in casting personalities who contrast yet complement one another, and who so closely tessellate in the early scenes that it immediately feels like a tragedy when the fates conspire to rip them asunder. Our heroines are the tall, upright Eurídice (Carol Duarte), a gifted pianist with plans to study in Europe that require saving herself for marriage, and the shorter, darker, lustier Guida (Julia Stockler), who finds herself tarred with the brush of disgrace after she runs off with a Greek sailor and returns to the family home pregnant. It quickly becomes apparent that, although operating with a bigger budget and more heteronormative relationships than he has previously, Aïnouz is still working through his recurring theme of secret and forbidden, unruly or unseemly love. And the subversion is still there, not least in the drunken wedding night that involves poppers and gloriously smudged make-up, or a swoony nightclub tryst that throws back to the Fassbinder of Querelle. An in-all-senses pointed close-up of an erect penis suggests we're witnessing a rethink of the costume drama, one where the costumes will be far less prominent than the hearts - and other parts - throbbing beneath them.

To this end, Aïnouz has armed himself with more or less the ideal collaborator in cinematographer du jour Hélène Louvart (Portrait of a Lady on Fire). From the prologue, which locates the sisters in the natural world, this is a film far more interested in bodies and faces than it ever is in material things. The plot, to isolate one element, runs for an hour on desire alone: I fear this is going to sound like a blatant bid for pullquote status, but The Invisible Life... is a far hornier period drama than the much-binged Bridgerton, featuring characters who can't contain their hormones long enough to deploy the withdrawal method, and thereby come to suffer the consequences of unprotected sex in a country that can hardly bring itself to talk about abortion. Here, Aïnouz's film starts to assume a political slant, possibly inspired by the Bolsonaro regime's efforts to roll back the clock on women's rights. Batalha's book was published in 2016, but the film is quietly informed by ongoing debates, setting the pleasures of people coming together against the stern control required to keep them apart. The second half leans into an Almodóvarian narrative tension, as the shamed Guida is banished, Eurídice's correspondence starts to be withheld by the girls' tyrannical baker father (António Fonseca) and the sisters lose sight of one another while attempting to rebuild families on their own, greatly more accepting terms.

The key to the film's success is that Aïnouz and Louvart know exactly where to look - towards the margins and fringes. That's why the women here register so much more forcefully than their male counterparts, why a long shot of a housewife fruitlessly beating a carpet tells us more about mid-20th century Brazilian society than anything said or done by Eurídice's husband, for one. (That penis is a raised hand, erection-as-interjection; it's also where a good deal of the trouble starts.) Where he glides serenely through events, the women of this world - born just too early for the liberations of the 1960s and 70s - are fated to pair up, give birth, suffer and disappear as the girls' mother does. Assisted by high-calibre material, Aïnouz spies just what they're up against: a bold yet desperately sad coda erases decades from our heroine's life, and sets us to wondering whether it could have been better spent. It is an instructive life, nevertheless, and you should emerge after two-and-a-bit hours with both teary eyes and a feel for a certain time, place and mindset. You will hear no better definition of patriarchy in a film this year than Eurídice's soft, resigned shrug of a line "my mother is the shadow of my father", but even the small talk here is equal parts revealing and dismaying. Upon leaving the hospital after giving birth, Guida is accosted by a female neighbour who inquires as to the newborn's gender. "A boy," Guida answers, with an early hint of the exhaustion to come. "Lucky him," comes the wistful response.

The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão opens in selected cinemas from Friday, and is available to rent via Curzon Home Cinema.

For what it's worth...

Top 10 films at the UK box office (for the weekend of October 1-3, 2021):

1 (new) No Time To Die (12A) ***

2 (1) Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (12A) ***

3 (3) Free Guy (12A)

4 (7) Paw Patrol: The Movie (U)

5 (2) The Many Saints of Newark (15) ***

6 (new) Chal Mera Putt 3 (12A)

7 (9) The Croods 2: A New Age (U)

8 (6) Candyman (15)

9 (5) Respect (12A)

10 (13) Space Jam: A New Legacy (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Scream

2. Gagarine

3. Freshman Year

4. No Time to Die

5. The Green Knight

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Free Guy (12)

2 (1) Black Widow (12) ***

3 (new) Fast & Furious 9 (12)

4 (11) SPECTRE (12) ***

5 (new) In the Heights (PG) ***

6 (19) Casino Royale (12) ***

7 (24) Skyfall (12) ****

8 (2) Monster Hunter (12)

9 (18) Luca (U)

10 (4) The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard (15)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Deerskin

2. Nowhere Special

3. Supernova

4. The Reason I Jump

5. The Fever

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind [above] (Saturday, five, 3.15pm)

2. Dirty Harry (Friday, five, 10pm)

3. Zootropolis (Sunday, BBC1, 3.05pm)

4. Game Night (Saturday, BBC1, 10.35pm)

5. Frantz (Saturday, BBC2, 12.25am)