For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office 
for the weekend of May 10-12, 2019:

1 (new) Pokemon Detective Pikachu (PG)
2 (1) Avengers: Endgame (12A) **
3 (new) The Hustle (12A)
4 (2) Long Shot (15) ***
5 (3) The Curse of La Llorona (15)
6 (5) Dumbo (PG) **
7 (4) Tolkien (12A)
8 (new) Amazing Grace (U)
9 (new) Dialogues des Carmelites - Met Opera 2019 (12A)
10 (6) Wonder Park (PG) **

(source: BFI)

My top five: 
1. Batman [above]
2. Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
3. Batman Returns
4. Batman Forever
5. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum


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

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

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Beautiful Boy
2. Colette
3. Stan & Ollie
4. Bumblebee
5. Fahrenheit 11/9


Top five films on terrestrial TV:
1. Young Frankenstein (Sunday, BBC2, 11.25pm)
2. All is Lost (Sunday, C4, 12.25am)
3. Evelyn (Saturday, BBC2, 10.45pm)
4. Edge of Tomorrow (Friday, five, 10.30pm)
5. Leave to Remain (Friday, BBC2, 11.45pm)

"Beats" (Guardian 17/05/19)

Beats ***

Dir: Brian Welsh. With: Cristian Ortega, Lorn Macdonald, Laura Fraser, Stephen McCole. 101 mins. Cert: 18

Back in 1999, that Britfilm upstart Human Traffic – born of the same creative big bang that begat both Trainspotting and Kevin and Perry Go Large – caught the tail end of rave culture. Two decades on, Beats offers a more considered return to the same scene, composed by cooler, wiser heads in artful silvery-greys, with contextualising clips of Tony Blair outlining his vision for a new Britain, after which it all plainly went a bit Pete Tong. Nostalgic flashbacks are guaranteed for a certain demographic, but the delivery system struggles to overcome a curious absence of the era’s biggest beats (were there licensing issues?) and some perversely cramped framing. For a good while, writer Kieran Hurley (adapting his 2012 play) and director Brian Welsh seem determined to fashion kitchen-sink drama from one of the most outdoorsy of youth phenomena.

One limitation is that the film’s energies are almost exclusively focused on a cosily familiar odd-couple bromance. We join cowed middle-class hero Johnno (Cristian Ortega) as he and his nervy mother Alison (Laura Fraser) are being installed in a newbuild home-slash-prison on the outskirts of an unidentified Scots town by a policeman stepfather (Brian Ferguson), in part to keep the lad away from his wayward dafty pal Spanner (Lorn Macdonald). The scenes in which these two naïfs fall in with an underwritten older crowd remain stubbornly theatrical, stranding us amid abandoned warehouses and damp toilet blocks; Welsh, who made 2010’s appreciably Loachian In Our Name, is setting a particular, unpromising scene here, but for at least half its running time, Beats is all oppression, no euphoria.

We finally get somewhere with the pair’s escape to the rave of their dreams, but Hurley’s thesis that all external tensions were forgotten about on the dancefloor, while historically verifiable, isn’t the smartest line for a movie to hold to: an already somewhat shambling romp slackens around its middle, and it requires armed police to break up the blissed-out imagery and give Hurley some kind of ending. A handful of transient highs remain – not least the fading memories preserved in Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography and Ortega’s doleful resting face, Welsh’s most reliable sight gag – but it’s more amiable than funny or especially persuasive. Set them against Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden or our own Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, and these beats sound ever so slightly tinny. 

Beats opens in selected cinemas from today.

"Breakthrough" (Guardian 17/05/19)

Breakthrough **

Dir: Roxann Dawson. With: Chrissy Metz, Topher Grace, Josh Lucas, Marcel Ruiz. 116 mins. Cert: 12A

Here’s yet another illustration of how the faith-based drama has pushed into cinemas (and thereby monetised) material indistinguishable from vast swathes of the afternoon TV schedule. A true-life miracle has been sourced from Judith Smith’s memoir: the resurrection of the author’s adopted Guatemalan son John, declared clinically dead after falling through the frozen Lake St. Louis in January 2015. Yet it’s presented with no mystery and scant wonder; instead, we get two hours of flatly professional procedural, enacted by performers whose career trajectories have slowed to the point where offering up a few prayers for cash cannot hurt. There are many spots where it suggests how the much-repeated Simpsons episode in which Bart falls down a well might play if its irreverence had been redacted as ungodly by Ned Flanders.

Scene by scene, life-or-death reality is reduced to the basis of an edgeless Sunday-school parable. Early sequences show Marcel Ruiz’s John, something of a novelty in his God-fearing, Caucasian neighbourhood, boosting his outsider reputation by shrugging off homework and feeding mama’s scrambled eggs to the dog, micro-rebellions that – in the film’s sexless, curse-free universe – signify he’s already skating on thin ice to some degree. While we await his rebirth as a meekly assenting believer, seasoned TV director Roxann Dawson kills time with sidebars in which burly fire-rescue workers and trained doctors question whether they too heard a voice out on the ice or saw signs in the OR, working overtime to claim John’s survival as divine intervention rather than, say, a consequence of devout medical care, or a teen basketball player’s innate resilience.

Writer Grant Nieporte allows for small, semi-intriguing pockets of tension beneath the bland surface, such as an ongoing niggle between the film’s traditionalist Judith (Chrissy Metz) and jeans-sporting Pastor Jason (Topher Grace), whose fondness for Christian rap-rock threatens the sanctity of the congregation’s megachurch. Yet they’re smoothed over in a second half over-reliant on that damp-eyed hyperventilation that pulled Metz through TV’s This is Us. What’s left may well be taken as gospel in the more credulous states, but seems likely to be looked upon as, at best, harmlessly dotty in sensible C-of-E parishes. At the production of a closing-credit photo of the real John Smith posing with pals on the same frozen waters that nearly took his life, you too may hear voices, doubtless screaming “For heaven’s sake, stop doing that”. 

Breakthrough opens in selected cinemas today.

The fame monster: "Vox Lux"

Brady Corbet's 2015 film The Childhood of a Leader was one of those directorial debuts that fell somewhere between curious and genuinely arresting: a dark-hearted origin story for fascism played out to a thunderous Scott Walker score, it was so unlike anything else a young American creative had reached for in the first years of this century that it couldn't fail to catch the eye - whether or not you were sold on its underlying psychology. His sophomore effort Vox Lux, a contemporary fairytale riffing on that creativity and celebrity born of trauma, demonstrates once again that this writer-director has his finger somewhere close to the zeitgeist, and an enviable contacts book besides - immersed in showbusiness, the film showcases bigger stars than its predecessor, splits its soundtrack between Walker and current pop goddess Sia, and employs Willem Dafoe on voiceover duties - and still you find yourself questioning the film's frankly gaga ideas of cause and effect. 

Corbet is at once more engaged with industry specifics, and the mechanics of how and why a star is born, than the broadly romantic Bradley Cooper: throughout Vox Lux, he dutifully logs the hours his heroine, a singer-songwriter known only as Celeste, spends in boardrooms and rehearsal spaces, soundproofed booths and group huddles, those bubbles that can put protective shields between damaged psyches and reality. (The conclusion is an unusually convincing depiction of a stadium gig, suggesting Corbet could take up a career in events management if this filmmaking lark doesn't pan out.) Much of the corroborating detail has the air of established pop truth: the trips to Stockholm to benefit from Max Martin-like production nous, the unpromising relationships with ill-shaved bad boys, the fraught, on-the-go conversations with increasingly estranged offspring. What's new is this: for Celeste to make it big, other people have to die. She's elevated by a mounting body count.

As a teenager (played by Raffey Cassidy), our heroine enjoyed huge success with a rerecording of a song she composed while recovering from a high-school shooting - and given how America has barely stopped grieving since, you get how such a heartfelt outpouring might be embraced as a second national anthem. Thereafter, Corbet and his Childhood co-writer Mona Fastvold insist, there is forever some psychic link between this girl and mass carnage. She's sitting atop the charts as the Twin Towers fall in late 2001; when we rejoin her in 2017, as a fully-fledged megastar played by Natalie Portman in full-on diva mode, it's in the downtime between an album launch and a terror attack at an Eastern European holiday resort, carried out by killers wearing masks Celeste herself had worn in her last video. The idea - and here's where Vox Lux gets provocative, contentious or laughably silly, depending on your point-of-view - is that extremism might be a corollary of celebrity culture: an imposition of will that leaves crowds screaming and makes monsters of mankind. Well.

Over the past two decades, celebrity - as evinced by everything from Woody Allen's 1998 film to last year's abominable Assassination Nation - has reduced filmmakers to gibbering hypocrites: fame is a terrible prize to pursue, at least according to the multi-millionaires whose agents have undertaken lengthy negotiations to ensure their clients' names feature prominently on the poster. Corbet is too coolly analytical to lapse into that hysteria, thankfully, yet from the first sententious words of Dafoe's narration to the reverse-scrolling closing credits, Vox Lux instead displays a straining seriousness that indicates its maker spent more time in pre-production revisiting his Michael Haneke DVDs than he did, say, the Britney back catalogue. (Corbet, you'll remember, was one of the whey-faced killers in Haneke's Funny Games remake.) On any other day, you'd doubtless find me insisting that the contemporary American cinema could well do with a shade more of Haneke's maturity and rigorous critical thinking, but the plain fact is that Vox Lux's thinking doesn't add up - conflating celebrity with mass murder would indicate that Corbet has mistaken candyfloss for asbestos - or at least doesn't add up to much more than a kind of paternalistic, high-culture fingerwagging that looks fogeyish in a thirty-year-old director.

The one person left having fun here is not someone you'd traditionally associate with the word: Portman, who gets to abandon her usual prim styling, curse in a salty New Jersey brogue, overdo the eyeshadow and hair lacquer, and start a ruckus in every scene and room she walks into. She can't do that much with Celeste's songs, which are at least semi-intentionally generic - you'd far rather hear whatever idiosyncratic spin Sia put on the original demos - but she's the one element of Vox Lux that seems to have been cut loose, for better or worse. The film around her struck this observer as uptight for no good reason, and deeply anticlimactic. Once it winds past the school-set prologue, this narrative holds none of the nasty surprises Corbet's debut film sprung on us; the backstage activity of the second half merely sprays a little glitter on what at every point seems a thoroughly flimsy thesis. The boldness of The Childhood of a Leader leads me to conclude Corbet has many more interesting projects in him - age remains on his side - but this one's all pretzel logic, a frowning condemnation of star power that relies on that exact same commodity to stay in any way watchable.

Vox Lux is now playing in selected cinemas, and is streaming via Curzon Home Cinema.

On demand: "Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened"

Fifty years ago, the Woodstock festival set the seal on a certain image of the counterculture, and while enough time has now passed for us not to get too misty-eyed about what that event represented (and how it was put on), it's hard not to watch Michael Wadleigh's 1970 documentary without being moved on some level by the sight of kids pulling something epochal together in the face of some lousy weather and attitudes. Fast-forward just shy of a half-century to the brave new world of 2017, where the rich jocks behind Fyre - the mobile phone app that promised consumers better access when booking bands - had the bright idea of throwing together what was meant to be a next-level music festival on a sunkissed island in the Bahamas previously owned by druglord Pablo Escobar. Anyone who was logged into Twitter that fateful April weekend will know what happened next. In what could be cited as a textbook example of con-job late capitalism in action - if the digital economy hadn't made textbooks seem so last century - partygoers were promised a seductive cocktail of glamour, money and sex, what celebrity frontman Ja Rule (or, as you and I know him, Featurin' Ja Rule) billed as "one of the most important cultural events in history". The reality, of course, would be something else: several planeloads of scared kids on an island, without access to food, water, music, toilets or even basic lighting.

Fyre, Chris Smith's documentary/postmortem, has the advantage of access to most of the company's key players and the hours and hours of videotape these moneyed narcissists shot in the hope of documenting what they thought would be their making. This latter footage carries us into a detached reality somewhere between the ahead-of-its-time Brooker/Morris satire Nathan Barley and Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho: a place where there are human men called Mdavid and PR firms called Fuckjerry, where filming an advert with pigs and willing supermodels counts as a normal Thursday, and where someone floats the none-too-smart notion of launching a jet-black metallic credit card for millennials, like those guys have credit, or wallets to carry such geegaws in. What follows is a chronicle of high-flying idiocy, populated by individuals - like Rule and Fyre founder Billy McFarland - possessed of that increasingly prevalent combination of naked ambition and abject dimwittedness. 

Told not to mention Escobar's name in their advance publicity, the Fyre crew duly blabbermouthed it to their followers, so requiring a second location to be found at a month's notice; when paying punters began asking questions, McFarland determined to bluff the crisis out and invest more money in non-essential items, choosing to protect the brand over sweating the small stuff like accommodation and flights. There is not a single point in the entire movie where you believe the Fyre Festival could ever have been a success. In the Woodstock model, when the storm blew in and the food ran out, everybody stepped up; that's what Wadleigh showed us between the headline acts. In our dog-eat-dog 21st century, everyone was in and at Fyre for the glory - and thus quick and damnably keen to deny personal liability when things went south. There are several points in the movie where you're amazed nobody died.

Smith knows that this story is so emblematic of the zeitgeist that he doesn't have to jazz it up much. As a company, Fyre had its own bright, shiny aesthetic, ported across here to enable an effective visual contrast with the dark clouds of reality. What the filmmaker has done is stitch everything together with zippiness enough to hold the attention of casual phoneswipers; it borrows both its editing strategy and several soundtrack cues from David Fincher's increasingly totemic-seeming The Social Network. I sat down expecting to guffaw at the hubris involved; in fact, from a very early point, the film is angering, but it's an instructive anger, much as Alex Gibney's Enron doc left us with. At one point, a member of McFarland's entourage is caught on tape declaring "We're selling a pipe dream to the average loser", a line destined to stick firmly in the craw of right-minded viewers; and yet, once you get past the contempt in that comment (and any heat it might fire in your own blood), you realise this has been the mission statement of almost every major company to have turned a profit these past hundred years - it's just a little more crudely expressed nowadays, that's all. 

In the second half, as the company rips itself apart and McFarland weasels away as best he can, Fyre offers illustration after illustration of the extreme positions money can push us towards: you see it in the weirdly blithe testimony of the senior staffer who confesses he was willing to fellate a customs official to ensure the show went on as planned, or the quietly jolting coda in which the Bahamian foreman who went unpaid for his onsite labours takes a call from McFarland on camera and offers to give a more favourable account of his experiences. By then, we are a long way removed from the glossy promises of facetime with Emily R. and Bella H., but then these are the lies that are allowed to proliferate on social media - by tech firms scarcely more diligent than Fyre were - and which allow cheats and conmen to gain the hold over us that they have. Fifty years on from the peace, love and unity of Woodstock, it's clear the world has ended up in the hands of utter idiots and stone-cold sociopaths. Watching this particular shambles replay itself in the course of Smith's film, a pressing question may begin to form in your head: when did basic competency become such a luxury?

Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened is now streaming on Netflix. 

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.