Hal Ashby directs Peter Sellers, Shirley MacLaine and Melvyn Douglas in this tale of a very simple gardener who has never left his master’s (possibly father’s) house, made homeless after the old man’s death, who then somehow thrives in the high end house of a political power broker. 

An exceedingly gentle, simple, subtle film. It is essentially a screwball comedy with the posh and powerful universally mistaking a (most likely autistic) dim bulb for a font of economic wisdom. Despite Sellers presence, this is almost obtusely not played for laughs. A comedy without jokes, a clown without expression. Instead we are left to ponder the mystery of Chance’s back story, his preternatural success in navigating a world he has only previously witnessed on TV. One scene sees him avoiding the cracks in floor tiles like a first grader while everyone else sings lyrical about his intelligence. Is that how he makes it through life? Or is the final surprise shot of him walking on water the key to his enigmas? The above pictured graffiti is the only time we explicitly see his accidental achievements as a white man matched with any religious connotations. But Being There is a film so poker faced, that both or neither interpretations are valid. It can at concurrent times be a satire on the advantages and privileges of race in a capitalist world while also a fantasy fable. In many ways it is a sweeter less bludgeoning Forrest Gump. Like that contentious favourite, it is an experience I admire, more than love. Yet I cannot help but keep revisiting its open ended puzzles, its austere gorgeousness. Special mention and praise should go to Dianne Schroeder who assembled and edited all the TV footage that entrances and directs Chance through his journey. It is a magnificent collage of imagery and sound.

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Wes Anderson directs the voices of Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig and Koyu Rankin in this animated adventure about an island of dispossessed dogs who help a young Japanese boy find his faithful bodyguard, Spots. 

Beautiful, witty, twee. Predictable, yet no less admirable work from Anderson then. This is an absolute intricate lark, full of spot on cultural appropriation of Japanese cinema. Hardly the most marginalised of cinematic cultures, so let’s not worry too much about the fantastical, and obviously obsessively affectionate, homage. There’s a line that states the leads should help “Because he’s a 12-year-old boy. Dogs love those.” You should love this as its a Wes Anderson flick. Moviegoers love those.

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William E. Badgley directs Viv Albertine, Palmolive and Tessa Pollitt in this documentary charting the struggles of all girl punk outfit The Slits.

If there is a more intriguing story behind The Slits troubled existence then this isn’t it. Self aggrandising at best, vague about the challenges faced and fractions within the band, more often than not. This ends up a lot of noise with nothing clear to say. The music is solid punk, the era specific footage makes the first half watchable. Once we are stuck with the most obnoxious members cashing in on their name for a reunion though, the second half is a large, hard slog. A good documentary might ask: Why did Island drop them from their label? Where was punk without them? Instead we essentially get an AV wake for a dead member whose positives are talked about in platitudes but rarely evidenced on film.

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Don Coscarelli directs A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury and Angus Scrimm in this low budget horror about two orphaned brothers investigating the terrifying going-ons around a shady mortuary. 

I enjoyed this a little more on a second try but it is still cheap and daft, overly ambitious. Better when it is trying to be Z-Movie David Lynch rip off (there’s a dream logic plot and Dadaist interiors) than an action adventure on $100 budget. Did we really need shotgun car chases to space out the spookiness? Not at all scary but with some nicely gloopy images that come out of nowhere.

5

 

Robert Stevenson directs Dame Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson and Cindy O’Callaghan in this comedy fantasy musical about a trainee witch, some blitz refugee urchins and a posh dreamer. 

Not a patch on Mary Poppins even if the formula is repeated studiously. The songs aren’t as good, although I have a soft spot for Portobello Road. The animated sequence lacks charm. Dick Van Dyke appears to be being played by three cute yet haggered looking kids. Yet it is still also the closest we have ever gotten to the sheer perfection of Mary Poppins. Lansbury and Tomlinson are excellent sports with nice chemistry. The bed travel sequences are trippy. And then the bloody Nazis only go and show up for a wonderous action slapstick finale.

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Ava DuVernay directs Storm Reid, Reese Witherspoon and Chris Pine in this kid’s fantasy about intelligent children exploring other realms to find a missing daddy.

I reckon I found the sheer ego of a house sized Oprah Winfrey (top billed despite less than 20 minutes screentime) as laugh-out-loud chucklesome as much she probably thought it perfect. This ridiculous image is the forger’s note that unravels all that is wrong with this clunky spectacular. It has been made in an echo chamber where values like self worth, diversity and literacy have been made paramount over joy and pleasure. We are presented with a childhood home full of tasteful furnishing and non-fiction hardbacks, which lacks toys and when the kid’s friend visits, he is given a dry salad for a snack. Straight faced. For reals! It is a fantasy where the reality is less believable in its utopian middle class obsessions than the wonderlands we (eventually) visit. Solemn kids mope around a prison that lacks sugary drinks or video games. No wonder they go mad and start imagining a world where Reese Witherspoon turns into a mega-leaf and Zach Galifianakis still has a movie career. A Wrinkle in a Time has its heart in the right place, has a better sense of wonder than Spielberg imbues Ready Player One with, and it even pulls a surprise villian out of its arse towards the end that suddenly grips you to the meandering plot. But ultimately it is a movie made directly for right-on moms, that will only fitfully entertain younglings. When it accidentally cheers up and cuts loose, you can just about see how it almost could have been a new children’s classic.

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Steven Spielberg directs Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke and Ben Mendelsohn in this sci-fi adventure about kids trying to find the easter eggs that will grant them control of the immersive VR game that dominates their lives. 

Where to start with Ready Player One? Is it any “good”, I guess? By modern blockbuster standards, it is standard. The human kids are blank husks. Olivia Cooke is undeniably cute and has a fake birthmark here but that’s where the sparkle of personality ends among our heroes. These dead eye automatons aren’t 21st century Michael J Foxs or even Sean Astins. There are lots of FX but very little wonder. Once you enter into a world with no limits you really want to feel overwhelmed… yet the OASIS delivers exactly what you’d expect from it and often with computer animation that feels slick yet rote. It has the same uninvolving sheen and lack of consequence that many of the Marvel set pieces suffer from. There’s no overriding risk. Sure, “death” means you can lose all your fantasy wealth but considering the characters will always have their skillset to reacquire all the gold coins and inventory it hardly feels like a major set back… and not a consequence that ever is really explored.

So where’s the thrill and tension? It is telling the simpler real world sequences of kids running about factories and hiding behind couches raise the pulse more and feel more Spielbergian (The Goonies meet Minority Report) than all the twisting cityscape demolition derby racetracks and massive raids on fortresses of doom within the game. Even then we hardly reach Inception levels of invention when physical attacks on the plucky gamers in reality effect their avatars in the dreamscape. A car smashing into their mobile gaming van creates an inconvenient wobble but we are hardly seeing that twirling, gravity defying corridor fight counter-physics that Nolan so persuasively dropped on us.

Much has been made of the tsunami of pop culture and geek culture references that dominate the game. The OASIS is a world where you can play as Lara Croft or Robocop or any signifier they managed to clear the licensing rights too. But in all honesty a cheeky nod to the Last Action Hero and a brilliant sequence that recreates Kubrick aside (seriously, these five star 10 minutes parallel the high points of Back to the Future Part II and Batman Vs Superman in their gleeful meta-meatyness; the undoubted highlight of the entire adventure), I met it all with a shrug.

Vintage-wise, these are precisely my generation’s toys and iconography but it feels either too obvious or too obscure. All bunged in without wit and often taking things to a show-off level of specificity that it plays only to the dullards. And dullards worse than me, who can’t get their head around new Star Wars entries or female Ghostbusters. Cuddling up to those who are making nerdy fandom a depressing place.

If you are going to have the Turtles crop up, don’t let it be their current newty incarnations when the bulky cartoon equivalents mean more to everyone. If you are going to throw the Delorean into the mix, let it have the advantages and limitations of Marty and the Doc’s trusty vessel rather than be just another fast racer that looks like the Delorean. And yeah… I recognise a Gundam…. but I reckon the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, a giant “Baby Ruth” screaming Sloth, stop motion ED-209, a mega engorged Johnny 5 or even Doctor Ivor Eggman Robotnik would have filled the same purpose and meant a lot more to far, far, far more people? And no obvious Star Wars… pffftttttttttt….

My point is not to make me as obnoxious as ‘those geeks’. I’m not merely saying ‘you included this and not that… boo hoo!’ I’m saying very little care has gone into the relentless nostalgia. It is constant but under utilised. Mere set dressing. Like being invited to rummage around a carboot sale of your childhood, where you aren’t allowed to touch and have no money to take any of it home and everyone wants to see the next busy blanket so the crowd pushes you along to the next trestle table full of lifeless, rigid touchstones from those play-filled Saturday afternoons with no chance to do more than steal a glance at it all. Imagination in aspic, stuck helplessly in a jelly, making it shiny and unpalatable. Let us play with it!

Of course Spielberg is doing all this on purpose. His overriding desire is not to create an adventure that kids will act out in a playground like we did with his Indiana Joneses or Jurassic Parks, or even a love letter to the generation who bought into to those triumphs. It is to critique two symbiotic cultures.

One is the gaming culture that takes a youth audience away from his immaculately crafted adventures into their own interactive worlds. People spending weeks immersed on Call of Duty or The Last of Us are not finding the time to go see War Horse. And Spielberg plays up the addictive nature of these rival experiences. The future he presents narrowly depicts nearly everyone obsessively playing out their second lives in the Oasis. The over populated Columbus, Ohio, where shanty towns of trailers piled on trailers, exists in this particular nightmarish state as the town is the birthplace of Gregarious Games. For all we know the rest of the world is fine compared to the dystopia presented. Only the game addicts have flocked to this particular city, using it as a communal jacking in point. We never meet anyone who hasn’t settled in Columbus to devote their life to the game. Everyone else around the globe might have perfectly healthy lifestyles. They could all exist outwith the narrative – never playing the game, or playing another game that isn’t twenty years old, or only visiting the Oasis in moderation with no threat of being sent to gold farming Loyalty Centres to pay off their neglected real world debts. Either way Speilberg’s assessment of the gaming world is one without innovation, one where an entire community is dangerously subservient to it, one with no interest in any culture that exists outwith the game.

Two: Spielberg attacks the current obsession in Hollywood for existing properties. He came to power in an age of original material. Sure, Jaws is based on an airport novel and Indiana Jones is rife with homage for the bearded wunderkind’s own childhood cinema… but they were made in an environment where the quality of the concept was more important than its recognition value. The 80s had remakes (The Fly, The Blob) and even reboots (Star Trek, Flash Gordon, Batman). It even had films based on toy lines (Masters of the Universe, Action Force: The Movie). But in the main, it was a decade where toys were based on cinema franchises, not vice versa. And everything else mentioned was surrounded on all sides by wide releases of original creations from famous auteurs, or sold on star power. Nowadays everything given tentpole marketing seems like a photocopy or a cosplay. Without Spielberg’s name as a brand and the fact the concept opens up the movie to have Tyrannosaurus Rexs / King Kongs / Batmobiles-a-go-go, it is hard to imagine modern Hollywood would greenlight a project like Ready Player One based merely on the limited readership of a cult novel. There is no benefit in constantly, cannibalistically, looking backwards… unless it is to open a sneaky level-completing, hidden, cheat back door.

So Spielberg creates an oppressive, exploitative playground exaggerating these two cultures. A playground where having your imagination perscribed to you by regurgitators and corporations only interested in repeating what has worked previously. One that is fascist and dangerous. It is all very well having a library devoted to the legacy, memories and pop culture absorbed by one brilliant man but surely the kids should becoming up with their own tastes, stories and icons. Not living in the 3 Dimensional Facebook feed of a dead tech autistic. The ultimate message of Ready Player One is it is sexier to find your own fun, give yourself space and time to make human interactions. “Tuesdays and Thursdays,” if you must.

Deeply flawed, grumpily misguided, Ready Player One still has enough fun within its griping motivations to make it one of the better blockbusters we’ve had recently. It never threatens the Spielberg 24 carat gold but it matches contemporaries Thor: Ragnarok or Justice League in terms of colour and kinetics, detail and gorgeousness. You just cannot help but think Spielberg might be better served lending his talents and creative control to something he authentically was excited about though. His thrilling recreations of 20th century historical amazing tales are his current forte. Both Bridge of Spies and The Post were effortlessly more entertaining than this, despite their mature, dry subject matters. This fits awkwardly in with his decent but ultimately flat CGI dominated adventures. The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, The BFG and this all remind me of David Bowie “Jungle” period in the mid 90s. An ageing master trying to give the kids what they want and coming across as average rather than spectacular, worse still alienating his middle aged fanbase. None of these heavily rendered blockbusters are awful but you yearn for the days when Spielberg was dragging Harrison Ford through deserts or chucking jeeps into trees with computer augmented hydraulics. The Amblin logo, the twinkling Silvestri score and the Drew Struzan poster promise the very best and a back handed warning about living in the real world with satisfactorily flat effects and lacklustre toy catalogue wallpaper just doesn’t cut it. Not when you invoke those particular totems of popcorn brilliance. You cannot wear the fetish of an old school Spielberg four quadrant magic around your neck, and deliver a jokeless satire. Don’t piss on your legacy when you still can create classics.

Mark Rylance though, playing this plot’s Willy Wonka (mixed a little with our reality’s Steve Jobs) is a marvel again. He imbues his creator figure with a confused sadness, a romantic wonder and accessible mystery. Like his Big Friendly Giant, he manages to be human and otherworldly simultaneously. Lucky for his regular collaborator Spielberg, Rylance manages to bring heart to a product that constantly, and almost willfully, avoids guts.

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My Top 10 Steven Spielbergs 

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
2. Jaws (1975)
3. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)

4. Schindler’s List (1993)
5. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)
6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
7. The Post (2017)
8. Jurassic Park (1993)
9. War of the Worlds (2005)
10. Empire of the Sun (1987)

 

 

 

 

Roman Polanski directs Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth and Leigh Lawson in this prestige adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s classic about an innocent Wessex lass whose life is destroyed by the men around her.

On a purely qualitative level I struggle with Polanski as for every masterpiece like Repulsion, Rosemary’s Baby or Chinatown; there is a dud like The Tenant or The Ghost. Partly his problems come with the limitations imposed by his exile from the Hollywood studio system. If he wanted to work at the scale he was accustomed to at any point in my lifetime he would have to return to the US and face statutory rape charges for which everyone agrees he is guilty.  It explains why nearly all his recent movies are compromised or limited. You couldn’t say that about Tess though. It is a glorious production, elegantly paced. Yes, it deals with a young girl being raped, and the rapist is sympathetically dealt with and somewhat charming… but Polanski doesn’t shy away from the grim inevitablity of the act, its prolonged unavoidable consequence for his heroine nor look for any forgiveness for her transgressors. What happens in the act itself is desexualised, the gory details lost in the fog, both figuratively and literally. Beyond what Polanski’s grim personal history forces on the viewer, his Tess is a superior period piece. It looks lush with Geoffrey Unsworth’s heavenly, bucolic exterior shots capturing the magic hour light perfectly. Kinski struggles with the accent but when silent and physical she is wonderful. Watching her whistle at caged bird is a moment of ironic horror for her fate, seeing her crucify herself by stubbornly perusing more and more gruelling work as she slips through society’s cracks is very affecting. There is also the slowly unwinding exploration of civilisation versus pagan traditions, references to which often wangle their ways into the proceedings. We end up stranded on Stone Henge surrounded by the newly formed police force. But with ancient stones and ways chafing against closed church doors and graffitied scripture much earlier, it feels like this destination was predetermined long before Tess innocently states she’d much rather work than pursue the life of a D’Uberville.

9

 

My Top 10 ‘Most Beautiful’ Movies

1. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
2. Dances With Wolves (1990)

3. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
4. The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
5. A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)
6. Amelie (2001)
7. Ghost in the Shell (2017)
8. Days of Heaven (1979)
9. Barry Lyndon (1975)
10. Tess (1979)

Steven Soderbergh directs Claire Foy, Joshua Leonard and Juno Temple in this thriller about a stalked woman who finds herself committed in the very asylum where her attacker is working. 

It is a solid hook for a thriller and a perfect showcase for Foy who impresses as the flinty, unsympathetic survivor. No wallowing for her – she is rude, aggressive and self centred. Pleasing so. It is a cracking performance in an OK thrill ride. Like Emily Blunt’s brave turn in The Girl on the Train, a complex lead working hard for a lacklustre film. Unsane is a bit more involving than that movie, even if it never goes anywhere particularly shocking, the threat that it might is at least constantly impressed on the viewer. Soderbergh’s gimmick of using an IPhone to film his feature works. It gives the image a burnt out, flat air matching our protagonist’s world view. The lack of focus means everything in frame is weighted with equal importance to our eyes, meaning shots are often busy rather than swiftly processable. And it is a film about perception and self image, so what better tool than the icon of how we as a society now distribute our projected lives. While Unsane doesn’t match the high standard of his best work, it is in keeping with an unwritten theme he explores in nearly all his movies. Criminal love. Whether it be fetishes of sex, lies and videotape or Full Frontal, the outlaw romances of Out of Sight or the Ocean’s Trilogy, the monetised sexualisation of Magic Mike or The Girlfriend Experience, or even the world where touch is forbidden like Contagion, Soderbergh is fascinated in making human contact impermissible and illegal. Joshua Leonard’s pleasant but controlling monster here is just another aspect of Soderbergh’s view that humans will break all manner of barriers to fulfill their needs – even consent.

6

Babak Najafi directs Taraji P. Henson, Billy Brown and Danny Glover in this action thriller about a mob enforcer who takes in an orphan from one of her hits, creating a gang war.

Taraji P. Henson is a star I cannot get a fix on. Like Nicolas Cage, her acting style seems to suggest a whole different performance is being restrained under her skin, a schizophrenia that often wriggles free in her expressions and emoting. And also like Cage it means you can never tell if she is lazily overacting or doing something incredibly unique. I’d give her some leeway if this wasn’t such a chore. More interested in homilies than shoot-outs, it struggles with scenes where morally we are to supposed to view some characters as good, others evil, when by action they are all cut from the same dubious cloth. Danny Glover gets some meaty screentime. That improves matters a tickle. But if you’ve come for exploitation or thrills, you’ll leave utterly bereft.

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