fevered.earth

Tag: Movies

  • 2023 review of films

    Expanding on my Letterboxd list, the new releases I saw this year and what they meant to me. Titles link to whatever gibberish I wrote at the time.

    18. The Flash

    In a year where I mostly didn’t bother seeing anything that I didn’t think would be good, The Flash has the indignity of being something that I went out of my way for despite expecting it to be a flavourless slurry. The production of this one is surely the nadir of Warner’s attempts to make a Marvel-like universe of DC films seaworthy, and ahead of release it seemed like it could only logically be an abomination in form and content. So it was with malice in my heart that I sat down to watch it in the cinema. But it surprised me — not offensively terrible except in certain specific ways and a tremendous sense of fun, some of the time. But the final third is a slog that just keeps getting worse and worse, and there’s nothing on this list that I can favourably compare it to.

    The suit looked really bad. Like a walking basketball, if you’re being kind.

    17. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar

    It’s a tightly-sprung little diorama of 40 or so minutes, Wes Anderson’s adapation of a slightly obscure Roald Dahl tale that I must have read at some point as a child. I was a furious reader and Dahl is (or was) one of the archetypical British children’s writers. All of his tales have an enchantingly sinister edge to them that often crops up again in film adaptations, from the gothic trimmings of James and the Giant Peach through to the animalistic protagonists of Wes Anderson’s (there he is again) utterly inspired Fantastic Mr Fox.

    Anderson is deep in a particular style he’s been cultivating even as a subset of his well-known aesthetic, and it’s as on-show here as it will be in (spoiler alert) the Wes Anderson entry that is going to make an appearance higher up this list. I suspect the coherence and ambition of that entry makes this one pale unfairly by comparison, but it’s a wonderfully crafted little ditty that moves at a breakneck pace even though there’s not much of anything happening. No quarter whatsoever is given for the viewer to catch their breath while listening, which can be a frustrating experience if you’re half paying attention on a phone, but is a marvel to attend to.

    Cumberbatch is still good. He doesn’t seem to do much capital-A Acting any more, does he?

    16. Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One

    Tom Cruise! You were the chosen one! You were supposed to be a fixed beacon of care and deliberation in blockbuster movie making, not propping up one end of a flimsy tent that’s blowing about in the wind… or something. End metaphor. I set myself up with this one really, having done a marathon over several weeks of the preceding six (six!) entries in the Mission: Impossible saga. Fallout remains the high watermark, with this being a real let-down that’s way less than the sum of its parts, despite the usual set-pieces and ensemble cast. It’s the shabby treatment of Rebecca Ferguson’s character that rankles most, and we can only hope that the (now consciously uncoupled) sequel remedies that.

    It’s a great stunt, but what does it have to do with AI?

    15. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

    I knew this was well-regarded but I hadn’t actually planned to watch it; I’m not a huge Dungeons & Dragons fan, despite spending most of my childhood in front of Baldur’s Gate 2 on the family PC — at one time I could have identified any one of the several hundred items in that game from the icon alone. I’m also not a fan of mainstream American comedy, which to my refined British palate doesn’t feature nearly enough bon mots and/or upper class men putting regional accents on for fun.

    Having been sat in a room while this was on though, there’s plenty to appreciate — it is genuinely funny, and affectionate for the setting in a way that brings specificity to the comedy. Michelle Rodriguez solidifies her position as the safest pair of hands for your ‘competent number 2’ role and Hugh Grant, who seems to be enjoying something of a renaissance, is a scene-stealer even if he’s definitely only giving it 60%.

    Cute puppet, though the kinda janky movement is why they don’t do that so much any more.

    14. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour

    In the gap between the release of this and now (only a few weeks), Swift has started to enjoy a little bit of a backlash, with critics pointing out that her feel-good, be-yourself non-specific feminism could be seen to be a little self-serving, and her silence on the genocide occurring in Palestine might suggest that selling records is a more prioritised leveraging of her pop culture cachet than doing good in the world.

    Of which, well, pop stars were never going to save us. Movies were never going to save us. It’s all worth saying — and saying so loud it becomes a problem for the great, crushing press engine that drives these stars forwards — but it struggles to become a moral imperative against enjoyment.

    As for the movie? Well, it’s nothing to write home about in terms of cinematography — a mostly prosaic camera is enough to show off the maximum-budget staging and on-stage choreography. On occasion there’s a shot that tells the big story here — Swift a giant astride the stadium — but no throughline. It’s all assuming that the staging and the Swift songs will be enough to sweep you along — and for me, they were. Taylor Swift dares you to suggest that her imperial days are behind her.

    This enormous woman will devour us all!

    13. John Wick: Chapter 4

    The audience in the cinema with me for this audibly groaned when he rolls back down those stairs. A positive groan, to be clear, an expression of solidarity with poor Mr Wick who has just so painstakingly climbed them. But still a groan — at four long entries, Wick’s unceasing tear of film revenge hasn’t lost anything in the stunt choreography column — and the addition of both Donnie Yen’s blind assassin and Rina Sawayama’s hotelier ninja provide plenty of opportunity for fresh ways of showing off there. But this series can only subsist on ramping up the action for so long before the always-overwrought plot collapses into tedium, and that’s feeling like it might come soon now.

    Great costuming, too.

    12. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

    It’s such a hard one to love. It’s got all the warmth, all the creativity and feels exactly as fresh as the first one, but out of all the “part 1 of 2s” that somehow came into confluence this year it’s the one where it just didn’t work for me. Not helped by seeing it in the cinema, where it certainly seemed like there was some kind of audio issues over the first twenty minutes (a bit of hyper-focus on the centre channel for dialogue?). And two people sat to the right of us who interacted with their various foodstuffs to such an extent that we fled like cowards to the other end of the row.

    But yeah, the film has just set up its major conflict… and then it ends. And unlike Rebel Moon, the first film is right there as a complete, cogent unit that told one story end-to-end. This feels like a regression — that’s terribly unfair to all the artistry and beauty, but making this list I found it a difficult notion to shake.

    Ahhh they’re doing the thing.

    11. A Haunting in Venice

    It’s just for me, the guy who loved both Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile! Branagh’s Poirot is such an odd project, taking on a role so recently lived in with tremendous aplomb for so many years by David Suchet. But he’s persisted with it, and for me as the person who is happy to see really any classic detective tale at all, I’m glad.

    Orient Express suffered from an identity crisis, with Branagh’s idiosyncratic take on the character and setting emerging out of step with the film — intense action sequences clashing with posed frame composition. Nile was a cinematic victim of Covid, ending up more than a little stiled. But Haunting delivers on the promise of Branagh’s Poirot at last — moody and atmospheric, it’s the best of the three.

    Tina Fey’s in this one. She’s fine.

    10. Master Gardener

    I saw this in a cinema in Valencia, of all places, away on a work trip. There was a great big cardboard display out for it in the lobby, which is a delightful thing to find promoting a new Paul Schrader film. I bought popcorn and soda and settled in to ignore the Spanish/Valencian subtitles, then afterwards walked back through the raucous streets of the old town to my hotel room.

    El Maestro Jardinero

    Schrader is retreading familiar ground in this story of a former Neo-Nazi turned flower-tender who falls in love with Quintessa Swindell’s millennial dilettante, but it’s done with such an eye for beauty and the hopeless pain and loneliness at the heart of every person that you won’t care. It’s tight, it’s thrilling, it’s unique — but my god, that ending.

    9. How To Blow Up A Pipeline

    Always fun to see a dramatic adaptation of a non-fiction book, and Daniel Goldhaber turns Andreas Malm’s book (which I sadly haven’t read) into a tense, small-scale thriller which approaches ‘Sorceror’ levels of tension. A group of activists each with their own reason to feel particularly passionately about the environment come together to do something about it: blow up a pipeline. Anyone with any kind of knowledge of activist groups can imagine from there the sorts of things that go wrong, but the true radical optimism of the film is in what it imagines could go right. Very few films have politics nowadays, so it was nice to go see one that did.

    It also looked really good, shot on 16mm film.

    8. The Pigeon Tunnel

    John Le Carre (fake name) tells tall tales about his disreputable father and time in the security services. It rivals F for Fake in the genre of documentary films that are actively messing with their you, but where in that film Orson Welles was actively setting out to disrupt the audience’s expectations of a documentary film, here veteran filmmaker Errol Morris (no stranger to deception and persuasion, mind) is desperately clinging to the rudder trying to keep this ship on course. At one point, prying ever so gently at his interviewee’s closely guarded secrets, he says “they think I should press you harder on this betrayal thing”, which provokes Le Carre into an absurd diversionary rant about his own sex life — but which reveals nothing. As enigmatic as one of Le Carre’s books.

    *whispering* That’s John Le Carre.

    7. BlackBerry

    The Thick of It mixed with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia mixed with Masters of Dune mixed with Bad Blood. The funniest film this year and probably the funniest film since The Death of Stalin. The rise and fall of Blackberry mobile phones, which were the undisputed top dog of business phones (‘Crackberry’, how quickly we forget) until the iPhone utterly obliterated it and left only a hard kernel of keyboard-phone devotees behind. Glenn Howerton manages to make a case for himself as a serious dramatic actor in a role which has him scream “I’m from Waterloo! Where the vampires hang out!” at a board of nonplussed executives.

    The most intimidating bald head.

    6. Rebel Moon

    This is generous, Zack! This ranking is generosity! Snyder’s reputation precedes him with all the internet’s worst critics and naturally this dreamy sci-fi action thriller has been received with the ceremony of a letterbomb, the audacity of doing Star Wars without involving the brand owner just too much for many. I’ve been a fully signed up Snyder sicko for many years now so this was high up on the anticipation list for me, and I got to see it in beautiful soapy 70mm at the Prince Charles Cinema in London. Snyder does what he does well on screen for two hours, though this may not be the one to convert to unfaithful.

    It’s the big Christmas Netflix release for this year, and Snyder’s take on the space opera has promise and promise and promise to spare — and of course, lots of utterly gratuitous slow-motion. But it’s part one of two, and (bafflingly) cut one of two, and cumulatively it’s hard not to feel some of the disappointment this year’s Spider-verse suffered from — but part two should hopefully only be a few months off.

    Brace for (bloodless) impact.

    5. The Killer

    Has Fincher been away? Since 2014’s Gone Girl there’s only been the 2020 cult hit Mank, about the writing of Citizen Kane, and well-regarded Netflix series Mindhunter. This then is something of a return to cinematic fiction, and he’s not missed a beat. Michael Fassbender’s titular trained killer muses existentially about the nature of his job, as a single missed shot unravels the whole thing. More than any other film on this list, the controlled, thoughtful nature of this is the foil to Dead Reckoning’s sprawling mess of plot sinew. There’s not a second out of place as Fassbender goes through the boring, everyday motions of hiring cars and unlocking storage lockers and memorably at one point signing up for a trial at a gym. A small slice of genius.

    Hits on the universal truth that everyone has their own special McDonalds order.

    4. Napoleon

    What if Napoleon were just a grotty little guy? Ridley Scott swerves the historic epic expectations and delivers the year’s second-funniest film in this unflattering portrait of old history-on-horseback himself. Critics slated it for bias, for mendacity, for simplifying the intricate historical events that make the Napoleonic era so attractive to lay historians. But it captures something so essential about self-assurance, self-doubt, self-pity in the dual protagonists of Napoleon and Josephine — both of who do as they will and let the whole world come round to agreeing with it.

    Much like the man himself, Scott’s great sprawling epic doesn’t give a damn if you like it or not. It’s stupid, it’s grandiose, it’s slapstick, it’s everything. Like Rebel Moon, it has a full-fat version coming in the new year. Unlike Rebel Moon, it doesn’t need it.

    Big hat.

    3. Oppenheimer

    I saw this on the biggest screen, the one at the BFI IMAX in London which I don’t think I’ve been to since seeing Watchmen there back in 2009. It’s an intoxicating experience, even if the three hours of film had me flagging slightly by the end. We had to get a taxi back it was so late.

    The badges look straight out of The Prisoner, but they were real.

    If Tenet felt like the peak of a certain cumulative thought in Nolan’s work, Oppenheimer feels like a whole new mountain. He keeps all the interpersonal tension, the motions of science and technology reflecting the behaviours of the people who enact them, but all the fiction is torn away, all the artifice. These were real people (and Nolan takes particular pleasure in showing as many of them to us as possible) but they may as well be in the plot of Interstellar with the scope of the world-historic change they provoked. Also it looked gorgeous in 4:3.

    It’s Nolan’s masterpiece, and I can’t see how he will top it. On that basis, it should be at number 1 in this list. But in a pairwise comparison of my own personal honest choice, I couldn’t place it above either of these next two films.

    2. Asteroid City

    Wes Anderson, as noted above, has started to make being Wes Anderson look effortless. Asteroid City is breezy, unassuming, utterly crushing, smart, unashamedly intellectual, silly, funny, lurid. If I watch it again I will cry. I might have cried the first time. Going back to The Royal Tenenbaums and presumably before, Anderson can tug the heartstrings when required with an expert finesse. But this is something more. It makes you feel for being human. I don’t know. Perhaps this is a film that will only be describable in the rear view mirror.

    The colour palette is superlative.

    1. The Creator

    Much like how Oppenheimer doesn’t deserve to not be number one, The Creator doesn’t deserve to be number one. It’s broken! It’s flawed! It doesn’t work at all! The film flies at a breakneck pace from scene to scene, setting to setting, allowing no time at all for establishment or inattention. Then, in the third act, it goes even faster. It doesn’t allow time for coherence, or explanation, or logic. Things just happen, images splashing across the screen. It’s left for the viewer to put them together into a compelling ending.

    If you’re not on board, it won’t work. But for me, seeing this on a last-minute trip to the cinema the day before it stopped showing, the imagery was enthralling. I can home talking about how incoherent it was and how it was in many ways a weaker retread of Avatar 2: The Way of Water. But it wasn’t weaker. It was stronger. And since seeing it that affection for it has only grown, to the point where when I did the pairwise comparison with the other movies on this list, it beat every one. The imagery is more direct, more vibrant than Oppenheimer. The story is more thrilling, more imaginative than Asteroid City. The subject matter is less tired than Napoleon. Every time, it wins. Unlike all the other flawed gems on this list, there’s no sign of an extended cut of The Creator. But perhaps that’s for the best; perhaps with a more complete version the spell would be broken.

    Didn’t see but will:

    • Barbie — I don’t watch films for children. But more seriously, the marketing campaign for this one was just a little bit too self-aware to click for me, and when the opportunity didn’t present itself I didn’t seek it out.
    • Blue Beetle — The latter DC cinematic universe is dead and gone and now’s the perfect time to start critically reappraising it.
    • Killers of the Flower Moon — I’m a philistine and a fraud and I should resign my stewardship of longmovie.club. There just wasn’t time to fit it in in a winter season full of films.
    • Maestro — I still haven’t gotten over Tár.
    • The Marvels — The latter Marvel cinematic universe limps on and I have no desire to start critically reappraising it.
    • May December — Might sneak this one in before the end of the year and silently edit it into this list.

  • A Class Onion (Glass Onion)

    Spoilers, naturally.

    Blanc is meant to be at rock bottom here but damn if that doesn’t look like a good time.

    Whenever someone asks me about Sherlock Holmes, I tell them the same (somewhat exaggerated) factoid: every single one of Doyle’s short stories about the famous detective concerns at least one character who has a dark secret from his or her time in the colonies. You can comically unravel a good number of the stories just by keeping an ear out for which character has been abroad and assuming that any mystery will have taken place therein. Why is Sherlock Holmes, a character who rarely if ever leaves England, so concerned with goings-on in lands far away? It’s because for all their pure-logic puzzle-box mystique, detective stories most often reflect the anxieties of the times and places they are written in. To have a mystery you must have secrets, and to have secrets you need anxieties. Sherlock fears the colonies, Poirot the precarious luxury of high soceity between the wars. Gervase Fen is very concerned about pylons and the electricity board.

    So it is into this tradition that Rian Johnson’s Southern US detective Benoit Blanc steps with his duo of murder mystery films which reflect a modern anxiety: that the rich are going to kill us all. The first film, Knives Out, steps lightly as it weaves a (slightly) contrived story about ungrateful children and rightful inheritance. The naked inequality of it all is present but nudged to one side, and by constraining the world of the film to a single house Johnson is able to turn the world upside down at the climax, with struggling nurse Marta on top and the privileged rabble of disinherited children below. It’s neat, if fantastical.

    The just-released sequel, Glass Onion, dives further into the mires of the present: it’s about an unfathomably wealthy tech entrepreneur and his chosen friends, it’s set in the COVID pandemic. It touches on the energy crisis, lingers extensively on social media and PR cycles, and has Dave Bautista playing a manosphere-aping supplement salesman.

    He’s not quite as horribly tactile as Eisenberg’s Lex Luthor but Edward Norton’s variety of psychopath outfits are fun.

    Edward Norton’s antagonist Miles Bron is a billionaire in the mold of Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, someone with world-changing resources which he devotes to the expression of personal whims (c.f. child submarines or virtual reality headsets) in the face of the cosmic terror of actually changing anything. The story goes thus: six aspirational young adults used to meet in their local bar, sadly closed down by the present for undiscussed economic reasons, and talk about their individual dreams. Positive-vibes hypeman Miles Bron becomes the de-facto leader of the pack, who along with Janelle Monáe’s Andi Brand founded a generic tech megacorp the resources of which were siphoned into a level of success for the other four. Andi and Miles came into conflict over a dangerous new fuel research and Miles cruelly gave Andi the boot from the company she made great, by use in court of a crude facsimile of the bar napkin on which the company was conceived. Her friends all turned against her, Andi was set to expose the fraud with the discovery of the original napkin when she was murdered by persons unknown.

    Already we have a fictional contrivance: the idea that for the creation of a tech company on the level of Facebook for instance there must have been someone who was uniquely talented. Andi Brand (a curious choice of surname) is the real talent in the duo, the true owner of the critical napkin that much of the plot revolves around. But the idea is ridiculous. Corporate creation myths are ridiculous. Facebook’s billion-dollar success story was fueled by a tech bubble and merciless exploitation of monopoly status. There are very few great ideas sketched out in margins, and none of them are about founding adtech firms — nobody ever scrawled ‘misrepresent video views’ on a snotty tissue. It’s interesting to note that this is the second film of the year with a scene where a money-making deal is noted on a napkin. In Elvis however, the napkin is representative of the scurrilous nature of the deal, the betrayal that must be hidden. Here it’s a case of good napkin v bad napkin.

    Bad napkin.

    Elsewhere in the story Johnson seems to understand this about the fabulously successful: that they write these stories about themselves. Bron’s affectation over the Mona Lisa is discussed in exactly these terms, as an attempt to mythologise himself and his ‘works’ by attachment to a recognised greatness. But in the case of the napkins, Johnson indulges himself, that fantastical climax from the first film reasserting itself in the suggestion that maybe everything would be fine if we had only elevated the right billionaire based on the right napkin.

    Glass Onion has been lauded in some parts for its integration of COVID restrictions into the story, with some light, humourous character work around which characters are wearing which kinds of masks and how, as well as Blanc’s overall motivation being driven by lockdown-imposed boredom. I do think this is a bold thing to have attempted, although it’s a fool’s endeavour to try and view the events of COVID as if they are settled history: that time we all wore masks and some people continued to throw parties, ho ho. It could just as easily settle, as many do want, into a grand narrative about the unimaginably disgraceful actions of talentless governments, or else a story about wide, mass tragedy. It’s akin to watching early World War II movies which are unaware that the popular history of that war will yet be in large part determined by the events of the Holocaust.

    Of course the movie also quickly sweeps the subject of the pandemic aside with some ambiguous super-vaccine technobabble in the opening scene. This isn’t really a story about that. It forms part of a conscious decision in the film to take aim at the stupidity of it all, the personal contemptibility and self-satisfaction of characters like Bron in place of a broader view of what actually makes them bad. It’s a focus on how Tesla’s “full self-driving” cars might throw themselves at cardboard children in the street while glossing over the more prosaic evil of torpedoing plans for public transport by turning up in the guise of Springfield’s Lyle Lanley and proposing all that money be spent on a ridiculous tunnel instead.

    I’ve sold road tunnels to San Jose, Miami and Fort Lauderdale and by gum it put them on the map.

    Curiously, Glass Onion is of a piece with The Dark Knight Rises in this regard: movies where billionaires have invented free energy but the ‘correct’ thing presented to do is to not use it to change the world at all. Probably a coincidence.

    Coming back to the Mona Lisa, the painting is critical to where I think the movie fails on its own terms: at the climax. The film reaches a point where Blanc has successfully laid out the entire mystery, warts and all. We know who did what, and when, and why. In a callback to a point made earlier in the film though, Blanc and Helen Brand (the sister of the dead woman) have no recourse, no evidence, no legal route through which to see justice done. Solving the mystery does not provide closure or remedy the wrongdoing. This is a deeply unsatisfying way to end a movie however. So Blanc conspires with Brand to trigger an explosive climax: Using Bron’s new energy source, they cause a hydrogen fire at his Greek island estate, burning his possessions and the Mona Lisa along with it. As the characters painstakingly explain to us, this will permanently tar Bron’s name as the man who inadequately cared for a great work of art, a humiliation he cannot recover from. Seeing the wind change, his underlings abandon him.

    Everyone knows it says “This is a fake” on the back anyway.

    It’s artfully done but that doesn’t seem like much of a punishment to me. The oft-noted propensity for Teslas to catch fire hasn’t done much to blunt the enthusiasm of their owners for their chaotic CEO. Despite desperate attempts by culture war fanatics to make it so, Kim Kardashian damaging Marilyn Monroe’s famous dress hasn’t roused much career-damaging shame. The rotating door of treasured underlings cursing his name and accusing him of all kinds of crimes didn’t bring down the Trump White House.

    There is an interesting conversation earlier in the film between Blanc and Brand which, in my opinion, hints at an earlier revision to the plot. Blanc emphasises the bloodless nature of the killing of Andi Brand, how there was no force and no violence involved. Any of the presumably-squeemish tech and politics nerds that make up Bron’s circle could have committed it. Helen Brand, by contrast, is not afraid to step into the tiger’s den — there’s a running joke about her getting drunk and doing something unwisely confrontational. The movie’s single pistol, which Bron used to try and murder Helen minutes before, is not present in the final scene. Personally, were I making the movie, I would give Helen more to do and say in the final seconds of the film than smashing a series of glass sculptures and accidentally making an incoherent reference to the Just Stop Oil protests.

    I had totally forgot that Mark Gatiss is piloting a helicopter for some reason in this scene.

    Another Sherlock, that played by Benedict Cumberbatch in Steven Moffat’s and Mark Gatiss’s modern-day adaptation, had a mystery with an ending not dissimilar to Glass Onion. At the end of the third season, Sherlock faces off against a Murdoch-esque newspaper magnate named Charles Augustus Magnussen, who taunts Sherlock at the climax of the episode in a similar way to how Bron taughts Brand and Blanc. Magnussen cannot be shown to have committed any crime, and his privilege and wealth will see him out of any embarrassment caused. Sherlock shoots him.

    If Glass Onion wants to be a fantasy, it should provide a properly fantastical ending. Miles Bron should be convicted and go to jail. If you can’t provide that, Bron should be immolated in a fireball of his own hubris. If you can’t provide that, Brand should shoot him. As it stands, Brand lights the touch paper, the grand explosion goes off, and the film cuts back to the lounge, everyone in place. Only property is damaged. To punctuate the point, Bron’s car falls through the ceiling. Like a Marvel movie, the only damage has been to innocent cars.

    RIP.

    One last thing I want to turn over in Glass Onion is the most unfair: Miles Bron has no children in the film. The previous film considered entirely children, figuratively speaking, so I can see why Johnson wanted to avoid going over the same ground. But the idea of children is as central to billionaires and their quest for immortality of any kind as anything else. For hundreds of years the desire of those with power to retain it forever was sublimated into inheritance and bloodlines. Rupert Murdoch has six. Elon Musk has ten. Donald Trump has five. Even Mark Zuckerberg has two. For sure, they’re all banking on human brain interfaces and cryogenic preservation first, but as a backup they’re happy to rely on the old ways.

    It’s odd that Bron has no aspirations in this department, nor any indication that he has considered it beyond his prominently-displayed heterosexuality-affirming affair. The question of immortality is inherently visceral, concerned with decay and rot. Even on fire, Bron’s estate is spotless. The shards from his glass onion form perfect beads on the floor. It’s all so very pristine.

    The child-free nature of Bron’s crew in Glass Onion allows them an uncanny childishness despite their advanced careers, but you cannot become the most divorced man in the world without children.

    If you like my writing, please subscribe to me here on Medium or to my Letterboxd reviews or watch Sixteen attempts to talk to you about ‘Suicide Squad’ available on Youtube now. I wrote about Andor for Blood Knife earlier this year. You can follow me on the billionaire’s folly.

  • Inside

    He’s tall and I’m short, and I don’t sing quite so well, but otherwise there was an unnerving amount of myself to see in Bo Burnham’s chronicle of his year indoors. I too spent most of the last year in a box room surrounded by tech kit. I too took the opportunity to grow a dubious beard that didn’t suit me. And I too used the lockdown period to shepherd a big long meandering video project through to its conclusion. I even, unknowingly, made a sock puppet.

    It wasn’t the most difficult pandemic experience, and in many ways it’s the preferable one — the ability to seclude oneself, to work from home, to live in a box like that, is a privilege not everyone shares. But that doesn’t mean it’s fun, or a natural state of being. I don’t live in as grandiose a house as I’m sure the international celebrity Bo Burnham does, but I spent the year of lockdown being able to work in one room, relax in another, and sleep in a third — this too is a privilege. I was able, as Burnham surely was, to go for walks in the local area — another privilege by no means universal.

    But these advantages don’t — or rather didn’t — free me, or presumably Burnham. They mitigate. They are things everyone ought to have access to even if not everyone does. But they don’t free you from the weight of boxing up your life, of not seeing your friends and loved ones, of attaching a risk assessment to every human interaction.

    Unlike Bo Burnham, my video project didn’t start during the pandemic. My video project started in 2017 when I was writing up my PhD thesis. Again, I had very good fortune in being able to do a PhD and very good fortune in being able to see it through to its conclusion. But that conclusion was a miserable experience. Finishing a thesis (for me, I guess) was working twelve hours a day for weeks on end in near-complete seclusion, chasing a goal that ultimately becomes only relevant to you. I put my personal belongings in storage and moved back to the university; I imagined packing up elements of myself and putting them in storage too. Hobbies, interests, friends — all in cardboard boxes and up on a shelf.

    It took a long time to unpack everything again. Some things may never have come back, forgotten deep in a mental storage locker. And some new things learned in that time have proven difficult to shake. But for COVID, and lockdown, this prepared me — somewhat. Putting things back in boxes, and getting them out again when safe. Taking solace in online relationships when interacting in person was unavailable. And taking the opportunity to finish my video project.

    All of which is to say, I found ‘Inside’ far too familiar to comfortably assess. Burnham’s ticks, Burnham’s fixations — shots of his head on a pillow, shots of himself in his pants — Burnham’s packaging of unfinished thoughts, unfinished gags, unfunny songs representing his choking inability to find solace in creativity. These all have an intensely personal response in a way that would make saying “Oh the internet song was funny” seem beyond facile.

    Following Stewart Lee, who Burnham occasionally channels in this: ‘Was it funny?’ ‘No, but I agreed the hell out of it.’

  • Tenet

    Tempting to say “Inception done right”, if that’s fair. Your tolerance may vary based on how able you are to keep up with the near-incessant rattling off of plot details in low voices — which comes to an apparently intentional breaking point in the finale — but if all else fails it’ll definitely support a rewatch. John David Washington and Robert Pattinson are up to the challenge of keeping it ticking over, both with a sort of pleasant, easy charisma, and they’re aided by a relentless, frenetic pace to the action for the bulk of the film.

    Inception is increasingly hamstrung as it goes along by Nolan’s bloody-minded refusal to approach camp or psychedelia in his film entirely about dream-worlds. Which is not to say he refuses to get silly with it, just that what Dark Knight Rises does for “some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb”, Inception does for all of dreams. The world of Tenet, pegged as it is to the world of James Bond spy thrillers, is a much better match for Nolan’s pared-down aesthetic.

    The video-game overtones of Inception make a reappearance here too, with the first pass through the tax haven vault following impeccable video game logic, up to the dispensing of a dual boss fight against a mysterious opponent. The motif makes a slightly less successful appearance at the climax of the film, where we’re forced to wait at a locked grille while the villain monologues over a PA.

    The film’s commitment to the forwards/backwards theme is complete, with Branagh’s villain beginning the film attempting to have the protagonist killed, progressing from there to being deceived into having him to dinner, and departing the film as the image of the consummate family man (billionaire). Are we meant to think that his silver suicide pill is identical to the one that does not kill the protagonist at the start of the film? In that case, it’s only the presence of Debicki’s vengeful wife which allows him to be killed at all.

    The most significant complaint I’d level is that the final action sequence is both a little confused — a showcase for forward/backward thinking that doesn’t quite linger long enough on the logic of any given part, and centred around the progress of protagonists who are difficult to pick out under their military gear. I assume it all makes sense in retrospect, but it lacks the finely tuned amping up that characterises the earlier action sequences — drip feeding a logical progression of increase in scope as we move from backwards bullets to backwards guns to backwards people to backwards plans.

    It’s all very (brace for it) Steven Moffat, and one wonders about the link there — not least the extremely Doctor Who finale for Pattinson’s character. Who and Bond have a long history of mixing and matching that’s too interesting to explain here but it’s absolutely a sensible leap for someone making a sci-fi Bond. And of course they do little else the whole film long than reversing the polarity of things.

    The costuming is pristine at every point, as you might hope. Special mention as well to the perfectly scored stamp on a cello in the opening sequence. It would have been nice to see this in a cinema — hopefully the opportunity will present itself at some point in a post-COVID world.