May In Film

 NT Live: Good

David Tennant plays John Halder, a German professor, intellectual and ostensibly “good” man whose noble qualities are eroded over time as he eventually becomes seduced and co-opted by the Nazi Party. Elliot Levey and Sharon Small both play multiple roles, including Halder’s Jewish friend Maurice and his wife and mother.

It’s certainly a role that benefits from having the stage presence and charisma of someone like Tennant and there is something undeniably chilling about seeing his character step into an SS uniform at the climax of the show. However, despite the quality of the performances (Halder’s discussions with an increasingly incredulous Maurice were the highlights), this didn’t quite do it for me. A friend of mine is a teacher who has previously expressed the view that she’s sick to death of World War 2 and my familiarity factored into my experience here. As someone who has probably watched enough war related content for several lifetimes, I felt it had very little new to say about the Holocaust or the banality of evil.

The performance was accompanied by a film during the interval focusing on the playwright Cecil Phillip Taylor, who sadly died a couple of months after the show’s original 1981 premiere. I have been sceptical in the past but providing an interval with an additional short film to provide further context works well. I probably wouldn’t pay £22 a pop every time to watch them but the National Theatre have once again provided an impressive package for their viewers.

Guardians Of The Galaxy: Volume 3

As much as I’ve been critical of Marvel of late, I am fond of the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies and they are probably the best vehicle for the talents of the much maligned Chris Pratt. A little surprisingly, Rocket takes centre stage as the emotional core of the film as we learn more about his back story, created by The High Evolutionary (a narcissistic figure who imagines himself with god like abilities, ably played by Chukwudi Iwuji). It’s a decision that works well, although as has been pointed out elsewhere it is a difficult movie to watch if you are especially sensitive to animal cruelty. I’m a big fan of Will Poulter and he is used to excellent if sparing comedic effect as Adam Warlock, a privileged mummy’s boy with unfathomable powers.

Near the end there’s a big fight sequence soundtracked by The Beastie Boys’ “No Sleep Till Brooklyn” and it encapsulates everything that’s great and joyous about the series. It’s a fitting finale to what has been one of the great Marvel success stories of recent times and I’ll look back on it fondly when we spend the next three years dicking about the multiverse.

Writer and director James Gunn appears to have a knack for this sort of ensemble superhero movie. In addition to this trilogy he also directed Suicide Squad, one of the best DC movies for years. I understand this will be his last movie for Marvel and I suspect their loss will be DC’s gain.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Another film breaking my rule about too many words in a title, but as it’s a book I suppose I’ll have to let it off. In the film’s marketing, it was highlighted that this was the first movie adaption of Judy Blume’s novel from 1970. Having watched it, you can’t help but feel that the reason it has taken 52 years to reach the big screen is that the central premise of the story isn’t especially cinematic or interesting.

The plot of this film is basically: middle class child moves from the big city to the suburbs away from her doting grandmother with her two well-adjusted and loving parents, Barbara and Herbert. She then finds herself dealing with the challenges of puberty and prays to God to be considered normal by her peers. Some conflict is belatedly inserted into the film when Barbara’s parents (fundamentalist Christians who disowned her for marrying a Jewish man) reach out to her and subsequently clash with Herbert’s mother Sylvia, although this does not provide a great amount of narrative impetus. It’s produced by James L Brooks, who is credited with providing many of the greatest moments of pathos in The Simpsons and sprinkles his heart-warming touch here also.

There’s something about Margaret wrestling with her religion that also feels quaint when viewed through a modern-day prism, as it’s difficult to imagine a child in 2023 dealing with such a quandary. Overall, it’s a movie which is sweet and charming, but also a bit slight.

Clueless

A rich privileged Los Angeles teenager learns to care about something other than herself over the course of 90 uninteresting and unfunny minutes. That’s about it. Also, she gets romantically involved with her college age stepbrother at the end of the film. The supposed justification for this is that the story is a riff on Emma by Jane Austen, which I would say is not justification enough. Surely this must have raised eyebrows even in 1995?

The film was also made in the five-year sweet spot in the 1990s where ska punk was at its height*, resulting in a curious cameo from The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, which was of moderate interest to a fan of the genre. You get to see a genuinely young Paul Rudd, before his transition into the 25-year-old man he has seemingly been for the past 30 years. He is obviously the best thing about the film, although the late Brittany Murphy is deserving of a mention, providing one of the movie’s better performances as the new girl Tai.

Other than that, there is virtually nothing to recommend this and I am absolutely bewildered by how well it was reviewed at the time. I imagine there must be about a hundred teen movies from the past three decades that deserve to be revisited more than this. I would advise you to pick one of those instead.

*See also Reel Big Fish’s appearance in Baseketball and Less Than Jake’s collaboration with Kenan and Kel on Good Burger.

Book Club: The Next Chapter

I honestly don’t have 250 words to write about this one, but I’ve set a precedent now and boxed myself into a corner. I didn’t see the first Book Club film and didn’t need to. Four friends have a book club which is forced to take place over Zoom during Covid. Post pandemic, they revive a plan from decades prior to visit Italy. They all have a solitary plot point to touch upon and shenanigans ensue.

This is very much the sort of film you would expect it to be. It’s “Live Laugh Love: The Movie”. They drink a lot of wine. They meet handsome men. There are jokes about elderly bodies and crumbling ruins, bawdy remarks about various nude statues, misunderstandings concerning policemen and strippers, phones and emojis. The soundtrack blares “Mambo Italiano” loudly. It stays in your head for days. An Italian version of “You Make My Dreams Come True” by Hall & Oates is of mild interest. Candice Bergen’s character getting caught in flagrante in a Venetian water taxi is by far the most interesting scene in the film. It’s bad, albeit in quite an inoffensive way. Still, the overhead shots of the Italian countryside look nice.

I have an affection for Mary Steenbergen that goes back to her appearance in Back To The Future 3, but she’s capable of so much better, as are Jane Fonda and Diana Keaton. I applaud any initiative to get older women on screen, but they deserve a more interesting vehicle for their talents than this.

NT Live: Best Of Enemies

Two NT Lives in one month? Truly I am a man of culture. This play centres on a series of debates during the 1968 Republican and Democratic conventions arranged by ABC between conservative writer and commentator William F Buckley (David Harewood) and liberal author and intellectual Gore Vidal (Zachary Quinto) who prove to be well matched adversaries in the televisual arena.

Harewood and Quinto are both hugely watchable talents and there’s a great amount of fun to be had in watching both men snipe at each other (“He is always on the right I think, and so always in the wrong” goes one of Vidal’s quips). I also thought the piece was cleverly staged. The ABC control room sits at the top of two staircases as real time footage of the men in black and white is relayed to the television screens above the stage.

The conclusion didn’t quite work for me as it used the device of both characters talking at length about what happened in the remainder of their lives, which I found quickly took me out of the narrative. I was also not entirely convinced by the suggestion that these debates were instrumental in forever changing political discourse in the USA, regardless of how much of a ratings boon they were for ABC. When Vidal shrieks “It wasn’t supposed to matter!”, you’re not altogether certain how much it did, though it provides an interesting case study. Overall though, it’s a well-acted, well staged and thoroughly enjoyable piece.

Casino

De Niro! Pesci! Scorsese! We’re back here again, as seemingly Everyman cannot resist programming their collaborations. Surely The Irishman will follow. Casino does rather feel like the end of a sort of thematic trilogy after Raging Bull and Goodfellas, another story where the mob loom large, where men make it big and then get greedy, this time transplanted into Las Vegas in a time before the city became “like Disneyland” to quote a scene near the end of the film.

As I’ve said, I find De Niro and Pesci a brilliantly entertaining screen pairing and I suspect there will not be anyone as good at playing a hot-headed Italian American as Joe Pesci in the next hundred years. I’m never entirely sure why but I always enjoy watching Pesci kick seven bells out of one of his adversaries while De Niro looks on impassively. Perhaps that says something about me. There’s also a strong performance from Sharon Stone playing a woman who has been chewed up and spat out both by Vegas and her marriage to De Niro’s character. I’ve said in the past that there is no reason for any film to be three hours long, but Scorsese plots and paces over 180 minutes better than most.

Basically, if you liked Raging Bull and Goodfellas, you’ll find stuff to enjoy here. The central problem is that it is too similar a film to Goodfellas, hitting nearly all the same story beats and is undeniably not as good. Entertaining stuff, but there are better Scorsese movies.