June In Film

 The Little Mermaid

I have not seen the original Little Mermaid for something like 25 years. This probably aided my general enjoyment of yet another Disney remake, as I imagine that more diehard fans of the original would find more to fault here than I did. Having said that, some of the alterations worked for me such as the decision to give Prince Eric more backstory and a new song.

Halle Bailey is perfectly cast as Ariel (regardless of what the internet’s worst arseholes will have you believe) and the quality of her singing is a match for the original. The highlight of the entire film is probably the moment when the crescendo of “Part Of Your World” hits, the waves crash against the shore and you’re fleetingly reminded of when Disney could still stir the soul. There’s an enjoyable performance too from Melissa McCartney as Ursula who brings a certain amount of fun to one of the House of Mouse’s greatest pantomime villains.

Unfortunately, what these films lose in the transition to live action are difficult to ignore. The features of hugely expressive characters like Flounder and Sebastian are lost to photorealism and songs like “Under The Sea” are given colourful sequences but lack the same impact. Animation is capable of things that live action films simply aren’t, as another film this month ably demonstrates.

All in all it’s a respectable effort that will probably do the job for the target audience, although I’m not sure how many more of these revivals I want to sit through.

Inception

This was arguably the defining film of the early 2010s* and yet completely passed me by during its original theatrical release. I saw this film on a Sunday night, which is a suboptimum time to even begin to wrap your head about what I can most accurately describe as a “high concept heist film”, a sort of pretentious Oceans Eleven. For various complicated reasons, a team must venture into an individual’s dream within a dream within a dream to alter his subconscious.

I am broadly speaking a fan of Christopher Nolan’s work, but mainly the less highfalutin stuff. I would bracket this film alongside Interstellar, which as I recall was three hours of complete bollocks and then Matthew McConaughey is lurking behind a bookcase in space. It's better than that, anyway. There are solid performances from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Elliot Page and Tom Hardy, the charismatic turn from the latter probably propelling him into the leading man status he’s enjoyed in recent years.

The whole thing is a high wire act that doesn’t always gel (the entire plot with Marion Cotillard as DiCaprio’s late wife doesn’t make an awful lot of sense) but Nolan just about pulls it off and the action packed second half of the movie keeps you engaged through the more complicated plotting. It’s a film that you admire, rather than necessarily enjoy.

*Apart from Toy Story 3, obviously. Christopher Nolan may be very talented, but he is yet to make me cry behind a pair of 3D glasses.

The Eight Mountains

This is an Italian film which was well regarded at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival which was declared the joint winner of the Jury Prize alongside EO, a film which is seen entirely through the eyes of a Polish donkey and which I would also quite like to watch at some point. It’s a relatively rare instance of Everyman programming something arthousey, an adjective which almost certainly doesn’t exist.

 The film concerns two childhood friends. Pietro, a boy from Turin who stays in Grana in the Italian Alps with his mother in the summer and Bruno, who lives with his aunt and uncle in the town. They reconnect in their 30s following the death of Pietro’s father and the two agree to collaborate on his last wish, to build a house on the hillside there. Having moved to Nepal in an effort to find himself, Pietro introduces to Bruno the concept of “The Eight Mountains” from Nepalese culture. It posits that the man who has travelled the eight mountain ranges is more learned than the man who has scaled the highest. Bruno disagrees, neatly encapsulating the difference in mindset between Pietro, the traveller and him, who has always considered his life to be in rural Grana.

It’s a film that proceeds very much at its own languid pace which did prove something of a challenge over two and a half hours. Nonetheless, there are pleasures to enjoy along the way and the general lack of conflict means that the dramatic scenes are all the more impactful when they do arrive. The cinematography is probably the movie’s greatest asset, with numerous beautiful shots of snowy mountains. It thematically struck a chord with me too, particularly its reflections on paths in life not taken and words left unsaid.

An enjoyable experience, although you may need to be in a certain frame of mind to get the most out of it.

Fast X

Here we are, the tenth film in The Fast & The Furious franchise. We have entered Roman numeral territory. Still, you don’t get to this point in a series without doing something right. We start with a gang towing a vault away and it escalates in ridiculousness from there.

I check my watch quite a lot during films these days and it was to my astonishment that at the point I first looked for the time, we were 75 minutes into the film. Better movies than this have been considerably less engrossing.

Don’t get me wrong. You still ask yourself a lot of questions. Questions like “What on earth are Charlize Theron and Brie Larson doing here?”, “Wouldn’t that be a child safeguarding issue?” “Why do you think that face mask is enough to conceal the identity of the man with the most recognisable physique in the world?”. But the action proceeds at such a breakneck pace that it often succeeds in overwhelming the viewer’s critical faculties. CRASH. BANG. WALLOP. FAMILY. REPEAT.

Jason Momoa is the film’s secret weapon with an almost camp sense of villainy and an amusing sense of self awareness. Proceedings are approximately 60% more entertaining whenever he’s on screen. Vin Diesel is Vin Diesel, it’s difficult to think of anything to add other than he is amusingly awful in the scenes that require him to convey any sort of genuine emotion. It’s such a stupid movie. But it’s so completely and so wholeheartedly committed to being stupid, that I came away with a begrudging respect.

Noel Coward: Mad About The Boy

The first of two 90 minute documentaries this month about fascinating figures from the world of showbusiness. I knew next to nothing about Noel Coward going in save for his song “I Went To A Marvellous Party”, which has been covered by Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. I greatly enjoyed going on the ride of his extraordinary life, from child actor to songwriter to playwright with goodness knows how many diversions in between, though sadly coupled with the difficulties experienced by many gay men during the period when homosexuality remained illegal.

He might even be considered one of the few British artists to have successfully broken America, securing the patronage of none other than Frank Sinatra during a triumphant residency in Las Vegas. I was particularly interested to hear about his cinematic collaborations with David Lean, someone else I knew little about apart from the fact a lovely independent cinema in Croydon is now named after him. The highlights of the documentary are excerpts from his various chat show appearances, in which Coward is never short of a wry observation or amusing quip.

His life itself is almost plotted like a feature film, having moved to the Caribbean having become disillusioned with life in England, though still being graced with notable visitors like the Queen Mother. Despite this, he enjoyed a late career, third act renaissance in which he revelled in national treasure status and collaborated with likes of Maggie Smith. A fascinating portrait of a remarkable life, one that was well lived.

Chevalier

This is a colourful, sort of frothy period drama. I imagine it’s what Bridgerton is like, though I’ve never seen it. It may have the best opening scene of any movie I’ve seen this year, in which the titular character upstages Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at his own concert with a virtuoso display of musicianship culminating in the film’s only expletive, beautifully deployed. It’s a bit of a shame that (though still enjoyable) the rest of the film doesn’t quite reach those heights.

Kelvin Harrison Jr is nonetheless terrific in the central role as Joseph Bologne, the illegitimate son of a French slaveowner in Guadeloupe and one of his slaves, who gradually comes to realise that he will never truly considered an equal of his Parisian contemporaries in spite of receiving royal patronage from Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton) . His is a hugely charismatic performance in a thoroughly watchable drama. He also has strong chemistry with Samara Weaving as Marie-Josephine de Comarieu de Montalembert. Their romance is an inevitably doomed one, resulting in the film’s most shocking moment, one that pushes him closer to the uprising brewing on the streets of Paris.   

I don’t think it’ll go down as one of the great historical pieces but will do the job for its target audience. Harrison Jr has a real star quality though and I’ll be interested to see what he does next. As noted in the closing credits, Bologne went on to be one of the few black military leaders in the French Revolutionary wars. Fertile ground for another film, I suspect.

Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse

I greatly enjoyed “Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse” and was hugely looking forward to this. I wasn’t disappointed. Its sequel builds upon the world created in that film, escalates the stakes and races along at a breakneck pace. This might alienate certain viewers, but I found it compelling. Our hero, Miles Morales feels like a real teenager with real and relatable problems, as does Gwen Stacy/Spider-Gwen whose own complicated backstory is fleshed out here.

The movie fizzes with so much creativity it’s hard to know where to start, with a seemingly endless number of ideas and “blink and you’ll miss it” references that will doubtless reward multiple viewings. It throws seemingly a million different artistic styles together yet somehow succeeds in working as a cohesive whole, introducing hundreds of new and distinctive characters like Spider-Punk and Pavitr Pabhakar. The multiverse concept has been drawn upon considerably in recent times and with diminishing returns. Yet here it provides genuine tension in the narrative, as Miles wrestles with the concept of all the Spider-Man variants having a pre-ordained fate and what the broader implications of that might be. It’s also genuinely funny in a way that hardly any superhero movies are any more*.

Overall, it’s supremely entertaining and I loved it pretty much from start to finish. After years of stale superhero movies, this represents a potential blueprint for the future of the genre and it’s an exciting one. I can say without hesitation that it’s my film of the year so far and I can’t wait for part three.

*Sorry guys, the Thor movies under Taika Waititi don’t count.

Asteroid City

I’ve greatly enjoyed Wes Anderson’s work in the past. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of my all-time favourite films. How I yearned for that sort of spirit of here. Instead, I regret to report that it’s comfortably the worst of his films I’ve watched.

It’s colourful and distinctive in the way Wes Anderson films are. There’s a ludicrous number of Hollywood A-listers in the film as per usual. A small town gets visited by an alien and locked down by the US government, then is released. Jason Schwartzman’s character tells his four children that their mother has passed away, three weeks after her death. Like a normal person would do.

There’s “a play within a play” conceit, which only really served to distance me further from what was happening on screen, which was already not a lot. If there was any reading between the lines to be done in this film, it was in text so small as to be impossible to view. There’s the occasional funny quip or entertaining moment of surrealism, but that’s about it.

I saw this on a day where conditions were hot and sweaty and I was tired and mentally all over the shop, which might well have affected my enjoyment of the movie. Perhaps under different circumstances and a repeat viewing, I would feel differently. However, that’s not a courtesy I extend to any of the other films I review so will not do so here. Entirely bereft of any substance and a baffling disappointment.

Still: The Michael Fox Story

This is available to watch on Apple TV+ but also had a brief theatrical run thus meeting the nebulous criteria I have for inclusion in this blog. I knew the broad strokes of Michael Fox’s career, but this documentary helpfully fills in a lot of the gaps as his story is retold through interview, re-enactment and archival footage. It starts dramatically with Fox recalling the moment after a night out when his pinky finger started to twitch, the first warning sign of Parkinsons. As viewers we’re aware of the extent the disease has come to affect his life but it’s still a shock to see him collapse to the floor outside his apartment building.

 The 60-year-old remains a compelling figure, somewhat haggard yet still retaining the boyish charm that America fell in love with during the 1980s. It’s amusing to learn that he was as cocky and charismatic off screen as he was off. One TV executive pushed hard against Fox’s casting in the Family Ties, arguing that his face wouldn’t sell merchandise. When the sitcom proved a smash hit with Fox as the breakdown star, he sent the executive a lunchbox with his character’s likeness and a personal note.

The tone is generally uplifting, with numerous touching scenes with his wife and his family. It occasionally left me hoping for something a little less saccharine. There’s a moment during the height of his fame where a typically indiscreet Joan Rivers asks Fox who he’s sleeping with, to which he inevitably declines to answer. One suspects there are stories untold about that particular part of his life that might have been interesting to hear.

Part of you wants to lament a wonderful career curtailed too soon and part of you wants to celebrate the remarkable things that he achieved regardless. He was Marty McFly and that’s good enough for me.

NT Live: Fleabag

Actor, writer and TV commissioners’ wet dream Phoebe Waller-Bridge returns to our cinema screens with the stage revival of Fleabag from 2019. NT Live fill a glaring hole in her summer schedule, Waller-Bridge gets some more exposure prior to her imminent appearance in the new Indiana Jones film. Everybody wins.

I have up to this point assumed Waller-Bridge and Fleabag were part of an industry conspiracy designed to hoodwink naïve creatives into believing you can achieve global success off the back of an Edinburgh Fringe show. I’ve watched one episode of the TV show and didn’t feel compelled to continue as the arch dialogue and endless nods to camera grated on me considerably. Given the overwhelming popularity of the series, I was prepared to accept that it wasn’t for me.

Still, I was pleased to find the stage iteration (presented largely in the form of a one-woman monologue) much more enjoyable. Waller-Bridge is a talented actor who excels at bringing the world of the narcissistic, pitiable Fleabag* to life. With her outrageous tales of threesomes on her period (amongst many other things), it’s easy to see how this character has captured people’s imaginations. She’s also adept at threading other characters into the story, her depiction of the small lipped man she meets on the Tube proving to be a particular delight. It’s an impressive calling card and I look forward to seeing what she brings to Indy’s last hurrah.

*I and think everyone else have assumed Fleabag is the name of her character but this is never made explicitly clear.