Well this was a cheerful watch. I say that sarcastically, though apparently some people found this one strangely uplifting. Maybe it’s that whole lost soul thing on a mission thing. Joaquin Phoenix always manages to go the extra mile, to the point where his range of complex characters always end up being compelling but rarely, if ever, end up being sympathetic. I guess it could be argued Joe is a gentle kinda guy (he loves his mum despite their strange, strained relationship) , but he does (thankfully mostly unseen) horrible things in his hunting down of horrible sexual abusers. Lynne Ramsay is a really good actor’s director who doesn’t make enough films, not to mention being bold enough to guide us through dark and distressing material with nightmarish flair. You have to be in the right mood to watch YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (I’m not sure if I was) but it’s worth a watch for the affecting scenes between Phoenix and young Ekaterina Samsonov alone. SSP
Review in Brief: You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Review: Incredibles 2 (2018)
Elastic, animated: Pixar Animation Studios/Disney
We knew this was coming. As Elastigirl said in her interview at the beginning of the Incredibles’ first outing, “Settle down? I don’t think so – I’m at the top of my game!”. She has always been the strong, most capable one despite her husband being able to lift cars. No question, INCREDIBLES 2 is her story.
Following a particularly destructive afternoon of city-saving, super-family the Incredibles are arrested and taken into protective custody. With their public reputation in tatters and their home life increasingly fraught, billionaire siblings Winston and Evelyn Deavor (Bob Odenkirk and Catherine Keener) offer to re-brand and restore superheroes to glory, with Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) as their campaign mascot. With Helen saving the world from jeopardy 9-5, Bob (Craig T Nelson) is left at home with the kids, including Baby Jack Jack who is about to reveal an impressive, and hugely destructive array of powers all his own.
I got that unmistakable nostalgic tingle as the film began, the red, Incredibl-ised Disney/Pixar logos, the soft brass of Michael Giacchino’s theme ramping up… My friends and I were in our early teens when the first Incredibles came out, and there’s a certain appeal going back to a favourite movie world years later and picking up the story exactly where we left it.
This is the best superhero movie of 2018 (yes, even better than that one). The way this superhero team work together and combine their powers primarily to save civilians over beating up the villain is a great example of something bafflingly often forgotten about in superhero movies. Combined, the opening sequence and the finale are a more faithful take on Superman than Superman’s last six film appearances and considerably better than any cinematic portrayal of the Fantastic Four so far.
The film would have a very strong case for being Pixar’s best-looking film, no mean feat considering the company it keeps. Animated humans have rarely been this expressive, the environmental effects from the first film that are now starting to show their age here look photo-real in a stylised kind of way and every action scene plays out over multiple planes and keeps you guessing where it’s going next through the sheer amount of inventive visuals being thrown at you every second.
Jack Jack’s antics alone is worth the price of admission. I was holding my sides with wonderful pain at any scene built around people (and raccoons) unexpectedly encountering his powers. See the film on the biggest, best digital screen possible and you can hear him moving around the auditorium as he dimension-jumps. Speaking of this particular power, Bob seems creeped out but unsurprised that Jack Jack can still hear everything across dimensions.
As I said in my Incredibles review, Brad Bird has a real gift for breathing life into animated characters. I love that Bob tries to leap at another opportunity of returning to the glory days before he is pushed aside by his wife, the more precision, tactical and less collateral damaging hero. Helen gets a real rush out of proving that she’s still got it and Bob’s insecurities of course finally boil over in spectacular fashion. Violet’s (Sarah Vowell) worst teen nightmares end up happening in quick succession with only a minor input from her powers, Dash (Huck Milner) is in a much less complex place in his life, when his parents put their foot down on future family super-adventures, his reaction is sticking out his chest and proclaiming melodramatically, “It defines who I am!” This all rings really true.
The identity of the new masked villain is all too easy to guess, mostly because the list of possible suspects is really short. Arguably too, the film might be accused of being a bit too talky for kids. Bird aims to make animated movies for everyone, but when the pace slows and the fireworks stop, the little ones might get fidgety.
Much like HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON 2, I wouldn’t say that this is superior the original, but it is deeper. INCREDIBLES 2 is thrilling in new ways, heartfelt in an old-timey fashion and it still has something new to say about the world today through the medium of a alt-universe period superhero movie. Pixar has some serious work on their hands to not disappoint in their next effort at a sequel. SSP
10 Years On: The Dark Knight (2008)
Put on your game face: Warner Bros/Legendary Entertainment
With my latest look back at the staying power and impact of a key film, I have to address an elephant in the room. Everything about THE DARK KNIGHT, even after a decade is still overshadowed by Heath Ledger’s tragic and untimely death. Yes, Ledger’s Joker is utterly spellbinding, his Clown Prince of Crime is a jerky, volatile, nihilistic terrorist fully deserving of plaudits. But Ledger is far from the only reason why the film is still held in such high regard after a decade. Many would argue that this was the year the Academy could have caught up with the world, that the Dark Knight was worthy of at least a shot at the grand prize. It’s also thought that it’s precisely because of TDK’s snubbing that the Best Picture shortlist was increased, though it would take another decade for genre pictures to get real recognition with THE SHAPE OF WATER and GET OUT.
Three years after he first donned the cowl, billionaire Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) works with Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman) and DAs Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Gotham’s new White Knight, Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) to clean up their city once and for all. But when in their desperation the mob turns to a man they don’t fully understand (Heath Ledger) Batman’s secret identity and the safety of everyone he loves is put on the line.
This is a seriously strong ensemble piece, with Bale as an increasingly downtrodden, conflicted Bruce Wayne; Maggie Gyllenhaal bringing the attitude and heart that was missing from Katie Holmes’ portrayal of Rachel; Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman bring a little welcome brevity to this otherwise pretty moody film, not to mention the force of nature that is Heath Ledger. I’d be hard-pressed to decide between Gary Oldman and Aaron Eckhart as the film’s MVP. Oldman’s performance as Gordon is grounded and extremely human – if Batman’s war with the Joker is the main driving force for action and spectacle in the film, then Gordon’s story provides the most scope for genuine drama. I also can’t heap enough praise on Eckhart for his performance as Harvey Dent, whose crusade to clean the streets of Gotham leads to his ultimate, tragic, downfall when he is horribly disfigured, becoming Two-Face (my favourite Batman villain). Eckhart carefully builds Dent’s character and motivations layer-by-layer for maximum pathos, and I like that they touch on his character’s more recent comic portrayals as being a bit unstable before his accident and becoming a violent vigilante rather than a straight villain.
Other than the cast’s performances, I think what really makes The Dark Knight is its thematic richness. The idea of duality and antithesis is continually emphasised – justice vs. injustice, order vs. chaos, Batman vs. The Joker. Even Harvey Dent, with his position openly and publicly fighting crime, is the polar opposite of Batman, a secretive, anonymous vigilante – they are two sides of the same coin, with the possibility of one becoming the other in the right (or wrong) circumstances. The film also looks beautiful, in no small part due to Nolan’s use of IMAX cameras for key scenes, including The Joker’s thrilling bank heist introduction, the action-packed Gotham freeway chase and the grandly imposing establishing shots of cityscapes. Hans Zimmer/James Newton Howard’s eerie and layered score also deserves a mention – this is not the epic, orchestral sound he made for the rise of a hero in Batman Begins, but a dark and disturbing musical accompaniment for a hero’s fall.
All the best Batman films are about his “one rule” directly or indirectly. The Joker will never truly be defeated because Batman will never cross that line to snuff out the pain and suffering he causes once and for all. That’s one of the main reasons why The Dark Knight and UNDER THE RED HOOD hit so hard as stories: they’re prepared to skewer the Batman.
Where The Dark Knight fails is in one sub-par sequence that threatens to derail the whole film. Everything from the hostages on bomb-rigged boats to Batman’s final confrontation with the Joker is overblown, overacted and thoroughly unnecessary. The film would be much better off if this sequence was deleted entirely, if the joker was dealt with more swiftly, then we could progress more directly to the film’s operatic finale with Two-Face.
With a far more formidable baddie, higher stakes and a hero suffering a crisis and hanging up his cape halfway through (for about five minutes) The Dark Knight hits all the darker superhero sequel story beats you might expect. Where it becomes really interesting is in discussing how much of a superhero film something with such a grounded aesthetic and so much allegory and symbolism and melodramatic tragedy really can be. Is The Dark Knight really a crime-thriller with Batman and the Joker in it? By throwing off the shackles of the superhero blockbuster, Nolan has allowed his series to mature, to comment on serious and relevant issues to the modern world.
Christopher Nolan has created a very smart, rich, and exciting thriller that is as different to Batman Begins as is possible to be. There’s very little to criticise apart from that misjudged, flabby sequence towards the end, and the film is technically superb. If only Nolan left it here, left us wanting the film we deserved, but not the one we needed right now. Oh well, an inferior concluding chapter can never take this masterpiece from us.
Review: The Incredibles (2004)
We are family: Pixar Animation Studios/Disney
Can you believe THE INCREDIBLES came out fourteen years ago? For millennials like me, that kind of thought makes us feel old. It’s a film that still holds up despite how much further on animation has come, this vibrant superhero-spy-family-sitcom really has legs, legs moving in a blur.
Following a backlash against the destructive actions of superheroes, capes are outlawed and heroes forced into early retirement. Two heroes, Mr Incredible (Craig T Nelson) and Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) marry, settle down and have three children, but a normal suburban life isn’t enough to keep Bob’s appetites for adventure sated for long. But someone is watching Bob when he has a crimefighting relapse, and soon an oportunity that seems too good to be true comes along, calling Bob and the Parrs back into action…
Brad Bird sets the tone from the start, with a Mr Incredible in his prime giving an awkward interview and opining ,”No matter how many times you save the world it always manages to get back in jeopardy again…Sometimes I just want it to stay saved, for a little bit!” The world may be heavily stylised, it may be animated, but it’s based in some form of reality that we recognise. Bird writes animated characters that feel more real than real people. The Parr family, their employers, friends and foes are all archetypes but askew, more interesting archetypes. Mr Incredible is the classic super-strong hero who finds humdrum domestic life as Bob Parr much bigger challenge than saving a city, who dreams of re-living the glory days to get his mojo back. Elastigirl put her successful superhero career on hold to settle down as stay-at-home mum Helen Parr, but is the family rock and the real leader when her powered family spring into action. The Parr kids Violet (Sarah Vowell), Dash (Spencer Fox) and Jack Jack have additional pressures than those usually encountered in growing up being in a family of supers and superfan-turned-supervillain Syndrome (Jason Lee) represents the (far more scarily relevant today) tragic and extreme end result of toxic fandom.
The shiny superheroics peppered with knowing gags are fun and all, but it’s the domestics, the arguments, broken dreams and unwavering support for family that really sticks. The contrast between the incredible and the everyday is key. Mr Incredible gets a new mission / Bob spends an evening drying waterlogged books with a hairdryer etc.
Michael Giacchino’s John Barrie-tinged jazzy score is one of my absolute favourites of any film. The music isn’t the only debt the film owes to early Bond movies. Interestingly, The Incredibles is probably more a spy movie than a superhero movie by quite some margin. The superhero references are relatively few and far-between: the family dynamic and power set from the Fantastic Four, heroes forced into retirement and past their best from Watchmen. For the spy (mostly Bond) stuff you’ve got the recruitment by recorded expository message; the cover of a mysterious unspecified job with lots of time away from home; the government handler; the gadget vendor who goes by a single letter; the villain’s scheme (monologued); the villain’s island paradise lair; the villain’s apparent defeat, surprise return then actual defeat at the end.
A lot of creativity may have gone into the action, but a decade-and-change on and some of the environmental effects are looking a bit ropey. Wet hair and skin goes shiny but doesn’t behave quite right; fire, ice and lava doesn’t look especially convincing in motion. The heavily stylised character and retro-futurist digital sets are timeless, but some of the binding elements of this world are starting to get a slightly uncanny sheen.
The grab-bag of technology and mix of decade-specific design details gives the film a similar alternative universe feel to something like BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES before it or ARCHER to follow. There are references to the “Glory Days” being some time in the late 40s, so the Parr family “present” must be the early 60s, but an early 60s set along a different path. It’s a distinctive, timeless world full of characters who make a genuine connection. It’s clever, inventive and it makes a connection. It’s a bit of a classic. SSP
My Favourite…Sci-fi
Motion controls never look this cool IRL: Twentieth Century Fox/Dreamworks
My favourite science fiction film is MINORITY REPORT. Far more than Tom Cruise running and jumping (though he does plenty of both) it’s at once a big ideas sci-fi, an exhilarating action-thriller and twisty mystery.
Washington DC, 2054. The PreCrime Initiative which predicts crimes of passion and apprehends perpetrators before they can cause harm, is a daily reality. Using a trio of psychic “Precogs” the DC Police force have virtually eradicated violent crime and are preparing to roll out the programme across the country. The system works, every time. Or does it? Everything changes when Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) is named as a future murderer…
The rules of this world are quickly and elegantly established, with nary an exposition dump (well there’s a little to fill in the gaps when Colin Farrell’s character first arrives at Precrime) but it’s all for the purpose of being manipulated, bent and broken as the plot thickens.
The Precog vision is a really effective visual; cold, distant and eerie. It’s also intentionally limited, focussed enough that the viewer’s mind as well as the psychic dreamer’s tends to focus only on the details the storyteller (whether Spielberg or the film’s big bad) wants you to see, allowing for the rug to be pulled out from under us, and Anderton, multiple times.
It’s amazing how close this film got with predicting near-future technological developments. A lot of these ideas may have been well on their way in the early 2000s, but it would be amusing to find out how many concept/development meetings at the big tech firms ended with “good, but make it more like Minority Report”. Motion controls, VR, HUDs, personalised advertising, widespread retina and facial recognition software – it’s all here!
I perhaps unfairly said in my READY PLAYER ONE review that Spielberg can’t, or won’t, do satire. This film is the exception, adapting the premise of Philip K Dick’s short story and expanding on it to create a grotesque mirror of the American Justice System. It packs an even bigger punch now, because you know some people would vote for preemptively incarcerating potential murderers if it was an option. “The fact that you prevented it happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen”.
It’s among Spielberg’s most philosophical films as well, being all about fate or lack thereof. It plays with this concept throughout, from the horrific implications of the flaw in the “perfect” system and the fact that, in theory, nobody can act spontaneously (“Put the gun down John, I don’t hear a red ball!”. Anderson’s son Sean’s disappearance is never solved, which grounds his experiences and his life without meaning to a huge extent; the only closure he ever gets is hearing a “what if?” story from Precog Agatha (Samantha Morton).
Of course there’s a grieving, broken father stuck in the past; it’s a Spielberg movie! The film also has one of the best jump-scares since the head popping out in JAWS. He has a lot to answer for in how a lot of modern sci-fi looks. You can spot a lot of the same assembly line gags as seen in ATTACK OF THE CLONES (filmmaker friends will talk…) and JJ Abrams’ shiny, lens-flarey STAR TREK could never have happened without the same aesthetic being used in Minority Report. The sick-stick and the sonic gun, despite only being used once apiece make their mark as some of the coolest ever future weapons. The police spiders are such a creepy idea, and the birds-eye-view of their apartment search offers the wonderful site of a couple stopping their domestic mid-flow to be scanned before immidiately resuming. I also love that Spielberg just blew these metal critters up several hundred times to create his WAR OF THE WORLDS tripods.
Everyone has a streaming cold, which is probably significant(?). Unless it’s just a genre-appropriate CHINATOWN reference. Peter Stormare’s mucussy sinister appearance as a backstreet surgeon (“Nothing quite like taking a shower with this large fella with an attitude you can’t even knock down with a hammer”) feels like a he’s playing a part in a Polanski picture. Spielberg rarely goes this dark in a genre piece.
Did we need the sentient vines attacking Cruise? Not really. Should they have thought about how stupid it is that Anderton can get back into Precrime using his old eyes in a baggy without setting off any kind of alarm? Probably. But these are nitpicks and don’t effect my view that Minority Report, among mind-expanding sci-fi and mind-bending mystery is a particularly satisfying package. SSP
Review in Brief: Wind River (2017)
For every Alex Garland who successfully shifts their focus you get a David Koepp who does not. Taylor Sheridan has added an extra step to the writer-to-director process, by acting first. He’s clearly talented, having penned two of the best screenplays of the past decade back-to-back. WIND RIVER is Sheridan’s least successful effort, possibly because he shouldn’t try and do everything. It’s far from inept, with a decent level of craft in the way the inhospitable but beautiful winter Wyoming is shot and it has a message worth talking about, but for whatever reason it lacks weight for such potentially punchy material. Wind River’s characters aren’t as fully-formed as those in HELL OR HIGH WATER, not as fascinatingly contradictory as SICARIO‘s. Aside from a late, contextualising flashback, performances rarely get to rise above the surface-level, any grounding in atrocities people can commit to each other given the opportunity is lost in pretty standard. SSP
80s Review: The Shining (1980)
This is why I don’t like hotel corridors: Warner Bros/Hawk Films
Most people’s first thought of Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING will be one of three images: the ghost girls, the woman in the bath and Jack Nicholson axing his way through the bathroom door. Few western horrors, except for perhaps THE EXORCIST are as iconic, are such an integral part of the pop culture furniture. And to think, Stephen King didn’t like it!
When aspiring author Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) accepts the position of overwinter caretaker of the isolated Overlook hotel in Colorado, he could hardly guess the horrors he is about to subject his family to. For the Overlook carries a burden within its walls, a history of murder, madness and malice, and Jack’s young son Danny (Danny Lloyd) has unique gifts, the kind that make him very appealing to the hotel’s unquiet dead…
Stephen King might not have liked it as an adaptation, particularly the reading of his lead becoming an antagonist, but Jack starting out on the edge (are you really going to trust Nicholson claiming that “nobody’s saner than me” with that grin?) before he arrived at the Overlook, supernatural events only exacerbating his preexisting mental health issues, really works. The hotel may be the home of a corrupting, black-and-white evil formed out of the atrocities committed within its walls, but it can only shape and mould what is already in the human heart, mind and soul; we are very susceptible to all kinds of influences as a species.
The acting is all very “big”, with Nicholson delivering what is essentially a proto-Joker and Shelley Duvall rarely allowed to be anything other than a nervous wreck. No, she shouldn’t have been put through the physical and emotional turmoil Kubrick insisted on, but it did result in the reality of her fragile nature. You tend to forget how good Danny Lloyd’s performance was, one of the all-time great child actor performances that has multiple levels to it.
This might be unsurprising to hear about a Kubrick film, but The Shining is staggering on a technical level. Everything bar the front of the Overlook at the beginning was purpose-built at Elstree Studios and that Steadicam (used to great effect in corridors) was in its infancy. That invention was so new, in fact, that its originator Garrett Brown was still operating it himself (doing split shifts with ROCKY II over the Atlantic). It’s the stillness of the camera that gets you, the rigidity. Nothing is obscuring your view and you’re not being allowed to look away even if you want to.
The sets are meticulous bordering on obsessive, because no one building boasted all the features Kubrick wanted we get a Frankenstein mix of all of the best, and worst, grandest and chintziest hotels you’ve ever stayed in. Never mind butting heads with his actors over incessant retakes, you have to feel for Kubrick’s long-suffering production design team that had to produce such an ingenious and versatile labyrinth of corridors and rooms to his exacting standards.
For all the blood and cross-cutting to horrific haunted house imagery, what makes The Shining such an effective horror is how it manipulates mundane images and sounds. Long corridors are made scary, and to this day I feel uneasy in hotels in case I turn a corner and see the Grady girls waiting for me at the other end of a corridor. The whir and the clatter of Danny’s trike as it goes from floorboard to carpet, floorboard to carpet is made scary. Being on your own in a large building with all the lights on is made scary. The soundtrack not playing ball, rarely clueing you in in when the next scare is coming until it’s there is scary.
The Shining arguably changes what King was trying to achieve with his story, but I’d take Kubrick’s version any day of the week. This take has humanity starting out a bit wrong, malevolent spirits only taking our worse natures further than they would go naturally. Humans are scarier than ghosts or psychic powers, an idea which carries more weight and leaves a lasting impression beyond the shocking visuals and uneasy tension-building. As a different Joker to Nicholson’s put it, “madness is like gravity: all it takes is a little…push!”. SSP
90s Review: The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Analyse this: Orion/Strong Heart/Demme Production
THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS has been a firm favourite of mine for a long time, one of those I’d always stop for if it was playing on TV late at night, and try as I might, be helplessly drawn in all over again.
To catch a meticulous and depraved serial killer, the FBI must use the mind of another meticulous and depraved serial killer. When trainee Agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) enters the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane to interview Dr Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) a game of wits begins…
Point of view is really interesting in Lambs. It’s not really a murder-mystery because we know who the killer is almost from the start. It’s really about how the protagonist catches up and whether they will manage it in time. This is a very Thomas Harris way of telling a story.
Clarice is set up to be underestimated from the start, with the 5’2″ Foster hemmed in on all sides by big men in the FBI lift. She has to work twice as hard to be noticed, to be respected and valued, but she’s likely learned to use these expectations of her based on her sex and stature to catch people off-guard. She puts up with a lot of belittling and more blatant sexism, from FBI colleagues including Scott Glenn’s Crawford (sympathetic, supportive, but still uses her), Anthony Heald’s puffed-up Dr Chilton (superior, lecherous), Frankie Faison’s hospital orderly Barney (kindly but patronising), but she also gets to play her hand, using guile and fortitude to keep at least a step ahead of everyone she encounters. Unless she is caught off guard by sociopaths that is, whether a keenly honed tool like Lecter or a blunt object like Bill.
Quite rightly, the film is best-known, best-loved because of its bravura set pieces, not action or visual spectacle, but conversations, Clarice and Dr Lecter mentally sparring, each trying to deconstruct the other. These scenes may only be a few minutes a piece, but Foster and Hopkins make them dazzle, giving Harris’ words, adapted almost verbatim, even more bite. From Lecter’s iconic, low-key reveal to the barrier that constantly divides them as their sessions get really intimate in the details, these sequences are masterful examples of economic yet deep dives into character.
Jonathan Demme isn’t a showy filmmaker here, letting performance and our imaginations do most of the work. By the time Ridley Scott brought HANNIBAL to the screen with sickly style but lacking power, it became really obvious that less is more. Dr Chilton showing an (unseen to the audience) Polaroid to Starling with the comment, “He did this to her…the doctors managed to reset her jaw, more-or-less” is far more chilling than actually seeing the incident (Scott of course actually showed it to us to shrug-worthy effect in the sequel).
“It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again”. I get that Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) can be seen as an offensive stereotype, that his prominence in pop culture along with several other examples from the 90s probably did the public perception of the trans community lasting damage. The book does a better job of distancing him from the group he is often seen to represent: “It’s taken years – we’re not through yet – showing the public that transsexuals aren’t crazy, they aren’t perverts”. I’d be inclined to see him as one isolated, disturbed individual (Lecter even theorises that “Billy is not a real transsexual”) but since the film unwisely dropped this subplot from the book, some nuance is lost. When trans characters are so seldom seen in mainstream films and when they are seen they appear like this, well, it’s problematic.
There’s something behind Hopkins’ eyes that is utterly terrifying. We empathise with Clarice and her struggles, we even feel a modicum of pity for Buffalo Bill, but we are never asked to feel anything but fear towards Lecter. As Harris came to realise when he wrote him, he represents the line to never cross. He remains beguiling and fascinating but an enigma from his introduction, his escape and beyond. In the foreword to the new edition of RED DRAGON in 2000, Harris admits that Lecter still frightens him, that the character holds some strange supernatural power over his creative process. He writes that “I found, and find, the scrutiny of Dr Lecter uncomfortable, intrusive” and that “I did not know that Dr Lecter would return”.
I love the misdirection at play throughout. I’m sure it wasn’t the first movie to do it, and we’ve seen it plenty of times since, but the cross-cut between Crawford’s heavily armed team knocking and Buffalo Bill opening the door to Starling alone on his doorstep gets me every time. This trick of storytelling is even foreshadowed earlier with Clarice’s flashbacks to her worst childhood memory, changes in time and location not signposted but blended into the same scene and Clarice’s perception of the present and how she got there.
For all Hopkins’ showy twenty minutes or so of screentime, it’s not Lecter alone we remember about The Silence of the Lambs, but his dynamic with Clarice. That’s one of the (many) reasons why the follow-up wasn’t as compelling; Lecter is only interesting when interacting with a worthy opponent and he’s in the spotlight far too long. It’s Foster’s movie through-and-through and Foster’s performance makes this slick thriller special. SSP
Review in Brief: Churchill (2017)
Trading showiness for human connection, CHURCHILL is far superior to DARKEST HOUR. The dialogue might range from poetic bluster (“My job is not to fight, not to die…I must exist”) to rather cumbersome exposition (“We’ve only a three day window before the tides change, making its possible to land our craft”) but Brian Cox’s portrayal of Churchill really manages to tap raw emotion rather than be a caricature. He may have been the icon, the rallying cry, of the British nation (despite being half American), but Churchill was not a well man by 1944, nor was he infallible, with the allied high command, chiefly Eisenhower (John Slattery) considering him a liabilty, a relic from another time, another type of warfare. Here, Winston Churchill’s angry blustering is shown to mask his insecurity, vulnerability and fear of at the very real prospect of losing everything. It tends to feel a bit TV Movie, but it gets under the skin of “The Greatest Britain”. SSP
Review: Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (2018)
Lava actually: Amblin Entertainment/Legendary Entertainment
Well, it’s certainly a lot more fun than the last one. JURASSIC PARK is my favourite childhood film and remains very close to the top of my list today. The sequels have never been up to much, and each time we go around again the wonder is diminished, the spark of creativity dimmed. This went especially for JURASSIC WORLD, which tried to both appeal to nostalgia and mix up the formula, achieving neither. FALLEN KINGDOM, for better or worse, knows exactly what it is.
After the PR disaster of dinosaurs running, flying and swimming amok in Jurassic World, the theme park is mothballed and the scaly attractions prepared for auction to the highest shady bidder. Enter former park executive Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard), now working for an animal welfare charity and tracker Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) whose only obstacles to saving the dinosaurs are those with too much money and no morals and the small matter of a volcanic eruption already in progress…
They really want you to know that they are aware of “Shoegate”. There are several quite pointed closeups of the sensible boots Howard is wearing. Sadly, more appropriate footwear for running for your life isn’t the same as character growth. At least Howard seems to be trying and isn’t on autopilot again (lookin’ at you, Mr Pratt). I still don’t buy Owen and Claire’s relationship, though a scene where they both have to get very up close and personal with an unconscious T-Rex in a shipping container to draw blood for…plot reasons is an unexpectedly great character moment for the both of them, and Pratt and Howard seem to be having a lot of fun playing this moment. The supporting cast are fine, with Daniella Pineda’s paleo-veterinarian Zia being a welcome addition and Ralph Spall having fun as a slimy suit impotently leading a collective of cruel mercenaries (including Ted Levine, collecting trophies again Buffalo Bill-style).
The fact that they really lean into the film’s silliness, the premise’s inherent nature as B-movie material (when Spielberg isn’t involved or involved in an inferior re-hash) does Fallen Kingdom a lot of credit. Yes, you could pick apart the logic some of the plot points if you were so inclined, but you’ll have a lot more fun if you just go with it. Ideas with their roots in Michael Crichton’s pages are taken to the nth degree and get some serious payoff, even if they don’t stick the landing executing every concept. Plus, if there’s an opportunity to show a Velociraptor being exploded through a window then I want to see it. Simple pleasures.
Something that also helps give it a distinctive flavour is hiring a director with a recognisable style. The film’s Gothic horror-tinged final act, all shadows and secrets, is an undoubted highlight. JA Bayona really pushes the vampiric side of the new Indoraptor. In a key scene we see it crawling vertically down the outside of a building to claw at a bedroom window, which couldn’t be more Dracula if it tried. It’s probably the new films’ highest-impact theme: any animal raised in isolation, whether artificial or not, will come out wrong when it leaves captivity. Auctioning off dinos as prestige pets or for sport is chillingly believable as well, far more so than sending them overseas as scaly soldiers (please don’t bring that idea back in the third film, Trevorrow…).
If they’re going to keep this series going, it’s got to evolve and offer up something different each time. These new movies can’t just be, “Remember this? Well here it is again!”. The film is crammed full of dino-cameos (Brits will be pleased to hear that the very belated appearance of our snappy native carnivore Baryonyx is worth the wait) and the camera captures these real-feeling creatures in some striking new ways, whether from above pacing restlessly in their warren of cages, causing mayhem as their world (outside) collides with ours (inside), or one particularly dignified and moving death-by-nature. We’re certainly not short on memorable visuals, but a few sharp or even vaguely memorable lines of dialogue to go with them wouldn’t go amiss.
I reckon Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom is going to be my 2018 ALIEN: COVENANT equivalent in that I quite enjoyed it, even its more divisive tangents, but I seem to be in the minority. It’s not that I can’t see value in the criticisms; the characters are still uninteresting, the storytelling standard and wonder mostly lacking. But this is easily the scariest and most tense Jurassic film since the first, it adds a fair few new ingredients to the stew and with Bayona’s stylistic flare and unabashed ease with serving up trashy entertainment we get some vivid set pieces too. It’s certainly not high art, but it makes an impression. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 