I’m almost there. At the end of 2023, I stated that I would write twelve articles, roughly one a month on this blog. We are now at the end of November, and this is article is number eleven. With my December article being my favourite films of the year, this feels an underwhelming introduction to the last monthly summary of films. Do I do a Frank Sinatra?
Regrets, I have a few, but then again, everyone regretted Uglies, Mean Girls and Joker 2.
Do we end with a that’s all folks, or a classic movie final line?
In case I don’t see you, Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Goodnight
Well, not that. Technically, it’s not the last line. That’s Scully from Brooklyn nine-nine saying “What else is on?”
Maybe, I just do an overly long introductory bit that most of the two readers will have skipped through by now to see what I think of the one film they’ve seen this month, purely ignoring my blood and sweat which has gone into the words, only looking for that futile star rating. Yeah, that sounds about right.
My month started with Juror #2, the Clint Eastwood film which is destined for a straight to streaming release, but awkwardly was in a couple of cinemas. Unfortunately, one of my local cinemas was one of the ones it was playing in.
We all like twelve angry men (unless we’re talking about the President elect and his team. Screw that guy). Now see what it looks like when one of the jurors actually did the crime. Nicholas Hoult plays said Juror who believed he hit a deer on his way home one night. Many months later, it turns out that there was a murder on the same night, that he is now a juror in. Contrived? Well, not as contrived as the rest of the plot. The hodge podge group of jurors all have coincidental skills, such as a doctor and an ex-detective who isn’t convinced something is right. There is a lack of suspense, with the only form of suspense being Juror’s incredible desire to make the wrong decision at every turn, decisions no person in the audience would make.
It’s your stereotypical dumb film made for dads that mine didn’t particularly like either. But, it was an evening out with him, so that was nice.
My next movie evening was a night out with Aunt to watch The Room Next Door. Having promised her this film, and watched Emilia Perez instead with mother, their bitter sibling rivalry meant a lot weighed on this film. Who would watch the better film with me? The answer was mum. Both aunt and I have seen both now, and I doubt she’d begrudgingly disagree.
Pablo Almodovar’s English debut is as stagy and melo-dramatic as his movies usually are, however The Room Next Door lacks the charm of some of his great predecessors (All About My Mother for example). Tilda Swinton plays a character who is ill and wants to die. Julianne Moore is a friend who has come back into her life. Both are a bit boring and pretentious and go to an AirBnB where Swinton will kill herself at some point. It’s the sort of film Swinton likes, that I don’t. I genuinely don’t consider her a bad actress. We just have different tastes in films, and she picks ones she likes. She’s good in this. Julianne Moore is, however, weepy and repetitive to the point that this film feels longer than its sub two hour run time. The screenplay is clunky at times, there were a couple of lines I actually found funny which weren’t meant to be. It’s okay arthouse snobbery at it’s most meandering form. Good if its your sort of film.
Netflix quietely released the documentary The Remarkable Life of Ibelin. About a Scandanavian boy called Mats, this movie starts by showing his life from his parents’ perspective. He lived with a degenerative muscular dystrophy. As he grew up, he became more hermitted, played video games and passed away. His family felt his life was wasted, until they found his blog and made one last post. Then floods of e-mails came in from his fellow World of Warcraft players.
The second half of the movie recreates the chat logs from world of warcraft, showing Mats’ character Ibelin interacting with others, changing their lives and falling in love with them, as well as tragically showing his own limitations and struggles far more than his parents could. It was a really interesting style of film, portraying a narrative well, intercutting it with real life footage of those who Mats played with.
As someone who has never been able to navigate the digital world, this story shows empathy for others who not only have done so as a comfort, but as a necessity. It’s their chance to be who they want to be, and while there is an older generation who don’t get it, I hope this film can be used to show what this is for people.
The current frontrunner for the Oscar best picture was next. Anora is the new film from Sean Baker who made the okay Tangerine, the not so okay Red Rocket, and the downright masterpiece The Florida Project, a movie which should have won best picture. The director who usually focuses on slice of life instead brings in a plot in this audience hit which is one not to watch with the grandparents if you don’t fancy an awkward Christmas.
Anora (Mikey Maddison) is a sex worker who doesn’t have much going on in life. One day a Russian man of mystery called Ivan asks for her as she speaks the lingo. They have a mad rush few weeks where they appear to fall in love. They marry. News reaches home, and his family send henchmen to get Anora and Ivan annulled, against their wishes.
When I was watching the film, I was really enjoying it. It’s far more comedic than the trailers suggest. Maddison and Mark Eidelstein have so much chemistry as the titular characters that their first hour is a romp. The henchmen each bring their own humour and personalities to the characters, with Yuri Borisov as Igor a standout. The script is tight, with plenty of enjoyable moments, and the film feels shorter than its two and a half hour run time. I think what stopped it being great is that we don’t get to know Anora well enough. The plot gets in the way of the characters, not letting them breathe as much as in The Florida Project. Since I watched the film, I’ve felt less enamoured as I thought about it more. However, it is a fun evening out.
If you had Lego George Floyd Protests on your 2024 film bingo card, you might want to call the line as the new Pharell documentary came out last month. Piece By Piece is an animated lego style movie telling Pharell Williams’ story. It is interesting, watching such a big producer becoming a household name. It was full of energy and generally fun. There are some enjoyable gags, such as a PG Spray being sprayed when Snoop Dogg is smoking.
The film does feel unchallenging and very much playing into Pharell’s ego, with the lego not adding as much. Being Mr Despicable Me, I would’ve found it funnier if they made his biopic but he and everyone else were minions. I’m being silly. It’s a fine movie.
Three documentaries in a week Joe? Three? That’s more than you’ve watched for the rest of the year, surely. Well, yeah, sometimes I just don’t have time to watch them, and sometimes some can catch my eye. The best documentary of the year so far is No Other Land. A co-production between Palestinian Basil Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, the documentary shows them as activists and the danger they put themselves in during the years prior to the events of October 7th 2023.
The movie particularly focuses on the illegal destruction of the Masafa Yatter community on the West Bank by Israeli forces, forcing Palestinians to live in caves or in increasingly crowded cities. It shows the impact on these two as well as the Palestinian locals. It’s a really distressing, but essential watch, showing what is happening when the media won’t do so. If there were one film you should urgently watch this year, this is the one.
The Piano Lesson was the latest August Wilson play to be adapted into a movie. The third in the last ten years after Denzel Washington and Viola Davis starred in Fences, and the late Chadwick Boseman starred in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, TPL stars John David Washington, formerly of Blackkklansman fame and Danielle Deadwyler of Till as a couple of siblings who have a piano in their childhood home. One wants to sell it, the other wants to keep it.
Adam saw this a few months ago, and did warn me it was pretty naff. I should have heeded (hed?) his warning, because it was naff. While Deadwyler is great, Washington just lacks that extra bit of spark that Boseman had in Ma Rainey. His character is a grifter, but you don’t really care. The stage play still feels jaunty, not flowing as one hopes. Maybe there was a lack of thematic tightness. The scenes just felt dull and uninspiring. It was such a slow mover that just wouldn’t end. You knew how it would as well. Just a disappointing movie.
Anyway, once I’d seen that movie, I walked from Victoria to Soho to watch Bird which was a much better film. Bailey is a young teenager living in poverty with her dad (Barry Keoghan) who is getting married soon and hoping to get money from a drug frog. She meets the mysterious Bird (ASBO winner Franz Ragowski) whom she looks to help find his family, while learning about herself at the same time.
A welcome mix of small scale social realism and fantastical elements, with a proper warm humour, there are plenty of elements to like. Both Keoghan and Rogowski support well, while the young leads all do their bits. The script feels tight and tender, with some wonderful needle drops, and a humorous fourth wall break about a certain song, which was one of the funniest moments of film this year. The production design is well done and frankly everything feels really smartly put together. It’s not some great magnus opus, but a small, simple film which is worth searching out about finding who you are in the world.
I fell asleep during Small Things Like These so don’t feel able to comment on it, so I won’t, but it did make me fall asleep.
One film which did keep me awake however, was Blitz, the new Steve McQueen film featuring a set of big name British stars, including Saoirse Ronan. George, a young mixed-race boy is sent away from London as part of the WWII evacuations, decides to jump off the train and go and find his mum. In this time, he’ll encounter a variety of good and bad characters straight out of a kid’s movie, as well as almost drowning in an underground station, running from bombs and racism.
If that sounds a rather haphazard description, that is because it kind of is. The movie feels at times like a kids film, much like a Dickens or a Railway Children. It then switches to a grown up film in other scenes. It doesn’t know its audience, which leads to frustration. However, there are some good things as well. Ronan is great, the child acting is questionably early Harry Potter standard, and there are a couple of great scenes, including one in a dance hall. There is heart at times, but the film seems disjointed and simple in others. Compared to other movies Steve McQueen has done, this one feels comparatively weak. It’s on Apple TV+ where it will probably spend an eternity.
This month I watched both Gladiator and Gladiator 2 for the first time on the big screen. In both, a character fights in a war, their spouse dies, they’re captured and they both become accomplished gladiators in a bid for their freedom and to overturn the corrupt villains. So yeah, they’re pretty similar, except that this time Paul Mescal plays Russel Crowe’s son and there are two emperors.
There are some good things happening in this film. While there are ridiculous CGI monkeys and flooded coliseums, these action scenes are entertaining enough if you suspend your disbelief. Paul Mescal, while no Crowe, is perfectly fine bringing his sad man instead of Crowe’s angry man. Denzel Washington particularly stands out as Mescal’s owner and the emperor’s advisor. If anything gets an oscar nod non-technically, it will be Washington’s performance.
However, this film wasn’t as good as the original for a good few reasons. As well as not adding anything tangible, the most nefarious downgrade was replacing Joaquin Pheonix’s fearsome leader with the loud and annoying Weasley twins (Not actually played by the Weasley twins), characters so annoyingly stupid that it doesn’t make sense for them to be emperors.
I actually did enjoy Gladiator 2. It was an easy piece of entertainment, even if it didn’t live up to the original. It’s by no means Ridley Scott’s worst film about an Italian Dynasty falling apart because of a semi-related outsider.
Four boofs out of five
British independent films current favourite topics seem to be a middle class person making a film about poor people (see Souvenir or whatever else Ken Loach made) or lost young gay people finding themselves (See Unicorn or Femme or Pretty Red Dress for just the last 12 months), so when another one comes out you hope it will do something unique. Unfortunately, Layla really fails to do so.
A young drag artist finds a boy they like, they date but aren’t compatible. You realise this early on and have to watch two hours of back and forth, wont they wont they. Layla also has to deal with their own demons around being from a British Asian family and having not come out to them. The whole film is rather paint by numbers standard British Indie-faire and the two leads don’t have chemistry. I’m getting tired and still have to write about Conclave and Wicked.
Everything about Conclave sounds like it would be theoretically boring. A pope dies, so a bunch of middle aged blokes need to vote for a new one. That’s pretty much it. However, it’s one of the most entertaining political thrillers in many a year. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the Conclave, meaning he has to run the election which is mainly between a few parties. Todesco is a bad mf who likes to drop a vape at only the best moments. He’s more conservative and wants to bring the church back to where it was. Bellinni (Stanley Tucci) wants to take it into the future, while John Lithigow’s Tremblay seems to have a dodgy secret about him. However, soon Lawrence, who is currently in a crisis of faith with the church, realises that nobody is what they seem and that everyone has some form of sin surrounding them.
The script for this movie is really tight, with each twist and turn being intriguing. Despite the big cast, it’s easy to follow. There is an adept social mirroring looking at our communities and democracies themselves. The film feels separate but close to our world. It also balances the serious with the entertaining, with a fun level of camp at times.
Shot on location, the film is beautiful with Rome looking wonderfully imposing and director Edward Berger using the surrounding art to great effect. However, the highlight of the movie is Ralph Fiennes. He is in a crisis of faith which he shows in an understated way and his feelings about becoming the pope feel both hidden and revealed in contradicting ways, almost up against Tucci’s character who clearly wants to become pope despite saying otherwise.
Out of the big awards nominees, this one is probably my favourite so far. It’s an entertaining and interesting story which will both appeal to indie film nerds and a wider general public as a twisty political thriller.
Wicked: Part one came out this month. I don’t know if you knew. I did. It’s been everywhere. Based on the 2003 musical, John Chu directs the first half of the musical, stretching it out to a gargantuan two hours and forty minutes. The movie is a prequel to the wizard of Oz as Glinda the good witch (Ariana Grande) tells (half the) full story of how she met the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba (Cynthia Eviro). In this movie the two characters both enroll into Shizz University (yeah, really), under the tutelage of Michelle Yeoh. Elphaba is green and unpopular, while Glinda is not green and popular. They end up as dorm mates and this half is about their friendship growing, while Elphaba is worried about the treatment of animals in Oz (Our vegan queen).
While the only thing more full on than this film’s run time is the marketing campaign, the film never feels slow. It’s a warm comfortable hug and a sweet family film. The whole thing feels grand (ba-dum-tsh) and impressive in scale. Erivo takes on her role well, with a strong voice which does defy gravity convincingly. However, the real stand out is Ariana Grande. While most likely supporting in the awards campaign, the co-lead is funny and heartfelt, with Grande showing off her acting and singing chops to great effect in a film much better than her cameo debut of Don’t Look Up. Every song is a bop and the whole film is solidly shot by Chu who has good experience with In The Heights.
However, while the film was good, there were a few issues which did lead to it not being quite to the level of hype I’d heard about. Firstly, it looks ugly. The set pieces are spectacular, but the whole movie is washed out, heavily contrasting the beautiful technicolour we know and love from the Oz of the 1930s. There were a couple of moments I did want things to move on a bit quicker, however on the whole these were minor qualms. By no means a bad film.
So yeah, film of the month is No Other Land. See you for Post #12
The Film Ramble 