Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom

Ocean’s Razor

Aquaman And
The Lost Kingdom
Directed by James Wan
USA/UK/Canada/Australia/Iceland
2023 Warner Bros
UK Cinema Print

Okay, so I was kinda putting off seeing this one but I’ve finally got around to looking at Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and, it plays much as the first one with me. I'd originally put off seeing the first film because the depiction of Aquaman looked closer to the modern day comics version of the character (although not really... I’ll pick up on that later) and it turned out to be a very entertaining, pulpy adventure movie. Bad word of mouth had put me off seeing this second one for a bit (the film was released over a week ago) but. once again, it turns out that the better a modern superhero movie is, the less the audience seems to like it. This year has been full of decent superhero movies (with the one dud being The Flash but, even that had some nice things about it, reviewed here) but none of them have really been making the kind of box office they should have been making. Heck, a few of them even ended up on my year’s best list and, while Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom doesn’t quite make the grade as far as that’s concerned, it’s a pretty fun romp of an entertainment.

Granted, there are a few jokes which might be looked on as in fairly bad taste, especially to someone of my generation but, ultimately a combination of fine performances from Jason Momoa as the title character and Wan regular Patrick Wilson as former villain Orm, now sprung from jail and forced to team up with his brother to save the world from the threat of Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), coupled with a story which is a good fit for the inevitable action sequences (although it gets kinda confusing by the end of the picture) gives this movie a good old fashioned theatrical serial kinda feel and, indeed, one of the director’s admitted influences was the 1980s Flash Gordon movie,which is itself informed from the original 1930s comic strip and the movie serial versions.

There is one other influence which I spotted as ‘a thing’ but didn’t honestly expect it to be anything more than a coincidence, until I looked up the IMDB trivia and found that the director is citing it as such. That’s the black, military style uniforms and helmets worn by Manta’s underwater army, which are very reminiscent of the costumes worn by the main protagonists of Mario Bava’s Planet Of The Vampires (itself an influential film, of course, to a certain other late 1970s movie which I’ll not delve into again here).

So, it’s a fast moving action piece and both Amber Heard and Nicole Kidman are back as Aquaman’s wife and mother, respectively. Now, after all the fuss in real life Hollywoodland with Amber Heard, I was expecting the film makers to jettison her character quickly into the running time and, indeed, there’s certainly an early sequence which keeps her hospitalised for a good deal of the movie... but she’s back in the heat of the action by the end of the film and I’m glad to say she’s not just treated as a throwaway character here. Dolph Lundgren and Temuera Morrison also do good stuff with their returning characters in this and so the film has a really good feel to it (although Willem Dafoe’s character seems to have died between movies, it has to be said).

And although this version of Aquaman is trying to be the modern iteration of the hero, I’m delighted to say that this is in appearance only. The ideas and creations of the world rendered in this underwater universe are pretty much clever and witty (for the most part), H2O fuelled versions of their ‘surface dweller’ counterparts, rather than giving us something totally alien in its nature... so, yeah, it’s really not a million miles from the golden and silver age stories of Aquaman from many decades ago that I used to read, for sure.

Rupert Gregson-Williams’ score to the movie is also pretty good, reminding me a lot of Lorne Balfe’s outstanding score for Black Adam at times but, alas, there is no proper CD release of this at time of writing. C’mon people, get this score out on the only format worth publishing it on!

Okay, so a short review but bottom line is that I had another, surprisingly, good time with Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom and... there is a mid-end credits scene which is a nice punchline to a gag earlier in the movie. But with that, this is also a heads up reminder that, due to the stupidity of those in charge of the DC movies at present, this will be the last of the DC Cinematic Universe films in this iteration... instead, all those beautifully connecting linking devices from various end credits have been jettisoned, along with the great actors involved, while a famous director has an experimental tinker and reboots everything. Probably the silliest thing you could do at the moment and, if there really is any rivalry between comic book companies DC and Marvel, one wonders if the person in question is really working covertly for Marvel because, with this braniac move, Marvel have ‘won’ for sure. It’s a shame the DCCU didn’t have the stamina of their nearest competitors but, there you go, these things happen I guess.

The Northman

May The Norse
Be With You

The Northman
UK 2022
Directed by Robert Eggers
Universal

The Northman is director Robert Eggers third full length feature film and, as a big studio release, is also around ten times more the budget of his previous two movies put together (at least). Now, I really liked his feature debut The VVitch (reviewed here) but I had some problems appreciating his follow up feature, The Lighthouse, truth be told (reviewed here). Having now seen The Northman, which has been receiving a lot of good word of mouth as being this generation’s equivalent of Conan The Barbarian (no, it really isn’t), I can say that for me, this one pretty much lays somewhere in the middle of both of those. Like many Hollywood released movies of recent months, I’d have to say it isn’t a great movie and, again, it’s not a bad one either. It feels a little compromised somehow (which fits with some things the director himself has said about it) and it doesn’t feel quite epic enough in scope to be counted among many of the big fantasy films which have gone before (and it’s certainly a fantasy version of a tale rather than a straight historical one, for sure, despite much authenticity to certain scenes depicting historical customs).

Another thing I’d heard about it was that it has a very complex story... um... really? No it hasn’t. It’s a very basic revenge movie where a son witnesses his father’s death (in this case, the father is a king played by Ethan Hawke) and escapes to a distant land so he can return to avenge his father many years later.  And, yes, you’ve seen the story done a hundred times before by now on screen, I should think. The grown up son is played by Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth, his mother is played by Nicole Kidman, his favourite seer is played by Willem Dafoe (from Eggers previous film), his father’s killer is played by Claes Bang and Skarsgård’s quirky love interest is played by the always incredible Anya Taylor-Joy (another Eggers collaborator). They’re all very good, the story is very simple... in that Amleth has to track down a legendary sword with semi-mystical properties (think of it as a lightweight, Stormbringer wannabe from Moorcock’s Elric Of Melnibone stories) and slay his father’s killer. So he brands himself as a slave and makes himself useful in his enemy’s community, to hide himself in plain sight and keep close to his target.

There’s literally nothing much to say about the plot but the comments that it has similarities to Conan The Barbarian, are not completely unfounded in terms of some of the content and the occasional (I believe, deliberate) nod. For example, the son living a hard life away from his slaughtered kin to return to avenge his father is pretty much the same as the first movie version of Robert E Howard’s literary creation. The scene where Amleth comes across his magical sword is very much reminiscent of the short Conan story The Thing In The Crypt, written by  L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, it seems to me. Also, the pre-credits sequence starts off with the similar, low percussion element on the music followed by the growly tones of voice over narrative introducing the character, which is again very similar to the first Conan movie... although, stylistically and in most ways, this is where the similarity ends.

It’s an entertaining enough yarn, though and it looks very good. Eggers has used something almost black and white for many of the shots set in the moonlight (which is the only time the sword can be properly used to feed on opponents blood... in darkness). So some shots will be completely monotone while others, midst the grayness, will have things like coloured torch flames, very much reminiscent of the style of pitching the colour and monotone together as seen in the Sin City movies.

So, yeah, the film looks pretty spectacular, rattles along at a hasty pace and, you are pretty much rooting for Amleth the whole way through the movie. It doesn’t, as I said earlier, feel really epic but this is more to do with the scope of the story, I think... as I said, it looks pretty spectacular.

Despite the opening bars of the score, this doesn’t go the full on, rich epic Hollywood sound of the Basil Poledouris music for Conan The Barbarian either. If anything, it’s much more stripped back and ‘of its time’ in terms of the way the music is functioning in the film (and when I say ‘of it’s time’... I don’t necessarily mean that literally, I mean that it’s more transparent, uncomplicated writing with simple orchestration). So it surprised me somewhat... since it sounds just the kind of score Eggers’ previous collaborator on his first two features, Mark Korven, would have written for this... that it’s actually composed by Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough. I need to hear this one again and, at time of writing, it’s been announced that there will be a CD release of this coming soon, so I may just get a chance if they stick to their guns on that.

And I’m sorry this is such a short review for this film but that’s me pretty much done with The Northman. Like The Lighthouse, I doubt I’ll be revisiting this one for a second watch but fans of this kind of stuff should have a strong liking for it, I would have thought. It’s an entertaining, bloody depiction of a familiar trope which people should lap up. I’ve certainly not given up on this director... and I’m happy to see what he comes up with next (I think the big studio experience has somewhat him soured to taking on something like this again, by the sound of it).

The Invasion

I, Pod

The Invasion
USA/Australia 2007
Directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel
and James McTeigue (uncredited)
Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Okay, so here we are at the tail end of ‘Body Snatchers Week’ on the blog with the fourth and, at time of writing, last of the big screen adaptations of Jack Finney’s serialised sci-fi novel, The Body Snatchers. At least, the final ‘official’ adaptation at any rate, there have been a lot of movies suddenly springing up over the last few years which have more or less stolen the basic concept and did their own thing with it. So yeah, this is the fourth version after the 1956 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here), the 1978 Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (reviewed here) and the 1993 Body Snatchers (reviewed here). This one is just called The Invasion and, I guess if this is the trend now of sequel titles, when they decide to do it again the only word they’ll be left with is... Of. That’d make a great title for a film about duplicates replacing humans... better than Us at any rate. ;-)

Now, I understand there were problems on this in terms of the suits (or shall we just call them what they are, ‘pods’) at Warner Brothers not liking the cut that Hirschbiegel delivered. So there were rewrites and reshoots with another, uncredited director in the form of McTeigue. This may explain why, at least over here in the UK and from what I can remember, there was no fanfare or publicity for the movie and its cinematic legacy. I think I may have seen a trailer for The Invasion the week before at the cinema or, most likely, saw the title of a new science fiction film starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig listed in my local paper... and decided to go along as there was nothing better on.

I remember sitting in the cinema as the movie opened on a scene from towards the end of the film which is foreshadowing the action to come before putting the title card up and then going back to... how it all started. So I was sitting in the cinema and not expecting any familiarity with the story but, I get about ten seconds into the film when I realise Nicole Kidman’s character is looking for drugs to keep herself awake, I put two and two together with the title of the movie and think to myself... ‘No way! Surely this isn’t yet another remake... I didn’t know it was even being done again?’ So I sit tight and wait for about 5 mins and, yep, the main character names confirm what I already suspected a few minutes earlier... this was definitely a fourth version of The Body Snatchers. Except, and I loved this, they flipped the genders so, instead of Kevin McCarthy playing ‘Miles’ Bennell and Dana Wynter playing ‘Becky’ Driscoll, we had Nicole Kidman playing psychiatrist ‘Carol’ Bennell and Daniel Craig playing her doctor friend ‘Ben’ Driscoll. Which, given the fact that we were now onto the fourth version of the story, I was not bothered by in the least.

Other notable people in the film are Jeremy Northam, playing Carol’s ex-husband Tucker Kaufman (presumably named after director/writer Philip Kaufman, who helmed the 1978 edition) and future Felix Leiter, Jeffrey Wright, as a chemical doctor friend of Ben. When the film was being shot, Daniel Craig was given the role of James Bond and had to halt filming for a few days to fly over and do a press conference about it over here in the UK.

Now, I know this film is probably the most hated by fans of the Body Snatchers movies but, honestly, I don’t think this is a bad film and it’s no worse... possibly even better... than the previous version directed by Abel Ferrera. It does, however, have its problems. It does things a little differently too, while staying almost exactly the same and... I don’t think this is a bad attempt. I do wonder, though, at the hasty soul who typed in a big paragraph in the trivia section of the IMDB listing all the ways this film adds new ideas to the original concept... before listing almost entirely ideas that were already there in the previous versions. It’s almost like the person who wrote that entry didn’t actually see any of the other films. Bit strange.

The one thing this does do slightly differently... and this is a bit of a loss to all the people who loved the prior three... is to get rid of the actual seed pods. These aren’t space spores drifting and finding our planet before growing clones of us and absorbing our intelligence... instead, after a space shuttle that has somehow come into contact with the source in space before crash landing back on Earth, it spreads itself as a virus and replaces our body ‘on site’, as it were. However, it does still need the host human to go to sleep before it can take it over and so the mechanism is essentially the same, just the delivery is a little different. When a human goes to sleep and is cocooned within its own biological material, it also looks just like the unfinished pod people from the 1978 version too.

So instead of growing a huge, novelty seed pod in your immediate vicinity, the alien versions of us here just vomit into our coffee or even onto us to get the dormant aliens into us. This gives us the bizarrely ‘out of place for commercial cinema’ moment where we have Jeremy Northam vomiting all over Nicole Kidman’s face and in her mouth, which also makes her the second Bennell in the movie versions to be actually ‘infected’ by the aliens... although with a much different result to what happened when Donald Sutherland was ‘podded up’ nearly 30 years before. And, of course, Jeremy Northam, who I always think of as the modern Cary Grant, plays a pod person quite well. Although, it has to be said, the aliens in this movie seem really dumb and easy to detect.

The writers and directors haven’t forgotten their long cinematic heritage either. For starters, one of Carol’s patients is played by Veronica Cartwright, who was in the 1970s incarnation of the film (and who is also famous for appearing in such films as The Birds and A L I E N). There’s also the nice moment where an old lady does the whole Kevin McArthy thing of running through all the cars and screaming about the aliens as a foreshadowing technique, before being run over and killed. It’s a shame they didn’t tap McCarthy to pick up this scene again but, you can’t have everything. There’s a nice moment later in the film where Nicole Kidman almost repeats the entire scene, which is a nice moment... from one Bennell to another. And another nod to the original is a scene which is a fourth version... although with people and not pods this time around... of the town square distribution scene. So that’s always nice.

The direction and editing is... somewhat problematic but there’s some nice cinematography in this, with some nice colours and framing, especially in the exterior city scenes when it’s raining at night. There’s also a bizarre, Dario Argento kind of moment where, when Nicole Kidman’s character starts to succumb to sleep a few times and the director switches to close ups of the white cells in her blood being swaddled by the alien virus.

The paranoia of the piece is fairly well done too, with a camera walk with Kidman’s character following her on her way to the office, taking in all the hustle and bustle of the people clashing against each other on their daily routine, contrasted later on in the film with more or less exactly the same sequence of shots... but showing all the people nicely behaved, to indicate that by now the majority of the people on the streets are alien hosts. There’s even a tense moment where the director resorts to using the old, boiling, whistling kettle sound in the background to ratchet up the tension... which works pretty much as well as it always does in these kinds of movies.

One of my biggest problems with the film is in the editing. There are four or five moments in the movie where they just start crosscutting between various scenes showing bits from earlier in the movie, bits which are happening now and bits which will happen later on in the movie, in fairly extended but rapidly edited pieces. Maybe its another stab at giving us some foreshadowing but I suspect it’s more a way of excluding bits of explanatory footage which were either missing and not shot... allowing us to get the jump on the next scene as we slide into the middle of the action on that next sequence... or the shot footage was just too slow and boring and they needed to ramp up the pace. Either way, it looks like the editor is trying to be Nicolas Roeg and, honestly, as much as I appreciate that particular directorial genius and his editing decisions, resorting to it here in an almost random manner really doesn’t serve the film and makes you pop out of the experience, as opposed to letting you make visual, metaphorical connections. It just doesn’t work well.

It’s not a total let down though because John Ottman’s score serves the film quite well and is appropriately sinister, helping to build the suspense when the colliding visuals let things down on occasion. Alas, fans of the previous versions of this may find the ‘magic bullet’ of the ending a bit of a bitter pill to swallow, it has to be said. Actually, being as we’re all now in a kind of magical and somewhat ineffective pseudo-lockdown from Coronavirus at the moment, I found it a nice idea that the aliens come up with the plan a third of the way through the picture to infect everybody under the guise of it being a vaccine. That’s a nice idea. I still prefer giant seed pods though, if I was given a choice.

Not much more to say on The Invasion other than... it’s not a terrible film, it’s quite a good one hobbled by some problems which may well have been exacerbated by the reshoots and re-editing job, I suspect. If you like the various Body Snatcher movies and the ideas in them, then there should be no real reason why you shouldn’t have an okay time with this one. I’d have to say, though, that I’m probably not going to rewatch the third or fourth ones as frequently as I’ll revisit the first two in years to come. But still... this is not a bad shot at it.

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers at NUTS4R2

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956)

Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978)

Body Snatchers (1993)

The Invasion (2007)

Destroyer

Destroyer Rides Again

Destroyer
2018 USA
Directed by Karyn Kusama
UK cinema release print.

Wow... this is a really great movie.

And, I’m happy to say... it took me unawares.

So Destroyer is a tale about a cop who was working with the FBI, 16 years prior to one of the main story timelines in the film, when the job went south for reasons I won’t reveal here. The cop’s name is Erin Belle and she’s played here by Nicole Kidman in what is a pretty amazing performance. She’s joined here by Toby Kebbell playing the lead villain Silas and Sebastian Stan playing Chris, Belle’s former partner in the back story.

The film is directed by Karyn Kusama, who directed both Aeon Flux and Jennifer’s Body (reviewed here) and it’s a real gem of a picture. I’m going to have to tread very carefully here to avoid spoilers.

Kidman plays two sides of Erin Belle, one as the bright, young thing who was involved in the original events and one as the current, burnt out cop version of her character who has been sent some evidence that the villain who wrecked things for her 16 years ago is back and up to his old tricks. So we see her piecing together the evidence and information she needs to find this villain while, at the same time, trying to juggle the stress of managing her fraught, alienated relationship with her 16 year old daughter. The film has twists and turns and, I have to say, I was not expecting most of them at all which, if you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know is a pretty rare occurrence. I almost always see the twists coming.

The film has a nice look to it and there are some great shot set ups with some very rich colour combinations, some of which almost reminded me of old Edward Hopper paintings. The director also uses a less than usual visual syntax throughout the film, especially with her use of establishing shots to give it an edgy, off kilter feel. Or should I say lack of use of establishing shots. That is to say... even her regular establishing shots tend to pull you into a specific location. One of the things I caught her doing was using a high shot of a building as an establishing shot, for example, before tracking down and directly into the eye level of Nicole Kidman sitting in her car, shifting the focus as she highlighted the character and placed her into the frame but also filtering out the peripheral information which is now jettisoned. She then used a sharp cut to take us to a completely different scene in another location.

Most of the time, though, I have to say I was unaware of any strong establishing shots to frame the action for the audience at all and this way of following the character in a relatively close environment a lot of the time makes things somehow more intense and immediate while not giving the collective audience the little breaks and cut aways it’s used to. Which I found both fascinating and sometimes a little disorienting and I am assuming that disorientation was deliberate because...

Okay... this hopefully doesn’t amount to a spoiler but I said it gets twisty and turny and there’s a specific, big story point that’s not revealed until right towards the end of the picture. And the thing is, normally I would have seen this coming right away but, because the structure of the film involves constant flashbacks to linearly tell the back story of the main character, the real structure of the film is hidden from view... hidden in plain sight, in fact... from the audience and I suspect the constant use of close ups and so forth to begin various scenes and lead you to the story in a visually convoluted (or at least less than usual) way helps greatly with the directors very subtle and, timed just right, sleight of hand when she’s not being completely honest with certain elements of the way the story unfolds. And that’s all I’m going to say about this one, because I really don’t want to spoil it for first time viewers... other than to say that the cleverness of the story structure works hand in hand with the mise en scene and almost relies on an aspect of Nicole Kidman’s performance in a specific scene near the start of the film. Well, she totally sold it to me because it’s not something the audience has been primed to watch out for yet and Kidman plays a specific scene just right, so that there’s not even a hint that what we are watching is not always necessarily to be trusted, so to speak.

The other great thing about this movie is the incredible score. It’s absolutely stunning and shame on the powers that be for only giving this an electronic download release instead of the quality CD release this music so richly deserves... and, frankly, since this picture was released into cinemas in America towards the end of last year, I’m practically frothing at the mouth right now that this score wasn’t given an oscar nomination. It’s so striking and, almost subliminally at times, sets the viewer on edge and enhances the drama and, very much I think, the mindset of the film’s central protagonist at any given time. I didn’t know who I was listening to when I watched this but by the final quarter of the movie I had pretty much made my mind up that this thing must have been composed by Mica Levi... the score is that amazing and it seemed a perfect fit for her style. Imagine my surprise, then, when I stayed through some of the end credits to discover the music was composed by Theodore Shapiro (who did quite a good score for the Ghostbusters reboot a few years back). Shame on the Academy for not recognising the sheer power and resonance of this score and shame on the company for not putting out a CD release.

So, what more to say on this one? Brilliant performances all round, fantastic direction, genius editing, an absolute classic and powerful score and a central protagonist, perfectly played by Kidman, who’s mindset throughout the film is wildly unpredictable and who is bound to catch the audience off guard at various points in the unfolding of her story. If you are into thrillers or police procedural movies then, seriously, Destroyer is definitely the film to see this year. Pitch perfect on all levels and, though I wouldn’t normally do repeat viewings, I might have to rewatch this again when it comes out on Blu Ray so I can nitpick my way through the story structure and figure out just how the director managed to fool me on this one. Such a cool film and one which will, I’m sure, feature in many critical essays and articles in the coming decades. A truly great piece of cinema that reminds us just how much this medium is a true form of artistic expression. Go and see this masterpiece soonest.

Aquaman

Curry On Sea Men

Aquaman
2018 Australia/USA
Directed by James Wan
UK cinema release print.

Okay... so this was nothing like what I was expecting this movie to be. I was assuming this would be, like most of the other recent DC movies in this particular cinematic strand of continuity... something of a mess. As it is, this is easily one of the most engaging and entertaining of the DC universe films, second only to Wonder Woman (reviewed here). That being said, I can’t imagine any other superhero movie ever coming close to Wonder Woman in my lifetime so, yeah, I guess you can say I thought a lot of the new Aquaman movie, even though he really isn’t the Aquaman I used to love as a kid.

Aquaman stars Jason Momoa as Arthur Curry, the title character, reprising his role from Batman Vs Superman - Dawn Of Justice (reviewed here) and Justice League (reviewed here). He bookends the narrative with voice-over narrative telling a big story of political battles in the undersea kingdom which threaten all the non-ocean dwellers on the planet but, he comes at it through the eyes of his personal story and... this is something which hooked me in right from the start... he tells it from the angle of a love story. A love story between his dad, Tom, played by Temuera Morrison (who you might remember as Bobba Fett’s father Jango Fett, plus a bunch of clones of his character, in the prequel Star Wars movies) and his mother, Atlanna, played by Nicole Kidman.

And it’s quite charming and heart warming and from this simple, fish out of water start where Tom rescues Atlanna and cares for her in his lighthouse, I was completely hooked. There’s a wonderful action scene in said lighthouse where Nicole Kidman goes full-on warrior and bashes up a load of Atlanteans and then sacrifices her freedom to return to the oceans, leaving Tom to raise their child... who we soon see has lots of cool, undersea powers from his mother.

From then on we get two parts of the villainous plot introduced... as Black Manta, a modern pirate played by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, is left hating Aquaman for reasons I won’t go into here while regular James Wan collaborator Patrick Wilson, as Aquaman’s half-brother King Orm, tries to persuade and manipulate wise King Nerreus, played by Dolph Lundgren, to raise up Atlantis, unite all the armies of the kingdoms of the oceans and wage war on the surface dwellers who have been polluting their oceans for centuries. Meanwhile, over the years, we have Orm’s advisor Vulko, played by Willem Dafoe, who has been secretly training Aquaman in his fishy ways over the years and Mera, played by Johnny Depp’s nemesis Amber Heard, reprising her role from Justice League, who wants Arthur Curry to find an ancient trident which will give him power to gain the kingship of the ocean and defeat Orm’s attempt to be Ocean Master.

So, basically, what we have is an action spectacular with a kind of road movie treasure hunt involving Aquaman and Mera, who are trying to gain the trident and avert disaster and... you know what? It’s a real fun ride.

James Wan is somebody I usually only associate with low budget, fairly high quality horror films but, it looks like he can really knock out a good, large scale action blockbuster if he’s given enough money to play with. Like Wonder Woman, the big action is matched by a very overt, emotional, beating heart which gives the audience something to invest in when the battle scenes come and this really took me by surprise since, frankly, the Aquaman character didn’t really get much of a chance to shine in Justice League. So the writers have really thought about this one and Wan has managed to pull it all together to make a very confident looking, big screen spectacle.

This is not the blond, short back and sides version of Aquaman I grew up with... reading him in his appearances in titles such as Justice League Of America and The Super Friends. I used to love the little Comic Action Heroes figure from Mego I had as a kid, despite the fact that my Uncle had squeezed it too hard one day and Aquaman’s leg would fall off whenever he went into action after that. So I was not very happy about the look of the character they’ve brought to the screen here but I really mellowed to it once I saw how well the film works. Also, there are a fair few throwbacks to those original Aquaman strips... including those little circles they used to draw to symbolise him talking to the creatures of the ocean and also, in the endgame of the picture, his old, colourful orange and ‘green gauntlets’ costume which I used to like so much.

Now, there are a couple of problems with the movie so let me just cover those here...

It’s been quoted many times over the years that ‘continuity is the hobgoblin of the small minded’. Well then call me small minded but I think story arc continuity is an important and much valued building block when fashioning a cinematic universe (or in any other kind of story medium, to be fair) and I got the feeling that if I were to sit down and re-watch Justice League right now, I’d find a couple of glaring mis-matches. However, there’s very little shout out to the former film, although it clearly takes place some time after that one and... they kind of get away with certain differences, I think.

The other problem is that it’s just too long... it kinda slumps about two thirds of the way through and the action scenes towards the end could have done with a fair amount of trimming it seems to me. Also, a more lengthy and personal fight between Orm and Aquaman may have been a little more satisfying. That being said, it didn’t detract form the sheer impact and brilliance of the film overall and I think this is definitely one of the DC films from this period which will be remembered in a positive light, providing audiences are willing to go and see it after the not so great Justice League.

But it also has a lot going for it... great acting, great story, some well choreographed action in the middle of the film and a beautiful score by Rupert Gregson-Williams, who also did such a great job on Wonder Woman. Also, it’s easily the most surreal of the contemporary DC movies, with characters riding armoured battle sharks, giant crabs and militarised crustacean people... it’s like if Salvador Dali was allowed to design the extended underwater battle from the James Bond film Thunderball (reviewed here) and did his own thing with it. Which is never going to be a bad thing.

Also, it’s got some amazing transition scenes in the movie including flashbacks which take you completely by surprise and a lovely transformation from a shot of a snow globe to the next narrative point in the story, fairly early on in the film. There’s some really nice stuff in here and I think James Wan has done a truly remarkable job cramming in all this great stuff in a compelling, visual way.

So yeah, that’s my take on Aquaman. There’s a mid post-credits scene which gives you some insight into where they might be going with a sequel and, if it does the numbers I’m hoping it does at the box office, then we should be seeing that at some point in the future (fingers crossed). If you’re, like me, wondering why the hell DC have been getting everything wrong lately other than Wonder Woman... well, wonder no more. If you decide to go and see Aquaman then you’re in for an aquatic treat. Thoroughly enjoyed this although, a quick ‘heads up’ to say that, since I saw this, I’ve found out it’s been cut under advice from the BBFC in this country... which means I’ll definitely be importing the Blu Ray from the US when it comes out, rather than buy the truncated, vandalised English version.

How To Talk To Girls At Parties

Spiking The Punk

How To Talk To Girls At Parties
UK/USA 2017 Directed by John Cameron Mitchell
London Film Festival screening 7th October 2017

So here we go with another year of films at the London Film Festival and, I have to say, this year has got to be one of the best line ups of interesting films that I’ve seen at the LFF in quite some time. Certainly, since joining the BFI almost 30 years ago, I’ve not seen a Festival Programme filled with quite so many movies I either can’t afford to go and see or being shown at times too inconvenient for someone who relies on the overground railway to get them home at night. So I’ve had to miss out on some real interesting debuts like Let The Corpses Tan and I am just hoping I’ll somehow get to see some of the ones that got away in some kind of release or another (although, I suspect like most years, some of them won’t get any kind of commercial release with English subtitles). So my first film in this year’s programme was How To Talk To Girls At Parties and I was off to a good start because it’s a real corker.

How To Talk To Girls At Parties is based on an award winning short story by comic book writer extraordinaire (among other things) Neil Gaiman. I’ve admired Gaiman as someone who can weave words together in a meaningful way ever since reading his character Death from his much revered DC Vertigo comic, The Sandman. I’ve not read this short story but, looking at a quick synopsis of it on Wikipedia, I can see that the film takes the kernel of Gaiman’s source material and then expands on it in a, perhaps less subtle but certainly cinematic way.

The film revolves around Enn (played by Alex Sharpe) and his two school friends who are all into the punk scene. Which makes sense since this is set in deepest, darkest Croydon of 1977 and everybody is celebrating The Queen’s Silver Jubilee (ahh, I remember that street party well). The three go to a punk gig to try to hook up with Queen Boadicea, who is a kind of promoter on the punk scene and played, totally against type but totally brilliantly, by Nicole Kidman. When the boys get lost and go to the wrong 'after party', they instead crash a gathering of people who are all kitted out in latex costumes much like the ones you’d see in a Skin Two magazine or buy from Honour Clothing. They are all indulging in strange, fetishistic rituals... which makes perfect sense because, as it turns out, Enn and his mates have stumbled on a colony of aliens living among us. Things get strange but Enn meets a beautiful, young girl called Zan, played by Elle Fanning and... the two fall in love. However, Zan has only 48 hours to get as many experiences from Enn and his ‘punk scene’ before committing human suicide (kinda) and returning to the alien form in which she appears to roam the galaxy with her species. Which makes things complicated.

Everybody is brilliant in this and the film pitches some nicely observed comedy against some poignant and touching scenes as both Enn and Zan experience emotions and adventures in what could be their first and last two days together. The humour is mostly centred on the cultural differences between Enn and his mates and the race of aliens with Fanning and her species playing off the standard ‘fish out of water’ scenario as she mistakes various Earth customs and sayings while Enn and his mates mistake the aliens for ‘Californians’ and use this to explain away some of the, actually very alien, things they see.

The director uses different kinds of camera work for the movie including some montage sequences where the camera speed and stock is played with to make it both more gritty and ethereal at the same time but he also brings us some very crisp compositions and sharp, brightly lit colour palettes to offset that a lot of the way through. It’s almost like a meeting of two worlds in terms of the way different styles of shooting the thing are thrown together... which, of course, is exactly what the film is representing. So it’s a nice way of showing it.

I’m seeing that this hasn’t been getting very good reviews from previews in other countries and I have to wonder why that is because I found it an absolute joy to watch from start to finish. The only thing I can think of which might be off putting is that the film is... not only ‘so very British’ but it’s also capturing a time of living in Great Britain that is barely recognisable now. The punk scene in the 1970s was gritty, raw, loud and in your face and the director really manages to show this. Indeed, when the film started I had absolutely no sympathy or empathy for these three punk urchins blagging their way into a venue without paying but, very quickly as the film progressed, my heart started to melt and get into the journey of the movie with them and... well... it helps that the film is quite funny in places. The first kiss... or attempt at one... between Enn and Zan is... well, I don’t want to spoil it for you here but the audience responded to it with a lot of laughter. It was a pretty well received film, I can tell you, judging by the brilliant audience response it was getting here.

As the film continued on and transported me into a love story which isn’t a million miles away from Romeo And Juliet in tone, I realised that the lead actor looked a little bit like Neil Gaiman and, then I figured out why he was called Enn (presumably, the letter ‘N’ for Neil). Indeed, after a heart wrenching ending which, again, I am certainly not going to spoil for you here, there’s a wonderful epilogue where the story jumps something like 15 years and Enn is signing a novel based on his experiences at a bookshop reminiscent of the old Forbidden Planet signings you used to get in Denmark Street and St. Giles High Street in the 1980s (of course, Forbidden Planet still do signings regularly but the look and feel of this one, with issues of 2000AD and The Sandman on display in the window, seemed just like a part of my childhood recaptured... although the early 1990s setting might be a little late for the atmosphere being evoked here). Again, I’m not going to spoil the wonderful epilogue scene for you here but what this did, to me, is drum home how much the movie incarnation of the character was partially based on Neil Gaiman... or at least a fictional Neil Gaiman who maybe never existed like this in real life. Who can tell... well , yeah, alright, Neil Gaiman could tell but I doubt somehow he’s going to be reading this review and providing me with an answer to that one.

Anyway, that’s my first of this year’s London Film Festival movies and, I have to say, it was a thoroughly enjoyable one. If I had any one minor complaint about How To Talk To Girls At Parties it’s that the three ‘school chums’ looked way older than the ages they were supposedly playing but, that’s okay, they all did a really great job here and it was pretty easy to suspend disbelief on this stuff when the script and performances of everyone in this movie are so good. I would love to see this released over here at cinemas and would also love to be able to pick it up as a Blu Ray at some point so... you know... here’s hoping this one somehow manages to grab the success it certainly deserves. I, for one, haven’t got a bad thing to say about it.

Paddington

Exit Peru, By A Bear

Paddington 
UK/France 2014 
Directed by Paul King
Studio Canal Blu Ray B

I never got to see this one when it came out in the cinema in the UK at the tail end of last year. I kinda wanted to get to it but, as usual, the lead in of the “Christmas rush” meant a lot of movies I wanted to catch had to be sacrificed to the annual present buying marathon. However, my mother also wanted to see it and so I grabbed her a copy of the Blu Ray for Easter. Thus, there I was on Easter Sunday drinking cups of tea with my parents and watching the latest version of Michael Bond’s, almost timeless, classic... tears crawling absurdly down my face because, well... the older I get, the more the sentimentality of these things gets to me, I’m afraid.

I was not the biggest Paddington fan as a kid. I never had a version of the bear, for example. I did, however, own the first book, beautifully illustrated and, of course, like most other kids growing up in the 1970s, watched the stop-motion animated TV show from time to time. My most vivid memory of which is, of course, the episode where they reconstructed the title song’s dance routine from Singin’ In The Rain. I believe Gene Kelly was a big fan of that episode.

I didn’t, I have to admit, expect great things from this movie. I assumed that the writers and director would want to modernise things a bit... I was just hoping they wouldn’t be disrespectful of the character and the spirit of the original tales. I needn’t have worried about any of that, actually. I was quite surprised by just how well the film holds up and I’d have to say that the whole thing is absolutely... magical.

The film starts off with black & white 4:3 aspect ratio, pseudo archival newsreel footage of Tim Downie* playing the excessively British Montgomery Clyde, in true eccentric fashion, as he discovers a colony of intelligent bears in Darkest Peru and befriends the future Paddington Bear’s grandparents. Decades then whiz by and an “incident” in Darkest Peru means that Paddington has to journey to London and throw himself on the kindness of Londoners with the old “Please look after this bear, thank you” tag hanging around his neck, while his Aunt Lucy goes to live in the home for retired bears. When he is taken in, temporarily, by the Brown family, the film opens up showing all the expected, yet nicely done, incidents about being a fish... um... bear out of water, while bringing in a mystery plot as Paddington and the Browns try to locate Tim Downie’s character in the present day. And that’s really as much as I’m going to tell you about the story line, such as it is... I really don’t want to spoil this one for you.

Now, it would be true to say that the film isn’t totally original in the way it’s put together. Both the techniques used and the references made are definitely pointing to Paddington being a distinctly postmodern bear in this instance, to be sure. But, the thing is, it’s all done so well and it’s beautifully crafted and edited together, that the various stock in trade tricks, and I can assure you it steals from the best, end up giving the film a unique identity of its own in terms of any borrowed components becoming just well handled instruments in a very sophisticated tool box.

Lovely stuff like the photos on a wall taking on a life of their own, very much like the photos in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, are in here, for example. There’s even, towards the end of the movie, a very much re-used but charming visual reference to the Indiana Jones films which certainly hasn’t outstayed its welcome in terms of it appearing in this movie. There were also some nice things I hadn’t seen before like the leaves on painted tress on the walls of the Brown household being used as an expression of the emotional health of the family, for instance. Or the floors depicted in a doll’s house or the windows of the carriage in a toy train set taking you into other worlds and clueing the audience in on more information. These were all genuinely refreshing little touches and I appreciated them, as I watched the story stealthily unfold, quite a lot. The writers even decided to have Paddington entering the old movie footage, used in the opening sequence, later on in the film to have a brief, day dream visitation with the spirit of the younger versions of his grand parents... which is just one of many heart warming scenes throughout the course of the film designed to hit you hard in the tear ducts.

Added to this, of course, there are some great jokes scattered throughout the well written script, some of which will appeal perhaps more to adults. Such as the trophy heads in the main villain’s Natural History Museum lair, and what’s going on in the room behind the walls they are “mounted” on. Others of which will also ensnare the kids as much as any ‘young at heart’ adults watching... such as Paddington trying to figure out the use of the ‘facilities’ in the Brown household and using two toothbrushes to clean out his ears. This is all good stuff and should, mostly, bring a smile to the face of most people in the audience, I suspect.

But it’s not just well lit sets and a beautiful melding of Nick Urata’s wonderful score with songs performed by D Lime and Tabago Crusoe as little ‘on screen’ visual inserts that make this film the masterpiece it’s turned out to be. It also has some of the finest actors and actresses of our generation in this, including Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Peter Capaldi, Julie Walters, Nicole Kidman, Jim Broadbent, the voice of Ben Whishaw as Paddington himself and... well the list, including some wonderful cameo appearances, goes on. It’s well performed by people who know just what they’re doing, is what I’m trying to say... so it would be hard to see how a film full of such wonderful professionals could be in a bad movie. That being said, I’ve seen it happen before but, I’m happy to say, they are supported by such a wonderful script, fantastic misé en scene (some of the colours used are gorgeous in certain scenes), surprisingly well done CGI (seriously groovy fur people!), great scoring and some inventive editing... amongst other good stuff... that this film is a marvellous success as both a children’s entertainment and a movie which can be appreciated by infants of all ages, myself included.

Not a film I was particularly expecting to come away with such a positive opinion of, to be honest, but there you are... sometimes these things happen. A truly enchanting movie experience that is a definite, solid, sure fire recommend from me. If there is a softer side to your movie going heart, you might want to take Paddington in off out of the cold and give him a place on your DVD or Blu Ray shelf. And always remember to keep a marmalade sandwich under your hat... just in case of emergencies.

*The gentleman in question tweeted me on the twitter machine yesterday and assured me that his correct mode of address is “the devilishly handsome and witty Tim Downie". Well, who am I to argue with that?

Before I Go To Sleep

Sleeping Pill

Before I Go To Sleep
2014  USA/UK/France/Sweden
Directed by Rowan Joffe
UK cinema release print.

I’ve got two minor observations about this movie, based on a best selling novel by S. J. Watson, that you might find worthy of me mentioning here.

Number one is that I’ve seen the overly long trailer for this film so many times now at the front of other movies at my local cinema... so you would think that, after suffering it so often, I should be able to at least remember the title of this movie, right? However, every time someone asked me what movie I was going to see, I had to describe the main premise, “Nicole Kidman can’t go to sleep without losing her memory”, because the title is just not interesting enough to stick in my mind.

Every time.

My friend and I even had to order our tickets at the box office when we got there with a description of the movie because, in the few seconds between spotting the poster outside the cinema and walking in to buy the ticket... we’d forgotten the name of the movie again. And, even now, as I sat down to write this review, I had to look at the IMDB page for Nicole Kidman to find out the title of the movie I was writing about. So I think my main conclusion here is... the title may (or may not) have been right for the novel but as a movie title it’s so unbelievably generic that it just doesn’t stick in the mind, to be honest. It could have done with being called something a little more poetic or imaginative, I think, as a film you aspire to go to see at the cinema.

My other point is that, when I told a few different people the basic premise, because I couldn’t remember the title, they all responded passionately with the same message... “not that old plot again?”. And then trotted out a few movie titles which have used similar plots. Of course, I tried to defend my choice by saying that there would be some kind of extra spin on this concept somewhere down the line because, after all, it was based on a best seller so there must be something more to it than what appears on the surface. Imagine my disappointment after having seen the movie, then, and realising that... no, they were right. It is the same old plot we have seen so many times.

However, this doesn’t make it a bad film and I’m pleased to report that for a lot of the time I was kept mildly curious and interested, waiting for some kind of unguessable twist to arrive in the narrative. It’s hard to not be able to take some pleasure in a film which, for example, stars three very strong actors - Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth and Mark Strong - who you know are going to deliver a compelling performance. Which they obviously do and, coupled with a very slow and almost voyeuristic shooting style for most of the movie, it does have a certain fascination as you watch the drama slowly unfold... up until a point.

Now I’m really going to try to keep this spoiler free but the basic plot concept is that somebody has bashed up Nicole Kidman to the point that she has a very special kind of amnesia that wipes the last 20 or so years of her memory out after she goes to sleep at night. She has to catch up each day making use of a secret diary she is currently filming on a camera. Why is it a secret diary? Well, because the story works as one of those “trust no one” kind of tales of paranoia where either of the two male protagonists in her life, her husband Ben or her psychiatrist Dr. Nash, may not be what they seem. She has to slowly try to solve the mystery of why she is in this state and who she can and can’t trust. Which is fine up until a point.

That point, for me, was about the last 20 minutes of the movie which are less than clumsily handled. I wish Nicole had spent more time trying to unravel the absolutely ludicrous plot holes in the film version of this story, which render the entire scenario unworkable as a real life occurrence... but don’t even get me started on tearing down some of the anti-logic in this one.

Now, all the way through the director has been using everyday objects and vehicles (cars and planes etc) to rush out from nowhere to give the audience a jump scare and I found this cheap and unnecessary for the kind of drama that was playing out. My friend observed that the director needed to feel he had to keep doing that because nothing much happens in the film. I think I’ll be a little more charitable than that and say that stuff does kind of happen from time to time... but you certainly don’t need these jump scares, which add nothing to this particular narrative, inserted at random intervals throughout the film.

I was mostly able to let this fly because of the voyeuristic way in which the drama was unfolding. I don’t know if many people will notice this but the camera is with Nicole Kidman’s character Christine for almost the entire movie, choosing to tell things about the events from how she perceives them... and this is great. However, in the last 20 minutes or so of the movie, when one of the characters is indeed found to be not who they say they were (and I’m not telling you which one, or even if it is just one of them, and this isn’t a spoiler because the movie works by making you suspect either or both of them), the camera then suddenly darts off with that person for a scene or two and we are no longer seeing events purely depicted from Christine’s viewpoint. Now, I don’t know if the decision to do that at this point was coincidental with when I stopped enjoying the movie or not... but I do know that there’s an intense fight scene which seemed a bit over the top, in some ways, to everything that had gone before and, when I saw an iron appear in shot during the fight... that’s when I started giggling at a point the director would probably have considered inappropriate.

This, coupled with a post-denouement sequence which is full of sentiment and utilising two characters we haven’t even met before in the film (although we have heard about them often) seems just really wrong for the tone of this one... at least to me. Now it may have been following the ending from the book, I don’t know because I haven’t read it, but due to the brilliant way the director had been setting up the shots of Nicole Kidman’s character waking up to each new day, I’m pretty sure there was a much better way to end this movie in a more cinematic fashion, possibly involving one of the other characters we’ve gotten to know through the course of the film. Alas, it was not to be and I can’t tell you what my ending to this one would have been because I don’t want any spoilers in this particular review... but it would have certainly have started with an arm moving off a bed sheet and a post diary watch reveal as the last shot.

So is the movie any good?

Well, for me it’s not something I could watch again. It’s the kind of cinema which places great stock in story content and, as far as I’m concerned, it lives and breathes until the revelation of its secrets... and I’m sure I’ve seen all this done before on TV and film anyway. However, if you’re fairly young, and your experience of movies is not so large, then you may well really like this film. After all, it still kept me fascinated and watching with a certain curiosity throughout the majority of its running time. Not one I’d recommend but certainly some people will clearly get something out of this one, I feel. Coupled with the fact that one of the more striking, Herrmannesque pieces of music used in the trailer is not from the actual film, it turns out, means I had a more disappointing time with this one than I was hoping for... but the lead actors are all very strong in this and if you are a big fan of any of them then you’ll probably love their performances here. Not much else to say on this one other than... I still have about as much success at remembering the title of this one as the central character does of remembering what she had for breakfast the day before. I might need to write it down somewhere.

Stoker

Stoker, Ace

Stoker
UK/USA 2013
Directed by Chan-wook Park
Playing at UK cinemas now.

Warning: Very slight spoilers if anyone knows their movie history.

Right then. Here we have famous Korean auteur Chan-wook Park directing a film co-financed between the UK and the US and shooting it in English.

Okay... I can do that.

I should, right away though, point out that... out of this particular director’s body of work, the only movies I am familiar with by him are his loosely knitted “vengeance trilogy” and out of those three films, the only one I really enjoyed was Lady Vengeance.

That being said, Stoker is a pretty neat film and my only disappointment stems from the lack of twist or sting in the tail of this one... the whole thing being, I’m afraid, fairly cliché ridden and utterly predictable. However, that’s kinda missing the point with a movie like this and there are a fair few things which raise this past the level of the routine meandering of the story and lift it well into the boundary of “necessary viewing”... the most obvious being the very rich and neat visual imagery on show.

There’s just so much going for it in “the look” and the bright green, yellow and red colouration used in a lot of the shots combined with some very leisurely camera movement and an editing style which is used as metaphor to capture the mood and psychology of the characters when required, makes for a very seductive and addictive piece of film-making. Indeed, a lot of the movie plays without the necessity of character dialogue and the visual richness, not just of the overall mise-en-scene but also of the way shots are rubbed together to create intent and foreshadowing, makes for an almost perfect movie.

Except it isn’t perfect, by any means.

The film does tend to broadcast the overall arc of the film quite blatantly, so perhaps the “silent cinema” mode of some of the sequences were perhaps a little over the top. The movie comes from a lineage which quickly switches from Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt to a less polluted cinematic legacy which includes movies such as Badlands and Natural Born Killers. Indeed, it could well be considered a less obviously humorous version of Heathers than it could be a lot of other things. And the performances by all the central characters are just superb. Everybody is perfectly framed and delivering lines or going through various actions in a cinematic space which is uncluttered, painterly and gives the performances a lot of room to breathe.

And top marks to Park for coming up with such staggering compositions which still somehow manage to look effortless. One particular shot in the movie has the three main characters sitting down together for dinner and even though the distance between each of the characters is only what can be arranged around a fairly standard sized table, the breadth of depth the director manages to get in by having Nicole Kidman and Mia Wasikowska share two separate planes (and therefore sizes) split up between the back of Matthew Goode’s head in the immediate foreground is absolutely astonishing as you see the three occupying completely different kinds of spaces within the same shot... it just blew me away. Ditto to a couple of other shots right at the end of the movie which were a quite beautiful mix of “blood and nature” which I would have thought almost unique... if I hadn’t already seen more or less the same shots done by Tarantino in Django Unchained (reviewed here) a few months prior to this (no, I don’t know who made their movie first... it’s probably all been done before anyway).

Clint Mansell’s score, too, is pretty good... as are some of the needle-drop choices in this movie. I don’t know if the amazingly sexualised piano duet was his invention or not, but it sounds amazingly like the music of Philip Glass (it’s not) and is making me want to rush out and grab the soundtrack CD as I write this.

My conclusion then, for this movie, is that it’s not as good as Lady Vengeance but certainly the next best of this director’s works... as far as I’ve seen, at any rate. Script, performances and visual poetry aside, the film is perhaps not going to blow you away in terms of originality unless you have not seen a lot of other movies in your lifetime. Ultimately, this isn’t quite the rich “visual feast” I had been lead to expect from this director... it is however, at the least, a very tasty “visual buffet with side salad” and certainly doesn’t deserve to be ignored at the cinema in favour of the loud and clunky Hollywood made movies which are currently on offer at UK cinemas. It’s a well made piece of art and you should take a look at it if you get a chance. Very much a recommendation and something which certainly has a lot to offer in terms of finding interesting ways to convey the inner psychology of the main protagonists and antagonists. Please see it before it goes.