The spoiler warning you desire is right here...
I don't like admitting this but I spent half of Moonage Daydream asleep. I expected something else, but the documentary I wanted was hiding behind two hours of rare footage. I didn't think it was going to be a two hour examination of David Bowie's life, but I sort of thought it would be more than just starkly linear. It took me about 25 minutes to realise that this was going to be a documentary made up of pictures, footage and snippets of Bowie from whatever available source there was and from that point on I struggled to stay awake and alert. This kind of thing has been done so much better with less charismatic characters.
I can't really say it was riveting because it clearly wasn't. It failed to make the right connection with me and I've seen similar, better, more interesting variants on this made for television. You can handle Bowie one of two ways - wigged out and bizarre or as straight as a die - he's a unique guy and a new look at him either has to take a different perspective or tell us something we don't know. This didn't do either; it tries to be different and feature things we've maybe never seen but loses its appeal quickly when you realise that with little exception we've seen the best of Bowie already; being dead rarely turns up a masterpiece when it's mainly barrel-scrapings on the menu.
***
Extraordinary isn't, yet. It tries to be but falls short, mainly due to a slow start. I'm fairly sure the 'only normal person in a world full of superheroes' thing has been done before, but I have no problem with re-treading old ideas as long as there's something to hold onto. This is a little bit rude but largely through innuendo and suggestion than anything else and it isn't going to have a subplot about why this version of our universe is mainly made up of people with superpowers. I suggest, this is largely a comedy about misfortune and not appreciating what we have. It doesn't really need a back story but over the space of this series we realise that part of good comedy is having a half decent back story.
Jen, the girl who isn't extraordinary and is now 25 is preoccupied by the fact she didn't gain a superpower at 18 like 99.999% of the population did and this series starts with her applying for a new job with an interviewer who has the power to make you involuntarily tell the truth to anything she asks you. This was both amusing and slightly cringey, but had the right balance. From this point on it's about introducing you to Jen and her circle of friends and to the fact that having superpowers has not really changed anyone's life and people's lives are still mundane even though they have something unique. However, by the time you get about half way through the series, you realise that Jen is extraordinary, but for all the wrong reasons.
It's most definitely one of those 'gets better with each episode' TV shows. Máiréad Tyers has the kind of face you're positive you've seen before and unless you've seen Belfast then you haven't, she's the main character in it, although her best friend, Carrie, played by Sofia Oxenham, who has an ability that would equally work in a drama; has a role to play that is just as important. Then you slowly begin to realise that while this is a funny TV show, it's also bitchy and focuses on a kind of person we probably all know one person to be like - the psychic vampire; the person who sucks the life out of everything by making everything about them. The person who believes the world is revolving around them and everything else is just, you know, not about them.
Jizzlord is a great character; is he a man who shapeshifted into a cat for too long or is he a cat that can shapeshift into a man? For most of the series you wrestle with that question as he takes more of a centre stage in the show, especially in situations where really being a cat instinct takes over. He's an odd looking guy and very much a lynchpin of the show, especially when Jen and Carrie stop talking. In fact as the series draws to a conclusion you're left with the uplifting conclusion that Extraordinary was a little better than just ordinary and then the post credit scene happens and just like that you're transported into the world of cliffhangers - a place that's well suited for superpowers. It isn't even the post credit scene you could be half expecting, it's proper left field, but it does introduce a back story, one we didn't know but now is, like, blimey, I didn't see that coming.
Seriously, Extraordinary would have worked as a stand alone series, but knowing there's at least a set up for a second season makes me happy.
***
I learned on Thursday that Doom Patrol had been cancelled and the second half of season four would also involve a wrap up story. I can't say I'm that disappointed, but it kind of proves something; if you can't really do sarcasm in print, do you have the same problem with weirdness on film? TV and film doesn't do 'off-kilter' because it isn't palatable for very long. It's why it's almost impossible to recreate a dream and give it universal meaning; Twin Peaks did weird well, yet it was grounded in reality. I can't really think of anything that tried to do something as weird but also tried to have some kind of linear understandable story. That's what Doom Patrol started off like: weird but with a story you could follow; but from season two on Doom Patrol's 'weird' was simply stupid.
Another problem with Doom Patrol is it either borders on the Vaudeville and slapstick too much at times or ends up with being weird for weird's sake; or delving into the histories of the team. The show starts to struggle when it tries to go outside its comfort zone - in many ways Doom Patrol is a sitcom; an ensemble cast in a room, each with their own quirk. A lot of the 'big' set pieces of the last couple of series felt like set pieces rather than actual threats. Mr Nobody (from series one) was a great villain, butt monsters or men with giant penises aren't - they're just silly. Having the team made up of a bunch of angry self-centred people can also be quite tiring, even if they're all mad in different ways; but using neuroses as a 'weird' tool isn't big or clever and this show falls into that category a lot. Where the team were at the mid-season break was weird enough to allow this show to go out with the bang it should have been delivering from the start of season 2; it just depends on whether Jeremy Carver and his team have the balls to do something truly different with this show.
***
The Wonder is a strange film because what purports to be a mystery is pretty much not after about 30 minutes. Florence Pugh plays the nurse brought over by the elders of a small Irish village to help prove an ongoing miraculous event. When she begins to doubt what she's seeing and tries to solve the mystery, she is 'educated' by local boy turned Daily Telegraph journalist Tom Burke about the price of deceit and how this entire 'event' is now a fait accompli - with only one outcome regardless of how wicked and tragic it will get.
I don't want to give too much away because the entire film is held together by the thing the nurse (and also a nun) are employed to watch and the last half an hour is really just a slow motion car chase (figuratively speaking); one where you wish you had some control over who was driving what vehicle. It is a little slow at times, but that's the pace of the entire film. In many ways this is a horror film where the monster is an entire village feasting off its own grief.
Pugh playing a frumpy, frustrated English nurse, resented by the locals is a perfect role for her. She's very good at being cold, charming but frosty; she also has the ability to be extremely attractive and very plain, but she's also very good and she'll win more fans with this film and her future eclectic choices.
***
Everyone Else Burns isn't what I thought it would be. Reading the Guardian review you'd think this is going to be the next best sitcom of the century - something the 21st century has struggled with... great sitcoms. I think I chuckled about twice, both times delivered by the wife, who I think is the secret weapon in this. The rest of the ultra-religious family this follows aren't necessarily funny, but they are sad and a lot of the jokes are simply things we'd expect, like what it must be like for young God Botherers to have to knock on the doors of people who wouldn't piss on them if they were in fire.
It's a little like Extraordinary, in that it's about fitting in or in this case choosing not to. Unlike Extraordinary it needs more laughs; just because you have a weird looking family doesn't mean it will be funny. I always thought Ever Decreasing Circles was a sitcom based on how fucking weird and anally retentive Richard Briers character was, but it was actually far more clever than that; Everyone Else Burns feels like a contemporary version of that but without a raison d’être or the nuances. Simon Bird isn't Richard Briers and at the moment his central character needs to find something humorous to add to proceedings.
***
I went into Django Unchained thinking it was going to be something else entirely. I think I expected more to happen in the near three hour running time. It must be a thing about Tarantino films that they all have to be really long, even if they don't need to be.
This is a simple idea - German bounty hunter enlists slave to help him identify some people, takes a shine to him, teaches him the business and then agrees to help the freed slave regain his wife. The problem is it's about an hour too long and while the underlying message is obvious, it felt like you were being beaten about the head with it a little too often.
It's not a film I can see myself returning to in the future.
***
Upon the conclusion of The Fablemans, the wife turned to me and said, "That was on for as long as Black Panther but didn't feel like I'd been watching it forever." Damning with faint praise or a seriously good indictment? You decide.
Only Steven Spielberg can write and direct a film that deals with some quite sensitive issues like anti-Semitism, mental illness and marital affairs but makes it feel like you're watching a feel good film for all the family. Because, in many ways, The Fablemans is exactly that - a feel good film about the young Spielberg's embryonic stage. It also appears to be very biographical with literally only the names changing, but don't let that put you off, it's a lot of fun. It also feels like a film that's been made to win awards and I don't mean that in a nasty or mean-spirited way, it's almost like this kind of film is only made to tickle the Academy's fancy and isn't made to make a lot of money. I mean, this is a vanity project, but it's also Spielberg and that usually guarantees VFM.
This film had a simultaneous cinema/streaming release in the USA - hence why I've had my copy since early December - it's in UK cinemas this week and I expect it will feel cinematic on the big screen because it feels like a proper grown up movie, tastefully done. The kind people will look back on in 20 years time and say things like, 'Did you ever see The Fablemans? That was an underrated film.'
***
Episode three of The Last of Us felt a little like the Last Chance Saloon for the TV show being called one of the best ever by reviewers with gamer's brains who are all under 40. The wife's only comment when I put it on was 'let's hope something actually happens.'
The kindest thing I can say about this episode is it was a sweet natured tale of love in a post apocalyptic landscape. About ten minutes into Joel and Ellie's journey away from Boston everything rewinds to 2003 and focuses on survivalist Bill, who evades the government execution squads and turns his village into a fortress. Fast forward four years and he meets Frank, who is just trying to survive. Before you know it, it's become a gay romcom behind barbed wire. These two lost lovers know Joel and Tess from a time before Boston was run by the fascist arm of the Gestapo and are self-sufficient and well-protected from the zomboids and the hordes of nutters trying to survive (given the on-line backlash from the anti-woke brigade out there, gay bashers will try extra hard to survive so they can roam the land purging it of woke LGBTQ+ survivors).
It was a good episode - after a fashion - but it moved the story along exactly nowhere and wasn't really about the two main characters at all, so what was the point of it? Why was it even here? Is this series going to be so weak on actual plot story that we're going to have 50% of episodes focusing on the back story of the following week's zomboid fodder? Three episodes in and we know more about Bill and Frank than we do about Joel and especially Ellie, but I'm not even sure I want to know their stories, or at least the last 20 years of it and that's what I think is going to happen; we're going to get what happened to Joel from the moment his daughter died in his arms to his journey across the fungal wastelands. That's going to be your USP because running away from, killing or evading the fungal infected is going to grow tiresome quickly. Especially in the wake of how long the Walking Dead franchise has milked this genre.
As with the first couple of parts, the sets are outstanding and the people doing all the Walking Dead franchise must dream of having that kind of a budget, especially when they don't seem to have much of a story. Apparently people think the 'banter' between Joel and Ellie is 'outstanding'. From what I can see Ellis barks at everyone exactly the same way. She doesn't appear to have any other mode than constipated angst.
The Last of Us might still be the highest profile mid-season drop we've had since Foundation. The jury is still out, part four needs for something to actually happen otherwise I'll leave it to all the people who've been fawning over how true to the game it is and go and watch something less boring instead.
***
Babylon is, as the wife pointed out, a kind of homage to Singing in the Rain. Early on in the film (about an hour in of the three hours) there's a rendition of the song in the year it was first released - 1929. I didn't think anything of it until the end when, in 1952, someone from the cast is watching the film.
Babylon is a semi-fictional, therefore semi-biographical, snapshot of Hollywood between the mid 1920s to the year, or so, before the Hayes Code changed the way Hollywood was. I'd wanted to see the film because I'm a bit of a film buff and I've had a particular interest in Hollywood between about 1924 and 1934 - an era where good taste and restraint was few and far between.
It was a time of excess and expression and this film follows the lives of a number of people, either directly or peripherally; Brad Pitt stars as silent movie heartthrob Jack Conrad (as maybe a Don Lockwood character), Margot Robbie as Nelly LeRoy (or maybe as a Lina Lamont type character), Jovan Adepo as talented musician Sidney Palmer and Diego Calva as Manny Torres - a Mexican migrant who yearns to be a film producer.
The film follows their careers through the ups and eventual downs; we witness Conrad's star fall, LeRoy's catapult into stardom that quickly fades because of her rather uncouth and debauched life style. We see Manny go from success to success but is constantly held back because of his unspoken but undying love for Nelly and we see Sidney, a man with principles, who walks away from a possible way out of his racially-abused life because it's not really a way out at all, it would just be a different kind of abuse.
It's a film with a lot of big, brash Cecil B DeMille type sets; an opening sequence that felt more like the big battle in Avengers: Endgame than anything else it was that grand; except this looked like it had been done in one take. This was a time when Hollywood was this uncensored den of inequity and depravity, which also had an underbelly that didn't just bite back, but will bite your head off and eat it.
Was it a good film? My biggest problem with it was I wasn't desperately bothered by any of the main players; none of them were that likeable, even Manny. For a film that's three hours long, you'd think it could have done a better job of making you care about the characters more. Take Robbie's Nelly - she's a spunky, go-get-em kinda gal, but like when she plays Harley Quinn, you don't really give a shit about her; her attitude - whether it's the characters she plays or the way she portrays them - make her a difficult actor to like. I suppose it wasn't bad, it just lacked a soul. It felt a little too cold and by the numbers and perhaps the director's love of the era overtook his ability to tell an interesting story.
***
Next time: There might be something a bit different, I'm erring towards an ITV thing. We'll work our way through the Flash Drive of Death.
No comments:
Post a Comment