Thoughts on NOSFERATU (2024)***

Robert Eggers' version of FW Murnau's iconic 1922 NOSFERATU is an earnest reimagining that looks wonderful, but I found it to be a frustrating and problematic film. First the good stuff. The film looks beautiful.  Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke film in colour but desaturate the film to look like old black and white films with colour tints to delineate the different moods and time of day of each scene. The production and costume design are immaculate, particularly in the Central European scenes. We absolutely believe we are in this gothic, sinister world.  And the ultimate test - the depiction of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) - works - with one exception that I will mention in the negative column. I also really loved Robin Carolan's evocative score and some of the performances. Lily-Rose Depp is tremendous as Ellen Hutter, as is Simon McBurney as the vampire-enabling lawyer Herr Knock. 

Now to the negative column. This version of NOSFERATU is, to my mind, not scary. And to my surprise, apart from a few very well telegraphed jump scares, it's just cheap EXORCIST style body horror. 

Second, I found a lot of it unintentionally funny, and once you get into that mindset it's hard to come back. As someone who works with legal docs, seeing Orlok sensually finger a legal covenant was hilarious. The whole film is basically about not doing sufficient legal due diligence!  Moreover, Count Orlok’s camp moustache may well be historically accurate but it looks funny.  And I cannot but believe that Willem Dafoe's attenuated pipe was a deliberate attempt at humour.  

And then there's the bad acting. Nicholas Hoult is just mediocre as Thomas Hutter but Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s acting is literally laughable.  I know his character, Friedrich Harding, is meant to be a misogynistic dullard, but must every line be spoken at eleven?  And then the poor actor is saddled with a really pointless necrophilia subplot?  What?  Just trim that nonsense and get to a tight running time.

Third, the message of this film is really problematic. Horny lonely teenagers get what’s coming to them. And what’s coming to them is Orlok orgasm and intellectual superiority? I think if the message is that a misogynistic and sexually oppressive society forced Ellen to invite in Orlok as a means to sexual expression then the film could have done more work around that rather than her saying she was lonely twice. It was a two hour plus film - I would have spent more time on that and less on pointless (thematically) necrophilia.

Interesting sidenote for anyone who has watched The Idol - in both Lily Rose Depp plays a sexually commoditised woman who we think has fallen thrall to an exploitative man but in the final scenes we realise she actually has all the power.  Okay so she has the power, but she ends up dead in this. So yeah. Feminism!

Also my perennial minor issue with all sail-ship Nosefaratus.  Why is Orlok sailing from Central Europe to the German Baltic coast? Pack that shit up on a wagon or a canal barge. Especially when in a modern re-telling you have thankfully cast off the anti-semitic undercurrent of an "other"/migrant bringing plague with them.

NOSFERATU is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes. It was released on Christmas Day 2024 in the USA and New Year's Day 2025 in the UK.

THE FALL GUY**

My two stars for THE FALL GUY are a weighted average of 90 minutes of flaccid, obvious, juvenile action-romance followed by 30 minutes of a super-fun sparky high-stakes romantic comedy. The difference? In the final 30 minutes of the film its stars Ryan Gosling (BARBIE) and Emily Blunt (A QUIET PLACE) are actually on screen together, in on the plan together, MacGuivering a trap for the Bad Guy, and vibing of each other. The two actors are superfun and have real chemistry. The problem is that this film contrives to have them at odds with each other for most of its running time.

Gosling stars as stunt man Colt Seavers who doubles for douchebag superstar Tom Ryder, clearly based upon Tom Cruise, and played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson (KICKASS).  When the star disappears from the set of his latest blockbuster, which happens to be directed by Seavers' old flame and debut director Jody (Blunt), her agent Gail (Hannah Waddingham - Ted Lasso) persuades Colt to go find the star and save the film. Crucially for some reason Colt has to do this without telling Jody. And this is what separates them for the majority of the film.

I dunno. I just didn't vibe with this film. The humour didn't catch fire for me. The meta jokes about action films and Hollywood and the 1980s, which is totally my era, just felt forced and off.  The action sequences from director David Leitch (DEADPOOL, ATOMIC BLONDE) never excited me. And the script from writer Drew Pearce (MI: ROGUE NATION) lacked any romantic fizz or genuine laughs. I feel Blunt and Gosling were doing all the heavy lifting, and it worked when they were allowed to get into it at the end of the film, but that was too late to save it for me.

THE FALL GUY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 126 minutes. It is on global release. 

TENET (some spoilers but they won't deter your fun)

Try to feel it!

TENET is a return to form  for Christopher Nolan after the technically brilliant but narratively simplistic and arguably jingoistic, DUNKIRK.  He is far safer in his home territory of cerebral sci-fi and kinetic action sequences.  In TENET, the big concept is that a future scientist created a technology to reverse an object's entropy. So it's not technically time travel but it does involve people and objects (cars/guns) going backwards from our present-day perspective.  None of it really makes sense, and there's a funny early sequence where poor Clemence Poesy has to do her best Basil Exposition impression, both explaining the concept AND telling us not to think too much about it.  

Realising the danger of this tech, the future scientist splits the algorithm into nine parts - like Horcruxes or Infinity Stones -  and hides them in our present. (Why doesn't the scientist just destroy it? Who the frack knows.) This naturally pisses off vague future people, who want to find and re-assemble the algorithm and use it to wage war on the present. 

It's not a very original plot is it?!

Why does the Future hate us, mummy? They hate us for the same reasons Greta Thunburg hates us.  Moreover, they are making a massive gamble that by wiping us out they won't also make their own existence void. And so they enable a present-day Russian oligarch called Sator to re-assemble the Infinity Glove, sorry The Algorithm, starting with a piece that was hidden in the closed Soviet city where he grew up.  

Is this a spoiler? Well yes, but not in any way that should detract from your enjoyment of the film.  The real fun is in seeing how Nolan takes us and his Protagonist through his world where the action is happening simultaneously in linear and reverse time. It’s a lot of fun of seeing events replay themselves from different time perspectives, and recognising little Easter eggs laid early in the film pay off later on.  This involves hand-to-hand combat scenes and car chases where people are fighting in dual times. It's all just enormous fun and technically an absolute marvel. No other film-maker is going to literally crash a 747 into an airport hangar for you.  And the delightful insouciance of Himesh Patel's Mahir explaining this plan is presumably a meta-comment on Nolan's own audacity.  

Another reason why this film is fun is its knowing humour.  First off, we have John David Washington playing against the very notion of suave sophisticated Bond - throwing barbs about snobbery back at Michael Caine's knighted fixer.  But mostly, it's all about Robert Pattinson's Neil, who starts the film as a kind of crumpled linen-suited alcohol soaked minor diplomat but ends as something of a hero.  I couldn't resist his rakish charm, perhaps modelled on a younger Jeremy Irons?  Let's see more of this! Every time he wasn't on screen - for example a deathly dull interlude on a yacht in the middle of the movie - I wanted to press the fast forward button.

Tailoring goals.

Another reason to love the film is its intelligence and its absolute refusal to dumb down for a mass audience. And to all the reviewers out there who claimed they couldn't understand what was happening, my retort is to DO BETTER.  Nolan takes great pains to colour code the timelines and to play back scenes so that we really understand what is happening from each angle. If you don't get it, that really is on you.

That said, there are limits.  Nolan's refuses to give the protagonist a name. He's called The Protagonist. He even has a conversation with Dimple Kapadia's arms dealer about who really is the protagonist. This is the sort of pretentious wank that only literary theory students should be allowed to indulge in.

The plot is also - sci-fi concept aside - pretty hackneyed. The idea of protagonist and antagonist in a race to assemble a MacGuffin that can - da da daaaaaah - end the world - is fairly common. And even at the micro-level, the idea of a protagonist falling for a waif-like blonde abused by her evil oligarch husband is pretty well-worn. Indeed it's something straight out of a B-list Bond movie like NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN. 

I am a waif-like blonde on my abusive lover's yacht, please help!

As is Kenneth Branagh's awful Russian acc-yent.  Could they really have not found a Russian actor to play Sator? Not to mention poor Elizabeth Debicki basically just reprising her role from THE NIGHT MANAGER here.  Every time Nolan tries to make us care about the fate of her and her son, I thought, I just don't care at all. Also, if you marry a very rich old Russian dude, are you not somewhat suspicious about what he did, and what kind of man he was and is, to get all that money?  My sympathy is thin. Let's get back to cool action sequences!

Please save me from my luxury yacht - again!

Anyway, B-grade Bond plot and silly Russian accents aside, TENET is a superbly fun and twisty, technically marvellous ride. And for the first time since THE PRESTIGE, I actually CARED about the characters. Not the stupid woman and her pointless son, but the evident bromance between Neil and The Protagonist. Now there's a sequel I wish Nolan would break his no sequel rule for.

TENET has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated 12A in the UK and PG-13 in the USA. It is on release in the UK and wherever the pandemic is allowing cinemas to be open.

OUTLAW KING

David Mackenzie (HELL OR HIGH WATER) shifts gears to medieval Scotland for his Netflix film, OUTLAW KING. It stars Chris Pine with a dubious Scottish accent as Scottish clan leader and aspirant king, Robert Bruce.  As the movie opens his dad is bending the knee to evil imperialist King Edward I of England (Stephen Dillane, the first of many GoT alum) - this is not a film that traffics in nuance. We are asked to believe that a newly head of the family Robert can  anachronistically resist schtupping his new bride (feisty Florence Pugh) while also letting him get away with murdering his rival for the crown. This film REALLY wants us to like its protagonist! So Robert raises a rebel army and takes on the English, helped mightily by the fact that the legendary king dies leaving his moron son in charge.  The film therefore culminates in a very cool battle scene that more than compensates for its dodgy accents, two-dimensional characterisations, and stilted opening twenty minutes. In fact, it's so well done, and so similar in concept to a key moment at Waterloo, that I basically now want Mackenzie to direct a film about that. Rare praise indeed from the woman who runs the @relivewaterloo twitter account and pretty much worships the Sergei Bondarchuk version!

OUTLAW KING is rated R and has a running time of 121 minutes.  The film played both Toronto and London 2018 and was released on Netflix last week. 

NOCTURNAL ANIMALS - BFI LFF 2016 - Day 11

It appears that Tom Ford's sophomore film is controversial - with people either in love with it or damning it as dull and potentially misogynistic.  My view is that it's neither excellent nor terrible, but something far more unforgivable - boring.

Amy Adams stars as Susan - a bored rich Los Angeles art gallery owner who is growing cynical about her perfect life and the pretentious art she surrounds herself with.  Abandoned by her philandering fraudulent husband (Armie Hammer - barely used), she starts reading a manuscript of a novel her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) has written.  She basically left him because he was a romantic loser, and the novel he writes is essentially about an emasculated man who fails to protect his wife (Isla Fisher) and child from some violent slack-jawed yokels (Aaron Taylor-Johnson included).  I suspect that the point of this B-grade revenge plot is to prove that in life as in fiction, the husband was basically weak, but kind of over-came it, depending on what you make of the ending.

AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

Joss Whedon had an almost impossible task to pull of in his AVENGERS sequel.  He had to give enough time to the storylines and character arcs of all the major superheroes we've come to know and love in the increasingly complex Marvel Cinematic Universe.  He had to also make room for new additions - not one, but three bad guys, and a nebulous almost a-ethical good guy.  He had to create enough CGI heavy wow moments of action and stunts. But he also had to give the movie heart. And all this in just over two hours.