FAHRENHEIT 451 (2018)

HBO's new adaptation of Ray Bradbury's iconic sci-fi dystopian novel is a strange and bloodless beast, differing wildly from the source material, handsomely designed, yet lacking in real punch. The film stars the wildly talented Michael B Jordan (BLACK PANTHER's antagonist) as Montag, a Fireman whose job is to burn books. Not just seditious books. All books. Because in this dystopian future books are scene as sowing chaos and frustration - giving people too many ideas - ideas that confuse or offend.  As the film progresses two important character developments occur that felt unearned and unexplored to me.  The first is that Montag steals a book - in shock that a woman would love them so much she would commit suicide rather than survive them.  This leads him to speak to Clarisse (Sofia Boutella), an "eel" who subversively reads books, leading him to a spiritual awakening.  Boutella is wasted here in a thin role that's basically a plot advancer.  The second thing is that we learn that Montag's supposedly dogmatically rigid boss Beatty is actually a secret reader too. And yet Montag never looks intellectually enquiring and Michael Shannon gives his standard 2-D performance as snarling baddie.

The plot motors on and we get to a finale that is meant to be profoundly moving but left me unaffected, as did the entirety of this film. I am deeply disappointed by Ramin Bahrani (MAN PUSH CART)'s direction and actually his failure to get better performances out of Jordan and Shannon - two actors I love. I suspect that this has something to do with a rather thin screenplay by Amir Nedari, that strips Montag of his wife, his home life, and makes Clarisse a much thinner character.  The only thing that I found really interesting was the production design and the way in which book burning is now a kind of reality TV show. But how much more powerful it could've been to show flashbacks to the world that slipped into illiteracy - to show our world - in which long form reading has given way to headlines and click bait - and fake news.....

FAHRENHEIT 451 has a running time of 100 minutes, premiered at Cannes 2018, and was released on HBO this week.

BLACK PANTHER

BLACK PANTHER comes to our screens freighted with the self-appointed weight of political history. It's as if action movies starring Denzel Washington, Will Smith or Wesley Snipes never happened. It's as if nuanced black action heroes like Lando Calrissian never happened.  This, we are told, is a watershed moment where a major franchise blockbuster not only stars a single male action hero, but a whole cast full of amazing black male and female talent.  I can't but agree - there's a qualitative leap when you have an entire film full of black actors, with African accents, with most of the action set in Africa.  This is all to the good, and it's great to see black representation go to that next stage, but I can't help but feel that that tide of goodwill toward the film - goodwill that I too shared - has clouded critical attitudes toward it.  I am hugely excited that such a project has come to our screens, but I think it would be patronising not to review it critically.  I sense in a lot of the excitement in the tweets since its preview screenings began, at best conflation between excitement that the project exists vs its content - and at worst virtue signalling.  Because let's be clear, this is an entirely disposable occasionally very funny, but often rather dull and overly complicated film.  And its titular character, as portrayed by Chadwick Boseman (GET ON UP), is the least interesting thing about it.

The story has so many strands it's hard to know where to begin.  We have a thinly veiled version of Rwanda blessed with a rare metal called Vibranium which gives their king, Black Panther, extra-ordinary power, and the country futuristic technology.  The film takes from this premise the following concern:  

1) Should this tech be hidden to prevent its exploitation by others;

2) Shared with the world for good;

3) Or be used to get revenge and achieve domination over the rest of the world? 

Broadly speaking, Black Panther starts off believing the first, and this story is his coming of age story, a classical Greek tale of a son learning to confront his father's assumptions and become his own man.  His wariness is made credible by the existence of a nasty white South African thief called Ulysses Klaue, who's being chased down by a CIA agent called Everett Ross.   By contrast, and despite seeing all this, Black Panther's little sister Shuri, who is a tech genius, believes the tech should be shared, tradition thrown off, and modernity embraced.  Finally, Black Panther and Shuri have a cousin called Erik Killmonger, who as his name suggest with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, is angry at being rejected by his family, the death of his father, and wants to overthrow Black Panther and use the Vibranium for evil.

Where the film works well is in its opening 45 minutes.  The prologue nicely sets up some of the mythology and origins of the Black Panther/T'Challa, and the emotional ties between father, uncle and son as well as the Panther and his love interest. The action is fast paced, we are introduced to the the man we think is the antagonist, and also the character who truly turns out to be the real threat.  And we get the surprise of two of the least well known members of the cast - Letitia Wright and Dalai Gurira - being by far the most charismatic and funny.  The problem is that after that we get a middle section that is extremely bogged down in all the intricacies of the cumbersome plot. And a final section that is your typical Marvel action set-piece with bad CGI.  Someone in the screening I attended, who evidently loved the film, shouted "Rewind!" as the credits rolled, and I just wanted to shout back "Edit!"  There's a decent 100 minute action movie struggling inside this over-blown 134 minute running time.

The problems for the film are worse than just a baggy script though. Chadwick Boseman is a charisma-less lead. Perhaps the most charisma-less lead since Henry Cavill's Superman.  And he plays the role not just with a South African accent, but with an almost pastiche version of a Nelson Mandela impression.  His entire acting range seems to be to bite his lip, and look concerned. He's acted off the screen by Daniel Kaluuya (GET OUT) as W'Kabi, his fellow Wakandan, not to mention Michael B Jordan (CREED) as his troubled cousin Killmonger.  And that's before we even get to the women. Lupita N'yongo is anonymous as the love interest - an early attempt to rescue Boko Haram kidnapped women makes you think she's gonna be feisty, but no, she really is just there to look adoring and be supportive. And so she in turn is acted off the screen by Letitia Wright's smart, irreverent Shuri, and by the Black Panther's General Okoye (Danai Gurira). And to be honest - and I'm not gonna be popular for saying this, the entire bunch of them are outclassed by Andy Serkis cameo as the evil Klaue, and he seemed to be having far more fun on screen than I did in the cinema. 

The tragedy of this film is that having waited so long for a black-led ensemble action movie the result is so anodyne. Take a Bond-like villain here, a character that's like Q, your typical Marvel action scenes and tech, an indifferent score and special effects.... And then for no reason at all, chuck in a cataphract rhino and a cliche of tribal strife. The result is a film that isn't half as good as BLADE and middling by the standards of the MCU.

BLACK PANTHER has a running time of 134 minutes and is rated 12A for moderate violence, injury detail and a rude gesture. It goes on global release on Wednesday 14th February. 

FANTASTIC FOUR (2015)

One gets the feeling that FOX have never really known who to handle the Fantastic Four IP, and with any luck the poor performance of this film will prevent a sequel and allow the rights to revert back to Marvel. We've had the broadly inoffensive but unmemorable 2005 and 2007 outings starring Ioan Gruffud, a pre-Cap Chris Evans and Jessica Alba.  And now we get a reboot of actively poor quality starring a much younger cast.   This causes as many problems as it solves - sure, the movie might appeal to a younger demographic but as a result the Four meet in a kind of super-nerd school that gives the movie a feeling of ripping of the X-MEN reboot.  Worst of all, the writer-director Josh Trank massively fell out with the studio and disowned the final 90 minute cut, and the resulting film feels incoherent in its editing.

Anyways, back to basics. The movie kicks of with twenty minutes of tedious pre-amble in which a geeky young Reed Richards befriends Ben Grimm and the two work on building a teleportation machine only to be mocked by teachers and students alike. Fast forward to their late teens and Reed (Miles Teller0 and Grimm (Jamie Bell) are recruited by Franklyn Storm (Reg E Caffey) to join his well-funded research org.  They hook up with Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B Jordan and Kate Mara) as well as the rebellious Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) and create the transportation device.  Pissed off that pro scientists will get to pilot it, they decide to take the ship out to Planet Zero, shit hits the fan, they get their superpowers and Doom becomes a destructive comic book villain.  Thereafter we get a kind of Hulk goes to Latin America to find his soul interlude and the inevitable showdown.  

The actors are all decent, so why does this movie suck? A hammy derivative script, hamstrung by bad editing and shitty special FX. Move along, there's nothing to see here. 

FANTASTIC FOUR is on general release. It has a running time of 100 minutes and is available to rent and own.

FRUITVALE STATION

Oh dear. The poor women next to me was in floods of tears and actually apologised for crying to me when the lights went up.  This may well be a peculiar trait of the English: apologising for a visceral emotional reaction.  I rather gather that this has been the response of the majority of viewers of FRUITVALE STATION - the critically acclaimed debut feature from writer-director Ryan Coogler. He has evidently made a deeply-felt earnest and politically charged film, and audiences are responding in kind.  After all, who can't feel sorry for a charming, fallible, but loving son, boyfriend and father who, through no fault of his own, ends up getting shot by a policeman at the metro station that gives this film its title.  The real Oscar Grant didn't deserve to die.  But he also deserves a better film than this piece of emotionally manipulative hagiography.

Ryan Coogler's conceit is to give us the man on the day before he died, enlightening only with a flashback to his time in prison and his beef with a fellow prisoner.  We see Oscar as a loving if occasionally unfaithful boyfriend, raising his daughter Tatiana responsibly, and supported by a loving extended family. It's certainly a far cry from the cliche of young black men raised by single mothers, ditching their multiple baby-mamas and up to no good.  To be sure, he's done time, and he has a cowardice when admitting to his family and friends that he's lost his job, but deep down we know Oscar is a great guy.  Why? Because he helps a pregnant woman take a leak and cradles a dying dog.  The problem is that this is a whitewash. The incident with the dog just didn't happen, and other factors we should have known about aren't mentioned.  Most crucially, the way the movie wraps up leads the audience strongly to believe that Oscar was deliberately shot by a racist cop, when the truth could be that it was just an honest mistake. Who knows?  The point is that the film doesn't admit of an alternative narrative and in doing so becomes trite propaganda.

Okay. So what if we were to approach this film as fiction and ignore any attempt at veracity, how does it work as pure drama? The opening shot of found footage showing a young man brutally treated on a metro platform is powerful and throws us into the action.  The opening scenes of the movie give us a character sketch of his relationship with his girlfriend that is deft and interesting. But then, as he roams around for the day getting ready for his mother's birthday party the movie loses pace and interest. We are marking time, hungry for character development.  The set piece confrontation at the metro station is brilliantly tense and horrific, if one can draw oneself back into the film, but just as you think "this is a tremendous movie" it descends into hackneyed E.R. territory and then into its politically simplistic ending.  So, a movie that doesn't quite cohere - that doesn't quite convince - hanging on the shoulders of a masterful set piece. A tremendous waste.

FRUITVALE STATION has a running time of 87 minutes and has been rated R in the USA and is rated 15 for strong language, violence, and injury detail.

FRUITVALE STATION played Sundance 2013 where it won both the Best Drama and Audience Award and Cannes where it won the Un Certain Regard - Avenir award. It also won the Independent Spirit Best First Feature Award. It opened last year in the USA, Singapore, Greece and Turkey and opened earlier this year in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Belgium, South Korea, Portugal, Brazil, Italy, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Germany. It opens in the UK and Ireland on June 6th.