DUNE: PART TWO***

DUNE: PART TWO is probably about as good a film as one can make about Frank Herbert's iconic religio-sci-fi book. The flaws I found in this film are mostly down to how distasteful and uninspiring I find the source material - with its superficial embrace of Middle Eastern and North African culture and the fact that its female characters are almost entirely reduced to breeding vessels. I understand that I am not perhaps the appropriate demographic for the books. But Denis Villeneuve has taken it and created two films of arresting visuals and a stunning score.  Greig Fraser's IMAX cinematography is bold and beautiful and truly envelopes us in Arrakis. And Hans Zimmer is at his finest combining sandworm-commanding drums, rock guitars, and menacing prophecy-reciting choirs.

As this instalment opens, we are mere days after part one. Paul Atreides and his mother Lady Jessica have survived the massacre of their House on the desert planet of Arrakis.  Paul has proven himself a fearsome warrior to the indigenous Fremen, some of whom think he is their long-awaited messiah.  This delights Lady Jessica and Atreides loyalist Gurney Halleck, who believes the Fremen will be a powerful fighting force. But Paul's lover Chani has it right - these prophecies are just stories being used to control the Fremen.  The narrative arc is powered by the choice that faces Paul. Will he be swayed by his prophetic dreams of devastating interstellar war and reject being a messiah. Or will he exploit the Fremen for revenge on the Harkonnens and seize the imperial throne?

There is so much to love in how Villeneuve brings this to the screen. He wisely leaves the sandworms as barely seen epic creatures. The production and costume design of the Harkonnen's world and of the Baron and Na-Baron in particular are arresting. 

But the performances veer from mediocre to weak. I found something almost comical in Timothee Chalamet's petulance as Paul and was unfortunately reminded of THE LIFE OF BRIAN - "He's not the Messiah - he's a very naughty boy!" Once you see the film through that lens - "the gourd!" - there's no turning back. There was zero screen chemistry between Chalamet's Paul and Zendaya's Chani which is odd as they seem to be constantly low-key flirting on the red carpet. Christopher Walken is hopelessly miscast as the Emperor - totally bringing me out of the film with his unique American accent. Only Javier Bardem stood out as Stilgar - petrifying in his increasing religious fervour.

I suspect that performances aren't really what interest Villeneuve. He is all about spectacle. Script and character are somewhat beyond the point for him. But this leads to weird choices around narrative. 

Most obviously, Villeneuve's choice not to allow the narrative to unravel over several years problematic. It felt as though Paul's journey from young pup to Emperor had taken place over a few weeks! Is it really so easy to seize power?  And how is this going to impact the timeline around Alia, who we see as a grown woman in Paul's dreams.  Another choice I disagree with is to minimise the influence of the Guild and put all of the machinations onto the Bene Gesserit cult. 

But perhaps the biggest macro issue I have with both books and film is that there's no-one to really root for. On the one hand you have a decrepit Emperor who seems flaccid and pointless. Then there are the comically evil and therefore uninteresting Harkonnens.  The Bene Genesserit are nuts and seem to have no endgame. The Fremen are religious extremists. And Paul is a self-acknowledged harbinger of mass genocide. It's like watching Succession but without the comedy swearing.

DUNE: PART TWO has a running time of 166 minutes and is rated-PG-13. It is on global release. 

THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.

AMSTERDAM***

What a glorious failure AMSTERDAM is! A film that is indulgent, incoherent, tonally uneven and not as whacky as it thinks it is.  And yet, and yet, there's something noble in its square-on look at racism, fascism, class snobbery and misogyny - a film that shows us clearly what war actually does to vital bodies - at the same time as attempting a JULES ET JIM romance combined with a Coen Brothers'esque caper. Writer-director David O Russell is more than ever himself - for all his brilliance and over-reach. This film is absolutely his.  I found flashes of brilliance within it. And in a month where Germany convicted men of fomenting a far-right coup, the central message remains important.

Christian Bale channels Kramer from Seinfeld in his role as Burt, a World War One veteran with a glass eye and a fondness for self-medicating with gonzo drugs. Burt is balanced out by Harold, a black lawyer who oozes charm, calm and confidence in a much-needed straight performance from John David Washington.  The third partner in their friendship is Valerie Voze, a daring, courageous artist played with elan by Margot Robbie.  The three live a bohemian life in post-war Amsterdam, helping vets recover from their horrific injuries, until the boys return home to New York.  

Fast forward to 1933, where the film opens, and a glamorous rich young woman (Taylor Swift) is murdered shortly after asking our boys to investigate the suspicious death of her father, their commanding officer. So begins a shaggy caper in which we discover that a bunch of fascist sympathisers are trying to manipulate a US general (Robert de Niro) into launching a veteran-backed military coup. Sound too fanciful? It really happened. 

The resulting film is, as I said, a mess. But it's a well acted one with some amazingly funny set-pieces and a truly sinister slippery turn from Rami Malek and Mike Myers as a British spy standing out among the bit parts. The film also looks fantastic, with stunning production and costume design and a dreamy sepia tinted warm glow thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki's lensing. I don't know what this film truly is, genre wise. It doesn't coalesce. But I'm glad it exists. 

AMSTERDAM is rated R and has a running time of 134 minutes. It is streaming on Disney plus.

THE NORTHMAN - Zero stars

THE NORTHMAN is a really bad, stupid movie made by a director - Robert Eggers - who has really blown it.  

It stars Alexander Skarsgard (BIG LITTLE LIES) as a super buff version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. We first meet him as a young prince, whose father (Ethan Hawke - BEFORE SUNRISE) is offed by his treacherous uncle, leaving our young Amleth to run for his life.  We then meet him as a buff young man, raised as a berserker warrior then Russian slave, intent on revenge, as foretold by equally nuts prophetess Bjork and as enabled by his witchy lover (THE QUEEN'S GAMBIT's Anya Taylor-Joy).  So he goes and kills his uncle and his mum - who it turns out rather resented the offspring of rape - and founds his own dynasty. The End.

What makes this unwatchable - apart from the really dumb plot full of dump people motivated by greed and expressing themselves in a mix of violence and drugged out lunacy - is the fact that all the acting is BAD. Pantomime bad. Bad with a side order of the worst fake accents since Dick van Dyke in MARY POPPINS.  What is this half Scottish half Irish half whatever nonsense they are all speaking? It's utterly distracting, totally unconvincing, and takes you out of the story at every turn.

These are all unspeakable people with unlistenable accents and no amount of self-conscious sweepingly majestic cinematography makes up for that.

THE NORTHMAN has a running time of 137 minutes and is rated R. The film is available to rent on streaming services.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO**** - BFI London Film Festival 2021 - Day 4

Edgar Wright (BABY DRIVER) returns to our screens with a brilliant thriller that's more murder mystery than horror film.  It stars Thomasin McKenzie (JOJO RABBIT) as a young fashion student called Eloise who is obsessed with all things 1960s thanks to her awesome grandma (the iconic Rita Tushingham). The key plot device is that Eloise can, M Night Shyamalan style, see dead people, and soon becomes obsessed with the glamorous Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy - EMMA) who rented Eloise's bedsit decades earlier.  As Eloise lives through Sandie she experiences the exhilaration of dancing in the Cafe de Paris and being seduced by Matt Smith's charming music manager, Jack. But soon the night-time dreams become nightmares as we learn that Jack is pimping Sandie out, and watch Sandie transform from free-spirited confident young woman to a weary, angry woman who doesn't believe she's worth saving. This allows for one of the most powerfully emotional scenes in the film, set-up by many previous mirror shots where Eloise and Sandie can almost interact with each other: Eloise tries to punch through a mirror to get Sandie to look at herself/Eloise and confirm her worth.

To say more would be to spoil the plot twists carefully laid down by screenwriter Krysty Wilson-Cairns (PENNY DREADFUL) and the marketing department. What I will say is that Wilson-Cairns script is delightfully authentic in its depiction of mean girl verbal violence and more profoundly of sexual exploitation. And as with all Edgar Wright films, the use of music is exceptional. I also loved the design team's recreation of a seedy Soho that has all but disappeared now, filtered through DP Chung-Hoon Chung (THE HANDMAIDEN)'s neon lights and rain splashed streets. But most of all, this was just a really enjoyable film that genuinely surprised me - both with its satisfying plot twist AND with its thought-provoking depiction of a bright young girl's slide into prostitution.

I'm only docking it a star because of Thomasin McKenzie's inconsistent and distracting West Country accent.

LAST NIGHT IN SOHO is rated R and has a running time of 114 minutes. The movie played Venice, Toronto and the BFI London Film Festival and will be released in the UK and the USA on October 29th. 

SPOILERS BELOW: This film has a REALLY clever marketing and misdirection plan. The trailer and media coverage lead us to believe it's a horror film rather than a murder mystery because Matt Smith's Jack is depicted as the bad guy. We go into the film thinking that the real mystery is whether Eloise will go mad and whether anyone will believe her when she tells them Jack killed Sandie.  My first inkling that this was not the game was when Sam Claflin turned up as a vice squad officer. Why hadn't he been in any of the media coverage or on the red carpet. Why hadn't I spotted him in the IMDB credits? Well obviously because we need to believe that Terence Stamp is the older version of Jack for the misdirect to work. And I checked. Even on the film's end credits, Sam is just listed as playing Punter number 5. Random side-note - I've long thought Claflin would make a great Bond and in his suit and slightly sixties fuller hair I was confirmed in this belief.

EMMA. (2020)

Autumn de Wilde's directorial debut is a handsomely made new version of Jane Austen's iconic romantic comedy, Emma. Except here it's cast as "Emma." with a full stop after it because the director wants us to know it's a period drama.  The film reflects some of this heavy handed and just bizarre gesturing. Why, for instance, do Harriet's schoolmates need to march around the village in red cloaks like something out of The Handmaid's Tale?  There's also lots of plain bad judgment.  Why does Mr Knightley have to be shown arse-bare? I blame Andrew Davies.  Why is Harriet's school bedroom more lavish than a country house?  Why do we need to see Mr Knightley petulantly throwing a fit when his initial attempt to propose to Emma is interrupted - and yes, dear reader, that is not a scene from the novel.

Still, one can forgive this EMMA.(!) its occasional lapses, and indeed its lack of ambition relative to - say - Greta Gerwig's superb meta-textual LITTLE WOMEN. This EMMA. is a movie for our strange times - and thanks to our strange times, available to stream at home. It is very pretty, very soothing, very funny, and very romantic. And indeed, apart from the lapses cited above, comfortingly faithful to the original text. 

It tells the tale of a spoiled young rich girl called Emma who takes pity on an illegitimate schoolgirl, much her social inferior, called Harriet. Rather than marry a solid, decent farmer, Emma persuades Harriet to aim socially higher, for the oleaginous reverend Mr Elton. Meanwhile Emma has her head turned by the similarly charming but nasty Mr Churchill, becoming nasty under his influence, until a third act redemption, with the social order being restored.  

I very much liked Anya Taylor-Joy (THE WITCH) as Emma. She gets that Emma really is a frightfully selfish snob at the start of the book with a nastiness that Gwyneth Paltrow simply wasn't willing to explore in her screen version of the heroine.  I also rather like Billy Nighy playing himself / Emma's hypochondriac father.  Whoever decided that his heavily brocaded jackets should camouflage themselves into his armchair and screens is a genius - and I like how the added comedy of the screens allows for a declaration of love later.  I even liked Johnny Flynn as a less than austere Mr Knightley and Mia Goth as Harriet Smith.

But the stars of the show are always in the smaller parts - with Miranda Hart heart-breaking as Miss Bates - and Tanya Reynolds of SEX EDUCATION simply brilliant as the odious Mrs Elton.   On the other hand, Amber Anderson was deeply anonymous as Jane Fairfax.

Overall, this really is a very charming, light, uplifting and wonderful piece of escapism. 

EMMA. is rated PG and has a running time of 124 minutes. The film is available on streaming services. 

SPLIT - Crimbo Binge-watch #4

With the release of GLASS on January 18th 2019 I thought it was about time I got my arse in gear and watched M Night Shyamalan's super villain origins story, SPLIT - the successor to UNBREAKABLE and THE SIXTH SENSE and prequel to GLASS.  That GLASS is happening at all is thanks to the remarkable box office success of SPLIT - making just under $290m off a budget of only $9m - making it the most profitable film of the year. 

I can happily report that SPLIT is a truly remarkable film beyond its financials - perhaps Shyamalan's best since UNBREAKABLE - and certainly featuring a career best performance from its lead actor James McAvoy. He plays a man suffering from the real-world-controversial psychological disease of Dissociative Identity Disorder.  He contains 23 personalities of which we see McAvoy portray a five or six, sometimes moving between them in the same scene. It's a truly bravura performance - encompassing not just different accents, but different ages, sexes, sexual orientations and personalities.  Shyamalan goes further than modern psychiatry - positing through his avatar of the psychologist (Betty Buckley - also superb) - that each different identity can manifest itself physically differently. And while McAvoy *is* physically transformed for one of his identities for the rest he merely relies on posture, confidence, presence to make himself appear larger, smaller, or more or less meaning.  For the life of me I cannot think why his performance was not nominated for awards other than the industry's prejudice against genre films in general, or Shyamalan in particular. 

McAvoy apart this is just a very well acted film across the board from a cast of largely unknown actors.  It's also a film that is tightly plotted and does more with less. I was shocked at how low its rating was, but then again, it suggests rather than shows violence. It also has a commendably light touch with make-up and CGI.  Even in his final identity, McAvoy is still a visible, tangible person, rather than some Marvel-esque super-villian. I also loved how it takes the typical trope of teenage hot girls trapped by a killer but gives them agency and smarts, and does't ever show them gratuitously running around naked covered in blood. (ASSASSINATION NATION, I'm looking at you.)

TL-DR - this is one of the best films I've seen his year - admittedly belatedly - and now I cannot wait for GLASS.

SPLIT has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film was released in 2016.