DISENCHANTED*

DISENCHANTED is a joyless, tuneless mess of a sequel that may well put Amy Adams' career to bed. Think about it: when was the last time she was the leading lady in an actual hit?  But the real issue here isn't anyone's performance (although to be sure, no-one looks like they're having a good time).  The real issue is a messy,  overly-complex script that doesn't seem to know what it wants the film to be about. 

As the movie opens, we see our fairytale princess Giselle (Adams) now married to her Manhattan lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey).  They're both over-tired and stressed parenting a new baby daughter and a surly teenage Morgan (newcomer Gabriella Baldacchino). So, they move to suburbia and meet Maya Rudolph's Malvina - the oppressively perfect mean girl who seems to run the town. At this point we think the plot is going to be about Giselle coping with the reality after Happy Ever After, and dealing with a real-life villain.  

But no. To add a needless complication and magical Macguffin we have King Edward (James Marsden) and Queen Nancy (Idina Menzel) turn up with a magic wand that Giselle uses to turn her town into a fairytale, and herself into a wicked stepmother.  This totally unanchors the plot, which is now about which mean girl will win. By the end, I think the point the movie is trying to make is that Morgan has to accept Giselle as her real mum.  But all that stuff about middle-aged and middle-class ennui seems to have been forgotten, and Malvina is presumably still harrumphing around the town scaring all in sight.

There was nothing charming or funny or wonderful about this film. It felt joyless and directionless and cheap. The quality of the songwriting was particularly disappointing. I am awarding it a sole star for the only decent and mischievous number - where Giselle and Malvina debate who is the most wicked. The rest is disposable.

DISENCHANTED is rated PG and has a running time. It is on release on Disney+.

UNCUT GEMS

UNCUT GEMS is perhaps the most unique and certainly one of the best films of 2019 - a surreal, 80s-vibe, darkly comic thriller, in which against all probability I became insanely invested in the largely self-inflicted travails of its hero Howard.  As played by Adam Sandler in a role reminiscent of his angry-loveable PUNCH DRUNK LOVE intensity, Howard has a life of unremitting stress. He's broken up from his wife (Idina Menzel) but still enmeshed in Jewish family dinners.  He's set up his mistress in a city apartment.  His diamond business is doing well thanks to the big music and sports buyers his middle-man (Lakeith Stanfield) brings in, and he's just been smuggled a super-valuable rock containing uncut gems. The problem is that Howard also has a massive gambling problem, and spends the entirety of the film's running time trying to fence the gems to pay the debt.  Oh yeah, and did I mention he finances his ever more gargantuan bets with mob loans?  

I was initially reluctant to watch this film because I'd heard such extreme reactions at the London Film Festival. People said it was nerve-wracking and intense - like having Adam Sandler just shout at you for two hours.  But I was pleasantly surprised at how funny the film was, and how the directors really did give the audience a chance to pause and recalibrate every once in a while - usually in a quieter family scene.  But the final act really is super-tense, and just phenomenally well crafted and I was literally on the edge of my seat. I was hugely invested in whether Howard would come through, despite his stupidity, because at the end of the day, the poor idiot is an addict, and actually he's not an idiot - there's something really impressive about his ability to keep spinning stories to keep his debtors at bay.  This is Sandler's best performance since PUNCH DRUNK and I was with him every step of the way. It's hard to think of anyone else carrying off this performance.

Phenomenal performance apart, everything about the production and costume design, the cinematography and the use of music is superb. Darius Khondji gives us  images that are at times gritty and urban-realist and at times claustrophobic and surreal and at times neon-lit 80s music video.  It's like being in a film that's at once recognisably the diamond district and at once something almost fairy-tale like.  Most of all, the Safdie Brothers have a confidence with tonal shifts that take us from casinos to auction houses and back again. This film is a tour de force and deserves to be seen. It also deserves far more awards love than it has been given.  

UNCUT GEMS is rated R and has a running time of 135 minutes.  The film played Telluride, Toronto and London 2019 and is now available to stream on Netflix. 

FROZEN II

I walked into FROZEN II expected nothing more than a cynical shameless cash-in on the success of its predecessor.  I knew Disney wouldn't have the balls to give Elsa a gay love interest so it didn't seem as if the story had anywhere to go. But I have to say that all my cynicism was overturned. FROZEN II is a beautifully told, technically stunning, deeply moving film, and one of the best I've seen this year. What's more, having heard a post-film Q & A with director Jennifer Lee, I can happily report that none of the character evolutions have been organised to be safe or commercial - rather to be true to the much-beloved characters and how they might feel at this "second act of a Broadway play".   A classic example of this is with the storyline of Kristoff. As the movie opens, Kristoff (Jonathan Groff) is grappling with how to craft the perfect proposal for Princess Anna (Kristen Bell).  But the writers actually went so far as to create and screen test a version where Anna proposes to Kristoff. The objection wasn't conservative, but that after a movie's worth of his efforts, it felt mean not to let him do it.  Similarly, when it comes to Elsa (Idina Menzel), I'm no fool - of course Disney isn't going to let her be out gay. But Jennifer Lee did make the good point that she's not actually ready for any relationship yet, because she's still at a weird place.  If the first film was about Elsa learning to accept that she can't hide who she is and isolate herself, the second film is about her moving away from just being almost pathologically grateful to be accepted by Arundel, to being genuinely happy in her own environment.

So that's the basic story arc. I loved the way the writers put it.  We have Anna as a fairytale princess and Elsa as a mythic archetype.  And as in the first film, we have to have Anna pull Elsa back from a classic mythic tragic fate, but we also have to respect that each has their own world.  To come to this resolution, we need to allow them to explore their back story. Why doesn't Anna have magic powers? Why were their parents out in a storm on a ship? To find out, the sisters, Kristoff and Olaf head north from Arundel to explore an enchanted forest that contains a dam that stops Arundel being flooded.  In doing so, we get a beautiful story that lightly but earnestly essays the dangers of not respecting nature, and the difficulty of confronting a colonial exploitative past. At the emotional level, there's a beautiful story about not being ashamed to depend on others, and how people from very different backgrounds (indeed, genres!) can come together to balance each other out, without demanding conformity.

All of which sounds terribly profound and earnest, and it is. But it's all dressed up in the most wonderful comedy and musical numbers. Olaf the snowman has a show-stopping old fashioned musical number that had the little children laughing.  Kristoff gets a parody 80s rock ballad that had the adults crying with laughter.  And the big number of this piece - "Into The Unknown" is just as beautifully crafted and penetrating as anything in the first film. I laughed, I cried, and was transported into the most dazzlingly created autumnal world.  I simply cannot wait for FROZEN III!

FROZEN II has a running time of 105 minutes.  It goes on global release on November 22nd. 

FROZEN - Disney Passes Bechdel

FROZEN is as delightful as it is intelligent - the best Disney film since BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and the only Disney film that passes the Bechdel test. Finally we get a film about Princesses where being a Princess isn't really the key point - a film about women who learn to be confident in themselves and protect each other - a movie that thoroughly de-constructs the Disney mythos.

Of course, I didn't know all that when I walked into the cinema, depressed by the cricket and searching for some light entertainment. In fact, I pretty much hated this movie for the first twenty minutes of its runtime.  It seemed to conform to every Disney stereotype about beautiful but isolated orphaned princesses, defined entirely by their relationships with their absent fathers and handsome lovers.  The kingdom of Arendelle seemed like a place created by the Disney of the 1940s and 1950s - it felt like SHREK had never happened.  

Or so I thought.  That was before FROZEN broke every cliché it had so skillfully set up - to create a movie that's better than a lampoon, because it actually has positive values that it espouses. 

So here's the deal. Princess Elsa is the snow queen of fairytale legend.  When she was a little girl her powers almost killed her little sister Anna, so her parents locked her up until she could control her powers.  Her life is one of suppression and repression until her coronation day when a furious argument with her un-comprehending sister sparks an angry icestorm of epic proportions. Elsa flees to the mountains, content to finally express her powers without fear, but wilfully optimistic Anna pursues her, sure that sisterly love can conquer all, and lift the icestorm that has frozen the kingdom. What follows is a struggle but not a classic Disney fight with an external evil.  Elsa needs to decide whether she wants to be a classic villain or whether she really does care.  While Anna needs to decide who she loves more - her sister, her fiance - the handsome Prince Hans, or the charming peasant Kristoff who has helped her up the mountain.

What follows is a movie of unsurpassed delight. Anna's aw-shucks goofy loveliness is grating right up until we realise what this movie is trying to say, at which point Kristen Bell's portrayal becomes utterly endearing.  Elsa is truly the most complex Disney character yet seen (not a high benchmark, I grant you) and her song "Let it go" is an empowering anthem with relevance beyond fairytale kingdoms. Idina Menzel gives a voice performance of nuance and strength and deserves an Oscar for Best Song.  Josh Gad (JOBS) is utterly adorable as the huggable snowman Olaf - the most charming animated sidekick since Donkey.  As for the men, well what a surprise to see that it's the male characters who are the least developed - and there's a cognitive dissonance when you realise that Prince Hans, whose face is clearly modelled on Paul Rudd, is in fact voiced by Santino Fontana, and that Kristoff, clearly modelled on Owen Wilson, is voiced by  Jonathan Groff. That's not to say that the actors do a bad job - it's just that the voice/face dissonance is so extreme that it was a bit distracting.

Still for all that, FROZEN had be captivated. The medieval folk architecture was beautiful - the stunning ice palace a marvel - the animation of racing through snow exhilerating.  Even better, the humour wasn't grounded in cheap pop-culture references (SHREK, I'm looking at you) but in real characters - those characters had emotional growth and development - and the surprises were genuinely shocking. I even loved the elegance with which small events and scenes were handled. The way in which it is delicately suggested that the King and Queen have died - when a black veil is hung over a portrait - is a great example here.

So kudos to all involved, but particularly to Jennifer Lee, who co-directed and wrote the movie.  She's the woman who wrote WRECK-IT RALPH - one of the best films of 2013 and is clearly a star to watch.  Particular mention also to Robert Lopez (co-creator of THE BOOK OF MORMON) and Kristen Anderson-Lopez who wrote the original songs for the film.  They're all strong, but "Fixer Upper" and "Let It Go" are instant classics.  I predict many, many awards, and rightfully so, this season. 

FROZEN is on release pretty much everywhere except South Korea, Estonia and Turkey, where it opens on January 17th; Sweden, where it opens on January 31st; and Japan, where it opens on March 14th.

FROZEN has a running time of 102 minutes and is rated PG for mild threat. 

Kids flick preview 1: ENCHANTED

ENCHANTED begins as a closely observed spoof of Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY. A handsome prince meets a beautiful princess but their fairytale marriage is ruined by a wicked stepmother who can transform into a dragon. She banishes the lovely Giselle to New York - "a place where no-one lives happily ever after". Giselle (Amy Adams) is quickly followed by her Prince Edward (James Marsden), his treacherous servant Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and finally by the wicked stepmother herself (Susan Sarandon). Giselle is taken in by a handsome, cynical, divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his cute daughter, Morgan.

The movie manages to have its cake and eat it. ENCHANTED wants us cynical ironic post-modern audiences to have a little more faith in true love. But it also wants the Disney heroines of old to have a little more pluck, and perhaps go on a date or two before falling in love at first sight. It's a far more delicate and honest approach to the position of the fairy-tale cartoon in contemporary cinema than those aggressively post-modern CGI flicks.

The best parts of the movie takes us along with them because the actors are playing this preposterous scenario absolutely straight. Dempsey and Marsden do well in this, but it's Amy Adams who is truly charming. I felt that Timothy Spall and Susuan Sarandon were a little too broadly drawn - simply too camp - especially Sarandon in her platform heels and glitter lipstick. Frankly she looked like a drag queen, as though she was consciously sending up Disney and winking at the audience. This broke the delicate balance between fairy-tale and modernity but thankfully her role in relatively small and the movie survives this small mis-step.

ENCHANTED is on release in Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines, the US, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Spain, France, Malaysia, Portugal and Estonia. It opens next week in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on December 14th in Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and the UK. It opens later in December in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, Australia and Norway. It opens in Australia, South Korea and Poland in January 2008 and in Taiwan on February 7th. It opens in Japan on March 14th.

RENT - why did I cry when I found this movie so dull?

The thing about RENT is that it features a bunch of people that I can empathise with but whose lives are so divorced from my own that it takes a lot of effort. They are a bunch of singers, song-writers, artists, film-makers, strippers, junkies....who are mostly gay or at least bi-, some of whom are HIV positive. What they have in common is that they have dropped out of mainstream society and squat in a loft in downtown New York. Now, RENT means a lot to a lot of people because it captures a time and a mood - when the AIDS crisis hit hard at a point in the 1980s when it seemed like Anglo-Saxon society had collectively sold its soul to flash consumerism. It was the first musical in a while to capture what was going on in contemporary society and make it from off-Broadway to Broadway proper and into the mainstream consciousness.

The problem is that RENT then is not the same as RENT now. What seemed like viciously acute concerns then are no less concerning but have played out differently in a different context. The meatpacking district is now chic and the subject matter in RENT the movie now seems so tame it was given a PG-13 rating by the notoriously strict MPAA.

The other problem with RENT is that the music, choreography, lyrics and story-line were always rather mediocre and had none of the subtlety, seduction or sheer danger of, say, CABARET - which similarly focuses on marginalised members of a brutish society. Added to that, the movie makes the mistake of using members of the original cast who are clearly too old for the parts they play. Anthony Rapp looks plainly absurd in some of the dance moves - a fact highlighted by ham-fisted director, Chris Columbus' decision to focus on him at bizarrely painful moments. Added to the director's rap-sheet we must also point out that barring La Vie Boheme, none of the numbers had any energy. I've seen RENT live and the entrance of Angel is usually a HUGE moment. Here is was throwaway. And finally, if Rapp's character, Mark, is meant to be an aspiring Indie film-maker, why not make his footage actually look inspired rather than like America's worst home videos?

All in all, I found this to be a pretty uninspired movie. However, seeing the final reels of all the friends before drugs and AIDS takes hold, you can't help but be moved. I shed a tear when the stills of Angel are flashed across the screen at the end. A rare moment of directorial brilliance.

RENT is already on release in the US and UK and opens in France and Germany next week.