THUNDERBOLTS* - ****

I bugged out of the Marvel Universe after GUARDIANS 1. Too many movies. Too many big bads blowing up cities. Too many sardonic quips from Iron Man. It just all became so same.  But for whatever reason I decided to watch THUNDERBOLTS* and thoroughly enjoyed it!  

The first phase of the MCU is over. The po-faced Captain America type characters are gone.  This is a post-Avengers world. And we are dealing with its detritus and emotional baggage.  I like the beaten up, jaded look of the characters. Florence Pugh's little sister to Scar-Jo's deceased Black Widow looks she's coming off a bender.  The millennial, I-hate-my job-angst is both hilarious and relatable. I like the idea that rather than saving the world she's just a mercenary. I really like the idea that despite all the tedious fight scenes what really matters is having mates with whom one can be vulnerable and tackle all the demons that haunt us. That's a nice message.  

And it's wrapped in a genuinely very funny script Eric Pearson and Joanna Cala and SUPERB line delivery from Florence Pugh and David Harbour as the most ridiculously messed-up and adorable father-daughter superheroes seen on screen. We haven't seen the name Bob deployed for this much comic effect since Blackadder 2.  I also LOVE Julia Louis-Dreyfus in basically anything. Here, she's a billionaire arms-dealer - kind of like the successful version of her character in Veep - who wants to control the mercenaries.  She manages to pivot so quickly it takes your breath away.

Kudos to director Jake Schreier for pulling off a genuinely enjoyable, funny and moving Marvel film. It's certainly a handbrake-turn away from his wonderful ROBOT & FRANK but I am here for it.

THUNDERBOLTS is rated PG-13, has a running time of 127 minutes and is on global release.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS**

Nicole Holofcener (ENOUGH SAID) returns to our screens with her brand of low-key rich white people dramedy. At its worst its tone deaf and deeply annoying. At its best it can be pleasantly surprising.  YOU HURT MY FEELINGS is mildly entertaining while also being a giant nothingburger.  I didn't hate it. I immediately forgot about it.  

The movie stars Seinfeld and Veep's Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Beth, a rich white person with rich white people problems. Her psychologist husband Don (The Crown's Tobias Menzies) is deeply loving but one day she overhears him saying he doesn't really like her new book. She reacts childishly. Rather than discuss it, she passively aggressively punishes him for something he doesn't even know he did.  Meanwhile their son Eliot (Owen Teague) is left third-wheeling their infantile psychodrama. The moral of the film seems to be that happy relationships involve some measure of deceit and that we should just get on with it. Okay. Cool. Mind blowing. It's all well enough acted and produced. It just feels so meh.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. It played Sundance 2023 and opened in the USA in May. It was released in the UK on Amazon Prime next week.

YOU PEOPLE****

Kenya Barris (BLACKISH) and Jonah Hill team up to write and then respectively direct and star in this new politically charged rom-com YOU PEOPLE.  Jonah Hill plays a Jewish broker called Ezra who feels lost in life and pressured to get married. He hates his office job and has an affinity for black hip-hop culture, which he expresses in a podcast with his best - black - friend Mo (Sam Jay).  He falls in love with a black girl called Amira (Lauren London) and it all goes swimmingly until they have to meet each other's respective parents.  

Ezra's parents (Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny) are embarrassingly but unintentionally racist. Their racism is the kind that comes out of a lack of experience of inter-racial friendship, cultural ignorance, but an awkward desire to be woker-than-woke. It is no less demeaning to its target despite its lack of intentionality.   Amira's parents (Nia Long and a very subdued Eddie Murphy) are political activists inspired  by the deeply anti-semitic Louis Farrakhan, but after an early skirmish we never actually get into that.  Their racism seems intentional and well-considered, born of experience and ideology.  They simply do not trust or want their daughter in a non-black relationship.  

Things come to a head and then resolve in true rom-com style.  That is achieved through Ezra's mum apologising to Amira for her behaviour and - natch - on behalf of all Jewish people. Amira's dad apologises for his prejudiced behaviour toward Ezra, period. We never actually interrogate the anti-semitisim inherent in Farrakhan's teaching. Clearly there's an asymmetry here that David Baddiel has rightly called out, especially as it so clearly demonstrated in his superb and polemical essay Jews Don't Count. 

The thing is, I really agree with David Baddiel and I know I should mark this film down on account of it, but honestly, I just had a lot of fun with this film. It may be flawed but I think it made an earnest and honest attempt to deal with the reality of inter-racial dating in contemporary so-called liberal America. The conversations between Ezra and his friend Mo were fascinating, provocative and frankly entertaining. I would legit listen to that podcast if it existed. I believed in Jonah Hill's confused, frustrated and then touchingly sweet boyfriend. I believed in Amira's smart, strong, creative, supportive girlfriend. I rooted for them. And if the end was hokey, well that's just the genre, and if the apologies were imperfect, even that felt like a wish-fulfilment fantasy that wouldn't have happened IRL. So yeah, I really enjoyed YOU PEOPLE and I admired the relatively restrained deeply felt performance from Jonah Hill. More of this, please.

YOU PEOPLE has a running time of 117 minutes and is rated R. It is streaming on Netflix.

BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER**

WAKANDA FOREVER is a film that is hobbled by its earnestly expressed grief for actor Chadwick Boseman, the T'Challa of its predecessor.  This memorialising is welcome in the early part of the film, and beautifully handled both in the Marvel opening credits and in the way iwriter-director Ryan Coogler incorporates the death of the character into its opening act.  But as we move into the film's second half, and another character dies, we realise that this movie is leaning into grief to a level that slows the pace, brings down the mood, and creates a rather mawkish and morbid end-product.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Shuri, T'Challa's younger sister and science nerd.  As written by Coogler and played by Letitia Wright, Shuri spends the entire film crying and quiet. Even the final scene is of her burning mourning clothes. I feel we could have gotten to her decision to move forward and adopt the mantle of Black Panther half way through the excessively long run-time.

The claustrophobically negative atmosphere spreads to the B-plot which sees Tenoch Huerta introduced as the character Namur. He leads an underwater kingdom of mer-people who also have access to Vibranium.  Namur is pissed off that T'Challa took the decision to tell the world about its wonders and so put his own kingdom at risk of colonial exploitation from the Americans.  

I really liked Huerta's performance and the design of this kingdom but the whole plot seemed weak as fuck.  He wants to ally with Wakanda against the imperials, but tells them if they don't ally with him he'll launch war on them.  Charming! So you end up with a massive battle between the two Vibranium super-powers with the real-world power of America left on the sidelines along with all of the American characters - Martin Freeman's CIA agent, his ex-wife - a wasted Julia Louis-Dreyfus who is now his boss, and Dominique Thorne as the MIT student who invented the vibranium detector.  The fact that the latter is squeezed out of screen-time is particularly sad, as it means the movie doesn't really explore the issue of the African-American versus African experience.

I also wonder how actual Africans feel about a film where lots of African-Americans are putting on a variety of accents and an African-American writer-director is creating a version of wise oracular Africa guided by its ancestors.  Not to mention the LGB community who must be looking at the almost embarrassed way the movie hints at a lesbian relationship between Danai Gurira's general and her sidekick played by Michaela Coel.  Somehow being so embarrassed about showing a proper kiss is even worse than not having any representation at all. 

WAKANDA FOREVER has a running time of 161 minutes and is rated PG-13. It is on global release.

LIVE FROM NEW YORK! - BFI London Film Festival 2015

LIVE FROM NEW YORK! is the directorial debut of Bao Nguyen, chronicling the history of the iconic comedy skit-show Saturday Night Live. He does so in 80 minutes so it would be easy to put this film's superficiality down to its brief run-time but I suspect it has more to do with the director having bought Lorne Michael's kool-aid, wanting to diminish the non-Lorne years and not having the guts to seriously interrogate the charges of institutionalised sexism and racism. And I don't by that "where was the black Friend" argument.  SNL was meant to be different - cutting edge radical. This is what skewers the director's use of hyperbolic opening music - Gil Scott Heron's The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - this may have been true in the 70s and 80s but for the past fifteen years it feels as though the cutting edge of radical satire has lived on South Park or The Daily Show. Let's be honest, isn't SNL mostly harmless by now? Isn't everything that Julia Louis-Dreyfus says about the 80s true now, where SNL was desperately trying to keep pace with pop culture rather than setting the pace?

ENOUGH SAID - LFF 2013 - Late Review

Nicole Holofcener is an American writer-director who specialises in brutally honest, sometimes brutally unpleasant films about women of a certain income in California. I had some issues with her last film, PLEASE GIVE, which could be described with the hashtag onepercentproblems, and if I, greedy capitalist bastard that I am, found it self-involved, imagine what everyone else must have thought.

The good news is that her latest film, ENOUGH SAID, is far more heart-warming while sacrificing none of her authentic observations of women-of-a-certain-age.  Perhaps that has something to do with casting James Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus - two of the most charming and likeable actors.  Or perhaps it just has something to do with accepting a more conventional high-concept rom-com conceit.

The movie focusses on Eva (Louis-Dreyfus), a middle-aged masseuse whose beloved daughter Ellen is about to leave for college.  She starts dating schlubby Albert (Gandolfini) but sabotages the relationship when she realises that one of her clients is his ex-wife Marianne (Catherine Keener). Rather than dump the client or confess to Albert, Eva just can't help but ask the ex what went wrong, and Marianne's jaundiced view of Albert becomes contagious.

To be honest, the chamber comedy aspect of this film - Eva hiding behind a bush to avoid meeting Marianne and Albert's daughter - the final reveal that she knew all along - is  the least satisfying part of the movie.  What really holds our attention is the finely observed and heart-warming depiction of the insecurities of middle-aged dating and the way in which parents fear their children leaving home. In fact, there were times at which I wished the side plot had more room to breathe - the way in which Eva subsconsiously fills her time with her daughter's lonely best friend was so tragic and real it broke my heart.

So what are we left with? Nicole Holofcener's most approachable film, full of human truth, if saddled with a rather clumsy conceit. Gandolfini and Louis-Dreyfus are a pleasure to spend time with, and it's so sad that this is Jim's last film. 

ENOUGH SAID has a running time of 91 minutes and is rated PG-13 in the USA. 

ENOUGH SAID played Toronto and London 2013 and was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Turkey, Mexico, Israel and Singapore. It is currently on release in Australia. It opens on November 29th in Poland, on December 5th in Greece, Hungary, Brazil and Lithuania, on December 19th in Germany and Spain, on January 15th in France and the Netherlands and in Italy on April 10th.