#cooper aldrich | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

disappointingyet · 5 months

Text

A bunch of movies that didn't make my final films of the year – some of them are very good, mind (and one or two really aren't).

Godzilla Minus One

Very much not to be confused with the current US Godzilla movies, this comes from Toho Studios and not only goes back to the start, but the story is all about Japan coming to terms with World War II. Our central (human) character is Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) a guilt-ridden former fighter pilot trying to get by in bomb-flattened Tokyo. He acquires not one but two found families: a young woman and the child she rescued from the rubble, and the crew of the minesweeper he finds work on. The healing for both the material and psychic damage seems underway when a massive, mysterious creature – which Shikishima encountered during the war – reappears, only bigger and with new powers…

G-M1 is a talky film with sombre stretches (there are jokes, too), with lots of grief and guilt and trying to figure out how not to make the same mistakes again*. And, in between all that, we get a big stompy monster (this is mean Godzilla, not saviour Godzilla). The special effects do the job: you’re unlikely to be awestruck, but equally I didn’t spend any time wanting to chuck something at the screen as I often do with (say) Marvel movies.

Satisfying.

(*I was trying to think of other movies where I successfully guessed what was going to happen not so much because of plot tropes as ideology… the only one that springs to mind is the Robert Aldrich-directed Burt Lancaster & Gary Cooper Mexican-set Western Vera Cruz.)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

What were the odds, in the year of full superhero backlash, that there would be a critically endorsed Ninja Turtles movie? But here it is, and yes, it’s good. Essentially, TMNT:MM is (as far as I know) lo the first post-Spider-verse film, embracing the idea that comic-book adaptations can look drawn. This is 3D computer animation, but it’s not trying to look solid or clean, and so you don’t end up with Shrekian chunkiness. It’s weird and colourful and sometimes rather beautiful.

It’s a basic origin story: how did these strange creatures come to be, why do they regard a rat as their father, what other weird animals are lurking in New York? Well, for one, Superfly, a massive insect styled after Ron O’Neal’s Blaxploitation antihero and voiced by Ice Cube.

The movie leans hard into the ‘teenage’ part of the title - these are kids, cocky, confused, bored, trying to fit in and figure themselves out (often contradictory impulses.) The script is by Seth Rogen and chums, so doesn’t take itself too seriously.

There’s an argument to be had about whether famous faces deserve to be the voice leads in animated movies - surely specialists are better at the job and anyway, much of the time nobody recognises it’s eg, Chris Pratt. But here, I think the star casting works - as well as Cube, we get Jackie Chan being very endearing as Splinter the rat, a brief but perfect turn from Giancarlo Esposito and the ubiquitous Ayo Edebiri as April.

The soundtrack is ace - and maybe gives away who the target audience is: it’s a bunch of late 1980s/90s hip-hop standards.

The storytelling isn’t groundbreaking but the visuals are so good. One of the best surprises of the year.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves

Essentially: ‘You know that game the kids in Stranger Things play? The one people used to get beat up for been associated with but now movie stars boast about their expertise at? Let’s do a Guardians Of The Galaxy-style film based on that.’ So they did, and gathered a more-than-decent cast: Chris Pine*, Michelle Rodriguez and Hugh Grant, and send them off on some questing. The jokes do the job, the dialogue largely non-fantasy mode, Rodriguez does all the action and Pine is the Hannibal Smith-esque generator of plans (but w/tragic backstory). As this kind of adventure movie goes, it’s comfortably above average: not as good as the first Guardians, the first Pirates Of The Caribbean or Jumanji: Welcome To The Jungle, but better than most of the tosh out there. *Brudenell Road’s most famous former resident!

They Cloned Tyrone

Strange things seem to be happening in the hood and a drug dealer (John Boyega), a sex worker (Teyonah Parris) and – reluctantly – a pimp (Jamie Foxx) team up to investigate. This is a comedy with sci-fi elements as well as things that would be horror if this had a different vibe. Maybe think of this as a much broader take on Jordan Peele’s Get Out or Nope or a less way-out Sorry To Bother You. Although it’s set now, there are nods to the Blaxploitation era (Foxx’s hair, various cars.) There’s a nice murky look to the night scenes, a tangible atmosphere and an excellent cast – so plenty to enjoy.

(Netflix)

Theater Camp

Fond and indulgent mockumentary made by a bunch of chums who grew up as theatre kids. Very familiar set-up: much-loved thespian institution (in this case, a summer camp) has its future under threat – will everyone rally round for a big show to save the day?

There are plenty of familiar faces here, particularly if you’ve seen Booksmart and The Bear (Molly Gordon, who is one of the directors, writers and stars of this links that terrific film and that excellent TV show.)

Ben Platt, who has become even more mocked and reviled in critical and showbiz gossip circles than his Pitch Perfect cast mates, makes the wise decision to write himself a largely dickish character to play.

Theater Camp mostly manages to be the right kind of silly – I enjoyed it a bunch. (Disney +)

Bottoms

Extremely daft although reasonably fun comedy. Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri (who are both 28 years old and aren’t trying to fool you otherwise) play a pair of unpopular high-school kids who start a female fight club with the hope of hooking up with the cheerleaders they have crushes on. It’s very silly, gets a reasonable amount of mileage out of people punching each other and has plenty of decent jokes. Had me thinking of Rock ’n’ Roll High School more than I expected.

Three Musketeers: Part 1 - D’Artagnan

Yes, yet another version of the Dumas book. This one has the virtue of being actually French. The vibe is somewhat gritty: the fights include guns and punching rather than only elegant sword work. Many of buildings are actual historic buildings rather something fairly see-through cobbled together on a computer. We get Vincent Cassel and Romain Duris as Athos and Aramis, plus Louis Garrel as the king. I’ve never really got Eva Green but she makes perfect sense as Milady. What’s added (from what I remember of the book) is a conspiracy involving a war-hungry faction at court and the Protestant rebellion.* Anyway, this is a solid and satisfying period action movie.

*To be clear, the siege of La Rochelle is in the book - it’s what leads to that that’s new here.

Maestro

Are you intrigued by the idea of current movie stars attempted many-layered 1940s accents? How about a film half in the lushest of lush black & white and half in fairly authentic-looking late 1960s colour, also rather beautiful? Tidal waves of great, great music? Fully committed performances? Some genuinely extraordinary, including a scene where biopic slips into ballet…

Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic is wildly ambitious, and it succeeds more than I was anticipating. Cooper, as often, gives a better performance than I expect him to. Carey Mulligan is excellent as Felicia Montealegre, Bernstein’s wife, even if the accent escapes her occasionally. It looks and sounds incredible.

But? It’s a big film with a small story at its heart. Firstly, what happens to a marriage between two people in the arts when their careers have very different trajectories? 'Isn’t the only other film Cooper has directed A Star Is Born?', you point out correctly.

Secondly, what happens to that marriage if it begins with the acceptance that one of this pair is going to continue shagging other people, but once there are kids to consider that seems less cool and you don’t feel like trying to explain to your daughter why her middle-aged father is chasing young men around, especially because this is only the 1970s…

I’m certainly not saying a film needs to say big stuff. But Maestro has a scale and sense of importance that seems at odds with what it wants to talk about. We do get some scenes with Bernstein pronouncing about music in grand terms – and those are the worst parts of the movie. But other than hearing the tunes, we don’t really get much of a sense of why Bernstein was such an imposing cultural figure. Credit to Cooper for acknowledging the pivot that most based-on-real-life stories take if they span a fair bit of time: things are fun, and then they are difficult. In Maestro, that fun part is not just in b&w, but the rules of space and time don’t apply. As we’re watching them, that’s clearly the case within scenes, but as we learn in the colour second half, things that you would have guessed took a couple of weeks took several years. All of that first part, it seems but is never stated, was lovely memories that edit all the tricky stuff.

Not a wholly successful film then, but one I’m really glad I watched and even a little regretful I didn’t see it on the big screen. (Netflix)

Creed III

Better than Creed II, nowhere near as good as Creed. Michael B Jordan does a decent job as the director and introduces some interesting visual elements. There’s no Stallone, which I’m fine with. The issue is a classic genre film trap: how to get the main character back to doing the thing the franchise needs them to do, even though that’s a terrible choice. Weirdly, for once, if this was hyper-realism, that wouldn’t be a problem – legendary boxers clamber out of retirement and back into the ring the whole time, often repeatedly. But in this movie, Adonis Creed seems to have too much going on – as the beautiful, successful guy with a beautiful, talented family – and to be too smart to get himself clobbered again. True to life, but somehow implausible within this fiction.

(Prime)

Babylon

Damien Chazelle’s massive, noisy discursion on the history of Hollywood is a film I definitely enjoyed talking about – there was so much to debate. But it was probably more fun talking about it than it was watching the last two hours of the movie (maybe watch the two big set pieces at the start and then stop?)

Full review here

Air

Schlubby dudes sit around in dingy offices arguing about the details of a deal for a young athlete to endorse a shoe. Not a painful watch, but nothing that Affleck/Damon manage here convinces me that this is a story worthy of cinema and not a very long Nike ad.

Full review here

Barbie

On the one hand, most of Barbie was fun, and an impressive feat of multi-level storytelling (eg, the very niche joke at the expense of fans of 1990s indie band Pavement.) Could’ve done without the Will Ferrell and Rhea Perlman bits, but a billion-dollar box office movie taking the piss out of the patriarchy is a great thing.

On the other, as much as I want to celebrate popular art, in my heart I know I’d rather Gerwig was making films like Lady Bird or Mistress America. Much as I hope Boden and Fleck’s future work is more like Sugar or Mississippi Grind than Captain Marvel, and that Cate Shortland goes back to films like Somersault and Lore instead of Black Widow.

Ferrari

In some ways, this could be a companion piece to Maestro – another film about wife who has sort-of-tolerated the chronic infidelity of her giant-of-the-20th-century husband. Although, in this case, he's only cheating with women and by the time the film is set – the late 1950s – only one woman. In Michael Mann's movie, Adam Driver plays Enzo Ferrari, Penélope Cruz Laura Ferrari and Shailene Woodley the mistress. These people, you may have noticed, are not Italian. Yes, this is a film in English in which the actors do accents to indicate they are speaking Italian (the bit players, confusingly, talk actual Italian). I'm generally not in favour of that approach. This isn't a biopic, as such – it seemingly takes place over a few months as Enzo faces simultaneous work and personal crisis, linked by Laura, who was his work partner as well as spouse. Cruz is excellent value as the fuming, grieving Laura. Driver – has his hair ever been this short on film – is good too, and wears excellent suits. It looks lovely, too – whatever issues Mann had during the early digital switchover (Collateral?!) are long past. But the ending just fizzles out, in a way that leaves me wondering (other than Cruz being entertainingly furious) what this was all about. And the big events just before that are handled in a way I found both clunky and kind of distasteful. (I feel you need to be at least somewhat careful portraying real-life tragedies on screen. And also announcing your characters bear no responsibility when with all things taken into account, they do.) One of those films that I was very into when I was watching, but increasingly less so on the walk home.

No Hard Feelings

The sort-of-return of the once weirdly popular older-woman-deflowers-kid ‘raunchy comedy’ genre. This being 2023, the kid is a legal 19 but socially awkward, inexperienced etc (I mean, to be fair, there are a lot of people like that). Jennifer Lawrence plays the desperate-for-cash local who is hired by a Princeton-bound nerd’s parents to make a man of him. The film is well cast, and some of the jokes work… ‘the hey! we’ve all learned something’ stuff maybe less so. Pretty OK.

The Killer

Michael Fassbender plays a stat-bore hitman in David Fincher’s fan-boy-pleasing thriller. Some generally sane critics reckon it’s a blinder. I reckon it’s cliched, obvious and very grating. (Many of the arguments in its favour are based on the idea that it is Fincher taking the piss out of himself – to which I say, who cares?)

Starts well as Fassbender is patiently doing the tedious prep for a kill in Paris, but goes duff quickly once he’s off on the obligatory revenge kick. Fassbender’s American accent is horrible, the gags are thumpingly obvious and yet triple-underlined in case you didn’t get them the first time. I kept hoping against hope that one of Fassbender’s enemies would finish him off and we’d be done with all of this. Tilda Swinton is good but she only gets one scene. (Fassbender had a supporting role in Fincher’s bestie Steven Soderbergh’s somewhat similar Haywire, which – for my money – is way better.)

(Netflix)

Love At First Sight

Industry wisdom is the romcom is one of the genres people will no longer pay to see in a cinema but will consume happily on streaming. Netflix is notorious for putting out loads of them with TV-movie production levels. This is maybe one of their higher budget efforts? I saw it because Haley Lu Richardson was great in two of my favourite movies of recent times: Columbus and Support The Girls.

LAFS* feels like three different ideas chucked together. First, a high-concept romcom with lots of vibrant colours and some bollocks about fate and Jameela Jamil as the narrator who pops up in turn as a flight attendant, immigration officer, bartender, helpful passerby…** Secondly, your contemporary British comedy where the characters are all wearyingly eccentric (so many British films, whether comedies or thrillers, just try far too hard.) Thirdly, a melancholy film about two people in pain who make a connection on a transAtlantic flight. Unsurprisingly, these three ideas constantly undermine each other. (Oh, and the London geography is just distractingly nonsense.)

*The title of the book this is adapted from is The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight, which is a much better match for the theme and tone of the story.

**An idea seemingly nicked, as I’m happy to admit I didn’t know when I watched it, from Max Ophuls’ 1950 classic La Ronde, emphatically not a romcom.

(Netflix)

Documentaries

Squaring The Circle: The Story Of Hipgnosis

What was Hipgnosis, you ask? Hipgnosis was a little company that designed the covers of long-playing records, most famously for Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. Its founders Storm Thorgerson and Po Powell were dope-smoking chums of the future members of (The) Pink Floyd in Cambridge (the city, not the university) who had enough photographic and graphic design nous to turn a favour for mates into a lucrative career.

Everyone in this documentary talks about how grumpy Thorgerson (who died in 2013) was: ‘He was rude to everyone,’ someone says. Now, as it happens, a long, long time ago I used to interview designers and photographers about famous album covers for a rock magazine. Almost all these chats happened over the phone… except for the one with Thorgerson about the Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Thorgerson invited me over to his large, comfortable north-west London home and we sat drinking tea as he told me about how the LP sleeve had come about. As I remember it, he was an excellent host and I sat there feeling guilty about how bloody hideous I thought almost all of his work was and how unbearable his old mates’ music was. Maybe he’d mellowed by then.

Anyway, this documentary was made by Anton Corbijn, legendary rock photographer/terrible feature film director, which accounts for the interviewees being shot in elegant, flattering b&w. Corbijn’s movies are utterly humourless so it’s a pleasant surprise to find plenty of chuckles here. The heart of the film, indeed, is a series of tales from the mid-1970s in which the album shoots involve vast expense, effort, travel time and even danger… and afterwards everyone decides for all the record buyers will notice, it could have been done round the corner or just in the studio…

If you like a rock dinosaur, there’s a bunch here: Planty! Pagey! Macca! Gabriel! And the surviving Floyds, of course. Speaking of which, my big concern watching this was the presence of Roger Waters and Noel Gallagher, both extremely low-quality human beings. Fortunately, restricted to talking about album covers (both) and the early days (Waters) they are non-toxic. Just why Gallagher is here is a different question. He has no connection to Hipgnosis – not as a client nor even (as far as made the cut) as a fan. He just talks about album artwork in general, including his daughter not knowing it was a thing that exists. So he’s effectively the cut-price Bono, here to provide uninformed vibes and enthusiasm – but as the man who shot U2’s most famous images, surely Corbijn could have got the real thing?

There’s a tradition of documentaries – which I think this fits into – that work two ways depending on how you feel about the subjects. If you think the cover of (say) Led Zep’s Houses Of The Holy is a great piece of image-making, here’s the inside story of how it came about. On the other hand, if you find the aesthetics of 1970s rock grotesque or funny, then this is an entertaining account of how completely everyone lost the plot as the cash (and coke) rolled in. (Netflix)

Little Richard: I Am Everything

You can see why people want to make documentaries these days about Little Richard – he was black, he was gay, he did some drag early in his career and certainly had no truck with the 20th-century western version of masculinity. In 2023, if you want to celebrate a rock ’n’ roll pioneer, he’s more appealing than one of those white guys with their child brides. (Before we overtip the balance, it's almost certain that Richard also had sex with teenage girls when he was an adult, even if they weren’t his main area of interest.)

The big problem I had with this film – which got some rapturous reviews – is not its fault at all. What happened was that earlier in the year I had seen the BBC’s Little Richard: The King And Queen Of Rock’n’Roll, which has some of the same interviewees (plus Keef rather than Mick as their Rolling Stone), much of the same archive and – as the title suggests – the same contemporary take. I Am Everything’s director Lisa Cortes does try to do some things to make this movie-like, including having clouds of glitter and bursts of high-speed nature montages. She also has some current musicians in to a play a few songs, almost always a bad move in a music documentary. There are some good academics etc here, but alas, if you’ve recently heard all this stuff, I Am Everything doesn’t add that much. But if you’re not familiar with this story, this is a great place to start.

4 notes · View notes