Captain Marvel
We haven’t watched this one for ages because Mrs Meeple was under the impression Captain Marvel was just another brooding Marvel male antihero, and to be honest how many of those kind of movies do you need to watch to get the point? When scrolling past it on the media centre she noticed the thumbnail and scrolled back to find out – no, this is a film centred around a woman and she was suddenly inspired to give it a go. Representation matters and all that.
Look, I’m not going to sit here and tell you Captain Marvel is a great piece of cinema or an important movie. All of the Marvel movies, in the end, are absolute nonsense. But they’re fun. The alchemy of the franchise thrives on its formulaic nature – you put in time, and enjoyment will come out. You could time the narrative beats with a stop-watch, and you will never be surprised by anything that happens. Nothing as alarming as innovation makes its way into any of these movies. I can understand, in that respect, why many serious cinefiles consider them to be soulless pieces of corporate committee work. They feel carefully manufactured rather than organically grown.
Not every film needs to be Citizen Kane though, and I found this a very enjoyable movie. Brie Larrson is great as Carol Danvers, and the supporting cast is full of heart and sincerity. Save perhaps for the algorithmically de-aged Samuel Jackson who during this movie is surely more machine (learning) than man. These movies may lack in originality but they make up for it in spectacle. A superb soundtrack combined with just enough action to keep the blood pumping, and just enough emotion to keep the heart beating. And it gains a little extra something-something by being a movie that I know a lot of ostensibly grown men cry themselves to sleep at night over. I liked it more than many other Marvel movies I’ve watched. At this point the franchise ranges wildy from the ridiculous (Ant Man) to the sublime (Guardians of the Galaxy) so that’s not really saying anything. Any passingly okay Marvel movie would still be a much better prospect than many of the others that have been committed to film. Just don’t make me watch Thor: The Dark World again, please.
I guess though I don’t understand why Brie Larson would put up with all that horror in Room if she was able to turn white-hot and fly through walls. That’s a massive plot hole. Boy, I hope someone got fired for that blunder.
Cuties
If you’ve been on the Internet at all this month the chances are you’ve encountered an Opinion on the movie Cuties. It seems like you need to pick a side here – it’s either a pedophile’s dream or an inspiring story of the empowerment of girls. Mrs Meeple and I took a look for ourselves and… well, I think it’s more complicated than either of the extremist arguments reflect. I mean, that’s true of extreme opinions in general but it’s especially true here.
It’s a film that is mired in controversy and for a good reason – it tells a story of the sexualisation of children, and it firmly sets its flag in the ‘Show, don’t tell’ school of cinematography. The main story follows Amy, an eleven year old girl from an unhappy, complicated home. She finds camaraderie and friendship with a ‘free spirited dance troupe’, as Netflix would put it. They want to dance their way to fame and recognition, and draw upon the heavily eroticised dance routines of modern hip-hop as an inspiration. The result is some extremely age-inappropriate performances interspersed with some grotesquely sexual incidents that set the backdrop of the story.
So, the first thing about this is – I think Cuties tells an important story about messaging. I have no idea how hard it must be to be a kid these days, but it seems like modern society has left no room for childish innocence. Children are bombarded with explicit songs, objectifying imagery and borderline pornographic (and actual pornographic) internet content on a daily, hourly, and per minute basis. Girls in particular get constant, regular reinforcement of one key message – ‘an easy way to get attention is through your body’. Cuties, at its core, is a story about over-sexualisation and the imagery that permeates modern society. It’s no surprise that the inciting incident of the story is when the main character steals a mobile phone and opens herself up to the unmoderated Internet for the first time. That theme is constantly reinforced throughout – that the sexualised scenarios into which she inserts herself, without real knowledge of what her behaviour actually means – is a symptom of a wider problem with how society presents and packages ‘acceptable behaviour’ for young girls. So much of Cuties is about lonely children trying to find acceptance. So those that accuse it of being a movie aimed at pandering to pedophiles are, I think, way off the mark.
But…
See, the problem here is one that you often see in movies that glamorises violence. Rambo: First Blood is a story about how America forgot its veterans and how the psychological scars of war create social frictions between returning soldiers and the countries for which they fought. It’s at its core a movie about what war does to people and what their country does to them when they’re not at war any more. It’s a movie that is, in other words, exceptionally critical of American military exceptionalism.
The thing is that when you tell a story like that by making your main protagonist look like an awesome killing machine, it’s really difficult to tell what’s supposed to be vilifying and what’s supposed to be glorifying. People can end up taking the wrong messages away with them. Look at Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Gone is the cynicism about violence. Gone is the concern about PTSD. In its place is a gleeful exploration of viciousness as a propaganda tool. People took away the wrong lessons and thus kickstarted a franchise that ended up being an unrestrained celebration of the exact thing it was designed to be against.
Cuties, to me, feels like a victim of that same storytelling mistake. The gratuitous crotch-shots, ass-shots and tit-shots of children are, I’m assuming, supposed to make the audience feel uncomfortable and complicit. It’s supposed to make the movie difficult and challenging to watch, and it does. Or at least, it did for me. But those that are aroused by the sexualisation of children are just going to be thankful for the long, lingering shots of tight-leather trousers and erotic dancing. They’re going to thank the team behind the movie for showing a preteen literally pulled out of her trousers into her underwear in front of a jeering crowd. It puts too much power in the hands of the audience, and not everyone in the audience is going to respond in the ‘right’ way.
I think my review of Cuties is ‘an important story that is told in an exceptionally irresponsible way’. I think the film will end up doing more harm than good. That’s a shame because a more artful, subtle take on the premise could have sparked a real conversation about the importance of safeguarding children in a world that conspires to make it virtually impossible.
Dave Chapelle The Closer
There’s nothing inoffensive or milquetoast about Dave Chapelle’s new show. And it’s – you know, it’s fine for what it was obviously intended to be. I’m not Dave Chapelle’s greatest fan. I don’t even think he’s all that funny at his best. But I still watched The Closer, and I’ll tell you why… because the screeching and rage that its mere existence provoked was enough to push it into my attention. There’s a lesson there for activists – you feed what you fight.
I watched his last show too for largely the same reason. I wanted an answer to the question of ‘What is everyone getting so angry about?’. And it turns out the answer was ‘Oh, I guess that? What an odd way to spend the one life you get on this planet’.
So now I’ve watched two comedy shows from a man I would have completely otherwise ignored. It’s not true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but I think in this case the massive success of his most recent two shows is entirely down to the backlash. Once you’re out of the distorting hall of mirrors that represents ‘common sense’ on Twitter, you’re in the realm of ‘real people’ who just don’t see things the same way as the ever-echoing chamber of social media. So people hear ‘The world hates the Closer’, and they think ‘Wow, let’s find out why’. And some of them come away thinking ‘That Chapelle guy has some interesting ideas…’
The cynical part of me (approximately 95% of me) though feels that this is exactly what both sides of the culture war want. They don’t want a dialogue, because that would rob them of the grievances that have come to define their personalities.
I don’t recommend The Closer. Not because it’s offensive, but because it’s just a bit dull. Why spend your time with Dave Chapelle when Marc Maron’s Too Real is a genuine peak of stand-up comedy?
I don’t know about you, but the review ‘It’s boring’ is far more likely to get me to ignore something than ‘it’s outrageously offensive’’.
Doctor Sleep
The Shining is one of my favourite movies of all time. I know Stephen King thought it was a travesty of an adaptation, but personally I think it’s way better than the novel. Kubrick created something genuinely special – an iconic movie where the claustrophobia of the camerawork is as much a part of the story as the script. It’s glorious.
So it takes a brave filmmaker to say ‘Hey, let’s make a sequel’. I haven’t actually read Doctor Sleep to say if this is a faithful, or worthwhile, adaptation. It starts off well enough – the first half has promise. The second half though is absolute rubbish. None of it makes any sense from a narrative perspective. None of it even makes any sense from a horror perspective. The sense of menace that is reasonably successfully built up in the first hour is squandered in the most mundane way. As usual I won’t directly spoil it, but imagine how scary a vampire would be if you could kill it with something as every-day as a kitchen knife. Now multiply that by about ten.
Essentially the last half hour of the movie is like a nostalgia tour of the Overlook Hotel, because of course they go back there and of course it’s for no reason that could possibly be justified in any sense other than ‘I dunno, maybe this is actually a good idea somehow?’. The lack of original ideas extends to Ewan Macgregor wandering through the exact same rooms to position himself in the exact same way Jack Nicholson did in the original. I guess it’s supposed to be a callback. It comes across though as a sycophantic homage. It doesn’t help that they literally splice in scenes from the original through the storyline. And what really kills it is the fact that it turns the weird, unsettling idea of ‘The Shine’ into an X-Men style superpower. I don’t know what I really expected from a sequel to the Shining, but it wasn’t ‘Harry Potter and the Overlook Hotel’.
It’s really disappointing even if you approach it with low expectations. Not worthy of your time.
Dune
I like David Lynch’s Dune, okay. I’m not ashamed to admit it. It is so unabashedly its own thing that it has a real, genuine charm that is in excess of the movie’s technical and narrative merits. And there are parts of it that feel more authentic than anything in the books.
The new movie is very good. Well paced, well plotted, well acted, and beautifully shot. It’s an extremely competent take on the story even if it does omit some of my favourite elements of the book. But it’s also… kinda Hollywood. I’m not going to say it’s paint-by-numbers or uninspired, because neither of those things are entirely fair. But I will say that it takes virtually zero risks with the source material and that’s a shame because Dune is just so god-damn weird. The movie is a smooth, well-polished marble when the book is an oddly-shaped and abrasive pebble. The thing I have always said to people that try to read the book is ‘This is a novel that couldn’t give a damn if you understand it or not’. It makes no effort to be approachable. It’s a distillation of the philosophy that it’s better for someone to be confused for an hour than bored for ten minutes.
So yeah, the Dune movie is very good and I enjoyed it. But also I haven’t thought about it once in the interval between seeing it and writing this mini-review and that’s pretty much how I’d sum it up. It’s an inoffensive, milquetoast interpretation of a confounding, complex and contradictory book.
And that’s a shame.
Enola Holmes
I was pleasantly surprised by this one – the trailers I had seen failed entirely to communicate its charm. It reminded me a lot of Young Sherlock Holmes, in that it brought to mind that I do occasionally enjoy these light-hearted trips into what is becoming a growing body of apocrypha around the Holmes mythology. Millie Bobby Brown was very charming in the role. The story is pleasingly free-spirited. The writing is relatively sharp. The only sour note really is that I didn’t like the way they changed the characters of Mycroft and Sherlock.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Mycroft would be a misogynist. I’m sure Sherlock would be indifferent to a sister should he have had one. But Mycroft’s personality is explained away as him being jealous of Sherlock’s gifts and that’s just completely counter to the source material. Sherlock believed Mycroft to the smarter of the two, and he is continually seen in positions of power, control and competence within his appearances in the books. He’s not a frustrated civil servant. Here he comes across like an emasculated Mr Banks had taken a wrong turn on the way to work and found himself in the wrong movie. Sherlock too is weirdly passive – not a personality trait that I would ever ascribe to him.
I’ve written before about how it’s important than an adaptation retain the soul of the thing even if it plays about with the specifics. It’s why I find Roberty Downey Jr’s Sherlock Holmes unwatchable even if it is strictly speaking ‘more accurate’ than the BBC take on everyone’s favourite consulting detective. I get that Enola Holmes wanted to carve out the space within which the characterisation of the main character can breathe. I just don’t think it needed to be done in this way because it overly tinkers with the formula that Holmes fans find appealing. It’s not egregious. I mean, it’s not The Watch. It’s just a bit too irreverent with the formula. A bit too willing to sacrifice important elements of characterisation in favour of easy storytelling solutions.
I guess, strictly speaking, this isn’t based on the work of Arthur Conan Doyle. But you know, c’mon. Sherlock Holmes may be well within the public domain as a character, but we all know the wellspring from which this (enjoyable) fanfic is drawn.
Still, a movie I really enjoyed. If it kickstarted a new franchise, I wouldn’t be at all upset by that. Especially since some quite troubling implications about the Holmes Matriarch are left completely unresolved by this, hopefully first, entry in the series.
Fake Famous
Imagine someone comes up to you and says ‘I can make you rich and famous – do you want that?’. What’s your first response going to be?
I think mine would be ‘Can I be rich without being famous?’, because otherwise I think my answer is going to be ‘no’. Once upon a time I would have had a different answer, but even my brush with micro-fame with Meeple Like Us has been enough to make me treat real fame like a kind of toxin. I honestly can’t think of anything worse than being constantly on show. I want to be respected, and ideally influential enough that I can move the needle on things like accessibility in tabletop games. If I could do all that while still being a secret name known only by a handful of people… I think that would be the best of all worlds. Perhaps the only sin of the Illuminati is that they have a healthy respect for their personal boundaries.
Fake Famous is a really interesting documentary looking at how easy it is for ‘influencers’ to ‘fake it until they make it’, as well as the downsides that come with that attention. It’s pretty good actually – they look at three unknowns and then manufacture virality to see how successful they can be through the use of bots, fake comments and fake likes. The most heartening thing about it is that two of the three felt so uncomfortable during the process that they basically bailed out. The third seemed absolutely in her element right up until Corona hit and she saw the importance of authenticity in reaching out to a struggling world. Or at least, pretended she did for the cameras.
One thing that I am grateful to this documentary for is actually putting a finger on the feeling I have had for quite some time. Essentially, ‘Influencers are a problem because their entire persona is built upon making you feel bad about your own life’. I always wince whenever I hear ‘influencer’ as an aspiration. Mainly because it is such an empty, directionless thing in and of itself. You want to influence. Great. But to what end? And what we see in documentaries like this is… ‘to the end that I can make you feel envy for the life I’m pretending to live, in order for me to profit from your jealousy’. That’s the business model, and for years now I have found it difficult to articulate the exact reasons why the whole industry gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Anyway, I thought this was a very insightful documentary and I would recommend you check it out.
Falling Down
Falling Down is another under-rated movie. One that people rarely even think of when they consider the resume of Michael Douglas. I’m not saying it’s one of the world’s finest pieces of cinema or anything but it’s more meritful than its relative obscurity would imply. I guess part of the problem is that it’s a rare example of a character-driven story of sociological intransigence. A man, broken by the iniquities of society, abandons his car on a gridlocked road. And then he goes on something of an incremental rampage as he violently reacts, and overreacts, to every societal ill he encounters. It’s a story of repressed frustration bubbling to the surface, and I’ve always found it speaks to me on a deep level. I once said that John Wick has the most relatable inciting incident in cinema. If I had the skills of a world-class assassin and someone killed my dog, I’d probably react in much the same way. Falling Down’s protagonist lacks the razor-honed skill of a gun-fu ninja warrior, but his descent into madness is one that I could see myself following if the chips in life had fallen a different direction.
The thing is that the characters in Falling Down are the focus of the story, but they’re not particularly well drawn. They’re caricatures, lampshaded viciously for the tropes they represent. But they are characters that act as our lens on the cruelty of capitalist systems. D-FENS, the protagonist, in the end doesn’t understand why he’s the bad guy because at every stage of his life he did what The System required of him. The shift from ‘a middle class failure having a bad day’ to ‘the top story on the evening news’ is one that occurs gradually. It’s the parable of the frog in the water – it will let itself boil to death if you keep the heat increase gradual enough.
Falling Down is an exploration of how the System doesn’t care about people. It’s not interested in individuals – they’re just material it can grind between its gears. In the process of dealing with that people can become hard, cruel and casually indifferent to the suffering of others. With that in mind, why is it bad to take a baseball bat to the stock of a price-gouging shopkeeper, or let a rich old bully die from a heart-attack that he largely inflicted upon himself? What is done may be morally in-D-FENS-able but it certainly seems cathartic. At least for the viewer. For the protagonist, it just seems psychically exhausting. This could have so easily have been a vicious thug of a movie, if at any point it looked like D-FENS was enjoying his reign of terror. He doesn’t though. He looks like he’s constantly aware this is his last, final gasp of the cool air of relevance before the dark waters of consequence take him.
I could understand why this is a film that would fail to resonate in modern times – in the end it’s a story of the angst and anger of a middle-class white man and as such it feels almost prehistoric in its framing. For me though, as an angry middle-class man, it’s a kind of dark wish fulfilment. There but for the grace of god and all that. The film is certainly inconsistent in how it portrays the dynamic between D-FENS as victim and D-FENS as villain, but I don’t really see that as a weakness. Rather it represents for me a kind of ambivalence – an uncertainty about the extent to which extreme disobedience in the face of systemic disenfranchisement can be a worthy undertaking.
I like it a lot.
Fighting with my Family
I expected absolutely nothing from this, and man – that’s not what I got. I’m not saying this is a movie that will necessarily stand the test of time, but it is so genuinely feelgood that I found myself getting properly emotional at the finale. And that was before I realised that it was actually a true story. I realised at the end that yeah, they had said that at the start… but I guess since I wasn’t at all consciously thinking about the move that it just flew past me like an indifferent starling.
It’s hard to say why this works really, because it follows a formula that is so traditional as to be cliché. Young girl dreams of stardom. She works hard and finds that it’s a lot tougher than she expected. She gives up. She is given renewed purpose. She works harder than ever. And then she wins. If there’s one thing that sport biopics do really well, it’s the good ol’ fashioned Hero’s Journey. And that’s what we have here.
What the movie does add though is a healthy focus on the brother that didn’t make it even though he thought he could and would. And his bitterness is such a counter flavour to the rest of the story-telling that it actually comes across as something novel. In the end his story too follows a predictable trajectory but it’s in the way those two arcs meet each other that a lot of the texture of Fighting With My Family comes in.
Also, I kind of spent the movie thinking that Florence Pugh was Florence Welch (the leader singer of Florence + The Machine) so it gets a little uplift of ‘Wow, she’s actually a really good actor for a musician’. I don’t think it had too much impact on my final opinion though.
It’s genuinely very good, and it instantly joins the likes of Major League and The Damned United as ‘Sports (well…) movies I actually really unironically love’.
Footloose
Oh boy there sure were a lot of dance movies in the 80s. Watching Dirty Dancing put us in the mood of giving this one a try – I’ve never seen it, and Pauline only vaguely remembered it. And it’s a mostly okay movie made faintly ridiculous by the premise. Dancing is banned. Rock music is banned. The town is in the control of John Lithgow playing the role of Handservant to God. It’s only when Kevin Bacon arrives, wielding the power of misdirected earnestness and wooden acting, do the shackles on the feet of the youth get broken. I’m not entirely clear on why.
Really the only character that I thought was interesting in the whole thing was the preacher that put their feet to rest. Leaving aside the darker edges of his character, he’s a great example of well-meaning zealotry. He’s not out for his own personal glory, or enrichment, or even a sense of power. He sincerely believes dancing leads to fornicating youth and that’s a bad thing. I hope nobody in the town has a Twister set. I found his narrative arc, such as it is, the only really compelling part of the movie. Perhaps because, in the land of Footloose, I would absolutely be John Lithgow. I too disapprove of public displays of movement as well as anything that brings joy to those younger than me. Which, these days, is ‘almost everyone and everything’.
It’s a faintly ludicrous movie built around a preposterous idea that is saved in the end by a kind of dorky enthusiasm and a passably decent soundtrack. It just makes Dirty Dancing look even better by comparison though, and it was already pretty damn excellent.
Ford Versus Ferrari
Ford Versus Ferrari is a perfectly fine movie. It’s a workaday biopic. It also though utterly bereft of any deeper insight. This could have been scripted in a day using only the Bumper Book of Tired Sports Movie Cliches as a reference. Beat for beat, it is predictable down to the actual timing. It doesn’t try to be daring, or emotive, or even particularly adventurous. It’s just going to follow the template to the letter. It works, sure, but in the same way a bubble sort works – because the formulaic nature of its construction arrives at a predictable result without doing anything upsetting in the process. It’s sufficiently disconnected from any real energy that I even found Christian Bale – the worst thing in every movie in which he appears – bearable. The chemistry between him and Matt Damon is basically the only thing that has any energy.
Perhaps my problem with it is fairly obvious – I find car racing to be a particularly soporific affair. It’s basically queueing, but at speed. And I don’t get all het up about people quickly changing gears or wildly swing a steering wheel around. Cars going around bends don’t excite me. So all that’s really left for me is the human drama. And that’s noteworthy just for how toothless it is across the rest of its runtime.
The movie is basically all surface phenomenon with the occasional bit of thoroughly dull toxic masculinity. Were Ken Miles a woman he’d have been dismissed as a ‘stroppy cow’ but here we’re supposed to find him intense and magnificent. He’s just a prick, really. Henry Ford is a prick. Leo Beebee is a prick. But none of them really own their prickishness in a way that says anything that matters. They are just pricks and the story accepts it. The only real exception is the scene in which Caroll Shelby takes a weeping Henry Ford around the track at top-speed in a cutting edge racecar. It’s absolutely wonderful, and the latter’s emotional breakdown is very enjoyable.
That probably doesn’t say good things about my character, but honestly this is a movie that would have been twice as good if it spent half the time showing people driving around a track in a way that is presumably supposed to be impressive even though you know they’re filming it against a green-screen in an air-conditioned warehouse somewhere.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
This is another movie I expected to hate, largely because Russell Brand is in it and I find him an intensely annoying cartoon of a man. But it also has Kristen Bell, who is awesome, and ‘that guy from How I Met Your Mother’, who is okay. No, not that one. The less whiny one. And there is a lot that I didn’t like in it, particularly the way that infidelity is hand-waved away in the final scene. It’s a film that is pretty disrespectful of relationships through and through really, but it’s a comedy so we won’t dwell too much on that. If we can’t allow a little lubrication of the taboos of the real world in the service of humour, we should give up entirely on the genre.
Anyway, the main character (whose name I forget) is dumped by his girlfriend (whose name I forget) in favour of Brand’s rockstar character (whose name I forget). The main character goes to Hawaii to forget (ironically), only to find his ex-girlfriend and her new lover are there too. He makes a connection with the girl working the reception (I forget her name), and it turns out that he completely gets over the other relationship with her help before he screws up the new relationship.
Along the way, some comedy happens. I forget what any of it was. There were some puppets and a Dracula musical at some point, but aside from that all my head has under the entry for ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’ is ‘File footage not found’.
So, I didn’t hate it – because I remember things I hated. And the fact it survives Russell Brand is a good hint that it was an enjoyable enough bit of cinematic irrelevance. But I also clearly didn’t like it enough to warrant its permanent inclusion in my memory.
Free Guy
Free Guy is a movie where all video game characters have a consciousness and one day a throwaway NPC gains the powers of a player character. That’s about the breadth and depth of it.
Mrs Meeple tells me the reason I didn’t like it is because I’m too close to the source material. And maybe she’s right – I found the movie intensely irritating because of how incoherent it was from a technical perspective. The suspension of disbelief it requires is the worst kind – it requires not just the acceptance of a premise, but the active rejection of an understanding of how the world works. I can get on board with the idea that NPCs have lives they live. I can’t get on board with the idea that ‘a reboot will fix it’, or that smashing up random servers with a fire-axe is any more sensible than simply disconnecting them from the network. Or that as servers get destroyed it results in discreet parts of a virtual world going offline as opposed to the whole thing blue-screening.
The movie is full of things like that. Things that conveniently forget, for example, that save files exist or that admin in MMOs have virtually unlimited power to interact with the world. The idea of gamemasters having to chase an NPC through a building for example just makes me think ‘One command will teleport any object in a game to the room in which a GM is standing’. Back on Discworld MUD – a game considerably less intricate than the world we see in Free Guy – there was even a jail room with no exits. You’d transport someone there, wait for them to cool down, and then deal with their problems.
To paraphrase Hitler (which I probably shouldn’t do, now I think about it)… this viewer of a movie will more easily believe a big fiction than a small one. Living NPCs – fine. A system installation that is so fragile that a reboot will reset everything – absolutely not. Save files are a thing, people, and no online game in the world is ran so irresponsibly that a single unexpected crash will reset years of player effort.
Anyway I didn’t like it but Mrs Meeple did.