Movies

It’s about cats. Singing and dancing cats. You’ll love it.

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Years ago, I went to see the stage version of The Lion King in London. As the lights went down and people stopped talking, knowing that the show was about to begin, a kid one or two rows in front of me piped up. “I don’t like lions!” Well, tough, kid, you’re going to get lions, whether you like them or not.

Most people like lions, if they keep their distance and don’t attempt to eat you or your loved ones. What many people don’t like? Musicals. Some people don’t like action films, others aren’t really into horror movies, but I don’t think there’s a single genre that as many people claim not to like as musicals. To be honest, though: until a few years ago, I would have said the same, though I may have qualified it a bit more – I don’t like the Platonic ideal (i.e. the pretentiously formulated stereotype) of a musical that people may think of when the genre comes up. At the same time, some of the films I liked best growing up were musicals, such as Hair or Jesus Christ Superstar. I’ve even rewatched some musicals that didn’t click for me when I was growing up, like West Side Story, and I’ve come to greatly enjoy them. Similarly, “Once More With Feeling” is one of my favourite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Killer, and I’d defend its artistic merits as much as I would those of my favourite less jazz-handy episodes.

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How to manipulate time… and people

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Richard Curtis, I’ll happily admit: your 2013 film About Time made me smile, laugh and shed a manly tear. Okay, not quite, but I found myself touched and moved. It also made me want to shout obscenities and throw things at the TV, and not in good ways: About Time can be witty in one scene and trite in the next, it has moments of poignancy and others that are saccharine, and it manages to come off both charmingly self-effacing and smug under the disguise of glib humility.

Perhaps it’s difficult to imagine how such an overtly inoffensive film could leave me so angry when I’d actually say that I enjoyed a lot of it. About Time is that most common of genres, the time-travel rom-dram-com, and the way it brings together its outlandish conceit may be one of the things I liked best – like all the men in his bloodline, the main character Tim (played by Domhnall Gleeson) can travel back in time within the limits of his own life, making changes as he sees fit. Why? Dunno. How? He just needs to go and stand in a dark cupboard, clench his fists and concentrate. In one of many lovely father-and-son scenes, Tim’s dad (Bill Nighy, as charmingly odd as ever) basically gives his son a Curtisian version of Looper’s diagrams-and-straws speech which boils down to this: shh, it’s silly, let’s have some fun with this, okay?

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Personal Ghostbusting

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personalshopper5Since I give every movie one chance, sometimes two, let’s call this one an experiment, because me watching Personal Shopper could go either way – I might like it, or I might not. Personal Shopper seems to lend itself particularly well to this experiment because it got booed first and later received rave reviews in Cannes – not a lot of middle ground. I admit I found Clouds of Sils Maria sometimes quite intriguing, sometimes weird and incoherent, and sometimes it dragged along for me. On the whole, Sils Maria was probably not as smart as it thought it was. So here we have the same director, Olivier Assayas, and one of its two stars, Kristen Stewart, in the main role. I know some people have huge problems with her, but I am not one of them. I liked her in The Yellow Handkerchief as well as in Welcome to the Rileys. Continue reading →

The old woman and the Sea

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aquarius1There is an apartment house on the beachfront of Recife, Brazil. It’s from a time when houses still had names, and this one is called the Aquarius. Throughout the years, towering hotels have been built around it; tenants move out until there is only Clara left. Developers turn up, friendly but smarmy, but Clara does not want to sell. For Clara, home is a place. That is why the movie is called by the name of the house, Aquarius. It’s impossible to separate the woman and the house, but the developers don’t realize that yet. We all have something outside ourselves that defines us. With Clara, it’s the place she lives in. In Clara’s living room, there is a wooden chest of drawers on which Auntie Lucia, a family legend, once made love to her lover and future husband. That is not a source of ridicule, but a way to fondly remember the past. Continue reading →

The young woman and the Sea

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julieta5Pedro Almodóvar’s latest Movie Julieta is a Homeric family biography, bookended with Hitchcockian disquiet. I am not sure if those two moods go easy together; the story is loosely based on three Alice Munro short stories, so maybe this is what kept me watching. The movie starts when the older Julieta (played by Emma Suárez) gets word that her long-lost daughter Antía is alive and well and a mother of three, living in Switzerland. Julieta leaves her lover and moves back into the flat where she and Antía used to live so that the daughter can find the mother at the old adress – if she wants to. This and the brooding score made me expect some long-simmering family conflict. Continue reading →

Giving us some song and dance

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la-lalandDamien Chazelle’s La La Land harks back to another era of moviemaking, but it stands entirely on its own two feet. Sometimes those feet jig and hoof and skip and jump, but they are also able to stand completely still while the head looks at someone else across a crowded jazz bar. It’s a musical, but it is much more. It starts as an exuberant fantasy, and when the romantic bits or the musical numbers run the danger of getting too much, real life comes crashing in, rooting the whole dream in firm ground, only to take off again later. It’s over two hours long, but there are no boring bits. There is funk, soul, jazz, tap-dance and waltz, there are vinyl records and live bands, there is beer and coffee. There is love, and there are kisses, and there are fights. Continue reading →

Bring me the head of 2016

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rogueoneoldstyleposterIn a lot of ways, 2016 was the year to get suspicious about a lot of things, most of all about the future, and maybe some of us even got superstitious a little bit. As far as my movies are concerned, I think I detect a pattern: the two movies I liked best in 2015, Whiplash and Birdman, ran here in January, and 2016 began with Carol and The Big Short, another couple of great movies. Superstition? Coincidence? Perhaps. I can’t quite shake the feeling that this year, you had to dig slightly deeper to find a really good movie. I wrote about The Assassin and American Honey, which are far from light entertainment, but are immensely rewarding and beautiful to look at. I also highly recommend Sing Street for its youthful irreverence and its music; Arrival, for its use of the sci-fi genre to learn a lot more about us humans than about the extraterrestrials (if you haven’t read thirithch’s excellent review, you should do so). And Rogue One, which tried hard not to be a blockbuster and was all the more successful because of it. Continue reading →

We must love one another or die

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You know how this story ends. It ends the same way as every story does, if we’re being honest. “Happily ever after” sounds nice, but it is really only a comforting fiction. All stories move towards the same end, mine, yours, everyone’s. Does that make them bad stories? Is every story that’s honest also depressing?

Then again, what choice do we have? And, if we admit to ourselves – not just occasionally, with a start, but with every breath – that every story ends the same way, would we still choose to live those stories? Could we even, without our hearts breaking constantly?

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Fan service, nostalgia and storytelling

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When I first heard about Warner Bros. Pictures’ plans to bring the Potterverse back to the big screen with Fantastic Beasts and How to Find Them, I pretty much dismissed those plans as them going back to their favourite cash cow: a decision based primarily on monetary interests. Rowling’s book, published in between the fourth and fifth Harry Potter novels, was more of a sourcebook for the fans, so why turn this into a film – or, indeed, a series of films? For the many shiny sickles and galleons the producers would add to their hoard at Gringotts, obviously.

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If music be the food of love

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I fell in love with John Carney’s Once. That is not a particularly original reaction to the film, but it’s definitely true for me. Once is a beautiful, subtle love story told mostly through music – or is it a music film told through romance? Having recently watched Carney’s follow-ups, Begin Again and Sing Street, those same elements, love and music, are central there too, and with them it’s also impossible to separate the romance and the music.

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