Blade Runner 2049 and Good Time

Blade Runner 2049

★★★★½

"And blood-black nothingness began to spin, a system of cells interlinked within cells interlinked within cells interlinked..."

When a great film of days gone by is rebooted, or given a sequel, there is always, and rightfully so, a sense of trepidation. But when one of the best genre films of all time (as well as single-handedly creating its own sub-genre) gets a sequel, the fear of failure is amplified. Blade Runner was a box office flop - taking $33 Million while needing $56 million to break even. Despite this it garnered a cult following for its inventiveness, world building and entirely new take on the sci-fi genre. After 4 different cuts, the last of which was in 2007, there was rarely any talk of a sequel. Nonetheless 25 years later, and approaching the actual year of 2019 in which the first Blade Runner is set, a sequel was greenlit, and found its way to the big screen.



While Blade Runner took a very simple plot (some replicants are here, hunt them down, Deckard.) in a vast and complex world, 2049 goes further, as Officer K (the fantastic Ryan Gosling) discovers something that according to Lt. Joshi (Robin Wright) "Breaks the world". And so he sets off on a vast and expansive mystery and at last we get a feel for the enormousness of what makes up the Blade Runner society. BR2049's world building is spectacular. Entirely confined with dystopian California,  we learn of the events in the 30 years preceding this story, as well as how the country is sustained across its different regions. We travel with K across California and experience the true vastness and implications of the result of the mystery on countless people. By getting a comprehensive look at Blade Runner society in 2049 we learn and become more personal with the stakes of the mystery, as well as learning more about K along the way.

Ryan Gosling delivers yet another standout performance. Fantastic in La La Land, The Big Short, Drive, The Nice Guys, Gosling takes another wicket as the tortured Blade Runner Officer K, and captures your heart through his tragic relatioship with a hologram - Joi. Their struggle together appears unique, and as Joi tells him at one point - special - but K is surrounded by images of the commercialisation of Joi as a hologram, as a product. Gosling's excellence is largely due to his great ability in bringing every corner of his character alive. While he's with Joi you can see his dual torture and acceptance of Joi's lack of physicality.



While Armas (Joi) doesn't have this duality, her descent into desperation is very convincing, especially considering in many of her scenes she won't have been shot opposite Ryan Gosling. Goslings acting also comes alive as we go through the second and third acts, as his character dives deeper into this mystery, where he is stretched to his breaking point. Two standout scenes are the baseline tests, where a rising score, combined with the inflection and vigour of Gosling's voice and piercing stare make for a supremely tense scene.

Elsewhere Harrison Ford looks like he gives a shit for the first time in years. Perhaps he's finally found something he cares about. Deckard returns after going on the run in the time since 2019. The scene in which K and Deckard finally meet is one of the best of the year, set against the orange hue of Blade Runner Las Vegas.




Director of Photography Roger Deakins absolutely nails this setting, and is the standout of the film. Blade Runner LV is drowned in orange smoke, whilst Los Angeles is a neon dystopia. Every shot is measured, whether flying above the sprawl or confronting a group of savages, BR2049 is a beautifully shot film. Across these three aspects, controlling the sizeable budget against Deakins' lavish cinematography, motivating Harrison Ford to actually work while perfecting Gosling's performance, and top tier world building, makes this Denis Villeneueve's best direction of a project for years. Blade Runner 2049 was such an enormous task, so I believe Villeneueve's direction is better than in that of Arrival or Sicario, even if they are  close to equal as pictures.



Blade Runner 2049 is everything the sequel to Blade Runner should have been and more. It is a high concept sci-fi study into dystopian commercialisation, the struggle of masculinity and the struggle of femininity, as well as asking that age old Blade Runner question, what does it mean to be human? I'll be doing a proper thematic analysis another time, but for today we can stick with Ridley Scott's vision being continued. Villeneueve has ensured with BR2049 that the Blade Runner legacy will not be lost, like tears in the rain.

Good Time

★★★★

"Don't be confused it'll just make things harder for me."

Good Time is a panic attack of a movie, that grabs you by the hair and thrusts you into a frantic scramble as you watch Robert Pattinson sprint the streets of New York, sinking further and further into desperation as he tries to get his brother out of jail by the end of the night. Driven forwards by snappy direction and camera work, Good Time is one of the most thrilling films of the year.

It's a simple film really. We open with a big wide shot of New York City, and this is the director telling you this is where we're going to be, take a good long look at it because this is the last time you'll see it in any positive light. Then a series of events leads to Connie Nikas' (Robert Pattinson) brother Nick get landed in jail. Nick is mentally disabled and Connie is convinced he won't survive in prison, tries to rustle up the bail money. Even in the opening moments of the film it is driven forward by a pulsating techno-synth score, which pounds harder than your heart a the Connie stands in a bank mid-heist.



The direction is also excellent from the Safdie Brothers, of whom, Ben plays Nick Nikas. The camera work is claustrophobic, often coming in for tighter shots, but also dissassociative, as in the final sequence. Rather than slow motion and CGI our expectations of how objects are treated are subverted - what's most important we know anyway, and special attention is given to what is seemingly meaningless. This keeps us on edge, and that score is still pulsing away, with all the synths this side of the Hudson.



Pattinson is brilliant as he slips further and further into his desperation. You get the sense that this race against time is well and truly on, and as the night continues, his schemes and journey become so twisted and absurd that at times he can't believe what's happening to himself. It's a thoroughly New York film, but not the New York of Hollywood. The glitz and glamour are gone, this isn't Friends. This isn't The Devil Wears Prada or Now You See Me. This is Robert Pattinson tackling a security guard and filling his mouth with hallucinogens. It's got a real sense of place and purpose, in a film filled with characters with no direction at all. It's one of the most intense thrill rides of the year, laced with tragedy and comedy, Good Time was great.

The Beguiled and Justice Snorefest

The Beguiled

★★★½

There are few tales that can be read in such a number of different ways as the plot of The Beguiled. The Don Siegel original, adapted from the 1966 novel A Painted Devil, explored much of the same themes as the 2017 remake. Though it is the enormous amount of different readings that makes a remake completely viable. Sofia Coppola retells the story from a new perspective and engages in questions about gender, power, and sexuality in what I believe to be her best work yet.

We open following a young girl through the woods, in the midst of the American Civil War. She's singing and picking mushrooms, and everything in the world is right, until she comes across an injured soldier. An injured yankee soldier, who she helps back to her home, an all girls boarding school in the deep south. The soldier enters this sexually repressed world dazed and confused, but soon comes to his senses, with every girl fawning over him. We're introduced to the three principal women - Nicole Kidman as Martha, the Headmistres, regular Coppola collaborator Kristen Dunst as Edwina, and Elle Fanning as Alicia, who each seem to represent women at a different stage of sexual naivety and maturity. Martha is matured, far more experienced than her pupils, though repressed by the expectations of the period. Kidman's performance in this role is magnificent. Every look she makes to the other girls carries with it its own cryptic message, beyond the words she might be speaking at the time, sometimes of instruction, of knowing, or of query.

Meanwhile Kirsten Dunst portrays the wholly naive Edwina, who, alongside most of the girls in the school, falls for the yankee soldier, while Elle Fanning takes on the role of Alicia, who, while young, attempts everything in her power to seduce the soldier. With The Beguiled, Coppola was aiming for a more ambiguous telling of the story, and it wholly hinges on the fabulous Colin Farrell as the yankee soldier, whose performance is contained enough for the first 60 minutes of the film to remain tense and suspensful and wonder just who is doing the beguiling and who is the beguiled. 

The film takes a sinister turn, and it's in this that we begin to see exactly what Coppola wanted to do with the original material. Yet some of the more interesting parts of the film - what does it mean to be a man and power in relationships are glossed over, instead the film focuses on what it means to be a woman. Sisterhood and childhood are touched on, but the three clashing forces - Martha, Edwina, Alicia struggle to find a synthesis of womanhood that goes beyond relation to the man in the story. Rather than being a powerful narrative that addresses the pros and cons of sisterhood and sexuality, The Beguiled falls flat and is rather an incomplete tale of sexual repression, and then, exorcision. But in this the screenplay only falls short of being outstanding, and is certainly strong enough to stand on its own as a remake and re-reading of a classic story.

Justice League

★★

Production budgets for films have increasingly become irrelevant to the quality of the movie, once you pass a certain point. Reservoir Dogs was shot on a shoestring budget, after Harvey Keitel rustled up some cash for Tarantino to make his feature length debut. Sometimes you get oddball stories about a movie's production budget - like the cocaine budget for The Blues Brothers. Today a small budget film would be a $5 million sum, whilst medium would be 5-50, and large being 50+. Dunkirk was shot on a $100 million budget. I say all this to put the following number into context, because without this context it's just a series of digits and what could have been done with it. The production budget for Justice League was $300 million. And good God did it go to waste.



Justice League is a movie about a bunch of faceless people flying into other faceless baddies at incredibly high speeds, and then congratulating itself on what a great action set piece that was with a few quips about something nonsensical. Justice League is so incredibly devoid of character and motivation it could be a Michael Bay film. The latest entry in the DC universe is yards better than Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, mostly because Justice League has a plot.

Cyborg is the black one, Flash is the nerdy awkward but hilarious one and Aquaman is there too. Three central characters are characters only in name, despite having no character to speak of. And no, playing The White Stripes as Jason Momoa takes his shirt off and dives into the water does not count as characterisation in any way. Wonder Woman carries much of the film's emotional heart, and plays off of Ben Affleck's Bruce Wayne/Batman fairly well, who also is treated to some characterisation. Of course these two each have had their own films before, one of which was superb (WW) whilst the other was dreadful (Batman v. Superman). But even so we at least had a sense of this brooding Batman that Batfleck wanted to portray in JL from BvS.



Here's the rub, Justice League was supposed to be 2 hours and 50 minutes long. Now, this would be far too long for any superhero movie, but by God did Justice League need it. Exposition was deivered at a breakneck pace, to the point where there is a solid 10 minutes of exposition dump. The reason for this is almost certainly the Warner Bros mandate that Justice League be no longer than 2 hours. And clocking in at 1 hour 59 minutes (with a hilariously cut final shot) JL sneaks in under the time limit. Now the issue that arises here is that this is a movie with 5 principal characters and lots of major plot beats, and there is absolutely no breathing space. In fact, during the second act of the film there's possibly the fastest philosophical and metaphysical debate ever taken, concerning raising "someone" from the dead. Suddenly, things just happen in Justice League, and that's what you have to deal with.

Every great hero needs a great villain to fight against. And the CGI tower of doom that is Steppenwolf in JL is a pathetic excuse for anything even considered threatening. He's big and he swings a big weapon around and often proclaims he's a very dangerous person who's going to do some very dangerous things. He is so incredibly unremarkable.



You have to give credit where it's due though. Zack Snyder sure knows how to shoot an action scene. Though the final battle is transformers-esque in its messiness, lots of other set-pieces are directed excellently, particularly the best scene in the movie, which takes place on Wonder Woman's amazonian island as portrayed in her eponymous film. The amazonians take on Steppenwolf and his faceless army on horseback, and desperately try to keep a macguffin away from the big baddie. It's well show and serves for some riveting action, even if you're  unconvinced by the villain.

Good action and comic relief though simply isn't enough to save a film from itself. They injected some levity into the franchise, but the problem was never the tone, it was the poor storytelling, flat characters and erratic pacing that saw Batman v. Superman fall flat, as well as literally everything going wrong with Suicide Squad. As a result, Justice League is a film grounded in a universe of flat characters, poor storytelling and erratic pacing, and reflects that in itself.

The Party, The Death of Stalin, and Thor: Ragnarok

The Party

★★½

A film that is 71 minutes long has no excuse to be slow to get going, but The Party really does struggle to get its comedic gears turning for the majority of the run time. The social black comedy is about a party for somebody who's just gotten promoted to the Shadow Cabinet for a different type of party, and as the various guests turn up, so do a series of revelations that turns the party into chaos.

The Party has four locations, the main living space, kitchen, bathroom and garden, and as we follow the characters around the house while the party goes on there is a real intimacy of the space you are in. When people move you know where they are going and what that may potentially mean for the plot and for those characters. It is this very physical nature of the movie that is played up for laughs. Cillian Murphy is the jittery, coked-up banker with anger on his mind, while Timothy Spall is still like a statue encased in cement, with the same constant expression on his face, that frankly gets tired after five minutes. In some cases the comedy works, as with Tom (Murphy) or it doesn't, as with Bill (Spall) even though towards the end of the movie the physical comedy plays out very well.

What Sally Porter apparently failed to realise though is that watching people be awkward isn't very funny. The Party which seemingly relies on its intensely physical and close quarters nature prefers to avoid the physicality, dishing it out sparingly rather than going all out. Now this would have been alright if the dialogue didn't feel so forced. Who are these people who have actual conversations about the development of feminism. One character constantly reminds you she is a realist - not for any character reason of making her appear obnoxious, just because Porter thinks you've already forgotten. An art-house film audience is going to be able to read the subtext, so why does Porter feel the need to bash you over the head with absolutely everything, from the party double entendre to the clunky repetition of plot points, and pseudo political discussion taking place within the party. 

A film with an interesting premise that is executed like the Duke of Monmouth - painfully and slowly. The Party throws a heap at the wall and sees a few fun performances and funny physical moments stick against a black and white subtext and non-existent world building.

The Death of Stalin

★★★★

When In The Loop released as the best comedy of 2009, we finally saw Armando Ianucci's long-form debut, after writing and directing three series of the BBC comedy from which In The Loop spun off of - The Thick of It. But this alongside his American TV breakthrough Veep have remained the only projects part of the Ianucci empire. Despite his excellent track record, I waltzed into the 20:30 screening with a sense of trepidation, as it would be the first time Ianucci would be writing and directing an adaptation, from a graphic novel no less. But despite this added challenge, and the darkness of the subject matter, The Death of Stalin strikes a great balance between terror and comedy, more so being the latter.

The movie is almost endlessly quotable. Between the personified political bureaucracy and tedium that so often accompanies Ianucci's work in the form of what exactly "all of you" means and the fantastic ensemble of supporting characters, The Death of Stalin is bursting at the seams with laughs. Rupert Friend and Andrea Riseborough play Stalin's son and daughter, whom the politicians are desperate to cater to. Friend is fantastic in his role as the chaotic and uncontrollable son, but with enough nuance in quieter scenes to make the Sverdlovsk plane crash hilarious. (And hello to) Jason Isaacs gloriously plays Georgy Zhukov, the head of the Red Army, bearing seemingly hundreds of medals on his chest and speaking like he's just got off the boat from Hull. The choice to keep accents non-russian only plays up the hilarity and absurdness.

The more overt aspects of Ianucci's directorial style were also more distinctly cinematic. He ditches the handheld cameras used in The Thick of It, Veep and even his other feature, In The Loop. It's a cleaner look that reflects the writer-directors' foray into the world of this wider released picture, much bigger than anything he's done before. Despite this it doesn't lose any of the authenticity or vigour present in his earlier work. The Death of Stalin relies on textbook humour driven by an absurdist plot, and we never lose sight of this in the audience.



We watch the story sprawl across Moscow, and the sets have been designed immaculately well. Everything from Stalin's lavish chamber to the dingy back rooms that boast autopsies and executions reflect a looming soviet presence. There are times where you're not sure if what you're watching is a comedy or a tragedy - Molotov's refusal to break the party line being a key part of this. There is no doubt in my mind that this was a hilarious film and anyone else would find it so, but it often strays into a very dark, and towards the end very intense tone. It doesn't feel disjointed as this occurence is constant, but rather makes you as the audience tense up in time with the movie's darker moments, and let go during the hilarity. The climax will leave you crossed between the two.

The Death of Stalin is one of if not the funniest film of the year, and has proven to be moderate box office success. With that out of the way I think we can say hello to Jason Isaacs properly.

Thor: Ragnarok

★★★

The third instalment in the Thor franchise and the 17th instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Multi-Comsmoverse comes with the jaunty villain, the witty hero, the witty sidekick, the meta references and oh my God why won't they do something different from the past 16 films. Thor: Ragnarok is such an utterly meh movie but is visually loud enough to keep you interested for around two hours, even if I did fall asleep during the first act. While there is a real hint at story telling beyond the hero saving the day, it struggles to make this vision clear. The film does have a very high laugh ratio, though, and is visually stunning featuring two charismatic leads, and as a result is another respectable entry in the MCU.



The film likes to play with the idea of place, culture and how this affects power, but not in any consistent way. This philosophical underlining of the film goes absent for much of the movie until is is convenient to the plot, when it did have the potential to be really interesting. Instead the film spends much of its time devoting itself to being part of a much larger franchise - building an odd and frankly superficial relationship between Thor and Hulk, as well as the entirely manufactured arc that Valkyrie has. She was afraid of fighting after a military disaster, but now it's okay because she likes fighting again.  Also she's friends with Thor now. Why? Don't worry. Instead watch the Hulk fight this enormous CGI wolf, doesn't that look cool?

In truth the visual spectacle of Thor: Ragnarok is immense, and addresses some of the photographical issues I've had with other MCU instalments. The saturation and colours are all a bit drab. Now while this is understandable in a grittier film like the first Ironman or Thor: The Dark World, it's odd that it continued in movies that are chock full of comic book explosive fun, like The Avengers or Captain America. Thor 3 ups the ante and delivers an affair bursting with colour. Asgard looks as immense as ever, though there is one sequence in particular which is so spectacular that I completely disregarded how I felt about the film. The scene in which Valkyrie and her comrades are sent in to attack Cate Blanchett's Hela. It is amazing to see how far film has come, especially since the great leap forward of 3D graphics and effects in James Cameron's 2009 epic Avatar. Now we see a fantasy noble guard fly horses with wings into battle against a goddess with a mean blade. And this doesn't let up, there are plenty of stunning sequences like this throughout the film.



The tragedy of the film is this though, for a film and screenplay that wants to be so focused on place, the film itself doesn't know where it stands. The MCU has been walking a line between having extremely high stakes/somewhat taking itself seriously and going too far. Thor: Ragnarok tries to remedy that by throwing in endless snigger worthy lines, for almost every character in the film - seriously. I think everyone in this movie apart from Blanchett has a joke written for them. Though the director himself pops up as the voice of the irresistibly funny kiwi Korg, the film can't help but feel like a glorified comedy - and yet it tries to maintain these world ending, disaster filled stakes. Unlike The Death of Stalin, Thor 3 does not have a skilled enough director or a well enough established 'universe' for this to make sense. And in the end you just feel a bit meh about the climax. That happened. Okay. Do I really care? Where was the payoff? Without a proper subtext then hero movies will always suffer, and Thor 3 did indeed. Probably worth watching, just don't have any expectations aside a few laughs per page.