Wednesday June 29th 2011
Transformers: Dark Of The Moon hits cinemas around the world today and like it or not, it’s going to make dollar. It’s a shame because the film’s essentially terrible, but then again there are certainly titles out there less worthy of financial success, namely the last Transformers movie.
The formula is basically the same: 2.5 hour runtime, awful script, dislikable protagonist and at least an hour of robot-based carnage — fifteen minutes of which might be worth waking up for. Luckily for Michael Bay, Dark Of The Moon‘s fifteen minutes are SO MINDFUCKINGLY SPECTACULAR that they almost justify the price of admission in one fell swoop. At least until Shia LaBoeuf sticks his big arrogant face in again and makes you want to murder whoever wrote such a hateful, solemn bastard of a character for an actor whose greatest skill remains bumbling physical comedy.
It might be a little premature to judge Megan Fox’s replacement, British model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, given how little she has to work with here — STICK YOUR BUM OUT, LOOK SCARED, POUT YOUR LIPS IN SUCH A WAY AS TO SUGGEST THAT YOU MIGHT BE PROFICIENT AT ADMINISTERING A BLOWJOB — but even with just a handful of lines she’s a firm lock for worst performance of 2011. I’m not even sure she can do a British accent properly. And those facial expressions! It’s hardly surprising that Shia LaBeouf chooses to physically manipulate her cheek muscles rather than trust her to do all that difficult emoting work by herself…
OTHER THINGS THAT ARE EQUALLY HATEABLE: the reliance on painfully sincere indie music to convey emotion, the nasty streak of homophobia that runs throughout, the fact that the title is blatantly missing the word ‘side’, and last but not least the veritable avalanche of product placement. At one point Shia actually Googles a specific Mercedes to find out how much it’s worth and then the camera lingers on the screen for a good five seconds while the car’s features are illustrated by the website’s sales page. It makes you want to spread anti-Mercedes propaganda just to redress the balance a little bit.
So surprise surprise, it’s not very good. But what were you expecting? Part 3 of the franchise to end all franchises is at least a significant improvement on the last entry, and if 155 minutes of soul-destroying materialistic bullshit is all we have to put up with for a couple of decent action sequences, then I’m 100% on board.
I am of course being ironic. Or not, I’ve lost track.
Tuesday June 28th 2011
I did a phone interview with Miranda July (of Me and You and Everyone We Know fame) about ten minutes ago, for a ‘piece’ I’m ‘writing’ in ‘i-D Magazine’ about her new film The Future. I’m not very good at phone interviews and did my fair share of nonsensical rambling during our half-hour chat, but she’s very nice and helpfully covered up any awkward silences with polite, affirmative noises.
While doing a spot of research on her awesome personal site earlier today, I also stumbled upon an amazing series of images she made with photographer Roe Ethridge for the Vice Film Issue a few years back, in which they intricately recreated the poses of background artistes from iconic movies such as Kramer vs. Kramer (above), Vertigo and Dog Day Afternoon.
Needless to say, there’s something quite magical about the whole thing.
View the entire set here. (Sorry if this is old news.)
Tuesday June 28th 2011
I watched Sleepless in Seattle again the other night, and as well as remembering how much better it is than When Harry Met Sally (feel free to disagree but also know that you are categorically wrong), I suddenly realised how long it’s been since Tom Hanks has been properly charming in anything. It seems like every character he’s played in the last ten years has either been a boring plank, a cartoon, or a romantic lead clearly written for somebody twenty years his junior.
With Larry Crowne, his second stab at directing, it’s time for Hanksy to finally own up to not being 25 any more, as he steps into the shoes of the titular Mr. Crowne, a Navy veteran who loses his job at a supermarket due to TOPICAL DOWNSIZING THAT IS TOPICAL. And if you think that sounds distressing and emotional, never fear: the scene in which Crowne gets fired occurs less than five minutes into a movie that is otherwise entirely devoid of any conflict whatsoever.
Instead, Hanks’s film is an insanely tedious series of increasingly saccharine ‘feel-good’ moments, in which Boring Old Man Larry Crowne goes to community college, becomes inexplicably popular with a group of attractive young students, has a makeover, falls in love with Julia Roberts and generally has everything go right for him all the time. All of which might be great fun for Larry Crowne, but carries about as much dramatic weight as a baby eating a Jaffa Cake.
Julia Roberts cements her apparent disdain for challenging work with the role of Mercedes Tainot (that’s Mercedes Tainot), a college professor who may or may not have distinguishable character traits. Equally wasted are Bryan Cranston, as her ‘professional blogger’ husband (get ready for plenty of ‘Ha! Blogs! Aren’t they worthless!’ business) and Taraji P. Henson, whose transformation from talented actress to permanently sceptical chipmunk is nearly complete:
In a way it’s quite sweet that Tom Hanks is so reluctant to introduce any kind of bad vibes into the equation. He’s like a friendly teddy bear wobbling around entertaining the elderly and infirm with big happy stories full of big happy people, and is that really such a crime?
I mean, whatever you think of his movies, you can’t deny that he’s one of the cuddliest directors in Hollywood. CAN YOU?
And Larry Crowne is exactly that: the cinematic equivalent of a big friendly cuddle, albeit one that makes you want to vomit up your own soul at the sheer awfulness of it all.
Friday June 24th 2011
With the other ‘big hitters’ consisting of a British prison drama, a Kings of Leon concert movie and a handful of documentaries that will be on DVD in a week’s time, there’s an open goal waiting for Bridesmaids at the UK box office this weekend. Its success will be lauded by the nation’s critics, who rightly celebrated this funny, charming, intelligent comedy and its tour de force lead performance from Kristen Wiig.
Sadly, what seemed to most impress critics (both male and female) was that anything funny, charming or intelligent could have emanated from an organism in possession of a vagina. ‘Women can do gross-out too!’ they proclaimed. ‘This is nothing at all like Bride Wars!’ For some it seemed that the entire concept of a woman being funny — you know, a real woman, not Jo Brand — was so astonishing that the only possible course of action was to reach for the thesaurus and locate every synonym for ‘feminist’ in the English language.
Some might call it patronising to congratulate a group of professional female writers, actors and comedians for simply managing to equal their male counterparts, but those who did find it necessary to take this approach stressed that they were doing so only to give the film ‘a fair chance’. In their eyes the film needed protecting from some perceived patriarchal threat – a hoard of male detractors who were apparently insisting that women couldn’t (or shouldn’t) hope to equal men in the comedy stakes. But where were these men? I certainly hadn’t seen any of them, and I was starting to suspect that perhaps they didn’t exist at all.
Enter Chris Tookey. In an article in today’s Daily Mail, the notorious bullying victim squares off against lovable bigot Jan Moir in a battle to decide whether Bridesmaids was ‘filth’ or ‘fun’. Taking up residence in the filth corner, Tookey effortlessly makes Moir look almost reasonable (which takes some doing) as he sets about issuing some of his most blatantly offensive mandates yet, all in response to the film that he found…
‘… tasteless and infinitely depressing, both in itself and for what it says about how women are being portrayed in modern films.’
He begins his piece with a series of rhetorical questions, the first of which is cleverly disguised as an issue of taste rather than gender:
‘Does the idea of women in expensive bridesmaid dresses vomiting over each other and answering calls of nature publicly and humiliatingly in the street strike you as side‑splittingly hilarious?’
Now, regardless of your opinion on gross-out humour (and personally I thought the scene in question was one of the worst in the film), there’s no question that for Tookey the outrage here is innately linked to the fact that it’s women partaking in transgressive behaviour rather than men. After all, his positive reviews for Dumb and Dumber (‘I cried with laughter’) and American Pie (‘sparky wit’) suggest that there is room for distaste in mainstream comedy after all. He even mentions the latter in his Bridesmaids review, and in a rare moment of self-awareness notes that…
‘[American Pie] had the excuse of being about hormonally-challenged males, and invited us to cringe along with their shortcomings.’
So I think it’s fair to say that it’s not the content of the film that bothers Chris, it’s the fact that it’s all happening in the vicinity of the womenfolk. Carried along by his questionable sense of moral righteousness (he’s careful to disown ‘misogynistic’ films like The Hangover: Part II along the way), Tookey plays directly into the hands of those who seek to make Bridesmaids a feminist manifesto of sorts, by extolling the virtues of an image of femininity that might be offensive if it wasn’t so ludicrously outdated:
‘Annie is supposed to be likeable, although she is having meaningless sex with a monstrous egotist (Mad Men‘s Jon Hamm) and doesn’t appreciate a local policeman (Chris O’Dowd) who is much nicer and is besotted with her.’
What he’s essentially describing here is the plot of every romantic comedy ever made, but obviously because it’s a woman being interested in two different men rather than the reverse, it’s a shocking portrait of the ‘sluttishness’ (his word, not mine) that’s so rife in today’s society. I bet you Wiig’s character has had pre-marital sex too. And she probably votes, the whore.
Later he makes some equally illegitimate complaints about films like The House Bunny and He’s Just Not That Into You, but they’re so blatantly irrelevant in the context of a Bridesmaids review that to give them further attention here would be pointlessly diverting.
He concludes that…
‘… in order to get made in modern Hollywood, [Bridesmaids] presents an astoundingly repellent view of the sex as immature, self-loathing and mentally unbalanced’
… which, if you’ve seen the film, can only be read as wilfully misleading. Each word in this glaringly misogynistic summation is essentially a compliment that might be paid to a male-led film, twisted into a criticism. So where their male equivalents are ‘flawed’, these female characters are ‘immature’; instead of ‘self-aware’, they’re ‘self-loathing’; and instead of ‘complex’, they’re ‘mentally unbalanced’.
For those who seek to make the film a gender statement, be it ‘you go girls’ or ‘back in the kitchen’, Bridesmaids will always be inseparable from its societal context – a pressure that male comedies are rarely forced to accommodate. And while Tookey’s brazenly offensive diatribe might be more immediately shocking than a five-star review that stresses just how ‘impressive’ the whole thing is, neither are doing the film any favours.
If you do see Bridesmaids this weekend (and I highly recommend you do) why not just go along, enjoy it, come home and not write a gender politics essay on its treatment of women in comedy? If there’s anything truly ‘refreshing’ about the film, it’s that it doesn’t come with an agenda. It’s almost as if they just want to make people laugh. And while forcing Chris Tookey onto his high horse is always a good source of humour, I suspect it’s not exactly what they were going for.
