It’s been over two months since I started Grantwatch, my heroic quest to view every Hugh Grant movie ever produced and rank them in order of brilliance, and many of you have expressed disappointment than I’ve only worked my way through five as of yet. What’s more, the five I’ve absorbed thus far are all bona fide Grant classics, rather than say … Sirens, or The Lair of the White Worm. With that in mind I rented both Mickey Blue Eyes and Extreme Measures this weekend, and while the former is completely amazing as well, it’s the latter I really want to talk to you about.
Released in 1996 and produced by Grant’s then-girlfriend Elizabeth Hurley, Extreme Measures sees Hugh play Guy Luthan (surely that’s one of the all-time best Grant character names?), an ER doctor at a New York inner city hospital. Written by Tony Gilroy, who went on to do the Bourne movies, and directed by Michael Apted, best known for the Up series of documentaries, the film offers no real explanation for the presence of an England fop in the gritty, urban environs of the hospital, and with the exception of a few clumsy references from his coworkers (“This is not England. This is not the National-Royal-Shakespeare-pick-up-the-tab healthcare system, okay?”) Grant’s incongruity goes completely unmentioned. It’s a fish out of water story in which neither the fish nor anybody else seems aware of his ‘out of water’ status.
Still, when he can deliver lines like this, who cares?
The film is only available on DVD in 4:3 pan-and-scan, so there’s a good chance I missed some vital details, but from where I was sitting it’s completely fucking insane. The plot concerns Grant’s investigation of a sinister medical organisation run by Gene Hackman, who may or may not be kidnapping homeless people and subjecting them to surgical experiments (spoiler alert: they are). Hackman’s henchmen include J.K. Simmons, Bill Nunn and David Morse, but only the latter is given any kind of back story, as eloquently illustrated in the following clip:
HIS WIFE’S ALL ILL AND SHIT!
HE’S LOST HIS FAITH IN JESUS!
HE’S GOT A GUN!
Grant isn’t given much in the way of complexity either, though there is a sort-of love interest in the form of a pre-Sex and the City Sarah Jessica Parker (thirteen years before they reunited in Did You Hear About TheMorgans?) and a weird friendship with a homeless hypochondriac named Bobby. And if you’re imagining how awkward Grant might look in those scenes, times it by twenty and you’re closer to the truth. It’s fucking joyous.
A rare excursion into drama (but with its fair share of inadvertent comedy), Extreme Measures is fascinating less as a box office flop than as career misstep that may well have dissuaded Grant from taking more risks in the years that followed. Nonetheless, it’s always exciting seeing H-G in unfamiliar surroundings, and they don’t come much less familiar than an opening scene in which he treats two gunshot victims simultaneously. It may not be perfect, or even ‘good’ per se, but Extreme Measures is — at the very least — deserving of a .gif wall.
I know I’m probably a week late on this because I don’t have Slash Film tattooed on my forearms (any more), but I saw the teaser trailer for Chronicle in front of In Time yesterday and fuck me has it shot straight to the top of my must-see list. (List available on request). It’s not exaggeration to say that the above two and a bit minutes of Chronicle are unequivocally, infinitely, immeasurably better than the full 109 minute cut of In Time.
Here’s hoping it doesn’t turn out like Cloverfield. Or Monsters.
I find it deeply encouraging that you can take the new two and a half minute trailer for Aardman Animation’s The Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists, remove every moment that doesn’t feature the voice work of Hugh Grant, and still be left with 48 seconds of material.
By that reckoning, the full feature should have at least 31 minutes of continuous Grantchat.
Either by coincidence or design, Shamewas classified by censors on both sides of the Atlantic this afternoon. As predicted, it received an 18 rating (for ‘strong sex and sex references’) here and an NC-17 rating in the States. But whereas the BBFC’s decision prompted nothing more than a collective ‘what did you expect?’ shrug, the US verdict has — at the time of writing — already prompted over 70 stories on Google News.
Most of them express surprise at the fact that Fox Searchlight, the film’s US distributor, are still planning to release the film uncut. Though many films receive the ‘kiss of death’ NC-17 rating, the vast majority are later re-edited to slip into the R category. Certain US cinema chains refuse to show films with the higher rating, and newspapers often deny them advertising space, meaning a film with any kind of mainstream ambition quite simply can’t afford to take the risk. It’s censorship of the most cynical kind (‘we won’t stop you releasing the film, but we’ll do everything within our power to make sure nobody sees it’) and it’s perpetrated exclusively by people who look like this:
[The woman pictured is Joan Graves, the only member of the MPAA ratings board whose identity is public knowledge. Go accountability!]
In theory, Shame‘s US rating should place precisely the same restrictions on the film as the British 18 certificate, denying admission to anyone 17 or under. But in practice, the MPAA’s decision will ensure that every imaginable barricade is put between the film and a successful run in cinemas. And not because it depicts graphic torture or the thoughtless slaughter of defenceless orphans, but because it has the temerity to show consensual sexual intercourse without strategically covering over any genitalia that might be on display.
Of course the irony is, these obviously aren’t the elements of the film that the youth of America will be missing out on. If they really want to see a thirty-something man rimming a prostitute they have all the necessary tools at their fingertips. What they won’t find on xvideos.com, however, are the aspects of Shame that make it worth protecting from thugs like Graves: the remarkable performances from Fassbender and Mulligan, the pitch-perfect cinematography from Hunger alumnus Sean Bobbitt and the arrival of Steve McQueen as a major directing force on the international arthouse scene.
Though the bulk of the movie is set in a beautifully rendered Elizabethan London, Roland Emmerich’s historical epic Anonymous opens with a big shiny aerial shot of modern-day New York — presumably a consolation prize to anyone hoping for another Godzilla. Down at street level we see jolly old Derek Jacobi hopping out of a cab and rushing into a theatre, which happens to be showing a play called … (wait for it) … Anonymous. You see what they’ve done there. Inside, Jacobi is shepherded on stage just as the curtains rise to deliver a short speech, a sort of prologue for the movie, the gist of which is:
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See also: Dead for ten years, Betsy.
From there we’re thrust back four hundred years to the time of William Shakespeare, a bumbling young actor from Stratford who’s asked by the wealthy Earl of Oxford to take credit for his plays. He willingly agrees to the deception, throwing himself and his contemporaries into the shady (and slightly boring) world of 16th Century politics.
If, from my use of the words ’16th Century politics’, you’re beginning to suspect that this isn’t your average Roland Emmerich movie, then you’d be correct. Few could ever have predicted that he’d be the man to bring the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship to the screen and fewer still would have imagined the result to be anything like Anonymous.
The film has a certain amount in common with Emmerich’s earlier films. Like 10,000 BC it has little interest in historical accuracy; like 2012 it’s based on a wild and blatantly false fringe theory; and like almost all of the films he’s churned out during a career spanning three decades, its characters are all insane pantomimic archetypes. Rafe Spall’s Will Shakespeare spends most of the movie wobbling around like a hyperactive Elizabethan Stan Laurel, while newcomer Trystan Gravelle boldly employs the Cheshire Cat as his model for Christopher Marlowe.
For a while this heretical approach to Shakespeare makes for a pretty solid film, that is until Emmerich realises he’s Doing A Drama and drops the knockabout Bard LOLs in favour of scene after scene of badly-written conversations about duty and honour and the like, half-heartedly delivered by a group of talented British actors who should know better. The whole thing quickly becomes as tedious as 2012 – if in a decidedly different way — and you start to wonder how much time and money you could have saved by staying at home and re-watching Shakespeare in Love.
The answer is 130 torturously slow minutes and about £10.
