The Prince of Egypt (1998)

I thought I’d throw in an extra film this week on the Saturday because it’s another date-appropriate release, which is to say it’s a film that deals with the story of Passover and we are now in the middle of that Jewish holiday. It’s a classic animated film, of sorts, depending on who you are; it’s my first time coming to this film so I apologise if my analysis is a little shallow.

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I don’t know if I’m really in a position to critique this, but it’s a telling of the story that informs the Jewish holiday of Passover, and it cleaves to a lot of the Biblical narrative fairly closely really, but with songs. It does feel, though, like it’s trying to grapple with the big question in terms of the extent to which God’s punishments of Pharaoh (Ralph Fiennes) impact on his people, which is to say how much is Moses responsible for the death, and that bit doesn’t quite resolve. Killing the firstborn is after all pretty bad whoever does the act. But this is a story of revolutionary anger leading to political change, and the niceties can sometimes be lost. In a sense it’s applicable even now: revolution requires action, which means that difficult choices sometimes need to be made. The original story, and this film too, is fairly clear that you can’t effect change by being a pacifist, and some level of fundamental disruption is going to occur. Perhaps that’s a message people need to hear, but it’s always going to be a hard one to pull off, especially in an animated family film.

CREDITS
Directors Brenda Chapman, Steve Hickner and Simon Wells; Writer Philip LaZebnik (based on the religious text שְׁמוֹת Shemot “Book of Exodus”); Starring Val Kilmer, Ralph Fiennes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sandra Bullock, Jeff Goldblum, Danny Glover; Length 99 minutes.
Seen at home (Amazon streaming), London, Friday 10 April 2020.

Minions (2015)

It’s a huge hit, its success already guaranteed on the back of the two Despicable Me films (in which the titular yellow creatures first appeared), so there’s little point in me getting too in-depth here, besides registering my general enjoyment. Here the Minions have been moved ever more to the forefront of the narrative, still voiced as ever by director Pierre Coffin in a strange burbling blend of European and Asian languages. It’s a prequel to the earlier films and sends us back to the swinging 60s, so the filmmakers lean heavily on a period soundtrack, which provides some memorable moments. Yet on the whole I found it just a little bit disappointing, lacking some of the inventiveness of the earlier films. That won’t probably matter much to the kids at whom it’s aimed, and it didn’t frankly matter much to me on a Friday night after a few drinks in the pub. It’s colourful, it’s silly, it’s not too demanding.

CREDITS
Directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda; Writer Brian Lynch; Starring Pierre Coffin, Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm; Length 91 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Haymarket, London, Friday 26 June 2015.

Gravity (2013)

I can’t help but wonder if I’m maybe going through a bit of a fallow period with my film writing. There’s only so many reviews you can bang out in a week (and I’ve been posting every weekday for the last few months, pretty much) without it all feeling a bit same-y. Perhaps I’m unenthused by what’s on offer at the cinemas right now, or maybe it’s just an autumnal thing of feeling like getting out and doing more exercise. In any case, when I think about Gravity — and more specifically, when I think about all the hype around it, about all the reviews of it that I’ve read over the last couple of months (for it was on release around the rest of the world before it came to the UK) — I don’t really feel I have a whole lot new to add. Which isn’t to say I didn’t like it: that might actually be a new angle on it. No, it was great in several respects. You’ve probably seen it, and you may well agree. If you haven’t, it’s a disaster movie set in space and it focuses on two astronauts, Ryan (Sandra Bullock) and Matt (George Clooney).

Of course, there’s already a backlash but that’s to be expected. A lot of the criticism seems to focus on the science, and not being a scientist I cannot contribute to such arguments, save that if you’re obsessing about these things and then writing off the film as a result, you probably don’t understand much about art. The film certainly works as an immersive experience. It’s the first film I’ve seen in the IMAX format, and it impressed me. Even the 3D impressed me, and that’s a gimmick I tend not to have much time for. I suspect it may have been the fact that Gravity builds far more deliberately and quietly than most 3D films, with slower, more fluid camera movements reducing the ocular strain that usually accompanies the format (given that big budget movies tend more towards speedy, fast-cutting action). As a film, it has more confidence in its script and its images to create tension than in artificially engineering such feelings through throwing things at you, and I welcome that.

More persuasive are criticisms regarding the screenplay and characterisations. Not so much about the way it builds from a quiet opening through to the first act disaster that threatens the crew of a space mission working on the Hubble telescope — that much is done superbly well — as the actual dialogue which at times shades towards the mawkish. Then again, by the time we get to the worst of it (when Ryan encounters Matt in the space station’s landing craft), it feels like this has been somewhat earned by the film: Bullock’s character has, to say the least, had to deal with a lot of stress by this point. It also points to the way the film is a generation away from those films of the 1950s and 60s that expressed a wonder at the vastness of creation; the key take-home feeling of this film, via Bullock’s character, is relief at being spared the terror of this final frontier.

Then there are the characters. Clooney’s in particular seems a bit thin — he’s basically playing his usual ‘type’, bantering on with an easy charm and totally unflappable — though in a sense his calmness is like a decoy to the terror that hangs over the mission from the outset (there are more astronauts initially involved than just Ryan and Matt, but they don’t get any screen time). After all, from the pre-credits title informing us that nothing can live in space, to the precarious work they’re doing and the news of approaching debris from a satellite accident, the film frontloads the suspense. Added to this is the sound of Ed Harris’s recognisable voice from mission control, which for the movie-savvy amongst us is rarely a portent of good news.

The next paragraph may be classified as containing spoilers, although I’ve tried to be as oblique as possible. Skip to the final paragraph if you’re concerned.

Sandra Bullock’s character, Dr Ryan Stone, is possibly more problematic, as she’s loaded down with a sentimental backstory of the type that doesn’t trouble Matt’s experienced (male) astronaut. She too is basically a ‘type’, a mother-figure (after a fashion), tethered to the Earth by her experiences and her innate nature. If there’s some mythological heft to it, then it’s a mythology that trades on age-old tropes of woman-as-life-giver-and-nurturer. That said, the film problematises these links a little bit. If there’s a feeling at times that being in space is like being a defenceless baby in a womb (and maybe part of that is just my own flashbacks to the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey, another formative space-set event film), space is instead clearly presented here as deadly and hostile, and Ryan is frequently untethered and terrifyingly afloat. And in recounting her backstory, her own status as mother has, it turns out, been undercut by gravity, the very force which is denying her safety in space. Her survival then is never assured, and the ambiguity even extends to the film’s final sequence, which seems to rehearse the ‘ascent of man’ and suggests a rebirth, or perhaps a new set of challenges to her survival.

Whatever the deeper meaning that one takes from it, the film is nevertheless assured at the visual level. The special effects and the cinematography is transporting and rather demands the immersion of the cinema; whether it will work in quite the same way at home on smaller screens remains to be seen. In that sense, this is a return to proper ‘event cinema’ status. It may eschew a lot of the extraneous noise of your standard big-budget big-screen spectacular, but it still trades on many of these ideas, aided by canny marketing and hype. However, it boasts an excellent performance by Bullock (far stronger than her recent work in The Heat to my mind), a clipped running time (all blockbuster films should be this concise) and those incredible space-set special effects sequences. The possibility of space travel may seem further than ever from our current generation, but if this film has any effect then it’s to make us rather more comfortable with that reality; the only terrors that await us are in the darkened auditorium of a cinema. I’m not sure whether that’s depressing, or a great thing. But for 90 minutes it tends a bit more towards the latter.

CREDITS
Director Alfonso Cuarón; Writers Alfonso Cuarón and Jonás Cuarón; Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki; Starring Sandra Bullock, George Clooney; Length 90 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Enfield [IMAX 3D], London, Monday 18 November 2013.

The Heat (2013)

I still think there’s a lot to appreciate about this film, and a lot of reason not to write it off from the outset. For a start, it’s from the director of Bridesmaids (2011), a very likeable comedy that was generous to its largely female cast, and the TV show Freaks and Geeks, which was unjudgemental about high school cliques and launched the careers of many of today’s comedy stars. The writer worked on Parks and Recreation, one of my very favourite TV comedies of recent memory, and it stars a number of alumni of the often very funny Saturday Night Live (including the wonderful Jane Curtin in a small role). And I remain very happy with the idea of taking a genre as hackneyed as the buddy cop film and giving it a gendered twist. In fact, I rather enjoyed the trailer to be honest, so I thought it might be worth a couple of hours of my time. It’s just that, as a finished film, it feels stale and underwhelming and lacks real laughs.

It trades in the most reductive stereotypes for a start, though I appreciate that’s not exactly a huge criticism for a comedy, and yet some tiny helping of subtlety wouldn’t go amiss. As Boston cop Mullins, Melissa McCarthy is just relentlessly full of physical abuse and pushiness, while Sandra Bullock’s Special Agent Ashburn is prudish and smugly supercilious. That these two diametrically opposed characters should have to work together is surely chapter 1 in Writing a Buddy Cop Film for Dummies, but even that text might suggest leavening the good cop/bad cop roleplaying with something a little bit sympathetic and human to these portraits. Sure, there’s a bit of backstory to explain away their respective behaviours (this is where the always-excellent Curtin comes in), but it’s tediously predictable.

And that’s the thing: the laughs just aren’t there. Sure, there are some, but it’s not sustained, and it doesn’t come from anything that feels like real understanding of these characters as humans, just as excuses for them to do ‘things which are funny’. They get drunk together and dance at a dive bar, but without any apparent spontaneity or fun; they aggressively trade insults, but it’s just to illustrate their different characters; they hang a drug dealer off a building to get information from him, but then drop him by mistake, and I just don’t know what that’s supposed to be (empowering? funny?). A lot of the comedy in fact seems to be solely in the idea of putting women in the place of the genre’s more familiar boorish, lawless men, but it needs more of a twist than that.

There’s a lot of plot too — something about taking down a notorious drug lord — and it feels as if it’s lifted wholesale from another chapter of the genre textbook. It’s not like the intricacies of this are particularly important to the film, but when the plot is quite so forgettable, it makes the jokes that hang off it easy to forget too. Added to this that the film is presented in a grungy neo-70s style, complete with vintage funk music soundtrack, and it doesn’t feel particularly fresh on the whole (even the 2004 Starsky and Hutch managed to feel more up-to-date, but perhaps the mid-2000s were a high-water mark for American comedy).

In truth, I wanted to like this film, still do want to like this film, but I feel let down. The potential was there, it just lost focus in the execution. Which is, after all, probably something I should have been clued into, given the hilariously bad airbrushing of McCarthy on the UK poster (the image with this review is of the US poster). ‘It could have been worse’ isn’t really a recommendation, but I remain in hope for future film collaborations by Feig and co.

CREDITS
Director Paul Feig; Writer Katie Dippold; Cinematographer Robert Yeoman; Starring Melissa McCarthy, Sandra Bullock; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at Cineworld Fulham Road, London, Tuesday 23 July 2013.