My favourite movie of the year was Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse. OK, I realise picking a cartoon superhero movie is controversial, but I loved it. Miles Morales travels across multiple versions of reality meeting alternative Spiderpeople to save the Universe. Each parallel world has it’s own artistic style, and the plot explores the “canonical event”, the moment of tragedy that defines the hero.
In 2nd place was Barbie, which worked equally well as a feminist fable and 2 hours of bright pink fun. I would happily watch it again now. The way it outraged thin skinned American right wingers only made me love it more.
There were 2 great action films this year, neither of which featured Keanu. Idris Elba’s return as Luther in the feature length Fallen Sun, starts out as a typical dark serial killer hunt, and then in the final third becomes Idris showing all of us exactly how good a James Bond he would have been. Even better was Bull – actually released in 2021 but only now readily available to watch – Neil Maskell is terrifying as a gang enforcer betrayed and seeking vengence. Bull will be a future cult classic, and a top bloke film.
I might have been one of the few people to enjoy Indiana Jones and Dial of Destiny. The first 2/3rds are a typical Indiana Jones romp, the final third is bonkers.
The 50th anniversary cut of Wicker Man was brilliant, even if the extra material was mostly shots of Britt Ekland’s stunt bum.
Elsewhere it was a really poor year at the cinema.
Maestro: Most of the attention went to Bradley Cooper who cast himself as Leonard Bernstein with an enormous prosthetic nose. Cooper’s performance is amazing, as is Cary Mulligan, and you soon forget the fake huge shnozz. A bigger problem was the soap opera approach to Bernstein’s life. In 1945 the great concert halls of Europe were in ruins and for the first time the centre of gravity in music moved to New York. Carnegie Hall, and Radio Free Europe programming, became the ultimate arbiters of taste. Tragically America was in the grip of the McCarthy witchhunts and one by one the world’s greatest composers fell out of favour. Aaron Copland was gay and a former member of the Communist Party, Benjamin Britten the same. Shostakovich was a hardline Marxist who turned down the chance to defect. Duke Ellington was black. In their place the US promoted composers like Schoenberg; reliably right wing and always available to perform. Schoenberg was a serialist composer whose works sounded like a piano being pushed downstairs, for 2 decades music was dominated by composers no-one really liked while the real greats were hidden away for no reason other than right wing neuroses.
Bernstein was younger than Copland et al, but was gay, Jewish, and left wing. When he was dropped from concert halls he wrote for Broadway (On The Town), Hollywood (On the Waterfront), and of course West Side Story. He made great popular music that people actually wanted to listen to.
He was also a left wing political activist. He conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” at the funeral of John F Kennedy and again in Jerusalem after the 6 Days War. He conducted Beethoven’s 9th (the Ode To Joy) as the Berlin Wall came down. He performed at Benefit Concerts for the Civil Rights movement and the Black Panthers, and in the 80s was an AIDS activists. In 1983 he headline the first big AIDS benefit concert at Madison Gardens “the biggest gay event of all time”. His FBI file was over 800 pages long
None of which you would know about from the movie, which focusses on his marriage and love life. Cooper gives an amazing peformance, but so much of Bernsteins life is missed out, including all of West Side Story, I assume for licensing reasons.
Leave The World Behind Based on the brilliant book Rumaan Alam, the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper, leaving confusion and a slow motion collapse of society. Starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, Kevin Bacon, Mahershala Ali, and Myha’la, and co-produced by Barrack Obama this could have been a brilliant and haunting fable of America falling apart. Instead it was empty, allowing different US political tribes read whatever they wanted into it. It never committed to being a liberal horror story or right wing fantasy with Ethan Hawke and Kevin Bacon one playing a hapless liberal arts professor, the other a paranoid blue collar contractor obsessed by Koreans.
Beau is Afraid was the latest movie from Ari Aster, who directed the fantastic and terrifying Midsomar. The only terrifying thing about Beau is Afraid was the length – a bum punishing 3 hours of rambling incoherent nonsense. I know I should come up with some long and complex explanation about why it is brilliant, but frankly I can’t be arsed.
Atter the horror Beau of Afraid I wish I could tell you that Killers of the Flower Moon or Oppenheimer were great, but they were so long I stayed at home and watched Spiderman again. Oppenheimer was so long it should have been called Woppenheimer.
Ridley Scotts epic Napoloen was a bit of a mess. The actions scenes are great, particularly Austerlitz, but the bits of politics and intrigue didn’t work at all. His decision not to cast any French actors was weird, but even odder where the choice of British comedy actors like Julian Rhind Tutt and Kevin Eldon. Also baffling that the included General Dumas (one of the first black senior officers) but cut all of his lines so he just appears randomly in scenes with no explanation looking hunky. There is an excrutiating scene where Napolen furiously confronts the British Ambassador “You just think you’re special because you’ve got loads of boats”. Rupert Everett as Wellington is as camp as a row of tents.
The Waterloo scene felt rushed, and the movie would have been loads better with more of the Battle of Waterloo and less of the diplomacy stuff. In fact Ridley Scott should probably just made a 2 hour movie about Waterloo and left it at that.
The Killer was a tragic waste of Michael Fassbender and duller than a week in prison. The Creator seemed to be an attempt to rework the Vietnam war in space, but this time the Americans were the baddies. This baffled me because I thought everyone already knew the Americans were the baddies. It also had some weird thing going on with ethnicity were Asians were all portrayed as pale skinned Brahmin Hindus, or Japanese Buddhists, with no other darker skinned Asians portrayed.
The strikes by the screenwriters and actors means that next year will be an even slimmer year at the Pictures. It feels that a lot of dependable ticket selling franchises, or movie trops had run out of steam over the last few year, and we really need something new and interesting to keep moviegoers engaged.
The only movie I regret not being able to see this year was Boy and the Heron Hayao Miyazaki’s last film. Hopefully I will catch up with it early in the New Year.