Ever Increasing Wonder

Films I've seen, songs I've heard, games I've played, whatever

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Well, unsurprisingly, Justice League looks a complete shower of shit

Stop suffocating us with CGI and darkness, it’s fucking tedious.

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"I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened..."

If you had told me when I was five and watching Star Wars for the first time that Princess Leia would one day die I would’ve called you a liar. 2016 has taken some of the best. Carrie Fisher you were our Princess and then our General. We won’t forget you.

May the Force be with you. YNWA RIP x

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - one hundred Moana · directed by: Ron Clements and John Musker · starring: Auli'i Cravalho and Dwayne Johnson · running time: one hour and forty-three minutes

Back in 1963, Disney had huge success with a project tapping into Polynesian culture. It wasn’t a movie, but a theme-park attraction called the Enchanted Tiki Room that surrounded visitors with singing animatronic birds. Amazingly, it’s taken fifty years for the studio to get around to making a feature film based around the lore of the Pacific Islands. The good news is that Moana was worth the wait. The bad news is that it does not have a single singing bird, although there is a scene-stealingly idiotic chicken called Hei Hei.    Originally it looked like the movie was going to be called Maui: the name of the tattooed demigod voiced by Dwayne Johnson. It was his folkloric exploits that first grabbed the attention of directors Ron Clements and John Musker. Then they decided to make the lead character a sixteen-year-old girl instead, creating a bickering, True Grit-esque dynamic between her and Maui as they navigate cyan-blue seas. It turned out to be an inspired move: the relationship is relentlessly entertaining. “I am not a princess,” Moana insists. “If you wear a dress and you have an animal sidekick, you’re a princess,” fires back Maui. She does and she has, but there’s no love interest and she is every bit the equal to her big-chested, big-talking, curiously nipple-free companion. It’s a progressive Disney movie that nimbly dodges outdated tropes.    Like Frozen, it’s got some mighty music, thanks in no small measure to the involvement of Broadway smash Lin-Manuel Miranda. There are some parallels between this and the musical that made him famous: both Moana and Hamilton involve someone leaving a tropical island to achieve greatness, and both feature earworming anthems of empowerment (’We Know the Way’, featuring Miranda himself on pipes duty, is the one you’ll be humming two days later). It’s also hard to resist Johnson singing Miranda’s ‘You’re Welcome’: an ode to egotism that is simultaneously a perfect storm of delightfulness.    Story-wise Moana doesn’t do anything radical. But visually it’s always finding new riffs, whether with the moving tattoo on Maui’s pec, a kind of inky Jiminy Cricket, or the sea itself, which transforms into an Abyss-style sentient wave to interact with our heroes. There’s a gloriously surreal battle with the Kakamora (think the Smokers from Waterworld, if Dennis Hopper was a coconut). And perhaps most fun of all is the sequence in which Musker and Clements, the duo who brought us The Little Mermaid, take us back under the sea for a confrontation with a glammed-up hermit crab (voiced by the wonderful Jemaine Clement, who also has his own song), a foray into a realm of fluoro nightmares.    There’s the odd dull stretch and dud line: “When you have a bird to write with, it’s called tweeting,” is unlikely to age well. It turns out, though, that Polynesian mythology and the House of Mouse go together very well indeed. Between Moana and Zootopia/Zootropolis, it’s been a banner year for Disney Animation. Pixar, watch your back.

8/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-nine Allied · directed by: Robert Zemeckis · starring: Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard · running time: two hours and four minutes

Fans of Brad Pitt eating things in movies, rest easy: your man tucks into an entire Moroccan tagine in Robert Zemeckis’ stolid, old-fashioned spy thriller. It’s one of the few reliable things in a curiously underpowered performance from an actor who should, on paper, lend exactly the kind of star wattage this tale of double-crosses and derring-do needs to spark into life.    Posing as a Parisian mining executive, Pitt’s Canadian spy Max Vatan is sent on a deadly mission behind enemy lines. Dropped into the desert outside Casablanca, he’s soon in a Gilda-style nightclub finding the other half of his cover story: a glamorous woman wearing hummingbirds on her blouse who’ll pose as his wife. It’s an apt motif, for the woman — Marion Cotillard’s Free French agent — is a free-spirited and captivating beauty. She’s soon putting the ‘fatale’ into femme with some dead-eyed Sten gun practice, working on his Parisian accent (“Québécois!” she sniffs, although “’Allo ’Allo!” is nearer the mark), and giving him lectures on the local mores. Moroccan men, we learn, always go to the roof after making love to their wives. To maintain their charade, Pitt is regularly sleeping under the stars.    While Cotillard is game as the steely-yet-vivacious Bonnie to Pitt’s more introspective Clyde, the only sparks that fly between them come during a slickly executed assassination sequence that recalls the climax of Inglourious Basterds. Unlike Allied’s obvious romantic touchpoints, from Casablanca to Notorious, this central pairing is hardly woozy with chemistry. Cotillard’s simmering intensity and Pitt’s more laconic charms rarely feel like natural bedfellows.    Of course, though, it’s into bed they tumble in a second act that relocates them to Blitz-torn London and throws a Nazi agent into the mix. Here, Steven Knight’s (Peaky Blinders) script seems on a surer footing. The shadow of those great Hollywood classics gives way to a brisk spy-chase flick straight from the pages of a Jack Higgins or Ken Follett thriller as Pitt’s paymasters pick up the scent of Nazi espionage and the pair are jolted from their domestic idyll. There’s a marvellously nasty cameo by Simon McBurney as an anonymous intelligence wonk from the feared V Section. He does everything except hiss and shoot flames as he grills Vatan on the mole.    Where Allied works best is in testing the strength of its central relationship as it comes under greater duress. Can the two lovers ever entirely trust each other knowing they both lie for a living? Will the brutal facts of war prise apart their bonds of loyalty? And can they keep their chickens alive as the Luftwaffe bombs rain down?    Unlike his most recent period piece, high-wire thriller The Walk, Zemeckis keeps most of his technological toys in the box for this one. A more classical piece of filmmaking, shorn of bells and whistles, its show-stopping moment comes with a whirling camera move around a car caught in a desert sandstorm. A reminder of its maker’s formidable skills, it’s a rare bravura moment in a more workmanlike thriller.

5/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-eight Pete’s Dragon · directed by: David Lowery · starring: Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, and Robert Redford · running time: one hour and forty-two minutes

Perhaps remembered more with a hazy affection than any kind of passion, 1977’s Pete’s Dragon was second-tier Disney - a mix of live action, animation, horrible acting and humdrum songs. It was a fun idea: a lonely boy makes friends with a dragon, but one that wasn’t properly fleshed out. As such, it’s an ideal target - and a notable point of difference - in Disney’s current sweep of remakes, which has so far given us satisfying live-action updates of Cinderella and The Jungle Book, with Beauty and The Beast still to come. If Disney dares to revisit the classics, then why not also make something good from the mediocre?    Pete’s Dragon is a very loose reworking. There are no songs and the setting is entirely different from the original’s coastal town, as is the young boy’s origin story. The only real similarity is the retention of a dragon and a Pete. In this version, Pete is a young boy whose parents are killed in a car crash while driving through an unnamed woody area in the north-west United States. Pete scuttles weeping into the woods and is almost eaten by wolves, but is instead rescued by a huge, fuzzy green dragon, whom he christens Elliott.    Thanks to Elliott’s ability to turn invisible and an awful lot of trees, the pair live undetected for six years - building an impressive tree house in the meantime - until loggers come a-chopping in their part of the forest and Pete is ‘rescued’ by a kindly ranger (the simply heart-stoppingly gorgeous Bryce Dallas Howard) and her family. Separation anxiety and musings on the meaning of family ensue.    David Lowery might seem an odd choice of director for this CGI-heavy children’s movie, his last film being the dusty romantic crime drama Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which was far more inclined to visual poetry than swift plot movement. Yet he’s an inspired pick. He gives a lived-in, left-behind weight to the setting. The town doesn’t seem fantastical, but it does feel isolated from society, a place that’s as unseen and out of time as the creature living in its miles of surrounding forest.    Lowery’s handed a slight story that follows obvious beats, but he works hard to make the characters within it sturdy. Take that opening crash scene. Lowery doesn’t shy from its horror, showing the crash fully, in graceful slow-motion, then staying with Pete as he crawls from the site of his parents’ death and into predator-filled woods. It is dark. And it tells you immediately what this child is made of. He also coaxes exemplary work out of Oakes Fegley as the older Pete, who turns in a mature performance beyond his years. As for the dragon, Elliott is not an especially convincing effect on its own, the weird fuzziness of the design making him ideal for plush merchandising but making him appear a little fake on screen. However, when Fegley is playing alongside him he is believably there.    Despite all this good work, Pete’s Dragon is nonetheless still not quite rich enough to sit alongside the Disney classics it’s being remade alongside. For as much as I enjoyed it - and I really did - it’s no more than a short story’s-worth of plot, which has been stretched to feature length. As an hour-long TV show this would have been superb, as a feature-length movie it’s a little thin. Still, this version has a lot more fire in its belly than the original and is a rare remake that’s better than the original.

7/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-seven Shin Godzilla · directed by: Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi · starring: Hiroki Hasegawa, Yutaka Takenouchi, and Satomi Ishihara · running time: one hour and forty-one minutes

The title of Shin Godzilla, an idiosyncratic take on the by-now iconic kaiju monster, can be interpreted in a few different ways: ‘New Godzilla,’ ‘True Godzilla’ or ‘God Godzilla.’ The latter seems most fitting since Gojira, originally a combination of the Japanese words for gorilla and whale, is translated as "God Incarnate" by characters in the film.   Shin Godzilla is a reboot, making this the first time that the Japanese military- or the world at large - have ever encountered Godzilla. The American government is responsible for dumping nuclear waste that an extinct lizard feeds off of. But this, the first Japanese Godzilla film since deliriously kitschy 2004 battle royale Godzilla: Final Wars, treats Godzilla like an act of God: He's here, and must be dealt with regardless of who made him.   In that sense the film is about damage control. There are singular heroes, like Disaster Prevention bureau analyst/leader Yaguchi (Hiroki Hasegawa), consulting biologist Ogashira (Mikako Ichikawa) and Japanese-American diplomat Kayoko (the beautiful Satomi Ishihara). But for the most part, the film's human segments are a wall of dialogue/consultation between various superintendents, supervisory committees, ministers, scientists, bureau chiefs and cabinet secretaries. Politicians scramble to take care of their end of the Godzilla situation regardless of their reasons. Some are careerists looking to get ahead, others are civil servants looking to serve the public. Writer/co-director Hideaki Anno (creator of the iconic Neon Genesis Evangelion) makes it easy to tell who the real good guys are in this film and who are just ineffectual bureaucrats. But every human politician must work together to stop Godzilla regardless of their intentions or skill sets. There's no "I" in this team.   Like a quasi-Aaron Sorkin-esque civics lesson that happens to be about a giant monster, this is a story about how the really good politicians are accountable for their actions, a message that British politicians should heed. And it's about adaptability, which we see when we look at the new creature design for Godzilla. The last shot of the film is an admiring shot of Godzilla's monstrous tail. He, after rapidly evolving from a belly-crawling moray-esque sea creature into the dinosaur-like creature we know and love, is in a constant state of flux. His arms grow bigger before our eyes, and he stops breathing through gills once he reaches land. Like the xenomorph in Alien, this Godzilla, a computer-generated special effect performed by a real actor in a motion-capture suit, is referred to as "a perfect organism surpassing man." In order to stop this creature, Japan's leaders must evolve with Godzilla. This movie is a response to the Fukushima nuclear disaster, but only indirectly. It concerns the lessons that politicians can learn from such a nuclear disaster and how they can move forward with a minimum of finger-wagging and chest-thumping.   By now, I'm sure you can tell that Shin Godzilla is a little different than other Godzilla films. It's probably drier, and more dialogue-centric than fans may want. But Anno and co-director Shinji Higuchi's (who directed last year’s two live-action Attack On Titan movies) idiosyncratic emphasis on the endless discussions and politicking that precedes the Japanese military is genuinely exciting. Their vision of the character is thoughtful and clever without straying too far from the Godzilla formula established in films like the original 1954 Gojira. Fans of what Godzilla have become may be upset to see Godzilla treated like a villain again after years of seeing him fight against more villainous kaiju monsters, like Mothra, Hedorah, Biollante and Gigan. But they should be excited at the thought of seeing a modern monster movie that isn't just the same old, same old.

8/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-six Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them · directed by: David Yates · starring: Eddie Redmayne, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Samantha Morton, Jon Voight, Carmen Ejogo, and Colin Farrell · running time: two hours and thirteen minutes

That entertainment enchanter JK Rowling has come storming back to the world of magic in a shower of supernatural sparks - and created a glorious fantasy-romance adventure, all about the wizards of prohibition-era America and the diffident wizarding Brit who causes chaos in their midst with a bagful of exotic creatures. It’s a lovely performance from Eddie Redmayne who plays Newt Scamander as a pretty fantastic beast himself. There’s a moment when he has to “whisper” an errant animal into submission and his contortions would put even Andy Serkis to shame.    Fantastic Beasts is a rich, baroque, intricately detailed entertainment with some breathtaking digital fabrications of prewar New York City. This is Steampunk 2.0, taking its inspirations from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday but the New York she creates also has the dark, traumatised look of Gotham City. The American wizards themselves are subject to an internal debate about their attitude to the civilians; in America a muggle is known as a “no-maj”. It’s a schism that threatens to reach X-Men proportions.    Daft Newt causes calamity almost immediately on arriving by creating a rumpus in a bank when some of his exotic specimens - carried in his battered suitcase with its worryingly insecure clasps. A quirk of fate means he forms the unlikeliest of friendships with a no-maj, Jacob Kowlaski (a beguiling performance from Dan Fogler) an ex-soldier stuck in a factory job but nursing big dreams about opening his own bakery. But Newt, our sweet-natured gentleman amateur from across the pond, exasperates the US wizard authorities and in particular their tough operative Tina Goldstein (Katherine Waterston) who herself has issues with her superiors. Tina finds herself having to protect Newt and Jacob and brings our two amigos back to the apartment she shares with her telepathic sister Queenie (Alison Sudol) who gets the hots for Jacob. And might there also be a spark between Newt and Tina? Meanwhile, creepy anti-witch activist Mary Lou (Samantha Morton) has an adopted son Credence (Ezra Miller) who appears to have a disquieting connection with top wizard-apparatchik Percival Graves (Colin Farrell).    It’s a very Rowling universe, dense with fun, but always taking its own jeopardy very seriously and effortlessly making you do the same. The Beasts movies may actually make clearer Rowling’s under-discussed debt to Roald Dahl. They also show that her universe with its exotic fauna is in the best way, a cousin to that of George Lucas.    There is a strange pleasure of seeing how her magic itself is as potent as ever. The muggle or no-maj world we are seeing is nearly a century old, but the basic language and furniture and procedure of magic is not in any way older or rudimentary. It is the same thing. They have moving pictures on newspapers in the same way as the present day. As ever, magic is a state within a state, a secret in plain sight, and part of the fun is being let in on the secret.    Katherine Waterston is great as Tina and perhaps gives the Rowling universe what it never quite had until now: a really strong young female lead who could tackle the bad guys on equal terms with the man - as well as having the chops for romance.    Rowling and Yates have given us a terrifically good-natured, unpretentious and irresistibly buoyant film. There’s a scene in a speakeasy where someone orders “six shots of Giggle Water.” This film felt to me like twelve.

8/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-five Your Name · directed by: Makoto Shinkai · starring: Ryunosuke Kamiki and Mone Kamishiraishi · running time: one hour and forty-seven minutes

Makoto Shinkai. Get used to that name. Within the next few years, if there is any justice in this crazy universe, it will be as synonymous with culturally transcendent Japanese animation as Hayao Miyazaki is right now. And there’s a good chance he will also be holding an Oscar early next year. Either for Best Animated Feature, or Best Foreign Language Film. Or why not even both?    Shinkai’s been making movies since 2004, such as 2011’s fantasy-tinged adventure romance Children Who Chase Lost Voices, but his fifth, Your Name, has proven a true breakthrough for the forty-three-year-old former graphic designer. In Japan it’s achieved a level of success for an animator only previously enjoyed by, yes, Hayao Miyazaki. It’s no wonder his countryfolk have already started proclaiming him ‘the new Miyazaki’.    With good reason. Just like the now-un-retired again head of Studio Ghibli, Shinkai exhibits a preternatural attention to detail; every frame of Your Name is a richly teeming composition, whether breathing in the vast sweep of a lush, crater-scarred landscape, tracing the aurora-tailed path of a sky-slicing comet, or focusing on the weaving of threads as they are nimbly braided into colourful cords. Whether blazing with sunlight, or shadowed by storm clouds, the film glows with an inner life that the hard, plastic sheen of CG animation so rarely attains; one awesomely trippy-cosmic sequence is even realised using pastels and chalks. Shinkai’s brazen narrative boldness, his dextrous handling of alternating, equally likeable lead characters, and his mastery of hand-drawn visuals all weave together to form a profoundly gorgeous cinematic experience.     There may be a lightness to the film’s early body-switch scenes, with a running gag about teen boy Taki (Ryunosuke Kamiki) fondling ‘his’ breasts whenever he wakes up as Mitsuha (Mone Kamishiraishi), but the comedy of biological displacement quickly evolves into an odd kind of long-distance love story, with Taki and Mitsuha leaving each other messages via journals and smartphone diary apps, while also charmingly setting each other rules about what they can do while in each other’s bodies. There’s a unique tension to their relationship. In one sense they are closer to each other than would normally ever be possible, literally sharing lives, yet in another they couldn’t be more separate. No doubt there’s a metaphor here for the simultaneous joys and horrors of adolescence.    The mystery of their predicament is found less in the reason it’s happening than the revelation of its purpose. There is a bigger story here, one that is fed by Japanese culture’s understandable preoccupation with mass destruction, almost switching sub-genres. To say more would be to deny you the joy of discovering the film’s secrets. So I won’t.

8/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-four Arrival · directed by: Denis Villeneuve · starring: Amy Adams, Jeremy Renner, and Forest Whitaker · running time: one hour and fifty-six minutes

If you need a deeply thoughtful and impressive new take on a familiar old genre (and in this era of identikit sequels, we clearly do), then Denis Villeneuve is your man. The French-Canadian director gave the drug-war thriller a violent shake-up with last year’s morally murky Sicario, and before that he turned the kidnap drama on its head with Prisoners (both excellent movies). Now we get his take on alien visitation. Arrival is Villeneuve’s The Day the Earth Stood Still or Close Encounters Of the Third Kind, and somehow he makes it true to the tropes while also feeling like something new.    It helps that Villeneuve and his creative team have made their extra-solar visitors as truly ‘alien’ as possible, and thereby ensure this first-contact narrative is inventively, fiendishly and (you’d imagine) realistically problematic. The alien craft, or “shells”, are immense, lens-shaped, black-rocky obelisks which levitate noiselessly several metres above the Earth’s surface, never actually touching terra firma. Every eighteen hours a hatch opens in the shell’s lower tip, admitting a delegation of Homo sapiens into the gravity-bending interior. The human visitors, carrying an achingly symbolic canary in a cage, arrive at a rectangular audience chamber in which they’re separated from a sea of ominous white mist by a transparent wall. And from the swirling space-fog they emerge: the eerie, graceful “heptapods”, resembling a hybrid of squid, spider, whale and mangrove. The tips of their gnarled, finger-like limbs, it transpires, peel open into starfish-like appendages which ejaculate ink that flows into lazily floating, coffee-mug-stain symbols. This is the aliens’ language. It’s way beyond “Klaatu barada nikto” - or even Close Encounters’ five-note salutation.    They have something to say, and the race to figure out what it is gives the film both its tight structure and pulsing momentum. Without a single planetary leader to be taken to on our divided world, the heptapods have suspended themselves over a dozen points around its surface. But why twelve, exactly? And why those specific locations? The mysteries layer up and when the Chinese and Russians get stroppy and sabre-rattley, the Americans put linguist Dr Louise Banks (Amy Adams) on the case.    On the exterior, Louise is the calm, albeit shaky, eye of this interplanetary storm. On the interior rages a silent storm of her own, a fugue of memory fragments that comes to twist and bend like a psychic cyclone as she begins to decode the visitors’ inky vernacular. Adams is the film’s quiet, luminous heart, and Villeneuve spends more time focusing on her face than he does the aliens or their mysterious vessels; we’re not even allowed to see the first shell properly until Louise herself witnesses it, and quite right, too. Also, in finding an actress to sell all this convincingly, Villeneuve could have done no better than Adams, who negotiates and balances Louise’s frustrations with the army wonks, her bewilderment/awe at meeting E.T.s, her personal tribulations and some hefty emotional baggage connected with the death of her daughter (not the cliché you think, ingeniously connected with the macro-trauma playing out around her) with subtlety and absorbing naturalism.    Arrival is a beautifully polished puzzle box of a story whose emotional and cerebral heft should enable it to withstand nit-picky scrutiny. And like all the best sci-fi, it has something pertinent to say about today’s world; particularly about the importance of communication, and how we need to transcend cultural divides and misconceptions if we’re to survive as a species. An ideal that shouldn’t need any translation.

9/10

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The xx On Hold (I See You LP - 2017 - Young Turks)

If Heaven really exists, this will be the first thing you hear in the waiting room when you first arrive there. It’s the The xx at their very best; deliciously gloomy as ever, but with added, deceptive sprinkles of positivity.    “Every time I let you leave, I always saw you coming back to me/ Where and when did we go cold? I thought I had you on hold,” sighs Oliver Sim as the glacial chorus is defrosted by Jamie Smith’s skittering, sample-heavy, upbeat production. As hoped, he’s marrying the inventive dance of his solo output and the minimal, crisp elegance of The xx’s previous records – and with a sample of Hall and Oates "I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do)”.    The results are perfect, poised and prettily sad (“My young heart chose to believe we were destined,” sings Madley Croft at one point) and as full of the trio’s musical DNA as ever, but a refreshing step on from when we last met. With ‘On Hold’, The xx are shuffling towards the dance floor, seemingly no longer the shy wallflowers that first emerged in 2009. As musical progressions go, this is one we can definitely get behind – whirlwind romance gone sour never sounded quite as glorious as this.

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-three Elvis and Nixon · directed by: Liza Johnson · starring: Kevin Spacey, Michael Shannon, Alex Pettyfer, Colin Hanks, Evan Peters, and Johnny Knoxville · running time: one hour and twenty-six minutes

It’s one of the odder political summits of the 20th century. In December 1970, Elvis Presley, rock god, showed up at the White House to meet President Richard Nixon, dorky crook-in-waiting. There he pledged to assist in America’s war on drugs and requested the secret position of “undercover Federal Agent-At-Large”, which answers the question of what you give the man who has everything. This frothy lark imagines what might have happened when these two minds met.    The balance of the film is not quite as the title suggests. It’s more Elvis less Nixon, with the President only dropping into the plot intermittently before the Oval Office encounter. Mostly we follow The King, a man whose immense fame has turned him into a cartoon of his public image. He’s forgotten how to be normal. He’s out of place with everyday people, with his giant gold belts and sunglasses emblazoned with his own initials, as if people won’t know.    Elvis is played, surprisingly, by Michael Shannon. Shannon is not really convincing as the popular image of Elvis. Physically, he looks about as much like him as he does Janis Joplin, and speaks in an uncertain mutter, rather than that ‘thangyaverrmuch’ honk. Yet his version of Elvis is magnetic, a man with an ordinary mind and an extraordinary presence. If Liza Johnson’s direction sometimes feels in need of a bit more swagger and a swifter edit to match the madcap adventure, she does manage to coax performances that make humans out of men remembered as caricatures. Kevin Spacey, as Nixon, pulls up short of the jowel-shaking cliché to show an old man baffled by, but not immune to, celebrity.    The two don’t meet for almost an hour, but it rewards the wait. The comic opportunities are many and hilariously exploited, and there’s smart play on the two different kinds of power on display here. In Nixon there’s a man who is in the highest office in the world, yet has little connection with the public. In Elvis, you have one who causes people to short-circuit with glee wherever he goes, but it’s an empty power. The petty ways in which they try to exert authority over each other are fascinating, like a battle for supremacy simmering over who gets to touch the President’s snack selection. There’s so much to mine when the two are together that you wish the film had got there sooner. A little less action, a little more conversation, please.

6/10

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Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-two The Light Between Oceans · directed by: Derek Cianfrance · starring: Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, and Rachel Weisz · running time: two hours and twelve minutes

Set at the end of World War I, this adaption of M.L. Stedman’s debut novel of the same name is blessed with some undeniably smart casting in Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander. The real life couple are a terrific team and the film's greatest strength.    Vikander puts in an absorbing performance as Isabel, the sparky small-town girl who spies an escape when the handsome new lighthouse keeper (Fassbender) is invited to tea - and wastes no time trying to prize him out of his shell. He’s buttoned-up, resistant, still nursing psychological war wounds, but her persistence pays off. It can’t hurt that she’s clearly the best catch in Western Australia, too.    And so the film starts as an engrossing portrait of a likeable couple in the first flushes of love, playing house and making increasingly less awkward love to the soundtrack of the crashing waves below them, all shot beautifully by cinematographer Adam Arkapaw. But things don’t stay perfect forever, becoming darker and harsher as Isabel’s desire to become a mother becomes more urgent following two miscarriages. This burning maternal desire leads the pair to make a fateful decision - one that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.    It begins when a boat carrying a baby washes up on the beach. This looks like fate to Isabel, but Tom soon discovers the child’s true identity and, even worse, that her real mother (Rachel Weisz) is still alive. Clearly, this presents him with a terrible dilemma — keep the stolen child from its natural mother, or betray his wife. Fassbender comes into his own here as his character wrestles with his conscience while trying to protect Isabel, who’s now blissfully happy with a child she is calling her own. It’s an initially gripping scenario: lives will be ruined whichever way he decides to go, so the stakes are high.    It’s also here that audiences may become divided as the film changes tack: morphing from the intense romantic drama it started as into a twist-driven melodrama. As the third act rumbles on, there’s something undeniably frustrating about the choices the characters make - as though they’re based less on realistic human decision-making and more on adding twists to the narrative. The result is that rather than being lost in the story you become more aware you’re being manipulated by a writer.    But there is always the possibility of redemption and hope, both for the characters and the film. Much like he did in The Place Beyond the Pines, Cianfrance takes his characters to dark places before bringing them back up for air - scarred, but wiser. And by the end, despite the contrivances that got us there, it’s a hardy soul who won’t leave feeling moved.

7/10

[everincreasingwonder]

Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety-one Imperium · directed by: Daniel Ragussis · starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Toni Collette, Tracy Letts, Nestor Carbonell, and Sam Trammell · running time: one hour and forty-nine minutes

“You seem pretty mature for a skinhead,” observes a white supremacist leader of Daniel Radcliffe. It’s a welcome acknowledgement of the unlikeliness in the casting, which turns out to be one of the film’s chief strengths. While maturing male actors from Ryan Gosling to Russell Crowe and Edward Norton have strapped on boots and braces as a sort of early proof of the toughness and danger of which they’re capable, Radcliffe’s performance asks how someone danger-averse and not-at-all tough would ingratiate himself into that dark milieu.    Unlike films such as American History X, Imperium - directed and scripted by first-timer Daniel Ragussis - is not principally concerned with exploring the political or psychological dysfunction that drives young men to join violent hate-groups. Indeed, though based on a story by former FBI agent Michael German (who based much of the narrative on his own undercover experiences), the depiction of the white-nationalist underground is ultimately background for a straightforward potboiler, and the film is at its best when it stays in that arena.    Radcliffe’s Nate Foster is a brilliant agent, but wet-behind-the-ears, disappointed to discover the jihadist terrorist suspect he’s been tracking for weeks is really just a low-level functionary. And yet his ability to empathise with the suspect during questioning attracts the attention of a superior, Angela Zamparo (Toni Collette, all gum-smacking insouciance), who suspects an extremist white nationalist group is trying to build a dirty bomb, and thinks an Alex Jones-styled, right-wing web-radio host (Tracy Letts) might have knowledge of it. Desperate to make his name in the agency, Nate agrees to become her mole.    In little time - perhaps a little too little - Nate becomes a sort of Zelig of the racist underworld, moving freely among factions and forging alliances as Angela needles him for actionable intel on terrorist activities. Despite a few overly convenient plot pivots, once the film gets moving, it tightens the screws and forces Nate to think on his feet, building a good deal of momentum. Never resorting to rote gunplay or secret-agent clichés, smartly written scenes concoct difficult dilemmas - how to stop one of his skinhead buddies from harassing an interracial couple without blowing his cover; how to avoid being recognised at a rally - with believable solutions.    It helps that Radcliffe effectively conveys the character’s intelligence, including the not-at-all simple trick of suggesting a racing mind without betraying hints of panic. But the real cast standout is True Blood’s Sam Trammell, as a warm, cultured family man who explains his racial hatred in a matter-of-fact manner: particularly chilling in the current political climate.

7/10

[everincreasingwonder]

100th Platinum Trophy Rocket League · PlayStation 4 · Saturday, 29th October 2016

The idea of rocket-powered cars flipping through the air in Thunderdome-esque matches of cage-football initially sounded to me like the incoherent ramblings of a madman. But bugger me sideways - it’s absolutely sublime.    Psyonix have given us us a rare example where the execution of a simple, absurd idea is so strong and so engaging that it just works. Why complicate things when you can just create something so fun? The rush of ripping across the pitch at full turbo to deny a shot on goal with a clutch bicycle-kick is enough to bring me back time and time again for just ‘one more match.’    Rocket League is great, goofy fun, easy to learn and difficult to master as all the best video games should be.

[everincreasingwonder]

Films I’ve watched in 2016 - ninety My Scientology Movie · directed by: John Dower · documentary film · starring: Louis Theroux, Mark Rathbun, Jeff Hawkins, Tom De Vocht, Marc Headley, Steve Mango, and Andrew Perez · running time: one hour and thirty-nine minutes

Louis Theroux versus the Church of Scientology. It’s a near-irresistible contest: the very face of deadpan scepticism, up against that many-headed hydra of indecipherable rage.    My Scientology Movie is the second documentary on the subject in recent months, following Alex Gibney’s more thorough and methodical Going Clear. Where Gibney circled the movement right from its beginnings, seeking to analyse its methods and impugn its motives, Theroux just gets right in there and jabs it in the ribs, that imperturbable mask of irony driving its partisans even more bananas than usual.     His efforts in Los Angeles to speak to their current membership meet with stony refusal, so only the apostates come forward: figures such as Marty Rathbun, former ‘Mister Fixit’ of the organisation, and now Public Enemy No. 1, as far as the church and its much-feared leader, David Miscavige, are concerned. The Theroux-Rathbun partnership, though it becomes interestingly fraught, draws all kinds of stalker-ish emissaries and cranks out of the woodwork, not one of them doing much to reassure us that Scientology is in fact cuddly, socially progressive or misunderstood.    Naturally lacking face-time with Miscavige or Tom Cruise – probably the world’s two most notorious Scientologists, with all due respect to Jon Travolta – Theroux comes up with the neat gambit of auditioning various jobbing actors to play them both. Key public statements are read out, in what amount to screen-tests for a film Theroux and director John Dower don’t even end up making: the tests themselves do the job.    Rathbun, who claims to have witnessed the alleged violence and bullying behaviour of his former superior, but is also far from immune to accusations of his own complicity, puts these Miscavige-wannabes through their paces and rates their proximity to the real thing.    These allegations against Miscavige, which the church has always vociferously denied are true, go back years, and this isn’t the sort of doc which throws more wood on the fire. It’s more about the mindset revealed when Scientology reacts to scrutiny – namely Theroux’s pursuit in broad daylight by mysterious cars with tinted windows, and the strangers with HD cameras who camp out across the street from his shooting HQ.    These cronies claim to be making their own documentary, as a form of retaliation, which is such a delicious idea for Louis Theroux to play with: fully half the film consists of cameras pointing at other cameras, like an absurdist gunfight at dawn, with neither side willing to holster.    Twice Theroux loiters on the boundaries of Gold Base, the church’s compound in Southern California, and gets in contretemps with a human guard dog called Catherine Fraser, which reach Pythonesque heights of gleeful weirdness: he milks these showdowns for all they’re worth.    Ultimately, this is an amusing, eye-opening documentary. However, the one thing we do take from it is that the Church of Scientology is no laughing matter.

7/10

[everincreasingwonder]

Films I’ve watched in 2016 - eighty-nine Anthropoid · directed by: Sean Ellis · starring: Cillian Murphy, Jamie Dornan, Aňa Geislerová, and Toby Jones · running time: two hours

The Cathedral-set gun battle that rages during the climax to this World War II drama is one of the most authentic and nerve-jangling set-pieces in film for many years. It is also a potent conclusion to a powerful film in which Metro Manila director Sean Ellis casts Cillian Murphy and Jamie Dornan as Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, who are sent from Britain - which hosts the Czechoslovakian government in exile - with orders to take out SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the architect behind the Final Solution. This is Operation Anthropoid.    An impressive cast (Toby Jones is superb, as always) recount this operational retelling with thick accents and the story builds slowly as the ear adjusts, tracking the heroes’ integration into the Czechoslovakian Resistance where suspicion reigns and every move is potentially fatal. Conflict is rife from the outset; some inside the movement are opposed to the plan, anxious about possible reprisals. Nazi rule has already proved ruthless. As Ellis demonstrates with brutal precision, these concerns are prescient. Several scenes in the final third will have audiences flinching.    As with his previous film, Ellis (who takes a co-writing and the cinematography credit) opts for unfussy handheld photography, which lets the audience feel integrated into the mission. And, with a sharp eye for detail, he also charts the heroes’ emotional travails with both Gabčík and Kubiš striking up relationships with local girls, a move that brings added depth and poignancy as the women risk their lives to aid in the mission’s success. The conclusion is both exciting and heart-rending. The Nazi response is grim.

8/10