Month / May 2019

by James Turrell

Avengers: Endgame

Writers: Christopher Markus & Stephen McFreely 

Directors: Anthony & Joe Russo 

The previous Avengers film, 2018’s Infinity War, was like a Doctor Who anniversary special on an intravenous crystal meth high. It was truly mammoth in scale; from the amount of characters to the number of planets to the sheer untold numbers of deaths. But given the sheer spectacle, the end-of-days gargantuan nature of it, there was no getting away from the fact that Infinity War had a very much standard ‘collect the gems’ plot, much used by role playing video games for decades. Endgame, directed by the Russo brother and written once again by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFreely, suffers slightly from the same problem, as the narrative pieces of Infinity War are re-staged via time-travel.  

The opening sequence is perhaps the greatest of any Marvel film. Set apart from the usual brash fighting that most superhero films begin with, this sees Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) teaching his daughter archery as they prepare for a cosy, outdoor family meal. And then suddenly they disappear with the whip of a strong wind. It is an intimate, brutal start.  

From then the remaining Avengers, Guardians and other assorted heroes are scattered across a unversed reeling from Thanos’s use of WMUD. Iron Man and Nebula are stuck on space ship losing oxygen and appear to be on the verge of death, only for them to be saved by the ever-intriguing Captain Marvel. She flies them all the way back to Earth and the gang set about trying to work out how to fix the mess of trillions of dead people. They source Thanos on a gorgeous looking planet, making stew and they charge in and attempt to steal the Infinity Stones and bring everybody back, simple? Wrong! The Stones are gone and with slash of Thor’s hammer, so is Thanos’s head.  

From there the film jumps five years later and codifies into a traditional three-act structure. This first act is perhaps a Marvel film at its most radical and interesting. Aside from a scene in which Hawkeye, with new scary tattoos and a cool haircut, beats up some Chinese gangsters, there is no action sequences whatsoever. Instead, the film attempts, as best a film of this size can, to deal with intense grief that follows the death of loved ones. Captain America is running a support group, Thor has collapsed into alcoholism and Black Widow has thrown herself into work to mask her emotional breakdown. It is extremely melancholic but also mature, and the stunning shots of empty New York streets add a genuine level of despair to what is the usual inconsequential superhero destruction.   

The sudden return of Ant-Man (by the stunning fortune of a wandering mouse) sets Endgame’s narrative wheels into full motion. The group discover the quantum realm in which Thanos has banished most of the universe allows for the possibility of time-travel, and so they set about trying to build a time machine using Ant-Man’s quantum truck. But for this they need Iron Man, who is off playing happy families with his daughter and sadly did not die when Thanos clicked his fingers. This leads to the various Avengers/Guardians to zip around previous Marvel films and retrieve the Infinity Stones before Thanos claimed them for his chubby purple self. This is pure, unashamed fan-service and – fair enough. But it is not the most elegant or sophisticated way of solving the immense puzzle they created for themselves in Infinity War, and for all the complexity of planets and time-zones and characters, the plot once again is slightly disappointing in its simplicity.  

The films heads inexorably towards a huge, climatic battle in the film’s final third, as our lost heroes are returned to fight Thanos’s army once more. The battle is less visually appealing than in Infinity War, feeling more static and predictable. Although, I think that maybe due to it taking place in a location that is less interesting than lush greens of Wakanda. There is of course the much-discussed sequence in which all the female characters come to together in order to aid Captain Marvel has she attempts to keep the Infinity Gauntlet from Thanos. This scene, while a clear and clunky bit of virtue signalling, would surely have meant a lot to a 10-year-old girl used to seeing mainly men on the Marvel screen. And that is more important than what Twitter thinks.  

The films end with the death of several major characters and the clear completion of what is now being called the Infinity Saga. On first viewing I was amazed by Endgame, swept up in the insane sugar-rush it creates. On second viewing, the films flaws were much more on show, it’s clunky plot and extended running time. But to make a film this big, with this much action and planets and characters is insanely difficult; and the creative team of the Russos and Markus and McFreely do a phenomenal job. The final shot, of Captain America and Peggy, dancing in their room is so obviously cliched but it works; you can’t help but smile at a character who sacrificed so much getting to live happily ever after. Endgame is a fine end to a sequence of movies that has redefined the blockbuster, and may be seen in years to come as its dramatic peak.  

9/10 

by James Turrell

Vice

Director: Adam McKay 

Writer: Adam Mckay 

Adam McKay’s last film, 2015’s The Big Short, was a revelatory look at the reasons behind the collapse of the world economy in 2008. It was heavily stylised, but character driven, with Christian Bale and Steve Carrell putting in exquisite performances. McKay essentially took the clarity of Late Night American comedy and applied it to a feature film, The Big Short felt, at some level, like a two-hour segment of Last Week Tonight. McKay attempts to do the same thing with Vice, a film which deals with the life and politics of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. However, this time he is less successful, while The Big Short had enormous political and moral clarity, it also felt nuanced, whereas Vice feels scattershot and pourous.  

Much of the pre-release press for Vice centred around Christian Bale’s mammoth transformation, and his look in the film is all hair and make-up and the after effects of double-digit donuts. It is visually startling, an actor you accustomed to looking young and svelte is transformed into an aged and overweight man. Vice follows Dick Cheney from his bar-fighting, sleeping at the wheel 20’s up until he hoovers up untold power as the Veep to George W. Bush’s President (Sam Rockwell) from 2000-2008. The film has a broad scope and the narrative attempts to sketch out the entire life of Cheney. One of the film’s central pillars is that his quest for power and his unquenchable commitment to that quest, is drawn from is relationship with his wife, Lynne Cheney (Amy Adams). Lynne is very much the Lady Macbeth figure, a snorting fire-brand who compels the very worst aspect Cheney’s personality to action; his greed, his callousness, his corruption. Amy Adams is fantastic in the role; she plays a person driven by an uncomfortable desire for power to dominate others, and she sells it wonderfully. The film depicts their early relationship as turbulent, one in which she waits at home for Dick to arrive drunk once again. And it’s her impassioned speech for him to make her proud that seems to compel Dick to stop drinking and start politicking.  

Vice has a similar structure to The Big Short in the way in which we have a narrator who is also an aware character within the film, this time played nicely by Breaking Bad’s Jessie Plemons. His relationship to Cheney is perhaps the one true surprise fact of the film, which I will spoil for you now: they opened an abortion themed organic herb shop together called Pro-Chive. He explains in a similar way to Ryan Gosling’s character in The Big Short, the big theoretical concepts of the film, such as the Unitary Executive Theory. Steve Carrell is again on magnificent form playing Donald Rumsfeld and he portrays him in the style of a sitcom character turned pure evil. And Sam Rockwell’s W. is great as well, he captures that particular President’s capacity for endless confusion with precision.  

The central problem with Vice and what separates it from attaining the dramatic or comedic heights of The Big Short, is that McKay presents Cheney as the centre of the universe; a God-like figure whose every action affects the world in an infinite number of ways. The film portrays Cheney’s time as Vice President almost as an island, in which the outside has no effect on the actions he puts into place. Whether it be the military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, which the film is not shy about showing the brutal reality of, or domestic policy to the right of someone who has just had their right leg blown of, all these actions seem to happen with no relation to the outside world. McKay’s portrayal of the world seems to suggest one in which the actions of politicians are not guided by external events, that the actions of other countries have no bearing on the decision making of Cheney. This is where the film begins to struggle not to collapse because we are presented with a world that is implausible, where the characters make decisions that are devoid of the cold logic of reality.  

There is a lot to commend Vice, from the acting to the way it again explains high-concept political and economic ideas to people who might not otherwise have engaged with them. McKay is a heavily stylistic director and clearly draws influence from Adam Curtis in the way he mashes live-action with archival footage to create a grand, sweeping historical narrative. He former life as a writer of often simplistic, crude comedies still lingers and he sometimes struggles with writing straight, dramatic lines. ‘How does a man go onto to become who he is?, delivered with the utmost seriousness by Amy Adams, is particularly clunky example. But Vice is an enjoyable watch and McKay’s determination to write about big, difficult political ideas is to be admired, even if the result is not always perfect.  

7.5/10 

by James Turrell

Green Book

Green Book 

Writers: Peter Farrelly, Brian Currie and Nick Vallelonga 

Director: Peter Farrelly 

There is a restaurant in Amsterdam that serves Battered Oreo, with chocolate ice-cream and bits of normal Oreo on the side. To the uninitiated, ‘Battered’ refers to something being coated in batter and then deep fried, you may have heard the hackiest of stand-ups use the idea of Battered Mars Bars as a shortcut to discussing Scottish culture. I have eaten this dessert twice, and both times have left me with a similar feeling of sweet satisfaction and stomach contorting queasiness. While watching Green Book, the surprise and controversial Academy Award winner, I felt a similar thing as I gazed sometimes in horror, but sometimes with a genuine smile, at this baffling buddy-cop(ish)/racial history mash-up of a film.  

Directed by Peter Farrelly, of Dumb and Dumber fame, with a screenplay co-written by himself, Brian Currie and Nick Vallelonga, Green Book is the story of renowned pianist Don Shirley’s (Mahershala Ali) 1962 tour of the American South. Given the awkward fact that Don is black, and the American South at the time was a bit like being a Turkey at Christmas, only a thousand times worse for people of colour, he is going to need some help along way. In steps Tony ‘Lip’ Vallelonga (Vigo Mortenson), a recently unemployed New York bodyguard who is hired by Don as a driver and protective muscle.  

Tony is either a pathological racist or a loveable unreconstructed un-PC Alf Garnett figure. The film, particularly in the first act, can’t decide which one he is. In the opening sequences, we see Tony throw away cups used by two black workmen labouring in his house, and Farrelly uses this an early characterization of Tony. He is a man so unequivocally opposed to people of colour, he will not use the same utensils as them. Which makes it all the stranger when he goes for a job interview in which he would be the driver for the purple blooded, aristocratic Don and doesn’t walk out in disgust. Would a man so intuitively revolted by black people, really agree so readily to be Don’s subordinate?  

As Green Book is unashamedly presented as a feel-good film, Tony’s genuine racism cannot last for long and instead morphs into racial insensitivity. So we see scenes in which Tony teaches Don how to eat fried chicken or explain what jazz music is. This is presented with a sitcom flair, but it falls rather flat, with the jazz music scene in particular, Farrelly is presenting the audience with cultural appropriation in real time. Tony presents jazz music, a black music especially in America during that period, to Don which he has never heard of, and then uses his knowledge of it to suggest he is more in tune with ‘black culture’ than Don is. Not only is Don’s experience of jazz music now filtered through a white person, that white person has now used his experience to downgrade Don’s experience, and renders himself more authentically ‘black.’ And the film presents these scenes as comic set-pieces, where the characters bond and their relationship is forged. The lack of self-awareness is simply staggering.   

As the tour commences, Don inevitably runs into a truckload of bile and prejudice at the hands of the people who have hired him and the society at large. Whether being forced to eat separately to the white people who have paid to see him play, or not being allowed to try on a suit for fear a white man will try it on next. The American South is presented, largely, as a black hole of bigoted cruelty. The point of the film is, to a certain extent, that because Tony is experiencing these prejudicial encounters with Don, that they slowly chip away at his conditioned hostility and he begins to view people of colour as something approaching equal. At one point, a police officer pulls over their car and seems intent on humiliating both Tony and Don, and calls Tony ‘half a nigger.’ To which Tony responds in the only way he knows with a swift one to the jaw. This is presented as pivotal by Farrelly, a Damascus moment where Tony experiences life as a member of the oppressed. But in actuality, Farrelly is showcasing a kind of inverse Uplift Suasion, where instead of a high achieving person of colour changing a racist mind via the sheer will of their achievement, a white person literally has to be called a ‘nigger’ before they begin to contemplate racial equality.  

All this points to a rather monstrous film, a reverse Driving Mrs. Daisy without the benefit of it being 1989 and a ‘different time’. However, the performances of both Mortenson and Ali and wonderful, filled with empathy and nuance, even when the material is lacking. Ali is all regality and vulnerability masquerading as high-minded snobbery. You can feel his desperation and loneliness, a man with an Elephant tusk in his living room but without two friends to rub into a third. His pomposity is infectious because we know it masks a very intense sense of isolation. Mortenson is also in inspired form, taking a character that you could dislike and recontextualizes him as human and flawed. Who could help but smile at a man in his boxers picking up a whole pizza, folding it in half and then eating it practically whole? These are towering performances in a film that perhaps doesn’t deserve them.  

Green Book is a film in which you watch with a grimace and a queasy stomach, a feeling of something not quite right. There’s a scene in which their car breaks down, and Tony and Don get out to fix it. They happen to break down next a field in which black men, in barely-there matching cotton uniforms, are tilling. They stop to look at Don in his impeccable (and most likely expensive) suit and look in over in what might be shock, or perhaps envy. Don looks back at them, a wistful but sorrowful look in his eye. It feels insanely uncomfortable and that’s because it is. It’s a scene that either demonstrates that Don should be happy with his lot and be thankful he isn’t working the field or to create a synergy between them, that Don and the field workers are still experiencing the same endemically racist America. In whichever direction it doesn’t work, it is a horrific misjudgment and is in essence the film in microcosm; something that appears to come from a empathetic place but in reality misses its point by a million miles to become insanely insensitve. 

5/10