Month / Jun 2019

by James Turrell

Long Shot

Writers: Liz Hannah & Dan Sterling 

Director: Jonathan Levine 

Long Shot is a film that switches from feeling like an idiosyncratic rom-com to plodding one – often from scene to scene. While it contains some interesting satire about U.S. political discourse and the representation of female politicians in the media, which makes it distinctive from many rom-coms, its rudimentary plotting leaves it feeling rather tame.  

The film concerns Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) a Secretary of State about to begin a world tour before announcing a run for the Presidency. Her love interest is Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) a stoner journalist, who quits his job at a newspaper after it’s bought by a Fox News-like company and is hired by Field as a speech writer. They knew it each from childhood and their relationship follows the usual, somewhat tedious path of the rom-com: embarrassing first meeting creates intimacy, the schluby dude teaches the pristine woman some kind of ‘truth’ that forces her to perceive him differently, a kiss after something intense happens, a break-up followed by ‘I Love You’ less than 24 hours later.  

Both Theron and Rogan are good in their respective roles, although are they are playing very much to type. June Diane Raphael is excellent as Field’s Chief of Staff Maggie Millikin, a character with cleverness and a caustic wit. Bob Odenkirk is great as a TV star turned President, who delivers perhaps the film’s funniest line, ‘No, I will not nuke a tsunami.’ Where the film struggles is when writers Liz Hannah and Dan Sterling get confused as to what constitutes radical in a rom-com context. The brilliant and often hilarious satire of the sexualisation of female politicians in the media is radical, watching a relatively straight politician taking MDMA isn’t. It’s a scene and idea we have seen played a 1000 times. And that is where the film falters, when it struggles to raise itself from the clichés of cinematic comedy; whether it be drug taking or falling out of windows or an unfortunate masturbation experience.  

Long Shot is a somewhat interesting but mostly unremarkable rom-com. It is no sense a bad film, but the beats of the story have been written for decades, and that is the film’s central fault; what could have been a radical, genre-bending film instead feels sweet but inconsequential.  

7/10 

by James Turrell

Tolkien

Writer: David Gleeson & Stephen Beresford.  

Director: Dome Karukoski 

Critics have to walk along the thin, often spiked tightrope between subjective and objective judgements. Whether you like or dislike a film is subjective, but you try your best to use objective reasoning as to why that is. While watching Tolkien, I saw more than a few things wrong with it; cliched score, monotone direction, by-numbers plotting, which on any other day may have made me hate it. But on this day, I just watched and smiled at a sweet film about a sweet man falling in love with a sweet girl. 

Tolkien, as you would expect, follows the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) who would go onto write The Lord of the Rings, told mainly from his perspective of him thinking over his life in the trenches during the Battle of the Somme. Ronald, as Tolkien is known in the film, is raised as an orphan in a pre-war England presented with lush, saturated colours by director Dome Karukoski. After moving to Birmingham to live in an orphan boarding house, Tolkien attends a private school, where he forms the T.C.B.S. literary society with his friends Robert, Christopher and Geoffrey. There’s is a life of privilege, but one ultimately weighed down by the iron-clad fist of upper-class British social rules. Also at the boarding house is Edith Bratt (Lilly Collins), a fellow orphan and keen piano player. Her character is under-developed, and we learn little about her life previous to meeting Tolkien, but Collins is excellent at portraying her rage at the gendered codification of her existence, which falls well short of dreams of being a great pianist rather than a wife.  

Hoult and Collins are good in their respective roles and bring a real sense of warmth to the romantic arc of their characters. The film is also excellent in showing the insane levels of reservation people had to show during budding romances, the tightness of the corsets and waistcoats reflecting the social mores of the time. The film struggles by virtue of its cumbersome plot, which moves slowly and predictably – with the narrative framing of Tolkien in the trenches looking back never quite working, as there seems to be no link between him in battle and the past memory the film switches to. The scenes of trench warfare, while nicely executed, seem rather timid and hollow compared to Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which I think at some level has destroyed the WWI biopic, as nothing could ever compare to seeing the real thing in brutal wide-screen colour.  

Tolkien has received rather negative reviews and I can understand why – it’s often understated to the point of non-existence and does the usual bad biopic mistake of forcing the main character to say something that defines their later life, in this case having Tolkien say the word ‘fellowship’ during a self-important close-up. But I just found it charming, I liked the two main characters and the whole film was obviously made with great deal of warmth for Tolkien’s life. When Tolkien leaves for France and war, Edith says to him ‘stay alive and come back to me!’ It could be cliched and cloying, the sort of line to raise to bile to throat but it just made me break out in a big grin.  

7/10 

by James Turrell

Fight Club

Writer: Jim Uhls 

Director: David Fincher 

Released at the fag-end of the 20th Century to critical indifference and a box office mauling worthy of the film itself, Fight Club has since gone onto achieve pre-eminence in the film canon and was even proclaimed the 10th best film of all time by Empire in 2011. Its hyper-violent, nihilistic critique of modern consumer culture seems more relevant by the second. And its portrayal of masculinity, while in some sense problematic, pre-figured much of the modern-day discussions about the notion of toxicity and fragile male-ego.  

Directed by David Fincher and adapted by Jim Uhls from the 1996 novel by Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club is the story of the unnamed narrator’s (Edward Norton) journey from office-bound lackey to God-like cult leader. He begins the film as a white-collar smudge, a nothing person who spends their time slavishly buying the entire Ikea catalogue. As Norton walks through his apartment it ingeniously becomes a catalogue, prices and all. The film has a fluid post-modernity and Norton’s character narrates from voice-over to inside the film itself, at one point he literally stops a scene and moves the film on to another one. Norton’s narrator is an insomniac and find a deliciously black comic cure in attending support groups for people with terminal illnesses. But this only last so long before the neurotic, funeral-clad Marla Singer (Helena Bonham-Carter), a fellow faker, shows up and sends him spiralling back down to zero sleep. The film’s opening section hammers home that he is adrift; emotionally, intellectually and perhaps most of all spiritually, lost in the fug of a pointless life.  

Enter Brad Pitt’s sexy, dangerous and stylish Tyler Durden – a character at ease in a way Norton’s could only dream to be. After meeting on a plane (and recognising they have the same briefcase, which offers a neat clue to their true relationship) Norton’s narrator ends up living with Tyler after discovering his condo has burnt down. Their first fight is played for laughs, as Norton almost pathetically punches the ear of Durden (improvised by Norton and Fincher in the moment). But the pair soon discover that ritualised fighting is something that is deeply embedded in the male psyche, as men from all sections of society que in a darkened basement to batter each other’s bodies.  

When Tyler begins a relationship with Marla, the cracks in his friendship with the Narrator begin to show. The performances from the main cast are all excellent; Norton is exquisite as the everyday loser composing his own personal revolution, you feel the savagery of his unspoken rage. Pitt by contrast is the epitome of coo; a kind of underground philosopher complete with sardonic self-help phrases; ‘It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything,’ ‘You are the all-singing all-dancing crap of the world’. He seems to represent both the revolutionary destruction of capitalism and the collapse of a society based on gender domination. One of his most telling quotes is ‘We are generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is the answer.’ Fight Club is at some level about the collapse of masculinity but rather alarmingly it seems to think that to resurrect it, we need to create communities solely of men. Helena Bonham Carter, who plays the only female character in the film to get more than one line, is again wonderful as the damaged Marla. With a pitch perfect accent, Carter brings real depth to a character struggling at all level with life. If Tyler and the Narrator allowed themselves as much vulnerability as Marla does, perhaps their lives would develop some genuine meaning. David Fincher’s direction is first class, and the film codified his break-neck style. The camera is constantly moving, creating a free-flowing but totally lucid dynamic. The film feels artificial, as all post-modern works do, but very much alive. There is a breathlessness, a sense that each frame will bring something new.  

There is a tragedy at the heart of Fight Club, the men of the film who join Tyler’s Project Mayhem, which grows out of the club they begin with, feel spiritually lost. Modern consumer society has created an endless parade of nameless, faceless hegemonic people devoid of any genuine agency. They follow Tyler because he recognises and sees fit to bring it down to a crumbling nothing. But, by joining Tyler’s army, they become exactly the same thing they left behind. Literally nameless, they wear the same uniform like the people who buy the same clothes from the same store. And their agency is once again gone, as they follow the orders of a mad nihilist without question. They think they have found meaning but they have simply replaced the false freedom of consumerism with a fake liberation that is just another form of control.  

Fight Club is a magnificent work; furious and funny and stunningly crafted. It’s discussions on masculinity are not working at the same level as its thoughts on consumerism and that make some of the violence very uncomfortable. It has perhaps the best ending to a film ever, as the glorious guitar of ‘Where is my Mind?’’ plays over collapsing buildings, the very last moment of the film is pure romance and is cinema at its most exhilarating.  

9.5/10