Category / Uncategorized

by James Turrell

Mary Poppins Returns

Writer: David Magee (Screenplay) David Magee, Rob Marshall & John DeLuca (Story)

Director: Rob Marshall

As a child and teenager I detested musicals. They could reduce me to a scything rage, like Tommy Robinson being forced to have a pint with a non-binary vegan. As a child I just found them utterly bizarre; why were these people always singing and why did they never talk about it afterwards? I was very much your typical sneering, ‘indie’ teenager, which meant I had a phobic reaction to a single whiff of sentimentality. And if there is one thing that seems to define musicals; it’s a sometimes wonderful, often mawkish sentiment.

Sadly, Mary Poppins Returns has not cured me of my ‘Cue Song’ aversion. The sequel to Disney’s 1964 perennial TV classic Mary Poppins takes place roughly 25 years after the original. Jane (Emily Mortimer) and Michael (Ben Wishaw) are adults living in 1930’s London, Michael still residing in the original house with his three children, Annabel, John and Georgie. Simply put, the plot of the film is Michael is five days away from having his house repossessed by Colin Firth’s villain banker William Wilkins. The Banks family is inevitably dysfunctional and down on their luck, mostly due to the death of Wishaw’s wife and the children’s Mother. This leads, by the way of a magic kite, to the return of Emily Blunt’s Mary Poppins.

Blunt is in no sense playing Julie Andrews playing Mary Poppins, which is the only way taking on such an iconic character can work. And she does make it work, she charms as the brisk but deeply caring Poppins, and given her accent, was presumably raised by BBC schedule announcers. This is a very RP film; it’s very much a classic take on England, all ‘sir’, ‘ma’am’, and ‘veddy good’. But Blunt shines in a role that is difficult to pull off, even without the need to sidestep Andrew’s shadow. Like all great children’s heroes, Blunt’s Poppins radiates with hope. She is magical and leads the children on glorious adventures, but she gives them the space to solve their own problems.

Aside from Julie Walter’s decent comic turn as housemaid Ellen, Hamilton creates Lin-Manuel Miranda is the only other major character not sounding like Radio 4 turned sentient. And, unfortunately, he is by far the most intensely annoying character in the film. His accent is appalling, a hacky ol’ chimney sweep cockney that itches the skin from the outset. He opens the show with the worst song in the film, ‘(Underneath the) Lovely London Sky’, which sounds like Ray Winstone ‘Live at the Palladium’. He already knows that Mary Poppins is magical, so he spends the whole film in an almost bored relaxation, no matter how fantastical the adventures get. On the whole though, the acting in Mary Poppins Returns is pretty good. Emily Mortimer as worker’s rights activist Jane Banks is excellent, and Ben Wishaw is great in a very much to type casting as a grieving, emotionally damaged man. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith is genuinely hilarious as a little too nice lawyer, Mr Fyre. And Colin Firth is, well, Colin Firth.

Director Rob Marshall has a showbiz but fairly neutral style and manages to create some excellent set-pieces, especially the ones that blend animation and live-action. The scene in which the children, Poppins and Jack go inside an illustrated bowl has a lovely, hand-drawn Saturday cartoon feel to the it. This sequence in particular feels both comfortingly classic and cutting-edge, which is surely what Marshall was aiming for. John Myhre’s production design is excellent; the streets of 30’s London are vivid and lush, with very bold colours. The city feels like a confection tin come to life, with the right amount of sheen and sweetness.

However, the film is several metres short of greatness. The songs, written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, are fairly innocuous and have none of the lasting earworm magic of the original. There is also a huge number of them, surely one every ten minutes, which feels like too much. Dave Magee’s script clips along as it should, hitting every emotional beat you imagine from the film’s starting off point of Jane and Michael searching desperately for a certificate that proves they own some of the bank that is demanding loan repayment. There is no getting away from the film’s saccharine nature and the chance to explore some interesting ideas about how the Great Depression affected the lives of the middle-class in London are lost beneath age-old, superficial resolutions.

It cannot be argued though that the film is not a success. I mean it literally is in terms of box-office but more in the sense that it’s an immensely difficult thing to pull off, make a sequel to arguably the most popular family film of all time. Nobody hates it, most people are actually filled with joy by it, and given they could easily have cried ‘HERESEY’, that counts as a huge win. However, whether Mary Poppins Returns will last the ages like the original remains to be seen. I no longer view musicals with teenage enmity; some of them are excellent, but this Poppins is too close to the centre to garner my real enthusiasm.

6/10

by James Turrell

Wildlife

Written By: Paul Danno & Zoe Kazan

Directed By: Paul Danno

Paul Danno is perhaps best known for playing Brian Wilson in 2014’s Love and Mercy, or for his brilliant comic turn as a member of the Animal Liberation Front in Jon Ronson’s Okja. Wildlife is his first directorial feature and he takes to the task with a delicate touch. Wildlife, based on a novel by Richard Ford, is the story of a marriage and family in disintegration, set amongst a wonderfully realised late 50’s time period.

The story is told from the perspective of 14 year-old Joe, the subtle but interesting Ed Oxenbould, as his Mother and Father’s relationship crumples. Newly moved to Montana, Joe and his parents Jerry and Jean are presented in the film’s opening sequence as the textbook Nuclear family of mid-century America. We see shots of Jake Gyllenhaal’s Jerry working hard at his grounds man job, while Jean, bought to life by the staggering Carey Mulligan, is an apron-clad hero of the family home.

This tranquillity is brought down by Jerry being fired at the Golf club he works and then, more importantly, turning down the chance to re-join the company when they offer him his job back. This sends Jerry spiralling into a depressed slump, which he uses an excuse to drink excessively; but crucially it allows Jean to re-enter the workplace, having left her previous job as a teacher to become a full-time housewife. From the outset, Danno and fellow screenwriter and actor Zoe Kazan, seek to show how Jeanette is pummelled by the gender boundaries of 50’s America. Mulligan plays the opening act with a furious resignation, she might love her son but she detests the fact her life is defined by groceries and cleaning. Mulligan is sublime in the role as Jean, bringing a ferocious intelligence mixed with an often devastating emotional veracity.

Jerry decides that he wants to leave Joe and Jean to go and help with the fight against a wildfire that is ravaging a forest in Montana. Jerry’s life seems defined by failure; he bounces from one dead-end job to another and is locked into the proscribed bread-winner role. He is much more emotional than his society allows him to be, saying to his son as he departs and kisses him, ‘men are allowed to love each other too.’

This decision leaves Joe and Jean alone in the house together and it exposes the bizarre intimacy at the heart of their relationship. Jean treats Joe as a mixture of best friend, therapist and son. She tells him about her sex life (or lack thereof), her deepening existential angst at the state of her life and the insecurities that come with that. Joe views all this with a bemused, often weirded out confusion. Danno has clearly instructed Oxenbould to play Joe to be as reserved as possible, his face is often impassive and his dialogue trimmed down to ‘Yes, sir,’ ‘No, Ma’am’ or ‘Is everything going to be okay?’ This allows the film to focus on Jean and how she responds to Jerry’s decision to leave the family for a low-paid, extremely dangerous job. The gap that Jerry leaves gives Jean a freedom she hasn’t really had since she gave birth to Joe. Gone are the aprons and the drab, plain dresses and she starts experimenting with colours and styles. Her anger at Jerry is clear but at some level she is glad when he leaves, as it finally allows the implicit oppression of her life to start cracking. This freedom brings with it a brutal new reality for Joe, as he witnesses first-hand the extent to which his mother will push this new life.

This is a very still film. The camera is often static, barely moving for the length of a scene. Often, a character will exit the frame and continue talking off-screen and the camera will be unrelenting in its motionless. The film is almost the anti-Birdman; it places the actors in front of the screen and lets them go. It also very small in terms of locations, existing mainly in the family home and the various work places which create a localised, intimate feel. The only time we see a true wide-shot is when Jean and Joe take a drive to see the wildfires Joe has left them to try to fight. The film itself has a wonderfully luxurious feel thanks to the work of cinematographer Diego Garcia and production designer Akin McKenzie. Danno and Kazan’s script is tight and held together by an admirable realism in terms of character and setting. Although, the presentation of time within the film is far from perfect and there are no indicators of over how many days/weeks/months the narrative lasts.

During a particularly ruthless parental argument, Jerry asks Joe his opinion and Jean spits, ‘Don’t ask him. He’s too young to know what is and what isn’t.’ This is one of the few times in the film in which Jean is dead wrong. Danno and Kazan use the small story of a family in crisis as a way of showing the damage societies defined by gender has on individuals. In a society in which emotions are regulated and gender roles codified, it is the adults who are truly unaware of how to feel or act.

8.5/10

by James Turrell

First Man

Written By: Josh Singer 

Directed By: Damien Chazelle  

I was at a screening in 2015 and an advert for La La Land came on. You know how it goes; girl meets boy, there’s a dance and a song, they seem sexually compatible and love blooms. I turned to my friend and said; ‘Well, that looks apocalyptically shit.’ And yet it turns out to be the biggest commercial and critical hit of the year. What a funny ol’ world.  

Damien Chazelle’s next feature is a world apart from La La Land, both figuratively and literally. While La La Land was all sheen and glitter and choruses, First Man is a brooding film with a surprisingly dark colour palette.  

First Man is the story of Neil Armstrong, the 1969 moon landings and America’s ascent to the summit of Cold War space race. At least, that’s superficially what the film’s narrative is centred upon. In actuality, First Man is concerned with the inner life of Armstrong and his struggle to recover from the grief of losing his daughter to a childhood illness. Armstrong, played wonderfully by Ryan Gosling, is a character defined by death. The death of his daughter, the death of his fellow pilots and the death of his fellow astronauts.  

Naturally, this film contains many great sequences of space flight and the inevitable money shot of Armstrong on the Moon. But the most alien aspect of the film is Armstrong’s inability to express any public or private emotion. His hyper-masculine emotional repression makes the 1960’s feel like Jupiter, let alone the Moon. He cannot discuss his daughter’s death or the death of the many friend’s that die during the lead up to 1969. The male default of internalising all pain or grief, which obviously still exists, is laid bare by Chazelle and Gosling. It is a smart decision by screenwriter Josh Singer to focus on the emotional landscape of Armstrong rather than the boorish politics that informed the Moon landings. Armstrong emotional life seems utterly bizarre and pre-historic, it’s like watching a Neanderthal trying to make a Spotify playlist. We all know men who are still like this, it is often a central reason for the rate of depression related illness in males. But Armstrong’s complete rejection of any emotional vulnerability makes the 20th century seem much further away than it actually is. The opening sequence of the film is Armstrong completing a small spaceflight and leaving the Earth’s atmosphere, briefly. He is of course wearing a spacesuit, with the customary helmet – a costume he wears throughout the film. The serves as a perfect metaphor for Armstrong’s emotional life; a person trapped behind glass, distant from the rest of the world. 

Armstrong stands in stark contrast to his wife Janet, played by Claire Foy, who is so good I didn’t realise it was her until the credits rolled. She is expressive, open and honest; and while Neil pours his entire life into NASA, Janet pours her’s into her children. Despite occupying a fairly stock female role of a woman waiting in fear at home while her husband does something dangerous, Foy brings so much life and warmth to the character, she rises above it. The standout scene of the film is not the multiple space sequences, but the scene in which Janet confronts Neil about his lack of emotions and refusal to talk to his sons before the Moon mission. It is wonderful acting from both Foy and Gosling, with gripping writing and direction.  

This is by no means a perfect film, I would struggle to describe it as a great one. For all it’s good qualities; Gosling and Foy, Justin Hurwitz’s score, the beautiful silent shot when they finally land on the Moon and Singer and Chazelle’s ability to create jeopardy in a historical story where there isn’t much, there is something lacking. The film is very underwhelming, so muted it sometimes feels like it barely exists. It just kind of rolls along, scene to scene and then it ends. It is a sombre film lacking a spark that really brings the world to life. There is also some poor construction in the scenes in which Armstrong is in space and something goes wrong with the ship he is flying. It is hard to understand what has gone wrong and how they fix it, and these sequences are undermined by poor direction and frenetic editing. There is much to be commended in Chazelle’s decision to move away from the Hollywood gleam of La La Land towards something more thoughtful and real. But you can’t shake the feeling as you watch First Man, that this is Sunday night filler rather than Saturday night prime.  

6.5/10 

by James Turrell

Colette

Writtens:Wash Westmoreland & Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Screenplay) Richard Glatzer (Story)

Director: Wash Westmoreland

‘I forbid you!’

So screams Willy at his wife Colette in the climatic scene of Wash Westmoreland’s biopic of the eponymous heroine. It’s a line that defines Willy’s, played with frothing brilliance by Dominic West, relationship to both his wife and the rest of society. He sees his sex, and himself in particular, stood tall above the rest – an eagle among pigeons. Unfortunately for Willy, this worldview comes into a fatal collision with Colette’s increased sexual and social autonomy and the changing flux of the incoming modern world.

The ascent of Colette’s, the equally wonderful Keira Knightley, autonomy forms the sweep of the film’s narrative. As she begins to gain more control over her writing, her finances and her body, her marriage to Willy first crumbles and then collapses. Colette is the story of a few years in the long life of celebrated French author Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, writer of numerous novels and short stories who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1948. And she was a mime. An actual mime. How cool is that? The film presents her as coming from, not exactly an impoverished family but certainly one of a low class. She ends up marrying the opulent Parisian Henry Gauthier-Villars and moves with him to the city at the turn of the 20th Century. Henri, under the pen-name Willy, writes music and theatre reviews, and in the film’s opening scenes decides to branch out into writing novels.

At least, that’s what Willy pretends to the intelligentsia of Paris.  In reality, he has several ghost writers who do the work for him, as he shouts vague ideas and deadlines at them. Colette is one of those writers and is seen early on composing numerous letters for Willy. He soon discovers that Colette has more than flair for writing and he first suggests, and then ultimately forces her, to write a series of novels based on her schooling and early life. The first novel, entitled Claudine, is a commercial and critical hit. Given its success, a battle ensues in which Willy becomes increasingly desperate for Colette to write more Claudine novels, while she refuses. This ultimately ends with him locking her in a room for hours at a time until another novel his completed. Which begets even greater success.

Moreland and Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script does well not to fall into the biopic trap of showing a single scene in which something happens which causes the protagonist to suddenly morph into the historical legend the public perceive them to be. Instead, they demonstrate how Colette, through writing these novels, even under conditions of tyranny, begins to assert control over her life. As soon as the first novel becomes a success and the majority of France believe Willy to be the genius, when in reality it’s Colette, the power balance between them is irrevocably changed. Her talent, combined with her secret knowledge of her ultimately fraudulent husband, is what begins to crack the concrete casing her life has thus far been lived in.

As Colette’s confidence in her own intellect rises, Willy’s ability to manipulate and distort her thinking decreases. Knightley is wonderfully subtle, showcasing an incredibly deft touch in long-playing the way in which Colette evolves as a character. This is perhaps most evident in her ever-progressing sexual dynamic. She begins the narrative devoted to her husband and is understandably distraught upon discovering his infidelity. By the second act, she has openly declared her bi-sexuality to her husband and is engaging in a relationship with an American woman named Meg. Willy at first appears to be progressively open to his wife’s sexual awakening. However, he soon engages in a sexual relationship with her himself and his whole acceptance of the two women’s relationship is an act of objectification; he is simply titillated by it and nothing else.

This is a stylish and moving second feature from Wash Westmoreland, originally conceived in collaboration with his late husband and Still Alice director Richard Glatzer. He utilizes the gorgeous set-designs of Lisa Chugg and Nora Talmaier to showcase the claustrophobia of Colette’s existence during these years. The film is slightly let down by an over-bearing and cliched orchestral score, which attempts to telegraph ever emotional beat of the story. And there is the bizarre decision to have writing sequences in which the voice-over of the words Colette is writing is in English, but the words Knightley is writing in the scene is in French.  However, this fails to detract from the overall success of the film, in which Westmoreland delicately uses the story of France’s most famous female writer to show the changing nature of female autonomy in the 20th Century.  

8/10

by James Turrell

Introduction

I am English but I live in the Netherlands, I moved here not long after we cut off our E to spite our U. It’s very nice, we have a railway system that doesn’t have you reaching for the vodka and sleeping tablets every time you catch a train, you get money for recycling your beer bottles and libraries are open past 11:30. You get to channel your inner Attenborough and observe stoner’s in the wild. You can get Vegan hot chocolate anywhere.

But life in Amsterdam is not all draped in a shimmering orange glow. We have the most cretinous tourists the low-airfare universe has ever created. I mean, do they not have bikes anywhere else in the world? Have you really flown three thousand miles to be jaw-dropped by a fucking bike? That’s all they do when there here, stand on canal bridges and take pictures of bikes. And eat poorly made waffles at outrageous mark-ups. Get out of the fucking road, honestly. The very worst of humanity in a bobble hat covered in weed leaves.

Anyway, the greatest achievement of the Netherlands is not turning a country sized bog into well, a country. Or Christmas bread, which is bread you eat on Christmas Day and it has chocolate in it. It’s literally pure joy with butter on top. No, the greatest achievement of the Netherlands is something called Cineville. Cineville is where you pay €17.50 a month and you get to watch any film in any cinema for free. Genius. And yes, I can hear you at the back shouting: ‘What about that Odeon thing mate?’ Well, the Odeon thing only counts for watching films in the Odeon, which is a bit like watching a film surrounded by H&M dummies that have come to life eating food designed to give you tinnitus. The difference with Cineville is that you get to go to any cinema, even the small ones that show films with subtitles and long boring ones that people like me pretend to like.

This is where the blog comes in. I have decided to get Cineville for a few months and record the findings of my bioscoop adventures in blog form, because that’s what we avocado humping millennials do. As we watch the world collapse into Neo-fascism, climate disaster and the blood-soaked ravages of antibiotic resistant drugs, it seems the perfect time to start a rather frivolous film blog.  

I aim to see 2-3 films a week, as I live somewhere my rent is so cheap that I can afford to work only three days. I can literally feel the throbbing hatred of any Londoner reading that. I will review all the films, both new and old, I see during this period and hopefully I’ll be able to make some interesting observations about the medium of cinema, storytelling and the nature of art. Or at least write something entertaining enough to stop you slashing your own throat open before you finish reading. And that my friends, is surely the dream of every writer.

Welcome to A Temporary Film Blog.