BRIGHT
As the release of Bright is busy reimagining the paradigm of blockbuster cinema itself, the actual watching of Bright turns out to be depressingly-familiar. Here, the director (and many of the cast) of fucking Suicide Squad hooks up with the screenwriter of Victor Frankenstein, teaming up for an $90mil buddy-cop-gone-fantasy popcorn-movie that is premiering on Netflix, not at your local multiplex. There’s all the macho posturing, gunfire, explosions, speaker-rattling sound, car-chases, corrupt cops, scenes set in strip-clubs, yes-we’re-still-doing-rap-rock-team-up corporate-mandated soundtrack, “cool” swears, adolescent male aesthetic, and fate-of-the-world-on-the-line climax you get in a big, stupid tentpole picture, only, now you get to suffer through it in the privacy and comfort of your own home!
Here, director David Ayer continues his obsessions with the LAPD and lurid caricatures of Los Angeleno street gangs, only with a supernatural twist! Will Smith is an honest cop(!) with a “hot wife” and a wise-beyond-her-years-but-also-adorable daughter who just wants to see out his five years ’til retirement without getting shot. Instead, he’s stuck partnered with the first orc on the force (Joel Edgerton, slummin’ it), a humble blue beast who isn’t out to break barriers of segregation, just do his job. They’re the original odd couple!
Screenwriter Max Landis imagines a contemporary Los Angeles where orcs, elves, and fairies live among people, and cooks up an entry-level race-relations parable to go with it. Chronicling a city divided by its uneasily-cohabitation of peoples —along ancient religious lines, no less— could be an ingenious exploration of modern-day Jerusalem. Bright, um, is not that. Instead, elves are merely the moneyed 1%-ers living in an enclave of pure affluence, and orcs are a very-ill-advised mimicry of black thuggery, a host of blue-skinned gangbangers in football jerseys drinking 40-ouncers on street corners. If that’s not enough witless caricaturisation, there’s even a cholo cartel full of dudes with face-tatts saying “esé”. Everyone, herein, be it cop or criminal, be it the many manly men or handful of ‘kickass’ women, is ready to point a gun at someone.
“I will fuck you up in a gunfight!” Smith says, at some point; the film’s three essential modes of dialogue being talking about shooting someone, crackin’ wise, or offering eye-rolling exposition about magical fantasy mythos. There’s proffered fluff about the Dark Lord, ancient orc pledges, a magical council, the rareness of someone who can handle a magic wand (for elves it’s common, for people it’s one-in-a-million; guess how those odds relate to Smith?), and a foretold full-moon prophesy. But Ayer doesn’t seem particularly interested in any of this, let alone invested in it.
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You know that elves will be the villains because they’re rich, and that a woman will be the ultimate embodiment of evil because Bright is that horrifyingly macho. So, eventually, we get Noomi Rapace in platinum blonde wig, swanning in as unstoppable killing machine, stopping at nothing to seize magical power. It’s great that she’s not some Steppenwolf-styled CGI concoction, but there’s also literally nothing to her character beyond her desire for power. In the scenes where she leads a band of evil elves in black leather outfits against Smith, Edgerton, and Lucy Fry’s Penelope-in-Peril elf —bullets sent flying beneath blue-filter, usually in warehouses at night— the film rather resembles a knock-off Underworld movie.
In such, Bright is a familiar-feeling flick: a nasty, violent, gun-worshipping product built from macho genre tropes, action set-pieces, and Smith’s flagging movie-star status. Its fantastical alternate reality may offer the potential for sequelising and world-building —that itself now a depressingly-familiar modern-blockbuster trope— but the film barely scrapes the surface of its pitch-meeting premise. Human & Orc buddy-cop barney is just the hook, a ‘fresh’ idea pasted over the same-old clichés. Bright is somewhere between witless and offensive, the kind of film for people who, the algorithms know, actually watched Suicide Squad. Dreck like this has long clogged up global multiplexes, now it’s coming for your streaming-service menu screens.
THE GREATEST SHOWMAN
It’s no surprise P.T. Barnum remains an iconic figure for Hollywood heavies, who preside over an entire industry that underestimates the intelligence of its viewers. The hoax-peddling huckster who birthed the circus —and, with his fondness for confabulation in the service of promotion, presaged the age of media spin— was a mid-19th-century figure whose personal rise was, in many ways, indivisible from the rise of his nation; taking entertainment away from the rarefied realm of European society and fashioning it, anew, as place for the common American. Barnum was, and remains, famous for his bullshit, so, in some ways, it’s fitting that the makers of The Greatest Showman —writer Jenny Bicks, director Michael Gracey— have made a screen musical so loosely based on the life of its subject that any notion of truth barely enters the picture.
Here, Barnum is a ragamuffin who grows up to be Hugh Jackman, marries way-blonde childhood sweetheart Michelle Williams, and has a pair of adorbz girls. He starts out tending to a museum of curiosities, before refashioning it into a full-blown circus freakshow. Such exploitationism is rewritten as body-positive celebration of plurality: his circus offering employment, status, and a home for bearded ladies, Siamese twins, tattooed men, giants, and the like; his freaks a veritable rainbow coalition, out and proud in stomping, posse-chorus song.
As the songs rattle on —no less than two of them choreographed around the pouring of alcohol— there’s little by the way of characterisation. Jackman comes from poverty, so yearns for the approval of the rich folk who once looked down their nose at him. His partner in the circus, Zac Efron, is a handsome scion who came from privilege, but never knew fun, friendship, or love! He finds the latter with Zendaya, the pair’s trailblazing love another victory for plurality in the face of dated (like, mid-19th-century dated) conformity, moralising, wowserism.
Jackman’s yearning for upper-class approval is embodied in the form of Rebecca Ferguson’s Swedish opera-singer, who also serves as a sexy temptation to distract him from love of wife and children. For daring to even dream of dallying, he’s cosmically punished by fire, learning that nothing matters more than family; be it immediate or workplace. This is all staggeringly conventional stuff, utterly conservative and non-threating and so positive as to be insipid; set to thumping contemporary-pop numbers that are, uniformly, awful.
A more adventurous story could dig deep into the thematic dirt, excavating the depths of Barnum’s career and character; see him not as some body-image crusader, but as analogue for filmmaker, corporate speaker, cult-leader, President of America. And you don’t have to strain hard to think of a more-adventurous, infinitely-superior film: the sight of Jackman in a top-hat, speaking winsomely about how duping an audience can delight them, duly brings back memories of Christopher Nolan’s best film, The Prestige. It’s no surprise that The Greatest Showman can’t measure up to The Prestige, but it even fails, horribly, when compared to, like, Les Mis.
DOWNSIZING
It’s a sterling satirical premise: rather than shrink the size of their All-American dreams, people would prefer to literally shrink themselves. In Alexander Payne’s fascinating yet flawed film, Norwegian scientists discover a process of shrinking organic beings; offering what they believe is a radical take on sustainability, with a miniaturised human race making for resources stretched further, landfill-waste minimised. Like all idealist scientific breakthroughs, though, this process of Downsizing changes when it meets the capitalist marketplace, and gets into the hands of lay-people.
Instead of being a noble sacrifice, being shrunk to five-inches is a boon for consumers: when operating on such a scale, your wealth suddenly stretches a long way, the luxurious lifestyle you always dreamt of —a towering McMansion, early retirement— being all too affordable. The wild sci-fi conceit is normalised only to the point that it’s a product to be sold, peddled with the kind of aw-shucks hucksterism familiar to shopping-channel viewers. Here, gated-communities for the small are kept under plastic bubbles (so as to keep the insects out), enclaves that boast of “zero crime” and have the instantly-forgettable names of exurban developments. It’s just a new version of white flight; a fantasy of green lawns and nonthreatening monoculture, an enclave from a hostile world.
Matt Damon plays an All-American everyman who yearns of a bigger, better life. With due iront, the answer is going small; he and wife Kirsten Wiig lapping up the salesmanship, signing up for a life of excess on a micro-scale. Only, she flakes at the last minute; leaving Damon not just stranded in his new home of Leisure Land, but broke, emasculated, filled with regrets. Payne and co-writer Jim Taylor, having come up with this fantastic premise, hitch it to a tale of middle-aged-male malaise, existential-questioning, and picaresque wandering.
There’s a world On Beyond Suburbia, full of Eurotrash parties, black-market goods, illegal immigrants, lower-class hovels; and, eventually, Edenic end-of-the-world Norwegian vistas of glacier and cult-ish communal living. Damon learns to live —and love!— again, courtesy of Christoph Waltz’s silver-tongued Serbian hustler, and Hong Chau’s Vietnamese-activist-turned-American-cleaning-lady. The moral, ultimately, is simple: the world is bigger than your bubble of white-privilege, and emotions oft run counter to upper-middle-class conformity.
Downsizing, thus, marries fascinating concept to sound message, and even finds cameos from Neil Patrick Harris, Laura Dern, James Van Der Beek, and Character Actress Margo Martindale. And, yet, something about the whole just doesn’t quite cohere; like so many films, an amazing premise delivers a great beginning, only to be periodically sidelined as we go through a less-inspired hero’s journey. There’re times, too, where there’s an almost show-offy quality to the film; as if Payne can barely contain his evident delight at the satirical concept, and the philosophical questions it raises. It’s not many films that try to tackle human life on individual, sociological, and existential levels; even fewer are those that manage to do it well.
CALL ME BY YOUR NAME
It’s an instant queer classic, a bittersweet portrait of first-love and love-lost, and a masterpiece of mood-sustaining mise-en-scène. Also, a guy fucks a peach. It’s a minor moment in a major picture, but this scene —where Timothée Chalamet puts a personal spin on peaches-and-cream— shows that Call Me By Your Name matches romanticism with a certain daring, knows that adolescent lust isn’t just sweet, but sticky, and messy, too.
Chalamet plays a teenager in 1983, a bilingual music-prodigy summering in Northern Italy with French mother (Amira Casar) and American father (Michael Stuhlbarg), this trio the kind of multi-lingual European family who spend nights sitting around listening to on-the-fly translations of ancient myths read from their original text. Summertime means books by the pool, swimming in rivers, biking backstreets, abundant stone-fruit(!), al fresco dinners, local dances. It also means the annual arrival of a grad-student, here to stay the season, helping Stuhlbarg, a bearded, romantic art historian studying the local statues of antiquity.
This time, this visiting academic is no bookish weenie, but Armie Hammer, a man with legs as long as the days, as statuesque as any iconic sculpture (Stuhlbarg notes that the cut statues verily solicit viewers, “as if daring you to desire them”, speaking, if not of Hammer, perhaps of his 17-year-old son; that fruit just beginning to ripen). This visiting grad is blonde, charismatic, flirtatious, clad in Converse, ready to cut the rug to the Psychedelic Furs. At first, Chalamet bristles at the presence of someone so American, and busies himself with throwing himself into first sexual-explorations with Esther Garrel, a curly-haired, quietly-confident French girl summering here, too. Yet, there’s no denying that there’s sure a spark with the guy sleeping in the room next door; a ready peach made the object of awakened, explosive desires.
Director Luca Guadagnino dials back the hysteria of the operatic I Am Love and bawdy sex-comedy A Bigger Splash, taking an unobtrusive approach big on atmosphere. Call Me By Your Name is shot on 35mm, the thick summer air embodied in celluloid grain, with the director employing single focal lens, also 35mm, for every shot (the DOP, notably, is Apichatpong Weerasethakul collaborateur Sayombhu Mukdeeprom; meaning the film is alive to the moment, and moments of wonder).
This decision fixes both the camera’s perspective and the characters within the location; making, in plain language, for mostly mid-shots, rare close-ups, with the characters to the front of frame sometimes stepping too close to focus. Guadagnino oft resists the impulse to cut, the sustained takes inhabiting the locations, too; this approach getting a centrepiece single-shot that finds Chalamet and Hammer walking through a local village, drawing close and moving away, in a five-minute take that watches, but also drifts. This directorial approach empowers the actors to inhabit not just their characters, but the space in which they move through. It also makes the space —the location— indivisible from the drama; takes that cliché of the ‘environment as character’ and makes it feel alive.
André Aciman’s original 2007 novel —adapted to screenplay by James Ivory, no less— is written from a years-later perspective, and Guadagnino instinctively understands that the most vivid, formatives memories have a tactile feel, a redolent smell; the environment evocative of time-past. Here, we drink deep from a youthful summer, in which the long days and late nights are loaded with endless possibility.
THE FLORIDA PROJECT
In a neverending procession of stripmalls and budget motels, the Magic Castle offers mock, off-brand Disneyfication for down-and-outers. Glowing a luminous mauve under the hot Floridian sun, it lures in some unsuspecting tourists, who’ve confused its name for actual proximity to Orlando’s Disneyland. But, mostly, this candy-coloured high-rise —a real-world dollhouse— is the home to a host of tenants living barely-tenable lives of hand-
to-mouth grind, daily scraping the cash together to pay their per-night rent. So close to the Magic Kingdom’s font of dreams, the Magic Castle is a deep well of cold reality; a natural subject for a work of cinematic social-realism.
Sean Baker has spent his career making films situated at the heart of micro communities: migrant workers, illegal immigrants, porn actresses, trans sex-workers. He seeks to depict dramas within these worlds with empathy, not pity; employing the phrase “plight-of movies” to finger the kind of films he doesn’t want to make. Here, he depicts the residents not as victims of an unjust, unequal, unfeeling society, but as a self-contained, surviving community; this corner of paved-over swampland a whole world unto itself.
It’s here that a sassy, charismatic, independent six-year-old (Brooklynn Prince) roams the land, free as a bird, looking for fun, adventure, ice-cream, trouble. School’s out for summer, and aided by a pair of pint-sized pals/enablers (Christopher Rivera and Valeria Cotto), she’s the kind of kid who’ll spit on a car or burn down an abandoned condo for yucks. Baker views this world through the eyes of these kids; how vast the area between motels and highways seems, how there are things about adults they understand perceptively (“I can always tell when adults are about to cry,” Prince boasts), and other things that they don’t understand at all (like, evidently, when Bria Vinaite, Prince’s oppositionally-defiant mother, is sneaking Johns into their room).
Baker’s filmography has been filled with turns first-timers and non-professionals, and most of the principles, here, are fresh faces. Prince, as its leading actor, is handed all the freedom of her character, the film veritably following after her, waiting to hear what she’ll say next. But —alongside small turns from great character-actors Caleb Landry Jones and Macon Blair— Willem Dafoe has a key role as the motel’s manager, custodian, handyman; a weary, even-keeled gent whose shoulders, otherwise, slump. Walking as if the weight of the world is on them, you get the sense that he’s propping up the whole operation.
He’s, essentially, an ‘in’ for audiences; someone inhabiting this world whilst having a perspective on it, able to see this daily grind for the tragedy it is. Baker sometimes pulls away, too, showing the Magic Castle from afar; but, most of the time, we’re on the ground, in the immersion of hand-held camera, real-life locale, and, on climax, even a bit of true guerrilla filmmaking. Whilst this final flurry offers a note of hope —or fantasy, or delusion— it’s in contrast to the world it has inhabited, to what we’ve seen.
The bright colours, the kids-behaving-badly laughs, and the sense of a childhood summer’s endlessness give The Florida Project a cheery, audience-friendly façade. But, like any work of social-realism, things won’t end well; dark things occurring in even the most sunkissed, luridly-painted locale.
JUST TO BE SURE
It’s French farce played as warm drama, a theoretically-emotional portrait of slippery paternity that continually places its characters amidst sitcom set-ups, watching how far they’ll take a lie, all to comic-in-theory ends. Just To Be Sure delivers François Damiens as a middle-aged man who discovers that his birth father isn’t really his birth father, and sets out to discover the true identity of his biological progenitor. This world-shaking fact he initially discovers because his daughter, Alice de Lencquesaing, is pregnant, and undergoing a DNA test. In the first of the story's endless coincidences, she’s having a baby but claims to not know —or not care to know— who the father is.
So, from there, Damiens grows obsessed both with the identity of his real father, and of the father of his imminent grandchild. He keeps this all under wraps from his own loving dad
(Guy Marchand), effectively two-timing his two dads when he meets his supposed birth pops (André Wilms), whom he first stalks, then befriends. And, when the woman (Cécile de France) he rom-com meet-cutes turns out to maybe be his sister, he keeps that a secret, too, leading to a date where something maybe approximating hilarity ensues, if you're easily amused.
Dancing through all these kooky coincidences and safe tastefully-arthouse hijinks, director Carine Tardieu also loads up on big, obvious symbols. The many shots of pregnant male seahorses is the most on-the-nose, but Damiens also works at a job detonating WWII-era UXO still littered on beaches and in quarries. Yes, he literally spends his days dealing with the bombshells of the past, buried secrets ready to dangerously explode in the now. Yet, the non-threatening drama of Just To Be Sure never makes its revelations of the past play out as particularly explosive or destructive. Instead, it’s the kind of film where everything turns out great for everyone involved; a mildly-quirky riff on a familiar rom-com template.
