HOLMES & WATSON
★★
Like a horror movie, a comedy is a functional movie. You can, if you so desire, strip away all notions of artistry, theme, and meaning, and instead measure it by a simple binary: did you laugh? If you did, it is a success, delivering what’s promised on the box. If you didn’t, then the comedy fails. That sounds simple, but it doesn’t really evoke what it’s like to actually experience a comedy failing; to hear the jokes land like thuds, the audience only shifting uncomfortably in their seats, not laughing aloud. Which leads us, of course, to Holmes & Watson.
Holmes & Watson is best described as a sketch-comedy lark stretched way-too-thin to barely make it to 90 minutes. It reunites Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly a decade after their beloved Step Brothers, and finds them mixing their scattershot improv comedy and man-boy buffoonery with bad English accents and a satirical takedown of the delusional male-entitlement fantasy of the ‘genius’ sleuth. There’s occasional moments of inspiration: a genuinely-great musical number, running gags about America’s robust democracy, and a gleeful mockery of archaic medical practices (the best: “Carbon Monoxide: The cure for Insomnia!”).
But, for every joke that works, there’s ten that die. Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan are in this, and they’re godawful. The filmmaking (by Etan Cohen, who previously helmed another bad Ferrell flick, Get Hard) is shoddy, the plot barely exists, Kelly McDonald’s voice is weirdly, badly dubbed, and the whole production seems resigned to the fact that most people will watch it on a tiny airplane-seat screen during a long-haul flight. Oh, and, worst of all, the score, by Mark Mothersbaugh, is v. garbage, incessantly trying to add jaunty levity to leaden scenes.
In such, Holmes & Watson feels like a sad waste of assembled talent; and makes you realise why this film wasn’t previewed to critics in advance. It’s a failure, in no uncertain terms. Watching it, I thought often, and fondly, of Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, another Reilly-starring comedy whose pisstake of a cinematic sub-genre was incisive and brilliant; two words no one will ever use to describe Holmes & Watson. Instead, people will use only words that convey a sense of disappointment. There’s nothing to be hated about the film, but there’s plenty to be lamented; starting with the fact that you wish the jokes were better.
MARY POPPINS RETURNS
★★★
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At its core, Mary Poppins Returns is essentially telling the same story as the recent Christopher Robin. Both are part of a Disney spate of ‘live action’ revivals of old IP, each taking to beloved English institutions anew. They’re made for children, but they’re pitched at nostalgic adults, and each film essentially peddles the same haute-Disneyist tale: a now-grown-up boy from the original tale has become a joyless businessman, worried about paying bills, dismissive of childhood whimsy. But, via the magic of a totem from their childhood — Mary Poppins/Winnie The Pooh — they learn to recapture the lost innocence, imagination, and sense-of-wonder from when they were young; reconnecting with their own kids in the process.
Where the tone of Christopher Robin was bittersweet, with sadness coursing throughout, Mary Poppins is a far-brighter, more boisterous, happy-family-entertainment kind of affair. Its best moments come when the film gets so Wonderful World Of that it borders on psychedelic; the stylised, silly, swirling animation, in keeping with the original, blessedly 2D (photorealist 3D CGI animation = the worst, always). Musical numbers plunge into the skies, lifted aloft by brightly-coloured balloons; into underwater worlds dwelling within a bathtub (ones far more vivid and evocative than Aquaman); into the painted fresco on a porcelain bowl; and, even, into a Music Hall knees-up contained within the painted-porcelain world.
We’re led into these surreal realms by the titular magical nanny, played with much panache and pitch-perfect pish-posh poshness by Emily Blunt, who at this point — after My Summer Of Love, The Devil Wears Prada, Your Sister’s Sister, Looper, Edge Of Tomorrow, Sicario, and A Quiet Place — surely must be one of cinema’s most beloved stars. The cast opposite her includes Ben Whishaw as the man-needing-to-rediscover-his-inner-boy, Emily Mortimer picking up the original novel’s social-activist B-story, Meryl Streep mugging as some kooky Eastern European caricature whose world gets periodically turned (literally) upside-down, and Lin-Manuel Miranda as a soot-streaked lamplighter, the Hamilton don either struggling with a cockney accent or delivering an extended homage to Dick Van Dyke’s disastrous garbling in the 55-year-old original.
There’s plenty of cameos, winks, nods, and reverence for that original; the great task for director Rob Marshall and writer David Magee making sure that Mary Poppins Returns manages to please those who love the original, whilst manage to feel like its own standalone artwork. On that front, viewer mileage may vary, much of it coming down to whether you believe the toe-tappin’ tunes — A Cover Is Not The Book, Trip A Little Light Fantastic, Nowhere To Go But Up — are sufficiently pleasing/earwormy enough. But anyone who’s affronted or outraged by Mary Poppins Returns should be treated with due scepticism and/or get-off-my-lawn derision. When a film so relentlessly attempts to disarm, charm, and delight, it’s pretty easy to be swept along with the current.
EIGHTH GRADE
★★★★
Without wishing to get too confessional and participate in the internet’s great first-person industrial complex, the worst year in the young life of your friend and humble narrator Film Carew was Year 8. But this is no great revelation, really, given it probably was for everybody. The harrowing horrors of nascent adolescence are so universal that Eighth Grade can play far and wide, for viewers young and old, prompting solemn nods and uncomfortable squirms of recognition for its depiction of life at this most unflattering time. It’s a film about coming-of-age in the social-media-soaked now, but it also feels pretty timeless; 13 is, always, a pretty shitty age to be.
Eighth Grade marks the debut directorial work of comic Bo Burnham, whose experiences in the trenches of online-video virality have blessed him with an intimate understanding of the currency of the over-documented times. He was inspired to make the movie from watching the sad, barely-seen videos that haven’t gone viral; most teenagers’ to-camera confessionals and monologues falling swiftly into the great digital graveyard. Its solitary subject, 13-year-old Kayla (beautifully played by Elsie Fisher), is a dutiful vlogger, making videos for no one. Online, talking to the camera, she carries a sense of authority; but at school, as in the YouTube landscape, she’s slipped through the cracks, a barely-noticed figure on the fringes.
Charting her final weeks of middle-school, Burnham turns familiar teenage exchanges and teen-movie tropes — first attractions, possibilities for ascent in social status, embarrassing dads, clueless teachers, the big party — into cringe-comic situations that walk a line between amusingly-awkward and genuinely-uncomfortable; the latter, especially, when our teen lead garners sexual attention from an aggressive older boy.
Burnham often frames his main character in tight, unflattering close-ups, studying the face of this actual-teenager, on which insecurity is so plainly writ. He’s got a way with montages, too, setting image to a great score by the genius composer Anna Meredith. Best of all, her bangin’ Nautilus is brought back to soundtrack an entrance to the party, its surrealist fanfare mined for all the absurdity in every note. It, too, scans as apt commentary on this terrible age, where every moment seems so ludicrously, impossibly dramatic.
FIRST REFORMED
★★★★
First Reformed is a crisis-of-faith movie in which the crisis is two-fold. It’s a dramatic depiction of an old-fashioned priest at an old-fashioned church, who is shaken by his counselling sessions with an eco-terrorist, and begins to question his life’s work. But it’s also about the crisis of Christianity in America, and how the Church has wed itself to political conservatism.
Churches, in America’s evangelical — or, indeed, televangelical — landscape, long ago became another business; somehow spinning Christ, whose teachings were filled with warnings against the evils of wealth, into yet another self-help guru who wants you to be Successful ($$$!). But, aligning their political values with the right-wing has fundamentally changed the notion of what it means to be a Christian: no longer charitable, but anti taxes; no longer about the equality of all souls, but supporting inhumane economic inequality; no longer caring for God’s creation, but being part of a political system that puts profits over planet, hyper-capitalism over environmentalism.
In such, First Reformed resounds as a cry of rage. It echoes from its horrified-by-global-warming eco-terrorist (Philip Ettinger), to its questioning-his-post priest (Ethan Hawke, doing great work), but this rage clearly comes from its writer/director, Paul Schrader. Schrader is best-known for his collaborations with classic-era Martin Scorsese, and there’s echoes of his writing in both Taxi Driver — in its outsider fury at a corrupt, repugnant world— and The Last Temptation Of Christ.
There’s also semi-explicit reference to Robert Bresson’s great The Diary Of A Country Priest; Schrader taking up that Bressonian mantle of using cinema as a way of wrestling with faith in a corrosive, hypocritical world. At 72, Schrader is looking at the world around him, and thinking of the world he’ll leave behind. First Reformed’s great horror, and its emotional trauma, comes not from pointing fingers, but from its grand confession of culpability; environmental/spiritual degradation something in which both director and viewers should feel complicit.
