Rocketman is a blast!

At the beginning of Rocketman we see Elton John march into a group therapy session, dressed as a fallen angel in a scarlet red be-winged outfit,  and declare  that he is an alcoholic, a cocaine addict, sex addict, bulimic  - and a shopping addict.    The rest of this  ‘true fantasy’  tells how little Reggie Dwight from Pinner got into this sorry state, and ends, as it starts, with him deciding to battle his way out of it.     It is a terrible story, wonderfully  told, and its postscript tells us that in the end Elton won.  He has of course just been awarded the French Legion d’Honneur to go with his English Knighthood. 

The story is well known,  from his childhood, when it seems his parents tried hard to live up to Philip Larkin’s famous nostrum  -

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you. 

We follow him through his acceptance at the age of 11 by the Royal College of Music,  meeting Bernie Taupin when he was twenty and breaking into song-writing with him.   That was followed by the fame and fortune that almost  appeared like magic, but were not what he really needed.   It tells of Elton’s  unhappy relationship with John Reid, his one-time lover/manager,  his spiral down into various  addictions and his attempted suicide, all the way to his decision to quit drugs and go into therapy.   The actual chronology is used freely, and in the case of the group therapy invented, but this rearrangement imposes some clarity onto what was really a very chaotic life.   

Most of the songs do not follow the actual chronology of Elton's life and career, and  of course none of them are to his own lyrics, even when they seem to be his personal commentary/confession, but Bernie's lyrics must have been informed by his friend’s  circumstances, and they are used here to fit the  ‘true fantasy’ well. 

Elton was a producer of this movie so I guess he must have put a lot of his money into it and thereby kept it out of the hands of the major studios.   Paying the piper  meant he could have ‘called the tune’ and given him license to whitewash the story  (as in the Queen produced Bohemian Rhapsody).  But Elton once said about being in therapy that "your pride will kill you" and I think this must be the most blisteringly honest bio-pic I have ever seen produced by its protagonist.    The budget also gave artistic freedom and it is, as they say, all up there on the screen.    Much of this story is illuminated by song and dance routines, which are large scale and impressive.    

Dexter Fletcher, who ended up directing Bohemian Rhapsody when Brian Singer was sacked, also directed this, delivering Lee Hall’s script (War Horse, Billy Elliot) and George Richmond’s images (he shot both the Kingsman movies, Tomb Raider and Warhorse) with a sure touch.   Matthew Margeson honours the original music and provides his own unobtrusively, and Taron Edgerton produces an award deserving performance as he sings, dances and plays the adult Elton (Matthew Illesley was nine years old when he played him in childhood).     Jamie Bell plays Taupin, and the guy from Bodyguard, Richard Madden plays Reid (who is painted very black and I suppose it must be true or he would have sued the hell out of them).   

It is good to see so many great  British actors on show, including Gemma Craven,  Stephen Graeme and Stephen Macintosh, alongside the amazing Bryce Dallas Howard as Elton's mother,  who I spent much of the move trying to identify as a Brit, never recognising her American self from Jurassic World – Fallen Kingdom.   

Bryce Dallas Howard

The postscript tells us the good news.   Elton did find someone to love.   Elton and David Furnish married in 2005 and have two adopted children.   Elton has been sober and clean for decades now,  and his AIDs Foundation has raised hundreds of millions of pounds.  He does, however confess to still having a problem with shopping.  I guess he can afford it. 

So,  although having doubts about the depiction of the therapy group, which might give some people a false impression of how they actually work, I think Rocketmanis a really good movie, telling an important story that has a clear message for all those who aspire for fame and fortune - and about the absolute need for forgiveness.     None of it would work, however, without the brilliance of the music, and I was very pleased to see it made clear that it is Taupin who has always written the brilliant and essential  lyrics for Elton to put to music,  and that Bernie retained his sanity while Elton was going crazy.  Their friendship is also a true love story, if never a romanic one..     

I saw Rocketman on a very big screen with a good sound system and if you can get to a proper cinema screen it is really worth the effort, this is a Big Movie, with Big Music - and a Big Story to tell.  

Could it be your Favourite?

The Favourite.   The Greek Director Yorgos Lanthimos has won many nominations and prizes at Cannes and Venice and at the Oscars for The Lobster, Killing of a Sacred Deerand, hugely, forThe Favourite.   These three films have also, however, divided audiences.    When I saw The Favouritein London I loved it, but my companion hated it.   It is certainly unlike any other period costume movie I have ever seen, taken from a script written by feature length film newcomers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara.    It famously stars Olivia Coleman, the Oscar Winner among eleven  other nominations for the film, including Best Supporting Performaces for her co-stars Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone,  Best Original Screenplay,  Best Motion Picture of the Year and Best Production Design, Costume Design, Directing and  Editing. 

So what is all the (divisive) fuss about?   The film is set during the early 18^thcentury War of the Spanish Succession, when England was ruled by the widowed Queen Anne.  The Queen’s physical and emotional wellbeing is fragile and she depends on her long term friend,  Lady Sarah Churchill,  Duchess of Marlborough (Rachel Weisz) – wife of  John, Captain General (a very effective Chief of the General Staff.)    There is political opposition to the ongoing cost of the war, but Sarah effectively runs the  Court and sets the Queen’s policies.   Then Abigail (Emma Stone) arrives,  working as a maid but looking for advancement.    The film follows what swiftly becomes a love triangle between the three women, with Sarah using her brains, long term friendship and Anne’s dependency on her, and Abigail using her sexuality.   The plot follows the various personal and political intrigues with biting wit – and very rude language.    

I know some people dislike this latter aspect, not being inclined to believe that royalty and aristocracy would ever use such langua     ge.    It is not at all decorous, but I have no reason to doubt it probability.   One aspect of the so called ‘upper classes’ is that in the main they do not give a **** about what anyone else thinks.    I remember similar outrage at the scatological language used by Thomas More in Hilary Mantel’s  Wolf Hall, but it is amply documented by his own letters and the contemporary accounts of others.   More as not at all as portrayed in  ‘A Man For All Seasons’,it seems, and Martin Luther also used similar language.   Times and cultures change, and it is anachronistic to judge the past by our contemporary  mores.   None the less some find it difficult – and I found it occasionally shocking, but then I don’t really mind being shocked.  

And what I loved about the film was its wit, passion and compassion.     Olivia Coleman, as  the much bereaved Queen (she had not only lost her  husband, but all 17 of her children) is truly pathetic.   She is petty, vindictive, depressed and desperate for love – even if it is from the host of rabbits she keeps in her quarters.      I did not like anything about her, but I was very moved by her.    The great film critic Roger Ebert said that ‘movies are empathy machines’,  and Olivia Coleman’s deeply rooted performance tests and proves the point.   She is a  deserved Oscar winner. 

The rest of the  cast, including Mark Gatiss and Nicolas Hoult, provide great support and the cinematography by Robbie Ryan (Slow West) and  Lanthimos’s usual editor,   Yorgos Mavropsaridis, provide visuals that can be sumptuous (I suspect no use of artificial indoor lighting – a la the BBC’sWolf Hall) and disturbing (the use of some rather strange lenses). 

 So, you pay your money and you take your pick.  Or you take your pick and don’t pay your money.    It is only, ever, up to you.

Catch up.

So, having been rather busy since Christmas I am playing catch-up and  recommending some movies you might have missed.  

Here are brief notes, but I will revisit some of these films at length  later.

Destroyer. In Karyn Kusama’s film DestroyerNicole Kidman provides an amazing performance, playing  the kind of role usually reserved for male actors; a broken down alcoholic cop racked by guilt for a tragic failure years ago and by the breakup of his marriage which estranged him from his daughter.   But this time it is a woman in the role, with flashbacks to the crucial events fifteen years earlier.   So Kidman (now in her early fifties) plays both the decrepit present day cop aged maybe around 40,  and her much more sprightly younger self.   The film has a good story line  and able support from Sebastian Stan (Avengers), Bradley Whitford (The West Wing)  and Tatiana Maslany (who played multiple roles as the lead in  Orphan Black, but this is absolutely Kidman’s movie, and she is astonishing. 

                                              

Spiderman; into the Spider-verse.   I enjoyed the first two Spiderman movies but lost interest in those that followed, until this movie came along.  It is animated to wonderful (and Oscar winning) effect in ways that honour the comic book origins of the character, and the writing keeps Spider-man’s backstory but does utterly new things with him, or rather with them.      An evil experiment breaks the bounds of the multiverses – the billions of other parallel universes hypothesized by some cosmologists – allowing other manifestations of the character to appear to aid this young  working-class mixed-race  New Yorker,  a teenager who isn’t quite Peter Parker.    These visitors include  a film noir, very black and white, Philip Marlow figure, ananime heroine and her futuristic robot-spider, a Spider-Pig and (of course) a Spider-Woman,  alongside two alternative versions of Peter Parker himself.   The splendid voice cast includes Chris Pine,  Jake Johnson, Shameik Moore, John Mulaney,  Nicolas Cage, Hailee Steinfeld,  Mahershala Ali and Lily Tomlin.   This is not just a film for Spider-man fans,  it is absolutely accessible, enormous fun and beautifully animated.

  Long Shot is a rom-com starring Charlize Theron and Seth Rogan written by Dan Sterling and Liz Hannah and directed by  Jonathan Levine. (Seth Rogan was in Levine’s 2011 50/50)    Once upon a time she was his babysitter.   Now she is the US Secretary of State and he is a radical journalist.   Happenchance brings them together (of course) as she prepares her bid for the upcoming Presidential nominations and she decides to hire him to add some humour and pizazz to her rather flat speeches.   You can guess the rest,  but don’t let that stop you seeing it.   It will not quite shake up the gender politics of Hollywood, but it does offer us a smart and powerful woman in a funny rom-com, who does not have to sacrifice her smarts or abandon her power in order to find love.    Being a Seth Rogan movie there is one gross out scene, but otherwise the humour is benign and tasty. 

    

  Fighting with My Family is a British (very British) movie that has a very different female star in a very different female role.    Florence Pugh (Lady MacBeth andThe Little Drummer Girl)  plays Sayara Knight, who is part of the real life English wrestling Knight family.  Stephen Merchant wrote and directed this,  and persuaded The Rock, Dwayne Johnson to play himself, recreating the part he actually played in the Knight family’s fortunes.  Sayara and her brother Zac (Jack Lowden, England is Mine andDunkirk)  try to break into the American World Wrestling Entertainment circuit.    She succeeds, he does not, and they both struggle with the consequences,  but this is not a down-beat docudrama, it is a funny and heartwarming story.   Nick Frost and Lena Headley (Game of Thrones) play the wrestling parents with enormous gusto, properly vulgar humour and great charm.   In fact that is what describes the whole movie, despite the hard falls some of the Knights have to endure.   Vince Vaughn is an actor whose performances I do not always admire, but that may be more to do with the roles he accepts rather than his acting ability.  Here he does very well as the  apprentice’s wrestling boot-camp  boss.   Stephen Merchant has made an impressive directorial job, his second after his 2010 Cemetery Junction.    

Leave No Trace.   Eight years ago I saw Debra Granik’s Sundance Grand Jury Prize winning film Winter’s Bone,  a simple, stark story simply told, set in the Ozark wooded hills in a community characterised by poverty and consequent criminality.   A young woman, 17  year old,  has to find her crystal-meth brewing bail-jumping father.    Unless he appears in court on time the family home will be forfeit and the family homeless.    Jennifer Lawrence  (aged 19 at the time) played the girl and the film and its star blew me away.    

Granik’s  2018 film Leave No Trace  takes place in the forests in coastal Pacific Northwest Oregon, the same setting as  Captain Fantastic, a movie that shares some its elements, but has a very different tone.   

Winter’s Bonefelt like a black and white movie – even  black and grey – and the woodland setting  was lean and bleak.   Here the woods are a lush,  luxuriantly fertile green and this reflects the  much warmer daughter/father relationship at its heart.   The father, Will, is a PTSD damaged vet.    He identifies the horror of war with the conformity of those who accept the rules of society, who follow orders, do as they are told and so march off to war when told.   So he has rejected all conformity – and even the houses that ‘conformists’ live in.     So he lives in the forest with his daughter Tom,  where he uses his intelligence and army training to survive and avoid detection.  Father and daughter are clearly devoted to each other.  She is well trained and disciplined,  knowing their situation is bizarre, but accepting it because it seem necessary for her father’s mental stability.   But when they are spotted by a jogger the local authorities come looking for them, find them and offer them a place to live and work for Will to do.  Will and Tom react to these radical changes in different ways.  That is all that happens.   There is no high drama.   There are no extravagant outbursts of emotion.   In fact the script is as lean as the Ozark woodland.    But the two stars are  amazing in their ability to convey subtle but profound internal changes without words, or even gestures.  Ben Foster (Hell and High Water, Kill Your Darlings)  plays the father and Thomsasin McKenzie (The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies) plays the girl, Tom, and it is one of the most impressive films I have seen this year – almost up there with Winter’s Bone,and that is very high praise indeed. Both films were shot by Michael McDonough. 

US.    I have been thinking and writing notes on Jordan Peele’s film Us for many weeks now.   I will continue to work on them, as this remarkable movie deserves the effort of a really considered response.    All I will say at the moment is that this may well be my film of the year.   It uses the horror tropes, but is much more complex and profound than any horror film I have ever seen.    Us provides a scathing critique of America,  using an inventive script that includes sound characterization and humour alongside the horror of the central metaphor.   The acting is amazing,  with all of the main character’s having doppelgangers, both played by the same actors, including  Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Shahadi Wright Joseph and Even Alex.    If you saw and enjoyed Get Out!  This is a film for you.    

Another film I really do want to promote is Widows, Steve McQueen’s exhilarating remake of Lynda La Plant’s 1970’s TV thriller, adapted by Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and starring Viola Davies (Doubt, The Help, Fences), Michelle Rodrigues (Avatar), Elizabeth Debicke (The Great Gatsby, The Night Manager) as the widows, alongside Cynthia Erivo (Hard Times at the El Dorado),   Robert Duvall, Colin Farrell, Daniel Kaluuya,  Jackie Weaver and Liam Neeson.   This movie has pace, thrills, convincing characters, and heart.   McQueen makes genre movies, but all in different genres, and all with  elements that transcend their genre.

My movies of 2018.

I live in rural Ireland, a long way from any ‘Art House’ cinemas,  and 25 miles from our little ’local’  multi-screen, so I don’t get to see a lot of films on first release – just 25 this year-  or a wide range.    But even on my limited viewing I think 2018 has been a very good year.    

So here are my top movies of 2018, and my bottom movies,  and a few that were entirely competent, but did no more than I expected.   They are in no order within these categories.   

You might have missed some of these, so there may  something here to encourage you to catch up with them – or even to watch them again, an activity that I usually find very rewarding.   Most of them are 'properly' reviewed below.   

Five Stars = great movies

BlacKkKlansman.  Spike Lee’s amazing retelling of a true story from the 1970’s, tragically still relevant, with John David Washington and Adam Driver.  

A Star is Born is a revelation of the combined writing, directing, acting and singing   talents of Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga.   Could this really be the best re-telling of this now classic tale? 

Black Panther.  Ryan Cooper’s film is certainly politically important, gender-wise and ethnically, but it is also a great movie by a new Directing star.     The ensemble cast includes Chaswick Boseman, Lupido Nyhong’o,  Angela Bassett, Daniel Kaluuya and the amazing Michael B. Jordan (see Creed)

The Happy Prince is Rupert Everett’sunflinching andmoving account of Oscar Wilde’s last days.    It took Everett 10 years to get this on screen, and maybe a lifetime to prepare his performance as Oscar.   

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.   A morally complex tale, brilliantly written and directed by Martin McDonach, and wonderfully acted out by Frances McDormand,  Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson.  

Four Stars = really good

The Darkest Hour.   The acting by Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas earned the four stars for this historically important drama,  but one needlessly invented scene lost it the fifth.  Joe Wright Directed, much in the style of his Atonement.  

Widows.   Steve McQueen masters another genre, a thriller adapted by Gillian Flynne from  Lynda La Planta’s TV series.   It  also ‘just happens’ to be bring a multi-ethnic female cast together; Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Bailey Rhyse Walters and Elizabeth Debicki, and they are wonderful.   

Incredibles 2 is every bit as good as the first movie.  Need I say more? 

Avengers: Infinity War.   I have no idea how it works, but it does.   Cannot wait for part 2.   But, hey, I will just have to. 

Bad Times at the El Royale  Drew Goddard earned his writing spurs on Buffy,Angeland Alias,and co-wrote the genre-subverting Cabin in the Woodsover a weekend with Joss Whedon.   (Chris Hemsworth got his part as Thorthanks to Whedon seeing the rushes of that movie.)   When writing and directing Bad TimesGoddard revisited genresin the way that Pulp Fictionreworked pulp fiction, ably aided by Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Eriva, Dakota Johnson, Lewis Pullman and others (including Hemsworth).   Great fun.  

Creed  is the best boxing film I have seen, created by Ryan Cooper, standing on the shoulders of the Rocky movies and bringing Stallone back on screen,  as he coaches the new boxing star (son of Apollo Creed), played by Michael B. Jordan. 

Phantom Thread.   Paul Thomas Anderson  wrote and directed this movie (announced as Daniel Day-Lewis’s last).  It is part of PTA’s own tour of genres (Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood,  Inherent Vice, The Master, Magnolia...).  This is an acting class led by Day-Lewis,  Leslie Manning and  the Luxembourgian Vicky Krieps. 

Three an a half Stars = better than 3, but not quite 4.

Isle of Dogs Any Wes Anderson movie gets my attention, and while this may not be Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums orThe Grand Budapest Hotel,   I still liked it a lot.   Anderson seems to have his own rep company, and most of them are here. 

Mary Magdalene.   I really enjoyed Garth Davis’s previous film, Lion,and was not disappointed by his telling of Mary’s story.    Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix play well together and I thought there was nothing there to contradict the Biblical account, plus some fresh insights and a welcome denial of the slander by Pope Gregory that Mary was a ‘fallen woman’.     Seeing Phoenix in this and then You Where Never Really Here  was remarkable.  

Three Star = glad I saw them

Mamma Mia! Here we go Again.   

Solo: A Star Wars Story,   I previously saw Alden Ehrenreich (Solo) in the Coen Brothers Hail Caesar, and was impressed by him in both).  

The Little Stranger.   Worthy, well acted, but somehow underwhelming.  

The rest – did what they said on the poster, but no more. 

Mission Impossible: Fallout  

Deadpool 2

The Spy who Dumped Me 

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom 

Ready Player One

Red Sparrow

Biggest disappointments?

Hereditary  - started so well as a stylish psychological thriller, but then degenerated into standard schlock horror.

A Quiet Place - good to look at, sold as horror, but actually just bad sf.   I say much more in m review! 

Black ’47-  this could have been an important movie about the Irish famine, but turned into standard action movie.   A misguided mix of genres. 

2018 movies I hope to catch up on

Get Out, partly becauseI spotted Daniel Kaluuya as a teenager in the 2011 BBC series The Fades,and predicted stardom for him.   

Unsane. With Clair Foy. I will always try to catch a Steven Soderbergh movie. 

The Sisters Brothers.  John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, directed by Jacques Audiard. 

The Miseducation of Cameron Poat, with Chloe Morentz.   

The Old Man & The Gun. Robert Redford, Daniel Glover and Tom Waits. 

Mowgli.  Andy Serkis, Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hollander. 

Ballad of Buster Scruggs. The Coens, Tim Blake Nelson (when a DVD is released).

Creed II, Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, but not directed by Ryan Cooper, who was busy on Black Panther.

Crazy Rich Asians.Michelle Yeo.

The Favourite.  Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz, Emma Stone.

Ant-Man and the Wasp.  Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly.

First Reformed.   Ethan Hawke, Paul Schrader. 

Still to come in December

Mary Poppins Returns. 

Aquaman

Mary Queen of Scots

Vice.

Destroyer

They Shall Not Grow Old.

Caught up with this year; 

Lady MacBeth.   William Oldroyd took Alice Birch’s adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s novel and cast Florence Pugh in the lead.   Stunning.   Ms. Pugh has recently starred in the TV serialization of John le Carre’s novel The Little Drummer Girl.  

Black Hawk Down.  I have no idea why it took me so long to catch up on this.

Ridley Scott took a great cast and put them through the US  Ranger’s Boot Camp in order to honourably recreate the disaster that overtook  US heliborne troops in Mogadishu, when they were part of a UN Peacekeeping force.  Visceral.   

Audition.  I really have to watchMiiki Takashi’s fascinating tale again to see if the final horrifically violent act is ‘for real’, or simply the imagined fears of the protagonist.   Fascinating.  

Eye In The Sky.    Drone warfare poses  a host of ethical questions and this movie, starring Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman, does a decent job of dramatizing them.    I notice that Colin Firth was one of the producers of this film, as well as Lovingand The Happy Prince,  two films I am grateful for. 

You Were Never Really Here.  Lynne Ramsey and Joaquin Phoenix produced a  brutal, fascinating,  compelling and somehow (amazingly, puzzlingly) beautiful portrait of a deeply traumatized and very  violent man.   

Wonder Woman. Broke the DC mold the way Black Pantherdid  for Marvel.

The Death of Stalin.   Brilliant (stellar) ensemble playing to a hilarious Ianucci script.    I am sure the actual events surrounding Stalin’s demise were just as farcical, but no-one is saying.   Or ever will.      

   

Love and  Mercy. Paul Dano plays Brian Wilson’s early days in The Beach Boysand then and John Cusack his tragically delayed  his recovery. A film about much more than music, but such music! 

The Handmaid.  Park Chan Wook’s take on a Sarah Water’s novel is a beautifully composed,  deeply complex and very erotic adaptation.   

And seen again from a Galaxy far away and long ago;  

Tom Jones,  the 1963 British romp, with the young Albert Finney, Susannah York and Diane Cilento  and the not at all young Dame Edith Evans.   Still fun after all these years.

The Godfather.      It was a long time since I watched this, but it was well worth seeing it again.    This time I paid attention to the lighting by Gordon Willis,  who had just shot Kluteand went on to  All The President’s Menand a host of  Woody Allen movies.     I had not known that the opening wedding scenes were shot at night, as they were behind schedule, and had also been advised to see how Willis  helped develop character by the way he lit Brando and Pacino.   

Dances With Wolves . I think this is a fine movie, and enjoyed  seeing Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica),  Graham Green and Kevin Costner all over again. 

The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.   I recently read John le Carre’s  latest novel, A Legacy of Spies,and it explores the repercussions of this 1960’s tale, so going back to the (faithful) movie version was quicker than re-reading the original book.    Richard Burton,  Claire Bloom and Oskar Werner fleshed it out well, and Martin Ritt directed with great discipline.    Shot in stark black and white it is a worthy adaptation of one of the few spy books to rank as a first class novel.