Late 2019 Movie Catch Up

I saw a stack of movies towards the end of last year, and didn't get to talk about them. Some of them I don't feel like are worth talking about that much, or I'm not particularly interested in talking about (ahem, Star Wars), but here are some thoughts on some of those films:

Doctor Sleep (MA15+)

I like director Mike Flanagan's work, but when I heard that he was going to be helming Doctor Sleep, a film that needed to either serve as a sequel to Kubrick's classic The Shining, an adaptation of Stephen King's novel that continues the story of his own original vision of The Shining, or both (!), I was a little sceptical. My experience of Flanagan has always been one of admiration of the control he has over his craft and the visual elements of his filmmaking more so than the structural story elements and his handling of thematic elements. But having seen Doctor Sleep and subsequently Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House series and Gerald's Game, he is seeming to really come into his own. 

Doctor Sleep works best when it isn't trying to be The Shining. Where it starts to falter is when it leans too hard into the nostalgia of recreating iconic elements from its monolithic predecessor. For the most part I would even hesitate to call Doctor Sleep a horror movie, but that's not to say that when it wants to be it isn't truly horrific - there is a sequence towards the middle of the movie featuring Rebecca Ferguson's parasitic antagonist Rose the Hat and a young boy that is one of the disturbing put on film all year. When Doctor Sleep is firing on all cylinders it is fuelled by mystery and driven by Danny Torrence's character, played well enough by Ewan McGregor.

By the time the main characters end up at the dilapidated Overlook Hotel, it is clear that what we are about to witness in the finale is a return to all the iconic set pieces from the original film, and they are all there - the elevator full of blood, the twins, Grady, the "nice party, isn't it?" guy, and the "best goddamn bartender from Timbuktu to Portland, Maine" himself, Lloyd the bartender (although neatly appearing as a recast Jack Torrence, deepening the mystery of what happened to Jack Nicholson's character at the end of The Shining). And while it certainly is a thrill to see all of these iconic images on the screen again, and it is certainly spooky to wander the halls of the Overlook Hotel again, it all just feels like the film is deciding to fall back upon its predecessor's reputation instead of committing to the film that it has been setting itself up to be. Upon second viewing the final act loses a large portion of its thrill, and undertakes a certain underwhelming feeling of wasted tension.

Having said this, a final act of slightly too much nostalgia doesn't take away from what is mostly an incredibly tightly wound supernatural thriller with a real grasp of character and a signature from someone with a legitimate sense of vision and direction in Mike Flanagan. Popcorn horror fans will likely dismiss it as boring and unscary (as many people did and still do with The Shining), but for everyone else it should prove to be a surprisingly effective treat with an overindulgent ending that will surely please the fans of the original, if only superficially.

6.5/10

Climax (MA15+)

For the uninitiated, Gasper Noe makes films that are probably the last thing you'd want to watch with your grandparents. With I Stand Alone and Irreversible, he dived into complete moral depravity via characters that are so damaged and traumatised - be it by others or the society they live in - that their trauma transmits outwards into experiences of unbearable violence and savagery, albeit with a genuine resonance and sense of loss. Enter the Void saw him at his most ambitious, attempting to grasp onto a life in its entirety as it fades at its end, his lens drifting in and out of first person POV, DMT-induced hallucination, and the freedom of a soul entering and reentering memories and visions of the past (no, really). His fourth film, Love, was originally meant to be made before Irreversible, but Monica Bellucci and Vincent Cassel felt uncomfortable with the level of nudity and unsimulated sex in the script, leading it to be put off until its eventual production and release in 2015 (if you've seen Irreversible you'll know why that is a remarkable statement). 

By the time we arrive at 2019 and Climax, there is understandably an expectation that comes with a new Gaspar Noe film. In some senses, he has deftly avoided meeting those expectations with Climax, but in others this feels like the most Noe film he has made so far. The set up is really simple - a group of dancers are at a party, when they begin to realise that someone has spiked the sangria with LSD. Hellish insanity ensues. It's an incredibly alienating film, and one that does its best to flush out anyone that's not going to be going along with it, but if you manage to hang on it is a breathtakingly terrifying ride that will likely induce feelings of genuine panic (I know it did for me). In that sense, I don't know if I can necessarily recommend it, but as a piece of mood filmmaking it is monumental. I don't even know where I would begin with a rating, so I'm not going to bother. 

Jojo Rabbit (M)

Taika Waititi's follow up to his 2017 venture into the MCU with Thor: Ragnarok carries with it so much of what makes his 2016 film Hunt for the Wilderpeople so memorable, to the point that I would almost feel comfortable with calling it a spiritual sequel. Like Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Jojo Rabbit is largely about how young children deal with grief and death, and approaches such a sensitive subject with the sort of irreverence and humour that a young child would. The miracle of both of those films, especially Jojo Rabbit, is that the humour - and in this case, satire - don't detract from the emotional impact of the themes they are trying to grapple with. 

The main talking point of the film beforehand was the portrayal of the titular Jojo's imaginary friend, Hitler, played by Waititi himself. Questions of bad taste and decency in comedy and film were thrown around by a lot of people, but to be quite honest by the end of the film the character had become almost nothing more than a footnote in a story about a young boy that has been brainwashed by the war machine that was Nazism learning to discover the humanity in others. And to the people that are worried about the film sympathising with Hitler and Nazism, a reminder that Jojo literally tells Hitler to fuck off before kicking him in the balls, sending him flying out a window. So there's that. 

Waititi's direction is fantastic, and there are a number of really clever visual cues that serve the story in smart ways. Not only that, but there are scores of great performances, especially young Roman Griffin Davis, who plays Jojo. A film like this hinges on the performance of its child lead, and Davis smashes it out of the park. He is charismatic and cute in all the ways you want a young child to be on screen, but he delivers in the difficult moments in ways you would expect from a more seasoned performer. Scarlett Johansson is just as good as Jojo's mother, a role that provides the film with a great deal of its emotional heft, and Steve Merchant has a great cameo as Deertz, a Nazi as comical as he is terrifying. 

But the thing that stuck with me and will continue to stick with me about Jojo Rabbit was the two central relationships - that between Jojo and his mother, and that between Jojo and Elsa, a Jewish girl he discovers his mother is hiding in his home. It is a film of startling power, one that left me in tears but with a real sense of hope, and one that genuinely surprised me with how tender it was given then expectations I had grown around it with both the marketing and the controversy surrounding it. 

8/10

Knives Out (M)

Rian Johnson's Knives Out is a murder mystery whodunnit in the style of Murder on the Orient Express and more contemporary comparisons like the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes films or even David Fincher's Gone Girl (a weird comparison, I know). The biggest thing Knives Out has going for it is the writing - Johnson's script is a tightly wound clock that has an impenetrable internal logic to it that holds up under scrutiny. There are no cop-outs, there is no cheating, and everything makes sense in the context of the world and the story. The conclusion is slightly underwhelming, however, in the sense that even after a second viewing there is never a sense of "it was right there the whole time" that translates to a genuine "a-ha" moment. That is something incredibly difficult to pull off, although one could argue that this is because of the way Johnson is changing up what we normally get and have come to expect in films like this by changing the rate at which we receive information - there is a particularly surprising revelation quite early on in the film that leaves you asking yourself "where is it going to go from here?"

There are plenty of laughs, and almost all of them land well, apart from some particularly ham-fisted political commentary towards the middle that seems strangely outward looking in a movie so confined within its own world. Not all of the characters seem particularly fleshed out, and while Toni Collette brings the goods with a hilariously over the top performance, Jamie Lee Curtis phones it in with another performance that confirms for me that her early success in Halloween was entirely to do with the instantly iconic villain she was paired with. 

And Daniel Craig. We have to talk about Daniel Craig. I think he's brilliant. There is a moment early on at which he opens his mouth to speak for the first time that strikes you immediately with just how ridiculous his accent is. It is very likely that it turned you off straight away, but I was so surprised, not having seen any trailers, and so intrigued, that it pulled me in. The more time I spent with him, and the more I realised what the film was actually trying to do, the more I found myself thinking that not only was it a fantastically meta way of constantly involving the audience but it was also one of the performances of the year. Despite how oppressively over the top it was, Daniel Craig disappeared and Benoit Blanc swallowed the screen with his presence every second he was on it. 

Perhaps partly due to how soon I saw Knives Out after Jojo Rabbiti, it seems to have slipped back in my mind into the majority of films that exist in the category of "stuff I've seen" rather than really memorable films. Besides Craig's outrageous performance there wasn't anything really that stuck to me beyond leaving the theatre. Like I said before, it is masterfully put together and an incredibly smart piece of writing, but I found nothing to found of emotional resonance or lasting impression in Knives Out. You'll have a great time watching it while it's on, but you'll probably forget about it pretty soon afterwards. 

7/10

1917 (MA15+)

Right upfront, 1917 left me an absolute mess. I don't think I could name another war film that has left me breathless at its action, white-knuckled at its tension, melting in my seat at the sheer beauty of its cinematography, marvelling at its technical proficiency, and genuinely emotionally distraught. All. At. Once. It's been a while since I've been as much of a wreck as I was at the end of 1917, a film that I think will in time be known as a modern classic in the realm of war films. 

I'm probably going to do a more in-depth analysis of it once I have access to it digitally or on Blu-Ray so I can really break it down, but my initial response after seeing it once in the cinema was one of being completely overwhelmed by its power and shocked by how deeply it affected me. Other than that I will leave it at saying that it is an unbelievably good film that you should go and see now while it is still showing in cinemas. 

9.5/10

What do you think about these movies? Let's keep the conversation going, I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Plenty of new content coming soon, including more movie reviews, book reviews, short stories, and more. 

Thanks for reading!