Tuesday, 27 June 2023
Saturday, 17 June 2023
Thursday, 15 June 2023
Sunday, 11 June 2023
Fast X
Fast X is, in every way that the film is enjoyable, a testament to the second-unit teams who describe the crashing action and the VFX studios that knit this disparate coverage together, allowing camera perspectives to come unshackled from their physical limits to zip around like curious insects (in this sense, Fast X is very much post-Michael Bay's Ambulance). Although pre-production and principal photography were begun by series mainstay Justin Lin, a falling out with Vin Diesel means that this tenth instalment is now credited solely to Louis Leterrier, a director who hit the ground running in 2005 with Unleashed (or Danny the Dog as it's known in Leterrier's native France) then never came close to scaling the same heights. Michelle Rodriguez revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that not only was this handover a few weeks shy of instantaneous but that a fight sequence between her character and Charlize Theron's Cipher was accomplished without any principal director in place. This point notable because this specific set-to, staged in a futuristic surgical theatre, is easily the highlight of Fast X: a crunchy back and forth between two actresses with very little else to do in the wider feature that uses shattered glass both as an improvised weapon and as an editing exclamation point. Other than that, Mr Diesel's efforts to elevate his Dominic Toretto from a rage case petrolhead to an invincible folk hero are a noticeable, and consistent, drag on the film. This insistence on relentless self-mythologising not only renders every new, radioactive, danger instantly moot, it also muscles out more of the piece's genuinely entertaining elements - be that John Cena as a world class entertainer of children or Jason Momoa swapping beauty tips with his decomposing henchmen.
Thursday, 8 June 2023
Army of Darkness
Watch a film like Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and you can detect the hand of director Sam Raimi, be that the canted angles he favours or an unusually jubilant sense of cruelty in the film's superpowered action. You can come away from such an experience satisfied that a seminal talent has defied the odds, motoring through a system of blockbuster production that demands subservience to an overall brand or blueprint. Then you watch (or re-watch) an earlier piece like Army of Darkness - or to give the film its complete, onscreen title: Bruce Campbell vs. Army of Darkness - and you're reminded what Raimi's brand of constant, heedless entertainment actually looks like. Everything in this third Evil Dead film is a gag, from the sun-baked Californian scrubland standing in for 14th century Britain (a geographical fallacy that explicitly connects Darkness to the Hollywood historical epics made decades earlier that restaged European history on stolen American soil), to a slapdash grimoire quest that traps Ash, the film's bumbling hero, in a series of bizarre literary allusions.
Ash is a time displaced American with access to engineering know-how, not unlike Hank Morgan in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court; he is also set upon and restrained in the manner of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver by Lilliputian-sized duplicates, all while residing in a windmill that looks like it has barely survived a tilt with Don Quixote. Tying all this mayhem together is the living special effect Bruce Campbell. The actor combines caddish, soap opera star good looks with the elasticity and indefatigability of a plotting Looney Tune. His frustrations are those of a media-literate straight man cast into the staid machinations of a movie he'd otherwise skip past when channel surfing. Somewhere in an all-action finale jam-packed with Harryhausen's living skeletons and a heavily customised Oldsmobile, you start to see the surface-level similarities between Raimi's endlessly inventive cartoon and Aleksei German's Russian epic Hard to Be a God. Both films posit that, when set against the ingrained ignorance of mankind's darkest ages, even the most unexceptional man can raise himself - through cunning and a basic technological superiority - into an unchallengeable, shamanic superhero.
Tuesday, 6 June 2023
Air
The longer Air goes on, the further the scales are tipped from a pleasant enough period puff piece to a full-on, Nike valorising advertisement. Director Ben Affleck's film about a sort of struggling sportswear company (and even then, we are told, only really within a very specific division) betting big on an up-and-coming Michael Jordan is so consumed with depicting the particulars of a high top sneaker pitch that it forgoes any perspectives or situations where the audience feels like they're being taken into a somebody's confidence. For instance, we're given an inkling that Matt Damon's Sonny Vaccaro has a gambling problem but the fragments of chronic ill fortune we witness are simply data rationed out early as a way to then contrast with the bigger bet Vaccaro makes with his department's budget in pursuit of Jordan. That's it.
Tacitly, we are told that Vaccaro, the man, isn't particularly interesting - it's the deal that he makes for Nike Inc that truly means something. Hobbled by this incuriosity, Air proceeds like a first act set-up for a second act that exists only in the audience's local shopping centre. This sense of arrested mechanical development is all over the film. The dramatic language of Air is trapped in its zippy groundwork laying phase, deploying dopamine hit singles from the 1980s with such careless frequency that the effect eventually grows aggravating. We never get to luxuriate in this music; not prompted to consider what the latest track might mean for the scene playing underneath it either. All selections are obvious and, largely, incidental. Air is deliberately light and superficially then, a film centred around grasping ad men that apportions negligible space to its most interesting subjects: Viola Davis, who invests a quiet dimension in a Deloris Jordan written to be an inscrutable obstacle, and Michael himself, who is treated with the same shrinking reverence afforded to Jesus Christ in Ben-Hur.
Monday, 5 June 2023
Thursday, 1 June 2023
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