Oscar Wishlist 2018

You want my Oscar predictions? Well you can’t have them. Instead, have my Oscar Wishlist:

Picture: The hardest one. I liked 6/9 of the nominees and could see merit in two others. My pick would be Dunkirk because I think it’s a phenomenal piece of work. Actually it would be Blade Runner 2049, but that’s not an option!

Actor: Everyone thinks Gary Oldman has this nailed on but I’d pick Daniel Washington for his incredible performance in Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Actress: It’s hard to look past Frances McDormand but this is an incredible field. Margot Robbie would just edge my vote but all five deserve it.

Supporting Actor: For me it’s Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project but I’m fairly sure Sam Rockwell will win and that’s okay too.

Supporting Actress: If anyone other than Allison Janney wins this then there’s no justice in the world. Laurie Metcalfe is a glimmer of light in the terrible Lady Bird but Lesley Manville is nothing special in Phantom Thread and Shape of Water is not even Octavia Spencer’s best performance this year. I haven’t seen Mudbound yet so I can’t rate Mary J. Blige.

Director: Christopher Nolan for Dunkirk. He won’t win but he should. Have I mentioned how phenomenal Dunkirk is? Very.

Animated Feature: Coco. Like, it’s not even close. That said, Loving Vincent will probably win.

Adapted Screenplay: Molly’s Game. You all know how much I adore Aaron Sorkin’s writing. He stands a chance too because to my mind the only real challenger is Call Me By Your Name, which took the BAFTA. But James Ivory is British so that may have helped.

Original Screenplay: Three Billboards. By a country mile.

Cinematography: Blade Runner 2049. I mean have you seen it? It’s like a masterclass. Dunkirk is close but Blade Runner 2049 is arrestingly beautiful.

Original Song: This Is Me. The others are all very average. This Is Me is a call to arms for the marginalised.

And that’ll do. There are 12 other awards but I either don’t know or don’t care enough about their merits to have an opinion.

The Oscars ceremony starts shortly. I’ll be watching and I hope you will too.

Review – I, Tonya

If you were consciously alive in the 1990s you will almost certainly the incident which rocked the world of figure skating when Tonya Harding’s husband orchestrated an attack on her main rival, Nancy Kerrigan, ahead of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. If you weren’t then just know, that actually happened.

I, Tonya tells the story of Tonya Harding’s life growing up dirt poor in Portland, Oregon with a cruel and abusive mother who pushed her hard to become a star. The film is presented in a mix of documentary style and cinematic style scenes to show us what that life was like. Here’s a trailer.

I, Tonya is a great film. The performances from Margot Robbie as Tonya Harding, Allison Janney as her mother and Sebastian Stan as Jeff Gillooly are all fantastic. The presentation works well to build up nicely to ‘The Incident’ and the film does well to delve into the complex nature of the characters in an attempt to show what happened and how it came to be.

The problem with the film is that it’s offering, or seeming to offer, redemption to a character who doesn’t deserve it. Tonya Harding may have had a hard upbringing and she may have paid for her crime but ultimately I feel the film shows too much ambiguity about her involvement in what happened. There’s no doubt in my mind that Harding was complicit in the attack on Kerrigan and even contemplating such a thing, as an elite sports star, is something from which you don’t deserve to recover.

That said, it’s still a great film full of great performances and only missed out on an Oscar nomination, I suspect, because of the controversial nature of the subject matter.

I, Tonya is in UK cinemas from Friday 23rd February. Go see it.

BAFTAs 2018

In case you missed it, last night saw the 71st annual British Academy Film Awards, AKA the BAFTAs, presented at the Royal Albert Hall. Hosting for the first time was Joanna Lumley, with regular MC Stephen Fry having stepped down last year.

The awards went well and, as you might expect, there were many mentions of Time’s Up and almost all of the women wore black in support of the movement. In the end there were few surprises, with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri taking the lion’s share of the prizes.

Here’s the full list of results:

• Best British Film – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• EE Rising Star – Daniel Kaluuya
• Best Adapted Screenplay – James Ivory, Call Me By Your Name
• Best Supporting Actor – Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Best Production Design – The Shape of Water
• Best Special Effects – Blade Runner 2049
• Outstanding Debut – I Am Not A Witch
• Best Supporting Actress – Allison Janney, I, Tonya
• Best Sound – Dunkirk
• Best Original Screenplay – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Best Leading Actor – Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
• Best Leading Actress – Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Best Director – Guillermo Del Toro, The Shape of Water
• Best Film – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Fellowship Award – Ridley Scott
• Best Original Music – The Shape of Water
• Best Make-up and Hair – Darkest Hour
• Best Costume Design – Phantom Thread
• Best Animated Film – Coco
• Best Editing – Baby Driver
• Best Documentary – I Am Not Your Negro
• Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema – The National Film and Television School
• Best British Short Animation – Poles Apart
• Best British Short Film – Cowboy Dave
• Best Film Not In The English Language – The Handmaiden
• Best Cinematography – Roger Deakins, Blade Runner 2049

Few surprises overall. I’d probably have gone for Molly’s Game for Adapted Screenplay but that’s because I’m an unashamed Sorkin fan! It was nice, however, that Call Me By Your Name won an award.

Does this tell us anything about the likely winners at the Academy Awards on March 4th? Probably not. The British Academy and the American Academy are very different beasts and whilst there is some overlap in voting members, it’s always hard to predict which films will benefit from hype and which will suffer from negative reaction when it comes to the Oscars.

Weekly Roundup – Feb 19-25 2018

On DVD from today we have two magnificent pieces of cinematic glory – Geostorm, in which Gerard Butler saves the world from a system of weather satellites that he created to solve climate change and have been weaponised, and The Snowman in which Harry Hole, much loved and much flawed detective of Jo Nesbo’s incredible books, gets a big screen debut in the form of Michael Fassbender, creating a film which I enjoyed but no one else did.

Netflix this week bring us Fullmetal Alchemist, Jem and the Holograms, Forgotten and My Old Lady none of which is particularly amazing but some of which might help you pass a bit of spare time.

Amazon, meanwhile, add Sherlock Holmes, Singin’ in the Rain, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Yogi Bear to their free streaming portfolio.

Finally, in cinemas this week you can see Allison Janney’s BAFTA winning performance in I, Tonya as the cruel and foul-mouthed mother of the titular disgraced skater Tonya Harding, played superbly by Margot Robbie. Also available is one for the oldies, Finding Your Feet, in which Imelda Staunton’s stuck-up Sandra finds herself encouraged to let herself go when she spends some time in the company of her rather more free-spirited sister played by Celia Imrie.

Review – Downsizing

Scientists have discovered how to shrink humans down to a tiny fraction (0.0364%, apparently) of their size. The hope is that by doing so, humans can halt climate change as, when you’re tiny, your needs are also tiny. The attraction? Well…your outgoings are also downsized, so your meagre, just-getting-by budget in the real world makes you a millionaire in the downsized world.

Paul and Audrey Safranek are a couple whose dead-end jobs have failed to match their aspirations. Paul is intrigued by the Downsizing concept but when an old friend turns up small at a high school reunion, he realises it could be the answer to all of their worries. Here’s a trailer.

Downsizing is based on an interesting premise. The main problem with its execution is that it opens up a number of potential paths and doesn’t really do any of them any justice.

The main message of the film – that humans are destroying the planet and even when presented with a perfect solution they’re too dumb to recognise it so the planet is screwed anyway – is laid on too thick. The driving home of the message, via a hippie-ish commune in Norway that’s made to seem like a doomsday cult, is done so ham-fistedly as to be almost painful. The interesting ideas – that in the paradise downsizing world there are still social problems and people with no money who are living off everyone else’s waste – is presented but never really explored deeply enough. Finally, the redemption of the main character – if you can call it that – when he realises what’s important, is presented not as ’I’ll do the right thing’ but rather ‘well, I can’t be bothered to walk for 14 hours so I guess I’ll go back and make it look like I’m doing the right thing’.

Another problem with the film is that the main trailer being shown in cinemas (which is not the one I linked above) reveals one of the major plot points of the film. You literally know what the major complication is so the first half of the story is just something to get through before you begin to find out the good stuff. There’s some speculation that this was a response to the negative reviews when the film hit the festival circuit but even so, you don’t improve your film by making the first half of it pretty pointless! A further minor issue with the trailer is that it contains at least 3 scenes that weren’t in the final film. Not the worst thing in the world, but annoying.

So the good – the first half hour where the concept is introduced is done very well. The crafting of the Downsized world, and how it interacts with the normal-sized world, is also done well. Matt Damon isn’t terrible – the ‘bored/boring middle-aged H&S consultant at a meat-packing factory’ is pretty much the right shade of beige for him. Christoph Waltz and Udo Kier are also great as a pair of hedonistic black marketeers for the small-world. Finally there’s a handful of genuinely amusing moments – though again, too many of them are in trailers.

Overall, Downsizing is not a terrible film. It has an interesting idea that gets a little bit lost in the execution. Ultimately, it’s enjoyable but missable.

Downsizing is in UK cinemas from tomorrow – January 23rd – and will probably be around for a week or two unless audiences start to love it.

Weekly Roundup – Jan 22-28 2018

Once again, we have a few treats to delight you this week in the world of big and small screen entertainment.

In cinemas this week, opening Wednesday, we have Downsizing (look out for my review tomorrow) starring Matt Damon and Kristen Wiig as a couple who decide to take advantage of human-shrinking technology as a way to ease their money problems. Friday sees quite a strong line-up, at least theoretically, with Maze Runner: The Death Cure – the long, if not eagerly, awaited third film in the dystopian Maze Runner series, 12 Strong, with Chris Hemsworth taking down the Taliban and, for the young at heart, Early Man sees the return of Aardman to our screens with a claymation story from the stone age. Also available this week is Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying which looks pretty good in trailers but also looks like it’ll have a limited release so you may need to check around to see if it’s showing.

Coming this week to Netflix, Thursday sees Despicable Me 2, Joy and Stoic added whilst Friday brings the 2014 remake of Annie starring Jamie Foxx, Bram Stoker’s Dracula with hero-of-the-darkest-hour Gary Oldman and hero-of-stranger-things Winona Ryder, Perfect Stranger with Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, and Wind Chill with Emily Blunt. One of those is a great film, the others don’t star Gary Oldman.

Amazon Prime, meanwhile, bring us Due Date with Zac Galifianakis and Robert Downey Jr, Jackie Chan’s First Strike, Red Riding Hood, Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, and average Stallone movie The Specialist on Wednesday 24th and then on Friday 26th we get to see Robinson Crusoe, though I have no idea which of the 17 billion films of that title it will be!

And finally, on your DVD/BD purchasing this week, check out Wind River – a decent murder investigation with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olson – mother! – a bonkers film from Darren Aronofsky that a lot of people enjoyed, though I wasn’t one of them – and finally the delightful Victoria and Abdul in which Dame Judy Dench’s Queen Victoria befriends Ali Fazal’s Abdul Karim during the tale end of her reign.

That should be enough to keep you amused for the week. If not, don’t forget that season 4 of the excellent Grace and Frankie is now available to binge on Netflix.

Weekly Roundup – Jan 15-21 2018

Slightly late this week but better late than never? Here’s a look at what the world of cinema, discs and streaming has for the movie-lover.

Let’s start with Amazon Prime who, from Wednesday, will be allowing you to watch SEVEN movies as part of your subscription. From Paris With Love is an action movie starring Jon Travolta and Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Murder At 1600 gives us Wesley Snipes trying to solve a murder inside the White House, The Bucket List has Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as a two old men who, facing the prospect of death, decide it’s time to escape their nursing home and live a little and Conspiracy Theory is a film directed by Richard Donner and starring Mel Gibson, Julia Roberts and Patrick Stewart that, frankly, should have been better than it was. Rounding off the day we have Charlie and the Chocolate Factory*, The Hangover and Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and if you need me to describe any of those then you’re probably on the wrong website.

Wednesday on Amazon bring us The Big Sick, Kumail Nanajiani‘s mostly-autobiographical tale of how he met his wife. It’s a decent film that didn’t quite work for me but if you’ve got a couple of hours and are looking for inspiration then you should check it out.

* The Johnny Depp one. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is already available for free on Prime.

Netflix this week brings us The Danish Girl, Eddie Redmayne’s excellent portrayal of a trans-woman, Eye in the Sky in which Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman must stop some terrorists in London, Face to Face, an Australian play-turned-movie that looks worthy of some time, The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam directs Christoph Waltz – I’m sold – and Grimsby in which Sacha Baron Cohen and Mark Strong are brothers or something like that.

Rounding off the week we have a new Netflix Original film, The Open House, a horror film starring the guy out of Thirteen Reasons Why and my pick of the week is The Belko Experiment. Battle Royale meets The Office in this gruesome and darkly comedic fight to the death that really had no right to be anywhere near as good as it turned out!

Our DVD/BD releases this week are the brilliant IT, the disappointing-but-watchable American Assassin, A Ghost Story in which Casey Affleck haunts Rooney Mara and finally Sweet Virginia tells the story of what happens when a violent stranger takes up residence in a small town.

This week’s cinematic delights are Coco, The Post and The Commuter. Coco is delightful and if you like Pixar then you’ll likely love it. The Post looks to be an exceedingly good telling of the story of government secrets being leaked by newspapers in the Nixon-era. The Commuter, on the other hand, appears to be Taken On A Train in which Liam Neeson must, for some reason, find and kill a passenger on a commuter train without knowing whom, or whym. Yeah, me neither.

So that’s this week on screen. Leave a comment if you’ve seen any of these and recommend doing so or not doing so!

Review – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Mildred Hayes is angry. She’s angry with the world for taking away her teenage daughter and she’s angry with the Police for not finding the people responsible. So what’s a grieving mom to do after a couple of months of no progress on her daughter’s murder case? Well…if you live in Ebbing, Missouri then the thing to do is to rent three billboards just outside of town and call the sheriff to account.

As you might expect, this is not a move that meets with universal approval, even within Mildred’s own family. Most members of the town, whilst sympathetic to Mildred’s cause, don’t feel that publicly calling out the sheriff is fair. He’s not, after all, able to magically find a killer who has long since disappeared and whose DNA is not on record anywhere. Mildred is, however, undeterred. Here’s a trailer (that contains VERY strong language):

The joy of Three Billboard Outside Ebbing, Missouri lies in its exploration of the characters involved. If you want to know why America is how it is then you see it all in this film. Racism, police brutality and family struggles all rear their heads in a film that deals with them all well. It also lilts from ultra-depressing to hilarious and back again, often in a couple of seconds. The humour is very dark and you will laugh, and probably hate yourself for doing so.

That’s not to say TBOE,M is a perfect film. Whilst the redemption of Officer Dixon is requested, it’s slightly unearned. He may have done something right but he’s still a small-minded racist. This wouldn’t be a problem if the film hadn’t made that a part of his character at all, but it does and then it kinda…leaves it alone.

But even with its flaws, this is a very good film. It treats us to a look inside both small-town America and ourselves. The ending, whilst slightly odd, gives us a chance to examine our own morals and decide just how far we’d go for a shot at revenge.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has been out since Friday 12th January. If you haven’t seen it yet then go along and see it. It really is good.

Review – All the Money in the World

It’s not easy being rich. You can have more money than anyone else in history and yet it seems that’s never enough. One man with such an affliction was John-Paul Getty, the founder of Getty Oil and also one of the most miserly men in the world.

The film All the Money in the World tells the story of the 1973 kidnapping of JPG’s grandson John-Paul Getty III (aka Paul, aka Paolo when he lived in Italy). Sixteen year old Paolo is wandering the streets one night when a group of terrorists drive up in a camper van and bundle him inside. They then take him to a remote farmhouse in Calabria and deliver a ransom note for $17 million expecting the whole matter to be wrapped up swiftly.

One slight snag, though, is that Paolo’s mother, Gail, and father, John-Paul II have been divorced for a long time. His mother has barely two beans to rub together and even his father doesn’t have that kind of money to hand. Grandfather, on the other hand, is not only the richest man in the world but the richest man in the history of the world up to that point. Job done? Well not quite. See…as I said, JPG was one of the most miserly men in the world. So what happens? He refuses to pay a single cent. Instead, he sends his ex-CIA security chief to track down the teenage boy. Here’s a trailer.

It’s impossible to talk about this film without mentioning the fact that the finished film was reshot, to erase Kevin Spacey, in the space of two weeks. That feat alone is worthy of high praise because, except for one scene, there is no evidence that anyone other than Christopher Plummer ever played the role of the billionaire. Rather than digitally erase and replace, Ridley Scott chose to reshoot the scenes – with the original cast returning – to give a seamless transition. The only one they couldn’t reshoot was the shot in the desert so that’s the only time it looks fake.

Looking beyond that marvellous feat, however, we begin to get problems. Firstly, the film is all over the place in terms of time. We’re here, we’re there, it’s the 50s, it’s the 70s, it’s the 60s. For me this wasn’t done particularly well and made the first act rather messy. The passage of time in the middle, too, is handled badly. It seems like a day or a week have passed and then one of the kidnappers randomly says ‘we’ve been here for months now’ and it jars rather than making sense. The rest of the film continues well enough and the conclusion is brought about, ultimately, in a vaguely exciting way.

Credit to Michelle Williams for her portrayal of Gail Harris, Christopher Plummer as John-Paul Getty and even the unrelated Charlie Plummer for his portrayal of the slightly bratty and terminally foolish teenage Paolo. Mark Wahlberg is suitably Mark Wahlberg-esque in the security role and, in the end, one of the heroes of the piece. The direction is great, the performances are great. So why isn’t the film great?

The main problem is that the film fails to really draw you in. ‘Rich people being rich’ isn’t always what you want to see – and when they’re being egregious about it that’s even worse. I didn’t want Paulo to die so it’s not THAT bad but I didn’t really care too much what happened to him. The whole thing is just a bit…dull.

All the Money in the World has been in cinemas since January 5th. See it if you must, but if you want my advice then save your money and spend it on something better.

Weekly Roundup – Jan 8-14 2018

On DVD/BD you can pick up the incredibly intense Detroit – the story of one night during the Detroit riots when a group of black musicians come up against some seriously over-zealous police officers. If you missed it in cinemas then you should definitely check it out but be warned – it’s not an easy watch. Elsewhere there’s Good Time starring Robert Pattinson – a film I wanted to see but that barely seemed to get a release before disappearing. Before you rush off to buy it, though, check out the rest of the article! And finally on disc this week we have Una in which Rooney Mara stars opposite Ben Mendelsohn as an abuse victim and abuser respectively.

If you’re looking for good stuff to stream this week, because you’ve already managed to cram in all 10 seasons of Friends, then check out The BFG which is on Netflix from today. From Wednesday you can also watch Good Time with Robert Pattinson as a bank robber trying to free his mentally ill brother from prison after a bank heist goes awry. And finally for this week, you can catch The Polka King with Jack Black. At a level 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, critics and audiences seem to agree that this is a slightly better than average film. High praise indeed!

Coming to Amazon Prime, we have the excellent Miss Sloane starring Jessica Chastain as the titular lobbyist who takes on the US gun lobby. It’s available to stream right now and if you like political drama then you should definitely check this one out. This week we have a big treat for Matt Damon fans as not one but two of his back catalogue are made available. Hereafter, directed by Clint Eastwood and Invictus, with Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela, are available from Wednesday. Also streaming from Wednesday are Spike Jonze’s under-appreciated Where The Wild Things Are, Ewan McGregor and Scarlet Johansson taking on the dystopian future in The Island and, last but by no means least, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood which deserves to be seen by a much wider audience.

On the big screen this week, three treats – well…two treats and a tired prequel anyway. The one you simply MUST check out is Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. I’ll have my review up later this week but the tl;dr is that it’s almost perfect. Secondly, Gary Oldman plays Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. I never got to see Brian Cox’s Churchill in Churchill last year – my local Cineworld decided not to screen it after having shown me the trailer about 50 times – but this certainly looks like a better film. Last, and by every means least, we have Insidious: The Last Key – a barrel-scraping second prequel in the once-interesting Insidious franchise. With a little bit of luck, no one will watch it and that’ll be the end of this series!

That should keep you entertained for the week. Laterz!