Let’s get naked and smoke
Three cinema visits this week, marked with a *.
WALL•E (2008) *
In which Pixar continues to pull away from DreamWorks Animation, proving that its focus on story, character and originality is a far more successful strategy than DreamWorks’ focus on celebrity voices and pop culture references. Pixar may not be at the Studio Ghibli level yet, but it’s definitely getting closer, and it has still to produce a single film that can be fairly described with the words average or mediocre or poor. It’s also good to see a film with an environmental message that doesn’t try to beat you over the head with it. It may be okay to make a film about a man standing in front of a Powerpoint presentation saying it’s all going to hell, but it’s much better to achieve the same result with cute (and frankly, not so cute) robots, a cockroach and the last surviving humans. Oh, and really, really good visual jokes, delivered at a furious pace.
Mamma Mia! (2008) *
The jukebox musical is a much derided beast, and rightly so. Appealing to the kind of popular music fan who only buys one record a year, and that record is a Christmas-released greatest hits compilation of some pop act they remember listening to twenty years earlier, the jukebox musical assembles an endless stream of songs, either from one act or from one genre of music, strings them together with a musical book so utterly stupid (We Will Rock You) or so utterly light (Mamma Mia!) that the end result has no substance whatsoever. The jukebox musical has proved that there are some song catalogues that cannot be mined for frothiness (Bob Dylan’s, for one), and it has proved to be enormously popular with the aforementioned popular music fans, the great unwashed masses of people who don’t really listen to music anymore, but don’t mind a lot of songs by Queen or Abba or Madness being packaged up and presented to them to singalong to in a theatrical context. Dismissed by critics, but embraced by the public, the jukebox musical is only too willing to show once more that the public has no taste. And having said all that, Mamma Mia! the movie was utterly irresistible and I enjoyed it enormously. So I have no taste either, and am just like the public. Rats! Centred as it is on the ups and downs of romantic relationships, Abba’s song catalogue makes a better fit redefined in a musical form than, say, the songs of Bob Dylan, which draw upon a greater range of subject matter that resists compilation into a flowing show. Mamma Mia! doesn’t really have a plot, though it does seem eerily like a Shakespearean comedy, and it doesn’t really have characters, just corny stereotypes. What it does have is Abba’s songs performed by Meryl Streep (who maybe puts too much into The Winner Takes It All) and Pierce Brosnan (who can’t really sing but isn’t going to let that stop him) et al, and perma-sunny locations in Greece, partly recreated at Pinewood. It’s candy floss cinema, and in this case, that’s not so bad.
Hairspray (1988)
In which John Waters, possibly feeling the effects of the Reagan era more than most filmmakers, rather than continue to subvert mainstream cinema from the outside, attempts to subvert it from the inside. Packed to the seams with great dialogue (”My diet pill’s wearing off”, “Our skin is white but are souls are black”, etc) and possibly even greater music (handpicked dance classics from the days before the Beatles), all Hairspray does in the subversion stakes is put a fat girl who can dance in the lead. These days, this wouldn’t feel at all out of place (or would it?), but this was twenty years ago, and no film director in America was casting large women as leads, they could be the lead’s best friend, but that was about it. And somehow this led Waters to Ricki Lake in her first movie, and Divine in his last.
the devil wears prada (2006)
I watched the first episode of Sex and the City (1998-2004), and swiftly decided that it wasn’t for me. The piece was packed with the kind of poor writing, sloppy generalisations and lazy stereotypes that characterise so-called think pieces in women’s magazines, and I couldn’t believe someone thought this would be a good idea for a TV series. Sex and the City may have got more interesting, but it did so without my support. And so to this movie, inhaling heavily from the Sex and the City vibe, based on Lauren Weisberger’s chick lit novel about her experiences as the new Emily for Vogue’s notorious editor in chief, Anna Wintour (and I’m not using the word allegedly here). The commentary track spends an inordinate amount of time detailing the designer outfits everyone is wearing with, appropriately enough for Americans, no sense of the irony involved in doing so. Having dipped in and out of publishing myself, it was nice to see that a lot of the details are spot on: everyone uses Macs, there’s “the book”, a kind of portable flatplan that’s the Bible for every issue, and Meryl Streep’s disdainful attitude and throwaway putdowns (this might seem over the top but these people are really out there, and publishing seems to attract them like moths to a flame).
The Dark Knight (2008) *
For the record, this was a sold out screening at the IMAX Birmingham, and it was every bit as great as everybody said it would be. It’s one thing to see this film in a conventional cinema, but it’s quite another to see it on a screen forty feet high with the majority of the action sequences actually filmed in IMAX filling the screen. Considering that this is only a comic book movie, the plotting is dense and complicated, and I have the feeling this won’t be the only time I see it. And if you can’t get to see a screening of this film in the IMAX format and you already like the film, you really owe it to yourself to make an effort to try. It’ll be worth it. As for the film itself, having devoted a whole chunk of running time in Batman Begins (2005) to the hero’s origin story, Christopher Nolan feels able to hit the ground running on this one as did Sam Raimi with Spider-Man 2 (2004). Continuing the Mob motif in Gotham from the first one (which I’m reasonably sure is a lift from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale’s The Long Halloween), Nolan relies on Heath Ledger to up the intensity even further with his turn as the Joker, and I tell you, it’s like someone gave Ledger a copy of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Batman: Arkham Asylum and Ledger did his utmost to bring the Joker in that book to the screen. The majority of the cast return from Batman Begins as well, with Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes as The Girl. And I’m not saying anything more.