Seberg

Seberg follows a couple of years in the life of Jean Seberg, the American actress most known for A Bout de Souffle and, arguably, being more revered in France than the US. She lived most of her adult life in France and was a prominent supporter of civil rights groups including the Black Panthers. This earned her the attention of the FBI and that's where the film kicks off. I admit to not really knowing much about Jean Seberg, considering that the above mentioned film is in my all-time top ten. But that lack of knowledge actually made the (mostly) factual events more maddening. The fucking horrid surveillance system the FBI used on Seberg and others is detailed here and its consequences leave an empty rage in the gut. Seberg gives a presser at one point and her ripping of the 'two dangerous bodies' - media and government - have murky modern echoes.

The film is directed by Australian theatre director, Benedict Andrews and he shows his nous at working with dialogue and actors. The cast are roundly fine with special mention to Margaret Qualley, who has a weird habit of moving her bottom lip into odd positions. Sounds like an affectation but it's strangely compelling to watch. Kristen Stewart, as Seberg, commands the screen and is an obvious star but I just can't work out if she's any good or not. And I like not being able to get to the crux of it. Anthony Mackie, sans wings, gives a nicely coiled turn as civil rights agitator Hakim Jamal, who gets some sauce on with Seberg. Zazie Beetz has some of the best lines and is on fine form here.

But let me explain my main issue. I found this film to be good but not great and part of the reason is the angle of the FBI 'whore with a heart of gold' stereotype. Jack O'Connell plays Jack Solomon, a young sound engineer with scruples, but who is 'just doing his job'. Without flashing a big red SPOILER light, you can probably guess how he becomes the gaping cavity for the viewer to see through and ultimately empathise with. Sure, there may have been agents with this kind of conflict but he's the only part of the story that is fully invented and it bites a touch that the film 'required' this character rather than focusing on Seberg or others. Mackie says at one point something like, "If you change one mind, you've made a difference", and this FBI agent is the predictable pay-off. In fact, that line seems to be the only reason to have his character in the film. Call me a big, old cynic if you will, but I'm not having that over-used device.

But anyway, all whinges aside, this was worth a watch. I especially liked the real film history crossovers. Paint Your Wagon, Airport and, of course Breathless (to give it its English title) are mentioned in relation to Seberg's career at the time and for a nerd like me, that's gold.

See also:

The Lives of Others (2006), directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, deals with similar themes, and have a look at the real Jean Seberg with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless (1960). You won't regret it.

Worst of 2019 - End of Year Report

Here are the films that I didn't think too much of last year. Some obvious duds (really, it's my own fault) and one surprising one.

10. Terminator: Genysis (2015)
Muddled, forgettable story with some wooden acting. Notably, not the worst in the series, though.

9. Ip Man (2008)
Faux-sombre, anti-Japanese piffle about the creator of martial art Wing Chun. Dull nonsense, albeit, with some ok fight scenes.

8. Rio (2011)
Overly colourful yet boring animation about an annoying bird and other animals. Jemaine Clement is the only saving grace.

7. Peterloo (2018)
Mike Leigh, what happened here? Preponderously talky, stuffy crap with cliches coming out of its peter and its loo. Just goes to show even great directors can lay steamers if the mood takes them.

6. The Commuter (2018)
Instantly forgettable train-based 'thriller'. Neeson can do much better but usually doesn't.

5. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)
Wet sequel to that other wordy pile. Reddy Edvayne should really get his arse back to the catwalk.

4. Alita: Battle Angel (2019)
Dire, colour-by-numbers sci-fi with Christoph Waltz only making things worse by reminding us of better films he's been in. And the lead CGI/human amalg just looks like a wrongun.

3. Aquaman (2018)
Really struggling to recall anything about this film, aside from my boredom and....a lighthouse? Was Jake the Muss in it? Fuck knows why I bother.

2. John Wick 2 (2017)
Can't get on board the Wick train. I don't see the attraction of a handsome dude slaughtering assorted minions in the midst of a bog-standard storyline.

1. Finding Santa (2016)
Weird little Danish animation that I really shouldn't have watched. As Augie March said, "Not for the likes of you and me."

MINOR SPOILERS IN POD

Listen to "Best and Worst of 2019" on Spreaker.

Best of 2019 - End of Year Report

Evening all. Here are my favourite ten films of 2019. As usual, some may be from earlier years but all are first time viewings.

10. Diego Maradona (2019)
A searching dive into the dualism of the man, Diego and the myth, Maradona. Some great pitch-side footage cut with Naples street life.

9. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)
Rollicking set-pieces and matured performances almost put this at the top of the trilogy. Driver and Ridley take plaudits but it's an assured hand from Abrams that delivers it.

8. The Sisters Brothers (2018)
A weird, slow-paced, Old West, English language debut from my favourite director, Jacques Audiard. It's filled with restrained performances and odd shit. Not everyone's cup of gold-finding chemical formula.

7. Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Not much more to be said about this. Amazing coda to a mostly cracking series of films.

6. The Irishman (2019)
Scorsese's ode to the mob/union/politics links in the post war U.S.  Excellent performances, especially from Joe Pesci.

5. Fire in Babylon (2010)
Fantastic documentary about the rise and eminence of the West Indies cricket team of the 70s, 80s and 90s and how they overcame racism and colonial attitudes along the way. The Master Blaster (Viv Richards) and Whispering Death (Michael Holding) are incredibly watchable.

4. Knives Out (2019)
What a bag of tricks this is. I haven't been as tickled leaving a cinema for quite a while. Clever story with great turns and topical undertones.

3. The Favourite (2018)
This almost Dogme style historical-based dark lark by Yorgos Lanthimos was superbly decked out with odd music, natural lighting and lavish sets. And about half a dozen top drawer performances too.

2. Parasite (2019)
Very hard to split the top two, as here is an absolute peach of a film. The curiosity of the title, the varied acting styles, the potty symbolism, the twisted plot, the Haneke-esque climax, and many more elements, all add up to a probable apex for the Bong man.

1. Us (2019)
But this film ever so slightly exceeded the one above for me. Jordan Peele takes the eye-clawing anxiety of his previous film up a notch with this hard to categorise gem. The story is super gripping, with a brilliant turn from Lupita Nyong'o. Oh, and Minnie Riperton's Les Fleurs is exactly the right song to end on. Excellent.

MINOR SPOILERS IN POD

Listen to "Best and Worst of 2019" on Spreaker.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

So here's the final part of the Skywalker saga. Or the third film in this trilogy. Or the ninth film in the Star Wars series. Or the eleventh film in the franchise. Let's be realistic - in the coming years there will be titles like 'Star Wars: The Yield of Lucre' or 'Star Wars: Hutt River Province' or 'Star Wars: The Something of Boris' (apologies to Adam & Joe). It's never going to finish and it may very well repeat the formula over and over until film becomes an obsolete medium. But people (me included) will still buy tickets. It's a cultural blind spot that no matter how bad these films get, folk will flock (even Attack of the Clones made north of half a billion USD).

In saying that, The Rise of Skywalker is a really fun film and it goes at a clip. J.J. Abrams had a look at what Rian Johnson did with The Last Jedi and mini-retconned most of it. In fairness, Johnson did pretty much the same after Abrams The Force Awakens so, even Steven? For the record, I really liked TFA and didn't much like TLJ for reasons mentioned in other entries. I do appreciate TLJ a bit more now, if only as a diversion between the two Abrams films - three in a row from him may have been too much. But allow me to start with the slight queries I had with TROS. One of my beefs comes about 30 seconds into the film. We're told on the traditional scroll that:

"The dead speak! The galaxy has heard a mysterious broadcast, the threat of REVENGE in the sinister voice of the late EMPEROR PALPATINE...."

Is this the best way in reintroduce the primary villain of the entire saga? Presumably, it happens between films but I'd have liked to have seen this pretty momentous event actually SHOWN, rather than TOLD as a piffling preamble. Surely this cock deserved a more dramatic entrance.

Another issue was the handling of certain characters and the amount of screen time they had. John Boyega has been sadly marginalised since he more or less stole the film in TFA. Here he gets to shout a lot, almost tell Rey something important (?) and almost get sweaty with another new character, Jannah, played by Naomi Ackie. She also has bugger all to do, though not as bugger all as Kelly Marie Tran's Rose. I miss the days when incidental characters like Max Rebo, Nien Nunb or Wedge Antilles could just show up once and not appear again or be killed off or surprise us all by popping up again in another film AND IT WAS ALL FINE. It seems this latest trilogy has tried to assign too much import to minor characters. I don't remember people wringing their hands that Bib Fortuna didn't get more lines (though in fairness, there was no Reddit back then, nor internet to host it).

There are also a couple of typically manipulative 'ejaculation points', one example being when Poe, at the nadir for the rebels, apologises to everyone before Lando (echoing Falcon from Avengers: Endgame) surprises him with pre-triumphant reinforcements. And the maguffin of finding a compass to get Rey to Exagol is no less transparent a device than the myriad of them in TLJ, though done without all the boredom.

Now to the gold. The pace of this film is staggering, especially in the first act. It matches TFA in this respect and it sticks to the formula of bags of action happening while the 'important' one goes off to do 'important' stuff. At least here, Poe and Finn have a little crack at Rey for not being with them in the tight spots. Speaking of these three, their platonic love/hate triangle was nicely played and Daisy Ridley has really grown into this role - she's one of the standout performers. Adam Driver as Kylo Ren is another. He's cracking in this, as he has been all trilogy. His transformation is fantastic and his show-stopping moment with &*@^%@^#!$*& was enough to turn me into a bag of weeping snot. One more thing to mention is the slight disappointment that Richard E. Grant as General Pryde didn't clench his fist and shout "Then the fucker will rue the day!" or "Don't threaten me with a dead fish." There's a Snatch Wars style mash-up going begging here. Oh, and spoiler alert, but Disney really missed a trick by not naming Ridley's character Velouria. Just imagine the soundtrack - "Velouria, her covering, travelling career. She can really move, oh, Palpatine." Thank you, yes, that's about all I've got.

So ultimately a solid, exciting ending to this trilogy. Hits all the right spots. Not quite as good as The Force Awakens but better than The Last Jedi. Probably sits around mid table in the canonical films. So until the next trilogy or stand-alone film, it's a fond Ruow (that's Shyriiwook for goodbye).

See also:

I'll always agitate for Gareth Edwards' Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and Bruce Robinson's  peerless Withnail & I (1987).

POD TO FOLLOW???

Frozen 2 (Me) (Kids)

Saw this with the wife and kids. Safe to say only the small humans enjoyed it with reckless abandon. Try as I might, I just couldn't abandon my reck. A few months back, I succumbed to the juggernaut and watched the first Frozen with the family. I was mildly impressed, especially with the re-jigging of storybook tropes and the filmmakers' ability to 'un-princess' the leads while at the same time making them gold for toy manufacturers. Nifty trick. But ultimately, that film wound me up with its singing, constant chatter, irritating voice work and its singing. Oh, I mentioned the singing? Well, as dire as it was in Frozen, it lowered the bar for Frozen 2. This is where I can't square things. These films would be fun kids' films, were it not for the fucking INTERMINABLE SINGING. There's even an 80s power ballad that's eerily similar to Peter Cetera's 'Glory of Love'. And that's the best one!

The plot is worthy but pretty redundant. It tries to squeeze in a few too many threads - dead parents, old tribal rivalries, omnipotence, the 5th element, some awkward romancing, overcoming fear and the comedy ice block man - all while affirming the relationship between the two sisters, fan favourite Elsa and goof but real star, Anna. The four elements at the centre of the film are water - Guinness ad horse; earth - big rock ape Igoo from The Herculoids; wind - just some frisky air; and fire - a cute salamander. Elsa - spoiler! - manages to contain or befriend all of them, like some animated musical version of the Twelve Labours of Heracles. You can probably guess the aforementioned 5th element (and no, it isn't Milla Jovovich).

A few points to note - the people of the forest, the Northuldra, seem to be Native American or possibly Inuit. The idea that they've been stuck in the foggy forest for years and the 'civilised' army hasn't slaughtered them yet is quaint. The forest itself promised to 'transform' our heroes in some way but I didn't see any of the much hoped for weird shit from Alex Garland's Annihilation. And Baymax is a snow toy at the very start of the film. Not so interesting that one, I'll agree.

If you have to see this film, take some ear plugs and pop them in for the singing parts. You won't regret it.

See also:

John G. Avildsen's The Karate Kid Part 2 (1986) and Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin (2013). Why? I'll leave that to you.