Film Shapes

Hats off to Ryan Coogler for turning out this vibrantly bloody cracker with only his fifth feature. It's also quite a hand brake turn after two Black Panther films and one Rocky spin-off to deliver a singular story like this (I'm presuming there'll be no Sinners Cinematic Universe but I could be wrong). I say singular but actually, this owes a lot to Tarantino, and many other genre directors. I'm dancing around the issue here as the best way to watch this is to be completely unaware of what you're going to get. What I can say is that this is great fun. It really zips along, there's hardly a scene without forward momentum. Even the wonderfully ambitious musical numbers (relax, it's not a musical) add background to the story. Coogler's script crackles, especially in the mouths of the excellent cast - more on them later. One of the best things about this is that it disguises itself really well, you're not sure where it's going until it arrives the...

We saw this on March 30 at the Toho Cinema complex in Nishinomiya (I think it was free as I'd built up 6 movies on the point card). As I recall, there was a long queue and I was a bit concerned our theatre would be full. Luckily, the clueless majority were evidently lining up for something called Tangled. Or some shite Japanese anime or baseball flick. As is usual with the Coen's films, True Grit looked great (shot by Roger Deakins again) and the dialogue fairly sparkled. The casting was typically spot on and they really have a sense of atmosphere - which the music (by Carter Burwell again), the costumes and the sets exemplify brilliantly. But I reckon this film sits around the mid-section of the Coen portfolio, just near Miller's Crossing and The Big Lebowski . Not quite up to the standards set by Barton Fink, No Country for Old Men and Raising Arizona but not as low as The Hudsucker Proxy or Burn After Reading .