Film Shapes

This iteration of The Courier is the latest in the long line of films called The Courier . Leaving out articles or add-ons (so no The Courier from Lisbon from 1921 Germany and Courier from the USSR in 1986), we're still left with a handful of exact titles. There's an Irish film from 1988 with Gabriel Byrne, a B-movie from 2007, a Jeffrey Dean Morgan vehicle from 2012 and a film from 2019 which appears to star Gary Oldman's eye patch and Olga Kurylenko's leather-clad arse. I guess films have been pitched on less. Without seeing any of these other Courier films, it appears they're set in the crime genre, whereas this most recent one, directed by Dominic Cooke, leads us through the murky world of cold war espionage in the early 1960's.  The characters are based on real people, the leads being Greville Wynne, played by Benefit Lumberjacks....Benadryl Cumberbash ....ummm Benedict Cumberbatch, and Oleg Penkovsky, played remarkably by a real Georgian, Merab Ninidze...

There's been a lot of interest (I was going to say 'buzz', but that doesn't really scan) around this film, directed by Chloe Zhao - one of the pod contributors even gave it top spot in his best of 2020 . I have to say though, I was fairly unimpressed by it. Clearly it has found an audience, it's hoovering up during this awards season as I write, and winning rave reviews along the way (94% on Rotten Tomatoes, 93% on Metacritic). And I have to say, I can see what the fuss is all about. It's just that it didn't hit any sweet spots for me, nothing came off the middle of the bat, if you like. This might be complete bollocks but the aim for near total authenticity actually made me feel I was watching something simulated, and my acceptance of the film suffered accordingly. Also, the plight of these people, rough as it was (and likely still is), didn't resonate with me; it was either too far removed or I'm just a heartless prick. The story, such as it can be...

Now, I wasn't too amped for this fillum. I'd seen the previous entries in the so-called MonsterVerse from Legendary Pictures - Godzilla (2014), Kong: Skull Island (2017) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) - and they were pretty much bobbins. I'd have to say though, this is the pick of them. Director Adam Wingard trims most of the fat and simply allows us to enjoy massive beasts thumping seven shades of shit out of each other. If that's your thing, fill your boots here. Admirably, it didn't waste much time setting things up (they either assume we know the back story or don't care about it), whipping through the motivations for getting Kong away from Skull Island and therefore onto the radar of Zilla. It would seem casting agents are on a hiding to nothing in finding human actors that can compete for the spotlight with the monsters in films of this kind. They've conceded defeat here with Professor Bland (sorry, Lind), Alexander Skarsgård taking the n...