Film Shapes

Empire of Light, Sam Mendes's follow-up to   the excellent 1917,  is a low-key, very British attempt at covering a whole range of weighty themes and not quite nailing any of them. This isn't to say it's a bad film, despite the critical shoeing it's copped since release. It just seems slightly misguided. For instance, there are two main characters - Olivia Colman's Hilary, and Micheal Ward's Stephen (three if you count the gorgeous cinema itself) - but the film doesn't quite know when or where to shine its beam of light. The Hilary section lands with a climactic flourish, but this happens about halfway through. Stephen's strand picks up from there and threatens to jumpstart with some character building (ex-girlfriend, mother) but then Hilary re-appears, soon followed by a National Front mob to add some tension and violence. The film juggles three main themes; mental health, racism and the power of cinema, and, unsurprisingly, only one of these is played f...

Dodging newspaper and podcast reviews as well as YouTube trailers is fairly easy but it's more difficult to avoid spoilers when a preview is shown ONE MINUTE BEFORE THE FILM STARTS. Twats. Anyway, onto the film itself. Skyfall is Daniel Craig's third Bond effort but not his best - Casino Royale still holds that mantle. It's hard to talk about this movie without bringing the previous two in as comparisons, but I'll try. I enjoyed Skyfall but rather less than I had imagined I would. I think one of the reasons was the storyline, which seemed a bit old hat. Without giving too much away, the villain (a brilliantly camp Javier Bardem) seems based on Sean Bean's character in Goldeneye. Bondies will get the reference. The M-centric part of the plot worked in a kind of oedipal, 'mummies boys' sort of way, with both Bond and Bardem's Silva hovering around Judi Dench, albeit with different motives. But the MacGuffin that begins the film buggers off halfway...