Lords of Chaos

In the 90s, Norwegian Black Metal emerged into the limelight through a combination of highly antisocial behaviour, earsplittingly loud music, intense male introspection, a little bit of Nordic mythology and a little bit of blatant self-exploitation. 25 years later these events form the basis of the biopic “Lords of Chaos”, with Kieran Culkin playing one of the founders of the movement in a tale full of suicide, murder, church burning, self-indulgence, Nazis and bad taste.

This is almost the “24 Hour Party People” of Black Metal, taking the piss out of the performers more than celebrating their artform – although “24 Hour Party People” still had a love for the art that came out of the mayhem that “Lords of Chaos” doesn’t – it’s a bit too eager to write these guys off as a bunch of overindulged idiots, and commercially it probably falls awkwardly between two stools – those who like the music will be annoyed at how much it’s being mocked, while those who don’t won’t be interested in the topic. But for those who are interested in an irreverent take on the subject this has a sarcastic verve and energy that’s quite enjoyable.

The Wandering Earth

This is China’s attempt at a big scale sci-fi blockbuster, and it’s got a very big scale premise – in the face of an expanding sun, the governments of the earth unite for a project that will shoot the planet out in search of a more accommodating solar system. Seventeen years into the trip, as the Earth is about to pass Jupiter, unexpected gravitational forces mean the mission is under terrible jeopardy, and one Chinese family is stuck in the middle of it all trying to survive and prevent planetary disaster. IF that sounds like one of the nuttiest ideas ever from the team of Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (the nutcases behind Day after Tomorrow, 2012 and Geostorm), congratulations, you have the tone pretty much down – although here, of course, it’s the Chinese who are going to save humanity rather than the Americans. But there’s still a whole massed serving of blockbuster cheese and grand spectacle along with dubious science and just a soupcon of propaganda. As stupidity goes, this is reasonable, but it never quite glories in the insanity of the premise so much as delivers a competent but not especially exciting standard issue blockbuster.

At Eternity's Gate

This is at least the third Vincent Van Gogh biopic I know of, and there’s at least two other major documentaries describing his life and times (plus a Doctor Who episode). What brings people back to examine his life again and again, and does Julien Schnabel’s film offer something new? Well, certainly it offers a very internal view of Vincent – the passion for painting that continued in the face of overwhelming rejection, the desire to capture the world and preserve it for generations to come. And that’s expressed through Willem Defoe’s performance in a pure expression of inspired rapture and artistic mania. But this tends to peak in individual scenes (in particular one with Mads Mikkelsen as a priest) rather than really working as an overall dramatic throughline – I don’t know that this entirely hangs together as an overall film. As a vehicle for Defoe, it’s a fine one, but this doesn’t entirely work as a dramatic presentation of its subject so much as a collection of moments that don’t quite pile up to enough.

If Beale Street Could Talk

A boy and a girl are in love, but when he’s accused of a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed, can their love survive and can he be saved? James Baldwin’s novel is brought to the screen by Barry Jenkins of “Moonlight” fame, and this is a case of a followup that has all the right intentions and comes very close but doesn’t surpass the first. It’s a little too fond of Baldwin’s literary devices, with a LOT of voice over, and a few bits of dialogue which don’t make the transition from page to screen very easily. Jenkins this time is solo on screenplay duty and, while there’s some great structural work and visually he’s a master, he’s sorely missing the tonal surety of Tarell Alvin McCraney who wrote “Moonlight”. There’s an early scene with the boy’s mother which turns the melodrama up to a fairly shrill level in ways that don’t help (it’s the weakest scene in the film), while later developments balance better in tone.  Which is not to say this is without merit – it’s lush and beautiful and the relationship between boy and girl feels lived in and real. But that element of the novel not entirely being re-conceived for filming ends up making it a little more of a film to admire rather than love.

Border

This Swedish film is of the “the less you know about it, the better” variety, so beyond mentioning that it’s from a short story by the same author as “Let the Right One In” and that it examines a border control officer who finds herself in an unusual romance, I don’t know that I can touch on the plot very much. I can say that it’s moody, funny, strange and enthralling, that while the lead character is a border control officer it’s not in any ways the obvious immigration saga you might be expecting, Eva Melander and Ero Mionoff provide a great pair of performances in the two leads, that there’s a spirit of mystery and something very distinctively Scandinavian at the heart of it and that it’s a great work of modern cinema. Edgy, sometimes bizarre, melancholy and enthralling.

Cold Pursuit

I will admit I made a bunch of Liam Neeson jokes before I saw this (starting with “I have a very particular set of skis”, and also me annoying my husband with an intense Irish “I’m Mr Plow, that’s my name, that name again is Mr Plow”). And then, yes, Liam Neeson had a racist moment and made it less funny. Never the less, I’m reviewing the art and not the artist. And this is … an unusual Liam Neeson movie. Yes, it’s still about revenge and it’s still fairly violent, but this plays more as an odd, slightly Coen-esque story that looks at the story objectively, bouncing between vengeful father and the criminal gangs who are the target of his vengeance, rather than being entirely from Neeson’s point of view – his involvement is largely to incite others to act rather than constantly being the centre of the action. This is a redo of the Swedish “In Order of Disappearance”, only this time set in Colorado, with the same director and much of the same plot beats (although part of the relocation means that a Native American gang fills in, who are treated with appropriate dignity). There’s a couple of moments that wander towards the hammy (in particular the lead villain, Viking, only lacks the mustache to twirl) and as playful snowy thrillers go this is no “Fargo, but it still is reasonably enjoyable.

Capharnaum

This Lebanese film tells the story of Zayin, a young boy in a teeming family who after a fight with his parents finds himself on the streets, fending for himself. And as he makes connections with others (a single mother with a baby, a young Syrian refugee, the various vendors and people on the street), he gets exposed to more and more risks just to survive.

This has some great performances from the child actors and is a good delve into contemporary Beirut. But … it feels like child-poverty has almost become a genre, between this, “Florida Project”, “Shoplifters”,  the first half of "Lion" and the under-released “Tigers are not Afraid”. And while there’s undoubted excellence in these, it’s also … starting to become a somewhat familiar awards gambit. And in this case, there’s a couple of plot contrivances near the end, presumably largely to make sure that the audience goes home without slashing their wrists at the pure misery of the circumstances, that serve to compromise the film. Other versions of this genre have used magic realism to soften the edges here and there, and for me, that acknowledgement of the unlikelihood of some of the events works better than this, which tends to ask us to take the contrivances on face value. Still, this is powerful work that, in the moment, tends to work very effectively.

Alita Battle Angel

This adaptation of the manga (previously also adapted as an anime) has been one of James Cameron’s dream projects for the better part of twenty years. It’s set about six hundred years in the future, two hundred years after a cataclysm has left the majority of humanity living in one giant city, underneath the mysterious paternalism of a floating world who are served resources by the ground dwellers  and in turn drop their scraps back down (and yes, the metaphor is pretty much that blatantly obvious).  When a cyborg falls into the scrapyard and a doctor specialising in cyborg creation gives her a body, she’s drawn into the complex power structures, violent battles against those that would exploit the city, and romance with an eager young man with a few secrets.

Like most dream projects, this does suffer slightly from insufficient distance from trying to achieve too much in too short a time (this has a running time just over two hours, and summarises the first two volumes of the manga) – there’s a heck of a lot of story in here, and some performers and story beats go distinctly under-served (in particular, Jennifer Connelly feels like her character has a lot to go through but it’s all done in broad stokes without the moments of detail it really requires). But it’s still good to see an ambitious sci-fi epic onscreen – and the combination of Cameron and Robert Roduiguez on directing duties means this has cutting edge effects work, including some gorgeous bright 3d. It’s also somewhat more violent than the trailers may be leading some to expect (it’s trying the “cyborg violence doesn’t count as violence” thing, but still, some of this is pretty intense., including one off-camera moment with a dog), and in some places it feels a little too overstuffed with plot and background, and there’s a couple of ropey acting bits (in particular the romantic lead comes across blander than he probably should). But never the less I enjoyed this as a good deep sci-fi delve.

Mary Poppins Returns

This is an odd film – a 50-something years later sequel to the Disney hit that plays so close to the model of the original that it feels like it’s as much a remake as it is a follow-up, with scenes constantly playing towards being reminiscent-of-but-not-quite-the-same-as scenes-in-the-original. The main acknowledgement towards the half-century that’s passed is a slightly more ethnically diverse American-playing-Cockney-in-a-bodgy-accent. It’s almost like watching a replacement cast in a long-running musical, where you can see the tracks that new cast members are stepping into that have been mapped out before them, with only a certain amount of leeway to make the role their own. Emily Blunt comes as close as can be reasonably considered possible in inheriting the role of Mary Poppins – both selling the prim-and-proper exterior and the secretly wild fantasy creature that bursts forth to make adventures happen. Lin-Manuel Miranda works his charm bone like crazy in sliding into the Dick Van Dyke model of “role that is kinda unnecessary in plot terms but is absolutely vital for production numbers” (and, to be fair, he does come in useful near the end of the plot). Ben Whishaw’s casting brings in tones of Paddington (helped by Julie Waters playing a fairly familiar maid), Emily Mortimer is kinda under-used, Colin Firth is dastardly and … while the film is difficult to defend in intellectual terms as the familiarity should feel oppressive, somehow it never quite does, and the charm still works, dammit. This is a pervasively likeable film while still feeling vaguely unnecessary.

The Front Runner

This depiction of what happened in 2 weeks on the campaign trail for 1988 Democratic Candidate Garry Hart has a lot of interesting segments, as it bounces around in perspective from Hart to his campaign team to various segments of the media. It’s a dive into several angles on a messy topic – how much should we expect from the people who represent us, and what rights do we have to look behind the curtain at their private lives? But it’s never quite able to come up with a final perspective that wraps everything up cleanly, and there’s never a single narrative thread that completely takes over – meaning this feels like a lot of first-drafts at a film about the Garry Hart scandal, rather than anything willing to be finalised. The segment on the treatment of Donna Rice, the civilian dragged into this without any protection, is intriguing, but it’s noticeable that it’s a section almost off to the side of the rest of the film – none of our main characters are prepared to engage with her in a humane way, which is what makes her treatment all the more notable. All the performances are fine as far as they go, but they never really are allowed to go deep enough for us to feel engaged. And while I’m a fan of Robert Altman’s kaleidoscopic methods, he has a gift for finding each of the single telling details about characters that give us everything we need to know – whereas here, director Jason Reitman seems reticent to allow us to know the characters deeply enough, meaning this ends up as an intellectually interesting but emotionally empty exercise that never quite cuts through the sound and fury to become something more.

Free Solo

The sport/art of free climbing (basically, cliff climbing without the assistance of a rope or anything other than a little bit of dust for grip) is one that seems challenging for the non-participant to understand. Why would you put yourself into incredible, impossible danger for no real benefit beyond to say that you can do it? Particularly when the consequences seem so frequently fatal. This documentary looks at one of these free climbers, Alex Honnold, whose skill is only matched by his distinct oddity. His family background is messy (a dad who committed suicide, a mother who wasn’t particularly emotional) and his current relationship reflects that difficulty in engaging with his partner – and he (and the camera crew) are very aware that his form of self-expression comes with significant risks – there’s a catalog of friends who have died in the act of pursuing what they love that appears throughout the film. And the film gets into some of the logistics of making the film – both the ethical ones (can you really just sit there and film when a guy could be going to his death) and the practical ones (does having the cameras in his line of sight make Alex’s task more difficult). It gets into the details of how this kind of climb is done, looking at the different sections that make this particular climb at El Capitain so difficult, and the combination of physical feats Alex has to pull off. And there’s distinct filmmaking skill in making such a dense, complicated task easily explicable to a general audience – with the final climbing sequence heart-stopping and tense and eventually triumphant. Oddly enough, it reminded me a little of the doco “Dancer” from two years back about the ballet dancer Sergei Polunin – similarly a physically endangering occupation that comes from a clearly damaged human being but never the less something that is fascinating to watch. – while this is a much better doco than that one, the question of “how much is the capability to perform truly exceptional physical feats worth” remains.  This is virtuosic, fascinating filmmaking.