I used to be normal: A Boyband Fangirl's story

Four different women of four different era declare their love of boybands. Through the Beatles, Take That, Backstreet Boys and One Direction, we get the sense of how deep and primal the appeal of a decently non-threatening set of boys with interesting haircuts can be.

Things that are targeted directly at a female audience tend, by and large, to get more pop-cultural mockery than things that are targeted directly at a male audience. And there’s no essential reason why this should be so. Yes, it’s undoubtedly true that a lot of it has some pretty heinous views about gender roles, wildly vague and nonsensical lyrics, and is shallow as all get out, but can you really say male-targeted popular culture doesn’t suffer from some of the same issues? This documentary does the admirable thing of taking all four women seriously (yes, even the wildly screaming teenage One Direction fan who gives the documentary its title) – but it also uses that serious access to ask the question – what do they get out of their fandom, what do they read into it, how does that relate to the rest of their life, and where does this lead them. The film’s clearly made over a number of years, meaning we see fandoms develop and morph as different stages of life approach these women, and this gives this an element of something like the “Up” series, as you get a genuine sense of life being lived on camera. It’s warm and happy and sweet-natured and thought provoking and all the good things a documentary should be. Thoroughly recommended.

Fantastic Beasts - The Crimes of Grindelwald

The first “Fantastic Beasts” was a bit of a hodgepodge of a movie. Weaving a story out of the ephemera and backstory of the Harry Potter universe, it tried to combine a charming innocent-abroad-who-just-wants-to-look-after-his-animals story with a deep delving into the hidden backstories of the battles that had rocked the world of wizards before Voldemort came along. It wasn’t entirely successful, but fortunately most of the focus was on the befuddled charming zoologist and his cute beasties, not on the messy backstory, so it remained reasonably charming as it moved the locale from a vaguely contemporary England to 1920s New York and introduced a nice bunch of characters it was fun to spend time with.

The follow up, alas, doubles down on the messy backstory – while still keeping our befuddled charming zoologist and the cute beasties. And the backstory gets very very messy (and indeed, infects the charming zoologist and his friends, all of whom manage to get hit by the stupid stick a few times in order to manipulate them into various positions so that they can be, pointlessly, at odds for a lot of the film).  Eager to almost immediately invalidate the ending of the previous film (so a character who was presumed dead is now alive, and another character who was imprisoned is freed again), there’s a vast number of exposition dumps. There’s some nice costume and art design, but quite frequently we’re rushing past it so much that we can’t enjoy it properly (and the climax takes place in an ugly cellar).  The animal stuff is the one bit that still works, but at this point it’s like gluing the Crocodile Hunter onto the Simirillion – it all feels extremely messy. And by the end of the film, we still feel like everything’s barely got out of first gear – it’s still all preparation-for-battle rather than anything actually happening in this film. There’s a vast detour into irrelevant genealogy for characters who are only ever going to appear in this film and who amount to red herrings in the grand scheme of things. And under the dead weight of all this lore, nothing like an actually fun movie gets a chance to escape. So alas, this is a shemozzle. But with a couple of very cute animals.

Shoplifters

This Palme D’Or winner tells of a family of low-income Japanese people gathered in one house in the middle of an unnamed city. Grandma, mum, dad, sister and brother are joined when mum and dad find a lost neglected young girl on her own and bring her into her family and their hardscrabble existence enhanced by a little light shoplifting. As the seasons pass and she gets more used to the tricks and cons that she’s surrounded by, the little scams begin to appear less like fun and games and more like something risky that could see their family falling apart at any moment.

I must admit for a reasonable amount of the length of this film, I found it a little bit aimless – the scenes didn’t seem to be building so much as just a series of events that could end at any time without much change to the film. Events in the last quarter of the film change that, and there’s a couple of surprising revelations (at least one of which is a little melodramatic). But there’s also some deeply emotive performances across the cast, both young and old, and an unflinching view of the hidden modern Japanese underclass. This is not perfect cinema, and I’m not entirely sure it’s really a worthy Palme D’Or winner, but it provides interesting viewing none the less.

The Old Man and the Gun

This is one of those case where we’re not so much getting a film as we’re getting a retirement gift to one of Hollywood’s longest running leading men. And certainly, as a celebration of Robert Redford’s considerable charms, this does the job well. Playing a bank robber whose repeated thefts see him living his life largely on the run, his entanglement with a woman of roughly his age (played by Sissy Spacek) asks the question whether he can really keep on running.

The chemistry between Redford and Spacek is off the charts, and is the prime reason to see this. There’s some good work in the supporting cast as well (Casey Affleck as the cop on his trail, Tom Waits and Danny Glover as two gang members), but the warmth and joy that exists between Spacek and Redford is the prime reason to see this. There’s little that’s particularly surprising, and it’s another “based on a true story” where the content of the story is more an anecdote than a full narrative, and in many ways this is an exercise that gets by on pure charm, nostalgia, our affection for the leads and some decently nostalgic cinematography. But if it’s a comfortable pair of socks of a movie, it’s at least a good pair of socks to be in.

Boy Erased

After an incident at his college, a young man is taken by his parents to an anti-gay treatment centre. As the sessions continue, he sees more and more the damage this is causing both to himself and to the other people around him, as the centre tries to delve deeper into his psyche to change him into something he isn’t.

This is well acted and a good and interesting topic to discuss, but it never quite develops the power it might. The conversion centre is largely seen as incompetent and unwise – a very banal kinda evil (though there’s one point where one treatment on another patient is extremely intense), but our protagonist is never really put under particularly excessive pressure – and it means that a lot of the power seems slightly removed and displaced – he’s a nice middle-class boy who goes through something that’s a little bit unpleasant but it’s never really the case that he’s in particular danger of anything other than being bored and lectured to for an extended period. There’s details that distract slightly (Troye Silvain does a good performance as one of the other candidates but his hair seems too flamboyant for a guy who’s meant to be trying to duck under the radar), and it’s another film about gay people that seems slightly scared of showing what gay love might actually be like to a mass market audience (much like “Bohemian Rhapsody”, it can’t portray a happy gay relationship beyond mild handholding and loose hugging, and that can only ever be in the margins). Which is not to say this is a bad film – it’s just not what it could be.

The Girl in the Spider's Web

The return of Lizbeth Salander, peak hacker and cyber-warrior, sees her, unfortunately, dropped into a somewhat more generic narrative than the previous stories – in this case, being tasked with helping a programmer recover his nuclear missile control technology to prevent it falling into the wrong hands. When, inevitably, it still ends up in the wrong hands, Salander’s sent on a chase that will see her tangling with multiple security agencies and a mysterious group known as the Spiders – and finally being dragged back into the past she thought she’d escaped.

Based on the fourth novel of the series (and the first not to be written by Stieg Larrson, whose death after the third novel resulted in some complex legal shenanigans with his surviving partner, meaning that not even incomplete notes of Larsson’s work made it into this one), this sticks our unconventional modern heroine into a pretty regulation action movie that just happens to be largely set in Sweden. Claire Foy has all the externals that should go into making a good Lizbeth Salander (the cool exterior, detached yet devastatingly direct in achieving her aims) – but the story around her never really gives her much of a chance to stick out particularly. There’s some odd casting in there (Stephen Merchant in particular sticks out in a conventional role as the guy who wrote the program that’s the McGuffin of the story – there’s no particular reason why he’s doing this role other than because it got offered to him), and a couple of decent action/heist moments, but the ending, in particular, is annoyingly pat and doesn’t really give us reason to stick around. Given the English language adaptations have skipped two books, there’s also a couple of character details that seem newly grabbed from the missing two books that are just sorta slapped on screen without any of the narrative support that would have meant they meant anything in particular. Salander’s periodic sidekick from the books, Mikail Blomqvist (yes, Salander was his sidekick in the first book but given her name’s on the title of all of them, he’s slipped back into sidekick territory), is back but he feels pretty marginal and could easily have been removed without anybody particularly noticing. This feels like a reduction of what was a smart thriller series into just another airport novel runaround (much as the recent Jason Bourne felt like it was going through the motions without any real reason to exist), and while it’s never particularly unwatchable, it doesn’t inspire a lot of reasons to go particularly looking for it either.

Susperia

This remake of Dario Argento’s seventies shocker combines modern dance and horror in an exploration of the connections between art, feminine power, control and revenge. It’s a visually beautiful film, and there are sequences that are astounding in their impact – particularly any of the dance sequences. But for some reason it never quite grabbed me emotionally or on a primal level – this is horror as thesis statement, for me, rather than something I feel deep in my soul. I can recognise intellectually the excellence in a lot of this (Tilda Swinton stands out in two very different roles) and it’s never dull to watch. But for some reason I come away from it recognising the skill and art involved, but never quite feeling it. It’s well made, and I’d never call it empty or soul-less, but it’s still a little too distant for me to take to my heart.