El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019)

 "Dude, you're on fire!"

This film is, perhaps, a little slow at first. But it's slow for a reason and, as with anything written and shot by Vince Gilligan, it has real depths. For this is a characyer study of one Jesse Pjnkman, a man who has been enslaved and caged for months, and who is suffering intense PTSD at the start of the film. We have various flashbacks, all meaningful, all riffing on what's happening in the present day, one at the end featuring a welcome cameo for Bryan Cranston as Walter White.

But this is a film about how Jesse overcomes his PTSD to become a badass, and to have the chance to start a new life. We see the highly disturbing flashbacks of his life in captivity, and get to know at closequarters just how disturbing Todd is. It goes without saying that Jesse Plemons and, especially, Aaron Paul are magnificent.

It's a slow burn. This, crucially, is not an action film, and won't be enjoyed by those looking for one. But I'm watching it a mere couple of weeks after marathoning all of Breaking Bad. I know what it means to show such guts with those two fake cops; with that very particular vacuum cleaner salesman who can make one disappear; and that Wild West shootout.

Jesse grows so much as a character, if one sees this film as a continuation of Breaking Bad. Those two fake cops waste their money on girls and drugs in a way Jesse once did. But no more. He wants a new start, a new life in, er, Alaska. And he gets it.

This is a philosophical film, not an action thriller. Watch it with that in mind, and it's the perfect coda.

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

 "I'm in love with Spider-Man's aunt!"

Yes, I know. I'm well behind oin the Marvel films; I intend to remedy that. And I'm being competist, and trying to track down Blade:Trinity. Anyway...

This film is awesome. It works brilliantly both as an action film and as a farce. It's totally a Spider-Man film- the characterisation of Spidey is spot on, and Tom Holland is superb, plus not only is Jake Gyllenhaal brilliant as Mysterio but the villain works perfectly. He's the master of illusion: what could be more gloriously cinematic?

And yet, at the same time, this is absolutely a big MCU film. It ties Spidey very strongly to the legacy of the late Tony Stark- including, with Happy, an important member of Shellhead's supporting cast. But it's deeper than that. The film takes place in the afteermath of the former dead returning after Thanos's snap. Nick Fury and Cobie Smulders take prominent roles... and turn out to be Skrulls.

And, yes, at the end, a dying Mysterio outs Spidey as Peter Parker- via J.K. Simmonds as J. Jonah Jameson once more!!!- which will have future consequences, but which is also a sign of the MCU disdaining the concept of secret identities. We do not rely on cliched tropes here.

It's mostly an adorable and light farce, though, with lots of comedy, bits of action and romance between Peter and Mary Jane, which is incredibly sweet. Yet at the same time it manages to  be a very Spider-Man film set far from his territory of New York- imagine!- and a brilliant MCU film.

Kevin Feige, you and your underlings triumph yet again.

Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

 "Also, this is Texas..."

Meh. This film  is a bit rubbish, Yes, it has Linda Hamilton and Arnie in it. Yes, they're both good. But the plot, co-written by no less than David S.Goyer, is just a selection of Terminator greatest hits.

Yes, there's a mildly satirical comment about automation. Yes, there's a very pointed comment about Trump's barbaric immkgration policy. In fact, the script is not bad, with decent characterisation of a bitter Sarah Connor, a redeemed "Carl", and a budding hero in Dani, the real stae. It's also nice for an American film to show a positive depiction of Mexico.

And yet..Linda Hamilton and Arnie are good.Natalia Reyes is a revelation. But the plot- yet another future Skynet to be foiled, is tired and repetitive. Plus, although it's not necessarily the fault of this film in isolation,  I'm really getting sick and tired of every film in this series since the second one- in fact, every one not directed by James Cameron- being decanonised with every passing film, despite all but one of them being pretty decent

It becomes clear from early on that this film feels tired, derivative and not clever enough to justify a retread. Yes, the action scenes are ok, but the whole thing, despite the occasional attempt at jokes, is so bloody humourless. The direction is technically ok, drspite the excessive CGI, but lacks either wit or seriousness. This is, despite a decent, ill-aserved script, far from a decent film.

Arnie is holding up well, though.

Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019)

 "Now, that's the way a cigarette should taste..."

This is, seen one way, a typical Tarantino film. It has his signature cinema-literate metatextuality (there’s an extended riff towards the end on spaghetti westerns and the whole Italian B movie industry, which I much enjoy), his narratives within narratives, his sense of controlled irony, his non-linear narratives and his deliberately ambiguous elements- did Cliff kill his wife or not, as many seem to think? He seems a decent man, but people are complicated.

And yet, in another sense, this is a real outlier in that it is not an action film at all but a serious drama with big themes- how one responds to the approach of middle ag;  male friendship and how it develops when the two men are not of equal status, with one living in a Hollywood mansion and the other in a trailer; how, in 1969, the era of Westerns and war films is slowly ebbing away towards an era of auteurs, hippies and changing values. It’s a film that uses footage cleverly to show us all the different sides of 1969, with Tarantino’s usual visual wit, and has a similarly evocative soundtrack, as his films invariably do.

This is not really a film about the Manson “family”, despite Margot Robbie’s splendid turn as Sharon Tate: it’s appropriate that Charles Manson himself only appears briefly and is told to go away. His “family” are shown as shallow, duplicitous petty criminals, manipulating a blind old man with dementia to get a place to stay- and, arguably, raping him. It’s fitting that Tarantino should do as he did in Inglourious Basterds and have history pan out differently and far more pleasingly.

This film is superbly shot, superbly made, and full of both heart and complexity. It may well be Tarantino’s masterpiece.

X-Men: Dark Phoenix (2019)

 “She’s not your little girl any more.” 

It's always instructive where a movie that has a lot seemingly going for it, like this one,turns out to be mildly disappointing. Not that it's terrible, but there's no denying that it fails to translate the excellent of Christ Claremont and John Byrne's source material, nor that the promising first half hour with lots of interesting character development and subtext yields to a load of dull fighting against a bland alien threat. Beyond the fact that we can by now be sure, I think, that Simon Kinberg isn't the person who should have been in charge of these films. But what went wrong?

There's a lot of good stuff in the early part of the film. All the characters feel real and well-rounded, even relatively minor ones like Quicksilver and Nightcrawler. There's some interesting questioning of Charles' habit of manipulating people's minds for their "own good". There's also a nice point made of Charles pushing the X-Men, at great danger, to be superheroes and to be popular, as the alternative is to be hated and feared: it's effective to see how quickly Jean's antics have the X-Men change overnight from popular celebrities to feared outcasts. It's unexpected, and effective, to have Raven die at the hands of Jean.

And yet, James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender aside, the main cast are all a bit bland, despite a splendidly charismatic performance by Evan Peters as Quicksilver, for the last time in this continuity. And then there's the vague nature of where the Phoenix force comes from and the equally vague aliens looking for it. There's a lot of good ideas here, but no real way of resenting them once the plot gets moving. A sad ending for the Fox X-Men movies. Let's hope we see them again under happier circumstances.

Captain Marvel (2019)

" If toast is cut diagonally, I can't eat it."

I should say fromthe start that I love this film, more so than most Marvel films and you can see (look at the Marvel Index) that I have a pretty damn high opinion of most of them. Partly, that's because the is a damn good blockbuster film of a science fiction nature. Partly it's the feminist message, even if it is a bit vague and "girl power" (how very '90s). Partly, though, it's because this film scratches my Marvel fan itch in a way few others have.

Let's take it as read that this works well as the first Marvel film with a female lead (rather late), and that Brie Larsen is xcellent. Let us enjoy the '90s setting, the awesome soundtrack, the impressive CGI that turns Samuel L. Jackson, with a pretty damn large part, into his '90s self with perfection. Oh, and let us briefy stop to note that, fo a Marvel zombie of my age, Captain Marvel is not Carol Danvers (Binary!), or Mar-Vell, and certainly not Billy Bloody Batson. It's Monica Rambeau. and, if you don't get that, read some '80s Avengers when Roger Stern was writing and Jim Shooter was the best boss Marvel ever had. Ah, nostalgia.

So let us, er, marvel at the tribute to Stan at the start, and then at the faithful recreation of both the Kree- we see Hala, Yon-Rogg (an excellent Jude Law), in a variation of the origin of Mar-Vell (female here, a nice touch), Dr Minerva (Gemma Chan of Humans), Captain Atlas, and of course Ronan the Accuser. But let us also enjoy the twist of the Skrulls (whose design is very Fantastic Four #2) being not only thgoodies but also just refugees, victims of the evil Kree, and not a galaxy-spanning empire.  Let us also marvel as the design of all things Kree, which is excitingly faithful to the comics.

This is right up there with the best Marvel films. Can we see Carol anvers agaon, please? And the Monica Rambeau of the present day?

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

 "She is not who you think she is..."

So we finally reach the end of the trilogy- if not, I suspect, of Star Wars movies- and we have a perfctly enteraining bockbuster movie that hits all the right beats and tugs at the heartstrings, quite rightly allwing the ounger generation of heroes to shine while still wallwing in some nostalgia in roughly the right balance.

So why am I, if not disappointed in a film that does exactly what one expects of a franchise blockbuster, perhaps just a little underwhelmed?

I think, perhaps, with J.J. Abrams returning to the helm, this film follows on awkwardly from The Last Jedi, which rather cleverly plays with our expectations in killing off Snoke and revealing that Rey isn't in fact the child of anyone we know (such as Luke) as we might have thought.

This film is far more predictable. Palpatine is back- a rather obvious thing to do. And Rey, er, actually is the child of someone we know, after all- Palpatine himself. This undermines the previous film somewhat, to put it mildly. And the way she uses the power of past Jedi to win, and sort of becomes a Skywalker at the end, is sort of meh. This isn't playing with our expectations; its's confirming them, and erasing the metatextual subtext of the previous and much more interesting film.. 

That's not to say the film is bad; it's well made and entertaining. It's just a shame the previous film aspired to say something beyond the usual Joseph Campbell plotting and relentless fan service. Fun though it is to see Lando, and Ewoks, and a very old-looking Han, well, this is just Star Wars by numbers, even if it's very good Star Wars by numbers.

Brexit: The Uncivil War

“Referendums are quite simply the worst way to decide anything. They’re divisive. They pretend complex choices are simple binaries- red or blue, black or white.”

It’s interesting watching this so soon after the National Theatre production of another James Graham play, This House; the parallels are striking, from the focus on back room operators rather than big political names to the introduction of each character as either "Remain" or "Leave", paralleling the uses of constituencies in This House. And, of course, the script is superb- human, philosophical, witty and awfully clever in how it presents the Brexit referendum as a coherent narrative.

Benedict Cumberbatch is superb as Dominic Cummings, unconvincing Mackem accent notwithstanding; this Leicestershire lad is married to a Geordie and knows these things. Cummings is, of course, much more well known today as Boris' puppet master and devotee of the driving-based eye test. This is a fascinating character study of a highly intelligent and capable man and a campaigning genius- I like how his clear campaigning methods are juxtaposed with those of the useless Remain campaign- whose sheer talent in this area should not be mistaken for a coherent or clever political philosophy. We are already seeing how his campaigning talents do not transfer to governing. Yet there's no denying his talents in the campaigning arena, especially against the uselessness of his opponents, unthinkingly rolling out the Clinton '92 "economy, stupid" campaign after a quarter of a century and not for once presenting Brexit as the massive surrender of sovereignty that it is, or speaking to those who have been forgotten by such campaigners.

We see both Cummings' arrogance and his unlikely charisma as well as, interestingly, as much of a clash between the two Leave campaigns as between the two opposing sides. And the script does not let Cummings off the hook for his "dead cat" methods of lying, nor for either the cynicism of letting Farage and his rabble of not-racist-buts talk about immigration, nor for his own mendacity about seventy million Turks. And yet the use of Bill Cash and Bernard Jenkin as foils allow even a Remainer like me to enjoy Cumming's effortless batting off of an attempted coup. One would think I would find this depressing, given the awfulness of its subject matter. It's a real credit to the script and to Cumberbatch that I don't.

It Chapter Two (2019)

“You've all grown up..."

This is a long film, in many ways well-structured, good with character, well cast, with excellent effects and a witty script. There are plenty of effective scares and Bill Skarsgard is still a superb villain. This is a very good film. But it’s not quite up there with the first chapter.

Why? Well, I’ll admit it gets the main things right in spending time on the characters and the demons they carry. Pennywise always was a metaphor for abuse- sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse and (especially) gaslighting. This subtext is handled exactly right here, hence things like our glimpse of the horribly abusive relationship with which the adult Beverley starts the film. Henry Bowers, while bad, is bad because of the abuse he's suffered. And Bill's guilt over little Georgie always was exacerbated by Pennywise's gaslighting. And I like the way this version was careful to emphasise the childhood anxieties we all had, and which can linger into adulthood if we don't face them as the Losers do here. And Beverley may be a textbook example of Smurfette Syndrome, but one can't blame this film adaptation for that.

The visuals, direction, lighting and suspense are superb, as are most of the scares. But there are, it has to be said, one or two which don't quite work, and in some places made us laugh- floppy jiggle tits, I'm looking at you. And, while there are plenty of effectively funny lines, Bill Hader in particular is superb at this side of things, and there's a splendidly metatextual cameo by Stephen King in which he accuses his fictional alter ago Bill of the rubbish endings his own critics keep mentioning, in the end the film is just a little too long and flabby, ad could do with editing down just a little.

None of that detracts from the fact I very much enjoyed this film, however, and the way it was shot was superb. It just didn't quite match the standard of its predecessor.

The Professor and the Madman (2019)

"When I read, no one is after me."

This is, while not entirely without verging into sentiment at times, an extraordinary film. The real life events it depicts are themselves extraordinary, of course: Dr James Murray, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, strikes up an extraordinary friendship with Dr William Minor- surgeon, veteran of the Union Army, erudite gentleman, paranoid schizophrenic and murderer- as Minor makes an enormous scholarly contribution.

Those facts alone are remarkable, and remain so in fictionalised form. But the film has more to it than that- the snobbery endured by Murray, of humble origins in the Scottish Borders; the tension between being with one's family and working to provide for them; the treatment of personality disorders; love; justice; friendship. Most of all it deals with the huge theme of redemption, with a sensitively written  and performed subplot in which the widow of the murdered man slowly comes to forgive and indeed love Minor.

The emotional depths, which are profound although excessively sentimental at times, are helped by a nicely structured script and outstanding performances from Sean Penn and Natalie Dormer, That wanker Laurence Fox is sadly in it but, happily, he plays a very hissable baddie.

This is well worth watching and, without a doubt, the finest film featuring a man cutting off his own penis I have ever seen.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)

“Everything can still be awesome!”

Yeah, I’m not exactly going to give this film a slapping. Let’s say right now that I loved the first film and that this is pretty much 140 extra minutes of the same stuff and the same quality. Basically, it’s a bit good. Oh, and Merry Christmas and all that. This feels a suitable film for today.

Anyway, we start with the Duplo invasion from last film’s cliffhanger (I love the toddler voices!) leading five years later to everything having gone a bit Mad Max except, of course, for Emmett, who is his old self. There follows a clever and very meta plot which partly represents a bit of sibling rivalry in another dimension and partly shows us how uncool it is to be overly grimdark and antiheroic. It’s a nice moral, although I’m not sure I approve of the revelation towards the end that cutesy chart pop is not evil: I think you’ll find it’s evil incarnate. It’s not rock ‘n’ roll that’s the Devil’s music, it’s manufactured pop.

Throughout all this we get far too many self-referential and metatextual moments to recount, but the best by far is Queen Watevra Wa’Nabi doing her song about how she’s Totally Not Evil. Plus we get sooo many pop culture references and more taking the piss out of Green Lantern. This is always a good thing. And Will Arnett is scarily close to being my fave Batman. Plus we get grim, dinosaur loving future Emmett with his timey-wimeyness and stubble.

Another superb film. Unbelievable, super cool, outrageous and amazing.

Frozen II (2019)

“You can’t just follow me into fire.”

“Then don’t run into fire!”

This afternoon Mrs Llamastrangler and I visited our local cinema accompanied by a certain little girl who was in equal measures nervous and excited. Yes, Little Miss Llamastrangler is both four years old and completely obsessed with Disney princesses, and this seemed like a good choice for her first ever film at the cinema. And it was. She loved everything about it, which ultimately should probably outweigh the more qualified praise of her forty-two year old father.

A Disney film sequel that isn’t a casually tossed off straight-to-video release is a rarity, but this is the real deal, with cast and creative team reuniting to dig for more box office gold-successfully, I suspect. But, with no original fairytale source to draw upon, the pressure was on.

But I needn’t have worried. Yes, the early scenes seemed overly cosy and devoid of the conflict that all good drama needs, but the magical mystery of the nearby enchanted forest gives the film the injection of epic fairytale magic that it needs. And by the hilarious Olaf song about how everything make sense when you’re an adult, and you in know way feel like an older child who’s winging it, I was well and truly won over. The animation, the story, some nice characterisations and the humour all worked well, and one of the songs in particular had Little Miss Llamastrangler singing all the way home.

Is it as good as the original? Probably not. But it’s a solid, moving, funny film that probably deserves the success it’s pretty much certain to get, particularly as a more cynical cash-in would doubtless have done just as well.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

“Go to sleep or I’ll sell all your toys!

I don’t care if I’m skipping a couple of recent films for this one; I’ve never been strictly chronological with the Marvel films in a pinch and I won’t start now. The months of spoiler-dodging stop now.

So... wow. A big, blockbuster geeky film that’s three hours long yet doesn’t feature a single Hobbit. And it had me in equal measures gripped, laughing and trying not to cry. This film is indeed as good as everyone says it is.

It also subverts expectations in an awfully clever way. In showing us the true horror of Thanos’ click via Hawkeye and his vanished family, it shows us a Thanos who has forever destroyed all the Infinity Stones and retired- so the Avengers visit him and Thor kills him in a massive anticlimax. Fast forward five years. That certainly wasn’t the obvious thing to do.

Cue the return of Ant-Man eventually prompting Tony Stark, now a husband and father, to invent time travel, and lots of highly entertaining dialogue about how the butterfly effect, and hence every time trace movie ever, doesn’t imply in the Marvel Universe. Time travel doesn’t work as in Back to the Future, says the now-smart Hulk, yet the solution to Thanos’ click is to travel back into the recent past and do a Back to the Future II, which is both clever and hilarious.

And so we get a coda where the Hulk’s click brings the dead back- but the Thanos of 2014 has found out the truth from the future Nebula and has time travelled back to kill them all. It’s good to see Karen Gillan with such a prominent role here, but her story is so very timey-wimey. And it seems to explain why Thanos originally had Nebula tied up, yet history is changed here and the 2014 Thanos has events play out differently. The dynamic between the two very different Nebulas, and Gamora, is wonderful, but this film doesn’t let its big, epic nature get in the way of character, pathos or humour. So Black Widow’s death has meaning. Tony Stark’s final, fatal click, saying “I am Iron Man”, May save the army if goodies from Thanos but gives him a meaningful death, dwelt on properly as it should be; if any character can be said to be the main star of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it’s him.

Cap, too, gets a suitable exit, spending the rest of his days with Peggy in a beautiful coda.

There’s so much more, though. Fat Thor. Tony Stark meeting his dad in 1970, with a cameo from Jarvis whom we’ve only seen in Agent Carter- at least one of the MCU TV series is sort of recognised as canon. There’s “Scott, I get emails from a raccoon”. Thor getting a pep talk from his mother. It’s wonderful that the film has so much heart, and all its characters are properly used.

A wonderful film, and a fitting end to an age. Let’s hope the future is just as bright.

Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019)

“People don't realise that there are killers among them"

 This is, to put it mildly, a controversial film, in spite of the way its execution (er, no pun intended) seems to be widely praised. In the wake of, I think, #MeToo, our culture is currently rethinking the practice of using fictionalised biopics of serial killers, who are invariably killers of women, as entertainment. And there is, I think, a point there. Not that we should in any way ban or censor the use of this naturally dramatic subject matter, of course; it intrinsically says a lot about the human condition, and specifically male violence. Exploring this sort of thing is precisely what art is for.

All the same, though, we should be wary of how we treat the subject, where a straightforwardly lurid approach can show the male gaze at its most problematic. This biopic of Ted Bundy tries a different approach, framing the narrative from the point of view of his fiancee Liz, from the time they met in a bar (did Bundy at first mean to kill her, and relent only upon discovering her baby?) until his final admission of his guilt on the eve of his execution. We spend much of the film, unless we already know the facts, doubting Bundy's guilt. Only at the end do we unequivocally learn of his guilt. His persuasive charm allows Bundy to gaslight us the way he did to Liz, to Carol and to all those women who rooted for him during his trial. That's clever. It's also a treatment that doesn't need to focus on the spectacle of the murders themselves. We are also reminded, too, that those complicit in the use of capital punishment, from the judge to the bloodthirsty sheriff, are every bit as evil as Bundy himself.

The film is superbly structured, and everything looks very convincingly of the '70s. There's a smallish role for scarcely recognisable James Hetfield too, appropriate for a film shot by the director of Some Kind of Monster. Jim Parsons also valiantly struggles against his typecasting as the Florida prosecutor as The Big Bang Theory winds to a close. But it' is, in the end, al about the extraordinary performances of Lily Collins and a swiftly maturing Zac Efron. Highly impressive.