Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

 "Well, if you save the world, you knoiw what that means...!"

I rather enjoyed the previous Kingsman movie, a fitrst class rollicking modern action movie which was basically a modern version of James Bond written by Jane Goldman and directed by Matthew Vaughn. I enjoyed this film for exactly the same reasons.

The first film was excellent. This sequel, unusually, maintained exactly the same level of quality, in exactly the same style. It's a blockbuster action film in the James Bond sort of genre, only without the historical weight and constraints on the visual style.

This works. Taron Egerton in=s a splendid lead. Julianne Moore is almost as good a Bond villain as Samuel L. Jackson was. We have a whole new American cast, led by Jeff Bridges, after Kingsman is destroyed, and are introduced to a new American secret socety based in the state of bluegrass and fried chicken, what would be the coolest state in the USA if it were not the fact that it votes for the Republican party, a fascist cult that hates democracy and is rightly despised by all who love freedom, including one hundred percent of the mainstream centre-right, . If you're reading this and you're a Republican, kindly cease doing so. And, indeed.cease reading my blog. You hate freedom and I loathe you as I loathed the USSR. Democracy hates you asv you hate democracy. Death to all you love. Thank you.

I admire the attitude this film takes to the drugs war. Personally, I'm on the fence. Cannabis obviously needs to be legalised, not least so that I can occasionally smoke it (at old-fashionred strength), but heroin? The film, while not telling us what think, addressed the topic thoughtfully, while showing us the cool side of Kentucky at the same time as giving us a US president almost as much as a prick as the criminal Trump. May he die in prison.

Anyway, superb film,.a blockbuster every bitbas good as the original..

Maps to the Stars (2014)

“She’s a Scientologist.”

“I was thinking of converting. Kind of a career move.”

I know I've blogged a lot of Cronenberg fils lately, but he fascinates me. He's known for his body horror, but his work (especially in recent decades) is so much more than that- philosophical, dreamlike, with clear themes but a very adult ambiguity of meaning. So here's another.

This film is, of course, a blatant denunciation, from far to the north, of Hollywood and it's vacuous culture where everyone is an aspiring actor/writer/second gaffer. And Hollywood royalty is as horrible and exploitative as anything in the Ancien Regime- arrogant, entitled, obsessed with new age mumbo jumbo, and full of nasty casual prejudices beneath the surface liberalism. They are empty leeches who both feed off and discard ordinary people, from whose lives they are so very far removed. Havana (an excellent Julianne Moore) is as much a monster as anyone in the creepily incstuous and cursed Weiss family, and the relationship between her and Agatha is, I suppose, the fairly straightforward thematic core of the film.

But we also have the weird, incestuous and similarly loathsome Weiss family, seen being generally empty and horrible until prodgal daughter Agatha returns to "make amends". The plot unfolds at the perfect pace as the full, repetitive, abusive horror of the family's curse slowly unwinds. This is, I think, a film that will reward repetitive viewings. While critics are, I know, divided on ths, still Cronenberg's latest, I personally find it utterly compelling.

Hannibal (2001)

"You can look at my face, but you shied when I said the name of God."

It's an interesting prospect; get Ridley Scott to direct the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs. The result is a very different style of film (co-scripted by David Mamet, no less) which, while not equalling it's predecessor, is nevertheless an excellent film. The same health warning applies here as applied before, however; I haven't read the original Thomas Harris novel.

This sequel further develops the ghoulishly fascinating relationship between Hannibal Lecter and a recast Clarice Starling, portrayed by Julianne Moore as a much tougher and less nuanced figure. She is again alone in a man's world which belittles her on grounds of both class and gender, put on to the Lecter case by an all-male disciplinary committee. 

The third lead character here is the wealthy, disfigured and thoroughly disturbed Mason Verger, whose face was peeled off and fed to dogs by the delightful Mr Lecter. It's immediately obvious that he wants revenge but Lecter is safe, for the moment, posing as an academic in Italy whom is not, for the moment, suspected of anything by his police inspector friend. This soon changes, however, and the inspector's growing suspicions are an early source of tension in a section of the film that, while entertaining, takes up a surprisingly high percentage of the film. It's structurally odd, but somehow it works.

Eventually we get to an equally gripping game of cat and mouse between Clarice and Lecter, in an inevitable prelude to their showdown with Verger. It is interesting that this third act, like The Silence of the Lambs, does not feature Lecter as the main antagonist; this is not the most interesting use for the character. Clarice, as usual, must battle against both male authority and male violence with her only supporter a violent, canniballistic psychopath. Creepily, he's only nice to her because she's polite and her distress excites him.

It's a slow-paced film that goes quickly and ends suddenly when it seems there's much more to come, and there's a particularly gruesome brain-eating scene towards the end. This film is very oddly structured but is also that rate phenomenon of a worthy sequel.