The Founder (2016)

 "You know,contracts are like hearts.They're made to be broken."

This is not, by any means, the sort of film I'd naturally gravitate to watching- the origin story of a major corporation. Yet, as a drama, this is quietly brilliant, both in terms of characterisation and what it has to say about business, morality, and the chimera that is the "American dream".

We're introduced to Ray Croc, a struggling salesman, viuaa straight to camera sales pitch, a device that, rather cleverly, gets us rooting for this underdog... only later pulling the rug out from under us and show that hehas, all this time, been not only a deeply driven go-getter but a callous dick with no morals or integrity, a terribe husband and utterly amoral. Michael Keaton, whose career seems to have had a real renaissance over the last decade, captures this superbly.

The contrast with the McDonald brothers is instructive. They are business geniuses, introducing thbe methods of Henry Ford to the burger bar, but still with a core of morals and integrity. And, while Kroc genuinely deserves credit for the success of the franchise model, he turns out to be an amoral parasite.

And there is, I think, something deeper here... the cruel concept of the American dream, that anyone can make it if they work hard enough. This is an ideology that crassly ignores the fact that we do not all start out from the same position- poverty, illness and discrimination exist as barriers for many. Capitalism goes hand in hand with a social safety net, making it safe to take risks. And ethics must be enforced by laws. Without such things... we won't have real, creative entrepreneurs like the McDonald brothers. We'll have the world of Ray Kroc.

Jurassic Park (1993)

 “An interactive CD-ROM!”

“An interactive C-D ROM!” 

I had a vague impression I’d seen this film 🎥 before. I hadn’t. It is, to avoid all beating around any bushes, brilliant. Oh, the cast is superb. Sam Neill and Laura Dern star with great brightness. Dickie Attenborough gives us a real career highlight. Jeff Goldblum gives us the prototype of the splendid maverick scientist role that he would come to own. Bob Peck, a find actor, finally makes it in Hollywood.

The CGI is dated. The science, perhaps, too: dinosaurs ARE birds. And, yes, Ian is highly charismatic. Yet his spiel against John’s sci-fi dinosaur DNS nonsense is subtly religious, objecting not only to John’s playing around with the ecosystem but to his perceived blasphemy- and “blasphemy” is a concept accepted only by tyrants who despise freedom and crave theocratic absolutism. Also, there’s an amusingly obvious subplot of getting the kid-hating Alan to begin to tolerate the little soda.

That aside, though, this is a solid blockbuster from the esteemed and too often snobbish my dismissed Mr Spielberg. Long may he direct.

Wild at Heart (1990)

“Too bad he couldn't visit that old Wizard of Oz and get some good advice."

This is a David Lynch film, so you just know there's going to be weirdness, symbolism and ambiguous subtext. We get all this in Wild at Heart, yet it simultaneously is and isn't what one might expect from Lynch.

Interestingly, despite the arty directorial flashes, dreamy atmosphere, eschewal of nturalism in both directorial and acting styles and Lynchian blurring of what is and is not real, on the surface this is quite a straightforward film, to the extent of being cheesy. After all, it's a road movie, a romance with a happy ending, and interestingly the kind of action movie based on American  grotesques that looks ahead to Tarantino.

And yet there's so much going on beneath the surface- playful irony, yes, but much more. There's a loving relationship between two flawed but decent people, lots and lots of good sex, and the soppiest ending ever- but there's also a lot of darkness, particularly sexual darkness. We learn of Lula being sexually abused as a teenager, and Bobby sexually assaults her in a very uncomfortable scene. Yet, although this film doesn't flinch from the fact that this is a sometimes dark world, where good people suffer and die needlessly, it's also a film that holds out the hope of eventual happiness.

It's also, interestingly, a film full of characters reminiscing to one another, but these memories are unclear, frangmentary and inconsistent: all the characters, and indeed the narrative itself, are unreliable narrators. Memory, and thus the past, is a fragile, vague thing. There is only now. There's a melancholy to this, but also hope: we don't have to be prisoners of our past, as Sailor ultimately learns from the Good Witch.

And no, I've no idea what those Wizard of Oz references are all about, beyond the obvious rarallel of a journey. But this is a film that can be enjoued at a much deeper level while also being a weirdly straightforward melodrama. Fascinating.

Blue Velvet (1986)

"Why are there people like Frank?"

It really is about time I got round to blogging a David Lynch film, frankly. It's inevitable when you review a large number of films (Blue Velvet is my 377th, quite shockingly) that certain omissions get more and more embarrassing, and David Lynch was at the top of that list.

Blue Velvet is, of course, at once very, very good and very, very weird. It may not break the fourth wall or break its linear narrative beyond a few minor flashbacks, and it may make narrative sense, but that uncomfortable sex scene with Dorothy and Frank goes beyond just weird and deeply uncomfortable into just plain weird, and just as weird are the whole scene at Ben's and, well, the entire characters of Dorothy and Frank. Into this very odd world come the picket fences and more or less wholesome characters of Sandy and Jeffrey.

But Jeffrey is no innocent, literally driven by morbid curiosity and having an affair with Dorothy at the same time as he tries to woo the very innocent and very vulnerable Sandy. It's tempting to see this as a film about the male gaze, centred on Jeffrey's spying voyeuristically from Dorothy's closet but essentially driven throughout by Jeffrey asserting his male gaze on the female sexuality and female life that surrounds him.

There's a lot more going on here than I've spotted, of course, not least the significance of the music, but there's no doubting that this is a splendidly shot, deeply multilayered and utterly superb cinematic classic. With some very '80s decor.