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Showing posts with label Jeff Goldblum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jeff Goldblum. Show all posts
Friday, January 23, 2015
Friday, January 23, 2015
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In the absence of press screenings (always a worrying sign) I trooped up to Angel and forked out for a ticket. At the Islington Vue they directed me to a tiny screen I'd never even noticed before, tucked away under the stairs next to the fire exit. I was greeted with a small, empty cinema occupied solely by a bearded old man in a giant coat. He nodded as I passed him, then I smelt the TCP. The guy stank of it - he must have been glugging bottles of the stuff
Nobody else showed up. Ten minutes into Mortdecai I heard the sound of peaceful snoring, which proved to continue for the duration. I figure he came to the cinema purely for the warmth. I've got to commend him for getting something positive out of this experience, because all I got was a sucking sense of horror, disappointment and boredom.
Mortdecai is an embarrassment for all involved; from Johnny Depp's crushingly unfunny lead through David Koepps's amateurish direction, through the score that sounds like The Real Slim Shady right down to the mangy mongrel of a script they're grinding their way through. Apparently Mortdecai is based on a series of books by a guy called Kyril Bonfiglioli, but I'll be damned if I've ever heard of them. Now, the advertising campaign for Mortdecai has been awfully vague about what this film is actually about, so let me fill you in.
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| Hilarious! |
Charlie Mortdecai (Johnny Depp) is a wacky upper-class English art dealer who travels the world getting into unlikely scrapes with his manservant (Paul Bettany). He lives in some old country pile with his long suffering wife Johanna (Gwyneth Paltrow), who's exasperated at Mortdecai for frittering away their money on some kooky scheme or another. Now, after an £8 million tax bill, they're at the point of insolvency, selling their family heirlooms and even *gasp* considering opening the house to the public.
The film itself revolves around Mortdecai attempting to secure a long lost Goya painting that'll solve his worries and pay off his taxes. Heading the investigation is MI5's Martland (Ewan McGregor) a university friend of Mortdecai who's also in love with his wife. Tracking down the painting involves all kinds of unlikely scrapes, misunderstandings and crap puns. Naturally this is all hilarious.
Oh wait.
No.
It's not hilarious. This is shit.
Mortdecai turns out to be the awful (yet logical) conclusion of Johnny Depp's success in Pirates of the Caribbean. 12 years ago he thrilled audience with the vulgar, semi-drunken louche Captain Jack Sparrow. Women wanted him, men wanted to be him; his performance singlehandedly launching a multibillion dollar franchise that still threatens multiplexes to this day. After Pirates nobody could tell Depp to stop acting like an ass, so we got Alice in Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Lone Ranger. With each self-consciously zany role Depp sacrificed a fragment of audience goodwill. Mortdecai marks the moment that goodwill runs out completely.
Watching him cavort about the screen is like watching a drunken uncle at a embarrass himself at a wedding. You cringe and watch through your fingers as he tries to chat up the bridesmaids, attempts to take the stage to sing with the band and crack bad jokes. Everyone sits there in frozen horror at what they're watching, wishing someone would take him outside and call him a cab.
Mortdecai is so stupendously crap that you might suspect it's some elaborate form of flagellation, a suicide pill of a script designed to torpedo careers. But Depp behaves as this is the height of humour, bumbling like a cut-rate Inspector Clouseau through lifeless slapstick and inane misunderstandings. At one particularly low point he has to shuffle down a corridor with a boner sticking out of his pants. Worryingly, there's no hint of shame as he does this - as if Depp genuinely, truly believes that people will lap this shit up. I can only compare this sense of comedy delusion to Mike Myers' similarly disastrous The Love Guru.
It's difficult to convey just how off-putting the Mortdecai character is; constructed with the idea that we'll be charmed by his eccentricity and root for him against the squares. But the combination of Depp's comedy cockney accent, the stupid moustache and the sub-vocal wibblings add up to a truly hateful cinematic creation who you wish the very worst for.
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| An unhappy Paul Bettany |
The rest of the cast approach the material with a combination of desperation and gritted-teeth professionalism. Ewan McGregor and Gwyneth Paltrow do their level best to get through this unscathed, gingerly interacting with Depp as if he's a much-loved relative in the early stages of dementia. In Paul Bettany the misery is more obvious; this is a top class actor relegated to the role of moronic comedy butler. Stare into his eyes and you see a man resolving to not just sack, but brutally assault his agent.
In every possible regard Mortdecai fucking sucks. Tragically everyone knows this but Depp, which is probably why this is being quietly squeaked into cinemas in the ass-end of January sans press screenings. I think it's time to stage an intervention:
Mr Depp, you need to stop. This is rock bottom. Put down the silly hats. Take off the beads. Throw away the eyeliner. For god's sake you're pissing away every happy memory audiences have of you. Look at Nicholas Cage - look at him - do you want to end up like that?! I didn't think so. Mr Depp, stop.
Please stop.
★
Mortdecai is released today.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Saturday, March 8, 2014
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If Wes Anderson was God the world would be a much nicer place. Over the course of his cinematic career he's woven unique cinematic style; creating a fractally detailed, synchronised universe. This is a world where every tiny thing on screen is a jigsaw piece in a bigger picture; the fabrics used in the productions, the style of beards; the fonts on the cover of books; the dents on cars and tiny sound effects and a thousand other minute, carefully considered elements adding up to a sumptuous feast - a beautiful world, an aesthetic world - a better world.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is pinnacle of Wes Anderson's style; a geometric, symmetric and rectilinear caper through beautiful spaces populated with the cream of modern acting talent. After watching this it's difficult to imagine how a film could be any more Wes Anderson than this; every frame packed to the rafters with his idiosyncratic style.
At it's core, the film is the story of a hotel. Set in the cartoonish fake Eastern European country of Zubrowka, the film quickly reveals a pleasingly onion-like structure. We open with a modern woman visiting a monument to a famous Zubrowkian writer known only as "The Author". As she opens a book we flash-back to 1985 where the middle-aged author is explains his methods and how he gets his ideas. From here we flash-back once more to the mid 1960s, where the author (now played by Jude Law) stays at the hotel; now bedraggled, largely unoccupied and suffering under a shabby Kubrickean refit. Here he meets the unassuming owner of the hotel. The two men have dinner and the elderly owner recounts the tale of how he came to run this building.
Now we're in the meat of the story: it's 1932 and Zubrowka is on the verge of war. The hotel is its prime, every aspect overseen by the exacting eye of concierge M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) with the assistance of his lobby boy protégé Zero (Tony Revolori). With the death of elderly patron Madame D (Tilda Swinton) and her subsequent bequeathment of a painting to the concierge, the stage is set for adventure. For the rest of the film we plunge into an energetic, fast-paced farce as Gustave and Zero battle assassins, the military police, prison guards and sinister in-laws of Madame D. The plot twists and turns across Zubrowka, taking in cities, countryside and mountain-tops, showing us every inch of a country which usually only exists on the front of a chocolate box.
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| It's always nice to see Jeff Goldblum in a film. |
As with most Wes Anderson films, you'd be hard pressed to put together a better cast he can. Every few minutes a hugely talented actor pops up, does themselves proud then vanishes back into the crowd. But though we see some memorable turns from luminaries like Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Harvey Keitel, Edward Norton and Adrien Brody, none of these can really touch Ralph Fiennes. Quite simply he's marvellous, combining a brittle pansexual grace with a military man's attention to detail. Often, (sometimes within the space of a single line of dialogue!), he's paternal, horny, cruel and touching. It's a masterclass of a performance; turning what could have been a prissy Basil Fawlty type into a weirdly noble action hero.
One aspect of Wes Anderson's writing I deeply appreciate is the sincerity of his characters. They wear their passions on their sleeve, announcing their loves and fears at the drop of a hat. There's no ironic winking in a Wes Anderson film, when someone declares their love - whether it be for a hotel, an elderly lady or a resourceful baker, the film takes them at their word. It's important not to take this transparency as shallowness; just because these characters don't have secrets doesn't make them any less dramatically fascinating. My own theory as to why Anderson's characters behave so oddly is that they're children's ideas of what adult behaviour is like.
This is at the forefront of most of his films; the childish revenge of Herman Blume in Rushmore, the arrested development of the children in The Royal Tenenbaums; the swashbuckling (apparently) 'ideal' Dad Steve Zissou of The Life Aquatic. Most of all it's at the forefront of his last film, the excellent Moonrise Kingdom, with two young runaways besotted with each other to the confusion of the neurotic adults. In Grand Budapest we see Anderson's child-like world butting up against realpolitik, from the opening sequence we realise that this idealised 1930s world will be crushed under the boot of concrete realism - innocent childhood gradually and acceptingly replaced by the cool utilitarianism of adulthood.
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| This is a very pretty film. |
This is furthered in the visual style of the film, the watercoloured matte-paintings and landscape wide-shots of Grand Budapest recalling children's pop-up books, the objects whizzing and wobbling through the scenery in a pleasingly analogue manner - looking like hand-made papercraft. In fact, of all Wes Anderson's films, the closest aesthetic relation is the stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox - a film that's literally children's literature in motion.
With the clear divisions between goodies and baddies and fast-paced rhythmic action The Grand Budapest Hotel succeeds largely because it follows this basic template of children's adventure story, with laser-perfect moments of swearing and the odd bit of gruesome violence. This is pure escapism - a retreat into a reassuring world of order and beauty. The camera movements, locked into horizontal or vertical geometric motions underline this vision of an ordered universe, which ultimately becomes represented by the clockwork running of the titular hotel.
This is an absolute pleasure to watch from start to finish, tapping into the same base level of wonderment as you get when you peer into a miniature village, or pull open the doors of an extravagantly detailed doll's house and marvel at the detailing on every tiny piece of furniture. Under Anderson's steady hand everything in the film pulls in the same direction, the best moment being a pursuit up a mountain where every single sound effect squeaks and beats in time to Alexandre DeSplat's masterful score.
The Grand Budapest Hotel makes no grand claims to sociological importance. It has no pretensions to tell us anything about the modern world. The message, such as it is, is essentially about the importance of good people sticking together - hardly news to a seasoned audience. Yet there's something to be said for simple beauty, humour and craftsmanship in cinema. For a film to quite simply make you happy is reason enough for it to exist: with The Grand Budapest Hotel now out there in the world, things are minutely happier.
★★★★★
The Grand Budapest Hotel is out now.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
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The phenomenon known as infrasound has some very strange effects on human beings. These are sounds lower in frequency than 20 Hz, below the normal limit of human hearing. Infrasound has the effect of inducing anxiety, uneasiness, uncontrollable feelings of fear and awe. In nature they're found in the roar of the tiger and other large predators - the theory being that that human beings are hard-wired to experience a surge of adrenaline at hearing them - triggering a fight or flight response to escape a hungry predator. When the Tyrannosaurus Rex, the undisputed star of Jurassic Park, roared full blast through the BFI IMAX sound system I felt that instinctive, primal fear - an awe that cut past all intellectual analysis right to the animal core of my brain.
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