Some folks has a lot of things around them that shines for other peoples.

Precious

(2009)

Alternately gruelling and over-egged, Lee Daniels’ film ultimately succeeds on the strength of the central cast’s performances rather than its director’s frequent clumsiness (apparently his latest, The Paperboy, has caused much unintentional hilarity due to his choices). Set in Harlem in the late ‘80s, it features Gabourey Sidibe as Precious, a withdrawn, obsese teenager pregnant with a second child by her own father (her first has Down’s Syndrome).

As good as Sidibe is in the title role, it’s Mo’Nique playing her abusive mother who gives the most astonishing performance. She’s fearless in portraying her character’s cruelty and damaged mind, a woman whose defining reaction to her boyfriend abusing their daughter was jealousy. The support from Paul Patton and Mariah Carey, as teacher and social worker respectively, is very much in the mold of sympathetic audience substitute (albeit the latter, as Precious notes, is out of her depth), reeling in shock from the horrors she has suffered. But there’s a sense of Hollywood casting that distracts from the realism Daniels appears to be aiming for; Lenny Kravitz’s turn as a nurse compounds this.

While the script is commendably stark in its matter-of-factness, it also tumbles into the didactic and obvious at times. Characters can sound over-written (for example Precious’ vocalisation of her situation towards the end) and scenes occasionally come across as contrived for maximum manipulative effect.

Daniels makes stylistic choices both good and bad in equal measure. Precious’ fantasy sequences are poorly conceived and realised; one gets the sense the device is contrived from other movies that have used it much more convincingly. Likewise, he employs editing devices such as jump cuts to invite us into her mental space but they are variably effective. Sometimes the handheld camera works, sometimes it feels forced, faux-verite. As compelling as the subject matter is, Daniels needed to exercise more restraint so as not to come off heavy-handed.

***1/2

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
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I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

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Prediction 2019 Oscars
Shockingly, as in I’m usually much further behind, I’ve missed out on only one of this year’s Best Picture nominees– Vice isn’t yet my vice, it seems – in what is being suggested, with some justification, as a difficult year to call. That might make for must-see appeal, if anyone actually cared about the movies jostling for pole position. If it were between Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody (if they were even sufficiently up to snuff to deserve a nod in the first place), there might be a strange fascination, but Joe Public don’t care about Roma, underlined by it being on Netflix and stillconspicuously avoided by subscribers (if it were otherwise, they’d be crowing about viewing figures; it’s no Bird Box, that’s for sure).

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Starship Troopers (1997)
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Mountains are old, but they're still green.

Roma (2018)
(SPOILERS) Roma is a critics' darling and a shoe-in for Best Foreign Film Oscar, with the potential to take the big prize to boot, but it left me profoundly indifferent, its elusive majesty remaining determinedly out of reach. Perhaps that's down to generally spurning autobiographical nostalgia fests – complete with 65mm widescreen black and white, so it's quite clear to viewers that the director’s childhood reverie equates to the classics of old – or maybe the elliptical characterisation just didn't grab me, but Alfonso Cuarón's latest amounts to little more than a sliver of substance beneath all that style.

My name is Dr. King Schultz, this is my valet, Django, and these are our horses, Fritz, and Tony.

Django Unchained (2012)
(MINOR SPOILERS) Since the painful misstep of Grindhouse/Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino has regained the higher ground like never before. Pulp Fiction, his previous commercial and critical peak, has been at very least equalled by the back-to-back hits of Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Having been underwhelmed by his post Pulp Fiction efforts (albeit, I admired his technical advances as a director in Kill Bill), I was pleasantly surprised by Inglourious Basterds. It was no work of genius (so not Pulp Fiction) by any means, but there was a gleeful irreverence in its treatment of history and even to the nominal heroic status of its titular protagonists. Tonally, it was a good fit for the director’s “cool” aesthetic. As a purveyor of postmodern pastiche, where the surface level is the subtext, in some ways he was operating at his zenith. Django Unchained is a retreat from that position, the director caught in the tug between his all-important aesthetic pr…

Can you float through the air when you smell a delicious pie?

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
(SPOILERS) Ironically, given the source material, think I probably fell into the category of many who weren't overly disposed to give this big screen Spider-Man a go on the grounds that it was an animation. After all, if it wasn’t "good enough" for live-action, why should I give it my time? Not even Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's pedigree wholly persuaded me; they'd had their stumble of late, although admittedly in that live-action arena. As such, it was only the near-unanimous critics' approval that swayed me, suggesting I'd have been missing out. They – not always the most reliable arbiters of such populist fare, which made the vote of confidence all the more notable – were right. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is not only a first-rate Spider-Man movie, it's a fresh, playful and (perhaps) surprisingly heartfelt origins story.

I don’t think you will see President Pierce again.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
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Now we're all wanted by the CIA. Awesome.

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Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
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Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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