Woah, that's a bad guy, that's a really bad guy! Did you see his face? His head looks like one of the Easter Island heads!

Get Smart

(2008)

Weird film. Steve Carrell is very good, for what it's worth, and seems to be in an entirely different film to everyone else from the director down. Peter Segal seems to think he's shooting an actual Bond film, which doesn't seem to me to be the way to go with Smart, since it's always been intentionally broad and hyper-real.

Apparently Carrell did a pass on the script, so presumably it was even less of a comedy before he was involved. There's a nice dancing sequence with a hefty dancing partner, a good piece of psychologising of a villainous henchman and some decent physical comedy, but there's little for him to play off and few sparring partners for him to challenge (with the honourable exception of Alan Arkin, unsurpassable as ever). Even Terence Stamp is wasted.

There's a brief taste of how lunatic the film could have become in Bill Murray’s cameo as Agent 13, but it's annoying in that it occurs early on and leaves you wanting more. Which you never get.

**1/2

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Joker (2019)
(SPOILERS) So the murder sprees didn’t happen, and a thousand puff pieces desperate to fan the flames of such events and then told-ya-so have fallen flat on their faces. The biggest takeaway from Joker is not that the movie is an event, when once that seemed plausible but not a given, but that any mainstream press perspective on the picture appears unable to divorce its quality from its alleged or actual politics. Joker may be zeitgeisty, but isn’t another Taxi Driver in terms of cultural import, in the sense that Taxi Driver didn’t have a Taxi Driver in mind when Paul Schrader wrote it. It is, if you like, faux-incendiary, and can only ever play out on that level. It might be more accurately described as a grubbier, grimier (but still polished and glossy) The Talented Ripley, the tale of developing psychopathy, only tailored for a cinemagoing audience with few options left outside of comic book fare.

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I was vaguely familiar with the title, not because I knew much about Jordan Belfort but because the script had been in development for such a long time (Ridley Scott was attached at one time). So part of the pleasure of the film is discovering how widely the story diverges from the Wall Street template. “The Wolf of Wall Street” suggests one who towers over the city like a behemoth, rather than a guy …

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