Would you like a waffle, Mr. Harris?

A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas

(2011)

Frequently hilarious second sequel, and superior to Guantanamo Bay (which hit a “high” early on with the aeroplane/terrorist scene and a definite low with the unfunny stoned George W Bush impersonator). Harold is working in the city (protestors hold placards reading “Wall Street Sucks” and “Wall Street 2 Sucks Harder”) while Kumar is an out of work stoner (he was briefly employed by the White House, one of a number of witty in-jokes). Although estranged from each other, the quest for a Christmas tree forces them back together. It’s awash with the usual bad taste humour (including a baby getting higher and higher on progressively stronger drugs), really stupid 3D, and of course the return of Neil Patrick Harris (Gracie: Get off me! I thought you were gay! NPH: I am gay. Gay for that…)

Most inspired of all are Wafflebot (of whom more in a moment) and the casting of Danny Trejo as Harold’s father-in-law (Koreans killed his mother). Trejo is sublime as a Christmas obsessive who is repelled by faux-trees and wears a horrendous-yet-fantastically-unTrejo seasonal motif sweater. There’s even a montage sequence in which Trejo acts out Kumar’s comment “When he sees this beautiful tree he’s going to jizz all over it”. Also having fun in a hard man role is Elias Koteas as Russian gangster Sergei Katsov. The movie missteps on a few occasions; the Claymation sequence simply isn’t very good, and NPH in heaven is trying a little too hard to be inflammatory. However, the splendor of Wafflebot more than makes up for the odd shortcoming elsewhere. He’s utterly adorable. He loves waffles. And he fucking hates pancakes.

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Atomic Blonde (2017)
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(SPOILERS) My initial reaction to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood was mild disbelief that Tarantino managed to hoodwink studios into coming begging to make it, so wilfully perverse is it in disregarding any standard expectations of narrative or plotting. Then I remembered that studios, or studios that aren’t Disney, are desperate for product, and more especially, product that might guarantee them a hit. Quentin’s latest appears to be that, but whether it’s a sufficient one to justify the expense of his absurd vanity project remains to be seen.

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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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Along with Pain & Gain and The Great Gatsby, The Wolf of Wall Street might be viewed as the completion of a loose 2013 trilogy on the subject of success and excess; the American Dream gone awry. It’s the superior picture to its fellows, by turns enthralling, absurd, outrageous and hilarious. This is the fieriest, most deliriously vibrant picture from the director since the millennium turned. Nevertheless, stood in the company of Goodfellas, the Martin Scorsese film from which The Wolf of Wall Street consciously takes many of its cues, it is found wanting.

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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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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(SPOILERS) I was going to say I’d really like to see what Vince Gilligan has up his sleeve besidesBreaking Bad spinoffs. But then I saw that he had a short-lived series on CBS a few years back (Battle Creek). I guess things Breaking Bad-related ensure an easy greenlight, particularly from Netflix, for whom the original show was bread and butter in its take up as a streaming platform. There’s something slightly dispiriting about El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie, though. Not that Gilligan felt the need to return to Jesse Pinkman – although the legitimacy of that motive is debatable – but the desire to re-enter and re-inhabit the period of the show itself, as if he’s unable to move on from a near-universally feted achievement and has to continually exhume it and pick it apart.

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