I'm Jim Cameron, and here's the deal.

Aliens of the Deep

(2005)

The capper (so-far) to a Jimbo Cameron and the Underwater Adventures of the Ego trilogy, Aliens of the Deep reconfirms that, whatever his deficiencies as a dramatist, Cameron’s far better suited to expressing himself in that direction, with the medium’s accompanying bombast and overstatement, than inflicting himself on poor, unfortunate real people – some of them poor, unfortunate professionals just trying to do their jobs, rather than seeking adulation – and repackaging interesting and thought-provoking subject matter into ill-serviced chicken feed.

This one, co-directed with Steven Quale, is easily the best produced of the three (the previous entries being Expedition: Bismarck and Ghosts of the Abyss; there’s also Earthship. TV, a documentary featuring footage from his return visit to Titanic, but since this ought to be covered by Ghosts, I’m not really counting it as a separate directorial effort), but it’s also the most shamelessly tailored to his tastes, blending his twin obsessions of deep sea and off-world exploration to extrapolate how discovery in the depths of the oceans would benefit a similar expedition to (say) the moon Europa.

As per usual, then, there are some splendid visuals, but a resoundingly patronising tone and delivery accompanies them. If you want any serious dive into the subjects broached, you’d be best going elsewhere. It might also be better to watch with the sound off during some passages, particularly whenever Jimbo is centre stage, holding forth and martialling “his troops” as if this is another of his military campaign-style movie productions.

Generally, the “Wow!” factor makes for a particularly witless constant. Cameron tells us, “I love this stuff!”, finding it much more exciting than any Hollywood special effects. To prove it, he wrote a 40-page manual on launching the submersibles, which also marks him out as incredibly anal amid all that self-regard.

He may love this stuff, but he fails to dazzle us with his broad spectrum knowledge. Rather than offering anything informative about its general purpose or mission in life, he comes across “like, the ugliest fish in the world”. But I’m sure that’s detail enough for you. He occasionally drops in a fantastically annoying “technical” phrase (“That’s the most amount of biomass I’ve ever seen in my life”, of an inundation of tiny shrimp, topping it with a typically knuckleheaded pronouncement that their “party’s been going on down there in the dark for the last billion years”).

The more you see of Jimbo in these excursions, the less you want to. There are frequently interesting visuals captured, particularly when it comes to deep sea lava and hydrothermal vents, but Cameron’s idea of enlightening is to follow a photogenic marine biologist around and frame her in the most adoring fashion possible, rather than have her expound on the understanding she has accumulated.

Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.

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I just hope my death makes more cents than my life.

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The Irishman aka I Heard You Paint Houses (2019)
(SPOILERS) Perhaps, if Martin Scorsese hadn’t been so opposed to the idea of Marvel movies constituting cinema, The Irishman would have been a better film. It’s a decent film, assuredly. A respectable film, definitely. But it’s very far from being classic. And a significant part of that is down to the usually assured director fumbling the execution. Or rather, the realisation. I don’t know what kind of crazy pills the ranks of revered critics have been taking so as to recite as one the mantra that you quickly get used to the de-aging effects so intrinsic to its telling – as Empire magazine put it, “you soon… fuggadaboutit” – but you don’t. There was no point during The Irishman that I was other than entirely, regrettably conscious that a 75-year-old man was playing the title character. Except when he was playing a 75-year-old man.

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For the majority of its first two hours, Casino Royale is top-flight entertainment, with returning director Martin Campbell managing to exceed his excellent work reformatting Bond for the ‘90s. That the weakest sequence (still good, mind) prior to the finale is a traditional “big” (but not too big) action set piece involving an attempt to…

Poor Easy Breezy.

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You're skipping Christmas! Isn't that against the law?

Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
Ex-coke dealer Tim Allen’s underwhelming box office career is, like Vince Vaughn’s, regularly in need of a boost from an indiscriminate public willing to see any old turkey posing as a prize Christmas comedy. He made three Santa Clauses, and here is joined by Jamie Lee Curtis as a couple planning to forgo the usual neighbourhood festivities for a cruise.

She was addicted to Tums for a while.

Marriage Story (2019)
(SPOILERS) I don’t tend to fall heavily for Noah Baumbach fare. He’s undoubtedly a distinctive voice – even if his collaborations with Wes Anderson are the least of that director’s efforts – but his devotion to an exclusive, rarefied New York bubble becomes ever more off-putting with each new project. And ever more identifiable as being a lesser chronicler of the city’s privileged quirks than his now disinherited forbear Woody Allen, who at his peak mastered a balancing act between the insightful, hilarious and self-effacing. Marriage Story finds Baumbach going yet again where Woody went before, this time brushing up against the director’s Ingmar Bergman fixation.

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Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)
(SPOILERS) Alexander Salkind (alongside son Ilya) inhabited not dissimilar territory to the more prolific Dino De Laurentis, in that his idea of manufacturing a huge blockbuster appeared to be throwing money at it while being stingy with, or failing to appreciate, talent where it counted. Failing to understand the essential ingredients for a quality movie, basically, something various Hollywood moguls of the ‘80s would inherit. Santa Claus: The Movie arrived in the wake of his previously colon-ed big hit, Superman: The Movie, the producer apparently operating under the delusion that flying effects and :The Movie in the title would induce audiences to part with their cash, as if they awarded Saint Nick a must-see superhero mantle. The only surprise was that his final cinematic effort, Christopher Columbus: The Discovery, wasn’t similarly sold, but maybe he’d learned his lesson by then. Or maybe not, given the behind-camera talent he failed to secure.

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Basil Dearden directs, and co-adapted the screenplay from Anthony Armstrong’s novel The Strange Case of Mr Pelham. Dearden started out with Ealing, helming several Will Hay pictures and a segment of Dead of Night (one might imagine a shortened version of this tale ending up there, or in any of the portmanteau horrors that arrived in the year…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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