How’d you manage to run over our llama?

Our Brand is Crisis

(2015)

(SPOILERS) Grant Heslov and George Clooney seem to have a knack for picking up fact-based fare on the grounds that it sounds vaguely interesting in a vaguely (or not so vaguely) political sense, and then attempting to work out a way of bashing it into some kind of semi-relatable narrative shape as a fiction movie. Occasionally they strike lucky (Argo, Good Night, and Good Luck), but more frequently they seem closer to having little idea, what with this and The Monuments Men and The Men Who Stare at Goats. Actually, I liked the latter, but it wore on its sleeve how no one had a clue how to make it work.

Our Brand is Crisis sounds like it should be good, based as it is on the 2005 doc of the same name concerning campaign strategists’ contributions to the 2002 Bolivian presidential election. But, like the majority of Clooney’s socially conscious fare it ends up mostly toothless (hardly surprising, when he happily hosts fundraisers for an overtly corrupt presidential nominee, presumably on the tremendously rocky grounds – always assuming he isn’t hopelessly deluded and genuinely thinks Hillary’s great, that is – that she’s better than the alternative). This is the movie equivalent of reformed ham, vaguely reminding you of the real thing but process-packaged to the hilt. The movie comes equipped with a jaunty, knowing, can-do vibe as it skims the surface of the ramifications and machinations of political power processes; it’s so determined to be accessible (rather than really good) that it ends up utterly inconsequential.

I’m not sure who’s to blame. Screenwriter Peter Straughan has been on a roll of late with Frank, Wolf Hall and Tinker Tailor, but let’s not forget he also has his name on The Debt, How to Lose Friends & Alienate People and the Goat Starers. Alternatively, I might single out director David Gordon Green, who like Richard Linklater tends to hit a bum note when he strays from the indie field.

The performers are fine, if unremarkable (Sandy Buttocks and Billy Bob Thornton and Scoot McNairy doing what we’ve seen them do many times, likewise Joaquim de Almeida appearing dodgy and duplicitous as per usual). The main problem is that the material, despite being ripe for exploration, is treated in the most obvious manner possible. The attempts by Bullock and Billy Bob to undermine each other’s candidates’ campaigns are banal, the genuine historical precedents ones we’ve heard many times before, leading to ones lacking any inventiveness (“I never knew Klaus Barbie”). Added to which, Bullock’s character arc is tediously familiar (burnt out, back in the game, firing on all cylinders to a generically upbeat soundtrack against campaign montages, shown to have more insight than everyone else, regular sparring chats with her Billy Bob nemesis).

In a way this is worse than straightforward mindless studio fare, because it’s made with exactly the same formulaic, hit-making mind-set but actually derives from worthwhile subject matter. As the opening voiceover informs us, campaign contributions (the ones Clooney, despite concurring with this assessment, is supporting) are indicative of an empirically corrupt system, but the self-satisfied manner in which Our Brand is Crisis sits on its satirical laurels and discusses electioneering through cartoonishly manufactured crises is dishearteningly antiseptic rather than stirring (inevitably the insidious IMF deal goes ahead, although curiously there isn’t a whiff of the CIA in all this). Worse still that our protagonist campaigner is lent nominal scruples; it’s a cop out to the realities of such forums, but of a piece with Clooney’s MOR handwringing in the likes of this, Money Monster and The Ides of March. A shame, as this might have been another Bulworth.

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.

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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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.

So you want me to be half-monk, half-hitman.

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(SPOILERS) Despite the doubts and trepidation from devotees (too blonde, uncouth etc.) that greeted Daniel Craig’s casting as Bond, and the highly cynical and low-inspiration route taken by Eon in looking to Jason Bourne's example to reboot a series that had reached a nadir with Die Another Day, Casino Royale ends up getting an enormous amount right. If anything, its failure is that it doesn’t push far enough, so successful is it in disarming itself of the overblown set pieces and perfunctory plotting that characterise the series (even at its best), elements that would resurge with unabated gusto in subsequent Craig excursions.

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.

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019)
(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.

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.

We’ll bring it out on March 25 and we’ll call it… Christmas II!

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.

On a long enough timeline, the survival of everyone drops to zero.

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(SPOILERS) Still David Fincher’s peak picture, mostly by dint of Fight Club being the only one you can point to and convincingly argue that that the source material is up there with his visual and technical versatility. If Seven is a satisfying little serial-killer-with-a-twist story vastly improved by his involvement (just imagine it directed by Joel Schumacher… or watch 8mm), Fight Club invites him to utilise every trick in the book to tell the story of not-Tyler Durden, whom we encounter at a very peculiar time in his life.

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(SPOILERS) There’s a near-Frank Darabont quality to Phil Alden Robinson producing such a beloved feature and then subsequently offering not all that much of note. But Darabont, at least, was in the same ballpark as The Shawshank Redemption with The Green Mile. Sneakers is good fun, The Sum of All Our Fears was a decent-sized success, but nothing since has come close to his sophomore directorial effort in terms of quality. You might put that down to the source material, WP Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe, but the captivating magical-realist balance hit by Field of Dreams is a deceptively difficult one to strike, and the biggest compliment you can play Robinson is that he makes it look easy.

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…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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