Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world.

Nocturnal Animals

(2016)

(SPOILERS) I’d heard Marmite things about Tom Ford’s sophomore effort (I’ve yet to catch his debut), but they were enough to make me mildly intrigued. Unfortunately, I ended up veering towards the “I hate” polarity. Nocturnal Animals is as immaculately shot as you’d expect from a fashion designer with a meticulously unbuttoned shirt, but its self-conscious structure – almost that of a poseur – never becomes fluid in Ford’s liberal adaptation of Austin Wright’s novel, such that even its significantly stronger aspect – the film within the film (or novel within the film) – is diminished by the dour stodge that surrounds it.

I read a comment suggesting Nocturnal Animals’ “framing” material was like The Neon Demon if it had nothing remotely interesting going on beneath its shiny surface. There’s definitely something to that. Ford has sketched a portrait of shallow, superficial super-rich dining out on their ever-so-empty artistic elitism (the picture kicks off with an exhibit of gyrating obese nude women, as if someone had dragged Peter Greenaway down the discotheque and then summarily locked him in an art gallery with a selection of variable frame rates).

Amy Adams (she’s okay; I mean she’s never not good, but she has nowt to chew on here) is Susan Morrow, the gallery owner who has eschewed any personal creative aspirations and finished it with her sensitive/weak – genuinely creative – first husband Edward Sheffield (Jake Gyllenhaal) after his failed to come to anything and she met bland superstud Hutton (Armie Hammer). But, when she receives a manuscript from Edward, dedicated to her, she discovers a tale she can’t put down, and as apparently distinctive as the characters and setting are, she recognises within a hard-hitting allegory for her own severed relationship.

It sounds like there’s a decent kernel here, but there’s nothing about Susan’s story to engage the viewer; it’s impossible to feel much empathy for her plight, her (new) hubby having an affair while her frivolous friends (Michael Sheen and Andrea Riseborough, of whom we see far too little) advise her “Believe me, our world is a lot less painful than the real world” as she opines “Do you ever feel your life has turned into something you never intended?” We’re treated – asked to endure, more like – flashbacks to her relationship with Edward that entirely fail to make either more interesting or reinforce the idea that there was something to invest in here in the first place.

So instead, the raw meat of the movie derives from Edward’s novel, Nocturnal Animals, Ford seguing back and forth from in the most indelicate manner. It’s a pretty big clue anyway that Susan reads the novel’s protagonist Tony Hastings with Edward in mind (so he’s also played by Gyllenhaal), a man who loses his wife and daughter to a trio of murderous redneck rapists on a deserted Texas road. What befalls them both is as crudely devised as any manipulative shocker – the build-up to events is horribly, expertly sustained – so Tony, tortured by his own – yes – weakness is naturally out for revenge, abetted by cancerous cop Michael Shannon, yet Ford makes this tale grimly compelling even as Aaron Taylor-Johnson appears to have studied at the foot of Straw Dogs and Deliverance for his unapologetic psychopath.

Ford is such a glacially controlled director that you almost forget to double take at some of the dialogue he attempts to get away with (as screenwriter). At a crucial moment, we discover that Susan not only left her first hubby, she had an abortion to boot, thanks to her leaving the clinic and delivering the line “I just don’t think I’m ever going to be able to look at Edward again after what I did to his child” to a consoling Hutton. Guess who’s standing in front of their rain-lashed car looking entirely bereft, right on cue? Just who’s writing the pulp novel here? Certainly, Sheffield is, with lines like “It’s fun to kill people”.

At other points, Susan is beset by dark visions of her haunting read, as Taylor-Johnson somewhat daftly leaps into frame on a colleague’s baby monitor app as if Ford’s decided to go all out for cheap jump-scare tactics. I was going to suggest he’s trying for a Polanski vibe with her unravelling psyche, but he doesn’t come close. He’s probably also angling for a Hitchcock flavour, certainly with Abel Korzeniowski’s sumptuous, elegant score.

Ford leaves us with Susan being stood up at a dinner date with Edward, letting the viewer surmise whether this was some elaborate revenge on his part – that he knew her emptiness would allow him to reel her in with the book – or rather that he decided he couldn’t face her. I’m not sure she should be too upset, since it probably wasn’t a great idea going looking to rekinde anything, not if Edward’s exorcising his demons through such an extreme elaboration of their experience. But if only we cared either way.

Taylor-Johnson was ladled a Golden Globe for his backwoods pains, while Shannon mustered on Oscar nomination. That latter’s certainly the most watchable part of Nocturnal Animals, enjoying a sympathetic role for a change and eschewing the over-familiar bug-eyed loon shtick. But as potent as Edward’s story is, it can only feel diminished as a tool of revenge/catharsis (complete with ending so absurdly nihilistic, only Nordberg in The Naked Gun could have outdone poor Tony). Ford isn’t so much delivering a slippery narrative conceit as a clunky one, since at least two-thirds of his devices are stillborn, and the one that isn’t is really little more than spruced-up western-noir horror.

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

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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.

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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Casino Royale (2006)
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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…

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Bumblebee (2018)
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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

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…

Welcome to the future. Life is good. But it can be better.

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It’s like an angry white man’s basement in here.

Bad Boys for Life (2020)
(SPOILERS) The reviews for Bad Boys for Life have, perhaps surprisingly, skewed positive, given that it seemed exactly the kind of beleaguered sequel to get slaughtered by critics. Particularly so since, while it’s a pleasure to see Will Smith and Martin Lawrence back together as Mike and Marcus, the attempts to validate this third outing as a more mature, reflective take on their buddy cops is somewhat overstated. Indeed, those moments of reflection or taking stock arguably tend to make the movie as a whole that much glibber, swiftly succeeded as they are by lashings of gleeful ultra-violence or humorous shtick. Under Michael Bay, who didn’t know the definition of a lull, these pictures scorned any opportunity to pause long enough to assess the damage, and were healthier, so to speak, for that. Without him, Bad Boys for Life’s beats often skew closer to standard 90s action fare.

To defeat the darkness out there, you must defeat the darkness inside yourself.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (2010)
Easily the best of the Narnia films, which is maybe damning it with faint praise.

Michael Apted does a competent job directing (certainly compared to his Bond film - maybe he talked to his second unit this time), Dante Spinotti's cinematography is stunning and the CGI mostly well-integrated with the action.

Performance-wise, Will Poulter is a stand-out as a tremendously obnoxious little toff, so charismatic you're almost rooting for him. Simon Pegg replaces Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and delivers a touching performance.
***

You’re a slut with a snake in your mouth. Die!

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(SPOILERS) Apparently this early – as in, two years before the one that made them both highly sought-after trailblazers of “New Hollywood” – teaming between Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn has undergone a re-evaluation since its initial commercial and critical drubbing. I’m not sure about all that. Mickey One still seems fatally half-cocked to me, with Penn making a meal of imitating the stylistic qualities that came relatively naturally – or at least, Gallically – to the New Wave.

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Pokémon Detective Pikachu (2019)
(SPOILERS) I was put in mind of Shazam! watching Pokémon Detective Pikachu, another 2019 tentpole that somewhat underperformed based on expectations. Not particularly due to any plot resemblance, but because both movies fall apart under the weight of an overblown and underwhelming finale. In the case of Shazam! that may be more damaging to its prospective sequels (if they keep the team of super-adult kids), whereas Detective Pikachu will simply have to struggle with a whole heap of unnecessary expositional baggage attempting to imbue the proceedings with emotional resonance.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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