How much would I weigh?

Lady Macbeth

(2016)

(SPOILERS) Not being familiar with the source material, I’d wondered if the title of this adaptation of Nikolai Leskov’s 1865 Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District was intended to be in some way ironic. Alas not. Alice Birch’s screenplay hits most of the main plot beats of the source material while embellishing Lady Macbeth with themes of class and race, but the material is so wretched, so squalid, and also at points so contrived, only Florence Pugh’s performance offers a reason to persevere.

And even then, there’s an oddly contemporary flavour to Pugh’s Katherine that’s at odds with the attempts to evoke period mores and constraints. I was put in mind at points of Andrea Arnold’s handheld Wuthering Heights a few years back, where you’re invited to adjust to the anachronistic tone but it nevertheless feels like an imposition.

The first section of William Oldroyd’s picture, in which Katherine is bought into marriage with disinterested husband Alexander (Paul Hilton), at the behest of his domineering father Boris (Christopher Fairbank), effectively establishes a stratum of control and sympathy for her plight. She’s as much a servant as semi-mute black housemaid Anna (Naomi Ackie), only she’s also reported on by the staff. As such, the affair she embarks upon with cocky cuckolder – and sexual assaulter and probable rapist – land worker Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis, of Armenian extraction, so further emphasising the class and race divisions) seems extraordinarily inadvisable yet represents understandable payback for the binding restrictions imposed.

This wilful behaviour soon escalates, however, as she poisons Boris and beats her returning husband to death with a poker, an extreme even Sebastian blanches at. Having reached this point in the narrative, Katherine is pretty much sitting pretty, with Boris in a box and Alexander feeding the worms, so it’s necessary to awkwardly introduce a new element. Birch is only taking her cues from the miserablist Russian originator, though, introducing Alexander’s allegedly illegitimate child in the ointment and his grandmother (in the novel, it’s Katherine’s husband’s nephew and his mother who arrive). It’s a clumsy development positioned to further expose the depths our titularly comparable character will sink to, and I guess it succeeds in said task, as she plans to kill the child in order to reunite with Sebastian, now keeping his distance (other occurrences too, such as her initial come-on to Sebastian after she finds Anna trussed up, and the final rush to believe her version of events, seem at variance, even if one can stretch to explain them away).

The big problem is that there’s little fascination in following Katherine’s growth as a complete psychopath, and the open ending, dispensing with the need for a moral judgement (again diverging from the novel) leaves us feeling nothing (I don’t think it’s clever because that’s exactly what Katherine is feeling, no).

William Oldroyd feature debut is confidently mounted and Fairbank’s cadaverously abusive father-in-law is a particular standout amongst the performances, but there’s no resonance, the additions to theme creaking in how obvious they are (white patriarchy is bad, those of ethnicity may as well be mute for all the power they have, abused by those of equal standing and destined to cop the blame in the end, even over those of lower class and breeding). Lady Macbeth is the kind of material calculated to earn nods of approval from the keenly perceptive, but once you get past the ingratiating thematic content, there’s little to appeal other than presentation.

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

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

Don’t Look Up (2021) (SPOILERS) It’s testament to Don’t Look Up ’s “quality” that critics who would normally lap up this kind of liberal-causes messaging couldn’t find it within themselves to grant it a free pass. Adam McKay has attempted to refashion himself as a satirist since jettisoning former collaborator Will Ferrell, but as a Hollywood player and an inevitably socio-politically partisan one, he simply falls in line with the most obvious, fatuous propagandising.

Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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