A Superfluous O

When I was a lad, especially prior to the home entertainment revolution, your actual classic Disney cartoons never turned up on TV: the corporation had hit upon a cunning wheeze to maximise its cashflow as far as these films were concerned. The trick was a simple one: rather than selling the films to TV networks, Disney just kept re-releasing them into cinemas on a seven-year cycle, meaning that every new generation got the chance to see them on the big screen. This continued until the dawn of the new modern age of Disney animation in the early 90s – I remember seeing The Jungle Book on its 1993 release. Things are different now, of course, with all of the corporation’s back-catalogue available on DVD. They have to find a new way of maintaining interest in these movies.

And the solution they appear to have landed upon is to remake all those lovely old cartoons as modern CGI blockbusters: a trend which started with Jon Favreau’s remake of The Jungle Book three years ago [It has been pointed out to me that Ken Branagh’s 2015 version of Cinderella predates this – A], and which is reaching full fruition this year – apart from the Mary Poppins sequel, which is not exactly the same kind of thing, we will see live action and CGI versions of Aladdin and The Lion King. First off the blocks, however, is Tim Burton’s new version of Dumbo.

The original Dumbo, released in 1941, was made in something of a hurry for Walt Disney, made economically after Fantasia proved to a glorious folly for the film-maker. The new film is twice as long as the original and basks in a budget of over $170 million dollars. The story remains very roughly similar, and concerns a rather down-at-heel circus, in the new film run by Danny DeVito. The year is 1919 and animal trainer Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from the First World War, in the course of which his arm has been CGI’d off, to be reunited with his (rather charmless) children. Their mother, along with many of the other circus folk, has died from the Spanish Flu, leaving everyone dispirited and emotionally scarred. (Good stuff for the tinies in the audience, this.)

Hopes are high that a new elephant recently purchased for the circus will turn the fortunes of the business around, as the animal is about to give birth. However, the mini-elephant, when it emerges, is an unprepossessing specimen, mainly on account of its freakishly large ears, and it is unkindly christened Dumbo. However, and you are almost certainly ahead of me on this one, Dumbo turns out to have an unusual talent – when properly motivated, those ears begin to flap and the pachyderm takes to the air!

So far, so very much like the 1941 version, you may be thinking. Well, yes and (very emphatically) no, for as you may have gathered, the more charmingly whimsical elements of the story have been almost wholly excised in favour of a bunch of largely one-dimensional new human characters. Think of an element of the original Dumbo that you remember with particular vividness and fondness, and I can almost guarantee that it is essentially absent from the new one. Oh, yes, there are plenty of call-backs and allusions, but only in the most superficial way – Timothy the mouse is gone, the extraordinary alcohol-induced hallucination sequence is gone, and the musical sequence with the singing crows has also gone (presumably it has been decreed that the crows could be construed as racially provocative). In their place are clangingly delivered messages about the treatment of circus animals and (for some reason) the evil of gender roles: in almost every scene, Farrell’s daughter gets to deliver solemn dialogue about how she is going to be A Scientist and Discover Things and Do Research And Experiments Using The Scientific Method. Nothing wrong with the sentiment, naturally, but why the hell are they crowbarring it into Dumbo?

I should point out that the new film blows through virtually the entire plot of the 1941 version well within the first hour, leaving a lot of time to fill before the obligatory happy ending. It is at this point that the new Dumbo stops being just dismaying and becomes actively baffling: arriving on the scene is wealthy entertainment tycoon V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who is opening a new theme park and needs a big attraction to lure in the punters. He initially comes across as a warm, avuncular figure, but (no real spoilers here, I think) eventually proves to be a ruthless, grasping, exploitative villain.

At which point one can only pause to wonder what on Earth the people at Disney think they are doing? Has no-one noticed the subtext of the new movie? This is a Disney film in which the bad guy is effectively a thinly-disguised version of Walt Disney, with ‘Dreamland’ presented as a thoroughly phoney and unpleasant place. It’s the worst possible advertisement for the world’s biggest entertainment brand. I can just about imagine someone like Tim Burton being amused by the idea of smuggling this kind of subversive idea into a film from the Mouse House, but this is barely subtle enough to qualify as smuggling – it’s hardly some buried subtext, more the essential message of the film. I say it again: has everyone at Disney gone mad?

Normally I would be quite amused by the extravagant way that the world’s biggest entertainment company is cheerfully shooting itself in the foot, but the execution of this part of the film isn’t really any better than that of the opening act. The characterisation is still thin (the best part probably goes to Burton’s girlfriend Eva Green, as a trapeze artist), the general tone of the film gloomy and grotesque. No-one seems to have figured out that a concept which is effortlessly charming when realised with cel animation and anthropomorphic talking animals just seems weird and slightly disturbing with photo-realistic CGI and human performers: we are clearly intended to find Dumbo irresistibly cute, but the glassy-eyed creature front and centre for much of the film comes direct from the Uncanny Valley.

I suppose one should even be slightly grateful for how comprehensively misconceived the new version of Dumbo is, for few films in recent memory are quite as worthy of this kind of self-sabotage. It’s a film which trades heavily on the audience’s fondness for the original film – fondness which is entirely warranted, I feel obliged to mention, for the 1941 film is packed with charm, imagination and pathos – but then attempts to lure them in to see something which barely qualifies as a remake, having a substantially different tone and story, and including none of the moments you remember. One can only assume the other films on the way will be better – it’s hard to imagine how they could be much worse – but Dumbo is, well, mostly just dumb.

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The Third Time Around

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that to cast one actor as Spider-Man is a sound commercial decision, to cast a second might be seen as a little questionable, but to give three people the part in the space of only about fifteen years is arguably labouring the issue. And yet here we are, with another ingenue web-slinger in the form of Tom Holland, starring in Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Homecoming. Yup, it’s yet another comic-book movie, but try to keep your fatigue at bay, for this one has a number of points of interest.

The Spider-Man rights are considered to be such a sure-fire guarantee to make money that the $709 million made by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014 was somehow decided to be a bit of a disappointment. Holder of said rights, Sony, decreed that better must be done, and – in a move that brought wild excitement to many people who should arguably be old enough to know better – re-opened negotiations with Marvel, publisher of the Spider-Man comics and producer of their own series of wildly popular movies. Basically, the deal they cooked up is as follows – Marvel Studios are now making Spider-Man films for Sony, which Sony is financing and distributing. In return for this, and of course various hefty fees, Marvel now get to insert Spider-Man into their own movies, which is indeed what happened with his extended cameo in Civil War last year.

The new movie recaps Spider-Man’s trip to Berlin and shenanigans with the quarrelling Avengers, before moving on to pastures new. Spidey’s alter-ego Peter Parker (Holland) is still very young and keen to impress his mentor in all things superheroic, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) – he chafes against Stark’s insistence that he take things easy and go slow and careful for a while. In short, he is in a big hurry to grow up.

However, staying low to the ground, as it were, brings Spider-Man into contact with someone else very keen to stay off the radar of Iron Man and the other Avengers – Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton), a former salvage engineer put out of business by Stark and the government, who has taken to scavenging alien materials and other miracle technology and using it to build high-technology super-weapons which he sells on to anyone who has the cash. Toomes has also built himself a set of jet-powered antigravity wings, because, hey, you’ve got to have a gimmick, I guess.

So, if going to your typical American high school, complete with stressful social rituals and ceremonies, wasn’t demanding enough, and trying to meet the exacting standards of billionaire genius playboy philanthropist didn’t make life totally unbearable, Spider-Man now finds himself forced to contend with the winged menace of this high-tech vulture. What’s a boy to do?

I have to confess I was less than overwhelmed with joy when the news of the Sony-Marvel deal came through – all right, it’s nice to have a version of Spider-Man in the MCU (the shared continuity of the other Marvel Studios films since 2008), but we have had some very good Spider-Man films already in the not too distant past, while there’s still no sign of a decent take on the Fantastic Four or Doctor Doom. Or what about another solo Hulk movie? Or Devil Dinosaur: the Movie? That said, however, Spider-Man: Homecoming is a top piece of entertainment, certainly outclassing the Marc Webb movies, and perhaps rivalling the standards of the best of the Sam Raimi-Tobey Maguire films from a decade and more ago.

The at-a-slight-remove conditions under which the Marvel Studios people are working seem to have paid off, for while this film has a distinctly different look and feel to it, compared to the likes of Doctor Strange and the Avengers movies, this is by no means a bad thing – it has a lightness of touch and sweetness that is totally disarming. Much of it is written and played as pure comedy, and it is consistently very funny indeed, in a disarmingly oddball way.

I was a bit dubious about the fact the film is called Homecoming, mainly because it seemed like it was only there as a crashingly unsubtle way of emphasising the fact that Spider-Man is now back in the MCU along with all the other characters, which at times seemed like the movie’s sole raison d’etre. This shared continuity is rammed down your throat at very regular intervals in the course of proceedings: the very first shot is a picture of the Avengers. The first scene takes place in the shadow of Avengers Tower, and is set shortly after the climactic battle from the first Avengers movie. Scenes from Civil War are restaged, Downey Jr appears in both his Stark and Iron Man guises, Jon Favreau reprises his role as Happy Hogan from the Iron Man films, Chris Evans cameos as Captain America, and another star gets an outrageous fourth billing considering they’re only in the movie for about two minutes. Marvel’s own movies take much less of a broad-brush approach to this sort of thing, but in the end it does kind of work, because a lot of the in-jokes and mickey-taking of the other films is spot on (this extends to some witty choices of voice casting and a brutally funny joke at the expense of the Cult of the Post-Credits Sequence).

One slightly ironic thing about this film that no-one has much commented on is the fact that Michael Keaton’s status as a ‘hot’ actor is largely down to his role in Birdman. Birdman was a film which gave its own sardonic commentary on the phenomenon of serious actors spending all their time in superhero movies, and yet Keaton has used it to get himself to this position, as a serious actor in a superhero movie – and, what’s more, playing the Vulture: someone who is, of course, essentially a… oh, work it out for yourselves.

All that to one side, Keaton is the film’s star turn when it comes to acting performances (although this is a notably well-played film throughout). We are quite a long way down from the pick of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, and the Vulture suit in this movie is a rather unwieldy piece of design, but Keaton manages to create that rarest of things – not just a great villain in an MCU movie, but a blue-collar supervillain is who both a plausible character and genuinely menacing. You really wish Keaton was in the movie much more – also that the MCU people start to create characters with this sort of presence and depth for their own movies.

I would say that the climax of the movie is arguably a little weak, but in every other respect Homecoming gets the mixture of comedy, pathos, and exhilarating action you’d expect from a Spider-Man film pretty much spot on, with the film’s insertion into the wider Marvel universe a real bonus too. How many movies in a row now, without a serious misstep from Marvel Studios? You would have to be a very brave person to bet on their hot streak ending any time soon.

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Another Franchise Movie

Your career progression used to be fairly straightforward as a Hollywood movie star, up until relatively recently anyway. You started off doing small films, maybe genre pieces, and gradually worked your way up until your name was over the title and you were suddenly a serious performer to be reckoned with, doing major films for mainstream audiences. Things are a bit different these days, of course, because (as I have noted in the past) the main career benefit an actor receives for winning an acting Oscar these days is to almost instantly be offered a leading role in a knockabout special effects movie. Recent beneficiaries of this include Felicity Jones (recently seen in a Dan Brown adaptation and a stellar conflict franchise installment) and Brie Larson (soon to be seen in the new King Kong film and also playing Captain Marvel for, um, Marvel Studios).

Even older performers can benefit from this effect, with occasionally surreal consequences: Michael Keaton, for instance, has been an actor in demand since he made Birdman (a film which itself might appear to be satirising the current trend for serious actors to appear in superhero movies), but someone somewhere is surely having a laugh – Keaton’s big film this year is set to be Spider-Man: Homecoming, in which he plays the Vulture, a character who is basically a… well, work it out for yourselves. Still, at least the fellow seems to be making the most of his current popularity, for he was not half bad in Spotlight last year, nor is his performance in John Lee Hancock’s The Founder anything less than impressive.

Keaton plays Ray Kroc, a struggling fifty-something salesman in the US. The year is 1954, and Kroc is somewhat sick of the low quality of the restaurants he constantly encounters in his line of work. Then he encounters the curious case of a small family-run restaurant in San Bernardino, California, which offers superb service and fantastic food in a family-friendly environment. Kroc instantly sees the potential for this business model to be duplicated across the country – across the world, even – and makes his pitch to the owners. They are a pair of brothers, and their names are Maurice and Richard McDonald (played by John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman). But the brothers are dubious, not to mention the banks and nearly everyone else who hears of Kroc’s scheme – a chain of burger restaurants all called McDonald’s? What are the chances of that happening?

Hancock’s last movie was Saving Mr Banks, which was a classy piece of work somewhat compromised by the fact it was clearly in part a brazen advertisement for the Disney Corporation, and my first thought upon hearing about The Founder was that something similar might be in the works here – monster corporations with $37 billion in assets are not usually in the habit of letting people make unflattering movies about them, after all. Like many people I am instinctively suspicious of McDonald’s, mainly because of the relentless attempts to brand the chain as innately wholesome and fun (not that this stopped me eating there at least once a week when I lived in Japan). The last thing the world needs, I would argue, is a two-hour-long commercial for McDonald’s – this movie was made on a $7 million budget, which second-for-second may possibly be less than some actual McDonald’s commercials.

Nevertheless, one thing the film makes clear is the sheer impact that McDonald’s has had on the way we lead our lives today, even if Thomas Friedman’s theory of McDonald’s-based international relations (the idea that no two countries with a branch of McDonald’s have ever gone to war with each other) has turned to be not strictly true. McDonald’s may not be important in the way that philosophy or music or literature is important, but it is at least significant and worthy of attention.

And, as it turns out, the film isn’t about McDonalds as an entity as much as it is about Ray Kroc as an individual. Quite how relevant the story of a ruthless property developer who rises to astonishing power and wealth relatively late in life is to the world today, I leave to you to decide, but Keaton is never less than magnetic in the role – which is just as well, as this is by no means a hagiography. The title of the film itself is ironic – Kroc styles himself as the founder of McDonald’s, but is of course nothing of the sort – and while Kroc is initially a relatively sympathetic underdog, as the story progresses he becomes a considerably more ambiguous figure. The conclusion of the film deals with some breathtakingly ruthless maneuvers carried out by Kroc against some sympathetic characters, by which point it is clear his success has brought out some hidden streak of monstrousness in his character.

Given this is the case, there’s no question of the film being nothing more than an advert for a fast food chain, even if at one point a parallel is specifically drawn between branches of McDonald’s and churches. This kind of ambiguity persists throughout the film – is Kroc an American hero or villain? Is his corporation a success story to be emulated, or just another example of capitalism gone berserk? – which in the same way can’t seem to make up its mind as to whether it’s a quirky indie comedy-drama or a major mainstream release.

Nevertheless, The Founder is a thoroughly engaging and entertaining film that sheds some light on things that it never occurred to me that I didn’t know. The narrative is fascinating, but the story is really given life and energy by the performances – primarily Keaton, of course, but he’s given tremendous support by Nick Offerman, and also Laura Dern as his long-suffering wife. But this is a film with few obvious weaknesses, even if some may be put off by the subject matter. Some may find its refusal to take sides simply annoying, while to others they may be key to its appeal – but for me, this is a fascinating story, told superbly. This is a very good movie.

 

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Fourth Estate Agency

Looking back on the list of films I’ve seen so far in 2016, an unusual pattern develops – there’s been Joy (based on a true story), In the Heart of the Sea (based on a true story), The Revenant (based on a true story), and The Big Short (based on a true story). So far the only film with the guts to go ahead and actually be fictional is Creed.

Joining the list now is the critically-acclaimed Spotlight, directed by Tom McCarthy. I guess we’re just not living in fictitious times any more, for there are a whole bunch of these movies about at the moment, including a significant percentage of the Best Picture Nominee shortlist (let’s not forget Bridge of Spies is on there too). Perhaps it is just the case that being based on true events is more likely to give your film gravitas, and thus turn it into Oscar bait.

The subject matter of Spotlight certainly gives it gravitas, for this is a film dealing with the most serious issues. It opens in 2001 with a new editor, Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber), taking over at the Boston Globe, which naturally causes a little uneasiness amongst the rest of the staff. Amongst these are Robby Robertson (Michael Keaton) and his team of journalists, a group specialising in highly sensitive long-haul investigations.

At Baron’s request, Robertson and his team revisit an older story – that of a paedophile priest. What makes this unusual is the suggestion that documents exist proving that a cardinal in the Catholic Church was aware of this man’s activities and complicit in ensuring they were covered up. This is a provocative, even explosive story in a strongly Irish-Catholic city like Boston, and the journalists (Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Matt Carroll) have to tread softly as they follow up their leads…

Well, Michael Keaton may not have won the Oscar last year, but being in an acclaimed film brings its own benefits. You could possibly argue that Spotlight only serves to confirm Birdman’s thesis that you can’t get anywhere as an actor unless you’re willing to play a superhero (Batman, the Hulk and Sabertooth set out to take on corruption in the Church!), but it’s impossible to deny that this film features an ensemble cast of the highest quality, doing excellent work together.

The team dynamic is actually a fairly crucial element of the film, as this is – after all – a story about a team. On paper this may look like (yet) another film examining the self-inflicted troubles of the Catholic Church, and the revelations which come to light in the course of the story are damning (there’s a grotesque encounter with a retired priest who openly confesses to molesting children, but is at pains to point out that he got no personal gratification from it, as if that’s some kind of an excuse). If you’ve seen Silence in the House of God, a straight documentary on this topic, you may already be aware of some of the astonishing statistics involved – 50% of all priests fail to meet the celibacy requirement, and 6% have some history of inappropriate behaviour. Spotlight puts this information over powerfully, though, and in a way which is accessible as a story.

But this isn’t simply an exercise in angry Vatican-bashing. Perhaps surprisingly, given the subject matter, the film manages to be, if not upbeat, then certainly guardedly optimistic. This isn’t necessarily with respect to the Church, but to society in general – terrible things did occur, and they were covered up for a while, but in the end the truth came out and justice of a sort was done. And this, the film suggests, was largely down to the efforts of journalists, who emerge from the film as dedicated, heroic figures, devoted to the idea of truth.

Sensibly, the film isn’t quite as black-and-white as that, and the various characters are depicted as flawed and troubled and capable of making mistakes – as well as of feeling the strain that their profession places upon them (Ruffalo plays a lapsed Catholic who is eager to attack the Church for his own reasons, Carroll has real difficulty sitting on the information they uncover). But this is a journalists-break-a-big-story film in the classic style, and you do identify with them and thrill at the moments when they face down their opponents or make the big discovery they’ve been searching for.

I have to say that Tom McCarthy’s name rang only a vague bell when I first heard about this film, but only the most cursory research revealed that he was the guy behind The Station Agent, one of my favourite films of the mid 2000s (apparently he was also involved in making Up, which suggests an interestingly eclectic CV is on the cards). The Station Agent was a no frills picture of the highest quality, and the same is arguably true of Spotlight, too.

Certainly compared to some of the year’s other big films, McCarthy’s directorial approach is almost underplayed: there are no big narrative devices here, no bold conceits or especially memorable choices of shot. (Though he does quietly contrive to have a church in the background of many of his exterior scenes, perhaps attempting to indicate the ubiquity of the institution in Boston.) He just gets on with telling the story in an intelligent and mature manner and does so extremely well. Is that enough for a film to garner significant awards glory in the modern world? I don’t know, but this film has the subject matter, the script, the performances, and the storytelling to be a serious contender in any sensible competition.

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Altered Ego

Oh, lord, not another new year? Another one? Will the line stretch on to the crack of doom? …you know, I think that it will, by definition. Oh well, time to lay aside the bloated seasonal blockbusters and engage in the usual cinematic detox, although hopefully this year’s serious and worthy awards-trawling films will be a bit less utterly depressing than the crop twelve months ago. Now, more than at any other point in the calendar, we are invited to ask ourselves what constitutes a good film, genuine talent, worthwhile art.

Which makes it a good time for Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu’s Birdman to be released, not least because this is a film which seems to be asking those same questions. Very little about this movie is straightforward, but the plot seems pretty straightforward, at least initially: Michael Keaton plays Riggan Thomson, an actor struggling for artistic credibility, but overshadowed by a stint playing a superhero in Hollywood back in the 90s. Now he is attempting to stage a (seemingly fairly dreadful) Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver story he has written, directed, and is starring in himself – to make the situation even more emotionally charged, also involved in the production are his girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough) and daughter (Emma Stone). However, when the production loses an actor, he takes on brilliant but wildly unpredictable method performer Mike Shiner (Edward Norton) – partly at the suggestion of his girlfriend (Naomi Watts) – not quite aware of what he is letting himself in for. As the pressure mounts, Thomson finds the voice of his super-powered alter-ego haunting him – but is he going mad, or is the world itself collapsing into chaos?

Birdman appears to suggest there is no meaningful distinction to be made here, which is surely key to making sense of a film which often seems to be on the verge of losing it itself. It’s a movie which demands the viewer to engage with it and think about its ideas, because offers very few cut and dried answers, and in places seems intentionally ambiguous. It’s pretty clear that at least some of the film is taking place entirely in Riggan’s head, but identifying what is real and what is fantasy is a challenge.

In the same way, the film itself blends fantasy and reality, at least for anyone aware of recent cinema history. Riggan Thomson, a man who reluctantly finds his career defined by a series of superhero movies he made twenty years ago, is played by Michael Keaton, best known for his stints in Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992). Mike Shiner, a brilliant actor but a nightmare to work with, is played by Edward Norton, whose unique approach to collaborating did not exactly earn the gratitude of his colleagues on either American History X or The Incredible Hulk.

The presence in the cast of one-time avatars of Batman and the Hulk, not to mention Gwen Stacy and Jet Girl, has led at least one critic to declare that Birdman is primarily a scathing attack on Hollywood’s current fixation on making superhero movies by the dozen, instead of ‘real’ films. Certainly an early scene where Riggan tries to hire Michael Fassbender and Jeremy Renner for the play, only to discover they are too busy making X-Men and The Avengers respectively, seems to support this, along with a moment in which Robert Downey Jr is roundly mocked for making the Iron Man series.

I’m not saying there isn’t an element of this in the film, but I don’t think the film’s argument is as simplistic as mainstream art = stupid and pointless / highbrow art = worthwhile and important. For one thing, this isn’t exactly a glowing portrait of the theatrical world, either, and especially not critics. This dubious profession is represented by Lindsay Duncan, who portrays a critic out of any director’s nightmare: untroubled by the need to actually watch a play before reviewing it, she decides which productions to support or destroy based solely on her own entrenched prejudices. Not content with presenting actors as unstable basket cases and critics as vicious harpies, Inarritu goes for the hat trick by having a go at the audience too: at one point the film briefly breaks into a Marvel-style CGI battle sequence, during which Thomson’s Birdman alter-ego glares contemptuously out of the screen, snarling ‘Look at them – this is really what they want to see…’

It seems to me that Inarritu has managed the neat trick of making a film which functions as a sort of distorting mirror, which basically feeds back to you whatever strange prejudices you happen to turn up with – if you turn up with an axe to grind against mainstream superhero movies (which are, let’s not forget, often superbly entertaining and technically immaculate pieces of film-making), then you can plausibly interpret Birdman as supporting you. If, on the other hand, you just think theatre actors are all just weird and experimental theatre is a pretentious waste of time, you will probably find the film backing you up here too.

If this is the case, then it’s a film which asks questions – what is the difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ art? Is one particular motivation for making art superior to the others? – without presenting any definitive answers. But, fortunately, the film is more than inventive and entertaining enough to make up for this. The film establishes its warped and restless mood through the conceit of seeming to be made in an almost unbroken single two-hour take, and this is achieved in a technically brilliant way (even if some of the transition points are perhaps not quite as invisible as others). But beyond this it is simply very funny, functioning as a bizarre black farce about the fragile minds and egos of actors. There is some winningly scabrous dialogue (‘I wish I had more self-respect’ ‘You’re an actress‘) and the performances are uniformly very strong.

I laughed a lot all the way through Birdman, even as I was trying to work out what the film was actually about or trying to say. It touches on a number of semi-serious topics, but manages to do so without feeling heavy or overly pretentious – although I admit it’s a near thing on this last point – and is consistently witty and engaging throughout. Perhaps the satire is just a tad too dark and vicious for this to be the kind of film that does very well when the actual awards start being handed out, but it’s still a hugely promising film to start the year with.

 

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Welcome to the Machine

I suppose I should be up front about this, and make it clear right at the start that Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 movie RoboCop is one of my personal favourites. It’s not flawless, but it comes very close, and for me it’s probably the best action SF movie to come out of Hollywood in the 1980s: better than Predator, better than Aliens – yes, better even than The Terminator. So, needless to say, my natural inclination was to give any remake the same kind of response a paid-up NRA member usually gives to burglars (perhaps this is where the expression ‘extreme prejudice’ comes from).

In other words, I approached Jose Padilha’s new version of RoboCop with expectations about as close to zero as you could imagine. On paper the story looks very much the same: a powerful corporation, based in Detroit, is looking to expand its profit margins by selling military technology to hard-pressed police departments, but there is resistance to this. At the same time, dedicated cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) gets on the wrong side of a particularly vicious criminal and finds himself crippled and mutilated.

But Murphy finds himself drawn into the corporation’s machinations – almost literally, one might say – as what is left of him is given a new lease of life in a hydraulically-powered, armour-plated, AI-equipped chassis, and put back on the streets to bring a whole new meaning to the expression ‘zero tolerance policing’…

So, like I say, I turned up to this new, 12 rated, no Paul Verhoeven, no Peter Weller RoboCop quite prepared to sling bricks at it for being a travesty of a classic. The opening scene, with Samuel L Jackson as a frothing right-wing media commentator, was not actively painful, which came as a pleasant surprise, and the film actually showed signs of wanting to honour the smart and subversive spirit of its predecessor. Then came an original sequence, with US Army war-robots stomping their way through the streets of Tehran blaring out ‘Peace be upon you’ through their megaphones – an image so unexpectedly audacious and darkly funny that it quite disarmed me. (The use of a few snatches of Basil Poledouris’s wonderful original score was also a welcome surprise.)

The film never quite manages to consistently hit this same tone, but on the other hand I suspect that’s not its main objective. The emphasis of this version is rather different – it’s less about violent excess and vicious satire, and much more about the personal story of Murphy himself. The key difference to the narrative this time around is that Murphy retains his original identity and memory throughout, rather than emerging from his transformation initially as an emotionless automaton and only later recovering his sense of self. This allows Kinnaman to give much more of a conventional acting performance throughout, and a pretty commendable one it is too, but at the same time it somehow robs the story of much of its pathos and depth.

Hey ho. One thing this movie is not short of is fine actors doing the best they can with the material with which they are issued: Abbie Cornish plays Mrs Murphy, who has a beefed up role in this version, while the various brains behind the RoboCop programme are portrayed by Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Jennifer Ehle and Jackie Earl Haley. The plot has been streamlined, which may actually constitute an improvement on one of my few issues with the original, and while its not as consistently funny as its forebear there are some very good moments: I particularly enjoyed a gleeful swipe at a certain bombastic, overblown, toy-related franchise. (For what it’s worth, I’m not wild about the new black and glossy RoboCop design, but that’s just me.)

The 1987 RoboCop did a superb job at deconstructing the materialism of that decade – human flesh literally becomes property, after all – and if the 2014 film may not have captured the zeitgeist with quite the same adroitness, it certainly attempts to acknowledge issues such as the bias of the US media and the ethical issues involved with the use of drones and other battlefield robots. It may not have anything terribly deep to say, but even the thought is more than I’d honestly expected.

The new RoboCop is not a truly great movie, but neither is it a disaster nor even an especially bad one. It’s solid piece of SF action film-making with a strong sense of exactly what it wants to be and a sensible approach to being it. I was extremely pleasantly surprised (though I suppose you should bear in mind that I approached it with the lowest possible expectations, after all). If we are living in a world in which unnecessary remakes are, in fact, necessary, then this is about as good an unnecessary remake as one could realistically hope for.

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King Jack Joker and the Triumph of Style

It must have been nearly four years ago, and as usual I was boring regaling a colleague with news about upcoming film releases. He turned out to be completely ignorant of the then-around-a-year-off release of The Dark Knight, and utterly aghast when I revealed that Heath Ledger was playing the Joker.

‘You can’t have Heath Ledger as the Joker!’ he cried. ‘Jack Nicholson’s the Joker! Nobody else can play that part!’

Less than four years ago, like I say: how things can change, huh? (And to be fair I was very dubious about the wisdom of casting Ledger myself for quite a while.) But it does show what a massive pop-cultural presence the 1989 Batman movie remained for quite a long time. Certainly it was inescapable that summer, almost omnipresent on TV, radio, and in terms of merchandise. (A friend of mine constructed his own batarang in metalwork class, with which he then proceeded to give himself a spectacular black eye – and unless he gets in touch with my people regarding a financial settlement, I will find it hard to find a reason not to reveal his identity. Hello, Steve. Hope you’re well.)

Christopher Nolan’s Batman films have reaped such deserved popular and critical success that the four movies that came out between 1989 and 1997 seem to have been largely forgotten about. And a good thing too, you might say, given the embarrassing excesses and general incoherence the series was prone to for much of that time. Well, maybe – but watching the original Tim Burton film again for the first time in ages, I can’t help feel this is a film that doesn’t really deserve it.

You could make a good case for arguing that Batman is the first modern superhero movie, in that it genuinely attempts to bring the essence of the comic-book to the screen. (The Christopher Reeve Superman movies are terrific – the first couple, anyway – but don’t bear much resemblence to the book in terms of their tone and plots.) The plot is certainly archetypal stuff – masked hero makes his debut, shortly followed by a grotesque villain of some kind, and the two of them battle it out in a succession of big set-pieces. And indeed much of the script just seems like the result of an exercise in ticking boxes and hitting marks.

However, the memorable stuff in this movie isn’t in the script, anyway – not that the screenplay is entirely mechanical, neatly undercutting the audience’s expectations from the very beginning (what looks like it’s going to be Batman’s origin turns out to be something slightly different). As a director of motion pictures, Tim Burton’s always seemed more interested in pictures than movement, and the visual style of this movie is rather more impressive than its action choreography. The look of the film – Gotham City seems to exist in some odd time-warp, stranded between the 40s and the 80s – may not be especially coherent, but at the time it was groundbreaking: such overt art-direction of a film with an ostensibly present-day setting had never really happened in a blockbuster before.

And so where Nolan created a realistic Batman who could plausibly exist in the real world, Burton creates an unrealistic world in which a fantasy figure like Batman seems entirely at home. I think this is a considerable achievement, and not something to be dismissed out of hand. You can see the excesses that would come to define the series lying in wait, of course, as first Burton and then Joel Schumacher chose to frame the later films solely in terms of their visuals, but the plot and script here are strong enough to support the visuals.

Acting-wise – oh, well, let’s face it, we’re talking about Nicholson. All the work, excellent, good, indifferent and poor, turned in by Michael Keaton (second-billed, tellingly), Kim Basinger, Jack Palance, Robert Wuhl, Michael Gough and every other performer – all of it is utterly obliterated by a giant, ravenous performance by an off-the-leash Jack Nicholson. Nuanced and understated it isn’t – neither, to be perfectly honest, is it especially sinister – but on this occasion it really sort of works, simply because it means your eyes are magnetically drawn to something other than the art direction.

On another level, it’s interesting to compare Burton’s Batman with Nolan’s The Dark Knight, simply because they both owe an obvious debt to Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, which came out in 1986. Miller’s book brought an iconic grandeur to Batman and Gotham City, as well as unprecedented moral and psychological complexity – and while Burton chose to concentrate on the former elements, Nolan has opted for the latter.

At the moment, of course, it’s Christopher Nolan’s approach which is in fashion, with Burton’s style somewhat out of favour. However, it seems highly unlikely that people are going to stop making or going to see Batman movies after Nolan moves on, and it’s quite possible things may swing back the other way, or achieve some sort of fusion between realism and fantasy. If that leads, in passing, to a reappraisal of the 1989 Batman, then all the better.

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