A Quiet Place

Another more experimental horror film today, the almost dialogue-free A Quiet Place, which was quite the hit a few months ago. I have to say, my initial stance was a little disapproving – this film is seven parts The Last of Us, three parts The Village, with just a dash of Cloverfield for monster design. A bearded but grizzled father whose name I can’t remember but I always thought of as Joel, has a first-act tragedy to get us invested and introduce the dangers of this world, then has to survive attacks from clicking, sound-sensitive monsters in a post-apocalyptic United States. It’s not unfamiliar territory.

This shows how the long-delayed The Last of Us movie could actually work extremely well and find a very receptive audience. It makes me a little sad that people who watch it when it eventually comes out might be pulled from their immersion by remembering how they’ve seen the Clickers somewhere before.

Beyond that similarity, this is a good chance for strong performances. The kids act well but the adults – the director John Krasinski, and his real-life wife Emily Blunt – get a real chance to shine. They can portray fear, pain, terror, resolve, bravery and even despairing resignation so well without words. For a short movie with a tiny cast, it does everything it needs to with brevity and grace.

Maybe the scares could have been better, and maybe seeing less of the monsters would have helped. The way they find to combat the creatures and the idea that nobody ever tried something like that before seems very far-fetched, but it worked in the little microcosm of the film.

Not bad, but not fantastic either, it at least tried something different. At least, different from other films. Not very different from video games.  

Hereditary

After recommendations from friends, decided to watch this recent horror flick. Backed by artsy distributors A24, it put me in mind of their previous experimental horror movie The Witch, which excited critics but didn’t resonate well with audiences. I remember The Witch fondly, daring to be different with the period setting and slow pace, but its problem was lack of scares. Hereditary is also slow-paced and experimental, and also hasn’t done overly well with audiences, probably mostly because general film audiences prefer to turn off their brains and enjoy formulaic scares when it comes to horror.

As long as it’s done well, I don’t care if a horror film is a rehash of old ideas or dares to be different. Hereditary definitely doesn’t play it safe, starting with a pretty ordinary set-up where a family is seemingly haunted after a death in the family, but soon hammering on the psychological trauma harder than just about any other film I can think of. There’s some degree of ambiguity whether anything is actually supernatural here or just a combination of human machination and delusions, which I quite like, and the film is unafraid of showing some of the starkest and most unpleasant imagery you can imagine.  

Toni Colette also gets real opportunity to shine here. I really loved her performance in The Sixth Sense where she kept everything restrained, but here where things can go to the extremes she gets to show what she can really do. It’s a tour de force that should be lauded regardless of whether it’s in a genre piece.  

Definitely not to everyone’s taste, and perhaps a little too slow and short on real tension for me to be drawn back to it again, and a little marred by some poor choices (like the little girl making a little popping noise with her tongue in an effort to have a creepy recurring sound), it was nonetheless one of the braver and more interesting horror films lately, in a world of Insidiouses and Conjurings that may entertain but don’t really attempt to get under the skin.

Return Plane Films: Big Eyes, Blade Runner 2049, The Commuter, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Founder and A Wrinkle in Time

Plane Films 1: Big Eyes

After finishing off 'The Disaster Artist', which only got more hilarious, I decided to watch a slightly older movie, Tim Burton's 'Big Eyes'. I don't actually remember ever seeing the work of Margaret Keane before the publicity for the movie began. Maybe very vaguely. 

This movie was one I absolutely wanted to see when it came out, but never got around to. So it was a pleasure to see. Not only is this a portrait of a peculiar outsider artist who gained popularity despite being completely outside the mainstream ideas of good taste (and has a very cartoon-like aesthetic I find quite appealing), but a fascinating story of agency stolen by a conman. 

The way the film portrays the situation unfolding is very convincing and dramatically compelling. At first it's a misunderstanding, and then expedience. Then there's a critical moment where there's a clear chance for the truth to come out, or at the very least for him to make the very reasonable assertion that the couple have been painting together - but takes a choice that only leads to lie upon lie and ever more darkness. 

There's so often this kind of partnerships in the art world - the actual artist, who is introverted and finds it difficult to live alone, and the extroverted salesperson who can't convince anyone with their art but shamelessly promote and commercialise the art. This is even more a perfect storm, with the salesman actually taking the success for himself. 

Burton does a great job of the storytelling here, peeling the layers off and letting Walter crumble in his dishonesty. It's done deftly, like when Walter misidentifies acrylic for oil, which prefigures a later revelation. And it's a great examination of an abusive relationship as well. Even with a very ambiguous accent, Christoph Waltz is perhaps the finest actor I can think of that can pull off a conman - so charming, so intelligent and so quickly able to flip to controlling, manipulating and devious. It's completely believable, and Amy Adams puts in a wonderfully believable portrait of the artist taken advantage of. 

Some scenes don't work so well, like a confrontation with a critic that gets massively overwrought at a point of the movie where it should be focused inwards towards the relationship as Margaret is getting emboldened and the promise of the payoff of the focus on how stifling and traumatic 1950s patriarchy could be.

Perhaps the saddest element of the story is that it's very probable that without her husband-manager-abuser-captor, Keane's weird big-eyed paintings likely never would have become famous. 

While perhaps there's a temptation to yell and scream at Keane to escape her torment and come clean sooner, it makes perfect sense given her background and the expectations of the time. 

2: Blade Runner 2049

After being put off by the sheer length of the film during other flights - as I think many audiences were - I decided that it would be good to watch it this time, split between two flights. 

And I'm glad I did. While it's flawed, especially when it comes to length, it was well worth seeing. 

I wasn't keen on the sequel happening at all, to be honest. There didn't seem to me to be a need for a follow-up. The film stood well on its own. There was also no Philip K Dick source material to work from, even if the original had departed from 'Do Androids...' in a big way. And Harrison Ford reappearing in follow-ups to his other big action roles hasn't exactly gone so well. 

Indeed, probably the most expendable part of this bloated film, the part that could have been cut but for the draw of a star name, was Deckard's part. He got a somewhat cool but unnecessary fist-fight, introduced a confused and rushed final-act moral question, flops about as a damsel in distress and then while he was able to give the film a somewhat satisfying conclusion, everything from the point of his introduction - well past the half-way point - seemed inferior, with coincidental plotting, unspectacular locations and odd pacing. I strongly suspect the film was written without Deckard appearing, and hastily redrafted when Harrison Ford agreed to take part. 

Beyond his part, though, there was a rich and interesting film. The Blade Runner future has gotten yet more gritty, with a lot of wastelands and toxic areas. Ryan Gosling's replicant, Joe, is good at hunting down the older, more human replicants. But when he sees there may be something beyond what he's always known, he begins to change. The parallel of his love story with his AI companion helps this grow, and I do like the debate over whether this film is simply mysogynist and objectifies for the male gaze, is simply projecting and thus criticising a highly commercialised future where women are further commodified, or actually sending a strong feminist message with certain key female characters and the central quest for the power to give birth - though I suppose to be right-on in today's world of identity politics, we shouldn't say that giving birth is just a female trait any more. 

What the film does well is evoking the style of the original film. That doesn't just mean instrumentation recalling Vangelis and fun cameos from original cast members - including a remarkable CG-enhanced lookalike scene. It's more about the way pace is controlled to build and release tension, give a sense of wonder and refer back to noir detective filmmaking. That's what works here, when they get it right - and is most glaringly lacking when it isn't quite right. 

But for its faults, this is a film of great ideas, great performances (especially in very minor roles) and great visuals. I loved the way Vegas ended up, and I loved how I thought I'd figured out the twist very early only for that twist to be perfectly undone and undercut. There are many good things to say about this film, but I don't think I'd ever sit through it again - and I'm still not sure it really added much to the original. 

3: The Commuter

After Blade Runner, I wanted to watch something a bit lighter. This thriller on a train seemed to fit the bill. I'd seen the trailer and it looked bland but entertaining. And that's what it was. 

Falling into typecast territory, Liam Neeson as an ex-cop gets a phone call instructing him to find someone on his train or people close to him might meet a bad end. And it builds from there as you might expect. The standoff at the end of the film gets a little more cerebral and some decent crime writing comes through, but the premise just isn't unique enough for this to make much of a big stir. 

Nonetheless, this was a well-made, well-acted Hollywood movie that provides good entertainment and has fewer plot holes than usual despite the extremely convoluted plan the baddies have come up with. Worth a watch even if I'm not sure how much of it I'll remember in 5 years. 

4. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

One of several successful films about hotels from recent years, this one had a truly stellar cast. Just seeing Judi Dench and Maggie Smith together is a pretty special thing, even if their interactions are minimal and it looks pretty conspicuously like the two of them were never actually on set together, but with performances by Bill Nighy, Tom Hiddleston, Dev Patel and Penelope Wilton - that's star power. So many of England's senior actors.

These aren't their most challenging roles of all time, but they certainly get moments to shine. At first I thought that the Indian characters were written in a bit of a daft, overtly soap opera way, but the just have fronts they're expected to show and as the film progresses we see the deeper levels. 

Of course there are feel-good moments and there are some very funny parts too. One interesting part is that there are two xenophobic older ladies, and it's interesting how different the way they come over is. One is so overtly hateful that somehow it's sweet and silly, and she eventually gets won over by the local people. The other has a pleasant facade but makes lots of disparaging comments and never actually learns to adapt even if she has a redemption moment where she accepts the problems with her marriage. 

I can't say this made me want to chase the joie de vivre of India. But it was certainly fun to watch!

5: The Founder

This is an interesting take on the business origin stories that have been popular for a while now. Not the story of the McDonald's Brothers, though they of course feature prominently, but of Ray Kroc, who took a great idea and franchised it across the country. 

Michael Keaton, who I still picture in his Birdman role, does a great job transitioning from struggling salesman to egotistical entrepreneur.

There's some common ground here with Big Eyes, especially when Kroc starts taking the credit as founder, though things of course get much less out of hand. 

There's something about 50s America that also makes me feel nostalgic, even if obviously I wasn't there. It's like they universal Western culture touch point for nostalgia. And it's a lot of fun to watch anything set in the period. Except maybe Grease.

A Wrinkle in Time

I wanted to sleep through the last leg of my flight but was too uncomfortable after walking up once, so decided to watch something light. This seemed to fit the bill.

I don't know anything about A Wrinkle in Time outside the movie. I think it was a novel first, and I vaguely remember one of those stupid debates about whether Diversity is our Strength or whether casting a white or unspecified book character as another race is white genocide. For my part, I have no problem with the casting of this film, and if there's a racial question here it's about why so many characters lack agency.

When a brilliant scientist disappears, leaving his family behind, his daughter Meg gets kid movie issues. She's sad and argumentative and gets bullied at school. 

Luckily for her, her six-year-old brother has done all the legwork, to the extent that this would probably have been more interesting as his story. Except that he doesn't have a growth arc and is just the precocious but adorable little boy archetype (not one of Jung's but common enough). He has contacted intradimensional beings broadly based on question words to help on a quest to find their papa. 

They are joined by Calvin, a boy from Meg's class who is gorgeous in a Disney musical sort of way and incredibly bland in a Disney musical sort of way. His entire personality development is covered in a 2-second vision of his father shouting at him.

Then there are the Misses. A young white woman who's supposed to be mischievous but is mostly obnoxious, a South Asian lady who gets no personality so has to communicate entirely in quotes, and giant Oprah Winfrey in full fabulous drag queen regalia - and you can't go wrong with giant Oprah.

There's very little tension to be found in the kids' quest, mostly hallucinogenic and lacking any goals, direction or direct opposition until the last half hour or so. So it's difficult to care about a story like that.

Looking it up now I’m off the flight and able to go online, I see not only was it a bigger controversy than I thought (I can kind of understand objecting to the removal of Christian themes, but disliking it based on the casting seems dumb to me, there’s nothing about this that should even be remarkable, though I guess I might feel different were I a fan of the book) but it was a huge flop. It’s listed on Wikipedia as perhaps the biggest (even inflation-adjusted) flop of all time if the loss ends up at the upper end of the estimate. Yowch.

Plane films: Goodbye Christopher Robin; The Shape of Water; Tomb Raider; Justice League; Fantastic Beasts; The Disaster Artist

Plane Film 1: Goodbye Christopher Robin

I had this film wrong. Recently there was a trailer for another movie, featuring a grown up Christopher Robin having a somewhat hallucinogenic experience late in life where Pooh seems to visit him and speaks in the Disney voice. This film was completely different, an enjoyable, of course highly fictionalised account primarily about how AA Milne came to write the classic books. I had no idea there were the two different films being made. And I have to say, I still have considerable doubts about Christopher Robin, and likely would have enjoyed Goodbye Christopher Robin more if I hadn’t expected a talking Pooh to appear at any moment.

I very much enjoyed the evocation of the inter-war period, the way Sussex nature looks so idyllic and the very believable performances, convincingly evoking the idea of strong emotions simmering beneath a refined exterior. And the kid playing Billy Moon was also a great find, swinging between emotions and going overboard as kids so often do.  

The characterisation is a bit overly broad. Alan Milne in particular is not convincing, falling too hard into the shell-shocked former soldier character type with not enough of his own personality. There's an attempt at a character arc showing Christopher Robin's parents as neglectful and completely emotionally disconnected from the child they've just left with their nanny for his childhood. It's not very believable after reading Milne's poems, or even seeing all the cute pet names and stories about being very young touched on here. It feels much too much like the result of a scriptwriting 101 class about character arcs and development. 

It's all a redemption arc but because it takes place over several years, there just isn't enough redeeming and much too much bad parenting for the intended sympathy to ring true. Especially since rather than pushing fame upon him, it seems like the think Christopher Robin would resent the most would be getting sent to boarding school, where his life began to get crappy. Yet that point is never raised. Maybe that's my own personal biases based on my own experiences coming through, though. 

Plane film 2: The Shape of Water

Guillermo Del Toro's latest Oscar darling isn't nearly as magical or iconic as my favourite of his, Pan's Labyrinth, but it's still a very compelling and likeable fable. In a grimy vision of Cold War America, a mute cleaning lady named Eliza discovers they are keeping an aquatic humanoid creature in a lab. When Eliza bonds with the creature and learns it's to be vivisected, she does all he can to free it. 

Del Toro's films tend to skirt the line between arthouse and comic book in a way very few others manage - perhaps Burton at his best is the closest. Here there are a lot of cartoonish things, like the ragtag group that helps Eliza, and how one minute, the antagonist seems like a seriously heinous figure, with his views on race and gender roles, the next he's having to focus on his positive thinking after his car gets bashed up. 

Sometimes it feels like it's taking itself too seriously when it's repeating tropes from ET and Free Willy. Still, the balance just about works and the story is very satisfying. Unlike Pan's Labyrinth, it's not one I'd care to rewatch over and over, but absolutely I enjoyed it. 

Plane Film 3: Isle of Dogs

See Animation blog

Plane Film 4: Tomb Raider

After a reboot of the video game series, it made a lot of sense to also reboot the movie franchise. She may not be up there with Bond or Bourne but Lara Croft is definitely an icon recognised the world over and deserves a decent film.

This version is definitely less camp and cheesy than the Jolie films, but I don't think it's going to reignite the franchise like the game reboot did. And the problem is that they didn't take enough cues from that game, which this film essentially adapts. 

It's the same basic story - Lara heads to the Japanese island of Yamatai to follow her father's research and ends up clashing with shadowy organisation Trinity as well as the mysterious forces that were being researched in the first place. It even takes some of the best setpieces, like having to climb a rusty old WWII-era plane. 

But almost everything the film changes in an attempt to improve the action to fit Hollywood ideas of a good screenplay definitely has a negative impact. The game begins right in the thick of the action with Lara having to survive on the island and the backstory getting filled in later. The film shows 40 minutes of dull preamble that's going to date horribly - Lara losing a kickboxing match; Lara is a delivery driver; Lara takes part in some stupid hipster bike chase; Lara goes to a pawn shop; Lara gets her bag stolen in Hong Kong and the chase takes her exactly where she needs to be. 

This Lara is also much less a positive feminist symbol, surprising for Hollywood. Lara in the game starts out vulnerable and feeble but very quickly becomes a capable survivalist constantly staking out on her own. Here she's much too often spured to action only by a male, or motivated by what a male is doing. The more agency the adaptation gives male characters who didn't feature much in the original, the less Lara gets.

And you know what? In a Tomb Raider movie, there should be a whole lot more raiding of tombs. 

Plane Film 5: Justice League

I'd been hoping for Black Panther, but unfortunately it wasn't the superhero flick available for my flight. Instead I got Justice League, which I can't say I had been desperate to see. But I was kind of curious to see how this team came together and how Wonder Woman was integrated. 

That said, I have basically no interest in the DC Cinematic Universe. Batman films have gone downhill in my eyes since Batfleck, and I'm not interested in watching the TV series that would inform me about this teenage version of Barry Allen. 

Justice League seemed to have a really forgettable villain and none of the exuberance of the Avengers films despite a similar gather-the-McGuffins plot. Unlike Infinity War, which had reactions absolutely everywhere I follow online, nobody really said anything about this film or the impact of Steppenwolf. I mostly had Boney M stuck in my head every time I heard his name. 

Everything here is so grim and pessimistic, too. Everyone keeps moaning about how the world has gone to hell. Even the quirky humour guy, apparently now Barry, has a pretty grim life. The humour also mostly misfired, with the best joke not only in the trailer but already done way better by the Powerpuff Girls decades ago. 

Ultimately, while the Avengers films have been incredibly fun recently, DC just can't make their movies fun enough. 

Plane Film 6: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Despite owning copies of the little charity book this film is based on (they were going to be worth a fortune as collector's items you know), I had litle to no interest in seeing it in the cinema. For me, Harry Potter definitely outstayed its welcome by the end, both the books and the movie series. Definitely more so the movie series. 

So when they announced they were further milking this series with a whole series based on this encyclopaedia-style booklet, I thought it was a terrible idea. 

Well, watching it on the plane wasn't a bad thing. Though I kept falling asleep. Basically, this was an extended episode of Dr. Who. The writing was extremely like Dr. Who - and much as I like seeing Eddie Redmayne, he was definitely  just doing his best Dr. Who. 

Newt Scamander comes to America and stretches credulity in the idea that wizards have managed to keep themselves secret at all by letting various magical creatures loose in a bank to steal people's money and probably ruin a few of their lives - not that they mention it.

He gets mixed up in a vague plot about what's basically a magical time bomb in human form. The ending is very questionable, with what's basically a police shooting ordered by the black female president, and only the big antagonist and Newt are suggesting it might be a bad thing. It also means the action just fizzles out. The way Newt manages to get everyone on his side despite still being a wanted criminal is also highly dubious.

It's only meant to be a bit of fluff. But I definitely feel like I could have got the same level of enjoyment from a mediocre episode of New Who.

Plane film 7: The Disaster Artist

The internet has made Tommy Wiseau a legend. The Room will probably endure now as one of the best terrible movies ever made. And Tommy Wiseau is the reason it's so entertaining to watch it. His terrible stilted delivery, his strong accent and of course his sheer blistering self-confidence. 

This film follows him and his roommate trying to make it in LA. Of course Tommy doesn't do so well, but his roommate starts to get some success and that causes friction. So they set out to make The Room and that's where it actually gets entertaining. 

A charming take on an outsider artist, it's amazing that this film could get made at all, and it's nice to show how some people walk their own path and may even get a film made about them just by doing that.  

Deadpool 2

I can forgive a lot of things in a Deadpool movie that would bother me if the story was meant to be taken seriously. I can forgive a slapdash plot where trying to follow the logic of what the antagonist makes zero sense (Cable not going back into the prison, for example). I can forgive the failure to make the story driving the plot in any way interesting or engaging. I can forgive using the only major female characters in the film as basically a plot-pushing angel and superpowered girls who are kind of along for the ride. I can accept the cast of secondary characters built up by the first film and some interesting new additions to the cast being totally underused. If, and only if, the film is funny.

The problem was that it just wasn’t that entertaining. Recent Marvel movies have done a great job of being laugh-out-loud funny. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies, Thor: Ragnarok and even the recent Avengers: Age of Ultron all managed to be really funny, slip in a whole lot of pop culture references and still switch to serious mode when required. Deadpool absolutely needs to set itself apart by not only being more irreverent and adult than these other comic book films, it needs to be the funniest of the bunch.

And it just isn’t. There were a lot of jokes that left me smirking – repeating the dig about not being able to afford a decent number of X-Men only for them all to be glimpsed watching in disapproval; a really big-name star playing an invisible character; calling out X-Men as a dated analogy for racism in the 60s and making cracks at Black Tom Cassidy not being black. They all got a little smile from me. But I only actually laughed once, and that was the dig at Rob Liefeld and his inability to draw feet (which is actually how I first became aware of him, when people were ranting about his art). And of course that was the point nobody else in the theatre laughed.

The humour just doesn’t work as well as the character-based humour in the other Marvel movies is working. Firstly, the film makes a point of trying to give Deadpool depth by making a good third of the movie a miserable rumination on mortality and being left alone if you’re basically immortal. Which obviously isn’t especially funny. It then sets up a gag where X-Force don’t last longer than a few minutes, and while it’s a little funny it doesn’t work that well after all this pontificating about how losing a loved one can have such a harrowing affect. Don’t Bedlam and Zeitgeist have any loved ones?

A lot of the issue is timing. I feel like a lot of the humour is in the vein of Parker and Stone vein – build something up as important then tear it down. The ‘Holy shit balls’ song for the Juggernaut was definitely very South Park. But I feel like they would have handled the parachute sequence so much better to make the bathos actually funny. Same with the opening credits – they’re a funny parody of James Bond with Flashdance thrown in there, but they’re at a point in the movie that’s just left the audience on a downswing so the humour just isn’t prepped right.

Russell and Cable also don’t work very well. Russell is very unlikeable, even for a kid who is destined for terrible things Looper-style. His storyline also leads Deadpool to making a whole lot of paedo jokes that just didn’t sit well with me because nobody’s gonna find them especially funny or edgy and child abuse is not really something to make light of. Cable just wasn’t very interesting either, seeming not especially driven or edgy. Also, a little ironically after seeing Brolin as Thanos, I just don’t think he was physically big enough for Cable, who is meant to be huge. A huge human, obviously, not huge like the Juggernaut – who I have to say was a highlight here and unfortunately underused.

Overall, I was pretty disappointed. The film only worked if it was actually funny, and for me it fell short. It was sometimes clever, sometimes impressive and sometimes very up-to-the-minute with what it chose to skewer, and thinking back on how the whole publicity campaign was done the concept is amusing, but it needed to actually make me laugh and it didn’t. It didn’t even try to for way too much of the movie. I didn’t particularly like the first film either, but I feel like it at least made me chuckle. Hopefully any future sequels will do better.  

Birdman

It’s been a few years since this came out and proved an unexpected Oscar darling, but I felt like watching some kind of subversion or parody of superhero movies and remembered this. Though there’s an element of superhero parody, especially with one glorious scene late in the film, actually this is much less about movie-making and far more about the entertainment industry as a whole.

The story is quite a simple one. An actor whose star has faded named Riggan wants to be taken seriously as a creative force, so is putting on an adaptation of a Raymond Carver story on Broadway. When he decides his co-star is terrible and an opportunity arises to replace him, one of the play’s actors offers to bring in her boyfriend, who is a highly respected method actor. A series of disasters in the previews and escalating conflicts with the other actors and family members he’s surrounded himself with lead to Riggan’s perception of reality getting increasingly warped.

Through these interpersonal conflicts, various themes get explored – high art versus mass entertainment; personal pride and insecurity; how to bring life meaning and the euphoria of performance; old-school fame through a series of gatekeepers versus social media and going viral by chance. It’s a thoroughly modern, thoughtful script aware of the past while looking at changes the world is going through, and tapping into the fashion for superhero movies was a great relevant choice.

There are a few things that annoyed me here. Mostly I thought the dialogue was great, but there was a bit too much of people walking around talking to each other about profound metaphysical conundrums or huge relationship problems, which even in the world of theatrical luvvies was a stretch. There was just too much soul-bearing without the counterbalance of normal conversation that suggests this isn’t just how they always communicate – which would be totally unsustainable. There was also a bit too much focus on the gimmick of simulating one long uninterrupted shot, which let’s face it isn’t anything new and without considering reel-change cuts has been done since Hitchcock. Some parts, like temporal transitions, really might as well have been cuts and just hurt immersion.

But what was good about this film massively outweighed what didn’t work. The biggest triumph here is the performances, especially the interactions between Michael Keaton and Edward Norton, which are tempestuous, brutal but most of all believable. All the actors here have to show great versatility – the characters all act, put on a façade for others and show the naked truth by turns and all of them pitch it so well. The stakes for a small circle of people with backgrounds that are pretty difficult to identify with over the course of just a few nights really feel significant.

The music is great, too. We basically get a jazz drum solo for the vast majority of the film, for all the original music. It’s a great sizzling jazz kit that at times gives a cool driving rhythm, at time a pounding, rattling, anxious beat that heightens the sense of paranoia, and at other times simply underpins the action and gives a sense of impetus in a film made largely without cuts.

Two things carry this movie. First, the fantastic multifaceted performances. Second, the play-like attention to characterisation, crisis and breakdown. This is dusted by interesting musical experimentation, some grimly comic moments and some great nods to the simple, addictive fun of Hollywood. Really fun to watch, though I would add not quite as clever as it seems to think it is.

Avengers: Infinity War

Keeping this spoiler-free, so it may be a little abstract at times!

I greatly enjoyed Infinity War. These days I don't often go to the cinema, and I don't tend to watch the standalone movies until a while after release day. I didn't see Doctor Strange or the latest Thor until a few months later, and I haven't seen Black Panther yet because I'm pretty sure it will be available on my flight back to England in July. But when they all team up, I get excited and want to go. Glad I saw it on opening day, too, because inevitably my Facebook feed showed a spoiler the very next morning. 

The movie was everything I wanted it to be, which is more than I can say for the first two Avengers movies. The first was fun but the final act had no real sense of a genuine threat or bit emotional payoff. The second was marred by the annoying way they wrote Ultron and his weird plan. This one was much bigger, more spectacular and crazier than the others. Shifting the whole MCU into Cosmic Marvel was always a bit risky, because when things become overblown space operas, you risk losing the human element and the idea that characters like Captain America can still hold their own seems a bit absurd. But the comics manage it, and so have the movies. The careful build-up from the largely human dramas of the first Iron Man movies and the original Captain America mean we're invested in these characters even when realism is long-since cast out. The battles and setpieces here are as far-fetched as anything in anime, but it works.

Thanos is also an excellent antagonist. Brutal and merciless but utterly convinced he is right, vulnerable and not beyond suffering, with a dream of fixing the universe and settling down quietly, he is actually convincing even at this absurd intergalactic scale. It’s believable that he’s committed to his goal and will stop at nothing to reach it. Honestly, his plan doesn't make that much sense in this version. His comic motivation - pleasing Lady Death - probably would seem too ridiculous to work here, but at least was logical. I can understand his modus operandi, but getting the Infinity Gauntlet and unlimited power surely offers alternate solutions to the original problem he wanted to fix?

What impressed me was how elegantly all the different elements here were juggled. The opening perhaps tramples on the triumph of a previous movie in something of an Alien 3 shocker, but it gives us a strong focus for who to follow in the narrative. We then have very clear points of focus during the fetch quest to follow – who has the stones, who is coming for them, and who is there to defend them. Thanos having his Black Order to split up and send to retrieve the stones made sense, even if they could have had much less difficulty teaming up from the start, and even if some of the heroes’ actions are dubious, the scriptwriters put in quite a clever catch-all from Dr. Strange that waves away any missed opportunities or seemingly misguided actions.

The big battle scene is a bit dull, to be honest. It’s great to see lots of heroes in action, but against CGI fodder it has very little impact. Still, this is a bit of a tradition from the Avengers movies. Probably the biggest thrill was having the Guardians of the Galaxy interacting with the Avengers, providing some of the funniest and most awesome moments.

The audience leaves probably a little surprised, perhaps moved, and almost certainly eager for more. I know I want the Avengers 4 ASAP. The story clearly isn’t over, and there are plenty more MCU movies to come. I have a feeling we’ll leave the next movie with a feeling of almost perfect inversion of what we got here. But I’m certainly curious to see what effect this is all going to have on upcoming movies like the next Spiderman and Guardians films. I’m assuming the new Ant-man and Captain Marvel films will be set before this, with some scenes perhaps in parallel. We’ll see.

Either way, this was an action-packed space melodrama with lots of battles that brought a smile to my face and a surprising range of emotions. I definitely enjoyed it, even if a little part of me was sad that we still can’t have the X-Men included in all this.