Friday 29 December 2017

The Greatest Showman (2017)

I can understand why some people wouldn't like The Greatest Showman. It takes extreme liberties with history, its story is oft-told, and the songs throughout it are over-produced and clearly intended to appeal to a generation that cut its teeth on High School Musical.

Personally, I thought it was great.

It shares the same lyricist (although I don't believe the same composer) as LA LA Land, and the publicity for it has been making quite a few references to it. That set me up for potential disappointment - LA LA Land has a great opening number, but nothing else in the film lived up to that potential.

Fortunately, The Greatest Showman doesn't repeat the same mistakes. This is not a film that happens to have a couple of musical sequences in it, but a bona fide musical. It also doesn't make the same mistake off its best material (although The Greatest Show is arguably the best song (but only arguably, unlike LA LA Land where Another Day of Sun is most certainly the best number).

It also manages to populate the film with people with genuine musical talent - Hugh Jackman looks like he would have fit right at home in the classic films of Hollywood's Golden Years.

It's also one of the few films when a total stranger (an older lady (how much older it would be impolite of me to speculate)) turned to me after the end credits had finished rolling (yes, I  remained to hear Rewrite The Stars again) and said how much she enjoyed it.

Sunday 24 December 2017

Stronger (2017)

If I came away with anything from Stronger, it was with a sense of how a phrase (Boston Strong in this case) can be over-used to the point of sounding like a meaningless platitude, which is the reaction from Jeff Bauman (Jake Gyllenhaal) as the phrase keeps being repeated to him.

To be fair, there's a lot more to take away from the film. For a start, losing your legs in an explosion is not a nice thing. The film gives us great detail on how much it is not a nice thing from the initial injury through to the wince-inducing removal of the dressings, to the pain of landing on one's face when trying to reach badly positioned toilet paper.

It also covers the difficulty of taking a shower, having sex, trying to get up stairs in a wheelchair, and coping with the demands of unwanted celebrity.

There are some excellent performances, particularly from Gyllenhaal, Tatiana Maslany and Miranda Richardson. The film itself is an interesting, detailed (possibly over-detailed) look at the effects of suffering a life-changing injury, a commentary on society's unrealistic expectations on victims that it elevates into heroes to try to find triumph within tragedy.

It has a lot to say and is commendable for that, but it didn't quite resonate on an emotional level for me. Amid all the detail, something of the whole seemed to be missing, which is a shame. What I would have loved to have been excellent is merely good enough.

Saturday 23 December 2017

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)

There seems to have been a recent trend for providing late-in-the-day sequels. This year we've had Trainspotting 2 (21 years later), Blade Runner (35 years), and this month Jumanji (22 years).

Surprisingly, they broadly seem to have worked, managing to understand what worked with the original, without being a poor replica of it.

Jumanji, coming from Sony Pictures (which hasn't had a stellar track record of late) is a funny, imaginative reworking of the original idea into something that works for the gamer generation.

The central performances (Dwayne Johnson, Jack Black, Kevin Hart and Karen Gillan), all of whom are in some way playing in opposition to their characters (Johnson for example is the in-game avatars for an allergy-prone, hyper-nervous nerd), are all played well, the juxtaposition of character with avatar hitting just the right spot.

I actually found it a better sequel than I would have thought the original film deserved.

Pitch Perfect 3 (2017)

In Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character spends one of his time loops desperately trying to re-make Andie MacDowell's character fall in love with him, reaching shrill levels of rising desperation.

That's what Pitch Perfect 3 feels like.

Or to put it another way, if the original Pitch Perfect was a steak dinner, Pitch Perfect 3 would be a Big Mac and fries. With too much ketchup.

The film manages to be occasionally funny, and there are some decent musical pieces, but the story is far from aca-amazing, more like below aca-average. It's the Pitch Perfect version of Three Men and a Little Lady, or Police Academy: Mission to Moscow.

It's still watchable, but ultimately it was a Pitch Perfect too far.

Tuesday 5 December 2017

Suburbicon (2017)

Suburbicon is not a bad film. It's  not a great film either. It's also not the quirky black comedy that its trailer made it out to be.

The trailer actually does the film a huge disservice. Without seeing it, I might have been able to enjoy the story unfolding at its intended pace, but instead I spent most of my time waiting for the next moment shown in the trailer. Any sense of surprise, mystery or shock is pretty much ruined.

The film itself is something of a mixed success. Its story is concerned with the rot of American society. One one hand we have a black family who have moved into a white neighbourhood who are blamed for dragging down the decent, safe world that the Suburbicons (Suburbiconians? have created for themselves. On the other hand there is a the white family that is very nicely dragging down society all by itself.

The focus of the film starts with the children - the only sons of the two families who reluctantly bond over baseball. When the film tells its story through that lens of childhood, it's at its most effective. Unfortunately, it strays into the world of adult shenanigans - at least on the part of Matt Damon and Julianne Moore (the black parents, Mrs and Mr Mayers (Karimah Westbrook  and Leith M Burke) get much less of a look-in - although there is a particularly disquieting scene involving inflated prices as a supermarket with Mrs Mayers) - and as a result loses something of its potency.

It's nicely shot, decently acted, and probably a better film than most critics would grant, but it had room to be a lot better. Worth a watch, but I wouldn't go out of my way to see it.

Monday 4 December 2017

Battle of the Sexes (2017)

Battle of the Sexes is the story of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King v Bobby Riggs, an event that I never knew about until seeing the trailers for the film for two reasons (1) I'm not a huge fan of sport and (2) I was only two-years old at the time.

It's a timely film considering the current gender battles and something of a sad indictment of the state of gender equality when many of the issues raised over forty-years ago are still the same issues our society faces.

The film itself is well put together - the tennis sequences well handled and the performances of the actors excellent. The story itself is interesting rather than compelling. I don't think it's going to be anyone's favourite tennis film, let alone favourite sports film, but it's still an accomplished retelling of an sport-related event that people should know about.

Hong Kong Railway Museum

For a little bit of context, I've been fascinated by trains for most of my life. I can't make any claim to being a true fanatic - my...