Ghostbusters

I would give Ghostbusters a sold 7 out of 10, it wasn’t as funny as I had hoped although there were some good moments, but the storyline was good, I loved the four female Ghostbusters because there was something very powerful and moving about the uncomplicated female friendships portrayed, particularly Abby and Erin reuniting, and the film wasn’t weighed down by boring bro jokes or the sort of douchebag behaviour of the original film.

I tried to watch that recently because I couldn’t remember if I ever had, and was put off by the tawdry attempts of Bill Murray’s character to flirt inappropriately with a female student at the beginning and then his date-rape of Sigourney Weaver’s character. Yes, that’s what it is. He had sex with a woman possessed by a spirit who was coming onto him sexually and behaving in a way the normal woman didn’t, without ever getting consent from the woman herself. Yuck. None of those guys were at all likeable.

Kate McKinnon played a wonderfully zany Jillian Holtzmann, Abby’s eccentric ghost-hunting aficionado, completely unconcerned with her own weirdness, feisty, super-smart, and best of all, a gifted engineer and physicist.

Melissa McCarthy was the irrepressibly chirpy Abby, whose initially strained relationship with childhood friend Erin and their joyful eventual reconciliation was totally believable, and again, she’s clearly a sharp scientist who believes in what she’s doing and works hard.

Leslie Jones was Patty, who joins the group later but brings sassy energy, a strong grounding force and a level head, and a lot of comedy from her reactions to bizarre things.

Kristen Wiig was Erin, who I felt I understood completely in her struggle to be appreciated by staid patriarchal academic figures, a career woman who grafted hard to get where she is, but displayed she’s deeply loyal, compassionate and self-sacrificing after she decides that she’ll do everything on her own terms from now on.

Light, fluffy, lots of visual spectacle, references to the original film, a fresh new take, Chris Hemsworth as the dopey receptionist brought some laughs, overall a film very gentle on the soul without stretching the brain.

The Neon Demon

The Neon Demon was curiously disappointing affair. I’m giving it a 4 out of 10, and most of those points are for the visuals, for the darkly atmospheric settings, the great use of colour and contrast and imagery, the glamourous sinister sensuous beauty of the film, and the soundtrack which accompanied the film perfectly.

Despite the hype, however, with crowds booing it at Cannes and walk-outs of the audience when it was first shown, it wasn’t frightening.

The film drifts through the surreal entry of naïve sixteen year-old Jesse (Elle Fanning) to the LA modelling industry, with no parents or family, living in an eerie motel run by a pervy scumbag (Keanu Reeves). Jesse builds an uneasy friendship with Ruby (Jena Malone) who grabs the psycho lesbian baton and runs with it right from the start where she eyes up Jesse with a lusty, over-lingering stare, but it’s also pretty clear that she doesn’t have Jesse’s best interests at heart after continually steering her into uncomfortable encounters with two veteran models: Gigi (Bella Heathcote) whose beauty is artificially constructed by extensive plastic surgery, and Sarah (Abbey Lee), whose mental stability is crumbling as it becomes clear that she’s yesterday’s “sour milk” and the industry increasingly prefers “fresh meat” like Jesse.

As the film progresses and Jesse’s star rises with the interest of a top fashion designer and a famous photographer, she becomes more detached from the ordinary life represented by her almost boyfriend Dean and becomes more egotistical and arrogant, rubbing her natural loveliness in the face of Gigi’s plasticity and her fresh youthfulness against Sarah’s rapidly approaching expiry date.

Jesse rejects a come-on by Ruby, who goes to her second job as a morgue make-up artist and masturbates while kissing a female corpse, fantasising about untouchable Jesse. Ruby later joins Gigi and Sarah in chasing Jesse through a mansion in the dark until they corner her by an empty pool and push her in. Ruby is later seen bathing in Jesse’s blood while Gigi and Sarah shower together to wash off the gory murder, and we find out at the end of the film that they cannibalised Jesse when Gigi throws up an eyeball, which looks so fake that it’s not even gross.

Breaking it down, there are startlingly few real “horror” moments in the film: (1) Jesse has a nightmare about the motel manager forcing a knife down her throat as a grotesque metaphor for oral sodomy; (2) Jesse listens against the wall while the motel manager rapes the thirteen year old runaway next door, depicted only in her muffled screams, after the motel manager failed to break into Jesse’s room; (3) Ruby’s cringeworthy masturbation scene on the corpse, which includes spitting into its mouth so kissing it seems more like kissing a person; (4) Jesse’s death, where she is shown broken and disarrayed like a dropped marionette on the floor of the pool in spreading blood; (5) the bloody shower and bath; (6) Gigi throwing up an eyeball and stabbing herself to death in the stomach; (7) and a weird scene of Ruby lying naked in a room, blood flooding from her shadowed genitals, like a man’s odd idea of menstruation.

These all take place in the last quarter of the film and there’s nothing that made me horrified – just an “ew” reaction like finding a rotting bird in the grass full of maggots. No one’s sympathetic and it all just feels contrived. The film doesn’t bother to go deep into anyone’s motivations or why Ruby suddenly turned against Jesse and incited Gigi and Sarah to turn up to kill her.

Independence Day: Resurgence

I do think Independence Day: Resurgence suffered from the absence of Will Smith, because while the film was equally as cheesy as its predecessor, it was less funny, a deficit that the massively improved special effects couldn’t hope to fill, and the simplicity of the original film’s plot was replaced by a more convoluted attempt at backstory and an unashamed sequel plug that fell flat. Overall I would probably give it a 5 out of 10, being very generous with my rating, because the new faces in the cast did not inspire any emotional reactions from me. If they had perished, I wouldn’t have cared.

Those of the original cast who remained were somewhat criminally underused – David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) didn’t have enough screentime or the right kind of surrounding characters to play his sarcastic humour off on; former president Thomas Whitmore (Bill Pullman) wasn’t around long enough or shown with his daughter enough to make his heroic sacrifice more affecting; and Julius Levinson (Judd Hirsch) has some sweet moments with a family of orphaned kids who rescue him, but he doesn’t have any comedic moments like the first film.

Resurgence is set twenty years after the first film. Most of the world has recovered, deconstructing alien technology from the destroyed ships in order to achieve the technological advances we have in the 21^st century plus better weapons, a base on the moon, anti-gravity, and faster space travel. In Africa, one of the ships actually landed, and the local people fought for ten years to defeat the surviving aliens under the command of a warlord. Thomas Whitmore, older and physically debilitated, is still deferentially looked after as a VIP with a security team, with his now grown-up daughter Patricia an aide in the White House to the current president (Sela Ward). Steven Hiller (Will Smith) died in the period between the films in an accident during a test flight of an alien-human technological hybrid ship, but his stepson Dylan has grown up to become a commander in a legacy squadron. Dylan has an ongoing feud with Jake Morrison (Liam Hemsworth), a cocky pilot who aspired to the status Dylan has achieved but nearly got Dylan killed in a training accident several years ago.

David Levinson runs the Space Defence Force – his ex-wife having conveniently disappeared into a plot hole so he could have a contrived flirting romance with some woman with a French surname – and he travels to that bit of Africa to speak to the warlord’s son, where he discovers that the ship there has been transmitting a distress signal into deep space, which someone is now apparently answering. Thomas Whitmore is suffering from peculiar visions and portents of doom, attributed to the residual effect of the alien’s mind invasion twenty years ago, and Dr Okun, who everyone thought was killed, has actually been in a coma from his encounter with the alien at Area 51, from which he now awakens with the same doom visions as Whitmore. The aliens conveniently return in time for Independence Day, this time with a 3,000 mile wide ship that actually lands on the Earth, its gravity sweeping chunks of Asian cities into the air and dropping them down on London. Better armed and better prepared, they quickly overwhelm Earth’s abortive response to the new threat, destroying the moon base, taking out the President and her cabinet in the Cheyenne Mountain Complex bunkers, and causing an even bigger death toll than before.

The film reveals new information about the aliens, which become known as the “Harvesters” – not locusts as originally envisioned, but eusocial like ants, the invasion fleets are led by a Harvester Queen and they actually intend to drill into Earth’s core and drain it off to use as fuel for their vast civilization-ship, which is big enough to contain its own ecosystem. (We get to see it when the band of young heroes we don’t give a shit about end up trapped in there for a while.)

The ship that landed in Africa had started this drilling process but the destruction of the mothership twenty years ago ended its operations. The aliens pick up this right where they left off, giving the film an arbitrary deadline to defeat them by before the core is drained and the Earth destroyed in the process. The Harvester Queen, much larger than her drones, is smarter than her predecessor and manages to lure the bombers of the counterattack into a trap, disable global communications, take out Earth’s space defences, assassinate the President and almost every in the line of presidential succession, all within a fraction of the time taken by the city-destroyers first time around. The key to defeating them is found within a craft that arrived – and was shot down, mistakenly under the belief it was a scout for the Harvesters – just before the Harvesters turned up over the moon. It contains a Sphere holding an artificial intelligence from another world. The Harvesters have spent thousands of years fighting an interstellar war with other alien civilizations, including the Sphere’s own, who shed their biological bodies to become computer brains, with the Sphere’s remnant people now aiding refugees of another wrecked worlds in training to fight the Harvesters, developing technology that could defeat them.

The Harvester Queen discovers the Sphere’s presence on Earth when it is activated at Area 51 to talk to the humans, which leads to her swiftly moving in that direction to take it out (“now, Princess, we will discuss the location of your secret Rebel base”). If they can take out the Queen, the other alien ships will sod off, because they will be “recalled” by other Harvester Queens who for some reason won’t be interested in finishing what the current Queen started. That’s a gaping plot hole if ever I saw one.

Cue the race against time to use the Sphere to bait the Queen into a trap and destroy her before the Earth’s molten core is sucked down by her ship. At the end of the film, the Sphere invites the survivors of humanity to spearhead the fightback against the Harvesters by joining the other alien refugees to take the war direct to the enemy, and thus is announced the intention to produce another sequel.

Yawn. If there’s a third film, I don’t think I will bother to watch it. The Jungle Book, while equally an attempt by the studios to capitalise on a classic film, was a much better watch. I’m glad I saw it but it wasn’t good enough to invest in a DVD as I have no desire ever to watch it again.

The Jungle Book

I loved the original Jungle Book as a child. My dad liked to sing Baloo’s songs to my sisters and I to amuse us. Given this nostalgia, I was reluctant to see the remake, for fear it would taint those happy childhood memories, but I ended up watching it because I couldn’t find anything else I wanted to see at the cinema, and one of my sisters had given it a decent review after seeing it with her boyfriend.

I would give it a 7 out of 10. It wavers between being more faithful to the original Jungle Books of Rudyard Kipling and being faithful to the original Disney animated film of 1967. They kept two of the animated film’s most famous songs – Bare Necessities and I Want to Be Like You – but altered to keep to the slightly darker tone of the live-action film. I disagreed with some of the voice casting, although Mowgli was well played by his young actor, much closer to Kipling’s stroppy character who wore constantly at the nerves of his predatory guardians, always questioning and quarrelling and winding the animals up.

I had to look up afterwards who voiced Bagheera, which turned out to be Ben Kingsley, because he sounded disturbingly like Ralph Fiennes at times, and I dislike him. Bill Murray voiced Baloo, not quite so jarring, except when he used slang like “cool” that made me wonder what the scriptwriters had been thinking.

Scarlett Johansson managed to carry off a superbly sinister turn on Kaa, who in the books was a powerful figure that terrified the entire jungle, including Bagheera and Baloo when they reluctantly approached him for help rescuing Mowgli from the monkeys. Idris Elba voiced Shere Khan, which I didn’t realise either, because he gave the tiger a voice that wouldn’t be out of place from a sneering football hooligan with a pint of beer in one hand and a bloody-knuckled fist of the other. I preferred the sleekly sinister English accent of the original voice actor, although the burned, blind in one eye Shere Khan of the live action remake was a bit closer to the Kipling original (where he was born with a crippled leg and went by the derogatory nickname Lungri, or “The Lame One”.

King Louie, voiced by Christopher Walken, was reimagined not as an orangutan, which are native to Borneo and not India where the story is set, but as a Gigantopithecus, an extinct species of great ape that had survived in the abandoned temple city inhabited by the monkeys. The monkeys themselves are generally larger than their real-life counterparts, with the stronger enforcers of Louie’s troupe actually the size of adult humans when compared to Mowgli.

All the animals in the film are CGI, conspicuously so, but computer technology has advanced enough that they look closer and closer to real animals and birds, and it’s apparent that huge amounts of studying have gone into the production of the beasts: their bodies, fur, feathers, and muscle structure are all sharply realised. Bagheera was rendered moving exactly as a real melanistic leopard would, with that distinctive cat gait, as was Shere Khan, even when they fought, and I thought this achievement was very impressive. I was also really impressed that they used so many different species of monkey in Louie’s tribe – pig-tailed macaques, hoolock gibbons and grey langurs, rather than just sticking to one generic looking monkey species.

Deadpool

Deadpool was brilliant. Plenty of laugh out loud moments, very tongue-in-cheek, sending itself up, in the same vein as Ant-Man but with a prison’s worth of swearing and a substantial gout of gore. People don’t just get meatily punched or kicked into things, they get their brains blown out, their flesh burnt, bones broken, heads cut off and Deadpool himself actually gets a metal pipe rammed through his body immediately post-transformation and a knife stuck into his skull. My sister and I had a disagreement about whether or not the film could be considered to have a plot, and if the bad guys were just evil for the sake of it, which is always laziness.

The humour is intentionally crude, and the slightly misogynistic comment I saw as just another send-up of people jumping onto the comic bandwagon since the Marvel Cinematic Universe started up. I disagree that the bad guys were ‘evil for the sake of evil’ – it was pretty clear to me that they were merchants of war, supplying illicit arms to various terrorist organisations and countries at war, and the creation of the ‘super-slaves’ was part of this agenda. That was their evil plan, chugging along in the background: making a profit from turning strangers into mutants and enslaving them to be used as disposable weapons in global conflicts.

The main plot of the film hasn’t got anything to do with the motivations of the bad guys – it’s basically Wade Wilson’s roaring rampage of revenge, to punish Ajax for the torture he was subjected to that made him a mutant, and to force him to reverse the hideous scarring he suffered from the mutagenic process. It only gets more personal after Ajax kidnaps Wilson’s girlfriend Vanessa to try and use her as a bargaining chip to bring Wilson’s violent predations on his organisation to an end.

On a subtler level, I can see that another part of the plot is Wilson having to come to terms with the consequences of seeking a cure for his terminal cancer rather than accepting that he might die young. He chose the opportunity to better himself over his love for Vanessa, which he comes to regret after his transformation, having become so deformed that he doubts Vanessa’s feelings will remain if she sees what he has become. He chose a selfish path and was punished; he ignored Vanessa’s pleas to stay with her, fight the cancer, perhaps die as gracefully as possible, sure in the knowledge of her love, and lost her.

His journey to getting back what he’d given up is not just about confronting Ajax, it is about finding the courage to see Vanessa face to face and let her see him, to let her decide if she can still love him in spite of his terrible deformities. Another subplot is the X-Men attempting to recruit Deadpool, and while he spurns them for the umpteenth time at the start, he eventually goes to them for help and they accompany him into the final fight as his back-up against Ajax. This is my long-winded way of saying there’s definitely a plot and the bad guys definitely have their reasons. What, do you not think that greed is a reason for action? Greed and war-mongering and sadism? I do.

Jessica Jones

I should have watched this series earlier. I love Jessica. She’s vulnerable, friable, frayed at the edges, drifting with her personal connections trailing damaged behind her like loose cables, drinking spirits at low moments. But she’s still feisty and full of fire, sarcastic, cynical, but good-hearted in her protection of her drug addict neighbour, her tolerance of the idiots that live upstairs and the manipulations of the hot-shot lawyer Jeri Hogarth who she occasionally works for. (I like Hogarth. She’s a cool customer, a glamorous lesbian who has an affair with her secretary and later divorces her doctor wife, always dressed to the nines, sharp, sympathetic, but not afraid to cut a few bitches  and step on some necks to get her way.)

She started out as a super confident girl with superpowers who wanted to make a difference in the world, tried being a hero, and ended up falling prey to a predator called Kilgrave who by the awfulness of random chance walked by as she was beating up some thugs. A petty sociopath with the ability to control others by giving them verbal orders (although it appears he has to do so in person, and they wear off if not renewed), Kilgrave put Jessica under his thrall and by what’s hinted made her do some seriously unpleasant shit to herself and other people. Including murdering a woman just before the climactic bus crash that freed her from Kilgrave, although it left her believing that he was dead, and that she was safe. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder which has left her a shadow of herself.

So Jessica reinvents herself as a private investigator, living in a dive, taking pictures of adulterers to keep the bills paid, until a case comes along in the first episode (AKA: Ladies Night) that leads to her discovering Kilgrave is still alive and still preying on others. He’s taken prisoner a fresh-faced college student from Omaha, manipulating her to do the same things he forced Jessica to do, from selling her apartment to give him money to having sex with him, and when Jessica finds her, she’s been lying in a bed for five hours in her own urine because Kilgrave told her not to move. Shortly afterwards, she murders her own parents on Kilgrave’s last order to her, leaving Jessica with a mission – to capture Kilgrave and somehow prove his abilities to the world in order to rescue the girl from a double homicide.

Jessica gets allies: her previously estranged adoptive sister, a famous talk-show host with a talent for krav maga; a police officer that Kilgrave tried to use to murder her sister, later her sister’s lover; and Luke Cage, who shares Jessica’s enhanced strength and has skin that can’t be damaged, even by a rotary saw. Jessica’s quest to vindicate the girl – the ironically named Hope – involves supporting her through the post-Kilgrave trauma, including finding that she’s pregnant with his child, which leads Hope to pay a fellow prisoner to punch her repeatedly in the stomach in order to try and induce a miscarriage. The psychological horror aspect of what Kilgrave does is understated compared to the megalomaniac drama queen shit that Loki and Hydra pull, but it’s infinitely scarier, and that is one of the great things about this show.

X-Men: Apocalypse

When I saw this film, I hadn’t seen Days of Future Past, although I had seen First Class and the original trilogy of X-Men films plus Deadpool in February, so I was looking forward to another X-Men outing but also unsure if this would be the misstep too far for the reboot. The ancient Egyptian opening only intensified this early feeling of scepticism. It reminded me too much of the grandly hammy openings of The Mummy and The Mummy Returns, and don’t get me wrong, I enjoy those films, but I enjoy them because they are pure cheese. I wasn’t committed to the film until after this bit had transitioned away and the background to Apocalypse’s revival had been set up.

Magneto continues to get absolutely no breaks in his attempt to get some normalcy back and distance himself from being a supervillain; in this film, having settled anonymously in Poland where he has a wife and a young daughter who herself has some mutant powers (control over animals), his new family are killed accidentally when he’s exposed to the local authorities as the fugitive Magneto. Charles has merrily gotten on with his school for baby mutants, with the latest recruits being the hapless Scott Summers, who discovered his powers when cornered by a bully in the toilets at his school, and Jean Grey (Sophie Turner who plays Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) who scares everyone else with her nightmares which shake the whole school. Mystique is working alone, rescuing mutants like Nightcrawler who have been oppressed and enslaved.

I thought the new takes on familiar characters were interesting. Nightcrawler offered comic relief alternating between plucky and timid; Angel was reimagined as a cagefighter in a ring that sets imprisoned mutants against each other; Jean impressed with the final, dramatic display of her Phoenix powers, with much less drippy romance angst than Famke Jansen in the third original X-Men film; and Quicksilver made a pretty sharp appearance as Magneto’s chippy long-lost teenage son, completely casual about his super-speed powers to the point of pure comedy. I give it 8/10.

Finding Dory

I went to see Finding Dory on the 31st July with my sisters, because going alone to a kids' film at 27 looks a trifle creepy. The sequel to Finding Nemo (2003), the film follows the regal blue tang Dory who has been living in the reef with Marlin and his son Nemo since they returned from their cross-ocean rescue a year before. Dory suffers from short term memory loss – the content of recent conversations and significant events from her personal past are mysteries to her, leading her to wander off or become easily distracted, which Marlin and Nemo endure with good humour. Dory has a flashback to a childhood memory and suddenly recalls that she has a family of her own: a mother and father who she became inexplicably separated from at some point in the past when she was a very young fish. Knowing she probably won’t make the journey safely on her own, given her memory issues, Marlin and Nemo accompany her to the only clue she has to her past and the location of her missing parents: the Jewel of Morro Bay, which turns out to be the Institute of Marine Life in Morro Bay, California, where injured sea creatures are ‘rescued, rehabilitated, and released’.

It’s a sweet film, with fun appearances by characters from the first film (Crush the surfer dude sea turtle and his son Squirt) and a host of new ones, from Hank the grouchy, seven-legged octopus who aids Dory in trying to find her parents inside the Institute to a pair of Cockney-like sea lions who help Marlin and Nemo get a ride inside from the open sea with the transport services of a handicapped common loon called Becky. It’s also fantastic that the protagonists of the story are a neurotic widowed single dad, his physically disabled child, and his mentally handicapped platonic friend, showing that disability is meaningless when it comes to personal worth or contribution to society. Dory may constantly forget her own friends, but she has a big heart, bravery and resourcefulness; Nemo might have difficulty swimming from his one deformed fin, but he’s insightful and compassionate beyond his years. Finding Dory also introduces Dory’s childhood friend Destiny, an extremely near-sighted whale shark who worries her inability to see properly will inhibit her from a normal life out in the ocean; Hank, who lost one of his eight tentacles in a traumatic accident that put him off living in the wild, but gets around like a ninja without any detriment; and Bailey, a beluga whale whose hypochondria has him believing he has lost his echolocation and that his bumpy head didn’t always look that way.

The film is beautifully animated, rendering a wondrous ocean glimmering with vibrant life and vivid colour, from frothing waves and drifting strands of kelp to what must be at least a hundred separate species of fish, so faithfully recreated on the screen from the real ocean that you can almost believe when you can’t see their faces that you’re actually looking into the deep blue sea. It’s incredible how far animation has come. There was a short film, Piper, which played before the main film and that showcased everything that is stunning about what people can achieve on a computer these days: individual grains of sand on a beach, every delicate feather on the sandpiper chick and his mother, the gleaming opalescence of the bubbles popping on the sand, the white crests of the waves, the movement of the incoming tide. 

Midnight Special

I went to see Midnight Special because it was billed as being Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) for the modern age, and good science fiction films are - in my opinion - in short supply. I liked the X-Files vibe it had going. The film follows Roy Tomlin, who “kidnapped” his son Alton Meyer from a religious cult known only as The Ranch where Roy and Alton’s biological mother Sarah lived before being excommunicated (in their absence, Alton had been adopted by the cult leader). Roy is fleeing with Alton, accompanied by his childhood friend Lucas, when we first encounter them, their situation quickly fraught with difficulties after an Amber Alert put out by an anonymous person – possibly someone at the Ranch – sets the police hunting Roy. They join up with Alton’s mother Sarah on their headlong flight towards a destination that Alton has told them he needs to reach by Friday March 6th. The cult believes that that is the date of the coming apocalypse and they need Alton to be at the Ranch for them to be saved, so the cult leader secretly dispatches two men to retrieve the boy, by force if necessary.

The federal government becomes involved when the contents of the cult leader’s sermons leak out, as they are based on Alton “speaking in tongues”, but turn out to be encrypted information from government satellites – plus the cult is stockpiling weapons a la Waco. The FBI lead a task force to investigate and acquire Alton Meyer, led by Agent Miller and with Adam Driver’s nerdy, nervous NSA agent Paul Sevier along for the ride. Sevier is fascinated by Alton. Actually, everyone is, because the reason everyone wants to get hold of Alton is the otherworldly powers he displays: beams of blinding white light that emerge from his eyes, tremors, exploding lightbulbs in his vicinity, to the point that he sleeps in daylight and is awake at night when his powers don’t seem to be as active. The cult believes he’s some kind of messenger from God because they see visions when they look into the light emitted by Alton’s eyes. Sevier thinks that Alton is a weapon of some sort.

 Refreshingly, Alton’s parents and Lucas don’t give a shit about the cause of his abilities. They love him and want what is best for him, so they do whatever is necessary to fulfil Alton’s unknown mission to a remote glade in Florida, despite knowing that it might separate them from him forever.

The film touches lightly on explanations. Alton is only able to say that he’s figured out that he comes from another world, a parallel world that “sits above our own”, populated by otherworldly beings with the same powers that he possesses who have been watching over Earth, “watching us for a very long time.” He needs to make that rendezvous in Florida in order to go back where he came from. To that end, he manages to convince Sevier to assist him, and due to some distraction by Roy and Lucas in the climax, Alton and Sarah manage to reach the glade where the extraordinary convergence of worlds takes place in an explosive dome of light that encompasses a good chunk of the southern USA.

Alien buildings emerge into our world, giving us a glimpse of the incredible architecture of Alton’s birthplace – gleaming spires, glass walkways in the bright sky greened with trees, revolving towers and an obsidian staircase gate that dwarfs any earthly skyscraper. All along them cluster glinting lights as Alton’s people gather to watch the joining of the worlds and welcome him back among them, and Sarah watches, broken-hearted at losing her son and at the same time gladdened that she fulfilled his mission and sent him back to where he belonged – a place where he wouldn’t be sickened, or exploited, or kidnapped by cultists.

It was a great film, I really enjoyed it – maybe an 8 out of 10? I thought Eddie the Eagle was a 9 out of 10, Zootopia was also an 8, pretty close to perfect, and Midnight Special lived up to my expectations by keeping some of the mystery and at the same time not copping out by never explaining Alton’s abilities or origins or by having him miss his rendezvous or by having us not see the world that he came from. 

Eddie the Eagle

I loved this film. It was the best film out of all those I’ve seen this year, I think, pipping Zootopia only by a small margin, but I had a very strong emotional reaction to this film – I laughed and I cried, it was sad and sweet and funny and uplifting all at the same time, a proper ‘heart-warming British underdog film’ as the Mitchell & Webb sketch goes. I think I enjoyed it because in a time of doubt over my own dreams and future, it feels like validation to see the story of someone who wanted their dream so much that they achieved it against absolutely all the odds, in line with the true Olympic spirit. It wasn’t about winning, it was about competing, about living the dream even if that meant failing over and over and getting back up again.

The cinematography was amazing, I was really stunned by the shots they took of the ski jumps; they felt so close that I felt right in Eddie’s shoes flying along the slope and out into thin air, on dizzying heights, and the crashes were terrifying. As Channel 4’s show The Jump demonstrates, ski jumping is an incredibly dangerous sport for amateurs and at least four participants in the show have had to drop out from broken bones. Eddie’s indomitable spirit made him likeable right from the opening montage of him as a bespectacled child comically tumbling and screwing up every Olympic sport he wanted to compete in before he ran across ski jumping.

Hugh Jackman did a fantastic turn as the alcoholic former-champion roped in by Eddie’s refusal to give up into coaching him. I love Hugh Jackman as an actor and he was at his best in the film, from his uproariously funny coaching fail, almost a version of the infamous scene from How Harry Met Sally (he tries to explain the stages of a successful ski jump to Eddie using sex with Eddie’s favourite actress Bo Derek as a metaphor, complete with acting out facial expressions) to the sadness when he was trying to convince Eddie not to ‘sell himself short’ by going to the Olympics in 1988 instead of waiting four years with more training and ‘going as a contender’. I like how their friendship developed through Eddie’s persistence. I enjoyed that Jackman’s character, Bronson Peary, gets his own moment of redemption when his own former coach apologises to him at the end, saying he had been wrong to write Bronson off as someone who didn’t take ski jumping seriously enough.

The relationship that Eddie had with his parents in the film – his father doubting, his mother assisting him subversively in his goals – compares to Judy’s in Zootopia, and both films have the same theme of working hard to achieve your dreams, even when you’re doubted and your abilities are questioned. Eddie was a raw amateur, facing impossible odds, and he kept picking himself up and dusting himself off, and that was the endearing quality, that was what made me cry when he failed to qualify at the last competition before the Olympics that would have allowed him to participate: his contained grief in telling his parents he was giving up. And then I cried again at his joy when the German judges decided to score his practice jump instead of the actual competition jump, because that bending of the rules gave him his shot, and although he came last in the Olympics at Calgary he set world records for British ski jumpers and showed how valuable pluck and courage are.

Zootropolis

Zootropolis (called “Zootopia” in the USA) is one of the best Disney offerings in a good long while – the message of tolerance and anti-racism is a wee bit ham-handed, but I thought it was great that they were also emphasising the importance of following your dreams, even when you have to work at them and even when other people doubt your ability to achieve them and try and put you off. Judy Hopps, the fluffy bunny policewoman, was a great protagonist. She fought to stay positive even when other people got her down, even when her own parents tried to dissuade her from her dream. I think it was also very powerful that they addressed microaggressions and subconscious prejudices through the protagonist, much more subtly than the rest of the message of tolerance.

Judy has a bad experience with a fox as a young bunny which reinforces the prejudice of her family against foxes, and they implore her to take a host of fox-repelling products with her to the big city to protect her in her new job. Judy thinks it’s nonsense, although she does carry one of the sprays for almost the whole film, unconsciously adhering to the stereotypes and racism she’s been brought up with. Her conscious behaviour averts this; she puts aside an initial reaction to Nick Wilde, a sarcastic red fox, and although she doesn’t like him very much after discovering he is a con artist, their friendship grows significantly through subsequent trials. In a press conference about halfway through, Judy unwittingly reveals she’s holding onto a lot of internalised prejudices when she speaks without thinking about how the predators are dangerous and might all go savage. Nick calls her out on it right after, pointing out she’s still carrying the fox spray, and when he pretends like he might eat her, she grabs straight for it, showing it affects her much more deeply than she had ever thought.

But she does apologise to Nick, then and more fully later on, for how her prejudices have affected him and led him to doubt their friendship, and he forgives her. I like the way the film nicely turns things on its head as well. A relatively simple missing persons case that Judy takes on to prove herself turns out to be anything but when it leads her (and Nick, dragged reluctantly along for the ride to get out of ‘felony tax evasion’) to the discovery that fourteen missing mammals in the city, all predators, have suffered from a mysterious affliction that made them turn ‘savage’, as feral as ordinary animals in our world without any of Zootopia’s evolved sensibilities.

The mayor rather foolishly has hidden the sufferers away while trying to find a cure in order to avoid upsetting the populace unduly, which Judy and Nick stumble on, leading to the mayor’s arrest and Judy’s disastrous press conference when she’s asked to explain what has affected the fourteen predators. Dispirited, Judy rejects the offer of her friend – formerly the glorified secretary ‘deputy mayor’, promoted to mayor – to become the face of the city’s police department and returns to her family’s carrot farm to give up on her dreams. But there she finds a clue that leads her to finding the predators were deliberately poisoned by somebody, and after reuniting with Nick, she learns that the new mayor was responsible.

‘This city is 90% prey,’ says the treacherous perpetrator, the sheep in wolf’s clothing, revealing she planned the whole thing to discredit predators and move power into the hands of all the more numerous prey species. ‘Aren’t you tired of being undervalued?’

There are some great touches in the film. I love the riff on The Godfather when Nick and Judy are hauled up in front of Mr Big, who turns out to be a minute arctic shrew with enormous polar bear bodyguards. They’re saved from being ‘iced’ by Mr Big’s daughter, who Judy saved earlier in the film from being crushed by a giant doughnut sign. The whole thing with the naturist club is very entertaining as well. Almost everything Nick says is gold. I would give the film a solid 9/10.

High-Rise

This is one of the most surreal films I’ve ever seen, with all kinds of resulting impressions in my head: that the dreamy and nightmarish alternating qualities of the world Laing moves through are representative of his own internal and unexpressed turmoil, a private struggle to establish identity and purpose in a purposeless world that has been externalised and portrayed by the other residents of the tower; that it is a disturbing vision of what human society would be like if we did not bend our heads and knees to the laws and the law officers we’ve artificially constructed around ourselves to hem in our worst, impulsive and destructive instincts; that it is a resonant paean to the necessity of class war, the use of deliberate anarchy and direct action to topple the blood-sucking 1% who live off the rest of us and hold most of the capital – or as Blackadder said, ‘The whole world cries out peace, freedom, and a few less fat bastards eating all the pies.’

Robert Laing has moved into a new high-rise tower designed and built by Anthony Royal, one of five in Royal’s creation, among the first to be built as it is fully occupied but suffering from all kinds of teething problems. ‘An investment in the future,’ is Laing’s reason for buying himself the ‘cell’ that he occupies: a bland grey apartment as dingy and ugly as the rest of the tower, which looks like an eyesore compared to today’s glinting skyscrapers of gleaming glass and polished steel in modern London. I see them on the train in and out, the grasping digits of the financial district reaching towards the sky, and that’s Royal’s vision for his five towers: the lake beneath is a palm and his towers the fingers enclosing it. The eponymous high-rise is supposed to have all conveniences – central heating, air conditioning no doubt, lifts, garbage chutes, balconies on the upper floors to survey the city at dizzying height, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, even a supermarket with competitive prices. Dark, chunky, brutalist  in its architecture, it is a sinister setting for a dystopian story.

At first glance the two thousand neighbours living cheek by jowl inside seem to get along, for Laing is welcomed by the Wilders below, single mother Charlotte Melville the floor above, and is even summoned for an intriguing interview by Anthony Royal himself, who no longer leaves the glamorous penthouse – which comes complete with its own large garden on the roof of the high-rise, large enough for his wife to ride a white horse around and for a black sheep, beribboned and curiously out of place, to roam around cropping the lawn. Laing attends parties with upper and lower neighbours, trying to find a place, and has an amorous encounter with Charlotte that’s interrupted post-coitus by her small son.

But despite Royal’s vision of harmony and a self-contained, perfectly functioning community, there are widening cracks in the society of the high-rise, rooted in continuous service issues for the lower floors that aggravate them into feeling (quite rightly) that they’re being treated as second class citizens, and in the snobbery of the upper floors, who look down their noses at everyone else. I cringed when Laing was invited to a party in the penthouse. He came so smartly dressed only to find everyone else in eighteenth century French costumes like extras from the Sun King’s court, and there’s a familiar swooping feeling in the belly, that sense that you have been deliberately left out of vital information in order to humiliate you; even in the ‘slippery’ mask that Laing wears, you can see that sick feeling creeping across his face. Painfully uncomfortable after a joke that he’s ‘come as a dilettante’, he’s soon thrown out by one of Royal’s go-betweens, the brutish Simmons, although Royal himself was unaware.

Revolution spreads as the high rise’s facilities crumble. In the supermarket, residents fight viciously over dwindling food supplies, with Laing getting into a wild, rolling on the floor brawl over a tin of paint, as in his breakdown he becomes obsessed with colouring his drab apartment in the perfect shade of blue, getting covered in paint himself. The characters’ appearances degenerate as society breaks down; bloodied, bruised, filthy, sodden and smeared. The elite shed their fancy costumes in favour of reality-denying orgies cooped up in the penthouse, although they must acknowledge in little ways that things are not what they’re meant to be: their dinner parties so reduced in menu they have to eat Royal’s horse. After kidnappings, killings, beatings, even the rape of Charlotte by the mentally fraying Wilder when he finds out her privileges stem from being the mother of Royal’s illegitimate son, the bacchanal of anarchic violence culminates when Wilder confronts Royal in the penthouse. Believing the architect responsible for the evils of the high-rise and the abduction of his heavily pregnant wife, Wilder shoots Royal in the chest – and is killed in his turn by the polished women who have accumulated in the penthouse, wielding steak knives, like maenads in a frenzy of bloodlust avenging the fall of Dionysus.

I would give it a 7 out of 10.

Stranger Things

November 6, 1983 in Hawkins, Indiana. Four twelve year-old boys play Dungeons & Dragons in a basement: Mike Wheeler, a shy boy whose angularly lined face reminds the audience of Adam Driver’s Kylo Ren, the host and gamemaster, brains of the group; Dustin Henderson, curly-haired, a little chubby, and with a permanent lisp due to his cleidocranial dysplasia, the heart of the friends; Lucas Sinclair, African-American with attitude and common-sense to back up his boldness; and Will Byers, whose disappearance cycling home from the game triggers the events of the series. On a dark road Will is frightened into the woods and pursued by an unseen creature – terrified he makes it home but finds it empty, and takes refuge in the shed behind the house with a loaded rifle that doesn’t keep him safe.

Will’s disappearance causes ripples through the sleepy town of Hawkins as Chief Jim Hopper discovers connections to the sinister government Department of Energy based out of the nearby Hawkins Laboratory and Will’s frazzled mother Joyce Byers realises her son is trying to communicate with her from the eerie place he has been transported to. Will’s three friends launch their own attempt to rescue him after they run into a strange girl in the forest with a shaved head, barely able to speak, with the number 11 tattooed on her arm – a girl with extraordinary powers.

One of the strengths of Stranger Things is its intense focus on characterization, developing multiple characters leading their own intertwining and converging plotlines. Joyce Byers, played intensely and affectingly by Winona Ryder, is a single mum trying to bring up two boys on her meagre salary without assistance from their deadbeat dad. Loving and focused unerringly on trying to look after her sons, Joyce is devastated by Will’s disappearance but determined that she’ll find him alive whatever the cost. Her firm belief in his survival is tested multiple times but she holds on, buoying up others with her strength. She discovers that Will – trapped in an eerie parallel dimension – is trying to communicate with her through the phone and then through flickering lights, and pursues doggedly the means of keeping that line of communication open even when people treat her as if she’s crazy.

Will’s quiet older brother, Jonathan, investigates his brother’s disappearance with the camera that he uses as the lens of his life. He has a crush on the mostly prim and proper Nancy Wheeler, older sister of Mike, who has a thing for local bad boy Steve. Jonathan spies on Nancy attending an illicit party at night with Steve and his friends and accidentally captures the moment before Nancy’s friend Barbara is abducted by the same creature that kidnapped Will. Jonathan is caught with the incriminating photographs but while Steve and company are outraged, Nancy finds the photo that gives her a single tantalising clue to the fate of her friend, who she has been desperately trying to locate. Nancy and Jonathan join forces to find out what happened to Will and Barbara, leading them into a confrontation with the creature within its parallel dimension. Together they arm up and prepare to hunt it down and kill it.

Chief Jim Hopper is the police chief in the town of Hawkins; he leads the investigation into Will’s disappearance. An alcoholic with a drug problem of ambiguous scale, his life has been in tatters since the death of his young daughter from childhood cancer and his subsequent divorce. His story deals with a separate piece of the mysterious events in Hawkins from Joyce’s quest to keep in touch with and rescue her son, and Nancy and Jonathan’s plan to track down and kill the creature – those behind it. Hopper becomes suspicious of Hawkins Laboratory and the ‘Department of Energy’ that runs it after confusing a sighting of the girl with the shaved head for the missing Will, finding a shred of her hospital gown near a drainpipe leading into the grounds of the laboratory, and investigating the staged suicide of restaurant owner Benny who tried to protect the girl from government agents trying to reclaim her. Hopper digs into the background of the Laboratory and the insidious Dr Brenner, its cold-eyed chief of staff, finding links to claims of human experimentation, MK Ultra, and the alleged abduction of a young girl from her mother who was a government test subject. He determines that the ‘body’ of Will dragged out of the river is a dummy after his suspicions are roused by the local coroner being banned from examining the corpse. Hopper draws too much attention from the Laboratory who try to gaslight him, bug his house and destroy his credibility, but this only leads him to join forces with Joyce to find Will.

The last group of characters are Will’s friends. Social outcasts at school – Dustin mocked for his lisp and missing teeth, Mike for his unusual features, and Lucas for being the only black kid in a white community – they have an unshakeable bond. With the absolute loyalty of children, they defy their parents to sneak out at night on their bicycles to join the search for Will in the woods. In the pouring rain and the pitch black, they find a girl shivering and frightened. She’s wearing just a t-shirt lent to her by the restaurant owner Benny, swapped for her hospital gown, soaking wet, on the run from the Laboratory which has been using her for her telekinetic powers to spy on Russian agents, her head shaved like a cancer patient. She could easily be mistaken for a boy. The boys smuggle her into Mike’s basement where they find she can barely speak, doesn’t understand concepts like changing clothes in private, and has the number ‘11’ tattooed on her arm. But El, as they dub her – short for ‘Eleven’ – claims to know where Will is. She calls the parallel dimension ‘the Upside Down’. She knows about the creature. She’s afraid of the ‘bad men’. And with her help, the boys try to cross the barrier between the dimensions to help Will get home.

Stranger Things skilfully balances all these perspectives and their individual quests, with the plot proceeding on all fronts, while dropping hints left and right about the cause of events and the part played in them by Eleven and the Laboratory. Eleven experiences flashbacks when she uses her powers to lab experiments where she crushed a coke can with her powers and Brenner tried to get her to use them to kill a cat, which later provokes her into accidentally killing two orderlies in a fit of rage and terror at an impending punishment. She remembers being put into a sensory deprivation tank to perform a reconnaissance mission on a Russian spy halfway across the world, entering a dark world where she first encounters the creature, and reveals that she accidentally triggered the opening of the Upside Down to the real world. Meanwhile, Brenner investigates a tree-like mass which appeared inside the Laboratory when Eleven created the gate to the Upside Down: a pulsing, growling, fleshy abomination whose roots are slowly taking over the space inside the lab, half-wood and half-meat, with an opening in the centre strung with sinewy ropes that are a repulsive cross between cobwebs and decaying tissue. This frightening gateway, walled in flesh, isn’t the only hole in the “veil” between the Upside-Down and the real world – the creature creates them when it comes out to feed, each gory hole as sickening as the core one in the lab.

So what is the Upside-Down? A second series has been announced, so more concrete answers about the mysteries of Stranger Things have to an extent been held back; how Eleven encountered the creature while trying to “spy” on the Russian agent, how that encounter triggered the appearance of the gateway to the Upside-Down, what the creature is, none of that has yet been explained. The Upside-Down is a mirror reflection of the ordinary world, with the same buildings and landmarks as Hawkins, but everything is decaying and falling apart, the light is a permanent shroudlike grey, white ash tumbles and floats endlessly through the sky in poisonous rain, and eerie dangerous beings inhabit it. The boys dub the creature that kidnapped Will and Barbara the “Demogorgon” after a monster in their Dungeons & Dragons game. There’s a hint of Slenderman in its unnaturally long, stretched out proportions. Its skin is slick grey. Its horribly long fingers end in claws. It doesn’t appear to have a face when first seen, until its head unfurls like a Venus fly trap into four petal-like flaps lined with teeth around a gaping maw. The CGI could do with some work. Seen full on in the light, it becomes less horrifying and more unrealistic, although the Upside-Down itself is very well rendered.

The series’ creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, confirmed there was a lot they had to leave out of the eight episodes of Stranger Things, mainly about the origin of the Demogorgon and the Upside-Down itself, which they hope to explore in a future series if there’s enough interest. I’ve got a lot of questions. What does it mean for Will that he threw up that otherworldly slug at the end? Is he infected by the Demogorgon? Is that why he keeps having flashes into the Upside-Down, as if it is pulling him back in? Brenner said the atmosphere of the place was toxic. His soldiers and scientists went into it wearing breathing equipment because prolonged exposure was dangerous; Will was trapped there unprotected for days and days. Did Eleven survive? Hopper seems to think so – or know so, since he’s leaving food parcels for her in the woods. Was Brenner killed in the Laboratory or did the Demogorgon drag him into the Upside-Down, just like it did Barbara and Will? Is he going to reappear? Will we see more of what the Department of Energy was doing? How did the experiments give Eleven her powers? Will she be reunited with her mother?

There’s a very Super 8 feel that I picked up about Stranger Things, particularly the band of kids in search of the truth about an extraordinary event going on right in their hometown, and the series is a homage to 80’s films, with one reviewer calling it the series “that Stephen Spielberg and Stephen King never made”. Eleven’s powers and her worrying swings between timidity and violence are reminiscent of Stephen King’s super-powered girls from Carrie and Firestarter, while the coming-of-age and brave band of kids elements channels Spielberg influences from The Goonies, Super 8 and E.T. The horrifying symbiosis of the demogorgon’s lair in the Upside-Down harks back to Alien, as does the creepy opened egg that Hopper and Joyce pass while they walk through the Upside-Down in the season finale, while Joyce’s conversation with Will through the lights comes from Close Encounters and their communication through the walls of the house recalls the little girl Carol Anne from Poltergeist. Star Wars pops up when Dustin encourages Eleven to levitate his model of the Millenium Falcon and when the boys discuss the possibility that a helpful adult might do a “Lando”, forced into betraying them by nefarious forces just like Lando Calrissian led Han and Leia into a trap on Cloud City for Darth Vader.