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Red, White & Royal Blue (2023)
Bed, Flights & Royal Ado
This film's source novel was a winsome and thoroughly charming slice of Prince Har... OK Henry fan-fiction. Yet when I first saw the trailer for its film adaptation, it looked like it had all the subtlety of a neon sledgehammer.
But it turned out to be a delightful surprise.
The two leads have genuine, palpable screen chemistry. It whips along at a fair pace, never outstaying its welcome. It has something to say about sexuality and privacy beneath its formulaic sheen. And although not exactly explicit, nor does it shy away from getting two men in bed together in a tender way, exactly like hundreds of interchangeable rom coms with straight lead characters have for years.
Changes from the surprisingly hefty source material are mostly intelligently made. Subplots that ultimately don't matter are dropped; a suspiciously familiar sounding Queen is traded for a King (Stephen Fry; having a blast)...
Yes, there are shortcomings; I'm sure getting Uma Thurman helped secure some financing, but she's fairly poorly cast with a distractingly effortful accent (though does shine in the Oval Office scene, alone with her son). And sometimes the overuse of unconvincingly applied green screen backgrounds can't help look anything other than trashy and cheap.
But it ultimately has real heart and sincerity, and that's largely down to an intelligent adaptation, a mostly impressive supporting cast and two well cast leading actors.
Wham! (2023)
Fun and sunshine; there's enough for everyone
A joyous, poignant, compelling and well edited overview of the brief but glorious period in which Wham's star shone briefly but brightly in the mid-1980s.
Using archival footage and interviews from Wham members George and Andrew as chronological voice over narration, the filmmakers have really done a 'fantastic' job in compiling what will surely stand as the definitive story of the group.
In doing so, they also capture the heady thrill of the 1980s pop scene, whilst not shying away from George's struggles in managing the inner conflict between his career ambitions and his feelings of being psychologically trapped by his burgeoning sexuality.
At 90 minutes, the film whips by. If it has any shortcomings, perhaps other documentarians may have dug a little deeper into the contract issues, and mentioned the related contentious release of the Club Fantastic Megamix single. But ultimately I think it gets the balance of tone and the narrative arc just right.
It's a story of huge international success, and a phenomenal legacy of pop songs... but ultimately this is a celebration of true, enduring friendship - the kind of friendship that supports you, lifts you up, lets you go and fly.
RuPaul's Drag Race: RPDR Reunited (2021)
Wish I'd fast forwarded
Zoom interviews with nothing to add. An interminable music video contribution from every queen. Stretched out over 80 minutes. This series has been 84 years long, and sometimes less is more. Wouldn't you have thought, in a pandemic, that they'd have wanted to get out quicker rather than stretch it out? If there had to be a wait for the season finale, then honestly I'd rather have just waited a fortnight and not have this episode exist.
There does come a tipping point where shows oversaturate themselves with content, and this once glorious show is so far past this point that it's losing the very thing that made it special to begin with. 10 x 45 minute episodes is the sweet spot for Drag Race. 16 x 60-to-80-minutes is absolutely not.
The Kissing Booth 2 (2020)
Better than the first
This is a predictable but charming and professional teen rom-com. In truth I found it better than the first, though I'm fairly certain it didn't need to be 132 minutes long (few comedies justify this running time, and often they diminish their successes in trying).
As with the first movie, the real triumphs here aren't even in the headline romance; but rather in the execution of the narrative barriers and the positive presentation of platonic mixed-sex friendship.
Without being familiar with the source material, in advance I would've put money on my expectation that - at some point during one of these movies - these two best friends who have perfect chemistry and mutual commitment, would've realised that they were in love with each other. That this never happens is hugely positive; the characters are absolutely clear in their friendship. The introduction here of another platonic friendship for Noah is a narrative curveball that doesn't play out the way you'd expect either. Good!
Whilst a subplot about a peripheral character wrestling with his sexuality feels like narrative padding with an idealised outcome that probably wouldn't ever happen in real life - that it happens here and will be seen by young people matters. Likewise, the wisdom of the college interviewer (essentially: don't try to give us who you think we want you to be) is a great takeaway for younger fans.
It's by no means a great or particularly memorable movie, but it's an enjoyable enough watch, and well performed by a spirited cast. I'm unconvinced we need a third instalment though.
Cats (2019)
Fine
Honestly, I don't know how expectation here ever got beyond what the project always said on the tin. Humans dress up as cats and sing a mixed bag of songs and it's sort of a fabulous hot mess. If this premise is for you, then you'll like it. If it's not, you won't. (See also: Cats the musical.)
Increasingly we are allowing ourselves to be pushed towards extremes of opinion on everything, and it's ruining our ability to see the shades of truth in between. The CGI in Cats bothered me far less than De Niro's waxy face in The Irishman (a film I liked far better than this, in spite of its needless miscasting).
The scale problems didn't bother me much because I just suspended disbelief. I'm watching a movie in which cats sing, so really I'm not looking for dimension realism.
Jennifer Hudson belts THAT note out, and it's a bit of a moment, but I'm not sure her sobbing throughout the song was the appropriate creative choice for the lyrics. But Judi Dench has bags of cheeky fun, and Laurie Davidson is a charismatic Mr Mistoffelees.
Honestly, I left the cinema feeling like I'd seen a perfectly OK movie which couldn't be a lot better because the inherent source material isn't all that brilliant.
To dismiss it outright, or enjoy kicking some pretty decent performers and dancers who enter into the spirit of it, isn't an especially balanced form of criticism.
The Perfect Date (2019)
You've already watched it, even if you haven't yet
This review contains spoilers, but to be quite honest you know the plot before you even watch it anyway.
Centineo - that bloke you adored in that other Netflix film (but not that other one) - stars alongside that actress from that Netflix show you used to love before it became dreadful, and another actress you've seen before but can't remember where, and it's a romantic comedy.
Centineo has a gay best friend - the most interesting character in the film - but the screenwriter couldn't care less about developing the best friend because why go beyond the bare minimum of woke box ticking?
The whole film feels written and cast by an algorithm.
That's not to say that it doesn't have effective moments - just because we're overfamiliar with this narrative arc, doesn't mean it's not an arc that works.
Centineo remains winsome and charming, doing much the same thing he did in those last 2 Netflix films, and Laura Marano has moments of great spark that the material never truly deserves.
At 90 minutes it doesn't outstay its welcome, and you get exactly the journey you sign up for at the start. It's basically: "fine".
One final note because I'm tired of seeing this portrayed badly on screen: Centineo's character and his home life is absolutely not poor. Not being rich does not automatically a poor character create.
Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)
Good hook; grows tedious
Bandersnatch is coasting on release buzz as one of those zeitgeist projects that people need to form a view on quickly whilst everyone else is talking about it.
It starts entertainingly enough, and the 'choice' angle feels like a fun gimmick for a while. (I'd like to make soundtrack choices in more films!)
But after a while three things become problematic:
1) you don't really like the protagonist;
2) you're made to feel that your choices aren't really choices because if you take a 'wrong' path you're made to go back... It feels a bit like the viewing equivalent of being told "You'll sit there until you eat all your vegetables";
3) you start to make decisions in the hope that they will make the whole thing end more quickly.
When I finally arrived at some end credits with an option to close, I was still given an option to change an earlier decision, and like a fool I took the bait, which pointed me towards a less satisfactory ending than the earlier one I'd been given.
Therefore this is a difficult "film" to review, because it's not a film; there's no tangible sense of what the overall vision is, because in effect the viewer - and the viewer's decisions - creates the vision. That in and of itself is quite interesting as a concept, but ultimately it means this review has to be a review of the "experience". And my experience was: moderately diverting at first, becomes a bit tedious, would never watch again.
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Perfectly fine entertainment
I have rated this 5 stars, predominantly because I think 9s and 10s should be provinces reserved for truly great movies. This is an entertaining one, which kept me interested for most of its overlong running time, but which won't leave me with much lingering sense of a tangible movie - it felt like a solid episode in a series I'm binge-watching, but I'll struggle to treasure many specifics of this movie from a line-up of Marvel titles.
There are a ridiculous number of characters in this; the film is using that as its "event" selling point, but in truth it was the factor which made me most apprehensive before watching it. To the filmmakers' credit, the juggling of storylines and superheroes (and their endless sidekicks and sub-teams) was almost impressive - it never felt as though many were shoehorned too awkwardly into the forward trajectory of the overall narrative, though some characters - including leading players like Spider-Man and Black Widow - inevitably get shortchanged.
The series' most rewatchable movies - for me Avengers, Winter Soldier, Civil War, Ragnarok and Black Panther - all have something compelling that feels unique to them. I'm not sure this has a unique selling point beyond a huge cast jostling for billing position on the poster, but whilst it plods along it's perfectly decent, and fans of the franchise will likely lap it up.
At the time of writing, the film is ranked number 10 on the IMDb list of the Top 250 movies OF ALL TIME. I'm certain it will plummet once the general public start to supersede the fanboy rush, but this kind of kneejerk over-ranking in the context of cinematic history is a nonsense.
Chocolat (2000)
Worth a reassessment
The amount of venom directed at this film for securing a Best Picture award slot is unbelievable. Having found the book too dull to finish reading beyond the half-way mark, the film is a wonderful, exotic, colourful, feelgood affair. It's also refreshingly saccharine-free for a movie which could so easily have reveled in its own manipulations. The film boasts one of those Juliette Binoche performances that is so luminous, it seems effortless. Johnny Depp, Judi Dench and Lena Olin are also on fine form. Rachel Portman's score is gorgeous, and the least Rachel-Portman-sounding score she has yet crafted. Ultimately this is a lightweight piece of cinematic comfort; exactly what it needed to be. 8/10