Wonka (2023)
Director: Paul King
Screenwriters: Simon Farnaby, Paul King
Starring: Timothee Chalamet, Calah Lane, Keegan-Michael Key, Paterson Joseph, Olivia Colman, Matt Lucas, Matthew Baynton, Tom Davis, Hugh Grant

Willy Wonka is an enigma. In Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), the original adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1964 novel “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” we don’t learn much about him, other than his desire to find an heir to his candy empire, as well as the cruel delight he takes in teaching naughty children a lesson. Wonka is charming and a little unhinged, paranoid from all of the years he has spent locked away in his factory, making sure no one gets their hands on the secret to his out-of-this-world sweets. With a devilish smile and a playful yet devious twinkle in his eye, actor Gene Wilder infuses Wonka with dimension, but we never dig too deep. He’s a nut that we never quite crack, and he works as a character because of that. There’s a reason why the original novel is called “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” after all – at the end of the day, it’s Charlie’s journey. Wilder’s performance hints at the layers inside of Wonka that we don’t need to unpeel, but nevertheless know are there. Wonka, the spiritual prequel to the 1971 musical classic, helmed by Paddington director Paul King, does unpeel those layers, but what’s found underneath is a deeply disappointing origin story that lacks the magic and edge that the original (and even Tim Burton’s 2005 remake) has in spades. Touted as a fun-for-the-whole family Christmas classic in the making, Wonka simply doesn’t have enough sparkle to ever hope to achieve that distinction.

Despite its tagline, which insists we will find out how “Willy became Wonka,” Timothée Chalamet’s version of the famous candy maker and magician doesn’t actually become anything. He just kind of already is.

The film begins with Willy, bright-eyed and bursting with optimism, atop a ship mast, where he begins his “I Want” song, “Hatful of Dreams”. Willy arrives in an unnamed city, fresh off the boat, ready to share his chocolate with the world, as his mother (Sally Hawkins) always hoped he would. Willy is earnest and determined, living on nothing but a dream. But the Galeries Gourmet is not what Willy initially imagined it would be. Instead of spreading his creations, he faces opposition and sabotage from three greedy chocolate makers, including Arthur Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), who will soon become his arch-nemesis. Willy then gets tricked into indentured servitude because he cannot read and fails to read the small print on his contract with Mrs. Scrubitt, played by Olivia Colman doing her best over the top Madame Thénardier impression. Aided by Noodle (Calah Lane), a fellow indentured servant and orphan who becomes Willy’s assistant, as well as the rest of the workers, Wonka bids to outsmart the trio and earn the freedom of himself and his friends.

Timothée Chalamet might be the only saving grace in the film, contrary to early assumptions that he may have been miscast. At times he’s charming, funny and endearing, but his performance is constantly in flux and dependent on the material and direction he’s given. When his jokes don’t land, his performance falls flat, even though he is clearly committed to the bit. Thankfully, he doesn’t try to do an impression of Gene Wilder, but he also doesn’t make the character enough of his own to really stand out. This isn’t his fault; he isn’t given much to work with.

All of the obstacles Willy encounters are external. Whether it’s Mrs. Scrubitt’s dishonest business practices, the antics of the greedy chocolatiers, or Hugh Grant’s Oompa-Loompa hijinks, the plot is always happening to Willy. He is almost entirely a reactionary character, and this is a problem in a movie that is supposed to be an origin story, the story of how he became who he is. It would have been nice if he actively participated in the narrative…

Willy’s desire to share his inventions with the world just as his mother hoped is sweet and admirable, but it simply isn’t enough to drive what we see. The writers, King and Paddington 2 co-writer Simon Farnaby (who also appears in Wonka as Basil), were backed into a corner considering Willy Wonka is a recluse by the time we meet him in the original movie. Telling that story would certainly be more interesting, but not very uplifting, so the filmmakers sidestep it entirely. As a result, there doesn’t seem to be any connection between Chalamet’s Wonka and Wilder’s.

Demystifying a character that works the best when we don’t know everything about him is a non-starter (as proven in Star Wars spin-off Solo), but the filmmakers didn’t give much thought to the supporting characters either. Lane and Chalamet work well together, and their friendship is a bright spot in the movie, but most of the supporting characters are so thinly drawn they barely register as real people. As for Hugh Grant’s Lofty, an Oompa Loompa who has been stealing Willy’s candy because he was excommunicated from Oompa Land until he can get back all of the chocolate that Willy stole, he’s surprisingly in very little of the film. The motion capture is jarring and unconvincing, but at least Grant’s contempt for the role, which he has expressed in several recent interviews, doesn’t show on screen.

Wonka, like the original film adaptation, is a musical, but not a very good one. The songs, written by Neil Hannon, King, Farnaby, and Joby Talbot, are unremarkable and lack passion, which is a shame considering Hannon’s exceptional work with The Divine Comedy. The songs in Wonka, especially Willy’s “Hatful of Dreams,” pale in comparison to those written by Howard Ashman, the songwriting genius behind the iconic tunes of The Little Mermaid (1989) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). By comparison, “Hatful of Dreams” lacks interiority or reflection. Perhaps the biggest faux pas in this regard is how Willy’s desire to sell chocolates in the hopes of reconnecting with the spirit of his late mother is barely mentioned. Songs in musicals should, in theory, take place when characters are so full of emotion that words no longer feel enough. And then, they must dance when singing doesn’t feel enough. But nothing drives the songs in this movie and they don’t feel needed. They are boring and directionless. Chalamet’s voice is fine, if a little weak and thin in places, but it’s worth noting that his best performance is when he sings “Pure Imagination”, a song not originally written for this film.

Wonka also strips away any of the melancholy or dark comedy found both in the 1971 movie and Roald Dahl’s overall work. The 1971 film feels a lot like “Alice in Wonderland” in that it is a dreamlike and slightly menacing descent into a magical world, but Wonka smooths all those edges out. As a result, the movie is sickly sweet and above all, nice. Which is ironic, because while the filmmakers were busy adding uplifting lyrics to “Pure Imagination” and simplifying the orchestrations, themes, and social commentaries of the 1971 film, they also made time to make several offensive and outdated fat jokes, aimed at Keegan Michael Key’s Chief of Police, who is dressed in a ridiculous fat suit and gets fatter and fatter the more he indulges in the sweets the greedy chocolate makers use to bribe him with. Using fatness as a shorthand for gluttony and greed, and having an actor who is not fat perform fatness, is hurtful and mean-spirited. It’s hard to believe such an antiquated trope is included in a film made in 2023 – especially one made about the wonderful taste of sweet treats – and it sours the viewing experience. For all of the niceness this movie tries desperately to exude, it makes sure to keep one of the only things from the original film that actually needed updating.

If Wonka is trying to say something, it’s hard to know what that something is. The film plays with themes of oppression, poverty, and greed, but doesn’t do much with them. It would be a losing battle to assume that Western filmmaking would trust its young audience enough to sprinkle in some adult themes, but it is equally weird to mention them in passing and not engage with them. Believing in your dreams and sharing those dreams with others should feel like magic, but the film doesn’t allow us to know these characters enough to genuinely care about them or their dreams.

The sets also leave something to be desired. When Wonka first unveils his factory in the original film, it’s a technicolor dream, calling to mind the reveal of the land of Oz in 1939’s The Wizard of Oz. It is bright and colorful and a little surreal. Wonka feels like a step down in comparison, and the filmmakers’ decision to set a good chunk of the film in the Galeries Gourtmet makes the world of Wonka feel like it’s just floating in space surrounded by nothing. It is small and claustrophobic.

Prequels bait us with the promise that we will get to see some of our most beloved characters become the people we love and remember from our childhoods. In Wonka, Willy may be younger and brighter and less mad than he will soon become, but if you are counting on the film to show you how that happens, you will be very disappointed. Instead, Wonka is a barely passable movie musical that is so sugary it ends up choking on its own sweetness.

Score: 12/24

Recommended for you: ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’ (1971) Earned a Spot in Joseph Wade’s 10 Best Films of All Time

Beginning his work behind the camera on televised plays for the BBC, such as the iconic uncomfortable chamber piece ‘Abigail’s Party’ starring Alison Steadman, from the beginning Leigh was a proponent of many months of intensive, theatre-style rehearsals with his his actors in an effort to discover the truth of their characters.

The “Leigh Method” is often so convincing that viewers mistakenly believe his films to be all or partially improvised, when in fact they couldn’t be more carefully choreographed affairs. His actors tend to live as their characters for months before filming so that their every line and direction provided by Leigh feels natural and authentic, even instinctual to them, his ultimate aim being to always create “emotional, subjective, intuitive, instinctive, vulnerable films”.

Leigh’s regular collaborators, who always benefit from his working method, include Timothy Spall, Jim Broadbent, Leslie Manville, Philip Davis, Sally Hawkins and Ruth Sheen, as well as his late producer Simon Channing-Williams (co-founder of Leigh’s Thin Man Films) and cinematographer Dick Pope.

Over five decades and fourteen features, Leigh has crafted contemporary kitchen sink dramas, relevant critiques of traditional gender roles, and hard-hitting psychological studies, as well as delving deep into Britain’s far-from-rosy past. He has also been a champion of the arts and of truly independent art at that, never compromising his vision or his chosen way of working even if it limits his more mainstream and commercial success.

But where should you start with this multi-award winner and recipient of the BAFTA fellowship? There’s probably no wrong place to begin here, but there are undoubtedly more harrowing entries in his filmography that should probably be gradually built up to. As one possible route of entry, we offer this recommendation on Where to Start with Mike Leigh.

1. Secrets & Lies (1996)

Mike Leigh’s films often seem to have dropped you right in the middle of an everyday domestic scene that is already unfolding, but the plot of Secrets & Lies, while always feeling completely truthful, is anything but everyday.

Secrets & Lies follows Hortense (Marianne John-Baptiste), a black British optician who is attempting to track down her birth mother who gave her up for adoption as a baby. Surprisingly, her mother turns out to be the white factory worker Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), and the two begin meeting in secret before Hortense is introduced to the rest of Cynthia’s dysfunctional family at a birthday barbecue for her other daughter Roxanne (Claire Rushbrook) and perhaps inevitably a very difficult conversation comes around.

Everyone in a Mike Leigh film feels like they’ve lived a full life before we’ve joined them, a life that will continue on as normal long after we leave. The impressive ensemble of Secrets & Lies all have their stories, their hangups, their myriad personal issues to confront. Hortense just wants to know where she came from; Cynthia wonders what might have been if she hadn’t had her first child unplanned as a teenager; Roxanne struggles to connect with her mother and open up about her own relationships; Cynthia’s brother Maurice (Timothy Spall) and sister-in-law Monica (Phyllis Logan) are, respectively, an ineffectual doormat and a passive-aggressive depressive. 

The two centrepiece sequences of the film, Hortense and Cynthia’s first soul-bearing face-to-face meeting in a café and later the barbecue where everything comes out in the open and emotions boil over, are among the most memorable in British independent cinema. The personality clashes are explosive and the emotions raw and painful, but there are funny moments as well, and none of the drama ever feels manufactured, anything less than a spontaneous. This is a natural and ugly representation of humanity at our best and worst. 

Secrets & Lies is Leigh’s tribute to modern British families whatever shape they take, warts and all, and it has only become more affecting over time as the view of what a “normal” family is has become less easy to define, the film surpassing its BAFTA wins and Oscar Nominations to become a popular favourite especially among those who feel like they’ve never quite belonged.

2. Topsy-Turvy (1999)

Most of Mike Leigh’s period dramas are excellent, but Topsy-Turvy is undoubtedly his least bleak and upsetting trip into the past, balancing the same meticulous attention to detail of Mr Turner or Vera Drake with infectious energy and humour that those films often understandably lack. 

An ambitious biopic of W.S. Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner), Topsy-Turvy focuses on 1884-1885 and the lead-up to the premiere of one of their most ambitious and troubled collaborations, “The Mikado”. The lucrative and critically successful creative partnership, with Gilbert providing lyrics and Sullivan composing their operas, had began to falter by this point in their careers and both men clearly had very different priorities in life and in art.

Set during the period of Victorian England’s fascination with all things Japanese following the East Asian country’s opening up to trade with the West, the film presents many uncomfortable attitudes to Japan and its culture. Yes, it’s deeply upsetting to see Jim Broadbent squinting his eyes and swinging a katana around in his dressing gown, Andy Serkis as a flamboyant, pipe-smoking choreographer trying to teach the women in the cast to move like Japanese ladies, and the exaggerated application of makeup employed to make British actors look Japanese on stage, but it is authentic to the time and place and adds to the tactile richness of the production design in general. 

None of the ensemble cast playing opera stars (including Timothy Spall, Kevin McKidd and Shirley Henderson) are professionals in the style, but they do a remarkably convincing job of it, especially considering that many of their own vocals are used in the final film. They also all, but especially Broadbent and Corduner, flesh out their troubled artists’ professional and personal lives, and the runtime just shy of 3 hours gives every character and subplot room to breathe while never threatening to lose your interest by peppering the story with plenty of entertaining backstage drama. 

With Topsy-Turvy, Leigh deconstructs two icons of English culture, bringing them down to the level of mere mortals, and explores how much passion and creativity, but also petty squabbles and selfishness, goes into making the most lasting pieces of art.

3. Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

About the closest Mike Leigh has come to a truly feel-good movie (though this still has more than a few shades of darkness), comedy-drama Happy-Go-Lucky is a great way to ease yourself into the British director’s oeuvre.

Happy-Go-Lucky is the story of Poppy (Sally Hawkins), an endlessly cheery primary school teacher going through life powered by her friendships and an unshakeable positive outlook on the world, no matter who she encounters or who may want to stamp it out.

While she had been seen on TV and had supporting roles in Leigh’s All or Nothing and Vera Drake, it was Happy-Go-Lucky that catapulted would-be Oscar and BAFTA nominee Hawkins into the limelight, and for good reason. You have to wonder how many real people’s lives Hawkins brightened in the months she was living as Poppy in London, though you also find yourself thinking that while she’d be a great person to know, you may perhaps avoid seeing her every day in order to avoid exhaustion.

We accompany Poppy on a series of experiences, from supporting bullied kids at school to finding time for her love and social life and flamenco dance classes, but the most memorable moments in the film by far are Poppy’s driving lessons taught by the volatile Scott (Eddie Marsan) – every scene they share together is even more tense than the last. Scott the driving instructor is a frankly terrifying creation who starts out seemingly just short-tempered and more than a little obsessive when it comes to Poppy’s short attention span and inappropriate footwear, but is gradually revealed to be a full-blown conspiracy theorist with an assortment of deep-rooted issues.

It’s here in particular that we really see how special Poppy is, that she shows empathy to everyone she encounters in life no matter how she is treated in return, and while anyone can make cheery small talk in a shop or show kindness to a homeless man, she can so easily switch modes from her joker default to showing genuine concern for Scott, a clearly disturbed man in need of help, even after she has been at the end of a tirade of verbal and physical assault.

Happy-Go-Lucky gives you a little hope in a world that sometimes seems to contain very little and lets you in on a snapshot of the complex personal stories of the everyday people you pass in the street. Occasionally, someone telling you to “Smile, it might never happen” really does come from a good place, and everyone could probably do with a Poppy in their lives… in small doses. 

Recommended for you: Where to Start with the Cinema of Peter Cushing

Mike Leigh is one of the most vivid and authentic UK filmmakers of the last fifty years, and just about every one of his feature films and work in the theatre and television are worth experiencing. Beyond the three suggestions above, Naked, Life is Sweet and Mr Turner in particular are worth your commitment, as hard as they are at times to watch. Sharing an equal role with his actors in creating real and memorable characters, and capturing the mundane with a beautiful eye, Mike Leigh holds a mirror up to British society from across the decades, and celebrates and lambastes in equal measure who we are and more importantly, why we are.

Godzilla (2014)
Director: Gareth Edwards
Screenwriters: Max Borenstein, Dave Callaham
Starring: Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Bryan Cranston, Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins, Juliette Binoche, David Strathairn, Carson Bolde, CJ Adams

67 years ago, Japanese studio Toho burst onto the international stage with Godzilla, an astonishing sci-fi/fantasy allegory for the Japanese nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 2014, a new vision of this well-worn story emerged from Monsters and Rogue One director Gareth Edwards.

The film opens in 1999 with two scientists (Ken Watanabe and Sally Hawkins) investigating the accidental excavation of some colossal animal remains in the Philippines. Along with a reptilian skeleton the size of a skyscraper, they discover something has hatched from a pair of strange eggs and is heading straight for the Japanese mainland. On the outskirts of Tokyo, nuclear physicist Joe Brody (Bryan Cranston) discovers some seismic anomalies and advises the immediate evacuation of the plant he oversees, but not in time to save everyone he loves. Cut to years later, and driven by his guilt and obsessive searching for answers, Joe and his estranged Naval officer son Ford (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) get caught up the chaos and destruction of monsters new and old making their presence known to the world.

While Edwards’ Godzilla pays tribute to Ishiro Honda’s original film quite explicitly at times – a monorail train comes off quite badly after crossing paths with a monster, Watanabe shares a name with a key character from the earlier film – the real lifeblood of Godzilla 2014 owes a debt not so much to Honda, but to Steven Spielberg and Jurassic Park. There are an obscene amount of references to the classic dino-disaster in terms of the story’s shape, the look and tone of the film at large, and even specific individual shots. The Jurassic Park nods include, but are not limited to: a creature imprisoned in a cage of electrified wire pinging the wire with a claw as it escapes; a comic moment where a bus driver has to wipe away fog from his windscreen to adequately survey the carnage going on outside his vehicle; Godzilla striking a victory pose and roaring triumphantly after a particularly tough fight. There’s also a clear nod to Edwards’ own debut film, and possibly even a reference to Roland Emmerich’s much-maligned 1998 Godzilla remake.

Whereas Honda’s Godzilla had nuance, depth and something important to say, Edwards’ film feels annoyingly non-committal. It never dares to make the leap to blame any one source for the events of the film. The Toho Godzilla was unashamedly an anti-nuclear, and anti-war piece, but this movie can’t seem to decide whether nuclear power, the destruction of nature, pollution, mankind’s violent nature or all of the above are to blame. By being non-committal it ends up criticising nobody – it’s all just a bit wishy-washy and lacking much-needed punch in the script.

Godzilla’s adversaries in the film, the radiation-sustained monsters dubbed “MUTOs”, are really dull in their inception, like a lazy amalgamation of the arachnids from Starship Troopers and the creature from Cloverfield. They inspire a newfound appreciation of how much effort and creativity went into designing the vibrant and varied kaiju of Pacific Rim.

Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Ford makes for a serviceable but vanilla hero. His motivations – the protection of his young family (Elizabeth Olsen and Carson Bolde), and a general sense of duty – make sense, but the macho-reckless way he goes about fulfilling them defies logic, and undermines his character. It could have been really interesting having a young military father torn between his paternal instincts and his patriotic drive, but instead, half the time Ford seems to forget he has a family. The more talented cast members are either under-used (Cranston) or are good, but not good enough to hold up an entire film  (Watanable, Hawkins).

Alexandre Desplat’s score for the movie is admittedly gorgeous, a bright spot in a world of grey and brown. It is grand and rich, and sits perfectly between East and West orchestration styles, with cues echoing the original film’s iconic score.

The H.A.L.O jump set-piece that was splashed all over the marketing is a very impressively constructed sequence, a painterly image designed for cinema posters. Sadly it doesn’t last much longer than it did in the film’s trailer however, and no other action beat in the film comes close to matching it.

The idea that Godzilla essentially functions as nature’s factory reset button is cleverly presented, but the big scaly dude himself is hardly ever there. When he’s on-screen, either standing proud against devastated cityscapes, or swimming crocodile-like between aircraft carriers with his towering spines exposed, or unleashing his secret weapon to turn the tide of battle – he’s wonderfully realised, but fans won’t feel like they’ve really got their Godzilla fix, or, as strange as it sounds, won’t feel like they got to know him, which isn’t good in a film about (and titled after) Godzilla.

Gareth Edwards’ take on Godzilla had a lot of potential – a solid cast, an interesting up-and-coming director and a studio already well-versed in giant monster carnage. But Edwards may have bitten off more than he could chew by going straight from independent creature sleeper hit to helming the latest revival of one of the biggest icons in creature feature history. If only the script, the performances and the characters had been as impactful as the soundtrack and visuals.

10/24

Recommended for you: Showa Era Godzilla Movies Ranked (1954-1975)

Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)
Director: Michael Dougherty
Screenwriters: Michael Dougherty, Zach Shields
Starring: Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga, Millie Bobby Brown, Zhang Ziyi, Sally Hawkins, Ken Watanabe, Bradley Whitford, Thomas Middleditch, Aisha Hinds, O’Shea Jackson Jr.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters is a beautiful piece of cinematographic art that suffers from a banal script and fails to deliver a satisfying story separate from the film’s action. It is also a picture that seems unable to present a clear philosophical and/or moral thesis regarding the “goodness” and necessity of titans (the term the film substitutes for kaiju), and fails to give any good reason for humanity to not simply kill them all (if humans are even capable of such a task). Perhaps logic isn’t the most pressing concern within monster-bash movies, but King of the Monsters may have gone too far.

At the top of the list of good things King of the Monsters has to offer is the work of Lawrence Sher, the VFX team and director Michael Dougherty on the visuals. The CGI is nothing short of incredible, and on par with Aquaman for the best seen on the big screen over the past 6 months or so. The red, yellow and blue coloration associated with monsters (blue for Godzilla, yellow for Ghidorah), character emotions and plot developments, ensure that the visual splendour on offer also has meaning, bathing the picture in not only a visual treat for the eyes but a significant one at that. To this point, the most strikingly beautiful visual component of this film is the plethora of Lovecraftian shots of enormous titans contrasted with tiny humans, especially those shot in the ocean that parallel Lovecraft’s most famous works Dagon and The Call of Cthulu.

Where this film differs from Lovecraft is in the concept of cosmicism; in Lovecraft’s fiction, humanity is insignificant in the grand scheme of the universe, and his Old Ones (who are natural beings like the titans in the film) are indifferent to humanity. This film puts humanity front and center for this battle between cosmically powerful beings, going so far as to consistently revisit human drama despite each of the human characters lacking depth at best, and being totally void of personality at worst. The human antagonist Jonah (Charles Dance) is introduced through an expository round table that all of the good guys are at, and he does little else besides say a couple of evil lines here and there. The film’s height of hubris and absurdity is the discovery that human voices are an important element in the audible signal that the characters use to control, or at least manage, titans.

The worst aspect of this film is its writing. King of the Monsters not only fails to incorporate strong and understandable laws and limits within its own universe (including zero attempts to answer why humanity hasn’t just wiped out the entire clan of titans by now, or why any of the titans can be considered to have different motivations from one another in the first place), but also incorporates one of the least imaginative tropes of blockbuster cinema, as evidenced in Batman v. Superman, where characters explain that we needn’t worry about loss of life because huge metropolitan areas where epic fights take place are evacuated and/or abandoned. Charles Dance is also shamefully underutilized and barely featured despite being the only true human antagonist in the film. He delivers stupid one-liners (for example, “long live the king”) like they’re lines from early ‘Game of Thrones’, and his character’s lack of depth and importance to the overall narrative is evidence of deep-rooted issues regarding the film’s characterisations.

Dr. Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler) is written to be about as one-dimensional as a protagonist can be – the only adversity he faces is the plot, but fortunately he always finds the right answers when called upon. Then there’s a side character, Dr. Rick Stanton (Bradley Whitford), who is almost exclusively used for comic relief and keeps bringing up the Hollow Earth Theory to explain titans travelling really far, really fast – it becomes a rarity for him to have more than one sentence to offer in any of his exchanges. Beyond that, sacrificial lambs are picked off at will, often with little to no emotional impact due to the overwhelmingly little they’ve had to do until that point and the stereotypes that make for their foundations.

Even the titular character, Legendary’s Godzilla, is (according to the film and at odds with what it seems was established in the first movie) a somewhat benevolent being that is consciously causing mass destruction to restore balance. Dr. Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), never relents on that point, and thus discovers that Ghidorah is malevolent because it is not a native titan – the message of the “other” as “evil” being counterproductive to our current societal concerns and the character seemingly only used to advance the plot. How they can tell the difference between one titan’s destruction and another’s is not explained, it’s just asserted by Dr. Russell and Dr. Serizawa (Ken Watanabe) that some titans are good. It read like a justification for America’s destabilization efforts in the Middle East; sometimes you gotta lead a few covert coups, drone strike civilians, or start long, bloody wars to bring about freedom! It is (consciously or not) propaganda attempting to normalize an “ends justify the means” approach to destruction.

At the end of the day, nobody needs a summer blockbuster to try so hard to make philosophical points and explain science, people go to watch big monsters fight. So while the cinematography in Godzilla: King of Monsters is good, it doesn’t make it worth seeing the the movie. The issue here was that there needed to be less focus on humans, more monsters punching each other, and they definitely needed to take themselves less seriously if they were going to offer so little by the way of logic within the film or fundamentals within the script. 

11/24

Submarine (2010)
Director: Richard Ayoade
Screenwriter: Richard Ayoade
Starring: Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige, Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor, Paddy Considine

Richard Ayoade’s darkly humourous adaptation of Joe Dunthorpe’s coming of age novel Submarine is a movie that feels like a song by The Smiths wrapped in the sort of self-aware cinematic tropes that paint a picture of teenage nothingness as if it is most special and unique in its intricacies. It is the sound of our melancholic youth, a bright spot in the tragedy of our own ordinariness and an ode to the want-to-be intellectual in each of us; a film with the type of honesty, flair and quietly humourous tone we can each only wish for our own life stories, and a bloody good watch at that.

Craig Roberts is a revelation as bumbling intellectual misfit teenager Oliver Tate, a 15 year old school pupil with a talent for accidentally falling into problems both way larger than he can truly comprehend and way less meaningful than he may first assume, something each of us can identify with should we search our true selves for long enough. It is in his misfiring quest to solve such issues and bring about the most solace to himself that the story moves forward, introducing parents Jill (Hawkins) and Lloyd (Taylor) as well as manic pixie dream girl Jordana, the sort alternative, Doc Martens wearing teenager who deals with a crush by insulting them and is played pitch perfectly by Yasmin Paige.

The quietly established setting of 80s Swansea provides some visually stunning backdrops, the scenery of which is referenced directly by the lead as ‘making him feel nothing’ and is subsequently pushed to one side as roaming shots of his favoured walks by a dock or on the beach take its place, the autumnal hills instead being referenced only as notes of displeasure from there on out. The key settings of Oliver’s home and school juxtapose this with a blatantly clean and almost impersonal aesthetic that comes to represent the adulthood awaiting this pretentious teenager in his poster-laden bedroom filled with props like typewriters and cassette players, just in case you’d forgotten that he’s the second coming of Morrissey.

Like Morrissey, Oliver is flawed and at times difficult to like, but there’s something so inherently genuine about the character that he’s identifiable and easy to empathise with; his self-narrated journey mixing self-deprecating humour, harsh realities and fantasy elements to reinforce he is a person worth rooting for. Side characters like Paddy Considine’s Graham and Oliver’s own mother and father come to shape his story through their actions but they’re seen with an intellectualised innocence of youth that is somewhat magically captured in the work of Richard Ayoade and his actors, thus ensuring that Submarine is more than a movie time capsule or celebratory coming of age film, but instead an honest intrinsic analysis of how downright self-centred each of us can be in our youth.

Clearly taking inspiration from the cinematography and editing techniques of the French New Wave, Submarine lends itself to the sort of audience Oliver would inevitably become and as such transcends its genre in many ways, the quality of its presentation also ensuring it isn’t bogged down alongside so many other British releases of its time. With Alex Turner providing an original soundtrack to what is a genuinely engaging and funny story about the insignificance yet overwhelming feeling of youth, Submarine offers something unique and interesting that is certainly worth exploring whether you’re 15 or 55.

17/24

The Shape of Water (2017/18)
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Screenwriter: Guillermo Del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Starring: Sally Hawkins, Michael Shannon, Richard Jenkins, Octavia Spencer, Michael Stuhlbarg, Doug Jones

The latest picture from famed fantasy-horror director Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone – 2001; Hellboy – 2004; Pan’s Labyrinth – 2006) is a beautifully crafted whimsical fairy tale reminiscent of old-fashioned monster-movies; a timeless classic from a filmmaker presenting the most earnest and poetic work of his career. The Shape of Water is a must-see piece of cinema that will engulf your senses and gently squeeze beauty, acceptance and love into your heart.

Del Toro’s typical deconstruction of what we ordinarily view as monstrous, and the mirror he places in front of us as regards it, is an authorial stamp that exists once again at the centre of his latest work. In The Shape of Water the typically monstrous is represented by an unknown salt-water creature discovered by the US during the peak of the Cold War, a time in which its discovery becomes an exercise in how to best exploit it for military and space-programme purposes. The slimy, screeching, human-like being, which is treated aggressively as a rule by the scientists and military members, forms a relationship with central protagonist Elisa (Hawkins), a cleaner for the facility in which the creature is kept and a person whom comes to identify with the “monster” due to her similarly as outcast societal position as a mute, working class female in early 1960s America. What ensues is a tale of boundless love that Del Toro uses to explore the very nature of prejudice and our ideas of monstrousness, a film which works on every level to tear down the walls we build as societies to separate the mythical “us” from “them”.

It is in this exploration that lies the true beauty of Del Toro’s work: its intentionally all-encompassing presentation of prejudice – a formula that is so often reinforcing of its central idea of deconstructing what we view as monstrous, unnatural, wrong, that it allows for your own input, your own identifiers, a means through which to feel for the film through your own experiences of prejudice brought from outside of the story he’s so elegantly presenting. The Shape of Water can be read as a film about sexual empowerment for the female gender or a critique on the losses in science during the cold war brought about due to the pursuit of bettering the opposition. It can also be viewed as a critique on masculinity, homophobia, artistry, racism and/or sexism, identifiers for which are placed as regular story beats in the picture’s dense script. It is fitting, then, that the lead character is mute, and thus someone who is easier to project your own thoughts and feelings onto; a presence that actively leads the narrative yet doesn’t say a spoken word and is therefore more susceptible to being read in all manner of ways. Whether you take the stance that it’s a critique of racism, sexism, masculinity, femininity or etc., the picture still works, and connects, because the very purpose is to discourage prejudices (of which no two of us ever share the same experiences). Del Toro masterfully walks the narrative through all of this in a central story arc that by itself is already a tale of fantasy melodrama worthy of investment, a story of honour and romance in an increasingly aggressive world filled with evermore difficult situations.

The Shape of Water as a technical achievement is noteworthy too, with the most urgent of praise being reserved for the movie’s wonderful use of light. Aside from some obvious lighting changes that occur at stand-out and very distinct moments of the screenplay which require a greater suspension of disbelief, The Shape of Water takes a powerful but often more subtle approach to light and shadow that often distinguishes tone and is so beautifully shot, and intricately thought out, that it looks like it’s come straight out of a black and white film of the classic Hollywood era. The movie is also coloured with the same richness that Del Toro features throughout his ouevre, a presentation style that can remove one from the story but in this case works only to enhance the beauty of the cinematography and drive home the picture’s overall magical quality.

The score works in a similarly as effective way, building on the magic of what’s in the scene with a whimsical tone more accurate of the screenplay’s central narrative, connecting the two in a seamless and non-invasive manner. It too is reminiscent of classic Hollywood, using wind instruments to dictate dread and becoming more melodic at times of incredible happiness or pleasure, but always feeling like the true sound of a fairy tale novel from a time we can’t quite recognise as our own.

The Shape of Water’s casting is an aspect of the film that is without fault. Lead actress Sally Hawkins provides a sterling performance despite being unable to use her voice to convey emotion, and her nervous portrayal and petite frame make her a great source of empathy, while Michael Shannon’s towering aggression and typically psychopathic glares made for an excellent antagonist whose characteristics were emphasised by some very clever shot choices. He in particular seems to have fully committed to the role, providing an edge and severity in his delivery that penetrated through to even the most casual of dialogue exchanges. Octavia Spencer also provided a typically nuanced performance as Elisa’s best friend, working to the highest standard in scenes alongside Shannon, while Richard Jenkins was somewhat of a standout as the friendly neighbour of Elisa whose own suffering as a closeted gay man brings about his own connection to the creature and is performed with the utmost respect. Inside the creature was Doug Jones, whose part-animal, part-juvenile physical actions brought great sympathy for the character in spite of sharing the lead’s same inability to verbally communicate; his performance was one that may be forgotten amongst the movie’s many great elements and performances but should be considered vitally important and impressive all the same due to how quickly the film could have fallen apart without a performance of such quality.

In many ways, The Shape of Water is Del Toro’s most personal film; a love-letter to the cinema that he’s openly discussed as having saved his life in his youth; a presentation of how film can provide hope, optimism and magic in times of great need (both for the characters in the film and for those of us watching his). It is perhaps this element of his fairy tale that shall sit with you the longest; a brief moment of true escape from an increasingly threatening world, your very own sea creature. It is what makes this film timely and relevant as well as poignant, beautiful and poetic. Guillermo Del Toro has created a gem of modern fantasy cinema, a source of great empathy and artistic quality that it is simply the best work of his established career; a great movie.

23/24

Paddington 2 (2017)
Director: Paul King
Screenwriters: Simon Farnaby, Paul King, Jon Croker
Starring: Brendan Gleeson, Sally Hawkins, Ben Whishaw, Michael Gambon, Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugh Bonneville, Julie Walters, Peter Capaldi

A collective sigh of relief could be heard across the nation when Paddington was released in the winter of 2014. Despite the worrisome marketing material it proved to be a joyous and goodhearted adaptation of Michael Bond’s original source material, arriving to remind us all that there was still some good despite all the hardship in the world. A sequel was immediately greenlit, and the cast and crew have somehow managed to match their previous accomplishments.

Paddington 2 succeeds because it understands, unlike so many sequels, that sometimes going bigger doesn’t make it better. Against the temptation to take the beloved bear and place him at the centre of a save-the-world narrative or facing off against fantastical creations, the plot is admirably simple and humble; Paddington (Ben Wishaw) wants to buy a pop-up book of London landmarks for his Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton), but has to get a job in order to afford it – hilarious mishaps follow, including a run in with Hugh Grant’s villainous actor character Phoenix Buchanan.

The key is returning director Paul King, whose direction is just as impeccable and picturesque as before, if not more so. A glimpse inside the pop-up book, in which Paddington guides his Aunt Lucy around a cardboard representation of London, is a beautiful call-back to the classic Michael Hordern animated series, but his work in the basic language of visual storytelling extends beyond that in creative and simple ways. From in-camera transitions which almost border on magic-realism, to effective time-lapse effects and camera movements, he brings a real sense of identity to the series that unboxes itself like a toy chest of wonders.

It carries over the same idealistic version of London as its predecessor; a multicultural society built on hope, integration and acceptance as epitomised by Windsor Gardens – where not even the constant grumbling of nationalist allegory Mr. Curry (Peter Capaldi) can deter the neighbours of the street from rallying behind Paddington. Its a 21st-century vision of contemporary London that works around its own iconography while feeling open and accepting of all people – this is still a world in which an anthropomorphic talking bear is never a topic of conversation. Modern in aesthetic and design, and yet at one point, Paddington calls home from a derelict red telephone box. Even the prison system seems like a far more charming place to inhabit as Paddington’s kindness slowly transforms the inmates, including Brendan Gleeson’s hilarious Knuckles McGinty.

Much of this is down to Wishaw who, as the titular character, brings so much warmth and wide-eyed optimism to the picture, giving a vocal performance so believable that it’s strange when you have to remind yourself that he’s a perfectly rendered digital creation. Although, he is almost upstaged by Grant, who is a riot as the washed-up former theatre performer (which is meant as the highest compliment). He’s an absolute joy in the role, and the various facades that he wears over the course of his fiendish scheme are all a physical comedy treat.

The structure of the film and its screenplay is faultless; many scenes of which play out like they could easily work as individual stories in and of themselves (Paddington… becomes a Window Cleaner, goes to the Barbers/goes to Prison etc.). It makes sure that the main cast is handled well, and as with the in the previous film every member of the Brown family eventually uses one of their own unique abilities in their efforts to bring Paddington home, and the returning cast is as game and enjoyable as before. There’s even an action sequence on a train during the climax that is more exciting, funny and emotionally engaging than anything in the last James Bond movie.

The cast and crew that made the original work so well have pulled off the impossible again. Paddington 2 is an absolute delight; an utterly charming storybook adventure that’s as sweet and gooey as marmalade, a confident and assured family classic and every bit as good – if not better – than the first.

22/24

Written by Luke Whitticase

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