There's a reason this TV adaptation is titled Ripley and not The Talented Mr Ripley. Or even, as another producer might have styled it: Patricia Highsmith's Mr Ripley. And that's because - although plot-wise this TV version stays much closer to the book than the 1999 movie - this is not Patricia Highsmith's Ripley. It is very much Steven Zaillian's Ripley. And, as such, it is first and foremost a director's exercise in film noir. So far as that goes, it is an exceptioinally stylish and moody recreation of noir. But while Highsmith's characters and story certainly lend themselves to a more broody treatment, Zaillian hasn't necessarily done Highsmith any favours in the scripting. The three main characters all become somewhat flat, and often more arch than real. Casting Tom with an older actor renders the character something of a seedy and desperate loser; it's not so easy to admire is ingenuity, or forgive his avarice. By contrast, the movie version is sexy and glamorous, and positively bursting with energy and passion. You instantly get why Marge loves Jude Law's Dicky, and why Tom wants to be him. Johnny Flynn? Not so much. Also, whjile Zaillian is all about maintaining the tension and the suspense, he also makes some choices that seriously undermine any plot credibility. It's bad enough that the police apparently fail to ever obtain a phot of the real Richard Greenleaf. But Zaillian has Marge sell her story to TWO Italian publications, who both choose to run stories about the Greenleaf disappearance with a selection of Marge's photographs - but not a single one of Richard. As if. Ultimately, Zaillian's focus on the intense press coverage of the case proves his undoing. Are we really supposed to believe that none of Italy's newspapers ever thought to obtain a photo of Richard Greenleaf from his parents, or his Princeton friends, or a college year book? Overall, while I enjoyed Andrew Scott's Ripley, Matt Damon's movie version is more engaging, more complex and more moving. Damon's Mr Ripley is genuinely *talented* and you're ultimately touched by his yearning and his despair. Scott's Ripley is, in fact, not talented at all; he mostly outsmarts himself, he's creepy as hell, and you mostly think he deserves to be caught. Which makes him not half as much fun as Highsmith intended.
Reviews
43 Reviews
Prosper
(2024– )
Godforsaken
22 January 2024
Richard Roxburgh is great at playing delusional hypocrites, so there was reason to be optimistic about him playing the pastor of a Hillsong-like mega church. Sadly, Prosper fails to deliver. Its fictional pastor, Cal Quinn, is a rather wishy-washy megalomaniac, it that makes sense. Sure, he's a controlling, egomaniacal, duplicitous piece of work. But compared to the real-life megachurch leaders we've all read about, he's really not worth getting too excited about. The writers seem to want to have it both ways: Cal is something of a con artist, but he's also a genuine believer, albeit with a tortured relationship with the man upstairs. It's the latter proposition that fails to convince. Cal's wife, Abi, also barely registers on the Tammy Faye scale, and it doesn't help that she's played by Mrs Suburbia herself, Rebecca Gibney. The rest of the family is an equally dull lot, and the murder mystery plonked into the megachurch narrative does nothing to generate the much-needed suspense. In short, it's typical Australian drama: an under-cooked concept, lame storylines, uninspired dialogue and ho-hum direction. Roxburgh and Gibney give it their best, but without much support from an otherwise lacklustre cast. Another not-half-bad idea utterly wasted.
Good Grief
(IV) (2023)
Grieving in Style
8 January 2024
Good Grief is clearly not what many viewers expected from Dan Levy - and the reviews make that pretty clear. It's not a laugh-out-loud comedy. It's not quite a rom-com. It's not anything any of his previous work would have led anyone to anticipate. Good Grief is actually a gentle meditation on loss and heartache, deftly written and stylishly directed. It is also an at times Woody-Allen-esque love letter to both London and Paris. Neither city has ever looked better on film. Perhaps most surprisingly, Dan Levy delivers a beautifully restrained, delicately nuanced performance that gives what might otherwise have been a lightweight film some genuine gravitas. My one reservation was Ruth Negga as Simone, the messy, chaotic, self-absorbed friend. I never for one second believed the character, didn't buy the other characters putting up with her, and was increasingly irked by Negga's doomed efforts to invest Simone with the kind of full-on charisma that might fool you into over-looking just how frightful she is. It would take a legendary comic talent - and I'm talking Goldie Hawn or Barbra Streisand at their peak - to make this character fly. And Ruth Negga ain't that great. It's a shame, since all the other peformances are as good as Levy's.
Maestro
(2023)
Bradley channels Orson, not Lenny
23 December 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Let's be honest: Maestro shows us Bradley Cooper trying desperately to be Orson Welles, not Leonard Bernstein. It's a concerted - and not entirely unsuccessful - attempt to deliver a stylish, sweeping epic of at least comparable grandeur and import to Citizen Kane. And visually Maestro is certainly impressive, albeit with considerable help from Bernstein's magnificent music. Performances are also top notch. The only problem is that the film should be called Felicia, not Maestro. Bernstein actually gets rather short shrift. The emotional heft of the film is all with the wife, and the sympathy is pretty much all hers too. What makes this not just odd, but distasteful is the movie's curiously old-school approach to sexuality. While pretending to be relaxed about Lenny's bisexuality, Maestro is actually peddling a much more traditional tale of the poor martyred wife. Felicia selflessly marries the young genius, despite his sexual proclivities, then lives a life of constant heartbreak before (spoiler alert) dying a tragic death. Note how the crucial emotional scenes are all from Felicia's point of view. Catching Lenny kissing a guy at a party. Watching him holding his boyfriend's hand in the theatre. Meanwhile, Lenny's emotional investment in these men is not explored at all. And there's no hint of the extra-marital flings Bernstein had with women. No, only "other men" are the villains in Cooper's movie. Take out the extended sequences where Cooper gets to show off his conducting skills and the movie is almost entirely Felicia's story. For all the longing to be Orson, Maestro often reminded me more of Douglas Sirk, with Carey Mulligan standing in for Jane Wyman. Except that Sirk's movies were more emotionally honest, and nowhere near as pretentious. I'd certainly recommend Maestro for the visuals and the music. But if you were hoping for a genuinely insightful movie about musical genius and the sexual struggles of a world-famous composer-conductor, then try Tar instead.
1946: The Documentary That Misses The Point
20 December 2023
Sure: "1946" is a worthwhile and enlightening documentary about how Christians came to be weirdly obsessed with homosexuality. The problem is that it's made by the wrong people. The film is the work of a small band of extremely well-meaning believers who, like many others, have been hurt and damaged by being rejected, demonised and persecuted by the church. So they set out to prove that those who have wielded the bible as a weapon against homos have been erroneously acting on a couple of ham-fisted mistranslations. The case they make is entirely persuasive, and not hugely surprising. Their first mistake is believing that it will make any difference, when clearly the church isn't about to give up any of its most dearly held prejudices. Their second and rather more tragic mistake is not seeing the bigger picture. There's much earnest discussion about the need to see the bible as a reflection of the times in which it was written, especially in relation to women, marriage and patriarchy, etc. But nobody goes that step further and suggests examining the promotion of a deity in the context of patriarchal power structures of the day. The real question is why anyone would want to be accepted by a hopelessly outmoded, irretrievably patriarchal, deeply judgemental and monumentally twisted organisation like the church, which has only ever existed to oppress and control. Still, well done to those who did the valuable detective work. Now how about applying the same intellectual rigour to the rest of the bible.
May December
(2023)
Plodding potboiler
10 December 2023
With a strong and potentially sensational premise, May-December really should have been fascinating. But it just isn't. The film's characterisation of the Older Woman and her once Schoolboy Lover could scarcely be more predictable: she's naive and vulnerable, he's more mature and responsible. She's dependent; he's starting to feel trapped, etc. So while it's not exactly a commonplace story, the movie has about it the air of instant cliche. Meanwhile, Natalie Portman's actress researching a role is uninspired and unconvincing. She's in an awkward position, yet does little to try and ingratiate herself or win over her subject. Ultimately, the movie goes exactly where you expect it to go, yet to very little dramatic effect. And we're really no wiser at the end than we were at the beginning. Just two hours older and wondering why Todd Haynes thought this strained soap opera was worth his attention.
Single, Out
(2022– )
Seriously Sub-Heartstopper
6 December 2023
Don't be fooled by the 10 ratings (every director has some friends). Single, Out might rate a generous Three if you give points just for gay content, a Four if you'll watch anything featuring cute guys and maybe a Five if you're a lonely gay teen who hasn't yet stumbled on Heartstopper. The series' heart is in the right place, but the script is basic at best, lame at worst, the threadbare story is padded out with cheesy fantasy montages, and the performances are mostly amateurish and frequently cringeworthy. The saving grace is Will Hutchins who is cute and can at least act to a Neighbours/Home & Away standard.
Nuovo Olimpo
(2023)
Melodrama Italiano
11 November 2023
Gorgeous cinematography. A fabulous soundtrack. Beautiful actors. And some enjoyably full-bodied performances. But for all that Nuovo Olimpo never quite achieves the heights of romantic melodrama to which it aspires. That's partly because the plot is just too silly, even for a Douglas Sirk-style tear-jerker. But also partly because so much of it is just too glossy, too idealised, too calculated for effect. It also doesn't help that the characters have little to no depth. As much as I wanted to surrender to the romance and nostalgia, the clunky artiface of it all constantly gets in the way of any suspension of disbelief. But it's nice to look at, and its worth sticking around for the unintentional comedy provided by a couple of plot twists that you'd only otherwise find in a daytime soap.
Frasier
(2023– )
Not Quite There Yet
12 October 2023
It's a slightly shaky seven-out-of-ten for the Frasier re-boot. The new concept seems solid, the writing is clever enough and Kelsey Grammar has still got it. The other positives are Jack Cutmore-Scott as Frasier's son, Freddy, and Anders Keith as Niles' son, David. Each instantly clicks in the roles and each can deliver both comedy and pathos. I'm less sure about Nicholas Lyndhurst as Frasier's friend, Alan. I can't see Lyndhurst and Grammar being as hilarious a pairing a Grammar and David Hyde Pierce. But time will tell. And for me Toks Olagundoye just didn't really gel as Olivia, and she certainly couldn't handle the zingers written for her. There was also some rather forced plotting (even for a sitcom) - like every character turning up for Frasier's dinner with Freddy. It was the kind of contrived development that the original Frasier would either have avoided or handled with considerably more aplomb. Overall, though, not a bad start. Fingers crossed.
A Place in the Sun
(1951)
A wildly over-rated sudser
6 October 2023
A Place in the Sun is frequently cited as one of the greats of American cinema, but I doubt many 21st century viewers would agree. As a tale of America's haves and have nots, the movie still has a degree of thematic heft, but the storytelling is sluggish and hugely melodramatic. All the key plot developments are clumsily telegraphed. And from a legal standpoint the courtroom trial in the final reel is ludicrous. There are also some curious moments worth mentioning in light of the Oscar nominations for director George Stevens and actress Shelley Winters. In two of Winters' key scenes Stevens chooses to shoot her almost entirely from behind (in the first she tells George she's pregnant; in the second she finds out he's abandoned her to be with Angela). It's possible that Stevens simply thought it was interesting to frame those scenes as he did. It's more likely that his main concern was keeping the focus on Montgomery Clift. But I wouldn't mind betting that he was also determined not to build too much sympathy for Winter's character, Alice, as the single, pregnant girl left in the lurch. God forbid the audience should sympathise with her, rather than her killer! Which makes it all the more remarkable that Winters scored a best actress nomination anyway. Whatever the directorial motivations here, they now seem transparently manipulative and more than somewhat distasteful. And the same can be said for the determination to make Alice both frumpy and whiny, as though that also makes George less of a monster. If A Place in the Sun still has any legitimate claims on greatness, then it's surely only for the genuine star power of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift. Their charisma lights up the screen, even when their actual performances fall short.
The Inheritance
(2023)
Murder Most Phony
29 September 2023
The Inheritance is a lame mystery/melodrama that stretches credulity at almost every turn. You'll spend most of the running time wondering why nobody is asking the most obvious of questions, or simply how such an under-cooked whodunit ever made it into production. (When they find out that their father has secretly re-married a woman he had been seeing for 14 years, nobody - not his kids, not the coroner not the police - stops to wonder why the couple felt the need to keep the marriage a secret!) It doesn't help that the three offspring who seem to have been cheated out of their inheritance are all more-or-less equally unlikeable. Performances are very much from the British Soap School of Acting or, in the case of Pauline McLynn as the Coroner, the Acorn Antiques School. Maybe a fun watch if you like picking the holes in silly murder mysteries, but otherwise best avoided.
Happiness for Beginners
(2023)
The bland leading the bland
2 September 2023
What year is this? Watching Happiness For Beginners one could be forgiven for thinking we'd been transported back to sometime pre-1970s. You know - when it was just fine to make gays, asians or fat people the butt of every joke. This less-than-delightful throwback to those days combines all three in the character of Hugh, a whiny, weak Asian queen who, wouldn't you know it, is the one who nearly ruins the hiking trip by doing something stupid. Interestingly, this offensive trope is the work of a production that is written, directed and just-about-everything-elsed by women, but whose notions of positive representation are clearly pretty limited. Offensive stereotypes aside (and the pudgy gay asian isn't the only one), this is a seriously bland rom-com. Despite a reasonably solid set-up - a mismatched group on a hiking trip - it fails to deliver much in the way of either character comedy or good-old-fashioned stuck-in-the-woods slapstick. As scene after scene played itself out to minimal effect I couldn't help wonder what those responsible for the classic Goldie Hawn comedies of the 70s might have done with such a premise. Ellie Kemper is at best passable as the lovelorn lead. She's likeable, but doesn't get a lot to do. Opposite her, Luke Grimes - also fatally ill-served by the half-cooked script - displays little of the charisma and depth he does in Yellowstone. All in all: a terrible waste.
Mates
(2023)
Cheap, Amateurish & Best Avoided
27 August 2023
In general, the standard of independent gay films has greatly improved in recent years. So much so that it's surprising that something as cheap, clumsy and amateurish as Mates can still earn a release. Mates is poorly scripted, the characters are wafer thin and if it weren't for the English countryside the film would have no production values at all. None of the actors is strong enough to rise above the weak material, and they're not helped by pedestrian direction and editing. Technical aspects aside, the central character, Connor, is unappealing. His would-be seducer, Adam, is entirely unbelievable - pursuing Connor in front of his apparently very straight mates, and after Connor has said he's not gay and not interested. And the mates are clumsy straight stereotypes, albeit with an equally clumsy attempt and questioning just how straight one of them might be. At what might seem a mercifully short 80 minutes, Maters is still 60 minutes longer than it needed to be.
Heartstopper
(2022– )
Undeniably cute, but also deeply problematic
11 August 2023
Clearly there's a deep hunger for innocent gay teenage romance. Which explains the gushing, wildly over-generous reviews of both Oseman's books and the TV series based on them. And - yes, absolutely - young gay readers and viewers deserve some wholesome, joyful, uplifting romance. I will also happily admit that I found the first series of the TV show a pure delight. Sure, the story is wafer thin, the characters are barely there and some of the dialogue would seem basic coming from kids five years younger than the characters are supposed to be. But it is charming enough to overlook all of that. Except... by the time we get past the first episode of the second series the charm starts to wear a little thin. Pretty soon there are some niggling questions about the whole Heartstopper enterprise and in particular about how Oseman deals with teenage gay guys and their sexuality. Or, more precisely, how she doesn't deal with it. Because despite Heartstopper being all about sexual identity and coming out, Oseman cannot bring herself to honestly and realistically discuss or depict sex, even in the most delicate, oblique or tastefully vague way. So the first series is all yearning and hand-holding and tentative kisses. Fair enough; that's what teenage relationships are like at the start. But by series two Nick and Charlie have been together for months. And, let's be real here: teenage boys are horny devils. They think about sex ALL THE TIME. At the very least there would be some VERY heavy petting going on. And it wouldn't matter if they were evangelical Christians or Mormons or suffering from a heady mix of social anxieties and neuroses around sex (which, unless I've missed something, Nick and Charlie are not). That's just the way it is. Always. But not with Nick and Charlie. No, they are fantastically chaste. When the subject finally comes up some months into their relationship they both react as if burned by a red-hot poker, then swear that they're not ready for sex just yet. Then Charlie then tells Nick that, although he wants to - one day - that if Nick is never ready, then that will be fine with him too. Because I guess Love Is Enough. Anyone who has been a teenage boy knows that this is complete nonsense, and that no sexually-healthy teenage boy in history has ever said this. And this is where we need to address the elephant in the room. Alice Oseman is asexual. So we have to assume that she has an asexual agenda here. Because she sure hasn't done any actual research into what actual teenage boys think or do. And this is where I start to have some concerns over just how "wholesome" and "uplifting" Heartstopper really is. Frankly, denying natural sexual urges isn't wholesome at all. And shrouding them with fear, dread and various other un-named negative feelings is positively dangerous, and not what you'd expect of a 21st century teen / young adult story that purports to have a healthy approach to sexual identity and coming out. But that's precisely what Oseman does. And the more I think about Heartstopper now, the more I see it as another piece of exploitative M/M fiction. It's another gay fantasy written by another woman who largely wants to deny the everyday sexuality of real gay boys/men. It's the teen version of A Little Life, if you like. It'll make a lot of girls/women weep buckets for the unbearably urgent romance - so long as they are not confronted by boners, semen or the icky things those boys do together. No, no, no. We'll have none of that here. Right? So tell me - honestly - just how positive and uplifting and wholesome and heartwarming is Heartstopper really? Hmmm?
The Mattachine Family
(2023)
Too much ado about baby
15 July 2023
As earnest as it is vapid, The Mattachine Family takes an awfully long time to say not very much about gay families and gays with babies. It desperately wants to be both amusing and heartwarming, but is neither. We get all the by-now-standard diverse gay movie stereotypes - the mixed-race lesbian couple, the flaming Asian best friend, etc. It's supposed to be finger-on-the-pulse contemporary, but actually feels depressingly seen-it-all-before. Nico Tortorella plays Thomas the gay husband who is tortured about whether to be or not to be a father. We're clearly meant to find Thomas endearing, but I mostly found him infuriatingly self-centred and Tortorella's performance annoyingly mannered. The notion of fatherhood for Thomas revolves entirely around personal fulfilment, with not even a second's thought given to what might be good for a child. Which left me really wishing he'd get a dog and not subject some poor kid to his emotional neediness. I should have trusted my instincts and switched off when the first 15 minutes made it grindingly obvious where it was all going, but I hung in there, hoping to be surprised. I wasn't.
In Our Blood
(2023– )
Amateur Hour at the ABC
8 April 2023
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. There's little doubt that everyone connected to In Our Blood had only the best intentions, but that doesn't excuse this being a cheap, misguided and very poorly executed account of the AIDS crisis in Australia. The weirdness starts with the drama's approach to history. Events and characters are "fictionalised" - except they're not really. Matt Day's Minister of Health is clearly Neal Blewett, and couldn't really be anyone else. The saintly Caroline, who heads the public health campaign, is clearly Ita Buttrose, and couldn't be anyone else. Stranger still, Matt Day appears to be doing a rough impersonation of Blewett, while Caroline is dressed and coiffured like a mean parody of Buttrose. Fictionalising doesn't fool anyone; it only does a disservice to those extremely well-known real life figures. But it's with the fiction that In Our Blood comes really unstuck. There are no characters, just cliched archetypes. And for the most part they mouth dialogue that sounds like it's lifted directly from news articles, government reports and AIDS pamphlets of the day. We're treated to whole scenes of ludicrously stilted dialogue that has all the finesse of an industrial health and safety video. Production values are rock bottom, with Brisbane doing a pretty poor job of trying to pass for Sydney. And there are historical clunkers throughout. Uniformed police officers have long hair (very long hair) in one scene. And the writers clearly have no clue about the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, who did not don habits as a lifestyle choice, but to make some serious political points. The musical numbers are High School Musical level (your local high school, not the TV show). And the lipsticked chorus anachronistically imposes 2020s notions of gender diversity on the 1980s in a way that completely misrepresents the gay community of that time. In the few moments where In Our Blood comes close to being dramatically effective, it is painfully obvious that it is also borrowing shamelessly from Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart. Entire scenes were clearly "inspired" by Kramer's infinitely superior work. Aside from Tim Draxl, who struggles manfully to inject some real human emotion into his scenes, the performances are consistently well below the standard you'd expect of a program produced by our national broadcaster. And that's putting it as kindly as possible. Yes, it's important that the lessons of the AIDs years are not forgotten. But there are more than a few landmark dramas on the subject, from Kramer's aforementioned work to Tony Kushner's magnificent Angels In America. In Our Blood really has nothing especially worthwhile to add, and I can't help wishing those responsible hadn't bothered.
The Son
(I) (2022)
Severely Underwhelming Family Soap Opera
23 February 2023
It's not like family dramas dealing with mental illness can't make great movies. Ordinary People comes immediately to mind. But The Son never even comes close to making the grade. The biggest problem is
an uncomfortable split in focus between the two sons of the story. It's Peter's teenage son, Nicholas, who is the one with the urgent, life-threatening depression. Yet the film is more concerned with Peter, how he's coping with Nicholas, and his own troubled relationship with his stern father (a one-scene cameo by Anthony Hopkins that gives The Son it's only standout scene). The stories of the two sons are simply not well enough integrated to make for a satisfying story. Secondly, there's not enough depth to any of the characters. As a result, Nicholas mostly comes off as endlessly whiny, and Peter as more than somewhat self-absorbed. That the script is fatally weak becomes increasingly evident. Not even the always excellent Laura Dern and Hugh Jackman giving it his all can breathe real life into the grim proceedings. To be brutally frank, there are soap operas and 70s TV movies that have handled the same material with greater depth and finesse.
Knock at the Cabin
(2023)
The Dumb and Dumber Apocalypse
21 February 2023
Warning: Spoilers
Once again M. Night has delivered a film with a strong premise, but an increasingly weak and disappointing denouement. I was on board for religious nutters looking for scapegoats to save them from the apocalypse. But when he asks us to buy into the apocalypse and accept that these horrid people are for real, I'm left wondering if M. Night isn't way more twisted than we already thought - and not in a harmless, creative way. By the time we get to Groff's character accepting that human sacrifice is necessary to save humanity I was moving beyond merely annoyed into thinking it would be kind of cool if some crazed person staged a similar home invasion at M. Night's Hollywood mansion. It would be nothing short of poetic justice. Matters of taste and decency aside, the plot has some mighty huge weak spots. I'll mention just two. When our boys finally turn the tables and take control they choose to lock loopy Leonard in the bathroom. Any intelligent person would have just shot him - in the leg or in the head, either would have worked. But, no, they do the wimpiest, lamest possible thing. I guess because they're gay; there's really no non-homophobic explanation for it. Later, Groff's character buys into the apocalypse/human sacrifice scenario, despite having already established that one of their tormentors is a guy who previously attacked his husband in a bar. There's a huge disconnect there, but it's just ignored. The two stars are for Kristen Cui as Wen, the daughter. She's cute and blameless. Everyone else should be ashamed.
Babylon
(I) (2022)
La La Land for masochists
11 February 2023
The most astounding thing about Babylon is that it's a film entirely composed of false notes. From the uber-indulgent near-thirty-minute opening orgy to the closing Singing In The Rain-inspired phantasmagoria there's not a single believable moment. The characters are cliches writ large, the comedy is forced to breaking point, every sequence sails past melodrama into overkill, then circles back for another assault on your battered sensibilities. If you know anything at all about Hollywood from the silent to the early sound era, then you know it was absolutely nothing like Damian Chazelle's perverse reversal of Singing In The Rain. Sure, there was debauchery. There was excess. Careers crashed and burned. But Babylon aims Sick And Twisted in biblical proportions, and it quickly becomes ludicrously outlandish. If Chazelle is trying to say something worthwhile here, he's making a giant hash of it. There's a would-be momentous scene toward the end in which gossip columnist Elinor St John tells movie star Jack Conrad that his career is over simply because his time is up, but he will be remembered in a hundred years time. Only we know that there were usually very specific reasons why silent stars failed in the transition to sound (Singing In The Rain knew that), and, actually, most of those stars weren't remembered 20 years later, and they're completely forgotten today. Elinor and Chazelle could hardly be more wrong. The only point at which I was emotionally engaged by Babylon was in one of Brad Pitt's later scenes. Was I moved by his character. No. I was moved by Pitt giving a masterful performance in this empty vessel of a film, to sadly little effect. Margot Robbie gives it everything she has too, but with rather more mixed results, given how her character's arc is from annoying to insufferable. By contrast, Diego Calva as an improbable Latino producer is an utterly blank canvas for most of the movie. And then there's Tobey Maguire giving what must surely be the year's most over-the-top performance in possibly the decade's most over-the-top film sequence. But can anything really be over-the-top when a film is an exercise in excess? Chazelle clearly thinks the way to cinema greatness is Go Big Or Go Home. Somebody needs to introduce him to the concept Less Is More.
Nolly
(2023)
Nolly? Really?!
5 February 2023
From Queer As Folk to It's A Sin, Russell T. Davies has a near-perfect record for delivering top class television drama. But Nolly isn't quite up there with his best work, despite being an enjoyable exercise in nostalgia and camp. The problem is partly Nolly herself. Noele Gordon certainly was something of a TV legend in her time and much loved by fans of Crossroads. But is being much-loved by the fans of an extremely creaky bygone soap opera enough justification for all this hoopla? There are any number of other soap divas who lived extraordinary lives and had thousands of devoted fans (Pat Phoenix & Julie Goodyear to name just two), and who would be equally worthy, if not more so, of this kind of dramatic tribute. What supposedly sets Gordon apart is the mystery around why she was fired. Except there isn't that much of a mystery. She was exasperatingly difficult and she wore out her welcome. In Nolly Davies contends that they wouldn't have treated a man the same way. But that just isn't true. There are any number of male soap stars who also became too big for their boots and were given the chop in much the same way. And, let's be honest, it wasn't as if Noele Gordon was a huge talent. Helena Bonham Carter's performance pretty much acknowledges that with the hammy re-creations of Gordon's TV performances, as well as a fairly accurate depiction of her subsequent stage work in Gypsy (Gordon's Madame Rose can be found on Youtube if you want to see just how ordinary she was). And therein lies the real problem with Nolly: you can't maintain that the woman was a hugely talented legend who was unfairly cut off in her prime at the same time as cheekily sending her up. So while Davies skilfully whips up the nostalgia and tugs at our heartstrings, he never quite convinces us that Nolly is either the grand heroine or the tragic victim he's writing her as.
Borrowed
(2022)
Borrowed... and wasted
26 January 2023
In this highly contrived melodrama a tortured painter invites a young guy to model for him, then holds him captive. There's a lot you could do with that scenario, but nothing that Borrowed chooses to do is either convincing or interesting. The young model, Justin, is understandably terrified and attempts to escape. But a little later he is canoodling on the couch with his captor, then frolicking in his pool. If he were biding his time and planning another escape, there might at least be some kind of suspense. But no. I presume we're supposed to deduce that he's developing something like Stockholm Syndrome and becoming emotionally invested in David. But there's little in the script to support that either. Ultimately, Borrowed goes nowhere much. The co-writers/directors seem to have no interest in liberating the material from its stage origins, so what we're treated to is a saggy talkfest and a great deal of dubious psychological introspection. The two lead actors are better than the material deserves, but they're not miracle workers. Frankly, the best thing about Borrowed is the set design - a stylish evocation of an artist's hideaway, full of interesting paintings, sculptures and objet d'art. But when you find yourself more interested in the backdrop than anything happening in front of it, you know all is lost.
A Christmas to Treasure
(2022 TV Movie)
Another nauseating faux-gay Christmas movie
24 December 2022
There's a common misconception that the barrage of gay Christmas movies in recent years is an attempt to cater to - or rather cash in on - a gay audience. It's not. In fact, the gay audience isn't even a consideration. These movies are targeted exclusively at a very specific female audience: women who get off on gay romance. Google "M/M romance" and you'll see that this is a booming area of written "gay" fiction too. This of course explains why the gay characters in these movies are barely even recognisable as gay, even if they're often played by out gay actors. The romance is strictly anodyne. It never goes beyond cute looks, a little hand-holding and one or two extremely chaste kisses. There's never any allusion to actual sex. The relationships are always 100% heteronormative, with aspirations of marriage and a suburban life together as responsible consumers. In other words, nothing to challenge anyone, least of all the *nice* women who consume this stuff. Some might say that gay romance as a commodity for straights counts as progress of sorts. But that kind of ignores how cynical, exploitative and borderline offensive this outwardly saccharine, but inwardly nasty little genre actually is.
Bones and All
(2022)
Where's Armie when you really need him?
17 December 2022
Since Bones and All is slow, overlong and mostly underwhelming, I found myself with a lot of time to contemplate what, if anything, might have saved it. And it finally struck me while watching the final scene. If only Guardagnino had cast Armie Hammer instead of Taylor Russell and made this the sequel to Call Me By Your Name that everyone wants to see. Just think about it. Imagine the look on Armie's face as Timothee Chalamet pleads with him: "Eat me, eat me!!" The look of ecstasy on would have had more than the usual amount of subtext, and given us a conclusion to Elio and Oliver's love story that Andre Acimen could never have equalled (and indeed, if you've read Find Me, hasn't). Honestly, it's the only thing that could have made this tedious, twisted road movie a complete triumph. Instead, in this topsy-turvy world in which we live, Armie is cancelled for merely fantasising about cannibalism, while Guardagnino is celebrated for making a very boring, very gory film on the subject. Weird, isn't it?
The Holiday Sitter
(2022 TV Movie)
Make the Yuletide (Tastefully) Gay
13 December 2022
As these gay-themed Hallmark Christmas movies become an annual event I find myself increasingly bewildered by the phenomenon. And not a little conflicted. First there's the question of the intended audience. It is quite categorically not gay men, which might be the first assumption of the unsuspecting. No, no, no, the core audience for these movies is straight women. Presumably the same straight women who are now devoted readers of the burgeoning genre of "M/M novels" - soft-core gay romances written exclusively for a female audience. That's right: there are large numbers of women who get off on romance (with only a hint of sex) between men. In fact, they can't get enough of it. The problem with these M/M novels - and with these gay Christmas movies - is that it's gay romance stripped of anything confrontingly gay. It's all gentle pining, thwarted passion, smouldering looks and, in the final moments, one mildly passionate kiss (two if you're lucky - but no tongue!). There's never anything sexual. In the books the writer will typically cut to the waves crashing on the shore. In the TV movies: nothing. There's also nothing about the lives of these gay characters that even vaguely resembles the lives of real gay men. In The Holiday Sitter the theme is family, with Jason so obsessed with family and children that he's planning to become a single father via adoption, while Sam is so traumatised by divorce that he's avoiding family and planning on Christmas in Hawaii - alone. Yes, alone. Not even the hint of a gay friend or the prospect of trawling Honolulu bars for a bit of fun. In short, this is family values propaganda that, if it weren't for the gay characters, would win the approval of any extreme right christian ministry. So the notion that these movies are "progressive" and offer positive gay images is questionable, to say the least. Apparently, all gay men must now aspire to marriage, two kids and suburbia. It's like gay lib merely transported us all back to the 1950s. Needless to say, in The Holiday Sitter Sam falls for Jason, realises how empty his (gay) life has been and signs on for kids and the suburbs. While Jonathan Bennett has previously been charming in some of these creaky pieces of agit prop, his performance here (as Sam) is mannered and cheesy. It's a good thing that George Krissi (as Jason) is almost sexy and charming enough to make up for him. I'm sure the ladies who lap this stuff up will be moist with appreciation. Meanwhile, I'm waiting to see if they'll ever make a gay Christmas romance that actual gays might watch without wincing and cringing at how the straights have re-packaged us for their own entertainment.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(I) (2022)
D.H. Lawrence meets Mills & Boon
4 December 2022
While not completely awful, this latest adaptation feels a bit like the suburban woman's book club version of Lady Chatterley's Lover. Connie is given a light feminist makeover, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but in most respects the writing and the direction loses the muscularity and the rawness of the novel. The scene with Connie and Oliver frolicking naked in the rain is emblematic of this director's approach. It's cute and maybe a tad naughty, rather than erotically charged or daring or liberating. And poor Mellors, while beautifully played by Jack O'Connell, feels somewhat emasculated by both the script and the tepid direction. It's also telling that they chose a boyish, svelte, hairless, almost twinkish type like O'Connell, who doesn't exactly embody Mellors as written by Laurence. So it's fair to say this movie is more Connie's story than it is Mellor's. The actors are fine though - particularly Joely Richardson as Mrs Bolton. And the cinematography is some compensation for the lack of literary cred.
Tell Your Friends