Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

I have been watching all the Bond films, in order, with my dad. Every Sunday, with the exception of the chaos that was March, I go round and eat lunch and we sit down for a couple of hours to watch the next thing on the list.

We have done all the Connery films. We endured the brief reign of George Lazenby, who would have been an interesting Bond if he could have signed up for a longer period and worked with directors who were not the director of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

A few weeks back, we hit the Moore era.

Moore was my Bond. When I was a kid, and the Bond films appeared on TV, he was always the man stuffed inside the tuxedo and ordering a martini. He defined Bond for me: the cheesy puns; the awkwardness that’s presented as charm; the ridiculous gadgets. I worked off the theory that I liked the Moore era.

Oh, gods.

Oh, gods, that is not the case.

Most of the seventies-era bonds where Moore was in the role are the kind of films I would gnaw my own arm off to escape. I came to dread Sundays, a little, ’cause it would mean another one.

Last Sunday, we hit the first film of Timothy Dalton’s career.

And again, I never rated Dalton that much. He was not the Bond of my childhood, therefore I resented him when he stepped into the role the same way people resent a new actor in the role of Doctor Who.

But the Living Daylights? Actually really fun, for a Bond film. Makes at least one smart narrative decision which made me squee with delight. Keeps some of the absurd gadgetry of the Moore era, but grounds everything so it doesn’t seem quite so unreal.

It’s the first Bond film I’ve genuinely enjoyed since the sixties instalments of the series.

A photo posted by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Apr 16, 2016 at 6:37pm PDT

So a year ago, everyone on the planet was all You HAVE to see Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s brilliant.

Over the weekend, I followed their advice. Settled in with a packet of chips and a few hours to kill, watched Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron drive some big-rigs and kill a whole bunch of war boys. And lo, it was…

Okay? Good? I am, quite honestly, not entirely sure.

I’ve heard the argument that we’re not yet equipped to really assess Fury Road, because it’s so far outside our experience of films thus far. It’s an incredible spectacle and an endless chase sequence and a monumental feat of world-building and the visual language is seriously fucking awesome.

It also has the benefit of the most perfectly timed act transitions ever. Every half-hour, on the half-hour. In terms of studying structure, it’s great.

But…

Well, I spent most of the first act kinda…waiting for the story to start. Watching things in motion without any real understanding of why that was important.

It feels kinda weird to say that, since one of the things I really enjoyed about the film was how little it gives away about what’s going on behind the scenes. That the world-building happens in the little moments, and that backstory is for suckers.

Well, suckers and Max.

Oh Jesus, does this movie want you to understand Max’s background and his juicy, juicy man-pain. There is voice-over and flashbacks and more voice-over and random action scene and…oh, wait, there’s Furiosa doing something unexpected and we can get on with shit now.

And that’s kinda the problem, for me.

Max’s man-pain feels like a short-cut. Quick-and-dirty characterization that we can hook onto before the folks we’re actually meant to care about comes aboard. Literally everyone has a better arc than Max, from Furiosa to Nux the Warboy to arc given to some of the wives in the handful of moments they’re permitted to be seen as individuals.

On one hand, this is awesome. Max gets the kind of character arc that is normally assigned to secondary characters. Often female secondary characters. I can totes see where the feminist readings of this film come from.

In the other, Max is still the first character we see, the first character we’re asked to invest in, and the character who is presented as being all protagonist-like. Could we not just put Furiosa front and centre in the goddamn film?

Then there was the other thing that bothered me about the film: Orange and Fucking Teal.

I was okay with the orange. The big, glorious desert shots were awesome and it was incredible to have a post-apocalyptic film in which everything wasn’t dark and brooding.

But then the night shots happen and…yeah. All teal. All the time. And suddenly the colour scheme is front and centre, and I find myself incredibly distracted by the whole thing.

And so I keep going back and forth. Great middle act. Okay third act. Terrible first act. World’s most distracting colour scheme.

I’m inclined to file the movie in the same drawer as Hail, Caesar. I really liked the bits I liked, I was largely ambivalent about the overall experience.

I went to see Hail, Caesar on Tuesday night and I’ve been thinking on it ever since. It’s a great film that is not, when you get to the end, a great film. A confusing contradiction that makes perfect sense once you’ve seen it, because it does so much right that it’s vaguely disappointing when you get to the end and find yourself asking, “so, that’s it?”

It reminded a good deal of seeing Zoolander for the first time back in 2001. A whole lot of people love that film and regard it as a classic, but it drove me crazy. The plot is…slight. An excuse to hold together a whole bunch of comedy set-pieces that are, on their own, funny, but never add up to something bigger.

The difference, in this instance, is that I loved Hail, Caesar. It was exactly three scenes into the film before I knew I’d purchase a copy of it when it come out on DVD, because the spectacular performances, visuals, and comedic moments are worth revisiting.

There is so much this movie gets gloriously right. The Coen’s strengths are quirky characters, exceedingly well-composed imagery, and getting something phenomenal out of their actors.

The film plays to those strengths in scene after scene, particularly when it comes to the actors. There are an incredible array of performances throughout the film, from major parts like Alden Ehrenreich’s portrayal of Hobie Doyle (which is incredible) through to minor parts Scarlet Johansson’s DeeAnna Moran, Tilda Swinton as a pair of twin gossip columnists, a whole host of folks like Fisher Stevens and David Krumholtz playing writers, in a film, that I did not loathe as characters, and Robert Picardo in a bit part as a rabbi.

They also deploy Channing Tatum better than Channing Tatum has ever been deployed in film before, and armed with two scenes and a glorious kick-leap, he is one of my favourite parts.

Any other film with performances of this calibre would be hailed as brilliant.

What lets the movie down is the assemblage – the parts are better than the whole. It feels a bit disingenuous to criticise a move so deeply steeped in the style of 50s movies for relying heavily on set-pieces, but there is a central narrative line to the movie in the form of the major choice faced by Josh Brolin’s Eddie Mannix and its conclusion feels unearned.

It seems like it’s meant to be saying something about the power of movies, but it doesn’t quite come off.

The Coen Brothers have made all sorts of spectacular movies. Hail, Caesar isn’t one of them, but from a creative standpoint its actually the most interesting thing that they’ve made in years.

Also, its goddamn funny. Extremely goddamn funny.