Category: Released in 2019

CONTAINS NO SPOILERS FOR “ENDGAME”, BUT THERE WILL BE SPOILERS FOR “INFINITY WAR”… OBVIOUSLY…

So what have I missed? Oh yeah, about 80% of the largest and most important film franchise of all time! Let’s see what I can give you in this pointless review.

Avengers Endgame picks up after the events of Infinity War with half the universe having been killed after purple meanie Thanos snapped his fingers while wearing the infinity gauntlet after finally getting all the infinity stones. With all that infinity, you can tell this is going to be a big one.

My personal relationship with the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been an intermittent one at best. I’ve only seen the odd film in this colossal series totalling out at twenty-two films featuring countless characters and a beautifully crafted in-universe continuity. If this were an American tv show, we would have just finished the first season and I would have seen at most a third of the aired episodes.

I watch these films and am forever impressed for their incredible scale which is balanced with a truly human touch. This is particularly true of The Guardians of the Galaxy, a soon-to-be trilogy of movies which deliver a truly epic space-opera with a greater depth of humanity than pretty much any other movie of their kind.

What’s even more fascinating than the movies themselves, however, is their impact on the film industry as a whole and how that has evolved.

It was not long ago that the common “wisdom” gained from the enormous success of the MCU was that everything had to have a Universe. The Dark Universe, the DC Extended Universe, the Star Wars universe, blah blah blah. Soon though, the penny dropped that interconnected continuity, as interesting as it is on a surface level, is not the keystone by which the MCU earns its achievements. It wins, because it works.

It works because it is the cumulative effort of an army of extremely talented filmmakers of all kinds with a real passion and understanding of what the audience needs.

Steven Spielberg suggested that superhero films will go the way of the Western. I believe that he is more right than even he realises. Westerns were the ubiquitous movie art-form for decades, showcasing a particular legendary form of the America we all wished there was. Superhero films have dominated the film landscape for the past ten years because they do the same on a truly global scale, showcasing a particular legendary form of the Human we all wished there was.

Like the Western, the Superhero film will fade away while a new breed of rebel filmmakers take what they teach us about this artform and fight against the dying of the light in this late stage capitalist society. They will fail in their fight and there will be a new uber franchise of some form unimaginable. Those underground soldiers for independent filmmaking will either go underground into this excitingly democratic and impossible industry or they will say “if you can’t beat em, join em” and try to continue the revolution from the inside.

In the meantime, let’s not be so angry about what entertainment makes people happy. What’s so beautiful about this period in film history is that there is no infinity gauntlet. Disney’s recent artistic achievements and acts of terrorism upon art and civilisation itself, brilliant and horrifying in equal measure will NOT turn us painlessly into dust. Let’s just enjoy a damn superhero film or not.

Wait a minute, I’ve gone nearly 600 words without telling you how I feel about the film I’m reviewing!

It’s really good! Lots of laughs, teary moments, very impressive character and plot balancing and a massive scale. Some niggles over filmic choices, but overall I can’t complain cause the badass moments are too badass!

Recommended Scenario: If you’ve seen a bunch of these films already and would like to see something pretty awesome!

Everything becomes awesome when there’s a new Lego Movie!

Lego Movie 2 picks up immediately after the end of the first outing of Emmet, Wildstyle and friends as they are forced to battle hordes from the planet Duplo. Years later, the constant brick-on-brick warring has left the world of Lego in a dystopian state. Wildstyle and the rest of Emmet’s friends are all kidnapped by an emissary of the Sistar system and Emmet has to go get them back.

The Lego Movies are excuses to sell toys. They are enormous adverts designed in a laboratory to convince children to scream at their parents to buy an overpriced piece of plastic manufactured in a sweat shop to line the pockets of the incredibly wealthy people at the top of Lego.

In spite of this, I have to concede that they are darn fine films.

The first Lego Movie was a delightful, funny and original piece (pardon the pun). Everytime it’s on TV I have to watch it to the end and for the next few days “Everything Is Awesome” is stuck in my head.

What followed was a spin-off film following that film’s brilliant version of Batman portrayed by the incredible voice of Will Arnett. That movie had a bit of Act Three blues and didn’t reach the heights of thematic weight that the original film had but was still pretty entertaining.

I will admit to having missed the Lego Ninjago movie. I’m sure it was fine…

Now it’s time for the first true sequel to the Lego Movie to compare itself to its lofty history.

Lego Movie 2’s main story is the conflict between the boy who played with the toys in the first film against his little sister. This is portrayed in the Lego world as a war between the characters from the first film with a bunch of new girly characters.

For the first act, I was laughing or smiling pretty much constantly. Then second act blues hit and my attention began to drift away and while I can say that overall, this is an entertaining film with some cool ideas at times, it does not hit the heights of the first movie.

There was one little niggle that kept me from fully appreciating this film. It was way too meta.

By their very nature these films have been meta, but there was always a sweet spot were things didn’t become too referential. At some point, Lego Movie 2 decided to just start calling out the fact that it’s a film and that the characters all know how this world works and then the script wouldn’t stop trying to be superficially clever by referencing something.

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are very talented filmmakers. They took a back seat for this project, choosing to write, but not direct. The filmmaker they did get did a very fine job. It’s just a shame that the material he had to work with was not of the perfectly balanced calibre the Lego Movies have peaked at.

I look forward to what happens with this franchise, it has so far delivered fun, engaging and smart films. Here’s hoping the next one doesn’t get too clever again.

Recommended Scenario: If you love the first Lego Movie, you’ll at least like this one.

The strange nature of being a film critic in Scotland is that all the films the Oscars are interested in come out in January as do the films of the Glasgow Film Festival. This means that most of the films I’m most excited about from the previous year are the first films I get to review in a given year. This is either super lucky, or it means it’s all downhill from here.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest bizarre creation is The Favourite (and yes that is the spelling of both the director’s name and the title), a costume drama from hell set in the early eighteenth century. Two ladies of the court, played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, compete for the favour of the long-suffering Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman.

I can’t consider myself to be a true Lanthimosian, partly because that’s a word made up by critics only a couple of months ago. It’s also because I’ve only seen one other film by Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos and that was 2014’s The Lobster, starring Colin Farrell as a lonely man who might be turned into a lobster if he didn’t find love. That’s not necessarily relevant to the review for this movie, beyond the point that he seems to have a knack for the darkly comic and weird.

This knack has transferred itself into his latest work, which is a truly subversive and transgressive period piece from its first frame to its last.

At the same time this film doesn’t do a Marie Antoinette by screaming “You’ve never seen a costume drama like this before!” It feels very much earned. The wit and energy of the characters and dialogue feel like they’re straight out of an eighteenth-century comedy. There’s a twinkle in the eye of the filmmakers as they make riot in this palace.

Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone are on top of their game right now. Both have received immense acclaim and attention for recent performances. It is here that they summit with a dry and hypnotic acting duet that goes from childish glee to the most cutting adult remarks.

Neither quite touch the brilliance of Olivia Colman, for my money the finest actress currently working, whose finally getting the attention she deserves after years of being the brilliant supporting performance in pretty much anything worth watching on British Television.

She plays Queen Anne with a tremendous sadness, which she somehow tinges with an unstable happiness. Anne has gone through some unimaginable suffering, the effects of which make her entirely unsuited for her responsibilities as Queen. It’s a piece of acting which does exactly what great acting should. It pulls you into the headspace of a woman we can never truly comprehend.

It is a performance which lies at the heart of this film which acts as a hilarious history lesson and a stylish fable of power and sex in beautiful palaces.

Recommended Scenario: When you want something a bit weird, but also just awesome!

It’s been a long time, hasn’t it. It’s been a long time since I’ve written a review. A long time since I’ve stepped into a cinema. I can only apologise for my negligence. Let’s get started again.

Stan & Ollie follows Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy on what’s supposed to be something of a comeback stage tour of the UK in 1953 in order to pay for an upcoming feature. Stan is played by Steve Coogan and Ollie by John C. Reilly.

Films like this come by every so often with the intent of making you feel all nostalgic for the Hollywood of yesteryear. When entertainment was pure and good and geniuses, like Stan and Ollie, were on our screens.

There is a lot of that in this film and admittedly it goes into a little schmaltz, but I believe that there is something about this film that makes its showing of affection for these comedy giants much less cynical than its contemporaries.

For one thing, at no point does the film seem to suggest that since Laurel & Hardy stopped being big stars that the art or indeed the world is worse for it. There’s a very important, subtext-laden shot in the film where a despondent Laurel looks up at a poster for Abbott & Costello Go to Mars. Now one could argue that that kind of film is not the best use of the talents of Abbott and Costello, but their very existence proves that there is great comedy after Stan.

Stan & Ollie is a celebratory and whistful film, not a defeatist one. Laurel & Hardy know they can’t do what they do forever. They don’t wallow in hatred for an audience which doesn’t seem to want them. They just try hard to put on a great show. Films like The Artist seem angry at the public and film studios and technology and culture for the fact that silent films are no longer popular. This film says “Oh well, onto the next chapter”. That’s a much more mature way of handling it.

Of course, when you’re making the film to capture the greatness of Laurel & Hardy, you’d better get the right Laurel & Hardy. Here we have two of the finest actors working today.

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are just outstanding, capturing everything from the face to the feet to the voices of the people they imitate. This is obviously helped by incredible hair and make up which has been inexplicably not been nominated for an Oscar.

When you see the two of them performing classic routines by L & H, you still find them funny. It’s always a mistake to make a film which makes you rather watch the thing the film is pretending to be (if you get what I mean). I admit I came out of the cinema wanting to immediately watch some Laurel & Hardy, but I didn’t feel like that while watching. I was too busy enjoying myself.

The rest of the film shows the pair interacting with one another and one can feel an intense love connecting them like an old married couple.

This is an incredibly heartfelt and humble tribute to a friendship that gave us some of the greatest comedy of all time.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to see a tribute to classic Hollywood which does not pander or patronise.