Films
The Disaster Artist
A very good film tag entry! Though Alison Brie maybe didn’t have the biggest role in this one, she was certainly a central character and just look at the options for film tag out from here!
I don’t know how much sense this will make to anyone who hasn’t seen The Room. I imagine it’d still be an entertaining story but you’d definitely be missing something. The completely bonkers film project, mysteriously funded, full of terrible dialogue and worse sex scenes… it’s hard to describe it in a way that remotely does it justice. This film gets a lot of its laughs for free just by lifting scenes wholesale from The Room (the credits sequence side-by-side reshoots are incredible). Both Francos do great jobs as the leads, but its the reactions from cast and crew that really make this film - how weird must the real life experience have been?
Promising Young Woman
A better one that we’ve had in a while in film tag. I’d read the description and feared it was going to be a hard and very heavy watch. The pre-credits scene does nothing to change that - leering creeps in a club argue over who’s going to take advantage of a drunk single woman. Thankfully, this the tone shifts a bit and moves towards a revenge-thriller, all the while hammering home the message that these men’s behaviour is very much not OK.
It’s a decent film, but after that first tonal shift, it never really went anywhere very unexpected. We’d pretty much predicted the plot after the first 20 minutes or so. Sure, there were some unpredictable details but nothing that you couldn’t sort of guess would happen. We spent much of the 2hr runtime wondering if it would throw us off but it never did. As such, I reckon it could probably have been trimmed down a bit - there’s probably a great 80 minute film in there somewhere.
The Great Gatsby
Oh dear.
This has all the elements it should need - excellent source material, great cast, art-deco period detail - but has been so thoroughly Baz Luhrmanned that it feels like a bit of a slog. It’s far too long. Baz’s “desire to blend the music of the Jazz Age, associated with the 1922 setting of the story, with a modern spin” is pretty clumsy. Worst of all, though, is the lavish quantities of astonishingly bad CGI. It’ everywhere. Every external shot of the city or Gatsby’s castle. The car journeys. The water. It’s mind blowing that someone looked at the crummy computer rendering and thought “yeah, that’s good enough”. If you can’t do it on a computer, do it on a set!
Gangs of New York
It’s another very long one. And I can’t say I enjoyed it an awful lot.
The story is suitably epic in nature, spanning the demise and rise of the Dead Rabbits gang of Irish immigrant New Yorkers in the 1860s. We have poor troubled Leonardo di Caprio butting heads with Daniel Day Lewis’ ’the butcher’ - an unrelentingly nasty, greasy, sneering gang leader. The period look and the grimy feel are done incredibly well, and it’s getting bits of the geography of New York filtered through the lens of mid-19th century rioters.
But? Well its long. Very long. And those impressively nasty, grimy characters? They just keep on being so. And on. And on. Whereas last week’s film tag, Cloud Atlas packed story after story into its nearly-three-hours, here Scorsese really only has one story to tell. I like a good bit of bloody violence and gratuitous cruelty, but was pretty tired of this by the time the end rolled around.
Cloud Atlas
This is an ambitious one. I feel like I’d have hated it in the cinema but did actually quite enjoy it at home.
In David Mitchell’s novel, which I remember really enjoying, the parallel stories are told in a pyramid-fashion: you start with the oldest, moving forwards in time and then it all cascades backwards again, until you finish up with the end of the oldest story. Someone decided (probably correctly) that this would feel a bit weird in film - too much like an anthology of separate stories - and instead has jumbled the stories all together. We cut from colonial-era shipping to future revolutions in New Seoul and back again. It’s a little disorientating but if you sit back and let it was over you its quite fun. The recurring cast, popping up again and again with face-altering prosthetics is great fun.
This was the Wachowskis’ next major project after the Matrix sequels and writing the screenplay for V for Vendetta, so I can sort of imagine how this felt a bit flat. It’s epic in scale but never really quite goes anywhere. I suspect this is something that a book handles much better - the sense that the journey was more important than the destination - but at the end of 3 hours of film you’re sort of left wondering what the point of it all was.
So yeah, ambitious, quite good fun, lots of silly costumes. Not bad.