Christmas, for some reason, means limericks — here’s one of mine. Trying to do seasonal spins on famous monsters.
And here are a few Shadowplay Christmas cards to cut out and keep.
Of course, once you’ve cut them from your computer screen, it will have rectangular holes in it, which may be an inconvenience. I suggest scrolling until the holes are blocking your view of the advertisements.
Just back from HOUSE OF GUCCI. Unexpectedly packed, even on a weekday afternoon, which presumably implies it’s a hit. Couldn’t even get two seats together, but after the BBFC certificate appeared there was still one vacant seat next to Fiona so I got into it.
It’s not bad. My trouble was we’ve started watching Succession, finally, and the writing in that is so much better, the Ridley Scott movie pales a bit, even though it’s much better looking. But not THAT good-looking. Very plush, very desaturated and metallic, very dark. But not a lot of exciting filmmaking on display. It moves quite slowly. The actors all seem to be in separate worlds. They’re all giving very good performances within those worlds, but because they don’t connect, the film never gathers energy.
Lady Gaga is the most compelling; Jared Leto, disguised as Inspector Clouseau’s lounge lizard disguise from RETURN OF THE PINK PANTHER, brings the entertainment. And, next to him, Pacino seems to be underplaying, so that’s sort of a bonus.
There are some very funny lines, but most of them seem to be predicated on the idea that Leto’s character doesn’t speak good Italian (which the film is translating for us, using movie magic — it’s one of those films where everyone SHOULD be speaking a different language, so they settle for pretending to have accents). It’s true, some people don’t speak their own language well, but would Paolo really have said, in his own native tongue, “If you coulda smell between my groins, you woulda unnerstan'”? It feels like, if you can write funny stuff like that (I laughed), you could, with a little more care, write lines that the character in question might say.
“Ridley Scott must really love Donna Summer,” whispered Fiona, “because he uses her A LOT.” It’s kind of hard to imagine Sir Rid on the dance floor, and I sort of wonder if he uses her a lot because it’s easy shorthand for the seventies. Most of the songs in this are very easy choices, though I respect them for using Bowie’s Ashes to Ashes rather than the same album’s Fashion. So we know it’s not a Robert Zemeckis movie, no way could he have resisted that.
Not a Tom Ford movie either, a movie with Tom Ford in it as a character — and they’re pretty careful how they handle him, which is fair enough. The film only mocks the dead or criminally convicted, which is pretty much everyone else. It’s most of the population of most of Scott’s films, in fact, which, taken as an oeuvre, are surprisingly bleak, negative and hopeless. Surprising since he’s such a commercial presence. But maybe the idea that what we want is optimistic stories of triumph has always been wrong.
Consider the animated ident of Scott Free Productions. A raincoated man flaps about in what sounds like a darkened lavatory, then turns into a bird and freezes, having run out of animation and becomes a lifeless logo at exactly the point of taking flight, the words “Scott Free” appearing beneath him as a kind of cruel jibe.
Consider BLADE RUNNER, where an assassin less human than the androids he’s hunting gets rained on for two hours, then flies off with the nonhuman girl at the end into footage originally shot for THE SHINING, implying they’re going to land their hovercar at a haunted hotel… until Ridley recut it to turn the hero into a literal android.
Consider THE COUNSELLOR, which might be Scott’s ultimate statement. I didn’t like that film at all but it did seem very Ridley. A summation of sorts. Characters don’t need to have credible motivations (consider the guy making kissy faces at the hideous snake alien in PROMETHEUS which is obviously about to eat his face) so long as their improbable decisions lead to their total destruction and that of everyone they love.
The Guccis, in other words, were made to order for the Ridley Scott Cinematic Universe.
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS is this giant Ridley Scott biblical epic and although it’s not ludicrous it somehow doesn’t impress either. You don’t know what’s real and what’s just pixels until finally you assume it’s all pixels. In fact they built quite a lot. It’s all colour-corrected to within an inch of its life, or beyond. Watching the extras was a breath of fresh air, suddenly things had their own colours and existence, of which they’re deprived in the movie itself.
The cast seem either clinically depressed or else just underused. Aaron Paul is introduced as a man who feels no pain, and then this never comes into play again. Sigourney Weaver has nothing to do. Christian Bayle — does he exist? His lack of personhood really comes across onscreen: maybe his best casting was VELVET GOLDMINE, which imagined its Bowie-figure as a shapeshifter with a void at the centre. In his interviews in the extras, Bayle speaks with the same gruff mockney accent he uses for Moses and which Russell Crowe used in GLADIATOR.
Joel Edgerton’s Ramses is based not on the Book of Exodus or Yul Brynner but on Joaquin Phoenix in the earlier hit. Phoenix’s confrontation with his father, Richard Harris, already echoed BLADE RUNNER’s meet-up between replicant Roy and his progenitor Tyrrel. It’s hard to decide if the echoes are deliberate, a recurrent theme as beloved of auteurists, or simply a case of Scott repeating a commercial formula that worked.
The movie is dedicated to Tony Scott, who took his life in 2012. As a tale of brothers, E:GAK is an odd tribute. Firstly, they’re not really brothers. Exactly as in GLADIATOR, the pharaoh (John Turturro)/emperor (Richard Harris) has a young warrior he wishes were his son. His natural son is a twisted egomaniac, lacking the competence of Moses/Maximus. The script’s only addition to Biblical lore that seems to resonate with the Scott brothers’ lives, in a way that isn’t grotesque, is Moses/Ridley trying to save Ramses/Tony from the annihilating Red Sea tsunami, which in this context would represent whatever depression or despair led Tony Scott to jump. But I don’t know if this was a conscious echo.
I also don’t know to what extent the film is deliberately right-wing. Scott films often seem to land in such terrain, but you can never get a sense of intent. Still, the movie is more concerned with the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, rather than their founding of their own land, so the film’s semi-namesake Preminger film is not evoked, and the film stops just short of being nakedly Zionist in a modern sense.
Scott in interviews appears tongue-tied, unfamiliar with basic figures of speech, at sea in anything resembling abstract concepts. His brains only work at full capacity when directed through his eyes, and then his design sense and imagery are often dazzling. But his colour sense, which always tends towards filtration, desaturisation, monochrome, has overlaid everything in a deadening glaze. Admittedly, this would be less of an issue in 3D, and I ought to have gone to see it on the big screen, if the lovely dimensional-environmental work in THE MARTIAN is anything to go by. But THE MARTIAN was far more involving on a human level.
The dialogue is functional. They avoid making the past seem like another country, they’re trying to make it seem like wherever we are now. I’m not sure this is a good call. I feel shortchanged — like I paid for a holiday and the plane never took off. The characters don’t feel like people you could know, which would be the advantage of robbing them of ancient world alienness. They just feel like movie cliches.
The real false good idea — apart from remaking De Mille, which apparently didn’t inspire the public with the desire to submit to spectacle — is the idea of demythologising the good book. The plagues of ancient Egypt are presented as natural phenomena. Moses communes with God via dreams, and even then, the burning bush doesn’t speak. Somebody stands in front of it and speaks. The dreams are quite scary and Lynchian, but devoid of magic. And the parting of the Red Sea is a tsunami where the tide goes out and rushes back in. Well staged, but you don’t get suspended walls of water. I think, just as the public wasn’t particularly drawn to Sir Rid’s dowdy ROBIN HOOD, a dowdy, unswashbuckled version with a chunky Robin, they weren’t enchanted by the idea of a Red Sea that doesn’t part, but just goes away.
EXODUS: GODS AND KINGS stars Patrick Bateman; Tom Buchanan; Barton Fink, Jesse Pinkman; Orson Krennic; Lucrecia Borgia; Ellen Ripley; Mahatma Gandhi; Halliday 7 Years Old; Freysa; Maya; Shansa; Saladin; Selyse Baratheon; Qotho; and Spud.
Shadowplay
shadowplay 