REVIEW: Bone Tomahawk

Forgot to write about this. It's really good! Don't read anything about it, just go and see it.

Unless you're squeamish. Then, um, don't go and see it.

★★★★

The Oscars - the political event of the year

When the Oscar ceremony began last night, surely there was only question on people's lips: what was Chris Rock going to do? His decision to stick with hosting an awards show darkened by storm clouds of controversy seemed like a no-win situation - whatever he could do, or say, would not change the snubs, or the seemingly systematic repression of minorities within the Hollywood production machine. (As upsetting as, say, Creed's snubs were, the real fact was that not enough opportunities are being given to those who need them - Danny Leigh pointed out that only one black person has ever been nominated for Best Editing: Hugh A. Robertson, for Midnight Cowboy in 1969.)

But from his opening line - "Man, I counted at least fifteen black people on that montage!" - it was clear that Rock was going to address the problem head-on. And for ten minutes, Rock delivered some great stuff. He called the Oscars the "White People's Choice awards"; he bluntly declared, "You're damn right Hollywood is racist"; and he made jokes with the kind of disarming edge that made his stand-up comedy so great in the first place: "The in memoriam montage is just going to be black people who were shot by the cops on the way to the movies!"

Slightly less successful were his attempts at easing the tensions in the room, and pandering to a largely white crowd. When he talked about black people in the 60s as being too busy "being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer," there was the uncomfortable sentiment that the problems with Hollywood weren't important enough to treat seriously. And the swipes at the #AskHerMore campaign seemed a little off-putting, especially considering the fact that, earlier in the year, sexism in the industry was as pressing an issue as race.

Still, the monologue worked, and the rest of the show was uncharacteristically entertaining, at least for a while. There were plenty of unpredictabilities on offer, namely Mad Max: Fury Road's surprise sweep of six - SIX! - Oscars in technical categories. I can't have been the only one overjoyed by Mark Rylance's ousting of Sylvester Stallone in the Best Supporting Actor category, a genuine triumph of performance over politics and the Oscar "story". And who expected that Spotlight would really win Best Picture? After Crash beat Brokeback Mountain in 2006, I think it's safe to say we all gave up on the Academy rewarding five-star films; yet here we were, seeing the hackneyed offerings of The Revenant and The Big Short ousted in favour of something genuinely brilliant.

Elsewhere, though, everything went as expected, in plodding fashion. The middle section was particularly dire: Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress; Inside Out won Best Animated Feature; Son of Saul won Best Foreign Film; Carol got nothing; the Earth revolved around the Sun; five cups of tea could barely keep me awake. The absolute nadir came when the fucking Minions presented the award for Best Animated Short, and Don Hertzfeldt's amazing World of Tomorrow lost out to some overrated film about bears (no, not that one.)

Alejandro González Iñárritu won Best Director, Brie Larson won Best Actress, and, of course, Leonardo DiCaprio won Best Actor. Larson deserved it; so did DiCaprio, in a way, though maybe not for this particular film. But what made this section of the show - and some otherwise numbingly dull segments - watchable was a focus on real-world issues. DiCaprio brought up climate change, saying, "Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted." This echoed the sentiments of everyone's favourite Bag Lady, Jenny Beaven, earlier in the show, who highlighted the possibility of Mad Max being "horribly prophetic ... if we're not kinder to each other, and if we don't stop polluting our atmosphere."

In light of winning Best Picture, the producers of Spotlight expressed hoped that the film could effect change in the Catholic church. And while I thought Lady Gaga's performance of "Til It Happens to You" was about as subtle as a punch to the face, it attempted to say something about the very real, very serious issue of college campus rapes - so important, in fact, that the Vice President Joe Biden introduced the song. It must, therefore, have been doubly painful for Gaga to lose out to Sam Smith's wet sneeze of a Bond song; but even he tried to bring light to LGBT issues, albeit in a hilariously naive, misguided fashion. (Elton John was sitting right there when he announced that no other openly gay man had won an Oscar.)

Surely this was the best way to use the Oscars, as a platform to effect real-world change? The more interesting event will be next year's ceremony, when we can see if any of this has stuck - or whether this relic of "old" Hollywood will be forever doomed to remain in the dark ages.

Oscar Predictions

Me again. This upcoming Oscar ceremony looks to be a mix of dead-certs and exciting/worrying unpredictabilities, so I'll do what every other critic is doing and try and predict where each gong will (and should) go. Well, almost every gong. I don't really give a shit about Best Documentary Short. Sorry, Claude Lanzmann.

(Also, just to note: I'm pretty sure that anywhere between 50-100% of these are entirely incorrect.)

BEST PICTURE

What'll win?
The Revenant
How sure am I?
60%
What should win?
Spotlight/Mad Max: Fury Road
What's been snubbed?
Carol (!), 45 Years, Inside Out, Creed

BEST DIRECTOR

Who'll win?
Alejandro González Iñárritu (The Revenant)
How sure am I?
75%
Who should win?
George Miller (MM: FR)
Who's been snubbed?
Todd Haynes (Carol), Ryan Coogler (Creed), Todd Haynes, Ridley Scott (The Martian), Todd Haynes

BEST ACTOR

Who'll win?
Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant)
How sure am I?
100 billion percent
Who should win?
Michael Fassbender (Steve Jobs), I suppose (weak category - plus, he was better in Macbeth)
Who's been snubbed?
Michael B. Jordan (Creed), Colin Farrell (The Lobster)

BEST ACTRESS

Who'll win?
Brie Larson (Room)
How sure am I?
85%
Who should win?
Eh, they're all pretty amazing
Who's been snubbed?
Emily Blunt (Sicario), Karidja Touré (Girlhood), Lily Tomlin (Grandma)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Who'll win?
Sylvester Stallone (Creed)
How sure am I?
50%
Who should win?
Mark Rylance (Bridge of Spies)/Christian Bale (The Big Short)
Who's been snubbed?
IDRIS FUCKING ELBA (BoNN), Benicio Del Toro (Sicario), Michael Shannon (99 Homes)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Who'll win?
Alicia Vikander (The Danish Girl, though she deserves it for Ex Machina)
How sure am I?
60%
Who should win?
Even though she's in the wrong category, Rooney Mara (Carol)
Who shouldn't win?
Kate Winslet (Steve Jobs)
Who's been snubbed?
Kitana Kiki Rodriguez (Tangerine), Marion Cotillard (Macbeth)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Who'll win?
Tom McCarthy & Josh Singer (Spotlight)
How sure am I?
85%
Who should win?
McCarthy & Singer (Spotlight)/Pete Docter, Meg LeFauve & Josh Cooley (Inside Out)
Who's been snubbed?
Noah Baumbach & Greta Gerwig (Mistress America), Quentin Tarantino (The Hateful Eight)

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Who'll win?
Adam McKay & Charles Randolph (The Big Short)
How sure am I?
70%
Who should win?
Phyllis Nagy (Carol)
Who's been snubbed?
Aaron Sorkin (Steve Jobs)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

What'll win?
Son of Saul
How sure am I?
80%
What should win?
Son of Saul, probably (I haven't seen it yet)
What's been snubbed?
Force Majeure, Girlhood, Wild Tales, Taxi Tehran...

BEST ANIMATED FILM

What'll win?
Inside Out
How sure am I?
99%
What should win?
Inside Out/Anomalisa
What's been snubbed?
N/A

BEST DOCUMENTARY

What'll win?
Amy
How sure am I?
90%
What should win?
The Look of Silence
What's been snubbed?
Going Clear

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE

Who'll win?
Ennio Morricone (The Hateful Eight)
How sure am I?
60%
Who should win?
Carter Burwell (Carol)
Who's been snubbed?
Rich "Disasterpeace" Vreeland (It Follows), Michael Giacchino (Inside Out)

Right, beginning to lose interest now. Only one more...

BEST ANIMATED SHORT

What'll win?
Sanjay's Super Team/Bear Story/World of Tomorrow
How sure am I?
??%
What should win?
WORLD OF TOMORROW please God let Don Hertzfeldt win an Oscar

Only four-ish hours to go...

The Best Picture Nominees - A Definitive Ranking

The Oscars are tonight, just in case you'd forgotten, and in my preparation for an all-night coffee binge I thought I'd rank the best picture nominees, from rubbish to least-rubbish.

#8: The Big Short

For some reason, a bunch of critics who I follow and respect have totally praised the crap out of this weird comedy-true story-drama hybrid. (At least, all bar P-Bradz.) I thought it was underwhelming: a few good jokes aside, the film mostly settled for being patronising, the guy who made Anchorman pretty much reading aloud from Michael Lewis' book for 130 minutes. The knockabout tone (it's filmed like an episode of The Office) then awkwardly switches gear into mawkish moralising when the shit hits the fan, and it feels completely unnatural. But hey, what do I know? Apparently it's one of the frontrunners for the big prize. God help us.

#7: The Revenant

What will likely be the big winner of the night, it's true that this story of man's tendency to disagree with all things bear has a savage power in its super-realistic scenes of snow and bloodshed. But it's also a bit wanky and pretentious, as Iñárritu often is, and would have benefited by shaving off an hour here and there. Still, there ain't no stopping the DiCaprio, who hopefully will spend his acceptance speech eating another buffalo liver, live on stage, just for the LOLs.

#6: The Martian

An entertaining if lightweight film about comradeship, the future of space travel, and Matt Damon's poo, it's a little perplexing that it's been given a seat at the big boys table. But then again, it's a resolutely old-fashioned Hollywood picture that affirms the positive aspects of the human spirit, which, alongside things about class struggle and repressed white guys, the Academy gobbles up like maltesers. Though for me, it loses serious points by NOT BEING CAROL.

#5: Room

Lenny Abrahamson's adaptation of Emma Donoghue's novel is surprisingly effective, particularly in its first hour, confined to the titular location. The second hour's pretty good, too, though its overpowering score and diversions into sentimental melodrama occasionally threaten to overwhelm. Good thing, then, that Brie Larson and newcomer Jacob Tremblay both turn in powerhouse performances, grounding everything in a properly convincing mother-child relationship. As much as I liked Blanchett and Rampling, I'm okay with the fact that Larson is practically guaranteed a win.

#4: Brooklyn

I'm going to be honest, I haven't seen this film yet. But the trailer looks really nice and it's got Saoirse Roman and Domhnall Gleeson in it, so I'll pop it in a neutral position and move on.

#3: Bridge of Spies

We take Steven Spielberg for granted sometimes. He comes along and makes a classy, rich, and properly exciting period piece that, in another year, could have been an awards frontrunner. Instead, most of us sort of shrugged like hey, what else was he gonna do, make a bad film? At least Mark Rylance'll win something - though if he's beaten by Rocky Balboa, I might just stab someone.

#2: Spotlight

Tom McCarthy's journo-drama was marketed as prime Oscar bait: true story, talented ensemble cast, a struggle against the odds, a boring promotional picture (above), the works. Truth is, it's a lot smarter than all of that - and might be one of the best investigative journalism films ever made. Bullshit drama and liberties with the truth are dispensed with in order to make the gut-churningly dark story (whose outcome we know, but forget we know) all the more gripping. Keaton, Ruffalo, McAdams, and the other one are all great, but it's Lieb Schrieber who steals the show as the quiet editor with absolute moral conviction. For it to lose to something like The Big Short would be nothing short of a travesty.

#1: Mad Max: Fury Road

How the shit did this make it into the Best Picture nominees? Genuinely one of the most gleefully insane films of the past 20 years, whose oil-spitting, tires-crunching action is enrichened by its surprise feminist bite, it might signal that the taboo surrounding action films (and comedies, and science-fiction films, and horror films...) at awards season is slowly being lifted. Or maybe it's an outlier. The latter is more likely. But we can hope.

REVIEW: A Bigger Splash

The spirit of Michelangelo Antonioni lives on in this fun European art house drama, and at times pulpy thriller, which centres around beautiful people sunbathing by swimming pools, waiting for the inevitable release of death. It involves a David Bowie-esque rock star (Tilda Swinton) whose holiday with boy-toy Matthias Schoenaerts is interrupted by the arrival of an old flame (Ralph Fiennes) and his apparent daughter (Dakota Johnson), whose loud stirring up of feelings, past and present, threatens to make everyone more miserable than ever.

There's an irresistible appeal in its sumptuous Mediterranean location, there's existentialism by the bucketload, and there's even a bit of Michael Haneke-style judgement of the middle class in the backgrounding of the migrant crisis - but really, the appeal of this film boils down to its stars, who ricochet off each other like pinballs. Johnson and Schoenaerts (god, that name) are given the best roles they've had in a while, but it's Swinton and Fiennes who shine brightest as a mute rock star and a likeable dickhead, respectively. Fiennes, in particular, is superb, continuing on a rich series of comedic roles that stretch back to foul-mouthed Harry in In Bruges - though Swinton, at times, channels the spirit of Charlie Chaplin in a brilliant gesture-based performance. It's luxuriant in every sense - including its running time - so your mileage may vary, depending on your individual level of patience with that Italian kind of self-indulgence. I liked it.

★★★★

Also, MOVE OVER OSCAR ISAAC, THERE'S A NEW KING IN TOWN:

Eight things I could have done instead of watching the 2-hour-long BAFTA ceremony last night

1. Knitted a scarf

2. Solved a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle

3. Watched Back to the Future

4. Read Tolstoy's War and Peace

5. Invented an economically-friendly alternative fuel source

7. Developed a sizeable cocaine addiction

8. Killed myself by driving off a cliff

At least Rebel Wilson was funny.

REVIEW: Deadpool

Let's talk about superheroes. Men, women, and deformed creatures in colourful costumes have been a core part of our popular culture since the 1930s, and throughout time they've adapted accordingly. It makes sense that Superman was the most popular superhero of his day - an era between, during, and immediately following a war would, of course, appreciate a strong-jawed hero to represent American patriotism at its finest. Likewise, it's no surprise that Batman dyed his hair black and began drawing skulls in his diary around the 1970s and 80s, when America was going through one of its more troublesome phases. The 90s were the last gasp of comic book nerd originality, whereas the 2000s saw these heroes burst into the mainstream with a string of high-budget Hollywood renditions - again, it's no coincidence that Sam Raimi's Spider-Man topped the box office less than a year after the September 11th attacks, when the world was in more dire need of superheroes than ever.

But where are we now? Having established gargantuan "cinematic universes", where electing to not follow the convolutions in a multi-billion-dollar "timeline" is seen as more subversive than reading the comics in the first place, the dual threat of Marvel and DC have overloaded our senses with superheroes of every calibre. The divisions seem clear; in Marvel, we have the standard A-list Avengers lot in Iron Man, Hulk, Capt. America, Thor, et al, and the equally star-studded X-Men, whose films continue to straddle the awkward line between individual personality and numbingly tedious special effects; whereas in DC we have the darker, grittier sorts of Batman, Superman, and the soon-to-be Suicide Squad, whose attempts to construct drama of Shakespearean grandeur are somewhat undermined by the bulges in their spandex.

Then we have the niche sorts, the outliers. Last summer we had Ant-Man, the film that shot itself in the foot by replacing a director with genuine talent - Edgar Wright - with a numbingly tedious one - Peyton Reed - and whose subversions were dwarfed by an adherence to the almost authoritarian formula of "the origin story". And now we have Deadpool, a film that could almost be Ant-Man's X-rated cousin, and a film whose attempts to be "different" (sorry, I'll stop with the scare quotes) are crippled by a similar sense of timidity in its narrative.

Ryan Reynolds plays Wade Wilson, a motor-mouthed mercenary who makes his living intimidating bad guys for money. One day he meets stripper Vanessa (Morena Baccarin), a sort of wish-fulfilment, fetishised reflection of himself, and the two fall in love - though their happiness is impeded by the discovery of cancerous growths throughout his body. Wilson volunteers for an experimental treatment, but he's betrayed by a one-dimensional British villain. He acquires superpowers that make him invincible, but he loses his chiselled good-looks in the process, instead becoming a scabby mess.

But never one to resign himself to his (not entirely terrible) fate, Wilson dons a stretchy red suit and calls himself Deadpool, and starts murdering goons in pursuit of revenge against his nemesis. Along the way, he tries to crack a joke every three seconds, his material stretching from fart jokes to fourth-wall breaking digs against X-Men to more fart jokes. It comes across as being in the room with a cocaine-addled 15 year old trying to be edgy - the emphasis, really, on "trying". Most of its humour derives from ironically pointing at tropes in superhero narratives, then doing them anyway, as if thinking of an alternative was just too hard.

Nevertheless, I have to admit - somewhat guiltily, I might add - that some of its scenes come quite close to hitting the mark. There's a nice montage after Wilson meets his amour that covers a year in their relationship, that's a bit like the kitchen table scene in Citizen Kane but with more penetrative anal sex. Ryan Reynolds has always been an actor without a clear purpose, but he gives a good, committed performance, his enthusiasm for the material growing to infectious levels at times. And while I could have done without some of the offensive-for-the-sake-of-offensive jokes, others really are quite funny - particularly those that satirise Reynolds' star image - and suggest that there is a tangible niche in a film that makes fun of the ubiquitous superhero narrative.

But then again, it never goes far enough. Deadpool repeatedly makes fun of boy-meets-girl romances, but it's played almost entirely straight here, its standard journey and resolution, where the Damsel in Distress is rescued from the Evil Villain by the Hero with Character Development, shining through its plethora of dick jokes. Deadpool calls himself an anti-hero, but he follows a boilerplate superhero's journey - which is maybe the point, his word-vomit personality masking a neurotic instability. Yet it's all too reigned in, as if the bigwigs at Marvel were afraid that, if the audience listened too hard, they wouldn't go and see Thor 4 or Iron Man 5: This Time There's a Robot Dog!

If you're happy to have your brain cells beaten into a pulpy mess, then by all means go and see Deadpool. Indeed, you'll probably laugh, remember a few good lines to share with your friends. But don't expect anything more, and don't think about it too hard - otherwise, you might start to wonder if this was all a bit of a wasted opportunity.

★★½