Realising his dream of shooting an entire film on 70mm IMAX stock, Christopher Nolan adapts Homer’s ancient Greek poem The Odyssey, a vast mythological epic and one of the foundational works of Western literature. We haven’t seen it in full IMAX but IMAX Digital, the pretender to the IMAX name that nonetheless offers the best screen in Birmingham, which for three hours immerses us in the story of a war hero’s attempt to return home and handle his past.
Other than the film’s tempo and structure, which tell the story swiftly and non-chronologically, but without ever losing us, we don’t agree on much. For José, it’s beautiful to look at; for Mike, the visual pleasures are few and far between. José likes the performances across the board; Mike expresses serious reservations about some of them. We also discuss the disappointment of the final action scene, the extent to which the film treats the Greek gods as real, Zeus’ law and how well the film represents ancient Greek culture and ways of thinking, and whether its explicit contextualisation of the story as a metaphor for PTSD is earned.
My first impressions after seeing THE ODYSSEY for the second time, the first in IMAX 70mm, is that it’s more richly a film about morality for immoral times. The 1.43 IMAX 70mm ratio and the huge screen make it a more intimate epic. One is immersed in these faces, often shot in two-shot, medium close-up, close-up. It’s amazing to see the preponderance of these shots in an epic. One is instantly immersed in these thinking, feeling beings. Focus pull doesn’t seem easy in this format and often the frame goes in and out of focus when in movement, which adds to the lack of clarity in the character’s understanding. There is a lot of shooting through screens, particularly in the scenes with Penelope, which have a similar effect. Mike was telling me the other day that in an interview with cinematographer with Hoyte van Hoytema, he discusses the compositional restrictions of the format, how everything important has to be shown in the centre of the frame, and this viewing experience confirms it. The screen is so huge, and one is so immersed, everything important happens at the centre of the frame. Of course this the begs the question of the experience in digital widescreen IMAX and whether that’s a diminished experience, and if so how.
In this viewing I particularly appreciated Travis Scott as The Bard in the opening; the calm, elegant strength of his bearing and the way he says the opening lines:’ “A face… a fleet… a war… a man… a thought… a trick… a trick to break the walls of Troy… and burn it screaming to the ground!”, and which reinforces my disagreement with those accusing the film of being tokenistic with people of colour (including Wilson).
Maybe because of the format, I also found the film more moving (Leguizamo on Odysseus’ return; the exchange between father and son, coded and clear; the husband’s return, each emotional beat achieved by the actors at their peak; and I liked Tom Holland much more this time around, the callowness, lack of strength, powerlessness, etc being part of the character, though I do think the final exchange in that scene of recognition could have been better handled. But this is quibbling. A serious film about our times, beautiful, delicate, exciting. The image of the cyclops clearly taken from Goya’s Saturn Devouring his son becomes even more potent this time around. Also seeing it at the BFI’s IMAX brought out all the sound work on the film, a work of art on its own, a sharpening of feeling. I think it a better film this second time around and now want to see it once more.
Third time seeing The Odyssey, in yet another format, 70mm. at London’s Picturehouse Central. It becomes clear that the only design proper in relation to composition is in the IMAX 70mm format, the rest is mere cropping, with some of the beauty and story-telling lost in translation to other formats. I still loved seeing it, now with other episodes eliciting emotion, this time, for example, those last lines of the siren scene, ‘What you want most is what you can’t have, and what you can’t have is what you already had and lost’, which seem straight out of a noir. What comes into sharper focus on this third viewing is the ingeniousness of the structure, the telling and re-telling of the Trojan Horse scene, by different people and at different times, its play with time, point-of-view, reliability, and then re-told again to Penelope at the end, just at that moment and related to the scene where Odysseus return Antinous his shame, just as he’s acknowledge, perhaps by confessing to Penelope, unburdened himself, of his own. And doesn’t that whole set up with Penelope, the way, she’s photographed, now convey both cloister and confessional? I find it brilliant. It does now seem that when most people refer to the weakness of the script they’re really saying they don’t like the dialogue, primarily Tom Holand saying Mom and Dad. I’ve noted no references to structure, imagery or sound design when detractors reference a script. Sometimes, as Richard Brody commented recently, the process of translation encompasses translating written words into sounds and images, sometimes images and sounds are part of the script, and the process, perhaps more of realisation in another medium, which I suppose is also a process of translation, if of another type or degree.
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, directed by former video essayist Kogonada, is beautiful to look at and very likeable, but derivative and ultimately unsatisfying. We discuss its lighting, its attitude towards people’s histories and the memories that live with them, and why a rubbish script Mike once wrote makes him particularly keen to sneer at it.
Over the last couple of months, Chinese children’s fantasy Ne Zha 2 has quickly, and arguably quietly, become the fifth-highest-grossing film of all time, and the first animated film to gross over $2 billion. It’s hard to keep up with the records it’s been breaking – but can we keep up with the plot?
No is the answer, but we readily accept that younger minds, and minds more in tune with Ne Zha 2‘s cultural context and mythological basis, won’t feel as overwhelmed as we did. It did make us feel old, but this audiovisual whirlwind is beautiful and coherent – writer-director Jiaozi exhibits great control over the most energetic of action scenes, and has an eye for striking, colourful imagery. We discuss how closely some of the film’s visual design and messaging might reflect the particular culture from which it comes, or whether it’s so different from American cinema after all, and ask why this and last year’s Inside Out 2 have been able to make so much money (the Pixar film grossing $1.7 billion and becoming the then-eighth-highest-grossing film of all time) with such little response from critics.
Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s romantic fantasy, All of Us Strangers, flows beautifully from scene to scene, inviting the audience to question the reality of what they’re shown but seldom requiring them to – it’s about the feeling it creates. It’s a film about isolation, building and rebuilding connections, how the past reverberates, and in particular, experiences of growing up gay in the homophobic society of the 1980s. Its themes are universal and easily understood, but people who share those experiences will identify with it more closely than most.
We discuss the complexity and natural feeling of the protagonist’s conversations with his parents, who carry with them, alongside love for their son, those homophobic attitudes; the way scenes flow into each other; how letting go of those questions of what and how things are real allows us to get the most out of the film; and we ask those questions anyway. We also take the opportunity to revisit the ending of The Zone of Interest, discuss audiences proudly displaying their dislikes, and have another think about The Holdovers with that in mind.
Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animator and co-founder of Studio Ghibli, who has previously announced his retirement three times, tells us all that The Boy and the Heron (as it’s titled in most of the world; How Do You Live? in Japan) is really, honestly, for real this time, I’m super serious, his last film. His longtime producer, Toshio Suzuki, has already cast doubt on this new claim, but for now, here we have Miyazaki’s final film, which tells the story of Mahito, a young boy in wartime Japan, who loses his mother in a fire and is evacuated to his aunt’s countryside estate, whereupon he meets a talking grey heron that promises that his mother is alive.
José sees The Boy and the Heron as a masterpiece of cinema, a film that does things that other films have forgotten to do, a doorway to thinking about life, loss, and worlds within worlds. Mike… didn’t really get on with it, but he puts it down to taste and maybe mood – any objection he has can be equally levelled at things he loves. We easily agree that Miyazaki’s and Ghibli’s reputation for visual design and craft holds, with image upon image here that dazzles. As for what it all adds up to? Take José’s side. It’s better to like things than be bored by them.
Paul King, the director of Paddington and Paddington 2, brings us Wonka, another reimagining of a British children’s classic. Roald Dahl’s beloved 1964 novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, has been adapted twice: once in 2005 by Tim Burton, but most memorably in 1971 by Mel Stuart, with Gene Wilder as eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka. It’s from the 1971 version that Wonka takes some of its cues (including musical ones), but in the service of that most 21st-century of cinematic artefacts: an origin story.
Within, discussions of: What we make of the world in which Wonka is set, one in which institutions purportedly in place for the public good are instead supportive only of corporate power; the reinterpretation of the Oompa-Loompas as a wronged people whose representative is out to retrieve what was stolen from them; Mike’s dissatisfaction with CGI and visual effects in British films and the production of the vocals in Wonka‘s songs; José’s opinion on Timothée Chalamet’s career and (apparently) uneven face; whether this film really benefits from its sentimental backstory and overtones; and how chocolate is best enjoyed.
Upon revisiting our podcast on the previous entry in the Harry Potter-adjacent Fantastic Beasts series, The Crimes of Grindelwald, we find that we could virtually have copied and pasted its content for our discussion of The Secrets of Dumbledore. It’s again less than the sum of its parts, a fantasy adventure with some charms, several good performances, but incoherent storytelling, and too little that convinces us to get invested in the characters’ lives and the fate of the world they seek to save.
The film begins with a powerful avowal of love between Jude Law (Dumblemore) and Mads Mikkelson (Grindewald), linking their lives together eternally and preventing one from acting against the other. It goes downhill fast. Famous as the film where Johnny Depp got replaced. Ezra Miller makes an impression.
The fairytale figure of the undine has been used and developed in the arts for two hundred years, and Christian Petzold, whose Transit we loved, brings his clear-eyed but sensitive aesthetic to it in Undine. Paula Beer plays the titular character with transparent emotion, in the opening scene regretfully informing her ex-boyfriend, as he dumps her, that she will have to kill him. It’s a moment that captures the timbre of the film that follows – fantastical, potent, full of drama, but grounded throughout.
We also discuss Undine‘s knowing and deliberate setting against a sociopolitical backdrop, the film devoting significant time to Undine’s lectures on the history of Berlin, tying them and the city to her relationships, and the way the film conveys the tactility of new lovers, unable to keep from touching each other. We disagree on the film’s greatness – to Mike, it’s something of a trifle, particularly in comparison with Transit, but José is in deep love with it. But we’re agreed that it’s well worth your time.
Pickings are slim at the cinema at the moment, so it’s MUBI to the rescue. We chose Border almost at random, our criteria being only something that looked interesting and would still be on rotation by the time we released the podcast. And what a fascinating film we picked.
Border is a Swedish art film that reeks of mud, pain and isolation, but with a sense of fantasy and irony that render it a curious, surprisingly light affair, despite some gruesome imagery and dark plot developments. It gives us a lot to talk about: the interstices of ideas of gender, place, what it is to be human, how we categorise ourselves, what makes us behave towards others as we do. The film takes a figure of fairy tale, fantasy, and horror, placing it in a contemporary setting. It supports all kinds of interesting interpretations: as a racial narrative, as a trans narrative, as an exploration of nature vs. nature, as a dramatisation of the fluidity of ‘the self’. It opens up beautifully as we discuss it.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
We’re disappointed with The House with a Clock in Its Walls, a children’s horror fantasy that insults its audience’s intelligence by assuming that this is the kind of simplistic shit kids love. We find some aspects of its design to enjoy but for the most part find it close to charm-free and not up to the standards of its stars – though Mike is keen to point out it’s probably director Eli Roth’s best film, which isn’t saying much. José goes on a rant about how often the adorableness of children in Hollywood cinema is signified by blue-eyes and the Nazi Aryan-worship implicit in such a consistent use of of that particular trope, as if dark-eyed children can’t per se be adorable.
The podcast can be listened to in the players above or on iTunes.
Boy oh boy, there’s a lot to talk about, and the word of the day is denial. Specifically, Mike’s unspoken, subcutaneous, existential denial that 1995’s Jumanji is crucially meaningful to him, because how else can you explain the tension in the air as he grapples with the simple question, “Do you recommend the new Jumanji?” Ironic, really. The new Jumanji depicts characters who are forced to confront harsh truths about themselves, and in doing so forces Mike to confront the fact that he can talk about Jumanji for an hour with very little prompting.
And that new Jumanji provides a surprising amount of food for thought. We discuss how the film uses and satirises videogames, how much it made us laugh, the Jonas Brothers, Mike being a sucker for a happy ending as usual and Jose rolling his eyes, the stereotypes from which the central characters are built, how the film has its sexist cake and eats it, the ways the stars play off each other and suit their roles, aspects of performance, the muddled nature of the world and fundamental change in the characters’ relationship to it, how much harder it is to play videogames than it is to watch films, moviegoers’ over-investment in films from decades past, and last year’s Power Rangers movie.
And it’s a name-heavy edition of the podcast, with Jose getting names wrong left, right, and centre, and a final, authoritative correction of our pronunciation of Jia Zhangke’s name. (Thanks to Sam and Jessy Stafford for their contributions.)
Recorded on 16th January 2018.
he podcast can be listened to in the player above or at this link
