Mini Reviews: Creed & Goosebumps

Creed

At the centre of the Oscars Diversity debate lie Ryan Cooglar and Michael B. Jordan, respectfully Creed’s director and star. Despite its “Oscar worthiness” – by which I mean its serious subject matter, serious performances, and ultra-super-special serious disposition, Creed hasn’t been nominated for Best Picture. A critic provocatively hypothesised that this is because Creed’s a film with a black protagonist that isn’t approaching issues of race with its caps-lock on. Of course every film’s about racial experience, but enough of my pseudo-intellectual tangents. The director/actor partnership resurges following their magnificent Fruitvale Station, incidentally a film very much concerned with the present black reality, and I’d be quite happy with them just making movies together for the rest of time. Cooglar uses shaky, proactive framing entwined with more cinematic Steadicam to generate a sense of murky actuality while maintaining an assured air of confident elegance.  The result is compelling, and he’s ably aided by Jordan establishing his own quiet classiness with a telluric performance, not Oscarly bombastic but rather beguilingly exacting and naturalistic. Same goes for Stallone, an always unfairly derided actor. Di Caprio can chew all the frozen scenery he wants and win an Oscar, but he can’t act like this. Maybe Creed’s nost interesting paradigm is its mutual timelessness and contemporariness. It’s immutably and pleasurably Rocky in its not-quite-rags-to-riches redemption narrative, a timely prompt that we’ll always be a sucker for these stories, but its economic literacy around the financial crash and excellent Cloud jokes, compounded by Tessa Thompson’s Bianca existing as a FKA Twigs-esque alternative R&B singer, suggests a context rooted in the of-the-now. Presumably this is the point; Rocky’s aged and his working class background contrasts with Adonis’s privilege, which in turn is an interesting inversion of normal race/class models, and his oldschool dependency alienates him from modern technocracy and ease of living. Creed’s very overtly about the idea of building your own family and identity, and while at times it can be didactic it is morally moving, and thankfully refuses to beat you to death with its “themes” (CC. Trumbo). Creed never goes anywhere you wouldn’t expect – despite passing up a radical, and in my opinion prosperous, opportunity to do so – but it’s accomplished and layered, perhaps a fine reminder that good cinema doesn’t have to be original or dynamic as long as it’s finely tuned. And for the record, the Oscars are a malodorous irrelevance and a taintedly arbitrary valuation of film.

Goosebumps

 The Goosebumps TV show used to scare the crap out of me. I’ve not watched an episode in over a decade but the memory of F-grade CGI blobs and animatronic, carnivorous chickens languishes in the deepest recesses of my subconscious. Sceptical is an imprecise description of my initial impression of this reimagining of RL Stine’s bestselling series; rather, I was uninterested. Transposing Stine as an definite character while having his lurid, monstrous machinations come to life in a Spielbergean suburbia sounds sorely twee. After unprecedentedly positive reviews I indulged myself, and came away pleasantly surprised. It’s a quirky, fun caper evidently inspired by the great adventure films of the eighties, a la Goonies and Gremlins in its accumulated breezy and eccentrically knowing tone, unremarkable setting and gregarious ensemble. In fact, easily its most potent quality is its intractable self-awareness. Its ceaseless nods and winks to monster history, including a great Stephen King gag, never feel unwelcome because it’s so authentic, and its scattershot structure works because it’s an exercise in charming shenanigans with familiar pop culture icons. Zombies in a graveyard is so nailed-on that it can’t be anything other than unpretentious genius. Why not have zombies in graveyards? Where else would you have them, in a Jane Austen novel? Jack Black is impressively restrained, while relative newcomer Dylan Minnette possesses everyman affability as the lead. It’s funny, simultaneously clever and deferential, and is enjoyably simplistic.