Hail Caesar
The 4th entry in
George Clooney’s ‘Idiot Trilogy,’ and the Coens’ most recent, Hail Caesar is more sketch show than
film, a scattershot wave of vignettes circling the central denouement of Josh
Brolin’s Eddie Mannix and his career crisis. There’s opaque
allusions to conflicting ideas of faith, politics and celebrity through curious
if malnourished subplots involving the potential scandal of Scarlett
Johansson’s single motherhood or the ethicality of Hollywood’s audience
manipulation, but Hail Caesar isn’t
so much about the detail as the effect. Esoteric glimpses into these fictional,
inspired 50s-based movies are charmingly inconsequential, the easy standout
proffered in Channing Tatum’s sailor-kitted musical number. It’s raucously fun,
but often feels underwritten and overstuffed, with a conclusion that is less
satisfyingly cohesive than it believes itself to be. Yet its ending
paradoxically remains one of the Coens’ most provocative; America might be stoutly
Christian, and the Coens may come from Jewish orthodoxy, but the real religion at
the heart of their Art is a devout reverence for cinematic joy; and just like
every organised church, Hollywood is a complicated, flawed and benevolent
monolith. Minor Coen but still worthwhile.
High Rise
Despite more-than-respectable
adaptations from Spielberg and Cronenberg, JG Ballard is still considered
luridly unfilmable. So trust Ben Wheatley – one of Britain’s most indefatigably
idiosyncratic directors – to tackle arguably Ballard’s most narratively
abstract work. Ballard’s literary style is characterised by a minutely
observed, pseudo-scientific precision, with scatological structure as case
study rather than plot. High Rise is
ostensibly a pop-psychology experiment, deeply unnerving in both its
interminable prescience and its gaudy pleasures. Wheatley nails it, purporting
a world with an – only slightly – exaggerated social hierarchy in a tower block
embodying by some design the human Super Ego, given way to the uninhibited Id.
The cast, particularly Luke Evans’s “sanest man in the building”
Trotsky-with-sideburns, are great, but Wheatley’s manic glee in subverting the
pompous ennui of the British class system is genius. His most clever device is
the simplest; immediate juxtaposition. The interminable sequences of dustless
walls, impeccable Savile Row suits and constant, constant showering,
transition, in only a 30 second montage, to a veritable orgy of starved
violence and ceaseless shagging, signifying the precipitous edge on which all collective
inhibitions function. It’s completely incoherent, but that’s the point. Rarely
has Sergei Eisenstein’s theory on the power of montage been so apt.[1] It’s about semiotic emotional responses, not some trivial plot. We’re 30
seconds away from primitivism. It’s sartorially funny – ‘Bafta him!’ has
already tied up the race for best one-liner of the year – and explicates
Ballard’s social commentary; its anarchist proclivity on class immobility and
paranoia is bleakly adroit. Intensely carnal, hysterically political, and just
a little bit madly brilliant.
Zootropolis
Thematically, kids films are invariably
difficult to get right. Sure, you can apathetically toss in platitudes about
being yourself and the importance of family etc. because they’re children right?
Children can’t grasp subtlety or inferential meaning because they’re ignorant and require graceless theme-bashing, right? Countless films abide this
policy, to their great detriment. It’s a lose/lose paradigm; adults are bored
and kids understand they’re being patronised. Then you have Zootropolis which, while inevitably
didactic, is mature, cerebral, achingly existential, and bizarrely pertinent. An anthropomorphised examination of the
ubiquity of prejudice, Disney’s newest adventure delves into gender inequality,
racial bigotry, and to what extent identity and behaviour is biological or
artificially constructed. It floored me. Everyone’s a bigot, our charismatic
bunny protagonist is no exception. While it’s a thoughtful, hopeful plea for
inclusivity and liberalism, it’s unafraid to tackle its darker delineations; that
prejudice is so casually exploited, the villain’s snarl that “fear always wins”
is beguilingly apposite of a certain presidential candidate’s campaign
strategy. It’s wickedly funny too, with vividly animated characters, witty dialogue,
inspired visual puns – the bank’s title as Lemming Brothers endures as a
personal highlight – and the, purely platonic, chemistry between Ginnifer
Goodwin’s rabbit and Jason Bateman’s fox is more compelling than that of any
RomCom you’ll watch this year. Zootropolis
is a staunch reaffirmation that this current purple patch is Disney’s
finest since their 90s Silver Age, and very possibly their best film
since The Lion King. With Miyazaki’s
retirement and Pixar’s modern inconsistency, are Disney reclaiming their throne
as the dominant force in animation?
