The Greatest Trick

Since Mamma Mia! has become such a massive box office success, I decided I really ought to give it a watch. My expectations were not high, but I enjoy musicals. Singin’ in the Rain, West Side Story and Top Hat are among my all time favourites and on a more contemporary note, I thoroughly enjoyed last years Hairspray. Also, as a fan of pop music in general, I am partial to Abba and was curious to see exactly what has made this film such a hit.

I do not wish to be accused of gender prejudice, so I am going to preface this review by saying many of my favourite films are movies that could be termed “women’s pictures” to use old Hollywood vernacular. Classics like All that Heaven Allows, Peyton Place, Mildred Pierce, and of course Gone with the Wind would be among these, along with occasional more contemporary pictures such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones Diary (essentially Jane Austen with lower moral standards). Admittedly contemporary favourites aimed primarily at a female audience are few and far between as generally speaking Hollywood (and Britain) seems to have given up on such films for complex reasons I shan’t go into in this review.

Anyway, to the matter at hand. Mammia Mia! is absolutely ghastly. In case that wasn’t clear enough allow me to reiterate: it is toe-curlingly, mind-bogglingly, headache-inducingly bad. It is an unwieldy mess of gargantuan proportions that didn’t even make me laugh once. At several points, I told myself it couldn’t get any worse, only for the film to reach hideous new lows. By the end of this criminal waste of celluloid, I was ready to gouge out my eyeballs. Time to name and shame those responsible: step forward director Phyllida Lloyd and writer Catherine Johnson.

The plot concerns Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a girl living on a Greek island who on the eve of her wedding wants to find out who her father is. After reading her mother’s secret diary she discovers it could be one of three men, so she invites them all to the wedding, unknown to her mother. That is merely the hook the entire cast use as an excuse to make complete idiots of themselves. But whilst I’m all in favour of pratfalls and slapstick in silly comedy musicals, this time it simply isn’t funny. The cast use their own singing voices, but this hasn’t the charm or novelty of – for example – Woody Allen’s Everyone says I love you. In between badly choreographed and flatly directed songs, the screenplay is like an episode of a really, really bad Australian soap opera with characters to match, especially the monumentally annoying Sophie and her even more annoying boyfriend Sky (Dominic Cooper), who I found myself wanting to stab to death with a toothpick.

Performances are all over the top, but not in a good way, and only Pierce Brosnan, who should be thoroughly ashamed of himself for starring in such rubbish, emerges with an iota of credibility. The rest of the cast – Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, Julie Walters, Stellan Skarsgard et al – all look like they are having fun, but crucially it is they who are having the fun, not the audience. There is not a shred of interesting character development or depth, and the plot is painfully predictable. No, I don’t care if that’s missing the point. Call me old fashioned, but I like these things, even in such lightweight alleged entertainment. Hairspray was light as a feather, but had characters with a modicum of complexity and even tackled a serious issue (institutional racism). Defenders of Mamma Mia! will counter that it’s supposed to be escapism and that its not what happens but how it happens that’s important. Well, I’m all for escapism, but the world of Mamma Mia! is not somewhere I would like to escape into, but somewhere I would want to escape from before my brain melted. Besides, regardless of whether it’s what happens or how it happens that’s important, in either case, the film is awful.

Since this is a movie aimed primarily at a female audience, I can only urge those women who have not seen it not to subject themselves to this rubbish, and demand that films aimed at them are actually good. However, at this stage, such statements are like shutting stable doors after the horse has bolted. Mamma Mia! has made more money at the international box office than The Dark Knight.

From a Christian perspective, this film represents the latest in a drip drip trend of moral relativism. The message seems to be that it doesn’t matter who Sophie’s father is, as long as her mother had a good time when she was young sleeping with lots of men. Well, that’s all right then. Of course, Christian morality is nowhere to be seen, having been soundly rejected by all concerned. Instead they seem to have swapped it for a kind of Greek neo-Paganism (there’s a silly subplot involving Aphrodite’s fountain). And of course, the obligatory token gay couple are present and politically correct in predictably annoying fashion.

If all this makes me sound like a prudish party pooper, good. The only – and I mean only – thing that prevents me from declaring Mamma Mia! to be the Antichrist, is the fact that I like the songs. This is particularly depressing as I could have stayed at home and listened to an Abba CD in the first place. During particularly excruciating moments in this film, I silently thanked the Lord that I was not watching a Celine Dion musical. Such a horror would not merely be a sign of the impending apocalypse, like this film, but THE apocalypse.

Simon Dillon, October 2008.

After their bleak and terrifying Oscar winning masterpiece No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers are back in comparatively zany territory with Burn After Reading, a strange and ultimately inconsequential story. Yet being inconsequential seems to be the point and suggests they have carried over the existential pessimism of their last film.

The plot? I hope you’re paying attention. Highly strung CIA analyst Osbourne Cox (John Malkovitch) is told he cannot continue in his job on account of his drinking problem, but is offered a demotion at a lower clearance level. Angrily refusing this, he instead resigns, and tells his stuck-up domineering wife Katie (Tilda Swinton) that he plans to write his memoirs. Katie is secretly having an affair with paranoid Treasury Agent Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) whom she is trying to bully into leaving his children’s book writer wife (who is in turn also having an affair). Harry is also having another affair with Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), who works in a gym with spectacularly idiotic Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt). Linda is looking for Mr Right, and wants to improve her chances by undergoing several plastic surgery procedures, despite the fact that her boss and unnoticed admirer-from-a-distance Ted (Richard Jenkins), thinks she looks fine the way she is. Anyway, after Osbourne begins to write his memoirs, Katie secretly visits a divorce lawyer who advises her to make a copy of all the documents on their home computer to get a picture of the family finances before beginning divorce proceedings. In doing so, she inadvertently copies Osbourne’s memoirs onto a disk that include classified but not really sensitive information from his CIA days. This disk is then recopied by the divorce lawyer’s secretary who accidentally leaves a copy in the gym where Linda and Chad work. When the two of them find the disk and discover its contents, they call Osbourne to tell him he can collect it, hoping their will be a financial reward (which Linda hopes will be enough to cover the cost of the plastic surgery). However, inept communication leads to a series of misunderstandings over the telephone that ends with Linda blackmailing Osbourne and telling him to pay up if he wants the disk back. When Osbourne refuses to play ball, Linda and Chad inexplicably offer the disk to the Russians at the Russian embassy, apparently under the impression the Cold War is still on. A CIA insider at the Russian embassy reports what is going on to his superior at Langley (a hilarious and underused JK Simmons), who is so utterly baffled that he refuses to intervene. Instead, out of curiosity, he does all he can to cover up what is happening, even when people start getting murdered by mistake.

What makes Burn After Reading funny is the absurd way the plot builds around endless misunderstanding, co-incidence and outright idiocy. The ludicrously overheated plot is deliberately intended to be like an exaggerated version of a Raymond Chandler story, but as with much of the Coen’s output, the best jokes are observational moments on the absurdity of modern life rather than clever genre spoofing. For instance, one particularly delightful moment sees Linda wrestling with those monumentally awful recorded messages that ask the caller to say words aloud to get through to the correct department, making you sound like a complete idiot to anyone in the room who can only hear your side of the conversation.

Performances are all strong, especially from the imbecilic characters portrayed by Pitt and Clooney (who both have a whale of a time). That said, this spectacularly intricate pitch black comedy/tragedy of errors is a comparatively minor work for the Coen Brothers, but it’s still sufficiently dark and twisted to please those who appreciate their particular brand of offbeat, quirky cinema. As I mentioned earlier, this film shares No Country for Old Men’s despair at the futility of human endeavour – a worldview I believe to be spiritually false, not to mention at odds with their earlier output. Burn After Reading may be thematically similar to – say – Fargo, but it lacks that films warm humanity personified in the central figure of Frances McDormand’s pregnant police officer. Here, there are no characters of any redeeming moral ideology (give or take Ted). That combined with a profanity laden screenplay and occasional brutal violence makes it impossible for me to recommend this film from a Christian perspective, but its still one Coen completists will not want to miss.

Simon Dillon, October 2008.

Ben Stiller’s latest comedy satire Tropic Thunder ought to have been a classic given the amount of money spent on it. Unfortunately, I didn’t laugh nearly as much as I would have liked, and therefore took a much dimmer view of the comic but gruesome violence, profanity, and general insanity. John Landis pulled a similar, albeit cleaner, PG rated trick in 1986 with Three Amigos, and although that was no classic, it’s a better film.

To be fair, the premise is good. A bunch of egotistical actors making a war film are given a harsh dose of reality when accidentally left in the middle of a genuine war, all the time thinking they are still filming. The lead actors – Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T Jackson and especially Robert Downey Jr – are all good, and there are amusing cameos from the likes of Steve Coogan and a near unrecognisable Tom Cruise.

There are also some very funny moments, particularly at the beginning with faux trailers that introduce us to the various actors. The high levels of bloody violence seen in recent war films are also spoofed to amusing effect, and one bit in the middle involving a Panda had me in genuine hysterics. But the movie is way too long, and feels bloated.

The problem with reviewing a film like Tropic Thunder for a moral/spiritual perspective, is that in saying what I must say – ie that it has no redeeming value whatsoever – will turn off one audience, and turn on another. A certain recipient of these epistles told me that whenever I say I cannot in good conscience recommend a particular film, it automatically goes to the top of his must-see list. Therefore, this person now has another film he will go out of his way to view, whereas many of the rest of you will no doubt avoid it on account of its filthy language, gruesome (if occasionally amusing) violence, and general unpleasantness. Personally, I would be more forgiving if I had laughed more, but unfortunately Tropic Thunder is patchy at best.

Simon Dillon, October 2008.