Hello readers, how’s your 2023 shaping up so far? Now that we’re past the consistently debunked notion of ‘Blue Monday’ (it was meant to be the 16th of January for anyone interested) and made it almost to Valentine’s Day, GG is back to give you a few viewing options as the year starts to stretch itself out.
We’ve been taking a look at other people’s films of 2022 and so far it’s been rewarding and fun.
Thirteen Lives, directed by Ron Howard and starring Viggo Mortensen and Colin Farrell is an account of the rescue of the Thai football team and their coach who were trapped in the Northern Thailand cave system of Tham Luang during unprecedented flooding in June 2018.
Howard is the ideal person to helm the portrayal of this story on film. The procedural detail and mounting tension mirror Apollo 13, probably his most successful and well-known film. Mortensen and Farrell (more on him in a moment) are both excellent throughout, giving what might be the most ‘British’ performance of British people I’ve seen in a non-British movie… there’s something about the taciturn, slightly grumpy, ‘just let us get on with it’ attitude of their portrayals that feels deeply authentic. We don’t learn much about them as characters – Mortensen is portrayed as wholly consumed by his diving to the point of being obsessed; he doesn’t like kids; Farrell is a father and finds the experience more challenging emotionally.
This is a procedural film, by which I mean it tells the story with little flourish and lets the events speak for themselves in just enough detail to keep the audience engaged. The underwater sequences are convincing to the layperson and the real-life divers have commented that they’re accurate in all but one respect: in the actual rescue, they had zero visibility and had to find their way through the hazardous caves by feel and experience. Terrifying, but hardly cinematic.
Once we get to the details of the rescue itself and the huge problem of getting youngsters with zero diving experience through some of the most challenging environments the experts have ever encountered, the details are simply staggering, even if you followed it at the time.
There is a documentary about the event which has also garnered a lot of praise, so will be watching that at some point. For anyone who remembers some of the more unpleasant details of the time, it’s gladdening to know that no mention is made of a certain human-shaped-capitalist-bot with a submarine-sized chip on his shoulder.
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Farrell also stars in the next film for your consideration and has been nominated for an Oscar as a result. Given the breadth of the roles he portrayed this year, it’s likely he’d get the Geek Graffiti vote. Consider that not only was he completely convincing in Thirteen Lives, but he also buried his heartthrob status under a ton of prosthetics to portray the best on-screen version of Batman’s foe The Penguin that we’ve had outside of video games and gave yet another brilliant performance for writer/director Martin McDonagh in the excellent The Banshees of Inisherin. Reuniting with the equally (and always) brilliant Brendan Gleeson to reprise the triple treat we first glimpsed with In Bruges, this is another character piece with brilliant, sparking dialogue throughout and pitch-black humour. The film is explicitly a metaphor for the Irish Civil War, little known to us in the UK and arguably responsible for more deaths than the War of Independence that preceded it. It was essentially a conflict about the constitution of the young state newly freed from colonialist power, with factions violently disagreeing about the terms imposed for peace. Hard as it is for a foreigner to understand, it must have been confusing for Irish civilians as well, having seen their countryfolk fight so long to achieve the prized goal of freedom, only to plunge into another war. That said, the receding tide of colonialism left damage wherever it flowed, often with arbitrary lines drawn on maps written by invaders, who at their very best were condescendingly paternalistic.
All of which is very heavy. The Banshees of Inisherin is anything but. Admittedly, not everyone will find humour involving self-mutilation as hilarious as Geek Graffiti, but black humour is the humour of life. It’s standing up in the face of overwhelming nihilism and laughing at the absurdity of it all.
Farrell and Gleeson play lifelong friends. One day, Gleeson’s character decides he no longer wants to be Farrell’s friend and goes to extreme lengths to ensure it, including severing the fingers of his talented fiddle-playing hands. Yes, as I said, it’s absurd. Cleverer people than I would probably discuss Camus and Kierkegaard at this point, and certainly there’s a lot going on under the surface of this movie. A fascinating essay by Mark O’Connell points to the links to James Joyce’s Ulysses and the English lens through which Ireland is deliberately depicted in the film. But again, you can leave this to the film studies class and enjoy this fantastic film on its own merits, the beautiful landscape of – for me – the most beautiful country on Earth, two magnificent performances with the obvious chemistry of real-life friendship, and simply the best dialogue you’ll encounter on screen all year. This is a funny, moving film, beautifully acted, beautifully shot, and beautifully directed.
Find it and watch it, maybe as a companion to Belfast.
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Finally, for this post, we have The Menu. Of the three films on this list, this was the one that Geek Graffiti took the most simple, visceral enjoyment. It’s brilliant.
The movie has been described as a comedy horror. Now, accepting that we enjoy a lot of horror films and are potentially a bit desensitised at this point, I have to say it’s no more horrifying than the average episode of Inspector Morse. It’s better described as a … as a what? A comedy-thriller-drama with heaps of social commentary? Frankly, who cares. We (especially critics) spend way too much time trying to put things into convenient, off-the-peg, ill-fitting descriptions, so here’s a more appropriate one: it’s just a bloody good film.
A couple played by Anya Taylor Joy and Nicholas Hoult have insanely expensive tickets to one of the most exclusive restaurants in the world, on an island where the chef and his team live and work. That chef is played by the ever-excellent Ralph Fiennes, here leaning into his stellar comedy work again as he did so well in In Bruges (hello again), Hail, Ceasar! and The Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s at his driest here, but your diaphragm takes a huge, hilarious pounding once the penny drops and things start to develop.
It’s a film we can talk very little about without spoiling it. There are numerous twists and turns as the story unfolds, but suffice to say there’s a lot more to digest here than a seven-course meal. Inevitably it doesn’t all work. Some characters are little more than placeholders there to react, but there’s an unwavering focus here matched by a simply outstanding lead performance. If you’re not a little moved by the moment Fiennes cooks a burger, then I can’t help you and you should probably stick to Michael Bay movies from now on. Oh, and did I mention? It’s abso-frigging-lutely, pant-wettingly hilarious.
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That’s it for the reviews for now. I have a backlog of films to get through and very little time at the moment, but I will be back. As always… thanks for reading, thanks for letting me write.
