the m0vie blog

Non-Review Review: The Midnight Sky

Posted on December 10, 2020 by Darren

The Midnight Sky is an ambitious and sporadically interesting mess.

There are a lot of individual elements that work relatively well in George Clooney’s most recent directorial effort. Indeed, the most surprising thing about this apocalyptic space drama is the way in which is eschews a lot of the stylistic trappings of the recent “sad astronaut” subgenre. Conceptually, The Midnight Sky feels like a companion piece to films like Gravity, Interstellar, The Martian, First Man, and Ad Astra. It is a story about isolation and about a space mission with the potential to go horribly wrong. However, Clooney gives the film a distinct texture, brighter and bolder.

Drinking it all in.

However, The Midnight Sky never coheres in a satisfying manner. Part of this is simply structural, with Clooney having to consistently cut between two sets of characters in radically different situations in a way that constantly undermines momentum. However, part of this is also narrative, with The Midnight Sky essentially built around a powerhouse closing twenty minutes that are obvious from the opening ten, but have to be delayed and postponed with a series of tonally disjointed episodic adventures to prevent the film from ending too soon.

This is a shame. There are hints of a much better movie in The Midnight Sky, but the film itself gets lost in space.

“Nuke the sky from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: colour, film, george clooney, netflix, non-review review, review, science fiction, sixties, the midnight sky, utopian, utopianism | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! On Sam Raimi and What it Means to be a Good (Spider-)Man…

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Darren

So, as I have mentioned before, I am launching a new video series as a companion piece to In the Frame at The Escapist. The video will typically launch with the Monday article, and be released on the magazine’s YouTube channel the following week. This is kinda cool, because we’re helping relaunch the magazine’s film channel – so if you can throw a subscription our way, it would mean a lot.

With that in mind, here is last week’s episode. With the release of Spider-Man: Miles Morales, we thought it might be fun to take a look back at Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, and the central stakes of the film: the question of what it means to be a good man, Spider- or otherwise.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: in the frame, morality, sam raimi, scale, spider man, stakes, superhero movies, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Flash Gordon” and “Dune” as Biblical Epics for a Secular Age…

Posted on December 7, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. As this week marks the fortieth anniversary of Flash Gordon and this month would have seen the release of the next cinematic adaptation of Dune, it seemed like a good time to talk about Dino DeLaurentiis’ science-fiction epics.

Flash Gordon and Dune exist in the shadow of George Lucas’ Star Wars, but they are markedly different films. While Lucas drew heavily from classic science-fiction serials, he adopted modern techniques in production and editing. In contrast, Dune and Flash Gordon are more old-fashioned in their storytelling. More than that, with the death of New Hollywood and the emerging blockbuster film market, it seems like the studios leaned rather heavily into the kind of epic that they knew how to make. As a result, Dune and Flash Gordon feel rather like biblical epics… in space!

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: biblical epics, blockbusters, dino delaurentiis, dune, epics, Flash Gordon, in the frame, science fiction, star wars | Leave a comment »

New Podcast! The Escapist Movie Podcast – “Unwrapping a Star Wars and Netflix Christmas”

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Darren

The Escapist have launched a movie podcast, and I was thrilled to join Jack Packard and Matt Razak for the fourteenth episode. It’s a seasonal special, as we discuss The LEGO Star Wars Holiday Special, The Star Wars Holiday Special and the Christmas Prince trilogy.

You can listen to the episode here, back episodes of the podcast here, click the link below or even listen directly.

Filed under: Podcasts! | Tagged: a christmas prince, christmas movies, netflix, star wars, star wars holiday special, the christmas prince, the escapist movie podcast, the lego star wars holiday special, the star wars holiday special | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! “The Mandalorian – Chapter 14: The Tragedy”

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Darren

I’m thrilled to be launching 3-Minute Reviews on Escapist Movies. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’ll be doing weekly reviews of The Mandalorian.

The review of the sixth episode of the second season, The Tragedy, is available below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: Boba Fett, escapist, the escapist, the mandalorian | Leave a comment »

211. The Wolf of Wall Street – Summer of Scorsese (#142)

Posted on December 5, 2020 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Jay Coyle and Darren Mooney, with special guests Luke Dunne and Aoife Martin, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every Saturday at 6pm GMT.

This time, concluding our Summer of Scorsese with his most recent film on the list, Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street.

Martin Scorsese is one of the defining directors in American cinema, with a host of massively successful (and cult) hits that have shaped and defined cinema across generations: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Kundun, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, Hugo, The Irishman. The Summer of Scorsese season offers a trip through his filmography via the IMDb‘s 250.

Jordan Belfort developed a reputation as one of the most amoral stockbrokers working in the financial industry, wearing the name “the Wolf of Wall Street” as a badge of honour. Belfort is afforded the chance to tell his own side of the story, of the gaudy excess and tasteless indulgence that defined the industry for so many years.

At time of recording, it was ranked 142nd on the Internet Movie Database‘s list of the best movies of all-time.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: aoife martin, capitalism, complicity, excess, gangsters, goodfellas, greed, jason coyle, jay coyle, jonah hill, Jordan Belfort, Leonardo diCaprio, luke dunne, margot robbie, martin scorsese, Matthew McConaughey, money, morality, power, scorsese, sex, summer of scorsese, the wolf of wall street, Wall Street | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “The Mandalorian”, Continuity and Brand Synergy…

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. There’s been a lot of Star Wars continuity dropped into the second season of The Mandalorian, with Boba Fett returning to the show following his apparent death in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi, and the live action introduction of characters like Bo Katan and Ahsoka Tano from The Clone Wars.

This is interesting, in large part because the first season of The Mandalorian was comfortable aiming for a broader sort of Star Wars nostalgia, things that looked like existing elements of continuity, rather than things that were existing elements of Star Wars continuity. The second season is much more heavy of Star Wars cross-promotion, populated with references designed to push viewers towards supplementary material. This is a nice illustration of transmedia storytelling in the streaming age, where it isn’t enough to attract fans, services have to retain them.

Streaming services hold on to existing subscribers by adding value, and Disney appear to have figured out that continuity offers its own added value. In its second season, The Mandalorian increasingly feels like an advertisement for the other riches that the streaming service has to offer, and a promise that any subscriber who doesn’t cancel once the season is over will have a treasure trove of archival material to binge at their leisure.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: canon, continuity, disney, star wars, streaming wars, subscription, the mandalorian | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Prom

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Darren

The Prom arrives on Netflix as part of director Ryan Murphy’s deal with the streaming service, similar to the adaptation of The Boys in the Band.

On one level, The Prom is perfectly suited to Murphy’s aesthetic as a director. It is an adaptation of a Broadway musical about Broadway musicals, one that collides with a stereotypical depiction of the American heartland in a way that invites a heightened and almost caricatured version of both. The Prom is a larger than life production, and feels very much of a piece with Murphy’s output as writer, director and producer – from American Horror Story to Ratchet to Glee. There is no sense that any approach to The Prom could ever be “too much”, and so it’s a good fit for Murphy.

Making a whole production of it.

At the same time, The Prom ultimately feels rather empty. Murphy is very good at offering stylised hyperreal worlds, but The Prom feels like a hollow confection. This problem is compounded by a tonal issue; the movie is never entirely sure how cynical or how earnest it wants to be, and so is frequently caught halfway between extremes. The Prom never seems entirely sure whether it’s a brutal parody of feel-good nonsense or a triumphant example of escapist entertainment, so it never works in either register.

This is a shame, given the talent involved in the production and the occasional momentum that the film manages to build through its high-energy song-and-dance numbers and its game cast. Sadly, though, it never manages to hit the high notes that it needs to.

It’s a bit Broad(way)…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Broadway, film, meryl streep, Movie, musical, non-review review, review, the prom | Leave a comment »

“It Will Always Be Broken!” The Strange Melancholy of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”…

Posted on December 2, 2020 by Darren

The podcast that I co-host, The 250, has been running a season of coverage of director Martin Scorsese. Last weekend, we discussed Scorsese’s Hugo. It’s a fun, broad discussion. However, watching the film and talking about the film got me thinking about the film’s strange melancholy.

Martin Scorsese is a more complex and nuanced filmmaker than a casual glimpse at his filmography might suggest.

The clichéd depiction of Scorsese is largely shaped and defined by his most popular movies: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, Casino, Gangs of New York, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman. Based on these films, there is a tendency to pigeonhole Scorsese as a director who makes violent films about violent men, usually filtered through the lens of the seedy underbelly of organised crime or urban decay. This does not quite capture the breadth and the scope of Scorsese’s interests.

Indeed, Scorsese is a much more interesting filmmaker than that list of classics might suggest, reflected in films as diverse as Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, New York, New York, The Last Waltz, After Hours, The Colour of Money, Age of Innocence, The Last Temptation of Christ, Kundun and The Aviator. However, even allowing for that range, Hugo stands out as an oddity in Scorsese’s filmography. The film was something of a flop when it was released opposite The Muppets, and is often glossed over in accounts of Scorsese’s career and history.

This is shame. Hugo suffers slightly from arriving in the midst of a late career renaissance for Scorsese that includes some of the best and most successful films that the director ever produced: The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, The Irishman. In the context of that body of work, Hugo is often overlooked. This is a shame, as it’s a magical and wonderful film. It manages to be a children’s film as only Martin Scorsese could produce, suffused with a melancholy and introspection that is rare in the genre.