by Oscar O’Sullivan

Monday – Toni Erdmann

There’s a wonderful specificity in the humour of this film. Despite covering an absurd breadth of settings and scenarios in it’s near-three hour runtime, it’s all firmly centred on the clashing personalities of the two leads. Ines is obsessed with control, raging against a lack of it in her career and imposing it on her life in bizarre and unhealthy ways. She’s desperately unhappy but too proud to admit it to anyone, especially because the only relationships she has are business-based. Her free-spirited father Winfried visits her to alleviate his own creeping depression, but realises that she’s doing much worse than himself. An inveterate jokester, Winfried does his best to gently crack his daughter’s shell, but she’s too tightly-wound and self-obsessed to put up with his intrusion in her ordered life, and soon sends him packing. This is where Toni Erdmann enters the picture. Winfried’s demented, no-filter alter-ego invade’s Ines’ life before she knows what’s happening and throws her utterly off-balance. As Ines’ carefully constructed facade is chipped away, Winfried’s commitment to playing Toni becomes increasingly pitiful as the question becomes not whether he can bring Ines out of her shell, but whether or not there even is a real Ines beneath all the bullshit. Despicably funny and emotionally cutting, it’s a disaster you can’t look away from, complete with unglamorous drug use, mortifying public singing and a birthday party that can only be described as surreal. Blending subdued, realist imagery with scenarios that border on and cross over into absurdity, Toni Erdmann is a comedy for the ages. 10/10.

Tuesday – Rio Grande

The appeal of the Western hero almost always lies in their rugged self-reliance. They’re the drifter who protects a small town, the bounty hunter running down the outlaw gang, the cattle driver conquering the untamed wilderness. Even the lawmen in the genre are defined by an upright independence, lone paragons on the fringes of civilisation pushed to the edge of their morality. So there’s something incongruous, to me at least, about a Western centred on the United States cavalry. Rio Grande is a war film against an old West backdrop, heroic soldiers riding out to do battle with the Native Americans, portrayed here as chaotic raiders who abduct children merely for the pleasure of killing them. John Wayne and his troops are protecting nothing but the broad idea of civilisation in a film where mass slaughter is an end unto itself. Execrable politics and paper-thin plotting aside, the film works as a low-stakes upbeat hangout. John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara smoulder at each other as they battle for the soul of their son, while the gaggle of colourful recruits that populate the cavalry camp are enjoyably rambunctious. The spectacle of the stunt work is as good as anything Ford shot, and the rhythm of the character scenes makes up for the plot’s lack of urgency. 7/10.

Wednesday – The Unforgiven

When I watched The Searchers a couple of weeks ago, I commented on how it couldn’t go far enough with it’s intended racial critique. The Unforgiven is a film that is not only prevented from fully exploring it’s intended theme, but seems to have not even known what it was going to say anyway. The setup is obvious and, on paper, effective: a local girl is revealed to be half-native, and the suspicious, fearful residents of a frontier community shun her and her adoptive family. The level of racism espoused by the characters is visceral, explicit in both word and deed, but the film fails to truly comment upon or condemn what it depicts. After the discovery of Rachel’s heritage and public shunning, the racists are not seen in the film again, no punishment or moral lesson for them. Instead, we end with our heroes under siege by, of course, Native Americans, nastily portrayed as a purely destructive force. The incongruity between theme and execution is insane to consider, a parable on racism where the maligned group are represented as thoughtless and murderous villains. Despite the best efforts of the strong cast, solid action and classic Western visuals, the complete inadequacy of the film as a story makes this a rotten, dreary, off-putting experience. 4/10.

Thursday – The Untouchables

The Untouchables is, quite possibly, the stupidest true-crime-story film I have ever seen. Bearing only a superficial resemblance to true events, it’s a cartoon version of reality, a purely filmic world where good and evil are clearly defined and actionable. Despite this, or rather because of it, this is also a primally enjoyable film. Our heroes are upstanding paragons whose rough edges merely add flavour, while our villains are snarling psychos committing crime for the pleasure of it more than anything. The simple morality of the film is clearly defined by a recurring exchange between Costner’s bleeding-heart hero and Connery’s jaded beat cop. Connery asks many times during the quest to nab Capone how far Costner is willing to go to get the job done. Ordinarily, this would imply an impending dilemma where Costner will have to sell his soul to save the day. But actually Connery’s dirty methods are a call to action, and Costner pushing through his reservations and going full cowboy cop saves the city with no untoward consequences. Director Brian De Palma has always been obsessed with images of extreme violence, and here he gets to explore them without any moral quandary. By pushing the good and evil of the story to the extreme, we can revel in the bloody violence without any revulsion or inhibition – after all, they deserve what they get. Costner is the perfect leading man for this film, taking a flat paragon of goodness and imbuing him with such earnest, good-natured charm that you can’t help but believe in him. It’s a film with nothing of note to say, no insight to impart, but an excellently constructed piece of surface-level entertainment none the less. 8/10.

Friday – The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson must have though this would be his last Hollywood movie because he crams every possible expense you could think of into this film. Helicopters, seaplane landings, a massive boat with matching intricate interiors, underwater shoots, a private island, a real orca whale, multiple Mann-esque gunfights, two dolphins, a David Bowie soundtrack – while his art design and direction may get even more intricate and deep as the years go on, this remains his most spectacularly vast work. Maybe his most underrated film too? If you’re a Wes-Head and haven’t seen this one yet, get on it. 10/10.

Saturday – The Tragedy of Macbeth and Pale Rider

Joel’s solo effort during the recent Coen split easily proves which brother is the visual brains of the outfit. Not to overly disparage Ethan’s work on Drive-Away Dolls, but Joel’s expressionist vision of MacBeth is one of the best-looking films of the decade. It’s a perfectly cast, straightforward telling of the original play. While a revisionist take may have been more interesting, this was clearly meant to be a visual exercise for the director and an acting showcase for it’s stars. What remains to be seen is how Joel would fare with an original script of his own construction, although I’d much rather see the brothers work together again. 10/10.

Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider could be best described as a realist fairy tale. The visual style is direct and unaffected, the score understated, the action scenes calmly calculated in set-up and execution. It’s also, on the surface, a very ‘real-world’ story – a poor mining community targeted by a ruthless capitalist. It’s classic working men versus the powers-that-be conflict, honest hard-working people pushed to the edge of survival by a system that only sees them as potential numbers in a ledger. What makes this simple scenario into something mythic is the Eastwood character, known only as Preacher. Summoned by the prayer of a young girl, he’s a phantom, an archetype – charismatic and stoic, an unbeatable fighter and an endlessly virtuous man. Like the classic stars of the studio days, Eastwood completely understands his own appeal and limitations, and as a director, he can play up his strengths to a superlative degree. The mythic realism of this film isn’t quite in perfect balance, and the final showdown is both too slow and over too quickly for my liking, but the film never pretends to be an action romp anyway, and it’s a compelling slow-burn. 8/10.

Sunday – Edward Scissorhands

Let’s be frank here – Tim Burton has lost it. No matter how much of an improvement Beetlejuice 2 appears to be over his recent work, it’s not going to touch his early work. He’s just not that person anymore – success has changed him in ways that are most certainly irreversible. A film like this is so emotionally resonant because you can feel Burton pouring himself into the sensitive, socially maligned hero. It’s so visually stunning even thirty years later because Burton set out to cultivate a look that was different to the mainstream. Even with his very early mainstream success, Burton still saw himself as an outsider, and he crafted his films accordingly – he drew inspiration from myriad sources, pushed boundaries of taste, and above all, he was sincere in his insertion of himself into his work. Modern Burton, unfortunately, has allowed success to change him. He has retreated into his own style, eschewing his old influences to cannibalise his own past work, becoming a hollow, surface-level parody of himself. He works almost exclusively in adaptations and remakes, merely lending his name and trappings of style to stories he has no investment in or connection to. It’s almost sobering to finally watch Edward Scissorhands and realise just how far he’s fallen from his glory days. Even if he was never really that much of an outsider, this film makes you believe him when he says he felt like one. 9/10.