In an effort to gather some sort of momentum and, shock horror, regularity, I’ve just had to half watch half of one of the worst films ever made, only to decide that what might seem dreadful on a Saturday morning can always seem better when held up against some of the half-baked rubbish we are encouraged to believe are works of genius.
We are, in case you had missed all the arse licking, smoke blowing, self congratulation and over-earnest hand wringing, mixed in with a sprinkling of hard cheese, a squeeze of sour grapes and a pinch of tough shit, right in the middle of the last, tired act of the moving pictures awards season, the tragic denouement of which is heralded by the most vacuous, wasteful and longwinded ceremony of the lot: the Oscars. Last weekend saw the British film industry stroking itself off with an ill-earned grin on its face at the Baftas – three and a half hours (that’s like watching Lawrence Of Arabia in one go, only a version in which Peter O’Toole, Omar Shariff, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn all sit in a tent and tell each other how wonderful they are and nothing else happens) condensed down to two hours of icky, runny and deeply unfunny television which offered very few surprises but enough hot air to keep a fleet of thespian Hindenburg fireballs afloat for the rest of time. It should be a time for celebration, but all this obsequious back slapping is just a cover for the continuing failures of a film industry that lost its way quite a while ago.
The chief problem with films these days is not that there aren’t any good ones being made but rather that there are a whole lot more mediocre ones coming out which are masquerading as masterpieces, all thanks to a magical luvvie blend of hyperbole, bullshit, self-love, self-promotion and that veteran killer of all artistic ambition: too much hype in all the wrong places. If there’s one thing worse than a bad film it’s a mediocre film that has been made out to be a work of untouchable genius. A truly great film is the kind of film that will still be on everyone’s lips ten years later, or twenty, or for all time. ‘No Country For Old Men’ or ‘Bridesmaids’, to name the first two such examples that spring to mind, are easily good enough to last for another few generations more, but how many people ever go back to watch third rate bargain bin fodder like ‘Shakespeare In Love’ or ‘The Green Book’ or ‘Birdman’ once they’ve ground through them to the bitter end the first time? The answer is, in case you were struggling, not very many. It’s why ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ had a hot flush for a year or two and now looks like rigor mortis set in not long after. The point is, to be a great film a film needs to actually be great – it isn’t enough to simply have a lot of people in Hampstead or Hollywood say it’s great before they go back to their industry waffle and hot yoga breathing exercises. People still tell me that ‘Parasite’ is a modern masterpiece but then they’re probably the same people who thought the second series of ‘Fleabag’ was the best thing on TV since World War II: the sort of white, middle class tits who go to Glastonbury to see Stormzy so they can say they went to Glastonbury to see Stormzy, all the while secretly wishing they could be in a safe hospitality tent watching an acoustic set by The Feeling.
Last summer I felt I had no option but to go and see both ‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ – the sheer scale of hype was just too much and it felt like not having an opinion on either film without seeing them would be an injustice too heavy to bear. By the time they had been filling cinemas for a few weeks a human centipede of ecstatic, grossly misjudged brown-nosing had extended around the earth several times over; there was even a name scratched together in a board meeting somewhere to suggest that somehow the two belonged in their own new palace of gold plated excrement, and so Barbenheimer was pushed out kicking and screaming. To call the pair of them, let alone the sum of their parts, average would be a kindness. If they’d been born in Sparta they wouldn’t have got far at all. ‘Barbie’ is a one joke pony that’s been covered in make up and spattered with ever so not so amusing winks to the audience, but as a pony goes it’s really just an emaciated donkey in an RSPCA advert. A half awake, is-that-really-what-feminism-looks-like, shiny pink snow drop that has turned out to be not much more than a string of internet memes with a persistent soundtrack.
‘Oppenheimer’ is even worse, or less good, if only because it takes itself far more seriously than ‘Barbie’ (which is why it has lots of big nominations and ‘Barbie’ has not a lot beyond costume design, make up and the most acting time spent in front of a green screen pretending to be acting). The warning signs are all there. Any big statement film that has deliberately chosen the monochrome route is easily identifiable as too full of its own shit to be worth watching more than once – see ‘The Artist’, ‘JFK’, ‘Roma’, ‘Mank’; I’ll let ‘Belfast’ off for good behaviour. It has Robert Downey Jr doing his serious, try-not-to-remember-I was-Iron Man-and-Dr Dolittle, acting thing; which very rarely pays off, and is why he already has a Bafta for it. It has endless scenes of men talking in rooms about things which aren’t fundamentally all that interesting and a plot that dulls the senses for three whole hours. It also marks the moment that Christopher Nolan, a very gifted director, finally managed to crawl up his own backside and made the fatal error of believing his own hype. Watching him collect his Bafta you could sense that this was a film made to win awards first and to entertain second. In achieving goal #1 it has, regrettably, completely ignored goal #2, which in time will seem like an ever-growing shame. This is not Nolan’s magnum opus and nor should it be remembered as so.
In the last few days I have seen two other films, both British but a world away from each other in most other respects. The first was ‘Saltburn’, which comes with its very own truckload of hype, but in this case it gets away with it because it doesn’t believe every minute of it and most of the minutes that form it are pretty enjoyable. It is neither perfect (no film, with the possible exception of ‘Jaws’, is or ever will be perfect) but nor is it dull or self-serving or needlessly overlong. It is several times more enjoyable than Bradley Cooper’s years-in-the-making Bernstein biopic ‘Maestro’, a film which isn’t doing well in the hunt for awards this year because it made the silly mistake of being released in the same year as ‘Oppenheimer’; who knew that awards would be given out to films based on their ability to send you to sleep for twenty minutes? The other film I’ve watched (the half watched, half of) is ‘Holiday On The Buses’. It was the third film spin-off from the brutally awful ‘On The Buses’ sitcom that drew in huge TV crowds in the 60’s, back when you could get away with a hell of a lot more (it even has an up-skirt shot, which is ridiculous). Even on it’s release ‘Holiday On The Buses’ was ripped to pieces by the critics and there are many reasons for this. It is rampantly misogynistic, horribly dated and about as funny as having your prostate checked by an impatient eagle. And yet it was, pound for pound, more or less, in a round about sort of way, and very roughly speaking as enjoyable as ‘Oppenheimer’, and also somehow no more ridiculous as ‘Barbie’. To be that awful and yet still watchable even now is some sort of a small miracle – the fact it is still available to watch on TV is another miracle, given that most dodgy comedy is being manically pruned to wash over what sense of humour we were once allowed to indulge in with being overwhelmed by guilt.
And that’s it. I’ve kind of run out of ideas now. Of course I wouldn’t for a second expect or want you to agree with me, but if you backed me into a corner at a party (because I’m always at parties me, y’know, partying) and tried to tell me that ‘Oppenheimer’ is as good as ‘The Insider’ and that ‘Barbie’ is a great film that should have won the Oscar it won’t win for best movie then I’m afraid we’re going to be arguing for quite some time. And I’m not a great one for arguments unless I think I’m going to win. It doesn’t matter that ‘Oppenheimer’ has just picked up some SAG awards and it won’t matter when it picks up the best film and best director Oscar next weekend because deep down I’d be surprised that very many of the people who bagged it a billion dollars at the box office will ever sit through it again, awake or otherwise. I’m not a betting man but I’d have a flutter on ‘Oppenheimer’ gently drifting away in the breeze over the next few years or, at best, join that group of tiresome ‘classics’ that fill in the gaps on a Sunday afternoon. Like ‘Dr Zhivago’. I’ve made my pitch: if I’m stuck next time between the next multi-award winning future beh-ego-meth ball-bore and a substitute Carry On film I’ll probably go with Hawtrey, James, Jacques and Williams. Or I’ll just watch ‘Jaws’ again, because it really is as close to a perfect film as we’ll ever get. But more on that another time. Spend your time wisely. You won’t get it back.
G B Burton. 25.02.2024
On stupidity......and other causes for concern. 