2013

dir: Martin Scorsese

2013

The Eighties Onslaught Continues!

I don't want to see any more films set in the 80s any more, at least for a while. That toxic decade is being over-represented at the moment, and I'm sick of it.

I mean, sure, it was a great time that a lot of awesome people lived during, way better people than those born in the 90s, but enough is enough.

"Enough is enough" is not a phrase that people like Jordan Belfort must have heard often enough, or accepted, ever. I don't think it's a phrase Peter Jackson understands either. And I don't think anyone says it often enough to Martin Scorsese, because here he has a 3 hour film celebrating the excesses and sheer horribleness of Jordan Belfort and almost every single person around him.

Yes, it's way too much film. It felt like, after the 2 hour mark, that I was watching the Director's Cut version you watch years down the track way after the cinematic release of a successful film. A two-hour version comes out, 2 and a half if it's Oscar-bait, which this most definitely is, and then years later a Director's Cut DVD comes out adding all the stuff the studios forced the director to cut out in order to not test the tolerance level of audiences too much.

Nu-uh. You can't do that to Martin Scorsese anymore. The man is a national treasure. He is probably the most beloved, most adored American director living today. Combine him with the megawattage of A List superstar Leonardo DiCaprio, and no-one will say no to them despite the fact that they should have, very loudly, just like no-one said no enough to Jordan Belfort until it was way too late, or at least he was beyond being capable of listening.

And yet I'm trying to figure out when that 'too late' time was, since Jordan Belfort, that supreme piece of shit as depicted in The Wolf of Wall Street, still lives and breathes, and barely, just barely paid at all for any of his many crimes.

His main crime is being Jordan Belfort. What a guy. What. A. Guy. In a slightly different reality, he would be President of the United States for life.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason and infinite in faculty! Or some crap like that that Shakespeare once tweeted about.

What a piece of shit is the man at the centre of this flick and its constant flow of excesses upon excesses, how lacking in self-awareness and infinite in his capacity for monstrous selfishness.

dir: David O’Russell

American Hustle is one of those big, blousy American movies with American in the title, which virtually guaranteed that it was going to get lots of attention at the Oscars. And, unsurprisingly, it’s got a stack of nominations, most of which I hope it doesn’t get, even though I liked it well enough at the time by the end.

It’s not a flick that gets better the more you think about it, though. The more I’ve thought about it afterwards, the thinner and flimsier it seems, but the bits I found entertaining are still strong.

Problem is, those bits were few and far between.

Two con artists (Christian Bale, Amy Adams) who get busted by the FBI are dragooned into running a scam in order to catch other corrupt people. Some element of this might have actually happened, in this world’s history.

I have no confidence that the real story is anything like what’s depicted here, not that I care. It’s not an important history lesson dressed up in 70s nylon and polyester with the necessary narrative and thematic shortcuts you’d expect from an Important Hollywood Movie. It’s an actor’s showcase, but not in a good way.

dir: David Twohy

You get these strange moments in the world of cinema where, because of your familiarity with its ins and outs, you get the stupid impression that nothing will ever surprise you again. It’s the height of foolishness.

The movie industry is always surprising me. How it continues to exist in this age, the sheer abundance of films it keeps pumping out to ever decreasing profits; it staggers me that it’s still going. Most of all, some of the movies they make thinking there’s an audience for them surprises the hell out of me.

That they, in their infinite wisdom, have made a third Riddick movie, imagining as they have, or at least hoping desperately that the multitudes are clamouring to see this character again, for me is on a par with a studio thinking the world wants to see a Jar Jar Binks movie. Or that the world needs, desperately craves a Turner & Hooch follow-up, or that Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger should make a sequel to Twins. Call it Triplets! Get Mel Gibson to play the middle one! Everyone from your maiden aunt to dribbling infants will kill to see that!

dirs: Cody Cameron, Kris Pearn

There I was, basking in the glory that was the presents, breakfast-in-bed, happy birthday birthdayness of my actual birthday on Saturday, when my daughter loudly and joyfully asserted that since it was my birthday, we should do what I wanted on this hallowed day.

And if that meant I wanted to watch a movie, then, by gum we were going to watch a movie. And if that movie happened to be Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2, then that was the best birthday present that I could possibly want.

How did this happen? Maybe I was hungover and very suggestible, or, like most parents, I gave in to forestall having to see that look of manufactured yet still heartbreaking disappointment on a child’s face. Whatever it was, somehow I agreed to go to the cinemas to see an advanced screening of this movie.

This movie? On my birthday I should have had the gods-given right to insist that everyone watch the most spine-crackingly boring movie I could find (as long as it was no more than PG-rated). I should have made them sit through 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the even more boring Russian version of Solaris. I should have had the dictator-like right to make my family sit through all 8 hours of Bela Tarr’s Satantango without being arrested for domestic abuse.

Instead, we watched a flick where food comes to life, and it’s meant to be a good thing.