I’d never seen Moulin Rouge! before. When the trailer came out, back in the day, I just thought, ach, I don’t fancy that. However, in the intervening years this has now meant 1 demerit point on my queer card, so when the GYFF had it as its closing film, I thought I’d rectify that.
The start was everything I thought it might be, full of slo mo and the ghost-train judder shots Baz Luhrmann loves so well. Songs playing over each other simultaneously, everything loud, everything bright, everything extra as fuck. I kept thinking about John Waters, and a quote I could only half remember, “If less is more, think how much more more would be”. Frenetic, tacky, cacophonous, it was exactly the Moulin Rouge! I expected. My granny watched it on TV once back in the 2000s and pronounced, “Whaever made that Moulin Rouge must be oan that co-caine”. My gran was right on the money.
However, once the film calms its tits, and we drift into the second act, I found myself slowly warming to it. Ewan McGregor’s naive young lover is disarmingly endearing, and Nicole Kidman plays the woman marked for doomed love with a mix of cool, sleek chic and nervous heartfluttering. I of course never sympathise with the right people, and just felt sorry for the Duke, who tries to make all Satine’s (Kidman) dreams come true, only to find out she’s making a fool out of him in front of the whole company, just to milk him dry. As the love triangle ramped up, I found myself thinking, well, it’s no my cup of tea, but it’s no bad.
Finally the melodrama reached its long-telegraphed crescendo, and the audience around me descended into sniffles, sighs and sobbing. And you know, as overwrought as the whole thing was, McGregor and Kidman just save it with excellent performances, they just commit despite the ludicrousness of everything around them. And I have to say I could sit through it again, I actually enjoyed myself.
The big thing that no one talks about is race in Moulin Rouge. The almost entirely white cast perform a play about an Indian courtesan and maharaja in stage brown-face, while the only Black cast member is named Chocolate. Yikes.
The other thing, more a plot hole, is if you find out someone has TB, you definitely do tell them, so they can make the decision about whether to continue swapping spit with the person they love. Plus, she’s huffing and puffing and belting out all these song numbers all over the top of the rest of the company, and you don’t think *maybe* it might be a better idea to tell her to no do that coz she’s got a highly contagious, fatal disease?
Outside of those, Moulin Rouge! is just a great big sing-along, bombastic, gaudy, and operatically over-the-top. And that enthusiasm is so infectious, it eventually just took me with it.
Wiping away tears of laughter. It would be really hard to write something as naturally funny as the folk in this film manage to be.
A Bunch Of Amateurs is a documentary about Bradford Movie Makers, an amateur filmmaking club that has lasted nearly a century. It has a vibrant cast of characters, each with their own passion and enthusiasm for cinema. Despite dwindling cash and an aging membership, it provides a community and creative space for people with a love of film.
The humour comes from the co-existence of the aspiration and fantasy of cinema with the relentlessly mundane concerns of the real world, this dry, deadpan, Northern, working class practicality banging up against imaginative endeavours. Harry wants to recreate the opening song from Oklahoma! Phil asks, “Where we gonna get a field where the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye? Nothing like that round here.” “No,” replies Harry, matter-of-fact, “Not in Bradford.”
The warmth though is what really makes the film. This is a group of people who have been meeting weekly for years, decades in some cases. They’ve built friendships, brought along their spouses, and become a family. Despite the ups and downs of creative differences and the limitations in budget, they are there for one another. Colin is adjusting to life at home now his beloved wife has moved to a dementia care facility, but going to the film club provides continuity, routine, engagement, and joy. When a fall prevents him from making it to a meeting, they come to him, putting up a projector screen in his livingroom.
The laughter the film brings out is the laughter of family, of indulging foibles, of not taking things too seriously when they are meant to be a bit of fun, of fostering each other’s dreams, even when they are decidedly impractical. I loved Colin’s habit of just deciding to do club house improvements at random moments, like sawing through wood partitions in the back kitchen while everyone’s watching Harry’s clip from Oklahoma!, or deciding to paint over graffiti on the side of the building in the drizzling rain. I loved Harry insisting on recreating the scene from Oklahoma! despite refusing to ride an actual horse. I loved watching Phil just stress-drink hunners of cups of tea, as he figures out how to make these ideas a reality.
It’s also great that the documentary gives a representation of 80-year-olds and 90-year-olds you don’t usually see on screen, namely at play. Depictions of that age group can be so unrelentingly grim, focusing solely on being confined to the body as it weakens. It’s good to see a reminder that even when older, we are still a world of imagination, storytelling, silliness, and whimsy. All of us, even in our longer years, are partly magic.
Just a great film, highly recommend you see it. A great laugh, very touching in places, about this little corner of the world where people are keeping their dreams alive. Goan yersel!
Going into seeing Corpse Bride, I remembered watching it at the pictures back in the 2000s and coming away rather underwhelmed. I remember thinking that the music felt very phoned-in. As I went for a rewatch in 2022, I struggled to remember if there were actual songs in it.
Trouble is, Corpse Bride was the first time the team of The Nightmare Before Christmas had reunited for an animated film and a lot of the marketing had been hyping that up. A decade of fans/wee goths had been raised on the Christmas/Halloween classic and were ready to devour more in that vein, myself included. I remember being disappointed in Corpse Bride, but now twenty years on, I wondered if it wasn’t maybe just its inability to live up to the hype.
And well . . . no, it’s not. Corpse Bride doesn’t work. And on rewatch it’s clear there are a number of reasons why.
First the music and songs are very forgettable. Name me one song from Corpse Bride? See, you can’t. Also the sound levels are all over the place, with dialogue descending to a whisper, then background music crashing in in a cacophony. The whole audioscape of the film needs another going over. Frequently in songs people are speak-singing, rather than actually singing, so a chorus sounds like the garble of a rabble, all lyrics indistinct and lost. This is a problem for the film overall, as the Corpse Bride’s backstory is told entirely in song, so if you don’t follow, you’re missing a chunk of characterisation, as well as (spoilers) the whole crux of the finale.
Secondly, in a musical, which this is, you usually open with one of two things, an “I want” song or “We are” song, establishing the world or your main character, both of which kick off the plot. Your world has a central premise which provides a challenge, or your character’s desires precipitate a journey. Corpse Bride opens with Victor and Victoria’s parents singing about how they want a perfect wedding to help them trade their status for wealth and vice versa. Like, it’s the least give-a-fuck-able aspect of the whole story. It doesn’t tell us anything about our main character, Victor. It doesn’t set up a world in which the creepy possibility of marrying a corpse might be possible. Imagine if the opening had been a spooky retelling of the legend of the Corpse Bride, her elopement, vanishing and suspected murder. That would have established your title character way before she is actually (rather belatedly) introduced in the film. And the foreshadowing would set some stakes before we’ve been bored to death by a dreary wedding rehearsal.
Victor at no point sings an “I want” song. He is a non-entity of a character. Meant to be a charming, bumbling, slightly sensitive, English, young man, he has no real personality beyond that. He seems reticent but resigned to being married, slightly encouraged when he meets Victoria for 5 seconds, which in the language of movies now means they’re in love, but willing to ditch her at the first sign of obstacle and kill himself to be with the Corpse Bride. Throughout this, he doesn’t really have highs and lows, he doesn’t fall down, despair and dig deep, he doesn’t learn a lesson. He’s a passenger throughout the entire film.
Far more interesting, both visually and in characterisation is the Corpse Bride. Both the animation and Helena Bonham Carter’s performance make her a much more dynamic and engaging person, with an interesting backstory and clear motivation. She has a clear “I want” number, eager to fulfil her thwarted dream of marriage. And she has enough screen-time to actually establish a rapport with Victor, enough that they could genuinely seem to have chemistry. And Victor seems willing to die to be with her, which would indicate a stronger feeling towards her than Victoria, who he has a simpering, pallid, awkward interaction with over a piano once.
And that’s the other thing about this film, it’s all over the place. Victor ends up with Victoria, not the Corpse Bride, in an ending so wrong it’s up there with Pretty In Pink (I’m with you Duckie, never forget). Like, the most he has in common with Victoria is their names. They have two scenes together, neither of which go beyond awkward politeness. While there is a gaping chasm where Victor’s character should be, the Corpse Bride at least seems to sweep him up in her own highs and lows. Instead of the romance culminating in a Romeo-style self-sacrifice to be with a woman he has some desire to be with, and resolve her sad tale with a happy ending, he ends up with the lassie that will make is his status-obsessed parents happy. What kind of ending is that?
It’s not just the ending I have a problem with, the whole movie is baggy. This isn’t something you see a lot in animation, because it is so fucking expensive and time intensive to make, it’s usually been storyboarded to within an inch of its life. Unlike live action, you can’t just do a rewrite and pull some reshoots. Scenes take months and years to make. So with this, you would think that the film would be tight, just scene-scene-scene, bang-bang-bang. But you find yourself watching scenes thinking, what is this for? It feels wooly and airy, with a lack of focus. Whose emotional through-line are we meant to be following? It’s only an hour and 10 minutes, but it feels long.
So in conclusion, it’s not just a matter of not living up to hype. Corpse Bride fails on its own demerits. Which is sad because there was a nugget of a cool idea there, and all the talent present to make it work. It just doesn’t.
GYFF showing Napoleon Dynamite was just the excuse I needed for a rewatch. It wasn’t until it started that I realised, shit I must not have seen this since I first watched it, back in the mid-2000s. I hoped it was as good as I remembered. My trepidation was at least partially founded on the fact the film spawned a boom in loser rom-coms, which leaned progressively more into nerd toxicity, the manic pixie dream girl trope, and geek misogyny – I’m looking at you Scott Pilgrim.
I needn’t worry, Napoleon Dynamite remains a superb piece of comedy. Its straight delivery with Napoleon’s flat, deadpan voice, only raising to whine or sulk – “God!” – is just perfection. The weirdness of the town, the rural backwater where everything is still trying to catch up from 20 years ago, being broke and dressing out of second hand shops so all your clothes are from the 80s. I loved Kip, his soft-spoken effeminate voice as he talks about “chatting with babes online” in what you are sure must be a catfish. With it being so quotable, I forgot just how much of what’s hilarious about the film is the physical comedy, Napoleon running headfirst out of shots, flinging a spatula of leftovers at Tina the llama, Pedro doing some deeply unimpressive “sweet jumps” on his bike.
As I say, later iterations on this kind of style of film became less pleasant, but Napoleon Dynamite is still good clean fun. Deb’s role isn’t to save or redeem or make whole Napoleon. She’s just his friend, even if there is the tingle of something more between them. The film doesn’t end on a kiss but on the two of them playing tetherball. This is a film in which friendship is the goal, the glue that holds everyone together. At the start Napoleon is a complete loner, but by the end, he’s built a little tribe. The sweetness is the sincerity of that, even amongst the lunacy of everything else.
Fourth wall-breaking, meta whodunnit. Thoroughly enjoyable.
An extra game to play throughout the film, if you’re a loser like me, is spotting actors who have been in Agatha Christie adaptations, and trying to remember from which story and which character they were.
Last minute Lucian Msamati was also a delightful treat.
Miss Juneteenth is about a mother and daughter, as they strive to make a better life. The mother, Turquoise, is a former Miss Juneteenth, who was granted a full university scholarship with the title, but through circumstances almost certainly to do with her drunk mother and waster boyfriend, was forced to drop out, and now struggles to make ends meet. She is determined her daughter will not face the same fate, and does everything she can to make sure her daughter uses this opportunity to fulfil her true potential.
Miss Juneteenth is not just a pageant. It commemorates the freeing of the last slaves, 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and draws a line straight from them to these girls, who use their scholarships to go on to be lawyers and doctors, surpassing the dreams of their ancestors. It is a way to pass on history to upcoming generations and inspire others. It celebrates the best of what the community is, and provides role models.
The daughter, Kai, isn’t sure if she gets it. Although she loves her mother, knows and respects the sacrifices she is making for her future, Kai doesn’t see how winning this pageant is gonna change her life, when it so obviously hasn’t benefitted her mother.
The film follows mostly practical concerns, and is told through the mundane scraping together of tips at a bar, trying to drum up shifts doing make-up at the morticians, and cutting back on everything to save every last dime. The basic financial obstacles to the pageant – entry fees and a dress – go from barely achievable to impossible as the film progresses. Mostly due to the shitty part-time dad, who talks a excellent game, but, while Turquoise is out there working two jobs with no electricity in her house, he has taken the wean to the pub with him to gamble over a game of dominoes. He even manages to get himself arrested on a bullshit charge, and she has to spend a chunk of Kai’s money bailing him out. Classic wasting bastard shit.
From the myriad barriers and knockbacks Turquoise faces, you’d think this is a film about the inescapabilty of class. Turquoise was an unusual winner, coming from the wrong side of town in a thrift store dress, who won through her sheer determination. And even when she had access to the benefit of a full scholarship, there were just too many burdens for her to thrive. And she ended up exactly where she was always meant to end up.
But that’s not it. And the emotional crescendo of the movie is when Kai finally gets it. The preparation and journey of the Miss Juneteenth pageant taught her discipline, perseverance, holding your head high, and speaking in your own voice. It taught her hard work, and insisting on your own worth in front of the crowd. It taught her the importance of always holding yourself up as a benefit to your community, someone you can be proud of. And these things it taught her, it taught her mother. Which is why when they still have nothing, her mother worked, and sacrificed, and put her child first, carrying herself with integrity and dignity. That’s how Juneteenth benefited her mother.
And that is what she will take away from Juneteenth, win or lose.
Went to see this coz I gret at the trailer. A story of sisterhood in the face of hardship. Rocks is a teenage lassie who is left to look after her young brother after their mum takes a nervous breakdown and disappears. Rocks spends the movie trying to handle this on her own, and stay invisible, so the social don’t come and separate her and her brother.
The movie is also about leaning on what you got, no one does this alone. Family is not just something you are born into, it’s something you make. And Rocks has to learn is that she has a family – they’re all around her.
The warm circle of laughter that is the group of girls stands in stark contrast to the hostility of the rest of the world, which just relentlessly attacks, picks at, and grinds down these young women of colour. Everyone is so quick to call the police, call the social, call security. Everything about them is a problem, their clothes, their voices, their independence, is seen as aggressive, defiant, and a threat.
And although the plot is obviously mapped out, I thought maybe the dialogue was largely unscripted, because it is so naturalistic. The girls talk all over each other, lots of times you can’t hear anything but the babble of the group. It makes you feel like you’re really watching someone’s life, rather than watching a film. Like you’re being let into something, rather than told a story.
A documentary about young drag queens and how there’s not really a venue for them to perform. They kinda have to exist on social media.
Drag shows are traditionally held in clubs and bars, where you can’t get in if you’re underage. Pride is a great venue but drag can often be lumped together with other performers with an overtly sexual aspect, such as leather or bondage. So there’s not a lot of age-appropriate venues to take young drag queens to perform.
Which is strange when you think about it, because what could more popular among kids of every generation than getting dressed up and pretending to be your favourite pop star? There should be as many drag and vogue classes as ballet and tap. A call to local dance teachers – it’s an untapped market!
The Witch was excellent. Paced more like a story of family breakdown than a stereotypical horror, it evokes a great sense of time and place. Would recommend if you want to remember what it was like when you were little and scared of witches.
Also an excellent film to make me thankful I didn’t have much of religious upbringing. You really do wonder what it’s for.
