Movie madness

I ended last year with a brief comment on a recently-watched movie (The Power of the Dog), so let's start 2022 in the same vein. Plenty of time for more serious stuff later.

We watched Don't look up, the hard-to-categorize disaster movie-cum-satire on Netflix. Reviews have ranged all the way from "masterpiece" to "worst movie ever made". For us it was somewhere in between, not least because the first hour is so much better than the second.

It's presumably not a spoiler by now to say that the premise is that a team of astrophysicists discover a comet heading directly for Earth, and try with mixed success to warn the world of the approaching danger. For the first hour, at least, it is very evidently played for laughs, though a surprising number of online reviewers don't seem to have clued in to that. The satire is not of a quality to cause Armando Iannucci any sleepless nights, but it's serviceable enough. Politicians, journalists and even the scientists themselves are the target of some reasonably well-aimed barbs.

The second half of the movie flags badly, with much less focus on the satire as the comet looms ever closer. The A-list cast (Leonardo di Caprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Mark Rylance) are watchable throughout, but the whole thing becomes tedious well before (spoiler redacted). 

Supposedly we are to read the whole thing as a cri de coeur from the movie makers that we take a looming existential crisis (climate change) seriously before it's too late. If that's the case, I'm not sure it really works: the message I took from it is that experts can make their best efforts, but politicians and rich people will always find a way to screw things up. That's largely true, but the movie offers no ideas at all about how that dilemma can be solved.

At the other end of the quality spectrum, we re-watched Stanley Kubrick's astounding Barry Lyndon. This may be the most visually perfect movie ever made. I paused it once or twice at random points for comfort breaks -- it runs over three hours --  and coming back into the room and seeing the still image on the screen was like entering an art gallery. The music is excellent too and reflects Kubrick's unflagging attention to detail.

Much of the criticism of Barry Lyndon tends to focus on Ryan O'Neal's performance in the title role. His Irish accent is certainly hit-or-miss. However, the criticism of his overall acting ability (or lack thereof), while justified, may be beside the point. In a Kubrick movie, nothing is left to chance, so we should assume that this is what Kubrick wanted, a tabula rasa performance that almost makes Barry a bit player in his own story rather than the focus of it.   

We're not done yet!  After enjoying Barry Lyndon, my wife and I have agreed that next week's three-hour marathon will be Visconti's 1963 masterpiece The Leopard (Il Gattopardo), starring Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale.  Life's too short, and the pandemic's too long, for bad wine and bad movies. Happy New Year!