In short: Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

Following as it does that pretty dire Suicide Squad movie, I didn’t exactly go into Cathy Yan’s Harley Quinn solo movie disguised as a Birds of Prey outing with high expectations. Particularly when you add various comics nerd problems I have with the movie conceptually: that the Birds of Prey without Batgirl/Oracle never feel like the Birds of Prey to me; that Harley Quinn has become to DC what Wolverine was for Marvel in the late 90s and early 00s – so omni-present, it becomes rather difficult to care about her; that the film uses characters so far from any of their comic incarnations, I’m not sure why it does use the names from the comics at all (see Cassandra Cain).

However, as a wise writer once wrote: talk about what’s actually there, not your expectations, and approaching Harley Quinn this way, I found myself really rather enjoying the whole affair. For one, unlike the David Ayer Suicide Squad film this is closest to, Cathy Yan and writer Christina Hodson actually know the tone they are going for and are sticking with it, yet still find time to just go off into the direction of some goofy, fun, or interesting idea if they come upon it. Most of the jokes are even funny, and the film is stuffed full of hilariously little details it presents for its audience to get or not get without having to tell us every damn second that we are indeed supposed to laugh now.

For my taste, this one’s much better at the humorous ultra-violence than the much praised Deadpool (which I still loathe with surprising intensity); but then, this is more playful than cynical a film in character, even if some guy gets fed to a hyena, so I’m bound to enjoy it more. It’s also surprisingly good at the small-scale/street level superhero violence, taking quite a few choreography tricks from classic martial arts cinema, which is never not a good thing.


And best of all: EXXXtreme Joker is not actually in the movie in person but only as a symbol of really shitty men for the heroine to mentally break free from, while ranting asshole Joker never existed in this world.

Three Films Make A Post: They faced death......and found life.

The ABC Murders (2018): Or as I like to call it “Poirot: The Grimdark Years”, seeing as this BBC mini-series directed by Alex Gabassi and written by Sarah Phelps goes down the road of all bad grimdark stuff of presenting a worldview and view of people so bleak it becomes more than just faintly ridiculous. In this film’s world, everyone is horrible 24/7, then murdered by a horrid person who in turn is hunted by a past his prime Poirot (John Malkovich doing his best with a crap script) haunted by the shadows of an of course sordid past. Thing is, once your portrayal of humankind becomes as one-note negative as the one presented here, an actual complex and complicated human being watching it does tend to lose the emotional connection to the oh so dark caricatures grimly making their way through one’s field of view. There is, needless to say, quite a bit of scowling involved, as well as the expected scenes of the killer (Eamon Farren) throwing “creepy” poses for the camera.

Need I mention that the main colours in the production are poison green and piss yellow as if this were exactly the low rent copy of a David Fincher production it indeed is?

The Dead Room (2018): As a matter of fact, this half-an-hour ghost story for Christmas written and directed by Mark Gatiss, is just as dark as that Poirot thing. Here, though, it’s a darkness that comes from an actual exploration of character and guilt of the piece’s lead character, radio horror narrator Aubrey Judd (wonderfully performed by Simon Callow). Where The ABC Murders only knows how to strike poses, this one derives its strength and its darkness from an understanding of human complexity rather than from turning humans into caricatures that only know how to be shitty.

Because Gatiss must have been in a hell of a form when he did this, the short film also deftly creates a sense of place and of time having passed, all the while demonstrating – as expected – the writer/director’s love for the classic British ghost story. Quite an achievement for half an hour of television.


Christopher Robin (2018): Despite today’s complaints against a particular style of grimdarkness, I am still a bit too cynical to enjoy the particular style of all ages personal improvement feelgood cinema of most films like Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin. However, in this particular case, I found myself rather spell-bound by the whole affair. In part, it’s certainly an effect of the nostalgia towards Winnie the Pooh et al, but there’s also the fact that the film is quite serious about its portrayal of a very specific post-war malaise that sees Christopher Robin (a fine turn by Ewan McGregor) losing himself in the surrounding greyness of 50s England (despite being married to the most certainly not grey Hayley Atwell). Also bound to win my heart is the portrayal of Christopher’s former friends around Pooh as childlike and gently, yet utterly weird living plush toys. Well, expect for Tigger, who is hilariously deranged and not at all gentle. Really, the only thing that isn’t enjoyable about this one is that it doesn’t solve the problem of alienation in a capitalist society it posits and instead has McGregor inventing paid leave, but I may be asking just a tiny bit much.

In short: Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

Unless he’s going the “Superman is Jesus” route, you can usually trust in Bryan Singer to turn out a good to great bit of mainstream Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. Personally, I hold him responsible for the fact that most of Fox’s X-Men films are actually worth watching, and actually seem to get what the better parts of the comics are thematically about.

Jack isn’t really up there with Days of Future Past, though. It’s still a fun bit of spectacle, with quite a few mildly rousing scenes of anti-giant violence, a usually fun to watch cast and assured pacing. This isn’t one of those big loud Hollywood movies that take their dear time actually starting (I’m looking at you, Suicide Squad’s never ending character introductions), either. Singer knows the hoary adventure chestnut he wants to tell, he knows which elements he needs to tell it, and he’s not going to bore his audience with stuff that doesn’t belong in it.

Still, there are some puzzling directorial choices here: why is the short exposition in form of a fairy tale shown as a bit of ass-ugly digital animation that looks as if they’d hired a handful of interns to cook something up in a weekend? Why does semi-fairy tale Olde Englande seem to be more inspired by Monty Python than fairy tales (or old England, for that matter)? What’s up with the curious tonal shifts between all ages fantasy adventure and moments of what surely must be conscious grittiness, seeing as they don’t have any thematic meaning? This certainly isn’t a film that’s trying to compare the idealistic ideas of adventure of its two young main characters with an uglier truth, nor one that’s trying to argue something about the power of the imagination trumping brutal reality, so I can see much reason for these tonal problems beyond them being the dreaded artefacts of earlier script versions that nobody bothered to get rid of. Also, why hire Stanley Tucci (whom I usually adore) of all people as a villain instead of someone who can do a proper Basil Rathbone by virtue of being British and not having to spend so much of his acting energy on his fake accent?

Again, this doesn’t mean Jack the Giant Slayer isn’t big loud fun. I certainly enjoyed my two hours with it, and am certainly not averse to watching it again in a couple of years. It’s just that Singer usually can do more working in the space Jack belongs to.