Dear Under Southern Eyes Readers and Followers,
Another year has come and gone and 2018 has dawned!
I feel I’ve probably seen a lot more films in 2017 than I did in 2016 – I certainly saw twice as many in the second half of 2017 than I did in the first half. Of course not all the films I saw in 2017 were great or even good – quite a considerable number were disappointing. On the other hand there were films that, while falling far short of what they could have been, nevertheless served up some interesting ideas and lots of food for thought.
The best recent films (as in films that had their first release in 2017 or the year before) that I saw were Rosie Jones’ “The Family”, Sinan Saeed and Tom Duggan’s “Aleppo Renaissance”, John Pilger’s “The Coming War on China”, Alex Apollonov and Aleksa Vukovic’s “The Haircut”, Erik Poppe’s “Kongens Nei {The King’s Choice)”, Dome Karukoski’s “Tom of Finland”, Jan Hrebejk’s “The Teacher” and Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing”. Note that most of the films listed are either documentaries or films from northern and central Europe. The TV series “Adam Ruins Everything” was entertaining if not always as informative and educational as it could have been; the half-hour format is much too short for the series and at least 45 minutes per episode would have been adequate for a series aimed at adults down to young teenagers.
Disappointments were various and most of these were Hollywood films or British / American fictional historical drama collaborations. Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049” had a thin plot and one-dimensional characters, in spite of its themes and contradictory attitude towards women. The current Hollywood trend of giving women roles that in the past would have been given to men, adding to a new stereotype that whatever men are or do in real life, in film fantasy land women can do even better – whether as underground guerrilla rebel leader or as chief sadistic enforcer to a money-hungry billionaire – is becoming ever more silly and unrealistic. This isn’t what I believe feminism was supposed to achieve. Likewise, David Leitch’s film “Atomic Blonde”, boasting a female James Bond character, came across as more cartoon comic than Cold War bleakness and its plundering of 1980s German punk culture and music was shallow and manipulative. The less said about Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant”, the better.
Of other films outside Hollywood that could have been better, D Kobiela and H Welchman’s “Loving Vincent” said very little that couldn’t have been done in a live-action film. Tadashi Miike’s “Blade of the Immortal” probably should have gone back to story-board stage to get more of the original manga in and more of the sword fights out.
So I found myself relying on films of the past to remind me that, yes, there can be such a thing as movies with more substance than style and which make you think even if the questions they ask and the issues they raise are treated quite cursorily. Peter Weir’s “The Truman Show”, Sidney Lumet’s “Dog Day Afternoon” and Phil Noyce’s “The Quiet American” were three such films that interrogated and criticised aspects of Western (and in particular American) culture of their time.
What 2018 is likely to bring, and whether the films to come will be any better than what they were in 2017, we cannot predict but one thing that seems obvious is that as the English-speaking world continues to decline politically, economically and culturally, its cinematic products will also be worse. Two films I saw – “Blade Runner 2049” and Kenneth Branagh’s ego trip “Murder on the Orient Express” – had endings suggesting that sequels were in the works; it seems that no film concept or idea is too sacred, that Hollywood can’t resist flogging it to death through endless sequels. Another Hollywood trend likely to continue is the industry’s plundering of other countries’ acting and directing talent to make up for its own shortfall in producing the successors to the Scorseses and Coppolas, the de Niros, Pacinos and Hoffmans of today.
Whatever transpires in 2018, I wish everyone a great year in 2018 and happy film viewing!
Regards, Nausika.