I’m one of the critics who enjoyed Kristoffer Borgli’s first English language film, Dream Scenario. For some writer-directors the conceit of a film can be enough and they either don’t interrogate their ideas deeply enough or coast on visual vibes and hope for the best. Luckily, his latest film, The Drama, skates close to being annoying but script and execution conspire to pull it off.
At a drunken menu and wine testing prior to their wedding, librarian Emma (Zendaya), art curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and their best man and maid of honour (Mamadou Athie and Alana Haim) who happen to be a couple, get themselves into a ‘truth or dare’ kind of parlour game where each one has to reveal “the worst thing they ever did” to group. No one really likes this idea but no one can back down and Emma’s final revelation proves to be the bombshell that threatens to blow up the wedding as well as the friendships.
The convention here appears to be that reviewers not reveal what it is that Emma confesses to. I’ll play along but reluctantly, as – firstly – it happens quite early on and – secondly – your response to the whole thing relies on it. Suffice to say that nobody handles it very well and Charlie starts to wonder who it is that he’s supposed to be marrying and Emma, in turn, sees that Charlie may not be the most emotionally reliable life partner that she could have found.
There are a lot of interesting things going on – psychological fragility being something of a theme of Emma’s story – but a lot of it comes down to trying to deal with all of this at the same time as organising a wedding rather than preparing for a life together. In situations like this weddings are an event to endure rather than a party to enjoy. A fiery portal to pass through and hope like hell you remember them fondly.
Why does it work when it’s a terrible beat-up of an idea that probably shouldn’t? The best performances that I’ve seen from each of the leads, for a start. Two actors whose movie star-ness means they can often look other-worldly, here look like ordinary people for a change. Somehow you continue to root for them, despite their fuck-ups. Pattinson’s Charlie, for example, is introduced doing something fairly heinous in order contrive a meet-cute with Emma, but he’s such a pathetically bad liar that he can’t sustain it for very long and you end up forgiving him (as she does).
And that’s one of the things the film is about – at what point does something you have chosen not to tell someone become a secret with all of its conspiratorial connotations? At what point do people you love become entitled to every aspect of your inner life? Do they ever?
Bart Schrijver’s The North could easily be titled The Un-drama as the friendship between two men slowly unravels on a long Scottish hike they intend as a kind of reunion. They are heading for a forebodingly named spot called Cape Wrath and on the way they experience all of the extremes of a great ‘trail’. The physical challenge of meeting your distance targets every day, the extreme Scottish weather, equipment failures1, but mostly their inability to relate to each other as their lives have diverged over a decade.
It’s a beautiful film – and having walked some of the earlier parts of the path myself over 40 years ago I can vouch for its often painful accuracy – but your enjoyment of it may depend entirely on your tolerance for men failing to communicate with each other.
The best film of the week – and I’ll concede that it’s a tight call – may well be the least heralded and that’s a shame. In the spirit of classic films about dangerous and unfair worlds seen through the eyes of children – Capharnaum comes to mind, or even Empire of the Sun – it tells the story of nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), chosen by the school lottery to bake a cake to celebrate the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 53rd birthday in 1990. This is no easy task as the international sanctions against his régime mean shortages of ingredients and no one around her seems to be taking the task as seriously as she is.
As she navigates a perilous path around the city – sometimes accompanied by her grandmother, sometimes by her schoolfriend and sometimes by her loyal rooster – we see a world of corruption and selfishness. On today of all days, though, it’s good to be reminded that when we describe nations as adversaries – even badly behaved ones – it’s invariably the ordinary people, especially the children, who bear the brunt of it.
There’s one scene in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie involving a sleeping dinosaur and a special raygun that turns characters into baby versions of themselves that I thought aspired to Looney Tunes levels of inspiration and actually made me laugh out loud, but the rest of it is a noisy, colourful mess.
I know it’s going to make tonnes of money but the money really shouldn’t be the point. If you are making films aimed at young folk, you should have some kind of moral compass that guides your storytelling and you really shouldn’t be resolving challenges with – even cartoon – violence.
We’ve been reading a lot during the current omnicrisis about how China is quietly going about leading the world in climate and electrification technology, while we in the west continue to cling to the disappearing old ways. Based on Bi Gan’s Resurrection, we can also add original blockbuster science-fiction to the list of areas where we are being left behind.
High concept and brilliantly realised, the film imagines a world where humans are no longer able to dream, except for one person (known as a Deliriant and played by Jackson Lee). He uses movies projected inside his unconscious mind as a place where he can continue to dream and a mysterious young woman creates four scenarios for them so she can understand what makes him so special.
Hypnotic, vivid, strange and also besotted with cinematic tropes, Resurrection may prove too slow for your own consciousness if you start it too late at night2, but if you turn up with the right energy it’s an amazing trip.
Time travel is taken completely unseriously in BenDavid Grabinski’s Hulu/Disney+ comedy Mike & Nick & Nick and Alice, in which a mid-level mob manager (Vince Vaughan) uses the time machine his organisation has inadvertently been financing to go back six months and fix something that is bothering his conscience – himself.
If Vaughan’s brand of deadpan non-acting suits you then you’ll love having two of him but the best things in it are Eiza González as the girlfriend with the hidden depths and Grabinski’s non sequitur laden script.
Man on the Run is a McCartney-approved Prime Video documentary by Morgan Neville about the period of the ex-Beatle’s life when he became an – um – ex-Beatle.
Not quite 30 but one of the most famous faces in the world and also out of a job, McCartney retreated to his Scottish farmhouse and tried to rebuild. He didn’t know what kind of music he wanted to make, he was frustrated by the business and his best mate was on the other side of the Atlantic lying in bed and being sarcastic.
After a couple of interesting false starts, he decides he needs a band again and that he also needs his famously non-musical wife Linda to be in it. This is the most interesting section of the film as he learns to tour again – kids in tow – and takes delight in splitting all the 50p entrance fees equally among the band. They are not quite as delighted as they don’t have Beatles mega-royalties to fall back on.
The second half of the film is less successful as Wings become a global success and we see McCartney turning into the 1980s boring family entertainer that he evolved into. He didn’t emerge from that whole Rupert Bear period, I think, until this century and started being really adventurous again.
As you might expect, Man on the Run looks and sounds great which is a pleasure when we’re being reminded of all those classic Wings singles. The hits may not have been pouring out of him they were during the Beatles days but they were still pretty good.
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Editor’s note
As usual, yesterday’s newsletter was written here in the website editor and then sent to Buttondown to be turned into a newsletter. It was there I found a couple of painful typos but only after I was already on the road to my first film of the day. That’s where I learnt how difficult editing Buttondown content is on my tiny little phone screen. I can’t say that we have ironed out all the wrinkles in this new process – handling of images may only be improved by me going up to another paid level of Buttondown – but we are getting better every day.
