Each Day, A Film
January 21st 2012 (Retrospective)
Except that this is the bit where the whole Retrospective thing falls down, because it's time to write about a film that I literally just got back from watching at the cinema.
And yes, it's a couple of months after the film's released, but the beautiful independent cinema a few towns over gets things a decent interval after the film is initially released, and, frankly, it's worth waiting for. Beautiful is a bit over-the-top - the waiting area is a little crowded, the bar staff are uniformly 18 (and, I suspect, get replaced as soon as they leave the sixth form and go to university), and the management are occasionally viewable as a little eccentric, but it's a lovely place, the 'normal' seats are what 'luxury' seats are in a high street cinema, and it has a fully stocked and licensed bar.
But enough about the cinema, you're saying; what about the film?
I honestly loved it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a Guy Ritchie fan - at least, a Guy Ritchie fan of his films I've watched, having avoided Swept Away - but with the Sherlock Holmes franchise he seems to have picked up the kind of confidence that only a large budget and a minimum of two big-name actors per film can provide, and instead of getting cocky with it Ritchie - plus some amazing visual effects supervisors - seem to have set about making something that looks, well, stunning at times and merely really pretty at others.
Yes, there are odd little tics - disposing of someone by giving them a unique strain of Tuberculosis while sitting next to them seems prone to failure or, at least, contagion, given that the BCG vaccination wasn't available until at least twenty to thirty years after the film was set, so why not just use poison? - and yes, Stephen Fry gets all kinds of non-revealing naked in the film, but for every tic there's a moment of beautiful visual effects to complement it.
And yes, I almost did write for every tic there's a tock there, but I thought better of it.
The main thing for me, though, is that I was thoroughly able to get into the film from start (although it felt like a slightly slow start, but that's not necessarily a bad thing) right up until the end.
One thing that bugs me about both the recent TV series and this film, though, is the Plot Immortality contract that almost feels a little insulting; we know the film / tv series is going to continue, so try as you might to make us think the main character is dead, dead, dead at one point, it's not going to stick, is it? So, writers, are you really expecting the audience to go oh wait! I was really surprised when he turned out to be standing in the graveyard / wearing a strange camoflage suit, that totally blindsided me!
The only think that I find more annoying, really, are villain suicides. Wait! My plan will fail unless I kill myself to stop you making me make it fail! BANG. Please, no more. Even throwing a smoke bomb, whipping your cape about you and running off in the confusion is preferable to a Se7en-induced plot-mandated villain suicide.
But let's get back to the matter at hand; there's one sequence that really stands out for me in A Game of Shadows, and maybe for everyone else, too; the forest sequence. It's a masterpiece of managing the flow and speed of time along with incorporating beautiful special effects and occasionally RunCam, i.e. that strange sensation when the viewer is supposedly running alongside someone with the loping gait that we all seem to have. It's kinetic, it's well-done, and it's the only time I've seen a giant artillery piece called "Little Hansel".
Anyway, it's a weekend night and, oh God, I'm writing again, so I should probably knock this on the head - but for now, it's nice to be only a week behind my self-imposed deadlines. Let's take a moment to enjoy that. Granted, in an hour and twenty minutes I'll be eight days behind, but hey, who doesn't love a challenge?
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