In brief: Wreck-It Ralph

So: there’s an arcade game called Fix-It Felix in which a muscle-bound vandal goes around smashing up a tenement building and terrorizing its occupants. A Super-Mario-a-like with a golden hammer, the aforementioned Felix, racks up the points while repairing the damage and is the hero of the residents. When the arcade closes at the end of the day, Felix is feted and enjoys the champagne lifestyle at a series of parties, while Ralph (voiced by John C Reilly) is ostracized to a pile of bricks behind the tenement building that serves as his home. Periodically, he takes a train to Game Central and attends a Bad-Guys Anonymous meeting. Finally, disaffected with his lot in life, Ralph game jumps … only to discover other characters in other games with equally debilitating problems.

‘Wreck-It Ralph’ is gorgeously animated and visually inventive, but suffers from two main problems. Firstly, only the Fix-It Felix game feels like a genuine old-school arcade game. The other two main games are a backstory-heavy RPG epic that looks more suited to PS3 or X-Box, and a ludicrously pastel-coloured racing game that I can only describe as what you’d get if the cast of ‘Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’ kidnapped the programmers of Gran Turismo and brainwashed them by playing the Katy Perry ‘California Gurls’ video on a loop. For the story to work, the characters have to exist in a world of arcade games. Do kids even play games at arcades anymore? Every frame of ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ feels like it belongs in the mid-80s.

Secondly, the game jumping concept – so to-the-fore in the trailers – isn’t explored or exploited beyond the two games mentioned above. Indeed, most of the film takes place in the KatyPerryVille racing game, a milieu that’s overdesigned and oversaturated with primary colours. This is where Ralph meets fellow pariah Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) – a frontrunner for Most Annoying Sidekick of the Year. It’s also where the gently improving themes of humility and the value of friendship are ladled out and spoon-fed to the audience. 

A much funnier narrative strand has the squeaky clean Felix (Jack McBrayer) join forces with gung-ho, weaponry-obsessed shoot-’em-up heroine Calhoun (Jane Lynch). It’s one of several moments in the film where the surface is briefly peeled back and the all possibilities of how much better it could have been are suddenly glimpsed.

The Aviator

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 3 of 10 / Overall: 65 of 100

While there is plenty to love about ‘Gangs of New York’ – the vast sets, the awesome opening sequence, Daniel Day Lewis in excelsis – it suffers from Leonardo di Caprio’s central performance. I still identified him back then as the floppy-haired romantic lead (albeit with a handful of interesting indie turns in his filmography) whose poster was di rigueur on the walls of teenage girls the world over. In ‘Gangs of New York’, he didn’t have the physicality, didn’t have the threat. His was a role that the younger de Niro would have torn into. For that reason, ‘Gangs’ never quite achieved what I wanted it to – the status of late-period Scorsese masterpiece that I’d been waiting for over a decade.

When ‘The Aviator’ was released, I approached it warily. It was an inherited project – Scorsese had only intended to produce, with Michael Mann calling the shots; Mann, however, decided he didn’t want to make another biopic so soon after ‘Ali’ and Scorsese took the helm – and it reunited the director with di Caprio. I was blown away. Sure, there are some minor quibbles (it’s slightly overlong, the CGI during the flight of the “Spruce Goose” is a bit wobbly), but ‘The Aviator’ has energy, visual opulence and a to-die-for cast pulling out all the stops.

Di Caprio’s portrayal of Howard Hughes completely sold me on him as an actor and he just seems to have gone from strength to strength since. Cate Blanchett is fantastic as Katherine Hepburn (I love the way Scorsese shapes some of her scenes, such as the banter on the golf course or the rat-a-tat-tat dialogue around the dinner table, as homages to Hepburn’s own movies), while Kate Beckinsale pulls off a sexy, sultry, don’t-mess-with-me approximation of Ava Gardner. Rounding out the cast are such luminaries as John C. Reilly, Alan Alda, Danny Huston, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Frances Conroy and always excellent Ian Holm, one of my personal favourite actors. There’s even a cameo from No Doubt singer Gwen Stefani as Jean Harlow – she doesn’t do much, but she nails Harlow’s look perfectly.

Scorsese handles the long running time (a shade over two and three quarter hours) masterfully, structuring the first third as an exhilarating immersion into the world of Hughes’ key obsessions – aircraft, movies, women – and seducing the audience with his charisma and playboy lifestyle. This stage of the movie contains most of the spectacular flying sequences, culminating in the mechanical failure and devastating crash of a test plane that Hughes insists on piloting himself. The middle stretch is heralded by aftermath of the crash. Things go wrong for Hughes: he loses Hepburn; his relationship with Gardner turns into a miasma of jealousy and suspicion; senate hearings coincide with his deteriorating mental state and increasingly obsessive and reclusive behaviour. The final third charts Hughes’s hermit-like withdrawal from the world; his phobia of dirt, germs and human contact. Things are almost redeemed when he emerges to pilot the “Spruce Goose”, his most ambitious undertaking in the field of avionics, but history is waiting to write it up as a magnificent folly.

‘The Aviator’ is full-tilt filmmaking, often flamboyant and indulgent, but also intuitively attuned to character moments and not afraid to follow its subject into his darkest times. Scorsese eschews the mannered, plodding, heavily expository approach that typifies many biopics. He maintains focus and a linear through-line without ever sacrificing narrative drive, pacing or the audience’s attention span. If all biopics were this good, I probably wouldn’t be so reticent about the genre.

A Prairie Home Companion

I’ve long been a fan of Garrison Keillor: the original radio broadcasts of ‘Lake Wobegon Days’ were homespun nostalgia in excelsis. The book was even better, a lovely, lyrical slice of Americana. With Robert Altman at the helm, Keillor’s timeless, poignant prose found its way into another medium and the result – ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ – is a perfectly cast, witty, subtle, cleverly observed ensemble piece.

It’s also a swansong. A summation.

As much as I wish Altman could have made more films (after the release of ‘Short Cuts’, his multi-narrative Raymond Carver adaptation, he hinted he was planning two more Carver films), it’s fitting that ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ was his last. It’s so perfect and quintessentially Altman in so many ways.

‘M*A*S*H’, the film that made the director’s name and allowed him to plough an eccentric and unique furrow through American cinema, established him as a master of overlapping scenes; with ‘Nashville’, ‘Short Cuts’ and ‘Gosford Park’ he put together ensemble casts par excellence; ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘The Player’ acerbically satirised the institutions of the military and Hollywood respectively.

All of these qualities (which are the keynotes to his best films) are present in ‘A Prairie Home Companion’. Parochial radio stations, corporate and personal self-importance, the lachrymose excesses of Country & Western music - all are gently, but effectively, sent up. Scenes overlap, character interrelationships merge and diverge and interlink. The cast is as eclectic as any Altman ever assembled: Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, Kevin Kline, Virginia Madsen, Lindsay Lohan, L.Q. Jones (a stalwart of Sam Peckinpah's films), Woody Harrelson and John C Reilly (the last two hilarious as a musical comedy duo).

Most poignantly of all, ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ is a film about endings. The death of its director, shortly after its completion, bestows upon the film an extra quality. And I’m still unsure as to how deeply this influences my appreciation of the film; seeing for the first time at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema, it sent me out of the auditorium with a tear in my eye, but how much of that was wrapped up in Altman’s passing? Catching the film on TV recently, a late night screening and a couple of glasses of wine already consumed, my reaction was similar.

If ‘A Prairie Home Companion’ had been made by any other (and crucially, still-living) director, would my perspective be different? How far does the heart rule the head?