Three Films Make A Post: Saving the World is Alien to Them

Rim of the World (2019): I’m generally on board with Netflix’s approach of producing or just buying up a lot of stuff to throw at its audience in the hopes of some of it sticking. Alas, other things are pretty sticky, too, which brings us directly to this abomination directed (ha!) by McG(odawful) and written by the guy who certainly wasn’t responsible for the good bits in Thor or the very many good ones in X-Men: First Class. This movie-like object tries to milk the Spielberg/Abrams/Stranger Things axis, but only proves how good and clever the things it rips off are by getting nothing whatsoever right, neither the characters who manage to be one-dimensional clichés the script clearly isn’t even clever enough to understand, nor the horrible attempts at “humour” that fall so flat, a pancake is voluptuous in comparison, nor the alien design that looks like something out of a really shitty SyFy Original, nor the plotting that can’t get a straightforward journey to save the world right. Also horrible are McG’s generic and bland direction, the generic and bland score, as are the special effects. The whole thing plays like something made by people who think they have the whole being Spielberg/JJ Abrams thing down pat but are indeed to those guys as Bizarro is to Superman.

Arcadia (2017): Fortunately completely unrelated to Rim is this attempt by director and writer Paul Wright to portray the repeated construction and reconstruction of the philosophical and sometimes physical relationship between the British and the idea of the land they live on (more than the reality). Wright does this collage-style, repurposing footage taken from everything from exploitation movies, to documentaries, to public safety films, building an impressionistic view of Wright’s interpretation of the Question of England.

Given this technique, what Wright wants to say about his theme isn’t always quite clear, and sometimes, things do seem to come down to one of that “closeness to nature = good / keeping the green shit away = bad” business I tend to be rather sceptical about.


Topsy-Turvy (1999): For reasons only known to my subconscious, I have for years turned Ken Loach and this film’s director Mike Leigh into a horrifying fictional poverty porn creating monster, where as a matter of fact, Leigh really isn’t into that sort of thing at all, as this period comedy about Gilbert and Sullivan’s creation of “The Mikado” proves rather handily. At first, a certain meandering quality and the film’s considerable length do threaten a bit of a hard time, but the longer the film goes on, the clearer it becomes that the film’s often episodic seeming structure does indeed lead to a rather interesting place where the film not only becomes a portray of the British operetta masters, and their fraught relationship, but also of their working methods, musical theatre, the sexual and social politics of their time, and the creation of art as a collaborative process; also, a film that suggests that “The Mikado” is really pretty great. All the while, the film (and its great cast) portray the very diverse cast of characters with depth as well as broadness, managing to mix human and social insight with quite a bit of the funny stuff.