Green Book

Set in the 1960's, we follow New York bouncer Frank Vallelonga (known as Tony Lip to his friends) as he is hired by famed black musician Dr. Don Shirley to serve as a driver/bodyguard on an eight-week tour of the deep South. Naturally then, it's an odd couple/road trip movie, with the two main characters initially bouncing off one another before bonding over the course of the movie. But what's fascinating about Green Book – and not necessarily fascinating in a good way – is the way in which these two characters change over the course of the movie.

Or more importantly, the way that one of them kind of doesn't. Green Book is book-ended by scenes that imply Tony Lip (and somehow his family, possibly via telepathy) has grown as a person during his time with Dr. Shirley, but the movie in between those scenes in no way challenges Tony's worldview or the way he acts – in fact, it validates and agrees with him almost unanimously, possibly because it was written by Tony's real life son, Nick Vallelonga, who naturally wouldn't want to portray his father in a bad light. Instead, it is Dr. Shirley's worldview that is challenged throughout, often on the receiving end of what can only be described as Tony's "white working class wisdom". Over the course of the movie, we see Dr. Shirley go from someone who doesn't respect or appreciate Tony to someone who does – which means that Green Book is, at a fundamental level, a film about a black man learning not to judge a white guy based on appearances.

That's pretty incomprehensible for a film set in the midst of the Civil Rights movement in the Jim Crow South to do, especially when Dr. Shirley's real life family dispute many of the claims made by Green Book, right down to the idea that Tony and Dr. Shirley were ever even friends. This is a film that seems to broadly agree with Tony when he says that he's blacker than Dr. Shirley, who at this point in the movie has been harassed and assaulted multiple times for being black, a film in which Tony helps Dr. Shirley get back in touch with his blackness by forcing him to eat fried chicken. In the years to come, we're going to look back at Green Book and laugh about the fact that it was ever considered a serious movie, let alone a best picture award winner – it's simply an incredibly tone deaf and stupid movie, offering a childish and mollycoddled take on a topic that deserves a far more intelligent and confrontational examination than Green Book is willing (or able, I suspect) to offer.

And yet I'd be lying if I tried to claim that Green Book wasn't at the very least watchable, reasonably well put together on a technical level with nice cinematography and good editing even while it sticks its foot so far into its mouth that it can taste its own kneecaps. Mortensen's Frank Vallelonga is a caricature of an Italian-American but it's exactly what this movie needs, a performance big enough and bizarre enough to keep you engaged where a more subtle performance simply wouldn't. Is it a good performance, of a well-written character? No. But it works within the context that Green Book presents it, much like the rest of the movie tapping into well-worn tropes to produce something so familiar that it can't help but end up feeling... well, comforting, and safe, and broadly inoffensive - as long as it's playing to "the right kind of audience", which just so happens to be the same demographic as the majority of Academy Award voters.

Green Book is little more than a shallow and superficial example of why the recognisable hallmarks of a prestige picture don't mean much at all if they aren't imprinted on something with actual merit, which really shouldn't have come as much of a surprise being as it's directed by one of the guys behind the excruciating Movie 43. With another writer and a different director, maybe Green Book could've been a genuinely good, enlightening movie. But as it stands, it's little more than a film that's only vaguely entertaining at its very best, deeply unchallenging and staggeringly misguided throughout - and if that's what we're holding up as the best picture of 2018, then something has gone very wrong indeed.

The Favourite

"Everything is about sex except sex. Sex is about power". It's a quote often attributed to Oscar Wilde (as far as I'm aware, no one actually knows where it came from), but more importantly, it's a quote that couldn't help but come to mind when thinking about The Favourite, the latest film from The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer director Yorgos Lanthimos (although Pop. 1280 is now in preproduction at the time of writing this). In The Favourite, sex is seemingly only ever a means of establishing power, whether that be through attempting to create an heir, marrying for a title, paying a debt or even simply gaining someone's favour. It is the latter of these that The Favourite naturally spends most of its time on, but make no mistake – sex and power are intrinsically linked throughout, whether it be staring you in the face or hiding just out of view, obscured somewhat by the norms and systems of society but still very much ever present.

It's a thematic core that in the wrong hands could've easily come across as misogynistic, playing into tired femme fatale tropes without a shred of irony or self-awareness, but thankfully Lanthimos, and writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, are smarter than that, able to ensure that we understand this to be a societal phenomena rather than a gendered one thanks to just how much of The Favourite ultimately circles back and highlights this link. Take, for example, a scene in which a naked guy gets pelted with rotten fruit for the entertainment of a group of bawdy male politicians, or one in which another politician sits there "stroking his goose" (not an innuendo within the context of this review but very much a visual innuendo within the film itself) as he and an opponent speak with the Queen – I wasn't over-exaggerating earlier when I called this link "ever present", and the result is a film just as focused and thematically interesting as The Lobster, and equally fascinating to think about after the fact.

Set during the War of Spanish Succession, we follow the once wealthy but now broke Abigail Hill as she starts work as a maid in Queen Anne's court, gaining the job thanks to the fact that her cousin is Sarah Churchill, the Duchess of Marlborough and the Queen's most trusted adviser. After Abigail creates an ointment that helps the Queen deal with her gout, Queen Anne takes a liking to her, making her a lady-in-waiting and in the process starting a competition between Sarah and Abigail for the Queen's favour – and the power that comes with it. And so it begins, a game in which Abigail and Sarah are constantly trying to outwit and outplay one another in order to become Queen Anne's favourite and achieve their goals, whether they be political or personal or both in nature, and as you might've guessed based on my opening paragraphs, sex plays a major part. The Favourite might not be the most historically accurate film you've ever seen, but then again that's by no means what it's trying to achieve – instead, it's simply using the vague historical theory that Queen Anne may have had a lesbian relationship with Abigail Hill as a kicking off point for an engrossing tale of female rivalry and political machinations in the 18th century.

Queen Anne, Sarah and Abigail are interesting on paper thanks to Davis and McNamara's captivating and often hilarious script, but once you factor in the brilliant performances given by the three leading ladies, these characters all take on additional life and really pop from the screen in ways they simply wouldn't have with different actresses in the roles. You've got Emma Stone as Abigail Hill, who brings a very modern sheen to this initially naive point of view character; Rachel Weisz as Sarah Churchill, who plays her as confident and domineering and downright unshakable in the face of opposition (with a bunch of fantastic outfits to boot - if we don't see Weisz play a maverick pirate captain in something soon, we've failed as a species); and of course the brilliant Olivia Colman as the sickly and deeply unstable Queen Anne, whose instability is first played for comedy (and to great effect) but soon morphs into something quite tragic, showing yet again that Colman is a far more talented actress than she has been given credit for in the past.

Seeing them interact with and bounce off one another is where the vast majority of The Favourite's entertainment value comes from, especially as the aforementioned great screenplay slowly reveals more information about these characters over the course of the films running time, forcing you to rethink whose side your on multiple times as you learn more about them and as their actions get more extreme. There are other characters in The Favourite, of course - I'd be remiss to not at least mention Nicholas Hoult's vile and conniving (but oddly compelling) Robert Harley - but they're very much secondary in nature, only really existing as a way to further complicate this triangle and add external pressure. There's no denying that The Favourite is an incredibly tightly focused movie, after all.

But maybe that's somewhat to its detriment, come the end. I mentioned earlier that it is hilarious, and that's true - but only really for the first two thirds or so of its running time. As tensions mount and Abigail and Sarah begin to go even further in their attempt to become Queen Anne's favourite, the film's increasingly laser-like focus on this story means that there is less time for the kind of character informing (and audience pleasing) humour that defined the earlier parts of the movie, and while the story itself is still strong enough to keep you engaged, it has to be said that I missed the comedy a fair bit.

Add to that an ending that can't help but feel underwhelming and a touch conventional in comparison to the film preceding it and sadly, The Favourite can't help but be a movie that ends not with a bang but... well, certainly not with a whimper, but not quite the extravagant fireworks you may have been hoping for either. Still, I'd be lying if I tried to claim that The Favourite is anything other than a film I enjoyed a great deal, engaging on a number of levels throughout and more accessible than Lanthimos' previous movies without losing his distinctive style or voice – and at the end of the day, that still all adds up to make a movie that's very much worth watching, flaws and all.