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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2022)

Contained possibly the worst CGI human face since The Rock from The Mummy Returns.

I went into this with a genuine desire to ignore the anti-hype, but this was an abysmal case of Confirmation Bias for anyone with an axe to grind about the MCU. Ugly, incoherent, unfunny and just plain tedious to watch; the FX were truly shockingly inept and flat. Ant-Man himself was thrown under the bus; his knockabout small-scale adventures of Super Science heists and family drama sacrificed, all so Jonathan Majors could ham up the runtime with the MCU's latest cod-English accent - coupled with an aggressive reminder these films simply exist to advertise the next one.

Green Room (2015)

Gnarly and nasty, but never excessive. If comedy's foundation is built upon timing - perhaps the best horror does too. Not like laughter and screaming aren't often interchangeable responses after all. Point being, this film was an able example of when and how one might use "gore" as a cinematic tool: not through sheer amount; or a desire to push the viewer's face into the viscera; but as punctuation, a sudden moment of extreme carnage quickly whipped away before the camera could leer, or the brain could process what it saw. That's not to say there isn't a place for OTT blood n' guts - step forward Evil Dead 2 - but it's only when something's done well, you can understand when it's done ... well, done by Eli Roth.

That's not to say this was a film dominated by violence mind you. Broadly, it was a stripped-down and economical "under siege" story with a unique and authentic isolated setting, its villains depressingly believable. While our heroes were a group utterly out of their depth, already on the fringe of society before they found themselves trapped with Nazis 20 miles from the Middle of Nowhere. Not a group of experts, military or otherwise, but a bunch of scared musicians. This genre of film can be prone to stumble when previously sober characters would grab the Idiot Ball and make a rash decision - just to create some loud noise and action. So the Movie Can Happen. Here, the panic of the ill-prepared never gave way to total foolishness; instead, the actions of the protagonists felt roughly parallel to how I'd react, if I'm honest. Then when the tables finally turned after sequences of excruciating viciousness, the catharsis felt twice as earned. Not like one needs a narrative excuse for a robust response to Nazism - but it helped tie up the sense of victims becoming the hunters.

The largest promotional angle at the time of release was Patrick Stewart playing the Big Bad - and I'm really stuck on this one. By all accounts, his was a menacing and understated performance; constantly matter-of-fact that in of itself was chilling, never indulging in theatrics or overplaying the part of the head Nazi as he plotted carnage like it was any other day. All that said, this was still Patrick Stewart and all the cultural goodwill and gravity he has amassed was often impossible to separate. That he barely even tried for an accent also didn't help. It was a great performance for sure, but also proved the man has become larger than his profession.

The Aviator (2004)

Stopping short to call the portrayal of Howard Hughes sensitive or nuanced, there was a degree of respectful sympathy towards his infamous OCD and neurosis that ... surprised upon a rewatch. A tonal choice where the audience was invited to feel appalled: but not by the extremity of the Hughes' debilitating "insanity", but by his rivals' attempts to weaponise it against him; the affliction never actually outwardly mentioned by others, but always used to get one over the mogul at critical junctures. The exploitation on the part of the men within the narrative, not those outside creating the fiction. This was a two-hander mind you because if Scorsese brought that choice behind the lens, DiCaprio's performance in front of them avoided anything hammy or overblown. Ultimately selling what amounted to a funny paradox to this ageing Lefty: that a walking, successful manifestation of Randian Ideals might be an underdog in the face of corporate greed?

Mind you, while Scorsese has the uncanny knack to make even a 3 hour runtime fizz by like it was just 90, the actual flying sequences have aged like milk and really wrenched me out of the yarn. Sure, by all accounts nobody watches Scorsese films for their FX but given the film had multiple, sometimes important set-pieces set within a cockpit, it was always deeply distracting just how fake and computer-generated those moments looked. Bad FX aren't a dealbreaker or anything - the recent Dungeons & Dragons film has awful CGI but never got in the way - only that here it seemed like the ... I dunno, lazier choice? The counterpoint being a crash, important to the story and Hughes' downward slide, rendered as a moment of frightening chaos through physical props and stunts - almost making up for the bad CGI everywhere else.

The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

This was a surprisingly claustrophobic and oppressive feature, where the camera rarely drifted further than centimetres from actors' faces - especially Jodie Foster's. All of it keeping the viewer in a state of constant discomfort - echoing the characters' own; the zenith being the various moments Dr. Lecter would stare down the camera at us, outwardly charming but his eyes full of menacing hunger. All that visual closeness put me in mind of the difference between subtext and text: how it can be a narrow band easily shredded by an inferior writer or director intent on hammering us over the head. An eagerness towards "discourse" that would jettison nuance or sometimes, a basic respect for an audience's intelligence. Instead, Jonathan Demme used the tools of cinema to push us right up to Clarice Starling's face, to feel that resting sense of unease as she navigated a male-dominated world. Her personal space obliterated, so that the viewer could share that same prickling sense of repulsion as Clarice; the world watching and judging before she even opened her mouth. No need for clumsy dialogue, or two-dimensional caricatures (though Dr. Chilton came perilously close), just good filmmaking. For sure it remained a masterful thriller, one unmatched even across the subsequent years of a zeitgeist increasingly obsessed with serial killers - but the craft of execution also remained peerless. Every year, the Oscars reinforce their redundancy with inane Best Picture wins - but when they got it right, you watch a film like this and say to yourself, "Yeah, I get why that won".

Of course, there was also the matter of its most famous performance: one whose impact could have been diluted through mimicry and parody; but watching this again reminded that the reason Anthony Hopkins' work became such a mainstay of pop-culture in the first place was because of his Luciferian turn as Hannibal Lecter. His performance and the camera's proximity to everyone's face ensured audiences would remember Lecter - whether they wanted to or not. Returns to the character saw Hopkins' method slip into ham, but first time of asking he nailed the part; a killer full of ineffable, undeniable charm all the way up to - and perhaps, including - the moment he ate your face. 

As to the lasting reputation with regards to Buffalo Bill? Uhhh. I'm not remotely the best person to comment, but it was noteworthy how ...intentional and deliberate Demme's film tried to put distance between Bill and Transsexuality. As if he knew the potential harm all those fictional insinuations could seed given the subject matter. All in all, it was a broadly considerate move given this particular era was one where mainstream humour still punched down, transsexuality often portrayed as something grotesquely humourous or shamefully deceitful. Putting explicit dialogue where the audience was told Bill was definitively not a transexual, while utterly clumsy, felt like emotional damage control. That's not to say the portrayal of the character wasn't without issue, but that degree of empathy from the production was still laudable.