Movie Review: Bridget Jones’ Diary

Director: Sharon Maguire

Writers:  Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis

Stars: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant

Verdict: Fucking lush

If you take a cursory glance at my DVD collection, you may see such films together in blocks as High-Rise, The Hitcher, and Honeymoon; you may see Bronson, next to The Brood; Mulholland Drive, Near Dark, and The Neon Demon together at last on my shelves. What you may not see is that also nestling there next to High-Rise is High Fidelity. If you take a look left of Mulholland Drive you’ll find stacked horizontally, Mean Girls; and next to Bronson, Bridget Jones’s Diary, (which really should be Bridget Jones’ Diary but oh well). I recently dropped a Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason reference on holidy and drew looks of shock from my Australian cousins. 

Bridget Jones’s Diary, (it irritates me every time I type that), follows the mistfortunes of ‘serious reporter’ Bridget Jones and her romantic escapades. In this modernisation of the key themes, plot beats, and attitudes of Pride and Prejudice we find a similar eviceration of the genre in which it finds itself. Instead of a beautiful Amy Adams making her way to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on the leap year before falling in love with the local Irish guy, or a perfectly lovely Christina Ricci except for a bad CGI pig’s nose trying to find her one true love, (referenced films are Leap Year and Penelope), we have Bridget Jones, professional spinster, sex lover and vodka drinker. She’s self concious about her weight and her vices and doesnt know how to adult. If that isn’t the most damn relatable thing I’ve ever seen then I don’t know what is. I’m only 18 and I already feel like Bridget Jones. 

Cards on the table time, you might be able to tell by now, I love Bridget Jones’s Diary. Not in an ironic way, not in an ‘oh look I’m a dude who also likes chick flicks aren’t I cool and trendy’ way, no. I love Bridget Jones’s Diary because Bridget Jones herself is a superb and on the money comic creation. Rene Zelweger, (who I might remind you got her start with Matthew McConahey in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation),  was actually Oscar nominated for her role in this film and I’m honestly not suprised because she does really add to the character, with a superb performance and half decent British accent but it’s at least in part down to the wonderful script. Helen Fielding adapts her own novel with the aids of screenwriting heavy weights Richard Curtis, (The Black Adder, About Time, Love Actually), who I just have abounding love for, and Andrew Davies, who’d actually adapted Pride and Prejudice before for the BBC. It’s really funny, it’s relatable and it’s a character aimed at people who you probably actually know and not Tom Cruise Tom-Cruising all over the place. 

The film is also aided by a plethora of great supporting performances. Hugh Grant, (About a Boy, Four Weddings and a Funeral) plays somewhat I think against type here as a complete cad where as before he was just sort of bumblingly useless but he does pull off the whole cad thing with aplomb, as he does in the sequel. Colin Firth, (The King’s Speech, Kingsman: The Secret Service, A Single Man) is as always, fantastic, he’s a great actor who knows what he is, what his range is and how to opporate perfectly within it. Gemma Jones, (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Spooks) delights as the mother; Jim Broadbent, (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Brooklyn, Filth) does that thing that Jim Broadbent does of looking kind of droopy in an avuncular mannar; Bridget’s hoard of friends, peopled by Shirley Henderson, (Trainspotting, Marie Antoinette, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), Sally Phillips, (Miranda), and James Callis, (Battlestar Galactica), all know exactly how to play their roles for maximum endearment. 

It’s also shot in a way that feels really, I guess honest. It’s not particularly styalised, it’s got a pretty naff jukebox soundtrack and it looks like they just sort of flung the camera anywhere for funky angles but it kind of knows how naff it is. It knows that it’s a bit cheap and a bit trashy but it has fun with that, just like our heroin is by the people for the people, the filmmaking is lo-fi enough to seem on purpose.

The sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is absolutely not a good film, however I like it, and I like it because I get to spend time with these characters who I feel endeared towards. It’s nice, it’s fun, and occasioanally makes me want to watch from behind my fingers with embarassment but mainly nice and fun. In the end Bridget Jones’s Diary is a well acted, staunchly funny subvertion of the romcom. It’s not exactly a feminist manifesto, and it’s not gonna change the world, but it makes me laugh and essentially serves as a warm cup of hot coacoa so there. 

TV Review: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

Creator: Max Landis

Stars: Samuel Barnett, Elijah Wood, Hannah Marks

Verdict: Really, really good fun

My my we havn’t done one of these for a long time. I did two of these when I just started out, I did a television review of Stranger Things and American Horror Story: Murder House. Since then I could talk about BoJack Horseman but I won’t. Call me a Netflix junkie because I am, I’m a student, we all are. Maybe I’ll talk about Rick and Morty season 3 who knows

First things first, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency the TV show is not Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency the Douglas Adams novel, I can’t comment quality wise because I havn’t read it but the main character is very different, and it’s very American. Instead of starting with Dirk heading down to Cambridge, we start with Elijah Wood, (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Lord of the Rings), setting up plot threads in what is undoubdetly a much more American reimagining than we saw with Stephen Mangan. The plot, I am not even going to begin to describe, and the television show isn’t served very well by me trying, so we’re going to move onto the review. 

Stick with this anecdote because it is going somewhere. My mum has never really been a fan of Sci-fi, or so she said. We watched The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi together which she liked even less than me. I had a really, really weird experience of watching Star Trek Beyond with her, then coming home and having her tell me that, to quote her, “it has no merit”, as I’ve said before on this blog I really like Star Trek Beyond and I told her why, I said the script is written clearly with a love of the source material, I never watched the television show but Simin Pegg clearly did and he got me on board, the make up is Oscar worthy and it’s directed with a sense of verve and fun and colour, and the actors are good and they play off eachother really well and it pulls on your heart strings and she said, yes that’s all true, but I still think “it has no merit”. Which left me a bit dumbfounded as she’d just aknowledged all it’s, um, merits. So my mum doesn’t like Sci-fi, or so she says. So I watched Moon with her, a film which my Dad refuses to watch because he seemingly has something against one-location-films, he will never watch The Thing even though it’s one of only two perfect films I’ve ever seen. Long story short, my mum loved Moon, I love Moon. It made me cry. After that my Mum revised her sci-fi manifesto to that she likes sci-fi if it’s about making you see new ways of thinking. If there is one thing you can’t argue about Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency it’s that it talks about new ways of looking at things, not least of all holism. It does have elements of smart alecness and choppy action that might get on the nerves of the over 40s, but that is very much a staple of Max Landis’ writing, (Chronicle, American Ultra), and it has enough brains and heart to keep itself going. 

The film does have a problem, due to what holism is, of character peril, and actually due to the element of time travel, which it introduces faily early on, but there is a certain rube goldberg machine element to seeing how they get out of problems and seeing how all the timlines sort of fit together in a jigsaw. There is actually an element of the time travel sort of self knowingly fiting together in a way it never does ever in films. In the past, as much as I like American Ultra, and as much as I do feel involved in the characters in that film, this does do better.  Landis is known for writing intersting character dialogue in his movies but an 8 episode Netflix series and the fact it’s based off a proper book instead of a half backed Mary Shelly prequel like Victor Frankenstein, gives him the opportunity to properly flesh out his characters and I felt really involved in their struggles in a way I just felt detatched from in some of his previous work. It is the best thing Max Landis has ever done that I’ve seen.

The film is aided by a cast who are really going for the material. Elijah Wood is the most fun I’ve seen him, Samuel Barnett, (Penny Dreadful) is clearly chanelling the Matt Smith Doctor Who, my least favourite Doctor Who, as the titular Dirk. However he’s doing it in a way that really works because I actually beleive in the character. I mean it is impossible to beleive that Matt Smith’s Doctor is a Doctor because, actually mainly because of the character tragectory set up by previous iterations but Sam Barnett has none of that history in his character but he gives it gravitas and dimentions that Smith lacked, that Barnett really didn’t have to give but I’m glad he did. The supporting cast are also lovely, Hannah Marks, (The Amazing Spider-Man), and Jade Eshete, who form the rest of the nuclear centre to the story are both really good and provide a really good counterbalance to what would otherwise become a complete sausagefest. There is a collection of completely scenery chewing performances that are a lot of fun, not least from Aaron Douglas, (Battlestar Galactica), who comes across somehow like a cross between Marlon Brando in The Godfather and Mr Plinkett in Half in the Bag, Michael Eklund, who’s this ridiculously punky energy stealing vampire figure who is just a ball of repressed hunger and energy, and Fiona Dourif, who whilst I don’t particularly care much about her plotline is a lot of fun. Dustin Milligan plays a character called Friedkin, (one of a few genre references in the film), who is this gloriously self aware character who starts off coming across like a macho inversion of the dumb blonde figure which would have such mysoginistic overtones otherwise, but he slowly becomes much more involved in the story and a much more intersting character, as does Neil Brown Jr., (Straight Outta Compton), who is really, really good in the TV show. 

I started out watching Dirk Gently as what was going to be a Netflix fest including some BoJack Horseman and some Being Human, but before I knew it, it was the last episode and it was 5 o’Clock in the morning. It’s headscrambling, supremely weird, good fun. It has character conflict and arcs that I felt were pertinent to me, and struggles I’m going through, I thought it was uplifting and empowering to dispossessed millenials everywhere. It’s really really good. 

Movie Review: Blade Runner

Director: Ridley Scott

Writers: Philip K. Dick, Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples

Stars: Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young

Verdict: Nearly a masterpiece
What to say about Blade Runner that hasn’t already been said? Who cares I’m gonna say it anyway. Blade Runner is an absolutely beautiful, work of art. It’s also got some really exciting set pieces, and a poignant tear jerking ending that still ends on an exciting note. 

Blade Runner is a sci-fi noir in the vein of something like Dark City, which takes place in the year 2019, (I know but this was the 80s forgive their naive souls), in which we have created a race of workers almost exactly like humans except they have a four year life span. The film brings up questions of if we create beings capable of developing emotions do we have the right to take their life away before it’s fully developed, would our gods and fathers have that right of us? 

There’s so much to love about Blade Runner, (if you’re watching the final cut); the gorgeous cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth, (Altered States); the hypnotic, unmistakable 80s score by Vangelis that somehow does not at all what you’d expect but works perfectly, the score alone represents the wonderful meeting between the two genres of sci-fi and film noir Balde Runner demonstrates; the wonderful production design that sometimes the camera will just get distracted to look at, there are aspects of this world lesser directors wouldn’t show us and director Ridley Scott takes every opportunity to show us this world he has meticulously created, there is no film quite like Blade Runner, many have tried, (Pluto Nash for one *shudders*), but none quite cut it; the fantastic screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, (Twelve Monkeys), that takes on a lot of burden and succeeds. 

The film is not in the least helped by a hefty hosts of supporting performances, which honestly balances out the at-his-best-ever but-still-wooden Harrison Ford, (Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Apocalypse Now), who, I really don’t understand why he’s famous because he really can’t fucking act. Ridley Scott has a way of choosing a great supporting cast, in The Martian he demonstrated it by filling every role with talented actors, here, like Sergio Leone, (Once Upon a Time in the West, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), does so frequently, he fills every roll with talented faces that just happen to be on good actors. With people like Edward James Olmos, (Battlestar Galactica, Stand and Deliver), M. Emmet Walsh, (Wild Wild West, Blood Simple.), and William Sanderson, (Last Man Standing, True Blood), their faces are so interesting it does half the job for them. This isn’t to downgrade their performances, they all do fine jobs. By far though, the standout is co-star Rutger Houer, (Batman Begins, Sin City, The Hitcher), as the charismatic but emotionally infantile Roy Batty, a combat replicant. He is enigmatic, empathetic and deeply sorrowful in his role, and he carries it off with aplomb, his little double couplet at the end gets me on the verge of tears every time. 

Blade Runner was recently listed on WatchMojo’s list of masterpieces that are actually kind of boring, and I disagree. It’s slow, but never boring, there’s always something interesting happening and the final show down set piece is thrilling. One problem is the sex scene which verges on rape, I think the film gets away with it but only just and it is problematic at best. However, the film would be a masterpiece if it wasn’t for that scene, and to quote the film, Ridley Scott, “has done a man’s work”, with Blade Runner.