Let me get this straight, right from the start. The Polka King is not a good film. It popped up on my Netflix feed as a recommended watch and I thought I’d give it a go. It didn’t look taxing and I’d had a long day. I had low expectations but still managed to be disappointed.
I now find myself in the embarrassing situation where I’ve never seen The Ten Commandments, Gone With The Wind, The Maltese Falcon, Boyhood, Crash, The Last of the Mohicans, The English Patient, Lawrence of Arabia, On The Waterfront, Unforgiven and Dr Zhivago but I have seen The Polka King.
For that, I should be entirely ashamed.
Jack Black plays Jan Lewan, a real-life polka music band leader from Austria trying to make a living in the USA. He was imprisoned in 2004 for running a Ponzi scheme (or pyramid scheme). That’s pretty much the story. There are some highs and lows.
Importantly, there are very few laughs. In fact, I didn’t laugh once. It is set up like a comedy. Everyone involved is a comedic actor (the supporting cast includes Jenny Slate, Jason Schwartzman and Jacki Weaver). The pacing of the script felt like it wanted to be a comedy.
Yet, as Black phoned in his performance and went through the motions of delivering on a part he was only vaguely interested in, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to some of the great comedy releases from Red Hour Productions that include Tropic Thunder, Zoolander, Tenacious D in the Pick Of Destiny and DodgeBall, and wonder whether Ben Stiller simply wasn’t available to oversee this production.
There are some great Netflix Originals out there to be watched and enjoyed. This just isn’t one of them.
Aaron Sorkin is a name familiar to many film lovers. Having achieved fame with big screen screenplays for the likes of A Few Good Men, The Social Network and Moneyball, his knack of taking complex plots and working his magic to weave something not only palatable but positively gripping gave him unquestionable renown in the industry. He’s also transferred his skills to great television series, most notably with the multi-award-winning political drama The West Wing.
It was with some surprise that I discovered he would be making his directorial debut with underground gambling syndicate drama Molly’s Game. It wasn’t the content of the film that was surprising, more the fact he hadn’t yet directed a film. How could he have a career spanning four decades and not be tempted to direct any of his fantastic screenplays? And what tempted him to make this story his first?
The titular character Molly is Molly Bloom, a former competitive skier until a freak accident curtailed her career [1]. Moving from snowy Colorado to sunny Los Angeles, she spent time as a cocktail waitress before getting involved with a group of highly famous and well-off Hollywood celebrities and millionaires (here given false names), including Player X (Michael Cera), Douglas Downey (Chris O’Dowd), Dean Keith (Jeremy Strong) and Cole (Joe Keery) [2]. First she works as a hostess for a weekly high-stakes gambling match, profiting primarily from the large tips she receives for her efforts. Later, she decides to take control and run her own, putting more at risk but with higher rewards.
The film depicts the build up to a court case following Molly’s arrest, with her lawyer Charlie Jaffey (Idris Elba) untangling her situation and the story told through a series of flashbacks, including the importance of her relationship with her father Larry (Kevin Costner), a professional clinical psychologist.
As expected, the film has a sharp screenplay from Sorkin, who makes sure there’s enough detail to keep the story believable without bamboozling poker novices. The film hovers around topics of sexism and gender imbalance, which makes it a perfectly-timed release, handling the ugly issues as openly as they deserve to be.
Crucially, he proves to be as good at directing as he is at writing. There are some excellent actors involved here, so emotionally-charged scenes involving Chastain and Costner, or Chastain and Elba, are almost bound to deliver (they do). It is the scenes with the lesser-experienced actors that really prove he’s delivered here. Most notably, the role Charie’s daughter Stellar (Whitney Peak) plays in revealing the nature of his character and how he analyses Molly is spot on, with a real camaraderie between Elba and Peak. He is harsh on her, setting her additional homework and relentlessly questioning her thoughts to ensure she is bettering herself.
It is a clear mirroring of Molly’s relationship with her father and brings out one of the most prominent themes of the film: the father-daughter relationship and how that impacts on the daughter in later life.
The emotional crux of the film hangs on the final scene involving Costner and Chastain, with Larry providing his daughter with “three years of psychological therapy sessions in three minutes”. It’s simply a joy to watch unravel – two actors emotionally lost in the characters they are playing, completely understanding of what the scene means to the characters and fully committed to what’s happening. For all the successes Sorkin has managed in the sexiness, seediness and hopelessness of the gambling ring, it is this scene that leaves the biggest impact.
Sorkin lost his father around Christmas 2016 and it is clear that this was dear to his heart when he created this picture. The fathers here operate with an otherworldly integrity to make sure their children achieve the best in life. If that’s how Sorkin remembers his father, and the success of good parenting is judged by the successes of their children, then on this evidence Sorkin has more than done his father justice.
Molly’s Game is an excellent film that delivers in every department.
[1] Note: In reality, this is one of very few pieces of artistic licensing Sorkin has employed in his career. There was no freak accident, simply a decision by Molly that she wanted a new challenge. (http://time.com/5073577/true-story-mollys-game/)
[2] It is rumoured that the real celebrities involved in the poker games include Tobey Maguire, Leonardo DiCaprio, Macauley Culkin, Pete Sampras, Matt Damon, Michael Baxter, Marc Lasrey and Alec Gores. (https://nypost.com/2011/07/10/the-queen-of-secret-celeb-poker/)
The Academy Awards have announced the nominees for the short list of the documentary short category at the 90th Academy Awards. They are listed below in alphabetical order.
Alone
Edith+Eddie
Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405
Heroin(e)
Kayayo – The Living Shopping Baskets
Knife Skills
116 Cameras
Ram Dass, Going Home
Ten Meter Tower
Traffic Stop
This list will be reduced to five on 23rd January 2018.
Those in the UK with access to Netflix can watch Heroin(e) now.
Fifteen films remain in the race to win the Documentary Feature prize at the Academy Awards. The remaining five features will be announced on Tuesday 23rd January 2018.
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Chasing Coral
City of Ghosts
Ex Libris – The New York Public Library
Faces Places
Human Flow
Icarus
An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power
Jane
LA 92
Last Men in Aleppo
Long Strange Trip
One of Us
Strong Island
Unrest
Those in the UK with access to Netflix can watch Icarus now.
The nominees for the Visual Effects category for the 90th Academy Awards® are, in alphabetical order:
Alien: Covenant
Blade Runner 2049
Dunkirk
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
Kong: Skull Island
Okja
The Shape of Water
Star Wars: The Last Jedi
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
War for the Planet of the Apes
The list will be further narrowed down to five, after which the final nominees will be announced on Tuesday 23rd January 2018.
I’ve created another film quiz for you to consume this holiday period. No prizes on offer, just some wholesome fun for you to devour with your friends and families this Christmas and New Year.
Which two actors presented the infamous Best Film Academy Award at this year’s ceremony, fumbling the result and announcing the wrong winner?
Which American cinema chain came under fire in April when they announced they would allow customers to use their phones during films?
Which film won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year?
Park Chan-Wook directed the brilliant film The Handmaiden this year, but what is the director’s nationality?
Which song was played in the famous “shopping for coffee” sequence at the start of the film Baby Driver? Half a point each for the artist and the song.
Which three countdown times were given at the start of Dunkirk to signify the start point for each of the three intertwining stories?
In the film Blade Runner 2049, what was the name of the company responsible for creating replicants?
Name the New Zealand director behind the Marvel superhero film Thor: Ragnarok.
The film The Disaster Artist depicts the creation of an infamous film by Tommy Wiseau. Name that film!
Which British comedian starred as Captain Edrison Peavey of the First Order in the film Star Wars: The Last Jedi?
Round Two – Academy Awards
Simply name the nine films that were nominated for Best Film at the 89th Academy Awards, presented in 2017. Have a bonus point for getting them all right!
The announcement of a new Blade Runner film after a 35 year gap was always bound to be met with trepidation from the loyal fans of the original. Ridley Scott’s sci-fi epic, first released in 1982, has undergone something of a cult status transformation and is now generally viewed as one of the greatest sci-fi films of all time, holding a 91% audience rating on results aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and serving as a touch point for films of all genres for generations. Surely bringing back the film for a rather needless sequel, re-treading old ground that fans didn’t want to revisit, would only result in failure.
Actually, the countless versions of the original film available to view indicate just how willing Scott was to wring the masterpiece for every drop of life, managing to go unnoticed as he George Lucased every scene and finally settled on 2007’s The Final Cut. The main reason he got away with it? Two-fold. Firstly, Blade Runner has fewer fans than Star Wars. Secondly, Scott was actually improving on the original.
So, thinking about it Blade Runner 2049 makes perfect sense. It can build on the existing fanbase, re-ignite interest in the original film and give a new and ambitious director a crack at creating something truly original and perhaps turn the cult film into a blockbuster franchise.
The man tasked with doing this is Denis Villeneuve, a director who crafted two excellent films in recent years in the form of drug crime-thriller Sicario and futuristic sci-fi Arrival.
Did he achieve everything the fans and studio had wanted prior to seeing the film? Not really. But the final result is absolutely astonishing and perhaps better than anyone could have possibly hoped for.
Set in 2049, the plot focuses on Ryan Gosling’s “K”, an agent working for the LAPD as a “Blade Runner”. It is his job to hunt down and eliminate rogue replicants – bioengineered humans who have been integrated into society to serve specific jobs, essentially working as slaves. K lives with a holographic girlfriend named Joi (Ana de Armas), a product of the replicant manufacturing company The Wallace Corporation, a company building on the work started by the Tyrell Corporation and headed up by Niander Wallace (Jared Leto). After K finds some potentially revelatory evidence that a replicant may have been a female replicant that gave birth to a child, his superior Lieutenant Joshi (Robin Wright) orders him to destroy the evidence to prevent an unpreventable conflict between humans and replicants should the knowledge reach the public. Going against his boss’s orders, K chooses to investigate a mysterious replicant named Rachael, with all routes pointing towards a former blade runner named Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford).
Villeneuve’s vision, created alongside cinematographer Roger Deakins, has turned out to be one of the most visually stunning spectacles of the year. A shoo-in for a Visual Effects nomination at the Academy Awards, the dull, desolate misery of the original film are replaced with brilliant orange hues, polarised colour palettes and sensory overloads. That it still feels part of the same universe seems unlikely, but it definitely does.
Ryan Gosling is perfectly cast as K, a replicant battling with questions about his own mortality. The pacing to some may feel slow, but in reality it is a deliberate choice. As K discovers more pieces about the puzzle, we as the viewer are given space to breathe and think about the very same questions. It an overpoweringly intelligent way to deliver a film and puts a lot of faith into the viewers that they are intelligent enough to process what is going on.
Questions remained about the character Joi throughout its cinematic release, and beyond. Criticism focused on the fact that Joi exists only to serve the needs of Ryan Gosling, and is totally dependant on him. My take on her was entirely different – indeed her inclusion felt like a genuine triumph. As a character, she has been created to show huge developments in replicants since the original film, but also poses further questions to the viewer. If a product could be bought straight off the shelf to stimulate every human emotion just as required, would that be a good thing or a bad thing for the human race? Does removing real emotion through human interaction make us any “less human than human”?
Director Villeneuve responded to the criticism, stating:
“Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. And I’m sorry, but the world is not kind on women. There’s a sense in American cinema: you want to portray an ideal world. You want to portray a utopia. That’s good—dreams for a better world, to advocate for something better, yes. But if you look at my movies, they are exploring today’s shadows. The first Blade Runner is the biggest dystopian statement of the last half century. I did the follow-up to that, so yes, it’s a dystopian vision of today. Which magnifies all the faults. That’s what I’ll say about that.” [full article here]
Incidentally, Julia Alexander wrote a superb and balanced article on the matter on the website Polygon, which is well worth checking out.
Box office
Blade Runner 2049’s performance at the global box office may well have done it out of further sequels, no doubt to the disappointment of Warner Bros. It made money – $258m based on a $150m budget (as of 24th December 2017) – but not enough money. It feels like a risky prospect to pump more money into the franchise when the likely drop-off in profit would potentially lead to a loss-maker.
This is a double-edged sword. 2049 feels like a fitting end to the original film, complimenting it whilst not ruining its mystery and intrigue. It would be difficult to achieve a third great film in the saga, so a studio unwilling to make any more instalments is a positive. However, it felt refreshing to see a genuinely thought-provoking blockbuster that left me contemplating the contents for weeks. It’s sad to think there will be fewer of these in the future.
Verdict
Blade Runner 2049 is a breath of fresh air for cinema in 2017. Villeneuve should get substantial credit for pulling off the near-impossible. He’s created a visually-stunning masterpiece that builds on the original without ruining any of it. Whether it will be talked about as much as Ridley Scott’s original in 35 years’ time remains to be seen, but for now it feels like a more-than-worthy addition to the story. Simply brilliant.
Short films
There were three short films created to bridge the gap between the original film and the new instalment, which can be viewed in chronological order below.
They don’t ruin anything about the film, but they do compliment it quite well. Very much worth watching.
Cinema, etc. 