Very helpful (not)

This blog post is rated 15 for references to sexual violence and torture.

The BBFC replied to my e-mail on Red Sparrow, and in doing so, reminded me why it is I don’t usually bother e-mailing them. The Call Me By Your Name thing was a fluke; I forgot how obstinate and obtuse these people are when they want to be or have accepted a bung from 20th Century Fox.

Don’t be fooled by the length; like Jamie Redknapp’s punditry, they have used a lot of words which ultimately say very little.

1) The BBFC are in the business of re-writing film history to suit their agendas.

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [10 - 6]

Now that awards season is all wrapped up, it’s time for this blog to slowly wave goodbye to 2017 and start looking ahead to the 2018 cinematic year! As part of that slow wave goodbye, I will celebrate the best and worst of 2017 according to me! 

We shall start with the worst acting performances. Here was 2016’s worst performances list for reference. I unfortunately had to throw shade at Jesse Eisenberg, one of my favourite actors, in last year's Hall of Shame. I'm glad to report he reined his Lux Luthor in a lot in Justice League, and thus, avoids making the list a second year running. Phew!

10. Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express

Although the Star Wars actress is very pretty, has a nice screen presence and seems like a lovely person, she was far too lightweight in the role of Mary Debenham. The film is set in the 30s, and Ridley’s character is secretly having a relationship with Dr. Arbuthnot (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr). Such are the outdated attitudes of the time towards inter-racial dating, that Debenham and Arbuthnot have to keep this, as well as their involvement with the murder of Johnny Depp’s character on the train, under wraps.

Look what Cara Delevingne’s bad acting made Taylor Swift do.

Just like every other woman with a perpetual mental age of about 15, I watched Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video as soon as it dropped, and have re-watched it several times to unpack all the shady Easter eggs not-so-subtly littered throughout.

I’m a fan of the regression-to-playground-levels-of-petty on display in the video (Amy Dunne recognises Amy Dunne, shall we say), and absolutely belly-laughed at the dig at Tom Hiddleston (he deserves it for being in High-Rise).

I noticed something curious in the coda of the music video, however, that piqued my interest. 

It's when Taylor Swift has 15 versions of herself lined up and riffs on the public’s perceptions of her. In the Taylor Swift of You Belong to Me era, she is wearing a T-shirt with several of her squad’s names on (for example, Selena [Gomez], Lena [Dunham, ew], Ed [Sheeran] and the three HAIM sisters). Look...

Cara Delevingne is missing!

For there's no club in town quite as manly...

Four months on from seeing Beauty and the Beast at the cinema, I'm still absolutely obsessed with the 'Gaston' song. Even the most tenuous thing, such as the club photographed above, gets me breaking out in song. It might just be my second-ever favourite Disney song (second only to 'Let it Go', obviously).

Oh, and say hello to what will almost certainly be one of the worst films of 2017:

Review of two concealers: MAC SELECT COVER UP SHADE 25 and BOBBI BROWN SHADE 6 BEIGE

I recently had to replenish my concealer supply, due to me using up the MAC tube pictured above, and me wishing to avoid looking like this chap below due to the bags under my eyes:

Something that goes together about as well as Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan.

The only difference is, unlike Delevingne and DeHaan, I enjoy gin (with a tonic) and cream soda ordinarily.  But sampled together, you get one steaming pile of Bye Felicia. The problem is that the cream soda has quite a mild taste, which does nothing to mask the strength of the gin. And it certainly doesn't complement.

So yes, because these two liquids were an absolute fail working together, I'm going to have to refer to Cream Soda + Gin as 'The Valerian'.

A strong frontrunner for the worst film of 2017.

I saw this on the Greatest Actress Ever (ahem)'s Instagram:

A sci-fi featuring Dane DeYawn (so called because of those prominent bags under his eyes and his yawn-inducing acting performances) and Upstart Delevingne, to me, just screams Razzie. I can't think of a more sexless couple than DeHaan and Delevingne (other than Dane DeHaan and Felicia Vikander, or Cara Delevingne and Joel Kinnaman).

I can't wait to hate-watch it and tear it to pieces on my blog. 🎬

In the theme of throwing shade at films I've not yet seen, I believe The Big Short is about to have its title stripped as the Most Smug Film of All-Time:

The trailer for Ben Wheatley (director of my pick for the worst film of last year, High-Rise)'s insufferable-looking crime caper was the most wannabe Tarantino thing ever. Just a lot of shooting in a warehouse, Sharlto Copley being incomprehensible and lame banter between caricatures.

Hard pass.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump: the most inauspicious matrimony in film since Zack and Deborah Snyder (I went there).

From the BBFC's extended information for Raw. What's a woman's 'public hair', just wondering?

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When Film Posters Lie: Crimes Against Billing Orders.

Today, I watched The Place Beyond the Pines, Derek Cianfrance's ambitious morality tale of how an encounter between bank robber (Ryan Gosling) and rookie cop (Bradley Cooper) affects their lives long after the meeting. I wasn't exactly sold on it; the three acts in the movie deteriorated monotonically, with the most gripping set pieces all being at the start of the film. The final act of the film focuses on the interaction between the two characters' sons, and the scenes between Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan felt like a blasted mumbling contest.

Overall, I was mightily disappointed with The Place Beyond the Pines; there were some good elements: Bradley Cooper was as nuanced and as convincing as I've seen him (I usually can't take him seriously because he's appeared in some godawful Jennifer Lawrence collaborations and both of them bring out the worst in each other, especially when David O. Russell is involved), and the scenes between Ben Mendelsohn and Gosling were nicely done. Based on their chemistry together, I can see why Ryan Gosling chose to cast the Australian in his own movie, Lost River, 2 years later. You even get a tiny glimpse of Mendelsohn's terribad dancing, one of the few redeeming features of Lost River, in this movie.

But another gripe that I had with The Place Beyond the Pines that was no real fault of the filmmakers themselves was the sheer inaccuracy of the billing of Ray Liotta in the film poster. The way Liotta is credited here gives the (misleading) impression that he's the fourth main character in the film. He ain't. Gosling and Cooper are the co-leads, then Eva Mendes, then Dane DeHaan and then Emory Cohen. Ben Mendelsohn features in the first and third acts, so he would take sixth precedence. Being generous (and it would be being very generous), Ray Liotta is the seventh main character in the film. At best.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I can see why they did it. Although DeHaan and Emory Cohen are now gaining status and their acting technique has definitely improved (Cohen put his mumbling Brando impression to far better use as an adorable suitor of Saoirse Ronan in 2015's Brooklyn and you know he was good because I don't even begrudge him stealing Domhnall Gleeson's thunder), they weren't that well known in 2013, when the film was released. Whereas Ray Liotta is properly famous, not least for his iconic performance as Henry Hill in Goodfellas. So they were riding on the fame of his name. Fair enough, given the calibre the star they had on their castlist (Liotta's combination of charisma, screen presence and intense-eyed gaze renders him one of my favourite actors).

An even more brazen case of erroneous billing of an actor immortalised by a Martin Scorsese picture would be the combination of the name order and the appearance of a photo of Jonah Hill in the Hail, Caesar! poster. The fact that he's one of the five pictured could let you think he's one of the five main characters. He ain't. His role in Hail, Caesar! is genuinely that of a cameo, lasting less than a minute. As a huge Jonah Hill fan who's two main draws to this picture were the Coen brothers and him, I felt mightily short-changed.

As with Emory Cohen and Dane DeHaan getting trampled over in the Place Beyond the Pines poster, the biggest loser here is Alden Ehrenreich, who stole the show in Hail, Caesar! and if there were any justice in the world, would be in the running for a Best Supporting Actor nomination for what was a warm performance as a rodeo-come-actor who struggles with his lines of on point comic timing. Ehrenreich's role was the size that I had thought Jonah would be getting. Boy was I wrong about that, but it seems bizarre that the best thing about the film doesn't even get his picture on the poster.

Obviously, worse things have happened, and the world will keep spinning. And I can't begrudge Hollywood studios for trotting out their big names ahead of the lesser-known chaps, even if they had more prominence in the film. Money does talk, after all. And in both Ray Liotta and Jonah Hill's case, they succeeded at tricking me. By misrepresenting the magnitude of the actors' screen time in their respective movies on the film posters, the films' distributors lured me into watching the film under false pretences. I'm just too much of a Marty Scorsese fangirl for my own good, goddamnit!

But I'm not in the mood to be fooled for a third time this year by film posters. All I'm saying is, if Jonah Hill isn't actually the lead when I see War Dogs, I won't be best pleased.