And so it is all over for another year. No more public holidays until Easter and the decorations in their last sad few days. So it goes.
The films I have reviewed this festive season have generally been a good bunch, two of them quite outstanding:
It's a Wonderful Life (no surprise there) and
Hunt for the Wilderpeople (rather more left field).
Wilderpeople is available on Netflix if that helps.
We finish with two more perfectly good films. First up is
The Big Short. I can see that the idiosyncratic styling of the film might grate with some viewers, not least because of the Brechtian breaches in the fourth wall, but I loved it. The text explores and tries to make some sense of the financial crash of 2008. It pierces the veneer of respectabilty that allowed markets to behave so callously and laments that the bad guys are still with us and still collecting their fat bonuses. It has Christian Bale (who is uniformly brilliant on the evidence available to me, going right back to
Empire of the Sun), Steve Carell and Brad Pitt portraying those (all on the autistic spectrum) who saw it all coming and won big time by betting against the housing markets. The rather damning conclusion we are left with is that this could happen all over again. An important film. 8/10.
La La Land. Most critics raved about this. As a lover of old-style musicals I had my reservations. Is it a great film? Did it deserve all those awards? I think no on both counts. That is not to say that it is anything other than a well-realised piece of film. There is an old-fashioned love story in there, wrapped around the protagonists' separate love affairs with their respective arts. But (and this is crucial with a musical) there are no commanding tunes, not to this admittedly tin ear anyway. I liked it but wondered quite what all the fuss had been about. 7/10.
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