IT SHOULDN’T HAPPEN TO A FILM JOURNALIST
Editor-at-Large JAMIE GRAHAM lifts the lid on film journalism.
Jamie on what Top Gun has in common with Santa.
In life, I’m something of a glass-halfempty kinda person, smothered by the clouds within every silver lining. Yet with movies, for some reason, I’m an eternal optimist, forever dazzled by the high concept or the talent involved or the spew of hype. I am, after all, the guy who reported back from the set of Jan de Bont’s Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life that it would be the best action blockbuster since Terminator 2… and then doubled down on Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, convinced from my week in Cape Town, watching vehicular carnage, and weekend in Scotland, viewing the fall of a castle, that it would be “Mad Max meets Highlander”.
And so it is that I now look forward to 2021’s titles – most of them carried over from 2020, with my anticipation not waned by the wait but rather ballooning by the week – with a cast-iron certitude that we have an absolute banner year on our hands. Experience should have taught me that the majority of movies will fall short of my hopes and expectations. But instead I see only what each movie might be if everything goes right and lightning is captured in each bottle on the rack.
REALITY BITES
I mean, look at the line-up: No Time To Die, Top Gun: Maverick, West Side Story, Last Night In Soho, Spider-Man 3, A Quiet Place Part II, Black Widow, Eternals, The French Dispatch, Godzilla Vs. Kong, Halloween Kills, The Matrix 4… to name just a few. Hell, I’m even excited by The Suicide Squad and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, certain that lessons will have been learned (just like I was with Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle Of Life). Add in the thrill of being back in a cinema – presuming they reopen and vaccinated viewers can once more shovel down popcorn with nary a thought – and surely this will be the best year ever.
Of course, it doesn’t work like that. In the Faber & Faber book Woody Allen On Woody Allen, the New York auteur talks of how filmmakers begin shooting with the perfect movie in their head, and each day a compromise is made or an intention botched that takes the picture further and further from what you envisaged. Well, it’s the same for the viewer as the movie unspools. The Top Gun: Maverick that I feel the need to see is a film that thrills me in the way that Top Gun goosed me when I was 14. And while I know that isn’t possible, just as I know that its visuals, music, fashion, etc. can’t hope to capture the zeitgeist as the original did, I also know that I believe like a child believes in Santa Claus.
LIVING THE FANTASY
In truth, the majority of studio blockbusters are three-star movies, as they’re always likely to be given they’re made by committee with commerce very much in mind. For every belter like Jurassic Park, Mad Max: Fury Road or Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy, there are tens of movies like Terminator: Dark Fate, Hobbs & Shaw and Kong: Skull Island – films that entertain and serve up spectacle while they last, but are ultimately forgettable (unlike, say, Cats, Suicide Squad and Alice Through The Looking Glass, so terrible they leave lasting scars).
But I will continue to live in hope, and this year more than ever after the 2020 we all had. And so I look forward to being part of an audience that gasps as one at the stunts in Mission: Impossible 7, jolts in perfect unison at Candyman’s scares, and roars with laughter at Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Perhaps most of all, I await the Mexican wave of furrowed brows that will surely greet Dune, with its intricate interweaving of ecology, religion, politics, philosophy and massive fuck-off sandworms.
And why shouldn’t I? They don’t call Hollywood the Dream Factory for nothing.
Jamie will return next issue… For more misadventures, follow: @jamie_graham9 on Twitter.
‘I WILL CONTINUE TO LIVE IN HOPE, AND THIS YEAR MORE THAN EVER AFTER 2020’