The Greatest Showman

Today the Greatest Showman or rather PT Barnum reinvented. To cut a not very well explained story short, Barnum (Hugh Jackman) launches a museum of curiosities with the support of his wife and long time sweetheart Charity (Michelle Williams). This is just the latest in a long list of money making schemes he’s tried. It bombs and even their two daughters point out how dull it is.

.

Hence he turns it in a circus of ‘freaks’ or rather not so elaborate hoaxes. In which he is aided by the financial clout of Phillip Carlyle (Zac Efron) who invests in Barnum’s venture for reasons that aren’t made very clear.

Their circus causes an uproar but a popular one with it’s dwarves, giants, bearded ladies etc. Barnum though soon moves on as promoter to Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), a famous Swedish singer, whom he persuades to tour America.

His ‘freaks’ freak out when he sidelines them for Lind, as does his wife, but before long Lind has walked out on him too. At this point, in a decidedly modern day twist, the film turns things on it’s head and Barnum becomes a sort of social justice warrior giving jobs and a voice to the world’s minorities.

Carlyle meanwhile is falling in love with Anne (Zendaya) who is one half of a brother and sister trapeze act who happen, not very sensationally, to be black. For our sins they treat us to a dreadful duet.

Yes, the music isn’t great. It’s like being stuck inside a long pop video of an artist you (possibly) hate.

You do feel, as with most musicals, that there is a coherent plot in there somewhere trying to get out but I couldn’t find it. I do like having to google the facts behind a film after having seen it. Just to clarify a few points you know but to have to find out the whole story, that's stretching it a touch and there does appear to have been a cracking story about Barnum but this isn't it.

Sadly it seems the world has learnt little from the success of La La Land and musicals have returned to square one. So I’m with the films own critic (Paul Sparks), who didn’t like Barnum’s show either.

They do say that musicals are escapism and yes, I wanted to escape.

The Snowman

Jo Nesbø’s book ‘The Snowman’ made for a weirdly complicated read, so how will it transfer to the big screen? Unless they’re simplified it probably badly, if they’ve made it even more complicated then very badly.

Harry Hole (Michael Fassbender) is the man chasing the Snowman, a serial killer who has the time to make an actual snowman at the scene of all his crimes. As a detective, Hole is a loose-cannon and an alcoholic who probably wouldn’t have had a hope of detecting anything had the killer not chosen to send clues personally addressed to him.

The Snowman has issues from childhood when his mother drove intentionally into a frozen lake and drowned while he escaped. Hole has issues too, his drunken behaviour has broken up his relationship with Rakel (Charlotte Gainsbourg) but they remain 'friends' largely because Harry gets on so well with her teenage son Oleg (Michael Yates) not that effective childcare seems to be a particular forte of his either.

Hole’s newbie detective partner Katrine (Rebecca Ferguson) has issues too (of course) centring around her father, another unconventional boozed up cop (Val Kilmer), who we see in flashbacks.

Her big moment is springing a honey trap for publishing mogul editor Arve Støp (JK Simmons). A man who has a disturbing habit of photographing women he’s only just met. Yet while the film contains the contractual obligation of a full frontal Michael Fassbender topless scene, the female topless scene photographed by Støp seems to have been cut during the editing. Which is disgracefully unPC. 

Needless to say the crime eventually gets solved, only after considerably bloodshed and with no great thanks to a fascinating piece of police kit known as the EviSync, which seems to do everything for the police bar actually solve the case. The only problem is it's about as portable as a tumble drier.

It’s a watchable thriller, if a largely nonsensical one where it’s difficult to keep track of who’s chasing who and why. To be fair to Fassbender, he makes a good drunk but the real stars of the film are the wintery landscapes of Oslo and Bergen.

The Girl on the Train

Apparently the film rights were acquired to Paula Hawkins’s ’The Girl on the Train’ before it was even published. Obviously they'd had a premonition that it would be a big hit and they’d have ‘Gone Girl 2’ on their hands. So before they’d realised that its very British setting would be a key reason why it was taken to its reader’s hearts they’d already exported it to America.

So out goes the grim commute through the London suburbs with terraces and semis backing on to the line and in comes upscale New York with its mansions and lush green gardens. Oddly Rachel even gets a seat for the whole journey. Everything is completely Americanised bar oddly our lead character Rachel, a professional drunk, played by the very British Emily Blunt.

Now we've all done the daily commute to work at some point. The same places, the same faces, the same overheard conversations, the same overheard music, day after day. It’s enough to drive you to drink. Well Rachel loses her job but still does her commute for reasons only she can rationalise. Perhaps rail season tickets are cheaper in New York than they are in London?

 

Every day she gazes into the homes that pass by her window, swigging her vodka from her drinks bottle as she goes, and becomes particularly obsessed with one couple Scott (Luke Evans) and Megan (Haley Bennett) who she sees groping each other on their balcony.

Ironically they live only a few doors down from her old house where her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) is now shacked up with a newer blonder model in Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). Rachel imagines that both these women have it all or in Anna’s case both Rachel’s ex and the baby she couldn’t have. Rachel becomes a professional stalker.

The film, more so that the book, has come under fire for its portrayal of women and it’s true that all three women are hardly role models for female empowerment. They are all essentially victims of their own men, who are naturally deceitful and controlling, and perhaps (whisper it quietly) themselves. In fact the whole lot of them, the men as well, are messed up beautiful people with too much time on their hands. Only one of the three women works, part-time, sometimes.  So unable to get their collective acts together it’s perhaps not surprising that they have affairs with each other instead.

It’s certainly not a feminine drama even if there is a lot of talk about babies even from Megan, a borderline nymphomaniac who is so messed up that she starts seeing a therapist Dr Kamal Abdic (Edgar Ramirez). However once it dawns on Megan that her therapist is a man rather than just a therapist, she tries to seduce him as well, naturally.

Then Megan goes missing and Rachel finds herself embroiled in the police investigation as a potential witness too drunk to know what she’s witnessed.

So it’s a cocktail of real life. You know infidelity, alcoholism, chauvinism, voyeurism, lust, lies, manipulation, murder... it’s a checklist of all the things you'd perhaps like to get away with but can't and don't obviously and of course you're not even allowed to think any of these things out loud anymore. I thought it was wonderfully entertaining.

Throw in an absurd amount of sex scenes just for good measure, preferably involving trees, and it’ll be just about perfect. Oh, they did that as well.

The plot itself is fairly transparent even if you haven't read the book, well at least I thought it was, because the murderer looks like a murderer from the moment you first see them on screen.

The acting isn’t too shabby especially from Blunt. Rachel looks dreadful most of the time, half dead mostly, which is a credit to Blunt who can do this look in her sleep. I would recommend it but it’s probably best watched Rachel style with a drink in hand.