Why F1 the Movie should win the best picture Oscar

It may not be in pole position, but Brad Pitt and director Joseph Kosinski’s sleek, technically inventive ode to motor racing definitely qualifies for the Academy podium Could, should, would F1 the Movie win the best picture Oscar? Well, we have to be realistic here: F1 is currently a massive outsider, at 200-1 along with The Secret Agent , which has no chance either but for very different reasons. It’s not hard to see why: this is a swaggeringly mainstream film, where tech and branding dwarf the human input, with the film itself acting as a front-end battering ram for a sports organisation desperate to break into the promised land of the US auto racing circuit. (I mean it’s right there in the title.) So even the most reactionary, conservative Academy voter is going to find it hard to mark F1 with their tick. So no, I don’t think it could win. That’s not to say F1 doesn’t have quite a bit going for it. The Oscars, as we know, have historically had a problem with so-called “popular” ...

Mission Alarum review – dreadful Sylvester Stallone spy thriller shames cinema itself

Donald Trump’s ‘special ambassador to Hollywood’ plays a grizzled agent in this dismal action movie

Back at the beginning of the second Trump administration (which feels like the Jurassic era now), the president named Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight “special ambassadors to a great but troubled place, Hollywood, California.” No one seems to be quite sure what these ambassadorships entail or if any of that troika of right-wing fellow travellers have fulfilled any official duties. But on the evidence of this, Stallone is already letting the side down – by making a film so bad it shames American cinema itself. And it wasn’t even made in Hollywood! Instead, it was shot in Ohio (pretending, deeply unconvincingly, to be Poland), making this what’s called a runaway production, the phenomenon that is undermining Hollywood’s film-making industry.

However, this cheapola would-be spy thriller is bad all on its own, whatever its politics. The idea is that secret agents Joe (Scott Eastwood) and his supposed antagonist Lara (Willa Fitzgerald) meet-cute in Prague (the real thing, shown in what looks suspiciously like stock aerial footage) while trying to kill each other, but instead they fall in love and get married. Five years later, Joe has seemingly retired from the spy business, but Lara is still working for an independent, territorially unattached agency called Alarum who supply her with what looks like a fancy pager to communicate with headquarters.

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