We complain about Hollywood’s ceaseless recycling of existing story material, yet two of this year’s most thrillingly inventive, unconventional mainstream films fall squarely into the sequel category. I’ve already joined the chorus of praise for Mad Max: Fury Road, but there’s been less fuss about the improbably extraordinary achievement of Magic Mike XXL (Warner, 15). The return of Channing Tatum’s Florida-based stripping collective deftly passes itself off as a horny summer throwaway while defiantly serving a range of perspectives neglected by contemporary studio cinema.
It’s a “bro” comedy that gives (and gives in) generously to the female gaze, not to mention the queer one; a celebration of carnality that finds middle-aged desire no less sexy than twentysomething friskiness. Even the racial status quo is questioned and flipped. Its most dazzling sequence sees Channing Tatum’s pale beefiness cut to size via the view of a black female crowd, as even the deep, dusky lighting is adjusted to bring dark skin to the fore. Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s a very different film from Magic Mike, even as it repeats much of the low-grinding performance antics that made Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 film such a scuzzy pleasure.
While that film was a downbeat economic crisis parable dressed up in Lycra thongs, this one is wholly pleasure driven, concerned less with the needs of its characters than those of their audience, within the frame and beyond it. Soderbergh cedes the director’s chair to his former assistant Gregory Jacobs. As cinematographer and editor, however, he now masterfully dictates the film’s fevered, daiquiri drunk look and rhythm. It’s a revolution disguised as a party.
While I’ll take Tatum’s bump and grind over any amount of superhero posturing, Ant-Man (Disney, 12) is the most disarming Marvel romp to date, largely because it admits a degree of dopey fallibility in Paul Rudd’s eponymous inter-species transformer. The film is all in the title: he’s a man! He’s a miniature! Wacky switches in perspective ensue! But there’s an old-fashioned Saturday matinee spirit of fun around the enterprise, and the ever likable Rudd contributes actual wit, not the smarmy irony of Iron Man and his ilk.
It says much for Marvel’s expanding cultural umbrella that Jessica Jones, its new TV series, uploaded to Netflix last week, barely seems to occupy the same universe as Ant-Man, even if they both strive to give comic book figures a more human face. Krysten Ritter’s surly, steely title character may be an ex-superhero, but she owes as much to such figures of detective fiction as VI Warshawski. A New York private eye dealing with supernatural cases, she’s PTSD-afflicted, which is a less banal narrative crutch than it initially seems when the drama’s punitive preoccupation with physical and sexual violence becomes fully apparent. Along with Netflix’s Daredevil, Marvel appears to be using the small screen as an outlet for sterner experiments; it’s working well so far.
The BBC’s response to new media options, meanwhile, is considerably sillier. It has recruited a pair of fresh-faced, clean-scrubbed internet vloggers to front the kind of japey travelogue they’ve made for years in Joe & Caspar Hit the Road (BBC, 12). Expressly not designed for anyone who questions the term “YouTube celebrity”, this Venice-to-Barcelona jaunt is an amiable enough showcase for its spotless young hosts, but it’s strange to see them being moulded into skinny jeaned Jeremy Clarksons so early in life. The Beeb is on surer ground with Abi Morgan’s stoic, formidably cast and reasonably engrossing detective series River (Arrow, 15), but even its virtues are familiar ones.
Finally, classic cinema buffs should heed the instructive title of Listen to Me Marlon (Universal, 15), British director Stevan Riley’s eerily effective portrait of Marlon Brando. “Portrait” may not be the right word, in fact, given the film’s unique audio fixation: Riley has exhaustively and uncannily excerpted and integrated a vast range of interviews and other archive material to form a running narration from Brando himself, talking us through his brilliant, bumpy life and career from a position of stateless, almost otherworldly authority. Dodging hagiography via its first-person mystique, it’s a startling study of a still startling star: perhaps YouTube celebrities will receive such treatment half a century from now, though it’s awfully hard to imagine.
