Is it really less than five months since Interstellar (Warner, 12A) opened in theatres? Christopher Nolan’s gargantuan space symphony – I’d say “space opera”, but Hans Zimmer’s mighty, organ-tastic score says otherwise – has bounced between so many opposing walls of hype, backlash and counter-backlash by now that it seems to have been in the cosmos far longer, as if made prematurely ancient by one of its intricately devised spacetime wormholes. Viewers might feel prematurely ancient by the end of it too: its near-three-hour duration, crammed with fidgety theory and great, stomping gestures of beauty, can’t be said to pass by in a flash. Having been visually and aurally dazzled by Nolan’s opus on our first, Imax-sized acquaintance, I was hoping a small-screen encounter might resolve my reservations about its ambitious intellectual construction.
Shrinking the spectacle, however, only magnifies Nolan’s deficiencies as a dramatist. An anguished parent-child melodrama embedded in the grandest of mass-population quandaries – the uncertain search for a new Earth – Interstellar doesn’t want for ideas or narrative stakes. But either Nolan doesn’t trust his own good story, or he doesn’t trust his audience to get it: valuable minutes of potential human investment tick by as characters pedantically explicate the science behind their actions, repeatedly quoting Dylan Thomas for poetic balance. We get it, or we would if we were listening: however diminished in a living room context, the oil-slick palette of Hoyte van Hoytema’s photography and the film’s brash, clashing sound mix still pull focus from the excess verbiage. Nolan makes films you feel with your senses, but not yet your heart.
Sound is feeling, however, in Get On Up (Universal, 12), a musical biopic that ticks pretty much every musical-biopic box with maximum care and minimal innovation – yet when the subject is as ragged and frenzied as James Brown, at least some of his disobedient energy bleeds into the whole. What the film tells you about the man behind the music is either what you knew or would have thought you’d known: it’s Brown’s external presence as a performer, as cracklingly channelled in Chadwick Boseman’s gutsy, sweat-stained performance, that is most compelling here. A less polite director than Tate Taylor might have dirtied up the film-making to match; still, the music gives this one life and reason.
Reason is not something Horrible Bosses 2 (Warner, 15) has in its corner: this mirthless follow-up to 2011’s already icky misogynist reversal of 9 to 5 rehashes off-colour gag after off-colour gag from its predecessor, leaving out only the punchlines and its predecessor’s knockabout pacing. The first film made you feel bad for laughing; we didn’t know how good we had it.
Though it’s a veritable buffet of delights by comparison, St Vincent (EIV, 12) has no more claim to being essential: a tissue-paper vehicle for Bill Murray’s reliably enjoyable soft-crust curmudgeon act, Theodore Melfi’s good-neighbour comedy tests its star and audience in equal measure, which is to say barely at all. You can see where it’s all going the second Melissa McCarthy’s harried single mum and her curious son move in next door to Murray’s dishevelled Vietnam vet; its fast-dissolving pleasures come in its cheerfully broad actory details.
There’s more small-scale truth and fine-knit feeling in Venezuelan director Mariana Rondóns bittersweet Pelo Malo (Bad Hair) (Axiom, 15), a considerably different story of a young boy inching past his mother’s authority. The title refers to the curly mop that nine-year-old Junior (the charming Samuel Lange Zambrano) is desperate to have straightened; from this precocious wish stems a tender, thoughtful look at pre-sexual identification.
It’s a relatively good week for TV releases on DVD – including the third series of Armando Iannucci’s still-sterling Capitol Hill sitcom Veep (Warner, 15), and the BBC’s ideally cast, sweetly pitched adaptation of Roald Dahl’s late-career miniature Esio Trot (Universal, U), which settles on just the right modest scale for a chaste, chipper autumn-years romance without sinking into preciosity. (Remarkable, considering Richard Curtis is involved.)
Still, just a fortnight after I sang the praises of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, all telly talk is once more rightfully dominated by Netflix, whose sun-drenched yet sombre family saga Bloodline is further binge-viewing bait. Patiently excavating assorted skeletons from the closet of a wealthy Florida Keys clan, the series has the classy ensemble of cable network dreams – Sissy Spacek, Sam Shepard, Kyle Chandler, the marvellous Linda Cardellini, seamy scenery-chewer Ben Mendelsohn – yet isn’t smothered by good taste. Though it’s smartened-up and slow-burning, there’s a hint of prime-time soap opera, the DNA of Dynasty and Revenge, in its own bloodline, and it’s all the more gripping for it.
