THE PENGUIN LESSONS and SINNERS

and the loooooooooooooooooooooooooooong Easter weekend 🐰🐧

If we were rather more civilised than our self-defeating, self-flagellating, self-sabotaging, selfish species has thus far proven itself to be, we could have four day working weeks (lots of super-smart-folk say it’s entirely economically viable, so I’ve no doubt the government will do whatever it takes to avoid it, the eejits) then every other weekend could be a four day weekend and it would be like Easter weekend twice every month (or Thanksgiving for the Americans or that one very special year when we had a four day weekend due to an extra bank holiday for The Royal Wedding - “The” Royal Wedding being Will and Kate’s Royal Wedding as opposed to that of Harry and Meghan for which we received precisely 0 days off work and is presumably just “A” Royal Wedding). And wouldn’t that be a marvellous thing?

If I went in for the full Easter-weekend-thing with all of the calorific trimmings, I’d be serving my famous Bermudian fishcakes and dark-n-stormies twice a month, every month, plus a huge spring lamb roast with fresh salads (one of which - a shaved fennel, grapefruit and mint salad requiring a spankin’ new mandolin for its preparation - ended up with quite a significant piece of my middle finger in it…) and a Sicilian lemon cake with creme anglaise, and we’d all be swimming in oodles and oodles of Cadbury’s mini-eggs and Peeps, right on the cusp of presenting with symptoms of type 2 diabetes (peeing alot, blurry vision, excessive hunger and thirst, apparently… ermmmm… somebody grab me an insulin shot… or another Cadbury’s cream egg, stat!). Also, in between those two days of feasting, providing some much-needed respite from the food, there could be a cinema day to do nothing at all other than watch movies (and, with all due respect to Pope Francis, RIP, I do not bother with the whole church-thing, but will co-opt literally any celebration, religious or otherwise, if I can possibly associate it with copious amounts of food and drink and a flick or two). Idyllic. Yes, please.

This year’s one and only Easter Saturday Sacred Cinema Session was divided between two highly anticipated films, one of which I was expecting to be absolute total tripe, so overly-sweetened as to make your Peeps ashamed of their comparably sour savouriness (someone recently told me alliteration is the lowest form of literary device, so I am ALL OVER IT!), and the other of which we have all had hugely high hopes for, both box-office-wise and critically speaking: THE PENGUIN LESSONS and SINNERS (and you decide which is which….).

Steve Coogan, eh? What is it with that guy? He was once very funny, sure, but he is now so sullen, somber and cynical you can’t help but wonder what the world has done to him (or, indeed, what he has done to it). And yes, he and Jeff Pope have brought home major awards gold with (overly sentimental…) PHILOMENA, but they also bear responsibility for THE LOST KING, an absolutely awful film about the discovery of the remains of Richard III under a Sainsbury’s car park in Leicester (and a film that was sued for libel for portraying a former registrar of the University of Leicester as an asshole, putting Pathe, Baby Cow Productions and Steven Coogan himself in the enviable position of having to prove that the registrar was in fact and in truth… an asshole…), and I guess we only have ourselves to blame for them teaming up again for THE PENGUIN LESSONS, teaching us that even an adorbs fluffy penguin in every single scene isn’t sufficient to make Steve Coogan bearable (although there is no argument the Penguin has been portrayed as… an asshole). For my part, I voted with my (happy) feet and got outta there at around the 1 hr mark. Expectations: met. Total shite. ⭐️ (for the Penguin, specifically…)

If Steven Coogan has an opposite - i.e. someone who is bright, luminous and optimistic (yes, I’ve been on thesaurus.com!) - then I think, perhaps, that person might be Ryan Coogler. Part of my excitement-building process for SINNERS was listening to a long-form interview of Coogler by Marc Maron, a man who can be something of a cynic himself, but one who seems to be genuinely interested in other people and prepared to have 90+ minute rambling conversations with some great filmmakers, all of whom he appears able to make very, very likeable (and putting the interview with Coogler to one side, Maron’s amazing capability of making subjects “likeable” is better evidenced by his recent interview with Mike Leigh, who comes across as totes fuckin’ adorbs! Phenomenal. Or one from a few years back with Paul Thomas Anderson, who comes across as something other than an outright cunt. And I suppose if we really, really wanted to test his skill for making people likeable, we could put a penguin-less Steve Coogan in front of him… 🤔). And so regardless of what you might have thought of FRUITVALE STATION (brilliant), or the CREED franchise (very, very good) or the BLACK PANTHER franchise (excellent), you genuinely want SINNERS to be great because Coogler seems kinda great himself. As, for that matter, does Michael B. Jordan, the rather dishy actor with whom he has shared his enviable career trajectory over the last twelve or so years, a true movie star, imo. And as a director who has had a fantastic ride with Michael B. Jordan, one can understand why Coogler’s answer to the question “What could be better than a huge movie with Michael B. Jordan in it?” was... “A huge movie with TWO Michael B. Jordans in it!” But I’m not sure that makes it the right answer, does it?

Have I told you about the way adult twins make me feel in my special bits? No? Well, it’s a very, very complicated feeling that is distinctly pleasurable, but mostly very, very scary. Let’s just say that if you were to show me a door and tell me there were twenty sets of adult twins behind it, I’d definitely go through that door, but I’d need a safe word and I’d be in and out of there like a shot (three mins, tops… okay, five…). [Case in point: please watch this unbelievably brilliant AND terrifying clip…. Right?!] An actor playing twins on film used to be both a huge technical achievement and an exercise in top notch craft, and it was a choice made rarely and only when truly required for the storytelling. Take, for example, Jeremy Irons as identical twin gynaecologists in David Cronenberg’s DEAD RINGERS, a film that is horrifying just as a log-line, and one (made in 1988) requiring either Irons’ double performance or actual identical twins who also happen to be brilliant thespians (and who did not exist, sadly… not least as the Olson twins were already gearing up for FULL HOUSE). But, imo, the remake from Alice Birch and Sean Durkin double-starring (the usually phenomenal) Rachel Weisz was outrageously bat-shit crazy (and not in a good way, I’m afraid) and completely lost me, and part of my problem is that the technical and craft achievement of a double-performance just ain’t that impressive anymore. Just CGI, init? Or some clever combination of VFX and SFX, but not nearly so clever as when Jeremy Irons had to do it all by himself and still be that freakishly frightening. So, what’s the lesson here? Casting people as twins needs to be taken very, very seriously, I think. And to completely and unequivocally prove my point, Armie Hammer played both Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss in David Fincher’s THE SOCIAL NETWORK (2009) and HE TURNED OUT TO BE A FUCKING CANNIBAL. 🤯

Anywho, Michael B. Jordan is very good as both Smoke and Stack of the SmokeStack Brothers (not to be confused with the SubStack Sisters…), and both Smoke and Stack are very, very handsome, too (which helps!). So, good call, Coogler - you got away with it. So far as the rest of the film goes, it is what the kids are calling “elevated horror” and the things elevating this particular horror are, imo, the music (and the whole concept references Robert Johnson’s selling of his soul to the devil in exchange for his remarkable musical prowess), a great cast of ever-reliables, plenty o’ camp dialogue and the wonderful Saul Williams. Bravo, all. Expectations: met (pretty much). Total pleasure. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

And now I guess I’ll make the most of this rare four day working week, wishing I had a full set of fingers for typing (honestly - it’s still unbelievably painful and bloody and gruesome… like a scene out of DEAD RINGERS…) and a decent excuse for more fishcakes and rum this coming Friday, or the next one, or the next. I have enough Peeps left over to keep us going to Christmas, though, if anyone wants some? Although I wouldn’t recommend it tbh - that shit’ll kill you faster than your homicidal twin brother disembowelling you with his specially-designed razor-sharp forceps-type gynaecological instrument (and who happens to be called Beverly… doesn’t sound like something a man called “Beverly” would do, does it?). Onwards….🐣