MovieMonday: Kingsman 2: The Golden Circle

What to make of this film?  It is a sort of double spoof of superhero movies and James Bond movies rolled up in a long and utterly preposterous series of set pieces.

This is the second Kingsman show.  The first, in 2015, made more than $400 million, making a sequel inevitable.  This new edition opened well over the weekend, grossing $100 million in theaters worldwide.

The Kingsmen are schooled in elite manners and warfare. They also are outfitted in bespoke suits, which they sell at The Kingsman Tailor Shop, the Savile Row front for their undercover good-guy organization.  They always know which fork to use at fancy dinner parties, but they do use the F-word rather more frequently than one might expect.

The story opens with Eggsy, a young man who joined the team in the first movie.  He immediately establishes his props in an extended battle with another young man, Charlie, who has gone over to the dark side, in this case a drug cartel called Poppy Pharmaceuticals.

Eggsy and Charlie tangle with ju jitsu moves, weapons, and Charlie's bionic arm in a lethally loaded Kingsman taxi that is being pursued by bad guys in SUVs with roofs that open to expose rocket launchers.  It's all very exciting and displays the range of tactical and online support that the Kingsmen can bring to bear in a fight.

Then, suddenly, the Kingsman organization is wiped out, and the world is plunged into peril.  The two survivors, Eggsy and a tech backup called Merlin, join forces with Statesman, an American counterpart organization whose front is not a clothing store but a whiskey distillery in Kentucky.  

There are many, many battles on three continents.  Harry Hart, a Kingsman who was shot dead in the first movie, is revived, somehow and in fits and starts, and he joins Eggsy and Merlin.  Harry is played by Colin Firth who, as ever, looks smashing in a well-tailored suit.  

It's clear the whole story is meant as a giant over-the-top parody, which renders any nodding glances at character development or motivation pretty much beside the point.  The effect is a very long two hours and twenty minutes of joke characters saving a joke world.  

If you like this sort of thing, you might as well go.


Notes

Actress Julianne Moore plays Poppy, the film's very bad bad gal, but she is not given much to do except bark orders to her minions.  Actors Jeff Bridges, Halle Berry and Channing Tatum also languish in small roles.  Perhaps the whole bunch are there to interest American audiences.

The film's two British screenwriters also have thrown in American stereotypes.  In one case, a Kentucky redneck provokes a bar fight by saying this: "Kiss my southern dick, bitch!"  In another, a generic American president is a secondary bad guy, comfortable with the idea of millions of deaths of his countrymen and other people worldwide.

The film opens with a bagpipe rendition of the John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads," a set-up planted for an exaggerated payoff toward the end of the film.  Turns out that Merlin the Kingsman is a John Denver fan.

Elton John plays himself with good-natured humor, even when he is required to wear a ridiculous feathered costume.  His "Saturday Night" song provides the accompaniment for a fight scene, and he kicks a very tall platform boot to good effect.

MovieMonday: Modern Times

None of the movies this weekend interested me (see below), and so I went to the local art house and saw "Modern Times."  Filmed in 1936, it is Charlie Chaplin's last silent movie and it is still fun to watch.  

Chaplin wrote and directed the piece, in which he plays his traditional Little Tramp character. His physical humor is on display throughout, from his characteristic splay-footed, tottering stride to the scene above, in which he roller-skates, blindfolded and blithely, around a floor with a big drop and no railing.  It would be simple now to create such a scene with clever photography, but it was not so simple 81 years ago when film was literal and actors performed their own stunts.  

(Yes, a smart set manager might have increased the apparent distance of the drop. Even so, Chaplin's skating is impressive.)

The two themes of "Modern Times" are factory innovation and survival during the Great Depression. The movie begins begins with Chaplin working on an assembly line and occasionally getting run through the machinery in a big factory.  The boss of the place bellows at workers from a screen in the odd moments when he is not working a jigsaw puzzle or reading the funny pages.  (CEOs were not popular in those days either.)

The hapless tramp loses his job and ends up in jail, then distinguishes himself assisting law enforcement and earns a comfy sinecure.  To his chagrin, he is released from jail and must find another job or, as it turns out, several of them.  

He meets up with a barefoot orphan, played by Paulette Godard.  She too is carted off to the hoosegow, in her case after stealing a loaf of bread, a clear Chaplin homage to the Victor Hugo novel, "Les Miserables."

Chaplin and Godard watch their luck rise and fall in the uncertain world of the times.  Every scene is a set piece for multiple humorous riffs. The audience in my theater laughed often and loudly.  The movie doesn't have much in the way of a resolution, but neither did the Great Depression in the mid 1930s.  Its two characters just keep trying; they are survivors.

This was the first time I had seen "Modern Times." What struck me was how many of its moments have been seen in other entertainments, including two scenes clearly inspired by "Horse Feathers," the 1932 Marx Brothers movie. The assembly line scene that opens "Modern Times" was rejiggered to good effect in the classic 1952 television episode where Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz work in the chocolate factory.  

There is even a scene in which a fellow jail inmate gets rid of "smuggled nose powder," and the Little Tramp ingests the stuff, unknowingly and with amusing results.  I hadn't known that cocaine jokes were a thing that long ago; I was surprised last year by what I considered a dated cocaine reference in a contemporary movie.

You don't have to go to a theater to see "Modern Times" these days, but if you get a chance, I say, do it.


Movies Today

The Idiosyncratist is now in Nashville, a city with a broad arts scene and more than a dozen colleges, set in a metropolitan area with a population of more than 2 million.

I believe this market would have supported a first-weekend release of  "The Big Sick" and/or "The Beguiled,"  so-called "small" films that were widely and favorably reviewed in the national media.  Neither was available on a single screen among the hundreds in the area.

Instead there were dozens of opportunities to see each of several mass-market rehashes:  the fifth Transformers movie, the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the third Cars movie and the third Despicable Me movie.  

Enough, I say.

In this era of multiple megaplexes, I wish theater operators would give moviegoers a little more credit and not so much more-of-the-same all the darn time.