Cindy Sherman #untitled review – love, death, ageing and parrots

Cindy Sherman does not want to appear on camera. “Why not?” asks the director, Clare Beavan. “People,” says Sherman, “are just so curious to see what I really look like. So there is this intrigue.” Can you make a film about someone without seeing their face as they talk about their life and work? I’m one of those desperate to see Sherman, to reconcile the person with the roles she creates for her art, but perhaps I’m just prying. In the Arena documentary Cindy Sherman #untitled (BBC Four), we get her voice in a new interview, and Beavan has filleted previous filmed interviews, the last from 2009. Peel away the layers in her portraits and you can see the traces of Sherman’s eyebrows and the wrinkles in her skin. “You can see the cracks in the armour,” says her old photography teacher. She’s in there somewhere, despite her best efforts to vanish.

This film is a great look at one of the most important artists working today, told through the interviews with Sherman and through insightful offerings from those who have known and worked with her. I could have done without the inclusion of a group of Instagram influencers – used to make the point about how relevant Sherman’s work is in our selfie-obsessed, digitally artificial world – and had more from Sherman on the big issues: love, death, ageing and parrot-keeping. Her parrot, Mister Frieda, is the only being allowed in the studio with Sherman while she works – it’s a pity he only says “hello”.

I love Sherman’s filing cabinets of props – fake eyeballs in one drawer, teeth in another, noses in another. People say she is really trying to do self-portraits or reveal a hidden side to her, but that’s not right, says Sherman: “It’s more that I’m trying to lose myself, to really totally disappear.” In footage from previous interviews, Sherman reveals more of her working practice – she has a mirror next to the camera and concentrates on “trying to transform that reflection that I see into this other person”. She edits out the pictures where she recognises herself until “finally, I see the one that looks like somebody else”. These somebody elses are a huge cast of characters, from clowns and Renaissance Madonnas and pig-nosed horrors to Hitchcockian heroines and pink-cheeked teenagers and ageing society dames. Even if we weren’t allowed to see Sherman’s process of transformation, it would have been great to have more on where these people came from.

Like most children, Sherman loved dressing up. “I think the whole reason I developed this into an art form,” says Sherman in an older interview, “was that I would get dressed up whenever I was depressed or confused about things, I would go off into my room and turn into somebody else.” An early series shows Sherman transforming herself, shot by shot, from an unremarkable young woman to “this total vamp”. “She shows you,” says Barbara Jo Revelle, her teacher from 44 years ago, “that it’s a decision … how you create your own identity.”

So much of this is wrapped up in Sherman’s experience of being a woman, from the anxiety she feels walking down a dark street to the memories of sleeping with curlers in her hair as a teenager “and how uncomfortable women would make themselves in the name of being beautiful, but beauty at that time was really how men wanted women to look”. Her Centerfolds series, created for the magazine Artforum (but never run, possibly because some of her women looked vulnerable and victimised), “were meant to resemble in format a centrefold, but in content I wanted a man opening up a magazine to look at it in expectation of something lascivious, and then feel like the violator they would be.”

Her stepdaughters (she says she was “lucky” not to have her own children) remember, wonderfully, playing in the scenes Sherman created for her grotesque Fairytales and Disasters period in the 80s, complete with fake bums and boobs and homemade vomit. “She would let us put on all the makeup,” remembers one. This work was a rally, remembers her old boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, against the male artists who were being feted at the time when, he says, it was the women “who were making the most aggressive, toughest art possible”.

Sherman claims not to be political, at least in her personal life, but it’s all there in her work. She made her 2008 portraits of ageing socialites so big “because male artists do it all the time, even when they’re not even well-known”. She is grappling, points out the curator Eve Respini, “with what it means to get older as a woman in a really youth-obsessed culture”.

And now, she’s on Instagram where she plays with filters – not to make herself look pretty, as everyone else does, but to transform herself not just into someone else, but something barely human. “I see them as sketches,” says Sherman, “and maybe some of them will work their way into being real art pieces.” A group of schoolgirls sit outside Sherman’s current London show, scrolling through her Instagram pictures. One wants to know what she really looks like. “Oh wow, she looks quite normal,” says another, finding an undisguised picture, and she sounds almost disappointed.

Toy Story 4 review – new characters but the same old Story

Having done so many things unimaginably better than so many other movie franchises, it’s fitting that the Toy Story series now gives us a classier, superior kind of anticlimax.

Compared to many fourquels we’ve had in the past – Jaws IV: The Revenge; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace; Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol – Toy Story 4 is in a different league. And if you’d never seen any other of the Toy Stories, you’d probably think this one – written by Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton with Stephany Folsom and directed by Josh Cooley – was a gem. It is sprightly, sweet-natured and gorgeous to look at (and how blase we’ve all become about animation standards that 10 years ago had us hyperventilating with astonishment). There are some nice lines and a nifty allusion to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. But this movie is fundamentally repeating itself: repeating characters, ideas and plotlines – even if it does it with buoyancy and charm.

The last two Toy Stories heartwrenchingly tackled the idea of obsolescence. How do toys feel when they are not wanted, and get thrown away? Before I became a father myself, I naively thought these themes reflected the child’s fear of abandonment by the parents. After my son was born, the truth hit me like a blinding light: it is the opposite way around. It is the parents who fear that moment when their child doesn’t want to play with them any more. In Toy Story 3, Woody, Buzz and the gang are shipped off to a community centre that is chillingly like an old folks home and is run by abusive inmates; there is redemption when they are given to a new kid called Bonnie.

And basically Toy Story 4 starts the same story all over again. Same deal, new kid, though a flashback adroitly stitches a new backstory into the drama: there is some history between Woody and a certain other member of the cast. And we also meet a new toy: when Bonnie has to go off for her first day in nursery school, Woody sneaks into her backpack to keep an eye on her, and witnesses little Bonnie make a crude toy out of a plastic fork that she calls “Forky” and brings home. Inevitably, poor Forky (voiced by Tony Hale) gets lost in a certain antique store when the family goes on a road trip, and Woody and the gang have to rescue him. They encounter new characters: a creepy doll called Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) with sinister assistants and shades of the terrifying Lots-o’-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3. There is a funny new duo, Bunny and Duckie (Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) and a very amusing Canadian stunt motorbike rider, Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves).

Forky is potentially a very interesting character. All the other toys are created by corporations, but what happens when a toy is actually made by the kid? Is there a primeval, even incestuous link between creator and created? Well, no, not really. However unevolved, Forky plays by the same rules as everyone else.

It is absurd to start complaining about implausibility in a film about magic toys, but for the first time I sensed a kind of evasion or even dishonesty in the Toy Story franchise. For this fourth film, they have decided to hit the reset button and simply restart the situation with a new kid – not Andy but Bonnie. Fine. But after more than a decade’s worth of use, these toys should be grimy and falling to pieces. Their actual demise as objects would be a real issue. Yet Woody et al look as fresh as daisies; as fresh as new toys. It is ridiculous to worry about this, of course, and yet Toy Story 2 was specifically about how toys might want to achieve immortality as collectables, the Faustian bargain of preserving their pristine quality under cellophane at the cost of not getting real, hands-on love from kids. Their mortality as objects was a real issue that has been sidestepped here.

Toy Story 4 also joins the X-Men and the Men In Black in trying to achieve a bit more gender balance, and this is something it does with artless persuasiveness and an implication that it isn’t just the kids who are growing up, it’s the toys themselves. I’m happy to see it happen. Toy Story 4 isn’t at all bad. But it’s time to let go.

Feminists with a bullet: how the ageing heroine became screen gold

The trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate hinges on the return of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor to the franchise. Halfway into it, she steps from an SUV with not one but two guns so big that the trailer slips into slow-mo in sheer awe. “Who are you?” another character gasps.

Sixty-two-year-old women don’t usually get to be action stars. It’s common for guys like Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger to tote firearms and perform stunts into their 50s, 60s, even 70s. But women in action films are typically younger than their co-stars, often by decades. In last year’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Tom Cruise was 55; female lead Rebecca Ferguson was 35.

Hamilton’s star turn in Dark Fate is the latest sign, though, that things may be starting to change. Jamie Lee Curtis, who is 60, starred in a reboot of Halloween last year. Sandra Bullock, who played the lead in the Netflix hit Bird Box, is 54. Trevante Rhodes, who played her boyfriend, is only 29.

Older female stars are finally getting big action roles because younger women started to get them 30 or 40 years ago. Halloween in 1978 and Terminator in 1984 were part of a wave of movies in which women heroes got to do what male heroes had so often done before: pick up guns and blast away.

Yet those early films came out of a tradition that was not exactly feminist in intention. Halloween and Terminator were variations on the slasher genre made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. Part of Psycho’s horror was based in a misogynist fear of gender confusion: the villain in the movie is a mentally disturbed man who dresses up as his own mother. Picking up on those themes, the suspense film Deliverance (1972) – a huge influence on later slashers – depicted a male rape. The slasher was a genre in which horror cut people loose from gender; much of the disgust, the terror, and the enjoyment was in the way that fear made men into women and women into men.

John Carpenter’s Halloween extended the gender play by making its protagonist, Laurie Strode, a tomboyish high-school student. Laurie is first pursued by killer Michael Myers in typical stalking fashion, but eventually she turns the tables, picking up the phallic knife and becoming the attacker. Laurie is the protoype of what Carol Clover called the “final girl”: the last character alive in a slasher – almost always a woman – who claims the role of violent victor.

The final girl gradually moved into the mainstream with characters like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (1979) and Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984), two sci-fi-inflected slashers. That helped pave the way for more straightforward action movie heroines, often with more explicit feminist messaging, as in the recent Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel films.

The success of those early slashers also created the opportunity for their stars to take up their roles again for sequels. Hamilton returning to play Connor again, or Curtis playing Laurie, is an event, just like Schwarzenegger reprising his turn as the Terminator or Harrison Ford coming back as Han Solo. The success of the earlier films mean their stars are still beloved and bankable.

As the Halloween reboot showed, slasher tropes work just as well with older actresses in the main role – if not better. The Final Girl is all about reversing power dynamics. The horror of the pursuit is greater because women are figured as weak and helpless, and the conclusion is more exciting because of the rush of the power reversal. Older women set up an even more visceral victory. Laurie by the end of the 2018 Halloween becomes more mythic even than Michael Myers. The seesaw excitement of disempowerment/empowerment is part of why Bird Box, a movie about a mature who has to blindfold herself to fight mysterious assailants, captured the imagination.
Advertisement

The creators of the early slasher films certainly weren’t trying to expand roles for older women in Hollywood. But pushing against stereotypes can have unexpected benefits. Because of choices some film-makers and actors made three decades ago, it now seems natural to watch a 60-year-old woman lock horns with a killer robot. When you start telling different stories with different heroes, you don’t know where you’ll end up, or who will get to hold the rocket launcher.

Top that! Game of Thrones pulls off the biggest spectacle in TV history

Thwack! The time for talking is over. Here was the ultimate rebuttal to any complaints about the chat-heavy nostalgia-fest of this final season’s first two episodes, a clonking great feature-length instalment that flew by in a flurry of limbs and severed heads. Game of Thrones is back to sticking them with the pointy end.

We had been warned, of course. Advance buzz over what was then being called The Battle of Winterfell, but is now known as The Long Night, had centred on the sheer heft of the thing: the fact that it was easily the most expensive single episode of television in the history of the medium; that it featured a battle scene longer than anything seen in Lord of the Rings; that it required several months and a cast equivalent to the population of a small Balkan country to film.

But even whispers from little birds couldn’t prepare us for the finished product. In its CGI-lacquered ostentatiousness, this felt like a new high water mark for TV, a dragon roar of a challenge to competitors from showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss: “top that”. Though you could argue that those competitors might not come from TV at all – it’s telling that The Long Night aired on the same weekend that another giga-spectacle, Avengers: Endgame, stomped into cinemas.

Biggest ever TV episode it may have been, but whether this was the best battle Game of Thrones has staged is an altogether trickier question to answer; some may still opt for the sudden shock and awe of Hardhome or the claustrophobic horror of the Battle of the Bastards. Certainly, compared to those two, The Long Night had the inbuilt handicap of being set at, well, night. Its earliest moments were so shrouded in darkness it required some intense squinting to discern what was actually going on. Salvation came in the form of Melisandre, striding through the freezing fog to set the arakhs of the Dothraki aflame, aiding them – and the audience at home – in battle. Dragon fire did a similar trick later, albeit on a rather more dramatic scale, bringing into focus the pallid, pock-marked faces of the Wights as they descended on Winterfell.

Where conflagration didn’t work, director Miguel Sapochnik relied on darkness itself to provide mood and tension, correctly surmising that an army of the dead are far more terrifying the less you can see of them. If the job of great war films is to provide viewers with the slightest sliver of the sensation of what it is to fight in one, this managed to do the same for an even more extreme situation – a fight to the death with the marauding, unceasing force of death itself. The moment when, at a flick of the Night King’s wrist, the bodies of the fallen lurched, groaning and clicking, to their feet was chillingly well-realised.

Of course, when staring death in the face you’re likely to see something of yourself staring back, and – away from the budget-blowing spectacle – one of the smaller but no less significant pleasures of The Long Night was witnessing how beloved characters reacted to this most desperate of situations. There was Sam, terrified, baffled, but clinging on; Jon, grimly throwing himself into the line of fire (well, ice in this case) as everyone else was running away; The Hound, Winterfell’s hardest coward, finding that his affection for Arya outweighed his own desire for self-preservation; Lyanna Mormont, an indefatigable, giant-slaying Scrappy Doo; and Theon, bug-eyed, jittery, but ably exemplifying the adage that being brave and pretending to be brave are essentially the same thing. Most fist-pumpingly stirring of all, there was Arya, who managed to reconcile her two jarring personalities – guileless teen and stone-cold killer – and save the day.

Arya’s sudden sprint into the limelight was perhaps the one big gasp-inducer in an episode that largely sidestepped shocking moments. (The only other was the awakening of the dead in the crypt, and let’s face it, we all predicted that.) In this gravest of battles, it was notable that only a handful of notables met their maker, and no one – with the greatest respect to Theon, Beric, Dolorous Edd, Melisandre, poor, brave Jorah and the aforementioned Lyanna Mormont (between her and little Ned Umber, this has been a rough season for pre-teens) – who felt truly significant. Perhaps Benioff and Weiss are saving some gut-wrenching deaths for the final trio of episodes but, for all the shankings and immolations, there remains the sneaking suspicion that Game of Thrones has largely lost its capacity to surprise.

The other major grumble is the relatively meek end of the Night King himself. Those predictions that this battle was a bluff, and that he was instead racing towards King’s Landing to see off Cersei and set up a climactic showdown in the final episode, proved wide of the mark. Instead, the greatest threat Westeros has ever known is now a puddle of thawing ice-cubes, and the final bosses are likely to be, as one wag on Twitter put it, “a pregnant lady and a pirate”.

Have Benioff and Weiss played their trump card too early? Perhaps, though it does feel fitting that Game of Thrones will conclude not with a straightforward clash between the diametrically opposed forces of good and evil, but with a return to the squabbling and infighting that has characterised the Seven Kingdoms to date. The conflicts within conflicts – Cersei v Jaime, the Hound v the Mountain, Sansa v Dany – that have been bubbling under can now play out. We’ve had the showstopper, now on with the show.

Us review – Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror

An almost erotic surge of dread powers this brash and spectacular new horror-comedy from Jordan Peele, right from its ineffably creepy opening. It’s a satirical doppelganger nightmare of the American way, a horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty, a realisation that the corroborative image of happiness and prosperity you hoped to see has turned its back, like something by Magritte. And though this doesn’t quite have the same lethal narrative discipline of Peele’s debut masterpiece Get Out, with its drum-tight clarity and control, what it certainly does have is a magnificent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, who brings to it a basilisk stare of horror. The musical score by Michael Abels has the same disturbing “Satan spiritual” feel of his compositions for Get Out.

This is a Twilight Zone chiller with something of John Frankenheimer or George A Romero. It opens with a playful borrowing from the spirit and the letter of Spielberg’s Jaws and there’s a horribly prescient invocation of Michael Jackson. The title is of course ambiguous: meaning either the snugly inclusive “us” or the US itself. (An RSC group-devised play about Vietnam in 1966 directed by Peter Brook had the same title and the same double-edged meaning.)

Nyong’o plays Adelaide, who with her genial, good-natured husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is taking the kids for a summer lakehouse vacation: this is Zora and younger brother Jason, in which roles Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both excellent. The family is in a handsomely appointed cabin, which they have stayed in before, but Gabe is discontented. He wants to drive a little further down to the coast for some old-fashioned family time at the beach. Adelaide is not so sure. It was at this very beach resort that she had a horrible experience when she was a child – in 1986, the Reaganite era of the optimistic Hands Across America charity campaign. While with her parents at the funfair, right after her dad had won her a Michael Jackson T-shirt, little Adelaide had wandered off on her own and had a terrible ordeal. Now, as an adult, she is terrified of her own children straying from her and being “taken”. And she has cause to remember a sickening detail: a strange man on the pier holding a sign with the biblical reference – Jeremiah 11:11.

The traumatised memory has stayed with her, although she has never spoken about it, and being back at this cursed place makes her jittery and on edge. On the beach, they are reunited with a somewhat jaded white couple, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), who annoy Gabe by showing off about being just that little bit richer. Their cabin is flashier, his car is a cooler model than Gabe’s and their rented boat seems in better shape. (Gabe’s is called “Craw Daddy”; the Tylers’ is toe-curlingly called “B’Yacht’ch”.) And so Adelaide and Gabe’s compromised family happiness, with its tingling undertow of material and personal disquiet, is shattered one night when they see a group of four people standing in their driveway, a group which seems eerily familiar.

Impostor syndrome is something that afflicts people who have fought their way up to a position of some prestige, while never quite being able to suppress the feeling that they don’t deserve it, that they are just fakes, and that they are taking up a space that should be filled by someone more deserving. Is that partly what Us is about: a whole nation of people who each feel a shadow of historical rebuke behind them? Or perhaps the impostors are coming back to grab everything back, having just been deposed? The demonic invaders seem to be attacking from below and at the height of the horror and mayhem, Gabe and Adelaide briefly discuss the possibility of escaping to Mexico, before deciding they are much better off where they are. Perhaps if America was in dispute with Canada, we would be getting a zeitgeisty horror-thriller about Americans getting attacked from above.

Yet perhaps these lines of interpretation are beside the point and what is important is the attack from within. It leads to uproarious scenes of chaos, as Gabe shouts to the invaders: “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy” – and crazy is certainly what they get, especially in the outrageous fight scene, which makes shrewd use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and NWA’s Fuck tha Police.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.