Morning Glory is one of those films that doesn't look immediately promising on paper. What's this? A film about a workaholic woman who gets the job of her life at a TV Station failing in the ratings, succeeds and then ends up realizing life isn't all work? Oh god. It just sounds so desperately awful. So here I am admitting that sometimes, the summary of a film does not always kill it stone dead. What you have here is a seriously funny comedy, if not the most memorable, and manages to avoid all those horrible cliches that make most films like this one horrific. For a start, the cast is terrific. Rachel McAdams is just a revelation here, taking a role that, in the hands of eye-clawingly annoying talent-vacuums like Katherine Heigl would have been just painful, manages to show perfect comedy timing while balancing steel and scattyness. She's great and massively likeable. Harrison Ford and Diane Keaton...why have these guys not worked together like this before? The two of them are just pure comedy, Ford is gruff and firing needling one liners all over the shop, Keaton is dry and acidic, acting as the perfect foil to Ford's grumpy newsman. The chemistry of the film is just sublime, even Patrick Wilson taking a minor romantic role and giving it presence. It also helps the script just zings along, with everybody getting some sort of hilarious one liner and situation to get themselves out of. No, you won't remember much of it, but I also don't remember laughing as hard at the cinema as I did during Morning Glory.
So, finally...we come to True Grit. The Coen Brothers' first proper western (No Country For Old Men was not a western, don't tell me it was) is a leisurely paean to many westerns that came before, and is a rather sharp and amusing buddy drama with a difference. Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld could not be more different, with Jeff Bridges playing a rough and grizzled drinking-sheriff called Rooster Cogburn, and Hailee Steinfeld the 14 year old but tougher-than-she-looks girl looking for vengeance against her father. Her daddy you see got himself stabbed by Brand from The Goonies (Josh Brolin, for them that be interested), and so she's on the warpath. What follows is a strange and violent journey for retribution that is rather cool and nothing less than spectacular. Everyone is amazing, Jeff Bridges is growlingly brilliant as Cogburn and Hailee Steinfeld is steely and tough as old boots as Mattie Ross. Now here's the thing...the film does rather leave me cold. I loved it and yet, I have this bad taste in my mouth when I think of the ending. Part of me just wants to tell the Coen Brothers to just cheer the fuck up and stop deliberately doing evil endings because hey, life's shit, but I am aware a happy ending simply wouldn't cut it. Maybe it was just the slightly postscript nature of how True Grit wraps up, the way Matt Damon seems almost omnipresent and then vanishes that annoyed me. The film is by and large great, looking utterly beautiful and the action is handled snappily (particularly a final confrontation involving Jeff Bridges, two guns and six bad guys that almost made me faint with pleasure), but maybe the emotional resonance just hit the wrong nerve with me. Perhaps I saw it in the wrong way, but I did feel left a tad high and dry by the way True Grit left me. I never demand things to be simple, but I do demand more than 5 minutes of fairly dull exposition to wrap up more than two hours of western. All I'm sayin'. Still, loved the film.
And now I am spent. I've been taking a small break from watching films owing to moving to a new flat, and do not have the cinema quite as close as I did before, but I am hoping to get my viewing habits sorted once again, come the end of March. Roll on!
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