This week I’m going to recommend a film I loved. It wasn’t the kind of thing I’d usually see, but I enjoyed it so hugely that I want to tip you off, in case it’s the kind of thing that you’d miss too. Like me, you might just not look out for this type of entertainment.
It’s a snuff movie.
It’s not a snuff movie. But it’s a genre which I have historically sought out with only marginally more enthusiasm: an action movie, full of car chases and stolen weapons and people rolling under descending doorways firing guns and a lead actor who usually plays characters from Marvel comics.
Ghosted, it’s called. You’ll find it on Apple TV+, in that very modern way where, despite its big stars and big bangs, it’s been released for streaming rather than cinema. It only came out last week, but it’s already got a Wikipedia page which flags it up as having been badly reviewed. I read a few and, sure enough, found a deluge of snarky condescension.
There’s no accounting for critics. Bunch of intellectual snobs, most of them, who experience their chosen culture in abnormal, solitary, po-faced circumstances and react in atypical ways. At New Year, I wrote about the sort of film critic who uses adjectives like “slow” and “bleak” as compliments (I was particularly grumpy, having recently seen that sequel to The Railway Children in which two thirds of the railway children are dead), and I asked: “Wouldn’t it be great if 2023 were the year that joy returned to cinema?”
This isn’t quite cinema, unless you have one of those giant screens, but it is big-budget action and full of the joy I’m talking about.
Should you trust me over the professionals? Hard to tell, these things are so subjective. Here are some parameters to help you get my bearings: I think Back to the Future is the greatest film of all time. I always cry at Rocky II. The only film I’ve ever walked out of halfway through is Prospero’s Books, an avant-garde take on The Tempest in which (I discovered too late, after paying) John Gielgud plays not just Prospero but all the other parts as well. I giggled throughout George Clooney’s very serious thriller The American, especially the sex scenes. I think Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is severely underrated. I smoked a cigarette in the Oxford Odeon during the closing credits of Schindler’s List, because I was so traumatised by its harrowing brilliance, but when a busybody hurried across the aisle to chastise me I regained my composure sufficiently to shout, “Who’s the Nazi now?”.
I’ve got crushes on John Cusack, Paul Rudd and Drew Barrymore. I could recite Some Like It Hot to you word for word, from “All right Charlie, this the joint?” to “Nobody’s perfect”. In 1993, I went with my friend Tim to see What’s Love Got to Do with It, a biopic of Tina Turner, at lunchtime in Soho, and there was nobody in the cinema but us and Tim’s old prep school headmaster who was sitting alone in the third row; the conversation afterwards was more awkward than the one after Schindler’s List.
I don’t know if any of that helps. But that’s my resumé and I found Ghosted funny, touching, fantastically paced and totally gripping. It starts as a romantic comedy – a properly charming, cutely observed romcom with Chris Evans and Ana de Armas having a perfect 24-hour date which leads to a really sexy love scene (and remember, I’m someone who got the giggles watching George Clooney do it). But then she stops answering his messages, hence the urban-dictionary title of the film, and he tracks her down to London where her secret CIA life is revealed and a super-fast action thriller kicks off.
The whole thing is an exciting, witty, romantic epic that thrills without taking itself seriously, and if its director Dexter Fletcher doesn’t move on to doing Bond films then … well, then it means someone actually wants them to be like Quantum of Solace.
I suppose there is a serious point in it somewhere, to do with how well you ever know your partner. But a clichéd closing question in high-minded culture is “Do we ever really know other people at all?”, and I think most married people would reply: “Oh God yes.”
My friend Charlie’s father, a Suffolk vicar and solicitor, used to say: “Anyone might be a spy. You don’t know that I’m not a spy.”
And Charlie would say: “I really do.”
Still, everyone loves the fantasy of a secret life. For a long time after seeing The Long Kiss Goodnight, I hoped that I myself was an assassin with amnesia. You can’t prove I’m not.
On Sunday at 3pm, the notorious government alert sounded on my phone but not my husband’s. I did briefly wonder if the Government wanted him dead. In many ways, he has all the traditional mannerisms of a spy. But he definitely isn’t one. (Unlike the contestants on Only Connect. They all are.)
Speaking of Only Connect, I was delighted to see that the male lead in Ghosted is beta, asthmatic and too needy with women. This is so refreshing, especially from an actor who usually plays Captain America.
I’ll stop raving now. You can tell me I’m wrong, but give it a spin. Critics know nothing. You should listen to me, because I’m not one. And please note: they’d only banned smoking in the Oxford Odeon three days before Schindler’s List came out.
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