The Movie Doctors. Simon Mayo
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Anna gets William, though Harry messes things up with Karen (careful with that elaborately wrapped necklace).
Feel-good factor
MAMMA MIA! (2008)
My, my, how can we resist you? Is it the best movie in the world? Er, no. Is it the best musical movie in the world? No again. Do any of the cast (Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Amanda Seyfried, Colin Firth et al) get to deliver career-best performances? We think not. However, this film – made in 2008 when the Greeks still had money (even if, as we learned later, it was all ours) – is so bad it is strangely wonderful.
In summary: on a Greek island, Meryl Streep sings the Abba catalogue like it’s Ibsen, Colin Firth can’t dance, Pierce Brosnan can’t sing and Stellan Skarsgård looks like he’s accidentally wandered in from a completely different movie. Fortunately for us, the songs are bombproof and somehow turn this sow’s ear into a celluloid silk purse. Before you know it you are dancing in the aisles and giving money to tramps. Don’t argue, just surrender to your inner dancing queen. Couldn’t escape if you wanted to.
Feel-good factor
SULLIVAN’S TRAVELS (1941)
If you want an ‘upper’ that will impress passing film students, then start here. Written and directed by Preston Sturges, it tells the story of a successful, if shallow, film director John Sullivan (Joel McCrae) who wants to make a film that means something. He worries that maybe all that froth and silliness (Hey Hey in the Hayloft) won’t count for much when the final tally is being calculated. So, much to the horror of his studio bosses who don’t think such a spoiled lightweight like Sullivan can make an ‘issues’ picture, he sets off dressed as a tramp to ‘get real’ (as they never said in 1941). He finds The Girl (Veronica Lake), and together they set off to understand what poor folk are really like.
He is robbed, beaten up, arrested and sentenced to a labour camp. This, as you might realise, is the downer section of the film. But while in the camp he watches a screening of Walt Disney’s Playful Pluto, a 1934 animation noted for a sequence where Pluto gets stuck on some flypaper. The crowd around Sullivan lap it up and he realises that comedy does, after all, have a purpose. He ditches his planned social epic O Brother, Where Art Thou? (yes, this is where it all started) and promises to stick to comedy. He also gets The Girl. As one of the best satires on the morals of Hollywood, your laughs are righteous, intellectual laughs, and so count double. Your recovery is assured.
Feel-good factor
GROUNDHOG DAY (1993)
The Movie Doctors believe that being what some people call ‘grumpy’ is actually just having standards. You’re no longer a child, you barely remember teenage angst and now, with a certain maturity, you find that standards, everywhere, are slipping. You might have put up with it once – when you knew no better – but not now.
The Danes invented the word (grum means cruel) but it’s an American who leads the field here. Few movie stars do ‘grumpy’ better than Bill Murray. He doesn’t even have to say anything, his face is grumpy. One stare at the camera and you know that he’s just very disappointed. With everything. And he has a lot to be disappointed about. He’s a bored weatherman stuck repeating the same day over and over again; a day that starts with the clock radio playing ‘I Got You Babe’ by Sonny and Cher (a trick repeated hilariously by Dr Mayo one fab Radio 1 morn). He’s in love with Andie MacDowell. She thinks he’s a jerk. But as the groundhog in question – ‘Punxsutawney Phil’ – works his magic, Murray uses his time to do good works and compile a list of MacDowell’s favourite things: poems, ice cream flavours, songs etc. She falls for this stuff completely, he toasts world peace and they ‘retire’ for the evening.
You’ll wake up tomorrow happy with your lot, keen to do good deeds and to avoid rodent-based weather forecasting.
Feel-good factor
DIE HARD (1988)
A man in a vest takes on not just mercenaries with mullets (studios take note: that’s a new franchise right there) but a snarling German anarchist (is there any other kind?). There is no doubt that this action movie is a hoot – a feel-good film full of jokes and memorable one-liners. True, there are a quite few deaths, falling bodies, explosions and scenes of general peril, but we never for one second doubt that Bruce Willis’s moral compass is pointed firmly at Righteous North.
Plus! You can luxuriate in an era of outdated terrorists. This is a time where the threat came from the ‘New Provo Front’, ‘Liberté de Quebec’ and ‘Asian Dawn’, who Alan Rickman’s Hans Gruber has just read about in Time magazine (he’s only pretending to be a terrorist in order to get the FBI to cut off the power). One viewing of Die Hard and you’ll be bouncing from your bed, hiding your detonators and yelling ‘Yippie-ki-yay, melon farmers!’ You’ll be back at work by morning.
Feel-good factor
KEEP TAKING THE HAPPY PILLS
A Clinical Examination
There’s an old showbiz adage which states that the key to success is to leave an audience wanting more. In movie circles, this has been refined to read ‘leave the audience wanting nothing more’ – to satiate their desires so thoroughly that viewers will leave the cinema on a euphoric high, ready to tell all their friends how fabulous the movie they just saw made them feel. In practical terms, this means ‘leave ’em smiling’ – no matter how grim or downbeat the preceding drama may have been, all will be well if the final reel closes with a life-affirming hug or a pulse-quickening freeze-frame.
The idea that what audiences really want from movies is to make them feel happy, positive, and upbeat is as old as the hills. There’s also nothing new about film-makers giving their audiences exactly what they think they want; as the racy compendium The Good Old Naughty Days (2002) proves, the birth of moving pictures predates the birth of moving pornography by about five minutes – a clear example of early ‘market driven’ movie-making. Yet the idea that the only guarantee of success is to leave viewers ‘feeling good’ has long been a bone of contention, with directors and producers regularly butting heads over the benefits (or otherwise) of ensuring that everything ends happily ever after.
As a case study, let’s look at Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), now widely considered to be one of the most important and innovative science fiction movies of the late twentieth century. Based on a short novel by Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?) Blade Runner portrays a dystopian future in which ‘replicants’ rebel against their human creators and demand ‘more life’ when faced with inbuilt obsolescence. The screenplay, written (separately, initially) by Hampton Fancher and David Webb Peoples, casts android-hunter Rick Deckard as a noirish assassin despatched to track down and eliminate rogue replicants, one of whom he falls in love with. In a classic Romeo and Juliet-style twist, Deckard becomes besotted with the android Rachael, despite knowing that her existence is terminal, and her future finite. As an associate tauntingly tells him, ‘It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?’
As originally conceived by director Scott, who had previously scored both critical and financial success with his stylish sci-fi shocker Alien (1979), the film was a dark parable about forthcoming ‘dangerous days’ – a discussion of the nature of so-called ‘artificial’ intelligence, and a foreboding look at the potential