Dark Waters

As the year wraps up I've been thinking a lot about what the best film of 2020 might be for me. Admittedly, I've not seen a lot. It's crazy as last year I went to the cinema and saw more new releases than ever before, and yet as new releases have technically become more accessible with them all being streamed now I just find myself less inclined to bother. After all, so much is about the experience itself of being at the actual movie theater and that immersive experience. It's why I can't relate when people philosophize about "is this the end of movie theaters" because they personally would rather watch from their sofa on a small screen filled with distractions. No thanks.

Despite having not seen much this year, I do think for me, personally, my favourite movie has definitely been Dark Waters. I know technically this is listed on IMDb as 2019, but it was released at the very end of and wasn't released in Europe until 2020, so to me, a European, it's a 2020 release!

I really had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to watch this movie, I just thought the trailer looked interesting, and those gritty investigative movies starring Mark Ruffalo are one of my absolute favourite genres all by themselves.

Told from the perspective of lawyer Rob Bilott (Mark Ruffalo) the story begins almost as a mystery as he's brought an environmental case by a local farmer and begins investigating the huge multi-billion corporation Dupont, and discovers the toxic waste they've been pumping into America's water supplies. The plot of this movie is absolutely enraging as Bilott soon realises just how far the corporate tentacles that grip every aspect of our lives go, and how untouchable such a huge company are even from the government, which just feels even more relevent with the state of the world right now.

I appreciate how difficult it must have been to write a movie that's essentially about research compelling, but they managed it. Ruffalo literally spends a portion of the film sorting through endless boxes of paperwork, and yet I still found myself on the edge of my seat at what he was about to uncover.

"The system is rigged. They want us to believe that it'll protect us, but that's a lie. We protect us. We do. Nobody else. Not the companies, not the scientists, not the government. Us."

I'm not sure why this movie isn't more popular, wasn't more widely discussed, didn't pick up steam and garner any kind of social action, but it's a shame (and its quite easy to get all tin foil hat about why none of these things happened). Not only does this movie have a really important message, but it also tells it well and is just really well made. I've seen it three times this year, and the power of it's message never dilutes even when you know it's coming. It's just an incredible movie, and one of my favourites of all time, not just 2020.

One Royal Holiday

As you'll know if you've read my intro post, Aaron Tveit is my favourite actor and obviously because of this I like to stay up to date with his work. I've been putting off watching his latest movie One Royal Holiday (2020) for about 2 months now, and oh boy. I haven't been particularly excited for it which is why it's taken me this long to finally get round to watching it when it was released way back on October 31st (which is the most random night to release a Christmas movie, but whatever) I've seen Hallmark movies before so I knew it would be overly schmaltzy and cheesy, and the preview didn't give me much hope, but somehow it ended up being even worse?

Fairly typical for Hallmark holiday fare, it tells the story of Anna who works as a nurse in a Boston hospital and is visiting her father's Inn in Conneticut for the holidays, and Prince James of Galwick who's stuck in the US with his mother the Queen of Galwick after their plane was grounded due to snow storms. They meet in a donut shop and when learning of their plight Anna offers them a place to stay at her fathers Inn. Prince James has a massive stick up his ass and it's Anna's job to remove it, and typically they fall in love in the process.

I'd guessed Prince James's accent was going to be bad just from the preview when literally all he says is "Sorry, what?", but even I wasn't prepared for just how bad. Aaron has worked extensively with British people, he even worked on a London stage for a while, I also read an interview where he boasted about having received British accent training when filming Les Mis (a movie in which he sounds distinctly American I should add) so it feels like a real accomplishment to have gotten it that wrong. I guess now I understand why the Broadway production of Moulin Rouge randomly made Christian an American - our man just can't do accents.

I'm also perplexed at the characterisation of the Prince and Queen as they make such a point in the movie of saying that their fictional country of Galwick is 'Northern Europe' which to me, a European, implies Scandinavia. Yet everything about this 'Royal family' was the most painfully ignorant British stereotype you could ask for and had absolutely NOTHING to do with anything distinctly 'Northern Europe'. Even several of the casual comments they made about how 'different' they were got to me because it was just so poorly researched and could of been quickly Googled:
➳ "I'm not used to being on this side of the road" - the majority of Europe drives on the same side of the road as the US, driving on the left is literally a UK only thing.
➳ "I minored in architecture" - THAT'S NOT HOW EUROPEAN SCHOOLING WORKS!!!! We don't have 'majors' and 'minors'.
Even all of the comments on tea, and the 'royals' laughing at the Americans and their donuts - y'know we eat donuts here too, right??? Patisseries and bakeries are kind of a big deal, we invented most of that stuff.

I honestly found this film painful because it was just so poorly researched, so "haha, Europeans, am I right?" without having the slightest idea of anything to do with Europe and it came across as borderline offensive in it's level of ignorance. Both of the lead characters of Prince James and Anna aren't even likeable and were just equally as smug in opposite ways.

Aaron looked like he didn't want to be there for most of it, and he barely bothered promoting it on his social media so I feel like this is just something he signed up to in a panic caused by the pandemic and Broadway closing - he even directly said as much, making the point that it was the first work he'd been offered in months since Broadway closed. It honestly hurts to be ragging on one of his movies like this because he is my favourite actor and usually watching his movies makes me so, so happy, but it was so genuinely terrible and such a disappointment as it's the first of his movies that I actually feel that way about.