Paddington travels to Peru to visit his beloved Aunt Lucy, who now resides at the Home for Retired Bears. With the Brown Family in tow, a thrilling adventure ensues when a mystery plunges them into an unexpected journey through the Amazon rainforest and up to the mountain peaks of Peru.
06 Jan Paddington in Peru (2024)
Nicholas Caged
In ‘The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent’ Nicholas Cage plays a larger self, which is the joke. He works with an actor who plays a larger Antonio Banderas. They are both movie obsessives, and share an opinion that ‘Paddington 2’ is the best film the world has produced. The layering of jokes that notion spins is enough to make the very idea fill a day of remembered amusement. Because basically all films are about other films.
Cage is our modern Klaus Kinksi, an actor that at least some of the time seems crazier than the character. Kinski’s touchstone is ‘Fitzcarraldo’, a great meditation on obsession. In this film, the character is reborn in the most cartoon of senses, obsessed by ‘gold’ and haunted by ancestors (played by Banderas).
In fact, this entire film is not just pasted parts from other films — as are most holiday family amusements — but is explicitly so. Gags and references from other films aren’t just the decoration, but the spine.
I won’t list the ones I recognised because the Fitzcarraldo reference was so bizarre and central it framed the whole thing for me. What you have to know to understand the unease — even a week later writing this — is the nature of that film.
The obsession wasn’t to find something in Peru, but rather to bring something. The ‘gold’ in that film was sex, sex of the ‘civilised’ nature in art. Ejaculation as art, and art as religion. I think the film failed, but Kinski’s teen daughter was able to have a career in film echoing that notion with her body.
There’s a jungle raised teen daughter here as well, placed in a very uncomfortable role, given the interim weaving.
The film itself was unsettling visually. In the previous films the base images were of London, a bit dreary atmospherically but with strange and fun set decoration. The synthetic images were registered in the real world.
They made the opposite choice here. The synthetic world of the bear and visual jokes is the reference. That means they had to process the conventional photography through hyper-real filters, sharpening edges and local contrast. I suppose this would not be noticed given current on-line photographic trends. But I found it unsettling.
Posted in 2024
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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