Colossal (2016)

19 Friday May 2017

Tags

Alcoholism, Anne Hathaway, Comedy, Dan Stevens, Drama, Fantasy, Giant robot, Jason Sudeikis, Monster, Nacho Vigalondo, Review, Seoul

D: Nacho Vigalondo / 109m

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Austin Stowell, Tim Blake Nelson, Hannah Cheramy, Nathan Ellison

Gloria (Hathaway) can’t resist a night out with her friends; or more specifically she can’t resist having a drink or two, or three, or four, when she’s out with her friends. Unable to deal with her repeated denials about her behaviour and her alcohol dependency, Gloria’s boyfriend, Tim (Stevens), ends their relationship, forcing her to move back to her old hometown, somewhere she hasn’t been in over ten years. She moves in to her parents’ old home, which is unfurnished. The next day, after having purchased an air mattress to sleep on, she runs into an old friend from her school days, Oscar (Sudeikis). Now the owner of a bar, Oscar takes her there and introduces Gloria to his friends, Garth (Nelson) and Joel (Stowell). Several drinks later, Gloria staggers home, passing through a nearby park on the way.

The next day, the world’s media is in a frenzy over the appearance of a giant monster in Seoul, South Korea. Gloria sees the footage and like everyone else is astonished by it. That night Gloria gets drunk again and goes home through the park. The next morning, the news reports a second appearance by the monster, but Gloria is surprised to see that it makes a similar gesture to one that she makes, and that it looks as if it’s trying to carry something over its shoulder, as she did with the air mattress. Putting two and two together and hoping it’ll add up to five, Gloria heads for the park where she strikes a number of specific poses. When she sees the latest footage, the monster strikes the exact same poses. Realising there’s some kind of link between them, Gloria tells Oscar and his friends.

The appearance of a giant robot alongside the monster is connected to Oscar, who shows signs of drinking too much (while Gloria starts drinking less). With Gloria having spent the night with Joel, and the sudden arrival of Tim, Oscar becomes aggressive towards Gloria, and threatens to cause havoc and destruction in Seoul if she doesn’t stay with him. Unsure of what to do, matters come to a head when Oscar tries to stop Gloria from leaving with Tim…

It’s safe to assume that, however many movies you see in 2017, you won’t see a stranger, more inventive movie than Colossal, the latest feature from Spanish writer/director Nacho Vigalondo. It’s a weird beast: by turns funny, dramatic, thrilling, challenging, poignant, even uplifting – and when was the last time you could say all that about one movie? And Vigalondo has the temerity to make it all look so easy. The movie is an unexpected cause for celebration, because this is a monster movie that is about so much more than just a creature terrorising downtown Seoul a la Godzilla and Tokyo. No, this is a movie concerned with notions of personal responsibility, self-respect, emotional insecurity, and redeeming past mistakes. It’s a movie with a very clear message: it’s never too late to start over, and to confound the expectations of those around you.

What could have been just another derivative monster movie also becomes, thanks to Vigalondo and his cast and crew, a surprisingly well grounded and credibly portrayed examination of survivors’ guilt, as both Gloria and Oscar deal in their very different ways with an event that happened when they were children, and which has left its mark on both of them. Gloria left her hometown for New York and fame and fortune as a writer, but she’s found alcoholism instead. Oscar has remained in their hometown and found that he can’t leave, that invisible ties hold him back, invisible ties, though, of his own making. Both are plagued by a sense of seemingly inevitable decline, that their lives are failing in terms of their potential, and neither of them know how to combat this. But by being given a chance to revisit that childhood incident, and to understand how it has affected them, both have the opportunity to rectify matters and move forward.

Of course, it’s not so easy, and Vigalondo twists the knife into both his lead characters, adding a layer of abuse to his increasingly dark and disturbing tale, and taking the story into places that the average fantasy drama wouldn’t even dream of trying to incorporate. And yet, with all this going on, Colossal isn’t as “heavy” as you might think, thanks to Vigalondo leavening things with massive doses of hope and pitch black humour. He’s helped tremendously by the performances of Hathaway and Sudeikis, two actors who might not be regarded as first choices for their roles, but who excel as two people struggling with their personal demons as best they can. Hathaway hasn’t been this good in quite some time, and she can sometimes seem removed from the character she’s playing, but here the opposite is true. She details Gloria’s growth from self-negating alcoholic to re-empowered avenger with such passion and empathy for the character that her performance gets better and better as the movie progresses. It’s impressive, and it’s courageous, and it’s Hathaway’s most deceptively skillful portrayal by far.

She’s matched by an intense, unsettling performance from Sudeikis, whose transformation from genial, easy-going bar owner and childhood friend to self-hating, conscience-free thug is one of the movie’s many highlights. When we first meet Oscar, Sudeikis plays him in much the same fashion as he’s played characters in other movies: with his trademark grin, amused yet casual demeanour, and equally casual delivery of his dialogue. Here, Sudeikis gets to subvert that image, and he seizes the opportunity with undisguised gusto. It’s a role that could so easily have descended into that of an unwavering, motiveless psycho, but between them, Vigalondo and Sudeikis have created a character whose psychopathy is believable to the point that when Gloria hits on what “ails” Oscar, the viewer can nod sagely and say to themselves, “that explains everything”.

The other characters aren’t given anywhere near as much depth as that shared by Gloria and Oscar, and Tim in particular is a distracting presence in the movie, with Stevens playing him as a shallow yet well-meaning putz. Thankfully, and one scene late on in the movie aside, Tim appears sparingly, and Vigalondo never makes him seem too important a part of Gloria’s future (she can do so much better and she probably knows it). As perhaps befits the tone of the movie, the visuals are kept muted, with the colour palette restricted to dull browns and distressed greys. The use of the monster and his giant robot adversary is kept in service to the story, and anyone expecting a full-on slugfest to close out the movie will be sorely disappointed. However, what does happen is clever, sad, and redemptive all at the same time, and allows the movie to end on one of the best sighs ever. Yes, a sigh, but one that says it all.

Rating: 8/10 – a bona fide gem, and chock full of surprises, all of them a pleasure to encounter and experience, Colossal is a movie that constantly moves the goalposts in its efforts to provide something different and extraordinary; Vigalondo has made an eloquent, remarkable movie that has something to say throughout and for once, it’s a movie that also knows just how to say it.

Iris (2016)

18 Thursday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Charlotte Le Bon, Crime, Drama, Jalil Lespert, Kidnapping, Mechanic, Ransom, Review, Romain Duris, Thriller

aka In the Shadow of Iris

D: Jalil Lespert / 99m

Cast: Romain Duris, Charlotte Le Bon, JaliL Lespert, Camille Cottin, Adel Bencherif, Sophie Verbeeck, Hélène Barbry, Jalis Laleg

Maxim Lopez (Duris) is a car mechanic with an ex-wife, Nina (Verbeeck) and young son, Eli (Laleg). He is way behind on his mortgage payments and his work as a mechanic doesn’t bring in enough money to allow him to clear the debt anytime soon. He keeps promising Nina he’ll deal with it, but it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to. Antoine Doriot (Lespert) is the owner of the bank that holds Maxim’s mortgage. He has an attractive wife, Iris (Barbry), and appears to have it all. But one day, after he and his wife have had lunch together, she disappears. Later on that day, Doriot receives a telephone call. The caller is a man, and he informs Doriot that Iris has been kidnapped. Unless Doriot pays €500,000 for her release, then she’ll be killed.

Despite being warned not to, Doriot contacts the police. Capitaines Nathalie Vasseur (Cottin) and Malek Ziani (Bencherif) are assigned to the case, and immediately suspect someone who holds a grudge against the bank. A list of people who have made complaints contains Maxim’s name. Before they can get around to speaking with him, a ransom drop is arranged at a railway station. Doriot is required to board a particular train but at the last moment he remains on the platform. Vasseur and Ziani continue to work their way through the list until they reach Maxim. They ask him what he was doing the afternoon Iris disappeared but he has an alibi that’s supported by his ex-wife.

The police decide that the kidnapping should be made public. What they don’t know is that by doing so, what seems to have been a straightforward kidnapping will turn into something far more dramatic and deadly. Unknown to them, Iris has faked her own abduction with the aid of Maxim, but when news of the kidnapping is released to the media, Maxim makes a discovery that turns everything he knows upside down, and puts both his life and his continued liberty at risk, and from an entirely unexpected source. Forced to put a plan of his own into action, Maxim must stay one step ahead of his adversary, and hope that everything will work out as Iris originally planned.

Originally planned as a US production, but eventually ending up in France – naturellement – Iris arrives with little fanfare and no shortage of problems in the script department, which is a surprise as the screenplay is by Andrew Bovell, whose credits include Strictly Ballroom (1992), Lantana (2001), and Edge of Darkness (2010). But it’s likely that Bovell’s script lost and gained things in translation, as this is very definitely a Gallic interpretation of what is otherwise a typical neo-noir. Once the police are introduced, the movie’s well constructed and intriguing beginning soon gives way under a welter of dramatic inconsistencies and dubious narrative decisions. There’s a good movie here somewhere, but under Lespert’s guidance, it only gets to shine on occasion, and remains an inconsistent, frustrating piece throughout.

Inevitably with a movie that stands or falls on the quality of its main “twist”, Iris relies on a piece of sleight-of-hand involving Iris herself that should immediately set viewers’ alarm bells ringing (it’s also the point where more experienced viewers will be nodding to themselves wisely and saying “Ah-ha!”). But the movie continues as if no one will have noticed what’s going on and then falls promptly on its sword by introducing Vasseur and Ziani. Ultimately it’s their involvement that ruins the whole tone of the movie, as their attempt at investigating Iris’s kidnapping proves to be both foolish and inane. The French may well be an idiosyncratic race, but it’s unlikely that their police detectives reveal intimate details of their sex lives when interviewing suspects (as they do with Doriot). And you’d certainly hope that if a kidnapper got in touch by mobile phone that they’d try to track him down by tracing his number – not here, though.

There are other instances of police stupidity on display including a dawn raid on Maxim’s workshop-cum-home where they haven’t bothered to check if he’s even there in the first place, and these instances take up too much of the movie’s running time. But even away from all that, things speed up and unravel at such a pace that there’s no time to wonder how all of it is happening, and without the principal characters – let’s leave the police out of all this – knowing about it. It all narrows down to Maxim and Doriot, and what each will do to get what they want. This leaves Iris as a pawn in both their games, but a pawn who has the capacity to ruin either one of them.

On the whole, Iris has the appearance of a thriller that’s been well thought out, but only to a point. Despite some appropriately moody camera work courtesy of Pierre-Yves Bastard, and a plaintive, melancholy score by ambient duo A Winged Victory for the Sullen, Lespert’s approach to the material remains scattershot and lacking in focus. Too many scenes seem to have been included at random, or for no appreciable reason, and too many dialogue scenes serve only to reinforce what’s already happened rather than to drive the story forward. The cast are often left stranded by the demands of the script, with Duris called upon to grimace his way through Maxim’s domestic crises (which have no bearing on anything else that happens), and Lespert himself prone to playing scenes where he stares off into space as if these moments will add depth to both the character (it doesn’t) and the scene (ditto).

The movie adds another couple of twists into the mix late on, but by then it’s too late, and most viewers will have worked out where it’s all going anyway. There’s also time for a fairly gratuitous and unnecessary sex scene, and the kind of denouement that aims for a combination of psychological integrity and emotional intensity, but instead falls well short of achieving both. The movie weaves various flashbacks into the narrative in an effort to explain certain things that have happened, but even with that clarity it doesn’t help the movie feel any less muddled or ill defined. As thrillers go it’s quite mundane, and plays out with a noticeable lack of energy – which could be forgiven if Lespert had opted for a more considered approach to the material.

Rating: 5/10 – despite a number of narrative and directorial flaws that hamper the flow of the movie, Iris takes its place amongst the movies that have aimed high, and without any clear sense of how those aims should play out; determinedly Gallic in tone but unable to offer anything new, it’s a movie that plays out favourably enough, but without being too memorable.

Gifted (2017)

17 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Chris Evans, Custody battle, Drama, Jenny Slate, Lindsay Duncan, Marc Webb, Mathematics, Maths prodigy, Mckenna Grace, Navier-Stokes problem, Octavia Spencer, Review

D: Marc Webb / 97m

Cast: Chris Evans, Mckenna Grace, Lindsay Duncan, Octavia Spencer, Jenny Slate, Glenn Plummer, John M. Jackson, John Finn, Elizabeth Marvel, Keir O’Donnell

In a small town in Florida, seven-year-old Mary Adler (Grace) is reluctantly preparing to go to school for the first time. Up until now she’s been homeschooled by her uncle Frank (Evans). Brighter and more precocious than the other children, Mary still has a lot to learn about social interaction and the rules she needs to abide by. Her first day doesn’t go entirely well, but she does catch the attention of her maths teacher, Bonnie Stevenson (Slate), who starts to suspect that Mary is a maths prodigy. An incident involving Mary and a boy on the school bus nearly sees her expelled; in turn it causes Mary’s grandmother, Evelyn (Duncan), to visit.

There is no love lost between Frank and Evelyn (his mother). In his own words, Evelyn is uncompromising, and she hasn’t seen Mary ever before. Her reason for showing up soon becomes obvious: she wants to take Mary under her wing and cultivate her gift with complex mathematics, just as she did with Mary’s mother, Diane. But Diane – who was just as gifted as her daughter, and working on the Navier-Stokes problem (one of seven Millennium Prize Problems) – committed suicide soon after Mary’s birth, and Frank blames himself for not seeing how unhappy she was. He also blames Evelyn for not letting Diane grow up like a normal child, something that he’s determined won’t happen to Mary. But Evelyn is truly uncompromising, and soon a custody battle is under way.

Frank and Bonnie begin seeing each other, while the custody hearing sees both sides in with a chance of winning. When Frank’s lawyer (Plummer) approaches him with a deal that’s been devised by Evelyn, and which involves Mary going to live with foster carers, Frank wavers in his commitment to his niece, and eventually agrees to the plan because he’s not sure he can give her the life she needs (even though he’s done really well so far). When the day comes for her to move in with the foster carers, Mary is understandably sad, and feels betrayed. With no other recourse at his disposal it takes a notice posted at Mary’s school to push Frank into getting Mary back, and revealing something about Diane that will ensure Evelyn relinquishes her claim on Mary.

Surprisingly, Gifted is only Marc Webb’s fourth feature, and it’s telling from the movie’s poster that any mention of a certain web-slinger isn’t going to be relevant here. But an acknowledgment that Webb made the terrific indie charmer (500) Days of Summer (2009) certainly is, as this tale of a troubled family, though genial and passively compelling, has the ebb and flow of Webb’s first movie rather than the bloated excesses of the last two Spider-Man movies. Where Webb’s skill and voice as a director was lost in the hubbub of taking on a Marvel icon, here he’s regained that voice and made a movie that’s more in keeping with his moviemaking sensibilities.

The crux of the matter in Tom Flynn’s straightforward, no frills script is whether or not Mary should be treated as the maths genius she undoubtedly is, or as a normal child who just happens to be good with exponential equations. Frank wants her to have a regular childhood, where she plays outside, has friends, and isn’t nose deep in a book of mathematical problems all the time. Evelyn wants Mary to eschew all that and devote her life – even at such a young age – to developing her skills and attaining the kind of recognition that Diane was beginning to achieve before she killed herself. The movie is keen to highlight the pros and cons of both sides of the argument, but as the relationship between Frank and Mary is a loving one, and the script makes Evelyn into a hard-hearted shrew from the moment she appears, there’s no prizes for guessing which way the movie wants the viewer to vote. (In fairness, the script doesn’t allow Evelyn any kind of redemption, and makes her self-serving and callous all the way to the end.)

Of course, the overall conclusion is that Mary should be allowed to have and be both, a child prodigy and an ordinary child at the same time. The signs are already there when we first meet her, and there are dozens of clues littered throughout the movie, from her karaoke nights with neighbour Roberta (Spencer), to the empathy she shows towards a boy in her class who’s the victim of bullying. As the movie progresses and Frank opens up to Bonnie about his sister, and the responsibility he took on in looking after Mary, his self-doubt becomes apparent, but the good work he’s done in raising Mary is also apparent. He may have sacrificed a lot to be a single parent, but he’s done a remarkable job, but the script never allows him a moment of true personal triumph; he’s never sure about what he’s doing, or if it’s the right thing. This does add to the drama of the piece, but when it’s relayed so often you just want to yell, “Get over yourself, man!”

Frank’s insecurities aside, there are too many times when Evans and the character are required to provide substantial amounts of exposition that slow the movie down. Evans is a more than capable actor but here he’s required to either dial back on Frank’s feelings, or limit any angry outbursts to one every half an hour of running time. The movie is on firmer ground whenever Grace is on screen. Whether pulling a frown that would have the Joker asking “Why so serious?”, or smiling with undisguised glee, Grace is yet another child actor who can’t strike a false note even if she tried. She’s the focus and the heart of the movie, and she gives a moving performance that at times is reminiscent of Ricky Schroder in The Champ (1979). As mentioned above, Duncan is the villain of the piece, and she does well to make Evelyn occasionally sympathetic in her desire to take over Mary’s life, but there are too many moments where the character’s humanity (seen occasionally) is pushed aside in order for her to behave appallingly yet again.

Spencer and Slate are given the odd scene to remind us they’re still taking part, though it’s hard to work out why Spencer’s character is there in the first place. Slate’s role diminshes the longer the movie plays out, and by the end Bonnie is there just to listen to Frank complain about the raw deal he and Mary have been dealt (even though he agreed to it in the first place). These are two very good actresses and it’s a shame to see them relegated to playing such under-developed characters. Webb handles it all with a surety and a conviction that helps overcome some of the movie’s more clichéd moments – Mary spots the deliberate mistake in a smug professor’s equation, Evelyn gets to make an impassioned speech on the witness stand that goes unchallenged – and keeps the movie from tipping over into unrestrained mawkishness, in particular during a scene set in a hospital waiting room – one that has a powerful, sentimental payoff.

There are times when the movie feels slighter than it needs to be, and other times where the drama threatens to overwhelm the relaxed nature of much of the movie. It’s not a movie that offers much in the way of originality but it does have a charm and a likeable nature that makes it eminently watchable, and Evans, despite the limitations of his character, remains an engaging, dependable presence. Littered with enough heartstring-tugging moments designed to have viewers teary-eyed and reaching for the nearest box of tissues, Gifted does pack an emotional wallop at times, and it does provide enough food for thought in terms of its central dilemma to offset some of the thoughtless moralising that passes back and forth between Frank and Evelyn. But it’s still a simple story, told well enough to hold the viewer’s attention throughout, and is a welcome return by Webb after too many years in the mainstream wilderness.

Rating: 7/10 – a largely effective exercise in manipulating an audience’s emotions, Gifted coasts in places and isn’t as focused in its second half as it is during the first; it’s still a good movie though, full of dry humour, winning performances, a sense of its own conventional nature, and overall, a more than pleasant experience.

Folk Hero & Funny Guy (2016)

16 Tuesday May 2017

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Alex Karpovsky, Comedy, Drama, Friendship, Jeff Grace, Melanie Lynskey, Meredith Hagner, Relationships, Review, Road tour, Romance, Wyatt Russell

D: Jeff Grace / 91m

Cast: Alex Karpovsky, Wyatt Russell, Meredith Hagner, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Ian Black, Hannah Simone, Heather Morris, David Cross

Paul Scott (Karpovsky) used to work in advertising, but he’s given it all up to be a stand-up comedian. His new career has its moments, but it’s still early days and he still has to refer to a notebook on stage for his material. Paul’s best friend since they were children is folk singer Jason Black (Russell). Jason’s career has brought him a degree of fame and popularity, and he’s the kind of carefree, live-for-the-moment guy that’s the complete opposite of Paul’s more grudging, dissatisfied approach to life (it doesn’t help that Paul’s just been dumped by his girlfriend). Seeing that his friend needs a bit of a lift, and some encouragement, Jason suggests Paul open for him on his upcoming solo tour. Paul thinks it might be a bit odd, a comedian opening for a folk singer, but Jason reassures him it’ll all be fine.

They set off in Jason’s battered old Volvo (his regular tour bus is too expensive for just the two of them), and on the first night of their trip they find themselves in a bar in Tom’s River, NJ, that has an open mic night. After hearing a very talented singer called Bryn (Hagner), Jason is cajoled into performing. While he does, Paul strikes up a conversation with Bryn, and they hit it off. The next morning, Paul is surprised to learn that Jason has invited Bryn along with them on the tour, and that she’s the new opening act, with Paul going on second. He’s a little flummoxed by it all, as he thought the tour was a chance for two old friends to spend some time together, but he’s also pleased because he’s attracted to Bryn and wants to get to know her better.

As the tour progresses, Paul and Bryn become good friends, while Jason pursues his usual vices. Bryn’s act goes down well with audiences, but Paul struggles to find the kind of form onstage that he can produce offstage. He begins to have second thoughts about being on the tour, and whether or not he should continue to pursue his dream. He and Bryn become closer still, until the revelation that she and Jason slept together that first night they all met, threatens to sever old and new friendships as Paul finds he’s unable to deal with it all…

Writer/director Jeff Grace – here making his feature debut – is also a stand-up comedian. Adam Ezra, who provides the movie’s original soundtrack, is a musician who it just so happens went on tour with Grace as his opening act. Using this as the basis of his screenplay, Grace has fashioned a perceptive, entertaining movie that has many pertinent things to say about the nature of old friendships, love and romance, and the downside of ambition. It’s a semi-serious comedy that isn’t afraid to show its three main characters in a less than flattering light, and it’s a very funny drama that highlights the difficulties involved in trying to start a relationship when you can’t articulate what you need from that relationship.

Paul is almost a classic underachiever, his personal life littered with regrets and misunderstandings that he can’t get past or overcome, and his new professional life proving to be just as frustrating. Part of the problem in both areas is that Paul doesn’t do enough to make things work in the way that they should. He makes the minimum effort required, and doesn’t see that this intransigence is what’s stopping him from achieving his goal as a stand-up, or committing fully to relationships. Even when he does try to commit, it’s done in such a way that the relationship is bound to founder as a result. Ultimately, Paul doesn’t trust in his own happiness, and he finds ways to sabotage things when they seem to be going well.

Jason is the exact opposite: confident, spontaneous, a risk taker, and someone who doesn’t overthink things. The tour is Jason’s idea of helping Paul regain some of the self-confidence that he had when he worked in advertising. He sees that Paul is down in the dumps, that his negative attitude needs challenging, but in the same way that Paul works against himself and any chance of contentment, Jason has the best of intentions but lacks the skill to reinvigorate his best friend’s life. He tries, but his efforts always backfire because he just can’t put himself in Paul’s shoes. Jason lacks the awareness that what pleases him and keeps him happy, isn’t going to work in the same way with Paul. There are times when you wonder just what it is that has kept them friends for so long, and Grace’s judicious script skirts this issue until the last night of the tour and the inevitable confrontation between the folk hero and the funny guy.

Grace handles the comedic elements with unsurprising aplomb, putting Paul on stage and letting him bomb in the same kamikaze way each time (“What is up with e-vites?”). It’s funny, sad and frustrating all at the same time, because before he gets to that point in his act, he always does so well. But Grace isn’t interested in making things easy for Paul – hell, even Paul isn’t interested in making things easy for himself – and Paul’s pent-up frustration leads to his being properly funny only when he lets things blow. It’s a good indication of the kind of stand-up comedian Paul could or should be, and Grace appears to be leading the audience in this direction when in fact he’s clever enough to steer everyone to a different place altogether. This makes the movie more intriguing than expected, and opens up the possibility that in good old indie movie fashion, things may not turn out so well for everyone at all.

Along the way, Grace gives Karpovsky some great routines to have fun with (until the rot has to kick in), and allows Russell and Hagner the chance to impress on more than one occasion with their soulful singing styles. All three give good performances in the kind of well written roles that only seem to come along in the indie sector these days, and in a brief supporting role, Melanie Lynskey proves yet again why she is one of the best character actresses working today. Grace does extremely well for a first-time director, drawing out the subtleties of his script with a sure hand and managing to avoid making it all look too obvious. If Paul’s intransigence becomes wearing after a while – and it does – then it’s a small price to pay for a movie that deals so effectively in portraying Paul’s downbeat persona, and counter-balancing it with Jason’s more hedonistic approach to everything. It all adds up to a movie brimming with heart and soul, and which never short changes its characters or its audience.

Rating: 8/10 – an appealing and thoughtful movie about the nature of unequal male friendships, Folk Hero & Funny Guy is also an irresistible road movie-romantic comedy-drama; with a great soundtrack and score, it’s a movie that signals Grace as a moviemaker to watch, confirms Russell to be an actor with an engaging, amiable screen presence, and features a screenplay that’s sympathetic and non-judgmental to all three of its main characters.

10 Reasons to Remember Powers Boothe (1948-2017)

15 Monday May 2017

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Actor, Career, Emmy winner, Movies, Powers Boothe, Stage, Television

Powers Boothe (1 June 1948 – 14 May 2017)

For the first ten years of his acting career, Powers Boothe was on stage appearing in a range of Shaespearean productions that included Troilus and Cressida to Henry IV, Part II to Richard III. Quite a difference in terms of his background as the youngest of three boys growing up on a ranch in Texas (he was also the first person in his family to go to university). Those early years helped Boothe hone his acting skills, and though he began his movie career with a bit part in The Goodbye Girl (1977), it was only three short years before he was impressing television audiences with his performance as the doomed cult leader in Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980). Boothe won an Emmy, and that auspicious portrayal heralded the arrival of a real talent.

During the Eighties Boothe consolidated his success with a variety of movie, television (particularly as Philip Marlowe) and stage roles that reaffirmed his skill as a performer, but as the decade progressed he appeared more and more as both a supporting actor, and as a villain as well. With his stern features, penetrating stare and sonorous voice, Boothe was equally suited to the various law enforcement roles he began playing as he got older, before moving on to senior politician roles such as Alexander Haig in Oliver Stone’s Nixon (1995). He was able to inject a sense of gravitas to these roles that often helped tremendously when a movie was lacking in other areas, but a glance through his filmography shows that he didn’t make too many bad choices during his career, and he was able to work with directors of the calibre of John Boorman, Walter Hill and Robert Rodriguez.

From the late Nineties onwards, Boothe gravitated more and more towards television, and appeared in a number of well received shows including Attila the Hun, Deadwood, and 24. In recent years he also appeared in the likes of Nashville and Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. But whatever the format, Boothe was always an actor worth paying attention to, someone who could take a role and spin something unexpected out of it. And despite the often serious nature of the parts he played – he never did comedy – he could be relied on to appreciate the benefits of his profession: “Hell, I’ve played as many guys who get the girl as I have heavies. I’ve done love scenes with Jessica Lange and Jennifer Lopez, and I won’t kid you, they’re fun”.

1 – Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones (1980)

2 – Southern Comfort (1981)

3 – The Emerald Forest (1985)

4 – Extreme Prejudice (1987)

5 – Into the Homeland (1987)

6 – By Dawn’s Early Light (1990)

7 – Tombstone (1993)

8 – Blue Sky (1994)

9 – U Turn (1997)

10 – Sin City (2005)

This Beautiful Fantastic (2016)

14 Sunday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Andrew Scott, Drama, Gardening, Horticulture, Jeremy Irvine, Jessica Brown Findlay, Review, Romance, Simon Aboud, Tom Wilkinson

D: Simon Aboud / 91m

Cast: Jessica Brown Findlay, Tom Wilkinson, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Irvine, Anna Chancellor, Eileen Davies, Paul Hunter

Bella Brown (Findlay) was a foundling child, abandoned in a park and kept alive by ducks. She has grown up to be a young woman with obsessive compulsive disorder, and an ambition to be an author. She works at her local library where her love of books has made her a valiuable, if persistently late, member of staff. Her home is a modest property with an expansive garden, one that she doesn’t maintain due to an extreme aversion to flora. She is shy, modest, inquisitive, and in the words of her neighbour, Alfie Stevenson (Wilkinson), has been “sent here to test us”.

One day at the library, Bella meets Billy (Irvine), a young man interested in the works of Leonardo Da Vinci. He leaves behind a piece of paper that Bella can see has the imprint of a drawing on it. She takes it home and uses a pencil to raise the image, which is of a bird. As she gazes on it, the window to the garden flies open due to a storm outside, and the drawing is whisked away into the branches of a tree. Plucking up courage, Bella goes into the garden and retrieves it. In the process she falls and loses consciousness. When she comes to, Bella finds herself in the home of her neighbour, Alfie, and being tended to by his doctor, Milly (Davies), while in turn, Alfie is being tended to by his housekeeper, Vernon (Scott). Alfie is an old curmudgeon, and berates Bella for the condition of her garden, calling her a “horticultural terrorist”.

Alfie’s displeasure at the state of Bella’s garden leads to Vernon working for her instead, which in turn leads to a battle of wills as Alfie tries to browbeat Bella into letting Vernon go back to him. Soon after, Bella receives a visit from her landlord, Mr O’Brien (Hunter), who tells her that unless her garden is kept to a reasonable standard, then she’ll be evicted. Bella has a month to make good on this condition, and with the help of Vernon and Alfie she begins to tackle the momentous job of clearing and redesigning the garden before O’Brien returns. Meanwhile, she begins a relationship with Billy, who proves to be an inventor. But when she sees him with another woman, she suffers such a sense of betrayal and loss that her commitment to the garden is put in jeopardy, and with O’Brien’s return getting closer and closer, it’s going to take a small miracle to keep Bella in her home.

Although This Beautiful Fantastic is only the second movie written and directed by Simon Aboud – after Comes a Bright Day (2012) (itself well worth checking out) – it’s not a feature that falls foul of “difficult second movie syndrome”. Instead it’s an appealing, sweet-natured, even goofy at times, romantic-comedy-drama that does its best to put a smile on its audience’s faces, and all with a lightness of touch that makes it an undeniable pleasure to watch. Aboud’s “movie in microcosm” is such a delight from start to finish that it’s like having cheesecake ahead of a main course at a restaurant: it’s definitely a movie to savour.

And it’s all so simply constructed and put together, with Aboud’s confidence behind the camera matching the quality of his screenplay, and the performances fitting perfectly into the whimsical nature of the material. This isn’t a movie that springs any surprises on its audience, and it’s definitely not a movie that tries to be different, but it does have a tremendous amount of quiet, understated charm, and a delightfully winning way about it. From its opening scenes, which offer a brief appraisal of Bella’s childhood coupled with Alfie’s sniping comments about her, This Beautiful Fantastic is a movie that sets out its stall from the start, and which doesn’t disappoint as it expands on its contemporary fairy tale theme and keeps its narrative wrapped tightly around its quartet of main characters.

In keeping with its lightness of touch and playful nature, the romance between Bella and Billy is engaging and kept just this side of annoyingly saccharine, with Irvine’s eager puppy of a young man a perfect foil for Findlay’s more restrained, and yet attentive Bella. Their relationship fits the bill in terms of boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl-through-unfortunate-mix-up, and then regains-girl-through-apologetic-explanation-of-mix-up, but again it’s all done with the full acknowledgment by all concerned that this is a fairy tale, and in fairy tales there are certain rules that have to be followed, and one of them is that the princess always gets her prince.

With the romantic elements having been taken care of, Aboud is free to create dozens of comedic moments that act as an undercurrent to the central drama of Bella making sure her garden doesn’t remain an eyesore. Alfie’s cantankerous, acidic nature is portrayed by Wilkinson with a deftness of touch that makes a virtue out of waspish pomposity, and the character’s arrogant outward appearance belies a romantic soul whose passion for horticulture is more personal than expected. As Vernon, Scott delivers a mannered, sympathetic portrayal of a widower with two twin girls whose sense of self-worth has taken a bit of battering thanks to Alfie’s bullying ways. But there’s a way back for him, and Scott makes sure that Vernon’s recurring way of dealing with Alfie is one of the movie’s more pleasing highlights. For her part, Findlay is something of a “straight woman”, and though she gives a fine, rounded performance, she’s not required to “dazzle” as much as her male co-stars, and has to leave the comedy to Chancellor, who plays her boss, Mrs Bramble (her insistence on complete silence within the library leads to a great sight gag three quarters in).

The drama is concerned with Bella’s voyage of self-discovery through gardening, as evidenced by her checking obsessively that her front door is closed every time she leaves home, and which falls by the wayside as she begins to experience love for the first time (though whether being in love really constitutes a cure for OCD is a bit of a stretch). Bella gains in confidence, and her ambitions as a writer, stalled until the arrival of Billy, allow her to blossom even further beyond the confines of her garden. Aboud ensures that Bella’s journey is punctuated with the necessary number of setbacks, all of which allow for and encourage her personal (allegorical) growth at the same time that the garden begins to flourish also. Alfie develops too, although his development is less about personal growth and more about acknowledging the past and its lasting effect on him. Again, Aboud handles all these elements with a great deal of skill and compassion for his characters, and the end result is a movie that will make you laugh a lot, cry on occasion, and feel glad that you took a chance on a movie that could have missed its target by a country mile.

Rating: 8/10 – with a couple of last-minute revelations that unfortunately undermine the good work Aboud has put in in assembling his movie, This Beautiful Fantastic is still a movie that provides a very pleasant viewing experience indeed; one of those movies that make you feel great if you’ve found it without help from critics or word of mouth, it’s a lovely piece that knows its limitations and works within them to provide a beautifully designed and established visual delight – just like Bella’s garden.

Poster(s) of the Week – A Landscape Collection

13 Saturday May 2017

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Get Carter (1971), Landscape, Portrait, Poster of the week, Posters, Shaun of the Dead, Steamboat Bill Jr, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Searchers, Tranquility of Blood

When choosing the posters for this particular thread, it’s always the landscape format that I aim for. There’s something so appealing about the format that I can’t help but be drawn to it. In comparison, the portrait format – for me, at least – lacks something I can’t quite put my finger on, which is ironic when you consider that my reviews feature exactly that style of poster. It’s also very difficult at times to do a poster sufficient justice, and though this is a category/thread that is one of my favourites, choosing the right poster is often more of a struggle than it needs to be. As a result, what was meant to be a regular weekly feature has become very hit and miss during 2017, something that I intend to address – though, sadly, not just yet.

In the meantime, here are seven landscape movie posters that are particular favourites of mine. A couple of them are also posters of movies that I have a specific liking for, but all the rest are here on their own merits. So, no commentary or examination of the posters’ and their relative pros and cons, and no other context either. I just think they’re damn good posters.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

12 Friday May 2017

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Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Drama, Horror, Katherine Waterston, Michael Fassbender, Prequel, Review, Ridley Scott, Sci-fi, Sequel, Thriller, Xenomorph

D: Ridley Scott / 122m

Cast: Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride, Demián Bichir, Carmen Ejogo, Jussie Smollett, Callie Hernandez, Amy Siemetz, Nathaniel Dean, Alexander England, Benjamin Rigby, Uli Latukefu, Tess Haubrich

When the Alien franchise was given a new lease of life with official prequel Prometheus (2012), audiences were teased with the idea that they would finally learn just where the series’ chief villain, the xenomorph, came from. Prometheus, though, raised far more questions than it provided answers, and while it introduced the Engineers and went some way to showing the xenomorph’s origins (though not the reasons for its creation), the intended link between this first prequel and the original Alien (1979) remained obscure, and still far from being revealed. With Alien: Covenant, audiences could be excused for believing that some of those unanswered questions would be addressed, and the connecting story expanded on. But with at least two further prequels (sequels to the prequels?) planned, and possibly a third, the message here is frustratingly clear: don’t expect to learn anything you didn’t already know.

After the cod-theological leanings of Prometheus, the latest in the saga opts instead for cod-philosophical leanings, and spends time musing on notions of creation and acknowledging one’s place in the scheme of things. But the movie – scripted by John Logan and Dante Harper from a story by Jack Paglen and Michael Green – isn’t interested in exploring these notions in relation to the human contingent of the story, but instead in relation to two androids: David and Walter (both Fassbender) who represent opposite ends of their creationist cycle. David is the prototype, while Walter is the later model built to surpass the limitations of the original. Together they talk about their creator’s expectations for them, and then their own. But while on the surface these musings appear in keeping with the wider story of the xenomorph’s creation (whatever that may be), they don’t add as much depth to the material as may have been intended. Instead, they provide a basis and a reason for a third act “reveal” that exists purely to set up the next installment.

Before then, we’re introduced to the latest group of dinner dates for the murderous xenomorph. Only this time it’s either a neomorph (“infant” version) or a protomorph (“adult” version), but either way it still behaves like its forebear(?), has acid for blood, screeches like a banshee, and kills anyone in its path. This time around, the movie’s motley band of victims is the crew of the colony ship Covenant. A group of terraformers en route to an Earth-like planet called Origae-6, their cargo consists of two thousand colonists all in cryo-sleep, and a thousand embryos all in cold storage. While the crew also enjoys their cryo-sleep (they’re seven-and-a-half years away from reaching their destination), Walter carries out a variety of assigned tasks and monitors the ship and its personnel. A blast of unexpected solar energy damages the ship, and Walter wakes up the crew – all except for the captain, whose cryo-pod refuses to open. Thanks to the damage to the ship’s systems, the captain burns to death in his cryo-pod, which leaves Oram (Crudup) in charge.

A distress signal picked up from a planet that apparently doesn’t exist on any celestial maps reveals a human origin, and prompts Oram to redirect the Covenant to check it out. With the planet appearing to support human life, and being only a few weeks’ to get to, the reservations of chief terraformer Daniels (Waterston) are acknowledged but unheeded. Leaving chief pilot Tennessee (McBride) and two other crewmembers on board, Oram, along with Daniels, Walter, and the rest of the crew descends to the planet’s surface. There they find an anomaly in the form of wheat, a crashed spaceship, danger in the form of spores that infect two of the crew, and an unexpected rescuer when said spores precipitate the deaths of more than the infected. With a massive magnetic storm hindering their return to the Covenant, Oram and the remaining crew must find a way to survive the deadly intentions of the protomorph, and a more sinister danger lurking in their midst.

Those who found themselves dissatisfied with the direction taken in Prometheus will be pleased with this return to the series’ more basic roots, but even though it’s a step in the right direction, the problem with the movie overall is that it doesn’t offer anything new, and it doesn’t come close to replicating the tension and sense of dread that made Alien such an impressive outing. It tries to, and the script is clearly designed and constructed to provide gory set pieces at regular intervals in honour of the series’ abiding commitment to shocking audiences with jolts of body horror, but for anyone who’s seen all the previous movies in the franchise, this is a retread of scenes and set ups that were far more effective the first time round. Likewise the introduction of the various characters as regular joes, a device used to very good effect in Alien, but which here is truncated in favour of getting on with the action. Inevitably this means that when the crew starts to be whittled down, it doesn’t have the same effect as in the past, and Waterston’s plucky terraformer aside, it’s difficult to care about anyone as well.

In many ways, Alien: Covenant is a stripped down series’ entry that concentrates more on reliving old glories than advancing the franchise’s intended long-form narrative. Whatever happens in Alien: Awakening (2019?), it’s to be hoped that it reverts to telling the story begun in Prometheus and which should eventually connect with Alien. Here there are still more questions to be answered, and there’s a suspicion that the writers are already painting themselves into a corner, and that the decision to make a handful of prequels instead of just one all-encompassing prequel is beginning to look more than a little unsound. This has all the hallmarks of a movie made in response to the negative reaction afforded Prometheus, and if so, you have to wonder what this movie would have been like if the reaction had been positive. More of the same? Further exploration of the Engineers and their motivations? More pseudo-religious theorising? Less rampaging alien attacks and gory killings? It looks as if we’ll never know.

With the characters reduced mostly to alien-bait, only Fassbender and Waterston make any impact, though it is good to see McBride playing it completely straight for once. Fassbender is a mercurial actor but he always seems to have a stillness about him that seeps through in all his performances. Here as both David and Walter, that stillness is used to tremendous effect, and whether he’s waxing lyrical about art and music as David, or looking concerned as Walter, Fassbender provides two endlessly fascinating portrayals for the price of one. Waterston is equally impressive in a role that will inevitably draw comparisons with Sigourney Weaver as Ripley, but Waterston is canny enough not to make Daniels as strong-willed as Ripley, nor as valorous. Though she’s the movie’s nominal heroine, Daniels retains a vulnerability that Ripley didn’t have at all, and Waterston is a winning presence, her last act heroism borne out of desperation rather than determination.

Third time around, Ridley Scott ensures the movie looks as beautiful and darkly realised as his other entries, but somehow fails to make the movie as tense and compelling as Alien, or as intellectually portentous as Prometheus. He does ensure that the movie rattles along at a fair old lick, but with the script providing a series of “greatest hits” moments for him to revisit, Scott’s involvement doesn’t always appear to be as purposeful as in the past. There are too many moments where the movie’s energy seems to flag, and the tension dissipates as a result, leaving the viewer to wonder, if a director’s cut should be released in the future, will it be shorter than the theatrical version? And not even he can avoid making the movie’s coda look uninspired and predictable, all of which begs the question, should someone else sit in the director’s chair for the rest of the prequels?

Rating: 6/10 – a fitful, occasionally impressive second prequel/first sequel, Alien: Covenant revisits the haunted house horror tropes that made the first movie so successful, but finds little inspiration to help it fulfill its intentions; another missed opportunity to make the series as momentous as it was nearly forty years ago, where the story goes from here remains to be seen, but in continuing Scott et al really need to remember that a satisfying mystery requires a satisfying answer, something that this entry seems to have forgotten about entirely.

Top 10 Stephen King Movie Adaptations

11 Thursday May 2017

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10 Best, Carrie (1976), Christine (1983), Frank Darabont, Literary adaptation, Misery, Movies, Novels, Pet Sematary, Rob Reiner, Stand by Me, Stanley Kubrick, Stephen King, The Dead Zone, The Green Mile, The Mist, The Shawshank Redemption, The Shining (1980)

Ah, Stephen King, a writer so prolific it was once said that he could publish his shopping list and someone would turn it into a movie. The years and the adaptations haven’t been excessively kind to the Maine-born writer; even the movies he himself wrote the scripts for have (mostly) turned out to be bad beyond belief. But with (nearly) every novel and short story being transferred to either the big screen or the small screen, inevitably some must be successful. Here are ten movie adaptations of his work that have bucked the trend and proven to be masterful examples of movies where the phrase, Based on a novel by Stephen King, isn’t something to be afraid of.

10 – Christine (1983)

John Carpenter’s adaptation of King’s 1983 novel began shooting just a few days after the book was published, and could have featured Scott Baio and Brooke Shields instead of Keith Gordon and Alexandra Paul – what a version that might have been. Poorly received on release, Christine has gone on to become something of an Eighties cult classic, and is still one of Carpenter’s better constructed movies. With songs such as Bad to the Bone and a well placed Keep A-Knockin’ included in the soundtrack to highlight the horror of a ’58 Plymouth Fury gone very, very bad, King’s ode to Fifties teen culture (despite being updated) still resonates thanks to Gordon’s accomplished performance as Arnie, Christine’s owner, and Carpenter’s professional approach to a job he “needed to do” for his career.

9 – The Dead Zone (1983)

As if one King adaptation by a proven horror movie director in 1983 wasn’t enough, the year also saw David Cronenberg take up the reins of The Dead Zone, a project that had stalled on several occasions before he came on board (Stanley Donen as director? Bill Murray [King’s first choice for Johnny Smith] as the star?). Rejecting a script by King as being “too brutal”, Cronenberg shaped the novel’s parallel story structure into a three-act play, and gave Christopher Walken the chance to shine in one of his most underrated roles to date. The opening and closing acts have their moments, but it’s the middle act, where Smith helps Tom Skerritt’s small-town sheriff track down a serial killer that impresses the most (and which may have put some people off using scissors for some time afterwards).

8 – Pet Sematary (1989)

A novel that King felt was “too disturbing” and which nearly didn’t get published, Pet Sematary should have been directed by George A. Romero, but a scheduling clash with Monkey Shines meant he had to pass on the project. Enter Mary Lambert, and a movie that “defied the critics and opened at blockbuster levels” was created. Retaining much of the novel’s harsh, nihilistic tone, the movie works on a primitive level, and in its increasingly nightmarish way, makes for uncomfortable viewing once Louis Creed’s young son Gage returns from the dead. Another adaptation that has grown in stature since its original release, this is unnerving stuff indeed, and much better than most mainstream critics of the time were willing to accept.

7 – The Green Mile (1999)

The longest movie adaptation of a King novel – at three hours and nine minutes – The Green Mile was a return to the prison milieu (albeit set in the Thirties) that director Frank Darabont had already visited with delayed success in 1994. An absorbing, intelligent, and often gripping drama with standout performances from one of the best ensemble casts ever assembled for a King adaptation, Darabont’s assured direction from his own screenplay fleshes out the characters, and ensures that what happens to each and every one of them (even Percy) is affecting. It also features one of the most horrific deaths ever seen in cinema history, as Michael Jeter’s mouse-loving Eduard Delacroix meets a grisly end in the electric chair. Its length, and its subject matter, has been known to deter viewers over the years, but this is one occasion where the material warrants it, and thanks to Darabont, the movie is all the better for it.

6 – The Mist (2007)

The third – and to date, final – adaptation by Frank Darabont of a King tale, The Mist was originally meant to be Darabont’s first crack at the author’s work, but another project came first. Ostensibly a creature feature, the movie is much more than that, and shows just how quickly humans can become monsters themselves given the right circumstances. A bleak, unremitting experience for the viewer unfamiliar with the source material, The Mist closes with one of the most unexpected, most harrowing, and most emotionally devastating final scenes in horror history. It’s like a punch to the gut, and although different to the ending of King’s novella, fits in with the tone and feel of the movie perfectly. Darabont prefers the black and white version, and he’s right to: the absence of colour makes The Mist even more disturbing to watch – and that’s saying something.

5 – Stand by Me (1986)

Based on the novella, The Body (1982), Stand by Me was a last-minute change of title for a movie adaptation that was originally meant to be directed by Adrian Lyne. Despite its good standing now, the movie wasn’t too well received on its release, but whatever your feelings about the story of four young friends who go off to see a dead body somewhere in the woods near their home, it’s their casting that makes it so special. Watching the movie and their performances, you can believe that Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Jerry O’Connell, and Corey Feldman really are good friends, and that how they behave with each other really is as true to life as to make no odds. Eventual director Rob Reiner captures the novella’s poignancy and heartfelt sense of nostalgia with a great deal of sensitivity, and does full justice to one of King’s finer creations, Davie “Lard-Ass” Hogan.

4 – Carrie (1976)

King’s first novel was also the first of his ouevre to be turned into a movie, and as firsts go, Brian De Palma’s brash directorial style was a perfect fit for King’s tale of sexual repression, extreme religious fervour, and terrifying teen angst. Featuring Oscar-nominated performances (rare for a horror movie) from Sissy Spacek (as Carrie) and Piper Laurie (Carrie’s mother), the movie takes its time in setting up the prom sequence that is justifiably famous for its split-screen depiction, and also spends more time letting the audience get to know Carrie than would normally happen in a standard horror movie. A bravura turn from De Palma makes Carrie the kind of heightened horror that rarely succeeds on its own terms, and it features a last-minute jump scare that is the absolute gold standard of jump scares.

3 – Misery (1990)

Stephen King + Rob Reiner + William Goldman + Kathy Bates = the first (and so far only) Oscar-winning King adaptation. King’s claustrophobic novel about a writer trapped in a remote cabin by his “number one fan” (Bates, the Oscar winner), is dominated by the actress’s astute, mesmerising performance. Like all the best King adaptations there’s a standout moment – usually horrific – and this time it’s the infamous “hobbling” scene. Changed from the novel, where the writer has a foot amputated, and made even more uncomfortable for viewers by the knowledge of what’s going to happen, it’s this scene that sticks, rightly, in people’s minds. But Misery is more than just a thriller about obsession taken too far, it’s also about the will to survive, and the corrosive nature of fame and its attendant idolatry.

2 – The Shining (1980)

Back when it was announced that Stanley Kubrick would be directing a movie version of King’s hugely impressive third novel, it seemed like a match made in Heaven. And for many fans of the novel, it is, but King took umbrage with the movie, saying that Kubrick missed the point of what his novel was about. However you look at it, The Shining remains one of the most – if not the most – remarkable King adaptations ever produced. Kubrick’s studied, deliberately paced movie is packed full of memorable moments, from the lady in Room 237, the appearance of the Grady twins, the elevator gushing blood, the revelation of what Jack Torrance has been writing, that soundbite, the inventive use of Steadicam (then still in its relative infancy) as it follows Danny Torrance along seemingly endless hallways, and a final photographic image that challenges everything that’s gone before. King and Kubrick may have been at odds over the nature of evil, and its source, but Kubrick’s vision remains just as disturbing and palpably unnerving as it did when it was first released.

1 – The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

If any moviemaker “gets” Stephen King then it’s Frank Darabont. The writer/director is on a winning streak of 3-0 in King adaptations – 4-0 if you count the short movie The Woman in the Room (1983) – and his finest moment (and King’s) is this redolent, beautifully realised ode to friendship and the will to survive (a common theme in King’s work). It seems impossible to believe that Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman weren’t the first choices for Andy and Red, but it’s true. What would The Shawshank Redemption have been like if Tom Cruise had played Andy, Harrison Ford had played Red – and Rob Reiner had directed? With all due respect to Messrs Cruise, Ford and Reiner, it probably wouldn’t be a version that sits at No. 1 on the IMDb Top 250 List (at time of writing). It’s yet another movie adaptation that plays to King’s strengths as a writer, with fully realised characters, an effective emotional undercurrent that makes Andy and Red’s friendship all the more credible, and a number of memorable moments that keep the narrative captivating from its opening story of murder all the way to Red’s arrival on a beautiful beach at the end. A movie that resonates more and more with each and every viewing, it’s the highpoint, the zenith, of King adaptations, and a tribute to Darabont, and Robbins, and Freeman, and everyone else involved in making what is easily the best prison movie ever.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

10 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Camelot, Charlie Hunnam, Djimon Hounsou, Drama, Eric Bana, Excalibur, Fantasy, Guy Ritchie, Jude Law, Londinium, Review

D: Guy Ritchie / 126m

Cast: Charlie Hunnam, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Jude Law, Djimon Hounsou, Eric Bana, Aidan Gillen, Freddie Fox, Craig McGinlay, Tom Wu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Neil Maskell, Annabelle Wallis, Geoff Bell, Poppy Delevingne, Bleu Landau, Peter Ferdinando, Mikael Persbrandt, Michael McElhatton

The tagline for King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a simple yet effective one: “from nothing comes a king”. But to quote William Shakespeare (and with the most sincerest of apologies), a better tagline would be, “nothing will come of nothing”. In fact, there are several famous Shakespeare quotes that are apposite for Guy Ritchie’s latest outing, so in an effort to provide a unique review for a movie that offers nothing that is in the remotest sense “unique”, here are some of the Bard’s most well known pieces of dialogue, and their relevance to King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

“Now is the winter of our discontent” (Richard III) – strictly speaking, it’s spring right now, but the sentiment remains the same whatever the season. Ritchie, along with co-screenwriters Joby Harold and Lionel Wigram (his producing partner), offers audiences a King Arthur re-style that lurches from one CGI-heavy action sequence to another, all of which are edited in such a way as to remove every last ounce of excitement from every single one of them.

“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) – it’s hard to work out just who fits this quote more, Warner Bros. for asking Ritchie to make this movie, or Ritchie for accepting the challenge. Perhaps it should be a joint award, as the end result stretches credibility at every turn, appears as if it was collated from a dozen different scripts, and ensures its cast of characters remain as one-dimensional as possible in order to match the quality of the narrative. This leads to Hunnam et al all struggling to give decent performances, and all looking uncomfortable throughout.

“We have seen better days” (Timon of Athens) – each year brings us a fantasy movie that attempts to bring us something out of the ordinary, something we haven’t seen before, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword certainly has aspirations in that department, but instead it ends up looking and sounding like an uninspired retread/mash up of The Lord of the Rings (with bigger elephants), Game of Thrones (without the style), and weirdly, In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (2007) (skip the better days angle on this one).

“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them” (Twelfth Night) – this is the central conceit that infuses the character of Arthur, but once again we have to put up with a character denying his destiny for half the movie before taking up the mantle that he’s been due all along, and then finally going out and kicking some ass. It’s a tired character arc that’s been done so often it’s lost any kind of dramatic weight, and now feels obligatory, as if every character faced with this kind of choice has to be humble and committed to self-denial. If the movie had really wanted to bring us something out of the ordinary, Arthur would have found out he was the rightful King, grabbed up Excalibur, left Londinium, and killed evil uncle Vortigern (Law) at the first opportunity (and shaved at least half an hour off the movie’s two hour running time).

“All that glisters is not gold” (The Merchant of Venice) – the presence of Ritchie behind the camera, and with such a talented cast in front of it, just goes to show that you can’t judge a movie by its intentions. If you saw the first trailer and thought, “Hmm, this looks great!” then a) the makers of that particular trailer got off lightly, and b) there’s not much anyone can do for you. This is a movie that delights in showing off its various boxes of tricks, but as so often happens in these cases (where ambition should have been strangled at birth), once the tricks have been showcased, it becomes obvious that there wasn’t any substance behind them at all. And this is what this movie wants you to forget: that it’s made up of various boxes of tricks and very little else.

“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” (The Tempest) – watching King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is an often painful, dispiriting way to spend a couple of hours, but it’s also one that should have no problem in uniting audiences in expressing their general displeasure at what they’ve witnessed. They say that watching movies at the cinema qualifies as a communal experience. It’s such a shame then that so many people are going to be disappointed by a movie that flails around looking for a cohesive story to tell, and which does so without any attempt at providing wit or panache to help it along.

“But, for my own part, it was Greek to me” (Julius Caesar) – in this reimagining of the Arthurian legend (complete with a Camelot that isn’t mentioned by name, only title caption), the once and future king is an East End brothel owner long before there were actual East End brothel owners, and long before anyone added the word “mate” to the end of a sentence. Ritchie and his screenwriter chums may believe this adds a certain piquancy to the dialogue, but instead it feels more out of place than organic, and on occasion, forced. It’s a verbal affectation that does the movie no favours and soon becomes distracting instead of part and parcel of the movie’s overall tone (as intended).

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth) – while Ritchie is by no means an idiot (libel lawyers take heed), this is still a movie that assaults the senses at every opportunity, and which never keeps still. This is a movie for people who can’t bear to see a shot last more than five seconds, who can’t watch an action sequence unless it’s cut into non-sequential chunks, and who like their soundtrack pumped up as much as the movie hopes they are already. The action lacks intensity (though it strives repeatedly to attain the intensity it needs in order to be halfway effective), and the spectacle soon becomes mind-numbing in its repetitiveness. And the occasional quiet moments? Just filler, until the next action sequence comes along.

Rating: 3/10 – you’ll laugh (unintentionally but often), you’ll cry (at the cumulative absurdity/lack of ideas on display), you’ll want to believe that somewhere, in an alternate reality perhaps, that Ritchie has made a masterpiece; alas, a terrible plot and central narrative counter any such notions, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword reaches us adrift on a shoddy raft of its own making, taking on water with every swell, and capable only of letting off distress flare after distress flare.

The Hunter’s Prayer (2017)

09 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Allen Leech, Assassin, Drama, For the Dogs, Jonathan Mostow, Kevin Wignall, Literary adaptation, Odeya Rush, Review, Sam Worthington, Thriller

D: Jonathan Mostow / 91m

Cast: Sam Worthington, Odeya Rush, Allen Leech, Martin Compston, Amy Landecker, Verónica Echegui

A couple enjoying a quiet evening at home. A man (Compston) lurking in their garden. When the couple’s housekeeper lets out their dog, the man comes out of hiding, shoots the housekeeper and then heads straight into the house. He shoots the wife, and then the husband. He listens for any sound that might indicate there is anyone else in the house. Soon he is pouring something flammable over the furniture, and then setting it alight. As he drives away, flames in the house can be seen through his car’s rear window. The man has remained impassive throughout, and hasn’t said a word.

It’s a classic opening for a thriller: a hit that serves two purposes. It gets the audience asking themselves, what is going on; and it acts as notice from the makers that their movie is going to be tough and uncompromising. Except that here it also prompts another response, one that the makers won’t want audiences to think about, and piggy-backs off of that first purpose. That response is: why has this man gone to all the trouble of burning the bodies? It’s a question that’s never answered, but it’s indicative of a script that gets its characters to do lots of weird things on lots of different occasions… and by doing so, it robs the movie of any validity. If you see The Hunter’s Prayer, watch carefully and you will see all sorts of odd things going on, and where some movies can make these moments part of the fabric of the narrative, here, in Jonathan Mostow’s first movie since Surrogates (2009), all they do is draw attention to the deficiencies of a screenplay that no one thought to read more carefully.

However, this being a thriller with a degree of ambition, those deficiencies are overlooked while the plot lumbers on in search of a reason to exist. Adapted by Paul Leyden from the novel, For the Dogs (2004) by Kevin Wignall, The Hunter’s Prayer (which isn’t referenced once during the whole movie) concerns itself with the couple’s daughter, Ella (Rush), and the assassin, Lucas (Worthington), who was meant to kill her. That’s right, meant to kill her. The turgid plot that this hinges on is as follows: Ella’s father stole £25m from English businessman-cum-crook Richard Addison (Leech), and Addison wanted Ella killed first but Lucas didn’t do it in time, so her father and stepmother were killed instead. Now Addison still wants Ella killed, and Lucas has taken it on himself to protect her from the man (whose name is Metzger) and anyone else who might be hired to make it three out of three. Makes sense? No, of course it doesn’t.

To be fair, the script does address this issue, but then it quickly ignores it, preferring to see Ella and Lucas pursued across Europe in a pale imitation of The Bourne Identity (2002), whose wintry, isolated feel it tries to emulate. As usual in these kinds of movies, the pair is found easily whenever the script calls for an action sequence, and whatever efforts Lucas makes to keep them safe always opens them up to the potential of being killed instead. At one point, Ella and Lucas are on a train; he’s been shot in the leg and he’s arranged for a friend, Dani (Echegui), to treat his wound while they’re on the train. She does so, persuades Ella to get off at the next stop, and then attempts to kill Lucas by giving him a drug overdose (did you know Lucas was a high-functioning addict whose drug of choice is supplied to him by Addison? Don’t worry, there’s more). Thank God that the script’s choices of adversaries for Lucas are as dumb as a box of spanners, otherwise he would have been dead within the first fifteen minutes.

Despite the occasional attempt to intercept and kill them, Ella and Lucas make it to England, where Lucas has a hideout that’s conveniently in the same city, Leeds, that Addison has his business HQ. By now, the movie has decided to be as reckless with its own (limited) internal logic as it wants to be, and it sends Ella off to kill Addison at his offices. You can guess how successful she is from the image above, and while Lucas goes cold turkey in a matter of hours, Ella is put in the care of FBI Special Agent Gina Banks (Landecker), who is in Addison’s employ (don’t ask. No, really, don’t). There’s some guff about the £25m being hidden in a bank account only Ella has access to, and then everyone shows up at Addison’s country estate for the final showdown, which handily involves just three security guards for Lucas to get past, and Addison’s young son popping up with a bow and arrow (again, don’t ask).

There’s a real sense as you’re watching The Hunter’s Prayer that it’s all being made up on the spot, and that the movie has been shot in sequence with everyone improvising everything from character motivation to dialogue. If true, it explains why there are so many little ironies dotted throughout, or as on one occasion, a giant irony when Addison decides to spare Lucas because he’s not worth it, but still intends to kill Ella as an example to others. There are more – a lot more – but they all go toward making the movie feel like a terrible waste of everyone’s time and effort. Worthington isn’t the world’s best actor, and there are moments where his “skills” are cruelly exposed, as in the scene where Lucas explains to Ella that he can’t kill her. His expressions are bad enough, but what he does with his hands? Wow. Just – wow.

The rest of the cast run Worthington a combined close second in the bad acting stakes, with Leech overdoing his smarmy crook routine, Landecker struggling to make her FBI agent look and sound convincing, and Rush labouring under the optimistic impression that Ella is more than just a tired plot device. By the movie’s end it’s only Compston who gets off lightly, and that’s because he has so little dialogue. Attempting to organise it all, Mostow does what he can but most dialogue scenes are flat and don’t build on anything that’s gone before – at least not in a meaningful way – and the movie plods from action sequence to action sequence with all the intensity of a skin care advert. Only the action sequences themselves prove diverting enough, with Mostow and editor Ken Blackwell atoning for the poor choices made elsewhere and making them genuinely thrilling.

Somewhat inevitably, The Hunter’s Prayer is another movie that has sat on the shelf waiting for a distributor brave enough to take it on and give it a belated release. Shot in 2014, it’s further evidence that some movies really should be cancelled at the pre-production stage. It’s hard to believe that Saban Films saw enough in this to release it three years on, and it’s even harder to believe that this will gain any kind of an audience outside of the merely curious, or fans of Sam Worthington. Forgettable and beyond second-rate, it’s a movie that should be avoided at all costs. Seriously, if it’s a choice between this and a rectal exam, choose the rectal exam. It’ll be a lot less painful and it’ll be over sooner.

Rating: 3/10 – the kind of movie that should win a Razzie Award, The Hunter’s Prayer undermines itself at every turn, and wastes more opportunities than most movies of its type; banal, derivative, trite, depressing – it’s all these things and more, and a movie that you can bet will not be one that anyone involved in it will be highlighting on their resumé.

Mini-Review: Unlocked (2017)

08 Monday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, CIA, Drama, John Malkovich, London, MI5, Michael Douglas, Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Review, Terrorism, Thriller, Toni Collette

D: Michael Apted / 98m

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Orlando Bloom, Toni Collette, John Malkovich, Michael Douglas, Philip Brodie, Makram Khoury, Brian Caspe, Tosin Cole, Aymen Hamdouchi, Michael Epp

In 2008, Peter O’Brien’s script for Unlocked made it onto the Black List. In order to make it onto the Black List that year, a script had to receive a minimum of four “mentions”. These “mentions” were tabulated from the responses of around two hundred and fifty movie executives, each of whom had to nominate up to ten unproduced screenplays that were relevant to 2008. Unlocked received five mentions, and though that keeps it quite a ways down the list, the idea that it’s on the list in the first place gives the impression that the script has some merit, that if it were to be produced, and if it did make it to our screens, then it would be a worthwhile movie to watch.

Well, Unlocked has been produced (by seven collaborating production companies), it has made it to our screens, but it’s far from being a worthwhile movie to watch. It’s yet another generic, cliché-ridden action thriller where loyalties are betrayed every five minutes, where the hero (or in this case, the heroine) goes it alone to prove their innocence, where jumps in credibility and logic are allowed to happen without any thought as to how they might harm the narrative, and where Noomi Rapace continues to show why the role of Lisbeth Salander will always be the high point of her career. It’s a movie that starts off moderately well – Rapace’s interrogator is called on to interview the go-between for an imam who’s sympathetic to terrorism, and an associate looking to release a biological weapon in Central London – and which quickly abandons that early promise by failing to connect the dots in any menaningful way, and by offering Tired Thriller Set Up No 387 as the basis of the action.

Such is the tired nature of the whole endeavour, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that this is a movie that was shot over two years ago, and which makes it to our screens now purely as a mercy release, a way of allowing those seven production companies a chance to earn back their investments. And it’s yet another movie where the quality of the cast and crew should ensure some measure of critical acclaim, but despite everyone’s involvement, this fails to happen, and the measure of the movie can be found in Bloom’s risible performance, Apted’s uninterested direction, a principal villain who sticks out like a sore thumb, and the kind of twists and turns that we’ve all seen in other, sometimes much better movies.

It’s hard to explain from the finished product just why O’Brien’s script made the Black List. Maybe since then it’s suffered from a pronounced case of rewrite-itis, and any subtleties it once had have been removed. Whatever happened between then and now, none of it has helped Unlocked become anything more than a weary, lukewarm slice of hokum. Rapace plays her character with grim determination and little else, Collette adds another high-ranking spook to her resumé, Malkovich provides the humour (welcome but still out of place), and Douglas is Mr Exposition, a role it’s unlikely anyone could have made anything out of. It’s a disjointed mess, providing few thrills and laboured fight scenes, along with a misplaced sense of relevance (chemical weapons smuggled into Britain from Russia? Really?). Ultimately, once it’s seen, this is a movie that fades away at speed, and is soon forgotten.

Rating: 3/10 – a movie that struggles to make an impact, but when it does, does so in ways that induces groans instead of applause, Unlocked could be re-titled Unloved and it would mean absolutely no difference to anyone; with too many scenes that provoke laughter – and often not deliberately – this is yet another reminder that low-key, low-budget action movies deserve more care and attention than their makers are willing to provide.

A Brief Word About The Dark Tower (2017)

06 Saturday May 2017

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Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, Movie, Nikolaj Arcel, Stephen King, The Dark Tower, The Gunslinger, The Man in Black

If you’ve seen the first trailer for The Dark Tower, and if you’ve read the series of novels by Stephen King, then chances are you’re already wondering what the hell is going on. While fans and non-fans alike of King’s fantasy magnum opus have been in agreement over the casting of Idris Elba as Roland Deschain, the Gunslinger, and Matthew McConaughey as Walter Padick, the Man in Black, there’s been little understanding of the movie’s structure or the makers’ intentions in telling King’s vast story. How much of the first volume, The Gunslinger, is going to be included? Is this the first of a series of movies, or as suggested in the past, will the next incarnation be shown on television as a mini-series before it all returns to the big screen? And how long will it be before we reach the conclusion of King’s tale?

Well, again, if you’ve seen the first trailer then you might have noticed that all those questions are actually irrelevant. For while The Dark Tower takes elements from all eight volumes, it is essentially a sequel to all of them, as the action takes place some time after the events of the final volume. Now bearing that in mind, is this the first adaptation in a series of projects derived from The Dark Tower novels, or is this the first in a series of projects based on The Dark Tower novels? It seems to be the latter, which means that credited screenwriters Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and director Nikolaj Arcel have decided to come up with new material. Which makes the next question a resoundingly obvious, Why? King has given them everything they need to produce a movie (or series of movies/TV shows) that would do justice to his literary endeavours. Instead, like so many adaptations of his work, it appears they’ve decided to go their own way with the material.

King himself appears to be happy with the way The Dark Tower is going, but for anyone who’s read the books and feels the same way about them as fans of The Lord of the Rings did when Peter Jackson stepped up to bring Tolkien’s classic to the big screen, this feels less and less like a viable proposition and instead like one more cinematic offering to join the dozens of other below-par movies that have been made out of King’s work in the past.

Agree? Disagree? Couldn’t give a ka-tet one way or the other? Let me know by leaving a comment.

The Vessel (2016)

05 Friday May 2017

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Aris Mejias, Drama, Faith, Jacqueline Duprey, Julio Quintana, Lucas Quintana, Martin Sheen, Puerto Rico, Religion, Review, San Juan, Tragedy, Tsunami

D: Julio Quintana / 86m

Cast: Lucas Quintana, Martin Sheen, Jacqueline Duprey, Aris Mejias, Hiram Delgado, Eugenio Monclova

At a small town on the coast of Puerto Rico, tragedy hangs heavy over the residents. Ten years before, a tsunami destroyed the elementary school and claimed the lives of forty-six children. The women, who all wear mourning black, have vowed never to have any more children, and the church services are largely unattended due to the townspeople’s loss of faith in God. Leo (Quintana), whose younger brother was one of the children who died, lives with his mother, Fidelia (Duprey), and is one of the few young men remaining in the town. Fidelia has remained grief-stricken since the tragedy, and has retreated into a world of her own.

Leo feels obliged to stay and look after his mother, even though the local priest, Father Douglas (Sheen), has told him that arrangements could be made for her to live another couple in the town. However, there is another reason for his staying, a widow called Soraya (Mejias). Leo has been entranced by her for years, and hopes one day they can have a relationship. Meanwhile, a chance to leave comes along when Leo’s friend, Gabriel (Delgado) announces his plan to leave town and start a new life elsewhere. On Gabriel’s last night in town they go out, have too many drinks, and at the end of the night, while at the sea wall, both fall into the water below.

Both are drowned, and their bodies taken to the town’s makeshift morgue. Hours after he has died, Leo returns to life. Father Douglas views it as a miracle (though he makes no more of it than that), while the townspeople view it initially with suspicion, making the sign of the cross when they pass Leo on the street. However, church attendance increases, and Father Douglas sees the beginnings of a return to faith amongst the community as a whole. Leo feels emboldened enough to speak to Soraya, and a relationship begins to develop between them. At the same time, Leo is compelled to build first a shelter, and then a boat from the debris left in the church. Why he does this he doesn’t know, but he is convinced that it will float if it’s put out to sea. He plans to put his own rediscovered faith to the test, but some of the townspeople, wanting Leo to provide miracles for them, turn against him (and the church) when he’s unable to give them what they want, and they turn to sabotage as a means of hurting him…

A movie about renewed faith and rediscovered hope in a community that has shackled itself to the idea of perpetual penance, The Vessel is a rich, contemplative movie that tackles its religious themes with a modicum of proselytising, and which provides a thoughtful and thought-provoking approach to the material. All of the townsfolk – except for Leo – are waiting on a sign, an indication that God has not forsaken them in the wake of the tsunami. They want the deaths of their children to have some kind of meaning, and when finally they receive the sign they’ve been waiting for, it’s not what they’ve expected: a drowned man returned to life is the kind of message that seems to be taunting them: why him and not their children?

Crucially, it’s a question the movie, written and directed by Julio Quintana (making his first feature) never answers, settling instead for alluding to Leo as a Christ figure come to free the townsfolk from their self-imposed emotional prisons. But Leo isn’t interested in helping the townsfolk, in fact, he’s not even sure he’s helping himself. His actions in building the boat certainly have an effect on the people and friends he’s known all his life, but as Quintana the director/writer is keen to point out, whatever message there is, it’s as open to interpretation as any other message might be. This allows Quintana the director to show the townspeople’s varied reactions to the fact of Leo’s resurrection, and to focus on the way that these reactions are less concerned with regaining hope and faith than in exploiting potential solutions to their own grief and fears (and without too much forethought, as well).

Leo pursues Soraya with a determination that brooks no interference or rebuke, and their tentative, sensitively handled courtship shows both of them taking a leap of faith – Leo in acting on his feelings, and Soraya in allowing herself to have feelings again. Their romance provides the movie with a strong emotional core, while elsewhere Quintana focuses on notions of grief, sadness and religious fragility. All of these aspects are addressed in a simple, straightforward way that keeps the movie from descending into unnecessary melodrama, and allows it to maintain an even tone throughout. But it’s still the town’s lack of faith that infuses the narrative, and though it becomes clear by the movie’s end that the townsfolk have regained some of their faith (in God and each other), it’s also clear that it’s not come about because of any religious imperative. This is why Father Douglas appears to be more tolerated than needed.

As the beleaguered priest, Sheen is a major draw for the movie, and his character’s involvement with Leo and the townspeople occupies a good part of the movie’s running time. It’s a measured, delicate performance from Sheen, who provides Father Douglas with a sense of ennui that perfectly explains the priest’s inability to make significant changes to the spiritual health of his flock. He’s too weighed down by the intransigence of the townsfolk, and despite his best attempts, he has no answer for it. As the source of reawakened feelings within the townspeople, Leo is perhaps an unwitting instrument of God, but Quintana leaves that up to the viewer to decide, and uses Leo’s own reluctance to engage with religion as a powerful way of sewing doubt as to the validity of Father Douglas’s claim that his return to life is a miracle.

The Vessel (and there’s no prizes for guessing who or what the title refers to) is also one of the most beautifully shot movies of 2016, thanks to some truly impressive location photography by Santiago Benet Mari. The visual acuity brought out by such spectacular surroundings creates a sense of natural beauty that is almost hyper-real, and even the interiors have a conspicuous harmony that complements the gorgeous exteriors. Quintana organises his characters within the frame so that they too seem like an organic part of the scenery, and some compositions are so striking they’re capable of making the viewer say, “Wow!” – and more than once.

Rating: 8/10 – a modest movie with modest ambitions, The Vessel succeeds in surpassing those ambitions to provide audiences with an earnest, yet genuine look at unfettered sorrow and dissipated faith; bewitching, and with good performances all round, Julio Quintana’s debut feature is honest, unpretentious, and above all, effortlessly absorbing from start to finish.

Their Finest (2016)

04 Thursday May 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bill Nighy, Drama, Gemma Arterton, History, Literary adaptation, Lone Scherfig, Ministry of Information, Moviemaking, Review, Sam Claflin, Screenwriting, World War II

D: Lone Scherfig / 117m

Cast: Gemma Arterton, Sam Claflin, Bill Nighy, Jack Huston, Paul Ritter, Rachael Stirling, Richard E. Grant, Henry Goodman, Jake Lacy, Jeremy Irons, Eddie Marsan, Helen McCrory

Britain, the summer of 1940. Since the outbreak of World War II, the British Ministry of Information has been making short information movies to be shown at cinemas. Its film department – headed up by Roger Swain (Grant) – takes on a young Welsh woman called Catrin Cole (Arterton) to act as a screenwriter, and in particular, to write better dialogue for any female characters (the other screenwriters are, unsurprisingly, all male). Catrin settles in, and finds herself working alongside Tom Buckley (Claflin) and Raymond Parfitt (Ritter), and under the stewardship of Phyl Moore (Stirling). Catrin soon earns a degree of respect from Buckley, who is nominally more experienced, and her work begins to gain recognition. But at home, it’s not quite the same. Catrin’s husband, Ellis (Huston), is a struggling artist whose bleak reflections on the War aren’t attracting any attention. He’s pleased that she’s doing well in her own job, but is inwardly jealous at the same time.

The film department is charged with making a full-length feature. Catrin is given the task of talking to twin sisters who took out their father’s boat and sailed across to Dunkirk to help in the evacuation. But she soon discovers that the boat developed engine trouble five miles out and they never even got to Dunkirk, let alone rescued anyone. Undeterred, Catrin returns to the Ministry and tells a fictional version of the twins’ story – and one that is believed by everyone except Tom. He keeps quiet, and the project is given the go-ahead. Catrin, Tom and Raymond all work on the script, while the casting goes ahead. Pompous actor Ambrose Hilliard (Nighy) is approached through his agent, Sammy Smith (Marsan), but turns down the supporting role of drunken Uncle Frank out of misplaced pride. Tragedy strikes, however, and Hilliard takes on the role thanks to pressure from Sammy’s sister, Sophie (McCrory).

The truth about the twins’ rescue mission is discovered, and though the Ministry has been determined to make a movie out of an act of real life heroism, Catrin convinces everyone to make a fictional version. Production begins on location in Devon, but the unexpected intervention of the Secretary of War (Irons) means that the script will now have to accommodate the presence of an American soldier in its plot, and specifically, Eagle Squadron pilot (and non-actor) Carl Lundberg (Lacy). Catrin persuades Hilliard to tutor Lundberg, while she and Tom grow closer. As the shoot progresses, their relationship develops to the point where surprising information volunteered by Catrin herself promises a sea change in her relationships with both Ellis and Tom.

Adapted from the novel, Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans, this awkwardly titled movie is the kind of heritage picture that the British do so well. From the moment Catrin steps out onto a Blitz-torn street we’re in oh-so familiar territory, with just enough artfully stylised devastation to provide the viewer with a visual shorthand as to the time and place they’re witnessing. In a way it’s comforting, seeing all these bomb blasted buildings with their scattered debris, and as Arterton’s plucky Welsh screenwriter-to-be makes her way to the Ministry of Information, there’s a sense that whatever happens in Their Finest, it will retain the opening’s carefully constructed sense of artificiality, and avoid any “difficult” or “realistic” moments.

And so it proves. The movie ticks all the boxes for a nicely balanced period feature, with Catrin filling the role of innocent abroad, Tom as the adversary-cum-mentor figure that she’ll inevitably fall in love with, Hilliard as the curmudgeonly actor who’s on grudging terms with humility, and a variety of supporting characters who pop up every now and again, contribute a further variety of notable moments or dialogue (“He is an actor. Unless you have reviewed him, had intercourse with him, or done both simultaneously, he won’t remember you.”), and then fade back into the background until needed again. There’s the requisite number of apparently insurmountable problems that are resolved in under a minute flat, bickering and misunderstandings between the romantic leads, obvious references to the sexism of the times, Richard E. Grant pulling faces whenever he can, and all of it coated with the rosy sheen of familiarity and nostalgia.

But again, this is the kind of heritage picture that the British (or the British as led by a director from Denmark) do so well, and again, so it proves. While the plot and its surrounding storylines all have the look and feel of scenarios we’ve seen before – and too many times at that – the best thing that can be said about Their Finest is that the director, the writer, the cast, the crew, hell everyone involved, knew this was true, and proceeded without a moment’s hesitation in using that knowledge as the basis for providing audiences with a very enjoyable movie indeed. Is Their Finest a true original, groundbreaking and constantly surprising? No, it’s not. Is it a movie that will change anyone’s life? Again, no, it’s not. But it is a movie that does do something unexpected: it makes the movie within the movie, The Nancy Starling, the emotional core of everything, and it does so with a carefree, nonchalant sense of entitlement that you couldn’t have predicted at the start. It’s here that Hilliard proves what a fine actor he really is, it’s here where a lunkhead American soldier can appear soulful and poetic, and where traditional values around serving the greater good and unavoidable personal sacrifice are made self-evident.

While the movie within a movie offers more dramatic meat than its parent, what the rest of the movie does offer is a recognisable template to hang a romantic comedy with dramatic elements on. It does this effectively and with a minimum of fuss, and gives the audience a succession of self-reflexive feelgood moments where anticipation is satisfied and rewarded thanks to the script’s commitment to playing it (pleasantly) safe. Only two moments stand out as being darker than all the rest. One is a bitter reflection on the realities of death by bombing, while the other is a “twist” that is as bold as it is dispiriting. Otherwise and elsewhere, the movie maintains its wry, comedic edge and its avoidance of being too serious.

Scherfig injects her usual bonhomie into things, keeping it all light enough to fly away forever, and doing so with a studied sense of what’s acceptable in terms of such lightweight material. A quality cast helps tremendously with Arterton displaying a charm and likeability that has been missing from more recent roles, while Claflin is all pent-up superiority and diffidence as the movie’s real leading man. Nighy invites the viewer to laugh at Hilliard with affection, while further down the cast list, McCrory scores highly as another woman attempting to do well in a traditionally man’s world. It’s all neatly held together by Gaby Chiappe’s heartfelt and engaging script, and the scenes behind the making of the movie within a movie are terrific in the way that they expose some of the tricks of the trade back in the Forties. It’s dourly glamorous too, with fine cinematography by Sebastian Blenkov, and there’s a suitably nostalgic yet rousing score by Rachel Portman that perfectly accentuates the movie’s sprightly tone.

Rating: 7/10 – an enjoyable piece of wartime flag-waving, Their Finest is funny, romantic, occasionally dramatic, and as winsome as it can be given its backdrop; entertaining in a generic yet fulfilling way, the movie coasts along for much of its running time, but it does so in such an amiable fashion that most viewers won’t mind at all.

The Comedian (2016)

03 Wednesday May 2017

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Comedy, Community Service, Danny DeVito, Drama, Edie Falco, Harvey Keitel, Leslie Mann, Review, Robert De Niro, Romance, Stand-up, Taylor Hackford

D: Taylor Hackford / 120m

Cast: Robert De Niro, Leslie Mann, Harvey Keitel, Edie Falco, Danny DeVito, Patti LuPone, Charles Grodin, Cloris Leachman, Veronica Ferres, Lois Smith

Jackie Burke (De Niro) is an aging stand-up comedian who is famous for having appeared in a very successful sitcom thirty years ago, called Eddie’s Home. His career is somewhat in the doldrums, with his agent, Miller (Falco), unable to get him any really well-paid gigs. But he’s well liked and respected on the comedy circuit, and his act – as an insult comedian – is well received also. But one night, while he’s on stage he’s heckled by a member of the audience. The heckling takes a more serious turn when Jackie assaults the man responsible and winds up in court. Tasked with making a sincere apology to the man, Jackie refuses, and is sent to prison for thirty days. And when he’s released he has to perform a hundred hours community service.

Community service turns out to be helping at a mission, serving food and providing clothing to the local homeless. There, Jackie meets Harmony Schiltz (Mann), who is there because she assaulted her boyfriend and the woman he was having an affair with. There’s an attraction there on Jackie’s part, but not on Harmony’s. He does persuade her to go out with him (as an appointment, not a date), and Harmony has such a good time, she agrees to go with him to his niece’s wedding. They miss the actual ceremony, but are in time for the reception, where Jackie – at his neice’s insistence but to the horror of her parents Jimmy (DeVito) and Florence (LuPone) – gives a speech. It’s peppered with swear words, deliberately offensive, but by and large, is exactly what his niece wanted.

The next night, Jackie acts as a birthday present for Mac Schiltz (Keitel), Harmony’s father. He’s a big fan of Eddie’s Home, and can’t resist pushing Jackie to recite some of the character’s catchphrases. Mac also harangues Harmony over her community service, and tells her she can complete it in Florida where she can also resume the work she did at a retirement home her father owns. Jackie takes exception to the way Mac treats her, and they leave earlier than planned. A few drinks later, and back at Harmony’s apartment, their relationship takes an unexpected turn. The next day, Harmony has left for Florida, and Jackie resumes looking for the kind of work that will pay handsomely and restore his standing with bookers and club owners. But when he tries to contact Harmony, she doesn’t reply to his calls or his texts…

Every now and again, a movie comes along that provokes antipathy and dissatisfaction in equal measure, and which causes the viewer to wonder why on earth said movie was even made in the first place. The Comedian is such a movie. It’s one of those movies that doesn’t make sense when you consider the talent involved, and the potential it holds. But this really is a movie that makes so little impact, and which has so little meaning that it’s hard to understand why everyone involved in its making didn’t spot it sooner. The original story and screenplay is by the producer Art Linson, and he’s been aided and abetted by Richard LaGravenese, Lewis Friedman and Jeff Ross. That’s a talented group of people, but between them they’ve written a flat, uninspired screenplay that’s replete with redundant scenes, a minimum of effort in terms of the characters (say hello to more borderline stereotypes in one movie than you’ve seen in a very long time indeed), yet another of Hollywood’s bizarre and unconvincing attempts at portraying a May-December relationship, and perhaps unsurprisingly given the project’s long gestation period, jokes that would have been funny five or six years ago, but which now sound stale and in need of a rethink.

This is first and foremost meant to be a drama, as Jackie struggles to maintain a livelihood that doesn’t have anything to do with, or depend upon, Eddie’s Home. He hates reciting the catchphrases, complains bitterly at how much his TV success is ruining his stand-up career, and behaves in a churlish, emotionally dysfunctional way that is unattractive, unendearing, and unapologetic. He’s not quite a relic from a different age of entertainment, but in a time when diversity is a key component of social interaction, Jackie is so far behind in his thinking it’s unlikely he’ll ever catch up. His material is offensive at times, and not because Jackie doesn’t understand context (which might make his jokes more acceptable), but because he doesn’t care enough about context to include it. And this leads to much of his stand-up material being as far from funny as you can get. There’s an incredibly awkward, uncomfortable scene in Mac Schiltz’s retirement home that sees Jackie improvise an act around the elderly residents and their sexual proclivities (or Jackie’s idea of their proclivities), and reworking the song “Makin’ Whoopee” into “Makin’ Poopee”. It’s hard to know who to feel the more sorry for: De Niro for playing the scene and not being able to make it work, or the writers for including it and thinking it could work.

Jackie’s relationship with Harmony is another area where the script struggles to make any headway, aiming for a mixture of cute flirtations and meaningful glances to provide the (un)necessary romantic shorthand, and failing to convince audiences that Harmony would be attracted to Jackie at any point, let alone take him back to her apartment after she’s been drinking a lot and do something she “wants to do”. This is the kind of lazy dialogue screenwriters come up with when they have no credible basis for a character to behave in such a way, and it’s disheartening to see the main female character treated in such a cavalier fashion (Mann does what she can, but sadly it’s not much in the face of such blatant sexism.) And try as they might, De Niro and Mann don’t exactly light up the screen with their chemistry together.

Making only his third feature since the Oscar-winning Ray (2004), Taylor Hackford gives no indication that he’s engaged with the material, and the movie coasts along in first gear for much of its running time, muddling through its contentious romantic scenario without any recourse to enthusiasm, and staging the stand-up routines with all the flair of a director who’s heard that the camera doesn’t have to be static but who doesn’t trust it all the same. The Comedian was never going to be a visually arresting movie, even with Oliver Stapleton behind the lens (he’s Lasse Hallström’s cinematographer of choice), but it’s such a bland, unappealing movie to watch that you end up being unsurprised. After all, if the material is bland and unappealing then what chance does any other production aspect have?

Even the participation of real life comedians such as Brett Butler, Hannibal Buress and Jim Norton doesn’t add any verisimilitude to proceedings, because Grodin’s Friars Club bigwig aside, everyone loves Jackie and his act. And so too does the Internet, with three(!) videos of him going viral in quick succession and each time boosting his flagging career. It would have been a sloppy plot device if it was used just the once, but three times reeks of desperation, and each time it happens it doesn’t help propel the story forward because the script resolutely refuses to exploit the idea in any sensible or confident way. Jackie becomes even more famous than he already is – and that’s about it. No character development (or at least none that isn’t trite and/or clichéd), and no reason to believe that any might be forthcoming. Like the movie as a whole, it doesn’t matter what happens to Jackie because whatever it is, it will be of little consequence, and as a result, will have no effect on the audience either.

Rating: 4/10 – dramatically poor and comedically estranged, The Comedian is a movie that feels tired from the off, and which never has the energy to drag itself up out of the same doldrums where Jackie’s career is stranded; with no ambition or sense of its own inconsequence, it’s a movie that plays for two hours and barely registers as an experience, so slight and insubstantial is it.

The Levelling (2016)

02 Tuesday May 2017

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David Troughton, Drama, Ellie Kendrick, Floods, Grief, Hope Dickson Leach, Review, Suicide

D: Hope Dickson Leach / 84m

Cast: Ellie Kendrick, David Troughton, Jack Holden, Joe Blakemore

Clover Catto (Kendrick) is a trainee veterinarian who hasn’t been back to her home since she was eighteen. Home is the Somerset cattle farm she grew up on, but a falling out with her father, Aubrey (Troughton), has kept her away. When she receives news that her brother, Harry (Blakemore), has died – by committing suicide – she returns home against her better judgment for the funeral. There she finds her father in denial over the way Harry died: he keeps saying it was an accident, but as Harry put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, Aubrey’s assertion is obviously his way of dealing with it all.

Clover is shocked to see how much the farm has deteriorated since floods hit the area some months before. The main house is in a state of disrepair since part of the roof fell in, and Aubrey is living in a mobile home. Also, Aubrey transferred ownership of the farm to Harry just before he died, but some of his recent actions are hard to understand. Aubrey had arranged for some of the livestock to be sold, only for Harry to cancel the sale. And the discovery of a number of dead badgers, all of them shot (something that’s illegal in the UK), further adds to the mystery of Harry’s mindset in the days before he committed suicide.

In the wake of all this, Clover and her father find themselves at odds over Harry’s death and the reopening of old wounds, their fractured relationship hanging on by a thread as they try to be civil with each other, and not let the past influence their present day actions. But as the truth surrounding Harry’s death comes to light, and Ellie understands both her own role in the tragedy, and her father’s, what has appeared to be a senseless tragedy becomes something that hits much closer to home, but which also has the potential to reunite Ellie and Aubrey after so many years of blaming each other for the distance between them.

The first feature from British moviemaker Hope Dickson Leach, The Levelling is a largely subdued, bitterly poignant movie about the different ways that grief can affect people, and the different ways that people deal with it. Clover tries to deal with her grief by questioning everything she sees and hears going on around her, from her father’s apparent emotional absenteeism, to her own physical absence from the farm at a time when her brother needed her. Clover has questions for her father, for her brother’s best friend, James (Holden), and in time, she has some for herself. As she gathers the various answers she receives, and begins to put them all together, Ellie discovers that her brother’s death isn’t as straightforward as it looks, and that her father isn’t as culpable as she believes.

Essentially a two-hander, the movie makes it clear that there are underlying tensions between Aubrey and Clover, and that these stem from her childhood. The issue of whether or not Aubrey was a good father is cemented early on, but as with Clover’s proprietary notions of innocence in her brother’s death, things aren’t as cut and dried as they may appear. There are faults on both sides, and perceived memories play a significant part in the way the two treat each other. As a result, Clover views her father with suspicion and mistrust, while Aubrey views his daughter with disappointment and enmity. Neither is entirely right or wrong in their assumptions and beliefs about each other, and the movie shows just how these unresolved feelings have driven a wedge between them, and how difficult it will be for them to reconcile their beliefs.

Harry’s role in everything though, is the reason for the distance between them. The movie tells us little about him at the beginning, but as the story unfolds, and we learn more and more about him, his death takes on the nature of an unavoidable – and possibly predictable – tragedy. In time, we discover that Harry – and despite all initial evidence to the contrary – would have been a responsible farmer, and probably much better in his way than either his father, or indeed his sister, who harbours a further resentment toward Aubrey because he didn’t transfer ownership of the farm to her. The movie explores this beleaguered family dynamic with a deft awareness of the way in which a combination of resentment and grief can cause further alienation between already distant individuals.

Although not a movie that is likely to appeal to mainstream audiences, The Levelling is nevertheless a powerful examination of grief and its debilitating effects that is effectively realised, and presented with a great deal of insight. Though this might seem a “difficult” subject, Leach ensures that her treatment is accessible (if a little too morose at times), and thanks to two excellent performances from Kendrick and Troughton, doesn’t deal in platitudes or trivialities. As the prodigal daughter not wanting to return, Kendrick’s sobering features and tensed up body language make for a convincing portrayal of a woman whose family role has never been clear to her, while Troughton’s quietly anguished performance as Aubrey more than adequately displays the character’s refusal to see beyond the surface of the problems that surround him.

Leach makes full use of the beautiful, autumnal Somerset locations, and in partnership with DoP Nanu Segal, uses the surrounding countryside to provide the movie with another character, and one that’s integral to the story being told. Leach also creates a strong sense of atmosphere (though again, it’s a little too morose at times), and gives the material a moving, impassioned quality that belies its somewhat dour compositions and decluttered narrative approach. It’s a movie to admire perhaps, more than to enjoy, but with a strong emotional core and moments of devastating incisiveness, it’s also a movie that remains constantly surprising and constantly rewarding.

Rating: 8/10 – an intelligent and (yes) thought provoking tale of the agony that comes with bereavement, The Levelling is formal and yet audacious, and a penetrating look at the pain that grief can cause; with Leach proving to be a writer/director to look out for in the future, this is a first feature that shows how grief can be used as a way of expressing deep-seated regret, and as a cleansing means of reconciliation.

A Dog’s Purpose (2017)

01 Monday May 2017

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Bailey, Britt Robertson, Comedy, Dennis Quaid, Drama, Josh Gad, K.J. Apa, Lasse Hallström, Reincarnation, Review

D: Lasse Hallström / 100m

Cast: Josh Gad, Bryce Gheisar, Juliet Rylance, Luke Kirby, K.J. Apa, Britt Robertson, John Ortiz, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Dennis Quaid, Peggy Lipton

A Dog’s Purpose tells the five lives of one canine soul (related in voice over by Gad), who initially lives a very short life as a feral puppy called Toby before finding a “forever home” in his second incarnation as a Golden Retriever. It’s 1961, and Toby is rescued from a locked car by a young boy, Ethan (Gheisar), and his mother (Rylance). Toby is renamed Bailey (or to his ears, Bailey Bailey Bailey Bailey) and he becomes a part of the family. Ethan’s mother is very supportive, but his father (Kirby) can be aloof, and prone to mood swings. When a dinner party for his boss goes awry thanks to Bailey’s fun-seeking nature, seeds are sown in relation to Ethan’s father and the work he does, seeds that will have serious repercussions later on.

As a teenager, Ethan is on course to earn himself a football scholarship, and he has a bright, vivacious girlfriend, Hannah (Robertson). Bailey goes wherever Ethan goes, and life for Ethan is pretty good, but his father pushes his mother to the ground while he’s drunk and Ethan tells him to go for good. Following that incident, one of his “friends” puts a lit firecracker through their letterbox, and the house catches fire. Ethan and his mother only get out thanks to Bailey’s quick response, but in jumping to safety from an upstairs window, Ethan fractures his leg. His dream of playing professional football now in ruins, Ethan becomes embittered and ends his relationship with Hannah, and leaves for agricultural college.

Bailey lives out the rest of his life with Ethan’s mother and her parents, and eventually dies of old age. His next life sees him reincarnated into the body of a German Shepherd K-9 called Ellie. With her police partner, Carlos, Ellie chases criminals and helps Carlos overcome his feelings of loneliness follwing the break-up of his marriage. Ellie has all of Bailey’s memories (and attitude), and misses all the fun and games she had previously with Ethan. In his fourth life, Bailey is a Pembroke Welsh Corgi called Tino who is rescued from an animal shelter by shy college student Maya (Howell-Baptiste). Tino and Maya are together for a long time before his next life comes along. Now a Bernese Mountain Dog, and called Waffles, he’s abandoned by his owner’s abusive boyfriend but is found by someone whose smell he recognises, someone he hasn’t seen since his time with Ethan…

An unashamedly feelgood movie, A Dog’s Purpose has had a surprising amount of negative publicity forced upon it in the last few months, so much so that advance screenings (and its Los Angeles premiere) have been cancelled, supporters of the movie have done their best to distance themselves from it, and Hallström has received numerous hate messages. The reason? Back in January 2017, footage appeared that seemed to show a German Shepherd called Hercules being forcibly dropped into and dragged through rushing water, and with no regard for his safety or if he was distressed. But the footage had been edited to give a false impression of the dog’s “distress” and in February this was confirmed by the American Humane Association.

All of which was very dramatic – way more dramatic than anything that happens in A Dog’s Purpose, and despite the movie killing off its central character four times. Based on the novel of the same name by W. Bruce Cameron, the movie retains the novel’s portmanteau structure, and unsurprisingly, some of Bailey’s incarnations are more effective than others. His time with Ethan gets the most screen time, and their scenes together paint an affecting portrait of mutual respect and understanding. But though the emotional bond between Bailey and Ethan is established very early on, it’s the closer bond between Ethan and his father that matters more, and the inevitable disintegration of their relationship. While the movie puts warm and fuzzy in the foreground, it has the sense to keep dark and upsetting sequestered in the background, and waiting to come out when needed.

The same occurs when Bailey becomes Ellie. Ortiz’s melancholy police officer lacks the connection that Ethan had with Bailey, and though the mechanics of the overall storyline dictate that each incarnation has its fair share of problems, Ellie’s life is the toughest, and the complete opposite of Bailey’s. This is reflected in the manner in which Ellie becomes Tino, but even though it should be heartbreaking, the knowledge that “Bailey will return” negates any inherent drama. Thanks to Cameron’s spin on canine reincarnation, there’s no sense that there’s anything at stake here, and even though it’s fairly obvious where all these different lives are heading, there are few lessons learnt along the way, and Carlos’ and Maya’s stories end up feeling incidental to the main focus, which is when will Bailey and Ethan be reunited?

What helps and hinders the movie in equal measure is the voice over provided by Gad. As a way of (literally) getting inside Bailey’s head during each incarnation, it’s an idea that gives the movie the opportunity to see things from the dog’s point of view, and to do so in a way that avoids the usual kind of anthropomorphism so often seen in movies where animals feature as central characters. There’s no sappy, snappy banter a la Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey (1993), just Gad relaying the joy of being a dog, and in such an infectious, humorous manner that you can believe that this is how all happy dogs think and behave. But there’s a serious side to it all as well, as Bailey takes time out every now and again to ponder on the bigger questions, such as why cats want to be dogs deep down and can’t admit it, why some owners don’t want to play Fetch, and more importantly, what is Bailey’s purpose in coming back so often.

While the answer may sound a little cheesy, and not quite as profound as Hallström and Cameron (plus his four co-screenwriters) would have liked, it does serve to give the movie more meaning than usual, and the material overall is in Hallström’s very safe hands. The director of My Life As a Dog (1985) and Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009) maintains his unique ability to craft emotionally resonant movies out of stories involving our canine friends, and though in many ways this is a movie that offers little in the way of anything new or original, it succeeds by telling Bailey’s story simply and directly. With a superb canine cast that easily puts its human counterparts in the shade, the movie also has a sentimental, decorative score from Rachel Portman, and vibrant, energetic cinematography from Terry Stacey that complements Bailey’s joie de vivre.

Rating: 7/10 – infectiously enjoyable, and a movie to warm the hearts of dog lovers everywhere, A Dog’s Purpose is at its best when showing the depth of the bond between a dog and its owner; less successful in terms of its structure, and perhaps showing one life too many, the movie also suffers from too many perfunctory performances (the script’s fault, not the cast’s), and a saccharine quality in places that’s completely unnecessary.

Monthly Roundup – April 2017

30 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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A Street Cat Named Bob, Aaron Eckhart, Action, Andy Mitton, Annette O'Toole, Anybody's Nightmare, Biography, Bob the Cat, Brad Peyton, Charles Barton, Chinook, Clark Freeman, Comedy, Crime, Crime Doctor, Dakota Johnson, Delayed Action, Documentary, Drama, Edward Dryhurst, Fifty Shades Darker, Gibb McLaughlin, Horror, Incarnate, Island of Doomed Men, James Foley, James Nunn, Jamie Dornan, Jason Bateman, Jesse Holland, John Harlow, Josh Gordon, Julie Suedo, June Thorburn, Kirby Dick, Kirby Grant, Literary adaptation, Luke Treadaway, Michael Gordon, Michael Powell, Mike Mizanin, Office Christmas Party, Patricia Routledge, Peter Lorre, Possession, Reviews, Robert Ayres, Roger Spottiswoode, Silent movie, The Claydon Treasure Mystery, The Marine 5: Battleground, The Night of the Party, The Woman from China, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Tristram Powell, True story, Warner Baxter, We Go On, Will Speck, William Beaudine, WWE Films, Yukon Vengeance

Fifty Shades Darker (2017) / D: James Foley / 118m

Cast: Dakota Johnson, Jamie Dornan, Eric Johnson, Marcia Gay Harden, Eloise Mumford, Bella Heathcote, Rita Ora, Luke Grimes, Victor Rasuk, Max Martini, Kim Basinger

Rating: 4/10 – Christian Grey (Dornan) successfully woos back Anastasia Steele (Johnson), tries to go “straight” in the bedroom, and then narrowly avoids an attempt on his life – and that’s it for Round Two; flashy and trashy at the same time, Fifty Shades Darker continues the series’ commitment to providing two hours of inane, tedium-inducing material each time, and by never going as far as it might in the sexual activity department, making this yet another slickly produced teaser for the real thing.

A Street Cat Named Bob (2016) / D: Roger Spottiswoode / 103m

Cast: Luke Treadaway, Ruta Gedmintas, Joanne Froggatt, Anthony Head, Darren Evans, Beth Goddard, Ruth Sheen, Caroline Goodall, Bob the Cat

Rating: 7/10 – a recovering drug addict and talented busker, James Bowen (Treadaway), adopts a cat he calls Bob and in doing so finds a reason to stay off drugs and rebuild his life – with unexpected results; though A Street Cat Named Bob charts a particularly diffcult period in the life of the real James Bowen, the movie avoids being too depressing by emphasising the bond between Bob and his musician “owner”, and by resolutely aiming for feelgood, something at which it succeeds with a great deal of charm, and thanks to an endearing performance from Treadaway.

The Woman from China (1930) / D: Edward Dryhurst / 82m

Cast: Julie Suedo, Gibb McLaughlin, Frances Cuyler, Tony Wylde, Kiyoshi Takase

Rating: 7/10 – a Chinese criminal, Chung-Li (McLaughlin), kidnaps the girlfriend (Cuyler) of a ship’s lieutenant (Wylde) in order to satisfy his lust for her, but doesn’t reckon on one of his accomplices (Suedo) having feelings of her own for the same ship’s lieutenant; a late in the day silent movie, The Woman from China is a British production that has a Dickensian feel to it, narrowly avoids stereotyping its villain (very narrowly), and thanks to Dryhurst’s talent as a writer as well as a director, remains a well crafted thriller that is ripe for rediscovery.

We Go On (2016) / D: Jesse Holland, Andy Mitton / 85m

Cast: Annette O’Toole, Clark Freeman, Giovanna Zacarías, Jay Dunn, Laura Heisler, John Glover

Rating: 5/10 – Miles (Freeman) is terrified of dying and wants incontrovertible proof of life after death, so he offers a reward to anyone who can provide it, but the responses he gets aren’t exactly what he was expecting; a paranoid chiller that doesn’t quite have the focus it needs to be interesting throughout, We Go On nevertheless contains some really creepy moments, and a fiercely maternal performance from O’Toole that elevates the material whenever she’s on screen, but overall it falls short in too many areas, and particularly the way in which it’s been assembled, which leaves it feeling haphazard and hastily stitched together.

Yukon Vengeance (1954) / D: William Beaudine / 68m

Cast: Kirby Grant, Chinook, Monte Hale, Mary Ellen Kay, Henry Kulky, Carol Thurston, Parke McGregor, Fred Gabourie

Rating: 4/10 – when a lumber company’s wages keep being stolen while en route to the nearest town, Canadian Mountie Rod Webb (Grant) and his faithful sidekick Chinook are sent to investigate; a remake of Wilderness Mail (1935), Yukon Vengeance is also the last in a series of ten movies Grant and Chinook made together between 1949 and 1954, and is pleasant enough if you go in not expecting too much, but it’s hampered by poor performances from Hale and Kay, uninterested direction from Beaudine (usually much more reliable), and material that offers no surprises whatsoever (though that shouldn’t be a surprise either).

This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006) / D: Kirby Dick / 98m

With: Kirby Dick, Kimberly Peirce, Matt Stone, John Waters, Kevin Smith, Maria Bello, Wayne Kramer, David Ansen, Mary Harron, Allison Anders

Rating: 6/10 – moviemaker Kirby Dick decides to try and find out just what goes on behind the secretive doors of the Motion Picture Association of America, and hires a private investigator to do so, while also eliciting the opinions of moviemakers who have had run-ins with the MPAA; Dick adopts a partisan approach to the material, but in the end, This Film Is Not Yet Rated doesn’t discover anything that viewers couldn’t have worked out for themselves without seeing it, and wastes a lot of time with Dick’s choice of private investigator as they sit outside the MPAA offices and take down car number plates for very little return (both investigative and cinematic).

The Claydon Treasure Mystery (1938) / D: H. Manning Haynes / 64m

Cast: John Stuart, Garry Marsh, Annie Esmond, Campbell Gullan, Evelyn Ankers, Aubrey Mallalieu, Finlay Currie, Joss Ambler, Richard Parry, Vernon Harris, John Laurie

Rating: 5/10 – following a disappearance and a murder, crime writer Peter Kerrigan (Stuart) becomes involved in a centuries old mystery at a country house, while attempting to work out just who is willing to kill to benefit from said mystery; what could have been a nimble little murder mystery is let down by Haynes’ solemn direction, and too much repetition in the script, but The Claydon Treasure Mystery does feature a handful of entertaining performances and a clever solution to the mystery.

Delayed Action (1954) / D: John Harlow / 58m

Cast: Robert Ayres, June Thorburn, Alan Wheatley, Bruce Seton, Michael Balfour

Rating: 5/10 – a suicidal man (Ayres) agrees to play the part of a businessman to meet the crooked demands of another (Wheatley), and forfeit his life at the end of the agreement, but doesn’t reckon on having a reason to live – a woman (Thorburn) – when the time comes; a sprightly little crime drama, Delayed Action never really convinces the viewer that Ayres’ character would agree so readily to the offer made to him, and Ayres himself is a less than convincing actor in the role, but the short running time helps, and Wheatley’s arrogant, preening master criminal is the movie’s trump card.

The Night of the Party (1935) / D: Michael Powell / 61m

aka The Murder Party

Cast: Malcolm Keen, Jane Baxter, Ian Hunter, Leslie Banks, Viola Keats, Ernest Thesiger, Jane Millican, W. Graham Brown, Muriel Aked

Rating: 5/10 – at a dinner party, hated newspaper proprietor Lord Studholme (Keen) is murdered, but which one of the many guests – all of whom had reason to kill him – actually did the deed, and why?; Powell was still finding his feet as a director when he made The Night of the Party, and though much of it looks like a filmed stage play (which it was), it’s exactly the movie’s staginess that robs it of a lot of energy, and stops it from becoming as involving and engaging as other movies of its ilk, and that’s despite some very enjoyable performances indeed.

Office Christmas Party (2016) / D: Josh Gordon, Will Speck / 105m

Cast: Jason Bateman, Olivia Munn, T.J. Miller, Jennifer Aniston, Kate McKinnon, Courtney B. Vance, Jillian Bell, Rob Corddry, Vanessa Bayer, Randall Park

Rating: 5/10 – with their office being threatened with closure, manager Clay (Miller) and several of his staff decide to throw a massive Xmas party in the hope that it will help secure a contract with businessman Walter Davis (Vance) and so save everyone’s jobs; only fitfully amusing, Office Christmas Party probably sounded great as an idea, but in practice it strays too far from the original concept, and has its cast going firmly through the motions in their efforts to raise a laugh, although McKinnon (once again) stands out as an HR manager who makes being uptight the funniest thing in the whole misguided mess of a movie.

The Marine 5: Battleground (2017) / D: James Nunn / 91m

Cast: Mike Mizanin, Anna Van Hooft, Nathan Mitchell, Bo Dallas, Curtis Axel, Heath Slater, Naomi, Sandy Robson

Rating: 4/10 – now a paramedic, Jake Carter (Mizanin) finds himself trapped in an underground car park and fending off a motorcycle gang who are trying to kill the injured man (Mitchell) who has just killed their leader; five movies in and WWE Films have used a low budget/low return formula to ensure that The Marine 5: Battleground remains a dreary, leaden-paced “action” movie that features a lot more WWE Superstars than usual, more glaring plot holes than you can shove the Big Show through, and proof if any were needed that playing hyper-realised athletes every week isn’t a good training ground for acting in the movies, no matter how hard WWE tries to make it seem otherwise.

Incarnate (2016) / D: Brad Peyton / 91m

Cast: Aaron Eckhart, Carice van Houten, Catalina Sandino Moreno, David Mazouz, Keir O’Donnell, Matt Nable, Emily Jackson, Tomas Arana

Rating: 4/10 – a scientist-cum-paranormal investigator (Eckhart) can induce himself into the minds of people possessed by demons and cast them out, but he comes up against a stronger adversary than any he’s encountered before: the demon that took the lives of his wife and son; a neat twist on a standard possession/exorcism movie, Incarnate suffers from the kind of muddled plotting, heavyhanded sermonising, and stereotypical characterisations that hamper all these variations on a horror movie theme, and in doing so, marks itself out as another nail in the coffin of Eckhart’s mainstream career, and a movie that lacks substance, style, wit, and credibility.

Crime Doctor (1943) / D: Michael Gordon / 66m

Cast: Warner Baxter, Margaret Lindsay, John Litel, Ray Collins, Harold Huber, Don Costello, Leon Ames, Dorothy Tree

Rating: 7/10 – a man (Baxter) found unconscious at the side of the road wakes with no memory of his past, but over time builds a new life for himself as a leading criminal psychologist – until his own criminal past comes calling; the first in the Crime Doctor series is a solid, suspenseful movie bolstered by strong performances, a surprisingly detailed script, and good production values, making it an above average thriller and hugely enjoyable to watch.

Island of Doomed Men (1940) / D: Charles Barton / 68m

Cast: Peter Lorre, Rochelle Hudson, Robert Wilcox, Don Beddoe, George E. Stone, Kenneth MacDonald, Charles Middleton

Rating: 6/10 – a Government agent (Wilcox) allows himself to be arrested and imprisoned in an effort to make it to an island owned by sadistic diamond mine owner Stephen Danel (Lorre), and then expose Danel’s use of ex-cons and parolees as slave labour; a seedy, florid atmosphere is encouraged and exploited by Barton as Island of Doomed Men allows Lorre to give one of his more self-contained yet intense performances, and which also shows that some Production Code-era movies could still be “exciting” for reasons that only modern day audiences would appreciate – probably.

Anybody’s Nightmare (2001) / D: Tristram Powell / 97m

Cast: Patricia Routledge, Georgina Sutcliffe, Thomas Arnold, Nicola Redmond, David Calder, Malcolm Sinclair, William Armstrong, Rashid Karapiet, Louisa Milwood-Haigh, Scott Baker

Rating: 5/10 – the true story of Sheila Bowler (Routledge) who in the early Nineties was arrested, tried and convicted of the death of her late husband’s aunt (despite a clear lack of evidence), and who spent the next four years fighting to have her conviction overturned; a miscarriage of justice story bolstered by Routledge’s dignified, sterling performance, Anybody’s Nightmare betrays its British TV movie origins too often for comfort, features some truly disastrous acting (step forward Thomas Arnold and Louisa Milwood-Haigh), but does make each twist and turn of Bowler’s legal case as shocking as possible, and in the end, proves once again that truth really is stranger than fiction.

Oh! the Horror! – Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) and Arsenal (2017)

29 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Adrian Grenier, Anna Hutchison, Brothers, Crime, Don Johnson, Drama, Johnathon Schaech, Johnny Martin, Joyce Carol Oates, Kidnapping, Literary adaptation, Nicolas Cage, Rape: A Love Story, Review, Steven C. Miller, Thriller

A Nicolas Cage double bill this time round, with two of his more recent movies offering him different roles, but both serving as reminders that when Cage is having a bad day on set, there’s really nothing quite like Cage having a bad day on set.

Vengeance: A Love Story (2017) / D: Johnny Martin / 99m

Cast: Nicolas Cage, Anna Hutchison, Talitha Bateman, Deborah Kara Unger, Don Johnson, Joshua Mikel, Rocco Nugent, Joe Ochterbeck, Carter Burch, Charlene Tilton

In Vengeance: A Love Story, Cage is Detective John Dromoor, a veteran Niagara Falls-based cop who meets a young woman, Teena (Hutchison), in a bar and takes a paternal liking to her. Teena is separated from her husband and has a young daughter, Bethie (Bateman). On their way home from a party at her husband’s, Teena and Bethie run into four men who proceed to drag them both into a nearby boathouse with the intention of raping Teena and, possibly, Bethie as well. Though Bethie manages to hide from them, it doesn’t stop her from being a witness to her mother being raped. The men leave Teena for dead, while Bethie comes out of hiding and gets help.

Dromoor is assigned to the case, but doesn’t recognise Teena when he arrives at the scene. But later, when her identity is revealed, Dromoor takes it upon himself to ensure that the four men are arrested and put in prison. Fate, however, has other plans: two of the men are brothers, and their mother (Tilton), protesting their innocence, hires a lawyer, Jay Kirkpatrick (Johnson), with a reputation for keeping violent criminals out of jail. When the trial begins and it begins to look as if Kirkpatrick’s winning streak will continue, Dromoor decides that, for justice to be truly served, he must go after the four men, and ensure they are punished.

Adapted from the novel, Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates, the more commercially titled Vengeance: A Love Story sees Cage coast along in the role of Detective Dromoor, and look throughout as if the anti-depressants aren’t working. Maybe Cage is attempting to internalise his feelings but it’s hard to tell, as his expression rarely changes and he’s given the kind of dialogue that makes him sound like he’s half asleep. It’s also the kind of performance that could best be described as disconnected. Even when Dromoor’s playing judge, jury and executioner Cage still looks as if he wishes he were somewhere else.

For a while, Cage was set to direct, but scheduling conflicts saw him hand over the reins to Martin. As a director, Martin is a great stunt coordinator (his primary role within movies), and his previous experience has been in directing low budget horror movies. As a result, Vengeance: A Love Story, is a leaden effort that eschews any subtleties that might have been a part of the source material in favour of a by-the-numbers approach. It’s also tension-free, features a performance from Johnson that seems to be taking place in a vacuum, and makes its villains the kind of grinning idiots that should have gone out of movie fashion in the Eighties. All in all, it’s dispiriting stuff that reinforces the notion that, these days, Cage will commit to anything for a pay cheque.

Rating: 3/10 – not even an attempt at creating the moody, stifling atmosphere of a modern noir can help Vengeance: A Love Story gain any dramatic traction; a poorly realised adaptation of Oates’ novel and a blunt exercise in emotional distress, it’s a movie that’s best forgotten as soon as you’ve seen it.

Arsenal (2017) / D: Steven C. Miller / 92m

aka Southern Fury

Cast: Adrian Grenier, Johnathon Schaech, Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, Heather Johansen, Lydia Hull, William Mark McCullough, Christopher Coppola

In Arsenal, Cage is Eddie King, a low-life Southern mobster who snorts a lot of cocaine and gets involved with the lives of two brothers, JP (Grenier) and Mikey (Schaech). As kids, Mikey was always the one ot watch out for his younger brother, JP, but as adults the tables have turned. Mikey has been in trouble with the law, while JP has built up a local construction company; he’s also married with a young daughter. Mikey takes a loan of $10,000 from JP to help him start again, but Mikey’s idea is to use the money to buy cocaine and re-sell it at a profit. But Mikey’s home is raided, and the cocaine is stolen from him. He tracks down the two men who stole it, but is unable to get it back. Soon after, a chance encounter with Eddie King leads to Mikey being kidnapped by King and held to ransom.

Despite being told not to involve the police, JP enlists the help of old friend and local cop, Sal (Cusack). Between them the pair discover that King is the kidnapper they’re dealing with, though they have no immediate way of managing the situation other than to pay the ransom of $350,000. While JP gets the money together, Mikey makes an unsuccessful escape attempt, old alliances are put to the test, Eddie deals with some awkward family ties, and a clue leads to the location where Mikey is being held. Determined not to let his brother be killed, JP comes up with a plan to save Mikey and stop King once and for all.

As opposed to his almost invisible performance in Vengeance: A Love Story, here Cage aims for the opposite end of the spectrum and gives his most over-the-top performance since Bad Lieutenant (2009). With an ill-fitting (and frankly ridiculous looking) wig, bulbous nose, and semi-laughable moustache (that’s rarely in the same place twice), Cage goes full throttle in his efforts to make his character appear dangerous and/or psychotic. He may have aimed for bravura at first, but it isn’t long before he’s shouting his lines at high volume and appearing to be on the verge of having a stroke. It’s a one-note performance that makes Eddie look and sound like the ultimate spoilt child, and in terms of the movie, it undermines his role as the central villain.

However, against the likes of Grenier and Schaech (who are supposed to be brothers, but who don’t look or sound alike, and have little on-screen chemistry together), Cage at least is making an effort. Grenier looks confused a lot, as if the rest of the cast is working from a script he hasn’t seen, while Schaech tries for muscle-bound yet deep-down sensitive and only succeeds in looking like he’s unsure of what’s being asked of him as an actor. Cusack wanders in and out of the narrative, mutters a few lines each time, then disappears until the next time the script needs him to tell Grenier just how bad things are getting. The movie lacks a sense of urgency once Mikey is kidnapped, its action scenes are perfunctory, and an extended prologue goes to great lengths to show the deep, caring relationship between JP and Mikey when a short dialogue scene could have done it in half the time. All in all, it’s dispiriting stuff that reinforces the notion that, these days, Cage will commit to anything for a pay cheque.

Rating: 3/10 – predictable on every level, Arsenal is a dull excuse for an action thriller, and directed in a manner that suggests Miller knew there was little chance of a decent movie emerging from out of the banal nature of Jason Mosberg’s screenplay; Cusack, wearing a bandanna and shuffling around a lot, seems to be acknowledging a debt to Steven Seagal, while any fun to be had is in seeing how many times the movie can set up a promising scene only for it to turn out to be just as bad as the rest.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

28 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Bradley Cooper, Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Drama, Ego, James Gunn, Marvel, Michael Rooker, Review, Sci-fi, Sequel, Star Lord, The Sovereign, Vin Diesel, Zoe Saldana

D: James Gunn / 136m

Cast: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel, Michael Rooker, Karen Gillan, Kurt Russell, Pom Klementieff, Elizabeth Debicki, Chris Sullivan, Sean Gunn, Tommy Flanagan, Laura Haddock

At the end of Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), there was a reference to the identity of Peter Quill/Star Lord’s father. It wasn’t particularly complimentary, but it did give some idea of where a sequel might be headed if the movie was successful (which it ever so slightly was). Three months on from the events of the first movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 begins with our heroes working for the Sovereign, a race led by Ayesha (Debicki). Charged with protecting some valuable batteries, the Guardians complete their mission but manage to earn the Sovereign’s enmity when it’s discovered that Rocket (Cooper) has stolen some of the batteries himself. Attacked by hundreds of Sovereign drone ships, the Guardians’ spaceship suffers a lot of damage before it can make a light speed jump to safety – and before the drone ships are all destroyed by another mysterious craft.

The Guardians crash land on a nearby planet and the mysterious craft lands also. The owner of the craft reveals himself as Peter’s father, called Ego (Russell), and that he’s been searching for Peter (Pratt) for years. It also transpires that Peter was abducted from Earth by Ravager Yondu Udonta (Rooker) at Ego’s request (though why Yondu kept charge of Peter goes unexplained). Now reunited, Ego suggests they travel to his home planet so that he can be “the father he should have been”. While Peter, Gamora (Saldana), and Drax (Bautista) agree to journey with him, Rocket and Baby Groot (Diesel) stay behind to repair their ship and look after Nebula (Gillan), Gamora’s sister and the payment they received from the Sovereign for their work. However, Ayesha has hired Yondu with the mission of retrieving the stolen batteries and capturing the Guardians.

On Ego’s home planet, Peter and his father begin to bond, but Gamora senses that something isn’t right. Ego’s attendant, an empath called Mantis (Klementieff), appears anxious over Peter’s being there but remains silent. Meanwhile, Yondu has been the victim of a mutiny, and some of his crew, led by self-proclaimed Taserface (Sullivan) and aided by Nebula, have taken over the ship. Nebula takes a ship and heads for Ego’s planet intent on killing Gamora, while Rocket, Baby Groot and Yondu find they need to work together to avoid being killed. Soon, everyone, including another drone armada sent by Ayesha, is heading for Ego’s planet, and the fate of the Guardians and hundreds of other far-flung planets hangs in the balance…

The surprise success of Guardians of the Galaxy three years ago was a shot in the arm for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, proving to audiences becoming accustomed to a regular diet of superhero theatrics, that there was more to said Universe than egotists in tin suits, enhanced super soldiers, and feuding demi-gods. By making a movie that had nothing to do with anyone else in the MCU, Marvel showed a confidence in their original material, and in the movie’s writer/director, that could so easily have backfired on them. That it didn’t must lie squarely on the creative shoulders of James Gunn, the man who took a motley crew of ne’er-do-wells and made them loved the world over. It wasn’t long before there was talk of the Guardians appearing in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), but a sequel was already in place. So – what to do with them in the meantime?

The answer is…not very much at all. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 falls into the category of uninspired Marvel sequel, a placement it shares with Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor: The Dark World (2013), and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) (only the Captain America sequels have avoided falling into this category). While it’s true that there’s much to enjoy this time around, and the first movie’s freewheeling sense of fun and adventure is firmly in place, the fact is that this is a two and a quarter hour movie that runs out of steam – dramatically at least – at around the hour and a quarter mark. By that time, the three main storylines – Peter finds his father, Yondu makes amends for breaking the Ravager code, Gamora and Nebula come to terms with their hatred of each other – have all reached a point where there’s nowhere further for them to go, and James Gunn’s script lurches into an extended series of showdowns and signposted revelations that offer little in the way of character or plot development.

On this occasion, and with only one post-credits scene designed to set up the already announced Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, it’s clear that this is Marvel’s first true filler movie, designed and made to capitalise on the success of the original, and to fill a gap in the release schedule. Fortunately though, and again thanks to the involvement of Gunn and his returning cast, this is a filler movie that replicates much of the first movie’s highly enjoyable charm and visual quirkiness. From the opening credits sequence that sees Baby Groot dancing to ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky while his fellow Guardians take on a multi-tentacled inter-dimensional monster in the background, Gunn’s novel approach to the material proves (again) to be one of the movie’s MVP’s, and is only bested by the sequence later in the movie when Yondu and Rocket take back control of Yondu’s ship. (However, Ego’s home planet looks like it was designed by My Little Pony on an acid trip.)

But while there’s a heck of a lot going on visually, it’s down in the story department that the movie shows signs of wear and tear. The emphasis on family ties is made over and over again as old enemies become bosom buddies in order to give the movie a happy, feelgood vibe, and the ranks of the Guardians are swelled temporarily (this is personal redemption achieved easily and without the slightest challenge). The characters remain much the same too, with Peter and Gamora still at odds over their attraction for each other, and Rocket retaining his knack for deliberately saying things that will antagonise others. Drax is even more insensitive than before, Nebula is still consumed with rage against her father, Thanos, and Baby Groot – well, he’s still just as cute (if not more so). Of the newcomers, Gunn doesn’t seem entirely sure of how to use Mantis, Ayesha is akin to a spoilt little princess, while Ego’s “purpose” isn’t fully explored, and makes Russell work extra hard in getting the idea across to audiences.

With much of the movie underperforming in this way, it’s fortunate that Gunn has retained the irreverent sense of humour present in the first movie, and there are some very funny moments indeed, from Rocket being described as a “trash panda”, to an out of leftfield reference to Mary Poppins, and the pay-off to the first post-credits scene. Elsewhere, Sylvester Stallone pops up in a role that’s intended to be expanded on in future outings, Russell is given the same younger version treatment Michael Douglas received in Ant-Man (2015), the Awesome Mix Tape Vol. 2 is exactly that, and the space battles are bewildering in terms of what’s happening and to whom. But with all that, this is still hugely enjoyable stuff, lavishly produced and glossy from start to finish, and designed to please the fans first and foremost. On that level it will probably succeed, but it won’t change the fact that this is not quite the triumphant sequel that many will be expecting – or hearing about.

Rating: 6/10 – with much of the movie feeling flat and ponderous in terms of the drama, and the characters no further forward in terms of their development, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 gets by on its often inspired humour, and the chemistry that unites its cast; a safe bet for the most part, with enough inventiveness and charm to make it look and sound better than it is, it’s a solid enough movie, but in automobile terms, it doesn’t have too much going on under the hood.

Mini-Review: Gold (2016)

27 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Bryce Dallas Howard, Drama, Edgar Ramirez, Fraud, Indonesia, Matthew McConaughey, Review, Stephen Gaghan, True story, Washoe Mining

D: Stephen Gaghan / 121m

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Edgar Ramírez, Bryce Dallas Howard, Corey Stoll, Toby Kebbell, Bill Camp, Joshua Harto, Timothy Simons, Craig T. Nelson, Macon Blair, Adam LeFevre, Frank Wood, Michael Landes, Bhavesh Patel, Rachael Taylor, Stacy Keach, Bruce Greenwood

Kenny Wells (McConaughey) is a struggling businessman trying to keep his father’s company, Washoe Mining, afloat. Working out of the bar where his girlfriend, Kay (Howard) works, Kenny’s efforts are proving fruitless. One night he has a dream of finding gold in the jungles of Indonesia. Inspired by this, and the recollection of having met a geologist, Michael Acosta (Ramírez), who works in the region, Kenny reaches out to Acosta and convinces him to go into partnership with him. Michael will find a drilling site, and Kenny will put up the funding (using every last penny he can muster). The gamble pays off handsomely: gold is discovered, and when the news reaches the outside world, there’s no shortage of people and companies willing to invest in the newly revitalised Washoe Mining.

The company makes billions overnight, trading high on the Stock Exchange. But soon, word reaches Kenny and his team that the gold find in Indonesia is a fraud. The gold hasn’t been mined, but is river gold, not of the same calibre and nowhere near as valuable. Also, Michael has disappeared, along with $164 million that he’s accrued by dumping stock over the past few months. The FBI become involved, and their investigation, led by Agent Jennings (Kebbell), has one all-important question to ask: was Kenny a part of the fraud or not?

Using the 1993 Bre-X mining scandal as the basis for its story, Gold is a cautionary tale of desperation leading to blind greed as everyone buys into the gold find and sees multiple dollar signs everywhere – and without looking too closely to see if it was all above aboard. In this version, the movie makes it clear: the signs were there but no one wanted to look at them. The message then is “be careful what you wish for”, or more appropriately perhaps, “all that glitters is not gold”. However, this message is all but buried by the movie’s focus on Kenny and his struggle to avoid failure. Kenny is not one of Life’s winners, and even when he does achieve success it’s short-lived. He’s a loser, grabbing at a last chance to honour his father’s legacy. This is all well and good, but in terms of the movie and the story it’s trying to tell, it’s not that compelling. Thanks to the combination of Patrick Massett and John Zinman’s drawn-out screenplay and Stephen Gaghan’s static direction, Gold doesn’t trade in any expected highs and lows, but instead, maintains an even keel throughout its two hour running time.

This leaves the cast, and the audience, with little to connect with. McConaughey gives a committed performance, putting on weight, shaving back his hairline, and adopting crooked teeth, but does his appearance add depth or nuance to the character? Sadly, the answer is no. The rest of the cast, even Ramirez, are left stranded by the script’s focus on Kenny, and they operate as satellites around his ever decreasing orbit. And no one is memorable enough to stand out. The bulk of the movie is set in 1988, but this doesn’t add anything either, and Gaghan’s efforts to add tension to the movie’s latter half also fall short of succeeding. Gold could have been about a combination of avarice and hubris bringing about one man’s particular downfall. Instead it comes across as a weak-minded morality tale where no one and everyone is to blame, and the only consequence to it all is a last-minute “twist” that undermines everything that’s gone before.

Rating: 5/10 – lacklustre in both design and execution, Gold benefits from some stunning location photography (with Thailand standing in for Indonesia), and a well chosen soundtrack, but otherwise fails to impress; a missed opportunity then, and a movie that doesn’t make much of an impact thanks to its undeveloped potential.

10 Reasons to Remember Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

26 Wednesday Apr 2017

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Career, Director, Documentaries, Jonathan Demme, Movies

Jonathan Demme (22 February 1944 – 26 April 2017)

Like many of his contemporaries, Jonathan Demme started his movie career working for Roger Corman. He wrote several screenplays, including The Hot Box (1972) and Caged Heat (1974 – which he also directed), and had several modest successes as a director in the mid-Seventies. He learned his craft well, and over the next decade Demme made a succession of well received movies as well as a string of music videos for bands such as Talking Heads and New Order (a group whose songs featured in pretty much all his movies from the Eighties onwards). Demme chose his projects carefully and as a result he wasn’t the most prolific of directors when it came to features, but he was a committed documentarian, making over a dozen during his career.

It was a certain Oscar-winning movie in 1991 that gave Demme his biggest exposure as a director, but though he could have used that success to helm any movie he wanted to, he continued to choose projects that most other directors would have passed on, from intimate documentary portrait Cousin Bobby (1992), to literary adaptation Beloved (1998), to the well intentioned but unsuccessful remake of Charade (1964), The Truth About Charlie (2002) (on the subject of remakes he never thought it was “sacrilegious to remake any movie”; for Demme it was “sacrilegious to make a bad movie”). He kept returning to music documentaries, and ventured into television, ensuring that he continued to have a varied, and sometimes eclectic career.

He was known primarily for his use of close-ups, for finding roles for his “stock company” (actors such as Charles Napier and Dean Stockwell), and for his work having had a profound influence on the writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson. If anything, Demme was a mercurial director who never quite received the acclaim that his body of work deserved, but for anyone who has followed his career since those heady days working for Roger Corman, he was an intelligent, perceptive director whose talent and skill behind the camera meant that whatever project he was working on, it would always be worth watching.

1 – Caged Heat (1974)

2 – Melvin and Howard (1980)

3 – Stop Making Sense (1984)

4 – Something Wild (1986)

5 – Swimming to Cambodia (1987)

6 – The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

7 – Philadelphia (1993)

8 – Neil Young: Heart of Gold (2006)

9 – Rachel Getting Married (2008)

10 – I’m Carolyn Parker (2011)

The Belko Experiment (2016)

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Adria Arjona, Belko Industries, Bogota, Drama, Greg McLean, Horror, John C. McGinley, John Gallagher Jr, Murder, Review, Thriller, Tony Goldwyn, Tracers

D: Greg McLean / 89m

Cast: John Gallagher Jr, Tony Goldwyn, Adria Arjona, John C. McGinley, Melonie Diaz, Owain Yeaman, Sean Gunn, Brent Sexton, Josh Brener, David Dastmalchian, David Del Rio, Rusty Schwimmer, Gail Bean, James Earl, Abraham Benrubi, Gregg Henry, Michael Rooker

On the outskirts of Bogotá, Colombia, Belko Industries has an office building where its mostly American, relocated staff, help other American companies set up in South America. The office building has been open for a year, and the eighty American staff that work there have what are called “trackers” implanted in the back of their heads in case of kidnappings. If any member of staff is kidnapped, these “trackers” will make them easy to find and rescue. One day, Mike Milch (Gallagher Jr), a Belko employee, arrives to find the local Colombians who work there are being sent home, and this is being overseen by a group of security guards Milch has never seen before. Inside the building, Evan (Earl), the building security guard, admits he doesn’t know what’s going on, and neither does anyone else, not even the COO, Barry Norris (Goldwyn).

While the staff talk over this strange development, new starter Dany Wilkins (Diaz) begins her first day, while Norris’s assistant, Leandra Jerez (Arjona), bemoans the unwanted attention of colleague Wendell Dukes (McGinley). Unwanted because he won’t take no for an answer, and also because she’s in a relationship with Milch. As the rest of the morning gets under way, a tannoy announcement heard throughout the building informs everyone that unless two people are killed in the next thirty minutes then more people will die as a consequence. No one takes the announcement too seriously, even when shutters come down that seal everyone inside the building (though the roof remains accessible). When no one is killed, four people die when the “trackers” in their heads explode.

Realising the danger from the “trackers”, Milch tries to remove his but the voice from the tannoy announcement starts a countdown to its being detonated. Milch stops, and the next time the voice gives instructions they’re even more chilling than the last: unless thirty people are killed in the next two hours, sixty people will be killed just as randomly as the previous four. From this, two distinct factions form amongst the employees: those who, like Milch, think no one should be killed (and an alternative solution found to their predicament), and those who, like Norris, think that thirty deaths is better than sixty. What follows pits employee against employee, and engenders a complete breakdown of morality and compassion.

Working from an old script by James Gunn, The Belko Experiment – to paraphrase the title of a Werner Herzog movie – could almost be called James Gunn, James Gunn, What Have Ye Done. While the basic premise is sound, here the “execution” is less than satisfactory, as the finished product lacks clarity, subtlety, and is only consistent in its lack of clarity and subtlety. If Gunn was attempting to write a straightforward schlock horror movie combining equally straightforward ideas regarding the erosion of social and moral restraints in a highly charged atmosphere, then in one sense that’s what he’s done. But if that is the case, and though much of that approach to the material is still in place, director Greg McLean’s interpretation still leaves a lot to be desired.

Following on from the dreadful outing that was The Darkness (2016), McLean makes only partial amends with this, focusing his efforts too quickly on getting to the kind of indiscriminate carnage that is the movie’s raison d’etre. Forget social commentary, forget a knowing critique of office politics, this is all about seeing how fast a group of (apparently) average people can descend into homicidal rage and leave rational thinking behind. On that basis alone the movie is more successful (the answer is quicker than you can say “exploding head”). But once all the niceties are done and dusted, and we get to know who’s going to be a hawk and who’s going to be a dove, then it’s on with the murky motivations and desperate attempts at credibility.

It’s always problematical when you have characters such as Milch proclaiming that no one should be killed, and then, by the movie’s end he’s on a par with psycho colleagues Norris and Dukes in terms of how many people he’s despatched. It’s not addressed because it doesn’t suit the needs of the movie, and yet if it had, it would have gone some way towards giving the movie some much needed depth. As it is, Milch takes to murdering his colleagues with as much gusto as he can manage, and any blurring of the lines that was intended on the part of the script is forsaken in favour of more killing. But with the body count rising, the movie feels rushed and even more implausible, and the problem of killing off the remaining seventy-six employees becomes more important than any moral considerations.

It could be argued that to expect any depth in a movie that’s only concerned with coming up with as many inventive deaths as it can in ninety minutes (death by tape dispenser anyone?), is something of a fool’s errand, but The Belko Experiment also lacks style and wastes its talented cast. Saddled with woefully underwritten characters who practically scream “stock!” every time they speak, the likes of Gallagher Jr, Goldwyn and Arjona get to mouth platitudes and banalities at every turn. Spare a thought for McGinley though; his character is so relentlessly one dimensional it’s amazing he doesn’t disappear when he turns to the side. There’s no one to care about – surprise, surprise – and as the movie progresses, the average viewer might feel justified in wanting to get inside the building and culling the employees themselves.

With its stock characters, muddled narrative, and laboured editing courtesy of Julia Wong, The Belko Experiment is unlikely to impress anyone but the most ardent gore fan. They’ll enjoy the numerous exploding heads, and one particularly impressive skull injury, but there’s really little else to recommend a movie that poses lots of questions at the beginning of the experiment, and then forgoes providing any answers. With a coda that attempts an explanation for what’s happened that’s as baffling as it is shallow, as well as shamelessly trying to set up a further movie, the movie should best be viewed as an old-style exploitation flick given a modern polish. However, that would be doing a disservice to old-style exploitation flicks.

Rating: 4/10 – insipid and unconvincing, The Belko Experiment is yet another nail in the coffin of Greg McLean’s directing career; it also acts as further proof that when successful writer/directors have old scripts to hand, they shouldn’t always be made into movies.

A Brief Word About Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017)

25 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Colin Firth, Harry Hart, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Poster, Return, Surprise, Trailer

They couldn’t help themselves, could they? They just couldn’t help themselves.

If by now you’ve seen the first trailer for Kingsman: The Golden Circle you’ll know that Colin Firth’s character, Harry Hart, believed to have been killed in the first movie, Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014), is very much alive, and eyepatch notwithstanding, looking pretty good. Now, it was a fairly safe assumption that this character would be back, and it was an equally safe assumption that they wouldn’t appear in the movie until some way in, making it a surprise for the audience – and a welcome one at that. But thanks to the trailer, that surprise won’t be happening at all now. Instead we’ll all be waiting for that moment some way in when the character reappears for the first time (and which we’ll already have seen). Now it’s true that his resurrection will make fans of the original very happy indeed (who still remembers the shock of it when he was killed off – apparently – with a third of the movie still to go?), but as returns go it’s not exactly earth-shattering.

But it seems that the makers of Kingsman: The Golden Circle have missed out on a golden opportunity. How much better would it have been if the character’s return had been kept quiet? This would have allowed doubt to take root in the audience’s collective mind, and provided a real surprise when he did appear. Instead the trailer gives the game away, and now we’ll no doubt be bombarded with a million and one online theories as to how he survived, and what his role in the movie will be.

And to make matters worse, the makers have gone even further in ruining the surprise. Take a look at the poster, and see who’s name is first in the list of cast members. Maybe they don’t feel it matters, maybe they don’t feel it’s important, but in this day and age when movies are hyped and promoted and positioned as important cultural events (and mostly they’re not), is it too much to ask for a little less transparency when it comes to the movies? Is it too much to ask to be kept in the dark? And is it really too much for moviemakers to do this? On this occasion, apparently so. But is it really necessary? Well, that’s an easy one: no, it’s not.

What do you think? Yes, you, reading this now. Leave a comment below – it’ll only cost you the price of a few neurons.

Unforgettable (2017)

24 Monday Apr 2017

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Denise Di Novi, Drama, Ex-wife, Geoff Stults, Katherine Heigl, Murder, Review, Rosario Dawson, Thriller

D: Denise Di Novi / 100m

Cast: Rosario Dawson, Katherine Heigl, Geoff Stults, Isabella Kai Rice, Cheryl Ladd, Whitney Cummings, Simon Kassianides, Robert Wisdom

Thankfully, it isn’t.

Rating: 4/10 – rescued from a lower rating thanks to Rosario Dawson’s committed performance, Unforgettable is an unfortunate choice of title for a movie that offers nothing new, or compelling, in its tale of a bonkers ex-wife (Heigl) who tries to frame her ex-husband’s new girlfriend (Dawson) for murder; with a script best described as dramatically inert, characters who might as well be cardboard cutouts for all the depth they have, and stolid, workmanlike direction from first-timer Di Novi (better known as a producer), this is a tepid thriller that telegraphs every single plot development from a mile away, and abandons any notion of credibility right from the very start.

Adult Life Skills (2016)

23 Sunday Apr 2017

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Bereavement, Brett Goldstein, Comedy, Drama, Grief, Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Rachel Tunnard, Review, Shed, Twins

D: Rachel Tunnard / 96m

Cast: Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Brett Goldstein, Rachael Deering, Eileen Davies, Ozzy Myers, Alice Lowe, Edward Hogg

Following the death of her twin brother, twenty-nine year old Anna (Whittaker) has moved into the shed at the bottom of her mother’s garden. It’s been eighteen months since he died, but although Anna works at a local outdoor pursuits centre, she doesn’t socialise or spend any of her free time away from the shed. Instead she stays inside it making videos that depict her two thumbs as astronauts in a space capsule. She uses this as a way of maintaining a connection with her brother, as they both made similar videos when they were younger. A lot of the stuff that’s in the shed is items and objects that she and her brother either played with or created. But while Anna is apparently content to remain living there, her mother, Marion (Ashbourne), isn’t as keen. She wants Anna to move out of the shed and start to rebuild her life. With Anna’s thirtieth birthday fast approaching, Marion gives her daughter an ultimatum: Anna has to be out of there before her birthday.

Anna has no intention of agreeing to this, and avoids or ignores all her mother’s attempts to get her to change. At the outdoor pursuits centre, Anna is given the task of monitoring the number of molehills that pop up each night, as well as ridding the site of any graffiti. It’s boring, mundane work, but she doesn’t mind, as it at least takes her mind off her brother. The reappearance of an old friend, Fiona (Deering), after she’s been away for some time, sees Anna begin to get out more (much to her mother’s delight), but she’s still adamant about remaining in the shed. Even the clumsy attentions of Brendan (Goldstein), a local estate agent who’s known Anna since childhood, aren’t enough to get her to rethink her future.

But when an eight year old boy, Clint (Myers), ends up in her family’s care temporarily following the death of his mother, his presence in Anna’s life begins to chip away at the carefully built-up walls she’s erected since her brother’s death. A night out with Fiona doesn’t go as planned, and puts a strain on their friendship, and when Clint goes missing overnight, Anna realises that she can care about someone else. But there’s still the issue of the shed, and the deadline of Anna’s birthday. Will Anna hold on to her need to be there, or will recent events show her a different way forward?

Expanded from the short, Emotional Fusebox (2014) (a lot of which is included or recycled here), Adult Life Skills is writer/director Rachel Tunnard’s feature debut. It’s a terrific little movie that’s emotionally astute and, in places, effortlessly poignant. The central conceit, that Anna feels bereft from everything following her brother’s death, is handled with sympathy and compassion for the character’s feelings, and the sadness that overwhelms her so much is often expressed in beautifully understated fashion by Whittaker. Even after eighteen months (or maybe because of that amount of time), Anna’s retreat from the world can still be regarded as understandable, but there’s still the sense that she’s using her grief as a way of avoiding any potential further heartbreak in her life.

But while Anna’s self-imposed predicament is viewed sympathetically, and the toll of her bereavement is presented with a great deal of care and sincerity, Tunnard is wise enough to know that the travails of a near-thirty something living in a shed isn’t going to be enough for a full-length movie. And so we’re introduced to the people around Anna, the people who care about her. Her mother – played with unrepressed yet entirely credible frustration by Ashbourne – is trying her best to get Anna to move on with her life, and it’s a tribute to the quality of Tunnard’s writing that Marion isn’t just the movie’s token “bad guy” but a parent trying to avoid losing both her children. No matter how acerbic or demanding she may be, she still cares. The same goes for Jean (Davies), Anna’s grandmother. Jean is supportive of Anna’s “lifestye choice”, and recognises that it’s a way for Anna to deal with her grief, that in time she’ll find her way back to everyone and everything. And though she too behaves in an acerbic manner towards Marion, there’s still the same love there as Marion feels for Anna.

The introduction of Clint, a small boy with a big attitude, acts as a catalyst for Anna’s eventual coming to terms with her pain and sadness at no longer officially being a twin. He’s challenging, acts like he doesn’t care, and sports a cowboy hat, gun and holster. He gets Anna to talk about her brother, something it’s clear she hasn’t done since his death, and as she trusts him more and more, you can see the weight lift from her shoulders. Unsurprisingly it’s Myers’ first movie, and though some of his lines don’t have the clarity needed for the viewer to understand them fully, he’s a child with wonderfully expressive features, and for his age, an equally wonderful insouciance about him.

As the emotionally tongue-tied Brendan, Goldstein provides much of the movie’s good-natured comedy (“How… is your… period?”), and Deering offers solid support as Anna’s best friend. Hogg pops up as a snorkeler Anna encounters at odd moments, while Lowe is her no-nonsense, lower-case angry work colleague, Alice. All the cast give good performances, but it’s Whittaker who holds the attention throughout, channelling Anna’s grief, confusion, and anger with an honesty and a warmth that can’t help but make the character likeable and someone to root for.

Aside from the performances, there’s much else to enjoy in Adult Life Skills, from the absurdist conversations Anna comes up with for her thumb videos (and those are Tunnard’s thumbs, not Whittaker’s), to the mangled version of Morning Has Broken courtesy of a recorder-playing barman, and its affecting sense of childhood nostalgia. Tunnard, who originally tried to pass on directing this, proves an adept, instinctive director, and her script isn’t too shoddy either. Unlike a lot of first-time moviemakers, Tunnard gets the pace just right (she is first and foremost an editor), and though she does overdo it on the quirky, shed-based activity that Anna involves herself in, she makes up for it by making Anna’s re-emergence into the outside world truthful and in keeping with the emotional journey the character is embarked upon. There’s fine cinematography courtesy of Bet Rourich, and the West Yorkshire locations provide an attractive backdrop to the action, all of which adds up to a hugely enjoyable movie about grief and loss – no, honestly.

Rating: 8/10 – sweet and sincere, and with the ability to pack an emotional wallop from time to time, Adult Life Skills is a blend of quirky characterisations, even quirkier confrontations and encounters, and sometimes, a potent examination of how grief can paralyse a person beyond their ability to deal with it; with a generosity of heart and spirit that adds further resonance to a movie with bags of sincerity already, this is a movie that doesn’t short change its characters or its cast or its viewers, and is also one of the funniest and most enjoyable British movies of the last five years.

The Transfiguration (2016)

22 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Chloe Levine, Debut, Drama, Eric Ruffin, Horror, Michael O'Shea, Milo, Review, Vampires

D: Michael O’Shea / 97m

Cast: Eric Ruffin, Chloe Levine, Aaron Moten, Carter Redwood

Milo (Ruffin) is a fourteen year old who lives with his older brother, Lewis (Moten), in the apartment they shared with their mother before she died. Milo is a loner, with no friends, no other family, and he’s regularly bullied by some of the children at his school. He is fascinated by vampires, and spends a lot of his spare time watching vampire movies. When we first meet him, Milo is in a bathroom stall drinking the blood of a man he’s just killed.

Milo’s vampiric behaviour is dictated by a monthly schedule that he’s worked out, and he chooses his victims at random. He uses a blade disguised as a pen to stab them in the neck, and it’s from the wound that he drinks their blood. But he’s not always able to keep the blood down, and he has none of the traditional signs that identify a vampire: he can go out during daylight, he doesn’t have fangs, and he still casts a reflection. But in the past he has mistreated and killed small animals, something his school counsellor is aware of. However, Milo reassures her that he doesn’t do that anymore, though unsurprisingly, he stops short at telling her why.

When a girl around his age, Sophie (Levine), moves into Milo’s building, they begin a tentative friendship. In her own way, Sophie is as much a loner as Milo. She has self-esteem issues, is bullied by her grandfather, and like Milo, both her parents are dead (she lives with her grandfather). They watch Milo’s collection of vampire movies together, and spend time getting to know each other. Meanwhile, Milo continues his killing pattern. Away from the apartment and school, Milo falls foul of a local gang led by Andre (Redwood). When he’s stopped in the street by a couple out to score some cocaine, he lures the man into a basement. The man ends up being killed by one of Andre’s gang, and Milo is taken in for questioning by police as a potential witness. He says nothing though, and is released, but in such a way that it makes it look as if he has snitched. Andre promises him that “it’s not over” between them, but Milo’s carefully constructed world is shaken properly when Sophie discovers notebooks Milo has written, notebooks that set out how to hunt people, and the best ways of killing them for their blood…

There’s much to admire in writer/director Michael O’Shea’s debut feature (expanded from his 2014 short, Milo). It’s a strong amalgamation of an indie teen drama and a low-key horror movie, and the melding of those two genres has created a deceptively powerful feature that moves slowly (and yet deliberately), and which brings an uneasy tone to the material. You could argue that the narrative concerns a teenage boy who wants to be a vampire, or conversely, that it concerns a teenage boy who wants to be normal. That’s what makes the movie tick: Milo wants to be a vampire, but once he meets Sophie, he wants to be a normal teenage boy as well. It’s this duality that drives the character of Milo and makes his situation so desperately sad. He has persuaded himself that he is a vampire – of sorts – but equally, he wants to have friends and be a normal child as well. But can he? Is it too late?

In keeping with its downbeat tone, The Transfiguration offers no easy answers, keeping the audience guessing if Milo is a real vampire or not right until the end (though for some viewers the answer will be a little more cut and dried). When it moves and sounds like a horror movie, O’Shea shows great promise, and there are moments where Milo’s behaviour, allied to Ruffin’s ability to provide a thousand-yard stare when needed, creates a chilling, morbid antipathy that suits the material and makes it unexpectedly expressive in terms of examining the inner life of a fourteen year old sociopath. Milo is quite detached from the world around him, only connecting with it if it can add to his obsession with vampires. We see the moment where he changes from being merely interested in vampirism to adopting the mantle of a bloodsucker. It’s a disturbing scene, made all the more disturbing for the way in which O’Shea portrays it as both a sacrificial offering and a rite of passage.

Having Sophie come into Milo’s life allows for some hope to form that Milo can be “saved”, that it’s not too late for him to be a part of the “real” world. As their friendship develops, O’Shea has Milo yearn for a simpler life (albeit one still spent watching vampire movies), and he begins to make an effort in that direction. But his craving for blood, and the secret life he leads proves too much. When he realises he’s missed that month’s date for hunting, Milo takes a bigger risk than he’s ever done before, and his actions show just how overwhelming his obsession has become. Just like the psychopath who needs to kill more and more victims to feel a continued sense of purpose, so Milo learns that he can’t escape the life he’s taken on. And so he does the one thing he can to save himself, and to save Sophie.

Like many first-time directors though, O’Shea is guilty of letting some scenes go on beyond their natural length, and including others that remain superfluous no matter how much they might feel integral to the script. There are also certain stretches where it seems as if the material is waiting for the right moment to move forward, and is hanging around on purpose until it arrives. As a result of this, the movie’s pace is often uncomfortably slow. Fortunately, O’Shea is on firmer ground when it comes to the relationship between Milo and Sophie, and he’s blessed by two impressive performances from Ruffin and Levine. Ruffin’s serious, sincere approach makes Milo all the more believable – and sympathetic – and in his scenes with Levine he displays a maturity that makes his performance all the more credible. Likewise, Levine imbues Sophie with a kind of damaged, yet reluctant vulnerability, as if her being aware of her situation isn’t about to define her if she can help it. In their scenes together, Ruffin and Levine share a chemistry that is completely convincing in terms of their characters finding common ground and coming to depend on each other.

As an ambitious melding of two distinct genres, The Transfiguration is a welcome change from the usual, run-of-the-mill offerings seen these days, and though it’s not entirely successful, its faults can be readily forgiven. O’Shea has made a movie that tells its story with a great deal of attention to detail, and in a robust, satisfying manner. More of a considered indie/arthouse horror than an out-and-out scarefest (and all the better for being so), O’Shea’s debut feature explores themes of alienation, morbid obsession, and emotional dysfunction, and in places, is genuinely unsettling. A surprise hit at Cannes in 2016, this will still only appeal to a certain audience, but if you have the time and the patience, it’s well worth seeking out.

Rating: 8/10 – a carefully constructed urban horror movie, The Transfiguration won’t be to everyone’s taste, but it is a tremendous addition to the small group of vampire movies that actually have something to say about the subject; boasting a superb performance from Ruffin, and a denouement that is both sad and uplifting, this is intelligent, vivid stuff that marks O’Shea as a moviemaker to watch out for in the future.

Going in Style (2017)

21 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, Bank robbery, Comedy, Eviction, Kidney transplant, Matt Dillon, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, Remake, Review, Zach Braff

D: Zach Braff / 96m

Cast: Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, Alan Arkin, Ann-Margret, Matt Dillon, John Ortiz, Peter Serafinowicz, Joey King, Maria Dizzia, Josh Pais, Christopher Lloyd

Three old friends – Willie (Freeman), Joe (Caine), and Albert (Arkin) – have worked for the same steel company for over thirty years. But when the company decides to transfer all of its manufacturing abroad, all three find their jobs are gone and that their pensions are being used to facilitate the overseas set up. For Joe it’s even worse: without his pension he won’t be able to keep up the mortgage repayments on his home, and in a month will be evicted, along with his daughter, Rachel (Dizzia), and granddaughter Brooklyn (King). But Joe has the germ of an idea. Why not rob the bank that’s overseeing the liquidation of the pension funds, take only what they need personally, and give any money left over to charity?

Joe has gotten the idea because he was there when the bank was robbed only a few days before. Three masked bank robbers got away with over a million dollars, and the police, led by FBI Agent Hamer (Dillon), haven’t got any leads at all. Figuring that if the bank robbers can do it, then they can do it, Joe voices his idea to his friends. Willie, who desperately needs a kidney transplant, agrees to it more readily than Albert, who takes some convincing, but soon all three are on board. They put their stealing skills to the test at a local store, but are easily caught. This embarrassing failure at least tells them they need “professional” help. Through Joe’s ne’er-do-well ex-son-in-law, Murphy (Serafinowicz), they’re put in touch with a criminal-cum-pet store owner named Jesus (Ortiz). He agrees to help them, and soon they’re putting a plan into action that involves robbing the bank using their lodge’s carnival day as cover. But during the robbery, Willie’s identity is compromised, and though they get away with enough money to help clear their debts, FBI Agent Hamer is hot on their trail…

Another month, another remake, another reason to wonder if Hollywood has any idea why certain movies work and the majority of their remakes don’t. On paper, Going in Style has a lot going for it. It has a top-notch cast, its director has a brash, indie sensibility that could add an edge to proceedings, it has a screenplay from the co-writer/director of Hidden Figures (2016), and is a reworking of a movie that many regard with fondness even if it didn’t exactly set the box office alight. In short, and in baseball parlance, it should have been a home run. However, what we do have is a movie that settles for being bland and innocuous, and which wants its audience to have a fairly okay time with it, and not really an uproarious one. It keeps its ambitions quiet, plays things squarely by the book, and not once attempts anything that might upset the status quo. It’s as close to moviemaking by committee as you’re likely to get.

The script, by Theodore Melfi, trades on various forms of humour, but adopts a lightweight, unassuming tone that ensures the trio’s attempts to steal from their local store – this is how bright they are! – is the movie’s comedy highpoint. After that, the bank robbery itself is an exercise in gentle whimsy, with Willie ending up reassuring a little girl and potentially putting the trio in danger of being apprehended later. There are chuckles to be had, and plenty to smile good-naturedly about, but nothing else to make the viewer laugh out loud. For a comedy, Going in Style is a pretty good heist caper, but even then it refuses to do anything to make events feel fresh or remarkable. If you want belly laughs, or a long succession of jokes and one-liners, then this isn’t the movie you’re looking for.

With the movie suffering from more than just a hint of creative ennui, it plods through its various plot contrivances and unconvincing character development with all the energy of a narcolepsy sufferer on their fifth nap of the day. Counting heavily on its cast to signpost the laughs (and then act accordingly), the movie skips lightly from one scene to another, and rarely stops long enough to add any appreciable depth or additional layers to its bare bones storyline. Thankfully, the movie’s cast have been around for a while, and know how to elevate thin material, though there are still moments that defeat them (e.g. anytime Caine has to play doting grandfather to King’s annoyingly chirpy granddaughter). Arkin is the movie’s lucky charm though, making the grumpy, defeatist Albert its MVP, and making the viewer wish he had more screen time.

Overseeing it all is actor turned director Braff, making his third feature and showing a limited amount of enthusiasm for a project that he hasn’t written himself. Perhaps the characters just aren’t quirky enough, or have enough issues to be dealing with, for Braff to be interested, but there are long stretches where his indie style of moviemaking is absent, and is replaced by a director-for-hire vibe that fits in well with the movie’s corporate, take-no-risks attitude. Maybe it was the chance to work with such a great cast that persuaded him, but judged on the final result, this won’t add much lustre to Braff’s burgeoning career as a director (unless he’s offered similar projects).

But when all is said and done, and despite the movie being as ludicrous as you’d expect, it’s entirely necessary for movies like Going in Style to be seen on our screens. While they may offer stress-free paydays for their casts and crews, and while they may also offer an amount of generic material that could only be beaten by a low-budget horror movie, movies such as this one are the cinematic equivalent of comfort food. You know what to expect, and watching the movie will be an easy, minor pleasure, one you may even want to repeat at some point. Its lightweight, undemanding nature will attract viewers just as its cast will, and anyone looking for an hour and a half where they can kick back and leave their brain behind, will find this a pleasing experience that won’t tax them in the slightest.

For its target demographic (and it’s safe to assume it’s fans of the cast rather than fans of the original), Going in Style will be warmly received and, in all likelihood, it’ll gain more fans through word of mouth. Over time, some movies gain a reputation that they didn’t have when the movie was first released. This may be one of them, even though it’s too early to tell. What is certain is that right now, it’s a movie that lacks enough imagination to make it stand out from all the other remakes out there, and while it has heart and a degree of charm that’s entirely down to the efforts of its leading men, it’s not quite memorable enough to woo audiences in the long term.

Rating: 5/10 – good-natured and sweet it may be, but these are attributes that could have benefitted from being “roughed up” a little bit, and in doing so, made Going in Style more appealing; as it is, the movie moves along at a steady (though not quite geriatric) pace and manages to tick all the boxes on the path of least resistance to its eventual, and entirely predictable, denouement.

Christine (2016)

20 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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1974, Antonio Campos, Biography, Christine Chubbuck, Drama, Michael C. Hall, Rebecca Hall, Review, Sarasota, Tracy Letts, True story, TV News, WXLT

D: Antonio Campos / 119m

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Michael C. Hall, Tracy Letts, Maria Dizzia, J. Smith-Cameron, Timothy Simons, Kim Shaw, John Cullum

In the Spring of 1974, Christine Chubbuck (Hall) was a twenty-nine year old news reporter working for Channel WXLT in Sarasota, Florida. She was single, she lived with her mother, Peg (Smith-Cameron), and she had been given her own talk show on WXLT called Suncoast Digest, in which she would focus on local people and community activities. But Christine also suffered from depression, and could be up one moment and down the next (nowadays she would likely be diagnosed as having bi-polar disorder). Her depression could lead to extreme mood swings, and she would often push people away even though the few friendships she had were very important to her. And she regularly complained that the news stories she, and the station, were covering weren’t interesting enough, and that the station should focus more on regular people’s lives and what those lives were really like.

This kept her at odds with news director Mike Simmons (Letts), and the two would have regular run-ins as Christine tried to emphasise the various ways she felt the station wasn’t living up to its potential. Simmons wanted “juicier” stories about murder and other crimes; Christine felt the station should focus more on local people and the drama inherent in their lives. Simmons didn’t. Also at this time, the owner of WXLT, Bob Anderson (Cullum), was looking for two of the news team to transfer to Baltimore to a new station he’d recently purchased. Lead anchor George Peter Ryan (Hall) was a likely candidate, but Christine felt that she could be the other person Anderson was looking for.

Christine’s determination to be that other person led her to make some questionable decisions in relation to her work, and she came close to alienating Simmons for good. When she discovered that she wouldn’t be going to Baltimore (even after speaking directly to Anderson), Christine’s depression seemed to be under control. Her mood swings disappeared, she was more agreeable to her fellow co-workers, and she apologised to Simmons. She also asked to helm a Suncoast Digest piece direct to camera, something she’d never done before. Simmons agreed, and on the morning of 15 July 1974, Christine became a news story herself…

In telling the last few months in the life of Christine Chubbuck, Antonio Campos and screenwriter Craig Shilowich have fashioned the kind of Seventies-based journalistic enquiry that wouldn’t look out of place when compared to similar movies made at the time. With its drab Seventies decor and often drabber costume design (brown was definitely the colour back then), Christine pays homage to an era when news reporting in the US was heavily community-based – parochial even – and sensationalism was just beginning to take hold (when one of Christine’s reports is bumped in favour of a murder outside their area, she’s informed it’s because it’s what the viewers want to see). The movie eloquently and confidently recreates the period (in all its dreary glory), and provides a perfect backdrop for its tale of a real-life news reporter who could never understand why her work wasn’t as well-regarded as she expected.

Christine’s issues at work were exacerbated by her mental health issues, and the movie spends a lot of time reinforcing the idea that she was unwell. There are references to a previous “episode” that occurred before she and her mother moved to Sarasota; Christine herself acknowledges at times her own inability to connect with the people around her (she seems more confident with strangers, something that’s noted but not examined too closely); and her continual on-again, off-again reactions to her colleagues speak effectively of someone struggling to make sense of her place in the harried world of news journalism.

That Christine Chubbuck suffered from a variety of mental health issues is clear from Shilowich’s sympathetic and engrossing screenplay, and Hall gives a bravura performance, imbuing the troubled newswoman’s lack of social skills, and her off-kilter idea of professional balance with a scary, aggressive approach that initially makes her a hard character to like. But with the knowledge that she is ill, the movie is able to provide a sympathetic hook for the audience to hold on to, even when Christine is being manipulative and horrible to her mother, berating Simmons for treating her badly, or when she mistreats her best friend and colleague, Jean (Dizzia).Through all this and more, Hall never loses sight of the woman who is trapped behind the cold veneer of mental illness, and whose sense of self-worth is only as strong as the approbation she receives from the people around her (and which she then refutes). It’s an often distressing performance, and one that’s tempered by a refusal to soften the blow of certain scenes and images (it also makes you wonder how on earth Meryl Streep could have received an Oscar nomination for Florence Foster Jenkins when Hall’s portrayal is on another level entirely).

Other aspects of Christine’s personality, character and history are explored, such as the work she did with children with intellectual disabilities, adopting a puppet show approach to teaching them life skills. The movie uses these shows to explore the depth of Christine’s own feelings about various topics, and they retain an added poignancy thanks to the knowledge that though Christine is passing on sound advice, the viewer is aware that it’s advice she herself won’t be able to follow. In a scene where Ryan takes her to a trancendental analysis meeting, Christine expresses all the things that are wrong with her life, including the lack of a partner and/or children. This is the crux of the matter: she doesn’t want to be alone anymore. She’s fast approaching thirty, is to all intents and purposes alone in her life, can’t see a way forward, and decides on a course of action that will deal with everything that contributes to her being depressed.

Anyone aware of Christine Chubbuck and what she did that baleful July morning in 1974, will already know the movie’s outcome, but what’s remarkable about the period before that day, and the way that both Shilowich and Campos treat it, is that it’s not until the last ten or twelve minutes that Christine’s fate is sealed. There are a couple of foreshadowings that viewers who are “in the dark” may well pick up on, but as well as its self-destructive mental health theme, this is the story of a woman fighting for recognition in an industry that was inherently sexist, and which was on the verge of becoming less conventional and more exploitative. This subplot is given enough screen time that it adds to the sense of Christine being beleaguered from all sides, and her efforts to break free and get to Baltimore all the more understandable. But it’s also Christine’s last chance to salvage something from her time at WXLT, and it’s only then that her “solution” presents itself. With both her personal and professional lives coming to a standstill, her decision has an inevitability about it that the movie has avoided delving into up until then.

Throughout, Campos’ direction is solid, sympathetic and invigorating. He wisely keeps the focus on Hall, while giving the likes of Letts and Michael C. Hall plenty of room to flesh out their characters and make them as credible as they can (in reality, neither Ryan nor Simmons had as much involvement in Christine’s life as they do here, and sometimes it shows). The hustle and bustle of the newsroom is downplayed in favour of effective character beats, while Joe Anderson’s muted yet moody cinematography is a perfect match for the emotional troubles Christine experiences. There’s a whole lot of heart and craft here, and as an examination of one person’s bitter disappointment with the hand Life has dealt her, it’s also painfully affecting.

Rating: 8/10 – with a mesmerising and compelling performance from Hall (a career best in fact), and a wealth of sincerity and compassion when it comes to its central character, Christine is a remarkable movie let down only by its lack of back story, and some repetition in Christine’s dealings with Simmons; absorbing and vivid, and with a sly streak of humour running throughout, it’s also a movie that refuses to pass judgment on her, and which does its best to honour her memory without sensationalising it, something she would most likely have approved of.

Little Boxes (2016)

19 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Armani Jackson, Comedy, Drama, Interracial family, Melanie Lynskey, Nelsan Ellis, Racism, Relationships, Review, Rob Meyer, Rome

D: Rob Meyer / 89m

Cast: Melanie Lynskey, Nelsan Ellis, Armani Jackson, Oona Laurence, Miranda McKeon, Christine Taylor, Janeane Garofalo, Nadia Dajani, Veanne Cox, Maliq Johnson

Gina McNulty (Lynskey) and Marcus “Mac” Burns (Ellis) are an interracial couple with a young, pre-teen son, Clark (Jackson). Gina is a photographer, while Mac is trying to come up with an idea for his second novel, his first having been published to moderate acclaim. They live in Brooklyn, have a nice, comfortable middle-class lifestyle, a great social life, and lots of friends with similar backgrounds and life experiences. In short, they’re comfortable. But their lives are about to change when Gina accepts a teaching job at a university in Rome, Washington State. Travelling across the country by road, they arrive at their new home to find the removals truck isn’t there (and won’t be for a while), and that they’ll have to make do until it does. A set of inflatable mattresses and a camping stove later, and they’ve officially moved in.

Rome proves to be a predominantly white town, with virtually no other ethnic groups represented there. This reveals itself slowly to the trio, and in different ways. Gina is accepted immediately by some of the female, tenured professors. Mac goes for long walks listening to free-form jazz on his MP3 player and encounters several of the locals who seem overly pleased that he’s moved there. Clark begins spending time with two girls near his own age, Ambrosia (Laurence) and Julie (McKeon). Gina’s acceptance is based on her being artistic and a woman. Mac’s acceptance is based on his being black, and when the local bookseller finds out, a published author. Clark is popular with Ambrosia and Julie because he’s ostensibly black and doesn’t mind being treated like a show-and-tell friend.

But at the same time, their acceptance by the townsfolk of Rome leads to divisions within the family. While Gina goes off to the university, and Clark spends more and more time with his “girlfriends”, Mac stays at home and works on an article for an online food blog. They spend less and less time together. As they adapt to their new surroundings, further cracks begin to appear in what used to be their comfortable lifestyle. Arguments and disagreements ensue, and Clark, determined to live up to Ambrosia and Julie’s expectations of him, begins acting like a surly teenager. When things go a little too far between him and Ambrosia, Gina and Mac begin to feel a sense of isolation, and it’s not long before they’re wondering if moving to Rome was such a good idea in the first place.

Diversity and equality seem to be cinematic buzzwords at the moment. The number of movies addressing issues surrounding racism and racial inclusion/exclusion seems to have increased exponentially in the wake of the OscarsSoWhite controversy in 2016. That most of these movies were in production before last year’s Oscar ceremony seems to point also to some kind of cinematic zeitgeist finally making itself felt. But one thing’s for sure: you won’t find a more low-key, or subtle, examination of middle class racism than in Little Boxes.

It’s a movie that takes reverse (or positive) discrimination and makes it feel just as insidious as direct discrimination. Mac is out walking when one of his neighbours asks if he needs any help. The inference is clear: it’s a white neighbourhood, and Mac shouldn’t be there. But the neighbour quickly realises that Mac should be there, and from then on it’s all okay, and Mac is treated like an old friend. The turnaround is sharply made and hard to dismiss as anything other than tokenism. Mac is initially bemused by this sort of thing, but as time goes on, he begins to like it, even though deep down he also despises it. Meanwhile, Clark is learning that fitting in can mean a loss of identity, but as long as Ambrosia and Julie spend time with him and include him in what they’re doing (mostly dance routines and lounging by the pool), then he seems happy to be the person they think he is: a cool black kid that only they are friends with.

It could be argued that, along with its glacial, racial undertones, Little Boxes is also about maintaining oneself in the context of a new environment. Mac struggles because he lacks a defined purpose. His writing appears stalled, and he’s more concerned about the mould he discovers in the house than anything else. And he’s easily led astray by his neighbour, knocking back uppers and ending up in a bar. For Gina, the path towards fitting in is paved with good intentions and liquid lunches with her colleagues. She does her best to fit in but finds it causes too many problems, problems that she discovers she’s ill-equipped to deal with. Clark’s growing rebelliousness adds to the lack of unity and faith in each other that all three had previously in Brooklyn, and it soon becomes obvious that this is a family that may have made a really bad decision in transporting themselves so far out of their combined comfort zones.

But while the movie examines these themes with candour and no small amount of intelligence thanks to Annie J. Howell’s perceptive script, it doesn’t make the family’s disintegration too believable. Just why their close-knit harmony and commitment to each other should fall apart so easily is never explained, and without this, the movie falls into the trap of presenting the trials and tribulations of a moderately well-to-do middle class family in an indie setting, and expecting the audience to feel sorry for them. Sadly, this doesn’t happen, and not just because these are characters who have attained a certain level of privilege in their lives, but because the trials and tribulations that they face operate on the level of minor farce. There’s nothing here that the average family couldn’t overcome or deal with as soon as it arose. Yes, it’s another movie where the characters say a lot, but aren’t actually talking to each other.

Thankfully, most of this is offset by the quality of the performances. Lynskey is a pleasure to watch – as always – and portrays Gina’s growing insecurities and bafflement with her usual sincerity. Ellis is on equally fine form, ensuring Mac is equally unsure of himself and his current role in life, and displaying Mac’s wounded pride when things he knows he can do, don’t go so well. Jackson, meanwhile, has that knack that most child actors have of not even appearing to be acting, so good is he as Clark, and he acquits himself so well it appears almost effortless. In the director’s seat, Meyer does a fine job on the whole, but can’t find a way to keep the audience sympathetic to the family and their woes (mostly because they’re self-inflicted). It’s not a movie that has a particularly distinctive visual style, and the narrative stops and starts a little too often, but it does have enough substance to keep viewers occupied, even if, in the end, they’ll find it hard to be concerned by what’s happening.

Rating: 6/10 – several nods to small-town inverse racist attitudes and the fragility of the nuclear family can’t save Little Boxes (a metaphorical title if ever there was one) from failing to connect with the viewer; good performances and a waspish sense of humour go some way to making up for the areas where the movie struggles to provide depth or resonance, but most viewers will find themselves disappointed by so much effort yielding a much smaller return than expected.

Asperger’s Are Us (2016)

18 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alex Lehmann, Asperger's, Autism, Comedy, Documentary, Ethan Finlan, Final performance, Jack Hanke, Massachusetts, New Michael Ingemi, Noah Britton, Trains

D: Alex Lehmann / 84m

With: Noah Britton, Ethan Finlan, Jack Hanke, New Michael Ingemi

In 2010, at a summer camp for children with autism in Massachusetts, graduates New Michael Ingemi, Jack Hanke and Ethan Finlan met camp counsellor Noah Britton (himself an autism sufferer). Finding that they all shared the same sense of humour, they decided to form the world’s first comedy troupe made up entirely of people with Asperger’s Syndrome. They called the troupe, Asperger’s Are Us, began putting together original comedy sketches, and eventually, doing gigs. Their aim was to use performances and interviews to promote autism-rights activism and the more positive aspects of Asperger’s Syndrome. They also wanted audiences to view them as just comedians instead of “people who’ve overcome adversity”.

Four years on, Asperger’s Are Us played their final performance due to Jack heading off to England on a scholarship to an Oxford university. In the weeks leading up to the show, they struggled to find all-new material to use, and also had problems finding the time to rehearse. During this period they were never sure where their venue was going to be, whether or not they should rely on old material mixed with new, or if any of it was going to work. Their main idea, Superhero Palace, was disliked from the start by New Michael, and there were fears that if it became part of the show, then New Michael wouldn’t take part in it. Eventually, all the potential hurdles were overcome, and the show took place.

The best thing about Asperger’s Are Us the movie rather than Asperger’s Are Us the comedy troupe is that it doesn’t have an agenda, or at least, not a social or political one. The members of the group aren’t poster boys for autism, they’re not out to score points for “overcoming adversity”, and nor are they advocates for any kind of “special treatment” for people with autism. Even though some of these things do creep into their performances, they’re not there deliberately. And the quartet do their best to be funny – and that’s all. By using a mixture of visual tomfoolery, clever wordplay, and pop culture references, Asperger’s Are Us have earned the right to be thought of first and foremost as comedians, and as people with autism second.

But no matter how much the troupe, or director/cinematographer/editor Alex Lehmann, tries to downplay their various social anxieties, intimacy issues (Jack’s dad bemoans the fact that when he shows affection to his son there’s no reaction), and emotional detachments, it’s obvious from their behaviour – either individually or as a group – that their autistic nature is a very big part of who they are, and also how they’re able to do what they do. There’s a point where Noah states that they don’t put on their shows for other people, they put them on because they want to do it, they’re performing material that makes them laugh even if no one else is, and if an audience “gets” what they’re trying to do and say, then that’s a bonus. In a very real sense, if they weren’t autistic, they wouldn’t be doing what they’ve been doing.

It’s an angle that the movie engages with from time to time, but never pins down in terms of how the four friends feel about their act, or each other. The relationship between Noah and New Michael gets quite a bit of screen time, and in many ways, it’s this that drives the narrative forward, as they disagree and argue like brothers, while Jack and Ethan look on from the sidelines. In a very telling scene, New Michael equates the foursome to The Beatles, and says that, for people looking in from the outside, Noah is the group’s John Lennon, and he is Paul McCartney. If you’re not paying close attention it sounds as if New Michael (he changed his name from Aaron when he was eighteen) is claiming kinship with McCartney, while making Noah sound as if he isn’t completely worthy of all the praise the troupe has been getting (Noah initiates much of the group’s material, and from that you can understand what New Michael is saying). Pay much closer attention though, and you’ll realise that New Michael is pulling the audience’s combined legs very subtly indeed. There’s a nuance in use here that is at odds with people’s (often limited) awareness of autism, and as such it’s very telling.

But as Lehmann has followed the group in the two months prior to their final performance, there’s plenty of footage of the group rehearsing, travelling from place to place within Massachusetts (trains are very important to them, especially Ethan), and except for Noah, with their families. It’s in these moments that the wider issue of dealing with autism is put into sharp relief. While New Michael has little to say about, or do with his father (“Old Michael”), Jack’s relationship with his parents is stable, but we never learn much about Ethan and his background. Noah has no one, but seems to prefer it that way, and though New Michael does introduce a female friend, she’s soon relegated to the background. It’s only when the four are together that we see them interact in a “normal” way, joking around, sharing ideas and thoughts (and the occasional dream), and behaving like brothers from different mothers. And when New Michael reacts badly to everyone being in his home for a rehearsal meeting, Noah’s indifference to how he feels is uncomfortable to watch, and yet refreshingly at odds with how New Michael would be treated by his family or others. For Noah, out of line is out of line, whether you’ve got Asperger’s or not.

Moments like these are enlightening to say the least, and there are many more that are poignant as well, but Lehmann’s skill as an editor means that they don’t overwhelm the disjointed yet cleverly assembled narrative. As the final show draws nearer and nearer, we see the sketches and the performances slowly take shape, and we see the group’s pride in what they’ve achieved. And their material is very, very funny indeed (the Presidential press conference is a highlight, especially if you’ve been paying attention to all the train references). And away from the stage they’re funny, with Noah wearing T-shirts with slogans on them such as “Ask me about my fear of strangers”, and Ethan hoodwinking Lehmann by dishing the dirt on his friends before confessing it’s all a joke. These are four guys who, despite their autism (or maybe because of it), are all talented comedians.

The movie as a whole is remarkably well-assembled, with personal contributions from each member of the group and where applicable, their families. The family dynamic surrounding New Michael is explored in some depth, and it’s here that the poignancy comes in, as Old Michael confesses that his work ethic in the past has caused the distance between him and New Michael to be so pronounced. Neither father nor son seems to know how to repair things, and their relationship remains a terse affair that only benefits them for brief moments at a time. Lehmann captures a terrible sense of sad inevitability in these moments, and the awkwardness between the two is heartbreaking. You can’t help but hope for the best for them both, and that New Michael will eventually overcome his feelings of not being good enough for his father. Whether or not that happens only time will tell, but for now, like the futures of all the troupe, everything looks very promising indeed.

Rating: 8/10 – a moving examination of four people with autism who have no time for pity, and whose collective sense of humour is disarmingly sharp, Asperger’s Are Us is a terrific documentary and a wonderful tribute to the group as a whole; whatever your thoughts on, or experience of, autism, this movie does what all good documentaries should do: it informs and educates and entertains (where possible) all at the same time.

Life (2017)

17 Monday Apr 2017

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Calvin, Daniel Espinosa, Drama, International Space Station, Jake Gyllenhaal, Mars, Rebecca Ferguson, Review, Ryan Reynolds, Sci-fi, Thriller

D: Daniel Espinosa / 104m

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada, Ariyon Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya

It’s a good day on the International Space Station (ISS). A probe that has been collecting soil samples from the Mars surface is on its way back and is about to be intercepted by the team on board the ISS. The hope is that the soil samples will contain evidence of extraterrestrial life. The team – medical officer Dr David Jordan (Gyllenhaal), quarantine officer Dr Miranda North (Ferguson), systems engineer Rory “Roy” Adams (Reynolds), ISS pilot Sho Murakami (Sanada), biologist Hugh Derry (Bakare), and ISS commander Ekaterina Golovkina (Dihovichnaya) – are all excited at the prospect. They’re further excited when they discover a dormant cell in amongst the samples. Derry manages to revive it, and it’s not long before it grows into a multi-celled organism. Back on Earth, the news is received with even greater excitement, and the organism is given the name Calvin.

However, Calvin enters another period of dormancy. Derry elects to use a low-level electric shock to help re-stimulate it, but this approach has an unexpected result: Calvin attaches itself to Derry’s hand and begins to crush it. Derry manages to free himself, and while Calvin devours a lab rat, Adams rushes in to the quarantine area to rescue him. Derry gets out but Adams isn’t so lucky: Calvin attaches itself to his leg, leaving Jordan no option but to keep them both locked inside the quarantine area. Adams does his best to kill Calvin but the creature escapes into the vents. As it continues to grow it causes further problems for the crew, leading them to realise that it’s far more intelligent than they could ever have expected.

With their communication with Earth cut off, and an attempt to send Calvin into deep space failing, the ISS enters a decaying orbit, one that will see it burn up on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere. Certain that Calvin would survive such an event, the crew have to come up with a plan that will see Calvin stopped from reaching Earth’s surface, while also ensuring their own safety, but further events dictate that this won’t be as easy as they’d hoped, and soon time is running out for everyone – both on the ISS and on Earth…

The first thing that anyone will tell you about Life is that it’s so obviously an Alien (1979) rip-off (and that’s supposed to make it a bad thing). And while it does share certain elements with that movie, it’s also a little unfair to damn the whole movie with such faint praise. With Ridley Scott poaching his own genre classic in Prometheus (2012), and no doubt the upcoming Alien: Covenant (2017) as well, accusing Life of being a rip-off isn’t exactly fair criticism. And if imitation really is the sincerest form of flattery, then Life has taken a pretty good template from which to tell its story. What screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have done is taken the bare bones of the Alien premise, and from that they’ve created an intense, thrill-ride of a movie that – if it has a real problem – only falls short when it focuses on the characters.

One aspect where the movie doesn’t emulate Alien is in the speed with which it puts the ISS crew in danger. There’s no leisurely build-up, no time to get to know anyone, and as a result, no one to care about. The characters express themselves solely through their roles on board the ISS, and when they do stop to express any philosophical or moral implications to the situation they’ve found themselves in, it all feels trite and under-developed. It’s all a bit Screenwriting 101: give the characters an inner life for the audience to connect with. But these interludes only serve to stall the movie and stop it from what it does best, which is ramp up the tension, exert as much pressure on the crew as possible, and reduce the odds of anyone surviving the longer the movie progresses.

To this end, director Daniel Espinosa and his editors, Mary Jo Markey and Frances Parker, have fashioned a series of encounters and showdowns between Calvin and the ISS crew that equate to good old-fashioned, edge-of-your-seat sequences designed to have audiences holding their breath as they wait to see what’s going to happen next. Life is like a rollercoaster ride, but an often grim, horrific rollercoaster ride, one that doesn’t let up (except for those pesky dialogue scenes), and which isn’t afraid to be nasty when it wants to be. Like the Nostromo before it, the ISS is a claustrophobic, up-is-down environment where Calvin could strike at any time. Espinosa lets the camera – operated with his usual aplomb by Seamus McGarvey – roam the corridors and remote areas of the ISS with an eerie stealth, emulating Calvin’s point of view or just setting up a scare that may or may not happen (you’ll never be too sure).

With the majority of the movie given over to these sequences, Life holds the attention and plays out its simple storyline with a great deal of confidence and a gripping visual style to it. The cast, however, are hampered by the script’s need for their characters to be introspective from time to time – too often, actually – and when they’re not debating whether Calvin should be feared or admired or both, they’re action figures floating around the ISS trying to survive. Gyllenhaal has a back-story that involves wanting to be completely alone, and which gives you a clue as to the eventual resolution, but it doesn’t resonate enough to feel important, just contrived. Ferguson is the tough decision-maker who won’t feel pity or remorse for killing another living creature, even if it is just trying to survive on its own terms, while Reynolds adds yet another semi-anarchic risk-taker to his resumé, a role he does well but which he could probably do in his sleep by now. Sanada and Bakare have their moments, and both actors are well-cast in their roles, bringing a much-needed sincerity to characters who could have been entirely forgettable. Which is almost the sad fate of Dihovichnaya, except that her encounter with Calvin is one of the movie’s more impressive set ups.

Fans of serious science fiction will find lots to annoy them, and though there are many occasions where disbelief is suspended too easily for the movie’s own good, Life isn’t going to be regarded as a modern classic like its genre forbear, but in terms of what it sets out to do – that is, entertain an audience – it succeeds for the most part, and its cheesy, forehead-slapping conclusion aside, is a lot more effective than most people will give it credit for. This isn’t a movie that will change your life, nor will it prompt anyone to become an astronaut and work on the ISS, but it is a solid piece of sci-fi entertainment, and in Calvin it has an alien life form that is one of the most well-conceived creatures ever seen on our screens; and it’s eerily beautiful too.

Rating: 7/10 – boasting superb production design and a vivid sense of impending doom, Life isn’t entirely successful, but it does more than enough to justify its existence (Alien clone or not); a popcorn movie for anyone seeking an undemanding hour and three quarters to kill, it’s unashamedly populist moviemaking and none the worse for being so.

Trailers – Detroit (2017), The Hitman’s Bodyguard (2017) and Atomic Blonde (2017)

16 Sunday Apr 2017

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12th Street riot, Action, Charlize Theron, Comedy, Drama, James McAvoy, Kathryn Bigelow, Previews, Ryan Reynolds, Samuel L. Jackson, Trailers, True story

It’s been five years since the directing/writing team of Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal brought us Zero Dark Thirty – and it’s about time they had something new for us. Thankfully, the trailer for Detroit looks as if they’re not going to let us down. A stinging, emotive, and visceral look at the 12th Street riot that occurred in July 1967 following events that took place at the Algiers Motel, the movie has already come under fire for not including any black women in its main cast. It’s a little early to tell if this is a deliberate piece of revisionism, but what is clear from the glimpses of violence seen in the trailer is that Bigelow has captured the atmosphere and the grim inevitability of a situation that quickly spiralled out of control and left three men dead, and nine others brutally injured. Bigelow has also assembled a great cast, including John Boyega as a security guard who gets caught up in the riot, Jack Reynor, John Krasinski, Anthony Mackie, and in what could be the role that catapults him to well-deserved stardom, Will Poulter as one of the three cops who ended up on trial for murder. One of the must-see movies of 2017, Detroit has all the potential to be an impassioned and excoriating feature that will leave audiences stunned and impressed in equal measure when it’s released in August.

Samuel L. Jackson is the hitman. Ryan Reynolds is the bodyguard. Gary Oldman is the dictator both men team up to defeat. The tone of the movie? Well, you only have to see the poster for The Hitman’s Bodyguard to work that one out: a parody of The Bodyguard (1992) with Reynolds subbing for Kevin Costner, and Jackson for Whitney Houston. The trailer drives the idea home with what is obviously a deliberate lack of subtlety, and though Tom O’Connor’s screenplay was included in the 2011 Black List of unproduced scripts, this looks likely to be an action comedy that is big on action set-pieces, but short on actual laughs (though Reynolds’ comment that Jackson’s character has ruined the word “motherfucker” has an ironic touch to it that bodes well). However it turns out, and the trailer’s mix of shouty humour, action beats and Roadrunner/Wile E. Coyote-style stuntwork doesn’t seem to say “instant classic”, this could still be the kind of dumb “Saturday-night-with-beers-and-a-pizza” movie that gains a loyal fanbase, and becomes a bona fide guilty pleasure in years to come.

After the success of John Wick (2014), it was perhaps inevitable that there would be a distaff version of that movie (literally) hitting our screens. And so we have Atomic Blonde, an adaptation of Antony Johnston’s graphic novel The Coldest City (the movie’s original title), and starring Charlize Theron as an MI6 agent tasked with retrieving a list of double agents being smuggled into the West prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The John Wick connection is cemented by David Leitch being in the director’s chair, and the trailer showcases a scene that has Theron taking out a roomful of assailants in much the same style as Wick. Whether there will be too many similarities between the two movies remains to be seen, and if there are it may hurt Atomic Blonde‘s chances with the critics, but if its sense of humour is as acerbic as its action sequences are full-on kinetic, then the movie has a chance of connecting with a wider, more appreciative audience. The presence of Sofia Boutella as a French operative Theron’s character “makes contact with”, plus James McAvoy as her operational ally in Berlin, and John Goodman as a less than friendly CIA agent, adds lustre to the movie, and the trailer can’t help but give potential audiences the impression that this may well turn out to be a very, very fun ride indeed.

Rules Don’t Apply (2016)

15 Saturday Apr 2017

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Alden Ehrenreich, Comedy, Drama, Howard Hughes, Lily Collins, Matthew Broderick, Review, Romance, Screen test, Warren Beatty

D: Warren Beatty / 127m

Cast: Warren Beatty, Lily Collins, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Broderick, Annette Bening, Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, Haley Bennett, Megan Hilty, Paul Schneider, Alec Baldwin, Oliver Platt, Taissa Farmiga, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Paul Sorvino, Dabney Coleman, Steve Coogan

Not counting the TV short, Dick Tracy Special (2010), this is Warren Beatty’s first time behind the camera since Bulworth (1998). That movie was a pithy, satirical look at (then) modern US politics, but eighteen years on, Beatty’s skill as a director isn’t on quite such good form. Rules Don’t Apply focuses on Howard Hughes’ life between 1958 and 1964, and adds a fictional romance to bolster the main storyline (which the movie can’t decide on). It’s not a bad movie per se, just one that isn’t sure which one of three stories it wants to focus on.

The first story concerns Frank Forbes (Ehrenreich), who has just started for Hughes as a driver. He has a fianceé back home, Sarah (Farmiga), and a dream to build affordable housing at an undeveloped location just outside Los Angeles. Working for Hughes, though, is somewhat limiting, and for the most part he acts as a chauffeur for some of the actresses Hughes has under contract. The second story concerns one of those actresses, the fresh from Virginia, Marla Mabrey (Collins). Accompanied by her mother, Lucy (Bening), Marla is excited to meet the great Howard Hughes, and screen test for a movie called Sally Starlight. But as time goes on, she doesn’t get to meet him, and the screen test seems increasingly unlikely to happen. But she and Frank hit it off, and soon there’s the beginning of a romance. Her mother, however, returns home, leaving Marla to navigate the treacherous waters of reachable fame – and with Frank’s help.

The third story has Hughes showing signs of the strange behaviour that will eventually see his ownership of Trans-World Airlines (TWA) challenged by the US government. He refuses to see people, makes appointments that he doesn’t keep, and generally acts as if the concerns of other people are irrelevant. But eventually he and Marla meet, and he meets Frank also. Hughes takes a shine to Marla, and he begins to trust Frank, and it seems their careers are set. But their relationship takes an unexpected turn, and they grow estranged from each other. Meanwhile, Hughes becomes more and more withdrawn from the world, and begins to show clear signs of dementia, demanding things like all the available quantity of a certain flavour of ice cream (and then wanting another), and repeating himself over and over. What seemed eccentric only a few years before, now seems detrimental to both his health and his wealth. Frank stands by him, now as a personal assistant, while Marla moves away to start her life over…

On paper, Rules Don’t Apply has all the hallmarks of a very good movie indeed. It has Beatty in the role of Howard Hughes (a project he’s been planning for around forty years), a supporting cast who all do a terrific job, a recreation of the period that includes broad vistas of cities such as Los Angeles and London as they were at the time, individual scenes that carry both emotional weight and poignancy, and provides a somewhat caustic examination of wished-for fame and fortune. But the movie also has difficulty in making Hughes, or indeed any of the characters, sympathetic, and it flits between each of the storylines without always allowing them to flourish or become integral to the overall narrative.

The romance between Marla and Frank starts typically for the period with lots of exchanged glances and oblique references to the relevance of sex before marriage (Frank has, Marla hasn’t). It’s an old-fashioned courtship, made slightly more awkward by Hughes’ insistence that if any of his employees take any kind of interest in his actresses, then they’ll be fired. However, although this is mentioned on several occasions (as if the audience won’t get it the first time), in the end it makes no difference, as Hughes has no idea about them, and the few people who do know – fellow driver, Levar (Broderick), Hughes’ personal secretary, Nadine (Bergen) – don’t say anything anyway. There’s plenty of unnecessary repetition in terms of Hughes not seeing people, or making strange decisions, and it all pads out the movie, making it feel unfocused and willfully disjointed.

In the end, it’s Beatty’s script, and some of it is really, really good, but some scenes could have been excised and it wouldn’t have made any difference to the overall story. It would have made it a lot tighter, though, and kept the audience more involved. As the romance between Marla and Frank begins to crumble, and Hughes’ dispute with potential investors in TWA takes centre stage, the movie attempts to show Hughes both in decline and also more self-aware than people believed at the time. (Beatty’s script avoids the uncomfortable fact that at this period in his life, Hughes had already taken to spending long periods of time alone and naked watching movies in places such as a bungalow at the Beverly Hills hotel.) Beatty’s intention seems to be to idolise the man while at the same time admitting that he was flawed, a circumstance that causes the movie to seem undecided in terms of what audiences should make of him.

This all leaves the movie feeling and sounding less dramatic than it should be, with only the occasional confrontation jolting things out of the cosy, straightforward approach that Beatty adopts as director. Inert in certain stretches, and lacking depth in others, the movie is rescued from being completely disappointing thanks to its cast. As the billionaire who marries in order to avoid being committed to an insane asylum, Beatty steals every scene he’s in because he still has that old-time star charisma. There’s a good-natured, yet inherently pathological bent to his performance, and Hughes’ unpredictable nature, complete with vacant stares, bemused glances and paranoid outbursts, is explored with the kind of range and subtlety – in both diction and movement – that makes Beatty still such a good actor. Unfortunately, both Marla and Frank, being original characters created for the movie, don’t feel as well-rounded, and their romance is tepid, and not entirely believable, as Collins and Ehrenreich – very good individually – don’t have the chemistry necessary to make audiences believe in them as a couple.

Elsewhere, Broderick and Bening are superb, there are lots of blink-and-you’ll-miss-them appearances from the likes of Sorvino, Harris and Coleman, and a very funny cameo from Coogan as a British pilot forced to sit back and watch Hughes deliberately cause the engines to fail while up in the sky for a joyride. There are other humorous moments in the movie, many in fact, and most of them are in service to the characters, but as they’re mixed in with the drama and the romance and aren’t always played out at the best moments, some viewers may find that the comedy is forced rather than organic. Ultimately, and despite the best efforts of Beatty as writer and director, the various elements on display don’t gel to good enough effect, and this makes the movie less compelling and (often) too bland. A more immediate approach, and a more historically accurate one, may have made for a better movie – we’ll never know – but what is certain is that Beatty’s passion project, after forty years, isn’t as passionate an experience as he may have hoped it would be.

Rating: 5/10 – slow and repetitive aren’t the best of bedfellows when it comes to creating a drama about one of the most intriguing and distinctive billionaires of the twentieth century, and Rules Don’t Apply suffers accordingly; Beatty the actor is terrific, but is let down by Beatty the writer and director, and although the first half hour is briliantly executed, the rest of the movie falls short of that initial promise and settles instead for the kind of soap opera theatrics that never ring true, no matter how hard everyone tries.

The Warriors Gate (2016)

13 Thursday Apr 2017

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Action, Ancient China, Black Knight, Dave Bautista, Drama, Fantasy, Mark Chao, Martial arts, Matthias Hoene, Ni Ni, Princess, Time travel, Uriah Shelton

D: Matthias Hoene / 107m

Cast: Uriah Shelton, Mark Chao, Ni Ni, Dave Bautista, Sienna Guillory, Francis Chun-Yu Ng, Zha Ka, Dakota Daulby, Luke Mac Davis

Jack Bronson (Shelton) is a teenager whose online gaming avatar, the Black Knight, is a complete badass, winning fantasy encounter after fantasy encounter. Away from his computer, however, he’s not quite so powerful or dominating. His life has its fair share of problems: his mother, Annie (Guillory), is a realtor who hasn’t sold a property in months (which means money is fast becoming an issue), and at school he’s being bullied by an older teen called Travis (Daulby). Jack does have a job, at least, even if it doesn’t pay an awful lot, but his boss likes him, enough to give Jack a gift: a large wooden, ornamental box. Jack takes it home and keeps it in his room. That first night, Jack wakes to find a sword at his throat, and an ancient Chinese warrior (Chao) asking if he’s the Black Knight. Even though he’s clearly not the fierce warrior the stranger is looking for, Jack is still given a task: to protect the Princess Su Lin (Ni) from harm.

The Princess is left in Jack’s care – but not before her bodyguard disappears back to their world via the box. The Princess is used to getting her own way, and it’s not long before she has Jack take her to the local mall so that she can learn how to blend in. But it’s also not long before mercenaries from the Princess’s world come for her, and despite Jack’s best efforts (which aren’t that great anyway), she’s taken back to her world. Jack follows, and finds himself in the company of the bodyguard, whose name is Zhoo. Soon, Jack learns that the Princess is the target of a murderous warlord called Arun the Cruel (Bautista). Arun plans to wed Su Lin, and once they’re married, kill her and assume the role of Emperor. Zhoo’s mission is to rescue her and kill the warlord. With the occasional aid of a wizard (Ng), and Jack himself, Zhoo sets off for the Imperial Palace.

Along the way they encounter danger in the form of three tree nymphs with a taste for human flesh, a number of Arun’s men, and having to cross a large lake despite Zhoo being unable to swim. Once at the Imperial Palace, their attempt to rescue the Princess is stalled, and they find themselves imprisoned. It’s only when a butterfly appears at their cell window that Zhoo is certain that his plan (which he’s making up as he goes along) will actually work.

If nothing else, The Warriors Gate proves that with great publicity comes greater accusations of racism. Zhang Yimou’s bloated melodrama The Great Wall (2016) came in for heaps of criticism for having an Occidental hero coming to China’s rescue when faced with hordes of rampaging dragons. Here, Matthias Hoene’s tiresome fantasy swaps Matt Damon’s Irish mercenary for Uriah Shelton’s whiny teenager as a Chinese dynasty comes under threat from a surly warlord who’s massively into face painting. And yet The Warriors Gate is just as guilty of cultural whitewashing as its more expensively mounted compatriot. More so, perhaps. How galling must it be for Chinese audiences to see their heritage, their culture, and their fierce warrior history ignored in favour of making the hero a – let’s say it again – whiny teenager.

Bad as this approach is, The Warriors Gate has far more things wrong with it than there are good. A pale imitation of the far more entertaining The Forbidden Kingdom (2008), Hoene’s follow-up to the low-concept, low return Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) sees him take a script by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen (who really should have known better) and turn it into a bland, functional, and entirely unremarkable teen fantasy movie that feels like it was made in the Nineties and has only recently secured a big screen release. With its bizarre set up, fortune cookie philosophising, bland time travel theatrics, agonising moments of teen humour, bullying subplot, cultural indifference to Chinese history, off-putting tonal shifts (sometimes in the same scene), and forgettable characters, the movie struggles hard to work on any level… and then struggles some more.

It’s a movie that steals from other, better movies too, and in doing so, only serves to highlight just how derivative and unoriginal it all is. Jack’s lack of self-confidence is such a staple of teen heroes and heroines these days that it’s a wonder any of them get out of bed in the first place. Naturally he has a skill that will enable him to defeat the bad guy, but the script can’t decide if it’s inside him all along or is something that he’ll need to learn. In the end, the movie settles for Jack being shown one single, semi-meditative pose and it’s all he needs to be the warrior Zhoo has been looking for. Inside of him all along, or a simple technique easily learned – either way Jack steps up and never looks back. And of course, everyone says they always believed in him (and yet Zhoo doubts him repeatedly).

There’s also the small issue of the reason Jack follows the kidnapped Princess into her world: he’s horny, has never been kissed, and fancies Su Lin like mad. (His hormones made him do it!) Even when he’s fully aware of what’s at stake if Arun’s plan succeeds, Jack is still thinking with his ‘nads, and though it’s unreasonable to assume he’s trying to help for more noble reasons, the movie keeps him firmly in place as a teenager with only one thing on his mind: getting the girl. With this level of ambition, it’s no wonder Jack is a character who screams “superficial!” when compared with his Chinese assistants – sorry, enablers. Unsurprisingly, Su Lin is attracted to Jack, but their romance has all the emotional clout of a Hallmark movie of the week.

The script sabotages itself too often for comfort. Arun the Cruel is revealed to be a pretty fair despot on the whole, and possessed of a sly line in humour. Bautista gets the tone right fortunately, but can’t do anything with the silly-sounding dialogue he’s lumbered with. As the Princess, Ni is allowed to be haughty for all of five minutes before falling for Jack’s, err, charms, while Chao has the dour straight man role and as a result, sometimes fades into the background. Ng is clearly enjoying his turn as a comedy wizard, while Guillory gets the thankless role of worried mother. The cast as a whole are hampered by having to deal with perfunctory characterisations and finding themselves unsupported by Hoene and the script. The fight sequences have a certain panache, but when the final showdown between hero and villain takes place, it’s too little too late (and no one ever explains why the Princess is hanging by her wrists the whole time).

Rating: 4/10 – sloppy writing and an uninspired vibe make The Warriors Gate (yes, there’s no apostrophe) a disappointing entry in the teen fantasy stakes; acceptable only if you don’t care enough to be insulted, the movie can best be summed up by stealing a paraphrased line from the New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott: it sets a very low bar for itself, and then trips over it repeatedly.

The Fate of the Furious (2017)

12 Wednesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Charlize Theron, Cuba, Drama, Dwayne Johnson, F. Gary Gray, Jason Statham, Kurt Russell, Michelle Rodriguez, Review, Sequel, Thriller, Vin Diesel

aka Fast & Furious 8

D: F. Gary Gray / 136m

Cast: Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Michelle Rodriguez, Charlize Theron, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Nathalie Emmanuel, Scott Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Elsa Pataky, Helen Mirren, Kristofer Hivju

And so we come to episode eight in the ongoing Fast and Furious franchise, the series that just keeps on giving and giving… and giving and giving and giving and giving. This is a movie, one of several that we’ll see this year, that will do incredibly well at the international box office, and which will be hugely successful no matter what critics or bloggers or anyone and their auntie says about it. It’s a movie that exists in its own little cinematic bubble, oblivious to movie making trends, advances or developments. If you live in the UK, it’s the equivalent of those Ronseal adverts that state, “It does what it says on the tin”. And if you don’t live in the UK, then try this comparison: it’s like going to McDonalds and ordering a Big Mac, fries and a Coke. You know exactly what you’re getting, and it doesn’t matter if you’ve had that particular combo more times than you can remember, that’s also kind of the point. Here, familiarity breeds expectation, and the makers of the Fast and Furious movies know exactly how to satisfy that expectation.

All the familiar elements are here: exotic locations (Iceland, Cuba, New York?), Diesel being taciturn and glowering a lot (he even shouts a few times, which is new), Johnson looking like a poster boy for steroid abuse, Rodriguez glowering a lot like Diesel, Gibson acting unconscionably stupid, Bridges giving nerds a fairly good name for once, over-the-top action sequences that regularly and deliberately challenge the laws of physics, and cars, lots of shiny, sleek, expensive cars. Relative series newbies Russell, Emmanuel and Statham slot in neatly amidst the rest of the cast, while complete newbies Eastwood (good guy) and Theron (bad guy) add little and a lot respectively. Throw in some old faces from previous entries, and a storyline that’s been built on the back of the last two outings, and you have another patchy, under-developed crowd-pleaser that does enough to keep its audience interested while at the same time giving said audience very very very little that’s new. And it’s the opener for a closing trilogy of movies that will see the franchise come to an end in April 2021.

If there’s anything interesting about the movie, it’s the way in which it harkens back to earlier entries, and tries to incorporate the look and feel of those earlier movies. The opening sequence, set in Cuba, is a throwback to the approach and feel of the first and third movies, with its street-level, underground racing vibe, and beautiful hangers-on to some of the ugliest drivers ever seen on screen. There’s a car up for grabs, a sneering minor villain who thinks he can outwit Dominic Toretto (foolish man!), and some very impressive stunt driving. But it’s a measure of how far the series has come in terms of its tone and style, that this sequence – which starts off well – soon descends into the kind of ridiculous, credibility-free, and excessive action set-piece that the series has become known for. Seeing Toretto winning the race in a stripped-down junker, in reverse, and with the engine on fire no less, serves as an acknowledgement that while the series wants to honour its more scaled-back origins, it’s grown too big and excessive to be able to.

Much has been made of this movie’s main storyline – Toretto betrays his “family” – but as a plot device it’s one of the weaker ideas in the series, and all because we know that there’s no way it’s “for real”. As expected, there’s a reason for his “betrayal”, and while it’s played out with as much sincerity as returning scribe Chris Morgan can instil in his by-the-numbers screenplay, it shows a complete disregard for the character of Letty (Rodriguez) and the trials she’s endured since “dying” in part four (and especially in relation to a scene between Letty and Toretto early on in Cuba). Worse still, the whole thing leads to a scene involving Statham’s returning nemesis Deckard Shaw, and the complete reversal of his character from murderous psychopath to genial funster. It’s as if the makers have seen his performance in Spy (2015) and thought to themselves, how can we exploit this?

Character assassination apart, the movie follows the tried and tested formula of the previous three movies, and never deviates from its cookie-cutter approach. It’s no secret that the franchise thinks up its action sequences first and fits a story and plot around them later, but this time the obvious nature of such a design is even more noticeable than before. An attack on a Russian minister on the streets of New York occurs at the halfway mark, and includes the appropriation by über-villain Cipher (Theron) of any car in the area that has an on-board computer system. Why she has to activate all of them makes no sense, but it does lead to mass collisions and vehicles falling from multi-storey car parks and no end of unconvincing CGI. Far better? The scenes predceeding this where Toretto has to escape Cipher’s surveillance in order to put his own plans into action. Short, simple, and so much more effective.

One thing The Fate of the Furious does get right – finally – is its choice of villain. Stepping out of the shadows no one knew she inhabited, Cipher is played with chilling conviction by Theron, and if as seems likely, she’s going to be the villain for the last two movies as well, then her involvement could be the best thing about them – as it is here. With Statham’s character now reformed, the movie needed someone to be a real villain, and Theron comes through in spades. She’s icy, mad, and bad to the core. Theron shares most of her scenes with Diesel, and every time it’s a no contest: she acts him off the plane Cipher uses, and off the screen as well (which is a shame, as away from all his franchise movies, Pitch Black (2000) excepted, he can be a very good actor indeed).

But what about those action sequences? And what about that submarine smashing through the ice? And all those explosions? Everything we’ve seen in the various trailers? Well, they’re all as slickly produced and homogeneously exciting as those in previous entries, and they’re fine examples of modern day action heroics, but even so they remain curiously thrill-free. A prison riot does Statham and Johnson no favours thanks to having been shot in a jerky, shaky style that makes focusing on the various punches and kicks both actors dish out quite difficult to follow. It’s a sequence that could have benefitted from having a few more bone-crunching sound effects thrown in as well. The submarine sequence is reminiscent of the ending to Furious 6 (2013) (justly famous for its neverending runway), but is surprisingly restrained for all that, while the movie’s biggest explosion – naturally saved for last – also gives rise to the movie’s most ridiculous and risible moment.

But none of this matters. Not Helen Mirren’s awful Cockney accent, not Hivju’s distracting resemblance to a young James Cosmo, not even the sight of Johnson manhandling a torpedo as it races across the ice. The Fate of the Furious can do what it likes and audiences will lap it up regardless. Does this make it a bad movie? On the whole, yes, it does. But for all that, is it entertaining? Weirdly, yes, but in a subdued, stopgap kind of fashion, as if this entry in the series was a bridge between previous episodes and the ones to come, ones that will (hopefully) up the series’ game considerably. After eight movies the franchise has reached a kind of tipping point: the final two outings need to be much stronger and more focused on what they’re trying to do. The series hasn’t quite run out of mileage yet, but it’s running perilously close, and if the makers aren’t careful, the remaining movies will most likely be running on fumes.

Rating: 5/10 – fans will lap this up, but The Fate of the Furious, with its tangled ideas about family and betrayal, doesn’t add up to much, and relies too heavily on its action sequences to prop up its awkward script; the cast have to make do with the same character beats they’ve been given in previous movies, and franchise first-timer Gray isn’t allowed to do anything different with the formula, making this a movie generated and made by committee, and as a result, lacking a distinct identity to make it stand out from the rest of the series.

Mini-Review: Sleepless (2017)

11 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Baran bo Odar, Corruption, Crime, Dermot Mulroney, Drama, Drugs, Internal Affairs, Jamie Foxx, Las Vegas, Michelle Monaghan, Review, Scoot McNairy, Thriller

D: Baran bo Odar / 95m

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Michelle Monaghan, Dermot Mulroney, Scoot McNairy, David Harbour, Tip ‘T.I.’ Harris, Gabrielle Union, Octavius J. Johnson, Tim Connolly

Vincent Downs (Foxx) is a crooked Las Vegas cop. Sean Cass (Harris) is his equally crooked partner. Together they steal twenty-five bundles of cocaine (though why they do this is a little fuzzy). Their use of department issue weapons gains the attention of Internal Affairs officer, Jennifer Bryant (Monaghan), who immediately suspects Downs of the theft. Convinced by her own intuition that he’s dirty, she brings her suspicions to her partner, Doug Dennison (Harbour), but he’s not convinced. Meanwhile, Downs – who has an ex-wife, Dena (Union) and teenage son Thomas (Johnson) – is trying to maintain a semblance of post-divorce family life when Thomas is abducted by local casino-cum-crime boss Stanley Rubino (Mulroney). The reason for this? Simple: the cocaine is his and he wants it back, or Thomas will pay for Downs’ actions.

Downs takes the cocaine to Rubino’s casino, but in one of those plot “twists” that never make sense, he hides twenty-three of the bundles in the casino, gives Rubino the other two and bargains for his son’s life, stating that he’ll hand over the rest when he knows his son is safe. Rubino agrees, but when Downs tries to retrieve the rest of the cocaine from its hiding place, he discovers that Bryant (who has been following him) has taken it, and in a move that would have her investigated by Internal Affairs as well, has hidden it elsewhere in the casino. But there’s a further wrinkle: the cocaine is owed to gangster Bobby Novak (McNairy), and he’s there to collect…

Nuit blanche. That’s the title of the French/Belgian/Luxembourgian co-production, released in 2011 that, in its English language guise, has become Sleepless. If it matters to you, Nuit blanche (aka Sleepless Night) has a score of 75 on Metacritic, while Sleepless has a score of 33. Which version would you rather see? (Don’t worry, it’s a rhetorical question.) Inevitably, Sleepless – a title that makes no sense without the word “night” attached to it – is professionally made, glamorous to look at, has Foxx and Monaghan working really hard to overcome the preposterousness of Andrea Berloff’s urgent-but-empty screenplay, and never once makes you care about Downs or his son’s predicament. It tries to, on several occasions, but thanks to a combination of Berloff’s writing and director Odar’s reliance on style over substance, it has a shallow, seen-it-all-before vibe that harms the movie more than it helps it, and which stops it from letting the audience in on the – sadly – warmed over intrigue.

Remakes of foreign language movies often suffer in comparison because there are more things that can be lost in translation than just the dialogue. Tone, the original movie’s rhythm, its location, its visual aesthetic, any subtexts – all these and more can be either abandoned or discarded in the process of “re-imagining” a movie for audiences who speak another language (though surely that’s what subtitles are for?). There may be an element of “we can do better” about these remakes, and though that certainly isn’t the case with Sleepless (and despite any intentions its makers may have had), this is still a bad idea that lets down audiences at every turn. Even its fight scenes, which see Foxx get pummelled regularly but to minimal effect even though he has a stab wound to deal with, don’t elicit enough reaction to be successful in themselves. And if an action thriller can’t get those scenes right…

Rating: 4/10 – lacklustre, and padded out with way too many establishing shots of Las Vegas itself (we know where we are, for Foxx’ sake), Sleepless is a run-of-the-mill effort that tries hard but doesn’t know how to deliver; an over-complicated script proves too much for the cast to deal with, and despite its relatively compact running time, you’ll be wishing for a quicker resolution than is actually on offer.

Hey Everyone, It’s Mike Mendez! – The Last Heist (2016) and Don’t Kill It (2016)

10 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Bank robbery, Comedy, Demon Hunter, Dolph Lundgren, Drama, Henry Rollins, Horror, Kristina Klebe, Mike Mendez, Review, Thriller, Torrance Coombs, Windows Killer

2013 saw the relatively unheralded release of a low-budget creature feature called Big Ass Spider! It was silly but it was also huge fun, and it was obvious that the makers had a fondness for the material that kept things from being too silly, or derivative of other similar movies. Then in 2015, SyFy brought us the latest in their ongoing series of movies designed to make audiences want to pluck out their own eyes, or take psychotropic drugs, in an effort to forget what they’ve just seen. That movie was Lavalantula, a Sharknado-style offering that accentuated the comedy while still providing a fair few thrills along the way.

Both these movies were directed and edited by Mike Mendez, and if you’ve followed his career since his debut at Sundance, Killers (1996), then you’ll already know that even if he’s got the most risible of material to work with, somehow he still manages to elevate it beyond its limited expectations. He’s a director who’s able to take the most unlikeliest of projects and put a massive spin on them. This doesn’t make them into out-and-out classics, but it does make these movies far more bearable to watch than they have any right to be. So if you like low-budget features that are low on concept and even lower on potential, but are still enjoyable for a reason you can’t quite put your finger on, chances are it’s a Mike Mendez movie you’re watching.

The Last Heist (2016) / D: Mike Mendez / 84m

Cast: Henry Rollins, Torrance Coombs, Victoria Pratt, Michael Aaron Milligan, Mark Kelly, Kristina Klebe, John J. York, Mykel Shannon Jenkins, Camilla Jackson, Nick Principe, Ken Lyle, Courtney Compton, Fay DeWitt, John O’Brien

What are the odds? You’re the leader of a group of heavily-armed bank robbers intent on stealing something very valuable from the vault of a decommissioned bank, and you discover that one of the civilians in the building – and the very one who isn’t a hostage – is a serial killer who is equally intent on killing everyone and taking their eyes as trophies. How does something like that happen? Why does it happen? Because this is the main idea behind The Last Heist, a movie that mixes horror, crime and action all together in a hodgepodge of a script that seriously doesn’t know how to actually mix them all together in the first place. Give thanks to writer Guy Stevenson for managing to be so diligent in messing things up from the start.

But then give thanks to Mike Mendez for taking Stevenson’s messy script and injecting it with some much needed energy and directorial awareness. What he does that is so remarkable, is that he doesn’t try to fix the things that can’t be fixed. Take for example, the bank’s location. To get to it, you have to enter a security code that opens a gate, then walk through what looks like a loading area into a small square where the bank itself is located. But this doesn’t look like a bank; instead it looks like an old rundown supermarket that’s recently closed. There’s a sign above the door that is never clearly seen – probably because it doesn’t have the word bank in it. And inside the bank it’s no better. It looks equally rundown, and there are corridors in back and floors above that seem to go on for ever. Seriously, the vault feels like it’s miles away. But Mendez isn’t interested in trying to make things look correct. He’s got his sets and he uses them to his best advantage, but he’s not focused on them. He’s got other things to worry about.

Mainly, that’s the cast. Mendez wisely concentrates on the performances, and in particular on often small moments within the action that offer a surprising amount of depth, depth that was unlikely to have been in Stevenson’s script originally. Rollins, naturally, is the serial killer, who does what he does because God has told him to. When he claims his first victim inside the bank, the unfortunate Tracey (Klebe), he does so with a calmness of manner that is eerily unnerving. As she bleeds out, he recites a monologue about the darkness within everyone, and his gentle tone and sympathetic ministrations are at odds with the grisly nature of his trophy collecting. Both actors are good here, and the scene is unexpectedly moving as Tracey fights against dying until she doesn’t have any strength left to do so. There are other moments like these dotted throughout the movie, as Mendez lets the characters reveal different sides of themselves, and though not everyone benefits from this kind of attention, there’s enough introspection between the action beats to offer a different perspective on things.

That said though, Mendez is lumbered with a number of clumsy plot developments that either muddy the waters or seem out of place, especially one very late reveal that feels like it was tacked on during shooting. Elsewhere, and once the body count inside the bank mounts up, Rollins is allowed to do his thing with impunity, while outside, first cop on the scene, Detective Pascal (Pratt), has to contend with a couple of comedy cops who want to go in guns blazing, and who act like they’re both six year olds who should be on Ritalin. Mendez is very good at strengthening the humour in his movies, and there are examples of very dark comedy scattered about in The Last Heist, but on this occasion the cops’ juvenile behaviour is another problem he chooses to ignore. It’s frustrating when things like that happen, but overall the rest of the movie, despite its failings, still feels like it’s a better movie than it is, and Mendez makes it so through sheer determination and no small amount of directorial wizardry.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie where individual scenes often carry more weight than the movie as a whole, the script for The Last Heist takes huge liberties with logic and credibility (as this kind of movie often does), but is saved by having Mendez in the director’s chair; with better-than-average performances, and a sure-footed sense of its own failings, Mendez elevates the material through his commitment to the project and a never-say-awful approach that helps immensely.

Don’t Kill It (2016) / D: Mike Mendez / 84m

Cast: Dolph Lundgren, Kristina Klebe, Tony Bentley, James Chalke, Miles Doleac

If you go down to the woods today… you’ll be possessed by a demon who leap frogs from person to person every time his host body is killed. This is what happens to a hapless hunter and his dog, and soon the small town of Chicory Creek (yes, really) is overrun by murders of whole families. But, wait. Help is at hand in the form of Jebediah Woodley (yes, really) (Lundgren), a demon hunter who knows exactly what the town is up against and who offers his services to the town sheriff (Bentley) and hometown girl-turned-FBI agent, Evelyn Pierce (Klebe). Of course, he’s taken for an interfering nutcase and promptly locked up, but when the sheriff and Evelyn see for themselves what the demon can do, their disbelief evaporates in seconds and they’re soon asking what can be done. Jebediah’s answer? Capture the demon while it’s in a human host, have someone willing to take fast-acting poison, and then get that person to kill the demon’s host body. The demon goes into the person who’s on the brink of dying, and its spirit is released, making it easy to capture and imprison.

Simple, huh? Well, in a year where we were advised not to breathe, think twice or look twice, or even hang up, not killing a murderous, psychopathic demon seems like a less than reasonable request, and naturally it proves more difficult than even Jebediah expects. Hampered by his own experiences, Jebediah is the kind of certain-minded hero who rarely gets it right until Lady Luck smiles on him and a solution to the problem of the demon is arrived at. Until that happens, the script has him carry around a large, heavy-looking net gun in the hopes of capturing the demon, while he gets to know Agent Pierce. The script here is slightly more polished than the one for The Last Heist – it doesn’t try to be more than what it is, for starters – but it still has no time for logic or credibility (it’s a middling supernatural version of The Hidden (1987), for Dolph’s sake), and it sprints from scene to scene with all the unsightly haste of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Here, Mendez concentrates on the murders and making them as horrific as he can; and on the humour. Shotgun blasts and meat cleaver blows are shown with both clinical detachment and a surreal complicity made on the viewer’s behalf that leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. Mendez doesn’t shy away from showing the horror of these moments, and though the movie sheds “real” victims as it goes, those early scenes carry a surprising amount of intensity. He’s also able to draw out the comic absurdity of the situation, such as when the town pastor (Chalke) is exhorting Jebediah to leave his church. The pastor flings holy water at Jebediah from a small vial, but the amount that keeps coming out is way too much for the vial to hold. And when the pastor abjures Jebediah with the words, “The power of Christ compels you!”, our trusty hero replies, “I’m pretty sure that’s from The Exorcist“.

There are other moments where the humour rescues the drama, and stops the movie from being laudable merely for the impressive splatter effects, courtesy of special effects wizard Robert Kurtzman and his team. This time around, Mendez doesn’t concentrate as much on the performances, but instead he focuses on the pace and the rhythm of the movie, and in keeping the tone just this side of entirely ridiculous (even though it is). The result is a standard-narrative horror movie that belies its low-budget origins and bland location work to provide a more diverting and enjoyable Dolph Lundgren movie than most of us are used to. Lundgren himself is wryly amusing, and Klebe makes for a good foil for the aging action hero, but full marks must go to Tony Bentley, as the sheriff who leaves a major crime scene because he’s too scared and is never seen again. That’s a scene that shows Mendez’s skills as a director, and which is only marred by Klebe’s dialogue, which makes her sound desperate instead of authoritative. Again, Mendez overcomes several hurdles in his quest to make a better movie out of Don’t Kill It than it deserves, and he does so with style. He may not have the biggest budgets, or the casts he deserves, but Mendez is still able to overcome those problems thanks to his usual commitment and enthusiasm.

Rating: 4/10 – once again, Mendez’s involvement in a movie project means that it doesn’t turn out to be as bad as it could have done, and Don’t Kill It works far better than it has any right to; on the whole, still a bad movie, but flecked throughout with Mendez’s trademark attention to detail in one or two areas (and always to the movie’s benefit), and the occasional nod and a wink that says, “We know it’s bad, but hey, it could have been so much worse.”

Yoga Hosers (2016) – Or, Whatever Happened to Kevin Smith

09 Sunday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Bratzis, Canada, Comedy, Eh-2-Zed, Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp, Justin Long, Kevin Smith, Lily-Rose Depp, Nazis, Review, True North trilogy, Yoga

D: Kevin Smith / 88m

Cast: Lily-Rose Depp, Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp, Austin Butler, Tyler Posey, Justin Long, Tony Hale, Natasha Lyonne, Adam Brody, Jennifer Schwalbach Smith, Genesis Rodriguez, Vanessa Paradis, Haley Joel Osment, Ralph Garman, Jason Mewes, Kevin Smith

Twenty-three years ago, a young, bearded denizen of New Jersey made his first movie, the very low-budget indie comedy, Clerks. It was an overnight sensation: acutely funny within the milieu it created, and introducing audiences to two unforgettable characters in the stoner forms of Jay and Silent Bob. The young movie maker who maxed out around a dozen credit cards and sold off a large portion of his comic book collection to make his first movie was, of course, Kevin Smith. He followed it up with Mallrats (1995), a TV pilot, Hiatus (1996), Chasing Amy (1997), Dogma (1999), an unreleased Prince documentary, and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001), a string of projects that cemented Smith’s reputation, increased his fanbase, and garnered a fair amount of critical approval.

But somewhere around the time of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Smith’s energies seemed to wane. Both Jersey Girl (2004) and Clerks II (2006) felt as if Smith was treading water, while Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008), despite the kind of premise that Smith could have had a lot of fun with, proved to be even more underwhelming than his previous two movies. He followed Zack and Miri… with the dreadful Cop Out (2010), a director-for-hire gig that made audiences and critics wonder why the King of Static Camerawork would be asked to make an action comedy. Red State (2011) came next, and while it was well-received by critics, and looked on as a return to form, it’s still a movie that only needs to be watched once. Smith took a break, and didn’t return to our screens until 2014, with Tusk. That particular movie, a Kafka-esque body horror comedy, was even more of a return to form (and despite an unnecessary cameo from Johnny Depp). Now, Smith has chosen to follow Tusk with Yoga Hosers, a movie for kids, and the second in the True North trilogy (Moose Jaws will complete the series).

For all that Smith has been making strides in regaining the kind of critical and audience mass that went with his work in the Nineties, Yoga Hosers remains Smith’s worst movie to date, a sprawling, endlessly disappointing concoction that lies flat on the screen like the title character in The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) (and without that character’s internal life to help it). By taking two minor characters from Tusk – the store clerks who didn’t even have names – and spinning a whole movie around them, Smith has managed to do three things all at the same time: one, write his lamest script yet; two, bring back Depp’s eye-swivelling private detective Guy Lapointe to no greater effect than before; and three, prove that nepotism is alive and well when it comes to making movies.

This time, the two store clerks are given names – Colleen Collette (Depp) and Colleen McKenzie (Smith) – and are portrayed as vacuous fifteen year olds who can’t live without their phones for more than five seconds, who disparage everyone and everything around them, and who seem destined to be the lead characters in Clerks III (should Smith ever write it). Working at the store owned by Colleen C’s dad (Hale), the pair spend much of their worktime rehearsing songs with their only other bandmate, drummer Ichabod (Brody) (cue a string of “inspired” jokes such as “Dickabod” that will give you an idea of the level Smith is aiming for). One night, one of their customers is murdered in a nearby park (though why in a park is a mystery the movie doesn’t have an answer for). The killer? Ah, there’s the rub (as Shakespeare would put it), because the killer is a six-inch tall Nazi bratwurst – or Bratzi.

Inevitably, there’s a back story, a tale of Nazis in Canada, and the legacy of Aryan supremo Andronicus Arcane (Garman). There’s cryogenesis, an arrested experiment that gives rise to the Bratzis, and a Bratzi-filled creature that’s made out of body parts and is technically inanimate, but which can still be kicked between the legs as a means of hindering it. And in an extended scene that matches Lapointe’s lone scene in Tusk for abject pointlessness, Garman gets to monologue by doing impressions of actors such as Al Pacino (‘hoo-ah!”) and Sylvester Stallone. So clever is Smith’s script, he has the Colleens unable to recognise any of Arcane’s impressions, thus reinforcing the notion (already made several times) that they don’t know about anyone or anything that hasn’t happened within their lifetime, or who isn’t their friend on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. (When Smith includes social commentary like that, it’s a shame he doesn’t realise how much it’s been done before.)

But being clever, and putting together a script that gels in all the right ways, is something that Smith seems unable to do anymore. Along with the Bratzis, the Colleens have to endure Collette C’s irritating stepmom (Lyonne) (quite lame), two teen Satanists (Butler, Posey) out to claim their virgin souls (very lame), and the snarky comments of their customers (not lame, just boring). What’s most dispiriting about the script is that Smith no longer seems to have that distinctive ear for dialogue that he had back in the days of the Quick Stop. Here, it’s all about providing the Colleens with the kind of empty-headed dialogue that confirms their latent idiocy, while poking fun at the Canadian accent, particularly the way they say words like about, which sounds like ah-boot, as in “I’m sorry ah-boot that”. Stress the word once and it’s mildly funny; stress it a hundred times and it becomes tedious.

Ultimately, the whole thing looks and sounds like a mess that’s been made off the back of a draft script that Smith couldn’t be bothered to tidy up or give a proper shape to. The performances range from grating (Depp as Lapointe, Rodriguez as the Colleens Phys Ed teacher), to one-note (Depp as Lapointe, Lyonne, Hale, Posey, Garman), to passable (Depp as Colleen C, Smith as Colleen M, Long as their yoga teacher), but it’s hard to stand out when the script you’re working from is determined to be as juvenile as possible while also trying to hold onto a semi-adult sensibility (this is only a movie for kids if those kids are fourteen to seventeen in age). Smith just doesn’t seem to have the focus or the fire that would make this movie even partially entertaining, and long stretches of it pass by without making any difference to the plot, any of the storylines, or any of the characters. And the Colleens remain the same at the end as they were at the beginning.

Whatever’s going on with Smith at the moment, one thing is very clear: like Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999), Smith needs to get his mojo back. How he’s going to do that – or if he can – remains to be seen, but right now he’s fast becoming a member of that singular group of movie makers, the ones who are fast out of the gate with their first movie, but who struggle to maintain the initial quality of their work. Directors such as Tobe Hooper and Spike Lee, movie makers for whom the news of a new project is no longer cause for the kind of interest they garnered earlier in their career. Smith is at that point, where his career may be better suited to podcasting and one-man shows than it is to making movies. Time, perhaps, for a rethink going forward, before his career is littered with more bad movies than good.

Rating: 3/10 – if this is what Kevin Smith is happy to see released with his name attached, then Yoga Hosers is a sign that any ideas relating to originality he may have had have long since left the building; he’s already proven that low budget doesn’t have to mean low quality, but this has all the hallmarks of a movie made cheaply and with the idea of making a quick return before anyone realises just how awful it is.

True Memoirs of an International Assassin (2016)

08 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Andy Garcia, Assassination, Comedy, Drama, Jeff Wadlow, Kevin James, Kim Coates, Review, Revolution, The Ghost, Venezuela, Zulay Henao

D: Jeff Wadlow / 98m

Cast: Kevin James, Andy Garcia, Kim Coates, Zulay Henao, Maurice Compte, Andrew Howard, Yul Vazquez, Leonard Earl Howze, Rob Riggle, P.J. Byrne, Kelen Coleman, Katie Couric

Sometimes you just want to sit down and watch a movie and not have to think about it. Sometimes all you need is a movie that you don’t expect much from, or a movie that you’re pretty sure isn’t going to live up to any expectations you may or may not have, and just be that movie, the one that you can watch without waiting for this moment or that moment to happen. A movie that, when it’s over, you can say, “Okay, that did the trick, I needed that.” A movie that can be as awful as it likes, and it doesn’t make any difference. All it needs to do is keep you occupied – mostly – for an hour and a half (or maybe more) and maybe help you tick the box marked “Seen it”.

A perfect candidate for this kind of movie is True Memoirs of an International Assassin, the latest “comedy” from Netflix. After The Ridiculous 6 (2015) and Special Correspondents (2016), you might think that Netflix would have wanted to reconsider their comedy projects, but True Memoirs… shoots down that idea within the first fifteen minutes, the period in which the movie is at its funniest. Would-be writer Sam Larson (James) is putting the finishing touches to his latest book. We see his lead character, Mason Carver (also James), fight off a horde of bad guys until he’s faced by one carrying an RPG. Deciding that an RPG is a little over the top, Sam has trouble coming up with an alternative. While he thinks about it, we see Mason and the (ex-)RPG carrier waiting around for the solution so that they can continue. They look like two actors on a set waiting for the next set up, or new script pages. It’s funny, and anyone watching the movie should remember this sequence well, because once it’s over, that’s as funny as the movie gets.

They say that comedy is harder than straight drama, and watching True Memoirs… is like trying to watch a comedy that has taken that particular maxim to heart and is doing everything it can to prove the saying right. Rejected by seemingly every publisher under the sun, Sam’s ambitions are kept alive by the unexpected appearance of an online publishing rep called Kylie (Coleman). She takes his manuscript, makes one very important change to the title, and the next thing he knows, Sam has a runaway bestseller on his hands. That change? It’s in the movie’s title: Sam’s book was originally called Memoirs of an International Assassin. Though his book is a work of fiction, Sam does his research, and he’s helped by his friend and ex-Mossad analyst, Amos (Rifkin) (can everyone say “lazy plotting”?). A story about a real assassin who was around in the Eighties and was called the Ghost, has found its way into Sam’s book, and now it’s non-fiction status and level of detail has people thinking Sam is actually the Ghost.

Now, if you’re watching this on Netflix – and chances are more people will see it there than will buy it on DVD or Blu-ray – then this is the point at which you should pause the movie and think very hard about that last sentence. People think Sam is really the Ghost. Later on this month (the 26th to be exact), Kevin James will be forty-two years old (and looks it). In order for Sam to be the Ghost he would have had to have been a pre-teen when he began his life as an international assassin. But nobody – seriously, nobody – brings this up. Not Andy Garcia’s Venezuelan freedom fighter, not his second-in-command, Juan (Compte), not even bumbling CIA field agents Cleveland (Howze) and Cobb (Riggle). Can everyone say “stupid plotting”?

Sam is kidnapped by Garcia’s El Toro and threatened with a horrible death unless he agrees to kill the Venezuelan President, Miguel Cueto (Coates). Through a further series of encounters too tedious to recount here, Sam is also tasked with killing a Russian criminal called Anton Masovich (Howard). Aided by DEA agent, Rosa Bolivar (Henao), Sam manages to avoid getting killed long enough to put a plan of sorts into action, one that involves bugging the President, and supporting El Toro’s revolution. By this stage, the screenplay – by director Wadlow and Jeff Morris – is intent on piling on huge levels of exposition onto huge levels of exposition as it does its best to make what should be a simple enough premise into something much more unwieldy and irksome. It’s a scenario that abandons simplicity almost from the beginning, and never looks back (it may actually be frightened to).

Fans of brain-dead comedies will no doubt enjoy True Memoirs… but for everyone else, the endless machinations that keep Sam ahead of everyone else will soon become tiresome, and the decreasing attempts at making the viewer laugh will become horribly apparent. By the movie’s end, discerning viewers will be wondering if they’ve really just wasted ninety-eight minutes of their life on this farrago, while even those viewers who were looking for the kind of distraction mentioned in the first paragraph will be shaking their heads in despair. When you end up hoping for something to come along to distract you from the distraction you’re already experiencing, then it’s time to choose your distractions more carefully.

Forced to carry the weight of the movie on his shoulders, James struggles to remain cheerful throughout, and soon gives in to the script’s requirement that he repeat over and over that he’s not the Ghost, while behaving like a petulant coward (and looking for a way out of his contract). James has a proscribed gift for physical comedy, but here he’s not given the chance to highlight that gift. Instead he’s pressed more into action hero mode, acquitting himself well in a series of fight scenes that are well choreographed and surprisingly invigorating. At all other times he plays the same physically awkward, bumbling, slightly desperate character he pretty much always plays. It makes you think that if True Memoirs… was written with James in mind, then he needs to avoid these kind of scripts in the future.

Orchestrating it all is Wadlow, a writer/director who for some reason was allowed to give us Kick-Ass 2 (2013). The same stumbling approach to the material that marred that movie is repeated here, with unexplained tonal shifts thrown in for good measure, and the cast encouraged to play their roles as clichéd stereotypes, or even stereotypical clichés. Garcia is wasted in his role (and that’s not a drug reference), Compte and Vazquez are allowed to pop up every now and then and add little to the overall narrative, Henao is tasked with being earnest while the camera focuses elsewhere, and Coates is in a different movie altogether as the Venezuelan President whose real name is Mike, and who doesn’t want the job anymore. Such is the variety and the standard of the performances, it’s obvious that Wadlow gave everyone carte blanche to do what they wanted. It would have been best if they’d all said no to the script (and a working holiday in the Dominican Republic), and just stayed at home. And if they needed to, watched something distracting.

Rating: 3/10 – while comedy is definitely harder to pull off than drama, there’s no argument when the comedy doesn’t even try that hard to beat the odds; a prime example of less is less, True Memoirs of an International Assassin is an embarrassing hodge-podge of stock situations and characters that reinforces the idea that when it comes to movies, Netflix are really good at making television shows.

Salt and Fire (2016)

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Drama, Ecological disaster, El Diablo Blanco, Gael García Bernal, Michael Shannon, Review, Salt flats, The Consortium, Veronica Ferres, Volcano, Werner Herzog

D: Werner Herzog / 98m

Cast: Veronica Ferres, Michael Shannon, Gael García Bernal, Volker Michalowski, Lawrence Krauss, Danner Ignacio Márquez Arancibia, Gabriel Márquez Arancibia

If you’re a fan of movies where the characters sit around philosophising obliquely on the nature of existence or other such topics, and where said characters behave in a mannered, artificial way that doesn’t reflect the behaviour of anyone you know or have ever met, then Werner Herzog’s latest foray into movie making, Salt and Fire, will provide you with ninety-eight minutes of elliptical, cod-poetic pleasure. What ostensibly looks like a thriller soon turns into something else entirely, and just as you get to grips with where Herzog is taking you, he then pulls the rug out from under you and leaves you to deal with yet another change in tone – or, as you might want to put it, his latest attempt at narrative (and audience) manipulation.

Such is the case with Salt and Fire, which begins with a car heading toward a lonely country estate. Once arrived, we see lots of armed guards, and a blindfolded woman taken out of the car and led inside. There she is surrounded by even more men, all of whom are wearing balaclavas to disguise their faces; one is even in a wheelchair. The woman is a scientist, Dr Laura Sommerfeld (Ferres), and it transpires that she is the head of a United Nations team sent to investigate a recent ecological disaster that has occurred somewhere in South America. Accompanied by two colleagues, Dr Fabio Cavani (Bernal) and Dr Arnold Meier (Michalowski), Sommerfeld is expecting to be met at the airport by a government representative. Instead, all three of them are flown to another location, and upon arrival, are kidnapped.

At the country estate, matters are made no clearer, and Sommerfeld is kept away from her colleagues. The man who seems to be in charge won’t explain why they’ve been abducted, but he does tell her that there won’t be any ransom demand. She’s given her own room, treated fairly despite the situation, and soon the man in charge reveals himself to be Matt Riley (Shannon), the CEO of The Consortium, the company responsible for the ecological disaster. Days pass without Sommerfeld becoming any the wiser as to the reason for Riley’s actions, but a grudging respect does develop between them. One day they head out on a trip to the site of the disaster, a vast expanse of salt flats known as El Diablo Blanco, and which is expanding at an exponential rate that could see it cover the entire continent in – possibly – a generation. Nearby is a supervolcano, Uturunku, that is showing signs of increased activity, and Riley is worried by that as well, though whether or not The Consortium is responsible for that, Riley neither confirms or denies.

By this stage of the movie, Shannon has been saddled with the kind of dialogue that could best be described as “pretentious twaddle”. Lines such as, “There is no reality, there are only perceptions of reality”, or “Truth is the only daughter of time”, are delivered with as much depth and sincerity as the actor can give them, but they just add to the whole pretentiousness of the situation. But once we’re at the salt flats, Herzog does us all a favour and removes Shannon and his daft philosophising from the movie, and leaves Sommerfeld stranded on a rocky outcrop that’s home to hundreds of cacti, and with supplies to last about a week. Oh, and she’s stranded there with two young boys, both nearly blind, called Huascar (Danner Arancibia) and Atahualpa (Gabriel Arancibia).

In this third act, Sommerfeld occupies her time by playing unofficial mum to the boys (who seem completely unperturbed by their being stranded in the middle of the salt flats), looking out over the vast expanse surrounding them, or making short videos on her tablet (which miraculously retains its battery charge for the whole time). Finally, and with their water on the verge of running out, Sommerfeld and the two brothers are saved by a twist that is as unlikely and dramatically unsound as most of the rest of the movie. If you’re still here at this point, you might be thinking that Herzog spent just as much time writing the script – itself based on the story, Aral, by Tom Bissell – as he did shooting it (a mere sixteen days). It’s a movie that rarely makes sense, rarely seems coherent, and though it’s trying to make a point about Man’s impact on nature, it makes the point so badly that no one’s ever going to care.

But while this is a movie by Werner Herzog that aims high and then never gets off the ground, this is also a Werner Herzog movie, and though it has a number of faults, and many of them are insurmountable, it can’t be dismissed so easily. Whatever he may be guilty of here, Herzog is still one of the most ingenious and perceptive directors working today, and while his dialectic approach to the material is an unfortunate liability, what isn’t is the truly stunning cinematography courtesy of Peter Zeitlinger. Salt and Fire features an impressive array of aerial views and beautifully framed landscapes, and the salt flats themselves, the quietly incredible Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Zeitlinger captures their vast expanse and the intricate nature of their honeycomb-like appearance so vividly that watching them can’t fail to provoke a response, even if that response is hard to articulate. What’s even more impressive is that the flats have been heavily exploited as a tourist attraction in recent years (you half expect the latest Kia model to zoom past in the background), but thanks to Zeitlinger’s diligence, you wouldn’t know it from seeing the movie.

Despite the poor quality of the script, and the lack of both nuance and insight, Salt and Fire, thanks to Herzog’s innate skill as a director, is still a mesmersing experience. There are few directors who could make a movie such as this one and still make it absorbing to watch, even if it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, doesn’t give its cast a fair chance at providing good performances (Bernal’s lascivious, hysterical Italian feels like he should be in a romantic comedy instead of a semi-literate exploration of whatever Herzog is trying to say), and doesn’t bother to provide credible motivations for the characters. Instead, what’s surprisingly effective about the movie is the mood Herzog creates. He’s described Salt and Fire as “a daydream that doesn’t follow the rules of cinema”, and on that level, he’s not too far off. Somehow it manages to get under your skin and it keeps you watching right until the end.

With both Ferres and Shannon doing their best to cope with the demands of Herzog’s script, but left to drift without any recognisable direction – Shannon randomly shouts at his female co-star, Ferres talks to her tablet as if it were another character – there’s even less for Bernal and Michalowski to do, and they soon disappear from the story, their characters left suffering from extreme diarrhoea (if there’s a subtext here it’s incredibly difficult to track it down). Only Krauss provides some much-needed levity, but inevitably, it’s at odds with the overall tone. It all adds up to possibly Herzog’s worst fiction feature ever – yes, even worse than Queen of the Desert (2015) – and a clear indication that not every director should work from their own script.

Rating: 4/10 – with its fragmented structure and appetite for obfuscation, Salt and Fire is a misfire that will probably have little effect on Herzog’s ability to make the kind of movies he wants to make; dramatically inert for long stretches but saved by some outstanding photography, it’s a movie that frustrates and confounds without any consideration for the negative effect these drawbacks have on the movie as a whole (or, indeed, Herzog’s reputation).

20th Century Women (2016)

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Annette Bening, Billy Crudup, Comedy, Drama, Elle Fanning, Feminism, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, Mike Mills, Mother/son relationship, Relationships, Review, The Seventies

D: Mike Mills / 119m

Cast: Annette Bening, Elle Fanning, Greta Gerwig, Lucas Jade Zumann, Billy Crudup

Mike Mills’ last movie was the appealing and very enjoyable Beginners (2010), in which Christopher Plummer gave an Oscar-winning performance. Six years on and Mills has upped his game considerably with 20th Century Women, a semi-autobiographical tale set in Santa Barbara, California in 1979. By writing a script that’s much closer to home than his previous outings, Mills has made a quirky, sensitive, and much more mature feature, and one that impresses on a variety of levels.

It begins with declarations of life, as divorced, single mother Dorothea (Bening) recounts giving birth to her son, Jamie (Zumann). Despite being a single mother, and receiving no support from her ex-husband, Dorothea views those early years when it was just her and Jamie with warm-hearted nostalgia. But finances being what they were, Dorothea was forced to take in lodgers. In 1979, with Jamie aged fifteen, he and his mother live with Abbie (Gerwig), a budding photographer, and William (Crudup), a carpenter whose work on the house is often paid for in lieu of rent. Abbie is like a big sister to Jamie, but he and William are virtually strangers to each other. Add in the presence of Julie (Fanning), Jamie’s best friend (and object of his romantic affections), and Dorothea begins to believe that her son, because he doesn’t have a father (or father figure) to guide him, and because she feels as if her connection with him is slipping away, decides he needs help “understanding women” and being a “good man”.

To this end, Dorothea recruits Abbie and Julie and persuades them to help Jamie learn more about life and relationships and women. When she tells him this, he reacts angrily and goes off with some of his friends to L.A. to see a concert. When he gets back he finds out that Julie has slept with someone and thinks she might be pregnant. Leading on from that, Dorothea advises Jamie that Abbie, who is in remission from cervical cancer, will be attending a doctor’s appointment and may receive bad news; she asks that he be at home in case she needs some support (Dorothea can’t be there). Instead, he goes with her. The news is both good and bad, but Abbie is glad of Jamie’s presence, and she starts to “teach” him about women by giving him books on feminism.

Jamie’s “education” causes a growing rift between him and his mother, and it provokes a straining of the relationships between Abbie and Dorothea, Jamie and Julie, and William and Dorothea. The friendship between Jamie and Julie is tested the most: an admission made by Julie causes him to question his feelings for her, but she manages to persuade him to take a trip along the coast with her. In San Luis Obispo, things come to a sticking point and Jamie leaves Julie at the motel where they’re staying. Julie alerts Dorothea, and she heads there along with William and Abbie. It proves to be a turning point for everyone, and the status quo is irrevocably affected.

There is so much more to 20th Century Women that any proper synopsis would run to thousands of words instead of mere hundreds. What is mentioned above is only a fraction of the material that Mills has collated for his screenplay, but almost none of it feels extraneous or superficial. Each scene acts in service to the character(s) appearing in it, and each scene helps to further the narrative and the myriad of subplots that float along waiting for the next occasion when they can be exploited. Mills has written such a carefully constructed screenplay that there are dozens of moments that echo or resonate in relation to both earlier and future moments (yes, it’s that good a script), and there are a similar amount of subtle references and non-linear connections that add to the quality and the depth of his writing.

Mills has also taken the time to make the various characters memorable and credible and unique in their own way, with special attention given to the relationships between them all. Dorothea is an odd mix of honest maternal concern and inappropriate parenting, wanting her son to be a “good man” but still wishing he could remain her little boy. The emotional tug-of-war that occurs through these warring factions leave Dorothea looking and sounding a little distracted at times, as if the notion of being a mother requires abstract thought for it to make sense (to her, at least). Bening perfectly captures the hopeful, yet curiously distant nature of Jamie’s mother with her customary skill and attention to character detail, making her by turns alarmingly obtuse and/or resolutely indifferent, and fixated by love at the same time. It’s a fine balancing act, and one that would have challenged most actresses, but Bening carries it off with seeming ease, displaying an emotional and intellectual dexterity in the role that serves as a reminder of just how fine an actress she is.

There are equally impressive turns from Fanning and Gerwig. As the seemingly carefree (and care-less) Julie, Fanning shows the character’s innate vulnerability even when she’s trying to be offhand or dismissive of her feelings, and there are times when Julie seems determined to suffer the fate she believes others expect her to. This kind of disturbing fatalism can be difficult to pull off (if it’s given too much emphasis it can come across as irreparably narcissistic), but Fanning acquits herself well, grounding the character through the discomfort and confusion she feels at being regarded solely as an object of desire. Gerwig is just as impressive as Abbie, taking the character’s history and using it to portray a young woman who speaks for the rights of others, but who seems unable to heed her own advice when it comes to the opposite sex. Like Jamie, she lacks a father figure in her life, and this informs her behaviour far more than she would like to admit, and when she’s challenged over this, she can only retaliate, and in doing so, deflect the pain she’s all too aware she’s causing herself. It’s a very subtle role indeed, but Gerwig carries it off with style and confidence.

On the male side, Crudup is the kind of sensitive, caring man who always appears attractive to women, even though they won’t ever commit to a sustained relationship with him, and the actor portrays him with an easy-going attitude that plays off well against the stresses and strained emotions of the female characters. And then there’s Zumann, a young actor showing a lot of promise, and more than capable of keeping up with his more experienced co-stars. Like a lot of child actors, Zumann has the ability to be casually audacious, and show the kind of emotional range that some adult actors never achieve. He’s intuitive, adventurous, quick off the mark, and he has the gift of making it seem that he’s much more wiser than his years. His scenes with Bening are touching, and Mills is to be congratulated for finding a young actor who can share a scene with her and not be intimidated or do anything that doesn’t match the effort she herself is putting in.

By setting the movie in 1979, Mills makes use of that period’s history to provide a backdrop of social and political upheaval that compliments the upheavals going on in the Fields’ household. He also plays deliberate havoc with the characters’ pasts and futures, illuminating them in a way that adds even more resonance to the main storylines. And while it can be an emotionally messy movie at times, Mills has become such a strong, confident movie maker that he can be forgiven the occasional misstep. He’s said in the past that, “Making a movie is so hard, you’d better make movies about something you really know about.” By making this semi-autobiographical tale so moving and funny and poignant and life-affirming, he’s certainly done that, and to an incredibly rewarding degree.

Rating: 9/10 – a movie that constantly surprises and impresses, 20th Century Women is that rare thing: a picture about women told from a male perspective and infused with a great deal of understanding and respect; with a clutch of great performances, and an equally great soundtrack to accompany it, Mills and his cast and crew have created a movie that is so good, repeat viewings will only make it look and sound better.

Free Fire (2016)

04 Tuesday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Armie Hammer, Ben Wheatley, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Drama, Guns, Jack Reynor, Review, Sharlto Copley, Shootout, Thriller, Warehouse

D: Ben Wheatley / 90m

Cast: Sharlto Copley, Armie Hammer, Brie Larson, Cillian Murphy, Jack Reynor, Michael Smiley, Sam Riley, Enzo Cilenti, Babou Ceesay, Noah Taylor, Patrick Bergin

It’s 1978 (not that it really matters), and at an abandoned warehouse in Boston, two groups come together to conclude an arms deal. Chris (Murphy) and Frank (Smiley), are members of the IRA, and they’re accompanied by two local career criminals, Bernie (Cilenti) and Stevo (Riley). They’re attempting to buy M-16’s from arms dealer Vernon (Copley) and his associate, Martin (Ceesay); they in turn have back-up in the form of Harry (Reynor) and Gordon (Taylor). Also present are facilitators Justine (Larson), who has brought the two groups together, and Ord (Hammer) who is there to ensure the deal goes through without any problems.

But as night follows day and action comedies demand conflict followed by murderous gunplay, the deal almost falls through when Vernon reveals a case containing AR-70’s and not the M-16’s Chris ordered. Ord helps pacify things and the deal goes ahead, with Chris accepting the guns and Vernon happy with his payment. But the inevitable fly in the ointment occurs when Stevo recognises Harry as the person who beat him up earlier over Stevo’s treatment of Harry’s seventeen year old cousin. Harry sees him and is incensed, and the deal is in jeopardy again. Chris tells Stevo to apologise, but though he does, he can’t resist bragging about what he did to Harry’s cousin. Harry responds by shooting Stevo in the shoulder, and the next moment everybody is shooting at each other, and fanning out across the warehouse.

What follows sees everybody shot and wounded in some way, but in particular it’s Martin who becomes everyone’s focus as he suffers a head wound that leaves him unconscious and lying next to the briefcase with the money inside it. Efforts are made to retrieve it on both sides, but it proves more difficult than anyone could have expected, and further injuries/wounds occur, leaving pretty much everyone struggling to stay alive – and when two further men turn up and shoot at them all, the whole situation goes from bad to worse to ridiculous.

The Closing Night Gala at last year’s London Film Festival, Free Fire is a movie that further cements writer/director Ben Wheatley’s reputation, but does so in a way that will have some viewers wondering what all the fuss is about. This doesn’t mean that Wheatley isn’t a talent to watch, or that his movies aren’t worth watching either, but Free Fire arrives in cinemas with a wealth of expectation behind it following its successfully received screenings at various festivals. Whether or not that level of expectation is warranted will depend on your acceptance of Wheatley being a movie maker with a distinctive visual style, and something to say. Because even though Free Fire is certainly distinctive, and directed with no small amount of flair by Wheatley, it’s not his most accomplished movie to date, and after the misfire that was High-Rise (2015), prompts the question, When will he make another movie that really confirms the talent we all know he has?

This isn’t to say that Free Fire is necessarily a bad movie, but it does appear to have been made with the intention of being entertaining, and it’s here that the movie gives cause for concern. For a director of Wheatley’s talent and rising stature, Free Fire feels too forced too often to be effective, or win over its audience. Some viewers, if they take the movie at face value, will find it enjoyable, but in a kind of loud, dumb fun kind of way. Wheatley, and his co-writer (and wife) Amy Jump, have gone for a crowd-pleasing black comedy action thriller that focuses heavily on the “fun” to be had from seeing a group of villainous individuals shoot each other, and which then sits back and watches them suffer even further.

This is where the notion that the movie is “fun” loses traction the longer the movie goes on. By letting all of its motley assortment of characters drag themselves around to less and less dramatic effect – Stevo’s demise is a particular example, a moment that makes no sense given his capacity thus far for survival – the problem of what to do with them all becomes increasingly more difficult for Wheatley to solve. In the end, he signposts the movie’s final scene, attempts to wrap it all up neatly, and confirms that any originality has been spent long before. For all its likeability, the movie hopes to beguile its audience into thinking that it’s fresh, sharp and funny, and though it does raise a smile quite often, this is more to do with the performances than Wheatley and Jump’s script.

Once the action and the shooting begins, some viewers will be left wondering who’s shooting and wounding who, and why co-writers Wheatley and Jump couldn’t have hired someone other than themselves to edit the movie. In the initial melee, it’s hard to work out just exactly what’s going on, and while it may serve to highlight the chaotic nature of the action, the spacing and the staging of the various protagonists isn’t made clear enough for viewers to accurately gauge where everyone is and how anyone can shoot anyone else. As a result, characters are hit – some more than once – and often it seems as if it’s the random choice of the screenplay. The effect this has is to distance the viewer from what’s happening – and to whom – and to reduce the characters to little more than that of ducks in a shooting gallery.

Thankfully, the cast know what they’re doing, from Copley’s quick to take offence arms dealer, to Hammer’s smooth-talking facilitator, to Riley’s drug-addled liability. As the lone female in the cast, Larson quickly becomes “one of the lads” as Justine has no option but to fight for her own survival just like everyone else. Strangely though, it’s Murphy’s IRA man who is the movie’s nominal hero, but the movie doesn’t do anything with this, and like its period setting, lacks any relevance to the action. But then relevance doesn’t appear to be in Wheatley’s remit. Instead, he wants to bludgeon us with a movie whose ambition is to be a wildly anarchic, blackly amusing thrill ride that will have audiences wincing and laughing in equal measure. He succeeds with the wincing, and occasionally with the laughing, but overall, this is dispiriting stuff from a director who can do so much more. Perhaps this is a movie Wheatley had to do in order to “get it out of his system”, and if so, then hopefully his next project will showcase his real talents as a movie maker.

Rating: 6/10 – on a basic level, Free Fire is a movie that will attract a lot of fans, and for some, reinforce their opinion of Wheatley’s skill as a director; however, even as a slice of depth-free entertainment, it fails to hit the mark fully, and stumbles too often in its execution to offer more than an occasionally diverting experience, leavened only by the occasional humorous twist, and an equally occasional sense of its own absurdity.

Mini-Review: Ghost in the Shell (2017)

03 Monday Apr 2017

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Action, Drama, Hanka, Juliette Binoche, Live action adaptation, Pilou Asbæk, Rupert Sanders, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-fi, Section 9, Takeshi Kitano

D: Rupert Sanders / 107m

Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Pilou Asbæk, Takeshi Kitano, Juliette Binoche, Michael Pitt, Peter Ferdinando, Anamaria Marinca, Chin Han, Kaori Momoi

While watching Ghost in the Shell, the latest animation to live action remake to reach our screens, it’s not too long before the question, Why? pops up. As in, why has this movie been made in the first place? Visually stunning but emotionally stagnant, this close proximity adaptation of the manga original (released in 1995) looks impressive, but soon reveals a heart that is as non-existent as its lead character’s. This is a sleek, shiny, superficial movie that in some ways has a very apt title: the movie is a ghost in its own shell, offering little in the way of a coherent or cohesive meaningful subtext about what it means to be synthetic of body and yet human of mind. This makes it very difficult to sympathise with Scarlett Johansson’s Major, despite her frowning a lot of the time as if she’s trying to work out a particularly difficult Sudoku puzzle.

Although this is a very faithful adaptation of Mamoru Oshii’s groundbreaking anime, somewhere along the way, the essence of Oshii’s work has been jettisoned in favour of a standard, by-the-numbers approach that keeps its characters firmly entrenched in a kind of personality-free limbo, and which struggles to provide equally standard motivations for their actions. Major’s dilemma: are the glitches she experiences part of a past that has been suppressed (for nefarious reasons), or merely issues with her current programming, is played out in such a way that there’s no emotional payoff or impact when – surprise! – the extent of those nefarious reasons are revealed.

Part of the problem here is the amount of time that’s passed since the original Ghost in the Shell was released. Twenty-two years on and the issues it raises around notions of self-identity and cyber-assisted body enhancement have become too commonplace in cinema for this incarnation to contain any resonance. With nothing new to offer, or even follow up on, the movie lacks the relevancy it could have had if it had been made twenty years ago. Instead, it makes a few spurious attempts at looking and sounding significant, and opts for a bland, uninspired standpoint that ensures the movie takes no real risks with the material (aside from the equally spurious idea that Johansson’s casting was a case of “whitewashing”).

With the script – credited to Jamie Moss, William Wheeler and Ehren Kruger – showing signs of ennui thanks to its long gestation process (the project was first announced in 2008), and Sanders unable to overcome the problems that hold it back from allowing its audience to engage with it, Ghost in the Shell ultimately – and ironically given how impressive it looks – suffers from a lack of vision that does it more harm than good. As a result, the cast are often left stranded by the banal nature of the material. Johansson tries her best, but is hamstrung by having to look deadly serious all the time, while Asbæk and Binoche have thankless secondary roles; only Kitano has the measure of his character, and he plays the head of Section 9 perfectly. In the end, the movie is only effective in its many well-choreographed action scenes, but even they’re not enough to offset the tedium that makes up the rest of its running time.

Rating: 6/10 – anyone looking for a live action anime with depth and something to say about the ethics of melding humans and machines should look elsewhere, as Ghost in the Shell has little to say about either; a remake that lacks purpose and drive, it’s a movie that disappoints on many levels, and which makes the cardinal sin of not being very interesting.

All Nighter (2017)

02 Sunday Apr 2017

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Analeigh Tipton, Comedy, Drama, Emile Hirsch, Ex-boyfriend, Father/daughter relationship, Gavin Wiesen, J.K. Simmons, MIssing person, Review, Taran Killam

D: Gavin Wiesen / 86m

Cast: J.K. Simmons, Emile Hirsch, Taran Killam, Analeigh Tipton, Jon Daly, Kristen Schaal, Xosha Roquemore, Shannon Woodward

Martin (Hirsch) is a struggling musician who plays the banjo in an on-again, off-again band. Ginnie (Tipton) is his beautiful, confident girlfriend. Frank (Simmons) is her workaholic father who spends most of his time abroad. Frank and Ginnie’s mother are divorced. Martin is intimidated by Frank, even though Ginnie tells him he shouldn’t be. When the three of them meet up for dinner, Martin continues to be intimidated, Ginnie continues to be reassuring, and Frank proves to be aloof and unimpressed by Martin. It’s almost but-not-quite, the dinner from hell.

Fast forward six months and Martin is woken one afternoon by someone at his door. He finds Frank on his doorstep looking for Ginnie. He hasn’t been able to get hold of her for a couple of days and is worried. But Frank is unaware that Martin and Ginnie split up three months before. However, Frank is a resourceful man, and when Martin remembers that Ginnie went to stay with their friends, Gary and Roberta (Killam, Schaal), he coerces a still mostly intimidated Martin into helping him find her. The pair soon find that Gary and Roberta have their own issues (some of it involving cheese) as well as the address Ginnie has moved to. Unsurprisingly, though, they can’t find it, and Frank and Martin begin searching for Ginnie through the places she’s worked at.

Soon they learn that Ginnie is seeing someone new, someone referred to as Mr Hot Stuff. But they’re still no nearer to finding her, despite some promising nods in the right direction, and Frank’s persuasive way with strangers. Along the way they encounter an assortment of Ginnie’s friends and work colleagues, get into a couple of fights, fall foul of the law, and (inevitably) learn that they have more in common than they thought. And by the end of the night, both men will have also learnt a lot about themselves as well.

A variation on the mismatched buddy movie, All Nighter is an amiable, good-natured comedy that – to its credit – doesn’t try too hard to make its audience like it, and as a result, proves to be endearing and enjoyable. In terms of the hoops that Seth Owen’s script makes Frank and Martin jump through, there’s nothing too outrageous (though a certain sex toy is likely to give the average viewer pause for thought), and if any offence is given, then it’s unlikely to have been intended. The only moment where the script teeters off-balance and seems like it’s about to fall into character disrepute is when Martin calls someone a rapist. It’s an odd misstep in a movie that’s as genial and inoffensive as you’re likely to see all year.

Despite its amiable nature, the movie does have several key strengths. One is the pairing of Simmons and Hirsch. Trading somewhat on his character from Whiplash (2014), Simmons plays Frank as a controlling, no-nonsense, humourless man of mystery (he works in “procurement”), and the actor’s stony, icily bemused features are a joy to watch as he displays his continual annoyance at everything and (almost) everyone around him. He’s contained, conservative, and contemptuous of Martin’s more freewheeling, carefree lifestyle. In contrast, Hirsch portrays Martin as the direct opposite of Frank: he’s insecure, unable to make decisions, and he’s not quite as concerned as Frank is over Ginnie’s apparent disappearance. He even has the solution to the problem of finding her (it involves knowing just who to speak to), but he allows Frank to talk him out of doing it.

As a double act, Simmons is ostensibly the straight man, and Hirsch the funny one, but their characters are such that those roles flip back and forth between them throughout the movie. Each has some damning things to say about the other, and each has some encouraging things to say about the other, and it’s in this way that Owen and second-time director Wiesen tease out the growing friendship between the two. It’s not unusual in this kind of movie for two markedly different characters to find a common ground and a mutual understanding, and All Nighter is exactly that kind of movie, but here it’s done in such a slow, unforced manner that it very nearly creeps up on the viewer before they’ve even realised it’s happened.

With both actors on very good form, it’s heartening to realise that one of the movie’s other key strengths is the simple nature of its storyline. Too often these days, too many movies feel as if they have to be edgy or dark or quietly subversive (or even openly subversive), and it’s to All Nighter‘s credit that it doesn’t try to be anything other than a straightforward search for someone who’s missing. There are the necessary obstacles that have to be overcome before they can be found, but none of the obstacles here feel forced or contrived. A lot of the humour comes out of the characters rather than the situations they find themselves in, and a lot of the drama – yes, there’s drama as well – is similarly well-rooted. You may not be surprised at what happens, but at least everything is in keeping with the basic set up.

By keeping everything fairly low-key and on an even keel (two more of its key strengths) , the movie does risk losing the viewer’s interest, and some of the minor characters are one step removed from being stereotypes, but this is a movie that needs to be approached purely as a pleasant, undemanding hour and a half that won’t change your life or make you want to take on the world. Instead it’s that rare thing: a movie that has modest ambitions and achieves them through a modest approach and an awareness that what it’s doing isn’t going to have critics falling all over themselves to praise it. Kevin Costner might call it “neat”, others may damn it with faint praise, but if you sit down to watch All Nighter in the right frame of mind, then it won’t disappoint you.

Rating: 7/10 – you won’t find anything original or different on show in All Nighter, but in this case that’s not a bad thing, as this is the kind of agreeable, diverting “fluff movie” that is the cinematic equivalent of comfort food; back in the Thirties, Hollywood used to churn dozens of movies like this every year, and now they’re looked on with fondness, a fate that wouldn’t be inappropriate for this movie in another eighty years from now.

Monthly Roundup – March 2017

01 Saturday Apr 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Adventure, Alistair Sim, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Bette Davis, Brie Larson, Charlie Day, Collide, Comedy, Crime, Documentary, Dougray Scott, Drama, Eran Creevy, Eugenio Ercolani, Felicity Jones, Fist Fight, Gordon Harker, Guiliano Emanuele, Horror, I.T., Ice Cube, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday, James Cagney, James Frecheville, Jimmy the Gent, John Moore, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Kong: Skull Island, Michael Curtiz, Mystery, Nicholas Hoult, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D'Amato, Pierce Brosnan, Review, Richie Keen, Samuel L. Jackson, Steve Barker, The Rezort, Tom Hiddleston, Walter Forde, Zombies

Fist Fight (2017) / D: Richie Keen / 91m

Cast: Ice Cube, Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell, Dean Norris, Christina Hendricks, Kumail Nanjiani, Dennis Haysbert, JoAnna Garcia Swisher, Alexa Nisenson

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Bell’s character wants to have sex with a pupil – and doesn’t think it’s wrong), Fist Fight is a virtually laugh-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

I.T. (2016) / D: John Moore / 95m

Cast: Pierce Brosnan, James Frecheville, Anna Friel, Stefanie Scott, Michael Nyqvist

Rating: 3/10 – meh; lame on levels you wouldn’t have thought possible (Brosnan’s character is a tech mogul who doesn’t know the first thing about the tech he’s promoting), I.T. is a virtually tension-free exercise that wastes the time of everyone concerned, and its unsuspecting audience.

Collide (2016) / D: Eran Creevy / 99m

Cast: Nicholas Hoult, Felicity Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Kingsley, Marwan Kenzari, Aleksandar Jovanovic, Christian Rubeck, Erdal Yildiz, Clemens Schick, Johnny Palmiero

Rating: 6/10 – Hoult’s backpacker finds himself mixed up with rival gangsters Hopkins and Kingsley, and using his driving skills to stay one step ahead of both of them; the focus is squarely on the action, which is a good thing, as Collide‘s plot is as all over the place as the various cars Hoult throws about on German autobahns, but when it’s bad it’s Hopkins intoning “I’m the destroyer of worlds” bad.

Jimmy the Gent (1934) / D: Michael Curtiz / 67m

Cast: James Cagney, Bette Davis, Allen Jenkins, Alan Dinehart, Alice White, Arthur Hohl, Mayo Methot

Rating: 7/10 – in an effort to woo back his former secretary (Davis), Cagney’s brash racketeer attempts to put a classier spin on his finding “lost” heirs business, and finds himself mellowing when a case challenges his compromised ethics; worth watching just for the pairing of Cagney and Davis, Jimmy the Gent is a typically fast-paced, razor sharp romantic comedy that may seem predictable nowadays but is nevertheless a minor gem that is effortlessly entertaining.

Kong: Skull Island (2017) / D: Jordan Vogt-Roberts / 118m

Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Samuel L. Jackson, Brie Larson, John Goodman, John C. Reilly, Thomas Mann, Corey Hawkins, Toby Kebbell, Tian Jing, John Ortiz, Jason Mitchell, Shea Whigham, Richard Jenkins, Terry Notary

Rating: 5/10 – an expedition to a mysterious island in the Pacific yields dangers galore for its participants – Jackson’s crazed Army Colonel, Hiddleston’s ex-SAS captain, Larson’s anti-war photographer, Goodman’s duplicitous government official et al – not the least of which is an angry hundred-foot gorilla called Kong; while Kong: Skull Island may be visually arresting, and its action sequences pleasingly vivid, the lack of a decent plot and characters with any kind of inner life makes the movie yet another franchise-building letdown.

The Rezort (2015) / D: Steve Barker / 93m

Cast: Dougray Scott, Jessica De Gouw, Martin McCann, Elen Rhys, Claire Goose, Jassa Ahluwalia, Lawrence Walker

Rating: 4/10 – after a viral outbreak that turned its victims into flesh-hungry zombies is contained, an island resort opens that offers survivors the chance to hunt down and exterminate zombies with little or no risk of harm – but the resort is targeted from the inside and a group of holiday makers find themselves becoming the hunted; a strong idea that runs out of steam by the halfway mark, The Rezort leaves its cast stranded with a standard “run from this place to the next and look desperate” approach that drains the movie of any tension and makes it all look as generic as the next zombie movie.

Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday (1939) / D: Walter Forde / 90m

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Linden Travers, Wally Patch, Edward Chapman, Philip Leaver, Kynaston Reeves

Rating: 7/10 – a seaside holiday for Inspector Hornleigh (Harker) and his trusty sidekick, Sergeant Bingham (Sim), leads inevitably to a murder case involving an inheritance and a criminal outfit who target their victims with the unwitting aid of döppelgangers; the second of three movies featuring Harker’s irascible policeman and Sim’s less-than-sharp second-in-command, Inspector Hornleigh on Holiday is a simple, easy-going, undemanding bit of fun that manages to combine drama and comedy to good effect, and which still holds up nearly eighty years later.

Inspector Hornleigh Gets on It (1941) / D: Walter Forde / 87m

aka Mail Train

Cast: Gordon Harker, Alistair Sim, Phyllis Calvert, Edward Chapman, Charles Oliver, Raymond Huntley, Percy Walsh, David Horne

Rating: 7/10 – despite being sidelined from regular detective work through a stint investigating thefts at an army barracks, Hornleigh and Bingham find themselves on the trail of Fifth Columnists; the last in the short-lived series, Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It is as sprightly and entertaining as the previous two instalments, and allows Huntley to make this priceless observation: “One of them’s tall, bald, looks intelligent but isn’t. The other’s short, sour-faced, doesn’t look intelligent but is.”

Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato (2017) / D: Eugenio Ercolani, Guiliano Emanuele / 69m

With: Joe D’Amato (archive footage), Luigi Montefiori, Michele Soavi, Claudio Fragasso, Rossella Drudi, Antonio Tentori, Carlo Maria Cordio, Mark Thompson-Ashworth

Rating: 3/10 – Aristide Massaccesi (aka Joe D’Amato)’s career in movies is assessed by some of the people who worked with him closely when he first started out; at sixty-nine minutes, Omega Rising: Remembering Joe D’Amato is a documentary that feels like it lasts twice as long, thanks to Ercolani and Emanuele’s decision to let their interviewees ramble on at length (and usually about themselves instead of D’Amato), and a random assortment of clips that don’t always illustrate what’s being talked about.

Prevenge (2016)

31 Friday Mar 2017

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Alice Lowe, Comedy, Drama, Foetus, Jo Hartley, Kate Dickie, Kayvan Novak, Murder, Pregnancy, Revenge, Review, Thriller

D: Alice Lowe / 88m

Cast: Alice Lowe, Jo Hartley, Kayvan Novak, Kate Dickie, Dan Renton Skinner, Tom Davis, Mike Wozniak, Tom Meeten, Gemma Whelan

In Alice Lowe’s feature debut as writer/director, the premise is simple: a pregnant woman is convinced her unborn foetus is compelling her to kill the people she holds responsible for the death of her partner. Angry and upset at being alone, Ruth (Lowe) targets each individual – inappropriate pet shop owner Mr Zabek (Skinner), repulsive Seventies DJ Dan (Davis), lonely corporate lawyer Ella (Dickie), anonymous victim Zac (Meeten), apologetic rock climbing guide Tom (Novak), fitness fanatic Len (Whelan) – at the behest of her unborn child, and in the process finds being a mother-to-be more daunting (obviously) than she’d ever expected.

Made over a two week period while Lowe was actually pregnant, Prevenge is a movie that covers a lot of ground in its relatively short running time, and which isn’t just a standard revenge thriller tricked out with gory set pieces. It’s also a pitch black comedy, an uncompromising examination of an emotionally disturbed pregnant woman, and a mordaunt exercise in extreme pre-natal depression. Lowe has created a complex, flawed-yet-undeniably decent anti-heroine whose particular psychosis is both alarming and understandable at the same time. She has conversations with her unborn child that push the envelope of maternal paranoia. While most expectant mothers will worry that there might be something wrong with their baby, it’s safe to assume that they won’t be worried about the foetus talking to them and advocating a string of murders.

Throughout, Ruth is worried that her baby might not be normal. She misses a scan just in case it reveals something abnormal, an issue that Ruth’s midwife (Hartley) dismisses with the practised ease of someone who’s heard it all before. But of course, Ruth knows better. Cajoled and persuaded by the baby growing inside her to become a serial killer, Ruth knows that her baby is abnormal; she just doesn’t want anyone to know how much. When the midwife makes mention of letting Social Services know that Ruth is struggling with the pregnancy, Ruth is adamant that she doesn’t want them involved, that she doesn’t want her baby taken away from her. Despite her mixed feelings, Ruth’s maternal instinct to protect her offspring is as deep-rooted and profound as any other mother’s.

Lowe makes Ruth’s ambivalence a credible reaction to the idea that she’s being urged to revenge by a foetus, a “belief” that is clearly the result of a mental break that Ruth has experienced in the wake of her partner’s death. Lowe is also clever enough to avoid trying to introduce any notion of ambiguity to this fractured relationship – Ruth is mentally ill, and though is a movie with very definite horror overtones, any potential supernatural reason for the foetus’ speaking to her is never allowed any credence. Ruth is maddened by grief, then, and it’s this reason that provides her with both a defined character arc, and the necessary sympathy to help audiences identify with her.

In terms of Ruth’s victims, Lowe is also clever enough to make it a game of two halves. Mr Zabek, DJ Dan, and Ella are all horrible people in their own right. Mr Zabek is the slimy high priest of sexual innuendo, while DJ Dan is so crass and boorish that he can throw up into his Seventies afro wig and then think nothing of kissing Ruth full on the lips. Ella is unfeeling, dismissive of others, and generally insensitive. Each of them are so awful that when Ruth kills them the temptation is to cheer, and urge her on to the next victim. But when she arrives at Zac’s home – and makes Ruth the cuckoo in the nest, a neat twist on her own situation – Lowe finds that Zac’s flatmate, Josh (Wozniak), is a genuinely nice man, something she wasn’t expecting. His subsequent demise doesn’t sit well with Ruth, despite her baby’s withering disregard for both him and Ruth’s feelings.

From there on, Ruth’s commitment to avenging her partner’s death begins to falter. Her first contact with Tom (prior to despatching Zac) didn’t go the way she’d planned, and her next attempt fails also, so she moves on to Len, who puts up a fight (complete with boxing gloves). Her midwife, realising something is wrong, admonishes Ruth and tells her it’s got to stop. Returning to Tom again, Ruth finds his partner is expecting a child also, and her maternal instinct kicks in for this other mother-to-be: how fair would it be for Tom’s partner to be in the same situation as Ruth? The foetus is unconcerned, but before Ruth can go through with anything, her waters break and her whole world changes. Some viewers may think that this “second half” isn’t as effective as the gore and humour-soaked “first half”, but Lowe isn’t interested in simply repeating the early formula, and instead adds layers to both Ruth’s predicament and the movie’s overall sense of bitter regret.

But this is a comedy as well as a sustained and impressive look at pre-natal paranoia and psychosis. Lowe is an accomplished writer of naturalistic dialogue, but she’s also a winner when it comes to pithy one-liners (of anchovies: “They look like the eyelids of old men that have died”), and isn’t afraid to include some really bad puns, such as, “It’s a cutthroat world, you know”, after slitting Ella’s throat. There’s the aforementioned sexual innuendo of Mr Zabek (which often settles for the single entendre), and some of DJ Dan’s observations (“You’re not Olivia Newton-John. You’re more like Elton John”) are so cruelly insulting that you can’t help laughing at them, even though you shouldn’t. And Ruth herself, in her disjointed, socially awkward way, says things that only she could (mostly) get away with. It’s through the dialogue that Lowe builds her characters, fleshing them out and giving the cast much more to work with than it seems at first.

When it comes to the gore, the movie doesn’t hold back, with each death played out in the style of an Eighties British horror, and there’s a mundanity to each one that adds to the overall effectiveness (Ruth’s weapon of choice is a carving knife). Again, Lowe isn’t afraid to show how awful each murder is, nor how it affects Ruth the longer she continues. In the lead role, Lowe gives a terrific performance, one that’s brimming with quiet verve and sincerity, and is thoughtful and brave. When she applies make up for Halloween and takes to the streets, it’s easy to see just how disturbed she is thanks to the design she’s created (even though you can see it just as well by the look in Ruth’s eyes). Ruth is a wonderful creation, and Lowe does her justice, never striking a false note, and staying true to the character throughout. The movie could almost be a one-woman show, were it not for a battery of equally commendable performances from the likes of Hartley and Dickie, and if the men – for the most part – come off as douchebags and unreliable pricks, then it’s a small price to pay when a movie is this good and this rewarding.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie about a damaged soul that comes complete with plenty of heart and soul amidst all the carnage, Prevenge is uncompromising, poignant and hilarious, and a major feather in Lowe’s cap; marred only by some poor lighting choices made on too many occasions, and a final scene that goes against everything that’s gone before, it’s a movie that’s full of surprises and confidently assembled by its very talented writer/director/star.

Genius (2016)

30 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Colin Firth, Drama, Editor, Jude Law, Laura Linney, Maxwell Perkins, Michael Grandage, Nicole Kidman, Review, Scribner's, Thomas Wolfe, True story

D: Michael Grandage / 104m

Cast: Colin Firth, Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, Laura Linney, Guy Pearce, Dominic West

If you’ve never heard of Maxwell Perkins (Firth) – and it’s very likely that you haven’t – then Genius, the debut feature by Michael Grandage, won’t actually tell you very much about him. You will discover that he was an editor at Charles Scribner’s & Sons during the Twenties and Thirties, and that he helped shape the writing careers of both F. Scott Fitzgerald (Pearce) and Ernest Hemingway (West). You’ll also learn that he had a wife, Louise (Linney), five daughters, and – apparently – never took off his hat, even at home. But these are just facts about the man. What made him tick, so to speak, what made him so passionate about books and writers, well, that’s another matter. And it’s one the movie, despite being based on A. Scott Berg’s National Book Award-winner Max Perkins: Editor of Genius (1978) and adapted by John Logan, fails to address.

Instead, the movie focuses on Thomas Wolfe (Law), an aspiring novelist whose first work of full-length fiction has been turned down by every other publishing house in New York except for Scribner’s. The novel, O Lost, is long, unwieldy, and overly descriptive in a grand romantic manner, but Perkins believes sincerely that it should be published, though with a fair bit of judicious pruning. Wolfe can’t believe his good luck, and agrees to working with Perkins to wrestle the novel into a more publishable form. Long months pass, and in 1929, Wolfe’s first novel is published to great acclaim with a new title, Look Homeward, Angel.

The two men are polar opposites. Perkins is quiet to the point of apparent catatonia, while Wolfe is brash, loud, and unapologetically hedonistic. He also writes like a man possessed, producing hundreds of pages of prose almost every day, but with no idea of how to corral that prose into a consistent format, or how to self-edit. Hence his need for Perkins to work with him. Wolfe’s success is compounded by his second novel (initially even more long, unwieldy and overly descriptive in a grand romantic manner), Of Time and the River, being just as well-regarded and received as his first. But now, jealousy and paranoia begin to take hold of Wolfe, and the idea that his books are only successful because of Perkins’ involvement, starts to nag at the author, and he takes steps to distance himself from Perkins and claim all the credit. This leads to an estrangement between the two men, as well as Wolfe signing with another publisher.

Genius moves at an agonisingly slow pace for the majority of its running time, and there are no end of scenes where Perkins sits reading manuscripts with nothing else happening within the frame. His is an interior, contemplative existence, allied to a contained, watchful existence that allows for few displays of honest emotion (when he raises his voice in anger to Louise at one point, it’s like a verbal slap across the face, such is the shock of it). Perkins may live most of his life through the pages of the books he edits, and he may be deliberately reclusive in terms of having a social life, but his skills as an editor can’t be challenged. The movie makes this point quite cleverly and quite succinctly, during a sequence where Perkins’ skill as an editor is given the spotlight. At first he reads out a passage Wolfe has written about the central character in O Lost falling in love at first sight. It’s overlong, and Perkins is unconvinced by much of Wolfe’s prose. And so he challenges Wolfe’s assertions at every turn, and soon the passage has been whittled down to a single, concise paragraph. And it’s so much better.

It’s also one of the very few occasions where the movie attempts to speed up or show a sense of urgency, but this is down to the editing of the sequence – step forward, Chris Dickens – rather than anything that Logan’s script or Grandage’s direction does. The slow, measured pace of the movie is its biggest obstacle to being liked, though the way in which Wolfe is introduced to the audience doesn’t help either. Where Firth underplays Perkins to silent perfection, Law is a bundle of energy as Wolfe, but in a way that soon proves wearing. He’s overly voluble, lacks filters, and is unconcerned if he upsets the people around him, a trait that become more and more entrenched the more successful he becomes. By the time Law has theatrically made his way through his third or fourth literary-style monologue, it’s clear that the template for the character has been set. Law is good as Wolfe, but his performance is one that Grandage doesn’t seem able to rein in when needed, and as a result, Law seems more in control of his performance than his director is.

While Linney is consigned to the background as Perkins’ demure, supportive wife, Kidman is given the more dramatic role of Wolfe’s lover, Aline Bernstein. Aline supported Wolfe when he was trying to get O Lost published, but as he found fame and fortune, their relationship became more and more adversarial, thanks largely to Aline’s feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Wolfe became dismissive of her feelings, and the disintegration of their relationship adds some much needed meat to the bones of Logan’s script. Kidman is caustic yet vulnerable as Aline, and it’s a shot in the arm for viewers who may have been thinking that the actress’s best work is behind her.

Despite the performances (Pearce is also on good form as a struggling Fitzgerald), the movie appears deliberately gloomy thanks to an almost monochrome colour scheme that’s been lit in equally dreary fashion by DoP Ben Davis. This makes the movie seem drier and even more constrained than it actually is, and again, Grandage doesn’t have any answers to combat this. Maybe it was a deliberate choice, and the movie is certainly consistent enough for this to be the case, but by making the movie look so unappealing and drab it has a knock-on effect on the material as a whole. It’s one of those occasions where you wonder if anyone was watching the dailies that closely.

In the end, the movie is less about Perkins and his talent as an editor, and it’s even less concerned with his legacy (trotting out scenes with Fitzgerald and Hemingway appears to be an attempt to do this, but these scenes are more about them than Perkins). The focus is on Wolfe and his need to write to the exclusion of all else that doesn’t further his writing. A scene midway through has Wolfe take Perkins to a jazz club. There the differences between the two men are highlighted, but in such a way that Perkins is left adrift as the scene concentrates on Wolfe. What Grandage and Logan have forgotten, it seems, is that Perkins is their main character, and not Wolfe, and this in turn makes one wonder: where was someone to shape and polish the script in the same way that Perkins shaped and polished the novels he helped publish? A fair point, maybe, but not one you’re likely to find an answer to.

Rating: 6/10 – good performances all round can’t help Genius avoid being labelled as tedious, tepid, or perfunctory; lacking emotions that might instil reactions from its audience, the movie is a dry, humdrum examination of literary excellence behind the scenes, and a love of the printed word aside, never takes flight in the way that it should do.

My Blind Brother (2016)

29 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Adam Scott, Blind man, Brothers, Comedy, Drama, Jenny Slate, Nick Kroll, Review, Romantic comedy, Sophie Goodhart

D: Sophie Goodhart / 85m

Cast: Adam Scott, Nick Kroll, Jenny Slate, Zoe Kazan, Charlie Hewson

Robbie (Scott) is blind. His brother, Bill (Kroll), is not. Robbie is an athlete who regularly takes part in sponsored sporting events such as marathons in order to raise money for charity (and hey, if it gets him a little press or TV attention, that’s okay, isn’t it?). Bill is the manager of a small printing firm who regularly finds himself helping Robbie with his training, and taking part in each sponsored sporting event. Does he want to? Well, yes and no. Bill loves his brother, but deep down he wants to be free to live his own life and not defer so much of it to Robbie. This makes him feel guilty, which in turn pushes him to help his brother, which in turn makes him want to feel free to live his own life, which in turn makes him feel guilty, etc. etc.

It doesn’t help matters that Robbie is a bit of a jerk, one who never credits Bill for the help and support he provides, and who rarely acknowledges that he even needs any help in the first place. Living in Robbie’s shadow for so long – Robbie has been blind ever since a childhood accident – Bill has become aimless, self-deprecating, and bored. So when he meets Rose (Slate) at the wake for her boyfriend (who was knocked down and killed by a bus while having an argument with her), Bill’s emotional guilt over Robbie is matched by Rose’s feelings of guilt over her boyfriend. They find they have lots of things in common, and later on that same evening, they sleep together.

But in the morning, Rose has second thoughts about seeing Bill again, and tells him so. Upset and humiliated, Bill tries to forget about her, but he finds that he can’t. Meanwhile, Robbie announces his latest plan to swim across a local lake, but Bill stands his ground and refuses to take part. Robbie continues with the plan and finds a volunteer willing to help him train, and be in the boat that guides him across the lake. Of course, the volunteer is Rose, and when Bill finds out she’s helping his brother, he begins to take more of an active role in Robbie’s training. This leads to some unexpected complications (unexpected except in romantic comedies such as this one), as Bill realises he’s in love with Rose, Rose develops feelings for Robbie, and after not too long, Robbie takes it for granted that Rose and he are a couple. As the day of the swim approaches, the relationships of all three are tested, and certain revelations muddy the waters enough so that on the day, nothing goes quite as planned.

Early on in My Blind Brother, Bill reveals to Rose how much he doesn’t like Robbie, and that he sometimes wishes him harm. Later, we see him leave open a kitchen cupboard in order for Robbie to walk into it face first. It’s darker moments like these that make the movie a little more interesting than you’d expect given its low-budget indie roots and general indie demeanour. But My Blind Brother does its best not to be so predictable, and even though the outcome can be guessed before you even sit down to watch the movie, there’s still enough there in the run-up to keep audiences involved and amused. This is thanks mostly to Scott’s performance as Robbie, whose narcissistic, self-centred, arrogant tendencies mark him out as a rare creature of little depth or self-awareness. At a restaurant, he criticises another disabled man for being too noisy, and makes no apology for it. The message is clear: his disability is more “important” than anyone else’s.

By making Robbie such a jerk, writer/director Goodhart – here expanding on her original 2003 short of the same name – allows the movie to retain a dramatic sensibility amidst the more standard rom-com tropes. As well, Bill is a bit of a maladjusted schlepp, the antithesis of Robbie’s hard-line positivity, a guy whose one ambition is to spend lots of time watching TV. When he discovers that this is one of Rose’s favourite pastimes, his face lights up with the unexpected joy of finding a kindred spirit. It’s no wonder he falls in love with her: she’s as unhappy as he is. But whereas Bill would be happy to wallow on his couch for the rest of his life, Rose at least wants to do something, even if she’s not sure what that something is. Thus her involvement with Robbie leads Bill to regain some of his self-respect, and shed the ennui that’s been holding him back.

These themes are spread throughout the script, and given equal screen time with the more comedic moments, such as the one pictured above, where Bill and Rose have been interrupted having sex by Robbie, and have to put their clothes back on without him realising what’s going on. Goodhart’s direction is so good in this scene. It’s not just the physical awkwardness of the moment, but the expressions on the faces of both Bill and Rose that makes the scene so funny. They barely have to say a word, and that’s what makes it so effective. Elsewhere there’s plenty of mileage to be made from Robbie’s overwhelming self-belief, whether he’s driving a car, jumping into a swimming pool, or patronising female reporters, and Bill’s perplexed looks when things don’t go his way.

The romantic elements are handled well, and though viewers won’t find anything new on offer, it’s the quality of the performances and the sharpness of Goodhart’s script that makes up for any failings in the material. Scott’s portrayal of Robbie is often harsh and uncompromising; he’s like the pantomime villain everyone wants to boo and hiss. Kroll (the former Bobby Bottleservice) is lovable and sympathetic as Bill, and handles the darker aspects of his character with understated aplomb. Slate, an actress who impresses with each role she takes, and who was especially effective in Obvious Child (2014), brings an off-kilter sincerity to her role that helps define the character and her quirky understanding of personal responsibility. There are good supporting turns too from Kazan as Rose’s roommate, Francie, and Hewson as Bill’s blind, stoner friend, GT, while the script balances the light and shade of Robbie and Bill’s relationship with a good deal of appealing charm.

Watching My Blind Brother is one of those movie experiences where you think you know exactly what’s going to happen and how, but again, Goodhart’s script is much better than the basic storyline suggests, and though it ends exactly as it should, its caustic approach to the combative nature of Robbie and Bill’s relationship (exacerbated by Rose’s involvement with them both) elevates the material and aids the movie in avoiding being too lightweight or frivolous by comparison. If Robbie’s “advanced spatial awareness” means he moves around or picks things up a little too easily, then that’s a small quibble to make, but overall this is an enjoyable mix of the conventional and the unconventional that is well worth checking out.

Rating: 7/10 – a winning combination of comedy and drama that is easy to like and which is unafraid to try a slightly different approach to its basic rom-com storyline, My Blind Brother has an agreeableness to it that helps it stand out from the crowd; likely to be overlooked amongst all the other rom-coms that get released these days, it would be a shame if it failed completely to attract an audience, or missed out on the attention it deserves.

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