Fantasia (1940)

14 Sunday Apr 2019

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Animation, Classical music, Comedy, Dance, Disney, Drama, Fantasy, Favourite movie, Leopold Stokowski, Mickey Mouse, Review

D: James Algar, Samuel Armstrong, Ford Beebe Jr, Norman Ferguson, David Hand, Jim Handley, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Paul Satterfield, Ben Sharpsteen / 125m

With: Deems Taylor (narrator), Leopold Stokowski

Viewing Fantasia nearly eighty years after its release, it’s astonishing to think just how much of a gamble this was for Disney. Borne out of a desire to boost the popularity of Mickey Mouse, Disney began work in 1936 on a deluxe cartoon short featuring Mickey called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but as the budget increased beyond its original expectations, Walt Disney realised that on its own, the short wouldn’t be profitable. In 1938, the decision was made to create a feature length movie that would include not only The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but seven other animated sequences based on well known pieces of classical music. With conductor Leopold Stokowski already on board as the movie’s musical director, Disney forged ahead with the kind of project that had never been done before – and until its belated sequel, Fantasia 2000 (1999), wouldn’t be attempted again. And this was only Disney’s third full-length animated feature. There’s no modern corollary for this; only the House of Mouse has made anything remotely like Fantasia, and perhaps it’s because there’s a very obvious reason: it’s that good.

It’s a perfect combination of music and visuals, each segment given its own unique style and presentation, and the animation is so beautifully in tune with the music that it’s easy to be drawn into the narratives and to be carried along by the emotions invoked by the music. Whether it’s a sense of wonder at the depiction of Earth’s beginnings as portrayed via Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, or the fun to be had from the animal ballets of Amilcare Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours, or even the menacing apparition of the devil Chernabog in Modest Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, the combination of sound and vision is hugely impressive. It’s a movie where the range of the animators’ imagination is such that the viewer is taken to places they could never have expected, and shown sights that remain indelible once seen. Conceptually bold, and daring, the movie is a panoply of colour and sound that is transformative and vibrant, the music soaring and dipping in time with the imagery, at once urgent and demanding of our attention, at other times, subtle and intriguing, and on yet other occasions, sensitive and emotive, all of it providing a wellspring of extraordinary moments.

That it continues to hold up as well as it does – it is, after all, a masterpiece – should be no surprise. Disney was so confident in its ability to enthrall and amaze that he planned to re-release the movie every so often with a new segment replacing one of the originals each time. But poor box office returns (the movie didn’t turn a profit until its 1969 re-release), and the US entering World War II put paid to Disney’s plan. But even though a sequel was eventually made, Fantasia should be appreciated for being one of a kind, a movie no one else could have made except Disney, and one that continues to astound today, even with all the advances made in CG animation. It’s also quite obviously not a children’s movie – though they might enjoy Mickey’s antics and the dancing hippos – and this is another reason why it’s such an ambitious movie: it knows there’s an audience out there for it, and it trusts that people will find it and appreciate it. Again, whether it’s the abstract visual concepts employed for the opening Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, or the centaurian revels depicted in the mythical Greco-Roman world created for Ludwig van Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Fantasia remains a fascinating, delightful, wonderful, and hugely effective exercise in exploring the boundaries of then-contemporary animation – and revealing the beauty of what’s been discovered beyond those boundaries.

Rating: 9/10 – the use of music is sublime, and so is the animation that accompanies it, and it’s this perfect melding of the two art forms that make Fantasia such an amazing and entertaining movie experience; breathtaking in its scope and ambition, it’s a movie that has never been bettered, and which stands even now as a testament to the visionary talents of its creator.

The Three Musketeers (1973)

11 Thursday Apr 2019

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Action, Adventure, Charlton Heston, Christopher Lee, Comedy, Drama, Favourite movie, Faye Dunaway, Frank Finlay, Literary adaptation, Michael York, Oliver Reed, Review, Richard Chamberlain, Richard Lester

D: Richard Lester / 105m

Cast: Michael York, Oliver Reed, Richard Chamberlain, Frank Finlay, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Geraldine Chaplin, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Christopher Lee, Simon Ward, Raquel Welch, Spike Milligan, Roy Kinnear

Fresh from the countryside, D’Artagnan (York) hopes to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a King’s musketeer. His initial efforts are less than promising: he’s knocked out and robbed by the Comte de Rochefort (Lee), an agent of Cardinal Richelieu (Heston), he manages to insult three of the very musketeers he wants to join, and he ends up duelling against all three of them in turn until the Cardinal’s men arrive to arrest them. The other musketeers – Athos (Reed), Aramis (Chamberlain), and Porthos (Finlay) – take the fight to the Cardinal’s men, and with D’Artagnan’s aid, defeat them. This leads to D’Artagnan being taken under their wing just as the Cardinal hatches a plot to embarrass the King (Cassel) and Queen (Chaplin). With the Queen having given her former lover, the Duke of Buckingham (Ward), a necklace as a keepsake – and one that the King gave her – D’Artagnan and his new companions elect to travel to England to retrieve the necklace before it’s to be worn at a ball. But matters are complicated when Milady de Winter (Dunaway), another of the Cardinal’s agents, steals two of the necklace’s diamonds…

Originally intended by Lester as a vehicle for the Beatles, The Three Musketeers was also originally meant to be a three-hour epic (including intermission), but when it became clear that it wouldn’t make its release date in that format, the decision was made to split the project into two movies (The Four Musketeers followed in 1974). The sequel/second half is a more sombre affair, some of it necessarily so, but this first movie is a blast, a riotous panoply of silly humour, even sillier sight gags, and some of the best swordfights ever committed to the big screen. Energetic, vibrant, and poking fun at everything it can with an insistence and a panache that even the hardest of hearts would be hard-pressed to deny, the movie is the quintessential romp, an action adventure movie with a surfeit of heart and a knowing sense of its own absurdity. Everyone involved is so obviously having fun, you want to join them and buckle your swash in the same exciting fashion as they do, leaping and spinning and pivoting, and killing the Cardinal’s men with flair and passion. If you take nothing else away from Lester’s movie, you have to applaud the swordfights – choreographed by master swordsman William Hobbs – and the breathtaking energy that infuses them all. Whatever else happens – and George Macdonald Fraser’s screenplay adheres closely to Dumas’ novel – it’s the action that elevates the material and ensures its entertainment value.

Lester and his talented cast may be looking to make sure everyone stays happy and smiling throughout, but he also makes the peril facing the Queen (and unsuspecting King) sufficiently serious to ensure that the movie’s comedy credentials aren’t the only thing on display. Richelieu’s dastardly plot, and the machinations of Milady de Winter (a spirited Dunaway), drive the narrative forward with a telling urgency, and though this slows down the action, the committed performances keep the audience from noticing the movie’s need to focus on the plot for a while. The relationship between the three musketeers and D’Artagnan is also given room to evolve, and even though Fraser comes close at times to making it seem perfunctory, York et al invest their characters with a great deal of heart and sincerity. As well as comedy and drama, there’s romance too in the form of D’Artagnan’s attraction for Constance (Welch), the Queen’s dressmaker who somehow makes a virtue out of being clumsy (full marks too for Miriam Brickman, the uncredited casting director who paired Welch with Spike Milligan; he’s her screen husband). With all the elements working extremely well together, and propped up by an exciting story told in exciting fashion, Lester’s one-time Beatles project reveals itself as a fun time to be had by all.

Rating: 9/10 – easily the best version of Dumas’ classic tale, The Three Musketeers is endearingly odd in places (or maybe oddly endearing), deliberately silly in others, and an absolute pleasure to watch – whatever is going on; a rip-roaring piece of unbridled entertainment, it’s funny and fresh, pays more attention to period detail than you might expect, and has absolutely no more ambition than to provide its audience with as good a time as possible, something in which it succeeds with consummate ease.

Groundhog Day (1993)

10 Wednesday Apr 2019

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Andie MacDowell, Bill Murray, Comedy, Favourite movie, Harold Ramis, Punxsutawney Phil, Review, Romance, Time loop

D: Harold Ramis / 101m

Cast: Bill Murray, Andie MacDowell, Chris Elliott, Stephen Tobolowsky, Brian Doyle-Murray, Marita Geraghty, Angela Paton

Although I have an All-Time Top 10 Movies list – one that has been carved in stone for a very long time now – and I’ve never been able to put together a Top 100, or even a Top 50, there are two movies that would sit comfortably at No 11 and No 12 on those lists – if they ever existed. No 11 will be reviewed later this month. This is No 12. It’s a wonderfully written movie, one that screenwriter Danny Rubin spent around three years working on before the movie was made. For me, the only comedy movie more quotable than Groundhog Day is Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). In that spirit, this “review” will be in the form of ten quotes that sum up the movie’s sweet-natured yet anarchic spirit. Something of a cheat, I hear you say? Perhaps, but when writing is this good, why not celebrate it? After all, “anything different is good.”

Psychiatrist: That’s an unusual problem, Mr. Connors. Uh, most of my work is with couples, families. I have an alcoholic now.

Phil: Ned, I would love to stay here and talk with you… but I’m not going to.

Rita: I like to see a man of advancing years throwing caution to the wind. It’s inspiring in a way.

Phil: You know, people like blood sausage, too. People are morons.

Phil: (Holding Phil the Groundhog behind the wheel) Don’t drive angry. Don’t drive angry!

Phil: This is one time where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather.

Ned: Ned… Ryerson. “Needlenose Ned”? “Ned the Head”? C’mon, buddy. Case Western High. Ned Ryerson: I did the whistling belly-button trick at the high school talent show? Bing! Ned Ryerson: got the shingles real bad senior year, almost didn’t graduate? Bing, again. Ned Ryerson: I dated your sister Mary Pat a couple times until you told me not to anymore? Well?

Phil: (Driving down the railroad tracks toward an approaching train) I’m betting he’s going to swerve first.

Rita: You’re not a god. You can take my word for it; this is twelve years of Catholic school talking.

Phil: Do you ever have déjà vu, Mrs. Lancaster?
Mrs. Lancaster: I don’t think so, but I could check with the kitchen.

Rating: 9/10 – still the best time loop movie ever made, and one of the finest comedies period, Groundhog Day features terrific performances (Murray is superb as the jaundiced weatherman on a very steep learning curve), Ramis’s spirited direction, and again, Rubin’s wonderful screenplay; when a contemporary critic boldly states that “‘Groundhog’ will never be designated a national film treasure by the Library of Congress” – and that’s exactly what happens – then you know that it’s a movie that isn’t just another fluffy, high concept romantic comedy.

Short Cuts (1993)

03 Wednesday Apr 2019

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Andie MacDowell, Comedy, Drama, Favourite movie, Julianne Moore, Literary adaptation, Matthew Modine, Raymond Carver, Relationships, Review, Robert Altman

D: Robert Altman / 188m

Cast: Andie MacDowell, Bruce Davison, Jack Lemmon, Julianne Moore, Matthew Modine, Anne Archer, Fred Ward, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Chris Penn, Lili Taylor, Robert Downey Jr, Madeleine Stowe, Tim Robbins, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Frances McDormand, Peter Gallagher, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Lyle Lovett, Buck Henry, Huey Lewis, Michael Beach, Charles Rocket

When the pre-teen son of television commentator Howard Finnigan (Davison) and his wife Anne (MacDowell) is knocked down by a car driven by waitress Doreen Pigott (Tomlin), he refuses to let her drive him home afterwards. Later, he falls unconscious and is taken to hospital. It’s the day before his eighth birthday. Doreen is harassed at the diner where she works by Stuart (Ward), an out-of-work salesman, and his buddies Gordon (Henry) and Vern (Lewis) before they head off on a fishing trip. Gene Shepard (Robbins), a cop whose wife, Sherri (Stowe), doesn’t know he’s having an affair, abandons the family dog because of its excessive barking. Ralph Wyman (Modine), a doctor, and his wife, Marian (Moore), are a couple in crisis who stay together out of convenience instead of love, while the Finnigans’ next door neighbours have a pool cleaner, Jerry Kaiser (Penn), whose wife, Lois (Leigh), works as a phone sex operator…

These are just some of the stories that intertwine and intermingle with each other in Robert Altman’s majestic adaptation of nine short stories and one poem written by Raymond Carver. Possibly the finest ensemble piece ever made, Short Cuts examines the lives of twenty-two separate characters, and does so with a precision and an understanding of the underlying desperation that each of them is feeling; it’s like watching a group therapy session where everyone is jockeying for the most attention. Altman achieves the impossible here: he makes every one of those twenty-two characters appear credible and relatable, and he does so by stripping away the masks they hide behind in order to reveal the fallible, scrabbling egos that fuel their shallow pretensions and selfish conceits. It’s holding up a mirror to society time, an indelible foray into the casual brutality of everyday lives, with verbal, physical, and emotional attacks being meted out, seemingly at every opportunity, in order for these characters to feel superior to the people closest to them: the people they purport to love. At times it’s terrifying to see the depths of despair that some characters are experiencing, while others go about their lives blithely and with an equally terrifying lack of self-awareness. How do these people survive from day to day?

The answer is: any way they can, and Altman, along with co-screenwriter Frank Barhydt, artfully highlights the ways that they achieve this, whether it’s through forbearance, a reliance on alcohol, or by simply ignoring what’s happening around them. All this – and at over three hours – could seem like spending time with a group of people you’d happily cross the street to avoid, but the movie has such a bone dry, and darkly scabrous sense of humour that you can’t help but find amusement in even the most horrendous moments (and sometimes to laugh is just about the best and only option the viewer has). With Los Angeles providing the perfect backdrop for all this psychic turmoil, and pitch perfect performances from all concerned, the movie is evenly structured among the characters for maximum effect, and Geraldine Peroni’s editing ensures the action occurs with fluidity and a pace to match. Aside from The Player (1992), Altman has never been this good, his direction proving incisive and perceptive in equal measure, and his mastery of the various storylines is an object lesson in how to make each disparate element of a movie as important as all the rest. It’s an impressive achievement, one that rewards the audience at every turn, and better still, with each repeat viewing.

Rating: 9/10 – a bold, multi-layered odyssey through the hellish environs of middle-class America, Short Cuts is abrasive, awash with attitude, fiendishly funny, and starkly revealing of the deceptions that ordinary people employ to give their lives meaning; a one-of-a-kind movie that goes to some very dark places indeed, it still has a degree of hope running throughout the various storylines – even if it is chafed and frayed to snapping point.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

01 Monday Apr 2019

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Action, Alan Arkin, Comedy, Crime, Drama, Favourite movie, George Armitage, High school reunion, Hitman, John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Review

D: George Armitage / 107m

Cast: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Alan Arkin, Dan Aykroyd, Joan Cusack, Hank Azaria, K. Todd Freeman, Jeremy Piven, Mitchell Ryan, Michael Cudlitz, Benny Urquidez

Martin Q. Blank (Cusack) is a hitman with a problem: he’s feeling miserable, and he’s unhappy with his work. He’s at odds with his boss, Grocer (Aykroyd), over plans to unionise the hitman “business”, and is made more unhappy when a contract goes wrong. Persuaded by the combined efforts of his therapist, Dr Oatman (Arkin), and his secretary Marcella (Cusack), Martin agrees to attend his high school’s tenth anniversary reunion – and while he’s there he can carry out another contract. Back in his home town of Grosse Pointe, Blank catches up with his old friend, Paul (Piven), and his old girlfriend, Debi Newberry (Driver). Though he walked out on her on the night of the prom, and hasn’t been back since, Martin and Debi soon reconnect, and attend the reunion together. But Martin is being stalked by another hitman, Felix LaPoubelle (Urquidez), and when Martin is forced to kill him in one of the school corridors, the aftermath is witnessed by Debi, who runs off. And matters are made even worse when Martin discovers that the target he’s there to kill is none other than Debi’s father, Bart (Ryan)…

If you had to sum up the appeal of Grosse Pointe Blank, then its dialogue would be a great place to start. This short monologue by Martin to his shrink Dr Oatman about the reunion is a perfect example of just how finely tuned much of this movie is, and also how it doesn’t take itself very seriously (a good idea in a comedy about a hitman developing a conscience): “They all have husbands and wives and children and houses and dogs, and, you know, they’ve all made themselves a part of something and they can talk about what they do. What am I gonna say? “I killed the president of Paraguay with a fork. How’ve you been?” It’s carefully crafted moments like this one – fluid, satirical, and very funny – that ensure the movie has a lightness of touch and doesn’t look and sound like it’s trying too hard. Instead it maintains an even, modest tone throughout, and focuses more on the characters than the action. In Martin Blank, the screenwriters (including Cusack himself) have created a sympathetic hitman whose “moral flexibility” belies a natural charm and wit that make the character more rounded and less stereotypical than usual, so much so that when he does have to kill someone – the corridor fight with LaPoubelle is a highlight – the intensity he displays is borne out of necessity rather than a fundamental flaw in his personality. The only real flaw is that he’s believed himself incapable of living a normal life for all these years.

Cusack is terrific in the role, deftly handling the various elements thrown into the mix – drama, comedy, romance, action – and displaying a versatility across genres that had been hinted at before this, but never fully exploited. The cast as a whole are on good form, from Cusack’s sister Joan as Blank’s faithful yet caustic secretary, to Piven’s lovelorn best friend, and Arkin as the therapist who remains unconvinced when Blank reassures him he’s not a target. Even Driver and Aykroyd, acquired tastes unless in the right surroundings, are likeable, and Armitage makes sure that everyone gets enough exposure to warrant them all making an impact. He also directs with a visual flair that’s unexpected, and in conjunction with DoP Jamie Anderson, keeps the movie from settling into a standard action comedy format. It’s a movie that’s full of surprises, touching in places but never too far from another quip or pithy observation, and though it ultimately treads an overly familiar romantic path, there are enough detours along the way to make it feel fresher than most. The action is well handled and expertly choreographed (a little ragged, but in a good way), and there’s a terrific soundtrack from Joe Strummer. All in all, it’s a movie that wants its audience to have a good time, and which achieves that ambition with skill and aplomb, and without having to employ the time honoured process known as shakabuku.

Rating: 8/10 – with various shades of light and dark that allow for differing perspectives on what it means to be a hitman, and a wicked sense of humour that Cusack et al exploit at every given opportunity, Grosse Pointe Blank is an absolute delight from start to finish; still as entertaining now as it was back on first release, it’s a movie that may have dated in terms of the costumes and the hairstyles, but beneath all the horseplay there are universal themes in play to help anchor the frothy, carefree nature of the main storyline, and ensure that the movie resonates with audiences in more ways than one.

Fisherman’s Friends (2019)

25 Monday Mar 2019

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Chris Foggin, Comedy, Daniel Mays, Drama, James Purefoy, Music, Port Isaac, Record deal, Review, Romance, Sea Shanties, True story, Tuppence Middleton

D: Chris Foggin / 112m

Cast: Daniel Mays, James Purefoy, Tuppence Middleton, David Hayman, Dave Johns, Sam Swainsbury, Maggie Steed, Vahid Gold, Christian Brassington, Meadow Nobrega, Noel Clarke

For city boy and music executive Danny Anderson (Mays), the thought of leaving London for the quieter environs of Cornwall, even for a friend’s stag do, goes against the grain. But when a planned sailing weekend fails to happen, Danny, his engaged friend, Henry (Brassington), colleague Driss (Gold), and boss Troy (Clarke), all find themselves having to be rescued when their paddle boarding excursion goes wrong. Afterwards, they find that their rescuers are part of a group of local fishermen well known for singing sea shanties. Danny is immediately impressed by them, and finds himself tasked by Troy to sign the fishermen to a record deal. Unaware that he’s being pranked – Troy has no intention of taking them on – Danny manages to persuade the men to make a demo recording that he can send to the record labels. Staying at the home of de facto group leader Jim (Purefoy), who is distrustful of “outsiders”, and finding himself growing more and more attracted to Jim’s daughter, Alwyn (Middleton), as well as the way of life there, Danny begins to understand why life in Port Isaac has more to offer than he could have ever expected…

Based on the true story of the Fisherman’s Friends, a group of Cornish fishermen whose distinctive renderings of traditional sea shanties has brought them fame (if not fortune), and even a spot on the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, Chris Foggin’s eponymous movie features the kind of heartfelt and sincerely handled narrative that is guaranteed to raise a smile and a tear, and sometimes even in the same scene. What makes it work so well isn’t the focus on the music – though there’s plenty of that, including a rousing rendition of What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor? – but the sense of community that the fishermen are a part of. Shot in Port Isaac, and with the town looking like an honest picture postcard version of itself, the movie doesn’t take long to woo the unsuspecting viewer with its various charms, not least the relaxed way of life on display, and the inhabitants’ positive atttudes about pretty much everything. A buoyant, ebullient sense of mischief also runs throughout the movie, with the men’s camaraderie allowing for a handful of comedic moments where pretensions are dismantled before they can take root… all of which is in stark contrast to the less amusing “humour” evinced by Troy and his sycophants. (Troy is the ostensible bad guy in the movie – but it doesn’t need one.)

With its knowing approach to the material, and a script that takes the time to add moments of poignancy to the mix, the movie is a celebration both of the sea shanties that the men sing and the tradition that keeps them from being forgotten. Again, the music is secondary to the feelings it evokes, and through the perfectly gauged performances, this appreciation is explored through a number of fine renditions that prove infectious and affecting. Mays is particularly good as the (entirely apt) fish out of water, succumbing to the love of a good woman, and the simple pleasures of Cornish life, while Purefoy makes more out of Jim’s sour demeanour than could have been expected; there are depths to his portrayal that aren’t necessarily in the script. With a number of minor sub-plots to round out the material, the movie isn’t afraid to explore more meaningful areas, such as absentee fathers, the perceived betrayal of a community, and the serious nature of what the men do away from singing. It’s ultimately light-hearted and often as whimsical as these things are usually, but Foggin ensures that it’s sprightly and entertaining in equal measure, and no one aspect of the narrative overwhelms all the others. A distinct and effective crowd pleaser, its message couldn’t be clearer: that heritage and tradition still have a vital role to play in modern day communities.

Rating: 8/10 – rousing, rambunctious, and hugely likeable, Fisherman’s Friends tells its story simply and with a great deal of subdued, yet appropriate style; beautiful Cornish locations and sterling cinematography by Simon Tindall add extra layers of charm to the material, and though it treads a very familiar path – Danny makes as many mistakes as he gets things right on the way to a hit record – this doesn’t detract from the sheer enjoyment to be found in such an unassuming movie.

What Men Want (2019) and the Demise of the Mainstream Comedy

20 Wednesday Mar 2019

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Adam Shankman, Aldis Hodge, Comedy, Erykah Badu, Josh Brener, Mainstream, Remake, Review, Sports agent, Taraji P. Henson, Tracy Morgan

D: Adam Shankman / 117m

Cast: Taraji P. Henson, Aldis Hodge, Josh Brener, Erykah Badu, Tracy Morgan, Richard Roundtree, Wendy McLendon Covey, Phoebe Robinson, Tamala Jones, Brian Bosworth, Jason Jones, Chris Witaske, Max Greenfield, Shane Paul McGhie, Auston Jon Moore, Kellan Lutz

On paper it had all the potential for being a classic screwball comedy built around a contemporary mindset, but in what seems to be a continuing trend, What Men Want is yet another movie that makes you wonder if Hollywood even knows how to make a comedy any more. Telling the story of a lone female sports agent (Henson) at a prestigious agency who is forever battling against the “boys’ club” that determines who makes partner, this remake of the Mel Gibson-starrer What Women Want (2000) – you see what they did there? – runs for nearly two hours and for long stretches forgets that it’s meant to make its audience laugh. They say that comedy is more of a challenge than tragedy or straight up drama, and in many ways “they” are right, but with all the talent and facilities available to producers in Hollywood, why is it that when it comes time to make us chuckle and smile, or even give out a big belly laugh, the movies that can do this are so few and far between? When was the last time a mainstream comedy really did deliver the goods and proved itself to be consistently funny? Was it The Spy Who Dumped Me? Or maybe Night School? Or what about The Happytime Murders (yes, what about it?).

There are too many comedies being churned out that follow the same safe formula: the lead character has to embark on a journey of self-discovery and become a better person. Along the way they’ll find themselves in all sorts of awkward situations, and decide that lying to everyone is the best way to get out of trouble, until later on when they realise the need to apologise and are unanimously forgiven. This is what happens in What Men Want, and Henson’s character, Ali (her father (Roundtree) is a boxing coach, just to make the metaphor stick all the more) uses her “gift” to get ahead at work while trampling over friends and colleagues and the obligatory love interest (Hodge) because that’s all she knows. Cue a multitude of platitudes and homilies about treating people with respect and being a team player and being true to yourself. But in amongst all the life lessons and the free psychoanalysis for anyone who behaves in a similar fashion in real life (the movie knows you’re out there), the script by Tina Gordon, Peter Huyck and Alex Gregory often resorts to padding out its scenes with unnecessary dialogue and extended “business” that add little or nothing to the overall narrative.

And even less of this nonsense is actually, deliberately, intentionally funny. The movie simply tries too hard. It’s almost relentless in its efforts to be humorous, and only succeeds on any kind of regular basis when the material tries to be off-the-cuff, or it feels as if a line of dialogue has been improvised. It’s as if the structure and Ali’s character arc were deemed too important to tamper with and this left the comedy out in the cold and struggling to find a proper place for itself. And for a movie where a woman can hear men’s thoughts, and the immense potential of that idea, much of what is heard is uninspired and predictable. It doesn’t help either that Shankman directs with all the pizzazz and verve of a man who heard the word “anonymous” and took it as his own personal mantra, or that the supporting characters – usually the reliable comedic backbone of any self-respecting comedy – lack the purpose and the inappropriate eccentricity we’re used to (Badu’s weed-supplying psychic comes close but her appearance is the most interesting thing about her). In the end, watching What Men Want is a dispiriting, frustrating experience that succeeds only in reaffirming the notion that Hollywood is wedded to formula and doesn’t want a divorce.

Rating: 5/10 – dull in parts, and over-stretched in others, with a surfeit of scenes that sit there hoping to be funny just by being there, What Men Want is yet another mainstream comedy that should have been abandoned in the planning stages; no one should have to struggle through a movie that doesn’t know how to be amusing, or that requires its more than capable cast of playing it broad when subtlety would be so much more effective, but this is what Hollywood is serving up these days… and that kind of Kool Aid really isn’t funny…

Finding Steve McQueen (2018)

19 Tuesday Mar 2019

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Bank robbery, Comedy, Drama, Forest Whitaker, Mark Steven Johnson, Rachael Taylor, Review, Romance, Travis Fimmel, True story, United California Bank, William Fichtner

D: Mark Steven Johnson / 92m

Cast: Travis Fimmel, Rachael Taylor, William Fichtner, Forest Whitaker, Louis Lombardi, Rhys Coiro, Jake Weary, Lily Rabe, John Finn

1980. John Baker (Fimmel) meets his girlfriend, Molly Murphy (Taylor) at a diner, where he proceeds to tell her that he’s not the man she thinks he is. Baker reveals that his real name is Harry Barber, and that in 1972, along with four other men, he robbed the United California Bank of around $12 million. The robbery was carried out in the belief that then President Richard Nixon had stashed $30 million in illegal campaign funds within the bank’s vault. After the robbery, the five men went their separate ways, Harry and his younger brother, Tommy (Weary), having been paid their “share” already. But it wasn’t long before the FBI, and lead agent Howard Lambert (Whitaker), had tracked down and arrested everyone except Harry, who promptly went on the run. Ending up in a small town, and finding a job as a bartender, Harry met Molly, and they began seeing each other. While Harry settled into small town life, he was still being sought by the FBI, but eight years later his relationship with Molly has become too important for him not to tell her the truth…

If you like your movies – whether based on a true story or not – whimsical and slightly silly, or with a surfeit of gosh-darn wholesomeness that overrides the drama of the biggest bank robbery in U.S. history, then Finding Steve McQueen will be the movie for you. It’s a movie that takes several disparate elements and mixes them all together to tell a light-hearted (and lightweight) story that opts for charm as its main characteristic, while adding dollops of goofy humour to its romantic sub-plot. Though inspired by a true story, Ken Hixon and Keith Sharon’s screenplay uses the robbery as a branching off point for a pointed exploration of Nixon’s fall from grace, an idealised appreciation for the movies of Steve McQueen, and a gently meandering romance between Harry and Molly that feels like it should be quirkier and more affecting. There’s also the FBI investigation, an avuncular affair that sees Whitaker play Lambert with a sad twinkle in his eye, and which sees the intervention of real life figure Mark Felt (Finn) in order to keep Lambert finding out (from him at least) that, yes, the President might be involved – somehow. These are worthy attempts at boosting the minimal impact the movie has as a whole, and though they’re not entirely successful, that charm that Johnson and his cast and crew have aimed for, is undeniable.

It would be easy to dismiss Finding Steve McQueen as a piece of cinematic fluff, or the movie equivalent of a meringue, but the fact that it is an enjoyable, and undemanding diversion is it’s main strength. With a slew of performances that display an awareness of the thinness of the material, and which have adjusted themselves accordingly, Fimmel et al give the more maudlin or outright saccharine-drenched moments a likeability that’s hard to ignore, and they make more of the humour than is likely was ever in the script to begin with. Fichtner is great as the Nixon-hating mastermind behind the robbery, Weary gives an affecting turn as Harry’s withdrawn, simple-minded brother, and Rabe is endearing as the rookie FBI agent whose eyes light up when she receives even the merest word of praise. Again, it’s a movie that shouldn’t work as well as it does, and kudos should go to Johnson (making only his sixth feature in twenty years) for finding a way to make each element feel more connected to the others than they should do, and for finding the through line in the narrative that keeps it all from becoming vapid and irredeemably innocuous. But then any movie that has one of its bank robbers attempt to eacape capture on a motorised lawnmower can’t be all bad…

Rating: 6/10 – with a script that could have been sharper, more focused, or less determined to make a Seventies cultural reference every two minutes or so (or all three), Finding Steve McQueen is a curious beast in that it somehow makes you forget just how bland it is once you take away the performances and Johnson’s direction; pleasant and undemanding – and those are good things – it’s a movie that serves as a reminder that sometimes less can really mean less, and still be entertaining.

Blindspotting (2018)

15 Friday Mar 2019

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Carlos López Estrada, Comedy, Commander Moving, Daveed Diggs, Drama, Indie movie, Oakland, Probation, Racism, Rafael Casal, Review

D: Carlos López Estrada / 95m

Cast: Daveed Diggs, Rafael Casal, Janina Gavankar, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Ethan Embry, Tisha Campbell Martin, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Kevin Carroll, Nyambi Nyambi, Jon Chaffin, Wayne Knight

Nearing the end of a year’s probation following a prison sentence for aggravated assault, Collin Hoskins (Diggs) is doing his best to avoid any trouble. With three days to go he’s living at a halfway house, and working with his best friend, Miles (Casal), at a removals firm called Commander Moving. One night while he’s driving back to the halfway house, he witnesses a white police officer (Embry) shoot an unarmed black man. Unwilling to jeopardise his probation, Collin elects not to come forward, but he does begin to experience nightmares about the shooting, nightmares that make him question if he’s done the right thing. Matters are further complicated by Collin’s ex-girlfriend, Val (Gavankar), working at the removal company, and Miles’ often irrational behaviour, such as buying a gun when he doesn’t need one, and giving in to violent outbursts. As Collin nears the end of his probation, two incidents involving Miles threaten his impending freedom, and he’s forced to wonder if remaining friends with Miles is going to allow him to move on with his life…

Nine years in the making, Blindspotting is the brainchild of Messrs Diggs and Casal, and a movie that aims to show what life is really like in today’s Oakland community, with all its racial variety and simmering intolerance. It’s a heady mix of comedy and drama, with a lot to say about racism, prejudice, and the title term, a phrase that means always seeing what your mind tells you is there instead of looking more closely. It’s an apt phrase for much of what causes pain and suffering in the world, our inability to see beyond what we want to see, and it’s brought out beautifully in a split screen exchange between Collin and Val that explains their whole relationship in a nutshell. The movie is full of perceptive moments like this one, with Diggs and Casal’s script being far more nuanced than anyone might have expected, and along with prejudice and the skewed perception people can have about us, it also examines notions of racial identity (and identification), as well as Oakland’s sense of its own identity now that the area is becoming more and more gentrified. Collin is wondering how he’s going to fit in once his probation is over, but as he’s reminded, he’s now known forever as a convicted felon – and how do you adjust to that?

Miles, on the other hand, knows where he fits in, but maintaining his place is his particular burden, as he too feels threatened by the changes in the community. Loudmouthed and brash, and prone to inappropriate behaviour, Miles is a relic of the past, a dinosaur unwilling to accept that his ways are fast becoming unacceptable, and threatened by the possibility that he’ll lose everything he’s achieved (and particularly his family). As Collin begins to question his future role, Miles is forced to examine his, and for both men it’s not a comfortable situation to be in. How they deal with all this is the crux of a movie that grows in confidence and charm the longer it goes on, and the script is peppered with small gems of observation, and moments of quiet introspection that perfectly complement the more dramatic scenes, such as Collin jogging through a graveyard where the dead all stand by their headstones. With so many disparate elements at work, and all needing their own moments to be effective, it’s a relief to see that Estrada (making his feature debut) never loses sight of what a scene is saying, or how best to get that message across. Directing with an honesty and a focus that boosts the material, Estrada takes Diggs and Casal’s screenplay and invests it with a sincerity and a sense of purpose that makes the narrative feel all the more impressively handled. And with both Diggs and Casal giving excellent performances, this is one occasion where being an indie movie with a voice is easily it’s best recommendation.

Rating: 9/10 – without a bum note anywhere to be had, and without resorting to cynicism or a jaded attitude, Blindspotting proves itself to be one of the most astute movies of 2018; hopefully it won’t be the last time that Diggs and Casal put together a script, but if they do, let’s hope that we don’t have to wait another nine years for it, and that it proves as hilarious, thought-provoking, sensitive, intense, and enjoyable as this is.

Happy Anniversary (2018)

06 Wednesday Mar 2019

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Ben Schwartz, Comedy, Drama, Jared Stern, Noël Wells, Rahul Kohli, Review, Romance

D: Jared Stern / 78m

Cast: Noël Wells, Ben Schwartz, Rahul Kohli, Joe Pantoliano, Annie Potts, Kristin Bauer van Straten, David Walton, Leonardo Nam, Kate Berlant, Sanchita Malik, Isidora Goreshter

Mollie (Wells) and Sam (Schwartz) have been together for three years. On the morning of their third anniversary, Sam treats Mollie to a special breakfast in bed, which soon leads to their starting to make love, and then Mollie’s blurted admission that she’s not happy. What follows is an argument where the couple pick out each other’s faults, and generally explain why they shouldn’t be together. This continues as Sam drops off Mollie at her parents’ home, where she reveals that she’ll be staying there while she sorts out her feelings. Sam is in the process of starting up an online clothing business, and he and his business partner, Ed (Kohli), are due to make a pitch that day to a supplier, Willa (van Straten). While they prepare, Mollie spends time with her parents, and tries to decide if her relationship with Sam is worth saving, while also encountering an old flame, Arik (Walton), who helps put things into perspective. Later, though, an emergency involving their dog brings them together again. But it proves to be temporary – thanks to a message Mollie receives from Arik, and which Sam sees…

You could argue that the romantic comedy is something of a spent force as far as genres go these days. Sure they still get made, and some even show up in cinemas, but when was the last time you saw a truly satisfying romantic comedy? And particularly one that was actually about how romance can endure, and not the standard boy-meets-girl scenario? That’s where Happy Anniversary comes in, the debut feature of screenwriter Jared Stern – Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011), The LEGO Batman Movie (2017) – a bright, appealing look at how we determine if we’re happy in a relationship, and what things convince us that we are (or we’re not, or we might be). When Mollie announces that she’s not happy, Sam calls time on her “bullshit” and accuses her of never being happy unless she’s feeling unhappy. And though this leads to the kind of recriminations we’ve all seen before, Stern is canny enough to make those recriminations more relatable because they’re exactly the kind of things that most of us have probably brought up at times in our own relationships. Mollie wants Sam to be the same romantic guy he was when they first got together, and Sam wants Mollie to acknowledge that she doesn’t know what she wants (sound familiar?).

As Stern explores the couple’s feelings about love and romance, the movie addresses further relationship issues such as getting married and having children, but thankfully not in a way that sounds pedantic or contrived, and Stern’s screenplay finds time for subtle, pithy moments such as when Mollie’s mother (Potts) tells her that marrying her father wasn’t a mistake, but not leaving him was. The movie makes the obvious point that relationships are difficult (possibly the hardest work you never get paid for), and that knowing the person you’re with is Mr or Miss Right isn’t always easy to work out, but it does all this with an easy charm, and a lightweight, comedic approach that will keep viewers smiling throughout even if there aren’t any real belly laughs to be had. Wells and Schwartz make for an appealing couple, and they share a slightly off-kilter chemistry that benefits their characters’ predicament, while there’s solid support from Kohli as the friend who does his best to help but can only do so as inappropriately as possible. There’s a bright, sunny feel to the movie thanks to DoP Nicholas Wiesnet’s use of space and light, and editor David Egan knows just when to focus on Sam or Mollie to get the most emotion out of a scene, while Stern provides us with the requisite happy ending – though one that’s tinged, for once, with a remaining sense of unresolved issues that feels in keeping with Sam and Mollie’s journey.

Rating: 7/10 – though much of Happy Anniversary follows established romantic comedy tropes, and its tone is breezily upbeat while it explores the downside of having “second thoughts”, it’s nevertheless an engaging, enjoyable movie that avoids any hint of cynicism and roots for its main characters throughout; a minor gem that has just enough dramatic heft to make it look and sound like more than just an average rom-com, it’s quietly perceptive, and just as quietly effective.

Songbird (2018)

01 Friday Mar 2019

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Cobie Smulders, Comedy, Drama, Jamie Adams, Jessica Hynes, Review, Richard Elis, Romance, The Filthy Dukes, University

aka Alright Now

D: Jamie Adams / 95m

Cast: Cobie Smulders, Richard Elis, Jessica Hynes, Noel Clarke, Emily Atack, Laura Patch, Holli Dempsey, Mandeep Dhillon, Griffin Dunne

Twenty years after they were first successful, rock band The Filthy Dukes are reduced to playing working men’s clubs in small British towns. Their lead singer, Joanne Skye (Smulders), is still living the rock n’ roll life, partying hard and trading on past glories whenever she can. When her manager-cum-boyfriend, Larry (Clarke), calls it quits on their relationship, and the rest of the band call it quits too in the same evening, Joanne ends up in a pub where she meets Pete (Elis) – but it’s not the best first encounter. Afterwards, Joanne meets up with old friend, Sara (Hynes), and under the influence of copious amounts of alcohol, they decide to enrol in a marine biology course at the local university. The next day they decide to go through with their enrolment, and at the university Joanne discovers that Pete is the admissions officer. Blagging their way onto the course, they also get a dorm room, and find themselves surrounded by young women half their age. For Joanne, it’s a chance to continue being a rock chick, but a growing attachment to Pete has her re-thinking her priorities…

Sometimes, a movie maker makes enough of an impression to ensure that his other work is tracked down or taken advantage of when it surfaces. Such a movie maker is Jamie Adams, whose Black Mountain Poets (2015) showed promise even though it was uneven and inconsistent in its approach. Songbird is the second of two movies made by Adams and released in 2018, and at first it looks as if it’s going to be a spoof of a pretentious Nineties indie band, with excerpts from a dreadfully arch music video for a Filthy Dukes song that was number one for fourteen weeks(!). Alas, it’s not to be, as instead, Adams decides to concentrate on Joanne and her bullish, hyperactive behaviour. She’s a verbal bull in a china shop, a slave to the persona she created twenty years before, and perilously close to having no self-awareness at all. She’s also really, really, really difficult to connect with as a character. Thanks to Adams’ further decision to have Joanne behave like the most annoying person in a room full of annoying over-achievers, most of the movie’s first half is a chore to sit through as she displays the kind of childish, free-form expressions (both verbal and physical) that denote either someone suffering from arrested development or incipient mental health problems.

All this is – of course – meant to be funny, but thanks to Adams’ leaden direction and a script that feels largely improvised (and which, like Black Mountain Poets, Adams appears happy to go along with, no matter how laboured it is), the movie struggles through long periods of dramatic and comedic inertia before it finally begins to tease out the semblance of a crafted storyline, instead of the fractured narrative it’s adopted up until then. The jittery romance between Joanne and Pete comes to the fore, and the movie almost sighs with relief at having something more defined to focus on, and the performances improve as well, with Smulders and Elis at last able to flex their acting skills in the service of something more meaningful and emotive. It’s a long time coming, and some viewers may well have hit the Stop button, or decided to head for the pub (or anywhere) long before this, but the movie’s last half hour shows just how good it could have been if Adams had been more rigorous in his approach to the material. It’s still fairly rough around the edges, and it does seem as if everyone suddenly woke up to the fact that more effort needed to be made, but it’s the one section of the movie that succeeds by actually having something to say – and knowing, at last, how to say it.

Rating: 4/10 – shot in five days (and it shows), Songbird has a dire first hour that acts as a challenge to the viewer to keep watching, and a final half hour that rescues the movie from obtaining a much lower rating; ill-advised and sluggish, with occasional flashes of inspiration that are quickly snuffed out by the next woeful occurrence, it’s to be hoped that Adams’ next endeavour has more structure and attention to both characters and plot than this does.

Happy Birthday, Toby Simpson (2017)

24 Sunday Feb 2019

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Alexander Perkins, Comedy, Edyta Budnik, Festival, Patrick Makin, Review, Romance, Self-discovery, Sun Soaps

aka Breaking Free

D: Patrick Makin / 78m

Cast: Alexander Perkins, Edyta Budnik, Zara Day, Gary Heasman, Josh Wood

It should be a good day for Toby Simpson (Perkins), but his birthday is lining up to be anything but. His stewardess girlfriend, Hannah (Day), is either accusing him of seeing someone else or demanding he finish work early so he can take her to the airport; the train he normally takes to work is cancelled and the replacement coach service makes him late, something his boss at Sun Soaps, Terry (Heasman), goads him about; Terry refuses to let him go early, and so he’s forced to head home on the replacment coach – which will make him late in meeting Hannah. On the return journey he gets talking to festival goer Renata (Budnik); when the coach reaches its destination, Toby discovers that he’s lost his keys, his phone and his wallet. Realising that they’ve been stolen by someone on the coach who was wearing a purple hat, and that they’re heading to the festival, Renata persuades Toby to let her help him retrieve his belongings. Once inside the festival grounds however, the possibility of finding the thief amongst thousands of music lovers becomes less and less likely. But Renata is determined that Toby shouldn’t give up…

The debut of writer/director Patrick Makin, Happy Birthday, Toby Simpson is a light-hearted and easy-going romantic comedy that in time-honoured fashion, takes its put-upon central character on a journey of self-discovery and personal redemption. It does all this amiably and with a great deal of subdued charm, and though there’s nothing new in its boy-gets-treated-badly-by-everyone, boy-meets-girl-who-believes-in-him, boy-regains-self-respect scenario, by offering viewers a pleasant enough diversion from more standard fare, it’s far more successful than might be expected. Toby is a classic under-achiever, unable to stand up for himself, and when he tries to be more assertive he ends up worse off than he was before. Makin and Perkins make Toby a sympathetic character from the start, and even when he’s flailing around trying to justify his weak-willed behaviour (or excuse it), the sense of quiet desperation he’s projecting remains sincere and awkwardly appealing. It makes the inevitable romance with Renata all the more credible, even though their relationship is a movie staple. Thanks to the quality of Makin’s script, and of Perkins’ performance, Toby’s journey of self-discovery is amusing and warm-hearted, and because there are no detours into melodrama or more serious territory, it retains that subdued charm that helps it along so much.

Shot during the set up of Wiltshire’s End of the Road festival (and careful not to show any of the artists who played there in order to avoid any copyright problems), Makin’s debut is a good example of what can be achieved on a very small budget but with plenty of forward planning. Utilising a number of visual techniques to make it look as if Toby and Renata are actually “there”, the movie uses some of the energy from the festival as a way of adding a sense of urgency to the plot device of Toby trying to retrieve his personal effects, and the short amount of time that he and Renata have together. As the couple thrown together by the movies’ idea of fate, Perkins and Budnik have an easy chemistry that makes their characters’ growing relationship convincing, while their portrayals adhere to the idea that sometimes the shortest but most intense connections are the ones that stay with us, or influence us, the most. The romantic elements are handled with confidence and a clear sense of affection on Makin’s side, while the humour stems from the characters rather than the circumstances they find themselves in. With a great indie soundtrack working well to support the action (An Horse’s Trains and Tracks is a particular standout), those lucky enough to see this won’t be disappointed.

Rating: 8/10 – though its basic storyline is as old as the hills, and has been done a million times over, there’s still much to enjoy about Happy Birthday, Toby Simpson, not the least of which is the performances of its two leads, and the happy-wise approach adopted by its writer/director; sometimes keeping it simple is the best formula for success, and by doing this, the movie overcomes its lack of originality by having characters you can care about, and by being unrepentently good-natured throughout.

Paddleton (2019)

23 Saturday Feb 2019

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Alex Lehmann, Cancer, Comedy, Drama, Euthanasia, Friendship, Mark Duplass, Ray Romano, Review, Road trip

D: Alex Lehmann / 89m

Cast: Mark Duplass, Ray Romano, Kadeem Hardison, Dendrie Taylor

For Michael (Duplass), the news is very bad indeed: he has terminal cancer. For his neighbour Andy (Romano), the news is also very bad indeed: he will lose his only friend in the world. The two live at the same apartment building, and have developed a close bond, spending their evenings and weekends together, watching kung fu movies and eating pizza, and playing a game of their own invention called Paddleton. When Michael decides that he doesn’t want to reach the stage in his illness where he’ll be connected to tubes and wires and spending more time in hospital than not, he tells Andy that he wants to kill himself before he reaches that point. Having arranged through his oncologist to pick up medication that will allow him to do this, Michael and Andy set off on a road trip to collect it. Along the way, Michael becomes aware of just how much his impending demise is affecting Andy, and encounters with a pharmacist (Hardison) and a motel owner (Taylor) reinforce the sense of loss that Andy is beginning to feel. When they return home, it remains to be seen if Michael will carry out his plan, and if he does, whether Andy will help him…

Made under the banner of the Duplass brothers’ production company, Paddleton rolls out its stall in the very first scene. With Michael calmly receiving the news that he has a mass and it should be checked out by an oncologist, it’s left to Andy to react in the way that you’d expect most people to react: he gets flustered, questions what Michael has been told, and looks for a more positive response from the doctor they’re speaking to. There’s comedy and pathos here alongside the obvious drama of the situation, and these three elements are the mainstay of a movie that takes a subtle, nuanced approach to the idea of euthanasia, while also exploring the strength of a friendship that has never been tested by something so serious – and life changing – before now. It’s a measure of the way in which the script (by Lehmann and Duplass) tackles these issues that the movie remains affecting and emotional all the way through, and without coming across as melodramatic or insincere, or worst of all, patronising. With the friendship between its two central characters having been so carefully plotted and constructed, Paddleton is a bromance that has unexpected depth and honesty.

This is thanks to both the screenplay, and the combined efforts of Duplass and Romano. Duplass is a quiet, solid presence, imbuing Michael with a sombre nobility, and entirely convincing as a man who wants to die on his own terms. Romano is something of a revelation, taking Andy’s many insecurities and inhibitions and making the character a fully rounded individual whose lack of social skills hides a greater capacity for love and affection than even he may be aware of. Romano’s performance is affecting and full of little touches that illustrate just how much he’s already grieving even though Michael hasn’t gone through with his plan yet. And yet there are small moments of hope dotted here and there for both characters, and though the movie has no intention of proving itself untrue to both the characters or the narrative, it’s these small moments that add detail and poignant circumspection to a story that is both heartfelt and intelligently handled. Lehmann builds on the promise shown in Blue Jay and Asperger’s Are Us (both 2016), and ensures that the more dramatic elements don’t overshadow the comedy – which is both bittersweet and meaningful – and vice versa. The end result is a movie that tells its simple story with a great deal of subdued yet effective panache, and without short changing either its characters or its audience.

Rating: 8/10 – low-key but brimming with confidence in the material and the downbeat nature of its themes, Paddleton is the kind of low budget indie movie that comes along every now and again and reminds us that there are still valid stories to be told about the human condition; touching without being sentimental, and bold in not pandering to any unnecessary romanticism about Michael’s decision, this is a well crafted and beautifully acted movie that shows just how complex and rewarding brotherly love can be.

Untogether (2018)

13 Wednesday Feb 2019

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Ben Mendelsohn, Billy Crystal, Comedy, Drama, Emma Forrest, Jamie Dornan, Jemima Kirke, Lola Kirke, Love, Relationships, Review, Romance

D: Emma Forrest / 99m

Cast: Jamie Dornan, Lola Kirke, Jemima Kirke, Ben Mendelsohn, Billy Crystal, Alice Eve, Jennifer Grey, Scott Caan

Andrea (Jemima Kirke) is a recovering heroin addict (straight for a year now) who wrote a successful literary novel when she was twenty-one, but who hasn’t written a word since. She has a one night stand with a doctor, Nick (Dornan), who has had recent literary success himself with a memoir of his time in a war zone. For the first time since her recovery, she feels a connection to Nick and finds herself pursuing a relationship with him. Meanwhile, her younger sister, Tara (Lola Kirke), is in a relationship with Martin (Mendelsohn), a former musician who’s much older than she is. When she meets a rabbi, David (Crystal), and he offers to help her reconnect with her faith, Tara finds herself smitten by him, and unsure suddenly about her feelings for Martin. Both sisters find themselves dealing with their own insecurities as they navigate these new relationships, and having to also deal with the fallout of the decisions they’ve made. Things are made even more difficult when Tara doesn’t attend a comeback gig that Martin has arranged, and an unexpected truth about Nick’s memoir is revealed…

The feature debut of English writer/director Emma Forrest, Untogether is another of those LA fables that revel in presenting a handful of characters with a surfeit of insecurities, and traits that keep them from ever being happy, no matter how hard they try. Your patience for this sort of thing will be dependent on how many similar movies you’ve seen already, because although there’s no shortage of pointed humour and affecting drama in Forrest’s debut, ultimately the problems and the issues her characters face aren’t all that original. Andrea is another in the long line of movie novelists who struggle to find that elusive second book, and detest the negative attention that comes with it. Nick isn’t a writer, and his easy success rankles with her, and it’s this and her own doubts as to whether she’ll ever write again that causes Andrea to do what she can to sabotage her relationship with Nick, and take steps toward self-harming. However, a lot of this perceived angst is just that, perceived, as Forrest’s script never takes Andrea to a dark enough place to make her as sympathetic as she should be. You just want her to get over herself and stop brooding about what she hasn’t got, and to focus instead on what she has got.

Unfortunately, the same is true of Tara. While we can assume that she likes older men given her relationship with Martin, her sudden attraction for David is never convincingly portrayed, despite good work from the ever reliable Kirke, and Crystal in a serio-comic role that carries a lot of warmth. This leaves the relationship between Tara and Martin to founder more and more as the movie goes on, becoming less and less interesting as Forrest moves her characters from Point A to Point B by way of convenience instead of natural progression. As for Nick, Dornan is stuck with a role that has no arc, and makes little impact, leaving Andrea’s infatuation for him something that comes across as more curious than plausible. Though her script struggles to avoid the clichés inherent in such intertwined stories, Forrest has better luck in the director’s chair, and keeps the viewer involved thanks to a combination of placing the emotion in a scene front and centre, and a cast that enters into the spirit of things with a commitment and gusto that smooths over the screenplay’s rougher patches. By the end, you may be glad that it’s all over, and that the journey wasn’t worth the time and the effort, but there are enough good moments along the way to make sticking with it a reward in itself.

Rating: 6/10 – another tale of lost souls in LA (just how many can there be?), Untogether sees its characters tasked with taking risks in their lives, but having no idea what to do, or being too afraid to do so in the first place; frustrating for its lack of a coherent message, but worth it for the performances (Mendelsohn is particularly effective), perhaps it’s an indication that Forrest should focus on directing instead of writing.

Then Came You (2018)

09 Saturday Feb 2019

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Asa Butterfield, Cancer, Comedy, Drama, Friendship, Hypochondriac, Maisie Williams, Nina Dobrev, Peter Hutchings, Review, Romance

D: Peter Hutchings / 97m

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Maisie Williams,Nina Dobrev, Ken Jeong, Tyler Hoechlin, David Koechner, Peyton List, Tituss Burgess, Sonya Walger, Colin Moss

(And the award for worst movie poster of 2018 goes to…)

Calvin (Butterfield) is nineteen and a committed hypochondriac: he keeps a journal of his symptoms, and is a regular at his long-suffering doctor’s. When his doctor sends him to a cancer support group in the hopes that it will put Calvin’s “problems” into perspective, he meets Skye (Williams), a sixteen year old whose condition is terminal. Skye latches on to Calvin, and browbeats him into helping her tick off the items on her bucket list. As they get to know each other better, and Calvin sees how Skye copes with her illness (and her impending demise), his own fears and worries begin to fall away, and he even entertains the idea of talking to the woman of his dreams, an air stewardess called Izzy (Dobrov) (Calvin works as a baggage handler at the local airport). With Skye and Calvin’s friendship helping both of them to recognise what’s important in their lives, a reticence on Calvin’s part threatens his budding relationship with Izzy, while Skye comes to realise that the items on her bucket list aren’t as important as she first thought…

And we’re back… in that strange realm where teenagers are saddled with the kind of emotional baggage that can only come from having back stories forged in the mind of a cruel screenwriter (here the wonderfully named Fergal Rock). Calvin’s hypochondria is the by-product of the guilt he feels for surviving the car accident that killed his twin sister when they were eight. Skye’s devil-may-care attitude hides her genuine fear of dying before she’s had a chance to really experience life. And in true movie fashion, their friendship allows them both to shrug off the emotional chains that they’ve allowed themselves to carry around (like teenage versions of Jacob Marley’s ghost), and to become better people as a result. All of which begs the question, just why is teenage suffering so widely explored in the movies? And why is it so often explored in such a lightweight, overly familiar, and generally superficial manner as it is here? Even if you had never seen this kind of movie before, you’d still be able to work out its dynamic and where it’s headed, and pretty quickly too. It’s a strange conundrum – why keep combining a coming of age drama with a tragic, illness of the week scenario?

In the hands of Rock and director Peter Hutchings, Then Came You lacks surprises, depth, and any appreciable consistency in the tone of the material, preferring instead to make an amiable comedy out of dying, and to use one character’s terminal illness to make another character feel better about themselves. If this leaves a nasty taste in the mouth, it’s as nothing to the scene where Calvin takes Skye to visit his sister’s grave, and explains how she died. It’s such a monumentally insensitive thing for Calvin to do, and yet you can tell this is meant to be one of those “important” moments that speaks to the pain he’s been suffering (poor thing!). Badly thought out as it is, it could have been a whole lot worse, but thanks to the combined efforts of Butterfield and Williams, scenes such as this one, and many others, look and sound better than they would do under closer inspection. Their performances (and Dobrov’s) are enjoyable, and their efforts allow Calvin and Skye’s relationship to appear more credible than it has any right to be. And this all speaks to the overall problem that the movie struggles to overcome: it never feels real and it never feels as if you could ever meet the likes of Calvin and Skye in real life.

Rating: 4/10 – with its central message – if you’re feeling bad about yourself, go find someone who’s worse off than you – Then Came You is a romantic comedy drama that plays derivatively as a romance, uneasily as a comedy, and disastrously as a drama; its attempts at being quirky fall flat, and without its talented cast to prop it up, it would all collapse like a poorly cooked soufflé, an analogy that is entirely apt once you realise just how little this movie has to say about death, love, and finding happiness.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

04 Monday Feb 2019

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Biography, Comedy, Dolly Wells, Drama, Lee Israel, Literary adaptation, Literary forgeries, Marielle Heller, Melissa McCarthy, Review, Richard E. Grant, True story

D: Marielle Heller / 106m

Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Dolly Wells, Ben Falcone, Gregory Korostishevsky, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Christian Navarro, Anna Deveare Smith

New York, 1991. Author Lee Israel (McCarthy) is struggling with a combination of writer’s block, alcoholism, and financial troubles. Her last book wasn’t well received, and her agent (Curtin) is unable to get her an advance for her latest project, a biography of Fanny Brice. In order to make ends meet, Lee sells a letter she received from Katharine Hepburn to a local bookseller, Anna (Wells). Anna’s chance remark that she would have paid more for “better content”, allied with the discovery of a letter by Brice while doing research, leads Lee to forging and selling letters by well known literary figures. She’s successful at first, but in time suspicions are raised, and Lee is blacklisted. To combat this, Lee enlists the aid of her friend, Jack Hock (Grant), an aging British actor who is as much down on his luck as she is. But though he too is initially successful at selling Lee’s forgeries, it’s not long before she becomes aware that the FBI is involved, and actively talking to the people she’s sold to. And then Jack is arrested…

What would you do to maintain your fame and (minor) fortune? How far would you go to retain the idea that your work is still relevant when the evidence points otherwise? And how would you go about it without jeopardising what little respect you still have amongst your peers? These are all questions asked by Can You Ever Forgive Me?, a sobering yet archly humorous exploration of the ways in which bitterness and a misplaced sense of entitlement can lead someone to abandon their principles in pretty much a heartbeat. What makes Lee’s fall from grace so ironic is that she was arguably more successful as a forger than she was as a legitimate writer. It’s another aspect of the cautionary tale that made up most of Lee’s later life that the screenplay – by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty – correctly focuses on. With its bittersweet coda, that sees one of Lee’s forgeries regarded as real (and priced accordingly), there’s an argument that what she did was her best work of all, and she herself would have probably agreed (at her trial, she relays the fact that her time spent forging literary letters was the best time of her life). Was she aware of this while she wrote them? It’s possible, and if she did, it goes some way to answering a good number of the questions the movie raises about her.

In raising these kinds of questions, the movie is helped immensely by the performance of Melissa McCarthy. An actress who is in many ways hampered by her comedy persona, McCarthy is a revelation here, unlikeable yet likeably tenacious, arrogant yet without cause, and undermined by her own insecurities. It’s a tremendous portrayal that allows Lee to appear vulnerable, and unerringly caustic at the same time, while giving McCarthy her best role so far (and one that enables us to forget her other two movies of 2018, Life of the Party and The Happytime Murders). Partnered with an equally unforgettable performance from Richard E. Grant – the relish with which he tackles his role is infectious; no wonder he’s already won eighteen awards – McCarthy channels unexpected depths as Lee, and makes her more than just a hack with a drink problem and a (deliberate) shortage of friends. If the movie does Lee any kind of injustice, it’s in distancing itself from her being a lesbian, something that’s awkwardly, and unconvincingly, addressed through a tentative friendship with Anna. Otherwise, this is a tremendously unfashionable biopic about an unhappy, disreputable woman (and her equally disreputable sidekick) who seek to repair their fragile egos through lying to others, and themselves.

Rating: 8/10 – with a transformative performance from McCarthy, and astute, carefully layered direction from first-timer Heller, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a dark comedy that touches on some very serious topics while daring the viewer to like its main character; fascinating and smartly handled, it’s a movie you feel the real Lee Israel would have been happy with, as long as she got the right credit.

The Merger (2018)

26 Saturday Jan 2019

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Australia, Bodgy Creek, Comedy, Damian Callinan, Drama, Footy, John Howard, Kate Mulvany, Mark Grentell, Rafferty Grierson, Refugees, Review, Stage adaptation

D: Mark Grentell / 103m

Cast: Damian Callinan, Kate Mulvany, John Howard, Rafferty Grierson, Fayssal Bazzi, Nick Cody, Josh McConville, Penny Cook, Angus McLaren, Stephen Hunter, Ben Knight, Sahil Saluja, Zenia Starr, Francis Kamara, Harry Tseng, Aaron Gocs

In the small town of Bodgy Creek, the local Aussie Rules footy team is in trouble. Without a coach, or even a full squad of players, and a clubhouse that has been condemned due to asbestos, the Roosters need a miracle – or a merger with another team. Town patriarch and team overseer Bull Barlow (Howard) is lost for answers, so when his daughter-in-law, Angie (Mulvany), suggests they ask local outcast and ex-professional footy player Troy Carrington (Callinan) to coach the team and find more players, he’s less than enthusiastic. An encounter with a Syrian refugee, Sayyid (Bazzi), gives Troy an unusual idea: to re-populate the Roosters with Sayyid and some of the other refugees that the town is supporting. As well as the expected resistance from Bull, some of the existing players are upset by Troy’s approach, but as they begin to learn about their new team mates and the often harrowing experiences they’ve had in their home countries, bonds develop between them, bonds that enable the Roosters to begin winning games, and restore the town’s lost pride…

Adapted from Callinan’s one-man stage show of the same name, The Merger is a timely comedy that looks at the refugee crisis, and Australia’s response to it through the use of Bodgy Creek’s tight-knit community. The movie has a serious streak to it, but this is first and foremost a light-hearted, very funny feature that serves as a reminder that when the Aussies make movies that focus on small town foibles and posturings, the end results are always entertaining – even when there’s a message in there too. Such is the case here, with Cullinan’s show being expanded to meet the demands of its new medium, and thanks to director Mark Grentell’s smart handling of the material, the comedy and the drama mix in such a way that neither overshadows the other. This makes for a light-hearted yet sincere movie that is as comfortable exploring topics such as xenophobia as it is in exploiting the ignorance of its characters, including bar owner Porterhouse (“Well done!”) (Gocs) and his attempts at fusion cuisine. There’s an endearing mix of humorous dialogue (“A hermit going to a stranger’s funeral is just weird”) and running gags (School Shoes’ injuries), and wry observations on a number of topics from small town politics to cultural differences.

Humour aside, the movie is also well crafted in terms of its drama. Troy befriends a ten year old boy called Neil (Grierson), whose father, Angie’s husband, has died a year ago in a motorbike accident. Getting to know him by making a documentary about Troy, Neil helps bring Troy out of his “hermit” shell, and by doing so, finds he has a new father figure in his life. Inevitably, Troy and Angie begin to develop their own relationship, and while this is entirely predictable, it’s handled with deft assurance by Grentell, and Callinan ensures there’s a minimum of sentimentality involved. More successful still is the focus on what it means to be a refugee, and the toll it takes when loved ones have been left behind. Less satisfying though is Bull’s blatant prejudice, an aspect of the movie that comes across as forced rather than credible, and which is resolved too easily thanks to an unlikely intervention by Sayyid. The performances are solid, with Mulvany and Callinan sharing an easy chemistry, while Grierson is terrific as a ten year old with way too many questions (the follow on question to “What’s a monologue?” is priceless), and a neat line in honest put-downs. Each character gets their moment in the spotlight (even Stan, the team’s oldest “player”), and each actor responds accordingly. It’s also given an extra shot of vim and vigour thanks to Tony Luu’s vibrant cinematography, and its willingness to embrace (and address) the vicissitudes of small town life, all of which adds up to a movie that has much to say but which does so without being pedantic or judgmental.

Rating: 8/10 – hugely enjoyable, and with moments of poignancy and heartbreak, The Merger is a wonderful reminder that when it comes to movies like these, the Aussies know exactly what they’re doing; charming and sincere in equal measure, its message of tolerance and inclusivity is welcome in the current international and political climate, and its positive attitude makes it exactly the kind of feelgood movie we can all do with right now.

Keep an Eye Out (2018)

19 Saturday Jan 2019

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Au poste!, Benoît Poelvoorde, Comedy, Drama, France, Grégoire Ludig, Interrogation, Marc Fraize, Quentin Dupieux, Review

Original title: Au poste!

D: Quentin Dupieux / 73m

Cast: Benoît Poelvoorde, Grégoire Ludig, Marc Fraize, Anaïs Demoustier, Philippe Duquesne, Jacky Lambert, Orelsan, Jeanne Rosa, Vincent Grass

Late one night, the man who’s found a dead body outside his apartment block and reported it to the police, Fugain (Ludig), finds himself being interrogated by Superintendent Buron (Poelvoorde). Buron asks Fugain to repeat his previous statement, and to go into further detail by explaining his actions leading up to the discovery of the body. Fugain begins doing so, but has to leave the room for a while to meet his son (Orelsan). Buron leaves another officer, Philippe (Fraize), in charge, but when their conversation turns to homicidal matters that don’t relate to Fugain’s discovery, it leads to an unfortunate accident that Fugain needs to hide from Buron when he returns. Fugain continues to recount the events preceding his discovery of the body, most of which are prosaic and dull, something Buron is quick to point out. As the interrogation continues, Fugain becomes less and less of a suspect in Buron’s eyes, but when Buron’s boss, Champonin (Duquesne), pays him an unexpected visit, a chance discovery leads to Fugain being put on the spot, but not before something completely bizarre happens…

If you’re familiar with the work of Quentin Dupieux, then you’ll probably be thinking that whatever happens in Keep an Eye Out, it won’t be ordinary or commonplace. And you’d be right. But it takes a while for Dupieux for reveal just how quirky and unpredictable his latest movie is going to be. Throughout the opening sequence, which sees Buron taking time out from interrogating Fugain in order to arrange a get-together with one of his friends (and which is humorous enough by itself), we can see another man with his back to the camera. Buron gains his attention and the man turns in his chair to reveal his has no left eye. This is Philippe, and it’s in that moment that you know that whatever Dupieux has up his sleeve isn’t going to be like any other French comedy you’ve seen recently. From then on, the movie steps up a notch and Fugain’s increasingly uncomfortable situation becomes the stuff of quietly controlled farce. Badgered by Buron’s insistence on breaking down his whereabouts before discovering the body into minute, but boring detail, Fugain can only sit and wait for his ordeal to be over. As he keeps saying, he’s innocent. But events have superseded all this, and like all good farceurs, Dupieux delights in putting Fugain in more and more trouble.

As well as having some very witty and very sharp dialogue, the movie also trades on some visual tricks and anomalies that add to the proceedings, and which act as clues for the observant viewer that not everything is as it seems. And so it proves. At the point where Fugain seems finally in the clear, Dupieux delights in pulling the rug out under from under him, and then in a startling move that defies expectations, from under the viewer as well. It’s a moment of sheer audacity that only someone like Dupieux could pull off (or even think of). But it wouldn’t work half as well if it wasn’t for the characters, expertly devised and played by Dupieux’s talented cast. Poelvoorde is terrific as the deadpan, seemingly bored but dogged superintendent, while Ludig is a perfect foil as the upright man targeted because of a moment’s rash behaviour, but who becomes embroiled in something far worse. Fraize almost steals the show from both of them as Philippe, a recently appointed officer whose opinions about set squares have a particularly apt payoff. But to say more about this wonderfully droll movie and the odd tangents it takes us to would be to spoil things. Suffice it to say, it’s definitely one to watch.

Rating: 8/10 – another unconventional, but delightfully peculiar outing from the off-kilter imagination of Quentin Dupieux, Keep an Eye Out is funny, arresting, bizarre, and an absolute joy; more impactful as well due to its short running time, it’s a movie that’s so confidently assembled and handled that the fact that it’ll be difficult to see outside of its native France is a terrible state of affairs.

The Upside (2017)

13 Sunday Jan 2019

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Bryan Cranston, Comedy, Drama, Kevin Hart, Life auxiliary, Neil Burger, Nicole Kidman, Quadriplegia, Remake, Review

D: Neil Burger / 126m

Cast: Kevin Hart, Bryan Cranston, Nicole Kidman, Aja Naomi King, Jahi Di’Allo Winston, Golshifteh Farahani, Genevieve Angelson, Tate Donovan, Julianna Margulies

Parolee Dell Scott (Hart) is fresh out of prison and trying his best (which isn’t much) to avoid going straight back in. Tasked with finding a job as quickly as possible by his parole officer, Dell attends what he thinks is an interview for a cleaning job. The number of waiting applicants surprises him, but when time drags on and he’s in danger of not picking up his son, Anthony (Winston), from school on time, he crashes the interviews in order to get a signature to say that he’s attended. But the job proves to be a life auxiliary for ex-businessman Phillip Lacasse (Cranston), who is paralysed from the neck down. Against the better wishes of Phillip’s associate, Yvonne (Kidman), Phillip takes to Dell’s unconventional attitude, and decices to hire him. Unsure at first, Dell’s decision is made for him thanks to a row with his wife, Latrice (King), over his inability to properly provide for her and Anthony. Realising that being a carer for Phillip could solve a lot of his problems, Dell accepts the job, but soon finds that he’s not quite as prepared for it as he thought…

The third remake of the French movie Intouchables (2011), The Upside reaches us long after its first screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2017. Caught up in the scandal involving Harvey Weinstein, the movie’s planned release in March 2018 was shelved until it was picked up for distribution by STX Entertainment and Lantern Entertainment (the successor to the Weinstein Company). Now the only question is: was it worth the wait? Sadly, the answer is, not really. This is a movie that is almost entirely depth-free, and dramatically inert. It’s a standard Hollywood interpretation of the kind of feelgood story that comes along every now and then and which, thanks to its sincerity and innate positivity, tugs at the heartstrings. But as usual in Hollywood, this kind of narrative can’t be allowed to exist in and of itself; it has to be treated with a level of over-simplification that five year olds would find frustrating, and slathered with enough gooey sentimentality to induce Type 2 diabetes in the unsuspecting viewer. There’s often a formula to these kinds of stories, but the best versions try their best to wrest something new from the material. Here the formula is embraced wholeheartedly… and then some.

This leaves the viewer with two choices: to either go with the flow and settle for spending an occasionally amusing, occasionally effective couple of hours that will leave them unmoved, or to rail against every predictable plot and story development for being so obvious. Either will involve a tremendous amount of effort on the viewer’s part, and neither will see them coming away singing the movie’s praises. For despite the chemistry between Hart and Cranston, and their performances – which at least stop the material from becoming too sappy – this is very much a movie that coasts for most of its running time, and which struggles to find anything to say. Burger does what he can, but someone really should have stepped in at the first draft stage and told screenwriter Jon Hartmere that a by-the-numbers approach wasn’t what was needed (though you do get the feeling that’s exactly what the producers wanted). Cranston is good value as always, and Hart, trying to broaden his range, is okay, but he doesn’t do anything to make us think that there’s a serious actor inside him who’s desperately seeking the dramatic limelight. And then there’s Kidman, on something of a role at the moment, but so under-utilised it’s hard to work out why she said yes. Like much about this movie, her presence begs a secondary question: was it worth the effort?

Rating: 5/10 – though its leads work well together, and there are some good comedic moments in amongst the otherwise routine material, The Upside is, unfortunately, a movie that doesn’t live up to its title; with issues around disability, class and race carefully ignored in favour of making this purely a feelgood movie, even the obligatory falling out between Dell and Phillip feels as manufactured as everything else.

Anchor and Hope (2017)

09 Wednesday Jan 2019

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Canal boat, Carlos Marques-Marcet, Comedy, David Verdaguer, Drama, Literary adaptation, Natalia Tena, Oona Chaplin, Pregnancy, Review

D: Carlos Marques-Marcet / 113m

Cast: Oona Chaplin, Natalia Tena, David Verdaguer, Geraldine Chaplin, Lara Rossi

Eva (Chaplin) and Kat (Tena) live a somewhat idyllic life on their canal boat, free to roam where they please and work how they wish. The death of their cat prompts Eva to raise the idea of their having a child, something that has been discussed previously but which Kat isn’t so keen on. The arrival of their friend, Roger (Verdaguer), for a short stay with them, prompts further fun times, until one night when all three of them are drunk and Eva suggests that Roger could be the sperm donor. David readily agrees, but Kat is less than enthusiastic, and though it goes against her better judgment, she allows herself to be persuaded to agree to the idea. The plan goes ahead, and despite a couple of hiccoughs along the way, Eva becomes pregnant. But while Eva and Roger – who is excited at the prospect of being a father, even though he won’t be fully involved in the child’s upbringing – bond over buying things for the baby, Kat becomes more and more distant from Eva. As their relationship becomes more and more strained, an unexpected turn of events pushes them further apart…

A Spanish production made in the UK, Anchor and Hope is an amusing, adroitly handled mix of comedy and drama that deals with the subject of same sex parenting, but in a way that doesn’t feel heavy handed or pedantic, and which also doesn’t exploit its potential as a LGBTQ+ movie with a pointed message. Based on the novel Maternidades subversivas by Maria Llopis, the movie treats Eva and Kat like any normal couple with a difficult decision to make (one that will mean a huge difference and change to their relationship), but does ensure that the relevant feelings on both sides are fully expressed and understood. What this reveals more than anything else is the ways in which two people sharing a life and a potential future, can still be acting out of selfish reasons that have nothing to do with the needs of the other. Kat is fearful of losing what she has with Eva (while behaving in a way that is likely to push Eva away completely), and Eva wants a child because of her own emotional needs. Of course there will be conflict between them, and of course their relationship will be tested, but Marques-Marcet and co-screenwriter Jules Nurrish avoid any unnecessary melodramatics and manage to keep things simple yet still largely effective.

By focusing on the characters, though, some of the wider issues – the rights of the donor father, how Eva and Kat will manage financially, how the child will be raised – are acknowledged but not explored, and Roger’s place in the narrative isn’t as fully developed as Eva and Kat’s. It’s fortunate then that Verdaguer provides Roger with a charming, care-free romanticism that provides much of the movie’s light relief. Tena and Chaplin are equally as good, shading their characters so that Eva and Kat’s motivations and behaviours are credible, and this even though the material flows toward the obvious on too many occasions. Marques-Marcet handles the dramatic highs and lows and comic flourishes with noticeable skill, and never once lacks for sincerity in his approach and commitment to the screenplay. With Dagmar Weaver-Madsen’s intimate cinematography catching all the nuances of the various performances, Anchor and Hope is perhaps more predictable than it needed to be, but though most viewers will see each plot development coming a mile off, spending time with the characters is rewarding enough, and the movie as a whole is surprisingly entertaining. And life on a canal boat has rarely looked so appealing…

Rating: 7/10 – Marques-Marcet’s first English language feature, Anchor and Hope is a quietly thoughtful, and emotionally honest movie that tells its story simply and with a great deal of probity; the obviousness of the situation, and the relationship between Eva and Kat, keeps the material from having more of an impact, but luckily this doesn’t detract from a movie that sometimes feels like it’s going to outstay its welcome, but which averts disaster by keeping things intriguing and realistic.

The Favourite (2018)

04 Friday Jan 2019

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Comedy, Drama, Emma Stone, Hatfield House, History, Olivia Colman, Queen Anne, Rachel Weisz, Review, Yorgos Lanthimos

D: Yorgos Lanthimos / 119m

Cast: Olivia Colman, Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Nicholas Hoult, Joe Alwyn, Mark Gatiss, James Smith, Jenny Rainsford

England, 1708. Queen Anne (Colman) is on the throne, but the real power lies with Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (Weisz), the Queen’s best friend, confidante, and lover. Sarah counsels the Queen on almost every matter that comes before her, and uses Anne’s malleability to promote her own political agenda. The arrival of a destitute cousin of Sarah’s, Abigail Hill (Stone), prompts the beginning of a power struggle between the two women, as they vie for the Queen’s attention, both in and out of the bed chamber. Sarah’s experience proves no match for Abigail’s determination to see her social status restored to her, and the on-going war with France that Sarah is supporting is undermined by Abigail’s mutually beneficial allegiance with politician Robert Harley (Hoult). With Anne’s health worsening due to gout, Abigail aims to supplant Sarah once and for all, and arranges for her to be missing from court. As Anne becomes more and more dependant on Abigail’s presence, and gives her blessing to an advantageous marriage to a courtier, Samuel Masham (Alwyn), Sarah returns to make one last effort to overturn Abigail’s influence, and restore her own position with the Queen…

For most people, The Favourite will be seen in 2019. There will be other historical movies that will carry over from 2018 and reach their intended audience, but it’s a sure bet that Yorgos Lanthimos’ ebullient follow up to The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) will be unlike any other. A riotous mix of scabrous comedy, intelligently handled drama, bawdy romance, political intrigue, and ferocious oneupmanship (oneupwomanship?), this plays fast and loose with historical accuracy (though the three-way affair depicted actually happened), and instead opts for being a rambunctious send up of both the times and the people who lived through them. Working from a glorious screenplay by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, Lanthimos has fashioned his most accessible movie to date, and one that offers a plethora of riches. First and foremost are the fierce, redoubtable performances of its trio of female leads, all of whom attack the material with undisguised relish, and all of whom give superb portrayals of women for whom men are either to be used, or ignored, or both. Harley is the principal male protagonist, and in any other movie he would emerge triumphant with all of his ambitions achieved, and stronger than ever. Here he achieves his ambitions, but the audience knows that it’s just a matter of time before his position will collapse into political and personal ruin.

With gender reversals of this type firmly on display (and encouraged), Lanthimos gives his cast full rein to inhabit their roles with gusto. Weisz is condescending and vampish as Sarah, a career manipulator who finds herself surprisingly ill-equipped to deal with Abigail’s more straightforward manoeuvrings. Stone is a revelation, portraying an historical character so far removed from her previous acting roles that her confidence is often astonishing; she embues Abigail with such a sweet-natured viciousness that you have no idea just what she’ll do next. And then there’s Colman, towering over both of them, her performance a thing of magnificent yet focused excess, railing against imagined injustices one moment, dew-eyed and poignant the next as Anne remembers her seventeen dead children. It all takes place against the sumptuous backdrop of Hatfield House, its rooms and corridors given tremendous presence in the movie thanks to the use of fisheye lenses and wide shots, making it another character altogether, one whose size helps to put the machinations of its human counterparts into stark relief for their transitory nature. But even with all this – and a terrific soundtrack as well – it’s the interlocking relationships between Anne, Sarah and Abigail, all counter turns and devious switches, that hold the attention and prove the most rewarding part of a movie that has so much to offer that it’s almost embarrassing.

Rating: 9/10 – Lanthimos’ auteur leanings are still on display, but here he’s at his most relaxed and amenable, and the result is that The Favourite is easily his best movie so far; a movie to wallow in over and over again, it is richly detailed, formidably acted, wickedly perverse, beautifully shot (by Robbie Ryan), and a pure delight from beginning to end.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (2018)

01 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Ben Wheatley, Bill Paterson, Comedy, Doon Mackichan, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Hayley Squires, Neil Maskell, New Year's Eve, Party, Review, Sam Riley

D: Ben Wheatley / 95m

Cast: Sarah Baxendale, Sudha Bhuchar, Asim Choudhry, Joe Cole, Charles Dance, Sura Dohnke, Vincent Ebrahim, Peter Ferdinando, Richard Glover, Alexandra Maria Lara, Doon Mackichan, Neil Maskell, Sinead Matthews, Mark Monero, Bill Paterson, Sam Riley, Hayley Squires

For Colin Burstead (Maskell), a New Year’s Eve party for his extended family at a seaside country manor seems like a great idea. But as he and his wife, Val (Dohnke), and the rest of the guests begin to arrive, the chances of the event going smoothly becomes increasingly unlikely, and begins when his mother, Sandy (Mackichan) trips over the front step and injures her ankle. With his father, Gordon (Paterson), trying desperately to convince Colin to lend him a large amount of money, and the news that his estranged brother, David (Riley), has been invited as a surprise by his sister, Jini (Squires), Colin begins to feel more and more agitated as he tries to keep everything from falling apart. With most of the other guests having their own issues to deal with – uncle Bertie (Dance) is a cross-dresser with a bleak immediate future, Val is perturbed by the presence of Lainey (Matthews), a member of the hotel staff who dated Colin before he and Val met – the arrival of David threatens to ruin everything…

With its simple premise and very basic set up, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead introduces us to yet another dysfunctional family whose individual idiosyncracies and personal motivations will ensure an awkward time is had by all, thereby allowing the viewer to reap the dramatic and comedic benefits. You know from the start that it’s all going to go badly wrong, as soon as David’s name is mentioned. You just don’t know how, and part of the fun of Ben Wheatley’s latest, emotional violence only, movie is in trying to work out just how it will all go downhill, and how rapidly. But Wheatley (here stripping back Coriolanus and using it as the basis for the action), isn’t just interested in revealing secrets and infidelities, he’s more concerned with the effects that these have had on his characters, and where those effects have brought them. In the end it doesn’t matter what David has done (though we do find out), but what is is how it informs the responses of everyone else. What this leads to, and what is refreshing in terms of the drama, is the restrained nature of the fallout itself. No one comes to blows with anyone else, and though there are plenty of strong verbal exchanges, Wheatley refrains from making this anything more than the kind of family disagreements that we’ve all witnessed.

So, while Wheatley’s restraint is admirable in terms of making things unpredictable, it does, however, have the unfortunate effect of making the drama of the situation itself feel less impactful. With its documentary style camerawork courtesy of long-term collaborator, DoP Laurie Rose, the movie flits from character to character with a restlessness that gives the movie some much needed energy and pace, but which doesn’t entirely hide the fact that the various storylines and personal intrigues on display aren’t as interesting or as provocative as might be expected. Also, some of the characters – necessarily perhaps – are marginalised by the demands of Wheatley’s script, which begs the question, why have so many? As a result, cast members such as Ferdinando and Cole have little to do, while some of the storylines peter out thanks to the need to address the issue of what David did. Though the movie suffers accordingly, and ends with a scene that some viewers might sympathise with (though for different reasons), Wheatley’s script does ensure that there’s plenty of dry wit on display, and the characters and their foibles are both recognisable, and understandable.

Rating: 7/10 – with an ensemble cast of British acting talent that takes to the material with obvious enthusiasm, Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is writer/director Ben Wheatley’s most relaxed and (for British audiences at least) accessible movie to date; with echoes of Mike Leigh’s work about it – the improvised dialogue, the emotive undercurrents – it’s a movie that takes a different tack with what is over-familiar territory, but in doing so, forgets to provide anything too memorable for viewers to take away with them.

NOTE: Currently, there isn’t a trailer available for Happy New Year, Colin Burstead.

Holmes & Watson (2018) – Or, Time for Will Ferrell to Do Something Different

27 Thursday Dec 2018

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Comedy, Dr Watson, Etan Cohen, John C. Reilly, Moriarty, Parody, Queen Victoria, Rebecca Hall, Review, Sherlock Holmes, Will Ferrell

D: Etan Cohen / 90m

Cast: Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly, Rebecca Hall, Kelly Macdonald, Lauren Lipkus, Rob Brydon, Pam Ferris, Steve Coogan, Hugh Laurie, Ralph Fiennes

A score of 3.9 on IMDb. A score of 25 on Metacritic. A 6% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. All beg the question: is Holmes & Watson really that bad? The answer is unequivocal: yes, it is.

It’s not just bad, it’s abysmal. It’s sluggish, dull, uninspired, monotonous, vapid, unimaginative, feeble, pointless, moronic, inane, stupid, tedious, stale, lacklustre, incompetent, and worst of all for a supposed comedy, almost entirely laugh free. It’s a clear contender for worst movie of the year, something of a feat when 2018 has already given us the likes of Lake Placid: Legacy, The Nun, Mile 22, Supercon, and Proud Mary. This is a movie that is so awful you have to wonder if anyone was paying attention while they were making it, a piece of dreadful nonsense about a plot to kill Queen Victoria (Ferris) by Professor Moriarty (Fiennes) that is so lazy its climax takes place on RMS Titanic (Victoria was long dead by the time it launched in 1912). Writer/director Cohen brings absolutely nothing new to the idea of a Sherlock Holmes parody, and wastes the time and efforts of his very talented cast. A perfect example of Cohen’s approach is the moment when Holmes smears Watson in horse shit; a better metaphor for the movie as a whole couldn’t be more fitting.

But more concerning perhaps than all of this is the performance of Will Ferrell. Someone really needs to take him to one side and tell him that his manic style of comic acting is wearing perilously thin these days. Shouting isn’t inherently funny, but Ferrell does this a lot, and when he isn’t shouting, he’s behaving in such an arch, mannered fashion that he just looks and sounds like he’s trying too hard, as if someone had told him that if he didn’t behave that way then the material – and his performance – wouldn’t be as effective. As a result, it’s hard to tell if Ferrell is afraid to try something different, or he’s just being lazy. Either way, he’s the movie’s weakest link, and he drags it down every time he opens his mouth or offers us another of his “hilarious” facial expressions (see above). Maybe it’s time for Ferrell to broaden his horizons and make more serious fare, and remind audiences that beneath his default man-child persona, there’s an actor with a greater range than portrayals such as Chazz Michael Michaels in Blades of Glory (2007) and James in Get Hard (2015) would seem to indicate. It’s not as if he hasn’t proved this already, with Stranger Than Fiction (2006) and Everything Must Go (2010), movies that showed he could do subtle and restrained, and find the truth in a character, rather than their inner idiot.

In the meantime we’re stuck with Holmes & Watson, a movie that sucks hard at the teat of comedy and comes away with the merest of dribbles to sustain its inept storyline, dire dialogue, and crass characterisations (you really have to feel for the likes of Fiennes and Hall, forced to standby as their credibility as serious actors is stripped from them with each passing moment they’re on screen). Cohen – whose first outing as a writer/director was the less than appropriately titled short, My Wife Is Retarded (2007) – displays a singular lack of ability behind the camera, cluttering up the frame, placing the camera where it has the least impact, and utilising close ups for dramatic purposes that only he can explain. Scenes connect haphazardly and awkwardly with each other, and Holmes’ leaps of intuition make about as much sense as why this farrago was made in the first place. This is the second movie of 2018 to feature John C. Reilly and Steve Coogan in its cast, and it’s instructive that this is markedly inferior to their other outing, the sublime Stan & Ollie. Now that really is a funny movie (take note, Will Ferrell).

Rating: 3/10 – saved from a 2/10 rating by virtue of its production design alone, Holmes & Watson is a terrible, dispiriting way to see out the year, and a firm reminder that Ferrell’s “schtick” is well past its sell-by date; when a “comedy” with such a talented cast is released straight to cinemas without the benefit of critics’ screenings beforehand then the warning signs couldn’t be more obvious, and the timing of its release near Xmas is entirely apt: it’s an enormous turkey.

British Classics: Love Actually (2003)

24 Monday Dec 2018

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Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Comedy, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Liam Neeson, London, Love, Provence, Review, Richard Curtis, Romance, Xmas

D: Richard Curtis / 135m

Cast: Rowan Atkinson, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Colin Firth, Gregor Fisher, Martin Freeman, Hugh Grant, Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln, Laura Linney, Heike Makatsch, Kris Marshall, Martine McCutcheon, Lúcia Moniz, Liam Neeson, Bill Nighy, Joanna Page, Alan Rickman, Rodrigo Santoro, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton

In the weeks leading up to Xmas, several friends and relatives who are all connected to each other find themselves dealing with love in (almost) all its various forms. David (Grant) is the newly elected Prime Minister who finds himself attracted to Natalie (McCutcheon), a junior member of the staff at 10 Downing Street. Mark (Lincoln) is the best friend of Peter (Ejiofor), who has just married Juliet (Knightley) – who Mark is secretly in love with. Writer Jamie (Firth), after being cheated on by his girlfriend, heads to Provence to write his latest novel, and falls in love with his housekeeper, Aurélia (Moniz). David’s sister, Karen (Thompson), begins to suspect that her husband, Harry (Rickman), is having an affair with someone at his work. Meanwhile, one of his other employees, Sarah (Linney), has feelings for her colleague, Karl (Santoro), but doesn’t know how to broach them. Daniel (Neeson), a friend of Karen’s, is a recent widower who’s stepson Sam (Brodie-Sangster) reveals his own life for a girl at his school. John (Freeman) and Judy (Page) are body doubles working on a movie, while Colin (Marshall) dreams of visiting the U.S. where he believes his being British will attract lots of women.

The glue that binds all these characters together, even more so than writer/director Richard Curtis’s excessive generosity in connecting them in the first place, is the character of Billy Mack (Nighy), an aging singer making a comeback with a cover version of The Troggs’ Love Is All Around, retitled Christmas Is All Around. Whenever the movie is spending time with the other characters, Billy is often there in the background, his cheesy monstrosity of a Xmas record and louche behaviour a much needed antidote to the surfeit of sentimentality and saccharine romanticism that peppers the narrative from start to finish. Even the less “happy” storylines – Harry and Karen, Sarah and Karl, Juliet and Mark – are bittersweet entries that are layered with poignancy and hopefulness. But that’s the point of the movie: it’s a positive message of love for everyone. Even if a marriage founders for a moment (Harry and Karen), or love is a case of wrong place, wrong time (Mark and Juliet), or even if it never gets off the ground at all (Sarah and Karl), all the clichés are in place: love will find a way, love is all you need, love conquers all… That Curtis holds it all together and still manages to make it work despite all the plot contrivances and rampant wish fulfillment that threaten to derail it several times over, is a testament to his confidence in the material.

Of course, he’s aided by an accomplished ensemble cast who rise to their individual challenges with gusto and no small amount of charm. Grant’s dance routine, Rickman’s hangdog expressions, Nighy’s inappropriate smirking – all of these character beats and more help to make the movie a feast of feelgood moments that linger like treasured memories long after it’s ended. Curtis may have laid on the romance with a trowel (sometimes it’s like being battered over the head with a dozen red roses), but this is a very, very funny movie with endlessly quotable lines (Colin: “Stateside I am Prince William without the weird family”), visual gags aplenty, and the ability to spring a number of clever narrative sleights of hand when you’re least expecting them. It’s an appealing, but unsophisticated slice of romantic fairy tale excess that’s bolstered by pin-sharp humour, terrific performances, and a refreshing awareness that it all takes place in a fantasy-based “reality” of Curtis’s devising (where else would the US President get such a public dressing down for his behaviour?). Fifteen years on, it remains a perennial favourite at Xmas, and despite an initial lack of enthusiasm on the part of critics, a movie that has transcended any criticism – deserved or otherwise – to become one of those rare movies that can be enjoyed over and over again, and which never seems to grow old or stale with repeated viewings.

Rating: 8/10 – a movie that tells nine separate stories and which does justice to all of them, Love Actually is a moving, thoughtful, and emotional look at love itself and what it means for a variety of people in a variety of situations and circumstances (though notably, not anyone who’s LGBT); comic and romantic in equal measure, it’s a movie you can fall in love with easily and unreservedly (and any movie that contains Jeanne Moreau in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo has got to be getting things more right than wrong).

Almost Christmas (2016)

22 Saturday Dec 2018

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Comedy, Danny Glover, David E. Talbert, Drama, Dysfunctional family, Gabrielle Union, Kimberly Elise, Mo'Nique, Review, Romany Malco, Xmas

D: David E. Talbert / 111m

Cast: Danny Glover, Gabrielle Union, Mo’Nique, Kimberly Elise, Romany Malco, J.B. Smoove, Jesse T. Usher, John Michael Higgins, Nicole Ari Parker, Omar Epps, Keri Hilson, DC Young Fly

For Walter Meyers (Glover), it’s the first Xmas since the death of his wife, Grace. Determined to have the same traditional family get together that they always have, Walter invites his children and their partners and their children, and his sister-in-law, May (Mo’Nique), to spend the five days before Xmas with him. It should be a happy time for everyone, but his two daughters, Cheryl (Elise) and Rachel (Union) don’t get on, his eldest son, Christian (Malco), is wrapped up in running for Congress, and his youngest son, Evan (Usher), has an addiction to painkillers that no one is aware of. Animosities old and new soon take centre stage as Walter tries to rein in his family’s inability to get along for just five short days, while Cheryl’s husband, Lonnie (Smoove), does more than flirt with checkout girl, Jasmine (Hilson), and Christian’s involvement with a local planning issue threatens the homeless shelter that Grace and Walter supported their entire marriage. And that’s without Walter’s own plans to sell the family home, something he hasn’t mentioned to anyone…

Ah, the dysfunctional family. What would movie makers do without it, and especially at Xmas? (They’d probably have to invent it,) In writer/director David E. Talbert’s ode to the the highs and lows of Yuletide family arrangements, the Meyers family behave just like most large families, with some members still clinging on to long past upsets and disappointments as if they were freshly minted, with yet others in unfulfilling or strained relationships, and yet others trying to make sense of the lives they’re leading (while all of them are wondering where it all went wrong). None of the scenarios and storylines in Talbert’s screenplay, however, are particularly original, and even if you haven’t seen that many movies with a similar set up, there’s little here that will come as a surprise, except perhaps for Talbert’s laidback approach to the material, and how the search for easy laughs hampers the more dramatic elements (such is Talbert’s reliance on the tried and tested that Glover even gets to repeat his Lethal Weapon catchphrase, “I’m too old for this shit”). Audiences may feel the same way, as each sub-plot and scenario is worked through in the same formulaic way that dozens if not hundreds of other, similar movies have adopted before.

It’s a relief then, that the movie has the seasoned cast that it has, because without them, much of Talbert’s laboured screenplay would have stopped the movie from having any kind of impact at all. Glover is the patient patriarch who should really be banging some heads together, while Union and Smoove grab the lion’s share of the viewer’s attention by playing, respectively, the sister who’s still looking for a direction in her life, and the self-absorbed ex-basketball player whose head is easily turned by a pretty, young admirer. Stock characters they may be, but at least the cast know how to play them for maximum effect, even if that proves somewhat contradictory in practice. As a result, the movie is pleasant to watch, but in an undemanding fashion that allows the viewer to just sit back and let the movie do all the work, while the comedy is successful enough to warrant a few hearty guffaws here and there. Ultimately, it’s held together by good will and perseverance, and by a determination to do the best that it can, even if the odds are against it. And so, it’s like a lot of Xmas movies that feature a dysfunctional family: basically entertaining, but you wouldn’t want to repeat the experience.

Rating: 5/10 – with little to recommend it beyond the obvious, Almost Christmas is competent enough to hold the casual viewer’s interest – and not exactly a chore to watch – but it does what it does without attempting to be anything more effective; one to watch on a quiet Xmas Eve afternoon perhaps, but not one that is likely to be adopted as an annual Yuletide treat.

Stan & Ollie (2018)

18 Tuesday Dec 2018

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British tour, Comedy, Drama, John C. Reilly, Jon S. Baird, Laurel & Hardy, Nina Arianda, Review, Shirley Henderson, Steve Coogan

D: Jon S. Baird / 97m

Cast: Steve Coogan, John C. Reilly, Nina Arianda, Shirley Henderson, Danny Huston, Rufus Jones

In 1937, Stan Laurel (Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (Reilly) are at the height of their fame: beloved the world over, they are in the midst of making their latest movie, Way Out West, when Stan’s determination to get them more money doesn’t go as well as he’d hoped. Sixteen years later, the duo are embarking on a British comedy tour, beginning in Newcastle. They’re playing small venues to small audiences under the guidance of impresario Bernard Delfont (Jones), and missing their wives, Ida (Arianda) and Lucille (Henderson). They’re also hoping to begin filming a new version of Robin Hood once the tour has finished, and Stan spends much of his spare time fine-tuning the script. As the tour progresses, the sales improve, and by the time they reach London, the tour is a critical and commercial success. But long held animosities begin to surface, and the pair have a falling out. With public appearances and further shows to be carried out, Stan and Ollie continue at loggerheads until Ollie is taken ill, and the rest of the tour is threatened. Stan is persuaded to carry on with an English comedian in place of Ollie, but Laurel and Cook just isn’t the same…

An entertaining, affectionate, and beautifully played tribute to the comedy genius of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Stan & Ollie offers fans of the duo a chance to revel in some of the best loved comedy routines ever created, and to share in the limelight they enjoyed for around forty years. The movie acknowledges that they had their personal ups and downs – Stan antagonising Hal Roach (Huston) and getting fired after Way Out West (effectively ending their success at the box office), Ollie going off and doing “the elephant picture” (1939’s Zenobia) – and it isn’t afraid to highlight just how often their professionalism kept them going during these periods. But through all the disagreements and the disappointments that followed in the wake of their severed ties from Roach, what shines through is the enduring, unassailable nature of their partnership. Jeff Pope’s nostalgic and emotionally redolent screenplay shows just how strong a bond the pair had, and through the exceptional performances of Coogan and Reilly, we see that bond expressed through shared moments of happiness and contentment where, whatever else is going on around them, they’re able to find solace and strength in each other.

So this is as much a love story as it is a fictionalised record of a British tour that didn’t include plans to make a Robin Hood movie (that occurred during their European tour of 1947), and which conflates several other incidents from the time. But for once, historical fidelity isn’t the issue, instead it’s about being true to the legacy of Laurel & Hardy, and the joy they brought to millions. As portrayed by Coogan, Stan is the restless creator, always thinking up new ideas, new jokes, or tinkering with old ones to make them better. Laurel’s facial expressions have kept impressionists in work for decades, and Coogan does an excellent job of recreating them, but there’s also heart and passion in his performance, and he perfectly captures the quiet melancholy beneath all the laughs. Reilly is also excellent as Ollie, consumed by a fat suit, but more than capable of relaying Hardy’s own doubts and concerns, while retaining his sense of joy and his surprising physicality. Though the illusion is dispelled in close ups, when viewed at a distance and when they’re replicating the pair’s routines, it’s almost as if a veil has been lifted, and for a moment, you can believe you’re seeing the real thing. Now that would have been truly wonderful…

Rating: 9/10 – a moving, delightful, and above all, joyous celebration of Laurel & Hardy’s unique personal and professional relationships, Stan & Ollie could be accused of lacking depth, but as a snapshot of a surprisingly successful period in the duo’s lives it’s winning stuff, and packed with charm; with a number of classic L&H routines on display, and terrific supporting performances from Arianda and Henderson (sometimes they’re funnier than Stan and Ollie themselves), this is Baird’s best movie to date, and for fans, an absolute delight.

The Sweet Life (2016)

09 Sunday Dec 2018

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Abigail Spencer, Chris Messina, Comedy, Drama, Golden Gate Bridge, Review, Road trip, Rob Spera, Romance, Suicide

D: Rob Spera / 90m

Cast: Chris Messina, Abigail Spencer, Maggie Siff, Tyson Ritter, J.D. Evermore, Karan Soni, Glenn Plummer, Nick Searcy, Josh Pence, Jayne Brook

After another day of poor returns, depressed ice cream salesman Kenny Pantalio (Messina) contemplates throwing himself off a bridge and ending it all. But he’s interrupted by Lolita Nowicki (Spencer), a young woman with her own suicidal tendencies. When they discover they have the same therapist, it leads to them wandering through night-time Chicago until outside a swanky restaurant, Kenny is mistaken for a valet parker, and is given the keys to a Mercedes. Lolita convinces him to take the car, and that they should travel together to the Golden Gate Bridge where they can both commit suicide. As their journey takes them across country, Kenny and Lolita find themselves in a number of weird situations, from trying to rob a convenience store on the promise of their having a gun, to Kenny’s stealing a car that has a surprising cargo on the back seat, to a side trip to meet someone from Kenny’s past. Through trial and error they arrive in San Francisco, where Lolita’s own past catches up with her, and her relationship with Kenny prompts a sudden decision…

Despite the best of intentions, and the best efforts of its screenplay – by Jared Rappaport – its director, and its two leads, The Sweet Life lacks the necessary credulity to allow the viewer to connect with the characters and the plot. From the moment that Lolita interrupts Kenny’s suicidal reverie, the movie goes off in several different directions all at once, and it tries to become a drama, a comedy, and yes, a romance, and often, all at the same time. This scatter gun effect works well at certain moments, but falls flat at others, leaving the movie feeling haphazard and poorly constructed. Even if you accept the unlikely “meet-cute” that brings Kenny and Loilta together, the contrived nature of their subsequent relationship remains a recurring problem. The idea is that they will support each other during their road trip, but this rarely happens, as each is as selfish and inwardly focused as the other, and even when they do put aside their differences to come to each other’s rescue, it’s always because the script needs them to, not because it makes their journey that much richer or profound. That said, their journey does avoid easy sentimentality, and there are trenchant moments that work surprisingly well.

What Rappaport’s script also avoids is any in-depth explorations of Kenny and Lolita’s reasons for wanting to commit suicide. There are hints and clues, but none that are fleshed out enough to make sense, or allow the viewer to feel sorry for them. Kenny is depressed, and as it transpires, for a variety of reasons; Lolita is the same. But their intention to jump from the Golden Gate Bridge always feels like a stretch, the road trip a way of giving them time to realise that their lives aren’t as bleak as they think, and for the movie to make a number of telling comments about the nature of happiness. If you were watching the movie, and didn’t know why they were heading to San Francisco, you could quite easily believe this was merely another modern rom-com where opposites attract. And on many levels, when the script isn’t addressing this issue directly, the movie is much better for it. Messina portrays Kenny with an increasingly endearing manner that proves likeable by the movie’s end, but Spencer has the very hard task of making Lolita look and sound like someone who would exist in the real world. In the end, Spera’s direction proves too wayward to help matters, and the outcome is both dramatically and emotionally spurious, something that undermines those moments earlier in the movie that do work.

Rating: 5/10 – with little in the way of depth, and little in the way of examining the serious side of suicidal tendencies, The Sweet Life is a rom-com with dramatic pretensions it’s unable to pull off; a frustrating experience, it’s a low-key, genial movie that offers odd moments of poignancy, but never gels into anything more substantial.

The Carer (2016)

05 Wednesday Dec 2018

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Brian Cox, Coco König, Comedy, Drama, Hungary, János Edelényi, Lifetime Achievement Award, Parkinson's disease, Review, Sir Michael Gifford

D: János Edelényi / 88m

Cast: Brian Cox, Coco König, Emilia Fox, Anna Chancellor, Karl Johnson, Andrew Havill, Selina Cadell, Emily Bevan, Roger Moore

Sir Michael Gifford (Cox) is a British acting legend, equally at home in movies and on television, but mostly on the stage. Now retired and suffering from the early onset of Parkinson’s disease, Sir Michael is being urged to accept having a full-time carer by his daughter, Sophia (Fox), and his housekeeper (and ex-lover) Milly (Chancellor). Resistant to the idea, Sir Michael finds that the introduction of Dorottya (König), a Hungarian care worker who has applied to study drama in the UK, isn’t quite the imposition he expects it to be. With her love of, and ability to quote, Shakespeare, Sir Michael finds Dorottya’s sympathetic approach and youthful enthusiasm something of a tonic – though he reserves his usual dyspeptic disposition for everyone else. However, when he’s put forward for a Lifetime Achievement Award, it causes friction between him and Sophia (who thinks he’s too infirm to attend), and Sophia and Dorottya (who thinks it would be good for him). Sir Michael decides he’s going to go, whether his daughter agrees or not, but before he does he has to recconnect with Dorottya, who has been sacked by Sophia…

In a similar vein to Venus (2006), The Carer is about a crusty, cantankerous old thespian who finds an unexpected kinship with a much younger carer, and in doing so, learns a number of valuable life lessons. And… that’s it. There are Shakespeare quotes a-plenty (with King Lear getting the lion’s share for obvious, though, undercooked thematic reasons), occasional nods to the indignities of getting old (adult nappies), regrets and recriminations flying thick and fast from all sides, and a tendency to soft-pedal any really serious issues through the use of ill-focused humour. Nothing about the movie is surprising or unexpected. It ticks along in time-honoured fashion, hitting each required beat with almost metronomic regularity, and relying on its talented albeit under-served (and undeserved) cast to rescue it from the doldrums of its own making. At no point do you feel that this could be happening in real life, or that you might meet any of the characters while walking down the street. With the action largely taking place at Sir Michael’s baronial hall of a home, a grim sense of claustrophobia soon settles in as Sir Michael takes profanity flecked inconstancy to new levels of banality; he’s the least disagreeable misanthrope you’re ever likely to encounter.

More problematical is the character of Dorottya. The Carer is a Hungarian/British co-production, with a Hungarian director, and dozens of Hungarian crew members, and so the inclusion of König as the title character is, like much else, unsurprising. But Dorottya doesn’t ring true on any level. She’s so one-dimensional you half expect her to disappear when she turns sideways. With the barest of motivations for what she does, and not even the required knowledge that medicaton and alcohol don’t mix, Dorottya is a lumpen plot device designed to allow Sir Michael to play to one last appreciative audience before popping his theatrical clogs. Making her feature debut, König does her best but hasn’t got a hope of imbuing the character with any meaningful traits or mannerisms, thanks to a script that makes very little effort to add depth or texture at any stage of the proceedings. There are misguided attempts at pathos, scattered instances of poorly judged poignancy, and an acceptance speech from Sir Michael that is part ramble, part soliloquy, and all contrived; it’s the musings of an actor who really can’t improvise. Cox is fine despite all this, and it’s fun to see him in his younger days through movies and posters, but if this was a role that was written with him in mind, he shouldn’t feel so flattered.

Rating: 4/10 – visually as bland and uninviting as the storyline proves to be, The Carer strives for emotional resonance and comes up short every time; acceptable only on a very basic level, and even then with reservations, this is a misguided and unconvincing movie that wastes the time and efforts of its cast, and never appears to be aspiring to anything other than being merely perfunctory.

Almost Adults (2016)

19 Monday Nov 2018

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Comedy, Drama, Elise Bauman, Friendship, Justin Gerhard, Lesbianism, LGBTQ+, Natasha Negovanlis, Review, Romance, Sarah Rotella

D: Sarah Rotella / 90m

Cast: Natasha Negovanlis, Elise Bauman, Justin Gerhard, Winny Clarke, Mark Matechuk, Pujaa Pandey, David John Phillips

Cassie (Negovanlis) and Mackenzie (Bauman) are best friends on the verge of leaving college and heading out into the wider world. Cassie has recently split up from her boyfriend, Matthew (Matechuk), while Mackenzie is coming to terms with being a lesbian. While Cassie tells Mackenzie about her love life, Mackenzie feels awkward about coming out to Cassie; she’s told their mutual gay friend, Levi (Gerhard), and recently her parents, but is unsure how Cassie will react. Persuaded by Levi to look for a girlfriend on Tumblr, Mackenzie continues to avoid telling Cassie she’s a lesbian, while a couple of chance encounters with Matthew lead Cassie to wonder if she is over him. Inevitably, Cassie finds out about Mackenzie’s “secret”, and her disappointment causes a rift between them. As they navigate the new dynamic of their friendship, with each finding fault with the other for their attitudes and behaviours, both Cassie and Mackenzie try to come to terms with all the new feelings and emotions they’re experiencing. Mackenzie begins a relationship with Elliot (Clarke), while Cassie focuses on getting the job she wants. As they focus on their own needs, though, their friendship suffers even more…

In any movie where one character keeps something a secret from their family/friends/workmates (delete as appropriate), the reason for their doing so often remains unanswered at best, or spuriously explained at worst. Almost Adults opts for the second approach and never makes Mackenzie’s reasoning convincing. Fortunately, this narrative misstep doesn’t hurt the movie too much, but it does mean that the animosity that develops between Cassie and Mackenzie feels unnecessarily contrived; in real life, Mackenzie’s reticence probably wouldn’t make such a difference. But where Adrianna DiLonardo’s subtly observant screenplay scores more highly is in its depiction not of two characters falling out because of a poorly motivated secret, but because they are finally learning how to be responsible adults. Their friendship – when we first meet them – is the kind that has them swearing to be in each other’s lives forever, the kind of promise that teenagers make out of a desperate need to be needed. DiLonardo soon waves off this affectation, and has Cassie and Mackenzie behave like the insecure and selfish young adults they really are. When faced with the demands of moving on to the next stage in their lives – and their friendship – life soon finds them unprepared and trying their utmost to control everything around them, including each other.

Although the movie falls under the LGBTQ+ banner thanks to its inclusion of openly gay characters, it’s not a movie about being gay. Rather it’s a movie about finding your place in the world, and at a pivotal moment in most people’s lives, when growing up becomes a mandatory requirement. Look what can happen if you don’t, the movie seems to be saying, and though it does include its fair share of coming-of-age clichés, it’s not weighted in favour of either character, and it does its best not to make easy judgments. Making her feature debut, Rotella handles the material with a lightness of touch that helps the movie through some of its rougher patches, and she has a knack for positioning the camera at odd yet effective vantage points. As the warring BFF’s, Negovanlis and Bauman have an easy chemistry that makes their characters’ falling out all the more dramatic, while Gerhard steals nearly all his scenes as the mandatory wise gay friend. The movie balances comedy and drama (with a smattering of romance) to good effect, and proves appealing throughout. It’s not ground-breaking stuff, or particularly original, but what it does it does with a quiet confidence and skill, and in a way that impresses more than it disappoints.

Rating: 7/10 – by not taking the obvious route in telling its story of a friendship undone by poor choices and a crippling lack of self-awareness on both sides, Almost Adults avoids looking and feeling like every other LGBTQ+ movie you might have seen recently; enjoyable though not exactly profound, and with two praiseworthy central performances, it’s a lovely, self-effacing diversion, and well worth anyone’s time and attention.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

17 Saturday Nov 2018

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Comedy, Drama, Ethan Coen, Gold prospector, James Franco, Joel Coen, Liam Neeson, Outlaw, Review, Tim Blake Nelson, Tom Waits, Wagon train, Western, Zoe Kazan

D: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen / 133m

Cast: Tyne Daly, James Franco, Brendan Gleeson, Bill Heck, Grainger Hines, Zoe Kazan, Harry Melling, Liam Neeson, Tim Blake Nelson, Jonjo O’Neill, Chelcie Ross, Saul Rubinek, Tom Waits

Six tales from the Old West: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, in which the titular singing outlaw (Nelson) rides into a small town and finds himself threatened with being shot at almost every turn; Near Algodones, in which a would-be bank robber (Franco) underestimates the difficulty of robbing his latest target, and winds up on the verge of being lynched; Meal Ticket, in which a grizzled impresario (Neeson) travels from town to town in a wagon that converts into a small stage that allows an armless and legless young orator called Harrison (Melling) to perform; All Gold Canyon, in which an aging gold prospector (Waits) discovers a valley that may just provide him with the strike he’s being hoping for; The Gal Who Got Rattled, in which a young woman (Kazan) travelling to Oregon by wagon train with her brother, finds herself alone and at the financial mercy of an unscrupulous trail hand; and The Mortal Remains, in which a group of travellers on a stage coach discover that their destination may not be exactly the one they’re expecting…

The Coen brothers have apparently been writing Western short stories for years, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs showcases some of those stories, plus one based on a story by Jack London (All Gold Canyon), in a handy compendium sized movie that offers a variety of pleasures for the interested viewer. Each tale or segment is different from the others both in terms of content and approach, though the Coens’ trademark humour can be found in all of them, and each is self-contained and thematically restrained. With no overlaps or need to wonder if a character from one story will pop up in another one, the various tales are linked only by a framing device that depicts each story as part of a volume entitled The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and Other Tales of the American Frontier. With this conceit established, the Coens proceed to have a lot of fun with their opening story, with Scruggs breaking the fourth wall and taking part in a series of shootouts that are ingeniously and very cleverly staged (the confrontation between Scruggs and Clancy Brown’s poker player is simply genius). There’s more physical humour to be found in Near Algodones, and though it is funny to watch, it’s the slightest of the six tales on offer.

The tone changes completely with Meal Ticket, and the story ends on a dark note that is a little uncomfortable, as commerce and altruism make for uneasy bedfellows (kudos too to the special effects work that makes Harrison’s limbless nature so convincing). Another switch is provided by All Gold Canyon, practically a solo performance by Waits and supported by some of the most stunning natural scenery seen in any movie this year. It speaks towards determinism and self-will, and like its predecessor, provides a wry commentary on the hardships of frontier life. Perhaps the most fully realised and affecting of all the stories is The Gal Who Got Rattled, which skillfully blends comedy and romance into its narrative, and which features a terrific performance from Kazan as an innocent abroad whose naïvete eventually gets the better of her (be warned: there are illustrations that accompany the stories in the framing device, and this one hints strongly at the story’s outcome). And lastly, The Mortal Remains sees the Coens ending the movie with a tale that strictly speaking isn’t related to the Old West or the frontier, but will be familiar to anyone who enjoys tales of the macabre or supernatural. All in all, the Coens have taken a chance in combining so many disparate stories within one movie, but such is their control over the material, and their confidence in their abilities as writers and directors, that as a result, it’s a movie that works exceptionally well throughout, and has much to offer – even for those who don’t like Westerns.

Rating: 8/10 – a compendium of stories that each hold their own, and which offer different narrative rewards, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs is an affectionate tribute to the Old West from a couple of writers/directors who clearly have a fascination for the period and its hardships; very funny in places, and with a dramatic flair to match, the movie sees the Coens back on form after the perceived stumble of Hail, Caesar! (2016), and showing that there’s still life in the Old West if you know where to look.

Burn Burn Burn (2015)

09 Friday Nov 2018

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Ashes, Chanya Button, Chloe Pirrie, Comedy, Drama, Indie movie, Jack Farthing, Laura Carmichael, Review, Road trip

D: Chanya Button / 105m

Cast: Laura Carmichael, Chloe Pirrie, Jack Farthing, Joe Dempsie, Alice Lowe, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Sally Phillips, Melanie Walters, Jane Asher, Nigel Planer, Matthew Kelly, Alison Steadman

Following the death of their friend, Dan (Farthing), best friends Seph (Carmichael) and Alex (Pirrie) find themselves tasked with spreading his ashes at four different locations. To help make sense of his choices, Dan has made several short videos that the pair have to watch when they arrive at each destination. At first, though, they aren’t keen on the idea, and decide not to do it. But when their grief and anger and confusion over Dan’s death from cancer causes both of them to lose their jobs (and Alex discovers her girlfriend is seeing someone else), they head out on the road to carry out his final wishes. Along the way, Seph begins to doubt whether she and her boyfriend, James (Dempsie) should be together, a detour to visit Alex’s mother (Walters) leads to the exposure of uncomfortable truths for Alex, and Seph’s behaviour threatens to cause a rift between them that’s exacerbated by some scathing comments by Dan on his videos. It all leaves Seph and Alex wondering if agreeing to Dan’s wishes was the right thing to do…

A charming mix of drama and comedy that often hides a melancholy centre, Burn Burn Burn is a deceptively sincere meditation on the nature of regret and the emotional toll it can take. Dan regrets the life he’ll no longer live and what he perceives as the mistakes he’s made with his mother (Asher). Seph regrets the choices she’s made both professionally (she works as a nanny for a therapist who consults from home) and personally (her relationship with James). And Alex has regrets over a childhood incident that causes her to push people away. It’s no wonder that they all became friends: how could they not when they’re such kindred spirits? The beauty of Charlie Covell’s nimble screenplay is that Dan uses his regrets as a way of challenging Seph and Alex to examine and overcome their own problems, and as the journey progresses from location to location, so Seph and Alex confront and overcome the things that are holding them back. There’s a welcome lack of empty sentimentality, and none of the cloying mawkishness that might ordinarily come with a movie such as this, and Button, making her first feature, keeps a tight control over the emotional dilemmas and resolutions that the screenplay delivers with aplomb.

The movie also offers up several surprising scenes that seem out of place at first, but which on closer inspection, relate closely to the characters and their predicaments. Alex makes a startling confession while tied to a cross (she’s standing in for an AWOL am-dram Jesus), while an overnight stay at a commune headed by counter-culture philosopher Adam (Rhind-Tutt) sees the pair part of a group gazing at the stars and determining what’s important in life. Moments such as these add appreciable depth and no small amount of artless candour to the narrative, and help make the characters’ problems relatable. As the troubled pair, Carmichael and Pirrie both provide astute, sympathetic, and likeable performances, and there’s fine work from Farthing that roots around in the despair of dying too young with a frankness that’s often unsettling to watch. The rest of the cast looks like a who’s who of acceptable British cameo providers, and Lowe aside (who’s once again asked to play the same character she normally plays, just in a medieval costume), they acquit themselves well, offering deft touches and character beats that flesh out their roles. Their portrayals are all in service to a movie that eschews the usual quirky road trip analogies, and which centres instead on telling its heartfelt story with quiet verve and incisiveness.

Rating: 8/10 – a winning blend of honest drama and good-natured comedy, Burn Burn Burn is a modest yet effective first outing from Button that is a pleasant and rewarding alternative to the huge number of similar movies that are out there; brimming with confidence, and unafraid to tackle some difficult topics head on, it’s bolstered by a moving score and soundtrack courtesy of Marc Canham and the indie band Candy Says, and leaves you wanting to know just how Seph and Alex get on once their trip is over.

Slaughterhouse Rulez (2018)

01 Thursday Nov 2018

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Asa Butterfield, Boarding school, Comedy, Crispian Mills, Drama, Finn Cole, Fracking, Horror, Michael Sheen, Monsters, Review, Simon Pegg

D: Crispian Mills / 104m

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Finn Cole, Simon Pegg, Michael Sheen, Hermione Corfield, Nick Frost, Max Raphael, Kit Connor, Isabella Laughland, Tom Rhys Harries, Louis Strong, Margot Robbie

Slaughterhouse is a traditional English boarding school, with the sons and daughters of the rich and famous and the establishment primed to follow in their parents’ footsteps. When a rare placement comes the way of Don Wallace (Cole), a teenager from a single parent, working class background, he doesn’t really want to go, but does so to please his mother. Once there, he’s placed in a room with Willoughby Blake (Butterfield), whose disaffection with the school leads him to carry out small acts of subversion. But the cruelties and occasional moments of relief from life at Slaughterhouse soon take a back seat to the consequences of a nearby fracking operation that has opened up a sinkhole. On a weekend when most of the pupils have gone home, the headmaster (Sheen), one of the teachers (Pegg), Don and Willoughby, along with a number of other pupils, find themselves fighting off attacks by a “frack” of subterranean monsters that have emerged from the sinkhole. It’s time to put personal differences aside and keep each other alive…

You know that feeling when you’re around five to ten minutes into a movie and you just know that you’re going to be disappointed – because you are already? That’s the feeling viewers of the first feature from Stolen Picture, a production company set up by stars Pegg and Frost, will have once they’ve started watching this ill-advised and poorly assembled comedy horror. It’s not just that Slaughterhouse Rulez isn’t that funny, or very effective in terms of its horror elements, it doesn’t work because it’s another movie that tries waaaaay too hard to be funny, scary, and exciting all at the same time, while not being able to strike a proper balance between all three. The script – by Mills and Henry Fitzherbert – adopts a kitchen sink approach to the comedy, with physical pratfalls, visual gags, terrible puns or references (you can guess the line that inevitably accompanies the apparent demise of the headmaster’s dog, Mr Chips), and lots of frightened yelling, screaming and running in fear. Like much else in the movie, it’s these efforts, and the extended effort that goes into them, that make you wonder if everyone’s trying too hard because they know the material isn’t strong enough to support itself.

So, the comedy is broad and buffoon-like, with the adult characters suffering the most, from Pegg’s lovelorn teacher, to Frost’s stoner anti-fracking campaigner, to Sheen’s priggish headmaster. These are caricature performances that have been done to death in dozens of other British (so-called) comedies, and they’re still not funny even now. The horror relies on gory special effects, and rapid fire editing to hide the deficiencies of the animatronics and prosthetics, while the monsters themselves look like they wouldn’t even pass muster in a Doctor Who episode. It’s also a movie that fails to exploit the issue of fracking and approaches it in a simplistic, “fracking is bad” fashion that makes the whole thing a plot contrivance instead of anything more rigorous. Potshots at boarding school life are numerous but offer nothing new, and the characters are as passively stereotypical as you’d expect. Tasked with breathing life into a movie that begins tired and winds up positively comatose by the end, the cast can only struggle to make their characters’ plight convincing; though they’re hampered by Mills’ pedestrian and uninspired direction. A disappointing movie, then, and one that would have benefited from taking more risks with the material than it does.

Rating: 4/10 – not the auspicious debut for their production company that Pegg and Frost would have wished for, Slaughterhouse Rulez lacks energy and purpose, and doesn’t even charm on a pizza-and-beer-on-a-Saturday-night basis; as it goes through the motions, the same will be true of viewers wondering how they can escape this mess with their sanity intact.

President Evil (2018)

31 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Comedy, Donald Trump, Horror, Jose Rosete, Libertybelle, Politics, Review, Richard Lowry, Sitara Attaie, Spoof

D: Richard Lowry / 81m

Cast: Jose Rosete, Sitara Attaie, Korbin Miles, Lys Perez, Amber Moone, Jacob Jorgensen, Kyle Sing, Ryan Quinn Adams, Vinn Sander, Christian Hutcherson, Kevin Alain, Johanna Rae

Well, it is Halloween, after all…

On the night of the 1980 US presidential election, young David Barron dons a Ronald Reagan mask and brutally murders his ex-porn star mother, Scorchy McDaniels (Rae). Thirty-eight years later, and on the eve of the mid-term elections, David (Adams) escapes from the Lar-A-Mago sanitarium where he’s spent the intervening years. Returning to his home town of Libertybelle, David takes to wearing a Donald Trump mask and hanging out at his childhood home. Meanwhile, Dr Lutin (Sing), his doctor, heads there in the hope of finding David – though he has an ulterior motive for doing so. In the same neighbourhood, best friends Lana (Attaie), Blanca (Perez), and Medjine (Boone) are preparing to have a pre-election party ahead of their participation in an anti-Republican rally on the day. Along with Blanca’s younger brother, Pepe (Jorgensen), and their transgender friend, Gabriel (Sander), the party gets off to a good start, but it isn’t long before David is picking them off one by one, while the town sheriff (Rosete) does his best to come to their aid before it’s entirely too late…

The pitch must have been a fairly simple one: hey, why don’t we make a spoof of the original Halloween where instead of a Captain Kirk mask, the killer wears a Donald Trump mask instead? And the response must have been equally simple: great idea, go make it. But in the tradition of simple ideas made on a restricted budget, President Evil is an uneven, occasionally inspired, occasionally woeful movie with a ton of good intentions that don’t always pay off. It begins with an opening credits sequence that replicates the style of Halloween’s own opening credits, but replaces the jack o’ lantern with a Trump mask. Then there’s an updated recreation of the young Michael Myers’ murder of his sister that is shot entirely from David’s point of view and ends with him being unmasked outside his home. So far, so reassuringly competent homage, though with the kind of comedic elements that reveal the makers’ broader intentions for their story. Nods and winks in the direction of John Carpenter’s seminal movie follow, as well as Easter eggs that reference some of his other movies, while the script also adds further homages from the likes of Psycho (1960) and Young Frankenstein (1974).

The comedy is a mixed bag all by itself, and ranges from deft visual flourishes (David’s Trump mask hides someone who looks like Trump), to irritating bouts of frat humour (best summed up by Miles’ popping up at odd moments as characters as varied as a perverted priest and a Jared Kushner look-a-like), and further Mel Brooks’ appropriations (“Be a Smarty and Join the Republican Party”). Like Halloween, there’s a minimum of blood and gore, but there’s a singular lack of tension throughout, and the killings are often poorly staged and framed. The performances are broadly acceptable for this sort of thing, though Attaie does make for an appealing heroine, and Lowry seems more confident when bending the knee to Carpenter’s original than he does with the newer material; it’s as if the obvious difference between them was a given he had no control over. But if there’s one aspect that the script – by Lowry and Gregory P. Wolk – does get right, it’s in depicting the anger and distrust of ethnic minorities in current day America towards the xenophobic attitudes of the predominantly white, privileged political system. The movie is strident in its approach, but is also unapologetic about being so, and on that level – and like the best of horror movies – proves to be a telling reflection of a section of US society’s real fears.

Rating: 5/10 – though there’s much that doesn’t work, and much else that should have been jettisoned at the earliest opportunity, there’s still much to enjoy in President Evil, not the least of which is the way it lampoons Donald Trump and his ill-advised ramblings; to call this a post-millennial horror comedy for post-millennials who believe they might be the last generation able to appreciate something like this, may be stretching things, but when it’s en point, there’s nothing “Fake” about it.

Juliet, Naked (2018)

28 Sunday Oct 2018

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Chris O'Dowd, Comedy, Drama, Ethan Hawke, Jesse Peretz, Literary adaptation, Musician, Review, Romantic comedy, Rose Byrne, Sandcliff, Tucker Crowe

D: Jesse Peretz / 97m

Cast: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd, Azhy Robertson, Lily Brazier, Ayoola Smart, Phil Davis

For Duncan Thomson (O’Dowd), there is only one recording artist of any merit: Tucker Crowe (Hawke), a singer-songwriter who twenty years before walked away from a promising career as a musician after making a highly regarded first album called Juliet. Duncan has set up a blog site dedicated to Crowe and his short-lived career, and this takes up most of his spare time. Which doesn’t leave much room for his partner, Annie (Byrne). Having been together for fifteen years, Annie is beginning to realise that Duncan isn’t going to change, and things such as having children, or cutting back on the time he spends in Crowe-land, aren’t going to happen. When Duncan receives a CD that contains demo versions of the tracks on Juliet, the fact that she listens to it first causes a row between them. This leads to Annie posting a disparaging review of the demo versions on Duncan’s blog, which in turn leads to Annie receiving a response from Tucker himself. They begin corresponding (a fact that Annie keeps to herself), and soon find they’re able to be really honest with each other about their lives. And then Tucker reveals that he’s coming to London…

An adaptation of the novel by Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked is one of the most easy-going romantic comedies of recent years. Treading a delicate path between meandering introspection and trifling whimsy, it’s a movie that could be the very cinematic definition of flimsy, so thin is its storyline and narrative arc. It’s also a movie that will have you wondering out loud about the characters and their pasts, and how they’ve come to be leading their lives now, from Tucker’s slacker muso and proto-dad, to Annie’s emotionally doused museum manager. Both Tucker and Annie seem to be treading water, waiting for someone or something to come along and free them from the traps they’ve fallen into. Tucker has allowed his talent to fray to nothing through fear of responsibility, while Annie has gone the opposite route and allowed responsibility to wither her creativity. They’re practically perfect for each other, albeit in an anodyne, nondescript fashion that makes their inevitable romance as cautious as they both are with everything else. Only Duncan remains true to himself throughout, even if he is thoroughly self-absorbed and operating entirely out of self-interest. Selfish he may be, but at least he’s doing what he really wants.

Thankfully, and despite the often vapid nature of the whole venture, the movie is rescued from being overwhelmingly twee by a trio of performances that elevate the material and make the characters more than the slavishly opaque stereotypes that the script – by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins – seems determined to make them. Byrne makes Annie gentle yet resilient, put upon perhaps but not entirely a victim, and willing to take a stand when she needs to. Hawke plays Tucker as a man adrift from his own life but also willing to make amends for the mistakes he’s made; it’s a carefully crafted portrayal that Hawke pulls off with ease. O’Dowd appears to have the hardest task of all, that of making Duncan more than the arrogant, annoying arse that he clearly is, but there’s no small amount of pathos in his performance, and Duncan emerges as more rounded than expected. Elsewhere, Tucker’s family issues occupy a good deal of the running time, and though they feel very much like the movie’s token dramatic thread, they at least offset the predictable nature of the romantic elements. Peretz directs with an emphasis on keeping things light and airy, and succeeds in making both the romance and the comedy as agreeable as possible, but in the end, at the expense of achieving anything new or different.

Rating: 7/10 – so thin it’s almost diaphanous, Juliet, Naked is a tribute to the efforts of its cast and director in making a movie that borders constantly on being insubstantial without actually crossing that line; engaging enough to be enjoyable without being anywhere near memorable, it’s a light-hearted tale told with a sprinkling of playfulness that makes it all the more tolerable, and on this occasion, that’s entirely okay.

McDick (2017)

25 Thursday Oct 2018

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Amanda Conlon, Chris McDonnell, Comedy, Crime, Danny Trejo, Molten lava, Peter Breitmayer, Private eye, Review

aka Big Guns

D: Chris McDonnell / 81m

Cast: Chris McDonnell, Amanda Conlon, Peter Breitmayer, Sanjay Malhotra, Mo Collins, Danny Trejo, Brandon Motherway

To his colleagues on the Force, McDick (McDonnell) is the worst cop ever. Lazy, and then lazier still, and with no sense of civic responsibility, or any awareness of how inappropriate his behaviour is, McDick is the non-thinking idiot’s policeman. When his partner is killed in an apparent domestic disturbance call, McDick’s boss, Captain Donkowski (Breitmayer), uses it as an opportunity to have him kicked off the Force. Setting up as a privaye eye, McDick proves to be just as bad as a private investigator as he was as a cop. But soon he finds himself the target of various assassination attempts, all of them organised by local crime boss, Molten Lava (Collins). With the help of his secretary, Melanie (Conlon), his son Douglas (Motherway), and dubiously legit lawyer, Oscar (Trejo), McDick sets out to discover just what are Molten Lava’s motives for wanting him dead. Things don’t work out as well as he’d hoped though, as he soon finds himself framed for murder, still being targeted on Molten Lava’s behalf, and desperately needing a plan that will keep him safe and in the clear…

They say that comedy is a serious business, and that it’s the most difficult genre to pull off. The first feature of writer/director Chris McDonnell, McDick is not entirely successful in its comedic aims, but there’s more than enough humour that does work as to make watching the movie a mostly enjoyable experience even if it’s pleasantly goofy one minute, and then a little too eager the next. Much of the movie depends on McDonnell’s ability to make McDick an insufferable yet sympathetic asshole, someone you can’t help but root for, even though if you saw him coming down the street, you’d cross to the other side to avoid him. McDick is a classic movie idiot, lacking in self-awareness, wildly inappropriate around just about everybody, stupid as a matter of course, and – just in case you haven’t got it by now – as dumb as a box of spanners. Thankfully, McDonnell makes his lead character’s behaviour more appealing than appalling, and McDick’s laissez-faire attitude soon gives way to a more serious determination to be more productive, even proactive, but it’s tempered by the kind of irresponsibility that he just can’t help. McDick himself is funny, and McDonnell plays it mostly deadpan, often leaving the audience to work out whether he’s being serious or not, and this ambiguity helps matters tremendously.

However, McDick the character isn’t as well served by McDick the plot as he is by his creator. Too much of what happens does so at the whim of the script – by McDonnell and his brother, Michael – and not entirely in a logical fashion. A sub-plot involving Malhotra’s wannabe crime boss, Munpoon, slows down the movie and doesn’t go anywhere, odd moments such as Donkowski having a display wall of stuffed and mounted animal testicles take the viewer out of the movie’s cautious attempts at reality, and casting constraints mean that McDick can get into Lava’s home whenever he likes, and one unfortunate goon aside, he’s never challenged. Ultimately, the script takes too many opportunities to take a sideways step away from the main, muddled narrative (hands up if Lava’s reasons for wanting McDick dead ever make sense). But while the narrative is uneven and rarely convincing on its own terms, McDonnell does have a keen eye for static compositions, and on several occasions, DoP Scott Beardslee shows an equally keen understanding of the effectiveness of space and distance within the frame. A shame then that McDonnell couldn’t have beefed up his script to be more structured and less haphazard.

Rating: 5/10 – when it’s funny, McDick is really funny, and much of the movie’s humour stems from McDonnell’s performance in the title role; though it doesn’t always make sense, and is somewhat flatly directed by its star, the movie is definitely one that potential viewers should approach with caution, but if they’re willing to just go with it, they might find themselves having a good time (mostly).

Undercover Grandpa (2017)

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Action, Comedy, Dylan Everett, Erik Canuel, Greta Onieogou, James Caan, Jessica Walter, Review, The Devil's Scum, Thriller

D: Erik Canuel / 94m

Cast: Dylan Everett, James Caan, Greta Onieogou, Jesse Bostick, Jessica Walter, Paul Braunstein, Louis Gossett Jr, Kenneth Welsh, Paul Sorvino, Lawrence Dane

Jake Bouchard (Everett) is a typical teenager: he’s easily embarrassed and/or annoyed by his parents, he has one really close friend, Wendell (Bostick), he does well enough at school, he wants to go out with Angie (Onieogou), the cool girl he’s known since they were four – oh, and he has a grandfather (Caan) who’s ex-military and so paranoid he sees enemy agents at every turn. On the very night Jake has finally arranged a date with Angie, his grandfather comes to dinner and he has to meet up with her later. Before that can happen, though, Angie disappears after letting Jake know that her car has broken down. Jake discovers that his grandfather is pretty good at finding clues that point to who might have abducted her, but just as they’re getting somewhere, they themselves are intercepted by a secret intelligence agency that grandpa Lou used to work for. Having been told to stay “retired” by his former boss (Walter), Lou elects instead to enlist the help of four of his old comrades in arms – the Devil’s Scum – to help him and Jake find Angie and the people who abducted her…

When a movie has a title like Undercover Grandpa, it’s likely that the average viewer won’t be expecting much from it at all, and may be watching it because a) they’re a big James Caan fan, b) they’re intrigued by the cross-generational approach of the material, c) they have an hour and a half to kill, or d) all of the above. This is definitely one of those movies that you didn’t know had been made until you came across it buried deep within a streaming service, or back in the good old days of the video store, when it might even have been a featured new release (for a week). It also fits into the “Whatever happened to…” niche that a lot of actors fall into as they get older and the really good roles start drying up. For James Caan this is one of those movies, another in a long, recent line of low-budget, barely seen movies that have kept him (at least) continually employed. But it is a throwaway movie, once seen, barely remembered, and only memorable as the movie where Kenneth Welch’s character is seen traversing a river bed in an old diving suit and navigating with a Zimmer frame. (That really is it, and despite the script’s good intentions.)

Is it sad to see Caan reduced to such shenanigans at the ripe old age of seventy-seven? Well, it is and it isn’t. It is because Caan clearly isn’t as mobile as he used to be (his stuntman is possibly in this movie more than he is), and it isn’t because it does appear that Caan is having fun. It’s not his best performance by a tollgate mile, and there are times when some of the dialogue defeats him entirely, but even when beset by low production values and a less than impressive script, Caan is still a good enough reason to give a movie a chance. But a chance is all you’ll need to identify this movie’s shortcomings, what with its pantomime villain (Braunstein), teen-oriented tweeness, stolid by-the-numbers approach, and it’s elderly, sub-par A-Team dynamic. The jokes are as old as the combined ages of the Devil’s Scum, Canuel’s direction shows why he’s more often employed in television, and the whole thing is as tired as the aging cast look. That movies like this one get made every year by the bucket load is a given, but the bigger question is, why do stars of the calibre of Caan agree to make them?

Rating: 4/10 – on a superficial, leave-your-brain-at-the-door kind of level, Undercover Grandpa offers few surprises but does provide the unsuspecting viewer with a degree of innocuous pleasure; one to watch then if you’re in the mood for something completely undemanding, but otherwise a movie with a likeable basic concept but very little else.

On the Road #2 – Better Start Running (2018)

22 Monday Oct 2018

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Alex Sharp, Analeigh Tipton, Brett Simon, Comedy, Drama, FBI, Jeremy Irons, Maria Bello, Review, Road trip, Roadside attractions, Romance

D: Brett Simon / 92m

Cast: Alex Sharp, Analeigh Tipton, Jeremy Irons, Edi Gathegi, Maria Bello, Karan Soni, Chad Faust

Working at an All Shop, Harley (Sharp) is enamoured of Stephanie (Tipton), who in turn is the object of store boss’ Mr Hankey’s (Faust) inappropriate attentions. One night, with the store closed, Hankey makes a play for Stephanie in his office, then attempts to rape her, but Harley comes to her rescue. In the ensuing scuffle though, it’s Stephanie who causes Hankey to fall through a window to his death. Panicking, Harley calls the police to let them know what happened, but in doing so, unwittingly sets the FBI – in the manic form of Agent McFadden (Bello) and her neophyte partner, Agent Nelson (Soni) – on his and Stephanie’s trail. Not content with it being just the two of them, Harley also takes along his war veteran grandfather, Garrison (Irons). Intent on using being on the run as an excuse to visit a number of roadside attractions on their way to meet an old flame of Garrison’s, the trio become a quartet when they pick up wannabe hippie, Fitz Paradise (Gathegi). As the trip continues, they visit several of the attractions on Harley’s map, and discover they share a camaraderie that deepens the longer the trip goes on…

From its opening scenes where Harley moons over the object of his affections while she behaves as if she’s in a world of her own (which, it turns out, she is), Better Start Running sets out its stall as a quirky indie romantic comedy. That it’s only partially successful is down to the narrative vagaries inherent in the script by Chad Faust and Annie Burgstede, which keeps realigning its focus every few scenes and adds moments of drama to the mix that don’t always sit well with the movie’s overall rom-com vibe. Whether it’s Bello’s gung-ho bordering on psychotic FBI agent, or Irons’ irascible and lovelorn grandfather, or even Gathegi’s mid-life crisis experiencing husband and father, the movie takes occasional lurches into more serious territory before righting itself and remembering it’s a rom-com. And even then the romantic elements are subdued, with Harley and Stephanie only coming together as a couple out of necessity rather than anything resembling true love. Maybe the movie is being deliberately counter-intuitive, but if the romantic angle doesn’t convince, then why have it there in the first place? In truth, it suffers because of all the other elements the script has seen fit to squeeze in along the way.

So the movie is uneven and often frustrating, though when it strikes the right note, it does so with a great deal of charm and skill. Some of this is down to the performances – Irons and Bello add a great deal of energy to proceedings – some of it is due to the offbeat nature of the roadside attractions that get a visit (give a big shout out to Devil’s Tower, everyone), but mostly it’s because this is a movie chock-full of laugh out loud one-liners. From Garrison’s earnest instruction to Harley (“If you must come to tomorrow, I need a flash light, concertina wire and buckshot!”) to Harley’s own admission early on (“I’m sorry. I have to go now. I’m going on the run.”), Faust and Burgstede’s script ensures that the movie retains a spirit of fun throughout, even when it can’t help but slide sideways into Seriousville. Simon juggles the various elements with aplomb but can’t unite them into an acceptable whole, and he never finds a way to offset the feeling that the writers have deliberately ensured that Harley and Stephanie aren’t the brightest bunnies in the petting zoo (which isn’t necessary at all). Still, it is amusing, and thankfully so, otherwise this would have been one road trip best conducted from the driveway.

Rating: 6/10 – with the comedic aspects triumphing every time over the script’s other, less developed or worthy elements, Better Start Running is a mixed bag that sadly, doesn’t always gel as well as it should; likeable overall, it should still be approached with caution, a bit like Agent McFadden when she’s got a perp in her sights: “A cost of a year’s incarceration? $50,000. Cost of a bullet? Fifty cents. Do the math.”

On the Road #1 – The Fundamentals of Caring (2016)

21 Sunday Oct 2018

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Comedy, Craig Roberts, Drama, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Literary adaptation, Paul Rudd, Review, Road trip, Roadside attractions, Rob Burnett, Selena Gomez

D: Rob Burnett / 97m

Cast: Paul Rudd, Craig Roberts, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Ehle, Megan Ferguson, Julia Denton, Frederick Weller, Bobby Cannavale

Ben Benjamin (Rudd) is a retired writer who takes a course to become a caregiver in order to support himself. He has a wife, Janet (Denton), but they’re in the process of getting divorced. Ben’s first job is to look after Trevor (Roberts), an eighteen year old suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, while his mother, Elsa (Ehle), is at work. As the two get to know each other, Ben becomes aware that Trevor has a fascination for roadside attractions, particularly the World’s Deepest Pit. Ben suggests they take a road trip to the Pit and take in some other attractions along the way. Trevor wants to but is scared of leaving his home, while Elsa has her own worries about his safety. In the end, he and Trevor set off on a trip that will take them a week. On the way, they give a lift to Dot (Gomez), who’s hitchhiking to Denver to restart her life after the death of her mother, and later to Peaches (Ferguson), a young pregnant woman heading home to Nebraska. But it’s Trevor’s determination to visit his absent father in Salt Lake City that changes the nature of the trip indelibly…

The road trip movie is a staple of American movie making, the country’s wide open highways and variety of physical locations often providing a vivid backdrop for what is usually a journey of self-discovery. Adapted from the novel, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison, this is yet another movie that takes that basic set up and offers a mix of heartfelt drama and sprightly humour as it plays out its simple storyline. This is a straightforward, no frills, no surprises feature that ticks all the boxes dramatically and comedically for this kind of movie, but which does so in such an inoffensive, pedestrian, but likeable manner that it’s hard not to approve of it, even though a lot of the time you’ll be wondering, Is this it? At first, Ben is out of his depth, but soon becomes adept at caring for Trevor, while Trevor’s initial snarky behaviour (and practical jokes) soon transforms into a respect for Ben that he hasn’t shown toward any of his previous carers. So far, so predictable then, but it’s the lightness of Burnett’s direction, and the relaxed performances of Rudd and Roberts that help offset any criticism. For once, a movie’s benign approach to the material makes it all the more enjoyable.

That’s not to say that it doesn’t address some serious issues along the way, because it does. Ben has a tragic past that is affecting his divorce; Trevor wants to resolve the emotional issues he has surrounding his father (who left when he was diagnosed at the age of three); Dot has her own father issues; and there are minor shout outs to the quality of disabled access at roadside attractions, depression, self-imposed guilt, and betrayal. But again, this isn’t a heavy drama, rather it’s a movie that makes its points with a laidback approach that suits the material and which is content to explore these matters with a restraint that underscores the characters’ emotional states throughout, and with a subtlety that’s refreshing. That old phrase, Less Is More, applies here, even when the material does thin out alarmingly in places, but it always slips back on track, thanks to the solid work of its cast, Burnett’s sense of rhythm and pace, and evocative camerawork by DoP Giles Nuttgens. The whole thing ends on a perfect coda, as well, one that will viewers away feeling good about the movie and having seen it in the first place. And what more could you ask for…?

Rating: 7/10 – anyone expecting a movie with the kind of depth that the World’s Deepest Pit might be a metaphor for, will find The Fundamentals of Caring to be anything but; however, it’s a lovely movie full of bright moments and with good intentions, and though you can accuse it of being slight and innocuous, on this occasion, these are actually strengths that make the movie more than it seems at first glance.

Funny Cow (2017)

18 Thursday Oct 2018

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Adrian Shergold, Comedienne, Comedy, Domestic abuse, Drama, Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Review, Stand-up, Tony Pitts

D: Adrian Shergold / 102m

Cast: Maxine Peake, Paddy Considine, Tony Pitts, Alun Armstrong, Macy Shackleton, Stephen Graham, Kevin Eldon, Lindsey Coulson

Growing up in Yorkshire in relative poverty, ‘Funny Cow’ (Peake – we never learn the character’s real name) experiences physical abuse from her father (Graham), indifference from her mother, and suffers attempts at bullying from other children. Through it all she remains defiant, using humour to help her through the worst of occasions. As a young woman, she meets and marries Bob, but although he’s loving and attentive at first, soon he reveals a violent nature that resembles her father’s. A night out at a local working men’s club offers an unlikely escape route: a comedian (Armstrong) helps ‘Funny Cow’ realise that this is something she can do, and which could offer her some form of independence. Meanwhile, she meets a bookshop owner, Angus (Considine), and a relationship develops between them. But Angus wants more from her than she is able to give, and her first attempt at taking to the stage falters due to her nervousness. While she tries to pull her life together, and make something positive out of it, another chance to prove her skill as a comedienne unexpectedly presents itself…

Told through a stage performance by its main character when it appears she’s reached a period of success, Funny Cow recounts her life more as a form of therapy than as a part of an established routine (if you were in the audience you’d be wondering when the jokes are going to start). Starting with her childhood and moving through the various stages and relationships that have brought her to this point, ‘Funny Cow’s story is one that proffers a dispiriting look at the life of a woman struggling to find happiness, and a true sense of her place in the world. It’s a harsh movie about a harsh life, relentless in the way it portrays domestic abuse and the psychological effects it has on ‘Funny Cow’, and unforgiving of the Northern working class background that she comes from. Almost everyone is either violent, depressed, selfish, abusive, or a mix of all four. Only Angus is different, but it’s his difference from all the other men she’s known that makes him unacceptable; she just doesn’t trust that he can be so naturally kind. With happiness feeling like a dream that’s not just out of reach but completely unobtainable, co-star Tony Pitts’ screenplay keeps ‘Funny Cow’ firmly in her place, trapped by her past and fearful of the future.

Of course, she has a wilful streak that gets her into trouble, and during her first stand up performance, out of it as well. But even her humour is harsh and unrelenting. A heckler suffers for his efforts, ‘Funny Cow’ using him as catharsis for all the abuse she’s suffered in the past. But she’s suffered too much for this to be anything but a temporary release. She’s angry too, and by using her stand up routine to express her anger, ‘Funny Cow’ finds a part of her life where she finally has some measure of control. As the unnamed title character, Peake is on superb form, audacious, brash, haunting, and fearless in her exploration of someone whose past is inextricably entwined wth her present, and to deleterious effect. Whether ‘Funny Cow’ is being mournful of her relationship with Angus, or laughing manically after having her nose broken by Bob, Peake is nothing less than outstanding. Making only his second feature, director Shergold adds poignancy to proceedings by having the older ‘Funny Cow’ cross paths with younger versions of herself, and he ensures that the humour is often pitch black – but still as devastating as the violence that’s depicted.

Rating: 8/10 – though as far from being a feelgood movie as you’re likely to find, conversely there is much to enjoy in Funny Cow, from Peake’s stellar performance, to a truly scabrous stand up routine, and flashes of magical realism in amongst all the tragedy; challenging and compelling, it also takes a sharp look at sexist attitudes of the period (the Seventies), and offers audiences an unflinching look at one woman’s attempt to break free from the patriarchal society that has continually aimed to hold her back.

Birthmarked (2018)

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Andreas Apergis, Comedy, Drama, Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, Experiment, Marital problems, Matthew Goode, Michael Smiley, Nature vs Nurture, Review, Toni Collette

D: Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais / 90m

Cast: Toni Collette, Matthew Goode, Andreas Apergis, Jordan Poole, Megan O’Kelly, Anton Gillis-Adelman, Michael Smiley, Fionnula Flanagan, Suzanne Clément

Ben (Goode) and Catherine (Collette) are two scientists who are interested in examining the whole Nature vs Nurture debate through an idea for an experiment they have. Newly married and with a baby on the way, their idea is to raise their own child and two adopted babies against their genetic predispositions. They’re lucky enough to find a backer for their experiment, Randolph Gertz (Smiley), and they raise the children in a remote cabin in the woods, home-schooling them as well and focusing their minds on becoming an artist (their own son, Luke), an intellectual (their adopted daughter, Maya), and a pacifist (their adopted son, Maurice). They’re aided by an ex-Olympic level Russian marksman called Samsonov (Apergis) who defected to the West in the Seventies. With twelve years of a thirteen year experiment having passed, Gertz’s assessment that the children aren’t extraordinary examples of Nurture over Nature prompts Ben and Catherine to try harder to get the results they need, but their efforts come at a cost to their marriage, their professional relationship, and the needs of the children…

Somewhere in the midst of Birthmarked there’s the germ of a good idea struggling to be noticed. Like the children that are the subject of Ben and Catherine’s slightly less than ethical experiment, the movie wants to be something it’s not allowed to be: sprightly, perceptive, and engaging. It is funny in places, though in a law of averages kind of fashion that only highlights how much of Marc Tulin’s screenplay doesn’t gel cohesively, and it has an appealing cast who are at least trying their best to put over the material, but thanks to some poor decisions along the way, the movie coasts on too many occasions, and never hits a consistent stride. A great deal of what hampers the movie from being more successful is its inability to focus on one storyline over the rest, with Ben and Catherine’s marriage drawing more and more attention during the latter half, while each individual child receives occasional turns in the spotlight, but not in such a way that we get to know them. Then there’s Gertz, the obvious bad guy of the piece, and his equally obvious machinations (revealed late on but easily guessed at long before). Add in Samsonov’s presence – friend or foe? – and you have too many characters who lack substance, and who only occasionally drive the movie forward.

All this has the misfortune of making the movie uneven and feeling like the cinematic equivalent of a patchwork quilt that has several panels missing. Hoss-Desmarais, making only his second feature, has no answers for any of this, and though some scenes work better than others, often this is due to the cast’s efforts instead of his. Goode plays Ben as a rather blinkered, the-experiment-is-all character who behaves badly for no other reason than that the script needs him to, while Collette goes from entirely reasonable to inexplicably depressed over the course of a couple of scenes in order to provide the last third with some unneeded secondary drama. The young cast are often the best thing about the movie, and that’s largely due to their playing their roles like ordinary children (which they are, despite the intention of the experiment), and there’s some beautifully austere winter photography by Josée Deshaies that at least provides the action with a backdrop that reflects the muted dramatics. In the same way that Ben and Catherine’s experiment lacks coherence in the way they deal with any problems that arise, the movie also struggles to offer a consistency of tone or content. Maybe the movie, like the experiment it’s exploring, needed a longer nurturing period before committing itself to audiences.

Rating: 5/10 – sporadically amusing, with a cast that play their roles as capably as possible, Birthmarked is moderately appealing for the most part, but is mainly frustrating thanks to the opportunities it wastes; too wayward then to work effectively, it’s a movie that should be watched under proviso, or maybe as an experiment in itself.

Support the Girls (2018)

14 Sunday Oct 2018

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Andrew Bujalski, Comedy, Double Whammies, Drama, Female solidarity, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, Regina Hall, Review, Sexism, Sports bar

D: Andrew Bujalski / 90m

Cast: Regina Hall, Haley Lu Richardson, James Le Gros, AJ Michalka, Dylan Gelula, Shayna McHayle, Lea DeLaria, Jana Kramer, Brooklyn Decker, John Elvis, Lawrence Varnado

It’s another day of problems at Double Whammies, a Hooters-style sports bar-cum-restaurant (or ‘breastaurant’) managed by the ever-reliable and ever-resourceful Lisa (Hall). What with having to carry out interviews before the bar opens, dealing with a man stuck in one of the air vents, organising a car wash with the proceeds going to a staff member who’s in financial difficulties, solving the issue of the TV screens having lost their signal, and the unwanted management advice of bar owner Cubby (Le Gros), as well as the prospect of a similar, rival company opening a restaurant nearby, Lisa has her work cut out for her – and that’s without providing support and practical advice to the staff, who have their own issues. Lisa is more of a den mother than a manager, but her expertise lies in treating everyone like family, and for this she gets back a lot of respect and loyalty. As she sidesteps further potential problems that arise as the day progresses, it’s not until an encounter with Cubby that she begins to question whether or not it’s time to move on…

Although the setting for Support the Girls is a tacky, less than appealing restaurant that promotes “family values” and which has a zero tolerance policy on customers who are disrespectful to the waitstaff, this isn’t about the restaurant itself, but about those waitstaff, and their manager, and the sisterhood that they promote amongst themselves. It’s this sense of solidarity, and everyone pulling together, that gives the movie much of its heart and soul, as writer/director Bujalski paints a portrait of ordinary women working in a low paid, low reward job but finding a purpose in supporting each other that makes up for the problems that said job throws at them on a daily basis, whether it be unruly patrons, unfair rules and prohibitions (Cubby won’t allow two black women to work the same shift), or their own unrealised needs and/or ambitions. Lisa does her best to juggle all these things and to keep Double Whammies running as smoothly as possible, but she’s like the classic image of a swan: on the surface she seems able to deal with anything, but below the surface she’s paddling like mad to maintain that semblance of being in control.

Adding depth to proceedings are themes surrounding perpetuated sexist attitudes, the socio-economic climate that keeps workers such as these from doing any better for themselves, and how senior management or owners are divorced from the day-to-day realities of managing such a business. These issues are given their due without the need for strident politicising or deftly written monologues bemoaning the current state of employment matters in the US, and this is because Bujalski is focused on how female solidarity allows the staff to feel and be more fulfilled than perhaps they would be otherwise. It’s a positive message given in the unlikeliest of locations, but it’s also the reason why it works so well. These are women who are working in an environment where it’s not just their gender that can come under attack but their sexuality, their physical appearance, their class, their race, and that’s without any challenges to their ability to do the job. That the movie balances all this without being too blunt or obvious, is a testament to the skill of Bujalski’s screenplay, and his confidence in handling the material. It’s also due to the talents of a terrific cast, with Hall giving her best performance yet as a woman doing her best to keep everything going, and by being that rare thing in the movies: consistently nice.

Rating: 8/10 – a comedy that avoids clumsy attempts at satire by being sincere in its approach to its characters’ environment, and their hopes and dreams, Support the Girls does just that, and in an affecting, heartwarming manner; as a snapshot of what it’s like to be a woman in 2018 America, it could be construed as dispiriting, but what it shows instead is that female solidarity is alive and well and ready for anything – and on its own terms.

Eighth Grade (2018)

13 Saturday Oct 2018

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Anxiety, Bo Burnham, Comedy, Drama, Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Middle school, Peer pressure, Review, Social media, Video blogs

D: Bo Burnham / 94m

Cast: Elsie Fisher, Josh Hamilton, Emily Robinson, Jake Ryan, Daniel Zolghadri, Fred Hechinger, Imani Lewis, Luke Prael, Catherine Oliviere

For Kayla Day (Fisher), coming to the end of eighth grade and leaving middle school should be a cause for celebration. But Kayla has a bunch of personal issues to contend with: she posts self-help videos on YouTube that hardly anyone watches, she’s naïve about boys but wants a boyfriend, her classmates give her a “Most Quiet” award, her dad (Hamilton) doesn’t understand how important social media is to her, and despite her best efforts, she’s never been able to fit in with the “regular” crowd let alone those girls thought of as most popular. A surprise invitation to the birthday party of one of those popular girls leads Kayla to attempt taking some of her own video advice and be more confident and take more chances. But even though she does so, things don’t automatically change, and it’s not until she attends a high school shadow day and meets twelfth grader Olivia (Robinson), that her efforts begin to pay off. Another invitation, this time to spend the evening with Olivia and some of her friends, leads to a moment of self-awareness that causes Kayla to reassess everything about her life, and what’s truly important to her…

Movies about the perils of being a high school student in the US are practically ten a penny, with every variation on the theme pretty well exhausted by now, but there are few that examine the perils of middle school. And of the few that are out there – e.g. the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, Jessica Darling’s It List (2016) – none are as astutely handled or feel as authentic as Eighth Grade. First-time writer/director Bo Burnham has obviously done his homework, as he doesn’t strike one false note throughout the entire movie, from the dialogue to the exploration of Kayla’s anxiety, to the pervasive nature of social media, and the way in which peer pressure can lead to young people making ill-informed decisions in order to “fit in”. Burnham also presents Kayla’s relationship with her dad (a single parent doing his best since his wife left them both) as a convincing mix of adversity and co-dependency, their exhanges never working out the way either one of them wants them to. But the bulk of the movie examines Kayla’s efforts to establish herself as someone worth knowing, even as she strays far away from who she truly is.

One of the successes of Eighth Grade is that if you’re the age the movie depicts, the chances are that you’ll identify with the characters and the situations they find themelves in. Male or female, Kayla’s anxiety and insecurities are very relatable, from being seen at the party in an unflattering lime green swimsuit, to admitting to the boy she has a crush on that she has “dirty” pictures of herself on her phone in the hope that he’ll be interested in her. Kayla’s naïvety and inexperience lead her into some unpleasant situations, none more so than a backseat game of Truth or Dare that is as uncomfortable to watch as it is awkward and manipulative. Burnham is often uncompromisingly honest in his depictions of the lives of middle schoolers, and he doesn’t sugar coat the real life consequences that some ill-advised choices can have. This approach is aided by a terrific, nuanced performance from Fisher, who incorporates some of her own tics and behaviours into playing Kayla, and in doing so, is able to make the character entirely credible and sympathetic. She’s the movie’s ace in the hole, and interprets Burnham’s script as if she were Kayla herself – and who’s to say in some ways she isn’t?

Rating: 9/10 – an unexpectedly genuine examination of teen life that is able to resonate with people of all ages, Eighth Grade is a triumph: funny, knowing, sincere, poignant, affecting, and bracingly honest; with a standout performance from Fisher, and a script that’s unwilling to provide any obvious or disingenuous answers – but which does offer hope for Kayla instead – this is something to recommend to anyone who’s about to turn thirteen.

Sorry to Bother You (2018)

10 Wednesday Oct 2018

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Armie Hammer, Boots Riley, Comedy, Drama, Lakeith Stanfield, Power Caller, RegalView, Review, Satire, Telemarketing, Tessa Thompson, WorryFree

D: Boots Riley / 111m

Cast: Lakeith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Armie Hammer, Jermaine Fowler, Omari Hardwick, Steven Yeun, Terry Crews, Kate Berlant, Michael X. Sommers, Danny Glover, Robert Longstreet, Patton Oswalt, David Cross

For Cassius Green (Stanfield), life in an alternative-present Oakland is something of a struggle. When he lands a job at RegalView, a telemarketing company, things look like they might be about to improve. But despite his eagerness to succeed, he finds it hard to get anywhere with the sales leads he’s given. It’s not until a colleague, Langston (Glover), advises him to use his “white voice” that Cassius sees his fortunes improve. Soon he’s RegalView’s top salesman, but at the same time that the workforce are being prompted to strike for better pay and conditions by union organiser Squeeze (Yeun). Promoted to the position of Power Caller, Cassius opts for more money and prestige over helping his friends and colleagues, including his girlfriend, Detroit (Thompson). But entry to the upper echelons of RegalView reveal a side to the company that sits uncomfortably with Cassius’s political and social beliefs, beliefs that are challenged even further when he discovers a connection to WorryFree, an organisation that promotes a life of free food and lodging, plus no bills, but on condition that people accept a lifetime’s working contract…

For much of the its first hour, Sorry to Bother You is a sharply detailed, refreshingly adept satire that pokes fun at working-class aspirations and the various ways that the lower middle-class stops those aspirations from being successful. The sales floor at RegalView is used as a metaphor for those aspirations that remain stifled at every turn, while the management provide their workers with mixed messages and false assurances that success is only a few calls – or a positive attitude – away. Cassius’ eventual rise to the level of Power Caller serves as a further satirical swipe at the establishment’s exploitation and integration of talented individuals for its own nefarious purposes. It’s a little bit obvious, and borders on being a little trite in its execution, as are the problems it causes for Cassius with Detroit and his friends at work, but first-time writer/director Boots Riley gives the material a fresh enough reworking to offset any real concerns, and once the viewer has settled into the movie’s comfortable narrative groove, he introduces Cassius to WorryFree’s head honcho, Steve Lift (Hammer). And from there, the movie goes in a completely unexpected direction.

As the poster has it, this is “something you need to see to believe”. What Riley has up his sleeve will either grab you and keep you watching thanks to the sheer lunatic audacity of it all, or it will make you say to yourself, “nope, that’s it, I’m out of here”. But it does put an entirely different spin on things, and is a completely original take on the lengths that corporations will go to to maximise profits while exploiting their workforce. It’s a brave approach by Riley, but also one that makes Sorry to Bother You an unforgettable experience that really takes huge, confident strides forward in its second half, both in terms of the narrative, and in terms of the characters’ involvement. Cassius is torn between securing a good life for himself and the extent of the growing social responsibility he feels once he discovers what WorryFree is up to. Stanfield, whose potential as an actor has been obvious for a while now, grabs the role with both hands and gives a terrific performance that’s far more difficult than it seems because for most of the movie Cassius is more passive than aggressive. There’s terrific support too from Thompson as Detroit (whose choice of earrings is something to keep track of), and Hammer as Lift, the entrepreneur without a soul or a social conscience.

Rating: 8/10 – with an arresting visual style, and no shortage of humour, Sorry to Bother You is an audacious, bold, and confidently handled exposé of the perils of unchecked elitism and its association with new capitalism; it may get “weird” but by (mostly) playing it straight, the movie still makes a considerable impact, and is definitely not a movie that you’ll forget in a hurry – and that is very much a good thing.

Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town (2017)

07 Sunday Oct 2018

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Alia Shawkat, Carrie Coon, Christian Papierniak, Comedy, Drama, Engagement, Haley Joel Osment, Los Angeles, Mackenzie Davis, Review, Romance

D: Christian Papierniak / 87m

Cast: Mackenzie Davis, Carrie Coon, Alex Russell, Alia Shawkat, Haley Joel Osment, Lakeith Stanfield, Annie Potts, Rob Huebel, Brandon T. Jackson, Sarah Goldberg, Meghan Lennox, Dolly Wells

Izzy (Davis) wakes one morning to find herself in the bed of a stranger (Stanfield). As she navigates leaving without waking him, she learns that her ex-boyfriend, Roger (Russell), is getting engaged to her best friend, Whitney (Goldberg), and there’s a party to celebrate that evening. Determined to get to the party and stop Roger from going through with it – she’s convinced he still loves her – Izzy sets off with plenty of time to get there. But obstacles soon present themselves. Her car isn’t ready at the garage, she can’t get enough money for cab fare, she takes a tumble on the bike she borrows and it’s too damaged to keep using, and the one person (Shawkat) who does give her a lift leaves her stranded in a neighbourhood she doesn’t know after going just a short distance. It’s only thanks to the help of another stranger (Potts) that Izzy is able to finally get to the engagement party. But when she does, things don’t exactly go as well as she’d planned…

There’s much to like in Christian Papierniak’s feature debut, not the least of which is Davis’s bullish, spiky performance, but Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is a movie whose episodic structure hampers both its flow and its effectiveness. It’s to be expected that Izzy will encounter setbacks in her journey to her ex’s engagement party, but it’s whether or not those setbacks are interesting or reflect on Izzy’s own emotional state that is the key. And that’s where Papierniak’s screenplay lacks consistency. Too preoccupied with trying to make eloquent statements about the nature of fate, or the validity of personal expectations and needs in relationships, the script often stops the action to contemplate these matters, and in doing so, negates the urgency of Izzy’s journey. What should be a more and more desperate race against time as the movie progresses, becomes instead a kind of semi-serious, semi-humorous series of bunny hops across Los Angeles as Izzy deals with one uninterested potential Samaritan after another (until Potts’s sympathetic romantic idealist comes along). Izzy herself is someone it’s well worth spending time with, and Papierniak is on firmer ground when she’s the focus of a scene, but the other characters don’t have anywhere near the same impact.

Again, this is largely due to the uneven nature of the script, and Papierniak not fully realising his thematic and subtextual ambitions. But it’s also due to a remarkable performance by Davis, who dominates the movie in a way that makes everyone else seem like they weren’t paying attention when Papierniak gave out notes. As Izzy, Davis is mercurial, fiery, amusing, good-natured at heart, abrasive when pushed, and altogether a person rather than an indie caricature (the drawback of both Shawkat and Osment’s characters). Only Coon as Izzy’s estranged sister, Virginia – they were a musical duo once before Virginia split them up – is as compelling, contrasting Davis’s messed up free spirit with a steely-eyed turn as a woman whose sense of responsibility is just as skewed as Izzy’s but in a way that has deadened her emotionally (there’s a hint that this could be Izzy’s ultimate fate but it isn’t developed any further). When it’s not trying to be serious about life and love, the movie is on much better footing, with a sly sense of humour that elevates the material, and there’s a bittersweet ending that feels antithetical to what’s gone before, but actually proves to be a bold move by Papierniak, and one that rounds off the movie much more effectively than if – well, you’ll just have to see for yourself.

Rating: 6/10 – although Davis steals the limelight and gives an indelible, finely-tuned performance, Izzy Gets the Fuck Across Town is let down by an uneven script and less than interesting secondary characters; that said, Papierniak isn’t afraid to throw in some odd stylistic choices that at least show he’s trying to do something different, and there’s a terrific moment that involves a bathroom, a change of lighting, and the exposure of past regrets.

The Middle of X (2018)

21 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Benjamin King, Bre Blair, Colin Egglesfield, Comedy, Drama, Friends, High school reunion, Josh Cooke, Marital problems, Nicky Whelan, Peter Odiorne, Relationships, Review

D: Peter Odiorne / 82m

Cast: Bre Blair, Ronnie Gene Blevins, Josh Cooke, Colin Egglesfield, Jeremy Gabriel, Jason Gray-Stanford, Sammi Hanratty, Benjamin King, Chrisdine King, Tina Parker, Elizabeth Stillwell, Nicky Whelan

Having graduated from high school, Mack Prescott finds himself at odds with his future, or at least, what it may bring. Twenty-five years later, and on the eve of a high school reunion that he’s hosting at the home that used to belong to the parents of his wife (and high school sweetheart) Emily (Whelan), Mack (Egglesfield) is still ambivalent about his life and where it’s taking him. As many of his teenage friends, some of whom he hasn’t seen in years, begin to arrive, Mack discovers that he’s not the only one with problems. His best friend, Carter (King), drinks too much and has an unhappy marriage; Dick (Gray-Stanford) and his wife, Lydia (King), are struggling financially; and teenage sweethearts Casey (Cooke) and Sam (Blair) are hopeful of rekindling their old romance. Only Marty (Blevins), who suffered a terrible personal tragedy the night everyone was last together, appears to be happy, and then through sobriety. As the evening unfolds, Mack begins to realise what it is to be happy, and why Life has a knack for leading people to where they need to be…

Upon reading that synopsis, you could be forgiven for thinking, Uh-oh, not another movie about angsty middle-aged, middle class people wondering where it all went wrong from the safety of their palatial homes. And you would be right; this is exactly that kind of movie. Thankfully, writer/director Odiorne offers just enough of a spin on this well-worn set up to make The Middle of X an entertaining if resolutely lightweight examination of middle-aged ennui. The drama unfolds in fits and starts, and some of the various sub-plots surrounding Mack and Emily’s fractured marriage – he cheated on her so she did the same – don’t play out as well as others. There’s a sense that the running time has been dictated not so much by the length of the script but by a limited budget, and as a result, those same sub-plots feel truncated. A case in point is Marty, who is given a terrific introduction, and who is set up to be a major character. But once he arrives at the house, his story doesn’t go anywhere, and he’s used as a way of undermining another, minor character who’s quickly disposed of. It’s as if Odiorne had loads of great ideas but didn’t know what to do with them all.

He – and the movie – are much more successful with the comedic elements. There’s a sardonic streak of humour that runs throughout the material, from Carter’s commitment to continual boozing, to Dick’s desperate attempts at nabbing new clients to keep his job afloat. By pricking at the aspirational natures of his characters, Odiorne makes their unhappiness and perceived failures a source of mirth. It’s cruel in places, but much sharper than if we were witnessing their unhappiness as straight drama. This also allows for a clutch of enjoyable performances, with Benjamin King and Whelan on particularly impressive form, while the likes of Cooke, Blair and Blevins are good but don’t have the opportunity to flesh out their roles to better advantage. By the movie’s end, a major wrong has been remedied (if a little too easily), problems have been solved (if only for a while – or until the next reunion), and there’s a moment of shameless manipulation that could have been horribly mawkish but which succeeds thanks to the efforts of the actress involved. It’s moments such as these, though few and far between, that show what Odiorne could do with a bigger budget and a sharper script.

Rating: 6/10 – the material could have made more effort to skewer the pretensions of its self-absorbed characters, and a longer running time could have allowed for more satisfying resolutions to many of the sub-plots, but for a first-time outing as a writer/director, Odiorne acquits himself well enough; The Middle of X may not attract many viewers because of its generic sounding nature, but for those prepared to give it a try, there are enough rewards to make it worth their while.

Breaking and Exiting (2018)

17 Monday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Burglary, Comedy, Drama, Final meal, Jordan Hinson, Milo Gibson, Peter Facinelli, Review, Romance, Romantic comedy, Suicide

D: Peter Facinelli / 78m

Cast: Milo Gibson, Jordan Hinson, Adam Huber, James Kyson, Lily Anne Harrison, Justine Wachsberger, Joaquim de Almeida

Harry (Gibson) is a career criminal, a burglar who targets homes when the owners are away on holiday, and who aren’t gun owners. Along with his cousin, Chris (Huber), he makes enough money to ensure he doesn’t have to get a proper job. One day, Chris announces that their next burglary will be his last: he has a temp job lined up, and he doesn’t want to wind up in jail. Harry is dismissive of Chris’s ambition, but their last burglary goes badly wrong and they’re lucky to avoid being caught. Harry still doesn’t Chris is being serious, but finds himself carrying out their next job on his own. While he goes from room to room gathering valuables and electronics, he discovers a woman (Hinson) in the bath who is trying to kill herself. Harry’s inherent lack of empathy causes him to point her in the direction of tablets that will help her achieve her aim, and then he leaves. But he doesn’t get far before he suffers a rare attack of conscience, and rushes back to try and save the woman, an unselfish act that sees him behaving in a way that’s completely new to him…

A romantic comedy (whose humour is largely on the dark, uncomfortable side), Breaking and Exiting does something unexpected from the start: it brings the viewer in at a point where Harry is making the decision to return and save the woman – who is called Daisy – from killing herself. So, from the beginning we know that Harry isn’t as bad as the screenplay will subsequently paint him as it rewinds the action back a few days. As a result we can bear Harry’s selfish, egoistic behaviour and attitude towards Chris, and his girlfriend, Lana (Wachsberger), partly because it’s inappropriately funny, and partly because we know he’s going to change. Hinson, who wrote the script and also produces as well as starring, wisely allows the viewer to have some vicarious fun through Harry’s unalloyed narcissism before showing us the good heart he has buried deep, deep inside him. But he’s also curious, just like the viewer, to find out why Daisy wants to kill herself. There’s a boyfriend she’s angry with, but it always seems as though that’s merely a small part of it all, and just as she teases out Harry’s deeply-rooted compassion, so we slowly learn what’s at the root of her unhappiness.

Along the way, Harry and Daisy get to know each other, and although there are a handful of generic rom-com moments, the script does its best to steer clear of anything too obvious as the story develops. Harry is open and honest about his criminal activities, while Daisy behaves wildly and erratically in line with her current mental state. It’s not until Harry challenges Daisy to let him cook her a final meal that mixed emotions on both sides begin to coalesce into something more stable for both of them. Hinson is a winning presence, likeable and endearing even when talking about suicide with determination, while Gibson (looking and sounding very much like his father), has an easy-going charm about him that is appealing and sincere. Together, the pair add a surprising amount of texture and depth to their characters, and when things turn more serious, they make the necessary switch in tone that much more believable. Facinelli directs with a good understanding of the absurdity of the basic set up, but makes it work in tandem with his committed leads, and offers up a neatly assembled and handled rom-com that does its best to avoid being predictable in its details.

Rating: 8/10 – with the chemistry between Gibson and Hinson an added plus, and Hinson’s screenplay balancing humour and more serious matters with aplomb, Breaking and Exiting is that rare rom-com that could have benefited from being longer; with fluid, emotive camerawork from DoP Christopher Hamilton and his team, and a terrific soundtrack, the movie has more than enough going on for even the most casual of viewers.

Let’s Take a Walk Down Hype Street – Crazy Rich Asians (2018)

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Comedy, Constance Wu, Drama, Family relationships, Gemma Chan, Henry Golding, Jon M. Chu, Literary adaptation, Michelle Yeoh, Review, Romance, Singapore, Wedding

D: Jon M. Chu / 121m

Cast: Constance Wu, Henry Golding, Michelle Yeoh, Gemma Chan, Lisa Lu, Awkwafina, Chris Pang, Jing Lusi, Nico Santos, Ken Jeong, Jimmy O. Yang, Pierre Png

In a summer that’s been dominated (as usual) by superhero movies, tired remakes, and special effects driven action movies, one movie has “broken out” and caught the attention of critics and audiences alike. It’s billed as a romantic comedy – though if there’s ever likely to be a breakout movie each summer it’s likely to be a comedy of some description – and it’s been hailed as not only a breakout movie but a breakthrough movie as well. The movie (surprise!) is Crazy Rich Asians, and it’s the first time since The Joy Luck Club (1993) that any feature has had a predominantly Asian cast (though it appears that an early producer thought it would be a good idea to whitewash the lead character, Rachel). Watching the movie in the wake of all this positive feedback is interesting, partly to see if it can or does live up to the hype it’s received, and partly to see if it succeeds on its own merits. Inevitably, it does and it doesn’t.

Let’s get the casting out of the way first. Perhaps a better way of describing the cast would be to say that they’re of “predominantly Asian heritage”, but that aside, it is good to see the major roles filled by recognisably Asian actors, and especially as the story is set within the confines of a recognisably Asian family and its attendant culture. But if you’ve seen one romantic comedy where the girlfriend or the boyfriend is the outsider who needs to win over a dysfunctional extended family, then much of what’s on offer in Crazy Rich Asians will be very familiar to you. Indeed, the only real difference between this movie and many others is the fact that it is an Asian family that’s on display – and display is perhaps the best word to describe what’s happening. In everyone’s rush to congratulate the movie, they seem to have forgotten that we’ve actually been here before, in My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and its equally culturally exploitative sequel. That the cast is predominantly Asian doesn’t matter when the same romantic comedy tropes and characterisations are trotted out, and when we’re asked to laugh at comic behaviour that’s been seen too often before. It’s not enough to have an ethnic twist when the material remains the same.

And then there’s the whole idea that the movie is a romantic comedy. There is humour in Crazy Rich Asians, much of it delivered by Awkwafina as the kind of quirky best friend to the heroine that seems de rigeuer these days, or Santos’ stereotypical gay fashion designer. But in reality this is a romantic drama that has comic overtones. There are long stretches where the material isn’t even trying to raise a laugh as it seeks to explore ideas of cultural isolationism (or indigenous racism), bitterness, marital betrayal, emotional regret, depression and envy. The obstacles that loved up couple Rachel (Wu) and Nick (Golding) have to overcome lead to some very dramatic sequences, and the hurtful behaviour of Nick’s mother (Yeoh) towards Rachel borders on the perverse. And that’s without a subplot involving Chan as Nick’s sister, Astrid, whose unhappiness causes her to binge shop and hide the purchases from her husband (Png). Perhaps the makers were aware of the darkness inherent in the material from the start, but felt that promoting the movie as a romantic drama wouldn’t attract as many viewers. And therein lies the irony: as a romantic drama it’s much more effective than as a romantic comedy.

Rating: 7/10 – with very good performances in service to a good script, solid direction, and production design that emphasises the opulent above the mundane every time (the wedding is a particular standout), Crazy Rich Asians is let down by its unapologetic sense of cultural appropriation; not as groundbreaking as everyone makes out, it’s still a refreshing change from the usual summer blockbuster fare, but definitely not the movie it’s been hyped up to be.

The Land of Steady Habits (2018)

14 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Mendelsohn, Comedy, Drama, Drugs, Edie Falco, Father/son relationship, Literary adaptation, Mid-life crisis, Nicole Holofcener, Review, Thomas Mann

D: Nicole Holofcener / 98m

Cast: Ben Mendelsohn, Edie Falco, Thomas Mann, Bill Camp, Connie Britton, Elizabeth Marvel, Michael Gaston, Charlie Tahan

Anders Hill (Mendelsohn) has turned his back on his life as a husband and father, and his work in finance. Divorced and living in a condo, he’s “retired”, but finding it difficult to make his new life work. Casual (and disappointing) hook-ups with women only remind him of his ex-wife, Helene (Falco), and how much he misses her, and the fact that she’s now seeing someone he used to work with, Donny (Camp), makes it even worse. And their son, Preston (Mann), has graduated from university but seems rootless and unwilling to do anything with his life. When Anders is invited to an annual party given by his friends, the Ashfords (Marvel, Gaston), he’s not expected to actually turn up. But he does, and ends up taking drugs with the Ashfords’ son, Charlie (Tahan). When Charlie ends up in hospital that same night, it’s the beginning of an unexpected if not entirely appropriate friendship, while unresolved issues involving Helene and Preston continue to cause friction between the trio, and have a wider effect on Donny and the Ashfords, as well as a woman Anders meets called Barbara (Britton)…

The first movie directed by Nicole Holofcener that doesn’t feature Catherine Keener in the lead role, The Land of Steady Habits is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Ted Thompson. The title refers to the collection of hamlets and towns that dot the Connecticut commuter line, and their similarity to each other. Anders has decided that he no longer wants to be a part of the “rat race”, and that his happiness has been impeded by his job and his marriage and having to be selfless in providing for everyone around him. But Anders is finding that being “free” brings its own set of problems, some that remain from his previous life, and newer ones that add to his woes. It’s clear he’s not happy, and it’s clear that he has no idea of what he’s doing (we first meet him trying to buy ornaments to fill the shelves in his condo; the choices he makes are less than complementary to each other). He wants to retain a connection with Helene but can’t articulate why, while he’s more in tune with Charlie and his issues with his parents than he is with his own son.

All this is handled by Holofcener (who also provides the screenplay) with her customary sincerity and sympathetic approach to each of the characters, and by doing this she manages to avoid making Anders’ story yet another dull tale of an affluent, middle-class man’s mid-life crisis. She’s helped enormously by Mendelsohn’s sensitive and often poignant portrayal of Anders as a man who is at odds with himself and what he needs out of life. Falco is slightly less well served by the material – Helene isn’t given the room to develop as a character – while Mann is terrific as Preston, with rehab in his past and facing an uncertain future. However, the movie is a mixture of drama and comedy that doesn’t always gel convincingly, the relationship between Anders and Charlie is the kind that exists purely in the movies, and there are times when it seems Holofcener has trouble making certain scenes appear relevant. The result is a movie that feels as if it’s holding itself back, and which, despite the cast’s commitment, always seems to be on the verge of saying something profound – without quite knowing just what it is it wants to say.

Rating: 7/10 – a great performance from Mendelsohn ensures The Land of Steady Habits remains watchable throughout, but the patchy material doesn’t always hold up; ultimately it’s a movie that remains likeable even when it’s not living up to its full potential, and it retains a certain charm that is hard to ignore, but a lot will depend on how much emotional dysfunction you can endure – and not just from Anders.

The Last Movie Star (2017)

07 Friday Sep 2018

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Adam Rifkin, Ariel Winter, Burt Reynolds, Clark Duke, Comedy, Drama, Film Festival, Knoxville, Lifetime Achievement Award, Nashville, Review

Original title: Dog Years

D: Adam Rifkin / 104m

Cast: Burt Reynolds, Ariel Winter, Clark Duke, Ellar Coltrane, Al-Jaleel Knox, Nikki Blonsky, Juston Street, Kathleen Nolan, Chevy Chase

Vic Edwards (Reynolds) is an aging, and mostly forgotten, movie star who lives by himself in a sprawling home, and whose one remaining real friend is another aging, mostly forgotten actor called Sonny (Chase). When Vic receives an invitation to accept a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Nashville Film Festival, he’s reluctant at first, but soon his curiosity gets the better of him, and he decides to attend. However, it soon becomes clear that the festival – run by two young friends, Doug (Duke) and Shane (Coltrane) – is on a shoestring, as evidenced by its being held in a bar. Annoyed at being fooled so badly, Vic decides to take advantage of having a personal driver, Doug’s sister Lil (Winter), and gets her to take her to Knoxville, where he was born and raised. Along the way, their adversarial relationship blossoms into something more friendly, as both share stories from their lives, and learn some life lessons that each other haven’t thought about…

Just in case you’re unsure of how “meta” The Last Movie Star is going to be, the opening scene dispels any doubts whatsover. Though introduced as Vic Edwards, it’s clearly Burt Reynolds being interviewed by David Frost sometime in the Seventies. So immediately we know that this movie is going to be self-reverential to quite a degree, and will be mining Reynolds’ own professional history (if not his personal life) for the details that make up the character of Vic Edwards. And following that interview is a close up of Edwards (or Reynolds; they’re interchangeable in too many ways for it to matter much of the time), his time-worn features bringing us up to date with the fate of a man once adored by millions. Edwards is a lonely man tempted by the limelight of long-past recognition. What’s a tired old actor who still wants to be relevant to do? In these early scenes, writer/director Rifkin shows us the monotony of Edwards’ daily life, the impulse to look at pretty girls his only remaining pleasure. Of course he’s going to go to Nashville, but Edwards still has his pride. He still remembers what it means to be a star. And being duped into attending a film festival both re-awakens that pride, and an unexpected need to reconnect with his childhood.

The subsequent tour of Knoxville and Edwards’ old haunts is a remarkably affecting and bittersweet occasion (bolstered by an overnight stay in a plush hotel), with Reynolds putting aside his character’s tetchy, arrogant persona and finding the man’s inner melancholy, those regrets he’s carried with him since becoming a star and living the kind of rarefied life that is being celebrated at the festival. As he revisits his past, Rifkin takes the movie into really “meta” territory and has Edwards share scenes with Reyynolds’ screen incarnations from Deliverance (1972) and Smokey and the Bandit (1977). They’re not entirely successful, both in terms of the visual effects used, and the dialogue on Reynolds’ side, which is minimal. But it’s a clever conceit, and much more subtle than the script’s approach to the matter of growing old, which is one area where it lets the side down. Rifkin is so keen to point out that growing old is a terrible thing that he hammers it home over and over, just in case we didn’t get it the first time. Along with an extraneous subplot involving Lil’s commitment-phobe boyfriend, and Edwards suffering the kinds of falls that would see most OAP’s end up in hospital, the movie rarely falters, and offers the kind of reflective musing on life that doesn’t have to be done in someone’s twilight years.

Rating: 7/10 – a moving performance from Reynolds anchors The Last Movie Star, and helps make it an enjoyable slice of life movie that is both bittersweet and poignant; with good support from Winter, and an apposite score by Austin Wintory, it’s the use of Reynolds’ screen history that has the most impact, and Rifkin is to be congratulated for not making it feel exploitative.

10 Reasons to Remember Burt Reynolds (1936-2018)

07 Friday Sep 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Action, Actor, Career, Comedy, Deliverance (1972), Smokey and the Bandit (1977), Thriller

Burt Reynolds (11 February 1936 – 6 September 2018)

If it hadn’t been for a series of injuries that ended his college football career, we might never have heard of Burt Reynolds. Faced with rethinking his future, Reynolds at first opted to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a police officer. But his father, with tremendous foresight, persuaded him to finish college (albeit with the intention of becoming a parole officer afterwards). There, Reynolds impressed his English teacher so much that he was given the lead role in a production of Sutton Vane’s Outward Bound (for which he won a state drama award). A career in the theatre followed on from this, and through the Fifties Reynolds honed his craft on the stage before transferring to television at the end of the decade.

Reynolds made his movie debut in Angel Baby (1961), but it would be a further decade before he found his breakout role as Lewis Medlock in John Boorman’s survivalist thriller Deliverance (1972). Finally given a role that he could make something of, Reynolds impressed critics and audiences alike, and thanks to a number of canny career choices that saw him take the action comedy genre to new box office heights. Always perceived as an easy-going, likeable actor, Reynolds channelled this perception into an on-screen good ole boy character that saw him become a major star across a succession of movies such as White Lightning (1973) and Smokey and the Bandit (1977). In the Eighties he segued from action comedies to action thrillers, but his star began to wane and his success at the box office was no longer guaranteed. Reynolds kept working steadily though, and returned to television at the start of the Nineties, particularly in the series, Evening Shade (1990-94).

Reynolds enjoyed something of a career resurgence with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1997), and his performance gained him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination, which must have felt good after his previous two movies, Meet Wally Sparks and Bean (both 1997) (and even though he hated the movie itself). But though he continued to appear on both the big and the small screen, often it was in supporting or guest roles, with an occasional lead role thrown in. Health issues plagued him throughout his later years, and by the time he gave what might be called a valedictory performance, in Adam Rifkin’s The Last Movie Star (2017), his obvious frailty made it seem unlikely he would appear in any more lead roles. That said, he was due to appear in Quentin Tarantino’s upcoming Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but he passed away before he could begin shooting his scenes.

Reynolds was once asked to play James Bond but he wisely turned it down, saying an American couldn’t play Bond; it wouldn’t be right. You could argue that he was an actor of limited range, but a more apt description would be that he was a movie star for nearly two decades, and an actor on either side of that period. And with a movie career that spanned fifty-seven years, that makes him an actor first and foremost – and one who will be sorely missed.

1 – Sam Whiskey (1969)

2 – Deliverance (1972)

3 – The Longest Yard (1974)

4 – Nickelodeon (1976)

5 – Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

6 – Hooper (1978)

7 – Sharky’s Machine (1981)

8 – City Heat (1984)

9 – Breaking In (1989)

10 – Boogie Nights (1997)

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