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.

Most Beautiful Island (2017)

19 Thursday Jul 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Tags

Ana Asensio, Caprice Benedetti, Drama, First feature, Illegal immigrant, Mystery, Natasha Romanova, New York, Party, Review, Thriller

D: Ana Asensio / 79m

Cast: Ana Asensio, Natasha Romanova, Caprice Benedetti, David Little, Nicholas Tucci, Larry Fessenden, Anna Myrha, Ami Sheth, Brian Kleinman

Luciana (Asensio) has come to New York following a personal tragedy that occurred in her home country of Spain. She’s an illegal immigrant, sharing an apartment she can’t afford because she can’t get a permanent job (she doesn’t have a social security number, or a work visa), and when she’s unwell, dependent on the ministrations of a doctor (Little) who’s willing to provide her with medicine. Luciana has a friend, Olga (Romanova), with whom she occasionally works on cash-in-hand jobs. When Olga tells her that there’s a party where the girls can earn a lot of money for one night’s work, and it’s not that kind of party, Luciana agrees to go in Olga’s place when she’s asked. At a Chinese restaurant she’s given a padlocked purse and told to go to another address. There she finds other women (like her they’re attired in high heels and little black dresses), and Olga. While she tries to discover just what kind of party she’s a part of, one by one the women are chosen and led into another room, a room that many of the other women are frightened of…

When writer/director/actress Ana Asensio moved to New York City in 2001, little did she realise that a party she would work at, one that was “dangerous and illegal”, would help form the basis of her debut feature, the taut, award-winning thriller Most Beautiful Island. It’s perhaps a good thing that she did attend that party, because out of it, Asensio has fashioned a compelling, darkly unsettling movie that begins somewhat predictably, with Luciana travelling to the offices of Dr Horowitz to cajole him into giving her the medicine she needs, and then to Luciana arriving home to find a final reminder about the rent she owes. So far, an unremarkable exploration of the likely experiences of an undocumented immigrant, and one that will have viewers most likely wondering what further obstacles she will have to overcome. But Asensio isn’t interested in pursuing this kind of immigrant story; we’ve seen these kinds of trials before, after all. Instead, she takes Luciana, and the viewer, on a different kind of journey, with a very different kind of trial at the end of it, one that is expertly constructed and which relies on very little exposition.

Asensio creates a heavy sense of increasing dread from the moment Luciana arrives at the Chinese restaurant and is told she can’t take her shoulder bag with her, one that contains her personal effects. The inference is clear: without it she becomes anonymous, and if anything were to happen to her, who would know? The padlocked purse provides a further sense of mystery (when the contents are finally revealed, the moment provides a frisson of sick surprise that’s hard to ignore), and the gradual revelation of the party’s raison d’être is paced with great skill by Asensio’s confidence behind the camera, and Carl Ambrose and Francisco Bello’s incisive editing skills. This is a movie that grows uneasier to watch as it goes on, and the use of Fessenden and Tucci as crypto-villains cleverly adds to the anxiety Asensio builds up, while Benedetti’s role as the party’s organiser – all surface glamour and reptilian emotions – is hard to tear yourself away from. Asensio herself is a winning presence, deftly portraying her character’s desperate need for money without resorting to melodrama or making Luciana’s predicament more than it is. She also makes a handful of telling comments about the plight of female illegal immigrants, but this is no feminist polemic. Instead it’s a quietly impressive thriller that lingers in the memory, and a remarkable debut from its creator.

Rating: 8/10 – with only a small handful of awkward moments that serve as a reminder that this is Asensio’s first feature, Most Beautiful Island is still an intense, powerful experience that makes the most of its low budget and constrained production values; Asensio is definitely a movie maker to watch out for, and on this evidence, her next feature can’t come soon enough.

Sisters (2015)

06 Sunday Mar 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Amy Poehler, Booze, Childhood home, Comedy, Drugs, Ellis Island, Jason Moore, John Cena, John Leguizamo, Maya Rudolph, Mother/daughter relationship, Parents, Party, Review, Romance, Tina Fey

D: Jason Moore / 118m

Cast: Amy Poehler, Tina Fey, Maya Rudolph, Ike Barinholtz, James Brolin, Dianne Weist, John Cena, John Leguizamo, Bobby Moynihan, Greta Lee, Madison Davenport, Rachel Dratch

Making the transition from TV to movies can be tough. For every Mike Myers or Johnny Depp, there are dozens more actors and actresses who make the leap only to find their particular schtick isn’t as popular with cinema audiences. Often it’s down to their choice of material, sometimes they make the mistake of doing exactly the same thing as they do on their TV show, and sometimes there’s just no explaining why their movie doesn’t click with audiences. Many persevere, trying time and again to make it work and be successful, and just as many fail.

Welcome then to Sisters, the latest attempt by Amy Poehler and Tina Fey to translate their TV personas into box office success. It’s a mix of teen party with adults, sibling dependency, and awkward romance, and it struggles to make any of these aspects even remotely entertaining. The teen party with adults is the worst of Sisters’ many creative decisions. Maura and Kate Ellis (Poehler, Fey) are middle-aged sisters. Maura is a nurse whose need to help others can be suffocating, and who hasn’t been in a relationship for some time. Kate is a nail technician who has a teenage daughter, Haley (Davenport), but no man, and has trouble keeping it together. When she loses her job it coincides with an invitation from their parents (Brolin, Weist) to come visit their childhood home before it’s sold.

Maura and Kate are horrified by this, especially as the invite has really been about them coming to clear out their room. Left to get on with it, Maura and Kate decide instead to have one last party in the house, and set about inviting all their old schoolfriends – with the exception of realtor Brinda (Rudolph) – along with a neighbour, James (Barinholtz), that Maura has the hots for. Everyone turns up as expected but as everyone is as middle-aged as the sisters are, the party isn’t as exciting as they’d hoped for. The intervention of local drug dealer, Pazuzu (Cena), leads to a much wilder, much more enjoyable party, and inevitably, the house suffering some extreme wear and tear. And then Kate learns that she and Maura stand to benefit from the sale of the house. But by now it’s too late to put a halt to all the damage that’s been done, and matters are made even worse by the efforts of Brinda to crash the party, and the imminent arrival of Maura and Kate’s parents.

There’s no denying that Poehler and Fey are two very fine comediennes – on TV. With Parks and Recreation, and 30 Rock respectively, both women have carved out hugely successful careers for themselves, and earned a sackload of respect and admiration in the process. But on the big screen the results haven’t exactly been that impressive. Fey’s attempts have included Date Night (2010), Admission (2013) and This Is Where I Leave You (2014), while Poehler, who admittedly has been trying for longer, has struck out with the likes of Spring Breakdown (2009), Freak Dance (2010), and A.C.O.D. (2013). The idea of them appearing together as sisters sounds like a great idea on paper (and the roles of Maura and Kate were written specifically for them), but it’s the movie itself that stops them from making much of an impact.

There’s plenty of scope to be had from making Maura and Kate as different as chalk and cheese – Maura is the dependable, slightly strait-laced sister, Kate is the carefree, mainly irresponsible free spirit – but without any friction between them until very late on, most scenes they appear in until then tend to focus on highlighting those differences to the point where even someone whose not even watching the movie will be aware of them. But still they’re no cause for disagreement or arguments or any kind of falling out. As a result, the movie plods along, content to find humour in the behaviour of secondary characters such as grinning hound dog Dave (Leguizamo), and mildly depressed Kelly (Dratch). But even then the laughter is thin on the ground, and has to be propped up by some actually quite funny verbal barbs courtesy of Kate.

And once the party gets really started, and several chocolate brownies have allowed the guests to loosen up, the movie encounters another problem. It wants to be a raucous comedy at this point, a la American Pie (1999), but as that series discovered when it arrived at American Reunion (2012), the idea of adults behaving like teenagers isn’t inherently funny, and something that audiences don’t really want to see. So the behaviour in Sisters is toned down to such an extent that whatever shenanigans or hijinks do happen, they’re about as funny as watching Amy and Tina trying on party dresses while a shop assistant drones that their outfits suit them (when of course they don’t).

Another part of the problem with Paula Pell’s script – and by extension Jason Moore’s direction – is that early on, scenes drag on past their proper length, partly in an effort to provide both actresses with equal screen time, and partly in an effort to wring out some extra laughs from situations and scenes that don’t support many laughs in the first place. That’s not to say that the movie isn’t funny it places, because it is, it’s just that it’s not funny consistently. It also tries too hard, and to the point where it tries to provoke a laugh from Weist using the C-word. When your comedy movie can’t manufacture enough laughs to maintain interest over nearly two hours, then you’ve got a problem.

As the sisters, Poehler and Fey are likeable enough, but even they can’t do much with a script that lacks substance as well as sustained humour. Rudolph pulls a lot of faces to make up for the one-note character she’s been given, Brolin and Weist have to settle for being constantly annoyed by their daughters’ behaviour, Leguizamo is wasted in the kind of minor supporting role he takes on every now and then, and Moynihan, tasked with playing the kind of too loud funny man whose jokes are always awful, is saddled with mimicking Al Pacino in Scarface (1983) in a charades scene that feels like it’s never going to end. Only Cena as the taciturn drug dealer (whose safe word is “keep going”) avoids being hampered by the material, and the movie picks up whenever he’s on screen.

Sisters would be a better movie if it was twenty minutes shorter and if Pell’s screenplay had concentrated on laughs rather than giving its two main characters “life lessons” to learn. Viewers looking for a great time in the company of two very talented comediennes would do better to try their respective TV series’, while anyone unfamiliar with their TV work, but thinking of giving the movie a try on the off chance that a movie featuring Poehler and Fey must be good (right?), should take a hasty step back and save themselves from being disappointed.

Rating: 5/10 – sporadic laughs do not a comedy make, and Sisters struggles repeatedly to get the mix of visual and verbal humour to work effectively, leaving it feeling and looking dull and uninspired for long stretches; best viewed as a valiant attempt to give Poehler and Fey their big screen breakthrough, but otherwise a movie that fails to deliver both for them and for the audience.