Tag Archives: Remake

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

20 Wednesday Mar 2019

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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…

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Miss Bala (2019)

14 Thursday Mar 2019

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D: Catherine Hardwicke / 104m

Cast: Gina Rodriguez, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Matt Lauria, Cristina Rodlo, Ricardo Abarca, Damián Alcázar, Aislinn Derbez, Anthony Mackie

Gloria Fuentes (Rodriguez) is a make up artist living and working in Los Angeles. She takes a trip to Tijuana in Mexico to see her best friend, Suzu (Rodlo). Suzu is planning to enter the Miss Baja California beauty contest, and that night she and Gloria go to a club where Suzu aims to impress one of the contest’s supporters, Chief of Police Saucedo (Alcázar). However, armed gunmen attempt to kill Saucedo and in the ensuing confusion, Gloria and Suzu are separated. The next morning, and still unable to find Suzu, Gloria seeks help from a policeman. But instead of taking her to the nearest police station, he hands her over to Lino (Cordova), the leader of Las Estrellas, the drug cartel responsible for the attack on Chief Saucedo. Lino tells Gloria he will help her find Suzu, but what this means in reality is that she will have to work for Las Estrellas first. Seizing an opportunity to escape them, Gloria winds up in the hands of the DEA and agent Brian Reich (Lauria), who blackmails her into going back and being a mole in Lino’s organisation…

Comparisons between remakes and their original predecessors is often invidious: the remake rarely makes the same impact, or has the same energy, or succeeds in the same fashion as the original did, and this is doubly so when the remake is an English language version of a foreign language movie. Such is the case with Miss Bala, a re-working of the 2011 movie of the same name that was Mexico’s submission for that year’s Oscars. There’s undoubted talent involved here – director Hardwicke has Lords of Dogtown (2005) and Twilight (2008) on her resumé, Rodriguez is best known for TV’s Jane the Virgin, and DoP Patrick Murguia lensed the under-rated The Frozen Ground (2013) – but there’s not much they can do to offset Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer’s smoothed over screenplay and its Hollywoodised approach to the basic storyline. Where the original Miss Bala had an ending that was deliberately ambiguous and suited what had gone before, here the ending is contrived and seems designed to pave the way for a TV series. It’s one of many disappointments that will frustrate viewers who have seen Gerardo Naranjo’s version and been impressed by its gritty, psychologically raw attitude. But even if you haven’t, it’s still unlikely that you’ll be singing the movie’s praises.

Part of the problem here is that Gloria is never treated badly enough for the audience to believe that she’s in any real danger. This robs the movie of any tension it may have been able to generate, and it makes Rodriguez’ job that much harder as she tries to sell the idea that Gloria is in real danger. Rodriguez does well to turn an ingenue into a bad ass by the movie’s end, but it’s a triumph that’s against the odds because everything comes so easily to the character, whether it’s learning how to shoot an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, lying convincingly to Lino (who is nowhere near as suspicious of her as he should be), or switching tracking devices in and out of mobile phones at the drop of a hat. There’s an awkward, one-sided romance between Gloria and Lino that seeks to explain the leniency with which he treats her, but it’s at odds with what else we know about the character, and just feels like a misguided attempt to provide the “bad guy” with “layers”. A handful of action scenes are dealt with in a way that could be described as “standard operating procedure” – all low angles, rapid-fire cutting, and the volume cranked up – and they offer some respite from the dreary nature of the overall plot, but they’re not enough to rescue yet another unnecessary English language remake of a much better foreign language original.

Rating: 5/10 – Rodriguez is pretty much the whole deal here, holding Miss Bala together through the sheer strength of her performance, and doing her best to make the viewer forget how homogenised and culturally indifferent it all is; with its sanitised version of a drug cartel not helping to fuel the drama, nor the idea that the DEA are more immoral and/or corrupt than said drug cartel, this isn’t a movie that has a foot in the real world, or anything to say that would make sense, or even be memorable.

The Kindergarten Teacher (2018)

11 Monday Mar 2019

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D: Sara Colangelo / 96m

Cast: Maggie Gyllenhaal, Parker Sevak, Gael García Bernal, Michael Chernus, Anna Baryshnikov, Rosa Salazar, Daisy Tahan, Sam Jules, Ajay Naidu, Samrat Chakrabarti

Lisa Spinelli (Gyllenhaal) has been a kindergarten teacher for twenty years. She has a family of her own – husband Grant (Chernus), and two teenage children, Josh (Jules) and Lainie (Tahan) – but seems more at ease with the children in her class. In her spare time she attends a weekly poetry class run by Simon (Bernal), but though she tries her best, her poems are regarded as derivative and uninspired. One day, one of her pupils, Jimmy (Sevak), recites a poem that Lisa notes down. Believing it to be both beautiful and profound, she uses it as her own at her next poetry class, where it is well received by everyone. Enjoying this new recognition, Lisa takes more of an interest in Jimmy and tries to ensure she doesn’t miss any more spontaneous poems he might come up with. Certain that he’s a child prodigy, Lisa encourages Jimmy to let her know when he has a new verse. Soon, she is attempting to insert herself more and more into his life in order to foster his talent, but it leads to her making some very unwise decisions…

A remake of the 2014 Israeli movie of the same name, The Kindergarten Teacher is that rare remake that is just as good, if not better, than the original. Featuring a bravura performance from Gyllenhaal, the movie tackles its theme of intellectual obsession with a rigour and a complexity that ensures the material retains a number of layers for the viewer to explore even as more and more of Lisa’s motives are revealed. At first, she seems to be exploiting Jimmy’s talent for her own benefit, getting praise at her poetry class, and in time, receiving Simon’s lustful attentions. But as the story unfolds, and we learn more about her, we discover that Lisa is unhappy, with her life which seems to be stuck in a rut, with her marriage which has become stale, and with her children who are striking out on their own and lack any apparent need for intellectual stimulation, something that appals her deeply. Unable to take control of anything other than her standing in the poetry class (and only by deception), Lisa does her best to be the overseer of Jimmy’s talent, and by doing so, to find a new purpose in her life. And as she does so, she becomes more and more willing to take the kind of risks that will cause her downfall – and yet still be grateful to do so.

Of course, there are moral and ethical dilemmas to be addressed here, and Colangelo, who also wrote the screenplay, covers these issues astutely, and displays a keen awareness of Lisa’s emotional needs, and the maternal instincts that have been dulled by her children’s growing independence. In Jimmy she can see a redemptive opportunity, and by nurturing his talent and making sure it’s not squandered as he gets older, Lisa is able to validate her own sense of self-worth. Gyllenhaal is magnificent as Lisa, giving the kind of assured, dazzlingly authoritative performance that we haven’t seen from her in ages, and she dominates the movie from start to finish, expressing Lisa’s hopes and fears and initial lack of personal direction with a fierce intelligence that makes the character entirely credible throughout, and which makes a last reel admission all the more heartbreaking for its wrenching honesty. There are good supporting performances from Sevak and Chernus (though Bernal is under-utilised), and Colangelo makes good use of an often unsettling score courtesy of Asher Goldschmidt. Some viewers may be expecting a tragic ending to such a tale of obsession, and while there is one, it’s far more tragic for what it implies than what actually occurs, something that adds a chilling grace note to what’s gone before.

Rating: 8/10 – with a powerhouse performance from Gyllenhaal, and a storyline that embraces the emotional turmoil of someone who’s desperate to restore some meaning to their life – however they can – The Kindergarten Teacher is compelling and thought-provoking at the same time; as much about one woman’s skewed maternal instincts as it is about the path she takes to redeem herself in her own eyes, this is a movie that slowly and quietly grabs hold of the viewer and doesn’t let go until the final, haunting shot.

Nothing to Hide (2018)

14 Monday Jan 2019

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Original title: Le jeu

aka The Game

D: Fred Cavayé / 92m

Cast: Bérénice Bejo, Suzanne Clément, Stéphane De Groodt, Vincent Elbaz, Grégory Gadebois, Doria Tillier, Roschdy Zem, Fleur Fitoussi

Seven friends gather together for a dinner party, held at the home of cosmetic surgeon Vincent (De Groodt) and his wife, therapist Marie (Bejo). Joining them are newlyweds Thomas (Elbaz) and Léa (Tillier), who have decided to try for a baby; distant married couple Charlotte (Clément) and Marco (Zem); and single friend Ben (Gadebois), who should be bringing his new girlfriend for everyone to meet, but who turns up alone as she’s fallen ill. A discussion about mobile phones and the secrets they may contain leads to Marie suggesting they all play a game: if anyone receives a call, or a text, or an e-mail, that person has to answer the call (with the loudspeaker on), or read out their texts and e-mails for the whole group to hear. The “game” starts off innocently enough, but it’s not long before some of the calls prove uncomfortable for the people receiving them. As the evening continues, secrets are revealed and relationships find themselves under threat, as the seven friends begin to realise that perhaps they don’t know each other as well as they thought…

One of a staggering eight remakes of Perfect Strangers (2016) that have been made in the past two years (and soon to be joined by four more), Nothing to Hide cleaves faithfully to the original set up, both in the secrets it reveals and the physical layout of Vincent and Marie’s apartment; there’s even a balcony for the friends to gather on when it comes time to take a group selfie. And although imitation is apparently the sincerest form of flattery, what Cavayé does with his adaptation, which he also scripted, is to take the pressure cooker atmosphere of Paolo Genovese’s original and dial it down to make it more recognisably French. There are outbursts, there is anger, but these aspects are much more subdued, and Cavayé’s decision to apply a degree of subtlety to the material helps the movie achieve a different kind of impact, one that fits the minor changes made to the narrative, and the overall approach. Here, there are silences and periods where the characters are forced to examine their indiscretions and lies that offer painful reminders that we all keep secrets, even and sometimes especially, from our loved ones. But is the price we invitably pay, ever worth it?

As with the original, the movie retains the curveball that marred Genovese’s ending, but somehow Cavayé makes it work, and with a wistfulness that feels completely in keeping with what’s gone before. He’s also assembled a terrific ensemble cast, with each getting a chance to shine, and each getting the measure of their characters. This leads to insights and revelations about each of the friends that help add layers to the narrative and which also allows the viewer to feel a degree of sympathy for each one – but especially Marco, who acts bravely but misguidedly to protect one of the others. Bejo and De Groodt are a convincing couple, and as the duo least affected by the fallout from the game, act as our touchstones as things get worse; they’re also at the centre of the movie’s best scene, when Vincent has to deal with a difficult and emotive issue concerning their daughter, Margot (Fitoussi). Elsewhere, Denis Rouden’s deft camerawork and framing catches reactions and behavourial tics that might otherwise go unmissed, and Mickael Dumontier’s restrained yet intuitive editing style ensures Rouden’s efforts are maximised for the best impact. It’s a French take on a universal story, and infused with a great deal of charm and wit, and as a cautionary tale – be careful of the games you play – very enjoyable indeed.

Rating: 8/10 – a rare remake that improves on the original, Nothing to Hide is a dramedy that often hits close to home in the way that it exposes the lies we tell ourselves in order to keep secrets; unexpectedly sobering at times, and laugh out loud funny at others, it does flirt uncomfortably with homophobia at one point, but overall this is an intelligent, entertaining remake that has its own style and its own way of being relevant.

NOTE: Apologies for the dubbed and subtitled trailer – sometimes you just can’t win!

The Upside (2017)

13 Sunday Jan 2019

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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.

A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop (2009)

07 Monday Jan 2019

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Original title: San qiang pai an jing qi

aka The First Gun; A Simple Noodle Story, Zhang Yimou’s Blood Simple

D: Zhang Yimou / 86m

Cast: Sun Honglei, Xiao Shenyang, Ni Yan, Ni Dahong, Cheng Ye, Mao Mao, Julien Gaudfroy, Zhao Benshan

Situated in a small desert town in China’s Gansu province, Wang’s Noodle Shop is overseen by its owner, Wang (Ni Dahong0, but managed and run by his wife (Ni Yan). Wang is cruel and abusive towards his wife, which has led her to contemplating having an affair with Li (Xiao), who works there along with Zhao (Cheng) and Chen (Mao). The arrival of a travelling Persian weapons salesman (Gaudfroy) gives Wang’s wife the opportunity to buy a gun with three bullets in it. Having it makes her feel safer, but when her husband is told that she’s actually having an affair with Li, he employs a local policeman, Zhang (Sun), to kill them both and dispose of the bodies. But Zhang has other ideas: he offers Wang manufactured evidence of their deaths, and then uses the gun Wang’s wife has bought to shoot Wang. What follows is a twisted and deadly game of cat and mouse between Zhang and Wang’s wife and Li, and between Zhang and Zhao and Chen, who are looking to get into Wang’s money-laden safe…

A remake of thw Coen brothers’ debut, Blood Simple (1984), Zhang Yimou’s A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop isn’t the kind of movie you’d expect from the director of such international arthouse successes as Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and House of Flying Daggers (2004). For though it may be as beautiful and visually striking as those movies, with its heavily stylised colour palette and bold desert landscapes, the movie is also a departure in that it wilfully embraces elements of slapstick humour and out and out screwball comedy (albeit in a Chinese fashion). Many of the movie’s early scenes showcase a lightness of touch and a comedic sensibility that Zhang has yet to revisit in his career, and the antics of would-be lovers Li and Wang’s wife, as well as the devious machinations of Zhao and Chen, allow the spirited cast a chance to overact wildly but to very funny effect (though bear in mind this is Chinese humour, and not always compatible with Western sensibilities; best just to go with it). As the misunderstandings and murderous plottings begin to accumulate, Zhang ensures that the humour remains a key ingredient in his adaptation, but as the movie becomes darker, so too does the comedy, until it’s as pitch black as Wang’s heart.

Fans of Blood Simple won’t be too surprised by this, as the screenplay – by Zu Zhengchao, Shi Jianquan and Zhou Xiaofeng – follows the Coens original story more closely as the story unfolds. Thanks to Zhang’s willingness to experiment with his own directing style, and to try something entirely different, the movie remains faithful while carving out its own unique approach, with its veteran director making terrific use of space and light, and editor Meng Peicong increasing the rhythm and pace as the movie progresses. It’s all anchored by a wonderfully deadpan performance from Sun, whose passive features still manage to express disdain, and boredom with events, as a matter of course. With all the crazy, buffoonish behaviour on display elsewhere, it’s Sun’s straight man who has the most impact, and he’s a pleasure to spend time with. As the would-be lovers, Xiao and Ni Yan bounce off each other with increasing delight, and there’s a terrific cameo from Zhao as a slightly cross-eyed police captain that is short but very entertaining. Zhang may not be delving into the motivations and desires of his characters as closely as he would normally, but then he’s wise enough to know that the material doesn’t require it, and by painting everyone with broad brush strokes, it helps the movie enormously.

Rating: 8/10 – not for all tastes, and certainly not the usual fare expected of Zhang Yimou, nevertheless A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop is hugely entertaining, both on a comedic level, and thanks to Zhang’s skill with visual imagery; occasionally surreal, but always intriguing, it’s a movie that is handled with a deftness and a simplicity that many other movie makers would do well to emulate, and features a bravura noodle making scene that is even more impressive for giving the impression that it was all done in one take.

A Brief Word About Dumbo (2019) and Its New Poster

15 Thursday Nov 2018

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Earlier this year, Disney released a first trailer for their new live action version of Dumbo (2019), directed by Tim Burton. Alongside it they released a first poster for the movie which looked like this:

Adopting the whole “less is more” approach, this poster remains a striking, beautifully composed and – more importantly – simple design that is evocative, boldly colourful and exactly what a teaser poster should be: a small, but potent glimpse of what’s to come. Now we have a second trailer and a second poster, and what a difference between the two. Somewhere along the way, the good folks at Disney have decided that evocative, boldly colourful and simple, isn’t good enough. And so, we have this:

This is the image that Disney want us to see from now on – that first poster will disappear into the archives with all the speed of a flying baby elephant. Cluttered, overwrought, visually distracting, and just plain clumsy in its design, it lacks the imagination of the first poster, and its simplicity. It may be small potatoes in the grand scheme of things – it is just a poster after all – but doesn’t it seem as if the person who signs off on these posters hasn’t got the slightest clue as to what’s effective and what isn’t? Posters can, and have been, regarded as art. But it seems that it’s a lost art, or at best, one that isn’t as valued as it used to be. Which, considering some of the classic posters that Disney themselves have given us over the years, is all the more surprising, and something of a shame.

Monthly Roundup – September 2018

30 Sunday Sep 2018

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Christopher Robin (2018) / D: Marc Forster / 104m

Cast: Ewan McGregor, Hayley Atwell, Bronte Carmichael, Mark Gatiss, Oliver Ford Davies, Jim Cummings, Brad Garrett, Peter Capaldi, Sophie Okonedo, Toby Jones

Rating: 7/10 – having left behind his childhood friends at the Hundred Acre Wood, an adult Christopher Robin (McGregor), now married and weighed down by the demands of his work, is reunited with them just at the moment that they all most need each other; a live action/CGI variation on A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories, Christopher Robin is an enjoyable if lightweight confection from Disney that features good performances from McGregor and Cummings (as both Pooh and Tigger), but which also takes a very straightforward approach to its story, and allows Gatiss to overdo it as the smug villain of the piece.

Melvin Goes to Dinner (2003) / D: Bob Odenkirk / 83m

Cast: Michael Blieden, Stephanie Courtney, Matt Price, Annabelle Gurwitch, Maura Tierney, David Cross, Melora Walters, Jack Black

Rating: 7/10 – two friends agree to meet for dinner but two other people end up joining them, leading to an evening of surprising connections and revelations that causes each to rethink their own opinions and feelings about each other; adapted from the stage play Phyro-Giants! (and written by Blieden), Odenkirk’s debut as a director is an amusing examination of what we tell ourselves to be true while being closely examined by others who may (or may not) know better, making Melvin Goes to Dinner a waspish if somewhat diffident look at social mores that feels a little forced in places, but is well acted by its cast.

BlacKkKlansman (2018) / D: Spike Lee / 135m

Cast: John David Washington, Adam Driver, Laura Harrier, Topher Grace, Jasper Pããkkönen, Ryan Eggold, Paul Walter Houser, Ashlie Atkinson, Michael Buscemi, Robert John Burke, Frederick Weller, Corey Hawkins, Harry Belafonte, Alec Baldwin

Rating: 9/10 – the true story of how, in the early Seventies, the Colorado Springs Police Department’s first black officer, Ron Stallworth (Washington), infiltrated the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan with the aid of a fellow, Jewish officer, Flip Zimmerman (Driver); a return to form for Spike Lee, BlacKkKlansman is entertaining and frightening in equal measure for the way it deals with contentious issues surrounding politics and racism that are as entrenched today as they were back in the Seventies, and for the deft way in which Lee allows the humour to filter through without negating the seriousness of the issues he’s examining.

Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary (2017) / D: John Campopiano, Justin White / 97m

With: Mary Lambert, Dale Midkiff, Denise Crosby, Brad Greenquist, Peter Stein, Elliot Goldenthal, Miko Hughes, Susan Blommaert, Heather Langenkamp

Rating: 6/10 – a look at the making of Pet Sematary (1989), with interviews and recollections from the cast and crew, and an assessment of the movie’s impact and legacy in the years that have followed; coming across very much like a labour of love for its directors, Unearthed & Untold: The Path to Pet Sematary features a wealth of details about the making of the movie, some of which is fascinating, and some of which is less so, making this a mixed bag in terms of content, but if you’re a fan of Pet Sematary, this will be a must-see, and should offer up behind-the-scenes information that hasn’t been seen or heard before.

Lake Placid: Legacy (2018) / D: Darrell Roodt / 93m

Cast: Katherine Barrell, Tim Rozon, Sai Bennett, Luke Newton, Craig Stein, Joe Pantoliano, Alisha Bailey

Rating: 3/10 – a group of eco-warriors discover a remote island that’s not on any maps, and find a genetically altered apex predator that soon begins whittling down their numbers; the sixth entry in the franchise, Lake Placid: Legacy ignores the previous four movies and acts – without explanation – as a direct sequel to the original, though that doesn’t make it any less abysmal, and it’s easily the worst in the series, something it achieves thanks to a dreadful script, Roodt’s absentee direction, the less than stellar efforts of the cast, and just by being greenlit in the first place.

Killing Gunther (2017) / D: Taran Killam / 93m

Cast: Taran Killam, Bobby Moynihan, Hannah Simone, Cobie Smulders, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Allison Tolman, Paul Brittain, Aaron Yoo, Ryan Gaul, Amir Talai, Peter Kelamis

Rating: 4/10 – an assassin, Blake (Killam), hires a team of other assassins to help him track down and eliminate Gunther (Schwarzenegger), the world’s most feared, and successful, hitman; ostensibly a comedy, Killing Gunther is yet another ill-advised movie where the script – and the cast – try way too hard to make absurdist behaviour funny all by itself, and where the tone is as wayward as the narrative, something that makes the movie an uneven watch and less than successful in its attempts to entertain – and the less said about Schwarzenegger’s performance the better.

Overboard (2018) / D: Rob Greenberg / 112m

Cast: Eugenio Derbez, Anna Faris, Eva Longoria, John Hannah, Swoosie Kurtz, Mel Rodriguez, Josh Segarra, Hannah Nordberg, Alyvia Alyn Lind, Payton Lapinski, Fernando Luján, Cecilia Suárez, Mariana Treviño

Rating: 6/10 – when a rich, arrogant, multi-millionaire playboy (Derbez) falls overboard from his yacht and loses his memory, a struggling single mother (Faris) that he’s treated badly sees an opportunity to exploit his misfortune for her own personal gain; a gender-swap remake of the 1987 original, Overboard is pleasant enough, with well judged performances from Derbez and Faris, but it plays out in expected fashion, with only occasional moments that stand out, and never really tries to do anything that might make viewers think of it as anything more than an acceptable remake doing its best to keep audiences just interested enough to stay until the end.

El club de los buenos infieles (2017) / D: Lluís Segura / 84m

Cast: Raúl Fernández de Pablo, Fele Martínez, Juanma Cifuentes, Hovik Keuchkerian, Albert Ribalta, Jordi Vilches, Adrián Lastra

Rating: 7/10 – four friends, all married but experiencing a loss of desire for their wives, decide to start a club for men with similar problems, and in the hope that by “seeing” other women, it will rekindle their desire; based on a true story, El club de los buenos infieles starts off strongly as the men explain their feelings, but soon the ridiculous nature of their solution leads to all sorts of uncomfortable moments and situations that stretch the credibility of the material, leaving the principal cast’s performances to keep things engaging, along with Segura’s confident direction (which helps overcome much of the script’s deficiencies), and a couple of very funny set-pieces that are worth a look all by themselves.

Destination Wedding (2018) / D: Victor Lewin / 87m

Cast: Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves

Rating: 5/10 – two misanthropes (Ryder, Reeves) invited to the same wedding (he’s the groom’s brother, she’s the groom’s ex), find they have much more in common than expected, including an attraction to each other; the kind of movie that has its characters spout pseudo-intellectual nonsense at every opportunity in an effort to make them sound wise and/or studiously profound, Destination Wedding could have been much funnier than it thinks it is, and wastes the talents of both Ryder and Reeves (yes, even Reeves) as it leaves no turn unstoned in its efforts to be a romantic comedy that isn’t in the least bit romantic, or comic.

The Resurrection of Gavin Stone (2016) / D: Dallas Jenkins / 92m

Cast: Brett Dalton, Anjelah Johnson-Reyes, Neil Flynn, D.B. Sweeney, Shawn Michaels, Patrick Gagnon, Tim Frank, Tara Rios

Rating: 6/10 – a former teen TV star whose adult acting career isn’t going as well as he’d hoped, finds himself doing community service at his hometown church, and discovering that having a lack of religious faith is the least of his problems; a bright and breezy romantic comedy, The Resurrection of Gavin Stone wears its Christian beliefs on its sleeve, while doing absolutely nothing that you wouldn’t expect it to, thanks to likable performances from Dalton and Johnson-Reyes, a solid if predictable script, and workmanlike direction that never lets the material stray from its formulaic constraints, though if truth be told, on this occasion that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The Predator (2018) / D: Shane Black / 107m

Cast: Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Jacob Tremblay, Sterling K. Brown, Olivia Munn, Keegan-Michael Key, Thomas Jane, Alfie Allen, Augusto Aguilera, Jake Busey, Yvonne Strahovski

Rating: 5/10 – a rag-tag band of PTSD sufferers and an army sniper (Holbrook) find themselves taking on a couple of Predators while a secret arm of the US government atempts to exploit their presence on Earth; a movie that could and should have been so much better (soooo much better), The Predator is unnecessarily convoluted and stupid at the same time, and despite Black’s best efforts, remains the kind of sequel that everyone has high hopes for, only to see them drain away with every dumb moment that the script can squeeze in, and every tortuous twist of logic that can be forced onto the narrative, all of which leaves everyone hoping and praying that this is the end of the line.

The Astounding She-Monster (1957) / D: Ronald V. Ashcroft / 62m

aka Mysterious Invader

Cast: Robert Clarke, Kenne Duncan, Marilyn Harvey, Jeanne Tatum, Shirley Kilpatrick, Ewing Miles Brown

Rating: 3/10 – kidnappers take their hostage up into the mountains, unaware that a space ship has crash landed nearby, and the sole occupant (Kilpatrick) is more than capable of defending itself; not a cult classic, and not a movie to look back fondly on for any low-budget virtues it may have (it doesn’t), The Astounding She-Monster is a creature feature without a creature, a crime drama with an annoying voice over, a sci-fi horror with minimal elements of both, and a movie with far too many scenes where the cast run through the same stretch of woods trying to get away from an alien whose only speed is ultra-ultra-slow.

A Window in London (1940)

21 Tuesday Aug 2018

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aka Lady in Distress

D: Herbert Mason / 76m

Cast: Michael Redgrave, Sally Gray, Paul Lukas, Hartley Power, Patricia Roc, Glen Alyn, George Carney

Peter (Redgrave) and Pat (Roc) are a young married couple whose jobs are keeping them apart. Peter is a crane driver working construction on Waterloo Bridge during the day, while Pat works as a hotel telephonist overnight. One morning, while travelling to work by train, Peter witnesses what looks like a murder being committed at an open window in one of the buildings opposite the rail line. He gets off the train and makes his way quickly to the flat where he saw the murder, only to find a couple – stage magician The Great Zoltini (Lukas) and his wife, Vivienne (Gray) – both alive and well and with an explanation for what Peter saw. A reporter covering the bridge’s construction hears about Peter’s heroism and the story ends up in the papers. But when Peter learns that Zoltini and his wife have duped him, it leads him into a world of sexual jealousy, showbusiness and danger that has potentially terrible consequences, both for Peter and his marriage, and for Vivienne, whose unhappiness proves to be the catalyst for a whirlwind twenty-four hours…

A remake of the 1939 French movie Métropolitain starring Albert Préjean, A Window in London had, until 2015, been unseen in its original UK version since its release (the US version was trimmed by eight minutes). It’s a shame, as the movie is a deceptively dark thriller that deserves better recognition than it’s received since 1940, and which features strong performances from Redgrave, Gray and Lukas in what is really an unlikely love triangle. An early scene sets the tone for Peter and Pat’s marriage: two years in and only able to spend any quality time together on a Sunday, Peter goes to kiss Pat “goodnight” only for her to yawn and turn away. It’s a telling moment, rendering the increasing awkwardness of their situation in one small action, and in Peter’s disappointed reaction, paves the way for his becoming embroiled in Vivienne’s wish to get away from her abusive husband. It’s rare for a British movie from the early Forties to deal with the subject of domestic abuse, but here the script by Ian Dalrymple doesn’t shy away from the violent emotions that underpin the Zoltinis’ marriage. It makes the scenes between Gray and Lukas crackle with tension, and when that tension boils over, what happens is abrupt and shocking.

What’s also fascinating is the ease with which Peter allows himself to become attracted to Vivienne. It’s as if she reminds him of the feelings he had when he first met Pat, when their relationship was new and exciting (if not so perilous). Drawn along in her wake, Peter is in way over his head, and doesn’t seem to care; Pat is forgotten as he follows Vivienne down the rabbit hole of her showbiz connections and a past that could be her only salvation. The movie maintains a terrible hold over the viewer, as it continually teeters on the edge of a happy ending – surely there’ll be a happy ending – but there’s a continual sense of foreboding throughout. And when the ending does arrive, it’s like a gut punch delivered full force. It’s a movie that’s tough and uncompromising in its own way, and which doesn’t pander to the accepted values of the time, preferring instead to retain the fatalistic Gallic flavour of the original. With an intriguing look at pre-war London, and scenes taking place at the site of Waterloo Bridge’s construction, this is an intimate and unsettling reflection of a time before things became really, really dark.

Rating: 7/10 – with fine performances from its three leads, and a dark, unnerving tone that Mason exploits to maximum effect, A Window in London is a minor British classic that deserves a wider, modern audience; a psychological drama in many respects, it’s also a nervy thriller and a doomed love story – though not in the way that you might be expecting.

NOTE: There’s no trailer currently available for A Window in London.

Trailer – Dumbo (2019)

17 Sunday Jun 2018

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If you’ve already seen the trailer for Dumbo (2019) – directed by Tim Burton, and starring Colin Farrell, Eva Green, Danny DeVito, and Michael Keaton – then you might be asking yourself: really? And it would be a fair question. Is anyone, having watched the trailer, really excited to see this unnecessary and unappealing remake? Does anyone truly believe that this incarnation of Helen Aberson’s classic story will be an improvement on Disney’s 1941 original? And perhaps more importantly, just what on Earth are Disney doing?

The answer to that last question is very simple: Disney are trampling all over their legacy as a leading purveyor of animated movies – classic animated movies – in an effort to bring in big box office returns. As a business plan it has its own undeniable merits: give an entirely new generation live action movies based on older, animated movies that Disney have stopped re-releasing on home video via that seven-year cycle that seemed to be the old business plan. Having already gone down the unnecessary and unappealing animated sequel route in the years between 1994 and 2008, Disney have decided that live action versions of their classic (emphasis on the world ‘classic’) animated originals are what’s best for business. And sadly, those live action movies that have already been released have been very successful financially – so why shouldn’t Disney continue milking their very own cash cow?

But though we’ve had Cinderella (2015), and The Jungle Book (2016), and Beauty and the Beast (2017), and though they’ve made a ton of money at the box office, can anyone say, hand on heart, that they’re an improvement on the originals? Or that they’re even a match for the quality of those movies? They’re all missing that vital spark that their animated predecessors all seem to have in abundance. But with Dumbo, Disney have gone several steps further than those other live action “events”. This is one of the synopses for Dumbo that’s listed on IMDb: A young elephant, whose oversized ears enable him to fly, helps save a struggling circus. But when the circus plans a new venture, Dumbo and his friends discover dark secrets beneath its shiny veneer. Dark secrets? Is this what Dumbo needs, dark secrets at the heart of its storyline? Does this adaptation have to be a mystery, a thriller with the usual eccentric Tim Burton elements? Will this make Dumbo one of the must-see movies of 2019? (Sadly, it will probably make no difference at all.) The trailer seems to confirm all these things, and that’s without mentioning the strong whiff of The Greatest Showman (2017) about it all as well. Sometimes, and to paraphrase the well known saying, just because Disney can, doesn’t mean that they should.

Death Wish (2018)

24 Thursday May 2018

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D: Eli Roth / 107m

Cast: Bruce Willis, Vincent D’Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Camila Morrone, Dean Norris, Beau Knapp, Kimberly Elise, Len Cariou, Jack Kesy, Ronnie Gene Blevins

Paul Kersey (Willis) is a trauma surgeon working at a Chicago hospital. He has a wife, Lucy (Shue), and a teenage daughter, Jordan (Morrone), who is about to go off to college. One night, while Kersey is working, three burglars break into his home while everyone is out, but Lucy and Jordan return while they’re still there. Lucy is killed, and Jordan suffers a skull fracture that leaves her in a coma. The police, represented by Detective Kevin Raines (Norris) and Detective Leonore Jackson (Elise), offer hope that they’ll catch the men responsible, but with no leads, time passes and Kersey begins to wonder if he’ll ever have justice for his family. Angry at the police’s inability to protect people, Kersey becomes a vigilante, and earns the soubriquet The Grim Reaper. When a gunshot victim is admitted to the ER and is wearing one of Kersey’s stolen watches, it provides him with enough information to begin tracking down the men the police can’t find. But as he hunts them down, Raines and Jackson become suspicious of his actions, and the leader of the men (Knapp) targets him directly…

The idea of a remake of Michael Winner’s exploitation “classic” has been mooted for a while now (since 2006 when Sylvester Stallone was set to direct and star). There have been a few stops and starts along the way, and now we have the combination of Eli Roth and Bruce Willis, and a movie that has all the charm and appeal of applying haemorrhoid cream. There’s no other way of putting it: this incarnation of Death Wish is appalling, a right-wing political tract that lacks the courage of its own convictions, and strives for relevance in a day and age where violence is a sad, every day occurrence in the good old US of A. While talking heads debate the merits of having a vigilante on the streets of Chicago, Willis’s monotone Kersey goes on a journey of violent wish-fulfillment that screams “under-developed!” For a surgeon with no previous experience of handling a gun even, he’s able to act with impunity (he takes out a drug dealer on the street – in daylight – without being shot at by anyone), and even when he takes on the burglars, he leaves no evidence of his involvement.

So while Kersey gets away with murder, the police amble through proceedings like unwitting sleepwalkers at a narcolepsy convention (they even have time to joke about their investigation with their boss). It’s laughable, and something of an insult to the talent and skill of Joe Carnahan, the sole credited writer of this farrago, whose original script was re-written once Roth came on board. With a plethora of poorly written characters (D’Onofrio plays Kersey’s brother, but why he’s even there is impossible to work out), dialogue that sounds like a deaf person’s idea of dialogue, and Kersey’s motivations remaining murky at best, this is further sabotaged by Roth’s inability to maintain a consistent tone or invest proceedings with any appreciable energy. Willis continues to look bored out of his skull (a too common occurrence these days), the bad guys are straight out of generic villain central casting, and the action scenes are the nearest the movie comes to waking up. It has all the hallmarks of a movie that was rushed into production before the rights ran out, or worse, was rushed into production without anyone having a clear idea of what they were doing. So they truly did have a death wish…

Rating: 3/10 – abandoning any notion of moral ambiguity from the outset, Death Wish – Roth’s exploitation-free remake – is as dull as they come, and as ineptly handled as you’d expect; if you need any proof, just watch the early scene where Kersey “consoles” a cop whose partner has just died – and then hang your head in dismay.

Cleopatra (1934)

28 Wednesday Mar 2018

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D: Cecil B. DeMille / 100m

Cast: Claudette Colbert, Warren William, Henry Wilcoxon, Joseph Schildkraut, Ian Keith, Gertrude Michael, C. Aubrey Smith, Irving Pichel

After his previous movie, Four Frightened People (1934), died at the box office, legendary director Cecil B. DeMille was charged with making an historical epic with “lots of sex in it”. DeMille, who knew exactly how to infuse his movies with sin when required, decided on a remake of the original 1917 version starring Clara Bow (that version is now lost, sadly). And with the Hays Code only just coming into force, DeMille had to move quickly. His intentions are clear from the start: the movie opens with a shot of a strategically lit woman who looks naked. And he doesn’t stop there. Star Claudette Colbert (not necessarily the first choice for a role bordering on that of a femme fatale) wears a succession of skimpy, revealing outfits, and DeMille ensures that there are plenty of equally skimpily clothed handmaidens and dancers lurking in the background. For a movie made in 1934, it’s remarkably en point when it comes to selling sex to the masses. And that’s without all the writhing and the coquettish looks and the inference that life in Rome and Egypt was one long round of hedonism punctuated by the occasional war.

But while DeMille keeps the focus mainly on a number of entertainments and festivities that litter the movie, the story suffers as a result. While the basics are there, this isn’t the movie to quote as an historical record. That aside, Cleopatra’s seduction of Caesar (William) plays out against a backdrop of Egyptian political intrigue before shifting to include Roman political intrigue (“Caesar! Beware of the ides of March!”), and her subsequent romantic entanglement with Mark Antony (Wilcoxon) plays out against a backdrop of Egyptian and Roman political intrigue. It’s a two-act movie with both acts appearing interchangeable with one another, and with only the contrast between William’s starchy Caesar and Wilcoxon’s rambunctious Antony to let the viewer know which one they’re seeing. It doesn’t help that the movie is also littered with some of the worst dialogue in an historical epic heard before or since (Caesar: “I picked a flower in Britain once, the color of your eyes”). The performances are reasonable in comparison, but Colbert has a hard time convincing the viewer she’s someone that one powerful man could fall in love with, let alone two – and in quick succession.

This being a Cecil B. DeMille movie though, the acting, the script and the dialogue are the least of the director’s worries. What’s important here is the spectacle, the sense of immense proportions and its impact. This is a movie that screams “production designed to within an inch of its gaudy life”. There are sets the size of football fields, with ceilings that remain out of sight no matter how hard you look, and rear walls that are so far back from the camera they might as well have their own time zone. It’s excess on a super-grand scale, and DeMille keeps the camera lingering over the sheer enormity of it all, from Cleopatra’s barge to her triumphant arrival in Rome (which was overshadowed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1963 version). Victor Milner’s lush, exuberant cinematography captures it all (he also won an Academy Award for his efforts), but it’s the efforts of uncredited art directors Hans Dreier and Roland Anderson, along with costume designer Vicky Williams (also uncredited) that truly stand out. Without them, DeMille would have had a movie with no sets and naked stars. (And he would probably have been fine with that.)

Rating: 6/10 – a turgid script by Waldemar Young and Vincent Lawrence is rescued in entertainment terms by DeMille’s insistence on everything being more sumptuous than is humanly possible, and with as many scantily clad starlets hovering around as possible; the story is weak, the chemistry between Colbert and William is something that never convinces, and Wilcoxon at times looks and sounds like Guinn “Big Boy” Williams – and that’s definitely not a compliment.

Flatliners (2017)

24 Sunday Dec 2017

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D: Niels Arden Oplev / 109m

Cast: Ellen Page, Diego Luna, Nina Dobrev, James Norton, Kiersey Clemons, Kiefer Sutherland, Madison Brydges, Jacob Soley, Anna Arden, Miguel Anthony, Jenny Raven, Wendy Raquel Robinson

Another remake no one wanted or needed, Flatliners is certainly a shocker, but not in the way that the producers (and they include Michael Douglas) probably intended. The story of five medical students who agree to conduct near death experiments on themselves in an effort to find out what’s “on the other side”, it’s a movie to endure rather than engage with. It begins with a very well staged car crash, in which Ellen Page’s mobile phone-focused driver, Courtney, loses control of her vehicle, ends up in a river, but survives… which is more than can be said for her younger sister. Years later, Courtney is a medical student obsessed with discovering if there’s an afterlife. She badgers patients who’ve had near death experiences, reads up on the phenomena, and does her best to live with the guilt of causing her sister’s death.

By persuading two of her fellow students, Jamie (Norton) and Sophia (Clemons), to help her, Courtney begins an experiment to try and record what happens when someone “flatlines”. Naturally, Courtney is the first to have her death induced and then be brought back to life after a minute, albeit with the help of Ray (Luna), another medical student. Yet another student, Marlo (Dobrev), also becomes involved. Courtney finds that near death has brought back long forgotten memories, and boosted her medical knowledge. Witnessing this, Jamie goes next, followed by Marlo, then finally Sophia. Ray sensibly steers clear of flatlining, but continues to help the others with the experiment. Each of the four experiences initial euphoria and heightened senses and awareness, but they all soon become troubled by visions of things they have done in their lives that they feel guilty about or haven’t admitted. Courtney is haunted by the ghost of her sister, Jamie by an ex-girlfriend and the baby she was pregnant with when  he abandoned them, Marlo by a patient she killed by giving him the wrong medication, and Sophia by the girl she humiliated in college by posting private, intimate photos of her on social media.

The rest is predictable, perfunctory, and incredibly dull, as all four affected characters seek answers to the visions and visitations that plague them. The fact that it’s obvious what’s happening to them doesn’t stop them from moping around, or acting in an irrational manner, and mostly not talking to each other. Time passes in this way to the point that you wonder just how they all managed to get into medical school in the first place; they’re about as bright as a dimmer bulb on its minimum setting. They all have guilty feelings over what they’ve done, and though the screenplay by Ben Ripley gets them to a solution eventually, by then one of them is dead, one of them has been stabbed in the hand, and Ray has been forced into playing the voice of reason even when the increasing evidence is there to say, “hang on, explain this away then”.

But the main failing of this movie is that it places four of its main characters in increasing peril, and despite the best efforts of all concerned – well, perhaps not Norton – there’s not one of them that’s worth caring about. Courtney is the loner of the group, Jamie is the party boy, Marlo is arrogant and self-absorbed, and Sophia is an under-achiever in her own mind. Watching these characters struggle with their personal guilt is about as gratifying dramatically as watching from the outside while someone tries to escape from a locked room with no windows – and never knowing if they succeeded. There are a number of scenes where Courtney et al are menaced by the people they’ve wronged, but it’s hard to understand why this is all happening because they’ve had near death experiences. And why some of the victims are dead and others aren’t. If the afterlife is involved, and if it’s the pivotal reason for these manifestations, are the four experiencing genuine supernatural phenomena, or is it all in their collective heads?

The script never makes a firm declaration one way or the other (though it does lean towards the supernatural), and where a hint of ambiguity is usually a good thing in a movie, here it serves only to muddy the waters. Stranded by the idea that these apparitions can have a physical effect when it suits the needs of the script, the movie lumbers from one tedious set piece to another, and throws in the kind of sub-par horror imagery that only serves to highlight the lack of imagination shown elsewhere and throughout. Oplev keeps it all looking glossy and generic, but his usual edgy directorial style is left high and dry, unsupported by any sense of urgency within the narrative, and the overall flatness of the material (seeing the dailies must have been so dispiriting). The lax nature of it all can best be summed up by the speed with which one of the wronged forgives the student they’re connected to. It’s another moment in yet another movie that will prompt a WTF? from the viewer.

Inevitably, the performances don’t add up to much. Page is earnest but dull, Luna looks as if the full enormity of how bad it all is is creeping up on him with every scene, Dobrev reacts to everything by looking startled (as well she might), Norton appears unable to judge the right reaction to provide for whatever’s happening, and Clemons does anxious with ever-decreasing sincerity or attention to Sophia’s limited character arc. As the only alumni from the 1990 original, Sutherland sports white hair and a cane in an effort to make himself stand out from the crowd, but his performance is as perfunctory as everyone else’s. If we can be thankful for anything it’s that the movie doesn’t end by setting up an unnecessary sequel, but rather closes out the story in distinctly sentimental style. Thankfully too, the movie under-performed at the box office, ensuring that the chance of there being a sequel is limited. So, there is at least one thing to shout about.

Rating: 3/10 – another movie to add to the long list of underwhelming remakes foisted on us in recent years, Flatliners is yet another dreary exercise in taking material that worked perfectly well the first time around, and then jettisoning everything that made the original work so well; even without the original to compare it with, this fails to make the grade, and manages to insult both its own characters and the viewer in equal measure, something that is one of the movie’s few actual achievements.

The Beguiled (2017)

11 Friday Aug 2017

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D: Sofia Coppola / 94m

Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Addison Riecke, Emma Howard

Remakes are ten-a-penny these days, with movie makers deciding that familiarity will attract more moviegoers than not, and if the original movie is one that is fairly well known and/or regarded (and even better, financially successful), then it makes it easier to justify revisiting said original. But it’s unlikely that anyone was clamouring for a remake of Don Siegel’s minor classic The Beguiled (1971), a movie that bombed on its initial release but which has gained a sterling reputation since then. However, on the advice of production designer Anne Rose, writer/director Sofia Coppola watched Siegel’s version and began thinking of ways in which she could update the movie for modern audiences. The result is a movie that is atmospheric, sophisticated, beautifully shot, and yet curiously distant in its evocation of female desires.

As with the 1971 version, Coppola has adapted the novel A Painted Devil by Thomas P. Cullinan. In it a Union Army corporal named John McBurney (Farrell) suffers a serious leg wound during battle and manages to get away from the fighting. He makes it to some nearby woods where he is discovered by a young girl, Amy (Laurence). She helps him up and takes him to the girls school where she resides along with the school’s owner (and teacher), Miss Martha Farnsworth (Kidman), another teacher, Miss Edwina Morrow (Dunst), a teenage girl called Alicia (Fanning), and three other young girls, Jane (Rice), Emily (Howard), and Marie (Riecke). McBurney’s arrival causes consternation and divided opinions amongst the staff and the pupils, with some of them insisting he be turned over to the Confederate Army as a prisoner of war, and others insisting that he be allowed to stay and at least recover from his wound. In the end, Miss Farnsworth decides that he can stay until his leg has healed.

McBurney’s presence gives rise to his being the recipient of overly attentive behaviour from the women and the children alike. Miss Farnsworth tends to his leg, while Miss Morrow hovers around offering assistance at every opportunity. Alicia too is in close attendance, and the rest of the girls all take an exaggerated interest in McBurney’s well-being. As his leg improves he begins to move around the school, and shows an interest in the garden, which he helps to maintain. He begins to spend more time with Miss Morrow, and eventually professes his love for her. They arrange to meet in her room late one night after everyone has gone to bed, but when McBurney fails to turn up, Miss Morrow goes to his room and finds it empty. And then she hears noises coming from another room…

Where the 1971 version traded on a more fervid atmosphere in order to tell its tale, this version remains an austere and measured accomplishment, with Coppola giving limited expression to any desires held by the female characters. While it’s a given that Miss Farnsworth and Miss Morrow would strive to remain aloof in relation to the presence of a wounded yet otherwise virile soldier, and for the perceived sake of the children in their care, thanks to the precise nature of Coppola’s screenplay, their being aloof hampers the effectiveness of the emotional outbursts that occur as the movie progresses. These outbursts are generally well handled by the cast, but in dramatic terms they don’t have the impact needed to make the viewer sympathise with the characters involved, and even though McBurney suffers more than an injured leg, what should be a moment of horror – both for McBurney’s discovery of what’s happened to him, and the ease with which his suffering is agreed upon and carried out – is let down by the restrained melodrama that precedes it.

This distancing between the viewer and the characters has a strange effect on the story and how it plays out. In many respects, and by making the directorial decisions that she’s made, Coppola has taken Cullinan’s novel and decided to explore it from a female perspective. And usually, this would be all well and good. But Coppola, rather than hold to the idea that repressed sexual tension should be the catalyst for the events that follow McBurney’s arrival at the school, instead makes it all to do with a failing of manners and etiquette on the soldier’s part. This may not be the most obvious reading of the story, and it may not have been Coppola’s main intention in telling the story, but nevertheless, what comes across is a tale of one man’s refusal to accept implicitly the hospitality he has been given, and the consequences of taking that refusal to “behave” too far. When McBurney is seeking to fit in, and to reward his convalescence by helping in the garden, he’s a favoured “guest”. Once his true motives are revealed, his benefactors become his gaolers and his transgressions must be paid for. It’s Old Testament retribution wrapped up in New Testament flummery, but determined by an arch, emotional rigidity of manner that suits Coppola’s arthouse style of movie making but which does a cruel disservice to the material.

The issue of passion in Coppola’s remains unaddressed by the director herself, and though she elicits good performances from all concerned, the somewhat stuffy dialogue and repressive mood often defeats the cast’s attempts to break free of their acting “chains”. Farrell gets a chance to rage out, but against the restrained nature of the residents of Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies it’s like witnessing a sudden downpour on any otherwise brilliantly sunny day. The movie does, however, look wondrous, with exquisitely composed exterior shots (moss has rarely looked this beautiful) and tastefully lit interiors that hint of secrets hidden just out of frame. Against the backdrop of the US Civil War, there’s a pleasing sense of deliberate isolationism that may or may not be a reflection on modern US politics, and Coppola wisely exploits the notion of being careful of what you wish for, and on both sides of the gender divide. But all in all, there’s less here than meets the eye, and for that, one shouldn’t be too surprised.

Rating: 7/10 – though Coppola has deliberately dialled down the “hothouse” nature of Don Siegel’s original, The Beguiled lacks for enough passion to make the young ladies of the seminary, and their teachers’ emotional dilemmas, entirely believable; as a thriller it has its moments, and as a drama it’s riveting enough to get by, but technical achievements aside, it’s another movie where Coppola somehow manages to disengage herself from the material too often to provide viewers with a movie that retains an emotional through line.

A Brief Word About the 2017 Blockbuster Season

17 Saturday Jun 2017

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Okay, it’s well and truly here, the 2017 Blockbuster Season, the time when the big studios release their tentpole summer movies in the hopes of bagging massive box office returns, and if they’re lucky, some long overdue critical approval. The movies that have been given the biggest push through trailers and promotional tie-ins and targeted social media outlets. The movies with the biggest budgets and the biggest stars. And the movies that roundly and soundly let us down. Each. And. Every. Year.

If you begin with Logan (released back in March), and if you treat it as a blockbuster, then the following movies all fall into the same category: big movies given big releases after big advertising spends have been pretty much exhausted. And those movies are: Kong: Skull Island, Beauty and the Beast, Power Rangers, Ghost in the Shell, The Fate of the Furious, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, Alien: Covenant, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Baywatch, Wonder Woman, and The Mummy. Not one of these movies is an original. They’re either a reboot, a remake or a sequel. Most of them have made a shed load of money already, and two of them have made over $1 billion. But can anyone say, hand on heart, that any of these movies have been so good that the anticipation built up by the studios was entirely justified? I don’t think so. To put it bluntly, none of them were that good.

So, still to come we have: Transformers: The Last Knight, Despicable Me 3, Spider-Man: Homecoming, War for the Planet of the Apes, Cars 3, Dunkirk, The Dark Tower, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. More heavy doses of fantasy and action, and another round of movies that we’ll all hope will be better than we think they’ll be. But how is it that we always fall for this “false advertising”? How is it that we always fall for the same build-ups and the same claims that Movie X will be amazing/fantastic/mind-blowing/the best thing sliced bread? Are we that numb to the continual failings of the big studios to provide audiences with movies that they can actually engage with on an emotional and intellectual level? And can we not just say No to over-hyped movies and their dire content? The people that make these movies are all highly regarded and all highly talented, but they make the same mediocre/rubbish/moronic (I’m talking about you, Baywatch) movies over and over. And we all rush to see them (and before you say, “yes, and so do you”, my excuse is that I’ll watch anything – I’m a movie addict).

This is a concern that I’ve raised before on thedullwoodexperiment, and I have no doubt that I’ll be raising it again in the future (probably next year). But before I do, think about it like this: the big studios tell us that their summer blockbuster movies help subsidise the smaller, more intimate movies that they also make. But even with that, aren’t we entitled to spend our money on seeing a tentpole movie that really does move us – and not to ennui?

My Cousin Rachel (2017)

12 Monday Jun 2017

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D: Roger Michell / 106m

Cast: Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, Holliday Grainger, Iain Glen, Pierfrancesco Favino, Simon Russell Beale, Tim Barlow

Philip Ashley (Claflin) is a young man whose guardian, Ambrose Ashley, owns a large Cornish estate. When Ambrose travels to Italy, his letters home tell of a woman he’s met, their mutual cousin, Rachel (Weisz). They are married, but it’s not long before Ambrose falls ill. His letters become increasingly paranoid, with claims that Rachel is watching him closely and that he can trust no one, and so Philip travels to Italy and the villa where Ambrose is living. There he meets Rainaldi (Favino), a friend of Rachel’s who tells Philip that Ambrose has died of a brain tumour. Philip returns home without meeting Rachel, and once there, he inherits the estate. Blaming Rachel for Ambrose’s death (he doesn’t believe there was a brain tumour), he makes it clear that if they ever meet he will exact a punishment on her. Not long after, though, Rachel arrives at the estate, and despite his vengeful intentions, Philip finds himself fascinated by her.

A relationship begins to develop between them, a friendship at first, and one that is welcomed by his godfather, Nick Kendall (Glen). Philip soon becomes infatuated with Rachel, and reacts poorly to tales of her misbehaviour in Italy with Rainaldi. Goaded by such gossip, Philip ensures she has an allowance (which she spends too rapidly), and at an estate party, wears a pearl necklace that was his mother’s. Kendall is none too happy with this, but Rachel returns them without any fuss. With his twenty-fifth birthday approaching – when he can do whatever he likes with his inheritance – Philip has a transfer written whereby Rachel becomes the estate’s owner. In return he expects Rachel to marry him, but she denies him, and despite their friendship having become intimate. And then Philip falls ill, and the similarities between his illness and Ambrose’s leads him to suspect that Rachel is now poisoning him…

A late arrival in the remake stakes, My Cousin Rachel appears sixty-five years on from its predecessor, and offers several good reasons for the gap being longer. Based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier, Roger Michell’s adaptation is a heady exercise in turgid melodrama that does little with its “Did she? Didn’t she? Is she? Isn’t she?” storyline, and instead of concentrating on the thriller elements, turns to a one-sided romance for its focus. This means there are plenty of scenes where Claflin’s love-sick booby hovers over and around Weisz’s prideful widow, and with the worst kind of eager beaver-itis. That Philip goes from determined avenger to smitten teenager (even though he’s twenty-four) in the blink of an eye, should alert viewers that this isn’t going to be an engrossing Gothic-tinged chiller, but a romantic drama with all the fizzle of a sparkler reaching the end of its lifespan. Philip’s actions in pursuit of Rachel’s affections become more and more absurd the longer they go on, until they culminate in his climbing up to her bedroom window in order to bestow on her the family jewellery (and in the process  his own jewels). (Oh, and he climbs down again the next morning.)

In between all this uninspiring swooning, the movie remembers to include scenes that paint Rachel as some kind of predatory black widow (as well as Ambrose’s sad demise, her first husband was killed in a duel). This secondary plot (which should be the movie’s primary one), relies heavily on Ambrose having left hidden notes and letters in his clothing and books, and their being conveniently found just when Rachel’s potential perfidy needs a nudge in the right direction. Out of this, any ambiguity is brushed aside as Michell’s script lacks the panache to sow doubt in the mind of the viewer. And if you’re familiar with the novel or Henry Koster’s 1952 version, then you’ll already know the outcome, something that Michell fumbles badly thanks to a very, very clumsy piece of foreshadowing, and an equally clumsy denouement.

Against this, Weisz delivers an arresting performance that in many ways highlights the paucity of ideas and the lack of energy that the movie exhibits elsewhere. Weisz’s career can safely be described as eclectic, and in recent years she’s done some of her best work. As Rachel, Weisz is an hypnotic presence, her round, moon-faced features expressing vulnerability, pride, determination, gratitude and forbearance in equal measure. As the naïve Philip, Claflin has the harder task, and he doesn’t always succeed, but this is due more to the script than his portrayal, as the character is more callow than necessary, and he operates on a dramatic level that never allows the viewer to feel sorry for him. Grainger (as Kendall’s daughter) and Glen offer solid support, while there’s a terrific turn from Barlow as the estate’s chief overseer, Secombe. It’s all wrapped up in a bucolic haze that’s further enhanced by Mike Eley’s evocative cinematography and Alice Normington’s impressive production design.

Rating: 5/10 – a movie that could have been a whole lot better had its writer/director tried harder to make it more compelling, and more of a psychological thriller, My Cousin Rachel is undermined by its inability to seem more than a stifled piece of moviemaking; Weisz’s performance almost makes up for its obvious shortcomings, but if you have to see this then adjust your expectations accordingly.

Trailers – Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Logan Lucky (2017) and The Founders (2016)

03 Saturday Jun 2017

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As remakes go, Murder on the Orient Express has its work cut out for it – or does it? When it was first made in 1974 with an all-star cast that included John Gielgud, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Sean Connery, and Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, its labyrinthine plot – adapted from the novel by Agatha Christie – required a cool head to keep up with it all, and to follow the various strands of its complex narrative. And the solution to it all still ranks as one of Christie’s more ingenious and surprising resolutions. So, with that in mind, perhaps it’s best that over forty years have passed between the original and this new version, directed by Kenneth Branagh, and featuring Branagh himself as the Belgian detective. Another strong point for the movie is that Branagh is working from a screenplay by Michael Green, who has provided scripts for two other highly anticipated movies this year, Logan and Blade Runner 2049. With a starry cast that doesn’t quite match the A-listers of 1974, this version still has enough acting firepower to ensure that audiences are kept on the edge of their seat – unless they’re focused entirely on the humongous moustache that Branagh sports as Poirot.

 

When Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from directing movies after making Behind the Candelabra (2013), it was regarded as a definite loss. An idiosyncratic moviemaker with a great deal of smarts and an enviable career (few directors could release movies as disparate as Erin Brockovich and Traffic in the same year), Soderbergh’s retirement always seemed to be less of a retirement and more of a break. And so it proves – hurrah! – as he returns with a spirited caper movie that features a great cast (including some newcomer called Daniel Craig), the kind of convoluted plot that won’t be as straightforward as it looks, and Soderbergh’s bold, feast-for-the-eyes cinematography. The script is by another newcomer, Rebecca Blunt, but from the trailer it looks as if Soderbergh has allied himself with the kind of tale that suits his eye for the ridiculous and his talent as a storyteller. If Soderbergh brings his A-game, this could well be one of the funniest, and most enjoyable movies of 2017 – and it could make a star out of this Craig guy.

 

If you’ve never heard of Shirley Spork, Marilynn Smith, Louise Suggs, or Marlene Bauer Vossler, it’s not so surprising. They were pioneers in a sport that didn’t encourage female players, and they helped to legitimise women’s involvement in that sport. In 1950, they and nine other women players formed the LPGA, the Ladies Professional Golf Association, an achievement that The Founders covers through a mixture of contemporary footage and interviews with the four surviving founder members. It’s an inspiring tale, and shines a light on yet another example of the institutional sexism that permeated sporting life in the US, where women were deemed unable to play as well as their male counterparts. It’s the first feature-length documentary for its directors, Charlene Fisk and Carrie Schrader, but in telling the story behind the founding of the LPGA, they’ve hit on a piece of recent history that has a wider relevance even today.

Whisky Galore! (2016)

22 Monday May 2017

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D: Gillies MacKinnon / 98m

Cast: Gregor Fisher, Eddie Izzard, Sean Biggerstaff, Kevin Guthrie, Ellie Kendrick, Naomi Battrick, Michael Nardone, James Cosmo, Fenella Woolgar, Brian Pettifer, Iain Robertson, Anne Louise Ross

During World War II, on the remote Scottish island of Todday, a terrible thing happens to the residents: they run out of whisky. With rationing in force, and the chances of the island being resupplied looking far from likely, the inhabitants – well, mostly the men – soon fall into despair. Forced to make do with tea, their spirits appear broken, with even the arrival home of Sergeant Odd (Biggerstaff), and the prospect of a wedding between postmaster’s daughter Catriona Macroon (Kendrick) and teacher George Campbell (Guthrie), failing to interest them.

Salvation arrives in the form of an unexpected shipwreck, when the SS Cabinet runs aground a short way from shore. The crew manage to get off the stranded vessel and head for Todday; as they do so, they let on to some of the islanders who have come out to help them, that their cargo included fifty thousand cases of whisky bound for America. News of this windfall reaches the rest of the island and plans are put in motion immediately to recover as many cases as possible before the ship sinks for good. But the small matter of it being the Sabbath day means the islanders have to wait twenty-four hours before they can put their rescue plan into operation.

During this time, Catriona’s sister, Peggy (Battrick) renews her acquaintance with Sergeant Odd and romance quickly blossoms; her father learns that the SS Cabinet was carrying other valuable cargo that must be retrieved; Home Guard leader, Captain Waggett (Izzard), determines that he should prevent any looting; and George Campbell does battle with his strict Calvinist mother (Ross) over her refusal to acknowledge his impending marriage to Catriona. And a mysterious man called Brown (Nardone) takes an interest in the wreck that arouses suspicion of his motives for being on the island. The whisky is saved (and with it the island), and all that remains is for the islanders to find as many hiding places as they can for it, while Captain Waggett makes it his personal mission to find those many hiding places and confiscate all the whisky…

The first reaction upon hearing that someone has gone ahead and produced a remake of a movie that is a bona fide classic – and a bona fide Ealing classic at that – may well be one of complete and utter disbelief. Such news may also provoke feelings of horror and revulsion; after all these years (and the original was released in 1949), to do so may well be thought of as tantamount to sacrilege, or at the very least, just plain unnecessary. The Coen brothers tried the same thing with their version of The Ladykillers (2004), and now it’s generally regarded as one of their poorer efforts. But at least that remake had a touch of the bizarre about it, a sensibility that was far removed from that of Ealing Studios when they made the 1955 original. Here, there’s nothing out of the ordinary to make the movie stand out, and despite the makers’ intention to make a “modern interpretation” of Alexander Mackendrick’s masterful comedy, they hew too closely to the style of the original for that to be true.

What this all amounts to is a movie that is a pale shadow of its former incarnation, and a project that should have remained in the development hell that it was rescued from a few years ago. In the hands of director MacKinnon and screenwriter Peter McDougall, this “modern interpretation” lacks all the requisite energy needed to engage with an audience, and much like last year’s other reboot of an English comedy classic, the execrable Dad’s Army, fails at the one thing it should be doing above all else: making its audience laugh. Like the island without its whisky, the movie is a dry, barren experience where the most that any unlucky and/or unprepared viewer can hope for is a wry smile or a short chuckle. The humour should be built into the storyline, but you have to search long and hard for it, and after a while the feeling takes hold that you’re searching in vain.

It’s a strange realisation to make. It’s not as if the cast isn’t already well versed in the art of making people laugh. Fisher is better known as Rab C. Nesbitt, the alcoholic Glaswegian and self-confessed “sensitive big bastard”. But as Macroon the island postmaster, Fisher is restrained by a role that requires him to be avuncular and quietly persevering, while all around him get to explore a wider range of emotions and character arcs. It’s as if the producers’ cast him in the role without any real appreciation of his skills as a comic actor. Instead of being at the fore, he’s too often reduced to playing second fiddle or fading into the background. And then there’s Eddie Izzard, a comedian who can take the most mundane of topics and reduce audiences to tears with his inspired musings on said topics. But if you didn’t know about his career, and how good he is as a stand-up comedian, then seeing Izzard in this would prompt most people to ask, what’s so special about him? And they would be right, because in this, Izzard just isn’t funny. Instead he’s set adrift in a sea of humdrum material and there’s no sign of land to spur him on.

In the end it’s McDougall’s bland, pedestrian script that lets him down, allied with MacKinnon’s inability to instill any energy into the proceedings. This leaves Whisky Galore! relying unhealthily on some unexpected delights, chief of which is Fenella Woolgar’s terrific performance as Captain Waggett’s wife, Dolly. Dolly is a woman whose understanding of the islanders exceeds her husband’s, and who offers up the kind of observations that only someone who retreats often into her own world could come up with. But alas, Woolgar isn’t on screen very often, and the movie plods along in neutral for much of its running time, so much so that it becomes an endurance exercise: can you make it to the end without losing the will to watch? It’s a close one, but this really isn’t a movie to start watching when you’re really tired and sleep is the better option.

Perhaps remakes shouldn’t be attempted unless something really new or different can be brought to the project, something that’s able to stop audiences from reflecting on the strengths of an older, more well regarded movie and judging the newer version accordingly. However, this definitely isn’t one of those occasions, and though there’s a clear improvement afforded by seeing some truly beautiful Scottish scenery in colour, it’s not enough to overcome the movie’s deficiencies in pretty much every other department. When the movie you’re remaking is an acknowledged classic, and you don’t employ your A-game, then this is the likely result: a movie that could stand as the dictionary definition of tedious.

Rating: 3/10 – whatever ambitions its makers had for it, Whisky Galore! lacks the wherewithal to achieve them, and the entire cast (bar the delightful Woolgar) look as if they’d rather be doing anything else, anywhere else; woeful in the way that only modern British comedies can be, this is a remake that serves no other purpose than to remind viewers just how good the 1949 version is.

Going in Style (2017)

21 Friday Apr 2017

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D: Zach Braff / 96m

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monthly Roundup – February 2017

01 Wednesday Mar 2017

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Life on the Road (2016) / D: Ricky Gervais / 96m

aka David Brent: Life on the Road

Cast: Ricky Gervais, Ben Bailey Smith, Tom Basden, Jo Hartley, Tom Bennett, Mandeep Dhillon, Andrew Brooke, Andy Burrows, Steve Clarke, Michael Clarke, Stuart Wilkinson

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Rating: 5/10 – post-Wernham Hogg, David Brent (Gervais) is now a salesman with dreams of becoming famous by putting together a band, Foregone Conclusion, and going on tour; the gulf between Life on the Road and The Office (2001-03) can be gauged within the first ten minutes as Gervais treats his most enduring (and sympathetic) character with a complete disregard for Brent’s development, and by being unnecessarily cruel to everyone else, making this a chore to sit through, and only slightly more enjoyable than Special Correspondents (2016).

Pete’s Dragon (2016) / D: David Lowery / 103m

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Oakes Fegley, Wes Bentley, Karl Urban, Oona Laurence, Robert Redford, Isiah Whitlock Jr

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Rating: 7/10 – following a car crash that kills his parents and leaves him lost in the woods, a young boy called Pete is “adopted” and cared for by Elliot, who just happens to be a dragon, a situation that continues until civilisation comes calling in the form of a logging operation; a good-natured remake of the 1977, Pete’s Dragon original offers good performances all round, beautiful New Zealand backdrops, a lovable dragon, and keeps it all light and airy, all of which compensates for a script that wavers too often in its attempts to put Elliot in any real danger from Urban and his men.

Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill (1948) / D: Lawrence Huntington / 92m

Cast: Marius Goring, David Farrar, Greta Gynt, Raymond Huntley, Edward Chapman, Mary Jerrold, Ralph Truman

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Rating: 8/10 – when a new teacher at an all-boys’ school, Mr Traill (Farrar), proves more popular with the pupils, and the school nurse (Gynt), than the older Mr Perrin (Goring), personal and professional jealousies lead to an unexpected tragedy; an adaptation of the novel by Hugh Walpole, Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill expertly creates a hothouse environment for its title characters, but never comes down fully on the side of either, making this a surprisingly jaundiced view of male rivalry, and a movie that features an exemplary performance from Goring.

Don’t Hang Up (2016) / D: Alexis Wajsbrot, Damien Macé / 83m

Cast: Gregg Sulkin, Garrett Clayton, Bella Dayne, Jack Brett Anderson, Parker Sawyers, Sienna Guillory

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Rating: 5/10 – two phone pranksters, Sam (Sulkin) and Brady (Clayton), find themselves on the receiving end of a psycho(?) who’s willing to play their own game against them, with increasingly disturbing and violent results; basically the first ten minutes of Scream (1996) stretched to breaking point, Don’t Hang Up will soon have you rooting for the psycho as Sam and Brady behave as stupidly as you might expect, even to the point of continually picking up the phone, or answering their mobiles, just so the story can advance a bit further.

Lady Luck (1946) / D: Edwin L. Marin / 97m

Cast: Robert Young, Barbara Hale, Frank Morgan, James Gleason, Don Rice, Harry Davenport, Lloyd Corrigan

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Rating: 7/10 – Mary (Hale), who’s staunchly anti-gambling marries Scott (Young), who does his best to reform, but a trip to Las Vegas – on their honeymoon, no less – soon puts their marriage in jeopardy; a lightweight romantic comedy featuring smooth performances and a pleasing sense of its own absurdity, Lady Luck is carefree, populist piece of entertainment that hits a few dramatic potholes along the way to its final scene, but is nevertheless an enjoyable way to spend ninety-seven minutes.

Friend Request (2016) / D: Simon Verhoeven / 92m

Cast: Alycia Debnam-Carey, William Moseley, Connor Paolo, Brit Morgan, Brooke Markham, Sean Marquette, Liesl Ahlers, Shashawnee Hall, Nicholas Pauling

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Rating: 4/10 – the suicide of one of her classmates leads Laura to regret unfriending her on social media, a decision that has dire consequences for her and her friends, as her classmate’s ghost seeks revenge from beyond the grave; in amongst the horror motifs and distressed editing techniques that are now a depressing norm of the genre, Friend Request does have some pertinent things to say about popularity and the perils of social media, but it’s done in such a ham-fisted, unconvincing way that all that effort goes to waste very quickly.

Sleepwalker (1984) / D: Saxon Logan / 50m

Cast: Joanna David, Bill Douglas, Nickolas Grace, Heather Page, Fulton Mackay, Michael Medwin, Raymond Huntley

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Rating: 7/10 – two couples at an isolated farmhouse share an evening deriding each other’s class and social values, unaware that the sleepwalking tendencies of one of them will lead to blood being spilt; part curdled Abigail’s Party and part baroque thriller, Sleepwalker has much to say about middle class angst, the antagonism inherent in middle class relationships of the time, and sets it all against the backdrop of a social evening from hell.

A Brief Word About the Toni Erdmann Remake

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

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Why oh why oh why oh why oh why?

Why does Hollywood, and in particular Paramount Pictures, think it can do justice to Maren Ade’s superb black comedy Toni Erdmann (2016) by remaking it? What makes them think that they can bring anything new to a movie that made the top of so many critics’ 10 best lists for 2016? And why involve Jack Nicholson? He’ll be eighty this year, and without trying to be ageist, that’s way too old to be playing the title character. It just doesn’t make any sense.

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And again, why Paramount? Seriously – why them? Why has the remake rights gone to a studio that in 2016-17 is producing the likes of Rings, Ben-Hur, and Office Christmas Party?

If anyone knows the answer, please spread the word so that the rest of us can understand just why this is being allowed to happen. Some movies just don’t need to be remade, rebooted, or have their success tarnished by a retread. And Toni Erdmann is one of those movies.

Silence (2016)

02 Monday Jan 2017

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D: Martin Scorsese / 161m

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver, Tadanobu Asano, Issei Ogata, Liam Neeson, Shin’ya Tsukamoto, Yoshi Oiza, Yôsuke Kubozuka, Ciarán Hinds

Seventeenth century Portugal: news has reached the Jesuit ministry that a missionary to Japan, Father Ferreira (Neeson), has renounced his faith and embraced not only the Japanese way of life, but their Buddhist teachings as well. Two of his pupils, Father Rodrigues (Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Driver), believing the news to be unsubstantiated rumour, are tasked with travelling to Japan and learning for themselves if the news is true. Needing a guide to help keep them safe once in Japan – the Japanese are persecuting anyone who promotes or follows the Christian faith – the two priests enlist the aid of Kichijiro (Kubozuka), a man whose contact with Christianity in his homeland has left him with a variety of personal demons.

Once in Japan, Rodrigues and Garupe soon discover how dangerous it is to be associated with Christianity. They witness the torture and murder of several villagers who have taken up the Christian faith, and are kept in hiding so that they don’t fall victim as well. They decide it will be safer for both of them if they split up, and make it easier to continue their search for Father Ferreira. But Rodrigues is soon captured. He’s assigned an interpreter (Asano), and is kept under the watchful eye of the local Inquisitor, Inoue-sama (Ogata). It soon transpires that Inoue wants Rodrigues to apostatize (renounce his belief in God) by stepping on an image of Christ. By this token, any Japanese who have been practicing Christianity will be allowed to live, and so will Rodrigues. Despite witnessing more atrocities, Rodrigues holds firm in his belief, even though his prayers remain frustratingly unanswered.

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Rodrigues’ faith is tested time and again, and Inoue continually informs him of the obstacles that Christianity will always face in becoming established in Japan. Despair begins to set in when Garrpe is also found and his fate determined by an act of valour. For Rodrigues it’s the first of several turning points, all designed to bring him to the point of apostatizing, but when he finally comes face to face with Father Ferreira, instead of the encounter reaffirming his faith and his weakening determination to stand firm against the violence perpetrated by his captors, the priest finds himself even more stranded, both in terms of his faith and his emotions. With Inoue’s tactics beginning to finally wear him down, Rodrigues finds himself having to decide which is more important: his life and the lives of others, or his faith.

An adaptation of the novel by Shûsaku Endô (and previously made in 1971 by Masahiro Shinoda), Silence has been a project that Martin Scorsese has been looking to make for around thirty years. Passion projects don’t always turn out so well for their makers, their closeness to the material producing a kind of tunnel vision that filters out any flaws, but with this, Scorsese has made a riveting movie about faith, religious idealism, and agonising self-doubt. It’s a measured, deliberately paced movie that is unlikely to satisfy everyone who sees it, but if you give yourself over to it, then it’s a movie that will reward you over and over again.

It opens with a blank screen and a cacophony of natural sounds including insects that builds to a crescendo before we see the title displayed briefly, and then the picture cuts to a medium shot of two severed heads resting on a piece of wood. It’s an arresting opening, and what follows isn’t for the faint hearted as Christian converts are tortured and left to die, with Neeson’s anguished priest looking on. This is the backdrop the movie keeps returning to, the resolute dispassion with which the Japanese treat all Christians in their country unless they apostatize themselves. And this is the very cauldron of hate that Fathers Rodrigues and Garrpe throw themselves into thanks to their naivete and, it must be acknowledged, no small degree of religious arrogance. And it’s not long before they, and the viewer, realise that they’re out of their depth.

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A major part of the narrative is taken up with the argument that Christianity has no place in the Japan of the seventeenth century, that the country’s Buddhist principles, although sharing many similar facets and ideas with the Christian faith, will never be superseded. Scorsese and co-writer Jay Cocks make much of this battle for hearts and minds, and the script is often eloquent on the subject, highlighting not the differences between Christianity and Buddhism, but their similarities. And the Japanese argument for religious isolationism has its merits when stood up against the arrogant assumption that the Japanese need Christianity to make their lives better. But while all this makes the argument sound quite a simple one, Scorsese and Cocks are also aware that faith – which can apparently move mountains – can also be stubbornly resistant to notions of change. Thus, Rodrigues endures physical torture and mental anguish, and has to be broken psychologically by Inoue (aided by the interpreter’s cruel barbs).

It’s always a difficult matter showing religious faith on screen without the characters seeming like zealots. Thanks to Scorsese’s meticulous direction, and Garfield’s magnificent central performance, Silence isn’t burdened by any notions of extreme religious belief, and nor is it hampered by too much exposition. Rodrigues’ and Garrpe’s mission is, on the face of it, a simple one, but as strangers in a strange land they underestimate their ability to make a difference. All they have is their belief in God, and it strengthens them. But when Rodrigues begins to doubt that God is even listening to his prayers, then it’s only a matter of time before that belief will be tested, and how strong that belief really is. Scorsese keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat, piling on the pressure, but in such a way that you don’t know which way Rodrigues will fall: back into renewed faith, or forward into religious exclusion.

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With the religious and cultural backdrops firmly established throughout, Scorsese refrains from adding the political upheaval Japan was experiencing at the time, and which played such a heavy part in the country’s rejection of the Christian faith. It’s a wise move, as the narrative isn’t about politics per se, but Inoue makes an important point at one stage, likening Spain, Portugal, Holland and England to the four courtesans of a king who wisely sends them away to guarantee himself a quiet life. The question is, why should Japan open its borders to other countries and see its lifestyle and traditions trampled upon? Again, Scorsese keeps the material focused on the battle for the hearts and minds of the Japanese people, and the audacity of the Jesuits for believing they could, and should, undermine a foreign culture.

Away from ideas of faith and religious fundamentalism, Silence is also a quietly beautiful movie to watch, with almost painting-like vistas and compositions delicately brought to the screen by the extraordinary combination of Rodrigo Pietro’s exquisite cinematography, Thelma Schoonmaker’s matchless editing skills, and Dante Ferretti’s outstanding production and costume designs. This is organic movie making at its best, a never-ending feast for the senses that’s rounded off by a lilting, elegant score courtesy of Kathryn and Kim Allen Kluge. And then there’s the performances. Garfield – maybe not everyone’s first choice for the lead role – impresses at every step, giving a passionate, despairing portrayal of a man facing a seemingly impossible choice: renounce God (and himself), or be complicit in the deaths of potentially thousands of people. Garfield is growing in stature as an actor, and with this and Hacksaw Ridge (2016) under his belt, is heading for the A-list at a rate of knots. He’s ably supported by Driver (though he doesn’t have a lot of screen time), a slyly vindictive turn from Asano, and Ogata’s distinctive, hypnotic, somewhat casual portrayal of a man who uses physical and psychological torture to ensure his country’s religious status quo. As for Neeson, his presence is necessarily limited, but when he is on screen, his appearance serves as a reminder that, outside out of certain recent movies he’s appeared in, he’s more than capable of giving a nuanced and intuitive performance.

As mentioned above, and at 161 minutes, Silence and its subject matter will no doubt put off some potential viewers, and it’s likely that many who do see it will not be swayed by its content, or Scorsese’s approach to the material. But this really is the work of a director operating at a very high level indeed, and his confidence and expertise is there in every scene and every shot. It’s a rare movie that examines religious morality and personal faith with such authority and poise, but Scorsese has pulled it off, and with no small measure of style.

Rating: 9/10 – superb on just about every level (only Garfield’s wandering accent is any cause for annoyance or concern), Silence is a demanding yet rewarding watch made by a director whose engagement with the material is masterful; a devastating movie about ideas that is intelligent and precise in its meanings, this is a very (very) early contender for Movie of the Year.

Question of the Week – 13 September 2016/Trailer – Rings (2016)

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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Forget the obvious question: why make another Ring movie? Instead, watch the trailer:

 

…and then ask yourself this very simple question:

Wouldn’t it be great if Samuel L. Jackson showed up and said, “I HAVE HAD IT WITH THESE MOTHERF*CKING RINGS ON THIS MOTHERF*CKING PLANE!”?

(Or is it just me?)

Trailers – Diary of a Chambermaid (2015), Morgan (2016) and Len and Company (2015)

27 Friday May 2016

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When you’re making a version of a novel by Octave Mirbeau that’s been filmed before by the likes of Jean Renoir (in 1946), and Luis Buñuel (in 1964), then you need to bring something special to the mix. Alas, from the looks of the trailer for this latest incarnation of Diary of a Chambermaid, it seems as if director and co-writer Benoît Jacquot has somehow mishandled things to the point of making Léa Seydoux’s title character more pouting and hostile than sympathetic. Combined with elements that make it look like it will descend into thriller territory, this adaptation looks as if it’s doomed from the start, but with Vincent Lindon in support it may yet redeem itself, although to do so, it’s really got to outshine a trailer that doesn’t do the movie any justice. Unless…

 

Morgan is the first feature from Luke Scott (son of Ridley), whose short movie Loom (2012) showed considerable promise. The tale of a corporate risk assessment consultant (played by Kate Mara) who is tasked with deciding if an artificial being that’s been created in a laboratory should be terminated, it looks stylish, creepy and tense, and the trailer holds back from revealing what the artificial being looks like – even though Morgan is played by Anya Taylor-Joy, Thomasin in The Witch (2015). By adding a touch of mystery, and not revealing too much about the movie’s scenario, the trailer does better than most in making Morgan a movie that might just be better than other Frankenstein-inspired efforts released in recent years.

 

In Len and Company, Rhys Ifans is the washed-up rock star turned in-demand producer trying to get away from it all by imposing a voluntary exile on himself. But the peace and quiet and booze-assisted reflection he seeks is interrupted first by his son (played by Jack Kilmer, son of Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley), and then by the pop star he helped create (played by Juno Temple). With director Tim Godsall’s drama leavened by some moments of bittersweet humour, the movie has a knowing attitude toward its characters, and serves as a reminder that Ifans can be a remarkable actor when necessary. It may not make it onto many people’s Ten Best lists for 2016, but this looks as if it has the potential to surprise anyone who sees it.

Special Correspondents (2016)

30 Saturday Apr 2016

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Special Correspondents

D: Ricky Gervais / 100m

Cast: Eric Bana, Ricky Gervais, Vera Farmiga, Kelly Macdonald, Kevin Pollak, Raúl Castillo, America Ferrara, Benjamin Bratt, Mimi Kuzyk

Comedians and Netflix – a good combination? After Adam Sandler’s The Ridiculous 6 (2015), we now have Ricky Gervais’ Special Correspondents, a movie so leaden and uninspired it makes Sandler’s movie look like a masterpiece (okay, that may be taking it a bit too far). A remake of the French movie Envoyés très spéciaux (2009), this transplants the original’s Paris-Iraq locations for New York-Ecuador, and in the process leaves out the humour that would have made it halfway watchable.

Gervais’ decision to make this movie serves only to highlight his inability to write, act and direct a full-length movie and show consistency in any one department. As the meek, self-negating Ian Finch, a sound engineer for a New York-based radio station, Gervais plays yet another sad-sack loser with zero confidence and a view of himself as a complete nobody. Gervais has played this character, and variations of it, several times now, and it’s as tired as the script he’s put together and somehow managed to get financing for. (If you really want to see just how bad an actor Gervais can be, check out the party scene early on, where it’s just him and Vera Farmiga; see how many grimaces and facial expressions you can spot that are exact replicas of the ones he uses when hosting the Golden Globe Awards… or playing David Brent in The Office.)

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Gervais’ painful attempts at acting aside, it’s his script that deserves the most criticism, ranging as it does from occasionally interesting to crudely simplistic. The basic story – radio journalist and his sound man fake reports from war-torn Ecuador – is lifted wholesale from the French original, and even though that movie wasn’t the most well received movie ever, it’s still better than the ponderous, laugh-free adaptation that Gervais gives us here. Yes, it has a predictable plot; yes, it has characters who are two-dimensional at best; and yes, you couldn’t care about any of them even if your life depended on it, but if after all that it was funny, really laugh-out-loud funny, then it could have been forgiven for all those things. But although Gervais has made room for moments that are clearly meant to be funny, in reality they aren’t, and the movie lurches from one almost-humorous scene to another with all the grace of a punch-drunk boxer fighting his reflection.

It doesn’t help that, Kelly Macdonald’s sweet-on-Ian character, Claire Maddox aside, the other characters are mostly unlikeable, from radio journalist Frank Bonneville (Bana) whose grandstanding and willingness to get the story no matter what makes him look and sound arrogant and unfeeling, to Ian’s wife, Eleanor (Farmiga), a listless shrew who only comes to self-aggrandising life when her husband appears to have been kidnapped by rebel forces. Farmiga, who has the misfortune of wearing one of recent cinema’s most unflattering wigs, does what she can with the role but there’s no subtlety in a part that calls for simpering insincerity at every other turn, and bald-faced self-promotion in between. The same goes for Bana, a more than capable actor here reduced to the role of awkward straight man to Gervais, and who has to spend a lot of screen time waiting for Gervais to deliver the comedic goods (so he gets to wait around a lot).

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In support, Pollak is the radio boss who cares about the legality of a story’s procurement one minute, but is willing to capitalise on the possibility of Frank and Ian being killed the next, while Castillo and Ferrara are the Latin couple, Domingo and Brigida, who help Frank and Ian fabricate their reports. What few laughs there are in the movie are delivered by the couple, playing a couple of innocents who haven’t quite grasped their roles in Frank and Ian’s deception. And in what must have taken him a whole morning to film, Bratt turns up as Frank’s arch-nemesis, TV journalist John Baker, who co-opts one of Frank’s broadcasts as if he knew all about the content all along (Baker is probably meant to provide an element of satire, but instead he comes across as an easy target for Gervais’ mistrust of the Press).

Of course, events dictate that Frank and Ian have to go to Ecuador so that they can “return” to New York and avoid losing their jobs and ending up in jail. It’s during this period in the movie that Gervais’ deficiencies as a director show themselves more clearly than elsewhere. Even with the aid of experienced DoP Terry Stacey, Gervais still manages to present the viewer with shots and scenes that are poorly framed, and there’s a scene with Gervais and Bana where Frank reveals a secret that is so badly assembled it feels like rehearsal footage has somehow made its way permanently into the final movie.

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As mentioned when discussing the trailer, Gervais track record on the big screen has not exactly been luminous, but here he’s come up with a project that will likely mean it will be a long time before he’s asked to write, direct and star in a movie of his own choosing once again. If Gervais has an aptitude for anything it’s for observational comedy, and Special Correspondents doesn’t fit that mold, which makes it even harder to understand why he chose to take it on in the first place.

Rating: 3/10 – dire and acutely unfunny, Special Correspondents is yet another English-language remake that shouldn’t have happened (and how many more of those will we see this year?), and shouldn’t have to be watched; Gervais never gets to grips with what his movie is about, or where the laughs should go, leaving the viewer resigned to the idea (from very early on) that this is a movie that has stalled before it’s even started.

The Jungle Book (2016)

20 Wednesday Apr 2016

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The Jungle Book

D: Jon Favreau / 105m

Cast: Neel Sethi, Bill Murray, Ben Kingsley, Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Scarlett Johansson, Giancarlo Esposito, Christopher Walken, Garry Shandling, Brighton Rose, Jon Favreau, Sam Raimi

The first of two live action versions of Rudyard Kipling’s classic tale – the other, just called Jungle Book and directed by Andy Serkis, is due in 2018 – Disney’s remake of their own beloved animated classic arrives with much fanfare and enough hype to stop even Shere Khan in his bloodthirsty tracks. It’s taken over $300 million at the international box office already, and the House of Mouse is keen to get director Jon Favreau and writer Justin Marks back for a sequel (surprise, surprise). The CGI environment created for the characters, and against which token human Mowgli (Sethi) interacts, is incredibly detailed and realistic, while the final showdown between tiger and man-cub is… well… it’s okay.

And that’s the problem with the movie as a whole: it’s okay. When the best thing you can say about a movie is that the backgrounds look realistic, then it’s a sure sign that whatever Favreau and co were aiming for, they didn’t actually achieve it. And yet the material is there to be taken advantage of, as Disney did nearly fifty years ago when they made the animated version. But this version makes some significant changes to the original, and while you don’t want an exact carbon copy of what went before, there’s too much that’s different for the movie to work as well as its predecessor.

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First, there’s the musical elements. Shoehorned into the movie are two of the animated version’s most enjoyable songs, The Bare Necessities and I Wanna Be Like You. This isn’t a musical version of the story, and yet these two songs are included, and awkwardly at that. There’s no reason for them to be there, unless Disney felt that modern audiences, perhaps weaned on the animated version, would feel upset if they weren’t included. As it is, The Bare Necessities is given a nostalgic feel that helps offset the oddness of its inclusion, but the same can’t be said of I Wanna Be Like You, an uncomfortable rendition of which is given by Christopher Walken as King Louie, a giant orang-utan you half suspect has been eating his tribe in order to get so big. Some viewers may well be happy to see these songs included, but in terms of the movie itself they’re interruptions to the flow of the movie and the narrative.

But the flow of the movie is also a problem. Favreau is a capable director but he doesn’t always get the pace of a movie right – check out Iron Man 2 (2010) as a prime example. Here he connects each scene as if they were part of a larger puzzle and he’s got too much time to put it all together. This leads to stretches where The Jungle Book pads along like Shere Khan at the watering hole, full of intention but held back by an unwanted need for restraint. It makes for a choppy, uneven movie that holds the attention completely in certain scenes, but then abandons that attention in favour of just moving on.

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And then there’s the ending, changed from the animated version – where Mowgli heads off to the man village because that’s where his future lies – to reflect… well, it’s not altogether clear. Mowgli has clearly found his true place in the jungle, but it’s at odds with what Shere Khan and even Bagheera have been saying all along: that Mowgli will grow up to be a man, and man has no place in the jungle (it’s even part of the jungle law, but the script ignores this practically the moment it’s been brought up). Back in 1968 this bittersweet ending was the perfect conclusion to Mowgli’s story, but here it seems like a cynical decision to help set up and ensure the sequel(s) that Disney are looking for. In a weird way, the script’s decision to integrate Mowgli more fully with the jungle environment makes him seem like another Tarzan in the making.

On the plus side, Favreau has assembled a great cast to give vocal life to the animal characters, with Murray on fine form as Baloo, and Johansson proving especially effective as Kaa. Kingsley is somewhat swamped by the script’s decision to make Bagheera almost entirely like a resigned schoolmaster, Nyong’o and Esposito make the most of their underwritten wolf parts, while Walken does his best to make King Louie frightening, but weirdly, sounds more like Kevin Spacey doing an impression of Christopher Walken than Walken himself. And then there’s Idris Elba, cast as Shere Khan; somehow his gruff tones don’t seem to suit the role, and his scenes have an awkwardness to them in terms of his voice not fitting the look of the character. In effect, it’s as if his voice has been badly dubbed.

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As the only human in the movie, a lot rides on the abilities of Sethi, and while he’s certainly proficient, his performance isn’t as effective as it could be. In the scene where Mowgli decides to leave the jungle and go to the man village, his lack of experience leaves the scene feeling perfunctory rather than highly emotive, and you get the sense that Favreau was unable to get more from him. If Sethi is to take part in any further movies as Mowgli then it’s to be hoped that his experience this time round proves to be the bedrock for better performances in the future.

All in all, The Jungle Book isn’t a bad movie per se, it’s just that it doesn’t have that spark that would have made it a truly enjoyable movie. And despite its evident popularity with audiences worldwide, it’s likely that its success is due to brand recognition rather than any inherent quality. Remakes are a tricky business to get right, as any studio or production company should know, but with Disney – and it shouldn’t be the case – you somehow expect something a little bit better, and a little bit more entertaining. That it’s just okay is perhaps worse than its being just bad.

Rating: 5/10 – nowhere near the live action remake audiences really needed, The Jungle Book suffers from being too clinical and too respectful of itself (if not Kipling’s original tale); with too many moments that pass without emphasis or emotion, it remains a beautiful movie to watch, but an empty one as well.

Monthly Roundup – March 2016

31 Thursday Mar 2016

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Deathgasm (2015) / D: Jason Lei Howden / 86m

Cast: Milo Cawthorne, James Blake, Kimberley Crossman, Sam Berkley, Daniel Cresswell, Delaney Tabron, Stephen Ure, Andrew Laing, Colin Moy, Jodie Rimmer

Deathgasm

Rating: 7/10 – when a teenage wannabe death metal band come into possession of sheet music that, when played, summons a demon called the Blind One, it’s up to them to stop both a zombie outbreak and the Blind One from destroying the world; raucous, rough around the edges, and with a liberal approach to gore, Deathgasm is a good-natured horror comedy that stumbles on occasion but, luckily, never loses sight of its simple brief: to be loud, dumb and lots of fun.

Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story (2013) / D: Andy Mikita / 87m

Cast: Michael Shanks, Kathleen Robertson, Dylan Playfair, Andrew Herr, Emma Grabinsky, Martin Cummins, Andrew Kavadas, Teach Grant, Ali Tataryn, Lochlyn Munro, Tom Anniko, Donnelly Rhodes, Erik J. Berg

HANDOUT PHOTO; ONE TIME USE ONLY; NO ARCHIVES; NOTFORRESALE Actor Michael Shanks as Gordie Howe is shown in a scene from the film "Mr.Hockey:The Gordie Howe Story," airing on CBC-TV on Sunday. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO -CBC-Allen Fraser

Rating: 6/10 – the true story of ice hockey legend Gordie Howe who, after retiring in 1971, came back two years later and played not only with his two sons but in a new league altogether – and maintained his winning ways; looking like a strange hybrid of TV movie and abandoned big screen project, Mr. Hockey: The Gordie Howe Story does its best to avoid being a formulaic biopic, but is let down by the episodic nature of the script and a tendency to raise issues but not always follow them through.

Point Break (2015) / D: Ericson Core / 114m

Cast: Edgar Ramirez, Luke Bracey, Ray Winstone, Teresa Palmer, Matias Varela, Clemens Schick, Tobias Santelmann, Delroy Lindo, Max Thieriot, Nikolai Kinski

Point Break

Rating: 4/10 – ex-extreme sportsman Johnny Utah joins the FBI and is given the opportunity to infiltrate a group of extreme sports fanatics who may or may not be responsible for a string of daring robberies; pretty to look at and featuring some great extreme sports sequences, Point Break is nonetheless a pointless remake with poor performances from all concerned, a woeful script, and lacks the edge Kathryn Bigelow brought to the original, leaving the viewer to wonder – yet again – why Hollywood insists on making so many dreadful remakes.

Stonados (2013) / D: Jason Bourque / 88m

Cast: Paul Johansson, Sebastian Spence, Miranda Frigon, Jessica McLeod, Dylan Schmid, William B. Davis, Grace Wolf, Thea Gill

Stonados

Rating: 3/10 – off the coast of Boston, freak water spouts appear and hurl large stone chunks in all directions, putting everyone in danger and hoping they don’t hit land and become… stonados!; made in the same year as Sharknado, this tries to take itself seriously, but without a sense of its own absurdity it stutters from one poorly staged “stonado” sequence to another while – ironically – being unable to shrug off a whole raft of ineffective, embarrassing performances.

Population / 436 (2006) / D: Michelle MacLaren / 88m

Cast: Jeremy Sisto, Fred Durst, Charlotte Sullivan, Peter Outerbridge, David Fox, Monica Parker, Frank Adamson, R.H. Thomson, Reva Timbers

Population 436

Rating: 6/10 – a census taker (Sisto) comes to the small town of Rockwell Falls and begins to suspect a terrible conspiracy, one that keeps the town’s population fixed at the same number; an uneasy, paranoid thriller with horror overtones, Population 436 features a good performance from Sisto and a well maintained sense of dread, but is held back from being entirely convincing by some awkward soap opera moments and a mangled reason for the town keeping its numbers to 436.

Death of a Gentleman (2015) / D: Sam Collins, Jarrod Kimber, Johnny Blank / 99m

With: Sam Collins, Jarrod Kimber, Ed Cowan, Giles Clarke, Narayanaswami Srinivasan, Lalit Modi, Gideon Haigh, Mark Nicholas, Chris Gayle

Death of a Gentleman

Rating: 8/10 – journalists Collins and Kimber set out to make a movie about their love of cricket and the challenges it faces, both commercially and culturally, and discover a scandal that threatens an end to test match cricket; not just for fans of “the gentleman’s game”, Death of a Gentleman is a quietly impressive documentary that sneaks up on the viewer and exposes the level of corruption at the very top of the game, revealing as it does the way in which the sport is being held to ransom by Srinivasan and a handful of others.

Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

11 Thursday Feb 2016

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Secret in Their Eyes

D: Billy Ray / 111m

Cast: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Nicole Kidman, Julia Roberts, Dean Norris, Michael Kelly, Joe Cole, Alfred Molina, Zoe Graham

Remakes of foreign language movies are never easy. Not everything translates as well in another language, and some of the idiosyncracies or nuances of the original movie will be lost in the process. But that’s not to say that foreign language movies shouldn’t be remade in English, or that movie makers shouldn’t try to put their own stamp on an existing idea/concept/storyline, just that if they do, we shouldn’t be too surprised if the end result isn’t as compelling or as satisfying as the original.

Such is the case with Secret in Their Eyes, the English language remake of El secreto de sus ojos (2009), an Argentinian thriller that was a bit of a surprise when it was released, and which garnered critical acclaim around the world. It’s a gripping, very stylishly realised movie, and easily one of the best movies of that particular year, a fact supported by its taking home the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. With that version being so successful, the question that needs to be asked is: do we need this one as well?

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The answer is not really, no. It was always going to be a difficult challenge, but when it was announced that the writer of Captain Phillips (2013), Billy Ray, was going to write and direct the movie, and the services of Messrs Ejiofor, Kidman and Roberts had been secured for the trio of lead roles, you could have been forgiven for thinking that this was one remake that couldn’t go wrong. But right from the start there’s a sense that something’s not quite right, that whatever magic made the original such a breath of fresh air is missing, and that what follows is likely to be more disappointing than rewarding.

And so it proves. The basic plotting and structure are retained but where the original wove its connected stories over a distance of twenty-five years, Ray reduces it to thirteen (perhaps to avoid having to cast two sets of actors in the lead roles). He also retains the cutting back and forth between the two time periods, as Ejiofor’s obsessed FBI Counter-Terrorism expert Ray Kasten investigates the death of his friend and colleague Jess Cobb’s daughter (Graham). While Jess (Roberts) is overwhelmed by grief, Karsten determines to bring her daughter’s killer to justice, but soon finds himself in hot water when his main suspect, Marzin (Cole), is connected to a surveillance operation he’s a part of, and none of his superiors, including DA Martin Morales (Molina), want to know anything about his potential involvement in a murder.

While Kasten battles political expediency, he finds an ally in newly appointed Assistant DA Claire Sloan (Kidman). Together they try to build a strong enough case against Marzin, but their efforts go unrewarded. Thirteen years later, and with Marzin having gone to ground in the meantime, Kasten stumbles across new evidence that points to Marzin’s whereabouts. He gets back in touch with Claire (now the DA, having succeeded Morales) and Jess, and vows that this time they’ll get Marzin. Claire is hesitant and unconvinced, while Jess seems unimpressed and unwilling to help. Kasten presses on, but as before his plans go awry, and catching Marzin proves as difficult as it was thirteen years before.

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By retaining the twin storylines and having them run side by side as the movie unfolds, Ray strives to keep the audience guessing as to the eventual outcome of both, but in the process he robs the material of any pace, and makes some scenes appear out of context to what’s gone before. Others seem to have sprung out of thin air, with certain relationship developments – a lukewarm romance between Kasten and Claire being the main culprit – stuttering in and out of life. It’s as if certain editorial choices were made in the cutting room, and the structure was the ultimate loser. It also makes for several frustrating moments when the viewer has to stop and remind themselves of where they (and the movie) are.

And unfortunately, Ray isn’t anywhere near as good a director as he is a writer. Too many scenes lack the appropriate energy, and his use of the camera doesn’t always show a knack for effective framing, leading to some shots where his cast are marginalised unnecessarily at the expense of the broader composition. He and the audience should be grateful then that, despite all these bars to their doing so, Ejiofor and Roberts both come up with terrific performances (Kidman is good but as with so many of her performances in recent years, she somehow manages to fall just shy of impressing completely). Kasten’s dogged, guilt-charged determination gives Ejiofor the chance to flex his acting muscles to highly charged effect, while Roberts steals every scene she’s in as the detached, grief-stricken mother who is a shadow of her former self; her de-glammed features display Jess’s sorrow so perfectly it’s heartbreaking to look at her.

But these are two unexpected positives in a movie that steadfastly refuses to provide its audience with anything other than a concerted diet of perfunctory plot and character developments, and which also asks said audience to take several leaps of faith in terms of the narrative and how it plays out (at one point, Kasten and Claire make a deduction – which Ray clumsily illustrates – that they can’t possibly have arrived at in the way that they do). And the end, which should be quietly powerful, as well as disturbing, lacks the necessary heightened emotion to provide the payoff the movie so badly needs by this point.

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Thanks to an ill-considered approach to the material, Ray’s adaptation lacks appeal and falls flat far too often to be excusable. As remakes of foreign language movies go it’s not up there with the best, but rather occupies a place much lower down the table, and serves as an object lesson in how not to compensate for the loss of nuance and subtlety present in the original. Some movies, as we all know – and studio executives should know by now – deserve not to be remade, and this is as good an example as any that El secreto de sus ojos should have been one of them.

Rating: 4/10 – laborious, and lacking in too many departments to be anywhere near as effective as it needs to be, Secret in Their Eyes may well be too much of a chore for some viewers to watch all the way through; however this would be doing a disservice to Ejiofor and Roberts, but their performances aside, there’s really very little to recommend this particularly unnecessary remake.

Vacation (2015)

25 Sunday Oct 2015

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Vacation

D: Jonathan M. Goldstein, John Francis Daley / 99m

Cast: Ed Helms, Christina Applegate, Skyler Gisondo, Steele Stebbins, Chris Hemsworth, Leslie Mann, Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo, Charlie Day, Catherine Missal, Ron Livingston, Norman Reedus, Keegan-Michael Key, Regina Hall

Q: When is a movie a remake, a sequel and a reboot all put together?

A: When it’s Vacation!

With movie franchises being extended or rebooted at every turn, it was only a matter of time before we started to see an influx of movies made from comedies out of the Eighties (there’s a Police Academy reboot in the works, and Kevin Smith is still keen to make another Fletch movie). But while we anxiously await the arrival of a further Lemon Popsicle or Porky’s installment, we have this latest attempt at producing a contemporary version of a much-loved comedy favourite.

The set up is clever enough: now grown up, Rusty Griswold (Helms) has a family of his own: wife Debbie (Applegate), teenage son James (Gisondo), and pre-teen son Kevin (Stebbins). Each year he takes them all to the same cabin in the woods that everyone except Rusty is tired of. But when he overhears Debbie complaining about it to one of their friends he realises he needs to come up with a different destination this year. Remembering the trip he took to Walley World with his dad Clark (Chase), mom Ellen (D”Angelo) and sister Audrey (Mann) when he was a kid, Rusty decides the best way to get his family to be more excited about going away is to plan a road trip to the theme park that he recalls so fondly.

It’s at this point that the movie casts a knowing wink at the audience, and does its best to sound cleverer than it actually is. In response to James’s statement that he’s “never heard of the original vacation”, Rusty replies confidently, “Doesn’t matter. The new vacation will stand on its own”. It’s a bold though far from oversold moment, and one that will have fans of the original saying to themselves, “Really?” And that particular word will be one that viewers will come back to time and again as the Griswold family road trip unfolds from Chicago to Santa Monica with all the grim inevitability of an influenza outbreak in an old folks’ home.

Vacation - scene

With the original framework firmly in place, Vacation relies on a mix of modern day gross out humour, old fashioned puerility, and laboured jokes to provide the comedy while asking its cast to take a back seat and not do anything too funny. It’s a strange circumstance, but watch the movie closely and you’ll find that Helms, Applegate et al aren’t that funny in themselves (or as their characters), and that the script by Goldstein and Daley has the Griswolds acting largely as observers of their own road trip. On the few occasions when one of them is directly involved in a comedic situation, such as Rusty helping Stone Crandall (Hemsworth), his sister’s overly endowed husband, to round up some cows, the initial joke of his killing one is outdone by the one that follows, when one of the other cows chows down on the remains (yes folks, it’s a movie first, cannibal cows).

Elsewhere we’re treated to a paedophile trucker, a side trip to Debbie’s old alma mater, the Griswolds bathing in raw sewage, a rental car called the Prancer that comes with a remote control that includes buttons labelled with a rocket and a swastika (wisely, Rusty never presses that button), Stone showing off his “six pack”, a love interest for James, a white water rafting trip that goes wrong thanks to just-jilted guide Chad (Day), and the sight of Kevin trying to suffocate his older brother with a cellophane bag – twice (though, admittedly, the timing of this makes it a whole lot funnier than it sounds). There are various subplots: Rusty and Debbie’s attempts to put the spark back into their marriage by having sex wherever and whenever they can; Kevin’s bullying of James; Rusty’s run-ins with rival airline pilot Ethan (Livingston); and the whole notion of a family trying to bond over a trip only one of them wants to make (again).

If you’re easily amused, and don’t mind how uneven the movie is, then Vacation will seem like a great movie to sit down with a few beers and watch on a Saturday night, but the reality is that it’s hard to tell if writers/directors Goldstein and Daley were either in a rush with the script, or felt constrained by having to follow the original in terms of the movie’s structure. Whatever the case, the movie coasts along without making too much of an impact, and mixes gross out humour with long stretches of quiet amiability, and some very awkward moments that can’t help but feel out of place e.g. Rusty’s uncertain knowledge of sexual matters leads to James wanting to give the girl he likes a rim job (he thinks it’s kissing with your lips closed).

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The cast cope well enough, and it’s good to see Chase back as the Griswold patriarch, but equally it won’t be long before you’re wondering what’s happened to his eyelids. There are some cameos dotted here and there, and a certain singer appears in the closing credits, but there’s no standout character or performance. What this movie really needed was someone like Cousin Eddie to come along and really stir things up.

Rating: 5/10 – not as amusing as the original movie it tries to emulate, Vacation suffers from trying too hard to be funny, and not having the conviction to be as subversive as its predecessor (watch it again to see how dark it is); beautifully shot however, and with a great soundtrack that features Seal’s Kiss from a Rose, this is technically well made but not a movie you’ll want to watch more than once.

Mini-Review: Knock Knock (2015)

10 Saturday Oct 2015

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Knock Knock

D: Eli Roth / 100m

Cast: Keanu Reeves, Lorenza Izzo, Ana de Armas, Aaron Burns, Ignacia Allamand, Colleen Camp

Architect and committed family man Evan Webber (Reeves) is forced to stay home for the weekend due to work commitments, while his artist wife, Karen (Allamand), and their two children go to the beach. On the first night he’s hard at work when he hears a knock at the front door. Not expecting anyone, he’s surprised to find two young women – Bel (de Armas) and Genesis (Izzo) – trying to find the location of a party they’re going to, and who are soaked through thanks to the rain. He lets them in to wait for another taxi, and gives them robes to wear while their clothes are put in the drier. He’s hospitable and friendly, but as the two women begin to flirt with him, Evan becomes uncomfortable. When the taxi finally arrives and he tries to give the girls back their clothes, he finds them in the bathroom, naked, and wanting very much to have sex with him.

Evan succumbs to their advances and they end up having a threesome. The next morning, he wakes to find Genesis and Bel have no intention of leaving. When they vandalise one of his wife’s sculptures, he threatens to call the police, but they call his bluff by saying they’d have an interesting story to tell the police, what with their being underage. Evan is shocked, and backs down, and the young women continue to disregard his pleas not to interfere or damage anything. Eventually he gets so mad he starts to call the police to report a break-in, and the women agree to leave. He drops them off where they’re supposed to live, and back home, cleans up all the mess they’ve created. Later that night, Evan is working again when he hears a noise. He goes to investigate and is knocked unconscious by Genesis. When he comes to he finds himself tied to the bed, and that both Genesis and Bel are determined to make him suffer for his actions of the night before.

Knock Knock - scene

“Knock knock.

Who’s there?

A pretty awful movie by Eli Roth.

Sorry, we’re out.”

A remake of Death Game (1977), which starred one of this movie’s producers, Sondra Locke, and cast member Colleen Camp, Knock Knock has all the tension and edge-of-your-seat suspense of an episode of The Simpsons. It’s stupid, ridiculous, annoying, derivative, farcical, erratic, ludicrous, woeful, preposterous, idiotic, and just plain dumb. It’s a psychological thriller that forgets all about the “logical” and plumps for the “psycho” side of things with a passion that will leave most viewers shaking their heads in disbelief. This is a home invasion movie where you can’t feel sympathy for Reeves’ character, or the barmy antics of Genesis and Bel, or even the unlucky Louis (Burns), Karen’s assistant, who proves that an asthmatic can still play piggy-in-the-middle long after they should have collapsed fighting for their breath.

The script, co-written by Roth, Nicolás López and Guillermo Amoedo, is a lumpen mess that judders from one unconvincing scene to another, and resolutely avoids giving Evan the chance to gain the upper hand, keeping him the shouting, sweating victim throughout, while making Bel and Genesis the equivalent of avenging angels (though why they do what they do is obscured by their commitment to behaving like five year olds on a sugar high). Reeves is also lumbered with some of the most awful dialogue written in recent years, and it shows up his deficiencies as an actor (it doesn’t help that for most of the movie’s second half, and one rant aside, his general reaction to what’s happening to him is to repeat the F-word). And Roth, whose caché as a director is becoming increasingly devalued, directs each scene as if it’s completely independent of the ones before and after it, and shows no interest in making it exciting or dramatic for the viewer.

Rating: 3/10 – a wince-inducing thriller that remains a huge waste of time, and confirms Evan’s question part way through of “What’s the point?” with every subsequent scene; more knock-off than remake, Knock Knock plays around with a decent clutch of ideas but ultimately hasn’t got a clue what to do with any of them.

Trailer – Secret in Their Eyes (2015)

03 Monday Aug 2015

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When The Secret in Their Eyes, an Argentinian thriller, was released in 2009, it was perhaps inevitable, given its critical success, that Hollywood would attempt a remake at some point – and here it is. Boasting a fantastic cast, including an almost unrecognisable Julia Roberts (could they have made her look more dowdy?), Secret in Their Eyes looks edgy and dark and compelling, and with Billy Ray in the driving seat as director and writer (bear in mind his last script was for Captain Phillips), this has all the potential to be as riveting as its predecessor, and pick up a healthy clutch of awards come 2016.

Mini-Review: Poltergeist (2015)

03 Wednesday Jun 2015

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Poltergeist

D: Gil Kenan / 93m

Cast: Sam Rockwell, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jared Harris, Jane Adams, Kyle Catlett, Saxon Sharbino, Kennedi Clements, Susan Heyward, Nicholas Braun

The Bowens – recently laid-off Eric (Rockwell), aspiring writer Amy (DeWitt), teenage daughter Kendra (Sharbino), young son Griffin (Catlett), and youngest daughter Madison (Clements) – move into their new home on a quiet estate. It’s a new start for all of them, but Griffin, who’s a nervous child at the best of times, senses that there’s something “off” about the house. When he finds Madison talking to someone in her room – who isn’t there – it adds to his unease. Later that night he finds a box full of clown toys that makes him even more anxious, as it seems one of them just might be alive.

The next day sees even more strange phenomena happen throughout the house, phenomena that escalates once Eric and Amy have gone out for the evening to a dinner party. Kendra is attacked in the basement, Griffin is grabbed by the tree in their front yard, and Madison disappears through a portal that opens up in the back of her wardrobe. Eric and Amy arrive home in time to save Griffin but when they can’t find Madison – who can now only speak to them through the TV – they turn to a group of paranormal investigators led by Dr Brooke Powell (Adams) to help get their daughter back. When events escalate even further, and it becomes clear that there are spirits trying to use Madison to free themselves from their earthly prison, Powell asks for help from an unlikely source: her ex-husband and TV ghost hunter Carrigan Burke (Harris). With time running out, a rescue mission is attempted to try and bring back Madison before it’s too late, but while Carrigan, Eric and Amy argue about who should go, Griffin beats them to it…

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Another week, another unwanted horror movie remake. As with all the other horror remakes we’ve been “treated” to in the past five or six years, Poltergeist fails to hit the mark it’s aiming for, and is about as scary as a loaf of bread. This version also can’t decide if it wants to be a straight-up remake, or a completely new reimagining, and because it can’t decide it ends up being an unwieldy, awkward mix of the two. And despite the more than capable cast, you don’t care about any of the characters, not even Madison. Part of the problem here is that in trying to be respectful of the original movie but not slavish to it, the makers have missed the whole reason why Tobe Hooper’s version was, partly, so good: it was fresh and we hadn’t seen anything like it before. This version is tired from the moment that Griffin walks in the door and starts looking around suspiciously. Uh-oh! Something’s up!

There’s no tension this time round either. When the tree outside Griffin’s room is first seen we know it’s supposed to be spooky and creepy and eerie and menacing, but in the hands of the usually talented Kenan – working from David Lindsay-Abaire’s by the numbers script – it’s just a tree blowing in the wind, again and again. It’s yet another example of how familiarity breeds disappointment. To make matters worse, the performances range from unexceptional (Sharbino, Adams) to disappointing (Rockwell, DeWitt) to annoying (Harris), and each attempt to add depth to the characters or story is left high and dry by not being followed through. All in all it’s a movie where just enough was done to get by.

Rating: 4/10 – good production values save this from being a complete dud, but as a horror movie that doesn’t provide any real scares it’s a far cry from effective; when there are movies of the calibre of It Follows (2014) out there showing how it should be done, it makes this Poltergeist look very redundant indeed.

Trailer – Raiders! The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made (2015)

26 Thursday Feb 2015

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It’s an amazing story: two eleven year old kids, neither of whom really know what they’re doing, remake Raiders of the Lost Ark shot for shot – all bar one scene. This documentary shows how they made their movie and brings them back together to shoot that one remaining scene. It has all the hallmarks of a movie that will amuse and amaze in equal measure, and hopefully, will be as entertaining – in its own way – as the movie it’s based around.

Mini-Review: Kite (2014)

05 Friday Dec 2014

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Kite

D: Ralph Ziman / 90m

Cast: India Eisley, Samuel L. Jackson, Callan McAuliffe, Carl Beukes, Deon Lotz, Zane Meas

Some time after the death of her parents, Sawa (Eisley) starts killing members of the criminal organisation headed by the Emir (Meas), the man held responsible for her parents’ deaths. Sawa is helped by Karl Aker (Jackson), a detective who was her father’s partner. As she kills the Emir’s people, she gets closer and closer to him, but her dependency on a drug called Amp causes her to begin making mistakes, and soon her identity is in danger of being revealed.

While Aker covers up any evidence she leaves behind, Sawa is also helped by a young man named Oburi (McAuliffe). He says he knows her from before her parents’ death, and that they were friends, but thanks to Amp, Sawa’s memories of him are hazy and indistinct (along with most of her past). When a hit sees her being chased by some of the Emir’s people, Oburi helps her escape and, with no access to Amp, her withdrawal symptoms begin to help her remember exactly what happened when her parents were killed. And when she finally comes face to face with the Emir, the encounter leaves her with more questions than answers.

Kite - scene

A live action version of Yasuomi Umetsu’s A kaito (1998), Kite was probably hoping that arriving so long after the original might mean any comparisons would be kept to a minimum. Sadly for the makers of this version, the gap in time isn’t an advantage, and the decision to “go live” has led to yet another dystopian vision of the future where street gangs dominate, crime appears to be the only growth industry, and the police are so jaded as to be little more than bystanders. We’ve seen this kind of movie so often now that it’s hard to get any kind of enjoyment out of it; the viewer can only sit back and watch as Kite ticks the boxes it so resolutely refuses to think outside of.

In the end, it’s all about the action, but despite some well choreographed moments of mayhem, including a bathroom shootout that’s reminiscent of the one in True Lies (1994), there’s nothing here that has any real impact. The characters are bland and/or one-dimensional, and nothing the cast does elevates the material in any way (not even Jackson, not exactly a stranger to crass or unconvincing dialogue, can do anything with lines that include “I can’t do this anymore”). As a result, there’s no one to care about, not even Sawa herself, and as the plot staggers towards the inevitable “twist” (that can be seen coming before the movie even starts), the sense of despair rises accordingly.

Rating: 3/10 – looking and feeling like a compendium of scenes and locations from every other ghetto-based action movie made in the last few years, Kite suffers from leaden direction and a script that fosters complacency all round; tiring and dispiriting, with missed opportunities galore, potential viewers should skip this altogether.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

01 Monday Dec 2014

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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014)

D: Jonathan Liebesman / 101m

Cast: Megan Fox, Will Arnett, William Fichtner, Alan Ritchson, Noel Fisher, Pete Ploszek, Jeremy Howard, Danny Woodburn, Tohoru Masamune, Whoopi Goldberg, Minae Noji, Johnny Knoxville, Tony Shalhoub

Ten reasons NOT to see this movie:

1) Megan Fox – still trying too hard and still unable to display even a hint of a recognisable or credible emotion.

2) Splinter learns jujitsu from a book.

3) Splinter teaches the turtles jujitsu – after learning from a book.

4) April O’Neil saves the turtles and Splinter from a lab fire – only to dump them into a sewer.

5) The Foot Clan ninjas use automatic weapons – they never use their ninja skills.

6) April O’Neil tries to convince her boss that there are mutant ninja turtles acting as vigilantes – and doesn’t provide a shred of proof – twice.

7) The New York sewer system contains enough discarded electronic equipment to assemble a sophisticated, city-wide surveillance system.

8) The super-rich bad guy’s only reason for being the bad guy is so he can be even richer.

9) April O’Neil is the subject of constant sexual harassment from Michelangelo – this is regarded as humour.

10) Turtles – apparently – are bulletproof.

Rating: 2/10 – so bad it’s a crime, and continuing evidence that Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes has no idea how to reboot a franchise or remake a movie from the Eighties; as poorly executed as you might expect, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles drains the life out of its own premise, and gives new meaning to the word “awful”.

The Grand Seduction (2013)

21 Tuesday Oct 2014

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Grand Seduction, The

D: Don McKellar / 113m

Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch, Gordon Pinsent, Mark Critch, Liane Balaban, Cathy Jones

After eight years of surviving on state benefits, the inhabitants of a tiny harbour in Newfoundland called Ticklehead, are given a potential lifeline when a multi-national company plans to build a chemical waste recycling plant there, and provide full employment for the community.  The catch?  Unless they have a resident doctor, the plans will fall through.  The stroke of luck?  A doctor, Paul Lewis (Kitsch) caught at an airport with cocaine and sentenced to a month’s community service as Ticklehead’s temporary medic.  When the locals, headed by Murray French (Gleeson) learn of his imminent arrival, they decide to spend the ensuing month doing their best to get him to stay full time and save their community.

To help with this, and because Lewis likes cricket, the villagers build a cricket pitch and pretend to be huge fans of the sport.  They also leave Canadian bills of increasing value where Lewis will find them, and on the understanding that if he feels lucky in Ticklehead he won’t want to move on.  By selling themselves and the harbour, the people of Ticklehead aim to make Lewis feel like an important and much needed part of the village.  They also monitor the phone calls he makes to his girlfriend, Helen, looking for clues about the things he likes so they can make his stay all the more amenable.  Murray even tries to get the local post office-cum-general store assistant, Kathleen (Balaban), to flirt with Lewis but she won’t do it.

As their plan begins to pay off, problems arise with the siting of the plant.  A “bribe” of $100,000 needed to cement the deal, and which human ATM Henry Tilley (Critch) attempts to raise by means of a loan, eludes them.  And the boss of the multi-national company decides to visit Ticklehead and see for himself that they have the required one hundred and seventy inhabitants needed to see the plant manned efficiently.  And Lewis’s relationship with Helen begins to unravel, as his enthusiasm for the harbour goes unreciprocated until he learns an unpalatable truth.  Murray and the rest of the villagers are overjoyed: now Lewis doesn’t have any ties.  But as ever, things don’t work out in quite the way they’d planned.

Grand Seduction, The - scene

A remake of Seducing Doctor Lewis (2003), The Grand Seduction is a great big, fluffy cardigan of a movie, a warm confection that elicits good-natured smiles from the viewer at practically every turn.  There is absolutely nothing new here and yet as is so often the case when something so familiar is performed with such confidence and affection, the experience is rewarding beyond any and all expectation.

And so it proves here, with Gleeson leading a cast that wouldn’t have been amiss in an Ealing comedy, and proving once again that ensemble casts representing a small community rarely ever disappoint.  If it reminds viewers of Local Hero (1983), then that’s no bad thing (and that movie carried the blueprint of Whisky Galore! (1949) firmly clutched to its chest).  It’s a fish-out-of-water movie too, with Kitsch’s bemused, deceived plastic surgeon all adrift at first, but finding his feet with ever-increasing confidence, and gaining a sense of purpose he didn’t have before.  Kitsch is better known for his action/fantasy roles but here he dials back the heroics to play a normal nice guy who may well have appeared colourless on the page, but who proves to be more sensitive than he seems in the beginning.

With the likes of Pinsent and Critch providing solid support – and a large portion of the laughs – it’s left to the ever dependable Gleeson to provide the movie’s dramatic backbone, imbuing Murray with the kind of rugged, roguish charm that wins over both Lewis and the rest of the villagers (even when they know he’s ‘playing’ them).  It’s the kind of role Gleeson could probably do in his sleep but he’s so effortlessly impressive it’s like observing a masterclass; he doesn’t put a foot wrong throughout.  He and the rest of the cast all help to elevate the material, making the slightness of it so trivial it’s barely worth mentioning.

As directed by McKellar, The Grand Seduction is an appealing piece of cinematic confectionery, its picture postcard locations photographed in all their roughhewn glory, and its (admittedly) lightweight construction proving a plus rather than the expected minus.  McKellar has the sense to go with the flow rather than try to make something different out of Ken Scott’s original screenplay (here adapted by Michael Dowse), and infuses even the smallest of scenes with both a painterly eye and a generous amount of good-natured, but not overwhelming sentiment.  It’s often a delicate balancing act, but McKellar demonstrates in scene after scene that he’s more than up to the task.  As a result, the movie never falters in its ability to entertain.

Rating: 8/10 – the kind of movie that makes a mockery of the phrase, “familiarity breeds contempt”, The Grand Seduction is a minor gem, and a movie that deserves as wide an audience as it can achieve; it may appear too whimsical for some, but that would be doing the movie a major disservice.

Mini-Review: Brick Mansions (2014)

13 Wednesday Aug 2014

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28616Quad_Final.indd

D: Camille Delamarre / 90m

Cast: Paul Walker, David Belle, RZA, Gouchy Boy, Catalina Denis, Ayisha Issa, Bruce Ramsay, Richard Zeman, Andreas Apergis, Carlo Rota, Frank Fontaine

In the not-too-distant future, Detroit has erected a wall around an area known as Brick Mansions.  Ruled over by crime boss Tremaine Alexander (RZA), this ghettoised area is full of drugs and guns and gang members (but not, it seems, any ordinary folk).  When the Mayor (Ramsay) decides that Brick Mansions has to be replaced by a brand new commercial development, he concocts a plan that involves sending undercover cop Damien Collier (Walker) into Brick Mansions to retrieve and “disarm” a hijacked bomb that could destroy the entire area.

On the inside, Alexander is having his own problems.  One of his drug shipments has been stolen by Lino (Belle) (and for no other reason than because the script needs him to).  When Lino proves too elusive to capture, Alexander has his ex-girlfriend Lola (Denis) kidnapped in retaliation.  He tries to rescue her but ends up in jail where Collier engineers a meeting with him and then tries to use him as a way of finding the bomb.  They form an uneasy alliance, and go after Alexander and the bomb together.

Brick Mansions - scene

As unnecessary remakes go, Brick Mansions gets by on its high-impact action scenes – expertly crafted and assembled by Delamarre and the movie’s stunt team – and the still impressive parkour abilities of Belle (who starred in the original movie, Banlieue 13 (2004), and doesn’t look a day older).  Beyond these elements, though, the movie pays lip service to plotting, characterisation, consistency and credibility, and merely jumps from one action sequence to the next with a minimum of fuss or subtlety.

The performances range from so-so (Belle, who has only the one facial expression) to trying (Walker, unable to create a character out of nothing), to embarrassing (RZA – when will someone tell him he can’t do menacing?).  The rest of the cast struggle with roles so under-developed they don’t even reach the level of being generic, and Luc Besson’s script (adapted from his co-written original) further handicaps everyone by relying on the kind of dialogue that sounds like it’s been badly translated from the original French.  While it’s true that Banlieue 13 isn’t perfect, it’s still the much better movie, and all Brick Mansions does is prove it.

Rating: 4/10 – a movie where acting was clearly not a requirement, Brick Mansions revels in its many patent absurdities; as brain-dead a movie as you’re likely to see all year but saved from being a complete loss by its well-staged action sequences.

Endless Love (2014)

08 Tuesday Jul 2014

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Endless Love (2014)

D: Shana Feste / 104m

Cast: Alex Pettyfer, Gabriella Wilde, Bruce Greenwood, Joely Richardson, Robert Patrick, Rhys Wakefield, Dayo Okeniyi, Emma Rigby, Anna Enger

Jade Butterfield (Wilde) is a quiet, studious teenager just graduated from high school.  She hasn’t made many friends, but she has caught the attention of David Elliot (Pettyfer).  He catches her eye at their graduation ceremony, and so begins a tentative romance made awkward by the difference in their social standing.  Jade’s father, Hugh (Greenwood) is an eminent surgeon; David’s father, Harry (Patrick) has an auto shop in town.  Jade is due to take up a medical internship in two weeks and follow in her father’s footsteps; David wants to follow in his father’s footsteps too – each has a sense of familial duty that’s important to them.  When Jade decides to hold a party for everyone in her year, it’s only David who turns up.  With help from his friend, Mace (Okeniyi), David manipulates their high school friends into attending.  Jade and David realise their attraction for each other, and Hugh becomes aware of this as well.  He’s not happy about it, though, and does his best to stop any relationship before it begins.

Despite his best efforts, Jade and David spend more and more time together.  They’re so passionate about each other that Jade decides not to leave to begin her internship, and instead opts to spend the rest of the summer with David.  When she tells her father this he reacts by forcing her to join him and the rest of the family – mum Anne (Richardson), brother Keith (Wakefield) and his girlfriend, Sabine (Enger) – on a trip to their lakeside summer home.  Jade retaliates by inviting David along.  Her father continues his enmity toward David and learns he has a history of violence.  When Jade and David run into Mace and David’s ex-girlfriend Jenny (Rigby), they’re persuaded to go with them to a zoo after it’s closed.  When Jenny (who still harbours hopes of winning David back) sees how Jade means to him, she calls the police and rats them all out.  When the police arrive, David draws them away from everyone else, but is arrested.

Jade expects her dad to help get David out of jail but he refuses and he tells her about David’s violent past.  Seeing how important David is to her, Hugh relents and gets David sprung from jail but they argue and David knocks Hugh to the ground.  When she confronts David about it, it leads to her being in a car accident.  Later, at the hospital, Hugh tells Harry he’s taken out a restraining order to keep David from coming within fifty feet of Jade.  With their relationship apparently over, Jade leaves for college and begins seeing a fellow student.  David meanwhile, stays at home, until a chance encounter with Anne leads to the realisation that, restraining order or not, he has to see Jade and win her back.

Endless Love - scene

The second adaptation of Scott Spencer’s novel, Endless Love is endlessly sappy, and endlessly derivative of just about every other teen romance you’ve ever seen (viewers unaware of the movie’s literary origin could be forgiven for thinking they’re watching another Nicholas Sparks adaptation).  David only has to glance in Jade’s direction and she’s instantly smitten, her years of social and personal reserve dumped by the wayside in a matter of seconds.  She also turns out to be quite the hussy, acting provocatively and kittenish around David until the night she decides it’s time they should take things to the “next level”.  Throughout this period of getting to know each other, it becomes clear that Jade is the subtly demanding modern princess, and David the noble savage she has ensnared.  It’s an interesting take on the standard roles you might expect from the scenario quoted above, but it’s abandoned as soon as the script requires Hugh to take centre stage and amp up the villainy needed to give the story some actual bite.

Of course, Hugh is meant to be a misunderstood, over-protective father (more so in the wake of the recent death of Jade’s other brother, Chris), but as Jade and David are staple characters in this kind of thing, so too is Hugh that other staple of the romantic drama, the man that David has to wrest Jade away from.  Sadly, the script tries to give Hugh some depth, and has him vacillate over whether to welcome David with open arms or closed fists.  With Greenwood required to leap both ways – often in the same scene – and on more than one occasion, Hugh becomes a bit of a distraction, but unfortunately a necessary one, as leading thesps Pettyfer and Wilde have their work cut out for them making their characters worth spending time with in the first place.  It’s not their fault, it’s just that Jade and David are about as exciting to watch as those airplane safety videos.  Once they’ve had sex, their story heads for their inevitable falling out with all the haste of a marathon runner intent on reaching the next water station.

If there’s anything about Endless Love that isn’t dispiriting it’s the performance of Richardson; she at least recognises the paucity of the drama on offer and adapts her depiction of Anne’s unhappiness accordingly.  Whenever she’s on screen the movie seems to improve just by having her there.  The same can’t be said of Pettyfer, who looks uncomfortable throughout, while Wilde seems intent on doing the bare minimum required to  make her dialogue sound just this side of reasonable.  Both actors are more than capable but here they seem unable to raise their game and defeat the shopworn elements that make up writer/director Feste’s lukewarm script.  Her direction is unfortunately quite pedestrian and the movie lacks a definitive visual style that might have lifted it up a little.  With a soundtrack that offers songs as indicators of the emotional content on screen (like Cliff notes, but with added harmonies), Endless Love has the feel of a movie that had better intentions than those that were actually delivered.

Rating: 4/10 – bland, and with plot developments that are signposted in bright neon lights, Endless Love is a remake that probably sounded like a good idea at the time; however, the finished product is a salient reminder that not every “good” idea should be acted upon.

Silent House (2011)

09 Monday Jun 2014

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Silent House

D: Chris Kentis, Laura Lau / 86m

Cast: Elizabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer Stevens, Julia Taylor Ross, Adam Barnett, Haley Murphy

While renovating the summer home her family hasn’t visited or used for some time, Sarah (Olsen) begins to experience strange phenomena that may mean the house is haunted.  She is particularly attuned to the strange goings on, and finds herself becoming more and more aware that not everything is as it should be.  A visit from childhood friend, Sophia (Ross), whom she clearly doesn’t remember, adds to the sense of unease Sarah feels.  When her uncle Peter (Stevens) leaves after a dispute with her father John (Trese), Sarah starts to hear weird noises coming from one of the rooms upstairs.  She gets her dad to investigate but at first they don’t find anything (though John does find some photographs that he quickly hides away).  When her father is attacked and injured, Sarah tries to flee the house but finds herself locked in and unable to get out.  With someone else in the house, stalking her, Sarah becomes increasingly terrified; she finds a key to the padlock on the storm cellar door and escapes.

Outside, she has a vision of a young girl (Murphy), and runs into her returning uncle.  She tells him about her father and they head back to the house.  Peter goes inside; while Sarah waits in the car she becomes convinced someone has gotten in there with her.  She runs back into the house and locks the front door behind her.  Peter can’t find her father’s body (though he does find some photographs that he quickly hides away).  They search for John but Peter is attacked and knocked unconscious by the unknown intruder (Barnett).  Sarah’s visions of the young girl become more frequent, and the intruder looks more and more like a reanimated corpse.  Once again, Sarah tries to flee the house…and runs into Sophia who begins to challenge her memories of the past.  With her visions of the young girl proving more and more revealing of a past tragedy that happened at the house, Sarah is forced to confront some horrible truths surrounding her childhood.

Silent House - scene

A remake of the Uruguayan movie La casa muda (2010), Silent House starts off well, its remote lakeside location just wintry enough to make things feel eerie from the start.  The house is a bit of a labyrinth and seems to contain more rooms than seems feasible when looking at it from the outside, and the basement seems twice as large again.  The lack of working electricity adds to the atmosphere and the battery lamps used throughout throw out just enough light to keep things hidden in the shadows, further adding to the sense of foreboding, while Olsen’s wide-eyed moon face reflects the building tension with unexpected authority.

With all this in place, it’s a surprise then that the movie doesn’t work as well as it should.  The main problem lies in the approach to the material. What begins as a haunted house movie mutates part way through into a psychological thriller with lingering supernatural overtones, and ends as an uncomfortable revenge drama.  Wearing and shedding so many identities leaves Silent House feeling as if the writer (co-director Lau) couldn’t decide which approach was the most effective.  This also leaves the movie feeling disjointed and incohesive, and there are too many moments when the requirements of the script make for forced (non-)activity on screen – is it unreasonable to assume that Sarah wouldn’t be seen hiding under the kitchen table by the intruder?  There’s also the issue of what’s real and what’s not real – there’s a good argument to be made for Sophia not being real throughout, but this isn’t confirmed one way or the other – and it’s unclear if what Sarah is seeing is happening at all, but in the hands of Kentis and Lau the ending is inconclusive (but maybe deliberately so).

While the directors try and decide what kind of a movie they’re making, it’s left to Olsen to shoulder the burden of selling the movie and its twists and turns.  Fortunately she’s up to the task, and even if she can’t quite make the final scenes ring true, it’s still a strong performance, Sarah’s increasing hysteria tempered by an overriding obduracy.  Trese and Stevens are fine, if underused, and Ross is realistically creepy in her manner; when Sophia gives Sarah a hug it’s so awkward as to be cringe-inducing.  When she returns towards the movie’s end, her appearance is a powerful boost to proceedings (even if it doesn’t make complete sense for her to be there).

Rating: 6/10 – it needs a better ending, but on the whole Silent House works well within its (for the most part) interior location; a great performance from Olsen anchors the more outlandish moments and there’s a degree of fun to be had in trying to work out what’s happening and why, but sadly the movie stumbles far too often for it to be completely successful.

Worst Movie Remakes…Ever!

24 Saturday May 2014

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In the light of the recent, hugely disappointing remake of Godzilla, I’ve been thinking about other remakes that have been less than a) wonderful, b) acceptable, and c) wanted, remakes such as any of the recent horror mishaps – A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) etc. – or modern reworkings of classic oldies such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). I’ve compiled a list of my Top 10 Worst Remakes…Ever!, but before I reveal them to the world, I wanted to find out which movies other people think are terrible remakes. So… I’ve set up a survey for people to vote for their favourite worst remakes (or even worst favourite remakes). No more than three choices, though (so I can more easily tally up the totals), and if you want to express your reasons for a movie’s inclusion, please feel free.

To give everyone an idea of where I’m coming from, here’s the movie that just missed out on my Top 10 and currently resides at No 11:

Disturbia (2007) – D: D.J. Caruso / 105m

Cast: Shia LaBeouf, Sarah Roemer, Carrie-Anne Moss, David Morse, Aaron Yoo, Viola Davis

A remake of Rear Window (1954) that did away with all the original’s subtlety, suspense and wit, and cast a sadly lacking LaBeouf in the James Stewart role. With no tension, and dubious attempts at making Morse’s character glamorous, the movie limps along like a bad graze looking for a plaster to make it feel better.

Disturbia

Happy Voting!

http://dullwood68.polldaddy.com/s/what-are-worst-movie-remakes-ever

 

RoboCop (2014)

20 Thursday Mar 2014

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D: José Padilha / 117m

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Harley, Michael K. Williams, Jennifer Ehle, Jay Baruchel, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Samuel L. Jackson, Aimee Garcia, Douglas Urbanski, John Paul Ruttan, Patrick Garrow, Zach Grenier

With the Eighties being increasingly plundered for material that can be remade, rebooted or re-imagined, the likelihood of a new RoboCop movie was always a strong possibility.  Now that it’s here, it’s inevitable that the comparisons between this version and Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 original are appearing thick and fast, with equally inevitable results: it’s not the same (shock! horror!).

From the black suit to the addition of a wife and child, RoboCop is – and was always going to be – a different beast from its predecessor(s) (let’s not even mention the animated and live action TV series’).  Some things remain the same though.  Alex Murphy (Kinnaman) is still a Detroit cop, working with his partner, Jack Lewis (Williams) to bring down crime boss Antoine Vallon (Garrow).  When the pair get too close, Lewis is wounded in a shootout and Murphy is subsequently blown up outside his home.  With his life hanging in the balance, OmniCorp boss Raymond Sellars (Keaton) offers his wife Clara (Cornish) a way to keep Alex alive: sign up to their research programme, headed by Dr Norton (Oldman).

Three months later, Alex is restored to waking consciousness to find himself encased in a metal suit and horrified by what is happening to him.  After an escape attempt fails he begins to accept the reality of his situation and works with Norton to make the best of things and, more importantly, find his way back to Clara and his son David (Ruttan).  With a projected annual return of $600 billion if their robot police programme is a success – and if a bill banning robot police officers is repealed by the Senate – OmniCorp is determined not to let Alex’s individuality ruin their investment.  They take steps to control his emotional and judgmental responses, but reckon without his love for his family – and his need for revenge on Vallon – overriding their protocols.  Soon, Alex begins to understand the depth of Sellars’ duplicity, and with his partner’s help, sets out to – yes, you’ve guessed it – bring Sellars to justice.

RoboCop (2014) - scene

Although Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner – the screenwriters of the 1987 version – are credited alongside newbie Josh Zetumer, little remains from their script except various names, the Detroit location, and the movie’s basic structure.  It’s not a bad (exo-) skeleton to hang things on and ensures the movie doesn’t stray too far from the (in-built) audience’s expectations.  The major difference here is that Alex isn’t killed but is critically injured, making his memories and emotions a much more potent angle to explore… except the movie doesn’t.  With the exception of a brief (read: cut short in the editing process) scene where Alex goes home for the first time as RoboCop, there’s no real exploration of what Alex might be feeling beyond having Kinnaman look aggrieved for a few moments in-between the action elements.

There’s also a lot of talking.  RoboCop may be the first action movie in a long time to spend so much of its screen time having its secondary characters talk so often, and to so little effect.  Jackson ramps it up as a thinly disguised version of Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, spouting diatribes as only he can, and providing the movie with its thinly disguised attack on corporate America and the media as devious bedfellows (Jackson also gets to say m*thaf*cka, so some things are all right with the world).  And then there’s the continual back-and-forth between Sellars and Norton where Norton voices a concern or a negative opinion, and Sellars just waffles a few sentences and Norton goes away appeased.  (I swear I have no idea what Michael Keaton is saying in those scenes.)

With all this dialogue and by-the-numbers plotting, how then do the action scenes fare?  Well, one first-person shooter sequence aside (which sticks out like a sore thumb), RoboCop delivers fairly effective if unexceptional action beats until it wimps out altogether and gives us one of the most ineffectual showdowns in action cinema history (look for the well-armed guard who doesn’t fire a shot – no, look for him: once RoboCop appears he all but vanishes).  And if I have to make one comparison only between this version and the 1987 movie, it’s that Vallon is a poor, practically disposable villain when set against Clarence Boddicker.

The cast perform efficiently enough and Kinnaman makes for a strong-jawed hero, while Oldman does his best with a character whose motivations change from scene to scene (and sometimes within them).  Keaton underplays Sellars and only occasionally shows off the nervous energy that made him so exciting to watch earlier on in his career, and Baruchel gets to play the annoying marketing character you hope gets killed by an ED-209.  As Clara, Cornish has little to do but look angry or upset from the sidelines, and Jean-Baptiste (so brilliant in Mike Leigh’s Secrets and Lies) is here reduced to treading water until her character is no longer required by the narrative.

Padilha directs with an efficiency and a drive that never quite translates into sustained tension, and there are too many filler shots of RoboCop zooming through the streets of Detroit on his customised motorbike.  That said, there are things to like: Lula Carvalho’s steel-burnished photography; Murphy’s treatment of hired mercenary Mattox (Haley) after a training exercise; a short scene where a man with robotic hands plays the guitar; Mattox’s choice of music during Murphy’s first training session (plus Norton’s bemused response); the seamless special effects, a predictably vast improvement on 1987; and the movie’s best scene by far: the moment when Murphy discovers just how much of himself fills the suit.

Ultimately, what’s missing from RoboCop is a clear attempt at relating the emotional trauma of being a man in a “tin suit”.  Without it, RoboCop doesn’t engage in the way it should do, and many scenes pass by without having any meaningful effect on the audience.  It makes for frustrating viewing, and robs the movie of any real drama; sadly, it all ends up being just too impersonal.

Rating: 6/10 – a tidier script would have helped but this is by no means a disaster; a shaky start to a new series of movies(?) but enjoyable enough despite its flaws.

Carrie (2013)

11 Saturday Jan 2014

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Carrie (2013)

D: Kimberly Peirce / 100m

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde, Portia Doubleday, Judy Greer, Alex Russell, Zoë Belkin, Ansel Elgort, Barry Shabaka Henley

When seventeen-year-old Carrie White (Moretz), already a social misfit at the school she attends, has her first period and doesn’t realise what’s happening, her fear and confusion leads to her classmates throwing tampons and sanitary napkins at her, and yelling at her to “plug it up”. This humiliating event is filmed by the worst of her tormentors, Chris Hargenson (Doubleday), and is later posted on the Internet. Stopped by their teacher Ms Desjardin (Greer), the girls are punished by having to stay after school and do repetitive exercises. Chris rebels against this and ends up being suspended; this means she will miss the upcoming school prom. Angered by what she feels is a terrible injustice, Chris vows to get even with Carrie (though not with Ms Desjardin).

For Carrie, her problems don’t end at the school gates. Her mother, Margaret (Moore), governs their lives according to her strict religious beliefs. Carrie tries to explain how terrified she’d been when her period started, but Margaret, her beliefs skewed by a pathological fear of sexual intimacy, berates her daughter for “becoming a woman” and locks her in a closet. Carrie’s anger surfaces and with just her mind she causes a jagged tear to appear down the centre of the closet door. With both mother and daughter realising there is going to be a shift in their relationship – and in Carrie’s favour – a tense line is drawn, and Margaret, now wary of the daughter she has controlled so easily until now, fears for both their futures.

While Chris plots her revenge, another of Carrie’s classmates, Sue Snell (Wilde), ashamed of how she behaved, tries to make amends by persuading her boyfriend Tommy (Elgort) to take Carrie to the prom instead of her. Tommy is initially resistant to the idea but eventually agrees, and asks Carrie if she’d like to go with him. Surprised but flattered (even if she doubts his sincerity to begin with), Carrie agrees. At the prom, and as part of Chris’s revenge, Carrie and Tommy are crowned Prom King and Queen. As they bask in the applause and approbation of their peers, Chris and her boyfriend Billy (Russell) drop two buckets of pig’s blood down onto Carrie and Tommy. The shock and the humiliation is too much and Carrie, using her nascent telekinetic powers, proceeds to take her revenge on everyone there.

Carrie (2013) - scene

Updated in minor ways for a new decade, Carrie plods its way uncomfortably from one leaden scene to the next, never fully convincing and never fully engaging the audience. As a remake it fails to justify its existence thanks to two main problems, both of which are insurmountable: Peirce’s direction and Moretz’s performance.

Peirce – still best known for Boys Don’t Cry (1999) – here proves a bad fit for the material, her approach leading to a curiously flat, matter-of-fact retelling that never takes off or impresses that much. It’s as if she’s decided to film events at a remove, keeping a distance between the audience and the characters so that any empathy the viewer may have is kept from flourishing. For a story with such a strong, emotional resonance, and centred around the age old topics of bullying and female empowerment, it’s even more surprising that Peirce has been unable to connect with the themes inherent in the script. This extends to the performances as well, which – Moore and Moretz aside – are perfunctory and/or lethargic.

Moore is a great choice for Margaret White, and expresses the religious paranoia that has blighted her life, and her daughter’s life, with a real sense of conviction. She’s like a coiled snake, biding its time until the right moment to strike. Moore is the best thing in Carrie but it’s effectively a supporting role and so she’s not on screen enough to make a difference.

Someone who is on screen too much, though, is Moretz, a moderately talented young actress whose rise to stardom on the back of the Kick-Ass movies has meant her being given more praise than is deserved, and who is cruelly shown to be lacking the acting skills needed to portray a character such as Carrie White. She may be the right age but the part requires an actress who is both older and more experienced. Moretz does her best but she’s just not up to it. She isn’t at all convincing as a put-upon teenager, and when required to show the pain and discomfort her life at home has engendered, there’s barely anything for the audience to latch on to. Worse still is the wide-eyed, “did-someone-just-goose-me?” stare she adopts for her telekinetic rampage; if it was intended to make her look scary then someone wasn’t checking the dailies.

With Peirce’s feather light touch on proceedings and Moretz’s underwhelming performance putting the movie at a disadvantage from the risible opening to the even more risible denouement, Carrie fails to meet its audience even halfway. The script is serviceable enough but there’s a lack of effort all round: even Carrie’s destruction of the prom is done half-heartedly, leaving a feeling of “was that it?” in the air.  In horror terms, this has to be the biggest disappointment of 2013.

Rating: 4/10 – yet another poor adaptation of a Stephen King novel/short story/laundry list, Carrie lacks the brio and energy needed to carry it off; turgid in the extreme and saved only by Moore’s creepy performance and a sequence that wouldn’t look out of place in a Final Destination movie.

Film4 Frightfest All Night Special 2013

05 Tuesday Nov 2013

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Taking place at the Empire cinema in Basildon, Essex here in the UK, the Film4 Frightfest All Night Special 2013 started at approx. 11:00pm on 2 November and finished at approx. 6:15am on 3 November.  The following four films were shown.

Patrick (2013)

Patrick (2013)

D: Mark Hartley / 90m

Cast: Charles Dance, Rachel Griffith, Sharni Vinson, Peta Sergeant, Damon Gameau, Martin Crewes, Jackson Gallagher

A remake of the 1978 movie of the same name, Patrick is the first feature from documentary filmmaker Mark Hartley.  Taking the same basic premise as the original – coma patient uses telekinesis to manipulate and murder those around him – Hartley’s version is a grim yet stylish offering that sits comfortably alongside its predecessor.  Dr Roget (Dance) runs a private clinic where he is attempting to “re-awaken” coma patients.  Following the disappearance of one of his nurses, he employs Kathy Jacquard (Vinson) to take her place.  Under the watchful eye of Matron Cassidy (Griffith) and the helpful ministrations of Nurse Williams (Sergeant), Kathy soon finds herself assisting Dr Roget in his treatment of “the patient in room 15”, a young man named Patrick (Gallagher).  As time passes, Kathy begins to realise that Patrick is capable of communicating with her… at the same time that strange things start happening to those around her, in particular, prospective love interest Brian (Crewes), and recently separated husband Ed (Gameau).  And so begins a cat-and-mouse game between Kathy and Patrick as she fights to keep those around her safe from harm, and Patrick becomes increasingly homicidal.

Patrick (2013) - scene

Patrick is an effective shocker, solidly done with a serious approach that works well (no jokey one-liners here).  Justin King’s script provides straightforward motivations for each character and ramps up the tension until the final showdown.  There are some narrative lapses along the way, and some of the dialogue sounds a little contrived, but on the whole Patrick delivers an often brutally efficient retake on the classic original.  The cast help immeasurably, everybody giving committed performances and proving that a little Grand Guignol can go a long way.  Patrick also benefits from a great score by Pino Donaggio, and splendidly nasty gore effects courtesy of the makeup department.  Aside from the aforementioned narrative lapses, it’s Patrick’s back story that strikes the only false note in the movie, an unnecessary sequence of flashbacks that would have been better presented as a suitably chilling piece of exposition by Dr Roget or Matron Cassidy.

Rating: 7/10 – gloomy interiors and deliberately low-tech effects work bolster this first feature from Hartley; and as the very last credit has it: Patrick vive.

 

Discopath (2013)

Discopath

Original title: Discopathe

D: Renaud Gauthier / 81m

Cast: Jérémie Earp-Lavergne, Katherine Cleland, Ingrid Falaise, Pierre Lenoir, Ivan Freud, François Aubin

This Canadian-lensed homage to the heady days of low-budget 80’s slasher flicks is so on the money it’s scary all by itself.  The movie opens in 1976.  Duane Lewis (Earp-Lavergne) is fired from the New York diner where he (badly) flips burgers.  On his way home he meets Valerie (Cleland).  They hook up, and later that evening she takes Duane to Seventh Heaven, a trendy nightclub that plays disco music.  The music triggers a murderous rage in Duane and soon he’s fleeing the country, heading for Montreal before the cops, led by Detective Stephens (Freud), can arrest him.  The movie then skips forward to 1980.  Duane is now working in a Catholic girls’ college as a sound and video engineer.  He wears hearing aids that block out any music that might trigger one of his murderous outbursts.  But when two of the girls decide to stay in their room one weekend while everyone else is away, the music they play causes Duane to revert to his homicidal urges.

Discopath - scene

Psychopath is a loving recreation of all those cheesy, hard-to-believe shockers that somehow found themselves “Banned in Britain” and whose video covers usually featured a girl in chains being approached by a maniac wielding his weapon of choice.  It’s a cheerfully ‘bad’ movie, with deliberately ‘bad’ acting, stilted dialogue, awkward scene transitions, off-kilter camera compositions, and plenty of gratuitous gore effects.  Writer/director Gauthier has crafted the kind of grindhouse movie that both Planet Terror and Death Proof should have been but weren’t.  It also throws a linguistic curveball when the action moves from New York (all dialogue in English) to Montreal (all dialogue in French-Canadian), and amps up the exploitation angle by throwing in some nudity and a tasteless slo-mo moment involving a female corpse tumbling out of a coffin.  Great fun, but not for everyone.

Rating: 7/10 – outrageous, awful (but deliberately so), corny, hammy, gory, stupid – all these things are true…and it’s great!

 

The Station (2013)

Station, The

Original title: Blutgletscher

D: Marvin Kren / 98m

Cast: Gerhard Liebmann, Edita Malovcic, Hille Beseler, Peter Knaack, Felix Römer, Brigitte Kren

Scientists working in the German Alps discover a mysterious red substance that acts as a mutating parasite when it comes into contact with living creatures.  As the team comes under increasing attack from a variety of mutated creatures, a party of visitors including Minister Bodicek (Kren) are hiking towards them, unaware of what awaits  them.  The Station is a clever, intriguing movie that creates a fair amount of tension without quite making you grip the edge of your seat.  The characters are well-drawn despite being standard archetypes – a rugged loner who just sees the creatures as needing to be killed (Liebmann), doubtful scientists who see value in the creatures’ existence (Beseler, Römer), a resourceful Minister and her assistant (Malovcic) who also had a previous relationship with the rugged loner, and the usual creature fodder – and the cast acquit themselves well.

Station, The - scene

The location photography is often spectacular without undermining the insular nature of the narrative, and director Kren marshals everything to good effect.  What lets the movie down however is the incredibly shoddy creature design and execution; they’re largely puppets and look like it.  This leaves the attack sequences bereft of any real menace and it’s up to the cast to sell it all.  There’s also a “Bond-in-the-shower” moment when the Minister, forced to remove a parasite from a young girl’s thigh, opens her up with an ordinary pair of scissors!  These problems aside, The Station works largely because of the committed cast, and the underlying subtext relating to climate and eco-change, giving the movie a depth and resonance most creature features lack.

Rating: 7/10 – a big step-up from Kren’s first feature, Rammbock, The Station is a fine addition to the roster of movies where Nature turns against Man.

 

Nothing Left to Fear (2013)

Nothing Left to Fear

D: Anthony Leonardi III / 100m

Cast: Anne Heche, James Tupper, Clancy Brown, Rebekah Brandes, Jennifer Stone, Ethan Peck, Carter Cabassa

Based in part on the true-life legend of Stull, Kansas, Nothing Left to Fear sees new pastor in town Dan (Tupper) and his family, wife Wendy (Heche), daughters Mary (Stone) and Rebecca (Brandes), and son Christopher (Cabassa) become the focus of a satanic ritual set in motion by on-the-point-of-retiring pastor Kingsman (Brown).  As strange events and incidents begin to happen around them it’s only Rebecca who realises that not all is what it seems and that the smiling, welcoming faces of the townspeople hide a deeper, disturbing secret.  And that secret is… well, frankly, a mess.  In the hands of first-time screenwriter Jonathan W.C. Mills, Nothing Left to Fear staggers under the weight of lacklustre plotting, hazy motivations, perfunctory characterisations and unconvincing dialogue.

Nothing Left to Fear - scene2

By the movie’s end it’s given up altogether, bogged down by an over-reliance on demonic movie tropes and all-too-familair CGI effects.  And the movie’s basic premise is further undermined by the movie’s coda, which sees another pastor and his family on their way to Stull…  (For anyone now thinking, Oh great, that’s a spoiler and a half, don’t worry, you’ll be more annoyed with the movie by then than you’ll ever be with this review.)  Of the cast, Heche and Brown should have known better, while Brandes and Stone at least make an effort, as does Peck as Rebecca’s love interest Noah.  Director Leonardi III, whose first feature this is, seems unable to generate any real tension or sense of impending horror, and badly mishandles an extended sequence where one of the children becomes possessed and attacks their siblings: what should be a terrifying experience for the audience becomes a game of cat-and-mouse that cries out for a quicker, more shocking resolution.  On the plus side, the score by Slash (also a producer) and Nicholas O’Toole is effective without being intrusive, and the production design by Deborah Riley adds a level of charm to small-town life that becomes pleasingly distorted by the movie’s denouement.

Rating: 4/10 – a muddled, narratively incoherent movie that promises much but fails to deliver almost entirely; there’s nothing left to fear except the movie itself.