It's a fairly well established device. Gather some friends who have known each other for years, all with a couple of secrets. Let them settle in among each other. And then have one of them drop a bombshell, and see what results.
Sally Potter's film benefits hugely from a top-of-their game cast - her script is reasonable but perhaps a little familiar, and some of the jokes feel a little over-written and probably wouldn't survive less expert handling. But with performers like Patricia Clarkson, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Bruno Ganz, Cillian Murphy, Emily Mortimer, Cherry Jones and Timothy Spall, this remains pretty damn gripping. The black-and-white photography gives this a speical kind of beauty, even as the people in the film are behaving worse and worse towards each other and the disasters are piling up. And I don't know that this really is anything more than an amusing diversion for those of an educated bent. But it does its job, it's short, tight and amusing.
Monday 30 April 2018
Saturday 28 April 2018
Early Man
I'm an admirer of the Aardman team - whether it be their various Wallace and Gromit shorts, music videos like "Sledgehammer" and "My Baby Just Cares for Me" or their features like "Chicken Run", "Curse of the Wererabbit", "Pirates: Band of Misfits" or "The Sean the Sheep Movie". But this one's a bit of a dud. The setup of pitting prehistoric man against the bronze age could possibly pay off, but making their field of battle a soccer match and running a series of gags very specifically about soccer gave me little to hang onto. It doesn't help that few of the characters are particularly fleshed out - possibly comic sidekick boar Hognob (voiced by Nick Park) gets the best of it, but everybody else is rather thin. This is particularly disappointing for Maisie Williams, an actress I'm looking forward to seeing a lot more of, but who's given pretty much nothing at all to play.
Look, there are one or two decent sight gags here and there, and there is some affection for the Aardman style of big-teethed claymation. But this is pretty flat stuff.
Look, there are one or two decent sight gags here and there, and there is some affection for the Aardman style of big-teethed claymation. But this is pretty flat stuff.
Rampage
Look, I like big smashy stupid fun as much as the next guy (have a look at my reviews of Kong Skull Island or Shin Godzilla). But the important part of that term is "fun", and this .. just isn't. It's a monotonously rote story as an evil corporation whose evil secret formula creates three huge monsters (a gorilla, a wolf and an aligator) who all gather to destroy downtown Chicago, and only the primatologist who used to look after the gorilla when he was merely a regular sized gorilla can possibly stop it, largely because he's played by Dwayne Johnston.
While Johnston is a charming guy, it tends to play here as more overly cocky ego than anything else (there's really no reason why he should be dashing around in the final battle beyond that he's billed over the title of the movie). Of the rest of the humans, Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets a few decent moment of shiftyness as the government liason, and nobody really embarasses themselves, but nobody really gets a particularly glorious moment either. The fighting is largely pretty rote, perhaps a bit bloodier and less-regarding of casualties than most, but that more plays as if the fights have been chucked at the CGI team without any co-ordinating ideas beyond "let 'em fight".
This is "nobody's trying very hard" cinema, and it's all rather pointless.
While Johnston is a charming guy, it tends to play here as more overly cocky ego than anything else (there's really no reason why he should be dashing around in the final battle beyond that he's billed over the title of the movie). Of the rest of the humans, Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets a few decent moment of shiftyness as the government liason, and nobody really embarasses themselves, but nobody really gets a particularly glorious moment either. The fighting is largely pretty rote, perhaps a bit bloodier and less-regarding of casualties than most, but that more plays as if the fights have been chucked at the CGI team without any co-ordinating ideas beyond "let 'em fight".
This is "nobody's trying very hard" cinema, and it's all rather pointless.
Friday 27 April 2018
A Quiet Place
In some ways, this film is a minor miracle. It's a film that gets an entire audience, in this modern era when everybody seems to treat a cinema like a loungeroom and mutters to their neighbour, texts away or generally respects none of the rules of civilised cinemagoers - and makes them be completely silent. It's a simple premise - the world is threatened by monsters who track people by sound, and only by being as quiet as possible can one family survive - but it's executed expertly and tensely.
There are certainly things that will make you think "hey, what about..." after the film is done - but this is a machine for producing fear in the cinema, not one for logical deconstruction afterwards. John Krazinski both stars and directs, with his directing showing surprising skill, and his chemistry with his on-and-off-screen-wife is instantly palpable (in a way a lot of real life couples have struggled to maintain). Millicent Simmonds, the American-Sign-Language speaking actress who plays their deaf daughter is strongly convincing, as is Noah Jupe as their son.
There's very little to say except that this is an excellent example of cinema of terror and should be watched preferably with a full cinema of people holding their breaths for about 90 odd minutes.
There are certainly things that will make you think "hey, what about..." after the film is done - but this is a machine for producing fear in the cinema, not one for logical deconstruction afterwards. John Krazinski both stars and directs, with his directing showing surprising skill, and his chemistry with his on-and-off-screen-wife is instantly palpable (in a way a lot of real life couples have struggled to maintain). Millicent Simmonds, the American-Sign-Language speaking actress who plays their deaf daughter is strongly convincing, as is Noah Jupe as their son.
There's very little to say except that this is an excellent example of cinema of terror and should be watched preferably with a full cinema of people holding their breaths for about 90 odd minutes.
Tuesday 24 April 2018
1945
We're between VE day and VJ day, when the Nazis have been defeated but World War 2 is not yet quite concluded. And in a small Hungarian town, the villagers are getting themselves back to normal. But the arrival of two men in black, Orthodox Jews, means everybody is suddenly wary again. What do they plan, and what secrets are the villagers desperate to hide?
This is a little bit of a slow burn. The setup (the small frontier town menaced when two men in black arrive) is reminiscent of a classic hollywood western (the black-and-white photography only emphasises this), and the silence of the two jews compared to the desperate running around of the town people only gives this more accumulating power. I will say that the measured state of the opening (combined with going to an early morning session) meant that my mind did drift a little and I took over extended blinks. However the payoff as we find the true reason for the visitors, and the consequences of the building anxieties of the townpeople, really fires on all cylinders and makes this a film definitely worth catching.
This is a little bit of a slow burn. The setup (the small frontier town menaced when two men in black arrive) is reminiscent of a classic hollywood western (the black-and-white photography only emphasises this), and the silence of the two jews compared to the desperate running around of the town people only gives this more accumulating power. I will say that the measured state of the opening (combined with going to an early morning session) meant that my mind did drift a little and I took over extended blinks. However the payoff as we find the true reason for the visitors, and the consequences of the building anxieties of the townpeople, really fires on all cylinders and makes this a film definitely worth catching.
Ready Player One
This film really shouldn't work at all. A vast conglomeration of pop culture references in a tale of an online world where people are competitively hunting three magic keys that will give them a vast fortune and rulership of the entire world, this is all the formulaic regurgitation that we've come to dismiss and fear.
Except that you should never entirely underestimate Steven Spielberg. True, there are plot holes you could drive a truck thorugh (if this game is meant to be a wildly popular essential part of the world, why does everybody important who's playing it appear to live in Columbus, Ohio? if this is set in 2045, how come absolutely nobody has pop-culture references that go beyond about 2011? why does your fully functioning gaming rig body suit allow people to hit you very very hard in the crotch?). And this has some serious malfunctions with some of the female characters - part of the backstory involves a lost love whose entire characterisation basically consists of those two words, and our hero's love interest similarly takes an interest in him for no apparent reason.
Still, Spielberg gives this energy and a celebratory feel to the world, and, if leads Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke aren't exactly giving deeply thoughtful performances, they are not actively annoying. Ben Mendhelson gives his somewhat generic corporate baddie some sneering swagger that makes his dopey schemes somehow fun, and Mark Rylance plays the creator of this whole world as a somewhat tragic figure, a guy who's never quite figured out human connection and clearly feels a little bit lost anywhere he hasn't created. The action sequences have verve, clarity, humour, and a lot of the pop-culture references feel deliberately more like wallpaper rather than anything masquerading as substance - the film doesn't try to make any of them mean anything more than they actually do. And while Spielberg can't resist splattering on a moral at the end of the film, it's not enough to drag down the pleasure of a story that maybe didn't need to be told, but is never the less told quite well.
Except that you should never entirely underestimate Steven Spielberg. True, there are plot holes you could drive a truck thorugh (if this game is meant to be a wildly popular essential part of the world, why does everybody important who's playing it appear to live in Columbus, Ohio? if this is set in 2045, how come absolutely nobody has pop-culture references that go beyond about 2011? why does your fully functioning gaming rig body suit allow people to hit you very very hard in the crotch?). And this has some serious malfunctions with some of the female characters - part of the backstory involves a lost love whose entire characterisation basically consists of those two words, and our hero's love interest similarly takes an interest in him for no apparent reason.
Still, Spielberg gives this energy and a celebratory feel to the world, and, if leads Tye Sheridan and Olivia Cooke aren't exactly giving deeply thoughtful performances, they are not actively annoying. Ben Mendhelson gives his somewhat generic corporate baddie some sneering swagger that makes his dopey schemes somehow fun, and Mark Rylance plays the creator of this whole world as a somewhat tragic figure, a guy who's never quite figured out human connection and clearly feels a little bit lost anywhere he hasn't created. The action sequences have verve, clarity, humour, and a lot of the pop-culture references feel deliberately more like wallpaper rather than anything masquerading as substance - the film doesn't try to make any of them mean anything more than they actually do. And while Spielberg can't resist splattering on a moral at the end of the film, it's not enough to drag down the pleasure of a story that maybe didn't need to be told, but is never the less told quite well.
The Death of Stalin
Armando Ianucci has become one of the premier satirists of our time, with "The Thick of It", "In The Loop" and "Veep" parodying contemporary politics in all of its vainglorious, self-seeking, shallowly minded, petty infighting glory. "Death Of Stalin" uses the title incident to show that all that jockeying for position, bitter insults and sleazy maneuvering is pretty perennial. While, yes, the stakes are in some ways higher (though "In the Loop" had a war being declared in the background), and the characters venality definitely gets more brutal (particularly Simon Russell-Beale's spymaster Beria), the combination is still pretty familiar.
I was slightly at a disadvantage when I saw this - it was a surprise film at Fantastic Fest, meaning that an audience primed for weirdness and spectacle instead got a sarcastic british historical comedy - therefore, for a comedy, it didn't arouse many laughs (in the theatre I was in anyway - I'm told in some of the other theatres the chuckles were continuous). And to a certain extent, with the stakes this high the laughs tend to stick in your throat a little more than they might otherwise - you know that for many people this is literally life and death we're playing with. Fortunately, as bitter drama this really works - Steve Buscemi's scheming Kruschev, Beale's aforementioned Beria (Beale is largely a stage actor and here finally gets a chance to show why he is one of the premiere actors of his era - this is the first time his power's really been captured on film, and I hope it's not the last), Jeffery Tambor's buffonish Malenkov, Jason Isaac's blunt Field Marshall Zhukov and a plethora of other actors capture the desperation of people manovering for their chance to stay close enough to power to not get killed tomorrow.
If I don't rate this quite as highly as "In The Loop", that may be due to the lower level of laughs and the slight familiarity of the style - but this is still strong, caustic cinema well worth watching.
I was slightly at a disadvantage when I saw this - it was a surprise film at Fantastic Fest, meaning that an audience primed for weirdness and spectacle instead got a sarcastic british historical comedy - therefore, for a comedy, it didn't arouse many laughs (in the theatre I was in anyway - I'm told in some of the other theatres the chuckles were continuous). And to a certain extent, with the stakes this high the laughs tend to stick in your throat a little more than they might otherwise - you know that for many people this is literally life and death we're playing with. Fortunately, as bitter drama this really works - Steve Buscemi's scheming Kruschev, Beale's aforementioned Beria (Beale is largely a stage actor and here finally gets a chance to show why he is one of the premiere actors of his era - this is the first time his power's really been captured on film, and I hope it's not the last), Jeffery Tambor's buffonish Malenkov, Jason Isaac's blunt Field Marshall Zhukov and a plethora of other actors capture the desperation of people manovering for their chance to stay close enough to power to not get killed tomorrow.
If I don't rate this quite as highly as "In The Loop", that may be due to the lower level of laughs and the slight familiarity of the style - but this is still strong, caustic cinema well worth watching.
Saturday 21 April 2018
A Wrinkle in Time
This is simultaneously visually spectacular and a bit of a plotting mess. The story of a girl thrown into interstellar adventure to find her long-lost father, this feels in outline reasonably generic, and certainly adding Oprah as one of three inspirational guide figures gives a bit of self-empowerment overload. But Ava Devernay's film also combines some lipsmacking visuals and a perforance that creeps in on you from lead Storm Reid - starting as a somewhat generic overly-put-upon teen lead, she grows into something far more interesting. I do wish the setup was better done (in particular there is a section of dialogue between two teachers that feels laboured beyond belief) but at the same time I can't argue that Ava Devernay has a good eye for surrealist, trippy visual concepts.
It's a pity this isn't flatout excellent because Disney has somewhat fallen into the uncomfortable spot of delivering only in strictly defined franchise models, and this is, whatever else it might be, certainly not a franchise. It's an experiment that only half works, but the half that does works is like very little else I've ever seen. So it may be worth it anyway.
It's a pity this isn't flatout excellent because Disney has somewhat fallen into the uncomfortable spot of delivering only in strictly defined franchise models, and this is, whatever else it might be, certainly not a franchise. It's an experiment that only half works, but the half that does works is like very little else I've ever seen. So it may be worth it anyway.
Sunday 8 April 2018
The Other Side of Hope
This story of two men, one a tired businessman starting a restaurant, one a syrian immigrant who comes under his protection, is a bit of a slow burn - it takes almost half hte movie to bring these two men together. And Aki Kaurismaki's usual dry style unfortunately in this case tends to lead to characters that are a bit thin - just functions of their place in the plot, rather than something more fully rounded.
There is the occasional sequence that works like gangbusters - the restraunt's desperate attempt at a sushi night - but this was a case where everything felt awfully thin and surface - there isn't quote enough plot to keep this ticking over, and there isn't enough character depth to fill the gaps while the plot isn't moving. So I didn't really go for this one.
There is the occasional sequence that works like gangbusters - the restraunt's desperate attempt at a sushi night - but this was a case where everything felt awfully thin and surface - there isn't quote enough plot to keep this ticking over, and there isn't enough character depth to fill the gaps while the plot isn't moving. So I didn't really go for this one.
Friday 6 April 2018
Pacific Rim Uprising
Guillermo Del Toro's "Pacific Rim" is, to my mind, one of his weaker films - suffering from a very bland protagonist in Charlie Hunnam and a lot overly complicated story elements for what should be a pretty simple "robots versus monsters" battlefest. But it does have some compensations, in particular Idris Elba being iconically heroic as the cheif of the battle robots in straight facedly delivering the words "We're cancelling the apocalyse", and a fun sideplot featuring scientists Charlie Day and Burn Gorman with Ron Pearlman as a sleazy wheeler-dealer.
The sequel loses Idris, Charlie and Ron but keeps Charlie and Burn, moving the action 10 years later and giving us a return bout of fighting between a new generation of robots and monsters. John Boyega takes over leading man duties and gives the part way more charisma than it really deserves - this is, in all honesty, a pretty thinly written bad-boy lead, but Boyega has so much charm it makes him surprisingly non-objectionable. Scott Eastwood is the by-the-book chief and is rather bland, as are a succession of new pilots (who may avoid the national stereotyping Del Toro indulged in, but with nothing coming in to replace it, it just makes for a whole sea of bland). THe monster-robot fighting, which is what you're here for, is reasonable but there aren't quite any great standout moments that make this particularly different from any other times you've seen two giant things slug it out. The location of the final battle, perhaps, at least pays a nice tribute to the obvious source for much of these types of films, but still... this is a middling to poor film that's elevated by a charismatic leading man to be watchable, rather than anything I can comfortably recommend to anybody not intrinsically interested in the robot-monster fighting.
The sequel loses Idris, Charlie and Ron but keeps Charlie and Burn, moving the action 10 years later and giving us a return bout of fighting between a new generation of robots and monsters. John Boyega takes over leading man duties and gives the part way more charisma than it really deserves - this is, in all honesty, a pretty thinly written bad-boy lead, but Boyega has so much charm it makes him surprisingly non-objectionable. Scott Eastwood is the by-the-book chief and is rather bland, as are a succession of new pilots (who may avoid the national stereotyping Del Toro indulged in, but with nothing coming in to replace it, it just makes for a whole sea of bland). THe monster-robot fighting, which is what you're here for, is reasonable but there aren't quite any great standout moments that make this particularly different from any other times you've seen two giant things slug it out. The location of the final battle, perhaps, at least pays a nice tribute to the obvious source for much of these types of films, but still... this is a middling to poor film that's elevated by a charismatic leading man to be watchable, rather than anything I can comfortably recommend to anybody not intrinsically interested in the robot-monster fighting.
Love, Simon
Teen movies continue to be popular for a whole bunch of reasons. The high-school experience tends to be one of those periods of life where, even if there's particular personal variations, certain common threads hold true - the opening flush of love and sexuality, the tensions and growing pains as you begin to find your place in the world and your own sense of certainty in yourself and others.
There hasn't really been a mainstream gay teen movie, though, until now. Yes, there's a bunch of arthouse options out there and films made for a specialist gay market, but "Love, Simon" is unashamedly mainstream, for a broad audience. It's probably the funniest of its type since "Easy A" gave us Emma Stone, and while, no, I don't necessarily expect lead actor Nick Robinson to be troubling the Oscar stage any time soon, still, this does have the necessary mix of humour and heart to capture the attention. In this case, it's about the challenges of coming out, both to yourself and to everyone else - that, while in our somewhat more progressive times it may seem an easy step, it's still fraught with dangers (though, yes, they're very middle-class kinda dangers). It only suffers occasionally from the teen movie syndrome where the writers are clearly well out of their teenage years and drop references that realistically probably wouldn't really mean much to their characters.
There's a lot of ways this could be argued to be a small toe-in-the-water. It's really not a gay romantic comedy at all as, for 99% of the film, Simon has no idea who the other gay man he's talking to might be (the internet and the benefit of online aliases does a lot of work here) - you get a version of gay desire that is high on the longing and low on actual physical passion. Still, that's the nature of getting into the mainstream - some of the rougher edges are going to get sanded off. And the basic spirit is sound - presenting a teen comedy for a broad audience that lets gay desire be a real and central part of the story. I don't really want to overstate this film - it's merely very sweet and good rather than superbly excellent - but it's an important cultural moment to have, and one I hope is joined by a whole bunch of others.
There hasn't really been a mainstream gay teen movie, though, until now. Yes, there's a bunch of arthouse options out there and films made for a specialist gay market, but "Love, Simon" is unashamedly mainstream, for a broad audience. It's probably the funniest of its type since "Easy A" gave us Emma Stone, and while, no, I don't necessarily expect lead actor Nick Robinson to be troubling the Oscar stage any time soon, still, this does have the necessary mix of humour and heart to capture the attention. In this case, it's about the challenges of coming out, both to yourself and to everyone else - that, while in our somewhat more progressive times it may seem an easy step, it's still fraught with dangers (though, yes, they're very middle-class kinda dangers). It only suffers occasionally from the teen movie syndrome where the writers are clearly well out of their teenage years and drop references that realistically probably wouldn't really mean much to their characters.
There's a lot of ways this could be argued to be a small toe-in-the-water. It's really not a gay romantic comedy at all as, for 99% of the film, Simon has no idea who the other gay man he's talking to might be (the internet and the benefit of online aliases does a lot of work here) - you get a version of gay desire that is high on the longing and low on actual physical passion. Still, that's the nature of getting into the mainstream - some of the rougher edges are going to get sanded off. And the basic spirit is sound - presenting a teen comedy for a broad audience that lets gay desire be a real and central part of the story. I don't really want to overstate this film - it's merely very sweet and good rather than superbly excellent - but it's an important cultural moment to have, and one I hope is joined by a whole bunch of others.
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