Tag: film review

Greta (2019)

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This film is deeply flawed. Features a character who is constantly getting phone calls from someone, and she never thinks to block the number. And when she tells the police she’s being stalked by someone, they point out it’s perfectly legal to stand in the street outside a restaurant where she works as it’s public property. One, this seems wrong, and I really hope it is, if that’s true then the world is a terrible place (but, restraining orders do exist, right?). But also, that time would have been a good point to mention to the police all the bags she found at the woman’s house, all with names on which if investigated would have been discovered to have belonged to missing people. That lone would have been enough to warrant an investigation. Also, we later find out that she’s not supposed to be in the country due to medical abuse, the police would definitely have discovered that and acted on it, thus stopping the entire plot. It’s an issue when a film is based on a kind of flawed premise. But you know what? I didn’t care, I really liked this film.

I knew nothing about this film going in. Well, I knew kind of what it was about, and one of the people in it. Other than that, nothing, I went in with no preconceptions. I think that was a good thing, I didn’t go in expecting tenseness from the off. Although I’m not sure that would have mattered because this started relatively quickly. Don’t get me wrong, the story itself was still slow moving, but it kicked off almost immediately. Now when I say it was slow, I mean it. The plot was almost glacial but in a good way. Like it was slow moving, but it was always moving forward. There wasn’t much time wasted, which was nice. What wasn’t nice was this film, there’s one moment involving a cookie cutter which I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to forget, was one hell of a scene that woke the audience up. But even before that the film has a great sense of tension that never lets up, you’re on tenterhooks for almost the entire time and it’s brilliant. Yes, there’s a twist near the end which is way too obvious to really be counted as a twist, but it’s enjoyable nonetheless. There’s also a great moment of realisation for the audience. If you want to avoid spoilers, stop reading now as I have to spoil it. There’s a moment early on in the film where there’s a loud banging behind a wall, Greta (the kind of evil woman in this) explains it’s just builders next door, and she bangs on the wall to shut them up. Later on in the film Chloe Grace Moretz’s character is behind that wall and starts banging on it, and we realise, as an audience, what exactly was happening earlier. When Greta was planning to kidnap Moretz’s character, she already had a victim in the house who was listening to the whole thing but unable to do anything to stop it. Imagine that from her point of view, terrifying. That moment is just subtle enough to work, and it’s glorious.

Know what else is glorious? Isabelle Huppert, I haven’t seen her in anything before but she’d make a great Bond villain. Actually, she’d be great in a horror film too. I cannot praise her performance enough. The film is almost worth seeing based on it alone, but you should go see it anyway.

Hellboy (2019)

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Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. That’s all I have to say about this really. I remember being kind of hyped up for this. It looked like it was going to be a mature bloody kind of film, but one that’s a lot of fun. It essentially looked like a mix of Logan and Thor: Ragnarok. Instead, it’s like a mix of Thor: Dark World, and a 15-year-old on Twitter. The Thor comparison is simple; I heavily disliked both and found them incredibly bland looking. The 15-year-old; that’s more complicated. You know when kids reach adolescence and they consider themselves adults? So they decide to act more “adult”, but all this means is they actually become pricks? Yeah, it’s that. This film is the cinematic equivalent of someone typing “I’ve got a big cock, you fag! Watch this video of people being executed. Hitler was my hero, megalols”. It has no nuance, subtlety, or actual maturity to it, in fact, it’s trying so damn hard to appear mature that it comes off as juvenile.

I did have kind of high hopes for this, hopes that faded when the early reviews came in. I understand this kind of film isn’t for everyone, so an average score in the ’60s would be acceptable. But at the time of writing the average score is 14%. That suggests a complete trainwreck, a film that fails on a very basic level. And it does. The pacing is just weird, it takes forever to say things that it could say in a minute, then glosses over things that they should focus on. We spend a lot of time introduced to characters who essentially don’t even matter. I’d estimate at least 30% of this film could be cut out and you wouldn’t lose anything. It doesn’t even have the decency to look good. I mean, it does in some parts, but in others, the CGI looks woeful, there’s one moment near the end in particular which is almost laughable. What’s not as laughable are the jokes, I think they’re supposed to be jokes, they have the cadence of jokes, but not the humour. It’s hard to tell because tonally this film is all over the place, and it’s not really helped by the performance. There’s a certain performer in this film who I have not seen in anything else, so I feel bad slating their performance because everyone can have an off day, so I won’t name them (if it was a very well known one, trust me I’d go all guns blazing, but with this it would just seem rude), but trust me, it’s one of the worst performances I’ve seen in a long time, probably not helped by the fact they’re playing a nationality that definitely isn’t their native one, and as such the accent wavers all over the place.

I mean, on the plus side the gore is a welcome change, they just couldn’t match the gore with grown-up sensibilities and tone (unlike Logan, which matched both PERFECTLY). And David Harbour is almost good enough to forget that he’s not Ron Perlman, almost. But it’s not good enough to pass over the multiple flaws this movie has. If I was thirteen years old, this would be my favourite movie,  although I’d also be too young to see at the cinema. In a world where Marvel movies are making billions, films which seem this lazy are not acceptable.

Shazam! (2019)

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Well this is fun. Genuinely one of the most fun superhero films I’ve seen in a long time. It’s pure cinematic joy. So yeah, I liked it. It melted even my cold cynical heart, eventually. I mean, it took f*cking forever to get going. That’s always the issue with the first film in a superhero series though, particularly with one that not many people now. You have to not only have a film within itself, you need to introduce everything; the universe (Batman Begins wouldn’t have been as effective, for example, without first setting up that Gotham was kind of a shithole), the main characters backstory, and the villains backstory. That’s a lot to do in a short period of time, and it’s REALLY hard. That’s why it’s shared universes are great for this kind of thing, you can set up the characters in someone elses film. Spider-Man: Homecoming for example didn’t need to spend much time setting up the character, as he was already introduced in Civil War (also, EVERYONE knows Spider-man). If you cut out the origin story then the biggest issue with this film would be fixed immediately as it will be a lot pacier and flow better. To be honest, this character would have been perfect in Justice League, taking most of the comedic dialogue away from The Flash. You’d have to restructure parts of this though so there is a chance that might break it. This film is pretty much about family, it contains genuine emotion, like, tears slightly welling up level of emotion. The cast is also great. Zachary Levi easily makes you forget you’re actually watching an adult, not a large child.

I mean, it’s not perfect. As I’ve mentioned the pacing is glacial at the start. And whilst there’s nothing wrong with the way it looks, per se, it just isn’t visually very interesting which is a shame. It looks just like a normal film, nothing really wows you. I also think they missed a golden opportunity. This bit contains plot spoilers btw. There’s a moment where all his adopted siblings also become adult superheroes. I feel this would have been a great chance to have some cameos, you know, have some fun with the casting in some way. Oh, and the villain is missing from long periods of the film. Holy crap this film had a lot of flaws now I look at it. But I don’t care. I wasn’t thinking about the flaws when I left the cinema, I was smiling like an idiot because the film was fun enough to make me not think about them. And really isn’t that all you want from a film a lot of the time? For it to entertain you? Although I’m still not sure if it’s Faithe Herman who’s adorable and lovely, or just the character. Let’s just say it’s both for sake of argument.

Fisherman’s Friends (2019)

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This is not the greatest film I’ve seen, but it’s enjoyable. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a piece of toast (I compare films to food way more than most people do, I should look into that). By that, I mean that no matter how perfectly it does what it needs to, it will never be your favourite. It sticks to a formula, and as such is kind of restrained by that. You can guess almost every single plot point in this film from the opening 10 minutes. It won’t surprise you at all. But it doesn’t really need to, this is not a film to analyse and pore over, it’s a film to sit and distract yourself, and it does that well. The dialogue is razor sharp, the characters are loveable (and fully fleshed out, even the background ones have minor details to them which help you know them), and it will make you smile. The whole thing is just massively endearing and charming and, I don’t know, warm I guess is the word I’m looking for. You know how certain films have colours attached to them? I’d say this one is a warm sea blue. It’s just comforting and lovely, the kind of film the whole family gathers and watches on Christmas Day, in that post-dinner haze where you’re all too exhausted to move, and someone inevitably falls asleep in the sofa with their Christmas hat still on. It’s incredibly BBC, and I mean that as positive and a negative.

So yeah don’t go out of your way to watch this, but if (actually, when) it comes on iPlayer, watch it immediately.

The above made complete sense in relation to this film. Which is weird, as with the exception of 3 words, it was lifted word for word from an earlier review. That’s both the best and worst thing about about this film. It’s nice to have something familiar, even if it is something new. It’s comforting to not have to sit there wondering exactly what’s going to happen and to just be able to lose yourself in the dialogue and the characters. It’s nice to have something you can have on in the background and talk to people during. It’s good to have something you expect, and have it meet every expectation. But yeah it can be a bit annoying to have that. It can be slightly frustrating to feel you’ve already seen everything in it. I think my feelings would be a lot less forgiving if I had paid for this, I feel that about quite a few films, but this one in particular was received more warmly because it was free. I mean, it is enjoyable, incredibly so, it just never feels like it does more than exist. It doesn’t grab you. It does have James Purefoy looking like a West Country Wolverine though, so it gets a few points for that.

Happy Death Day 2 U (2019)

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First off, applause for that title. It’s the best/worst sequel title ever and I love it. Now, I LOVED the first movie. Yeah it wasn’t that scary, but it had a great plot and terrific performances, was truly one of the highlights of 2017. I heard initial reports that this one was a disappointment. Personally I liked it. I get why people wouldn’t though. It’s quite different from the first one, with a different emphasis which takes it away from the horror genre somewhat. It also wastes what would be a great plot in the opening 10 minutes where another character is trapped in the same day. Although part of me thinks that that plot wouldn’t have worked because it would have been incredibly similar to the first one. The moment where they find that character from another universe is in this one and trying to kill them definitely would have worked and it’s a shame they didn’t use it. I mean, the plot they used was incredibly good. She wakes up on the same day as the first one, but in an alternate universe where things are different. One of the major differences is that her mum is now alive. This sets up a brilliant sub-plot of whether she wants to stay in the new universe or go back to the one she knows.

I’m under no delusions that this is a great film. But it is a film I love already. Jessica Rothe  is damn amazing in this, and Phi Vu handles his increased duties incredibly well, stepping up from a one-note character to a fully-fleshed out supporting character. Quite a few minor characters from the first movie have increased roles this time. I mean, yeah it’s not the same as the first one, but it works great as a companion piece. They don’t feel too separated, they feel like they belong together naturally. Like this wasn’t a sequel, but was the second part of the first one. Crucially it didn’t need to do this. When you watched the first one it felt like a whole movie, you left it with questions, but not questions that distracted you from how much you liked the film. Your thoughts weren’t “but why did x happen?” it was “I liked that”. So this film wasn’t needed, but you’ll be very glad it exists.

Hasn’t been my longest review, or my best. This is a film that has to be seen to be believed. It’s really weird and worth your watch; even if only for Jessica Rothe’s performance. And the music. And the editing. Editing in movies are like drums in music, I tend to only notice them when they’re really bad (There’s a scene in Bohemian Rhapsody in particular that’s a mess) or really good (this). The montage editing is superb, flows brilliantly and has a great rhythm to it. The emotion this film manages to bring to the table should be commended too. Has genuine tear-causing moments. Which in a film THIS funny is something special. So yeah, go see it, especially if you loved the first one.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

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Do you have an interest in seeing this film? Then see it at the cinema. Trust me, this is a cinema film. You’ll get a lot more out of seeing this on a big screen than you will by sitting on your sofa watching it. This is spectacle cinema at it’s very best. And like most spectacle cinema, you do feel it’s lacking something though.

It’s not the performances, they’re all fantastic. All of them, and there’s a lot of them. I think it has so many characters as this film was made with an eye towards a sequel. I mean, with the ending this film has, it has to have a sequel otherwise the story will just be unfinished. Christoph Waltz actually seems charming and not-evil in this film, which I didn’t know he was capable of (off topic, if they do a remake of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, he’s Judge Doom). The star of the show is definitely Rosa Salazar, who is so damn impressive in this it’s hard to believe. The way they kind of animate her eyes is genius, a beautiful blend of reality and CGI which is an incredible use of the technology. It’s not being used to replace or create reality, but to work alongside it, which is a technique which always works better.

Now the downside; the big one is the plot is kind of generic. The romance sub-plot seems kind of forced. A lot of the dialogue is just explaining plot points and character motivations to the audience, some of which could have been done a lot more subtly. It’s tonally all over the place, going from a film that’s seemingly aimed at children, to a dog being slaughtered then having its blood used as war paint before saying “fuck mercy” and killing someone. It’s a 12A which features a character being chopped in half at the waist, not a robot, a human. I’m not sure if being chopped in half would kill a robot in this film as it’s incredibly inconsistent when it comes to things like that. Sometimes having a limb chopped off leads to them being severely weakened and makes them as good as dead, and sometimes they just walk it off like it doesn’t affect them. It makes the action scenes difficult to get invested in as after every hit you’re not sure how to react, did that cause immense damage, or does it not matter? You have no idea until AFTER each hit, there are no rules set to tell you which makes it incredibly frustrating.

I feel I need to mention the motorball sequences. They’re the action highlights of the film and make you want to see a film based around it (wait, that exists, it’s called Rollerball and the original is awesome), in fact, I would be genuinely surprised if there’s not a video game based on that sequence, and kind of disappointed.

So should you see it? I’d say yes. The visual world-building is top notch and film-making like this deserves to be rewarded. So go buy a ticket and see it at the cinema, even if you’re not blown away, I highly doubt you’ll regret it either.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018)

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No, Melissa McCarthy, we can’t forgive you for Tammy, or The Boss, or Happytime Murders, or, damn McCarthy, you’ve been in a LOT of bad films. I mean, also been in St. Vincent, and that film was fantastic. I do like McCarthy, but I don’t trust her. Like I will never go and see a film because she’s in it. She can be really good but occasionally falls into scripts which just seem incredibly lazy and one joke (that joke being: woman swears and is violent, HAH!”. Thankfully this is one of her good ones. Full of emotion, warmth, and great characters. This film has had so many awards thrown at it that it begins to feel like an assault. But it earns every single one. Not just McCarthy’s performance, but Richard E. Grant finally seems to be getting the mainstream attention he deserves with a beautifully broken performance. I really hope this leads to him becoming a household name. I mean, he is a known name among people who like films, but I don’t feel he’s yet at the “recognised by people who watch one or two films a year”, and he should be, he’s immensely talented (also, how great a horror movie villain would he make?).

The script is also brilliant. It’s about a woman knowingly making forgeries of letters by famous people. That doesn’t exactly sound fascinating, does it? It sounds boring as hell. It also sounds like it will be hard to make the main character likeable. This manages it though (but I think McCarthy’s performance is part of what makes the character likeable too), the story is incredibly riveting, but it does make one misstep. It’s not a problem with the film, but with the marketing, or maybe even the story itself. The trailer showed us how she got found out and investigated for fraud. This doesn’t happen until into the closing section, so it’s odd to watch a film about a plan and KNOW it doesn’t work. I mean, it is kind of fascinating in a way to watch with the knowledge that it all goes to shit, but it does take away from the drama somewhat.

I did like this film a lot, didn’t love it for some reason. Think it might have been because of the aforementioned lack of narrative surprise. It might have just been that the story itself felt inconsequential. I mean, it was incredibly charming and delightful to watch, and if it’s on BBC over Christmas I’ll give it a watch, but I don’t need to buy it. It deserved the plaudits though, without a shadow of a doubt. I must check out the book some time.

The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (2019)

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I genuinely enjoyed this film and will definitely buy it on DVD when it comes out. It was funny, heartwarming and had an incredibly well-crafted script that is suitable for children and adults. If you asked me during the first half of the movie my response would have been the opposite. I was kind of bored, the jokes were mainly from the trailer so were ones I’d heard before, and the songs were only okay. That songs gripe might not have been the film though, it is possible that the way the cinema set it up was the problem; the background noise and the music was louder than the lyrics so you couldn’t make them out clearly.

So yeah I was not a fan of the opening, it felt not quite as sharp as the first movie, and it sidelines a lot of the characters. Princess Unikitty for example was one of the highlights of the first movie and is not really in this one. The same goes for almost all of the characters from the first one with the exception of Emmet, Lucy, and Batman. This would be fine if the characters who replaced them were as good, and whilst there is nothing really wrong with them they just miss that spark.

One other issue is reality. In the first movie the fact that it was a kid playing with lego didn’t really matter until the very end of the movie. In this it goes throughout, which is both better and worse. It does mean that since you’re constantly aware that it’s kids playing with toys, your brain always thinks “ok, this is what’s happening in the film, now what’s REALLY happening?” so you can’t really get invested in it. The upside is how beautifully it ties into the ending. The final third of this film is amazing and WOULD NOT work without the reality subtext. It’s genuinely genius what it does, and what it means. Yeah this film is about kids playing with toys, but it’s about HOW they play with them. It’s the first film I’ve seen which kind of takes aim at the notion of everything having to be dark and gritty, that phase which every teenage male goes through where they feel everything they like has to be grown up. The idea that films they watch have to be dark and fully of guns. A concept which causes people to try so hard to appear to be mature that it comes off as juvenile. This film takes aim at that notion, and does so wonderfully. The way that reality bleeds into this film is a work of art and I commend it.

So yeah, go see this film, see it twice if you have to. It may not start great but it does achieve greatness when you stick with it. Has a few niggles, and there’s one live action moment which drags longer than it needs to. But it’s very funny with GREAT voice performances and is just as loveable as the first one

How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (2019)

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Hot damn this film looked good. There’s one moment where the characters are on a beach, making indentations in the sand, and you can almost FEEL the sand, it’s that beautifully animated. That doesn’t quite make up for the script though. It has its moments, but it feels incredibly generic. Unless this is the first film you’ve ever seen you will know exactly what’s going to happen before it does. This is not helped by the villain; who is incredibly unremarkable to the point where he’s forgettable. This is probably also due to how much of the time he spends off-screen, and when he’s not on-screen the shadow of him doesn’t really hang over the film. The main focus of the film isn’t the villain, it’s the female version of Toothless. It seems like the villain is just a method to get to THAT story, rather than the other way around. And the Toothless/Light Fury romance isn’t quite sweet enough to wash away the cynical feeling that it was geared towards toy sales (and yes, I know it was probably in the books first, but meh).

So all of that builds up to what is undoubtedly the weakest movie in the trilogy. The first one was REALLY good, the second one was also very good, and a worthy continuation of the series. This one? It just doesn’t have that inexplicable magic that the first two had. There’s something missing and that stops it being great, and means it’s just good. The ending is pretty great though. I hope it’s the ending anyway. I’d be incredibly disappointed if there’s a sequel to this as the ending to this provides perfect closure to the series as a whole. Maybe that’s my problem with it, it doesn’t seem like a series, just a sequence of films. There’s a few moments of connectivity between the films but they don’t really feel like they’re related. A lot of the characters are exactly the same as they have been throughout. If there was a sequel to this and someone watched that one, but missed out this one, there’s nothing they’d be surprised by. There’s no “wow, that character really changed in that movie I missed”.

I did like this movie, more than this review makes it seem. But put it this way; I don’t have the first one on DVD, and I do occasionally feel like my DVD collection is missing it. My collection will definitely not miss this. Also, the main characters looks way too much like Jake Gyllenhaal at the end.

dragon-3

Also, I can’t help this but whenever I hear the title to this series I sing it to the tune of Paint Your Wagon

Stan & Ollie (2019)

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I recommend you see this movie, but with one caveat. It’s about one of the most famous comedy duos of told time, so you expect this to be highly comedic, right? That’s the wrong approach to this, go in expecting a drama and you’ll be fine. It took a while for me to adjust to that mindset, so for about half the film I was disappointed, then there was a scene in a hotel lobby of the two of them having an argument, a really heavy one. Not in terms of shouting and screaming, but in terms of the pure emotion on display. At that point a switch in my head was turned on and I got it. From that point on I enjoyed it a lot more. I get the feeling they used artistic license with history at some moments, but not too many. It seemed relatively honest. By which I mean it made them seem like dicks at times, it admitted they were not perfect individuals or ones who had just suffered misfortunes, but were in fact sometimes the cause of their own misfortunes. I like when biopics do that (for a great example of this, watch Get On Up, the film about James Brown which seems to veer from loving warm tales to a full-on character assassination depending what scene you’re watching).

I will admit to having never seen any Laurel And Hardy, but now I want to. I want to see how accurate their depictions are of them. I’ve heard people say they were spot on imitations, but I can’t really comment on that, all I can comment on really is the story, which was great. It was almost like a love story. Well, it is a relationship story, essentially. We see them at their best, and at their worst. When their wives join them it completely changes the interplay between them, for the better. The wives’ interactions with each other are delightful, in a cringey way. The pair throw pointed barbs at each other all the time, some subtle, some not, and they provide some of the best laughs of the film. It also provides the backdrop of one of the biggest heartwarming moments near the end. A moment which will make you think “oh no, don’t do that” but then be very glad they did.

The big downside is the pacing is a bit slow at times. And we’re not really shown enough background about them. But that is minor, this isn’t a film about Laurel and Hardy, this is a film about a very specific time period in their life. And that it does very well, you really get a feeling for how far they’ve fallen.

This film is very good, but it lacked that something that made it great. If it’s the best film I see all year I won’t consider this a good year, but if it’s the worst film I see all year then 2019 is going to be great.