Tag: film review

The Festival (2018)

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I’m not proud of some of my reviews. Looking back at them,  y review of Darkest Minds said this:

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My review of The Meg said this:

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I really need to stop mentioning semen in these reviews, you don’t see Barry Norman or Roger Ebert talking about cumshots every review (maybe for their reviews of Basic Instinct I’m not sure). So I’m not going to reference it at all this review. Going to be completely clean and innocent.

So, this film. It’s very funny.  The opening scene shows the main character and his girlfriend having sex, he pulls out and ejaculates (DAMNIT, I lasted one sentence without mentioning it) over his graduation robe. When he’s at graduation his mum sees the stain, thinks it’s something else, so licks her finger to rub it off, then licks her finger again, an understated look of recognition and disgust on her face. THAT’s how this film starts, and it’s no false dawn in terms of vulgarity and general “eww”ness. Also in this film; the main character gets pissed on, his nipple ring gets torn off when it gets stuck on a fence post, and someone fucks a goat. This is not high-class cinema. It’s gross, vulgar, and very funny. That last one is subject to opinion, I mean, I found it funny, but I did spend a lot of it feeling like I should turn away as it was so cringe-ey, in a good way. The temptation as a director with this will be to cut away, quickly get to the next joke and move on, pack as many jokes as you possibly can into the short time, maximise the laughs. He does the opposite though; he holds, he keeps the scene going, wringing every drop of awkwardness past where it stops being funny, becoming incredibly awkward and hard to watch, in the best possible way. It’s a risky strategy but it pays off. This is a film definitely made by people who know what they’re doing, this isn’t shown just in the directing, but the writing too. Considering the level of humour in this it would be easy to just make it funny, but this has moments of genuine insight and pathos in it. One thing in particular came as a surprise; a piece of dialogue which was genuinely inspirational. In summary it was this:

“just because you’re a dick, doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Gandhi was racist yet still one of the greatest humans. Lance Armstrong was an abusive drug cheat yet raised millions for charity”. It’s an interesting piece of dialogue, and it really deserves to be in a more important film than this. Don’t get me wrong; it was a funny movie, and if it was on netflix I’d watch it. But I don’t need to get it on DVD. It just doesn’t do enough to stand out in a crowded field of similar movies. If somebody would ask “why should I see this film NOW?” it would be hard for me to think of a response. It’s a “I’ll watch it when I can” movie. It’s also got a dreadfully bland title which will be a bitch to search for in a few years time. Claudia O’Doherty was great in it though and I really want to see her in more stuff. And it is nice that the girl he meets and has sex with turns him down afterwards, and he accepts it. It shows the futility of placing all your hope on one person liking you, and also how to deal with it when it doesn’t work, which is an incredibly mature piece of film-making, and one I wish I saw more often.

The Meg (2018)

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The opening scene to this did not fill me with hope; Statham’s accent was off, we saw an action scene that wasn’t that great, and the character dynamics were a bit meh. It was at this point I worried, that I’d watch something just dumb, instead of dumb fun. As the film went on, I warmed to it, even at some points being able to tolerate Statham’s accent (why they couldn’t let him do a natural one is beyond me). It isn’t anywhere near as dumb as I expected it to be. I mean, if you think about it for a few minutes there are numerous scientific inaccuracies throughout, but the point is you have to think about it. They don’t immediately jump out at you. It’s fun enough, and well-crafted enough, that you don’t really notice any flaws or problems with it. Yeah sure, once you’ve finished you will have lots of “wait a minute, that didn’t make sense”, but in the moment you don’t care as you’re too entertained. Jon Turteltaub (who also gave the world the best bobsled-themed movie of all time in Cool Runnings, and also gave us the pilot episode of Rush Hour, which I didn’t even realise had a TV show based on it) knows what to do; he is great at showing scale. It would be very easy to forget how big the titular Meg is, to just show a plain shot of it with nothing else in frame to give an indicator, he doesn’t do this; every time the shark is on screen, you’ve given a reminder of how absolutely massive it is. It’s spectacle cinema, but in a different way than Skyscraper was. Skyscraper was about set pieces, this is about creating something larger than life, and I haven’t seen it done this well since Kong: Skull Island. It helps that the CGI holds up REALLY well in this film, there’s not many moments where you sit there thinking “that looks fake as shit”, although you do wonder how a movie featuring a giant shark can look more real than a scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming where two characters have a conversation.

It’s also funny as hell. With the right kind of jokes. You don’t have people get brutally killed then characters making jokes about it, the jokes are contextual and relevant, which is a welcome change.

I’ve spent most of this film gushing over how likeable and fun I found this. I suppose to be balanced I should talk about the bad things. That cast……are actually good. Ruby Rose continues to be incredibly likeable in almost everything she does. Hmmm, okay so I can’t go for that as a negative. Okay, the obvious pandering to the Chinese market…..wasn’t that big an issue. They had good narrative reasons for a lot of it so it wasn’t as jarring as it was in Independence Day. Damn, have to go with something else. The romance….actually kind of worked. Jason Statham’s character is joined by his ex-wife on the trip, so I expected it to go the traditional way and have them get back together. But nope, he ends up with another character, (played by Li Bingbing) joining her and her child. Okay that’s it; the child actor……wasn’t terrible and provided the film with a lot of emotion and heart, wasn’t distractingly awful, and her decisions didn’t render her a useless load on the rest of the characters. This was helped by both her performance, and good writing. Gosh darn it! Going to have to go with something else. The restrictions placed upon it by the rating? Actually that would be a valid criticism. It keeps threatening to be gorier than it is, and it would be a lot more satisfying if we could see more blood. This needs gore, we need to see destruction and lots of people eaten and we don’t get that. There’s a scene in particular near the end where the shark heads towards a crowded beach. The film builds up a brilliant scene full of carnage and fantastic set pieces, which we then don’t get as it pulls away at the last second. The film gives the audience an over-the-pants handjob when it really needs to fuck us.

And that’s where I’m ending this. Next weeks reviews will be The Festival and The Equalizer 2, where I’ll spend most of the review trying not to call it “The Sequalizer”, and probably failing.

The Darkest Minds (2018)

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I first became aware of this film a few weeks ago, I was at the cinema watching the trailers (controversial opinion; I actually LOVE watching the trailers at cinema) and saw the trailer for this. Now I had no idea this existed. I did, however, know of a film called The New Mutants, a teen drama/horror set in the X-men universe. As I was watching the trailer I thought “this new x-men doesn’t look as good as I thought it would” then I found out it wasn’t new X-men film. But whilst watching it; it REALLY wants to be. I haven’t seen a rip-off this poor since I released My C-men, described by critics as “a little hard to swallow”, “needs more substance”, and “a bit chewy”.

Okay, with that horrifying visual out of your brain I’ll get into more detail about this film. it doesn’t really work. It has many issues, the pacing, the story itself, and the underdeveloped characters. But the real issue; it’s a romance story where the romance at the heart of it doesn’t work. At no point do you buy them as a couple, I’m not sure whether it’s because of bad writing or just lack of chemistry, but it doesn’t really work.

The story itself also seemed to fall a little flat. There’s been A LOT of apocalyptic fiction aimed at young adults lately, so for one to stand out it has to do something different, something to make you think “okay, THAT’S why this is important”. For me, The 5th Wave did it through having an incredibly tight plot and astounding action scenes which really showed the brutality, but in a PG-13 way. This one attempts to do it by taking aspects of Hunger Games, the aforementioned X-Men, Maze Runner, Divergent, etc. As such, it never really seems to stand on its own two feet. There’s nothing about THIS film that marks itself as unique or special. Side note; how ripe is YA apocalyptic fiction for parody fodder? So yeah this film is just okay really. Not great enough to be remembered for years to come, not bad enough to make fun of that much. I mean, there’s nothing inherently BAD about this film, but there’s nothing really that made me sit up and take notice. The performances were good, but the characters are kind of meh so it balances out. Personally, I think the “oh, the person the audience assumes is bad turned out to be bad? quelle surprise” thing needs to stop happening (but then again if it was a red herring I would also boo that as being cliche, so can’t really win really). One thing which is kind of unforgivable though; the trailer.

See the film establishes that she can wipe herself from memories, and when she does so we see the characters memories of her and she kind of Thanos’s away. (turns into dust and floats away). So, what scene is in the trailer:

Screen Shot 2018-08-29 at 14.36.54.png That’s her, wiping the memory of her from the male lead. This happens JUST before the end and is one of the last moments where if you went for a piss, you’d be confused when you came back. The film leads up to this; and they put it in the trailer? Yeah, that’s not good. But at least they don’t put the very last scene in the trailer, where she accepts her role as the leader of the uprising and makes a call to arms in front of a stadium of other young people, they’d have to be an idiot to put that in.

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God-fucking-damnit!

Teen Titans Go! To The Movies (2018)

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This film was weird, and I’m not entirely sure in a good way. It felt like it was written by people who never spoke to each other about what kind of film they wanted to make. About 30% of it is really good, meta as hell about superhero movies and the recent overabundance of them. But when it’s bad, it’s embarrassingly bad. The good moments make you laugh out loud, but the bad moments make you remember that what you are watching is fundamentally a kids movie; terrible accents and dialogue by “cool” characters, singing and dancing (although there is one song in it which is pretty cool actually), really juvenile humour (I know, childish humour in a kids movie, who’d have thunk it?), and just a general lack of substance. I suppose the is plot okay; the one they actually use anyway. The film goes through about 4 plots they could have used, one of which (when they travel back in time to stop superheroes trauma from happening, thus stopping them from becoming heroes. yet when they travel back to their timeline the world is overrun with supervillains) would have been a MUCH better film, but instead is used for a quick 4-minute sequence which is never referenced again. Usually, films which are adapted from television shows have bigger stories than usuals; ones they couldn’t fit into a standard episode. This film is just 88 minutes long and has A LOT of padding, you could easily condense the plot into a 30-minute episode. It seems like the only reason it’s a feature is because the plot revolves around them wanting a super-hero movie, so thematically it suits a feature-length film better. But whilst the story suits a feature, the way its told does not. I mean, I suppose the feature-length nature of it made it easier to get big names like Nicholas Cage and Stan Lee (and Greg Davies for some reason). And it meant the mid-credits reveal had more weight to it, if that was done in an episode it wouldn’t really be that notable, but it happened in a big event, so it’s talked about.

So that’s enough about the things I didn’t like. What about the good things? When the jokes land, they REALLY land. When it’s funny, it’s very very funny and will make you think it’s one of the funniest films you’ve seen all year, it’s a shame that doesn’t happen often enough though. The animation style has been criticised as being too basic, but to me, it works for the film. It’s aimed at a very young audience, and young people prefer bright colours that pop. It brings to mind spending weekends at home, waking up before everyone else in the house did, and using that time to watch cartoons. But my favourite memory of this film is something that wasn’t intentional; a few days later I was on my way to see another film and was sitting down eating food beforehand. Behind me there was a bloke and his son who had just left the cinema after seeing this. They were sitting there discussing comic book movies, breaking the fourth wall, and the history of British comics. It was such a lovely and touching moment, one of the most adorable things I’ve been witness to. That’s when it hit me; it’s okay if I didn’t love this film, I don’t have to, it’s not for me. It’s not for the cynical and jaded, it’s the cinematic equivalent of bubblegum and aimed at kids, and that’s okay.

Hotel Artemis (2018)

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I really dug this. I mean, I won’t buy it on DVD or anything but it was a great watch. It’s better than the adverts make it seem. I thought it would be kind of a dumb action film but it’s SO much more. The satire in it is spot-on, and won’t date. That’s the trouble with satire sometimes, it can become irrelevant really quickly. This won’t. This will only become irrelevant when one of two things happen: when we reach the time the film is set in (2028), or when poor people start getting treated with respect and dignity. So really this film has ten years of relevance, being set in a society where there are riots because access to water is being denied to people without money (something which a lot of people predict will happen in the future), so the film hits home in terms of satire. The rest of it? The plot is actually really well paced, it builds and progresses at a steady pace, not showing too much too soon, but also not spending so long building up that you end up bored. It looks stunning, the future-dystopian aesthetic showing a great mix of slick and dreary (like a Nick Cave album). The performances? Dave Bautista continues doing what he does, being terrifyingly intimidating with conflicting thoughts in his head. Sterling K Brown somehow manages to feel underused despite being a main character, and Jodie Foster is still a fucking treasure. I was reminded how truly great she is during this film, she wasn’t just acting vocally, or with her face, her entire body was consumed by her character, the way she stood, the way she walked, everything about her was character driven, and shows the difference between a great performer, and one of the greatest performers.

Despite that; Jodie Foster wasn’t my favourite part of the film. My favourite part of the film was the sense that there were other stories in this world. The spin-off potential is huge, everything about the world and the characters seems developed, to the point where if somebody told me it was a comic book adaptation I’d believe them. Even the way characters interact suggest a huge backstory behind their relationship (Batista and Foster in particular.

Now for the negatives; it’s really hard to find negative things about this. Not in a “it’s so brilliant it’s almost perfect” way, but in a “not a lot of it stood out” way. What it does, it does well, but it very does better than that. The plot is simply an excuse for the action scenes at times. I mean, that’s fine, but it would be nice if it tried harder. Also the satire doesn’t go quite as hard as you feel it should, it very quickly becomes just the backdrop, it would be like if Robocop had the exact same setting and atmosphere, but was a movie about golf.

So in summary; very good, but continued the modern trend of “Jeff Goldblum turns up for only 5 minutes”, and makes me disappointed that Sofia Boutella still hasn’t had a film franchise built around her.

Skyscraper (2018)

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This film knows what it is. It’s a popcorn movie. A film that demands being seen at the cinema as that’s its home. It needs to be seen on a big screen, and you can’t expect great cinema etiquette. Yeah if someone is on their phone then you should still legally be allowed to slap their wrist with a razor blade, but someone laughing loudly? That’s fine during this. Someone sitting there loudly eating popcorn? Also fine. It’s almost like it was made specifically for people to audibly react, it’s like the anti-Quiet Place. It’s an incredibly fun distraction. The kind of film you can imagine watching whilst drinking with your friends late at night. It’s not going to change the world, or be studied in film class by future directors, and if you say this is your favourite film, I will judge you.

So this film should be run of the mill guilty pleasure. There’s one thing that stops it from being that; the main character is an amputee. To say that again; the action hero is an amputee. It’s very rarely mentioned, he’s not defined by it and it only really comes up once every so often. It’s a small thing, but I love that action movie fans in a similar situation finally have representation on screen. Usually, when you see someone like that on screen it’s as the villain, it’s about damn time they were allowed to be the hero. Yeah, it’s a shame the character was played by someone with 2 legs but still, baby steps. Also, The Rock is just killing it lately. Jumanji, Rampage, and now this? He’s quickly becoming the go-to guy for popcorn flicks.

So we’ve established this film is fun. It’s entertaining shlock and you’ll enjoy it whilst watching it. There are some issues with it, of course, the CGI isn’t quite as clean as it needs to be in some areas, which occasionally makes it feel like you’re watching a video game cutscene. The majority of characters are underutilized, and, personally, I’m getting incredibly bored of “the bad guys are doing this so they can get hold of this USB stick” plots (seriously, it’s the MacGuffin for sooooo many movie characters lately). Also, it’s hard to feel any genuine tension as you can pretty much pinpoint how every scene will play out. I must commend them on the room of mirrors scene though, that was BEAUTIFULLY orchestrated and laid out, THAT’S the scene you need to see. You don’t need to see the rest, but I advise that you should, and watch it on a big screen. This film will lose so much of its potency if you watch it on a small screen. It’s spectacle cinema, and deserves to be treated as such. The action is some of the most jaw-dropping you’ll see. The bits which aren’t action-heavy? They’re…..look watch the action bits. The rest of it is difficult to recommend. The opening third, in particular, is exposition in a film that really doesn’t need that much exposition. People aren’t going to see this film for the brilliant camera work, they’re going to see it because “ooo things go boom”. It doesn’t need as many characters as it has, as it means most of them go to waste. Neve Campbell, in particular, seems incredibly underdeveloped for a performer of her calibre. I think Hannah Quinlivan is underwritten as well, but it’s hard to tell as her character flits in and out of the script like a drunken desire to commit suicide. She’s good when she’s in it, but she isn’t really in it enough to warrant a strong opinion on her either way, I’d like to see her in more so I can find out.

So yeah, go see it. You may not love it, but you will enjoy it

Marrowbone (2018)

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My cinematic history is full of films I knew nothing about but enjoyed immensely; Bogowie, Table 19, The Last Word. This was not one of those. It was a mess, and not even a hot mess. It has potential but never realises it and is too flawed to be recommended.

For starters; it doesn’t seem to know what kind of film it is. It’s shot like a horror movie, written like a drama, and paced like a thriller. It’s both all of these things and yet none of them. There’s nothing scary in it to warrant it being deemed a horror movie, the characters aren’t defined well enough to call it a drama, and the stakes aren’t enough to call it a thriller.

It also has too many twists, by which I mean it has more than one. It turns out that the “ghost” (that is referenced to about 3 times in the film) is actually their dad, who they locked in the attic after he tried to kill them, surviving for years on rats etc. THAT should be the main twist, it kicks off the third act. The other twist? All the other family members (apart from the main character) are now dead and he’s been imagining them to deal with guilt. That was too much. It overegged the pudding and didn’t really add anything. It also came after/was attached to, a terrible scene. It was with a scene that was the main character being chased by his dad, written as a scene full of tension of whether he’s about to survive. One issue: it’s a flashback. You can’t add “OMG is he going to survive?” scene in a flashback, unless it’s REALLY good, and this wasn’t. It felt like it was supposed to be at the start, it would have made sense then. That kind of sums up this film; bad choices were made somewhere that ended up harming the final product. It’s a shame as everybody involved in this is better than this. The writer/director also wrote The Impossible, which was incredibly brutal and interesting to watch.

I feel that somewhere, if this went through a few more rewrites it could have been interesting. It just needed a bit more care and it would have worked.

The Incredibles 2 (2018)

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Fourteen years. Fourteen long years we waited for this. Cinema has changed, animation has changed, yet this film is set the day after the first one, so the characters haven’t changed. And I don’t care, this film was superb and I loved it.

The first one was Incredible, and this one was Incredible two (I’m so sorry). Everything about this film just works beautifully, the voice-work, the way it looks, the story, it all interacts with each other in the most wonderful way.

It picks up almost immediately after the first one ends, starting with a fight with the villain that turned up at the end of it. The action scene that that causes lets you know what kind of film it’s going to be: bombastic fun that looks INCREDIBLE (although let’s face it, with Pixar, you always KNOW it’s going to look great). The story is serviceable, it doesn’t come anywhere near the depth of Toy Story 3, or the heart of Finding Dory, but that doesn’t actually matter. You’re not sitting there thinking “well this story is pedestrian” because the way the film is done you don’t really care, you’re just sitting there amazed at what you see unveiling in front of you. It does what it needs to do, and it does it well. That’s not to say it’s a simple movie, it’s probably the only mass-market animated movie this year that has dealt with the themes this does. Themes of masculinity and feeling worthless because you’re not the one the family depends on, the emasculation that can cause.

There was a worry when the initial trailer came out that the film would focus too much on Jack-Jack, pushing him from background character to the main one, making him as insufferable as minions became. We really should have trusted Pixar more. They use him well, using him as an excuse for some amazing visual slapstick gags. More about the visuals; these films have their own visual style, it’s not just the animation. The architecture is a kind of future-past hybrid that just works beautifully and helps create a universe which is both retro and timeless.

Yes, the reveal of the villain is kind of obvious, but I’d rather a films twist was obvious than if it made no sense. And you don’t really sit there and analyze the story of this, you sit back and let it take over you. Pixar movies really are great, they’re the only studio for whom I eagerly look forward to almost anything (cars excluded) they do. Even the films which are thought of as bland, are only seen as such compared to the excellent standard they normally produce (seriously, give Brave a rewatch, it’s actually REALLY good). This is Pixar at their best, but if they make me wait fourteen years for another one, I will be pissed off.

Adrift (2018)

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This film was ruined for me by a positive review. It simply said “with a heartbreaking twist ending”. Okay, so it’s about a woman and her boyfriend on a boat that’s survived a storm. The most logical twist ending for that is; he’s been dead the whole time. Which turned out to be correct. I also knew it was based on a true story, so with him being dead, the other thing I could infer was that she made it out alive; otherwise how would anybody know about the story? She had to live because otherwise, they’d have nothing to base on a story on as they would have no idea what happened. This completely robbed the film of any tension what so ever. I knew she was going to survive, and I also knew that no matter what, what happens to him doesn’t matter as he’s already dead. This would have been okay if the film itself was spectacular enough for you to ignore it, but sadly it’s not. The scenes of them lost at sea are intercut with them meeting and preparing for the journey etc, the events leading up to the storm. I get why they did this as it meant that the audience wasn’t bored by a singular story (it’s REALLY hard to get a B-story in a film like this as what else can you really focus on that would still be relevant to the main story).

So yeah, I get why they did this, because of the aforementioned “breaking up the film” film, but also because it helped to build up their relationship. One problem; because a lot of the film was on the boat, this meant the build-up, i.e. their relationship, had to be developed REALLY quickly, and so it came off as forced and unnatural. They went from “hi” to being incredibly in love with each other in about 10 minutes of screen time, probably less than that. This undermined the entire film, the film isn’t really about them being STRANDED, it’s about THEM being stranded. But if you don’t buy into their relationship then the film loses its effectiveness. It doesn’t help that the leads don’t seem to have any chemistry so they don’t really make that believable a couple. Shame as both performers are really good and give it their all, but it’s just missing that certain spark, they don’t match for some reason. They are great in it though; Shailene Woodley has never looked worse, in a good way. The only thing I’ve seen her in before this was The Fault In Our Stars, a film where she starred as a cancer patient. She looked closer to death in this, which is a huge testament to the make up department and director. Sam Claflin, he’s also in this movie. But I couldn’t really focus on his performance as I was too busy thinking “where do I know him from?”. I’ve since gone through his filmography and I still have no idea. My best bet is from the trailer for Me Before You, if that’s the case then that trailer was well overplayed, especially considering the films I haven’t seen any trailers for.

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So, should you see this film? I find it hard to recommend to be honest. There’s not much in this film that you haven’t seen anywhere else. It’s a great story to be told, but it’s just not told well enough. Compare this to The Impossible, that film was brilliantly directed and you felt danger in every scene, here, you just find yourself knowing things won’t matter. It does contain more Tom Waits than most films though, which is nice. And Woodley puts in a great performance. But other than that? Meh

Swimming With Men (2018)

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Yet again, a film which I knew absolutely nothing about. It is weird how I can see so many films at the cinema (37 so far this year) and yet there’s still a lot of films where I don’t see the trailer beforehand (11 so far I’ve gone into blind), it doesn’t say much for film marketing really does it? So, this film, it’s about someone who goes swimming, with men (oh my science that’s why it’s called that! That’s SO clever). It’s based on a true story about a group of middle-aged Swedish men who started a swim team. In a nice touch, they’re in the film, playing a Swedish swim team who in everything. I like that.

Of course it’s a low budget British film; but it’s very different from a lot of films like that. For starters, this isn’t about a group of elderly British people doing things, this is completely different; it’s about a group of middle-aged British people doing things.  There’s no way a major American company would finance this, and for good reason; a lot of people won’t like this. Some of the dialogue is quite bad, almost none of the actors will be known outside of this country, and it’s so slow paced it’s almost glacial. Plus, it’s a film about synchronised swimming, which isn’t exactly a major source of excitement for casual moviegoers (although it does provide some spectacular cinematography).

If you’re unsure about whether to watch it, the opening won’t change your mind. It’s a typical “middle-aged person is bored and thinks his wife is cheating on him” that you’ve seen MULTIPLE times before. Actually, there’s not much in here you haven’t seen before, outside of the swimming sections. But that’s where it shines. The swimmers are people who come together to escape their mundane lives, they don’t give any details of their private lives to each other, they just use it as an outlet for frustrations through teamwork and bonding. It’s actually a lot sweeter than I’m making it sound. It would be even sweeter if the film was a bit longer. If it was longer it would give some of the other characters more to do, as it is there are a few members of the team who you completely forget about, one of them is someone who never speaks, he speaks finally near the end in what is supposed to be a big moment, but in reality you’d have barely noticed him in the film and will completely forget about that being his character trait. This does make it sound like I disliked it, that’s wrong though. It was funny, incredibly heartwarming, and the characters that we did focus on were really well written in terms of their interactions with each other.

It’s also incredibly funny at times. But in a believable way. There was a lot of opportunities for silly slapstick but it admirably never takes them, instead going for character-based jokes and dialogue. Still not enough to forgive the criminal misuse of Jane Horrocks though.

I’d suggest seeing it if you can get in cheaply, otherwise, I’d wait for it to inevitably be on BBC over Christmas, and then watch it then.