Tag: The Trouble With Jessica

2024 In Film: Day Five (The Meh)

On By troubledproductionsIn Year round upLeave a comment

Back To Black
Ups: Marisa Abela’s singing voice.
Captures the time period.
Emotional.
Downs: Doesn’t go quite as in-depth as it could.
Seems to hate its main character.
Occasionally seems like we’re watching a romcom about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn.
Best Performer: Marisa Abela
Best Moment: The meeting between her and Blake is quite sweet.
Worst Moment: When her and her dad reject rehab. Makes them seem a bit shitty.
Opening: Family party. Lets us know the main characters and their dynamics. Good introduction.
Closing: Blake has a new partner who is now pregnant, Amy is sad and walks up some stairs.
Best Line: I want people to hear my voice and just forget their troubles for five minutes. 
Original review here

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice
Ups: It’s nice to see these characters again
Some fun moments.
Dark, but not in a scary way.
Downs: Pays too much reverence to a character played by a paedophile.
Burton hasn’t advanced his directing skills since the first one.
Unfocused, to the point where it seems like even the film itself doesn’t know what the story is.
Best Performer: Catherine O’Hara
Best Moment: The snake death, manages to be obvious but also comes out of nowhere.
Worst Moment: The wedding, mainly because the song choice feels wrong.
Opening: Lydia Deetz hosts a talk show. Would have been nice to see more of this.
Closing: Dream sequence!
Best Line: I want to make memories with people I love, rather than be haunted by them later
Original review here

Bob Marley: One Love
Ups: Good performances.
Genuine use of Jamaican patois in dialogue. Some may feel this is a “down” as it’s hard to understand, but I think it’s authentic, and it never affects how you understand the narrative, you just don’t understand certain sentences.
Downs: Unfocused narrative.
Lacks an emotional anchor.
Best Performer: Kingsley Ben-Adir
Best Moment: When he gets shot.
Worst Moment: The argument between him and his wife. Feels half-done.
Opening: He gets shot. Emotional, shocking, and sets the scene.
Closing: He dies. Spoilers. Doesn’t really have the emotional impact it could have. We don’t really see him mourn his own mortality and don’t get a sense of how his death was perceived. We are then shown real-life clips of Bob Marley on stage, and it makes you realise that Ben-Adir was too restrained in his performance, the real-life Marley was a ball of energy on stage.
Best Line: You can’t separate the music and the message.
Original review here

Don’t Move
Ups: Believable sociopath.
Minimalist cast.
Downs: Needs a hook. Something to make it stand out.
Quite plodding
Best Performer: Kelsey Asbille
Best Moment: When she finds the strange man. I was concerned he would turn out to be a creepy rapist. But nope, he’s nice, and helps figure out a way to converse with her and help her.
Worst Moment: The “I wanted to die” car conversation, feels very first draft.
Opening: The sound of screaming over a national park. Then cuts to Iris laying perfectly still in her bed. Neat if you know the concept of the film.
Closing: She survives, stands over his dying body and thanks him for making her want to live. So really he did a good thing.
Best Line: His explanation of the effects of the drug.
Original review here

If
Ups: Funny.
Cute.
Inventive.
Downs: Doesn’t make the best of Reynolds.
Bit predictable.
Some more coherent world-building would be nice.
Best Performer: Caily Fleming
Best Moment: When she changes the home. Magical. Although the moment when her grandmother dances is also excellent, but for different reasons. The dance is more emotional brilliance as opposed to whimsy.
Worst Moment: When you realise she’s been walking around New York on her own every day and nobody seems to care.
Opening: Rapid montage of Bea growing up. Could have done a better job of expressing just how important creativity is to her character, it would have helped sell some of the later reveals. Also, just because that’s quick, doesn’t mean the rest of the film is. It takes a long time to bring you the gimmick.
Closing: The most obvious twist ever. The very end, where her dad falls over his invisible imaginary friend is very funny though.
Best Line: Hey, Keith!
Original review here

The Critic
Ups: Feels like a time capsule
Subtly subversive
Looks good
Downs: Not as tense as it could be.
Best Performer: Mckellan
Best Moment: Him telling her why he doesn’t like her. Fantastic performances.
Worst Moment: Them coming up with the scheme. Doesn’t feel earned.
Opening: Jimmy is watching a play and is deliciously bitchy,
Closing: He’s in prison. The only way it could end really.
Best Line: There is art in you, Miss Land. My disappointment is in your failure to access it.
Original review here

The Trouble With Jessica
Ups: Very funny.
Moments of biting satire.
Downs: It doesn’t hit as hard as it could/should.
Doesn’t seem to know what to do with its own concept.
REALLY loses steam towards the end, with some baffling character changes which render most of the film pointless.
Best Performer: Shirley Henderson
Best Moment: The dinner itself. Very socially tense.
Worst Moment: The post-suicide. The use of establishing shots kind of takes away from the tense nature of the situation.
Opening: A preparation for a dinner party. Very stylish, much more than it needed to be, and I appreciate that. Sets up the “they’ll be moving soon” quite subtly.
Closing: A couple eats a clafoutis.
Best Line: “I fucking hate cross-examining rape victims. It’s impossible to do and not look like a cunt”
Original review here

Timestalker
Ups: There’s a very sweet unspoken relationship between her and Meg
Unique idea.
Fun.
Downs: Could have had more fun with the music.
Runs out of momentum.
SHOULD be great.
Best Performer: Aneurin Barnard
Best Moment: The entire 80’s section.
Worst Moment: The carriage wheel decapitation. Mainly because it’s much shorter than the others, but not in a fun and frantic way, more in a “we lost a lot in the edit” way.
Opening: A pink heart floating in the air like a Princess Peach power up. Then a woman operating a loom. Some really vibrant colours, and then it flashbacks to a man being brutally murdered. If you didn’t know what this film was about, this wouldn’t tell you. It’s only when she falls over and kills herself that you get the feeling this is going to be a bit weird.
Closing: She finally gets the “I love you”, and runs away from it.
Best Line: “It’s all in your head”
Original review here

Twisters
Ups: Characters speak genuinely.
Good action scenes.
Actual emotion.
Downs: One of the characters is too unlikeable.
Could tie into the original more.
Best Performer: Daisy Edgar-Jones
Best Moment: That opening.
Worst Moment: The almost vehicular manslaughter. Knocks this down further than any one scene has done to another film in quite a while.
Opening: Put it this way; it shows why tornados are dangerous. Shocking, and brilliant.
Closing: Standard romcom closing. Kind of dull compared to what came before.
Best Line: Can always trust a guy who puts his face on a t-shirt.
Original review here

The Trouble With Jessica (2023) Review

On By troubledproductionsIn ReviewLeave a comment

Quick Synopsis: Sarah and Tom have one final dinner party before selling their home. The suicide of an unwanted guest ruins the party (and the chances of a successful sale)

I fucking love a good dinner party scene. There’s something about them that’s so tense to watch unfold. I think it’s because they have societal expectations in ways that other parties don’t. There’s an expectation that everyone will behave politely and behave well. There’s also the fact that they tend to be very conversation-based, so it’s VERY easy to get information over via dialogue. “so how’s the new job going?” is a perfectly normal thing to ask at a dinner party, so it’s very useful for exposition. I mention that because the one in here has some of the most tense five seconds I’ve ever seen. A tenseness which is then made worse by the revelation that the character was joking. There’s a definite shift in dynamics there. Ordinarily, it would be “This rudeness puts everyone on the defensive”, but here it actually does the opposite, it puts everyone on the offensive, against her, so your feelings are conflicted when she commits suicide soon after.

On that subject; I wasn’t a fan of the post-suicide moment. She commits suicide, they try to cut her down and save her but are unsuccessful, and she falls onto the floor dead. Title card. That, that I’m fine with. But then there are establishing shots of the house and food before we go to the characters reacting. Those shots are only roughly 5 seconds long but completely kill any momentum. It’s just a weird narrative decision.

That’s The Trouble With Jessica’s (TTWJ, pronounced That-weej) biggest flaw; it has a good story but no idea what to do with it. The main farcical driver is that the characters want to move her body to her own house because they think having a dead body in their house will affect their house price. Very funny, very middle class. But they get to that decision far too quickly.

Part of the problem is that the satire never hits as sharply as it could. Primarily because tonally, it feels like the target of its ire and its target for a viewing audience are one and the same, so it’s very scared of annoying the people who are viewing it.

It REALLY feels like a weirdly dark episode of Coupling without Jeff, in which Jane kills herself. Seriously, watch this movie with the core 4 from that sitcom in mind, if I told you “Which Coupling character would this person be?” I GUARANTEE you’d get the exact same. That’s a criticism of the script, by the way, nothing against the performances. Shirely Henderson gets the plaudits, but it’s fascinating how well Alan Tudyk plays a middle-aged Brit.

The familiarity and lack of bite aren’t the only issues with the script. There are completely unnecessary flashbacks to scenes we saw earlier, it would have worked better if we saw just the flashbacks, not the originals. It also has trouble ending. It doesn’t so much drive to the home stretch, as stutter.

It has some fun moments though. The intertitles are interesting, but when they get to “The trouble with driving a dead body across London in the middle of the night”, they suddenly become brilliant. Some of the dialogue is hilarious, and the characters are very believable.

In summary, I’m glad I saw this, but that’s mostly because it’s available on Netflix and I watched it there, if I watched it at the cinema I’d be much harsher towards it.