Was that in Cinemas?... The Skeleton Twins

Oh that Bill Hader! Everything he does just cracks me up!

 

So my wife is in India for a couple of weeks and I've been left alone to tend to myself. Now I'm not completely lost on my own, but I was looking for a film to cheer me up. So I waded through the growing stack of dirty clothes and take-away boxes to find the remote and pulled up the comedy section on my OnDemand movies and found The Skeleton Twins. It stars Kristin Wiig (funny, like in Bridesmaids), Bill Hader (very funny, like in Superbad) and Ty Burrell (I mean, come on, he was in the Muppet movie!). Surely, this was a recipe for good times. So I present to you, The Skeleton Twins: fun romp about how midlife crises happen in your mid-to-late-twenties nowadays - especially to lonely people, married life if often rubbish and suicide might be (though probably isn't) the answer to all your problems.

 

Are you laughing yet?

 

Hader plays Milo, gay, depressed, a failing actor. Reaching the end of his tether, he decides to commit suicide, but fails. The hospital calls his estranged twin sister Maggie (Wiig) who invites him to stay with her and her husband (Luke Wilson) while he recovers. During his stay, Milo discovers that Maggie's life is far from perfect: she is cheating and lying about wanting to have a baby. Furthermore, when he tries to rekindle a relationship that he had with one of his teachers in high school (Burrell), he finds that the teacher now has a wife and a son, older now than Milo was when they had their relationship. As Milo struggles with the idea that life does not necessarily get better after high school, he finds strength by rebonding with his sister and their shared experiences.

 

It's the classic comedy format - characters struggling to find direction; quiet contemplation of the unfairness of the world; hard-hitting truths that everyone must face about life not being everything you ever hoped it would be.

"I don't understand any of that, because I am James Franco and I exist only to remind you how little you've done with your life."

No, I'm not bitter, shut up.

 

So it's not that funny, but it does have that sad, quiet, character-driven thing going for it that I really like and in many ways, it really, really works.

 

As an indie movie, it is practically obliged contractually to have a solid soundtrack and this movie delivers, with particular credit going to the reintroduction of Jefferson Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now to my playlists.

 

The dialogue is brilliantly natural. I can't think of a single line in the film that felt forced or exposition-oriented. Even the dramatic scenes are not over-played. Everything is very low-key to the point where it's no longer "I can imagine having conversations like that.", but rather "I've had that conversation.", which is rare but extremely important for this type of film.

 

The acting is also superb and, in spite of my mock-disappointment at this not being a comedy, it is wonderful to see these actors stretching their muscles in a different genre. Seeing Wiig shrug off her usual goofiness for realism; Hader exhange his carefree-stoner-guy for a genuinely troubled individual; seeing Ty Burrell furious. These are all things that I would never have expected could be achieved so competently by actors who are, to an extent, so iconic in their comedy roles to have become typecast. Particular credit goes to Hader who captures one of the most natural portrayals of a gay man that I have ever seen in film. Indeed, his balance of campness without flamboyance was so believable that I was actually compelled to look up whether or not he was actually gay (he's not) - a powerhouse performance by any measure.

Pictured: Subtlety

 

The character that is a little more of a conundrum is Wiig's Maggie. As I've said, Wiig's acting is admirable and she has more than a few scenes that prove that her talent is wasted in many of her comedy roles (I'm looking at you, Anchorman 2!) but the problem is the character she is playing. No matter how well Wiig does with the script, the character of Maggie is nonetheless a disloyal wife, manipulative person and, when all is said and done, pretty darn selfish. But the film asks us to feel sorry for her. Indeed, it chalks up these actions to the same kind of crisis that Milo is suffering, and sorry, but "I've been a set upon my entire life, and now that I'm trying to fulfill my dreams and rise above my teenage life, I'm failing", is not equal to "I'm unhappy being married to a man who loves me very much, but rather than talk to him about it, I'd rather sleep around and lie". I found Maggie so dislikable that, until the end of the film, I found myself wondering whether I was supposed to like the character, but in the end it seems that the movie is asking us to accept her actions under the same "life is tough sometimes" heading as is used for Milo's struggles, and I just...can't.

 

That being said, the film is great, and my objections about Maggie's characterisation are not enough to take that away from the story in general. The stellar performances from everyone involved make it worth watching. What makes it rise above the average stock of indie films, though, is that The Skeleton Twins opts not to be a comedy. It doesn't make fun of the problems raised. It doesn't make light of the seriousness of the issues being faced by the characters. It is just realistic people dealing with realistic lives. And the casting of comedy actors to set up the expectation of a frivolously fun picture is a brilliant move. Grab a comforter and a bucket of ice cream, and check this movie out.

OK fine, it's not completely without frivolity, but this scene is improvised so that's basically just Wiig being Wiig...

 

That's a wrap...

 

 

 

 

Rerun... Scream 4. Remembering Wes Craven

This is the face of your nightmares!

I love horror. I am a huge defender of the medium in all its forms and my affair with all things gory, scary, thrilling and suspensful (my danse macabre, you might say?) has continued for about as long as I can remember. Every once in a while, I get a horror itch - a need to delve back into the genre and just revel. This was the itch I experienced on Sunday 30th of September, 2015. I found myself in HMV perusing the shelves and my eye fell on Scream 4, most recent entry in a franchise that I love dearly and so I decided to complete my collection. I didn't know, as I picked up the film, that the director of it, creator of the Scream franchise and altogether iconic film maker was living his final hours upon this earth, nearing the end of his struggle with brain cancer.

Wes Craven passed away later that day.

One's relationship with one's favourite horror film-maker is always curious: the person whom you so admire is the same person who has likely tortured your mind some evenings and nights. I still remember when I was young overhearing that my sister was going to watch a film that I was absolutely not allowed to watch. I sneaked in to the room to glimpse the first scene of Scream and ran hell-for-leather after seeing Drew Barrimore hanging lifeless and bloodied from a tree. Nightmare on Elm Street: Dream Warriors gave me one of my earliest full-blown recurring nightmares - the opening scene where Patricia Arquette thinks she has woken up and then the taps suddenly grab her hands gives me chills to this day.

And is set in a bathroom, doubling the desire to wet yourself.

That's just me, but think about it - what would the landscape of modern horror look like today without Wes Craven and movies like these? Without Nightmare on Elm Street, without The Hills Have Eyes, without Scream, without Last House on the Left? These movies aren't just landmarks in the horror genre, they shaped the genre itself.

Scream was a particular feather in Craven's hat as it was not only a well-made horror film, but a love-letter to the genre, and fans appreciated it as such. Often, self-referential films come off as a bit heavy-handed, but Craven achieved the perfect kind of parody, pointing out the flaws in the genre and improving upon them. This kind of integrity in and reverence of the creation of horror varied in the sequels, but when Scream 4 was first considered, Craven said that he would not even think about directing until he thought the script was as good as the first Scream. This was not a man looking to make a quick buck. This was a man wanting to create great movies.

Scream 4 is not the best Scream movie. Certainly, I think it misses the greatness of the first one, but in the light of Craven's death, it does, in my opinion, take on a new significance. You see, the franchise is all about the creation of horror: the rules that go with them, the cliches, the pitfalls, the wonder and the fun. Scream 4 is no different, but, released fifteen years after the original, it is all about how the new wave of filmmakers are creating horror movies. Stage cameras are swapped for webcams. Movie buffs are now bloggers (it's like he knows my life!). Every five minutes there is a reference to the ridiculousness of reboots and remakes in the horror franchise. Now, one might expect Craven to criticise, harking back to the glory days of horror cinema, but this is not the case. Craven, with Scream 4, is diligently, gleefully, celebrating the genre as it exists today. It isn't making fun - it's passing the torch.

Watching this film, one cannot help but think about the innumerable directors, writers, reviewers, actors, and fans that are working today as a result of the inspiration that Wes Craven provided, and while Scream 4 modestly suggests that it can roll with the times, we as fans must proudly proclaim that these times would not exist but for people like him.

Wes Craven was known as a fun-loving man, a practical joker on set. He was a man who would never make a film for the paycheck. He was an artist who cared deeply about everything that he made, and its impact upon the genre. Horror, especially the slasher subset, is a divisive genre and there is plenty of discussion to be had about it's worth. But in the centre of that discussion sat a hard-working, genuine man with a love and integrity towards his craft that must be admired.

He has inspired me, and I thank him for it.

“If I have to do the rest of the films in the [horror] genre, no problem. If I’m going to be a caged bird, I’ll sing the best song I can[...] I can see that I give my audience something. I can see it in their eyes, and they say thank you a lot. You realize you are doing something that means something to people. So shut up and get back to work." - Wes Craven

That's a wrap.



Rerun... Unfriended VS Cyberbully

Movie stills? Or Red Wedding reaction videos?

Movies do often come in pairs. Dante's Peak and Volcano. Armageddon and Deep Impact. 12 Years a Slave and The Lone Ranger (identical in their depiction of ridiculous racial insensitivity) It's inevitably tempting to pick favourites (Dante's Peak, Armageddon, and obviously The Lone Ranger) but it is always interesting to bounce them off of one another to see how they compare. So this brings us to Cyberbully and Unfriended, two remarkably similar stories which deal with the subject matter in two very different ways.

Cyberbully shows us Casey (Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones fame), learning the hard way that her cyber-bullying of a classmate has, after snowballing into a storm of abuse from around the web, led to said classmate's suicide. The lesson is being taught by an anonymous hacker who takes control of Casey's computer and threatens her with uploading pictures from her "personal collection", shall we say, while they play a psychological game of Simon Says, suggesting that, since Casey's victim suffered suicide, fair recompense would be for Casey to do the same.

Unfriended starts identically, as we meet a group of high school kids (lead by Shelley Hennig) who we find out had, at the very least, a hand in the cyber-bullying of a classmate who had an embarrassing party video uploaded to the internet which, again, led to the girl committing suicide. The lesson-teacher in this instance, however, is the ghost of said girl who takes a more active role in the process by personally possessing and murdering each of the film's protagonists over the course of a protracted game of Never Have I Ever (look it up, parents).

So which film fares better?

Anyone else just start humming Eye of the Tiger? No? Just me then?

The look: Both films are filmed largely from "Webcam-view", and the look of both reflects the fairly shoddy quality of these cameras, though whether to save money or to build the atmosphere, I will leave up to your own level of cinema cynicism. Cyberbully does have a little more variation, allowing for some more stylised and professional looking shots, but Unfriended does really take the cake on this point. It was filmed on an actual computer using computer programs (some real, some created for the movie). While the action plays out over the 6-way Skype call, characters have bitchy asides with one another through instant-messaging, with the literal ghost-in-the-machine pulling up articles and videos behind everything. It is wonderfully immersive, especially if watched on a laptop or PC, and I'm willing to sacrifice a little production value for a successful experiment.

The acting: It's a thriller against a slasher. What do you think? Maisie Williams has shown in her previous endeavours that she has serious acting clout, but it was great to see her holding up in a one-man-show. Unfriended isn't ridiculously bad, but pretty standard fare for horror movies. Cyberbully takes this point hands down.

The theme: This is the most important thing by far. Both films deal with a difficult subject matter, but the degree of sensitivity is very different in each film. In Unfriended, we are given barely twenty minutes of learning to like the characters before we discover what they are supposed to have done. Once this is established, the film takes us through a self-rightous slaughter which we are allowed to enjoy because "Well...these guys are assholes". That being said, the acting is good enough that the repentance seems genuine and there's enough room to stop and think "Is this really the best way?", given that our protagonists are slightly too dead to learn any lesson. The problem for Unfriended is that, with a ghost story, the murderous ghost is always going to come off like the bad guy and, no matter how much you try and portray your main characters as "deserving it", I did become a little uncomfortable with the idea of the "literally bullied to death" character being the villain, especially when it is little more than a pretext for emotional (and visceral) catharsis for anyone who has ever been bullied online. Cyberbully is a little more careful with the subject at hand. The villain of the piece is simply seeking vigilante justice, not personal revenge, and the crime committed by the protagonist is relatively innocuous, meaning that it's less of a problem (though not completely) to cheer for her as she gradually figures out how to beat her adversary. The fact that Cyberbully actually takes the time to admonish cyber-bullying and also deal with how easy it is to become a bully without realising it makes it by far the more nuanced of the two. Game set and match, Cyberbully.

And it's nice to see Maisie Williams in a role that I can actually root for...

In the end, your decision of which film you prefer relies largely on what you're looking to get from them. Stacked up against the myriad of low-to-middle budget horror films out there, Unfriended holds up brilliantly and is a very enjoyable film. Indeed, on its own, you might even say that it is thoughtful. Stand it against Cyberbully, however, and you see the difference between a film that is trying to create a threatening atmosphere by using an important story, and a film that is trying to tell an important story by creating a threatening atmosphere. And in my book, you are always better off serving the story first.

Be sure to let me know if you disagree...

...but please be nice.

That's a wrap.

Rerun...Les Miserables (Quickie review)

Every Hugh Jackman film becomes more fun if you assume that he's still Wolverine, just at a different point in time

I very nearly didn't bother writing anything after watching Les Miserables because, as we've encountered before, if ever you were going to watch this film, you probably already have. However, I thought I would crack out a quickie review because the film did end up presenting an interesting challenge for movie criticism. Suitably intrigued? Then we'll begin.

To break down the critical aspects of a musical, I find you are most concerned with "How does it look?", "How does it sound?" and "How was it acted?". The look of Les Miserables is terrific, it does well what so many other book and stageplay adaptations fail to do, which is to give it a cinematic beauty, without resorting to big action setpieces that weren't in the originals for the sole reason that "Well, you couldn't have done that on stage!". A particular example is the barricade, which I have found in live performances often look either too well-built or not well-built enough, cheifly due to the danger of having your actors crawling over broken kitchen furniture. On the silver screen, however, that sense of debris-turned-fortress, is captured perfectly.

The music in the film has been discussed to death due to the interesting, if potentially ill-advised, decision on behalf of the director to have the actors voices recorded on stage, rather than in a studio. The music suffers as a result, there is no way around it, though there is a trade off - the emotion being acted comes through much more strongly, with the actors choking up while singing or screaming a line in rage rather than melody. All in all though, I'm left with the feeling that if I wanted to hear live voices, I'd see it live. I'm watching the movie because with a studio, you can mask problems with actors like Russell Crowe, clearly cast for his acting rather than his singing. Though it is interesting to note that I am a little suspicious of how diligently the "no studio singing" idea was upheld. The group scenes in particular must have been captured with a space-age boom mic to get the sound quality they did if it was not done in post. But I'm not a sound editor, so I could be wrong.

Pictured: Space-age boom mic? Maybe?

The acting is generally good, not great, with the exception of Anne Hathaway who was rightfully rewarded for an astonishing performance. Hugh Jackman holds his end up and outclasses Russell Crowe in almost every way. Eddie Redmayne is adorable, I mean, come on, did you see that Oscar acceptance speech?

So all in all, you'd expect me to be pleasantly surprised, perhaps? "Meh" with a side of "OK, I'll admit bits of it worked"? So why then was my reaction more like this:



But...you know...manlier...

This reaction led me to an interesting conclusion: It seems that the story and the music of Les Miserables is so good of its own account that even not-so-great productions can have a profound effect on the audience. Now, yes, I'm not exactly breaking down any critical walls by saying "Hey guys, Les Miserables is good!", but it did get me thinking about how far this phenomenon extends. Is it as popular as it is because the source material is so good that it's actually difficult to do badly? Is it the same for Phantom of the Opera? Cats? More to the point, how do you review it? Must stories like these be held to stricter standards, since even the bad versions will be good? Should we be encouraging or discouraging studios to take on these classic tales that, in many ways, are safe bets regardless of the effort that is put in? Or perhaps these stories can only be considered in relation to other productions of the same tale, i.e. "The movie is bad, because the stage musical was better."

It's difficult to quantify of course, but it does cause one to wonder: how many stories can claim to be so well-made that they literally transcend criticism?

An interesting thought, if not revolutionary.

Vive Rosebud est un Traineau!

That's a wrap.



New this week... Fantastic Four

In every fanfiction for the next six months, a Fox executive is just below frame

There is an interesting observation that can be made about "nerd" culture when it comes to comic-book movies. With a culture that has already torn apart, reassembled and torn apart again each film before it is even released, the idea of "popular opinion", that is, the opinion that is shared by most of the community, has distorted into "opinions that are popular to have", that is, the opinion which you feel you ought to have in order to fit into the culture. What's curious is that this is not a new phenomenon, natural product of the bar set by The Avengers and its kin, but has existed since the birth of the genre. Remember Daredevil? Until very recently, you would be shunned for aknowledging it without a sneering irony. Similarly, Joel Schumacher is still a dirty word amongst much of the community. And lest you think I'm getting on a high horse, I'm guilty of it myself: a friend once confided in me that he had actually enjoyed The Green Lantern, to which I immediately admonished, "But that movie was terrible!...wasn't it?", at which point I had to admit that I hadn't actually sat through the whole thing myself.

I have done since, by the way...and well...hate to say I told you so...

The reason I mention any of this is because Josh Trank's Fantastic Four is not great. It's not even good. But it is extremely popular to dislike. Indeed, if you have seen anything about it online before seeing it in the cinema (or merely glanced at it's dismal Rotten Tomatoes rating, currently 8%), even the most open-minded of individuals would have trouble setting their expectations any higher than say, Birdemic or, well, the last Fantastic Four movie. I was subject to the same bias, and was therefore confused when, forty-five minutes in to the film, I was finding it pretty enjoyable. Had I missed something?

The plot of the film hardly needs reiterating, as anyone who cares enough to read a review probably already knows it: Reed Richards (Miles Teller) is one of the greatest young minds of the era and has cracked interdimensional travel before an age that most of us learned what order the seasons come in. Later, in high school, he is offered a full scholarship to a prestigious institute to complete his work on a bigger scale. There he joins Johnny and Sue Storm (Michael B Jordan; Kate Mara) to build a teleporter, and eventually brings childhood friend, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), along for the ride. Finishing up the team is a fifth member, (whaaaat?) the totally-not-going-to-be-the-bad-guy-later Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbel). A drunken dare has most of the team enter another dimension where they are all irradiated with strange cosmic power and Von Doom is lost, presumably dead. Upon return, they find that they have all developed strange powers: respectively, extreme flexibility, flight and fire powers, invisibility and forcefields and finally, the inability to ever ride in a lift again. Cut to a year later, when the heroes have more or less gotten used to their new powers, but are being manipulated by the government to use them for warfare. They decide that they need to re-enter the other universe to try and cure themselves, but instead they find a horribly transformed Von Doom, who wants to destroy the world that left him behind. They face off with him. Credits.

Now, you may already be noticing some of the problems that the film suffers from. In fact, I could hardly blame you for asking me whether or not I fell asleep during the second act, because it certainly seems like there was one missing. The first act (also the first hour) plays out like a slow release sci-fi in line with The Sphere or even a massively dumbed down Primer. If it hadn't opened with the Marvel logo, you might think you've walked into the wrong film - a good film. Make no mistake, this portion of the movie is well made, atmospheric, the acting is pretty good (Jamie Bell is criminally used in this film, given almost nothing to do, but doing what he can with what he is given), the science is intriguing. Then they get their powers and everything falls apart.

You see, there is a reason that the first in a series of superhero films always follows the same pattern: you're a normal person; you gain powers; you discover how it changes you as a person; then you learn...well, come on, if you don't know by now...

He's basically Marvel Buddha now (and as I thought of that joke, I googled it and yes, there is in fact a version of Buddha in the Marvel universe...)

Fantastic Four completely skips the central aspect of the hero's journey. After gaining their powers, we don't even get to see a training montage, we literally just screenwipe to one year later when everyone has kind of gotten used to their new abilities. Not to mention it's particularly off the mark to miss this with the Fantastic Four, whose most interesting attribute is the fact that they have no secret identities - their powers inconvenience them in their daily lives and they have to alter themselves as people accordingly after gaining them. The stupidity of missing this in a superhero movie is so staggering that I feel like I need to make the point again,

Superpower movies are only interesting because the powers reflect changes in our own lives. If you don't show a transformation process, then the audience has nothing to connect to!

Agh...OK breathe...

In fairness to director Trank, there are a lot of rumours circling about trouble behind the scenes with this movie, but the most corroborated one states that Fox Studios meddled furiously with the production of this film. This is obvious from the blatant attempts to copycat more successful franchises, the startling lack of action setpieces (of which there is one, Fox apparently demanded that three be removed from the script, though did not object to one of the annexed scenes being used in promotional material for the film) and shamefully obvious reshoots.

Note to editors: if your actress looks like a different person halfway through the film, you've done your job wrong

But however much you try to redirect blame from Trank or the actors (and in interviews since they have all done their very best to do exactly that), it doesn't change the fact that Fantastic Four is a badly scripted, badly shot, badly lit, badly edited, not brilliantly acted, and pretty damn boring film for the latter half of its runtime. It's not offensive in its ineptitude, and I think many of the derisive comments hurled at this film are as a result of it being a "popular to hate" film, but you certainly won't find many people saying that they loved it either.

In the end, it will come as a surprise to no-one that Fox, like Sony, really ought to be leaving these films for Disney to take care of. Though, now that I think of it, they did answer one question that fans have been aching to know forever: Does The Thing have a thing?

Answer: sorry, Thing's thing...

That's a wrap...

PS. If you've stuck with me this far, I'd like you to hold on a little longer because there was one thing that I wanted to comment on about Fantastic Four that did get me pretty upset. It's nothing to do with the quality of the film per se, and more to do with a general state of things in Hollywood, so I thought I'd leave it out of the main body of the review. However, it's worth mentioning I think: in case you didn't notice, Susan Storm and Johnny Storm (brother and sister for those of you who don't know - Hi Mum!) are not of the same skin colour. In the comics, both are white, as is their father, but in this film Susan is the only white member of the family. It made me very angry, then, that whoever wrote the script (or perhaps, whoever altered it after an initial draft), felt the need to include a scene where Reed asks Susan whether she was adopted, to which she replies that she was. Leaving aside the fact that a black father could biologically birth a white daughter, Susan Storm's status as an adopted child is never referenced nor made relevant in any way elsewhere in the film. The scene serves no purpose other than to explicitly make clear how these two people can be siblings to an audience that (supposedly, I guess?) cannot possibly fathom this idea. We as movie goers can buy Luke and Leia Skywalker as family, even though they were damn near in each other's pants, but if you want Kate Mara to call Micheal B. Jordan "my brother" in the script, you apparently require a scene where another character all but asks "Do you mean 'brother"? Or 'brother'? Because you can see that he's black, right?"

The sooner we grow out of this kind of thing, the better we will be as people.

Rerun... The Maze Runner

Magic Mike XXS was a non-starter

In my opinion, the most frustrating films are those ones that come so close to being really good and then muck it up. I find it hard to blame the Scary Movie movies or the Sharknado clones because when your expectations are sub-basement, then you can't be disappointed. But when you watch a film that you begin to really enjoy and then it pulls the rug out from under you, either by doing something monumentally stupid or unbelievable or by simply running out of ideas, that really hurts.

And so it is with The Maze Runner.

The Maze Runner is one in a long line of young-adult dystopian future book-to-film adaptations, however while most films in this category are largely aimed and the teenage girl market, this one is very much aimed at the boys (read: there is swearing drinking and fighting). Our protagonist is Thomas (Dylan O'Brien) who wakes up in The Glade, a small square of green land surrounded by a huge stone maze. Its inhabitants are a tribe of kids self-named "The Gladers" (yes, this film, like most of its kind, has invented new words to stand in for perfectly acceptable ones to show how "futurey" it is. That being said, this being a PG-13/12A film, the combined swear word "shuck" is genius). The Gladers are all boys, one new arrival coming every month, and they explain to Thomas that his life now consists of basic living-off-the-land survival, and the exploration of the maze, every day, in search of a way out. But if you don't get back to The Glade before nightfall, you get trapped in the maze where no-one has ever survived a full night. However, there's more to Thomas than meets the eye, and from the day he arrives, the rules of the maze start changing.

When William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, he painted a wonderfully vivid picture of what young boys are like devoid of rules and regulations, however, I could never help but feel that it was a slightly unfair portrayal - mainly I had a problem with the idea that everything would turn to ash quite so quickly. The Maze Runner obviously owes a lot to Golding's novel, even having many of the same stock characters.

Marked for death? Surely not...

Where this film separates itself from its predecessor is that it shows the boys as more than capable of keeping it together. Granted, these boys are 15-16 rather that 12-13, but it's refreshing to see an "abandoned kids" plot where they have been managing OK for years. And this is what really drew me in to the film: like Thomas, the audience is dropped into this story in medias res with a fully functional society at work with hierarchy and job systems. None of the boys remember anything pre-incarceration except for their names and no-one knows who has subjected them to this puzzle-death-game. We are asked to accept the world as it is without explanation, and that which is unknown is an intriguing mystery. This kind of trust in the audience has been rather absent in this kind of movies, with films like The Hunger Games opting instead for an introductory exposition dump to detail who is good, who is bad and why the world is the way it is. I was gripped for the first hour, as The Maze Runner parrots the mission statement of The Cube in saying "Don't worry about why they're here, worry about how they'll escape."

Then it all falls apart. The finale of the movie has the boys tripping over the entrance to building of the people in charge, wherein they are met with a video which does a concluding exposition dump about who the good guys are, who the bad guys are and why the world is the way it is. Normally, it would just be lazy - an indication that the writers couldn't think of a good way of ending the film and were probably running out of money, but that's not all that's at play here. As we wade through the torrent of information being spewed at us, we begin to realise that we aren't quite following everything. Information is being left out. But this is the end of the movie why would they...? And then it hits us. This is a young-adult dystopian future book-to-film adaptation. It is bloody obligated to be a franchise. And as the final line of the film rings out "It's time to begin Phase 2", I just got mad.

I'm coming for you, Hollywood!



Not mad because I'm against franchised movies. Not mad because it's still a lazy way to end a film. Not mad because somewhere there is a table of businessmen actively seeking to reduce art to a value sum. Mad because, in spite of the state of cinema today, The Maze Runner was almost really good. Up until that point you had a brilliantly built world. An intriguing premise. Great acting, for the most part - Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a young English actor who is popping up in all sorts of things now is quickly proving himself as the next Jamie Bell. I got mad because it just seems like every good idea now has to go through the wringer of business marketing until what little originality is left is eclipsed by the necessity to optimise merchandising. It spoils the fun.

And the fact that this happens so often, never ceases to a-maze.

Corporate Jim's tip # 64: End your presentation with a subtle joke and a handy visual aid!

That's a wrap.

Was that in cinemas?... The Devil's Carnival

"It is I! Six hundred and sixty...uh...LINE!"

 

Gather around children and I'll tell you a cautionary fable. There once was a handsome young film reviewer. He was very sad because recently he had only been watching good movies and he was tired of writing about how much he enjoyed films. He looked at his DVD collection and saw Doom, but he didn't watch that. He was sad, not masochistic. Just when he was about to give up hope, a happy thought came to him: "Wait, there was a really bad horror musical made by Darren Lynn Bousmann, director of most of the Saw films except the first one which was actually good! And didn't he make another, even worse film?" A wave of his magic internet and he was watching the film, titled The Devil's Carnival. And then the boy died of Badmovieitis. The moral of the story is "Be careful what you wish for." and also "Holy hell, does Darren Lynn Bousmann make bad movies".

 

In truth, I have an interesting relationship with Bousmann's first attempt at horror musical theatre: Repo! The Genetic Opera, because, as bad a film as it is and as ridiculous a project as it certainly, certainly is, about twenty minutes into it, I started to really dig it. Though admittedly, that may have been due to the delirium caused by seeing Anthony Head in a role about as diametrically opposed to the "Nescafe Gold Guy" as you can possibly get.

"Think you can steal my schtick and get away with it, do you, Kris Marshall?"

Also, I get double points for super-involved British advert humour.

 

Repo exists now as a film that I delight in showing people so that we can revel in the absurdity of it together, but when I try and watch it on my own (and I have tried), I never make it to the end because the film is just so awful.

 

So I went into The Devil's Carnival with cautious optomism. I didn't think for a moment that the film would be good, but I had precedent to believe that it might be insane and ridiculous enough to be fun.

 

The plot of the movie follows three "sinners", a kleptomaniac, a girl who's main crime is naiveity and a predeliction for bad boys, and a man who is in hell for, I kid you not, grieving too much over his dead son. Each of them must navigate a horror movie version of an Aesop's fable, (The Dog and Her Reflection, The Scorpion and the Frog, and The Grief and His Due, respectively) in an attempt to redeem themselves and learn a lesson about...life? Death? The afterlife? The film never really bothers to explain.

 

The plot is, amazingly (given the source material is Aesop), paper thin, evidenced by a ludicrous fifty-five minute runtime, and serves very little purpose in a film which clearly cares more about its stylised "goth circus" atmosphere than any story or character that might populate it. That being said, the look of the film is quite impressive and it is enjoyable to see demons and zombies dolled up in circuswear.

I might even call it novel had I not seen the similar if much superior stageshow Circus of Horrors.

 

Listing the various things that don't work in this film would take too long (though it would certainly be cathartic), however, mention must be made of the music. This is a musical and, if you haven't guessed already from previous entries in this blog, I am a big fan of musicals, both classic and experimental varieties. Now, Repo had many terrible songs and often the lyrics of the good ones were laughable, but the good songs were pretty good and if you asked me, I could probably start singing a few of them off the top of my head right now.

So...no-one? No-one's going to ask?

 

In The Devil's Carnival, however, the soundtrack is not just forgettable, it's painful! There is one song - one in twelve - that was passable (and I'm being generous there) and the rest are either sung by an atonal chorus line or by individual singers (and presumably friends of Bousmann) who seem to really want to bring the concept of "Hell" alive with their singing voices.

 

What truly perplexes me about this movie, though, is that if you ignore imdb's viewer rating (which is low) and look at the critical reception of the film, it actually fares quite well. Critics have called it "darkly, enchantingly comedic" and "subversive". And I'm forced to ask: "Was I watching the same movie?"! It's dark, yes, mostly because the director seems to have a phobia of proper lighting. It's enchanting, sure, because you have to give it your full concentration just to follow the weak plot (which I still had to double-check on Wikipedia afterwards to make sure I was getting it). I agree, it's comedic, in that the writers think that there's enough substance to this franchise to warrant a sequel. And fine, it's subversive, in as much as it rejects every tenet of "good" cinema to further what is clearly a pet project for Bousmann. But I don't think that's what those other critics meant.

 

Immediately after finishing watching The Devil's Carnival, I began making excuses for why it didn't strike me the same way that Repo: The Genetic Opera did. "Maybe," I thought, "It's because I was expecting it to be bad but also shocking and ridiculous. Maybe the reason I like Repo is because I didn't know what to expect when I first watched it." But this simply isn't the case. The film is hard to watch because the script is bad, the acting is worse and the music (again, in this musical), is diabolical. It isn't insane enough to be fun. It isn't gory (at all, a rare turn for Bousmann) to make it shocking. It doesn't look good enough to be truly mesmerising. The plot is too weak to be compelling. 

 

Perhaps in time, this movie will prove to be somewhat like that other Aesop's fable, The Tortoise and the Hare: as I sit hubristically mocking this film for its failures, it will zoom past me in a blaze of cult popularity. More likely, I think, it will prove exactly like The Tortoise and the Hare: unrealistic, and a clear violation of the laws of nature.

 

That's a wrap.



New this week... Ant-Man

Visual representation of the audience upon hearing that there may be reference to Spiderman in this movie.

 

Well the time has come for me to pay my dues as a film reviewer and look at one of the Marvel Cinema productions: Ant-Man. The problem with doing this is twofold: first of all, these movies are all given pretty close care and a huge budget - even if the money poured into this one was comparatively small (Honey, I shrunk the budget? OK, I only get two more of these...) which means that, by and large, they are all close to great, Ant-Man being no exception; secondly, I could write a review that is nothing more than a serious of "small" and "insect" puns (I won't, two more, I promise) and it wouldn't remotely affect your decision to go and see the film or not because at this point, if you're watching the Marvel movies, then you're probably signed on for the long haul - and long haul it is as these films are in no short supply (Short? Get it? OK one more...).

 

So that being said, let me play you this classic from the Marvel Movie Review Soundtrack (Set to the tune of the 1812 Overture):

 

The film looks cool and the CG's alright!

The script is funny 'cos it's Edgar Wright!

Paul Rudd is clever, there's a Stan Lee cameo!

And a character from Ultron we know!

It isn't overflowing with fan winks!

But there's enough that you can miss when you blink!

The action setpieces are among the greats!

So grab some popcorn and go see it with...YOURRR MATESSS!

 

Thank you! Thank you! Next stop, Rosebud on Broadway!

 

Seriously, though you've seen this review before. Ant-Man is better than some, not as good as others but a fun film that, when all is said and done, will be lumped into the "good" category of Marvel films.

 

But Marvel (and Disney) have dug themselves a little bit of a hole in that their other projects have been so incredible that one can't help but hold their works to a higher standard, even when those works are pretty successful on their own. So with that in mind, there are some elements of the film which didn't work quite so well.

 

First and foremost, while the script is playful and funny throughout most of the film (Edgar Wright's influence lingering after his departure from the project), the remaining holes that have been filled in by replacement Payton Reed leave the film looking patchy, oscillating between irreverent humour and stodgy forced character development. For example, there is a line early in the film that is such an obvious set up for the final scene that I almost laughed (it is a literal Men in Black-esque "See that button? Never touch that button!") which, in the hands of Edgar Wright I am certain would have been played ironically but, as it is, is tragically played completely straight.

 

The action setpieces themselves are brilliant - it's wonderful to see the destructiveness of previous Avengers films played out on egg cartons and cereal boxes. But the gag of "impressive thing looks less impressive when seen real-size" is used a few too many times.

 

Finally, from a film series that has given us Loki, who will go down as one of the better cinema villains of the era, the villain (should I say, ANTagonist? That's three! Nailed it!) of Ant-Man, played by Corey Stoll is the most cartoonishly evil badguy since the Joel Schumacher Batman movies. I know it might seem like a petty gripe given that I'm talking about the villain  in a comic book movie , but seriously, this guy makes the Green Goblin look nuanced.

Spot the bad guy. Hint: he's he one that looks like Lex Luthor.

 

Overall, as I've already said, you probably already know whether or not you're going to see and even enjoy this film. For those who will come out saying "It's amazing! Marvel can do no wrong!", I'd say, "I get why you say that, but calm down, don't overdo it." And for those who will come out saying "Well, that's it, the Marvel movies have finally run out of ideas!", I'd say "I get why you say that, but calm down, don't overdo it." And then for fun I might add, "Don't get ants in your pants."

 

That's a wrap.

 

Written by: James Tibbetts

Directed by: Eli Roth

Digital Effects by: blogger.com

Catering by: James' wife

Best Boy: Tchaikovski

All opinions expressed herein are my own but by all means feel free to parrot them to your friends as if you thought of them, I mean, it's not like I'm going to know, right?

 

There you go, internet. Now why don't you go ape over me for a while?



Rerun... Rollerball (The 1975 one, relax)

"Social Commentary! I choose you!"

 

 

Everyone remembers the first violent film that they encountered. Some snuck into the cinema to see Nightmare on Elm Street. Some were just watching post-watershed TV and were caught offguard by A Clockwork Orange or Urban Legend. Others were sat down by a parent and told, "Look, if this gets too much, tell me, but this film is awesome!" And so it was for me with Rollerball. What I remember most about the first viewings of this film is a sense of "Wow, the violent bits are fun. I don't understand the rest but I'm sure I will when I'm a bit older!" So now that I am older, and a bit wiser (shut up, yes I am), I've returned to Rollerball to see whether I can enjoy it on a new level.

 

It is the future (the distant lands of 2018, to be specific) and corporate businesses have replaced governments world wide. It is almost a utopia - to quote the film's enigmatic tagline: "In the future there will be no wars, but there will be Rollerball". Rollerball has replaced every sport and is played in practically every city on the planet. It is technically a ballgame (think handball meets fight club meets Starlight Express), but it has one significant difference: it is a full contact blood sport. The corporations use rollerball to show an ever-more bloodthirsty populace that individuality is pointless, that you can only achieve anything through cooperation, which keeps the masses subdued. We view the story through the perspective of Jonathon E, key player in the Houston team and star of the sport who, becoming the very kind of individual that the corporations fear, is asked to retire and, when he says no, the rules are changed to make the game more and more dangerous in an effort to put a permanent end to Jonathon E's celebrity.

 

If that plot summary seems a little cliche to you, well, you're not wrong. And yes, my nose wrinkles as well at a film trying to suggest that a sport (even a violent one) could be so universally loved that it would quash all individual thought (a concept actually done better in a much, much worse film The Running Man, where the game is a punishment for criminals as well as entertainment). And when the film does go for the hard-hitting social commentary, it misses "subtle" by a wide margin.

Spot the bad guy. Hint: he's the one engulfed in flame.

 

But that's kind of how dystopian sport movies are. Think about the aforementioned The Running Man, or Death Race 2000, released only months before Rollerball. Even the wonderfully made Battle Royale spends so much time building the parameters of its game that the time left for the actual message falls on the short side.

 

And on the subject of world-building, Rollerball surpasses even Battle Royale (if you know me, you know how big a statement that is). There is never a point at which the audience would realistically question the world which Rollerball inhabits, as the characters are never caricatured or overplayed. The film is not even particularly "sci-fi" (save for one scene where we see an unrealistically powerful pistol). Most importantly, the sport of rollerball makes absolute sense. The opening ten minutes of the film manage, for me, to do what cricket has failed to do in twenty-five years: concisely explain the rules in a way that makes absolute sense, without boring me to tears. The sport is so playable in fact that the cast and crew did exactly that between takes (minus the violence, one hopes, but then this is James Caan...) and the director, Norman Jewison, was horrified to learn that there was interest in starting real-world rollerball leagues.

If only J.K. Rowling had been so conscientious...

 

Combine the immersive sense of the world that is built through the film, the clear message being portrayed and some impeccable acting from the lead performers, and you have a film that absolutely deserves the praise it received in its own era.

 

The reason, however, that it is worth returning to the film today is that, forty years down the line, the movie has taken on new significance. Perhaps one of the most significant criticisms that a modern audience could have of Rollerball is that it isn't violent enough. As realistic as the game itself looks, we are asked to believe that people are literally dying to Shatner-esque faux punches and, this being the 70s, you rarely see the "blood" part of "bloodsport".

Dave's "Line Painting With My Face" business was short-lived.

 

But isn't that fascinating in itself? A film from the 70s states that one day we will be so obsessed with violence that we will cease to see the horror in it, and in the 2010s, we release The Hunger Games, bloodier by far, as a 12A? It's an interesting thought and shows, if nothing else, that Rollerball was foreward thinking enough to almost be considered precognative.

 

Overall, I'm left curiously torn by this movie. When I was younger, the violent bits thrilled me because I was young, and the talky bits bored me because I didn't understand them. Now that I have a greater appreciation of cinema and the world at large, I find the talky bits are a bit heavy-handed and the violent bits aren't quite violent enough to make the point that it is trying to make. However, given that those reactions are exactly what the film criticises in its audience, it's hard not to be completely captivated by a film that wasn't just striding ahead of its time, but skating.

 

That's a wrap.

Was that in cinemas?... Primer

"Ok, ok. I'll explain the plot one more time..."

 

In all honesty, this movie barely qualifies for my "Was that in cinemas?" segment (designed to tell you about movies that you may not have seen), because if you know me and have ever had a discussion with me about cinema, I've probably already demanded that you watch Primer. It's a film that I feel so passionately about that I've actually had to remind myself from time to time to stop banging on about it quite so much. But now that I've got a louder drum, let me play the tune once more. Strap in, swallow an aspirin, and prepare for potentially one of the most interesting and difficult movies you've ever watched.

 

The plot of Primer seems simple enough. Abe and Aaron are two brainy engineers, suffering as meaningless pawns in their day-job and trying to work out a lucrative side-project for their off hours. They create a device that is intended to reduce an object's mass but, while they succeed, they find that there is a strange side effect. The object also goes back in time. Now, these guys are not your average mad-scientist stereotypes - the kinds who invent time travel and then immediately go back and punch a dinosaur in the face - these guys are smart. They meticulously plan out the best way to optimise the use of their new invention without mucking up the timeline (spoiler alert: it involves a lot of sitting around in a hotel room for twelve hours not talking to anyone). At first it works brilliantly, the boys play the stocks just enough so that the extra cash flow looks legitimate on their tax returns, but when human error causes a blip in the timeline and nothing drastic happens, Abe and Aaron begin testing the boundaries of what they can get away with (starting with a brilliantly natural "theoretical" discussion concerning whether you could punch your boss in the face, then go back and stop yourself doing it so that you still have the experience without the consequences) .

 

Now, that may sound as generic as a time travel movie could come, but trust me when I say that this film is completely different from anything else from the genre. Do you remember that scene in Looper when Bruce Willis tells Joseph Gordon-Levitt that he's not going to sit there and explain how time travel works because it would just be a waste of time, and it's a blatant nod to the audience to say "Look, just shut up and enjoy it."? Well Primer is the polar opposite of this. You literally need an engineering degree to follow the jargon being tossed around during the construction scenes, and the dialogue of "how time travel works in practice" is so fast-paced and complicated that I challenge anyone to actually get this film on the first watching. Even XKCD, notable "smart person" comic couldn't make sense of the timeline of the film.

Already, I hear some of you saying, "Jamie, why on Earth would I want to watch a film this confusing?" The answer is that, primarily due to the complicated plot structure and the unforgiving lack of exposition or explanation, the film is more immersive than many of today's blockbusters. As the characters begin to become more and more confused, losing track of where and when they are, misremembering things and making mistakes, so does the audience. There was a moment during my first viewing of Primer when I became so lost that I thought "No, I need to rewind this and try and make sense of that last scene, I don't get it." Then, as I did so, I began to laugh. I had had to go back in time to try and make sure that I wasn't making mistakes in the timeline of the movie. In that moment, it struck me that this may be the cleverest movie I'd seen in a long time.

 

It is also worth noting that the film is incredibly well made, given the budget of $7000 (I'd call it a shoestring budget, but I rather think they didn't have money to spare on shoestrings) and particular credit has to be given to Shane Curruth in his capacity as Director, Producer, Writer, Star, Sound Designer and Editor (as well as being a former software engineer himself). It is one of these films that really does seem like an impossible feat.

 

Of course, the biggest selling points of the film are also its biggest weaknesses. There was no way that Primer was ever going to make it big in the box office because so few people have the patience for films as confusing as this one (and even fewer want to pay to see it in a cinema without the luxury of pausing, rewinding or starting over). And the small budget means that there are no big setpieces, but a lot of "talky" scenes. Indeed, it's another one of these films that you, as reader, will probably have already decided whether you are going to watch. However, while I would normally encourage people to fight that gut reaction to certain movies, on this occasion I'm going to tell you to trust that instinct. If this film piques your interest because "OO! Smart Sci-Fi!" then you will absolutely enjoy this film (and go mad trying to figure it all out), but if you are currently thinking "Doesn't this blog usually have more pictures?" then I'd give it a miss. You don't have to be smart to enjoy the film, but you definitely need to be ready to feel stupid. And as incredible as Primer is, trust me, you'll be glad that you took that aspirin.

 

That's a wraaaa...AAAH! WHAT'S HAPPENING?

 

 

"Ok, ok. I'll explain the plot one more time..."

In all honesty, this movie barely qualifies for my "Was that in cinemas?" segment (designed to tell you about movies that you may not have seen), because if you know me and have ever had a discussion with me about cinema, I've probably...