https://www.thefilmagazine.com/truth-koreeda-movie-review/ SSP
The Truth (2019) Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Catherine Deneuve, Drama, Hirokazu Koreeda, Juliette Binoche, The Truth, World Cinema
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Windows into Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite
Posted in Film, Film Feature, The Film Magazine
Tagged Bong Joon-ho, Parasite, World Cinema
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Review in Brief: Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)
ZOMBIELAND: DOUBLE TAP is so much better than you might expect. The first film worked so well almost by accident, but there’s enough wit and splatter here to make this return journey fly by. It’s just great to spend another movie with this beloved foursome – Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) are in it for the duration. There are new zombies (stupid-even-by-zombie-standards “Homers”, smarter-than-the-average-zombie “Hawkings” and double-tap-proof “T800s”) and new traveling companions of varying levels of survivability. Zoey Deutch’s adorably dumb Madison may be a stereotype, but she completely owns it, and Rosario Dawson’s Nevada gives Tallahassee a run for his money. Some of the winking humour crosses the line into smug and there’s a bit too much plot-retreading, but then you see a Gen-X hippie commune taking cover in “Babylon”, named of course after “that David Gray song”. SSP
Review in Brief: Aladdin (2019)
There’s a line of dialogue in the new ALADDIN that sums it up rather well: “Clumsy, but in a charming sort of way”. It’s very close to the animated movie, with Mena Massoud really looking and sounding the part, but this time Jafar (Marwan Kenzari) is young and smouldering and Jasmine (Naomi Scott) wants to be Sultan and comes with a song spelling that out. Most musical sequences are abbreviated except for the Genie’s two still spectacular extravaganzas “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali” which Will Smith handles with aplomb. A few moments of speed-ramping aside, you’d never really guess this was a Guy Ritchie movie – weirdly the personalities of the guards on the tail of Al in the original animation felt more Ritchie than anything here. Elsewhere it’s business as usual in the Disney remake game, all gloss and scale and impressive recreation but very little to make it essential viewing. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review, Review in Brief
Tagged Aladdin, Blockbuster, Disney, Family Film, Guy Ritchie, Marwan Kenzari, Mena Massoud, Naomi Scott, Will Smith
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Porco Rosso (1992) Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Animation, Anime, Hayao Miyazaki, Porco Rosso, Satire, Studio Ghibli, War Film
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Review: Onward (2020)
Haven’t we been here before? SHREK, BRIGHT, DISENCHANTMENT and many others all present us with a fantasy world that operates by the rules of the world today to some extent. Pixar’s latest, ONWARD, might not be the sharpest or most original animated family adventure, but it is one of the most heartfelt.
In a fantasy land, magic has been abandoned in favour of the far easier electricity and the world has continued to evolve to present day with much less wonder. Meek teenage elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) is gifted a wizard’s staff on his sixteenth birthday and together with role-playing game obsessive older brother Barley (Chris Pratt) they try and cast a spell to bring their dearly departed dad back to life for one final day. Things of course do not go according to plan, and so the brothers depart on a dangerous quest…
This world is populated by, according to director Dan Scanlon, “everything that would be on the side of a van in the 1970s”. Think Prog Rock, Dungeons & Dragons and authors who thought they could be the next Tolkien, all dumped in sitcom America. So you get suburban elves, biker gang pixies, trolls in toll booths, centaurs as beat cops and a manticore running a family restaurant, not to mention unicorns going through the bins.
Ian and Barley’s shoddily resurrected dad appearing for the majority of the film as a disembodied pair of legs (their spell went a bit wrong) is a thing of genius, Pixar’s best running sight gag in a long time. What the brothers do to the legs to make him blend in a bit better is even funnier, especially for the reactions of passers by.
We get not one, but two explicit INDIANA JONES references in this quest. There are as you’d expect plenty of winks to fantasy and adventure tropes, and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them sight gags, my favourites being a drive-thru “now serving second breakfast” and the way in which they visualise Barley’s rustbucket van making a heroic charge. It’s a dazzling film to see in IMAX though the larger format probably isn’t the best for spotting all the jokes in the background. Now it’s coming early to Disney+ I’m sure there will be many, many pause-worthy moments.
The supporting players are arguably not given enough to do except react to the progress or lack thereof of the Lightfoot brothers, and an interesting cast aren’t served well enough by the script. We’ve seen single parents and step-parents go on these journeys to understand their children before – giving them pointy ears, horns of hooves doesn’t make their stories automatically stand out. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Octavia Spencer give appealing performances as Mrs Lightfoot and the entrepreneurial Manticore respectively, but you want them to show a little more growth to go with the jokes at their expense as middle-aged fantasy women.
This is also a world where the internal logic doesn’t quite add up if you pause to think about it for any length of time. It’s a convenient storytelling shortcut to have the film world the same as ours is now but with fantasy creatures, but it might have been more interesting to see what else might have changed in a world formally powered by magic, or to tell us exactly how a centaur driving a car works…mechanically.
It may take a while to find its feet, to realise what it is, but when the pieces move into place Onward becomes another classic Pixar tear-jerker. It’s not quite the classic fathers-and-sons tale and the slightly divergent path taken is pleasingly refreshing. So Onward is new, but not new enough to be really special. That said, even mid-level Pixar is pretty great animation chock full of honest emotion, visual invention and amusing adventure hijinks. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review
Tagged Bright, Chris Pratt, Dan Scanlon, Disenchantment, Family Film, Fantasy, Indiana Jones, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Octavia Spencer, Onward, Pixar, Shrek, Tom Holland
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Review: The Lighthouse (2019)
THE LIGHTHOUSE is an experience, and no mistake, but it’s an experience I’d struggle to sell. Much like director Robert Eggers’ previous film THE WITCH, it’s fascinating, but it’s an acquired taste.
Two lighthouse keepers (Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson) must spend a month together tending their light on a spur of land in inhospitable New England waters. But what will drive them to madness first, the tedium, the merciless weather, the hypnotic quality of the light, or each other?
The relentless soundscape digs right into your internal organs from the off. Before we see anything we hear a chugging engine and foghorn. In a cinema with a good sound system your teeth rattle. This opening salvo of sonic buffeting is the most peace you’ll have on this journey. You quickly find yourself getting in the same headspace as the two men losing their grip on reality.
They actually had to build a lighthouse for this, and its presence looms effectively. They had the unforgiving weather and the inhospitable location for real, but it had to be accessible, filmable. The filming too is making a real statement – Jarin Blaschke’s bleak black-and-white, square framed and claustrophobic cinematography, shot using period lenses because they hadn’t already made their lives difficult enough. Willem Dafoe lived in a cabin for the duration, so there’s that as well.
Pattinson’s character (who may or may not be called Ephraim Winslow) is trapped in an eternal cycle of exhausting routine. He scrubs floors and polishes metal and quicklimes the water supply, and maintains the and powers greasy mechanisms the purpose of which is a bit of a mystery. Don’t expect answers, only further questions.
Willem “save some cheekbones for the rest of us” Dafoe in particular mesmerises as Thomas Wake (pronounces “wick” in his accent), like an enigmatic beam of light. He’s like when (one for the British reader) they made Captain Birdseye sexy all of a sudden, but with more farting. I’ll admit to understanding less than half of what he says in his thick seadog brogue, but the impenetrable dialect and rhythm of his voice certainly adds authenticity to the “Poseidon’s Curse” scene.
The two men really come across as losing their grip on everything – sanity, willpower, humanity. The tired trudging, terrifyingly tortured grimaces, jerkily dancing out of nowhere. Of course there’s bodily expulsions of all types and animal tormentors both real and imagined, because it’s that kind of psychological drama.
I loved how their relationship grew from animosity to tolerance to old married couple passive aggression over the course of the story. They finally strike up a pleasant conversation over a meagre dinner after a few days of hostile sniping and abuse. Then they get into a routine of getting absolutely sloshed every night thereafter. When provisions run low, so do tempers. Drinking lamp oil can’t be good for you. One curses another for a careless action bringing bad luck down upon them, but perhaps their biggest scraps happens when the truth comes out about the cooking “Yer fond of me lobster ain’t ye?”.
The Lighthouse won’t be for everyone, in fact it probably won’t be for the majority, but you can’t say it’s not interesting. If you like a certain weird tone, ambiguous plotting and theme and oil-black humour wrapped in an all-consuming soundscape then its for you. It’s only the latest in a series of eclectic and interesting roles for Pattinson, so long may that continue in and among Batman movies. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review
Tagged Black Comedy, Horror, Psychological Drama, Robert Eggers, Robert Pattinson, The Lighthouse, The Witch, Willem Dafoe
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The Invisible Man (2020) Review
Posted in Film, Film Review, The Film Magazine
Tagged Elisabeth Moss, Horror, Leigh Whannell, The Invisible Man, Universal
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Review: The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019/20)
If there’s an adjective you don’t tend to associate with Armando Iannucci, it’s sincere. Witty and incisive, sure, but not sincere. But that’s the way he and regular co-writer Simon Blackwell play THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF DAVID COPPERFIELD, Charles Dickens’ most personal of tales.
The remarkable story of a remarkable young man who has a remarkably inconsistent lot in life – David Copperfield (Dev Patel) seeks to make a name for himself, but it will not be an easy journey, even to keep the right to use his own name.
Following LITTLE WOMEN last year, this is another great adaptation that is a story about storytelling. Reality weaves in and out, David Copperfield living his life and telling his story with artistic embellishments aplenty. He is witness to his own birth, comments on key events of his life both bad and good as they pass by and actively edits his own story as he tells it.
What a lot of Dickens adaptations make the mistake of doing is sapping the story’s world of colour. Unless we’re talking a musical like OLIVER! brown and grey seems to be the order of the day. David Copperfield’s costumes by Suzie Harman and Robert Worley are brightly coloured, intricately detailed and well lived-in. There are little details to savor everywhere. Even the more muted colour palette used when David confronts some of the untruths in his life is more eye-catching than the majority of stories set in this period.
While it’s visually distinct from the usual Dickens adaptations, the big, exaggerated characters and all the go-to archetypes of Dickens are still all present, correct and unaltered. Good men trapped in a cruel world, beguiling manipulators, monstrous step-parents, good-natured fops and naive young women who are all but seventeen. If you’re a British Radio 4 comedy listener, it really won’t help if you’ve recently listened to Bleak Expectations because that loving spoof is only slightly exaggerated from Dickens’ page.
The ensemble are sublime across the board. Colour-blind casting has been in theatre for decades and it’s about time film, especially a committed theatrical film, made use of it. This is, after all, not professing to present reality but a reality. Dev Patel completely inhabits the lead role as an idealistic dreamer who nonetheless has to be tough and isn’t above sly manipulation and back-stabbing to further his own ends and to survive. Ben Whishaw, Aneurin Barnard and Daisy May Cooper all impress, but it is Hugh Laurie and Peter Capaldi who really vie to steal the show with the former bringing pathos and nuance to the potentially ridiculous Mr Dick and the latter having the time of his life as the kind-hearted scoundrel Mr Micawber. Tilda Swinton doesn’t get any bonus points for turning up and being Tilda Swinton.
I would say the film does run a little on the long side – it’s a long-feeling two hours, perhaps due to the measured pacing or the sheer amount of ups and downs David is put through time and time again. I don’t know what you’d cut, though, and still stay true to the piece, but you may feel exhausted at the film’s close (uplifted, but exhausted).
I wouldn’t be adverse to seeing Iannucci and Blackwell try to adapt other works of classic literature. They clearly have an eye for it, making the most of inherently comic moments but not shying away from the dark or the tragic. The Personal History of David Copperfield is a refreshing new direction for Iannucci and a cracking, colourful and emotionally connected new take on Dickens. SSP
Posted in Film, Film Review
Tagged Aneurin Barnard, Armando Iannucci, Ben Whishaw, Bleak Expectations, Charles Dickens, Daisy May Cooper, Dev Patel, Hugh Laurie, Little Women, Oliver!, Peter Capaldi, Robert Worley, Simon Blackwell, Suzie Harman, The Personal History of David Copperfield, Tilda Swinton
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