Why is American politics so fascinating? Because it’s a real event. KOCK DOWN THE HOUSE is also one hell of an underdog story. The ideal candidate, and the only one with any real chance of success against an entrenched New York incumbent is “An insurgent, outside, grassroots candidate that’s a woman of colour from the Bronx”. Oh only all those things? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may have ended up the only giant-killer among this group of passionate, driven and talented women, but all of their stories are compelling. The documentary crew stick very close to their subjects so we end up seeing little of their opponents, but that’s forgivable in highlighting those without heavyweight promotions teams. It’s captivating and inspiring and an antidote to being disengaged in modern politics; it’s a promising sign of what might have been, and also what still might be in the not-too-distant future. SSP
Review in Brief: Knock Down The House
Review: It Chapter Two (2019)
Smile like you mean it: KatzSmith Productions/New Line
Two years have just flown by haven’t they? The first IT floated high above all expectations and had pretty much everyone clamoring for more. CHAPTER TWO is good…but only just. Stephen King’s novel isn’t an easy one to adapt and part two of the Losers’ story is about as good as the same stretch in the book.
27 years after banishing shapeshifting fear-parasite Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) the grown up Losers, who have mostly moved away from Derry and moved on with their lives reconvene back home to destroy It once and for all.
Every adult Loser has no trouble at all convincing you they are the same children all grown up. I was convinced they must’ve shot the new scenes with the young Losers concurrently with the first film but they didn’t – incredibly they used de-aging effects on their teenage cast, which has to be a first. Despite some big names (James McAvoy, Jessica Chastain) the performance highlights are easily Eddie (James Ransone) and Richie (Bill Hader), much like last time with Jack Dylan Grazer and Finn Wolfhard, come to think of it. They do an interesting tweak to one character’s driving force as well, which, while not explicitly in the book, makes complete sense and adds a certain level of unexpected poignancy later on.
If there’s one thing I didn’t expect in this it’s a meta commentary on Stephen King as a writer. McAvoy’s Bill Denbrough is King’s self-insert character (they’re always writers with unfeasibly attractive wives or girlfriends) and he’s really successful despite the fact that everyone “didn’t like the ending” of pretty much everything he’s ever written.
The Chinese restaurant meeting and the scene with Mrs Kersh, the two most memorable scenes from the adults’ story in the book, are perfect, chilling and straight off the page. The discomfort and the creeping dread of the Mrs Kersh scene is especially effective and you’ve got to hand it to Joan Gregson’s skill at portraying that something’s more than a bit off with this seemingly kindly old lady with the subtlest of facial expression shifts and freezes. For me it was the scariest scene in the book and it’s one of the only genuinely frightening scenes in the film.
You always have to ask one thing of a horror film: is it scary? Frustratingly the answer here is no, not really. It’s handsomely moulded and fairly atmospheric, but the imagery won’t stay with you. Fear is tied so much better to character on a thematic level in the first film. Here it’s shallow, and aside from the natural fear of mortality, the Losers still seem affected by exactly the same generic spook-house stuff that frightened them as children. Pennywise really should have been morphing into mortgage statements and credit card bills.
Considering the runtime, surely there was room for more “rotten in Derry” scenes. A key part of It’s power is how he’s corrupted the whole town to its core over the centuries, how numbers of freak accidents, child disappearances and gruesome deaths have sky-rocketed. Aside from the ghastly homophobic attack at the beginning and some odd trance-like stares from the locals the film story’s primary location is missing this texture, this subtext.
This film could have been so much weirder. I wanted psychedelic sci-fi. I wanted trippy nightmare fuel. I wanted space turtles!
It: Chapter Two is solid. It just about makes up for a relative lack of scares with good performances throughout the cast and some entertainingly executed set pieces. All the money is up on screen and director Andy Muscietti still clearly loves this material, but with all the flashing back to events we saw last time you have to question whether it was worth splitting the film at all, whether one part of this story becomes redundant. SSP
Border (2018) Review
Review: Crawl (2019)
You skip cleaning the kitchen one week and look what happens!: Paramount/Raimi Productions
This was pretty gnarly, as the kids used to say (probably). We’ve seen so many varied creature features from the paranoid 1950s to the invention of the blockbuster in the 1970s and the low-fi efforts of the 2000s. CRAWL is of a piece with a lot of these but seems to get a lot more of the basics right that so many bafflingly get wrong.
Championship swimmer Haley (Kaya Scodelario) braves a ferocious hurricane to rescue her dad (Barry Pepper) who has become trapped in the crawlspace under his house as it floods and fills with alligators.
You can visualise the pitch meeting for Crawl pretty easily. “Hey! I’ve got a great idea for a movie! What if you were trapped in a basement? Right, but what’s a lot worse than being trapped in a basement? Being trapped in a basement that’s flooding! Right, but what’s a lot worse than being trapped in a basement that’s flooding? Being trapped in a basement that’s flooding and there’s alligators! And not just one or two alligators but loads of them! I know, right? Mind blown!”.
It really doesn’t matter what shape of animal is chasing you in movies like this, the pertinent question is do you care if it catches our protagonists? A good old-fashioned strained father-daughter relationship works well enough, giving Haley and her dad ample time between saving their limbs to talk through their myriad issues works wonders.
Haley and her dad really are put through it, battered, beaten and bitten by the natural world until one of them is more tourniquet than person. Objectives and consequences of each stage of the escape are clearly set out, action set pieces are well-paced, punctuated with jumps and a fair few surprises that blindside you and the alligators themselves which look like a combination of CGI and puppets/animatronics mostly convince. I say mostly because there’s always that split-second transition between something practical and something computer animated that really jars.
The film is a tight 85 minutes and not a moment is wasted. Yes, extra characters are introduced later on purely to give the scaly hunters more to chew on (oh I wonder what might happen to the occupants of an overladen, rickety boat or that guy leaning over a dark cellar hatch?) but our two leads only have so many limbs they can lose. Also having a very cute dog on hand for you to hope for survival is a cheap trick to keep audiences engaged but you expect that with this sort of territory.
Creature features are completely reliant on the animal antagonists being far more aggressive and relentless than they would be in reality. What alligator wouldn’t give up after being stabbed in the eye? You also just have to check your brain and go with the rules of this world – don’t question blood loss rates or the fact that an alligator could out swim any human no matter how long they’ve spent in the pool. Yes, even if we’ve had an opening scene establishing just how much Haley has to prove, it doesn’t turn her into a mermaid at a convenient time.
Crawl doesn’t really break any new ground but it’s very good at what it does, and what it does is serve up a jumbo helping of tense thrills without outstaying its welcome. Pop it on next time you have friends around for beer and snacks, enjoy the laughs and gasps and watch food, beverages and furniture fly at the jumpy bits. SSP
Review in Brief: The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2018/19)
You don’t tend to see chamber pieces about big men with guns, but that’s exactly what THE STANDOFF AT SPARROW CREEK is, which is pretty novel. Someone in this militia has opened fire at a cop’s funeral and everyone is baying for their blood. James Badge Dale is reliable as always, here a coiled spring acting as chief interrogator of such character actors as Chris Mulkey and Gene Jones and writer-director Henry Dunham gives the film a good murky look to match the deception at play. But it somehow manages to feel much longer than it actually is, the dialogue doesn’t have much crackle and the surprises, when they eventually come, aren’t all that surprising. You’d also be hard-pressed to nail down exactly what the film is saying about American gun culture, “both sides”-ing the debate. It’s a decent effort but nothing that you’ll remember come the morrow. SSP
Review: Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood (2019)
It’s been emotional: Bona Film Group/Heyday Films/Sony
The release of a new Quentin Tarantino film is an event. Even if it’s not his 9th. It’s really not his 9th – by my count it’s either 10th or 11th. You generally know what to expect from QT, so you’ve got to give the man credit that he’s doing something a bit different for much of ONCE UPON A TIME… IN HOLLYWOOD.
Former Hollywood heartthrob Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is past it, and his industry knows it. Stuck in a rut of demeaning TV villain guest star roles, Dalton is only kept a functioning human being by his stunt double-turned-gofer Cliff Booth, who himself has a possibly dark past and a go-nowhere career. The Swinging Sixties are drawing to a close, Hollywood is changing and opportunities are aplenty for rising stars like Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) who lives on Dalton’s street, but can he find a place for himself again or is he condemned to irrelevance?
The first half is pretty restrained as far as Tarantino films go. No violence, relatively little swearing, not even much showboating in the script. We just follow Rick and Cliff looking back at when they mattered and forward to the not-too-distant future when they most likely will not. We then progress to palpable menace and Acting for the second movement where some stuff actually happens before coming finally to an uncomfortable black comic horror finale.
Speaking of acting, yes it’s probably the best work from DiCaprio and Pitt for quite a while, the former throwing himself into full-on breakdown mode and the latter doing much of the heavy lifting with a more subtle performance (subtle, at least, when he’s not fighting Bruce Lee). Robbie as Sharon Tate dazzles when she’s on screen (sadly not all that often) and even gets to take pleasure in watching the woman she’s playing on a cinema screen at one point.
Once Upon a Time is focussed on a peculiar period in Hollywood and a very particular kind of star. While the maverick young filmmakers of New Hollywood rebelled and made their statements, some performers found themselves trapped in a demeaning cycle. Old Hollywood to New, TV to film, there were a lot of uncomfortable transitions.
The best scenes for me were a pair of intimate minor-key moments, one where a tired Cliff Booth gets home to his ramshackle trailer and feeds his dog and himself, the other where Rick Dalton gets a crash course method acting lesson from an eight-year-old (Julia Butters).
Tarantino knows what you think about his obsession with feet, so he’s going to shove them in your face. It almost gets parodic at points, with pretty much every female character with a speaking role making a point of drawing attention to their lower appendages for no real reason. Each to their own, but surely a fetish shouldn’t distract from what matters?
The Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) scene (and it is just one scene) didn’t really bother me. I completely understand why it might not have gone down well with audiences but the scene is from Cliff’s POV and it’s Cliff’s skewed view of the world and jealousy of anyone doing well in an industry that doesn’t really want him in it anymore.
The ending is shocking, but not in the way you expect a film with the Manson Family on the periphery to be. Without giving away exactly what happens, think in the same ballpark as what Tarantino did at the end of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. Sharon Tate’s memory isn’t disrespected either; Tarantino is never anything but affectionate, bordering on reverent for her.
Hollywood the place will no doubt love this, because it’s about itself. Tarantino makes it clear in every frame he can that he’s done his research and he’s going to pay tribute to his favourite things from this period. The most entertaining material is how he pastiches the most popular TV shows (Westerns and Procedurals) and films (War and Spaghetti Westerns) of the time.
Much like everything else he’s done over the last decade-and-a-half, Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood is good but not great, with plenty to admire, a killer look and great performances but as a whole is less than the sum of its parts. Maybe I’ll pick up more on a second viewing, but as of now it did not meet the sky-high expectations Tarantino’s supposedly penultimate release had generated. It won’t be in my top 10 of 2019. It might not even be in my top 20. SSP
Review in Brief: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018)
Well you can’t accuse anybody working on this of just doing the same thing twice. PACIFIC RIM: UPRISING might be even dumber than the first film, which was Guillermo del Toro valiantly attempting to get something with thematic substance out of massive robots hitting massive monsters with cargo ships. Speaking of which, can you believe GDT would prefer to win Oscars than make another one of these? New director Steven S DeKnight throws plenty at the plot, a few unexpected twists and turns, many ideas which only kind-of work and a fair few which don’t work at all, but the film moves at pace and the brightly coloured spectacle is undeniably enjoyable. Cailee Spaeny steals the show from our uninspiring leads John Boyega and Scott Eastwood and Burn Gorman and Charlie Day get a lot more to do this time to mixed success. SSP
Review in Brief: Fighting with my Family (2019)
I am not a wrestling fan. Childhood friends were and I suppose I must have unconsciously absorbed a few names and special moves, but I still know next-to-nothing about it. And yet I found FIGHTING WITH MY FAMILY, this (mostly) true story rather compelling. It’s got all the classic beats of a sports movie (yes, even a training montage) and many of those expected from a British biopic too, but the honest performances, warmth and life lessons carry it through. You can laugh, you can cheer, you can get pretty darn emotional as you follow Paige and her mad family on their quest for success. Florence Pugh is versatile as always, embodying Paige at her best and worst and strong support is on hand from Nick Frost, Vince Vaughn and Jack Lowden. SSP
Review: Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)
No HE’S balder!: Chris Morgan Productions/Universal Pictures
I came to the FAST & FURIOUS franchise in time for FAST FIVE, when any pretence about the series being about cars and street racing anymore went up in a bloom of ignited fuel. Since then we’ve had 2 very good and very silly action movies and one less good silly action movie. HOBBS & SHAW is another less good silly action movie, but I can’t say I didn’t get what I came for.
DSS Agent/human tank Luke Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) and former baddie mercenary-turned-less-bad mercenary Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) reluctantly team up to secure a deadly engineered virus carried in the blood of Shaw’s estranged sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby). But unstoppable cyborg fanatic Brixton (Idris Elba) is on their tail, an opponent who may be too much of an obstacle even for all three of them, if they ever get along.
Johnson and Statham are a pleasing bickering double-act and both are given memorable reintroductions (Shaw destroys a room full of henchmen with a surprisingly durable champagne bottle and Hobbs does the same to a similar bunch of bad guys with his fists and head). They then trade insults and emasculating put-downs throughout, some of which really push the film’s age classification. David Leitch of DEADPOOL 2 is directing so it isn’t a surprise when the gags fall in the same ballpark (“ball” being the optimum word).
Vanessa Kirby steals the show from the titular heroes without breaking a sweat. As Hattie Shaw she’s easily the most layered character (in that she has some) in the film not to mention proving herself particularly deadly an opponent to anyone standing in her way (the noises some people made in the cinema when you see how much damage she can do just with a fold-up chair…).
There’s no reason for this to be 2 hours+. It’s an A-B chase movie but it chooses to take a really circuitous route to get there. If it had just received a bit of a trim, made more streamlined and pacey it might have been more enjoyable overall. The final act in Hobbs’s homeland of Samoa would have also had much more of an impact if we hadn’t been shown the whole thing in trailers.
The most hilarious thing in the film, intentionally funny or not, is bulletproof super-soldier Idris Elba always putting his motorbike helmet on before a chase scene. I know it would have made the stunt work much simpler to film if you’re not worrying about using doubles, but the amount of times Brixton and his sci-if bike is clearly CGI, you might as well have reinforced his fearless nature.
The CG compositing in general could have used another pass – the stunt work is good, as are individual stunts and effects, but when it goes from one to another it’s jarring on the eyeballs, especially when Idris Elba seems to become a rubbery Mr Fantastic to get his bike around sharp corners. The much-ballyhooed train of off-road vehicles chained to a helicopter going over a cliff must’ve had some practical basis but I really can’t tell where the the effects work takes over from the tactile, so that’s something I suppose.
Hobbs & Shaw is mostly harmless fun that refuses to subscribe to logic or put a check on its stars’ egos or on-screen personas. You probably saw that story the other week about how Johnson and Statham (among other F&F stars who now have producer roles) have an iron grip over how their characters are allowed to appear in this franchise, which makes everything less organic but not any less fun. Just sit back, get comfortable and let the stupid come to you. SSP
SSP Thinks Film 