Review: Thor: Ragnarok (2017)

Posted on October 27, 2017 by Sam S-P
Thor-Ragnarok-Trailer-Gladiator-Weapons

Show me your war face: Marvel/Disney

Some of you may remember THOR: THE DARK WORLD wasn’t that good. It wasn’t that bad either, but between storytelling falling over itself to cram in more of a certain God of Mischief after the fact and the worst villain in a Marvel film so far, it left a lot to be desired. THOR: RAGNAROK sends the trilogy out with a bang, and at the moment I’m struggling to remember the last time a film left me grinning ear-to-ear throughout. It was probably another Taika Waititi film.

Following the destruction of his all-powerful weapon Mjolnir by the vengeful goddess Hela (Cate Blanchett), Thor (Chris Hemsworth is dumped on a distant planet to fight for his life as a gladiator. Thor reconnects with the Incredible Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) during combat, and along with morally iffy brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and outcast warrior Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), the God of Thunder must return to Asgard and prevent the end of their world, Ragnarok.

This is the most vibrant ensemble that doesn’t feature wisecracking raccoon. We already know Hemsworth and Hiddleston were born to play the sons of Odin, but the new additions of Jeff Goldblum’s campy despot, Tessa Thompson’s formidable Valkyrie and Waititi himself as a rock monster with incongruous New Zealand accent kept the smiles coming. Plenty of random cameos are sprinkled throughout as well, from inside the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Doctor Strange gets a scene) and out (nope, not going to spoil those).

Here we see Thor and Loki’s relationship actually grow, with the brothers coming to finally accept that they’re just different people. It’s a vibrant space romp, but everyone is given room to grow and their own moment to shine. Between this, IRON MAN and CAPTAIN AMERICA, Marvel now have unparalleled form in giving their trilogies satisfying denouements.

I love that even when dealing with gods and superheroes, Waititi isn’t averse to making pretty much everyone a bit crap at what they do. Thor still has ego issues (when he can’t work out the solution to a problem in the final act, this results in the best put-down of the film); Loki is still up to his old tricks despite most now being wise to his slipperiness; Valkyrie is a high-functioning alcoholic, the Grandmaster is an insecure tyrant and a glittery perv. The one-liners keep on coming, but so does the action, which is among the most eye-catching and creative in the Marvel series so far, lacking the bone-crunching wallop of fights in CIVIL WAR but more than making up for it with its own flow, style and fireworks.

Denis Villeneuve seems to have been all-but chosen as the next filmmaker to take a crack at DUNE, I don’t think Waititi would be a bad shout for the job either. He can clearly do over-the-top but doesn’t lose sight of what his ensemble is going through. In Ragnarok, he really leans into the pulpiness of the source material, everything being as big, bold and colourful as any Jack Kirby splash panel. Expect luridly coloured costumes and industrial spaceships decked out with war paint, imposing CG-extended sets and larger-than-life characters squabbling, scrapping and quite often just talking.

While some might criticise the gag-rate, the fact that we’re seldom allowed a moment to mull over anything, Ragnarok is still pretty bold in its iconoclastic aims. The shock destruction of Mjolnir is only the beginning, and the ultimate cost of Thor’s battle with Hela ends up pretty high. Blanchett might not have had to bring her A-game (as much fun as she looks like she’s having) but Hela’s presence and how she leaves things by the end is key. This is Marvel making another confident statement going forward: give them a couple more films and nothing will be the same. The big changes have already started, and after this thrilling mirthful ride, darkness and death looms on the horizon. At least it feels like they’ve earned it. SSP

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Review in Brief: Gerald’s Game (2017)

Posted on October 26, 2017 by Sam S-P

There’s such fine, detailed character work here and such a limited pool of performers and locations that you can imagine GERALD’S GAME working as well on stage as it does on film. Sooner or later, one of the usual Stephen King backstories for a female character comes to define her, but Carla Gugino still gives a heart-rending and nuanced turn as the captive Jessie nonetheless. Bruce Greenwood, as the stubbornly talkative dead husband Gerald manages to be deplorable and mocking but stops short of being a monster (that is saved for a player who arrives late in the game, to mixed success). Mike Flanagan is rapidly becoming my favourite director of suspense films, and he seems to be a real actor’s filmmaker, encouraging great performances from his cast and with a devious eye for nasty (and I mean nasty) visuals. Put Gerald’s Game on this Halloween for a sweaty-palmed ride with real jeopardy and jolts of leftfield weirdness. SSP

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Review: Death Note (2017)

Posted on October 24, 2017 by Sam S-P

DEATH NOTE isn’t very good. That’s not to say the premise isn’t clever, or the original Japanese source material not worth your attention, but Adam Wingard’s American film adaptation agonisingly squanders potential at every turn. This upsets me, because I usually like Wingard’s work. The characters are all detestable, the actors’ performances jarringly strange (and I’m not even talking about the murder demon voiced by Willem Dafoe) and the plotting makes it feels like you’re turning over at least two script pages at a time. Even the more fun and out-there elements (orphans trained to be super-detectives, the power to kill anyone in any way with a thought) that could have made this a cult curiosity are presented completely straight-faced and without any self-awareness. The film admittedly looks good, with time and care taken with lighting, cinematography and special effects, but you just can’t care about what happens to anyone in this story. SSP

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Review: The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

Posted on October 19, 2017 by Sam S-P

THE EDGE OF SEVENTEEN is an absolute delight. This is a really funny, sweet, real movie. Of course thirteen year-old Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) curses God for her uncanny resemblance to “Vote for Pedro” as she hits puberty. As she hits seventeen, she is gawkily charming, but she can be insufferable as well – in the grand scheme of things, her issues (best friend going out with brother) aren’t all that bad. As said brother (Blake Jenner) so succinctly puts it, “Please rise above yourself Nadine”. This scenario probably packs more of a punch if you have siblings you  love-hate, but I think everyone knows (or is) a Nadine. As real as Kelly Fremon Craig’s script rings, it is this wonderful cast, especially Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson and Woody Harrelson that really sell it by playing compelling and flawed human beings. SSP

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Review in Brief: Loving (2016)

Posted on October 17, 2017 by Sam S-P

LOVING is glacial in pacing, almost apologetically low-key and the thick-as-treacle accents can be just as tricky to translate as in writer-director Jeff Nichols’ other work. The two grounded performances at its heart (career bests from both Joel Edgerton and Ruth Nega) give it real dramatic heft and the power of the real story make it completely captivating. Why is this Civil Rights injustice an obscure chapter in American history? The quest of the Lovings to be recognised as a legitimate married couple in their home state should be as well-known and revered as the Bus Boycott and Brown vs Board of Education. This story clearly really affected Nichols on a personal level, and Loving feels like his most personal film to date. Sometimes all you need is to let a true story breathe and speak for itself unencumbered and talented performers to tell it; no bells and whistles required. SSP

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Review: Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Posted on October 14, 2017 by Sam S-P
2049

Madame Tussauds has nothing on this: 6:14 Entertainment/Alcon Entertainment

Good things come to those who wait. Sometimes they’re really good. BLADE RUNNER 2049 not only builds on the world created by Philip K Dick and visualised by Ridley Scott, but it takes the ideas behind both much further and also manages to leave a mark all its own.

A lot has happened since Deckard (Harrison Ford) hunted down four rogue replicants and fled for a better life. Three decades on, replicant production has been perfected, the artificial humans made to follow orders and live their lives as second-class citizens. When a routine job for Blade Runner K (Ryan Gosling) uncovers some evidence with earth-shattering implications, K goes looking for Deckard, and for answers.

If Ridley Scott’s film was chiefly about androids searching for a soul, 2049 is about artificial beings owning their memories. If you’ve lived a life and your memories guide your actions, are they not your own, even if they were once artificially implanted? There’s some real soul-searching and strokey-beardy philosophising behind this question.

2049 goes one step further along from asking, “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” Holograms may have feelings in this world as well, and here they’re not even arrogant prigs like RED DWARF’s Arnold J Rimmer. The future world depicted seems to operate on a caste system, with the surviving humans at the top, the new more obedient replicants below the middle and holograms right at the bottom of the pile.

Replicants are now public, they have ghettoised communities and are allowed to hold down jobs as long as they can handle prejudicial behaviour targeted at them. 2049 explores the original’s issues from alternative angles only possible now a good chunk of time has passed. The group we focussed on in BLADE RUNNER were just criminals on the run, we’ve never before seen replicants just living, making ends meet as prostitutes, farmers, and even in a limited capacity sanctioned by the people in power.

There is a scene in 2049 that is so low-key, even unremarkable, you might not even realise how crucial it is. There’s really only been one debate about Blade Runner, and here they strive to keep you guessing, or at the very least suggest that in the grand scheme of things the answer isn’t that important. That conversation does happen in a roundabout way, but it is what happens around it and the themes that feed the wider story that settles, re-starts and then fuels the debate to rage on anew.

It’s not all about you. I loved the middle finger they flip to the classic “chosen one” storyline here, and the big moments of pathos are sold by Gosling like a champ. Elsewhere, Ford continues his run of (Indy aside) successfully returning to, refining and maturing his best-known star turns and Ana de Armas’ hologram Joi grows far beyond the stay-at-home girl she is satirising. I don’t really want to say any more about the performances lest it leads to spoilers, but I will say that Sylvia Hoeks’ new replicant heavy-hitter Luv is a hell of a lot scarier than Rutger Hauer in his underpants.

It’s sadly a novelty to have a 2 1/2 hour film that doesn’t just become a punishing, endless action set piece. Villeneuve and his talented team know the power of good pacing, of giving audiences time absorb every facet of this world. Even with all the retro-futuristic design elements, this is a terrifyingly plausible future. The remnants of humanity clinging to the dying husk of Earth subsist on vast protein farms, whole swathes of cities are nuclear wastelands or landfill and a wall that wouldn’t look out of place on GAME OF THRONES is fighting a losing battle against the rising seas.

Roger Deakins is such a good match for this bleak-beautiful world. From the opening plunge from the heavens to an endless expanse of sterile white to the Dante’s Inferno lighting of the irradiated old LA skyline and a should-be-trademarked Deakins fight in silhouette, this is the most striking cinematographer in Hollywood’s most awe-inspiring work since the last time he worked with Villeneuve. See this in IMAX if at all possible, just be prepared for the fact that your eyes will sting and your ears will ring from the shear quantity of audio-visual information to be processed.

Blade Runner 2049 is one of the most thought-provoking science-fiction films of the decade, a thoroughly entertaining mystery-thriller, but in the end at it’s core it’s still a simple and emotionally tactile tale being told. Not only does this do Ridley Scott’s iconic original film justice, but it would make Philip K Dick proud. SSP

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Review in Brief: Life (2017)

Posted on October 12, 2017 by Sam S-P

For what it is (which is essentially THE THING if it was on a space station), LIFE is very watchable. The characters are of the stock variety and you can plainly see what order they are going to die horribly in, but on a technical level the film quite often impresses. The viewer, like the unfortunate crew, is suspended in uneasy zero-G, helplessly hanging directly in front of the shifting, translucent threat that’s about to do something horrible to you . The design of deadly alien life form “Calvin” is pleasingly unconventional, looking and acting more like a jellyfish-Venus fly trap hybrid than a recognisable animal, and you’ve got to give credit to the filmmakers for acknowledging that if we ever do encounter intelligent alien life then we’re pretty screwed. Unique beastie aside, don’t sit down to this expecting anything revolutionary, but as a diverting space-thriller Life is far from lifeless. SSP

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This is not going to go the way you think…

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Sam S-P

Something happened last night (or this morning in the UK). There was a disturbance in the force and millions of voices cried out in jubilation, not to be silenced until December. The first full trailer for STAR WARS: THE LAST JEDI dropped and it was good.

The quote I’ve used as a headline comes from Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) himself, and I think he is speaking on behalf of his director Rian Johnson directly to their audience. Johnson is not known for playing it safe and he and his team will be taking risks. Revelations, shocks and surprises aplenty are on their way.

We see Rey (Daisy Ridley) in training, a haunted Luke seemingly in terrified awe of her skill, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) brooding and apparently gunning for his mother Leia (Carrie Fisher), Finn (John Boyega) settling a score with Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie), Chewbacca sharing his cockpit with an excited porg/space penguin. There’s almost surely some editing trickery in the succession of images and soundbites from longer conversations presented without context. Everything is still guess work at this point, and that’s how I like it.

Here’s how I think things could go down, my best guesses in no particular order:

By the end of the film Rey and Ren will have either switched places, or Luke will have fallen fully to the Dark Side. The light/dark balance will be maintained but the shape of it will have changed. Luke will be in hiding not out of shame at his failure, but because he has committed some truly horrific act. Maybe when he saw Ren luring the other apprentices down a dark path, he took it on himself to put them down (“the raw strength” he now fears could have been his own). Luke will be a changed man, he will be morally compromised, he will be on the precipice of a final, decisive fall. I still think Snoke (Andy Serkis) is far less than he seems, something in the realm of THE WIZARD OF OZ, though he does seem to be using a force power to torture Rey at the close of the trailer (again, this could be clever editing). As for Rey, they’re keeping the issue of her parentage firmly under wraps for now, but it seems like her journey ahead will be far more important than where she came from.

I might be completely wrong about all that, and there are plenty of interesting directions they could go, but I’m very much looking forward to finding out. I might try and avoid any future trailers for the film lest something is spoiled. I’m just going to breathe and trust in Rian Johnson. SSP

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Review in Brief: Hidden Figures (2016)

Posted on October 10, 2017 by Sam S-P

HIDDEN FIGURES is a gentle take on a crucial story. Why do more people not know the names Katherine Goble Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson? All three were key figures in the Space Race and remarkable, nigh-on-miraculous in their achievements for the time they were working in as black women. The last part of that sentence answered that question, but it’s well past the time for that to change. Though the depicted prejudice the trio face isn’t aggressive, in a lot of ways the passive-agressive segregated work environment and condescending treatment of brilliant women comes off as more offensive, more malicious. Comparisons with THE RIGHT STUFF are generally avoided despite covering many of the same events simply by exploring them from a different, even more compelling angle, and this faultless cast (especially Taraji P Henson as Johnson) makes you forgive certain dramatic license when the story being told is this inspiring. SSP

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Review: Mother! (2017)

Posted on October 8, 2017 by Sam S-P
mother

Oh you mother…: Protozoa Pictures

I like Darren Aronofsky’s new film MOTHER! I think. Or do I? It’s one that I’m going backwards and forwards on the more I think about it. It’s certainly unique, unequivocally its own thing. That could describe the greater part of Aronofsky’s career, really.

A idyllic lives of a woman and her poet husband (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem) take increasingly bizarre and destructive turns as strangers arrive unannounced at their house. A doctor and his wife (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) are just the first in an unstoppable tide, and before long their dream home environment becomes a living nightmare.

To derive meaning from this, you’ve got to decide what the space these characters inhabit represents for you. I settled on a meaning quite early on, but I found it harder to make it stick as the plot (probably the wrong word for the passage of time and events here) progresses. There are so many different takes you could have on the bewildering series of sights and sounds that envelop us. Personally I find my own my take on what is going on and what it all means made more of a connection with me than when Aronofky’s intended meaning is made explicit in the closing moments of the film, but everyone’s experience will likely be very different.

There really isn’t much point describing what does or doesn’t happen outside the bare-bones synopsis, but suffice to say something invades this film’s universe. Whether disease, addiction, madness, sin, faith, a dangerous idea, this something slowly but steadily corrupts and eventually it completely takes over the world that Lawrence and Bardem’s characters inhabit.

Aronofsky returns to most of his favourite themes somewhere along the way. Our perception of time is elusive and cyclical, love is also elusive and cyclical, faith influences everything and nothing in our lives, physical forms are broken and reshaped…

Lawrence is at the epicentre of the singularity, always the focus, and always sublime. She’s put through a lot here and is given nowhere to hide, with Matthew Libatique’s camera more often than not inches from her face. Just as a hoarde of strangers invade her space, we the viewer feel guilty for doing the same with the actor. The other film Mother! reminded me most of was Lars von Trier’s MELANCHOLIA, in that the female lead is broken down to her very essence by the weird goings on around her, and in both the viewer is made uncomfortably complicit in watching what she is put through. Everyone else in the cast plays it so (intentionally) odd that it’s difficult to comment on their acting.

You’ve heard of comedies of absurdity, but Mother! is a horror-thriller of absurdity. Just when you think things have gone as far as they possibly can, something is pushed further, you are subject to a new, sickening experience. If you’re prone to any kind of social anxiety, then this film is your worst nightmare. I thought REQUIEM FOR A DREAM was full-on, but it’s nothing compared to this. If Requiem knocks you off your feet to crash painfully to the ground the Mother! hits you with a freight train while you’re down there.

The Oscar sound categories this year surely have to be between DUNKIRK and Mother! They both play with sound, amplifying and distorting, jarring and enrichening their world.  Both films prove how important an element of filmmaking sound design is. Mother! is a hyper-sensory experience; as well as aesthetically and sonically bludgeoning the audience, something in the makeup of this queasily fascinating concoction makes you smell the paint, polish and blood, feel the woodgrain. It’s textural. Added to this the ingenious use of space, the impossible, ridiculous house that seems to morph, expand and contract as the lead character’s body and mind is out through the wringer, and you’re utterly enveloped in oddity.

Mother! is going to drive some people mad. It’ll make them absolutely livid. For some directors (Aronofsky, Nicolas Winding-Refn, von Trier), that’s what they set out to do, to provoke a reaction. It’s so ambiguous, so odd and so unlike any other 2017 release that this could be the year’s most argued about film. I’ve got my take(s) on it, have you got yours? SSP

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