Category: Released in 2017

Oh, I am super late with this one. I saw this film as part of the midnight double-bill of Episodes VII and VIII. That was well over a week ago now. I’ve seen it again since then. Now I feel ready to deliver my review. I am ready to get eviscerated by the internet.

The story starts not long after The Force Awakens finishes off. The First Order has found the Resistance base and tries to blast them into oblivion as they try to flee. Meanwhile, Ray is on Luke Skywalker’s beautiful island trying to convince the old Jedi Master to join the fight again.

How do you even review a Star Wars film? The baggage of this franchise is so heavy that people will make petitions to make entries’ canonical status nullified if they don’t like it, or a petition to replace the director with a retired one they despise. Star Wars belongs to all mankind.

So Rian Johnson’s decision to auteur one of these pictures almost like it’s an indie flick is, in my opinion, commendable madness. His flairs of style are all over this movie.

Episode VIII, is the second part in this sequel trilogy. In the traditional screenplay structure, this is the collective “all is lost” moment. So much of the discussion between players is about failure and so many of their actions result in failure. It’s exactly the tone required for a middle part of a trilogy.

As such, the best parts of this whole thing concern the central conflict, i.e the goodies and the baddies.

Ray and Skywalker’s scenes have a haunting brilliance to them. They spend their time on their island having some of the most well-written and truly meaningful dialogue and character-driven sequences in this series.

On the baddie’s side, Kylo Ren is back and proves himself to be, if not the scariest villain in the franchise, certainly the most interesting. He evolves from Vadar clone to something far more revealing of character.

This also has the most interesting directing style in all of Star Wars. It’s not outlandishly stylish, but there are directional choices which you can tell were thought about. It’s like when you see a Spielberg film. It’s subtle most of the time, but these moments of cinematic cool are peppered here and there and make a film nerd like me blush with excitement.

Now onto the stuff I’m not so hot on. The half of the film focussed on the Resistance is not bad, per say. It is simply the connective tissue that is a little weak. Small things could have been changed to iron it all out.

They introduce new characters in this film and, while they do their jobs well, introducing cool new concepts and complexities to the world, I feel it sidelines pre-existing ones a little much. I love Laura Dern, she’s one of the most underrated actresses around (check out anything she does with David Lynch for evidence), but her character, though she is serviceable and has her moments, is superfluous.

Benecio Del Toro appears in a great little role as part of a plotline which allows for some lovely nuance in the canon of Star Wars. However, that line of plot comes and goes in a way that should fill the characters with a sense of true failure by the end. Instead the internal consequences are spread too thin and leave too little impact.

So that’s The Last Jedi. It’s utterly gorgeous. It’s stuffed with too many pointless characters. It’s well-written and original. It’s filled with gratuitous humour. It’s challenging and thought-provoking. It’s structure called for way too many conveniences (just count how many times someone should have been killed in an explosion).

People try to put this into the bad category or the great category. They try to put it into the “heretical to what it means to be Star Wars” box or “breaking new ground” box.

This film, and remember that this comes from a liker of Star Wars and not a lover, is a Star Wars Film.

It’s a little messy, there are things I wish weren’t there, but I can say the same thing about ALL of this weird space opera. I love the things I love in it, I wince at what irritates. I’m still going to be humming the music for the next few weeks.

Recommended Scenario: It’s Star Wars, you’ll watch it anyway.

For once in my philistine life, I read the book first. That is, after watching the bizarre film without which the book would not exist.

The Disaster Artist, based on the autobiographical book of the same name follows Dave Franco as Greg Sestero, a young actor with big dreams who bumps into a strange man called Tommy Wiseau, played by James Franco. Wiseau shares the same dreams ofstardom and so decides to make a movie with his best friend, Greg. That movie was The Room. This is a true story.

The Room materialised in 2003. It starred and was written, produced and directed by Tommy Wiseau. It was a bad film. The incalculable ineptitude of this $6 million drama has captured the hearts of millions around the world. It is the Citizen Kane of bad movies.

 

Just as Citizen Kane had Orson Welles, an eccentric, once in a generation genius whose brain we’d all like to pick, The Room has Tommy Wiseau, a man clearly eccentric, but with a more mysterious and debatable form of genius. Until the release of Greg Sestero’s masterful book The Disaster Artist which chronicles his weird and touching friendship with Tommy, much of the genesis of The Room has remained an enigma.

James Franco, who has stated that he has an artistic kinship with Wiseau, has directed an adaptation of that book that treats him, Sestero and the production with genuine respect.

If the story had been nothing but bizarre behind the scenes antics from Tommy, the film would not be much more than a visual recreation of The Room’s Wikipedia page.

Instead we see the story through the lens of the relationship between Greg and Tommy. The result is way more endearing.

The film is also much more focused on the comedy and lighter aspects of that tale than the book was. The book had these elements, but partly due to literature’s inherit shifts in perspective, there’s a deeper, darker level to Tommy that we get to see and I personally miss when watching the film. I suppose this is the 60% supposed inaccuracy that the real Tommy says the book had. The film he described as being 99% accurate. Take that as you will.

I hate it when a review simply states that the book is better, but in this case I feel that for the purposes of the meta-narrative of The Room and Tommy and Greg and now the Franco brothers who have joined this legend, this film was inevitable and necessary.

The filmmaking in all areas of The Disaster Artist, from the writing to the directing to the acting is excellent in all the ways The Room was not. It even follows the central theme of betrayal and friendship better.

That simple irony, for me, is probably the most beautiful thing to come out of the complicated mess that The Room and its creators were.

I miss some of the darkness that Sestero had mentioned in his book, but as Tommy says now when describing his work that was originally meant to be taken seriously; “It’s a comedy”.

Recommended Scenario: If you’re familiar with The Room. You may still enjoy it, but some of it might go over your head otherwise.

This is it. This is what all those calamitous DC movies were leading up to in their DCEU. A big team-up of the most powerful superheroes in all of fiction. What did this all add up to?

Justice League follows Batman and Wonder Woman’s attempts to bring together a group of “meta-humans” to fight a possibly unstoppable alien force. This team includes the super-speedy Flash, the underwater dude Aquaman and a half-robot called Cyborg.

This genuinely is a piece of cinema history. This Justice League film has been one of the hardest properties in the history of film to get made. The number of false starts and bad decisions along the way beggars belief. How do you make a film about a bunch of demi gods only about 3 or 4 of whom people have heard of?

Then Marvel happened and DC played catch up with some travesties which all did things which ranged from admirable risks to basically summarising what is wrong with modern cinema in just over two and a half hours.

Even when this film was being made there were issues. Focus groups and social media demanded that the script be changed and scenes be reshot to make the tone lighter. Sequels prematurely planned were aborted. People were shocked by the fact that the most likable, marketable and best property under the JL umbrella turned out to be the GIRL of the team.

Then all these issues paled into comparison with the real-life tragedy suffered by director Zach Snyder. Joss Whedon took over his duties, though he is credited as a screenwriter in the film. I’m going to do the common reviewing thing and state upfront that regardless of my feelings on the film, I have nothing but sympathy for Zach Snyder and his family during this horrible time in their lives.

I’ve made movies before and trust me, every one of them felt like a disaster while I was making it. Every film follows murphy’s law. And out of the madness, some beauty can appear.

Did Justice League come out of this series of unfortunate events unscathed?

In a word, no.

The tone is all over the place, you can see where they struggled to cut the length to the point of genuine confusion. Scenes are so totally not in the right order. And overall this is a calamitous mess.

I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it though.

I hope that this is not like when I gave a moderately positive review to Batman vs Superman out of denial the first time I watched it. I really did enjoy some parts of this movie, buried underneath a tonne of nonsense.

Maybe I’ve been fooled by the superficial cool that the film has in spades. Snyder has finally ditched the Instagram filters that made his well composed images look like vomit, in favour of brighter more beautiful colours. Characters are now telling jokes and being more than brooding, boring garbage. It’s still bad, and when put into context with the first three DCEU films it makes no sense, but at least I’m relatively engaged.

Never before have I seen a film try so hard to make up for the sins of previous entries in a franchise. Tired of us forcibly setting up sequels to a franchise you haven’t decided you like yet? We give you only ONE reference to Darkseid! Tired of brooding idiots instead of heroes? We have 90% less brooding! Tired of characters you don’t care about? Two of the new League members you like within minutes of meeting!

Sometimes the sins of the father come to haunt the son, however. The fixes they pull are for errors so inbuilt into what made the previous films so insufferable that it’s actually kind of laughable that they could try to sort them out here.

When Bruce Wayne says “Superman was a beacon”, I nearly burst out laughing. Maybe the Christopher Reeve one, mate, not the guy who LEVELLED THE CITY HE WAS TRYING TO SAVE and MOPED AND DOPED ABOUT INSTEAD OF SAVING PEOPLE! Then he has in one scene the gall, the freaking cheek, to go after Wonder Woman for not doing her bit. Mate, seriously, back off!

One of the most egregious moments of the film I cannot mention due to their spoilery nature. Once you see it you’ll know what I mean.

My favourite element of the film is the League’s balance. As much as the tone shifts every other scene and the editing is a bit odd and the beginning is in the wrong place, every hero feels like they contribute to the team. They all feel instrumental.

Finally I’m actually excited to see where the hodgepodge of the DCEU is going. We finally have a ground on which we can take off into more of these weird films. Wobbly ground, but at least it’s not quicksand made of skulls.

Recommended Scenario: If you can put up with some stupid stuff in order to see the full potential of this project.

As much as it shames me, to the best of my knowledge I have not seen an episode of David Suchet’s version of Poirot. I know, burn me at the stake of classic murder mystery television.

Murder on the Orient Express is the latest adaptation of the eponymous thriller story by Agatha Christie, this time directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring him as Hercules Poirot and pretty much every major star in the world right now as the guests upon the Orient Express. Of course, because Poirot is on the train, during the night, one of the passengers is murdered and it is up to the great Belgian sleuth to discover the culprit.

The trailer for this film got me more excited than I have been for other thrillers recently. It was one of the few times in which I was excited due to the people in front of the camera rather than the people behind.

Penelope Cruz, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench, Olivia Coleman, Josh Gad, Derek Jacobi, Leslie Odom Jr, Michelle Pfeiffer, Daisy Ridley and (doing a performance that can be described as at least trying) Johnny Depp are among the passengers.

Ensemble films I can get behind. The danger though is the possibility that these famous faces might distract from the rest of the film. This fortunately is not as much of an issue as might have happened, due to the relatively balanced nature of the cast of characters. I say relatively as Olivia Coleman, for my money the greatest actress of our age, is woefully underutilised, though she does shine in the few moments she is permitted to do something.

Kenneth Branagh does like to make his films like the theatre from which he was born. The performances he brings out are pretty over-the-top at times and there is a flair for the dramatic in whatever he does. This is not by any means a bad thing. His own acting here is utterly sublime as a new, enormously moustached Poirot that I would love to see more from.

The problem that really bugged me through the beginning of the movie is the tremendous clip at which everything moves. Characters and situations are set up way too fast. Moments don’t get a chance to sink in. There were times when I genuinely couldn’t tell what was happening as the camera swirled around and around.

Once we were on the train, the elements come together and Kenneth becomes a great director again, always finding the right places to place a scene within this tight space and pulling out the best from his cast.

This is a mystery I would be hard-pressed to say people will not enjoy.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a classic mystery with a modern thriller sensibility.

I saw this movie when I was 20 years old. I am now 21. My apologies for the delay.

Loving Vincent is an animated film centred around a young man, a former subject of one of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, discovering details about the great artist’s death and life.

There are times in film criticism where you cannot help but make objective statements. This is one of those moments. The way this film was made is legitimately astonishing.

Every single one of the over 60,000 frames used in the making of this 90-minute film was oil-painted by an army of artists from around the world, trained to emulate the style of Van Gogh. This effort took 5 years and its results are simply mesmerising.

You really must pinch yourself sometimes while watching Loving Vincent. You are literally watching a moving painting and a moving painting that could have been painted by Vincent himself!

It is truly amazing, and I cannot recommend it enough based on the technical prowess alone.

Technical prowess alone is not all that makes a film though, so we have to look at the story.

In the broad strokes, this is a genuinely moving tale of an imperfect man trying to find his way to the heart of a dead and equally imperfect artist. As the film began I genuinely disliked our protagonist for his attitude and for the way the actor portraying him worked.

Yet as we go along with him, his arc made true sense and I am grateful that the writers decided to give this man the flaws he had so we can relate him to the artist whose life he is studying.

In the tighter strokes, I must admit, there are some flaws.

The structure is a little flawed and the dialogue can go from poetic to simply banal. The actors are generally doing a good job, but when we see them in their painted forms, there is a moment where I go “I’ve seen him before”. One could argue that this is true in any film, but it is more pronounced here when you are supposed to believe that this is a world from the mind of the great Dutch artist.

The ending has some problems also. At the very end, like in many films with a true story as its basis, there is an epilogue describing the fates of the characters involved. This comes in the form of a booklet on screen that I had difficulty reading quickly enough to get every detail.

My advice to filmmakers who want to do these epilogues is summation. Let the audience have a chance to pull out their phones on the way home and check out Wikipedia for further information.

You may think I am being harsh to a film that is objectively a marvel, but to not notice the imperfections in the canvas would be a disservice to you.

Recommended Scenario: If you want to see a film quite unlike any other, and can put up with some annoyances.

Blade Runner, the 1982 science-fiction film directed by Ridley Scot, is one of the most perfect while also bizarrely flawed films of the 20^th Century.

The tings it had to do well were, be pretty, be spiritual, be like a noir film and feel authentic. It did that and more, becoming a true cult classic and a movie to point to when you wonder why Sir Ridley still gets work. Not to mention it had Rutger Hauer giving one of the great cinema performances.

I say that it was bizarrely flawed because one has t oadmit certain things have not been nearly as timeless. Its portrayal of women is troublesome, particularly in the relationship between Harrison Ford and the replicant Rachel. Smaller things get to me like the dove in the otherwise perfect “Tears in Rain” scene and Roy Battey’s confusing stigmata earlier on.

No movie is perfet. I still really like the ol’ Blade Runner, it’s a moving cinematic film htat tries for higher things, but I don’t see as pretentious.

CUT TO:

INT. BELMONT FILMHOUSE, ABERDEEN – 35 YEARS LATER

Craig and members of his University Film Society take a seat in Screen 1 and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 plays.

I have been cautiously optimistic for a good while about a sequel to Blade Runner. Ridley Scott’s taking a back seat as Executive Producer, a move I feel was to the film’s advantage. Denis Villeneuve is fresh off of a stream of original hits so he has the street-cred to work on something more ambitious.

Blade Runner 2049 picks up 30 years after the original and follows Ryan Gosling as a new Blade Runner trying to solve a mystery. That’s how far I’m going with a plot summation since so much of this film is spoiler sensitive.

Blade Runner as a franchise, it turns out, is amongst other things about feminism. This sequel does something with this interpretation and uses it to not only make it better, but retroactively improve the original film. I waited a week to review this film so I could come to this conclusion. The underlying misogyny present in both these films is a deliberate commentary on the misogyny itself.

I adore the character of Gosling’s girlfriend. She is a very beautifully rendered hologram. Essays will be written on how her character is not an active participant in the story and is basically Gosling’s property. This was on purpose. A negative is a positive, creating an arc which I have a feeling a third Blade Runner film will complete.

Sorry, I had to start by making that point clear, at least to myself.

Onto the unambiguously positive. Everything else.

To start, Roger Deakins will win an Oscar for Best Cinematography in 2018 as an apology for all the disgraceful times he was denied one. Luckily, this is also some of his finest work. Rare is there a big budget film with such gorgeous photography.

Rare too is a blockbuster with this level of commitment to a difficult to grasp, but awe-inspiring tone and world. Villeneuve knows intellectual sci-fi. This is him taking real chances with a 2017 audience and it pays off.

Ryan Gosling has made a living as an emotionless beefcake and here he is perfect as an android android-killer. The stand-out performance, however, comes from Harrison Ford in a considerably smaller reprise of his character from the first film, Deckard. This may be his best work to date in a long career.

This is an odd time to be alive. Sequesl are really good lately. Blade Runner 2049 is in every “measurable” way better than the original, Denis has done a crazy good job.

However, much like The Godfather the original, despite it being improved somehow by its follow-up, is forever going to occupy a special place in the history of film despite a superior sequel. It is of its very particular time. 2019.

Recommended Scenario: If you love to experience some pretty powerfully executed sci-fi.

If you’re going to have someone be Queen Victoria, it might as well be Judi Dench.

Victoria & Abdul focusses on the unexpected friendship between Queen Victoria and one of her Indian servants in her later years and the problems this caused within the royal court.

I feel like Victoria & Abdul is something of a detox for me. I saw it two days after my, let’s say, experience with mother! so I was in need of something a little light and a little silly.

Enter a charming little film about a royal interacting with a servant. Those are always a load of fun.

There are a few things to like about this movie. Judi Dench is of course made to be Queen Vic, having played her, among many other historical monarchs, before. Her interactions with Abdul, played by Ali Fazal, are quite sweet. She allows him to exuberantly explain his culture while serving her and this change in her life rejuvenates the old Empress.

The whole film is quite sweet and quite funny, if a bit by the numbers.

There are of course the people who don’t understand how a Muslim can be a friend to the Queen. There are of course scenes with some pretty awkward comedy that doesn’t quite work. You might as well be watching a period version of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

I can’t say there’s much wrong with Victoria & Abdul, it just happens to do exactly what it says on the tin and no more. Sorry, this review isn’t quite as mad as my one for mother! but then that’s an entirely different film!

Recommended Scenario: When you want a perfectly safe little film about bridging the gap between two people from very different backgrounds.

This is going to be the easiest and hardest review I’ve ever had to write. I find it difficult to express what this film really is without spoiling it and I find it difficult to recommend it to people because it is one of the most intense cinema experiences I’ve ever gone through. However, I do enjoy gushing over a film I absolutely love!

Let’s start with the basics. mother! is the latest film from confrontational director Darren Aronofsky. It stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a married couple living in an old house in the middle of a field. One night a stranger, played by Ed Harris, comes over and stays the night with them. Then things start to get really weird.

A particular flaw I find in my own way of writing reviews is in my compartmentalisation of the different things that make a movie good or bad. The acting, the writing, the direction etc, and then how they come together to form a whole. This is an efficient, but I find boring way to construct criticism.

I will, therefore, be brief in my appraisal of the different pieces in this whole. The acting across the board is very good. Jennifer Lawrence was brave for taking on this role, but I won’t go so far as to say her performance is mesmerising. The stealer of the acting show is Javier Bardem as he falls deeper into what can either be interpreted as love of humanity or madness. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Aronofsky has always had a controversial streak to him. His films even at their tamest have a furious nature. The camera shakes, the characters framed a bit too close, the disgusting details not hidden. He makes sure that your reaction is fierce in whatever direction. Jared Leto’s arm was black with the effects of his character’s substance abuse at the end of Requiem for a Dream, Noah felt compelled to do God’s will even if it meant killing his grandchild. This director really tries to push your buttons.

Here he constructs a little world which may make up his vision of what it means to be an artist in love or possibly his vision of the Christian God in his acts of creation and love. My friend Ruaridhri and I watched this film and came up with those different, but equally valid interpretations.

I’ve had to try to calm down after watching this film over the past few days. My brain caught fire. My hands were shaking. My throat was bone-dry. Like Roy Batty in Blade Runner “I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe”. The audacity of this movie which apparently took 5 days to write is astounding. This has to be one of the most shocking things I have ever watched.

With that said, it never feels forced. I’ve seen A Serbian Film and I was not shocked by it. That movie was an exercise in the excess of shocking material. mother! shocks with a genuine purpose.

I haven’t even talked about the incredible sound mixing, or the atmosphere of dread that builds so much before the explosion of insanity in the final act.

This movie has shaken up the sand at the bottom of my mind. It’ll take a while for it to fall back.

Recommended Scenario: If you think you can handle some truly horrific, but amazing stuff.

That other Steven something-burg is back in his full-on comfort zone. Comedy crime capers!

Logan Lucky is Steven Soderbergh’s latest offering, following Jimmy Logan, a West Virginian blue-collar worker who, when let go from his job decides to rob Charlotte Motor Speedway with his brother and sister along with an explosives expert and his two brothers.

Soderbergh is one of those artists I’d describe as a chameleon. He always something a little different and interesting and hard to define. Even when he fails you can’t tell me it’s not at least cool to witness.

Here we get a film drastically different from its trailer which demonstrated wacky hijinks and slapstick. While we do get helpings of those elements, we also get a soberly executed heist film. It calls this the Inherent Vice effect. Go back and watch the trailer for Inherent Vice and tell me that was not a misleading piece of advertising.

Ol’ Steve’s audacity has its moments in Logan Lucky. For one thing, he really cuts the fat off the runtime efficiently without ever skimping on the provision of motives or set-up. It tried to do this but ended up confusing me.

By the end of Logan Lucky, I was confused, but that’s par for the course of a good heist film upon first viewing.

Some experimentation really doesn’t pay off, however. Some humour feels a bit forced and the film makes a couple of bizarre tangents which I didn’t get. I think the filmmakers were going for a Coen Bros vibe, but it didn’t gel with the rest of the movie.

Channing Tatum and Adam Driver are the Logan Brothers. They are endlessly charming in their hill-billy smarts.

Seth Macfarlane is surprisingly not that annoying as an idiotic Nascar driver, though his role is kind of odd in the narrative.

The stealer of the show is Daniel Craig as their explosive expert convict. His performance reminds us of the man’s range as an actor, giving us an intimidating redneck you’d forget was British.

I kinda like Logan Lucky. It made me laugh, left me a little confused and reminded me that films are a playground.

Recommended Scenario: If you want a cool heist film and Baby Driver is not available.

Stephen King time folks! That means unrivalled brilliance total insanity or both!

It is an adaptation of King’s novel following a group of kids as they take on a shape-shifting clown who is hungry for their fear and for them.

It is so much better than it had to be. This could so easily have been some watered down 12A garbage to capitalise on the recognisability of it being another telling of that clown horror story.

We have a tonne of jump-scares and there’s a bit of a standard cheap 21^st Century horror feeling sometimes. What really sells it though is the film’s authenticity to what it is.

We get properly DARK, imagery and just because our characters are kids, don’t expect it to be held back. Swearing and violence and blood galore.

The kids are great too. I don’t know how it happened, but this current generation of child actors has produced some real gems.

Our evil clown of the day is <INSERT ACTOR>. While he ain’t no Tim Curry, I do love how creepy he gets. I forget there’s a human present when he’s on-screen, which is exactly what you need.

There are some annoying parts too, however. While I love the creepy imagery, I wish they could have gone just a little bit further into David Lynch territory and not explained as much.

There’s also some really weird quick shifts in tone between horror and 80’s comedy. This isn’t helped by a pace that is way too fast and loose, particularly in the first act. Whole characters go missing for a good half-hour before the film remembers they exist.

The thing that really pissed me off though was the ending. Not to spoil it, but we leave at a “To be continued” as the book is only half-adapted here. That’s not what I dislike really, because it would be cool to come back for part two a few years from now with the same group of actors grown up a bit. I won’t spoil what I really hate about the ending, but it involves a kiss. It really annoys me.

Either way, this is a surprisingly solid horror remake. You might not sleep well afterwards!

Recommended Scenario: Go for a spooky 1980s time!