This wasn't made for me. I say that about an increasing number of films of course, but probably best to get it out of the way now. I knew this wasn't made for me long before I sat down in screen 1 of course. But when I found myself the youngest person in the auditorium, watching the flag-waving trailer for Dambusters 75 and Diane Keaton sliding towards being offered gigs doing life-insurance adverts, it was a done deal.
So imagine my utter delight*1 at the first scene of Mike Newell's The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society, beginning on the island during occupation in the Second World War, where the drunk Tom Courtenay character vomits onto the boots of a German officer while my surrounding audience chortled heartily. The film's very first gag (no pun intended) bears all the hallmarks of Brexit: The Movie, a simplified, rose-tinted, fictionalised*2 version of history that few involved are old enough to remember at all*3. And so it plays for the entirety of the first act and well into the second.
After this opening we jump to 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the war. Lily James plays Juliet Ashton, a london-based writer travelling to a fishing village on Guernsey after hearing about a secretive book-club used to keep up morale during the occupation. Once there, she finds that not all of the inhabitants are ready to be open about those years, and that the cobbled streets hold darker secrets. Meanwhile, Juliet begins to fall for the man who initially wrote to her about the Society, after finding her name in a book she once owned. Everything's slightly sepia-tinted and there's a piano and light-orchestral score. You get the picture.
Credit where it's due, Lily James leads the ensemble cast well, gives the clunky script her absolute best and is always a pleasure to watch (even if she's essentially reprising her role from Darkest Hour). However, Lily's frequently required to walk around muttering to herself and to read everything aloud, so certain is the director that the audience needs to be spoon-fed whatever remains of any subtext. Meanwhile, Katherine Parkinson seems to have been given the script from another film. Again, she's always fun to be around but her boozy, spiritualist character becomes more disparate from the setting as the run-time increases. Penelope Wilton is turned up to 10 for the duration, her wild-eyed mistrust of anyone from the mainland sure to be a hit with island communities everywhere, and Matthew Goode appears to be playing a role which has been written specifically for Jeremy Irons.
Despite the wardrobe department and set-dresser's best efforts, none of what we see feels like it's happening in 1946, but in a modern-day facsimile. The shadow of this artifice is always in-shot, with the performances spirited but ultimately a bit pantomime. There is a decent story buried beneath the layers of smugness and sanitised post-war defiance and denial, though. The strand about Jessica Brown Findlay's Elizabeth, her affair with an occupying soldier and the child they had deserves its own movie, quite honestly, suggesting that if this one took itself a bit more seriously it would have much more to offer.
The main problem (ie not just me saying "I didn't enjoy this") is that the screenplay is never quite sure which plate it should be spinning. You can have the story about how books can bring people together and inspire during dark times, you can have the story about the islander who fell in love with an enemy soldier and how their relationship was doomed from the start, or you can have the story about the wide-eyed outsider who goes off to a close-knit community and falls in love with the pig farmer*4. But choose one. The gear-change between each strand is jarring as it effectively becomes a different film each time.
Despite moments of demonstrable heart, this is nowhere near the movie it could be. 30% charming, 70% infuriating. I never thought I'd write these words, but in the hands of Richard Curtis, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society could have been quite wonderful. But it wasn't, and it isn't.
Behind the closing credits we get an audio-track of the cast reading passages from famous novels, an attempt to remind the audience that the story was about books and convince them that they've watched something well-written.
Best bit: The start of the movie where the fledgling book-club all bond together by getting pissed on homemade gin and killing a pig.
*2 There's absolutely nothing wrong with historical fiction, of course. Most movies of this ilk can't wait to get the 'based on true events' card onto the screen, but not here. The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society is adapted from a bestselling novel, which is to say, it is made-up. And while that doesn't necessarily preclude the themes of the work being based in reality, this particular film is so far removed from the reference section that it wasn't even filmed on Guernsey. And watching the tourist board trying to spin that one is, quite frankly, fucking hilarious. [ BACK ]
*3 Although unlike Brexit, this movie has the bonus of at least being an optional pursuit.
Yeah, bit of politics there. Beiß mich. [ BACK ]
*4 With Juliet being a struggling writer, the script builds to a moment in the third act where she finds herself newly-single and back home from the island, when the inspiration finally strikes home for her to write her masterpiece (in montage-form, naturally). While she does this primarily for her own satisfaction, it's nonetheless well-received by the island natives she's grown fond of, in particular the one who still holds her heart. And it's at that point that I wished I'd just watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall instead... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
Beast Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Michael Pearce / Trailer
Ah, this is what the Spring months are about. Creeping in under the radar, between the awards-botherers of January and the superhero spandex which will come out of the wardrobe for May, are the smaller more interesting flicks that many moviegoers will miss*1. We've had monsters, psychopaths and ghosts, so the idea of a claustrophobic murder mystery set in suburban Jersey fits right in...
Writer/director's Michael Pearce's Beast is just that. Following Moll (Jessie Buckley), an introverted young woman living on the island with her domineering mother (Geraldine James) and a father in the early stages of Alzheimer's (Tim Woodward), we see her meeting and falling in love with a local handyman and poacher, Pascal (Johnny Flynn). A spate of abductions and murders of young girls has the islanders on-edge, and while nobody dares to point the finger directly at Pascal, he does have a chequered history. Moll, still struggling to come to terms with events in her own past, is torn between the guilt of a family life which is suffocating her, and freedom with a man she knows no-one will trust.
The first thing which hits you about Beast is that it's quite televisual, in a sort of Sunday night, 10pm sort of a way. But you also know that if it had premiered on television, you'd be wondering why it wasn't on at the cinema. The photography here is gorgeous, capturing the vibrant, bleak and poetic landscape in the same way as it does with its cast. From her very first scene, Jessie Buckley's Moll is both unstable and haunting, almost matched by Johnny Flynn in a role which brings to mind a younger, more suave, but still thoroughly unhinged Sean Harris. And while we're on the cast, Geraldine James is also every bit as terrifying as her part requires. Sympathetic characters are thin on the ground, here.
Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun captures a weird, timeless quality on the island, assisted by Jim Williams lingering score. The interior settings often look to be of the late 1970s, but not in a pastiche, Life On Mars sort of way. This just looks like a community which has become left behind without any of the residents noticing. And while there's nothing specifically setting the events in any fixed timeline, the TV reports and news-crews (and the police's use of digital voice recorders) seem to place this in the 21st century, yet we don't see a single mobile phone for the duration.
While the film drops certain clues and easter eggs with regards to the characters' pasts, Pearce doesn't spend too much time tying everything together. Ultimately, this is about shame, remorse, unresolved psychological issues and abusive relationships. It just happens to have a murder-case at the centre of it all.
To say more would be to unpick the plot, and this is really a character-piece. Beast is worth your time for its performances alone; the landscapes are a bonus...
I suspect this will get a fairly limited release, but if you can, sure.
As enjoyable as it is, this will probably be a streamer. Not a huge amount of rewatch value unless you're in love with the Jersey landscape..
Difficult for me to say, but it's solid work all round.
Doubtful.
There isn't.
Level 1: Battle-of-Scarif Rebel pilot Blue Three is in this.
*1 Certainly if tonight's numbers were anything to go by. As an exclusive Unlimited Screening, the only real commitments members face to attend are travel costs and time itself. And the fact that the recent advance showing of Ready Player One was filled wall-to-wall is an indication that most card-holders will make the journey when it matters to them. I can only imagine that with a title like 'Beast', the occupants of tonight's empty seats either assumed the film was a flat-out horror and hadn't bothered, or they'd watched the trailer and realised it was something altogether more weird. Then hadn't bothered. Hey, I don't mind. While I want my cinema to do well, fewer people in the room means - statistically - less chance of me being annoyed with them. Speaking of which, bonus shout-out to the guy in seat G9 directly behind me, who booted the back of my seat every time he fidgeted. Approximately once a minute for the first half-hour… [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
leaden (adj.)
1. Made of lead.
2. Oppressively heavy; sluggish; lacking spirit or animation.
3. Joe Carnahan's screenplay for the objective-free 2018 remake of Death Wish.
So, is 2018 the best or worst time for a post-modern deconstruction of the fragility of 21st century Western masculinity and gun-control issues? Well, don't you worry about that! Eli Roth has remade Death Wish with Bruce Willis, so troublesome questions will receive all the ponderous scrutiny you'd see from Donald Trump at a salad bar. This film is about as heavyweight as the single sheet of A4 it was pitched on, and every bit as layered...
I imagine we're all vaguely familiar with the plot setup of Death Wish, but here it is anyway: hard working, blue-collar (well, an ER doctor) family man Bruce Willis*1 is out of the house one night when a burglary by some local thugs goes wrong. This leaves his wife dead and daughter hospitalised. Like anyone, Bruce's first reaction is to seek revenge on the escaped perpetrators, because the goddamned cops just can't seem to get the job done. Like anyone in a film, he manages to acquire firearms illegally*2 and begin his gruesome task. There's some shooting, some crying, some more shooting and eventually the same cops let him get away with it because he's a vigilante who is white*3.
But y'know what? This is A Saturday Night Movie and I watched it on a Saturday night*4, so has anyone really been conned?
The central plot-conceit of Willis hunting his family's attackers is at least more of a driving force in this telling*6, but the amount of actual detective work our doctor has to do is kept to a bare minimum, as there are apparently only about twelve criminals in Chicago, so everything falls into his lap in short order. If only the rest of the Death Wish was so efficient.
When the cast aren't discussing exactly what's just happened in the previous scene or what they think is going to occur in the next, they verbalise their feelings and inner monologues, since apparently that's as good as them doing acting. Willis has the look of a man who does not want to be here, and every disinterested grimace brought to mind Kevin Smith's anecdotes about his time on Cop-Out. One suspects that director Eli Roth 'got the moon' on this particular set.
Roth's not that interested in the sleuth work, and he's certainly not in this for the moral ambiguity. Nope, uncle Eli has rocked up for the grudge-match gunfire, but even this is bereft of the unbridled joy he's brought to such endeavours in the past. If this had been Tarantino and two decades earlier, the screenplay might have gotten away with seeming ironic. In 2018 it just feels dated, even (especially) with Memes™ shoehorned in as horrifically as Bastille Day's use of #Hashtags.
When the finale eventually cruises into view, you know the director's been waiting for it every bit as much as he hopes the audience have. As so often in real life, the violence is short, messy and oddly anti-climactic. Maybe that's the real message of the film?
While I'm thankful that Death Wish is nowhere near as grubby as Knock Knock, it's clear that Roth's not trying to make anything unique, here. And since the original film has a further 4 sequels (the last in 1994), you have to wonder what the point is, if there's no new angle being presented.
With Bruce skulking around the back streets in his hoodie, this feels like an unofficial, ramped-up sequel to Unbreakable, which would have been more interesting at least. And if the final scene in Split is anything to go by, it would have been far funnier as well...*7
Things like Homefront.
It's not.
Streaming / £3 DVD, max.
It's not.
That's conceivable.
There isn't.
Level 2: Bruce Willis was in Unbreakable with Sam 'Windu' Jackson.
*1 He has a character-name in this, but I'm not going to use it because it's not important. Bruce Willis has been cast because he looks, sounds and acts like Bruce Willis™. He certainly didn't get the part because he was eager, but we'll get to that... [ BACK ]
*2 Bruce Willis™ is a surgeon in this, you see. A bad man came into the hospital on a trolley and a 3-kilo handgun fell out of his pocket and onto the hard, hospital floor, but it did this silently so that Bruce Willis was able to surreptitiously pick it up without his colleagues or anyone in the corridor seeing him do it. Also, there's a bit in a gun shop where the assistant tells him (practically winking to the camera with both eyes) that passing the minimal safety training for owning a handgun is really easy. This is probably supposed to come off as 21st century satire, but given that everyone in the cinema has come specifically to watch Bruce Willis shoot people in the face, I'm not sure who the butt of the joke is supposed to be. [ BACK ]
*3 Truth be told this aspect isn't even addressed in the film, but I really don't think it needs to be since anyone who watches the news knows how this shit would go down in real life with a white vigilante and a black one. [ BACK ]
*4 A Saturday evening screening of a revenge-shooter attracts an audience which could be described as... how best to put this... 'casual'. Fidgety, chortley*5, and remarkably hungry, the guy next to me had brought his own pretzels. And not in a crinkly-bag, but a fucking foot-long jar. Hey, I'm not the snack police, and while at least he wasn't rustling the wrapper, the upshot was that I had to hear him chewing for most of the movie. Which was still better than a lot of the dialogue. [ BACK ]
*5 And while I'm on, a special shout-out to my fellow patron who exclaimed his appreciation of the script's sardonic jokes in a manner which sounded like a seal operating an air-horn. People with annoying laughs aren't particularly unusual of course, but the same guy had barked through the deapan one-liners in both Ghost StoriesandThoroughbreds that day. Seriously, I know I can't be the only one who goes out for a #FilmDay, but I do that for my own enjoyment, not to inflict my enjoyment back on the auditorium. And yes, a footnote within a footnote. Isn't it, though?[ BACK ]
*6 I mean, let's not lionise the 1974 original movie. Sure, it was 'first', but Michael Winner directs like it's a 1960s TV commercial. [ BACK ]
*7 Which, one assumes, would be right up Seal-Boy's alley... [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
As the third-entry in a recent four movie marathon, Cory Finley's Thoroughbreds was something of a wildcard. The performance-time fitted neatly into my schedule, and I'd seen the trailer once several weeks previously, although I couldn't remember much about it. With this in mind, I felt somewhat unprepared as I sat down in screen 4*1, which is probably why I can't decide if Thoroughbreds is interestingly uneven or completely magnificent.
In an upmarket suburb of Connecticut, troubled high school student Amanda (Olivia Cooke) receives unexpected help with her coursework from the highly-strung but highly intelligent Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy). When Amanda learns that Lily's home-life is even more fraught with tension than her own, the two form a precarious bond and begin to wonder if murder might be a solution…
Well. This felt like hiding in a broom-cupboard during someone else's group therapy session, and if that idea fills you with horror then Thoroughbreds won't be for you. This is very much a performance-piece, bouncing between Olivia Cooke's oddly-detached Amanda and the concealed seething of Anya Taylor-Joy's Lily. Taylor-Joy is dependable as always, although it's great to see her again in a more dramatically-demanding part (cf). Anton Yelchin has a smaller role than the publicity-machine would perhaps suggest (his last, sadly), as low-rent potential assassin Tim, but his presence brings a more human sense of comic-uncertainty (and at times, panic) to the proceedings. He almost feels too likeable for a film which doesn't particularly want to be liked.
Cooke, on the other hand, is the pleasant surprise here. It's not inaccurate to say that I've struggled with her past performances, feeling an emotive disconnect between the actress and the camera. So when Olivia rocks up here as a character with an empathic dissociative disorder, someone incapable of feeling an emotional response to anything, even I can't explain why I suddenly found her to be more relatable than ever*2. Far from being uncomprehending in her responses to people, Amanda reads emotions in others flawlessly, using them to her own advantage with the unclouded logic of someone unencumbered with guilt or even morality. Very much my kind of psychopath*3.
The mechanics of Cory Finley's story are effective, even if any twists in the road are signposted well in advance. But the heart of the film is as morally dysfunctional as its protagonists, not quite willing to endorse their behavioural breakdowns, but not flinching away from showing them anyway.
And cinematographer Lyle Vincent's lengthy 'sofa shot' in the third act, complete with its crawling zoom, is a work of art in itself. Bravo.
Thoroughbreds won't get the exposure it deserves this early in its release, but the natural home of this movie is that unnerving and unexpected surprise on the streaming service of your choice…
To rent/stream, sure. Most people won't get much out of repeat screenings.
Then again, you're not most people, right?
Let's not go mad, but everyone involved can be pleased with what they've made.
I wouldn't have thought so.
There isn't.
Level 2: Anya Taylor-Joy's in this, and she was in The VVitch with Ralph 'Garmuth' Ineson and Kate 'Hux's First Order Monitor Who Apparently Doesn't Have A Character Name Yet' Dickie. Seriously guys, she's got dialogue in The Last Jedi, Garmuth doesn't. Get her a name already…
*1 Although I have it on good authority that this is how many people choose watch movies; just turn up at the cinema and see what's on. This seems like a borderline insane scheduling of free time, but I have to concede that as someone who keeps a blog-assisting spreadsheet, I'm very much at the other end of that particular scale... [ BACK ]
*2 Although I suspect that says more about me as the audience than Cooke as the performer, admittedly... [ BACK ]
*3 Like I said, this admiration reflects upon me, I know. [ BACK ]
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
