Look at that poster ^^ (there's a bigger version here, if you like). It may seem quite functional, but on a technical level it's far better than it first appears. Across the lower section of the poster, just above the title, are the words "Inspired by a true story of real life heroes". The legend takes up approximately 0.5% of visual real-estate, states its case clearly, but barely attempts to conceal the background image of 52,000 tonnes of steel which is exploding and on fire. And if there's ever been a movie poster which so accurately summarises its product, I've yet to see it.
Much like Peter Berg's previous true-story thriller starring Mark Wahlberg, Peter Berg's latest true-story thriller starring Mark Wahlberg isn't inherently a Bad Film™ in itself. It just feels massively inappropriate given how recently the events in it took place and adds nothing to the tale above the needless pomp and glamorisation of a bonafide disaster. The first hour consists of the cast pointing at everything on the titular oil exploration-rig and saying "well that's an accident waiting to happen!", then the second hour consists of everything being on fire. Some people get off the rig, some people don't, that's about it. If this was a Roland Emmerich movie it might be a more forgivable state of affairs; the overall mawkishness is a given, but Berg's film feels borderline exploitative.
It's hard to know who's patronised more here, the cinema audience or the actual fatalities of the actual disaster who are reduced to a five-second photograph and name-caption before the closing credits roll (not that their screen-counterparts have any dialogue or constructive part to play). Central and supporting performances are solid enough for a middle-of-the-road Sunday night DVD*1, but Deepwater Horizon is anchored by a pedestrian screenplay that does no-one any favours, on or off-screen. The harder the film tries to remind you of its factual connections, the more gauche the whole thing seems.
And if you think all of this sounds like a very cynical attitude, I'll remind you that I'm not the one who looked at one of the worst industrial/environmental disasters in history, then turned it into what is essentially an action-movie starring Will Ferrell's straight-man*2.
If a studio really wanted to to celebrate the heroes and honour the victims of Deepwater Horizon, a documentary would have been a more appropriate vehicle...
*2 Yes, the actor who wouldn't be allowed on an actual oil-rig because he's so wooden he's been classed as a fire-hazard. The actor who somehow managed to make 40-ft high robot beating the crap out of each other appear boring. The actor whose most well-received role was arguably opposite a swearing, farting, animated bear. I can't pretend this didn't colour my view of the movie from the first time I saw the trailer…
*3 Oh, and while I'm on, that BP-exec's tie isn't "magenta" as mumbled by Kurt Russell in an early scene, it's fucking purple. Magenta is magenta. The tie is purple. This point is especially underlined later when we see the magenta-alert onboard the oil-rig, and it's shown to be fucking magenta. Not fucking purple. And considering this is mentioned because 'the guys on the rig are superstitious', presumably that level of supernatural caution doesn't extend so far as not working with a shitload of malfunctioning equipment and wearing their ear-defenders sporadically and/or incorrectly? And this footnote doesn't even tie up with a * in the main review. It just needed saying. On the plus side, I'm fairly certain the broadcast-restrictions on oil-rigs are still in place, so at least the people most likely to be enraged by the film are statistically less likely to see it…
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.
It's a well-established fact that I'm not a particular fan of the classic-model Western™. It's a lesser-known, but concurrent, fact that I watched the 1960 version of The Magnificent Seven a few years back and didn't particularly enjoy it (see fact #1). So going to see a re-tooling of a movie I wasn't arsed about in the first place did not fill me with rootin'-tootin' joy.
And Antoine Fuqua's 2016 reboot begins on unsure footing as the marauding bandits of previous iterations are replaced by a greedy, capitalist gold-mining baron intent on buying up frontier outpost Rose Creek for a pittance and slaughtering anyone who objects, causing the Equity-cards of all concerned to be bent just shy of breaking-point as the live-action pantomime unfurls. Bad Man Wearing Black Is Bad, etc. Luckily (thankfully), the film then slows down as the town's ever resilient Haley Bennett recruits bounty hunter Denzel Washington*1 to help the good folk see off the corporate-menace. Obviously Denz can't do this alone, so he rides around for about an hour picking up Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Byung-hun Lee, Vincent D'onofrio, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Martin Sensmeier to assist him.
Now, this was my bugbear with the John Sturges version of the movie. Despite a respectable two-hour running time, the Seven themselves are never fully painted in; and if the eponymous heroes themselves are placeholders then what does it matter what they're fighting for? With only an extra eight minutes in the bank, Fuqua's 2016 version manages to explain the setup (okay, heavy-handedly), then introduce seven other characters to the point where we don't necessarily know them, but we do like them. Ergo, the battle for Rose Creek matters. More to the point, it's also bloody good fun into the bargain.
The principal cast of Washington, Pratt and Hawke aren't stretching themselves particularly here, but they're giving it their all in being entertaining characters. Funny in some places, self-deprecating in others, and committed to whatever the screenplay has in mind for them. Of particular note are Semsmeier, Rulfo, Lee and the fantastic Vincent D'onofrio in being way more than the bit-part players many other films would have featured. Although I'm more than a bit disappointed that Haley Bennett's role didn't expand the way the film seemed to suggest it would, but that's a grumble for another post*2.
The Magnificent Seven looks and sounds fantastic, and is performed with all-round gusto. Although behind it all, there's always the feeling that this is a love-letter to everything about Western movies, rather than being an actual Western™ itself. An action movie with cowboy-hats, if you will. Although I'm reliably informed by Mrs Blackout that that's exactly what a good Western should be, anyway…
Tonally, it borders on Guardians of the Galaxy (and not just because of Chris Pratt's involvement). But you'll watch it because you enjoyed the 1960 version, obviously.
For the cinematography, yes.
Everything else will be just fine from your sofa.
It does.
It's not.
I won't.
There isn't.
And given that the film's features arrows being fired and has people falling off horses from arsehole to breakfast-time, there really is no excuse for its non-inclusion.
Level 2: Loads of direct links in the behind-the-scenes folks, but let's go for Byung-hun Lee, who appeared in Red 2, as did Garrick 'Biggs' Hagon.
*3
*1 I'm not going to bother with character names for this review. The film barely bothers with them and you never forget that you're watching Washington, Pratt and Hawke, anyway. I mean, the characters get names, but they're so inconsequential as to be meaningless.
*2 I won't go into potenially spoilery spoiler-stuff here, but talk to me about it on The Twitter or The Facebook.
*3 Yeah, as much as I enjoyed the film, I'm deducting a point for the marketing department's visual plagiarism:
…talk about having so little faith in your own product that you have to ride on Tarantino's coat-tails.
"Oh Terry, we need to promote a western but I don't want any earth-tones in the poster, everyone uses those. Come up with something, would you?" That poster still boils my piss even after seeing the film, because Magnificent Seven and Hateful Eight are about a thousand miles apart, tonally. To suggest otherwise is either foolhardy or fraudulent.
Also, This is why I don't work in marketing.
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.
Oh, it's that kind of Zombie-flick, I see. When it's not poking adoring-fun at the genre*1, British cinema has a tendency not only to slightly over-egg the claustrophobia in a living-dead scenario, but also to avoid using the Z-word altogether (which can easily come off as a sort of snobbishness). Y'see, for all the BFI funding, arty posters, delicate cinematography and complete lack of the aforementioned word in the script, The Girl With All The Gifts*2 is a zombie movie. And is all the better for that.
Not wanting to jump right onto the pre-established bandwagon, the infection-vehicle in this movie is a fungus which infects the brain leading to an almost complete shut-down other than ravenous hunger for anything which is alive and uninfected. But it's still spread by bites, blood and bogeys though, and the end result is the same: shambling in stand-by mode, feral and desperate when they get a whiff of fresh meat, and anything other than a heat-shot will only slow them down. The film takes place after the initial plague of society-rending infection has occurred, with the remains of humanity hiding in bunkers frantically searching for a cure. A potential avenue seems to be a generation of children born after the outbreak, who exhibit the uncontrollable craving for human flesh when they're within nose-shot of it, but appear normal in all other situations. By applying blocker gel to mask their scent, a research team tests and educates one particular group in a fortified military base outside of London, keeping them in borderline barbaric conditions (it's not the fact that they're secured in wheelchairs during lessons which evokes notes of Guantanamo, but that they're forced to wear Crocs). When the undead hordes breach the base's defences, a small group of survivors treks toward the capital in search of civilisation, reinforcement and hope…
From the outset, the film waves its symbolism-flag proudly (if slightly heavy-handedly). Mike Carey has adapted his own novel for the screen, which is always preferable, but some of the story's more delicate points feel hammered home a little, especially in the third act. Sennia Nanua is great as Melanie, the eponymous Girl, while Paddy Considine and Gemma Arterton walk a delicate line between dour-drama and camp-action-movie. But it's Glenn Close who gets to do most of the heavy-lifting in delivering exposition to the audience (her role as the chief scientist researching a vaccine makes this natural at first, but by act-three you know that every time she opens her mouth it's so that the film doesn't have to show something).
In fact, from the cast to the cinematography, to the percussive score and to Colm McCarthy's tense direction, everyone seems very committed to the project. You just get the feeling they were shooting a slightly better film than the one that came out of the editing suite, somehow. I can't work out if the story runs out of steam or just paints itself into a corner. More details are crammed into the life-cycle of the virus, but at a time when we're more concerned with the characters. By the time we reach the crescendo, all the foreshadowed circles are closed neatly enough, but the film is running rigidly on its rails. Never clichéd exactly, but there are fewer surprises in the screenplay the further along it goes, and the conclusion feels far less convincing than the premise*3.
If The Girl With All The Gifts film had kept to the symbolic and philosophical path, I think I'd have enjoyed it more. The film is a valiant effort as it stands, but seems to be happy being a a slightly run-of-the-mill apocalyptic thriller when it could be so much more…
The film's closest spiritual relative is probably 28 Days Later, although there are splashes of Dog Soldiers and even Never Let Me Go in there, too.
For the immersiveness of the cinematography, maybe, but you won't lose too much by watching this at home.
I think it probably does; but the question is, is that enough?.
Probably not best but solid, certainly.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 1: Daniel Eghan. He plays a soldier in this movie, and he's due to appear in Rogue One this December as a militiaman. Me neither, I'm afraid. Sorry Daniel.
Obviously I only know this from IMDB. That's how I research most of these, but when you get an extra and/or bit-part actor, it really underlines it, I know. Anyway, it's still more satisfying than the Level 2 connection of Glenn Close appearing in Guardians Of The Galaxy alongside Peter 'voice-of-Maul' Serafinowicz. Level 1s are just better, trust me.
2 And can I be among the first to say how nice it is to see that The Girl has ended her dangerous pursuits of Playing With Fire and Kicking Hornets Nests, and is now doing nothing more dangerous than coming home after a long afternoon's Christmas shopping…
…and while you may well groan and place bets on that joke being recycled from Twitter, it was nevertheless recycled from my own Twitter-feed, at least.
I thank you.
*3SPOILERY questions for those of you who've seen the film (highlight-to-read):
1)While it's a ghoulish picture that Caldwell paints about the second-gen zombies 'eating their way out' of their mothers, how would foetuses be able to do that when babies don't start teething until about three months after they're born? Plus it'd take them ages to get out of there, how would they breathe once the host is dead and all circulation of blood and amniotic fluid has stopped? Hey, don't look at me, I'm not the one who decided to throw biology into the screenplay... 2)Not withstanding that the pack of feral children seem to have learned to feed, walk and generally support themselves with precisely no outside guidance (a newborn cub will die on its own, instincts or not), surely by the time they're herded together to start learning as the credits roll, all the behavioural bad-habits are burned-in? The kids in the research centre had been 'rescued' at a younger age and raised more like regular humans; this lot are rolling around the floor in their own shit…
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.
After watching Kubo and the Two Strings for the first time on Saturday and being thoroughly overwhelmed by it, I wrote up a gushing love-letter masquerading as a review and set about reading some of the others online (after planning this second visit, of course). Other than similar levels of admiration for the film, what put an even wider grin on my face was that almost every piece I read went out of its way to directly reference the film's opening monologue. So clearly and powerfully is it delivered, grabbing the audience's attention and setting up the kaleidoscopic framework of the storytelling, that the words "If you must blink, do it now..." will surely become round-table shorthand for penning an excellent script. And much like The Book of Life, the film handles spirituality, faith and tradition in a respectful but totally non-dogmatic and non-patronising way. This film is outstanding.
Another thing which cropped up, albeit less frequently, was debate of the film's PG certificate in the UK. The BBFC (the UK's film certification body, similar to the MPAA in the US)'s guidelines state that "frightening sequences or situations where characters are in danger should not be prolonged or intense. Fantasy settings may be a mitigating factor. Violence will usually be mild. However there may be moderate violence, without detail, if justified by its context (for example, history, comedy or fantasy)". Short version: this should be fine, but obviously don't just park your kids in front of it while you go to Wetherspoons, yeah?
Now at no point did the reviews necessarily suggest that the rating for Kubo should be at the next level up, a 12A (even if one article specifically claimed the film is really an animation for grown-up audiences only), but several of them were worried that the darker moments would be too scary for younger members of the audience. And I got the distinct impression they didn't mean three-and-four year olds, but children in general. To which I call bullshit, frankly.
Yes, Kubo has scary sections. They're supposed to be scary. The level of threat is no worse than in many of Disney's classic animated features (and keep in mind that while the likes of Cruella de Vil can indeed exist in the world outside the cinema, the threats in this film are framed in a magical enough context that no child should be worried for long about them actually happening). Because of the story's metaphorical nature, young Kubo faces literal ghosts and demons here, and although our hero possesses the ability to perform magic, it can't be used as a weapon for attack and he doesn't wield it as one.
And it's important that Kubo's foes are supernaturally powerful, because that way he won't be able to beat them with conventional violence, even with the magic armour he quests for- the film's macguffin, in a very real sense, since Kubo already carries with him the means of ending the conflict. It's also vital that the hero learns this on his own, rather than just being told it by the Monkey and Beetle guardians (who also learn this through Kubo's actions).
Naturally there will be a cut-off point at which children are too young get what's going on (this applies to any movie), but if they're old enough to understand why the hero is in peril, they they're old enough to learn from the film. The scary moments in Kubo are more than compensated for by the film's message, indeed they're part of it. Some media will require a parent to sit down with their child afterwards to talk about what they've seen, read or listened to. It doesn't mean that's bad content, often the very opposite. I believe that discussion is called parenting*1. But hey, you know your kids.
The 'G' in PG stands for guidance, not gatekeeper...
If the film isn't scary then there's no weight to the story and we're not willing Kubo to succeed. Because the lesson here isn't to be fearful, but that fear can be overcome with knowledge, with persistence, with acceptance. Kubo doesn't defeat his nemesis with violence, he does it with compassion. And not in a 'I've decided to spare my enemy at the last moment and hey we're all friends now' sort of a way, but a clean slate that benefits everyone, with no aggrandisement of the victor or shame upon the loser. There are no losers, here.
Kubo and the Two Strings teaches us that while there's certainly a time to stand fiercely against the things which oppose you, a warrior's greatest weapon isn't their sword, but their heart. And you're never too young to learn that lesson...
Any of Laika's previous work, and maybe a little Samurai Jack?.
Yes.
Absolutely.
I'd say so.
Well, I shall look sternly over my spectacles whilst you explain yourself, I imagine.
There ain't.
Level 1: This film's got George Takei's voice in it, and he is most famous of course for portraying the Nemoidian shrubbery-menace Lok Durd in The Clone Wars.
*1 Although I say this as someone who doesn't have children. But I did used to be one, and it wasn't that long ago...
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.
*3
