Greed Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Michael Winterbottom / Trailer
Five days before his 60th birthday, boorish retail magnate Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan) is overseeing preparations for a lavish party on Mykonos. A coterie of minions and hangers-on surrounds him including his mother (Shirley Henderson*1), current partner (Shanina Shaik), ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher), son Finn (Asa Butterfield), PR Manager*2 (Sarah Solemani) and personal assistant Amanda (Dinita Gohil).
Also lurking in the background is Richard's hired biographer Nick (David Mitchell), tasked with chronicling the great man's success story. The problem is that the more people Nick meets, the harder it becomes to write anything nice about his subject...
MISH And what an almighty mess this film is. No, seriously. Greed should, by all accounts, be a story uncovered for the audience by the on-screen author. Instead we just get a mish-mash of everything. He's a writer, so somehow we get talking-head cutaways from a completed mocumentary as well as his own amateurish cam-footage. The film opens on the day of the party before flashing back to five days earlier, then we get more flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks until it becomes unclear who's telling each segment and what the point of it is. The fast cuts are migraine-inducing, even outside of the stylised montage sequences.
As well as the incoherent editing, we get a number of sketched-in subplots. An Oedipus thread with Finn and the building of a plywood amphitheatre are at least fitting for the storyline, as are the Syrian refugees living on the beach next to Richard's party venue. But the constructed-reality show being filmed on the island featuring McCreadie's daughter Lily (Sophie Cookson), other than bumping into the refugee story, feels like it's been dropped in from another movie. When there's A Message to convey, Greed is very on the nose. It also keeps forgetting there's a message.
The film either employs improvised dialogue shot on a first take to increase spontaneity, or Michael Winterbottom is actively directing his cast to talk over each other with no natural end-point to each scene. It is intolerable that this left the editing room.
MONSTER The real shame is that there's a fantastic cast here, all of whom have been much better elsewhere. Even Coogan struggles in a role which feels like it was written for Sacha Baron Cohen. His central figure should be an absolute monster of a man. Clearly - CLEARLY - a composite of around 15% Alan Sugar, 85% Philip Green, McCreadie is a character we already know on an instinctive level before the opening titles have even finished. But for all the bull-headed excess and yelling at subordinates, Coogan plays him pretty much as his own Gareth Cheeseman character from the mid-90s, with a little bit of Del Boy swagger and a few cracks of awkwardness mined from Alan Partridge. IE three comedy characters. Two of whom are his own. No drama.
Coogan forgets to be unlikeable or Winterbottom forgets to direct him as such. Quite possibly both. So when the film's climax comes lumbering into view, what should be a shocking, even sobering, moment instead means... *checks notes* NOTHING. I spent more time wondering where they found the CGI budget than I did empathising with Amanda*3.
PIEAND Because in its final moments, the film suddenly grows a conscience, lecturing its audience with captioned statistics on global inequality and the fashion industry, as if it's taken anything else seriously in the preceding 100 minutes. While there is certainly a point (indeed A Better Film) to be made, this is cack-handed frowning like that time Russell Brand pretended to be outraged that a cleaner doesn't earn the same money as a CEO, despite the two having completely different jobs and responsibilities*4. The whole thing is painfully wearing.
Is Greed a raucously sharp comedy? Is it a thought-provoking satire? Or is is it just an ADHD mood-board, a prolonged elevator pitch thrown together by a sleep-deprived first year film student, the cinematic equivalent of being yelled at for 100 minutes?
Michael Winterbottom doesn't know, so why the hell should we?
I was going to throw on an extra point for the bit with James Blunt because that was good, and then I decided not to because the rest of the movie isn't good enough to have earned that one, brief high-point.
*1 What the fuck accent is Shirley Henderson meant to be doing in this film, though? Anyone? She's normally great. The characters here say she's Irish, but it sounds like the Belfast suburb of Cardiff. Much like Jude Law's verbal wrangling in that submarine movie, I suspect the accent is either a very specific regional twang that she knows intimately from relatives across the water, or she can't do it at all and has opted for Shop Demonstration Mode. [ BACK ]
*2 This isn't me being rude by the way, if I haven't named a character above it's because those aren't recorded on the film's IMDB or Wiki pages. [ BACK ]
*3 Because with the best will in the world, it's not McCreadie's fault that Amanda's aunt died in a fire at another factory because she was sacked from McCreadie's supplier weeks earlier. A fire in the original factory, if they'd had to cut safety measures because McCreadie was driving down costs elsewhere? McCreadie's fault. Malnutrition or illness from working long underpaid hours at the original factory? McCreadie's fault. The original factory being struck by a meteorite while her aunt was working a shift? Not McCreadie's fault, mate. The fire could have happened anywhere. Remember this is fiction, Winterborrom. You have the absolute power to make these things link up into a coherent narrative.[ BACK ]
*4 Y'know, as if when Russell did his Arthur remake, he got the same salary as a 17yr old who spends the day bringing everyone coffee on-set. [ 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.
Well, fourth-quarter is the graveyard shift in the cinematic calendar, and the dumping ground for many an oddity that film distributors have no other slot for. And they don't come much odder or more dumped than director and co-writer Crispian Mills sophomore creature-com, Slaughterhouse Rulez.
When a place becomes unexpectedly available at a prestigious boarding school, working class northern teenager Don (Finn Cole*1) is encouraged to apply by his socially-aspirant mum. Struggling to adapt to the norms of private education, Finn gradually forms a guarded friendship with fellow sixth-formers Clemsie (Hermione Corfield*2) and Willoughby (Asa Butterfield*3). But things take a sinister turn when it's revealed that the mysterious headmaster (Michael Sheen) is in cahoots with a fracking company, and their drilling at the edge of the school's grounds has awoken something - or things. With teacher Meredith Houseman*4 (Simon Pegg) and environmental protestor Woody (Nick Frost) thrown into the mix, traditional allegiances have to be discarded as a weekend of off-term debauchery turns into a comic fight for survival...
HAMMERING Yeah, it's not great. Not great at all. The main problem is that the setup itself feels laboured, so no script coming off the back of that is ever going to sparkle, and so neither are the performances. The film spends the first twenty minutes not quite getting over its own joke that a school would be named Slaughterhouse*5, hammering home the archaic eccentricities of British private education like no-one else had noticed.
Cole, Corfield and Butterworth are basically fine, but none of them really have the acting chops at this point to lead the movie's young cast, even as an ensemble. At the other end of the scale, Pegg, Frost and Sheen are left to mug and autopilot through their (largely completely separate) scenes. All of the above need firmer direction, as does the screenplay itself. Instead we get a loose collection of weak sketches from the man who brought us A Fantastic Fear of Everything (34%).
ESCHERING The more creative the film tries to be with its monster scenes (of which there are surprisingly few, for a monster movie), the cheaper it all feels. Predator-lite heat vision and shadow-play can't disguise the obvious budgetary constraints, and the creature shots we do get strike an uneven balance between admittedly strong props with severely limited movement and fluid-but-murky-as-hell CGI.
More a clunky homage to teen horror than actually being one itself, there's little in the way of thrills and even less in shocks. A few smirks are to be had in the script, but no actual laughs. It's hard to know exactly what Slaughterhouse Rulez is trying to be, and as a result it's often hard to know exactly how badly it's failing.
DONALDING Monsters or otherwise, the movie as a whole feels uninspired. Even with its heavy-handed fracking plot, you'd swear this had been sitting on a shelf since 2006, when Pegg and Frost were still enough of a thing to draw audiences with their presence alone.
The fact that Mills continually lifts beats from Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy while under-using those films' leading stars tells the audience how thin on the ground the ideas are. Slaughterhouse Rulez wants to be Harry Potter for fans of The World's End, but comes out more like Percy Jackson in the vein of Lesbian Vampire Killers.
DUCKING Stories with a young leading cast aim to transport the audience back to imagined ideals of their youth, with camaraderie and adventure. Horror-tinged movies of this ilk either want the viewer to think that they'd love to be in that situation with the heroes, or just be relieved they're in the cinema watching at a safe distance. But for all the two-hour runtime and backstory bombardment, there's no immersion here.
The story isn't engaging enough to be a spectator-led affair, instead feeling like none of this matters. It's faintly ironic that the film is set in a public school since the it feels like it's been written by a drama student 6th Former with no outside social contacts.
Slaughterhouse Rulez is never flat-out awful, but its waste of a decent cast is an affront to the acting profession. There's the suggestion that this probably felt a lot more coherent and meaningful on-set, when everything was being experienced in a non-linear order and the final product was still a hazy dream. But hazy dreams produce hazy results, and this film should be included in the Media Studies module teaching that very lesson…
The impact will be lessened even more in your living room, but it's the natural home of this.
Hahahaha, hell no.
That's entirely possible, yes.
Not that I heard. And in a flick like this, it would likely be front-and-centre if it were there.
Level 1: Well aside from some of the most cack-handed Star Wars references you've ever seen committed to film, Unkar Plutt is in this. So is Tallie. It's no consolation.
*3 Asa Butterfield is 21. These are your teen-leads. It's like Grease never happened. [ BACK ]
*4 These really are the characters' names, by the way, I'm not making this up. [ BACK ]
*5 The title is (from what I can tell) effectively a portmanteau pun on Tom Sharpe's Cambridge-satire Porterhouse Blue and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, with the mis-spelling of 'Rules' lending the same air of intellectual confidence instilled by a hairdressing business with "Kutz" in its name. [ 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.
Well, pre-judge not lest ye be pre-judged. As much as the trailers*1 had led me to believe that Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children (look, MPHFPC, yeah>) was going to be 'Tim Burton's X-Men Juniors'*2 with a light dusting of Hogwarts, it turned out to be more a mashup of Goodnight Sweetheart and Nightbreed. Which is far cooler, when you think about it…
When placid outsider Jake receives an ominous message from his grandfather Abe, he arrives at his house to find him murdered. Against the full support of his parents, this leads to an emotionally charged journey to an orphanage in Wales, and the unravelling of a secret Abe had been hiding in plain sight for years…
Even under its 12A safety-blanket, the film is surprisingly dark given that it will be put on the same shelf as its more mainstream contemporaries. In thematic terms this is attributable to the source-novel's author, Ransom Riggs of course, but an equal hat-tip has to go to screenwriter Jane Goldman for translating it so intensely (it was she who adapted the inexplicably-12A Woman In Black, if you remember). But Goldman's natural darkness is tempered by Tim Burton's propensity for kookiness, although this never quite reaches its regular default level because of Goldman's focus.
At just over two hours, MPHFPC is by no means a short film, but I'd have been happy to have an extra half-hour or so scattered throughout, if only to connect me more with Jake. After the cursory Hero's Journey setup in act one, the film spends a lot of time introducing a lot of fantastical elements, and any awe, wonder or fear we feel is most probably our own, not the protagonist's. I was engaged and intrigued throughout, but I wasn't really moved by anything I saw; the pace of the story and rapid world-building not allowing the relationship between Jake and his grandfather Abe to have any real weight*3. Another part of the disconnect was that I could feel Burton struggling to fully direct a screenplay that wasn't his own based on a story he hadn't written. It's not that he hasn't left a stamp on MPHFPC, but Tim's definitely playing in someone else's sandbox, here.
And on the subject of wants-lists*4, I'd have liked the mechanics/limitations of the time-travel and causality looped explained more thoroughly (why/how can Abe make phone calls and send letters to the past, given that he's a spotter, not a time-controlling Ymbryne? Do all loops have to be limited to 24 hours?) Then again, if they'd gone into all of that, I'd probably only have written another couple of thousand words picking it all apart.
Still, the costs of on-set catering were presumably minimised by the scenery-chewing competition going on between Eva Green and Sam Jackson. They're both great (thanks in no small part to Burton's direction, of course), but their constant mugging is definitely A Thing™.
All in all though, Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children is better than I expected, and a solid effort given its internal struggles.
As above; Harry Potter, X-Men, Nightbreed.
For the visuals, sure.
The story itself will work on any size screen, though.
I think it probably does, just about.
Probably not.
Probably not.
Definitely not.
Level 1: Chancellor Valorum and Mace Windu are in this.
*1 Speaking of trailers, I'm relieved to note that the fucking trailer song (which only has one fucking line, apparently) isn't used in the film. Well, not in the main body, at least, I left before the first song of the credits had ended in case it was going to be in there. I should also point out that I don't dislike the song itself, nor Disa Jakobs' voice. Just the way she keeps truncating the word "coming" as if she's a fucking blues singer or something, her delicate delivery tripping over the word every single time like a member of the aristocracy trying to eat a kebab with a knife and fork. Yeah, it fucking bothers me.
*2 …because a group of gifted youngsters being looked after by an older teacher/guardian and using time-travel to repeatedly evade their predators is the basic setup for X-Men: Days Of Future Past. A film which Jane Goldman also screen-wrote. I'm not dumping the similarity at her door, by the way. Much as MPHFPC is based on the 2011 novel, the X-Men movie sprang out of the 1981 comic series. I'm sure the whole thing is a massive, chronological coincidence.
*3 Also cobbling the emotional-stride of the film is Terence Stamp taking "crazy old man" to previously undiscovered levels. I love the guy to bits, but there are few other performers who can manage to overact whilst being dead on-screen. Oh, spoilers.
*4 And on the subject of non-wants lists, point-deducted for Tim Burton's blink-of-an-eye cameo appearance which still managed to be wall-shatteringly obvious. I wasn't even waiting for it, and he still may as well have been carrying a neon sign...
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.
Ender's Game (Caution: spoilers. MASSIVE SPOILERS.)
Cert: 12A / 114 mins / Dir. Gavin Hood
I found Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's celebrated work to be oddly infuriating at times. In short, I thought it started strongly but played all its best cards in the first two acts, so that by the point where I was meant to be on the edge of my seat, I'd pretty much stopped caring about anyone on-screen.
The film does a great job of setting up Andrew Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) as a conflicted but determined cadet; a tactical genius who remains likeable (to the audience at least) as he whizzes past his peers toward military greatness. Butterfield's performance is remarkable and you don't doubt if for a second. You just kinda doubt everybody else's. Harrison Ford's Graff repeatedly states to his contemporaries that Ender's ultimate goal will be to sacrifice himself during the ultimate battle with the alien invaders in order to save mankind, even though that makes little sense the first time he says it, and less as the film goes on. Despite the film's proclamation that 'we need a new kind of commander', there seems to be little actual proof of that requirement*1, and other than developing a telepathic link with a species light-years away, Ender seems to show nothing above the level of technical brilliance you'd expect from someone in that position anyway.
So given that the International Space Fleet's proposed tactic appears to be turning up at the enemy's house fifty years later and unleashing planetary genocide, why do they need a surgeon's scalpel to achieve what a sledgehammer could do? Although I understand Ender's subsequent distress at carrying out such an act, what did he think he was being employed for, to have a game of snakes and ladders with the Formics?
The first two acts look and sound magnificent (especially the zero-gravity segments), and even Harrison Ford's deadpanning works in context, building up the tension as Ender's career escalates almost out of his control. But the film's finale skirts too close to watching someone playing a video game (for obvious reasons), and ultimately I felt almost as cheated as Ender. Viola Davis and Hailee Steinfeld seem largely wasted, but only because you've seen them both do so much more, and it's just not needed here. So, maybe I just hoped I'd be grabbed more firmly by a story with such a successful lineage. Maybe it's too close to hard sci-fi for me? As usual with this sort of thing, I suspect any issues I have with it are between me and the story, rather than the film itself. But it feels like the film should be more.
From the heavily-applied morality-of-war dilemmas, through to the wandering vocal stylings of Sir Ben*2, Ender's Game is a bit of a jumble, and it didn't all fit as neatly as I wanted it to. I know the idea of the film is to ask difficult questions but I suspect that with more time and less of a partisan approach, the books manage it a lot more pertinently.
Wanted to like the film more, but just couldn't.
It sets up the why, if not the how.
For the first two acts, yes.
For the first two acts, yes.
It does look marvellous on a big screen.
No.
Not for a while, at least.
I didn't hear one.
^^ I feel like I should mark it more highly than mid-points, but the fact is that the last act bored me, and it's left me with little more than a niggling dissatisfaction.
And they're just going to let him go off in a military shuttle, are they, with an apparently indefinite amount of supplies and an oddly pulsating holdall, looking for a planet to essentially infect with a species that's already proven itself to be openly hostile once in the past? Oh, alright then.
*1 Another point which is nullified once Ender works out that he's not the only one to have spotted patterns in the enemy behaviour. He shares this trait with the other Great War Hero who didn't need to sacrifice himself to win. Which everyone in high-command knows.
*2 Seriously. He's got Maori tattoos, and has a paragraph or so where he explains that he's got Maori tattoos, any why. We don't need the 'sounds more like an Australian but we're sure no-one will notice' accent as well.
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.
Five days before his 60th birthday, boorish retail magnate Sir Richard McCreadie (Steve Coogan) is overseeing preparations for a lavish party on Mykonos. A coterie of minions and hangers-on surrounds him including his mother (Shirley Henderson*1), current partner (Shanina Shaik), ex-wife Samantha (Isla Fisher), son Finn (Asa Butterfield), PR Manager*2 (Sarah Solemani) and personal assistant Amanda (Dinita Gohil).
