Review: Unwelcome

Unwelcome
Cert: 15 / 104 mins / Dir. Jon Wright / Trailer

Directed by Jon Wright, Unwelcome is the story of a young expecting couple in central London - Maya (Hannah John-Kamen) and Jamie (Douglas Booth) - who inherit a house from Doug's elderly aunt in rural Ireland. Upon arriving in the idyllic village, the pair are cautioned by neighbour Maeve (Naimh Cusack) that certain superstitious traditions have to be upheld. More pressingly though, repairs to their semi-dilapidated home are being carried out by local ne'er-do-wells The Whelan Family (Jamie-Lee O'Donnell, Chris Walley, Kristian Nairn and none other than Colm Meaney - the Poundland Brendan Gleeson). The incompatibility between city attitudes and countryside manners soon grinds everything to a halt as Maya and John begin to find out who their enemies really are...

BALANCE

Some movies struggle to balance all their ideas, feeling like they've been written by a committee. Others suffer because only one person was at the typewriter, unable to fully develop ideas or bounce them around to greater effect. Unwelcome is firmly in the second camp and, frankly, Uneven. The film teases its semi-demonic Powrie (or red caps / little-people) well enough throughout, but the backstory and methodology is too vaguely defined to really sell their malevolence to the viewer. There's plenty to enjoy for seasoned fans of mid-budget horror, but for everyone else the film will be markedly less satisfying.

It's perfectly cast, albeit for slightly undemanding roles (I certainly wish I could have seen the version of the film that Hannah John-Kamen seems to be acting in; it looks much better), and initially appears to be beautifully filmed with crisp, rich, warm tones from cinematographer Hamish Doyne-Ditmas. But then this look continues. And increases. Now I'm as guilty as the next reviewer of complaining about stylised desaturation these days, but this is too just colourful for the atmosphere it's trying to conjure. Even the night-scenes are lit up like an operating theatre...

Despite clearly sitting within a set budget it's not that the film feels cheaply made, but cheaply written. Penned for the screen by Mark Stay (from a story by him and the film's director), this begins in heavy-handed full-throttle and pretty much continues in this vein as even the 'friendly' people in the village seem inherently weird. But this isn't some London-phobic tale of outsiders being shunned by locals, we're just hanging out with a couple who can't catch a break. There's also a rich seam of dark comedy waiting to be mined out in the countryside, but for the most part the gags are DOA because of how needlessly harrowing the rest of the movie is.

CROSS

The main problem is that once our heroes arrive in Ireland, the intense colour saturation lends the film a dream-like air, as in a video game or a badly shot soundstage pretending to be an exterior location. In this environment, it's impossible to introduce a credible threat since a sense of reality doesn't exist to be disrupted. Therefore, the only way to generate sympathy for Maya and Jamie is for the film to relentlessly punish them for misdemeanours they really haven't committed. Director Jon Wright clearly despises his characters, but would like you to stroke your chin at their misfortune instead.

Unwelcome never slows down enough to properly build tension. The Whelan family are certainly very unpleasant, but never become real characters to be properly frightening. And the only person in the entire town who seems to know anything about the Powrie is Maeve, who fails to really give enough detail about why they're to be feared/respected. Jamie's Aunt may have entered into some bargain with the little people, but it doesn't follow suit that Maya has to continue it, particularly since they don't seem to be intimidating the rest of village (not in an organised way, at least).

KRISTOFFERSON

On a social-level, the film deals with its very specific themes very acutely, but there's little beyond that. Horror works best as metaphor; this is just a modern retooling of the Hammer-era folk chiller (by way of Dog Soldiers, then by way of Labyrinth) using mawkish audience manipulation rather than actual storycraft. If anything, it's disappointingly literal.

When the film finally lets rip with its bloodsoaked finale, the story has spent so long gleefully abusing its protagonists that all of the inbuilt ridiculous humour instantly evaporates, but the focused urge for crimson revenge isn't quite there either as the bad guys are split over two hastily sketched - but entirely separate - groups.

I can envision Unwelcome playing really well to a packed film-festival crowd who are into the corniness and care slightly less about pacing, but in a quarter-full multiplex screening this sort of fell on its arse a bit. The lack of atmosphere in the room is not the film-makers' fault of course, but that does affect a viewer's perception of what they're watching. A civilian audience isn't going to wryly guffaw at a heavily pregnant woman being terrorised for over an hour and a half.

This is a weird little first-draft of a movie. As a trashy, cautionary-horror flick it's absolutely fine, but there's the unscratched-itch that Unwelcome could have used its runtime for something much smarter and more meaningful...

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.

Review: Tolkien

Tolkien
Cert: 12A / 112 mins / Dir. Dome Karukoski / Trailer



IT'S THE STORY THAT TOLKIEN'S FAMILY DON'T WANT YOU TO SEE! imply the headlines following a cursory Google search into the contractual furore surrounding Dome Karukosi's biopic of the celebrated author. Having watched the film without being already familiar with John Ronald Reuel's life, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly controversial in there. That said, there doesn't seem to be anything particularly interesting, either.

Maybe that's their beef…

SOMME

We meet Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) as a bedraggled officer in the Somme. A particularly gruelling morning in the trenches leads to our protagonist staring glumly into the middle distance, a recurring pose that acts as a framing device for a series of flashbacks which pan from his adolescence in Birmingham through to university days in Oxford, up to the First World War. The earlier part of this (with Harry Gilby as younger-Tolkien and Guillermo Bedward as his brother Hilary*¹) is belted through at a rate which barely escapes the pacing of a montage, each beat so mercilessly on-the-nose that the film hardly has the time to pat itself on the back after winking at the audience. Although it manages this anyway.

In this first-act zipping back and forth, the audience's suspension of disbelief is challenged by a casting director who was unable to find an actor who looked like a young Nicholas Hoult. If only there was some sort of accessible reference material. Mid-way through a scene in Barrow Stores' tea room, we leap forward five years or so to find Tolkien and his three compatriots played by different actors. Let's just say that time has evidently not been kind to these kids. We plod along through Uni-life at an unremarkable pace until Sir Derek Jacobi™ arrives for his two scenes, chewing his way through the scenery as an Oxford professor and stopping one board short of going Full Widow Twanky.

(Still, it makes a nice change to see a group of young, privileged, entitled white males bemoaning their struggle to make professional inroads into the arts, rather than government. Although the fact that they're not being immediately shepherded down the pit is another sign of their position in life. As war breaks out*², they may be sent to the front lines, but they do so as officer-class, after all).

DANNGER

Hoult is basically fine as the lead, but he's not right for the part. He does abrasive and rebellious well enough, but struggles with the sadness and… well, the struggle that his character has to show, giving nothing more than the surface-contents of the script and never getting underneath the page. Which, when you remember the context of his role, is criminal. Lily Collins does well as JRR's muse Edith, but she's definitely treated as The Girl One in a film more preoccupied with The Lads. This could be a sign of the times of course, but whether it's a sign of those times or these is less clear.

While it may not be the fault of the film explicitly, a big part of the push for this telling is that it's what inspired Tolkien's fantasy writings. What we see here is a young man having a close bond with some friends, hardly an unusual occurrence at all. And while that's certainly an aspect of Lord Of The Rings, the journey through the midst of war to find purpose and light is what's going on around Tolkien while he's laying in the mud thinking about his salad days. The film doesn't outright ignore this (how many other Sunday night dramas do you see shoehorning in a CGI dragon?), but the actual horrifying inspiration for his works' darker scenes is treated as something of an afterthought.

MINNNIE

Because ultimately, the main thrust of Tolkien is 'man lost some friends in the war'*³. Yeah, a lot of people did mate. A lot. With the best will in the world, there's nothing unique about JRR's experience as shown here, only what came out of it. And the film doesn't have the insight to reflect that properly.

Moving on from JRR's mustard gas induced reverie*⁴, we get a muted finale in which Tolkien is still struggling to write his magnum opus, the tale closing on an unearned moment of iconic triumph as pen hits paper in trademark (and trademarked) calligraphy. Tolkien's work may have a timeless quality, the background to it is rather more mundane.

Marketed as a behind-the-scenes precursor to Lord of The Rings, Tolkien is bloated and self satisfied, with remarkably few strings to its bow. You might expect the formative years of one of literature's most notable authors to be more interesting, frankly. Because if it's not, is it really a story worth telling..?

Watch alongside War Horse, for similarly romanticised levels of existential futility.



With the best will in the world, not really.



Yeah, if you like.



It is not.



We will.



There isn't, and given the trench-scene here that's unforgivable. Although there is a moment with a dude running around completely on fire, which is the next best thing.



Level 1: Young Mon Mothma's in this.





*¹ A pivotal part of JRR's young life whom the film manages to forget about completely, and so won't be mentioned again here either. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Loving that moment from the trailer (intact in the film) where a rep from Oxford University's town-crier society helpfully strides across the quad bellowing to let everyone know "WAR! WAR! ENGLAND'S AT WAR!". I like to think that all the colleges had one of these (and still do) for just such an occasion. Or indeed, lesser points of note on a daily basis.
- "DRIZZLE! DRIZZLE! IT'S LOOKING A BIT GREY, BETTER TAKE YOUR MAC OUT WITH YOU!"
- Get off the bloody grass, Jenkins!
-"BUT RAIN, PROFESSOR!" ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ One of the closing caption-cards tells us that JRR named his third child Christopher, implying that this was a nod to Christopher Wiseman, one of his close friends he lost during the war. My initial thoughts were a) Is there any citation for this which you haven't mentioned, though? Christopher is hardly an unusual name. Because b) I notice the tribute was so important to Tolkien that he waited until his third child to implement it. Then I thought 'now be fair, his first two may have been daughters and this was the first opportunity he got to honour his friend'. Nope, John and Michael arrived before Christopher did. How lovely. I'm knocking off a point for that, and it's not even the fault of the movie. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ A slow fade to black gives us a caption card reading "Oxford: years later". What, it's "years" later because Tolkien looks absolutely no older but his hair's a bit different? We skipped forward about five years earlier and you changed the fucking ACTOR. Why does this film hate putting the date on the screen? If it wasn't for the outbreak of the First World War, there'd be no timestamp on this until the closing caption cards (which kindly explain that Tolkien went on to write Lord Of The Rings, for any audience members who weren't sure what they'd stumbled in to watch). A bittersweet coda also gives us a brief flashback to the tea room scene from earlier, the very moment that Tolkien tells the audience that this is the same tea room from earlier. You know, in case you'd forgotten the film you were still watching. It's the little things which annoy, dear reader. The little things. ^{[ 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.

Review: Norm of the North

Norm of the North
Cert: U / 90 mins / Dir. Trevor Wall / Trailer



If there's one thing worse than the worst film of the year*¹, it has to be being made to wait unduly for it, after the prescribed 27 minutes of targeted ads and trailers ended only to be met with a blank screen in a darkened auditorium. Now I spend a lot of time at the flicks (as well you know), so I've got no problem at all being that guy who goes to alert the staff in the foyer to any problems. But this particular no-starter took two further enquiries, four failed attempts and thirty minutes to rectify (although they did rectify it). Now technically, that means not only have I watched an animated film featuring the voice of James Corden, but I also expressly requested one. A special circle of Hell awaits me, no doubt. It's almost as if the film itself, taking three whole months to cross the Atlantic weighed down by its aggregate critic score of 8%, was actually just too embarrassed to show up. Naturally, none of this helped in my anticipation of a film that was frankly only making up the numbers in my Saturday viewing, so if the rest of this review seems a little harsh, it's entirely the fault of the production studio, the distributor and a semi-automated system which occasionally projects films…

So, Rob Schneider (yes that's right, career high-point: 1999's Deuce Bigalow) voices a polar bear who can speak English for reasons which are neither credible nor explained, and stows away to New York when he learns that an Evil Property Developer (voiced by Ken Jeong, letting the industry know that they can stop offering him work now) wants to build luxury condos in the Arctic Circle for Plot Reasons. He does this by starring in the Evil Property Developer's TV ads, which he hopes to ambush as the last, crucial moment (despite having been a significant part of the campaign to make it so successful in the first place). Some of this involves dancing to corporate dance-music, and much of it involves three animated lemmings who are not in any way, shape of form just cheap stand-ins for Minions. I cannot for a single second imagine why this has (albeit finally) hit cinemas a week before Disney's Zootropolis.

Embellishing the distributor's disownership of the movie, we get directionless, noncommittal voice-acting that fails to match (and sometimes fails to sync with) bland, poorly-weighted character models which appear to have been rendered on a PlayStation 2. Even the computer which wrote the screenplay seems to have got bored with the idea and just started hammering out "Something, something, twerking bear; something, something, ice-caps".

Disaster was narrowly averted at two points in the script. The first where the Bill Nighy auto-piloted Socrates the Seagull says the line "'Bread and circuses', your grandfather said. That means it's easier to distract ourselves with food and entertainment than it is to deal with the real problems…", and shortly afterwards where the in-movie TV advert-director*² wryly quips "Everything can be fixed in post! In one of my movies, I wrote the entire plot in post!". I believe both of these points were supposed to be thought-provoking and incisive. Sadly, in the middle of a Saturday afternoon multiplex playing to a small audience who were already deeply regretting the time, money and energy spent on getting there, this formed an irony-well so dense that the resulting black hole could only by destroyed by my own physics-defying fury at being talked down to by such a poorly animated stereotype.

Norm of the North is a film which both patronises and openly insults not only its core target audience, but also their parents and guardians who've paid for the privilege. The eco-message is so heavy-handed that I began to suspect the film was actually being sarcastic, gleefully willing the end of all life on Earth. A movie like this would certainly make compelling evidence for the prosecution. Rarely has a film been so thoroughly deserving of the 92% penalty it's suffered at the hands of those it's failed to impress.

Had Splash Entertainment managed to gather more funding and secure the rights to Mr Hankey, at least there'd be a logical reason for a cinematic turd of this magnitude...

Wishing for humanity's extinction.



Never watch this film in a anything.



Someone, somewhere is proud to have their name in the credits, I imagine.
Although I also suspect they're in a distinct minority.



Get out of my house.



*looks pointedly over spectacles*.



There isn't.



Level 2: Well it pains me to even calculate this, but Bill Nighy devalues his own stock in this film, and has also starred in Love, Actually along with Liam 'Qui-Gon' Neeson, Hot Fuzz with Simon 'Dengar/Unkar Plutt' Pegg, Pirates Of The Caribbean with Keira 'Sabé' Knightley and About Time with Domhnall 'Hux' Gleeson. There are probably more. In fact, it would probably just be easier if we could just get Nighy into Star Wars somehow, wouldn't it? Even in a voice-role?







*¹ In all fairness, that may not be entirely true. Before this film I saw a trailer for the new Top Cat movie. No, seriously. After the last CGI outing clawed in a massive 15% aggregate approval from critics. This is why we can't have nice things and our children are trying to kill us.

*² I have no idea what the character is called or who voices him. Only that he's the type of director that only exists in parodic versions of film-sets. Please don't make me look the information up, I've already spent far too much of my life focusing on this...


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.

Review: Free Birds

Free Birds (2D) (SPOILERS! …I suppose)
Cert: U / 91 mins / Dir. Jimmy Hayward



Hmmm. If your own publicity machine is going lay first claim on the phrase "turkey movie", you should probably make sure that the knowing irony you're intending it to be read with is justified, otherwise Monday morning's meeting is going to be quite embarrassing when the Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes aggregate scores*¹ become the elephant in the room.

Free Birds takes a passable enough premise (two turkeys - one free-range, one battery-farmed - steal a government time-machine to travel back to the first Thanksgiving and prevent the tradition of turkey-eating at the source), and for the most part, wastes it. For the first half of the movie, the script is lifeless and a lot of the gags (visual and scripted) just don't work. Things pick up in the remaining run-time, but it's really too late by then. There's a nice time-travel riff at one point, but it's over-telegraphed to begin with, and then over-explained; I know the movie's aimed at a young audience, but there's really no need to patronise them to this extent.

Elsewhere there are references to Mork & Mindy, Back To The Future, Star Wars and Indiana Jones, executed with varying levels of success. It's not that it's ever "a bad film", but it feels half-arsed. When the screenplay is setting up the time-travel riff, mentioned above, there's also the potential for another extension of it, more along the lines of Looper. Sadly this doesn't happen, and the wasted opportunity to get the younger audience members thinking and introduce some re-watch value is emblematic of the whole film (unless they're going to save that plot-thread for a sequel, of course). There's also the niggle that by altering the historic timeline, however amusing it looks on paper, the characters in the film end up in a version of the world which clearly isn't this one. It might have been a nice destination for the film, to give kids an alternative, fantastical spin on history. Alas, that wasn't to be.

And yet, towering above all of these gripes, for me at least, is the casting. There's no dynamic between the leads of Reggie (Owen Wilson) and Jake (Woody Harrelson). They may as well have read their lines on different days and had them edited together; then again, the script doesn't give them much to play with either. To make matters worse, if you're casting the parts of Big Red Stupid Bird and Small Blue Smart Bird, why would you choose two actors who sound almost identical? It's the animation equivalent of a mismatched-buddy-cop movie starring Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner.

Free Birds is a nice idea, thoroughly underdeveloped. Audiences deserve better, and luckily they probably won't have to wait too long to get it.

Largely.



Not as much as I wanted to.



For a UK audience, no. Even for a US audience it's doubful..



DVD at best.



No.



I shouldn't imagine so.



There isn't.






*<sup>1 38% and 19% respectively, at the time of writing. Ouch.

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.</sup>

Review: Alan Partridge - Alpha Papa

Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa
Cert: 15 / 90 mins / Dir. Declan Lowney



It seems to have become a yearly occurrence that in the UK we get a TV-to-Cinema comedy crossover movie. Sometimes they amuse, sometimes they don't; but either way, there's always been a bumpy transition between the small screens in our homes and the large ones of the cinema. 2013 heralds the turn of Norwich ambassador, Alan Partridge - can the polyester slacks and driving gloves successfully make the leap to the silver screen? More to the point, is it worth paying nearly a tenner to find out..?

Best line: "Michael, you're like a sort of Geordie Anne Frank..."

...kinda, yes. Where my biggest bugbear with this sort of thing has been "it's not a film", I can see why Alpha Papa was put into the format. The story has a wider scope than the Partridge BBC shows, and while I think it loses direction slightly in the third act, the first two benefit hugely from having the time to unfold under their own steam. The story makes great use of the existing Partridge canon*¹, even if it does little to develop on it, and the return of Lynn and Michael gives Alan a couple of tried and tested foils to play off.

Best line: "Right... Ah've got nee tax, nee insurance, and ah'm not wearin' me seatbelt. What are y'ganna dee aboot it this time?"

Another great plus-point is that Alpha Papa is funny. Consistently funny. The style of humour is exactly what AP fans are accustomed to, and although it makes no concessions for newbies, it's broad enough to be enjoyed by most audiences. It almost goes without saying of course (although I'll say it anyway), that if you really don't like Partridge, this isn't for you.

Best line: "Aye, I've done a poo in the box..."

As much as I loved Alpha Papa, I have to say that it didn't really leave me with much apart from 'the memory of laughing a lot'. As the credits roll, there's the nagging feeling that nothing's really changed on any higher level, and that while the extended running time is welcome, the things which make this great are the same things that stop it being 'cinema material'. In about a year, either BBC3 or ITV2 will buy the broadcast rights to this and start playing it on rotation. In all honesty, you'll lose nothing by watching this as home. For the next three weeks at least, it's what Orange Wednesdays were invented for*².

TL;DR version? 'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' is very funny, even if it does nothing new. Because of this, if you're not already a fan of Norwich's premier D-Jock, there's little for you here. On its own terms it succeeds marvellously, and those are the only terms it's playing on.

The trailer sells it short slightly, but captures the essence.



Yes.



Yes.



Your choice; any will be fun, but it's a question of how desperately you want to see it.



No.



Yes, but probably not 'til it hits DVD.



Not that I heard.

Partridge fans: Do you rate Sky-era AP over BBC-era AP?

*¹ Uber-nerd moment: I did notice a few minor inconsistencies with the BBC series and the autobiography. 1) When Lynn visits Alan at home, he's living on a housing estate - why isn't this the house he was having custom built in series 2 of I'm Alan Partridge? 2) Detailed in the book, Goredale Media are the company who buy Radio North Norfolk and drop the expense of having its FM licence (hence North Norfolk Digital); in Alpha Papa, why would they be brought in to take over their own company? I know perhaps I shouldn't be expecting GFFA levels of continuity, but everything else in Brand Partridge dovetails beautifully.
*² The cynic in me is assuming that's why Alpha Papa opened on a Wednesday (as did The Inbetweeners). It worked, the cinema was packed; but whether those figures are sustainable remains to be seen.

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.