Underwater Cert: 15 / 95 mins / Dir. William Eubank / Trailer
The fates were already conspiring against William Eubank's new movie before the it began. Someone bastard my allocated-seat, a fire-exit sign shining directly onto the screen, then a delayed start-time due to a projector failure once the film itself began (which was going to be ten minutes, but became fifteen and then thirty*1).
So Kristen Stewart was going to have to work pretty fucking hard to turn this around in a film with a painfully literal (and yet wholly nondescript) title and a trailer which makes Underwater look average, at best.
Reader, Underwater is average at best.
A mining station in the Marianas Trench is compromised when a series of earthquakes are revealed to be the work of mysterious creatures, the likes of which haven't been seen before. The small band of survivors must suit-up, leave their ruined base and cross the ocean bed on foot to reach a relay station where they can escape to the surface. During this perilous journey, members of the group are picked off one*2 by one by the monsters, the environment, or a screenwriter who's only ever watched alien-invasion movies. Yeah, it's basically Aliens but underwater*3.
SCIENTIST Credit where it's due, it has quite a strong cast for a film this inconsequential. Kristen Stewart leads the gang as a brainy-but-tough scientist. You know KStew's brainy because she's wearing glasses in the first scene. Glasses with a prescription so ethereal that they do not bend light in any way when viewed from an angle, which is probably why she gets through the rest of the film absolutely fine without them. It feels as if Stewart is picking roles like letters from a scrabble-bag these days. As a performer, Kristen is definitely better than this, yet it's becoming more difficult to pinpoint exactly what she should be doing any more.
Elsewhere, Vincent Cassel is vaguely unlikeable (again) and TJ Miller resorts to playing himself (again). Fair enough guys, stick to what you know.
HARDEST PART A b-grade sci-fi/horror with a story that runs on rails, Underwater is the exact amount of silly bollocks you expect, and you'll enjoy it accordingly. Our heroes bicker, shriek and mumble their way through the script, so it's probably a good thing that words are largely redundant here. You could watch this dubbed into any language you don't speak and have exactly the same experience*4. You just can't shake the feeling that none of it matters. The movie looks great and is efficiently assembled, but feels generic.
Of course the film starts moralising about drilling and humanity's moral duty in its third act, but by that point the whole thing is so divorced from reality that it could segue into an episode of Spongebob Squarepants and make as much sense...
On paper, Underwater categorically does not need to exist, and the film does nothing to challenge that situation. But hey, at least it's not about sharks.
*1 With audience-members still turning up during this time, the late-running of the movie rewarding their tardiness if anything. Outrageous. [ BACK ]
*2 Because of course Mamoudou Athie, the only black cast-member with a character-name, is the first to die. Although that's probably a lucky escape, to be honest. [ BACK ]
*3Movie exec 1: So what if we made Aliens, but underwater?!?
Movie exec 2: Pretty sure that's already been d--
Movie exec 1: Rhetorical question, Terry. Kristen Stewart has already signed on and agreed to run around in her pants for half of it. We start filming on Monday... [ BACK ]
*4 Although in an early scene, Stewart's character voiceovers that you lose track of time when you can't see daylight. And fair play, 95 minutes seems like fucking forever when you know you're going to be late getting across town for your next movie, as a 45-minute travel window is hacked down to quarter of an 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.
[INT. A LUGGAGE LOCKER-ROOM, ATHENS. DAY.]
Jason Bourne uses a key he has been given to retrieve sensitive material which has been placed in an otherwise unidentified locker for him. Among the weapons and passports is a black USB drive containing encrypted data. We know it's encrypted because the drive has the word ENCRYPTED embossed into it in 36pt white Helvetica caps. #VisualStorytelling
^^ That's what Post-Snowden™ filmmaking means, apparently. Well, that and putting the word "Snowden" into the script every fifteen minutes or so, in a bid to resonate with the audience who'll have heard the name but know little of the situation surrounding it. Although we'll come back to that demographic of viewer in a while.
And so we're back, this fifth installment of the franchise making reference to the fourth one with about the same frequency and fondness as its marketing campaign (which is to say not at all)*1. Jason Bourne (Mr Damon) is making a tidy living off-the-grid by punching people in car-park punching competitions, when former-CIA operative Nicky Parsons (Ms Stiles) tracks him down in a bid to get his face onto CCTV cameras throughout European capital cities. By absolutely no coincidence at all, the CIA (Mr Lee Jones and Ms Vikander) pick up on this. Because it's 2016, there are also heavy-handed references to social-networking and privacy-vs-security issues, courtesy of Mr Ahmed. Anyway, carnage ensues.
Now, I've been quite facetious about the whole thing so far, but Jason Bourne*2 is actually a fairly entertaining film. Tonally, it runs a middle-ground between the first three movies' habit of belligerently withholding plot-points from the audience, and the fourth one's habit of spoon-feeding them instead. Despite repeatedly lunging for the zeitgeist with both hands, the film brings little new to the genre (or to the series, in fact), but it's reliably solid nonetheless.
The performers are something a mixed-bag, as we've come to expect. Julia Stiles acts the part but has trouble delivering her clunky dialogue with any real commitment. Meanwhile, Alicia Vikander fares slightly better, but seems to have joined in with the whole espionage-thing by changing her accent every twelve minutes. And Tommy Lee Jones struggles with his inability to personify anyone other than Tommy Lee Jones™, second only to Matt Damon's identical debilitation. You're constantly reminded that you're watching the cast, rather than the characters, but when they're this good anyway, it doesn't de-rail the movie.
I don't think this entry is the best in the series, and yet I say that as someone who hasn't particularly loved that series anyway. Despite my (manifold) gripes, the early installments were far more robust in terms of film-making. But the sequel-klaxon is duly sounded here, so I'm sure Mr Greengrass will be having another go.
Jason Bourne is either a self-aware, modern tour-de-force which simultaneously entertains and philosophises with the audience using a combination of action and meta-reconnaissance, or it's a cheap-ass thriller using the Bourne-brand as a pass to ride with the big-boys, using shaky-cam to overcome the 12A restrictions on graphic violence and using the climate of techno-paranoia as an inadequate smokescreen for bullshit, clichéd machismo.
It's definitely one of those, but I'll admit it's enough fun either way...
Best line: a scene early in the film shows a covert hacking-hub in Greece. Among the controlled chaos within as activists bustle around the operations centre, one line is subtitled for the audience from the Greek: "...use SQL to disrupt their databases!". Now, given that SQL is a programming language designed for building and managing databases, that's a bit like saying "use the custard to disrupt their trifle!" and is indicative of a script which hurls faux-technobabble at the audience hoping they won't have any real knowledge of the subject(s) being discussed. This level of unwieldy background noise runs throughout the film, of course, but it's the fact that this line is translated and presented on-screen which makes it stand out, blowing its own cover instantly. This is the best use of 'I don't know what that means but I'll write it anyway' since "They're ready to go... the hashtags will tip them over!" back in April.
I'm going to go right ahead and say Bastille Day, even though this isn't as much fun.
Only if you like 'em big and loud.
You won't lose too much by watching this at the tail-end of a Bourne-marathon in your living room.
As amiable as it is, not quite because it takes itself so seriously.
Nope.
Nope.
There is.
Level 1: This movie stars Riz 'Bodhi Rook' Ahmed.
It's okay that reference will be familiar soon enough, trust me.
*1 I don't care what people say, I quite enjoyed The Bourne Legacy. I mean, I've never felt the need to watch it again since, but I quite enjoyed it.
*2 Really though, what kind of title is that? We're used to them being a bit more dynamic, springboarding off the borderline-pun of The Bourne Identity (because he wasn't 'born' with it; do you see?). Anyway, I've thought of some better titles if they want to ret-con it for the DVD release...
• The Bourne-Broker
• The Bourne Cocktail
• From Dusk Till Bourne
• Hung, Bourne and Quartered
• Bourne Free
• Bourne Again Seriously Universal, hit me up. No need to pay me, a mention in the credits will be fine…
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.
Tale of Tales (aka Il Racconto Dei Racconti)
Cert: 15 / 134 mins / Dir. Matteo Garrone / Trailer
When Salma Hayek eating the red, boiled heart of a sea-monster with her bare hands isn't the weirdest thing in a film, you're in for some fun. Matteo Garrone brings us a loosely interwoven trio of medieval Italian folk tales set in the three neighbouring kingdoms. In one, Toby Jones falls in love with a flea the size of a small cow and uses similar judgement to choose a suitor for his daughter, meanwhile John C. Reilly slays the above-mentioned serpent so that his barren wife can conceive a child (again, what could go wrong?), as the randy-royal Vincent Cassel fails to keep it in his pants, inadvertently seducing one of the village-crones and leaving her emotionally-stunted sister in a precarious state-of-mind…
While Tale of Tales probably isn't a film to wander into blindly, the best approach will be to take in as little baggage as possible and just let yourself be told a story (or three). Even my brain spent the first twenty minutes or so shouting down the small voice pointing out "how would that happen?" before finally slipping into gear. And it's worth noting that the stories on offer here aren't quirkily-gothic fairy tales, nor are they the judicially-harsh morality lessons you'd expect of the format. They're just weird. Pro-level weird. Making Tim Burton's kookiness look like Coronation Street, weird. You might laugh, you might squirm (spoiler: you'll do both), but you won't be able to look away*1. I should also point out that despite my usage of the Italian title at the top of this post, the film is English-language. I know not everyone's a fan of subtitles, so if that was potentially putting you off then it won't be a problem here.
The film is utterly enthralling, in an often jaw-dropping sort of way (the borderline code-breaking winces, gasps and guffaws of the couple next to me served as a fair barometer of the mood in the room). And given how outlandish the content is, the cast's performance is amazing; never even approaching the grotesque pantomime it would become in the hands of many other directors. Garrone has his actors on a tight leash, but it still doesn't restrict their abilities. Similarly, Alexandre Desplat's score and Peter Suschitzky's cinematography are quietly overwhelming, complementing Garrone's work perfectly.
In fact, my only slight gripes are that while the stories are presented in a staggered format (rather than a linear portmanteau series), the balancing often feels a little uneven. The natural breaks in each tale, where you'd switch to the next chapter of another, seem erratic and sometimes just too far apart. And one of the three also seems to run out of steam rather than have an actual ending, but as I said, these aren't your run-of-the-mill fairy tales.
A thing of often terrifying beauty, Tale of Tales will leave you stunned through the meticulously rendered end-credits as your brain tries to process what it's just witnessed. There's far more than what's on the surface, but it'll get more intense the deeper you go…
If you can, yes. Just to be amused by the reactions of your fellow patrons (and that's a mutual experience, I assure you).
It does.
It could well be.
Not at all.
There isn't.
Level 2: This film's got Vincent Cassel in it, and he was in that Black Swan with Natalie 'Padmé' Portman.
That's a very strong 6, but frankly I was too freaked out for it to be a 7 and I'll probably only watch the film again once just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating half of what happened…
*1 Unless you're the patron who walked out after about an hour. And in a film like this one I understand that reaction, but I am amazed it took so long. The sea-monster heart is in the first fifteen minutes, after all. But because of the format, that cinematic evacuee doesn't know how any of the stories end. Imagine that. Well, I suppose they'll have to…
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.
Child 44 Cert: 15 / 137 mins / Dir. Daniel Espinosa / Trailer
Now, I haven't seen Child, Child 2, Child 3, Child 4, Child 5… [ I should point out at this juncture that as a dyed-in-the-wool devotee of Lee & Herring, I will never tire of this joke. Never, I tell you.] … Child 42 or Child 43, so I had a fair bit of catching up to do in the first ten minutes. Luckily, the film makes little-to-no mention of previous installments, so this should be ideal for newbies to the franchise.
Stalinist Russia, 1953, and a series of child-deaths determined by the authorities to be 'accidents' bear all the hallmarks of a serial killer. MGB agent Leo Demidov is determined to unravel the case, but finds his progress hindered by his superiors, colleagues and even those he thought of as friends. Because how do you track down a killer when "there can be no murder in Paradise"..?
The film's setting is its unique selling point, but it the darkness of the era and that of the story never seem to gel the way you know they should. Not especially cinematic in either tone or form, Child 44 feels like a solid four-hour TV drama which has been compacted for a single big-screen outing, often at the expense of the narrative-flow. The film does a fantastic job of following the 'show, don't tell' ethos, resulting in some solid character building for Hardy's Leo, but things still feel rushed, even at two-and-a-quarter-hours. Noomi Rapace and Tom Hardy are reliable as always, but are crying out for stronger scripting and more focussed direction. In fact, it feels like Paddy Considine is the only member of the cast really grabbing the dramatic bull by its horns, and he outshines everyone with the momentum he brings to the film.
A major stumbling block (for me, at least) is that stretches of dialogue feel casual to the point of being improvised (and if they're not improvised, that's even more of a problem). This results in 21st century, English speech-patterns inserted into a 1950s Russian setting. Not quite as jarring as the way Julian Fellowes writes characters in Downton Abbey saying "…as if", but on the same page, certainly. The assortment of accents are distracting enough*1 without being pulled out of the story by the script itself. The worst offender in this department is Tom Hardy's line: "Obviously we are all guilty by association, irregardless." You can have irrespective, or you can have regardless. But 'irregardless' isn't a real word. How did this make it into the final edit?
A great story let down by dodgy accents, mumbled, off-the-cuff dialogue, atrocious shaky-cam and a rushed approach to storytelling, Child 44 is thoroughly intriguing but fails to live up to its full potential.
…not really.
Probably a rental; I doubt you'll get more than a couple of watches out of it.
With the best will in the world, no.
Narratively, yes. Dramatically, no.
I won't.
Well, who makes a film featuring a full-on battle scene in the first ten minutes and doesn't insert a Wilhelm Scream? The guy who hires sound-designer Christopher Assells, that's who…
Gary Oldman and Tom Hardy are both Nolan-era Batmanalumni of course, as is Liam 'Qui-Gon' Neeson.
^^ That's a strong four, but a four nonetheless.
*1 Although I'm also aware that Noomi Rapace and Vincent Cassel both speak heavily accented English to begin with, so maybe giving fake Russian accents to the cast puts everyone on the same handicap, so to speak? That said, Child 44 contains another small role for Charle Dance, illustrating that he either can't do All The Accents, or just chooses not to.
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.
So, David Cronenberg's tale of the Russian Mafia in London (his second film so far in this ongoing season) turns out to be nowhere near as difficult to watch as I'd feared. Sadly, it turns out to be nowhere near as interesting as I'd hoped, either.
There's the feeling (particularly towards the end of the film) that an intricate story of corruption, vice, family loyalties and power would have worked better laid out as a four-part TV drama, and that the extra screen-time that format allowed would make for stronger character building as a result. The gangsters that make up the film's principal movers feel like crudely drawn stereotypes here (although I've seen many worse portrayals in more recent years). On one hand, Cronenberg would like the audience to marvel at how 'real' everything is, but the then undercuts this by having his Russian-speaking mobsters talking in English to each other most of the time. Actual Russian scripting would have helped greatly with the authenticity, especially since the mumbled dialogue itself necessitates having the subtitles on throughout the runtime, anyway. Additionally, having your three main Russian characters played by German, French and American/Danish actors doesn't really help matters, either. I get the impression that Cronenberg was basically fine with how everyone sounded as long as it was 'foreign'.
Conversely, succeeding on the accent-front is Naomi Watts (already given a head-start by being Australian) as a troubled midwife from London who gets mixed up in the Russian power struggle after delivering a baby whose mother, an illegally-immigrated, coerced sex worker, dies at the same time. This, sadly, the accent is the only area in which Naomi succeeds. I like Watts, but she's really not that good an actress, and her default 'glazed' expression is used to its full extent in Eastern Promises, exacerbated by the fact that her role in the screenplay as the bridge between regular 'civilian' life and the unseen, seedy underworld seems to be treated as an afterthought after the first ten minutes of the movie. The naivety that should endear her character to the audience only serves to make her more irritating.
The only time Cronenberg ever seems to come into his own as a director is the infamous brawl-scene in the sauna-baths, and the fighting is presented with a surgical precision that the characterisation sorely needs.
Eastern Promises is a frankly ordinary film, made by an extraordinary film-maker. In the hands of a more 'human' director, the film's inhuman characters could have flourished more...
(Oh, and that baby would clearly have been born with a heroin addiction, yet this isn't even mentioned in the script.)
It didn't play at my local cinema, and it's not really the sort of cheery Saturday-night-fare you choose at random, so no.
Yes, although I don't feel I've gained much from it.
Only as part of a season of similar films, I think.
There ain't.
Naomi Watts starred in 2013's The Impossible alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi himself, Ewan McGregor..
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.
The fates were already conspiring against William Eubank's new movie before the it began. Someone bastard my allocated-seat, a fire-exit sign shining directly onto the screen, then a delayed start-time due to a projector failure once the film itself began (which was going to be ten minutes, but became fifteen and then thirty*1).
