This is a film which features a lengthy, suburban Miami foot-chase setpiece between Kevin Hart and Ken Jeong, soundtracked by Gloria Estefan. Close your eyes and imagine that. No, close them again, and imagine it again. The panting. The shrieking. The gratuitous bikini shots. Nowhere near edgy enough to earn a 15 certificate, but nothing you'd want to show to a 12yr old, either. With Gloria Estefan singing at you all the while. It encapsulates everything that Ride Along 2 is, perfectly.
One of the worst things about the movie is being forced to remember Ride Along, and concede that it was better than this; a film which I by no means hated but could likewise muster very little enthusiasm for. And so, two years have passed and director Tim Story returns to his established continuity with Kevin 'Haha, I'm short, that's funny' Hart and Ian 'Bullshit' Cube. An uncalled for follow-up to a film nobody wanted, like a head-on car crash between GTA: Vice City and Saved By The Bell, in which nobody survived who was able to deliver a joke. Or write a joke. Or identify a joke.
As with its predecessor, Ride Along 2 isn't awful for its entire runtime (several smirks, although no laughs I'm afraid), but the concept isn't even trying any more; a watered-down version of something which was diluted to begin with. Formulaic yet unfocused, even its headlining stars look bored. I swear to god that there's a computer whirring away in the back offices of Universal Pictures churning out screenplays of comedically mismatched buddy-cop pairings that begin with glowering glances and shrieking, and end with a car-chase/shoot-out in a shipping yard. It's not even a particularly powerful computer. It doesn't need to be.
Best scene: The Ice Cube character arches an eyebrow and says to the Kevin Hart character, "Do you ever listen to the shit that come out of yo' mouth?"*1, to which Hart wordlessly slides a full-length mirror in front of Cube; a mirror which has the cover of Straight Outta Compton sellotaped in the top corner with a sad-face sticker on it.
Hart arches an eyebrow in return and walks off set…
I have no idea. Probably not even Ride Along, to be fair.
This is, at its absolute best, a film to get from the £3 shelf in Asda to watch while you're getting drunk with as many friends in the room as possible, so that your minimal financial outlay is still spread over a wide audience.
I have no idea.
Nope.
Yep.
Nope.
Level 2: Ride Along 2 stars Olivia Munn who appeared in last January's underwhelming comedy of choice Mortdecai alongside Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor.
*1 This part genuinely happens. The man whose production company was partially responsible for the film keeps a straight face while his character criticises the scripted lines of another.
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 film which keeps on giving, here are some Dark-Side-oriented observations after watching Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the eighth time…
• Hologram technology seems to have improved exponentially over the thirty-or-so years since RotJ, doesn't it? Not only does the Supreme Leader Snoke transmission look far better than anything we've seen before in the GFFA, but in his first scene talking to Kylo Ren and General Hux, this construction of projected light actually casts a shadow on the floor in front of it. And we know it's the holo doing this because the shadow is moving with the same general motions of Snoke. It's like the Return of the Jedi lightsaber-blades creating shadows on the throne-room floor, all over again ;)
• Despite my earlier grumbles, I see now that Kylo Ren isn't trying to kill Finn in their woodland lightsaber duel, he's just toying with him out of sadistic/petulant pleasure. I understand that he has another agenda with Rey, meaning that he's also not trying to destroy her just yet, but I'm still amazed that a warrior as volatile and undisciplined as Ren can hold himself back when presented with such an easy target (and a target who's been a significant thorn in his side over the course of the movie).
• Seriously though, when Snoke tells Hux to return to him with Kylo Ren, how can he possibly locate and retrieve him before the planet implodes? I know the film's climactic scenes aren't in documentary real-time, but the order in which they're shown doesn't give Hux much of a window to pick up The King of Sulking, let alone locate him in an unlit forest. Has Snoke had Kylo microchipped, like you would with a house-cat that you can't trust to find its way around outside?
• So, Starkiller Base collapses in on itself and then goes pop, and the implication is that Hux did indeed manage to pick up his left-luggage before he made it offworld. What does this mean for Kylo Ren? His treasured Endor-bonfire souvenir was located on the Star Destroyer Finalizer, so that should be safe at least, but the Sith-ashes which Ren used to keep his own hat in (and indeed that hat) were both on the planet when it blew (in the room where Rey was interrogated). In the real-world, a new mask will obviously be the perfect marketing tie-in for Episode VIII, but in the GFFA, what mystical totem will the Solo offspring use to channel his dark energy now? Will this up the ante for Vader's fire-sale helmet?
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In other news, this viewing of my new favourite film was in Cineworld Greenwich's D-Box screen. Short description: the film has accompanying seat movements, similar to the ones you get in those flight-simulator rides. It's a total gimmick of course, but a one which is perfect for a Star Wars movie. You're already at the cinema to see two hours of overblown spectacle, what's a little extra fizz in the soda?
The pitch-and-roll movements sway the viewer's individual seat with camera-pans and aerial-flight scenes, while the rumble-pads are used to varying degrees of intensity to simulate everything from Force-powers, to blasters, lightsabers and of course explosions. With a movie like The Force Awakens, this means the seat is rarely idle for longer than about thirty seconds. There are four selectable levels of interaction (plus an 'off' setting, for those who find it too distracting after all) to suit how shaken you'd like to be. If the inflated ticket price*1 of these features is making you think twice, you can at least be assured that the D-Box track for TFA provides excellent value for money.
While the system obviously won't be for everyone, the D-Box enhancements certainly have more to offer the film than the IMAX adaptation I saw earlier in the day, which in turn (even though I moaned about that) was superior to the Superscreen viewing.
I'd originally planned to give the 4DX version of the movie a whirl, too, until it occurred to me that a flash of the house-lights every time there's an explosion would be intolerable in a Star Wars film. Although if you have seen The Force Awakens in 4DX, I'd genuinely love to know how well it's been adapted, so feel free to spill about your experience in that box below. As memory serves, the only part of 4DX I really enjoyed was the seat-motion, and I got that with D-Box anyway...
...that Star Wars.
Yes, but hurry.
It does.
Hmm…
Oh, probably.
Oh, definitely.
Level 0: It's Star Wars.
Although also, Star Wars: The Force Awakens stars Peter Mayhew, who put in an appearance in Comic Book: The Movie along with James Arnold Taylor, who voices Yondu in the animated series of Guardians Of The Galaxy, a show which also utilises Tom Kenny, who performed vocal work for 2006's Happily N'Ever After, as did Sarah Michelle Gellar, who starred in an episode of 1980s TV historical-action series William Tell, which also employed David Prowse, who had a small role in 1977's Jabberwocky, which also featured Kenneth Colley, who guest-starred in an episode of the 1978 TV series Hazell, as did Peter Mayhew, who stars in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
You don't have to 'present' me with a trophy for these, just leave it on the side, and we'll say no more about it.
*1 Or uplift-fee, if you're an Unlimited customer.
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.
"I worked very hard to make [each Star Wars movie] completely different, with different planets, with different spaceships – you know, to make it new… they wanted to do a retro movie. I don’t like that."
So, now that the dust is settling, an increasing number of people are noticing (or at least mentioning) the new Star Wars film's structural similarity to earlier installments in the franchise. In fact, while it's not entirely accurate, even I have a hard time arguing with this set of parallels.
Under the stewardship of Ms. Kennedy, Messrs Abrams, Arndt and Kasdan have brought us a movie which feels familiar because yes, we've pretty much seen it before, and not just from Lucasfilm. Thematically, The hero's journey has touched far more stories than the Star Wars universe, and was doing so long before 1977. The complaints (and some of them are framed as observations, but many are certainly complaints) aren't at the level of the self-entitled moaning about The Phantom Menace which persists to this day, but they're no less critical of their subject. What began as observing the film's 'narrative homage' to A New Hope (and indeed to TPM) seems to have quickly snowballed into taunts of 'story rehashing'. Y'know, as if they're really different things.
And yet, in terms of on-screen content, there's actually comparatively little recycling going on. Sure, Jakku looks and feels a lot like ANH's Tatooine, and the Resistance-base on D'Qar bears a startling resemblance to ANH's Yavin IV. And even the characters themselves in TFA compare the Starkiller Base to the Death Star (which had already been re-used once anyway). But, from those crucial marketing and storytelling perspectives, there are no planetary locations in The Force Awakens that we've seen before.
The population of the GFFA has a largely new twist to it, too, and the vast majority of faces we see on screen are new ones. Obviously, the legacy-cast of the original trilogy have been dusted down, as have the upgraded Star Destroyers, TIE-Fighters, X-Wings and The Millennium Falcon. And on an un-named level, we get more Astromechs, Gonk-Droids, and a couple of familiar looking aliens in Maz Kanata's bar-castle. But everything else (and it's a proportion which counts for a lot, is fresh from the drawing board. A new desert-world means no Jawas or Sandpeople, and the woodland-planets (three of them in this film) have neither an Ewok or Gungan in sight. Gone are the Rodians, Ithorians, Aqualish and Dugs which populated the Expanded-Universe, and in come a phalanx of (individually named, but largely dialogue-free) creatures who are already warming the pegs at your local TRU and Entertainer stores. As Hasbro have found with their various other licences, Star Wars is the only brand which can sell weird-looking figures of characters who don't speak and appear on-screen for less than five seconds.
And speaking of those toys, The Force Awakens not only brings us the re-designed Stormtrooper and TIE-Fighter Pilot, but also the Flametrooper and Snowtrooper, as well as pauldron-sporting Commander variants of them, too. No Star Wars film has ever drenched the market with new armour variations like TFA has, and that's before we get to the chrome-plated Captain Phasma. Completists and army-builders have never had their overdrafts so tested since the paint-variations of the Clone Wars era.
I'm not complaining about any of this by the way, because at its core, TFA still feels like Star Wars to me (and as an Expanded Universe veteran, I've been dealing with fatally-flawed super-weapons and Villain Of The Week bad guys for over twenty years now). Although JJ's at the helm and Disney are writing the cheques, the movies are still made by Lucasfilm, and they've been making the Star Wars I love since around the time I was born. My judgement is clouded and even I know I'm such a fanboy that I'd enjoy Episode VII whatever it contained, but the comparisons to earlier films in the canon hae been made by others before me, and while they can be debated, they can hardly be disputed.
A total cynic might even say that Disney have recruited JJ Abrams to sell you something you already own (and probably several times over). Inherently marketable and at saturation point before the film had even been released, The Force Awakens is a movie full of shiny new things which have never looked, or felt, so familiar…
In fact, if George Lucas had made this film, the media would have crucified him.
Again.
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In other news, I finally a) saw The Force Awakens in IMAX, and b) saw a film in IMAX! Yep, first timer. I know, some movie-geek, right? You've probably seen loads of films on the most talked-about cinematic format, right? So, help me out here: why wasn't I utterly blown away?
Maybe my expectation was too high as someone who's heard nothing but great things about the immersive-experience for years? I'm just not sure what's so special about IMAX in 2015. For the viewer who goes to the cinema a lot (ie. me), or regularly visits more than one cinema (also me), it's little more than "a really good presentation", which is surely what you'd want and expect in 2015 anyway (and rightly so, given the price of tickets these days)?
The average IMAX screen may be six-storeys high, but the larger auditoriums in today's multiplexes feature regular ones which are four-storeys high as a matter of course. The size of the film in your field-of-vision is as much dictated by your choice and position of seat as it is by the dimensions of the screen (cf sitting at the back/top of the 'superscreen'). The curve of the screen also seems to overcompensate for its size, too. It's not going to be a deal-breaker watching most movies, but the distortion of the straight lines on the BBFC rating-card at the film's beginning tells you that the next two hours are going to show you something that the cinematographer didn't quite intend.
Speaking of which, while the curved screen doesn't 'wrap around' the viewer, it was of an overall height (or more correctly, position) by which I had the silhouettes of two heads interrupting the bottom of the frame for the entire movie. The first guy sat down directly in front of me, so I budged along a few seats (allocated seating be damned, when it's that quiet in there). By doing so, I avoided having his protruding bonce at the bottom-centre of my vision, but I'd also moved to where another patron's was then 'balanced' with the original guy. And yeah, it's not a deal-breaker, but Director of Photography Daniel Mindel didn't stand in the Abu Dhabi desert saying to the cast "Okay, for this shot you need to keep your eye-line up because the audience can't yet see beyond that post over there, but you can do what you like with that hand, because it'll be obscured by the heads of the row of people sitting directly in front of pretty much everyone!". If I can't see the entire film because of the size of the screen and the angle/gradient of the tiered seating, how is that 'better'? To further confuse matters, apparently the Enfield IMAX screen isn't even classed by purists as one of the 'big' ones, either. So who knows how much detail audiences in those theatres are missing?
But - crucially - the IMAX presentation of the film is fantastically clear, with a colour-range and depth that you don't get with regular 3D presentations. Speaking of which, the 3D itself looks really spiffy, too. Again, not really necessary for the film, but I've seen TFA enough with the glasses on to know which bits work and where the problems arise. Other than some ghosting on BB-8's lights in the droids's very first scene in the Jakku village, it seems the IMAX system is far more suited to three dimensions than regular 3D/Real-D showings (although it can be done; most animated movies don't suffer the way that live-action seems to in terms of ghosting).
For all that cineastes bemoan the era of semi-automated digital projection, I do think that general moviegoing looks better now than it ever has, to the point where an IMAX presentation of a regular movie is no longer a thing of jaw-dropping wonder, unattainable elsewhere. And sure, it was great in the days when cinemas had a specially trained projectionist, to whom it was as much an art-form as a job. But I've sat through enough slightly-out-of-focus movies and magnified-lint in my time to know that that generation hit retirement before the reels themselves did, and you could go and have a word out in the foyer (missing more of the movie), but ultimately if they were going to recognise/fix an issue at all, they'd have done it before you got out of your seat. What I'm saying is, I've got two cameras at home; that doesn't make me a photographer.
So, tell me why I'm wrong about the amount of new stuff in The Force Awakens and why I'm wrong about IMAX ;)
The Star Wars films.
Yep. It's still on, too.
It does, although that's not to say that it achieves all it could.
Some yes, some not so much.
Nope. Already had several animated discussions about several aspects of the movie.
There certainly is.
Level 0: It's Star Wars.
But to go round the houses with it: Star Wars: The Force Awakens stars Kiran Shah as Teedo, who also made an appearance in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, as did Christopher Lee, who starred in 1999's Sleepy Hollow, as did Ian McDiarmid, who was in the BBC series 37 Days, alongside Oliver Ford Davies, who took a role in the 1973 TV series Moonbase 3, whose roster also included Garrick Hagon, who appeared in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman flick, which also starred William Hootkins, who rocked up in Raiders of the Lost Ark, of course, as did Kiran Shah, who starred in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Yeah, I've decided I'm just going to keep on doing these, so that the amount of praise which is eventually heaped upon me will be gargantuan ;)
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.
Already generating more than its share of awards-buzz is Alejandro Iñárritu's The Revenant, the tale of a US frontier trapper who gets separated from his hunting party, attacked by a bear, attacked by a tribe of Native Americans and attacked by his own hunting party. It like a fairly arduous journey, and indeed it is. I've seen the trailer a lot recently, and I have to admit that it didn't really push any buttons for me other than the names involved. But the trailer only hints at the setting and the story, and its duration can't properly show off what the film is. Which is fantastic.
Credit where it's due (and the awards-panels of the media industry will no doubt observe this), Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy are on quite, quite magnificent form (even if Hardy goes Full Jeff Bridges™ and mumbles much of his dialogue). Both have become immensely talented actors, and I think we've still to see the best work from each of them. But what really makes the film so enjoyable*1 is the collaboration between director Iñárritu and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. While it's not at the level of their previous outing Birdman'sseamless-take presentation, The Revenant features some of the lengthiest and most complex continuous shots I've probably ever seen. Neither Iñárritu or Lubezki are afraid to use a single camera for a single take, while often showing the audience the full 360° of the surrounding landscape. This alone meant I sat grinning like an idiot for much of the film.
Although I really don't enjoy making the distinction, I think there's more in The Revenant for the film-fan than the movie-fan. The main narrative itself is well structured and relatively linear, but it's occasionally interwoven with dreams. hallucinations, and symbolism. While it's not exactly art-house, even the main thrust of The Revenant has a ponderous, often hypnotic quality that could well disappoint anyone sitting down hoping for a punchily-paced revenge tale of the Tarantino-school*2.
But rest assured, the film's got the physicality when it needs it, too. Large stretches of the story are (necessarily) combat-based, and while Iñárritu doesn't revel in the gore of projectile and blade weapons, he certainly doesn't recoil from it, either. I've never known a collective audience audibly wince as much as they did during the film's climactic showdown.
An outstanding, if exhausting, piece of cinema, The Revenant is a hauntng and relentlessly bleak survival horror. A bit like an olden-days version of The Walking Dead but without any zombies, yet just as fraught with danger. Fantastic.
Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, Birdman.
For the cinematography alone, yes.
Undoubtedly.
No, but it's up there…
Probably not.
There's not, even though the number of arrows and horses in use means it's the perfect movie for one.
Level 1: The Revenant stars none other than General Hux himself, Domnhall Gleeson.
Oh, and let's just say there's "a Taun-Taun scene" in it, as well :P
*1 Okay, maybe not enjoyable… satisfying?
*2 Although I didn't rush out to question their reasons, there were a couple of walk-outs at my screening. On one hand, this was an Unlimited Card preview, so the patrons in question hadn't necessarily paid anything extra to be there and would feel less aggrieved at giving up on a movie. But on the other, I find card-holders to be generally more receptive to different genres and styles, since they've bought the subscription precisely because they love the cinema. Maybe it was just Tom's mumbling?
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.
