Despite everything that I'm about to throw at the bargain-shelf-warmer that is The Forest, I should add that it still towers above the trailers I saw beforehand for The Other Side Of The Door, The Boy and Friend Request. It appears that casting agents for crap horror movies these days just sit around watching The Walking Dead before picking up the phone and yelling "that one!". Still, we get the films we deserve.
Following the BBFC card, the deafening volume of the Icon films ident tells you exactly what to expect for the next hour and a half, and the quiet-quiet-LOUD mantra is rigorously enforced throughout. Despite the first fifteen minutes of The Forest securing the 2016 Guinness World Record for the most expository points crammed into an opening act, the rest of the film is so lethargic and self-indulgently paced than you'd swear the final draft of the screenplay only clocked in at 55 minutes, requiring some heavy-duty padding to make it cinema-shaped.
Not withstanding the boneheaded premise of a fragile, doe-eyed sister following her troubled twin into a haunted suicide-forest (accompanied by a character who was clearly played by Mark Ruffalo in the screenwriters' minds), the film also has the story taking place in Japan (where the forest is an actual thing) allowing the superstition to be ramped unfeasibly up to eleven along with the jump-volume, and with a liberal dosing of pidgin-English that rides a line somewhere between exploitative and outright xenophobic. After a series of quasi-hallucinogenic episodes, the pair eventually find an abandoned log-cabin in the haunted wood, which conveniently contains all the horror tropes hitherto undiscovered.
I can't work out if The Forest is openly referencing just about every key horror movie of the last fifty years, or if the writers*1 genuinely haven't seen them (but have spoken to lots of people who have). It's not even so much that the screenplay is clichéd, but it's also unremittingly stupid. Sitting in a bar just outside of Tokyo, Natalie Dormer's Sara asks "Are you fluent?", to a man (the false Mark Ruffalo) who's literally just finished speaking fluent Japanese to the bartender. Mind you, she just had to explain to this chap that she looked the same as her twin sister, and he still seemed surprised when he saw a photo of her. Later on, Sara says the words "Grandma rushed outside…", narrating a visual flashback in which Grandma demonstrably rushes nowhere, even accounting for the slow-motion. Many of the film's more outré setpieces may actually have been the result of me repeatedly crashing my head into the seat in front of me…
To go further down my list of gripes would be shooting fish in a barrel, actually no, in a washing-up bowl. With a shotgun. Suffice to say that The Forest could well be the most sloppily assembled horror flick I've watched since Annabelle. Yeah.
Still, a bonus point is awarded for the use of a haunted View-Master.
No, seriously.
Hitting yourself over the head with a tin tray for an hour and a half.
The only reason this is even allowed within 500 yards of a cinema is because it stars Natalie Dormer. And the fact that it is and it does is of benefit to no-one, not least to Natalie Dormer.
Unless "annoy that Blackout" was at the top of the film-makers' list, no.
Oh, let's ask Natalie that…
Go away.
Thankfully, there isn't.
Level 2: Natalie Dormer is out of Game Of Thrones and the last Hunger Games movie, both of which also star Gwendoline 'Phasma' Christie.
*1 The term "writers" used here in its loosest and most non-legally-binding sense. As is the word "screenplay". And "film".
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.
Whilst being carpet-bombed with products and services for GIRL-THINGS™ for 27 minutes prior to the film, I watched the trailer for The Choice, the upcoming movie based on the Nicholas Sparks novel of the same name. As the promo-reel served not so much as an enticement for the film, but basically the entire thing in a truncated 3-minute form, I found myself thinking "hang on, this looks remarkably like the last trailer for a Nicholas Sparks adaptation I saw. And the one before that. And the one before…" At that moment I realised pretty much exactly how tonight's target-demographic feels when they sit through a trailer for a superhero movie. Just as I wasn't buying the clichéd horseshit about sanding down boats and going for long walks with dogs under emotionally turbulent skies etc, these fine cinemagoers around me don't think "Hey, I like the way they've adapted Iron Man's armour for the new movie; it really evokes the silver-age without being too retro!". Seriously ladies, I can tune out the odd TV and billboard advert that I know isn't aimed at me, but after being force-fed for half an hour the bullshit you're exposed to constantly? I genuinely have no idea how you manage to live in this world full-time. I salute you.
Which is more than Warner Brothers are doing in their cinematic interpretation of How To Be Single, a film which is every bit as patronising and methodical as you'd expect (and, I suspect, as was intended). Recycled chick-flick tropes fill the gaps left by the borderline-incoherent storytelling and erratic editing. Nowhere near as provocative or hedonistic as it'd like to think it is, but thoroughly unable to commit to being contemplative (or even mawkish), either.
At its best, How To Be Single is faintly amusing, if facile and self-indulgent. At its worst, the film is like being waterboarded with Lambrini, your gurgled screams drowned out by a Cosmopolitan-compiled playlist. That the script goes so far as to dismissively reference both Bridget JonesandSex & The City shows just how far above its station the film's ideas are. The cast give good value for money as far as they're able, but they're hobbled by a format which objectifies and belittles them far more than the society it's cocking a snook at. The Insecure one, the Mumsy one, the Needy one and the Fat one*1. You can go out and party as much as you like, girls! As long as you conform while you're doing it. Well played, Warner Brothers, well played.
Oh, and take a good look at that poster. It's the only time you'll see those four actresses in the same room. I'd initially wondered why the IMDB page for the film lists Alison Brie far, far apart from the other stars (in the Rest of cast listed alphabetically section), especially as it's apparently in 'credits-order'. This is because while Brie's character and Dakota Johnson's character share a mutual friend, Alison's story-thread has not-fuck-nothing to do with the rest of the film. It feels like some side-anecdote which the movie keeps forgetting to tell or wasn't edited out properly.
Bizarre, unfocused and every bit as slapdash as the rest of the production...
"Maybe we're been making all the wrong moves? Maybe we've been focusing on the wrong stuff and now it's too late..?" says Johnson's Alice in a third-act moment of realisation.
I imagine the editing-team remarked much the same thing, just before they handed in their final cut of the film…
Being patronised by film studios suggesting your love-life (or lack thereof) is somehow not dramatic enough.
It's not really designed for that format, to be fair.
Well I didn't utterly despise the film, despite its best efforts, so no.
I should hope not.
A little bit.
I mean, probably not a lot.
But yes.
There isn't.
Level 2: Rebel Wilson is due to appear in the upcoming Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie alongside Celia 'Bravo 5' Imrie and Gwendoline 'Phasma' Christie.
*1 I like Rebel Wilson. I want to like her more, I really do. But her ongoing choice of roles is frankly atrocious.
Take a long look in the mirror, Rebel. Or just watch Grimsby. Either/or.
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.
Grimsby (aka The Brothers Grimsby)
Cert: 15 / 83 mins / Dir. Louis Leterrier / Trailer
Ah, Mr Baron Cohen, we've been expecting you. Striding blithely forth, the standard-bearer of 2016's first cinematic graveyard shift is Grimsby, a thinly connected series of comedy/spy set-pieces, overflowing with swagger and stupidity like the bastard-brother of Kingsman that only took two GCSEs and managed to fail those.
Never quite at his best on the big screen, Sacha is aided and abetted by a faintly embarrassed-looking Mark Strong; the perennial straight-man in an utterly mechanical screenplay which spends its short 83 minutes constantly searching for the comedic lowest common denominator; and managing to surpass itself time after time as it finds new thresholds of common decency to disregard. Ian McShane and Isla Fisher are confined to a black-ops control room and escape largely with their dignity intact, which is more than can be said for almost every other member of the cast, including Penelope Cruz who doesn't quite seem to know why she's there (and is arguably better-off for that). Perhaps most amazing of all is that the film's star, born and raised in London, has more difficulty holding on to his The North™ accent than his screen-wife Rebel Wilson. Who is from Sydney. On the other side of the actual world.
Fixated with exaggerated stereotypes that have already been flogged to death elsewhere, Grimsby chooses broad, easy targets and attacks them with the bluntest of instruments, attempting to satirise The Class of Jeremy Kyle whilst also selling them tickets and popcorn. Even the film itself isn't sure who it's actually for.
In fact, I can't really understand why I enjoyed it so much…*1
Grimsby aims low in every sense, so it probably does, yes.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 2: Grimsby stars Ian McShane, who also appeared in The Golden Compass alongside Christopher 'Dooku' Lee and Daniel 'Suggestible Stormtrooper' Craig.
*1 I can't even explain it, because if the film had starred Adam Sandler instead of Sacha Baron Cohen, I'd have fucking despised it. This is in no way, shape or form a good movie, either technically or artistically. But I enjoyed it very much.
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.
"Today is the end of the Republic! The end of a regime that acquiesces to disorder! At this very moment in a system far from here, the New Republic lies to the galaxy while secretly supporting the treachery of the loathsome Resistance!"
~ General Hux, Starkiller Base, 34ABY.
Right, sorry to go back to this again, but hang on a minute: 'in a system far from here'? Really? How far? You are aware, aren't you Hux, that Starkiller Base is a hyper-lightspeed weapon, yeah? Even the folks in your much-maligned Resistance have figured that one out. Like, it can actually travel to the places it wants to blow up? Almost as if that was the very point?
What I'm getting at is, if there's one thing more long-winded than destroying an entire star (and by extension its dependent solar system) only to use that energy to pulverise the planets in another system, it's got to be carrying out the second part of that watertight plan by firing the weapon from so far away that it's going to require more energy to get the Destructo-Beam™ to the planets in question than it is to actually neutralise them.
It's not like the beam travels at the speed of light, remember. Kylo Ren stands on the bridge of the Finalizer and watches it lazily pootling through space at the rate of a London bus down Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon. Now I get that the path of the beam is pre-calculated to account for the planetary position on its arrival (that's just standard astro-navigational practice), but even being fired at just under light-speed it could take years for the Mega-DeathRay™ to reach its targets in the Hosnian System's primary star's orbital range. Space is big, remember?
Once you factor in that you can't really can't remove an entire star from the cosmic balancing act that is The Galaxy without having unforeseeable gravitational knock-on effects in adjacent systems (and beyond), Starkiller Base really is starting to look like a completely impractical weapon, used thoroughly inefficiently. By a moron.
+ + + + +
Oh and while I'm on, am I the only one wondering if Jakku is Tatooine after all? There's been speculation and subsequent denial ever since that first trailer hit showing Finn in the Goazon Badlands. And while it's clear that for the purposes of this movie, Jakku is Jakku, the planet's dunes, shanty-towns and moisture-vaporators seem remarkably familiar from a visual standpoint, doesn't they? Like, too familiar. And relatively little about Jakku's long-term history has actually been revealed in the rebooted continuity as of yet.
I mean, the main (and let's face it, only) marked difference is that Tatooine has two suns and Jakku only has one, right? What I'm wondering is, what if one of Tatooine's suns was depleted/destroyed in order to provide the initial charge for Starkiller Base? When we catch up with Snoke and Hux in SW:TFA, the superweapon is completed and ready-charged; it must have drawn that power from somewhere. Granted, this would probably have a catastrophic effect on Tatooine, as mentioned above, but if it didn't... what if Tatooine was then reclassified as Jakku, in some bid to erase/reset its galactic reputation? It seems unlikely that such a feat could take place in as short a period of time as thirty years (the new Battlefront game posits the Battle of Jakku as happening a year after Endor), but let's not forget that everyone basically forgot who the Jedi were in less than twenty…
Ultimately, I don't think it's a particularly likely scenario (or even that workable). But if it does turn out to be the case that we've visited this dustball several times previously, then I want to be directing people to this post and pointing out that I nailed it.
Otherwise, we shall never speak of this again ;)
Er… Star Wars?
If you haven't and you can, yes.
Pretty much.
So-so.
Maybe a little.
There definitely is.
Level 0: It's Star Wars.
Although it's also worth mentioning that Star Wars: The Force Awakens features veteran performer Andrew Jack, who also also made an appearance in the 1950s TV series ITV Sunday Night Theatre, a title which also boasted the presence of Mr Peter Cushing, who starred in 1981's Mystery on Monster Island, alongside Terence Stamp, who rocked up in 1968's Modesty Blaise with Clive Revill also on the payroll, an actor who also appeared in the TV series Crown Court, as did a certain Don Henderson, who slipped into the 1968 adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Sebastian Shaw, who clocked up eight episodes of the aforementioned ITV Sunday Night Theatre, a show which starred a young Andrew Jack, who appeared as Major Ematt in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
I'll be completely honest with you, I'm not going to miss doing these.
Don't know if I'll have the strength once Rogue One comes around in December...
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.
Deadpool (second-pass / SPOILERS)
Cert: 15 / 108 mins / Dir. Tim Miller / Trailer
An interesting second-pass for 20th Century Fox's Deadpool, as it's a movie I scored full-marks initially yet didn't get a whole lot more out of when I re-watched it. That's not to say I enjoyed it less in any way, but other than a stronger grasp of the mechanics of Wade Wilson's superhero-transformation (more on that later), the movie holds that instant-classic feel of comforting repetition, rather than a film which is going to unfurl new secrets each time you watch it. In many ways it makes a nice change to not be bludgeoned over the head with Too Much Activity Obscuring The Plot Points™, but short of sequel ret-cons or back-referencing, it means that Deadpool has said pretty much all it has to say the first time you sit waiting for the end-of-credits scene.
And as much as I love this movie (I do, despite the picking apart I'm about to embark upon), it was this second-pass which highlighted a few of the cracks that were masked by the film's novelty the first time around. Whether Sunday night's audience just weren't as hyped as Wednesday's, the laughter wasn't as vociferous and the 'laugh-gaps' in the film become more apparent. The same can also be said of the classic-jukebox soundtrack, much of which is listened to in-movie resulting in a pretty firm nod towards Guardians of the Galaxy that also cuts down slightly on the cost of scoring the film. I'd been a little unclear on Wade's transformation, too, until a re-watch confirmed that yes, they basically just inject him with an accelerant then torture him until his mutant DNA kicks in. We aren't shown any scanning for traces of mutant DNA before that, so is it safe to assume that everyone has it, to some extent? So this process could apply to pretty much everybody? Really? Okay then.
The thing which really stuck out however, was what a sub-par villain Ed Skrein's Ajax (aka Francis) is. Not withstanding the fact that The Transporter Refuelled" is still making me be sick in my own mouth, the role itself seems to have been hastily sketched in at the last moment, never mind Skrein's inability to do much interesting with it. Don't get me wrong, he'd make a more than passable henchman (this portrayal and the actor), but he's just not boss-material here. Although is he more cringe-inducing than The Wolverine's Viper? Well of course not.
No, this movie is Deadpool's show in name and in spirit, and if that means eclipsing almost everybody else on-screen, then we should have been expecting that anyway, right? The movie has scored the goal which Marvel missed with Punisher and Ghost Rider, and made a fun, exciting flick for older (if not necessarily more mature) audiences. Then again, the central character is a creation of the 90s, and so isn't hampered with the baggage many heroes bring to the screen with them. Most importantly, Deadpool is a positive which more than cancels out the negative of last year's Fantastic Four reboot, but potentially sets the bar unfeasibly high for Fox's other Marvel output. Time will tell.
Superheroes appeal to us because they show us what we could be without our limitations, and dare us to aspire to that even with them.
And if we're allowed to have super-powers and still make dick-jokes all the time?
Even better…
As much as you'll scoff at this, X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
Yes.
Yes.
Ryan's on spectacular form, everybody else just about keeps up.
Oh, maybe a little.
I'm not hearing one.
Level 2: Deadpool features Gina Carano, who starred in Haywire alongside Ewan 'Kenobi' 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.
