Onward Cert: U / 107 mins / Dir. Dan Scanlon / Trailer
Odd times, we live in. The new Pixar movie opens with a 5-minutes Simpsons short, an acknowledgement that the former 20th Century Fox is now part of the Disney brand. Essentially a silent film, Playdate With Destiny centres on Maggie as she falls in love with a toddler at the local park. It's a fairly sweet affair but far from the humour and even acerbic warmth that the show is capable of at its best.
Which, it turns out, is a fitting overture.
Set in the present-day of a parallel world inhabited by mythical creatures but which has forgotten magic, Onward follows adolescent elves Ian and Barley Lightfoot (voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt) as they embark on a quest to be reunited for a day with their father who died fifteen years earlier. The spell which can enable this has already been partly cast, meaning the pair are accompanied by the sentient legs and feet of their dear papa, which they bulk out to approximate humanoid form using a stuffed sweatshirt, cap and sunglasses, bumbling around for comic effect. So think of Lord Of The Rings by way of Weekend At Bernie's.
DIRECTION It's may also be worth noting that this classically structured adventure makes distinct nods in the direction of Indiana Jones, Gremlins, Ghostbusters and even Back To The Future along the way. And while all this is fun, it's also the heart of the film's problem: Onward feels like an affectionate series of homages rather than its own unique story. The vocal performers are well cast*1, the story is consistently funny and charming, and the animation and music are as perfect as you'd hope, but there are only occasional flashes of the cinematic magic upon which Pixar basically wrote the spell-book.
The film opens efficiently, and sets all its story-markers and callbacks in plain sight. It's more than a little 'Hero's Journey 101', yet in a U-rated adventure that's no bad thing. But while this movie regularly ticks the right boxes, they feel like boxes in someone else's list. From an emotional point of view, this is Pixar's b-game, even though that's still more than many animation studios manage with their best efforts.
FLEWOVERTHECUCKOO'SNEST All told, the fantasy setting perhaps feels a little too on-the-nose (although I love the idea that Warhammer-type games exist in a world already populated by elves, centaurs and dragons), so the high-concept magical elements of the story feel more expected than exceptional. And when you factor in the weird release strategy in the UK, a Disney animation with an A-list voice cast which lands for previews in the week after half-term (ensuring that the general release will miss that window completely), it suggests a worrying lack of enthusiasm on Disney's part.
If it sounds like I'm being unduly harsh on what is a more-than-decent adventure movie, it's only because the creators have set their own bar higher than this. Then, like all the best quests, the treasure wasn't the macguffin after all. That's not to say the rewards mean any less, but the feeling persists that maybe you've travelled way further than you needed to.
Because now that animation has advanced to the point where Pixar can make anything, why isn't Anything as exciting as we'd hoped*2?
I think we've covered that...
Just about, as it'll probably lose no small amount of its magic on the small screen.
This will be a good rainy-afternoon DVD.
Let's not go mad.
Unlikely as I have no really strong feelings on the film either way.
*1 You've got to hand it to Chris Pratt though, he effortlessly manages to play his one recurring character again even when we can't see his actual face. [ BACK ]
*2 Although I'm just going to come out and say it: Ian Lightfoot with his coiffured hair, sticky-out ears and plaid shirt, unsure who he's supposed to be and learning how to create magic while fighting through the emotional conflict of daddy-issues? That's young George Lucas.
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.
StateLikeSleep Cert: 15 / 100 mins / Dir. Meredith Danluck / Trailer State Like Sleep is a psychological thriller from writer/director Meredith Danluck. American fashion photographer Katherine Grand (Katherine Waterston, Inherent Vice) is slowly rebuilding her life after her actor husband Stefan Delvoe (Michael Huisman, The Age Of Adaline) is found dead in their Brussels apartment from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot.
Twelve months later with her mother hospitalised after a series of strokes, the property is due to be sold and Katherine returns to empty it. But revisiting her old life rekindles unsolved mysteries, and soon Katherine is drawn into a seedy underground club scene where she meets her husband’s secret friend Emile (Luke Evans, Midway) as well as her own enigmatic hotel-neighbour Edward (Michael Shannon, Midnight Special).
PROBLEM Despite some solid casting, the main problem is that the emotionally-anaesthetised characters and their sprawling story aren’t particularly interesting, yet neither are they presented in a particularly interesting way. And since Katherine knows at the time of his death that Stefan had issues with drugs and women, there’s no revelation awaiting her return. Everything she finds out about Stefan’s life comes more as an explanation rather than a shock.
The film’s 100 languorous minutes feel far more ordinary than a film with this cast ever should. Scenes taking place in the fetish club aren’t as provocative as they’re perhaps intended to be, and the sequences in which Katherine is quietly wide-eyed on a variety of recreational drugs feel worryingly similar to those where she’s not.
VOODOO And so what could easily have been a solid yet unambitious thriller turns out to not even make it to that mark. Originally filmed in 2016, State Like Sleep finally saw its US release back in January 2019, with an international straight-to-domestic follow up almost a year later. It’s not difficult to see why there’s been little enthusiasm to get this out there.
At one point, Katherine propositions Edward into casual sex with the disclaimer “It doesn’t have to mean anything, it can just be tonight”, seemingly unaware that this should really be the tagline for the front of the DVD…
A load of stuff on Netflix that you've never heard of.
The £3 DVD shelf in ASDA.
The distributors have wisely taken that decision out of your hands.
Stream it out of idle curiosity if you must.
Not not likely.
Quite possible.
Definitely not.
Level 2: Katherine Waterston is in this, and she was in that Logan Lucky with Adam 'Kylo' Driver and Daniel 'Gullible First Order Stormtrooper' Craig.
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.
Dark Waters Cert: 12A / 127 mins / Dir. Todd Haynes / Trailer
Interesting sidetrack on the excellent Sciptnotes podcast recently, where it was discussed that production companies routinely buy the rights not only to news stories but also magazine articles about news stories. And it's not that these are tales of real-life angst just yearning for the big screen treatment and a wider audience, more that their leading actors enjoy the earnest, awards-bait frowning, and the films themselves routinely make modest but reliable amounts of money. A reminder that commerce will always beat art in these times.
And I only mention all this because it's like a tonal template for Todd Haynes' Dark Waters, a hand-wringing political thriller about that time DuPont poisoned an entire town for forty years. Mark Ruffalo leads as the underdog lawyer*1 trying to take on The Man™ in a story which begins in 1998 then spans eighteen years, and boy do the audience feel every single one of them*2. That said, if your movie regularly has to caption-card that it's a year later because nothing of narrative note has happened in the intervening months, this may be a sign that it'd make a better documentary (although in one photo-heavy recap, it basically turns into one anyway).
Whether or not the audience is familiar with the source material, there are absolutely no surprises here. Mario Correa and Matthew Michael Carnahan wrangle the legal saga into the most rudimentary screenplay imaginable, less of a crafted story and more a list of events in chronological order. With sincerity doubling up for intrigue, there's no doubt Dark Waters' heart is in the right place, but the end result is very nuts-and-bolts. Because so much of the film takes place at boardroom and kitchen tables, there's an awful lot of telling-not-showing going on. Even when the film does opt to show, the action is so On The Nose that it could pass for a pair of pince-nez.
To be fair, Dark Waters isn't exactly the film the trailer makes it out to be. It's somehow even more so. Act I tells us that the town may be being poisoned, Act II tells us that they are and Act III tells us that they were. All with a colour palette so desaturated that I was about to go out into the foyer and complain that the red bulb had packed up in the projector.
If the real message here is that many people give up on lengthy litigation dramas because death just seems like an easier option, then well done.
Dear The Film Industry,
Please stop making direct-port films from magazine articles*3.
We already have the news.
We go to the cinema to get away from all that.
(because you know if Ruffalo's character had been female then Jessica Chastain would have been cast in this)
It is not.
If you've got this far through the review, you're either definitely going to anyway or are definitely not.
Absolutely not.
That's very likely.
There isn't.
Level 2: Mark Ruffalo has been in all manner of Avengers movies with, among others, Sam 'Windu' Jackson.
*1 In one scene, Tim Robbins hilariously puts forward the notion that lawyers are actually the good guys in this crazy world of ours, and I'll be honest I don't laugh that hard in most comedies that I watch, so fair play. [ BACK ]
*2 In a sort of cinematic Dorian Gray twist, the actors barely age at all on-screen while the audience feel themselves growing older instead. Putting more grey in Ruffalo's hair and changing Anne Hathaway's wig doesn't count. [ 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.
Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker (eleventh-pass)
Cert: 12A / 142 mins / Dir. J.J. Abrams / Trailer Previous reviews:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
First-in, last-out, that's how I like to play Star Wars. As well you know. And the weekend brought one more chance to slip over and enjoy that star-field and iconic golden logo on a huge screen for one last time (for the forseeable future, at any rate, because even subsequent films are unlikely to be in this Saga-format). And my track record is safe since I got well into double-figures for this one, at least.
So what has the last six weeks taught me? Well, that I love Star Wars, although I knew that anyway (as did you). It's no secret that Episode IX could have been Jar Jar Binks walking onto an empty soundstage and farting for two hours, and I'd have found something to enjoy in it. Each new movie bearing Lucasfilm's badge brings a mad rush of conflicting expectations*1, and the best way to resolve those is by looking for things you love rather than ones you don't. There probably hasn't been a Star Wars movie which ticked all the boxes since 1980, and even that didn't please everybody at the time.
TRUE And while I'm delighted with my Lego, soundtrack and Visual Dictionary, it's also true that the general merchandising has been all over the place for this last outing. Topps have got two trading-card collections on the shelves at the moment, but no sticker album. Similarly, my range of Top Trumps has yet to be completed with a Rise Of Skywalker edition. And don't even get me started on the absence of new Hasbro product. People who sneer that Star Wars is a ruse to sell toys clearly haven't tried to buy any recently*2.
And as much as I love The Rise Of Skywalker (and love moaning), this is arguably the weakest film of the whole Disney-run so far. But these years have at least been a sign to the new owners that the GFFA can't be handled in the same way as the MCU, and especially that Star Wars movies don't just write themselves...
GOLD But on a character-level, for the the ones who matter, the film not only works but is a fitting and coherent end-of-a-chapter. I urge anyone not yet on this bus to check out the recent Rebel Force Radio podcast where John Marcoux breaks down the mythical aspects of Rey's character and how the movie looks at her identity and destiny, there's more there than even I realised.
Time, hindsight and perspective will smooth out the turbulent Sequel Trilogy, an even I agree that a little more thoughtful direction would go a long way at Lucasfilm. In the meanwhile, I'm still chuffed with the movies we've got and I look forward to poring over the (usually sparse, to be fair) bonus features on the upcoming Blu-ray.
The Skywalker is dead.
Long live the Skywalker...
The Star Wars.
Obvs.
Obvs.
That one's up for debate, but probably not.
I'm envisioning that happening on at least one occasion.
You know who you are.
Start prepping your losing-argument now ;)
Not that I can tell.
Level 0: It is Star Wars.
...but if you wanted to go around the houses with it, it's no spoiler at this point to note that The Rise Of Skywalker features Mr Harrison Ford, who starred in Cowboys & Aliens alongside Clancy Brown, who provided voice-work for the 2011 Green Lantern movie that starred Taika Waititi, who voiced Korg in Thor: Ragnarok, a film which also featured Ray Stevenson who was in Big Game with Sam Jackson, who lent his vocals to 2009's Astro Boy, as did one Alan Tudyk, who starred in the 2013 baseball movie 42 alongside... Harrison Ford.
*1 Personally, I'd expected Luke Skywalker to play a much larger role in his spiritual-form, and who among us didn't think that the Knights Of Ren would rock up wielding lightsabers, rather than just, y'know, outsize cutlery... [ BACK ]
*2 That said, my local branch of The Entertainer still has the discounted dregs of The Force Awakens merchandise on its shelves from four years ago as well as peg-warmers from every movie since. This is probably more down to Hasbro's case-packing order than the popularity of characters themselves. Although that has long since been the way... [ 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.
Odd times, we live in. The new Pixar movie opens with a 5-minutes Simpsons short, an acknowledgement that the former 20th Century Fox is now part of the Disney brand. Essentially a silent film, Playdate With Destiny centres on Maggie as she falls in love with a toddler at the local park. It's a fairly sweet affair but far from the humour and even acerbic warmth that the show is capable of at its best.
State Like Sleep is a psychological thriller from writer/director Meredith Danluck. American fashion photographer Katherine Grand (Katherine Waterston, 
Interesting sidetrack on the excellent 
First-in, last-out, that's how I like to play Star Wars. As well you know. And the weekend brought one more chance to slip over and enjoy that star-field and iconic golden logo on a huge screen for one last time (for the forseeable future, at any rate, because even subsequent films are unlikely to be in this Saga-format). And my track record is safe since I got well into double-figures for this one, at least.
