I have, to put it mildly, a rough track record with Western-type movies (both vintage and modern), to the point where I'm never sure if it's a genre or setting that I actually enjoy. But let's face it folks, with a cast like John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed, there's got to be something to enjoy in The Sisters Brothers, right?
Right. Jacques Audiard's cinematic rendering of Patrick DeWitt's novel sees the eponymous brothers (Reilly, Phoenix) heading west to San Francisco on the trail of a bounty (Ahmed, who befriends and drags in Gyllenhaal en route), while fending off fellow outlaws as well as each other's bickering, bad luck and poor judgement.
MOMENTS The film is not 'a comedy', but there are plenty of amusing moments (certainly far more than the one which preceded it), and begins with quite possibly the bleakest opening sequence in living memory. It's brutally violent in several places; never exploitatively so, but Audiard is certainly unflinching in his bloodshed. And yet, this can be more properly called a character-study, with the fantastic performances you expect from the central cast*1 and beyond.
For a movie which is a combined road trip and low-speed chase, The Sisters Brothers is an oddly paced affair. Not slow throughout, just uneven and ponderous. Although again, there's the feeling that the parts which I didn't connect with are more to do with my reservations about Westerns than this film itself.
JOHNSON
An audible ripple went through the auditorium during 'the spider-scene' (and again shortly afterward in its payoff moment). One of the few examples where mild breaking of The Code is probably permissible. By the time you add on a wonderfully relatable script and Benoît Debie's gorgeous cinematography, it's fair to call this something of a mixed bag, even if all the elements appear to be pulling in largely the right direction.
What begins loud ends quiet, and although the eponymous pair have more than earned their rest by the two hour mark, there's the feeling that it would have been more satisfying for this to be implied rather than shown. Had the title card made an appearance when they reached the gate five minutes earlier, the more ambiguous ending would have been - perhaps ironically - far more satisfying…
This is a film that's relatively unique to me, stylistically. It would be reductive and unhelpful to cite Django Unchained here, not least because The Sisters Brothers is nowhere near as desperate to be hip, but let's go with that anyway.
*1 What the hell kind of accent is Gyllenhaal meant to be doing, though? It's not American, it's certainly not British. I can imagine that in the expansion-era of 1851 it would be possible to have acquired a mix of the two, but this is just distracting... [ 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.
This review is dedicated to the occupant of seat C4, in screen 9 of Cineworld's Leicester Square cinema, at the 12:15pm showing of The House, on Saturday 8th July 2017*1.
Now, I like to be as punctual as possible with my cinema-viewing. I aim to arrive at the doors of the auditorium itself at the start-time on the ticket, or shortly thereafter pending queues etc. I know there are twenty-seven minutes between that time and the on-screen arrival of the BBFC card (everything thereafter being the film itself). I also know that within those twenty-seven minutes, people will be entering the room on a steady basis and probably, depending on my seat-location, edging past me to get to their own. I'm fine with that (providing it's before the BBFC card), I just don't want to be that guy.
I mention this because I was pretty much on-time, as above, for my viewing of the new Will Ferrell / Amy Poehler comedy, The House. And as I entered the room, seat C4 was already occupied. Fair play, I thought, this is a man after my own heart, a patron who wants to take in the entirety of the presentation*2. Like myself, this was a viewer escaping the bustling activity of London's West End on a Saturday lunchtime and enjoying the group-solitude of cinema. What I'm saying is, this guy clearly wanted to be there as he'd arrived before I had and had bought snacks at the concession counter. Which made it all the more funny when he sat through the adverts, trailers, promo, more ads… and then left the film four and a half minutes in. Such is this man's judgement and foresight, he doesn't need to know what he then missed, he just knew when the script dropped a rape-joke*3 four minutes into the run-time that it's not going to get any better than this.
To be fair, I knew that as well, but I can't review a film after only watching the first scene. If I'm going to objectively hate something, I want all the evidence.
Scripted Joke Interlude #1 EXT. SUBURBAN STREET - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking down their drive, explaining to their teenage daughter ALEX that taking drugs in college is a bad idea.
ALEX: But you're always saying how you smoked a lot of pot and peed outside in college?
KATE: Okay, they used to call me 'smoke a lot of pot and pee outside Kate'...
This is the first verbalised joke in THE HOUSE. The conversation moves on after this, the second line was the punchline. It was a joke. This is the bar that the film sets itself. A bar that the film spend the rest of its mercifully-short runtime smashing its own face into, hoping to raise laughs from the audience in lieu of words.
Now, you may be tempted to judge this film by its trailer, and save yourself 85 minutes. You're free to do that, but I assure you that the 2½ minutes of the promo necessitate a tightness of editing and brevity of dialogue that the completed film does not even know is possible. From the initial scene mentioned above, this is a screenplay full of placeholder lines where the jokes should be; where every plot point is explained three times in immediate succession by different characters, then explained again three scenes later. The needless repetition and verbal floundering is a sign of poor ad-libbing and even worse editing. It's only 88 minutes long. Including the credits. Imagine being writer/director Andrew Jay Cohen and not even coming out with enough footage to cross the line of an hour and a half.
This ridiculous mess of a movie is so staggeringly sub-par that even the likes of genre stalwarts Melissa McCarthy and Tina Fey haven't put their names down to appear in cameo roles. Although they could well be in entire plot-strands which have been cut from the movie, so disjointed and erratic is the final product. Ironically, the choreography in the brief fight sequence is executed with an enthusiasm and efficiency that the screenplay writers can barely dream of. Jeremy Renner (yes, the Avenger) turns up in act III as a criminal overlord for some reason, executing the same regretful grimace and decision-making process that led him to appear in a series of British TV adverts for mobile phone contracts. He's no Winston Wolf, that's for sure.
Scripted Joke Interlude #2 INT. 'THE CONTAINER STORE' - DAY.
Middle-aged parents KATE and SCOTT are walking around The Container Store with their teenage daughter ALEX. We know it is The Container Store because there is a sign on the front of their shopping trolley which reads "The Container Store" and also because there are containers of varying sizes on shelves and standalone displays. This is the setup for a joke. Suffering from a severe hangover, KATE reaches onto a nearby display to grab an opaque container. She removes the lid and vomits violently into the box (vomit unseen by audience).
KATE: …it's a good job this is The Container Store and there are containers everywhere.
SCOTT then opens the front of a container about the size of a coffin and jumps in for no reason, tipping it over. The scene ends.
Amongst about a hundred other poorly conceived ideas, the film has a scene featuring a generic US Club-Standup™ playing to an audience of one, who's finding the act absolutely hilarious while observers look on blank-faced at the below-average execution of it all. It's a pretty good allegory for the screening I was in as I only heard one other audience member make any noise of humorous appreciation throughout, and even that wasn't enough to make you think the person was watching 'a comedy film'.
I yearn now for those sweet, heady days when I thought that C.H.i.P.s. would be the worst comedy I'd see this year. On the Hollywood career-ladder, The House is a film you make on the way down. Utter, utter shite.
The cruellest touch might be the the eventual and uncomplicated title card proffering the words "THE END" in massive letters, raising the hopes of the audience like a hostage hearing a police siren outside of the building in which they're being held. This card is immediately followed by a slew of shit out-takes from the film, feeling like the siren tailing off down the street to some other crime-scene. To be fair, at least this is a sign that you can leave the room.
Unless you're the lucky holder of ticket "C4", in which case you need no such permission…
In the dysfunctional family of studio-comedy, this is the inbred sibling of Sisters.
No. Absolutely not.
No. Absolutely not.
Amy Poehler is better than this.
Will Ferrell isn't.
I shall ask you, loudly and in a public space, to explain yourself.
There isn't. There was a one in the VW Golf GTE advert which ran immediately before the film, but a) that doesn't count and b) even if it did, this film doesn't deserve for that to count.
Speaking of before-film activities, while two of the trailers which ran in front of The House ('Geostorm' and 'Rough Night') feature no familiar faces from the GFFA, the others were for Logan Lucky (with Adam 'Kylo Ren' Driver), American Made (with Domhnall 'General Hux' Gleeson) and Detroit (with John 'Finn Boyega). And I only mention this because when you think of the difference in subject and tone between those films, it illustrates that the distributors have no fucking clue who's going to be watching The House.
So anyway it's a Level 2: Amy Poehler's in this, and she was the voice of Joy in that Inside Out, alongside John 'Derlin' Ratzenberger, Frank 'Yoda' Oz, Bill 'BB-8' Hader and Jim 'has done voice-work in eight Lucasarts SW video games' Ward.
Yes. One.
*1 I don't facetiously mean myself here, I was in seat B7. [ BACK ]
*2 It's not like I sit there myself like an eager puppy for just under half-an-hour, gazing in awe at TV adverts shown on a big screen. But I'll use that time to check-in on Facebook/Twitter, and on a day like today prepare something to scribble on as I'll be seeing another film almost immediately afterwards. Plus, I enjoy watching the trailers when I've finished arseing about doing all that (more on those trailers later, though). Those twenty-seven minutes are my get in the zone time. [ BACK ]
*3 And the intended get-out from writers Brendan O'Brien and Andrew Jay Cohen seems to be "oh, it's okay because it occurs during a conversation between two teenage girls, so that's okay", irrespective of how flippant and tasteless it would be coming from any character in this film. [ 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.
Krampus (SPOILERS)
Cert: 15 / 98 mins / Dir. Michael Dougherty / Trailer
Ah, Christmas, Christmas, Christmas*1. The annual season of cheer, goodwill and unfettered capitalism has been the hand-in-glove companion for the film industry since 1901's Scrooge; Or Marley's Ghost. Of course, not all movies are candy-cane-sweet, and so the self-aware sub-genre of 'Christmas Horror' was created for moviegoers who like to think they're a bit more cynical about the whole thing. Which is precisely why I'm going to be as cynical as I am about the latest addition to the festive-library, Krampus…
Based around the (suddenly remarkably well known) alpine legend of St Nicholas' diabolical counterpart, we begin with possibly the most facetious title sequence for a Christmas movie in living memory, watching a slow-motion montage of sales-shoppers destroy everything in their path in the bloodthirsty quest for a bargain. It's especially notable given how formulaic the film becomes after it. The problem is that the idea at its core is reasonably good; but the film is rarely more than reasonable. Too many of the movie's central family are unlikeable to the point that their continued survival doesn't become important to the audience, but they're not quite despicable enough that their grisly ends can be met with any satisfied glee.
This isn't helped by a ninety minute screenplay which drags its heels in dispatching most of its hapless inhabitants, leading to a mass cull in the last ten minutes that feels more like carelessness than a crescendo. Krampus can never let go and become as boldly different as it'd like, struggling to reconcile a mainstream horror flick and a relatively tame black comedy. Rather than working together, the styles spend too much time undermining each other's effectiveness. That said, when The Horror™ does finally arrive in force, it's still a little too cartoonish to hold any real sense of threat on its own. By the third-act finale, Krampus has begun to resemble the old Puppet Master series, with a range of festive atrocities who - although finely crafted and realised - seem to have been designed to cater to a secondary revenue-stream of t-shirts and high-end maquette collectables. More Hot Topic than Hammer House of Horror.
But it's not awful at all. This is just the kind of low-rent monster-flick which usually gets released straight-to-DVD (which, for shameless Cousin Eddie rip-off, David Koechner, is the second one in as many months). The production values are all relatively high, but they're dragging around a screenplay which needs a thorough polish.
For a Christmas-based black-comedy/horror that's truly quirky, you'd be better off with 2010's Rare Exports, although this pared-down Hollywood re-tooling is perfectly acceptable for a night in with the sherry and the eggnog…
Spoilers - highlight to read: Mind, that Bobby-Ewing-stepping-out-of-the-shower ending can fuck right off, as well.
Not unless mainstream horror is really your thing.
Maybe buy it for the Christmas-pile, but wait until it's under a fiver.
It does not.
It does not.
I will not.
There is not.
Krampus stars (inexplicably) Toni Collette, who also appeared in 2000's Shaft remake, alongside Sam 'Windu' Jackson.
*1 Of course, the most annoying thing about reviewing these movies is reading back what you've written and seeing that you've put the word 'Christmas' three times in one paragraph and twice in the next. And there's only so many times you can get away with 'festive', 'seasonal' and 'holiday season' instead. Bunch of arse. Anyway, Christmas Christmas Christmas...
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.
