Review: The Son

The Son
Cert: 15 / 123 mins / Dir. Florian Zeller / Trailer

It's Earnest™-season so here comes Florian Zeller's The Son, a turgidly po-faced, navel-gazing domestic melodrama starring Hugh Jackman as the worst type of Pantomime Business Dad who doesn't know how to set his phone to do-not-disturb for meetings, who pulls sad-faces for two hours because his teenage boy doesn't appear to be coping well with his parents' divorce from a decade earlier.

Laura Dern turns up intermittently to sob into her Martini, Vanessa Kirby pouts around an apartment which thinks it's too good for wallpaper, and Anthony Hopkins phones in just enough of a performance to secure the 'and' in the credits-ranking. Hugh's boy is played by Zen McGrath, setting out his stall here for a tour of the Northern club circuit as a Timothée Chalamet tribute act*¹.

WRONG

This is one hundred and twenty minutes of characters angrily asking each other what's wrong and nobody having the answer. It's depression. The kid has clinical depression. It's no-one's fault and it can't be cured, only treated. There, saved you two hours. To be fair, the film doesn't come up with any magic solutions for all this, not least because there aren't any of course, but in the meanwhile it wallows in knowing that anyway and tormenting members of the audience who can see it a mile off.

The whole thing might be meaningful if it wasn't so offensively average, whilst also apparently refusing to explore the subject it's chosen for itself. Going full-Atonement in the last stretch just isn't good enough. Adapting his own play (again), Florian Zeller is happy to churn out a desaturated Channel 5 weekday afternoon angst-a-thon, and Jackman is happy to take the money for pretending he can do serious films as well. Theirs is the only happiness you'll see here.

And I'm taking points off for the shot where the kid is filmed walking alone the 'wrong way' down a heavily signposted one-way street. That's GCSE film-making.

Beautiful Boy was far better at all this, and at least there was some excitement 'cos of all the skag...

*¹ Oh and Hugh Quarshie turns up as well - that's right, Captain Panaka - as a hospital administrator, and nobody calls him Dr Griffin which means this film doesn't take place in the same continuity as Holby City despite having the obvious opportunity and quite frankly I'm probably more furious about this than I am about the appalling approach to mental health issues (including the very scene which Hugh Quarshie is in, for the record).^{[ 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.

Review: Transformers - The Last Knight

Name: Transformers: The Last Knight (2D) / Student Responsible: Michael Bay / Age: 12 (advisory) /Studied: 10 years / Projects Completed: 5 / Latest Project Length: 149 minutes
This has been a difficult year for Michael as he struggles to find coherence in his creative activities. Never the highest achiever in his peer-group, he has nonetheless been a conscientious student in the past, delivering projects to the best of his ability. Recent years have seen him coast into unfocused laziness however, an attitude resurgent in his end-of-year project, The Last Knight. While we wouldn't expect the fifth part of his ongoing series to be a vie for critical acclaim alone, after watching the performance we weren't sure who it was actually aimed at. If Michael is to succeed in his chosen field, he needs to spend more time thinking about why his projects exist, rather than just how to complete them.

Performance in specific areas:


Whilst Michael has succeeded in the relative non-achievement of engaging the theatre department's Mark McMark for a second consecutive production, it has been noted that the performer only initially became involved because of the director's falling out with prior collaborators Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox from years 3 and 2, respectively. In his latest presentation, Michael seems incredibly self-satisfied to have secured returning supporting cast-members from earlier productions, namely Josh Duhamel, John Turturro and Glenn Morshower. This charitable act of continuity on Michael's part is undercut slightly given that LaBeouf and Fox either haven't been asked to reprise or just aren't interested, although the former's image is presented as a photograph at one point, presumably as a move in some manner of theatrical tit-for-tat. In addition to all this, the film sees the return of the Megatron character, but voiced by the music department's Mr. Frank Welker, as it apears Hugo Weaving has changed his phone number.


Michael's main mechanical-cast look visually impressive as always, and the director has managed to abstain from following the film's female characters around at bottom-height, this time. However, sunsets and lensflare continue to be a problem, and the filmmaker's boastful use of Imax cameras throughout means that the 99.9% of cinema audiences who won't be watching on the proprietary format will still be subjected to an aspect ratio which isn't even as wide as 16:9, never mind the generally expected 2.35:1. Because the school auditorium's side-curtains were not operational at the time of our performance, the examination panel could actually see two sets of black bars at the picture's sides as a result.


The Last Knight establishes in its first act a ticking countdown-timer of three days. The story's principal characters manage to stay alert, active and energetic for that entire duration despite apparently going nowhere near a wink of sleep. Extra points are awarded in this category for the same characters' resourceful good hygiene in having frequent changes of clothes, despite both having been effectively kidnapped on the fly in the first twenty minutes.


With the exception of Anthony Hopkins who overacts gleefully in every single scene of his, the vast majority of exchanges here consist of cast members awaiting their delivery cues, be that the director shouting 'action', someone else's line of script or just a prop thrown into shot by a runner to simulate some robots fighting off-camera. While there is little-to-no meaningful interaction between the human characters, this doesn't actually matter in The Last Knight.


Whilst Michael has a broad grasp of gravity, he continues to be unsure of basic time/distance travel calculations, the resulting actions of a 20+ tonne machine walking upright over a muddy field, and the impactful introduction of a moon-sized object within the Earth's atmosphere and onto the planet's surface. Mr Spielberg has offered Michael extra tuition on these and further items on several occasions, to no avail.


See Physics.


For a film with a concept of robot-smacks-robot, the population is far too high. Outside of the core cast of Mark McMark, Laura Haddock and Anthony Hopkins, the story introduces significant numbers of tertiary (human) characters who are apparently forgotten about until they're wheeled in to deliver exposition at some later point.


Michael has been assisted by four writers here, all apparently obsessed with sassy, comedic bickering but encumbered with a cast unable to deliver it. People in closed rooms shout at each other as general conversation. The narrative makes no sense, the script is awful, the characters are flimsy, the cast lack direction and the direction lacks coherence. The Last Knight ends up like a two-and-a-half-hour cutscene from a video game nobody needs to play.


"The judgement… is death!" cries one executioner-robot during the film's finale. No, the sentence would be death. The 'judgement' would be guilty. And this is a character with a computer for a brain, remember…


This is where we have serious concerns with Michael's performance at our school. Although operating in a fictional, non-documentary capacity, The Last Knight has such a basic disregard for its locations that we have refused to award a mark for this module. Bay may believe his core audience is too young to think about the internal logic of the film, but to even hold children in educational contempt is nothing short of shameful.

The problems which were noted included (but were not limited to):

• Mark McMark's chauffeured aeroplane arrives at the United Kingdom and actually touches its wheels down on the While Cliffs of Dover, the implication being that his host Anthony Hopkins lives in his castle in Dover. Otherwise, why would the vehicle have landed in Dover? After several scenes of messy exposition, it's revealed that this castle is actually about three minutes drive away from Westminster in London (which is in actual fact 85 miles away from Dover), and also about five minutes drive from the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford (which is 59 miles from Westminster, and 144 miles away from Dover). Audiences in England (especially the Southern counties) will be acutely aware of this disparity.

• In fact, if the aeroplane is flying in from America (which is to the west of Britain, if we remember correctly), why would it be seen approaching the White Cliffs of Dover (which are located on the south-east coast)? The plane would be skirting over Cornwall at an absolute push, which is still hundreds of miles away from London. The only time you see those cliffs is if you're coming in from Calais, France.

• Additionally, Hopkins' jaunt into the capital takes him within walking distance of "Trinity Library", as it's named in the script. While this is is not geographically described in the film, it is nonetheless revealed to be the very famous library of Trinity College in Dublin, which is 369 miles from London.

• The exterior of Oxfordshire's Blenheim Palace has been filmed as a Nazi stronghold in a Second World War flashback-sequence, and while the building is not intended to be its actual self, Michael has nonetheless chosen a very visually distinctive landmark already associated with that war (being the birthplace of one Winston Churchill) to pretend is somewhere else completely. Presumably he could not find any other old buildings in England to film outside of.

• Back in London, the film implies that one can just walk up to the front door of 10 Downing Street (one cannot), and then that there's a 'secret back door' entrance in the Strand, which is about half a mile away and in the opposite direction to the one in which Anthony Hopkins walks off.

• And our most contested moment might have been where Hopkins instructs McMark to liberate a submarine from "the Naval Museum", which in London can only realistically mean Greenwich. This action is duly performed and the craft is seen cruising under London's Tower Bridge having travelled eight and a half miles up-river for no reason whatsoever, before next emerging at the foot of Dover's White Cliffs in what can only have been a coastal-skirting waste of time. Here is that every-second-counts journey on a map:


There IS a (slim) chance that the Naval Museum which Hopkins refers to is the one in Portsmouth (where the scene was actually filmed), but given that's 73 miles south-west of London, this wouldn't explain why the submarine is then spotted at Tower Bridge before arriving back at Dover...

For audiences with even a basic grasp of UK landmarks or geography, this film is going to be unwatchable.

We appear to have reached Peak Bay; The Last Knight is absolute cinematic gibberish. It is the school's recommendation that Michael should leave to pursue more varied projects in the wider world, allowing other students to experiment, flourish and learn from his follies.

Transformers: Age of Extinction. It is like that one.



If you must.
Although I'll warn you now: I had a headache by the time we get to Mark McMark's junkyard twenty minutes in, and it did not shift until I was back out in the street after the film. Never before have I welcomed the tranquility of rush-hour traffic.



In Michael Bay's head, it probably does.



By no means, although it's oddly harmless considering everything that's wrong with it.



Oh, probably not. For everything I've written*¹, I didn't actively hate The Last Knight. Apart from anything else I didn't have a chance to, I spent too much time trying to work out what the actual fuck was going on.



I may be mistaken, but I believe the film actually opens with one, melded into some other sound-effects. Not that I'm going to watch it again to make certain, of course.



Level 1: That Uncredited First Order General / Stormtrooper from The Force Awakens / Rogue One is in this. Yes, of course that counts.





*¹ I hope you're impressed, by the way, that I've gone this far through the review without needing a single footnote.
I know I am. ^{[ 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.

Review: Solace

Solace (thematic spoilers)
Cert: 15 / 101 mins / Dir. Afonso Poyart / Trailer



Oh, Anthony. Lending credence to the rule that it's better to be a busy actor than a meticulous one, the esteemed Mr Hopkins lands in our cinemas with a feature which is tailor-made for television. Starring as a retired, reclusive psychic who's recruited by Jeffrey Dean Morgan (a reassuringly disheveled New York homicide detective) and Abbie Cornish (his unfeasibly glamourous counterpart), the three set out to stop a mysteriously gifted serial killer, played by Colin Farrell (it's not a spoiler that Farrell plays the killer; that's in the trailer. In fact, the trailer makes a far bigger thing of this than the film does).

[ I'll also point out now that all of these characters have names but they really don't matter that much, so for the rest of the review I'll just be referring to them by the actors who portray them. If you write a story and call your characters John and Joe, you're not really trying. Although credit where it's due, Cecil is a pretty fucking solid name for a serial killer, even if you never forget for one second that you're watching Colin Farrell. ]

The first key thing here is that that Anthony Hopkins does have precognitive/psychometric powers, and despite the initial skepticism of Abbie Cornish, there's never any doubt over this. As soon as his character is introduced, we see his flash-forward visions and object-memory-replays pretty much whenever he touches anything (many of which seem to resemble a swish, post-modern car ad, but with much more blood).

The second thing that's crucial to the film is that Colin Farrell has exactly the same powers, but is using them to choose victims in a murder-spree. On a metaphysical level, Anthony and Colin are the perfectly matched foils for one another, locked in a game that neither can walk away from, but which they each feel compelled to win out of a sense of transcendent duty. Like The Joker and Batman re-enacting Se7en*¹, the authorities and civilians alike are drawn into play with assuredly fatal results, but the film's key dynamic is between the Yin and Yang of morality, and ruminations on the justification of murder form the balance-point on which the narrative rests…

Well, I imagine that's the idea, anyway. What we actually get is a hackneyed detective story featuring some of the hoariest, cliché-ridden dialogue you've heard this side of a Channel 5 afternoon-TV-movie, and sprinkled with an ill-thought-out supernatural element. Director Afonso Poyart can't decide if he wants to make a tense action-flick or a philosophical thriller, and ultimately he chooses something that's not quite either.

The full extent of the psychic powers - much like the special effects which illustrate them - isn't explored properly, seeming instead like a toy which is occasionally picked up by an absent-minded child before being distracted by something else. And the pivotal interplay between the two leads (the point of the film) doesn't even appear until the third act, robbing most of the movie of its most interesting facet. Much more is made of this in the trailer, and then a bog-standard murder-hunt takes the place of the moral-quandary the story thinks it boasts. It's not often I'll say that a film needs more Colin Farrell, but there it is.

The presence of the supporting cast I understand (and to be fair, they're as good as they can be in their thoroughly undemanding roles*²), but I can't figure out why Anthony Hopkins has agreed to Solace; the role doesn't suit him and he doesn't commit to it fully, instead retreading previous beats from his big-screen career. I suspect he saw something special in the screenplay which he then couldn't quite bring to the camera, trying to inject an otherworldliness to his jaded psychic, but coming off like a confused old man who's just realised he hasn't read the script properly and now the cameras are rolling…

Disappointing, but in a curious way rather than an annoying one. The story at the film's core is fascinating, but I get the feeling that the cardboard characters and wooden dialogue are more forgivable on paper than they are on-screen. I don't think Solace is a particularly bad movie (script issues aside), but it had the potential to be so much more…

Oh, and the film's final flashback-scene would have held much more dramatic weight if it had been inserted ten minutes earlier, during the stand-off in the subway station. Just saying.



Not really.



Probably a rental.



Not really.



Not really.



Not really.



Not that I heard.



Anthony Hopkins starred in 1974's Juggernaut, as did Julian 'General Veers' Glover.







*¹ The film's Wiki page indicates that the screenplay for Solace was initially intended as a sequel to Se7en. And it's a shame that didn't come off, because far more attention would probably have been paid to the final draft…

*² And I'm not even going to mention Farrell's consistently inconsistent accent. Oh, I did. Ah well.

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.

Review: Noah

Noah
Cert: 12A / 138 mins / Dir. Darren Aronofsky




While I'll freely admit that I found Darren Aronofsky's interpretation of Noah far more engaging than the trailer had suggested, I'd still be hard-pushed to tell you that I enjoyed watching it. Veering between batshit-crazy and infuriatingly monotonous, as an exercise in film-making, I think it's unfocused compared to Aronofsky's other work. As an exercise in storytelling, it's all over the shop, with the inconsistencies of the original tale and a whole host of new ones. Although to be fair, most of those pale into insignificance when Ray Winstone's army is being battered into the dirt by 20ft high Rock-Megatrons. The first half of the film has some gorgeous touches (the constellations visible in the daytime sky, the strangely modern wardrobe choices), but by the time the rains come the creativity takes a back seat to the brooding storyline. It's surprisingly well acted given how preposterous it all is (with the exception of Jennifer Connelly's "emotional scene").

Besides, when you've got Percy Jackson and Hermione Granger on your team, surviving a heavy shower should be a doddle, shouldn't it?

Like a drunken mashup between Lord of the Rings, Kevin Smith's Dogma and Hitchkiker's Guide To The Galaxy*¹, Noah has to be seen to be believed. A striking effort indeed, but an effort at what, I'm not sure.

In many ways, not at all. Those aspects of the trailer are in the film, but that's not an accurate summation, no.



I don't think so, but it held my attention.



I have no idea.



It does look nice on a massive screen, but this is an Orange Wednesdays kind of film.



No. If anything, talk to me about it, I don't care if we disagree.



I doubt it, but never say never.



I didn't hear one. Plenty of opportunity, too.

If God's been flooding the UK recently because he doesn't like The Gays, how come he told Noah everything was going to be just fantastic now by sending him a massive rainbow, eh?

*¹ Because I really wanted one of those angels to say "God? Don't talk to me about God..."

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.

Review: Thor - The Dark World (third-pass)

Thor: The Dark World (2D) (third-pass)
Cert: 12A / 112 mins / Dir. Alan Taylor



It's always nice when I can get three cinematic reviews of the same movie spread over three calendar months; if only because it shows that it's enjoying a good run*¹. So tonight was the last showing of the The Dark World at my local, and as I was there for the first, I figured I'd see it off in brighter-than-I'm-used-to 2D, to shorten the gap until I can start devouring the extras on the BluRay. I also managed to drag along my brother-in-law tonight, who hadn't gotten round to watching it, so that I can compare his first reactions with my seasoned ones. This is why I'm a geek.

Watching the movie now, it actually holds up slightly better than it did when it had my fresh expectations burdening its shoulders. My gripes about the chief-villain aside, it's a very entertaining offshoot movie, showing us 'the stuff which happens between Avengers films'. I'm still of the feeling that the story itself lends itself more to a comic arc or novel, but there's no doubt that I'm getting more out of it on repeat viewings than I did for its predecessor. Maybe its because Thor spent most of its time introducing characters, whereas with TDW its welcome-reel is inserted (okay, clumsily) into the first twenty minutes. I don't think it's a better film, but in many ways it is more watchable; although I'm still hoping Kenneth Brannagh will return for a future Marvelverse installment.

Considering how outside-the-box The Dark World is compared to the rest of the Avengers canon, I can't wait to see audience reaction to Guardians of the Galaxy, next August…

For the record, bro-in-law thoroughly enjoyed it. More than I thought he would, actually. Although he was a bit put off by Greenwich being turned into a smoking pile of rubble. Which is fair enough.


I'd say so.



Mostly.



Not as much as I'd have liked..?



You're pretty much stuck with DVD/BRD now, which isn't the worst thing in the world.



No.



Yes.



Three times now, and I have to concede that I can't hear one. Bugger..

Where is Lorelei? Seriously.

*¹ Or just that it was released strategically towards the end of a month. Well okay, that.
Oh, and apparently I can (one for the people who saw the 'search description' field under the link on the way in).

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.