Cars 3, arriving six years after its forebear and eleven years after its originator*2, follows the story of Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a hotrod-red racing car who's beginning to realise he's past him prime as young up-and-coming contenders leave him crossing the finish-line in their wake. We meet old favourites from the previous movies, plus a slew of new characters, all animated and voiced in the inimitable Pixar style.
Nothing short of exquisitely animated (and I love that the sets and backdrops are now essentially photo-realistic), it's enthusiastically voiced and fairly solidly constructed for a target-audience of younger viewers. But ultimately, the whole thing is uninspiring, coming across as little more than a loosely-connected series of fast-cut track races. For a full on Disney/Pixar production, you know this should be more engaging on an emotional level. If anything, the most interesting thing about the film is how uninteresting a film which had seven writers can turn out to be. It's also a Disney movie which manages to have a tongue-in-cheek dig at saturation-merchandising, which is either very meta, or blissfully non-self-aware.
By no means Disney/Pixar's A-game, Cars 3 will keep your youngsters entertained for the duration of its run-time, at least. As a tale of mentoring, motivation and the inevitability and acceptance of ageing set in the sun-scorched desert, it's a bit like Logan for the under-10s.
Albeit with less claret. Obviously.
Cars. Cars 2.
Not unless your padawans are dragging you there.
Keep the franchise ticking over in a low-gear? Yes.
Nope.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 1: This film's got the voice of Major Derlin in it.
*1 Although in defence of what I'm about to say in the rest of this review, beforehand I witnessed trailers for The Emoji Movie, The Nut Job 2, The My Little Pony Movie and a CGI thing where James Corden voices Peter Rabbit, all of which look fucking dreadful, so at least I wasn't sitting through one of those. [ 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.
Free Fire (second-pass)
Cert: 15 / 91 mins / Dir. Ben Wheatley / Trailer
An odd one, this. Free Fire is a film I'd been itching to watch again since my first-pass.*1 In the interim, I'd somehow managed to forget how consistently funny it is, despite me telling people over the last few weeks that humour is one of its many strengths, and I can say hand-on-heart that there are nothing but fantastic performances all round. I fact, I can't think of a single bad thing to say about any of it.
Which is why I'm struggling to think how I haven't given the movie full-marks. Sure, I don't hand that score out often, but Free Fire is a remarkable film. It's not a sequel, reboot or franchise-entry, the 'price of admission'*2 is low and it's continually engaging with a fairly linear story. The script is eminently quotable and the run-time doesn't outstay its welcome. The film's almost unique in that I wouldn't really know what to place it next to on a shelf, other than Ben Wheatley's other films. For an out-of-the-blue movie which can appeal to multiple demographics*3, this is unprecedented Film Of The Year material. And yet I'm still only marking it 6, without knowing what could possibly make it any better. Answers on a postcard, please.
I didn't necessarily 'get' more out of watching Free Fire again, but I enjoyed it every single bit as much. This film is future comfort-food for the cold, dark winter months.
Oh, and nice touch with Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury's Justine's Theme on the soundtrack being a musical reference to Giorgio Moroder's end-credits piece in Scarface.
I'm assuming that's deliberate since it sticks out like a sore thumb.
Best dialogue:
a)"...I like his jumper."
b) [two men, grappling on an abandoned warehouse floor]
"You smell of perfume!" "IT'S... BEARD OIL!"
c)"I just want a little sympathy, that's all." "You want sympathy, son? It's in the dictionary between shit and syphilis, now get over there..."
Best? Probably not.
Most entertaining? Quite possibly.
Nope.
Nope.
Level 1: Cornelius Evazan's in this. And he has two of those best-lines, up there.
*1 And what a difference a change-of-screen makes. The mumbled dialogue I'd noted last time was all but gone, with the general-release run of the film taking place in the more bijou Screen 3 of my local (as opposed to the advance showing, in the massive Screen 5). Whether it was the same levels bouncing around a smaller room or a different speaker-balance, it goes to show how much film/audio presentation can vary, even within the same venue. [ BACK ]
*2 By which I mean intellectually and philosophically, not financially. The literal 'price of admission' for actual cinema viewing is both high, and frustratingly consistent over varying levels of artistic quality. But that's a grumble for another post. [ BACK ]
*3 Because you don't have to be a Ben Wheatley-nerd to enjoy the film's gunplay and humour, but at the same time it's not an action-movie and there's far more under the surface anyway. [ 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.
While it's a long, long way from the heavy ordnance and monosyllabic adrenaline of the likes of The Expendables, the setup for Ben Wheatley's Free Fire is still reassuringly low-concept: an illicit gun-deal in an abandoned Boston (MA) factory between a couple of Irish buyers (Cillian Murphy and Michael Smiley) and a South African seller (Sharlto Copley), brokered by a mutual contact (Brie Larson) and also attended by various henchmen on both sides. But when two of these subordinates recognise each other from an unresolved conflict, things quickly get out of hand. And when things get out of hand at a gun-deal, they're only heading one way...
As it goes, it's the second time in a week that I've watched Larson in a 70s-set flick featuring an overly-jukeboxed soundtrack. And the first of these didn't exactly leave a great taste in the mouth. Free Fire features a host of borderline-unlikeable, sketched in characters who remain barely developed for the most part, frequently mumbled and inaudible dialogue, a worryingly notable quantity of scripted 'quips' which left the audience silent though the subsequent laugh-gap, and a combination of lighting and editing that often makes it impossible to tell who's shooting at who (kind of the point of the film).
Also, I loved it.
The opposite side of the John Wick coin, the single gunfight makeing up the lion's share of the running time is the very antithesis of Hollywood Slick™. When bullets start flying, there are no trick-shots, gymnastics or one-hit kills. The shootout here is a long, drawn-out war of attrition with lucky hits and brute force doing most of the work and soundtracked (in this section where it matters*1) primarily by scuffling, breathless-complaining and fluent profanity. And that's not to say every line's a tightly engineered zinger (as I mentioned above), but it's certainly less of a sassy quote-fest and more representative of a deal between tired and angry middle-aged men, which began with poor organisation and went downhill from there.
From a writing point of view, it would have been very tempting to make at least one of the factions here the sort of loveable anti-heroes we've found in The Nice Guys. But writers Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump have kept in mind that these are people buying and selling guns, after all. The natural charisma of performers like Larson, Murphy, Smiley and Copley means they're inherently watchable without having the script cast too much judgement on them either way, and the humour veers between darkly-comic and violent-farce. Even that Armie Hammer's great fun in this, so the film's got to be doing a lot right*2.
Just what the doctor ordered after an emotionally taxing awards-season, Free Fire is a film that will bear re-watching because of the number of levels it works on. This is Ben Wheatley raising an eyebrow at the escalatingly ludicrous stream of action movies we enjoy, playing with the genre without being too acerbic at one end or getting too silly at the other. Nothing here is glamourised, but neither is it disparaged; the film takes its ridiculousness very seriously.
Because even if you examine the sandpit, you can still have a shit-ton of fun playing in it…
*1 The main drag isn't completely music-free as there is some deftly inserted John Denver to be heard. But that's a set-piece in itself, so easily clears the Jukebox Soundtrack hurdle. [ 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.
Ah, a 'late-morning' screening. While the attending crowd was slightly more varied than the ones for Under The Skin and Knock Knock, there was still a strong contingent of Unaccompanied Middle Aged Man™ present. And during the lengthy, slow-motion opening sequence of Nocturnal Animals, I could sense many brows furrowing around the room and mouths falling agape, silently forming the look of "hang on, this is not the film that the trailer sold me…". There is a context for what happens at the beginning, but only in that the context is itself out of context. I won't spoil it, you'll see for yourself when you watch the film.
Confused? Welcome to Nocturnal Animals.
Tom Ford's adaptation of Austin Wright's novel, Tony and Susan, follows Amy Adams (Susan no less), as a fundamentally unhappy contemporary artist who receives a pre-publication manuscript from her ex-husband, Edward, after several years of non-contact. When it turns out that Edward's book is a violently clear allegory for his feelings about their failed marriage, Susan is appalled and enthralled in equal measure. The film splits into a visual adaptation of the work, Susan's reactions to it and a series of progressive flashbacks which reveal the ways their relationship broke down.
Nowhere near as challenging as it'd like to think it is, Nocturnal Animals is, nonetheless, very good at being difficult to like. Probably a little too good, actually. It's well acted and solidly directed, but I couldn't work out if the film has a terrible, clunky script, or a brilliant script of terrible, clunky characters. Maybe they're the same thing, even though they shouldn't be.
With Adams' as the emotionally reinforced artist, Armie Hammer as her second (and externally lecherous) husband, Jake Gyllenhaal as her flawed husband in the flashbacks and the flawed central character in Susan's interpretation of the book, and obstructive or negative supporting characters in all three timelines, I don't think it's unfair to say that there's not a single redeeming character in the whole film. That's not to say if has no redeeming features, but they're scattered loosely down a long, dark road.
The novel Susan receives depicts a man (Tony, from the title or the original book, above) driving through the southern states of America with his wife and daughter when they become ambushed by a gang of rednecks. One thing leads to another and the man is separated from his family while they're raped and murdered. The rest of the story follows Tony as he teams up with a borderline corrupt cop to bring the gang to violent justice. It's basically a 1970s exploitation flick with a framing device.
The bottom line is, for all the stark visuals, subtext and narrative layering, Nocturnal Animals slowly descends to a sort of art-student torture-porn, raising one eyebrow as it plays ironically in a sandpit it thinks it's too good for, all the while throwing in flashbacks and real-world segments which make decreasing amounts of sense*1. True to its title, the film embraces that sense of heightened-yet-detached unreality which is both the confidant and tormentor of the 3am insomniac. But that's no consolation.
With plenty of frowning and yelling but little genuine emotion on display, Tom Ford's film is a compelling artifice of drama. Which might actually be the point, admittedly…
It'll be more atmospheric on a big screen than a small one, yes.
Oh, I have no idea.
No.
No, but I will ask you to explain yourself in great detail.
There isn't.
Level 2: Nocturnal Animals features Isla Fisher, who starred in 2010's Burke and Hare alongside Simon 'Plutt' Pegg, Andy 'Snoke' Serkis, Tim 'Palpatine' Curry and Christopher 'Dooku' Lee...
*1 Okay, this section is in highlight-to-read spoilers for people who've seen the film and hopefully understood it more than I have:
1) The scene with Susan's colleague and the mobile phone which shows a monitor-video of a baby in a crib before a screaming demon leaps into frame, causing Susan to scream herself and drop the phone: I was under the impression that it was one of those prank videos that occasionally does the rounds. Except that her colleague's reaction displays no recognition at all, never mind amusement, once the punchline has been delivered. Okay, her phone screen is now smashed, but you'd at least get a "well, that joke backfired" line in response. So the other alternative is that the video is a nightvision baby-monitor app, as described, and Susan is in such a bad place psychologically that she's hallucinated the demon's appearance causing her to drop the phone. Except that we get no further hallucinations of this nature to suggest a descent into madness. So what gives with that scene?
Oh, and 2, who's the late-teen girl that Susan phones on the Sunday morning, who calls her 'mom'? The story leads us to assume that she doesn't have any children, indeed the 'bad thing' Susan did was aborting Edward's child (the vengeful reason for the couple's daughter's death in the book) at the start of her relationship with Hutton. But in one scene, Susan tells her assistant that her ex-husband is from 'a couple of years ago', which would be nowhere near enough time for Susan and Hutton to have a daughter of this age (and would also explain why neither Adams or Gyllenhaal look that much younger in the flashbacks - certainly not twenty years younger). And apart from anything else, Hutton's presented as such a prize tool that there's no way their relationship could have limped along for eighteen years, child or otherwise. Was Susan impacted so much by the discovery of the bodies in the book that she hallucinated her own aborted daughter back to life? I only ask because the poor girl isn't mentioned before or after that. Bizarre.
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.
Oh, Guy. You do know, don't you Guy, that they're still making East-End gangster movies? That 'Krays' one comes out in less than a month. That looks good, Guy. Why weren't you involved in that, Guy? I love your work when you do those movies. What are you doing, Guy? What is this?
And so, the inimitable Mr Ritchie takes directorial (and co-penmanship) duties over the relaunching of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., the 1960s TV spy-show. Normally in this paragraph I'd summarise the film's premise in one or two sentences, but I'm not actually sure what it's about. Yeah, I've just watched it. Something involving inconsistent accents, a nuclear weapon and women wearing ridiculous sunglasses, but then aren't they all? Even Mission: Impossible (playing in the screen next door, aptly) has managed to leave most of that behind, although that's not a period-piece, to be fair.
But first things first, I didn't actively dislike this. I just couldn't like it, either. I feel it's important to lay that out now, because I'm about to do nothing but complain about it *ahem*…
What an almighty fucking mess this film is. A very stylish mess, like a Christmas-season aftershave commercial with extended bouts of gunfire, but a mess all the same. A plot which has been copy/pasted from page one of the spy-movie-screenwriter's-handbook, yet is still utterly incoherent, somehow; a distracting soundtrack which is all over the place stylistically and too loud in the mix; choppy editing and excessive split-screening; subtitles for the stretches of German/Russian/Italian dialogue which appear in a massive, yellow, block-serif typeface which is borderline unreadable for the amount of text (and time) displayed; and a leading man whose cartoonishly repetitively oscillating register makes all of his dialogue irrelevant*1.
Credit where it's due, Henry Cavill succeeds in one notable area; he manages to make Armie Hammer not be the worst thing in a film. Much of the script's dry humour falls upon Henners to deliver, and it's a ball which he drops repeatedly*2. The problem is that with Ritchie's much-maligned Sherlock Holmes movies, Robert Downey Jr was able to carry things along in his own style. TMFU has no such crutch. That said, Ritchie scores in one similar way with his latest rejuvenated franchise, in that the film will infuriate fans of the original series whilst baffling everyone else.
And was the inclusion of 'a still-practicing Nazi war-criminal who shows his victims photo-albums of his 'work' prior to torturing them slowly to death' written in to the film before or after the decision to go for a 12A certificate? For obvious reasons things don't get too gruesome, but it's still there and it's completely out of kilter with the rest of the film. Even if I found the electric-chair finale to be one of the best-delivered gags.
But y'know what? The Man From U.N.C.L.E. looks very pretty and if you're not fussy about being spoon-fed a non-plot then you'll probably get something out of it.
And yeah, that's me not-hating a movie...
Oh, it probably is, but only because it'll be better on a big screen than a small one.
Netflix/telly.
I have no fucking idea.
I don't think so; your mileage will vary.
Not really.
(already disagreed with Mrs Blackout over this one, even though she conceded many of my reasons for it being a mess)
Not that I heard, although anything that isn't Cavill's/Hammer's/Vikander's voice or the seizure-inducing soundtrack is largely white-noise, anyway.
The Man From U.N.C.L.E. stars Alicia Vikander, who appeared in Anna Karenina with Keira Knightley from The Phantom Menace,
Son Of A Gun wih Ewan McGregor from TPM, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, and Ex Machina with Domnhall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac from The Force Awakens.
She's connected.
What I'm asking is, why hasn't Alicia Vikander been cast in a Star Wars movie yet? Everything about her just yells Naberrie/Skywalker/Organa…
*1 Seriously, listen to Cavill in the trailer. His line about "and what came after me was barely human…"; he delivers every single fucking line in 'that' exaggerated voice. It's like he's almost singing his dialogue, except none of the lyrics make any sense and you only realise that when you have no idea what the fuck's meant to be going on because he's been the one chosen to deliver the pre-finale plot summary (no, seriously), and two minutes later you realise that it actually doesn't matter because look, here's a speedboat chase and an explosion.
*2 Either Cavill can't deliver the humour, or Ritchie can't direct him to do it. It could well be both, although I have a friend-of-a-friend who went to school with Cavill on Jersey, and attests to the fact that the man has absolutely no sense of humour. This ties in with what I saw in the movie.
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.
