Review: RocketMan

RocketMan
Cert: 15 / 121 mins / Dir. Dexter Fletcher / Trailer



Credit where it's undeniably due, when you put your money down to see Dexter Fletcher's Elton John biopic, RocketMan, you know pretty much exactly what to expect, and that’s pretty much exactly what’s delivered. The fact that the film is also (mostly) fantastic is a bonus atop of this directional clarity.

SAILING

It’s not all plain sailing. I struggled with the two child-iterations of our hero and storyteller, the whole thing having a distinct am-dram air as a heavy-handed rendition of childhood strife is laid out for the hard-of-thinking in the audience. But at the moment - that very frame - where Taron Egerton takes the reins, I instantly relaxed back into my seat with the thought ’ahh, it’s going to be great now’. And so it proved. The Kingsman star is shaping up to be one of the greatest performers of his generation, effortlessly endearing even when he’s portraying a self-confessed diva.

On that subject, naturally this whole thing should be taken with a pinch of salt so large it requires its own health warning. Sure, we see Elton John as a self-obsessed bundle of nervous energy, self aggrandisement and bad decision-making, but never forget that this is Elton John’s version of bad-boy Elton John. Many scenes seem to carry the subtext that things were probably either nowhere near that bad or about a hundred times worse. Let's just say that you don’t need to wait until the closing credits tell you that Elton John was the executive producer of this to work out that Elton John was the executive producer of this.

LEGEND

But the music’s great (as you’d expect) and the flashback-based structure is loose enough to have fun with the well-known facts while not getting too bogged down in plot-minutiae. All was going swimmingly until one particular climactic moment where I may or may not have broken The Code by muttering “oh fuck off!”, so needlessly literal is its amateur-hour psychoanalysis. But that’s fine because we still end on a high, and the ride leading up to it was great fun. Bonus points for the 'what happened next' cards which close out the film, in case anyone is sitting in the auditorium thinking 'yeah, because Elton's kept a very low profile since 1990, is he still around at all..?

Oh, and how come in the John Lewis advert he gets the piano for Christmas and is instantly entranced by it, but in this film the piano's just in the dining room anyway and he starts playing it one day for no reason?

Well? Which one is it Reggie, you lying shit..?

There's a clear and upward line through Fletcher's earlier films, Sunshine On Leith and Bohemian Rhapsody, to where we are here.



It is.



It is, but watch it in the cinema for the full effect.



Fletcher goes from strength to strength, Egerton is fantastic as always*¹

Bryce Dallas Howard should be a fun revelation, but her accent's Downton Abbey one moment and Eastenders the next. And while there are some scenes where she's putting on airs, I don't think that's intentional for the amount of times she wanders over the line.



As much as I love most of this film, that's still a distinct possibility.



There isn't.



Level 1: Dr. Harter Kalonia is in this.





*¹ Okay, almost always ^{[ 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: Jurassic World - Fallen Kingdom

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (SPOILERS)
Cert: 12A / 128 mins / Dir. J. A. Bayona / Trailer

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should..."

~ Dr Ian Malcolm, in one of the few notable moments from the first Jurassic Park film which isn't the subject of a direct callback in the fifth, but really should be.

One of the things I found amazing about Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom was that a movie with this budget, creative crew and a limitless digital palette has so little imagination. Think how far through the ideas-book you'd have to be when the fifth movie in a series spends its first hour retooling Kong: Skull Island instead. That's not to say there aren't a plethora of hamfisted references to earlier Jurassic Park entries of course, but still.

The film does feature some nicely executed set-pieces as you'd expect, but they're all very on-the-nose. If anyone watching genuinely believes that the heroes are in danger of not waving behind the end-credits, they've clearly got some catching up to do. And while I freely admit that applies to the vast, vast majority of action-cinema, the protagonists' safety is underlined here with a fat red screenwriter's marker.

It's not that I particularly disliked JW:FK or even that it bored me, necessarily. I just found myself thoroughly uninterested in what was going to happen to the more-cardboard-than-ever characters (although the four raptor 'puppies' in the flashback scenes were adorable).

Nature = good, corporate = bad. It's a message which certainly wasn't invented with 1993's Jurassic Park, but now feels as old as the DNA lying in the veins of a fossilised mosquito, as Universal hammer it mercilessly home - apparently without irony - to the viewers sitting in dark, air-conditioned chain cinemas around the globe.

Speaking of morality: we all know, yeah, that Maisie Lockwood is singly and directly responsible for every death which occurs (on the land, admittedly) after she hits the Big Red Button™ in the compound? Good guys, bad guys, bystanders, pets, the lot. And that includes every evil businessman, cackling mercenary and nameless extra who carks it in the next movie, too.

"...but they're alive!" she tearfully emotes as the surviving dinosaurs thunder out into the night. Well sweetheart, tell that to the families and loved ones of every corpse that racks up because of your moment of humility.

So in order for Jurassic World 3 to create a Hollywood-friendly narrative balance, either Maisie's character has to be held accountable for her actions (ie, suffer the ending of Toby Jones, Rafe Spall etc), or the story will need to fall back on the idea that Maisie doesn't really have a conscience because she doesn't really have a soul because she's just a clone. In which case: so were the dinosaurs, so what does it matter if the they were saved or not? Good luck with that one, Amblin…

Biggest disappointment: that our heroes escape the island on a ship named Arcadia, then the film *doesn't* turn into a Resident Evil crossover.

Rather fittingly, Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom is the perfect theme-park ride. Methodical, mechanical, precision-engineered thrills designed to entertain a summer audience for the duration.

Right before they leave, then immediately start queueing for something else...

Oh, and I'm also taking a point off (no, seriously) for that "nasty woman!" line in the script, the most cloyingly cackhanded bit of zeitgeist camera-winking since Linda Cardellini was made to say 'snowflake' in Daddy's Home 2. Appalling…



Jurassic World.



Well…



Oh, if you like.



Hahahahahahahaha.



We very well might.



Not that I heard, but there is a section in the middle with about five minutes' worth of screaming, and there could well be one layered in there.



Level 1: That engineer out of Rogue One is in this. You know the one.



(did you think I was joking about knocking that point off?)




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: Gold

Gold
Cert: 15 / 121 mins / Dir. Stephen Gaghan / Trailer



And to gently ease our way out of the It's A True Story*¹ rut that is the early part of each year, comes Mumblin' Matthew McConaughey in the guise of one Kenny Wells, a gold-prospector down to his last chance after the 1988 financial crash. Making a written-on-a-napkin deal with a half-remembered contact in Indonesia, the pair take a punt and manage to land themselves a literal gold-mine. What could go wrong?

Everything, naturally.

The jungle of Borneo is filthy and damp, the boardrooms of New York are polished and plush, and McConaughey comes across like a walking midlife crisis. For all the niggles I had with it, Gold is a fine-looking film. If only the same level of enthusiasm had gone into Patrick Massett and John Zinman's screenplay. The movie never becomes more than you expected it to be and in the first hour particularly, struggles to make it that far. As excited and distraught as the various characters get, it's hard to feel any genuine emotion for grown men slobberingly chasing an unreachable dream. And while the film highlights the vacuousness of that dream at every turn, it still doesn't have the bite to become a morality-tale, just a rather sketchy study of edacity, faith and delusions of grandeur*².

Gold doesn't wield the wanton excess of The Wolf of Wall Street, or hold the narrative resonance of The Big Short, although it still shares that air of naivety and chaos in the face of a beast which can't be tamed: greed. It's not even that you find yourself willing Kenny to succeed, more that you're just wondering how hard he's going to fail. Because no story that starts out from a place of unashamed, capitalist avarice really deserves a happy ending.

While McConaughey's on the reasonably good form which is fast becoming his autopilot and Edgar Ramírez supports well but feels under-used, the best performance here may be from Bryce Dallas Howard as his long-suffering girlfriend Kay. It's certainly the only thing in the film which feels remotely real, at any rate. Meanwhile, everyone else is basically a placeholder; this is Mumblin' Matt's show. It's just not his best one.

For all its exuberance, Gold is a passable story, unremarkably told.



The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, American Hustle.



Not unless you need to see McConaughey's paunchy, balding, wonky-toothed chrysophilist on a massive screen.



Well I'm not entirely sure what the film's setting out to do, so…



Well, no.



I shouldn't imagine so.



There isn't.



Level 1: This has got Toby 'additional voice-work in The Old Republic and yes that still counts' Kebbell in it.





*¹ The film's opening card which reads "inspired by true events" is about as loose a commitment to reality as you'll find in the film, not that it really matters for the story being told. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² And no, the irony isn't lost on me that I used the phrase "delusions of grandeur" almost immediately after shoehorning the word "edacity" into the text. Snarky comments to the usual address, please. ^{[ 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: Pete's Dragon

Pete's Dragon (2D)
Cert: PG / 103 mins / Dir. David Lowery / Trailer



The cynic in me (and as regular readers will attest, that's who holds the majority-sway in my psyche) would perhaps wonder if Disney's current programme of retooling older animated content as sumptuous live-action holiday-bait means they're finally running out of ideas. But even the cynic shut the hell up less than five minutes into Pete's Dragon and just went on the ride. Because when they're making them this good, who cares?

A complete restructuring of the older movie, the 2016 version sees five-year old Pete suddenly orphaned and alone in dense woodland when he befriends the dragon he names Elliot, after a character in a storybook he has with him. For six years, the two survive as companions until their makeshift home is disrupted by deforestation/construction works. The film then follows the 11yr-old boy's rehabilitation into a civilised world he barely remembers, as well as the separation-anxiety for both Pete and Elliot, and of course the builders' reaction to an actual live dragon. Herein lies adventure...

Of course, being Disney, this film is pro-level Twee™ and is so preachy that's the screenwriters have hand-carved their own pulpit. Yet it's still thoroughly charming for all that, in a way which only The House Of Mouse can make look effortless. The wistful sunsets and easy-listening soundtrack threaten to get a little heavy-handed from time to time, but both suit the tone of the film perfectly.

Set in a nondescript time-frame (no mobiles, no laptops, little in the way of TV although the kids have got BMXs), the film lifts some of the more memorable beats from E.T. and Jurassic Park while never feeling like it's really stealing them. In fact, it seems to be the case that director David Lowery is more Spielbergian that even Spielberg himself can manage, these days. That said, there's also a dash of Predator thrown into the mix*¹, which was a nice surprise.

Pete's Dragon turns out to be everything that The BFG should have been (and The Jungle Book, come to think of it). Although in common with those films, once again the best performances come from the young lead actor and a CGI counterpart. Oakes Fegely is fantastic as young Pete, and while his role is a lot more lighthearted than Jacob Tremlay's in Room, there's a dynamic to both the character and performance which makes it comparable.

As much as I enjoyed this, I know it'll be too saccharine for some audiences. Under the normal run of things, it probably would have been for me, too, but something just clicked the first time the gurning, grunting Elliot appeared on camera.

I had smiles, I had goosebumps, and on at least one occasion I might have had something in my eye. Pete's Dragon is another great example of a magical story told with absolute sincerity, and being all the better for it.

Despite what I've said there, The BFG, and probably Disney's live-action Cinderella, too.



You could do far worse during the Summer holidays, if your padawans are pestering you to go out and do something.



It does.



It'll be the high-watermark which director David Lowery and lead actor Oakes Fegely will be judged against.
Certainly around these parts, anyway.



Nope.



There isn't.



Level 2: This movie's got that Robert Redford in it, who we saw in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, of course, playing opposite Mace Windu himself, Sam Jackson.




*¹ Not only can Elliot the dragon make himself go invisible to evade his enemies, he's also got a broken tusk like Dachande from Steve Perry's Aliens vs Predator novels (a look which was also directly referenced in AVP: Requiem, one of the only cool things about that movie). Hang on, I'm not the only person who sees an adorable green furry dragon and thinks of Predator, am I?



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: Jurassic World

Jurassic World*¹ (3D)
Cert: 12A / 124 mins / Dir. Colin Trevorrow / Trailer



To be fair to the Jurassic Park franchise as a whole, there are really only so many ways you can spin "we may have built a theme park full of murderous carnivores which we've underestimated a tad". Each film is an unashamed variation on that theme, and the fourth entry to the canon is no different.

Thankfully, most of the preachy eye-rolling is contained to the film's first act, as is most of the perfunctory plot-setup, and as soon as Chris Pratt is done scowling at some scratch-marks on a wall, it's carnage-central (y'know, in a sort of agreeable, 12A-friendly sense). In terms of Summer blockbuster action, you'd be hard pressed to ask for anything more, and Jurassic World is an enormous amount of fun, but it's never anything more. The film's main handicap is that it spends so much time trying to recreate the beats of its predecessors (1993's Jurassic Park in particular), that it forgets to really develop any ideas of its own. And it does have some, they just feel as tacked on as the underused 3D post-conversion.

That said, at least director Colin Trevorrow has taken the time between JP retreads to riff heavily on Aliens, too. Luckily that lends the film its only real sense of menace, as there's precious little coming from the dinosaurs. The series has never managed to top the raw danger emanating from the Velociraptors of the original film, and JW sees them pack-bonding with Chris Pratt's dino-tamer, Owen, which anthropomorphises them slightly too much to be any real threat. They're pretty cool, but they're not meant to be cool; they're meant to be fucking terrifying. That mantle is also supposed to be handed to the film's new creation, Indominus Rex, and also misses its mark by some way there, too.

Look, I'm being far too hard on the film, but it's no Jurassic Park. And this wouldn't be a problem if all of Universal's pre-press and trailers hadn't tried so desperately to convince us that it is. The sense of awe, the sense of wonder, the sense of danger… all lost in a frantic bid to up the ante for the 2015 Summer crowd. I can't work out if Park Director Claire's cynically hard-nosed line about needing bigger attractions to maintain visitor numbers is overflowing with self-awareness, or echoing around an empty barrel.

As enjoyable as it is (and it is), Jurassic World really makes me want to watch JP again. And that's not necessarily a compliment…

If Summer blockbusters are your thing, yes it is.



If you're on the fence, probably a rental. But you'll want to see it on the biggest TV in your house.



Not quite.



Not quite.



Not really.



Fairly sure I heard one during the pterodactyl-attack, yeah.



Chris Pratt's breakthrough role was of course Peter Quill/Star-Lord in 2013's Guardians Of The Galaxy, a movie which also starred Peter Serafinowicz, who voice Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace.







*¹ And it's nice to know that there are enough people on the internet who can't spell the word 'Jurassic' that the first predictive, auto-fill hashtag on Twitter is for #JurasicWorld…

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.