Hell's Kitchen, New York, 1978*1. The put-upon wives of three mobsters (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Elisabeth Moss) find themselves struggling when their husbands are jailed following a failed store robbery. At first they decide to take up the reins of the business themselves, then the idea occurs that the ladies could be players in their own right. As their operation grows, they find themselves rubbing up other underworld figures the wrong way, and eventually decisions have to be made about how far each is prepared to go to assure their success...
POINT Now. I've heard a few folks comment that the premise of this movie is a blatant rip-off of 2018's Widows, and I feel the need to point out that this is definitely not the case. The Kitchen is in fact based on the 2015 comic from DC/Vertigo, and that was a rip-off of 1983's Widows. Come on people, really. Flippancy aside though, this is closer in tone and structure to a sort of Grand Theft Auto '78, since they're not pulling off One Big Job but building a sprawling criminal empire.
And although the levels of intensity feel right, the setup for the central premise itself feels a little linear. "Hey, y'know we could do The Crime, right?" - "Shall we do The Crime?" - "Yeah, let's do The Crime!!". Structurally this isn't a million miles away from Hustlers, except here it's a fight for identity and survival, rather than entitlement (obviously there is a bit of entitlement). Also, the vintage soundtrack is better in this movie, even if the best tunes have appeared in numerous other soundtracks over the years).
PRISON The central cast all do well with roles which don't tonally overlap too much, joined by Margo Martindale in full, glorious gangster-pantomime mode. Each of trio are individually flawed outside of their base criminal aspirations, with their own hurdles to clear before the credits roll. Two of our gang take to the life of crime like ducks to water, while the third still gives it one hell of a crack before becoming uncomfortable with the consequences of her new responsibilities. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Melissa McCarthy is far better at drama than she is comedy, even if she plays both almost identically*2. And it turns out that the same appears to be true of Tiffany Haddish. Elisabeth Moss is great as always.
As well as the strong - borderline caricature - 1978 production design*3, we're treated to some fantastic establishing scenery shots courtesy of cinematographer Maryse Alberti and the effects team who brought them to digitally enhanced life. At times this feels a bit like an early Guy Ritchie flick (no bad thing) in that the police are mentioned, but fire a handgun a few times in broad daylight and they're nowhere to be seen. This isn't their manor, and the players in this tale don't take them seriously anyway.
BIG The film drags a bit in its third act, and the whole thing ends up feeling like it could easily lose around twenty minutes. When the final plot tie-up arrives, it feels like something which has been dropped in because it's expected for the format, rather than the thing which has been driving the story all along. As escalating crime-sprees go, The Kitchen is a relatively nuts-and-bolts rendition, but one made with conviction and no small amount of style...
Buy it, but maybe wait for the price to come down first.
Not particularly, but there are strong and surprisingly nuanced performances all round.
Unlikely, since while The Kitchen won't be for everyone, it'll be a difficult to movie to actively take against.
No.
Level 1: General Hux is in this (and whose deadpan comic timing is superb, by the way)
*1 While obviously I'm aware that the title is location-specific, I can't help but feel that putting three women in a movie called "The Kitchen" in 2019 is playing into the wrong hands, somewhat. [ BACK ]
*2 I'll be honest, a small part of me was hoping Melissa McCarthy would be dreadful in this so that I could say "If you can't stand The Heat... stay out of The Kitchen!!1!". Alas, that cheap pun doesn't apply because her turn here is absolutely solid. We can only play the cards we're dealt, right? [ BACK ]
*3 Mate, it's 1978 and no one mentions Star Wars? At all? It'd only been out for six months and was still massive. You have a scene in a street full of movie theatres and the most recognisable name you've got splashed on the hoardings is Grease? ...what do you mean 'this isn't a documentary'? [ 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.
The Walk (3D)
Cert: PG / 123 mins / Dir. Robert Zemeckis / Trailer
Not convinced by the trailer? Don't worry, I wasn't either. I struggled to see how Robert Zemeckis was going to make a compelling movie about a subject which is already documented on pageandon film. But The Walk is much more than a series of escalating events (no pun intended), instead it gets inside the head - and heart - of wire-walker Philippe Petit, and ends up being three movies in one.
The first act follows Philippe through his childhood and adolescence, showing his fascination with performance acrobatics first in rural France, then to Paris, and his idea for the World Trade Centre walk. From the very beginning, Zemeckis is keen to highlight that this is a true story, with a massive title card informing the audience of such. And yet this section of the film is also the least convincing, as the director employs an array of techniques to keep pulling the viewer out of the story and create a strong sense of artiface; be it the fourth-wall-breaking on-screen dialogue from Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit as he narrates the major points of his life from the top of an astoundingly false looking Statue of Liberty*1, the black-and-white scenes with bursts of colour injected, Ben Kingsley's voice*2, or even just the heavily stylised filming of the scenes which aren't designed to catch your eye, particularly. At this point, it almost feels like Zemeckis is saying that the truth of the story isn't enough, that it has to be embellished with spectacle and exaggeration. It doesn't bode well, and I still wasn't convinced.
However, once Philippe arrives permanently in New York and begins assembling a team of accomplices to help him achieve his unauthorised and highly-illegal walk between the towers, the film becomes an energetic heist-movie, not unlike American Hustle, complete with JGL donning a number of disguises as he cases the still-incomplete South Tower with a view to infiltrating it with all of his wire-apparatus. It's at this point that the chemistry between Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Charlotte Le Bon really kicks in, and they're fantastic together even if their combined screen-time is relatively short. This is also the act which features the comic relief from the misfits Philippe recruits, partly because of their skills, but also through sheer desperation. Additionally, it's here that the director seems to delight in homaging his own Back To The Future movies*3, as he's already got Alan Silvestri to score the film, and then goes on to show his love of a) ominous thunderstorms in the lead-up to a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, b) fascinatingly detailed architectural maquettes, painstakingly over-built to illustrate only one point, and c) steel cables and ratchets. Lots of ratchets. The heist-act is a lot of fun, by this point I was well onboard.
But it's act-three, the final stretch, the walk itself, which everyone's come for and this is where Zemeckis really shines. The Walk becomes a film not about the technicalities of stringing a wire between two buildings, nor about the adulation and amazement coming from the streets below while that's done, but about the performance art itself. About testing your own limits and doing something unique purely because you can (with a lot of help from your friends, of course). Far from being the hyper-tense tale of hubris that the trailer hints at, it's a film about freedom on a personal and artistic level. Philippe refers to the planning and execution of his walk as le coup, but despite the authorities (eventually) becoming involved, there's nothing either political or egotistical about his actions; it's just something he has to do for himself.
Then, almost as a post-script to the story, Zemeckis' film deftly delivers a metaphorical love-letter to the Twin Towers, but again it's a one which manages to steer well clear of any mawkishness or politics somehow; not mourning their loss, but just celebrating their existence. A carefully crafted final sequence shows the towers as beacons of hope and possibility, of Philippe's dream and everything he did to achieve it. A reminder that people may think you're crazy (in fact, you very well might be), but all the time it's your dream, you're the only one who can chase it properly. And a reminder that the best art is created for the sake of art itself.
The unspoken fate of the buildings aside, any film which can make a wooly-yet-cynical liberal like me misty-eyed over two monuments to naked, unabashed capitalism - in today's climate - is doing something very right, indeed.
Go and see The Walk...
It is, and in 3D as well. There a fewer 'fairground thrill-simulator shots' in there than you'd think (although there are several, obviously), but much like The Martian, this is one of the rare examples of a live-action movie which looks great in 3D.
Seriously, much of the effect will be lost on the small screen (unless your telly's massive), but this will be one to buy. Once the price drops, naturally.
Accent quibbles aside, JGL's on great form here.
More than.
Probably not…
There isn't.
Which is ridiculous, because there is the perfect spot for it, too.
The film stars James Badge Dale and Ben Kingsley, both of whom appeared in Iron Man 3, along with Jon 'Pre Vizsla' Favreau.
*1 And like I said, this first act is specifically designed to not be a documentary, but how come in some of the shots of Petit narrating, the wind machine's turned on to simulate standing exposed to the elements 150 feet in the air, but in other's it's not and everything's just deathly still? I know I'm not meant to believe it Zemeckis, but you could at least pretend you're trying to convince me…
*2 Oh, and fair play to Kingsley here as Petit's mentor and trainer, Rudy. Levitt's introductory narration tells us that "Papa Rudy never said exactly where he was from…", which gives Ben carte blanche to employ a wildly-roaming non-specific European drawl for the rest of the film, which seems to change with each scene he's in. Half of me suspects that this is a deliberate tie-in with his advice to Philippe when he tells him "Never be insincere on stage, it must come from here. The audience will know if you're lying". Because for all his shop-demonstration-mode vocal acrobatics, he plays his role perfectly (more importantly, his accent doesn't matter, although JGL's might)…
*3 There's also a sort of homage to 1985's Ghostbusters too, in the form of people standing on the streets of New York, looking at the top of a building they can't really see properly and ooh-ing and aah-ing. Although this is less of an intentional reference than an unavoidable one, I suspect.
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.
Parkland Cert: 15 / 94 mins / Dir. Peter Landesman
Peter Landesman's telling of the events surrounding the assassination of John F Kennedy could easily have gone down a mawkish route (especially with a release date to mark 50 years since the event), but his tense script and busy camera keep the running time fully on the rails, with little time for weeping. The only real sentimentality on show is the depiction of a time when the public revered, and even loved, their elected representatives. Even then, there's little in the way of judgement being bandied about; the parts of the film featuring the average citizen (these scenes are in a minority, admittedly) reflect the shock and helplessness of a public who could barely even imagine that something like this could happen, never mind that it would.
Now given that I'm no scholar on the subject, I've pretty much got to take the true story aspect of the film in good faith. There are great performances all round, especially in a marvellously tense scene in the emergency-room as doctors fruitlessly pound away at the deceased's chest, a deafening silence filling the room as no-one wants to be the one who gave up on The President while the packed room bears witness. Between the Parkland hospital staff who are faced first with trying to resuscitate the most powerful man in the world and just days later have the same task presented with his killer, the Secret Service and FBI agents trying to establish if they could have prevented the shooting, and the traumatised bystander who took one of the most infamous home movies ever, the film chooses its areas of scrutiny carefully. Even as it stands, and with only four days of events depicted, there's a lot to cover, so this is by no means a complete journal.
But for all the accomplished acting I've listed so far, the standout performances come from James Badge Dale and Jacki Weaver who star as Lee Harvey Oswald's brother and mother, respectively. The former is torn between trying to have some sympathy for his brother, despite being horrified at what he's pretty sure he's done, and facing increasing hostility from the public and police for guilt-by-association; the latter is a terrifying vision of an attention-seeking fantasist, literally attempting to cash-in on the actions of her son (who's even more certain that he's guilty). These can't have been easy parts to write, research or play, and they lift the film above the historical melodrama it could have been.
On a far less serious subject, the film features Jackie Earle Haley from Watchmen, Glenn Morshower from X-Men: First Class, and James Badge Dale from Iron Man 3. That's quite a spandex pedigree, isn't it?
It's to be applauded that the film centres on the memory of the events, rather than those of the man, whilst also largely steering clear of conspiracy theories. The number of angles the story is told from constantly jostle for position, not always successfully, but they also work together to form a tense patchwork of four days in 1963. It's doubtful how much light this will cast on events this far down the line, but it's a tale worth telling, nonetheless.
Yes.
I can't go that far, but the film kept my attention for its duration.
I think it does, if only because it's not trying to cover too much.
Realistically, this is a DVD-movie.
No.
At some point, but it's hardly "Oh, I know what I fancy watching tonight…".
There isn't.
Was I supposed to find it funny when the FBI agents were sawing into the doorway of the plane in order to fit Kennedy's battered coffin through? I seemed to be the only one chuckling, that's all.
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.
There really isn't a lot to say about this latest Pirates of the Caribbean movie*1, other than it does exactly what you expect it to, exactly when you expect it to, and for far too long.
There's nothing inherently bad about the film; it's just not interesting enough. There are flashes of greatness sprinkled here and there, but they're outnumbered by flashes of 'yes, get on with it', as dull characters with no backstory fail to develop because they're supporting Johnny Depp Wearing A Hat™. Visually, the film is beautiful, with some stunning landscapes and a mixture of colour palettes. Audibly, Hanz Zimmer scores the film like only he can*2, so we're in tried and tested hands there. The lead players are all comfortably ensconced in their roles, giving 'reliable' performances. It's just...
…why isn't a film featuring a man riding a horse on the top of a train more exciting? Probably because it feels like it doesn't know what it wants to be. There's a great action movie struggling to get out, bound by a Disneyfied gun-toting hero who steadfastly refuses to shoot anyone until the final climactic scene (and even then he pretty much misses), and a sidekick who's the star of the show, whose Pidgin English becomes remarkably fluent when the plot requires it.
It made me smile, it made me yawn, it made me fidget*3. Despite what I've said about PotC, the framing device with Old-Tonto talking to the child, combined with the horse/train action set-pieces reminded me a lot of Indiana Jones. Only… without the fun.
Interestingly, the pre-trailer ads featured, amongst other things: Haribo, Jack Daniels, Nerf Guns and Cidre. Even the advertising companies don't know who this is meant to be aimed at.
Pretty much..
Sometimes. Not enough. Although the 'hi-ho Silver' line is funny.
Make money for Jerry Bruckheimer? Not from what I hear…
*shrugs*.
Nope.
Only in advance of the sequel.
I think I heard one, yes. When Ian Ranger and Ian Tonto jump off the train (that narrows it down, I know).
Johnny Depp is capable of much better work. When is he going to prove that to everyone?
*1 Seriously, though; you know that's exactly what this is.
*2 Or, 'the only way he knows how', depending on how fond you are of his work.
*3 Not with my phone, that goes without saying. I just lost interest to the point where I was reminded how uncomfortable my non-aisle-seat was.
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.
World War Z (3D - SPOILERS)
Cert: 15 / 116 mins / Dir. Marc Forster
This latest addition to the Pitt-canon is a curious beast. A sort of zombie-flick for people who don't normally watch zombie-flicks, yet based on one of the most acclaimed zombie-novels whilst having nothing in common with the book except the title. Bizarre.
So, how does it fare? Well, it's a summer blockbuster starring Brad Pitt and Her Out Of The Killing*1, and that should tell you everything you need to know. It often feels more like an adaptation of a video-game than a novel, with its chiseled hero dashing through action-mission after escape-mission after stealth-mission, interspersed with talky-plot-cut-scenes. The final act in particular has more in common with Jurassic Park than Dawn of the Dead.
In short, it's not really a horror film, but then the trailers never suggested it was going to be. It's not the absence of gore that leaves me wanting, but rather that of engagement. There's never any doubt that our hero is going to stick around for the long-run, which wouldn't be a problem if he didn't go through action-sidekicks like sickbags on a rollercoaster. Secondary characters seem to be introduced with the sole intention of helping out for one 'level', imparting one piece of the solution and then dying (with one exception, and hero-Brad saves her by cutting her hand off, after which she's completely under-used). So while the structure is largely 'go to A to get B', it feels far more formulaic than it should when 'everything goes wrong so end up going to C, D and E as well'.
In the interests of full disclosure, I didn't particularly like the book either*2, but for completely different reasons. I just want you to know that I'm not complaining that it's not the same as the source material; I'm complaining because it's a very pedestrian film. I'm honestly not bothered that it's not exactly to my tastes, but I think it could (and should) be so much better*3. The 3D's not particularly good, either. There was a lot of ghosting, and the action-scenes feature too many fast-cuts to use it properly. If you think it's worth your money, go for the 2D.
If anything, I feel let down by how unremarkable The End Of The World is going to be...
For an action film, it's not too bad; but for a zombie film it's pretty damned poor. And since it's not called 'World War A', but 'World War Z'? Well…
WARNING: Contains Piers Morgan in the first five minutes.
Pretty much, yeah.
Sometimes. It has its moments.
I'm going to go with 'no'. Your mileage may vary.
DVD, tops.
Yeah.
Maybe when it's £3 in the Sainsbury's DVD section?
Not that I heard. I mean, come on…
Now that the zombie genre is as irrevocably mainstream as the vampire one, where do we go from here?
*1 No offence intended, Mireille, but that's what I heard one patron in the cinema calling you.
*2 And yet I loved Max Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide. My problem with WWZ was that there wasn't a cohesive enough narrative; like it would make a fantastic series of blog posts, just not a great novel. But hey, that's just me.
*3 The most excited I got throughout the whole film was when I realised that the supermarket-scene (set in Philadelphia) was the bit that was filmed at Heyford Air Base, about 30 miles away from where I live. I got similarly excited in Sherlock Holmes 2 where they used the railway museum down the road from me. It's all go, round my way.
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.
