Dolittle Cert: PG / 101 mins / Dir. Stephen Gaghan / Trailer
So we get through the ads and trailers and more ads, the film is about to start and then nothing. Blank screen, silence. After about 30 seconds, I'm on my feet and off out to the foyer to let the staff know there's an issue in Screen 3 (because I'm that guy and I'm fine with that), and to their absolute credit we were up and running again within a couple of minutes. My point is, long after the anonymised online ordering of my ticket for the new Robert Downey Jr talking-animals-film, I could have taken this glitch as an omen, a sign, a get-out-of-the-cinema-free card. But fate tried to intervene and I brushed it aside. I went out into the foyer and actually, physically, verbally asked to watch Dolittle. It's not even like this hasn't happened before.
Reader, I am directly to blame for everything that followed...
Dolittle is a studio boardroom's idea of fun. An adventure without being exciting in any way, a comedy without jokes, old-fashioned without nostalgia, twee without charm, humourless without grit, depressing without weight, mawkish without any genuine emotion to call upon, energetic to the point of incoherence, white-Hollywood's attempt at diversity when left to its own devices, the kind of misguided faux-imperialist bullshit suggesting Tarzan had a one night stand with Pirates Of The Caribbean and this screenplay was dumped on the steps of a local orphanage shortly after, populated by a star-studded voice cast who each appear only to have seen their own lines and which still sound as if they're ad-libbed like the resurrection of Johnny Morris through a combination of CGI and witchcraft, all led by Robert Downey Jr trying to coast on charm through his own appalling decision-making*1 and managing to stumble over his own vocals as the central character seems to hail from the small Welsh village*2 of Barnsley-upon-Ganges...
If this is life-after-Stark then the MCU isn't all that's going to suffer.
Down with this sort of thing.
And also with this actual, exact thing.
Part of me is delighted that The Call Of The Wild is playing in cinemas at the same time as this atrocity, like an instant antidote. But a larger part of me is embarrassed on that film's behalf..
*1 And I can't believe someone actually green-lit the decision to give RDJ the Iron Man 'helmet-shot' as he dons the deep sea diver's outfit, as if that's not a calculated insult to the actor and audience alike.
Actually no, it's Universal. I can believe that... [ BACK ]
*2 He literally says "boyo" on a couple of occasions without any sense of affectation or irony and I'm pretty sure that's, like, racist?[ 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.
Well, fourth-quarter is the graveyard shift in the cinematic calendar, and the dumping ground for many an oddity that film distributors have no other slot for. And they don't come much odder or more dumped than director and co-writer Crispian Mills sophomore creature-com, Slaughterhouse Rulez.
When a place becomes unexpectedly available at a prestigious boarding school, working class northern teenager Don (Finn Cole*1) is encouraged to apply by his socially-aspirant mum. Struggling to adapt to the norms of private education, Finn gradually forms a guarded friendship with fellow sixth-formers Clemsie (Hermione Corfield*2) and Willoughby (Asa Butterfield*3). But things take a sinister turn when it's revealed that the mysterious headmaster (Michael Sheen) is in cahoots with a fracking company, and their drilling at the edge of the school's grounds has awoken something - or things. With teacher Meredith Houseman*4 (Simon Pegg) and environmental protestor Woody (Nick Frost) thrown into the mix, traditional allegiances have to be discarded as a weekend of off-term debauchery turns into a comic fight for survival...
HAMMERING Yeah, it's not great. Not great at all. The main problem is that the setup itself feels laboured, so no script coming off the back of that is ever going to sparkle, and so neither are the performances. The film spends the first twenty minutes not quite getting over its own joke that a school would be named Slaughterhouse*5, hammering home the archaic eccentricities of British private education like no-one else had noticed.
Cole, Corfield and Butterworth are basically fine, but none of them really have the acting chops at this point to lead the movie's young cast, even as an ensemble. At the other end of the scale, Pegg, Frost and Sheen are left to mug and autopilot through their (largely completely separate) scenes. All of the above need firmer direction, as does the screenplay itself. Instead we get a loose collection of weak sketches from the man who brought us A Fantastic Fear of Everything (34%).
ESCHERING The more creative the film tries to be with its monster scenes (of which there are surprisingly few, for a monster movie), the cheaper it all feels. Predator-lite heat vision and shadow-play can't disguise the obvious budgetary constraints, and the creature shots we do get strike an uneven balance between admittedly strong props with severely limited movement and fluid-but-murky-as-hell CGI.
More a clunky homage to teen horror than actually being one itself, there's little in the way of thrills and even less in shocks. A few smirks are to be had in the script, but no actual laughs. It's hard to know exactly what Slaughterhouse Rulez is trying to be, and as a result it's often hard to know exactly how badly it's failing.
DONALDING Monsters or otherwise, the movie as a whole feels uninspired. Even with its heavy-handed fracking plot, you'd swear this had been sitting on a shelf since 2006, when Pegg and Frost were still enough of a thing to draw audiences with their presence alone.
The fact that Mills continually lifts beats from Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy while under-using those films' leading stars tells the audience how thin on the ground the ideas are. Slaughterhouse Rulez wants to be Harry Potter for fans of The World's End, but comes out more like Percy Jackson in the vein of Lesbian Vampire Killers.
DUCKING Stories with a young leading cast aim to transport the audience back to imagined ideals of their youth, with camaraderie and adventure. Horror-tinged movies of this ilk either want the viewer to think that they'd love to be in that situation with the heroes, or just be relieved they're in the cinema watching at a safe distance. But for all the two-hour runtime and backstory bombardment, there's no immersion here.
The story isn't engaging enough to be a spectator-led affair, instead feeling like none of this matters. It's faintly ironic that the film is set in a public school since the it feels like it's been written by a drama student 6th Former with no outside social contacts.
Slaughterhouse Rulez is never flat-out awful, but its waste of a decent cast is an affront to the acting profession. There's the suggestion that this probably felt a lot more coherent and meaningful on-set, when everything was being experienced in a non-linear order and the final product was still a hazy dream. But hazy dreams produce hazy results, and this film should be included in the Media Studies module teaching that very lesson…
The impact will be lessened even more in your living room, but it's the natural home of this.
Hahahaha, hell no.
That's entirely possible, yes.
Not that I heard. And in a flick like this, it would likely be front-and-centre if it were there.
Level 1: Well aside from some of the most cack-handed Star Wars references you've ever seen committed to film, Unkar Plutt is in this. So is Tallie. It's no consolation.
*3 Asa Butterfield is 21. These are your teen-leads. It's like Grease never happened. [ BACK ]
*4 These really are the characters' names, by the way, I'm not making this up. [ BACK ]
*5 The title is (from what I can tell) effectively a portmanteau pun on Tom Sharpe's Cambridge-satire Porterhouse Blue and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, with the mis-spelling of 'Rules' lending the same air of intellectual confidence instilled by a hairdressing business with "Kutz" in its name. [ 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.
Well, fair play to Columbia Pictures. No, really. I can't quite envision the table of reactions at the Friday afternoon meeting when one voice piped up "Passengers a sci-fi movie… why don't we just release it six days after Star Wars?", nor the ensuing discussion which saw that idea get signed off. But it clearly happened. Fair play.
Set in a future time of commercialised off-world colonisation, Passengers is the story of two prospective settlers who wake from cryo-sleep 30 years into their 120-year journey on the starship Avalon, and have to figure out what's brought them round early, and how they can avoid dying of old age before the ship reaches its destination. All the best science fiction works on an allegorical level, and Morten Tyldum's film seems to be a metaphor for two people waking from cryo-sleep 30 years into a 120-year journey and having to figure out what's brought them round early and how they can avoid dying of old age before the ship reaches its destination.
Loneliness, destiny, purpose, the weight of responsibility and the isolating vastness of space. Precisely none of these themes are properly explored in a film which is the cinematic equivalent of candy floss; very pretty to look at, but almost entirely without substance or nutritional content of any kind.
I didn't hate Passengers, but the plot felt so staggeringly linear that I began to wonder if I was missing something huge. If that's the case then I continue to miss it.
The first act belongs to engineer and everyman-archetype, Chris Pratt (largely playing Chris Pratt™), on his own in the ship and slowly losing the plot as his 5,300 sleeping peers manage to doze through his escalating breakdown*1. The whole thing plays out like a retelling of I Am Legend, overlaid with a child trying to explain the premise of Red Dwarf. Jennifer Lawrence arrives soon after as a borderline unlikeable writer*2 who'd been on 'a journey' to 'find herself'. The thing which apparently upsets her most about living out the rest of her life in space is not being surrounded by people telling her how great she is (#23rdCenturyProblems). And then after a while, Laurence Fishburne arrives in an officer's uniform, being the only one trained or qualified to drive the story forward. Throughout all of this, Michael Sheen periodically supports as an android bartender, the one role where that weird grin of his actually feels appropriate.
With a couple of very minor exceptions, this is a cast of four people (with the addition of Andy Garcia laughing all the way to the bank). Which is fine. Pratt and Lawrence make the most of what they're given to work with, Sheen arguably has the most fun and Fishburne is chewing the scenery and thinking about the money. Which is fine.
The film as a whole? Not fine. And not fun, either. When did starting a new life on the other side of the galaxy, investigating a mystery on-board an ostensibly deserted spacecraft and fixing a reactor-core by opening an airlock using a door as a makeshift flame-shield become so boring?*3. The super-generic on screen displays and minimalist interior of The Avalon look like they're from a screenplay written in the 1970s which has been waiting for the effects-industry to catch up. And everything looks Nice™ here, but an incredibly bland way. Notwithstanding that the trailer actually mis-sells the premise of the movie*4, anyone hoping for a third-act reveal is going to be disappointed. Generally speaking, I enjoy the work of all the cast*5, but their performances just aren't enough to carry the weak screenplay.
Passengers at least does some of what it says on the tin.
I didn't go 'on a journey', but I do feel like I was taken for a ride…
Level 2: Let's go for an easy one, Jennifer Lawrence was in X-Men: Apocalypse alongside Rose 'Dormé' Byrne and Oscar 'Dameron' Isaac.
*1 They sleep throughout the whole thing. At one point I was worried I was going to join them.
*2 And after the film features some of her 'desert island prose', this is a term I use very loosely.
*3 Doesn't it bother anyone else that when the gravity fails on the ship, previously static items in the various rooms begin to drift around - indicating that the film-makers are aware that the forward thrust and corkscrew motion of the ship would act upon these objects -, yet when our heroes step outside for a tethered spacewalk, they're not immediately yanked back into the craft's slipstream? We're told it's travelling at approximately half the speed of light, and while gravity won't apply to them outside the ship, momentum and inertia would. Maybe it's not a documentary...
*4 This is Mystique & Star-Lord: The Stalking Years. Every bit as creepy as that sounds and nowhere near as dramatic as it could (would) be.
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.
You had one job, Matthias. You're a shepherd; protect the sheep. And if protecting those sheep involves you manufacturing a sturdy fence that they won't be able to push over the moment the fancy takes them, then you build that bloody fence, Matthias! Twice in this film (twice) Dorset's most lackadaisical ovine protection agent stumbles at the hurdle of fence-erection, and is still somehow trusted to look after the sheep. You had one job…
Thomas Vinterburg's big-screen adaptation of the 1875 Tomas Hardy novel, Far From The Madding Crowd, boasts a very capable cast in the form of Carey Mulligan, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tom Sturridge and the ever-smirking Michael Sheen. What is potentially a thoroughly depressing story of poor decision-making and bad circumstances is lifted from the doldrums by the performances of Mulligan and Schoenaerts, which isn't to belittle the efforts of everyone else, but they're essentially the only sympathetic characters on offer. Some beautifully quiet photography*1 of the Dorset landscape also provides some respite from the strains of rural life, courtesy of cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen.
It's definitely a film for Fans Of This Sort Of Thing, and while I wouldn't consider myself a member of that club, I found plenty to enjoy in the acting, direction and writing (ironically, it's most often the screen-writing, or just the narrative itself, of literary adaptations which rubs me up the wrong way). As someone who isn't familiar with the original work, I thought it worked very well, and the themes of indecision and good intentions married with bad outcomes translate to 2015 with ease. The film feels a little rushed on occasion, but the two-hour runtime is a good fit for the story which is being told, so no real complaints from me.
Carey Mulligan starred in 2013's Inside Llewyn Davis alongside Adam Driver and Oscar Isaac, both of whom will appear in this year's Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
*1 Although again, for several indoor scenes we have close-up shots filmed using hand-held cameras on zoom, with every judder and sway of the operator's hand being exaggerated by the magnification. When you're watching this on a cinema-screen it's nausea-inducing.
*2 I imagine. I'll be honest, I haven't looked up those criteria across the year's other releases, but by all means let me know if any fit the bill.
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.
So we get through the ads and trailers and more ads, the film is about to start and then nothing. Blank screen, silence. After about 30 seconds, I'm on my feet and off out to the foyer to let the staff know there's an issue in Screen 3 (because I'm that guy and I'm fine with that), and to their absolute credit we were up and running again within a couple of minutes. My point is, long after the anonymised online ordering of my ticket for the new Robert Downey Jr talking-animals-film, I could have taken this glitch as an omen, a sign, a get-out-of-the-cinema-free card. But fate tried to intervene and I brushed it aside. I went out into the foyer and actually, physically, verbally asked to watch Dolittle. It's not even like this hasn't happened before.
