Review: Love, Simon

Love, Simon
Cert: 12A / 110 mins / Dir. Greg Berlanti / Trailer



Full disclosure: I wasn't originally going to watch this.

Now, I try to be a good liberal, I really do. Long-term readers will know that my political views (when I occasionally dip into them here) are progressive and the rolling news-feed of the last three years has given me a near permanent stress-headache. Similarly, I like to try and keep my movie-watching as open and inclusive as possible, as I've found great stories in unexpected places while I've been writing this blog*¹. But I saw the trailer for Love, Simon a few weeks ago. Its theatrically earnest approach to social and personal angst neatly packaged in emoji-shaped avocado-snowflakes for millennial viewers brought back memories of how angry I got during The Fault In Our Stars and Me Before You. Thus I surmised that this was not going to be the film for me. Fair play.

Then on Tuesday evening, I sat down with a not-inconsiderable number of fellow cinephiles, eager to sample the mystery cinematic goodness of the latest Cineworld Unlimited Secret Screening™, the chain's sporadic series of turn-up-and-see previews. The house-lights went down, the BBFC card came up, and the film's title was displayed to all. Fair play*². Naturally, I decided to give the movie a crack of the whip anyway, because as a 21st century, teenage coming-out story, Love, Simon is clearly going to have some resonance for our times, and be a contemporary frame for the challenges which younger marginalised groups face on a daily basis. I try to be a good liberal and I'd at least want to like this.

Yet at the same time, it would be an affront to my position as an honest movie reviewer if I didn't say that the first hour or so was one of the most mawkish, toe-curlingly excruciating experiences of my entire life.

That would be those parts of the hour which I didn't miss by rolling my eyes so hard I ended up looking at my own brain. Our eponymous hero (Nick Robinson) is a 17yr old who listens to 80s synth-pop in his car and plays The Kinks on vinyl at home, struggling with the concept of coming out as gay since he's such a hetero-hipster that the rest of the gay community would instantly and rightfully disown him. From his first fumbling flirtations with the gardener (don't worry, that's not expanded upon), Simon's world-view is challenged when one of his contemporaries comes out anonymously, via the school's online messageboard*³. As he enters into an ongoing e-mail exchange with the author, Simon can't work out if he's falling in love or just infatuated - or if the difference even matters. Which is fine, in principle.

But all of this is communicated by a script which comes off like fortune-cookie platitudes have being emptied out of a scrabble bag, then assembled by someone who might well know one gay person, but has never met any teenagers. Not even when they were a teenager. From his overly-sympathetic hippy mother (Jennifer Garner) to his loveable-jock of a father (Josh Duhamel) to his function-free cardboard cutout of a younger sister (Talitha Batemen), nothing in Simon's home life rings remotely true.

Outside of this nauseating family, any sense of intended realism immediately drops through the floor because this a certificate 12A, so none of the kids sneer or swear the way that actual teenagers do. This level of artifice carries over the entire film. While Simon is barely bearable, everyone else is irritating in escalating measure to the point where you think things can't get any worse. Then Tony 'Buster Bluth' Hale blows them all out of the water by playing the sort of school vice-principal who would be murdered by the other teachers before first-break, never mind the students.

And so the story lurches from one obscenely twee suburban exchange to the next, like a Frankenstein's Screenplay fashioned from offcuts of High School Musical*⁴ and The Secret Diary Of Gaydrian Mole. A chance bit of 'not signing out of the e-mail account specifically created for covertly conversing with the only gay person Simon knows' means that our hero's secret is picked up by a classmate who proceeds to blackmail him. Not because the guy's a homophobe, just because he's a cretin and thinks Simon can put a word in for him with a girl he likes. Simon goes along with this in a half-hearted manner and gets sick of it in the same lacklustre fashion.

And then suddenly, the third-act drama kicks in, the protagonist is unwillingly outed (by the cretin) to his school and family, and Love, Simon becomes a pretty good film (albeit still a heavy-handed one). This could be because the central themes broaden in both their focus and execution, or it could be because that's when the screenplay has more to focus on than patronising its cast and audience. The tension as Simon's hand is forced in developing the confidence he'll need for the future is one of basic human emotions; anger, shame, trust, acceptance. Scenes with his family which should be all rights be cloying are handled with a sense of reassurance, and there's the thought that this section of the film is where the real life-lessons lie.

Then there's just time for ten minutes of reverting to cinematic type. The 'making-up' of high school friendships awkwardly does the rounds and culminates in Simon's emotional blackmailing of his e-mail-writing friend, effectively forcing him to out himself in front of everyone or continue living in secrecy and its associated shame. Because it didn't do Simon any harm and these are the kind of sweeping generalisations the film is happy to make in its closing moments. Delightful.

In an age where films like Moonlight and Lady Bird exist, Love, Simon adds little of substance to the cultural zeitgeist. And it doesn't even do that well.

I try to be a good liberal, but that doesn't mean passively accepting anything with "issues!" stickered on the box in massive letters.

And as much as I may have taken against Love, Simon, at least I'm not the two guys who walked out five minutes into the movie when they realised what it was going to be about. Or the guy who left alone five minutes after that...

If you enjoyed The Fault In Our Stars then you'll probably be thoroughly engrossed by this.



This is not a £10+ film.



Stream it, tops.



It's not.



I doubt I'll have the strength to argue about it, but let's see.



There's not.



Level 2: Jennifer Garner's in this, and she was in 2009's The Invention Of Lying alongside Fionnula 'Catarine Towani' Flanagan.





*¹ The Greatest Showman can do one, though. As can Fifty Shades. Got to draw the line somewhere. ^{[ BACK ]}
*² I'll be honest I was expecting Tomb Raider. That film was out on general release the next day anyway, but Cineworld have previously previewed Dawn Of The Planet of The Apes less than 48 hours before it was due out. But I digress. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ Do these school-specific sites even exist in the age of Facebook? Or is it another thing made up by someone in their forties who thinks they're down with the kids? I ask that as someone in their forties who has neither the time nor patience to be down with the kids. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Oh, and massive props to the movie for still including a fantasy song-and-dance number, when it's very evident that our leading actor Can. Not. Dance. ^{[ 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: The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave
Cert: 15 / 112 mins / Dir. J Blakeson / Trailer



Because if an Oscar-winning actress like Jennifer Lawrence can cash cheques from YA cine-franchises, then there's no harm or shame in a talent like Chloë Grace Moretz following suit, right? An alien invasion (in the form of effects-budget-friendly body-inhabiters) sees Chloë star as Cassie, a normal teenage girl in a crisis situation, trying to be reunited with her younger brother as society collapses around them and Earth's last line of defence against a series of quasi-biblical plagues designed to wipe out humanity. She gets to watch a hot guy washing down his chest in a river, too, which I think is meant to represent hormones, or something.

Credit where it's due, The 5th Wave is a far better teen-adventure flick than it is a survival thriller (that's right Evan, if you're ever on the run, just start an open fire in unlit woodland at night, that won't give away your position in about a second). Because yeah, seasoned veterans of The Walking Dead (*raises hand*) will take issue with some of the strategic techniques used, and the story's "twists" are telegraphed from the first fifteen minutes of the film. All you can do after that is at least enjoy the movie for what it is.

It's an entertaining enough ride and certainly earnestly acted (although too much so, in the case of Maika Monroe) but there's no real depth to any of what we see (y'know, the extinction of humanity) and any message or subtext which manages to slip through the net of one author and three screenwriters is neither new nor unique, sadly. The 15 certificate certainly helps the tone of the film, but at its heart, this is a 12A (not that there's anything wrong with that at all).

You know Cassie's going to be alright in the end though, since the first act shows the 16yr old girl firing a Colt .45 for the first time using only one hand, and absorbing all signs of recoil effortlessly. That's survival skills, right there. And of course, no Sony movie would be complete without the obligatory product placement (this time for a cell-phone which the screenplay has already told us won't work again for the rest of the film), but we also get a couple of separate Spider-Man references, too. Y'know, in case you thought the studio had lost the web-slinger.

All things considered, human civilisation in The 5th Wave seems to be taking the unannounced arrival of an alien spacecraft and subsequent genocide of their species quite pragmatically; in any other invasion flick, it'd be absolute bedlam from day one. Although we only really see it affecting Ohio, so maybe they're all a bit more relaxed about the whole thing.

But hey, grumbles aside The 5th Wave is still better than Independence Day. And it's better than Skyline.

Although being stabbed repeatedly in the shins with a rusty cake-fork is better than Skyline…

I Am Number Four, How I Live Now.



Being shoved out at the end of January into not many cinemas, you might be lucky if you can find it (I only caught the film because I was in London).



Oh, probably.



It isn't.



I won't.



I didn't hear one.



Level 2: The 5th Wave stars that Liev Schreiber, who appeared in The Butler, as did David 'Kallus' Oyelowo.







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.