Name: Transformers: The Last Knight (2D) / Student Responsible: Michael Bay / Age: 12 (advisory) /Studied: 10 years / Projects Completed: 5 / Latest Project Length: 149 minutes
This has been a difficult year for Michael as he struggles to find coherence in his creative activities. Never the highest achiever in his peer-group, he has nonetheless been a conscientious student in the past, delivering projects to the best of his ability. Recent years have seen him coast into unfocused laziness however, an attitude resurgent in his end-of-year project, The Last Knight. While we wouldn't expect the fifth part of his ongoing series to be a vie for critical acclaim alone, after watching the performance we weren't sure who it was actually aimed at. If Michael is to succeed in his chosen field, he needs to spend more time thinking about why his projects exist, rather than just how to complete them.
Performance in specific areas:
Whilst Michael has succeeded in the relative non-achievement of engaging the theatre department's Mark McMark for a second consecutive production, it has been noted that the performer only initially became involved because of the director's falling out with prior collaborators Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox from years 3 and 2, respectively. In his latest presentation, Michael seems incredibly self-satisfied to have secured returning supporting cast-members from earlier productions, namely Josh Duhamel, John Turturro and Glenn Morshower. This charitable act of continuity on Michael's part is undercut slightly given that LaBeouf and Fox either haven't been asked to reprise or just aren't interested, although the former's image is presented as a photograph at one point, presumably as a move in some manner of theatrical tit-for-tat. In addition to all this, the film sees the return of the Megatron character, but voiced by the music department's Mr. Frank Welker, as it apears Hugo Weaving has changed his phone number.
Michael's main mechanical-cast look visually impressive as always, and the director has managed to abstain from following the film's female characters around at bottom-height, this time. However, sunsets and lensflare continue to be a problem, and the filmmaker's boastful use of Imax cameras throughout means that the 99.9% of cinema audiences who won't be watching on the proprietary format will still be subjected to an aspect ratio which isn't even as wide as 16:9, never mind the generally expected 2.35:1. Because the school auditorium's side-curtains were not operational at the time of our performance, the examination panel could actually see two sets of black bars at the picture's sides as a result.
The Last Knight establishes in its first act a ticking countdown-timer of three days. The story's principal characters manage to stay alert, active and energetic for that entire duration despite apparently going nowhere near a wink of sleep. Extra points are awarded in this category for the same characters' resourceful good hygiene in having frequent changes of clothes, despite both having been effectively kidnapped on the fly in the first twenty minutes.
With the exception of Anthony Hopkins who overacts gleefully in every single scene of his, the vast majority of exchanges here consist of cast members awaiting their delivery cues, be that the director shouting 'action', someone else's line of script or just a prop thrown into shot by a runner to simulate some robots fighting off-camera. While there is little-to-no meaningful interaction between the human characters, this doesn't actually matter in The Last Knight.
Whilst Michael has a broad grasp of gravity, he continues to be unsure of basic time/distance travel calculations, the resulting actions of a 20+ tonne machine walking upright over a muddy field, and the impactful introduction of a moon-sized object within the Earth's atmosphere and onto the planet's surface. Mr Spielberg has offered Michael extra tuition on these and further items on several occasions, to no avail.
See Physics.
For a film with a concept of robot-smacks-robot, the population is far too high. Outside of the core cast of Mark McMark, Laura Haddock and Anthony Hopkins, the story introduces significant numbers of tertiary (human) characters who are apparently forgotten about until they're wheeled in to deliver exposition at some later point.
Michael has been assisted by four writers here, all apparently obsessed with sassy, comedic bickering but encumbered with a cast unable to deliver it. People in closed rooms shout at each other as general conversation. The narrative makes no sense, the script is awful, the characters are flimsy, the cast lack direction and the direction lacks coherence. The Last Knight ends up like a two-and-a-half-hour cutscene from a video game nobody needs to play.
"The judgement… is death!" cries one executioner-robot during the film's finale. No, the sentence would be death. The 'judgement' would be guilty. And this is a character with a computer for a brain, remember…
This is where we have serious concerns with Michael's performance at our school. Although operating in a fictional, non-documentary capacity, The Last Knight has such a basic disregard for its locations that we have refused to award a mark for this module. Bay may believe his core audience is too young to think about the internal logic of the film, but to even hold children in educational contempt is nothing short of shameful.
The problems which were noted included (but were not limited to):
• Mark McMark's chauffeured aeroplane arrives at the United Kingdom and actually touches its wheels down on the While Cliffs of Dover, the implication being that his host Anthony Hopkins lives in his castle in Dover. Otherwise, why would the vehicle have landed in Dover? After several scenes of messy exposition, it's revealed that this castle is actually about three minutes drive away from Westminster in London (which is in actual fact 85 miles away from Dover), and also about five minutes drive from the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford (which is 59 miles from Westminster, and 144 miles away from Dover). Audiences in England (especially the Southern counties) will be acutely aware of this disparity.
• In fact, if the aeroplane is flying in from America (which is to the west of Britain, if we remember correctly), why would it be seen approaching the White Cliffs of Dover (which are located on the south-east coast)? The plane would be skirting over Cornwall at an absolute push, which is still hundreds of miles away from London. The only time you see those cliffs is if you're coming in from Calais, France.
• Additionally, Hopkins' jaunt into the capital takes him within walking distance of "Trinity Library", as it's named in the script. While this is is not geographically described in the film, it is nonetheless revealed to be the very famous library of Trinity College in Dublin, which is 369 miles from London.
• The exterior of Oxfordshire's Blenheim Palace has been filmed as a Nazi stronghold in a Second World War flashback-sequence, and while the building is not intended to be its actual self, Michael has nonetheless chosen a veryvisually distinctive landmark already associated with that war (being the birthplace of one Winston Churchill) to pretend is somewhere else completely. Presumably he could not find any other old buildings in England to film outside of.
• Back in London, the film implies that one can just walk up to the front door of 10 Downing Street (one cannot), and then that there's a 'secret back door' entrance in the Strand, which is about half a mile away and in the opposite direction to the one in which Anthony Hopkins walks off.
• And our most contested moment might have been where Hopkins instructs McMark to liberate a submarine from "the Naval Museum", which in London can only realistically mean Greenwich. This action is duly performed and the craft is seen cruising under London's Tower Bridgehaving travelled eight and a half miles up-river for no reason whatsoever, before next emerging at the foot of Dover's White Cliffs in what can only have been a coastal-skirting waste of time. Here is that every-second-counts journey on a map:
There IS a (slim) chance that the Naval Museum which Hopkins refers to is the one in Portsmouth (where the scene was actually filmed), but given that's 73 miles south-west of London, this wouldn't explain why the submarine is then spotted at Tower Bridge before arriving back at Dover...
For audiences with even a basic grasp of UK landmarks or geography, this film is going to be unwatchable.
We appear to have reached Peak Bay; The Last Knight is absolute cinematic gibberish. It is the school's recommendation that Michael should leave to pursue more varied projects in the wider world, allowing other students to experiment, flourish and learn from his follies.
If you must.
Although I'll warn you now: I had a headache by the time we get to Mark McMark's junkyard twenty minutes in, and it did not shift until I was back out in the street after the film. Never before have I welcomed the tranquility of rush-hour traffic.
In Michael Bay's head, it probably does.
By no means, although it's oddly harmless considering everything that's wrong with it.
Oh, probably not. For everything I've written*1, I didn't actively hate The Last Knight. Apart from anything else I didn't have a chance to, I spent too much time trying to work out what the actual fuck was going on.
I may be mistaken, but I believe the film actually opens with one, melded into some other sound-effects. Not that I'm going to watch it again to make certain, of course.
*1 I hope you're impressed, by the way, that I've gone this far through the review without needing a single footnote.
I know I am. [ 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.
Sixteen. As someone who spends a not-inconsiderable amount of time in the cinema, I've seen various trailers for Fast & Furious 8*1 and, as a result, had wondered how many times the word "family" would appear in the final script. It's sixteen times. I counted. To put that in 'cinematic catchphrase' context, the second Paul Blart movie featured A Fat Man Falling Over a mere eight times. Make of that what you will, but I'm at least glad that Peggy Mitchell's secured a job as a screenwriter.
So despite my thinking that the F&F series really should have been laid gently down after part seven, it's evident that it may well be the last great franchise that Universal have. It's certainly the best vehicle (no pun intended) for the dubious talents of Vin Diesel*2, who at least has the rest of the cast to share the limelight and ease the burden of the script (which is frequently excruciating, but who's here for the dialogue, right?).
The film is, in pretty much every sense, exactly what you expect it to be (and no less than you'd expect from the eighth installment of any series). From the opening race around the streets of Havana in which Diesel pushes an old banger literally into the red, this is impressively ridiculous stuff. Things take a predictably mawkish turn when the aforementioned 'F'-word rears its head, but the faux-sentimentality doesn't get in the way of what is essentially a petrol-burning action flick. Old faces and characters appear like at a reunion party, past transgressions not necessarily forgiven, but put on hold out of general goodwill. And once more, the screenplay takes the same cavalier attitude to technology and hacking as it does to the general laws of physics*3. F&F8 may not be everything it could be, but it's certainly everything it needs to be to meet its own selection criteria.
Best line is awarded unapologetically to Jason Statham for "Let's go, Scarface. These arseholes aren't going to kill themselves…".
Fast & Furious 8 is largely an immense amount of fun*4, albeit the perfect definition of Bubblegum Cinema™. It's brightly-coloured and distracting, of no real nutritional value, and after a couple of hours you realise it's pretty much without taste.
Plan your viewing schedules accordingly.
The movies which preceded it.
If you like your testosterone and burning rubber to be on a massive screen, yes.
Pretty much.
Whether that's a good thing is up for debate.
It's not even the best of its series, to be fair.
Nope.
Not that I heard.
Level 2: This film stars Michelle Rodriguez, who performed voice-work in Turbo alongside Sam 'Windu' Jackson and Bill 'BB-8' Hader.
*1 And seriously Universal, you attach the tagline "Fate of the Furious" to the eighth movie in the series and not one of you thinks to type it "F8 of the Furious!" on the poster? You had one fucking job, mate. And don't even go thinking about 'Fast10-Furious, because a friend of mine's copyrighted that shit already. [ BACK ]
*2 Although obviously he's more than acceptable when he has three words to say as the voice of an animated tree. Make of that what you will, as well. [ BACK ]
*3 Notwithstanding that the film's centrepiece of an EMP-device which not only disables electronic devices but magically shuts down wholly mechanical engines and opens all locked security gates (y'know, the setting you'd definitely have in the event of a power-cut), Vin Diesel's car is clocked doing over 200mph to get onto the boarding ramp of a moving plane, yet he manages to come to a stop within 40 feet once he's in the cargo hold… [ BACK ]
*4 That said, I'll admit that the bits about the unstable egomaniac who's set to launch nuclear warheads just to prove a facile point tasted a touch more bitter than they were no doubt intended. Maybe I should have seen the movie before last weekend, to be fair… [ 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.
This is a film which features a lengthy, suburban Miami foot-chase setpiece between Kevin Hart and Ken Jeong, soundtracked by Gloria Estefan. Close your eyes and imagine that. No, close them again, and imagine it again. The panting. The shrieking. The gratuitous bikini shots. Nowhere near edgy enough to earn a 15 certificate, but nothing you'd want to show to a 12yr old, either. With Gloria Estefan singing at you all the while. It encapsulates everything that Ride Along 2 is, perfectly.
One of the worst things about the movie is being forced to remember Ride Along, and concede that it was better than this; a film which I by no means hated but could likewise muster very little enthusiasm for. And so, two years have passed and director Tim Story returns to his established continuity with Kevin 'Haha, I'm short, that's funny' Hart and Ian 'Bullshit' Cube. An uncalled for follow-up to a film nobody wanted, like a head-on car crash between GTA: Vice City and Saved By The Bell, in which nobody survived who was able to deliver a joke. Or write a joke. Or identify a joke.
As with its predecessor, Ride Along 2 isn't awful for its entire runtime (several smirks, although no laughs I'm afraid), but the concept isn't even trying any more; a watered-down version of something which was diluted to begin with. Formulaic yet unfocused, even its headlining stars look bored. I swear to god that there's a computer whirring away in the back offices of Universal Pictures churning out screenplays of comedically mismatched buddy-cop pairings that begin with glowering glances and shrieking, and end with a car-chase/shoot-out in a shipping yard. It's not even a particularly powerful computer. It doesn't need to be.
Best scene: The Ice Cube character arches an eyebrow and says to the Kevin Hart character, "Do you ever listen to the shit that come out of yo' mouth?"*1, to which Hart wordlessly slides a full-length mirror in front of Cube; a mirror which has the cover of Straight Outta Compton sellotaped in the top corner with a sad-face sticker on it.
Hart arches an eyebrow in return and walks off set…
I have no idea. Probably not even Ride Along, to be fair.
This is, at its absolute best, a film to get from the £3 shelf in Asda to watch while you're getting drunk with as many friends in the room as possible, so that your minimal financial outlay is still spread over a wide audience.
I have no idea.
Nope.
Yep.
Nope.
Level 2: Ride Along 2 stars Olivia Munn who appeared in last January's underwhelming comedy of choice Mortdecai alongside Ewan 'Kenobi' McGregor.
*1 This part genuinely happens. The man whose production company was partially responsible for the film keeps a straight face while his character criticises the scripted lines of another.
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.
Southpaw (PLOT SPOILERS)
Cert: 15 / 124 mins / Dir. Antoine Fuqua / Trailer
Okay, full disclosure (although regular readers will probably already know), I don't really do boxing-movies. Nothing personal against boxing-movies, but I don't really do boxing, because I don't really do sport. If you want to watch sport, watch sport; it's not inherently cinematic in itself, and it's generally not narratively interesting. That said, there are movies (case in point, Rush) which use sport as a background to tell great stories, and in doing so become great films. And for the first 45 minutes or so at least, Antoine Fuqua's Southpawis a great movie.
The film begins with Billy 'The Great' Hope securing the World Light Heavyweight championship title winning his 43rd consecutive match, and then guides us to a tragic event, following which Billy loses everything; his family, his job, his house and the vast majority of his friends and entourage as he uncovers a clearer picture of who had his back all along. The events of the film's first act are emotionally stunning, and Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams and Oona Laurence give incredible performances accordingly.
Once Billy hits rock bottom however, and arrives at a run-down gym owned by Forest Whitaker's grizzled veteran trainer Wills, it seems that director Antoine Fuqua loses interest in the human drama and just wants to make a boxing-movie after all. Every tired old trope is duly rolled out, from the starting-again-at-the-bottom approach to Billy's training, through the I'm-a-disappointment-to-my-kid and the associated quivering bottom-lip, all the way to a-training-montage-set-to-music (yes, really). I should point out that it's never a bad boxing movie, but it certainly becomes a one you've seen before (and as mentioned, I don't watch boxing-movies and even I've seen it before). Because quite frankly, when the promo-material trumpets that it's "from the director of The Equalizer", how groundbreaking do you expect the end product to be?
But saving the film, indeed lifting it triumphantly, is Gyllenhaal's performance. Even in its most pedestrian moments, the screenplay is graced with the presence of one of the finest screen actors of his generation. Countering this perfectly is Oona Laurence as his daughter Leila, a role which could easily have come off as bratty and contrary with any other actress, but to which she brings a genuine sense of internal conflict*1. And last but not least is Rachel McAdams, demonstrating once again that while she doesn't always pick the most challenging roles, she's got the skills when the part calls for them*2.
Jake Gyllenhaal is giving everything he's got as an immersive screen performer to a story of trust, loss, regret and redemption.
Forest Whitaker is in a boxing movie.
Oh, and I mentioned plot spoilers.
Do not read if you haven't seen the film. Now, as the film goes on, the converging screenplay makes it perfectly clear that this underdog-story is only going to end one way. And I'm fine with that. Of course Billy is going to accept the grudge-match fight against his moral enemy. Of course that fight is going to go on for twelve rounds with both fighters in increasing states of disrepair. Of course that last round is going to go on until the final few seconds when our hero will land one final uppercut which sends his nemesis flying backwards in a high-framerate/slow-motion spray of blood, sweat and saliva. But when Escobar then gets up again before the bell rings; when the winner is decided by the judges and even then Billy only squeezes through by two points, he hasn't really redeemed himself, has he? It may be a technical victory, but it's not the moral, narrative one if he's only "slightly" better than his opponent. He hasn't spent the last two hours of our time proving that he's "about the same" as the major-league arsehole from act 1, has he? He hasn't gone on this elliptical journey of self-realisation and fulfilment only to be validated not by his own actions and determination, but by a judge who frankly couldn't made a decision either way, has he? Really, Fuqua? Really? Apart from that, I really enjoyed it.
Oh, and…
When Maureen is shot in the scuffle at the hotel lobby, the police tell Billy that they suspect it was one of his minders that had the gun, but they can't go any further because "no-one's talking". What the actual fuck? A hotel that opulent would have CCTV everywhere, especially in a public-area like the lobby. Even if the gun was concealed at the time of the shot, the CCTV would pick up the muzzle-flare and/or the recoil easily. Are the NYPD really lazy enough to suspend a murder investigation of an international sporting champion's wife in public because "no-one wants to talk"? What's worse is that no-one outside of the police force really seems to give a shit about it for the rest of the film, either. …it's still rather good, though. Really.
If boxing movies are your thing, yes.
Probably a rental, you may not get enough rewatch-value to buy it.
Gyllenhaal is on fire, once again.
Only just.
Nah.
There isn't.
Southpaw stars none other than Forest Whitaker, due to make an appearance in 2016's Star Wars: Rogue One.
*1 Although during the final, climactic match, her section of the script devolves to "Oh! Daddy's getting hurt!", as if she's been previously unaware that he's a boxer and has forgotten all the nights he's come home and kissed her goodnight, drooling blood all over her duvet. No seriously, this happens in the film. That won't come out at forty degrees...
*2 One of McAdams' first scenes sees her sending an apparently surreptitious text to an unknown recipient, in a sort of "oh, we'll be coming back to this one later" type way. Then it's never mentioned again. What gives there, then? Trust-issues sub-plot lost in the edit?
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.
Name: Transformers: The Last Knight (2D) / Student Responsible: Michael Bay / Age: 12 (advisory) /Studied: 10 years / Projects Completed: 5 / Latest Project Length: 149 minutes
