Ah, we're finally getting into the Autumnal graveyard shift, I see. That time of year when distributors can release the smaller, more interesting films which wouldn't stand a snowball's chance in hell during the Summer or Winter blockbuster seasons (not to be confused with the stretch in late December / early January where we get all the Worthy Awards Bait™.
Writer/director Lulu Wang's film The Farewell centers around Billi (Awkwafina), a young Chinese American woman whose family engineers the phoney wedding of her cousin in order to visit the family matriarch Nai Nai (Shuzhen Zhao) en masse. The reason for this subterfuge is that Nai Nai has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but doesn't know as the family are keeping this from her - determined instead for their beloved mother/grandmother to live for as long as possible in blissful ignorance.
PLENTY Yeah, not going to lie, I struggled with this. And don't get me wrong, there's plenty to love here. Plenty. Wang's direction is quiet and focused, the screenplay takes its time and all of the performances are outstanding. Anna Franquesa Solano's scenic cinematography is solemnly graceful*1, while Alex Weston's ominous, stripped back score wouldn't be out of place in an Almodovar film.
Yet as much as I admired the craft here, I just wasn't sure what I was supposed to get from it all other than "family politics up to and including life-threatening lies are basically a global language, and there's nothing you can do about that so just suck it up". While the film certainly tackles the issue of the non-disclosure, it refrains from really making any judgement on it, implicitly suggesting that the audience should too. And I just couldn't get over that hurdle.
GONDOR The Farewell is often wryly funny, but the long silences leave the audience deliberately uneasy, as if the film is holding their hand somewhat, trying to goad reactions early on. And the moral of the story seems to be that enforced ignorance has demonstrable moral - and medical - benefits. The more time I spent in the company of Billi's family, the more actively I disliked them (apart from Billi and Nai Nai, obviously*2), and by the time the credits rolled I wished they'd all get stage four lung cancer, too.
And I hardly think that's the message the film is trying to impart...*3.
Oh, I don't know. Something like The Big Sick, I imagine.
If you know beforehand it's going to be your thing, sure.
Stream it.
That's entirely possible, although you've already worked out that I'm not really in any position to make that call.
*1 Genuine question for those who have seen The Farewell and know about these things: the film's conversational scenes seem to have some very odd framing where characters’ heads are lined up with the horizontal centre of the screen rather than being in the top half. You rarely see below anyone's waist so it feels like the film should be in 16:9 but has been cropped at the bottom to make a 2.35:1 presentation (even though the subs are in the correct place, so that’s definitely the final print). I'm not sure if this is a regular setup in Chinese cinema or another device to subconsciously throw the audience off kilter along with those glorious long, awkward silences. Any ideas? [ BACK ]
*2 Not for nothing, but Nai Nai is Shuzhen Zhao's only credited screen role. I mean, leaping in at that stage in life, with that performance? FUCK YEAH. [ BACK ]
*3 Note to whom it may concern. If I ever develop a terminal illness, please tell me. Apart from anything else, the countdown would probably spur me back into finally catching up with The Walking Dead, so that'd be handy. Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D. may just have to wait until the afterlife, though. [ 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.
Skyscraper (3D / SPOILERS)
Cert: 12A / 102 mins / Dir. Rawson Marshall Thurber / Trailer
This is a film which features an innovative tech/real-estate project overseen by a hubristic billionaire. He gathers a group of experts (one of whom has their young family in tow) to give them the grand tour and get the insurance signed off before opening to the public. This is going well until it transpires that a disgruntled employee has sold out his boss to a rival, has hacked the security systems and ends up dead while the guests and organisers alike are trapped in the chaos, fighting for their lives as the whole thing goes to hell around them.
I thought Skyscraper would be Die Hard With A Wooden Leg, but it turned out to be Vertical Jurassic Park instead. So don't make assumptions, kids.
I won't bother summarising the plot, it's all very much in the trailer, there*1.
Yes, it's the Summer so this is Action Flick 101, and Dwayne Johnson continues his trend of accepting jobs without fully reading synopses in Rawson Marshall Thurber's concrete-shattering opus. The action may take place in Hong Kong, but his is a piece of entertainment in the most American of traditions*2.
The end result is nowhere near as awful as it could have been, but so staggeringly average that it feels like a criminal waste of its $125m budget. The film's central location, The Pearl, is apparently 220 floors of relentlessly telegraphed cliché, built on foundations of exposition, callbacks and deus ex machina. The cinematic equivalent of a dot-to-dot book, the story lurches from one set-piece to the next like a 260lb ex-SWAT agent with a prosthetic limb. Despite his considerable screen presence and innate likeability, even Dwayne Johnson can't make this interesting*3.
And because it's a 12A, none of the point-blank gunshots have exit-wounds. A trivial point I know, but I'll bring it up anyway. I thought at one point this might have been the most clockwork genre-flick I'd seen all year, then I remembered Den of Thieves.
But if you've never seen any action movies ever, this will be great.
Die Hard.
Yeah, I know everyone's saying that.
That's because it's inescapably true.
Oh, watch it in the cinema if anything, because this will lose most of its impact on the journey to your small screen. And bravely clinging on to a rapidly-dying format, you'd perhaps think that the 3D would be utilised to showcase the vertiginous heights of the drama at the world's tallest building to better effect. But no, the extra dimension is used to make things darker, blurrier and with heavy ghosting of any point of light in the background..
Stream if you must, I suppose.
It's not.
We might.
There isn't.
Level 2: Neve Campbell's in this, and she was in that Scream 3 alongside Carrie 'Leia' Fisher.
*1 Although there's at least one major dialogue exchange in the trailer which didn't make it into the final cut. God knows how many test-edits of this film are in a cupboard at Universal somewhere... [ BACK ]
*2 As well as the genre standard of having a morally-untouchable hero who's an invalided service-veteran put in a perilous situation while providing for his young white-picket-fence family (this is basically a Mark Wahlberg movie), there's probably a separate review to be written about a Hollywood's gleeful presentation of a Chinese entrepreneur saved from European gangsters by American hetero-masculinity. But I'm too tired to dig that hole, frankly… [ BACK ]
*3 And seriously though, why would that massive screen be on, with the public ooh-ing, ahh-ing and gasping through a live feed (multiple camera sources apparently) of what is clearly an ongoing police/military emergency, being left to stand around at the foot of the world's tallest building as it burns and begins to collapse? [ 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.
Arrival (SPOILER FREE)
Cert: 12A / 116 mins / Dir. Denis Villeneuve / Trailer
I shall have to tread lightly here, since the real power of Arrival lies in a spoiler-free first viewing. That said, I know I'm going to enjoy the hell out of watching it again at least once, too.
When twelve gigantic alien Shells suddenly and silently arrive at unrelated positions around the globe, the authorities scramble to ascertain who is inside them, why they're here and what they'll do to achieve that why. The US military calls upon the services of highly experienced translator Louise (Amy Adams) to decode noises they've recorded, but her learning curve of communication with the visitors*1 is hampered by the un-cooperation of international governments, their sense of paranoia and increasingly itchy trigger-fingers…
All that's just one part of the film, of course, and not even the largest one. Running parallel to the muted Independence Day plot is a story of loss, grief and resolution, but always with an eye on the hypernatural. Make no mistake, the core of Arrival is distinctly heavyweight, yet only as much as the audience will want it to be. At times it's deliciously cynical; while the film tends to focus on the US-based response team itself, glimpses of news footage illustrate my own long-held belief that in the event of a grandiose extra-terrestrial arrival, general society would, to put it delicately, go completely to shit. So it's hardly a barrel of laughs for the times we're living in. Additionally, the Hard Sci-Fi™ part of the movie (ie, the nuts and bolts plot rather than what the film is actually about) can feel heavy-handed every time someone in a military uniform scowls and talks about nuking the Shells. That side of the story is one of the few things that its showier (albeit emptier) relative actually did quite well, although if I need reassurance that humanity are dicks, I can switch on the news, thanks.
But Arrival holds the attention. Much like the gradual communication breakthrough between Louise and the Heptapod visitors, the film takes a while to go from being interesting to being intriguing. The story never drags its heels, but the setups it carefully assembles during the first act are deliberately disingenuous. The payoff is worth it though, a section of the film I watched whilst grinning like an idiot.
If you couldn't tell by the trailer, this is really Amy Adams' movie, though and through. The supporting cast are reliable enough, but Forest Whitaker and Jeremy Renner appear to have been cast purely to give the poster of a philosophical sci-fi movie a bit more mainstream pull. Neither really have roles justifiable of the casting or with enough for them to actually do. Tonally it has more in common with director Villeneuve's Prisoners than most alien-invasion flicks, but the emotionally profound element seems to be fighting with an intriguing sci-fi plot device (which also seems to be fighting with the aforementioned impatient-man-in-camouflage-is-impatient). While the central elements of the screenplay are explained, I'd have liked to see them more thoroughly explored. But that's a discussion for next time.
Short version: The film stayed with me, I really enjoyed it.
I think the film's ending will be the real Rorschach test for audiences, though.
Not because the events are open to interpretation but, ironically, precisely the opposite.
Go and watch Arrival before somebody spoils it for you.
Jurassic Park, Prisoners, The Others.
No, really.
For the atmosphere and immersion, yes.
It does. Although probably not everything I wanted from it (hardly the fault of the film).
*1Heptopods, as the seven-legged, faceless creatures are dubbed in the film. While our view of the aliens is often limited, they reminded me a lot of a hyper-intelligent spider-phase of Dagobah's Gnarltrees.
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.
