Fences Cert: 12A / 139 mins / Dir. Denzel Washington / Trailer
I finally saw the acclaimed Fences mere hours before the 2017 Academy Awards, where I hope/expect the film will get some recognition. After that, I trust I can go back to watching less-serious fare and no doubt moan about that instead? Well okay, then.
Based on August Wilson's play and adapted for the screen by the playwright himself before he died, Denzel Washington directs and stars in a film about Troy Maxson, a 50-something working man in 1950s Pittsburgh, having a midlife crisis when there's no-one around him to put that label on it. Troy's tale is told and revealed through the interactions with his borderline-dysfuntional family. An interweaving story of commitment, compassion, tolerance and resentment, above all else this is a family-drama in the truest sense, although it seems trite to categorise it as such. The audience isn't necessarily supposed to like everyone here, the aim is just to understand them. And that's where the performances take over from the writing.
Washington's turn is the strongest I've seen for a long time, Viola Davis' as his wife Rose is stronger. Also deserving of massive praise is Mykelti Williamson's heartbreaking performance as Troy's war-wounded brother, Gabe. Truth be told, this film doesn't put a foot wrong in terms of script-driven storytelling or acting prowess. Fences is an intimate yet broad portrayal of the stresses all families go through (although the Maxson's is particularly heightened), and while it's certainly Powerful™ in its delivery, I found it more Exhausting™ overall. In a good way I suppose, but still.
The first half alone is more dialogue-heavy than even the likes of Tarantino or Smith would dare to write, with Washington in particular barely pausing to draw breath until it's his turn to swig gin in the back yard*1. But whereas others would fill their scripts with triviality as a way of reflecting everyday banter, every single word matters in Fences, and the gaps between them matter even more. And it's this constant batting between character-history, narrative-driving and subtext which I found wearing. In a good way.
Not as heavy-going as you might expect, not as neatly-resolved as you might hope. But then, life rarely is.
Everything will be amplified by a cinema screen, but you shouldn't lose too much by watching this at home.
Absolutely.
It could well be, yes.
Depends on why we disagree, but I shouldn't think so.
There isn't. Amazingly.
Level 2: This film's got that Viola Davis in it, and she was in that Ender's Game with Harrison 'Solo' Ford.
*1 Really though, during the sequence between Troy, Bono and Lyons passing the gin around during a heated conversation, the level in that bottle is up and down between camera-angles in a way that suggests the swigging wasn't as scripted as the dialogue during those takes… [ 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.
Suicide Squad (2D / SPOILER-FREE)
Cert: 15 / 123 mins / Dir. David Ayer / Trailer
A Preface:
As regular readers will be aware, I'm not a DC-geek in any way shape or form. If anything, I bat for the other side. There's no agenda behind that, it's just the way my childhood/adolescence panned out, and that's the universe I'm at home in. As a result, I'm not familiar with the principle characters in this latest DC ensemble-flick. I know The Joker, of course, and I'm aware of Harley Quinn in the same way that a movie-goer who's never seen Star Wars still has a rough handle on who Darth Vader is*1. But the other members of the team and their assorted handlers, and hangers-on? Not a clue. I'll be honest, it's all I can do to ignore the fact that I'm quite looking forward to a movie that stars both Will Smith and Jai Courtney. That doesn't feel right.
So, with all this in mind, I decided to forego any frantic background reading/viewing in the run-up to Suicide Squad*2, since I believe a movie this early-on in the franchise should be introducing its characters properly to a civilian audience anyway. Also, I did read the faintly disappointing lead-in comic, Suicide Blonde, then decided the film could speak for itself ;)
As usual with a movie of this prominence and audience, my first review will be free of plot-spoilers. If the film really impresses me, we can get into picking apart the story another time…
A Review:
And so, after the queue for much needed coffee-at-midnight, the ads, the trailers, and not one but two post-trailer ads, the BBFC card displayed the words Suicide Squad, and the very respectably-sized audience in Screen 5 exhaled, their (our) wait over.
DC's chronological - if not tonal - follow-up to Dawn of Justice finally swings into our cinemas with all the swagger of unwanted party-guests, but also with the reassuring fun that it's not your party they're trashing. In fact let's be fair: the party needed livening up a little. But I know what you're thinking: 'yeah, what music do they use to open the film though, eh?'
Well, what with House of the Rising Sun, You Don't Own Me and Sympathy for the Devil all making an appearance in the film's first five minutes, it soon becomes clear that all non-orchestrated soundtrack here is going to be the cinematic equivalent of a needy child repeatedly tugging on your sleeve as you try to concentrate on the movie. Ironically, the problem is made worse the more familiar you are with the songs being used, as the connection between on-screen events and the tongue-in-cheek audio accompaniment feels even more tenuous and threatens to pull you out of the film each time*3.
Jukebox aside, with the twin barrels of Viola Davis' narration and stylised flashbacks, the members of Task Force X are individually introduced with sequences whose length correllates almost exactly with the billing position of the actor in question. Will Smith's Deadshot and Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn each get around three minutes of character-building exposition, Adam Beach's Slipknot gets a hurried four-word aside as he walks on-camera. Everyone else is on the sliding-scale between the two, their intro-scenes being a good indicator of how much attention the script is going to pay them.
But of course, the question on everybody's lips is how is Jared Leto's Joker? A mixed bag, frankly. Leto certainly brings a dangerous unpredictability to the character, but I'm not convinced that's what Joker really needs. He's less the scheming maniac here, and more an ADHD Godfather. The best moments with the clown-prince are his quieter ones; unfortunately, they're also the moments when he evokes The Spirit of Ledger. There's also been some concern online as to his share of screen-time. A fair way of putting it would be to say that Mista J is a recurring character here, but not a central one. This is his introduction to the timeline, it's not 'his film'.
And as much as Harley Quinn tries desperately to steal the show (completely in line with the film's marketing focus, to be fair), the most interesting characters here are Cara Delevingne's Enchantress and Jay Hernandez's Diablo. Both go some way towards developing throughout the film*4, both have backstories and motivations which aren't fully fleshed out, and both pay the price of trying to fight for screen-time with a cast this expansive.
Although the plot-mechanics of Suicide Squad are sketchy at best, and the central conceit makes little-to-no sense*5, the film is quite fun. It finally feels like DC are starting to feel comfortable playing by their own rules in the timeline (although the shadow of the Bat looms comfortingly over proceedings, too).
All in all, Suicide Squad is rather good. Although without the pop-soundtrack and misguided one-liners, it would be rather great...
A Post-Script:
Hang around at the end as there's a mid-credits scene, but there's no after-credits, so once the names start rolling up the screen you can make your way to the exits.
If comic-book movies being big and loud is your bag, yes.
In light of the cinematically turbulent time DC's had of late and of the reported reshoots for Suicide Squad, I think it probably does.
No, but that only means the best could be yet to come.
No.
I think there's one buried in the subway-scene, yeah.
Level 2: It's not too long ago that Margot Robbie appeared in About Time alongside old General Hux himself, Domhnall Gleeson.
*1 Not the best analogy, obviously, as the most direct comparison to Vader from an outsider's point of view would be The Joker, not Harley Quinn, but you get the idea. Some characters manage to seep into the mainstream (or at least, wider geekdom) consciousness by force of personality alone; others are General Madine.
*2 Partly because previous comics, cartoons etc wouldn't gel with the continuity of this movie so would probably just make things worse; partly because I've got a lot on at the moment and I just haven't had the time.
3 It's not like these are tracks that the characters can hear in-movie. Most seem to just be there because someone in the mixing department wanted to win a bet; a prime example being "$15 says I can get Eminem's vocally-heavy 'Look Who's Back' laid right over some dialogue!"
4 As much as I enjoyed Suicide Squad, there's little in the way of actual character development here. The film serves to introduce (some of) its players well, but by the time the closing credits appear, most are basically where they were to begin with. Literally, in some cases. It's basically stalling until Justice League comes along. Entertaining stalling, but stalling.
5 Because if you were putting together a black-ops task force designed to have the prowess to "stop a bad-Superman", why would you have it comprising of people who a) don't want to do what you tell them, b) are basically uncontrollable and c) are situated in a completely different timezone? It's hardly rapid-response, is it? Any evil-alien worth their salt will have gleefully committed genocide by the time these cats are scrambled to the chopper. You'd almost think it was a wafer-thin excuse to make a movie consisting largely of loveable villains since DC's heroes tend to be largely uninteresting…
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.
Ender's Game (Caution: spoilers. MASSIVE SPOILERS.)
Cert: 12A / 114 mins / Dir. Gavin Hood
I found Gavin Hood's adaptation of Orson Scott Card's celebrated work to be oddly infuriating at times. In short, I thought it started strongly but played all its best cards in the first two acts, so that by the point where I was meant to be on the edge of my seat, I'd pretty much stopped caring about anyone on-screen.
The film does a great job of setting up Andrew Ender Wiggin (Asa Butterfield) as a conflicted but determined cadet; a tactical genius who remains likeable (to the audience at least) as he whizzes past his peers toward military greatness. Butterfield's performance is remarkable and you don't doubt if for a second. You just kinda doubt everybody else's. Harrison Ford's Graff repeatedly states to his contemporaries that Ender's ultimate goal will be to sacrifice himself during the ultimate battle with the alien invaders in order to save mankind, even though that makes little sense the first time he says it, and less as the film goes on. Despite the film's proclamation that 'we need a new kind of commander', there seems to be little actual proof of that requirement*1, and other than developing a telepathic link with a species light-years away, Ender seems to show nothing above the level of technical brilliance you'd expect from someone in that position anyway.
So given that the International Space Fleet's proposed tactic appears to be turning up at the enemy's house fifty years later and unleashing planetary genocide, why do they need a surgeon's scalpel to achieve what a sledgehammer could do? Although I understand Ender's subsequent distress at carrying out such an act, what did he think he was being employed for, to have a game of snakes and ladders with the Formics?
The first two acts look and sound magnificent (especially the zero-gravity segments), and even Harrison Ford's deadpanning works in context, building up the tension as Ender's career escalates almost out of his control. But the film's finale skirts too close to watching someone playing a video game (for obvious reasons), and ultimately I felt almost as cheated as Ender. Viola Davis and Hailee Steinfeld seem largely wasted, but only because you've seen them both do so much more, and it's just not needed here. So, maybe I just hoped I'd be grabbed more firmly by a story with such a successful lineage. Maybe it's too close to hard sci-fi for me? As usual with this sort of thing, I suspect any issues I have with it are between me and the story, rather than the film itself. But it feels like the film should be more.
From the heavily-applied morality-of-war dilemmas, through to the wandering vocal stylings of Sir Ben*2, Ender's Game is a bit of a jumble, and it didn't all fit as neatly as I wanted it to. I know the idea of the film is to ask difficult questions but I suspect that with more time and less of a partisan approach, the books manage it a lot more pertinently.
Wanted to like the film more, but just couldn't.
It sets up the why, if not the how.
For the first two acts, yes.
For the first two acts, yes.
It does look marvellous on a big screen.
No.
Not for a while, at least.
I didn't hear one.
^^ I feel like I should mark it more highly than mid-points, but the fact is that the last act bored me, and it's left me with little more than a niggling dissatisfaction.
And they're just going to let him go off in a military shuttle, are they, with an apparently indefinite amount of supplies and an oddly pulsating holdall, looking for a planet to essentially infect with a species that's already proven itself to be openly hostile once in the past? Oh, alright then.
*1 Another point which is nullified once Ender works out that he's not the only one to have spotted patterns in the enemy behaviour. He shares this trait with the other Great War Hero who didn't need to sacrifice himself to win. Which everyone in high-command knows.
*2 Seriously. He's got Maori tattoos, and has a paragraph or so where he explains that he's got Maori tattoos, any why. We don't need the 'sounds more like an Australian but we're sure no-one will notice' accent as well.
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.
Prisoners (Spoiler-free)
Cert: 15 / 153 mins / Dir. Denis Villeneuve
Well, the good news is that Prisoners isn't quite the 2½ hour downer the trailer might suggest. I mean, it's still quite hard work, obviously, but Villeneuve ensures there's a tension which grips you, rather than a malaise which smothers. Most of the scenes in the trailer occur in the first act of the film, and once the girls have been confirmed as missing, a larger puzzle starts to appear. The main thread with the children is never put on the back burner, as such, but the backstory behind their abduction certainly comes to the fore as both families struggle to cope as best they can in their absence.
Now the opening act sets a very claustrophobic tone, focusing on the reactions of Jackman, Howard, Davis and Bello as the girls' parents (unfortunately Zoe Borde and Dylan Minnette get slightly shortchanged as the older children of each family), and it's suitably uncomfortable to watch as shock and panic set in while the police begin their investigations. Once Jake Gyllenhaal's Detective Loki becomes involved, the film becomes a little more like a standard Mystery Thriller, as clues and red herrings are laid out and things take a more disturbing turn as Jackman's Keller Dover begins to lose the plot. Also keeping the audience on its collective toes are Paul Dano, Melissa Leo and David Dastmalchian, all trying to out-weird each other, and all pretty much succeeding. The power of this film lies in the first watch, so avoid spoilers where possible*1.
At two and a half hours, it does start to creak under its weight a little, although nothing's deliberately dragged out, it's just not a ninety minute story. Director Denis Villeneuve and writer Aaron Guzikowski take great care to tease the plot out at its own speed, and make the audience complicit in some of the more disturbing scenes of the film, by virtue of witnessing them through the eyes of other characters. When it's exploring guilt, vigilantism, penance and vengeance, Prisoners is masterfully done; the rest of the time it's a solid (if reliable) thriller. If it doesn't force you to ask yourself some questions then you're probably not paying attention.
It's not an easy watch, and at many points it's reminiscent of a made-for-TV thriller, but Prisoners is saved by fantastic performances from Jackman, Gyllenhaal, Leo and Dano. It's not necessarily a cinema-movie, but recommended all the same.
Kinda. The trailer only tells the opening act, though.
Yeah.
I'm pretty sure it does.
As good as it is, it's a DVD.
No.
At some point, maybe, but the first-watch is where the power lies.
There isn't.
You'd think Wolverine and War Machine, working together, would have gotten to the bottom of it sooner though, wouldn't you?
*1 Also, don't be one of those people sitting second-guessing the film at every turn; Prisoners takes its own time in unravelling, and Marpling the plot doesn't make you a greater person. And it you absolutely must do it, don't sit in the row behind me and whisper your brain-commentary to whoever's sitting next to you and who only 'uh-hm's you instead of telling you to shut the hell up like they should. Because next time I'll turn around and punch you.
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.
