Film

Black 47

08/04/19

A taciturn soldier deserts the army, heads back to his homeland  and finds that, in his absence, his family has been decimated. Powered by a hunger for revenge, he sets off to exact bloody mayhem on the people who have wronged him.

It sounds like the plot of a typical Clint Eastwood western, but here the army in question is the English forces in Afghanistan, the soldier is Feeney (James Frecheville), his family is based in County Connemara and the year is 1847, when the potato famine is wreaking mayhem on the Irish nation. What’s more, the English landlords are turfing out all tenants who cannot afford their rent, or will not ‘take the soup’ – a free handout that is only given to those who will renounce their Catholic faith and become protestants.

Once Feeney is embarked on his violent mission, old comrade, and former Connaught Ranger, Hannah (Hugo Weaving), is recruited to track him down, working alongside young English officer, Pope (Freddie Fox). But it’s a long journey to bring their man to justice and, as they progress along their corpse-littered route, Hannah begins to realise that the real enemy here is not Feeny, but the oppressive English landlords, who seem to regard the native population as vermin to be eradicated.

Lance Daly’s film, Black 47, was never going to be a big hitter at the box office but, like so many other mid-list titles, has found a home on Netflix. It’s a bleak, hard-hitting movie, beautifully filmed in desaturated colour by Declan Quinn and, while it pulls no punches with its political message, it focuses more on the action scenes, of which there are plenty. There are some superb actors in small roles. Stephen Rea shines as local opportunist, Coneely, and Jim Broadbent, usually such a jovial presence, makes a plausible villain as the sneering, venal Lord Kilmichael. There’s even the presence of rising star, Barry Keoghan, playing (of all things) an English soldier.

Perhaps the film can be accused of a certain heavy-handedness (virtually every English character we meet is a contemptible villain) but this is nonetheless a decent action film that keeps us suitably gripped to the final scene.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

The Ritual

07/04/19

We missed this at the cinema – not difficult to do, since it had a blink-and-miss-it release – but we saw the trailer and thought it looked promising. But The Ritual, directed by David Bruckner and based on a novel by Joe Barton and Adam Neville, is now happily located on Netflix. It starts well enough, exerting a steadily mounting Blair Witch-style sense of dread, but eventually loses its way.

At the film’s opening, Luke (Rafe Spall) is out with his mates on the town. They are Phil (Arsher Ali), Hutch (Robert James-Collier), Dom (Sam Troughton) and Robert (Paul Reid). Luke’s mates are all showing troubling signs of growing up. They don’t want to stay out on the lash and are discussing plans for their upcoming holiday together, which – instead of the usual booze up in a hot climate – is shaping up to be a hiking trip in a remote part of Sweden. Luke persuades Robert to go into a off-licence with him to purchase a bottle of vodka and the two of them chance upon an armed robbery in progress. Luke ducks behind some shelves and Robert winds up bloodily murdered.

Six months later, Luke and the rest of the band find themselves embarking on the long hike that Robert was so keen to do – but Luke is haunted by the fact that he failed to help his friend and is also aware that the others think less of him for not stepping up when push came to shove. The group soon become lost in dense forests and, when a violent rain storm hits them, they take refuge in an old shack for the night, where things turn decidedly scary.

Now they have to continue their trek, horribly aware that they are being pursued by something unseen, something that has a nasty habit of leaving dead animals hanging in trees…

The first two thirds of the film are really rather effective. The edgy interplay between the characters is convincingly written and the terrifying foe is a powerful concept as long as it remains pretty much unseen, which it does for about an hour. But the final section squanders all of that hard-earned suspense by offering a convoluted explanation that feels distinctly risible. It’s not helped that the effect sequences that finally show the marauding beast are rather less than convincing.

Also, there’s something strangely skewed about the logic of this tale. Luke badly needs some redemption but, as it stands, he doesn’t really get any; he just finds himself plunged into a desperate struggle for survival. And I’m desperately struggling to care.

A shame, because this could be a decent little chiller. Instead it feels more like a great big missed opportunity.

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

Pet Sematary
Left to right: John Lithgow as Jud and Jeté Laurence as Ellie in PET SEMATARY, from Paramount Pictures.

01/04/19

Since the success of It, Stephen King seems to be enjoying a bit of a cinematic renaissance – and, as most of his books have already been made into films, studios are gleefully remaking the ones that weren’t so successful first time around.

Pet Sematary initially saw the light of a cinema screen in 1989, under the direction of Mary Lambert, and boasted a screenplay by Mr King himself. I know I saw it when it came out but I remember very little about it – other than the fact that I was rather underwhelmed by what I saw. This new version, directed by Kevin Kolsch and Dennis Widmyer, certainly offers a more confident approach to the source material, even if there are some inherent problems lurking  in the mix. Essentially a spin on WW Jacob’s famous short story, The Monkey’s Paw, Pet Sematary still harbours some of the tropes that might have passed muster when the project was first conceived, but which look a little dodgy in the current climate.

Here, Louis (Jason Clarke) is the overworked doctor who decides to move his wife, Rachel (Amy Seimetz), and his two children, Ellie (Jete Laurence) and Gage (Hugo Lavoie), from the big city to the peace and quiet of the countryside. Major mistake. The family’s new home comes complete with a massive stretch of land, most of which is heavily forested and much of which is the former ancestral burial grounds of the Mic Mac Indians. The land also encompasses the badly spelled graveyard, where the local kids go to bury their dead critturs (though I feel impelled to ask, where are these local kids? We see them only once, wearing creepy looking masks and then never again).

Young Ellie soon makes friends with elderly next-door neighbour, Jud (John Lithgow, twinkling effortlessly), and even introduces him to her beloved pet cat, Church. But the highway beside the house is a regular route for articulated lorries driven by reckless idiots and, when Church winds up splattered across the tarmac, Jud convinces Louis to hide the truth from Ellie and to bury the feline’s remains up on the old Mic Mac land, assuring him that, if he does so, something incredible will happen.

Sure enough, the next day, Church comes wandering home but, as the family soon discovers, something about his nature has changed for the worse…

For the most part, the film holds up well, creating an atmosphere of steadily mounting terror, even if some of the developments do test my credulity. (The family owns a vast stretch of land, so naturally they decide to host Ellie’s birthday party right beside that dangerous highway instead of somewhere safer – like, that would happen, right?) But there are some genuinely nerve wracking scenes here and also some explicitly visceral ones that push the 15 certificate to its very limits.

What really don’t work are the sections that flash back to Rachel’s childhood, when she had a morbid terror of her sister, Zelda – because she had a twisted spine. Sorry, but physical deformity is not fair game for horror and somebody should have thought carefully about those scenes before merrily throwing them into the screenplay – especially when said sister behaves like something out of The Exorcist.

Still, that error aside, this is genuinely compelling in places and offers one of the bleakest endings I can remember seeing since… well, another Stephen King-inspired movie, The Mist. Go to this if you feel like being terrorised but, be warned, some of those body horror scenes have been woefully misjudged.

3.8 stars

Philip Caveney

Out of Blue

01/04/19

Out of Blue is a bit of a conundrum, a real curate’s egg of a film. At times, its audacity is breathtakingly impressive; at others, its pretentious incoherence is, well, kind of annoying.

Patricia Clarkson is Detective Mike Hoolihan, a genre-typical detective with an alcohol problem and a troubled past. When astrophysicist Jennifer Rockwell (Mamie Gummer) is found dead next to her telescope, Mike notices similarities to a series of unsolved murders by the so-called .38 calibre killer. As she investigates, long-repressed childhood memories begin to resurface, and her composure fractures, leaving her vulnerable and exposed.

So far, so good, but of course Carol Morley was never going to embrace a straightforward whodunit crime procedural. Instead, we are treated to a philosophical musing on the nature of our place in the universe, looking outwards into the infinite vastness of a black hole, and inwards to the personal experiences that shape who we become. Stylistically, this works: the cinematography is sumptuous, and the blue-red colour palette is bold and arresting. But the endless banging on about Schrödinger’s cat gets a bit wearisome; this is entry level stuff given unwarranted gravitas. And the suggestion of parallel universes seems an unnecessary complication, adding little and muddying the plot.

I like the plot, actually, with its twisty ending (although presumably that’s down to Martin Amis, on whose novel this is based), and Patricia Clarkson’s performance is admirable here. Toby Jones is a welcome addition to any movie, and his depiction of Rockwell’s snivelling boss, Professor Ian Strammi, is no exception to this rule. Jacki Weaver never disappoints either, and she’s on top form as Rockwell’s flaky mother. But even these fine actors are not quite enough to save this film from its own sense of how clever it is. It’s all a bit show-offy for my taste.

3.4 stars

Susan Singfield

Dumbo

 

31/03/19

Disney’s 1941 animation Dumbo is one of the House of Mouse’s greatest achievements. The simple tale of a baby elephant with oversized ears and the mouse who gives him the confidence to fly, it’s also one of the most affecting films ever made. Only the hardest of hearts can sit through the scene where Dumbo goes to visit his captive mother, without collapsing in floods of tears. Continuing the trend for making live action versions of Disney cartoons, Tim Burton offers us a much more complex reimagining of the original, devoid of its snappy songs, its inspirational mouse and, I’m afraid, also bereft of any real sense of emotion.

It’s 1919, and the little travelling circus belonging to ‘the Medici Brothers,’ pluckily makes its way across Florida, just about managing to survive despite the economic ravages that have laid the country low. There is actually only one Medici, ringmaster Max (Danny DeVito) and he’s doing everything he can to hold things together. Former stallion-master, Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell) returns from the great war minus an arm and is reunited with his children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finlay Hobbins), who he has left in the care of a couple of other entertainers. To add to the family’s woes, their mother has recently died after succumbing to the Spanish flu.

Holt soon learns that his beloved horses have been sold and he is now expected to take control of the circus elephants, one of whom, Mrs Jumbo, is heavily pregnant. The result, of course, is her son, Dumbo, who’s oversized ears make him the subject of much derision, but who, it turns out, has an amazing skill.

Matters become even more complicated when that skill comes to the attention of V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), an entertainment entrepreneur who senses an opportunity to make some money. He swiftly incorporates Max’s circus into his unfeasibly massive Dreamland complex on Coney Island and teams Dumbo with another of his acquisitions, French trapeze artist, Colette (Eva Green). Vandevere is an interesting addition to the story.  With his fake hairstyle, his predilection for making money and the fact that he is in hock to the banks up to his eyeballs, he is the very embodiment of a certain Mr Trump, and Keaton plays the role with evident relish.

I emerge feeling strangely conflicted about this film. On the one hand, I’m delighted that Burton hasn’t produced a cut and paste imitation of the original – on the other, I fail to understand why it’s so curiously dispassionate. There’s so much potential sadness here, yet Burton and his screenwriter, Ehren Kruger, seem unable to bring it out, often having to resort to characters telling us how sad they are just to make sure we haven’t missed the point.  The problem is, I need to feel that sadness and try as I might,  I do not – and trust me, I’m usually a sucker for that kind of thing

This is, of course, by no means a complete dud. As ever with Burton, the film looks absolutely stunning and the acting is pretty good throughout. Dumbo himself is a marvellous CGI creation, cute but not sickeningly so. It should have been a contender.

But without the heart that lies at the core of the original, the film is fatally skewered. Though it occasionally flaps into life, it never really soars.

3.5 stars

Philip Caveney

Shazam!

27/03/19

It’s generally accepted that, as comic book universes go, Marvel is the outfit that employs a lighter touch, whereas DC habitually plays things dark and po-faced. So Shazam! is clearly an attempt to give the latter franchise a kick up the spandex-clad backside, playing things primarily for laughs and making a pretty good job of it. Unfortunately, the tone of the film tends to veer alarmingly back to the dark side every now and then and, whenever it does, the momentum is temporarily lost and has to be recaptured.

Shazam! began life back in 1939 as a comic, where the central superhero was known (rather confusingly, given recent film history) as Captain Marvel, but the origins story remains pretty much intact. This is the tale of young orphan, Billy Batson (Asher Angel), who loses his young mother in a crowd one day and, years later, is still desperately trying to find her. For no good reason, an ancient wizard (Djimon Hounso) gifts him with the ability to transform himself into the titular superhero, Shazam (Zachary Levi). But before we see that origins story, we are obliged to sit through another one, a scene from the childhood of Thaddeus Sivana, who will one day grow up to be played by Mark Strong and who will be a very bad egg indeed.

To be honest, the opening twenty minutes of the film are a bit of a trial – indeed, I am actually considering walking out of the screening until Billy’s first transformation occurs and the film takes a huge step in the right direction. The central conceit – what would a superhero be like if he was actually a fourteen year old boy? – is a bit of a masterstroke and Shazam’s early attempts to come to grips with his newfound abilities, aided by his nerdy friend, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), are laugh-out-loud funny. Likewise, Billy’s interplay with the foster parents who take him on is nicely done with some lovely dialogue between him and the other kids in the group home.

But of course, it’s only a matter of time before a grown-up Dr Thaddeus Sivana shows his face and matters lurch straight back to the dark side. Sivana has managed to find a way to channel the seven deadly sins, giving himself superpowers of an altogether more sinister kind than Billy’s. A scene where Sivana flings his older brother through the window of a skyscraper and then orders his brutish parasites to chow down on a boardroom full of businesspeople (one of whom is his father) does not sit particularly well with the humorous stuff I’ve just been enjoying so much.

The film continues to seesaw its way along in this disconcerting fashion and I find myself constantly having to reassess my position on it. For the most part, it’s enjoyable stuff and even the distressingly long, CGI-assisted final confrontation is, I suppose, par for the course in a superhero movie. There’s a brief coda that provides a brilliant last laugh and a post credits sequence that suggests the possibility of a sequel. I’m not sure this idea has the legs to go very much further, but Shazam! is, for the most part, entertaining and, unlike so many comic book movies of recent years, it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Which, when I think about it, may be the best recommendation of all.

3.4 stars

Philip Caveney

 

Mid90s

25/03/19

The latest Hollywood actor to take his position on the other side of the camera is Jonah Hill. Mid90s is his first film as director and, it turns out, he wrote the screenplay too. The result is a charming little calling card of a film, with a grungy, indie sensibility and a clear determination to avoid the clichés that have dogged so many earlier attempts to get to grips with the subject of skateboarding.

Thirteen-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) lives in LA with his single parent mom, Dabney (Katherine Waterston), and his bullying, older brother, Ian (Lucas Hedges, working wonders with an almost monosyllabic role). Left mostly to his own devices and clearly fed up with his brother’s constant physical abuse, Stevie chances upon the Motor Avenue Skateshop, run by Ray (Na Kel Smith), a talented skateboarder who has accrued a small coterie of followers. There’s wannabe skate boy, Ruben (Gio Galicia), messed-up rich-kid, Fuckshit (Olan Prenatt) and putative filmmaker, Fourth Grade (Ryder McLaughlin).

Watching the gang interact, Stevie has a kind of epiphany. He buys an old skateboard from Ian and sets about following the other kids around with an almost obsessive zeal, taking every opportunity to get into their good books. Though he can’t ride a skateboard to save his life, his presence is soon accepted and and the others even adopt him as a kind of  mascot, giving him the nickname ‘Sunburn.’  Pretty soon, they are introducing him to the dubious delights of drugs, acts of minor hooliganism and granting him access to their regular parties, where, on one momentous night, he even manages to shrug off his cumbersome virginity.

There’s no great message in Mid90s – it’s a picaresque adventure in which we share Stevie’s growing awareness of who he is and what he wants to be. It’s set against a meticulously researched 90s landscape and is provided with a kicking soundtrack to ease matters along. With a surprisingly brief running time of just one hour twenty-five minutes, the film fairly races by on well-oiled wheels and the performances are uniformly  spot-on. Hill even throws in a few simple visual tricks that hint at the possibility of even better things to come from him.

This surely won’t be for everyone, but it feels like so much more than a Hollywood actor’s vanity project. It’s a genuine delight.

4.2 stars

Philip Caveney

Us

23/03/19

Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, Get Out, was an extraordinarily accomplished start to his filmmaking career – indeed, we chose it as one of our ‘best of 2017’ movies. Although Us has a few echoes of that film, it’s an altogether more complex and ambitious project, a powerful metaphor about American society (does Us actually stand for U.S? Could be…). This is about privilege and aspiration and good old-fashioned greed. If occasionally it feels as though Peele hasn’t quite got control of the plethora of issues he unearths here, it’s nevertheless an eminently watchable film.

The Wilsons are a likeable and clearly affluent family, who set off for a summer vacation at the beach resort where Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o) used to go with her parents back in the day. Her affable husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), can’t wait to hit the beach and rent out a fancy powerboat, just like his even more wealthy friends, the Tylers (Elizabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), with whom Gabe has a bit of an unspoken rivalry. The Wilson kids, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph), and her little brother, Jason (Evan Alex), are happy to be anywhere that has wifi and access to a mobile phone. But Adelaide is hiding a fearful secret. Back in 1986,  when she last visited the resort with her parents, she wandered into a beachside hall of mirrors, where she had a life changing experience…

The past soon makes its chilling presence felt with a night-time visitation by a mysterious family, who turn out to be warped doppelgängers of the Wilson’s themselves – and what was supposed to be a relaxing vacation turns all too quickly into a frenzied struggle for survival.

The first half hour of Us is brilliantly played, starting with subtle intimations of approaching disaster and leading very convincingly into a terrifying twist on the old ‘home invasion’ genre. But, as the story progresses and we begin to learn more about the Wilsons’ nightmarish visitors, we realise that we are in the midst of a raging allegory that attacks the tenets upon which much of middle-class America is founded, sending a warning to the current elite that there’s a whole underclass out there, casting envious eyes upon all those fancy possessions, and covertly drawing up plans to come and take their share.

There are, it has to be said, a few mis-steps here. The Tylers have little to do other than be obnoxious and serve as bloody victims of the new order – and, though I initially enjoy the jokey dialogue that sets up the Wilson family’s dynamic, I feel less comfortable when characters are still doing it in the midst of total carnage. Furthermore, the complex plot strands that explain the existence of the doppelgängers don’t always stand up to close scrutiny. On the plus side, Nyong’o’s performance as the tortured mother with a terrible secret to protect is really quite brilliant and, with a lesser talent in the lead role, this film wouldn’t fly nearly as successfully as it does.

In the end, this doesn’t really measure up to Get Out but there’s enough here to keep you hooked to the final frame, and – unlike many films in this genre – it also gives us plenty to think about afterwards.

4 stars

Philip Caveney

Joni 75: a birthday celebration

21/03/19

Joni Mitchell is seventy-five years old. After suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015, she’s probably lucky to have made it this far but, tragically, her condition has robbed her of the ability to perform. This birthday concert, recorded in November 2018 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in LA, is a celebration of her music, performed by a whole host of artists who openly acknowledge her as one of the greatest singer-songwriters in musical history.

I’ve long been a huge Joni Mitchell fan. I have only to hear the opening chords of All I Want, the first track on Blue, to be transported back in time to a grungy little bedsit in Barkingside. I’m in my twenties, I’m spending my spare time singing with a rock band and I’m beginning to take my first tentative steps towards becoming a published author. And Joni is providing the soundtrack. Heady days.

Blue is, quite simply, an astonishing album, a collection of heartrending confessional songs, chronicling the up-and-down relationship Joni had with Graham Nash in the late 60s. It was followed by a string of equally accomplished albums, her career perhaps reaching its apotheosis in 1975 with the extraordinary jazz-inflected landscapes of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, where Mitchell’s lyrics somehow transcended the idea of mere ‘songs’ and became a series of brilliantly observed short stories set to music – and all this from a young woman who openly claimed that her first love was painting; to her, music was just a ‘sideline.’ Boy, what I wouldn’t give for a sideline like that.

So, here at last is the tribute she’s long deserved – a band of highly skilled session musicians supporting a series of top flight artists all performing songs by Joni. There’s so much to enjoy here and the standard is excellent, but there are, naturally, some particular highlights: Diana Krall crooning a heartfelt Amelia, Rufus Wainwright offering a plaintive rendition of Blue and, perhaps best of all, Seal delivering an absolutely knockout version of Both Sides Now. Graham Nash makes a brief appearance too, singing Our House, the hymn to domestic bliss he wrote for Joni when they were still a couple, and which has the audience singing gleefully along.

Of course, as ever in concerts like this, I miss some of my particular favourites but, when there are so many shimmering nuggets to choose from, it’s inevitable that some absolute treasures are going to be overlooked. As the artists perform, the screen behind them features photographs from Joni’s past and selected paintings that amply demonstrate that she’s no slouch at the artwork either. There’s even a clip from her infamous appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, where she berates an uppity crowd for ‘acting like tourists’ and then goes on to slay them with sheer talent.

Of course, the saddest thing here is that Joni is sitting in the audience throughout, a silent spectator, unable to contribute anything to the proceedings beyond blowing out a single candle on her birthday cake. But it’s heartening to see that the big screen at the Cameo is completely sold out tonight. Clearly, there are plenty of others who love her music every bit as much as I do.

Belated birthday greetings, Joni. And many more of them.

4.5 stars

Philip Caveney

The Kindergarten Teacher

20/03/19

The Kindergarten Teacher is an enigmatic film. A remake of Navid Lapid’s Haganenet, this is a quietly unnerving, genre-defying drama, with a devastatingly understated performance at its heart.

Maggie Gyllenhaal is Lisa Spinelli, a kindergarten teacher longing for a more culturally enriching life. She loves art and poetry, but feels trapped by the mundanity of her suburban existence. There’s nothing wrong, exactly: she’s good at her job; she has a supportive husband; her teenage kids are decent, and doing okay. But there’s a spark missing. Her children seem happy to just pootle along, and she can’t hide her disappointment that they don’t aspire to anything great. “I noticed you’re good at photography,” she tells her daughter, Lainie (Daisy Tahan), “Why don’t you take dad’s old camera and set up the dark room?” But Lainie is dismissive: “I post lots of cool stuff on Instagram,” and Lisa is adrift, with only her weekly poetry class to fulfil her need for erudition. But she’s all drive and no substance: her poems are, it seems, derivative, clichéd. Her heart aches for creativity, but it’s out of reach.

So, when five-year-old Jimmy starts reciting oddly esoteric poetry, Lisa pounces on his potential. Habitually a quiet, undemanding little boy, he regularly enters a trance-like state, declaiming lines extraordinary for one so young. They seem to speak of experiences beyond his years, and Lisa gleefully transcribes them. He’s a child prodigy, she thinks, a Mozart of verse. And she’s determined to let neither the school curriculum nor his benignly neglectful family stifle the boy’s genius.

And, in order to protect it, she crosses a line.

It’s to writer/director Sara Colangelo’s credit that we never discover the root of Jimmy’s precocity: there’s a hint of the supernatural about the way the poems come to him, but it’s never really explained. This ambiguity serves the film well, complementing the moral uncertainty surrounding Lisa’s response to the gifted child; there are no easy answers here. It’s a deceptively simple piece, the very banality of Lisa’s decision-making process somehow highlighting the grotesque nature of her behaviour.

Parker Sevak’s delivery is remarkable for one so young; he shows us a Jimmy who is convincingly doubtful, yet easily manipulated. But Gyllenhaal is the beguiling core of this movie, demonstrating once again an astonishing level of complexity in her performance. There are so many layers to Lisa’s character, and we’re aware of them all: from her craven seeking of validation from hot young lecturer, Simon (Gael García Bernal) to her instinctive reluctance to allow her son to join the armed forces. We know that what she’s doing is wrong, but we can understand her, all the time.

This is a quietly powerful piece that will provoke discussion after the credits have rolled.

4.3 stars

Susan Singfield