Review πŸ‘‰ Searching

Monday, August 27, 2018 |


Searching is the new thriller directed by Aneesh Chaganty. Widowed father David Kim (John Cho) searches for his missing teenage daughter (Michelle La) with the help of multiple laptops and hard-talking detective Rosemary Vick (Debra Messing). All the action takes place on screens; the mystery unfolds through texts, FaceTime, YouTube and video blogs.

While some may have their doubts about watching what is essentially a filmed set of screens for nearly two hours, this unusual set up soon feels natural. After all, many of us spend a lot more than two hours without looking away from a screen in our daily lives.

The portrayal of familiar online habits on the big screen is cleverly used for comic effect. The constant rewriting of messages and the replacement of the jovial exclamation mark for the famously passive aggressive full stop is fully relatable and funny to watch. Some of the visuals are also arresting because they are taken out of their familiar context. Most notably, David’s screen saver is transformed into an enormous malignant jellyfish when shown without the borders of a laptop.
The clever parallels between the title, Searching, and the extensive use of search engines (particularly Apple’s “Finder”) throughout the film invite us to look at how we use the internet. Google asks us to “Search Google or type URL,” but when the missing object is a person rather than the answer to inane questions, these words take on a much more frightening currency.

Searching maintains a fantastic tension throughout the search for Margot. The contrast of the horror of the situation and recognisable ordinariness of the technological format is extremely effective in unsettling the audience.

The twists are truly chilling. By the end, there are perhaps just too many wrenching turns, which slightly dents the believability of the film. This is the only thing stopping Searching from getting a solid five-star review. It is a wonderfully sharp, brutally tense and inventively shot thriller that shows the blossoming possibilities of technology in film.







Signatured




  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Written by Heulwen Blade

Review πŸ‘‰ The Meg

Monday, August 20, 2018 |

MaryAnn’s quick take..


Jason Statham versus a giant prehistoric shark. It’s never less — yet also never more — than you expect, and never more suspenseful or scary than it is cheesy. But whatev.


What, you need more?
Okay.
Jaws’ reputation as the best shark movie ever is safe, but yes, they’re gonna need a bigger boat. Jurassic Park’s reputation as the best ancient-creature-in-the-modern-world movie ever is safe, but yes, the scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. Oh, they’re not genetically engineering enormous extinct ocean predators here, but there’s definitely some meddling in realms that humans were not meant to blah blah blah.
More?
Are you ready for this?
Stath goes hand-to-fin with the giant prehistoric shark.
If that is not enough for you, then you needn’t bother with The Meg. You are not among those being pandered to with this movie, which is very ecumenical in its pandering:
• There’s the literary crowd: Statham’s (The Fate of the Furious, Mechanic: Resurrection) deep-sea-rescue diver is haunted by the spectre of the monster that killed his crew — his best friends! *stifles manly sniffle* — five years earlier. A creature that no one believed him when he said it existed. But now! Vindication and revenge shall be his — maybe — Moby-Dick style.
• There’s the classic-sci-fi crowd: The Megalodon, the giant shark, has been disturbed from its hidden underwater realm, a place cut off from time or evolution or whatever, just like The Lost Continent, except on the ocean floor.
• There’s the “Chinese production money must be acknowledged” crowd, so we get significant sequences set in Shanghai, and a cast that also features the awesome Bingbing Li (Transformers: Age of Extinction) — as the scientist who knows sharks, and whose offshore research station is ground zero for the shark havoc — and adorable little Sophia Cai as her daughter.
•a Seriously, Statham has found a terrific niche for himself starring opposite badass little girls; see also 2012’s Safe and 2013’s Homefront. He and Cai together onscreen here are non-shark highlights. He is thoroughly charming with little girls. So there’s another crowd being pandered to: the one that likes to see tough guys softened by kids.
• There is the crowd that is grateful for totally and pointedly gratuitous male nudity, a crowd that is sadly almost never appeased onscreen. Statham doesn’t even do anything for me, and yet I was delighted to be pandered to in this way. Thank you, The Meg.
That said, the crowd that appreciates cheesy movies — I count myself in this one — may be just a tad disappointed. The Meg is certainly more cheesy than suspenseful or scary, but even cheesier still would be better. The script — by Dean Georgaris (Tristan & Isolde, The Manchurian Candidate) and Jon and Erich Hoeber (as a team: Red 2, Battleship) — leans on so many clichΓ©s of action melodrama and disaster flicks. But it never leans quite hard enough. You’re never really sure if the movie intends to make you laugh at the terrible and often histrionic dialogue, or if it’s genuinely offered as would-be serious and emotional drama. I laughed out loud quite a few times. Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the movie wanted me to or not. But I think if it wanted me to, it would have done it more often. Director Jon Turteltaub (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, National Treasure: Book of Secrets) seems to want to tightrope between comedy and horror, and so the movie doesn’t totally satisfy in either direction. (This is based on the bestsellling novel of the same name by Steve Alten, which doesn’t seem to bear much resemblance to what ended up onscreen. The book also doesn’t sound like it is meant to be funny.)


The Meg isn’t quite as much big dumb ridiculous fun as Rampage, from earlier this year, in which the Rock and his giant gorilla pal fight a giant croc and a giant wolf. (There’s only one species of big bad here, alas.) It’s never less — yet also never more — than you expect. But as big dumb ridiculous action movies go, this one… well, The Meg will do until the next one shows up, though it will probably already be forgotten by then.







Signatured







  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Written by Heulwen Blade

Review πŸ‘‰ The Equalizer 2

Thursday, August 16, 2018 |

In all of his years in the film industry, Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington has never been in a movie sequel. Until now. Director Antoine Fuqua’s “The Equalizer 2” changes that and marks the first time Washington has returned as a character he has previously portrayed.
In “The Equalizer” (2014), Washington played Robert McCall, the manager of a hardware store in the Northeast part of the United States. In “The Equalizer 2,” McCall is a Lyft driver who takes nefarious characters to and from their destinations.
“The Equalizer 2” is a violent film, but the violence is justified within the parameters of the storyline. Also returning to the story are Oscar-winner Melissa Leo (“The Fighter”) as Susan Plummer and Bill Pullman (“Independence Day”) as Brian Plummer. The duo portrays a married couple who have stayed in contact with McCall, even though he is “officially dead.” I do not mind vigilante-based movies because the heroes have set rules and moral codes that guide them through their journeys. For instance, the Bruce Willis-led “Death Wish,” in which hero Dr. Paul Kersey helps people in the hospital get back on their feet. Most recently, Willis starred in an update of “The Magnificent Seven” (2016). The film, also directed by Fuqua and starring Washington, allowed Willis to bring his street-wise sensibilities to an Old West setting. The closest Washington has come to a remake was his starring role in Oscar-winning director Jonathan Demme’s update of the “The Manchurian Candidate” in 2004 in which Washington plays a brain-washed soldier returning from a war. His character Ben Marco was played by Frank Sinatra played in the original John Frankenheimer classic. A subplot in “The Equalizer 2” deals with an elderly person who is thought to suffer from dementia and finds out that he wasn’t crazy. I’m all in when the heroes are justified in their calling.

All in all, “The Equalizer 2” does what it’s supposed to do. It entertains us for the brief time we spend as members of the audience.







Signatured





  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(1)
Written by Heulwen Blade

Review πŸ‘‰ MISSION : IMPOSSIBLE - FALLOUT

Thursday, August 02, 2018 |


An old franchise finds new heights for a whole genre.

How good is Mission: Impossible – Fallout? Three quarters of the way through it I realized I had totally forgotten I was supposed to be reviewing it. Why’s that a big deal? Well, have you ever tried counting the nuts and bolts on a rollercoaster in the middle of the ride?
That is perhaps the most tired metaphor for action cinema. “A real rollercoaster!” But exiting the theater that was the only metaphor that really made sense. The propulsive nature and relentless tension of the experience of Fallout pulls the feeling over two and a half hours that you’re used to waiting two and a half hours for to experience for a minute and a half. This movie should come with a warning for pregnant mothers and riders with heart problems.
Over an improbable twenty-plus years and now at a truly impossible 56 years old, star and producer Tom Cruise has mastered the art of separating your body’s reflexive responses from your intellect’s knowledge. Stunt after stunt, sequel after sequel, Cruise makes the ghost of Evel Knievel blush with his latest death-defying act. And while your brain may know that Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt probably wont die in the first ten minutes of a movie about him… your body lurches up in its seat, your jaw drops, your pulse rises. If you’re afraid of heights, you might even get nausea.
That is no small feat, and Fallout is a film of no small feats. Tenuously connected and always featuring a different director (until now) the Mission series made its bread and butter in being an action sampler platter, serving the audience the same cuisine via different dishes each time out. This time Oscar-winning writer and current Team Cruise MVP Christopher McQuarrie (The Usual Suspects, Valkyrie) makes his mark as the first returning writer/director of the franchise after already making his mark decidedly on it with the exemplary Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation. But this move hardly represents Cruise and Paramount merely pulling leftovers from the back of the fridge.
Fallout may have a familiar plot – terrorists want plutonium to do deathly destructive things – but wrinkles that familiarity with the presence of Henry Cavill’s CIA bludgeon, Walker – sent to monitor Hunt and crew in a fantastic “will they/won’t they” kill each other punch-com, as well as returning other favorites and antagonists from the OG’s like Ving Rhame’s Luther Stickell to more current All-Star’s like Rebecca Ferguson’s to-meet-her-is-to-love-her Isla Faust and Sean Harris’s quiet creeper with confident menace, Solomon Lane. But from these highlights down to Angela Bassett and Alec Baldwin’s agency boss characters, to particularly Michelle Monaghan’s surprising (but it’s in the trailer guys) return as Ethan’s once-upon-a-time wife – this Mission sets itself apart maybe with less a new brand of action, than with a heavy dose of emotion. Everyone has some degree of pathos to play; and while you’ll white-knuckle through action beats, you’ll be shocked at how much you’re feeling in a 20 year old action franchise too. Stakes are more applicable than they’ve ever been, and plutonium too, is made personal.
Tom Cruise gives a performance through all of this that says not just “look how fast I can run!” but “don’t forget I’m one of our great actors”. His dedication to the dangerous is obviously impressive, but his more imperceptible commitment to craft shows why we’re lucky to have such an actor playing this role with a subtle, purposeful nuance that could be unguided wooden flotsam in a lesser performer’s hands.
This is all, in thanks, to Fallout finally cracking one of Ethan Hunt’s defining characteristics (besides merely being Tom Cruise). Frustrating philosopher Jeremy Bentham and Vulcan Mr. Spock, Ethan Hunt shorts out when confronted with the choice to choose the needs of the many over the needs of one or a few, and simply will not. A person’s life, stranger or bestie, is equally as important as a continent’s to this hero. What feels like a simple philosophical exercise also provides new levels, moments and inventive instances of tension throughout this installment. There is a maze, a labyrinth plot of action sequences and double-crosses that leads to that plutonium Hunt and his team need to save the world, but who will Hunt go through to get there, and can he? This dynamic adds a nice foundation of emotional stakes that’s amplified through every familiar face Hunt encounters, and every stranger he’s faced with threatening.
Bad guys, however, still get disposed of with aplomb. And there are plenty of bad guy bricks to build out this movie’s myriad action sequences. Watching Fallout after the rest of the series is a bit like knowing Bruce Banner, thinking he’s a pretty tough guy you’d rather not mess with, only to see that bastard turn into the HULK. Some familiar features are still there — a motorcycle chase, a beat ’em up rendezvous with assassins, a stunt on a rope — but they’re presented with such adrenaline and ferocity that you’d swear you’d never seen them before, and maybe want to hide under your chair.
It is perhaps not widely known that Cruise and his Impossible creative compatriots think of action beats and stunts first and then find a cohesive way to retrofit them into an appropriate plot. And while that makes story take a literal backseat, you’ll never sense it, even as it has the upside guarantee of making every action sequence mount, and mount, and intensify and outdo the last in a tantric exercise that would shame even Sting or Christian Grey. But damned if it isn’t exhilarating.
It’s difficult to applaud each of these without giving them, or their sequence away, but if Brian DePalma’s low angles and split-diopters defined Mission at the first, and John Woo’s doves and flames sent Mission to peak (now sorta silly) 2000 cool in M:I-2, decades and directors later McQuarrie in his second installment has solidified his own trademark — impact. Every punch, leap, collision and shot hits to shatter, snap, break. This carries over into the plot as well, with each wrinkle being decidedly felt, and is all shot in beautiful wides or breakneck mid-to-close. When Tom Cruise jumps out of a plane that’s flirting with breaking the Earth’s atmosphere, you will feel it in your throat. When he flies through porcelain in a bathroom brawl, you’ll wonder if your doctor has openings tomorrow, when he engages in a dizzying helicopter chase and duel, you’ll giggle as you break from sanity – the mind and body having completely surrendered to this movie’s elevated, unmatched madness – only for it to then dare you to go two steps further. And it’s all jarringly, breathtakingly real. There is no doubt it is Cruise hanging under the helicopter or jumping from the building as much as there’s no denying the gorgeous cinematography that captures Paris, London or the mountains of Kashmir in the background.
Mission: Impossible – Fallout is the best movie of the summer. In a summer full of hits “McQ”, Cruise and the rest of the IMF crew have found a way to make their earthbound spy game, in it’s sixth iteration, hit harder than Thanos’s gauntlet, franchise veteran Brad Bird’s beautifully staged Incredibles sequel, than a CGI mutant dinosaur, than The Rock fighting a building with his bare hands. From the opening moments of Lorne Balfe’s percussive score (the best since Whiplash or  at least since you discovered the kitchen pots and pans could make disconcerting noise if you hit them with a spoon) you know you’re in for something hilariously and gratefully unrelenting, a marathon of entertainment. That’s before iconic theme’s been heard or a title card’s been seen. This movie is special. It has nods for the die-hards and new wrinkles for those accepting their first mission. It is probably one of the greatest action movies ever made, one of the most technically impressive movies I’ve ever seen, and a lifetime achievement award for an actor who’s been dogged at upending our expectations for nigh a lifetime in Tom Cruise. I hope there’s more. I almost can’t comprehend how their could be. I thought we ran out of things for Ethan Hunt to jump off of two movies ago.
I love James Bond. Batman. Whatever Dom, Letty and their crew are up to these days. What Marvel has done rivals Zeus and his Olympians. But Mission: Impossible – Fallout just put them all on notice with a paternal pat on the head. Everything they’re doing is cartoon cute. This is now the preeminent action franchise. Everyone else is just smashing action figures together in a sandbox.





Signatured



  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Written by Heulwen Blade

Review πŸ‘‰ Avengers : Infinity War

Thursday, April 26, 2018 |

Not infinity perhaps, but a really, really big finity war. Colossal, cataclysmic, delirious, preposterous – and always surreally entertaining in the now well-established Marvel movie tradition. It’s a gigantic showdown between a force of cosmic wickedness and a chaotically assembled super-team of Marvelsuperheroes made more complicated by Doctor Strange’s tendency to multiclone himself in moments of battle stress.

There are some very unexpected family relationships that we had no idea about – potentially compromising unity in the face of encroaching evil. There are also some very surprising deaths – of which, of course, the less said the better. There are, moreover, some surprising omissions in the cast list. Or are there?

Avengers: Infinity War is a giant battle for which directors Anthony and Joe Russo have given us touches of JRR Tolkien’s Return of the King and JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The film delivers the sugar-rush of spectacle and some very amusing one-liners.


Whatever else it does, this Marvel movie shows its brand identity in the adroit management of tone. One moment it’s tragic, the next, it’s cracking wise. It’s absurd and yet persuades you of its overwhelming seriousness. And there are some amazing Saturday-morning-kids-show moments when you feel like cheering.

Earth is being threatened by a massive malign hunk with a huge ridgey chin called Thanos, played by Josh Brolin. If he can gain ownership of all the talismanic infinity stones and place them in the holes in his custom-built gauntlet then he will have the ultimate power to destroy anything he wishes in the universe. And he has a chilling wish for mass slaughter of half the sentient beings in existence, ostensibly so that the other half will have enough food to eat – but really so they will bow down to him as the tyrant lord.

Ranged against him, of course, are the good guys who come together not in a single phalanx but a constellation of improvised groupings, in which the alpha males have a tendency to bicker. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) is nettled by Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) and his supercilious air of intellectual superiority – and vice versa. Spider-Man (Tom Holland) shows up and annoys the hell out of them both with his milliennial’s flair for pop culture references.

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) finds himself having to do a ride-along with the Guardians of the Galaxy and Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) is intimidated by Thor’s godlike machismo and finds himself trying to do the basso profundo voice.

Vision (Paul Bettany) and Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) are tormented by the glowing stone in Vision’s blue head, and they’re agonised by the thought that self-destruction is the only way to keep it out of Thanos’s huge mitts. Their own situation brings them into contact with Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) – who prefers his non-super name now, not Captain America, and also the always frowning Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), together with the frankly traumatised Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo).

Scenes and situations whoosh by like a bizarre and bizarrely exciting dream. A sudden trip to Wakanda, with its secret world of remedial hi-tech surgery, seems entirely plausible. T’Challa, or Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) greets the visitors with his habitual Shakespearean bearing and princely calm.

Inevitably, there is a little confusion. Groups of superheroes clash and each thinks the other is on Thanos’s side. “What master do you serve?” shouts one, awkwardly. “You mean – like Jesus?” comes the exasperated reply. No. Thor is the only god around here and even he isn’t guaranteed a result. It’s all in the cosmic balance.

In theory, all these superheroes crammed into one movie should trigger the law of diminishing returns and the Traveling Wilbury effect. And yet somehow in its pure uproariousness, it works. It’s just a supremely watchable film, utterly confident in its self-created malleable mythology. And confident also in the note of apocalyptic darkness.

I know it’s silly. And yet I can’t help looking forward to the next supersized episode of mayhem.






Signatured



  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(1)
Written by Heulwen Blade
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)