Bad Boys: Ride or Die Review by BMC 24 Jun 2024, 2:24 pm

Directed by the returning directing team Adil Bilall, this latest entry in Jerry Bruckheimer’s high-octane action-comedy series, starting nearly 30 years ago, delivers the goods.

At one point in Bad Boys: Ride or Die, one of the leads exclaims: ‘This is some dysfunctional shit!’ With that kind of meta arthouse commentary, who needs critics? Not that reviews will matter to the genuine affection of viewers for the action-comedy buddy cop series that started three decades ago and whose lineage goes deep into 1974 (Freebie and the Bean and Busting; cite the others, if you want). It’s a format that works, even if this fourth entry is a little stretched.

Seeing Will Smith’s Mike and Martin Lawrence’s Marcus go through their trademark bickering routines is like spending an evening with a long-married couple whose constant jibes have got downright boring. At the beginning, when Mike calls Marcus a junk-food junkie, you think: Not again.

His worry is disturbingly prescient, as only a few months later, while going crazy from dancing at Mike’s wedding, Marcus suffers a heart attack. He has a near-death experience in a surreal, cosmic sequence that can only be described as a 2001: A Space Odyssey outtake, in which the now-dead Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano) assures him: ‘It’s not your time.’ An entirely recuperated Marcus wakes up in the hospital, tears out his IVs, and then teeters on the ledge of the building’s roof, ranting floral space-age nonsense that would make a regular of Oprah’s shame-pit Marianne Williamson blush – not to mention his ass exposed to all of Miami.

Marcus’ newfound piety is the film’s big joke, indeed its only gag, but to say that it wears thin quickly is an understatement. During the entire film, Marcus is a gibbering fool; at one point, he thinks he can stare down the evil gator in front of him with his willpower. And Mike, predictably, starts panicking, which means that the film’s second most annoying plot strand is panic attacks.

Lots of those going around: indeed virtually the entire plot of Chris Bremner and Will Beall’s screenplay, which involves the pair working to clear Howard’s name of posthumous corruption charges – not just because they’re his friends, but because he had made a video for them (recorded before he was murdered, naturally) that must be played in the event of his death.

This also allows for Pantoliano’s popular character to come roaring back to life, albeit a bridge too far for the film’s makers to also turn him into the equivalent of Obi-Wan Kenobi — fuzzily photographed cameos dropping pearls of beneficent advice like a streetwise Dalai Lama.

Their work is made even more difficult for them when they come under suspicion of being crooks themselves (for complicated reasons), and go into hiding with Armando (Jacob Scipio, here as he was in the previous film, fresh out of jail for killing Howard but now good as gold).

This is a common feature of franchises such as this and the Fast ­Furious series, in which ne’er-do-wells can switch from bad to good from one film to the next, and where, to add a twist to the twist, a key protagonist will – spoiler alert – turn out to be the Real Bad Guy (he or she usually wears a suit). A development common to any series is the creeping number of characters in each successive film (this one feels like it’s on spreadsheets).

Many of the cast from the first movie reprise their roles, including Vanessa Hudgens and Alexander Ludwig as coworkers of Mike and Marcus who apparently are in between delinquencies, now hilariously romantically linked to one another. There’s also an extended cameo featuring Tiffany Haddish, but she’s demonstrated in the film that she’s no uppity nigger, and gets to let her freak flag fly in a way no White character could ever hope to.

The three escapees are stalked by every thug in Miami after the top bad guy (the low-key tough guy Eric Dane, whose villainness is announced by his perfect bone structure) puts a $5 million price on their heads.

Trailing the pair is the daughter of the murdered Captain Howard (now a US Marshal), intent on revenge on Armando for killing her father. She is played by Rhea Seehorn, who doesn’t get so much as a mention in the film’s press notes, despite being – by this viewer’s opinion anyway – its finest actor. The cursed thing continues the depressing trend for singly and uniquely talented actors making the jump to one-dimensional A-list cinema after finding fame on the small screen her work on Better Call Saul is so much more engaging Considering the film’s all-star casting, her performance here is unexceptional, unfortunately.

All of which is an excuse for a lot of high-energy action sequences directed by the returning directors Adil ＆ Bilall (as Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah are billed, evidently) who appear to have tried their hand at every technical gimmick they could think of. They must have sold their drones to their nearest competitor, because they’re used so frequently, both on-screen and off, that you start to get motion sickness from all the swooping and swirling overhead shots.

For their part, the directors seem fond of body cameras too, so you get the visceral feel of the action, just like a video game (no joke intended like that, I promise). The effect looks odd rather than immersive: a scene, involving Smith tossing a gun with an attached camera to Lawrence, is clearly supposed to be a virtuosic flourish, but it just looks dumb. Panicked close-ups, applied here with an excess of the requisite grating energy, are also a motif. The actors’ nose hairs might as well be numbered.

This isn’t to say the movie lacks thrilling set-pieces — a car chase and a fight aboard a crashing helicopter are both as good as the best of the Mission: Impossible films. The single best scene features the pair as mere spectators, with the two of them helplessly looking at video monitors as Marcus’ son-in-law Reggie (played by Dennis McDonald) has become a beefy Marine, and handily dispatches more than a dozen bad guys who’ve invaded Marcus’ house.

Greatly choreographed, hyperviolent madness, leavened by Smith and Lawrence’s reactions, serves as a tantalising scrim Josh Brolin has to burn through in pursuit of some Amber Heard drugs. that ought to be the LA of Bad Boys 3. It could have been as hot as the first one – in all of its unbearable, amusing, undeniable warmth.

Kingdom Of The Planet Of The Apes Movie Review 24 Jun 2024, 2:17 pm

Story: One day after Caesar, an adolescent ape will strike out on a path that will lead him to refine his notion of a distant past – and reshape the future of both apes and humans.

Review: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (2024), directed by Wes Ball, deposes the veneration of the character Caesar and announced that his titanic story was complete. In its place, the film forces us empathise with Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee who survives a horrific attack on his village. A quest for vengeance and meaning leads Noa down a path that tells us more about his species’ controversial relationship with humans and its ruler’s taxation without representation – the fascistic Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand). Noa is joined in his journey by Mae (Freya Allan), a human girl beholden to a plot device with unexplored gravity; Raka (Peter Macon), an orangutan whose name signifies Caesar’s lost ideals of nobility in a new age of ape dominance; and Kaya (Laura Harrier), a gorilla who doesn’t believe Proximus is as bad as she says.

The story and characters in the new instalment are not nearly as compelling as the previous trilogy but sets the stage for a potential exciting journey, for imagining a future ripe with possibilities for richer narrative. Most of the major characters are chiefly computer-generated apes, materialised with the computer-generated visual effects and motion-capture performances of skilled technicians and artists. You feel the realism in these characters’ physical ways and gestures, their facial expressions and emotions in each of the three films of the Planet of the Apes prequel. The characters wouldn’t be believable building communities that are either good or bad if it were not for the sheer genius of technical effects in computer graphics.

It’s visually impressive to see this bleak world reclaimed by nature and its subjects – the decaying skyscrapers are beautiful, and the forest scenes are all so detailed. I wish it didn’t sometimes linger on them quite as much, though: there are times when the pacing could be sharper and there’s more to be learned about its protagonists. People will emerge talking and discussing whatever ‘Endgame’ is – this movie is somewhat like that: you watch because of the early trailers. There are hints throughout about what might happen in a third and fourth film; at times, it seems less like a story than a set-up for a series of stories. But then we are left with a cliffhanger: who did the chopping, and how are they going to get home?

For all its plot weaknesses, it’s still a breezy adventure that keeps you interested. The performances, particularly from Teague and Durand, are good, and the visual effects also set new standards for the franchise. It might not be as memorable as the previous trio of films, but Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is still a worthy addition to the series, with equal parts action, drama and visual astonishment.

Black Dog Movie Review 4 Jun 2024, 1:58 pm

The top prize went to Dark Cloud by director Guan Hu (The Eight Hundred, Mr Six); a darkly comic thriller about a taxi driver and released convict entangled in underworld politics, and starring the Canadian-Taiwanese actor Eddie Peng.

Chinese director Guan Hu’s stylish new feature Black Dog opens in familiar mode: a former convict named Lang (Eddie Peng) has spent a decade in jail. Now, upon his release, he is attempting to re-enter normal life in his native, tiny city on the fringes of the Gobi Desert in Northwest China. But some old devils rear their heads.

If you expect the story to resemble any number of prefab B-movies – or even the scenario of the Sylvester Stallone miniseries Tulsa King (2022) – you need to be told that Black Dog is, quite simply, not that kind of film. For one thing, who is the titular black dog? In any case, it’s not the total loser of a protagonist – a man who rarely speaks more than a few words of dialogue to any person throughout the entire film (including to his own dad) as he tries to make himself comfortable in a town that does not want him – or to the stray black greyhound he meets in town, with whom he eventually bonds.

Black Dog is no Man’s Best Friend movie, either – even if Lang and his rabid mixed mutt fly like Huck Finn in the middle of the film’s runaway plot. An urban fantasia of sleazy violent decay and dog craziness that starts with a startling scene of dogs overturning a bus on a desert highway and gets wilder and weirder, Guan’s strangely deadpan thriller is really a redemption story, taking unexpected detours into and around pitfalls as its down-and-outher struggles toward rehab.

The director’s past credits do not augur well, including rock-em sock-em action vehicles such as Mr Six (2015) and The Eight Hundred (2021), which could not be more unlike the Black Dog’s oddball tone and arthouse stylistics that seem to come from a crossbreeding of the Coens’ No Country For Old Men (2007) and recent Chinese noirs such as The Wild Goose Lake (2019) by Diao Yinan. There’s some bloodshed – but not at all graphic. There’s certainly some animal cruelty. But largely this is a movie about a very strange place and time, where men and dogs leave bloody paw prints in the leechy, smoke-smeared ground, seemingly for all eternity, in a desolate city on the verge of state-sponsored bulldozing.

Set over the summer of 2008, the months before the Beijing Summer Olympics, the main action kicks off with Lang – pale, morose, shaved-headed – emerging from the wreckage of the bus in which he was first injured only to walk into town, where he returns to his childhood home. His father has finally given in to eviction and moved out to live at the town’s zoo, while a triad leader called Butcher Hu (Chinese auteur Jia Zhang-ke plays a gangster for the first time) is seeking revenge for ‘the crime’ that put Lang in prison for a decade, all of which is revealed much later in the film.

The only other buddy he makes on his return is a lanky greyhound he finds outside one of the many bombed-out shells that litter the city’s margins, doomed to demolition as part of a massive urban renewal programme that’s left much of the terrain occupied by gangs of growing pups. Guan slips a dog (or two) into almost every frame of his film, whether they’re watching from a distance by the action, strolling in the background, running through empty streets, or, in a standout stunt shot, smashing through a window.

Shot by the brilliant cinematographer Gao Weizhe in strikingly wide-frame compositions rendered grainy with dust and blanchéd with colour, Lang and his symbolic homeless dog (who never gets a proper name) are often lost in the great expanses of unpopulated city­scape and encircling desert, with sand blowing in from all sides, dogs running wild, other animals (snakes, tigers, macaques) wandering around – Mother Nature finally getting its licks in on the downtrodden dogtown settlement that no one in the rest of China is bothering to remember, while they get ready to roar their triumphs when the summer Olympics begin in August.

Lang makes up with his dad, and eventually deals with Butcher Hu – a real butcher who, for serious, specialises in local snake delicacies – but, more importantly, he takes the black dog home and gets her to stop limping. He does so at first because, panicked that the greyhound has given him the rabies, Lang wants to avoid fighting the smartest regiment of his life because he’s already pretty dumb; but then, slowly, his story with her becomes one of love at each painful, fleeting biting moment. Man and hound get to know each other. They help each other out in special ways that take care of the other.

In Hollywood, it seems like a canine-centric drama is a dime a dozen – the latest US blockbuster starring Mark Wahlberg is Arthur the King, but an international subgenre of other action-dramas and thrillers takes a more artistic and less empathetic approach to the canine. Guan’s dreamy and erotic new film belongs to the latter breed, following in the pawsteps of films to showcase at the Cannes festival in recent years, including last year’s Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning Anatomy of a Fall, where furry fear or friendship becomes a key plot point.

Black Dog may not have walked off with Cannes’ ironic Palme Dog prize for films of that ilk (it went to the French actress-director Laëtitia Dosch’s Dog on Trial), but it did win an equally well-earned Prix Un Certain Regard — no small feat in a sidebar many felt this year served up the most interesting writings of the week. That should give Guan’s latest some mojo to slip past the borders of China, where he’s already proven himself the czar of major commercial fare (The Eight Hundred grossed a jaw-dropping $460 million), but who now has shown he can make something off-kilter and, in a strange way, compelling.

Summer Camp Movie Review 4 Jun 2024, 1:49 pm

Shot at a boomers reunion, it is another outing for writer-director Castille Landon, with Eugene Levy and Dennis Haysbert also starring.

Should Hollywood want to lure older people – who have been among the most faithful friends of cinema and who patronise less than their younger counterparts these days – back to the multiplex by redoubling its attentions on the over-50 set, here’s a cipher – from the so-so to the seriously, erratically so-bad – as to what works (they cast Eugene Levy!), and more importantly, what most assuredly does not – efforts at wacky disorientation saturated in enforced thinness. Zipping here and there between strained slapstick and thoughtfully scripted tête-à-têtes, this boomer-centric reunion comedy finds a well-meaning and capable cast of septuagenarian professionals – Alan Arkin, Christopher Lloyd, Kenan Thompson, Sally Field – stranded in a mostly laugh-free zone of zip lines and trite setups.

Dialogues in the screenplay by its director, Castille Landon, often ring true but add up to nothing like momentum. Landon, whose previous films include the Katherine Heigl vehicle Fear of Rain and two of the After movies, a series of female-oriented romances, does get some things right in this story of three lifelong friends who reunite at the sleepaway camp where they first met. The friends are played by Diane Keaton (who also serves as a producer), Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard. The setting, Camp Pinnacle, is the real scenic place of the same name in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

During a flashback scène, we learn why such a trio of outcast Pinnacle day campers became interconnected in the first place: protectorate Nora (Taylor Madeline Hand), new-age pacifist Mary (Audrianna Lico) and slightly older, sexier but still wholesome Ginny (Kensington Tallman) had each other’s backs. Together, they endure the bulldog of predatory insults from Pinnacle’s bondage-bra-and-hotpants wearing social monitors, Pinnacle’s answer to The Plastics, and called the Pretty Committee in their 2018 selves by Beverly D’Angelo, Victoria Rowell and Maria Howell.

Not only does this set-up tell us who the three central women are to each other, but it also gives us the movie’s central conceit: that it could, indeed, be 50 years later, and they are, mostly, basically, their tween selves. The reunion in their old summertime lair could be sweet and stupid and sad. For amid all this busy-busy, there are little glimpses of each woman’s inner kiddo.

The trouble is, everyone here is, in no uncertain terms, one thing, and that thing needs fixing. Keaton’s widowed executive is an overworkaholic, Woodard’s married emergency-room nurse is manifestly, tellingly self-denying and overdone, and Bates’ Ginny has apparently converted her career-woman take-charge worldliness into an ostensibly self-help empire (with an aggressively smug branding, to boot: ‘Get Your Shit Together’ – a catchphrase that is, in all likelihood, going to blow back on her) that threatens to leave her just as misguidedly bossy as that vocalising massage lady.

No matter how complex the underlying thought processes, Bates and Woodard can each condense a world of nuance into a flick of the wrist, a flicker of the eyes, while Keaton’s pea-brained waffle here seems to have ossified into mere distraction, the equal of gallows humour: could this Nora be a CEO? By contrast the moments when Nora’s breath catches and her mask cracks become all the more effective because they pierce the pattern.

With a shrillily named bookings bus, her bestselling tote bag in hand, Ginny bullies Mary and Nora, who haven’t caught up with each other in years, to ‘Team Pinnacle!’ at Camp Pinnacle’s new week-long reunion, which becomes the first fundamental shift in the plot and the first of many truths. She’s the girl who ‘had fries with that’ But, oh, the other guillotine drops! A neurotic glamping-grade bunkhouse – the low-cost set design is by Scott Daniel – is the first misfit (and truth).

Dropping names and sex-toy gifties along with unwanted advice, Ginny doesn’t shrink from words, and she isn’t shy of them. ‘You seem to be hiding behind quite a few socially acceptable hashtags,’ she tells D’Angelo’s Jane — a good diagnosis not only of a narcissistically appearance-minded protagonist, but of a virtue-signalling age. Landon’s screenplay sidelines a few mock-savage swipes at self-help in general, and at sacred cows that the drama has targeted before.

But Nora’s tween hunk – the ‘whip-smart’ Stevie D (Levy) – and Mary’s – the ‘handsome as hell’ Tommy (Dennis Haysbert, who at 69 is the youngster in the central cast, even if only by a few days at the time of the movie’s release) – also appears at the party, conveniently single and sweetly reigniting those teenage passions.

There is not much for Haysbert to do here other than provide some smoothly resonant depth to his vocals and radiate good-guy radiation; he does both marvellously, especially in a scene with Woodard that might be the goofiest comic high point of the softcore sci-fi décolletage: an almost silent moment at an old-fashioned pottery wheel, the tactile connection and the awkward joy, not to mention the phallic symbolism — all nicely delineated by the cinematographer Karsten Gopinath.

And, against Nora’s neurotic dedication to proprietary technology – manifested in her pitiful urgency to ‘get it up and running again’ – Levy’s ex-corporate executive contrasts with a relatively newly adopted worldview of ‘work-life balance’. Even more so than this, the slowing, ebbing intensity of his line readings bring the film’s halting, lurching energy to a still point, a moving stillness.

Landon’s penchant for reaction-shot thrust-and-parry, in which the off-screen player can’t provide the beat, makes many sequences too on-edge to be comfortable, and too unfocused to be revealing. When the fire dies down, Summer Camp has room to breathe, room to find its heart and its mettle — in a conversation late at night between the three friends about loneliness, romance and autonomy, and in the would-be couple’s coterminous discreet heart-to-hearts. The comedy cuts, too.

As for the camp staff, sweet-sincere Josh Peck plays Jimmy, a young counsellor looking to find his purpose in life. Overseing the reunion activities is Sage, a barely-there Zelig of New Age bliss, played by a painfully game Nicole Richie, offering little zones of mellow WiFi against the full-bandwidth craziness of her woo-hooing lackey, Vick, who is played by Betsy Sodaro, evoking a mixture of Melissa McCarthy in Bridesmaids and Sam Kinison.

In between its many, many minutes of unfunny physical silly-stuff, its cartoonish disasters, and its chase-filled, crisis-filled, tension-filled plot-points that offer both maximum melodrama and minimum suspense, Tom Howe’s Chirpy-McChirpy score assures us that we will be absolutely fine. But along the way, there are yet more appealing zingers, wise-cracks and disparaging remarks from Ginny herself, and with every cutting line, including the ones she directs towards the briefly unhappy bride, Mary (and the only one on the trip with an actual treasure trove of troubles), we know that, even if she’s not always right, she must almost always be right most times. We know that because Landon has so sanitised Mary’s (remarkably uncomplicated) dilemma, making her husband such a transparently inept jerk and so flagrantly wrong for her.

And as sharp as Bates makes Ginny’s egocentrism and hauteur, she likewise nails how moving she is in exhorting women – friends and strangers alike – not to settle. To Landon’s credit, she stops short of a romantic ‘happy ending’ for this ragin’, self-made and very single woman.

After all, that’s nature’s way; it’s nature’s way to, every now and then, have sharks. But really, Summer Camp never reneges on expectations. It goes exactly where you expect it to go. And along the way, it has a couple of truly impressive gags and a bunch of stinkers. When the big inexorable food fight finally breaks out, it’s either an Animal House callback or, per the description of Stevie D, a Three Stooges situation. Either way, you might be inclined to begin following him toward the exit.

Young Woman and the Sea Movie Review 4 Jun 2024, 1:42 pm

Courtesy the Art Institute of ChicagoThe ’Star Wars’ and ‘Magpie’ actress in Joachim Ronning’s portrait of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel.

She adored the water: ‘To me the sea is like a person. A child I’ve known a long time,’ she once told reporters. ‘I never feel lonely when I’m out there.’

This unflagging determination fueled by that comfortable feeling of being at home in the water got this young German American swimmer (portrayed here by Daisy Ridley) within steps of the English Channel record despite a storm that churned up the channel and sexist notions that female swimmers were inherently less capable. When Ederle completed it in 14 hours and 31 minutes in 1926, she not only broke a world record (held by a man), she was widely credited with changing minds about the nature of female athletes. When she returned to New York, crowds threw her a parade on a scale the city had never seen before (or since). She was cheered home as ‘the Queen of the Waves’.

As with most of her pioneering counterparts, Ederle’s cinematic biography started with barriers and animosities, many of which the director Joachim Rønning treats with the right amount of respect in Young Woman and the Sea. The slender film (written by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book of the same name by Glenn Stout) follows Ederle from childish splashes around the Coney Island pier to her momentous titanic clash with the waves of the English Channel.

Rønning, who has directed more than one Disney film (including Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, both also helmed by Espen Sandberg), goes full sugary at times. A heavily string-based score by Amelia Warner acts as an emotional scorekeeper, setting us up for both triumph and woe.

There are enough shots (DP Oscar Faura) of Ridley, looking across bodies of water with awe and ferocity; hair balled at her neck, shoulders rounded, ready to dive as a reflex. There is some tug in these pieces, but the greatest emotional nuance is hemmed in by Nathanson’s by-the-numbers screenplay. The careful dramatic threads and subtext of Ederle’s life then, in Young Woman and the Sea, like Netflix’s recent Nyad, get swept up in the most literal of dramaturgies.

This record-breaking swim defied the odds — and Nathanson and Rønning are efficient in take us through Trudy’s early life. We meet the swimmer in 1914, five years old, riddled with measles. She appears on her death bed and her parents (portrayed by Kim Bodnia and Jeanette Hain), afraid they are about to lose a daughter, brace themselves. Then Trudy recovers, and promptly on the eight-year-old’sreturn to health, her mother asks her father if he will teach the daughter to swim. She needs her to learn to swim, we learn the reason, because once, she tells us, a boat full of women drowned because they couldn’t swim their way out of rough waters. Because Trudy had measles, and because of the communicable nature of the disease, she was unable to swim in public pools. She learnt to swim in the Coney Island pier where she literally learnt to swim in the rougher waters.

Real action in Young Woman and the Sea doesn’t start until Gertrude (played by Rønning, who also directed) signs Trudy and her sister, Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), up for competitive swim lessons the very first winter women are permitted. Rønning’s film revolves around the special part motherhood played in Trudy’s life, a longstanding narrative thread: mother and daughter are more similar than different, each cut from a determined cloth that doesn’t do no for an answer.

Trudy doesn’t give up even when Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford), the woman’s swim coach who goes by Eppy, won’t let her practice with the girls at first. She petitions for a chance and ends up being one of the best swimmers on the team.

Ridley’s performance as Trudy is never less than fine. She plays the character’s clumsiness and awkwardness with a degree of introversion and hesitancy that might have reminded me of the heroine of Sometimes I Think About Dying if the latter hadn’t been so busy writhing and swooning. The actress also gives an impressive performance in the water (with a lot of help from doubles), and on land.

The awards happen quickly. Trudy wins local and national competitions, and then is asked to join the US women’s Olympic swimming team in Paris. Her own visions for herself are becoming more focused. However, as Trudy thinks that she may be ready to attempt her own childhood dream and swim across the English Channel, her sister Meg retreats toward her generation’s characteristics of the time, she quits swimming, consents to marry the man she was raised to marry, and starts working at the family butchery shop.

But as much as it does, their natural rapport in person lends credence to the sibling relationship that forms the backbone of Young Woman and the Sea. Neither of them overplays it. Their characters log the most time onscreen together and they make the most of those scenes. Playing petty practical jokes on Trudy’s sour date is lovely, as is Meg helping her plan her Channel swim.

It keeps up a brisk pace, but takes a right turn for the stirring once Trudy starts her record attempt. The first attempt, to cross that choppy span, is scuttled by a snide coach (Jabez Wolffe) and the chauvinistic president of the athletic union (Glenn Fleshler). Trudy must recruit a Believer, and finds her guy in an eccentric fellow called Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham) who himself crossed the Channel in a previous version of this odyssey. Ridley seemed to me to be the expressionistálatess. Ridley on screen with Graham crackles. Their first encounter as ‘partner’ and then training buddy makes clear different levels of Trudy’s personality, and this aspect of her, the ‘balls’ that appetite needs, is evident too.

Those scenes are some of the few moments at which Young Woman and the Sea manages to be something other than a lacquered, wooden tale. The script doesn’t completely dismantle the film, not enough of them for a filmonder just how many angles a project like this could take, and how much better a version of this film could have been if the frozen feet of the screenplay didn’t encumber a person whose biggest success was her own sense of movement in the water.

Spaceman Movie Review By BigMoviesCinema 10 Apr 2024, 3:59 pm

Spaceman(3 / 5)

In director Johan Renck’s Spaceman, early on, a small girl asks Adam Sandler’s astronaut Jakub whether. Can I ask you a question?’ There is a pause. ‘Can I ask something?’ Sandler hesitates again. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘But probably not the question you want to ask.’ ‘OK,’ she says. ‘If you are the loneliest man on the planet, will you come back?’ Sandler tosses his head to the side: I… I am not alone.’ She smiles. ‘Then you’re not lonely.’ ‘No, I’ll be back in a few weeks,’ Sandler tells her. ‘And to my family.’ The hesitation in the astronaut’s reply undermines what he’s saying. Jakub is heading out to Jupiter to find out where Chopra’s particles come from. He’s light years from home. His pregnant wife, Lenka, played by Carey Mulligan, is looking forward to the day he returns, just as much as he is checking the clock down to these minutes.

Director: Johan Renck

Cast: Adam Sandler, Paul Dano, Carey Mulligan, Isabella Rossellini, Kunal Nayyar

It does not take long for Renck, the director here, to put the viewer in Jakub’s spinning spacecraft and inhabit his mental isolation, and loneliness. You expect nothing less from the man who directed Chernobyl.

So Spaceman is existential sci-fi, but an interesting aspect of the writing is that it subtly almost inverts the lonely astronaut syndrome template, by making it seem as though portions of Jakub’s delusion are depicted as reality and portions of life in the space vessel, such as the astronaut’s real attempts to go to bed, presented as memory. At some stage, a giant spider visits Jakub in the space vessel. It tells the astronaut that it comes from galaxies and light years away, in search of tranquility. Is the spider for real? If so, how on earth did it get there? Or is it an imaginary aspect of Jakub’s desolation? We never quite find out, or we certainly don’t find out soon enough to lose interest, which we aren’t.

Paul Dano narrates as the arachnid who at times opens and closes this film like an ominous, psychopathic throwback to the (sentient) supercomputer HAL 9000 in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), by using such precise diction, rooted and spare, and rich in the emotional bass register of his voice. There are moments in which Dano performs so well that it seems that the spider is nothing but Jakub’s protoplastic conscience – the source of his deepest ontological unease and the governor of his immanent hell.

Renck counter-cuts between the spider and the astronaut’s interactions with each other to Jakub’s fading memories of moments spent with his wife, blurry visions of her that emerge from the background only to vanish a moment later. Jakub’s reality in 3096 oscillates in his mind and is played out like one hallucinatory, almost unreal chapter of his life. About to be cocooned himself, Jakub aids the spider in its process of transforming the other characters of the narrative into protein. It could all be so melodramatic were it not for the way in which the cinematographer and director Jakob Ihre stage these passages, sculpting this part of the narrative like a lucid dream, in homage to Emmanuel Lubezki and Terrence Malik’s work on The Tree of Life.

In its languorous way, Spaceman gets around to telling its tale of cosmic loneliness, and of how an astronaut attempts to balance work and family without sacrificing either. But it’s not the first film to get at these stories, and isn’t even close to the closest in terms of sheer thematic complexity, with everything from Solaris to Alien to The Right Stuff to Gravity to Interstellar to the Martian and First Man playing with these questions in various ways. But Spaceman is distinctive, and one of the few such films to reverse the traditional lonely astronaut tale.

It’s adapted from Jaroslav Kalfar’s book ‘Spaceman of Bohemia’ and written by Colby Day and Mulligan and Sandler communicate their characters’ desperation and longing for one another well as the hourglass of existence around them empties into an hour glass. It’s a slow-burning sci-fi movie that takes a bit of patience during the 100 minute run time but your time and investment fully pay out.

The Gentlemen Series Review By BigMoviesCinema 10 Apr 2024, 3:54 pm

The Gentlemen(3 / 5)

In the end, his spin-off series is an enormous success. A bit too long-winded for its own good in places and too glossy for its liking, especially in its deployment of tropes, but on the whole, its clown car of characters (attached to a wealthy aristocratic family/estate in transition) would hold your attention. Guy Ritchie’s penchant for eccentricity, the oddball and the outright darkly comic is on full display, and if the filmmaking is rarely less than spot-on, few filmmakers can make a joke quite as successfully. (Were it not for Lock, Stock and Snatch, one would be listening to me say Snatch, Lock, and Stock) The spin-off would have been a miniseries with half the running time and more careful distribution of attention to the comic or enigmatic characters, as the case may be. But the lingering production remainders of those early films (such as Mad Mel’s mercenary mayhem) is unavoidable.

Creator – Guy Ritchie

Cast – Theo James, Kaya Scodelario, Daniel Ings, Giancarlo Esposito, Joely Richardson, Vinnie Jones

Streaming On – Netflix

The groundskeeper Geoff (Vinnie Jones), who seems to be an insignificant if ever-present extra, is the one person at Halstead Manor who never misses anything. His defining characteristic is his endless devotion to the Halsteads and, in that way, he is the silent repository of all the drama contained in the estate. The old duke of Halstead has just died and his will has (as Williams, the lawyer, says) ‘turned Halstead on its head’. Like all kinds of dynasties of English landed gentry in most kinds of terrible movies, the stewardship passes from father to elder son, as patriarchal as posh gets. The second son – Edward ‘Eddie’ Horniman (Theo James) – is a dapper uniform-wearer doing time abroad, and he’s come home before the old codger hits the deathtrap in question. The will decrees that he inherits the manor – and the title – rather than Fredrick ‘Freddy’ Horniman, ‘the rightful heir’ or the eldest son. Freddy is the antithesis of his brother: addicted and unhinged, which is pretty much the same as crackers. He tells Eddie – who after all the well-rehearsed dramatics regarding the will being dead wrong – that he owes about 4 million quid, which includes, pointedly, the ‘ridiculous interest’. The statuesque Helen is soon kissing Eddie for once being the man who says what she wants to hear. She introduces him – who is American, elevating his Americanness – to a woman who takes him down to the sprawling professionally manufactured barn, which is really a marijuana farm, its prosthetic c intend only to protect the lettuce from the bad weather growing happily under the tiny casual roof.

The obscene amounts of dope sprayed in gargantuan plastic tents make sense of the warehouse of wealth those acres must generate year by year. Given the significant amounts of pot money floating around his newly inherited estate, the suave, quick-tongued and statuesque-James’s Eddie, who isn’t flappable under pressure, is in trouble. His crackhead brother’s busted up situation, an eviction – the ones you don’t cover up – of an illegal business under his home, and the pushy prospective hoity-toity American buyer who has a perverse fascination with Halstead Manor – those are not open-and-shut cases. For any worth of goddamn, it seems that he’s inherited a dumpster full of madness.

Ritchie’s greatest strength lies in how well his characters are written. In such a vast sea, a few float to the surface. The first of these is Susie Glass, the boss of a very organised and money-making weed-crop crime syndicate. The inscrutable Miss Glass has a charming wickedness about her person. She will say that killing is bad for business, yet brushes off hacked-up bodies being placed at her feet, held in place by industrial-grade 3M tape. Her tongue is sharper than her scissors and her gaze is colder than arctic air. After Theo James made a valiant fight here and there, it is Kaya Scodelario who’ll steal the scene. You can never tell what you are going to get with Susie, and she’s never far from your mind. You never know what she’ll do next.

It is superb commitment to one’s craft. Another brilliant addition is John ‘The Gospel’ Dixon. This is the boss of a very religious mafia family, played devilishly by Pearce Quigley. He’s a slick-tongued elderly preacher-type gent. In true Ritchian fashion, he looks fondly on the scriptures and snuffs out the lives of those who have wronged him. When his dimwitted hothead brother, Tommy, goes missing from halstead, he makes a visit to the brothers. This exchange is one of the funniest on the show as The Gospel reads sharply from his manuscript in that high-pitched delivery, ‘urgently imploring’ the men to hold their hands in prayer (as Freddy squirms inside) while lowering himself into a deep squat, looking every bit like a prepubescent who has just squeezed out a mischievous fart.

There’s an apt shoutout to Giancarlo Esposito, every bit the gun-toting man, as the uber-rich Yank who wants to buy Halstead with the express motive of expanding his Entire methamphetamine operations on the estate’s acres and connections. Bobby Glass (Ray Winstone) is meant to be the real puppetmaster but we do not see much of his scheming in real-time. In that motley, peculiar cast of characters, there’s Chucky, a black Pakistani-British money launderer who is Susie’s under-boss and whose latest great idea involves Mexican Corn dogs. In the role, Guz Khan is riotously funny.

But for all that, some of these characters, mentioned above, remain too much in the wings of the tale; the black comedy, in its patches, is kept in check by too much of the ‘posh’. The affect of aristocracy and money and privilege on the great unwashed who are thrust into contact with them, the cool talk/manner these first-class carriers of such baggage is accustomed to speak in, all that’s fine in dribs and drabs but too much of it gives you ennui, these takes on the British gentry, and fast. Films by writers with an ear for dialogue are of too few since the great Jimmy McGovern left off since the late 1980s. I wish there had been more work for either or both of the following actors, Vinnie Jones and Joely Richardson as, respectively, Lady Sabrina Horniman (bringing some welcome touch and class to proceedings). She shoots not only a mean game of snooker as well as lining pockets with ease; both these under-employed actors are much glummed-up here.

When cabbage does get slung, the shoot better be from the bow of a cannon, not a peashooter. A few, quite touching moments seem lost when one is giving attention to shenanigans, but I enjoyed them all just the same, for example, the relationship that unravels between Lady Horniman (thankfully, here she is not Webster’s simpering wife), and Geoff, this former bruiser (played by Johnny Harris) and Susie’s, in the rare moments you’ll spot it, dropping of her working-class guard referring to her boxing-mishap of a brother; not to forget Eddie’s, unwavering allegiance to his older, reprobate brother (and brother-in-law in addition), too.

All roads lead to Halstead Manor, the eye of the storm Here’s a film about a lot of stuff, and The Gentlemen casts a lot of people on people whom Eddie (played, hilariously, by Charlie Hunnam) would rather not be getting acquainted. On top of the aforementioned criminal aristocrat, there are high-rollers galore, from high-flying London gang bosses, to flashy wheeler-dealer types, to dumb-ass street thugs. Interwoven into this mix are blackmail, bros who do a ‘chicken dance’ for porn, creepy money guys, a promising young boxer, criminally powerful fight promoters, high-end auto thieves, and gypsy travellers always eager to initiate a free fist fight. It’s a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s a bit too long. It’s a bit too convoluted. But, for the most part, it’s a workmanlike affair.

The First Omen Review By BigMoviesCinema 10 Apr 2024, 3:47 pm

The First Omen(3 / 5)

In setting the prequel to The Omen (1976) in Rome, as the debut director Arkasha Stevenson has done, you can better show why an antichrist is ‘ altering into a hotbed of anti-clericalism in government.

An American (who has previously worked in the New York Police Force and is called Margaret Daino, but is referred to by others as Nell Tiger Free) comes to work at an orphanage in Rome, and to take vows of nunhood, even as her piety leads her to question some of the orphanage’s most worrisome practices (keeping some smitten-with-evil students in lockbye) – whose extreme nature is fully exposed by her compassion for one such student. Like Conner, Daino finds herself privy to the diabolical machinations of the Church. And, while it is clear (to us) that she will fail in her quest to stop evil – on its way to The Omen and its sequels – the second half of Arkasha’s The First Omen focuses only on the unavailing attempts of kind people to stay the inevitable.

Possibly its ace in the hole, and that of its debutant director Tim Smith and screenwriters Keith Thomas, is making you root for the murder of Damien, even if you’ve seen the original movie and know what happens. The first half has plenty of that deconstruction of the hypocritical behaviour of priests and nuns but there’s little of The Omen beyond a few throwaway references. This worked for me because finally we understood why they behaved the way they did and they weren’t doing it for no good reason.

This piece of social commentary anchors the film to the world it was made in, but the need for distinction between faith for heavenly rewards versus faith for worldly dominance is both timeless and timely. As the film winds up, it intersects with Richard Donner’s The Omen as Daino passes out at seeing the demon’s hand emerge from a woman giving birth in the orphanage.

Tiger Free acts the house down (especially when voicing self-doubt); Sister Silvia, played by a repentant-looking Sonia Braga who seems saintly and sweet, is almost as menacing at her most simpering, when she acts as though everything is fine and that Daino just might be a bit weird. Ralph Ineson tackles the part of Father Brennan originally played so successfully by Patrick Troughton.

It’s where The First Omen stumbles most, in contrast to the 1976 film, which did it so well. The Omen world was big. A birthday party goes horribly wrong, some animals start acting strange in a zoo, a photographer sees something is off in his photos, the kid throws a fit in the Church, a bunch of deranged dogs are loose in the graveyard — all of this helps to create a slow and steady build of horror that does not feature in The First Omen. Most of the drama takes place in the orphanage.

And the low tally of scares ensures that the forces of light make a nigh-cinch run of their more or less routine business. ‘Where are the masters of the universe who vowed to invade the planet to root out the benighted infidels and leave no one alive?’ we mutter when there isn’t a lot of villainy on the screen.

Then again, thankfully since things start to go downhill with the narration, the chasers do catch up with the chased, yet somehow things are back on track as we appear to be witness to the fleeing of the sheep, that is, the good ones. Damien’s birth staging in the bottom left corner of the scene is rushed, as he is being ‘birthed’ from a surrogate mother (but nevertheless is a huge clincher, and the gore that follows is disturbing) − and next we have the classic ‘Ave Satani’ background music by Jerry Goldsmith with a short dedication to Gregory Peck and Lee Remick.

Thankfully, the film concludes on a hopeful note that suggests more transformations to come. While a few missteps mar it, Stevenson gets the critics’ points wrong in large part while getting others – the casting, notably, and not extending the Superman connection too obviously, or even as far as witnesses might ideally like – right, and generally takes the characters’ powerlessness to the audience with supreme effectiveness.

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire Movie Review By BigMoviesCinema 10 Apr 2024, 3:40 pm

Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire Movie (2.5 / 5)

All of the joys and delights and embracing goofiness of a Kaiju film have been there, but that’s been undone by the human drama. You’re used to how stories work – so we don’t complain when the picture cuts away from Godzilla glowing-red with rage and radiation, to puny little humans talking about their feelings or whatever. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire magnifies the genre’s great weakness by turning the giant monsters as human as their human characters, and in so doing – adding such goofiness – makes the whole thing kind of enjoyable. What we get instead of this ecstatic experience of giant, alien beasts, of these forces of nature towering over all of humanity, and bowing all of Earth with every stride, is an action movie full of gigantic circus-trained animals. The one monster hero who feels like a monster is Godzilla – he is inevitable – Godzilla is our favourite radioactive Kaiju and he has been reduced to a lengthy cameo appearance, where he has almost nothing to do until the climax swings into gear.

Director: Adam Wingard

Cast: Rebecca Hall, Brian Tyree Henry, Dan Stevens

In the opening stretches, she sees Kong doing its daily grind: moping unhappily through its new domain like an unemployed bachelor, getting its teeth pulled, hunting for sustenance only to stumble into its cave a few minutes later and slump back down. The anthropomorphising is punched up even harder when a mini-Kong is introduced and the father-and-son dynamic between Kirby’s Kong and his new son is explored through charmingly cheesy scenes. Yet, in those initial moments, before the final-act of logic-smashing bullshit is unleashed, Kong pouts and she yearns for it to find other members of its species. And there’s also the Iwi girl Jia (played by Tian Jing), who missed her home in Hawaii and became a misfit within her new home at the Monarch base, living with her adopted mom (played by Rebecca Hall); those two characters’ yearnings are then mirrored in each other in a smart writing choice, and everything is then double-ruined because the film has decide to over-explicate that arc with gushing expository dialogue that’s as stupefyingly simplistic as everything else in the screenplay. Even when the camera veers away to keep the frame visually interesting, the characters have to ‘say’ something to us and it is always an info-dump of exposition laid on as thick as treacle. It’s frustrating not because the dumbing down condescends but because it’s the arrogance to think that their story is complicated enough that our stupid heads would need to be spoon-fed in such a strained manner. These are standard blockbuster sci-fi/fantasy concerns, sure, but a film’s MOST irredeemable aspect needs to be addressed here: Dan Stevens’ Trapper. No one in Glibert’s all-star cast is less bearable than Stevens – his Titan-veterinarian hippie bearman stereotype (who is also a streamer, but played by Brian Tyree Henry, not Stevens himself!) is instantly hateable because he’s so over-characterised and the film tries too hard to make him ‘cool’. Rock music! Fly skils! Chill vibes! Lez flirt with female lead! Air drum! They’ve done it all and, on every beat, we cross our fingers that some Hollow Earth creature will bite that smug perfume model’s head off in a jump-scare. It never does.

With all these problems you wondered what made the filmmakers believe that all these awful decisions were necessary. Perhaps they thought that if the Titan fights were sufficiently over-the-top then the audience was so enthused about the creature-vs-monster battles that goodish writing didn’t matter, so decided to go easy on themselves. If that’s the case, then the numbers balance out, it seemed, because a movie with gratuitously lavish brawls between the Titans is just what we came for. It would be a serious complaint if the film had sold us something less than we came for. Godzilla vs Kong gave us much more than we came for but a full-on WWE-style zero-gravity fight between two teams of Kaiju is a spectacular pay-off indeed. The last act of Godzilla vs Kong really turned on the Kaiju dial, but no sense of dread lingers by this point. Bruce Banner isn’t turning into the Hulk when Kong swells up to 125ft by ingesting nuclear sludge. That scene might have been forlorn in any film not about giant monsters. Expectations are low. Instead of menace, we get something unabashedly Titan-y versus Titan-y. The Monsterverse has embraced the silliness of its franchise at last, but has gone too far in doing so.

It is of course best watched with a few mates who all share a certain critical understanding of what is actually AWESOME about watching a giant gorilla suplex a giant lizard the height of a skyscraper, and then, like, two scenes later, man-thrust their metal arms together like Arnie and Carl Weathers in Predator, straight into a larger scale shroomstomp to get to… the REAL meat of the movie: the portion I went to be FORCED to endure plot and human characters in order to get to the ludicrous action set pieces. If that poem doesn’t do it for you, then I highly recommend the novel Gattaca.

Heart of the Hunter Movie Review By BigMoviesCinema 10 Apr 2024, 3:35 pm

Heart of the Hunter(3 / 5)

Based on a novel by Deon Meyer, who also co-wrote its screenplay (alongside Willem Grobler), it’s not a bad little action thriller – especially for an embattled South African political climate that teeters between corruption and conspiracy. The premise is hardly novel: nor is the plot armouring of the known political thriller devils – no one can be trusted; the assassination attempt, no matter how successful, can’t actually remove the target because those in need of elimination would rather get their claws onto him than see him exposed or assassinated; insidious elements are deliberately turning a regrettably imperfect state even more imperfect; and there remains an unwashed populace fit only to suffer the sins of their misguided leaders and stumble blindly into the cooling cauldron of their own, one-pot justice. It’s not exactly original, and only mildly original in execution. But where Heart of the Matter does deliver is on the true-to-life performances of its cast, with roles tailored well, and performed better. The lead, Bonko Khoza (Zuko), has an inherent simmering lurking behind his eyes. He was a hired assassin sent to dispatch bad choices for leadership of South Africa’s new democracy and, finding a conscience as a hitman, has walked away from the fun and into the unceremonious preglobalised grey drear of a thin Afrikaans metro bruised by years of South African political slapstick. He has a wife, a home, a stepson, and earns his bread at a five-star bike dealership. Living clean can’t make one escape chequered pasts,umbent president absent on tour, it’s a good time for his pals to want to persuade him to furlough his paternal instincts and continue offering the rest of the country a kind of serial atonement for whatever left his soul raw and steely. To get rid of the one presidential hopeful guaranteed a winidant puts it, ‘a man with sociopathic rampage rattling in his soul like a death’s head intend on possessing our nation’. There’s a change to Zuko’s eyes, constant but chute-like narrow; one moment, he’s biking across the karoo to escape manhunting Hounds of Hell and the next chatting up his stepson about farming.

Director – Mandla Dube

Cast: Bonko Khoza, Connie Ferguson, Tim Theron, Nicole Fortuin, Masasa Mbangeni, Sisanda Henna, Peter Butler, Deon Coetzee

Streaming On – Netflix

The main villain, Mtima (Sisanda Henna), is hardly a fleshed-out character at all – he’s a stereotype all the way. And there can be only one suspect: the writing. Here, making him the sort of person he is (rather than his being a representation of entitlement/corruption) would have been a better course. Nothing says that such a being doesn’t exist in the South African set-up (the truth is that such a beast exists in any political set-up) but, for pity’s sake, show us what made him this way in the first place? All we’re given is his riding the beast. Eating, drinking and being merry at the Government’s expense; using the country’s state security agency as a private, personal amnesty for him and his family; bugging political opponents so that he can indict them on trumped-up charges. OK, I know that you want him to appear evil; that’s a necessity. So why do you have to be cliché about it? The film would have benefited from drawings on several of its existing characters: Johnny Klein (Peter Butler), Mtima’s former rival, as well as Nicole Fortuin’s (Mpho Skeef) and Deon Coetzee’s (Deon Lotz). The former’s relationship with Zuko is neither explained nor examined; ditto the latter (once a media maverick, a stand-out journalist) because his past story is never told. Here is some of what is lost to us in the chases, action sequences and assumed ‘knowledge’ when we are told but not shown.

While the script is sometimes ponderous and misjudges the occasion a few times too many, the performances – particularly of some of the ancillary staff – are uniformly strong and hold it together. It’s not just Zuko, although he is a torrent of male posturing, but Johnny Klein, Naledi (Nicole Fortuin) and Mike Bressler (Deon Coetzee) in particular who all deserve our full attention. Too much of what happens before the story reaches its inevitable resolution threatens to tarnish the sheen of these performances. And yet for all its flaws, Heart of the Hunter repays the viewer for all that it tries to say in its opinionated analysis of South Africa’s current politics, which cannot extricate itself entirely from the shadow of its Apartheid past. ‘You are an enemy,’ Zuko tells Mtima. ‘You kill the people like you used to kill our ancestors. When they were white men.