Month: March 2019

Us

Rated: MA15+Us

Directed by: Jordan Peele

Written by: Jordan Peele

Produced by: Jordan Peele, Sean McKittrick, Jason Blum, Ian Cooper

Starring: Lupita Nyong’o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Anna Diop, Evan Alex, Shahadi Wright Joseph, Madison Curry, Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon.

‘What do you want?’ asks Adelaide Wilson (Lupita Nyong’o) of her shadow.

‘What do we want?!’ her reflection, Red replies.

Us is a film of many layers, the use of reflection, of Adelaide talking to herself reflected in a glass window; shadows tethered to bodies, while waving across the sand: ‘Once upon a time, a girl was born with a shadow…’ introduce the folklore of the doppelgänger to create the fear of self as an everyday American family meet their Other selves, while vacationing at their summer beach house in Santa Cruz.

It’s a strange setting for a horror-thriller – going to the beach as a family of husband, Gabe (Winston Duke), wife, Adelaide, daughter, Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) and son, Jason (Evan Alex); meeting friends, hanging out on lounges, drinking, well husband and wife, the Tylers’ (Elisabeth Moss, Tim Heidecker) drinking while their two teenage daughters Becca and Lindsey (Cali Sheldon, Noelle Sheldon) play in the sand.

And that odd play of normality, just off kilter, sets the tone of the film.

Us is different to what I expected.

I thought I was walking into creeps and super-scary, but for me, I found the film thought-provoking, and sure, suspenseful, lightened by this incredibly dark satire.

Director, writer and producer Jordan Peele states, “Horror and comedy are both great ways of exposing how we feel about things…  The comedy that emerges from a tense moment or scene in a horror film is necessary for cleaning the emotional palate, to release the tension.  It gives your audience an opportunity to emotionally catch up and get prepared for the next run of terror.”

I wholeheartedly agree there’s a close link between horror and humour.  There’s a fine line between the two, tapping into an old part of our brain that can react with fear or laughter, if the moment misses the mark – I’m not afraid of the dark, ha-ha.  To tap into this reaction and include a character like husband Gabe bases the film in normality, because that’s the way people behave: tissue up a bloody nostril, and statement, ‘almost looks like some kind of fucked-up art instalment,’ included.

Winston Duke really nailed the character, Gabe and I appreciated this layer of bizarre humour to lighten the strange – as Jorden states above, to, ‘clean the palate’.

Jordan has managed to tie the normality of the family priority: money, cars, competition in the face of brut survival – like reacting to threat with violence being the most normal thing in today’s world.   Never forgetting how cool it is to own a boat.

The story hangs on this story of a family, of a mother still traumatised by an incident in her past, back in 1986 when she gets lost as a little girl in a Fun Park, where she meets her Other.  And vacationing back in the place of that first incident creates a domino effect of coincidence, until, her family meets…  Hers.

But there can only be one self.  That’s where the horror comes in, with some good blood and guts – yet the film’s not really about the doppelgänger, it’s more about what the doppelgänger represents: evil, the shadow, the end of times:

The verse from Jeramiah 11:11 also a running theme through-out the film:

There thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto me, I will not hearken unto them.

So, did I like the movie?

Honestly, Us wasn’t as scary as I thought it was going to be.

Yet, the careful handling of timing and layering of complicated ideas and story made a unique viewing experience.  And I kept giggling – strangely, the humour was what affected me the most – while also thinking about the comment made about the ones we’ve abandoned far below the tunnels of ourselves.

Five Feet Apart

Rated: MFive Feet Apart

Directed by: Justin Baldoni

Written by: Justin Baldoni & Tobias Iaconis

Produced by: Cathy Shulman, Justin Baldoni

Starring: Haley Lu Richardson, Cole Sprouse, Moises Arias, Kimberly Hébert Gregory, Paraminder Nagra, Claire Forlani.

Based on the fact people suffering from cystic fibrosis can’t touch each other because of risk of contamination, transference of bacteria; infection, Five Feet Apart is a romance between two teens: cute-as-a-button Stella (Haley Lu Richardson), who deals with her illness by controlling everything in her environment; and rebel, Will (Cole Sprouse) who now carries the bacteria strain Burkholderia cepacia, or B. cepacia for short, making any chance of lung transplant impossible.

Added to a bleak future, the bacteria’s easily transferred by casual contact, so the CF sufferers must stay six feet apart.

You’ll find out why the film’s named Five Feet Apart if you decide to expose yourself, not to the bacteria, but a film made specifically to make you cry, using every trick in the book.

Writer and director Justin Baldoni came up with the idea of this romance while shooting his 2012 series My Last Days.

While filming an episode about CF he met Claire Wineland, “One day I asked Claire if she’d ever dated anybody with CF. Claire kind of looked at me like I was stupid.

She said, ‘of course not’

And I said, ‘wait, why not?’

That’s when she explained that people living with CF can’t get closer than six feet because they could pass on dangerous bacteria to people with CF.

Once she said that, I had so many reactions,” he recalls.

Five Feet Apart is set in a hospital following CF sufferers while they contemplate their mortality.  Even with a lung transplant, the shelf-life of the new lungs are five years, while waiting to die, drowning in their own secretions.

Walking into this film, I wondered if I was going to get sucky, cheesy, teary or romantic.  None of these options was particularly appealing.

And I have to say the film is all the above.

My God, people were sobbing in the cinema.

I personally couldn’t wait until it was over.

If you like a romance, then the idea of lovers falling for each other but unable to touch is a potent idea.

Forbidden fruit and all that.

And the character, Poe (Moises Arias), Stella’s best gay buddy coming out with statements about Stella’s anal-retentive behaviour helped lighten the film, a bit: ‘I know you Stella, organising a med cart is like foreplay’.

And Cole Sprouse as Will is dreamy – even with nasal tubing.

But the whole film is riddled with slow motion takes with the underlying cheesy soundtrack.

I know I know, Brian Tyler is a very famous composer (of over 70 films including Avengers: Age of Ultron, Furious 7, Iron Man 3, and Thor: The Dark World and recently Crazy Rich Asians featuring a big band jazz and romantic string score that was voted to the 2019 Oscar shortlist for Best Score…!); but it felt so contrived, to me…

Just to re-cap: Teens, sick in hospital, fall in love, but if they kiss, they will die.  All set to that teen romance music – sobbing with tubing inserted and attached to a ventilator included.

Destroyer

Rated: MA 15+Destroyer

Directed by: Karyn Kusama

Written by: Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi

Produced by: Fred Berger p.g.a. Phil Hay p.g.a. Matt Manfredi p.g.a.

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Tatiana Maslany, Jade Pettyjohn, Scoot Mcnairy, Bradley Whitford, Toby Kebbell and Sebastian Stan.

A watery pair of blue eyes flicker and open, their colour washed out by the blazing sunshine. After what appears to be a night of heavy drinking slept off in the car, hungover and burnt out LAPD detective Erin Bell lumbers along to a crime scene. An anonymous victim lying in a drain bears the markings of a gang affiliation and with a dye stained note on his body. To Bell, this is a warning. Her long time arch nemesis, Silas (Toby Kebbell), is back and Bell will stop at nothing to track him down.

Whether we are introduced to him propped up at some bar or nursing a shotgun on the front porch, we can be pretty sure that a grizzled loner will somehow be redeemed by the end of the film. Things are more complicated when a female takes on this traditionally male role.

While many of the overseas reviewers have hailed Kidman’s role as a bravura performance, an almost equal number have described her character as a ‘demon-haunted’, ‘zombie,’ ‘crypt keeper’s bff,’ and ‘luxuriating in the flames of a personal hell’. At issue is the use of wigs and makeup, with many of the critics claiming the props overwhelmed the role and the Bell’s disintegration could have been more convincingly portrayed through acting. So, with the controversy in full swing, I was very curious to find out which side I would take.

One of the reasons for the differing views, is the way the film crosses genres, with some reading it as a cops and robbers thriller, others perceiving a horror movie slant, while Bell’s relationship with her estranged sixteen year old daughter Shelby (Jade Pettyjohn) lends a dramatic overtone.

Initially, the horror stems from unacknowledged trauma, when Bell as an undercover rookie was forced to watch on while a gang member is bullied into putting a loaded gun to his temple and made to pull the trigger. It is a seminal moment. If a life can be taken away as the mere setup for a joke, the change is profound. The future disappears.

For Bell, the trauma from that earlier life has been deeply etched into her being and any hope for herself abandoned long ago. That is until her fury is reawakened by Silas’s re-emergence. As she pursues her quarry through the fierce sunlight and blinding shadows of L.A’s seedier parts, Bell’s self-imposed mission takes on a more surreal and nightmarish cast, and the feeling is amplified by the parallel timeline that entwines the past and present. It is a montage of sensation, not unlike consciousness, and it creates a sense that we are viewing Bell’s quest through the unforgiving prism of her own interior reality.

Compounding Bell’s desperation, Shelby has been caught in the thrall of a charismatic but treacherous small-time thug, and seems hellbent on obliterating her own future as efficiently as possible. Even if Bell were prepared to forego redemption for her own sake (which she is not), nothing will stop her fighting for her daughter.

In her role as lone vigilante, Bell pulls out all the stops, at times breath-takingly so, and Kidman turns on an equally intense performance.  Whether she has taken a step too far into ‘hellmonster’ territory is up to you, but for me a ‘hellmonster’ is exactly what’s needed.

Fighting With My Family

Rated: MFighting With My Family

Directed and Written by: Stephen Merchant

Produced by: Kevin Misher, Michael J. Luisi

Starring: Dwayne Johnson (The Rock), Florence Pugh, Jack Lowden, Nick Frost, Lena Headey, Vince Vaughn.

Based on the 2012 documentary, The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family (directed by: Max Fisher), Fighting with My Family is a dramatization about WWE professional wrestling diva, Paige and her rise to fame.

From Norwich (the mustard capital of England) to the sunny shores of Florida, we follow the wrestling obsessed Bevis family as siblings Zak (Zodiac) and Saraya (AKA Paige, named after her favourite Charmed character) try-out for training for a SmackDown at The O2 Arena.

There’s the tough as nuts Brit humour – ‘dick me til I’m dead and bury me pregnant’ – from the wrestling-mad family; the mum Julia (Lena Headey) coming out with lines like, ‘his legs bend both ways – you should see his dick’.  And Nick Frost cast as Rick the dad (who spent eight years in prison, ‘mostly for violence’) is brilliantly cast.

It’s the sibling rivalry that adds drama to the film, with brother Zac (Jack Lowden) wanting to make it to the WWE arena just as bad as his sister, Saraya (Florence Pugh).

Or, as it goes, Saraya has to prove she wants it just as much as him; and well, anybody.

It’s a cheering the underdog kinda movie – dog included – that goes hard on the humour to start, including some gems from The Rock himself (Dwayne Johnson).

Seeing Dwayne circle back to his origins here, showing that, fight until you win, drama gave me an appreciation of the sport.

It’s not fake; it’s fixed.

Trainer Hutch Morgan (Vince Vaughn – always good in a trainer role!) has to harden the want-to-be professional wrestlers so they can take the pain and winding and 60 quid if you’ll take a bowling-ball-to-the-balls action.

Then there are those dramatic moments like the advice of: Be the First You; the timing of these moments well-placed, well-stated, and really, very sweet.

The sport is shown as escapism, making sense of the outsiders who embrace it.

And I related, feeling warm and fuzzy because the characters are so down-to-earth.  I like escaping too.

Paige went on to open-up the sport – being the youngest female wrestler to succeed.  Because of Paige, the sport now shows more coverage of female wrestlers.

And the fun of the story made a surprisingly entertaining film.

I kept bursting with laughter at the obvious crude humour, but there’s also the ticklish like a literal hammer on the end of a long pole made by kids because they’re bored: hilarious.

Not a wrestling fan, I did not expect to enjoy this film as much as I did.  But Fighting With My Family is well worth a watch.

Everybody Knows (Todos Lo Saben)

Rated: MEverybody Knows

Directed and Written by: Asghar Farhadi

Sound: Daniel Fontrodona, Gabriel Gutiérrez, Bruno Tarrière

Composer: Javier Limón

Produced by: Alexandre Mallet-Guy and Álvaro Longoria

Starring: Javier Bardem, Penélope Cruz, Ricardo Darín, Carla Campra.

Even as it delves deeply into the convoluted ties of love that bind a family and a community, and the underlying tensions roiling beneath the surface, this film is above all a taut psychological drama and an exquisite slow burn mystery.

‘Laura is a woman with a secret, and suddenly she finds herself faced with a crisis,’ says Penelope Cruz of her character.

Laura has returned to a small village in her native Spain to attend her sister’s nuptials, bringing with her Diego, her young  son, and Irene (Carla Campra), her beautiful but wild sixteen year old daughter, while her husband remains in Buenos Aires to attend to business. Before their car even reaches its destination, Irene sets the village boys agog and she is soon hooning around the countryside on a trail bike with a smitten local boy in tow. Laura’s extended family is a jovial, rumbustious and permissive clan, at once completely modern but with an abiding sense of its long history and changing fortunes.

When Irene falls asleep in the middle of the wedding festivities it is initially put down to the effects of jetlag and mischief, since she has been sneaking cigarettes and illicit sips of wine all evening. It is only when Laura finally turns in for the night that she discovers that Irene’s bed is empty. In her daughter’s place is an ominous pile of newspaper clippings about a long ago abduction where the lifeless body of the victim was pulled from a well.

One of the criticisms often levelled at mysteries and thrillers is that character development is sacrificed at the expense of plot. Not in this case. According to screenwriting lore, the deep truths at the heart of a character are only revealed under duress, and here the pressure is tremendous as the moral dilemmas multiply and the thumbscrews tighten.

Fifteen years on from the time Iranian director Asghar Farhadi originally conceived the idea, Everybody Knows has been lovingly produced. The subtitles are effortless to read and the sound design subtly underpins the drama. As Laura and her former lover Paco (Javier Bardem) set out in an unseasonal downpour to search for the missing girl, the wipers in Paco’s four wheel drive beat a heavy tattoo echoing the thrumming rain and the collective heartbeat of occupants.

The cinematography and mise-en-scène have also been skilfully designed, with the outer landscape closely mirroring the inner. Lush greens and the golden hues of early summer give way to autumn’s stubble and dust, while the graceful sandstone buildings of the plaza cede to the crumbling ruins that dot the surrounding countryside. Paco in particular is closely identified with the land through his cherished vineyard, and his transformation over the course of the ordeal is remarkable. Indeed, the entire cast have turned in compelling performances.

While this film is a beautifully nuanced portrait of characters under extraordinary pressure, it is also a tightly scripted mystery, where the boisterous and joyful wedding party gradually comes to learn that the perpetrators must be from among them: ‘Watch everyone you know, carefully.’

The Sisters Brothers

Rated: MA15+The Sisters Brothers

Directed and Created by: Jacques Audiard

Based on the Book Written by: Patrick DeWitt

Screenplay Written by: Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain

Produced by: Alison Dickey, Michael De Luca, Pascal Caucheteux, Michel Merkt, Megan Ellison, Gregoire Sorlat, John C. Reilly

Starring: John C. Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rutget Hauer, Carol Kane, Rebecca Root.

Set in America, circa 1851, guns-for-hire, The Sisters brothers, Eli (John C. Reilly) and Charlie Sisters (Joaquin Phoenix) work on the request of The Commodore (Rutger Hauer).

The brothers are sent to rob, track and kill – if necessary, or if it’s just easier – Riz Ahmed (Hermann Kermit Warm).  A man who has created a formula to find gold.

The killing doesn’t seem to be personal with the Sisters brothers.  For the brothers, it’s just life.

But Riz believes life is worth examining; and a life worth examining, is a life worth writing about.

We see Riz hurl his hat at a chicken, to see the bird captured underneath.  All the while observed by another tracker, the subtle John Morris (Jake Gyllenhaal) hired to find the chemist and keep him in place until the Sisters arrive – a bit like the chicken under the hat, l guess.

Morris also thinks about life.

When tracker Morris and the chemist, Riz meet, it’s like a meeting of the minds.

But as is the nature of this film, there’s duplicity; the lying to one’s self to not be afflicted by gold fever but to want to create a better society by panning for gold.

That’s what Riz writes about.  He wants to create a better society.

And because he’s found a formula that separates gold from water, a chemistry that makes the gold glow, the Sisters brothers have been sent to find him.

The use of light is the common threat used by director Jacques Audiard to piece one scene to the other, one thought to the next; from the light reflected from stolen pearls hanging from a saddle bag to the sun reflected off a snowy mountain.

There’s nothing electric here, only fire light, candle light, sunlight. Yet the film doesn’t dwell on being set in the 1800s. This is more a story of character.

Based on the book written by Patrick DeWitt, we get this intricate thread of people just being who they are: killers, brothers, chemists, intellects.  The truth of each character is revealed by circumstance; to convey the subtleties that show a killer to be too nice for a whore, for a drunk to have ambition, a philosopher to have greed.

There’s so much to think about with this film, I’m still unpacking as I’m writing.

We get moments captured in fevered dreams; the nightmares that cry out, the one crying out only to laugh at the helping hand to lighten the idea of safety as the brothers sleep at night, hand on revolver.

It’s incredibly subtle, the quiet touch behind the powerful performances made it feel like no performance at all.

I was particularly impressed with John C. Reilly as Eli Sisters.  There’s something genuinely adorable about this guy.

To have layers peeled back from this character, Eli, was the drive behind this intricate film.

Superficially, this is a Western, a classic tale of two bad guys going after the man who’s found the secret to finding gold.  But underneath all the killing and gold fever is a delicate tale of humanity.

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