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Non-Review Review: Denial

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Darren

Denial is a vitally important story, albeit one told in a rather unimpressive manner.

Denial documents the libel case that David Irving took against Deborah Lipstadt upon the publication of her book Denying the Holocaust. In that book, Lipstadt accused Irving of being a Holocaust denier. Irving took offense at this, and attempted to sue her in the British courts. Under British law, the onus was placed on Lipstadt to prove that she was correct in her assessment. Essentially, the court case put the Holocaust itself on trial and served to interrogate the idea of objective truth in a postmodern age.

Suits you, sir.

Obviously, Denial feels a lot more relevant now than it would have two years ago. In fact, it feels more relevant now than it did two months ago. Or two weeks. This is big weighty subject matter, dealing with an important issue in a very sensitive and delicate manner. It is in many the perfect focus for a prestige awards-season film. However, the problem is that film itself feels rather flat. Denial often feels like a made-for-television movie, clumsy and forced. It is a film aware of its own importance, but lacking its identity.

Denial feels very much like a missed opportunity.

Lecture notes.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Denial, film, Movie, non-review review, review | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: T2 Trainspotting

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Darren

“Nostalgia,” Sick Boy scoffs. “You’re a tourist in your own childhood.”

It is no surprise that Trainspotting 2 is saturated with nostalgia. It is, after all, a long-delayed sequel to a beloved nineties classic, a prestige picture counterpart to Jurassic World or Independence Day: Resurgence. Despite its fine pedigree, Trainspotting 2 is subject to the same basic questions. Is this really necessary? Does the original require a sequel? Can this film be judged on its own terms? Why now? Is there anything more to the film than cynical nostalgia?

An impressive pool of talent.

After all, one can never go home again. Any true sequel to Trainspotting would not be a film directed by Danny Boyle, featuring these characters or carrying this branding. Part of the appeal of Trainspotting was its gritty youthful aesthetic, the product of a young film-maker and a young cast with everything to prove against all odds. This is fundamentally at odds with approaching the original as a venerate relic and building a worshipful sequel around it. That is the central tension of Trainspotting 2.

This is also a key strength of Trainspotting 2. At its strongest, Trainspotting 2 is more a movie about the trap of nostalgia and the dangers of its sweet allure than a sequel to the adventures of four heroin addicts in nineties Edinburgh. Still, Trainspotting 2 is trapped in the gravity of its younger and angrier self. Trainspotting was a young man’s film, all manic energy and desperation and iconoclasm. Trainspotting 2 is a middle-aged man’s film, affectionate and soft in the middle. Its desperation is quieter and less endearing.

Projecting?

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Movie, non-review review, review, trainspotting, trainspotting 2 | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: xXx iIi – The Return of Xander Cage

Posted on January 19, 2017 by Darren

Perhaps the most endearing aspect of xXx iIi: The Return of Xander Cage is how absurd the movie feels, on just about every level.

xXx iIi is the third in a trilogy of films that launched in 2002. xXx is highly unlikely to rank as anybody’s favourite Vin Diesel film, sitting somewhere below The Fast and the Furious and Pitch Black on the “viable Vin Diesel movie franchises” scale. The movie was very much part of that turn-of-the-millennium attempt to craft an American answer to the highly successful James Bond franchise, and as such had arguably been rendered redundant by The Bourne Identity two months before it was released.

Quite Cagey on the matter.

In fact, xXx was such an underwhelming Vin Diesel vehicle that the performer did not return for the sequel three years later. In xXx II: State of the Union, the extreme sports daredevil was replaced by a veteran marine played by Ice Cube. As such, it seems strange that the third film in the trilogy should be released fifteen years after the original and more than a decade following the only sequel starring a substitute lead. It is very hard to argue that the world was crying out for a xXx sequel promising the return of a low-tier Vin Diesel persona.

In its best moments, xXx iIi actively embraces that absurdity and swivels into the insanity. There are points at which xXx iIi ultimately collapses under its own ridiculousness, as it struggles to fill the gaps between admirably over the top set pieces with terrible dialogue delivered by a fairly weak cast. However, there are also moments when xXx iIi works much better than it should, if only because it recognises the absurdity of its own existence and just runs with it.

It’s good to be back.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Movie, non-review review, review, Vin Diesel, xander cage, xxx, xxx 3 | 3 Comments »

La La Land and Nostalgia’s End

Posted on January 13, 2017 by Darren

One of the enduring criticisms of La La Land is the extent to which it indulges in nostalgia.

This is true of both the film and its characters. The opening scene proudly declares that the movie has been filmed in “Cinemascope”, with the landscape heavily saturated with bright colours that evoke classic Hollywood musicals even before a final showstopping number that evokes everything from An American in Paris to 7th Heaven. In this day and age, producing any big budget musical would feel like an act of nostalgia, but La La Land is a love letter to a genre that has fallen even further to the wayside than the western.

Even the characters inhabiting the film’s world are defined by nostalgia. This is most obvious with Sebastian, a jazz nerd who desperately wants to construct a loving shrine to the artform as he loves it. “It’s dying,” he urges Mia. “It’s withering on the vine.” Sebastian laments the conversion of a cultural landmark into a “samba and tapas” restaurant. However, Mia is implied to be just as nostalgic. Her room is decorated with classic Hollywood memorabilia. When she finishes a rendition of her one-woman show, she asks Sebastian, “Is it too nostalgic?”

This sense of nostalgia has become an obvious line of attack against La La Land, particularly once it emerged as a Best Picture frontrunner. This is the way that things work; the same accusations were leveled at films like The Artist and Argo, to pick two recent examples. However, these criticisms miss one of the more compelling and nuanced aspects of La La Land‘s nostalgia. The film clearly pines for a lost past, wistfully remembering a world that no longer exists. However, it also accepts that loss. Unlike most exercises in nostalgia, La La Land understands that things can have value because they end.

Note: This post contains spoilers for La La Land, including a discussion of the film’s ending. Go see it. Then come back.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: endings, film, la la land, nostalgia, review, transcience | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Live by Night

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Darren

Live by Night is a film with big ideas. Writer, director, producer and star Ben Affleck is very clearly attempting to use the classic gangster film as a commentary upon the American Dream. This is hardly a novel idea, but it still resonates as powerfully as it did during the pulp era of the thirties and forties. Working from a novel by Dennis Lehane, Affleck crafts a story about violence and power that is clearly intended to resonate with modern audiences looking to understand fundamental aspects of the American identity.

And there are moments when Live by Night really works. Affleck is a solid writer and a performer who can skilfully channel that old-school Hollywood charm, but he has proven himself a very impressive director. Live by Night is occasionally a beautiful film, as the camera pans across the wilderness of the Florida everglades or spins around a room during a tense dialogue scene or even just captures the lead character on the shore with the reflection of the sky framed so perfectly that it seems like he is standing upon the edge of heaven itself.

Speaking easy.

However, these moments are assembled in a haphazard fashion around a disjointed plot. Live by Night plays like a stream of consciousness attempting to delve into the symbolic heart of the United States, tossing out crazy ideas like a turf war between Prohibition gangsters and the Ku Klux Klan or arbitrarily drawing long-absent characters back into the narrative with little foreshadowing. Live by Night seems to navigate by night, prone to storytelling detours and narrative cul de sacs that undercut (rather than enrich) its thematic intent.

Live by Night is built like an epic, but its script lacks the discipline and structure to justify an impressive running time. Affleck is a strong enough director that the film never collapses, even as it stumbles. There is a sense that the writer and director is having a great deal of fun playing with a very archetypal set of iconography and themes, and that fun is occasionally contagious. However, Live by Night never truly comes alive in the way that it promises.

Sea changes.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: ben affleck, film, live by night, Movie, non-review review, review | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Manchester by the Sea

Posted on January 10, 2017 by Darren

What is most effective and affecting about Manchester by the Sea is what is not said.

It seems a strange thing to note of an Oscar-caliber drama, but one of the most striking aspect of Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by Sea is the sound design. Sound carries repeatedly in the film. A recurring motif of Manchester by the Sea is the thinness of the walls, as characters eavesdrop on one another and overhear conversations in adjoining rooms and spaces. However, it is more than that. When the characters retreat into silence, the world almost seems to swallow them whole.

“If Colin Farrell thinks he’s stealing my Best Actor trophy, he’s got another thing coming.”

As one character discusses funeral arrangements on the phone, other characters prepare breakfast around him; the sound of the bowl hitting the table, of the rice crackling in the milk, of the chair scraping off the ground, of the spoon hitting teeth. Attending the funeral, the eulogies are drowned out by the dull recurring buzz of a mobile phone on vibrate. When another character walks by a graveyard, he picks up a stick so that he might strum it against a fence to generate some ambient noise.

Sound designer Jacob Ribocoff does amazing work in bringing the environment to life around the film’s central characters. Manchester by the Sea is light on dialogue, with Casey Affleck conveying an incredible array of emotions through a carefully restrained performance. Affleck’s performance is not perfect, but one that exists in harmony with the sounds around him. Manchester by the Sea is not just a film that breaths. It is a film that sings in its own unique way.

Brother’s keeper.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, manchester by the sea, non-review review, review | 7 Comments »

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Season 5 (Review)

Posted on January 6, 2017 by Darren

The fifth season of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is one of the best twenty-odd-episode seasons of television in the history of the medium.

Naturally, some episodes are stronger than others. There are a couple of duds to be found in the twenty-six episodes that make up the broadcast season. This is true of any season that runs for over twenty episodes; the reality of television production means that not every episode can be perfect and that some will inevitably be terrible. This is one of the nicer things about shifts to shorter television seasons; while it means fewer episodes in a given year, it also allows the production team more consistency.

So the fifth season has episodes that do not work, to nobody’s surprise. The fourth season had Shattered Mirror and The Muse. The third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation had The Price and Ménage à Troi. The third season of The X-Files had The Blessing Way and Teso Dos Bichos. The second season of Millennium had Sense and Antisense and Siren. These are all great seasons of television, diminished in no way by their failures. The fifth season gets its failures out of the way early, with The Assignment and Let He Who Is Without Sin…

However, the fifth season of Deep Space Nine works so well because it has a very strong sense of internal consistency. As with the fourth season before it, there is a clear sense of where this production team wants to take the series. More than that, there is a very strong sense of harmony to the season. While each of the individual members of the writing staff have their own strengths and interests, they are all working together in pursuit of a common goal. Everybody writing for Deep Space Nine is on the same page as to what the show is about.

The result is a season that marches very effectively and very coherently towards a logical and organic end point. A Call to Arms is perhaps the most radical cliffhanger in the history of the Star Trek franchise, sending Gene Roddenberry’s utopia into a two-season-long war while evicting the primary cast from the title location for more than just a single episode. It is to the credit of everybody working on the season that this finale is at once a gripping and subversive addition to the franchise mythology and a perfectly reasonable conclusion to the season.

The fifth season of Deep Space Nine ranks as a spectacular accomplishment.

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Filed under: Deep Space Nine, Movies | Tagged: star trek, star trek: deep space nine | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Assassin’s Creed

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Darren

“What the f%$k is going on?” asks Michael Fassbender about halfway through the film.

It is not the first time that Cal Lynch has asked this question. Earlier on, the character wondered out loud “what’s happening?” after waking up following his state-sanctioned execution and being hooked up to a gigantic robotic claw that yanking him into the air mid-sentence. The audience is probably asking the same questions as Assassin’s Creed bounces across time and space with mountains of exposition (occasionally helpfully subtitled) about rival societies conspiring to find an artefact that can harness (and eliminate) mankind’s free will.

The Fass and the Furious.

To be fair, incoherence is not the real problem with this disjointed video game adaptation. In fact, there is a certain weird charm to watching the amazing cast and the game director react to the crazed concepts that they have been dealt. For the first hour or so, the sheer weirdness of the film proves compelling, drawing in audience members willing to resist the tonal whiplash and laboured exposition as the film rockets along. What ultimately kills Assassin’s Creed is not its lack of sense, but the stubborn insistence that it must make sense.

Assassin’s Creed would be a stronger film were it willing to revel in its incoherence instead of trying to impose order upon it. The gonzo plotting and zany high concepts give the film a strange texture, but the problems do not really kick in until Assassin’s Creed starts awkwardly and painfully trying to construct a rational framework around this bizarre cavalcade. The result is to wed a visually hyper-kinetic and tonally unruly film to an incredibly tired generic plot that winds transforming the film into a plodding mess.

He’s so hot right now.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: assassin's creed, film, justin kurzel, Michael Fassbender, Movie, non-review review, review | 8 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Passengers

Posted on December 19, 2016 by Darren

Passengers is a super creepy tale of male entitlement.

The movie has an intriguing science-fiction premise. On a sleeper ship intended to ferry passengers to the colony world of Homestead II, a freak accident awakens James Preston. The only problem is that Preston awoke far too early. Preston awoke approximately thirty years into a one-hundred-and-twenty-year voyage. The engineer is now destined to spend the rest of his life as the only waking inhabitant of a gigantic city ship, living and dying completely alone. It is a horrifying thought.

“We need a little space.”

There are suggestions of a powerful science-fiction epic to be found in the film. Jim finds his every physical need has been anticipated. He can live a life of material luxury. He will never want for food or space or activity. He effectively has a gigantic space craft all to himself. And therein lies the rub. Feeling almost like a sadistic episode of The Twilight Zone, Jim grapples with the question of what he will or will not do in order to end his loneliness. In his desperation, Jim makes a horrifying (if entirely understandable) decision.

The biggest problem with Passengers is that it strains too hard to make that decision palatable instead of terrifying. It is a super creepy tale of male entitlement that brushes aside any of this issues in favour of a much more conventional action romance.

Peace in a pod.

Note: Very minor spoilers for Passengers follow. If you know the cast list, you can probably deduce where the movie is going from the opening ten minutes.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: chris pratt, film, Jennifer Lawrence, male entitlement, Movie, non-review review, passengers, review | 11 Comments »

The Dark Knight Rises (and Falls) in 2016

Posted on December 15, 2016 by Darren

As it draws to a close, there has been considerable reflection on the fact that 2016 has been a very “strange” year.

Of course, “strange” is perhaps a polite way of phrasing that sentiment. “Harrowing” might be another. “Depressing” could also fit. The year has been physically and emotionally draining for virtually everyone. It was the year that audiences around the world bid farewell to talents as diverse as David Bowie, Prince and Leonard Cohen. When it was determined that December 2016 would receive a “leap second”, it felt almost like an insult. Why should 2016 last one second longer than it absolutely has to? (Not that 2017 promises to be better.)

The hole in things.

However, the biggest shocks of 2016 were political. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump shook the world to its core, and not just because the pollsters somehow failed to predict them. Those public votes were seen as stern rejections of liberalism and progressivism, of an angry and disenfranchised class striking back at what had been seen a disconnected and aloof elite. It was presented as a strike back against the establishment, against vested interests, an expression of rage – whether racial or economic.

Some of the best films of the year helped to capture that sense of anxiety and resentment. The Hateful Eight suggested that perhaps the United States had never reconciled itself following the end of the Civil War and perhaps it never would. Green Room suggested that there was still a primitive savagery lurking just off the main roads, nestled snugly in the heart of the country. The Girl With All the Gifts dared to suggest that those who reacted with panic and fear to change were likely to find themselves consumed by it.

Everything falls apart.

However, the movie that most successfully embodied 2016 was not released in 2016. It was released four years earlier. That film was Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, the conclusion to his groundbreaking Batman trilogy of films. Batman Begins had been released in 2005, and its meditations on fear made for a potent superhero story in the midst of the War on Terror. The Dark Knight was released in 2008, and seemed the perfect film to close out the Bush era. It was even described as “the first great post-Sept. 11 film.”

In some respects, The Dark Knight Rises was lost on its initial release. It seemed rather out of place, with audiences unsure how best to read the film. It was not the sequel that anybody had been expecting. Indeed, it seems fair to observe that it was not the sequel that Christopher Nolan would have been expecting as he worked on The Dark Knight. That had been a crime epic with political undertones. The Dark Knight Rises was a revolutionary epic and war movie, an odd combination for a film released in 2012. And yet it feels perfectly in step with 2016.