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Non-Review Review: Angry Birds

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Darren

The Angry Birds Movie is an enjoyable animation experience.

Adapted from the famous touch-screen game, a favourite of phone users everywhere, The Angry Birds Movie has a fairly thin premise that can successfully distilled into its two-word title. Set on an island populated by flightless birds, the film follows the adventures of the series’ distinctive red character as he struggles to contain his rage and anger in a culture built around peace and harmony. The plot, such as it is, is driven by first contact between the feathered inhabitants and the mysterious green-skinned visitors from “the world of the pigs.”

All fired up.

Video game adaptations can be tricky, particularly when it comes to adapting a video game that lacks a strong internal narrative. After all, very few players could claim to be emotionally invested in the skilful (and joyful) application of physics that made the original game so popular. Trying to construct a world around the stylistic affectations of a plotless video game can lead to all manner of convoluted nonsense; one need only look at Street Fighter or Super Mario Brothers to see the dangers of adapting a plotless video game.

The strength of The Angry Birds Movie is in how the films luxuriates in its plotlessness, embracing the arbitrary nature of its internal logic. The Angry Birds Movie is more concerned with being witty and energetic than in being cohesive or making sense. Given that it is a movie about cartoon birds propelling themselves like missiles towards a group of egg-snatching pigs that manages be both charming and funny, it seems like the prudent choice.

Bite-sized fun.

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Non-Review Review: Everybody Wants Some!!

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Darren

Richard Linklater is a director fascinated by the time in between.

This seems like a very obvious statement. After all, Linklater is still (relatively) fresh from a slew of nominations for Boyhood, a film that was famous for being shot with the same cast over the course of years and allowing the audience to literally watch its central character grow and develop. Many critics argued that the film was nothing more than a gimmick, a piece of performance art more than a narrative. Of course, the gimmick was largely the point of the film. Linklater is a director fascinated with the passage of time; Boyhood pushes that to the limit.

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Of course, it is also interesting what Linklater does with his sense of time. Many of Linklater’s films unfold against the backdrop of a deadline. Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and Before Midnight build their deadlines into the title. Dazed and Confused follows a bunch of students on the last day of school. Everybody Wants Some!! operates with a literal countdown the ticks from the moment that Jake arrives at his college dorm to the start of his college classes. In theory, the film runs up against the clock.

However, Linklater’s deadlines tend to be arbitrary. His films are never race-to-the-finish thrillers as one might expect. Rarely are those precious few hours and minutes filled with important life-changing decisions and profound conversations. Instead, they are filled with a celebratory glimpse of the mundane, more extraordinary for their ordinariness. If anything, they feel like collective pauses; they are a deep breath before jumping back into life, a moment taken out of time, the last few hours before the clock really starts ticking.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: everybody wants some, film, Movie, non-review review, review | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Silent Storm

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Darren

The Silent Storm is an ironic title for this over-produced melodrama.

The Silent Storm is a story about an abusive marriage and an unlikely affair that blossoms on an abandoned Scottish island when a trouble young man is assigned to the care of a fire-and-brimstone minister and the minister’s housekeeper-slash-wife. Inevitably tension mount and passions flair as the three characters dance around each other, with nothing but the craggy cliffs and choral soundtrack to keep them company. For an empty island abandoned to the forces of modernity, there’s a pretty loud choir to keep our three primary characters company.

Let us prey…

There is an appeal to this sort of dour character study. Writer and director Corinna McFarlane has cast two great actors in the lead roles of her first narrative feature; Damien Lewis and Andrea Riseborough are perfectly suited to this depressive melodrama, as a couple trapped in a repressive and abusive marriage with simmering tensions. The problem is the McFarlane never pitches the film at the right level. For a harrowing story of abuse and violence, the film frequently trips into self-parody.

Part of the fault rests with Lewis and Riseborough, who turn their performances up to eleven to match the production around them. However, a lot of the blame falls to McFarlane, who is utterly unwilling to let any moment stand on its own without pushing the theme or the mood to breaking point. The result is a film that struggles to find the right tone and so occasionally feels like a postmodern ironic deconstruction of the genre into which it is trying to fit.

Passion project…

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Non-Review Review: Friend Request

Posted on April 19, 2016 by Darren

Friend Request does not work.

There is a great horror film to be made about the internet age. After all, the best horror has always reflected the time around it. The witch hunts of the fifties paved the way for The Invasion of the Body Snatchers, while the AIDs panic of the eighties gave way to body horrors like The Fly or The Thing. There is undoubtedly a classic horror waiting to be made about the perils of online life and the strange connections that form through computer monitors. Unfortunately, Friend Request is not it.

“I CAN HAZ FRIEND?”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Alycia Jasmin Debnam-Carey, facebook, film, friend request, Movie, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Man Who Knew Infinity

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Darren

It takes a lot of skill to make mathematics seem beautiful. It is enough work to render those complex equations that mash together numbers and greek letters as something profound and understandable to contemporary audiences. After all, maths is static at best. When it comes to the kind of mathematical genius that inspires these sorts of biographies, the math tends towards the abstract. When The Man Who Knew Infinity works best, it manages to capture just some of the romance trapped between those braces.

Of course, there are points at which The Man Who Knew Infinity threatens to get too romantic. Writer and director Matthew Brown has an obvious (and infectious) enthusiasm for his subject, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The Man Who Knew Infinity works best when it expresses this affection through its leads. Jeremy Irons makes a surprisingly convincing evangelist for abstract mathematics, and Dev Patel offers utter conviction in the lead role. However, there are points at which Brown seems unwilling or unable to trust his actors or his audience.

What a nice fellow…

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Non-Review: Eye in the Sky

Posted on April 4, 2016 by Darren

Eye in the Sky is a powerful contemporary morality play.

Eye in the Sky feels a lot like an old-style “television play.” It recalls the sorts of stories from the period when television was trying figure out its relationship between film and stage. The action unfolds in a number of relatively confined locations with a relatively modest cast. This cast is then presented with a moral dilemma, which the script spends most of its one-hundred-minute runtime carefully twisting and unpacking. Even today, it is not too difficult to imagine an event “live” broadcast on a smaller broadcaster working from the same premise.

Mirr(en)ed in doubt…

That is not to suggest that Eye in the Sky is cheap or uncinematic. Director Gavin Hood imbues the story with a lush cinematic style that feels a lot bigger than the moral drama playing out between the characters. Hood gives Eye in the Sky a sense of scale and heft that belies any formal similarities of classic television productions. At times, Hood is a little too cinematic, the hand of the director feeling a little too heavy in a morality play that takes great pains to be even-handed and complex.

However, these moments are fleeting; the film’s power lingers longer.

Eye see all…

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Non-Review Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Darren

10 Cloverfield Lane is a beautiful piece of speculative paranoid horror.

The plot follows Michelle, a young woman who is involved in a car crash. She wakes up to find herself in a strange concrete bunker, under the care of the mysterious (and more-than-slightly sinister) Howard. As she comes to her senses, Howard advises her that something horrible has happened; the world has ended outside and they are sealed safely inside an air-tight self-sustaining bunker. However, Michelle has a healthy degree of skepticism about Howard’s claims, wondering what exactly is going on and just how trustworthy Howard actually is.

At home at the end of the world.
Maybe.

To reveal any more would be to spoil the film. 10 Cloverfield Lane is very much a “mystery box” production, in keeping with various other JJ Abrams projects from Cloverfield to Super 8 to Star Trek Into Darkness. Although Abrams is not directing, 10 Cloverfield Lane retains a lot of the director’s aesthetic. It is a film that is designed to be seen with the bare minimum of information, to the point where the unveiling of the movie’s title came surprisingly late in the release process.

However, writers Drew Goddard and Daniel Casey (working from a story by Matthew Stuecken and Josh Campbell) and director Dan Trachtenberg use that mystery box structure in a manner distinct from Abrams’ blockbuster sensibilities. 10 Cloverfield Lane plays like a feature-length high-budget episode of The Twilight Zone, a story that looks and sounds great but would (mostly) lend itself to a stage play adaptation. 10 Cloverfield Lane feels very much like a classic high-concept science-fiction horror, in the best possible way.

Music to his ears…

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Non-Review Review: Divergent – Allegiant

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Darren

In terms of dystopian young adult science-fiction/fantasy franchises, Divergent is solidly mid-tier. It is in technical and production terms superior to The Maze Runner, but markedly inferior to The Hunger Games. It lacks the sort of spectacular camp that made The Mortal Instruments stand out, for better or worse. It is a reasonable execution of a fairly reliable (although also heavily problematic) central concept, but without anything that really elevates it above its competitors.

Allegiant is the first part of a two-part finalé to the series, as has become the norm for these types of films. However, it all feels rather rote. Allegiant does not feel like the first part of a two-parter, instead feeling like its own story that could support a sequel but alternatively would be a perfectly fine place to wrap up if the studio decide to all it a day. The fact that it is the first of a two-part adaptation of a source material feels like a decision that was made because that is just how you adapt young adult franchises at this point in time.

Hate to burst your bubble…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: allegiant, Divergent, film, jeff daniels, Miles Teller, Movie, non-review review, review, Shailene Woodley | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Midnight Special

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Darren

Midnight Special is a lot of things.

It is a meditation on faith. It is a road movie. It is an indie superhero movie. It is a Spielbergian science-fiction adventure. It is a coming of age tale. It is a film fundamentally about awe and wonder. It is a spectacle that nevertheless remains firmly rooted in the ground even as it looks upwards. It is a tribute to the “lay lines” that serve to tie the United States together, from the dark country roads to the shady motels. Midnight Special is a lot of things, and it is very good at being all those things.

However, Midnight Special is fundamentally a movie about parenting. It is a movie about the unquestioning hope that a parent might be responsible for something that is ultimately more than they were.

Son rising.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, jeff nichols, Michael Shannon, midnight special, non-review review, review | 5 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Posted on February 29, 2016 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Audi Dublin International Film Festival 2016.

It can be difficult to balance tone when setting a comedy inside a warzone.

That difficulty only increases when setting that comedy in the aftermath of the United States invasion of Afghanistan. America’s military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan remains a defining moment in twenty-first century history; although the Obama administration might have worked hard to reduce commitment to the region, the conflicts remain divisive and controversial. As such, setting a comedy drama against the backdrop of the Afghan conflict is a dicey proposition.

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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot struggles to pitch itself at the right tone, unsure whether it is an absurdist comedy about the excesses of modern war or a character study of what it must be like to live in such an environment or whether it is a more mature reflection on life during wartime. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot tries to have the best of all possible world, which leaves the film bouncing between extremes. There are moments of irreverent irony followed by earnest sincerity. The movie alternates between bitter cynicism and saccharine optimism.

The result is a movie that feels uneven and unfocused, tonally lost and wildly variable. And not in a way that reflects the conflict unfolding in the background.

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