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Jameson Cult Film Club: Lethal Weapon

Posted on May 26, 2015 by Darren

Watching a film with an audience really into it is a joyous experience.

For all that cinema is a social activity that takes place in a dark room with everybody staring in the same direction, there is a lot to be said about the communal nature of the activity. Bringing together a theatre full of people to celebrate a classic film is always a worthwhile activity. A lot of the films chosen by the Jameson Cult Film Club are familiar to audience members, but there is something to be said about actually experiencing a movie like Lethal Weapon with a room full of like-minded people.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: cinema, film, jameson, jameson cult film club, lethal weapon, Mel Gibson, Movies, Shane Black | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Tomorrowland

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Darren

Tomorrowland encapsulates a number of recurring themes in American mainstream science-fiction,

In many respects, it harks to sixties utopianism. Tomorrowland positions itself as a spiritual companion piece to films like Star Trek or X-Men: First Class or Interstellar. Although most of the film is set in the present day, its retro futurism is firmly anchored fifty years in the past. An early flashback takes place in the 1964 World’s Fair. Space flight is explicitly described as the “new frontier”, recalling Kennedy’s famous speech. Tomorrowland is absolutely fascinated with the idea of organised space flight as a beacon calling mankind forward.

Field of dreams…

It almost seems like, to paraphrase George W. Bush, “The future was better yesterday.” There is a paradoxical nostalgia to Tomorrowland, which feels like a desperate plea for the modern generation to abandon their own visions of the future and embrace those of their predecessors. It is a fascinating conflict at the heart of the film, and not necessarily one that writer Brad Bird and Damon Lindelof comfortably resolve. There are aspects of Tomorrowland that do feel distinctly uncomfortable and contradictory.

At the same time, it feels like a genuine and heartfelt criticism of the tendency towards the apocalyptic in mainstream fiction – an impassioned and aggressive urge to embrace a more hopeful and optimistic future. Tomorrowland has its heart in the right place, but it occasionally gets a little lost.

Going against the grain…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: ayn rand, Brad Bird, film, Movie, Movies, non-review review, objectivism, review, the incredibles, tomorrowland | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Mad Max – Fury Road

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Darren

Mad Max: Fury Road is a live action cartoon in the best possible sense.

It is a movie that seems like an incredible gamble. Warner Brothers essentially gave director George miller $150m and let him loose in the Namib Desert to make a belated follow-up to his cult Mad Max trilogy. There is precious little sanitation here, no sense of order. It seems like Mad Max: Fury Road was never screened in front of focus groups, as if Miller never really received any studio notes that weren’t ringing endorsements or encouragement. Mad Max: Fury Road would be a strange film under any circumstances, but it’s a particularly strange summer blockbuster.

Just deserts…

But it works.

Mad Max: Fury Road is gloriously gonzo, an extended two-hour car chase across a desert wasteland where it seems like dialogue is a commodity as scarce as oil or water. The script is surprisingly light on exposition, trusting the audience to pick up everything that it needs from descriptive nouns like “the Bullet Farmer” or “the People Eater.” The film makes no real nods towards conventional popcorn film-making, but is all the more effective for it. It is a movie that is utterly unashamed of its pulpy sensibilities, offering a live action post-apocalyptic Wacky Races.

Front and centre…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: charlize theron, film, furiosa, george miller, mad max, mad max: fury road, Movie, non-review review, review, tom hardy | 15 Comments »

Millennium – The Curse of Frank Black (Review)

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Darren

This May and June, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the fifth season of The X-Files and the second season of Millennium.

The Curse of Frank Black is a phenomenal piece of television, and an episode that demonstrates the raw potential of the approach that Glen Morgan and James Wong have adopted towards Millennium, making the show feel (simultaneously and paradoxically) more intimate and more epic. It is a show about the end of the world, but where the end of the world can be conveyed through the late night wandering of an old man on Halloween. It is a superb piece of work on just about every level.

The Curse of Frank Black is, in a many ways, the perfect encapsulation of many of the themes and ideas that Morgan and Wong have played with over the years. It is constructed in the style of a classic horror film, but is driven by character. As with Scully in Beyond the Sea, Mulder in One Breath, and McQueen in The Angriest Angel, Frank Black finds himself facing an existential crisis at the darkest moment of his life. What will Frank do when faced with the most horrific of possibilities?

What does anybody do when they are confronted with the end of their world? Morgan and Wong are fond of putting their characters through the metaphorical crucible, seeing what happens when the foundations are eroded and the support framework is taken away. The Curse of Frank Black suggests that there are only two possible options when the world falls to pieces: either you stand safely on your side of the line and watch it happen, or you pick up a bucket of water and start cleaning up.

It is a simple choice, an elegant metaphor, and it sits at the heart of The Curse of Frank Black.

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Filed under: Millennium | Tagged: apocalypse, curse of frank black, film, frank black, Glen Morgan, halloween, haunted, James Wong, Lance Henriksen, millennium, nightmare, Satan, Television, the curse of frank black, x-files | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Good Lie

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Darren

The Good Lie works very well.

Margaret Nagle’s script was inspired by the “lost boys” who escaped the Sudanese Civil War. These displaced refugees found themselves scattered. Some walked hundreds of miles to neighbouring countries like Ethiopia or Kenya. Some travelled even further, emigrating to countries like the United States. The Good Lie is a fascinating exploration of the lives of four such immigrants who arrive in their new home in the year 2000, finding themselves struggling to adapt to life in America. It is a subject that could easily seem exploitative or maudlin.

Packing light…

It would be easy to turn The Good Lie into a heavy-handed meditation on human suffering as explored through the eyes of these four immigrants. The poster for The Good Lie allots considerable space to actress Reese Witherspoon, and it would be easy to write the story as told from the perspective of the American characters who interact with these new arrivals. It is to the credit of Nagle’s script that The Good Lie never allows its focus to shift, that it is never distracted by the more prominent American cast members.

The Good Lie is perhaps a little bit too broad in its humour at points, and its structure occasionally feels a little contrived. However, there is a lot of warmth and affection underpinning the script, with the sense of humour helping to relieve what could easily descend into an overly solemn drama.

Leaving on a jet plane…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, films, Movies, non-review review, Reese Witherspoon, review, Sudan, the good lie | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Avengers – Age of Ultron

Posted on April 17, 2015 by Darren

Avengers: Age of Ultron is a hot mess.

It is fun, witty and fast-moving. However, it is also disjointed, uneven and awkward. Age of Ultron is a big and bombastic summer blockbuster, but it feels like Marvel learned very little from The Avengers. Rather than simply taking what worked in the first film, it often seems like Age of Ultron doubles down on every part of its predecessor. There’s more action, there’s higher stakes, there’s bigger conflict, there’s more Tony, there’s even less of an idea what to do with Thor, there’s more continuity.

“Hey, at least I beat the Terminator prequel to cinemas, right?”

“More” seems to the be the word here. Age of Ultron is bigger than its predecessor in just about every way. The film boasts an ensemble so large that it threatens to collapse under its own weight – a fact perhaps wryly acknowledged by the genocidal robot’s evil plan at the climax. While it is nice to have more diversity in the cast – The Avengers are no longer a bunch of white guys and their token female colleague – it does seem like Age of Ultron strains and groans under all that Joss Whedon and Marvel heap upon it.

Bigger is not always better.

You know, “pull Thor’s hammer” is probably not a family friendly party game…

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: avengers, captain america, comic book movies, comic books, disney, film, iron man, joss whedon, marvel, Marvel Studios, Movie, non-review review, review, tony stark, ultron | 11 Comments »

Daredevil – Rabbit in a Snowstorm (Review)

Posted on April 15, 2015 by Darren

To celebrate the launch of Marvel’s Daredevil and the release of Avengers: Age of Ultron, we are reviewing all thirteen episodes of the first season of Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil. Check back daily for the latest review.

One of the more interesting aspects of Daredevil is the way that it wears its influences so confidently on its sleeve. As if aware that the stock comparison for the show will be Batman Begins, the series goes out of its way to hit a number of key points from that particular film – introducing its masked vigilante during an atmospheric attack at a dockland smuggling operation, stopping the import of superweapon into the city by a secret society of ninjas. The show returns to the work of Frank Miller time and time again, knowing that he is the defining Daredevil writer.

In terms of televisual influences, it feels like producer Steven DeKnight was heavily influenced by a lot of prestigious contemporary drama. In particular, Rabbit in a Snowstorm features sequences that feel like they might have been lifted from Breaking Bad and The Wire. This makes a certain amount of sense; those are two very well-respected shows that lend themselves to “binge” watching of (relatively) short seasons. Netflix has even found great success as a distributor of Breaking Bad in Europe. There are worse influences for Daredevil.

To be fair to Daredevil, the show never loses sight of itself. This is a superhero story about a masked vigilante who cleans up Hell’s Kitchen and comes face-to-face with honest-to-goodness ninjas and other possibly supernatural events. Nuance and subtlety have their place, but Daredevil arguably works best when it revels in its theatricality – grand sweeping statements, bold imagery, heightened drama. For all that Rabbit in a Snowstorm tries to expand and ground the world of Daredevil, it is marked by two acts of over-the-top violence at the open and close of the hour.

At the same time, this underscores the biggest problem with Rabbit in a Snowstorm. Daredevil is not a show that lends itself to the same sort of aesthetic as The Wire, and some of the attempts to ground the show feel clumsy and awkward; the show works best when it is big and bold and operatic, stumbling a bit when it tries to present a grounded real-world setting.

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Filed under: Television | Tagged: ben urich, daredevil, film, matt murdock, rabbit in a snowstorm, Television, the wire, wilson fisk | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Boychoir

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2015.

Boychoir hits just about every emotional note that you would expect it to.

Of course, it hits those notes in ways that feel incredibly contrived and emotionally manipulative. Director François Girard and writer Ben Ripley are incredibly cynical in how they choose to resonate with the audience. The script and the direction for Boychoir is advanced with an almost ruthless pragmatism, a pragmatism that is not afraid to kill of relatives to generate tragedy and which is willing to gloss over any real or tangible emotional reactions to get the film to the point that is most coldly calculated to affect the viewer.

Boychoir very much goes through the motions for a film like this. It is a coming of age story set inside a highly competitive environment, juxtaposing a rather working class protagonist with those who have enjoyed privilege from a very young age. It is the story Stet Tate, a young boy who finds himself joining the National Boychoir; who quickly and inevitably discovers that his voice is a rare gift, and discovering exactly where that gift can take him and what it will teach him along the way.

Boychoir is a competent execution of a bunch of familiar tropes, albeit one that never strives for loftier goals. It is sappy and manipulative, but – given it aims to be sappy and manipulative – it is hard to treat that as a scathing criticism.

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

Non-Review Review: Lost River

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2015.

There is a good film buried somewhere in Lost River.

Unfortunately, it is probably buried as deep as the community that give the movie its name.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, jdiff, lost river, moview, non-review review, review, Ryan Gosling | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: The Canal

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Darren

This film was seen as part of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival 2015.

Ghosts are all around us.

As the opening scene of The Canal quite clearly states, the deceased endure long after their passing. Whether as images captured on camera or stories repeated in hushed tones, the dead haunt us. What are ghosts but the voices of history reaching out to the individual like some nightmare lodged deep in the collective unconscious? The “stone tape” theory of paranormal activity suggests that horrific events leave their mark, a blood stain that won’t wash out. What if that stain is psychological? What if ghosts are nothing but tales that echo in the darkness?

It is not an entirely original concept, to be fair. The idea of ghosts that exist as stories (or as media) is quite an old idea. In fact, one particular jump scare in The Canal owes quite a specific debt to Ringu, the iconic Japanese horror story about a ghost trapped inside a haunted video cassette. That scene is not the only parallel; The Canal centres itself upon a man working at the National Archives who finds himself processing old footage. No sooner has he discovered the gory details of a brutal murder in his home than it seems that those same ghosts come to life.

The Canal hits a few speed bumps in its final act, but – for most of its runtime – the film is a thoroughly compelling modern day ghost story. Writer and director Ivan Kavanagh wears his cinematic homages on his sleeve, drawing quite openly from directors like Roeg or Kubrick. The Canal is an unsettling and fascinating Irish horror film.