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Non-Review Review: Big Game

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Darren

Big Game is a rather unlikely combination. Jalmari Helander’s comedy action movie plays as a cocktail of Airforce One and E.T., a coming of age film blended with a old-fashioned action adventure film. It is a combination that works surprisingly well, allowing Big Game to be both playful and charming. Big Game feels like an homage to classic eighties and nineties cinema – the emotional beats are broad, the action is absurd, the irony is layered on pretty heavy. Big Game is always wry and self-aware, but never quite breaks character.

It is a potent mixture, and one that manages to hold itself together remarkably well across the film’s ninety-minute runtime. Big Game never takes itself too seriously, providing a light and exciting action adventure treat.

“I’m king… er… leader of the free world!”

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: action, big game, comedy, coming of age, e.t., finland, machismo, masculinity, Movie, non-review review, potus, president, review, samuel l. jackson, violence | 2 Comments »

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 »

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: Pressure

Posted on March 28, 2015 by Darren

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

Trapping a bunch of people in a claustrophobic location under time pressure is really the key to instant drama.

It is a well-proven strategy that has been used so often because it works. It is a great vehicle for high-stakes tension, but also for tough interpersonal drama. If you pack people close enough together under just the right amount of strain, it is a great way to reveal and inform character. It leads to conflict, which is generally quite entertaining to watch. If you can harness that tension and that conflict, it is fairly easy to get the audience to go along with the rest of the film.

Pressure is a quintessential “bunch of people trapped in a tight space waiting to die” film. Four divers venture down to repair an oil pipeline, only for disaster to strike. The four characters find themselves trapped alone at the bottom of the ocean, with no real chance of survival. Tough decisions have to be made, and characters are thrown into conflict with one another as the air runs low and the power runs out. There are moments when Pressure really works as a claustrophobic thriller.

Unfortunately, there are just as many moments when Pressure doesn’t work. The film seems intent on pulling the audience out of the harrowing situation – whether through quick flashbacks or nightmare sequences that undercut the claustrophobic tension of the rest of the film. Despite the best efforts of the cast, the characters feel stilted and stock – spouting cliché dialogue and coming in the form of broad archetypes. The scripting is similarly haphazard, particularly in the somewhat contrived third act.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Danny Huston, diving, film, matthew goode, Movie, non-review review, pressure, review | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: Force Majeure

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Darren

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

A blackly comic interrogation of modern masculinity, written and directed by Ruben Östlund, Force Majeure documents a family holiday that goes horribly and spectacularly wrong.

Following a nuclear family on their five-day ski holiday, Force Majeure examines the consequences of a fateful decision by the family patriarch. Dining on a restaurant on the upper levels of the resort, the family witness a controlled avalanche that quickly seems more and more uncontrolled. As a sea of white washes over the restaurant, Ebba tries to shield her children – while Tomas grabs his phone and his gloves and runs for cover, abandoning his wife and children to the elements.

This sounds pretty bleak. However, Östlund shrewdly decides to play it as black comedy. He uses Tomas’ pretty spectacular failing as a jumping-off point into a number of delightfully uncomfortable sequences that manage to be both squirm-inducingly awkward and laugh-out-loud funny. For all the epic scale suggested by the movie’s one-line synopsis, Force Majeure is a rather more intimate piece of work. Two separate meltdowns over dinners with two different couples are arguably more catastrophic than any force of nature unleashed over the course of the narrative.

Force Majeure is a triumph, a stunning examination of a marriage under pressure.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, force majeure, jdiff, Movie, non-review review, review, Ruben Östlund | 4 Comments »

Non-Review Review: All About Eva

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Darren

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

All About Eva has ambition to burn.

It is a modern film noir set against the backdrop of the Irish racing scene, filmed mostly on a single stately country home and with a functional budget that seems minuscule even by the standards of independent Irish film. The fact that it exists is a testament to everybody involved. The fact that it comes very close to working is icing on the cake. All About Eva is a very stylish piece of work that very clearly has a lot of ambition behind it. It is a trashy revenge saga that is produced with a very high level of competence. In particular, director Ferdia MacAnna does great work.

However, ambition is only so much. As good as the film looks relative to its budget, there are a number of key structural flaws that cannot support the weight heaped upon them. Most obviously, All About Eva is an attempt to hark back to the classic femme fatale movies, with a seductive and manipulative young woman infiltrating a racing dynasty so as to dismantle it from the inside. All About Eva lives or dies based on that central performance. Newcomer Susan Walsh simply does not have the ability to carry the movie around her.

To be fair, Walsh is let down by an uneven and scattered script, which revels in cliché. All About Eva is a film that seems wryly aware of its own trite plot beats and dialogue, but that self-awareness can only carry a film so far. There is a point where homage is not enough to sustain a genre pastiche. All About Eva comes surprising close to working, and has an energy that is almost infectious. Unfortunately, it cannot make it over the line.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: all about eva, femme fatale, film, Film noir, horse racing, Ireland, irish film, kildare, Movie, non-review review, review, web series | Leave a comment »

Non-Review Review: La French (The Connection)

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Darren

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

La French (aka The Connection) looks and sounds beautiful.

Working with cinematographer Laurent Tangy, director Cédric Jimenez manages to capture the scenic beauty of seventies Marseilles. The classic architecture, the sea views, even the hot night spots all look absolutely stunning. Le French manages to capture the crisp feeling of the late seventies without ever feeling stylised or staged. Similarly, Jimenez manages to pull together a beautifully evocative soundtrack, with songs as distinct as Call Me and This Bitter Earth helping to underscore emotionally-charged sequences and giving the film a sense of style and taste.

La French is a stylishly-constructed crime thriller that stretches from the south of France to New York and back again, a family loosely inspired by the infamous “French Connection” that fed drugs into France and overseas to the United States. However, despite its obvious overlap with William Friedkin’s The French Connection, it seems like Jimenez owes more to the work of filmmakers like Michael Mann or Martin Scorcese, constructing a crime epic that flows beautifully and effortlessly, with an impressive soundtrack complimenting a dynamic visual style.

This is perhaps the biggest problem with La French, a sense that there might actually be too much style – that the film may occasionally feel a little too hollow or detached from its twin leads. However, Jimenez cleverly casts Jean Dujardin and Gilles Lellouche in the lead roles, who help anchor the film with a sense of humanity that only occasionally gets lost in the film’s beautifully-crafted production.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: crime, drugs, film, French, heroin, Jean Dujardin, la french, Movie, non-review review, review, the connection, the french connection, thriller | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: Cinderella (2015)

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Darren

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

Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is probably the safest and most down-the-middle live action remake of a classic Disney cartoon. It is not as heavily stylised or esoteric as Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, but it is also not as deeply flawed as Maleficent. If anything, Cinderella suffers from a lack of its own identity or energy. It is a well-made and functional film that avoids any truly significant problems, but it also lacks any real edge that might help it stand out.

Cinderella looks lovely. Dante Ferretti’s production design and Sandy Powell’s costume designs are breathtakingly beautiful. Branagh’s direction is clean and crispy, avoiding excessive clutter and trusting the story to tell itself. The cast are great – with Cate Blanchett and Helena Bonham Carter doing wonderful work. Even the script does exactly what it needs to do, walking the line between traditional and self-aware with considerable grace. Cinderella does pretty much everything that you would expect a live action adaptation to do.

At the same time, it lacks any real sense of cinematic ambition. It is nowhere near as iconoclastic as Alice in Wonderland or as ambitious as Maleficent. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Alice in Wonderland attracted a lot of criticism for playing more as a Tim Burton movie than an Alice in Wonderland film, while Maleficent tripped over itself in its attempts to re-write the classing story of Sleeping Beauty as a feminist parable. Cinderella‘s problems are much less severe, but its accomplishments are also less noteworthy.

The result is probably the most solid and reliable live adaptation of a classic Disney cartoon, albeit one that never seems to have any real ambition or verve.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: adaptation, branagh, cartoon, cate blanchett, cinderella, disney, evil stepmother, feminism, film, kenneth branagh, lady tremaine, Movie, remake | 8 Comments »

Non-Review Review: From the Dark

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Darren

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

A large part of the joy of From the Dark is the way that the story translates its horror conventions to rural Ireland without breaking a sweat.

From the Dark is a very simple horror story that could be told anywhere. It is the standard story about a young couple who get lost in a remote location, discovering that their phones don’t work just as they stumble across some grotesque evil. It is a standard horror template, which feels particularly traditional once it becomes clear that the grotesque evil exposed by our two lead characters are very traditional vampires. However, director Conor McMahon does an excellent job executing all those traditional tropes against a very Irish backdrop.

A lot of the credit belongs to cinematographer Michael Lavelle who skilfully conveys the sense of rural Ireland as an isolated wilderness. From the Dark unfolds in Offaly, with Lavelle working hard to make the locality seem ethereal and haunted. Long grass sways in the wind, the sky lights up with beautiful colours at sunrise and sunset. From the Dark manages to expertly capture a sense of the countryside that is both breathtaking and alien. It seems like a world that is simultaneously magical and dangerous.

From the Dark is a rather efficient little thriller – one that moves along quite cleanly and efficiently. However, it is executed with a great deal of technical skill and proficiency, making for a satisfying old-school horror film.

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Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, from the dark, Movie, non-review review, review, vampire | 2 Comments »

Non-Review Review: The Water Diviner

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Darren

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

The Water Diviner is a solid directorial début for actor Russell Crowe, a well-intentioned and relatively under-explored story that occasionally wanders into clumsy melodrama.

Crowe works both in front and behind the camera, directing himself as a father who embarks on a journey across the world to bring his lost sons home. Set in the wake of the First World War, The Water Diviner charts Joshua Connor’s effort to recover the remains his three sons who perished in the battle for Gallipoli. Travelling from the Australia to Turkey, Connor finds himself fighting against bureaucracy and civil strife as he tries to keep the promise to bring his children back to home soil.

It is a fascinating a compelling story. Crowe is a reliable leading man, imbuing Connor with a sense of humanity and relatability that helps to anchor a somewhat spotty screenplay. Crowe seems to trust his cast a great deal, affording them room to work and never rushing them along. However, he also seems somewhat sceptical of the audience. The Water Diviner is packed with repetitive flashbacks and awkward montages designed to impart information that the audience has already grasped.

The result is a rather uneven film. Much like its title character, it seems like The Water Diviner works best when it trusts its instincts; not when it tries to second-guess itself.