Madame Web

Uncle Ben’s
Responsibility

Madame Web
Directed by S.J. Clarkson
USA/Canada
2024 Sony/Columbia
UK Cinema Print

Warning: Some spoilers, if you care enough.

Hmm... okay, Madame Web is the first of three Sony films released this year as part of their extended Spider-Man universe. You would think that now they have absconded again with the rights to the character, that they would, at least, feature Spider-Man in these three stories but... oh no. Or rather, actually, yes kinda in this one but... okay I’ll get to that in a minute. The film stars Dakota Johnson as the titular character (although she’s never once referred to as that in the film... which makes total sense when you see the movie) and, due to shenanigans involving her birth and special powers she doesn’t realise she had (like Diana in the first Wonder Woman movie), she is trying to protect three ‘teenage’ girls from the movie’s main villain, who sees future versions of them killing him at some unspecified point. When I say teenage... Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor and Sydney Sweeney are all in their twenties, the latter only a few ears away from 30 but, still, it’s Hollywoodland and they’re all supposed to be between about 16-18, it seems to me.

Anyhow... the movie itself has got some of the worst reviews (bearing in mind it wasn’t even screened for critics) I’ve heard for a Marvel related movie but, I have to say, though it’s inferior to almost any of the MCU branded Marvel films, it’s actually not the disaster that people are reporting it to be. Saying that though, I can totally see why it has got that reaction because the structure of the movie promises way more than it gives in terms of what the content of the film is actually going to be... the people making this weren’t that smart not to realise what they did, I think.

So, yeah, Johnson’s character is someone who gets brief glimpses of the very near future, like a very strong deja vu, so she can change things just before they are supposed to happen. So the director will sometimes use a big sound (like a champagne cork being pulled) or sometimes, quite cleverly, a distinctive camera movement, to usher in a replay of the events as they are about to repeat. And although it’s an obvious concoction the first time she does it, it is done pretty well throughout and the visual and audio shorthand built on those key aspects does the job very well.

You also have a couple of good performances, especially Sydney Sweeney (who was so brilliant in last year’s Reality, reviewed here), who really does well with facial expressions and so on to make her ‘bizarrely teen’ teenager come to life in quite sophisticated ways. However, although there are some good and likeable performances here, the structure of the film undermines a lot of the work being done.

Here’s the thing, all the stuff in the trailers where the three girls are in costume and using their spider powers are... just seen as brief, visions of the future in the heads of both the title character and the villain. So there are maybe three brief moments, maybe totalling less than a minute and a half, where you see the girls in costume, at some undetermined future date. In fact, whatever superpowers the three ‘teens’ do acquire... they don’t get them in this movie. It’s for some ‘future’ movie which, I’m guessing, might not even get made... and with Dakota Johnson jokingly downplaying the movie when she’s supposed to be promoting it, I’m guessing the four leads would have to be locked into contracts before they return to those characters. Which may well be the case actually but, I’m guessing this movie won’t be doing the numbers enough to make the next film worth making. This is obviously, like the up and coming Venom 3 and Kraven The Hunter movies, supposed to be leading to the Sinister Six, which started happening (again, it’s Sony’s second lead in after the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies) in Morbius (reviewed here)... when Morbius and Michael Keaton’s Vulture character met at the post-credits on that film. But, if the other two perform badly (I suspect Venom will do well but I can’t see the new Kraven doing much better than Morbius), then that may still not happen.

To that end though, there are some really bizarre references to the Spider-Man universe in this film... asides from the Spider powered natives in the Amazon plus the main villain all dressing pretty similarly to Spider-Man. The thing is, though, Sony are making references and shouting them out while simultaneously keeping a lid on things a little with their linking materials. If you are a Spider-Man fan and are not distracted by the visuals, you’ll ‘get’ who a couple of the characters are supposed to be... and one of them is teased but not named, even though fans will know exactly who he is.

The main action of the movie takes place in 2003 and I couldn’t figure out why they did this. Until Dakota Johnson’s character Cassie, a paramedic, calls her partner by name. He’s... drum roll... Ben Parker. Yeah, that’s right... future Uncle Ben. And the ‘with great power comes great responsibility’ line, which has been a core Spider-Man ingredient since his first comic book appearance in 1962, is dangled about like crazy in slightly reworded terms. And, that’s not all... Ben’s sister is pregnant and the girls are trying to protect her so she can give birth at the end of the movie. Casual viewers won’t twig it because he’s not named (despite an earlier ‘guess the name of the baby’ scene calling attention to it in the most obvious manner) but by the end of the film she gives birth to Peter Parker... aka Spider-Man. I guess the actor who was/is supposed to be playing that role in ‘films to come’ for Sony is not yet decided, is my guess. Or... you know... not yet given a big enough pay hike to return to that role.

But the biggest problem with the film, as I eluded to earlier, is the fact that it keeps telegraphing the gals suiting up and being super heroes... and so this is what the audience is expecting to happen at some point in the movie. So many people may not be aware that the climactic action scene is exactly that until it's over, I’m guessing, because they are waiting for the superhero element to come into play. It never does and that’s why I suspect we’ve had the huge negative reviews on this. It’s just an overly complicated set up for a film to come (with a poor ending, it has to be said). But, like I said, it’s not a terrible movie... just an unsatisfying one so, yeah, I can totally understand why it’s getting the word-of-mouth that it has. Madame Web is not a crowd pleaser but it’s also not as bad as, say, Morbius was so... there’s that. I had an okay time with it... I’d probably watch it again. Just not anytime soon. Maybe worth watching to see how it locks into the next few Sony Spider-movies perhaps but, there’s absolutely no post-credits scene on this one so, something tells me that rug may have already been pulled.

Wounds

Bugs ‘N’ Kisses

Wounds
Directed by Babak Anvari 2019 UK
London Film Festival 2019 screening Saturday 5th October

For my third film of this year’s London Film Festival, I saw Wounds, which is the second feature length film by the Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari, known for his previous movie Under The Shadow (which I kinda raved about here). The film is written by the director and based on the novella The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud. It’s also, like his first feature, a horror movie. In the question and answer session after this screening, Anvari said that it was purely an accident that he returned to this genre as he wanted to demonstrate some kind of proficiency with various different kinds of movie genres before returning to horror but, after he was fed a copy of the novella on which this is based, he realised he was so in tune with it and the author (unknown to him at the time but now a good friend) that he had to do this one.

And... I have to say that, although it lands in the same genre as the last one, it really isn’t that much like his debut feature. Similarities would include things like some lovely shot compositions and, as his first film, the sound design plays an important role (yeah, I’ll get to my embarrassment about the sound design later). At a stretch, I’d say another common feature is that it’s starts off as a slow burn before the director ratchets up the intensity... although, in a way, that could be said of a lot of movies.

One main difference, though, apart from this not being a ghost story but more a ‘demonic possession/body horror’ tale, is that he has some real 'A list' Hollywood talent. The film stars Armie Hammer as main protagonist Will, who shows just how intense and edgy he can play here... along with Dakota Johnson as his girlfriend Carrie and the wonderful Zazie Beetz (who I loved in Deadpool 2, reviewed here) as former girlfriend Alicia. All the cast are particular good in this but a new level of respect to these three for being brave enough to see this one through.

Will is a college drop out and one of the main, much loved bartenders at his local pub in New Orleans and the majority of the action of film, with a few notable exceptions, is set either in the bar or in the apartment he shares with Carrie. It was the director’s intent, as he made clear in the Q&A after the film had finished, that he was trying to make a film which started off and looked like one of those 80s relationship movies like Reality Bites, to suck the viewer in before going full horror. He also mentioned, among many influences name checked, his love of the films of David Cronenberg... so you can see exactly how someone like him can arrive at what is a fairly intense and somewhat technologically aware adaptation like this.

I say technologically aware because the peculiar brand of demonic witchcraft gone wrong, if that’s what it is, is passed on by means of a mobile phone left in the bar by some college kids who leave when a fight breaks out. When Will forgets he put the phone in his pocket and takes it home, he starts seeing some strange messages pop up. Using some not too hard to figure out detective work to quickly crack the password in the space of about thirty seconds, he then starts answering some of the texts and it’s not too long before some nasty images start to appear along with all manner of things which threaten the fabric of his and his girlfriends reality... there’s a lovely scene where he comes home and finds her staring into a slow moving portal displayed on her laptop and it takes him putting her into a bath to wake her from her bizarre coma (and that’s not all that happens in that scene but I won’t tell you what happens when he puts her in the bath).

One of the things the director does nicely... and I think it’s this more than anything else in the movie that could be said to be a partial homage to the modus operandi of Cronenberg, is to blur the lines for the audience about the sanity of their main protagonist (that being said, there's a possible armpit growth happening too... flashes of Rabid, reviewed here). He uses little flashes of things like the severed heads of Will’s friends, which Will obviously sees as well as the audience, to start planting doubt in the viewers mind. The director referenced Nicholas Roeg in relation to these moments when he talked to the audience after the movie but in some ways they’re a slightly different kind of association... although, to be fair, since we don’t know how the character of Will progresses after ‘the incident’ which is the final shot of the movie (yeah, like I’m going to tell you what that is here), they could be very much in keeping with Roeg’s flash forward/flash back visions of the history of his characters so, yeah, maybe that was this director’s intent with those almost subliminal moments all along.

Asides from having a good script and some great actors in it, I mentioned the shot designs earlier. This guy likes his verticals and he hasn’t abandoned them here. I’d really need to watch this again to unravel what I was seeing but one of the things I really liked was a shot fairly late in the movie where Will is breaking into his girlfriend’s computer and there is one of those classic fans on the desk. There’s a cool moment where we see Will’s head, with the fan taking up the visual space in front of half his head but, because the blades are moving so fast, we don’t see them at all, just Will’s face. I’m guessing that must have been a hard thing to capture what with film speeds and not getting some kind of motion clash but it made for a nice shot and one wonders if it was some kind of metaphor for the way the character is, quite possibly, becoming immersed in something... evil.

There are also a lot of bugs.

Cockroaches, in fact. These are definitely both a metaphor and an indication in the movie that something bad is coming... they seem to have a homing instinct and are drawn to things which have become ‘demonically touched’ and, according to the director, they were a real pain to work with. There’s a beautiful rendered moment when Will first presses ‘play’ on a video which arrives on the phone which involves the cockroaches attracted to a severed head/skull and, the end moment of this video, where the film takes the first real turn into giving you a sense of the supernatural at work, is a really nicely executed shock idea. I’m sure it’s been done before but not necessarily in this medium and it’s certainly effective here. Again, though, I’m trying to keep this review spoiler free so... go see it yourself, I understand it’s getting a release in a couple of weeks though, sadly, only on the internet and not in a proper cinema or home video release (as yet... what is wrong with this country?).

The other thing in this is the sound design and the... ahem... score. Like his first feature, Anvari uses a powerful blend of soundscapes that help the film along. There’s a nice moment, for instance, where Will is slowly swiping through the phone and, each time he swipes, it’s echoed within the sound design. As I was watching this I found myself desperately hoping for a CD release of the score so I could hear the lovely atonalism of the music better. Imagine my surprise then when, in the Q&A, the director said something along the lines of... “obviously, there was no musical score in the movie, just sound design we created...” So, yeah, I guess nothing was actually ‘composed’ for the movie and that just shows how I’ve become used to modern horror movie music, which a lot of the time tends to sound like this stuff anyway. Oh well. I say this owning an old vinyl copy of the non-musical ‘soundtrack’ of Eraserhead so, yeah, I don’t have that special kind of tunnel vision which says music has to include melody, rhythm and harmony like a lot of people do, I guess.

Still, despite the lack of music, Wounds works a treat and the ending is nicely done. Alas, I wish this was getting a cinematic or Blu Ray release so I could take another look at it but, either way, this film is another strong recommendation from me and something I think will appeal to most fans of horror films. Like The Antenna, which I saw at the London Film Festival the night before (my review of that one is here), this would have done really well at FrightFest this year, although the audience would probably have been a little smaller, I would imagine. Definitely one to watch out for.

Suspiria 2018

Entrail Acte

Suspiria 2018
2018 Italy/USA Directed by Luca Guadagnino
UK cinema release print.

Well this is a worryingly problematic film which I’d be tempted to sum up in just a line or two but, since some of it seems to be fairly well made, I’ll give the project its due. Fair warning though... I’ve not seen any other films by this director so I can’t comment on how his particular sensibilities find any commonality with any of his other projects.

Let’s get all the preliminary nonsense out of the way first by clearly stating that there’s no reason and, really no way, that you should... or could... attempt a remake of Dario Argento’s masterpiece Suspiria (which I reviewed here). The original/real Suspiria is a unique film and is also unshakeably bound by the artistic sensibilities of its director. I would no more think of remaking this classic than I would any other classic of cinema such as Citizen Kane, Star Wars or Taxi Driver (and you can bet at least two of those are coming in the next 10-30 years). It’s almost impossible to subvert Suspiria to a modern sensibility with another creative team behind the film and... in some ways it’s a relief to find that this is, in fact, not what Luca Guadagnino has done here with his new, ‘updated’ version.

In fact, the approach to this version seems almost childlike in that he’s almost gone in exactly the opposite direction from all the things that made the original so unique in order to not be compared to it. If that was the case, "well done" because it’s certainly true that this could never be compared to the original. It’s just too different. The original had two things which are common to the majority (not all) of Dario Argento’s work... bad acting and a not so great story. It also had absolutely stunning mise en scene, shot in bright, primary colours via a technicolour printer and an absolutely awesome score by Goblin. It is incomparable to most any other film (even to Argento’s equally superb sequel Inferno) and stands alone as the piece of art it is.

In this new version, it’s hard to find much of any common ground. You have the basics of Daria Nicolodi and Dario Argento’s story of a dance academy housing a coven of witches, also remotely inspired by a certain couple of essay pages written by Thomas De Quincey about the three mothers, often published in compendiums of his writing bundled with Confessions Of An English Opium Eater. And... that’s about it as far as connections go. You have characters who aren’t necessarily fulfilling the same kind of story roles as they did in the original. Dakota Johnson’s Susie Bannion is a completely different kind of protagonist and she has a much different arc here... as does, surprisingly, the character of Helena Marcos (played as one of three roles by Tilda Swinton)... who has a kind of demotion from her status in the previous version (I won’t go into spoiler territory here though).

You also have a great cast... with Johnson and Swinton having to hold their own among equally gifted actors such as Mia Goth, Chloë Grace Moretz and Angela Winkler. One thing this film is big on is acting talent. There’s even a cameo from Jessica Harper in this but the character she’s playing (again without giving too much away as to the true nature of her role), is connected to an element of the film which is in no way present in the original story. Indeed, Swinton’s turn as the male Dr. Josef Klemperer is one of many different avenues the film goes down into a story, set the same year as the original release of 1977, which seems to be more about fallout from World War Two and, also, the whole Bader-Meinhof thing than it does to the witchy goings on in a dance school.

Furthermore, the famous primary colours have been dropped in favour of an almost exclusively washed out colour palette and, although there are a few sequences with smooth, longish camera movements there is also, it seemed to me, an abundance of short, static shots in an edit which is something which pretty much removes this film’s right to be compared to Argento’s opus even more. So you really have to look at this movie on its own terms as, frankly, anything you could use to compare it to the former is taken away from you.

As a film in it’s own right then... well, it starts off really strong and builds up a nicely unsettling and powerful atmosphere which it manages to sustain for the first two thirds of the movie... which it then somehow manages to waste completely by getting truly dull and uninspiring by the time it reaches the last third. This last third includes scenes of orgiastic goriness which, frankly, should have left me shocked and gasping but which... and maybe it’s just the way it was cut and paced... distanced and comforted me in a kind of dull, passive way almost, rather than confront me with the visceral jolt of horror I was expecting. I mean, people having their entrails pulled out, limbs twisted and heads half severed to spray fountains of arterial blood over the rest of the cast sounds like a great and visually ostentatious, fun time should be had by all but, the way it was shot and presented here it just felt a little too much like David Cronenberg-lite, to be honest.

The most interesting things about the film were the bits where it built up the political and redemption sub plots but, honestly, they seem to amount to nothing by the end of the movie and when it comes to Tilda Swinton, one of the great actresses of our time, playing Dr. Klemperer in this one... a character who isn’t even in the original... one has to ask the obvious question here. Why? She does it well but... could they not afford another male actor?

And then there’s Thom Yorke’s celebrated score. It’s just fine. It’s mostly appropriate... although I could do without the songs... but the film is really not as special or as visually striking as the 1977 movie so it doesn’t have to serve the same function as Goblin’s absolute masterpiece of the original. It must be a hard thing to score, knowing you’re going to be compared to Goblin in this way but, there you have it. It’s not nearly as strong but it doesn’t have to be and so, being appropriate and probably a nice enough listen away from the images is absolutely fine. It’s pleasant rather than essential but, frankly, that’s no mean feat anyway so I’m not complaining. I’ll be picking up the CD of this one soonest, I suspect.

And that’s all I’ve got for you as a first impression. This is really not a remake of Dario Argento’s Suspiria. Instead, it’s a nice but somehow muddied (plot wise) horror film which starts off phenomenally well but which then gets burdened with an overlong and excessively dull final third which kind of felt like it wasn’t living up to the strength of its set up. Still, it’s an interesting curio but... why call it Suspiria? I’d hate for youngsters today to think this is in anyway a substitute for the real thing. A nice enough attempt to do something interesting but a failed one (not necessarily a bad thing... spectacular failures can be as interesting as successes) and something which seems unnecessary to be birthed in, quite, this ‘named branded’ manner. I couldn’t watch it over and over again like the original but, then again, I really wasn’t expecting that to be the case anyway.

Bad Times At The El Royale

Royale, No Cheese

Bad Times At The El Royale
2018 USA Directed by Drew Goddard
UK cinema release print.

So this one surprised me a little.

I took a punt on Bad Times At El Royale and kept my fingers crossed that Drew Goddard, who directed The Cabin In The Woods (reviewed here) would deliver something greater than the dreadful, slickly edited gangster film that the trailer kinda half made it out to be. I’d recently said to somebody that, more often than not these days, trailers really put one off going to see the movie and reflect the tone of said movie in a completely inaccurate manner and... I’m happy to say that this is the case with Bad Times At The El Royale.

Now, the film is about criminally inspired shenanigans at a famous hotel (once owned by Frank Sinatra) which is split in half by the state line which separates Nevada from California (the rooms on the California side are a buck more expensive). It’s also got a rollicking good ensemble cast including Jeff Bridges, Cynthia Erivo, Dakota Johnson, John Hamm, Cailee Spaeny, Lewis Pullman and Chris Hemsworth... who are all truly excellent and it’s nice to see this cast interacting in ways you wouldn’t expect them to here.

I say ways you wouldn’t expect because, although I quite liked The Cabin In The Woods, I did find it incredibly predictable. However, this new film surprised me a number of times when I was sure I knew what was coming next. For example the film has a pre-credits sequence which consists of a static camera watching a room in the El Royale. After a while the action within the shot keeps cutting to different parts of the day in the same shot placement, rapidly, in a montage which shows us the set up one of the film’s main plot points. I don’t want to ruin this sequence for anyone but this set up includes buried treasure (of a sort) and a man with a shotgun. Now, after the sequence ends and the title goes up, the rest of the film takes place ten years later, in 1969 and tells the story of what happens when seven characters converge on the place over the course of the fairly long running time. My point is, though, that I was pretty sure I could figure out the identity of the man with the shotgun within the opening minute of the post opening credits shot but, as it happens, I’m glad to say I was wrong. On the other hand, certain things about this opening set up do go unanswered still by the time the end credits start to roll but, you can take an educated guess at certain things and it’s nice to at least leave a movie with something to think about.

Now, the film has an excellent script, good acting, a nice fluid camera style which alternates between static shots and slow pans when required and it gets you interested in the various characters in a number of chapters which give you a little of the back story of each person and how they came to be here as the movie progresses. It’s an old cliché of a way of giving you the information in the most suspenseful way, to be sure and certain things are deliberately left unsaid (as in that pre-title sequence) so you can draw your own conclusions about them but, for the most part, it’s a very smart movie and it keeps you interested in the way things are going to turn out all the way through. It also feels dangerous a lot of the time, so you fear for the way things are going to go down when you see someone who’s got a gun, for example. Especially when not all the characters are as stable or predictable as you might think... Dakota Johnson’s character, for example, or Chris Hemsworth, who seems to be playing some kind of evil cult leader in the same vein as Charlie Manson.

I guess if I was going to compare it to something else, I might say it’s put together in the same way and with the same intensity as a Quentin Tarantino movie... just with less flowery dialogue (not knocking Tarantino’s dialogue, it’s usually very good, just saying that the speech here doesn’t match expectations of his particular work). Less sonorous dialogue is no bad thing though and I have to say I found the, relatively, smaller amount of ironic, post modernistic references in the movie to be a refreshing change in a film set in this kind of era, to be honest. That being said, Jeff Bridges does sign his name in the hotel register as Father Daniel Flynn, Flynn being the name of his character in the two Tron movies (reviewed here and here)... but I can forgive them that one, I think.

My main criticism of the movie is actually found within that dialogue, however. That being the use of very similar phrases coming out of different character’s mouths, rather then getting them all to speak about things in different ways. For instance, at least two different characters from different backgrounds use the phrase “all the bad” when such a distinctive phrase is not probably something two different protagonists are going to share. So the voice of the writer/director is very much present in the dialogue and... like a lot of writers tend to do and should really think about not doing... all the characters are thus easily perceived to be a version of how he speaks/writes. Which is a shame if you ask me.

The only other thing I didn't like so much was the constant use of songs in the film. They play an important role in terms of both atmosphere and, in at least one scene, commentary on the action but the rest of the music in the film is handled by Michael Giacchino and is less prominent. Maybe if I’d known more than a couple of the songs I would have had a better response to the musical side of the film but, as it stands, I’m not sure it’s quite my cup o’ tea.

All that being said, though, these are really minor criticisms and I have to say I enjoyed Bad Times at The El Royale from end to end. Which is especially impressive because the film has a running time of 2 hours and 22 minutes but it really doesn’t feel that long and the pacing is such, with a cliff hanger seemingly at the end of every chapter stop, that you certainly won’t realise where the time has gone. At least I didn’t so, yeah... pretty impressed with this one. It’s not something I think I could watch again but it certainly holds the attention and I’d definitely recommend you catch this one while it’s at cinemas. There’s a lot of rubbish out there at the moment in movieland but this film certainly doesn’t add to that pile and is worth your time, I’d say. You’ll find yourself caring for characters who probably make a bad first impression on you when you first meet them, which is no mean feat in itself... so give this one a go.