Weapons

 

Hair Of The Stick 
That Bit Me

Weapons
Directed by Zach Cregger
USA 2025
New Line Cinema
UK cinema release print.

After containing my disappointment that the movie in question does not include a return to cinema for Chesty Morgan, I went to my local cinema to take a look at Weapons, because both the trailer and the one short clip I’d seen of it were, if nothing else, certainly intriguing. And, I would add that the film, while not great as some people have been hailing it, is certainly not a bad movie either and, though I was disappointed by some obvious aspects of it, it certainly kept me entertained throughout... so that’s pretty good. 

The film concerns the events of a day when Justine (played by Julia Garner) shows up to teach the kids in her third grade class and 17 of the 18 children in that specific class did not show up to school that day. This is because, at 2.17* that morning, all the kids ran out of their homes and ran off, disappearing into the night. So, naturally, the townsfolk aren’t very happy with Justine, who they all think is somehow responsible. Especially Archer, played by Josh Brolin, who lost his son to the incident too. 

The film then unfolds events to a total resolution of that story, split into chapters and each telling a portion of the events through the point of view of different characters. Such as Benedict Wong as the principal of the school, or Alden Ehrenreich as an ex-alcoholic cop. 

Now, the critics have been saying two things about this film that have me annoyed. One is that some of them are citing Rashomon as the way in which the narrative works. Now I’m assuming not many of them have read the original story on which Rashomon is based but, even if they are, as I suspect, referring to Akira Kurosawa’s excellent movie version... well, I have to wonder if any of them are actually familiar with that movie at all. That film (and story) tells of the same incident taking place over the same time from different points of view and, like Mario Bava’s sex comedy version Four Times That Night, each viewpoint recalls the same events in a much different way, relying on memory and interpretation of what has been seen. This film doesn’t do that. 

So, no, it’s not Rashomon. 

What it is more like is a series of Matryoshka dolls with each one presented reflecting what you’ve already seen but then taking you a little further into the same narrative from when you left it last. And that works fine as a somewhat gadgety narrative structure... even if it’s not completely necessary much of the time. It at least allows the story to build some kind of suspenseful impetus by not revealing everything at once... a tactic also employed by the cinematography which tends to focus on people and then move slowly over to what they are seeing, to imbue the shot with tension, as the environment a character is standing in is slowly revealed (thus harbouring the potential of a jump scare... even though that doesn’t happen that often). 

The other thing which annoys me is critics saying the movie makes no sense. It totally does, everything is fully explained and even the big visual metaphor we get at one point... which somehow left some critics pretty baffled.... seems a little too obvious, it seemed to me. However, I would have much preferred the film if it had left a lot of things hanging because, frankly, the film makes the same mistake as the popular (with everyone except me) Longlegs (reviewed here), in that it not only explains things too much but, delving firmly into a specific kind of folk horror, it gives the movie an actual main antagonist and, to be honest, the film suffers from it. Giving the film an actual villain to focus on not only denies the mystery of the film but, in this case, also leaves little flaws in the logic that governs the way in which the main antagonist weaponises people in the film. Which kind of sucks and ensures that I probably won’t be picking this one up on Blu Ray because, once it’s all been explained, I don’t feel the need to watch this one again. 

So... yeah. Weapons is a fine film in the horror tradition for sure. If anything, it feels like the kind of thick spined best selling novels that both Stephen King and Dean R. Koontz were putting out in the 1980s. And I do feel that this movie would have made a better, 600 page plus novel than the format it’s ended up in. But, you know, very nice to look at, some good performances, some intense moments but, for me at least, not really essential viewing. 

*Room 217 is the infamous room in the Overlook Hotel in the original Stephen King novel The Shining (though not in the movie versions of both that and the follow up, Doctor Sleep).  

Sicario 2 - Soldado

Dancing Cheek To Cheek

Sicario 2 - Soldado
(aka Sicario - Day Of The Soldado)
2018 USA/Italy Directed by Stefano Sollima
UK cinema release print.

The last time I saw the winning combination of Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro lighting the screen up, they were both looking very different to how they appear in real life, going toe to toe (toe to chest, actually) as Thanos and The Collector in the excellent Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here). However, the film where they absolute burn the screen down with their performances has to be the original Sicario (which I reviewed here).

When I first heard that the Hollywoodland people were planning a sequel to Denis Villeneuve’s excellent war on drugs classic, I didn’t think it was such a great idea to do a follow up to a film that was so striking and had such a powerful ending. Also, the Emily Blunt character was written out very early on in the genesis of this sequel and I think that was actually a big mistake (and I’ll get to why I think that’s the case a little later on). I also remember saying that the original was something that was so morally ambiguous in the way the main characters were portrayed that I didn’t think I could ever watch it again. However, I did watch it again a couple of months ago because the solid direction coupled with the absolute gorgeous cinematography was haunting me (and did I mention the Blu Ray had come right down in price to a few quid?). I have to say that, although the intensity of the film was somewhat diminished when you knew what was coming, I actually liked it a lot better the second time around and will probably even watch it again sometime in the next decade. Nevertheless, a sequel to the story of these particular characters just seemed wrong.

This is neither here nor there, though, as a sequel has been made with the atrocious name of Sicario 2 - Soldado, as it’s known in the UK and with the slightly better title of Sicario - Night Of The Soldado in various other territories. Now, I have to say I was expecting a little better of director Stefano Sollima, purely and unfairly because he’s the son of Sergio Sollima, who directed at least two of my favourite spaghetti westerns back in the 1960s. However, it would be true to say that this film suffers a lot because it doesn’t have the keen eye and gravitas of Villeneuve’s original, aided substantially by Roger Deakins' absolutely jaw dropping cinematography and the late Jóhann Jóhannsson’s striking score.

Instead, what we have are two great central performances, again by Brolin and Del Toro but, with a storyline which, in some ways, fails their characters a little bit, I think. Although they are both quite blistering here, Del Toro’s character Alejandro seems to lack the emotional weight of the slightly earlier version we’d seen before but, again, I think the writing failed him a little. I kind of expected the writing to soften him down a little in this one, to be honest, because the trailer showed that there was a kid in it but Brolin, too, seems to be a little more diminished in that he has a little more overtly expressed emotion to his character this time out.

I’ve been trying to figure out just why this is and I think it’s because it’s written from a slightly different point of view this time around. In the first one, almost everything was very much shown through the eyes of Emily Blunt’s outsider character and, although we didn’t stay with her the whole time, I think it would be true to say the majority of the movie is pretty much experienced as an audience from her point of view and this really allows Brolin and Del Toro the contrast needed to come in and be very hard hitting, almost brutal, with their rendering of their characters. Sicario 2 - Soldado kind of lacks this approach. True, the film has a fairly strong second opening (after a prologue featuring people trying to get across the border), set in an American supermarket which is absolutely terrifying. Alas, that’s the most terrifying sequence in the movie and when a young girl played (brilliantly) by Isabela Moner is thrown into the mix, we’ve already started renewing our relationship with Brolin and Del Toro so her reactions to the characters, quite apart from being from a different kind of point of view to Emily Blunt’s character from the first one, are somewhat diminished as we have already been following their antics before this point. If it would have been me I think they would have been better off starting with this scene and introducing her character from early on, sticking with her throughout the entire length of the film. As it happens, her shock and horror at the events going on around her are less useful in this regard and... well... you just feel less.

Now, I can’t blame the writers for doing this, to be honest. The structure serves a story where Brolin and Del Toro split up for the majority of the movie and so trying to tell this tale from a single viewpoint might have seemed a bit odd. It doesn’t, however, get away from the fact that you really do feel this one a lot less.

Added to this is the fact that the cinematography, so beautiful in the first movie, is somewhat pedestrian in comparison. Don’t get me wrong, it’s got a very competent and very clean look which I appreciate but... well... it’s no Sicario.

Also, we have a musical score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, who has worked with the original film’s composer a number of times, trying to sound something like his predecessor but never quite getting there... at least in the mix as it stands in the cinematic release (the stand alone listen may be a quite different beast, I suspect). In fact, I’m sure that, by the end of the movie, they had either re-recorded one of Jóhannsson’s main themes from Sicario or, perhaps as likely, just tracked it straight into the movie in an attempt to give the audience something they were at least familiar with. Which is a shame because the music is certainly very good but...not really holding its own, in comparison.                            

Added to this we have some quite badly telegraphed ‘miracle escapes’ for some of the characters along with some ‘surprise attacks’ which are just a little disappointing because you can usually see them coming. There are some touching moments where Del Toro and his charge are helped by a deaf man and his family in the desert but a few brilliant scenes do not a great movie make and, sadly, although this is quite a good thriller, it’s really not got that ‘gut punch feeling amidst the incredible visual beauty’ which the Villeneuve movie had in spades.

So there you have it. Sicario 2 - Soldado implies quite heavily that there will be a third part and... well, we’ll have to wait and see if I can get excited about that prospect later on down the line. For now, Sicario 2 is a competently crafted but by no means outstanding piece of genre cinema which I think will divide audiences passionately and which, perhaps, really didn’t need to say anything further than what we already know about the characters. And I think I’ll leave it at that.

Deadpool 2

Pool Runnings

Deadpool 2
2018 USA Directed by David Leitch
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’ve tried to keep it to a minimum but... slight spoilers.

Okay so, just over two years since the fairly awesome Deadpool movie (reviewed here) hit our cinemas we finally have Deadpool 2 and it’s... err... okay, well it’s really not bad, I suppose... ish.

Actually, I did find this sequel kinda disappointing to be honest... I just can’t put my finger on why that was because the performances by the likes of Ryan Reynolds, Josh Brolin, Morena Baccarin, Brianna Hildebrand and Zazie Beetz were all pretty cool. Likewise, the script wasn’t too bad and although I found it a little bit more dense in terms of semi-obscure Marvel Comics and Marvel Cinematic Universe references (I suspect some people will not have a clue that there are certain jokes here) it was pretty “full on” and moved a mile a minute. Added to that, the direction and action editing wasn’t bad, with David Leitch, who directed Atomic Blonde (reviewed here) jumping into the main chair on this one... at least you could understand what was going on most of the time.

Why, then, did I feel this movie was fun but not all that engaging?

Well, it doesn’t help that one of my favourite characters from the first film is basically killed off in the first five or ten minutes. Now, it has to be said, since this film’s big new character, Cable, is a time traveller, it kinda felt this was an easy set up for the first major casualty of the film to return at the end. The strange thing was, the film-makers didn’t take the easy way around to this (nor one which made any sense in terms of how we’ve seen the way their version of time travel works earlier in the film... temporal logic flies completely out the window by this point) and have saved it for one of the mid-closing credits sequences in the movie. Which is fine but, since the jokey and metatextual nature of the majority of those extras could possibly be taken as a separate thing apart from the movie, I and a couple of people I spoke to, couldn’t quite work out if the character was supposed to be alive for the next movie or not (if there is one). So, yeah, it’s kind of puzzling. Either way, though, there’s not too much of the particular character in question (who I won’t reveal here) in this and so I was not happy about it.

I was even less happy when I watched a somewhat James Bondian opening title sequence which kinda commented on what the audience’s state of mind must have been in after the pre-credits sequence in which said character died. I really didn’t need to be told how I was supposed to be feeling and, like I said, I was already expecting time travel shenanigans by this point.

Another thing which niggled a little is that another of my favourite characters from the first film... didn’t have a heck of a lot to do in this one either, it has to be said. I wanted to see more of a particular person in this and that just didn’t happen for me... although that character's arc since the first movie is kinda cute, at least.

There were, of course, loads of good things about the movie too and, like I said, it’s really not a bad experience at all... I just didn’t love it like I did the first one.

Okay so, good things...

Well there are a couple of nice new characters. One of them didn’t last that long (although, again, time travel to wipe out past incidents people!) but the one who did, Domino (played really well by Zaxie Beetz) was a pretty cool one. Domino’s super power is good luck which Deadpool argues is not cinematic. Then the cast and crew spend time demonstrating just how visually interesting and comedic it is throughout the rest of the film, of course. I loved the way how sometimes things would just fall into place for her and at other times, the action would pre-empt and set things up to her advantage. For example, we see some stuff happening with a bus heading towards the walls of the building she’s in just before we hear her say something along the lines of “We could really use a bus right now”. Said transport crashes through the walls for her to use a half a second later.

Also, Cable’s character does go through kind of an emotional arc and Brolin plays him really well... I’m really beginning to get the hang of this actor now. He brought a lot of depth and emotion to Thanos in Avengers - Infinity War (reviewed here) and he’s similarly interesting and three dimensional here.

Other good stuff includes a battle between Deadpool and Cable in prison where our hero tries to stop Cable from killing a young boy before he has the chance to do horrifying things in the future. The problem here, though, is that probably nothing else in the film really tops this sequence, which must be about half the way through the movie and the rest of the film felt a little like an anticlimax in comparison. However, it’s a very nice sequence and, like I said, the film really isn’t a bad one.

Another great thing is the quality of the jokes. I said that a lot of them are going to go over some people’s heads but there’s a lovely moment where the character bridges the gap, so to speak, of the various Marvel franchises by cracking a line made famous in some of the MCU movies which I really appreciated. Plus, the very first thing you see on screen of a certain musical paperweight is going to get some wide grins I’m sure. Not to mention some of the franchise crossing and even, in a weird way, comic book company crossing in some of the post-credits scenes. In fact, there are a fair few jokes at the expense of the DC universe in this movie too, which got some laughs from the audience I was with (despite having to wait 40 minutes for a broken projector at Cineworld to be repaired before the movie started).

All in all, I find I don’t have too much to say about this one, to be honest. My hope is that there was just so much going on with it that I need to see it again to process it properly and then I’ll maybe enjoy it more then. I usually refer to the Ryan Reynolds character as being similar to Groucho Marx crossed with the superhero genre and, if I were to push the analogy, I might say that the original Deadpool felt a little like one of the early, Marx Brothers masterpieces of the late 1920s and early 1930s whereas, Deadpool 2 is more like one of their later, not so outrageously funny but still fairly entertaining efforts. If you’re a Deadpool fan you may find yourself a little less enamoured with this one but, saying that, I seem to be pretty much in the minority on this one. Not the best Marvel movie I’ve seen but, absolutely nowhere near the bad ones either. Hopefully the third one, if there is one, will recapture the spirit of the first.

Avengers - Infinity War

No Turn Unstoned

Avengers - Infinity War
2018 USA Directed by  Anthony and Joe Russo 
UK cinema release print.

Well this was surprisingly good.

I honestly thought that Avengers - Infinity War, the first of two movies which is a culmination of the various plot threads left deliberately dangling in the wake of the first ten years of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), was going to be only half watchable at best. Since the film teams up most (but, contrary to what was advertised, not all) of the specific Marvel superheroes in those films, I was assuming that this would be patchy at best. After all, with over 60 major characters making appearances... well... my thinking was that you could only give them a few lines of dialogue each and then there would be no time left for action. I’m happy to say I was wrong about this... plus a few other things I’d predicted for this film so... yeah, happy to be proved incorrect in this instance. There are some minor problems but not really enough to do overall damage.

Now I’ve not read the comics these are based on but I’m well used to the Marvel movies not being anything like the original source materials and this one certainly isn’t... although I’m guessing the basic plot elements are the same. For instance, in the comics it’s the Silver Surfer who crashes through the roof of Doctor Strange’s mansion and warns him what is coming his way. Well, we still get the roof crash and warning here but it’s courtesy of one of the other characters... specifically one who isn’t locked into sticky negotiations as Disney’s lawyers retrieve the Silver Surfer and many other characters from 20th Century Fox.

The film follows the antics of super villain Thanos, played by Josh Brolin, as he gathers the five Infinity Stones seen in a fair few of the previous movies so he can wield them with his Infinity Gauntlet. Standing in his way are Iron Man, Spider-Man, Thor, Doctor Strange, Hulk, Black Widow, Captain America, War Machine, The Falcon, White Wolf (formerly The Winter Soldier), Black Panther, Scarlet Witch, The Vision, The Guardians Of The Galaxy... and a fair few others.

Now the script is actually quite well written and, breaking the burden of the story to what is effectively three mini teams working together in different parts of the universe, the directors manage to pull together an entertaining movie which doesn’t get distracting and which doesn’t feel like the story is in service to the characters instead of, how it should be, the other way around. In fact, even when they're cross cutting on mini cliffhangers built into the action sequences from one group to the next, it never becomes too overpowering that you don't know exactly where you are with the various characters.

It’s actually very dark in places... in fact the threat and tone of the movie is dark all the time but that doesn’t stop the film-makers from having a lot of humour with it and it’s great to see new combinations of the characters reacting and arguing with each other. There are some truly funny scenes in this and it’s a really nice juggling act because you do find yourself laughing even though the lives of half of the population of the universe can be wiped out at any second.

The movie starts off with a fairly bleak opening sequence, the sound of which can be heard even as the opening logos are rolling up on the screen, which carries on from one of the post-credit sequences in last year’s Thor - Ragnarok (reviewed here). The film takes a little time here to show us just how lethal going up against Thanos can be, in no uncertain terms. It also shows up just how ineffectual against Thanos the biggest ‘character weapon’ in The Avengers' arsenal is. And, yeah, the story didn’t go the way I thought it would. The IMDB cast listings for the film are, at best, wildly inaccurate and I suspect that this, along with other strong hints along the way, were deliberate instances of misinformation by Marvel/Disney so the fans of these movies wouldn’t be able to figure out what is going on here until they were in a cinema watching this thing. Everything is handled quite deftly and, with the excellent performances we get from regular cast members such as Rob Downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Chris Hemsworth and Elisabeth Olsen, it makes for an entertaining movie, to say the least. A cast ably supported by Alan Silvestri’s music for this one...

Now, I wasn’t the biggest fan of Silvestri’s score for the first movie but he does some good work here which, obviously, utilises his main Avengers theme to good effect. The best use of this, for my money, is when two of the characters are about to get ‘taken out’ by allies of Thanos in a train station in Scotland. Just as things are about to go dark for two of the characters, three of the other regular characters show up for the first time in the film and the music suddenly swells on Silvestri’s main Avengers melody. It’s a great movie moment and gets the hairs on the arm standing to attention, that’s for sure.

Okay so, there’s some bad stuff here too. One of which is the recasting of a character from one of the previous movies. If the character is not that important and could be replaced by another if the original actor didn’t want to come back then... why use that character at all? It seemed a bit odd, to be honest.

Another thing is... well I’m not going to reveal the ending here but how dumb do Marvel think their audience is? Some stuff happens in the last 5 to 10 minutes of the movie and... it just feels like Marvel are insulting everybody’s intelligence here. I can understand how they might have been able to tease out this specific ending around thirty years ago, before the internet but... well all I’m saying is that we all know what movie sequels will be coming out in the next couple of years. Sure, the next two MCU movies... Ant Man and The Wasp and Captain Marvel (in reality, Ms. Marvel) are both set before the events of Infinity War but, you know, people already know what other stuff is in the works down the line. The end of this movie makes the prospect of next year’s follow up seem like it’s going to be a big ‘control z’, ‘undo’ moment of a film, to be honest. So the, actually quite nicely done, dramatic punch of the final act is somewhat softened by the fact that, I would guess, most of the audience don’t believe a moment of it.

One final thing I question somewhat is from the film’s post credit sequence. If you have a distress beacon you can send to a specific person that you think can make a difference to the clear and present danger the various characters find themselves in here... wouldn’t you have activated that during the events of the first Avengers movie? I find it a bit of an odd deus ex machina, to be honest.

Apart from these few things, however, the movie is not the mess I was expecting it to be and the Russo Brothers have knocked out one of the better of the MCU movies with this one. Especially in terms of the main villain. Thanos is not the one dimensional bad guy you might at first think. His motivations for the wholesale slaughter of half of the universe are, it has to be said, not that different to what should be happening in real life on this planet now anyway. We are a vastly overpopulated world and we should be looking for ways to cut back on the growing population... which I think could be done without killing anyone. It’s exactly the same kind of motivation that the ‘evil’ mastermind in Ron Howard’s Inferno (reviewed here) has and, although Thanos’ pursuit of his goal is inherently evil (what with all the wholesale slaughter and such), it doesn’t change the fact that these are exactly the conversations people should be having here now and his arguments do make a lot of sense. When Thanos returns in the next movie, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s Thanos himself who sets everything back the way it was before some of the events of this movie take place because, if nothing else, he certainly has an unshakeable moral centre.

And that’s about all I’ve got for you on this one. I suspect that the follow up part of this story could easily be a bit of an anticlimax... although I am still expecting the character I thought would die in this one to meet his maker in the next one, that’s for sure. Avengers Infinity Wars is a truly entertaining, funny but also bleak movie experience and, you never know, I might go back to this one and have another look while it’s still at cinemas. Not Marvel’s best movie but certainly one of their best. If you claim to ‘Make mine Marvel!’, as the phrase used to go, then you don’t want to be missing out on this one.

Hail, Caesar!

Hot Hail

Hail, Caesar!
2016 UK/USA/Japan
Directed by The Coen Brothers
UK cinema release print.

Ha! You know, when I first saw a trailer for this movie on the internet sometime last year, I thought the idea of this one looked promising but I was in no way expecting this to be a good movie. It looked like a whole bunch of actors and film-makers having a whale of a time and, quite often when this happens, you often find the people making the movie are going to have a far better time than the audience who are going to be watching this. I might cite the 1967 version of Casino Royale or 2015’s Mortdecai (reviewed here) as examples where this tactic seems to seriously backfire on the studio.

Another problem I have, and which made me fairly wary is that, much as I love some of the Coen’s movies dearly, I do find them a bit hit and miss and, over the last five or six years, I have found their movies definitely in the miss category, for me. I love the Coens of The Big Liebowski, Oh Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn’t There but some of their other stuff seems to be less emotionally involving to me.

Well, I needn’t have worried on either count, as it happens, because although it took me 20 minutes or so to warm up to their latest opus, Hail, Caesar!, I absolutely loved it, once it got going. The film stars Josh Brolin as famous Hollywood ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix, a fictional version of the real person who works here in a made up studio where thinly disguised ‘Coenised’ movies from Hollywoodland’s rich legacy are in production. When famous film star Baird Whitlock, played by George Clooney as a kind of Charlton Heston via Victor Mature type, is kidnapped from the set before the completion of his latest movie Hail, Caesar!, it’s up to Eddie to get him back while still trouble shooting other problems with various stars who work for the studio.

In a nice touch to the William Wyler version of Ben Hur, the fictional Hail, Caesar! shares the exact same subtitle of that movie, A Tale Of The Christ. There’s even a hilarious scene where Clooney is trying to channel the same look of reverence that Heston does in Ben Hur, when Christ gives him water on his journey to be a galley slave, although the roles are slightly twisted around here, just like a lot of other stuff in this movie is nicely subverted... such as the gay subtext highlighted with a joke in the sailor’s song and dance number performed by Channing Tatum as Burt Gurney, this film’s equivalent of Gene Kelley.

Other people who populate this film are Tilda Swinton in a kind of dual role playing a kind of ‘twins’ version of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, Ralph Fiennes as Laurence Laurentz and Scarlet Johannson doing a kind of earthy version of famous water dancer Esther Williams. The character which made it completely watchable for me though, is the role of Alden Ehrenreich as ‘singing cowboy’ sensation Hobie Doyle. I don’t know who this guy is but he’s phenomenal. Sure, he gets some good laughs in scenes with Ralph Fiennes character as the studio attempt to ‘change his image’ but it’s his other role in the film which really help bring this all to life.

Hobie is obviously a parody of the Roy Rogers/Gene Autrey cowboy stars of yesteryear and can perform some neat tricks as demonstrated here. He even has his very close parody of a Gabby Hayes style sidekick who, obviously, gets all the laughs from the fictional audience when he takes his date to see one of his films. And about that ‘date’. This movie is very much a film watcher’s movie... like a Quentin Tarantino piece, a lot of the pleasure in watching it is derived from how many famous movie references you can pick up on. A real movie spotter’s pursuit, is this. We only hear her name teased a few times in the movie, for a while, and as soon as I heard her name, Carlotta Valdez, my brain was on fire. I spent the next twenty minutes or so of the movie agonising where I’d heard it before until it finally kicked in and I realised that this was the name of the fictional, historical figure that Kim Novak is pretending to be channeling for the benefit of James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Vertigo. Oh my gosh, I thought to myself, are they going to go the whole hog and make her look like the ‘Portrait of Carlotta’ right down to the iconic hairstyle in the Hitchcock movie?

As the film wore on and I realised the Coens weren’t taking the strength of their parody too seriously (I’ll get to that in a minute) I then started thinking that maybe they were going to have Hobie dating a parody of the Mexican Spitfire, Lupe Velez, herself. As it happens, it turns out Hobie is dating a version of the famous actress Carmen Miranda and, it has to be said, Veronica Osorio, the wonderful actress playing her here, makes it more than apparent who she’s supposed to be in her very first scene. She is an absolute delight in the role and her scenes with Alden Ehrenreich, as Hobie entertains her with both a real lasso and, later, a spaghetti lasso, are just so charming they will probably win your heart right over. However, Hobie’s solo scenes as he goes after the kidnappers are equally great and... I’ll briefly mention those in a little while.

George Clooney, of course, is also brilliant in his role and when it turns out he’s kidnapped by communist writers, his scenes with them are pretty funny too. And it was nice to see Patrick Fischler as one of those writers... I always wondered what had happened to that guy who played the video store clerk in Ghost World and... here he is. He has a very distinctive face which makes him a good person if you want someone to stand out and add texture to a crowd. Clooney is marvellous, though, and the more stuff he makes these days which border on almost parodying himself, to an extent (with a little bit of stretch), forces me to admire him more and more as both an actor and a star as the years go by. Some people might be afraid to take on this kind of role but, as usual, Clooney gives it his all.

Now there are some problems with the parody in this movie, to be sure, and I’ll highlight those soon enough, but one of the things which made me stop worrying about the authenticity of a lot of the stuff on show in the movie is that, it soon becomes obvious that the Coen’s just don’t worry too much about making it all authentic. These are broad strokes which create a brief impression rather than full blown homage and, as such, it kinda works at its own level. Where it’s less satisfying is when some aspects of a parody are finely tuned to the smallest details but maybe slightly tarnished by another element being less so...

For example, the sailor’s song and dance number, headed up by Channing Tatum, is an incredible movie moment. It’s clear that the choreography and dialogue of those big MGM mid-fifties numbers have been studied here to the nth degree. And Tatum has obviously been looking at Gene Kelly and the way he moves, the way his face expresses (or doesn’t always) and the way he delivers his lines... it all works really well. As does the consistency of the simplicity of the colour scheme of the set being used. However, what doesn’t work about this scene is the veracity of those colours themselves. The MGM films used to be... well, over the top and almost over saturated beyond belief in those movies... the colours here, while simply wrought, have none of the luminosity of the hues used in the films the Coens are trying to emulate in this scene... which kind of spoiled the overall effect of it, for me.

Another example would be Carter Burwell's score throughout the movie. Now this must have been a dream job for a composer to work on as he has to cover a range of musical styles due to the nature of the content... but I noticed that he was more successful in some styles than others... although that might not have been his fault. For instance, the music he delivers for the Hail, Caesar! movie within a movie scenes are typical in structure and tone of the kinds of scores these films were getting by the likes of Dr. Miklos Rozsa but... well, they just don’t seem to have the same punch or over the top-ness, over scored quality of the originals. However, like I said, it might not be the composer’s fault, it might just be mixed too far back into the background compared to the way the music would have been mixed into a genuine Roman/Religious epic of the mid 1950s so... well I’ll find out once the CD arrives.

The composer does do some really great stuff here too though and, getting back to Hobie going after the kidnappers, the scenes where the Coen’s get almost metatextual and use the vernacular of the 1940s and 1950s film noirs to tell that part of Hobie’s story is faithfully backed up by Burwell with something which really does the trick in those sequences. So, yeah... looking forward to this score arriving in the post sometime soon.

And that’s what I thought of Joel and Ethan Coen’s Hail, Caesar! Once it starts coasting along the movie is a real breath of fresh, or maybe that should be reconditioned, air midst a cinematic climate where no other film is being made quite like this one at the moment. So as far as subject matter and approach are concerned, there’s nothing else like it out there currently... so if you want to see something different then check this one out. I, for one, had a great time with this movie and if you’re a fan of old school Hollywood movies then you’ll probably have a good evening with this one. Definitely a big thumbs up for this one... if I had a massive, giant thumb to do that with.

Sicario

Blurred Mentality

Sicario
2015 USA
Directed by Dennis Villeneuve
UK cinema release print.

Well this is an interesting film and not the kind of thing I would normally go and see. Being as its subject matter is a war on the drug cartels between the US and Mexican borders, it comes dangerously close to being a gangster type of picture and I really don’t like those... gangster movies populated by psychotic murderers remind me too much of having to survive a middle class grammar school when I was growing up.

However, there were two things I did like about the trailer I saw. One, the fact that the movie has Emily Blunt in it... an actress who I’ve got a lot of time for, sharing the spotlight here with her two male co-stars Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro. That being said, I’m not the greatest fan of either Brolin or Del Toro but they do pretty well in this and I’m finally beginning to get an insight on the power a performance from someone like Del Toro can bring to the table on films like this, where the line between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ is blurred so much that you are almost certainly in just as much danger, if not more, from the people purporting to be on the side of the law in this kind of scenario. That being said... I would love for somebody to write something for Del Toro that’s completely against type. I’d like to see how he could handle himself in a romantic comedy or some such because, with an actor this powerful... I’m guessing there are quite a few things we haven’t seen him do yet, of which he’s more than capable.

However, I’m digressing... so, yeah... I think Emily Blunt is an interesting actress and this is easily one of the best performances she’s done, I reckon but, seriously, she wasn’t enough on her own to draw me to check out a movie dealing with the kind of horrific subject matter that this film uses to explore its themes. The thing which equally got me to the cinema to check this out before it left is Jóhann Jóhannsson’s amazing score... which was getting good reports and I really needed to know if I should pick up the CD while that’s still available (the answer to that one is ‘yes’... but I’ll get to that later in the review).

Okay, so I’m there in the screening and the first thing I’m hit with is Roger Deakins exquisite cinematography filming a drug raid by the FBI... where we meet Emily Blunt’s character Kate Macer. The opening sequences, encompassing both before and sometime after the raid, including an amazingly grim find between the walls of the house and a booby trap which kills some of the Feds, is clearly an attempt to unsettle the audience and build up an awareness of just how bad things can get in this movie. This way of building tension from showing us that terrible things are possible within the world of the characters is an impending threat tactic employed by a lot of film-makers over the years... off the top of my head I would compare it to the opening scenes of Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park (reviewed here) and David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. 

This opening sequence absolutely makes everything seem dangerous and this sense of unease is brilliantly maintained by Deakin’s and Villeneuve’s contributions to the cinematography, shot design and the way these elements are put together. There’s a thing which is done throughout the movie which is give the camera eye, usually composed of sweeping and very smooth movement, a voyeuristic sense. It will often focus on an irrelevant or less necessary detail in a shot, such as another shot of a decomposing corpse (after we’ve already seen a load of these) or a basketball game... and then use these details as a starting point to open out the focus of the shot, usually with a pan or a zoom or some other camera flourish, and then allow the audience to catch and follow the real intent of the scene. It’s a really interesting way of looking at the content of the shot and, done quite leisurely as it is here, makes for a very creepy feel. You don’t know what’s going to be coming at you next... which is kinda the point and certainly gels with the fact that Emily Blunt’s character is never given the full facts of what she’s getting herself into and is on very shaky ground as to what to expect from any situation she gets involved in... which is why this particular visual approach in the design and movement through the frames is so appropriate on this movie. The style of the mise en scène puts the audience at exactly the same disadvantage as the main female protagonist... and it works very well.

There are also some truly beautiful sots of landscapes such as the first plane ride, where we never get an exterior shot of the plane carrying our ‘heroes’ to their destination... instead we get these amazing aerial shots which look like they could have been lifted out of Godrey Regio’s Koyaanisqaatsi and the shadow of the plane to indicate that what we are seeing relates to the path of the journey the lead actors are taking. There are a fair few arial shots used in this movie and the director also uses different media sourced in the film by the characters to do the storytelling at some points... such as a night vision lens on the helmets of certain people or a pan back and forth across a bank of black and white security cameras. This is all good stuff, is edited into the film in a less than intrusive manner and adds another layer of visual texture to the film.

Added to this we have some brilliant performances by the leads with Emily Blunt being particularly amazing in her role of, basically, observer (there’s a reason why she’s there and it becomes apparent by the final reel) and Del Toro and Brolin playing quite terrifying people who, frankly, are just as terrifying, unpredictable, merciless and, in the case of Del Toro, as evil as the cartel they are trying to destroy. This makes for a quite unnerving film and, coupled with the startlingly gorgeous cinematography, the juxtaposition of the grittiness and grimness of the lives of these people with the beauty of the way the camera catches them, it’s a very powerful combination and this film does get under one’s skin a little by the conclusion.

And then there’s that music. That score by Jóhannsson is pretty amazing. It’s not unique in that it seems to be using a lot of that kind of droning sound which has been so popular with movie audiences over the last few years in films like Gravity (reviewed here) and Interstellar (reviewed here) but he also hits the percussion beats quite a lot and the way it’s composed actually helps promote a lot of tension... especially when it’s low key and then suddenly dialled up right into the mix. You know when the music starts to ramp up that something big is going to go down... but it might not be as disturbing as some of the stuff which happens when there is no music playing at all. The film seems quite judiciously spotted in regards to which sequences are scored or left without music and, sometimes, the lack of music in the lead in to a scene produces its own uneasiness, to tell the truth. This is definitely something I need to listen to away from the world of the film so I’m looking forward to listening to the CD at some point soon.

And that’s about it for me and Sicario. I couldn’t watch it again because the moral ambiguities of the majority of the characters are quite disturbing but it’s certainly a fine, well made film which is a strange mix of styles, elevating the sleaziness in a really good looking package which, combined with the electric performances, raises it to something quite striking, arresting and ultimately disturbing... not to mention haunting. Definitely check this one out on a big screen because, as I said earlier, Roger Deakin’s cinematography is exquisite.

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For

Miller’s Kiss

Sin City - A Dame To Kill For
2014 USA
Directed by Robert Rodriguez & Frank Miller
UK Cinema release print.

Warning: One slight spoiler to kill for here... although if you’ve not read the original comic then you may not even realise there was a twist reveal in this movie at all.

Okay, so I’ve not been to Frightfest much since it first started to be “a thing”.. I think I’ve been maybe four or five times only and two of those were for UK premieres of Dario Argento movies The Card Player and Giallo. The other one that sticks in my mind was back in 2005 and it was the first and last time, to date, I’d ever booked a ticket for a “surprise movie” at any festival. I hate the uncertainty of those kinds of screenings and on that one time I took a gamble that the surprise movie would be some kind of UK premiere of Sin City and... I’m happy to say I was right. It blew me away too. Sin City was a great movie and a faithful adaptation of Frank Miller’s original source material. A film I can watch over and over again throughout my life without getting bored.

I was kinda worried about the new film for many reasons, one of which is the fact that it’s now nine years since the last one and audiences seem to have short memories these days. I was also aware that some of the original cast had died, far too young (Michael Clarke Duncan, Brittany Murphy), and that it would be a shame having to see their characters played by different people. As it happens, that wasn’t as distracting as the one character I wasn’t’ that worried about having a change of actor for... basically because the original Frank Miller comic book it’s based on kinda dictated it. However, the way the “reveal” in the comic book is dealt with here is one of the very few false notes in an otherwise perfect second helping of the beautiful union between the semiotics of comics and movies that is the Sin City franchise.

Yeah, that’s right. Near perfect. I know this has done really badly at the box office already and I’ve astonishingly seen some bad word of mouth tweets on the film by people whose verdict on all things cinema I would normally trust. I really don’t know why this incredible wave of negativity is happening with this film though because, frankly, I had a blast with it.

It’s been said that the language of cinema and the language of comics are very similar. Both deal with the telling of events and incidents in a fashion perceived as linear, with comics using a series of static panels to do the same thing as films... but personally I think that’s a little too cut and dried. After all, what is film other than a series of static images projected at a rate the human eye can perceive as motion? It’s not a great leap from 24 frames a second to 24 panels a second. I think, for me, the rich visual language of comic books, much like the edgy subject matter they can sometimes tackle head on in a way that a commercially conscientious movie cannot, is far superior to the visual styles used in the majority of movies. You think it’s a case of film being like a comic book but actually it’s more a case of comics being visually closely allied to film... and then pushing that collision into other realms which aren’t necessarily the most expressive or appropriate ways to explore the territory they are trying to understand. Ang Lee’s Hulk movie, for example, is a perfect example of a film trying to be more like a comic book in the way that it encompasses a very similar visual language by using the background organisation of the printed comic page being split into panels and then finding a way to, sometimes very cleverly, use those panels to make a narrative which can speed up or slow down your perception of time as required by the confines of the story.

The first Sin City film followed the stark black and white colouring shot through with odd, bright colours highlighting various characters and objects which was used in some of the issues... although I seem to remember the original A Dame To Kill didn’t actually use any colour in it (if memory serves me correctly). Like the first movie, though, it serves to enhance the overall look of the Sin City branding and it’s certainly used very effectively. This film looks every bit as spectacular as the first movie in the franchise and, once again, Rodriguez and Miller have done a fine job of adapting this masterwork, even going as far as to graphically bring many of the comic book panels to life as almost “animated moments” like they were in the first movie.

I have very few complaints but one of them would be Jessica Alba in the role of Nancy. Don’t get me wrong, she’s an incredible actress and does a fine job here but... again, in Sin City: A Dame To Kill For, we see her obviously reluctant to take her clothes off like the character does in the comics and this really does kinda blow the credibility of Nancy on film in terms of someone who is an infamous stripper dancing in one of the sleaziest bars in Sin City. I love Jessica Alba as much as the next warm blooded guy or gal but, for such a crucial part, there really needs to be a lack of clothes, I feel.

My other complaint would be the character of Dwight, as played by Josh Brolin, who does very well in the part and bounces off of Mickey Rourke’s exquisite return engagement as “the tough guy’s tough guy” Marv in just the way you need him too. I wasn’t too worried about Brolin replacing the already excellent Clive Owen in the role of Dwight for the simple reason that, if you’ve ever read A Dame To Kill For, you’ll know that they would have had to have used a different actor for the majority of it. The story is set before most of the events that took place in the previous movie and so you get to find out why Manute has a bright yellow eyepiece and why Marv, and Goldie and her sister, of course, are all alive in this one. In the original A Dame To Kill For, Dwight gets his face changed after sustaining some fairly fearsome injuries and, when the bandages come off, he is revealed as the later version of the character which he was portrayed as in the previous comics/films. This is a great reveal and I was really looking forward to Clive Owen coming back for the last part of this movie as the Dwight we knew and loved in the first film.

Alas, it wasn’t to be.

Apparently Owen’s schedule would not let him return for his part of the role in this one. Now, personally, I would have waited him out because, although they’ve tried their best with prosthetics to make Brolin look like the version of the character Owen played earlier, when the bandages come off in the movie it kinda just looks like Brolin with a haircut that... really doesn’t suit him. This is the one thing that fails the movie big time, I reckon, because... if you haven’t read the comic, and most of the audience wouldn’t have... it doesn’t come across that Dwight’s face is supposed to be as it was in the first movie. Without Owen there to sell the illusion, the fact that there is even supposed to be a reveal here... rather than just Brolin with a scruffy mop top... is probably not something most people are going to pick up on. So that’s a real shame and, like I said, I wish they would have just delayed the film again and waited for Owen’s schedule to clear up. It wasn’t, after all, the first time this particular sequel had been delayed.

Aside from that though, Miller’s beautifully written noir dialogue and the heavy blacks and bleached out whites colliding with the reds, blues and yellows makes for another Sin City film which is pure visual poetry. And added to that you’ve got Joseph Gordon-Levitt playing a brand new character to the Sin City universe, Rosario Dawson back as Gail (although not nearly enough of this gorgeous actress as I would have liked to see... she’s always fun to watch and listen to) and the always stunning Eva Green playing the title character Ava, literally A Dame To Kill For. And I’ll tell you people who have an interest in this kind of thing up front... Eva as Ava goes through most of the picture not wearing much of any clothes at all, for the most part... so in terms of the celebration of naked femininity on screen, she more than makes up for the lack of Nancy strutting her stuff like she does in the comics... although I still think it’s a bit of a heavy credibility issue to have a stripper who doesn’t strip, to be honest.

The music to the first film was supplied by Rodriguez himself, working with composers John Debney and Graeme Revell. For this one, however, he’s working with a composer called Carl Thiel but, honestly, you wouldn’t notice any change because the music uses themes and orchestration which are the dead spit of the style of the first movie in the series and the continuity between the two of them is completely copacetic, I’m happy to say. I can’t wait for the release of the CD of the score in September so I can give it some play.

One last thing I will say though is this... I don’t know why this movie has had such a disappointing weekend but I do know that the Sin City films are absolutely the kinds of films that are meant to be seen at the cinema. They are what film is all about and they are little masterpieces of modern art that, if ignored now, will resurface and be reappraised in decades to come and your support for films like this is badly needed so future generations don’t turn around and ask us all, through the mists of time, why only two of these movies were made. Minor gripes aside, Sin City: A Dame To Kill For is an absolute corker of a movie and should appeal to true cinephiles the world over. Go and soak it up in all its 3D goodness on a big screen while you still can.

Men In Black 3

Spare MIBs


Men In Black 3 USA  2012
Directed by Barry Sonnenfeld
Playing at UK cinemas now

Men In Black 3 is not a roller-coaster ride of a movie.

Nor is it high octane, pulse pounding, thrilling adrenalin rush of a cinematic experience... and if that’s what you’re hoping for I think you may find yourself a little disappointed. And I think that may be the case with much of what the studio thinks is its target audience.

On the other hand, Men In Black 3 is exactly what I was hoping to get from another installment in the franchise...

A decent movie.

A film.

Something with a little story and a warm heart rather than just a whole flying saucer load of mind-numbing set pieces fused together with a storyline tagged on around it. In other words... it’s a nice, pleasant time at the cinema and not a confusing one.

Now I loved the original Men In Black movie when it hit cinemas back in 1997. It had a darkness and a downside to it that gave the movie a certain amount of warm fuzziness while still being a nice bit of a sci-fi adventure yarn. I even watched it once again when it was released on video tape. Men In Black 2, however, was a whole different ball game. It was competent enough and had some nice bits in it but, ultimately, I felt like that one was just a load of set pieces shoved together and tied up with a bow. It wasn’t terrible, how could it be when Rosario Dawson was in it (she is hot!)? Ultimately though, it didn’t provide what I was looking for and I never was tempted enough to look at it again when it hit the home video market.

It’s been ten years since that misfire (I’m sorry, that’s just how I see the second one) but the trailer to MIB3 looked pretty good and I’m always a sucker for time travel stories so I decided to check this one out... besides, my mum loves Will Smith so it was a shoe in I’d have to take her along to it anyway. Like I had a choice.

As I said above, MIB3 has a solid storyline and some genuinely funny moments. The banter between the warm Agent J (Will Smith) and his dead-pan senior partner Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones) is all in fine form but after a major set piece or two at the start of the movie... yeah, okay, they put some major set pieces in, it’s not like they didn’t try to turn it into a roller coaster, they just didn’t succeed enough on that level to let it ruin the film okay? Anyway... as I was saying... after a major set piece or two at the start of the movie, Tommy Lee Jones goes missing in action. Quite literally missing. Missing from the present day time/space continuum, in fact, when a psychopathic alien (who reminded me a bit of Charlie Manson, it must be said) escapes from his lunar jail and goes back in time to the launch of the famous moon landing mission of 1969 at Cape Canavrel, killing Agent K and thus changing history. The only one who can remember K is Will Smith’s J... and with the world in peril from marauding alien invaders, J has to go back in time to 1969 to prevent the moon escapee, Boris The Animal, from killing Agent K and thus allowing the older Boris to succeed where he, in the past, failed.

And pretty much the rest of the movie’s short running time is spent with Agent J and a younger version of Agent K, played expertly by Josh Brolin in a performance which is a brilliant echo of Tommy Lee Jones own take on the role, as they do the whole “tracking down alien Men In Black” thing and we see some great moments in American history recreated to boot... including a nice series of moments in Andy Warhol’s factory (Andy Warhol, of course, turning out to be an undercover MIB). There were some nice little nods to the time and place the movie inhabits and I even, at one point, saw a blink and you’ll miss it cameo of a guy dressed up as a Metalunan Mutant from This Island Earth. That one really made me smile.

There’s some stuff towards the end of the movie when the two agents and their friend, who can see all the possible future events of the universe, are put in a situation when you realise there’s a good chance that nobody is going to get a very happy ending out of this one. You already know that the reason Agent K has looked miserable all these years is because of what happened the day that the movie is working itself up to and with both agents taking on a different version of Boris from two crossing time streams at once, the chances of them both surviving don’t look very good... and I’m happy to say that my best guess on this one was wrong. I expected this to be an exit for one of the characters, and not necessarily the one who it’s all set up to be the last exit for... so I was really glad that the movie wasn’t as obvious as I’d expected it to be in this area... although that outcome would have been a pretty bleak proposition. There’s also a bit I didn’t really understand with a little bump/bounceback in time happening with no apparent explanation... can anybody who’s seen the movie please explain that one to me?

I can, however, reveal one tiny thing without actually spoiling your viewing experience of the film. All I’m going to say is that Boris isn’t the only person who shares some simultaneous timeline with a younger version of himself... and I’ll leave it at that. You might have a suspicion from that but I’m guessing you’ll be wrong. There’s a nice little surprise before Agent J returns back to his own time stream. And when I say nice I mean the moment is tragic and dark and explains just why K is not the most cheerful person whenever we see him... and I really can’t say anymore. Suffice it to say that the movie is quite moving towards the end and gives a nice understanding of certain things that happened in the first movie... although I’m going to have to check that first movie again now to ensure that the third movie hasn’t created some glaringly new, timey-wimey continuity errors in the trilogy.

This film is well shot, well acted, has some nice visual effects, some gentle comedy, a villain you really won’t like too much... plus music by Danny Elfman riffing on his original baseline for the series, so what’s not to like on that “score”? It’s not a perfect movie, by any means. I would have liked to see more of Tommy Lee Jones in the movie, since he gets kind of jettisoned from the film about 20 - 30 minutes of the way in and then only comes back for about a minute or two at the end... that was a shame... but it’s not about the cast it’s about the overall effect and Men In Black 3 is a nice, respectful companion piece to the previous two movies and certainly doesn’t let the high standard set in the first one drop any. The 3D in this one wasn’t nearly as distracting either, I would say. Completely pointless and unnecessary, of course, specifically because of that reason... but not distracting.

If Men In Black is your thing then you shouldn’t find yourself disappointed by the third installment... it’s a really solid piece of movie making. Go see it.