Blink Twice

Me Two

Blink Twice
Directed by Zoë Kravitz
USA/Mexico 2024
MGM/Warner Brothers
UK cinema release print

Wow.

Blink Twice is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz (daughter of pop star Lenny Kravitz and actress Lisa Bonet), who also co-write the screenplay under the original working title Pussy Island... a name which she was intending to be the release title until it was eventually shot down... not a bad thing actually because that title might have been a bit of a spoiler. And talking of spoilers, I am going to do my best here to write this review without spoilers as best I can because, you should really go in blind to the plot details, as I did. But one spoiler about this specific review however is... when I say wow it’s because, well, this is one impressive directorial debut, for sure. And I don’t remember the director as an actress in the many films she’s appeared in other than, she played an impressive Catwoman in The Batman (reviewed here) and also voiced the same character in The Lego Batman Movie ( reviewed here).

Okay, so Kravitz does not star in the film herself. The main protagonist, Frida, played by Naomi Ackie, is having a hard time to pay the rent but she is obsessed with famous billionaire Slater King (played by Channing Tatum, who also is one of the producers of the movie) , who has publicly apologised for some unspecified abusive behaviour and has been out of the public eye for a while, going to an island he has bought to relax with his friends while one of his pals looks after the successful King Foundation. Frida and her roommate Jess, played by Alia Shawkat, accidentally hook up with King and are invited to go with him and his entourage to his private island for some decadent partying.

They agree and meet various other guests like Sarah (played magnificently by Adria Arjona) and, frankly, among the rest of the cast it’s a veritable who’s who, with no offence intended, of stars of yesteryear who somehow seem to have disappeared from the cinema goers radar for a while, it seems to me. These include an adult Haley Joel Osment (remember him... he sees dead people), Christian Slater, Kyle MacLachlan and the great Geena Davis. And, over the course of the endless partying, fuelled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol, things start getting a bit deja vu for Frida and some of the other guests. Put it this way, the audience will notice that one of the guests has gone missing before Frida does. And... that’s really as much as I want to say about the plot of the film... continuing my attempt to write this thing with no spoilers (because it’s the kind of film that really deserves no spoilers, if doable).

Okay, let’s talk about the impressive debut of Zoë Kravitz then. Now, I may be talking out of turn here but, the approach to filming this is not, I think, something which might be taught at a film school, I suspect. In some ways I might be justified in saying you can tell this is someone’s first film because of what it doesn’t do as much as what it does. But in this case, I don’t mean that in a negative way at all. Here’s what I mean...

Okay, so in my previous review on the blog for a new film called Starve Acre (reviewed by me here) I noted that, sometimes, the director would start off a scene focusing on a detail rather than give the audience the expected establishing shot that ninety nine out of ten directors would go for. Well Zoë Kravitz does that in spades in this movie, starting out with people in their headspace and then sometimes withholding any kind of establishing shot for a while.

The opening shot, for instance, of some kind of reptile (possibly a snake, actually, in hindsight) is held for a long time for no apparent reason... except you’ll find out exactly why we got that particular shot near the end of the movie. The film is bright, colourful and, when it breaks the accepted rules of film (or should that be expectations) by doing this kind of thing... it absolutely gets away with it and it all works well. Nothing here is done by accident and it makes me feel that Zoë Kravitz must be, already, a master of her craft. I remember when my best friend (sadly no longer with us) and I got out of a screening of Woody Allen’s masterpiece (of his many masterpieces) Shadows And Fog at the Lumiere cinema in London (also no longer with us) back in the early 1990s... he basically said, “... that’s just Woody Allen flexing his muscles. He walks all over the other directors out there...” and, at the time, I had to agree with him. Well, the way Kravitz and her crew pull you in with the shot design, cinematography and editing here to make, not only a great piece of art but also a very relevant and still timely film about a serious issue, makes me think the same of her. She’s just flexing her artistic muscles here... except it’s her debut as a director, people!

And not only that, although a lot of the elements of the story come as absolutely no surprise... for instance, the arc of Geena Davis’ character panned out exactly as I thought it would... it genuinely doesn’t always do what you think it’s going to do in a lot of other ways... often technically with the way it’s shot, as discussed above but, also with the paths Kravitz chooses to reach her final destination. And that includes a crazy ending which, I have to admit, I totally didn’t think she’d go with and, while it’s not quite what I would have expected, it’s a bold choice so... power to her.

Not only that but the effective score by Chanda Dancy (sadly not available on CD) and even the various needle drop songs, work really well with the film and lift the visuals they are accompanying. As does the sound design, which really focuses on the state of mind of the lead protagonist as much as anything else, it seems to me.

And that’s me just about done on the very cool Blink Twice. No idea in the film is really that original... she even steals a nice visual gag from an early scene in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in an early moment here (review coming soon) but, that specific gag aside, Kravitz goes up to eleven on everything in the movie and, quite surprisingly, it all works very well. Hopefully this one will get a Blu Ray release soon so I can study it a little better. Worth seeing at the cinema if you can catch it at your local, for sure.

Confess, Fletch

Etch A Fletch

Confess, Fletch
USA 2022
Directed by Greg Mottola
Miramax

Once upon a time there was a movie called Fletch. It starred Chevy Chase as the title character, Irvin Maurice Fletcher, or I M Fletcher (pronounced, I Am Fletcher) and it was based on the first book of a series of Fletch novels (including prequels), written by a truly great writer called Gregory McDonald (now sadly deceased). Me and my late, great best friend Kerry loved Fletch and quoted it as often as we could. It was the first but, not quite the last, time I liked Chevy Chase in anything and, as a result, I acquired and read all of the Fletch novels available (which included the one this current film is based on) and picked the others up as and when McDonald wrote them. They were all absolutely brilliant (apart from, maybe, Carioca, Fletch, which I could never get on with for some reason) and we were all chomping at the bit for a proper sequel.

Fate was not kind to the legion of Fletch fans because, in the film company's infinite stupidity, the direct movie sequel, Fletch Lives, was not based on one of McDonald’s books, being completely a studio concocted adventure. And it showed. It was, alas, pretty awful (asides from Harold Faltermeyer’s wonderful follow up score) and, yeah, I think it must be the combination of terrible, unwitty dialogue coupled with yet more outrageous disguises for Chase to don (which were never a part of the novels and which they should have ditched for the first film too), which killed the franchise stone dead. There was talk of it being revived over the years, most notably when the great Kevin Smith was going to write and direct McDonald’s first prequel, Fletch Won, to star Jason Lee. That would have been awesome as Smith is one of those writers who would have completely understood how the dialogue and characterisation would have worked... the novels are all about the dialogue and the odd, subtly done surprise twist, as far as I’m concerned.

Which brings me to the new adaptation of a Fletch novel... Confess, Fletch. And, wow, the audience finally got the sequel it deserved.

This one stars John Hamm as former investigative reporter Fletch, dabbling around the art world and, on the surface, attempting to find some stolen paintings so that his new fiance, Angela (played by Lorenza Izzo), the daughter of a count, can find the painting required to pay off the ransom on her kidnapped father. But, as complicated as that plot seems... there’s always just a little more twist with a Fletch story and, like most of the novels, you won’t properly begin to see the real picture until the  evolving post-mortem of an epilogue, where all the pieces finally fit together. And that’s all I’m saying about the plot because, by the very nature of the style of story telling involved in these books/films, I need to keep this one spoiler free.  

Now, I’m going to address the elephant in the room for fans of the novel right away here. I was angry about the exclusion, from this movie, of the second most important character in the book, the eccentric Irish Detective Inspector Francis Xavier Flynn. He’s a force to be reckoned with in this novel and was popular enough that, after appearing and making a difference to the way events run in this story, spun off into his own series of Flynn books by MacDonald. Here he’s replaced by two equally likeable police characters who, it has to be said, are mostly portrayed as incompetent whereas, if memory serves, while Flynn seems like he’s incompetent to Fletch in the novel at first, he comes into his own and brings his own spin into giving the movers and shakers enough rope to hang themselves... and others... with. And I was annoyed he’s not in the movie but, it turns out, there are legal issues with using the character in this film (which I hope are beyond the stupid one of just paying more money for the character) and so... it had to be done without Flynn.

Normally I would be calling this an unforgivable crime (which, to be fair, it is) but I have to cut the writers, director and performers some slack here because... absolutely everything else about the style and atmosphere of the novels, they got right. Admittedly, they’ve felt the need to update Fletch to an era of emails and cell phones (not right) but the dialogue is clever and the spirit of the piece is well and truly intact. It was an absolute joy to watch this.

The actors in this are great too. I’ve got no idea who John Hamm is and I don’t remember him from anything I’ve seen but he’s almost perfect for Fletch. By ‘almost perfect’ I mean he delivers his lines well and has exactly the same ‘laid back to the point of being deceitful’ attitude of the character (who nobody ever really listens to well enough to get any of his jokes). I love the way that, like the books, half the stuff he says to people goes by them without them noticing it. So, yeah, Hamm does an absolutely gorgeous job... but... at 51 years of age he’s just too old for the part and looks it, to be honest. That’s the only problem I had with it but, I’m willing to overlook that because a) it’s not his fault and b) he’s absolutely fabulous... although I’d get any sequels done quickly because I do not want to see a 60 year old Fletch running around in this kind of story. Oh.. and a quick shout out to another person I never heard of, Ayden Mayeri, who really knocks it out the park playing a character called Griz. Stellar work lady!

And, he’s backed up by some great actors doing some wonderful performances...  Kyle MacLachlan’s germophobic art dealer is good, John Slattery as Fletch’s former boss at the New York Tribune is excellent and, wow, Marcia Gay Harden does a wonderful turn as Fletch’s possible future mother-in-law, The Countess. And it all goes towards cementing the perfect formula of the novels... these are not comedies, as Paramount found out when it went into full comedy mode for the bizarre sequel Fletch Lives... these are comedy thrillers. That is to say, straight thrillers with a very strong sense of humour, not least of which is found in the dialogue and thought processes of the titular character. Which is exactly what we have here and which they really managed to nail.

So yeah, I loved Confess, Fletch and, if you liked that original first movie and, especially if you liked MacDonald’s fantastic series of books, you will probably love this one and go into it with the right kind of expectations. I’m very interested in seeing how this does at the box office because, frankly, I think we might find the audience for this kind of solid movie has probably not got a lot of  crossover with the young target audience who go to the cinema... so I hope they look at figures for streaming and, please give us a Blu Ray release of this one (not to mention a proper CD edition of David Arnold’s wonderful score... damn thing’s only available as a stupid digital download at present). So, yeah, great movie, don’t miss out.