Orla Smith.

Nazo Dharejo’s story is extraordinary.

It’s standard for films based on true stories to end with title cards that tell the audience what happened next. I was more moved reading that text at the end of My Pure Land than I was throughout the whole of the rest of the film.

My Pure Land ― which markets itself as a feminist western ― successfully exposes Pakistan’s corrosive patriarchal values. Nazo and her sister are taught by their father to defend against invading men who intend to claim their property.

They are fit with checked shirts and AK-47s when they practice defence; their father laughs and comments that he appears to have two sons. The fact that the film ― which is written and directed by a man, Sarmad Masud ― considers itself ‘feminist’, is at first worrying. Masud appears to be equating female empowerment with women adopting the traits of men.

However, as the film progresses it become clear that Masud intends to challenge that trope, which is initially held by some of the film’s male characters and internalised by its female ones. When the real danger comes, the girls aren’t in their ‘boys clothes’. They are dressed in saris. They are told that they are ‘better than sons’.

Masud should be commended for giving thought to his approach of his female characters. However, he still adopts the ‘feminist’ label a little too carelessly.

What My Pure Land needs is more focus ― and what it needs to focus on is Nazo. Instead, we chop back and forth between two timelines, with a lot of screen time devoted to Nazo’s father in prison. Switching between past and present is mostly unnecessary and confusing ― although it is occasionally effective when it powerfully contrasts life with death.

The best elements of My Pure Land come hand in hand with its worst.

Overuse of music sabotages real emotion in scenes that might otherwise have been effective. There are snatches of startling, arresting cinematography ― but Masud is unable to harness those images for their full potential.

I’m almost tempted to recommend My Pure Land because of the woman at its centre. Then again, skimming Wikipedia would be just as useful and far less time consuming. My Pure Land is frustratingly factual. I wish it was as interested in who Nazo is than it is in what she did.

Orla Smith.

There isn’t much to say about Kills on Wheels. That’s saying something, for a film that seems built to stand out. This Hungarian submission for last year’s foreign language Oscar has crafted its appeal around an eye catching premise: it has been sold as a ‘buddy-movie about a wheelchair-using gang of assassins. If your first thought is recent capers starring older veterans such as Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, you’re off the mark. The poster for Kills on Wheels shows a young man in a wheelchair, posing proudly with a gun in his hand. This isn’t a silly comedy about pensioners past their prime. It is a film that attempts to give young (or younger) disabled people their own action stars.

The film’s exploration of what advantages disability might bring to a criminal is its most interesting element. The central trio includes two young men – Zoli and Barba – who share a room in a rehabilitation facility, and an older man they meet named Rupasov, who has recently been released from prison. Rupasov is a hitman who, in one of the film’s only sparks of wit and imagination, is able to kill people by hiding his gun in a plastic bag placed on his wheelchair. Nobody suspects a thing. In a busy public square, no-one spares him a single glance of suspicion. Kills on Wheels touches on ideas of society’s precious attitude towards the disabled ― but it gets distracted by the clichés of the common crime drama along the way, failing to dig deeper.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF3GWhtoFg8

Thankfully, the film itself doesn’t hold those precious attitudes. The disabled main characters never feel as though they are defined by their disabilities, but their characterisation is still thin. Director Attila Till stated: ‘It was crucial to me to make a movie about disabled people where they finally aren’t played by actors, but get the opportunity to act themselves and be the real heroes’. It’s a commendable sentiment, and it’s refreshing to see actual disabled people taking on disabled roles. They inhabit their characters naturally and with confidence, but are hindered by uninteresting material.

The film’s most worrying element is its attitude towards women. Women are only ever visible as worrying mothers, nurturers and objects of desire. Even then, they are given scarcely little screen time ― this being a film chiefly centred on male relationships ― but misogyny is rarely ever fully out of the picture. In one scene, when the central trio are fishing together, one of the younger characters goes on a sudden tirade that is unspeakably misogynistic: he complains about how their nurses in the rehabilitation home ‘totally lack sexuality’, and it gets worse from there. His thoughts are then reinforced by an older character. This is a film that attempts to be uplifting and entertaining, so why is it that its director has decided to alienate and insult all of his female viewers for no rhyme or reason?

As that behaviour may suggest, we are given little reason to like these characters, and they are given little reason to like each other. Till introduces a ‘life or death’ medical plotline relating to one of the main character’s disability, and it seems incredibly forced. For a filmmaker who preaches the virtues of positive representation of disabled people on screen, he isn’t doing a particularly good job of letting them live freely within their own narratives. This extraneous plotline is unnecessary and convoluted ― and on top of all that, it asks us to care about someone who doesn’t feel like a real human being in the first place, let alone a sympathetic one.

Kills on Wheels is competently crafted and performed, but incompetently scripted and characterised. Despite its eye-catching premise, it is indistinguishable from any other wannabe crime saga. This film could have been commendable for allowing disabled people to exist in the kind of narrative usually reserved for able-bodied people, or it could have been commendable for exploring the way disabled people are treated in society and the unforeseen advantages that could afford them in those sorts of narratives. It fails to do either successfully.

By Anthony Reyes.

It: A portrayal of childhood and terror

As an avid fan of Stephen King’s literary masterpiece of the same name, I was skeptical when I discovered that a new adaptation of It was being produced. Adaptations from novel to the screen are always a risk, but the stories of Stephen King always bring an extra layer of insecurity. Despite featuring many themes of the supernatural and horror in his stories, Stephen King is a humanist at heart. He frequently writes about universal topics such as the loss of innocence, loneliness, and the pleasures and instability of small town America. But since the movie industry is a business and distribution companies needs to market their products, the main selling point of most of the adaptations from Stephen King’s stories is the horror aspect. And that can be plainly seen with It. Since the start of this film’s development, the horror of a killer crown terrorizing kids of a small town has been piled on so that mass audiences get hyped up to watch this film on September 8^th. But fans of the source material as myself know that It is special for many reasons other than the supernatural horror side to it. As I entered the theater for a special advanced screening of It that I was invited to, I hoped that Andres Muschietti, the director, kept those reasons in mind when making this film.

The story of It follows a group of children living in the small town of Derry, Maine. Brought together by their shared isolation and status as social outcasts, Bill, Eddie, Richie, Beverly, Ben, Stanley, and Mike form the Losers club. They are also brought together by the fact that they each have come across a terrifying clown called Pennywise (Bill Skarsgård) who exploits their personal fears in order to feast off of them. Disillusioned by surrounding adults, together they try to find a way to defeat the clown to stop him from hurting anyone else.

Having watched Andres Muschietti’s Mama, I was confident that It had potential to be a great horror film and coming of age story.

Muschietti knows how to successfully balance horror with emotion, which is horribly important for this story. These children, led by Bill Denbrough, have all been through horrible events in their lives. They are victims of life’s cruel touch, from abusive fathers to gas lighting mothers. They are bullied and harassed relentlessly by other kids. Not in a light, playful manner either. These kids are beaten and held at knifepoint by Henry Bowers and his gang. They even chase after Mike for being black and Ben for being fat. The film did a wonderful job of establishing their status as losers. They are scared. They are alone. They have nothing to do with their time except avoid bullies. They’ve each been terrorized by a supernatural clown. So, the natural next step would be for them to come together and unite. Muschietti succeeds in relishing those moments of unity. After all the hell each character has been through, the moments in which they are carefree and are just enjoying being kids together are the strength of the entire story.

This film also knew how to establish the role of every member of this group, which helps when the main character is an ensemble. Bill Denbrough is the leader, the brave one who has no issue charging forward against Pennywise. Ben Hanscom, despite being terribly insecure due to being overweight, is a clever thinker. He knows how to research and find solutions to problems. Beverly Marsh is the confident one, the girl who can get the boys out of their shells. Eddie Kaspbrak is the loyal one who overcomes many of his fears in order to help his best friend Bill. Richie Tozier is the wisecracking jokester of the group, who finds something to say at every turn. Stanley Uris is the skeptical one of the Losers club, often being unsure of whether the group should take on It or not. Mike Hanlon is the one with a long connection with Derry, with his family and the color of his skin leading him to the others. These roles establish the importance of each member to the Losers Club, and how they can only be effective against Pennywise together. The casting for Muschietti’s It really reflected how dedicated the filmmakers were to Stephen King’s story. Each actor played their role with precise vulnerability that later turns into budding confidence. Their performances helped portray the character arcs that they all experience throughout It, the one that takes them from innocent, small town children to the fighters that must save their town from the monster that wants to feed on it.

While the emotional arcs of these characters are ultimately the entire crux of the film, Andres Muschietti was very creative on the way the horror was to be conveyed. Despite being focused on children, the horror is by no means childlike. I was surprised by the lengths It went to in order to scare the audience, but delighted on how effective it was. From the scene at the beginning when Pennywise meets George at the sewer drain, the audience becomes thrown into the world of a relentless monster. Muschietti does not leave up. He uses every horrific and violent detail that he can use to build a world where the adults have been so traumatized that only children can fight the dancing clown. Bill Skargård’s portrayal of Pennywise the Dancing Clown was a joy to watch, but also incredibly frightening. At some points, the clown was wildly eccentric, relying on physicality to terrify. He would dance, jump around, shapeshift. And while those moments were terrifying to watch, Skarsgård also pulled off the most chilling aspect of Pennywise: what he represented to the children. He represented fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of not being in control, of your fate being in someone’s hands. Skarsgård hit all those notes impressively. He made Pennywise’s very presence earth shattering, which is a feeling that barely went away throughout the whole film. When you combine Skarsgård’s performance with the nerve wracking cinematography, you get a horror movie experience that stays with you long after you leave the theater.

To the children of Stephen King’s story, the only thing more terrifying than Pennywise the Dancing clown is the idea of losing each other, or returning to their own lives. Being a kid is hard. Nobody listens to these characters, nobody pays them any mind. Some of them think that they are invisible. Every single member of the Losers club struggle with their own demons, their own personal hell that they escape from when they’re together. Stephen King likes to write about the loss of innocence, but these kids have lost their innocence a long time ago. It was stolen from them by parents or other external forces that disregarded them as human beings. The fight against It is a fight to reclaim their innocence, because It represents everything that they’re afraid of, everything that has ever victimized them. Muschietti understood that and did everything possible to establish the bravery that these kids display to fight the dancing clown. There is a speech around the middle of the film delivered by Bill Denbrough where he explains why he feels the need to face Pennywise. It is one of the more eye opening moments of the film. You see the emotional weight on everybody’s shoulders, how much is at stake if they give into their fear. Producing a horror film with great emotional balance is difficult enough, but when childhood innocence is added to the structure, it would be easy to depend more on the horror than the story arcs of the characters.

But It beautifully depends on its young characters to carry the film, to make the audience sympathize with them and see why they matter.

What a person who has read Stephen King’s It might know that a person who hasn’t read the novel doesn’t know is that this 2017 film is only the first installment in a two-part story. It spans across three decades: when Pennywise appears to the kids and twenty-seven years later, when they come back to Derry to finish off the clown one and for all. This film covers the first part, and Muschietti makes it a point to give hints that this story has not come to an end. As the film establishes the roles of each character within the Losers club, you can see where the characters might end up in the future when the second film begins. The kids also establish that Pennywise comes out of hibernation every twenty-seven years, and they keep that in mind as they film ends. They look to the future and swear a blood oath to finish off the Dancing Clown if he were to ever reappear. And although news of the It 2 has been relatively thin, this film promises a continuation of this story. I’m sure we’ll watch closely as Muschietti embarks on telling the story of the adult Losers club.

I was skeptical going into Andres Muschietti’s It for many reasons that are all attributed to being devoted to the source material. There was doubt within me that the film would focus too much on exploiting the horror of the story and not focusing on portraying the emotional weight that comes with being haunted by a force that feeds off your fear. However, I was impressed to see how well Muschietti could get me invested not just in Pennywise the Clown but every single member of the Losers club. These kids were not afraid of a clown. They were afraid to live their lives, to become used to the abuse and neglect that they have been subject to. Sure, Muschietti might indulge in some horror movie clichés such as jump scares, but every aspect of story and filmmaking is used to heighten the horrific story of child hood and monsters.

It is a powerful horror, coming of age drama, just what a lover of Stephen King’s original novel would hope for.