Author: BRWC

By Marti Dols Roca.

It’s difficult to decide what to make out of Spaceship, the writer-director Alex Taylor debut which will be in UK cinemas on May the 19th; what is undeniable though, is that if Mr. Taylor keeps doing what he just did, he is a force to be reckoned with in the indie British film industry.

The way the writer of this article humbly sees it, and I may be completely wrong, is that story wise this is a movie about teenagers, in the first place; and about teenagers and their relationship with adults, secondly. Therefore, it is told from a teenager POV, as daunting, confusing, exhilarating and changing as their mind and behavior can be. If cyber punk aesthetics; a blurry line between fantasy and reality dwelled by alien abductions, vampires wannabes, unicorns, black holes and reincarnations; and drug triggered psychedelic sequences under ultraviolet light and florescent body paint are added to the mix, the result is an extremely appealing visual piece, an interestingly puzzling story and, as far as I’m concerned, a really intriguing audiovisual poem.

The movie follows a bunch of different characters and even though initially one would say that Lucidia (Alexa Davies) is the main one, her abduction more or less at the middle of the film, leaves the story orphan in that sense. The premise, if we follow a classic way of analyzing this movie (which we shouldn’t since this is all but a classic movie) would be something like: A teenage girl tries to cope with the disappearance/alien abduction of her mother while learning to relate with her environment (father, friends and landscape). Until the point she is the one abducted and now it is her environment that needs to find her.

Lucidia aside, the movie follows: her father Gabriel (Antti Reini), an archeologist and Finish immigrant forced to reconnect with her daughter’s world through her friends and especially Tegan (Lara Peake), who looks exactly like his absent wife; an interesting in terms of concept but not really successful extra subplot portraying two squaddies making banal chit chat around the town while they train for their future and shining army careers; and last but not least, quite on the contrary, there’s Alice (Tallulah Haddon): in my opinion the best of the movie by far. The truth is that the casting is truly remarkable and pretty much all performances are excellent, but Tallulah takes it to another level with her mysterious, manipulative, flashy, extremely intelligent (rationally and emotionally) Alice impersonation. If there’s an actual alien in the movie, it’s her. And she’s AMAZING.

I know this article is getting confusing but that’s how the movie is, and it really is something else. Two more examples:

When Lucidia wakes up in “the other side” she needs to find a kid raving in a cave in order to be able to come back, or something. Whatever it means, love it.

Or, as a random teenager expresses in the following conversation with Gabriel:

T: You want some MDMA? G: No, I’m good. T: Good? Good isn’t enough anymore.

We could establish a parallelism between our current society and the teenager attitude; maybe another day. In any case, for a teenager, and especially a current one, happiness is not enough, euphoria is demanded! And that’s how it should be.

Spaceship, go watch it. It won’t leave you indifferent and it’s surely going to be talked about. It definitely should.

By Marti Dols Roca.

Austin Powers, Johnny English and now Richard Thorncroft A.K.A Mindhorn. It is a very British tradition in the audiovisual world to come up with irreverent, politically incorrect and hilarious private investigators that get to “crack the case and get the girl” in the most unexpected, insane and quite usually fortunate way. We could add to this three-name list a couple of other characters like Sacha Baron Cohen’s Grimsby; or Colin Firth’s Harry Hart-Kingsman, but they are not exactly molded in the same pattern if we think about it thoroughly. In case we wanted to do that, of course.

And, as Myers and Atkinson, his predecessors, did, Barratt’s character will be loved and loathed in equal measure. He is a chauvinist, tacky, kind of racist, selfish, narcissistic piece of work who, eventually, will learn about true love, generosity and respect. But before he gets there, lots of people will be offended by his jokes and modus operandi, to put it nicely.

As far as the writer of this article is concerned, there are two possible ways of looking at it:

One: in order to get another example of the worst kind of English man with all its prejudices, negative clichés and mentality, we don’t need to spend 12 pounds and go see a make believe character messing around, Nigel Farage is within reach for no charge.*

Two: it is actually quite admirable to see that the same concept (Powers, English) can be redone and still feel fresh and funny. If you, as a reader of this article and respectable member of the audience, hate Mike Myers’ films, then you will hate this one too; there’s no way around it. On the other hand, if you laughed with Austin Powers and Johnny English (publicly or not) and feel like another portion of good ol’ politically incorrect British humour, you will love this film. **

*But at least with Mindhorn you get to laugh.

**In all honesty, Mindhorn’s tone is less hysterical than Power’s but more irreverent than English’s; so there’s that.

By Last Caress.

The Happiest Place on Earth opens with a montage of childrens’ pencil drawings, all depicting a typical family idyll. My mommy, my daddy, my brother, my sister and me. A dog here, a cat there. A house behind them, or maybe “Old Glory” herself. A sunny sky above. The happiest place on Earth. The drawings are by the children in the daycare centre where Maggie (Jennifer Faith Ward) is a teacher. Maggie is hoping to create a happiest place of her own. She and her husband Jonah (Tom Kemnitz, Jr.) have just purchased a brand new property. It’s a little pricier than they wanted but it’s perfect for raising a family, which is the step they want to take next. They’re doing everything right, playing by the rules, and everything is going right for them.

And then, before they’ve even finished unboxing, Jonah is made redundant from his job.

A new job proves hard to come by, since Jonah works as a layout artist in print media and newspapers all over the country are making cuts in that area, trying to expand their web presences instead. Maggie’s parents – disapproving of Maggie’s choice of husband in the first place – are well-off but reluctant to help (“You’re supposed to be an adult,” opines her mother, helpfully. “What would it teach you to bail you out?”), and Maggie herself refuses to take a step back in their life trajectory to a small apartment which would be more fiscally manageable but inappropriate for the child she wants to bring into the world. She takes a second job, waitressing, and Jonah starts mowing lawns but, since the bank won’t restructure their mortgage payments, it’s not enough to make ends meet. Jonah even resorts to rigging the electricity meter to save some money, although Maggie interjects and, after an argument, succeeds in stopping him from committing that act. The situation is becoming desperate, and it’s getting to them.

Following a particularly demeaning job interview, Jonah decides to take a short camping break for a couple of days, at Maggie’s behest (“I think it’ll be good for you to get away, and clear your head. Re-group. I… think it’ll be good for both of us”). However, Jonah doesn’t return from his trip. What has happened? Has he been dragged out to sea and drowned in his kayak as it would appear? Has he killed himself in order to try to avail Maggie of the $500,000 life insurance policy he’s taken out? Maggie doesn’t want to claim the policy in the hope that Jonah might still be out there but the world keeps turning, and it keeps squeezing, and Maggie is having to sell their belongings in order to get by. The insurance company aren’t likely to pay out on a death for some years; they’ll probably only pay out half without the discovery of Jonah’s body and, with the cops pursuing the likelihood of Jonah’s act being a suicide committed in order for Maggie to collect on the policy, she may never see a dime. She’s drowning now, too. Will she survive?

The Happiest Place on Earth, written and directed by John Goshorn, is anything but. Made with an impressively slight $10,000, it’s a bleak and sobering look at The American Dream gone bad, and how precarious our lives are within the society we’ve created. It’s not perfect; Maggie’s intractability in the face of her husband’s struggles make her hard to warm to, particularly through the first half of the picture. But the movie commands one’s attention from start to finish, due in no small part to the strong performances from leads Tom Kemnitz, Jr. and particularly Jennifer Faith Ward. Shot in an unassuming, low-key but almost dreamlike style and augmented by a beautiful ambient score by Gavin Salkeld, The Happiest Place on Earth is not the happiest film on Earth, but when it becomes available to VOD in the Summer, it will prove to be well worth eighty minutes of anybody’s time. Recommended.

Available on Amazon.