Author: BRWC

Set “Ten Winters” after we left the Apes of wrath, setting themselves up in New digs and starting their own civilization, the sequel amps up the action and the tension, not just on the interplay between warring species’ but from within their own respective camps and families.”Cloverfield” director Matt Reeves gets plenty here to sink his teeth into, plating up awesome set pieces, family drama, Shakespearean power struggles and some astounding CGI on the Ape folk.

Last outing was mainly focused on setting up the premise and thusly had to be keeping the humans central. More time spent on the interplay between the Apes showing it’s not just their CGI that shows attention to detail paying Off. The lack of real characterization On the surviving humans makes them come across as something of an afterthought, all in all minor quibbles when you can boast a John Woo aping (apologies) 2 gun salute set piece in your movie.

So, a Shakespearean power struggle/family drama smuggled in under the guise of summer blockbuster? Yep, that’ll do it.

Bowing out of Directorial duties in “X Men: Days Of Future Past” to helm another of Comic scribe Mark Millar’s titles, we were hoping for something worthwhile and after the recent news of what Matthew Vaughn was looking to include ( a re-cast “Wolverine” and a “Juggernaut” prison break set piece being chief concerns.) I think it’s now safe to say it was a good shout for all involved. With his twisted take on the Batman dynamic in “Nemesis” all but dead in the water, it was time for something else.

Proposing to do for spy movies what “Kick Ass” did for superhero movies ( hmmmmmm) , this was looking to be a shot in the arm of what was a genre found seemingly wanting.  Adapted from Millar’s 2012 title, with his usual dubious politics, taste for notorious, punchy dialogue and storming set pieces that ache with a flair for the fantastical, absolutely beg to be put to screen by partners in crime Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman.

There’s not an awful lot in the way of storyline to follow, broken Britain poster child “Eggsy” ( played by Taron Egerton) is saved from a life of cameos on “Judge Rinder” by Harry Hart/Galahad ( Colin Firth, clearly buzzing his absolute tits off in this role.) to take part in a training program for membership in an ultra secret, secret service that his father was once a member of but never mentioned, y’know due to the secrecy and that.

Alongside the training tropes , underused love interests and team building exercises is a bare bones plot of a Mark Zuckerberg type billionaire ( played by a strangely lisping Sam L. Jackson) and megalomaniac ( weirdly though, I kind of understand where he’s coming from, does siding with Bond villainy mean you’re growing old or mental? A question for another time perhaps…..) who is striving to bring the world’s population down to a more manageable size, done more poetically in Channel 4’s “Utopia”, sure but fuck it, we’re not here for originality I suppose.

As imagined, it wears its influences on it’s Saville Row sleeve and won’t be worrying next year’s Academy Awards and even manages to ape his Bananna Splits scored introduction to “Hit Girl” this time but when you’ve got Firth channeling a David Niven-esque Roger Moore era Bond, taking on a church full of born again mentalists to the strains of Lynrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”……….you can keep your nominations and your “C-bomb” dropping Tweens because that was balls out brilliant.

It’s not without flaws, there’s a weird “Scanners” type homage, the token “Plebs” were something of a Daily Mail wet dream that if you found the kids in “Attack The Block” hard to take, then this is what puts the “Grate” in The representation of Great Britain’s underclass, more of Mark Strong’s Q like “Merlin” would have been welcome, more Caine in general and Samantha Janus, well “Game On” was a while ago eh? A few stragglers aside, it’s a cracking opener for a youthful take on the Bond movies that takes the tropes and runs them bloody ragged, the usual Bond innuendos seemingly elevated to an eyebrow raising spiritual plateau of the “Single Entendre” and thoroughly find a home there.

So, with the spy market in safe hands……..what we saying about “Nemesis” then folks?

Ok, so there was this film out last year called “The Babbadook”, it masqueraded for all intents and purposes as a common garden variety horror but was in fact a beautifully coherent melodrama of loss, stress and dealing with your “Inner demons” before they eat away at you. Now, although “Bad Milo” (a tale of one man coming to terms with the demon that lives up his arse.)touches upon many similar themes, I think it’s fair to say, they’re handled very much differently.

Owing more to 80’s schlock like “Basket Case” and “Critters” than it does to any sterling character driven work that you’d expect from producers The Duplass Brothers, it’s thankfully not just pitch black humour and fart jokes. Ken Marino plays the lead- Duncan- anxious, brow beaten and constantly bottling up his emotions until one day Milo escapes from his rectal prison and kills those that have wronged Duncan. Gillian Jacobs ( Britta in “Community”) is brilliant as his understandably freaked out wife and Peter Stormare kills as his Psychiatrist when he’s on screen but as weird as it is to admit, it’s all about the chemistry between Duncan and Milo.

That a film that includes the line of dialogue: “You’ve got a trooper in your pooper.” and touches(cloth) on abandonment issues via a nice bit of Arse demon mythology can hold interest is solid enough but that you start falling for the little doe-eyed bastard from brown town came as an absolute shocker to me. So, “Bad Milo” then, a bit of a guilty pleasure…….definitely not an Austrailian independent melodrama but if you like your creature features with pitch black humour and an 80’s vibe, then I think this is the colon dwelling monster movie for you.

“…wind up peeking through her keyhole

down upon your knees…”

A Review of director Dammie Akinmola’s BOARD TO DEATH

by Pablo D’Stair

For my money, director Dammie Akinmola’s Board To Death is the epitome of what a good bit of short-form cinema should be—well (just because I like to not lose people for lack of specificity) it’s what a film with the purpose of slick (yet not superficial) entertainment should be. It is unique enough to give self-contained credibility to its quirks; it is thought through enough to sustain as a short, wholly complete hypnotism without demanding too much retroactive analysis (even as it leaves off on a puzzler which, in some sense, side-steps the pieces main, sustaining strength); it’s visually stylistic without allowing the traction of its voice, it’s narrative, to lose out at all.

And let’s start there, getting a bit more particular in this investigation: the film’s voice. Well, quite literally, it belongs to actor Joshua Expoisto, who delivers a constant narration as the film weaves in and out of its frame story and the rendering of particular (actual? fantasized? both perhaps?) vignettes of his character’s deep seeded (and exponential growing) noia regarding his wife’s fidelity.  And it’s a voice more than a match for the visuals it accompanies—in fact, it is a voice that dominates, in texture and stylistic, the vocal performance of the actor supplying the undercurrent of grit to the depictions of increasingly male-centric, misogynistic violence that become the visual linguistics of the piece.  And not to dump too much praise, I would go as far as to say that the voice—in it inflections, its specific yet still seemingly in-the-thought-moment deliveries—is the magic trick of the thing, infusing a gallows humor to the proceedings, a giddiness we as audience need present in order to be teased in to fully committing to and appreciating (with a kind of shared intoxication) the content for the dark laughter it contains.

None of this said to take away from the film’s visuals.  Even as one who has more an affinity for a rougher around the edges look to cinema, the pristine photography of Kazi Zaman went a good length beyond impressing me.  Exactly simple enough in it construction to allow the tiniest nuance (a light obscuring a face momentarily to a specific beat of music; the elegant geometric change to light and dark as car headlight off camera alter a still shot of a man seated in a silent room) to expand in to a pointedly necessary element of narrative.  Even the subtle difference in how the “stage play” frame story is shot versus how each vignette seems to ratchet in a bit tighter, become somehow more askew without tipping its hand as to how so, speaks to the controlled impact of the imagery—here lingering long, here cutting quick in tounge-flick dances to match the constant voice-over of our increasingly dubious protagonist.

And the final link that holds the piece so uniquely together is the very subtextual performance of Victoria Ashford, the cipher-object of the narrator’s Edgar-Poe-meets-Johnathan-Nolan style obsessiveness.  What at first blush could seem nothing more than a bit of modeling work rather than acting on Ashford’s part, becomes over the course of the film the guiding and impactful backbeat, the appropriate mire the rest of the film’s struggle is set in.  In my own viewing, what I first took to be a reductive role for “the wife” (fitting to the very satiric rendering of a misogynistic self-centeredness of the narrative) became—via sets of eyes, fleeting yet specific framing of this or that wrinkle of the mouth as Ashford’s expression moved from one puzzle to the next—a coy control, more than control, a dominance—the downplayed, minimalist performance the perfect pairing to the obviousness of “the husband’s” roiling down the drain.

Short cinema of this sort, at its best, reveals itself to be more than the sum of its parts, a moving art that expands by keeping itself as constricted as possible and Board To Death achieves this with aplomb through its deft balance of substance-over-style, yet style enough to spare.

BOARD TO DEATH can be found here: http://www.boardtodeathofficial.com/

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Pablo D’Stair is a novelist and filmmaker whose works include A Public Ransom, HULLY GULLY: a new American romance, and HONEY HALO: the Left By Snakes video series.  More information on his work can be found at https://pdstairfilms.wordpress.com/