Author: BRWC

“Currently cringing at All Superheroes Must Die. It sucks. ‘What’s going on?’ ‘He’s screwed. He’s gonna die soon.’ Worst acting/dialogue.”

This was my Twitter summary of my feelings whilst watching All Superheroes Must Die last night. I admit, it’s not particularly eloquent or amusing, but hey – this is Twitter.

This morning, in an unexpected twist, I awoke to find that my 135 character review had been retweeted, by none other than the film’s writer, director and star Jason Trost.

I initially felt a little guilty about this. I’m not exactly influential on Twitter (48 followers, woo!) and so my tweet was just intended as throwaway comment expressing my frustrations at watching a terrible movie. I never meant for anyone involved in the film to actually read it. Poor guy – I’d feel horrendously depressed if I knew people out there thought my creative output sucked (thanks BWRC, for not having a comments section).

Then I looked at his twitter feed. It comprised of quite a few other RT’s of negative reviews. One particularly unimpressed gentlemen referred to the film as “ass juice”. It also comprised of a lot of Mr Trost trying to dodge the bullet. He blamed studios for altering his cinematic baby to make profit. He blamed the internet for making films more homogenized. My favourite was when he said – and I quote – “And when something original arrives, so does the blind hatred of the internet.”

Oh Jason. I feel sorry for you, I really do. But the internet doesn’t hate All Superheroes Must Die because it’s “original”. It hates it because it’s really, really bad.

The basic premise is a sort of Saw / Kickass combination, in which four everyman style superheroes are pit against a series of no-win challenges by their nemesis Rickshaw (James Remar – the only decent actor).

Essentially, the film fails for the following reasons:

• The script seems to have been created from a mash-up of clichéd superhero lines and a sixth-form Drama Studies play. At one point the characters walk into a room in which three coffins are propped against a wall, their names written on each one. They pause dramatically. The audience wonders what they will do. Shadow (Sophie Merkley) turns to the camera. “Guys, these coffins have our names on them.” Oh dear.
• There are some brief attempts at delving into the characters’ psyches, but they quickly fall flat. Trost’s character Charge is the “leader” and not much else. Cutthroat (Lucas Till) is the resentful side-kick who finally reveals a supposedly-shocking but actually super obvious confession that he was in fact just jealous of Charge all along. Shadow has no discernible personality at all. Neither does The Wall (Lee Valmassy).
•  It’s boring. Watching the characters move from sequence to sequence is like watching a bunch of annoying teenagers play a board game. Except people die. But even that is boring.
• It doesn’t make any sense. If they have previously always managed to defeat their nemesis Rickshaw why is he so good at screwing them over now? Why did Cutthroat try to put out a fuse by hitting it with a chain, instead of just cutting it or pulling it out?
• The ending. I won’t tell you what happens, in case you do ever watch it (don’t). But suffice to say it is both dull and ridiculous.

I do pity Jason Trost, not just because this film has so many problems, but because it seems like it could have been good. The idea of pitting a group of superheroes in a no-win scenario, forcing them to question their moral code and exacerbating their tense relationships, is a potentially interesting one. It didn’t even necessarily need to be made on a bigger budget (All Superheroes Must Die had an almost infamously tiny one). It just needed to be done well.

The internet does favour originality, Mr Trost, but only when it results in something entertaining, interesting and thought-provoking. This movie, unfortunately, ticks none of those boxes.

To call The Kings of Summer a ‘coming of age story’ could very well be construed as laziness, but actually it’s an entirely fitting description of this wonderful little indie comedy. While not groundbreaking in its narrative, the movie’s strengths lie in its cast and sharp writing.

Teenager Joe (Nick Robinson) is sick of everything. His frosty relationship with his sad-sack Dad (an excellent Nick Offerman) is the catalyst for him to run away from home with best pal Patrick (Gabriel Basso). Upon stumbling upon a idyllic woodland clearing, they set about building their own home, using everything from stolen timber to bits of corrugated iron. Along with their tag along weirdo buddy, Biaggio (Moisas Arias) they construct an impressive two story home – the ultimate dream treehouse, complete with makeshift conservatory and maisonette.

Soon, they’re fending for themselves, attempting to hunt and maintain their home. Joe’s aim is to become a man, to take control of his own destiny and live for himself. For a while, things are great and the film bathes in the golden sun as the boys adventure. Their woody home is shot lovingly, the camera gliding past the flora and fauna with ease.

Unsurprisingly, things don’t stay smooth for long. The boys stubble begins to grow, as does their animosity over, you guessed it, a girl. Joe invites school-friend and obvious crush Kelly (Erin Moriarty) to come see what they’ve built, hoping to woo her with his new-found masculinity. She, however, has eyes for Patrick. Meanwhile, Nick’s Dad is growing to understand his own failings as he worries about his son’s whereabouts.

Narratively, The Kings of Summer plays out exactly as you’d expect, with few surprises. That isn’t to its detriment in the slightest, as it’s off-beat comedy is beautifully delivered by a uniformly triumphant cast. Anyone who’s seen Parks & Rec will already be familiar with Offerman’s comedic superiority, but he’s more than matched here by his younger cast. More than this, we get to see him exercise his dramatic muscles – his portrayal of a man who’s unaware of just how miserable he is is genuinely affecting.

Ultimately the movie feels familiar in a warm and comfy way. It was criminally under-screened on theatrical release in the UK, so the current DVD release should give opportunity for more people to view this glowing indie gem.

The opening sequence says everything about a film. It is the equivalent of entering a party, alone, with all eyes on you. Whilst names, relationships and intentions may not immediately be explained, everything from your cufflinks to your shoelaces express who you are, the mood of the room, and the starring roles and disposable beings circulating within it. In many films, predictions can be made in the first thirty seconds that prove true in the last. Just like a party, you can tell who’ll still be around when the sun comes up and the credits roll.

With this in mind, from the outset it is clear that Arbitrage is entirely, wholeheartedly about Robert Miller (Richard Gere) who, in turn, is all about money. We enter mid way through an interview where Miller, who is cold and hard like the cash in his pockets, is discussing the fact that we humans are in constant competition for a finite number of dollars, and it is this competition that makes us, to use his word, ‘manic’.

This frantic mania hinted at in the opening dialogue is clearly an indication for what’s to come, and as intriguing a prospect as this hinted-hysteria may be, as the camera zooms in on his smug face, Gere-haters in their drones would be inclined to take this moment to switch off their television.

Except, actually, don’t.

The film (made in 2012), as expected, follows the business and personal exploits of the Machiavellian Wall Street billionaire Robert Miller, whose life we enter in to moments before it’s complete combustion. Juggling his financial cheating in work with his romantic cheating on his wife, (played expertly, of course, by Susan Sarandon), he is managing well enough, until a huge tragedy and a wily detective, (played, of course, by Tim Roth) threatens to pull the Persian rug out from under his Prada-clad feet.

I’m not going to lie, Arbitrage isn’t a great film by any means. Nicholas Jarecki’s direction is pretty enough, but the plot, whilst attempting to be everything at once, is spread too thinly, and no single interesting avenue is explored to its full potential. Relationships, whilst initially misunderstood enough to be curious, are never adequately explained or delved in to, and audiences are in danger of missing out on an excellent ending due to the dry, clinical middle. This lack of depth is only emphasized by the sterilized nature of the characters, which, thankfully, are expertly played, and when tragedy does occur, the film leaps from some seedy Wall Street affair to something else entirely, and as we witness it with Gere, and as such there is a burst of frosty relief in and amongst the misery.

It is in fact the casting that elevates this film from okay to arguably great. Award-winning Gere is regal and luxurious in his perfectly tailored suits, Roth swaggers as the somewhat-typical downtown detective, and Sarandon is consistently excellent until her waspish, vapid character is required to really announce herself, at which point she becomes subtly, elegantly masterful.

Whilst the film develops in a largely obvious manner, the end handful of scenes are reason enough to sit through the first hour-and-then-some. Without giving anything away, despite the initial sequence showing the film to be entirely about Robert Miller and his exploits, an admittance of knowledge makes you want to re-watch the entire thing, with that character’s awareness in mind.

Needless to say, Miller, as powerful characters do, implodes at the exact moment he is required not to. In the final moments of the film, after nearly two hours of exploits and smarm, he is required to make a very public, very important speech. As such, we finish where we began, with all eyes on him, with the audience speculating intently what he will say. Will he reveal all in his final speech? Will there be a hand-on-heart moment of admission or a revealing heckle from the destroyed wife and daughter? Or will he say nothing at all? Will the camera cut because we, like those he’s wronged, have by this point heard it all.

Eyes Wide Shut sans boob.

Not so much found-footage horror as faux-documentary horror. The films main conceit is that two documentary film makers; Aaron and Jim (played by Aaron Poole and James Gilbert) are creating a film based around a conspiracy theorist they found on YouTube. We’re shown talking heads with people clearly acting at ‘being natural’ and some people who appear to be the genuine-article. We see clips of the conspiracy theorist haranguing members of the public with a microphone which the actor clearly enjoyed doing behind the protective guise of character. Suddenly the focus of their film vanishes. Picking up his work Aaron and Jim are drawn into the world of conspiracy theories, becoming paranoid theorists themselves. Or are they paranoid? After a few more talking heads mixed in with some melodramatic docudrama scenes our directors end up at a pagan-esque meeting in a swanky mansion filled with masks. So it’s a bit like Eyes Wide Shut as mentioned without the nudity.

With all the found-footage horrors rushing our way to spoil Halloween it’s refreshing to find a film that takes a different approach. The documentary portions of the film are genuinely interesting and present compelling, if far fetched theories on some of the worlds hidden hierarchies. Whilst never mentioned by name it seems that writer/director Christopher MacBride has the Illuminati very much in mind – the notion of a powerful few controlling billions. Where the film begins to come apart is when acting and plot begin to take things over. The jump that the directors take from film-makers to full blown conspiracy theorists, jabbering about connected events, pinning photos to boards seems a leap too soon as though there were a few scenes deleted between.

Whilst the film holds interest in the first half, it slows to a crawl in the second half which should be the most tense. We watch through tie-pin cameras as the pair infiltrate a mass meeting of the powerful group. What should be unbearably tense as we wait for the two to be discovered becomes an insufferable 30 mins filled with candles lit rooms and heavy breathing. You know that at any moment they will be discovered. Perhaps something nasty will happen. Cut off a hand? A head? Maybe a hanging? But yeah I wasn’t really bothered. I never felt the threat and therefore there wasn’t much to be frightened of.

So whilst being an intriguing concept, The Conspiracy becomes a disappointingly lame seen-it-done-it.