Author: BRWC

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World Review. By Christopher Patterson.

An Unusual, Boring, and Generally Half-Heard Attempt at Something Beyond the Film 

Right from the jump, this film hits you with cardboard. No, literary. After this, we see the character Angela wake up in a monotonous opening. This will become a key element of the issue here. Despite its unique, somewhat clever, and experimental ideas, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World undermines them with excessive bluntness and indulgence. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World attempts to present a variety of styles and themes to the table in a unique way but fails to effectively integrate them coherently into the film. It bears a resemblance to an experimental student film project, albeit with a more robust budget. It’s respectable, yet it’s too indulgent and weak to achieve even a hint of the monolithic nature it aims for.

Variety. That is a way to understand how this film builds itself. Almost every shot here feels like a bold but not paid-off choice. For instance, we will have numerous car shots in the opening of characters driving in their cars, and it takes on a nice and unique style in certain shots. It’s clear that so much attention to detail is there. Furthermore, the film seamlessly transitions from black and white to colour, showcasing unique stylistic choices in both formats in a way that is almost referential. Even more interestingly, the cameras used in the film feel quite different and successfully match the tone they aim for. Despite all of this, the film appears to prioritise the style of these agonising shots over any narrative or plot-related elements.

The main thing holding this all back is the overwhelming sense of indulgence and detail, which feels utterly pointless throughout. One can toss a bird and a cat into the air and attempt a lot but accomplish little, except for interpretation. If I had to pick a way to describe it here, it would be the Euphoria effect. Specifically surrounding the show Euphoria. Euphoria‘s use of prioritising visuals over everything else. Lights, camera, and visuals. And that’s a wrap. The visuals effectively overshadow everything else in the film in both their indulgence and the amount of time put into them over anything else, it seems. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World tries to balance both story and nice direction but ultimately fails due to its excessive focus on how a shot looks rather than the actual film. 

The acting here is generally lackluster. While a film doesn’t have to have over-the-top acting, it can at least rely on the brilliant use of more quiet and interesting performances. In this case, the performances are merely ordinary, lacking any exceptional elements. The acting isn’t typical; it’s merely forced. No actor or actress ever stands out and brings nothing to the table. 

Lights. Camera. Radu Jude’s direction, while interesting, often falls short of expectations. And cut. Despite the film’s occasional attempts at interesting shots, it ultimately fails to impress. Long shots of a character simply driving often leave a feeling of pure emptiness, but not in the intended way. It feels like a director is aiming for more than what is on the paper. Basic ideas guide a dull script in the wrong direction. It attempts to make something out of nothing, since the shot itself feels poorly put together and has an almost lifeless feel. While intention may have been behind this, it only feels pretentious and misses so much of how shots like that could work. That’s a nice way of summarising the direction here. The concepts are usually dull, and they lack any distinctiveness or true style.

This work, in my opinion, best fits into the category of cramming too many ideas into a small space. It’s a work that tries to show off so much, so loudly, but does so little. It feels as though most of it hides this behind nice but dull visuals and a decent but, at other times, tedious story. Though behind this veil it keeps, nothing is inside the box. In some ways, it appears pretentious and dull. Attempting to innovate without adding anything new is a common practice, not only a century ago but also as shown here.

VERDICT

Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World disappoints, with less to say and more to show off. While show-not-tell is certainly a great feature, here, all it shows is a bunch of nothing, albeit a near-unique nothing.

2/5 

Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World will be released digitally on 3rd June.

Infested – Review. By Daniel Rester.  

Anyone with a high level of arachnophobia may want to stay away from Infested – aka Vermines. Otherwise they might just have a heart attack. For everyone else, Sébastien Vanicek’s directorial debut offers a wild ride of spider horror thrills. 

Infested stars Théo Christine as Kaleb, a young man who lives in a dilapidated French apartment building with his sister Manon (Lisa Nyarko). While Manon tries to clean up the building, Kaleb is more interested in selling black market shoes and collecting rare insects. Kaleb’s latest arthropod is a deadly desert spider. 

After the spider gets out of a shoe box, it soon multiplies and the apartment building becomes infested with thousands of them. Kaleb, Manon, and their friends try to avoid the spiders and escape the building. This becomes more difficult once authorities quarantine the place as the eight-leggers rapidly grow in size. 

Vanicek and his co-writer Florent Bernard set up a terrifying stuck-in-a-building plot along the lines of horror classics like Shivers (1975) and [REC] (2007). They write clever scenes using the characteristics of the environment, including a webbed hallway walk with a timed lighting system and a chase scene up flights of stairs. The script also includes some surprisingly emotional beats between characters and social commentary regarding how impoverished families are often ignored. Kaleb and many of the other characters are also brought to life by people of color, adding another level of awareness. 

The mix of practical and digital effects in Infested is expert. The spiders look real and creepy at every turn, even as they grow to unbelievable sizes. Vanicek builds suspense well by often revealing the spiders to the audience but keeping them out of sight of the characters for a bit. When the spiders do attack, the action is handled excitingly. The stairwell chase is definitely a highlight as Vanicek keeps the lighting restricted to a flashlight the characters are using. 

Infested only lets down in the third act. There is a major character decision that just makes zero sense, seemingly only existing so that a noisy climax can unfold. There is simply too much going on in this section of the film. 

Vanicek was recently announced as the director for the next installment of the Evil Dead franchise. He is an inspired choice as he proves with Infested that he can bring real intensity and unique creative touches to the horror genre. Despite its third act, Vanicek’s film is still one of the best spider horror films ever. 

Rating: 8/10    

Challengers: Another Review. By Christopher Patterson.

“Challengers” tells the story of former tennis player Tashi, her husband Art, and her former partner Patrick, as well as the whirlwind that ensues in the not-so-simple game of tennis. Or, as the poets might say, all is fair in love and tennis. To avoid giving anything away, this is a film you need to see. It’s more than just the romance that the trailers might have you believe it to be about, and it’s more than just tennis. It’s so much more. 

To start, Guadagnino’s directing bursts with a style that is prone to overuse, yet he appears to have finally found his balance with this approach. The opening is a great, minor, yet significant example of this. At the beginning of this film, we see a tennis match. Rather than simply zooming in on every detail to intensify the match, as most tennis films do, Guadagnino opts to focus on the surrounding scenery, immersing us in the world. This works so well because Guadagnino is giving us the world, not the people, to consume.

Instead of just grabbing cool shots, Guadagnino wants us to know the world through the characters, like portraits we look at and examine from a wide distance before seeing the finer details. As the match concludes, Guadagnino infuses the film with a sense of style, as the characters become the focal points from the beginning to the end, and the tennis matches require this build-up to intensify the tension. While this is quite a minor scene, it reflects all of the brilliance Guadagnino has retained in his days with “Call Me By Your Name” that seemed lost with “Bones and All.”

The acting is one of the most gripping things about “Challengers.” Despite the film’s explosive direction, nothing quite captivates the screen like Zendaya’s powerful performance, which blossoms through subtle behaviours and quite funny, to the point, actions. While the over-the-top antics in this film may be the thing that catches your eye the most, upon examination, it’s the details in the characters’ specific words and intentions that make this film so good. Even more, it’s in the way the characters make slight, irrelevant choices, saying a thousand words more than Tashi’s slap to Patrick. If there was one thing this film definitely gave to the world thanks to all of this, it would be Zendaya’s next Oscar for this mesmerising performance no one could’ve expected.

The screenwriting would be the element that almost distracts from the acting in a good and sad way. The screenwriting here is near flawless, with each line of dialogue having this energetic, more modern-like tone that matches the characters without ever coming off as put-on or as if an older person was attempting to write how people talk. This is so important because the film itself has dialogue that may seem a bit overly witty or cringey if in the hands of a worse writer or one not in touch with today’s society, but thankfully, here, that never occurs. Furthermore, the screenwriting in this film achieves a level of realism and comedic skill that one might expect from a drama like “Succession.”

Despite all the efforts to make the final tennis match quite believable through the buildup and nice direction, the final tennis match itself still feels slightly too over the top. However, the ending itself makes sense; it’s just an issue with execution. Though, this touch of indulgence does not take too much away from a truly magnificent wonder this film is.

Overall, “Challengers” is a powerful spectacle that will likely be a highlight of the careers of all involved.

4.5/5 Stars

Classic Movie Review: The Silence Of The Lambs. By Christopher Patterson.

If there was ever a film that soaked you into it in the first five minutes, it’s The Silence of the Lambs. Right from the start, you know that you are in for an experience. And an experience it is. This film not only accomplished being one of the most thrilling films to come out of the 1990s, but it was also able to be one of the most moving pieces of cinema all at once.

One of the greatest elements this film produced was the interactions between Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. There is a reason their interactions are still discussed over 30 years after the film’s release. One of the most brilliant elements of this relationship is the mind games that are further intensified by magnificent direction, mesmerizing acting, and a genius script. An element, to be specific, that makes this so impactful is how the camera is aimed. The director, Jonathan Demme, takes possibly the most intense direction seen in film, with each shot in their interactions feeling like a person itself judging the people talking. In a sense, the detective in this whole film is the camera through which the characters are examined. 

The hunting of “Buffalo Bill” is one of the most interesting elements of the film. A key element of this is how compelling it is to see his fascination with butterflies and the meanings behind them, along with his motivations. This all works to serve Clarice’s compelling search to capture him, which brings us to one of the most interesting main characters in the film. Her backstory is compelling and rough, but it is how it is slowly and cleverly revealed and the themes behind it that work to serve the story so well, all of which lead to some essential themes of the film. If I had to list them, they would be: trauma and true evil. Trauma is an element stuck in nearly every character, with the exception of Lector. What makes this theme work so well is how the trauma of the characters takes them to the present. While most of it is not said, it can be easily inferred through characters such as Jack Crawford, for instance. Another element is what defines evil. We see a variety of examples in this film of evil, but how do we truly classify it? Is evil an action, a mistake, or something born into you? At the core of the film is this theme, and it is brilliantly illustrated through the many explicit examples it brings.

Even more, the pace of this masterpiece is engrossing every second. From the shocking moments to the slower-paced ones, the narrative feels precise and always focused, thanks largely to a genius script. From some of the most iconic and powerful dialogue produced to some of the greatest reveals, this script is a diamond on every page and truly is what would’ve made or broken this film.

If there was ever something to critique, it would be the final twists. While the ending to the “Buffalo Bill” chase was compelling, it could have benefited from a longer buildup, as in its final form, it feels slightly rushed based on how fast-paced the film has been. Though even an issue like this barely takes away from one of the most compelling ending scenes of cinema, where we see Clarice truly take “Buffalo Bill ” down, and the weight that has been built up explicitly and un-explicitly through many other characters and subtext is powerfully executed.

Overall, this film is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. It nearly perfected what a thriller is and can be through some of the most compelling dialogue and direction seen in cinema. If that’s not enough, you have the honor to see two of the greatest actors giving it their all in Oscar-winning performances.

The Silence Of The Lambs