Author: BRWC

The Lunchbox: Review. By Joe Muldoon.

A good friend of mine once shared with me a poem of hers in which a family communicates through food, a full stomach signifying their love. I’ve held a great fondness for the piece ever since she first shared it with me, and –excuse the pun– it provided me with fertile food for thought. Language needn’t solely be a matter of pen-to-paper; why resign language purely to verbal correspondence when we have the ability to communicate and supplement our feelings through other mediums? In director Ritesh Batra’s breakthrough feature The Lunchbox, this is precisely the case.

Ila (Nimrat Kaur), a young Mumbaikar, is a housewife stuck with a mostly-incommunicative partner. Every day, she seeks guidance from her beloved upstairs neighbour (who she affectionately calls ‘auntie’), and cooks mouthwatering meals for her husband in the hopes that he will get the message and reciprocate her love. Saajan Fernandes (played by the magnificent late Irrfan Khan) is a widowed accountant nearing retirement after 35 years of working in his current role.

Saajan is a subscriber to the famous Mumbai dabbawala service, a loaded tiffin being personally delivered to his work desk daily. One fateful lunchtime, he notices the sudden change in food quality, the typically decent offerings miraculously becoming exquisite. A stroke of luck for the accountant, another man’s meal has mistakenly been sent to him – namely, that of Ila’s husband. And so is forged the unlikely connection between the widower and housewife, the two corresponding through food and a series of handwritten notes left in the box, their lives bound by a simple aluminium tiffin. Their friendship blossoms gradually, each meal and accompanying note bringing them closer together, helping them to come to terms with their respective personal lives and tribulations.

Batra’s writing is artfully subtle and beautifully delicate; rather than strong-arming any romanticism between the co-leads, he instead opts to develop their relationship at a leisurely pace. Despite their physical separation, we never feel as though the pair are ever truly apart – the soul of their bond resides within the food and notes they share with one another.

The unwavering chaos of inner city life is captured well, the overcrowded buses, trains, and streets offering nothing but loneliness and interpersonal disconnect. To this end, I think that the picture shares somewhat of a spiritual kinship with the films of Taiwanese filmmakers Tsai Ming-liang and Edward Yang, the isolation felt by the characters only intensifying with the bustling busyness of metropolitan existence.

Upon its 2013 release, The Lunchbox was met with widespread critical acclaim, enjoying a very warm reception across the festival scene, including a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. To craft an onscreen relationship is a difficult task in itself, but to do so with the characters never interacting in-person is an incredibly impressive feat. Batra manages to bring two people together through their loneliness, the contradictory nature of this showing the strength of his writing. It’s a great pity that his filmography currently remains so small.

Where others would be perhaps tempted to infuse within the story some melodramatic licks, Batra resists the urge. He empathetically gives a voice to the dissatisfied correspondents, not by leading them to fall into one another’s arms in a loving embrace, but by offering them what they quietly yearn for: understanding and friendship. A fantastic fusion of the culinary and epistolary, The Lunchbox is a reminder to us that love assumes many forms, and can be expressed in many ways. Even something so simple as a curry and unleavened flatbread.

By Joe Muldoon

The Little Mermaid: The BRWC Review. By Jake Peffer.

Over the last decade or so, Disney has been set on remaking most of their animated classics into live action movies. Outside of a few of them, most not only are nowhere near the quality of the original movies but also do nothing to capture that magic that audiences have enjoyed for many years. For me, the only live action remake that has surpassed the quality of the original is Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book from 2016. Despite mixed reactions to most of these remakes they continue to perform well at the box office so Disney continues making them. Now we have their live action version of The Little Mermaid, arguably one of their best animated movies. With a great cast and a competent director behind the camera this has all the right pieces to be one of the better live action remakes.

If you’re not familiar with the story of The Little Mermaid it follows Ariel (Halle Bailey), a young mermaid who longs to discover the world above sea. She collects numerous things that fall under the ocean from up above and constantly begs her father, King Triton (Javier Bardem), to allow her to explore the land. King Triton is against anything involving humans, as her wife was killed by humans. Against her father’s will, Ariel makes a deal with a sea witch, Ursula (Melissa McCarthy), where she will trade her voice for human legs so she can discover the world above and impress a young prince (Jonah Hauer-King) that she once helped rescue.

This remake of The Little Mermaid is one of the few remakes that is able to recapture most of the magic that was in the original. Director Rob Marshall does a good job getting the best out of his cast and allowing them to stay true to the characters while still making them their own. Normally, I’m not a big fan of remakes that just do the exact same thing as the original. Shot for shot remakes mostly don’t work as they end up just having numerous callbacks to the original and usually lesser performances than what worked the first time around. Here it works, mostly because of how good the cast ends up being. Sure, I would say the original still works better and tells this story in a more enjoyable manner, but this remake does a good enough job to stand on its own.

There are some aspects here that do not work, and they do bring the movie down a bit. The special effects are extremely hit or miss. Everything underwater looks a little on the rough side. All the scenery, fish and plant life look great. It’s all very colorful and for the most part looks as it should. Everything involving human actors is where things start looking like something out of a video game. When the story goes above sea level it looks great and all the effects in those scenes really do stand out. Unfortunately, more than half the movie takes place underwater, and the characters just don’t look right. While the cast here is great there is one person that doesn’t seem to be bringing it like the rest and that is Javier Bardem. His performance isn’t bad but every time he’s on screen it feels like he would rather be somewhere else and that’s a shame because I think he’s a good choice for King Triton. With this being live action now, things must be fleshed out a little more which means the run time here is quite longer than the original. Adding in some extra things to flesh out characters or the story is fine but adding almost an entire hour to the run time from the original is just too much.

Like I mentioned before, outside of Bardem the rest of the cast here is great. Halle Bailey was a great choice to play Ariel and she does a fantastic job in her performance. She is able to capture the feeling of Ariel from the original while making the character her own and her voice on all of the songs sounds great. Melissa McCarthy is the biggest scene stealer of the movie. Her performance as Ursula is unlike anything we’ve seen from her before, and she knocks it out of the park. Jonah Hauer-King ends up being a perfect choice to play Prince Eric. He brings a certain charm to the character and his chemistry with Halle Bailey is a highlight of the movie. As for all of Ariel’s animal friends, they couldn’t have made better choices for these characters. Daveed Diggs is a highlight as Sebastian, providing plenty of humorous moments and a great sidekick for Ariel throughout. Awkwafina as Scuttle is the obvious comic relief, but she does well in her performance. Scuttle also has the best character design out of any of the animals featured. Lastly, Jacob Tremblay brings his boyish charm to the character of Flounder and puts in another quality performance.

Overall, The Little Mermaid (2023) is one of the best Disney live action remakes. While it does struggle with a longer than needed run time and some questionable visual effects, the cast here carries the movie and Rob Marshall is able to capture the heart of the original story making this a worthy remake.

Nathan-ism: Review. By Samhith Ankam.

Art allows one to parse their experiences. It allows one to retroactively understand how it affected oneself. It can make a memory exist tangibly, to become a part of the collective history without getting lost in the death of the individual, but Elan Golod, the director, is trying to find legitimacy before awarding Nathan Hilu’s memories as a US soldier in Nazi Germany that status.

All of it is important in the push against an increasing denial of the Holocaust, to tell the past without cracks to fuel these claims. The problem is that it causes the documentary to take a step back from the emotion running through these images and instead lean into a procedural in making a documentary. What to keep and what not to keep and is it worth making it at all. The scrutinization is done, mostly, indirectly with historians, etc., as it’s terrified to ask the hard questions at the source; it can’t help but feel like a failure to get the tension between validation and a need to be heard to overlap, to crack open Nathan for us.

So much of this is constructed, not archival footage where mise-en-scene is tethered in time. And yet, formally, this is mostly rudimentary – the camera is framed not to interrogate but to spend time with the people it looks at, which causes this to lack a drive cinematically even if the words being said holds weight in the acceptance of art as documentation at large.

While the sketch-pad visualization of the narrated stories mimics Nathan’s art, which he found as an outlet for his experiences, Elan’s recreations lack soul. When the camera holds on Nathan’s hands, drawing almost obsessively, it feels so cathartic in ways that don’t translate with digitized images. That rush to insert new lines as if Nathan is losing your interest, constantly adding addendums so details don’t get lost in the air, plays directly into the tension that’s so direly needed here, of Nathan lonely living with his thoughts.

The mix between the aesthetics of Nathan’s art and that of pure documentation causes omissions from either in scenes to feel quite odd – especially when the font for the text labels introducing the images, such as Laura Kruger, who’s the curator of the Hebrew Union College Museum, doesn’t continue the sketched-out look.

In the end, there is some true devastation in how it plays out, but it feels so indirect with its engagement of Nathan to feel worthwhile in swaying opinion.

2/5

Fast X – The BRWC Review. By Jake Peffer.

The Fast Saga continues with Fast X! Here we are at the tenth entry, eleventh if you count the spinoff, in the never-ending series about cars and driving them fast. If you’re coming into a Fast & Furious movie you pretty much know what you’re getting into. Dom and the family get involved in some kind of convoluted plot revolving around one enemy or a specific device and the cars go fast. Seems basic but that is how most of these movies tend to go. This time around they go toe to toe with the son of Hernan Reyes, the villain from Fast Five, Dante (Jason Momoa) as he is out to get revenge on Dom and the crew for the death of his father.

This series has seen its ups and downs but there’s one thing that always seems to stay consistent, insanely over the top action sequences that defy any bits of reality. There is no shortage of that here as we get a car pulling down two helicopters at the same time as well as a car driving down an exploding dam. Louis Leterrier takes over as director here and he’s no rookie when it comes to directing action movies. While it all is ridiculous there’s never a dull moment throughout the movie and Leterrier makes the most of his time in the director’s chair.  It’s easy to dismiss these movies as just dumb and ridiculous but ever since they started embracing that mentality in the movies themselves is when this series has really started to find its groove. Sure, there’s entries that don’t work as well as others but if you know what you’re getting into you know at the very least that you’re going to be entertained to some degree.

There is a lot to like here but it starts and ends with Jason Momoa. His performance as Dante is one of the most insane performances, I’ve ever seen but it works incredibly well. He is menacing and diabolic but at the same time he’s flamboyant deliciously cheesy. How Momoa is able to pull off this performance is beyond me, but it is definitely the biggest highlight. The rest of the cast here are essentially what they normally do in their roles. These characters are what they are at this point, and everyone is still playing them well. Vin Diesel does get some emotional moments to shine his dramatic skills off a bit more and that is a nice side of the character to see. Joining the cast for this go-around, outside of Momoa, are Brie Larson and Alan Ritchson, both of whom are welcome additions.

While this is a highly entertaining movie and a step up from the previous two entries it is not without its flaws. The runtime does go on a bit too long. Pacing isn’t much of an issue but there are so many characters that the movie does struggle juggling them all around. Most of the action set pieces are done practically but there is quite a bit of CGI used here as well and there are moments where it doesn’t look too good. After the announcement that this movie will be the first part of a trilogy to end the franchise, it does feel like the overall arc of the story is going to get stretched too thin. There is an easy point to end this movie on but because it will be a trilogy the movie ends on a rather large cliffhanger that may anger some audiences. This feels like an Infinity War type set up for the next two movies and only time will tell how it plays out.

Fast X does everything you want to see out of a Fast & Furious movie. The action sequences are top notch, the dynamic between the characters works well and we get a noteworthy performance from the likes of Jason Momoa. Despite its flaws there is plenty here to enjoy and get audiences excited for what’s to come for the end of the franchise.