Author: BRWC

Woman Of The Dunes: Review. By Joe Muldoon.

When it comes to film adaptations of classic works of literature, filmmakers are faced with a difficult choice; stay faithful to the source material and create a predictable but crowd-pleasing piece, or bravely take creative liberties and risk upsetting original fans. Visconti went with the first option with his 1967 adaptation of Albert Camus’ epoch-defining novel The Outsider (which I personally find to be an oft-overlooked film, especially considering Mastroianni’s excellent performance), and Kubrick famously opted for the latter with his 1980 version of Stephen King’s The Shining.

One thing to bear in mind about works of absurdist literature, such as Kôbô Abe’s classic The Woman in the Dunes, is that their very offbeat nature makes them incredibly difficult to tackle. The nuance required to truly capture the atmosphere and character of what is a deliberately idiosyncratic style, is something that even our greatest auteurs would struggle to grasp. Yet, despite working with such intimidating source material, Hiroshi Teshigahara managed to do just that, faithfully preserving its thematic richness in what is now arguably his most well-known and (rightly) beloved directorial feature.

Strictly speaking, a story about a man who is imprisoned in a sand dune and forced to shovel sand hardly sounds like a compelling story, but as we already know, the sandy surface is much deeper than it first appears to be. There are few surprises to fans of the novel, but this by no means hampers enjoyment of the picture.

Hiroshi Segawa’s dreamlike cinematography elevates the monochromatic film stock to a point at which it feels almost vibrant. The oppressiveness of the scorching arenaceous environment is brought brilliantly to life, the acid air emanating from the screen, and the suffocating sands sullenly sweeping across the lifeless, languorous landscape.

In our Kafkaesque tale, a schoolteacher and entomologist, Niki Junpei, uses his holiday time as an opportunity for insect-hunting, and this brings him to the outskirts of a remote desert village. Having missed the last bus from the village, he is offered lodging with one of the locals, a woman who lives alone at the bottom of a sand dune accessible only by a rope ladder. His host is as gracious as could be, and his sleep is comfortable. The following morning, he realises that the rope ladder has disappeared, eliminating the pit’s single exit point.

He soon learns that his would-be host (now his fellow prisoner) lives a Sisyphean existence, condemned to shovelling the endlessly sliding sand from the bottom of the pit, lest she become swallowed up in a deluge. Attempts to scale the dune are unsuccessful, and the man slowly realises his fate. First denial, then rebellious anger, then bargaining, then depression, and then acceptance. Hope is scant, and the human will is systematically and cruelly broken.

The parallels to our own lives are stark; is the cyclical drudgery of our own work lives any different to our protagonist’s sand-shifting? Have we not also become institutionalised within our own lives, dependent upon the very sand dunes that surround and imprison us? Perhaps Niki Junpei is more the everyman than we would ever care to admit.

By Joe Muldoon

Beau Is Afraid: The BRWC Review. By Samhith Ankam.

Impressive, really, how little there is to Beau is Afraid but how it also, in turn, wants you to ponder on it like you’re paying to be Beau’s therapist for two hours, or indulge in its cruel pulling of the strings that only seems to result in a joke with no clear construction of character to guide it anywhere else. After Beau’s first phone call with his mom, one of the two phone calls that set his journey of returning to the source of his current situation— a rundown apartment in a poor, thus anarchic, neighborhood with seemingly no job and no passions beyond heating frozen meals —, this always stays at a stasis point, where Beau’s eyes are sans a glimmer of thought beyond wanting to move forward. 

There’s a rigidity to Beau is Afraid, a series of episodes that seemingly hit at random to Beau, but in a way that creates cycles of him always hoping for the best but ending in the worst, that it finds its creator as the reason behind all its impulses. Not Beau, but Ari Aster. I’m finding it really interesting even placing the movie in perspective this way because, behind the satire, there is something genuinely affecting here that captures helplessness when someone starts to feel so overwhelmed by blame they start accepting reality through degradation – one that’s maybe as cruel as what Aster is presenting. The problem is that there’s no interrogation of this reality; instead, it plays everything as fact. Even the most unrealistic situations continue to embed themselves into the movie feeling like it would make the morning paper as there’s no discernable cracks in the seams to play to subjectivity nor is it propelled by character to play to surrealism.

A world perfectly constructed to be as cruel as possible, a script structured to push Beau perfectly to the next cruel attraction, and a perfect protagonist to take its wrath because he’ll never think about what’s happening. It’s impossible not to take a step back and find it gleefully writing Beau with hatred, *not* empathy, that it starts to propagate the viewpoint of the world around Beau instead of suggesting it it as a tragic showcase of how he *feels* the world is being to him; after all, does he even perceive? Joaquin Pheonix’s performance is particularly boring here, so obviously what you expect from him that it starts to feel like a parody at this point.

Ari Aster isn’t Beau but Beau as a vessel of his worst nightmare; that’s the distinction – at its core, this is missing humanity and only starts finding it when dealing explicitly with its mommy issues two-thirds through. At that point, it just starts backfiring. Especially when it starts framing Beau’s existence from those in his life older than him, asking if he’s guilty of what transposed across this 3-hour epic of the mundane. If he’s guilty of not helping those who are homeless; If he’s guilty of his mother’s traumatic incident with his birth or his dismissal of her constant care. Ari Aster won’t allow Beau to say no, so the answer to all of these may as well be yes. The movie is constructed to say Beau is guilty of it all, to turn him into the scapegoat for systemic issues so it won’t have to truly deal with what’s its rambuctiously depicting. 

This deals with modern anxieties through each of its episodes, but playing it all over the top. The best of them manage to topple successive events on top of each other to reach the tension of the world being against you, as in the scene where Beau takes medication that is lethal in the absence of water and immediately finds his apartment’s water supply is cut off. The worst of them, being the majority of the three-hour running time, plays out a ridiculous event ad nauseam to reach a punchline (or conclusion, if you’re not as sadistic as this movie is). So it’s an endless barrage of sights such as a teenager popping pills like candy culminating in her drinking paint or using a PTSD-ridden veteran as an attack dog (satirizing Gen-z’s vanity oddly through their anti-war sentiments). 

Amidst it all, there’s an animated sequence, impeccably putting Joaquin Phoenix into artificial environments, that reminisces about the simplicity of the past where hunting and gathering was the only concern. It’s arguably Beau is Afraid’s only moment that doesn’t deal with cynicism but is rather serene, and the contrast with all the vapid hyperbole places its anger in naivety – like an old man yelling at the clouds. Nothing to say about why the way things are in the present but romanticizing the past without the baggage it comes with. It’s obtuse.

The way Beau is Afraid indulges in itself as capital-A art reaches an inane point, turning whatever enjoyment you could get from its random developments into tedium, if not outright annoying. The visual style never quite breaks free into camp after its first hour which is the most playful. A giant penis becomes a significant development in the plot, but all it does within the confines of the movie is claim Beau’s dad was a dick. We can’t keep reducing relationships to one word; A short film’s level of detail is blown out into 3 hours, and it’s excruciating to get through. There’s a way one can put this together as to vibe with its sense of paranoia, but it’s hard not to find this distasteful. 

Murder Mystery 2: The BRWC Review. By Jake Peffer.

Murder Mystery hit Netflix back in 2019. At the time it garnered the biggest opening weekend for a new film to hit the streaming platform. It would also go on to become Adam Sandler’s most successful movie on the platform, so a sequel seemed to be inevitable. While not a hit with the critics Murder Mystery, I personally enjoyed it for the most part. It was better than it had any right to be and both Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston made for an entertaining pair. So how does the sequel stack up against the first movie?

This sequel ends up being about the same as the first movie, although it’s a bit more underwhelming I would say. The set up here is basically the same however instead of a murder it’s a kidnapping. We follow Nick (Adam Sandler) and Audrey (Jennifer Aniston) as they try to track down who kidnapped one of their friends from during the night of his wedding.

Despite the story not really working all that well I did find this outing to be quite funnier than the first. There are a lot of great gags that are set up and pay off well. It’s not a lot of huge belly laughs but there are some consistent laugh out loud moments throughout. Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston once again work well together. The way they play off one another works so well and the chemistry they have resembles the chemistry Sandler always had with Drew Barrymore in the movies they did together.

Because this is a sequel, they do make an attempt to ramp up the action set pieces and they mostly come off as the filmmakers trying too hard. This is a comedy for sure so the attempts at action are fine, they just unfortunately work the same way. There is a big action set piece for the finale of the movie that just feels like it goes on for much too long. It gets to a point where it all just feels ridiculous and just like the first movie there of course must be more than one twist at the end.

Had they tried to do something a little different this may have ended up being much better but the fact is that they tried to play it safe and just do what they did in the first movie all over again. There are some funny moments and it can be entertaining at times but overall Murder Mystery 2 just ends up being only moderately enjoyable. If you enjoyed the first movie you will probably enjoy this one as well it just doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

The Quiet Girl: Review. By Nick Boyd.

“The Quiet Girl” is a very gentle and understated, yet powerful coming-of-age movie about a nine-year-old Irish girl named Cáit (Catherine Clinch) who gets sent off to live with distant relatives over the summer because her parents are overwhelmed by poverty, chaos, and the birth of yet another baby.

Cáit is a shy girl who often goes unnoticed, though at the same time gets made fun of at school, a place she has come to dread.  She does not have any friends and seems to want, more than anything, to simply be loved. Yet, her household is a crowded one where individual attention from either her parents or siblings takes a backseat.  Her mother is in over her head – pregnant with four young children and her father is a gambler, alcoholic, and philanderer, largely ignoring his family members.  Much of the film’s meaning is shown, not through words, but through Cait’s quietly nuanced expressions and glances.

When it comes time for Cáit to go off with relatives, her parents show little emotion.  The new people whom she is to live with (husband and wife) are differing in their approach to her.  The wife Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) is very welcoming and hospitable, while the husband Seán (Andrew Bennett) is much less so at least initially.  Eibhlín and Seán’s place is even more remote and rural than where Cáit had been living.  With Eibhlín, Cáit is able to find the motherly love that she did not have back home. 

And in time, as they work side by side on their routine farm chores, Seán warms up to her in a sweetly protective way; eventually, more embracing and kind than her own father.  In this pastoral land, Cáit has no interactions with any children her age.  She does, though, express a real sense of curiosity.  Free from any kind of judgment, we get the feeling that Cáit wishes she could stay here for as long as possible.

The film really shows a sense of realism as the girl adjusts to her surroundings and the relatives go about their day.  It is also beautifully shot.  My only criticism would be I wish it was not quite so slow.  Clinch, in her breakout role, gives a quietly strong, and naturalistic performance that speaks volumes, while Crowley and Bennett are powerful as the parent figures Cait has been yearning for.

While certainly an unsentimental coming-of-age portrait, the film’s emotions do steadily build for these three characters – Cáit, Eibhlín, and Seán.  The ending shows the effects of unconditional love; it is heartfelt and deeply moving, as is this entire film. 

Chevalier: The BRWC Review By Richard Schertzer.

I’m calling it: The Best Picture of the year

I just came back from the theaters and I got the opportunity to see the latest film about a notable black, historical figure named Chevalier. He is the son of an African Slave during the French Revolution and then rose to prominence as a formidable violinist and fencer. However, all is not full of happiness and splendor in paradise as the systemic racism, miscegenation and French Revolution troubles attempt to destroy everything that he has worked so hard to achieve.

Very few actors are able to conjure up a career-changing performance that has audiences mesmerized, but Kelvin Harrison Jr. as the titular role is the whole package and captivates audiences with his sheer magnetic virtuosity with the subtlest of ease. Whenever he comes onto the screen, it’s impossible to not put all of your focus on the actor.

The film has an essence about it that rivals that of other incredible films like 12 Years A Slave and Amistad. What is so amazing about all three of these films is that they bring to light such obscure figures that would not have been known by the general public today and audiences are forever grateful for it.

Admittedly, the film seems to tone down the true hate and bigotry that went about during that time in the Revolution, but it’s certainly worth it seeing Harrison deliver what could be an Oscar-worthy performance of great expectations and proportions.

Chevalier takes up the mantle of being such an audacious film that the audience melts into the narrative of the story and we never look back. It’s like taking a Delorean back into the past and seeing the pain and anguish behind this black man’s plight in a white world that, despite everything he did and how talented he became, was not accepted into their high-class life of privilege and power.

The film has such an elegance to it that it becomes impossible for one person to pass up and it is easily a frontrunner for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. The story is as passionate as the main character’s work behind a violin and never shakes or wavers.