The black-and-white shot film “C’mon C’mon” is a tender, thoughtful look at a radio journalist named Johnny (Joaquin Phoenix) who interviews and really listens to children about their hopes and outlook for the future. Early on, he gets a call from his sister Viv (Gaby Hoffmann) who asks him to look after her son Jesse (played by film newcomer Woody Norman) in Los Angeles, as she deals with a messy situation with her ex named Paul (Scoot McNairy), who is hundreds of miles away and needs help.
Ill-prepared for what he is about to take on, Johnny (single with no kids) discovers that the boy is curious and energetic, but requires a lot of patience as he navigates the ups and downs of parenting. It is apparent that Jesse has been raised in a very laid-back environment with little structure. He is imaginative and fascinated by make-believe scenarios. The chemistry between Johnny and his nephew is magical and their relationship is full of honesty and empathy.
One day, Johnny asks Jesse if he would like to go with him to New York City, which Jesse has never been to before. The reason for the New York trip is so Johnny can get back to his work, but it also allows the chance for Jesse to experience a completely new environment and learn more about Johnny’s work first-hand. It also lets the viewer experience the sunny beaches of Los Angeles juxtaposed against the grittiness of New York City’s crowded sidewalks.
As Johnny and Jesse form a bond, the film pulls on your heartstrings without being contrived. Jesse is quirky, but also endearing with an authenticity that will win you over. Johnny on the other hand is more reserved, but also occasionally playful and rambunctious a bit when Jesse’s energy level is high. The role is certainly a less intense one than we are used to seeing from Phoenix. (Think “The Joker” and “The Master.”)
The interviewing of the kids by Johnny and his team gives the movie a different kind of approach, albeit I think an effective one, that turns it into a quasi documentary. What the interviewees have to say, while not necessarily profound, nonetheless offers up moments of reflection, which we also get from the characters as well.
This low-key yet poignant drama is very well-written and acted, providing relationships and interactions that come across as genuine and heartwarming. The rawness of the emotions is palpable, and while the picture is simple and somewhat bleak – both in its look and in the situations that are presented – the ending does provide some hope, not simply for the characters’ uncertain future, but for all of us.
It is a rare feat to watch a movie fail to execute its ambitions at almost every twist and turn. Unfortunately, that is the case for Sensation. While it has a somewhat interesting premise it constantly gets bogged down by convoluting the story throughout and spending too much time making you wonder is this really happening or is it an altered reality. Eventually it just gets to the point where you couldn’t care anymore and you’re just ready to see the conclusion.
We follow Andrew, who is brought into a top-secret agency where he entered a government program that tracks the human senses. He learns that himself and a small group of others contain superhuman skills involving their sense and the ability to control the senses of others. They are put through numerous different scenarios triggering all their senses. It gets to where Andrew starts to struggle with reality as his emotions are being tested to the point of him losing all control of his surroundings.
On paper this story probably sounded like a decent idea. You take these people who have superhuman abilities, you put them together and run outlandish tests on them to see who has the will to last. It gets very reminiscent of movies like the X-Men series and even has hints of The Matrix as well. The problem here is when you take that interesting premise and don’t really know what you want to do with it. Director Martin Grof never feels like he has any kind of grasp on this movie. Once they start doing the tests on the characters Grof continually keeps shoving down your throat the question, is this real or is it not? After so many times of jumping from one thing to another and never getting enough time to breathe in between to even have a thought on what’s real and what’s not it just becomes unbearable.
The cast here is no help at all as none of them are even remotely memorable. For a movie that plays a lot with emotions it’s hard to believe how emotionless they make these characters. It is so hard to root for anybody here. Other than Andrew you really don’t get learn much about anyone else and then none of them give you anything redeemable about themselves to make you care for them at all. Why should I care what happens to any of these characters if none of them give me anything to like about them?
While this starts with an interesting premise it doesn’t take long for Sensation to lose steam. Too many twists and turns make things hard to follow and confusing. This entire cast feels like they are sleepwalking through this whole movie. The director just doesn’t seem like he knows what route he wants to take things and it really shows. Unfortunately, I can’t recommend this one when there are so many better options with similar stories.
Review ‘Lemmings: Can You Dig It?’ – life in seven by ten pixels. By Neil Merrett.
The world of gaming is not short of cute, cartoony mascots. In recent years, characters such as Sonic the Hedgehog, Pikachu and the Angry Birds have all headed apparently viable cinematic franchises – a concept and phrase that seemed unthinkable just a few decades ago.
Yet for a subsection of home computer owners in the early 1990s, Britain has its own homegrown gaming icons in the form of the Lemmings. These green haired, passively suicidal rodents were brought to life with just a few dozen pixels.
While their look was seen as graphically limited even by 1991 standards, the game was still something of a commercial and critical sensation. In time, Lemmings would find its way to all number of home computers and consoles. The Lemmings were huge gaming icons, until they weren’t.
Three decades on
30 years since Lemmings first debuted on the Commodore Amiga in 1991, gaming publisher Exient – which has in recent years has sought to reimagine the digital rodent’s adventures as a mobile game – has released a documentary looking at the appeal of the once ground-breaking title.
The film is part documentary and part advert for the both the original and latest iterations of Lemmings. It mostly focuses on a somewhat compelling rags to riches story about how a group of plucky hobbyists and after school coders created the foundations of a company that has gone on to become a billion-dollar behemoth.
But in a world where the green, blue and white Lemmings have not themselves found their way into a lucrative cinema franchise, or even appearing on more modern home console hardware, how exactly does one go about showing the value of a once mighty franchise?
DMA Design, as Lemmings’ developer was originally known, has since been rebranded into Rockstar North. The company is now known as the developer of the Grand Theft Auto 5 – a game that was estimated by 2018 to be the most profitable piece of entertainment ever produced in any format with estimated earnings at the time of some US$6bn.
Fascinating as this origin story is, particularly considering DMA Design started life in a flat above a Dundee fish and chip shop, the documentary keeps its focus on the game of Lemmings rather than Rockstar’s success in redefining games and culture.
This is largely told through a collection of talking heads consisting of the founders and key early figures behind DMA Design. They are joined by high-profile developers such as Peter Molyneux and the co-founder of Lemming’s original publisher Psygnosis.
A more contemporary view of the game’s significance – important after three decades of hardware and software innovation – is provided by YouTube documentarians such as Larry Bundy Jr and streamer Trista Bytes.
Leaving and breathing pixels
As the latter notes at one point of the documentary, Lemmings’ success is arguably in how it made a player feel that a couple of dozen pixels – extremely crude in terms of modern graphics – were helpless living and breathing creatures worthy of your guidance to avoid being incinerated or pulped.
Instead of using the well-worn gaming tropes of shooting and jumping that dominated gaming for the 80s and 90s, Lemmings was a puzzle game that charged you with managing, rather than controlling the lemmings directly. Instead, the player used a mouse to assign abilities to individual characters such as stair building, demolition, or blocking large crowds.
These abilities were often limited in number and had to be used judiciously to safely get a menagerie of lemmings to the exit of each level. Left to their own devices, they would usually fall en masse into lava pits of walk casually off cliffs. The game was, and arguably remains cerebral and charming, with a healthy level of cartoonish brutality and Darwinism to offset the overt cuteness of the main characters.
Importantly, the documentary argues that the game was an early glimpse of a future era of more conceptually rich, immersive videogames that were to come over the proceeding 30 years.
It wisely strays from focusing entirely on using its talking heads to discuss how revolutionary or formative Lemmings was to individual gamers, and instead looks at the how hobbyists in Dundee built an industry from scratch out of some charming and basic animations in an old school computer paint programme.
From a games industry perspective at least, Lemmings: Can You Dig It? is an at times charming and important story about the creative process of coding games and the emergence of the medium as a genuine career path and art form.
However, a decision to include streamers and high-profile UK Youtube producers does also serve to highlight that the internet and social media are now awash with a range of videogame and pop culture documentaries. Some of these, provided for free across video sharing sites, take highly creative visual and narrative approaches to explaining sometimes niche cultural artefacts with brilliant uses of archive footage and brilliant research.
By comparison, Lemmings: Can You Dig It? takes a more straight forward approach to tell the origins of the game’s development up to its huge commercial success using mostly first-hand accounts of the team behind it.
It is testament to the film’s editors that the origins of the game are so well told, essentially via a series of in-person and Zoom interviews. The early stages of the film in particular give a compelling insight into how technical and economic limitations can be an essential and painful part of the creative process.
The documentary also lightly explores how much of the game’s charm and rule breaking stemmed from the naïve lack of experience of its developers as they expanded the building blocks of their less commercially successful works to create something iconic for at least one generation of gamers.
So inexperienced were some of this team, that they had to be told by the game’s eventual composer that ‘copyright’ was kind of a big thing that prohibited them from using popular TV theme tunes of their era within their commercial product. Sadly, the 1960s Batman TV show never made it into the final game!
At two hours, the film can feel a little too long, particularly for those that may not have played a Lemmings game. This is especially with a final 15 minutes spent focusing on the recent mobile reinvention of the game for smartphones.
The film also lightly touches on the eventual formation of Rockstar North. There is a sense that a better, and more complete movie might be made about the evolution of the company with many of the same talking heads, but this is a story ultimately about one step in this overall process.
Lemmings: Can You Dig It? is probably the nearest fans will get to a movie about the digital critters for some time? For non-gamers or those not versed in the Lemmings games, there might be more engrossing tales about the game development.
But for those with a passing familiarity of the game, the documentary tells a fairly interesting story about the unpredictability of the creative process and the often humble origins of vital art and artists.
Ian Hetherington (1952 – 2021)
It is also worth noting the inclusion in the film of Ian Hetherington, the co-founder of the now defunct, but highly influential Liverpool-based publisher Psygnosis.
Mr Hetherington passed away on December 14, 2021, and is portrayed in the film as a commercially and creatively astute force in the growth of the British videogame scene from a hobby to a central component of modern popular culture.
Have you ever wished you go could back in time and edit your past? Take back that mean thing you said in the heat of an argument, tell someone how much they meant to you before they died unexpectedly or not sleep with that guy who turned out to be awful. Well if so, you may enjoy ‘Being Erica’, a brilliant Canadian TV series, created by Jana Sinyor, which ran from 2009 to 2011 (CBC).
Erica, who is in her early 30s, has a long list of regrets, and feels her life is going nowhere when she meets a mysterious and miraculous therapist, Dr. Tom. He can send her back to the moment she is regretting. When Erica does change her regret, however, things don’t quite turn out the way she had thought they would.
This provides an entertaining and interesting exercise in philosophy for the viewer. Can we change the path we are on in life or is it all pre-destined in some way? Do we really have freedom of choice? There are philosophical questions and quotes throughout, mostly from Dr. Tom. ‘The life which is unexamined is not worth living’ (Plato). ‘We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way’ (John Holt). ‘Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it’ (Winston Churchill). Erica certainly seems to learn from examining her history in her therapy sessions and becomes more confident and self-aware as the series goes on.
Towards the end she even learns the year in which she will die, which raises yet more questions. How do we live when we know we only have a certain amount of time left, when we know the year of our death? It’s too far away for Erica to party every day, but it’s close enough not to bother with a pension or worrying too much about the future of the company she has now set up.
‘Being Erica’ addresses some interesting questions of our time such as, ‘Why does my boyfriend masturbate to porn when he could be having sex with me?’
‘Why did my best friend choose relative strangers over me to be godmother to her child?’ ‘Should I have sold out my principles to get that great job I wanted?’
The acting is excellent, particularly from Erin Karpluk who plays Erica. You really feel her pain when she is betrayed by friends or falls out with boyfriends. I watched it again recently and it made me so nostalgic for the days when people may have had these honest discussions and arguments. Nowadays I think we are more likely to simply be ‘unfriended’ on social media or blocked on the phone. Even just being able to go out for a drink after work, go clubbing and flirt with random strangers and worry about why we aren’t married yet instead of worrying about a deadly virus made me miss the ‘good old days’.
‘Being Erica’ is a fabulous trip down memory lane with laughter, drama, great outfits and high heels. It has philosophy, ethics, coffee, wine and sex. I wish more TV was like this.
Another year goes by and here we have our annual Jason Statham action movie. You generally know what you’re getting into with one of his movies but nonetheless he’s got some that are rather enjoyable. Thankfully, Wrath of Man falls into that category and ends up being one of Statham’s most entertaining movies in quite some time.
We follow Statham as a character named simply H. He’s a mysterious figure who works for a cash truck company that moves hundreds of millions of dollars around Los Angeles each week. During a routine day a group attempts to rob the truck causing H to take matters into his own hands and eventually stopping the heist. This causes all of his co-workers and everyone at the truck company to question who he really is and why he joined their company. His motive becomes clear as we watch him attempt to settle a score that’s been taking place over a several month period.
Director Guy Ritchie is no newcomer to the action genre. He knows all the right steps in making something competent and putting it on screen. With Wrath of Man he does a great job crafting this story and letting it play out with excellent execution. Giving a character like H a lot of depth and motivation keeps the audience invested and you really want to see him succeed in his mission. A lot of that depth can be attributed to Statham’s performance here which is arguably one of his best in recent memory.
Statham is a guy that definitely gets typecast a lot but he has a particular type of character that he likes to play and he generally plays that character quite well. Anytime he teams up with Guy Ritchie, Ritchie always seems to get the best out of him and here is no different. While H is a character that Statham has played more than enough times in his filmography, he still has a certain presence and charisma that he brings and it’s a real treat to watch here.
The rest of the cast is made up of solid character actors that all do well in their respective roles, with the exception of Scott Eastwood who always just feels like he’s trying a little too hard. Special shout out to Holt McCallany who does a great job playing the character Bullet and it is always great to see Josh Harnett when he decides to pop up in something new. There is some intense and edge of your seat moments here during most of the action set pieces. It all leads up to a big finale with plenty of head shots to satisfy even the most casual action fans.
In the end, Wrath of Man is a well-made and slick action movie with solid action, good direction and a great performance from Jason Statham. Some points get a little sluggish as the story jumps around between different points in time a little too often and it would have been nice to see a few more of these characters fleshed out more. Despite it’s few shortcomings this is definitely a movie worth seeking out.
