film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Jack Hawkins

  • Judas And The Black Messiah: Another Review

    Judas And The Black Messiah: Another Review

    Judas and the Black Messiah is a solid biopic of Fred Hampton and the conspiracy that killed him. Over two hours, Shaka King’s film presents a compelling popular history of the man, his ideology of Afro-Marxism, and the nefarious elements that caused his brutal assassination in December 1969. 

    The roots of conspiracy are established with pace and brevity. Petty crook William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield) bursts into a Chicago bar wielding a badge and donned in a raincoat and trilby. He uses this guise to frisk young black men at a pool table, taking cash and car keys that he claims to be contraband. However, a lapse in O’Neal’s confidence causes the men to see through his act and they pursue him onto the street, where a passing cop car catches him. 

    O’Neal finds himself in custody facing two years for grand theft auto and five years for impersonating a federal agent. However, Agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) sees potential in this wily career criminal. He offers to drop the charges if O’Neal goes undercover and infiltrates Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) and the Illinois Black Panthers. 

    Soon, O’Neal is in close contact with Hampton, attending seminars and assisting at community functions. As Hampton, Kaluuya is an immediate screen presence, stealing every scene as he embodies the activist’s rousing energy. The London native adds another accent to his repertoire, too, seamlessly capturing the baritone rhythm of Hampton’s oratory. The only thing Kaluuya does not reflect is Hampton’s remarkable precociousness; he was just 21 on the night of his death. 

    O’Neal’s charade continues as he postures at the sidelines. He bears witness to street politics of black Chicago, namely the tensions between the Panthers and the Crowns, a fellow revolutionary group. More interesting than that, though, is Hampton’s diplomacy with white and Hispanic groups. It is here that he speaks not just as a civil rights campaigner but also as a socialist. 

    In one scene, Hampton addresses a provincial white crowd, empathizing with their blue-collar plight. Shortly before he takes the stage, the audience’s leader says, “Our people oppressed your people for years”, to which a crowd member responds, “My family didn’t oppress shit, they were sharecroppers!” Hampton understands this sentiment. Indeed, it was his understanding of power and authority that was most resonant about his brand of Afro-Marxism. Hampton’s rhetoric targeted not the average working person but the authority figure. He made this clear as he worked his audiences into a righteous frenzy, “I live for the people! I love the people!’ It was all part of his Marxist worldview, that of the haves and have-nots, which held equal footing with his black identity. 

    As the film details Hampton’s character and purpose, we are acutely aware of the tragedy creeping towards him. His eventual death is depicted literally and without stylisation, following the record established by the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton. It is a fittingly direct ending to a film that explains but does not enthral, informs but does not involve. Because of this, despite its central performance, Judas and the Black Messiah will not join the pantheon of great biopics.

  • Rams: Review

    Rams: Review

    Back in 2015, Icelandic director Grímur Hákonarson won the Prix Un Certain Regard with his film Rams, which impressed critics with its dry humour, raw emotion and arresting visuals. It tells the story of two grizzled brothers who are estranged yet share a family farm. Borderline hermits, they dedicate themselves to their prize-winning sheep, obsessing over their nutrition and form. However, their lonely passion is thwarted when a pandemic ravages their livestock, leaving them no choice but to slaughter the animals they live for. 

    As with so many successful foreign language films, an English remake was on the cards. Australian screenwriter Jules Duncan has adapted this latest example, with fellow countryman Jeremy Sins serving as director. Duncan’s script is a ‘reimagining’ of Hákonarson’s film, following the same major plot points of two brothers, Colin (Sam Neil) and Les (Michael Caton), having their lives overturned by Ovine Johne’s Disease (OJD), an incurable infection that condemns their entire flocks.

    The nuts and bolts of the story are the same, so why is this new film some 20 minutes longer? Is it the good stuff like character development, narrative depth and comedic set pieces? I’m afraid the answer is no. Instead, the running time is padded with flat mediocrity. It takes the trappings of an interesting premise and dawdles from scene to scene, showing little in the way of humour or pathos. 

    This could have been an earthy, Aussie juxtaposition to the original’s dour Nordic charm. But when Rams isn’t being outright dull, it just has this safe aesthetic that casts a middling sheen over its moments of boozing, gunfire and bogan behaviour. 

    The performances are a saving grace, with particularly naturalistic turns from Neill, Caton and Miranda Richardson, who plays Kat the ‘Pommy vet’. Less naturalistic is Leon Ford in the role of De Vries, a government stooge who has been caricatured to solicit maximum disdain from the audience.

    He is the proverbial urban bureaucrat who lives for policy and cannot deal with anything that deviates from it. Spontaneity confuses his little mind nearly as much as the townsfolk of Mount Baker, whom he speaks to in a patronising and facetious manner. It’s an enjoyable caricature. But it is just that, a caricature. 

    Then there’s the predictability of it all. With a virus killing their sheep, forest fires ravaging their land, and bureaucrats knocking at their doors, do you think the estranged brothers will finally come together? Hmm, I wonder. Rams may delight a senior matinee audience, but for everyone else it will lack all edge.

  • Cup Of Cheer: Review

    Cup Of Cheer: Review

    Cup of Cheer is a film from the Naked Gun school of comedy, with gags coming thick and fast. There’s a strong serving of American Pie, too, with a bucket of smut emptied onto the script.

    Leading us through this ironic chaos is Mary (Storm Steenson), a gentle parody of the typical New York millennial who lives in a ‘cute industrial loft’ that turns out to be a 6ft cage. A magazine journalist, Mary returns to her parochial hometown in search of a Christmas story when she runs into goofy cafe owner Chris (Alexander Oliver), who introduces himself by spilling a vat of hot chocolate down her.

    What ensues is a screwball-inflected romance, displaying the leads’ ceaseless energy that’s supported by equally zany turns from Liam Marshall, who plays Chris’s brother Keith, and Jacob Hogan, inexplicably assuming the role of ‘Authuh’, a time-traveling British army officer.

    Like the material that inspired it, Cup of Cheer’s purpose is to inundate with silliness. Naturally, it hits and it misses, with a theatrical energy that will irritate some and entertain others. Then there’s its good-humoured ridicule of Christmas schmaltz, which is better described as playful rather than outright cynical.

    It may lack the twinkle in the eye of Leslie Nielson or the grizzled misanthropy of Bad Santa, but Cup of Cheer may well find an audience with its knowingly twee and absurd shenanigans.

  • Muscle: Review

    Muscle: Review

    Craig Fairbrass has long established himself as a hardman amongst hardmen, stealing scene after scene with his bristling intensity. Muscle, the third film from Gerard Johnson, is the best realisation yet of Fairbrass’s imposing screen presence, in what is an ominously powerful character study of manipulation and psychopathy.

    Our focaliser is Simon (Cavan Clerkin), a disillusioned office worker whose cold-calling sales job is slowly killing him. He cuts a sorry figure, draped in a loose jacket as he shuffles along the alleys of Newcastle, his balding head held low. His wife and home offer no sanctuary, either. It’s a sexless marriage of excess drinking, long silences and snide remarks.

    Shortly before attending some awful sales seminar, Simon is stopped in his tracks by a broad-shouldered man leaving a city centre gym.  He makes a strong impression on him, triggering some remaining impetus – “I don’t feel the same anymore, I want to shake it up a bit, I want to change myself”, he explains to a colleague.

    His first session at the gym is an awkward one, moving limply from machine to machine, including the pull-down, which he pulls behind his neck rather than towards his sternum – a cardinal sin to many lifters. Terry (Craig Fairbrass) makes this clear, bounding over to him with an aggressive tirade. This is followed, however, by a welcoming gesture, albeit one designed to coerce Simon into accepting his personal training service ­– “Fuck fit, you wanna get big and you wanna get strong.”

    This manipulative combination of fear and positive reinforcement is a harbinger of what’s to come. When Simon’s wife leaves him, he goes to Terry for support, lamenting how he can’t afford the bills by himself. Terry sees an opportunity and asks to become his lodger, which he achieves with little resistance.

    With this encroachment complete, Terry’s controlling behaviour confirms him as an abject psychopath. He pushes boundaries, inviting people to the house without permission and throwing parties that devolve into grimy spectacles of drugs and escorts. Eventually, Terry has a live-in girlfriend, taking over the living room as Simon stews upstairs.

    Although Terry is clearly a bully ­and a second-rate human being, the full extent of his past is as unclear to us as it is to Simon. There is no dramatic irony here, just frightening mystery. Terry claims to have been a soldier, mentioning a collection of ‘trophy pictures’ that would ‘get him a life sentence’. However, later in the film, there are comments suggesting that Terry is much worse than anyone could imagine. Perhaps the only thing we can be sure of is that Terry is a nomadic psychopath, with Simon his latest victim in a life of roving crime and exploitation.

    The depth of the script is matched by the stark, monochrome and occasionally experimental aesthetic. This style reaches its peak during an orgy scene that sees the frame warp and blur as Simon observes the violation of his home, with Matt Johnson’s evocative score casting an aura of gloom, menace and sin in equal measure.

    Muscle is Gerard Johnson’s third film in 11 years. It’s also his best. One can only hope that his next project comes sooner rather than later, for Johnson has proved himself as a director of real force, intelligence, and explicit reality.

  • Make Up: Review

    Make Up: Review

    Make Up is a realist British drama with an aberrant psychological edge. It brings to mind The War Zone with its isolation and atmosphere, but Clare Oakley’s debut is a more inward experience, placing us in the protagonist’s headspace to feel her suspicions and confused paranoia.  

    The premise is simple. Eighteen-year-old Ruth (Molly Windsor) moves down to Cornwall to live in an off-season caravan park with her boyfriend Tom (Joseph Quinn), sharing various odd jobs. Within a day of her arrival, she finds traces of another woman – lipstick on a mirror, stray hairs on Tom’s clothing – that sends her into paranoia. This jealousy, however, morphs into something much deeper and sensual.  

    Ruth’s experience is more circumstance and environment than plot and dialogue. She’s young, unsure of herself and stuck in a bleak, windswept stretch of the Cornish coast, away from her parents for the first time in her life. She wanders from scene to scene, awkward and withdrawn despite the three years she’s been with her boyfriend. Ruth’s introversion requires a performer to act with their eyes and facial expressions, yet while Windsor is generally natural and authentic, she can also be overly blank.

    Her counterpart is Jade (Stefanie Martini), a confident twenty-something who’s unconcerned about others’ perception of her. We see Ruth open up in Jade’s company, basking in the warm light of her bohemian living room. These moments best reveal Oakley’s tactile sensibilities, which are cinematically framed by Nick Cooke’s wide, arresting camerawork. 

    The psychodramatic trappings may misrepresent the film for some, because what Make Up amounts to is a quiet coming of age tale with a heart of social realism under all the menace and pathetic fallacy. It is a minor yet accomplished debut feature from Clare Oakley.