film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Author: Alton Williams

  • DVD Review – And Soon The Darkness

    And Soon The Darkness
    Dir: Marcus Efron
    Wri: Jennifer Dewington & Marcus Efron based on the script of the 1970 film “And Soon The Darkness” by Brian Clemens & Terry Nation
    Starring: Amber Heard, Karl Urban, Odette Yustman, Cesar Vianco
    Run Time: 87 mins
    Distributor: Optimum Home Entertainment
    *Be Warned – Contains Spoilers*
    Remakes are usually the bane of most film lovers lives. Classic films we hold cherished memories of are given face lifts, but instead of looking newer and sexier they just look cut up and pointless. Made for the pure sake that a well known film title will get bums on seats. So it’s refreshing to see a remake of a film that holds only a mild cult following.

    Originally made in 1970, And Soon the Darkness was directed by Robert Fuest (The Abominable Dr. Phibes, The Devil’s Rain). The story centres on two young women on the holiday of a lifetime. But as is usually the way the dream holiday turns into a nightmare when one of the women is kidnapped by an unknown assailant. Thus ensues a thriller where everyone is suspect and no-one is quite what they seem.

    In this updated version we follow Stephanie (played by rising star Amber Heard) and Ellie (Odette Annable) as they ditch their group on a cycling holiday around the Argentinean countryside. We know that’s just asking for trouble, I mean the film’s not called And Soon the… Ice Cream Factory. The duo end up in a picturesque village and spend the night getting druuuuuuunk. Ellie hooks up with one of the locals, but things turn nasty when he tries to force himself into their room later that night. Luckily American ex-pat, Michael (Karl Urban) sees him on his way.
    The next day the women cycle out to a remote area. But after a heated argument Stephanie cycles off leaving Ellie to the fate of a mysterious kidnapper. Becoming concerned for her friend Stephanie goes to the police but is fobbed off by a “not suspicious in the absolute slightest” police chief. Realizing her options are slim and working against a ticking clock of catching her plane home she teams up with Michael – who we discover is looking for his missing fiance. Together the pair try to discover what has become of Ellie and Michael’s fiance.
    What is instantly noticeable about And Soon the Darkness is it’s wonderful photography. The Argentinean countryside is full of luscious green tress and rivers of the deepest blue. DOP Gabriel Beristain manages to make the area look both beautiful but menacing. Beneath every sun baked tree branch lies a dark shadow. It instantly makes you feel like you’re watching something that has been made with love and care as opposed to being a slap-dash thriller waiting to be shown on midnight TV.
    Amber Heard and Odette Yustman make for appealing protagonists. Their banter feels natural, managing that great feat of being smart mouthed but not being annoying as hell. Amber Heard in particular shows why she is currently becoming Hollywood’s new darling. Appearing in virtually every scene she carries the film with an earnest performance that goes through all the stages of fear, panic and terror. As Stephanie she is the straight laced girl to the wild child that is Ellie. It made me think that maybe the film would have been more interesting if the more sensible girl was kidnapped, leaving the fuck up to try and find her. Just a thought.
    The film takes its time to set up the plot. Perhaps a little too much. At just 80 mins we should get to Ellie’s kidnapping with haste but it’s a good half hour before the event itself. So the rest of the film, which is the film itself in terms of the plot, is rushed along at a pace which feels like it’s trying to be done so it can get itself down the pub.
    Karl Urban’s character too feels rushed and redundant. In what is essentially an extended cameo Urban does little with his character, essentially being there to explain to Stephanie the underlining reason for the kidnapping. This reason being that girls are kidnapped and sold into sex trafficking. It’s a frightening subject, one that has become more prevalent in the last decade particularly with stories coming from Eastern Europe. This plot line like everything else in the second half of the film is brushed over with great abandon. Taking a disturbing subject which deserves a well researched, though-provoking drama is relegated to being a plot device. I’m not trying to get on a high-horse or anything but the way this film just tosses it in a kind of “oh she’s being sold as a sex worker” just doesn’t sit right. Perhaps leaving the reason of the kidnapping a bit more ambiguous would have created a more menacing atmosphere. Giving it a real-life issue sets itself up to offer a solution to the problem… which never comes. The film instead ends in a classic thriller way with our heroine going up against the bad guys with fists and shotguns blazing.
    The story is also prone to the occasional non-sensical plot point. My favourite being when Michael suggests to Stephanie that it would be better if they split up to look for Ellie. This is after we’ve established that young women are wantonly kidnapped in the area, Michael himself has already told them to stay away from the locals and they are looking for her friend – who has been abducted by a local. She shouldn’t be out of his fucking sight!
    It is a shame. The opening 20 mins of the film seem very promising. A chilling opener points to the dangers ahead, a wonderful looking film complemented by good leading performers. But the film really could have benefitted from running twenty minutes longer. The main story focus is rushed through so quickly it’s hard to really invest in any of the tension director Marcos Efron tries to create. It’s to his credit that he manages to make everybody in the small Argentinean town a suspect without devolving into a Americans = good, Argentines = bad situation. But he really could have told composer tomanddandy to tone back the shrill violins. It’s a classic case of the soundtrack telling you “suspense, suspense, suspense, SUSPENSE!!! It becomes a bit grating. Aside from one or two genuinely surprising revelations And Soon the Darkness feels like a rushed version of Polanski’s Frantic – is it time for a remake of that yet, or I suppose there are a billion other kidnap films out there.
    And Soon the Darkness – **

    © BRWC 2010.

  • 25 Books…

    25 Books...

    …Every Cinephile Should Read is a article here.


    The books listed all sound fantastic.  Any others that should join the list…?

    © BRWC 2010.

  • The Union Opens Tribeca

    The Tribeca Film Festival have announced that the world premiere of Cameron Crowe’s documentary The Union will be the opener. 

    The Union is an unprecedented and personal look at the creative life of Elton John and the remarkable collaborative album with Leon Russell, produced by T-Bone Burnett.  Begun in November 2009, the filming captures the entire writing and recording process of the heralded album John recorded with his early-career idol, Russell.

     

    Never before filmed in his composing process, John¹s creation of The Union is an extremely candid portrait of one of the world’s most treasured artists and performers, and his extraordinary journey of the heart — one that sent him to powerfully reclaim and reinvigorate the life and musical career of Russell, to whom John hadn’t spoken in over 38 years.  The Union is a captivating and exhilarating real-life experience of musical creation and generosity, directed by Cameron Crowe.
    Award-winning music producer T-Bone Burnett, John’s lifelong lyricist Bernie Taupin, icons Neil Young and Brian Wilson, legendary R&B organist Booker T. Jones, steel guitarist Robert Randolph and a 10-piece gospel choir are featured on the album, while appearances by Stevie Nicks and Don Was color the documentary about a love of making music.
    “It’s a special opportunity to open our 10th Festival in this distinct and unique way—not only are we inviting the community to join us for the world premiere of Cameron Crowe’s film The Union, but to have Elton, whose music transcends generations, perform after is an extraordinary gift to our Festival and more specifically the downtown community,” said co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival Jane Rosenthal.  “Cameron Crowe gives audiences unprecedented access into Elton John and Leon Russell’s artistic process in an emotional and realistic way.”
    “I’m absolutely thrilled that the documentary about “The Union” will premiere opening night at the Tribeca Film Festival,” said Elton John.
    “As a longtime fan of both artists, it was a pleasure to spend a year filming their collaboration,” said Cameron Crowe. “We can’t wait to show it to one of the greatest audiences in the world, the Tribeca Film Festival.”
    The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival will announce its feature film slate on March 7 and 14, 2011. 

    © BRWC 2010.

  • Beatdown: Review

    Ahh… cage-fighting. That glorious dance of masculinity where men pitch their instinctual desire to maim and control against their need to stay out of jail, win a girl’s approval and establish themselves as stable family men. 

    Drawn into the primitive ritual by events out of his control, Beatdown‘s Brandon unwittingly finds himself at the centre of this brutal place of fisticuffs and threats. At 21 and caught between emotive urges and responsibility, Brandon is negotiating what it means to be a man.
    Yet while the themes are there, this is a film delivered with a overwhelming absence of style or authenticity. Surprisingly, as the characters wreathe around in pain, it is easy to envy the short-lived nature of their suffering. In contrast, forced to endure one and a half hours of the most unprofessional and tedious cinematography known to man, the audience are the real victims. Beatdown didn’t come with a press release, but if it did it would have been in the form of a pint of absinthe and a bullet, the only absolution for a picture this bad.

    By choosing cage-fighting as a theme, the producers didn’t do themselves any immediate favours. But this is a film about a disgustingly vulgar activity that does little to inject any degree of creativity into its content. Perhaps the film’s only redeeming feature is the name of its lead actor as Rudy Youngblood’s appellation works to supplement any characterisation with far more depth than his poor acting.

    The inclusion of the slightly less appropriately named Michael Bisping is certainly interesting, if not entirely successful. The Lancashire-based professional middleweight clearly can’t act, leaving a residue of authenticity over the over-cooked film. If this was the style of the whole feature, Beatdown would perhaps come across as a refreshingly gritty production, borrowing much from the medium of documentary. However, as the naturally laddish Bisping is placed in the ring with imperfect actors, the mediocrity of the rest of the cast shines through and abandons the film in a bland middle-ground between convincing factual representation and watchable, entertaining movie.

    Unfortunately, when it comes to representing the emotional counterbalance to this brutality, the film fairs no better. There are more overacted bromances than a changing-room scene in a teen movie and verbal interactions between men are inevitably delivered with a forced intensity. Paradoxically, the result of this over-emphasis is that even emotional relationships become primitive struggles for control. Instead of portraying convincing allegiances rooted in sensitivity, the film relies on tired discussions copied-and-pasted from any clichéd daytime drama as the men acknowledge that ‘it’s not gonna be easy’, yet promise to ‘learn’ and ‘try’.


    Thanks to a scriptwriter who is ultimately distanced from reality and who presumably lives in a house wallpapered in Clinton cards, Brandon gets the nice girl. If, like me, you were too mesmerised by the couple’s devastatingly well-coordinated shirts to notice how their relationship developed, don’t worry. A cheeky little montage which alternates between scenes where the couple play with a – previously unseen – dog and Brandon’s work-out sessions certainly fills in all the gaps and allows for efficient plot development with the depth of a Twitter post.

    With a disturbingly animalistic subject, primitive acting, elementary filming and a plot that never quite sees evolution, Beatdown is set to leave its viewers downbeat.

    © BRWC 2010.

  • Film Review with Robert Mann – A Glaring Emission

    A Glaring Emission **

    Upon hearing the title – or even seeing the DVD cover – for A Glaring Emission it is easy to come to the impression that the film is some sort of satire dealing with issues relating to climate change. After all, the simple changing of one letter has transformed the entire meaning of the title and the cover art definitely creates a certain idea of what to expect from the film. This, however, is all a deception on the part of the filmmakers – or whoever is responsible for marketing the film. In the words of director Aaron Scott Moorhead, “the film is vaguely about global warming, but not really.
    Also, in the vein of Thank You For Smoking [a film which this is not in the same league as], we broke the fourth wall and dealt with the dark side of economy, but again, the film isn’t about that. It’s really a caper film about two clever people who are also incorrigibly stupid.” Moorhead, who since making this film as gone on to work as a cinematographer in Los Angeles with multiple projects completed and in place since completing this film and who apparently modelled the central character of this film on a real life friend with the same name, originally started developing this film as a short – something which perhaps it should have stayed as, read on to find out why – after taking a class on global climate change where he learned about the carbon credit market which he found absurd. With the production being “more than a little low-budget” and also being a ticking clock as Moorhead was about to enter film school, the process of making the film was apparently quite a troubled one but, nonetheless, Moorhead says of the final product: “I’m very proud of it and all it represents.” There is some real talent on display in this film but there is also at least one glaring omission – read on to find out what it is.

    Brian Torro (Sean Dennison) is a businessman, a self proclaimed genius and an admitted liar. Having set up a fake corporation in England he has become a multi-millionaire by taking advantage of environmental laws put into effect by the 1997 Kyoto Accords. England limits the amount of carbon dioxide that companies can put out and so large companies that must overproduce can purchase carbon dioxide quotas from companies that under-produce and it is exactly these underproduction quotas that Torro’s company sells, despite the fact that his company produces absolutely no product whatsoever. It’s the ultimate con and Torro makes 100% profit with virtually no cost, which is exactly what he needs to finance his expensive tastes and his equally expensive girlfriend Cally (Caitlin Musgrove). 


    He lives as richly as possible through his lies but things begin to go very wrong when one of his clients, the plump Oswald Plimpton (Joe Reed), discovers what he is up to and tries to blackmail him to the sum of $50 million. With no way of paying that kind of money, Torro attempts to find some dirt on Plimpton so he can blackmail him in return, enlisting the aid of assistant Eugene Dillipeck (Mark Petersen) and reuniting with his estranged mentor, seasoned con artist Demetreous Flagg (Simon Needham). With time running out, Torro soon finds himself becoming entangled in his own web of lies as he desperately tries to save his own ass.

    In this time of economic recession, savage cuts in public spending and the average person being screwed over by greedy, spineless and downright evil rick folk, it is very easy to blame major corporations for all the wrongs that are being inflicted on us and, judging by A Glaring Emission, rather fun too. This is how I thought of starting my write-up for this film upon reading the description on the DVD cover. After all, the tagline, “a corporate climate-changing cap-and-trade comedy”, certainly seems to suggest that this might be a film with much to say about the major issues that are corporate greed and climate change and that the style of the film might be very satirical in its nature. 


    The film starts off in fine fashion. Revolving around a company that makes huge sums of money despite not really doing or producing anything of value – wait, that’s sound very familiar doesn’t it; oh that’s right it’s called a bank – the film may not explicitly say anything about corporate greed in the real world or the role of big corporations in the current economic climate but anyone with a trained eye should be able to pick up on some subtexts that appear to be present here – the corporation in the film may be fake but its goals and the way it operates certainly share parallels with those of a real corporation. Dealing with two of the biggest issues affecting the world today – despite not actually being about either – the film seems poised to go to some very interesting places and deal with some very topical issues. The writing is pretty sharp, the way Torro speaks to the camera, something which often seems clichéd and lazy on the part of the writer, works very well here, things seem quite funny and the visuals are stunning, in particular a scene where Torro explains what the Kyoto Protocol is and how he is exploiting it, using donuts and chocolate candies as visual aids. 


    This scene features some excellent but subtle blink and you’ll miss them visual effects that really are impressive. Watch very closely so as not to miss them. The editing, done by producer Lazaro Trejo along with director Aaron Scott Moorhead, is also absolutely superb, showing off some of the smoothest editing I have seen in a long while, the scene effortlessly sliding from one location to the next in completely seamless fashion and, were this film under consideration for an Oscar for Editing, I genuinely think it might have a chance at being nominated, if not winning. All of the above applies to the first ten minutes of the film and were it a short that ended at this point I may well be awarding it a five star rating but, alas, I am not, as this excellent start makes way for a considerably less impressive overall film, much of the duration being a misguided and aimless mess.

    The film seems to be at its best when embracing its corporate greed and global warming themes but all subtexts evaporate after the opening ten minutes have passed, in its place entering a sort of caper as Torro tries to save his own ass but, unfortunately, not a very funny one. With a mostly tedious screenplay, written by Moorhead along with co-writer Andrew Preston, and a lack of a strong storyline as well as characters that are overdrawn without being very funny or interesting, the overall film proves to be nowhere near as smart or funny as it clearly thinks it is and even the way Torro speaks to the camera grows tiresome after a while, the film actually feeling like a drag at only 87 minutes in length. The biggest culprit of this stems from a glaring omission – the humour. 


    Beyond the first ten minutes there is little to make you laugh, only the occasional line delivery raising a giggle or two and the film being completely devoid of jokes, witty banter – the dialogue for the most part is rather poor – or sharp satire. The film’s independent, low budget – a mere $24,000 (although, considering that last year’s Monsters was done for only $15,000, it is hard not to think that so much more could have been done here) – origins betray it at times and it is hard to overlook the low production values and the general feel that this film is more like a student production than a professionally put together film – writer, director and producer Moorhead made it when he was only 19 years old so perhaps this shouldn’t be altogether surprising. That said, however, the original music score by Seth Woodard, featuring a blend of a light and comic and serious and suspenseful tones, proves perfectly complementary to the visuals and the impressive editing largely continues after the opening ten minutes while the cinematography, despite clearly having been done on rather basic equipment, is generally very good, the visuals boasting crisp, clear clarity and being vibrant and colourful. Unfortunately, all that this does is apply an aesthetically pleasing veneer to an ultimately hollow shell of a film.

    One of the film’s biggest undoings is its representation of Britain and British people, the filmmakers failing back on old American stereotypes of what Britain is actually like, the ‘British’ characters speaking with dodgy fake accents, often having crooked teeth – things that are both evident in the characters of Eugene Dillipeck and Dan Beniele (played by Benjamin Daniele), the latter being a ‘British’ news reporter who features in some very irritating TV news reports that permeate the film at several points – and having names that I’m not really sure any British people actually have. With Tampa in Florida masquerading as London and doing a very bad job of it – outside of the time that Hawaii was used to double as London in Lost I can’t think of a less convincing depiction of England’s capital city – and only one of the ‘British’ characters actually being portrayed by a British actor – that actor being Simon Needham, portraying Demetreous Flagg, whose name isn’t even spelled correctly – this film may well prove almost offensive to British viewers. 


    It really is obvious that the filmmakers don’t actually know much about Britain and did not have the British moviegoing audience in mind when they made the film. Aside from Needham, who is easy to buy as being British – obviously, he actually is – and who proves pretty amusing as Demetreous, the ‘British’ cast members are quite awful. Clearly having no conception of what it really means to be British, none of them prove even remotely convincing and personally I found them all to be plain irritating. A global warning – American viewers likely won’t notice but to anyone British considering seeing this film its presentation of Britain and British people isn’t merely irritating but borderline demeaning. The rest of the cast do at least perform quite ably, even with the weak writing. As Torro, Sean Dennison has all suaveness and charisma of a real corporate executive, being a real smooth operator and fluid talker who it is easy to believe could pull off everything his character has in the film. 


    Simply put he is largely quite excellent, his performance being truly vibrant and charismatic and, as he seemingly channels Joseph Gordon Levitt, perfectly sarcastic too as his character lies through his teeth. Needham, meanwhile, is as every bit as suave as Dennison but far more cunning with a touch of bitterness. And, playing a complete idiot who, as Torro says, is like “a lovely house but no one’s at home”, Caitlin Musgrove is perfectly cast as Cally. There is definite promise among these cast members but the material they have to work with here doesn’t even begin to tap into it. 


    All in all, A Glaring Emission is a film that has its moments but for the most part isn’t very funny. More of the quality seen in the first ten minutes would have made for an overall better production but, as it is, it isn’t all bad but it is a long way from being good either. Regardless of the many many flaws, there is some true talent on display here but everyone clearly has a long way to go before they can achieve anything that can truly be called good. Torro says “B.S. is our business”. Perhaps, given that the film completely fails to do anything of the things that it seemed to promise to, the filmmakers should be saying the same thing.

    If you want to know more about A Glaring Emission you can check out the official website at this address:

    You can also check out the official MySpace page here: http://www.myspace.com/aglaringemission


    And the trailer can be viewed here: http://vimeo.com/8915355

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    Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

    © BRWC 2010.