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  • HBO Max, Van Helsing, Solid Snake: Weekly Round Up

    HBO Max, Van Helsing, Solid Snake: Weekly Round Up

    HBO Max, Van Helsing, Solid Snake: Weekly Round Up – Arguably one of the most important pieces of legislation, when it comes to movie distribution, is the fact that movie studios aren’t allowed to own their own movie theatres. The point in this was to prevent studios from creating a monopoly. It made sense. Of course, earlier this year a judge in America ruled to end that piece of legislation, but since Coronavirus continues to upset the current cinema landscape it’s safe to say that we don’t quite know what the repercussions of that will be yet. Perhaps more importantly, then, is the fact that there is no current law preventing movie studios from owning their own streaming services.

    This one has gone under the radar somewhat, given that streaming services operate in a weird sort of state between a television channel model like, say, Netflix (or, at least, Netflix back in the early days, before they really properly began producing their own content), licensing products from other production companies, and a mode of premiership distribution through which studios can produce and hoard their own content, like Disney+.

    You might be wondering why I’m talking about this in the weekly news roundup. Well, let me explain. This week we learned that Warner Bros. will be debuting their entire upcoming 2021 theatrical slate both in cinemas and on HBO Max on the same day. This won’t be a Disney and Mulan type deal either, as Warners are releasing the films at no extra cost beyond the monthly subscription fee (side note; what this means for the UK, where we don’t currently have HBO Max, I don’t know. My gut feeling is that everything will be going directly to… ugh, Sky. And that fucking sucks). Moreover, we’re talking about a lot of movies; Mortal Kombat, Tom & Jerry, The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It, Space Jam: A New Legacy, James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, The Matrix 4, and Dune are among the films included. 

    Now, aside from the obvious questions surrounding movie theatres and what this could mean for them – and the response regarding the news from the theatre chains themselves has been pretty negative to say the least – this turn also raises a question of sustainability in general. There was, even pre-COVID, talk of the movie industry pricing out many low-income earners, especially in terms of affordability of cinema tickets. This was, arguably, one of the key reasons streaming took of in the way it did to begin with. Are we now going to see a similar situation occur across these streaming platforms?

    Already the big hitters include the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Apple, and HBO Max, and that’s without even mentioning the smaller options like Shudder or Mubi. Are we going to reach a point where, without the theatres, the streaming services will become unsustainable since there’s just too many of them, and none of them will share content? I don’t know. Of course, purchasing outside of the monthly subscription is also an option, but if studios are going to continue pumping millions and millions into there movies then is that really going to be viable. Mulan cost $30 to watch on your own TV and, let me tell you, as a parent with two young kids and not a lot of spare cash as is, that ain’t worth it. And I fucking love the movies.

    Anyway, enough negative speculation. We’ve got news to discuss.

    One of my favorite pieces of news to come along this week surrounds Universal’s continued attempts to repackage and rework their disastrous Dark Universe experiment. Of course, we all know about the now legendary Tom Cruise starring misfire that was The Mummy, and the ensuing collapse of the studios planned shared cinematic universe. We all also know (or we should do by now) that with Leigh Whannell’s take on The Invisible Man, the classic monsters have finally been given a new lease of life.

    Universal have been quick to push ahead with this approach (which… quite why they didn’t go with this one in the first place is, honestly, baffling) announcing the likes of Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Invisible Woman, and a few original projects centered around their classic monster characters. This week we got word of another film to add to the list, with a reboot of that other famous misfire, Van Helsing.

    Released in 2004 (God, I feel old), Van Helsing starred Hugh Jackman in the title-role and saw the iconic vampire hunter take on vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein’s monster. It was a bomb and it’s bloody awful in a sort of cheesy and fun way, but it would seem there are still those at the studio who are eager to give the concept another go. Surprisingly for a movie studio, though, it does appear they have learned from their mistakes, as this version of the film will be produced by James Wan, who is no stranger to horror films, and will be directed by Julius Avery, who directed 2018’s fun but forgettable Nazi Zombie flick, Overlord.

    What the film will be about beyond the general concept we don’t know, but Avery will be re-writing a script originally penned by Thor: Ragnarok and Black Widow co-writer Eric Pearson, which suggests it’ll be leaning toward action once again. Here’s hoping second time’s a charm.

    Perhaps one of the more interesting and exciting stories this week came in the form of a piece of casting news. The long in development Metal Gear Solid movie adaption has had its ups and downs, but for a while now Kong: Skull Island director Jordan Vogt-Roberts (who is a legend) has been attached to direct, working from a screenplay by Jurassic World and Safety Not Guaranteed co-writer Derek Connolly. But news beyond that has been slow to non-existent.

    At least, that was the case. But, this week we learned that Oscar Isaac has been cast in the lead role of Solid Snake, suggesting that there really is movement happening with it now.

    Isaac’s casting is interesting not just from a “Oh, wow! Is this actually happening?” perspective, either. Isaac has long been something of an underutilized presence by Hollywood. He has the looks, charisma, and talent to be a real big hitter, and yet, outside of his excellent working in indie movies, he has been relegated to side-characters and supporting players. This is an opportunity to for the actor to really lead a big budget, mainstream project and, moreover, if it turns out to be good, totally change the way the audience view video-game movies in general.  – HBO Max, Van Helsing, Solid Snake: Weekly Round Up

  • Greenland: The BRWC Review

    Greenland: The BRWC Review

    Whether he’s saving the president (again and again in the Has Fallen series) or leading a shirtless Spartan army, Gerald Butler has established himself as a premier action star. He may not be a critical darling, but Butler’s sturdy gravitas deserves praise for carrying even the most middling of screenplays. His latest B-movie vehicle Greenland attempts to relish in the destruction of our planet, a set-up that could be oddly distasteful given the current times. Taking away the lousy timing, this middling disaster film rarely embraces the strengths of its dopey subgenre.

    Greenland follows John Garrity (Butler), a family man who embarks on a perilous journey to find sanctuary when a planet-killing comet hurtles toward Earth. As the countdown to the global apocalypse approaches zero, the Garrity’s incredible trek culminates in a desperate and last-minute flight to a possible safe haven.

    No one plays a gruff, straight-laced everyman like Butler, but his compelling presence can only take this emotionally vacant thrill ride so far. Oddly enough, Greenland attempts to establish its own voice among its bombastic peers. Director Ric Roman Waugh opts away from grandiose setpieces to convey a murky realism, a sensibility that has served him well with prison dramas like Snitch and Felon. Waugh’s shake-ridden framing lacks the creative edge to compensate for the cheap visual veneer, while his hyper-realistic presentation makes a clunky accomplice for the genre sensibility. I’ve enjoyed Waugh’s previous work, but disaster movies’ inherent cheesiness don’t mesh with his filmmaking identity.

    Chris Sparling’s sparse screenplay double downs on the edgy identity. Vignettes of semi-realistic world-ending scenarios attempt to place audiences in the boots of our everyman protagonists. In a cerebral apocalyptic offering like Contagion, frames like these can serve as a stark reflection of our fragile humanity, ruminating on how people are pushed in times of fear and vulnerability. Here, Sparling’s greeting card-level of depth only speaks contrived motifs about our desire to put ourselves over others in times of need.

    Greenland tosses out the kitchen sink of B-movie trappings to form a shallow connection with audiences. The opening frames establish a soap-opera level of melodrama that permeates throughout every clunky interaction, with the Garrity’s cliche-ridden origins being unengaging to invest in (this movie rips the maudlin divorce subplot right from Roland Emmerich’s 2012). Butler and Morena Baccarin hold their own with the material, but the vanilla family figures never evolve past vapid cardboard cutouts. Once the characters get on the road, they run past a myriad of desolate survivalist-types to reach their salvation. Whether they are kind-hearted or cruel, they all just become road bumps for John’s macho-man mission to save his family.

    By meshing the borrowed tropes of disaster movies with an inauthentic grit, Greenland doesn’t satisfy any of its audience’s desires. Even bloated misfires like 2012 and Geostorm found ways to embrace the innate appeal of their sandbox destruction. Everything in Greenland is presented with a dour self-seriousness that becomes tiresome to endure, as it’s not like the material has anything of substance to say. Once the action finally starts to fly in the third act (Butler outdrives a wave of falling asteroids), I had lost interest as I awaited the inevitably saccharine conclusion.

    While admittedly competent, Greenland never achieves much of note with its well-trudged premise. As a fan of Butler and Waugh’s track record, I hope the duo return to their well-established action roots.

  • Farewell Amor: Review

    Farewell Amor: Review

    Farewell Amor: Review. By Trenyt Neely.

    This film from writer/director Ekwa Msangi follows an Angolan family reunited after 17 years apart. Father and husband Walter (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine), his wife Esther (Zainab Jah), and their daughter Sylvia (Jayme Lawson). Upon initially reuniting, all are filled with an understandable mix of joy and trepidation given the years that have gone by. Walter has been working as a cab driver in New York City, waiting and petitioning for the immigration process to be finalized so his wife and daughter could join him. It is soon revealed however, that Walter had a serious relationship with another woman during his separation from Esther and  Sylvia, causing him great guilt.

    Compounding his guilt is the fact that during their time apart, Esther has become a strict Christian. She spends the film regularly listening to sermons and forcing Walter and Sylvia to attend church and pray fervently, even though they do not share her level of zeal for the faith. For her part, Sylvia finds herself in conflict with her desire to pursue her passion for dance and her mother’s disapproval of it, as she views it to be immodest. In addition, Sylvia does not have a lot of memories of her father. Not only is she far from her friends and what is familiar as she is thrust into American society, but she has to develop a bond with a man she hardly knows. The film follows this family as they seek to navigate the American experience, deal with their personal struggles, and build their family and life together after such a lengthy time apart.

    One of this film’s greatest strengths is how much care and time it takes with its three protagonists. Msangi chooses to have the film separated into three sections, each one titled and focused on one member of the family. This allows for the full depth and complexity of each character to shine through and minimizes the degree that a character is reduced to cliches or simplistic interpretations.  

    Consequently, such a character-centric approach requires strong performances, and the actors here more than meet the challenge. Mwine as Walter perfectly captures the struggle of a man who has sacrificed and worked for years to build a future and a life for his family, while at the same time wrestling with the fact that he has lost a lot of time with them and must therefore rebuild those relationships. Also, he must reconcile that while he loves his family,  he developed a genuine love and bond with another woman. Mwine portrays this effectively by delivering a lot of his dialogue in hushed tones and with his head down. This goes a long way in showing the audience a man of a caring nature, and also one who carries a lot on his shoulders.

    Jah also does a great job taking on a role that could have proved to be somewhat limiting. It is easy at the start of the film to view the character of Esther as overly fearful and controlling due to the severity of her religious convictions. However once one gets to the portion of the film focused on her and sees the history and context surrounding her, it is understood that her faith is her anchor during a turbulent time in her life as she is adjusting to this new country. In addition, she has a layered view of America as a land of opportunity, but also a land of corruption if one does not stay vigilant. As a result, she views it as her Christian duty to remain prayerful not just for her own sake, but the sake of her husband and daughter. Jah has the added challenge of spending a lot of screen time isolated as her character is home alone while Walter works and Sylvia attends school. This means Jah must convey these complex emotions largely through prayers that serve as monologues, and phone calls where her speech and facial expressions are her main tools, which Jah uses to great effect.

    Similarly, Lawson imbues Sylvia with a maturity not always present in teen characters. Sylvia wants to pursue dance and ordinary teen experiences, we see the joy on Lawson’s face when she is lost in music. At the same time,  she does not wish to upset her mother by dancing, who has been her sole source of comfort and stability during her life. Ironically, Sylvia’s relationship with Walter really begins to grow when he encourages her to pursue dance, even though both of them know it upsets Esther. When Sylvia upsets her mother, the sadness and pain is as clear on Lawson’s face in these moments as the moments of joy are when she dances.

    The film’s cinematography also does a great job of showing the complex relationships between the three characters. For the scene of their reunion at the airport that opens the film, cinematographer Bruce Francis Cole keeps the camera far away from the action and refuses to cut the opening shot for a long time. This allows the apprehension and stiffness the characters are experiencing to be conveyed succinctly and stronger than dialogue probably could. Even as film progresses, Cole frequently uses wide-angle lenses for dialogue scenes,  so even when characters are in a relatively small space, it feels like there is a great distance between them. Again using the power of visuals to show how difficult it can be to rebuild relationships after long periods of absence.

    If you are looking for a film that offers a deep, nuanced, character-driven look at the immigrant experience and how that affects a family, seek this film out if given the chance.           

  • Sound Of Metal: The BRWC Review

    Sound Of Metal: The BRWC Review

    Ever since breaking out in 2014’s moody thriller Nightcrawler (his mumbling charm is one of the film’s unheralded strengths), Riz Ahmed’s profile continues to be on the rise. Along with being a sturdy supporting player, Ahmed flexed his versatile talents in HBO’s The Night Of, generating massive award buzz for his vulnerable take as an incoming prisoner. Ahmed’s latest starring vehicle Sound of Metal boasts his best performance to date, as his talents carry an emotionally raw character study bristling with authentic truths.

    Sound of Metal follows Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a heavy-metal drummer whose life is thrown into freefall when he begins to lose his hearing. Alongside his girlfriend/bandmate Lou (Olivia Cooke) and his new mentor Joe (Paul Raci), Ruben attempts to adjust to his drastic lifestyle change through therapeutic means.

    Writer/director Darius Marder (who collaborated on the screenplay with Place Beyond the Pines director Derek Cianfrance) wisely morphs this story of loss into a tale of meaningful rehabilitation. His filmmaking verve is established from jump street, opening with an electrifying showcase of Ruben’s passionate musical drive (I’m not a metal fan, but the sequence’s explosive intensity exemplifies undeniable artistic merits). The early emphasis on sound morphs into a nightmarish reality when Ruben’s hearing becomes dulled and distorted. Marder’s scaling audio mixture places audiences right in our protagonist’s frenzied shoes, utilizing thoughtfully-constructed techniques without over-straining their impact (this is a movie made to win sound awards, with the delicate audio profile holding significant narrative weight).

    Even with Ruben’s life-changing discovery, Marder’s film never wallows in a pit of despair. Along with conveying the internal pains of addicts (Marder cleverly evolves Ruben’s past drug addictions into a craving for sound, with the character’s personal journey becoming one of self-acceptance), Sound of Metal articulates a spirited voice for its marginalized community. The screenplay empathetically conveys the sentiments of the deaf community, a group that doesn’t view their hearing loss as an impediment. The well-textured authenticity enhances Marder’s dramatic narrative at every turn, surrounding Ruben with compassionate and lived-in figures to aid him in his transition.

    Sound of Metal’s ultimate showstopper comes in the form of performance work. Riz Ahmed reaches impressive new heights as the chaotically unwieldy Ruben, a man whose volatile passion often overwhelms his search for inner peace. Ahmed’s performance dials the character’s juxtaposing states with understated emotionality, never striking a false chord as he drives the narrative forward. Olivia Cooke is great as Ruben’s supportive partner, while unheardled character actor Paul Raci steals the show as the film’s soulful center.

    While the film doesn’t quite hit every note (the 2-hour runtime is admittedly shaggy, with the third act straining before reaching its heartfelt conclusion), Sound of Metal operates as a compassionate character piece enhanced through its brazen artistic drive.

  • Sweet Street: Review

    Sweet Street: Review

    Sweet Street: Review. By Beth Widdicombe.

    Written and Directed by Leeds native Coz Greenop, this short gives us a 24-hour window into the story of Isabella, a sex worker based on the real, legalised Red District located on Sweet Street in Leeds, North Yorkshire. Having an interest in social realism and his local area, he started research to bring these girls stories to life. Taken from an interview by ‘Directors Notes’; directorsnotes.com

    “For a long time, I’ve wanted to do something that has some kind of social realism. All my previous movies have been about real issues but with this, I wanted something close to home and where I’m from in Leeds”.

    Although only 15 mins long, this short packs a punch, and we become very aware that there are no happy endings on Sweet Street.

    We meet Isabella (Ariadna Cabrol) in the early morning, finishing another shift on the street. Her friend and fellow sex worker Kayleigh (Kimberley Barrett) invites her to a party later – but unexpectedly, instead of heading back to her squat/parents/flat (who knows the background of a prostitute, it could be anywhere), she makes her way to an aquatics centre. While staring into the aquariums, she is approached by a man who works in the garden centre, Mark (Philip Hill-Pearson).

    They have a meet cute situation, and she agrees to meet him for a day trip to Farley the following day. Seeming quite excited by the prospect Isabella heads to her home (not a squat, however the neighbours are continually arguing), and gets ready to meet her friend for the party. There are scenes of drug use, and it is here that the audience gets an idea of the reason for their choice in career, and its unglamorous reality. The party is a typically seedy affair, casual hook-ups, drinks, obligatory vomit in the loo, followed by hazy camera movement.

    Feeling somewhat fragile, Isabella makes it to meet Mark the next morning, albeit late and they head to the seaside. They drink on the beach, they chat. All seems like loves young dream.

    They end their day in the local chippy. Personally, I’m living my own future love fantasy right now. Then comes the inevitable conflict…not all stories have a happy ending, and although we just want Isabella to live happily ever after, life just isn’t like that.

    Coz’s attempt at telling the stories of the red district workers both sensitive and well executed. It’s not often that I get emotionally involved in stories such as this, but it gave me a new level of empathy for these poor women.