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  • Blackjack – The Jackie Ryan Story: Review

    Blackjack – The Jackie Ryan Story: Review

    As an avid NBA fan, it’s my film critic mandate to engulf any basketball film that hits release… and I mean any (seriously, how many other Netflix users watched Amature back in 2018?). This mantra has driven me towards a few slam dunk-worthy films (Love and Basketball and Uncut Gems), along with a few woeful air-ball stinkers (Rebound and Thunderstruck). The latest addition to the subgenre Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story takes a refreshingly low-key approach to the high-flying sport. Despite an underdog earnestness, Danny Abeckaser’s film never escapes the grasp of simplistic narrative-handholding.

    Blackjack follows the story of hot-tempered Brooklyn native and streetball legend Jackie Ryan (Greg Finley). Stuck in a personal crossroads, Jackie listlessly spends his days partying with his pal Marty (James Madio) while vying over his former crush Jenny (Ashley Greene). When Jackie is called for a tryout with the Brooklyn Nets, he tirelessly builds towards personal and professional redemption.

    As a craftsman, Abeckaser’s full-hearted adoration towards his subject-matter radiates throughout. He and screenwriter Antonio Macia define their film through its rustic Brooklyn setting, employing gritty framing and wisecracking barbs that crackle with a naturalistic light (every character is a cartoon-y ball-buster, which feels surprisingly tailor-made for the hard-nosed setting). This potent sense of place imbues the sports movie formula with much-needed personality onscreen, as the duo allows their personal stomping ground to breathe with raw authenticity.

    Blackjack is also aided by its assured cast. Greg Finley brings Jackie Ryan to life with swaggering bravado, tapping into the streetballers cocky attitude while empathetically examining Ryan’s inner-demons. James Madio has a blast playing into Marty’s smart-guy persona, while Ashley Greene makes for a personable presence as a former basketball standout. Perhaps the standout of the bunch is David Arquette, who elevates Jackie’s tough, but fair father into a fairly complex role despite limited screentime.

    There are charming elements on display throughout, but they can’t compensate for Blackjack’s notable limitations. Abeckaser’s visceral sensibility leaves something to be desired, combing poorly-lit settings and sloppy edits to leave an unfinished feeling. When it comes to the tightly-contested basketball games, Abeckaser does an able job displaying the free-flowing movements with a steady hand. However, the lack of intensity hurts these scenes severely, as viewers are met with actors haphazardly speed-walking through their iconic skill moves. For a movie about a streetball legend, audiences rarely get to bask in the star’s awe-inspiring talents.

    Blackjack also finds itself in a stark identity crisis. Macia’s script never decides if it wants to be an uplifting sports film or a personal drama, undercutting both identities in a clumsy attempt to make the two co-exist. This rise-and-fall story is screaming for raw intimacy, but the dramatic elements are handled with a skin-deep complexion. Even as Jackie descends towards a drunken stupor, his personal struggles are treated with a level of sanitation that mitigates the impact of his heroic comeback.

    Blackjack: The Jackie Ryan Story serviceably tells its underdog story but can’t quite deliver on the film’s full picture of promise. Either way, I relish the chance to watch any new basketball film, and I am sure diehard NBA fans will get a level of enjoyment out of this.

  • Playhouse: Review

    Playhouse: Review

    Jack Travis (William Holstead) is a famous playwright whose tales of horror inspired by history bring a fright to delighted audiences. Feeling a need to get away from it all, Jack and his daughter, Bee (Grace Courtney) go to Scotland to stay in a castle where Jack can get immersed in Scotland’s history.

    Bee is less than happy about her situation, moving up into the middle of nowhere she thinks there’s nothing to do and thinks that living in spooky old castle is bound to drive away any potential friends. However, after making some friends and playing a game inside the old castle, Bee starts to feel the influence of what lies behind the castle walls.

    Jenny (Helen Mackay) and Callum Andrews (James Rottger) are a couple going through a rough patch in their relationship, but after Bee invites them both over for dinner, Callum sees an opportunity to pick the brains of a famous horror writer so that he can do some writing of his own.

    The trouble is that the Andrews have no idea that Jack has become possessed by one of the ghosts that lives in the castle and that Bee is going through something far worse which may mean a huge transformation.

    Playhouse is the directorial and writing debut of Fionn and Toby Watts. The Watts Brothers, perhaps influenced by demonic ghost stories and maybe a little of The Shining have created a slow burn horror that makes its audience wait right until the very end for the full extent of the scares to take place – and it’s worth the wait.

    Never really showing what’s happening to Bee until they absolutely have to, The Watts Brothers know exactly how to keep an audience in suspense and entertaining while they wait.

    The cast all give great performances, particularly Holstead who once possessed stays on the right side of Nicolas Cage for eccentricity, but thankfully never pushes it too far. Also, Mackay and Rottger play a believable couple and their parts weave seamlessly into the slightly outlandish plot. Playhouse is a ghost story with a cast that make their roles work in a plot that could have been too campy under the wrong directors.

  • You Cannot Kill David Arquette: The BRWC Review

    You Cannot Kill David Arquette: The BRWC Review

    You Cannot Kill David Arquette: The BRWC Review. By Alif Majeed.

    You wonder exactly what prompted David Arquette to make it and what point he has to prove with it when you start watching, You Cannot Kill David Arquette. Especially as it focuses on a “fake” sport like wrestling and on an actor who did show much promise when he started acting. He seems to have a decent life and looks to have it reasonably well. 

    David Arquette’s fame was, to some extent, tainted by him becoming a WCW champion in 1999 in a sham of a match. This incident has become synonymous with the downfall of not just WCW but also the overall reputation of wrestling. Anyone who has a cursory knowledge of the wrestling war would know about the WWE / WCW rating war of the ’90s. As one of the butterfly effects of trying to boost its ratings was when the higher-ups of WCW made Arquette win the world championship belt. Yes, he agreed to do it to promote his wrestling movie Ready to Rumble releasing back then, but it threw a wedge in both WCW position as a wrestling company (tellingly, the company folded months after this incident) and also in his career, which was never the same afterward. 

    The documentary is mainly divided into three sections, like a three-act structure from the Hollywood paradigm. The first section is where David Arquette tries to convince his friends and family and also us, the audience why he wants to get back into wrestling. Maybe it is because the primary protagonist in the documentary is a Hollywood actor, and it follows the rags to riches template to the fault. It tries to set David as a guy who is down and out. You know that it will all be tied together neatly with a bowtie and ribbon by the end. You raise your eyebrows when he says that he has been out of work and failing auditions for a while. But a cursory glance at his filmography shows the guy has been working steadily contradicting what he said. It might not be up to the A-list standards of the promise he showed in the ’90s, but the exaggeration shows a bit at this point.

    The surprising aspect here is the willingness that his friends and family are showing to indulge him in his delusional fantasy of redemption. He, at least in the initial stages, comes across as this overgrown man – child (playing up Dewey from Scream maybe) who is immaturely trying to get everyone to agree to his tantrums. This is all fine, but I still was not convinced why this documentary exists.

    Thus begins the second section, which comprises David Arquette going to different places to train. It is the most amusing part of the documentary. Again, following the Hollywood movie paradigm, this seems like a giant second act. The “wax on wax off” part where he is training to be a professional wrestler. 

    There are many amusing scenes peppered throughout this segment as how these training montages go. It was fun seeing him training with a bunch of kids playing dress-up and getting his ass kicked and then the one where he goes to Mexico and trains and puts on a show at the traffic lights with a group of local Lucha Libre wrestlers. His surprise at not receiving the same amount of tips that the experienced wrestlers do plays up his delusional nature. Purely on an entertainment level, this is easily the best segment of the documentary and the section that works well at paving the way to root for David to succeed as a wrestler.

    In the last section, where the third act begins, he gets around the wrestling circuit on a more serious level. Seeing the way he transformed from overweight to fit actor turned wrestler is commendable. A lot of the wrestling in the arena might be fake and done with a lot of practice and good timing but to see him getting punished and brutalized in the wrestling ring is not just scary, but you almost want to tell him, “Okay you proved your point, now stop.” Only for him to keep on at it and getting critically injured. 

    The man loves wrestling, both as a sport and as entertainment, and it shows. And the need to get rid of the tag of at least being in part ruining the reputation of the thing he loves so much is also incentive enough to “fake” punish himself in the ring. Following the typical 3-act paradigm might not be a bad thing, as it best helps its case in making those points. 

    Beyond the Mat might still be the gold standard of wrestling documentaries, but, You Cannot Kill David Arquette makes its case as one of the better documentaries in the wrestling category. The competition might be less, but it is as much a wonderful tribute to the sport he reveres so much as it about his redemption.

  • Film Grad Charlie Steeds Makes $100K Sales

    Film Grad Charlie Steeds Makes $100K Sales

    Film Grad Charlie Steeds first £2000 self-financed film has made over $100,000 in world sales

    Charlie Steeds is just 27 years old and is about to go into production on his 10th ‘retro horror’ feature-film, he graduated London’s MetFilm School in 2014 after studying a two-year BA in Practical Filmmaking.

    Charlie’s love for films started when he was only 10 years-old, he’d discovered the films of Tim Burton and as he grew older, he discovered Stephen King, but it was an interview that he saw by Quentin Tarantino that encouraged him to become a filmmaker.

    Charlie said: “I was probably 14 years-old, I’d seen Reservoir Dogs and I was interested to know more about Tarantino, I watched an interview he gave, I think it was part of the special features on the Jackie Brown DVD when I learned that Tarantino was basically once a film geek like me – he was working in a video store and just started writing scripts.

    “Straight after I saw the interview, I managed to get hold of a camcorder and I grabbed some of my friends and that’s when I started making films.”

    Mid way through his A-levels, Charlie started investigating film schools, he’d originally considered going to America, but the cost of doing that was prohibitive so he looked closer to home. He chose MetFilm School because it was a practical hands-on degree that he could complete in two-years.

    Charlie with the cast of Death Ranch

    He said: “One day our tutor Robin Vidgeon took a few of us to Pinewood Studios and it was incredibly insightful. Naturally, being a horror fan, I admired Robin (who worked on the Hellraiser films) and his advice/knowledge was always inspiring, as was the whole cinematography department.

    When Charlie graduated in 2014 he didn’t have a job to go to and felt there wasn’t one on the horizon so he went back home to Bristol and eventually got a videography job with Mountain Warehouse.

    He said: “Having the film degree was important to them, I’d never have got the job otherwise – I was making their corporate videos, content for their social media and website.”

    While employed Charlie managed to save enough money to make his first feature-length film. The film, originally called Labyrinthia (retitled Deadman Apocalypse for the US market) was released in 2016, it cost less than £2000 and has since made over $100,000 in sales.

    Charlie said: “I didn’t know how to release a film and get it picked-up by distributors so, I made a trailer, created an IMDbaccount and sent some information about the film to a movie magazine.  

    “I was lucky, the magazine did a five-page feature on the film and it wasn’t long before an American sales company got in touch, wanting to pick up the sales rights.

    “The sales company required me to shoot an additional 20 minutes of the film and change the title to Deadman Apocalypse, they felt that it would boost sales, they were right.”

    He attributes the success of this film to coincidence, the distributers wanted something like Mad Max Fury Road (which had just been released) and Charlie’s film fitted the bill.

    Using some of the money he’d made on Deadman Apocalypse, he self-financed another two films. 

    One of these films, The House of Violent Desire explores LGBT themes, it has a black female lead and has a running time of nearly two hours – all things a sales agent, at the time, wanted to avoid or cut from the movie, for the sake of international sales. 

    Sadly, the film agent was right, the film didn’t sell as well as Deadman Apocalypse, but it hasn’t deterred Charlie from developing and writing black characters; he’s just completed another film where black actors are the lead protagonists (battling KKK cannibals) and… it looks to be a winner – he’s just sold the USA rights and has big plans for the 2021 release – it’s called Death Ranch.

    These days, others finance Charlie’s movies. Distributors approach him and tell him the sort of thing they’re looking for, he said: “Different distributors want different things and there are trends to watch out for too… one company might want vampires or werewolves and another might want sci-fi or paranormal.”

    Charlie’s recent release, A Werewolf in England – reached number 3 in the UK DVD charts, and remains in the top 100 six weeks later, it’s his biggest project to date. 

    According to figures, compiled by The Official Charts Company, UK consumer spend on digital buys grew 87% to a value of £113 million ($145.6 million) during the lockdown period, from March 28 through to late June. Research firm Kantar also reports that 1.8 million new customers either bought or rented digital content during lockdown.

    Charlie is back living in Ealing and continues to make two films a year for the straight to DVD and digital download market, you can find his films in HMV, ASDA, Tesco and Sainsbury’s and via digital downloads on Sky, Apple, Amazon etc.

    Charlie’s mother, Megan Steeds has been a huge support to him, Charlie said: “My mum has been incredibly supportive, as a child whenever I needed a camera, or equipment she made sure I got what I needed.  She had to sacrifice a lot to send me to film school. 

    “I was delighted when she agreed to play a small part in one of my films, it’s a cameo in The House of Violent Desire, she plays a maid – slashed to ribbons with a razor and dies in a pool of blood on the floor.”

    Charlie seems quite relaxed about his future, he says: “Naturally I dream of being discovered one day by the big film companies like Netflix, I’d love to make a film with a £500K+ budget, but I’m happily enjoying straight-to-DVD filmmaking at least until I hit my 30s. But if I’m not discovered, that’s okay too – I love the creative freedom of working with lower budgets and I’m having so much fun doing it.”

  • Beyond Driven: Review

    Beyond Driven: Review

    Beyond Driven tells the story of Lella Lombardi, former butcher’s delivery driver and ex Formula 3 Championship runner up who became the first, and still only, female driver to win F1 World Championship points at the Spanish Grand Prix in 1975. During one of the most controversial weekends in F1 history, set amid a notoriously dangerous Barcelona street circuit, spectator deaths, driver boycotts, a huge first corner crash, and a shortened race, Lombardi made history and recorded a fete that is yet to be bettered more than 45 years later.

    Lombardi accomplished what seemed as impossible at the time; to finish in the top 6th in the highest tier of motor racing as a woman. She was a trailblazer who defied the social norms imposed by a more patriarchal society. Yet, it seems like her story was not as widely regarded as it should have been. Thankfully, this film delivers a powerful tribute to the late racer, highlighting the influence she had for other aspiring female racers.

    However, Beyond Driven is far more than just the life of Lella Lombardi, as several female racers such as Amna Al Qubaisi and Tatiana Calderón are interviewed about their relationship with the sport. We get a glimpse of their accomplishments and the complications they’ve experienced as women going professional in a male-dominated sport.

    The film really excels in placing women at the forefront of the story. All the talking heads are from women, which makes it feel more empowering for females to witness the representation of passionate and diverse female racers. The decision to only have female interviewees felt appropriate in order for the film to not feel suppressed by a male speaking on behalf of what is ultimately a story focused on women.

    Along with the successes and accomplishments, the film also reveals the shortcomings that come with being a woman in the competitive racing industry. Some of the themes presented revolves around the extra effort these women have to put into training due to their different body physiques. In addition, it looks into the importance of sponsorships and how essential they are in allowing these women to continue racing.

    The story of Lella Lombardi is depicted through some quirky animations and archival footage that prevents the narrative from getting one-dimensional. It does often teeter in between interviews from the other women racers which at times could feel disjointed, especially since these animations feel like short vignettes scattered across the entire film. This was the part where  I wish they would have tied her story more cohesively and maybe developed more upon her issues as a woman living in a time where competing in a Formula 1 race was unorthodox. At times, it feels like there are interesting points that were brought up but never further explained.

    Aside from that, this is an important story to tell. When young females hear Amna Al Qubaisi talking about her first win in Arman and how she’s the first female Arab to win in kart racing, I can imagine the inspiration that would spark in them, knowing that they can not only dream big, but manifest those dreams with determination. It seemed like the filmmakers put tremendous respect into this film, making sure that these women were shined in a positive light.

    Beyond Driven embraces its double entendre by centering the narrative around female racers and their pursuit to go “beyond driven” in order to thrive. The result is sure to inspire many.