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  • Wheatley, Power Rangers, The Meg: Weekly Round Up

    Wheatley, Power Rangers, The Meg: Weekly Round Up

    Okay, so let it be known upfront that I’m a fan on Ben Wheatley. His filmography may be varied, and not every project is a hit, but by and large I know that when Ben Wheatley is directing a movie at the least that movie is going to be something interesting. Just take a look at this week’s Netflix release, a lavish retelling of the classic novel Rebecca, which was made famous by the Hitchcock movie.

    While Wheatley’s Rebecca may, but like the new Mrs. de Winter herself, be forever stuck in the shadow of a superior former version, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. It leans further toward the melodrama than the Gothic, but Wheatley’s Lynchian approach to nightmares and dreamscapes is present throughout, and that’s something.

    It’s no surprise then that I was curious when he was announced a few months back now as the director of Tomb Raider 2, a sequel to the 2018 big screen outing for everyone’s favorite video game archeologist that would see Alicia Vikander reprise her role as Lara Croft. It seemed a peculiar choice, there is no doubt about that, but Wheatley as a director does have form when it comes to spooky things from the ancient past. After all, what is folk horror if not an exploration of the long-forgotten world of old, and Kill List, A Field in England, and yes, even Sightseers, all have that sort of concept running through them.

    But if you, like me, thought the Tomb Raider announcement was strange, well, you ain’t heard nothing yet. This week we learned that the director of High-Rise and Free Fire will be taking on another surprise sequel to a 2018 big-budget Hollywood blockbuster, and this time there seems to be even less that makes sense about it.

    That’s right folks, Ben Wheatley, known for his blend of discomforting atmospheric horror and kitchen sink drama, will be taking on The Meg 2, in which, presumably, Jason Statham once again fights a giant shark. Full disclosure, I actually quite enjoyed The Meg, which makes this even more interesting to me.

    Of course, it’s possible Wheatley might aim for a harder rating and more grisly violence than the first movie, directed by John Turtletaub, did, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The Meg could benefit from being a bit less action-adventure and a bit more horror, so if the studios are willing to take a left-field choice like Ben Wheatley for director, then who’s to say they won’t go further than that.

    Could The Meg become some kind of absurd and over-the-top action horror franchise like Alien? Are we about to see Jason Statham batter a giant shark to death with a hammer? Does it turn out there are prehistoric monster worshipping cults out there? Who knows? But whatever happens, this movie suddenly became one of the most fascinating up-coming projects out there.

    And while we’re on the subject of massive mega-blockbusters that are way better than they have any right to be, this week Universal Pictures confirmed that they intend to wrap up the main Fast and the Furious franchise continuity with the one-two punch of F10 and F11.

    Justin Lin, the man who is more or less responsible for the entire franchise as it currently stands, will return to direct both outings, and it’s assumed that he will be joined by returning cast members Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Chris “Ludicris” Bridges and Tyrees Gibson among others. Of course, we’re still waiting for F9, which would have been coming out this year, but due to the ongoing Coronavirus crisis has been rescheduled to a May 2021 release.

    It’s important to note here that this announcement is only in relation to the main series, as there are currently still plans in place for a sequel to Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw, which starred Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham (him again!) at some point in the not too distant future.

    In 2017 Paramount Pictures attempt to kick start their own over-the-top action blockbuster franchise with a gritty reboot of the 90s children’s show Power Rangers. Poor box office takings and even poorer critical receptions meant that the franchise was dead pretty much after that first entry, but it would seem that studio isn’t entirely done with the concept.

    Instead of producing a sequel though, the folks over at Paramount are intending to reboot the whole thing and start again, envisioning a connected series of films and television shows, sort of like Star Trek. Unfortunately, however, they have decided to let Alex Kurtzman carrying on destroying the classic sci-fi franchise, and have instead hired End of the F**king World and I Am Not Okay With This writer, Jonathan Entwistle, to shepherd the project.

    What this will look like is anyone’s guess, but it makes sense that a more interconnected universe of film and television is the way forward now for the extended cinematic universe model, so I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more studios looking at properties that could potentially take up that mantle.

    Speak of which, it looks like we’re getting yet another reboot of Battlestar Galactica as well! The last proper reboot of Battlestar Galactica was the 2004-2009 television series, which is pretty highly regarded in science-fiction crowds. This new take on the material, however, will be a movie reboot, and X-Men: Dark Phoenix scribe Simon Kinberg has been signed to write and produce the project.

  • The Witches: The BRWC Review

    The Witches: The BRWC Review

    For a director with several well-regarded classics under his belt (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump, Who Framed Roger Rabbit), Robert Zemeckis’ career has since spiraled down a negative trajectory. Recent offerings like Welcome to Marwen and Allied rank among the director’s weakest offerings, with these films showcasing Zemeckis’ creative bend without its usual dynamism or emotional heft. His latest release The Witches (which is opting for an HBO Max release due to COVID conditions), is similarly spiritless, noisily portraying its source material without much inspiration.

    Based on Roald Dahl’s acclaimed novel, The Witches follows “Hero Kid” (Jahzir Bruno, with an older version played by Chris Rock), who moves in with his grandma (Octavia Spencer) after his parents’ deaths. After an encounter with a mysterious spectral force, the two travel to a luxurious hotel where an army of witches has assembled. Led by the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway), these witches set their sights on turning every bratty kid into mice.

    The seldom liveliness comes from the film’s assured cast. Anne Hathaway is clearly playing to the back of the auditorium, spewing theatrical energy that dominates the screen. As the Grand High Wizard, Hathaway has a blast playing into the character’s delightfully sinister persona, elevating what could have been a cloying presence in the wrong hands. Octavia Spencer is tailor-made for the sweet, yet stern maternal figure role, while Jahzir Bruno holds his own as the standard-issue protagonist (it’s also always a joy to see Stanley Tucci bring his signature wit).

    Whether audiences are comparing this adaptation to Dahl’s novel or the 1990 film, this iteration of The Witches feels noticeably timid. Nicolas Roeg’s demented visual sensibility is substituted for a sterile blandness, with Zemeckis concocting busy CGI-driven sequences that lack a creative vision (transforming characters merely poof via purple clouds, a far cry from what the original dreamed up). Similar to other modern YA adaptations, this film would rather offer a forgettable diversion for adolescent audiences than actually challenging them, embracing dated conventions that mitigate Dahl’s inventive landscape. This is particularly disappointing coming from Zemeckis, who once shined for his ability to marry lively visuals within a well-constructed narrative (judging by his poor animated output, he seems to focus more now on filmmaking techniques than well-fleshed storytelling).

    Zemeckis’ greatest sin derives from his avoidance of the material’s substantive qualities. Dahl’s novel ruminates on the vitriol of racist parties, using its 1960’s setting to educate young readers about the ignorance of prejudice. The script (written by Zemeckis and Kenya Barris, with an earlier credit from Guillermo del Toro), dances around this conceit while largely ignoring its significance, leaving audiences with a hollow shell of what Dahl was trying to create.

    While crafted with visual busyness, The Witches rarely re-creates the timeless magic of its source material.

  • GSFF Review: How To Disappear

    GSFF Review: How To Disappear

    How to Disappear, by Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner & Michael Stumpf, tries to push the boundaries of the first-person shooter video game Battlefield.

    Whilst calmly musing on the history of desertion in war, the players learn that it is impossible to desert the battlefield. If the player persists in their desertion attempts, they receive two warnings: One visible and one audible, followed by execution.

    In Battlefield there is simply nothing beyond the perimeter of the conflict zone. A little like Truman discovering the edge of his world. 

    Battlefield, they say, is ‘A game that makes war consumable’. The filmmakers suggest that war cannot be ‘played’, because games are voluntary and war is not. But we say that wars are ‘waged’ and I’d go so far as to say that wars are consumable, just not by the soldiers. 

    War games are a type of propaganda. They affirm that you, with your poor posture and dangerously low levels of vitamin D, You have what it takes. Alarmingly, with drone warfare, this may well be true.

    George W Bush was a fan of either/or statements: You’re either with us or against us, and we’ve gone a long way down that road. The binary nature of the game may be a comfort to some. Perimeter: On; Friendly Fire: Off. And it’s interesting to note that the only indestructible object within the game is the flag. Flags are sacrosanct, which tells us a lot about the game’s target audience, and the lines that game developers choose not to cross.

    Müllner and co. are not the first people to play video games in unintended ways. Take for example Tim drowning Lara Croft after a run-in with his ex 

    More recently Blindboy has been using Red Dead Redemption as a venue for songwriting 

    This film wants to explore how to play a new game within the constraints of the game’s structure. Games like GTA allow for a certain amount of goofing around, but is it more fun to try this when the game doesn’t encourage it?

    This kind of experiment is art, but what kind of art? It feels a lot like Dadaism: 

    Developed in response to the horrors of WW1 the dada movement rejected reason, rationality, and order of the emerging capitalist society, instead favoring chaos, nonsense, and anti-bourgeois sentiment. (Read more…)

    The constraints of the game are thoroughly explored and only after this can the players learn how to circumvent them. In this way it is similar to the Ouxpo groups. Oujeupo perhaps?

    In their earlier film, Operation Jane Walk (also at GSFF as part of their Urban Palimpsests programme) the filmmakers play with the idea of using videogame landscapes for guided tours. This short can be viewed here, and it’s worth pairing with this early colour film which is also a tour of New York.  

    How To Disappear is a video essay, a game within a game, and a piece of performance art. Like Dadaism, it is an absurd response to the absurdity of war. And like Ouxpo, one must know the rules in order to break them.

    How to Disappear was shown at Glasgow Short Film Festival 2020

    Glasgow Short Film Festival, the largest competitive short film festival in Scotland, champions new film talent by providing an annual showcase and meeting point for new and established Scottish and international filmmakers, industry delegates and the local audience. Our programme celebrates diverse forms of cinematic expression, whether fiction, documentary, animation or artists’ moving image, and foregrounds disruptive, ground-breaking work that transgresses the boundaries of conventional narrative film.

  • Rom Boys: Review

    Rom Boys: Review

    By John Battiston.

    One visiting East London suburb Hornchurch for the first or hundredth time wouldn’t possibly think to liken it to southern California, the epicenter of, among a bevy of other phenomena, skate culture. But upon entering the ramshackle gates of The Rom, a forty-year-old, 8,000-square-metre skatepark built within a ’70s-esque, drained-pool-style framework, one might just buy such a comparison, if only fleetingly. As one interviewee in Rom Boys: 40 Years of Rad — Matt Harris’s debut documentary feature covering the park’s history, inspiration and influence over the years — tells the camera, The Rom is basically “a little corner of California in Hornchurch.”

    While Harris makes it clear that Americanism was integral in the construction of both The Rom itself and U.K. skate culture at large (modern patrons are seen wearing Dodgers ballcaps, NYC t-shirts and the like), his film first explicates the impact The Rom itself has had on the surrounding skate and BMX community. It establishes the myth behind The Rom and the mythically freewheeling, punk-infused epoch whence it came, before narrowing its scope to dynamically illustrate the passion, kinship and creative chutzpah that brought it into the world and sustained it for decades.

    While Rom Boys does actively deconstruct the grandiose lore that surrounds spots like The Rom, these efforts never undermine the park’s importance in the lives of Hornchurch locals, its function as a much-needed creative outlet for the neglected. Judging by its first few minutes, one might dismiss the film as an advertisement for the park or a hamfisted plea to place it into governmental protection as an historic landmark — The Rom is one of the film’s sponsors, after all. By the end of its less-than-80-minute run, however, Rom Boys transforms into a broad assertion for a need to offer local, youth-centric recreation spaces. 

    Further, Harris has crafted his documentary to act as an interrogation of what we consider historic, and which characteristics might qualify or disqualify a person, structure, movement or other landmark to receive such a label. As another interviewee puts it, “It’s not a cathedral. It’s not a monastery. It’s not a great house. It’s about fun. It’s about recreation.” In the eyes of the highbrow viewer, The Rom’s function as a monument to the signature sport of a cultural faction so often associated with punkish, sometimes anarchistic attitudes could easily preclude it from obtaining historic status tantamount to religious or governmental landmarks. But with its touching, forthright investigation of the park’s personal benefits for many (“It’s kept me on the straight and narrow,” one regular admits), Rom Boys convincingly argues that an entity’s historicity ought to be measured in its bare-bones human impact.

    On a macro scale, the material in this documentary is so captivatingly sequenced and photographed that one can easily overlook its less refined minutiae, formal blunders that indicate Harris’s newness to the feature-documentary format. Specifically, the graphics frequently interwoven into archive and interview footage are often feckless, if not altogether daft: The choice to lay pull-quotes over audio of a subject offering a different statement is, to say the least, baffling and disorienting, while many other captions peppered throughout the film are penned in an almost self-parodic sort of pseudo-poetry, seemingly antithetical to the unpretentious nature of the film’s subject. On that same wavelength, more thought could have been given to the overall effects design, which, instead of the roughhewn appearance more befitting the subject matter, tends to be uncannily glossy, as if thrown together with iMovie.

    Nonetheless, it isn’t the formal assembly that will lead Rom Boys to wow viewers. Rather, this document of an expressive, community-binding artefact will enwrap even those completely unstudied in the world of skate with its dazzling photography, compelling framework and, most of all, its passion for an increasingly under-appreciated craft that has invigorated and anchored the lives of many.

  • New Order: LFF Review

    New Order: LFF Review

    Parasite meets The Purge in this shallow Mexican drama from Michel Franco 

    Mexico is a country wracked by violence and corruption. There were 17,439 murders in the first half of 2020, a year in which Mexico was ranked 130th in the corruption index, sharing its position with Guinea, Laos, the Maldives, Mali, Myanmar and Togo. Meanwhile, the country has an OECD income inequality rating of 0.42, one of the worst in the world. All of this comes to a head in New Order, director Michel Franco’s vision of his nation in a free fall of riots and murder. 

    We see flashes of the carnage – dead bodies on the street, rioters throwing green paint – as a wedding party kicks off in an expensive city residence guarded by walls and a security detail. It is a chic compound far removed from the nihilism on the streets, yet we feel it encroaching with palpable menace. 

    A brief narrative unfolds as the guests indulge with drink, drugs and boastful financial chatter. Rolando (Eligio Melendez), a former staff member of the family, arrives at their door pleading for 200,000 pesos to pay for his wife’s emergency heart surgery. He is met with impatience and even outright disdain, yet he finds empathy in Marianne (Naian Gonzalez Norvind), who makes it her mission to secure the funds. However, this is jeopardised when rioters scale the compound’s walls, beating and shooting their way through the house in search of valuables. 

    What follows is about 60 minutes of sadism. None of it has the outrageous gore and splatter of Possessor, but it is nasty and visceral all the same. Franco’s film has a stark authenticity to it and there is a crisp yet muted sheen to the grading of Yves Cape’s cinematography, yet there is little to be digested beyond its absorbing realism and merciless violence. 

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWg9xQPvsI0

    Its scenario is too extreme to reflect Mexico’s problems. This is a vision where rioters are shot en masse, with troops casually finishing them off like some Medieval pikeman. Even if Franco’s vision was subtler, there would have to be far more depth to the narrative and characters for there to be any commentary or satire.

    Where Parasite had wit and nuance, New Order just has gunshots and screaming. It absolutely convinces us of Mexico’s capacity for violence but it does not explore its characters or the country’s issues.