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Ready Or Not: The BRWC Review – For Grace (Samara Weaving) marrying into a wealthy family was never her intention. Growing up in foster homes all she ever wanted was a real family, so tying the knot with her boyfriend Alex (Mark O’Brien) was important to her emotional stability.

We meet Grace and Alex on their wedding day in “Ready or Not;” and, aside from a small plot preview flashback of Alex and his brother Daniel (Adam Brody) during the opening credits, these two seem like a nice couple. They were totally in love and hot for each other, and I quickly found myself really rooting for them to be together.

Well, as fate would have it, or as Alex’s family would have it, after the nuptials, Grace is forced to play a game to become an official member of the Le Domas family, who, unironically, made their fortune in gaming. There is a catch though, this isn’t just any game. This is a game that can quickly turn sinister if deceased family overlord Le Bail decides it to be so. Unfortunately for Grace, Le Bail decides she is to play Hide-and-Seek, but not in a traditional way, in a human flesh sacrifice way, with Grace being the Le Domas family target.

Co-Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett cleverly infused both horror and comedy into this wickedly fun treat. It’s almost a marriage of “Scream” (1996) where we get the campy blood, guts, and horror, and “The Cabin in The Woods” (2011) where we get more of the fun and humor. 

Samara Weaving was perfectly cast as Grace, her looks are a unique marriage of sweet and sinister which worked well in the first movie I saw her in, “The Babysitter” (2017) and even more so here. The Le Domas family was also cast incredibly well though I don’t have a stand out side character I thought was really unique, it was more of an ensemble with each family member feeding off the other. 

The Le Domas house was also almost a character in and of itself which gave me some fun memories of watching “Clue” (1985) when I was a kid while simultaneously painting the perfect backdrop. The lighting is impeccable as is the cinematography by DP Brett Jutkiewicz, it was the perfect blend of fire oranges, yellows, and browns which really gave the mansion a hell pit look, and made me feel confined and as breathless as Grace was as she ran away from the family hunting her. 

I have to say I was impressed with this piece, the horror was so over the top and matched the crazy humor. Hunting bridal human flesh on her wedding day was a devilishly fun ride, and I had an equal amount of good laughs and scare jolts. I have not seen many directors with a natural ability to commercialize horror so well and with such care and attention to detail since Wes Craven.

I am so looking forward to what this directing duo does next. I’m also pretty sure the shot of Grace smoking a cigarette on the back steps of the mansion was a nod to Winona Ryder as Veronica in “Heathers,” (1989) and there’s nothing I love more than a good “Heathers” reference.

By Alif Majeed.

The thing about Bananas is that, though the humor is very much a product of its time, it has managed to age fairly well. The political situation in the late ’60s might have served as a hook or starting point for it, but we did get a hilarious movie out of the bargain even though it can get REALLY silly at times. It is also clear that classic political comedies like Duck soup and The Great Dictator were a considerable influence on Bananas. You can also find its genes in later political spoofs that it subsequently inspired like Idiocracy. 

Cut from the same cloth as Dr. Strangelove, where Stanley Kubrick turned a political thriller novel Red Alert into the movie that we now know and love. The way Woody Allen and co-writer Mickey Rose took Don Quixote, USA, a political novel with comic undertones and mangled into Bananas, is commendable. 

The movie starts with an announcement of a would-be assassination of a democratic leader while the broadcast prepares the audience for it with its running commentary. Based on the broadcasting norms of the time, it is fascinating to watch the scene play out as the host and commentator takes it all the way down to the assassination and choosing of the new dictator.

We then move to Woody Allen, as Fielding Mellish, who works as a product tester for a company that sells multi-tasking equipment for corporates. If that sounds like a chance that he would use to show off his sight gag comedy skills, that is pretty much what he does. The character is a quintessential stock Woody Allen character, which comes as an extension of his first movie and pretty much many of his classics since. Nervous and twitching, a guy who just wouldn’t get the message when his co-worker is spurning him, but still try to come up with a punchline out of the rejection.

It was a pleasant surprise to see Sylvester Stallone in the movie, in a cameo as a thug who intimidates Woody Allen in the subway. The story of how Stallone lands that bit role says a lot about Woody Allen as a person in real life and pretty much explains a lot about his comedy.

Under his misguided delusion of trying to impress a local social worker, Nancy (Louise Lasser), he decides to go to a banana republic country to sort their affairs and show them solidarity and support. He ends up coming across as comically patronizing which doesn’t go down well with the dictator who decides the best way to get US aid is to assassinate him and blame it on the revolutionaries.

Narrowly escaping the attempt, he manages to join the rebellion, train with them for a coup and somehow find time to be the dictator of the country. The training scenes where he trains with the revolutionaries are some of the funniest scenes he has ever made. All this leads to a hilarious climax that takes great pains in explaining what a sham trial is (“I object, your honor! This trial is a travesty. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”)

One thing about the movie is that, like many of his earlier films, he manages to fill it with as many gags as possible. And the jokes keep on coming right till the last frame of the movie. Though he uses a broad canvas and brush strokes to paint the picture here, there is something that would remind you or make you draw a parallel with the current state of affairs across the world in some form. All the while continuously making Bananas and its political commentary is as silly as possible.

Louise Lasser, Woody Allen’s ex-wife, plays Nancy, a precursor for another charming and neurotic archetype he created in Annie Hall. Though she may be confused about her political views (“I may be bombing an office building, but I’ll soon find out”), Louise does manage to infuse enough charm into her character and you understand why this shy guy would go out of his way to impress her by joining the rebellion.

It is safe to say that Bananas was one of the funniest movies among his earlier films and there is a lot in it that would get a laugh or at least a chuckle out of you. If you have to watch one movie from his earlier phase, you can’t go wrong with this one. 

Sometimes Always Never: Another Review – Loss is our most bitter pill to swallow in life, and it only becomes worse when the loss is avoidable or unable to be fully explained. Carl Hunter’s “Sometimes Always Never” deals with this kind of loss, the kind that tares you apart as you look for answers. We follow Alan (Bill Nighy) and his son Peter (Sam Riley) on a search for the other son of the family, Michael, who an indiscriminate amount of time ago, ran away from home during a game of scrabble. 

Instantly the tone of what one would assume to be a sombre film is proven to be instead somewhat quirky and eccentric, much like Alan himself. When we first meet him, he stands solitary at a beach, before beginning to wander around handing out missing person posters and muttering to people who are not there. This strangeness lasts throughout the film, but it becomes more channelled, mainly towards scrabble, and more proactively finding Michael. 

Soon Peter and Allen are off on the road, and ironically, neither of them can find the words to express how daunting a trip they are taking. The sinister reason they are travelling begins to become apparent to us as the two of them bicker. They are heading to a morgue to potentially identify Michael’s body. However, they refuse to discuss it, instead opting to rehash long-held resentments and bitterness from childhood. Only making things worse is the fact that Alan hustles a couple staying at the same inn as them by convincing them he isn’t any good at scrabble, then promptly beating them. 

From here, a beautiful and poignant story plays out about connecting through words you can’t bring yourself to say. We meet Alan’s daughter in law Sue (Alice Lowe) and grandson Jack (Louis Healy) who form the basis of another dysfunctional parental relationship. It is only when grandad decides to stay with them that we begin to see his unique talent for bringing people together through words in scrabble, which is the films greatest asset provided by the work of Bill Nighy. 

In portraying Alan, Nighy is perfect. He brings to life the character’s idiosyncrasies with uncanny consistency. There is no one out there who could have quite played the role this way and thanks to that he steals the show. As we learn more about him, and how deeply broken losing Michael has left him, all his strangeness shines in a new light and Nighy nails this transformation. Come the credits he produces a character who is so easy to empathise with genuinely, and whom you want nothing more for than to reconnect with his remaining son. 

However, outside of the fantastic central performance, the film can often fail to stick the landing in other aspects. The story, for the most part, balances the light humour with the dark concept, but there are times where the full weight of things fails to become apparent. The most jarring instance being the couple Alan hustles in scrabble and how they too are heading to the morgue to see if their son lies waiting for them. There is one line that mentions the concept of Alan hoping it’s their son because that means it isn’t Michael, but it just isn’t enough to explain their haunting presence, and makes their characters seem totally out of place when they appear later in the film. Sue and Jack, whilst likeable, are also simplistic and aloof for the most part. They had the makings to be so much more if the film offered an element of depth.

Sometimes uneven, always endearing and never unlikeable, Sometimes Always Never evolves into an enjoyable dramedy thanks to the work of Bill Nighy and a family unit you can’t help but love.

WORTH (wert): Review – Throughout history there has always been a stigma attached to a woman’s period. The topic of a woman bleeding monthly is still largely taboo, so much so that many women are too ashamed to talk about it, thus the invention of the relatively new phrase “period shaming.”

“Worth” is a short film that follows two women, one who struggles with pain and excess blood loss during her period, and one that misses it entirely. The film shows the emotional journey the two women go on and how they are affected by it.

I appreciate the filmmaker, Alejandra Jenni, taking a huge risk by centering her entire short film around periods, and it makes sense to bring this topic up in the current climate. Trying to erase the stigma associated with periods will likely take a long time to correct, as the topic of a woman’s monthly flow is still not socially accepted. Period shaming is something that has simultaneously both fascinated and infuriated me.

It is no secret that both women and men alike are brought into this world because of a woman’s period, it is literally how mankind appeared upon the earth, yet somehow it is seen as something gross or weird by society, and, furthermore, any man who period shames should be more embarrassed of himself and his own behavior than the woman should be of her period.

That being said, I’m not entirely sure what the deeper meaning was in terms of the film’s storyline, and although I do appreciate this as the film’s central topic, the journey the two women went on were isolated, and I think the film would have been much easier to follow if the storylines had a more marked intersection at some point.

The editing left something to be desired as one woman’s voice overlapped into the other’s shot, which left me wondering how these two were further connected to one another. Yes, they were connected by the struggles with their periods, but I was waiting for a deeper emotion to come out of it. I think the film would have benefitted from an additional scene or flashback of somewhere they shared a further, perhaps unexpected connection. This would potentially give the piece a more unique and entertaining flare, and could be something to explore if Jenni wanted to expand Worth into a feature.

I also wanted to understand where the period pains came from for one of the women, if they were associated with a medical condition, or why her monthly period seemed more abnormal. It would be important to show how and why this happened to her, and it could hopefully help others. My hat is off to the filmmaker for addressing this topic, and I hope to see more of this in all forms of cinema.