film reviews, interviews, features | BRWC

Category: REVIEWS

Here is where you would find our film reviews on BRWC.  We look at on trailers, shorts, indies and mainstream.  We love movies!

  • African Apocalypse: Review

    African Apocalypse: Review

    African Apocalypse (dir. Rob Lemkin) is a startling film – both in the sense of the recorded accounts of atrocities that occurred within the Niger, Africa, but also the unsettling feeling of the repetitiveness of the conditions that allowed these crimes to occur. 

    Femi Nylander is a British-Nigerian Oxford student who traverses West African country of Niger to record the repulsive crusade of Paul Voulet – a dark shadow across Africa that still lingers today. Voulet’s attempts to unite West Africa under French colonial rule descended in to such extreme war crimes that the emotions evident from the modern day Niger peoples are almost unbearable; but bear it they do.

    We start in London before heading to Niger – clever editing merging the past and the present to our eyes, a technique which it uses freely throughout the film and to great effect. The past atrocities didn’t just change the history of Niger – it’s still present to this day in everything the Niger people do, think and are taught in schools. One poignant scene with an ever-smiling teacher gives a glimmer of a sunny future while the students study solar power. A powerful interview with these children reveal the tragedies of murdered family members – it’s moments like these that drive home the message of the film: modern day colonialism is generational trauma, it is a wrong that must be righted (looking at you, France). 

    The dramatic irony of Black Englishman hearing feelings of anger, resistance and oppression against whites is not lost in the film. Femi struggles to interlock the present emotion he sees every day in Niger with the fact that Europe has largely forgotten the massacres that occurred in Niger and left the country broke.

    The presence of life becoming art, and vice versa, is thick within the film; the same day Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad was published (excerpts follow the narrative of the film uncannily) Paul Voulet was reported on in the same magazine – a real life Mr. Kurtz if you can imagine such a terror. A terror that is a past, a reality and a future unless the effects of modern day colonialism can be dissected and diffused. 

    There is hope – the division in the film is supplanted with unity and culminates in some truly stunning scenes of Femi, transformed from a stoic bystander to an active participant in memorial and remembrance. Linking our modern protests at modern day atrocities (the events that sparked BLM protests worldwide this year), the undeniable link between then and now is clear to us. Perhaps there is a heart of darkness in all of us, or perhaps it’s about which side we shine a light on.

  • 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.