Category: REVIEWS

On October 26^th 1881, the gunfight at the OK Corral took place cementing Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday’s names at a significant moment in American history. Tombstone-Rashomon attempts to retell the story from the points of view of various people involved in the famous gunfight.

These people include Wyatt Earp (Adam Newberry) and Doc Holliday (Eric Schumacher) themselves, adding a little tongue in cheek humour as it tells its story.

The opening text of Tombstone-Rashomon tells the audience about a time travelling camera crew who went back in time and accidentally got to Tombstone the day after the notorious gunfight, saying that the following will be eye witness accounts. This firmly tells the audience that as well as the retelling of the story of the gunfight, there’s going to be a little fun had with the story and for the most part there are some comical moments. Some moments that work and some that don’t.

Unfortunately, this element, despite being partly inspired by the 1950 Japanese film, Roshomon doesn’t really lend anything to the story and in fact distracts from the way it’s told. A particular moment is spoiled when after a dramatic retelling of the story, Earp is told to hold something up for the camera, wiping out any tension from the previous scene.

There’s also the issue that if a camera crew did time travel back to the day after the gunfight, then how did they get the footage of the events as told by the interviewees?

There is also some rather forced dialogue and character choices that are distracting and unnecessary. Although they may have seemed funny at the time, they don’t translate well to an audience. Little-known facts are also scattered throughout the script and brought up without prompting, seemingly only put in to show the audience that the filmmakers have done their research.

Facts such as Doc Holliday having been a dentist is brought up several time and there’s a bizarre choice to have Hungarian born Mary Katherine Horony-Cummings, here simply known as Kate (Christine Doidge) assign the incorrect gender pronouns to the men she talks about. Even if that may have been accurate to how she spoke it’s still odd, jarring and unfunny to those who don’t know the real person’s story that well.

Considering Tombstone-Rashomon’s limited budget the costumes and locations that retell the story add to the atmosphere and for a while they immerse the audience in the telling of the gunfight from such unique perspectives, despite the obvious fly-on-the-wall style filming.

However, as a link to Rashomon it doesn’t work because there have been so many mockumentaries throughout cinema that it feels like the attempt to link the two is yet another attempt to suggest the filmmakers are cleverer than they really are.

While trying to ensure that his sister’s wedding day goes smoothly, Jack (Sam Claflin) finds himself juggling an angry ex-girlfriend, an uninvited guest with a secret, a misplaced sleep sedative, and the girl that got away — as alternate versions of the same wedding unfold, Jack seeks his own happy ending with chance dictating his future.

Dean Craig’s Love Wedding Repeat is yet another romance movie that you probably had no interest in seeing just by looking at the trope-filled poster and synopsis. Released straight to Netflix this past Friday, the new film is being watched by a high number of people, likely due to the fact that nearly everybody in the world is in quarantine right now.

Surely this movie isn’t in the charts on the streaming platform right now because of the film’s quality, because it is a bad movie that has nothing interesting or exciting to say. It’s more proof that a large portion of romance movies these days are incredibly boring.

For the first thirty to forty minutes in Love Wedding Repeat, virtually nothing happens. Literally. We witness lead protagonist Jack get into an awkward conversation with his love interest Dina (Olivia Munn) when his friend Bryan (Joel Fry) happens to intervene. This entire sequence lasts about ten minutes when really, it should have only lasted a few minutes. From that point onwards, it just gets more boring by the minute.

The screenplay here by Craig is not only the most dry and uninvesting script of the entire year so far, but it is one of the most dull scripts in years. Look, I have seen some tragically boring and bad films over the past few years. But this one is on a whole other level. None of the characters are developed enough for us to genuinely care about them and their goals. They all just have their own little quirks and as a result, we have characters that feel incredibly one-note and generic.

All of the characters end up going in directions that are so predictable that it’s not even funny. I am willing to bet that the majority of people that go ahead and watch this movie will be able to predict the ending a mile away.

But, I must admit, the acting on display from the whole cast is actually quite great. They give their all in a movie that clearly doesn’t deserve their hard work and effort. Out of the large cast though, the best performances come from Sam Claflin and Olivia Munn, who have excellent chemistry with one another and feel authentic and excited to be a part of this movie.

In addition, the cinematography by Hubert Taczanowski is greatly pleasing to look at. Everything is framed extremely well and nothing looks bland or lifeless. It’s an incredibly lively looking picture. It’s just a shame that the rest of the movie was exactly that – bland, lifeless, and generic.

With a dull and tragically boring script, Love Wedding Repeat is a predictable, trope-filled romance film executed poorly.

Gelateria is an esoteric piece of abstract cinema from writing/directing duo of Arthur Patching and Christian Serritiello and released under Tropical Grey Pictures.

“An artist is forced to journey into an unknown world far from home to retrieve her stolen work.”

This film features a series of intriguing vignettes which are often visually stunning and with some fun character roles along the way.

The film however, much like all great abstract European cinema refuses to stick to any kind of narrative thread or structure and you will be hard pushed to find anyway. It is at times gritty & real and at others totally bonkers (such as animated section half way through).

As a ride and cinematic & visual acid trip however it is compelling and has the quality of making you watch till the end whilst not really knowing what or why you are watching.

The talent of the film-makers is clear although any narrative structure is lacking – probably a deliberate choice. It is however more aimed at the hardcore cinephile rather than the casual viewer.

Gelateria gets 3/5

CREDITS: Written, directed, edited, photographed, and produced by Christian Serritiello and Arthur Patching.

Starring Carrie Getman (Eleanor), Tomas Spencer (PC George Hartree), Christian Serritiello (Zbigniew), Jade Willis (Tom Rigby), Simone Spinazze (Giovanni), Arthur Patching (Alfie Dunn), Daniel Brunet (Julius Row), Joulia Strauss (Joulia Strauss), Julie Trappett (Priscilla), and John Keogh (James Flannigan).

By Fergus Henderson. Davie, a cocky wee man from Dundee, gets his leg mashed by a local tough whose fiancé he’s just recently slept with. With that his dreams of football are now over, so Davie sets about trying to promote local gigs to impress another woman, Shona, the student nurse that treated him during his recovery. So begins the scrappy, and true, story of band manager Dave Maclean.

Maclean is now most well-known for managing Placebo, but Schemers, which Maclean wrote and directed, tells the tale of how he got started in his local Dundee, graduating from small gigs to a climactic Iron Maiden gig at the Caird Hall.

Set somewhere between the late 70s and early 80s, Schemers is crammed with music from the time, making its soundtrack a hoot to listen to, including Dundee’s own The Associates, as well as Hawkwind and others. At times it seems like the budget has mainly been put towards making the soundtrack as classic as possible.

Lead actor Conor Berry is an archetypically Scottish chancer as Davie, the kind of instantly likeable, charismatic character that Schemers rests the film’s heavy lifting on. Not only is his voiceover omnipresent throughout, but his is the only character that is properly fleshed out. Not that the rest of the ensemble don’t invest their characters with plenty of life, most notably Sean Conor as pal Scot and Alastair Thomson Mills as Fergie, the criminal Davie becomes indebted to. 

Herein lie the film’s main weakness, which is that – aside from Berry’s terrific performance and Maclean’s natural passion for his story – the film hits very predictable beats, and the supporting characters are very recognisable types. They are certainly all played with passion, but that doesn’t stop them seeming puzzlingly rote for a film made by the man who was supposedly pals with their real life counterparts. As for love interest Shona (Tara Lee), her character is sadly sidelined and undeveloped.

Still, this is a quintessentially Scottish (and Dundonian) film. You could compare it to Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, in that it is a first time, low-budget-rough-around-the-edges kind of film that is buoyed by its warmth and the talents of its cast, imbued with a fundamentally Scottish sense of things, paying affectionate tribute to its own part of the world.

Dundee is never seen onscreen – Schemers thus represents the kind of win that will be celebrated and that Dundonians will point to with pride. 

Schemers will be in UK Cinemas from 25th September.