Category: REVIEWS

Toxic Beauty. The ingredients in your makeup could kill you.

Toxic Beauty is very much tip-of-the-iceberg stuff. Director Phyllis Ellis recognises this, and concentrates on two threads throughout. Firstly, a group of women affected by the Johnson & Johnson talc scandal. Secondly, medical student Mymy Nguyen’s decision to test herself for the toxins absorbed from her regular beauty routine.

Phyllis Ellis does not pitch makeup as the bad guy. She doesn’t press too hard on unattainable beauty standards—it’s mentioned, but the scare here lies in the fact that these toxins can be found in the most basic of hygiene products: soap, toothpaste, shampoo.

The European viewer can take a little comfort in the knowledge that many of these products are regulated in the European Union (that’s an example of the ‘red tape’ certain politicians are keen to do away with), but it’s a global problem, and a slippery fish at that. Formulations change, problem substances are renamed. It avoids becoming an extended advertisement for “clean” products, but does suggest that they exist.

The film is peppered with occasional appearances from glassy-eyed corporate creeps delivering their uncanny valley monologues. That these almost-definitely-not-a-bot-humanoids appear suddenly between interviews with real victims at their most vulnerable makes them all the more jarring. 

We are familiar with this kind of behaviour, with so many examples of corporations engaging in a harm/cover-up loop, from Big Tobacco to The Radium Girls. But this doesn’t make Toxic Beauty any less heartbreaking. “Corporate greed is a type of cancer in our democracy right now.” A punchy statement tucked in right at the end of the credits. The speaker’s nameplate frustratingly out of view.

Hopefully Ellis is not done with this. There are many more avenues to explore with Toxic Beauty as a starting point. Her style is engaging and understated—shocking enough without trying to fabricate drama. It is informative without being dry. 

I was expecting a Supersize Me for makeup, but it’s much more sophisticated than that. Spurlock went out of his way to prove a point, inviting drama in a Michael Moore meets Jackass stunt. In contrast, Mymy Nguyen and the other women are simply operating as normal, having been lulled into a false sense of security by large corporations. Worryingly, this type of exposé runs the risk of adding fuel to the anti-vaxxer fire—with their fear of chemical ingredients, but that’s a whole different documentary.

Not Quite Adults (Tampoco Tan Grandes) opens with our lead Lola (Paula Reca) attempting to steal sunglasses from a convenience store. The film never explains why Lola does this, she does make another attempt later in on, and it’s not explained then either.

In fact, it’s a plot point that really amounts to nothing at all. The only reason I mention it is because it is the perfect representation of everything that is wrong with this film. So much happens to so little effect in so little time.

The plot is nothing new. Within the rom-com/dramedy structure, we follow Lola and her ex-boyfriend Teo (Andres Ciavaglia) on a road trip from Buenos Aires 400km south to Mar Del Plata. They embark on this road trip to spread Lola’s fathers’ ashes on the land he granted her in his will. Along with them are Teo’s sister Rita (María Canale) and her father’s partner Natalio (Miguel Ángel Solá), whom she never met while her dad was still alive. Altogether this makes for a story that from the get-go had no plans of being anything but completely predictable and generic.

And that’s exactly what it is. At every turn, the script opts for the most obvious solutions to the most overdone of problems. In doing this, all Not Quite Adults achieves is managing to be entirely unimpactful and forgettable. Which is unfortunate because the humour is there, one or two genuinely funny moments do occur where things really could have expanded, but nothing comes of it. It’s impossible to class this film as a missed opportunity, but it certainly could have been more entertaining than it ended up being.

However, it is the dramatic aspects that are Not Quite Adults’ most significant failure — none of them land how director Federico Sosa intended. Every time the narrative drifts to a more serious moment, which is fairly frequently, it only amounts to a close up of someone being sad for a few seconds. It feels like every serious scene is truncated and shallow as if they are there only because they had to be.

Which begs the question, if the film wasn’t going to take the drama seriously, why does it make up half of the film? Each of the four characters we follow has something going wrong in their lives around them, and each of them has one or more scenes where they are confronted by it. Rita’s arc is by far the worst. Her issues don’t even get resolved despite being the most pressing. Instead, the film uses her as a minor catalyst to get the main couple to get back together.

All this imbalance comes down to Sosa. He never manages to find any balance between the comedy or the drama. In the process, he only managed to make both aspects of the film fall flat and the entertainment value with it. The cast was game to make something of this, they manage to spark some chemistry every now and then, but it just isn’t enough for how weak and uneven their characters are. Overall it seems to lack passion, and I take no pleasure in saying that, but when you watch something this run of the mill that still doesn’t function as a film, what else is there to say?

Not Quite Adults tosses mud at the wall to see what sticks and misses the wall. With hollow characters and a generic plot, this film is not quite good enough for 2019.

Dark, Almost Night: BRWC Raindance Review. By Matt Keay.

Fairytales have been an integral part of our culture for centuries. Applied metaphorically, the model enabled preliterate civilisations to form their own literature, morphing into the cautionary tales we know them as in modern society. The tropes of these tales, (old hag, princess in peril, knight in shining armour), were cemented late in the history of the genre, as the true origins of fairy tales are rooted in cruelty, violence, and mysticism. 

‘Dark, Almost Night’, Borys Lankosz’ third feature, based on Joanna Bator’s novel, is a film which tells its story through the more traditional fairy tale method. You will find no princesses in the story, no singing snowmen or friendly dwarves.

The film has more in common with the Italian writer Giambattista Basile’s seventeenth century permutations of the stories, where Cinderella snaps her stepmother’s neck with a dressing trunk, and Snow White tortures her evil stepmother to death. For ‘Dark, Almost Night’ is certainly not a fairy tale for children, even though it is more than willing to make them suffer.

The plot, such as it is, concerns Alicja Tabor (Magdalena Cielecka), a journalist reporting on the disappearance of three children, who returns to her home town of Walbrzych, Poland.

There, she meets individuals from her past who aid her (in varying levels of helpfulness) in uncovering the secrets not only of the crimes she is investigating, but those of her family, and her childhood. The film is dark, literally and figuratively, and explores a litany of taboo subjects, paedophilia, incest, rape, murder, sometimes sensitively, other times flippantly, but always appearing to serve the story, as best as could be gleaned.

‘Dark, Almost Night’ is overwrought and half an hour too long. It seems so bogged down in its own mythology that it always leaves the viewer behind a few steps. That said, the cinematography is atmospheric and arresting, (the forest sequences, in particular, are the most effective, bringing the film into the horror genre momentarily), and the central performance from Cielecka is passable.

However, there are many great films constructed within a fairytale framework, but unfortunately this is not one of them.