Category: REVIEWS

Good Boys: The BRWC Review.

Invited to his first kissing party, 12-year-old Max (Jacob Tremblay) asks his best friends Lucas (Keith L. Williams) and Thor (Brady Noon) for some much-needed help on how to pucker up. When they hit a dead end, Max decides to use his father’s drone to spy on the teenage girls next door. When the boys lose the drone, they skip school and hatch a plan to retrieve it before Max’s dad can figure out what happened.

Upon my initial viewing of the first official trailer for Good Boys, I immediately had a concern about the film but I was hoping to be proven wrong. Practically everything about the trailer sold the film as a downright crude, disgusting, and unfunny movie that only had children swearing to offer and nothing else.

However, I was trying to hold out hope due to the fact that it is directed by Gene Stupnitsky, and co-written by him and Lee Eisenberg. These two served as writers on my favorite television comedy series The Office. As soon as I figured this out, my curiosity was rising quite a bit with this discovery, also with the fact that Seth Rogen would be producing, who is usually hilarious.

Gladly, Good Boys is exactly the type of movie that I was hoping it would be. Instead of solely relying on crude humor and featuring annoying children throughout its running time, we are treated to an exceptionally funny yet grounded story of a group of best friends who get into some trouble, but are still good at heart, hence the title.

Honestly, the kids involved here are actually pretty funny and they are quite hard to dislike. Each one of them has something unique about themselves and they all have goals they want to accomplish by the end of the film. By far the most compelling character was Tremblay’s Max, who has a massive crush on his classmate Brixlee (Millie Davis). All he wants to do is to attend a party that a fellow student is hosting in order to hopefully tell her how he feels. Nothing is too crazy to believe about the story which was nice to see.

The most impressive element of Good Boys is without a doubt its humor and the amount of heart it has. All of the jokes, while massively inappropriate, worked really well for the story and what the film as a whole was going for and I never found them to be annoying like the trailers made them out to be. Throughout the film, I constantly laughed at the scenes that were being shown which was a major surprise.

It is not all fun and games at every single second however, as there are some great moments where the picture shows that it has quite a bit of heart. There are a few sequences in the third act that were quite sweet and will warm the hearts of many viewers.

When it comes to issues, sometimes the editing styles can be somewhat jarring, notably in the first twenty minutes or so. The scenes in question utilize slow motion and music cut together and it just felt off. In addition, the third act, while highly entertaining to watch, felt like it was going on way longer than it needed to. Several scenes felt as if they could serve as the final moment in the film and it would have been fine, but the picture keeps moving along. When we finally approach the ending, the final shot was completely unnecessary and it would have been better had the credits rolled just one scene earlier.

Finally, this is a movie in which so many insane things happen that it can be a bit hard to believe at times. If viewers can learn to suspend their disbelief for one hundred and ninty minutes, they will have a fun time. It is not entirely unbelievable, but some plotlines definitely would not work in the real world.

With a terrific cast full of young and funny stars, a ton of heart, and some pure craziness sprinkled in, Good Boys is a highly entertaining time. 

Friendships that survive the test of time are always intriguing to see on the silver screen. Particular forms of drama can only be generated appropriately between characters who have known each other for a long time, and that is what is worth watching when done well. Even more so when said friends are reuniting in a picturesque Australian holiday destination. That is what Rebecca Ward’s “Palm Beach” pitches to us. 

Set in Sydney’s beach of the same name Palm Beach sees old bandmates Billy (Richard E. Grant) and Leo (Sam Neill) flown over to visit their old band manager Frank (Bryan Brown) and his wife Charlotte (Greta Scacchi) for his birthday. Their wives Eva (Heather Mitchell) and Bridget (Jacqueline McKenzie) round out the 6-person group with a lifetime’s worth of friendship.  

Having lost their lead singer years earlier the band never managed to take off and was left with only one minor hit. Over the years, their failure to become famous artists and an ancient love triangle of sorts leads to drama fizzing below the surface of their affluent well to do lives. 

Palm Beach on paper shouldn’t be as fun as it turns out to be. Relating to these characters in this setting is no easy task. None of them has a job that most individuals could relate to, and despite a slight undertone of financial woes for some characters, they all come across as people who never want for anything. Once they move on from the sunshine intro into the emotion that drives the film, it is hard to believe them.

There are small plot points meant to drive the fact that these characters have faced issues recently, for instance, two characters have faced cancer battles, but the film mentions this briefly and quickly moves on as if trying to cover its tracks and nothing more.

This highlights the biggest flaw in the entire endeavour, the script. Everything becomes a bit soapy as it goes along and draws many similarities to the Australian soap opera “Home and Away” which isn’t a compliment. As each resolution to the inter-character conflicts plays on screen, it feels like they are only resolving the issues because they had to, not because any of the characters found new insight. Also, there are a couple of scenes where the humour is entirely low brow and unfunny. This excellent cast could have benefited from something to dig their teeth into, but the script doesn’t provide that. 

In saying that, the cast is everything in Palm Beach. They are the creators of everything good in this movie and were they even slightly less entertaining this would have been a catastrophic misfire. However, they have undying chemistry that ties them all together and makes them convincing old friends. Whenever the story begins to lose its way, any combination of these talented performers does something to spark it back to life. It is particularly entertaining watching Richard E. Grant as the snarky Billy in this film.

He’s had better roles but is on such a run of form at the moment that he shines in amongst his fellow stars. Sam Neill and Bryan Brown are also standouts, their emotional repression is a key plot point, and they both manage to get is across with a pitch that doesn’t spoil the fun. 

The trio of women are just as good, although they find themselves with the worse of the writing to play out. Their issues are resigned to being offshoots of their husbands’ problems, which makes the emotional depth far shallower than it could have been. Eva and Bridget fall victim to this, both of their arcs rely solely on their husbands waking up to themselves and seeing they are losing something great. Regardless, they are talented enough to generate just as much charming fun as the rest of the cast.

Palm Beach is far from perfect. The script is flawed and has a knack for being overly dramatic. However, the brilliant ensemble always manages to draw you back in whenever a plot point is just a bit too much. All in all, this is another solid Australian film for 2019.

Blinded By The Light: The BRWC Review.

Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra) is a British teen of Pakistani descent growing up in 1987 England. Amidst the racial and economic turmoil of the times, he writes poetry as a means to escape the intolerance of his hometown and the inflexibility of his traditional father. But when a classmate introduces him to the music of Bruce Springsteen, Javed sees parallels to his working-class life in the powerful lyrics. As Javed discovers an outlet for his own pent-up dreams, he also begins to express himself in his own voice.

Every once in a while, we need a film to come along that will warm our hearts and take us on an incredibly inspiring journey to escape from the real world. One of my favorite films of this entire decade thus far was John Carney’s Sing Street. Everything down to the performances, music, acting, and emotion felt so rich and raw and it was one of the most inspiring pictures of the decade, and perhaps in the entire coming-of-age/music genre.

This is what I was hoping Gurinder Chadha’s Bruce Springsteen-inspired movie Blinded by the Light would do for me. I was wanting to leave the theatre with a big smile on my face, and I wanted to feel something after watching it. After watching it, I can happily inform you that this film did that exact thing for me, and so much more.

The cast of Blinded by the Light is an extremely diverse one which is great to see. Often films of this calibre do not feature this many people of color sadly, which is why its so fresh and exciting to see this cast. Practically every actor in the film does a truly terrific job here, but the strongest one has to be Viveik Kalra, who portrays lead protagonist Javed Khan. He is a teenager with a plethora of hopes and dreams. He wants to leave his depressing town of Luton with hopes of moving to somewhere better to pursue his goals of becoming a writer and finally obtaining true happiness in his life. Why is this such a struggle? His home life is down-right awful.

At home, Javed’s father always finds a way to shoot down his confidence every time he brings up his writings such as his diary entries and poems. His father wants him to have a different job, specifically a doctor, but that is not what Javed wants. He wants to do what he has dreamed of doing ever since he was a young boy.

The story of Javed finding Bruce Springsteen’s music which inspires him to finally begin to pursue his dreams of becoming a writer is one of the most heartwarming stories I have experienced in a cinema in quite a long time. Throughout every single scene, I was rooting for Javed to succeed and I was hoping that things would eventually work out for him. Kalra does such a great job here, that he never once felt like an actor portraying somebody. It is truly remarkable.

Since this is a film that is centered around the music of Springsteen, set in the 1980s, you would more than likely expect there to be some great songs played throughout, and there gratefully is. Every once in a while, we will hear an iconic 80s song (usually a Springsteen hit) and the scenes that accompany them are a blast to watch.

When it comes to issues with the movie, there is only really one thing that I wish was done differently, and that is about it. There are a couple of sequences in the film that I felt were cut too short. Some scenes end without an explanation as to what happened, or if they do have an explanation, it is essentially glossed over and they never bring it up again. It would have been nice to have had these scenes extended by even just a minute or two to better explain the situation.

Blinded by the Light is an incredibly raw and powerful picture with an inspiring story, outstanding performances, and deeply emotional moments.

Silver Stars On Red Velvet: Review.

Offensive, pathetic, ridiculous, misogynistic, morally repugnant trash. That is how I would describe RJ Cusyk’s fourth and hopefully final feature “Silver Stars on Red Velvet”. When watching it, I couldn’t believe that it was real; it was like I was in a bad dream where not being able to wake up was a running joke. This mess of a film is about the impossible to like Alexander De Toth (Max Caudell), a photographer pretending to date porn star Madelyne Jones (Laura Sharlotte) to make his ex-girlfriend jealous.

Together they witness what appears to be a hit and run that results in a death, but soon come to realise they’re dealing with a serial killer murdering adult film actresses. From there, we meet a perverted detective, whom the characters frequently decide to contact directly rather than calling 911, and they film pornography, I don’t know why, but they do, multiple times. Because that is clearly the smartest course of action when dealing with a serial killer targeting sex workers, right?

There is nothing remotely likeable about this film, a feat I thought was impossible. No matter how much I try, I cannot think of one nice thing to say. So, with that in mind, I’ll start with the script. Silver Stars on Red Velvet has such an idiotic script the fact that a human being made a movie out of it is amazing. From its outrageously cruel depiction of the adult film industry to its moronic characters, who never seem to care about what’s happening, this script is one of the worst I have ever seen brought to life. Every character is unlikeable because of how poorly they are written.

The two leads care more about sex than the killer killing people they know, Detective Castillo (Joseph Calverase) has far more interest in the pornographic models than investigating the murders, and there are simply no words to describe Dick Stilettos (Michael Lakota Dillon), a pornographic film director who verbally abuses everyone who works for him. The only thing I will say about him is that he has no place in any film ever made or made in future, he’s a disgrace. 

The acting isn’t any better. These characters are all too aware of the camera in front of them. This film has an estimated budget of USD 6000, which is about as low as it goes, and it still can’t use that as an excuse for how bad the performances are. Caudell and Sharlotte make one of the least believable pairs I have ever seen, and Dillon flubs lines while the movie plays on as if nothing happened. Also, there is at least one moment where the wrong actress dubs a character’s lines, how does that even happen? I would love to write that these performers were humorous in their failure, but when all the jokes are so crude and so poorly delivered, it is impossible to see the humour. 

The Tagline of the film on IMDB reads: “A Film so Offensive 23 Actors Refused to Be a Part of It”, sounds an awful lot like bragging to me. Cusyk seems to think he made something profoundly edgy and proudly extends his foot over the line of what is generally acceptable. Yet, the finished product is so far from edgy it’s not funny. Instead, Silver Stars on Red Velvet is no more or less than a cinematic crime worthy only of being forgotten.

On his end of the camera, Cusyk is about as inventive as a hamburger phone. The grainy camera effect adds nothing, and some shots and cuts place actors in the entirely wrong positions as if they missed their cues. I understand that time constraints would have played a significant role in all of this, but I can’t bring myself to grant it any modicum of forgiveness. The movie plays like he was trying to force his way to a movie as hilariously bad as “The Room”, completely ignoring the ignorant charm that makes The Room so loveable.

I don’t have much to say on it, but I can’t write this review without mentioning the sound work, it’s terrible. To quickly sum it up I’ll say, the music mixed into certain sequences is so loud it drowns out the actors, and at various points throughout dialogue is dubbed so awfully it is out of sync with their lips. Also, the music feels as if it’s from an entirely different movie; it shares no relationship with the context of this film and fails even almost to match the tone. 

Finally, I have thought of something nice to say. There is a certain contentment that comes from wasting 70 minutes on Silver Stars on Red Velvet. I think it’s because I am so sure I have seen the worst film of 2019. Heck, by comparison, I am more than ready for a double feature of Hellboy into The Hustle. Needless to say, despite my newfound contentment, don’t see this movie, even if it’s free, don’t see this movie. Not that anyone would ever screen it anyways.

Rojo: Review

It’s nearly 25 minutes in to 2018 Argentinian drama/mystery Rojo before the title card appears. 25 minutes of prologue is a pretty ballsy movie, but director Benjamin Naishtat has, by that point, already set up so much of what the film is going to be about, establishing themes, introducing key characters and capturing our intrigue, that it’s hard not to already find yourself won over.

The truth is I wasn’t all that fussed when I first switched it on. The run time (coming in close to two hours) put me off, and I’d not heard of anything the team behind this has done before. But even the opening scene, a single locked off tripod shot of a house, all shuttered and abandoned, as people empty it out of anything of value so casually as to make you wonder just what this is all going to be about, captured my interest.

And then we’re whisked away to a restaurant and introduced to our protagonist with little to no explanation as to what what we’ve just seen has to do with anything. The scene in the restaurant is as tense as it is oddly sad, and what follows is a dialogue exchange that wouldn’t be out of place in a Tarantino movie, about the etiquette of taking up space in an establishment designed to make money without spending any.

Set in Argentina in 1975, Rojo details the story of prominent local loyal and all round well liked guy, Claudio – played with a sinister underpinning by Dario Grandinetti, who manages to somehow imbue a likeability to a character that is, for the most part, so much a false front. When Claudio and his wife, the understated by equally as engaging Andrea Frigerio, are attacked by a strange during dinner and then later on the drive home, the ensuing drama leads the couple, and more specifically Claudio himself, down a dark path of uncertainty, paranoia and greed.

To be clear, Rojo is a slow build, and on that front, it undoubtedly won’t be to everyone’s tastes. It takes its time, introducing us to characters in a way that feels natural, carefully laying out the foundations of who they are in an effort to backup where we will find them later on in the story. It’s an approach that for the most part works, and gives the film a strange, almost literary feel. When everything is approached with such care it’s difficult not to respond to it positively, and it makes for the eventual “endless spiral” Claudio finds himself trapped in all the more sinister as a result.

It’s also disarmingly funny, and in places reminded me more of something we might expect from the Coen Brothers in their No Country For Old Men/Blood Simple mould.

Shot using stylistic choices not out of place in more low-brow, B-movie affair, the film somehow manages to capture a sort of classy precision one would expect more from a David Fincher film that a movie that so gleefully jumps between harsh cuts, crash zooms, split-diopter shots and any other number of pulpy devices. Even the music, which layers a sense of foreboding of every scene, pulls off the trick of being both delightfully manic and expertly subdued.

And all of that is before we even get to the story proper, with its oddball characters – including a celebrity Detective played by Alfredo Castro, who lights up every moment of the movie he features in.

I found a lot to like here, from the enticing and punchy visuals to the warm, yellow and green, color palette most of the film is shot in. The nighttime sequences are especially beautiful, including a scene in the aforementioned 25-minute prologue where Claudio finds himself out in the desert, which is shot using wide angles against the slowly rising Argentinian sun.

I don’t know much about the history of Argentina, and I know even less about the coup that would befall the country not long after the events Rojo presents, but it’s undoubtedly integral to the message of the film, which explores the corruption – and perhaps more importantly, the apathy – that was rife then. My lack of knowledge didn’t seem to hinder my enjoyment though, as the film delivers on the mystery front and pitch-black humor scattered throughout.

While it’s lethargic, slowly unravelling pace may put some viewers off, the way in which all the pieces slowly fall into place is an example of a filmmaker with a fantastic grasp of their craft. As we roll into its final moments the true meaning becomes all the more apparent, and while a film is so often more inclined to side with the victims than it is those who simply turn to look the other way, the truth is we are all more likely to find ourselves in that position than we are any other. And when the opportunity to do the right thing does arise, the scary truth is that many of – as Rojo so effectively illustrates – would prefer to do nothing, not because we don’t want, but because it’s simply easier that way.