Category: REVIEWS

Two For Joy is a new British drama from writer from director Tom Beard
The film stars Samantha Morton, Billie Piper, Daniel Mays, Bella Ramsey, Emilia Jones, & Badger Skelton.

“TWO FOR JOY is an authentic and unwavering, ultimately uplifting coming of age story; a visceral, moving exploration of one British family’s life. Mother AISHA, her teenage daughter VI and young adolescent son TROY, are at a crossroads in their lives.

Vi has been forced to grow up fast; mother-daughter roles are reversed, Vi is Aisha’s carer as well as trying to control her rascal younger brother Troy, who with no father figure and a struggling mother, is a law unto himself – something must give, the situation must change”

The film perfectly captures the quiet depression of the British seaside and the troubles some young people in less that ideal situations suffer on a daily basis just by existing.

The pacing is at times oppressively slow and reflective and we take a while to get going but eventually it’s sad and timely tale unfolds about how without proper adult supervision childish games can have terribly ‘adult’ consequences.

Perhaps fittingly the young cast get to shine brightest in this film while the adult characters are more in the background.

4/5

The film has a VOD release on February 25th.

EDIT – Screening today! – https://www.everymancinema.com/screen-on-the-green/film-info/two-for-joy-live-qa
iTunes pre order link here:
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/movie/two-for-joy-2018/id1443901223

After being administered an experimental drug, accused bank robber Macdonald (Matthew Modine) is dragged to landmarks of his crime to try to discover where the money was stashed. Unfortunately Backtrace also drags Matthew Modine through a plot as hollow as the actors around him. Sylvester Stallone makes what has become an annoying, yet increasingly common token appearance purely to get his face on the cover. Stallone adds nothing to the film despite his talent, and appears to be simply reading a list of tropes from Law and Order. Honestly, Backtrace looks feels and acts like a TV crime drama, but not even a very good one. Repeated dialogue throughout  adds nothing to the story and feels like the point in a TV where you know in the US there in some crucial commercial break but in the UK we receive only a fade to black followed by the  same dialogue you saw two second earlier.  

Backtrace reveals itself in the first few scenes when the bank robbers argue with gun wielding aggressors because someone with more power ‘changed the plan’ to screw them over. It’s at this early point we know we’ll see nothing special, and you’re not left disappointed. In an attempt to change this and throw in a little immersion, director Brian A. Miller shakes the camera a lot and bully’s the viewer with effects to make us feel disorientated in an attempt to match Modine’s emotions. Unfortunately it’s over used and creates confusion instead of clarity. I mean, yes I was disorientated, but I also lost a sense of plot and cared very little about getting it back.

To defend Backtrace is hard, but Modine does put in a good performance, the action scenes are decent and I’d probably happily watch it on a Sunday afternoon whilst I reluctantly cleaned the house, but I wouldn’t choose to watch it again with any concentration. If you really love Stallone you may enjoy his starring role come cameo, but otherwise I’d probably avoid Backtrace and leave it in the straight to video category where it should be.

By Tom Morton.

A film crew making a zombie film in an abandoned tower block find that the next block over is being used for a different kind of shooting; the gangsters realise they have witnesses, and take action. But the film crew have a martial arts expert, and the gangsters don’t want to risk using their guns in a building rigged for demolition, which levels the odds a little.

There’s a clear influence from The Raid here, but with the action spliced with a large amount of very funny, extremely British humour, some Living in Oblivion-style meta stuff about low-budget filmmaking and a surprising amount of heart. There are interesting characters in both groups of people and the humour helps make the film crew extremely likable – all of which pays off in bucketloads once they start getting hurt. I actually felt properly shocked and upset when one of the characters got killed, which is a tricky mood for a film to hit, especially when it’s largely a broad comedy full of lo-fi martial arts and makeshift explosives!

The fight scenes are also a revelation here; the budgetary restrictions and close quarters may not allow for as many clever shots as some top-end martial arts films but having action this inventive and well-choreographed in a low-budget film is an absolute revelation; these fights are close-up, brutal and fast paced, with moments that I would hold up to literally anything in the genre.

It’s not a perfect film by any means – there’s a definite suspension-of-disbelief barrier to the actual setting, which is somehow both in the middle of a large, developed area but also completely isolated, and there’s a slight frustration in the way that the filmmakers cleverly find a way to take mobile phones out of the equation for the film crew but still have to rely on lack of reception for the bad guys. The sweary dialogue also feels slightly dated at times, although the sheer number of killer lines mostly balance that out. This is the kind of film where the flaws are easy to excuse though, because it’s just so much fun.

I think I always run the risk of over- or underrating films that I see at festivals due to the massive difference in watching a film at home and watching one with a large and appreciative audience. I’m not sure this would be a five-star film if I’d caught it at home, but I can’t resist splashing out all those stars for the sheer joy of experiencing this with a few hundred other people who winced, cheered and at one point burst into a round of spontaneous applause at one of the most incredible moments in what is an astonishingly crowd-pleasing film and a wonderful example of low-budget filmmaking at its finest.

I’ll admit it right off the bat – I did not know what to make of Newly Single. The story follows an aspiring, and seemingly newly successful indie-filmmaker called Astor. He is, as the title suggests, single after his girlfriend leaves him. What follows is a series of romantic and sexual adventures – and misadventures – between Astor and a number of different women. So, as you can tell, the plot is very simple. It’s barely there and focuses solely on its characters. Far from a bad thing, there are plenty of films I love that do the same thing.

Newly Single as a film is also very well crafted. I cannot fault the actors, all of who do an excellent job at capturing their characters. They feel as close to being a real person as the people you went to school or go to work with. You don’t know more about them that what you are given, but it is enough for you to know them well enough. Astor is the primary character, and I didn’t like him. That is not me calling him a bad character – he is exceptionally well realised and the writing for him could not have been better, not to mention the pitch perfect performance of actor Adam Christian Clark. I simply didn’t like him because I don’t like people like him – self-absorbed, pretentious and carrying that unintentional holier-than-thou-art attitude.

Newly Single’s writer/director, also Adam Christian Clark, does have a keen eye for how to film his vision. This is clearly a passion project and it’s very well presented. The cinematography, especially the use of colour and lighting, was very striking – your eyes will be drawn to the screen with little resistance. While any music I found to be forgettable, even while watching it, but the dialogue is interesting and not entirely hard to listen to. Not liking the character for who he is, is certainly a problem when it comes to hearing the dialogue, but it was never a deal breaker for me.

My issue with the film was simply that I had no idea what it was meant to be. I just couldn’t grasp what it was that was bothering me and what the very core of the film was. That was until I found out that Newly Single is a comedy – then things started to fall back into place. Yes, it’s obvious now – and it certainly accounts for scenes like a woman being horrified when Astor comes out to show her his literal gun, when she thought he meant his crotch, not to mention the scene when Astor gets vomited on during oral sex. But that’s where my issue lays. Newly Single, for all it does simply isn’t funny. I get the feeling that something like The Big Lebowski or any number of Woody Allen films contributed to the film’s influences. But for me, those films worked because I either liked the main characters or because they had a strange quirk that helped them hit the right spots. Newly Single is well constructed but it isn’t quirky.

Comedy is of course one of the most subjective of all genres. Whatever I don’t find funny, there will be somebody out there who does. The same goes for when I laugh but someone else is silent. I just can’t recommend a comedy that didn’t make me laugh. I can recommend a good character study and drama though, and on that Newly Single succeeds. It’s not devoid of joy or entertainment, and I’d say it’s worth a look. Maybe you will see something that I couldn’t, and I am willing to accept that somethings I missed in this one. I just won’t be revisiting it any time soon.