By Orla Smith.

Not to be dramatic, but Modern Life is Rubbish is one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Not that I seek out bad films like someone with a death wish, but I’ve done my time – I saw Grace of Monaco, Assassin’s Creed and Dracula Untold. I even saw The Do-Over (feel free to thank me for my service), but this, quite possibly, tops them all.

Making its world premiere at the Edinburgh Film Festival, lead actor Josh Whitehouse told us that he hoped we enjoyed watching it as much as he enjoyed making it. I’m struggling to work out if that was a genuine sentiment or a coded cry for help, but I would fear for the life of anyone who had the same experience on set as I had in that theatre.

Set in London over the course of a poorly defined ten years, the film flashes backwards and forwards through the relationship between Liam and Natalie, a twenty-something couple, both of whom are missing that one key ingredient – a personality.

Although, to be fair, there are a few descriptors I could apply to Liam, none of which would be fit to repeat in polite company. I’ll say this about him – he loves his music, and god help you if you own an iPod. He tends to his extensive collection of physical media with the preciousness of an overprotective parent. One might almost think that the whole film was just an excuse for director Daniel Jerome Gill to show off his record collection.

As Natalie, Freya Mavor is less of an actress than a victim. The couple’s meet-cute in a record store sees Liam lecturing Natalie on why she shouldn’t buy Blur’s Greatest Hits (it’s cheating, apparently), in an epic feat of terrible writing that seems to directly challenge its audience: if you thought that Ryan Gosling mansplained jazz, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Natalie shuts him down a few times, and the film seems to think that’s enough – yet she still falls for him, despite his complete lack of redeeming qualities (except looking a bit like if Harry Styles tried to grow facial hair, if you consider that a positive). He acts awfully to her throughout, to the point that the film would work better as a dark drama exploring one woman’s crushingly low sense of self worth.

But Modern Life is Rubbish sees itself as a cute rom-com, peppered with awful indie rock and quirky “humour”.

I watched most of from behind my fingers, needing that barrier as a shield against the full force of the horror playing out onscreen.

Some films are bad because they’re mind-numbingly dull – see Guy Ritchie’s recent King Arthur – but then there are those bad films that are just so baffling that they have to be seen to be believed.

It’s not that I’d recommend Modern Life is Rubbish – I lost enough of my self respect actually watching the thing – but it’s something to be gawked at. Almost like a parody of a man who can’t write women, it’s also a handy guide of avoidance, containing almost every single cliché that we’re always chastising filmmakers away from.

It’s not a particularly long film, numerically speaking, but mentally it drags on into an endless abyss of dark despair. By the end, I felt like Dr. Dave Bowman watching the universe unfold before him at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only this time the stream of garish flashing lights were coming from one of Liam’s concerts – in which he plays his “music” (which is brilliant, apparently) – instead of the infinity of space and time. Nevertheless, the immensity of both experiences are pretty much the same. Modern Life is Rubbish is titanically terrible, with the deal being sealed when it dares to end in the way that it does. It’s… rubbish.

By Orla Smith.

The 71st Edinburgh Film Festival started with a simmer rather than a bang. Yorkshire set drama God’s Own Country opened this year’s festival, and those who see the film continue to be taken aback by it. It’s quite an accomplishment for a tiny movie with a first time director and very little star power to gather so much steam, but God’s Own Country deserves its steadily building reputation.

You many not have heard of Josh O’Connor, but that will undoubtedly soon change. O’Connor has so far taken small roles in British productions such as Florence Foster Jenkins and The Riot Club, as well as a bit-part in Steven Knight’s BBC drama Peaky Blinders and a regular role in ITV series The Durrells. He’s no staple yet, but he gives a performance in God’s Own Country that suggests it’s only a matter of time. As Johnny Saxby, a young and careless farm worker, he captures a stifled sensitivity and loneliness in the early scenes, when Johnny is at his most brutish.

We first see him as a pale, bare body crouched over a toilet bowl, violently throwing up after a night of hard drinking. It soon becomes clearly that this is nothing out of the ordinary. There are two sides to Johnny: he’s often drunk, is sullen with his grandmother (Gemma Jones) and ailing father (Ian Hart), and he engages in casual sex while actively avoiding a deeper connection with his hookups. He only softens when he’s with the sheep he tends to every day. With no-one around, he talks softly, handling them gently.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vxA-r4KeWI

That is, until the arrival of Gheorghe (Alec Secareanu), a Romanian migrant worker who has come to help on the farm over the weekend. Johnny picks him up from the train station at night and Gheorghe bemoans the lack of phone signal: he’s entered a new world, up on the Yorkshire moors that are cut off from the rest of civilisation. Director Francis Lee has stated that he made the film in an effort to express the isolation he felt growing up there. The film is not autobiographical: Lee moved away from his home to become an actor at age 18, similar to the old friends that Johnny meets one night at the local pub. Instead, the film explores an alternate reality: what if he had stayed? What if someone had come along to ease that isolation? What would life have looked like then? Johnny taunts Gheorghe at first, and Gheorghe makes no effort to appease him. However, the two quickly become curious about one another. To start with, their relationship is a rough, physical one. Soon, that gives way to romance, and a deeper connection that makes their oppressive surroundings more bearable – even beautiful.

God’s Own Country calls to mind various influences, including British social realism such as the cinema of Ken Loach, and the elemental Yorkshire scenery of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights. The film has been compared most often to Brokeback Mountain, which is in many ways reductive, however Lee does include a few explicit visual references to that film.

There’s a frank unsentimentality to the filmmaking, and a thoughtful avoidance of cliché in the queer elements of the story. Johnny is already aware of his sexuality before Gheorghe’s arrival, making it less a story of self-awakening, and more of a pure-bred romance that demonstrates the ways in which love can help us to open up. There are still issues of acceptance hanging over the character’s heads, but they are allowed to speak for themselves. In particular, the film’s handling of Johnny’s family’s discovery of his relationship with Gheorghe is a refreshing divergence from what we’ve been taught to expect.

Secareanu is every bit O’Connor’s equal. His role is the less volatile of the two, but there’s always warmth behind his eyes. He holds himself with assured strength, and so we understand the safety that the more unstable Johnny finds in their companionship. The two have wonderful chemistry. Ever since I saw the film, I’ve found myself smiling as my mind drifts back to the small, comforting moments they craft together. Despite the grey toned vistas captured by cinematographer Joshua James Richards, this is a warm and welcoming film, at its best akin to sitting in comfortable silence around a campfire.

God’s Own Country charts the incremental emotional unfurling of its protagonist, but despite its subdued build-up, the emotional pay-off is huge. You are forced to realise just how much everything you’ve just seen has meant – all in one of the year’s most sublimely acted and written scenes. It plays out against a silent landscape, just as much of the film does, but is preceded by a burst of score. Instrumental music only features at three points in the film, which act as emotional markers. Rather than being unnecessary, they allow you a moment to step back and enjoy the view.

Despite having being scripted before the referendum was announced, the shadow of Brexit inevitably hangs over God’s Own Country.

It is hopeful, like a plea for a future in which we see the welcoming of immigrants as a chance for connection and co-operation, rather than an imposition. This is not a film that tries to be political – in that sense, it’s far from Ken Loach – but its simple and honest story sends a clear message about small lives, and the things that make them feel a little fuller.

By Last Caress.

A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey, the documentary by Harold Monfils chronicling the work of war photographer Jason P. Howe begins with Jason jumping out of a Chinook helicopter with a squadron of British soldiers into Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in November 2011. They immediately have to traverse a minefield. Jason photographs the scene. Then, they sweep a compound for enemies, explosive devices or materials, weapons et cetera. Jason photographs the scene. Moving through a second compound, one of the soldiers – stepping through a doorway many of the other soldiers, and Jason as well, had already passed through – triggers an improvised explosive device (an IED), blowing his leg off. Jason photographs the scene.

They then have to get the injured soldier, along with his separated leg (“at the end of the day, we don’t want to leave it behind because then the Taliban would probably use it as trophies and that…”) to another Chinook, this time taking enemy fire across an open field. Jason photographs the scene. In fact this entire sequence, recalled in voiceover by Jason and by members of that quadron, is being illustrated for us entirely by Jason’s pictures. It’s a scene which manages to convey brilliantly well and at extremely close quarters the brilliance of the British armed forces but there is little here of the jingoistic romance of war as seen all too often in war movies (particularly older war movies). “It was quite strange,” recalls a corporal, “Because when I was treating the casualty all I could picture was me and my son playing football in the garden.” These men are scared for their lives, their futures. And that was just their first day of that particular operation. It was also the tenth anniversary of Jason’s life as a war photographer. Many of Jason’s days had been like this, all around the world. Colombia, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan. In A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey, we’re about to see a number of them.

At the heart of A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey is the tale of how Jason taught himself to become a photojournalist, in his own words: “Not by attending some theoretical university course, or taking portraits in a cosy studio, but by pitching myself in at the deep end.” So what was the deep end? For Jason, it meant going to Colombia and placing himself in amongst the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a Marxist guerilla outfit operating in various parts of Latin America in opposition to numerous government-sponsored right-wing paramilitaries and funded by a variety of unsavory means including kidnap, ransom, extortion and drug production and distribution. Here he was able to photograph plenty of harrowing images of the decades of conflict in Colombia but, hoping to build a more rounded picture both narratively and photographically, Jason went looking for the FARC’s principal nemeses, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). What he found was Marylin.

When Jason met her, Marylin was a civilian living in the Colombian capital of Puerto Asis, with friends in the AUC (or simply “The Paras”). Jason stayed with Marylin and her family as he photographed the strife in Colombia from an opposing perspective and, as he did, he and Marylin became close. Eventually Jason had to briefly return to the UK but, upon going back to Colombia, he found that Marylin had since become an active member of the AUC. This didn’t curtail his further research in Colombia however and, as his work began to garner critical attention, he was encouraged to go photograph the war in Iraq. After six months in Baghdad he returned yet again to Colombia to find that Marylin had graduated to becoming a full-blown assassin for the AUC, killing traitors to the cause. Beyond this, however, she was also operating as a contract killer, happy to execute anyone for whom anyone else might pay a price. Does this budding romance have a happy ending? I guess maybe it would if A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey was a fictional piece. But it’s not.

A Good Day to Die: Hoka Hey is a hugely episodic look at a number of conflicts across the globe, as seen through Jason Howe’s lens. It’s also a look – I mean, a REAL look – at the horror of those conflicts, up-close and personal, and a look at just how personal the documenting of these horrors can become. Harrowing in several places, but recommended nonetheless.

www.hokaheymovie.com

By Orla Smith.

Blaring ambulance sirens set the tone for Heard, a London-based religious short that plays more like a music video, or one of those non-specific adverts that seem to only exist for the purpose of making you feel very, very bad.

The whole ordeal scored to one generically sad piece of music, it builds to a cacophony of over-egged crying and screaming, pitched to feel like an incessantly annoying ringing in your ears.

We’re presented with a series of tragic scenarios – a little boy covering his ears to drown out the sound of his arguing parents, a man living with a cancer that he refuses to medically address,  a woman who has lost a loved one to a car accident… At four minutes, the film only gives itself time to glance at each of their lives. Their suffering is reduced to a couple of shots each of crying, and just looking, y’know, sad – in a non-specific sort of way.

But at least they’re pretty shots. Cinematographer Pete Coggan is the greatest asset that Heard has. He shoots the film in an unusually wide aspect ratio, both the interiors and the mountainous vistas stretching across the screen like pieces of ribbon.

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But director Chris Smyth has no idea how to harness this powerful image-making. At one point, one of his actresses, mid-cry, whimpers out a strained ‘why’ into the distance. It’s one of the only pieces of dialogue in a very noisy film, and it rings shockingly hollow. The credits name these characters Fear, Anxiety and Loss, and I couldn’t think of anything more apt; these aren’t real people. They’re vague echoes of what real people are. They’re blurry reflection of fear, anxiety and loss. Naming them would be giving them too much credit.

The film’s ending attempts to add a touch of hope to its misery fest, but it’s hard to parse any meaning from it whatsoever. Heard begins and ends with two quotes that might clue its audience into what it’s trying to say.

The problem is, if you take away those bookends the actual film itself in no way supports their message. With those quotes, we know what the film wants us to take away: that ‘the cries of man echo into the heavens’. Without them? Well, I could only guess, but perhaps we’re being told that if you’re in pain, don’t worry! Some dude will take your stuff and leave it at the top of a mountain, and it’ll all be okay.

B, A, B, Y, Baby! Baby Driver is the latest film from master director Edgar Wright.

I call him master director because not only has he not made a single bad film, but all of his films are considered to be great modern classics. This includes Shawn of the Dead, The Worlds End, Scott Pilgrim Vs The World, the TV show Spaced, and my personal favourite of his, Hot Fuzz. The man has never let us down and I was honestly interested to see what he could bring to the table with Baby Driver. The trailers looked great and the cast looked amazing, so I was quickly hooked and begging to see this film. However, I could say the same with many films lately, and they have been rather disappointing of late. Could Wright break the streak, or has he finally stumbled?

Baby is a driver. He is the getaway man, the one who drives bank robbers in the getaway vehicle. He also happens to be the best driver for a job like this. Baby also has tinnitus; you know that ringing you get after a concert? Well, it’s permanent for him. So he plays music to drown it out. Classic songs and some he makes himself, whatever it takes to quiet the ringing. Baby has one more job to do and then he is out. He can leave the bad business and be with Debbie, the waitress he is smitten by. But, as these things go, this “last job” might very well end up being Baby’s last job.

Of all of Wright’s films, this is probably his most basic. It’s very typical of a heist movie at times. But, while the film can be pretty unpredictable, you can tell the beats. You know certain things are going to happen. Like the “last job” story. There’s the loose cannon character. There’s the sociopath who goes full blown psycho the closer we get to the end. The cop chase. The scouting the bank scene. We are all familiar with these plot points, even if we don’t know it.

But, what saves Baby Driver from being a simple “been-there-done-that” is how these moments are set up and executed. Because, while you will find moments familiar, I promise you that you have never seen a film like Baby Driver before.

Wright has done it again, with a vengeance. And from him, I would expect nothing less. Baby Driver is stunning in almost every way. It’s visually interesting, with little moments hidden in the background as well as hidden in the foreground. The opening features one of the best uses of graffiti I’ve ever seen in a film. And Baby’s tinnitus and addiction to music are key to this films style. This film uses its songs and music even better than Guardians of the Galaxy ever did. I would almost go as far as to call Baby Driver a musical with how it uses its songs. It really does have to be seen to be believed.

Edgar Wright, much like George Miller, insisted on using actual cars, roads and stunts and pretty much no CGI at all. Because of this, the action and chase scenes are all breathtakingly intense and phenomenal. Almost to the point of Mad Max Fury Road levels, although Baby Driver does play it more for laughs at times too. It’s equal parts funny and exciting, and often both. This is probably less violent than the Cornetto Trilogy (Shawn of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The Worlds End), but there is still some violence and a little bit of gore to go around still. The comedy works its way between these action moments, but never to the point where it feels psychotic. It’s just all in the name of fun.

In the centre of all this talent that Wright brings in buckets to the table, is the cast. Ansel Elgort, the guy from A Fault in Our Stars, plays Baby and he is perfect in this role. He gives us so much emotion and visual performing to a mostly silent role. He easily holds his own and could easily hold this film together if he needed to. Along with his is Lily James as Debbie, and powerhouses like Jamie Foxx, Jon Bernthal, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Hamm and Kevin Spacey. With names like these I don’t think I should mention how amazing the performances are. It may be a stretch to call these the best performances of all these actors careers, but they are definitely contending for that spot. Everyone looked like they were giving it their all, while also having fun. Especially Jon Hamm. I can’t remember the last time I saw him in anything. I’m glad this film reminded me why I love Jon Hamm. But what I will say about the relationship between Baby and Debbie is, while it’s not bad (Elgort and James have great chemistry), it is rushed and therefore a little unbelievable at times. It’s an unfortunate gripe I have, but it does get saved by the performances.

I don’t feel that I could add any more to Baby Driver. Not without spoiling it anyway.

And I don’t want to spoil it. It’s a great film, and one you can’t miss! A rushed romance and the odd familiar moment does nothing to slow down one of the year’s most unique films. I always look forward to Wright’s films and I’m eager to see what he will make next. But in the meantime, I know that Wright likes to hide jokes and messages in his films for later watches. So, I guess I’m just going to have to see Baby Driver again, and again.