The title, Doobious Sources, is a deliberate pun that will get you laughing from the moment you see the cover. Yes, Doobious Sources, as the title of the movie suggests, is a comedy about stoners. Watch the movie in its entirety, however, and you will find an entertaining movie with personality.

Doobious Sources is written and directed by Clif Lord. It tells the story of two marijuana-loving video journalists who got caught in their own doings. The rest is a series of thrilling acts that unravel beautifully.

Plot Summary

The movie is about Reg and Zorn, two stoners who consider themselves legitimate investigative journalists. They actively search for stories to uncover and report, especially about local scam artists and con men. Their ambitions lead them to take a more dubious route when constructing their stories.

As they sell their pieces to TV news and get the stories broadcasted, their habits of cutting corners and fabricating facts are starting to cause problems. One of those problems is a wealthy man who Reg and Zorn ruin. That man then seeks revenge and Reg and Zorn have to use everything in their playbook to survive.

The straightforward plot makes this movie very easy to watch. It is a movie that you can watch when you just want to relax for the night and you’re looking for something really entertaining. The twists and turns along the way, on the other hand, keep the movie exciting for most viewers.

A Strong Cast

Jason Weissbrod plays the role of Zorn Tappadapo, while Jeff Lorch plays Reginald Block-Hunsleigh. We’ve seen Jason in movies like Never Been Kissed and Fuzzy Connections. He also directed the latter, along with two other short movies: Curious and Dance Club: The Movie.

Jeff, on the other hand, showed his acting skills in titles such as Masters of Sex and What Once Was. The latter is a Sean Penberthy-directed movie about stranded astronauts who find that their biggest enemy isn’t the planet that they are on, but each other.

The combined acting of Jason and Jeff really brought the two characters to life. They played Zorn and Reg to a stunning degree, but without taking the movie too far to the serious category.

A Pleasant Watch

It is arguable to say that Doobious Sources is one of the best stoner movies in history but with no doubt It is a light movie that you will certainly enjoy, but not too light that you get bored after a few minutes. In fact, the story holds characters and plot keys really well all the way through to the end of the movie.

While it may not be a big-budget movie like other stoner titles, it is still a masterpiece nonetheless. Doobious Sources has the wittiness of Pineapple Express, but without the cheesier approach of titles such as Harold and Kumar. It finds balance in the comedy genre and it successfully utilizes strong plot twists and interesting storytelling angles to take you, the audience, on a journey.

Last Monday at the opening of the Cannes press conference for The Killing of a Sacred Deer, the presenter, before introducing the key actors said, “This is very much a family movie” which created a moment of silence in the room as people briefly wondered if they had seen the same film. He then amended his phrase to “Sorry, this is a movie about a family”, which made many burst into laughter. There can be a big difference between the two.

In competition for the Palme d’Or, screenwriter and director Yorgos Lanthimos’ fifth feature film features a family in America. Steven Murphy (Colin Farrell) is a heart surgeon. He has attained the trappings of a successful life – well-adjusted children – a son Bob (Sunny Suljic) and daughter Kim (Raffey Cassidy) – an ophthalmologist wife Anna (Nicole Kidman), a dog, and a large and lovely suburban house. He appears to be a man with a past, whom friends and family treat gently.   Crucial to the story is Martin (Barry Keough), a 16-year old boy whose ambiguous relationship with Stephen reveals a struggle between manipulation and affection.

An unusual characteristic of Lanthimos’ films is the way the actors deliver their lines in a direct and detached way. Lanthimos describes the style as “replicating a certain kind of naivety, awkwardness and insecurity familiar to all of us in our everyday lives, since we don’t really know most of the time what we are going to say or do, and how other people are going to react to that.” It is an illustration of the fear of vulnerability. Lanthimos was interested in exploring the subject of sacrifice when he wrote the script with long-term collaborator, Efthymis Filippou. It’s a study of revenge, justice, choice, human nature and behavior when faced with a huge dilemma, and raises questions about all those things without hinting how the audience ought to respond. The result is intriguing, tender and distressing.

Shot on film, the curious tracking shots created by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis,

produce a feeling of creeping around and secretly observing the scenes, while the sound design by Johnnie Burn makes even the most ordinary scene alarming. It’s a slow burner, leaving the viewer to ponder guilt and responsibility.  As for whether it’s a family film, Nicole Kidman said that this is one her children will not be seeing…

Yorgos Lanthimos’ second feature Dogtooth, won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2009 Cannes film festival, followed by numerous awards at festivals worldwide. It was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award (Oscar) in 2011. Alps won the Osella for Best Screenplay at the 2011 Venice film festival and Best Film at the Sydney Film Festival in 2012. His first English language feature film The Lobster was presented In Competition at the 68th Cannes Film Festival and won the Jury Prize. It also won Best Screenplay and Best Costume Design at the 2015 European Film Awards. In 2017 it was nominated for a Best Original Screenplay Academy Award (Oscar).

By Last Caress.

Hounds of Love opens on a netball match, being viewed in bullet-time slow-motion, lingering intrusively on the girls’ tanned legs and short swishing netball skirts. The individual through whose eyes we are seeing this perfectly innocent after-school activity is viewing the contest from afar, sexualising every movement, savouring it, drinking it in. It’s uncomfortable from the off, but Hounds of Love is merely beginning as it means to go on. A film hasn’t made me feel this uncomfortable since Wolf Creek (2005) over a decade ago, and not so relentlessly from start to finish since Michael Haneke’s Funny Games (1997) TWO decades ago.

Vikki (Ashleigh Cummings) is an adolescent living with her mum in Perth, Australia, sometime in the mid/late eighties. She’s resentful of mum’s recent decision to leave dad and this presents itself in the form of the usual acts of teenage rebellion: Casual experimentation with recreational drugs, sneaking out to parties et cetera. It’s on her way to one such party that Vikki encounters Evelyn and John White (Emma Booth and Stephen Curry), who pull up beside her in their car and ask her if she’d like to score some pot. Since Vikki hasn’t lived in the area for very long she’s more interested in finding a payphone so she can get a taxi but, hey, Evelyn and John’s house is just nearby, she can call a cab from there and they’ll build her a nice big blunt to take to her party while she waits. She’d never normally take a lift from a stranger but this isn’t some guy prowling about on his own, it’s a couple. And Evelyn seems nice, and the thought of taking a lovely big bifta to her mates at the party seems very nice. It’ll be fine, just this once, eh?
Well, no, it won’t be fine. It won’t be fine at all.

John and Evelyn are serial abductors and killers of high-school girls, and they do so for their shared sexual kicks. These are the people who were watching the netball match at the start of the movie and at this point in the proceedings we’ve already seen John disposing of their previous houseguest. At their house, Evelyn engages Vikki in some friendly chit-chat about her marriage to John and about her kids from a previous relationship whom she never sees, and she pours Vikki a drink which also happens to be spiked. Vikki has just enough time to realise she’s being overpowered, dragged to a small room at the back of the house, gagged, and handcuffed to a bed before she passes out. The clock is now ticking, and Vikki has to somehow convince Evelyn that her monstrous actions are a result of John’s abuse and that it’s not too late to change, in the hope Evelyn might relent and release Vikki before the couple tire of her and dispose of her. In the meantime, John wants to play…

I almost swerved Hounds of Love. Early buzz around the picture suggested to me that it might be an exercise in torture porn, and I had little desire in getting my cinematic jollies watching some poor soul being brutalised for an hour or so. I’m fine with a gore flick but it needs to be a fun ride too. Endurance tests of graphic human suffering merely for suffering’s sake is old hat for me. I’ve no interest in it. However, it would appear that writer/director Ben Young has little interest in titillating his audience with an overabundance of grue here either, because the focus of this quite remarkable debut feature – based loosely upon the Moorhouse murderers David and Margaret Birnie, who abducted and raped five girls in Perth in 1986, killing four of them – isn’t on the acts of barbarism perpetrated directly upon Vikki’s person, the vast majority of which happens mercifully just off-camera with the blanks filled in by our own horror-stricken, reeling minds. The focus is on Vikki, the victim; on John, the monster; and most of all on Evelyn, who has become a monster under the yoke of John’s years of psychological abuse towards her. Outside of the murderous sex-crazed hell he’s created in his home, John is a weak man, mocked and dismissed by his peers. When a neighbour hears Vikki scream for help, he has Evelyn deal with it even though the neighbour is shouting for John to come to the door, mistakenly assuming it was Evelyn screaming for help in the midst of what must be yet another domestic.

But why does Evelyn go to the lengths to which she does for John? Well, she’s not very bright, she’s deeply insecure and she’s somewhat smitten by John, who has used all of this to manipulate her to such a degree that she is not only prepared but willing to commit unspeakable atrocities in the name of their relationship. John has convinced her that this is all about them when it’s clearly about him. Vikki, assaulted both by the couple and by John on his own in Evelyn’s absence understands this and knows that convincing Evelyn is the only hope she has of escaping this, which won’t be easy since Evelyn’s reaction to John’s treatment of her manifests as a sick jealousy of John’s attention to the girls they abduct. The more he wants to rape them, the quicker she wants to kill them. It’s these relationships between the three principal characters, brought to life with stunning conviction by Ashleigh Cummings, Stephen Curry and especially by Emma Booth as Evelyn, which makes Hounds of Love so grimly fascinating and which keeps us, the audience, bound in place throughout a movie which retains from start to finish the most palpable sense of dread I’ve experienced in years.

Hounds of Love is not a movie which will entertain you. It is not a movie you will “enjoy”. It’s likely not a movie you will want to see more than once. I’m unsure if I’ll ever choose to settle down to it a second time. But it is gripping, nerve-shredding and even grotesquely beautiful in its way; an unsettling, grounded horror told without compromise but nonetheless with great integrity, deliberation and guile, and featuring not one but three performances which will not be bettered in a film of this type this year. Strongly recommended.

Hounds of Love is released in cinemas July 7, 2017.

By Kit Ramsey.

Shot in a loose, improvisational style that makes use of current consumer-grade digital equipment, Fabienne Berthaud’s Sky (2016) is a cheap and cheerful wanderlust and love letter to new beginnings and identities that one can find in new cultures.

Chronicling the tumultuous but never overwhelmingly depressing life of French tourist turned traveller Romy (Diane Kruger), the story consists of one woman’s journey of self-discovery following the dissolution of her holiday (and marriage) with her husband (Gilles Lellouche) along the Mexican/Californian border region.

As previously stated, this film has a distinctly loose quality to it, especially in the narrative. There’s no particular direction or structure that Romy’s life takes following her decision to head out on her own, instead a series of characters and settings play in the background as Romy wanders through.

Her character feels like a ghost, drifting in and out of various lives unseen for the most part. Along the way she finds herself meeting and staying with a handful of supporting cast members, each having some impact on her life and burgeoning new identity, no matter how big or small. On the larger side of impact we meet park ranger Diego (Norman Reedus) whose rough exterior is slowly eroded by Romy. If you think that sounds cliché, it’s because it is.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFZqLV8Oxbw

Sky’s biggest issue is that for all its soul searching and moody ennui, there’s not much originality that can be wrung from it. The locales we see are fairly part and parcel of the genre: I lost count of the amount of red neon-lit roadside bars and flimsy cafe-diners we see in the film. Then Las Vegas shows up in all its glory complete with show girls and Elvis impersonators. There’s even an interlude with Native American culture, where the classic scene unfolds of a clueless outsider  shown some sort of hitherto unknown deep insight into life around a camp fire, complete with ceremonial psychoactive drink.

When the film isn’t taking detours into American Road Movie scenes (perhaps it’s meant to resemble the sight seeing holiday of which the film begins?) it’s marvellously supported by a series of excellent performances from the leads. Kruger pulls it out of the bag, having to convey everything from trauma to delirious excitement during her travels. Shout out as well to Lena Dunham who pops up in a small but sweet role as the wife of Diego’s brother. She manages to put on an excellent show of naive innocence despite most of her most famous roles being primarily self aware and neurotic.

The thing that most sticks out about Sky is that it does tell the story that it wants to tell, and does it in a way that feels very attainable from a filmmaking stand point. If nothing else, Sky’s deceptively well crafted construction feels inspiring, almost urging the watcher to get out there and make their own road film with nothing more than a DSLR. The fact that it creates a sense of wanderlust in the viewer is a great success in its own right.

3.5/5

It’s safe to say expectations weren’t optimistic when Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl launched in 2003. However, it won over audiences with its fun, frothy, swashbuckling antics, a couple stellar performances and a rousing score. Then, going the way of The Matrix sequels, Gore Verbinski shot Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End back to back, releasing them a year apart. Bigger, louder, swashbuckle’ier and way more convoluted, these sequels made for a fitting end to a franchise burning twice as bright for half as long. Jump ahead four years and On Stranger Tides failed to live up to expectations, wasting a marvellous Ian McShane as Blackbeard and Penelope Cruz, who played his daughter. But On Stranger Tides broke $1Bn at the Box Office, ensuring the further adventures of Jack Sparrow and his crew.

Six years on and another shift in directors has led us to what is the least remarkable Pirates entry to date. The narrative rehashes elements from the first film, with plot-holes a mile wide. Emotional beats are bereft of build-up, franchise mythologies are swept aside and we’re left with a big, dumb, spectacle akin to the Transformers movies. Newcomers to the series Brendan Thwaites and Kaya Scoldelario are as inoffensively handsome as Sam Claflin and Astrid Bergès-Frisbey from the previous instalment. It astounds me that Disney continue to find actors blander than Orlando Bloom and Kiera Knightley circa 2003, but here we are. As deliciously sinister as Javier Bardem can be when he’s working with the likes of Sam Mendes or The Coen Brothers, here the titular Salazar is yet another shameful waste of a superb talent, and the less said about poor David Wenham the better.

But make no mistake, it doesn’t matter how many handsome, young faces or respected actors they place in villainous roles, most people are buying the ticket for Captain Jack Sparrow. It’s amusing to think that his performance in the first instalment was considered such a risk by studio execs, but his (now) iconic look, his Keith Richards’esque drawl and penchant for rum have made the character as recognisable as any Disney princess. In the early 90s, before taking on the role of Batman a second time, Michael Keaton said he would only portray the role if he was satisfied he wasn’t just doing an “impression of Michael Keaton as Batman”. It’s taken me nearly 30 years to understand what he meant by that, but sure enough, Salazar’s Revenge features Johnny Depp doing an impression of Johnny Depp playing Captain Jack Sparrow. It’s peculiar, as if he’s just going through the motions. Elsewhere, Geoffrey Rush is practically sleepwalking as Barbosa, but Depp’s performance gives the impression that he’s forgotten how to embody the role.

It’s almost a redundancy to say the visual effects are incredible. The first two Pirates sequels marked a huge leap in CGI and it really has become impossible to notice the seams. The de-ageing of Depp (as seen in the trailer) is eerily-good but overall, I found the IMAX 3D experience to be lacking when compared to the recent Guardians of the Galaxy vol.2 or Kong: Skull Island.

A couple kinetic and giddily frantic sequences aside, the pacing is oddly languid, losing much of the spirit and energy of its predecessors. Despite being wholly critic-proof and likely to break $1Bn at the Box Office, Pirate5 of the Caribbean feels like a franchise farewell as returning characters receive closure but there’s a definite sense of everybody “going through the motions” in this dull, repetitive sequel.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge is out May 25th