Category: REVIEWS

Providing a window into a scene at a breakfast table, Something Blue documents a stilted conversation between a man and a woman without elaborating on the woes that have befallen them. From the dialogue and performances, we are to ascertain that this is a couple attempting to heal from a crisis, although it is the spaces between the words and the merest hint of turmoil in their speech that prove more telling than their seemingly mundane tête-à-tête.

Shot with a confident restraint, there are several key moments in which a character glances directly into camera, anchoring the viewer into scene. We are participants in the narrative, perhaps sat with this pair in the kitchen, making the melancholic underpinning all the more poignant. Each close up and shift in focus drawing us closer to both the man (Ric Law) and the woman (Pippa Winslow). The lilting score provides the merest hint of scar tissue over the couple’s unspoken troubles, doing so with subtlety and nuance.

Despite the seven-minute runtime, writer/director Joe Johnson manages to convey a significant amount of anguish and underlying emotion. Something Blue feels personal and private, getting to the core of a familial drama and holding the audience’s attention, leaving us to draw our own conclusions on the husband, the wife, their relationship and (perhaps) troubled history.

A wealthy woman employs a writer and his producer partner to turn her daughter into the next Taylor Swift in this thriller from debut writer-director Luke Pennington. But as the hit men’s true intentions become apparent, events take a dark and drug-fuelled turn for the worst.

The film feels exactly like the kind of thing you’d expect from someone fresh out of film school – a tired jumble of Tarantino shtick and Coens’ caper. And like Tarantino, Pennington also seems partial to a gurning turn in front of the camera, playing coked-up and prattling pop producer Marty Vie.

Warning signs start early as the characters are introduced with biographies that have literally been scribbled down on post-it notes and thrown at the wall. As we’re then thrust into the first meeting between the parties, it’s never explained why the woman and her daughter – who already have a fair amount of money and a song that’s “the sixth most downloaded in the world right now” – would need to employ the services of these two shambolic shysters conducting their business out of a grotty ground floor flat.

From there, we’re treated to a handful of excruciating scenes stretched out to a runtime just long enough for it to count as a feature film. Like a late-night drunk-driver, they lurch nauseatingly between sweary bouts of shouting and reams of pretentious sixth-form pseudo-philosophising over mass media and consumer culture.

Yet there are elements of the film that aren’t entirely without merit; the ironically-monikered Happy Anderson makes the best of his writer character Charlie Wolczek – basically a depressed version of The Dude – while the opening long take provides a far more engaging and enticing introduction than anything in the script. Unfortunately, rare moments of competent cinematography are blighted by a truly appalling sound mix.

Like the vacuous pop that its titular characters are peddling, Hit Men is just another witless and pointless imitation of some of the most imitated of filmmakers.

In Remainder the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. In this film from writer/director, Omer Fast, based on the best selling book by Tom K McCarthy reality and fantasy merge leaving the viewer to draw their own conclusion as to what really happened.

Tom (Tom Sturridge) loses his memory after he’s involved in a mysterious and unexplained accident. His whole purpose during the film is to decipher what remains and how he got to where he is.

If you don’t enjoy films containing lots of flashbacks then stop reading now. Also if you hate being shown the end of the film at the beginning then this isn’t the film for you. Remainder is, and I hesitate to even compare the two films, a very low rent version of Memento without the great plot, narrative and emotions you feel. It is glossy and there are some interesting moments but on the whole it fails to engage.

On watching what happens to the central character, my thoughts were when is this going to end. Notice, I didn’t use the word how. I felt no empathy towards any character in this film. This type of story has been told before in much more interesting ways. A film needs a plot that weaves its way throughout, it doesn’t have to be traditional but there has to be a plot, and this film doesn’t appear to have a discernible one.

Remainder was released on DVD on 24 October.