Category: REVIEWS

It’s an unseasonably cold late-May evening in Berlin and I’m sitting under a blanket in an outdoor cinema. The locals are taking deckchairs from a pile and attempting to set them up near the front. No one knows how they work. Fingers are trapped; chairs collapse. It’s like pre-feature performance art just for my entertainment.

Grüße aus Fukushima (Greetings From Fukushima) picked up a few awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, as well as being nominated for a couple at the German Film Awards 2016 . Directed by Doris Dorrie (Cherry Blossoms, 2008), with a small cast including Kaori Momoi (Memoirs of a Geisha, 2005) and Rosalie Thomass. The film is predominantly in English though chunks are in German and a little Japanese too. The screening had only German subtitles, so I missed out on the non-English dialogue, but this was no real issue, as the screenplay was strong and the actors skilled enough for their story to speak volumes.

Marie’s character, along with the rhythm and aesthetic of the film led me to conclude that it is an unintended sister film to Frances Ha (2012) (and by extension, Mistress America, 2015). It is about a young woman searching for a meaningful existence and stepping out of her comfort zone, although Thomass is more than simply another Greta Gerwig. Her acting packs a punch, and where Gerwig leans towards awkwardness, Thomass has an aggression. It is accompanied by both tears and laughter, and Dorrie is right to spin humour in with tragedy. However, the film’s supernatural element was not so strong, becoming more theatre than cinema – Dorrie should know that sometimes things are more powerful when the audience can’t see them. Though ultimately the threads do pull together, including real footage from the disaster, itself haunting and uncomfortable.

It rained slightly during the screening, but not a single person was put off. That’s proof of a completely engaging movie. Grüße aus Fukushima could slip through the net for UK audiences, so don’t let it pass you by.

The second helping in the latest movie iteration of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles; TMNT: Out of the Shadows sees our unlikely heroes take on a fight of inter-dimensional proportions as they’re forced to unite with the city of New York and reveal themselves for the first time.

TMNT has everything a fan of the turtles could want. April O’Neil, Casey Jones, Rocksteady and Beebop as well as the indomitable Shredder;there’s lots of pizza and even the odd Kawabunga for good measure. Unfortunately, the film itself isn’t worthy of its contents. TMNT: Out of the Shadows is possibly one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Having actually enjoyed the first (unlike many) I was more than willing to give this film a chance, I even hoped the consensus was horribly wrong, having seen so so many bad reviews before going in. They weren’t wrong.

TMNT: Out of the Shadows goes so far into the childish category, delving so far into the world of slapstick that TMNT feels more like a set of sketches designed to make children laugh rather than build any sort of atmosphere. There is so much cutting and changing that everything happens within a five minute window. Clearly designed for an audience with the attention span of a gnat, there is no time to build up suspense or to build any kind of 3D characters. The ‘twists are so regimented and formulaic that for the first time in years I considered leaving the cinema many many times.

There are no acting performances worth discussing in this film, but I feel I need to defend the actors in someway. It’s clear throughout that thee script,the direction, but more than likely the force of the studios and audience polls has pushed this film so far down into the toilet, not even DiCaprio could make this film look good.

I love TMNT, and I wanted to love this. Unfortunately, the only good bit about the film are the closing credits.

You can see the trailer for TMNT: Out of the Shadows below.

Italian-born UK-based director Laura Spini’s debut film You Are Whole has just been released online after screening at a wide range of film festivals from Edinburgh to Palm Springs. It is a 16 minute well-formed, visually interesting and beautifully filmed story with a great cast.

American actor Fred Melamed, (Sy Ableman in the Coen Brother’s A Serious Man) is Norman Pugg.  Spini apparently wrote the script with Melamed in mind. Using his dulcet tones and convincingly polite manner, Pugg has a list of prospective clients to visit – elderly women intriguingly named Mrs Droogkloot, Mrs Stoneshell and Mrs Catberg – all living in the same small English seaside town.  He is an astral-evangelist trying to gently flog his book: Children of the Mountain of the Star, “a Swiss-army knife of the soul”. Pugg, with his large oscilloscope, gently ambles around, seemingly undetected in the quiet village, and unaware of a murderer he appears to be following, finally ending up as the naïve suspect. With an aesthetic similar to that captured in Martin Parr’s photographs of England (www.martinparr.com), Spini has created an intriguing dark comedy.

A recent graduate of the London Film School, Spini is a writer-director-producer and editor. For more information, have a look at her site: www.lauraspini.com

Looking for other films about travelling evangelists? Check out these two:

Elmer Gantry (1960) is director Richard Brooks’ contribution, nominated for an Oscar in 1961 and featuring Burt Lancaster in the role of Gantry, a possibly saved salesman. Mixing bible verses with hard-sell, the dubious but brilliant pitch is ‘Christ in Commerce’.

The fourth feature from French director Michel Leclerc is La vie très privée de Monsieur Sim (2015) (The very private life of Mr Sim) about a lonely hobby-less man, whose wife has just left, taking their daughter with her. Sim finds a job as a travelling tooth brush salesman, moving from his empty suburban house to his company car. As he tries to revolutionise French dental health, he makes the most of the long drives to visit people and places from his past, revolutionising his own life as he goes.

By Last Caress.

“OH! OH! She don’t like that… OH! There you go… nice! Nice! Come on! OH! There you go! OHHH! There we go! She ain’t got no defence, let’s go… Ah, yeah! I told you that! Go to her, you’ll kill her! Go to her! Go to her! There you go! c’mon… there we go! Let the right hand go! C’mon… Ooohhh yeah! She ain’t seen nothing like you! She ain’t NEVER seen nothing like you! Look at that… get the belts, ‘Ress! We finish strong, ‘Ress! Ahh yeah, nice! T-REX! AH!”

T-Rex, the new documentary about boxer Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, opens on a press conference just after one of Claressa’s matches prior to London 2012, at which Claressa became the first ever Olympic gold medal winner in Women’s boxing (Middleweight). She’s unhappy. Did she lose? No. She didn’t like the score. “23?” She wonders. “I never got 23 in my life.”

“What are your usual scores?” Asks one journalist.

“30, 31,” sulks Claressa. I’m briefly reminded of “37?!” from Kevin Smith’s Clerks (1994), and silently berate myself for the inappropriateness. Still, here it is. And here too in many ways is T-Rex in microcosm: Claressa Shields, the remarkable athlete with dreams of Olympic history and the tools to make that happen versus Claressa Shields, the driven but often sullen teenage girl struggling with issues of anger, abandonment and life up to that point in the deeply troubled city of Flint, Michigan (from whence also sprang filmmaker Michael Moore of course).

We take up Claressa’s story as she’s seventeen and headed toward the Olympic Games held in London, UK in 2012, the first Olympic Games in which women’s boxing is a participating event. Her trainer Jason Crutchfield- the ullulator of the opening paragraph of this review – takes us further however, back to when he began working with Claressa when she was eleven years old. “She was catching on real quick. Real quick. I said, ‘Woah! You need to come with me! You need to come with me!’ And I just took her under my wing from there, you know.” Still, he confesses up front that he didn’t for a moment think she’d get anywhere with her ability, such as it was at the time. Not because of her lack of it, you understand; but because of his lack of belief in women’s boxing as a serious pursuit. Claressa Shields’ ability, confidence in herself and bull-headed determination to become more than her destiny dictated (“Girls get easily pregnant in Flint. My goal before boxing was to have ten kids before I was 26. Without boxing, I’m not goin’ to say where I’d be at.”) was such that she altered Jason’s perceptions as to just what she could go on to be. We hear from members of Claressa’s family but it’s this relationship which is at the heart of T-Rex. Its highs, and its lows.

As we move through the movie we hear more about the dreams of Claressa and of her family, mostly driven by Claressa’s need to try to pull herself and those closest to her out of and away from the relative Hell of Flint, a city with a per capita violent crime rate seven times higher than the U.S. national average. Claressa’s mother is an alcoholic, sweet when she’s sober but prone to violence when she’s not. Her father, in and out of prison, was rarely there. Eventually and at the insistence of Jason’s wife, Claressa moves in with them. Jason becomes the de facto parent as well as Claressa’s trainer, poring over her school grades, berating her for tardiness and absence, encouraging her where she’s earned it. How well though can he juggle being her “father” and her coach?

Directors Zackary Canepari and Drea Cooper keep themselves out of the picture – not something done by every documentarian of course – and in doing so paint an incredibly intimate picture of Claressa’s hard road to victory in London, taking in more drama along the way than most soap operas manage over a similar timespan. But they take us beyond that golden moment too: we also look at how Claressa is alarmingly unable to parlay Olympic success – Olympic history, no less – into a life which can secure her family. Is there still a stigma towards women? No? Towards black women? No? Towards black women boxers? Depressingly, it would appear so. But if T-Rex shows us nothing else, it shows us that Claressa Shields has the fortitude to effect changes to those perceptions as she marches towards a potential second gold medal in Brazil later this year. If you like your documentaries, T-Rex comes highly recommended.

T-Rex is available on Video on Demand now.

t-rexthefilm.com

Do you ever feel ridiculous as you look around the bus to see all your fellow traveller’s heads bent down with eyes fixed on their small screens. I do. Or do you ever miss real communication with people instead of the endless texts? Yep.

Written, directed and produced by Michael Henry, MUTE, is what happens when this behaviour is taken to an extreme; when only the privileged are allowed to speak.  As the title suggests, the totalitarian town, a form of autocracy in which the state has total control over its citizens, is very quiet, except for the tapping of fingers on screens as people have virtual conversations. Forced into silence by the threat of punishment or death from the dominating Spectrum Business Group, people live in constant fear. Despite this, some of them are going underground to avoid this repression, remembering a time when it was possible to talk and rediscovering their voices.

A mixture of tragedy, sadness and humour, which at times had me thinking of David Brent at The Office, MUTE  provides an interesting perspective on the current problem of the monitoring of private electronic devices and who has the right to access them. I learnt today that unless we turn a specific switch to off, Google is listening to our conversations in order to ascertain the type of advertising they’ll send our way…

Michael Henry has managed to present these real issues in a poignant way.

Have a look at www.quandaryproductions.com for your copy of MUTE.

Based in Lincoln, and founded in 2009, Quandary Productions was founded by Michael Henry, with the goal to make short and feature films, as well as encouraging aspiring filmmakers/actors/musicians/comedians and artists to push forward with their own work.