Tag: US

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Asteroid City

Director – Wes Anderson – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 104m

***

A stage play frames a tale of various characters in a 1950s US desert town, built on the site of an asteroid impact, which becomes the centre of a cover-up after an alien appears – out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 23rd

Iconoclast Anderson’s latest is being sold as one thing by its trailer, when it’s actually something else. And watching the film, that something else completely threw me. What we are being sold via the standard letterboxed movie framed image is, a 1950s family trapped in the town of Asteroid City, USA when their car irreparably breaks down, then the entire (not very large) population including visitors imprisoned there following an incident with an extra-terrestrial spaceship and an alien. The overall tone is of whimsy, but maybe there’s something unsettling and disturbing about it too.

Anderson’s movies have never been about photorealism as much as artifice, which is part of their undeniable charm. Perhaps that’s even more true of Asteroid City than most. The costumes, the production design, have gone for a very particular, stylized look. This is fifties American desert romanticised into pastel-shaded eye candy, and if all that were required of going to a movie were to sit down in your seat and soak up the scenery, then provided you’re not the type to insist on photo-representational accuracy, this would be a winner hands down.… Read the rest

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Memories To Choke On,
Drinks
To Wash Them Down
(Ye Heung,
Yuen Yeung,
Sham Shui Po,
夜香・鴛鴦・深水埗)

Directors – Leung Ming Kai, Kate Reilly – 2019 – Hong Kong – Cert. N/C 15+ – 77m

**1/2

Four stories from contemporary Hong Kong comprise three dramas and a closing documentary segment – plays Focus Hong Kong 2023 on Saturday, June 24th at 3.30pm

An anthology of four stories from contemporary Hong Kong – three fiction and one documentary – showing the city’s diversity: Forbidden City, Toy Stories, Yuen Yeung and It’s Not Going To Be Fun.

Forbidden City features an old lady (Leong Cheok-mei) and her immigrant carer (Mia Mungil). The first time ‘grandma’ mentions that her son is now a big shot but used – as the not quite right subs put it –to scratch his wee-wee when he was young, it’s funny. The second and third times, it becomes obvious she has dementia and keeps repeating the same phrases over and over. Mia initially refuses to accompany her charge to a reunion in town, but after taking a video of the old lady swearing that she won’t take her carer to her son’s office (“if I do that he’ll fire me,” the carer says), she agrees to accompany her on the bus into town.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Inland Empire

Director – David Lynch – 2006 – US – Cert. 15 – 180m

*****, *, or somewhere in between

Immersing herself in the role she plays in the movie she’s currently shooting, an actress loses herself in it as she becomes increasingly divorced from reality – 4K remaster is out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th then Blu-ray / DVD on Monday, June 19th

I first watched this when it came out in 2007. I wasn’t sure what to make of it then and, revisiting it for the first time in roughly a decade and a half, I’m still not sure what to make of it now. It’s a Hollywood film in the sense that Lynch is highly respected in Hollywood, yet it’s not a Hollywood film in the sense that it steadfastly refuses to play by any rules other than Lynch’s own – and whatever those rules are, they are almost certainly made to be broken.

To attempt to impose a plot on the film is probably a mistake. Most commercially produced movies have a script, characters, a plot and can be judged on their narrative coherence, technical expertise and the actor’s performances. Technical expertise may be a good place to start.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Flash

Director – Andy Muschietti – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 144m

*****

Tormented by the death of his mother, The Flash goes back in time to try and save her – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, June 14th

Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) is running late for work again. The girl that usually makes his special sandwich at the shop near his workplace isn’t in today, so instead he has to deal with someone who needs to be talked through the order. On top of that, he gets a call from Alfred (Jeremy Irons) at the Batcave because no other Justice League superhero is available: could The Flash please attend to rescuing staff and patients from the explosives-rigged Gotham City Hospital?

So he races over there and while Batman (Ben Affleck) pursues criminals on the Batbike. Barry / The Flash, a superhero with the ability to move at incredible speed, saves falling babies and their ward sister from a collapsing, high-rise, maternity ward. The pursuit is mostly over when Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) turns up at a fight on at a bridge to save the day and wield the Lasso of Truth.

Barry has parental issues: specifically, he is trying to get his wrongly convicted father Henry (Ron Livingstone) exonerated for the crime of killing Barry’s mother (Maribel Verdú from Pan’s Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro, 2006; Y Tu Mamá También, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001) in their home when, as he claims, he was out buying a can of tomatoes at the time.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

John Wick
Chapter 4

Director – Chad Stahelski – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 169m

** The first hour or so.

***** The last hour and a half or so.

The eponymous assassin is given a path to follow that will rid him and others of his obligations to shadowy organisation The High Table once and for all – available in Collector’s Editions, Steelbook, 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD from Monday, June 12th

The fourth episode in the John Wick franchise is not a film to come to without seeing the previous three first – and in the recent past, so they’re fresh in your memory. That was the mistake this reviewer made. Too much in the first hour or so refers back to what has gone before. Characters wander through vast urban or other sets (there’s an early sequence in the open North African desert) often spouting ponderous dialogue.

This works if you have an actor of the calibre of Ian McShane, who plays Winston, the deferential owner of the New York Continental Hotel, and, perhaps surprisingly, it also works with the franchise’s action star Keanu Reeves, who has got the delivery of grunts and one word dialogue lines (“yeah”) down to a fine art.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Champions

Director – Bobby Farrelly – 2022 – US – Cert. 12a – 124m

****

A disgraced basketball coach is sentenced to community service coaching a team of people with learning difficulties – out on Blu-ray and DVD on Monday, June 12th

After spending the night with less than impressed, fortysomething, one night Tinder partner Alex (Kaitlin Olsen), assistant American football coach Marcus (Woody Harrelson) vocalises his strategy disagreement with his coach boss Peretti (Ernie Hudson from Ghostbusters) during a match on the sidelines with national TV cameras watching. Later, drunk driving and full of himself, he drives into the back of a police car. His lawyer (Mike Smith) assures Marcus he’ll be fine in court until his brief reveals the judge to be the notorious Hanging Mary (Alexandra Castillo). Despite almost talking himself into a jail sentence, Marcus is given 90 days community service.

His service consists of coaching The Friends, a team of people with learning difficulties run by Julio (Cheech Marin). There is one brilliant player on the team, Darius (Joshua Felder), who was set for basketball stardom prior to being hit by a drunk driver’s car. His immediate reaction when Marcus enters the gym is, he won’t play for him.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Reality

Director – Tina Satter – 2023 – US – Cert. 12a – 83m

*****

A young woman working in US security services is questioned in her home by two FBI interrogators who believe she’s leaked classified documents to The Intercept – out in UK and Irish cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

This film is based on a true story. That commonly used phrase can encompass everything from attempts at verisimilitude through to extreme misrepresentation. This film, however, is something different from most films bearing that legend.

The true story on which this film is based is an interview of a woman by two FBI agents. That organisation’s protocols dictate that such incidents, planned ahead of their execution, must be recorded in transcription form. So the film is not based on the incident so much as it is based on the official transcript of it. That includes not only the verbal words, but also pauses or gaps on the parts of those speaking them.

Writer-director Satter was hooked by the transcript and has already turned it into the critically acclaimed Broadway play Is This A Room. Theatre and cinema, while they often share certain elements, are essentially two different media; a successful play has an immediate attraction to movie producers who believe its proven theatrical track record will sell cinema tickets, yet the cinema is littered with stagebound adaptation of plays which worked far better on stage than screen.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

The Boogeyman

Director – Rob Savage – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m

*** 1/2

Two sisters recently bereaved of their mother start to imagine something nasty waiting for them in the darkness of night – Stephen King adaptation is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd

An uninvited man Lester Billings (David Dalmachian) turns up at the home-based office of therapist Will Harper (Chris Messina) wanting to talk. His family died, and he is suspected of murdering them… but, he claims, it wasn’t him who did it. Harper has recently lost his wife, so it’s inevitable that Billings’ story will resonate with him. While Harper excuses himself to covertly call the police, Billings starts wandering round the home in which Harper lives with his two daughters – the teenage Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and the much younger Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair).

The scene in the office is the Stephen King short story (published in his Night Shift collection) and only a small part of the movie. It is, however, a highly significant part – the incident that sparks everything else off. Billings claims his family was slain by a hideous monster, and the impressionable Sawyer is at the age of childhood where she imagines monsters lurking in the closet or hiding beneath the bed.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Reality

Interrogating the text

Reality
Directed by Tina Satter
Certificate 12a, 83 minutes
Released 2 June

A film named after not, as you might imagine, a state of truth, but a young woman, the main protagonist Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney). She works in a US security facility, translating documents from Farsi to English. The room in which she works separates its workers into cubicles with dual computer screens and workstations. TVs on the wall constantly play Fox News.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction. This is not one of those ‘based on a true story’ movies; it actually is a true story in that the dialogue (along with the pauses within it) is lifted from the FBI transcript of the real life interrogation of the real life Reality Winner.

So, the actors take the words, pauses and so forth, and… [Read the rest in Reform magazine]

Reality is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, June 2nd.

Read my review at Reform magazine.

Read my alternative review for this site.

Trailer:

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Master Gardener

Director – Paul Schrader – 2022 – US – Cert. 15 – 107m

****

Order and chaos. A man works bringing horticultural order to his employer’s garden estate, but the disorder of his past threatens to catch up with him and wreak havoc upon it

Or. A man engaged in sexual relations with his female employer becomes involved with her grandniece, to whom his employer may one day leave her inheritance

Or. A man orders his employer’s garden estate until she ejects him for sleeping with her grandniece, leaving the pair to survive in the tough world beyond – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 26th

This appears to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it concerns a man (the central character, the eponymous master gardener) imposing order, but he is a man coming from chaos and at some point that chaos may undo what he has achieved there. On the other, it concerns two women – one his monied, controlling, matriarchal employer, the other her grandniece, from the wrong side of the tracks, who the employer wants to learn the business. The man is initially the lover of the first and, later, becomes the lover of the second, for which the first fires him.… Read the rest