Month: November 2024

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Moana 2

Directors – David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller – 2024 – US – Cert. PG – 100m

*** 1/2

The desire to connect with the people who must surely live beyond the known horizons of her world drives Moana on a new seafaring adventure – out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th

Set three years after Moana (John Musker, Ron Clements, 2016), this features the eponymous Polynesian heroine (voiced once again by Auli’i Cravalho) not as a 16-year-old but as a 19-year-old. She has now become a wayfinder and the leader of her island people. Weirdly, perhaps, for a leader, she likes nothing better than going off into the middle of the island, accompanied by her two Disney-obligatory small animal friends Pua the pig and HeiHei the dim-witted cockerel (voice, or at least cockerel noises: Alan Tudyk), climbing to its highest point and blowing a shell in the hope that someone out in the world beyond the one she knows might respond. She wants to reach out and connect with other islander populations. Alas, she gets little more than Heihei blowing a shell a few yards away.

Following a vision in which she is visited by Tautai Vasa (voice: Gerald Faitala Ramsey), a wayfinder from a distant generation who sent out to sea and never came back, Moana and her small crew set sail for the lost island of Motufetu.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Contestant

Director – Clair Titley – 2023 – UK – Cert.12a – 90m

*****

How a man’s incarceration in a room, broadcast on TV, became a media sensation in Japan– out in UK cinemas on Friday, November 29th

Before The Truman Show (Peter Weir, 1998), which would be released later the same year, a couple of years before Big Brother and the start of the UK’s reality TV phenomenon, a Japanese TV show breaks new boundaries. A man is put in a room where he had to earn a million yen in prizes from magazine competitions before being released. The facilities are basic – there is a sink unit and a gas ring, but no cooking utensils. The whole situation is filmed by two cameras. The man in the room, Nasubi, knows it is being filmed, but has been told by the producer that most of it will be thrown away. He is completely unaware that this setup is being edited into a weekly, six-minute TV spot and going out on the weekly, magazine format, endurance TV show Denpa Shonen.

The Denpa Shonen show is the brainchild of TV producer Tsuchiya, who for this segment auditions a dozen or so male hopefuls and chooses one of them, Nasubi, by lottery.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shoulders

Director – Jamie Flatters – 2024 – UK – Cert. 15 – 101m

* or *****, depending how I’m feeling at the time

A group of soldiers armed with sticks instead of guns fight a war against an unseen enemy on open ground near some woodlands – opens the Clapham International Film Festival which runs from Wednesday, November 27th to Saturday, November 30th.

With a title that sounds like a mis-pronounciation of ‘Soldiers’, Shoulders is a pretty strange experience. Photographed, ***** SPOILER ALERT ***** apart from a couple of shots in colour ***** SPOILER ALERT ENDS *****, in at once stark and ravishing black and white, it features a visually partially diverse cast some of whom are instantly recognisable and some of whom it’s easy to confuse with one another. There is (I believe) a script, although any narrative coherence is largely lost under what feels like multiple layers of improvisation. And yet… Somehow, the whole thing coheres, at least up to a point, by virtue of its own peculiar internal logic and succeeds almost entirely on its energy and that of its various collaborators, director, cast, and crew. I’m not even sure that that logic can be adequately expressed in words.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Face/Off

Director – John Woo – 1997 – US – Cert. 18 – 138m

*****

John Woo’s third US film, his strongest to date, has FBI agent John Travolta switching faces with villain Nic Cage – part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

When screenwriters Mike Werb and Michael Colleary collaborated on original screenplay Face/Off, they had in mind such classic films as post-war gangster tale White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949)and identity change outing Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966). Only after completing an initial draft did Colleary see a John Woo movie – The Killer (1989) – at which point he immediately knew the pair had found the perfect director for their material.

This was clearly reciprocal – if Woo had already astounded Hong Kong audiences with A Better Tomorrow (1986) and crossed over internationally with The Killer and Hard Boiled (1992), he had yet to win comparable critical acclaim in America, even though his modest budget American debut Hard Target (1993) had had its admirers and his first blockbusting actioner Broken Arrow (1996) had impressed Hollywood with its box office.

These films both felt like the work of a director for hire not an auteur, and while Woo, like numerous Hollywood immigrants before him, could probably have continued in similar vein, the Face/Off script contained exactly the elements the director needed to take up in Hollywood where he’d left off in Hong Kong.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Broken Arrow
(1996)

Director – John Woo – 1996 – US – Cert. 15 – 108m

***

Woo’s second US outing pits Christian Slater against nuclear stealth bomber co-pilot turned bad John Travolta in the Arizona desert – part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

The first project to see the light of day from WCG Entertainment, whose initials stand for Woo Chang Godsick. This triumvirate of names belongs to respectively the director of A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), and Hard Boiled (1992), his longstanding Hong Kong producer Terence Chang, and former agent Christopher Godsick – whose William Morris client list had included Woo himself and the director’s onscreen alter-ego Chow Yun‑fat.

Like his earlier successful action blockbuster Speed (Jan de Bont, 1991), Graham Yost’s script was initially written for producer Mark Gordon. After Woo’s more modestly budgeted US debut Hard Target (1993) was followed by disappointing setbacks on other American projects; Yost’s screenplay was exactly the entry into the US blockbuster market Woo needed. While the resultant film may be ultimately less satisfying than Woo’s best work, it quickly established him as a top Hollywood A-list director.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Hard Target

Director – John Woo – 1993 – US – Cert. 18 – 100m (UK version), 86m (US version)

****

John Woo’s US debut is a New Orleans remake of The Most Dangerous Game with action star Jean-Claude Van Damme – part of Art of Action, a major UK-wide season celebrating the artistry of real action choreography at cinemas across the UK October-November 2024

Essentially the first of two remakes of The Most Dangerous Game / The Hounds Of Zaroff (Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, 1932, shot using the same cast, crew and jungle sets as King Kong, (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933) – the second being Surviving The Game (Ernest R. Dickinson, 1994) – this updates the original’s remote island to the urban jungle of and countryside surrounding New Orleans, making its mad game hunter (Lance Henriksen taking on the role originally played by Leslie Banks) prey not on lost seafarers but unemployed down and outs on dry land.

In true New Right nineties spirit, the hunter of humans has now graduated from being merely a gratifying personal sport for deranged psychopaths to a lucrative business attracting high rolling, thrill-seeking clients who get to pull the trigger themselves.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Tallinn Critics’ Picks selection: Searching for vanishing corpses and disappeared people

I, the Song - Critics' Picks Best Director

Jeremy Clarke looks back at this year’s Critics’ Picks and finds some unsettling, recurring themes

Let’s Talk about the Weather

This PÖFF is going to be remembered by those of us at DMovies as the year when the weather we left behind us in the UK was colder and more wintry than the weather in Tallinn, where the average seemed to be between five and minus one degrees, very mild for this time of year. I’m checking the weather forecast over there as I write from the UK, to see that it is warmer still this week, and up to seven degrees tomorrow. Global warming is real, people.

The warmer weather had a strange effect on the festival’s annual tram party – basically, you are marshalled around and ushered onto a tram in subzero conditions, and then on the tram you drink lots of vodka to warm up. On this year, no subzero conditions as it was much warmer, so the vodka didn’t need to be consumed in massive quantities in quite the same way, so I stuck mostly to the alternative, very pleasant, local alcoholic beverage and consumed a ridiculous amount of gherkins (the only food on offer but one to which I’m extremely partial).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

I, the Song

Director – Dechen Roder – 2024 – Bhutan, Norway, Italy, France – 112m

*****

A woman fired from her teacher’s job for appearing in an online sex video she claims is of someone else sets out to find her doppelgänger and clear her name – winner of Best Director in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

This starts off deceptively with singing children’s voices, cutting into accompanying images of a school play with the children costumed as various types of flowers. The camera moves slowly to the back of the school hall where watching teacher Nima (Tandin Bidha) is told she is urgently needed in the office of the principal (Kezang Dorjee aka Kazee), where she finds herself being fired because of the video, now widely seen online, in which she appears. She protests that the person in the video isn’t her, but the principal says he can’t have her seen on school premises with so many parents about today.

She phones her boyfriend Penjor (Dorji Wangdi), who is in the middle of a gig hosting traditional Bhutanese folk plays. She goes to see him. His reaction is, “so, I’m not the only person who thinks it’s you.”… Read the rest

Categories
Art Features Live Action Movies

Nobody Likes Me
(Nikdo Mne Nemá Rád)

Directors – Petr Kazda, Tomáš Weinreb – 2024 – Czechia, Slovakia, France – 105m
*****

The female gaze. An introvert woman finds love in an unlikely place where, it turns out, there are catches – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

A figure stands in interior darkness. Watching. She moves forward. She lies down on the bed. She sits up. She makes and eats a simple breakfast. She stands on a moving tram; the brown autumn leaves behind her. At her desk, wearing her military uniform, Sarah (Rebeka Poláková) details to the Commander his itinerary for the day, and fields requests from others for his attention. She seems content in her work.

One evening, Sarah sees a woman across the street in physical difficulty. Perhaps she should help but, frozen on the spot, she stares. The woman starts to throw up – presumably she’s had too much to drink. A man appears from nowhere and comes to the woman’s aid. Sarah can’t take her eyes off him. The female gaze. He looks back at her. She looks back at him.

She gets on well with her dad, a doctor, who she regularly visits at his surgery for health check-ups.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Body
(2024)
(Il Corpo)

Director – Vincenzo Alfieri – 2024 – Italy – 115m

*****

The body of a rich industrialist’s wife vanishes from the morgue after her death – stylish giallo premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 28th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

An unashamed genre piece, The Body is a giallo – an Italian crime and murder mystery named after the yellow book covers of their literary equivalents. While it absolutely fits into that very specific Italian genre, it’s actually the fourth remake of Spanish murder mystery The Body (Oriol Paulo, 2012) following remakes in India (twice, as Game, A.M.R. Ramesh, 2016 and The Body, Jeethu Joseph, 2019) and South Korea (The Vanished, Lee Chang-hee, 2018).

The current version juxtaposes stock elements from gialli and popular fiction with some highly original ideas which may or may not have been used in the earlier versions as yet unseen by this writer. The stock elements include: the womaniser suspected of murdering his wife, the hard-bitten inspector investigating the case, the man who has married into wealth, and the university professor having an affair with a student. The highly original ideas: a man running out in front of a car, a corpse disappearing from a morgue, and a married woman who is also a practical joker.… Read the rest