Tag: Fleischer Brothers

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Joker
Folie à Deux

Director – Todd Phillips – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 138m

****1/2

Get Happy… Get Ready for the Judgement Day! Prison movie, courtroom drama, musical… the new Joker movie is something of a wild card – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 4th

The big surprise about this sequel to Joker (Todd Phillips, 2019), if indeed it is a sequel rather than another standalone film reimagining the same character, is not one but two big surprises. In no order of anything… One, it is a courtroom drama. Two, it is a musical. This is extraordinary. Less of a surprise is that, like its predecessor, it is also a character study. More of a surprise is that it completely breaks the mould as to what a comic book superhero – or, in this case, supervillain – movie might be.

Warner Bros. / DC appear to have unearthed a unique asset. DC Comics have a long tradition of alternate histories, something capitalised on in their Elseworlds imprint which have, for example, recast Batman on different occasions in as diverse roles as an historic American Civil War participant and a vampire. Thinking about such volumes in terms of the movies, such shifts of context as a musical built around a character like Joker makes perfect sense.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

IF

Director – John Krasinski – 2024 – US – Cert. U – 104m

****

A 12-year-old staying with her grandma in New York meets many imaginary friends forgotten by the adults who befriended them as children – out in UK cinemas on Friday, May 17th

This follows the time-worn children’s story template of a child whose father in hospital and is worried that they might not ever come home. In this instance, the child’s fear is grounded in her previous experience of this happening to her mother, who went into hospital and never came out.

Thus, 12-year-old Bea (Cailey Fleming) is sent to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw) in New York while her single-parent dad (John Krasinski) goes to the hospital for what he assures Bea will be a routine operation. Dad is an inveterate practical joker of a gentle sort, performing impromptu song and dance routines with his treatment drip on a stand or staging a tableau of his escape out of the window via a rope made of knotted bedsheets. As you can probably tell, director Krasinski is clearly having a lot of fun playing this role, and fortunately for us that fun translates onto the screen. As a bonus, likeable child actor Alan Kim (Minari, Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) plays the patient in a nearby ward.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

The Peasants
(Chłopi)

Directors – DK Welchman, Hugo Welchman – 2023 – Poland, Serbia, Lithuania – Cert. 15 – 114m

****1/2

A rural drama of romance, adultery and inheritance is expressed through the remarkable, foot-in-two-camps medium of live action filmmaking turned into animated painting – out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

A small rural village in the early 20th Century. Young woman Jagna Paczesiówna (Kamila Urzędowska) is in love with Antek Boryna (Robert Gulaczyk). Unfortunately, not only is Antek already married to Hanka (Sonia Mietielica), who is fed up with his philandering, but also the latter’s father Maciej (Mirosław Baka), who is the richest person in the village, is widowed and wants Jagda to marry him – against her will but in line with that of her parents, who know a good thing when they see it. Alas, after the marriage, she carries on with Antek and things slowly go from bad to worse.

It’s gripping if harrowing stuff and would probably work well enough in live action, although it might not look that dissimilar to many other period costume dramas. It can occasionally be hard to keep track of who’s who, which I suspect is down to the script, an adaptation of a 1906 novel originally written as four volumes covering one year through the seasons Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer, a trajectory also followed by the screenplay.… Read the rest