Directed by: James Franco
Written by: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber
Starring: James Franco, Dave Franco
IMDb Link
The Room (2003) is one of the greatest terrible films, a textbook example of how not to make a film, and the maker's of The Disaster Artist love it.
*
The Disaster Artist follows the story of Tommy Wiseau (James Franco) and the making of The Room, largely from the perspective of Greg Sestero (Dave Franco). It's intriguing, and almost too bizarre to be true. We are introduced to Wiseau's oddities and mysteires one at a time alongside Sestero; the seemingly endless supply of money, the indecipherable accent, the jealous behaviour and seemingly delusional perspective. The film goes a long way to simply express these as factors of who Tommy is, and while there's an exasperated comedic tone to it, it's not an attempt at the expense of Wiseau so much as it is that trying to acknowledge the existence of this seemingly impossible man creates a sense of shocked humour. The film works in the same earnest of expressing Wiseau and Sestero's journey as Wiseau did in making The Room; the difference is that Franco is a talented filmmaker.
That's not just behind the camera either: Franco becomes Wiseau in his performances, mimicking his mannerisms, his speech patterns, his accents, all to near perfection. It's easy to see the slight imperfections in re-enacting scenes from The Room, "I did naaaht" felt notably overdone for example, but otherwise as Wiseau, Franco is Wiseau. Everyone else gives a strong performance too; Dave Franco isn't a perfect copy of Greg Sestero, but as a performance he carries strong emotional growth as he expresses Sestero's own journey as an actor. A personal favourite was Ari Graynor as Juliette, the woman who played Lisa: in the final moments of the movie, the audience is treated to re-creations of scenes from The Room played side by side with the actual scenes from The Room, and in every one them, Graynor's timing, voice, movement, expression, are all mimicked absolutely perfectly, sounding like listening to the movie in stereo.
Beyond being about the making of The Room and the journey Wiseau and Sestero went on, the film importantly gives context to the whole experience, showing us the struggles of Wiseau and Sestero as they try to make it in show business, and the odd fondness Wiseau has for Sestero, what ultimately drives them to make the movie and persevere through rejection. It's a nice touch to the movie that makes the whole thing just a little more approachable, despite Wiseau's seemingly alien experience, and reinforces the events of the movie over an over. It's baffling that The Room was even made, but everything here gives meaningful explanation.
The Short Version: The Disaster Artist is a loving and well-crafted tribute to the best worst movie ever made and the people who made it, and James Franco embodies Tommy Wiseau in one of the best performances of the year.. This is best seen with the context of The Room, but even without that it's still a thoughtful discussion on the meaning of success and how it drives us. Highly recommended.
Rating: 8/10
Published December 1st, 2017
Thursday, 30 November 2017
Tuesday, 21 November 2017
2017 Film Review: The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017)
Directed by: Yorgos Lanthimos
Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Fillipou
Starring: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan
IMDb Link
A minor key to knock you off your game. Deadpan performances that never fail to make you uneasy. A conceit that demands to be taken both seriously and not. A camera that keeps you constantly shifting your eyes and your head. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is absurdism at its most uncomfortable, succeeding almost exactly as it sets out to do, and gets better the longer it is left to settle on you; it is also incredibly difficult to grapple with
*
Steven Murphy (Farrell) is a surgeon, a husband and a father. When a patient dies under his knife, he attempts to comfort the son (Keoghan) in any way that he can, meeting with him and giving him presents. However, it is not enough for the boy, who only sees restitution in Steven losing something of equal value.
The film is unsettling from the beginning, and only gets more so as the film carries on. Its beginnings are that of an incredibly dark comedy, but a very specific moment changes everything and the whole tone of the film becomes that much more threatening. At the same time, a purposeful disconnect between the characters and the audience complicate the emotions of the film further, making the whole experience something you don't want to be involved in but can't look away from. It leaves you in a relatively consistent state of unease, as the film crescendos in ways that eek shaky laughs and evoke literal Old Testament imagery.
This is in large part due to the performances. Farrell, Kidman and Keoghan all offer extremely stiff, almost reptilian cold performances that restrain almost all emotion and reinforce the strange world they live in. Keoghan in particular is absolutely horrifying, so alien in his mannerisms and perspective that his every action and eventually even his presence cause you to recoil.
The direction is undoubtedly a consideration here as well. Lanthimos evokes a similar but more sinister feel to his previous work The Lobster (2015), but even without that context it's not difficult to see that every surreal or absurd moment is meticulous and intentional in its placement, as are the moments where he employs realistic technique, which when laid alongside the film's much more consistent absurdity feels in itself absurd. His constant use of shots that never connect at eye level, gliding overhead shots, sneaky ground-level shots, tilted and unfocused shots and edits that play with time and distort reality, all work in aid of the film's absurd goals and reinforce a sense of lack of control in the film's situation, that the "God" of this movie sees fit to predestine its ending.
My Take: The Killing of a Sacred Deer is exactly as absurd as it intends to be, every moment as confusingly unsettling as you would expect just from its name alone. It is often brilliant in craft and story, and for those that can stomach unease for two hours it's absolutely worth the watch. That said, its greatest strength makes it difficult for me to think of a person who I'd recommend it to.
Rating: 7.5/10
Published November 21st, 2017
Written by: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthymis Fillipou
Starring: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Barry Keoghan
IMDb Link
A minor key to knock you off your game. Deadpan performances that never fail to make you uneasy. A conceit that demands to be taken both seriously and not. A camera that keeps you constantly shifting your eyes and your head. The Killing of a Sacred Deer is absurdism at its most uncomfortable, succeeding almost exactly as it sets out to do, and gets better the longer it is left to settle on you; it is also incredibly difficult to grapple with
*
Steven Murphy (Farrell) is a surgeon, a husband and a father. When a patient dies under his knife, he attempts to comfort the son (Keoghan) in any way that he can, meeting with him and giving him presents. However, it is not enough for the boy, who only sees restitution in Steven losing something of equal value.
The film is unsettling from the beginning, and only gets more so as the film carries on. Its beginnings are that of an incredibly dark comedy, but a very specific moment changes everything and the whole tone of the film becomes that much more threatening. At the same time, a purposeful disconnect between the characters and the audience complicate the emotions of the film further, making the whole experience something you don't want to be involved in but can't look away from. It leaves you in a relatively consistent state of unease, as the film crescendos in ways that eek shaky laughs and evoke literal Old Testament imagery.
This is in large part due to the performances. Farrell, Kidman and Keoghan all offer extremely stiff, almost reptilian cold performances that restrain almost all emotion and reinforce the strange world they live in. Keoghan in particular is absolutely horrifying, so alien in his mannerisms and perspective that his every action and eventually even his presence cause you to recoil.
The direction is undoubtedly a consideration here as well. Lanthimos evokes a similar but more sinister feel to his previous work The Lobster (2015), but even without that context it's not difficult to see that every surreal or absurd moment is meticulous and intentional in its placement, as are the moments where he employs realistic technique, which when laid alongside the film's much more consistent absurdity feels in itself absurd. His constant use of shots that never connect at eye level, gliding overhead shots, sneaky ground-level shots, tilted and unfocused shots and edits that play with time and distort reality, all work in aid of the film's absurd goals and reinforce a sense of lack of control in the film's situation, that the "God" of this movie sees fit to predestine its ending.
My Take: The Killing of a Sacred Deer is exactly as absurd as it intends to be, every moment as confusingly unsettling as you would expect just from its name alone. It is often brilliant in craft and story, and for those that can stomach unease for two hours it's absolutely worth the watch. That said, its greatest strength makes it difficult for me to think of a person who I'd recommend it to.
Rating: 7.5/10
Published November 21st, 2017
Thursday, 16 November 2017
2017 Film Review: Justice League (2017)
Directed by: Zack Snyder
Written by: Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill
IMDb Link
This is exactly what you'd expect from a series that is built upon the shakiest of foundations in Batman v Superman. Wonder Woman was the anomaly here, not a new trend.
Justice League tries so hard to 'correct' everything that was wrong with Batman vs Superman and spends so much time setting up future movies that it doesn't take the time to actually be a movie itself. This experience is nothing, just a raw two hours of failing to try that's only held up by some decent spectacle and one or two intriguing characters.
*
I'd warn spoilers, but there's really nothing to spoil, as the plot is cookie-cutter at best; a super powerful bad guy shows up with unclear motivations beyond "destroy Earth, become a god", so Batman gathers some superheroes and forms the Justice League to combat him. As an ensemble piece, the focus should be on character interactions, but the characters are so poorly defined that there's very little to get from that either. Affleck's Batman just doesn't want to be there and plays completely differently to how he was in Batman v Superman, Gadot's Wonder Woman is still the best thing about the series and the one shining light in this mostly dismal movie, Jason Momoa's Aquaman has no screen presence and feels utterly useless when Wonder Woman and Superman exist, Ezra Miller's Flash flits between charming and insufferable, and Ray Fisher's Cyborg is the only other interesting character in the movie besides Wonder Woman, and is held back by his incredibly poorly CGI-ed body.
Unfortunately, the bad CGI doesn't stop there; just about everything effects-based in this movie looks disgustingly cheap and fake for a movie with a $300 million budget, which is also a reason that this is a notable problem with the movie. Everything from Cyborg's body to the Parademons looks unfinished and rushed, never meshing with the world and harming the visual experience on the whole.
The thing that makes this all fall that much harder is the way the movie tries to backpedal on everything that was done in Batman v Superman while also relying on the movie to exist. So much of Justice League requires Batman v Superman to exist, yet it's so sure of its predecessor's mistakes that a lot of the film is a complete turnaround for the characters; Batman is suddenly murmuring awkward quips to himself and being generally useless, and when Superman comes back they essentially use the opportunity of his resurrection to make him behave more like the Christopher Reeve version. The corny, jokey tone exists within a film that us still very much the dark Snyder vision, and as such the film simply does not fit together at all. There's pieces of better movies here, but the whole film is just a Frankenstein's Monster of ideas and goals sewn together by a love of money.
The Verdict: Justice League is a complete mess from start to finish; everything from the tone to the characters to the music to the plot to the effects just don't fit together as a whole, as the movie flails about unsure of its goals and intentions. Don't bother seeing it; somehow a movie about the Justice League does nothing more than try to correct the mistakes of its predecessor.
Rating: 4/10
Published November 16th, 2017
Written by: Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio, Joss Whedon
Starring: Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Henry Cavill
IMDb Link
This is exactly what you'd expect from a series that is built upon the shakiest of foundations in Batman v Superman. Wonder Woman was the anomaly here, not a new trend.
Justice League tries so hard to 'correct' everything that was wrong with Batman vs Superman and spends so much time setting up future movies that it doesn't take the time to actually be a movie itself. This experience is nothing, just a raw two hours of failing to try that's only held up by some decent spectacle and one or two intriguing characters.
*
I'd warn spoilers, but there's really nothing to spoil, as the plot is cookie-cutter at best; a super powerful bad guy shows up with unclear motivations beyond "destroy Earth, become a god", so Batman gathers some superheroes and forms the Justice League to combat him. As an ensemble piece, the focus should be on character interactions, but the characters are so poorly defined that there's very little to get from that either. Affleck's Batman just doesn't want to be there and plays completely differently to how he was in Batman v Superman, Gadot's Wonder Woman is still the best thing about the series and the one shining light in this mostly dismal movie, Jason Momoa's Aquaman has no screen presence and feels utterly useless when Wonder Woman and Superman exist, Ezra Miller's Flash flits between charming and insufferable, and Ray Fisher's Cyborg is the only other interesting character in the movie besides Wonder Woman, and is held back by his incredibly poorly CGI-ed body.
Unfortunately, the bad CGI doesn't stop there; just about everything effects-based in this movie looks disgustingly cheap and fake for a movie with a $300 million budget, which is also a reason that this is a notable problem with the movie. Everything from Cyborg's body to the Parademons looks unfinished and rushed, never meshing with the world and harming the visual experience on the whole.
The thing that makes this all fall that much harder is the way the movie tries to backpedal on everything that was done in Batman v Superman while also relying on the movie to exist. So much of Justice League requires Batman v Superman to exist, yet it's so sure of its predecessor's mistakes that a lot of the film is a complete turnaround for the characters; Batman is suddenly murmuring awkward quips to himself and being generally useless, and when Superman comes back they essentially use the opportunity of his resurrection to make him behave more like the Christopher Reeve version. The corny, jokey tone exists within a film that us still very much the dark Snyder vision, and as such the film simply does not fit together at all. There's pieces of better movies here, but the whole film is just a Frankenstein's Monster of ideas and goals sewn together by a love of money.
The Verdict: Justice League is a complete mess from start to finish; everything from the tone to the characters to the music to the plot to the effects just don't fit together as a whole, as the movie flails about unsure of its goals and intentions. Don't bother seeing it; somehow a movie about the Justice League does nothing more than try to correct the mistakes of its predecessor.
Rating: 4/10
Published November 16th, 2017
Wednesday, 8 November 2017
2017 Film Review: Murder on the Orient Express (2017)
Directed by: Kenneth Branagh
Written by: Michael Green
Starring: Kenneth Branagh, Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer
It's a book that made a name for itself with its famous mystery and has already been filmed a number of times; what can Kenneth Branagh bring to the table?
Well, apart from a glorious mustache that I was tempted to emulate the moment I saw it, nothing particularly new. The film has the usual Branagh charm of attempting to make things as faithful as possible to expectations in terms of storytelling but using the medium of film in his own way to affect the story's tone and style, but so much of that is dependent on the work he adapts and the new ways he can do things, as well as audience familiarity. His adaptation of Shakespeare's Henry V was fantastic because the writing his film was based on is, well, Shakespeare, and he did something with the medium of film that was far more than simply filming the play. His version of Thor was far less good; his direction fine, but adapting from a convoluted story originally intended for children, and far too intent on making it look and feel like a comic book without altering the fact that the lore is too much, even for a comic. Murder on the Orient Express adheres to its source, but sometimes so much so that, aside from giving the ensemble a chance to chew the scenery and fawn over the excellent update of the production design, there's not a lot to get out of it.
For those unfamiliar, Murder on the Orient Express is originally an Agatha Christie detective novel following Hercule Poirot, here played by Branagh. While on holiday he travels on the Orient Express to get between cases, but of course there's no rest for the weary Poirot, as during the train's journey, someone is murdered in the night.
Branagh's direction makes great use of the train set to emphasise the tight, claustrophobic nature of the whole affair and the two-faced deception of the suspects. Conversations are often shot through snowed or crystal windows that obscure them in some way, and shots from the top of the set show just how tightly packed everyone is; Branagh has always had a terrific sense of blocking, and every character's position seems deliberate in reinforcing the paranoia, a sense of needing to look over your shoulder but not being able to because it's too tight to turn your head. Unfortunately, this loses out when they open up to scenes outside the train, and later attempts at theatricality end up seeming more self-serious than they may have been intended; a shot of the suspects emulating the last supper gives a strange gravitas that doesn't quite fit. That said, it's still pretty to look at.
Speaking of pretty, the production and set design on this film is gorgeous, and Branagh knows it. An often gratuitous amount of time is spent proudly examining the aesthetics of the film, and deservedly so. Everything from the neatly prepared desserts and bottles of champagne in ice to every detail of the train itself looks slick and somewhat saturated for emphasis. From a purely design standpoint, this movie is fantastic to take in.
The acting is all decent as well. There's so many in this ensemble that nobody gets a real chance to flesh out their character, but everyone gives a respectable performance that suits the initial tone the movie sets, with enough personality to carry each of their scenes. The exception of course is Branagh as Poirot with most of the screentime to play with. He's such a strong English orator that it's a stark contrast to see him playing a soft-spoken Frenchman, and his natural screen presence sometimes betrays his attempt at a softer performance, but it's a convincing Poirot nonetheless.
Verdict: Branagh's stylised direction and everyone's effective performances keep this movie entertaining, even though the former ultimately sets too self-serious a tone as the film comes to a climax. The production design and costuming are almost sublime to look at, but their sheen can't hide the fact that knowing the twist mutes the overall experience, and while the lack of meaningful deviation makes for a good homage it leaves little to get out of it that you couldn't already from previous adaptations or the book itself. If you know the story, you're in for a slick modernisation that doesn't break any new ground. If you don't, it's an intriguing murder-mystery with some moral quandary and a big cast. It's worth seeing, just.
Rating: 6.5/10
Published November 9th, 2017
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