I don’t get to see every single thing when it comes out, and
even when I do see something during its initial release, I don’t always have
enough to say about it that warrants a full review. To remedy this, I’ve
compiled a collection of short reviews of films that, for whatever reason, I
never got to the first time around. If you want to see some mini reviews from
the first half of the year, you can check them out here.
Okja
This Netflix exclusive, courtesy of Bong Joon-Ho, director
of The Host (this one, not that one) and Snowpiercer, is a simple story about a
girl and her pig/hippo/manatee/thing. An agricultural mega-corporation has bred
a new species of super pig as a new food source, and as a publicity stunt,
they’ve sent piglets to different farms around the world to determine which
country’s husbandry methods were the best. The winner is Okja, raised by a
South Korean farmer and developed a special bond his daughter Mija (Ahn Seo-Hyun).
When Okja is taken away to be ceremoniously slaughtered, Mija chases after them
to rescue her friend, only to be used as a pawn by both the publicity minded-conglomerate
and a group of militant animal rights activists attempting to expose their big
secrets. If you’ve seen Joon-Ho’s previous work, then you probably know about
his knack for multi-layered satire while combining multiple genres, and Okja is no exception. The tone bounces
back and forth between whimsical and pitch-black comedy, which can be
especially jarring for those expecting this to be a family film. (It is not.)
While its message about the meat industry and industrial farming is about as
subtle as a wrecking ball, the movie doesn’t take sides with either the
industrialists or the activists, showing equal disdain and frustration for both
of them. This is reflected perfectly in the performances, as most of them are caricatures.
Tilda Swinton pulls double duty as the ruthless corporate figurehead who’s
grafting a faux-progressive face onto the same old capitalist practices, and
has a late-game reappearance as her sister, an on-the-nose ringer for Hillary
Clinton. Paul Dano, meanwhile, plays the leader of the animal rights group as
someone with a calm and endearing composure who eerily has no problem doing
horrible things in the name of a good cause, with his mask slipping only
occasionally. On the other hand, Jake Gylenhaal is nearly unwatchable with his
cartoony performance as a drunken, abusive TV zoologist. The only grounded
performance, it seems, is Ahn Seo-Hyun and Mija, which makes perfect sense
since her only real goal in this is to just take her friend back home so they
can be left in peace. The tonal inconsistency may be a turn-off for some, but there’s
still plenty going for this movie to give it a recommendation. Just know what
you’re in for. Also, the people at Cannes who booed this just for being a Netflix film can just fuck right off.
7/10
The Big Sick
Based on the real-life story of how comedian Kumail Nanjiani
met his wife Emily V. Gordon (here played by Zoe Kazan), it follows their
courtship which blossoms from a one-night stand and his clashing with his
strict Pakistani Muslim family who want to arrange him with a more traditional
marriage. Things become complicated when Emily is inflicted with a mysterious disease
and is put into a medically induced coma, and the stress becomes an unexpected
bonding experience for Kumail and Emily’s parents (Holly Hunter and Ray
Ramano). Nanjiani and Gordon (who wrote the screenplay together) took a story
that would otherwise just be a little anecdote to tell their friends at dinner
parties and were able to spin it into something sweet, endearing and multi-faceted.
There are some movies where you can see the story beats coming from a mile
away, but it doesn’t stop them from being any more effective. The Big
Sick is one of those movies. The plot of Kumail’s family not approving of
his new-found romance goes exactly how you think it goes. Same goes for the
rocky start of the bonding with him and her parents, Emily’s reaction when she
eventually wakes from her coma, and how that all inevitably bleeds into his
stand-up. It’s based on a true story, so there’s bound to be some foregone
conclusions. We’ve seen romantic comedies about clashing cultures and warming
up to the in-laws before, but what separates this from the flock is how
grounded it is. There’s plenty of cringe comedy with the predictable setups
with potential wives or the awkwardness of bonding over a stressful medical
crisis, and the film does have a lot of the hallmarks of a Judd Apatow piece
that a lot of people have grown sick of (Apatow was only the producer, with directing
duties going to Wet Hot American Summer’s
Michael Showalter), it’s easily the best of this kind since probably Superbad. The film also isn’t completely
true to facts, as there was never a rift in their relationship after the coma,
but it does add to the drama and keep it from sliding too smoothly into happily
ever after truisms. As far as romantic comedies go, this is far and away one of
the better ones. But if I’m being completely honest, I’m a bit disappointed that
“Girlfriend In A Coma” by The Smiths wasn’t used in the soundtrack.
8/10
The Dark Tower
Adapting Stephen King’s The
Dark Tower series, a cross-dimensional epic that’s equal parts fantasy,
horror and western, and creates a shared universe that encompasses nearly all
of King’s fictional work, was going to be a herculean task for anyone. This
adaptation has been stuck in development hell for almost twenty years, and while
I was confident at first, the red flags became harder and harder to ignore.
Condensing pieces from all seven books into one narrative? That’s never a good
sign. Fitting all that into a paltry 95 minutes? Even worse. The series is
packed with outrageous visuals and complex, meta narratives (Stephen King
himself even shows up as a character at one point), so there’s a plethora of
material to draw from, which makes it all the more painful that what we got was
so aggressively bland and dull. The story involves a boy named Jake (Tom Taylor)
who’s been having psychic visions of a Dark Tower, a Man in Black (Matthew McConaughey)
and a Gunslinger (Idris Elba). The Tower is a pillar at the center of the
universe that holds all the different worlds together, the Man in Black is an evil
wizard who’s been kidnapping psychic children from different worlds to use their
power to destroy the tower, and the Gunslinger, Roland Deschain, is the last of
an ancient order of cowboy knights who wants to kill the Man in Black for murdering
his father. That’s pretty much the gist of what made it into the movie from the
books, aside from a few subtle blink-and-you’ll-miss-it references to King’s other
novels. The rest is just a generic tale of a special boy who meets a good guy
and helps him beat a bad guy. The movie expects people to already know the
material, so a lot of things are left unexplained. The characters are flat and
unineteresting, and every actor is clearly just showing up to collect a check. The
plot is essentially a bunch of meaningless exposition strung together with some
incredibly boring gun fights smothered in terrible CGI that looks like it was
ripped from of the Resident Evil
movies, all leading up to a final confrontation between Roland and The Man in
Black that’s over before it even begins. It isn’t even the kind of bad that you
can laugh at like Children of the Corn or Maximum Overdrive, it’s just kind of there
and serves absolutely no purpose. In a year where we’ve had three excellent King
adaptations with It, Gerald’s Game and 1922, I shouldn’t really be that upset
that this was a dud, but since this is The Dark freaking Tower we’re talking
about, it just stings that much more. Put in the right hands, this could’ve
been a sprawling masterpiece that could rival Lord of the Rings. Don’t believe me? Just look at the generic vapor
of a movie we got, then imagine it under the direction of someone like
Guillermo Del Toro, and weep.
3/10
Free Fire
A group of IRA thugs meet with some American arms dealers in
an abandoned warehouse in 70’s Boston to buy and sell some guns. Two guys who
had beef in the past recognize each other and open fire, and suddenly it’s
every man and woman for themselves. As far as premises go, it doesn’t get much
simpler than that. Normally when an action movie has such a bare bones plot, it’s
usually an excuse to show off a bunch of John Woo style gun acrobatics or
demonstrate a mastery of scene geography and keeping track of multiple
characters in a particularly chaotic situation. But what writer and director team
Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump (Kill List, A
Field in England, High Rise) decide to do with this is highlight just how messy
and disorienting a situation like this would really be. All the main
characters (save for the one woman) are idiots who think they’re smarter than
they really are and can’t tell who’s firing at who half of the time, whenever a
bullet doesn’t make a headshot (IE: most of them) it leaves target battered,
limping and crawling for the exits, and the filthy conditions of the warehouse
are just as much of a hazard as the bullets. It’s exceptionally well directed,
choreographed and edited, and has a mastery of scene geography. (Apparently Ben
Wheatley used Minecraft to map out the movie.) The performances are fun to
watch as everyone shows up dressed to the nines, ready to sling profanity laced
Guy Ritchie style barbs at each other. Sharlto Copley, here sporting a porno
mustache and an indistinguishable accent, is the most fun to watch go for
broke actor since Nicolas Cage, and this is one of the moments where he’s let
off his leash. Armie Hammer shows off a lot of dry humor that we don’t get to
see from him very often, and Brie Larson is just plain sick of all the men’s
idiocy. The most obvious comparison is Reservoir
Dogs, in that it’s about a group of incompetent morons in a secluded
location dealing the bloody aftermath of a job gone horribly wrong. But Free
Fire isn’t anywhere near as clever as Reservoir
Dogs and doesn’t really have much to say beyond “Hey, want to see a 62-minute
gun fight?” As far as smartly executed dumb action movies go, you can do a hell of a lot worse.
7/10
Murder on the Orient
Express
How do you make a murder mystery based on an 83-year-old Agatha
Christie novel with an all-star cast released during the holiday season in 2017
work? Not like this. The story, for those unfamiliar, follows Kenneth Branagh
as Hercule Poirot, a legendary detective with an outrageous mustache, who’s on
vacation in the titular luxury train. His holiday is cut short when the train
is derailed and left stranded in the middle of the mountains and one of the
passengers is found stabbed to death, so he puts his skills to the test to find
the culprit. It’s a simple meat-and-potatoes whodunnit murder mystery, only it’s
based on the novel that practically invented that genre. The film sports a
massive cast including Johnny Depp, Daisy Ridley, Michelle Pfeifer, Judi Dench,
Derek Jacobi, Penelope Cruz, Leslie Odom Jr., Josh Gad and Willem Dafoe, who
all do a serviceable job even though none of their characters rise above
archetype, and of course, Branagh is his usual delightfully hammy self. The
film also exhibits some exquisite camera-work, making multiple uses of
single-takes following the character through the narrow train cars and overhead
shots that give the feeling of watching a real-life game of Clue. Aside from
that and a few modern updates, including making the cast more racially diverse,
there’s little in the way of suspense or investment, which can be poison for
this kind of movie. The book it’s based on is considered one of the most
influential detective stories ever written, and was even made into a movie in
1974, but the problem it has with being made now is how to separate it from all
the other whodunits that it inspired. Giving the detective the uncanny ability
to immediately notice flaws in the world that make him a great detective but
his life a nightmare otherwise was probably a novel concept at the time, but
doing a straight cover feels trite when that characteristic has been passed on
to damn near every detective afterward. At the end of the day, this film just
feels unnecessary. Perhaps it’ll make for a good plane ride time killer given
you don’t already know the book’s famous twist ending, but beyond that, there’s
not much to take from this. Color me unimpressed.
6/10
Long Time Running
In 2016, Gord Downie, the legendary frontman of celebrated
Canadian rock band The Tragically Hip, was diagnosed with terminal brain
cancer. In order to say goodbye to their fans and cap off over 30 years
together as a band, they embarked on one last cross-country tour, which sold
out every venue. Their final performance in their hometown of Kingston was
broadcast across the nation and viewed by millions. To put the magnitude of
this loss into perspective for those unfamiliar with them, The Hip aren’t just
a band, they’re a Canadian institution. To ask a Canadian what they thought of The Hip would be like asking an American for their opinion on Bruce Springsteen. While they never made it past cult
status in other countries (I myself would’ve never known about them if not for a music critic on YouTube I’m very fond of who listed them as one of his all-time
favorite bands), they’ve been an integral part of the national landscape since
their formation, and their songs are often about uniquely Canadian ideas and
stories. Needless to say, this was a
huge loss. But even detached from all that, it’s still a heart-wrenching story
about inevitability, facing death, letting go and perseverance. Some of the
scenes chronicling Gord’s struggles with his health and mental state were
genuinely hard to watch, as he had to relearn his songs and bring a medic with
them on tour. Everyone was afraid that he would have a seizure or collapse
onstage in front of tens of thousands of people, but miraculously, Gord pushed
through armed with skill, determination, and grace too. For the uninitiated
looking to get into them, this documentary actually isn’t a bad place start.
(For their actual music, I recommend the albums Fully Completely and Phantom Power.)
The live performances are absolutely stellar, and… Let me put it this way: I’m
typically not the kind of person who cries at movies, but this managed to make
me do it twice (during the performances of “Grace Too” and “Ahead by A
Century”).
8/10
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