Tag: film review

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film review

Starry Eyes (Dir. Kevin Krolsch and Dennis Widmyer, 2014)

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Sarah (Alex Essoe) resides in LA, the sunshiny place of dreams and superficiality and is an actress, or at least wants to be one; is resolute to be one yet throughout Starry Eyes the line between determination, desperation and ultimate destruction is crossed, blurred, eventually rubbed out – and bloodied – altogether. Sarah tirelessly auditions for role after role in between working at fast-food restaurant Big Taters for sleazy, loser-ly manager Carl (a moustachioed Pat Healy). She has friends, none of whom are particularly close except maybe her roommate Tracy (Amanda Fuller). There is Danny (Noah Segan) who lives out of his mini-van and is ‘determined’ to make it as a director and Erin (Fabianne Therese) a wannabe actress who has had minor success and relishes in being well, a bit of a “bitch”.

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Gamine in appearance, Sarah has ‘issues’, she suffers from nightmares, self-harms and is extremely body-conscious. She teeters on the precipice of insanity, is emotionally raw and literally tears her hair out at the roots to ease her anxiety. Her vulnerability does not necessarily make her weak but her hunger to be somebody does, it is easy to empathise with her – that yearning; she could be your sister, or daughter. Hell, she could even be you. Desires, primal or otherwise, push people in all kinds of directions. Then comes the call-back from a successful, if odd, audition for an Astraeus feature (the company taking its name from the Titan God of dusk, creator of winds and wandering stars) and the casting directors’ insistence that she lose her inhibitions has surprising results on the leading lady – “If you can’t ever let go, how can you fully transform into something else?”

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Starry Eyes is Faustian in nature, a satirical, abject, allegory about the grim underbelly of Hollywood and the true price of fame (there is even a sly swipe at Scientology too). It is emotive in its execution and (bloody) ambition. An almost melodramatic beginning gives way to a glorious and stomach-churning body horror; Matt Falletta and Hugo Villasenor’s practical make-up effects are visceral, disturbing and quite disgusting, in the best possible way, and displayed amid a synth-heavy musical score which sets the mood perfectly. Alexandra Essoe is astonishing as Sarah, she even at the most grim and a gruesome moment, manages to humanise the character and create a filmic-female that breaks the boundaries of the horror genre’s ‘monstrous feminine’.

There is a moment when ‘The Producer’ (Louis Dezeran) refers to the film industry as a plague; a festering pestilence: “hollow be thy name, shallow be thy name.” – Thankfully, Kevin Krolsch and Dennis Widmyer’s unsettling cautionary tale is anything but.

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film review

Enemy (Dir. Denis Villeneuve, 2013)

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Enemy sees French-Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve and the ubiquitous Jake Gyllenhaal re-team for their second filmic outing after Prisoners. Based upon Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize-winning novel O Homem Duplicado (literal translation: The Duplicated Man), the film opens with a group of seemingly voyeuristic men in a Gentlemen’s Club. It looks exclusive as naked women parade around; cries of distress follow with a close up of a scuttling spider. Cut to University lecturer Adam Bell delivering a lecture amid words like ‘censorship’ ‘dictatorship’ ‘oppression’ and scrawled in chalk on the board behind him the phrase ‘chaos is order un-deciphered’.

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That is the pleasurable thing about Enemy, trying to decipher the film long after viewing. It is an elliptical puzzle that fascinates from beginning to end. Bell is stuck, it seems, in his own Groundhog Day, destined to repeat the same daily mundanity of lecturing, marking coursework, engaging in passionless sex with his girlfriend Mary (Mélanie Laurent), who promptly dresses and departs when they have finished. Then a colleague recommends a film, something he is loath to try but does anyway; something to break the cycle. He then notices that the Bell Boy, onscreen, looks oddly familiar, identical even… and that is when he seeks out Anthony St. Claire.

Enemy is weird, mysterious, and highly entertaining. Scenes are cast in a yellow hue which makes the world seem jaundiced, Adam’s visions – if that is what they are – are unwieldy and steeped in symbolism, is it reality or is he losing his mind? Anthony is the steady hand to Adam’s nervous wreck, leather wearing to tweed, straight-standing to stooped, lover of blueberries while Adam deplores them. However, they are not entirely different. Villeneuve likes the concept of duality – see his previous two films, the afore-mentioned Prisoners and Incendies – mirroring, mother-figures and the uncanny; the familiar and unfamiliar often meet and collide. Here it takes the form of the doppelgänger; two Jakes (or is there only one?), the seemingly alternative worlds they inhabit and the pretty blondes they each love, Laurent and Sarah Gradon who plays Anthony’s wife Helen are also visually strikingly similar. There are recurring motifs dotted throughout and the religious aspect of the characters’ names is intriguing.

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Personally, I applied Freud to my reading to Enemy and this added coherence; as the male subconscious is exposed, questions of mothers, fear of fatherhood and existential crisis surround the contempt of the inner self but hey, that’s me. The film is complex (and entertaining) enough to withstand any reading and still be profound, and that ending will leave you astounded long after the credits roll. The only minor criticism is the vapid representation of the female characters especially the two main women, neither is explored fully and both tend to blend into the waxy yellow surroundings. Isabella Rossellini makes an impressionable cameo and then is gone all too fleetingly but then, perhaps they are meant to, and really one is not supposed to understand any of it…chaos un-deciphered.

At one point Adam turns to Anthony and asks “What’s happening?” To which Anthony replies, “I think you know…” Nope, haven’t got the foggiest but that is all part of the fun.

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Blu-ray film review

Stage Fright (Dir. Jerome Sable, 2014)

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It seems almost apt that the man who declared ‘hot patootie bless my soul, really like that rock and roll’ would wind up playing the director of a musical summer camp for kids. For Meat Loaf Aday – his film roles seemingly have come full circle from his Rocky Horror days and his theatrical stage performances – as his Roger McCall nurtures and mould the little darlings for their annual show in Jerome Sable’s directorial debut Stage Fright.

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The film opens with the Minnie Driver’s primadonna Kylie Swanson ending her performance in The Haunting of the Opera to rapturous applause, her twins Buddy and Camilla take a tour of the auditorium, while their mother preens in front of her dressing room mirror. She is then savagely hacked to death by an unknown assailant wearing the mask of the Opera’s villain. Ten years later, the twins work at Center Stage Camp, a place where all misfits/theatre geeks love, laugh, sing, dance and, best of all, fit in. The Haunting of the Opera is chosen to be the musical book restaged (in keeping with the tragic anniversary), albeit relocating setting to Japan and replacing the plain white mask with that of a Kabuki, complete with top-knot. Camilla (Ally MacDonald) has always wanted to perform on the stage and despite being kitchen staff and not a student is allowed to audition. As pre-production begins, one-by-one cast and crew are picked off.

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Okay, so it is not extremely difficult to see what, who, or how this film was inspired, it is painting a rock-horror-musical-by-numbers. It is an extended Glee episode (although the cast is by and large far more likeable) via The Phantom of the Opera and Friday the 13th. The score and song list is, however, original and fluctuate between eye-rollingly naff and grin-inducing, especially those songs sung by the supremely camp, foul mouthed villain who is, typically, dressed heed-to-toe in black brandishing a knife and electric guitar with murderous aplomb. In fact, one criticism is that he is not on screen nearly enough and an audience has to sit through more teen-angst than is absolutely necessary; where is the slicing and dicing?

There are enough sly allusions to other horror films to keep the seasoned genre-crowd satisfied (the sight of a twelve-year-old set designer wearing an apron whirling a hand-saw around made me chortle) and for those with a hatred or largely indifferent view of musicals there is a splendid rock and roll slayer to empathise with. Anyone with a sense of humour and a 90-minute window to fill should enjoy Stage Fright. It does exactly what it sets out to do, perhaps not quite frighten but it certainly entertains for the most part.

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Blu-ray film review

Keeping Rosy (Dir. Steve Reeves, 2014)

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Charlotte (Maxine Peake) is having a bad day. Not only has she been passed over for partner in her job but then she returns home to find her cleaner smoking and potentially stealing from her; an altercation ensues and triggers a catastrophic turn of events which has things going from bad to so much worse and in real time too.

British thriller, Keeping Rosy is a highly televisual affair and would work well as an ITV drama due to its episodic editing, this is not necessarily a bad thing; it just lacks a certain filmic quality. Peake is a fantastic actress and her performance really gives pause for thought, her Charlotte begins the film as a brittle, uptight career woman with a pinched face who physically flinches at the prospect of holding a colleague’s new baby. Yes! That gendered caricature; however, she makes the very best of the material at her disposal and is extremely engaging, even making the character more likeable as desperation takes hold. That said, as her controlling workaholic unravels it does make it impossible not to notice plot-holes and makes it increasingly difficult to reconcile character motivations. Throw in an annoying younger sister Sarah (Christine Bottomley) and a quite inexplicable performance by Blake Harrison (The Inbetweeners) as security guard, Roger and it is easy for interest to be all but diminished by the third act.

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Roger Pratt’s cinematography is grimly effective – especially the shots within Charlotte’s sterile, open-plan apartment which overlooks a building site – in its depiction of London; the City divides and rules, and this is reinforced by the inclusion of some rather crass stereotyping ; Northerners, Southerners, Poles, they are all expendable it would seem albeit by a really implausible denouement.

By the end, the audience is left unsure as to what the film is trying to say specifically in relation to gender politics, class, crime and punishment. There are hints but it never fully commits.

Categories
Blu-ray film review

The Congress (Dir. Ari Folman, 2013)

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Robin Wright (the actress playing a version of herself) has made some lousy choices when it comes to her film career and men, or so she is forcefully told by her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) at the beginning of Ari Folman’s The Congress.

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Her son Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee) has health problems, her daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) thinks she should ‘do’ a Holocaust film as she can perfectly encapsulate ‘Nazi and victim’. These chalk-and-cheese children are just two of the reasons listed why character Wright ultimately chose life over the film offers and now Miramount Studio executive Jeff (Danny Huston) wants to offer her the chance to sign away the pressure. They wish to own “[the] thing called Robin Wright”; to create an image they manipulate and render in any filmic form as long as she retires from acting altogether. Any initial reluctance is given way to an affirmative and Wright is scanned; every emotion , every line, twinkle and wrinkle (a sequence that is particularly breath-taking, if completely isolating). The viewer is then transported twenty years into the future and the pension-age Wright is thrust into Abrahama City – the animated zone where she meets a 2D Disney-fied Jon Hamm.

The Congress, based upon a Stanislaw Lem story, is relevant, provocative, thematically rich – often to its detriment – and is almost impossible to categorise; part sci-fi, fantasy, family drama, there’s even some speculative dystopian fiction thrown in for good measure. However, what begins as a stinging critique and almost sly satire aimed primarily at the commodification of celebrity disappointingly loses its anger and gestates into something else entirely. The animated world is hallucinatory and disconcerting, a sinister Disney World™ where eagle-eyed viewers can spot Michael Jackson as a restaurant waiter, Grace Jones as a nurse or an exaggerated toothsome caricature of Tom Cruise. It is exhilarating, mesmerising and a little tiresome but perhaps this is the point in a post-avatar, digital-obsessed world? The questions of mortality our protagonist faces are replicated in our own manipulated interpretation; we should beware of the image. While its plethora of ideas and ambition feels relentless and even a little confusing, The Congress finally finds its humanity amid an existential denouement.

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In any other actor’s hands, The Congress could have been a huge failure but the luminous Robin Wright delivers a stunning performance thanks, in part, to an excellent supporting cast of Keitel, Hamm, Huston and Paul Giamatti but mainly due to the fact that she is just that damn good. There is one scene in which the forty-plus Wright gazes at herself as Buttercup on a Princess Bride film poster, perhaps nostalgic for youth or the career she might have had, yet aside from the hair and the odd wisdom line, she appears exactly the same. If this film is one of her lousy choices, let’s hope she keeps on making them.