Month: February 2020

Come to Daddy

Posted on by victorfraga

Longtime producer Ant Timpson’s directorial debut is an energetic comedy-horror, which borroes freely from different genre staples in order to create a potent and fresh hybrid. Thirty-something millennial Norval (Elijah Wood) travels to a cabin (in the woods, of course) to see his estranged father, who sent out a letter reaching out to him. Once he arrives there, a selfie gone wrong puts his phone out of action. With each confrontation, the man with whom he’s trying to reconnect grows meaner and weirder. Without communication and surrounded by miles of wilderness, he realises soon enough that he’s trapped. Eventually, the atmosphere in the house – which was never very familial – descends into brutality.

The film constantly shape-shifts, with every detail pulling the audience into a rabbit hole. The first act plays out like a slow-burning family dramedy, but when a shocker sets a speedy chain of events in motion, it morphs into a home invasion thriller, and it all ends up in horror. It never really goes where it’s expected to and never stays anywhere for long – and it’s all the better for it.

Through this journey, Norval needs to confront his feelings for his father, even though it comes at a price: terrible revelations about his own life surface. In the script, penned by Toby Harvard from an idea from Timpson, he’s a young man who’s been through hard times and who goes through life longing for something he doesn’t quite know. A wannabe musician, the protagonist is unemployed and went back to live with his mom after recovering from alcoholism and attempting suicide. Nevertheless, he sets out to meet the man who walked out on him eager to impress, a decision which will eventually land him in hot water.

Wood nails a character full of contradictions effortlessly and with a pitch-perfect body language. He goes from a heart-to-heart with his father from a comical reaction to strange noises in the house at night without skipping a beat. Amping up the humour even more, Michael Smiley’s menacing turn as bad guy Jethro is downright hilarious.

The director has mentioned in interviews that the inspiration for Come to Daddy was the passing of his own dad – and this does show. For all its antics, the heart of this feature is a son’s quest for fatherly love and reconnection. At its most dramatic moments, it almost resembles a therapy session, but when the whole it’s this laugh-out-loud funny, who cares? By tackling the grief over his father’s death, Timpson created a debut feature film brimming with life.

Come to Daddy is on VoD on Friday, February 21st.

The Intruder (El Prófugo)

Posted on by victorfraga

Inés (Érica Rivas) works as a dubbing artist in a studio in Buenos Aires, mostly in horror movies. She has to shriek, pant, gurgle and moan, and create unusual voices for the characters on screen. Parallel to this, she also sings in the local choir, where she exhibits her angelical soprano voice. A life full of contrasts. She has a new caring yet very jealous boyfriend called Leopoldo (Daniel Handler). The film open with the couple’s first (and also last) holiday trip abroad, in an unnamed sunny nation somewhere in Latin America.

The young lady has been haunted by the same nightmare since her childhood, and it now seems that some sort of entity (the titular intruder) is beginning to creep into her physical existence. And the consequences are deadly. Leopoldo inexplicably commits suicide, leaving an already deranged Inés in sheer disarray. An eerie old woman called Adela (Mirta Busnelli) at the dubbing studio informs Inés that the elusive creature is attempting to take over her life, and that she has inadvertently fallen in love with it. However, Adela fails to offer her a solution to her affliction.

At home, her doting mother Marta (played by veteran Cecilia Roth) is worried that her daughter is slipping out of sanity. At work, she’s advised to seek treatment, including a psychiatrist. She begins to take various pills, which seem to have precisely the opposite effect on the vulnerable female. Her reality begins to disintegrate. Her mind becomes fragmented. Reality blends with dream and imagination.

This is a finely crafted movie with an impeccable score. There is an enormous amount of attention paid to the audio, which is central pillar of the narrative. Strange little sounds inexplicably appear in the recording of Inés’s dubbing. Her voice falters halfway through the presentation of the choir, and she leaves the stage in tears. Is a supernatural entity taking control of Inés, or is she simply having a mental breakdown?

Despite her unusual predicament, Inés begins a liaison with the organ player Alberto (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart). Of course this is no conventional romance. Inés has very vivid sexual fantasies, but it never entirely clear whether these are pleasurable or just another clever ruse by the elusive intruder.

This is not a straightforward horror movie, despite leveraging various familiar suspense devices (such as mysterious voices, and unexplained movement under the bed sheets). There are at least a couple of jump scares, but they do not constitute the film climax. This is perhaps best described as a very dark and sombre psycho-sexual thriller, with a little humour thrown in. It has some very powerful moments, and a superb performance by Rivas and Roth. However, the entire movie fails to gel together. It lacks cohesion. The closure is ecstatic and energetic, but it also leaves many questions unanswered.

The Intruder was based on the novel El Mal Menor by C.E. Feiling. It showed in Competition at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It premieres in the UK in October, as part of the BFI London Film Festival.

Minamata

Posted on by victorfraga

Eugene Smith (played by a heavily bearded, grey-haired and hardly recognisable Johnny Depp) is a photographer for the now defunct Life Magazine. His work is widely respected, but his life couldn’t be more dysfunctional. He is estranged from his wife and children. He recognises being an awful parent, and he drowns his sorrows in whisky and incessant cigarettes. He’s collapsing, both physically and psychologically. He has seemingly lost his will to live and to love. Beneath all the dirt, however, is a kind and dignified human being.

One day in the year of 1971, his boss Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy) commissions him to do a job in the Japanese. He must capture the horrors of the Minamata Disease in the eponymous Japanese city. At first, he refuses, as images of WW2 still haunt him (In 1945, Smith was seriously injured by mortar fire while photographing the Battle of Okinawa). Eventually, he’s persuaded to embrace the ambitious task. He flies to Japan assisted by the interpreter Aileen (French-Japanese actress Minami Hinase), where he engages with the community and witness the horrific Disease firsthand. The neurological disorder in caused by mercury poisoning from the neighbouring Chisso Factories. The corporation refuses to pay the local for the deaths and the irreversible damage caused to their lives. The company dismissed the human suffering as mere collateral damage.

Minamata Disease caused spams, paralysis and convulsions. Victims were left severely disabled, scrawny, blind, unable to walk, speak and even feed themselves. Their fingers and limbs contorted, not dissimilar to the victims of Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1999). I imagine that the images snapped by Smith (such as the iconic Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath) influenced the aesthetics of Japanese horror.

Life Magazine wished to expose the horrors of the obscure disease to the world. Smith gradually won the affection of the locals, who allowed the unpleasant American photographer to capture their intimacy. They were aware that international visibility would assist them in their fight for compensation. The thoughtless Chisso chief cynically attempts to dissuade Smith from carrying out his task by telling him that the chemicals manufactured are utilised in the photographs that he makes, amongst many other uses. Smith carries on undaunted, forcing the unscrupulous businessman to resort to more extreme measures in order to silence the American photographer.

Minamata is a powerful reminder of the devastating consequences of environmental negligence. Parallels are drawn to other industrial and pharmaceutical disasters, including Chernobyl, the Thalidomide tragedy, mercury poisoning in Indonesian mining, and the more recent Fukushima and Brumadinho disasters (in Japan and Brazil, respectively). Such tragedies are not confined to the past. This is a film that will resonate with environmentalists, or anyone concerned with the consequences of brutal and reckless corporatism.

American filmmaker and photographer Andrew Levitas directed this American-Japanese co-production, which is guaranteed to see UK distribution. That’s partially thanks to the urgent environmental message, partially thanks to the top-drawer cast (Depp, Nighy and Hinase). But the intense focus on the protagonist also cripples the film. While the role of Eugene Smith in exposing the Minamata Disease to the world is undeniable, the director’s constant interest in the photographer’s psychology prevents him from investigating the impact of the Disease on the victims and their families. At times, it seems that the people in the community are merely secondary characters supporting our wonderful white saviour.

Minamata premiered at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. It’s out in cinemas and VoD on Friday, August 13th. On IMDB TV on Friday, January 14th (2022).

My Salinger Year

Posted on by victorfraga

The year is 1995. Joanna Rakoff (played by Margaret Qualley, who was catapulted to fame last year in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood) works as an assistant for a prominent literary agency in New York. Her job is to answer the vast amount of correspondence addressed to the reclusive Jerry Salinger (who passed away 10 years ago, in 1993), author of the cult bestseller Catcher in the Rye. She is a huge fan of literature and wishes to become a writer herself. In the office, she is surrounded by images of the biggest American writers in history, and she often gets to meet some of her idols. Yet, a career in literature couldn’t be further away. She’s stuck in a rut. Doing such menial job, and working for a commercial organisation primarily preoccupied with profit-making, means that her writing ambitions must be put on hold.

The young and beautiful female is full of ideas, but her formidable boss Margaret (Sigourney Weaver) promptly clips her wings, reminding her that she’s merely a secretary. She’s not supposed to write. Her chain-smoking boss exudes confidence and elegance, but she’s also arrogant and heartless. She’s prepared to fire Joanna at the blink of an eye. She’s some sort of Miranda Priestley of the literary world. But the cold and ruthless woman has a secret in store, and she’s far more vulnerable than she appears. Maybe she does have a heart after all.

Margaret is also very old-fashioned. She resists the pressures of the digital world, and refuses to have a computer in their office. She dreads the day people will communicate via e-mail. Joanna has to operate a typewriter, where she writes standard letters to the numerous Salinger fans, who assume that they are communicating with the eccentric author. Gradually, she earns the respect of her callous boss, who entrusts her with more challenging tasks. She begins to communicate with a hard-of-hearing septuagenarian Salinger, who calls her Suzanna (she never dares to correct him). Could Joanna challenge the established orthodoxy of the literary industry, twist her career ladder and become a successful writer of her own? Or will Joanna stand on her way?

This is a real story, based on the memoirs of Rakoff and an adapted screenplay by the French-Canadian director Philippe Falardeau. It will ring bells with anyone who has a creative mind and struggled to reconcile career/money-making with creative aspirations. The narrative is very conventional and straightforward, very easy for anyone to follow (even if you are not familiar with any of the writers in the movie, such as Salinger, Rachel Cusk and Judy Blume). The soundtrack is quite groovy, with a few songs from the 1990s, including Elastica’s connection. Qualley and Weaver are well cast. The ending, however, is a little abrupt and unexpected, and a lot of questions are left unanswered. Overall, this little drama is entertaining enough for its 101 minutes of duration, but hardly memorable. Not a film that will stay with you for a long time.

My Salinger Year premiered at the 72nd Berlin International Film Festival, when this piece was originally written. In cinemas on Friday, May 21st. This film is also known as My New York Year in the UK.

The Twentieth Century

Posted on by victorfraga

One seldom gets to know how footwear and cacti influence a country’s government, but Matthew Rankin’s The Twentieth Century is the rare film which accomplishes just that. This debut feature, premiering in Europe as part of the daring Forum section of this year’s Berlinale, is a highly idiosyncratic fever dream with the right amount of kitsch to make it a hit with the midnight movie crowd.

The film follows Mackenzie King (Dan Beirne) in his quest for becoming Prime Minister of Canada, trying desperately to prove himself to his peers and to a archetypal formidable mother (Louis Negin). However, this personal journey is shown in such a stylised and over-the-top fashion, it might as well be an alternate universe.

Here, Toronto is rendered in colourful yet austere architecture, Winnipeg appears as a cesspool of depravity and Quebec looks like a Utopian commune. Dany Boivin’s brilliant art direction channels German expressionism and Soviet agitprop in order to create an imaginary country – one that simply could not exist, yet feels tangible. The mise-en-scene, combined with Rankin’s editing, creates the effect of complete sensory overload.

Freed from the constraints of reality, the script, also handled by Rankin, tackles a lot of themes. Some of these will hit harder if the viewer has some background of Canadian political history: the country’s relationship to England, its role in the Second Boer War, the Quebec independence movement and the elusive character of King himself play considerable parts in the plot.

More overt, however, is the filmmaker’s intent of painting this fantasy Canada in decidedly queer tones. The casting is full of interesting gender-switches, adding to the surreal nature of the film. The games in which the contestants for Prime Minister partake are hilarious partly because they reinforce the notion of masculinity – as well as politics – as performance.

For King and his desire to ascend to his country’s upper political echelon, this also means that he has to look the part: being tough, get a trophy wife and control his sexual urges towards shoes. The film revels in unusual sexuality, with most characters indulging in some sort of kink.

Ironically, no matter how wildly allegorical The Twentieth Century gets, echoes of reality always creep into the narrative: the scheming of the aristocracy, the way politicians are groomed for public appearances, the divisive ideological struggles. In those moments, Rankin’s visual feast of a film morphs into one hyperreal canvas – cacti and footwear notwithstanding.

The Twentieth Century premieres at the 70th Berlinale, which takes place between February 20th and March 1st.

Little Joe

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

A vertiginous shot circling over rows of plants in a high tech, white, laboratory nursery to the accompaniment of an eerily unearthly electronic score is quickly followed by a scientific explanation. Alice (Emily Beecham) and Chris (Ben Whishaw) have genetically engineered a plant which in return for being looked after, watered regularly and talked to emits a scent which will make its carer/owner happy.

Outside of work, single mum Alice confides in her psychologist (Lindsay Duncan) her worries that she doesn’t give her young son Joe (Kit Connor) enough of her time. We sense that Alice is a control freak concerned that her “handling the unpredictable” job may include elements she can’t manage. Then she crosses a line by bringing one of the happiness plants home for Joe to nurture, naming it Little Joe. In caring for the plant, he sniffs its scent. As he becomes more and more occupied with the plant’s welfare, he neglects other things, including his hitherto beloved mother.

When in the same nursery as the happiness plant specimens of another plant die out, Alice’s colleague Karl (David Wilmot) asks if Alice used unauthorised methods when breeding the plants. Karl’s assistant Bella (Kerry Fox) warns that since the plants are designed as sterile, Alice may be tampering with forces of nature beyond her control: plants like all living things will do anything to reproduce. Chris is startled by Bella’s dog Bello in the nursery and accidentally inhales some of the plant’s spores. Bello later starts behaving in a hostile manner towards Bella causing her to become convinced he is no longer the same dog.

One by one, the colleagues of the workaholic Alice also change. Subtly. Each of them will do anything to protect Little Joe – which rather confusingly becomes not only the name of the plant Alice brought home for her son but also the name for the whole flower breed as well. And indeed on occasion the label for her human son. Such sloppiness is indicative of the fact that the edginess of the first half hour doesn’t quite know where to go, leaving the film to fall back on the actors’ performances, the unsettling music score and some distinctive production and costume design. All of which are, admittedly, superb.

Beecham’s performance as the self-doubting. emotionally distant scientist plays in marked contrast to the actors portraying her colleagues and her son who, one by one, turn into distant relatives of the pod people from Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956). Instead of being physically replaced, Little Joe’s pod people are simply changed in their minds and thought processes.

In one uncharacteristically playful scene, the mother listens horrified to her son and his girlfriend telling her that they’ve been taken over by the plants, only for them to suddenly reveal that they’re having her on and that the whole thing was a joke. While most of the film isn’t quite that clever, it effectively plays out the pod people myth amongst unique visuals of spotless, high tech, clinical metal and glass interiors by people in white green-tinged lab coats to an unsettling, electronic score.

Little Joe is out in the UK on Friday, February 21st. On VoD on Monday, June 15th.

The Public

Posted on by victorfraga

Public libraries are important public facilities. Not only do they provide an instant point-of-access for information, learning, news and culture for anyone who walks into them, but they are also vital havens of rest, quiet and warmth for many marginalised people in our society, especially the homeless. Homelessness is a big problem not only in this country but also in the United States. This film is built on a beautifully simple idea. What would happen if all the homeless people who took refuge in public libraries during the bitterly cold winter months refused to leave at closing time?

This film is constructed round this idea and both written and directed by Emilio Estevez, who also acts the principal lead Stuart Goodson, a geeky but honest man who cannot bring himself to impose on the homeless the prospect of a freezing winter night in Cincinnati, during which one man has already died. The delight, wit and incisiveness of The Public relies on how the different characters react to the homeless occupying a public building and, therefore, too much plot spoiling is not in order here.

One librarian is at the cutting edge of progressive politics and insists on travelling by public transport and always shopping organic but letting the homeless occupy the library? That’s beyond her. Josh Davis (Christian Slater), a right wing mayoral candidate, is quite convinced that this is a law and order issue and is determined to prove his ability to nip this in the bud to gain credit with the voters. So is his law enforcement assistant Detective Bill Ramstead (Alec Baldwin).

The trouble is that his son Michael is a heavy opioid user and, as he later discovers, is among the homeless in the library. Feisty news reporter Rebecca Parks (Gabrielle Union), while oozing charm and concern for the participants, is, in fact, only interested in getting that big, exclusive new break on public TV and spends a lot of time pumping up and exaggerating the story to the point of distorting it. Anderson, the library’s head, is thoroughly annoyed by the mayhem created in his library, but ultimately ends up identifying with it.

The Public challenges the viewer to take sides. Are homeless people a public nuisance? How should this be dealt with? What is it about our society that condemns the marginalised to a predictable death in freezing weather just because a public building must close at 6pm? Are these people bums and losers? Are we really the bums and losers who might have all the right views but are not over bothered if the homeless die on our streets?

It also makes another important point. Goodson says that “books saved his life”. You find out later what specifically he means by this. Estevez is raising a vital issue. In Trump’s America where facts are fake, correct information is difficult to find, where honesty and decency are often derided, public libraries are centres of information, culture and learning, open to all and concerned to enlighten. The library in this film is full of banners extolling famous literary figures, political heroes and thinkers and exhorting people to read. It may all be a bit corny and designed to promote attention (including a huge, stuffed polar bear housed there temporarily by the local museum) but the message is serious. Public facilities are meant to promote good, not bad. As Anderson (Jeffrey Wright), the library’s director declares in the film, “The public library is the last bastion of democracy that we have in this country!”

The Public rightly fulfils the mission of DMovies to present subversive and thought-provoking cinema. In its quiet way, it does just that. It’s out in cinemas on Friday, February 21st.

When Lambs Become Lions

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Both sides of the ivory trade are thrillingly explored in documentary When Lambs Become Lions, which has truly amazing unfiltered access to both rangers and poachers at a wildlife park in Northern Kenya. Withholding judgement while expanding perspectives, it is a great example of how the documentary form can muddy even the most ostensibly clear-cut moral cases.

Filmed in gorgeous widescreen format, elephants elegantly roam the landscape. The rangers, armed with machine guns, talk about them in reverent tones, as if they are holy creatures. They are less kind to the poachers they find hunting with bow and arrow. They throw them to the floor, kick them in the head, and threaten to kill them, making us wonder what they would do if the cameras weren’t rolling.

On the other side are these poachers, who we learn about via an unnamed protagonist. When looking purely at the facts, it’s easy to see wildlife poachers as unambiguously bad people. However he argues that he has no other choice and has to provide for his family, making him a sympathetic person despite his actions. When Lambs Become Lions does a great job of illuminating this perspective, showing us that the real issues are more structural than personal, leading up to the highest offices of the country.

When Lambs Become Lions

With the International Union for Conservation of Nature listing the African elephant as a vulnerable species, the ivory trade threatens to wipe them out completely. The Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta is serious about ending ivory poaching: in 2016, he even burned over $100 million worth of stolen ivory as a pledge to make it stop. These burning tusks form the opening of the movie, an ominous ballet of flames and smoke a symbol of the conflict’s endless violence.

Perhaps he should’ve actually sold some of the ivory: at one meeting we learn that the rangers haven’t been paid in two months. This leads to a fascinating alliance between one poacher and ivory hunter that sees them having more in common than the government might have you think. Meanwhile danger hangs over every scene, with both sides afraid of being killed by the other. Director Jon Kasbe is fearless, breathlessly joining the poachers on their hunt despite knowing that they could be killed at any moment. This results in some truly thrilling non-fiction storytelling that equals any big-budget action film.

Kasbe spent three years with his subjects, allowing us to really get into their lives. His fly-on-the-wall approach works wonders here: with no editorialising or sermonising, the Brooklyn-based director allows these two men to tell their own story. Compressed into a punchy 76 minute runtime, When Lambs Become Lions rarely wastes a frame; all leading into a paradigm-changing final scene. By the end it is unclear who is the lion and who is the lamb: revealing a grey area in-between as wide and deep as the plains of Kenya itself.

When Lambs Become Lions is in UK cinemas on Friday, 14th February.

Ghost

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

Everyone has seen Ghost before they’ve seen Ghost. We all know the iconic scene where Demi Moore shapes pottery while Patrick Swayze sits behind her as The Everly Brothers “Unchained Melody” plays in the background. It’s been parodied everywhere, from Family Guy to Two and a Half Men to The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (David Zucker, 1991). There’s a good reason it has been parodied. It’s a good scene. Cheesy, but memorable; a portrait of love that has transcended the ages.

But these parodies give a false expectation of what Ghost is actually about, which is less concerned with the transcendent power of love than a mishmash of different genres that cannot master any of them. While a huge success upon its release, winning Best Screenplay at the Academy Awards and making a mind-bending $505.7 million worldwide, the rest of the film barely shapes up to that one iconic scene.

The film is split into two key parts: before and after Sam Wheat’s death. This first part is far more engaging, with the young yuppie couple seemingly having it all yet afraid that their love is transient. Sam watches a plane crash on the TV, and states that he shouldn’t fly to LA as these things always come in threes — a false flag intended to tease those well aware of the film’s premise.

The point is that death can take us any time, and that the love we have on earth is special. Their communication at this time is tentative; with Sam — played with typical stunted machoism by Swayze — unable to tell Molly how much he truly loves her. Unpolished and unvarnished, these feel like real people. When the classic scene comes, it’s his way of saying that he cares about her, their joint caresses of the pottery wheel a symbol of the life that they want to share together.

This all changes after Sam is killed by a criminal on the street. Ghost quick jumps us through unnecessary narrative hoops instead of giving us the time to feel the immense loss that Molly must be feeling. Sam is not only literally a ghost but metaphorically too. Likewise Molly is half-formed, still waiting to be shaped at the pottery wheel.

In fact, Ghost doesn’t really get into the nature of grief at all. Instead this shaggy dog story — part comedy, part conspiracy theory, part exploration of purgatory, part action thriller — launches into a convoluted plot-line involving murder and illicit bank transactions. Therefore, Sam is not forced to try and get Molly to notice him for his own sake (which might be more moving) but to stop further crimes from being committed.

Ghost

Whoopi Goldberg won an Oscar for her brilliant supporting role (only the second black woman to do so) as a spiritualist who can talk to Sam, but her character is kind of shortchanged too. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his initial review about the classic kiss scene where Sam kisses Molly through her body: “this should involve us seeing Goldberg kissing Moore, but of course the movie compromises and shows us Swayze holding her — too bad, because the logical version would actually have been more spiritual and moving.” While the former move would’ve been a better representation of the power of love to transcend anything, the second is just another classic example of Ghost changing the rules of the game for the sake of the screenplay.

This is a film completely unconcerned with logic. One moment he can’t touch anything, then he figures out that he actually can; initially she can’t hear him, then right at the end she can. These kind of manipulations take us out of the emotional journey of the characters, which ends with a typically Hollywood action climax which must’ve satisfied denizens of the Box Office back in 1990 but ruins the film’s potential as a genuinely moving work of art.

Jerry Zucker, known previously for his far wackier works as part of the Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker team such as Police Squad (1982) and Airplane! (1979), felt like the wrong director for the work, which might’ve succeeded far better as pure comedy. Anthony Minghella‘s Truly Madly Deeply (1991), released just a year later and containing a very similar premise, is the far more moving and humorous work, able to track the multi-varied emotions associated with grief with actual nuance and depth. I recommend you watch that instead.

The 30th anniversary edition of Ghost is in cinemas on Friday, February 14th.

First Love (Hatsukoi)

Posted on by Jack Hawkins

From Ichi the Killer (2001) and Visitor Q (2001) to The Happiness of the Katakuris (2002) and Ninja Kids!!! (2011), Takashi Miike is amongst the most eclectic directors on the world stage. He is frequently described as bizarre and extreme, yet First Love is a mediocre headache of a film.

Much like Free Fire (Ben Wheatley, 2016) – that exercise in naff banter and dreary combat – First Love has a stale mix of harsh combat and pantomime comedy that fail independently and intertwined. Both films have a litany of swaggering, hollow characters who are so charmless and unlikeable that you just will for them to kill each other so you can leave the screening and get on with your life. Some compared Wheatley’s film to the quips and wisecracks of Quentin Tarantino, but it wasn’t even on par with Guy Ritchie – and neither is this frivolous nonsense from Takashi Miike.

There is a story to First Love, something about a drug deal gone wrong and a petulant young boxer called Leo (Masataka Kubota), whose fight scenes, it must be said, are filmed quite well. Anyway, the angsty boxer crosses paths with Monica (Sakurako Konishi), a young girl forced into prostitution due to her father’s debt to the Yakuza. These two, who apparently share the titular first love, become entangled in said drug deal, which involves so many parties it’s not worth repeating.

This is the main problem with First Love – it is a convoluted mess. Screenwriter Nasa Nakamura throws hordes of pinstriped Yakuza into the story and fails to make any of them interesting, and the performers’ wacky shtick only makes it worse.

It is here that a comparison to Tarantino is actually called for, and it isn’t favourable. True Romance (Tony Scott, 1993) is, as the trailer pithily summarises, a story of ’60 cops, 40 agents, 30 mobsters, and a few thousand bullets’. However, there’s one thing they missed in that summary – the chemistry of Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette). Their relationship proves befitting of the film’s title and acts as a binding agent for the dynamite energy of Tarantino’s script and the ensemble of fantastically dirty performances from Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken and Gary Oldman.

Alas, First Love is just adolescent carnage with no heart, no soul and originality; it’s one of those films where you spend the running time wishing you were watching an old favourite that did it so much better.

First Love is in cinemas Friday, February 14th. On VoD in March.

Post-Wars Star Wars: Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Posted on by victorfraga

As it stands, J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) has divided opinion among the hard-core fan base and casual cinemagoers unlike any film since, well… the last Star Wars movie. Many believe it to be a rollicking adventure that flits from one gorgeous location to another, and with the introduction of new and old characters, livens the up last chapter to a fitting finale and enjoyable film overall. On the other hand, the film’s naysayers point at its many sinkhole sized plot holes and editing structure that means the film moves at a pace best suited to hyperspace travel than the usual 24 frames per second.

Since its release in December 2019, I’ve had a chance to see the film again and with refreshed eyes and lower expectations have still not fully comprehended the impact this film has on all the previous episodes and its impact on the popular discourse as a whole. Yes, it’s a fairly enjoyable galactic romp, but, my guess is, much like Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi (2017), it will be overanalysed and dissected to such a point and at such great length that the internet will still be in discourse when the next set of Star Wars films hits cinema’s sometime in late 2022.

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Back to the past

My own initial disappointment comes from many different aspects of the film. The retcon of everything interesting about The Last Jedi and the direction that film took the franchise in, the reversal of characterisation developed, the idea that The Force was for everyone and not just a prestige bloodline. One point of severe disappointment is the very end of the film. As The Rise of Skywalker was pushed as a final instalment that concludes 42 years of storytelling, but the sheer lack of completion and closure is so apparent as to bring the whole saga crashing down.

The film ends with the rag-tag Resistance defeating the combined evil forces of the First Order/Empire/Sith and with this the restoration of order and peace has been brought to the galaxy. This is what we are led to believe, anyway. After the battle has been won, the trilogy’s main protagonist Rey takes a solo journey to Tatooine, the desert planet we first saw in 1977’s Star Wars: A New Hope (George Lucas) and a location we would return to again in Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983), The Phantom Menace (George Lucas, 1999), Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002) and very briefly in Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas, 2005).

On Tatooine, Rey visits the old farm homestead of Owen and Beru Lars, Luke Skywalker’s uncle and aunt and the couple that raised him since his birth. Rey buries both Luke and Leia’s lightsabers in the desert sand and when asked by a passer-by who she is Rey answers that she is Rey (long pause) Skywalker. The final locale Rey chooses to bury Luke and Leia’s Jedi lightsabers and the name she adopts is actually quite fitting when one takes into consideration the impact the planet and the Skywalker clan has had within the entire arc. Tatoonie has been the home of Anakin and Luke Skywalker after all. We have returned again and again to this dust ball in the outer reaches of the galaxy and it has been the location of much struggle, pain and peace. However something is amiss with this ending. Whilst we get an inkling of the completion of Rey’s story arc, there is little knowledge as to how the galaxy as a whole will continue on.

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Searching for answers

So many questions arise. Has democracy been restored? Does the defeat of Emperor Palpatine and the First Order mean that The Republic, the one that lasted thousands of years before the events of The Clone Wars (Dave Filoni, 2008) and the rise of The Empire resurfaces to restore justice? We sense that at the end of 1983’s Return of the Jedi that a relative peace and continuation of that era will be restored. After all, within The Rebellion there are past remnants of that Republic. Seasoned Senators such as Mon Mothma and military leaders such as Admiral Ackbar seem destined to have a leading hand in restoring the galaxy back to representative democracy.

Although, now thanks to the post-Return of the Jedi Disney+ series. The Mandalorian, set just a few years after Luke Skywalker’s last adventure, we know that the entire galaxy was not brought to peace and justice and that lawless pockets and remnants of the Empire still hold incredible sway, hence the title character’s ease at operating as a bounty hunter within an organised guild of fellow assassins.

The Sequel Trilogy set 30 or so years later squashes this assumption even further. We are now aware that a new Republic did arise, but alongside it a well-funded military junta hell-bent on its destruction and the enslavement of millions to its cause.

The end of the Prequel Trilogy also gives us galactic oversight in these matters. We are made fully aware that The Empire has seized control. It’s not a positive outcome in any way, but the overall arc is complete. With the Sequel Trilogy ending on such ambiguous notes the fate of the galaxy is unknown. At this point I would point readers towards the podcast What The Force (especially their reaction podcast to TROS) presented by Marie-Claire Gould and Ty Black and their deep-dives into the Sequel Trilogy’s lack of a fulfilling narrative arc, particularly the hero’s journey, or monomyth set out by Joseph Campbell and adopted by George Lucas for his saga. This journey is ignored in The Rise of Skywalker, which might add to its hollowness. The Rise of Skywalker and failings of the trilogy as a whole become grossly apparent when seen through this lens.

There are a few clues as to what might be in store for the wider galaxy. None of them, unfortunately, point to a very positive future. The final battle of Exogol sees thousands of ships join the call put out by rebel-hero Lando Calrissian to take up arms against the revived Emperor. Piloting the iconic (to the audience, but also to the citizens of the galaxy) Millennium Falcon, Calrissian leads the charge of a mismatch of ships and vessels. Who are these saviours? As one First Order officer comments: “it’s not a navy, it’s just people.” And that is what indeed the freedom fighters are; a random alignment of people, factions, organisations, militias, bounty hunters, spice runners, warlords, crime syndicates and lone wolfs. Anyone with a ship and a gun is welcome to the fight. In the grand scheme it makes for an affecting circumstance. Across the galaxy, people have put aside their differences and rivalries to come together and fight against tyranny. But, with no real outcome for the galaxy, and no real replacement in mind, surely the factionalism and rivalry will re-emerge as a leader to the rabble vies for control. Tin-pot-dictators and quasi-fascist blowhards are maybe all that is in store for the galaxy. Certainly no Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn type figures appear to be on the horizon to promote the much needed, though very unsexy, discussions about wealth redistribution, renationalisation of hyperspace lanes, jobs programs and healthcare for all.

We don’t, in this instant, need to look to the Star Wars Universe to know that revolution without consensus or demands of what comes after is usually a harbinger of more problems. We can look to real world events.

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Earthly wars

Libya, for a modern and still unfolding example, is a failed state of factions and military commanders fighting for power over regions and pockets of the country. The installation of a post-Colonel Gaddafi government has failed to quash insurrection and day-to-day life for citizens is a terrifying ordeal. To put it mildly, unplanned revolution often disintegrates into a much harsher reality. There are of course positive examples to draw on. The call for representative democracy that was the Arab Spring of 2010/11 engulfed Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and Libya and overthrew or at least reduced power of a gallery of merciless dictators. But, again, without consensus there has been a vacuum of power within these countries that has meant an even worse predicament for those citizens that demanded change as power-players and loyalists fought for power, or as is the case in Syria with President Bashar al Assad who continues to violently suppress the uprising and cling to his position of authority.

The Occupy Wall Street movement that began in September 2011 in New York’s Zuccotti Park and spread throughout the world was a valiant attempt to forge a new world consensus based on individual participation and a collective agreement that the chips were fully stacked with the richest one percent. In many ways, Occupy’s message wasn’t a failure as such, but was simply too opaque, with no list of demands or a vision for a replacement of capitalist greed the movement disintegrated and dispersed. Many of the movement’s participants have splintered off towards other causes such as the call for a $15 dollar minimum wage, the abolishing of college tuition fees, and Medicare for all. As a political training field, Occupy may still prove to be fruitful.

In the aftermath of the final battle in The Rise of Skywalker a similar situation could easily befall the post-war galaxy. Yes, the evil Sith have been defeated, yes, the First Order are no more, yes, the ethos of the Jedi and the Resistance emerge victorious, but every potential leader, every guiding voice of reason, every legendary hero has vanished either in death (Luke, Leia, Han) or in influence (Calrissian, Wedge Antilles). This means that the galaxy is now actually in far worse position than when the saga began all those years ago. No Republic, no Jedi Council, No obvious leader among the rabble of combatants that fought at Exagol. Tyranny, on a mass scale might have been vanquished, but now sectors, planets and star systems are on their own with little in common and perhaps no real desire to unify themselves for the betterment of the galaxy only for personal gain and personal fortune. Factionalism and internal squabbling will become abundant in this new era. Now the galaxy far, far away may also become a galaxy very distant within itself. Surely not the outcome foreseen all those years ago.

The images on this article are from ‘Star Wars: the Rise of Skywalker’, except for the image at the top, which is from the Occupy Wall Street movement