The Light Between Oceans: Film Review

The Light Between Oceans: Film Review

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Rachel Weisz, Emily Barclay, Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson
Director: Derek Cianfrance

Making great fist of the desolate New Zealand coast and aiming for emotional devastation but landing somewhere nearer trying experience, Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance's The Light Between Oceans aims big in its period affectations.

Beautifully shot and framed, The Light Between Oceans is the film adaptation of ML Steadman's post war story. Fassbender stars as Tom, a World War I veteran who simply wants to recover from the horrors of the Great War (or as he understates he's "just looking to get away from things"). Ending up in the Lighthouse service and asking for a posting on Janus Rock which overlooks the oceans, Tom meets Vikander's Isabel on the mainland and despite his withdrawn nature, an instant attraction blossoms.

The pair's marital bliss is hit by double tragedy with miscarriages and when a boat washes up with a dead man on board and a crying baby, Isabel pleads with Tom to raise the child as their own. Reluctantly, he agrees and the pair settle into a familial life, blissfully happy.

But years later, on the mainland, Tom meets the widow and grieving mother (a dignified and gravitas-filled Weisz) and a chain of events is guiltily set in motion.

The Light Between Oceans benefits from a great solemn first half, that hits all the emotional beats required.

In among some stunning cinematography and some melancholy moments that border on the darkness, Cianfrance draws the best from Vikander with some truly heartbreaking and devastating sequences playing out as Isabel loses two children (the first in the most harrowing of circumstances). But the film hits a stumbling block as it saunters towards the end (which no doubt is in large part the fault of source material) and negotiates both time jumps and desperation for closure, sacrificing the emotional heft that's needed to allow the choices to feel quite so cataclysmic for all involved.

Of the two actors, Vikander's the strongest and most adept at translating her arc to the screen, and while Fassbender's stoic outlook on Tom is nigh on aloof, he's helped by some choice morsels of dialogue that provide insight where characterisation on screen can not.

His ethos of "I just try to keep the light burning for whoever needs it" is laden with tragedy and selflessness but the implications of this lightkeeper doing more than his duty unfortunately never feel fully fleshed out on screen as the film slips into melodrama and divergent endings.

With Cianfrance using cutaways to the rolling oceans and the cruelty of nature a little too often to segue between it all, The Light Between Oceans struggles to really find its own voice in its back half. Granted, the emotion is there initially and it's hard not to get swept up in the bleak unfolding tragedy of Tom and Isabel; but the final strait and its long dawdling route to get there mean its emotional effectiveness is muted and stilted, despite some of the finest efforts of its central cast.

Never as devastating or as provocative as it should be, this effective translation of Steadman's source material may look rich on the exterior, but its core is flawed when others come into the picture and its attempts at emotional resonance are thwarted.

Rating:

Stranger Things: Season 1 Review

Stranger Things: Season 1 Review

Episodes : 8
Released on Netflix

Mixing up Stand By Me, Poltergeist, Spielberg, Stephen King and a dash of horror, the 8 episode series Stranger Things is a nostalgic blast of addictive mystery.

Set in 1983, it's the story of four kids who find one of their number go missing in middle America. As the search begins, a mysterious and relatively mute little girl is found - and a shadowy government agency comes looking...

Nicely paced, this mystery series works well and is cleverly constructed by the Duffer Brothers. Pulling in genres of the time, mixing in some spookier elements and providing a chapter narrative works brilliantly for Stranger Things.

It also works as it's generational; choosing to concentrate on three groups - the young kids, the teens and romances thereof and the grieving mother (played by Winona Ryder) and damaged policeman (David Harbour) - works well and when all three sides intersect, it feels naturalistic and in keeping with what's already passed.

Ultimately, Strange Things is a show that's worthy of a binge and worthy of sticking with. It remains to be seen whether season 2 of Stranger Things will still hold the attention for as long and or whether it'll benefit as an American Horror Story style anthology; but for now, this original Netflix series is up there with the best the small screen has to offer.

Win a double pass to see Nocturnal Animals

Win a double pass to see Nocturnal Animals

Nocturnal Animals In Cinemas November 10

Rating R16

Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles art dealer (portrayed by Ms. Adams), lives an incredibly privileged yet unfulfilled life with her husband Hutton Morrow (Armie Hammer).

One weekend, as Hutton departs on one of his too-frequent business trips, Susan receives an unsolicited package that has been left in her mailbox. It is a novel, Nocturnal Animals, written by her ex-husband Edward Sheffield (Mr. Gyllenhaal), with whom she has had no contact for years. 

Edward’s note accompanying the manuscript encourages Susan to read the work and then to contact him during his visit to the city. Alone at night, in bed, Susan begins reading. 

The novel is dedicated to her…

 …but its content is violent and devastating. While Susan reads, she is deeply moved by Edward’s writing and cannot help but reminisce over the most private moments from her own love story with the author. 

Trying to look within herself and beyond the glossy surface of the life and career that she has made, Susan increasingly interprets the book as a tale of revenge, a tale that forces her to re-evaluate the choices that she has made, and re-awakens a love that she feared was lost – as the story builds to a reckoning that will define both the novel’s hero and her own.  

To enter simply email to this address: darrensworldofentertainment@gmail.com or click here  and in the subject line put NOCTURNAL! 

Hacksaw Ridge: Film Review

Hacksaw Ridge: Film Review

Cast: Andrew Garfield, Hugo Weaving, Vince Vaughn, Sam Worthington, Teresa Palmer, Rachel Griffiths
Director: Mel Gibson

It's perhaps easy to see why Mel Gibson would be drawn to the true story of conscientious objector Desmond Doss, a man whose unconventional ways saw him save 75 of his colleagues during the battle of Okinawa in May 1945.

Once on the outside of Hollywood, director Gibson's had a bit of a comeback, with a recent starring role in B movie Blood Father and now with Oscar talk for a war film about the attack on Hacksaw Ridge during the height of the campaign.

But opting to take more of a cheesy biopic route for Hacksaw Ridge lends the film more to a feeling of Christian Forrest Gump goes to war, rather than a war film destined for the ages.

Garfield plays Doss, an almost simpleton hick of a man whose pacifism and world view was shaped by accidentally nearly bashing his brother to death in a play fight. With a fragile father suffering from PTSD from the Great War (an excellently nuanced turn from Weaving who pitches it perfectly between pathos and faltering abuse), Doss decides he wants to go to war - but to save lives rather than take them.

Despite his father's refusal to endorse this route for either of his sons, and with the army resolutely against Doss' denial of weapons, the fight between values and principles forms the large part of this film, complete with corny dialogue and cliched moments of imposed conflict with fellow trainees.

Facing a court martial, Doss is saved at the last moment unexpectedly from spending the war in prison and ships out to Okinawa to face the Japanese, swarming like locusts from underground and into direct conflict with Doss' ideologies and comrades.

It's perhaps during a ferocious 15 minute fight sequence atop Hacksaw Ridge that Gibson's film comes to life, spinning multiple brutal attacks and displaying the true horrors of war (and comes at a welcome relief from the onslaught of over-wrought and slow-mo shots of burned and battered bodies - subtlety is not Gibson's strong point here).

But in the final third of the film, Gibson's content to over-saturate proceedings with Christian elements, complete with overtly religious iconography (no worse than Doss' messianic final shot as he ascends in a stretcher from atop the Ridge with a Bible clutched in one hand and another hanging over the edge as the score rouses higher and higher) that feels as brutally obvious as some of the earlier elements of this relatively rote war film.

Doss' story is supposed to inspire and while Garfield gives good hick and earnestness to the man, he's not well served by the screenplay which wrings as much pathos as it can from an over-use and over-reliance on an unsubtle approach. Perhaps the final nail in the coffin is the inclusion of documentary footage and interviews from the real-life Doss to hammer home the point of it all - an unnecessary touch that removes any remaining power from what's already transpired.

Ultimately, Hacksaw Ridge eviscerates the heart of its own story by heading down a cliched route that's well trodden by others before it; its heavy-handed direction cripples its ultimate goal and what should be an inspiring true story depicting the horrors of war and the heroism of some is ham-fisted and hackneyed.

Shots from Big Boys Toys

Shots from Big Boys Toys

Big Boys Toys hit Auckland's ASB Showgrounds this weekend.

Check out some shots from the event here

James White: DVD Review

James White: DVD Review

Rating: M
Released by Madman Home Ent

Financed via Kickstarter and brought to life when writer Josh Mond wanted to explore his feelings over his own mother's death, James White is clearly a labour of love for all involved.

White (played with rawness by Girls star Christopher Abbott) is a New Yorker, whose life is spiralling out of selfishness. But things change when his mother's cancer returns.

Intensely raw, and shot in close ups throughout, Mond manages to bring a claustrophobic intensity to the screen as he explores the story of self-destruction. Both Abbott and Sex and The City star Cynthia Nixon bring a degree of complexity to proceedings as White and his mother respectively.

You can't help but get swept up in proceedings, given the emotional levels mined here, and while the film has a universality that's likely to hit with more resonance for anyone who's ever been touched by cancer, the film's uncompromising and brisk approach to a sparsity of story-telling is to be applauded.

NewsTalk ZB Review - Doctor Strange, Hell Or High Water and Ghostbusters

NewsTalk ZB Review - Doctor Strange, Hell Or High Water and Ghostbusters

This week, we're talking the 14th Marvel film, Doctor Strange, the brilliant Hell or High Water and take a look on Ghostbusters.

Take a listen below

http://www.newstalkzb.co.nz/on-air/saturday-morning-with-jack-tame/audio/darren-bevan-doctor-strange-hell-or-high-water/