Promising Young Woman: Film Review

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Laverne Cox, Clancy Brown, Jennifer Coolidge, Alison Brie

Director: Emerald Fennell

Denied a release in 2020 thanks to Covid-19 and scheduled for New Zealand cinemas on January 7, 2021, Promising Young Woman will have you squirming in your seat - both with unease and with glee that films as bold as this can still be made.

Destined for discourse on gender politics and rape culture, the film stars An Education's Mulligan as Cassie, a woman who seemingly goes out every night, gets blind drunk and waits for a "decent guy" to help her home. Only each "decent guy" turns out to be as predatory as the rest.

But Cassie's no damsel in distress - in fact as the opening moments of the film reveal, she's fully in control and on a mission to punish men for taking advantage. As to the finer details of why, it's honestly best to discover as the film plays out - needless to say, the med school drop out Cassie finds her life plans changed when she meets former classmate Ryan (Bo Burnham) and she begins to succumb to his charms...

With a searing lead and a provocative tone, writer director Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman is the kind of indignant cinema we frankly needed more of in 2020, but which life cruelly denied us.

With a punk ethos and an utterly edge-of-the-seat mentality throughout, the film's desire to leave you unsure is nothing but an outright success.

It helps that Mulligan owns every single scene she’s in and while some may take issue with a script where all young men are less than respectful it’s perhaps more a societal indictment and commentary than sweeping generalisation. In fact, it’s distinctly plausible there’s a reason only the older are more guilt-ridden or worthy of admiration.

But in amongst this tumultuous hurricane of unease is Mulligan's unswerving and fearless performance - it's one that appears brave and gutsy but demonstrates an actor who isn’t afraid to show their vulnerability when the script demands it. It's easily one of the standout performances of the upcoming year.

It's a brave film that offers such surprises as the last 30 minutes do - and while Promising Young Woman's ending is polarising to say the least, it's guaranteed to have you bolt upright in your seat, fearful of where Fennell is taking the seemingly toxic story. The volcanic mix is addictive, and fair play to Fennell and Mulligan, it's never enough to push you away from what's playing out, and will leave you wanting to debate long after it's done.

It’s an audacious film of conscience and unconscionable events - triggering maybe but demanding of thought, Promising Young Woman is unlike nothing committed to the screen this year - and is all the better for it.

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Disney+ Film Review

Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Disney+ Film Review

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Terence Stamp, Eva Green, Samuel L Jackson, Chris O'Dowd, Ella Purnell
Director: Tim Burton

It should in theory work, as it has all the kooky elements of a Tim Burton caper – unusual kids, an unusual setting and some spooky bad guys.

But Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is mired in a lengthy set-up that takes forever to tie all its ends together and even get started, crippling it for the first hour.

For those unfamiliar with American author Ransom Riggs’ number 1 best selling novel and its Harry Potter-esque trappings, it’s the story of Jake (Enders’ Game Asa Butterfield who brings a degree of intensity even if his character is saddled with exposition) who heads to Wales after the grotesque death of his grandfather Abe (Terence Stamp).

Jake was close with his Grandpa, who used to regale him with night-time stories of the oddball children who’d live at a school under the watch of Eva Green’s Miss Peregrine. Believing the stories to be true, Jake stumbles into their world in Wales and marvels at the peculiarity of it all.

But what initially appears to be dream-like soon turns into a nightmare with something stalking the children and their charge to carry out a terrifying scheme…

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children mixes the macabre and the Burton vibe with a degree of visual aplomb as the allegory for Jewish persecution and child alienation is brought to the fore.

There’s eccentricity all over the place but thanks to a disjointed flow and some middling acting from some of the younger charges under Burton’s watch, the piece never quite achieves the levels of quirkiness it’s aspiring to.

Samuel L Jackson gives good scenery-chewing as the ultimate bad guy menacing the kids, Eva Green is barely there as the slightly plummy, stuffily British toothy pipe-smoking schoolmarm (Scary Poppins, anyone?) and Butterfield manages the awkward emotions of Jack quite well and is fine, but nothing more; it never fully gels in the way it should on the human front, thanks to a convoluted plot and a muddled attempt to get there.

Even Burton’s touches on this feel muted, almost as if a darker approach proved a little too out there for the audience it was aiming for.

It’s a shame the Beetlejuice vibe is played down as the Gothic gallows humour that appears in places is a welcome touch, and the more comic touches add to an air of oddity that's crying out to be set free, but which withers under such underwritten side characters.

Nowhere is this more evident than a brilliant showdown on Blackpool’s pier (of all places) with animated skeletons taking on stretched Slender-men style shadow creatures. It’s inventive, meshed with touches of both Burton and Harryhausen as the bony bodies bounce manically around. (A similar stop-motion scene with two doll puppets, a la Toy Story spider-babies, fighting to do the death is equally as welcome.)

It’s certainly dark, and the more nightmarish touches may explain why Burton had to reign it in for a more Addams Family vibe (but without the jokes) and an ongoing gag about why Florida is so horrific to so many.

The darker touches work well too – the inherent sadness of the war, the displacement of children, mental health problems and parents summarily dismissal of their child's illness, the impressive visuals as the Nazi bombs drop towards the house, the persecution of Jews by human monsters, they all lurk below the surface, but never fully bubble upto the top, almost as if there are fears the audience wouldn’t engage.

Ostensibly lashed with timey-wimey sensibilities and more confusing moments, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is a fascinating could have been movie from Burton; the offbeat touches meshing with the more gruesome edges to form a queasy cinematic experience that frustrates rather than thrills. It could have done with more of its danse macabre ethos, and a little more ooky rather than just kooky to ensure this children's home is one you'd want to check into again.

Bill & Red: Face The Music: Blu Ray Review

More uneven than a fully formed coherent journey, Bill & Ted: Face The Music sees Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reprise their William S Preston and Theodore Logan roles, nearly 30 years since we last saw them.

It's 2020, and Bill and Ted are still living in the shadow and fear of their legacy. But the airheads are just about still married to their wives and have two daughters (Weaving and Lundy-Paine, a great source of vacant-headed energy throughout and the breakout stars of this, potentially setting up a new franchise) as the world starts to fall apart.

Unable to write the prophesied song that will unite the world, and with reality collapsing in on themselves, Bill and Ted are visited by Kelly, Rufus' daughter and told they have a deadline to sort the music or it's all over.

So, the boys decide to go into the future to steal the song from themselves...

It may start off a little ropy, thanks to the feeling that Reeves is struggling a bit to recapture some of the lunk-headed nature of his younger self, but once Bill & Ted: Face The Music settles in, there's a great deal of charisma to be had from seeing this duo back together and interacting with various future versions of themselves.

There's a lack of comedy throughout, and it misses the knockabout charm of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (a reunion with William Sadler's never-not-funny Death happens too late in the piece); a sub-plot sees Bill and Ted's daughters Billie and Thea essentially doing a musical journey a la Excellent Adventure's history quest, and there is a general feeling that it could have used a more knockabout approach to a fan service script.

Whereas Reeves seems to be struggling to get the tone and intonation of the wholesomely goofy and enthusiastic Ted (he even says at one point to Bill that he's "tired, dude"), Winter effortlessly slips back into Bill and even offers a few subtle spins on the character as the story pans out. It's here Bill & Ted Face The Music finds its emotional core, and even dances lightly around the nostalgia of its franchise - there's a sweetness (and sadness) to these two friends never quite growing up and reaching their potential, and the script rightly recognises that fact.

Generally, Bill & Ted: Face The Music is more adequate than excellent, but when it comes together in the last 20 minutes, it really does leave an undeniably goofy grin on your face. But it also does demonstrate that given a tighter script polish, and a bit more of a humorous edge, Bill & Ted: Face The Music could have been another time-travel cult classic.

As it is, it's perhaps the film 2020 needs right now - but thanks to the unevenness not quite the one we were expecting from the dudes.

Blithe Spirit: Film Review

Cast: Dan Stevens, Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Judi Dench

Director: Edward Hall

Not exactly highbrow, but packing a bit of a screwball edge, director Edward Hall's slightly over-the-top Blithe Spirit follows a familiar edge to the Noel Coward story.

Stevens plays Charles Condomine, a writer frustrated by writer's block as he tries to adapt his own book for the screenplay. Wife Ruth (Fisher) is equally frustrated by Charles' lack of progress - both on the book and on their marriage.

When Charles invites apparently fraudulent medium Madame Arcati (Dench, having a roaring time in the period drama and overplaying her role with some acerbity) to their home for a seance, she accidentally conjures up the spirit of Charles' dead wife Elvira (a playful and irritating Mann) - meaning suddenly there's three in the marriage...

Packed full of period art-deco touches and some truly eyepopping costuming, the 2020 version of Blithe Spirit zips along with some chutzpah and pizazz, without ever really being anything more than a shallow farce dressed up nicely for the big screen.

Stevens has a riot going over-the-top as the froth sets in, and a malevolent Mann displays a devilish impishness to her ghostly Elvira. Fisher brings the right amount of heart as Ruth, the woman in the middle of it all, but in among the wizz-bang chocks away approach of the time, the film's energy is 

enough to propel it through its stage derivation.

Leaning more into the wacky edges and all the better for it, Blithe Spirit has a frothy feel that's never quite contagious enough but it is more than enough to get it through its mischievous edges and will leave audiences not looking to be challenged, merely leaving them more than satisfied.

Merry Christmas everyone!

So this is Christmas, and if anything, 2020 has guaranteed this year's festive season will (hopefully) be unlike any other one ever.

Thanks to all those who've provided access to media screenings this year, to those who've provided review codes for games, to those who've provided review and giveaway copies of films on DVD and Blu-Ray and to those of you who've taken time to read and submit news to this site this year.

For now, it remains only to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a better 2021.

PS Don't forget Doctor Who: Revolution of the Daleks airs in the UK on New Year's Day (and in New Zealand on January 2), and prepare to farewell Ryan and the Chase's Bradley Walsh aka Graham!

See you in 2021.

Your future is in safe hands.
01.01.2021 pic.twitter.com/pt4kisinOU

— Doctor Who (@bbcdoctorwho) December 21, 2020

Nomadland: Film Review

Cast: Frances McDormand, Gay DeForest, Patricia Grier

Director: Chloe Zhao

There's an authenticity to Chloe Zhao's Nomadland, an adaptation of the book by Jessica Bruder, that makes this tale of a nomad hard to shake.

McDormand plays Fern, a disenfranchised widower who moves from region to region in a van after the mining village she was part of in Nevada is essentially shut down and removed from the US map. Stripped of the place she used to call her home, Fern travels around in a beaten up old van that she's made up to be her safety zone.

Bruder's 2017 tome looked at transient older people in mid-west America, and Zhao's film easily taps into that. It helps that McDormand feels so natural in the role (possibly due to the months she spent living in a van prior in the name of research) and that all the extras who appear in the film's cast are nomads themselves.

Zhao's at pains to point out that Fern has chosen the lifestyle ("I'm not homeless, just house-less - it's not the same thing," she intones at one point) that has to a degree been thrust upon her. But Zhao's lens and cinematographer Joshua James Richards paints an all-too different picture with large swathes of the countryside shot in wide angles to emphasise the scope of the landscape, and internal shots taken in close up to emphasise Fern's comfort.

Equally, the Amazon warehouse where Fern resides as a seasonal worker is shot with vast amount of spaces around her, as if to push the point that Fern doesn't fully belong within the world she's forced to be part of.

McDormand lives and breathes the role, and never once feels like she's acting - it's all done on Fern's own terms, and it shows on screen. But there's an organic dignity running through this film that's hard to shake, and deeply compelling to watch.

At its heart, Nomadland is haunting, elegaic, and guaranteed to shake up your world view as a capsule of life in the 21st century, and the harsh economic realities faced by older Americans, it's disturbing. But bizarrely, it's beautifully hopeful, speaking to communities and connections of souls as Fern travels weaving in and out of people's lives as the days and roads lumber on.

Nomadland is the road trip 2021 deserves - a shake up reminder that our pasts and presents can collide in ways that are both freeing and frightening; it's a road movie of humans' innate desire for connection, but also strangely, of alienation.

Nomadland is simply unmissable; a film of layers and impressions rather than a normal narrative, it will stay with you long after its perfect final shot has faded from the screen.

Soul: Movie Review

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey, Rachel House

Director: Pete Docter

Pixar's Soul is the latest Disney movie to suffer an existential crisis.

Not just in the way that it's being premiered on Disney+ over Christmas after Covid-19 denied it its time to shine in the cinema, but also thematically with its somewhat simplistic and overtly obvious message of stop and smell the flowers.

Foxx plays Joe, a middle-aged middle school band teacher, who yearns to play jazz in the clubs. But life has denied him his break, and things get even worse on the day he ends up receiving success. For as soon as Joe is given a full-time job and scores a gig with a well-known jazz singer (Angela Bassett), he promptly falls to his near death by plummeting down a manhole in New York's streets.

Waking up in another realm, The Great Before, Joe's desperate to return to Earth - but ends up becoming a mentor to a listless soul called 22 (30 Rock's Tina Fey) who has yet to discover their purpose in life...

There's much to admire with Soul.

It starts off wonderfully pacy and a little bit out there by seemingly killing off its lead. Thrust into another world, complete with its Cubist characters and concepts such as shaping souls in the Great Before, as well as tackling going into the light, the film's dalliances with the existential and the spiritual is enough to send any adult meandering through life closer to the edge.

But then after about 40 minutes, a kind of Pixar universal reality sets in, and the filmmakers remember they're making family fare, and the whole thing comes back down to earth with a glorious jolt and into more familiar refrains and cartoon tropes.

That's not to deny Soul its due - it's a fairly robust odd couple film that's been done to death a million times before. However, imbued with its hues and etheral colourings, there's a vibrancy to the animation that sings as much as the jazz music scats. 

Yet, there is a feeling that the film could have pushed its edges a little more, rather than settling into the usual tropes, no matter how well executed. As a film with a cast largely filled by people of colour, and with praise for the African-American influence on the country's culture, there's daring to be had within the frames of Pixar's latest.

It's a shame Soul has been denied a big screen release thanks to lush animation, and daring concepts brought to life; complete with its desire to push viewers into an existential crisis, it would have soared on the big screen.

But alas, Soul is confined to Disney+, and while it's not a disaster, it is a travesty that a viral outbreak has robbed the cinemas of something a little more challenging and beauteous to behold.

While there is plenty of soul in Soul, and a rather simplistic learning to be had, there's much enjoyment from its weirder edges early on. Its unpredictability is its charm, and its trippiness is a great benefit with the animation paying homage to previous expressions of the artform.

At one stage, one character says “You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what Earth is for.” Soul is aimed at promoting a message of appreciating what you've got in the now, and after 2020, that's probably the soothing message we all needed, no matter how unoriginal it is, nor how well the story is presented.

Soul premieres on Disney+ on Boxing Day.