The usual spoiler warnings are in force and as the things I'm reviewing at the moment are old films there's going to be much discussion of plots and things in these films, so be aware if you haven't seen them and want to...
Entertainment Guaranteed
Audrey Plaza plays an intern at a Seattle magazine who get's chosen by journalist Jake Johnson to accompany him and another intern to cover the story of a man who has placed an advert asking for someone to join him on a time travel mission. No one thinks it's real but it's a quirky enough idea for a fashionable magazine to cover. So off they travel into Washington State in search of a story, except Johnson is really just there to try and hook up with an ex-girlfriend, so it's down to Darius (Plaza) to get the skinny on this would be nutter.
The problems start when Darius starts to fall for the nerd-like Kenneth (played by Mark Duplass), because he's essentially a nice guy and she's not really cut out to be a journalist. What follows is how their relationship builds and also how Johnson's hook up with his ex also goes to places you didn't think were possible given his initial observations on how she's aged and is no longer this skinny blonde bombshell. Things start to get serious when it's clear that paranoid Kenneth, who believes he's being watched by government agents, is actually being watched by government agents. The rest is just perfect, prosthetic ears and all.
What the Actual Fuck?
The thing about this film is even when I figured I'd got an idea what was happening, it made no real sense to me because there was no logic involved. Let me, probably forlornly, try to explain... Primer starts with 20 minutes of discussion between four colleagues about the creation of something that probably isn't a time travelling device, then at around the 22 minute mark one of them discovers something to do with fungus that suggests the device might be used to travelling through time, although this is not specifically said. In fact, much of the entire film is made up of mumbling and vague science; it might not be vague, but I'm no physicist so Albanian sign language is back in the equation.
The two main protagonists Shane Carruth - as Aaron and David Sullivan - as Abe, decide to go it alone and keep their two other colleagues out of their [ahem] loop and it's from about the 30 minute mark that we get into some actual, physical time travel, except where none of this movie made an sense for the first half hour, the next 47 minutes is quite remarkably as nonsensical as you could possibly imagine - think Albanian sign language for Koi carp.
It simply made no real sense. There's this thing about them putting themselves in man-size cages duplicating their initial experiments and something about their present selves locking themselves into a hotel room for the amount of hours that their other selves need to enact whatever they need to do before, presumably, there is no longer alternate versions of themselves running doing the things they planned on doing. Then something goes wrong, there's something about a man following them, a man with a shotgun at a party that is lived over and over again to determine exactly what action to take to prevent it from happening and then some scenes from earlier in the movie are played out again, making you think that what happened earlier was the future returning to the past that the viewer hadn't yet.
Then I read a review on IMDB that suggested you need to watch the last 30 minutes a few times to fully comprehend what was going on. Fuck right off. I'm not going to watch it a number of times, especially when I thought it was a badly made piece of crap, just to understand it. I fancy myself as an aficionado of time travel films, paradoxes and think I've seen just about every twist and concept known to man, yet this simply made no sense from any aspect; the dialogue was mumbled and vague, the time travelling made little sense and you saw nothing of benefit come from it and some of the ideas used made the Grandfather Paradox redundant, in fact Aaron at one point suggested the entire concept of said paradox was 'bullshit.' This isn't a good film; it's not an intelligent film and if people think confusion is a good concept for a time travel film then good luck with this.
Signs and Portents
According to the story, a number of people in said town of Point Pleasant all witnessed the appearance of a supernatural apparition called Mothman, which allegedly appears when a (major) disaster is about to happen [but is more likely a huge constructed story to try and benefit from the bridge disaster and provide the town with some kind of tourism income after the main factory closed down in the 1970s - probably due to the bridge disaster]. Richard Gere plays a grieving reporter for the Washington Post, whose wife dies of a rare brain tumour but shortly before it is diagnosed has a car accident where she sees a strange winged moth-like creature seconds before she crashes their car.
It's described as a horror film but I prefer my supernatural mystery description because there is no real horror in this but plenty of mystery and while it's filmed and dealt with in a slightly forensic manner it does enough to convey a sense of dread, foreboding and jeopardy, especially with the bridge disaster. The downside of the movie is that a lot of the witnesses to the strange events all come across as mad hick locals who give off the impression, even in the film, that you simply wouldn't believe them if they told you the time. Gere does a reasonable job of being earnest and compelled to get to the bottom of this mystery, but generally the feeling of a self-fulfilling prophecy prevails, such as when Alan Bates explains to Gere that all that happens when you forewarn people of an impending disaster is you either get looked at like you're mad or you become a suspect.
It's an entertaining and cleverly done piece of work with a good cast including Deborah Messing and Will Patton, but there are some jolting parts which don't aid the narrative, a few obvious red herrings and some things that are not in keeping with the rest of the film - such as the appearance of Gere's wife two years after her death, suggesting an even more supernatural aspect that the film didn't need. It was worth watching and if it ever reappears on TV it's worth checking out.
Leftism
This was the first thing that bothered me about Sinister, a 2012 film from James Wan, the guy responsible for a number of torture porn films and popular ghost/apparition/found footage nonsense over the last 20 years. It stars Ethan Hawke, who probably should have known better and on the surface it's a creepy horror film about a series of linked murders through the decades dating back to the 1960s at least.
Hawke plays a true crime writer, one popular with the readers, but unpopular with the police because he paints them as largely incompetent. He's had his 15 minutes of fame and now he's struggling to write another book as popular as his first. He's onto something new and he omits to tell his wife that he's moving his entire family into a house that saw four murders and the disappearance of a child. He's warned off almost immediately by the local sheriff, but Hawke's character Ellison is determined to recapture his former glories while watching his marriage slowly disintegrate. His first mistake is not to tell his wife about the house's history.
His second mistake and the other logically stupid thing is he finds a box in the attic with home movies of a series of murders the ones briefly mentioned in the second paragraph. This is where he should have contacted the police, because these are graphic 8mm filmed 'diaries' not just of the four who died in his new house but all of the families who died in horrible ways. If it was you or I we'd have gone to the police straight away because this would have helped no end with their investigations. Not Ellison, he does enlist the help of fan-boy deputy - referred to as Deputy So and So - but doesn't tell him anything much until it's getting too late. Of course, our crime writer is drinking a lot, not sleeping much and generally getting obsessed, while his family starts doing odd things that don't seem to bother him the way they should.
Did I mention it's quite a creepy film? I suppose if you enter into this kind of junk with your logic and common sense switched off you'd find it as jumpy as hell, but I was just watching the clock and wondering what I was going to say in my review...
I think I should mention that a few years ago I stopped watching horror films because I can't take them seriously. There is nothing in real life that you wouldn't confront head on, because there is nothing supernatural and there is only natural. If I met a ghost, what could it do to me? It isn't corporeal, it's a ghost. How's it supposed to scare me? Monsters don't exist - at least not supernatural monsters - and most of the fictional ones thrive on fear; what if you don't get frightened by imaginary horse shit? How does it have any control over you? Be frightened of human monsters by all means (which was why last week's most frightening film was Sicario), but the supernatural? Bah humbug and all that nonsense. I don't like blood and gore so a film series like Saw does not appeal to me, it's not frightening; Torture porn isn't big or clever; it isn't scary. The dark isn't frightening, especially when you have light at the flick of a switch and if you haven't you have a fucking torch built into most smart phones. It's just bollocks, like this film.
Time Stands Still
Now, the thing is, as I've gotten older I've become a bit prudish about unnecessary female nudity in films and my review, which absolutely reckoned Cashback was one of the best films I'd seen all year, has lots of nudity in it, but I claim that while the film is literally full of gratuitous nudity it's essential for the film to be enjoyed. This sounded like 45 year old Phil simply reconnecting with 15 year old Phil, but I was intrigued about why I rated this film so highly, so I downloaded it and watched it on a sunny Tuesday afternoon, while the wife was crafting in her cupboard. What would 61 year old Phil think?
It's the story of Ben Willis, an art student who breaks up with his rather stunning girlfriend, or rather she breaks up with him and he struggles to get over it. He becomes obsessed with not being with her any more and eventually this leads to him suffering from insomnia. He cannot sleep and wastes his time trying to, until he finally decides to do something constructive with all this new free time he has, so he gets a night shift job at his local Sainsbury's. Then he discovers he can freeze time.
The film is told from his perspective, so it's a lot of him explaining off camera about the things he likes and one of the things he's quite obsessed with is the female body, especially when it is without clothing. The thing is he's an artist and a very good one, so his obsession with the female form is more aesthetic than sexual, but this doesn't stop him from using his new found ability to undress a number of extremely beautiful - but frozen in time - women, but only so he can draw them. However, while he still struggles to get over his former girlfriend, he's slowly falling in love with the checkout girl called Sharon, played by Emilia Fox.
Now Ben is played by Sean Biggerstaff, someone I can't say I've seen in anything since (although, apparently I have as he was most recently in the first season of Good Omens) and he's a likeable and affable young man with some good friends and a few dodgy ones. His new obsession with Sharon leads to him drawing, painting and generally worshipping her in art form, but when he finally gets the chance to take her out, his past catches up with him and his former girlfriend seemingly ruins his chances. As he says, Sharon saw one second of a two second meeting, unfortunately it was the wrong second...
This is a comedy, but it's also a love story and a strange timey-wimey barrel of weirdness and it's also a fucking fantastic film. I mean, a really lovely film that makes you forget about all the boobs and vulvas on display and just leaves you in a really nice place. It's possibly the best thing I've watched in ages and that's exactly what I said about it 16 years ago. Quality persists it seems. If you ever get the chance and can see beyond the actually very necessary and Ben's explained fascination with nudity, I reckon you will absolutely love it as well.
https://youtu.be/4M8zAJQsxQY is the theme tune of the film and it's also really good.
Atomic Bollocks More Like
I really didn't like it. In fact I found it quite boring. It was trying to be clever but ended up just washing over me. James McAvoy was okay in it as was Bill Skarsgård, but in general it was a lazy, poorly executed double/triple agent film that barely registered as a thriller. This felt more like the then 42-year-old Theron wanted to show the world what a fantastic body she had and that she could do sex scenes or sit naked in a bath full of ice cubes without her layers of belly fat showing like Saharan sand dunes. I didn't enjoy the film at all and the wife thought we'd seen it, but that was because it was just like so many other films of its ilk but not as well made. I'd give this a miss if you haven't already.
WTAF2
This 2012 movie focuses on the relationship between these two best friends as Mike arrives at Chris's with the intention of either talking him in to rehab or forcing his old friend into cold turkey. What follows is really odd as Mike starts discovering films, photographs and evidence that suggests things that can't possibly have happened and the more he delves into the mystery the more he becomes convinced that he's walked into someone else's nightmare. Some of the pictures show events from many years ago, while others, including video tape, show things that have yet to happen. Or have they?
It's not as overtly loopy [if you'll pardon the pun] as The Endless but it is as weird, with other characters that pop up in the latter film dropping by as well as dodgy Native Americans, crack dealers and people Chris either owes or is indebted to somehow. Mike also can't really understand why Chris is so intent on killing himself - his way - but it soon becomes as clear as mud that Chris thinks he's reliving his life, or at least a portion of it, over and over again and it appears that Mike is now trapped in the same nightmarish situation.
It's not a particularly good film, but it does try and convey a point and a theme that is explored more deeply in The Endless, but ultimately you don't care enough about any of the characters to give a shit about their trials and tribulations, especially Chris, who is essentially an arsehole.
999s
Is Reynolds a TV actor who has fucked up? Is he a screenwriter who gets shafted? Or is he a video game creator who is led into the wilderness to have his godliness spelled out to him? Or is he actually God who's taken a holiday from heaven to play the role of three different people because he loves being with all the little plebs?
I'm not totally convinced it worked, but I did think it was a good idea. I was totally blown away at how young McCarthy looked and how Reynolds was convincing as a body who starts to no longer understand what is happening to him - an on-screen existential crisis. Does this film explore the reality of unreality or is it a fantasy sci-fi film with the chief protagonist an extra-terrestrial omniscient being carrying out a review of God's work? There are a number of clues throughout the film, but the way it's played out you don't realise they're clues until the film ends - a kind of existential Sixth Sense.
The red herring in the film is in the second vignette when McCarthy appears as a 'version' of herself along with her actual husband Ben Falcone, who then reappears at the end/epilogue of the film when McCarthy is trying to understand what she has been through and asks her daughter what mommy's name is. It's confusing, but it's also quite compelling and the fixation with the number 9 appears to be something to do with where Reynolds' character sits in the grand scheme of things. Humans are 7s, Koalas are 8s (because they're telepathic and understand what is happening to the world) and Reynolds is a 9, one short of being a God. Given that his final character is called Gabriel it could be surmised that he's actually an angel and angels were who really created the world we live him while God just watched.
Um... No I Almost Can't Believe it Either
So many films we have and haven't seen and yet there's a small series of them we never completed. The story goes something like this - we watched part one and wasn't that impressed, but you know it was a special event. Then with part two we actually did something we'd never ever done before, we walked out of the cinema half way through the film because we were even less impressed and I had already fallen asleep twice, so we never bothered with the third part and that has been the case now for almost 20 years. In fact, I take great pleasure telling people I never watched this trilogy and even deride fans of this franchise for liking something I've always felt was a tad overrated...
I dunno. Perhaps it's been the fact that some of the films we've watched recently have been proper stinkers, outweighing the good and the quite lovely by far too many. Perhaps we wanted to see if this was as bad as we remembered and if it was it would round a shit week off with a shit film (it's been a shit week because I've had another chest infection and have spent most of the week feeling worse than a shit Star Wars film).
The thing is, it wouldn't have been a half bad film if it wasn't for the overt racism, the bad script, the subliminal racism, the woeful dialogue and the fucking Gungans, who were like walking racist caricatures. Other than those things and Annikin - badly acted by Jake Lloyd - (and here was me thinking the awful Hayden Christensen was in all three films - I'm that much of a SW fan) - it wasn't a bad film. The aliens who sounded like the Chinese were even badly dubbed so Lucas really went to town with the stereotypes and a lot of the large scale special effects looked like computer generated landscapes.
Actually, it was a bad film, it just wasn't quite as shit as I remembered and if they'd cut about an hour and 40 minutes out of it, it might have made an entertaining half hour short. McGregor wasn't bad as Alec Guinness, Natalie Portman was Natalie Portman as the Queen of Naboo. What the fuck was Samuel L. Jackson doing in it or Celia Imrie for that matter? Ray Park was such an awful actor they had to get Peter Serafinowicz to dub his voice - and he is soooo short! Lucas even managed to squeeze Warwick Davis in, which isn't really difficult.
We've still only seen seven Star Wars films all the way through. Saturday night is going to change that with an Attack of the Clowns night, but that and Revenge of the Slithereen will have to wait to be eviscerated in next week's blog.
Next Time...
Invasion is back. I just hope we can remember much from the first series that only really seemed to improve just as it was finishing. we might find out what the kid does, how the Japanese astronaut fits into all of it or what the Iranian woman's part is - everything else, apart from Sam Neill's brief appearance is a bit of a blur; the wife might even suggest not bothering.
More Star Wars nonsense, more time travel films and maybe They Cloned Tyrone (because my mate Chris rates it) and/or whatever else there's left on the increasingly marginally interesting Flash Drive of Doom. I bet you can't wait? I know I can...
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