Category / Cinema

by hutchwp

Film review – Passengers (Morten Tyldum, 2016)

It’s fun to slam a bad film, isn’t it? Hand us a terrible film and we’re all there ready with our sticks to beat it down. It’s funny, because the filmmakers have no control over it and we get away with having a good laugh at their expense.

Passengers has been that film for the last couple of weeks.

I’ve had an article shared to me with some photos that prove how creepy Chris Pratt is in it. I had another one sent over about how it had failed at the box office after poor reviews. Generally the early reviews were positive, then the consensus changed and everyone has now decided it’s a poor film, so that’s the stance everyone has taken. Even positive reviews have misleadingly negative titles to ensure they don’t buck the trend (News.com.auhad a favourable review but they titled it “What was Jennifer Lawrence thinking?”).

The three people who sent me the above articles have no intention of watching Passengers. That is entirely their loss.

Passengers is an excellent film.

There’s more to this than the reviews have suggested

Spoilers now follow.

At its heart, it is a romantic drama that explores the relationship ship between James Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), who are trapped in space on the Avalon spaceship, en route to the planet Homestead II. To make the 120-year journey, the crew and passengers are in hibernation pods, but Preston’s pod opens early and he is forced to fend for himself, physically and mentally.

Trapped in space alone, he eventually starts to consider waking up fellow passengers. As an electrician and mechanic, he can navigate the user manuals of the hibernation pods and is able to select who he wakes up based on video messages left on their personal profiles onboard the ship’s communication devices. He chooses writer Lane, a woman he has fallen in love with, and makes the unforgivable choice to wake her up, sentencing her to the same fate as him – certain death before anyone else wakes up.

The critics have centred on this decision as a blocker to any enjoyment. That is truly unfair. If they were handed the film to edit, presumably it would finish after forty minutes and we’d have a shot of Pratt’s character dying alone as an old man, trapped and miserable, yet having made the morally correct decision. 

In Mark Kermode’s book Hatchet Job, there’s a brilliant passage on how Casablanca would have turned out if it had been shown to test screenings, with one of the greatest love stories of all time likely being changed to a happier yet implausible conclusion. 

The same applies here.

This is a plot that is deliberately divisive, meant to create discussion. Some will argue that Preston was insane, on the cusp of suicide, and his relationship with Lane sustained him long enough to figure out there was a critical error with the ship, this saving the entire ship (with her help – it was a two-person job). Others will side with Lane’s stance immediately after she realises the truth; also quite justifiable due to the fact their entire relationship is based on a fundamental lie.

Either way, director Morten Tyldum fully explores every possible line of thought enough to allow the viewers to make their minds up, with enough space in the pace of the film for those thought processes to go to fruition during the film.

Pair this complex romance with some beuatiful visuals and some stellar performances from the two leads, and you get a film much better than the critics will have you believe.

You will be robbing yourself if you believe the negativity and don’t see this film for yourself.

by hutchwp

Best Films of 2016

I’ve seen a lot of films in the last year, perhaps the most I’ve ever seen in a single year. It’s phenomenal given how busy I’ve been. 

There were a couple of films I caught at the London Film Festival that I haven’t put in because they will be 2017 films. I may as well state that there is no way La La Land won’t make the list for 2017. It’s just that good.

I also decided I’d treat documentary films seperately because this year was the best in a long time for this genre. The top of the pile was probably Weiner, though there was a whole bunch of great efforts that will get their own article.

Here’s my top twelve, in alphabetical order:

Arrival


What I said:

“Arrival is one of the best films of the year. Gripping, intelligent, thought-provoking and stylish. A must see.”

Read the original review here.

Deadpool


What I said:

” It’s brash, it’s offensive and it’s graphic. It’s almost like a superhero film from an alternate reality, where the primary goal isn’t to sell action figures and lunchboxes. Its failings are more than made up for by how refreshing it was to see a completely different take on the genre.”

Read the original review here.

The Hateful Eight


What I said:

“This is a psychological mystery that isn’t afraid to maintain the whole story in complete isolation. It intertwines some laugh-out-loud moments with shocking gore in a way that only Tarantino knows how. It may not be his greatest achievement but it certainly doesn’t disappoint.”

Read the original review here.

Julieta


What I said:

“A beautiful work of art and a must see for anyone with a penchant for high quality cinema.”

Read the original review here.

Moana


What I said:

“The plaudits must go to Auli’i Cravalho, who comes in as a complete unknown and has delivered a lead performance that equals the best Disney has ever achieved. At just sixteen but with a voice as good as anything I’ve ever heard on stage, she has a very bright future indeed.”

Read the original review here.

The Neon Demon


What I said:

“This is a sensational film with a powerful leading performance from a girl just seventeen at the time of filming. Pairing this with such bold film making and the result was never going to be anything but an overwhelming success.”

Read the original review here.

Nocturnal Animals


What I said:

“If you’re interested in seeing Tom Ford’s latest then you need to know what you’re getting yourself in for. It’s a veritable misery-fest. And it’s absolutely breathtaking.”

Read the original review here.

Raw


What I said:

“Clearly, any film that can accurately depict a human devouring the flesh of a fellow human is going to turn some stomachs. It would be easy enough to nail the visual effects, make a shocking trailer and launch it out into the world. Where Raw will find wider success is the fact that there is a genuinely interesting and well-realised film beyond the surface, which justifies its critical praise.”

Read the original review here.

Room


What I said:

“It may not seem it but it’s a wonderful hidden gem, the quality of which will only become apparent once you’ve seen it. It is deliberately difficult but equally rewarding to witness. An early contender for one of my top films of the year.”

Read the original review here.

Spotlight


What I said:

“The film is now serving the same purpose as the original article: to shine a spotlight on a diabolical scandal that should have been eradicated decades ago. It is possibly the most important film you will see this year.”

Read the original review here.

Victoria


What I said:

“When I say one-shot, I mean one-shot: no trickery, no cut-aways, no cheating. That’s 138 minutes of film in one continuous take – a bold move that took three attempts to get right. It’s a glorious achievement and a wonder to behold, even though the film is perhaps flawed as a result of its own triumph.”

Read the original review here.

When Marnie Was There


What I said:

“Instantly it will strike you that it’s just as beautifully animated as anything we’ve seen before, with hand-drawn drawings taking us on the typically personal, solitary journey of the main character. Animation has seldom looked this good.”

Read the original review here.

by hutchwp

Film review – Arrival (Denis Villeneuve, 2016)

For many cinema-goers, Arrival may have been one of the worst films of the year. For all its big-budget sci-fi overtones and its positioning alongside other space-based 2016 blockbusters such as Independence Day: Resurgence, Passengers and Rogue One, if you sought out Arrival expecting more of the same you may have been disappointed. Indeed, you will have been tricked into that much-elusive cinematic experience: thinking.

Set in modern-day USA, it stars Amy Adams as renowned linguist Louise Banks, brought in by the government to help humanity communicate with extra-terrestrial life forms that have mysteriously landed throughout Earth. She teams up with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) to begin to decipher their language and understand why they have chosen now to begin communication.

Amy Adams as linguist Louise

It is anything but a full-blown rollercoaster of action, instead concentrating its efforts on an elegant storyline with some seriously unsubtle political messaging. Or should that be serious and unsubtle?

What screenwriter Eric Heisserer has set out to do – and succeeded – is position the viewers in the shoes of alien lifeforms understanding Earth for the first time. In that sense, we are asked to consider the absurdity of the fact that so many countries have ongoing conflicts, unable to get along with one-another.

It may be set in the USA but you would be mistaken in thinking this was a lazy choice in making the Americans the saviours. The decision was more likely financial. Sure, the hero could have been from Pakistan or Chile, but this would have seriously hindered sales in the USA and all other countries where English is either a first or second language.

Amy Adams, as always, puts in a brilliant turn as the determined linguist Louise. She’s a likeable and versatile actress, perhaps at the top of her game right now, and it is a crime that not one of her five Academy Award nominations has thus far earned her a win. Perhaps this year, with a potential double-nomination for this and Nocturnal Animals, we’ll see her rightly rewarded.

Arrival is one of the best films of the year. Gripping, intelligent, thought-provoking and stylish. A must see.

by hutchwp

Most viewed reviews of 2016

Writing these blogs is a weird and wonderful endeavour. Some of my most treasured works will get such a small amount of traffic it can be extremely disheartening. Other times, I get a silly amount of traffic for a review and I will never understand where the differences are made.

Here are the top ten most accessed review pages for this last year.

Dancer

Headshot

Looking for a Home

Your Name

A Bigger Splash

So what does this tell me? Clearly films that are mainstream do less well, whilst the ones listed above are all certainly out of the mainstream and I guess more likely to appear sooner on popular search engines.

Interestingly, three of the films are for the Asian continent, with the majority of views arriving from the country the film was made in. I guess I can say that I was big in Japan this year.

Thank you to everyone for your continued support!

by hutchwp

Best Albums 2016

Here’s a quick list of my favourite albums of 2016. In no particular order, although I suspect Gregory Porter edges it in terms of listens for the year, closely followed by Mr Bowie.

David Bowie – Blackstar

Gregory Porter – Take Me To The Alley

Radiohead – A Moon Shaped Pool

Travis – Everything at Once

Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein – Stranger Things Vol. 1

Michael Kiwanuka – Love and Hate

Takatsugu Muramatsu – When Marnie Was There Soundtrack Music Collection

Ed Harcourt – Furnaces

by hutchwp

The worst Xbox 360 achievements I earned

I’ve recently taken the decisive step to ditch my old Xbox 360 and purchase an Xbox One S, bringing me back into the light from a four year period of darkness on what the wider public refer to as “serious gaming”. [1]

Playing on an Xbox console is synonymous with the strangest of progress markers: the Achievement. I unlocked my first achievement for over a year on Monday night, “Cast Member”, essentially for starting to play a fun platformer called BattleBlock Theater. I had this sudden dread fall over me, which reminded me of a time when I had fallen out of love for video games and had instead got addicted to increasing my GamerScore, which for those of you who don’t have an Xbox console is their way of keeping track of your progress in a videogame in a way that displays your progress to everyone on your friends list. It’s a hollow existence, especially when you don’t know anyone on your friends list and you’re doing it anyway.

So to remind myself to not get involved in this silliness again, I thought it would be cathartic to list out the worst “achievements” I earned in my first run during the Xbox 360 era. Before I start I will answer the two questions that will spring to mind for you as you read: I was largely single and my job wasn’t very taxing.

1000 GS for “completing” Avatar: The Last Airbender

This is probably the most shameful on the list, and it’s one I can’t even believe I did. In the time where the internet existed but Netflix hadn’t taken off, there was a thing called Lovefilm in the UK that allowed people to rent DVDs, Blu-rays and games via post… Sorry, what? Oh… it still exists.

Anyway, I’d heard that there was a glitch in the training section of this children’s game that allowed you to unlock all the achievements in around five minutes. I rented it, I exploited the glitch, then put the game back in the post.

For what? I’ve no idea. I’ve spent the intervening time (almost a decade) hiding it from anyone I speak to.

80 GS for Treasure Hunter in Final Fantasy XIII

This started off as an innocuous attempt to complete my first Final Fantasy game since the seventh installment on the PlayStation. What ended up happening was a 60 hour end game that book-ended the conclusion of the game with misery and a huge detriment to my mental and physical health.

The game finishes after about 40 hours and there are a few standard completionist-type achievements for maximising all of your stats and getting five star ratings all Cie’th Stone missions, but this one took the biscuit.

Whilst collecting all the weapons and items might seem like a normal request, what was required was an unexpected and very slow slap in the face. The precise requirements were a heck of a lot of gill, some very precise catalyst items and (most importantly) six trapezohedrems. It was unrewarding and unforgiving and all I got was 80 measly GamerScore points. It’s almost worthy of a t-shirt, but for the fact that nobody would want to wear it and nobody else would understand it.

1650 GS for being a frustrated completionist by Family Game Night

Due to a rights issue, Yahtzee wasn’t available on Family Game Night in the UK (it isn’t owned by Hasbro outside the United States). So whilst I sat there playing Connect 4 for hours and hours with nothing to show for my efforts, I also wasn’t even able to 100% the achievements.

So what have we learned? I’m an idiot.

120 GS for 100 matches won in Pro Evolution Soccer 6

This is where the online community of website True Achievements comes into play. I managed to hook up with someone else with the same chronic completionist issues as myself and spent several long nights connecting and then immediately quitting online Pro Evolution Soccer 6 matches, taking it in turns to get default wins. The game was so awful we couldn’t even bring ourselves to keep playing it; even on the last game we decided we’d play an actual game and the lag was so bad we got kicked out. This all happened five years after its initial release and took about ten hours of our lives that we will never ever get back.

Please help me.

50 GS for Duo-Hedgeidecimal on FIFA 09

I’m still split on this one. I’m not sure if it was a complete embarrassment or a triumph of the wills.

This achievement required 20 players to play in the same match session at the same time, making a 10 v 10 game. It was a logistical nightmare that was co-ordinated by a group over on xboxachievements.com. That we got it over the line was something of a fantastic gaming moment.

But why? Why did we do it? I’ve got no idea. The match was actually played, but it was dreadful. No fun to be had here.

765 GS for some random achievements in Football Manager 2006

The sad thing about this was that I played this game for months and months in an honest manner when I first owned an Xbox 360. At the time I only had Football Manager 2006 and Top Spin 2 so I had to make do. Then, six years later, I booted it up and within a couple of weeks had boosted my GS for the game from 15 to 765, by exploiting glitches and collaborating online.

Nobody on my friends list owns this game and nobody I know in real life would be impressed by the so called achievements.

1000 GS for 100% completion of Truth or Lies

This took me just under four hours to complete on 20th January 2011. It’s probably the worst game I’ve ever played, involving a quiz where you ask your friends to be honest about the answers to questions. I sat there, alone, answering questions in particular tones of voices that exploited a glitch with the interface between the microphone and the software.

Just imagine that.

A hollow existence indeed.

[1] By this I mean I’ve been playing on my Wii U for four years, so even though I’ve enjoyed gaming moments like the stupidly challenging Champions Road on Super Mario 3D World, or the very much adult-themed Bayonetta 2, or the complex fighting mechanics of Super Smash Bros. U, all of these are on a Nintendo console so can’t be really serious games, right?