by hutchwp

Upcoming Crowdfunded Films Preview Part One: Beyond Clueless

There are a three crowd-funded films I’m pretty excited about: Beyond Clueless from Charlie Lyne; Elstree 1976 from Jon Spira; and The Angry Video Game Nerd Movie from James Rolfe. All three are extremely talented people who opted to crowd-fund their projects, and succeeded way ahead of their target dates.

Crowd-funding is a double-edged sword. In an ideal scenario, you get the money you need to complete your project and ensure you have an audience of backers who are all on board from the start, getting e-mails on a regular basis updating them with all the latest progress as it happens. It also gives you a bit of impetus to finish it on time as you have 100s or 1000s of people to keep happy.

The negative side of crowd funding is that you can end up highly embarrassed if you fail to get enough backers and your project falls flat on its face. There have been some big-name stars who’ve fallen foul of this for a variety of reasons, usually because they set their target too high (see Bjork’s failed Biophilia app campaign) or they didn’t come up with enough interesting rewards at appropriately-pitched prices.

These boys have got it right so I thought I’d write about them and give them the attention they deserve. I’ll start with Beyond Clueless, with the other two covered over the next week.

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I’ve been a backer of this campaign for almost two years now and thus feel wholeheartedly part of the journey that all backers have gone on with writer and director Charlie Lyne, who makes a living as a columnist to The Guardian and as the editor of film blog Ultra Culture. With regular updates to all the backers and exclusive videos and artwork sent out to us all (and preview screenings), this was a crowd-funding campaign that has been executed perfectly by Lyne and maintained my interest throughout, and this in turn has evidently generated a lot of buzz around the project.

The film is essentially a review and dissection of the teen movie genre narrated by Fairuza Balk (American History X, Almost Famous). The press release states “Beyond Clueless is a dizzying journey into the mind, body and soul of the teen movie, as seen through the eyes of over 200 modern teen classics”. I’m a big fan of many of the films covered, including Mean Girls, Clueless, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club (to name but a few). The film promises to draw comparisons by interlinking scenes of different films and commenting on the themes and critically analysing all the films it covers – no easy achievement considering the breadth of the subject. Judging by the backer updates, Lyne is clearly very passionate about the subject matter and so everything will be dealt with the utmost respect.

The soundtrack is provided by the excellent Summer Camp and I’ve been listening to bits of it already and it’s absolutely perfect for this film. Plenty of it is available online and it’s well worth a listen. This is complimented by the highly stylised illustrations surrounding the film, provided by Hattie Stewart. She has done wonders to create a brand for the film and help nurture the buzz, and this can’t be underestimated.

Having read some reviews, there has been some criticism of Balk’s narrative and also of the cutting techniques used by Lyne to produce the final edit. This all remains to be seen when the film arrives locally – I’ll be at the QUAD screening in Derby when tickets and times are released. On a side note, there is a mini tour going on to promote the film and if you get chance to drop in to one of these screenings there’s quite a lot on offer, including Q+A sessions with Lyne and live soundtrack accompaniment from the aforementioned Summer Camp. They start on 13th January and go pretty much until the general release later in the month.

When it is finally released across the UK, I hope it gets the audience the team behind it deserve.

Beyond Clueless is on a promotional tour, with dates across the UK leading up to a wider release on 29th January 2015. All dates for the tour are on the official website.

by hutchwp

Film review – St. Vincent (Ted Melfi, 2014)

Note: This is a review that is full of spoilers. If you are yet to see the film then I suggest you don’t read on.

St Vincent is an indie film that charts a small-town tale of a young boy Oliver (Jaeden Lieberher), his mother Maggie (Melissa McCarthy) and their neighbour Vincent (Bill Murray), as they compete with their various individual struggles. Maggie is going through a divorce with her husband and has had to move away and start a new job to support herself and her son. Oliver is being bullied at his new school and is finding his way in a new neighbourhood without a father-figure (or indeed mother-figure) to guide him. Vince is an unlikely companion to Oliver, as he battles addictions to gambling and alcoholism.

Whilst Murray isn’t playing out of his comfort zone as a grumpy old man who is as sarcastic as he is rude, seeing him re-tread old ground is hardly a painful experience. Indeed, it’s exactly what we love him for and why he has been so successful in his career. It’s a little like when a band you love plays your favourite song as the encore – everyone is much older that the first time it came around but we all play along as it’s something we love experiencing.

There are some pretty unforgiveable plot holes in the film that really let it down and make it impossible to enjoy wholeheartedly. Whilst Naomi Watts is dong a fantastic job as the heavily pregnant dancer and “lady of the night”, it seems unfathomable that she’d have kept the baby and her jobs for so long. Whilst her being pregnant served as a humorous point for some good physical comedy, it was at the expense of the realistic façade Melfi had worked so hard to create.

It was confusing trying to rationalize Vince’s actions when they were eventually revealed to be revolving around keeping his wife in such an expensive care home. She has Alzheimer’s, which is a terrible condition, but since he wasn’t working and didn’t have any other responsibilities (children are never mentioned), if he truly loved his wife maybe he could have kept her at home instead of spending all his time with a Russian sex worker.

The most irrational decision was the choice of Maggie to palm off her son to a neighbour she knows only through arguments. It is convenient for both Maggie as a character and also as a key plot point around which to bend the storyline, but it would never happen. She also seems too quick and easy with her money, even though she is evidently struggling to make ends meet. Any of Vince’s personality traits would have set alarm bells ringing for a single mother, yet she chooses to ignore them all and employ him as a babysitter, essentially to serve the plot.

I also find it unlikely that the divorce would have been settled with joint custody of the child, when the evidence was clearly stacked against Maggie. If her husband was creating an equally bad environment for Oliver, then he would surely have gone into a foster home since neither parent was fit to care for their own child.

I forced myself to see past these flaws in order to enjoy the film, but a truly great film wouldn’t have asked so much of its audience.

St Vincent is out now at cinemas in the UK.

by hutchwp

Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014)

Christopher Nolan’s space-exploration epic has transcended being merely a film and has become a kind of international event. With its sprawling starscapes, well-thought-out science, huge cast and mind-blowing visuals, this was always bound to get people talking. It’s a shame that I didn’t enjoy it very much at all.

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Before I start, I should say that I watched it an IMAX cinema. I’ve heard stories about different experiences depending on which cinema you’ve seen it at, but mine certainly wasn’t a pleasurable one. The film starts with a blasting soundtrack, so ear-piercing it makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. The discomfort never truly goes away throughout the film, but it is most pronounced in these scenes, and sort of lulls back and forth in the background for the rest of the film, making the spoken words more or less audible depending on how Zimmer and Nolan wanted to play it. To add to this, I had the joy of watching it in a busy screening so I was also fighting against the 100s of people who were eating rustly popcorn, chocolates and sweets, slurping drinks as big as their heads, or tucking into crunchy, pungent and hideously over-priced nachos [1].

As a visual experience, the film has many merits and if there is one area it should sweep up come awards season, it should be on the special effects. The distant planets are fully realised, tangible places and when we step off into a vast rocky, icy plane we feel completely like we on a place not of this planet but totally real. That probably benefited from being seen at an IMAX, and I was doubly pleased that it didn’t have to tart itself up with 3D visuals that weren’t required.

I didn’t think any of the lead actors were at the top of their game. Following last year’s Oscar winning turn in Dallas Buyers Club and a memorable appearance in The Wolf of Wall Street, Matthew McGonaughey was obviously on a high going into this. Bar a highly emotional scene where he starts to receive video messages from his eldest child (played, eventually, by Casey Affleck), the rest of his performance was merely adequate. Anne Hathaway and Michael Caine both did a great job playing the same role they usually play in Christopher Nolan films. It’s just a shame none of these performances blew me away.

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As the film has many opportunities to have the plot ruined by people, mostly people said to me “It’s good, but the last 40 minutes were completely pointless.” That annoyed me because I was expecting a slump at this point. As much as I resisted, they were wholly right. Up to this point we had a solid, thoughtful action film and in the last chapter it just descended into madness, tripping itself or the audience (or both) up with complicated 5D gravitational bleeding theory and scientific speculation. At one point I actually laughed out loud. I’m convinced the most cinema goers would have been completely lost by the end of the film. Maybe that was the idea. Following Nolan’s previous films, where we were challenged and surprised by the twists at the end (The Prestige is still one of my favourite films of all time, precisely because it has a great twist or three at the end), it was disappointing that the big reveal was so well thought out but yet so poorly communicated. Perhaps they needed to have a 30 minute lecture before the film introducing us all to the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. Maybe an idea for the Blu-Ray release [2].

I’m not going to sit here and recommend you don’t see this film. It’s just an opinion, and seemingly one that goes completely against the grain of everyone I’ve spoken to. I just didn’t think it was as good as the hype, nor as good as Nolan’s previous efforts. All-in-all, a bit of a let down.

Interstellar is out now at cinemas worldwide.

[1] = Why-oh-why would you choose to do spend so much on food at a cinema. A cinema of all places? It’s so expensive and you annoy everyone else at the same time. Have we, as a nation, become so obese that we can’t make it through a three hours screening without doubling our calorie intake for the day? I think it’s a serious issue and indicative of where society has taken itself that we must consume unhealthy food every couple of hours. No wonder there’s an obesity problem. It reminds me of the guy in China who buys every single ticket to a screening at his local cinema for once a week, which is increasingly seeming like a good idea (though I don’t think I could justify the £2k spend each time to be honest).

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[2] There’s a great explanation of the science behind the film over at Screen Rant. It’s full of spoilers but if you’ve already seen the film and want a bit of a nudge on what was happening, that’s a great place to start.

by hutchwp

Weird Science (John Hughes, 1985)

Screened as part of Mayhem’s The Created Woman festival in Nottingham, I had a fantastic opportunity to revisit a childhood favourite on the big screen. Whilst perhaps of its time, John Hughes’s Weird Science still stands up to my memories and was every bit as enjoyable a I remember it.

The plot centres around two teenage geeks: Gary Wallace (played by Hughes regular Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt Donnelly (played by Ilan Mitchell-Smith). When we first see them, they are on the wrong end of a beating at the hands of school bullies (one of which is an extremely young Robert Downey, yet to add Jnr.). When they return home, inspired by a viewing of Frankenstein – or was it Bride of Frankenstein? – they fire up their Memotech MTX512 and try to create their perfect woman using a few magazine cuttings, some rudimentary computer software, a doll and a hacked power station. What they don’t expect is that this woman will come to life, in the form of Kelly LeBrock, the sexy, British, athletic, intelligent, headstrong woman of their dreams.

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To enjoy the film you have to accept its many faults. There’s quite a bit of unfathomable science going on to get us through the story, with no real basis in science. The computer visuals really set the film deeply in the 1980s and have dated badly. I’m not sure the idea of a 23-year-old woman passionately kissing a 15-year-old boy would pass studio execs nowadays but LeBrock is clearly hamming up and revelling in the “ideal woman” role, where the ideal woman is one imagined by two young geeky teenagers who have never had girlfriends and don’t really know what they want. You don’t have to try hard to put that to one side and accept it for what it is – a classic teen comedy by one of the greatest directors of a generation.

Bill Paxton puts in a hilarious turn as Wyatt’s older brother, who is in charge for the weekend and is running the house like a military camp. His eventual punishment for the way he treats Wyatt is unexpected an quirky, but I’ll leave the surprise for you if you’re going to watch it soon.

Revisiting Weird Science didn’t disappoint me one bit and I’d like to thank Broadway Cinema in Nottingham and Mayhem Festival for allowing it a rare return to the big screen, especially in gorgeous 35mm print form. Keep up the good work!

Weird Science is available now to buy on Blu-Ray. A print of the lovely poster art I’ve used at the top of this article is available at Old Red Jalopy.

by hutchwp

Frankenstein Created Woman (Terence Fisher, 1967)

Terence Fisher’s 1967 Hammer Horror film Frankenstein Created Woman was screened as the opening film of the Mayhem Presents The Created Woman weekender at Broadway in Nottingham. It was a perfect way to kick off the festival.

Fisher had spent his career making a name for himself as a director of great Hammer Horror titles, including The Mummy, Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles. This film came towards the end of his career (he was 63 at the time), by which point he was clearly a very accomplished and well-established director. Despite this, there is nothing stale about this picture.

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He relied again on Peter Cushing to take the role of Baron Frankenstein, a tried and tested appointment. Yet it isn’t Cushing that takes centre-stage. Playboy centrefold Susan Denberg is absolutely brilliant as the shy and physically scarred Christina, whose body is the subject of Frankenstein’s latest experiment. Fusing her body with the soul of her deceased lover Hans (Robert Morris), she becomes a schizophrenic femme fatale, with a personal vendetta to murder those responsible for his death. Her role has two sides and both are played perfectly, though she is obviously more at ease with the second more sexually-confident character.

The film has a few loose points. It is responsible for one of the worst court scenes in cinematic history, in which Hans is sentenced to death for a crime with no evidence and no witnesses, even though the judge knows he is innocent, essentially because his father was a murderer. It’s in there for necessity and Fisher tries to see it through as quickly as possible. Elsewhere, three men essentially allow themselves to be killed, in reality because if they’d tried to struggle they would have easily overcome their attacker. Apparently it’s much easier to just lie still in shock and take the inevitable.

It’s probably not the best Frankenstein-based story ever told, but with a great performance from Denberg it is one that is worthy of the franchise and I recommend checking it out if you’re a big fan of the series, or indeed of Hammer Horror in general.

Frankenstein Created Woman is available on Blu-ray now.

by hutchwp

Exodus: Gods and Kings (Ridley Scott, 2014)

Ridley Scott as director. An all-star cast including Sir Ben Kingsley, Sigourney Weaver and Christian Bale. A modern retelling of The Book of Exodus. An estimated $140m budget. Epic battles. The scale and subject matter of Exodus: Gods and Kings means it’s destined for success. But is it any good?

Before I start, it’s important to note that my experience of the film has been informed by the fact I’m an atheist. Not only that, to my shame I actually went into the film without a clear memory of the story of Moses. I’m probably in the minority on that. I mean, I remember the stuff with the frogs and the locusts and the parting of the sea and the burning tree. It’s all in there, for sure. I just couldn’t remember why any of those things happened or what order any of it came in. I was approaching it with an air of naivety that was perhaps self-inflicted, both in my youth and subsequent life choices, but also in a lack of effort to remind myself of the story before I went in to the première.

To cut a long story short, I can’t tell you whether or not this is a faithful representation of the Book of Exodus. What I can tell you is that it’s a pretty spectacular experience. The story itself is a gripping tale of two brothers battling for power, one of whom is struggling to understand his own place in a world ravaged by slavery, elitism, poverty and racism, a world where he has grown up believing he is something he is not.

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It is the kind of tale that has been brought to the big screen many times before, though rarely on such a grand scale. Scott probably had his work cut out to keep all parties happy. He has stated that he would have had difficulty getting financial backing for the film had he not cast a white A-list actor in the lead role, though this has caused dissatisfaction amongst those that want something more accurate to the story (or is that disgust…?). Clearly, deviating from the Book of Exodus would have been a terrible move too, so most of the time he plays it safe. The story doesn’t need to be embellished to keep it interesting, so there’s no cause for panic there.

One of the things that impressed me most – and it’s something that has caused a lot of debate after the previews – was the scientific explanations of the various aspects of the story. In particular, the parting of the Red Sea is apportioned to a tsunami. Actually this is a pretty robust explanation and I can see how this would work, though I do wonder how the 400000 Israelites about 10ft above the wave on a small rock survived en masse whilst the Egyptians were wiped out as they were at sea level (sorry, spoiler alert). I also question how Ramses managed to be the lone-survivor when he was the worst positioned of everyone. That said, the fact an explanation is offered, along with the hints at Moses having hallucinations rather than seeing a real-life messenger, anchors the story in the real world and makes it far more believable. Whether a devout Christian would see it the same way is another question.

On a side note, anyone attempting to boycott a film before it has been released will probably never enjoy anything in their life. So much media attention has focused on the casting of the leads, with accusations of “white-washing” being the main issue. I was on review lockdown ahead of watching the film so I wasn’t aware of it ahead of the screening, but it wasn’t something that jumped out at me whilst I was watching. Maybe I need to see it again to see if I missed it, but it seems disrespectful to suggest that Scott would choose such a late point in his career to intentionally start showing racial bias in his films. Also, if the popular imagery of Christianity is going to be criticised then a better starting point might be the generally accepted depiction of Jesus as a tall, white man with long brown hair, which I think humanity will eventually agree probably isn’t what he would have looked like at all.

Despite some pre-film trepidation, I was pleasantly surprised that I could enjoy a Biblical film so much. The way Scott has constructed this retelling makes it accessible to all cinema goers. Hopefully it isn’t at the expense of the Christian market.

Exodus: Gods and Kings is released in the UK on 26th December 2014.

by hutchwp

Mayhem Presents The Created Woman (Broadway Cinema, Nottingham, 2014)

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This weekend I’ll be heading over to Mayhem Presents The Created Woman at Broadway Cinema, Nottingham. The festival is “a three day journey into Sci-Fi with film screenings, events and discussions”. So far I’ve only got tickets to the Friday night screenings of Terence Fisher’s 1967 film Frankenstein Created Woman and John Hughes’s 1985 cult classic Weird Science. There’s also a free screening of Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde later on in the cafébar, which will be an interesting experience.

The events are on all weekend, including screenings of two different versions of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis on Saturday. I was lucky enough to see the original robot from Metropolis last month at le Musée de la Cinémathèque in Paris and it has reignited my interest in this picture, so I’ll be going to at least one of these screenings. The discussions and introductions look set to offer a lot of insight into the films.

At £5 a ticket, you can hardly go wrong!

Mayhem Presents The Created Woman runs at Broadway Cinema in Nottingham from 5th-7th December 2014.

by hutchwp

Film review – Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance (Mark Kidel, 2013)

I’ll throw it out there – I’m a huge, huge Elvis Costello fan. I can’t pinpoint an incident that served as a catalyst to get into him. As a 30-year-old Brit, the only major hit of his I remember is the Charles Aznavour cover “She” from the Notting Hill soundtrack, which, I think it’s fair to say, probably isn’t a great representation of his fantastic and varied body of work. Yet somehow the songs seeped into my psyche and I now rate him as one of my favourite artists.

This documentary serves as a biography of sorts, albeit potted around some key periods of Costello’s life. Aspects covered include his upbringing, his hometown, the politics of his lyrics and a small selection of his songs. Some huge guests are interviewed, including Paul McCartney, Mark Ellen and Nick Lowe.

Each element that is picked out is tended to perfectly. In particular, the collaborations with Paul McCartney really ignited my enthusiasm to seek out more information. Kidel has managed to get all this contributors to talk really enthusiastically about their part in the Elvis Costello journey and I as a viewer found myself swept along with it.

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Unfortunately, the documentary length doesn’t allow too much delving into each topic, whilst the shear bredth of his career means that a lot of his life is skipped over. It’s an impossible balance to achieve because his life and background are both so interesting, and perhaps his story is instead worthy of a series. Or perhaps that’s just the inner fan getting the better of me and I should just make do with what I’ve got.

The one lasting impression you get after watching this film is that Elvis Costello is overly enthusiastic about everything he has done. Be it having a string of top 10 albums, releasing an album of jazz soul music with Allen Toussaint, collaborating with one of the greatest songwriters of all time or creating an ill-received classical string album with The Brodsky Quartet, he has continually done so enthusiastically and been hugely successful in a variety of ways with every genre he has tried his hand at.

If you’re willing to be enthused by one of Britain’s greatest ever songwriters then check this out. Otherwise, the limited storytelling might have you searching for a biography that has a bit more detail.

Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance is available on the BBC iPlayer in the UK until 20th November 2014.

 

by hutchwp

What We Do In The Shadows (Taika Waititi and Jermaine Clement, 2014)

Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement’s mockumetary What We Do In The Shadows follows a group of Wellington-based vampires as they try to come to terms with living in the 21st Century. It’s a nice new take on the vampire genre given the recent attempts by the Twilight Saga to ruin both vampires and werewolves for a whole generation, but it didn’t really get going until the final third.

A lot of the dynamics of the humour come from the fact that the three main characters – Viago (Waititi), Vladislav (Clement), and Deacon (Jonathan Brugh) – have their own separate issues in adapting to and accepting a modern domestic life. Viago is a bit of a stickler for cleanliness, moaning about the dishes not being done and putting tissues down to protect the carpets before he bites into victims’ necks. It works well for most of the film and they’re able to create a lot of humour from the situations.

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One thing it borrows on heavily from Waititi and Clement’s most successful collaboration – Flight of the Conchords – is the ability to inflate the mundane everyday goings-on of the main characters to create massive issues. They’ve clearly thought the subject matter through and found some humorous takes on what could happen if vampires had to, for example, go clubbing. First of all, they can’t check themselves out in the mirror as they have no reflection, so they have to draw pictures of each other to illustrate what they each look like. Secondly, the only clothes they have are salvaged from their victims, so outfit choices are limited. It is funny, but not side-splittingly hilarious.

Towards the end of the film, their relationship to the local werewolves provide some huge laughs and the situation at the annual social dinner with other vampires (plus zombies) is also well thought out and delivered. It was the pay-off for what at times felt a little contrived throughout the saggy middle of the film.

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Mockumentaries are a strange thing. Some people love them, some people hate them. They’re always going to get compared to the genre-defining Spinal Tap, which is probably never going to bettered. I saw past that, but couldn’t help thinking that it was both a great idea and a missed opportunity.

This isn’t a film that necessitates a trip to the cinema, but would be a worthy view once it becomes available on the various home entertainment channels early next year, especially if you’re a fan of their previous work.

What We Do In The Shadows is released in the UK on 21st November 2014 and in the USA on 13th February 2015.

by hutchwp

Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014)

“The closer you look, the darker it gets” declares the poster for Dan Gilroy’s directorial debut Nightcrawler. And so it was. As I sat in the cinema wondering how far Jake Gyllenhaal’s character would take it, the answer tended to be “Oh, that far.”

The film is a bildungsroman tale of Lou Bloom (Gyllenhaal), a young man driven by money and success, and willing to go to any lengths to achieve it. He gets hooked on the idea of freelance crime journalism, specifically filming violent crimes and accidents with a personal camcorder, with the plan to sell them on to local news station KWLA manager Nina (Rene Russo). However, as his business grows and the stakes are raised, he goes to great lengths to ensure he rises to the top of the pile and stays there, no matter what the consequences are.

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Gyllenhaal is a wonder to watch in a film like this. He has chosen his films wisely over the years and has a body of work he can already be very proud of, including Donnie Darko, Jarhead, Brokeback Mountain, Zodiac and Source Code. This is definitely amongst his best overall, and I’d go as far as say that Lou is his most defined character yet. He plays sinister very well and clearly knows how to make his audiences tick. At times it’s a real joy to watch, at times it made me want to cover my eyes; both responses indicative that I was hooked.

The plot works as a game of oneupmanship unto itself, and this operates across the board. The characters become fuller and more dislikable as the time progresses, the gore gets gorier, the action gets more explosive and by the final act the whole movie had me whipped up into a frenzy of disbelief. Well played Gilroy.

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The supporting cast includes a top-form Bill Paxton (whoopee-fuckin’-do) as a rival video journalist, and a further emerging Riz Ahmed, who Brits may remember from the excellent Four Lions. Ahmed is one of my favourite British actors and it was a nice surprise to see him with such a big role in an American blockbuster.

As the finale approached, I found myself getting increasingly engrossed by Lou’s actions. His morals become so loose by the end that there is nothing remaining. His actions are fuelled by a desire to earn money, which is only possible because the viewers of KWLA are hungry to see the gruesome truth of their city. It’s an intelligent method of storytelling that we are enticed in the same manner into Lou’s own story, and by the end I found myself questioning my own morals, sitting on the edge of my seat, watching in excited disbelief.

This is an excellent film and it’s well worth seeking out whilst it’s still in cinemas. Check it out!

Nightcrawler is in cinemas worldwide now.