Film Shapes

Had a little trouble getting to this preview. Hands up, I thought it was a Luna screening but it was actually at the Windsor. No matter, it turns out you can get from one cinema to the other in under 15 minutes. So, just in time to crimp off the end of a Matt Damon trailer, we settled in for The Rose Maker . This lovingly made light drama, set in northern France, positions itself as one thing, and then not so subtly, takes a different tack. It opens with a prestigious flower show, where Madame Vernet (played with irascible verve by Catherine Frot) and her slightly beleaguered assistant, Véra (Olivia Côte) are clearly struggling to keep their small rose farm’s head above water. It only adds to their feeling of deflation when Lamarzelle, an oily business-oriented operator, wins the ‘rose of the year’ prize for the umpteenth time in a row. So begins the themes of helplessness and desperation in the face of corporate power. Vernet’s farm was left to her by her father and she runs it like a...

The Toll is a laid-back, Welsh crime drama starring Michael Smiley, Iwan Rheon and Annes Elwy. The key adjective here is laid-back, it may be that somewhere along the production line someone mistook dull for cool. It kicks off with a toll booth operator (Smiley) on a near deserted back road meeting a police officer (Elwy), in order to get something off his chest. The first words in the film are, "This had better be fucking good". Hopeful prescience. The film tries to spin a bunch of strands together, personified by big city gangsters, small city gangsters, village hoods, farmers and a local ambulance driver, who's fond of a spot of dogging. Sadly, these strands don't make much of a garment, they start to fray and hang loose around the film's saggy waist. The confusion is even alluded to in the dialogue, but that doesn't make up for the supposed clever clogs writing. The performances aren't too bad, and Elwy is really solid, but everyone seems laboured and...

The fact that I'm not sure how I feel about Black Widow probably means the part of my brain that wanted it to be better is still fighting  with the part that realises it isn't. And that pile of word spew is all down to my  brain  too. Just be thankful  you don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. I'll try to unpack. I admire many, and quite like a few of the Marvel films. I have a Lost in Translation -based soft spot for Scarlett Johansson. I also trust Kevin Fiege and assorted minions to put together a cast and crew that know what they're doing. And so, I didn't walk into the cinema with any chips on my shoulders. But, but...I can't help thinking that this film, for all its good intentions, may have missed a golden opportunity. Setting this chunk of Natasha Romanoff's back story just after the end of Captain America: Civil War meant that  the writers (Eric Pearson, Jac Schaeffer and Ned Benson) had references points, but basically  carte blanche o...

Yep, that was a hoot. I'll just summarise the ten films I saw, but unlike last year, I thought I'd list them in order of least to most liked. So here we go: The Killing of Two Lovers  ★★ Here's a muddy, tension-soaked drama set in frosty Utah about a couple with four kids who are undertaking a trial separation. The fella, David, isn't as keen as the woman, Nikki, and a third, smarmy wheel in the form of a new boyfriend, Derek, doesn't improve the mood. The discordant soundtrack and the naturalistic, grungy setting try hard to overcome the amateurishness of the production values but ultimately, it's a losing battle. Not terrible, just not much good. For a little more on this, see my earlier post. Nimby ★★½ This is a Finnish comedy/drama about couple who don't really fancy telling their respective parents that they're lesbians. Neo-Nazis and refugees are seamlessly (!) stitched into the plot and all manner of shenanigans occur. The biggest issue with Nimby...

Nine Days is a directorial debut from Brazilian Edson Oda, starring Winston Duke, Zazie Beetz and Bendict Wong. It's a pensive, fantasy film that explores what would occur if there were 'observers' of life, making decisions on who could or couldn't enter. Duke plays Will, the observer of around a dozen or so people, one of whom suddenly dies, leaving a 'position vacant' on earth. The process begins with neat intercutting of applicants, all quite different folk. One of them is extremely tardy and is about to be rejected until Wong's character, Kyo, pleads for a chance. This is Emma, played by Beetz, and she promptly becomes the heart of the film. I was concerned that this would be a quasi-religious tract and it does centre on the idea of a higher power, but this is done in a thoughtful, even nuanced way. Wong ponders at one point that there may well be other watchers watching them, and so on. The 'job interviews' for a place on earth are just as squi...

Here we have Edgar Wright's first stab at documentary film making, and it's something of a departure from his style. The chuckles are there but he seems to have gone for a reasonably risk-free structure - lots of talking heads, ups and downs of the subject, a chronology of their career and some pretty good music (a given for a music doco, I'd guess).  The subjects are Ron and Russell Mael of the band Sparks, admittedly unknown to me (aside from one song that was on the Kick-Ass soundtrack - This Town Ain't Big Enough for Both of Us). One of the taglines is 'Your favourite band's favourite band' and the folk that front up to wax lyrical about Sparks are fairly glittery. You have Beck, some of Duran, Duran, Flea from Chili Peppers, Bernard Butler from Suede, Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand, some of New Order, Roddy Bottum from Faith No More, Mike Myers, Weird Al Yankovic, Jason Schwartzman, Neil Gaiman, Giorgio Moroder, Adam Buxton, Mark Gatiss, bloody hel...

Ok, real quick, here's the second film in the double bill from the Black Maria Film Collective and byNWR from late last month (scroll down for the first). This is  Night Tide , directed by Curtis Harrington (who plied his trade in TV mostly) and starring a young Dennis Hopper. Now, this is a pretty neat, kooky little oddity about a sailor who falls for a girl who may or may not be a mermaid. It's ok and I'd probably have thought much less of it had it not screened straight after The Nest of the Cuckoo Birds. But in comparison, it's a fucking masterpiece.  There are some over-wrought performances, possibly a hint at the director's future work on Charlie's Angels and Dynasty, but it had clean camera movements, functional editing and crisp enough sound design - things all devoid from the earlier film. Hopper is fine, very perky even, a world away from: "What are they going to say about him? What? Are they going to say he was a kind man? He was a wise man? He...