Year: 2017

Movie Review – The Girl With All the Gifts

The Girl With All the Gifts (2016, dir. Colm McCarthy)

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Zombies. I don’t really get it. They seem to have an endless appeal to a large enough group of people that creators keep coming back to them. They’ve never really scared me which probably has to do with how I see them in that category of conflict of Man vs. Nature which isn’t interesting to me. A few have broken through and managed to interest me: Pontypool, 28 Days Later, Deadgirl. But for the most part, they seem to play out the same tired cliches and tropes.

The Girl With All the Gifts (based on the novel by Mike Carey) starts us out in the twilight of man’s fight against a fungal outbreak that has turned humans into ravenous hordes. The film is told through the eyes of Melanie, an 11-year-old girl who, with dozens of other children are kept in a subterranean prison, observed by scientists, and held at gunpoint by paranoid soldiers. As things often do in zombie films, the proceedings get chaotic, and our human characters are on the run. However, they survivors bring Melanie along who isn’t entirely human and whose origins reveal something much bigger about the fungal outbreak.

The overarching theme of the film is about the power of the older generation being lost and handed off to the younger generation. This particular passing of the torch is not one done willingly, and it is easy to see the conflict reflective of generational clashes in our own history. There is also some impressive play with the idea of how one generation processes the behavior of the new as mindless and evil when they simply don’t understand the underlying motives at play. Sadly, these themes are about the only good thing in this film.

The most frustrating aspect of The Girl With All the Gifts is the lack of strong character development. Instead, the script focuses on hitting plot points and moving characters from location to location. There are never enough still enough, quiet moments to develop the relationships between characters, most importantly Melanie to her teacher Ms. Justineau. That relationship feels like it’s meant to be the crux of the entire story and it is so lightly touched upon it feels inconsequential. The film’s ending behaves as though we have a high investment in these two and ends up feeling shallow because the foundations were never laid to evoke the strong emotional response the filmmakers except.

Melanie is played by newcomer Sennia Nanua, and she feels very much like a child actor. Maybe I was spoiled by Royalty Hightower’s naturalistic style in The Fits, but Nanua isn’t as hammy as a stereotypical “Broadway kid, ” but she just doesn’t seem to have a handle on realistically emoting. It never feels like anything that happens in the story lands with weight on her. There is a scene where Melanie has to take a life, nd it should play as dark and heavy, but the performance just feels like an actor doing “actor tears”. The supporting cast has some strong names: Paddy Considine, Gemma Arterton, and Glenn Close. However, even they aren’t given much to do outside hitting plot points to advance the story.

The flaws in this film likely come from the inexperience of the director in feature work. Colm McCarthy has primarily done television work which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it does come with a lack of interesting cinematography and different type of pacing with character development. The look of The Girl is disappointingly bland. The majority of shots are either medium shots or long shots when there could be some more interesting ways to show this story unfold. The setting of the third act is full of interesting visual potential but never seizes it.

I was very excited to see this film and expected some interesting twists on the tired zombie genre. While there are lots of interesting themes and ideas brought up, nothing is ever developed particularly through the characters.

Movie Review – Sing Street

Sing Street (2016, dir. John Carney)

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Conor Lawlor is fifteen years old and, with his two siblings, stuck in the middle of his parents’ deteriorating ends up at Synge Street, a free state school run by the Christian Brothers. The school is managed chaos, full of delinquent young men and priests who brutalize their students. Conor meets Raphina, a girl who lives across the street from the school and after seeing a Duran Duran music video for the first time decides he wants to form a band. The group is assembled from the boys he attends school. At the same time, his older brother begins educating Conor on various bands of the day (The Cure, Spandau Ballet), and slowly Conor develops his own sense of songwriting. The endeavor awakens a love of songwriting in him, and the band becomes more than just something to impress a girl, and their relationship becomes more than merely a crush.

By the mid-1980s due to economic stresses, young Irish were immigrating to London in significant numbers. Early in Sing Street, we see a news report covering this and mentioning the fact that many of this young people arrived with little to no money and quickly ended up on the ferry back to Ireland. Conor’s parents’ problems come from both a marriage that is drained of love and the economics issues that have come up. The Catholic Church also looms as an institution that not only oppresses Conor but even his parents. At one point his older brother says, “Two Catholics in a rented flat with a screaming baby who just got married because they wanted to have sex. They didn’t even love each other.” So while the tone of the film is generally upbeat, there is an honesty in the events unfolding.

The style of humor in Sing Street is a mix of dry and playful. I was reminded of the great recent Irish sitcom Moone Boy during a lot of the interactions between the boys in the band. There’s this sense of heightened wit among the children where they come across as wise beyond their years. Other moments have the feel of a Wes Anderson film like Rushmore or Bottle Rocket, that mix of staged scenes and rough energy. The side characters never overtake the main story but are painted with just the right full broad strokes that we have a definitive sense of who they are without the film having to overtly explain.

The music, written by Gary Clark a veteran of the music industry in the 1980s who still writes and produces has a very genuine feel. Each song is directly mimicking a particular band’s style and reflects exactly how a young songwriter would operate, first simulating the music they like as they develop their own sensibilities. I was born in 1981 so much of the music featured in the film I don’t necessarily look back with nostalgia. I certainly enjoy the lighter pop of that era, despite my dark tastes in nearly all other media, and I found the music well done.

Sing Street is a feel good coming of age movie, and I approach this type of film with a lot of trepidation. So often these films depend on a false sense of emotion. They use lazy shorthand to get across the feelings they want to evoke in the audience. Sing Street always manages to keep itself grounded and never tread into those maudlin spaces. Even the film’s “happy ending” leaves the real conclusion for these characters open. The message is that we don’t know what happens when we risk for those higher aspirations, but the risk itself is a victory.

TV Review – Search Party

Search Party (TBS)

Created by Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, Michael Showalter

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Dory (Alia Shawkat) has no real aim in life. She works as a personal assistant to a rich housewife and in dwindling relationship with her boyfriend. On a walk to work one morning, she comes across a Missing poster for Chantal, a girl she vaguely remembers from college. Apparently, during the weekend of her older sister’s wedding shower in the Hamptons Chantal vanished and her family is starting to think she may have been killed. Dory believes otherwise and makes this mystery the center of her life. She enlists her nebbish boyfriend (John Reynolds) and two best friends (John Early and Meredith Hagner). The quartet attempts to solve the mystery while getting distracted by their day to day lives and bouts of narcissism and ennui.

The depiction of Millennials in popular media has come under scrutiny in the last few years. Shows like Girls, The Big Bang Theory, Two Broke Girls, and more recently The Great Indoors have created some contentious dialogue about just how the Millennial generation should be portrayed. Writer-Directors Bliss and Rogers had previously produced Fort Tilden, an independent film about two of the most grating, yet somehow endearing 20-something young women on a Godot-esque trip to hang out with some guy at Fort Tilden. There was a certain endearing quality to these two central characters despite their surface level vapidity. They were complex and not just figures of ridicule.

Bliss and Rogers bring this same layered sense of character to Search Party and, because of its ability to spend more time with its characters, does an even better job than Fort Tilden. Alia Shawkat leads the cast and could have easily become the straight woman to the antics of John Early and Meredith Hagner. However, she delivers the best performance I’ve ever seen out of her, bringing realism to the feeling many people in their late 20s feel about prospects for their future. Searching for Chantal allows Dory to feel like she is actually doing something rather than just existing. As Maeby Funke in Arrested Development, Shawkat played the kid smarter than all the adults but here she is a character who makes mistakes and gets lost in her own frantic energy to hunt down the truth. There is comedy here but with a lot of well-measured pathos interwoven.

John Early is the obvious stand out from the supporting cast as Elliot. I became a quick fan of Early from a small role he performed in Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer series, and he went on to be featured in an episode of their The Character anthology. Here we have Early played a character he has mastered, the self-involved insecure, dumb guy. He brags about his charity to bring water bottles to the children of Africa and gets comically frustrated when confused friends start to question the whole premise of the charity. He frequently brings up his teenage bout with leukemia as a way to avoid criticism though it rarely has anything to do with the feedback he’s getting. Meredith Hagner plays Portia, a wealthy kid who has recently booked a role on a Law & Order pastiche. The most painfully real and funny part of this gig is she’s a blonde white woman cast as a Latina police detective and seems oblivious to the inaccuracy. Hanger and Early have fantastic comedic timing and often have the opportunity to play off each other.

The cast member that surprised me the most is John Reynolds as Dory’s boyfriend Drew. This character could easily have come off as a flat, easy to dislike antagonist to Dory. Instead, Bliss and Rogers choose to introduce him that way at the start and subsequently develop him to challenge our first impressions. The relationship between Dory and Drew is much more interesting than I initially expected it to be. In the same way, the characters feel like they are going to fall into those lazy Millennial stereotypes, but the creators work hard to find the genuine humor in that but also show us these are fleshed out people.

At its core, Search Party is a comedy and mystery. The good thing is this is a comedy that is actually funny. The jokes are smart and situational. Nothing feels contrived, and the best humor comes out of the character interactions. This is balanced with a considerably strong mystery. As Dory investigates, she goes down dead ends but always seems to find at least one clue that keeps the momentum going. The answers behind the mystery are satisfying, and even the red herrings turn out to be incredibly entertaining.

I was honestly surprised at how much I enjoyed Search Party. I’ve become tired of the lazy portrayals of Millennials in media and this series manages to acknowledge the truth of some of those stereotypes while adding depths to character types that are often punchlines in other series.

Movie Review – The Fits

The Fits (2015, dir. Anna Rose Holmer)

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Toni, an eleven-year-old girl, is very focused and determined when it comes to working out with her brother at the local community center’s boxing gym. She even stays after to help him wash towels, replace water cooler jugs, and get a little extra training. However, she’s recently been intrigued with a competitive girls’ dance team that trains in the larger gym at the community center. Slowly, Toni begins to be torn between these two worlds and witnesses girls on the team seemingly falling ill to strange trance-like seizures.

Continue reading “Movie Review – The Fits”

PopCult Book Club Announcement #7

A Once-Crowded Sky by Tom King

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He was definitely my favorite comic book writer of the year thanks to Omega Men, The Sheriff of Babylon, Batman, and The Vision. Once I saw he had written a superhero-themed novel I decided to give it a chance.

“King’s story revolves around the only superpowered hero left in the world—the one who stayed behind with his wife when all the others sacrificed themselves to save the world. As a strange new violent terrorism begins destroying parts of cities at random, PenUltimate needs to decide whether he wants to be a hero again…an enjoyable postmodern superhero story.” (Washington City Paper)

2017: My Most Anticipated Films

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Presented in no particular order, with brief commentary

Star Wars Episode VIII (Directed by Rian Johnson) – This is a pretty obvious one. I loved The Force Awakens but am interested to see the new ideas that Johnson has teased. Johnson also has a tremendous track record: Brick, The Brothers Bloom, Looper. I expect some interesting takes on the criminal elements of the galaxy.

Alien: Covenant (Directed by Ridley Scott) – I was pretty disappointed with Prometheus and I think it goes beyond simply expecting an Alien film. My hope is that of the inconsistencies present in Prometheus have been addressed. The Alien universe has the potential to be a great horror sci-fi landscape again and crossing my fingers that this will do it.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos) – The Lobster was a wonderful film that did fall apart in its second half. Despite that, I really love Lanthimos’ work. Dogtooth remains a powerfully disturbing film that had something to say. My hope is that Lanthimos finds a way to retain his incredibly dry sense of humor and pair it with something a bit tonally different from his previous work.

Mute (Directed by Duncan Jones) – I tend to view 2016’s Warcraft as a weird misstep in an otherwise interesting career. Jones returns to his science fiction roots with this “spiritual” sequel to Moon. Forty years from now in Berlin, a mute bartender (Alexander Skarsgård) searches for the woman he loves and two strange American surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux) seem to be tied to her whereabouts.

Blade Runner 2049 (Directed by Denis Villeneuve) – Villeneuve is arguably the best working director we have at the moment. Prisoners. Enemy. Sicario. Arrival. (I haven’t seen Incendies yet). He hasn’t made a bad film. As long as the studio allows him to have the majority of creative control I suspect this sequel will turn out to be one of 2017’s best.

Thor: Ragnarok (Directed by Taika Waititi) – My hope is that Marvel learned some lessons by pushing Edgar Wright out of the Ant-Man film and will allow Waititi to have fun with this film. The strongest aspect of the Marvel films, IMO, is that each franchise has its own tone and style. The news of this film’s connections to the Planet Hulk story arc makes me even more excited for it.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (Directed by Jon Watts) – This is one where the director doesn’t get me too excited, but the incorporation of Spider-Man into the MCU has me expecting great things. Tom Holland demoed his Spider-Man in Civil War and sold me on it. I’m not expecting a film masterpiece but just an enjoyable, comprehensible Spider-Man film.

It’s Only the End of the World and The Death and Life of John F. Donovan (Directed by Xavier Dolan) – I devoured Dolan’s filmography in 2016 and am excited that we have two films coming to American screens in 2017. End of the World pairs the director with some French acting giants (Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Lea Seydoux). John F. Donovan will be his first English-language film and has him working with Jessica Chastain among others in the story of the media bringing down a famous actor.

Baby Driver (Directed by Edgar Wright) – Wright is probably the best comedic director we have working right now. Baby Driver will be his second non-UK film and is set in New York City centered around a young man who becomes involved in a bank robbery. This premise in another director’s hands would have me luke warm but I know Wright will deliver something amazing.

Logan (Directed by James Mangold) – The first trailer we’ve seen of this film has me more excited than I expected. I haven’t seen The Wolverine and don’t really feel a need to. But the tone evoked in the Logan trailer has me on board. If the film lives up to the strength of the trailer then we have a very powerful, moving film on our hands.

Annihilation (Directed by Alex Garland) – I have read 2/3 of Jeff VanDeMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and this has the potential to be a deeply disturbing and visually interesting film. It’s being helmed by Garland who delivered one of 2015’s best with Ex Machina. He definitely knows how to create science fiction cinema that plays with ideas rather than spectacle which is what this story needs.

The Shape of Water (Directed by Guillermo del Toro) – Not much is known about this film except that it’s set during World War II in America. Michael Shannon is in the cast which has me sold, plus Doug Jones is back likely to play some sort of creature. I wasn’t a huge fan of Crimson Peak but del Toro is always an interesting director.

Blossoms (Directed by Wong-Kar Wai) – Wong-Kari Wai is a director who can be frustratingly aloof in his work but always produces something that is hypnotic. This film is based on the novel by Jin Yucheng and tells the story of a hundred every day people living in Shanghai in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. How the director will choose to adapt this work should be fascinating.

Okja (Directed by Bong-Joon Ho) – Most people would probably cite The Host or Snowpiercer as their favorite Bong-Joon Ho work, but his Hitchcock-ain thriller Mother will always be my favorite. This latest flick is billed as an action-adventure about a little girl protecting her giant monster friend from an evil multi-national corporation. Possibly a twist on The Host?

The Trap (Directed by Harmony Korine) – Nashville native Korine delivered one of the strangest and most enjoyable IMO films of 2012, Spring Breakers. This will be him moving towards a more mainstream audience with a very violent, revenge film. The cast includes Idris Elba, Al Pacino, Benicio del Toro and more. 

Under the Silver Lake (Directed by David Robert Mitchell) – It Follows is one of the best horror films to come out in decades and director Mitchell’s next project will be tackling a classic L.A. Noir story. Plot details are sparse but his minimalist tone and strong visuals will be an interesting match with the genre.

The Nightingale (Directed by Jennifer Kent) – Coming off the critical acclaim of The Babadook, Kent takes on Australia’s dark colonial past. Set in Tasmania, the film follows a woman determined to get revenge on a soldier for a terrible act of violence he committed on her family. She enlists an Indigenous tracker to help her and through these characters, the horrors of the British Empire are explored.

The Death of Stalin (Directed by Armando Iannucci) – No one writes political satire as biting and funny as Armando Iannucci. The creator of The Thick of It and Veep adapts a graphic novel about the finals days of Stalin and the chaos of his regime after he passes. If his previous work is any indication this film will be absolutely hilarious and clever.

Nosferatu (Directed by Robert Eggers) – The Witch was one of my favorite films of 2016 and Eggers seemed like a veteran filmmaker. His next project is a remake of the first vampire film. Like with The Witch, I expect a lot of sincere period accuracy that helps immerse us in the world and horror elements that aren’t overt and paced very meticulously.

A Cure for Wellness (Directed by Gore Verbinski) – Verbinski is most known for his work on Pirates of the Caribbean but I always think of him as the director behind films like The Ring and The Weatherman. I suspect this film could be quite a great big budget horror film, a rare thing these days.