OUT NOW: Saloum

During the 2003 coup in Guinea-Bissau, a trio of mercenaries (Roger Sallah, Yann Gael, and Mentor Ba) rescue a drug dealer and a consignment of gold bullion.

When their getaway plane runs low on fuel, they make an emergency landing in Saloum, where they seek shelter at a local retreat.

While the others are suspicious of their environment, leader Chaka (Yann Gael) has other reasons for staying there...

I wish I watched this on the big screen and not on my laptop. 

Sans distractions, I would havre a more immersive experience. 

So do not be surprised if this one gets a second look if Saloum gets a big screen release in NZ.

A deft mix of genres, Saloum takes its time to reveal what is really going on, and the movie would still work without the supernatural elements.

I am not the biggest fan of supernatural horror - I can appreciate it but it does not work for me.

It speaks to Saloum's strengths that I was still engaged. 

The movie does not bother with exposition, letting information come out naturally as our protagonists go about their business amid the chaos of the coup.

The film establishes several potential catalysts for conflict - there is the gold itself; there is the knowledge that someone sabotaged their plane; there is the police man who joins them in Saloum; and finally a young Deaf woman (Evelyne Ily Juhen) who knows who they are...

So even while we are getting settled into the central location, there is an underlying sense 

of dread that is building throughout the movie.

We are given hints of Mentor Ba's spirituality and place in the group - he uses a sleeping spell at various points in the early scenes - but they are dealt with matter-of-factly.

For roughly the first half, the film feels like a crime movie - a couple of seemingly amoral characters out to make a buck, and willing to kill anyone who gets in their way.

Considering the film is 84 minutes long, it is a testament to director/co-writer Jean Luc Herbulot and his co-writer Pamela Diop that these characters are not stuck as these archetypes. 

As the action progresses, the film slowly reveals more about Chaka and his comrades, that builds them into more complex and fascinating characters. And mostly without dialogue.

Herbulot's direction gives the film a no-nonsense economy and pace, while juggling the film's various genre elements. 

Underneath its tough exterior, the film packs a weary empathy for its characters, and the wider world they inhabit. 

A lot of the characters of veterans of the continent's wars, and the exploitation of Western interests is always hanging in the background. 

There is probably more going on in terms of historical context that I have missed, but that sense of history is visible and digestible - it is a part of the text, and informs the supernatural antagonist that our anti-heroes have to confront.

Saloum is worth seeing, particularly on the big screen.

OUT NOW: Orphan - First Kill

Taking place before the events of the original Orphan (2009), First Kill covers Leena’s (Isabelle Fuhrman) journey to America, disguised as a missing child, Esther.

Once stateside, she joins the grieving but wealthy Albright family: Mother Tricia (Julia Stiles), father Allen (Rossif Sutherland) and son Gunnar (Matthew Finlan).

As Leena settles in with her ‘new’ family,, it becomes clear that her scheme may be more difficult than she thought…

Orphan is a neat little thriller with a nasty edge. It is an evil kid movie that manages to ride the right side of silly while also managing to create a legitimately terrifying antagonist in Esther/Leena, played by the great Isabelle Fuhrman.

After over a decade, Fuhrman is back in a story which takes place before the original movie.

Fuhrman's return was welcome but somewhat puzzling since the character Esther is meant to be 10 years old (at least in appearance).

Could the filmmakers (led by director William Brent Bell) pull off Esther's return?

Well...

...It turns out the answer is YES. 

Not only is First Kill a worthy follow-up, I think it might be a little better - and part of the reason is that the movie feels like its own beast.

And this beast has its forked tongue firmly in its cheek and one bloody talon wrapped tightly around your funny bone.

It might be the lack of competition, but First Kill might be the funniest movie I have seen so far this year. And the laughs are intentional.

Orphan is an enjoyable movie, but it is not particularly fun. There is something funny to how bleak it gets, but it is a rather earnest picture.

Not so with First Kill. Its darkness is laced with a deep vein of irony.

First Kill manages to find its own tone but also finds its own way to be weird and f-d up that does not feel derivative of the original. 

Considering it is a prequel, that is something of a surprise.

This movie never feels like it is straining to bend itself to fit the start of the original movie.

The filmmakers do not try to hide Esther’s true identity - that info is dropped right at the start and the movie turns into a suspenseful black comedy, as we follow Esther ingratiate herself into her new family.

This works fine for the first half of the movie - it feels like a rough re-run of the original, except here we are party to Esther’s perspective.

And then midway through, there is a narrative turn which elevates First Kill and wrenches it away from feeling like Orphan Origins: Esther.

It solves two problems, the first being the sweaty plot syncing a lot of prequels fall victim to.

The second is that it shifts the audience from being an ambivalent observer of Leena’s machinations to cheering her on.

As Esther finds herself caught in a conspiracy not of her making, the film becomes suspenseful in a completely different way.

Esther is disoriented and scrabbling to escape, and the audience is similarly on new ground. First Kill is not focused on reaching the next movie, and it becomes more exciting. 

The movie also feels like it is stepping into more overt gothic territory - not just in terms of the primary setting (the old dark house), but in terms of the nasty surprises Esther uncovers in her new family.

This is also where Julia Stiles makes her presence felt.

Playing Esther’s distraught mother, initially Stiles comes across as a little stilted and one-noted. Her performance is a perfect distillation of the movie - a familiar cliche that is suddenly upended.

Midway through the movie, Tricia suddenly drops the act and reveals that she knows Esther’s secret. 

When it is revealed what really happened to her daughter, Stiles gets to throw off her morose front to reveal the vicious, selfish monster hiding underneath. Stiles is having a great time as this film’s antagonist, spitting venom and matching Fuhrman’s ferocity beat for beat.

Their conflict is also sexual, as the pair clash over Tricia’s oblivious husband Allen (Rossif Sutherland). There is no subtext to this conflict - Tricia is constantly ridiculing Esther for her height and even her infertility. 

The new power dynamic between Esther and Tricia shifts the tone fully over into farce, as our anti-heroine has to juggle being under Tricia’s thumb while maintaining her facade for the outside world. This new conflict also recasts Esther as an underdog, as she tries to dodge Tricia’s various attempts to kill her.

While there is tension, the last half of First Kill is a riot. 

Esther and Tricia’s bickering and schemes is genuinely hilarious. 

Back in the lead role after 13 years, Isabelle Fuhrman never misses a beat as the diabolical Esther. There is a relish and wit to her performance that is always entertaining - the scene where she excuses herself to chug a bottle of vodka and decompress is hilarious.

And despite the age gap since her last performance (she is now 25 years old), Fuhrman does not jostle in the lead role.

The filmmakers decided to use in-camera effects to de-age the actor (including using two child doubles and makeup), and after the first couple of minutes I was so immersed I completely forgot about the behind-the-scenes trickery.

In fact, because Fuhrman is playing an adult pretending to be a child, her age works for the movie.

The effort put into ageing Fuhrman backwards is not even the best element of the picture.

As previously stated, First Kill is a great black comedy.

There are some great cruel one liners, and various attempts at murder, a great needle drop and a finale which directly references one of Orphan’s predecessors in the ‘evil kid’ sub-genre.

Orphan - First Kill is a terrific picture. It is not a masterpiece, but it is a hell of a good time. I actually hope they figure out some way to create a Part 3.

Pierce Brosnan - The Bond In Waiting

 

The latest episode of the James Bond Cocktail Hour is out now!

On our latest episode, we take a look at two key roles from Pierce Brosnan's early career. 

First, we take a measure of Brosnan's star-making performance as the suave conman from TV's REMINGTON STEELE (1982-1987).

In the second half, we review the 1987 thriller THE FOURTH PROTOCOL, in which Brosnan plays a rogue Russian agent armed with a nuclear weapon. It is an interesting performance and - according to director John Mackenzie (The Long Good Friday) - his casting was a play on his association with James Bond.

Links to all of this season's episodes are below:

No Time To Die (review)

No Time To Die (commentary)

Pierce Brosnan - The Bond In Waiting 

Fresh (Boaz Yakin, 1994)

Fresh (Sean Nelson) is a 12 year-old drug carrier living in New York City.

Determined to save his older sister Nichole (N’Bushe Wright) and himself from their current circumstance, he enacts a scheme to play off his various employers against each other.

With so many players involved, the stakes could not be higher…

Sometimes you watch a movie and it leads to other movies.

Recently I have been bingeing Spike Lee’s movies and after Mo’ Better Blues, I was curious to check out other black filmmakers and films from the wave of the nineties. I made my way through John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood, Ernest Dickerson’s Juice, the Hughes Brothers’ Menace II Society and F. Gary Gray’s Friday.

I threw in Waiting to Exhale and Soul Food to provide some reprieve, and expand my knowledge of nineties black cinema.

 

I wanted to front porch this review a bit because that context played a big role in my viewing.

This might be unintentional but watching all these movies chronologically, Fresh feels like these films are calcifying as a genre - with set expectations and recurring elements.

Those films featured crime, drugs and violence, but these elements were contextualised within more specific stories about characters’  lives in their communities, with deeper messages about racism and other systemic inequalities in America.

Unlike a film like Boyz n the Hood, Fresh feels more like a genre movie.

Genre, in both terms of how it feels like the film is reusing elements of earlier ‘hood’ movies, and how it uses a familiar narrative template - Fresh’s plan is basically a version of Red Harvest/Yojimbo/Fistful of Dollars.

As such it lacks the same sense of verisimilitude and unpredictability as those earlier films. Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society do not fit familiar story structures, and not as concerned with plot as with the interior struggles of their characters.

Fresh is tense and it packs some surprises, but it feels more traditional in structure, and in the way it builds to the conclusion.

There are some moments of violence which - coming on the heels of Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society - feel like the filmmakers are trying to match the brutality of those past films. One act in particular, involving an animal, feels unnecessary and cruel. 

Because the film’s narrative beats are familiar, the violence also fits into the film’s dramatic structure in a way that feels more inevitable and expected.

While the focus on a twelve-year-old makes it unique, there is a version of this movie where Fresh could have been an adult, and I am not sure it would affect the story that much.

Still, Fresh is a good picture - Nelson is terrific in the lead, and the Red Harvest-style plotting is exciting. The young actor’s performance is so self-assured that the complex manoeuvrings of the third act do not feel implausible.

If you are new to this blog, I also co-host a podcast on James Bond, The James Bond Cocktail Hour. 

You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

OUT NOW: Three Thousand Years of Longing

While a work trip to Istanbul, scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton) buys an antique bottle.

When she begins to clean it, she accidentally releases a Djinn (Idris Elba). 

When he offers to grant her three wishes, she is suspicious of its motives.

To clear her mind, the Djinn tells her the story of his life, and the previous times that he was imprisoned in a bottle.

Earlier this year I devoured Kyle Buchanan’s exhaustive oral history of Mad Max - Fury Road.

One of the key aspects of the production was the importance of the film’s dramaturg Nicolas Lathouris.

Throughout the book, Lathouris and his colleague Nadia Townsend reappear to focus, research, interpret and develop the purpose behind every element of the story - they are the ‘why’ behind the film’s spare sense of theme and dramatic construction.

It is fitting then that George Miller’s follow-up to that film would be a movie about story-telling, its purpose and function in our lives and how to make order out of the variables of life.

Storytelling is a constant theme in Miller’s work - at least the films I have seen.

One of the more lambasted aspects of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, the subplot involving the lost children who rescue Max, features a striking version of this theme - the tribe’s focus on oral story-telling as a vehicle for preserving the past and creating hope for the future. 

Survival and a fierce humanity are key to Miller’s work - even amid the carnage and violence, there is a deep empathy for the sanctity of life. 

As the Djinn tells his story, it feels like he is using the form to preserve the people he has lost, and the hard lessons he has learned in the course of his long existence. I would like to watch this movie a couple more times to really unpack it more because there is a lot going on in this film and it deserves more words, even if not all of it works.

I was getting quite taken with Three Thousand Years of Longing but the film has a key flaw which scuppered this enjoyment.

The love story is a bust - I was having trouble tracking where the relationship was going and when our heroes started making the love craft the key issue became obvious.

I had heard ahead of time that there were chemistry problems but it still jarred.

When Alithea makes her wish that the Djinn love her, it comes out of nowhere.

I was getting unfortunate echoes of No Time To Die, in terms of how the story suffers from the lack of heat between Elba and Swinton.

Even beyond romantic connection, the two performers feel completely detached from each other. At first, I put it down to the characters they were playing, but as their scenes played out, there was no sense of connection between them. There is no way in which they complement each other. It feels a little hack to put it this way, but when these two people are alone talking to each other, it feels like two strangers talking on separate phone calls. The vibe is off.

Flawed but ambitious, Three Thousand Years of Longing is worth watching, and contemplating. One thing I will give it - it is the first movie I can remember having a lucid dream about. The night after I saw it, I could not stop thinking about it, even after I had passed out.

Now if that is not a compliment, I do not what is.

OUT NOW: Beast

Following the death of his wife, Nate (Idris Elba) takes his daughters back to his spouse’s homeland, South Africa.

While on a safari, they get ambushed by a rogue lion who has been driven mad by the massacre of his pride.

With little water or weapons, Nate will have to dig deep to save his family from the beast…

Beast is not a good movie.

And there are elements which could count against it:

The opening scenes are clunky in terms of exposition, and there are plenty of moments where characters do things which make no sense.

But it never completely falls over.

Beast feels like a combination of Cujo and The Ghost and the Darkness - and not in a bad way.

This movie is a lot of fun. And it does what is written on the tin.

It is a straightforward horror movie about an ordinary guy protecting his family from a lion, and while there are a few silly moments and obvious scripting, that is part of the charm.

Family trauma? Check. 

Broken relationship with teenagers? Check.

Best friend who will not make it out of the movie alive? Check.

I am not a fan of logic gaps in movies. I am also not particularly ‘theatre smart’ when it comes to these things. But there are some fairly obvious flaws in the story that are kind of irritating at first but once the action gets going, it does not matter. 

The lion itself is terrific. It is realised through CGI, but for the most part, it looks like it is in the environment and interacting with the actors.

While the script is very formulaic, the story does take a couple of fun zags - one involving a tranquiliser dart - that prevent it from being dull.

And some of the more familiar parts of the script feel like they’ve gone through a polish to add a little more wit - when Norah is asked what she wants to do when she grows up, she says she wants to become a therapist for families.

Plus the generic nature of the story adds to the fun - the movie starts to feel like a game, where you are trying to predict which of the obvious foreshadowed elements are going to be introduced, and in what order.

The movie is better directed than it is written. Baltasar Kormákur has a good feeling for suspense, and knows how to use onscreen space to build tension. Philippe Rousselot shoots the movie with a lot of steadicam shots - the camerawork gets pretty frenetic but you always know where you are in the scene.

Producer Will Packer has been trying to keep mid-range theatrical genre movies afloat for about a decade - he produced a lot of the Screen Gems thrillers, like Obsessed, and comedies like Girls Trip and the Think Like A Man series. Hopefully Beast is not the last time he gets behind a no-frills creature feature. We need more programmer-level movies like this.

The acting is fine. Idris Elba is overqualified for this but he lends the movie some credibility - he cannot save the early scenes but once the action moves to the truck, he and the rest of the cast take the peril seriously.

Even when [redacted] runs away from the truck, it makes some emotional sense.

The actors playing Elba’s daughters are good. Iyana Halley has the more stereotypical role as the rebellious older daughter Mer, but she is fine. As younger daughter Norah, Leah Sava Jeffries gets some of the best MacGyver-ish moments in the movie - I was half-expecting her to be the one who ends up fighting the lion.

Beast is never going to win any awards. It does not have to - it is a movie designed for hanging out with your friends, eating junk food and talking back to the screen.

Definitely the better movie involving Idris Elba and cats.