Short Film: Wine & Die

Hello! This is the film I made for the end of my first year of film school. There are some technical elements I know could be better but overall I’m really happy with it.

Movie Review: Victoria & Abdul

Director: Stephen Frears

Writers:  Lee Hall, Shrabani Basu

Stars: Judi Dench, Ali Fazal

Verdict: Eh

So this is a film that probably no one will remember that’s a sequel to a film… that no one remembers? Or is it? It’s not really clear and frankly, I don’t really care.

My real problem with Victoria & Abdul is really just how much it tries not to offend anyone. In a weekend where I saw Mother!, the low bar at which Victoria & Abdul aims just doesn’t seem good enough. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy it because I did, I laughed a lot, but that’s about it. It has no real character depth, there’s no sense of believability to any of the dialogue which more often than not comes across as cheap and visually it’s really, really bland.

There are two real problems with Victoria & Abdul that are kind of, summed up by its real driving force to be innofensive. Number one is, it really sidesteps the real issues that it could talk about and would be really interesting. Instead of really talking about the Empire and subtlety or nuance with regards to racial prejudice the film becomes instead somehow about, what Pascal observed as the loneliness of Kings, and about being old and friendless. 

It also panders pretty strongly to modern politics, as in Queen Victoria is very much a modern woman with modern views, and although this is a neat way of sidestepping the ‘charming old racist’ trope it does come across as kind of fake. 

I mean there are good things about Victoria & Abdul, Judi Dench, (Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, Philomena), is, as always fabulous, as is the rest of the cast including unknown Ali Fazal, (Fast & Furious 7), who plays Abdul, who comes across really as a natural. And of course, the supporting cast is rounded out by the likes of Eddie Izzard, (Valkyrie, Hannibal), and Michael Gambon, (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Sleepy Hollow), who all do just as well as you’d expect. There is also, of course, an element of costumes and set design that can’t go ignored and is really done with some gusto and vigor in this film. 

The real disappointment for me though is that I really expect more from director Stephen Frears. He directed High Fidelity, which is one of my favorite films ever, and My Beautiful Laundrette, and Dirty Pretty Things, and Dangerous Liaisons, and Prick Up Your Ears. Talented man who’s done some really dynamic and substantial work but in recent years has just become a safe pair of hands who kind of churns out work, and like Woody Allen, (Annie Hall, Manhattan), who’s become similar he does some fantastic films, (Philomena), and some films that are just, vapid and without any real edge, like The Program, and Florence Foster Jenkins. 

In the end, this film isn’t really worth wasting a lot of breath on, it’s empty, ‘looking pretty but doing as little as possible’. Like it’s fine, but it’s not really going to inspire anyone to make films the way High Fidelity did for me is it?

Movie Review: Mother!

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Writer: Darren Aronofsky

Stars:  Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem

Verdict: Fucking baller

Fuck. 

Fuck fuck fuck. 

Fuck you, Darren Aronofsky, (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, The Wrestler),  now I’ve seen this movie I have to fucking talk about it. 

Life of a film critic I guess. 

Mother! starts with a vision of fire and Javier Bardem, (No Country for Old Men, Skyfall), putting a crystal in a container that will recur frequently throughout the film, we then see a vision of a burned house coming to life again in a way that you just know in a Nolanesque, (The Prestige, Inception), way this imagine will come back again in the film with added context. We then move into this house where Javier Bardem is married to the much younger Jennifer Lawrence, (The Hunger Games, Silver Linings Playbook), who seems obsessed with personally fixing and maintaining the house herself while Bardem spends most of his time moping in his writer’s room. Then Ed Harris, (A Beautiful Mind, Westworld), and Michelle Pfeiffer, (Scarface, Batman Returns, Dangerous Liaisons), turn up and just won’t leave. Things, well, you know that mad stuff you’ve seen Darren Aronofsky do before, it’s a bit like that, and I don’t know if I love it or if I hate it?

Let me elaborate on that, it is a fantastic film, like Black Swan and Requiem For A Dream it may appear like a descent into madness but it is a lot more controlled than it appears. The difference for me is that the pacing and editing are so perfect they really stride that line of instead of a descent into hell it always feels like escalating action. It was a film that I was constantly waiting to see spill over into terrible violence and madness and it does descent into that but it never feels like it’s spilling over it just feels, natural, in the most terrible way. 

I haven’t felt this trapped inside a movie since the first time I watched Kill List which was a long time ago. I hated Kill List when I first watched but now it’s one of my favourite films, and I feel much the same way about Mother! because remembering it is like remembering this pitch black hole of despair. It’s mostly shot with wide lenses in extreme close-up on faces so the background is compressed right into the face. 66% of the film is shots of Jennifer Lawrence’s face and it is fucking relentless. Only in Mother! will you see images that very deliberately evoke images you’ve seen in the middle east of people being shot, but by order of a Kirsten Wiig, (The Martian, Bridesmaids), cameo. IN A MOVIE, MAY I REMIND YOU, ENTIRELY SET IN ONE BUILDING. 

So yeah, it’s hard for me to say if I love this film but I will probably grow to love it on rewatches. 

On the subject of Wiig can we talk about her for just one second because she is fantastic in this film and I think her presence in the film is a good primer for the actual tone of the film. 

There was a point made by Red Letter Media about how Wiig and Melissa McCartney, (Bridesmaids, Spy, The Heat), basically started on SNL at the same time but whereas McCartney has gone on to do these crass, broad comedies, Wiig has gone onto, well, films like this. Even so Wiig still mainly works in comedy, just of the more interesting, indie comedy scene. That is very much the mode this film works in, which is this over-cranked, allegorical, surreal, and blackly comic tone that explores the area of just how black can comedy be before it becomes abject horror; which is an area that I am very interested in. It sets this plate out from the opening credits where the exclamation mark of the title comes in with a typewriter ding and I actually think it’s very important that it’s an exclamation mark that comes in like that and says something about the really in your face nature of the film and also the occasionally pitch black comedy. 

You could read it in a variety of ways. Aronofsky himself thinks it’s an allegory for the way in which the planet is exploited, and that reading is if anything extraordinarily on the nose at some points, I took it as an allegory for the toxic nature of male privilege and toxic masculinity and it works fine on that level as well and many other people have read it in a variety of equally interesting and valid ways; and that’s one of Mother!‘s core strengths that these could all have been somewhere in the dark dank recesses of the filmmaker’s brain as it was being made, giving it this really rich texture of meaning. 

There is one rather problematic scene of ‘rape but then she enjoys it’, which is a problem for me but it works a hell of a lot better than say, Blade Runner or Straw Dogs. There are scenes of great violence too, but then even in that near nape scene the camera never appears leering, exploitative, or titilatory, it seems, just really sympathetic and empathetic, which for female protagonists railing against implicit societal pressures is a real strong suit for Aronofsky. 

Watching Mother! is like trying to crawl through an increasingly tight maze with razor blades on the walls, but in a good way. It is a singular cinematic experience that I think you kind of have to see on the big screen. I mean I was in a multiplex and they played trailers for actual fucking movies like Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and Downsizing instead of the hyper-active explosion porn that modern cinema brings us. Then the BBFC card came and it was an 18 and it struck me just how long it’d been since I’d watched an 18 in the cinema which was probably The Neon Demon. Then the first company logo came up and I realised it was shot on film (16mm), and I was primed and ready for a proper movie and that’s what I got and that experience alone was probably fucking worth it with the state cinema’s in. 

Movie Review: A Ghost Story

Director:  David Lowery

Writer:  David Lowery

Stars: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara

Verdict: Fucking fantastic; a strong, strong, five stars.

I have a theory about A24, once they’d gotten over their middling indie era at the beginning with Spring Breakers and The Spectacular Now they started releasing hard hitting intelligent masterpieces like The Lobster, Green Room, and Swiss Army Man before picking up some Oscars with Room and Moonlight. Now they have a following they’re like, how far can we push this..? So now we have A Ghost Story which can only be described as 2001: A Space Odyssey for millennials.

Ok that isn’t exactly right, but the production design will press all of your hipstery millennial buttons. It plays somewhat like the last act of 2001: A Space Odyssey where Bowman watches himself grow older as a metaphor for artificial evolution in some kind of alien experiment. The difference is that this makes a lot more coherent sense, visually it is very literal unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey whilst also being incredibly expressionistic. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot because it’s so much more than you think it is, or than I thought it was going in.

The cinematography is unique. It is presented in 4:3 which is a very televisual ratio with curved edges which makes you feel like you’re watching a moving polaroid like something out of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. You are watching memories through a moving photograph. The colour work itself is also incredibly evocative of this. You are detached, you are foreign in your own world, everything feels like something you’ve voyerisitically just stumbled across and happened to observe like you are yourself the titular spectre. This can at first seem irritating but slowly begins to make sense, and that’s part of why I need to see it again I need to digest this again knowing what I know now about the film. There are times when the film will just be going along how it does and something brilliant, and virtuosic and extraordinarily watchable will come out of no where and sideswipe you and leave you frankly, breathless.

The production design is incredible, it makes awfully mundane things seem awfully important and emotional. The score is exquisite and I’m getting it on vinyl. The sound design evokes works like that of Lynch, (Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Eraserhead), and Kubrick, (2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange ) and Mallick, (Badlands, The Tree of Life), and it looks and visually references all of these films makers as well in a way that I really didn’t expect from the maker of Pete’s Dragon.

The film will divide audiences, but I thought it was just beautiful. It has something interesting and relevant and often profound to say about art and legacy and death and the afterlife and it has something to say about how our personal ghosts are just the memories that we attach to places and it inspires us to move on and it’s almost like the film is from the perspective of one of those memories. The nature of that life is what inspires us to leave it behind in a way few films achieve. I thought it was transcendent. I loved it, when it comes out in two months I’m going to do whatever I can to see it again. It might end up being one of my favourite films ever if it works out on rewatches. I need, I need to see it again right fucking now!

Movie Review: La La Land

Director: Damien Chazelle

Writer: Damien Chazelle

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone

Verdict: A Joy

Y’know just before going into this movie I was like “I had a load of horror films in my top list for 2016, wouldn’t it be funny if La La Land was my favourite of the year for 2017?”. I mean all the peices were in place, I loved Chazelle’s last film Whiplash, (my dad said, ‘a film about a jazz drummer, what was the point?’ would it be too obvious to say that’s kind of missing the point of it?), Ryan Gosling is one of my favourite actors working at the moment and I’ve always felt Emma Stone, (The Help, Easy A, Birdman) has had the potential to do great things, and I’ve been looking for a really great musical to fall in love with. I will say though, I saw this on the 8th at a preview screening, (I know how luxurious, little old me), 8 days into the year and I feel it’s pretty safe to say this might well be my favourite film of 2017. Then again I havn’t seen 20th Century Women, yet which just seems geared towards me. 

La La Land is, at it’s core, a fairly standard romance, it’s essentially a twist on Singin’ in the Rain only, better, and less sexist. A lonesome jazz pianist meets a struggling actress and at first they hate eachother but, y’know what, very quickly the ice begins to melt. The premise may be conventional but how the story unfolds from then on is not, and the plot is really just an excuse to have dazzling set peices and musical numbers. 

Not since I think Mad Max: Fury Road have I seen a film as dedicated to purely entertainng you as this one. It begins with one of the best cinematic traffic jams since Sicario, and one of a very different sort. Instead becomming one of the tensest shootouts I’ve seen for quite some time, it turns into one of the most dazzling, colourful, and best choreographed dance routines I’ve seen for quite some time. It’s all filmed in long takes to sell the routines, and the routines are great. No one fucks up, it’s all synchronised and just looks dazzling. The cinematography on display is truly astounding. It was done by Linus Sandgren, who most recently did Joy, which I recently reviewed, (here), and the cinematography was actually probably the best thing about that film. Actually to hear him talk about the difference in approach for those two films is very intersting. 

The performances are lovely. Who knew how funny Ryan Gosling was? He’s turning into a proper Ryan Goose, but I feel like that joke’s been done to death at much earlier stages of his career but there aren’t many adult gosling puns you can make. He’s had three movies out in last year and this year; this film, The Nice Guys, and The Big Short. This role combines the wit of The Big Short, which was actually the film that made me stop and go ‘wow Ryan Gosling knows exactly how to do comedy on a technical level well done him’; with the physical comedy of The Nice Guys; with the melancholia of Drive. There’s a face that Ryan Gosling does at the end of that iconic lift scene in Drive of just utter sadness and longing and regret and it’s a great face, and he’s really good at it, and he does it a lot in this film. He is really, really good, and he sings and dances and plays the piano and it’s lovely. Emma Stone I have never before seen at this level of good. She has a way of talking that makes it sound like it’s coming out of an actual person. She looks like she’s improvising in the sense that it doesn’t look like she’s saying lines that she’s rehearsed, she looks like someone having a conversation in real life. She is such an individual screen presence that it’s almost incongruous but I’m really glad she’s there because I love that manner of acting and I wish more people were doing it. 

If I was to nitpick I would say that it is a bit contrived, there’s one particular scene where Ryan Gosling makes a point about Emma Stone’s heels so she immediately gets tap shoes out of her bag and you go ‘oh right it’s this kind of musical’ but that’s not really representative of the rest of the film because in general, La La Land does make an effort to seem natural. Chazelle has talked in interviews about wanting to make it feel like you were ‘falling into’ the songs and for the most part I think he manages it.

If you go out onto the street and ask people to name a director, they’ll probably say, Steven Spielburg, (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler’s List, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), Stanely Kubrick, (The Shining, A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey), Martin Scorcese, (Goodfellas, The Wolf of Wall Street), maybe George Lucas, (Star Wars), and probably Micheael Bay, (Transformers). If Damien Chazelle keeps this up, this already quite extraordinary winning streak after only two big films and co-writing credits on 10 Cloverfield Lane, he might well join that linneage. You see the poster and it’s incredible that any film could get that many five star reviews and they wouldn’t have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of publications to get them. I tell you now, if I did stars, they could have included me. It’s wonderful!

Movie Review: Bridget Jones’ Diary

Director: Sharon Maguire

Writers:  Helen Fielding, Andrew Davies, Richard Curtis

Stars: Renée Zellweger, Colin Firth, Hugh Grant

Verdict: Fucking lush

If you take a cursory glance at my DVD collection, you may see such films together in blocks as High-Rise, The Hitcher, and Honeymoon; you may see Bronson, next to The Brood; Mulholland Drive, Near Dark, and The Neon Demon together at last on my shelves. What you may not see is that also nestling there next to High-Rise is High Fidelity. If you take a look left of Mulholland Drive you’ll find stacked horizontally, Mean Girls; and next to Bronson, Bridget Jones’s Diary, (which really should be Bridget Jones’ Diary but oh well). I recently dropped a Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason reference on holidy and drew looks of shock from my Australian cousins. 

Bridget Jones’s Diary, (it irritates me every time I type that), follows the mistfortunes of ‘serious reporter’ Bridget Jones and her romantic escapades. In this modernisation of the key themes, plot beats, and attitudes of Pride and Prejudice we find a similar eviceration of the genre in which it finds itself. Instead of a beautiful Amy Adams making her way to Ireland to propose to her boyfriend on the leap year before falling in love with the local Irish guy, or a perfectly lovely Christina Ricci except for a bad CGI pig’s nose trying to find her one true love, (referenced films are Leap Year and Penelope), we have Bridget Jones, professional spinster, sex lover and vodka drinker. She’s self concious about her weight and her vices and doesnt know how to adult. If that isn’t the most damn relatable thing I’ve ever seen then I don’t know what is. I’m only 18 and I already feel like Bridget Jones. 

Cards on the table time, you might be able to tell by now, I love Bridget Jones’s Diary. Not in an ironic way, not in an ‘oh look I’m a dude who also likes chick flicks aren’t I cool and trendy’ way, no. I love Bridget Jones’s Diary because Bridget Jones herself is a superb and on the money comic creation. Rene Zelweger, (who I might remind you got her start with Matthew McConahey in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 4, or Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation),  was actually Oscar nominated for her role in this film and I’m honestly not suprised because she does really add to the character, with a superb performance and half decent British accent but it’s at least in part down to the wonderful script. Helen Fielding adapts her own novel with the aids of screenwriting heavy weights Richard Curtis, (The Black Adder, About Time, Love Actually), who I just have abounding love for, and Andrew Davies, who’d actually adapted Pride and Prejudice before for the BBC. It’s really funny, it’s relatable and it’s a character aimed at people who you probably actually know and not Tom Cruise Tom-Cruising all over the place. 

The film is also aided by a plethora of great supporting performances. Hugh Grant, (About a Boy, Four Weddings and a Funeral) plays somewhat I think against type here as a complete cad where as before he was just sort of bumblingly useless but he does pull off the whole cad thing with aplomb, as he does in the sequel. Colin Firth, (The King’s Speech, Kingsman: The Secret Service, A Single Man) is as always, fantastic, he’s a great actor who knows what he is, what his range is and how to opporate perfectly within it. Gemma Jones, (You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Spooks) delights as the mother; Jim Broadbent, (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Brooklyn, Filth) does that thing that Jim Broadbent does of looking kind of droopy in an avuncular mannar; Bridget’s hoard of friends, peopled by Shirley Henderson, (Trainspotting, Marie Antoinette, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets), Sally Phillips, (Miranda), and James Callis, (Battlestar Galactica), all know exactly how to play their roles for maximum endearment. 

It’s also shot in a way that feels really, I guess honest. It’s not particularly styalised, it’s got a pretty naff jukebox soundtrack and it looks like they just sort of flung the camera anywhere for funky angles but it kind of knows how naff it is. It knows that it’s a bit cheap and a bit trashy but it has fun with that, just like our heroin is by the people for the people, the filmmaking is lo-fi enough to seem on purpose.

The sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is absolutely not a good film, however I like it, and I like it because I get to spend time with these characters who I feel endeared towards. It’s nice, it’s fun, and occasioanally makes me want to watch from behind my fingers with embarassment but mainly nice and fun. In the end Bridget Jones’s Diary is a well acted, staunchly funny subvertion of the romcom. It’s not exactly a feminist manifesto, and it’s not gonna change the world, but it makes me laugh and essentially serves as a warm cup of hot coacoa so there. 

Movie Review: Your Name

Director: Makoto Shinkai

Writers: Makoto Shinkai, Clark Cheng

Stars: Ryûnosuke Kamiki, Mone Kamishiraishi

Verdict: Nearly a masterpeice

WHY HAVN’T I GOTTEN INTO ANIME YET? WHY THE HELL NOT? If this movie is anything to go by I really should. I think I was probably put off by my ex’s obsession with Howl’s Moving Castle, but that’s all about to change. 

Your Name is a body swap movie with a twist. It’s also a time travel movie with a twist, it’s also an apocalypse movie with a twist. Freaky Friday meets Looper meets Independence Day, except actually really good. Not that Looper isn’t good, it’s very good, but although there are terrible time travel movies I couldn’t think of one off the top of my head; sorry. You have a boy and a girl who dislike the lives they lead – one is a girl who lives as a daughter of an official in a secluded countryside hamlet- one is a classy, technology savy but beligerant city boy living in Tokyo. They start to swap bodies in their dreams and that’s not the weirdest it gets. To say anything more, I think, would definitely be to spoil the joys and secrets this movie holds. 

This was actually the first film I watched in the new year. I’d said in my Year Round Up, (here), that this was one of the films I was really bummed about missing in 2016 so when I get on the plane home and see this as one of the few inflight selections not censored in some way, of course I lept at the chance to watch it because I have heard nothing but good things about Your Name. So, I am very pleased to report back that I loved it, and if I had my time again it would definitely slot right in there in my top 10, or 13 it would be I guess. 

Where to even begin with this film? It adresses some really complex issues through its premise that a lot of these body swapping movies are playing too much to the cheap seats to even think of touching with a 6 foot barge pole. These are themes like gender body dysmorphia, and how tradition affects the way we see ourselves in the community and affects how we look at ourselves through our gender. One of the lovely things about this movie is that you begin to loose track of who is in whose body at which point, or rather, it stops becoming important, you stop thinking about it and you start to see them as one homogenous unit of gender singularity. The best thing is that that’s only there if you want to look for it, it’s not a surtext but it’s a very easy to do reading of the film. 

It is absolutely beautifully animated. The more traditional animation is great but that at one point gives way to flowing surrealist watercolours, (I think watercolours), and it’s absolutely stunning. It has this sense of impending doom yet also joy and wonder and youthful frivolity. It captures so well what it is to be young and unsure of yourself in a way that speaks universily across cultures. It also has one of the most kick-ass soundtracks I’ve seen since Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. 

One tiny little flaw I’d say is that the film is not quite sure of it’s own lore, but then again neither was Looper and look how great that turned out to be. This film is sorrowful, mournful, heartbreaking, but also full of live and love and energy and passion. I can’t quite recommend it enough, it’s great. 

I’m gonna wait for Akira to arrive, then I’m gonna watch that, then watch Ghost in the Shell before the remake, then I’ll start working my way through Death Note and Attack on Titan before the Adam Wingard, (You’re Next, The Guest), film; which I’m actually looking forward to; then the Studio Ghibli backcatalogue, I’ll rewatch Spirited Away because that’s always great. This could be the start of something folks. The director, Makoto Shinkai, (5 Centimetres Per Second), has been called the new Miyazaki, (Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle), and I can really beleive it. 

I would just like to take this chance to say; a few years ago IMDb upped the amount of votes needed for official placement on the top 250 from 3000 to 25000. Your Name currently stands at 8.7, easily enough for the highest ranks of IMDb, but only has 13000 votes. Watch, vote and share, so this movie can have that kind of recognition it deserves. It’s not the best film ever but it’s really good, and given its limited release in the UK and USA, stands a risk of being forgotten. 

Year Round Up Part 3 – The Top List

Part 1 – Films I missed out on this year

I’m kind of miffed with the amount of films I missed this year. When I tallied the 2016 films I’d seen vs missed, it came to 42 vs 48. Damn.

I was incredibly dissapointed to take a whole year to not see big 2016 Oscar contenders that I really wanted to see like Room, A Bigger Splash, Son of Saul, and Anomalisa. I have no excuses I know.

I think that photo aptly expressess my emotions at not having seen Anomalisa.

I somehow managed to see all the live action DC releases from this year but somehow managed to not see Batman: The Killing Joke and Captain America: Civil War, to be fair that Captain America: Civil War hype is really going down. It’s almost as if it was a pretty good movie that critics and fans latched onto in the middle of a summer of lacklustre summer blockbuster releases. Oh wait…

There were a whole pleathora of indie/indie spirited films I was so excited for that I know I would have just loved that I miss out on seeing and I may never forgive myself. These films include King Jack, Sing Street, Embrace of the Serpent, and Men & Chicken. Sing Street in particular. As well as this, there are a few such films coming out this Oscar season or in Oscar talks that embody what seems lost; lower/midbudget films, that aren’t horror films, that do actually OK. Such as; Swiss Army Man, American Honey, Hell or High Water, Captain Fantastic and the new Pedro Almodovar film Julietta.

Two films I was particularly cheezed off at missing, that look like I would have absolutely loved above most others on this list are Jane Austen adaptation Love & Friendship which just looks beautiful; and adult fairytale compilation Tale of Tales which looks like Pan’s Labyrinth for a new generation.

Four really interesting, unusual films that I’ve missed out on catching towards the end of the year, films that maybe you might not have seen that I’d be really intersted in giving voice to as I’ve tried to with films like I Am Not A Serial Killer, are; strippers vs zombies horror festival breakout Peelers that I wasn’t able to catch at the LIFF but have been in touch with the films PR people and they’re lovely. The film hasn’t gotten picked up for distribtion, home or cinema as far as I know and it’s shame because I really don’t know how I’m going to see it and I’m desperate to; Japanese gender-bending anime box office sensation Your Name, which it’s dissapointingly hard to see in UK although I nearly did before selling my ticket to a good friend of mine who forgot to actually buy a fucking ticket, because that’s how good a friend I am; I missed Raw at the LIFF as well because I was going home that weekend, which is a shame because any film that people pass out watching I want to see; also, coming of age comedy Edge of Seventeen which looks like Perks of Being A Wallflower for a new generation.

Other films I missed this year that I wanted to see include; Boulevard, I Am Belfast, Eye in the Sky, When Marnie Was There, Where To Invade Next, The Conjouring 2, The BFG, Nerve, The Shallows, Weiner-Dog, Lights Out, War Dogs, Morgan, Ouija: Origin of Evil, The Accountant, and A Streetcat Named Bob, because who doesn’t love a good bit of schmaltzy schmaltz.

Part 2 – Top 12 List

Yeah I’m doing a top 12 suck it it’s my blog, LET’S COUNT IT DOWN

12. 10 Cloverfield Lane

It doesn’t quite crack the top 10, and maybe although it doesn’t seem to herald the great blockbuster revolution we all hoped, this is still a taut and tense thriller/horror filled with great performances.

11. Hail, Ceasar!

I seemed to be the only person laughing at the new Coen Brothers comedy, maybe because as a fan of theirs I’m in tune with their off beat rhytms. It’s also incredibly well shot, filled with wonderful musical numbers, and is put together with a love for the film itself, and film itself. It upsets the ‘George Clooney Is An Idiot’ trilogy they’d all been working on together, but if Douglas Adams can do it why can’t the Coen Brothers? I ask you…

10. Nocturnal Animals

This cerebral psycho-sexual noir western thriller is an incredible feat of narrative story telling and practical filmmaking, it’s well acted if for the most part a detactched, cold experience. You will think for a good few days after seeing this movie

9. Star Trek Beyond

I talked in my Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency review, (here), about my experience seeing this with my mother. If you ever think I’m somehow anti-blockbuster, somehow pretnetious, somehow anti-just-having-fun-in-a-cinema then just looked at how many full buckets of fun I had with this space adventure. It’s better than Rogue One!

8. Get Better: A Film About Frank Turner

I didn’t write a review of this film, mainly because with uni work I just left it too long to still be fresh, but this film is a love letter to Frank Turner’s music and also an investigation of Frank Turner as a person, and an investigation of what it means to consider yourself a punk musician. It’s also a great investigation into the writing process, it has a great sequences of building the song Josephine up from the vocals up and it really works in a cinematic way as well as a musical way. It’s, in a word, a joy. It’s gotten some really sniffy reviews but in a way Frank Turner is a supringly easy target because of just how much he puts himself out there and puts himself into the music he makes. A superior rock-doc, I actually left on the verge of tears.

7. The Nice Guys

Shane Black’s back with another neo noir comedy. Instead of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang which was very much a noir pastiche, this is very much a more mature, comedic thriller with a cereer best comedic performance from Ryan Gosling. A staunchly entertaining fiev star comedy that captures the period detail supremely.

6. Zootropolis

Yeah bet your didn’t expect to see an animated family flick on this list did you! However, this funny, poignant, subversive, and colourful film has substance and humour for audience members of all ages.

5. Arrival

Ok so this is my favourite non horror film of the year, I don’t know what it is or why or how but the top four are all, in one roundabout way or another, either horror films or in the vein of or inspired by them. However this is a great film, it made me cry, which seems to be simultaneously really easy and really hard for a movie, but this thriller sets Villeneuve up perfectly for Blade Runner 2049, even if the aspects that do that maybe aren’t perfect for this film, it still works really well.

4. The Neon Demon

Haters will be haters, this is a great fucking movie. It’s a trippy psychadelic horror thriller giallo surrealist head spinner that just gets better upon rewatches. I reviewed this right after Performance, another film that aims for a similarly surrealist acid trip with some kind of substantial point, and The Neon Demon just does it so much better.

3. Don’t Breathe

I know I put this above I Am Not A Serial Killer in the end of the month list, but on reflection I think IANASK is better. That doesn’t mean though that Don’t Breathe isn’t absolutely fucking incredible because it is. It should have had more people singing it’s praises, if anything just from a filmmaking perspective because it is really deserved. This top 3 was incredibly, incredibly close.

2. I Am Not A Serial Killer

This film starts of looking somewhat generic but it turns very quickly into somethig much more badass. It’s, really, really incredible; really powerful. I don’t want to spoil anything about it but it’s great, and it has the best performance from Christopher Lloyd maybe of his whole career.

1. The Witch

In my review I voiced concerns with the ending but on consideration I take it all back, I need to watch it a few more times for it to certify itself but this might be a perfect film, something I bestow very, very rarely to a film. If it is, it’ll go right to my 3rd favourite film ever which would be some feat. Wish it luck!

Movie Review: Drive

Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

Writers:  Hossein Amini, James Sallis

Stars: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston

Verdict: Pretty damn great

I remember when I was writing my review of The Thing, I love the film, and I’ve seen it many times, so it was really easy to write about it. This time around it’s a similar situation but The Thing isn’t actually that wide a seen film, where as Drive has already had so much said about it, it’s actualy a lot harder to find anything new to say.

For a film that actually was a reasonable box office sucess, Drive has already developed somewhat of a cult reputation and drawn more than its fair share of contraversy. We have had both a Texas woman suing the film’s distributors for misleading atvertisements and being antisemtic, (spoiler, it’s not), and Radio 1 recently rescoring the movie for a one time showing utilising bands like The 1975 and Biffy Clyro, very much transplanting the film’s smooth, iconic, (properly iconic not Ubisoft iconic), synth led score with something more edgy and rock centric, not as an improvement but a compliment, almost like a big fan edit. 

The fact is that Nicolas Winding Refn has never been a filmmaker who aims to please everyone, just take his quote that if “everyone can agree on a film it hasn’t cut deep enough”. This film is interesting mainly because it takes Refn’s history of exploitation, edgy, crime thrillers like Pusher and Bleeder , and throws it into a much more mainstream areana, kicking up all kinds of sand in the process. It’s an interesting film because it’s marketed to the The Fast and the Furious crowd, references films like Gasper Noe’s Irreversible, and is really neither of these things. There are 2 car chases in the whole films and it’s really a romantic tragedy at heart.

I watched it this time with my Dad, after many times inisiting, ‘no Dad, Dad there are only 2 car chases, Dad it’s not The Fast and the Furious I promise’ and for the first act he made pretty much every call, (mind only after they’d set up that particular plot point), and at the end his complaint was that “it was too spiritual”, which is kind of where the film aims itself, it elevates what in other hands might be fairly standard crime thriller elements. Some might call his distinctive visual aestetic and Cliff Martinez’s woozy score and the synth pop soundtrack style over substance, I just call it filmmaking. The fact is all style is meant to do is tell the story better and it really does that in Drive. There is one iconic scene in an elevator that in other hands would come off empty but the way Refn directs it, it is an absolutely heart breaking moment. It is up there for me with “you’ve met me at a very strange time in my life” from Fight Club, the Heroes in a tunnel bit from The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and some of the more viceral sequences from The Thing in terms of all time great movie moments. Then at the end, it just leavs me feeling all gooey and mellow and nice, and for a film with such graphic violence in, that’s pretty damn impressive. 

Also, compliment to the British that we quite righly nominated it for the best film BAFTA, best actress and best director, all of which it deserves. It also has some really good sound mixing.