LONDON CITY NIGHTS: 1 star

Sunday, June 22, 2014

Walking on Sunshine (2014) directed by Max Giwa & Dania Pasquini

Sunday, June 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

Films like Walking on Sunshine make you think al-Qaeda might have a point after all. Like anybody else, I’ve got serious problems with the basic tenets of Islamic Fundamentalism, but it’s got to be better than this. Produced with a cynical eye towards snaring World Cup widows, this 80s jukebox musical is a stunningly accurate simulation of being manacled to a chair in a dodgy karaoke bar and forced to watch a bunch of jerks tunelessly disembowel pop standards.

Read the rest at We Got This Covered

★

Walking on Sunshine is released June 27th.

Thursday, May 22, 2014

'Blended' (2014) directed by Frank Coraci

Thursday, May 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

"Blended is awful. Worse, it doesn’t even have the decency to be awful in an interesting way. I secretly love a bit of bad film rubbernecking, a ‘what-the-hell-were-they-thinking?’ trainwreck like Sandler’s Jack and Jill or That’s My Boy. Films like these are bonkers awful – so bad you can squeeze a fragment of masochistic pleasure from them. Not so with Blended. Here, Adam Sandler briefly steps away from his usual self-congratulatory manchild fare and attempts a schmaltzy, super-cutesy family romcom.

And it’s even worse than usual."

Read the rest at We Got This Covered.

★

Blended is on general release from 23rd May

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

After the Night (Até Ver a Luz) (2014) directed by Basil de Cunha

Tuesday, April 22, 2014 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

After the Night, a 95 minute gangland adventure from a first-time director, initially feels like a promising proposition. This is usually a recipe for lean, muscular cinema; low budget film-making with a reliance on urban flavour, smart dialogue and interesting characters over expensive action sequences and flashy camera techniques. The problem is that After the Night isn't lean and muscular at all. It's flabby, ponderous and frustrating, a meandering tension-free bundle of just-plain-boring.

Set in the creole slums of Lisbon we follow Sombra (Pedro Ferreria), a solitary, numb and dreadlocked small time drug dealer. The story opens with the local gangsters discovering their stash has been stolen, understandably furious they look for someone to blame. Their eyes fallon Sombra, who to be fair to the gangsters does spend most of the film acting pretty shady. The rest of the film shows an increasingly tight noose forming around Sombra's neck as he tries to claw back money owed to him, pay off the furious gangsters and care for his pet iguana. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this is a pretty promising set-up, it's film noir 101 for sure - but transplanting that into modern Lisbon could just maybe give it a fresh edge.

The slums form a pretty damn miserable backdrop. These characters are all first or second generation African immigrants, and it seems as if this is a little slice of urban Africa transplanted into the middle of Europe. Exposed rebar juts from a thousand crumbling concrete walls, the corrugated iron roofs creak metallically overhead and, for the most part, the police are nowhere to be found.

De Cunha's characters (particularly Sombra) are at one with this environment. They constantly sneak along walls, pad across rooftops and burrow into gloomy holes - everyone having their own relationship with the neighbourhood, especially the local band, who've fashioned their instruments from the detritus around them. At bare minimum this is a relatively unique environment for cinema, though obviously influenced by Brazilian favela crime dramas (particularly City of God). But interesting though this location initially is, under de Cunho's lens it gets pretty samey pretty fast.

That's small fry in comparison to the colossal problems in the pacing of this film. It drags on and on (and on) with very little happening, almost every scene able to be trimmed down to half its length without any damage done to the coherency. Much of this is due to the improvised nature of the script, which is a theoretically a ticket to naturalistic cinema but in practice means the dialogue goes in endless circles.

De Cunha seems to be going for a zoned out, trippy structure, with a slightly mischievous edge to his style. He pulls directorial stunts - for example when his hero is stalking across a rooftop, machete in hand, ready to wreak bloody violence on his foes - he randomly runs into a friend and stops for a relaxed 5 minute chat about lanterns. I can almost respect the ballsiness of a director who confounds and teases his audience - but if you were the passenger in a car de Cunha was driving he'd suddenly slam on the brakes, causing your head to bonk off the dashboard. He'd probably laugh too.

By the mid-point you realise there's more digression than actual plot. I tried my best to re-evaluate what I was seeing, trying to work out what the director was going for and coming up short. Matters aren't helped by a protagonist whose emotions range from unconscious to staring blankly into space. Sombra gives us next to no reason to care about his plight, just sticking in a kind of deranged, detached drugged outness for the entire run-time. With this yawning chasm of charisma at the centre of the film the character who I found myself caring most about was a damn iguana.

Still, Sombra's subdued passivity is at least quiet, unlike the long, semi-improvised scenes with the gangsters. If you've ever wanted to see a bunch of angry guys yelling at each other in indecipherable accents then boy this is the film for you. Apart from it being difficult to tell what's going on (even with subtitles) I was just worn down by the constant screaming. Being numbed by aggressive dialogue isn't necessarily a bad thing, but here I was just annoyed - checking my watch and getting that sinking feeling when I realised there's at least 40 minutes more of this to go. My fellow audience members clearly felt the same way, at least half the cinema leaving in dribs and drabs as it became increasingly apparent that this wasn't going to get any better.

I was envious of those that left and very tempted to get out of there myself - but I don't feel right criticising a film without watching the whole thing. So my suffering was on your behalf - and I report back that After the Night is an unrewarding, annoying and very very boring film that's difficult to enjoy on any conceivable level.

★

After the Night is on general release from April 25th

Sunday, December 1, 2013

'Homefront' (2013) directed by Gary Fleder

Sunday, December 1, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

They had my ass in the seat at 'Jason Statham versus James Franco'. Both actors are favourites of mine: Statham for the balls-out craziness of the two Crank films, Franco for the neon-soaked hypnosis of Spring Breakers and his whole jack-of-all-trades art persona. So, you've got Chev Chelios battling Alien over meth in a quiet Louisiana town! You've even got a supporting turn from Winona Ryder as a raddled, thickly eyelinered biker babe! Even the script has great action pedigree - adapted by none other than Sylvester 'Sly' Stallone. Surely even the most cackhanded director couldn't screw this up? Just point a camera at these guys, have a gunfight or two, blow some stuff up and - bam - instant cheesy classic. Right? Wrong.

We begin with a promisingly violent prologue. Statham is the pleasingly glottal-stop named Broker an undercover cop that's infiltrated a meth-dealing biker gang. Judging by Statham's dodgy wig and dodgier accent you suspect the gang must be sampling the merchandise a bit as frankly he's not fooling anyone in this getup. Anyway, things go south quickly and the biker gang's son is shot to bits with satisfyingly squelchy use of squibs and blood bags.

This sort of thing had me primed for a silly and slightly camp cops and robbers tale. Unfortunately once the main plot kicks in, the brakes come on and... nothing much happens. Broker has retired and moved to a small town with his daughter to lie low and give her some semblance of a normal life. Thankfully by this point Statham is back to his familiar baldy bonce and pissed off London cabbie accent (why an undercover DEA agent talks like he's walked off the streets of Bethnal Green isn't ever touched upon, probably for good reason).

James Franco pictured thinking of his paycheque

His daughter proceeds to make an enemy at school, the miniature tiff spiralling into a full blown feud between Broker and a meth-addled family of rednecks. They enlist the help of James Franco's Gator, kingpin of this small-town and meth-maker extraordinaire. Gator discover's Broker's undercover past, and before you know it a swarm of angry biker drug dealers are on the way to wreak revenge. The stage is set for Broker to prove to himself and his daughter that a man's home is his castle, that no meth-dealing local boys can bully him and blah blah blah you get the picture.

On paper this all sounds fun enough. On screen: surprisingly boring. Where we want dudes on fire flying through windows we get a fizzled-out romance subplot in a school. At the moment we expect James Franco to over-act his guts out, he disappears from the movie. Just when the film looks like it's finally going to go freak-out Southern Gothic there's a sun-dappled, idyllic, relaxing horse ride. This isn't what I signed up for dammit.

If I was directing this film one or both of these horses would be on fire and something would be exploding.

When the film (finally) remembers that it's an action film it's still disappointing. Simply put, Gary Fleder can't direct action. At all. Even something as straightforward as Jason Statham beating up a bunch of dudes in a gas station is completely botched, a flurry of quick cuts and confusing angles obscuring every single bit of choreography. It gets difficult to say exactly what's going on, the lack of impact meaning the film ends up peculiarly neutered. We see the build-up to a fight and the aftermath, but everything that happens in the middle is edited into incoherence.

Similarly rubbish are the gun-fights. What's important to remember is that this film is not exactly high-complexity when it comes to its action sequences. Five or six baddies with guns trying to invade a house with an angry Jason Statham inside is probably covered in chapter one of How Not To Make Shitty Action Films. But once more, Fleder fumbles the ball - the scene taking place with close to zero sense of spatial geography and surprises.

The actors seem to sense that this isn't going so well. Statham quickly slips into a standard gritted teeth patter with none of the 'human hard-on with a bonkers blood lust' that characterises his best roles. Even worse, James Franco has obviously completely checked out - the contrast between the joyfully defined and magnetic Alien of Spring Breakers and whatever Gator is supposed to be is like night and day. A diner scene where the two meet that could have been a (sort of) modern equivalent to De Niro and Pacino having a coffee in Heat is, in line with rest of the film, dull dull DULL. Only the women in the film come out with a performance worthy of any praise. Kate Bosworth gives her role as a supermean meth Mum a decent bit of angry welly, and Winona Ryder manages to salvage something touching from a rather under-written supporting part.

What should be a clash of the titans is a wet-rag polite disagreement. Boooooo! BOOOO!

Most of the time Homefront looks and feels like something that really should be going straight to video, a cheapness to proceedings stretching through production design, costuming and special effects. Particularly egregious is an atrocious looking CG car crash - it speaks volumes about how much passion a director is investing in an action film that he can't even be bothered to flip a police car over for real. By the underwhelming end of the film both myself, the actors in the film and most of the people behind the camera had obviously checked out - everyone just wanting to get this shite over with.

To squander the talents of Jason Statham and James Franco is a crime against the action genre. When both men are on their A-game it's electrifying stuff, and there's no reason that the basic plot and setting of Homefront shouldn't allow them to bring it. The only reasonable conclusion then, is that Gary Fleder is a godawful director and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near an action film again in his life. This could have been great but it just sucks -and worse, it doesn't even suck interestingly. Shame on you Gary Fleder. Shame on you.

★

Homefront is on general release from December 6th.

Friday, October 4, 2013

I Play with the Phrase Each Other (2013) directed by Jay Alvarez

Friday, October 4, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 0 Comments

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island”. Jay Alvarez thinks otherwise. In his debut film, I Play With the Phrase Each Other, a gang of interconnected characters live in a self-imposed technological solitude, communicating only through mobile phone conversations. Alvarez says:

“This is an announcement of youngness. The movie screams our modern nausea, our florescent [sic] nightmare. It speaks for the first time all of the grinding lives spent on one end of electronic data transfer."

To create a film where the characters only communicate over the phone is a brave cinematic choice; a purposeful excision of interpersonal dynamics; a reduction of humanity to a chorus of tinny voices that bounce endlessly from antenna to antenna.

'About Time' (2013) directed by Richard Curtis

Thursday, August 15, 2013 - by londoncitynights · - 1 Comment

About Time is a film devoid of curiosity, wit and intelligence yet stuffed to the gills with unbearable schmaltz, whiny acoustic guitar music and cutesy dull rubbish. This is about as crap as it gets: two hours of not much happening to not very interesting people. Every moment the plot looks like it might head somewhere interesting the film shrugs its shoulders, does a U-turn and makes a beeline right back to Dullsville. I lost count of the times I muttered "for fuck's sake..." under my breath and sunk into my seat as the film obstinately refused to end.

LONDON CITY NIGHTS