Genre: Comedy
Director: Paul Feig
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Jason Statham, Jude Law, Rose Byrne, Allison Janney, Bobby Cannavale, 50 Cent, Will Yun Lee, Morena Baccarin
Runtime: 2 hrs
Rating: M18 (Coarse Language and Some Nudity)
Released By: 20th Century Fox
Official Website:
Opening Day: 21 May 2015
Synopsis: Susan Cooper (Melissa McCarthy), a shy deskbound CIA analyst, goes on a mission to help a field agent in trouble. Employing outrageous identities and fancy spy gadgets, she attempts to infiltrate the shadowy world of an alluring but dangerous weapons dealer. She leaves a trail of mayhem crisscrossing Europe, utilizing deception and false bravado to try and outwit her quarry and locate a stolen nuke.
Movie Review:
Move over, James Bond. The coolest spy in town is the CIA’s Susan Cooper, a rotound desk agent who looks and walks like Melissa McCarthy that is given her first field assignment to stop a Bulgarian arms dealer Rayna (Rose Bryne) from selling a rogue nuclear weapon to the highest bidding terrorist. While her textbook-suave male counterparts get to don tuxedos and hide behind cool aliases, Susan gets assigned to be a divorced mother-of-three from Iowa or a single woman living with ten cats in her apartment. Instead of flame-throwers and jet-packs, Susan’s purse is filled with items disguised as stool softeners, toe-fungus spray and haemorrhoid wipes. Clearly, she isn’t who you would normally associate with spy material, but hey that’s precisely why writer-director Paul Feig’s send-up of the genre is so, so funny.
The official synopsis will let you know that Susan is called upon to assist the Agency when her assigned field agent, Bradley Fine (Jude Law), is killed in the call of duty by Rayna, the latter also threatening to know (and therefore kill) every single active field agent of the Agency has. So, from her vermin-infested basement where she acts as the eyes and ears for Bradley, Susan volunteers her anonymous self for a “track and report only” mission in Paris, where Rayna is supposed to meet with a notorious middleman named DeLuca (Bobby Cannavale). Needless to say, the enthusiastic former desk jockey steps out of the mission parameters very quickly, and throws herself right into the thick of the action, globetrotting across Europe to Rome and finally to Budapest in order to track down the missing nuke.
As far as spoofs go, ‘Spy’ is surprisingly well-plotted. Instead of a catfight between McCarthy and Bryne, Feig has them form somewhat of an unlikely friendship somewhere during the middle act, as McCarthy pretends to be a bodyguard hired by Bryne’s father to protect the latter. Watching Bryne’s snobbish, judgmental Reyna trade verbal barbs at McCarthy’s in-your-face, expletive-hurling Susan is a hoot, and their chemistry is even more delightful than discovering that Susan has an “inner rage” that makes her one hell of a mean fighter in the first place. Ditto it is to find out that Statham isn’t just rehashing his action hero persona from the countless B-grade movies he’s been of late, but instead sending it up by constantly exaggerating the things he has had to endure in the line of duty (like having to cut one arm off and sew it back with the other).
From its James Bond-style title sequence, there is no doubt that Feig has his tongue firmly in his cheek. And yet unlike other send-ups, Feig plays his with a thoroughly straight face, and comes off all the better for it. At no point does it come off looking silly (just look at ‘Austin Powers’ as a counter-factual); quite the opposite, you might even be inclined at several points to call it brilliant, which only goes to show just how deftly Feig has managed the fine balance between farce and genius. Like his past two female-centric comedies, that genius lies also in Feig’s gleeful lack of regard for political correctness, so those who cannot stand the pottiness of ‘Bridesmaids’ or ‘The Heat’ should know that this is likely to offend your delicate sensibilities as well.
Yet if there’s something these previous Feig-McCarthy collaborations have shown, it is that theirs is truly an inspired comedic pairing. It was Feig who first introduced us to McCarthy’s foul-mouthed attitude in ‘Bridesmaids’, but as ‘Identity Thief’ and ‘Tammy’ showed, her trademark shtick can get tiresome and ingratiating very quickly without the right finesse. Feig knows exactly how far and when to push the right buttons, so that McCarthy’s outward bravado never gets on your nerves. More than in her previous roles, there is palpable sense of insecurity to McCarthy’s fish-out-of-water character here, and the highly gifted comedic actress delivers her most heartfelt performance portraying Susan’s anxieties as she realises how way out of her league she is.
In place of the ensemble in ‘Bridesmaids’ or the complement that Sandra Bullock was in ‘The Heat’, Feig surrounds McCarthy with a colourful cast of supporting characters. Statham and Law have a whale of a time with their winking performances, the former as a tough-talker and the latter as a debonair spy who isn’t so perfect (heck, he accidentally kills the one man with the information he needs when he squeezes the trigger while sneezing). Bryne is gloriously bitchy, and like we said earlier, her scenes with McCarthy snap, crackle and pop. Other no less entertaining additions include Miranda Hart, who plays McCarthy’s colleague down in the basement that harbours similar dreams of being out there in the action (her ideal codename being Amber Valentine no less), as well as British actor Peter Serafinowicz, who plays an amorous local CIA handler enlisted to help McCarthy while she is in Rome. Feig juggles all these distinct characters beautifully, while never ever forgetting that this is McCarthy’s show through and through.
If you’re looking to be tickled silly, we guarantee that ‘Spy’ will leave you in stitches, but the real ingenuity in this espionage spoof is how it is never in itself silly. Indeed, its humour lies not in putting down its characters or by extension its actors, but rather by subverting our stereotypes of just who and how certain people are supposed to be. It is precisely because we do not expect someone of McCarthy’s calibre to be a secret agent that we laugh at how wrong we were – and yes, contrary to what you may expect, McCarthy does get to kick ass, a lot of them. The same goes for each one of her other co-stars, whose characters are deliberately meant to be counter-intuitive. But hey, one can say precisely the same about ‘Spy’, which easily surpasses what Feig and McCarthy have done before. It is funny as hell all right, and it even has a genuinely exciting spy story in itself.
Movie Rating:
(Even funnier than 'Bridesmaids', Melissa McCarthy reteams with writer-director Paul Feig for a riotous send-up of every cliche and stereotype you've had of the spy movie genre)
Genre: Drama
Director: Russell Crowe
Cast: Russell Crowe, Olga Kurylenko, Jai Courtney, Isabel Lucas, Ryan Corr, Cem Yilmaz, Yilmaz Erdogan
Runtime: 1 hr 52 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Violence)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website:
Opening Day: 7 May 2015
Synopsis: Russell Crowe's directorial debut, THE WATER DIVINER, is an epic adventure set four years after the devastating battle of Gallipoli during World War I. Australian farmer Joshua Connor (Russell Crowe) travels to Turkey in 1919 to discover the fate of his three sons, reported missing in action. Initially blocked by military bureaucracy, his determination unwavering, he is helped first by the beautiful Ayshe (Olga Kurylenko) who owns the hotel he takes in Istanbul, and then by a Turkish Officer who had fought against Connor’s sons. Holding on to hope, Connor and Major Hasan must travel across the war-torn landscape to find the truth, and for Joshua to find his own peace.
Movie Review:
Welcome to the club, Russell Crowe. The 51 year old actor (who was born in New Zealand, but has lived most of his life in Australia) is the latest member in showbiz to direct himself in a movie. How does this first time director fare? Is he more of a Clint Eastwood (2004’s Million Dollar Baby) and George Clooney (2005’s Good Night, and Good Luck), or on the other end of the scale like Roberto Benigni (2002’s creepily bad Pinocchio) and Tom Green (2001’s terribly unfunny Freddy Got Fingered)?
Crowe, best known for his Academy Award winning performance in the epic Gladiator (2000), has decided to add another line item to his resume – after dabbled in film producing (most Hollywood actors have produced a film or two these days), sports (he’s a big fan of the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby league football team) and music (he, ahem, sang in 2012’s Les Miserables as Inspector Javert).
Based on the book of the same name written by Andrew Anastasios and Dr Meaghan Wilson Anastasios, this historical drama sees Crowe taking on the role of the protagonist who travels to Turkey after the Battle of Gallipoli (read more about it on the worldwide web) to try and locate his three missing sons. There, the Australian farmer and water diviner gets involved with the local military, and also finds time to be entangled in a romantic relationship with a war widowed woman. Somewhere in the mix, there’s also an adorable kid to tug at your heartstrings.
Shot in Australiaand Turkey, this film is aesthetically pleasing. The breathtaking landscapes are beautifully captured on camera, thanks to cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy). Unfortunately, this is also the final film from the Australian, who died recently of a heart attack.
Clocking a runtime of 112 minutes, the film does feel dreary at times. Considering that the historical setting may not be one that most viewers in this part of the world is familiar with, viewers may feel the need to follow the sequence of events to be aptly engaged. The story follows a somewhat predictable arc – the aftermath of war and how a parent deals with the loss of a child are themes audiences have seen elsewhere. The melodrama put on the big screen here offers nothing excitingly or innovatively new, so movie goers have to look elsewhere to stay interested throughout the film’s two hours.
What one can’t deny though, is the sincerity and effort Crowe has put into this project. It may be a vanity exercise, but looking at the sheer work put into ensuring a polished set of production values is enough to Crowe’s determination to make this film work on display. A capable ensemble cast was rounded up for this film – Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace, Oblivion) as a Turkish woman with a heartbreaking past, Yilmaz Erdogan (the 47 year old actor was awarded Best Supporting Actor for his performance) as a kind Turkish officer and Jai Courtney (Jack Reacher, A Good Day to Die Hard) as a captain who helps Crowe locate his sons.
The production did fairly well at the 4th Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, taking home three awards, including sharing the Best Film accolade with Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. This should already be a confidence booster for Crowe. Here’s hoping that he will continue his passion to helm projects behind the camera, and along the way, get a surer footing of his directing style.
Movie Rating:
(While offering nothing new, Russell Crowe’s first foray into directing is still a commendable effort which features strong performances and lush production values)
Review by John Li
SYNOPSIS: After a failed global-warming experiment to stop global warming, a post-apocalyptic Ice Age has killed off nearly all life on the planet. All that remains of humanity are the lucky few survivors that boarded the Snowpiercer, a train that travels around the globe, powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system has evolved aboard the train, fiercely dividing its population but a revolution is brewing. The lower class passengers in the tail section stage an uprising, moving car-by-car up toward the front of the train where the train's creator and absolute authority resides in splendor. But unexpected circumstances lie in wait for humanity's tenacious survivors...
MOVIE REVIEW:
While our local theaters continue to showcase countless forgettable Thai horrors and straight-to-video duds starring Bruce Willis, gems liked Snowpiercer missed the chance of getting a theatrical release.
Watching Snowpiercer which is based on a 80’s French graphic novel requires somewhat a little patience and a suspension of disbelief but trust me, the end results is both compelling and thought-provoking.
Bong Joon-ho, the celebrated Korean director behind The Host and Mother marks his first foray into Hollywood in this apocalypse sci-fi drama set in the aftermath of a scientific experiment to combat global warming went awry. The remaining survivors managed to cram themselves into a hi-tech locomotive dubbed Wilford named after its creator. While it might seem fortunate to survive the disaster, the train is divided into two different classes: the rich at the front enjoying spa facilities and sushi while the poor being relegated to the back suffered overcrowding, unhygienic living conditions and only protein bars as food.
After nearly two decades of travelling around the globe in the train since it’s deem too cold to survive outside the train, one of the dwellers at the back, Curtis (Chris Evans) decides to led a revolt to seize control of the train with the assistance of wise man, Gilliam (William Hurt) and his right hand man, Edgar (Jamie Bell). Will Curtis succeed? And what’s the mystery behind Wilford?
Bong is a wunderkind when it comes to telling a fascinating tale mixed with beautiful visuals and Snowpiercer is no exception. It’s often brilliant not forgetting small dosages of dark humor and borderline violence. The premise is a clever nod to the current cynical world we are living in. What’s more, the movie also confronts you with an unwavering narrative. What if the noble grand plans are not necessarily what you imagine. The CG in general may falter at some point but the clever use of visual effects and excellent production design rolled out plenty of interesting display of fascinating train carriages which revealed the vastly different social class.
Captain America aka Chris Evans is a strong presence throughout despite having his chiseled body and handsome face hidden behind grubby clothing and unkempt facial hair. Stealing the show is an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton as the haughty second-in-command of the train. The only setback that I feel is the casting of Song Kang-ho as the train’s former security expert. While Song is a capable actor, his casting here (equipped with plenty of Korean dialogue) unintentionally took away some of the magic of Bong’s English directorial debut.
I haven’t seen such a captivating sci-fi thriller for a while. In short, Snowpiercer is best watched without a faint idea about it especially the climax which featured a familiar face. It’s very much an exhilarating, brainy ride that surpassed plenty of contemporary sci-fi titles.
SPECIAL FEATURES:
I very much preferred a commentary track by Bong and Chris Evans nevertheless Critic's Commentary Hosted by Scott Weinberg which touches on the movie themes and Bong’s influences makes a rare, alternative listen.
Clocking close to an hour, Transperceneige: From the Blank Page to the Black Screen - A Documentary by Jésus Castro-Ortega offers a documentary detailed look at the original creators and how the graphic book came to the big screen.
The Birth of Snowpiercer mainly covers brief production aspects such as plotting, set design etc.
The Characters takes a closer look at the various key characters in the movie. Recommend to avoid because of spoilers.
Animated Prologue, which offers sound effects and narrative, reproduced the events told in the beginning of the movie.
Through the two Hollywood leads, this feature offers a deeper look into the story in Chris Evans & Tilda Swinton on Snowpiercer.
The Train Brought to Life: Behind the Scenes of A Special Screening covers the screening event held at the Alamo Drafthouse cinema.
Lastly, a Concept Art Galleries round up the extra features on Disc Two.
AUDIO/VISUAL:
This might be a dark, grim movie with plenty of scenes, which intensively test the black levels. Fortunately, the blu-ray passed with flying colors with accurate skin colors, graphic details and more. The DTS-HD lossless 5.1 is insanely strong. Directional effects liked gunfire and dialogue is robust while the rumbling sound effects of the train are formidable.
MOVIE RATING:
DVD RATING :
Review by Linus Tee
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STRANGE MAGIC Singapore Press ConferencePosted on 21 Jan 2015 |
Genre: Action/Thriller
Director: Pierre Morel
Cast: Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Mark Rylance, Peter Franzén, Daniel Adegboyega, Idris Elba
Runtime: 1 hr 55 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Violence and Scene of Intimacy)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website:
Opening Day: 9 April 2015
Synopsis: Two-time Academy Award-winner Sean Penn stars in THE GUNMAN, an explosive, international action-thriller from Pierre Morel, the director of TAKEN. Terrier, an international operative who is betrayed by the organization he worked for, must go on the run in a relentless game of cat and mouse across Europe.
Movie Review:
You can’t blame Sean Penn for wanting to be the next Liam Neeson. After all, both are critically acclaimed actors who were constant mentions on annual honour rolls, and both had been experiencing a drought of dramatically compelling roles in recent years. Then Neeson reinvented himself as a geriatric action hero with a nondescript B-action movie called ‘Taken’, and has since been enjoying some of the biggest box-office successes of his entire career built on the same or similar profiles. So Penn, whose last commercial release as lead was with Nicole Kidman in ‘The Interpreter’ a decade ago, has decided to follow suit, enlisting Neeson’s ‘Taken’ director Pierre Morel to do a similar career turn-around.
Except that Penn can’t quite figure out just what he wants his movie to be, and ends up with a hodgepodge as dull as its title itself. On one hand, it sets itself up as a social drama that intends to expose corporate exploitation of the African continent; on the other, it wants to be a gripping suspense thriller about a man on the run from the ghosts of his past. On both counts, it leaves its audience wanting; in fact, not only does it fail to satisfy, it ends up being ingratiating for wasting a good part of its first act as a tiresome soap opera involving a woman caught between her past and present lover.
Yes, we kid you not. While waiting for Penn’s titular character to pull out his weapon and shoot some of ‘em bad guys up, we are forced to endure at least three clichéd exchanges between Jim Terrier (Penn), the fiancé he was forced to leave behind eight years ago when he fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after assassinating its Minister for Mining, and his former handler who has since married the fiancé and is preparing to adopt a kid with her. Penn is a good enough actor to know how to pretend enough to emote, but Javier Bardem, who plays his love rival Felix, is downright annoying, not least for the fact that the actor (who was so good as the bad guy in ‘Skyfall’) turns in a one-dimensionally over-the-top smarmy performance all the way through.
By that point of time, the politics of the story are done and dusted, forgotten in just under fifteen minutes after Jim leaves the Congo which he returned to for London, then Barcelona, and finally to Gibraltar in order to meet with his ex-cohorts and uncover just who among them is trying to silence him for good. The various locations around Europe do make for some gorgeous settings for sure, but the subsequent narrative is as primitive as the country that he came from. Besides Felix (who is eliminated at the halfway mark), there are only two other characters Jim consorts with – one, an English pal named Stanley (Ray Winstone) who also used to be a gun-for-hire; and two, his former colleague Cox (Mark Rylance) who is now a top-level executive with a private security firm – and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which one of them wants him dead.
But because Penn, who co-wrote the screenplay based on a 1981 pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette with Don MacPherson and Pete Travis, insists on building a character study around Jim, we are forced to contend with clunky exposition that doesn’t make us care one bit more about his character, or for that matter, the fact that he experiences bouts of intense post-concussion syndrome because of the nature of the work that he used to do. Unlike Neeson’s character in 'Taken', Penn’s is simply out to protect himself, and remains utterly unlikeable through and through. For a movie clearly conceived to be Penn’s film, the fact that we cannot quite relate to his character simply means that we are left out in the cold.
That pretty much also sums up the few action setpieces which Morel choreographs with little imagination or flair. Whether a shootout at a countryside mansion or another at an aquarium theme park, it isn’t anything that you cannot find on a direct-to-video release these days. Only in the climactic showdown set in and around the storied Spanish toreadors arena known as La Monumental do we see some of that panache in the first (and best) ‘Taken’, but it is too little and frankly too late. In truth, Morel’s deliberate attempt to humanise Penn’s character consistently undermines the action – not only because the head pain and blurred vision that kicks in whenever Jim has the upper hand gets repetitive very quickly, but also because it leaves Penn devoid of any “particular set of skills” and any discernible reason why he should emerge relatively unscathed out of every single confrontation.
Despite what promise it may have shown at the start for being a politically aware action thriller, ‘The Gunman’ fails to make good on any count. Its offers no more than platitudes about its topically relevant premise. Its action is too perfunctory to generate any real excitement. Worst of all, it gets muddled up in a mawkish love triangle during the first half and an predictable mystery in the second. The dialogue is terrible, especially a cringe-worthy metaphor about building treehouses that Idris Elba’s Interpol agent uses to persuade Penn to come clean. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of it is Penn’s sculptured body, which the film never fails to emphasise at every opportunity, and that we are sure his current squeeze, Charlize Theron, would be quite happy about.
Movie Rating:
(As tired and dull as Sean Penn’s scraggly look throughout the whole movie, this attempt to make a middle-aged action hero out of him is a lamentable backfire for its well-respected star)
Review by Gabriel Chong
Genre: Drama
Director: Kornél Mundruczó
Cast: Zsofia Psotta, Luke And Boy, Sandor Zsoter, Szabolcs Thuroczy, Lili Monori, Laszlo Galffi, Lili Horvath
RunTime: 2 hrs 1 min
Rating: NC-16 (Coarse Language & Some Violence)
Released By: Golden Village Pictures & Lighthouse Pictures
Official Website:
Opening Day: 26 March 2015
Synopsis: Winner of the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2014 Cannes Festival, Kornel Mundruczó’s newest film is a story of the indignities visited upon animals by their supposed human superiors, but it’s also a brutal, beautiful metaphor for the political and cultural tensions sweeping contemporary Europe. When young Lili is forced to give up her beloved dog Hagen because its mixed-breed heritage is deemed “unfit” by The State, she and the dog begin a dangerous journey back towards each other. At the same time, all the unwanted, unloved and so-called “unfit” dogs rise up under a new leader, Hagen, the one-time housepet who has learned all too well from his “Masters” in his journey through the streets and animal control centers how to bite the hands that beats him...
Movie Review:
Few films took us by surprise the way ‘White God’ did, and we mean that entirely as a compliment. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year, it imagines a dystopia where man’s best friend is turned into man’s worst enemy after being subject to the cruelty of his ways, culminating in a canine uprising that sees them turn against their human abusers in the same brutal ways that they were treated before. Oh yes, it’s an underdog tale all right, but one that gives new meaning to the saying that ‘every dog has his day’.
The leader of the pack is one of two key subjects in Kornel Mundruczo’s bracingly original film, who starts off as the four-legged best friend of his other subject, a 13-year-old teenage girl named Lili (Zsofia Psotta). While her mother is sent abroad for a work trip, Lili is sent to spend three summer months with her surly father, Daniel (Sandor Zsoter). Divorced from Lili’s mother, Daniel is ill-prepared for the unexpected reunion between father and daughter, much less to accommodate her cross-breed mongrel she names Hagen in his apartment. When an irascible neighbour calls the authorities to enforce the state-wide tax on impure breeds, Daniel dumps the animal on the side of the road, that single act setting in motion a whole chain of events which will bring the human-canine relationship to its heels (or should we say, paws) .
Mundruczo spends a good part of the first act developing not just the prickly relationship between Lili and Daniel but also the bond between Lili and Hagen; in particular, a nail-biting scene during Lili’s band practice in school where we wait with tenterhooks for the moment when Hagen will burst out of the closet where Lili has left him underscores the extent to which Lili would go in order to keep the pooch. That this first part unfolds pretty much like a typical Hollywood movie between man and his best friend (think ‘Lassie’ or ‘Marley and Me’) is pure genius, because that familiarity only makes what follows in the subsequent acts even more disquieting.
Upon Hagen’s abandonment, Mundruczo splits the narrative into two parallel halves. On one hand, Hagen starts to associate with the other strays roaming the streets, looking for scraps amidst the trash at the back alley of meat shops at the Central Market and avoiding capture by the city’s animal control – but what truly takes the narrative in a different direction is his adoption by a ferrety dog fighter who sharpens Hagen’s teeth, feeds him steroids and other cocktails and trains him to be a merciless killing machine. And oh, the said fighter renames him Maxi after stripping and whipping what heart was inside Hagen in the first place.
On the other, Lili charts her own rebellious course to defy her father, hanging out with her bandmates at late-night parties in the hope of catching the attention of a particular boy she seems interested in. Her path of self-destruction comes to a head when she is found with a stash of drugs in her pocket during a raid by the police on one of these rave parties. Whereas many commentators have focused on the more sensational half of the film, you will also find within a touching story of reconciliation between father and daughter that is meant to complement Hagen/ Maxi’s own search for love and acceptance in a cruel and unflinching environment.
Their fates become intertwined yet again in the stunning finale, which begins with Hagen’s impending execution, his vicious escape from the clutches of his executioner, and his emancipation of his fellow hounds bound for a similar end. The production notes say that a total of 274 real dogs were trained for this thrilling climax, and let’s just say it looks as awesome as it sounds. The feat is not just in the choreography (courtesy of head trainer Teresa Ann Miller) but also in its cinematography, where against emptied streets of Budapest we experience the reign of terror of the canine mutiny as packs of bloodthirsty mutts go after each and every human who has transgressed against them before. It is impossible to convey the awe and aura of these scenes; rather, you’re best off witnessing them for yourself and bearing in mind that they were filmed completely without any CGI.
Certainly, such animal uprisings are not new to literature, and Mundruczo’s revisionist fable with thematic similarities to the classic ‘Animal Farm’ is in fact meant as allegory to the persecution of the “other” in real-life Prime Minister Viktor Orban's Hungary, where outsiders are regarded and treated no better than dogs. Though Mundruczo follows too faithfully the tropes of a typical revenge thriller in Hagen’s persecution of his enemies, there is no doubting the power and resonance of his emotional finish, especially as how it comes full circle to the very intimate bond that it led with in the first place.
Proving that there is no need for motion capture when you have the right non-human actor or actors, real-life mutt twins Body and Luke convey an astonishing range of emotions through their facial expressions and expressive eyes, which run the gamut from fear to loneliness to grit to anger and of course love. Newcomer Psotta is also a revelation as Lili, her performance a terrific combination of innocence, angst and eventually maturity. Thanks to his actors, both human and canine alike, there is more than just artifice to Mundruczo’s film, which we guarantee will put you through an emotional wringer.
Indeed, ‘White God’ is one of the most extraordinary pieces of filmmaking we’ve seen in recent years, original in the way it reinvents classic themes of love, cruelty, vengeance and redemption in a dystopian light and audacious in the way that it executes its vision. There is of course allegory about oppression and the underdog, but even if you don’t get the subtext, you will still be transfixed from start to finish by its gripping blend of gritty realism and breath-taking fantasy.
Movie Rating:
(A strikingly original dystopia reminiscent of ‘Animal Farm’, this gripping drama of love, cruelty, vengeance and redemption is an extraordinary feat of filmmaking)
Review by Gabriel Chong
Genre: Action/Thriller
Director: Daniel Benmayor
Cast: Taylor Lautner, Marie Avgeropoulos, Adam Rayner, Rafi Gavron, Sam Medina, Luciano Acuna Jr.
Runtime: 1 hr 34 mins
Rating: PG13 (Brief Coarse Language and Violence)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website:
Opening Day: 26 February 2015
Synopsis: Tracers is an action drama set in the dangerous and nimble world of parkour. Cam (Lautner) is barely scraping by and trying to pay off his debts. He crashes his bike into Nikki (Avgeropoulos), a complicated stranger caught up in a gang of broken street criminals who seduces him into her dangerous world. The parkour takes him to places he has never been before and lands him a lucrative job under the gang’s leader, Miller (Rayner). Ultimately extricating himself from a world unimagined and unanticipated becomes a whole different heart-stopping challenge.
Movie Review:
Tracers revolves around Cam (Taylor Lautner), a bike messenger in New York City. He barely gets by, taking up messenger assignments only to get enough to pay off the debts owed to the loan sharks. During one fateful encounter with Nikki (Marie Avgeropoulos), he unfortunately crashes his bike. That encounter got Cam curious about Nikki, and ushered him into the world of parkour and illegal business. It also sparked the beginning of their dangerous relationship...
The movie had a hopeful beginning, getting quick into action and showcasing the swift, sleek moves of the parkourists. They treat the concrete jungle their playground and stage for parkouring, becoming one with the urban landscape. Unlike many other parkour movies which focus on tough and tedious moves, this movie came across as refreshing. It made a female parkourist the protagonist, but this came with some slight compromise on the action.
Just like any other boy-girl movie, the boy (in this case, and the girl) has to have some bad or tragic background. Case in view, Cam borrowed money from the loan sharks because he was desperately protecting memories left behind by his late parents while Nikki was caught in some bad love with Miller (Adam Rayner) because of a feeling of indebtedness. Honestly, the reviewer has nothing against movies using clichés. In fact, clichés are clichés only because they are good enough to be used repeatedly. However, clichés have to be delivered well through good acting or good development in the plot. Sad to say, both of those qualities are absent from the movie.
In terms of development, Tracers has a rushed storyline and a hasty ending. The characters do not have ample time to be fleshed out, so they do appear dimensionless and hollow. There is a fine line between what is a simple plot and a simplistic plot. Tracers tend to fit in to the latter. Although marketed as an action drama, the movie did not score well in terms of the drama. It was perhaps not totally groundless as to why Taylor Lautner was nominated many times, and even won a couple of times on the Golden Raspberry Awards (a legitimate award ceremony founded in America which honours the worst in film). The relationship between Nikki and Cam got steamy but their onscreen chemistry was well, unattractive.
If you’re mildly interested in parkour, or curious to find out how the werewolf from Twilight takes on the role of a parkour boy, then perhaps you have some motivation give Tracers a try. If not, it is better to avoid this, lest you come out of the cinema totally regretting it and feel that you’ve probably caught the worst film of this year.
Movie Rating:
(So forgettable a movie, it’s probably not even worth mentioning. Tra... what?)
Review by Tho Shu Ling
Genre: Comics/Action/Adventure
Director: Josh Trank
Cast: Miles Teller, Michael B. Jordan, Kate Mara, Jamie Bell, Tim Blake Nelson, Toby Kebbell, Reg E. Cathey, Dan Castellaneta
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Rating: PG (Some Violence)
Released By: 20th Century Fox
Official Website: http://www.fantasticfourmovie.com
Opening Day: 6 August 2015
Synopsis: FANTASTIC FOUR, a contemporary re-imagining of Marvel’s original and longest-running superhero team, centers on four young outsiders who teleport to an alternate and dangerous universe, which alters their physical form in shocking ways. Their lives irrevocably upended, the team must learn to harness their new abilities and work together to save Earth from a former friend turned enemy.
Movie Review:
Just because you can do it doesn’t mean that you should – and this wholly unnecessary and woefully terrible reboot of Marvel’s most famous superteam is proof of that axiom. Say what you may about Tim Story’s earlier cinematic adaptations, but as generic and middling as they were, they were at the very least entertaining. Unfortunately, the same cannot even be said of Josh Trank’s back-to-basics origin story, which plays like a humourless retread of his debut film ‘Chronicle’ but on a bigger budget – and lest there be any doubt, it is far, far from fantastic.
Not that it doesn’t demonstrate such promise; the first act which establishes the friendship between the visionary Reed Richards (Miles Teller) and his tough-guy longtime best pal Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell) as well as the team dynamics between Reed and the other members of his research team – the equally brilliant Sue (Kate Mara), her hot-headed younger brother Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), and malcontent genius Victor Von Doom (Toby Kibbell) – capably lay the foundation for what could have been a character-driven drama based on their clashing personalities. Indeed, after the boys sans Sue decide on a whim following a night of intoxication to put their teleporting machine to the test, how they respond to their newfound super-powers individually and as a team should be an organic evolution from how they were before.
Alas, Trank, who co-wrote the screenplay with ‘X-Men’ veteran Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, doesn’t quite know where to go from there. Rather than setting them on a course that would follow the perennial ‘X-Men’ theme of inclusiveness versus insularity against the rest of society, our teenage super-heroes are pretty much seen only in an isolated military facility where they are trained and from which they are deployed on covert operations overseas. While Johnny relishes the opportunity to be different, powerful and useful for once in his life, Sue and Ben are not quite so sanguine and participate insofar as there remains a possibility that the Government’s research on them would yield some way of reversing their abnormalities. In the meantime, Reed has vanished off the grid, while Victor is presumed dead on the planet they had landed up on in the other dimension.
One senses a conscious decision on the part of Trank to eschew the usual superheroics seen in the recent profusion of Marvel and to a lesser extent DC comic book adaptations, but the middle act drags precisely because Trank never quite finds a compelling substitute. Johnny’s potential conflict with Sue and Ben over the Government’s exploitation of their super-powers never amounts to anything more than a playground squabble. The estrangement between Johnny and his father (Reg E. Cathey), whose Baxter Institute had overseen the ill-fated project, is under-cooked. And last but not least, Reed’s guilt over his teammates’ fates as well as his strained friendship with Ben seem to vanish as quickly as he is apprehended and brought back to the facility to aid them in version 2.0 of the same project.
Trank’s intention of emphasising the tension within the quartet is evident and admirable, but is ultimately undone by a script that doesn’t develop it in any substantive manner. Worse still, it leaves an audience looking for visual spectacle severely wanting, that not even a very busy third act manages to salvage. Doom makes an unsurprising return here as their common enemy, driven by a fusion of body and alien matter to cause global destruction and around whose defeat to ensure the survival of planet Earth becomes a rallying call for the team to unite despite their differences. It is one of the dullest and most unexciting finales we’ve seen in a Marvel movie, not least for the fact that it doesn’t know how to collectively bring together their superpowers except in a tag-team fashion to distract their opponent.
It is also on the whole one of the ugliest comic book movies we’ve ever seen. The planet from which the quartet gain their powers is a barren rocky wasteland that has no character or distinction whatsoever, shrouded perpetually with thick grey clouds and given the even more nondescript name of ‘Zero’. The energy that gives them their abilities appears as some slimy green goo that belongs entirely in a C-grade Syfy TV movie, while their powers – whether Reed’s rubber limbs or Sue’s telekinesis or Johnny’s pyrotechnics or Ben’s rock-covered body – look equally cheesy. It is no wonder too that the eventual showdown, which takes place almost entirely on the planet surface of ‘Zero’, doesn’t play out any much better against such a bland setting, coming off even worse than any of the action scenes in its predecessors.
And certainly, this reboot is in no way better than Tim Story’s earlier adaptations, no matter of its ambition of being a darker and more character-driven superhero piece. ‘Chronicle’ may have been a perfect calling card for Trank, but ‘Fantastic Four’ shows a young, inexperienced director completely out of his depth, absolutely justifying the advance bad buzz it had spent months battling. It is utterly embarrassing that a film about Marvel’s most enduring creations is no better than a live-action ‘Power Rangers’ movie, but that’s exactly the ignominy that this misconceived and badly executed excuse of a superhero movie has wrought.
As is typical with such origin stories, this one ends with the quartet ‘stumbling’ on their title as they admire their new home in Central City and reflecting on how far they have come. Ben aka the Thing describes their journey as “fantastic”; we’re not entirely sure anyone of their audience shares the same sentiment.
Movie Rating:
(An empty plot and nonexistent character development make this reboot of Marvel's iconic superhero quartet a pointless exercise in ignominy)
Review by Gabriel Chong
Genre: Drama
Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Josh Brolin, Reese Witherspoon, Benicio Del Toro, Owen Wilson, Katherine Waterston, Maya Rudolph, Jena Malone, Sasha Pieterse, Martin Short, Anders Holm, Wilson Bethel, Peter McRobbie, Timothy Simons
Runtime: 2 hrs 28 mins
Rating: M18 (Drug Use and Sexual Scenes)
Released By: Warner Bros Pictures
Official Website: http://inherentvicemovie.com
Opening Day: 29 January 2015
Synopsis: When private eye Doc Sportello’s ex-old lady suddenly out of nowhere shows up with a story about her current billionaire land developer boyfriend whom she just happens to be in love with, and a plot by his wife and her boyfriend to kidnap that billionaire and throw him in a loony bin…well, easy for her to say. It’s the tail end of the psychedelic `60s and paranoia is running the day and Doc knows that “love” is another of those words going around at the moment, like “trip” or “groovy,” that’s being way too overused—except this one usually leads to trouble. With a cast of characters that includes surfers, hustlers, dopers and rockers, a murderous loan shark, LAPD Detectives, a tenor sax player working undercover, and a mysterious entity known as the Golden Fang, which may only be a tax dodge set up by some dentists... Part surf noir, part psychedelic romp — all Thomas Pynchon.
Movie Review:
Some fiction should remain on the page, and ‘Inherent Vice’ is to us an unequivocal example of how even a master filmmaker should take that adage to heart. For good reason, acclaimed novelist Thomas Pynchon’s books have been known to be “notoriously unfilmable”, so if anything, writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson should be lauded for his ambition at even trying. Yet that is hardly justification to forgive this muddled and overlong mess of a movie, which is the first P.T. Anderson film that we dare say is just plain boring.
Published back in 2009, Pynchon’s book was a noir goof that riffed off the Los Angeles detective genre of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald. The book told of private investigator Larry “Doc” Sportello, who gets caught up in a missing persons case when he helps out a former flame that suspects her current lover, a powerful real estate developer, is being set up by his English wife and her lover. Soon into the investigation, Doc is labelled a murder suspect after he wakes up in the Southern Californian desert next to the body of a bodyguard of the developer’s.
That one paragraph worth about half an hour of screen time is probably the movie at its most coherent. Like its lead character played by Joaquin Phoenix, the rest of it seems to unfold in its own marijuana-induced stupor. As Doc digs deeper, he encounters sadistic cops, corrupt cops, druggies, new-age spiritualists, hookers, Aryan Brotherhood bikers, Black Power ex-cons, dentists, and Nixon politicos. It isn’t the cultural polyglot of eclectic characters that we mind; rather, it is the storylines that they inhabit which we take offense with.
We won’t try describing every one of the shaggy sprawl of plotlines to you; suffice to say that it flits from Josh Brolin’s flat-topped cop with macho swagger to Owen Wilson’s saxophonist triple agent to a pansexual masseuse to a pot-smoking district attorney to an Indo-Chinese heroin cartel of tax-dodging dentists (one of which is played by Martin Short). To give credit where it’s due, Anderson approaches his source material reverently, in particular in retaining the assembly line of eccentrics in Pynchon’s novel; unfortunately, that devotion ultimately proves alienating onscreen, leaving his audience going from one kooky character or situation to the next with little continuity or purpose. The combination of so many disparate parts is baffling to say the least, and self-indulgent to the point of being silly and frustrating at the same time.
Fans of Pynchon’s work will probably tell you to read the book, or in this case watch the film, with either eye on the narrative is missing the point, for the writer’s brilliance really lay in his prose, characters and distinctly offbeat scenarios. Just as he did with the plotlines, Anderson keeps with Pynchon in all three respects – lifting paragraphs of prose for his characters to blabber as if in a heightened state of disorientation; giving his characters names such as Buddy Tubeside, Sauncho Smilax, Adrian Prussia, Japonica Fenway, and Petunia Leeway; and importing wholesale the treasure trove of jokes from the book, such as Brolin’s detective shouting for Swedish pancakes in a Japanese restaurant or his oral fixation of fellating chocolate-covered bananas. There are occasional good moments, bolstered by Robert Elswit’s cinematography of the gorgeous period detail, but these are too few and too far in between for a movie that stretches over a torturous two and a half hours.
Not even a game cast can quite redeem the movie’s tedium. Phoenix, who last collaborated with Anderson on ‘The Master’, keeps up a suitably off-balance act to centre the film and hold it together, but he doesn’t have the comic timing to make each scene stand out. Brolin fares much better as the no-nonsense cop who turns out to be both friend and (uneasy) friend to Phoenix’s Doc, the former’s deadpanning utterly amusing as he bulldozes his way through the uneasy truths of the latter’s case. Deserving of special mention however is Katherine Waterston, who shares a pivotal intimate scene with Doc that is mesmerising to watch in its poignancy and emotional candour.
But watching Waterston nude is hardly enough payback for a movie that comes off meandering and eventually pointless. There is no hook to the mystery, no logic in the procedural and only a modicum of occasional pleasure in its sheer absurdity. It is a satire all right, but one that rings hollow for far too long. Now that Anderson has taken his lark in the park with Pynchon, let’s hope he finds his way out of the drug-addled haze.
Movie Rating:
(Ponderous and pointless, Paul Thomas Anderson’s hippie noir has its occasional absurdist pleasures, but is largely just a bore)
Review by Gabriel Chong
Genre: Drama
Director: Peng Sanyuan
Cast: Andy Lau, Jing Boran, Tony Leung, Sandra Ng
Runtime: 1 hr 49 mins
Rating: PG
Released By: Shaw
Official Website:
Opening Day: 26 March 2015
Synopsis: After losing his two-year-old son, Lei (Andy Lau) begins a fourteen-year-long quest in search of his missing child. Hanging off the side of his motorcycle is his most valued token, the last picture he ever took of his son, which has been circulating on the microblogging community. On the road, he makes a stop at a repair shop where he comes across a young repairman, Zeng (Jing Boran), who was also kidnapped at the age of four. Robbed of the life he was meant to live, Zeng can only vaguely remember snippets of home – a chain-link bridge, bamboo trees, and his mother’s long braids. Impassioned, Lei posts Zeng’s story and information online. Agreeing to help each other’s cause, Lei accompanies Zeng to Chongqing to try to find his home, developing a fatherly relationship along the way.
Movie Review:
A series of interconnected stories attempt to shed different perspectives on China’s child trafficking phenomenon in novelist-turned-filmmaker Peng Sanyuan’s ‘Lost and Love’, the second film in six months (after Peter Chan’s ‘Dearest’) based on the pressing social matter. On one hand, there is Andy Lau’s Lei Zekuan, an Anhui farmer who has been on the road on his motorcycle for the past 14 years in search of his lost son, whose picture as a kid is prominently displayed on a banner attached to the back of his vehicle. On another, there is Jing Boran’s mechanic Zeng Shuai, who was abducted as a child along with another boy from the same village and has been searching for his birth family since.
Besides Lau and Boran, there is also Ni Jingyang’s grief-stricken mother, whose 18-month-old infant was recently abducted at a busy traffic intersection. Besides handing out flyers to pedestrians, she spends her time hanging around the same intersection hoping to get a glimpse of her daughter. Interestingly, Jingyang’s character isn’t given a name, but there is no doubt she is intended to represent the shock and anguish of countless parents in the days and weeks immediately after their children’s disappearance. And to a much smaller extent, Sandra Ng plays her daughter’s kidnapper, driven by money to partake in such a heinous trade.
As well-intentioned as the multi-character narrative may be, it is quite blatantly clear just where Peng, who wrote and directed the movie, has her eye on. Indeed, despite opening with a ripped-from-the-headlines story of the abduction of Zhou Tianyu, that arc involving her mother and her kidnapper never quite goes anywhere – whether on its own or in the larger context– so much so that it winds up being an unnecessary distraction that comes literally to its own watery end. Unsurprisingly, Peng spends most of the screen time developing the fraternal bond between Zekuan and Shuai, whose dynamic becomes the movie’s emotional anchor.
They meet after Zekuan gets into an accident en route to the Wuyi Mountains and Shuai offers to fix his bike for free, thus beginning a poignant relationship of two kindred souls united by circumstance. To Peng and her actors’ credit, neither overplay the sentimentalities, allowing their bond to develop slowly but surely into one of gentle but unwavering psychological support. In one of their first scenes together, Shuai blames Zekuan for failing to look after his son, but in one of the later scenes, it is also Shuai who pulls Zekuan away from his washed-up motorcycle on a beach after being thrown overboard into the sea. Theirs is a relationship of complements, culminating in Zekuan’s pivotal role in Shuai’s eventual reunion with his birth parents.
Between Zekuan and Shuai, it is perhaps surprising to note that Shuai is the more compelling one. Indeed, though much has been said about Andy Lau’s uncharacteristically gritty performance as the grieving peasant parent, Peng dedicates more detail to her other character, whose desire to be reunited is tempered by ambivalence at what life awaits for him after that reunion, especially because of his emotional attachment to his adopted parents as well as his older step-sister. An excellent sequence typifying this has Shuai relating his adopted father’s wish for him to marry his step-sister, just so he can remain the family legitimately. Such moments illustrate the psychological dilemma facing such individuals, particularly if they have since settled into better lives in their adopted families.
In contrast, Zekuan remains a frustratingly opaque character throughout the course of the film. Other than his own admission to Shuai that he is afraid to go back to his family empty-handed, there is no other insight to the man who has dedicated more than a decade to such a singular mission. In some of the earlier scenes, Zekuan mounts a banner of Tianyou on his bike to aid in the latter’s search, but that act of kindness is never quite expounded into anything substantial. In fact, the second act pretty much sidelines Zekuan as the focus shifts to Shuai’s unlikely reunion, leaving only an epilogue involving a group of Buddhist monks in meditation (probably inspired by Andy Lau’s own religious convictions) to bring our attention back to this obscure figure.
That is also a consequence of Lau’s own unexceptional performance – much as it is a departure from the usual ‘superstar’ roles he is known to play, his acting is convincing without ever being moving, failing like his script to help his audience understand just what his character is thinking or feeling. Lau and Boran do have a good rapport next to each other though, which makes their scenes together much more engaging than that of Lau alone. Since we are on casting, we might as well add that the decision to cast comedian Sandra Ng in the role of Tianyou’s kidnapper comes up to no more than a gimmick – ditto for Tony Leung Kar-Fai’s cameo as a kind-hearted policeman whom Lau meets on his way to Quandou.
As a reflection of the reality of child trafficking, Peng also fashions her film like a road movie, with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s regular DP Mark Lee Ping-bin providing some stunning images of the rugged beauty of the Chinese hinterland. In many ways, her pacing also follows that of such a journey, which for the most part is leisurely, picking up only in the more interspersed dramatic sequences, such as one where Zekuan’s goes on board a floating fishery on a tip that the family’s adopted son has a similar scar to that of his own child. That isn’t a bad thing in itself, but it does mean that those looking for a more propulsive narrative like that of ‘Dearest’ will probably be quite disappointed.
No matter that it is coming out so closely to Peter Chan’s film of the same theme, Peng’s ‘Lost and Love’ has a lyrical quality that its predecessor never aimed or attained for. Alas her decision to have a multi-strand narrative ultimately makes the film seem scatter-shot and somewhat lacking in momentum, and the fact that most of her characters seem under-developed only reinforces that sentiment. Though it isn’t as emotionally powerful as it could have been, there are genuinely affecting moments within, and gives voice to a phenomenon that pleads for wider social redress.
Movie Rating:
(Some genuinely affecting moments and nice chemistry between Andy Lau and Jing Boran make up for a scatter-shot narrative that doesn't define its characters well enough)
Review by Gabriel Chong
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