Hello everyone! Christopher Nolan’s ego has landed again with Harry Styles from One Direction in tow and a force behind him. Throw in a couple of oddies but goodies and let’s see what is new at the box office.
Dunkirk ####
There is no doubt that Christopher Nolan is a director’s force to be reckoned with, especially of modern age. His scope and breadth of vision knows few bounds, and his own perception and theme of time plays out in this latest epic, Dunkirk. Detailing the onslaught and drama of WWII’s largest survival and rescue mission of armed forces, Nolan washes the screen in a dizzying tale of reality that is so bombastic, it fuses itself into your core. Only one thing is missing: there are so many humans (alive, dead and even One Directioner Harry Styles) in the film, but I saw very little human connection, whether out on the sea or up in the air. Tom Hardy and Mark Rylance are the A-listers here, but newcomers Fionn Whitehead, Tom Glynn-Carney and Barry Keoghan take the cake for their non-nuanced inflection of camaraderie. Gone in this war epic are the splattered guts and gore of most genre-based films. Nolan doesn’t need the carnage, it would seem. Instead, he details the struggle and final, barely-made-it redemption of this brutal battle as the Second World War ended…and with much aplomb!
Rough Night ###-1/2
Any movie that includes Kate McKinnon is sure to be enhanced by her perfect comic timing and natural beauty. I just wish she had more even more screen time in this Scarlett Johansson-led caper by TV’s Broad City writer-director Lucia Aniello. It is clear from the get-go that this brand of raunchy overtness is meant to break established female roles and get some women behaving badly. The premise has been thrown out all over the advert world, so when the ‘incident’ happens, although we’re maybe aware of what’s coming, it still is a shock when you’ve been laughing non-stop for the first half an hour. The supporting cast of McKinnon, Zoe Kravitz and the fantastic comedic actresses Ilana Glazer and Jillian Bell certainly round off a dynamite group of lovely weirdos, though the moment that the drama begins, the film immediately takes a dive towards formulaic. I saw the women reacting more like scared teenage boys while the film juxtaposed the men’s bachelor party (ScarJo’s soon-to-be-hubby and mates) with all the self-assurance of a snooty, gay male get-together. When a Sex and the City character makes his presence known as the bad guy, things started to feel too much like an Eighties TV movie…but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Fun.
47 Meters Down ###
Last year, on our Top Films of 2016 list, one shining example of the ‘shark-in-horror-film motif’ was The Shallows, so perfectly executed by Catalan director Jaume Collet-Serra. I’ll find it very hard to see other great white shark tales without a bit of side-face mistrust. Case in point: 47 Meters Down. Now, I remember Mandy Moore, its main star, when she was singing that horrid wannabe bop ‘Candy’. I also recall her amazing role in the comedy Saved, as well as, her fantastic Coverage record and short but loving marriage to Ryan Adams, who co-owns a bar in NYC with my Aunt Laura…i.e. I reeeeaally like the girl, no joke! What this film gives us is an archetypal telling of a sisters story gone awry in a most taut way, but because the characters are so vapid and, ahem, shallow and cliched, it is really not easy to buy what they’re trying to sell. When they go out for a post-midnight party in some Mexican party town, they wind up meeting a group of ‘amazing’ guys who convince them to throw their plans out the window and go deep-sea diving amongst great white sharks…in a cage, of course. Enter Matthew Modine (still looking nerdy but handsome) as some Americano lugging on the ocean hosting tourists for these illegal shark dives and, voila, drama happens. When their cage’s rusty hook line breaks, the girls plummet to the bottom of the sea and the rest of the film is spent in clenched-fist terror. Meh…but stressful and claustrophobic as hell!