#04: A REAL PAIN

 

WRITTEN, STARRING AND DIRECTED BY Jess Eisenberg, also starring Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe, Jennifer Grey, Kurt Egyiawan, Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes. Running time 90 minutes. Budget $3million.

Two Jewish American cousins set out on a Holocaust tour of Poland in honour of their dead grandma, one Benji Kaplan (Kieran Culkin) is a self-centred, obnoxious, arrogant, entitled, whinny, unfiltered little shit and the other, David (Jess Eisnberg) is a meek, neurotic, emotionally needy, spineless, enabling, milquetoast of a man. 

During their wretched tour of Poland, Benji emotionally and intellectually bullies his cousin and all the other guests on the tour with his ridiculous rants and emotional baggage, forcing everyone to just keep their heads down and weather his odious, tedious rants. None more so than his cousin, who we are told used to be more like a brother to Benji, but now isn't. David moved away, has a family, and holds down a job as an online ad salesman, while Benji lives in his mother's basement and smokes dope. As their smug self-indulgent tour of Poland drags its sorry arse from city to city towards the emotionally-shocking stop at Auschwitz, we have to witness Benji just being an absolute shit, spouting random outbursts of opinionated bullshit at the other characters. And apparently it's 'funny'. 

Scoring 96% on Rotten Tomato where it's described as: "Funny and sincere", "uproariously funny, quietly witty, achingly sad and excruciatingly well-observed." or a "masterpiece", this was by far the most obnoxiously self-indulgent piece of shit I've seen in a long time.

Culkin's Benji is so needy and selfish from the very beginning that you have no patience for his shenanigans, and when the film finally arrives at Auschwitz for its emotional apex and Benji's protestations are finally put into perspective, you don't feel sympathy for him you just want him to shut the fuck up and grow up, or else for someone to slap the smug out of him, because the world isn't all about him. From then on it's one last trip to Grandma's old house and some revelations that perhaps shine a tiny little light on Benji's arsehole behaviour and David's reasons for being a little bit distant before jetting back to the US of A and one last emotional beat before the whole sorry film slides to a dreary smug full stop, with a self-satisfying sigh of self-pleasure. 

I struggle to think of why anyone would think this was a, 'funny' film. There's perhaps one or two pithy comments or observations that twang a string, but miss the chord. In fact, this feels more eager to point out how some aspects of Polish life seem rather amusing - like serving sandwiches on trains that once would have transported their ancestors to their deaths amusing, or the obvious rich humour vein of war memorials. It's the sort of film where a passionate tour guide is ridiculed and humiliated for doing his job, while standing in a Jewish graveyard.

It's not all self-indulgent twaddle, The music by Chopin was wonderful and Jennifer Grey as a rich divorcee, was a revelation! How great to see her back in movies, I loved her in Red Dawn. Likewise, the supporting cast, especially Will Sharpe as the luckless tour-guide and Kurt Egyiawan as the converted Rwanda  genocide survivor were both excellent bringing some much needed humility and depth to proceedings.

To quote Horse from Ren & Stimpy, "No sir, I did not like it."

How apt to see a film whose title reflects exactly how you felt when you finally walked out of the cinema with your life 91 minutes shorter than it was. 4/10

#03: A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

 

STARRING: Timothée Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Monica Barbaro, Boyd Holbrook, Dan Fogler, Norbet Leo Butz and Scoot NcNairy. Screenplay by James Mangold and Jay Cocks. Directed by James Mangold. Budget $50-70 million. Running time 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Following the early years of Bob Dylan's professional career, from hitch-hiking in 1961 to New York to visit Willie Guthrie in hospital, to over night sensation, and to his first electric performance at the 1965 Newport Folk festival where he was famously heckled as 'Judas'.

From beginning to end this is Timothée Chalamet's film, his utterly mesmerising performance grabs your complete attention from the first second he appears on screen in the back of car as a hitchhiker to the last as he rides off on his motorbike, 140 minutes later that seem to have flashed by in the blink of an eye. 

His vocal portrayal of Dylan is superb capturing the tone and style perfectly, his performance of the man himself is twitchy and buttoned up, he comes across as a man unable to sleep without an audience and bridled with a creative force that seems to consume him wholeheartedly. But he's not alone, everyone involved with in this film delivers wonderful performances, singing and playing their own instruments, from Monica Barbaro's depiction of Joan Baez, to Edward Norton's political activist and folk legend Pete Seeger, to Boyd Holbrooks' Johnny Cash. And complementing them all is Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo, a fictional version of Dylan's first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo after Dylan asked the film not use her real identity. 

The styling of New York in the 1960s seems perfect, at no point do you find yourself dragged out of the illusion and throughout it all the sound track is pure Dylan. Indeed you could be mistaken for believing that this is a full out musical, since Chalamet sings a total of 40 Dylan songs in their entirety, while playing the guitar and harmonica and were all recorded live.

This is a very straight forward sort of musical bio-pic, that sort of thing that Hollywood used to make back in the 50s, like one of my favourites, The Glenn Miller Story, which offered not one iota of detail about Glenn Miller's actual life. 

It's a $70 million dollar Karaoke movie, a visual and musical delight that captivates completely and yet you'll leave the film knowing nothing about the man himself beyond what's on display – that he was a singularly driven young man consumed by music and its creation and that he was a 'tad' ego-centric. If you go in expecting a warts-and-all expose of Bob Dylan you're going to leave a little frustrated, cos you ain't gonna get it, but then maybe that's the truth of the whole thing, maybe there is no deeper hidden truth, and why should there be? He was only 20 years-old at the beginning of the film and 25 at its end. Although I did discover, much to my delight, that he was penpals with Johnny Cash.

One of the things that surprised me while watching this film was that I knew so many of his songs almost verbatim and I realised that with the likes of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and David Bowie, Bob Dylan has been a part of my life's soundtrack for so long that i don't remember the first time I heard his music. It's made me want to listen and find out more about him and any film that can make you do that can't be all bad. 

9/10

#02: SE7EN

Starring Brad Bitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow and John C. McGinley. Written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Directed by David Fincher. Music by Howard Shore. Budget $33-34 million. Running time 127 minutes. Originally released in 1995.

Se7en follows Detective Lieutentant William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and Detective David Mills (Brad Pitt) as they investigate a series of horrible murders based on the seven deadly sins. Somerset is a week shy of retiring, his faith in humanity drained and longing to escape the nameless, crime-infested, rain-drenched city he has no love for. While Mills, just arrived is eager to make a name for himself. Let's hope no one loses their head.

30 years-old and still daisy fresh. This is a gruelling film, dark, bleak and superb. The murders are genuinely shocking and the look and feel of the film is almost physical. The performances by all four of the main characters is top class, as is the music, the art direction and direction by a young David Fincher. The two leads play well off each other and balance the film perfectly, Pitt's youth is all ticks and jitters, while Morgan's world-weary wisdom creates the balance.

It also features one of the finest credit sequences of all-times, which helps to prepare you for what is to follow. This is one of those films, like 1982's Blade Runner that utterly re-defined a genre and spawned a slew of imitators and Hollywood's love of the ridiculous idea of genius-level serial killers.  

This is one of those films where you leave shaken and thoughtful.

10/10 

#01: NOSFERATU

 

STARRING: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney and Bill Skarsgård. Written and directed by Robert Eggers. Cinematography by Jarin Blaschke, music by Robin Carolan. Budget $50 million. Running time 132 mintues.

1838, Wisborg, Germany. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) are newly weds, he is an eager solicitor and estate agent and she a young women troubled by a traumatic past and plagued by bizarre seizures. When Thomas is sent by his boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to visit Count Orlok, an elderly old man and conclude a deal to sell him a derelict old house in Wisborb he believes it will secure his financial future with a promised promotion. Thomas reluctantly leaves his young wife in the care of his dear friends, Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) and embarks on a six-week trek to the castle of Orlok. Things go a wee-bit Pete Tong once he gets there and we discover that old Orlok isn't a sad old man at the end of his days but rather a undead monster trapped in a body of a corpse and only the love of a young woman can free him. Turns out when Ellen was young she accidentally awoke Orlok and he needs to her to declare her undying love to free him from his curse. And he sets out to Wisborg.

Before long Wisborg is invaded by rats, and the plague and people are dropping like flies. Ellen starts going mad and Friedrich's family doctor, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) realises that something else is at work and enlists the help of disgraced professor, Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who just so happens to be an expert in the occult, mysticism and alchemy and quickly recognises the psychic link between Ellen and Orlok. And once Thomas staggers back into town our band of heroes set out to kill Orlok and save Ellen.

Obviously this is a remake of the extraordinary 1922 silent masterpiece starring Max Schreck and directed by F.W. Murnau, that was an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula. And it's also the third time the tale has been filmed.

Robert Eggers delivers yet another deeply personal and extraordinary experience with this version of Nosferatu, it's a passion project for him that was first announced in 2015. Succeeding in making the vampire something disgusting again, this version of the Dracula mythology is a deeply atmospheric cinematic experience, thanks to the skills of cinematography Jarin Blaschke, the score by Robin Carolan, which is unsettling and dream-like, the production design is glorious and the look of the whole thing boarders on perfection to such a degree you'll swear you can smell it. It's a creepy film, but never scary, it's held aloft by the performances of Lily-Rose Depp whose dedication to the role of Ellen is genuinely impressive and backed up by the likes of Hoult, Ineson, Dafoe and McBurney, who is fantastic! However, the Keanu Reeves of this Dracula-esque outing is Aaron Taylor-Johnson, whom I used to really like, but I'm now beginning to think is a bit of a personality vacuum as well as a tad on the wooden side, his clipped British delivery boarders on the comical and his performance feels awkward. 

At 132 minutes this tests your endurance and I wonder if it really needed to be this long. It's nevertheless engrossing and like all the best train crashes you just can't look away. The only fly in the gruel is Orlok himself who just doesn't look as horrific as the staggeringly iconic Schreck version. Bill Skarsgård does a fantastic job, and his voice is like liquid gravel but ultimately his Orlok is just a big-nosed, massively moustachioed old man in a big coat.

Grotesquely beautiful but somewhat disappointing and sadly, in the final analysis, lacking in bite. It's a film of style over substance. 7/10