Hopes: 2019

Glass

They called him Mister…

Glass, an unlikely sequel

to Unbreakable

 

Cold Pursuit

U.S. remake, but…

with same director, Neeson

in for Skarsgard. Hmm.

 

Happy Death Day 2U

Groundhog Day: Part II.

I know what you Screamed before.

Meta-mad sequel.

 

Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Cate Blanchett missing,

Daughter on her trail, thru time,

Very Linklater…

Pet Sematary

Stephen King remake.

Yes, sometimes dead is better,

but maybe not here.

 

Shazam!

Chuck: superhero.

Big: but with superpowers.

This could be great fun.

 

Under the Silver Lake

It Follows: P.I.

Sort of, Garfield the P.I.

Riley Keough the femme

 

Pokemon: Detective Pikachu

Ryan Reynolds is voice

Pikachu is the shamus

PG Deadpool fun?

The Turning

of the screw, that is.

Mackenzie Davis the lead,

can the ghosts be real?

 

John Wick: Parabellum

Keanu is back

On a horse while in a suit

Killers in  pursuit

 

Ad Astra

James Gray does sci-fi,

Brad Pitt looks for dad in space,

Gets Conradian.

 

Flarksy

Rogen heart Theron;

High school crush, now head Canuck.

No problem. Wait, what?!

Ford v Ferrari

Mangold for long haul;

Le Mans! Ferrari must lose!

Thus spake Matt Damon

 

Hobbs and Shaw

The Rock and The Stath.

The director of John Wick.

This will be bonkers.

 

The Woman in the Window

Not the Fritz Lang one!

Amy Adams: Rear Window.

Joe Wright the new Hitch.

CR: Chris Large/FX

Gemini Man

Will Smith and Ang Lee,

Clive Owen and the great MEW,

cloned hitman puzzler.

 

Charlie’s Angels

K-Stew’s big comeback

French films have made her, um, hip?

Just don’t bite your lip…

 

The Day Shall Come

Anna Kendrick stars in-

Um, nobody knows a thing

Bar it’s Chris Morris

 

Jojo Rabbit

‘My friend Adolf H.’

is Taika Waititi-

this could get quite strange…

Table 19

Anna Kendrick stars in a slightly unusual romcom that is notable for being more amiable than the usual Hollywood fare.

Kendrick is Eloise, the ex-maid of honour, who is still attending her best friend’s wedding despite being ditched from the bridal party after breaking up with the best man Wyatt Russell, brother of the bride. To avoid awkwardness she is relegated to the back of the room, Table 19. And as she planned the wedding Eloise knows just what a humiliation this is: seated next business acquaintances of the bride’s father, Craig Robinson and Lisa Kudrow, a nanny, June Squibb, a ‘successful businessman’ who is clearly nothing of the sort, Stephen Merchant, and a frustrated teenage lothario, Tony Revolori.

The Breakfast Club is an obvious point of reference for Table 19, and there is an undeniably goodhumoured spirit to proceedings that counts for much. But the presence of the Duplass brothers as original screenwriters makes you wonder what this movie was envisioned as in earlier drafts, especially as a striking camera movement when Eloise dances with a stranger and the best man sees it almost feels like a leftover from a draft where the real time wedding was being imagined as one single long take.

Table 19 isn’t hilarious, but it is more thoughtful than one would imagine and hides its grand romantic gesture with some glee.

3/5

Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates

Zac Efron and Adam Devine need nice girls to accompany them to Hawaii for their sister’s wedding. Instead they get Aubrey Plaza and Anna Kendrick.

The inseparable Stangle brothers Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) live together in a chaotic flat, work together selling liquor to the harassed likes of Marc Maron, and party together just a bit too hard. And so their parents (Stephen Root and Stephanie Faracy) insist that they both find nice girls to bring as wedding dates or be barred from the wedding of their beloved younger sister Jeanie (Sugar Lyn Beard). The idea being that the brothers rile each other up when they go stag, whereas some respectable girls will calm them down. But when their Craigslist ad goes viral, they get royally played and end up taking Tatiana (Aubrey Plaza) and Alice (Anna Kendrick). Soon the self-absorbed co-dependent hedonistic BFFs Tatiana and Alice have wreaked more destructive chaos on the wedding than the brothers stag ever could have.

Bill Nighy at a 2009 L&H Q&A promised with perfect deadpan that The Boat That Rocked contained “a lot of stupid jokes … profoundly stupid jokes.” One might say that Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates is a stupid comedy, a profoundly stupid comedy, without many jokes. It is in fact a variation on the great transatlantic comedy chasm, but unlike previous summer puzzlers Let’s Be Cops and The Heat this is not an obvious thriller script repurposed as a comedy by the addition of crassness, crudity, and mugging for laughs rather than the insertion of jokes and comic characters. Bad Neighbours writers Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien have penned a cookie-cutter Apatow gross-out rom-com about accepting responsibility, but without Rogen or Hill to riff absurdly, the improvisation encouraged by SNL director Jake Szymanski produces little of true value.

Continuing the trend noted by Bret Easton Ellis whereby gay characters fade out of spectacle aimed at the international market but proliferate in domestic fare, we have stand-up Alice Wetterlund as Cousin Terry; a bisexual yuppie tormenting Mike in a fashion not dissimilar to Kieran Culkin’s constant poaching of Anna Kendrick’s boyfriends in Scott Pilgrim. Except that, as with Silicon Valley star Kumail Nanjiani’s bizarre cameo as a masseur, in the absence of charm and wit you find yourself unsure how to interpret this. Laughing at and with minorities at the same inclusive time? Is it a bold move or sheer laziness to have Jeanie’s black fiancé Eric (Sam Richardson) be so unambiguously boring? Is the movie’s apparent need for Beard to do what Plaza and Kendrick presumably wouldn’t slightly creepy or predictable? And can zippy pacing and breeziness overcome inanity?

Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates, like Suicide Squad, contains lines in TV spots and trailers that don’t appear in the movie. But we don’t need Szymanski’s director’s cut.

2.5/5

Jamie & Spencer Need Movie Dates

“Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” said Oscar Wilde, and so to celebrate the release of Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates on August 10th, eligible bachelors Jamie Laing and Spencer Matthews are looking for two friends to join them as their dates to a preview screening of the film in London on August 2nd.

To enter the competition, applicants must comment on Jamie Laing’s post on Twitter or Instagram, tagging 1 friend that they would like to enter the competition with, explaining why they would make the best dates for Jamie and Spencer.

Entry for the competition is open now and closes Wednesday 27th of July at 11:59pm GMT.

See here for terms and conditions. Entrants must be 18 or older.

Mike & Dave Need Wedding Dates sees hard-partying brothers Mike (Adam Devine) and Dave (Zac Efron) place an online ad to find the perfect dates for their sister’s Hawaiian wedding. They’re looking for respectable girls at the insistence of their father (Stephen Root) who doesn’t want them ruining the wedding. But the ad soon goes viral and instead of respectable girls they get a conniving and uncontrollable duo (Aubrey Plaza, Anna Kendrick) and find themselves outsmarted and out-partied.

Kendrick’s 50/50 director Jonathan Levine produces a script by Bad Neighbours creators Andrew Jay Cohen and Brendan O’Brien as SNL and Funny Or Die director Jake Szymanski makes his cinematic debut.

Life After Beth

Dane DeHaan had never made a comedy before this film. I’m not sure he still hasn’t made a comedy after starring in Life After Beth.

Zach Orfman (DeHaan) is inconsolable with grief after his girlfriend Beth Slocum (Aubrey Plaza) dies from a snakebite while on a solo hike in the hills. Despite the best efforts of his abrasive security guard brother Kyle (Matthew Gray Gubler), and his helicopter parents Judy (Cheryl Hines) and Noah (Paul Reiser), nothing can shake him out of his gloom. Instead he spends his time with Beth’s parents, playing chess and smoking weed with Maury (John C Reilly), and going thru Beth’s clothes with Geenie (Molly Shannon). So far so Moonlight Mile. But when the Slocums’ Haitian maid Pearline (Eva La Dare) flees town, it’s not long before a horde of zombies appears, heralded by a returned Beth – who has no memory of dying, and is now super-strong, insanely jealous of Zach’s reappeared childhood friend Erica (Anna Kendrick), and increasingly hungry…

Warm Bodies approached the conundrum of how you make a romantic comedy with zombies by making the zombies not zombies. Life After Beth keeps the zombies as zombies and instead ditches the romantic comedy aspect. Which can’t be intentional, can it? There are so many good actors onboard that you feel something has gone disastrously wrong. Reiser is more likeable than I’ve ever seen him, and Gubler is fantastically obnoxious. But the lead performances don’t match them. Plaza presumably signed on for eating people and blowing up a lifeguard post, but, while she has fun with the physical shtick, the role mutes her comedic grouchiness. DeHaan’s everyman is ill-served by the puzzling script. What should be deadpan just turns out blank. Reacting blankly to absurd situations does not by itself provide comedy, there does need to be jokes in addition.

Writer/director Jeff Baena co-wrote I Heart Huckabees which makes it all the more baffling what the hell went wrong because he’s not a man short of comedic invention. Technically everyone is at the top of their game. Jay Hunter, who was the DP for Joss Whedon’s crisply monochrome Much Ado About Nothing, bathes this gated community in a sunlight wonderfully inapt for a zombie horror; again displaying flair on a shoestring. Kudos must also go to the casting directors (Nicole Daniels and Courtney Sheinin) who realised that with the right haircut DeHaan and Gubler are perfect as brothers. But technical competence and solid acting can only get you so far. By the end when a gratuitously naked female zombie appears you’re not sure if it’s a ham-fisted nod to Re-Animator, or a stunt to arouse the audience from its slumber.

Life After Beth is a zom-rom-com that’s played so straight that it ends up a romantic drama about a bad break-up and an unstable ex-girlfriend; now with added zombies.

1/5

Top 5 Muse Soundtracked Film Scenes

(5) New Moon
‘I Belong to You’ is a great song, and Matt Bellamy even re-worked some elements of it for the purposes of this movie, but of all the films to waste it on… I don’t think I could ever stomach re-watching New Moon; with its endless moping by Kristen Stewart and its failure by Taylor Lautner to make any impression despite an ocean of screen time because his dialogue is so poorly written; even to enjoy hearing it.
 
(4) Eclipse
The throwaway nature of this usage of Muse is rather hilarious and is what makes it noteworthy. Director David Slade (former music videos lenser) puts the soaring track ‘Neutron Star Collision’ on a stereo in the background of a party scene so that Anna Kendrick can excitedly say ‘Oh, I love this song’, before the camera pans away from her to follow other characters away from the music and towards the actual dramatic purpose of the scene. Delightful.
 
(3) Southland Tales
Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales is a fascinating mess but it does have any number of memorable moments, and many of the best involve music: The Rock running scared to the surf version of the Pixies’ ‘Wave of Mutilation’, Justin Timberlake showily performing The Killers’ ‘All These Things That I Have Done’, and Muse’s magisterial ‘Blackout’ providing a suitably odd soundtrack to a scene where The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar and Mandy Moore clash at an opulent mansion.
 
(2) Twilight
The greatest cinematic game of baseball ever played sees the Cullen family take advantage of an approaching thunderstorm to hide the tremendous cracking sound made when a super-strong vampire batter hits a baseball thrown by a super-strong vampire pitcher. Thirteen director Catherine Hardwicke’s gritty films may make her appear miserable but soundtracking this with Muse’s incredibly funky (and allegedly a parodic attempt at doing a Britney Spears song) ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ shows a well cultivated sense of fun.
 
(1) Switchblade Romance
Alexandre Aja’s French shocker from 2003 has, for me, made the best use of any movie of Muse’s unique sound. Cecile de France, having been scared out of her wits while stealthily hiding from the psychotic trucker who has slain her friend’s family and kidnapped her friend, is reborn as an avenging fury when she roars off after him in a yellow sports car to the sound of ‘Newborn’ by Muse; escalating in as the car-chase proceeds.

Top 5 Cinematic Big Sisters

I recently saw Donnie Darko at the IFI Open Day and the brilliance of the double-act by the Gyllenhaal siblings made me think about compiling a shortlist, not of the best sisters in cinema because that’s a very long and different list, but of the best big sisters in film.

(5) Lauren Bacall (The Big Sleep)
It may seem odd to isolate this iconic film noir femme fatale role for this one particular quality but a huge part of Vivian Sternwood’s motive for keeping tabs on the investigation of Philip Marlowe is to protect her crazy little sister Carmen, and she’s prepared to do a lot to keep her safe…

(4) Anna Kendrick (Scott Pilgrim)
Anna Kendrick’s character is perhaps the best example of the hilariously unappreciated big sister. She’s perpetually put-upon by her younger brother’s best friend, who is constantly stealing her boyfriends, but continues to risk it, and hilariously continually suffers, for her loving compulsion to be forever doling out good advice to her irresponsible and inattentive sibling.

(3) Jennifer Grey (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)
Ferris’s big sister is eternally infuriated by his popularity, but, after a day where his shenanigans once again drive her up the walls, an encounter with a drug-addled Charlie Sheen (how little things change in 25 years) leads her to loosen up and finally stick up for her conniving but loveable younger sibling.

(2) Maggie Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko)
Always keeping an eye out for Donnie; quizzically observing his antics at their party; but never doing so without a good deal of snarkiness; the opening dinner scene; Elizabeth is probably the most convincingly nuanced big sister in recent memory, undoubtedly helped by the fact that this exuberant double-act is an actual brother-sister acting team.

(1) Zooey Deschanel (Almost Famous)
“Listen to Tommy with one candle lighted and you will see your entire future”. Zooey’s break-out role was the impossibly idealised cool older sister who defies their mother on her younger brother’s behalf, before setting him on the path to his eventual career by bequeathing her awesome record collection to him; with handwritten cryptic instructions…