Tag: movie review

MOVIE REVIEW: ‘I Am Not Big Bird’ is bold as it tries to push the boundaries, but it isn’t bold enough

Advertised as a raunchy sex comedy, ‘I Am Not Big Bird’ is pretty progressive in scope and vision. It’s a period piece (set sometime in the mid 2000s, pre-smart phone era) that stars a returning Enrique Gil (without his popular love team) in comedy that is set almost entirely in Thailand and is all about sex and genitalia. It’s been said over and over: this is so new to the Philippine film landscape and it’s refreshing. While a large majority of the country can still be very conservative (and even downright oppressive) in their views on sex, the new generations are more open about it (just check social media). It’s the perfect time for a comedy like this to stir the pot and push some boundaries and trigger some pearl clutching.

But as the movie unfolds – it’s the story of Luis Carpio (Gil), whose marriage proposal is rejected by his girlfriend of five years (because he hasn’t had sex with her as he is waiting for marriage) flies off to Thailand with his two friends for a chance to be “a bigger man,” as according to a random flyer that was handed out to him – the film is a lot tamer than I was expecting it to be. This is coming from director Victor Villanueva, who directed the excellently done ‘Patay na si Hesus’ as well as ‘Boy Bastos’ and ‘Lucid.’ Tonally, ‘Patay na si Hesus’ was way more outragous and provocative than ‘I Am Not Big Bird’ is, and it was not even revolving around sex. What creates this tempered outrageousness is its straddling its risqué elements with mass appeal. You can tell they want to push the lines but not cross it so they can keep the rating low and not raise too many eyebrows.

Case in point, the main dramatic premise of the film is that Luis, called Carps by his friends, looks exactly like the porn star known as Big Bird. Big Bird has a huge penis. It’s astronomically huge as we are shown this in the film’s prologue on a sex tape from Japan. So, humorously, the size is indicated via how much is pixelated in the video. An impression is created, the joke is set. But then the film never goes beyond this after the prologue. The three friends, which includes standup comedian Red Ollero as July and Nikko Natividad as Macky, have their first night at a seedy club. They are taken to a back room so that they can have sex with some of the hostesses there, but the film suddenly enters into an advisory that the scene is “too sexy for Filipino audiences” and goes to describe what happens in the cut scene with sound effects and a dub to amplify the humor. And then after we see the effect it had on our characters.

The film is fixated on the size of Big Bird’s penis (and the subsequent jokes of Luis, who ironically has a tiny one) and pushes the characters to do risque things. The many hijinks that follow from being mistaken for this porn star leads to kidnapping, to the possibilities of castration, and so on. The friends get high on psychedelic substances and, in one scene, have to try and make a porno and other such strange happenings. It’s all for laughs and I’m all for it – I just wished they allowed us to really get the full-on unsanitized comedy that this dramatic situation allows.

We don’t actually see them smoke or ingest the drugs. We don’t see too much skin (until much later, and it’s not from Enrique Gil, the main character of the film). It never gets dirty or grimy or full-on offensive the way that it teases us that it will. At least, in the presentation of Macky as a gay character, he actually gets to kiss another guy and they get almost naked and almost have sex. It’s where I thought this film would go but that’s the spiciest the film ever gets. There’s a scene where Gil has to kiss Deborah (Wipawee Charoenpura), a porn producer who is chasing after Big Bird, but as their faces come closer together, they change the angle of their heads, and we don’t actually see the kiss; just the impression of it.

It’s this sanitized tone that hinders this film from reaching its true heights and from really pushing boundaries. Yes, they say penis a lot and show us the huge bulge in full display in other scenes but it’s always just that: covered up and sanitized.

And for all the joking around about male genitalia and the like, the film does a sneak attack and suddenly turns to transform this film into a story about male friendships but the most important aspect of the friendship is not what the film is focused on either. Luis only shows up when he needs something and isn’t privy to the goings-on of his two friends. But this is only told and never shown. And while Macky’s story is at least given a scene, July’s back story isn’t even that developed. So, when the film tries to subvert the film’s comedy by surprising us with the story of the friendship, it feels forced and rather hollow.

What I do appreciate, though, is the friendship that is shown with Macky and July. If there’s anything to applaud, it’s the unproblematic friendship between a straight guy and a gay guy. The way the film just allows July and Macky to be good friends and not have their different gender preferences get in the way of anything is just so pleasant to see onscreen. I would have given everything to see more of this, and the fac that Luis wasn’t even aware. That is an important element of the story that doesn’t feel like it was given attention to.

As something new and different, ‘I Am Not Big Bird’ was poised to really turn heads, start conversations, and really break boundaries. But they played it safe. They got the laughs, for sure, the people in the theater with me were laughing at all the gags, shocked at “the audacity of it.” But this is the era of tv shows like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘Saltburn.’ Just a decade ago, ‘Game of Thrones’ was doing more shocking things about sex and nudity that hadn’t been done before. It’s a bold move for this movie to go in this direction, but it wasn’t bold enough. I would have liked it to go all-out.

My Rating:

I Am Not Big Bird is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 19, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: Crippled by a weak script, ‘Madame Web’ struggles to even be light and fun

There’s actually a lot going for ‘Madame Web’ to make it big. It stars Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, one actress who has a following because of her star-making turn in the divisive but immensely popular ‘Fifty Shades of Gray’ and the other, a rising star from hit television shows like ‘Euphoria’ and ‘White Lotus.’ While it is a comic book movie, it is based off a not so well-known character, which means that the expectations won’t affect the movie as much; the creative team have more leeway to play with the character just a bit. It’s a women-led story, which addresses the growing call for more women-centric stories in all genres. It’s also directed by a prolific film and television director, SJ Clarkson, who has worked on episodes of ‘Jessica Jones’ and ‘Succession.’

Unfortunately, the film tries to spin a complicated web but the script by writing duo Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless and also with Claire Parker and SJ Clarkson fail to bring all of its elements together. ‘Madame Web’ is burdened by a narrative structure that spends most of its time establishing story points and explaining the protagonist’s abilities than actually setting up an intriguing character arc for her. The dialogue is also extremely prosaic and literal; explaining everything that is happening in the most straightforward (thus uninteresting) way. If any of the elements are working towards the possibility of this film being exciting or thrilling, the script somehow undermines any of this by focusing on plot points rather than character building.

The film centers around Cassie Webb, a paramedic, who was orphaned when her mother died in the Amazon jungle while researching spiders (as humorously explained in the trailer). Because of her being orphaned – what she knows is that her mother died during childbirth, though the audience is aware that she was killed by her security detail – Cassie has an aversion to children and motherhood. She seems more comfortable being one of the boys than hanging out with the wives and sisters and mothers of her co-workers. A near-death experience triggers her powers, her ability to see the future, and she ends up saving three young teenagers from being murdered by Ezekiel Sims, the man who killed Cassie’s mother. Cassie must discover her past and reconcile with the truth about her mother so that she can save the three young girls from Sims.

Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced), and Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney) in Columbia Pictures’ MADAME WEB.

Clarkson takes a frenetic and loud directorial style for ‘Madame Web.’ Set in the year 2003, she infuses her film with older songs closer to that time period – ‘What’s Up’ of 4 Non Blondes, ‘Bitch’ by Meredith Brooks, and ‘Toxic’ by Britney Spears – and tries to create urgency by fast cuts and crazy camera work but somehow the film always manages to feel unhurried. Even a scene where Cassie is on the job trying to save the lives of people in a burning building, it lacks urgency or excitement. From the get-go, the film employs these camera tricks and strange edits before any actual real danger or excitement has really kicked in. In the process, the film doesn’t quite achieve the energy it is trying to convey.

And the script is just literal and straightforward. At every turn, most especially in the parts of Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), the dialogue openly explains the character’s thoughts and motivations, which ends up making the film feel like a comic book. It feels like exposition and it spoon-feeds the entire plot of the film as to make sure that people understand what is going on – even though the film isn’t that hard to understand at all.

Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney in Madame Web
Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Because of this, Rahim ends up looking like he’s over-acting as he is trying to add a sense of drama and danger to his character (even though the film hasn’t quite given us any real reason to) while the young teens who are in trouble – Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’ Connor, and Isabela Merced – are doing their best with the most archetypally written teen characters in the genre. On the flipside, Johnson and the usually very interesting Zosia Mamet are doing the bare minimum for these characters, as if they both realised that the words they have to say are quite silly. They are working, for sure, but they aren’t sweating it out either like they usually do.

There is an interesting way that they visualize the way Cassie’s powers work at the start when she first gets the abilities. The jarring way by which time seems to keep repeating. It’s an interesting effect but it quickly loses its appeal after the nth time it happens. Later on, it starts to play with your head because you have no idea if what you are seeing is a vision or the actual scene. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It can really ruin the pacing, but more importantly, it kills any feeling of suspense or thrill for the film. At some point, we stop worrying because we know that Cassie will figure it out and avoid any real danger.

The issues with the script – especially the way it handles a critical point in the second act when Cassie finally explores her mother’s story – really keeps the film from finding any semblance of stability and keeps ‘Madame Web’ from being taken seriously – even as a light, fun comic book movie. It can’t even get into that level because everything is so out in the open in terms of that screenplay.

It’s unfortunate because all the elements are there. But unless it’s the animated Spider-verse franchise or without the backing of Kevin Feige and the MCU, ‘Madame Web’ might just fall in the same pile as ‘Morbius’ and the critically panned ‘Venom’ films.

My Rating:

Madame Web is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 15, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: ‘Poor Things’ reimagines the coming-of-age narrative through an absurdist lens

I’m a huge fan of the works of Yorgos Lanthimos. From ‘The Lobster’ and ‘Killing of a Sacred Deer’ to ‘The Favourite,’ I’ve found that his style of highly formalistic realities playing out a sort of morality play that critiques contemporary human society has always been executed with such a delightful meticulousness of craft. Not only are the worlds that he creates out of the box and off-kilter but the way by which he presents them amplifies the absurdity of human life. His use of crazy camera angles and distorted visuals (like the use of the fisheye lens in ‘The Favourite’) and the unsettling musical score that he favours; his works have always been equal parts hilarious and disturbing.

Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone on the set of POOR THINGS. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Of the three works that he’s done that I’ve seen (and I heard his earlier, non-English works are even better), they have always been mired in irony and expressed a cynical view of the world. So, it’s surprising that his latest outing, ‘Poor Things’ ends somewhat hopeful, even joyful and it’s a shift that feels more aligned to his irreverent sense of humor because it still feels like the other shoe is about to drop. And unlike his previous films, this one ends right before it does.

Emma Stone in POOR THINGS. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.

‘Poor Things’ centers around the growth of Bella (Emma Stone). We are introduced to her as a woman who had “hurt her head” and is now learning everything all over again like that of a child. While the setting implies a Victorian-era London, Lanthimos and screenwriter Tony McNamara opt for a dreamy, lo-fi steam punk world. It has shades of George Melies with a bit of the Spanish architect and painter Gaudi splashed into the aesthetic design. Bella is in the care of a brilliant surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a master of anatomy and surgery, who conducts experiments that is akin to Dr. Moreau. His home is a menagerie of strange animal experiments. A duck with a dog’s body. A chicken with a pig’s head. And then there’s Bella, a grown woman acting like a child.

Willem Dafoe in POOR THINGS. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.

When Godwin asks one of his students, Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef) to watch over Bella and record her growth, he questions her origins but cannot help but find her attractive. He falls for her and in the urgings of the paternal Godwin, Max proposes marriage to Bella, who at this point is old enough to understand a portion of what it means and accepts.

Ramy Youssef and Willem Dafoe in POOR THINGS. Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures.© 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Except Bella still wants to know more about the world, so seduced by a sly lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo), Bella leaves home to explore the world outside the safe yet imprisoning walls of Godwin Baxter’s home.

Mark Ruffalo in POOR THINGS. Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 20th Century Studios All Rights Reserved.

What presents itself as either a strange gothic romance or a meditation on the morality and cruelty of scientific experiments conducted in the post-period of enlightenment, the movie really is a coming-of-age story of a woman who wants to understand the world. Bella’s unique circumstance allows her to see the world as an innocent, with pure intentions and is grasping for experiences that will help her wrestle with all the emotions that come with the knowledge about the world itself. Her mental growth is quick and fast, and in a few months, she has the mind of an intelligent young teen (though the sentence structure of a verbose child) but, having the body of a grown woman, she discovers the joy and power of sex and enjoys it.

Emma Stone in POOR THINGS. Photo by Yorgos Lanthimos, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2024 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Sex, then, becomes the fulcrum of her understanding of power and joy. Bella questions the world around her, including polite society, which – when taken from her point-of-view – is suspect about the true nature of the power dynamics involved. Unintentionally, to understand the world, she has to face what it means to be a woman and what society demands from her. With her child-like point-of-view, she feels no shame nor guilt of which society bears upon her. And because this, she is so much stronger than everyone in the world around her.

Everyone in this film is incredible, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo are doing their best work – and these are two actors who always do amazing work – but here, they synch into Lanthimos’ sense of absurdity and they fit right in. The mannered performances are brought in with equal levels of absurdity but tempered with the reason that they don’t feel like they are hamming it up.

Emma Stone in Poor Things. Photo Courtesy of Searchight Pictures.© 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

But through and through, this is Emma Stone’s movie. It is all grounded on her and her portrayal of Bella. She is absolutely committed to this role and is unafraid of being foolish and vulnerable. She is acting with every inch of her body, creating a character that is rapidly growing before our eyes. From the times of Bella with the mindset of an infant to her fully grown and in full realization of who she is and what the world is capable of, you can see the shifts and nuances of the character’s transformation. If she wins her second Oscar for this role, it would be so deserved.

Emma Stone and Mark Ruffalo on the set of POOR THINGS. Photo by Atsushi Nishijima. Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2023 Searchlight Pictures All Rights Reserved.

Lanthimos’ incredible filmmaking is so perfectly matched for this story. The pacing, the world building, the design, and the way he captures it on camera. After the prologue, he tells the story first in black-and-white to somehow mimic Bella’s view of the world – without colour, without understanding. But as she gets older, the colours start to come in. I was trying to take notice of when it would change and shift (I knew the film would be in color because of the trailers) but I was so engrossed in Emma Stone’s performance and the hilariousness of the screenplay that I totally missed the shift the film takes to colour. And when it does, the movie just comes completely alive as it coincides directly with Balla’s on growing perspective over the world.

It’s definitely a philosophical film as much as it is the ultimate coming-of-age story that I can think of. The incredible score by Jerskin Fendrix, with its discordant melodies highlight the imbalance of power and the ways by which Bella deals with the people around her. But the music finds moments of harmony, especially at its surprising end.

‘Poor Things’ is a complete assault on the senses and this aesthetic is wonderfully maintained all throughout its 142-minute running time. It’s an exquisite meditation on the world and manages to highlight the discrepancy of power between the sexes.

My Rating:

Poor Things is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 14, 2024
Movie Review: The new ‘Mean Girls’ musical is kinda fetch

I was expecting to hate the new ‘Mean Girls’ movie. I’m a huge fan of the original 2004 Mark Waters-directed film and feel that it’s a perfect movie on its own. It was a cultural phenomenon and the way the movie presented the idea of the high school queen bee archetype was the pattern for later usage of that trope, like that in ‘Gossip Girl.’ It opened important discussions about the way teenage girls see themselves and each other and how they tear each other down. Many of the lines in the film are still used today in memes and gifs and, on social media, October 3 is dubbed as ‘Mean Girls Day’ due to a line in the film that mentions the date.

When I saw the trailer for the film adaptation of the Broadway musical based on the 2004 film, I had to ask why. Why make another movie when the original movie was already perfect as it was? Especially when the whole idea of a nasty, mean queen bee is such an outdated concept in 2024? This is the age of the internet and cancel culture. People like Regina George would be canceled in a heartbeat. How would this version address this shift in the generational mindset? And the trailer made it feel like it was exactly the same movie with some jokes just swapped for a more modern take but was essentially the same.

So, I was sitting in my seat, as the movie began, and when the first song opened, an intro presented like an IG or FB reel or Tiktok with Janis and Damian (Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey, respectively) singing a song with the tone of a narrator, I immediately put my walls up and resisted. Despite the excellent vocals of Cravalho and Spivey, I found fault within the song. The two were playing their own instruments in a garage but the moment the garage doors open and it’s the wide-open savannah of Africa and we are introduced to Angourie Rice as Cady Heron, I was turned upside down.

It was an incredible scene transition that would be carried out throughout the whole film. Rice sings Cady’s first song about her life in Kenya and the song was catchy and allowed us into the interior world of our protagonist. One quick, clever transition later and she’s in high school back in the United States and experiencing her first day.

As much as I was resisting it, this musical version of ‘Mean Girls’ found a way through my walls. The full-on musical numbers help break reality and create a world for the film that is entirely of its own. It allows for the presence of a popular girl in school like Regina George to exist because the movie is not set in any sort of reflection of real life. It brought the story to the level of a fable or a modern fairy tale and so it created a space for the less realistic parts to exist.

So, when Renee Rapp makes her entrance as Regina George, the effect is actually quite staggering. Rapp is a powerful presence with a strong, powerful voice that demands attention. Rapp is not your typical svelte or skinny blonde girl. She’s a strongly built, hot young girl with the vocal chops of a diva. She has incredible confidence mixed with deadly charisma. Rachel McAdams, who originated the role in 2004, was perfect for that era’s imagination of the American dream girl but Renee Rapp is the rightful evolution of it. And boy can she sing!

Everything within this version of ‘Mean Girls’ pretty much follows the same narrative beats as the original. What is different is now that instead of Cady Heron’s narration, the voice-over is now song numbers and each girl gets a chance to reflect on their interior worlds. While Karen (played by Avantika) gets a humorous dance song about how young women can dress sexy during Halloween (as a reflection on the misplaced needs of young teen girls to be thought of as hot), it is Gretchen Wiener’s (Bebe Wood) song about her own insecurities that allows her to let Regina step all over her add something new and layered to the character.

Certain jokes remain the same – fetch is still there, and so is “she doesn’t even go here” – though others have been replaced with new jokes; some that work and some that don’t but what is surprising is that the core message of ‘Mean Girls’ has not changed over the years, but it still feels timely and important until now. The usage of the elements of social media and the internet somehow fits perfectly into the story and manages to highlight the overturning of Regina George’s popularity in favor of Cady and this is done really well with this new intrusion. It manages to showcase how shallow and petty all the noise in social media can be. One day they are praising Regina and the next, they are making fun of her and praising Cady.

This new ‘Mean Girls’ doesn’t quite top the original. It’s hard to do. What it does, though, is that it takes everything good about the first and dresses it up in modern sensibilities and makes it sing and dance and have really good scene transitions. With the vocal prowess of Cravalho and Rapp pushing it along for good measure, the film manages to justify its production and gives us a pretty fun time in the cinema in the process.

My Rating:

Mean Girls is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 13, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: The unserious ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ struggles to make its quirks and whimsical elements come together

The moment I stepped out of the cinema after watching ‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ I had to really think about what I had just seen. It is an oddball of a film, a mixed bag of genres – Is it gothic-horror-comedy? Is it a dark, satirical, coming-of-age story? Is it an anti-romance movie with gothic inflections? – with so many quirks both in the script and direction that everything about the movie is distracting. The worst part was not knowing what the film was really about or what it was trying to do.

Set in the late 1980s, Lisa Swallows (Kathryn Newton) is living in an unnamed town with her dad, stepmom (Carla Gugino), and step-sister (Liza Soberano). Lisa is a survivor of a horrible attack where she witnessed her mother get killed by an axe murderer. She’s now an awkward teenager living with her oppressive, vicious stepmother and her cloyingly perfect, cheerful stepsister. She finds solace in spending time alone in an abandoned cemetery and dreaming about dying, lying on the ground side-by-side six feet under beside her favorite marked grave. After a rager where Lisa is drugged, embarrassed, and even sexually assaulted leaves her disoriented and walking home during a freak storm, for some crazy unexplained reason, a ball of lightning strikes the cemetery and brings the corpse of her favorite marked grave alive (Cole Sprouse).

From an awkward, antisocial teenager, the appearance of the undead boy somehow brings Lisa out of her shell. She dresses in Madonna circa 1980s-inspired outfits (with inflections of Stevie Nicks and the hippie-witch aesthetic) and her character does a drastic character change. She becomes more driven by her sexual desires and starts to fight back against the forces that have tried to bring her down – her stepmother and the boy who assaulted her – including being an accomplice to murder.

Because while Lisa is discovering her own strength and voice, the undead boy is slowly putting himself together, taking body parts from his victims so that he can be whole again. Throughout this process, he looks less and less like a zombie, throwing loving glances at the self-absorbed Lisa, and going through the entire movie communicating merely through grunts.

It’s a strange movie because there is no moral center that anchors this film. Yes, the murders that happen are bad and thus paint our protagonist, and unlikely romantic leads, as bad people but never does the film ever treat them as such. They are heroes in the way director Zelda Williams and writer Diablo Cody decide to depict them. The film turns each act of violence as comedic moments but never posits a stance about it. This ambiguity is refreshing but what it does is that it invalidates and undermines any moment of emotional weight that the film may try to achieve later on.

There are some interesting subversive elements within the film like Soberano’s Taffy. What would be a Regina George-esque character in any other film, is actually very sweet and genuine and is unafraid to call out her vicious mother and honestly try to treat Lisa like her sister. It’s a role that Soberano manages to portray with great aplomb. When things start to get hairy and Taffy and Lisa’s own relationship is put through the grinder, there’s a touching scene where Lisa finds a vulnerable moment and opens up to Taffy. It would have been more powerful had the film managed its quirky, ambiguous tone better. It’s hard to take this scene seriously when nothing else in the movie asks for that same treatment.

From the get-go, Williams’ and Cody’s treatment and style of this world is exaggerated and highly stylistic. It almost feels animated. Lines are delivered in such a mannered way that, at first, I thought everyone was overacting. It wasn’t until the movie stretched out that I realized everyone was acting in the same hyper-real way. It was a tonal direction – everything a little over-dramatic – that I saw the directorial control. Unfortunately, much like many aspects of the film, there’s no underlying intention behind any of it. It’s all quirky and unserious about everything – the romance aspect, the horror aspect, the gothic aspect, even the coming-of-age aspect – nothing is fully committed to by the creative team.

By the time the film ends, I felt no real connection to this world, to these characters, or to the experience. ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ felt like a hodgepodge of many great ideas and was shot and produced before any real development was put into the piece. Newton is acting up a storm but without any real context or grounding element to her character, for all her commitment, she ends up just seeming spastic and overdone. On the other hand, Gugino and Soberano find a sweet spot within the weird tone of the movie and somehow fit right in. They work completely in this movie even if the movie never really gets off the ground. I’m usually a huge fan of Diablo Cody’s work. Her previous films like ‘Young Adult’ and ‘Tully’ are just amazing works that get under your skin. Unfortunately, ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ does the opposite. It feels like an experiment in tone and whimsy that didn’t quite succeed.

My Rating:

Lisa Frankenstein is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 10, 2024
Movie Review: Spaeny is exquisite in Sofia Coppola’s ‘Priscilla,’ a film that is more impressionist than a dramatic biopic

Sofia Coppola takes an impressionist approach to the biopic, as she adapts Priscilla Presley’s memoir ‘Elvis and Me’ in her latest film. Coppola is not out to sensationalize the couple and instead puts her razor-sharp focus on the coming-of-age story of a young woman who is suddenly thrust into the orbit of one of pop music’s biggest stars. ‘Priscilla,’ as a film, makes no concessions in its treatment of Elvis. It knows who he is, and it expects its audience to do so as well. So, all of the trappings and glamour of his popularity is left in the periphery. Images of his fame tries to creep into the frame, but Coppola keeps it away. She focuses her camera on young Priscilla Beaulieu (played with a pitch-perfect performance by Cailee Spaeny) as she meets Elvis Presley at the age of 14 and is swept off her feet by his charisma and stardom.

Coppola keeps her camera close and tight. She only lets it breathe to contextualize the immensity of some scenes – to fully impress upon the audience the isolation Priscilla must have felt being alone with Elvis’ family and entourage in Graceland – before bringing it really close to her and her intimate moments with the rock and roll giant (played by a magnetic Jacob Elordi). It is these intimate moments that is rife with meaning and evokes the uneven power dynamics within the couple.

Image Source: Creation Studios FB

Elordi stands a whole 5 inches taller than the real Elvis, while Cailee Spaeny is only 5’1 (as compared to Priscilla Presley’s actual height of 5’4). The height difference on film between Elordi and Spaeny really helps visualize that tension. It amplifies the fact that Elvis was 24 when he began seeing Priscilla at 14 (though, amazingly, Elordie and Spaeny are roughly the same age). The film, following events from the book, portrays Elvis as someone who waited for her to be of age before he married her and slept with her, but the intensity of their relationship is put into question.

Image Source: Creation Studios FB

At 16, Elvis flew her from Germany where they first met to live with him in Graceland away from her family. The implications of this are huge but wonderfully enough, Coppola never places judgement on it. Sure, some people question it, her parents made him work for it, but never does Coppola take any form of judgement in the filmmaking. To the characters – Elvis and Priscilla – they were in love. The writer and director never shy away from the fact that she’s underage and that she was probably just as starstruck as she may have been in love and despite all his flaws (of which the film shows many), Elvis may have truly loved her.

Never does the film dwell on any of the dramatic moments – the arguments they have, the sudden outbursts leading to violence that Elvis would sometimes show, the ways by which Priscilla’s life is consumed entirely by Elvis’ being – the film gives us snapshots of these but never fully explores them. The film is working on broad strokes. ‘Priscilla’ is not out to discuss or explore Elvis and the effect of his popularity on the world and on people but pushes to put Priscilla’s life in the spotlight and how her being in his orbit has affected who she is and the decisions that she ends up making as she gets older through the film.

The movie plays out like a highlight reel, only showing the greatest hits of her memory, so to speak, that leads to her powerful decision to come into her own by the end of the film. We know or have heard of Priscilla’s story and what the film does is to create an impressionist painting that tracks particular moments in time that leads up to her eventual growth.

Grounding the whole movie, outside of Coppola’s masterful direction is Spaeny and Elordi’s arresting performance. Spaeny is at the center of it, having to play the character from 14 to 28 in the span of almost two hours. She gets all the emotional cues right and delivers a genuine performance that you cannot take your eyes off of while Elordi never tries to mimic Elvis, but he encapsulates his charisma and appeal. Coppola chose Elordi because he shares that same magnetism that Elvis Presley had and all Elordi had to do was amp it up to its highest levels.Of the many talks about Oscar snubs in this particular season, I feel that Spaeny is another performance that could have made it to the nominees list for Best Actress while Coppola could have also been considered for direction. But that’s just me. ‘Priscilla’ is not a mainstream or commercial movie. It’s an arthouse, memory piece that serves to evoke feelings and create an impression of womanhood growing at such challenging, unprecedented circumstances rather than to create an in-depth character study. It’s a masterful work that deserves a bigger audience.

My Rating:

Priscilla is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 3, 2024
Movie Review: Campy to a Fault: a review of ‘Argylle’

Matthew Vaughn, director of films like ‘Kick-Ass’ and ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service’ and its sequel, infuses his crazy brand of bombastic action (with heavy inflections of comedy) on ‘Argylle,’ a spy film that is filled with narrative twists and CGI-infested action scenes. ‘Argylle’ has the same tonal quality of Vaughn’s earlier work like ‘Kick-Ass’ and The Kingsman films (‘Kingsman: The Secret Service,’ ‘Kingsman: The Golden Circle’ and ‘The King’s Man’) but the director dials up the hyper-reality by a notch and pushes the “fun factor” of the movie to an uncomfortable level.

The story of this film centers around Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard), a successful spy novelist and introvert, who is suddenly the target of a real covert organization because her books coincidentally align with real events in the world of spies. Coming to her rescue is a rogue agent, Aidan (Sam Rockwell) who, like every character in the film, is way more than he seems.

Bryce Dallas Howard and Sam Rockwell in ARGYLLE, directed by Matthew Vaughn

The reason that I make the claim that ‘Argylle’ takes the “fun factor” of its filmmaking to an uncomfortable level is that the film, despite its crazy and unrealistic tone, lacks the same grounding elements that Vaughn’s earlier work has that allows us to feel a part of the world, or at least, interested in it. In ‘Kick-Ass’ and ‘Kingsman,’ the main characters there are presented as underdogs. In the first film, the crime-fighting Kick-Ass (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a comic geek/nerd and unpopular guy in school who suddenly gains the courage to don a costume and fight crime after an accident gives him the capacity to not feel pain. In the latter film, Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is a diamond in the rough, a street-smart kid who society has forgotten and who manages to rise the ranks against elitist kids for a place amongst the Kingsmen. In these films, no matter how crazy or off-the-wall Vaughn gets, we are always grounded by the origin stories of its characters.

In ‘Argylle,’ it’s hard to connect with Howard’s Elly Conway. She’s a successful writer, who lives a reclusive life in a lake house in Colorado. Her house is huge and being an introvert and a recluse is not a thing to be pitied. As her whole life is upended by either being killed or kidnapped by this spy organization, she resists it and tries to escape it and I don’t feel sad or scared for her. In the hyper-real world of ‘Argylle,’ the reaction seems unbefitting for the tone of the film. In a point of comparison, Sandra Bullock played a similar character in a movie with a similar plot line in ‘The Lost City of Z.’ When her character is kidnapped so that an evil corporate boss can use her expertise in archeology to uncover a priceless jewel, Bullock’s character is unwilling but throws herself into the absurdity of the film’s plot.

Howard’s Conway seems antithesis to the genre and is acting in a way that seems befitting a film with a more grounded approach to its reality. In this movie, the world is so out-of-the-box and divorced from a grounded reality. The bullets are endless, the physicality of all the characters are such that they can survive the shockwave of explosions and other such hijinks and distortions of the laws of physics that are typical of films in the genre of an action/comedy.

In fact, even the acting of ‘Argylle’ feels disjointed and distant. Bryce Dallas Howard is an excellent actress (see her work in the ‘Black Mirror’ episode ‘Nose Dive’) and Sam Rockwell deservedly won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.’ These two actors have shown great range and understand tone. But in this movie, they seem to be just throwing themselves into the craziness of Matthew Vaughn’s world and it feels like they are having more fun than they are truly building a character.

Vaughn loves his CGI and huge set pieces to keep his film loud and big and excessive. There’s quite a lot of campiness to what he tries to do here in ‘Argylle’ and the essayist and cultural theorist Susan Sontag had said, in her classic essay ‘Notes on Camp’ that camp is best when it is unintentional. When one actively strives for camp, the results are never that satisfying. This feels exactly where ‘Argylle’ goes wrong. They aren’t serious enough about the craziness of this tonal exercise.

Unlike, say, ‘Kick-Ass’ or ‘Kingsman,’ where the actors were serious enough in the world that they belonged to make the characters at least feel genuine and true, Howard and Rockwell and the rest of the cast like Henry Cavill and Bryan Cranston did not really believe in the world that they created. They were actively striving for camp, winking, and nudging with the audience every step of the way and trying to look cool while having fun that it came at the expense of the film. Sure, there’s a lot that could put a smile on your face but it doesn’t help you really get into the story.

And since the film is heavily dependent on the effect all its twists have with its audience, it doesn’t hit as hard as it should when each new revelation starts popping out of the woodwork on each scene.

If you’re looking for something brainless and something light and fluffy, then ‘Argylle’ can be a fun time in the cinema. It has two wickedly large set pieces (one involving bright-colored smoke bombs and contemporary dance and another involving a lethal skating sequence) that are just a complete visual treat and so off-the-wall that you can’t help but smile. But other than that, the film doesn’t quite pack the punch it hopes to have. It’s having so much fun that they forgot to take themselves seriously enough so that we would too.

My Rating:

Argylle is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

February 2, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: A Different Donny Pangilinan shines in ‘GG’

It’s a different Donny Pangilinan that I’m seeing in Prime Cruz’s ‘GG,’ a hodge-podge of a film that juggles a sports movie (with e-sports at the center of the narrative), a family drama, and a coming-of-age barkada film all rolled into one. I saw Pangilinan in ‘An Inconvenient Love’ back in 2022 and he was great when matched with Belle Mariano but didn’t seem entirely in the moment in his scenes without her. There were times when I felt he relied on cute than pushing forth with his character. But in ‘GG,’ Pangilinan seems to have shed off that idol-appeal, leans into the gritty, and presents a character that is difficult to like and makes him interesting enough for you to witness his transformation and character arc. It’s a committed performance and he keeps your interest despite a whole bunch of amazing supporting actors are threatening to steal the spotlight like Gold Aceron, Baron Geisler, and the-always-reliable Maricel Laxa.

In ‘GG’ (short for Good Game), Pangilinan plays Seth, a college student who is living with his grandmother and is heavily into playing games on his computer. He is part of a team called Tokwa’t Badboys and they play competitively in a multiplayer first-person shooter game called Requiem. When Seth’s grandmother passes away, Seth must now live with his very wealthy but estranged mother (Maricel Laxa) and her new family and transfer to a new, elite school.

But as the film opens, Seth isn’t a nice person. While he’s really very good in Requiem, he is positioned by the film as not being a team player. He’s good enough to make the Tokwa’t Badboys win games on his own skill alone and he’s not afraid to let his team know it. He’s withdrawn and guarded to his mother and her new family and keeps his distance and he has no friends or relationships outside of his gaming group.

With mounting pressure from his mom’s family to do something with himself and to do well in school, and when a member of his gaming group leaves the team (due to Seth’s difficult personality), Seth must figure out his life before the arrival of a huge national Requiem competition that can make or break the team and solidify his choice to put the game above all else.

By all means, ‘GG’ is a sports movie. The action comes primarily from when the team is playing Requiem versus other opponents. There are sequences that director Prime Cruz gets right: the training montage, the bonding that creates a stronger team (especially this one where the biggest issue is their teamwork), and how the film raises the stakes and making the national competition a make-or-break event for these character’s lives.

What Cruz doesn’t quite accomplish is to fully let the audience into the game itself. Requiem, according to press interviews the cast and crew did period to the film gave, is an actual first-person shooter game that they developed: the rules, the map, the game play, etc. They were actually playing the game for the movie. As a new game (and for non-gamers like me), I would have loved to have given a layout of how the game works, how the team operates, rather than to leave it all via dialogue from the members and the commentators when they get into competition. Any good sports movie explains the game and manages to incorporate a technique or skill into the story, to give the audience something to look forward to during the game. In ‘GG,’ the game Requiem has a special maneuver, named also after the game, that can turn the tide to a losing team. You know it’s going to be a plot point for the end but it’s never actually shown in the first two acts of the film so it doesn’t have the same impact as it would in a normal sports movie.

Also, the film’s first act is so focused on Seth that we don’t see the team’s dynamic established. The film starts and Seth is already acting arrogantly, and his team can’t stand him. Their history is suspect and it begs the question, how did this team form in the first place? The film also holds back the backstory of Seth and his mom, but this is executed better as Cruz manages to build on the family drama piece by piece so that he can throw in the dramatic stuff later on in a big reveal that actually kinda works.

Luckily, after the film’s premise is set, and as the film enters its second act, Seth learns the problem is him and he asks for forgiveness. It’s a scene that humanizes him and lays the groundwork for the barkada movie that is set to follow. All the questions I had during the first act is rendered pointless now and the film finds it heart. It’s a completely human moment that Pangilinan handles really well and is punctuated by Geisler, Aceron, and the rest of the cast that gets the film moving at the pace and rhythm it needed to be in.

While Pangilinan and Aceron do amazing jobs at making the sports movie part of the world enjoyable, it is Maricel Laxa who manages to take all her little moments, her quiet looks, her reactions to her son (both her son in the story and in real life, which I just discovered recently) as he struggles in school and in his new surroundings and gives the film its strongest heartfelt moments. ‘GG,’ with its gritty neon-laced visuals and its lack of any sort of romantic angle in its storytelling, or its confidence in telling this story without the use of its lead stars matinee appeal feels refreshing and different. With regards to how the film handles its sport-movie elements, I wish that the film made me more familiar with the game that I didn’t rely on the dialogue or commentary to understand what was happening during the third act competition, but I enjoyed the film and found a lot of pockets of truly human moments that made me attached to these characters and this world.

My Rating:

GG is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

January 25, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: Studio Ghibli does it again: ‘The Boy and the Heron’ marvels and inspires with a personal tale of grief and loss

When watching a Studio Ghibli, you are somewhat assured of stunning visuals and a fantastical story filled with inherent symbolisms. Hayao Miyazaki, the renowned Japanese filmmaker is back after ten years with ‘The Boy and the Heron,’ a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story set in the era of the Pacific War. While the film is magical and mysterious, there is a heavy, pervasive sadness that grounds this movie, as the story keeps at its center the main’s character sense of loss and grief for their dead mother. It is the beating heart of this lusciously drawn animated feature.

‘The Boy and the Heron’ is the story of Mahito, who loses his mother during a fire in the middle of the Pacific War. He then moves to the countryside with his father and his new wife, Natsuko, the younger sister of Mahito’s mother. As the young boy copes with his new environment – a large home the size of a castle, bullies at school, a host of nosy, elderly women helping around the house – Mahito struggles resolving his feelings for Natsuko, who is pregnant with his soon-to-be-sibling, and the grief he still carries for his mother.

It is at his most vulnerable when Mahito discovers that the heron living near the grounds is inviting him to explore an abandoned, locked up tower in the woods. At first, the heron is mysterious and mystical, capable of speech and other fancy tricks. But later, it takes on a more sinister approach, and even revealing human teeth. When Mahito finally gives in to the lure, in efforts to find Natsuko, who has gone missing in the woods, he finds himself in a fantasy world where birds can take human form and speak, where the oceans are cursed, and beings who command fire exist.

There are quite a few parallelisms found in ‘The Boy and the Heron’ with Hayao Myazaki’s life – the loss of his mother, the point-of-view of a world filled with strife and conflict, amongst others – that there is a heaviness to the film that keeps the tone dark and melancholic, despite the sheer beauty of the film’s visuals. The film is not without its share of whimsy, including cute characters like a warawara, that can float into the sky by inhaling deeply. The film is also filled with birds of various breeds and when they flock around a character, that character is filled with bird poop. It has no real effect on the plot but it’s just a sense of visual whimsy that pulls against the sadness that anchors this film.

Because what is truly pushing the story forward is Mahito’s grief for his mother but also his determination to reconcile his emotions with Natsuko. More than his relationship with the heron, who becomes his guide in the fantasy world, it’s his relationship with both Natsuko and the fire being, Lady Himi, that sets the tender and beating heart of this film.

What is great about ‘The Boy and the Heron,’ aside from the sheer beauty of its design and art is how the story does not dawdle or feel like it needs to explain itself to the audience. There are things that happen in the film that are never justified nor picked apart and it is perfectly fine. The connection between the fantasy world and the real world is tenuous and unexplored but it is also not a necessity to know. There is a confidence in the world and world building of Hayao Miyazaki that allows you to just accept what is given narratively and you just take it because it makes sense.

Practically a legend, the renowned filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki still manages to dazzle and impress even in his latest outing. ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is a film that will leave you breathless with wonder and invites you to marvel at the power of creativity and dreams. The score by Joe Hisaishi is splendid and creates incredible melodies that can sometimes contrast a scene, creating a rich texture to the story as it unfolds. It is surprising at every turn and while it has an air of sadness and weight, it never wallows in it. It manages for whimsy and even humor while still delivering a lovely adventure that crosses time and space. Studio Ghibli has, since 1985, delivered gorgeous, animated movies that inspired and marveled audiences from around the globe and ‘The Boy and the Heron’ is just another continuation of that legacy. There are threats that this film may be Hayao Miyazaki’s last, and if it were, what a way to go.

My Rating:

The Boy and the Heron is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

January 15, 2024
MOVIE REVIEW: What You Didn’t Know About Bees: a review of ‘The Beekeeper’

There’s an old-school, unseriousness that permeates throughout David Ayer’s ‘The Beekeeper.’ Even the premise feels like a tongue-in-cheek semi-parody of over-the-top action films of the past: a retired agent of a top-secret organization called The Beekeepers is now living a quiet life as an actual beekeeper, who decides to take revenge on the corporation that runs a phishing scam who terrorized his neighbor. After the neighbor commits suicide after losing all her money, Adam Clay, the aforementioned Beekeeper, goes on the hunt to “protect the hive,” as a metaphor for all of society.

The film is chock-full of dialogue that mentions bees, and even the police and FBI, who are chasing after Adam Clay through his explosive (he commits arson several times) path to vengeance, are reading about bees to understand their suspect, blurt out facts and trivia about the insect. Twenty minutes into the film and I’ve learned way more about bees than I have about Adam Clay, our film’s sort of protagonist.

I say “sort of protagonist” because while Adam Clay is the reason why we have a plot in the first place – it is his revenge-laden crusade that is driving this story – as played by Jason Statham, he is character with no real discernable character arc. He is just a force of nature in this film, capable of taking down any force that gets in his way, so much so, that it becomes comical in the ways that he is better than everyone in this movie. In fact, only one person offers up himself as a challenge to Clay and this person just shows up in the end (with no real backstory of his own).

So while Statham is the film’s central figure and the character the title of the film is based on, the one with any real actual story is the FBI agent who is chasing after him, Agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who is also the daughter of Adam Clay’s neighbor and the victim of the phishing scam. While she is after Clay to stop his relentless rampage, she is doing it half-heartedly because, in her mind, what he is doing is right – getting back at the people who hurt and steal from innocent people, whom the authorities can’t seem to catch. How she feels about Clay and his actions is the story’s real tension but, it never is really explored fully. This isn’t that kind of film.

It has extensive fight sequences (all showing how unstoppable a force Adam Clay is) and that’s its main selling point. It has big explosions and lots of gun fights and martial arts fights but not enough to cover its lack of any real story, which may not be the point of the film anyway.

What was fun to watch, though, was Josh Hutcherson’s committed turn as the ultra-wealthy owner of the company that handles the phishing group that Adam Clay has now targeted. Hutcherson’s Derek Danforth is heavily Gen-Z coded, with his use of the lingo, and his affinity to new age practices while keeping his business light and informal. It definitely has an air of parody, making fun of this archetype of young, Gen-Z bosses and Hutcherson leans so far into it that he’s obviously having so much fun playing the bad guy and it makes watching him so enjoyable.

The other character that contributes the story in the film is Danforth’s mother, played by Gemma Redgrave, who is shown in short bursts in the first act and at the start of the second act but it’s when the film reaches its zenith when her true position is revealed, that puts into play the high stakes the film was secretly holding close to its chest but also how crazy and over-the-top the film is willing to go for this story.For those who love no-brainer, big and explosive action sequences, then ‘The Beekeeper’ is for you. It’s a strange beast as there are some actors who take the film too seriously (Statham, Raver-Lampman) while others are just having fun and chewing up the scenery (Hutcherson and Jeremy Irons and Minnie Driver, who are also having lots of fun in their semi-villain roles) and so the effect is somewhat jarring. But it’s kind of silly and would have been more effective if everyone just went onboard with it.

My Rating:

The Beekeeper is now showing. Check screening times and buy tickets here.

January 13, 2024