Odeon - Colchester 101

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY

16th December 2016colchester101

ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (BBFC 12A)

There’s a well-known, much-beloved high street clothes and food retailer whose sumptuous advertisements for puddings makes one salivate at the mere thought of them and, in general, they are quite delicious though sometimes a little less so than they would have you believe. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is such a confection, it’s not quite what you were expecting. There are those that are wholly committed to the brand who will absolutely love it and defend it to their dying breath and there are those that may choose to try it the once and, although mildly pleased by the product, opt to mark it up as a decent enough effort but are not entirely sure what all the fuss is about.

Rogue One is so calorie packed with Easter eggs and nods to previous movies (or chapters to come or however this works) that Star Wars fans may well leave the cinema with the top button of their trousers undone, appetites well and truly sated. The rest of us may find we need to cinch our belts one hole further.

When her mother is murdered by the Empire and her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelson), taken to finish construction of the first Death Star, young Jyn Erso (Beau Gadsden) escapes the clutches of evil Director Orson Krennic (Ben Mendelsohn) and delivers herself into the guardianship of more-than-slightly fanatical Rebel Alliance fighter Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker). Years and untold adventures later, Jyn (now played by Felicity Jones) is rescued from a prison planet by Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), his robot side-kick K2-SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk) and his troop of rebels in the hope that she will lead them to her estranged father.

Meanwhile, Imperial defector Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed) seeks (the now even loopier) Gerrera with a message from Galen and news of the Empire’s new super-weapon. All sides converge on the desert planet Jedha where they enlist the cooperation of blind monk(?) Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen) and his protector Baze Malbus (Wen Jiang) and witness at first hand the destructive power of the Death Star.

Rogue One then shifts from all this set-up to full-on “Men (and woman and robot) On A Mission” movie as the companions track down Galen, argue a bit and finally attempt to recover the blueprints of the Death Star and get them to the Rebellion.

So, what we have here is episode 3½, kind of. Assuming you’ve seen episode 4, Star Wars: A New Hope, (or at least, the opening crawl) you’ll already know whether, or not, the mission is a success and therefore the narrative drive of Rogue One rests wholly on which, if any, of the team will survive?

And therein lays Rogue One’s greatest strength and (one of) its greatest weakness(es). Being part of the larger Star Wars narrative it gives greater depth and resonance to the following part: there is greater weight placed on the climactic Death Star battle of A New Hope; Luke Skywalker’s final torpedo becomes laced not only with saving the rebels but with the sacrifices laid down before he even steps into his X-Wing fighter; we now understand why such a terrifying and devastating weapon was fitted with a single and ridiculous flaw.

Unless you’ve just emerged, Kaspar Hauser-like, from a gothic basement bereft of all forms of story-telling you will understand how these men-on-a-mission movies work: a disparate bunch of characters are brought together, often for the greater good, to battle indomitable odds and wave-upon-wave of bad guys and many, if not all, of the team will die for the good of the mission. We’ve seen it countless times in movies such as The Dirty Dozen, The Magnificent Seven and The Guns of Navarone, and the success, or failure, of the story-telling lays in how much we care about the characters and how much of our emotions we invest in them. It’s all about the ensemble and how well they’re written. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of sub-par character writing going on in Rogue One, many of the team feel under-written and more like tropes than real people and this detracts from any emotional gut-punch you may feel when any of them meet their heroic ends.

Rogue One’s problems don’t stop there, however. There is one character in particular that presents a hugely worrying and moral question that, I suspect, will rumble on in the many think-pieces that will be written about the movie: Grand Moff Tarkin. Originally played by the late, great Peter Cushing, Grand Moff Tarkin is replaced here not by another actor but by a CGI avatar. Beyond the quality of the effect (which is uncanny but rather waxen), I was pulled from the movie by its absolute brazenness and my mind began to wander from the film’s narrative to questions of the ethics of the resurrection of long deceased and how studios may employ this effect in future. Another character in CGI’d in to a much lesser extent (appearing in just one scene), though its inclusion seems arbitrary and an unnecessary reveal, I’ll let you decide on that one (you’ll know who I’m talking about as soon as you see it).

That said the rest of the movie’s special effects are absolutely on point and the climactic space battle is exciting and wrought with spectacle. There’s also a welcome return of practical alien effects rather than an over-reliance on CGI, which is to be applauded.

Director Gareth Edwards keeps the action moving along at a brisk pace even though he tends to drop the ball when it comes to emotional beats. The acting, on the most part, is good but not great (a few lines soar, though many are flat as if being read for the first time without emotion or understanding and one made me want to strangle myself – a Darth Vader “Zinger” that even a Roger Moore era Bond would shudder at). Michael Giacchino’s score hits a lot of the familiar John Williams beats and then becomes its own thing always adding to the film and never detracting.

Overall, Rogue One is the Rocky III of the franchise: it is so invested in entertaining its audience that, for the most part, its problems can be ignored. And it is entertaining, it’s the best movie in the franchise since The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars fans are going to love it and, at the end of the day, that’s what counts. It would be churlish of me to moan that it doesn’t work as a standalone piece of work, that’s not what it is designed to be (imagine watching a single episode of, say, Game of Thrones and basing your opinion and understanding of the entire series on that single viewing), Rogue One is part of a greater whole and, as such, it “adds to” rather than “detracts from” the series.

Andy Oliver

MOANA

29th November 201629th November 2016colchester101

MOANA (BBFC PG)

Beautiful.

There is nothing about Disney’s 56^th animated feature that is anything less than beautiful. From the tops of mountains to the depths of the ocean; from the inspirational, aspirational heroine to the ; from the comedy (both broad and oblique) to the truly exciting action set-pieces; from the effortlessly toe-tapping songs to the colourful, unforgettable characters; from the story to the message; from start to finish (and I mean the very end when the screen goes blank) Moana pulls at your eyes, heart and mind then snaps them back into your body leaving you breathless and basking in its sheer audacious over-use of the word.

The descendent of Polynesian sea-faring nomads Moana of Motonui (Auli’i Cravalho) feels the waves of wanderlust washing over her as she enters her mid-teenage years, she yearns for travel and adventure, to break away from the responsibility and staunchly land-based community provided and nurtured by her father, Chief Tui (Temuera Morrison). When ecological disaster threatens her tribe’s paradise and based upon the advice of Gramma Tala (Rachel House), Moana takes the initiative to return a magical stone to its original resting place on the distant shores of Te Fiti.

So, she takes a canoe, her pet pig Pua and, along with stowaway rooster Heihei (clucks by Alan Tudyk), sets sail to save her people. But to achieve her task Moana must enlist the aid of prankster demi-god Maui (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), who stole the stone in the first place and this entails rescuing his magical fish-hook from the Realm of Monsters and the clutches of villainous, “Glam-Rock” crab Tamatoa (Jermaine Clement).

Add in one of the most exciting chases since Mad Max: Fury Road involving some extremely diminutive pirates and the climactic battle with Te Ka, the monstrous lava creature guardian of Te Fiti and you have in place everything you’d expect from a Disney “Princess” movie.

Except one.

Romance.

There’s no handsome prince to woo Moana’s princess (although she determinably expresses that, despite being the daughter of a chief, she is no such thing). Moana is about friendship, mutual trust, platonic and familial love but not romance. And you know what? It is absolutely the right decision, Moana is about finding out who you are rather than how you are defined by your romantic relationship. It’s a subtle but powerful message that is as empowering as it is refreshing and it’s genuinely appropriate.

Directors Jon Musker and Ron Clements are no strangers to creating perfect Disney fare, their CV boasting The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and the criminally under-appreciated The Princess and the Frog. The DNA of those movies is more than evident in the character of Moana, someone who yearns for a life beyond their immediate environment, whose courage and ingenuity is tested, who lives beyond the screen. Using full computer animation for the first time (their previous films used traditional hand-drawn techniques with limited CGI) has not limited but expanded their palette, there is an incandescence to the colours, bright, popping and luminous; there are levels of detail here that deserve the biggest screen and highest resolution; there is warmth and emotional involvement from even the most surprising characters.

The voices are all perfectly cast and all deliver excellent performances, especially from Auli’i Carvalho as Moana who, only 14 when she recorded her part, makes for a believable and loveable protagonist, perky, plausible, intelligent and brave, she’s the person we all hope our daughters could be. Dwayne Johnson proves to be just as likeable and amiable as his on-screen persona and provides many of the movie’s best laughs (most of the others come via Alan Tudyk’s crazy rooster and Jermaine Clement’s jewellery obsessed crab, Tamatoa, both of whom are, again, perfectly cast). Maui is as vainglorious as Moana is earnest and they complement each other gloriously, like opposing sides of the same shiny coin you’ll want to keep in your pocket forever.

The bad news for parents who’ve only just reclaimed their music systems from their little darlings and the Frozen soundtrack is that the music and songs of Moana are just as catchy, infectious and sing-along-able to the point of distraction. The song-writing trio of Disney regular Mark Mancina, Samoan singer Opetaia Foa’i and Hamilton impresario Lin-Manuel Miranda have crafted songs that will have you humming on the way home and power millions of school-runs. All the cast sing their own songs which means, yes, The Rock sings and he’s not half bad, in fact he’s pretty good (so, that’s about the last thing you need to cross off your “Worry List”).

I don’t know whether Moana will have the same impact as Frozen, that’s down to a generation much younger than my own, although I very much hope it does. There’s so much misogyny and racism in the world right now a little immersion in a vibrant foreign culture and a bold heroine is a welcome respite, an exciting, funny, colourful and stimulating ray full of hope.

Beautiful.

Andy Oliver

Arrival

10th November 2016colchester101

Arrival has arrived at Colchester’s Odeon cinema and 101’s movie critic Andy Oliver gives us his verdict.

When twelve mysterious, monolithic objects appear at random points around the Earth, the race is on to find out why they are here: is this an invasion? A warning? A gift? A precursor to war?

That is the conceit at the heart of director Denis Villeneuve’s provocative, thoughtful and (at times) stunningly beautiful new sci-fi film, Arrival, and to tell you too much more about its plot would wander into the territory of spoilers. I shall attempt to review it without giving too much away but, in case you’re worried, know this and read no further: Arrival is not just one of the best science fiction movies since Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, it is one of the best movies of the year.

Still with me? Good. I’ll tread as carefully as I can. Promise.

The objects are so alien when they appear that their purpose is completely unknowable. They float just feet from the surface like giant sky-written exclamation marks or (from certain angles) like enormous chocolate orange segments. There are no observable means of propulsion, no cockpit, no weapons, no clue as to what they are or why there’re here. Governments around the world gather academics to discover their purpose: physicists, engineers, code-breakers and linguists alike are charged with the seemingly impossible task.

US Army officer Colonel Weber (Forest Whittaker) brings together a team including physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner) and linguist Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to decipher the meaning of the wedge hanging unfeasibly above the Montana landscape. It turns out that a door in the base of the object opens every eighteen hours, allowing access to the inhabitants and the chance to communicate.

Arrival doesn’t baulk at showing the aliens and we get to meet them very early, mammoth, seven-limbed, intimidating beasts that move through their atmosphere like elephant-sized squid. Their language is so alien and complex that Banks quickly realises it is only through the written word that we will be able to communicate, if only we can work out their alphabet, grammar and the limitations of translation.

It’s a movie featuring solid but seldom flashy performances by the central trio of Adams, Renner and Whittaker, which is not in any way a criticism more another attempt to avoid spoilers (revealing anything more would likely hint at the movie’s remarkable denouement). Beautifully shot by cinematographer Bradford Young, Arrival is frequently breath-taking, occasionally abstract and builds tension and character with oblique lighting and strikingly vivid splashes of unexpected colour against the desaturated environments.

As with all the best science fiction, Arrival holds up a mirror to the viewer and the viewer’s world finding allegory and metaphor without sacrificing story, character or intent by pushing it in your face. Villeneuve has already proved he is a master of the subtlety of theme with the excellent thriller Sicario, a film about how men use sex to maintain power skilfully hidden within a drug war narrative. Here Villeneuve explores how cognitive linguistics shape our understanding, and limit our perceptions, of the world about us and cultural differences. It’s heady stuff that has led to some reviewers claiming that parts of the narrative are misleading and unnecessarily tricksy, but that’s missing the whole point of the movie.

Arrival is a movie for people who enjoy taking their brain to the cinema, who love to think through movies for many weeks after viewing, who like to dissect, discuss and argue. Don’t expect gung-ho heroics, laser beams and the destruction-porn of landmarks a la Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay, this is a film about understanding not xenophobia, it’s about the world today and the hope of what the world could be. It’s a ferociously smart movie and one, I hope, we’ll be talking about for a long time to come.

Andy Oliver

Doctor Strange

25th October 201625th October 2016colchester101

Doctor Strange is the latest superhero movie from Marvel Studios based on the comic book character of the same name. 101’s movie critic Andy Oliver has been along to the town’s Odeon cinema to bring you this exclusive review.

The opening act of Doctor Strange has a feeling of familiarity, of déjà vu, of “Haven’t I seen this before?”; by the end of Doctor Strange there is a feeling of vertigo, of wonder, of kaleidoscopic, hallucinatory weirdness you’ll wonder if your popcorn hasn’t been laced with LSD*.

That first act is hugely reminiscent of Iron Man, the movie that kicked off this whole connected Marvel Universe: Dr. Stephen Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is arrogant, confident, in control of his world until an injury takes everything away from him. His hands crushed in an horrific car crash, the world-class surgeon spends his fortune trying to find a way to mend his damaged digits and, as a last resort, heads to the Himalayas to search for a guru/cult-leader/holy-person he has heard can cure any ailment. In finding The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton), Strange finds not only a fix for his injured hands but also his for injured soul as he repurposes his destiny as a master of the mystical arts.

Anyone who’s a sucker for cocky student/inscrutable teacher paradigms (like the many Eastern martial arts movies that Tarantino’s Kill Bill riffed upon and, obviously, Harry Potter) will love the interchanges between Cumberbatch and Swinton as the sceptical, intellectualism of Strange smashes head on with the theosophical platitudes of The Ancient One.

Upon his graduation to the title of Sorcerer Supreme and his return to Manhattan Strange must battle the threat of the movie’s big bad, Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelson), a former pupil of The Ancient One who believes that Earth would be a better place if magic were allowed to thrive rather than a hidden force that keeps the world in balance and other dimensional threats at bay.

Cumberbatch throws himself into the role of Stephen Strange with deadpan theatrical zeal, relishing the journey from arrogant intellectual through humility to champion warrior of the astral plane. Strange is Sherlock with the rational, intellectual glamour of that character slowly and surely chipped away revealing the hero beneath.

A lot was made of the “White-washing” of Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One character – The Ancient One was originally portrayed in the Stan Lee and Steve Ditko comics as an oriental Methuselah complete with long white beard and crinkly, smiling eyes a la Sam Jaffe’s High Lama in Frank Kapra’s Lost Horizon – when news of her casting was announced. Whatever your opinion of this decision it is hard to argue that Swinton’s other-worldly androgyny makes for an interesting choice and she appears to be having a lot of fun as Strange’s enigmatic mentor.

As with so many of the Marvel movies, Doctor Strange suffers from limited screen time for the supporting cast and a villain that seems a little too under written. Mads Mikkelson doesn’t appear for long enough to present a credible threat but still manages to inject a little complexity and humour into his role. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Benedict Wong appear too infrequently as fellow apostles of The Ancient One: Mordo and Wong (though subsequent movies should feature them more heavily, Wong as Strange’s manservant/librarian of mystical tomes and Mordo as… well, that would be telling but hang around for the post credits scene for a clue). Rachel McAdams stars as doctor Christine Palmer, for whom Strange still carries a torch but, again, she struggles to break out from a role that is little more than “Love interest”. Of the supporting cast it is weirdly Strange’s Cape of Levitation that has the most life and the one you want to see more of, imbued with a personality of its own much like the magic carpet in Disney’s Aladdin.

But it is in the visuals that Doctor Strange really comes alive, we’ve never really seen sorcery used in such an original way or at such a scale: magical engrams fizz and crackle with blazing intensity; cities and buildings fold, twist and turn inside-out to create Escher-like landscapes; journeys into nightmare alternate dimensions bring Ditko’s weird, exciting comic panels to terrifyingly beautiful life. Director Scott Derrickson keeps the action tight and exciting, using the effects to create a dizzying trip into the unknown but sometimes struggles to keep the attention during the (necessary) talkie bits.

As a movie, Doctor Strange is a bit of a mixed bag and is in no way the best of the Marvel Studios crop but as an eye-popping, energetic thrill-ride it totally delivers the goods.

*Disclaimer: It hasn’t

Andy Oliver

The Girl on the Train

18th October 2016colchester101

Andy Oliver has visited Colchester’s Odeon cinema to watch Tate Taylor’s The Girl on the Train based on Paula Hawkins’ debut novel of the same name. Here is what he thought of it.

There is a separation between page and screen that The Girl on the Train seems unable to understand. The twisting, three-person narrative that made Paula Hawkins’ novel so successful just makes for a confusing and plodding motion picture that will leave fans of the book frustrated and those new to the material, quite frankly, bored. And that’s a shame, what could have been a taught, Hitchcockian thrill-ride is reduced to a prurient, picaresque soap-opera that would better be consigned to one of ITV’s “filler” time slots.

Rachel (Emily Blunt) commutes to Manhattan by train from the leafy suburbs of up-state New York, staring out the windows and constructing fantasy lives for a young couple, Megan and Scott (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans) she spies every morning. One morning she sees the girl in the arms of another man and when Megan subsequently disappears Rachel becomes entangled in the missing person investigation. But there’s more to this story than at first appears: two doors down from the fantasy couple is the house where Rachel used to live and where her ex-husband, Tom (Justin Theroux), and his new wife, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), are now building their new life together. And there are plenty of witnesses that can place Rachel in the vicinity the night Megan disappeared.

It’s a pretty straight-forward plot convoluted and confused by the film’s often jaw-droppingly unnecessary narrative structure, not only does it skip between characters but between time as well. Add to this the fact that Rachel is an alcoholic who suffers (conveniently placed) black outs and you have a thriller that is so intent on keeping the audience guessing that it forgets to include any thrills. All thrillers rely to some extent on contrivance, but The Girl on the Train pushes its contrivances to the point of viewer exasperation; there are enough red herrings to fill a trawler and secondary characters seem arbitrarily introduced just to further muddy the waters.

Emily Blunt, an actress who has shown that she can play injured, fractured, believable characters in the past (Sicario, The Devil Wears Prada) does her best here but Rachel is such a whingy and relentlessly weepy role that Blunt struggles to break free of her constraints. The rest of the cast fit perfectly with the bland characters presented to them and, apart from Alison Janney as the tough detective in charge of the case, they’re pretty perfunctory and forgettable.

Director Tate Taylor chooses melodrama ahead of tension, pacing or invention and seems as confused by the film’s structure as the audience. That structure is a major problem of a screenplay, by Erin Cressida Wilson, that resolutely refuses to take the core of the story and assign it to a single protagonist rather than stick so rigidly to a structure that can only work on the novel’s page. Had the film stuck with a single point of view, however unreliable the narrator, not only could the pace have been upped, but the sex scenes might not have felt so jarringly voyeuristic rather than the fantasy love making they are presented as.

I think it’s fair to say that, despite the hype, The Girl on the Train was not the next Gone Girl on the page and it is certainly not that on the screen either. The screenplay of Gone Girl understood the difference between the two mediums and wasn’t afraid to cut the stuff that worked in the book but would seem shoe-horned into the film. The Girl on the Train is neither brave enough or smart enough to make either of these decisions and therefore is not only a lesser film it’s a confusing trudge devoid of entertainment. Fans of the book will be as disappointed by it as much as those looking for a movie full of tension and thrills.

Andy Oliver

Pete’s Dragon

15th August 2016colchester101

We can count ourselves lucky at Colchester 101 that our resident movie critic has written this review of Pete’s Dragon as he wasn’t expecting to like it. Instead he loved it.

It was a very different person who walked out of the darkened cinema to the one that went in. A grumpy, middle-aged cynic took his seat for the remake of Disney’s underwhelming Pete’s Dragon, a cutesy-cute confection of a kid’s film from that studio’s doldrums years; it was a small child, heart full of hope, joy and the possibilities of an unlimited imagination, cheeks still damp from tears, that emerged into the bright Summer sunshine 100 minutes later.

Pete’s Dragon is an absolute gem of a movie, a family film that is enchanting, beautiful, terrifying, funny, glorious. In short, it delivers everything that the very best of cinema promises: it lifts you up, carries you on a journey and leaves you way up high with emotions, characters and story that will live long in your heart.

The film opens with five-year-old Pete and his family heading out for an adventure in America’s densely forested Pacific North-West. Pete is sat in the back of the car reading Elliot Gets Lost when a deer wanders into the road resulting in a devastating crash that kills his parents. Young Pete crawls from the wreckage his picture book in hand and wanders off into the forest. Things go from bad to worse for our young hero when he is set upon by a pack of ravenous wolves, but then a huge, lumbering form intervenes and saves the child from a horrific death a great, green dragon, its shaggy fur bristling with anger and menace. When the child places his hand on the dragon its fur changes from dark to a light, friendly green and I think this was the moment I fell in love with not only Elliot (as Pete names him) but also with the film itself.

We then skip to six years later and civilisation begins to encroach upon the idyllic, fun existence the boy and his dragon chum enjoy, loggers are clear-cutting the forest in which the pair have played, romped and flown. Only park ranger, Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) and her kindly old dad, Meacham (Robert Redford) stand between the loggers and the destruction of the wilderness, but this is further complicated by the fact that Grace is engaged to Jack (Wes Bentley), the owner of the logging company responsible. Jack’s brother Gavin (Karl Urban) is determined to push further and further into the forest and cutting as much as possible and it is here that he encounters the now feral Pete (Oakes Fegley).

Pete is the boy many of us wanted to be, tough, self-sufficient, effortlessly athletic, brave and living his life and adventures with his very best friend. Oakes Fegley is yet another wonderful find in a year stuffed with great child actors, especially in the moments where he realises the other side of the fantasy – the loneliness, fear and isolation, the pull of reality and that first pre-teen love (provided here by Oona Lawrence, Jack’s snappy, street-wise daughter Natalie).

It’s a great cast and everybody gives nothing less than their best, especially Karl Urban as the movie’s villain, Jack. Whereas the big bad of the original was a two-dimensional cartoon baddie played by Jim Dale, Urban plays Gavin with nuance and depth, a deeply wounded man who is just doing what he believes must be done. And it’s always great to see that winning twinkle in the eyes of Robert Redford.

But it’s Elliot who’s the standout character. Maybe not every shot of him is perfect but every shot he’s in is perfect. With his big eyes, wonky under-bite, stumpy legs and bright green fur it’s impossible not to love him. He’s silly and sad (sometimes in the same scene), exuberantly full of life and love for his forest and for Pete and full of happiness.

Director and writer David Lowery has crafted a beautiful and awe inspiring cinematic experience, that’s not afraid to wear its heart on its sleeve and yet is full of goofy fun and buckets of snot. All the characters are allowed to be fully human, or in Elliot’s case fully dragon, and there are hints of their back stories carefully hidden in plain sight. It’s difficult not to compare Lowery’s approach to that of classic Spielberg, there’s a sense of awe that permeates the entire film and not just those fantastical scenes where Elliot appears. Pete’s Dragon is a big screen movie that is unashamedly big screen, that’s where it was designed to be seen and that’s where you should see it, you’ll thank me later.

I was glad I saw Pete’s Dragon with a real audience and not in a screening room full of cynical critics (myself included). I revelled in the joy, giggles, awe and occasional sniffles of the children (and some of the parents) in the audience. It’s a movie that makes adults feel nostalgic, not for the original or for toys but for the nostalgia of a time when we felt anything was possible and for younger viewers just starting out on the journey that cinema offers, Pete’s Dragon is a giant, furry, welcoming pair of friendly arms that say, “Come with me, let’s go on an adventure”.

Andy Oliver

Finding Dory

4th August 20164th August 2016colchester101

Our resident movie critic Andy Oliver selflessly taken himself along to Colchester’s Odeon cinema to see Pixar’s 3D computer-animated sequel to Finding Nemo. Here are his thoughts.

Finding Nemo was a pretty great movie, from the emotionally devastating beginning to its uplifting and exciting finale; it was stuffed full of great characters; there were plenty of laughs and a few tears; oh, and it was beautiful to look at, really, really beautiful.
Dory, the big-hearted Blue Tang with short-term memory loss (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) was a terrific sidekick, but the idea of basing a whole movie around her? I’m not afraid to say I was more than a little sceptical about the idea, I was worried she might just get a little, um, annoying.
Turns out, I was wrong (not for the first time). Dory is a terrific central character, full of warmth, heart and bravery, a fully realised, emotionally vibrant protagonist whose journey every bit as heart-warming and heart-breaking as any Pixar has offered up before.

It’s such a shame that Finding Dory falls apart in the second act when it moves from the open ocean to an aquarium.
When a memory is sparked by the migration of hundreds of stingrays, Dory sets off in search of her family only to fall into the hands of some well-meaning marine biologists, Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) in pursuit. Dory ends up in an aquarium/fish hospital from which she enlists the aid of a cranky septopus (a seven limbed octopus wonderfully played by Ed O’Neill), a short sighted whale shark (Kaitlin Olsen) and an echo-locationally challenged Beluga whale (Ty Burrell).
Finding Dory begins with a series of flashbacks that lead up to Dory’s first head-on meeting with Marlin and then Finding Nemo happens. The opening scene itself is beautifully touching as Dory’s parents (Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) try to teach her coping mechanisms for her short-term memory, parents of special needs children will no doubt recognise the small triumphs and the struggles portrayed here.
The problems begin to appear as Dory first remembers that the aquarium is the place she was raised and tries to get from one pool to the next and then the next and so on. Then she tries to escape, which basically involves trying to get from one pool to the next to the next. Meanwhile, Marlin and Nemo are trying to break into the aquarium which involves… well, you get the idea by now. It’s all a bit frantic and, as a consequence, character development suffers, especially for Destiny the whale shark and Bailey the beluga. There’s just too many set pieces and not enough story and by the time you get to a highway car chase (yes, really), it’s all a bit tiresome and exhausting.
It’s a shame because there’s a lot to enjoy and some great comic relief characters like two sea lions played by The Wire alumni, Idris Elba and Dominic West, and a seriously freaky-weird bird called Becky. Ed O’Neill is great as Hank, the escape obsessed septopus, snarky and broken-hearted by turns. A couple of old friends return, there’s cameos by the seagulls and Sigourney Weaver, but not enough of the sea otters (seriously, you can never have too much sea otter “Cuddle party” action).
Dory isn’t as funny as she was in Finding Nemo, but that’s okay, it allows DeGeneres the space to go deeper into the character and note-perfectly plays sad resignation and childish excitement.

Listen, Finding Dory isn’t a bad film, at times it’s really, really good and less demanding audiences won’t complain too much at its repetitive, hyper final two acts. The problem is that Pixar have set the bar so high with so much of their output that it’s really noticeable when they dip slightly under it.

Oh. And if nothing else Finding Dory is really, really beautiful to look at.

Andy Oliver

The BFG

28th July 2016colchester101

Our resident movie critic Andy Oliver is fresh back from a trip to the Odeon to see Stephen Spielberg’s big screen production of Roald Dahl’s much loved children’s book The BFG. This is what he thought of it.

The sound of a falling bin in the dead of night usually alerts us to the midnight hunger of the neighbourhood cats or the occasional urban fox, but for young, insomniac orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), there is something far, far larger that disturbs her wee small hours. A giant stalks the London night and, once seen, he has no choice but to kidnap the curious youngster for fear that she will reveal his existence to a world he secretly fills with dreams and wonder.

A relationship that begins with fear and suspicion blossoms into a warm and loving friendship, the giant and the little girl finding in each other that which they are both missing in their lonely existences. The Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance) lives in a world where he is bullied and threatened by bigger giants, he needs a friend as much as Sophie needs a family, they are two halves of one greater whole and, together, they are an unstoppable force for everything that is good and brave and decent. Together, the BFG and Sophie must figure out how to stop the larger, more vicious giants from eating children and how to live in a world where both are exceptionally sensitive to the pain of others.

As much as Sophie and the BFG are bound by their kindred spirits, so are Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg: Two of the greatest storytellers ever to grace their respective, artistic fields. Dahl is one of the treasures, if not the crowning jewel of children’s literature and Spielberg the undisputed master of a cinema that speaks to the child in all of us. Forget Batman and Superman or The Avengers, this is the team-up to beat all team-ups.

Working from a script by the late Melissa Mathison (who wrote ET), based on the Dahl’s favourite of all his stories, Spielberg creates a vision that, although narratively slight, is a beautiful love letter to both writers and, also, a statement of his own body of work. The BFG takes Sophie to a magical realm where he harvests the dreams that flit around like technicolour fireflies, remixes them to his own recipe and distributes them to the world of slumbering human beans (sic). If that’s not metaphor for the work of the writers and of himself, then I don’t know what is. A lesser director might have mined their back catalogue for nods and winks, but Spielberg is way too savvy to use obvious (and over-used) Jurassic Park tumbler of water/approaching footsteps gags or overplaying the giants’ fear of going in the water.

The film is a mixture of live action and wildly inventive computer effects, the giants and their world standing just on the right side of cartoonish. The opening scene, a sweeping, descending shot of London at night and the production design (especially of the idealised architecture) both recall Mary Poppins, a live action/animated classic that also perfectly nailed this mix. The effects are seamless and carry you on a journey that enters through wide eyes and nourishes the soul, it is a landscape of wonders beautifully realised.

Mark Rylance, who brings the BFG to life through motion capture performance is wonderful. He delivers his Dahl-isms with a charming, and occasionally heart-breaking, bumpkin accent (“Use your titchy little figglers”) and slowly brings you into the head of a character that you initially distrust to that of someone suffering crushing loneliness and a desperate need to connect. Whilst in Ruby Barnhill, Spielberg has found another natural gem of a young actress, she’s sassy, tough, smart and caring as Sophie and has charisma to spare. The Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement is marvelously evil as the movie’s big bad, Fleshlumpeater and Penelope Wilton puts in a wonderfully understated performance as The Queen.

The BFG is squarely aimed at children but there’s much to enjoy for mums and dads too, though Spielberg doesn’t throw in any sideways winks of adult humour. There’s fun and scares and wonder and fart gags aplenty (three of the Queen’s corgis realising, in unison, that an explosive exhalation of bottom-gas is on its way is going to take a lot of topping in the laugh stakes this, or any, year). Yes, there’s a bit of a pacing issue (the film occasionally dips) but you’d have to be a World-class cynic not to enjoy anything The BFG throws at you. Unless it’s a Snozzcumber.

Andy Oliver

Ghostbusters

12th July 2016colchester101

It’s been a busy summer at the town’s Odeon cinema for 101’s movie reviewer Andy Oliver who is freshly back with this review of the Ghostbusters remake for you.

It’s difficult to talk about the new Ghostbusters movie without first addressing the elephant in the room: that small but vocal group of misogynist internet dweebs who have taken it upon themselves to down-vote this movie on ratings sites; shout down anyone on social media who “dared” to defend the choice to switch the gender of the titular team; shout down anyone who rightly insisted that you cannot judge the quality of the film until you have seen it; they’ve even gone as far as to claim the original is an out and out horror movie with comedic elements and that turning it into an all-out comedy is somehow “Sacrilegious”, or that it is, in some bizarrely twisted-logic way, disrespectful to, and ruins, their childhoods.

Quite frankly, I have no time for these people or their hateful, whining rhetoric and empty threats. I’ve already had death threats on Twitter for not only defending the build up to this movie and accused of receiving cash for giving Batman vs. Superman a bad write-up (I wish). My response? The one that hurts them the most: I ignore them. They are the film fan equivalent of ISIS: hiding their identities behind false names and avatars; their hatred/ resentment of women in anything other than submissive roles; they want their “sacred” favourites to be the only ones that exist and think that their views are the only ones that should exist.

Now, for the sake of transparency I would just like to say that I in no way receive any payment or favours or special treatment for writing these reviews. I take every film I see on face value and never review a film without having seen it first. I try to give my honest opinion and am in no way biased in favour of any company. I just love movies and I love writing about them.

So, now that’s out of the way, the reason you’re reading this: Is Ghostbusters any good?

Actually, yeah, it’s pretty good. Not great, I’ll admit, but a perfectly good Summer movie that compares very favourably to the original. It’s funny in all the right places and scary in all the right places and makes for a very enjoyable evening at the cinema.

Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is about to receive a tenure as a professor of physics at prestigious, if snooty, Columbia University, when she discovers that a book about ghosts she co-wrote twenty years earlier has been re-issued by her co-author and former childhood friend, Abby Bates (Melissa McCarthy).

Abby is still working on paranormal research and technology with Jillian Holtzmann at a rinky-dink college that has, quite frankly, forgotten they are still there. Erin goes to persuade her friend to withdraw the offending book from sale but finds herself helping Bates and Holtzmann in an investigation in to the sighting of a ghost at a New York mansion/tourist destination. A few gallons of ectoplasmic goo later and it’s “a-ghost hunting we will go” for the three women as the investigate and battle spooky goings-on around the city. They pick up more help along the way in the form of street savvy subway worker Patty (Leslie Jones) and thick-as-excrement receptionist Kevin (played with comedic excellence by Chris Hemsworth).

The veil between the living and the dead, it turns out, is being scratched away by angry nerd (ahem) Rowan North (Neil Casey) who wants to bring about the apocalypse in revenge for a life of being bullied and overlooked.

Ghostbusters works really well for maybe its first three-quarters and there’s plenty of great laugh-out-loud moments and a couple of genuinely scary moments. It’s in the climax that it falls a little flat, the laughs and scares kind of fall flat and it lacks somewhat in excitement drifting off into the generic. It’s okay but it never really has you sitting on the edge of your seat or falling off it with laughter, which is a shame because the journey getting there is so much fun.

There’s some really great comedy performances, Wiig and McKinnon are especially good and Leslie Jones nails all her moments. Melissa McCarthy plays a much more subdued, almost straight, role which, although she’s good, fans of her usual foul-mouthed mania might find a little disappointing. Chris Hemsworth is terrific as the good looking, but dim, Kevin and Andy Garcia makes a welcome and very funny appearance as the mayor. There’s cameos from virtually all the original cast, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson, even the late Harold Ramis is in there or, at least, his likeness is. Oh, and don’t worry, Slimer is in there too. The cameos are nice on the whole but nothing more, they add very little to the movie and an appearance by Ozzy Osbourne is downright embarrassing.

Those cameos are not the only things that hark back to the original, there are far too many nods and winks to it as well. These Easter-egg references, whilst entertaining enough for the more forgiving fans of the original, tend to hold Ghostbusters back from being its own film, they anchor it too closely and, as such, the remake never quite escapes the shadow of the Bill Murray et al classic.

Writer/director Paul Feig keeps the fun moving at a cracking pace but lacks the action credentials to hold the climactic battle together. Feig is a terrific comedy director and sets up a couple of truly unexpected jump-scares I just wish he’d got that third act nailed, then I might be watching a movie that really annoyed the Ghost Bros.

I hope Ghostbusters does well enough to demand a sequel, I enjoyed being in the company of this gang and look forward to an adventure unshackled from the chains of the original. It’s a movie made for a mainstream audience, not for a vociferous few who believe they are entitled to a movie just for them, it’s not a feminist movie as the Ghost Bros. would have you believe, it’s a movie where the main protagonists happen to be smart, brave and funny women.

How can that be a bad thing?

Andy Oliver

The Legend of Tarzan

6th July 2016colchester101

When Colchester 101 asked for a review of The Legend of Tarzan our resident movie critic Andy Oliver swung into action.

Tarzan is a character out-of-time. In a post-colonial world, the “Slayer of beasts and many black men” is an anachronism, a throw-back, a hero for then and not for now. As much as I loved the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs as a child, it was always difficult not to notice the underlying racism and misogyny that pinned them firmly to the era they were written in: the natives were invariably cannibalistic, mean and destroyers of the nature that surrounded them; women were either damsels or riches/power-hungry manipulators of men.

So how does a film-maker approach Tarzan in the twenty-first century? Very carefully, it would seem. And it is that very carefulness that is at the centre why The Legend of Tarzan does not work as a piece of entertainment, though, unfortunately, it’s not its only failing.

Set some years after Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) has returned from his jungle upbringing to claim his hereditary title of Lord Greystoke, the film begins with a character still uncomfortable with his gentrification and his wife, Jane (Margot Robbie) still uncomfortable with the constraints of society and city life after her childhood of freedom in the Congo. It is with little persuasion that the Greystokes return to Africa, initially to investigate British access to The Congo and subsequently to investigate claims that King Leopold of Belgium is building his empire on blood and toil of slaves. This second reason to return arrives in the form of George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) before you can say, “British Colonial crimes against humanity”!

Once back in Africa, Skarsgård (and the film) can’t wait to get his shirt off and start swinging, swimming and running about with his old jungle chums: apes, lions and simple, jolly natives. Conflict comes in the shape of Belgian emissary, Leon Rom (Christolph Waltz doing his usual, kooky bad-guy turn) who has some convoluted plan to hand over the lord of apes to his mortal enemy, Mbonga (played with super-baddie charisma by Djimon Hounsou). The story of Mbonga’s enmity is told in flashback which also charts Tarzan’s already well recorded origin.

Director David Yates, who directed the fun (but increasingly dark) last few episodes of the Harry Potter franchise, struggles to maintain any pace and interest in a movie that looks increasingly like it was written by committee (inasmuch as that old joke about “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”). There are moments where, tonally, the movie is all over the place and Jackson (despite giving his best with a more than clunky script) sometimes seems little more than the movie’s “Get out of jail free” card (an intelligent black character, based upon a real person, whose expositionary speeches about fighting in the American Civil War and killing Native Americans are supposed to remind viewers of America’s own patchy record of human rights, but in reality feel flat and simperingly apologetic).

The action, when it comes, is efficiently filmed and never feels like it packs any punch, for example Tarzan battles a gorilla, but the confrontation lacks excitement and edge-of-the-seat thrills, yes it’s noisy but it’s all a bit, “Yeah. So that just happened”. The stunt work is under-realised and the computer generated animals never look anything but computer generated. Judging The Legend of Tarzan’s effects against this year’s other child-in-the-jungle movie, Disney’s The Jungle Book, is like judging a meal at The Ivy against a micro-wave dinner for one: it fills a hole but it won’t impress your friends when you tell them about it. Having said that, the climactic stampede is pretty good, but it’s a case of too little, too late.

The cast do their best but they are shackled by a script that is never quite sure what it wants to be: too comic-booky to be Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke, too earnest to be a Jonny Weismuller action/fun-fest. Belgium’s legacy of horrors in West-Africa sit uneasily within an action movie framework and add little to the overall tone, a return to the source material might’ve provided a more fun, if problematic, experience. Like The Lone Ranger before him, Tarzan feels like a character who has had his day and now seems like as good a time to retire him and hand the vines to new heroes as any.

There’s little to recommend about The Legend of Tarzan unless you’re a fan of male abdomens, if you are you’ll probably love it, for the rest of us though it’s an ill-fitting wig that daren’t move too fast lest it fly up and reveal what lies beneath.

(BBFC 12)

Andy Oliver