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Reviews
Press Play (2022)
A great movie on the wrong platform and in the wrong category...!
This movie was a breath of fresh air compared to the usual Hollywood/Netflix commercial films, especially for something that's pushed on Amazon Prime.
I really believe the bad average review is caused by the fact that people expected this to be something it's not because of bad distribution and marketing choices.
In fact, Press Play is an anomaly on such streaming platform as Prime Video to begin. Why? Because it has much more in common with indie movies such as Red Rocket or Call be by your name than what you'd expect to see there!
In essence, it's the story of two normal teenagers falling in love with each other; one of them die in a tragic accident and the other try to keep on living. We've heard this story 1000 times.
Where this gets interesting is how the film excites our sense of wonder and romance through the very clever use of magic, taking a supposedly standard item, a cassette player, and turning it into a time machine.
It's therefore not much a sci-fi movie as it is a fantastic movie (as in soft-fantasy, not hard fantasy with dragons and wizards), so I don't even know why it says "sci-fi" in the résumé in the first place.
No, this movie doesn't use it's budget to explore crazy quantum theories;
No, a lot of things in this movie don't "make sense" (and that's okay, it's wrongly classified as a sci-fi movie anyway!);
No, this movie isn't going to fulfill your expectations if you expect time travel to other eras or laser shooting aliens or whatever "hard sci-fi" thing you might think this is going to be.
But what this movie does, it being more human than most. I've read someone who said that the love story was "unmemorable" - I couldn't disagree more.
Characters don't have to be famous, special or idolized for a story to be great. I loved this movie because it's relatable. I loved it because the budget was spent on a perfect cast, gorgeous locations and set design, and just the right amount of VFX, which happens to be very little.
Even the crash scene isn't shown, simply suggested - and it works! It's doing so much with so little :
a little cassette player with the mention "auto-rewind" on it (very clever double-entendre considering it's time-machine function in the movie!), a wall of lost and found tapes in a small record shop, some summer love vibes, some hidden symbols in a wall-painting becoming clearer as the film advance;
whatever budget this had, they did the right choices and told the best story they could.
The photography direction is absolutely gorgeous as well, with beautiful, bright colour schemes, and a beautiful break from the usual bleak images we see all the time.
We got used to insanely fast-paced scenes with crazy drone sequences and VFX every 2 minutes and dark storylines, so much so that we forgot about the importance of slowing down and watching such movie.
We need more movies like this.
The marketing for this movie is a sin, and I truly believe it would've done so much better had it been marketed to the proper audience, because this is not a sci-fi movie, it's a Big Fish 2.0, NOT a "millennial back to the future"...!
Oh and one last thing : please refrain from telling everyone how you hate the soundtrack. While the songs might not be relevant to you personally, it's not about how good they are but the kind of feelings they evoke (which obviously is subjective anyway). So there's a definite generational gap thing going with the music where this is going to appeal to younger audience.
The Purge: Election Year (2016)
Great idea, very poor execution...
So, we have this amazing plot in mind : the annual purge during election years. On one side, a great hero, the anti-purge senator; On the other side, the bad guy, the pro-purge minister.
Said bad guy remove the rule stating that government officials are immune from the purge, with the intention of killing the anti-purge senator in a perfectly legal way.
Brilliant.
I don't know how this came out to be one of the most inconsistent film I've ever seen tho...
The film start on a high note with an excellent introduction, perfectly depicting the atmosphere that should've been present through and through.
In a very Tarantino-like fashion, it also serve as a way to introduce the senator's character. I loved the fact that it started with the senator's traumatic flash-back first, providing plenty of emotional background for her motivation to stop the purge.
Then, for the bigger part of the movie, it all spiralled downward for some reason. As if some of scenes' endings were never written, we're greeted with an awkward, mid-dialogue fade-to-black instead of a proper ending...really? And this goes not once, not twice, but three times in a row! After such a great start, I really can't wrap my mind around this.
Each time after those awkward fade to black comes an ellipse in time taking us closer to the fatal date of the annual purge. However, the rhythm is completely broken by those absurd scene endings - or lack of endings - ruining the whole "count-down" feeling.
The dialogues and acting are both quite inconsistent as well, although most of the actors provides a nice performance given how ridiculously loose the script is. Special mention for Betty Gabriel whose performance is absolutely faultless are usual...
So, alright, we're left with the bonus-points for social implication. Force once, the white Americans are the bad guys, and the neo-nazis, religious freaks and alt-right members are gonna show their true colours. No holding back on them.
Right? .... Riiiiight.
Not really.
This movie tour-de-force is to play on it's anti-white supremacist social message while depicting some of the worst clichés about the anti white supremacists.
So the worst of them all, Neo-nazis cold-blooded killers covered up in nazi tattoos, act as any pro mercenary would do with zero emotional implication. They're depicted as professional, efficient, and politically correct. They are simply "doing their job"...
Meanwhile, who are the real freaks, you may ask?
Of course : a bunch of black teenage girls. Yes.
Seriously. Oh, and Russians, obviously. Always the Russians and the black teenagers, right?
... I mean, could you get more hypocrite than this?!
It's as if the director wouldn't actually assume the intended message and decided to "paint the pill in gold" (as we like to say in France) for those viewers who would be shocked to see pure, white Americans as the bad guys.
The film is littered with clichés about afro Americans, despite the fact that a lot of the casting is black, including most of the supportive characters - which I would like to applause heartily, but I somewhat can't, given the ridiculous display of cliché scenes.
It makes you wonder if the scenario actually want to talk about real problems, or it just surfing a wave of political controversy.
Top top if off, there are a number of absurd lines that don't make any sense, making the script even more of a mess.
For instance, the senator calling the exact coordinates of an enemy to her bodyguard; how the hell does she know how to this? She never had a gun in her hands!
Or even worst (spoilers ahead) : after the black gang allies shoot on their friends for absolutely no reasons, wasting countless ammunitions and risking their lives (another great "blacks are freaks" cliché), the nazis mercenaries which are supposed to be gone because their job is done, were in fact waiting in the parking lot.
Why the hell they didn't came over to help their employers and actually have a chance of getting paid - regardless of the convictions nazis are supposed to have - I don't know.
It even get worst but I'm getting discouraged.
All in all, a amazing idea sacrificed to literal correctness, a loose script and incredible inconsistency. Even the photography direction weirdly goes from an ethereal glowing style to a crude, gritty action-movie standard look out of nowhere, God knows why.
Really sad to see such a great plot being butchered like that. Every ingredients was there to make a great movie : amazing plot, actors, and beginning.
It overall feel like a loose wanna-be Tarantino attempt.
Really disappointing; not worth watching, unless you want to study how a great idea can be ruined by bad editing, script, and not assuming a politically loud, alternative message, badly needed in today's America.
Too bad.