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DJ (2018)
An Awesome look at Dance Music
The tunes were amazing and I love a strong female lead. Great work.
Upside Down (2012)
The UPS and DOWNS of Upside Down
There is something very lovely about the unabashed romanticism of this film. Been a long time since I remember seeing something where the lovers are so joyously and innocently in love - devoid of any sense of the complexities that arise in real relationships. There is no attempt to contextualise their union nor is the film interested in anything beyond the fairytale notion of 'true love'. Which is both the film's strength and its weakness.
Great tales of forbidden love don't dwell on where or why the love comes from - it just is. Romeo loves Juliet and Juliet loves Romeo - accept it and move on. Their pure love is then tested by the shackles of society and their purity will either last or not whether in life or in death. The premise of Upside Down is of course entirely true to this Shakespearean notion of star crossed lovers and then creates an almost literal interpretation. Conceptually it is wonderfully cinematic - taken to its full potential with some stunning imagery and great ideas. The build up to their reunion is exciting and makes great use of the opposing gravities problem. The offices upside down of each other is visually wonderful and neatly portrays the us and them nature of society and the anti-matter objects is a great touch - the idea of this literal face-lift cream is quite brilliant as a nod to the way the rich world abuses the skills and resources of the poor world. So far so interesting and charming. Then she gets her memory back.
From that point onwards the story and the concept becomes very thin. There is no new life that she has to fight against to be with her childhood love - no husband or parents or protective repercussions that have arisen from her accident. This releases Adam from having to fight a more realistic complication which robs the film of any real sense of drama. Instead we have mysterious gunmen who chase after them and try to kill them for reasons that make absolutely no sense at all. Who are they and why do they have to kill the lovers? We simply get some voice over exposition of it being illegal - but why is it forbidden? What space-time continuum shift is in danger if they are together? There is supposedly a law where things from opposing worlds catch fire if in contact - why then does this not apply to humans? That would certainly have heated things up a bit. That would have been dangerous. Instead the danger exists without any convincing reasons. Like we have to accept their love we have to accept that it's wrong.
This is the major flaw that no amount of stunning imagery can gloss over. The danger has no name and no reason and no scientific basis. It just is. There is no antagonist. Even TransWorld is harmless, which is odd as they seem to be the evil company that keep the worlds apart yet there, again, is no reason behind it. Not even a plot strand where TransWorld is holding the poor world to ransom through some secret knowledge they possess that would unite the worlds if it was exposed. Or some kind of powerful boss, played by John Hurt, who knows that the union between these two will create a more equal future which will forever destroy his influence and so he keeps an eye on their union to ensure he gets hold of whatever it is that will lead to this future. Or a husband who uses his wife's transgressions to learn more about the magic Adam is able to wield making Adam believe that Eden is only pretending to remember their love to get to his formula. Sort of thing. There are countless possibilities for creating a believable antagonist and danger that would greatly heighten the drama of the film. It doesn't even need to be very explicit - just so it's there.
The other major flaw is the science and the solution. Lot's of interesting ideas are floated on how the two worlds function and how if mixed things - well - float. Or something. The solution of her pregnancy somehow fixing everything between the worlds is one of those late night whisky induced ideas conjured under great deadline stress:
- Bob comes running in - 'I figured it out! Now go see your girlfriend!' - OK, but what about all the security that would be around her - and him for that matter? - Eh. Just ignore it. - And wouldn't going to the café be the stupidest place to go? - Yes, but it's nice and symbolic. - Don't people want some kind of explanation of the goldfish bit? - Yeah, but let's just have her be pregnant and people won't care. - So how do we lead it to that closing shot of all the buildings almost touching? - Just throw in some 'that's another story' line with the voice over. - But... - Just write it. You have 30 minutes.
It really feels like this is how they cobbled together the ending. Which is a shame. There are astounding moments of true cinematic beauty in this film: her hanging between the worlds on that rope; the wide shot of the two offices; the cityscape of bright lights behind the desolation of Adam's world; the rain falling upwards. To name a few. And the pure fairy tale like innocence of their love is very sweet.
It's a pity that a potentially brilliant sci-fi/fantasy/magical-realist story is undone by some very simple missing story elements and a painfully clichéd voice over.
Pacific Rim (2013)
Awful - even for a no-brains Blockbuster
What the hell was that? I'm as much a fan of sitting back and enjoying some popcorn- style, CGI-induced mayhem as anyone but this was truly awful. With someone like Del Toro at the helm you expect at least a little bit in the way of sympathetic, fun characters you can care about - but someone got in the way of allowing him to exercise any of his Hell Boy wit or sense of magic and wonder. It's like a bad version of a Michael Bay film(which is really saying something). Like the producers had a mission: to be bigger, better and louder than Bay. The result being that the actors out-overact Bay's actors with the unfortunate disadvantage of not having the acting chops to pull it off. Every scene is strained and over-elaborate, just like in Bay films, but even more so. It veers into farce and ridiculous melodrama, devoid of sentiment and involvement. How anyone can care about any of the characters is beyond me - whatever depth they've been given is quashed with every shouty, fake-teary-eyed confrontation that take up surprisingly and unnecessarily long swathes of the epic running time.
Don't get me wrong - every film of this nature has the same predictability and cliché- ridden plot structure and character arcs. But Shia Lebeouf is capable of eliciting sympathy and the odd smile and Pirates has Johnny Depp and Armageddon has Bruce Willis shedding a tear. Pacific Rim has a B-list cast who lack charisma and most importantly they lack joy, wit, fun. Transformers had John Turturro and John Malkovich as comic relief instead of two pastiche, pseudo-comedian, cabaret revue 'actors' doing one of those duo acts where no one in the audience is laughing or paying attention except for when it's their turn to throw rotten fruit. The science duo are not just palpitations-inducingly annoying but they also get reels and reels of screen time - managing to be more nauseating than Jar-jar in the process. The main character acts and looks like a cheap version of Channing Tatum or Josh Hartnett and his Japanese side-kick spends the whole movie in tears. Idris Elba and Ron Perlman are the only characters with any kind of gravitas but are sadly lost in a sea of melodramatic absurdity.
Now - obviously this film is all about Giant Robots vs. Giant Aliens so the above should be totally irrelevant. So why spend such an inordinate amount of time developing these rice paper thin characters? I don't care about plot holes and over- long exposition scenes in these kind of films - it's part of it. But if the film decides to have a lengthy story between relatively short mega-action set pieces then give them a worthy script and cast some decent actors. Also, make us excited about finally seeing these beasts and these magnificent machines fighting it out instead of showing us everything in the exposition intro. One of the great aspects of these films is the way the director gets to slowly build towards the mayhem. Here we are in it from the beginning - like it's normal. Massive oversight. And for God's sake don't set the final fight in an environment where the scale of the beasts and robots are rendered entirely irrelevant. Reminded me of Ang Lee's Hulk. Wrong part of the film to play it safe. Look to Avengers and the latest Transformers for how to massively up the ante for the final battle.
I expected Battleship to be terrible but watchable - it was. I expected this to be ridiculous - it was. But not in the way it should have been. It should have been ridiculously fun but instead had us sit through a masterclass in poor scripting and acting with far too little of the thing that was written on the tin.