The Grudge (2020)

Here we are with another take on The Grudge, a movie series that has been going on now, in some incarnation, for about twenty years. I have loved most of the movies in the series, from those I have seen, and hoped for the best from this, despite hearing some pretty scathing reviews. Sadly, it's a whole big pile of nothing.

Shown in the series-standard non-linear style, the basic story concerns a Detective Muldoon (Andrea Riseborough) and her young son, Burke (John J. Hansen) being affected by the cursed house. She is working with a Detective Goodman (Demián Bichir), who saw his partner (Detective Wilson, played by William Sadler) driven to madness by the house. There's also a tale of a young couple (John Cho and Betty Gilpin) going through some major horror, and an elderly couple (Lin Shaye and Frankie Faison) who show some terrible sights to someone visiting to discuss assisted suicide (Jacki Weaver).

Written and directed by Nicolas Pesce, The Grudge feels like a movie written by someone given a summary of the previous films, but no direct experience of them. There's no impressive atmosphere here, no consistency in the way scares are built, or delivered, and generally not much that makes it feel like a film in the series. The juggled chronology quickly becomes annoying, especially as it all leads to a finale that absolutely underwhelms.

Without intending to offend most of the people onscreen, the casting doesn't help. Riseborough is a particularly cold nominal lead, and her scenes with Bichir are quite abysmal. She fares better with Sadler,who is a definite highlight. The scenes involving Shaye, Faison, and Weaver are the best in the film, mainly due to their comforting familiarity, but both Cho and Gilpin are wasted in their story strand, as much for the sad inevitability of it all as for the lack of any solid scares.

Considering the films he has done before this, I am even struggling to figure out why anyone would think Pesce a good fit for the series. He seems to specialise in mood and strangeness, which may have been marked in his favour, while The Grudge does best when full of palpable dread, punctuated by major shocks.

And, as lame as this may sound, this take on the material also underuses some other strengths, namely some fantastic audio and visuals that have given fans goosebumps for years.

Very disappointing. You would be better going back to revisit the many other interpretations, sequels, and tangents that the series has had since the start.

3/10

https://ko-fi.com/kevinmatthews

Netflix And Chill: Bird Box (2018)

It's fitting that those with the ability to see the world around them would have to have been blindfolded for the past few weeks to have somehow missed the promotion and memes that have been doing the rounds since Bird Box was released on Netflix. It all helped to turn the film into another big hit for the company (although exact numbers are always hard to come by when figuring out how good or bad things do on the platform).

Sandra Bullock is Malorie, a woman who was extremely happy at one point, just before the whole world went to hell. Malorie had been attending a standard check up on the health of her baby, accompanied by her sister (Jessica, played by Sarah Paulson), and then people started to act funny as they headed home. It's a strange force, something that people see that drives them to commit suicide. Malorie ends up in a house with some others (including Tom, played by Trevante Rhodes, and Douglas, played by John Malkovich) who have quickly surmised that the key to staying alive is to stop yourself from being able to see the outside world. But that makes things difficult when provisions need collected, and when there are some other people who are insane enough to want to help others look at what they somehow view as something glorious.

I approached Bird Box with no small amount of trepidation. Let's face it, I was already a week or two behind everyone else, a lot of people seemed to be having more fun with the memes than the actual movie itself, and I assumed that it was another case of Netflix doing a better job of creating viral content than a film that would actually impress me. I'm pleased to say that I was wrong.

This is a fantastic film. Not just a fantastic film to land on a home platform, although that undoubtedly helped it to snowball and find the kind of audience figures it may well have struggled to reel into cinemas, but a fantastic film for genre fans. Many have already labelled it as a cross between The Happening and A Quiet Place. While that comparison isn't entirely unwarranted, it's not exactly fare. Bird Box ends up being better than both of those films (which I know is an opinion that will leave me pretty lonely, in the case of the latter movie anyway, but I'm standing by it).

Based on a novel by Josh Malerman, the screenplay by Eric Heisserer is very good indeed, using jumps between the present and the past to help maintain tension and optimise the pacing. The fact that the central force is unseen (but physicality is certainly hinted at - people focus their sight somewhere, shadows are cast across windows, etc) helps to avoid any anticlimactic reveals, and there's also the variety added by the other survivors who become a problem, as happens in almost every "post-apocalyptic" movie, a subgenre that this film certainly has a foot in.

Director Susanne Bier has a solid enough filmography, although nothing that seems to be as horror-tinged as this is. But that may be another factor that really helps, Bier helps to keep everything consistent in tone by allowing the characters to lead the way, simply allowing the situation to allow them to show more of themselves as they have to act and react quickly, to preserve their own lives and anyone else they decide to try and protect.

Bullock is excellent in the lead role, but that's not much of a surprise to anyone who has been a fan of her work over the years (and I count myself among them), but I doubt the film would have worked as well if they'd placed it all on her shoulders, a la Gravity. No, this time around, a strong lead performance is boosted by strong supporting turns from a cast that includes Trevante Rhodes (who is very good), John Malkovich (as excellent as ever), Jacki Weaver (underused), Danielle Macdonald (saddled with being the character who makes the decisions that will make you roll your eyes), and Tom Hollander (very good in a role that is perhaps the weakest link in the whole film). There are also good performances from Paulson, B D Wong, Rosa Salazar, Lil Rel Howery, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Parminder Nagra, and young Vivien Lyra Blair and Julian Edwards as the young children accompanying Bullock for part of her journey.

Because of the sheer number of people who rushed to see this, Bird Box has very quickly proven to be a divisive film. And I already know a lot of people who don't want to watch it because they're already fed up of the gags that have gone viral. I would say, as with most movies, it's still well worth your time. See it and make up your own mind about the film itself. Not the marketing, not the reaction to it, just the film. And I hope you end up enjoying it almost as much as I did.

8/10

Here's a pack of other Sandra Bullock movies available to buy.
Americans can get a Bullock fix here.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

Oh hai everyone.

First of all, you cannot watch The Disaster Artist without first "treating yourself" to a viewing of The Room, a film which has grown to become arguably THE cult movie of the past two decades. The Room is, and I think this is a decent enough analogy, a large, tacky, cruise ship being steered towards every iceberg around by the bizarre captain known as Tommy Wiseau and, unsurprisingly, a number of people were left adrift in its wake. It had terrible acting, an awful script, strange unerotic sex scenes shoehorned in, and set decor that was bizarre, to say the least.

Greg Sestero, one of the people involved in the making of The Room decided to write a book about the experience, getting everything down in one volume co-written by Tom Bissell, and titling it "The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made". And that's how we eventually get to this film.

What could have easily been full of either easy laughs or more merciless digs at the walking oddity known as Tommy Wiseau has instead turned out to be quite a joy. It's a film that celebrates the strange, almost even admiring the fact that even the most misguided singular vision is still an undeniable . . . vision, and it allows Wiseau to remain an enigmatic figure while showing how everyone else ended up giving such uniformly poor performances.

The script, by writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (who have worked together for a number of years now), blends the background of the movie and Wiseau with a number of moments that viewers will know to expect. You don't go into a Saw movie without expecting some deathtraps that also test the morals of those caught up in them, right? And nobody would go into a film about the making of The Room without expecting to see a few of the most popular/infamous moments from that movie. Everyone involved knows that, and they deliver.

James Franco, who directed the film, stars as Wiseau, and he certainly has a lot of fun in the role. It's an impression, for the most part, but it's hard to fault, especially when you think of Wiseau himself always seeming to be putting on a performance for everyone around him. Dave Franco plays Greg Sestero, and he does well in the role, and there are substantial roles for Seth Rogen, Ari Graynor, Alison Brie, Jacki Weaver, and Josh Hutcherson, among others. Everyone does their best at recreating moments from The Room, yet they also all work well together when acting in the moments that don't show the acting, if you know what I mean.

You only ever have to watch The Room once, I hope (I have ended up seeing it twice now *shudder*), but an extra reward for enduring it is that you can now follow it up with this. So we should be thankful to everyone involved.

8/10.

The Disaster Artist can be bought here.
Americans can buy it here.

Magic In The Moonlight (2014)

Although there are still delights to be found, a modern Woody Allen movie seems to have the same template. The writer-director will include some lovely jazz on the soundtrack, he'll use the movie to explore one main topic, with love always either helping or clouding the issue, and an assorted cast of great names will have some fun in some picturesque European locations (although New York is also an acceptable setting). I'm not saying that every film he has made over the past couple of decades is EXACTLY the same (Blue Jasmine happened to take place in San Francisco, for example). I'm just saying that he's almost become a genre unto himself. Gone are the days when his movies were either funny or serious, gone are the more interesting/fun ideas (such as those explored in Zelig and Sleeper), and gone is the sharpness. It can appear, at times, as if Allen is giving people an impression of an Allen movie. Allen-lite, if you like.

Colin Firth plays Wei Ling Soo, a master stage magician who can also remove the clothing and make-up to move around more inconspicuously as . . . . . . . Stanley. Stanley is famous for his cynicism and ability to disprove psychic phenomena, which is why his friend (Howard Burkan, played by Simon McBurney) enlists his aid when he thinks that he has met a young woman (Emma Stone) who has a real gift. So begins a battle of wits, with Stanley soon coming around to the fact that he may actually have met someone with a very real, very astonishing, psychic ability. He may not even notice the fact that love is in the air, so intent is he on trying to expose the girl for the fake that he assumes her to be.

Firth and Stone are both delightful here, although neither are at their very best. The fault doesn't lie with them, but rather with Allen's sadly flat script. Early scenes have a few great lines scattered throughout them, Firth is much more acerbic in the guise of Wei Ling Soo than he is as Stanley, and then it starts a gentle slide downhill from there. All is not lost, however, thanks to some solid support from Eileen Atkins, Jacki Weaver, Marcia Gay Harden and Hamish Linklater. And those leads.

The main theme being looked at here is whether or not lying is good, especially when it can make people so much happier. It's not a bad subject for Allen to explore, it's just a shame that he does so in a way that feels too lightweight for even just one feature. This leads to many scenes in which people just talk about their own views of the universe, and the possibility of spirits and magic, or Firth and Stone dance around one another, figuratively speaking. The latter scenes are far more enjoyable than the former.

You can always tell when a movie is being made by Allen about something that he feels passionate about. There's a story that he feels compelled to tell. With the lacklustre approach he takes here, it's clear that this story could have been pushed aside for something better. It's light and frothy, nothing more and nothing less. Worth a watch, especially if you're a fan of the director and cast, but not necessarily one that you'll be revisiting a few years down the line.

6/10

http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Moonlight-Colin-Firth/dp/B00O0292GW/ref=sr_1_2?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1418905545&sr=1-2&keywords=magic+in+the+moonlight