Netflix And Chill: BlackBerry (2023)

Some technology stays with us for what seems like forever. Some of it comes and goes, having a shining moment before becoming an obscure novelty, and becoming the modern version of a tech antique within just a few years. Show someone a portable CD player nowadays and explain it to them. In fact, show someone the Sega Mega-CD. Remember that? My old flatmate had one. I'm not sure anyone else did. The world of the mobile phone is littered with other prime examples. Models that were once so ubiquitous, but are no longer around (unless re-released to appeal to nostalgia). The sturdy Nokia 3310 is one example. The Motorola Razr V3i is another. And there's the BlackBerry, the first device that I saw sold as letting you have the power of a computer in your pocket. I never had one, but I used to view all mobile communication devices as nothing more than accessories for yuppies and/or wankers.

Speaking of those kinds of people, here we are with a movie that tells us about the incredible rise, and just as incredible fall, of the device. Directed by, co-written by, and starring Matt Johnson, it shows how a couple of men (Mike, played by Jay Baruchel, and Doug, played by Johnson) were able to make their mark on the world once they allowed a wolf (Jim, played by Glenn Howerton) into their metaphorical hen-house.  

Based on a book, "Losing The Signal", written by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, BlackBerry benefits from a great script co-written by Johnson and Matthew Miller, and a trio of fantastic lead performances from Baruchel, Johnson, and Howerton, the latter an absolute bulldog in human form. There's also the inherent nostalgia factor, of course, and it helps that the true story has enough fascinating twists and turns to build a movie around.

Howerton is the individual overshadowing all others here, and his constant aggression is very entertaining, mainly because of how others struggle to deal with him. While there are elements of the character that you know would appeal to Howerton, it also forces him to leave any comedic instincts at the door as he depicts someone so strong-willed and single-minded that he becomes quite monstrous. Baruchel does his usual slightly awkward schtick, but also convinces as his character ages up and loses most of his innocence and naivete. Johnson might give himself the role of the most sensible one of the three, but that also allows him to stay present throughout most of the runtime without usually being the focus of any one scene, which may have helped him to focus on his role behind the camera. Martin Donovan turns up for a scene or two, as do Saul Rubinek, Cary Elwes, Michael Ironside, and Rich Sommer, and everyone else does what is necessary to make the environment onscreen feel as busy as it needs to be.

I didn't think I would enjoy this, despite hearing some good word about it when it was released a couple of years ago. Considering my own views of the BlackBerry device, I wasn't sure what the film would offer me. It turns out that it's a bittersweet look at people trying to maintain some integrity and optimism in a world that only holds those values for as long as the profit margins remain high enough. BlackBerry celebrates innovation and the blood, sweat, and tears that workers put into a product they had faith in, but it also makes clear from the earliest scenes that innovators and hard workers need someone to get out there and negotiate with businesses, and sell the product, to make it a real success. It's a great shame that everyone can't share the same principles, but maybe that's why certain products crash down so low after such unexpeted highs.

Anyway, I'm off to use an online game emulator to play Snake. Because some days I am reminded of how much I used to enjoy playing Snake on my Nokia 3310. 

8/10

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Mubi Monday: Julia (2008)

It's not often that you can watch a movie starring Tilda Swinton without appreciating the acting skills of Tilda Swinton. Julia doesn't change that. It gives Swinton a lead role that may well rank up there with her very best. It is just a shame that the film around that performance isn’t as good as her work deserves, although I have already noticed that I am seriously in the minority with this opinion.

Julia (Swinton, of course) is an alcoholic about to lose everything. Her job, her home, maybe even her life if she keeps blacking out and ending up in the bed of whatever stranger is most responsive to her. Things look set to change, however, when a woman asks for help to get her son (Aidan Gould) back in her life. The young boy is apparently in the custody of family on his father’s side, and Julia can get a big payday if she effectively kidnaps him to return him home. You can imagine how well this plan unfolds, but each extra “wrinkle” ends up changing Julia, perhaps changing her into a better person.

Director Erick Zonca, who also co-wrote the screenplay with a number of different collaborators, has a good handle on where he wants this cinematic journey to take us, and also where he wants it to take the main character. Unfortunately, many of the scenes in between the more impressive moments don’t work half as well as they should. For all her great work, Swinton is left adrift in situations that feel messy and pointless. I get that the style of the film may be signifying the very messy and unhealthy mental state of Julia, but it’s difficult to sit through without becoming frustrated and/or bored, especially when those scenes make up so much of a movie that runs for just over two and a quarter hours.

In fact, let me put it this way; the film only ever hits the heights it aims for in the scenes that focus on Swinton and Gould. Everything else feels like white noise, with the exception of a scene or two stolen by Saul Rubinek.

I started this review by praising Swinton, I have JUST mentioned how good she and Gould are together, and that’s all I have to do. Julia is a weak film that is lucky enough to be hung on some excellent performances. There’s nothing else to really praise here, despite those involved trying to use some thriller genre tropes to help disguise what may have worked better as a more straightforward character study. It’s particularly telling that the very best moments here could be removed from the film and displayed as a short, with very little or no context, and they would work just as well. All thanks to Swinton, Gould, and Rubinek.

Hugely disappointing in many ways, but absolutely worth your time if you are a fan of the lead. The good doesn’t manage to outweigh the bad, but it helps to raise my final rating to absolutely average.

5/10

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Prime Time: Death Ship (1980)

I am sure I am repeating myself here, but if you were there when VHS changed the world of home entertainment then you will always have a number of films that you think you saw without actually seeing them. Because the trailer seemed to be on every bloody horror movie that was rented in the early 1980s. The main ones I recall were The Dunwich Horror, Superstition, Necromancy (a trailer boosted by the extra baritone provided by the mighty Orson Welles whenever he was shown), and Death Ship. It took me far too long to check out these movies, having assumed I'd already seen them, but I'd advise anyone seeking them out to try and consider them within the context of those well-remembered days of top-loading VCRs, tracking dials being adjusted, and people who had a collection of home recordings housed in covers that were designed to look like leather-bound books.

I'm saying that now because Death Ship isn't that good, but it also has enough moments throughout that remind me of the trailer to keep me happy. The basic plot revolves around a cruise ship being rammed by a big, scary freighter. A few people stuck in a lifeboat are relieved when they encounter a big boat that they can climb aboard, unaware that it is the very same freighter that put them into the sea. Once aboard, it's soon obvious that strange things are afoot. All of the WWII Nazi regalia is a bit unnerving, as well as the fact that there seems to be no crew. That could all change soon though, especially as unhinged Captain Ashland (George Kennedy) starts to feel more and more connected to the ship.

Directed by Alvin Rakoff, who has a hell of a lot of TV and film credits to his name (but this remains arguably his best-known work), Death Ship is a competent and atmospheric horror that I'd love to see get the remake treatment today. The actual ship is the star of the show, and there are lots of shots here that simply show various parts of the structure, be it corridors or chains and fittings, with a menacing score letting you know that every inch of it could be dangerous. The screenplay by John Robins may not work as well as it could, but it takes some time in the opening section to introduce the characters that will be dragged through the madness of the rest of the movie. It's just a shame that nobody was more creative and daring when it came to the death scenes here. Some memorable gore could have made this one an absolute corker.

Kennedy is a lot of fun in his role, throwing subtlety to the wind as his character develops from a tetchy and paranoid Captain to a . . . tetchy and paranoid Captain who would like to kill people. Richard Crenna is the new Captain, Trevor Marshall, who puts Kennedy's character out of sorts from the very beginning, and he tries his best to play the hero role, although the film continually moves back to focus on the ship itself, and Kennedy's kinship with it. Victoria Burgoyne has a memorable shower scene (no, not for the reason you may be thinking), Saul Rubinek is the light entertainment man on the cruise ship who proves less entertaining on the "death ship", and Sally Ann Howes, Jennifer McKinney, and Danny Higham make up the wife and children, respectively, of Crenna's character. Howes is fine, the children are just a bit too annoying.

There's enough here to make Death Ship an enjoyable horror movie, and the details littered throughout are interesting and unsettling, but it's a shame that it couldn't have made the most of the concept. Add some disposable teens to bulk out the cast of characters, and some more fantastical deaths, and it would be an easy one to recommend. As things are, one to watch if you have the fondness for the trailer that I did.

6/10

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Unforgiven (1992)

Unforgiven is an astonishing film, truly astonishing. Taking a great script and adding the baggage of Clint Eastwood's entire Western filmography, it makes for a fitting finale to that particular aspect of his career. From start to finish, the movie fills every scene with a love for the genre and an intention to show the flip side of that lifestyle. Many movies end with a gunslinger riding off into the sunset, but this one picks things up years later and shows how men who have killed other men can hold something inside them for the rest of their days, a mixture of regret and also the knowledge that they can easily kill again if the situation calls for it.

Eastwood plays Will Munny, a man with a violent past who has tried to make a new life for himself. He has children and stays true to his deceased wife. Unfortunately, his violent past doesn't always lead to him having a quiet life and that's the case when he's approached with an offer by 'The Schofield Kid' (Jaimz Woolvett). A couple of men were responsible for cutting up a whore (played by Anna Levine) and the other working girls in town weren't too happy with the punishment they received from Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman). Strangely enough, Bill normally metes out far worse punishments to anyone he sees as a threat to his idyllic vision of the town. He doesn't even allow anyone to enter with guns on their person, which doesn't bode well for the likes of English Bob (Richard Harris). It also doesn't bode well for The Kid, Munny and Ned Logan (Munny's friend, played by Morgan Freeman).

Unforgiven sees Eastwood hitting it out of the park in his role as director and, when you think of how well he's done in his directorial career, that's high praise indeed. It helps that he also does great in the acting department and surrounds himself with fine talent (Freeman, Hackman and Harris do some of their best work, there's a great little role for Saul Rubinek and Woolvett, Levine and Frances Fisher, playing mother hen to her girls, all do sterling work). Then, there's the great script by David Webb Peoples. It's full of quality lines and character moments that are often mesmerising (I should rave more about Hackman and Harris, both outstanding with the former, in particular, getting his teeth into an interesting villain who is given an interesting complexity and sense of morals). And everything is turned into pure gold when the distilled essence of Eastwood's years in the Western genre is added to the mix.

The film is both a love letter to every movie that has ever feature a gunslinger on-screen and also a serious and moving study of how a man who spends his life doing bad things can ruin any future chance of happiness and contentment that he may one day hope for. It is ultimately, of course, about the deeds and the people and even the reflections in the mirror that are unforgiven.

10/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Unforgiven-Blu-ray-Region-Free/dp/B000RWDXDC/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1355953348&sr=8-2

Death Wish V: The Face Of Death (1994)

The last film in the original franchise, it's a shame that Death Wish 5 is such a damp squib ending the series.

Written and directed by Allan A. Goldstein, this sequel sees Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson in his final film role) returning and getting close to some people who you just assume are going to be hurt in some way. Right enough, the inevitable happens and Kersey goes into full-on gunhappy mode.

With a cast that includes Lesley-Anne Down, Michael Parks, Saul Rubinek and Robert Joy, this movie may have a familiarity factor that the others slightly lacked but it's offset by the fact that it's slightly below average from start to finish. The film even loses the vibe of borderline exploitation nastiness that the preceding four movies had, making it nothing more than a standard revenge action movie that fails to stand up alongside many better films from the the time (ruled, essentially, by the likes of Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger defining modern machismo).

Charles Bronson is still highly watchable, and Michael Parks makes for a decent villain, but there's so little effort put in to the other aspects of the movie that it just feels lazy, tiresome and tired out. The violence isn't shocking enough compared to the previous films and the premise starts to become a bit of a joke, in many ways. Viewers most certainly considered the awful truth by the second or third movie in the series - being close to Paul Kersey is a very dangerous place to be - but it was often hidden behind the escalating violence and the quest for revenge that the central character would embark on. Sadly, there's just not enough going on this time around to detract you from thinking "actually, maybe Paul Kersey just shouldn't get into relationships".

The end of an era in many ways, and the last film role for Bronson, Death Wish 5 is just one disappointment after another. But it's not unwatchable and it doesn't take anything away from the many other great movies that gave us Bronson at his bad-ass best.

4/10.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Death-Wish-DVD-2012-Release/dp/B0073DOJWM/ref=sr_1_4?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1329081969&sr=1-4