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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 23 August 2021

Three months ago, I’d never heard of the America music duo Sparks.  Now, having seen Edgar Wright’s brilliant documentary (The Sparks Brothers) twice on the big screen, I know Ron and Russell Mael as two incredibly gifted artists who have forged a 45-year career in the music industry by staying true to themselves and continually taking chances.

Now, for the first time, they’ve got a screenwriting credit to add to their impressive resume.  Back in 2012, French director Leos Carax used a Sparks song in his warped drama Holy Motors.  Ron and Russell reached out to simply say thanks and, in the process, pitched the idea for an off-beat movie musical they’d been working on for some time.  Annette is the end result and it arrives in Australia with buzz having won the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival last month.

If you’ve seen Holy Motors or other works from Leos Carax, you should know to expected the unexpected.  Annette is a head-scratching mix of reality and fantasy that doesn’t always make sense… but that’s part of its allure.  The opening titles are proof of that.  The film begins with Ron and Russell Mael (playing themselves) performing a song called “So May We Start” as they interact with stars Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard (playing characters).  It’s reminiscent of the opening to the successful Broadway musical Pippin in that it’s trying to break the fourth wall.

From thereon, I’d describe the movie as a dark, Shakespearean-like fairy tale.  Henry (Driver) is an edgy comedian / performance artist for whom no topic is taboo.  Ann (Cotillard) is a renowned soprano who continually sings in front of large, sold-out crowds.  The pair meet, fall in love, get married and have a daughter.  A standard romance, right?  Oh, did I mention the child takes the form of a wooden marionette puppet?  It’s probably worth noting.

This film could have been messy in the wrong hands but Annette succeeds because of Leos Carax’s gutsy direction.  It’s a hypnotic experience in the way the camera hovers around these characters (often at a distance) from a variety of angles (sometimes looking up, sometimes looking down).  The use of lengthy, unedited shots creates an intensity that is hard to shake.  The emotive music, sung live on set as opposed to later in a recording studio, adds authenticity to key scenes.

I wouldn’t be recommending this film to everyone but if you’re after an experience as much as a movie, Annette delivers.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 08 August 2021

Some will be familiar with the reality television series Ice Road Truckers that ran for 11 seasons between 2007 and 2017.  It followed a group of truck drivers who, needing to access remote parts of North America during winter, would drive their heavy vehicles on frozen lakes and rivers.  It’s an occupation that is both fascinating and scary.  I don’t know if I’d have the nerve to do it!

It was only a matter of time before the idea was used in a Hollywood feature film and, having seen him successfully operate a snowplow in 2019’s Cold Pursuit, it seems fitting that action-hero Liam Neeson steps into the shoes of the lead character.  He plays Mike McCann, an American truck driver who could use some extra cash to look after his brother (Thomas) who is struggling from aphasia after several years in the military.

There’s been a mine explosion in northern Canada which has trapped roughly 20 miners in a tunnel below the surface.  The only way to get them out is with a special welding machine and about 300 feet of pipe.  The equipment is too heavy to fly in by plane and so, a group of 4 drivers are offered a lucrative contract of $50,000 each to transport it from the United States to Canada via truck.  Nice work if you can get it, right?

Well, not quite.  There are two problems.  Firstly, this is taking place in April and with the warmer temperatures starting to unfreeze/weaken the ice, this is not the time of year you want to be taking trucks with heavy loads on frozen rivers.  Secondly, there’s no alternative because the clock is ticking.  Corporate big-wigs know the trapped miners have limited air supply and so the drivers must take the shortest routes and go as fast as possible or else their rescue efforts will be pointless.

It’s a decent idea for a movie and there’s enough realism in the opening half to make this a suspenseful action-thriller.  It’s not all smooth sailing (as you’d expect) and this diverse group of drivers must navigate their way out of tricky scenarios.  I enjoyed watching them discuss their backgrounds, the risks of what they do, and then the fast-paced nature of their decision-making process.  When the ice is breaking up beneath them, there’s no time for doubt and hesitation.

Regrettably, the film loses its way in the second half and degenerates into a non-sensical, cliché-laden mess filled cheesy villains and dumb motives.  That’s as much as I can without giving away spoilers.  The dialogue falls away also and it reaches the point where Neeson says to a co-worker – “It’s not about a money now.  This is personal.”

Writer-director Jonathan Hensleigh has a history of penning popular action movies including Jumanji (the 1995 original), Armageddon, The Punisher and Welcome to the Jungle.  The Ice Road starts promisingly but lacks the stamina to go the full distance.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 22 August 2021

Reminiscence shows us a future world ravaged by the effects of climate change.  Many have become nocturnal.  It’s so oppressively hot during the day, people stay inside and then venture out at night for work and socialising.  The polar ice caps have melted, sea levels have risen, and low-lying streets of major cities are now flooded.  High rise buildings are still occupied but it’s commonplace to travel by boat instead of car.  Huge dam walls prevent the disaster becoming even greater.

The climate has degenerated but innovation still thrives.  A technology now exists that allows specially trained people to tap into one’s memories and allow them to be replayed.  For example, if you wanted you reflect on the time you first met your best friend, you strap yourself into a giant sensory deprivation tank, fall asleep, and let an expert probe your mind and recreate the memory.  It’s as addictive as any drug with customers doing it regularly to provide a fleeting moment of happiness in an increasingly depressing world.

As thought provoking as the backdrop is, it’s not the focus of Reminiscence.  Rather, this is a more conventional film (unfortunately) that is part mystery, part romance.  Hugh Jackson plays Nick, a memory reader with a struggling business and a single frustrated employee (Newton).  I’d be annoyed if a new customer came into my office after closing time without an appointment… but that’s not what happens when Mae (Ferguson) walks in looking for a short, standard treatment.  It’s love at first sight for Nick and the pair soon become inseparable.

That is until Mae goes missing.  Nick is tormented by her disappearance and spends every waking hour trying to work out where she’s gone.  It reaches the point where he sits in his own tank and relives his memories of Mae with hope that he’ll find a key clue.  The pieces of the puzzle start fitting together but it sends Nick down a dangerous road filled with dangerous people.

I like the reflective questions Reminiscence asks of audiences.  What if this technology did exist?  Would you want to go back and relive happy moments from your past?  Or does it create a world where we detach from reality, stop looking forward, and risk creating no new memories?  Could authorities and villainous folk have the opportunity to see “recordings” of these memories and use them against us?

Writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) can’t quite bring everything together into something meaningful and emotional.  We see so little of Nick and Mae together.  This makes it tough to understand why he’s willing to risk his life for someone he hardly knows.  Scenes involving gangsters and goons are run-of-the-mill and the same can be said of weak subplots involving police detectives fishing for information, and a wealthy family looking for happiness.

There’s decent banter between Thandiwe Newton (my pick of the cast) and Hugh Jackman but Reminiscence doesn’t make the most of its great ideas.

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Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 01 August 2021

Twenty years ago, Disney curiously greenlit an action blockbuster based on an amusement ride at its Los Angeles theme park.  The film was Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and, in addition to earning Johnny Depp his first Academy Award nomination, it spawned a franchise that grossed more than $4.5 billion USD at the global box-office.  It’s easy to be cynical but it shows that when it comes to screenwriting, inspiration can come from unusual places.

Studio executives will be hoping that history repeats.  Jungle Cruise was a boat ride that formed part of the first Disney amusement park when it opened back in 1955.  It’s gone through a few changes over the years but the ride still exists today.  A script was written, Dwayne Johnson came on board as a producer, the directing reigns were handed to Spaniard Jaume Collet-Serra (Orphan, Unknown), and the finished product can now be seen in cinemas… and on streaming due to COVID-19.

Jungle Cruise is a mix of realistic fiction and supernatural oddities.  It’s set in the year 1916 and is centred on Dr Lily Houghton (Blunt), a gifted British scientist who cannot gain the respect of her peers simply because she is a woman.  There’s an early scene where Lily’s younger brother (Whitehall) must present research on her behalf to The Royal Society in London because women were not allowed to be members (the first wasn’t admitted until 1945).

Determined to prove her worth, she sets off to Brazil with hopes of locating a long-lost magical tree with “petals that can heal all”.  Needing transportation to navigate the windy, dangerous Amazon River, she teams up with a joke-loving steamboat owner, Frank (Johnson), to go in search of the plant.  On their tail is an unpleasant German (Plemons) who wants the tree for himself and sees it as critical to his country’s success in winning World War I.

Many will be drawing comparisons with the likes of Indiana Jones and Pirates of the Caribbean.  Jungle Cruise has been crafted as a light-hearted family escapade with lots of running, chasing and evading.  Despite the best intentions, it comes across as a very unadventurous adventure.  There’s almost too much going on.  There’s no time to soak in any tension (we can blame the feeble villains for that) and, while our strong-willed heroes love a chat, they come across as one-note, empty and uninteresting.  It’s just the same repetitive stuff throughout (e.g. jokes about Lily’s “posh” brother being out of his element).

Coming across more as a hokey throwback to films from a prior era, Jungle Cruise might schmooze people with the casting of Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt but it misses the opportunity to be something fun, original and contemporary.

Details

Written by Matthew Toomey

Created: 15 August 2021

Free Guy is Pleasantville meets The Truman Show meets Wreck-It-Ralph.  Since I love all three of those movies, that’s perfectly fine with me!  The opening scenes introduce us to Guy (Reynolds), a character inside a super popular video game.  He’s referred to as an NPC – a “non-playing character” who has no impact on the game, does the same thing repeatedly, and is largely relegated to the background.

His daily routine consists of waking up in a one-bedroom apartment, making breakfast, walking to work, buying a cup of coffee, working as a bank teller, and waiting for robbers to come in and steal money.  It’s reminiscent of Bill Murray in Groundhog Day except that Guy doesn’t know anything different.  His entire existence has been the same repetitive loop.

And then… something changes.  Guy sees a beautiful character within the game (Comer) who is controlled by someone outside of it (also Comer).  The pair interact and Guy starts to develop a mind of his own.  He stops going to work, he starts fighting bad guys, and he explores parts of the computer game world he never knew existed.  Could this be artificial intelligence?

Directed by Shawn Levy (Night and the Museum, The Internship), Free Guy has a great sense of humour and explores some fun ideas.  His adventures have an impact on other NPCs within the game who ask themselves philosophical questions about whether there’s more to life (ala Pleasantville).  As this all takes place, we follow the perspective of the real world where people are tuning into the game (ala The Truman Show) to learn more about the character who has seemingly come alive (ala Wreck-It-Ralph).

I’ll the first to admit that Ryan Reynolds feels like he’s playing the same goofy klutz he’s played in a bunch of other recent movies like Deadpool and The Hitman’s Bodyguard.  That said, it’s hard to imagine another actor stepping into Guy’s shoes and creating something equally memorable.  From his over-the-top expressions to his general naivety, Reynolds ensures the jokes hit the mark.

The supporting players also pull their weight.  In her biggest cinema role to date, Emmy Award winner Jodie Comer (Killing Eve) is excellent as the spirited woman who first realises Guy’s intelligence and potential.  Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit), using as much improvisation as possible, is hilarious as the eccentric video game boss who loves a creative insult.  There’s also a bunch of cameos which shouldn’t be spoiled.

More entertaining than I expected it to be, Free Guy is a winning comedy.