Whiplash (2014) Movie Review

Director: Damien Chazelle

Writer: Damien Chazelle

Starring: Miles Teller, J.K. Simmons, Melissa Benoist

I don’t want drums! I want pictures of Spiderman! I think that joke was great. Mainly because there is one, very lazy joke still in circulation about this film and it makes me want to shove two drumsticks into my eyes. One each of course. Whenever someone says, ‘not quite my tempo’, and thinks that that makes them a funny human, I want to attack them. I bet there’s even a review out there that uses it

as a funny little ending even though it’s probably irrelevant. I actually found a user review on IMDb titled, ‘Just My Tempo’. Do you think you’re funny? Do you think that not everyone else thought of that and then cringed their skin off? You know what no one thought of? A Spiderman joke. Truly the most original thought to date.

Drumming! Drumming! Drumming! This film is about drumming. More specifically, a drummer called Andrew Neiman who wants to be the best… he wants to be remembered. On his path to the top he meets a band conductor, Terrence Fletcher, who is a ruthless, unrelenting asshole. Andrew wants to play the drums so well and so fast that he magically earns the respect and admiration of his conductor. In doing so, blood flies everywhere.

First off, I would like to get out of the way, the only thing I took issue with in this film. That is the drumming. I am not saying that the film shouldn’t have had drumming, (although that would be funny) it was the sounds that were coming out of the drums that ground my gears. I suppose the idea may have been to make it seem like Andrew (or his rivals for that matter) was just so good at drumming that even when he didn’t hit the drum it would make a sound. I am not sure if it was an issue with syncing the audio or if the sounds just didn’t fit the action. A lot of the time, half the drum kit would be slightly out of frame so that you couldn’t see how all the sounds were being made. It really had a jarring effect but this problem wasn’t too prevalent so we’re all good. Also I find it hard to believe that you can get much better at the drums by just hitting them really fast. I also saw it as a much more rhythmic skill but who am I to judge.

Okay, almost the entire rest of this film is bloody marvellous. While the audio of the drumming sequences could sometimes be jarring, my lord, the crazy stuff Miles Teller does with his hands is mesmerising. Even if he is just pretending to make the correct sounds, it certainly looks impressive and like I mentioned, I really wouldn’t know if what he is doing is actually correct. The way these sequences are shot is also incredible, particularly in the final scene. You see the cymbal being smashed and all the sweat flying off. The best shot in that last scene is one where the frame is alternating J.K. Simmons’ conducting and the drums like a tennis match. Like I say… bloody marvellous.

The relationship between Neiman and Fletcher is the focal point of the film. Because of this, there is an excellent, liquid nature to it. It is never the same for five minutes. At first Neiman is looking up to him, then he feels like they are friends and then he absolutely resents him. This makes the plot highly unpredictable and tense. This relationship’s importance is compounded by the fact that all the other ones he has are peripheral to him. He absolutely resents everyone in his family. “Teacher of the year? Get out, mate! I play the drums the drums really fast,” is what I wish he had said to his father at the dinner table… he was definitely thinking it though.  He also thinks of his girlfriend less than drumming. Even when he makes a move to reconcile their relationship, his mind leaps straight back to the drums.

Whiplash is a film that I regret not seeing when it was initially released. Needless to say, I thought it was fantastic; the tension, the cinematography, the yelling. It is about as high octane as a drumming film can get and it is stylish as all hell. Style Hell.

Whiplash receives a: 10/10

The Raid 2 (2014) Movie Review

Director: Gareth Evans

Writer: Gareth Evans

Starring: Iko Uwais, Yayan Ruhian, Arifin Putra

It would be an understatement to say that I was excited to watch the sequel to The Raid. Unfortunately, the second film is strikingly different to the first.

After Rama escapes the building from the original raid, a police official offers him an opportunity to go under cover and wreck the entirety of the Indonesian organised crime ring.

If this film were to consist only of the fight scenes that the movie has, it would be one of the most entertaining experiences put to film. There are great characters who have signature, recognisable weapons who are all part of excellent fight scenes. This being said, the general idea of a lot of the fight scenes is that the main guy you’re looking at walks forward while people attack them one at a time and the camera looks at them from the side. While each of the individual moves is impressive, you know who is going to win the fight and, generally, what it is going to look like. Because of this, the fight scenes that have very few people involved in them are far more impressive and entertaining. The idea of one guy taking on a silly amount of people may sound cool but when you always know the outcome, all suspense is lost.

The biggest difference between this movie and the first is the over abundance in story. There is likely no difference in screen time of story scenes between this movie and the average action film but these scenes drag on so much because of the repetitiveness of them. They all look the same, people sitting down talking in a room we’ve seen multiple times before. It makes it so that even though we should have been interested in the story of the film, we are just left waiting for another fight scene to watch.

I feel that it is important to mention that this is one of those Asian action movies in which people’s bodies become action figures and limbs get snapped like toothpicks. The first raid was blatantly and gratuitously violent but this something else. I think I saw a guy ripping another man’s jaw off with his bare hands. So fair warning, if you are unable to withstand gross violence, you may not enjoy this film.

While this film has a ratio of action to story that really doesn’t work, said action is fantastic when very few people are fighting each other at once. It may seem that I dislike this film but some of these action scenes are some of the best I’ve seen. If only about a third of the story scenes existed, the film would have been outstanding but unfortunately they hold the film back. As much as I would like not to compare the two films in this series because they feel so different, I feel that I must mention that I prefer the first film.

The Raid 2 receives a: 7/10

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Get Santa (2014) Movie Review

Director: Christopher Smith

Writer: Christopher Smith

Starring: Jim Broadbent, Rafe Spall, Kit Connor

I feel that there is no mixture of genres, nationalities and subject matters that look consistently more underwhelming than British Christmas comedy movies. The nativity movies honestly looked like they were made by a primary school. After watching the trailer for this movie preceding Paddington, I was convinced that it was going to be awful. While it didn’t totally blow me away, it was nowhere near as bad as I thought it was going to be.

Santa [Jim Broadbent] has been arrested for trying to steal back his reindeer. This means that the father and son generic duo [Rafe Spall, Kit Connor] have to save Christmas and break Santa from prison.

Where the movie succeeds is in how it plays with your expectations. Warwick Davis is only really in the movie because you expect him to be an elf and they can bung him on the posters. Everything that he does in the movie is actually hilarious. On a rather unrelated note, I have finally realised how many references there are to more adult movies there are in children’s films. Before the movie I saw a ‘Silence of the Lambs’ reference in a trailer for ‘The Shaun the Sheep Movie’. This film contains a very well impersonated reference to the ‘Shawshank Redemption’.

The thing I most noted in the movie was how the music was used. The genres were instantly recognisable and added to the jokes that were going on. I would like to use an example of one of these moments now but they make some of the funniest parts of the film so just trust me… it’s funny!

I wished more than anything else this Christmas that this movie would not have stupid looking CGI because it would have worked so much better if it didn’t have it. There were two notably dumb sequences that you could tell were all filmed in an entirely green room. In one they are flying through a massive box kite. It had the production value of Spy Kids 2.  Perhaps there should be a theatrical cut with a few more cuts.

The film was pretty well summed up when my sister said ‘it wasn’t really Arthur Christmas’. This statement is entirely true. While the film isn’t nearly as bad as I expected, there was nothing in it that made it more than mediocre. Arthur Christmas has fantastic animation, Home Alone has myriad memorable moments and Elf has Will Ferrell. Get Santa, unfortunately, has nothing.

Get Santa is an unexpectedly funny Christmas film with some outstandingly terrible CGI sequences. It isn’t awful but it doesn’t have the memorability of the Christmas classics.

Get Santa receives a: 5/10

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Paddington (2014) Movie Review

Director: Paul King

Writers: Paul King, Hamish McColl

Starring: Ben Wishaw, Hugh Bonneville, Nicole Kidman

Being the relatively young person I am, my entire familiarity with Paddington Bear is a stuffed toy with misty-eyed anecdotes from my close relatives. After seeing the most recent cinematic instalment of this personally unknown franchise, I am more than inclined to look into the lineage of the anthropomorphic marmalade loving bear.

A very rare species of bear is discovered in a place known as ‘Darkest Peru’. This species is able to learn English and construct a marmalade squeezing rube-goldberg. After an earthquake levels the forest of their residence, the protagonist’s aunt must check into the bear retirement home and the soon to be named, Paddington [Ben Wishaw], flees to London.

Children’s movies have an unfortunate tendency to recycle jokes at nauseam. The best jokes that the comedy provides are ones that are new and exciting. There is one scene where two security guards are playing a self-devised game in which they guess the nutritional content inside a popular product. I was almost in tears wondering how they came to start playing this game. They even seemed comfortable with it as if it was a thing they have been doing for years.

Another scene shows why the Brown family father is such a boring person. They use a matching transition (which I love) and the joke, which has probably been used before, was given a hilarious spin. The jokes in the movie felt fresh and as a comedy, you would hope so. I certainly did laugh throughout the movie.

The thing that struck me the most when watching the movie was it’s intermittent spells of great cinematography. There are aerial shots that are worryingly reminiscent of the ‘Raid 2’. There is a scene in which Paddington first arrives at the eponymous station. The camera is bunged right down on the ground with the 3 foot tall bear making even the audience members feel claustrophobic amongst the suspiciously uninterested commuters.

Where the movie trips over its willies is in the children that were cast. They achieved the triple double of poorly done child characters in movies. They were acted boringly, written boringly and there were two of them, who were boring. To their merit, the acting wasn’t the worst a child has done but their performances really made me dislike them. Especially Judy [Madeleine Harris]. She was attempted to be made interesting by having Paddington narrate his writing about letters to his Aunt [Imelda Staunton] about his host family. She apparently had some sort of interesting trait but it was so forgettable that… I forgot. Jonathan [Samuel Joslin] differs in that his proficiency in Meccano structures led to a couple visually attractive shots. Overall, the children felt more like props than characters.

Another problem that I had with the movie was that there seemed to be no one anywhere unless they were supposed to be there. The only notable scene in which extras were used was in the station scene. It was actually rather eerie at the end of the movie when the children feel compelled to have a snowball fight and no other children are in sight on the entire street. I have a feeling the street was bought out entirely by the Brown family except for Mr. Curry [Peter Capaldi] so that he can be creepy. It didn’t massively affect my enjoyment of the film but was questionable nonetheless.

Paddington is the latest incarnation of the age-old bear that loves marmalade. It was funny exciting and had surprisingly great cinematography. The children were underwhelming and sets contained a scary lack of people. It was a lot of fun to watch and I highly recommend it. So remember my friends, “It’s actually rather fun”!

‘Paddington’ receives a: 7/10

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Interstellar (2014) Movie Review

Director: Christopher Nolan
Writers: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan
Starring: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Mackenzie Foy

Christopher Nolan has one of the most impressive filmographies in cinema history. It is almost certain at this point that he has positively propelled himself into the imaginary directorial hall of fame. While Interstellar isn’t my favourite of Nolan’s films, it certainly doesn’t drop the confusingly entertaining ball.

Whilst watching the movie, it was extremely difficult not to draw obvious parallels to Inception. They are almost identical thematically (Anyone who has seen Inception would know that this is definitely not a bad thing). The films have different settings but at their core, is a story of a father trying to return to their children. In terms of this so-called ‘man’, I much prefer the character of Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar to Cobb in Inception. Since the whole story is about the parental relationship, your belief of the relationship is paramount. In Inception you get one reused shot of some children in a garden but in Interstellar you get countless scenes with two great characters with great chemistry having very interesting dialogue. There is scene where Cooper is talking to his daughter’s teachers and just verbally backhands them and then jokingly breaks the news to her that he has gotten her suspended. It is a brilliantly memorable performance and most importantly; you just want Cooper to succeed because of how much he makes you like him.

The leading man is not the only great thing the movie has to bring to the table. There are some images the movie provides that have welded themselves deeply to my central nervous system and I haven’t been able to get them out of my head since I have seen it. In my opinion, the most impressive sequence (visually) in the entire movie is when the crew go through a wormhole (this isn’t a spoiler, the movie’s called Interstellar for god’s sake). As the ship eclipses the hole, it appears flat like the animated Chicken Little movie. It was an utterly jaw-dropping shot. It was as if something had glued the Hubble deep space image onto the inside of a Jupiter sized steel drum. When they went in it, I believe I recall my mind melting due to sheer mind numbing awesome. There were multiple times I found my mouth slightly agape.

One criticism I have heard from my friends and other life forms is about the complexity of the movie. I personally loved how much I had to think about the story as we were pulled along through it. Imagine a movie in which people go to other planets and things happen. I can think of ludicrous amounts of movies that can be described in that way and I’m happy to say that Interstellar isn’t one of them. It’s complexity means that it will be talked about in years to come much like Inception and Memento. If you said that the plot-driving ending is rather convenient, you would be rather correct if you have seen the movie, let’s be honest, you didn’t see that ending coming.

A definite criticism that I personally have of the movie is that it felt too long. They could have probably cut out a character that appears later on and not have hindered the movie too badly.  Everything that is in the movie certainly has a reason to be there but it did make it feel like time was slowing down at some points *wink*.

Interstellar is a solid addition to the list of Nolan movies that look incredible and question how much time you have to constantly think about it later. Its title is deceptive, its characters are great and its visuals are vibrant and memorable to say the least. While it wasn’t able to reversely murder Memento as my favourite Nolan movie, I see it being worshipped as Inception’s younger (yet equal) brother in the coming years.

Speaking of Memento, there is a line in Interstellar where Anne Hathaway says that you can’t travel backwards in time. Probably not a reference but I can certainly hope it is. In any case…

Recommendation Status: Unmissable

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