MARJORIE PRIME

I liked the ideas in MARJORIE PRIME far more than the film itself.  The ideas surround the nature of memory and AI.  In a near future, AI has developed to the point that grieving people can buy a "prime" - a lifelike robot who can learn to remember your family memories. As the film opens, we have an old lady called Marjorie (Lois Smith) who interacts with a younger avatar of her dead husband (Jon Hamm).  What's fascinating is that she is teaching him their shared memories but chooses to alter some of them - making his proposal more romantic so that that becomes his version of events. And then, as her memory fades and he becomes her factual record, it's the fake memory that becomes the shared history.  Marjorie's daughter (Geena Davis) is initially horrified by the concept of her mother having a relationship with a Prime, while her husband (Tim Robbins) sees it as a boon.  But as the film develops, we see the two of them have their own relationships with Primes and the position shifts as they too start to re-interpret history through shared but altered memories.  Most impressively, in the final scene of the film, we see the Primes themselves interact and share those memories, moving further away from the truth.  The film, then, raises important and nuanced questions about the nature of shared memory and the ethics of altering it. Should the truth be privileged or is it better to tell white lies that comfort people?

The problem with the film is that it reads like a didactic treatise rather than a living and breathing drama. Matters aren't helped by the fact that director Michael Almereyda largely keeps the action in the closed confines of the family home, paces the film slowly, and does little with his camera. To that end, the movie feels like a filmed stage play, and it is indeed based on a play by Jordan Harrison. I found myself admiring its ideas and some of its performances but deeply deeply bored.  

MARJORIE PRIME has a running time of 98 minutes and is not yet rated and does not yet have a commercial release date.  It played Berlin, Sundance and San Francisco. 

THE STUDENT

THE STUDENT is a tough, challenging, brilliant and depressing film about the battle between scientific knowledge and rising religious extremism that is colouring debate around the world.  Set in contemporary Russia it focuses on a teenage boy who suddenly adopts extreme religious views that manifest as homophobia, misogyny and creationism. This puts him in opposition with his high school science teachers and fellow students who wear revealing clothes and have sexual relations with each other. It also earns him a disciple in the form of teenage boy who is in love with him, provoking a strange and ambiguous response in the protagonist.  What's fascinating is seeing the response of those around him. His mother is exasperated but powerless. The high school kids take compromising videos of him but it doesn't seem to come to much. The science teacher is driven to near madness. But the liberal consensus is depicted as powerless to resist. The authority in the movie is the headmistress, often shown in an office beneath a picture of Vladimir Putin.  She sides with the pupil, noting that even in America, the government allows the teaching of creationism.

The resulting film is a damning indictment of religious extremism and the lack of backbone in liberal society to resist it. It's also a fascinating depiction of an aspect of contemporary Russian society, but poses difficult questions to western viewers about how far such currents are gaining ground in our own countries. I found it to be fascinating, disturbing, compelling, strange and yet too familiar by turns.  Not to be missed. I would also give special praise for the director who manages to take a stage play out of the theatre where so many of them stay and give it a real visual flair and dynamism. 

THE STUDENT has a running time of 118 minutes and is not yet rated.   The movie played Cannes and London 2016 and opened last year in Estonia, Belarus, Russia, Italy, France and Greece. It opened earlier this year in Hungary, Norway, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. It opens in the USA on April 21st and in Poland on May 19th.

LANDLINE

LANDLINE is a laugh out loud relationship comedy set in the mid-90s from direct Gillian Robespierre starring stand-up comedian Jenny Slate (THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE).  It shows us a close knit family dealing with the fall out from two affairs, and focuses heavily on the female relationships and reactions with that.  

The parents are played by Edie Falco (THE SOPRANOS) and John Turturro (THE NIGHT OF).  He's a failed novelist having an affair with a woman who provides the praise his wife fails to.  And while the movie gives his crisis some time, the main focus is on the complicated and moving reaction of his wife.  Of the children, the eldest is Dana (Slate) - a quirky and bubbly girl who has just become engaged to her long-time boyfriend Ben (Jay Duplass) but has an affair with her old flame Nate (Finn Wittrock).  I love that the writers of the film dare to give us in Dana what could be, and for some will be, a fairly dislikable character.  Dana can come across as spoiled and unthinking in her actions.  The writers are trying to make the point that women who have affairs are typically portrayed less sympathetically than men who do - and I get that - but it felt to me as thought the pendulum may have swung too far the other way. After all, if the mother gets a psychologically complex and fully explored reaction to her husband's affair, why can't Ben get more than a montage?  The family is rounded out by simultaneously the wisest and dumbest member of the family - little sister Ali (newcomer Abby Quinn).  She's a bright high school student who often seems the most emotionally mature of all concerned, but she's also making dumb choices in the name of rebellion. I found this section of the film the most fascinating and authentic, and Quinn to be the true star of the film.

LANDLINE is beautifully observed and has a light touch in recreating the 1990s.  It's constantly laugh-out loud funny and has some fantastic sight gags. I had a fantastic time watching despite my reservations of its treatment of the male characters. As I said, I get the need for balance in portrayal of female and male characters, but it just felt as though it had moved too far in the other direction for my liking.

LANDLINE has a running time of 93 minutes and is not yet rated. The movie played Sundance and San Francisco 2017 and opens in the USA on July 21st.

GET OUT

GET OUT is a confident, subversive and visually assured horror movie from debut feature director (and longtime stand-up comedian) Jordan Peele.  It tells the story of a young African American man called Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) whose girlfriend (Allison Williams - GIRLS) takes him home to meet her parents (Catherine Keener and Bradley Whitford) for the first time.  As with all the best horror, there's a deep and subversive commentary on social conditions here.  And in the case of GET OUT, Jordan Peele is trying to tell us that the most insidious form of racism is that is secretly practiced by liberal educated rich white people - the people who vote for Obama and donate to the ACLU but don't actually want their daughters to date black men.  The director also seems to be sending a message to his fellow African Americans - a message warning against complacency about race relations. And this message is embodied in Chris' hilarious best friend Rod, who warns him against going to his girlfriend's parents house in the woods early on, and is instrumental in helping Chris as her parents turn out to be quite literally using the silver spoon of privilege to subjugate him.

This tale of modern day racial slavery is, then, deeply profound and provocative, but this film is also hilarious and frightening by turns.  It's quite astounding to see a debut director handle the tonal shifts with such aplomb, not to mention the impressive production design of the oppressive house and his eye for framing a visually iconic shot. The cast all deserve praise, although it was particularly interesting to see Allison Williams subvert her GIRLS character's preppy self-absorption in this film. But the subversive nature of this film is many faceted. I particularly enjoyed the fact that the most hated of bureaucrats and petty power brokers - the TSA - turn out to be good guys here. 

Ultimately, GET OUT feels like exactly the right movie for our times - in which the happy surprise of Obama's election is over-turned by the surprise victory of Trump - and in the wake of the #blacklivesmatter movement.  It entertains us but also reflects the deep fractures in American society.  And this may well be why the film continues to do so well at the box office.  

GET OUT has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R.  The movie played Sundance 2017 and opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Philippines, Greece, Singapore, Estonia, UK, Ireland, Denmark, Kuwait and France. It opens on April 7th in Indonesia, Lithuania and Norway; on April 20th in Sweden, Hungary, Malaysia and Turkey; on April 28th in Poland; on May 4th in France, Australia, Switzerland, Chile, Germany, Portugal and Finland; on May 11th in Russia; on May 18th in Hong Kong, Italy and Spain; and on June 15th in Brazil.

A partial review of LIFE

I walked into LIFE thinking it would be a GRAVITY like intelligent sci-film with an A-list cast and great visuals.  Actually what I got was a movie far closer to ALIEN - sleek, well-acted, but basically a derivative horror film. And as I don't do well with horror films, I left after the first hour.

Still for what it's worth, the movie rolls like this:  we're in the International Space Station and the action starts in media res.  Ryan Reynolds plays the character he always plays - a wise-ass cocky man who is highly skilled at something and ultimately has a heart of gold. In this case, Ryan/Rory is rescuing a set of soil samples from Mars that a previous astronaut suspected might contains microscopic living cells.  Back on board, Rory hands the soil over to scientist Hugh (Ariyon Bakare - JONATHAN STRANGE & MR NORRELL) who is delighted to discover a micro-organism that he lovingly tends until it grows to the size of a playful little starfish like creature that could sit in the palm of your hand.  Naturally, LIFE is not going to be about how this new alien species and humanity learn to love each other. Very quickly the alien beastie, nicknamed Calvin, goes into hostile survival mode, and all the carefully set-up CDC security measures designed by Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson - THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN).  It escapes out of the lab and into the ship, and the rest is an ALIEN style hunter-prey thriller.  

Of the cast, the Russian and Japanese crewmembers (Olga Dihovichnaya and Hiroyuki Sanada) are actually among the most compelling - with a deeply ethical arc to play out and the emotional resonance of a family back home respectively.  Bakare is also impressive as the biologist who has the most sympathy for Calvin's survival instinct. But Reynolds barely moves beyond self-parody, Ferguson is under-used and Jake Gyllenhaal is under-drawn as the kind of nice, banal, everyman figure.  Nonetheless, this film has the makings of something great given its superb cinematography from DP Seamus McGarvey (NOCTURNAL ANIMALS) and elegantly choreographed space sequences from Director Daniel Espinosa (CHILD 44).  It's just a shame that the basic story is such a predictably derivative version of a justifiably classic space-horror.  For that, we have DEADPOOL writers Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese to blame. 

LIFE has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated R. The movie is on global release everywhere but South Korea, where it opens on April 6th; France, Brazil and Greece where it opens on April 20th and Japan where it opens on July 8th. 

CHiPs

I have a strangely warm-hearted nostalgic recollection of the cheesy 80s motorcycle cop show CHiPs - enough that I ventured into the cinema to watch the ill-reviewed big screen remake starring writer-director Dax Shepard as rookie cop John Baker and Michael Pena as his partner Ponch.  I was expecting a knowing but essentially light-hearted and funny post-modern take on the TV show, in the same vein as the recent 21 JUMP STREET film. But by contrast, CHiPs felt underwritten, crude, and just not as clever.  Worse still, Shepard and Pena are fine on screen together, but they certainly don't have the natural chemistry of Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill. 

So in this version Ponch is the cover name for an FBI agent from Florida who is sent to investigate corruption in the California Highway Patrol that gives the movie its acronym-title.  He's meant to be a sex addict (how funny!) and not that good on a motorbike and is grieving his dead partner.  Ponch is teamed up with middle-aged ex pro biker Baker (Shepard) whose body is so messed up from biker accidents he can barely walk, and who's becoming a cop to win back his bitchy ex-wife (played by Shepard's real wife Kristen Bell). 

The humour is broad and crude and often misses the mark but on the handful of occasions it works this really is a laugh out loud funny movie.  It's also surprisingly violent, in a kind of weirdly arbitrary way - and ventures into social commentary territory that it should probably leave well alone. Still, there are worse films out there.

CHIPS has a running time of 100 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release everywhere except Australia, where it opens on April 6th; Germany where it opens on April 20th; Brazil where it opens on May 4th; and Cambodia, where it opens on August 11th.