ASSASSINATION NATION - Crimbo Binge-watch #5

Sam "Son of Barry" Levinson returns to our screens with the stylish but morally bankrupt political satire slash horror film, ASSASSINATION NATION. It's a film written and directed by a guy who believes he is being truly progressive in calling out slut-shaming and female sexual exploitation but who tragically and apparently without self-awareness is similarly exploitative in how he depicts teenage girls.

The film posits a contemporary American town riddled with social media and MAGA sentiment.  An anonymous hacker starts released people's private emails, photos and texts.  Predictably, the townsfolk respond by becoming a feral mob, and with law enforcement too busy to deal with it, violence ensues. Our heroine, Lily (Odessa Young) is a truly dumb girl who sends explicit pictures of herself to an older man (Joel McHale).  This could've actually been an interesting story if the writer had explored the grooming aspect of this but no, it's just passed over quickly.  She gets exposed and is painted as a whore, and targeted by the mob when they think she's also doing the doxing. I mean, how dumb do you have to be - why would you dox yourself? Anyway, this leads to her and her three best friends being hunted, before they in turn become revenge killers. 

There are occasional moments of brilliance in this film.  Hari Nef is truly amazing playing Bex - a teenage girl who hooks up with the guy she really likes at a party only to have him reject her after sex.  The sheer depth and nuance of emotion on her face after he pulls away is so moving - and what I love is the ambiguity of whether he's just being a classic teenage boy douchebag or whether there's also a layer of him freaking out because she's trans.  Nef is an actress to look out for.

But other than a handful of very truthful moments, what I mostly got from this film is that Levinson wants to tell us the movies he likes - from THE SHINING to KILL BILL - and would probably be better off directing commercials than features. He has an eye for an arresting visual, but doesn't have the balls to sustain his narrative. After all, in the world he posits, the logical outcome is that the two girls pulled out of the house would be gang-raped and left for dead - the trans girl would be strung up - and the protagonist would be shot.  But what's most offensive is that the director seemingly wants to criticise society for sexually objectifying girls while simultaneously really enjoy showing his heroine scantily clad covered in blood. Grow up. 

ASSASSINATION NATION is rated R and has a running time of 108 minutes.  It played the BFI London Film Festival 2018. It also played Sundance and Toronto and was released in the USA and UK earlier this year. 

BLENDED

BLENDED is the latest in the series of harmless rom-coms starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore as Jim and Lauren. In this iteration they play a widower and a divorcee respectively who go on a horrible blind date where he takes her to a Hooters and pays her no attention.  Naturally they are opposites. She's a professional closet organiser and so is portrayed as uptight and overly controlling, with her two boys dressed in smart suits. He's a sports-nut with there girls dressed in athletic wear.  Neither parent is coping particularly well with their kids going through puberty. 

The plot kicks off when Lauren's best friend ends her relationship with Jim's boss freeing up a luxury holiday that the boss had booked. They both get to go with their kids, and while they start of hating each other and protesting that they aren't dating - well, you can guess what happens. 

The humour is very very low key indeed. It's not really a laugh-out-loud movie. But I did, in spite of my in-built cynicism, feel that trademark Sandler-Barrymore warm cuddly feeling and I genuinely liked these people and wanted things to work out. There are no surprises, and I knew I was being manipulated by a script that repeated a tried and trusted formula. But I just couldn't help it.  And you know when I knew this movie was really working?  Terry Crews.  When I first saw his cameo as a South African singer I thought, my god, is this borderline racist?  By the end, I just went with it, and even found it funny. So yes, there's nothing original or pioneering here.  But it works.  It really does.

BLENDED is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 117 minutes. BLENDED is on release in the USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, Puerto Rico, Austria and Canada. It opens on May 30th in Thailand, Bulgaria, India and Vietnam.  It opens in June in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Singapore, Uruguay, Colombia, Cyprus, Pakistan, Belgium, Iceland, Kuwait, the Philippines, the UAE, Australia, Lebanon, Peru, Indonesia, Panama, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Greece, Romania, Taiwan, Mexico, Spain, Finland and Sweden. It opens in July in Italy, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Venezuela, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Brazil and the Netherlands. It opens on August 6th in Egypt, and in Japan on March 11th 2015.

TED - Less Subversive Than It Thinks It Is

Seth Macfarlane of Family Guy fame comes tothe big screen with an R-rated stoner movie that thinks it's radically subversive, but is really just another tired Judd Apatow-esque movie about infantile men wooing back their long-suffering mature girlfriends.  For the life of me I can't figure out why they fall for it.

Mark Wahlberg plays fit loser John Bennett who, as a bullied child wished upon a star and found that his Teddy Ruxspin had come to life.  Fast foward twenty-five years, and Ted is a washed-up former child-celebrity who drinks, does drugs, swears and treats women as cheap sex objects.  John has become a car rental agent and is implausibly dating successful businesswoman Lori (Mila Kunis) - that is until Ted invites round a hooker who shits on the floor of their apartment.  I kid you not. The rest of the film has two threads.  The first sees Ted get a job and move out to allow John to try and impress Lori with his new-found maturity.  The second sees Ted abducted by a psycho (Giovanni Ribisi - typecast), which of course allows a final act redemption as everyone realises just how much they love Ted after all.

It's not that Ted isn't funny.  There are a handful of laugh out loud scenes.  But as ridiculous non-PC subject matter goes, TED isn't in remotely the same league as, say, TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE, BAD SANTA or Armando Ianucci's The Thick Of It. And after a while the nostalgia for 1980s popculture - notably Flash Gordon - became a little tired.  Most of all, the movie just wasn't consistently funny enough for my taste, and when that happens you start questioning the endless gay jokes and crude talk.  Don't get me wrong, I love filthy humour more than most, but the only excuse for that kind of language is that the comedy hits the mark, and TED just didn't.

TED was released in June in Canada and the USA; and in July in Australia, Taiwan, New Zealand, Iceland, Croatia, Portugal, Estonia, Romania and Slovenia. It was released earlier this month in the UK, Czech Republic, Germany, Russia, Bulgaria, Israel Finland, Norway and Spain. It opens this weekend in Lithuania.  It opens next weekend in Greece, Hungary and South Africa. Ted opens on September 6th in Argentina, Denmark, Singapore and Poland; on September 14th in the Netherlands and Mexico; on September 21st in Brazil and Turkey; on September 28th in Hong Kong and Colombia; on October 4th in Sweden and Italy and on October 10th in Belgium and France. 

London Film Fest Day 13 - THE INFORMANT!

THE INFORMANT! is perhaps the most enjoyable film that Steven Soderbergh has ever made. It’s clever and accomplished but wears its high production values lightly. It’s a story as playful and charming and roguish as its protagonist, Mark Whitacre, a man that we laugh at while laughing with. Whitacre was a successful executive at a corn-products manufacturer with a somewhat Walter Mitty-ish hold on the truth. Who knows why he embezzled money? He was making a good living after all. And worse still, if you were embezzling money, would you really make up stories of corporate espionage, attracting the attention of the FBI? Even more ludicrously, would you become an FBI insider, making tapes for the FBI indicting your firm of an international price-fixing conspiracy? Whitacre did all this and more. In his own mind he was a character in a John Grisham or Michael Crichton novel, and the tongue-in-cheek 70s serial score hints at the fact that this is a man who really is living in a world inspired by popular culture. He’s a hero in his own mind, much like the other real life lost soul Josh Harris in Ondi Timoner’s documentary WE LIVE IN PUBLIC. Soderbergh’s movie is a success because it knows just what balance between mockery and empathy to sustain, and because Matt Damon is superb in making this rather bizarre and exasperating guy likeable. After all, as Soderbergh chooses to tell it, we spend the entire movie inside Whitacre’s head, listening to his banal, bizarre stream of consciousness. This device could’ve been intensely irritating and it’s credit to the script and Damon that in fact, it’s very funny and also rather touching. It reminded me a bit of his performance as Tom Ripley - an altogether more sinister character - but again, someone who has a tenuous grasp on reality. You spend the movie knowing Ripley is a psychopath but still, the tragedy of his self-created prison is touching. THE INSIDER! is not an entire success, however, The momentum and sheer fun of the first half, as we watch Whitacre live out his dream as an FBI spy, fade as we enter the second half, and the lies are exposed. I felt it could’ve been trimmed down to a neat and zippy 90 minutes. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed the film and was delighted to have finally found a Soderbergh film to admire after a string of over-inflated pretentious flicks that left me cold.

THE INFORMANT! played Venice and Toronto 2009. It opened in September in Canada, Italy, the USA, Spain and France and in October in Greece, Brazil, Sweden, New Zealand and South Africa. It opens later this month in Finland, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Iceland and Norway. It opens on November 5th in the Czech Republic, Germany, Russia and the Ukraine. It opens on November 20th in Belgium, Slovakia, Lithuania, and the UK. It opens on November 27th in Estonia and on December 3rd in Australia.