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Review | Ralph Breaks the Internet

/ Harrison Abbott / Leave a comment

Despite a couple of flaws, this superior sequel is overflowing with charm.

Review | Coco

/ Harrison Abbott / Leave a comment

Harrison reviews Coco (whilst stubbornly refusing to say ” Día de los Muertos” out of fear of mispronunciation), explains the voting habits of the Academy AND gives us an insight into his cold, unfeeling soul. All in just under 10 minutes!

14. A Pirates Franchise Ain’t For Me

/ Reel Opinions / Leave a comment

Jack and Harrison draw blood from a stone by somehow pulling off a full length talk about Salazar’s Dead Men Tell No Revenge Tales.

 

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Reel Opinions is a UK based film review group that covers just about anything. From reviews of terrible movies to interviews with casts and directors Reel Opinions covers everything we can be bothered to make.

 

Review | The BFG

/ Harrison Abbott / Leave a comment

I want to open this review with a small disclaimer. You see, as is no-doubt the case for many, Steven Spielberg is the person who made me fall in love with films. Indeed, my earliest memory is of watching Jurassic Park on VHS (at least I assume it was on VHS, it is a very early memory) and since then almost every image from that film has been permanently ingrained on my mind, fuelling my subsequent passion for cinema, blockbusters, and also my unhealthy obsession with dinosaurs. I still really like all three of those things.

Anyway my point is, like every fanboy, I love Spielberg. Of course he’s recently become a bit hit-and-miss, and since the dawn of 21st century he’s only directed a handful of truly great films. Still, even the weakest Spielberg films have something worth championing and shouting about, yes, even the one with Shia LaBeouf and the monkeys

So when I say that The BFG probably sits towards the lower end of his filmography, I mean that as a very faint criticism. While his latest effort may lack the strange, indefinable magic that is so central to E.T, or the sense of wonder that Jurassic Park and Close Encounters have in spades, it is still a charming, entertaining and thoroughly likeable film.

For those who don’t know, it tells the story of Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) a young orphan from London who is captured by the titular BFG and taken off to giant’s country. There, Sophie bonds with the giant (played by Mark Rylance), learning about his way of life, the food that he eats, and his career as a dream catcher.

However, it soon transpires that the BFG is comparatively approachable for a giant, and that he’s also not that big. You see there are far larger, and far nastier giants out there. These giants (lead by Bill Hader and Jemaine Clement) don’t share the BFG’s vegetarian lifestyle, and are always on the lookout for any stray humans to eat. They thus treat the BFG with contempt and cruelty, viewing him as a runt and a soft-hearted disgrace to giantkind. With the help of Sophie however, the BFG plots to finally rid himself of the bullies and simultaneously show the world that not all giants are cannibalistic monsters after all.

It’s a simple story, yet it’s also one that takes a frustratingly long time to get going. I never thought that an adventure story could contain so much sitting around doing nothing. For almost all of the first act, we just watch the BFG and Sophie go through a seemingly endless series of fairly dull conversations. Of course, the whole crux of the story is meant to be their relationship, but did it need to be developed in such a mundane way?

In terms of the Spielbergian oeuvre, E.T is the most obvious reference point here, and it feels more than fair to compare the two. I bring this up, because in that film Elliott and E.T’s relationship is established and developed far more economically and much more entertainingly, through the use of visual storytelling, comedic sequences (like the one where the extraterrestrial gets drunk) and, you know, actual stuff happening that enhances their bond. Here, we just listen to plodding exposition over and over again, with little sense of excitement or narrative progression.

The relationship would have been much more engaging and believable if it developed over the course of an adventure, rather than via an hour of talking before the story could properly begin. Luckily, when the plot genuinely sets in motion, most of this can be forgiven. In the latter half of the film there’s much more of Spielberg’s signature creativity on display. Two set-pieces in particular stand out, one involving the villainous giants searching for Sophie in the BFG’s home, and the other simply revolving around the pair chasing after multi-coloured wisps of light. The former feels like an inventive and energetic cartoon, one which uses the environment in imaginative and dynamic ways. Meanwhile, the light-show sequence, in which the BFG introduces Sophie to the act of dreams catching, manages to make you feel far more connected to the characters than any of the preceding dialogue scenes do. Make no mistake, there’s good stuff here. In fact, there’s even a bit towards the end that actually has a funny fart joke. Yes, fart jokes can be good!

It’s very tempting to say that Mark Rylance is the MVP here, and that’s probably because that is the case. His performance hits every necessary beat. It’s funny when it’s supposed to be, it’s heartwarming when it’s supposed to be, and it’s consistently endearing. Moreover, the physicality of the giant is realized really well. It’s a performance that really demonstrates what the motion-capture process can bring to a character, as it provides a sense of spontaneity, with the giant’s body language and mannerisms being particularly distinct and lifelike. As an achievement in both technology and acting, the BFG himself is a triumph. It also helps that he is one of the least uncanny CGI characters that I’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately, I can’t quite say the same thing about Sophie. Criticising a child’s performance can often feel a little mean and unfair, they’re just kids after all. Still, Barnhill’s Sophie is really quite annoying, which is odd, because delivering authentic child characters is one of Spielberg’s specialities. It may be lazy to conjure up the looming specter of E.T once again, but that film managed to create child characters that felt truly grounded and believable. There, the children’s interactions never once felt scripted or staged, instead they came across like real, genuine kids just acting and behaving as they normally would. The performances felt much more sophisticated and nuanced, whereas here Sophie feels less like a character that happens to be a kid, and more like a traditional child archetype.

What I mean is that she doesn’t really behave like a child, but instead like an adult’s perception of what a child should be. She lacks any of the detailed behavioural quirks that make kids feel real in movies. It just appears too much like a performance. It’s hard to tell if it the problem lies with Barnhill, or with her character, because honestly she doesn’t have that much to work with. Sophie is just one of those irritating movie kids that’s meant to be endearingly confident, but is instead obnoxious and a little-too perfect. Elliot was flawed. Elliot had weaknesses. He got scared. He got upset. In stark contrast, Sophie is an idyllic angel child who never seems to mess up or show any hint of vulnerability. Come to think of it, even when she’s in mortal peril she barely reacts at all.

My other big criticism is one that I never expected to be making. I’m genuinely shocked that I’m saying this, but I didn’t like the score at all. John Williams is one of my heroes. He has been instrumental to many of the cinematic moments that shaped not only my childhood, but also my later life too. He is a genius, and is unrivalled in the realm of film scoring. And while I can’t expect him to deliver Jaws levels of brilliance every time, I have to say I expected more than this. It just felt like he filled the soundtrack entirely with cues that were rejected from Harry Potter. I’ve listened to it a few times now and there’s one or two motifs that I can pick up, but most of it is really unmemorable and actually vaguely annoying. It’s repetitive and generic whimsical music, and even worse, it never really goes away. It’s almost constantly there and I honestly found it to be quite grating. Still, it’s received a lot of critical praise, which is great. I’m always happy when composers get name-checked and referenced, but I just personally didn’t feel like it was warranted this time.

Overall, The BFG has it’s moments, particularly in the latter half when the actual adventure begins. It also contains its fair share of visual flourishes. Say what you want about Spielberg, but the man knows how to create some truly impressive images when he puts its mind to it, and the dream catching sequences certainly evidence this talent. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel like that key spark was missing. I want to reiterate, I’m not saying every family film needs to be E.T, but I do feel like a good 40 minutes of this was fairly boring and I really couldn’t get attached to Sophie at all.

Yet despite these ostensibly damning criticisms, I would ultimately recommend The BFG, if nothing else because the titular giant  himself is a great creation brought to the screen by a superb performance and an expert technical team. As I said, even lower-tier Spielberg is still Spielberg.

RATING: 6/10 

The BFG (2016) is directed by Steven Spielberg and is distributed in the the UK by Walt Disney Studios, Certificate PG.

Review | The Good Dinosaur

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Harrison and Matt look at the other Pixar film that came out this year.

Transcription below.

Transcript

Harrison: Okay, so now me and Matt are going to be reviewing The Good Dinosaur.  Yay! So, The Good Dinosaur has been notoriously plagued by production problems; that was alliteration. They go quite a long way back, we’re talking years not like months, and I kinda want to avoid talking about that too much because I don’t know the details and I can’t really speculate on how it affected the film. I don’t know for sure. This background is there, it’s had production problems, but now it’s here – and all we can definitely say is it’s the second Pixar film release this year and pretty much definitely the weakest.
Matt: Yeah, definitely.
Harrison: That’s true, but that’s not to say it’s bad. So the plot, it’s basically a mash-up of Finding Nemo and Ice Age, if you think about it, because for a start it’s about a human boy who travels with a prehistoric creature to them both to find their way home. That’s Ice Age. More or less the same. As for Finding Nemo you got the very similar structure to Finding Nemo because it’s this journey and along the way they meet these secondary characters in the same way that you know they meet the turtles in Finding Nemo or the sharks in Finding Nemo, and it’s a coming-of-age story about a dinosaur called Arlo, who is the titular good dinosaur, and it’s a coming-of-age story about him learning to like make his mark on the world and it’s a journey. A journey for him to find his home. What did you think?
Matt: I thought it was, I want to say I was disappointed by it but it was more that it did exactly what I thought it would do, where it was ok. Which is, I suppose it’s not bad thing. I thought what you were saying about the plot and about the Finding Nemo thing, I thought that kind of similarity to other films was something that kind of popped up quite a lot in it. There were lots of bits to it that were just kind of rewritten from other films. Like the best scene in the film, pretty much, is this kind of moment

of like voiceless emotion, there’s no talking and it’s really powerful… but it’s basically just Wall-E. It’s basically just that whole idea.
Harrison: Yeah, they do. I mean there’s you no scene in Wall-E that’s the same, but it’s very Wall-E-esque.  I can see what you mean. Yeah the biggest problem with it is that, if you think of Pixar in their golden years, is that they were kind of champions of originality and doing these fresh innovative things, and this just feels like if I didn’t know it was Pixar I would have thought it was from one of the Pixar imitators.
Matt: Yeah.
Harrison: It looks beautiful, or half of it looks beautiful. The backgrounds are rendered in this really photorealistic way, they

look like they could be live-action Would you agree with that? Particularly even like the water is probably the best animated water I’ve ever seen, but then they place in this photo realistic environment – very cartoonish character models. Which I was saying, and I know a lot of people said this so I don’t want to harp on about it too much, but I thought it was a little jarring. You weren’t that bothered by it were you?
Matt: It didn’t add anything to the film, the juxtaposition but it didn’t take anything for me.
Harrison: I just kind of think that they should have picked one, like even if it was to pick the cartoonish route and have the backgrounds cartoonish as well, just so it’s consistent. Because I would frequently be like looking at these amazing backdrops in a shot that was just a landscape shot, and then a character would walk into it and it would really take me out of it for a second. To come back to what you talked about with the dialogue-less moment. All of the best moments in the film I think were

dialogue-less, be they emotional or the comedic moments. The best comedic moments were the physical comedy moments rather than the ones that relied

on dialogue, and I don’t think it’s necessarily the case that Pixar have to

make films that don’t have dialogue, but I just think the dialogue

wasn’t up to scratch here as much as the visuals were at times. The secondary characters are all cool. I think that’s like a thing Pixar do well, they’ve always got really good secondary characters, and some of them here are really good. There’s a triceratops with parrots and birds on him and… he was funny, I liked him. There are the T-Rex’s but they’re just the Sharks from Finding Nemo.
Matt: But not as good.
Harrison: Yeah, exactly.
Matt: Characterless, shallow.
Harrison: One of my problems was that I didn’t like Arlo. I thought he was really annoying and whiny. He never did anything but whine and I found him very difficult to sympathize with after a point because all he ever did was make things worse and complain.
Matt: Yeah, well to retouch for the third time on the voiceless, I think Spot was the best character, maybe because he was voiceless so they were forced to be more creative. In the way that they made him express himself.
Harrison: As we were saying the films about Arlo, the dinosaur, and Spot’s the little boy that he takes with him and the kind of reverse the “boy and his dog” formula,  because in this case the dinosaur is the humanized one and Spot’s like a dog, he acts like a dog. This is all because a meteor missed Earth and dinosaurs have been allowed to evolve to the point where they run farms and things, which took me a long time to kind of understand why they were running farms and then I remembered it’s because the meteor missed and they’ve evolved to the point where they’re like taking part in agriculture – and thought it was really weird and I kept forgetting it all the way through the film. I was like “why are the dinosaurs like ranches? Why are they herding cattle? Why are cows around? Or whatever they were, wildebeest?
Matt: Bison.
Harrison: Bison, yeah. Then I remembered that it’s because we’re in this “different world”, that history is changed.


Matt: I quite liked all that stuff I thought it was quite interesting.
Harrison: Yeah it was good, I just kept forgetting. Like, it made the point at the beginning and then never really touched on it again and I just forgot. It’s also a little – because it’s kind of cartoonish and we said compared to some of Pixar’s other films, almost babyish?
Matt: Yeah


Harrison: – and then there are these moments of really bizarre darkness, ever so occasionally.
Matt: Yeah it’s a strange juxtaposition. For the most part it’s quite a childish film, it’s much more of a film for kids than most Pixar films, and then every now and then you have… like there’s a scene where they eat these rotten peaches on the floor-
Harrison: That bit is surreal.

Matt: – and they get really drunk or really high, and have a hallucination scene.

Harrison: It’s intense!
Matt: They swap heads and stuff…
Harrison: Doesn’t one of them like open their mouth and the dinosaurs start coming out of his mouth?!
Matt: It was a really funny scene, but I can imagine that you take a child to it and it would kind of break the child a little bit…
Harrison: There’s like heads being torn off of living creatures and things, but then it was back to being quite sickly cute.
Matt: Yeah, yeah there’s quite a bit of violence to it. You get this cute little creature that they saved from a log… and then eat him… tear him

apart. It’s literally like a nature documentary where they’re fighting over the little thing.
Harrison: – and it is kind of, it’s like a person. It has like a human personality, it’s not just an animal, so it’s quite disturbing. Should we go to ratings? Do you wanna go first?
Matt: I think I did I really like the visuals and even though the story wasn’t very original, it wasn’t bad. I don’t think there was anything particularly bad about the film. So I think I’ll probably go for a 7.

 

Harrison: Ok, yeah, I agree with that in the sense that there’s no element of it I think “that was really really bad.” It’s just nothing about it was really really good apart from the odd moment. I also thought that the narrative just kept starting and stopping, it’s very episodic because of the way that it’s just a journey, so I’d give it a six I think. Because, you know, it’s not Inside Out and I think it’s always going to be remembered as the film that was not Inside Out in the year that Inside Out came out. Cool.