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Reviews
Miss You Already (2015)
A different kind of tearjerker
Alarm bells start ringing very early on in "Miss You Already". Alarm bells that anyone who has seen "Beaches" will immediately recognise. Like that film it follows two best friends who have known each other since childhood. Their dynamic - one a dominant bohemian personality, the other straight laced and endlessly compliant - is also quite similar but it only takes a short while for the bells to be silenced as the film gradually establishes its own identity.
Milly is a successful P.R. woman who has a gorgeous husband and two adorable kids. Her life has been one of extroversion and adventure. Her best friend Jen has gone along for the ride, always there to help pick up the pieces when things go wrong. After Milly is diagnosed with breast cancer she leans on Jen more than ever before. This creates friction between Jen and her husband Jago who have been trying, for some time, to get pregnant.
When Milly has to go for chemotherapy Jen accompanies her. When she has to shave her head and pick out a wig Jen is there. Even when she starts going off the rails and acting irresponsibly Jen still turns up no matter what else might be going on in her own life. Their bond is beyond simple camaraderie. They are, in a way, the great loves of each other's lives.
What makes the film itself stand out from the crowd is the fact that it eschews the conventional weepie structure in an attempt to fashion something that is genuinely poignant rather than a contrived narrative that overtly tries to jerk tears. The part where Milly tells her kids she has cancer is one such moment. Rather than mine it for every grain of saccharine Milly presents her plight as if she is pitching to a new client thus assuaging her children's fears.
The director Catherine Hardwicke also employs unorthodox framing and camera-work to heighten moments of intimacy and panic. She also treats the subject of cancer differently. Milly is not ennobled by her cancer. It terrifies her and prompts her regression to the darker corners of her egotism until she becomes, as Jen calls her, a "cancer bully". As her life fragments she finds it more and more difficult to cling on to who she was before hearing the diagnosis. She tries to take refuge in alcohol and sex but in doing so only serves to alienate Jen who grows more and more impatient with her.
This impatience as juxtaposed against her concern for her best friend is what gives the film its bite. Disease can turn the person you love into a selfish child and love can sometimes mutate into bitterness in the wake of this transformation.
Toni Collette, as she always does, gives a towering performance here as Milly and while the final act sees the film slightly succumb to the more traditional beats of the weepie it is nonetheless an interesting attempt to do things differently.
Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)
Miss
A sequel to an adaptation of a video game. To lovers of decent film everywhere this sentence is a linguistic klaxon that screams "Run fast, run far, do not turn back". Think about it for a second. Think about films like "Max Payne", "Prince of Persia", "Tomb Raider" and, of course, the supremely execrable "Mortal Kombat". This is where big studio conservatism and the attendant franchise mania has gotten us - they'll make anything if they think there's a built-in audience.
What's probably most surprising here is the cast. Have a look at the names. This isn't a bunch of desperate, talentless, straight-to-DVD chancers. They've all proved themselves to be more than capable in the past. And yet for some reason they've all ended up here together; each and every one begrimed by the woefulness of this "movie".
The plot, and I'm using that word in its loosest possible sense, deals with a genetically engineered assassin who is attempting to track down Katia, the daughter of the man who genetically engineered him. There's a bit of a problem though because an organization called Syndicate International (they're an international syndicate you see) are after her too and they've sent John Smith, a man with sub-dermal titanium armour (no, I'm serious), out to make sure they get to her first.
So, there you have it. What follows is basically lots of gunplay and car chases and explosions and fighting, the usual ingredients of your standard action movie. The only problem is that the director doesn't seem to understand how to direct his material. You can forgive the action genre most foibles as long as the big set pieces are decent but the problem here is that every single scene is directed like an action scene.
Being close to tranquilised by boredom I found myself counting the amount of cuts in certain shots to stay lucid. There are 20 cuts to show Katia walking into a metro station. There are nearly 15 to show Agent 47 looking at his computer. When every non-action scene is cut and shot like an action scene there is no discernible change in momentum when the real action arrives thus robbing it of energy.
A boring action movie is akin to a bland curry or an esoteric pantomime and when every fight scene is rendered incomprehensible thanks to yet another plethora of quick cuts and epileptic camera-work you quickly lose any sympathy you might have had in the first place. The fact that its barely over an hour and a half long should it make it more tolerable but somehow all that quick-cutting and frantic editing produce a time dilation effect so that a third of the way through you're already praying for the end.
Fantastic Four (2015)
Fantastically Misunderstood
I'm a little flabbergasted by the amount of chagrin this film has engendered. Going in I was expecting an unmitigated disaster comparable to "The Happening" but instead I got one of the most interesting Marvel movies released so far.
This a genuinely daring reboot, a film willing to explore the horror of having your body irreparably altered due to a terrible mistake. Pain and guilt and the reconciliation of these emotions are at the heart of this film and it's not often you can say that about a comic book adaptation.
After building what he thinks is a teleporter wunderkind Reed Richards is swiftly enlisted into the Baxter Institute by Dr. Franklin Storm after they meet at a science fair. Storm explains he has actually forged an inter-dimensional transporter and together with Storm's children, Sue and Johnny, and irascible former employee Victor they build a device that can facilitate the transportation of living matter to the new dimension.
During a drunken celebration of their achievement Victor slyly inveigles Reed and Johnny into joining him as the first human party to explore the new world. Reed calls on his old friend Ben who has supported him since they were children and together they venture forth into a planet that resembles a nascent Earth. Victor is entranced by an energy pocket and places his hand inside causing tectonic activity and eruptions. Sue realises what they are up to just in time to save them but she is caught in an explosion when they return.
What follows is a completely different take on the acquisition of "powers" than any ever before portrayed in the Marvel Universe. The doleful depiction of Ben ("The Thing") is both poignant and resonant. Reed's guilt, Sue's paranoia and Johnny's eagerness to "become" a weapon are equally jarring.
This is not a flawless film but it is memorable, no more so when Victor returns as a villain of pure monomaniacal malice. Modern cinema needs people like Josh Trank. I pray this won't be his last shot at big-budget movie-making.