Review: Here

Robert Zemeckis' movie Here is based on Richard McGuire's graphic novel Here, and you only have to be familiar with the work of one of them to wonder how the heck this is going to work. Shock twist: it doesn't, and sad to say the blame lies pretty much entirely on the Zemeckis side of the ledger, because on the rare occasions when he seems to realise he can use the substance and not just the surface of McGuire's work there are glimmers of a worthwhile experience.

Here (the novel) uses the grammar of the comic book - panels on a page - to unfold an experience that remains fixed in space while roaming freely in time. Each page shows the exact same view onto the world, presented randomly from the dawn of time to the distant future as it goes from wilderness to wasteland to jungle to a suburban lounge room and back. Smaller inset panels show other points in time - a person in the 1950's is seemingly handing a drink to someone there decades later while around them a primeval forest thrives, and so on as all of time is layered before us.

How does this work as a movie? Not well; Zemeckis does use the device of panels as windows into different times, but mostly just as a way to transition from scene to scene. The real power of McGuire's book is the way events and situations echo across time, revealing patterns and interactions even as the human scale shrinks down to nothing. Here (the movie) isn't interested in that.

Instead, we're mostly shown moments in the lives of the people living in the house. Or the time before it: there's a bit of dinosaur versus meteor action early on, and both a Native American couple and the residents (Ben Franklin's son!) of the colonial-era mansion across the road get a few scenes as they travel to and fro. But the main focus is on two generations of the one family, led by WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and then his son Richard (Tom Hanks) and wife Margaret (Robin Wright).

Aside from folksy sayings like "time flies" and "there's no place like home", there's not a lot of substance in their stories (suburban life is tough, especially when you're a cliche), and the smaller lives around them don't add much. It seems the house was once owned by the inventor of the La-Z-Boy Recliner Chair, but said chairs play no part in future events (though a new couch and a fold-out bed do).

The rare moment where something does echo across time - the pandemics of 1919 and 2020, for one - provide a brief window into a much more memorable film. Emphasis on brief: it seems much more likely that the driving force for Zemeckis here was the requirement to digitally de-age his cast to cover their decades of puttering around the lounge. The technology used is competent.

Here (the movie) is surprisingly busy - that lounge room sees strokes, funerals, bedridden invalids, sex scenes and a lot more - and yet resoundingly hollow. It tells a handful of cloying, uninspired stories using a conceit that constantly hammers home the small and inconsequential nature of our lives. 

It wants to be a warm look at connection over the years. Instead, its centuries-spanning gaze into a structure that outlasts and erases all who dwell within tells us the opposite: trying to slap a feel good ending onto the march of time is both futile and pointless. 

Sadly for Here, that's not just a matter of perspective.

- Anthony Morris

 

Review: Saturday Night

There's plenty of interesting and exciting facts about the early days of Saturday Night Live. The problem with Saturday Night is that it packs them all into the 90 minutes before the first episode went to air. It's not that it all becomes a bit much, it's that when you put them all right next to each other... well, maybe being a bit much really is the problem.

It's 90 minutes before the first ever episode of Saturday Night (the Live was added later) and Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) the man behind it all, is flailing. Scripts are being worked on, sets are being built, the crew aren't exactly helping, the cast are all over the place, and management - which may very well have only said yes as part of a wider power play - are wandering around considering whether they should pull the plug. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

There's a lot to like here. Director Jason Reitman (who co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan) keeps things moving at a snappy pace, shifting seamlessly from character to character, subplot to subplot in a way that suggests bedlam but never lets the viewer get (too) lost.

The cast are pretty much all note-perfect. Stand-outs include Rachel Sennott as Michaels' wife Rosie, who's having an open affair with Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien), and Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris, who feels his theatre background (and race) makes him an outcast (he's right). Everyone else either looks enough like their characters to keep things feeling authentic without getting into CGI creepiness, or is chief writer Michael O'Donoghue (Tommy Dewey), who it's nice to see making many of his notoriously offensive one-liners.

Reitman also gets many of the smaller details right. Most of the characters (and the conflicts) are accurately, if briefly, sketched - though John Belushi (Matt Wood) attacked Bill Murray (not in this film), not Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith). Weaving in various rehearsals and sound checks allows for most of the first episode's classic moments to make an appearance, even if they're also a reminder that comedy has changed a lot since 1975 (don't worry, there's plenty of cutaways to people laughing hysterically at these bits).  

But even if you know nothing at all about Saturday Night Live, it's not hard to see that something's off. The bad guys here are a): manual workers who don't want to work outside of their positions, b): Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets, c): NBC's David Tibet (Willem Dafoe), who looks at this obvious train wreck and is like "yeah, we need a backup plan here", d) host George Carlin (Matthew Rhys), who also suspects the wheels are coming off, and e): Milton Berle's penis. Reitman's swimming against the tide of history on all counts.

And while LaBelle gives an excellent performance, making Lorne Michaels the hero of your story is definitely, as they say, a choice. After all, SNL was the end of a comedic era, not the beginning: pretty much everyone involved already had solid track records (the writers on National Lampoon; most of the cast had worked together on The National Lampoon Radio Hour). 

Saturday Night ends up being a salute to Michaels' drive and vision as he overcomes a wide range of obstacles that the film created to make things seem more dramatic. It wants to applaud a comedic visionary who blazed a trail people still follow today; it ends up being a high five to middle management, a man whose real skill lies in getting everyone else to think he's irreplaceable. 

Looks like he's still got it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Hellboy: The Crooked Man

As a comic, Hellboy has been running for 30-odd years now under the guidance of his creator, Mike Mignola. Things have changed a lot for the demon fated to destroy the world, and his adventures have grown creepier and closer to folklore than they were back when he was punching out Nazis and giant monsters.

The year is 1959 (well before any of the previous Hellboy films) and the chain smoking, tough talking good guy demon (Jack Kesy ) and a couple of government sidekicks are taking a demonically possessed funnelweb spider back to the lab via train. Thinks go wrong, not all the sidekicks survive, and it's left to Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) to track down the giant spider through the Appalachian mountains. That's not all they find.

Supposedly a big part of the reason why Guillermo del Toro (director of the first two Hellboy films) didn't get to make his idea of a third was because Mignola wanted to take the character back to his roots; that's definitely one way to look at Hellboy: The Crooked Man (which is specifically based on a three-issue run of the comic).

While Hellboy himself remains the same character here, this is a pretty big pivot to small scale horror for the big screen version, in ways that those looking for pulp action might find off-putting. There's no evil end-of-the-world cult or giant monsters or Nazi hold-outs to punch here: ok, there are a few zombies at one point. But this is much more about a creeping sense of dread, of people stumbling into a place that's gone rotten with bad magic.

A lot of the small moments are memorably creepy. There's a witch who leaves her skin behind to roam the woods as a raccoon; another witch rides a horse that turns out to be someone's enslaved father. The main evil haunting the mountain is called The Crooked Man, a walking hanged corpse who sells souls to the Devil for a cent apiece in an attempt to rebuild his long gone fortune.

The main plot is straightforward: Hellboy and Song team up with newly returned local Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) to purge the area of evil, which involves battling the local population (now basically all witches) and defeating The Crooked Man. But for long stretches, it's the kind of story where unsettling things just happen. 

There's asides explaining how to make witchballs and summon up a demon, hints of portals and Lovecraftian monsters, a number of dream sequences featuring Hellboy's mother, a grim joke or two, and at least one character dies for (again, memorably creepy) reasons that are never quite explained... which is kind of the point. They've stumbled into a place where bad things just happen, and a certain dream-like quality is to be expected.

Still, there are also points where this doesn't quite work, rough edges that feel more the result of an uneven script (co-written by Mignola himself) and low budget than firm intentions. Director Brian Taylor (the Crank films, the second, more demented Ghost Rider movie) does a decent job of balancing the unsettling mood with some high energy weirdness (there's the occasional Evil Dead vibe to proceedings), but the whole thing never fully comes together like it should.

If this film manages to chart a new direction for Hellboy, smaller in scope but bigger in strangeness, that wouldn't be such a bad thing. As the film handling the pivot, this struggles to straddle two worlds; it's those memorable moments that stand out, like pennies scattered on an old floor.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Subservience

If you're the kind of person who watches a lot of direct-to-streaming movies, you'll have noticed that Megan Fox is slowly becoming a name you can trust when it comes to halfway decent trash viewing. Not everything she's in is gold standard, but if she can make a decent film out of a story about a sexy nanny who sleeps with the boss then tries to replace the wife - only here the nanny is a robot - then she's doing something right.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a construction foreman who must be making a decent living, because when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a pre-sexy times heart attack he's quickly off down to the robot department store to purchase a helper. Fortunately for him, his younger daughter takes a liking to Alice (Fox) and not one of the many non-hot models that are no doubt flying off the showroom floor.

Horror movies about AI tend to fall into two categories. The first is "oh no, our house is possessed", where an AI assistant or app or doll uses the power of AI to do a bunch of evil murdery stuff - basically, the AI is non human. The second is "oh no, our maid / butler / sexbot is possessed", where a human is playing the murdery AI. And so it goes with Subservience.

Those films are usually less interesting because it's basically just an evil person and we know the kinds of things they can do, but Subservience pulls out a few tricks to keep the interest levels up. Alice isn't intrinsically evil, for one: Nick's poor programming leaves her fixated on him (bad move when there are other family members) and enables her to fully commit to her forbidden love. Also, Nick? Bit of a dick.

Not only does he have sex with Alice, he then does the whole "it was a mistake, we can never do that again" thing, turning this for maybe fifteen minutes or so into the robot version of Fatal Attraction. Also, unlike most movies of this stripe, having home robots is not a brand new thing. As the movie goes on we see more and more how they're reshaping the world.

For one, "construction worker" isn't really a viable career when your boss can just rent some super strong robots. Suddenly Nick's loyalties are torn between his workmates on the chopping block and bringing in a steady income (again, he's kind of a dick). 

Somewhat surprisingly, this is not one of the many, many recent films where having to pay medical bills forces our lead into a morally dubious corner. This is surprising because for the first 20 minutes or so you'd be forgiven for thinking Maggie (who is nowhere to be seen) was dead, and then when Nick (the dick) does finally visit her we discover she's in dire need of a transplant. Presumably hospital costs are down because yes, robots are doing all the heavy lifting there too. 

While the focus remains on Alice's descent into murderous evil, all these background details gradually build up, creating a wider sense of unease. If robots are all around us doing all the work - as you'd expect they would - and they can turn nasty like Alice, then everyone is in a lot of trouble.

So while this does deliver the usual "I'm doing this insane murdery thing for your own good" thrills, there's just enough going on around the edges - plus decent performances from Fox and Zima - to keep it from feeling like it's just going through the motions. 

In the end it's still more of the same, and how much you get out of this will depend a lot on a): your interest in sexy robots and b): your interest in evil robots. But within those parameters, this does manage a few memorable moments: is letting robots take care of humans ever going to be a good idea?

- Anthony Morris

Review: My Old Ass

Stories where younger and older versions of someone meet are usually focused on the older person. They're the ones with wisdom (and stock tips) to impart; young folks are usually too busy living for today to want to leap into the future and meet their older selves. My Old Ass says "too bad, here's your older self, deal with it"; thankfully the rest of the movie is not someone yelling "you're not my real future self" and slamming their bedroom door.

Elliot (Maisy Stella) is all set for college and looking forward to the bright future (and college girls) that awaits. But first there's a painful summer to be spent on the family farm being annoyed by pretty much everything that isn't hanging out with her friends. Then one night after taking a lot of mushrooms with her buddies, the usual group hang now includes a 39 year old (Aubrey Plaza) who announces "I'm you dude".

Turns out she hasn't been sent back in time to save her younger self from a killer robot, but instead to hand out some basic wisdom: appreciate her family, and stay away from a boy named Chad. It's not a long visit, but she does leave behind a contact in Elliot's phone: My Old Ass.

No surprise then that when Chad (Percy Hynes White) does show up, there's an instant connection. Which is a bit confusing for Elliot, who's only been into women before now. Also, her older self is not one for giving out any big details about the future (aside from the fact she clearly has some regrets), so exactly why he's to be avoided is a mystery. Which is kind of the point.

This is a tightly packed (at barely 90 minutes) coming-of-age story that's not afraid to keep the stakes low. Having her older self lurking around - and seemingly still figuring stuff out - makes it clear that growing up is an ongoing condition. Whatever choices she makes, right or wrong, there's going to be a lot more choices after that.

The performances are a delight, with newcomer Stella and Plaza sharing an energy that makes their connection totally convincing. Writer / director Megan Park really nails the "last summer before everything changed" vibe of waiting to ditch small town life and head off to higher education (though the farm and local lake look gorgeous), and Stella is totally convincing as a bubbly teen having fun living a low-stakes life.

My Old Ass is pretty slight, but the film's lightweight nature is the point. Time does go by fast, and small decisions can linger. Appreciating what you have? That might not be a bad thing.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Uglies

Is Uglies a real movie? At barely 90 minutes (before credits), it scrapes in time-wise; director McG used to make real movies, but that was a while ago. It's available on Netflix, which features things that are definitely movies, and also a lot of things that are definitely not movies. Let's put it another way then: is Uglies a serious movie worthy of serious consideration, or just an excuse for some cool hoverboard action?

The central premise of Uglies is that a few hundred years into the future, a series of disasters have driven humanity's survivors to embrace the idea that the only way to avoid conflict is to make everyone roughly as hot as the best-looking person on some sexy sex-based reality show. If this seems stupid to you, don't worry: there's an actual in-movie reason why humanity has (mostly) fallen for this, which largely boils down to "we only have to convince people this silly idea works until they're 16".

Tally Youngblood (Joey King) has bought into the system 100%. The only drawback as far as she can see is that her platonic bestie Peris (Chase Stokes) gets to have an extreme makeover and go live in the party city across the river a few months before her. But when he doesn't get in touch after his touch-up like he promised, she sneaks over to see how the other half live - and realises that maybe partying all night is the kind of thing only vapid airheads are totally into.

Fortunately her new bestie Shay (Brianne Tju) lets her know about the outdoor rebels led by David (Keith Powers), and while Tally isn't really up for the camping lifestyle she does enjoy learning about the exciting world of hoverboards. There is a lot of hoverboard action in this film, which is a big plus, especially as "hoverboard" pretty much equals "skateboard" here. Skateboarding is not a crime, unless you use it to smash the state.

After a few twists and turns Tally finds herself denied her makeover, but only because she has a secret mission: she's the only one who can track down David and infiltrate his organisation before they can unleash their "weapon" which will destroy party central and make everyone's eyeliner run. Will she be unable to resist the allure of his message, which is basically "touch grass"? Will party central turn out to have a dark secret? Will part of the big action climax be a direct steal from one of the most iconic moments in The Matrix?

Anyone who has ever watched a single movie in their lives can spot the problem here. In a Young Adult novel you can get away with having a lead who's meant to be tough to look at: in a YA movie, no. Everyone pre-makeover here is still very easy on the eyes, which you can either go along with or complain about - luckily enough, both responses work as far as the message of the movie is concerned.

Otherwise the great ideological divide here is between vapid high-tech partying and getting back to nature and doing something real, which is as good a conflict as any for a YA movie. The bad guys are bad but have just enough justification behind their actions to be plausible, the good guys are romanticised but are clearly on the right side of history, and the whole thing only has to work as a metaphor for a bunch of teenage life choices anyway.

What this is really about is Netflix (and by extension, Hollywood in general) wanting to see if audiences are ready for the return of the good old days when Harry Potter led to The Hunger Games and YA ruled both the page and the screen. The trouble with this kind of trial balloon is that it's for a genre that really needs some serious money spent on it to make it work: Uglies does pretty well with its special effects for what it is, but it's just not on the same scale as the YA classics of yore.

So is Uglies a real movie? Well, it's not a serious one; neither is it an epic tale of overwrought emotional angst like the best YA films. But King makes for a solid heroine who sells her character's journey even when the film is fast-forwarding through it, everyone else looks good even when they shouldn't, and it makes up for its lack of an emotional rollercoaster by having Tully hoverboard down a real one. 

Plus, this pushes the ending just far enough past the (very effective) conclusion of the first novel to make sure we don't need a sequel that we know will never come. Tidying up loose ends: Hollywood should do more of it.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Speak No Evil

There's a certain kind of story that really pulls you in but can't really sustain a full-length movie all on its own. Comedies have this problem all the time; it's a very high bar to come up with something that's hilarious from start to finish, so they're always slipping in a bit of regular drama to drag things over the line. There's not a lot of laughs in Speak No Evil, but there is a lot of awkward, unsettling family interactions - and when the story moves on from them it's hard not to feel a little let down.

Ben Dalton (Scoot McNairy), wife Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and their daughter Agnes (Alix West Lefler) are holidaying in Italy when they run into semi-retired doctor Paddy (James McAvoy) and his family, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi) and speechless youngster Ant (Dan Hough). Paddy is a force of nature, fun and welcoming; Ben is cautious, careful, and something of a wet blanket. But eventually he's worn down and forced to enjoy the company of their new found friends. When they part, they promise to catch up again back in the UK.

Everyone in the Dalton family (even their daughter, who's getting a little too old to be so emotionally attached to her stuffed rabbit) knows that seeing Paddy and the rest is probably not a great idea. But being stuck in London, where Ben's failing attempts to find a job add to Louise's growing annoyance with his passive ways, isn't helping them either. Maybe a trip out into the countryside to stay at Paddy's isolated farm for a few days is just what they need?

No it isn't.

The best part of the film is the lengthy middle stretch where it's screamingly obvious that something isn't quite right on Paddy's farm (their parenting methods, for one, leave a lot to be desired), but the Daltons can't quite put their finger on what. As a host Paddy is so forceful and seemingly reasonable - even when he's being nosy or using the importance of truth-telling to stir things up - that it's hard to say no to him, especially if you don't want to look insensitive or ungrateful. And that's the last thing the Daltons want, even when it feels like every conversation ends up in an awkward, uncomfortable place.

With so much of this reliant on vibes, good casting is essential. McNairy is spot on as a man with a wet noodle for a spine, a sad sack whose commitment to meaning well and wanting to do the right thing has been enough to get him through life (until now). Davis is strong as a character who should be trusting her instinct but being halfway out the door relationship-wise has worn her down, while Franciosi remains consistently convincing as someone who has to sell at least two contradictory stories.

Based on a 2022 Danish film, this ditches the grim inevitability of euro-horror for a more predictable fight-and-flight third act. It's not a fatal flaw, but delivering the familiar thrills does let a lot of the tension out of the room. Once all the cards are on the table it's pretty easy to see how things will play out, even if exactly when and how characters will meet their grisly end is up in the air (and then flat on the concrete).

It's McAvoy who carries this through, putting out enough energy to power a small town as in the space of a minute or two Paddy goes from your best mate to that guy who's always trying to test your limits to someone just having a laugh. He's a memorable villain in a film that can barely hold him, an always entertaining dinner party guest you'd be happy to have over - just so long as you were able to get him out the door before things turned sour.

- Anthony Morris