Monday, April 2, 2018

Crisp Criticism - "Ready Player One", "A Wrinkle in Time", "Peter Rabbit", "Pacific Rim: Uprising"


by
Julien Faddoul














Ready Player One

When the creator of a popular video game system dies, a virtual contest is created to compete for his fortune.
A master filmmaker – who in the 1970s helped perpetuate the now obsessive need for the culture to soak itself in nostalgia for whatever occurred during one’s formative years – delivers us the ultimate ouroboros of nostalgia for nostalgia. Literally hundreds of visual and aural pop-culture references whiz by in an uncompromising celebration of the introductory years of the early movie blockbusters, recreated here with a $200 million budget. And that’s the reason why, in spite of any amount of skilful staging, dazzling CGI or clever stratagems (not that there’s a lot of any of these), this film had almost no chance with me, as, philosophically, everything the film propagates I find unconditionally abhorrent. We live in the era of the death-dealing nostalgia. Even on the most superficial level, what is more serviceable: A amalgamation of seemingly endless pop-culture references or creating something new that others may yearn to refer to? Dear reader, if spending 140 minutes playing spot-the-reference is your idea of a fulfilling experience, then by all means ignore me. But, personally, I have better things to do with my time.

d – Steven Spielberg
w – Zak Penn, Ernest Cline (Based on the Novel by Ernest Cline)
ph – Janusz Kaminski
pd – Adam Stockhausen
m – Alan Silvestri
ed – Sarah Broshar, Michael Kahn
cos – Kasia Walicka-Maimone

p – Donald De Line, Dan Farah, Kristie Macosko Krieger, Steven Spielberg

Cast: Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke, Ben Mendelsohn, Lena Waithe, T.J. Miller, Simon Pegg, Mark Rylance, Philip Zhao, Win Morisaki, Hannah John-Kamen, Ralph Ineson, Susan Lynch













A Wrinkle in Time

After the disappearance of her scientist father, three peculiar beings send Meg, her brother, and her friend to space in order to find him.
Intolerable garbage: Ugly visuals, atrocious performances (particularly from its juvenile cast) and blatantly clumsy direction on a scene-by-scene basis. The method of this madness is the typical contemporary velvet thinking that if one believes in oneself one will achieve the impossible. As good as their intentions are, both DuVernay and Winfrey (and many other modern filmmakers, it seems) need to understand that thrusting one’s politics onto the shoulders of a movie will not make it inherently enlightening. Cinema is an artform and, like any artform, requires rumination and expertise rather than ardour, money or a big megaphone.

d – Ava DuVernay
w – Jennifer Lee, Jeff Stockwell (Based on the Novel by Madeleine L'Engle)
ph – Tobias Schliessler
pd – Naomi Shohan
m – Ramin Djawadi
ed – Spencer Averick
cos – Paco Delgado

p – Catherine Hand, Jim Whitaker

Cast: Oprah Winfrey, Storm Reid, Deric McCabe, Levi Miller, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Chris Pine, Zach Galifianakis, Rowan Blanchard, André Holland, Michael Peña, David Oyelowo, Bellamy Young












Peter Rabbit

Feature adaptation of Beatrix Potter’s classic tale of a rebellious rabbit trying to sneak into a farmer’s vegetable garden.
Nasty, annoying, crass comedy that contains none of Potter’s wit and is content to believe that James Corden’s insufferable voice and Domhnall Gleeson falling down are both automatically and routinely funny.

d – Will Gluck
w – Will Gluck, Ron Lieber (Based on the Book by Beatrix Potter)
ph – Peter Menzies Jr
pd – Roger Ford
m – Dominic Lewis
ed – Christian Gazal, Jonathan Tappin
cos – Lizzy Gardiner

p – Will Gluck, Zareh Nalbandian

Cast: Rose Byrne, Domhnall Gleeson, Sam Neill, James Corden, Daisy Ridley, Margot Robbie, Elizabeth Debicki, Colin Moody, Sia Furler, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Felix Williamson












Pacific Rim: Uprising

Jake Pentecost, son of Stacker Pentecost, reunites with Mako Mori to lead a new generation of Jaeger pilots, including rival Lambert and 15-year-old hacker Amara, against a new Kaiju threat.
Loud, dull sequel that no one asked for; this instalment is more akin to the Transformers franchise than anything else.

d – Steven S. DeKnight
w – Steven S. DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, T.S. Nowlin
ph – Dan Mindel
pd – Stefan Dechant
m – Lorne Balfe
ed – Dylan Highsmith, Josh Schaeffer, Zach Staenberg
cos – Lizz Wolf

p – Guillermo del Toro, Jon Jashni, Mary Parent, Thomas Tull, Femi Oguns, John Boyega

Cast: John Boyega, Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny, Jing Tian, Burn Gorman, Charlie Day, Rinko Kikuchi, Karan Brar




No comments:

Post a Comment