MOVIE REVIEW | Arrival (2016)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “Arrival takes itself very seriously.  Arrival tells an insane story.  What Arrival forgets to do is have fun with it.”

“Memory is a strange thing.”

The academy awards have often been accused of being elitist. Only awarding highbrow, often little seen movies, so voters can feel smart.  One of the reasons the Best Picture category was opened up a few years ago to include up to 10 movies was so more crowd friendly, box office hits could be included, instead of exclusively recognising prestige, “important” movies. Last year was an example of that system working, with fun, genre escapism being nominated in the form of Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian.  This year, the genre, blockbuster slot is filled by a far less worthy recipient, Arrival.

When giant, alien spacecraft appear in a dozen different places all over the globe, world leaders freak out as they try to determine if these visitors come in peace, or if they have something more threatening in mind.  Recruiting college professor and linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams), the American government makes contact with the seven limbed aliens they dub heptapods. Communication and translation proves to be a slow process, but piece by piece, Louise, along with physicist Ian Donnelly (Jeremy Renner), builds a rapport with extra-terrestrial visitors.

MOVIE REVIEW | Manchester By the Sea (2016)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “I never once wondered why critics have been praising this movie as much as they have for an entire year.”

“I said a lot of terrible things to you, my heart was broken, but I know yours was broken too.”

It might be hard to remember now, but there once was a time when La La Land wasn’t talked about as the clear front runner for every Oscar up for grabs this year, and probably even somehow retroactively winning a few from years gone by.  Yep, before it broke the record for most Golden Globe wins and topped the list for most number of Academy Award nominations this year, there was another movie that was getting all the Oscar buzz.  From this time last year when it showed at Sundance, to when it was eclipsed by La La Land a month or three ago, Manchester By the Sea was the belle of the Oscar speculation ball.  Now that I’ve seen both movies, the concept of somehow comparing the two to decide which is better seems kind of absurd.

Sad sack Boston janitor Lee (Casey Affleck) goes about his days unclogging toilets, shovelling snow and dealing with one annoying tenant after another.  It’s clear that Lee isn’t happy. He gets even less happy when he receives a call alerting him to his brothers’ (Kyle Chandler as Joe) death an hour and half away in the seaside, New England town of Manchester.  In and out of hospital for years with a heart condition, Joe’s death isn’t a surprise to Lee, what is a surprise is Joe’s will, announcing that Lee is now the legal guardian of Joe’s 16 year old son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges).

MOVIE REVIEW | Lion (2016)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “A moving, inspirational, feel good story, in none of the corny ways that those words would suggest.”

“It would take a lifetime to search all the station in India.”

It’s that time of year…  The Oscar nominations are out and prestige movies are everywhere.  That can be a good and a bad thing.  In the last few years we’ve had amazing, but none the less, “Oscar bait” prestige that I really enjoyed.  Movies like The Imitation Game, Spotlight and Foxcatcher.  But there’s also been plenty of really on the nose, pandering, bullshit faff that is just too impressed with itself.  Movies like 12 Years a Slave and Whiplash.  I find it hard to articulate why some of these movies feel like authentic artistry, while others come off as desperate and cloying.  Whatever it is, I feared I was in for one of those categories, and was so glad I got the other, with Lion.

It’s 1986 in northern India, and five year old Saroo (Sunny Pawar) lives in poverty, but happiness, with his mother (Priyanka Bose) and older brother, Guddu (Abhishek Bharate).  Saroo doesn’t just look up to Guddu, he idolises him.  One night, Guddu is about to leave their small village and look for work.  Saroo convinces his older brother to let him tag along.  Guddu’s initial reluctance to bring Saroo Is proven correct when Saroo ends up locked on a train that takes him thousands of kilometres from his family to Calcutta, where he doesn’t speak the language or know his way back home.

MUSIC REVIEW | Japandroids – Near to the Wild Heart of Life (2017)

Two blokes, eight songs, just over 30 minutes of music. That’s some incredible economy from Japandroids. But what’s more incredible is the punch packed by Near to the Wild Heart of Life. It never feels slight, rushed or in any way lacking. In this tight half hour of riffing guitars and thunderous drums, they find room for plenty of the Japandroids signature sweaty, break neck rock and roll in songs like the title track and No Known Drink or Drug.  They find room for soaring fist raisers like In a Body Like a Grave and the ode to their native Canada, North East South West. They even find room for a rare moment of more subdued ontrrospection in the synth heavy, seven and half minute epic Arc of Bar, which somehow actually sustains its full seven and a half minutes.

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MOVIE REVIEW | La La Land (2016)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “It delivers flashy song and dance numbers that somehow manage to be fantastical and real at the same time.”

“This is the dream! It’s conflict and it’s compromise, and it’s very, very exciting!”

I’ve been very slack in writing this review. Generally, I write a review they day of, or maybe the day after, watching a movie.  If it’s a new movie and still in theatres, I try to post the review within a week.  I’m writing this more than three weeks after watching La La Land and by the time it’s posted, it’s a little over a month later.  In that time, the movie nerds and sites I read have declared La La Land a masterpiece and Oscar front runner, before backlash saw it painted as an overrated piece of style of substance, before a backlash to the backlash had much of the public opinion coming back around to masterpiece and Oscar front runner.

Breaking the record for number of Golden Globes won by a single movie could be seen as a good thing or a bad one, depending on your opinion of the trashy celebrity jerk off that is the Golden Globes.  For me, La La Land is a movie that I loved when I walked out of the cinema.  It’s a movie I have recommended to anyone who’ll listen in the weeks since, and it’s a movie I’ve thought about every day since seeing it, and smiled whenever I do.

MOVIE REVIEW | The Unforgiven (1960)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “I’d never say that The Unforgiven is a good movie. But I also can’t say that I wasn’t entertained by it.”

“I’ve left my family. They’ve changed. Turned into Indian lovers; Injun lovers.”

John Ford and John Wayne’s The Searchers is widely recognised as one of the greatest westerns ever made. In fact, when I wrote about it here on Bored and Dangerous, it was as part of my countdown of the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American movies. While the performance from Wayne is one of his absolute best, and the film making of Ford only gets more impressive with every rewatch, the political and social views haven’t aged so well.  So when I read that The Unforgiven (similar to Clint Eastwood’s 1992 masterpiece in name and genre only) was director John Huston’s answer to those troubling political and social views, I was intrigued to see what he had to say.  The Unforgiven is a response and polar opposite to The Searches. It just does something I had assumed was impossible, and presents something even more troubling than the movie it’s responding to.

With his father dead, Ben (Burt Lancaster) has become the patriarch of the Zachary family. There’s his old but spry mother Mattilda (Lillian Gish), hot head brother Cash (Audie Murphy) and adopted sister Rachel (Audrey Hepburn). It’s Rachel and her adoption that brings trouble to the Zachary clan and drives the plot of The Unforgiven.

MOVIE REVIEW | Sully (2016)

In a nutshell, Bored & Dangerous says: “One of the best movies of 2016.”

“Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time.”

Heroics are what movies are made for.  Sure, there’s drama and pathos and catharsis and comedy and a million other things that movies are made for.  But big screens, surround sound, movie star charisma and stunning visuals all get the chance to show off and really go for broke when a movie is built around a hero doing something extraordinary.

On the one hand, it was only a matter of time until a movie was made about the real life heroic daring do of pilot Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger.  Almost just as inevitable was the fact that he would be played the ultimate everyman, Tom Hanks. With so much seeming so obvious about this movie, the one thing that had me optimistically unsure of what to expect was its director. How would the stripped back, no nonsense story telling and film making of Clint Eastwood translate the possible inspirational schmaltz of a movie like Sully?