The Babadook & Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day – Richards Reckons Reviews

A gruesome twosome for you today (well, one far more gruesome than the other, I suppose, unless you have a strange fear of Steve Carrell) on Richards Reckons, both about people having really quite terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days. Some considerably more than others…

First up on the bad day list is The Babadook.

SO then, The Babadook may go bump in the night but it does so with a plot, don’t you know, that plot being this; Amelia (Essie Davis) is a frazzled Australian mother, trying to cope both with the death of her husband and her difficult 6 year old son Samuel (Noel Wieseman). Samuel picks up a book from his shelf for Amelia to read to him at bedtime one day called ‘Mister Babadook’. Like a good mum, she starts to read to him, but notices that it’s an incredibly disturbing pop-up book about a creepy, sinister figure who preys on anybody it chooses. Samuel begins to see the Babadook everywhere he goes and his behaviour becomes more and more troubling, as Amelia slowly realises as the sanity of herself and her son starts to slide that the Babadook may not be just a book…

Okay, so you may remember in my review for Annabelle that my main criticism of it was that it was nothing in any way new, and is simply mildly scary down to being quiet-quiet-quiet-quiet-LOUD NOISE (or jumpscares as they’re known in the trade); scaring you and jolting you for a second but not lingering with you for any length of time (if you don’t remember that, feel free to scroll down and read it after saying “previously, on Richards Reckons…” to yourself).

The Babadook is the complete opposite of this.

The Babadook is INCREDIBLY disturbing. Its frights and chills don’t come from sudden jumps (though there are a few very effective ones), but instead the lingering sense of dread and its surreality. There is a nightmarish quality throughout the whole film (though particularly in its second half as it is quite a slow burner) that means, as an audience member, you are constantly unsure of what is going on; what’s real, what’s fake, who’s awake, who’s making that noise; even, at points, who is still sane. It is a very bizarre film which does not comply by any other rules of horror films or indeed reality; it, like the Babadook himself, is its own entity, creeping slowly into your consciousness and your fears; indeed, as Samuel says, “it wants to scare you first…”.

As I mentioned in that previous paragraph, it is a bit of a slow burner, but that makes it all the more effective. We are introduced to the main characters and their situation slowly rather than rushing it in; the film wants you to get to know its characters and their dilemmas before allowing the fear and supernatural eeriness to seep into them. If you are looking for a conventional “house being haunted by a ghost demon” (because ghosts are unpopular now since Paranormal Activity, it’s always gotta be demons) narrative that is ever so popular these days, you won’t find it here; it’s a completely different beast, acting in a completely different way. Amelia does what we would all do in this situation before things turn darker; asking for help, losing sleep over what is going on, generally not being an absolute horror-protagonist-idiot, making her even more relatable. But that ability to relate slips further and further away from the audience as her sanity is slowly peeled like an apple, making the audience more and more uneasy. The characters are portrayed astonishingly well by Essie Davis and Noel Wieseman; both of whom acting vulnerable and disturbed in equal measure all the time, as well as dealing with the heavier more dramatic elements of their relationship to incredible effect. Freud would have an absolute field day analysing their relationship…

As for the titular Babadook himself, he is terrifying. He looks like the demented cousin of both a Tim Burton creation and a Noel Fielding creation put into a blender. He reminds me a bit of the Judderman from those beer adverts in the 90s; sometimes moving like a stop motion character, sometimes near gliding across the floor; people in the screening I was in audibly whimpered at the sight of him. And we never really get a true glimpse of what he looks like in full, leaving a lot to the imagination, for your mind to fill in the blanks in the pant-wetting sight you see before you. The amazing sound design helps with this too, ramping up the tension and giving odd little noises in the background that can make even the smallest creak seem terrifying. The lighting, composition and even the design of the furniture gives the impression that the monster is always there at all times; once again, to quote Samuel (in the film, not the incredibly wise Samuel Richards); “you can’t get rid of the Babadook”.

In summary, then, director Jennifer Kent has done an amazing job here. The Babadook is a psychological horror that certainly won’t be to everybody’s tastes with its surreality and darkness, but it’s a truly intense and terrifying tale into things that go bump in the night and the psyches of those that hear said bumps. If you want to be scared this Halloween, make sure The Babadook is the film you see, as it gives you the willies in such an intelligent way (steady).

Next up, the astoundingly titled Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (which is still a better title than Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice).

 

So then, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (or AATTHNGVBD as I’ll know abbreviate it too, but even that feels like writing a short essay) is a day with a plot, and that plot is this; Alexander Cooper (Ed Oxenbould) is a 12 year old scamp who almost constantly down on his luck; at school, he’s accident prone and the other kids don’t like him so much, and at home he can be ignored by the rest of his family, who all seem to have much better luck than he does pretty much all the time. On the eve of his birthday, he makes himself an ice cream sundae at around midnight (terrible idea for his sleeping habits but there we are) and wishes that his family would experience a day similar to what he experiences all the time. The next morning, things start to get chaotic for the rest of the family, and Alexander tries to hold them all together…

This is the kind of plot description that can make adults groan because it’s from Disney, centred around a child and sounds a bit juvenile; it therefore could be all gooey and childish and not funny for adults. It is indeed fair to say that it is a family orientated movie, but there is a some enjoyment still to be had by adults here too. Steve Carrell and Jennifer Garner play Alex’s parents, both of them not exactly doing anything absolutely revolutionary with their performances but not underplaying them either; they fulfil their roles of stay-at-home-dad and workaholic-mum very well, with charm and warmth. Ed Oxenbould too has good comedic timing for such a young actor, and has a pleasant screen presence; though the film would pretty much wholly fall apart if this wasn’t the case.

The comedic setpieces, though somewhat slapstick, play out nicely and all contain things that the whole family can enjoy. It’s nice to see a family comedy that isn’t an animation, in fact; something involving real people in a real family dynamic is a surprisingly refreshing thing to see on the cinema screen these days. The chemistry between the family members is all good too, making their exchanges believable and more slick. There are some funny moments to be found here too, and some surprising cameos from the likes of Dick Van Dyke, Tammy 1 from Parks and Recreation (playing a different character obviously; that would be horrifying to see in a family movie) and Donald “Childish Gambino” Glover. Though, again, none of them do anything that particularly changes the rulebook on family comedy, it’s still enjoyable to see them and they do their duties reasonably well.

In all, then, AATTHNGVBD isn’t terrible, horrible, not good or very bad at all; but by no means is it absolutely amazing – it’s completely fine, but nothing more. It’s a warm, fuzzy affair which will amuse the young ones as well as the older ones in your family, though I wouldn’t recommend going out of your way to see it otherwise.

Hector and the Search for Happiness – Richards Reckons Review

There’s a joke about the word “happiness” I’d love to put here but I unfortunately won’t for deux reasons; 1) because it’s phonetic and this, in case you haven’t realised, is in print and b) they actually use it in the film. Basically, the word “happiness” sounds like a male sex organ. Worth it, eh?

Enough organ jokes, down to business. Hector and the Search for Happiness is a British comedy drama film (made by no less than 6 production companies), and the plot will follow after this cheeky semicolon; Hector (Simon Pegg), a psychologist who lives in a lovely flat in lovely central London with the lovely Clara (Rosamund Pike), decides that he for some reason doesn’t like his life and needs to set out on a trip around the world alone to investigate and research what happiness is, for the sake of himself and for the sake of his patients.

Similarities between this, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and Eat, Pray, Love will all be made because, like those films, it involves somebody travelling the globe, often to more rundown areas, in order for them to truly appreciate their own life.  As you can tell from the title and the concept, we follow Hector for quite a lot of the 120 minute run time – and played by Simon Pegg, it’s safe to assume you are in safe hands… er, safely. Or, at least, that’s what I thought, being a fan of the Peggster’s work for many years (thus earning the ability to call him “Peggster”). And, yes, Ol’ Si in areas does give it his all, with waterworks in all the various places they need to be.

 

But the fact of the matter is this; Hector is, in parts, actually an incredibly unlikeable lead character. Within days of being away from his girlfriend, he cheats on her without any regret whatsoever (and in fact suggests that this could be a “key to happiness”); after being in impoverished Africa, he celebrates the fact that he is on 1st class on the plane; he also has a tendency of being incredibly smug. Of course, I understand that not all protagonists are likeable or moral, but it certainly doesn’t help that he’s not even immoral in an interesting way like Don Draper, Walter White or Big Mac from Casualty (only joking, he’s a hero).

It’s filled with pseudo-philosophy and moral lessons that just feel so forced and whimsical it puts you off the whole thing as they appear in scribbled handwriting and little doodles on the screen. They’re exactly the sort of thing you write in a little book in stylised writing in your teens, then find it under your bed years later and cringe to death by how little sense they make; for example, one of them is “people who are afraid to die are afraid to live”, or “happiness is sometimes not knowing the whole story :(“, which appears as his little moral lesson as he sees a pimp drag off and beat a prostitute he had slept with the previous night. Poor him, not knowing the whole story. It’s just one of the occasions in which he feels sorry for himself and the audience pretty much wholly disagree with him.

 

There’s also an absolutely bizarre shift in gear to a very dark place about 5/9ths of the way through that really doesn’t work; maybe it would as a particularly dark denouement, but at that time it just seems oddly placed, like a nihilistic tortoise in the pilot’s seat of a helicopter. In fact, a lot of the pacing is erratic and jerky (perhaps the previous simile doesn’t apply here) – it certainly feels like a very long 120 minutes, and not a very funny one either.

There are also a lot of very good actors in this that are completely wasted – among the criminally under-used are Toni Collette, Stellan Skarsgård, Jean Reno and Tracy Anne-Oberman, all of whom only play very two dimensional characters. Rosamund Pike too suffers from, I suspect, her scenes being cut short – this may go some way to cover her character’s very strange mood shifts over the course of the Skype calls, which I sense are not on purpose. 

 

All of these are the ingredients of a particularly lacklustre and irritating end result, full of stereotypes bordering on offensive, overly fluffy and whimsical segments and “redemption” that doesn’t feel deserved at all. Simon Pegg gives it his all but the central character is burdened with terrible, unlikeable decisions and a central relationship that doesn’t quite make sense. The search for happiness certainly is not found in a screening of this, lemme tell ya (ZING!).