Black Sea, Get Santa and Men, Women & Children – Richards Reckons Reviews

That title is a bit confusing, granted, but I’ve never used the Oxford comma and hell, I’m not gonna start now. So no, the second film isn’t “Get Santa and Men”, that’s an entirely different film which I’m sure is available to order on DVD from some online black market store.

ANYWAY, first things first (I’m the realest), Black Sea.

Blimey Jude, alright, we’ll get there.

Black Sea is not just about Felixstowe’s beaches; in fact, it doesn’t even reference them. Nay, Black Sea follows a man named Robinson (Jude Law, the originally J-Law), who has been made redundant after being a submariner with a shipping salvage company for over 20 years, and after basically losing his family to the job too. So he’s a bit hacked off. He then gets a tip off about a sunken U-Boat from World War 2 filled with Nazi gold waiting in the, well, black sea of Crimea. So he gathers a half Russian, half British team (with a cowardly American and a psychopathic Australian thrown in for good measure) in a rusty old Russian sub to salvage the gold; however a number of problems occur, especially when friction between the Russian and British submates starts to come into fruition…

Director Kevin Macdonald, whose work includes The Last King of Scotland, uses the submarine setting very well indeed; emphasising the claustrophobic environment by seldom leaving it at all. Even when we do leave the sub, it’s only to see the exterior; never above the surface. It positions you, as a viewer, in the submarine itself and makes you feel as trapped, cabin feverish and smelly (just the bloke sat near me then?) as the men onboard the sub itself. In turn, this makes the tension ramping up feel very close to home, and just as impactful.

The performances here are all very solid, including from J-Law Mk 1 as the surprisingly level-headed captain scotsman (whose accent very occasionally can drift into bum notes). All the crew portray the bubbling tension very well (some, of course, more hotheaded than others), never reaching cartoonish levels of anger. There’s an underlying social commentary on how the men of the Navy are treated after their stints and are proverbially thrown on the scrapheap of life, so to speak. There are shots of job centres, rants about poverty, various twists and “the man” to back this up, so it’s hardly subtle but it’s still a reasonable subtext to have.

While Black Sea lacks, er, fun and laughs, it’s heavy on character, pressure and setpieces; it has all the bearings of a heist movie, except underwater and in a pressure-cooker environment. Just as the rusty pipes clang and various parts blow up, the men grow more and more desperate; both for their money and for their lives. The film is a very well shot, solid descent into what happens when human beings, who have been treated badly by the system anyway, are pushed to their very limits.

Next, it’s Get Santa!

You may think from the title alone that Get Santa is solely about getting santa, but not in the “get ’em boys!” sense. And you’d be absolutely right, yes, but there is more to it than that. Just a few days before Christmas, Santa (Jim Broadbent) crashes his sled, leading to his reindeer being spotted roaming about London, and the man himself taking refuge in the garden of young Tom (Kit Connor). His father Steve (Rafe Spall) is a getaway driver who has just got out of prison, and is roped in to help Santa by his son after he is sent to prison for trying to rob his reindeers back from Battersea Dog’s Home. While Santa tries to convince people of his identity and survive jail, can Steve and Tom track down everything in time and save Christmas?

Bizarrely, this is produced by Ridley Scott, and is directed by Christopher Smith of Brit horrorfests Creep and Severance fame, so it’s quite a change of pace from the norm for them. Even with these names on board, after Nativity 3: Dude, Where’s My Sanity?, I was somewhat trepidatious when it came to this movie; that it would have all the cringeworthy, gurning and just awful beats that it had, becoming an embarrassment to the British film industry. And while it’s not a shining light and a stone cold classic Christmas movie, Get Santa is a warm and funny enough diversion from Christmas shopping to warrant having a watch.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, the story is ridiculous, and to begin with actually quite hard edged. Prison, a criminal father and an apparently messy divorce don’t exactly scream “HOORAY YAY CHRISTMAS!” straight away, and nor do the admittedly quite bleak colour tones towards the beginning. But, when it gets there, it’s quite a colourful affair; playing with and using the Northern lights and “Lapland” to good effect. The somewhat ludicrous story is actually a touchstone of most Christmas movies in themselves, so it’s to be expected, and the plot holes may be papered over by Christmassy wrapping paper but they’re still there.

Rafe Spall and Jim Broadbent shine in this in their roles as the somewhat dodgy but well meaning father and Santa himself, with Jim Broadbent in particular being an “Ah eureka!” moment of casting. Stephen Graham, Warwick Davies and Jodie Whittaker are also all on good form here but are somewhat overused. There are the odd jokes that make you chuckle (such as Santa walking in slow mo down the prison corridors to the tones of the NWA, or the odd japes with the police), but nothing is really gutbustingly hilarious or all out moving to tears.

All in all then, Get Santa has some unique points to it (pour example the giant letterboxes for all santa’s letters), and a funny enough concept with good casting to get it through, but it doesn’t have enough originality or family laughs per minute to quite reach the absolute Christmas classic level of Elf, Muppet Christmas Carol or Die Hard (yes, Die Hard is a Christmas film, watch it again and tell me otherwise). So if you fancy seeing a family Christmas film and Paddington is sold out, you could do a lot worse than Get Santa.

Right, finally then, Men, Women & Children.

So, what is this extremely vaguely titled film about? Well, it follows a series of stories that intertwine with one another in a small way; mainly, it’s about families with teenage kids who all go to the same high school. The film examines their problems and issues in relation to the internet and their technology. It includes, and isn’t limited to, anorexia, porn addiction, extra marital sex and cyber smothering.

So heavy stuff there, obviously, with such massive relevance in this day and age. Writer and director Jason Reitman has given us some very good movies in the past too, with Juno and Up in the Air under his belt. And with a high quality cast and some fairly slick visuals to boot, this story is gonna be good, right? Riight…?

Wrong.

It’s a massive disappointment.

First off, the stories – it makes a narrative choice to keep five story plates spinning at the same time that intertwine with each other rather than have the episodically, which is very brave, as they all reach their crescendos. But it just doesn’t work. Some stories get lost in the mix, others climax (stop laughing) at times when others don’t and therefore undermine one another. The stories themselves, too, are all very undeveloped and stale (and often ridiculous). It all feels a bit like Reitman has stuck his storytelling fork into a bowl of quite poor narrative spaghetti and has slopped down the tangled and confused mess onto a plate and said “there you go, eat that!”.

Some of the stories are based on good ideas and themes, but it just all feels a bit… preachy and tell-offy. “The internet is bad… sometimes!” is the vibe it tends to give off; a completely confused message that is very selective and ham-fisted. It feels like a film that desperately wants to say something but has absolutely no idea what – simultaneously condemning internet freedom and internet restriction. The performances are actually very good, and I must say that Adam Sandler is actually, for once, one of the best bits of it, as he is good in this (I know!). But the writing and dialogue is all so poor and often boring that even the good performances swallow themselves like a black hole of tedium. As soon as you see Ansel Egort’s trembly little lips you can tell pretty much exactly what is going to happen in his mumblecore story segment, as you can with frankly a lot of them. It is literally just some stuff happening, some nonsensical, which have a small relation to the internet.

Men, Women & Children is a long, confused, preachy, modern-while-old-fashioned, boring and predictable disappointment from Reitman. Even the wonderful Emma Thompson gives her voice over with a degree of “why am I doing this?” in her tones as she speaks over a satellite drifting around space (yep, seriously, it’s bookended by space). Don’t bother.

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.