Kelly + Victor (18)

This two star film is out on DVD and Blu-ray Monday 13th Jan.

Kelly + Victor (18) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

Kelly + Victor is the feature debut of Welsh director Kieran Evans.  On his search for a story that spoke to him he discovered the 2002 novel by Niall Griffiths, a no holds barred harrowing romance about young love gone bad.

Victor is something of a watered down hipster, and Kelly is a petite lost soul with a broken heart.  They meet on Victor’s birthday when he’s out celebrating, and lust strikes without hesitation.  After a hasty night filled with sadomasochism, neither can get the other out of their minds, much less the marks left off of their bodies.  After this fiery start they try something bordering on conventional, a date to a museum, where they ponder what love means to a Godless couple, and whether what they have can be beautiful.

In their own ways the two characters become afraid of what the other means to them, and they take a hiatus to lick their wounds, emotional and otherwise.  Antonia Campbell-Hughes and Julian Morris give admirably raw performances with only a paper thin script to draw on.  Tellingly, Evans removed a lot of the book’s rich narration from his adaptation, leaving Kelly and Victor as unfinished skeletons of characters crying out for flesh and blood.  Promising subplots go nowhere, and the director only demonstrates any inventiveness in the shooting of the sex scenes, which aren’t much more than eye candy for the marketing campaign.

Budget constraints meant a reduced crew and humble resources, and Evans and his cinematographer Piers McGrail admittedly do a splendid job of creating a haunting and unusual portrait of Liverpool, and it’s broken youth underbelly.  But some obvious visual metaphors bring down the level of sophistication, and the overall style is disappointingly derivative of many other better gritty British films.  The typically indie soundtrack plays it safe, and the incongruity of it’s cutesy feel compared to the film's darker side has been done before and much better in films like 2010’s Blue Valentine.

Whilst the photography is sharp and modern, the performances brave and immediate, Kelly + Victor commits the one true sin of filmmaking - being boring.  The story is so slight and the dangers it warns of self-evident; you’re left thinking did we really need another down-and-dirty Brit flick to state the obvious?

DVD & Blu-ray extras: Trailer, Q&A with Kieran Evans

Taking Off (18)

If you love One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest then you'll like Taking Off (1971). Out on DVD & Blu-ray Monday 7th November.

Taking Off (18) (This review on FilmJuice.com)

Whether it’s exploring Peter Jackson’s gore fuelled horror films, or Stanley Kubrick’s rarely seen Fear and Desire, there is a certain fascination to be found in discovering how future masters of their craft honed their cinematic vocabularies in the early days of their careers.

Taking Off, the 1971 feature debut for the U.S. market by Czech-American director Milos Forman, is an almost forgotten gem and a must see for any fan of his later work, such as the bonafide masterpieces One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus.

Jeannie Tyne is a shy teenager who runs away from home to take part in an audition with a popular anti-establishment band. Naturally her parents Larry and Lynn are sick with worry, and at a loss as to how to begin searching for their special only child. But as time passes the empty hole that Jeannie leaves in their lives begins to give way to a strange sense of rediscovered freedom.

Opening with a sequence showing countless auditioning young girls singing their hearts out, Forman makes brilliant use of music and unorthodox editing. The auditions continue to be intercut throughout the film, acting as a kind of Greek chorus complimenting and enriching the unfolding plot.

Larry, memorably played by Buck Henry, soon discovers a whole subculture of parents searching for their lost teens. Together with his wife he joins the so called ‘Society for Parents of Fugitive Children’, and they find themselves at such a large and prestigious meeting of this group that it feels like an awards dinner. The many parents there are willing to try anything in an attempt to understand the youth of the day, culminating in an outrageous but hilarious drug taking experiment.

Taking Off entertainingly studies the growing divide between an ageing and conservative generation and their offspring, young people growing more and more disenchanted with the free world that was won for them in World War Two.

Interestingly there is a young actress who is on screen for no longer than a minute or so, yet she sings a song so haunting and with such obvious talent that it might be the most lasting memory the film leaves with you. It’s the brilliant Kathy Bates, making her feature film debut as one of Jeannie’s musical peers.

Although a product of a bygone era Taking off can still speak to us in 2011, what with every successive generation of parents perpetually lamenting over ‘kids today’. Using a blend of edgy themes and absurdist comedy Forman instantly made his mark on American cinema, and given the stone cold classics which were to follow it’s something to celebrate that he was given that chance.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) - 27/01/08 - *****

Review of the Film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) (18).

Warning: this review contains some plot spoilers. The rating is out of five stars.

Tim Burton’s long awaited bloodthirsty musical does all but disappoint the legions that have been looking forward to it’s release. Anyone doubting the singing abilities of the leads Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter will be very pleasantly surprised within the opening few minutes…

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) is about human nature; and it makes a very bold statement about the truth of that, which I am sure many people who see the film will either just subconsciously ignore, or be so repulsed by the notion of admitting it that they will form an unchangeably negative opinion of the film. That point, which the film makes all too well, is that the apparently wicked and twisted Todd himself is in fact the one person in the story who has even the slightest inkling as what humanity really deserves. Death, suffering and painful slaughter… and for anyone to deny that is one of the very most incredibly and disgustingly pompous expressions of self-inflicted moral blindness possible. A lot of people are finding this film very enjoyable and even saying that it is one of their all time favourites, but I suspect that they can surely not be seeing the ultimate point of the tale for this reason. Of course there is much else to ‘like’ about the film other than the expert way that it makes it’s taboo point, such as the breathtakingly charismatic turns given by the two popular lead actors, Johnny Depp who has been nominated for an Oscar as Sweeney Todd, who’s best friends are his silver handled razor blades, and Helena Bonham Carter who plays Mrs. Lovett, Todd's sexually charged landlady and the creator of the worst pies in London… Also the Oscar nominated, inspiringly gloomy art direction is really something to behold, which along with the fittingly demented cinematography makes Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) a truly unique visual experience. Of course though, it is the magnificently electrifying music and lyrics by the legendary Stephen Sondheim that makes the film what is, and the full soundtrack CD has gone straight onto my own personal wish list!

The film is definitely not flawless though. I can’t quite put my finger on the reason for it, but I found myself struggling to become enough emotionally connected with the characters to really feel their pain, unlike in many other truly great films… perhaps it’s because I was reacting to the story in a way that wasn’t quite as expected by the filmmakers, as the message of humankind's deserving of suffering and damnation was so plain to me unlike it probably was to most people, but I’m not at all sure and will have to think about that more on my second viewing. That I’ll be seeing the film again though says a lot, and this is a masterpiece by Tim Burton… it’s cynical and truly insane, but it is a real masterwork.

It will probably be confusing to a lot of cinema goers whether or not they are supposed to sympathise with Sweeney, and I think that the film creates the right balance in his character of portraying the truth of his motives, along with the inappropriateness, impracticality and ultimately pointless nature of his actions. The fact that so many of his victims seem to go totally unmissed is quite saddening but also very eye-opening… it puts to bed the idea of a single human life having any say in the ultimate scheme of things, which is powerfully reflected in Sweeney’s own final fate. He realised the truth of the problem, but found the wrong solution and so was left as if in a boat with one paddle… and he ends up in an even worse place than when he first begun.

On another note, don’t believe everything you’ve heard about the unparalleled levels of blood and gore in the film, making even Saw (2004) look like Toy Story (1995) … it’s just not true. There is actually very little ‘gore’ as such, and although there is quite a lot of blood squirting around at various stages, on the whole it is not on a level that most people won’t have seen before. What I will say though is that unlike with a lot of films, the camera doesn’t turn away and/or the shot doesn’t cut away at the ‘moment of impact’. In my opinion that is a much more honest way to depict violence, especially in a story like this. There are many films out there with stories featuring much more violence than this, but in which we aren’t actually shown anything more than the build up to a violent act, followed by the effect of it… with the ‘moment of impact’ completely omitted. That can be far more desensitising and unhealthy to watch I think than the way that the violence is shown here.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) is a tragic and soulful film, but more importantly it is also extremely refreshing and bracingly non-single-minded, so that the bleakness of it does not darken your outlook on life, but in fact opens new doors of opportunity for the viewer who truly watched it with their eyes wide open! What you should go away with after seeing it is this: we all deserve to die… murder is not the answer. So what is…?

Rating : *****

Written by,

.Peter.D.Marsay.

Originally completed: 27/01/08.