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

The Great Gatsby (12A)

The latest big screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby is still showing in cinemas.

This review was first published in The Methodist Recorder (www.methodistrecorder.co.uk).

The Great Gatsby (12A)

Director Baz Luhrmann’s first film since his 2008 epic Australia, is an adaption of the classic novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.  Tobey Maguire plays Gatsby’s neighbour and story narrator, Nick Carraway.  Intrigued by the mysterious multimillionaire next door, he leaps at the opportunity to attend one of Gatsby’s famous parties, and a friendship is formed as Gatsby needs Carraway to do him a favour - reunite him with his lost love, Carraway’s cousin Daisy.

The Great Gatsby has been filmed four times before, and apart from the 1926 silent version which is now lost to history (reviews at the time were favourable and described it as faithful to the novel), no version has entirely pleased devotees of Fitzgerald’s text, and this one is no exception.  Luhrmann has remained about as faithful to the book as can be expected of a film adaptation, with corners being cut to suit the medium; stylistically though he has taken liberties with the art direction and soundtrack, updating every aspect of the 1920’s set story to be palatable to a generation brought up with MTV and iPhones.

The first half hour is plastered with 21st Century Pop and Rap music, giving the impossibly opulent partying that Gatsby facilitates for his many celebrated acquaintances a jarring but undeniably fresh edge.  The camerawork is bold and dizzying, with a mostly superfluous use of 3D only occasionally making the blinding production design even more striking.

Nevertheless the power of the story shines through, and once the plot takes precedence the film becomes engrossing, due in no small part to Leonardo DiCaprio’s fascinating performance as Jay Gatsby.  DiCaprio rivetingly embodies the character’s elusive ambiguity, and is the strongest link in an impressive cast.  As Daisy, Carey Mulligan continues to accelerate her ascent to stardom, delivering lines taken verbatim from the 1925 text as if fresh from her own lips.

While the novel is largely open to interpretation, the 2013 film is more on the nose with it’s warning about the dark side of the American dream, with Luhrmann highlighting themes of hope and love, contrasting them with the corrupting power of ambition and fame.  “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” arguably doesn’t apply to Gatsby himself, but the truth of that verse is something that had he understood, might have helped him avoid his most tragic mistakes.