No. 362 : We Are Your Friends (2015)

 

We Are Your Friends at the IMDb

Time for a bit of a rave now at the W Movie Blog as Zac Efron takes us on a whirlwind tour of a vapid DJ’s rise to stardom.

 

The film’s hero, Cole, is listed as 23 with the 28 year old Efron looking all of the five years older than he’s supposed to be. I guess it would look a bit sad if someone was nearly 30 and still struggling with ‘what will I do with my life’ type issues.

Cole is a DJ and looking for a big break. A chance encounter with a superstar DJ gives him some hope, but of course the famous DJ has a sexy girlfriend that Cole lusts over. Whilst trying to spin the wheels of steel, (he's actually more of a laptop man) Cole tries to arrange some DJing gigs with his friends and generally hangs around a lot. The gang do get a job at Jon Bernthal’s boiler shop property business, but our guys are better than that!

 

Are they though? They seem like a bunch of drug taking wasters! Cole gets offered a big gig but makes an arse of it by sleeping with the superstar DJ’s girlfriend and by calling him a has been. Later some more drug taking claims a victim and Cole re-evaluates his life choices – can he make the record that will seal his DJ credentials?

 

I must admit to quite enjoying this film despite it’s overly familiar premise and unlikeable cast of characters. For a start it’s always sunny and everyone is gorgeous, so there is that. The plot is so familiar you’ll think that you have seen this before, but given its box office, you likely haven’t. It does however ask little of the audience and it has a banging soundtrack, albeit one that relies of the euphoria burst style of music a little too often.

There were some decent touches such as Cole’s voice over animated description of how DJing works – and it’s not just sticking on a load of records people! There was also a fun sequence where Cole takes drugs, and the scene becomes slowly animated as he gets more and more mashed.

The subplot of the exploitative mortgage scheme didn’t go anywhere, and Jon Bernthal was largely wasted. It did teach the kids that capitalism is wrong however and they’d be better off in clubs and taking drugs.

 

Efron is good as Cole but he is a bit too old and I didn’t really buy his character who seemed like a sneaky and ungrateful wee shit. His epiphany at the end that his killer tune should be sounds from real life was a bit silly and I doubt many of the punters in the Glasgow Tunnel would have indulged his five-minute build up and the track which included sound bites from his pals.

All in all it was a vacuous and pointless exercise, but the kicking soundtrack and bikini clad ladies made it a passable experience – but only just!

Best Bit - Pool Party

W Score 13/23

No. 361 : Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

 

Wake Up Dead Man at the IMDb

 

This is the third film in the ‘Knives Out’ franchise, with the first reviewed in my Michael Shannon blog and the second’ Glass Onion’ not bothering the scorers. I have now watched them all, and although they qualify as decent entertainment, I doubt they could be seen as the event movies that Netflix seem to have them down as, or worth their $200m budget. In fairness that money is all on the screen, given Daniel Craig earned a reported $1m a minute for his less than one hour screen time.

Still, budgets aren’t all, and if you can get a fun murder mystery on screen who cares what it costs? Well, Netflix shareholders only, as my £6.99 subscription is the same whether I watch this or some 70’s sex farce from the UK.

Craig once again plays his flamboyant detective Benoit Blanc who, whilst presumably French, has a ridiculous and wavering accent and a dress code that Dick Emery would have issues with. Craig doesn’t appear for the first 30 minutes as the murder, with which the film is concerned, is played out. The narrative is that familiar style of someone writing a letter as we dissolve to the action. A young priest with a chequered past is sent to a new church to assist Josh Brolin who is as convincing as a priest as Kenneth Williams would have been as Dirty Harry. Brolin makes the younger cleric take his confession, which is mostly about him wanking a lot.

 

Brolin is assisted by church elder Glenn Close, and he has several parishioners to contend with including Andrew Scott, Thomas Hayden Church and Hawkeye off ‘The Avengers’. You can’t say the cast list isn’t stuffed, but it does seem like overkill to have so many familiar faces shoehorned in. You could argue it’s like a panto or old Agatha Christie film, but it does take you out of the action when Mila Kunis shows up as the cop and Jeffrey Wright as the Archbishop. I’m guessing there will be no prizes for the casting director here!

The victim is Brolin and the young priest is the prime suspect. For reasons unclear Blanc is in town and keen to solve the case with his customary and annoying arrogance. He asks the priest to write out everything he remembers and that takes us full circle to the letter writing opening.

There are a couple of decent twists and several unlikely ones. Various cast members get bumped off and a convoluted story about an $80m diamond is revealed – that’s so much money you could get nearly two Daniel Craig performances! Some of the twists are telegraphed like the impenetrable tomb which can be easily opened from the inside – remember that throwaway fact for later kids!

Overall, this was a decent offering, but it was probably my least favourite of the franchise. I think the re-treaded formula is wearing a bit thin, with the players and the murders laid out before the inevitable denouement where twist upon twist is unravelled before we learn the contrived truth.

 

The murder here seemed awfully unlikely and dependant on a lot of chance events falling into place. It plays out OK at the end, but in reality many of the moving parts would have derailed the intricate plan long before the murderer and fate of the diamond were decided – I managed to figure out both, and I’m a bit slow at this stuff!

The plot was thin for an over two hour run time, and I may have dozed off for five minutes in the middle – that was fine though, as everything is explained in minute detail at the end for the thick people and those who’d fallen into a turkey coma. These films are an ensemble piece, and it is always fun to see your favourite actors ham it up and play in the dress up box. That said, it is debateable whether this is worth a large chunk of your TV viewing allowance and if this was the end of the franchise, I doubt I’d notice or be upset.

W Rating 13/23 Best Bit : Confession Time

No. 360 : Where Eskimos Live (2002)

 

Where Eskimos Live at the IMDb

I picked this DVD up in a charity shop having never heard of it before. Well, its name starts with a ‘W’ so it must be decent! It does hold a reasonable 6.7/10 on IMDb, but I felt that was high and I’d be around half marks, if I was feeling generous.

Bob Hoskins stars as Sharkey, a tough as nails child trafficker who sports the worst accent since Sean Connery’s Egyptian in ‘Highlander’. The DVD box says Sharkey is English, but he has an Eastern European twang for some reason. I wonder if he was dubbed in post, as he doesn’t sound like the Bob we know and love.

Anyway, Sharkey has a fake UNICEF badge and backpack and is floating around Bosnia in 1995 looking to pick up some children. His motives aren’t immediately clear, but we know he has false credentials and is clearly up to something nefarious. It turns out it’s adoptions he’s facilitating but I think the subtext is far more noncey. He is pretty rubbish at his job, getting his papers and stuff taken off him on a regular basis. There is an air of lawlessness due to the war and  Sharkey is frankly underprepared.

He encounters Vlado who is part of a gang of orphans straight out of ‘Oliver Twist’. We know he’s a good guy as he befriends a Downs kid that the others shun. They have almost nothing, but they do have a nice light up globe on which Vlado points out Norway to his friend. ‘That’s where eskimos live’- he says. He may be nice but don’t have him as your phone a friend on ‘Millionaire’!

Vlado’s gang blow up a truck that contains a local Colonel’s daughter. He is rightfully pissed at this and vows to hunt down Bob and Vlado who have now joined forces. This minor peril is quickly dealt with, and the pair bond as they travel across the war-ravaged land with Bob getting some action along the way in a frankly strange sex scene.

The two eventually make it to Germany where Vlado is to be handed over to the gang leaders for a potential organ harvest. Will Bob take the money and walk away? What do you think?!

This was a decent effort, but the multi-nation production showed through, with a lot of dodgy accents and performances. The central relationship was poor with the kid playing Vlado being far too ‘stage school’ for my liking. There were scenes where he was screaming in delight and mugging away as Bob took polaroids that were just awful.

Bob didn’t convince either as a latter-day child catcher and his Road to Damascus style conversion didn’t ring true. He did give it his all however, especially by wearing a comedy style neck brace at the end, after he was beaten up with a trash can.

The story was pretty sleight too and I thought that the film must have been based on a true story, but no, this really was the best the scriptwriters could come up with.

To its credit the film did address some serious issues and the brutality and horrors of war, such as a big pile of corpses, was well done. Overall, the film lacked any tension or peril for me, with the cute kid and grumpy Bob not convincing to any degree, apart as a couple of actors cutting a pay cheque.

Not one that will live long in the memory and one that you will be able to find in my local charity shop sometime soon!

Best Bit - Bob's Full Bed

'W' Rating 10/23

No. 359 : Wild Men (2021)

 

Wild Men at the IMDb

 This subtitled Danish film was offered up to me on the BBC iPlayer and I was glad that I gave it a go. Most Scandinavian films involve murders and detective work in the dark, but this was mostly good fun and it had a strong heart.

The film opens with a large man dressed in animal skins attempting to shoot a goat with his homemade bow and arrow. He fails to nail his quarry and ends up having to settle for a toad instead, which causes him to be sick. He’s obviously a novice at the outdoor life and he soon heads to a petrol station/grocery store where his lack of money leads to him fighting with the staff and making off with a basket of shopping.

Meanwhile three more urban young men come a cropper when they hit an elk in the road and crash. There is seemingly only one survivor, and he staggers off with their large holdall of money. He soon stumbles into the path of our fur clad hero Martin, who manages to carry out some pretty decent first aid, including some stitches on a nasty leg gash.

Elsewhere the police are looking into Martin’s shop heist and into the crashed car, which now has no bodies, unless you count the elk hanging out of the front, which I do.

Two hapless policemen find the injured bagman but Martin decides to help his new friend and handcuffs the two cops together. The bagman, whose name is Musa, convinces Martin that they should head to an idyllic village where people live as Vikings did, off the land. As they set off on their quest a jaded police chief ramps up the investigation and Musa’s erstwhile colleagues set about recovering their cash. Who will achieve their goal? – and is it one that is worth having?

I quite enjoyed this film which was for the most part a gentle comedy, but one laced with a bit of gore, torture and some killings. The central theme was one of isolation and of people struggling with the modern world.

We didn’t get a lot of backstory to Martin’s plight but we know his life in the woods amounted to only ten days when we first encounter him. His seemingly long-suffering wife and his two daughters – and their rabbit! -set off from Denmark to find him in the Norwegian forests and, to be fair, she does a lot better than the cops!

The ‘tired of life’ policeman was a bit of a cliché but I liked his curmudgeonly attitude, and he got a fitting end, something akin to that of Mike in ‘Breaking Bad’. There was some commentary on immigration and the dilution of traditional values – some of it deliberate, such as the monetised Viking village and some of it less so with the drugs trade seemingly following the incomers. This slant was tempered by the Martin/Musa relationship which ended on a positive note.

I don’t think I learned much here – certainly nothing about surviving outdoors! – but it was a warm good-natured film that offered some social commentary and a few laughs along the way.

Best Bit - Viking Village Visit

W Rating 15/23

No. 358 : Windfall (2022)

 

Windfall at the IMDb

This film popped up on my Netflix offering and, despite never having heard of it, I thought I’d give it a go – well you are entitled to your once a year ‘W’ fix!

The film is pretty low key, set all in one house and garden over a couple of days. We open with a man approaching a sumptuous desert property eating an orange from the orchard along the way. There is no dialogue for the first seven minutes as he systematically goes through the house looking for things to steal. He chances upon a handgun, a wad of cash and a Rolex watch. So far so good and he’s ready to go.

 Fortunately for the film, the two homeowners arrive back and soon chance upon the hapless burglar. The next 80 minutes or so deal with the ensuing hostage situation and, as you’d expect, details slowly emerge about the relationships and the background to the situation. At an early stage the burglar leaves but on seeing a CCTV camera, which the owner had denied existed, he returns seeking a $500k payoff. The owner readily agrees, but the cash will take a day to assemble. To complicate matters further the Mexican gardener shows up and soon he’s a hostage too.

Will the cash appear and why has this specific target been chosen? Will the crumbling marital relationship survive the ordeal and who will reap the windfall of the title, if anyone?

 

This was an OK sort of film, but it was really slow and not a lot happened to cover even the lean run time we are given. None of the characters are afforded names which is always an annoying conceit for me – everyone is shouting ‘Babe’ or ‘You’ all the time! The burglar, named ‘Nobody’ in the credits, was played by Jason Segel who you’ll remember from ‘Forgetting Sarah Marshall’. This dramatic role highlights that comedy is his strength as I wasn’t buying his desperate hours, soul searching protagonist here. The homeowner is credited under ‘CEO’ and is played by Jesse Plemmons or Todd from ‘Breaking Bad’ as he’s more commonly known. I think he may have done a better turn as the burglar as he didn’t convince as the tech entrepreneur billionaire.

 

Filling out the cast as ’Wife’ was Lily Collins – she was forgettable too and did little with thin material. She gets a big finale that wasn’t earned, and I think that was the result of 90 minutes of the run time approaching with no cohesive or logical ending in sight.

 

The film did offer a bit of commentary on technology making people obsolete but to be honest my sympathies started with CEO and stayed there. ‘Nobody’ came across as entitled and unfocussed and although his randomness was a deliberate part of the character, he never came together as someone whom I cared about, feared or believed.

 

There are a couple of minor twists to keep you interested but it will be a passing, and soon to be forgotten, interest. I see the three principals all got producing credits along with the director and I’m sure a sunny shoot on the Netflix tab was fun for all concerned – just a shame the viewer wasn’t invited along for the ride!

Best Bit : The Gardener Does the Windows

'W' Rating 11/23

No. 357 : Wonka (2023)

 

Wonka at the IMDb

 

The original ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’, is the same age as me, having been released in 1971, as was I. We have both endured well and become well established favourites, with Willy possibly having more memes than myself.

I aways liked the film and even had time for the Tim Burton remake, but I wasn’t in any rush to catch up on this prequel which I felt, based on the marketing, seemed a bit slight and sanitised compared to the original. I did however dive into the figurative chocolate river when it was offered up as Christmas viewing on Sky at a family gathering.

 

I sat through the whole thing and have to say it was better than I thought. Not great by any standard, but a mild distraction or passable confection, if you will.

 

The film opens with Wonka, already in his trademark hat, with a few coins to his name which he manages to piss away in the forgettable opening song. He gains lodgings at Olivia Colman’s guest house – huge mistake- and soon finds himself in indebted servitude with some fellow guests including Jim Carter out of ‘Drunk in Time’.

 

Wonka has ambitions to open a sweet shop but is thwarted at every turn by three chocolate factory owners played in part by Matt Lucas and Johnston off ‘Peep Show’ who is clearly trying to execute ‘Project Zeus’ on the unsuspecting townsfolk. They are aided by a bribeable police man who gets fatter in every scene he’s in due to his chocolate addiction.

 

There are a couple of side quests including the origins of Wonka’s sassy sidekick and a mysterious present gifted to Wonka by his now dead mother which he’s never been able to open. With this being a prequel, the end result is never really in doubt but there are a few decent moments to make the ride to the destination worthwhile.

 

I would say that the songs are instantly forgettable, which was a shame as I had higher hopes when I saw Neil Hannon of The Devine Comedy was the songwriter. I think the film suffered by including a couple of songs from the original which put the new ones in the shade.

 

I did like Hugh Grant’s turn as an Oompa Loompa although the CGI was his scenes was obvious and distracting. Indeed, the use of CGI in general was poor with Wonka firing chocolates and sweets out of his hat at every turn – I get that the film is a fantasy but it just looked fake and a pale shadow of the practical effects from its predecessor.

 

Timothee Chalamet was decent as Wonka, but he didn’t have much of a singing voice nor the presence of someone like Gene Wilder to make the role memorable. There were recognisable faces down the cast list which is always fun, and there were plenty of call backs and sight gags to keep you on your toes. I liked the suggestion of from where the golden tickets idea came from, and the scenes with the late mother were sweet. Pro-tip though – if your dying mother leaves you a gift, just open the bloody thing! Pay attention Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 1 – this applies to you too!

Wonka is a decent family offering but I’d be surprised if it has half the legs of its predecessor, although I can see further instalments coming in the franchise – hopefully ‘Grampa Joe: Dole Cheat’ is up next! 

 

Best Bit:  Opening the long-held gift

 

‘W’ Rating 14/23

No. 356 : Woman of the Hour (2023)

 

Woman of the Hour at the IMDb

Anna Kendrick stars and directs this film which, although based on a promising premise, was ultimately disappointing.

 

It’s the 1970s and Sheryl, played by Kenrick, is an aspiring actress. She fails to get any proper acting jobs but her agent promises her some exposure by casting her as the girl on a TV dating show.

As she goes about her business and prepares for the gig we also get regular vignettes of a photographer who is also a serial killer. He meets and enraptures various woman and takes them on photo shoots in the desert, before murdering them. These sequence were very matter of a fact and brutal and this caused my wife to bail out after 40 minutes. I can see why as the scenes were disturbing and the film as a whole can’t be seen as entertainment.

 

Still, I pushed onto the end and although it was decent, the film was unsatisfying and seemed somewhat embellished, which having read up on the details, appears to be the case.

 

The film is well realised with cheezy 70’s sets and costumes, so it is a bit jarring when Sheryl is full on ‘me too’ slagging off the idiotic men and suffering the host who mutters the ‘C’ word in her direction. I’m not saying it was right, but what we saw on screen didn’t ring true of the 1970’s that I remember.

 

The actual TV show begins about an hour into the film and Sheryl is described as ‘the Woman of the Hour’ which seems a bit of an unlikely way to justify the name of the film, which doesn’t make much sense anyway.

 

The show rumbles on with the sassy Sheryl going off script and coming up with her own complicated questions to flummox the dopey male suitors. I may be off target here, but I’m guessing a tightly scripted TV show wouldn’t tolerate such dalliances – ask me about my ‘Weakest Link’ experience!

 

The host, not unreasonably, gets irritated with Sheryl, but she finds an ally in the make up woman. Meanwhile an audience member recognises the murderer as a criminal and tries to get him arrested but is thwarted by idiot men, who seem over represented in this picture.

 

The serial killer demonstrates his wit and charm – as well as his backstabbing skills against his fellow bachelors - and wins the day and a date with Sheryl. Despite picking him Sheryl soon smells a rat and has a narrow escape after an awkward dinner. As a coda we see the killer's next attempt at a kidnap and murder before some captions tell us how things played out.

 

I think this story about a killer who happened to appear on a TV game show was a bit thin for a full feature. I feel sure that all of Sheryl’s ad-libbed questions and her after show date were all invented and I doubt the added tension of the person reporting the killer during the taping actually happened. As I mentioned this seemed like a jarring modern take on a 50-year-old incident and it didn’t ring true.

 

The direction by Kendrick was OK but some scenes lingered too long, and the pacing was poor. I also disliked the jump around timeline, with it often unclear where we were with the serial killer’s journey.

 

Overall it’s probably worth a look but ultimately it is a small piece of TV trivia stretched beyond breaking point to justify a full feature.

 

Best Bit: The closing scene with the girl acting for her life was well done

‘W’ Rating 12/23