NOT QUITE SO MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR

MOVIE
Yesterday
Himesh Patel, Lily James
Director Danny Boyle
Review Ray Chan

With Yesterday, director Danny Boyle collaborates for the first time with Richard Curtis, the master of the modern British romantic comedy, whose films include Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral.
    The movie, in case you didn’t already know, contemplates on what the world would be like without The Beatles, and in which someone who remembered their songs decides to make a living off them.
    It’s as strange a concept as the illogical force of nature that causes this cosmic imbalance.
    A global electrical power outage, lasting a matter of seconds, stealthily rewires the world, and for Jack Malik (Himesh Patel), a struggling singer-songwriter, it changes everything.
    Knocked unconscious by a collision with a truck in the ensuing blackout, Jack wakes up to find he’s somehow in a universe which lacks everyday items such as cigarettes and Coca Cola, and has never been exposed to cultural icons like Harry Potter and the fab four.
    But he remembers the tunes, ensconced as they are in the musical history of the world he used to know.
    When Jack plays the lilting Yesterday to his friends, who are suitably impressed by the words and music, the lightbulb flashes. With one of the world’s finest musical back catalogues at his fingertips, the temptation proves all too much.
    Jack begins the process of writing down the lyrics of the songs that have been oft-quoted, sung, and memorised over decades of existence.
    It’s no easy task, as evidenced by struggles to recall the verses of Eleanor Rigby and attempts to play Let It Be to his parents.
    But reproduce them he does, and before long Jack is in a recording studio with a little help from devoted friend Ellie (Lily James).
    Jack’s tracks soon fall into the hands of Ed Sheeran (the musician playing himself), whose spiky agent (Kate McKinnon) wastes no time in signing Jack to a contract for a global launch. With such an illustrious repertoire to fall back on, worldwide fame ensues.
   Patel doesn’t have classic movie star looks but exudes enough of a likeable charisma to keep the audience engaged.
    He sings the Lennon/McCartney songs adequately enough, with feeling, soul and a rockier twist to make them sound modernised.
    But his character is sullen and difficult to warm to, as Jack agonises over his musical plagiarism while still holding a torch for Ellie, who has committed herself to someone else.
    All the while, some viewers might be wondering about how the movie pans out across this universe, and whether Jack can get back to where he once belonged, now that his life has changed in oh so many ways. And is Ellie in fact merely a girl with kaleidoscope eyes in a land of tangerine trees and marmalade skies?
    For this reviewer, the conclusion of the movie slightly disappoints, but one thing the film surely does is bring new life to Beatles classics which everyone from the last century is familiar with, while also introducing the younger generation to this amazing songbook which has well and truly stood the test of time.
    Indeed, ultimately, that’s where this movie excels, succeeding more as a commercial for the songs of the band, rather than as the uplifting, humorous rom-com with a difference it set out to be.
    And while we're in that mood, it's hard not to close with more Beatles references. The movie does have charm and you might definitely end up believing in Yesterday, but it's a long and winding road to get there.

#yesterday #yesterdaymovie #universalpictures

NEURALYSER NEEDED

MOVIE
Men In Black: International
Chris Hemsworth, Tessa Thompson
Director F Gary Gray
Review Ray Chan

If Chris Hemsworth is looking for a new franchise to get his teeth into after leaving The Avengers, then the Men In Black series would seem right up his alley.
    After all, it combines humour, action and sci fi elements in much the same way Thor:Ragnarok did, with director Taika Waititi's free-flowing God Of Thunder threequel allowing the Aussie to showcase a much-praised improvisation side to his screen persona.
    Yet curiously, where the three previous MIB instalments shone for their genuinely funny interplay between the heroes and bad guys, in Men In Black: International Hemsworth and fellow Thor co-star Tessa Thompson both appear to be locked into rigid characterisations and underwhelming banter that give them little leeway to emerge as a memorable pairing.
    Hemsworth’s emotional range has been hindered by the arrogant and irritating swagger of his Agent H character. Thompson, comically delightful as Valkyrie, portrays the scholarly, serious Agent M, who’s on probation and rarely comes out of her shell.
    While the duo undoubtedly have great chemistry, they're really stuck with what they're given, and can only elevate this film so far, as the organisation once again has to confront an alien threat.
    In fact, both are given backstories that appear to be more engaging than their main arcs in the movie.
    H once saved the world, granting him hero status in the agency, in the process becoming envied and despised by some of his peers.
    M, for her part,  survived an alien experience as a child with her memory of the event still intact. Yet despite spending years trying to track down the Men In Black, driven by determination, smarts and charisma, these winning attributes mostly disappear when she joins the MIB and the film's main plot gets started.
    The same malaise seems to have descended upon the action scenes, which while well-executed, amount to little else.
    A sequence in which H and M ride an MIB-designed bike through the streets of Marrakesh (seemingly the go-to site for spy and action chases in a thousand other movies) is shot well and ends spectacularly. But the computer-generated spectacle misses an emotional punch, and the villains that our heroes go up against lack any sort of menace about them.
    Along those lines, the supporting cast is also packed with talented people who don't get to shine: Emma Thompson is impressive as the veteran Agent O dishing out orders, but does little else; Kumail Nanjiani struggles to deliver the chortles as the tiny, wisecracking alien chesspiece creature Pawny; and Rebecca Ferguson just looks weird even for an alien, with a third arm and a hideous wig.
    To be fair, MIB: International is not inherently terrible. Many of the elements that made MIB popular are there: the slick, fancy gizmos, the exotic outworlders, the memory-erasing neuralysers … but it seems that the novelty has faded with time, and there's little that's particularly fun or exciting. 
    While it's a perfectly functional film with some competent special effects and tight action sequences, the heart and the humour of the originals seem to be lost.
    MIB: International does break new ground by involving more women this time around, and there’s an amusing scene where the two Thompsons debate the name of the organisation. It’d be interesting to see if the bravado is extended into the next episode, by renaming it Women in Black. 

#sonypicturesaus #mibinternational

MONSTER MASH

MOVIE
Godzilla: King of Monsters
Kyle Chandler, Vera Farmiga 
Director Michael Dougherty
Review Ray Chan

Michael Dougherty’s name may be unfamiliar, but he did help write the big-budget blockbusters Superman Returns and X-Men Apocalypse, so he appears well-suited for Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a creature feature on a massive scale, peppered with sprinklings of black humour.
    This is the third instalment in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, following Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ prequel Kong: Skull Island; a mega-franchise which models itself on the Marvel and DC ones, featuring super-beings and villains slugging it out in a world where humans are for the most part expendable, collateral damage.
    Dougherty’s movie opens with a flashback to the 2014 Godzilla film’s climactic mayhem, and then unfolds in the aftermath of this hidden monster’s first public appearance.
    Ever since, the cryptozoological research group Monarch has been tracking Godzilla and monitoring many other ‘Titans’ found dormant beneath the Earth’s surface.
    The theory, already proffered in the first two chapters, is that these behemoths have long existed to bring global balance, a premise more fully explored here as their epic battles are made to allegorise and embody the cataclysmic upheavals of nature that man-made climate change is bringing to Mother Earth.
    At the centre of Godzilla’s revival from its slumber is an acoustic device named Orca, which echoes the sounds of the monsters to summon, repel, anger or calm them.
    Godzilla’s big fight against two Mutos in 2014 tore apart not just San Francisco, but also researchers Mark (Kyle Chandler) and Emma Russell (Vera Farmiga), the husband-and-wife team who had developed Orca together, but whose young son was killed in the devastating onslaught.
    Now divorced, they are driven by divergent ideologies: Mark wishes to destroy all monsters, while Emma sees them as a necessary evil if mankind is to have a future.
    This same division can be seen between Monarch and the military, ever disputing whether to pulverise the Titans or preserve them.
    Ex-military eco-terrorist Alan Jonah (Charles Dance) steals the Orca device – along with Emma and her daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) – and plans to introduce widespread chaos to restore world order.
    He succeeds in awakening all of the hibernating Titans scattered around the globe, including the lepidopteran Mothra, the three-headed King Ghidorah and the winged pteranodon Rodan – regulars of the Godzilla franchise who all, according to the closing credits, appear as themselves here.
    The chaos that ensues, with confrontations which seem to last interminably, will either bore the casual viewer or thrill those brought up on a fare of 60s Japanese action programs on TV, when rubber-suited creatures delighted in destroying papier mache skyscrapers.
    In the parallel rush by Jonah and the bloodthirsty Ghidorah to topple incumbent hierarchies, to kill the king and to set an unruly replacement on the throne, the fate of Godzilla proves intimately intertwined with that of the entire human race. There’s metaphor and symbolism aplenty if you can spot it through the devastation and carnage.
    Godzilla: King of the Monsters rattles and races along to an explosive finish, while leaving the gate open for a perpetual Pandora’s pandemonium of sequels.
    And of course, we can’t forget the titular character. 
    In championing him, Dougherty respects both the B-movie beats of Godzilla’s film history as well as the environmental subtext that he has always represented, maintaining the lizard's persona as equal part ‘rampant destroyer of cities’ and ‘snarling action hero’, but mostly ‘noble ally of the righteous’ .
    Ultimately, the climax is predictable, but don't let that mar your enjoyment of the movie. All that’s required is a mandatory suspension of critical judgment.


#godzillakingofthemonsters #buzzmarketing