It can't really be Room if Door's open.

Room

(2015)

(SPOILERS) Perhaps predictably, the least of the Best Picture Oscar nominees in terms of box office take turns out to be one the best. It would be spurious to get into a debate over the chalk-and-cheese merits of Room versus Mad Max: Fury Road, as both exhibit an exemplary standard of filmmaking craft. Room has been rightly recognised for Brie Larson’s invested, dedicated performance (as affecting, if not more so, than her turn in Short Term 12), but equally laudable are young Jacob Tremblay (how he didn’t earn a supporting actor nomination is beyond me) and director Lenny Abrahamson.

About the only thing Room has in common with Abrahamson’s previous film, Frank, is the difficulty of getting inside the (papier-mâché or otherwise) head of its secondary protagonist. Larson’s Joy, that is (and, respectively, Michael Fassbender’s Frank). She has been abducted and imprisoned in a 10-foot-square, soundproofed garden shed, routinely raped by her captor over a period of seven years, her light and salvation the five-year-old son she would do anything to protect. There’s no articulating her resulting emotional state, and wisely Abrahamson doesn’t try.

An apt scene finds the reunited Joy flaring up at her mother Nancy (Joan Allen), unable and unwilling to relate her feelings and experiences. She believes, possibly rightly, possibly not, that Nancy won’t be able to cope. Later, a touching moment finds Nancy silently processing as Jack (Tremblay) matter-of-factly and devastatingly explains how he would retire to the closet when Old Nick (Sean Bridgers) visited Joy. While Jack, shielded from trauma during his years in Room, is able to adapt to this vast new world, Joy faces a new kind of nightmare, one in which she holds no hope of being understood.

Escape is no release. She finds herself in a different kind of prison, best illustrated by a television interview in which Wendy Crewson’s hostess assassinates her with understanding. Ruthlessly, but using the same sympathetic tones, she repositions Joy as the guilty party for failing to persuade Old Nick to give Jack up for adoption. In due course, we leave mother and son on a telling note as, revisiting Room at his request, Jack discovers it to be impossibly small and absent of the warmth and comfort it hitherto held; it’s no longer the whole world, or Jack’s Wonderland. While he simply loses all interest, Joy spends her time there just wanting to leave; she may say goodbye to Room with Jack, but she doesn’t have his closure.

Abrahamson’s direction is extraordinarily intimate and empathic. Within Room, he enables us, via Danny Cohen’s cinematography, to experience the meagre surroundings through Jack’s eyes: the entirety of existence in a microcosm (contrastingly, when we see Room from Joy’s perspective it is a place of claustrophobia, entombment and isolation). Yet the progression from there, through Jack’s daring escape into an uncanny environment of un-Room exteriors, unfamiliar faces, hospital floors, grandparents, and pets, is one that elicits fear, bewilderment and then, by incremental turns, adaptation and integration. Notably, the shed housing Room is revealed as a totally unremarkable garden shed in a totally unremarkable neighbourhood (not unlike the exterior of the house in the Elisabeth Fritzl case, the inspiration for Room).

Tremblay’s performance is entirely natural and immediate, while Larson’s is simply heart-breaking. Allen is hugely sympathetic as the mother (the haircut scene is quite wonderful). Tom McCamus (I can only assume the someone on the production was an Orphan Black fan, as they share several cast members, including Amanda Brugel’s hero cop and Joe Pingue’s useless one), slightly dishevelled and boggle-eyed, initially feeds on our, and Joy and Jack’s, uncertainty as Nancy’s boyfriend Leo, yet proves to be the sensitive rock where ex-Robert (William H Macy) cannot even bear to lay eyes upon his grandson.

Stephen Rennick, Abrahamson’s regular composer, provides a low key, evocative piano score, one that reminded me a little of Jon Brion’s work on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I haven’t mentioned Emma Donoghue’s screenplay, adapted from her 2010 novel. She is acutely insightful throughout, avoiding spelling things out or overstatement. Although, if I were to raise a minor niggle, the faux-pint-sized philosophy Jack pronounces as narrator is occasionally a little florid, more suited to gilded affairs such as The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet or Extraordinarily Loud and Incredibly Close than Abrahamson’s immersive, heightened-yet-simultaneously-grounded realism. Nevertheless, his film is a powerful, perceptive, wholly immersive experience, one that avoids both sensationalism and tying a bow around its fraught subject matter.

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She writes Twilight fan fiction.

Vampire Academy (2014)
My willingness to give writer Daniel Waters some slack on the grounds of early glories sometimes pays off (Sex and Death 101) and sometimes, as with this messy and indistinct Young Adult adaptation, it doesn’t. If Vampire Academy plods along as a less than innovative smart-mouthed Buffy rip-off that might be because, if you added vampires to Heathers, you would probably get something not so far from the world of Joss Whedon. Unfortunately inspiration is a low ebb throughout, not helped any by tepid direction from Daniel’s sometimes-reliable brother Mark and a couple of hopelessly plankish leads who do their best to dampen down any wit that occasionally attempts to surface.

I can only presume there’s a never-ending pile of Young Adult fiction poised for big screen failure, all of it comprising multi-novel storylines just begging for a moment in the Sun. Every time an adaptation crashes and burns (and the odds are that they will) another one rises, hydra-like, hoping…

I will beat you like a Cherokee drum.

Fast & Furious 8 aka The Fate of the Furious (2017)
(SPOILERS) Fun. Brio. That’s what any director needs to bring a sense of to the ever more absurd Fast & Furious franchise at minimum. Action chops are definitely up there, but paramount is an active affinity with how plain silly the series is. And it’s a quality F Gary Gray doesn’t really have, or if he does, he’s never shown it, previously or here. Even his action leaves something to be desired (his The Italian Job remake is far superior in that regard). Which isn’t to suggest there isn’t fun to be had from Fast & Furious 8/The Fate of the Furious, but it’s much more sporadic and performance-based than the previous outing, lacking the unbridled gusto James Wan brought to Furious 7.

But maybe I’m wrong about this. While I’ve seen every instalment in the franchise (only the once, mind) I haven’t followed it avidly in order (1, 4, 5, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, I think, only the first and last two at the cinema), although, it isn’t as if t…

I’m sorry to bother you, but are you telling people you’re God?

The Leftovers Season 3
(SPOILERS) I didn’t watch the final season of The Leftovers in Damon Lindelof’s preferred weekly format. Rather, I took it in over three nights (blame Sky for not knowing what to do with it), and if I’m completely honest, it wasn’t until the finale that I thought it reached the heights of Season Two. Which doesn’t mean it isn’t still (probably) the best series currently on TV (or was, at any rate), just that by the time of its third run it had evolved into something familiar, rather than disconcerting. As such, HBO was probably right to call time, as a fourth innings (Lindelof projected it might have had enough juice to go that far, left to its own devices) could have seen a shift towards mild contempt.

The big takeaway is that Lindelof has successfully rehabilitated his reputation after the litany of brickbats coming his way following the Lost finale (3.8: The Book of Nora is the anti-Lost finale) and the unfair maligning he received following Prometheus (blame …

This is our last stand. And if we lose... it will be a planet of apes.

War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)
(SPOILERS) It isn’t difficult to see why War of the Planet of the Apes didn’t open as well as its predecessor and is unlikely to come close to its gross; it plays it safe. Which sounds odd to say, for such a dark, downbeat, (almost) relentlessly grim blockbuster, but the lack of differentiation between this and its dark, downbeat, (almost) relentlessly grim predecessor suggests Matt Reeve and Fox thought more of the same would tickle its audience’s anthropoid itch, when in fact it only leads to a lack of differentiation. Which is a shame, as War of the Planet of the Apes is (mostly) an accomplished movie, expertly directed by Reeves and performed with due conviction by its mo-capped (and otherwise) cast.

It does seem a tad churlish to complain about what a movie might have been when it maintains the series’ consistent high quality, but I’m now firmly in the camp of wishing some of the more tonally-varied content of the original pictures was finding…

There’s no surf in Michigan.

Don’t Breathe (2016)
(SPOILERS) I passed on Fede Alvarez’ The Evil Dead remake – it seemed a tad too close to torture porn for my tastes, and besides, why redo Evil Dead if you’re eschewing a sense of humour; it’s what made it what it is – so this home invasion thriller in reverse is my first exposure to his work (he also has a new Lisbeth Salander movie, baffling rebooting the series with the fourth instalment, and a remake of Labyrinth on his to-do list). Don’t Breathe is okay, effective within its highly exploitative bracket, rarely doing anything but serviceably pushing obvious shock buttons.

I’ve seen reviews complain about the rape subplot herein – some even seem to think the Blind Man’s defence of “I’m not a rapist” is a representation of the views of the filmmakers, and that it thus needs emphasising that he is, in fact, which rather suggest a desire to be outraged than ends up making them look a bit dim – but it seems to me to go with the generally dubious territory of this ki…

Why would you sell the cows?

American Pastoral (2016)
(SPOILERS) Maybe Philip Roth and cinema just don’t mix. I couldn’t say for sure, as I haven’t read any of his novels, but the consensus is pretty much that none have resulted in highly acclaimed adaptations (eight have been translated to film or television thus far). American Pastoral won him a Pulitzer, so I presume it must be good, although you wouldn’t know it from the stodge that ends up on screen, any more than you’d have the remotest idea what it was in the material that hastened Ewan McGregor to make his directorial debut.

He can’t take the blame for the screenplay (stand up, John Romano) so that’s something in his favour, and technically, I guess, you could call him competent, but in terms of putting a dramatically coherent film together he does, alas, seem pretty hopeless, miscasting himself in the lead (and this after a string of roles that have rather re-established his early promise) to underwhelming effect – ironic, since he had been attached as an…

He’s a good kid, and a devil behind the wheel.

Baby Driver (2017)
(SPOILERS) Pure cinema. There are plenty of directors who engage in superficial flash and fizz (Danny Boyle or JJ Abrams, for example) but relatively few who actually come to the medium from a root, core level, visually. I’m slightly loathe to compare Edgar Wright with the illustrious likes of Sergio Leone and Brian De Palma, partly because they’re playing in largely different genre sandpits, partly because I don’t think Wright has yet made something that compares to their best work, but he operates from a similar sensibility: fashioning a movie foremost through image, supported by the soundtrack, and then, trailing a distant third, comes dialogue. Baby Driver is his most complete approximation of that impulse to date.

Is that a cherry pie?

Twin Peaks 3.11: There’s fire where you are going
(SPOILERS) A damn good episode. Perhaps the lesser part of it is the still great FBI plotline, but that’s only because – despite having the most overtly weird elements – it is more linear and less inimitable than the other claims to fame: Bobby and the shooting incident, and Dougie-Dale’s encounter with the Mitchum Brothers. Yes, it’s taken me a while, but I’ve finally come around to silver fox Bobby. Or should that be Becky’s pops.

What impressed me most about this sequence was the way it develops – escalated would be the wrong word. You think the scene is about one thing but then it becomes about something else, and then it becomes about something else entirely. During the build-up to this we’ve had the ominous, Blue Velvet-esque scene in which a boy playing ball sights Miriam crawling bloodied from the woods. Followed by Shelly riding the bonnet of her car until Becky throws her off.

There’s something very matter-of-fact procedural …

A man who doesn't love easily loves too much.

Twin Peaks 2.17: Wounds and Scars
The real problem with the last half of the second season, now it has the engine of Windom Earle running things, is that there isn’t really anything else that’s much cop. Last week, Audrey’s love interest was introduced: your friend Billy Zane (he’s a cool dude). This week, Coop’s arrives: Annie Blackburn. On top of that, the desperation that is the Miss Twin Peaks Contest makes itself known.

I probably don’t mind the Contest as much as some, however. It’s undoubtedly lame, but it at least projects the season towards some kind of climax. If nothing else, it resolutely highlights Lynch’s abiding fascination with pretty girls, as if that needed any further attention drawn to it.

Special Agent Cooper: You made it just right, Annie.
I also like Heather Graham’s Annie. Whatever the behind the scenes wrangles that led to the disintegration of the Coop-Audrey romance (and it will be rather unceremoniously deconstructed in later Coop comments), it’s certainly the …

Rejoice! The broken are the more evolved. Rejoice.

Split (2016)
(SPOILERS) M Night Shyamalan went from the toast of twist-based filmmaking to a one-trick pony to the object of abject ridicule in the space of only a couple of pictures: quite a feat. Along the way, I’ve managed to miss several of his pictures, including his last, The Visit, regarded as something of a re-locating of his footing in the low budget horror arena. Split continues that genre readjustment, another Blumhouse production, one that also manages to bridge the gap with the fare that made him famous. But it’s a thematically uneasy film, marrying shlock and serious subject matter in ways that don’t always quite gel.

Shyamalan has seized on a horror staple – nubile teenage girls in peril, prey to a psychotic antagonist – and, no doubt with the best intentions, attempted to warp it. But, in so doing, he has dragged in themes and threads from other, more meritable fare, with the consequence that, in the end, the conflicting positions rather subvert his attempts at subversion…

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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