Plane films (return leg): Crazy Rich Asians, Jurassic World 2, King of Thieves, Searching and Leave No Trace

Crazy Rich Asians

I didn't think I would like this film, which received a lot of hype this year and was a big part of the reason 2018 was called a year of great Asian representation. Honestly, the trailer looked obnoxious and I didn't think being money-hungry, snobbish, exclusionary and wastefully profligate was what I would call positive representation. But while I wasn't by any means blown away by the originality of the film, I really enjoyed watching it and at several points it actually made me laugh. 

While I am no means a crazy rich Asian - though the way the older ladies in the film grew up probably wasn't so different from how my mother grew up in one of the richest families in Sarawak - a lot here was familiar. One fun part of the film was seeing key locations and thinking, 'Oh, I've eaten there,' 'I've been in that church, 'I've done that with my Chinese family too!' And a family wedding in Singapore, while by no means a crazy rich party, was still one of the most fun and memorable ceremonies I've been part of. 

This story is not particularly new or original. A normal girl dates a guy, finds out he's actually extremely rich, but the family disapprove so she has to face hard times before we end up having to discover whether or not true love will win through. It's a very common story, whether in Asian dramas (Korean TV dramas in particular have this plot over and over) or throughout time in the West, and if this gets remembered as historically significant, I'm sure people will be a little perplexed as to why. But this is very timely, and it's purely and simply because this old chestnut of a story is about Asians - but meant for American consumption. Not only Asian-Americans, though their presence and market share in the States no doubt had to grow big enough to get this green-lit, but Americans in general. 

I get it. I get that this is far outside the norm because Asians have not been represented well in Western cinema, especially recently. Asians can be warriors, computer nerds, funny sidekicks or quirky cookie-cutter girls with a streak of colour in their hair. But this film, for a general American audience, can present Asians as headstrong, influential, self-assured, and perhaps most importantly of all, sexy. And while it shouldn't be, that's a very significant thing right now. 

How rich the Asians are gets stressed much less than I'd expected. Only the prologue in London is an outrageous demonstration of wealth. The rest is just big houses and expensive items, which isn't that exciting. The most interesting characters are by and large the less wealthy people and while sure, fantasising about absurd wealth is fun, this is more cautionary tale than aspirational, whichever perspective you might be looking at this story from. 

Definitely interesting to watch and enjoyable throughout, I certainly recommend watching the film. But it's certainly not particularly special. 

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

Given how unnecessary the first Jurassic World seemed, this sequel certainly didn't strike me as essential viewing. But plane viewing? Sure. 

Isla Nublar is about to EXPLODE. Yeah, the volcano became active and the whole place is going to explode. Good-hearted characters from the last movie want to save them, but as usual they're not in a humanitarian expedition but an exploitative capitalist one. Wasn't that what happened to Alan Grant? 

Despite how often this film tries to hark back to it with music cues and repeated dino entrances, we're a long way from the first movie here. There's so little heart in this action-packed sequel and so little desire to give the audience anything new or unexpected. Only the first third of the movie is spent on the island, and the rest is about unravelling the cartoonish bad guy's cartoonish plot, with the help of junior Lara Croft. 

It's all supremely unlikely, of the new characters only the kid is vaguely likeable - and MAYBE the useless Mos from The IT Crowd type - and her backstory raised about the only interesting questions in the script as well as justifying her final decision in a way that wasn't hugely hypocritical for a little girl who isn't a stringent vegan. way too many coincidental things have to fall together for this story to work. Overall, there's little to recommend this movie and it's going to date very, very quickly, but hey. There's nothing exactly terrible about the film either. It's just really mediocre. 

Perhaps worst of all, the whole thing ended on an insipid cliffhanger that I don't care to see concluded. They didn't even bother to tell a full story. 

King of Thieves

On one level, it's always going to be fun to watch elderly British acting royalty doing anything, from staying in a hotel to robbing diamonds. On the other, this film does glorify a life of crime a little too much for my tastes. 

That said, the first half of the movie, with the heist and initial divvying-up, is hugely fun. The silly old men are very, very entertaining. I find it faintly hilarious that Paul Whitehouse, who I used to love doing his Michael Caine impression on the Harry Enfield show, is now sharing screen time with him. Plenty of other stellar cast members - Michael Gambon, Ray Winstone, Jim Broadbent. There's a lot of funny bumbling about but getting the job done. 

The second half, where the thieves get paranoid about one another and start clamouring to double-cross their old partners, is a bit of a drag - even if it perhaps has slightly better moral lessons for us. I'd like to see how much this is based on a real story. 

I have to say, though, a few guns to wave around would have made this a fair bit more convincing. The young man could very easily overpower the rest when they bully him, so some scenes don't exactly ring true. But I'd probably watch this cast read the phone directory together. 

Nice to see shots of my neighbourhood in London, too, with the cable car running happily in the background. 

Searching

Honestly, I thought that I was scraping the barrel when I started watching Searching. I hadn't heard of it and didn't think there was much chance it would be a good movie. But it turned out to be by far my favourite of the movies I watched on my plane trips this time. Not that the competition was that fierce.

Of the various found-footage-type gimmick movies, this one is probably done best. The whole movie plays out on a computer screen, through streaming, Facetime calls, movie files and social media sites. By and large, the movie also manages to use real sites and operating systems, which is so much better than using fake imitations. 

The thriller mystery functions well, with a twist ending I didn't see coming, having fallen for one of the red herrings. The method of conveying a story was remarkable too, with a lot of story coming through text so strong performances not really needed - except for John Cho's at the centre of it. To my mind this film did the things Gone Girl tried to do far more adeptly and believably (even if the fundamental story was different). It's a shame this apparently didn't become a cult hit, because I thought it took its gimmick and did good things with it. Though perhaps there was a little too much cheesiness in the final act. 

Leave No Trace

Well, I finished off my movie-watching with Leave No Trace (though I had an hour or so extra both ways, so I watched March of the Penguins 2 on the way to the UK and Charles Dance's episode of Who Do You Think You Are? on the way back). Compared with the comic book fluff I mostly watched, this was on the heavy and serious side. 

Very slow-burning, somewhat uneventful but absolutely beautifully-acted, this movie tells the story of a man who, wracked with the PTSD of so many soldiers, has withdrawn from society and began to live in the woods using all his survival skills. But the twist is that he has his young daughter with him, aged about 13. She is well-used to living in the wild and her father makes sure she's educated, but of course when the two are caught and she gets an introduction to life in civilisation - and society - doubts begin to grow in her mind. 

The narrative isn't all that important here. What matters is the hook and how the characters develop from there. The interpersonal relationships are fascinating, in good times but mostly when things become fraught. While this isn't a film I would care to rewatch, it's certainly one I was glad to have experienced once. 

Film movies (outbound): Ant Man and the Wasp, Solo: A Star Wars Story and Ready Player One

Ant Man and the Wasp

One of the Marvel movies I didn't get to see was Ant Man and the Wasp. And a superhero movie is usually the first thing I watch on a plane - I don't want to have to engage my brain but I want to be entertained. And this movie fit the bill, while still being one of my least favourite Marvel movies of recent years. I definitely wanted to see Black Panther more, though. 

Recent Marvel movies have really refined the balancing act between goofy humour and seriousness. It started with Guardians of the Galaxy, became most pronounced in Thor: Ragnarok and now even pervades the Avengers movies. And I really like it. They've taken that smug Wheadonesque humour I used to despise and found a way to make it less smug, less jarring, less self-aware - basically by making it dumber so that it feels like what people in the situation might actually do. 

Ant Man and the Wasp attempts to do this too, but doesn't quite get there. It's extremely hit-and-miss. Some moments that undercut the seriousness work really well, like a phone call in the middle of a hostage situation. Some, like Scott being possessed by someone else and doing awkward things, are just stilted and awful. And it's not the performers. Most of the time Scott himself, the FBI agent and the dodgy former criminals do this well, but all sometimes just seem to miss the rhythm of the jokes. Most of the time Michael Keaton and the Wasp do it really badly, but sometimes it clicks for nice amusing moments. But it needs to work all the time, or very nearly all the time, for things to hang together. The movie was just nowhere near as funny or character-driven as it needed to be. Especially after Thor: Ragnarok did that so well. 

I don't get too hung up on the nonsensical science here, but this is also the most confusing of the Marvel properties - at least Doctor Strange is just meant to be magic being magic. In the first movie we were told the technology just squashes down atoms by reducing the empty space, and Scott's punches still carry the mass of his full size, but then we get people picking up cars and buildings. Why are they so light? How is being sub-atomic possible if the atoms are not altered? How are the CGI ants controlled with such precision? Are they psychic? And now we get this extra layer of mumbo-jumbo with quantum entanglement meaning instructions and 'antennae' can be planted in others' brains by contact in dreams...it's just a bit too much for advanced-technology-is-synonymous-with-magic. All strung around a dodgy plot where 90% of the action hangs purely on the antagonist's attitude being "I won't wait a few hours, I must do everything NOW."

Still, though, with brain off and detailed blurred over, it was still a fun way to pass time and Scott has a good place in the Avengers line-up as a particularly minor character. He's shown up in the trailers for Endgame so I'm interested to see what role he'll play in the next biggie. 

Solo: A Star Wars Story

This movie got a lot of flack for being the first big failure for the Star Wars franchise. Everyone could tell from Disney's reactions and adding certain missing figures - like marketing budgets - to the reported profit/loss numbers that this was not a winner at the box office. As a result of which, several potential spin-offs may never see the light of the day. It was eviscerated by online fan voices like Ethan Van Sciver and widely mocked. But reading between the lines, the impression I always got was that this was actually a decent film that basically got punished for how much everyone hated The Last Jedi. 

And I think that's true. If this had come out before Last Jedi, it would absolutely have done much better. It's not bad at all. Not as fun or interesting as Rogue One but certainly better than The Last Jedi or any of the prequel trilogy. It hit a lot of notes well, told a moderately interesting story that I grant you nobody really needed, but it was by no means a chore to get through. I wouldn't rewatch it, I'm glad I saw it on the plane instead of paying to see it in a theatre, but I don't regret seeing it. 

Here, we discover that Han Solo grew up as a kind of Artful Dodger to some huge gaudy space-eel-Fagin, escaped with his wily ways, and got tangled up in a heist that made him the loveable but grizzly rogue we see in the main series. There's romance, comedy, some interesting interactions with Lando and a lot of nods to lines from the originals that are much less forced than they were in The Force Awakens. Though it IS kind of awkward that Han just never comes across any force users and somehow manages to go through life thinking it's a myth. And showing him to be inadvertantly instrumental to getting the rebellion started was a bit awkward, too. 

I liked Woody Harrelson's mentor figure a lot, and his crew at the beginning was pretty interesting. I also liked Donald Glover as Lando, letting insecurities peek through the facade. The main actor felt a bit wooden to me, not really resembling Harrison Ford at all and mostly looking more like a young Jack Black when he tried to pull faces reminiscent of the older version of the character. And Emilia Clarke was pretty as always but didn't bring anything very unique to the character, whose final scene, though fun with the unexpected cameo, was either a reference I don't get or likely to be a cliffhanger than never gets resolved. And I really disliked L3 (L337 also being among the worst possible choices for a name). I get that she was meant to be fierce and empowered, but the way that was written she was basically just snide and unpleasant to everyone, less a revolutionary and more like the middle-aged entitled women with the asymmetric haircuts who retail workers dread because they're going to be demanding and sarcastic and make them go and get the manager. And if she was meant to be an inspiring revolutionary agitator, what happened as soon as she actually got involved in an uprising seemed more like a lesson to learn than a celebration. 

Overall, this wasn't too bad. For every moment I wasn't sure about - the character's name is an English pun? The final plan really works in that way despite how incredibly unlikely the set-up is? - there was a fun action sequence or effects-heavy shootout. Nothing special or original, but certainly a long way from the disaster its detractors make it out to be. 

Ready Player One

Something about this film didn't sit well with me. And not the various flaws the film had, like being way too long, not world-building very well, being super clumsy with how people respond to death of people close to them, or generally very stilted dialogue. It was something more fundamental and conceptual. Even though I'm squarely in the demographic this was aimed at, it just didn't sit well with me. 

Firstly, the gimmick isn't much of a stand-out any more. Seeing characters from a bunch of franchises together was a thrill back when Kingdom Hearts came out, or when the first Wreck-It Ralph filled the screen with surprise cameos. It's not that new any more, even if it still makes for some great moments, be it bizarre momentary team-ups like Chun-Li and Tracer, or battles between various robots I never knew I wanted to see interact until it was right there on the screen. Undeniably there's a geeky thrill to that, and the Shining portion allowed Spielberg to pay tribute to his great friend and influence in a way that was part homage and part hokey cg-fest. 

But it's not just that this isn't very new. It doesn't tell a story I thought was engaging. The idea of people inhabiting virtual worlds and that having a significant influence on their real lives is very old - Red Dwarf did it, .hack did it multiple times, Sword Art Online did it, 1/2 Prince did it, and perhaps the closest iteration of it to this movie is the vastly more heartfelt and compelling Summer Wars. So the key part is to tell a really interesting story. All Ready Player One can muster is a boring by-the-numbers misfit-teen beats dastardly-corporate-guy set up. Corporate-guy--who-wants-everyone-to-have-to-watch-ads-and-becomes-a-homicidal-maniac-over-it-and-could-never-have-won-anyway. Then there's a romance with all the simmering tension of the produce in a fish market with that old groaner of revealing a tiny facial blemish that the lover interest believes is horribly disfiguring. 

The rules of the world are also bewildering. We get a set-up where people are on treadmills but then they can experience flying around in the air upside-down and they use this gear in the streets and you can fall backwards off a chair and that somehow gets translated. How this machine works is bewildering. Then the idea of one particular avatar, the curator, becomes ridiculous when you think about what he must have been doing outside the main character's interactions with him. The rules of the game at the centre of the story are kind of absurd, requiring extensive research into the life of the creator and some really random logic in the Shining part - which may not have been in the original book, I know, since there was a different world for that. And the avatars used are so inconsistent. Our main characters each use super unique ones but other people like to be famous game characters, and a lot of them hang out exclusively with other people following the same theme, like the Sanrio mascots. We know from Second Life people are seldom random original avatars and usually just follow the latest memes, like Ugandan Knuckles. 

The ending was strung out way too much. We didn't need yet another car chase sequence, or gun-waving showdown. None of that really affected the story. I was very bored by the end, despite the endless kabooms and hi-yas. And I have to say, if you bring in the Holy Hand Grenade, at least give a bit more of a reference. 1, 2, 5!

Annabelle: Creation

I enjoyed this film more than I expected to. That’s mostly because my expectations were very, very low. A derivative of a derivative of a derivative, this is about the breaking point of how far James Wan projects can be stretched. When they completely abandon ‘things-based-on-things-the-Warrens-claimed’ angle for Conjuring spin-offs with The Nun, I think that might be a step too far. This one is just about grounded in their exploits still, though it goes wholly into invented-plot territory by showing where the creepy Annabelle doll was made. The real one, of course, was made in a factory with all the other Raggedy Anns, but movie Annabelle is an ugly, creepy pseudo-Victorian doll. Here, we find she was made by American dollmaker Samuel Mullins in the 40s. Because I guess someone still had to make creepy dolls that they didn’t even sell back during WWII.

I was so uninterested in the particulars of this movie that I didn’t even realise it was the second Annabelle movie. I thought it was the only one, but there was an Annabelle before Annabelle: Creation, itself a prequel to the Conjuring films where the story of the cursed doll was told in brief. I guess that film only covered the events that led the Warrens to investigating the doll, whereas this one covers how the doll was made.

Honestly, the doll barely figures into the story. It has nothing to do with the tragedy that kickstarts the action, acts as a vessel in an episode told only in flashback, and then is only briefly the place a nefarious being resides (that can in any case project itself out around the house in just about any form) before spending most of the film being just a bit of background decoration. The film wants to show a darker evil than an ugly doll, but in doing so makes the doll seem superfluous.

But there were some things I liked here. While it shared with the other Conjuring films a propensity to show too much of the monsters/spirits that come with the tedious jump scares, there were some scenes where tension was built quickly. The level of gore was ramped up a bit from the safe boundaries of the other films. Plus while we’ve had a whole lot of creepy kid and creepy doll movies in the past few years, other than IT – adapting an older property anyway – there have been strangely few films with kids on their own being terrified. Slicing them up is probably way off-limits for a film like this, but having the nasty hauntings happening to little orphan kids without parents to run to felt a little different from other properties.

There are some fairly decent performances, too. The Mexican nun caring for the kids and the father are very believable, but the two main kids are definitely the most interesting. I wonder if the two kids will go on to have interesting careers. The rest of the kids did their best with the roles they had, but they were paper-thin - little more than bully girl, token black girl with no discernable personality, smallest girl, etc.

The film trundles along with jump scares and some creepy setpieces, never really shows any interest in defining rules as to what this evil spirit can and can’t do, gets a bit lost with which girl the audience follows as the core of the narrative, and then comes to a satisfyingly bombastic climax.

Nothing new, nothing clever and nothing exceptional, it was nonetheless a solid, safe Hollywood film. I expected it to be dreadful, so being merely mediocre leaves me feeling quite positive about it.

A Dark Song

A slow-boiling, low-budget indie horror, A Dark Song was something a bit different from the other, glossier films we’ve been watching lately. The set-up reminded me of Lord of Tears, only with performers who can actually act and a genuine sense of danger, while the feeling of being trapped in a mansion with the supernatural in the UK reminded me of The Quiet Ones.

A grieving mother hires an abrasive occultist to work through the lengthy Abramelin Operation from The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abremelin the Mage. In the world of the movie, working through the ritual leads to a guardian angel not of the internal plane but in the real world, who will grant a powerful wish. Well, it’s not how grimoires are generally presented to work, but it works for a film. At first it’s dubious whether magic is real or whether an abusive man is just taking advantage of a vulnerable woman, but before long inexplicable things start to happen. It’s a bit odd that there’s still some question of whether the ritual is doing anything when it rains gold inside one magical circle.

Things escalate towards the end, and I felt that if they were going to go the route the film finally settled on, perhaps more glimpses of it earlier would have been better. The slow burn is a little too slow. But the human drama of two very different people, who don’t trust one another and are both pretty unstable, is pretty fascinating. I admire the film for showing not only the typical horror elements of the occult, but attempting the transcendental and elevated as well, and the final twist of what Sophia finally says when she’s face to face with what she wanted was quite beautiful.

I wouldn’t sit through this again. A lot of the uncomfortable atmosphere is created by unpleasant impositions occultist Solomon forces on Sophia. Drinking blood, stripping down, being deprived of sleep. It makes for an interesting dynamic between them, like Lara Croft being harangued by Frankie Boyle with a London accent, but takes a little too long. This is definitely not one for the horror fans who just want ghoulies jumping out with loud violin screeches to tell you when to squeal and giggle. This is a horror fan’s horror movie, rather like The Witch or Hereditary, and while I admire how it dares to be something unusual and am pleased to have watched it, it’s definitely not for everyone.

While I’m not an occultism freak, I’ve done a lot of research into Golden Dawn and grimoires and of course encountered Abremelin while reading into Crowley. Even if the film’s take on the guardian angel is very exaggerated, it’s clear there’s a lot of knowledge and enthusiasm for occultism here. I guess that Solomon’s name and the title are a reference to the Song of Solomon – but to be honest, ‘A Dark Song’ isn’t a very good title at all. Something about a ritual would have been better. Great care and attention goes into drawing magical circles and patterns, and the design department seem to be having fun.

There was very little one could call scary, and there isn’t even that much tension, so I can’t say this film got me any closer to finding a horror film that is actually frightening – becoming a bit of a holy grail for me at this point. But it had way more substance than the average by-the-numbers exorcism flick with a CG monster popping out, so I’d rank it as one of the better horror films of recent years. But the quest for something that’s actually scary goes on…

Insidious: The Last Key

Decided to finish the Insidious saga with The Last Key, released earlier this year. And like most horror sequels everything’s stretched very very thin. James Wan is obviously barely involved at this point, and Leigh Whannell seems to be in too deep with this project to know what the audience wants to see and what’s actually entertaining.

But it’s not as though I expected Insidious 4 to be an earth-shatteringly good movie. The previous films have degenerated from creepy but mostly effective to little more than a series of jump scares roped together. Elise was a strong character but already spread thin in the last film. This generic foray into her past with unthreatening bad guy, unconvincing stakes and made-up rules leading to made-up last-moment saves was even less satisfying than ghostly headbutts. Nobody seems to care in this movie and nothing is clever or original other than a couple of very brief visual moments that were kind of neat, like a walking figure becoming hanging clothes, or revelations that some ghosts are not actually ghosts at all.

But a couple of kind-of clever moments in a very uninspired full movie is pretty inadequate, and that’s what this film was. Ticks the box of simple, vaguely thrilling horror movie, but does nothing at all to advance what happened in the previous films.

Insidious: Chapter 3

Possibly watching this after a few artsy horror flicks wasn’t the most charitable thing to do. It was never going to be anything but a piece of fluff, and judging by box office numbers for the likes of The Witch and Hereditary, this is the sort of thing mass audiences want. Not very scary, but with a few little jump scares with ridiculous string section blasts to tell you what you’re meant to think, and then you can laugh and cuddle up to your partner a little more and feel good. This sort of by-the-numbers horror is to horror what The Big Bang Theory is to comedy. Nothing wrong with it, it’s enjoyable to watch and it does what it’s meant to do, but plays it totally safe, follows a formula and doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

From Poltergeist to The Conjuring, and quite possibly back to The Exorcist, it’s pretty obvious with these sorts of supernatural films that the interesting people to follow tend to be the exorcists themselves. The often very quirky individuals who show up after all the normal family’s problems have reached a climax point and teach them how to fight back. And that’s true for Insidious, too – I cared a lot more about the funny older lady with the power to look into ‘The Further’ than about the dad of the family who was ostensibly the central figure of the first two films. So this prequel shows her in action again. Not revealing much about her past – it looks like that was saved for the recently-released Insidious 4 – but showing a case from her past and, a little unconvincingly, how she got her team together.

This film is noticeably more ropey than the last two. The family that gets haunted are very wooden, there’s quite a bit of awkward cutting to make it look like a 70-year-old woman is getting violently thrown around. As usual, the things the ghosts do are arbitrary and based more on building up audience tension than actually making any sort of internally consistent sense. Many of the supposedly creepy moments are more comical, as are the times Elise steels her spiritual power to become a badass and fight back. Meanwhile, there’s nothing whatsoever funny about the supposed comic relief guys.

But frankly I don’t watch Insidious 3 expecting anything different from this. So in what it sets out to do, it succeeds. I doubt I’ll remember the details of the story next year, though, never mind in 5.  

A Quiet Place

Another more experimental horror film today, the almost dialogue-free A Quiet Place, which was quite the hit a few months ago. I have to say, my initial stance was a little disapproving – this film is seven parts The Last of Us, three parts The Village, with just a dash of Cloverfield for monster design. A bearded but grizzled father whose name I can’t remember but I always thought of as Joel, has a first-act tragedy to get us invested and introduce the dangers of this world, then has to survive attacks from clicking, sound-sensitive monsters in a post-apocalyptic United States. It’s not unfamiliar territory.

This shows how the long-delayed The Last of Us movie could actually work extremely well and find a very receptive audience. It makes me a little sad that people who watch it when it eventually comes out might be pulled from their immersion by remembering how they’ve seen the Clickers somewhere before.

Beyond that similarity, this is a good chance for strong performances. The kids act well but the adults – the director John Krasinski, and his real-life wife Emily Blunt – get a real chance to shine. They can portray fear, pain, terror, resolve, bravery and even despairing resignation so well without words. For a short movie with a tiny cast, it does everything it needs to with brevity and grace.

Maybe the scares could have been better, and maybe seeing less of the monsters would have helped. The way they find to combat the creatures and the idea that nobody ever tried something like that before seems very far-fetched, but it worked in the little microcosm of the film.

Not bad, but not fantastic either, it at least tried something different. At least, different from other films. Not very different from video games.