Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Edgar Wright (screenplay)
Stars: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jon Bernthal, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Hamm, Jamie Foxx

Synopsis: After being coerced into working for a crime boss, a young getaway driver finds himself taking part in a heist doomed to fail.

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Completely sober thought here, but the best concert to attend this week is the one with no musician and instrument. Not the conventional kind, anyway, when the headliner is a filmmaker and automobiles are the tools of the band. Disparities aside, this zippy and roaring caper from Edgar Wright (of Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy fame) can still prompt audiences to behave when a show reaches its zenith: stand up and rock out.

Getaway maestro Baby (Ansel Elgort) has tinnitus when young, after a car accident that orphaned him, and the only way to soothe the ringing is with tunes. Any will do, though he has exceptional taste in music. Since they would power Baby through every roadblock and cook up neat maneuvers, cunning heist orchestrator Doc (Kevin Spacey) is absolutely proud of his wheelman. New-age Bonnie and Clyde, mischievous Darling (Eiza Gonzalez) and rugged Buddy (Jon Hamm), also agree. Only one unimpressed is the obnoxious gangster Bats (Jamie Foxx), who always has “How can I be the crew’s top dog?” on full-blast in his head.

Wright made a musical before, the rock-oriented Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, but 2010’s questionable taste in movies (The Expendables won the box-office crown) and music (hello, Justin Bieber) have effectively – and unfortunately – kept the homemade band where they are. For good. The U.S. fanfare was absent to recognize the director’s distinct blending of styles, crafting of golden banter and sculpting of characters – rotten and otherwise – into shades of cool. Rejecting a made-by-Wright film is turning down an invite to live a dream life, one where planning with the guts is preferred, Wright-speak is the language to learn, every moment has a great-and-above soundtrack and a pro d.o.p. (Bill Pope, in this case) is never off-duty. With all these items at their sharpest in Baby Driver, easy to realize is how much craftsmanship and energy has been poured into making riding shotgun with Atlanta’s finest driver akin to watching New Year’s Eve fireworks in the front row.

Besides the flair factor, also inherent when Wright is at the helm is love. After a fleeting glimpse at radiant waitress Deborah (Lily James) while on an astounding Ryan Heffington-choreographed coffee run, Baby finds himself in the diner where she works and has her gentle crooning of Carla Thomas’ B-A-B-Y on tape. Talks of songs and laundromats evolve into a way out for each and a life with both in the picture. Elgort and James’ instant compatibility in looks and click in chemistry make them a couple worth rooting for, or feel sorry for when the criminal life keeps separating the two, at one point to Sam and Dave’s When Something is Wrong with My Baby. Acclaimed composer Steven Price and the soundtrack crew’s knack to match song to scene is used more properly here than Suicide Squad, serving the “driven by music” vision in a manner more collaborative to the story, more harmonious with the footage and less insulting to audiences’ musical knowledge. No Slim Shady to hammer home the team’s off-kilter nature, thankfully.

Baby has two other important relationships as well, all familial – one with a deaf surrogate father, Joseph (CJ Jones), and the other with Doc (his personal Miyagi). The former’s story is better-developed, thanks to a kindness visible in Jones’ eyes, but Spacey’s intensity helps prevent his plot device of a character from becoming extraneous. Since Hot Fuzz, characters have become a weaker gear in Wright’s works, still a colorful bunch that check the terms of entertainment but little reason to be noteworthy.

Luckily, Baby Driver has the best material to repair any pothole it has: focus. While high-profile releases vault right off the drawing board with fantasy of multiverses, Wright’s fifth outing aims to perfect itself as a one-off experience first. Where vehicle-involved actioners escalate the carnage while setting ablaze their rulebooks (isn’t that right, late-phase Fast & Furious or xXx?), this film stays humble in scale yet astounds in execution. When rapid-fire editing is to be in vogue, its purpose here is to build Baby either as a crewman with skill or lover in jeopardy.

Baby Driver has a confined climax that deprives the film – a chase film – a coup de grace. Color what Wright has done in this respect similar to Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, but the cramped nature of it all brings the personal stakes forward, majorly. And without forgetting it is a part of an “audio-prioritized” experience, this ultimate set piece is the most ear-ringing, literally and figuratively, and spotlights the most killer track in Baby’s playlist.

There is a sadness when the film, like any song, welcomes the fade out after the crescendo. The thing about a newly discovered favorite track, however, is that the brain will play it at the most unexpected of times, a prompt to smile usually in tow. Personally, Baby Driver has been doing that since the press screening on Wednesday.

Have to tone down the subsequent elation a bit, still, or else people will think that alcohol is in the system.

Overall Grade: A

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 228, coming soon.

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Director: Michael Bay
Writers: Art Marcum (screenplay), Matt Holloway (screenplay), Ken Nolan (screenplay)
Stars: Mark Wahlberg, Anthony Hopkins, Josh Duhamel

Synopsis: Humans and Transformers are at war, Optimus Prime is gone. The key to saving our future lies buried in the secrets of the past, in the hidden history of Transformers on Earth.

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Recall the images of wealthy whippersnappers writhing after a musical event they attended – one with a name that rhymes with “liar” – got everything off-key. Harrowing photos and anecdotes popped up like daisies; the advertised “two transformative weekends” were exactly that by way of exposing people to (debatably) their first scam. Michael Bay must have read this news, translating the media from the Exumas to renowned mayhem and notions of enlightenment to a signature absence of them. Indeed, no mind enters Bay’s world to receive an expansion, but at least it is safe from shrinkage. That won’t happen with The Last Knight, though, a film that drains brains the same way Billy McFarland siphoned wallets back in April.

The advertising model is even the same to Fyre Festival, here and there some compelling plot beats and characters that all turn up in a lesser form. After Age of Extinction, Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen) leaves Earth to find the Creators, an alien race that always has Earth in its hostile sights. He finds one, the wraith-like sorceress Quintessa (Gemma Chan), after crash-landed onto a Cybertron now under her reign. Human-sized, she may be, but a lightning bolt from her can get Transformers on their knees or just a slight caress will get Prime to reveal his nemesis persona. Powerful (and beautifully rendered, too), but ultimately non-threatening since she carries out apocalyptic deeds by being stationary a la Suicide Squad‘s Enchantress. This is not the only time The Last Knight  will borrow DCEU’s all-villain affair, a subplot – golly, another one – involves Megatron (Frank Welker) has him assembled a team where each obnoxious member is introduced with a title card.

Meanwhile, Earth has its fair share of events. Still having flashbacks to the Chicago attack, the government establishes the TRF (Transformers Reaction Force), led by Santos (Santiago Cabrera) and Lenox (Josh Duhamel), to shoot down robots with extreme prejudice. Never one to align with what society thinks, 14-year-old Izabella (Isabella Moner) finds more purpose being Rey to her BB-8 – a rackety Vespa Autobot called Squeaks – and repairing other robots. Texas-based Cade Yeager (Mark Wahlberg) has also become more salvager than inventor, keeping himself busy daily so the familial loneliness doesn’t creep into his muscles. Down in Cuba, a disgraced and sweat-drenched Simmons is angrily sipping iceless mojito, turning down soccer games with his NASCAR Autobots buddies and researching the appearance of oversized mechanical horns around the globe.

To link all of the above to Quintessa’s presence, the franchise’s new set of screenwriters – Art Marcum, Matt Holloway and Ken Nolan – introduces even more characters, in their triptych wisdom. See, Quintessa is missing one thing, namely a Transformers-built magical staff once wielded by Merlin (Stanley Tucci), and Arthurian expert Sir Edmund (Anthony Hopkins) and Oxford professor Viviane (Laura Haddock) know how to find it (what is it with part five and staff as the MacGuffin in 2017?). While there is much preaching about unity, segmentation is the fuel that operates the story; characters who have been around for a considerable amount time are dropped suddenly and brought back when they are least necessary. There is an irksome see-if-it-sticks mindset to the progression and shoehorning of immaturity into every moment possible. “If it blows, it works; if there’s a mess, care for it less” has got to be the writers’ room mantra.

All Marcum, Holloway and Nolan have done is confirming that today Bay is no longer a maker of films but of moments – recently those of inadequate quality more often than the other.

Exotic cars screech, people fly, robotic parts littered the landscape and blinding pyrotechnics – these are the reasons we go and see (or endure) Bay, but try and do that in The Last Knight. With six (six!) editors on board, all required to be caffeinated before entering the suite, stunts become blurs and certain happenings do some jarring teleporting, both telltale signs of directorial boredom. There was much hope when the franchise injects new blood in the photography front by introducing John Wick’s Jonathan Sela, but other than moments of Bay-isms – slow-motion, high-tech squad emerging from water and revolving hero shot – every editorial decision smears the camerawork. Also, what is aspect ratio, anyway? – the film asks.

The most consistent element here, which is also the most consistent thing in Bay’s filmography, is that if a character does not pass for “American,” “white,” “male,” or sometimes in that order, they shall be recipients of juvenile insults. A French robot (Omar Sy)? He sounds funny. A British butler android (Jim Carter)? You are a sociopath. Over the human side, there is a need to see the next acting luminary whom Bay will direct to insult Asian characters in Transformers 6.

It seems like anything of quality is The Last Knight’s Kryptonite. Moner’s vibrancy to her sassy Izabella is all extraneous when the script made her a false-protagonist. Haddock is the Mikaela we need (her make-up at one point has her identical to Megan Fox), but is reduced to the typical Bay-girl whose existence alone can court derogatives and whose eyes ogled at Wahlberg’s physique. The Bostonian actor, ever the opportunist, flexes his biceps hard at this moment. The oddly delightful King Arthur sequence that starts the film is a moment that turns out to be to elongate the film, a sneaky seed to what comes after this Transformers series – prequels and spin-offs unbound by time or characters.

Perhaps all this, the entirety of The Last Knight and its eventual spawns, is solid entertainment in an alternate universe. Still inhabiting 10 Downing Street in the film is a David Cameron look-alike, so safe to assume how in that dimension Blink-182 is currently performing in the Bahamas.

Overall Grade: F

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Hear our podcast review on Episode 227, coming soon.

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Director: Lucia Aniello
Writers: Lucia Aniello, Paul W. Downs
Stars: Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, Holliday Grainger, Iain Glen

Synopsis: Scarlett Johansson, Kate McKinnon, Zoë Kravitz

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Watching Rough Night will probably render a rough night for a lot of audiences. Lucia Aniello’s directorial debut is overly clichéd with dry characters and a tedious narrative. If you are waiting for a movie that will match the caliber of Kate McKinnon’s comedic abilities, you will unfortunately have to wait a little bit longer.

2017, in particular, looks very promising for women directors with several shattering genre expectations. Aniello – of Broad City fame – is still able to demonstrate her comedic strengths in similar ways that makes Broad City such a great and funny show. For example, Broad City is great in how it spreads its humor around, which Rough Night was able to achieve, but it lacks a consistency that stifles the overall experience.

As stated above, the plot really kicks in when a male stripper becomes involved, and if you’ve seen the trailer, you know bad things happen quickly. Let us backtrack, however, to how the girls get to this point. Jess (Scarlett Johansson) reunites with four of her best friends (Jillian Bell, Zoë Kravitz, Ilana Glazer, Kate McKinnon) reunite ten years later for a wild bachelorette weekend in Miami. The first 25 minutes is the same Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V of things we have seen many times before. I am all for flipping the script and showing that men are not, the only ones allowed to have this type of fun but will not defend poor execution.

The stripper scene itself, while some humor is to be had, it overall feels demeaning and is somewhat mean-spirited. Once the chaos unfolds, the movie takes a huge nose dive and tries its hardest to keep you entertained but merely does not work. There is side plot with Jess’ fiance, Peter, that involves diapers and sexual activity that does not work. The stripper essentially becomes a prop for most of the film and the way Aniello uses it comedically is hit or miss.

Rough Night is a comedy that relies heavily on dirty jokes that become excessive and tedious by the end. The film’s screenplay – written by Aniello and her partner Paul W. Downs – deploys some of its jokes in a way that feels rather regressive socially. Aniello is more than capable of making a pure comedy without the overuse of dirty comedy as a punchline. In the few moments where the film focuses on the camaraderie between the characters and tackles this idea about living in the past, that’s when the film is at its best, it just comes too late to make a difference.

Scarlet Johannsson does not have the same comedic chops as the other woman, and is outclassed in almost every way. Kate McKinnon and Ilana Glazer deliver the best two performances and show that you do not need crass humor all the time to be funny. Jillian Bell plays the same sex-driven, drug-snorting character she always does.

I expected much more from Aniello than this snooze fest. Broad City showcases her potential and hopefully she can find her voice in a more streamlined manner in the future.

Overall Grade: C

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It could not be more against the message that Cars want to send, but there is less sputtering when only Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) receives the attention. See what happened when Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), No. 95’s go-to tow-truck, was given all the lanes in the sequel? “More of what you love” never hurts, but Pixar bewilderingly applied that concept less to the drawing board and primarily to the toy shelves. Must be why Planes got the green light, and the less said about that project the better, even if the manufacturing was all Disney.

Imagine the shock when McQueen ends his third run with a blazing podium finish.

For all of his flair, fans and friends, Lightning is “fading, fading fast,” losing out to the next generation of souped-up and stylish Piston Cup Racers. The swiftest and sleekest of them all is Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer), owning a passive-aggressive, master-of-all attitude that would render him the cinematic Winklevoss twins’ vehicle of choice. While revving hard to avoid seeing instant nemesis’s tail-end, Lightning wrecks himself in a notably harrowing sequence featured in the first trailer. And although the sequence impresses through its intensity and loudness, it is first-time director (but experienced animator) Brian Fee’s lingering on the silence afterward that commits the events to memory. Whereas every moment the audio eases off in the first Cars is to highlight animated-automotive beauty, Cars 3 does that and concurrently install a resonant thematic note. A promise delivered: The new phase of our anthropomorphic stock car begins here.

Blast the nature of numbering things, for real, as the narrative of Cars 3 renders it the true Cars 2. That World Grand Prix and posse of lemons business is made-for-TV stuff. Should any element feels like they are about to expand the universe, writers Kiel Murray, Bob Peterson and Mike Rich will not include it. The approach is appropriate since “old out, new in” is the theme here; for McQueen to enter the new age he has to let go of certain things, whether they are tangible – like his Rust-eze sponsors, Rusty and Dusty (Tom and Ray Magliozzi) – and otherwise – days when skill determines winning chances and not Natalie Certain (Kerry Washington)’s statistics.

The minimizing serves up poignant parts where Lightning exhibits his newfound ability of self-reflect, which sometimes also doubles as Pixar beautifully paying tribute to Doc Hudson (the late Paul Newman), but it lessens the impact of Jackson as Lightning’s foil and his high-tech ilk as exterminators of racing’s senior figures.

“He’s obviously an impostor. He looks old and broken down. And with flabby tires,” mockingly remarks racer trainer Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) straight to Lightning’s face in their first meet. The feisty canary yellow Jaguar-like is the Gunnery Sgt. Herman of high-end Rust-eze Training Center, albeit a firm believer on motivating others through fluffy clouds and car-eobics instead of colorful insults. Overlooking the facility is the silver-tongued suit Sterling (Nathan Fillion) who wishes to see Lightning revives his glory the “Chef Skinner” way: plastered on Rust-eze products.

Perfect doesn’t even begin to describe the casting of Alonzo and Fillion, the former’s passion-laden voice and the latter’s apparent channeling of his Browncoat persona really give their models a scene-chewing ability. Cruz gets to carry out most of the script’s jokes and an expected identity crisis moment – she wanted to be a racer until life intervened – but Fee designs these moments with efficiency in setting and lighting that the vocal performances’ emotions come through first.

As a creator of spectacle, however, Fee does not disappoint. A six-year break between the last installment and this equates to a fantastic tune-up of the cars’ sheen, the environments’ ever-photogenic trait and, most importantly, the cinematography. Cars 3 has a much more engaging, and at times borderline daring, camerawork that sees the velocity breaking the fourth wall and our eyes briefly believing Pixar’s pixels are reality. Look for the destruction derby sequence for a culmination of animation wizardry, hilarity and electricity as Lightning, under the muddy guise of Chester Wipplefilter, whipping around the figure-eight, dodging hyper cars and a crazed school bus (Lea DeLaria).

In Cars 3, variety is to the fun parts while purpose is to the closing. Legacy, as Stirling emphasizes, is important, and in this aspect the film locks down the best kind, one that sees Lightning becoming the truest sense of the word “leader.” Fee may have taken a page from the debut of this universe at this key part, but it is how the character’s arc discovers completion.

Needing an end point, too, is the Cars franchise. Fee has found the perfect spot. Should the returns of this film ignites the idea of “one next ride,” let’s hope Cruz will become real to get Pixar back on track by showing why the studio must push harder than its competitors: originality.

Or maybe a fluffy cloud will suffice.

Overall Grade: A-

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Hear our podcast review on Extra Film, coming soon.

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Director: Roger Michell
Writers: Daphne Du Maurier (novel), Roger Michell (adaptation)
Stars: Rachel Weisz, Sam Claflin, Holliday Grainger, Iain Glen

Synopsis: A young Englishman plots revenge against his mysterious, beautiful cousin, believing that she murdered his guardian. But his feelings become complicated as he finds himself falling under the beguiling spell of her charms.

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The mysterious Rachel (Rachel Weisz) arrives in Cornwall to meet her cousin Phillip (Sam Claflin), the adopted son of her recently deceased husband. Phillip is determined to subject Rachel to an intolerable visit having received frenzied, scrawled letters from the late Ambrose revealing that Rachel is a danger to his life, only to find on her arrival that she is a beautiful and charming young woman with a generous spirit. Phillip is intoxicated by Rachel and soon alters the terms of his inheritance to give the family home to her when he turns 25 years of age. He is under Rachel’s spell; she is his sickness, but is she all she appears?

The most striking thing about Roger Michell’s adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel is the outstanding beauty of the cinematography. The film presents its audience with breathtaking sweeping shots of the Cornish coast imbued with sandy, stony hues. The contrast of the film’s frequent use of dark rooms with flickering candlelight to the dazzling brightness of the cliffs and the daylight sky is jarring. It makes us uneasy; as does everything else.
The film’s score invites the audience to give over to paranoia and doubt Rachel’s intentions as much as Phillip does not. Rael Jones’ soundtrack is foreboding to say the very least and does a great deal of the work in surrounding Rachel’s presence with an air of distrust. Of course, Du Maurier’s compelling narrative conjures a sense of suspicion too; who swears revenge on someone only to immediately fall head over heels for them and sign everything away in the name of love?

Michell limits what his audience are able to see, creating a claustrophobic space that reflects the sudden intimacy of the central two characters. Whilst faces and expressions are often only visible by dim candlelight, the shot-reverse-shots of conversations are very shallow in focus. We see a face, a flame, pearls bouncing down a staircase and often have access to little else. It is a suspicious love story; a story that is about all the things we don’t know as well as what we see. There is an air of suppressed eroticism that is beautifully handled for the film’s first two acts until, unfortunately, a scene in which the pair are depicted rutting away in a field of bluebells. The mystique somewhat dies from hereon.

A crucial plot point to the film’s final revelation is laid on so thickly that you will see it coming a mile off and as beautiful as the film is aesthetically this is unfortunately not mirrored in the dialogue, which is clunky in places and occasionally weighed down by plot exposition. There is also moment of sudden coarse language from Phillip’s manservant Seecombe (Tim Barlow) that has no place in the film; it is entirely out of keeping with the 19th Century setting and baffling given that the object of his outburst is a Christmas tree.

Rachel Weisz is a fantastic casting choice for the curiously enticing Rachel and she is such a fascinating screen presence that the other performances get a bit lost in her shadow and in the fragmented plot, played out through conversations that alternate between dark bedrooms and beaches. Holliday Granger’s performance stands out second to Rachel Weisz’s as Louise, the young girl Phillip ought to marry. With limited screen time Granger delivers a well-rounded performance as the supportive friend whose suspicions are shared with the audience and whose heartbreak at Phillip’s new affections are painfully masked.

The film was a few plot and script tweaks away from an erotic and eerie gothic whirlwind of a film but, alas, My Cousin Rachel is a little more forgettable than forbidding.

Overall Grade: B-

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Hear our podcast review on Extra Film, coming soon.

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