Film Roundup 02/05/2024

It’s Thursday, which means it’s time for the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we take a look at the upcoming film releases, talk about why you should get excited about them, and help you decide what to spend your time and money on. This week sees a whole range of films falling, flexing, frightening, flirting and force-pushing their way into the cinemas…

Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these films. All of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.

The Fall Guy

First on the list this week we have Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling in his first role since his hugely popular and Oscar-nominated portrayal of Ken. Gosling plays Colt Seavers, a Hollywood stuntman working on a film directed by his ex-girlfriend, Emily Blunt’s Jody Moreno. When the star of the film (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) goes missing amidst rumours of involvement with criminal gangs, Colt is roped into tracking him down.

This looks like a ton of fun. Gosling is clearly still channelling his inner Kenergy to tackle this with a similar level of charm and charisma, and seems to have a nice easy chemistry with Emily Blunt (who is always a sign of a good film). As soon as you hear Journey’s Any Way You Want It striking up in the trailer you get a good feel of what the tone is going to be like – big, heartfelt and tongue very firmly in cheek. All the early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive, saying that this is everything an action comedy should be.

Appropriately for a film about a stuntman, it’s also a love letter to cinema stunts. The director, David Leitch, started out as a stuntman and stunt coordinator, so he knows how to make them as big and exciting as possible. The movie-set setting gives the audience an opportunity for a behind-the-scenes look at how much work goes into pulling off the stunts they see in their favourite action films, before the plot provides an excuse for this film to stage its own action set-pieces. Particular props to stunt driver Logan Holladay, who broke a Guinness world record for the most cannon rolls in a car – managing to roll the car eight times to take the record from Casino Royale. It would not surprise me if the inevitable success of this film helps lead the charge for stunts finally getting their own award at the Oscars in the near future.

• The Fall Guy on IMDB
• The Fall Guy on Rotten Tomatoes

Love Lies Bleeding

I was fortunate to attend a preview of Love Lies Bleeding at the Mockingbird last weekend, and it was excellent – dark, sexy, violent and edgy. Kristen Stewart plays Lou, a manager at a local gym and daughter of Ed Harris’s arms-trafficking criminal boss. She falls in love with Jackie (Katie O’Brian), a bodybuilder passing through the town with dreams of competing at an upcoming national contest in Las Vegas, but as Jackie starts getting drawn into Lou’s family life, their relationship takes a darker turn.

Despite her career kicking off with Twilight, Kristen Stewart (much like her co-star Robert Pattinson) has gone on to take some interesting roles that have shown her to be a talented and versatile actor – see for example her recent Diana biopic. A million miles from being a princess, her character in Love Lies Bleeding is introduced with her arms elbow deep in a gym toilet trying to dislodge a clog. She spends her evenings alone with her cat, listening to tapes about quitting smoking. We are later told that she has never left the city – a result of feeling the need to look after her sister (Jena Malone) who is in an abusive relationship. Lou is downtrodden but tough, resilient and protective at her core, so it is all the more believable that she quickly falls for the more visibly tough Jackie. Katie O’Brian (herself a former bodybuilder) has popped up in a number of things recently, including Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania and the Mandalorian, but this is the role where she makes the biggest impact. Jackie starts off warm and trusting, showing genuine tenderness in her more intimate scenes with Lou. The romance between them feels natural and real. But as she pushes herself and her body harder in pursuit of her dream, some psychological cracks start to appear and O’Brian portrays them well, using her physicality to frightening effect.

The violence is infrequent but visceral, and all the more impactful for its infrequency. We are gradually introduced to the backstory of Lou’s relationship with her father’s underworld activities through dreamlike flashbacks in red monochrome, which creates a disconnect between that world and the world that Lou lives in now. So when they do start to bleed into each other the film gets increasingly surreal, culminating in a final showdown full of magical realism that you won’t see in other revenge flicks. This is definitely not one to watch with kids around, but it is well worth a watch.

• Love Lies Bleeding on IMDB
• Love Lies Bleeding on Rotten Tomatoes

Tarot

A group of friends breaks the rules in a tarot card reading and unwittingly unleashes dark supernatural forces, which take the form of the cards that they drew. The premise of a bunch of teens messing with evil forces that they don’t understand, recklessly disobeying the fairly straightforward rules and warnings, and suffering the consequences, was used to great effect in last year’s excellent Talk To Me. Tarot does not look quite as original as that film, nor does it appear to have the same level of subtext sitting behind it. And there aren’t many big names in the cast – the only ones I recognise are Jacob Batalon (Ned in the Marvel Spider-Man films) and Avantika (Karen in the Mean Girls: The Musical movie). But it does have some creepy demons in creepy masks doing creepy things. If that’s what you enjoy in a horror film, or you are stuck for ideas for this year’s Halloween costume, this could be one for you.

• Tarot on IMDB
• Tarot on Rotten Tomatoes

The Idea Of You

The idea of The Idea Of You is that Solène (Anne Hathaway) takes her daughter to Coachella and, after a chance backstage meeting, falls in love with the much younger Hayes (Nicholas Galitzine), a member of a wildly successful boyband about to play the headline slot. Despite the age gap, he also falls in love with her. Basically, imagine if your mum started dating Harry Styles…

The premise implies that it would be unlikely or inappropriate for someone so young to be attracted to Anne Hathaway, which I am struggling with a little – the idea of any straight adult male not being attracted to Anne Hathaway would require a far greater suspension of disbelief. Once you get past that though, this looks like a decent little romance film that plays out like an updated Notting Hill, exploring how the modern world reacts when a normal person has the temerity to start dating a huge celebrity (especially when that celebrity is the object of millions of teenage girls’ crushes). I’m not hugely into romance films, but the reviews for this have been positive so if you like this sort of thing then you should enjoy this. Plus Anne Hathaway is a fantastic actress, and she looks a lot less unhinged in this than she was recently in the excellent Mother’s Instinct (although if she is that unhinged here too, that is definitely a film I would watch…).

• The Idea Of You on IMDB
• The Idea Of You on Rotten Tomatoes

Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace

There was a time when The Phantom Menace and its fellow prequels were the butt of every Star Wars joke. The ability to use the force, which was previously a mysterious phenomenon akin to magic, was explained away as a high concentration of microscopic organisms. Darth Vader, one of cinema’s most iconic villains, was reduced to an irritating child (and later a petulant whiny teen). The tone careened between interminably dull debates in the senate about trade disputes and childish jokes about characters stepping in smelly poo. Jar Jar Binks existed. In the run-up to its release in 1999, die-hard fans who had grown up watching the original trilogy at the cinema hyped the prospect of a new Star Wars film up to a fever pitch, and then afterwards spent the next decade or so venting their disappointment.

But for a lot of people in my generation, who had watched the original films on TV growing up but didn’t have quite the same nostalgia for them, Phantom Menace was our first experience of Star Wars on the big screen. And for all its flaws it had some genuinely epic moments. Scenes such as the separatist ships dropping rank after rank of battle droids on Naboo, or the entire pod-racing sequence, now feel like classic Star Wars scenes. I still remember the communal intake of breath at the cinema when Darth Maul revealed his second lightsabre blade for the first time ahead of his duel with Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon (and Duel of the Fates is still one of the best pieces of music across the entire franchise – John Williams was on just as fine form here as he was in the original trilogy). They are not, by any means, perfect films, and they certainly aren’t a patch on the originals, but nor are they anywhere near as bad as the earlier backlash suggested.

Since then, the landscape of the Star Wars universe (or should that be the galaxy far, far away?) has changed a lot. TV series such as The Clone Wars, Obi-Wan and Ahsoka have built on the mythology of the prequels – giving the fans whole new reasons to love characters like Anakin and Mace Windu, fleshing out background Jedi characters like Plo Koon and Kit Fisto, and continuing the stories of fan favourites like Darth Maul. Other stories that run tangentially to the main Skywalker plot, such as those told in Rogue One and The Mandalorian, have reinvigorated the franchise in the public consciousness. And the muddled and directionless Episodes 8 and 9 have united fans of the originals and the prequels against a common enemy, prompting whole new cries of “It’s just not Star Wars!” and making the prequels look better by comparison. They may have been tonally all over the place, but at least George Lucas knew how to carry a plot across three films. Somehow, despite being hugely successful mega-budget blockbusters, the prequels are almost seen as cult classics nowadays – underappreciated on release but increasingly beloved through a combination of rediscovery and nostalgia.

So it is with some excitement that, with Star Wars Day (May the 4th of course – as far as I know the only holiday based on a cheesy pun) coming up this weekend, The Phantom Menace is getting a cinema re-release to mark its 25th anniversary. Apparently there is also a preview of upcoming new series The Acolyte at the end, too. Take the excuse to dust off your lightsabre, hop in your pod-racer and go watch Jar Jar Binks stepping in poo on the big screen again.

• Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace on IMDB
• Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace on Rotten Tomatoes

If you only see one film this week…

Although The Fall Guy looks great and will doubtless get the bigger box office, my film of the week this week is the much darker and more interesting Love Lies Bleeding.

Still in cinemas and worth a watch

• Challengers
• Abigail
• Civil War

Trailer of the week

This week, we’ve been given our first look at Mufasa: The Lion King. I wasn’t fully sold on the ‘live action’ remake of The Lion King – most of it felt like either an inferior pastiche or an inexcusable divergence from the original. But this new film, which is untethered to any classic source material, is a much more intriguing beast. For a start, it’s directed by Barry Jenkins, who has made such incredible films as Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, both of which took a grounded story about the Black experience and gave it a dreamlike, mythical quality. It also has an incredible cast – as well as the returning Beyonce, Donald Glover, John Kani, Seth Rogen and Billy Eichner, Mufasa adds Thandiwe Newton, Mads Mikkelsen, Anika Noni-Rose, Keith David, Lennie James and Beyonce’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter. The latter plays Simba and Nala’s daughter Kiara, suggesting that as well as giving Mufasa an original back-story, this will also borrow elements from The Lion King 2: Simba’s Pride (easily the best of the Disney straight-to-video sequels). And finally, it is revealed at the end of the trailer that there are original new songs by Lin Manuel Miranda. So yes, this is a prequel/sequel to an unnecessary remake of a classic Disney film. But if that doesn’t float your boat, it’s also a cross-generational story set in Africa with a hugely talented, predominantly Black cast, directed by Barry Jenkins and with music from the man behind Hamilton.