Hello there, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we take you through the biggest new cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week: AI, F-words and canines…
Usual disclaimer: unless otherwise stated, I haven’t seen these movies yet so all of my opinions are based on trailers, early reviews and other rumours and buzz.
Tron: Ares
Tron: Ares is the third Tron film after 1982’s Tron and 2010’s Tron: Legacy. Ares (Jared Leto) is an AI computer program given form in the material world by Julian Dillinger (Evan Peters), the grandson of Ed Dillinger in the original movie, to track down a piece of computer code that will help control the new technology that brought him to life. That code is now held by Eve Kim (Greta Lee), who has taken over management of game design company ENCOM.
A lot of people have a lot of nostalgia for the Tron franchise. As one of the first major uses of CGI in cinema, it laid the groundwork for every big blockbuster that followed it. Its neon world of lightcycles and identity discs is instantly recognisable and iconic enough to overlook how dated the graphics look nowadays. The sequel, released nearly three decades after the original, updated not just the look but also the sound, courtesy of Daft Punk’s incredible soundtrack (which arguably had a bigger impact on the public consciousness than the film itself). Although neither film is top tier cinema, their cool imagery and willingness to push the technological envelope have garnered them a big following.
Ares continues Legacy’s legacy by sharpening the effects even further and introducing another great soundtrack, this time from Nine Inch Nails (whose Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have become quite accomplished film composers in recent years). However, the early reviews would suggest that this entry is even more style-over-substance than its predecessors. It’s well-established in the franchise that red is coded for bad guys, so unless Ares is deliberately written as an antihero his crimson get-up immediately suggests that the film isn’t respecting its own lore (as does the absence of Bruce Boxleitner’s eponymous AI). And he is played by Jared Leto, whose off-screen behaviour has not made him especially popular. The reviews have been particularly scathing over his performance on-screen too. Which is a shame, because the rest of the cast (including, as well as Peters and Lee, Gillian Anderson, Jodie Turner-Smith and a returning Jeff Bridges) is great.
If you can get past Jared Leto and you’re not too entrenched in the earlier films, this will be a visually impressive way to spend a couple of hours with your brain switched off and some great music that will sound incredible blasting through the cinema’s surround sound speakers. Fans of the franchise may be disappointed, but supporting this will increase the likelihood of getting another Tron film in, at the current rate, maybe a decade if you’re lucky.
- Tron: Ares on IMDB
- Tron: Ares on Rotten Tomatoes
I Swear
I saw a preview of this a few weeks ago at one of Cineworld’s secret screenings, and it was excellent. Robert Aramayo plays real life Tourette’s sufferer John Davidson, as the film charts his life growing up in Galashiels at a time when the condition was relatively unknown, as well as the work he accomplished as an adult to change that.
Aramayo, probably best known for playing the young (relatively speaking) Elrond in Amazon Prime’s Rings of Power series, gives an incredible performance. He gets Davidson’s tics just right, but there’s a wealth of emotions that come through behind them depending on the context. You can see the pain when he knows he’s said something that will get him in trouble, the humour when he’s said something amusing, the frustration when he was just hoping to relax. Without going into detail, there’s also earned pride and a profound sense of hope by the end that will bring a tear to your eye. Props also to Scott Ellis Watson, who plays Davidson as a kid and has some of the darkest scenes – it feels incredible now to see how badly people with Tourette’s were treated back before it was properly understood, when everyone assumed he was just a kid playing a really committed practical joke.
There are some fantastic supporting characters too. Shirley Henderson plays John’s mum Heather, who never seems to quite understand or accept what he’s going through or the best way for her to deal with it. It’s hard to know whether to see her as a sympathetic character or a selfish monster, but she mostly just comes across as tired. At the more positive end of the spectrum, John gets a much nicer mother figure in the form of Maxine Peake’s Dottie – a woman dying of cancer who decides to take him in and spend the last of her energy trying to turn his life around. Peter Mullan also shines as Tommy Trotter, one of the first people to take a chance on John and give him a job. Peake and Mullan are both a welcome source of warmth in a story that must have played out very differently for other Tourette’s sufferers at the time who didn’t have someone like them to support them.
The film’s overall treatment of Tourette’s strikes a nice balance between serious and amusing. From the outside looking in, watching someone randomly yelling out swear words and inappropriate comments can be very funny, and writer-director Kirk Jones doesn’t try to deny that. There are some scenes where the natural silliness is allowed to play out and breathe, especially in the final act when John starts to meet other people with Tourette’s. It’s made clear to the audience, from the off, that there is nothing malicious or deliberate in anything that he says, so when he and the other characters find it funny too, it’s like we’re being let in on a joke and you can feel the tension dissipating. But at the same time, we are regularly reminded what an incredibly difficult condition this is to live with, and how horrifically it can play out when people don’t see the funny side. It would be very easy for a film with this subject matter to lean too heavily on the humour and come across as exploitative, or go too far the other way and feel miserable and preachy, but I Swear manages to be both respectful and enjoyable. And in doing so, it achieves what Davidson has been trying to do for a long time – it raises awareness of Tourette’s. I genuinely feel like I understand it far better now than I did before.
I cannot recommend this enough. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll fall in love with Davidson’s incredibly patient dog. Which leads us nicely onto our third film this week…
- I Swear on IMDB
- I Swear on Rotten Tomatoes
Good Boy
This has been a great year for horrors, and as we approach Halloween there is one more spooky treat waiting to extend that list. Todd (Shane Jensen) moves to a quiet house in the woods to try and recover from an illness, but the house is haunted by a supernatural presence that quickly turns malevolent. His only hope is his dog Indy (played by the director’s real pet dog Indy), through whose eyes the entire story is told.
It is a well-established fact that cinema audiences love a cute dog. It’s an easy way to make us immediately trust their owners and despise anyone who is mean to one. As any John Wick fan will testify, we will cheer on the most extreme murderous rampages if they’re being committed as an act of revenge for puppy murder. So the idea of a horror movie centred around a dog trying to protect his owner and avoid the evil spirits pursuing him sounds like a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. It’s hard to imagine not being immediately invested in the fate of such an adorable face.
The trailer is quite light on plot so it’s hard to say much more, but this is getting some solid reviews, with Indy’s animal performance in particular garnering a lot of praise. It looks like it works both as a horror film and as an experimental piece of art about how a dog might see the world.
- Good Boy on IMDB
- Good Boy on Rotten Tomatoes
Plainclothes
Lucas (Tom Blyth, best known for playing the young Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) is an undercover agent tasked with luring and arresting gay men in a shopping mall bathroom. But it all changes when he meets Andrew (Russell Tovey) and starts to fall in love. Will his desires overcome his sense of duty?
I haven’t heard too much about this but it sounds intriguing. It’s set in the 1990s, which feels too recent for its premise of men in New York being arrested for being gay, but that could just be me showing my ignorance. In any case, it sounds difficult to get behind a protagonist who’s doing something that feels so wrong nowadays. The reviews have been mixed, but they all agree that the two central performances are excellent and show real chemistry. There was a time when Russell Tovey seemed to pop up in basically everything the BBC made, so it feels odd to see him with an American accent here. He is normally a sign of something good though, and he is a much less frequent sight on screen nowadays.
I’ll keep this one brief because I am rapidly running out of Thursday, but Plainclothes sounds like a fun indie queer romantic drama, and should be well worth catching.
- Plainclothes on IMDB
- Plainclothes on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
I Swear, it’s really good.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
- One Battle After Another
- The Smashing Machine
- Him
Trailer of the Week
I’m going for a TV trailer this week, for a show that I’ve been looking forward to for a while. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is a new series set in the world of Game of Thrones, based on the three (so far) Dunk & Egg short stories by George R R Martin. Ser Duncan “Dunk” the Tall is the apprentice to a hedge knight – a sword for hire who travels the land, sleeping in hedgerows and fighting for whichever lord is willing to pay for his service. Hedge knights in Westeros have a bad reputation, but this one teaches Dunk the value of chivalry and honour before dying moments before the start of the story. Although it’s never clear whether he actually was actually knighted before his mentor passed away, Dunk takes on the hedge knight lifestyle and sets off to make his way in the world. He meets a bald kid called Egg who becomes his squire, and together they go on a series of adventures that see them embroiled in some key moments from Westerosi history (this is set around a century before the events of Game of Thrones).
This is the first trailer for the show, which will adapt one book per season (GRRM has said he intends to write more of them, but he’s said that before…). The short stories have a much lighter tone than the Song of Ice and Fire books, and it looks like they’ve captured that well here. Dunk has more of an accent than I imagined him to have, but you get used to that pretty quickly and actor Peter Claffey certainly looks the part, as does Dexter Sol Ansell (best known for playing the even younger Coriolanus Snow in Hunger Games: A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes) as Egg. Whether you’re a diehard Game of Thrones fan or not, this should be a fun watch.
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