Hello, and welcome to the Geeky Brummie Film Roundup! Each week we take you through the biggest upcoming cinema releases and why you should be excited for them. This week brings us, hunters, horseriders and homosexuals…
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.
Kraven the Hunter
Kraven the Hunter is one of Spider-Man’s most enduring villains. A master hunter and founding member of the Sinister Six, he once buried Spidey alive for two weeks and impersonated him in his absence just to prove he was better. But he’s a tricky one to translate into a film – animal-themed characters (even those that are just associated with animals in a broad sense) can come across as childish and are quite hard to take seriously as a threat. Add that to the fact that the Sony Spider-Man Universe spin-off films have become a bit of a laughing stock by this point, and Kraven the Hunter has a bit of an uphill struggle at the box office this week.
This is the third Sony Spidey film this year after the much-maligned Madame Web and the underwhelming Venom 3, so (accepting that the bar is pretty low) have they saved the best for last? The action here looks genuinely quite brutal, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven taking out baddies using everything from bear traps to his own teeth, and Taylor-Johnson himself does a decent job of making the silly costume look quite badass. The plot looks to be a fairly light origin story – we’ll see Kraven growing up with his power-obsessed gangster father (Russell Crowe, doing an accent) before powering up courtesy of a little lion blood and setting off on a campaign of revenge. Somewhere along the way, the film is also introducing fellow Spider-man rogue the Rhino – doubling down on the safari-themed supervillains and hopefully giving him a better part than he got in The Amazing Spider-Man 2.
I was apprehensively looking forward to this, but the reviews are just starting to come out and they’re not looking great. On the plus side though, if this fails at the box office as badly as Madame Web did, it might make Sony finally decide to sell their Spidey rights back to Marvel so that this sort of thing can be handled properly in future…
- Kraven the Hunter on IMDB
- Kraven the Hunter on Rotten Tomatoes
Queer
Based on a book by William S Burroughs, Queer tells the story of William Lee – an American expat living alone in Mexico City – who is finally inspired to make a meaningful connection with someone by the arrival of a young former soldier.
Director Luca Guadagnino has good experience of portraying queer romance following his critically acclaimed Call Me By Your Name (and, arguably, a certain reading of this year’s Challengers). But while those films were about the discovery of young love, this feels like a much more mature beast. Daniel Craig’s Lee is clearly already comfortably out of the closet from the start, and there’s a sense in the trailer that he’s become lonely and miserable in the absence of anyone he can bond with. There’s a dreamlike quality to Guadagnino’s filmmaking through his use of muted colours and slow motion, which in Challengers and Call Me… evoked a sort of nostalgia, like looking back at a blossoming romance from a heady summer decades ago, but here feels more like a sense of yearning. The dreamlike quality is compounded here by flashes of surreal imagery and magical realism.
This has been getting very good reviews and it wouldn’t surprise me if it gets a few Oscar nominations (Daniel Craig has just picked up a Golden Globe nomination this week). My film of the year is All Of Us Strangers – another queer love story with a surreal element – and if this can capture the same magic then it could be something special.
- Queer on IMDB
- Queer on Rotten Tomatoes
The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
While Queer evokes my favourite film of the year, War of the Rohirrim (much more deliberately and overtly!) evokes my favourite film trilogy of all time. Peter Jackson’s epic Lord of the Rings movies are perfect cinema for me, so the idea of Jackson and his creative team getting behind an anime director’s take on a piece of Middle Earth’s history is a very exciting one.
The story is based on a tiny piece of Tolkien’s writings, setting out how the legendary king of Rohan, Helm Hammerhand (voiced by Brian Cox) had the great fortress of Helm’s Deep built to defend his people from the wild men of Dunland. The siege of Helm’s Deep is a standout sequence in The Two Towers and there’s a good chance that this will have the same level of excitement. Cox is great casting, and his Helm should have some great moments – his one-punch KO shown in the trailer is what earned him the nickname Hammerhand – but a lot of the focus here seems to be on his daughter Hèra, voiced by Gaia Wise. If there’s one valid criticism of the Lord of the Rings as a whole it’s the lack of strong female characters (off the top of my head I can think of six named female characters that appear across the entire 10 hour trilogy, and one of those is a giant spider – if you add the 10 hours of Hobbit films it goes up to a lofty seven), but female representation is something anime often excels at. Hèra, a fiery shieldmaiden of Rohan, is clearly channelling Miranda Otto’s Eowyn, who also appears in this as a narrator to provide some connective thread to the original trilogy.
Also connecting it to the original films are the gorgeously animated backgrounds, which have captured the majesty of New Zealand beautifully, and some cues from Howard Shore’s incredible score. The Rohan music is particularly evocative and I just know it’s going to give me shivers hearing it coming out of a big screen again.
There are a couple of moments in the trailer that make the Tolkien purist in me slightly anxious (why would a mumak be chasing a Rohirrim shieldmaiden past the Watcher in the Water’s pool outside Moria?) but hopefully it will make more sense in context. Overall I am very much looking forward to seeing how this turns out, and I hope it spawns more experimental dips in the vast oceans of Tolkien’s Rings appendices.
- The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim on IMDB
- The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim on Rotten Tomatoes
If you only see one film this week…
It won’t be as awards-worthy as Queer, but I can’t not go for a unique take on my favourite cinematic IP – my film of the week this week is The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
Still in cinemas and worth a watch
Trailer of the week
Kraven the Hunter may have him facing off against gangsters and the Rhino, but in 28 Years Later Aaron Taylor-Johnson will be trying desperately to survive a plague of rage-infested zombies. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland are back with the third in their 28 Wotsits Later trilogy (possibly not the franchise’s official title) with an incredibly creepy trailer – the chanting voiceover, quoting a Rudyard Kipling poem, lends a sense of insanity to the proceedings, laden over imagery of towers of skulls and blood-spattered Teletubbies. Also in the cast are Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, Jack O’Connell, Erin Kellyman, and the now Oscar-winning Cillian Murphy returning to his breakthrough role from the first movie.
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