We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
A Best Picture, an intrusion, a coming-of-age story, and F9.
THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)
The first of several epics director David Lean made during his career, The Bridge on the River Kwai is a fascinating film to revisit sixty-five years after its release - and not just because it won Oscars in the Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Music (even though Malcolm Arnold composed the score in just eleven days), and Best Picture categories. It's easy to see why the Academy would give it so many awards, it was a very impressive cinematic achievement. What's a bit more stunning these days is that the film was a massive hit, the highest grossing film of 1957. So by watching this, you get to see what droves of people would turn out for in '57, and it's not along the lines of what a highest grossing film would be like these days. Many viewers these days would probably struggle to keep their attention on this movie for the entirety of its 161 minutes, as it's not exactly action-packed by today's standards.
The story originates from a novel written by Pierre Boulle, the author best known for writing Planet of the Apes. A secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, Boulle was captured and had to serve two years of forced labor. It was that experience that inspired the writing of The Bridge on the River Kwai, which is about World War II prisoners of war being forced to build a bridge over the River Kwai that will allow the Japanese to carry supplies back and forth between Bangkok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma. The prison camp is headed up by Colonel Saito (Oscar nominee Sessue Hayakawa), who has promised his superiors that the bridge will be ready by a certain date. If it's not, Saito will have to commit suicide, so he is very dedicated to making sure his prisoners get this thing built. At first, this causes major conflict between him and British Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), as Saito is making soldiers with officer rankings work on the construction as well, and the rules of POWs say officers can't be forced to work. Well, Saito isn't very interested in rules at this point.
Eventually, Nicholson will become quite dedicated to making sure the bridge is completed and well constructed, because he sees it as his chance to leave a lasting legacy. But while Nicholson is making this thing the focus of his life, a POW who managed to pull off a seemingly impossible escape from the camp, an American named Shears (William Holden), is being recruited into a mission the British are planning to carry out to destroy the bridge. But even with that "men on a mission" aspect, there aren't a ton of thrills to be found.
The true selling point of The Bridge on the River Kwai are the performances. Guinness and Hayakawa absolutely deserved the nominations they were given (Guinness won for his lead role, while Hayakawa lost in the supporting category), but they are terrific in the film. Apparently there was a lot of anxiety about Guinness's performance during the production, as he was known for comedy at the time and wasn't sure he was playing this role correctly, but he is so great in it that even his family said it was the best work he had ever done. Much of the film involves Guinness having conversations, and his interactions with his co-stars are captivating.
There is gunfire in the movie, there are explosions, but the reasons to watch it are to marvel at the acting and to see what sort of movie everyone wanted to watch in 1957. Plus there are those whistling scenes that even movie fans who haven't seen this one yet are aware of.
Writer/director Nicholas Holland’s An Intrusion has been described as a home invasion thriller, but most movies with that description make the invasion scenario last for the majority of the running time, showing how the residents of the home find a way to stand up against the intruders. Produced by Sam Logan Khaleghi, An Intrusion does begin with a home invasion, someone breaking into the residence of Sam Hodges (Dustin Prince), his wife Joyce (Erika Hoveland), and their teenage daughter Rebecca (Angelina Danielle Cama) in the middle of the night… but the intruder leaves rather quickly. This is just the first of the scary situations they’re going to have to deal with as the story plays out, and the craziest things that happen to the characters in this movie happen to them outside of the home.
The day after his home was broken into, Sam receives an email from someone who has photo evidence that he has been cheating on his wife. This same someone also stuck a dead deer in the back of Rebecca’s car, so someone clearly has a serious vendetta against the Hodges family. The film follows Sam as he tries to figure out what’s going on while the break-ins and threatening messages continue, and kudos to Prince for turning in an intense, captivating performance while playing one of the least likeable lead characters I have ever seen in a movie. Sam is a deeply flawed man and tends to be quite a douchebag, to put it mildly. The deeper we get into An Intrusion‘s 99 minutes, the more we learn just how bad of a person Sam can be. He’s someone who can do something terrible and just go on like it never happened, and yet he’s the character we have to stick with in order to find out where this is all going.
The cast is quite good all around, with Hoveland doing some impressive work in the emotional moments she was given. Genre regular Scout Taylor-Compton provides solid support as Savannah Simpson, the police officer looking into what’s going on with the Hodges, and Keir Gilchrist shows up rather briefly as Layne, the boy Rebecca has been seeing and Sam doesn’t approve of. Billy Boyd, the Scottish actor who has played a Hobbit and the seed of Chucky, was given the chance to come in and deliver an extended monologue as a minister with a Southern accent. The church scene probably could have been a bit shorter, but when you have Billy Boyd monologuing and doing an accent, it’s understandable why Holland would want to let the scene go on longer than necessary.
Sam is not a fun person to spend time with, but the story Holland crafted is interesting enough – and Prince’s performance is strong enough – that I was compelled to stick with the movie through the ups and downs and find out who was after the Hodges and why. I can’t say I was entirely satisfied by the answer, but it made sense given what we had seen before, especially given what we see from Sam throughout.
There are some storytelling issues; there could have been more set-up for the payoff, there are story elements I wanted to see get pushed further but they were mostly dropped instead, and the movie definitely could have benefited from being shorter than 99 minutes. But in the end, the biggest issue I had with An Intrusion is an issue I’ve had with several movies in recent years: the modern filmmakers’ fascination with making their movies as dark as possible. There are night scenes in An Intrusion where it’s very difficult to see what’s going on, and there are even scenes that take place in the middle of the day that have the actors obscured by deep shadows – even though they’re sitting right beside a glass door that gives a view of the daylight outside, plus we have reason to believe the light bill has been paid, so there’s no reason for the people to be sitting in darkness. But darkness is popular these days.
An Intrusion is an intriguing ride. If you have 99 minutes to spend on a thriller starring a character you’ll consider to be a total scumbag, check it out.
The review of An Intrusion originally appeared on ArrowintheHead.com
EIGHTH GRADE (2018)
It's not often that I would watch a movie about the life of an eighth grade girl, and I wouldn't normally expect to enjoy one if I did happen across it on TV or something because it would probably be aimed at kids, with a childish tone and sense of humor. But then there are movies like Eighth Grade, which centers on an eighth grade girl but also has a universal human truth to it. It's relatable, even if you are not now or never have been an eighth grade girl.
I certainly don't know what it's like be a kid in this technologically advanced age. By the time I graduated high school, we didn't have much more than dial-up internet and message boards. We didn't have to worry about keeping up with social media, most of us weren't yet filling the web with pictures and videos of ourselves. Writer/director Bo Burnham is about seven years younger than me and came to prominence through a YouTube channel he started as a teenager, so he knows that world, and captured it well in his movie. I can buy that this is an accurate representation of what it's like to be young these days.
The film's lead character is Kayla Day, brought to life through an excellent performance by Elsie Fisher. Kayla is all wrapped up in the world of social media. When she's not in school, her eyes are always directed at her phone. Like Burnham, Kayla has her own YouTube channel... but she's not nearly as successful as her creator, and it's easy to see why. In her videos, she gives rambling advice about how to be confident and put yourself out there, but these videos are not a reflection of her true self. She is not the confident, popular person she pretends to be. She's an awkward, anxiety-ridden kid who is struggling through the social scene. And since I'm an awkward, anxiety-ridden adult, this is how I was able to understand the character.
There's not a whole lot to Eighth Grade, it's just an episodic look at Kayla's life in the last days before she finishes middle school. She goes to a pool party, has some bad and ill-advised interactions with some guys, befriends a senior girl named Olivia (Emily Robinson), has to deal with having a caring, devoted father (Josh Hamilton). And in my favorite scene in the whole movie, she has a chicken nugget dinner with a kid named Gabe (Jake Ryan). Which really goes to show how low-key the movie is, when a favorite scene involves two kids chatting over nuggets. That's how day-to-day life often is; very low-key, yet filled with anxiety, and a good dinner with good company can be a major highlight.
While most of the world seems to be rooting for the Fast and the Furious franchise to continue getting bigger and more ridiculous with each installment, I've been wanting the franchise to scale things back a little bit, at least down to Fast Five levels. After films like Hobbs & Shaw and The Fate of the Furious pushed my fandom to the limit, I had hope that F9 would be a bit of a course correction. Justin Lin, who had directed the third through the sixth films, was back at the helm, and for the first time since the third movie there were new writers working on the script. Chris Morgan had written all of these things since Tokyo Drift, so I figured this sequel could benefit from fresh perspectives and new blood.
It didn't. F9 is just as ridiculous and over-the-top as The Fate of the Furious and Hobbs & Shaw, if not more so. Lin directed a movie just like the lesser sequels that followed his, and the screenplay he crafted with new writers Daniel Casey and Alfredo Botello feels like it might as well have been another script from Chris Morgan. Which is great for fans who like where the franchise is these days, but not so much for those of us who look back wistfully at the first half of the series.
Going deeper into action soap opera territory, F9 gives us the absurd revelation that Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel) and his sister Mia (Jordana Brewster) have a brother we have never heard referenced before. His name is Jakob, he's played by John Cena, and he's one of the villains in this movie, as is the hacker Cipher (Charlize Theron), who was introduced in the previous movie. To give excuses for massive action sequences there's a MacGuffin called Project Aries, which is some kind of super-hacking device that really doesn't matter. The addition of Jakob brings with it flashbacks to the death of the Torettos' father in 1989, and the whole global spy adventure aspect allows for the twist that the character Han (Sung Kang) - who appeared to die in a random car accident in Tokyo Drift, then turned out to have been murdered by Deckard Shaw (Jason Statham) in Furious 6 - is still alive. He has to be alive, otherwise fans wouldn't be able to forgive the filmmakers for turning Shaw into a hero in later movies... but while I always liked Han, his return is another thing that kills my enthusiasm for these movies, because it drives home more than ever that nothing in them matters at all. Dom's wife Letty (Michelle Rodriguez) died in one movie and came back a couple sequels later. Now Han has died and come back. Why bother to care about any of this anymore?
At one point, Roman (Tyrese Gibson) and Tej (Chris "Ludacris" Bridges) take a rocket car into orbit to sabotage a satellite. When that's one of the less silly things in a movie, that's really saying something about how far The Fast and the Furious has drifted from its roots.
I have been with this franchise since the start and will see it through to the end, but the ride isn't as fun for me as it used to be.
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