Film review: TERMINAL (Vaughn Stein, 2018)

A waitress talks to a dying man. Two bickering assassins await orders on their next hit. And a quirky janitor lurks around a dilapidated train station. These seemingly disparate goings on in an anonymous neon-lit British town are all somehow linked, and slowly the plot pieces together in Vaughn Stein’s crime caper that plays out as a terrible Quentin Tarantino rip-off.

Inbetween a 15 and an 18

This blog is rated 15 for strong sex references.

Every year, I like to analyse the BBFC short insight for a film, before I’ve even seen it. Last year, I nerded out to the BBFCinsight for Dunkirk, as it was an unprecedented case of four different adjectives for each of its classification issues.

The year before, I was excited because Suicide Squad got a 15, which is really unusual for a big studio superhero movie. Funnily enough, Suicide Squad’s short insight is actually subsumed in Dunkirk’s, ‘sustained threat, intense sequences, moderate violence, strong language’, yet Dunkirk is a rating lower.

Tangential, but Dunkirk has Harry Styles (a singer-turned-actor) and Suicide Squad has Cara Delevingne (a model-turned-cocaine addict). They used to ‘date’ each other. I daresay one was substantially more successful at acting than the other.

2018’s bout of ‘Emma critiquing the BBFCinsight of a film having not even seen the movie’ comes for the upcoming The Festival. For this film, Iain Morris and Damon Beesley, the creators of The Inbetweeners, collaborate again, as director and producers, respectively.

10 Lessons Learned from the 2017 BBFC Annual Report

I’ve waited long and hard, but Christmas for Emma has arrived! The BBFC Annual Report for 2017 dropped today, and here are the ten main takeaways I got from consuming it!

01. Emma knows her BBFC

Just as I’d predicted in my anticipation blog, the film which got the most complaints to the BBFC last year was Logan. 

Second-guessing the films that the BBFC got the most complaints in 2017

This blog is rated 15 for references to child abuse and strong sex references.

The BBFC drop their Annual Reports around July every year, where they discuss all facets of their guidelines and the film classification process in the UK. I await these reports with the same eagerness I await the Oscars with, and I think it's fun to try and predict which titles cause the BBFC the most complaints every year!

Love, Emma

This is a BBFC-ccentric blog. In the great tradition of the BBFC, I will now preface articles on film ratings with a film rating (how meta, eh?).

This entry would be rated 12A for references to murder, sexual threat, racist behaviour and snide digs at certain druggie actresses.

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Midnight Sun, a film which I have no interest in seeing (it stars that meth-head Bella Thorne (for future reference, just so you know, whenever I refer to ‘Meth-head’, I’m talking about Bella Thorne, and ‘Cokehead’ is Cara Delevingne), recently got handed a rather interesting BBFC insight.

It is rated 12A purely for ‘underage drinking’.

The extended insight reads:

There are scenes glamorising alcohol use in which teenagers, including some who are underage, attend a party where they play drinking games and do shots.

Seems a pretty draconic reason to hand out a 12A certificate, no? The actual 12A rating itself I’m not going to quibble with too much, as it got PG-13 in the States and 12A in Ireland, so it’s probable that the BBFC just didn’t want to stick out like a sore thumb by giving it a PG rating.

But at least Ireland came up with a semi-plausible reason for their 12A, citing ‘moderate sex references’. By giving a film a 12A purely for underage drinking, the BBFC have opened up an unwelcome can of worms, a can of worms which BBFC pedants like me are quick to catch on to.

See, Love, Simon, another 12A-rated film, also contains a party scene where the characters (who are in High School, and thus underage), drank alcohol. Yet Love, Simon is rated 12A for ‘infrequent strong language, moderate sex references’, with no mention of the underage drinking in the extended insight or short insight.

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [5 to 1]

Emma’s shade-throwing at bad acting continues! Read 10 to 6 here. I like to think I was relatively measured in my snark before. As we’re now onto the bottom five, I can’t promise to be so kind! Ehehe.

05. Johnny Depp, Murder on the Orient Express

As the sketchy art dealer Ratchett, Depp’s character is killed off early on, leaving Kenneth Branagh’s sleuth the rest of the film to piece together whodunit. The Johnny Depp of old, the Depp we saw in Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one, not the 34897 laboured sequels after), Ed Wood and Edward Scissorhands would have seized this role with aplomb and made an indelible impression in his limited screen time.

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [10 - 6]

Now that awards season is all wrapped up, it’s time for this blog to slowly wave goodbye to 2017 and start looking ahead to the 2018 cinematic year! As part of that slow wave goodbye, I will celebrate the best and worst of 2017 according to me! 

We shall start with the worst acting performances. Here was 2016’s worst performances list for reference. I unfortunately had to throw shade at Jesse Eisenberg, one of my favourite actors, in last year's Hall of Shame. I'm glad to report he reined his Lux Luthor in a lot in Justice League, and thus, avoids making the list a second year running. Phew!

10. Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express

Although the Star Wars actress is very pretty, has a nice screen presence and seems like a lovely person, she was far too lightweight in the role of Mary Debenham. The film is set in the 30s, and Ridley’s character is secretly having a relationship with Dr. Arbuthnot (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr). Such are the outdated attitudes of the time towards inter-racial dating, that Debenham and Arbuthnot have to keep this, as well as their involvement with the murder of Johnny Depp’s character on the train, under wraps.

Statistical Analysis of the 141 films I watched in 2017, with BBFC analysis.

Just like last year, when I put my hard-earned coding skills into practice by analysing all the marks I’d awarded every film I watched in 2016, I repeated the process again this year.

The arithmetic mean of the 141 films was 6.64, a fractional increase from last year, meaning that my discernment skills to have improved slightly. That being said, the lowest mark out of 10 I gave last year was a 2, whereas I gave 1/10 to two films this year, and zero out of 10 to one, Darren Aronofsky’s bloated stinker, mother!, which is the worst film I’ve ever seen in my entire life, and featured that movie ingredient that I am so averse to: Jennifer Lawrence screaming her head off.

Nobody's gonna drag Harry down.

I was perusing Awards Daily's FYC gallery when I noticed this ad Warner Brothers put out for Dunkirk:

In case that shade was a little too nuanced, here's a list of actors who WB are campaigning for:

It's of trifling importance as bar Mark Rylance, none of the cast really have a shot at an Oscar nomination (and even for Rylance, with no show at the Golden Globes, SAGs or even the London Film Critics' Circle, that's an uphill battle), but I couldn't help thinking that Warner Brothers are shading Harry Styles somewhat by not listing him here.

I wasn't bowled over or anything by Harry Styles in Dunkirk (he did what he had to do, no more, no less, but was definitely more successful transitioning into acting than his former beardgirlfriend Cara Delevingne), but given he got to act 'angry' and Christopher Nolan used both of his PG-13-mandated allowances of the f-word on Styles, it seems somewhat amiss not to at list him here. It certainly couldn't hurt, IMO, and bar Rylance, who was the standout performer, the gulf in acting quality between Styles and the rest of his co-stars certainly wasn't that palpable.

So it's a bit harsh for Warner Brothers to be tacitly saying 'young Fionn Whitehead is worth the adspace... but you? Nah.'

As a side note, back when Dunkirk first hit UK cinemas in July, I was tickled by this e-mail we got from the Odeon:

Interesting that here, they've focused on the two Peaky Blinders and Inception/Dark Knight Rises actors, Cillian Murphy and Tom Hardy (who British audiences would more likely to be familiar with), thesp Kenneth Branagh and of course, the pretty boy Styles himself, yet omitted Oscar-winner Mark Rylance as a result.

It reminded me of what Nolan said about casting Styles in his movie, 'I saw thousands of young men, but Harry just had something that the rest didn't.'

I believe that 'something' in question is the ability to draw in randy teenage girls by their droves. ;)

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I saw this pun in The Sun, and I kind of loved it:

Look what Cara Delevingne’s bad acting made Taylor Swift do.

Just like every other woman with a perpetual mental age of about 15, I watched Taylor Swift’s ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ music video as soon as it dropped, and have re-watched it several times to unpack all the shady Easter eggs not-so-subtly littered throughout.

I’m a fan of the regression-to-playground-levels-of-petty on display in the video (Amy Dunne recognises Amy Dunne, shall we say), and absolutely belly-laughed at the dig at Tom Hiddleston (he deserves it for being in High-Rise).

I noticed something curious in the coda of the music video, however, that piqued my interest. 

It's when Taylor Swift has 15 versions of herself lined up and riffs on the public’s perceptions of her. In the Taylor Swift of You Belong to Me era, she is wearing a T-shirt with several of her squad’s names on (for example, Selena [Gomez], Lena [Dunham, ew], Ed [Sheeran] and the three HAIM sisters). Look...

Cara Delevingne is missing!

10 things I learnt from the 2016 BBFC Annual Report

So, after waiting, and waiting, and waiting, the BBFC Annual Report for 2016 dropped! Here it is, and having pored over it, here are my major takeaways from reading it!

01. I guessed those complaints pretty much spot-on

I’m glad my many hours of wasting time watching films purely for BBFC research purposes (such as Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry), poring over BBFC minutes and lurking who complains to their Twitter account has paid off, because my prognostications for the films that would cause them the most complaints were even better than my Oscar predictions (and the Oscar goes to…. La La Land! No, Moonlight! #stillgloating).

For there's no club in town quite as manly...

Four months on from seeing Beauty and the Beast at the cinema, I'm still absolutely obsessed with the 'Gaston' song. Even the most tenuous thing, such as the club photographed above, gets me breaking out in song. It might just be my second-ever favourite Disney song (second only to 'Let it Go', obviously).

Oh, and say hello to what will almost certainly be one of the worst films of 2017:

Second Guessing the Most Complaints the BBFC Got in 2016

The BBFC’s 2016 Annual Report is set to be dropped any day now (2015's one came out late June last year), and for me, it’s basically like waiting for Christmas. Of course I’ll do an extensive coverage of the Report when it comes out, as I did with the 2015 one, but for now, I thought I’d guess which films the BBFC got the most complaints about.

Note that these are my predictions for public feedback, not my own thoughts about the BBFC’s performance in 2016, which I have outlined in this blog post already.

01. 10 Cloverfield Lane (12A, people will say it should have been a 15)

Product reviews: BOX OF SIX MACARONS (Ladurée) and POSH PROFITEROLES (Marks and Spencer)

"Not really your kind of place, is it?"

Product reviews: MANGO and VANILLA BODY BUTTER (Boots)

Back in March, when going through airport security before my holiday in Prague, it transpired that due to a last minute reshuffle of things in suitcases, I’d put my expensive Body Shop blueberry body lotion in my hand luggage rather than my check-in luggage. 

As you can see, the size of the container is substantially higher than the limit of liquids you’re allowed on a flight, and so, a perfectly good container of body lotion which was only about 80% used was unceremoniously confiscated from me.

Now that the sun’s finally shining the UK, I now need lotion to apply to my legs, lest they look too dry when wearing sundresses, so I had to replenish my body moisturiser supply. I bought these two items as part of a ‘Buy one get second half price’ deal. 

Something that goes together about as well as Cara Delevingne and Dane DeHaan.

The only difference is, unlike Delevingne and DeHaan, I enjoy gin (with a tonic) and cream soda ordinarily.  But sampled together, you get one steaming pile of Bye Felicia. The problem is that the cream soda has quite a mild taste, which does nothing to mask the strength of the gin. And it certainly doesn't complement.

So yes, because these two liquids were an absolute fail working together, I'm going to have to refer to Cream Soda + Gin as 'The Valerian'.

A strong frontrunner for the worst film of 2017.

I saw this on the Greatest Actress Ever (ahem)'s Instagram:

A sci-fi featuring Dane DeYawn (so called because of those prominent bags under his eyes and his yawn-inducing acting performances) and Upstart Delevingne, to me, just screams Razzie. I can't think of a more sexless couple than DeHaan and Delevingne (other than Dane DeHaan and Felicia Vikander, or Cara Delevingne and Joel Kinnaman).

I can't wait to hate-watch it and tear it to pieces on my blog. 🎬

In the theme of throwing shade at films I've not yet seen, I believe The Big Short is about to have its title stripped as the Most Smug Film of All-Time:

The trailer for Ben Wheatley (director of my pick for the worst film of last year, High-Rise)'s insufferable-looking crime caper was the most wannabe Tarantino thing ever. Just a lot of shooting in a warehouse, Sharlto Copley being incomprehensible and lame banter between caricatures.

Hard pass.

Ben Wheatley and Amy Jump: the most inauspicious matrimony in film since Zack and Deborah Snyder (I went there).

From the BBFC's extended information for Raw. What's a woman's 'public hair', just wondering?

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10 Fittest Women in Film, 2015.

I had so much fun doing the 2016 hotties list, I thought I'd do the same, going back each year!

 10. Anna Kendrick, Pitch Perfect 2

Moonlit dreams.

As I said in my prediction post, I didn’t watch the Oscars live on Sunday, because I anticipated a La La Land sweep, culminating in it winning 8 Oscars, including Best Picture.

In fact, it did win six of the eight I’d predicted it to. It did not, graciously, take Best Sound, because the superlative that should be awarded to its sound is quite the opposite of ‘best’.

But the real miracle was that it also didn’t win Best Picture.

Film review: JOURNEY TO THE WEST 2: THE DEMONS STRIKE BACK [西遊伏妖篇] (Tsiu Hark, 2017)

When we first came to England, my family didn’t have that much money and so despite loving films, TV and all things multimedia from a young age, I didn’t actually own that many VHSes. One of the few videos I did possess were episodes of 西游记 [Journey to the West], taped off the TV.

An extremely popular Chinese children’s novel, it’s had many adaptations, from TV show to film to plays. Even though I recognise that, were I to watch said episodes now, I would pick up on its low production value, campy acting and all-too-convenient deus ex machinas at the end of almost every episode, I loved that show as a kid, and I still regard the concept of it with fondness.

For that reason, when I clocked that the Chinese cinema-friendly Odeon Panton Street were screening Journey to the West 2, I leapt at the chance to see it, despite not having known about Journey to the West 1’s existence. I knew the general construct pretty well (a Buddhist monk, accompanied by three disciples possessing magical powers, the most prominent being monkey Sun Wukong, carries out his life calling to capture demons), so figured I’d be able to follow the plot despite not having seen the first.