Friday, 11 April 2025
Monday, 7 April 2025
A Minecraft Movie
Quite apparently tied in knots by teams upon teams of writers (the finished piece is, variously, attributed to Allison Schroeder, Chris Bowman, Hubbel Palmer, Neil Widener, Gavin James, and Chris Galletta), director Jared Hess' A Minecraft Movie betrays very obvious traces of this chronic overthinking and re-wiring. Denied entry to his beloved mines as a child, Jack Black's Steve, upon growing to manhood, returns with his pickaxe to tunnel his way into another, much blockier dimension. His ability to pass between this computer rendered world and ours thanks to a shining cube that, eventually, finds its way under Steve's childhood bed. A significant amount of time later, Emma Myers' twentysomething Natalie and her little brother, played by Sebastian Hansen, seem to move into Steve's long deserted home, whereupon they will find his precious gem and go on their own, Amblin-inflected adventure? Well, not quite.
Turns out they didn't reckon upon actor-producer Jason Momoa, whose star presence demands that the tragic (and admittedly pat) backstory sketched up for this Movie's younger actors be obliterated to concentrate on detailing why Garrett, Momoa's tassel jacketed buffoon, thinks so highly of himself. It's not that Momoa particularly detracts from a film that might otherwise be completely given over to Black's increasingly monotonous honking. If anything it's sort of amusing that Momoa, a recently divorced father, can wield so much behind-the-scenes power when assembling a vehicle through which he might hope to win the eternal adulation of his own children. Although it would be impossible to adequately adapt the totality of Mojang Studios' enduring, Twitch-streamed juggernaut, it does seem notable that, when outfitting this Swedish video game property for the American big-screen experience, the filmmakers have overlooked plaintive pianos and unbridled creativity (but not the sudden transformation of sentient beings into tools that power the various mechanisms of Minecraft) to concentrate on invading subhumans and explosions. Speaking of which, can you guess how Hansen's Henry contributes to the teeming lexicon of this deliberately pre-industrial sandbox realm? That's right: he bashes together a firearm.
Friday, 4 April 2025
Wednesday, 2 April 2025
The Monkey
Adapted from a short story by Stephen King that plays around with themes and ideas inherited from The Monkey's Paw, writer-director Osgood Perkins' The Monkey wrings any last remaining fragment of wish-fulfilment out of WW Jacobs' original, finger curling tale. Perkins' take then not so much a cautionary yarn about attempting to interfere with fate but rather a funhouse ride through which is transmitted a relentless, and hilariously arranged, kind of syrupy malevolence. We are never more than a couple of minutes removed from a body detonating into a flowering, ruby viscera. And how! Actors Christian Convery and Theo James both pull double-duty as a pair of twins seen at two, disconnected eras in their lives. We see the Shelburn boys as infighting children and estranged adults, both stages of life stained by a clattering toy monkey whose frantic drum playing foretells a swift and impending doom. Unusually, it is the younger of the two actors who gets to play more of the depressive trauma generated by such a horrifying object. The young Convery ably assisted here by Tatiana Maslany's turn as the twins' single mother. Comparatively, as an adult, James is able to lean into the numbed, ironic distance that his character has used to cope with having meddled with such unwieldy power. To everybody's credit these two fragments marry together well, with James comfortable and amusing in the role of the frustrated patsy who sits rocking at the centre of this comedy. Perkins' film may be episodic and dramatically slight but it moves like the clappers; the basic shape of this story could easily be moulded into a The Outer Limits episode, or a Treehouse of Horror for that matter. Pretty high praise.
