SEPTEMBER 7 — With the summer movie season already over, the amount of sizzling new titles opening in Malaysian cinemas every week have also taken a tumble, with fewer and fewer exciting movies lining up to win the hearts and wallets of local audiences.
If you’re thinking of a night out at the movies, outside of Asian and local hits like Successor (China’s summer box-office champion, with over US$456 million or RM1.97 billion collected in China alone, way ahead of Hollywood hits like Deadpool & Wolverine and Alien: Romulus) and Takluk: Lahad Datu, which has already banked RM16.5 million in 12 days, there really isn’t much out there right now that can be called a sure thing when it comes to audience satisfaction.
Partly as a result of the writers’ strike, which led to Hollywood studios postponing or delaying the release of a lot of exciting new titles, I think we’ll have to get accustomed to this lukewarm feel in cinemas at least until next year.
But if you’re a movie fan, you’ll still need something to watch in the cinemas, despite the comforts of home that streaming services have been offering.
Once in a while, it still feels good to go out of the house for a night or day out, right? If you’re planning to do so this weekend, well, outside of the newly opened Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (which I haven’t got the chance to see yet) and the aforementioned titles, here are two more relatively new movies that just might interest you.
Blink Twice
Opening very quietly in local cinemas about two weeks ago, this one was of extra special interest to me because it is the feature directing debut of actress Zoe Kravitz (from films like Mad Max: Fury Road, The Batman, High Fidelity and Kimi), and it is always fascinating to see how actors make the transition from being in front of the camera to doing work behind.
A sort of post-#MeToo feminist nightmare that will probably remind some people of Get Out, the film tells the story of Frida (Naomie Ackie), an ambitious catering waitress with a huge obsession on a tech billionaire named Slater King (Channing Tatum) who suddenly gets a chance to hang out with Slater during a fundraising event before ultimately being invited to come along with his entourage to party at his private island.
Anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two will know that a situation like this will not end well, and there’s a good reason why this movie was originally called P*ssy Island, before the studio chickened out and retitled it Blink Twice.
Frida is accompanied to this private island by her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat), and right out the gate the audience’s alarm bells will start ringing when all the guests are asked to put away their phones, which will be kept by their hosts until it’s time to go back to reality.
But when you’re in a tropical paradise, where the food is fancy and the champagne never stops flowing, not to mention the endless supply of recreational drugs, you can’t help but go with the flow, with such luxuries in abundance, especially when your real life is as dreary as the girls’ are.
There will be plenty of horrific twists and turns as the movie progresses, hence my previous mention of Get Out, and maybe even a bit of Midsommar, and Zoe proves to be quite a natural at filmmaking, choosing extreme close-ups and seemingly unrelated cutaway shots as her main weapons of choice to induce dread and suspense within the audience’s minds.
A hugely promising debut that hopefully results in a long and successful career writing and directing movies for Ms Kravitz.
The Crow
From the surprise excellence of Blink Twice, we go to the shockingly bad remake of The Crow that has been, rightfully, slaughtered by both critics and audiences alike.
Not being a huge fan of the original film, I didn’t even have high expectations walking into this remake by director Rupert Sanders, who did Snow White and the Huntsman and the Ghost In The Shell “live” action remake.
However, any goodwill I was willing to give to the film dissipated the moment I realised that this is going to be a Twilight-ish adaptation of The Crow IP aimed squarely at a young adult audience, with the added insult of the filmmakers probably not even knowing what that audience even likes nowadays.
While I actually enjoyed (in an ironic, camp way) the romance in the Twilight films, the way that the film focuses entirely on the romance between Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgard) and Shelly (played by singer FKA Twigs) in its first half will make more than a few adults cringe, and once the film decides to become more of a supernatural thriller, you’ll get the awful combo of a skulking emo hero walking around and a film that doesn’t seem to know which steps to take to become what it wants to be.
There’s a form of integrity here, as the film sticks to its belief that love does conquer all, especially once you hear the line “Love me harder” spoken again late on in the film, which I admit is a nice payoff to all the emo romance that went on before, but it’s how it went about sticking to that belief which I think will frustrate a lot of the audience.
A jumbled mess, but maybe that is the point, because love is messy?
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
