The amiable David Farrier doesn’t want to be talking to me right now. The New Zealand director was in our hemisphere to chat up his documentary Tickled.
“I wish I wasn’t doing this now,” he says.
“I wish there was no trailer. I wish there was no reviews. I wish people could hear about this thing called Tickled, a film about the sport of competitive endurance tickling and say, ‘I’ve got nothing on, let’s go to the movies and see what happens.’ That’s the dream. I wanted people to feel like they were on the same what the f—? journey I was with (co-director) Dylan (Reeve) when we made the film.”
The story of Tickled begins when Farrier, a self-described “light fluffy journalist,” came across a strange tickling video on the internet.
Thinking it would make a good story he contacted the makers of the video requesting an interview.
“I’m always trying to find a story no one has seen before,” he says.
“I’ve been doing this for 10 years now and it’s harder and harder to do that because everyone on Facebook is sharing the craziest things. But when I came across this tickling video alarm bells went off. You’ve got these young, model-esque men in bright Adidas clothes in a stark white room. One of them is tied down with shackles and they’re tickling and having a great time.
“It jumped out at me because I genuinely thought it must be some sort of Adidas sponsored (video). I thought it was legit. It wasn’t shot on a cell phone. It wasn’t shot in someone’s bedroom. It was shot in a studio and that costs money to rent. Aesthetically, it grabbed me.”
When the video maker was slow to respond via email Farrier contacted them through a public Facebook page and that is when the story got weird, troubling and took on the aura of a thriller. Imagine Michael Clayton with tickling and you get the idea.
The documentary sheds light in the dark corners of competitive endurance tickling.
There’s alleged cyberbullying, blackmail and catfishing involved as Farrier takes viewers deeper into the subject matter.
“This company does so many strange things,” Farrier says of the outfit that hosts the endurance tickling contests.
“I have to talk about it in obscure language, I’m sure you understand. Part of it is the game.
“They love tickling but, as it came out, they love bullying and abusing and derailing lives as well.
“When I came along I was another target.”
Farrier says being the subject of threatening lawsuits didn’t concern him too much.
“It’s been two years now and I am so used to threats. Other things keep me up at night. Also, I’m an entertainment journalist from New Zealand. I don’t have money.”
But the documentary subjects have been persistent. At the Los Angeles premiere last Friday, two men who feature in the documentary — David D’Amato and Kevin Clarke — confronted Reeve (Farrier was not at the premiere) and accused the pair of using recorded material they had agreed was off the record.
The circumstance that inspired his documentary is “an unusual thing,” says Farrier.
“I still can’t believe this happened,” but he thinks the movie has messages beyond its obvious examination of cyber bullying. “Hopefully those who come along will learn the simple lesson that not everything is as it seems,” he says.
“If you are engaged in anything on the internet, look into it before you dive in. On a slightly cheesy level, just be yourself.
“If you are into something, as long as you’re not hurting anyone, be loud and proud about it. Try and have that confidence. We’re living in 2016 and we have a long way to go but if you can, try and be yourself, it will help you. Repression is bad.”
“That is definitely bigger than the last one,” says David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum).
He’s talking about the alien spaceship that puts our planet in peril in “Independence Day: Resurgence,” the twenty-years-in-the-making sequel to Will Smith’s 90s mega-hit, but he could also be talking about the movie itself. It’s certainly bigger and louder than the original, but is it better?
In the two decades since the first invasion the world has become a better place. “Our survival is only possible when we stand together,” says President Lanford (Sela Ward). The White House has been rebuilt, a woman is President and countries now work together. There’s a military installation on the moon and using the ET technology salvaged from the downed spaceships they have safe guarded the planet from another attack.
Or so almost everyone thought.
Ex-President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) is plagued by bad dreams—or are they premonitions?—of another extra-terrestrial incursion and it turns out he’s right. A distress signal from the first wave of space invaders triggered another assault, this time with bigger, badder aliens from deep, deep, deep space.
“Make them pay,” says ex-first daughter Patricia Whitmore (Maika Monroe) to her boyfriend, warrior pilot Jake (Liam Hemsworth). “I’m not going out there to make friends,” he says. Look out aliens! Cue the computer generated carnage.
At their best big special effects movies like this should fill the viewer with wonder. Large-scale spectacle, like the world on the verge of collapse, should fill us with shock and awe but in “Independence Day: Resurgence” we have to settle for an unsettling sense of déjà vu. It’s a movie that exists as an excuse to showcase the special effects in a cynical attempt to recycle an idea that worked well enough the first time. Not only have we seen virtually everything here in the original film, we’ve seen similar images in every end-of-the-world movie from the last twenty years. Here they are bigger and louder, but not better.
Ditto the dialogue. It feels like a first draft to the original movie, updated for a new cast. Goldblum is always a welcome presence but he’s saddled with terrible, trite words and he gets most of the good lines. It’s the kind of movie were people ask questions instead of saying anything interesting. “How the hell did we miss this?” “What’s going on?” Or the classic, “What the…??!!,” delivered with mouth agape. It’s less a script than a series of catchphrases and questions cobbled together and sounds like it was all run through the Blandizer® before being handed over to the actors.
It’s the kind of movie where you root for the aliens, hoping they make quick work of humanity because that would be less painful than sitting through one more minute of this mess. You don’t watch “Independence Day: Resurgence,” you subject yourself to it because even though it could be the end of humanity there’s no real humanity here, just empty heroics.
The most alien thing about the movie is the presence of Lars Von Trier’s favourite actress Charlotte Gainsbourg. If anyone in the movie noticed she was there I’m sure they would say, “What the hell is she doing here?” Cashing a paycheque I imagine.
I really hated “Independence Day: Resurgence.” It’s a popcorn flick but this popcorn stale. “Independence Day”? More like “Groundhog Day.” We’ve seen it before and better.
Former “Gossip Girl” actor Blake Lively not only stars in “The Shallows,” she appears in virtually every frame of the film.As a woman surfing alone off an isolated island, she is attacked by a Great White shark and must use her wits to get to safety. Vanity Fair dubbed it, “Lively or Death.” The screenplay appeared on the 2014 Blacklist, the annual list of the “most liked” unmade scripts in Hollywood, and has been described as “Jaws” meets “127 Hours,” but the woman vs. nature struggle sounds more like Blake’s “Castaway” to me.
Lively is Nancy Adams, a medical school drop-out spending an idyllic day hanging ten on a secret Mexican beach recommended to her by her late mom. “What did you say the name of this place was?” she asks a local. “This is paradise,” he coos. Beautiful and remote, it seems perfect for a restful and relaxing day, but trouble soon comes to paradise when she is stranded on a rock two hundred feet from shore. As an experienced surfer Nancy should be able to make it back to the beach easily. Unfortunately there is a toothy, bloodthirsty Great White shark looming between her and safety. “I’m not dying here,” she grunts while forming a plan to avoid becoming shark bait.
The Great White in “The Shallows” makes the shark in “Jaws” seem laid-back. Seemingly inexhaustible in his hunt for humanoid tartar, he is a constant menace to the lithe Lively. It’s one long nautical nightmare for Nancy as she plots to outsmart and outswim her finned tormenter.
Cinematically it’s not as much of a nightmare. The setup is minimal, and as far as actual thrills go, less isn’t more in this case. Less is actually less. There are some moments of tension—Spielberg trained us that any underwater shot pointed up at a swimmer or surfer means impending doom—but too much of the film involves Nancy and her seagull sidekick marooned on the rock.
Director Jaume Collet-Serra occasionally embraces the film’s b-movie ascetic—he actually has the shark go airborne in one spectacular attack—but mostly he’s willing to treat the look of the film like a “Sports Illustrated” layout with vengeful sharks. He does use some effective tricks—we don’t see much of the shark until late into the film and one grizzly scene spares us the bloody details by focussing on Lively’s horrified face rather than the action—but the Nature v Nancy storyline isn’t amped up enough to for us to care if she becomes fish food or not.
There is an interesting story to be told of the exploits of rebellious Mississippi farmer Newton Knight but “Free State of Jones” is not it.
The “action”—mostly raggedly bearded men sitting and speaking in lilting Podunk accents—takes place over the course of fourteen tumultuous years, from 1862 to ’76. When we first meet Knight (Matthew McConaughey) he’s a war nurse doing triage for Confederate soldiers blown apart by musket and canon fire. After a young relative is killed he goes AWOL, fed up with the brutality and the Confederate Army’s illegal pillaging of locals for supplies. Hiding out with runaway slaves he fights back, becoming a force for change and a champion of freedom for all men.
Intertwined in the narrative are the rise of the KKK, fixed elections, burned churches, surprise attacks and much more. Not content to tell the sprawling Civil War story “Free State of Jones” intermittently jumps forward 85 years to tell the story of a relative of Knight who was prosecuted in Mississippi for the crime of being 1/16 black and marrying a white women.
“Free State of Jones” aims to be an epic but in biting off more story than it can chew ends up a didactic mess, bereft of emotional content or revealing historical perspective. It feels as if it was shot as a mini-series and cleaved down to feature length. Parts seem to be missing, and by that I mean the interesting parts.
A surprise attack that is heavily featured in the film’s trailers should have been a rousing showstopper but instead comes and goes in the blink of an eye, barely raising the movie’s pulse rate. Better are the opening moments that effectively, if grimly, display the realities of face-to-face combat.
McConaughey has been on a remarkable career upswing of late but it feels like the McConaissance has hit a bump in the road. He’s less a character than a saviour, an empathic speechifying rebel with rotten teeth who embodies all that is righteous. He kills dogs and people and is a bigamist but he’s also apparently on the side of the angels and that is all we really get to know about him.
More interesting and human is Mahershala Ali as Moses, an emancipated slave who joins forces with Knight.
“Free State of Jones” has its rebellious heart mostly in the right place. In our time of continued racial unrest it is important to have a historical perspective but this movie can really only be described as problematic in some of the tone deaf ways it approaches its subject. For instance a speech that begins with, “Everybody is just somebody else’s n-word,” is meant to be rousing, a call to solidarity, but clumsily equates conscription with the plight of people taken from their homes, shipped to a new country and enslaved. Like the rest of the movie it means well but falls very flat. I gave it one star because it has aspirations to greatness and fails on all accounts. It’s done in by its own ambition.
How to describe director Nicolas Winding Refn’s “The Neon Demon”? You could use five dollar words like transgressive and hallucinatory. Or make comparisons to “Mulholland Drive” and “The Eyes of Laura Mars,” but none of that really comes close to capturing the nervy essence of what Refn attempts here.
Elle Fanning stars as the underage, somewhat naive model Jessie. An orphaned teen from a small town who’s been in Los Angeles “for like, a minute” scores a shoot with a hot shot photographer (Desmond Harrington). “She has that thing,” says her only friend, a makeup artist named Ruby (Jena Malone). Jessie’s fresh-faced appeal opens doors in the industry—Alessandro Nivola plays a big time designer who gives her the closing spot in his show even though its her first trip down a runway—but earns the ire of established models like Sarah and Gigi (Abbey Lee and Bella Heathcote) who she is replacing. “What does it feel like to walk into a room and it’s like the middle of winter and you’re the sun?” Sarah asks the new girl.
Refn, who also wrote the script, has pulled off something quite extraordinary here. He has made a movie that visually mirrors his subject. Setting the film in the vacuous world of fashion allows him to indulge his filmic sense while mirroring his visual ideas in the script. When the designer says, “True beauty is the highest currency we have,” he may have been talking about the fashion biz or Refn’s style of composing gorgeous images that accompany the film’s performances. I say accompany because there is a chilly disconnect between the story, which, true to its subject, is kind of hollow, and striking images on the screen. To reinforce that notion Refn even has a character say, “Beauty isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”
A gutsy late movie turn toward necrophilia, horror and violence, while heart pounding and jarring, mostly draws the film even further away from any kind of traditional structure, although does graphically display how far people will go to capture the true essence of beauty.
“The Neon Demon” is a tone poem. The cast is terrific, especially Fanning in a role that requires steely determination and vulnerability, Keanu Reeves fans might get a kick out of seeing him go down ‘n dirty as a scummy motel manager and fans of “Mad Men” will enjoy seeing Christina Hendricks back at work, but this is a film more about feel than narrative and is the very definition of a “not for everyone” movie.
Despite the light ‘n fluffy name “Tickled” is hard core investigative journalism with a human touch. A personality driven doc with pop culturist David Farrier going down the rabbit hole into the deeply weird and wild world of competitive endurance tickling is a “Law & Order: SVU” style story, complete with heroes, villains and unbelievable, but true, plot twists.
The story of “Tickled” begins when David Farrier, a self-described “light fluffy journalist,” came across a strange tickling video on the internet. Thinking it will make a good story for his New Zealand TV3 pop culture show he contacts the makers of the video requesting an interview.
When the people responsible for the video were slow to respond via email Farrier contacts them through a public Facebook page and that is when the story gets weird, troubling and takes on the aura of a thriller. Imagine Michael Clayton with tickling and you get the idea.
The openly gay Farrier finds himself on the receiving end of virulently homophobic responses and harassment from the American tickle video makers that escalates to repeated threats of lawsuits if he pursues the story. Despite the intimidation he and co-director Dylan Reeve soldier on with the documentary, travelling to the US to meet others with similar stories.
One young man claims he was subjected to on-line humiliation that ruined his chance at a pro football career when he objected to his tickling footage being used in ways he hadn’t originally signed off on. The tickling tale gets stranger and stranger as Farrier and Reeve uncover more accounts of bullying and, using financial records, follow the story to a Wall Street law firm and beyond.
Comments on the evils of cyber bullying are front ‘n center but “Tickled” is primarily a cautionary tale for our times. Hidden among the film’s intrigue and entertainment is a strong worded moral about looking before you leap; about why placing your trust with anonymous internet entities is a dangerous thing and despite the movie’s name, that’s no laughing matter.
Years ago my now-wife and I went to see a particularly grim horror movie. Despite “watching” the entire film through her fingers, as though she could shield her face from the gallons of blood ’n guts on display, the creepfest jangled her nerves so badly we had to go see Finding Nemo directly afterwards as a palate cleanser.
Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Dory’s (Ellen Degeneres) underwater road trip to find Marlin’s lost son Nemo, coupled with gorgeous animation and warm-hearted humour, calmed her and because of Pixar there were no bad dreams that night.
Roger Ebert called the family classic “a delight,” and parents snapped up so many of them it became the best-selling DVD ever. Disney is clearly hoping those good feelings have lingered over the 13 years since Nemo first made a splash. This weekend Finding Dory enters a crowded summer season, one already stuffed to the gills with sequels, reboots and reimaginings.
The original cast return (save for Alexander Gould who aged out of voicing Nemo) along with Idris Elba, Diane Keaton and Kate McKinnon. Will that be enough to mine gold when recent sequels have come up empty?
Hollywood wisdom says audiences want familiarity, characters and brands they already know and love, but this year moviegoers have rejected repackaged ideas. Zoolander 2, Ride Along 2, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising, The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Alice Through the Looking Glass, X-Men: Apocalypse and TMNT: Out of the Shadows all under performed in what the Hollywood Reporter is calling the Summer of Sequelitis.
For the record. I think Finding Dory will do just fine. Not just because Pixar is the gold standard in animation or because it has a story audiences will connect with but because it’s good.
Do I think moviegoers are suffering from Sequelitis? No. Many of this year’s sequels have stiffed because they weren’t very good. The best thing about Zoolander 2 is that it was so unfunny it’s hard to imagine Ben Stiller and Company making a third.
Perhaps the dip in box-office returns for cinematic re-treads is just what Hollywood needs and they’ll realize a constant diet of movies with numbers and colons in the title — or worse, both, as in Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising — is not as appetizing to audiences as they think.
Executives are scared. Pitch Perfect 3, the planned follow up to the $287.5 million grossing Pitch Perfect 2, has been delayed while Universal waits to see whether the sequel slump is a passing phase. In the meantime, expect more than one sequel-crazed studio suit to say, “Thank you Pixar,” when Finding Dory reels in the top spot.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into,” says Eric Zala.
Zala, along with Chris Stompolos and Jayson Lamb, spent much of the 1980s, their entire teen years, making a shot-for-shot remake of Raiders of the Lost Ark complete with special effects, car chases and melting heads. Ambitious in the extreme, they stopped at nothing to translate their vision to the screen, almost burning down a family home in the pursuit of their DIY dream.
“You can be surprised at what you accomplish,” says Zala. “As adults you have awareness of your limitations, real or perceived. That was one thing we had on our side when we embarked on this as kids. We didn’t know what we were trying to do was impossible. It’s a damn good thing because we would have been scared to death.”
A new documentary called Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made uses the original home movie as a basis to pick up the story decades after the trio abandoned the project. Zala and Stompolos are front and center to tell the tale of the obsession as they, now as thirty-somethings, try and finish the movie by shooting the one scene that eluded them as children, the exploding airplane sequence.
Stompolos describes seeing Raiders of the Lost Ark for the first time as “lightening in a bottle.”
“For our generation I don’t think we had ever seen such a perfectly crafted, mythologically aligned hero,” he says. “Indiana Jones was human, accessible, smart, macho, academic and flawed and could get hurt. The historical context was interesting and everything was just perfect. This larger than life character just kind of blew my mind. For me I wanted to create a playground for myself and see what it would be like to have those experiences.”
Enthusiasm and chutzpah go a long way, especially when they aren’t tainted by cynicism. The love of Raiders these fans—both as kids and adults—share is pure and respectful and their passion bleeds through the screen.
“We finished it in ‘89 and would have loved for Spielberg to see it but that was a pipe dream,” says Zala. “We certainly didn’t anticipate any kind of fan film movement back then. As far as we knew we were alone in the world. Come to find out, we weren’t. Lots of kids played Indiana Jones in their backyard. We just took it a little further. None of this was supposed to happen, we just did it for ourselves.”
“Eric and I pushed it over the finish line and stayed true to the pure vision,” says Stompolos, “because we simply love the movie.”
For this pair of fan filmmakers Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t just a childhood fixation. Both have seen it recently, thirty-five years after Zala says it, “split my brain open.”
“It took our breath away,” Stompolos says of his recent viewing. “Even now there is so much detail. We caught so many new things. I can still watch the film and love it. I don’t ever get tired of it. The thing that amazes me to this day is that no matter how many times we’ve seen it, it still has secrets to give.”
The key to “Central Intelligence,” a new action comedy comedy from “Easy A” director Rawson Marshall Thurber, will be the rapport between stars Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson and Kevin Hart. Physically they’re Laurel and Hardy, Johnson is at least one foot taller than Hart and weighs a hundred pounds more, but physicality aside, do they have the chemistry to pull this off?
Today Bob Stone (Johnson) is a CIA assassin who bears an uncanny resemblance to wrestler The Rock. He’s a mountain of a man but that wasn’t always the case. In 1996 he was a ninety-pound weakling so teased by his classmates even his principal says, “Well, there’s no coming back from that,” after one particularly humiliating hazing stunt.
On the other end of the high school scale is Calvin Joyner (Hart). Popular, he was homecoming king and voted most likely to succeed. He is, as the principal says, “Everybody’s favourite all round guy.” The future buttoned-down accountant was also the only kid in school to treat Bob with any humanity.
When Bob reconnects with Calvin on Facebook Calvin has a hard time remembering his former classmate. “You lost like two hundred pounds,” he says when they meet in person. Bob is now a CIA agent, but there’s a problem. The agency thinks he has gone rogue and is now a terrorist trying to hawk classified military secrets. To help clear his name Bob enlists Calvin. “Bottom line,” he says, “are you in or are you out?” Calvin wants out. “I thought you’d go, ‘I’m in Bob!’” says Stone, “and we would have a really cool moment but you kind of ruined that.” Of course Calvin is in, otherwise there’d be no action in this comedy.
The good news is Johnson and Hart have chemistry. They click. The bad news is the script doesn’t give them much to work with. There is the occasional funny moment but frankly, “Central Intelligence” rarely garners more than a titter from an audience who want to laugh, who want desperately for Hart to let loose or Johnson to display the kind of comedy chops he’s showed on “Saturday Night Live” and the kind of action aptitude he’s shown, well, everywhere else. Instead we’re handed a tepid action movie with badly choreographed fight scenes, few laughs and anti-bullying pop psychology better suited to an afterschool special.
What could have been a vehicle that played up to its star’s strengths is little more than a generic action flick that fails to let us smell what the Rock has cooking.
By Richard Crouse – Metro Canada
