Fast reviews for busy people! Watch as I review three movies in less time than it takes to do a handstand! Have a look as I race against the clock to tell you about the drama “We Live in Time,” the satire “Rumours” and the edgy family film “Bookworm.”
Watch the whole thing HERE!
SYNOPSIS: In “Bookworm,” a new family adventure film now playing in theatres, 11-year-old Mildred’s (Nell Fisher) world is turned upside down when her estranged father, the washed-up magician Strawn Wise, played by Elijah Wood, agrees to take her camping to find a mythological beast known as the Canterbury Panther, claim the $50,000 reward, and pay off her mother’s debts.
CAST: Elijah Wood, Nell Fisher, Michael Smiley, Morgana O’Reilly, Nikki Si’ulepa, Vanessa Stacey, Theo Shakes, Millen Baird. Directed by Ant Timpson.
REVIEW: A quirky and original (if slightly edgy) family film, “Bookworm” is an old-fashioned adventure, one that sets a father and daughter off on a camping trip that turns into a tale of survival and self-discovery.
Elijah Wood is “Bookworm’s” above the title star, and he delivers a memorably odd performance as a showy illusionist, with a big bag of tricks, but little idea of how to be a father. It’s a funny performance, driven by an irrational hate for magician David Blaine, but it is Nell Fisher as Mildred who steals the show.
She is precocious but never precious, smart but not a smart aleck. It’s a natural kid’s performance that helps anchor the film’s quirkier aspects.
Together they’re an engaging odd couple forced to put aside their differences—his reluctance to be a parent and her indifference to his parenting skills (“You’ve failed as a man and crapped the bed as a protector,” she tells him.)—and get to know one another to complete Mildred’s mission.
Set against the backdrop of Canterbury Plains in New Zealand’s southern region, “Bookworm” sees Wood on another adventure in familiar territory, and while this one is not as epic as his N.Z.-shot “Lord of the Rings” films, it satisfies in a less-is-more sense. It’s idiosyncratic and features some language and peril (see Michael Smiley’s excellent villain) that is definitely not the norm for kid’s flicks, but its story of reconciliation is relatable and has a great deal of eccentric charm.
In “Censor,” a new psychological horror film on VOD, Niamh Algar plays Enid, a stern young woman who brings childhood trauma to her job as an English film censor.
Set in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, “Censor” makes it clear that Enid sees her job as an essential service. Her profession, as she sees it, is to protect the public by cutting out eye gouges, intestinal tug of wars and other ghastly staples from the “video nasties” she screens before they are released. Convinced those bloody exploitation films feed anti-social behavior, she’s snip happy. Her co-workers mockingly call her “Little Miss Perfect” but she has a dark side.
When she reviews a gorefest called “Don’t Go in the Church,” it brings back long suppressed memories of the disappearance of her sister Nina. Delving deeper into the work of the movie’s notorious director Frederick North, she comes across Alice Lee (Sophia La Porta), an actress who looks exactly like her late sister. Searching for answers Enid visits the set of North’s new film, and her descent into madness begins. “People think I create the horror,” North says. “But I don’t. Horror is already out there, in all of us.”
“Censor” works on several levels. It has elements of the video nasties Enid tries to suppress, but as fact and fiction intertwine, it is her efforts to edit her memories that resonates. She is driven in her work by trauma in her life, and vice versa. As “Censor” drifts from tribute to the video nasties that fuel the early part of the story to a psychological portrait of Enid’s problems, it is clear she can no longer tell what is real and what is not. Driven by guilt, she is unable to move past grief to acceptance. That is the root of her problems, not the outside influence of art, no matter how grotesque.
The Welsh-born director Prano Bailey-Bond doesn’t have quite enough steam to keep the intriguing premise going straight through to the end but she does fill the screen with compelling images, some inspired by the lurid video nasty period VHS horror aesthetic, others reflecting the dull grey of 1980s England. It adds up to a movie that stylishly explores the relationship between art and real-life.
A science experiment with real world repercussions is at the heart of “Birthmarked,” a new comedy starring Toni Collette and Matthew Goode.
The action in the film begins with a simple, timeless question, “Could we have been anyone other than who we are?” Married scientists Ben (Goode) and Catherine (Collette) attempt to answer the question by staging a social experiment that they hope will once and for all determine what is more important in shaping young lives, nature or nurture.
In a remote cabin under very controlled circumstances Ben and Catherine, with the help of sex-starved Russian assistant Samsonov (Andreas Apergis), condition their kids to defy expectations. Their son Luke (Jordan Poole), their biological child is be raised as an artist. Two adopted children, daughter Maya (Megan O’Kelly), from a “long line of dimwitted people,” is trained as an intellectual while son Maurice (Anton Gillis-Adelman), adopted from a family with angry, aggressive ancestors, is taught the ways of peace and love. The artist. The brain. The pacifist. “No one is a prisoner of their genetic heritage,” says Ben, who “teaches” his kids unorthodox classes like Stimulated Self Expression.
Their carefully documented experiment takes a turn when their patron (Michael Smiley) demands results. “Remember our deal,” he says. “If this fails you owe me every cent I put into this.”
“Birthmarked” has the kind of low-key quirk that Wes Anderson has mastered. Unfortunately it eludes Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais. Example: “The use of a narrator is weak dramaturgy,” Ben says by way of criticism of his son’s play, in a movie with loads of narration.
You can imagine “Birthmarked” being given a freshening up by someone who looks past the character’s idiosyncrasies instead of embracing them. A little less cleverness might have left room for whatever humanity these characters possess. As it is the film never lifts off because Ben, Catherine and Company don’t feel like real people. They feel like characters thrown into an odd situation and not like people living in, and dealing with, a strange state of affairs.
