Watch the whole thing HERE!
Listen to the whole thing HERE!
Watch the whole thing HERE!
CAST: Angourie Rice, Spike Fearn, Minnie Driver. Directed by Alicia MacDonald.
REVIEW: In true rom com fashion, one night in a loud Manchester student bar sound engineer and bumbling romantic Owen (Spike Fearn) becomes instantly smitten by Emily (Sadie Soverall), a young woman wearing fairy wings he meets on the dancefloor. Before leaving, she gives him her number, then disappears. The next morning as he attempts to text her, he has a terrible realization—she mistyped the number. “It’s missing a digit.”
“I don’t know herb last name,” he says, “or anything that will help me find her.”
Unable to reach Emily, he sets off on a mission to track her down which puts him in the sights of another Emily (Angourie Rice), an American psychology student studying on a visa, who agrees to help him in his search. “She’s a perfect, uncomplicated, heteronormative projection of everything you want her to be,” she says of Emily Number 1.
But she has an ulterior motive. She’s writing a thesis called “Romantic Attachment: A Self-Sabotaging Madness.”
“He’s the case study I’ve been waiting for,” she says. “He’s my very own Stanford prison experiment.”
For her, he’s a case study in how romantic attachments cause “temporary psychosis.”
Owen’s quest to locate “Fairy Emily” soon becomes a sensation, for better and for worse. What some people see as a sweet attempt at getting her attention, other view as stalking.
He becomes a social media star after serenading the missing Emily online and sending e-mails to every woman named Emily at the school. But as Owen gets closer to finding his Emily, psychologist Emily begins to rethink her scientific thesis.
Produced by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, the team behind gold standard romantic comedies like “Bridget Jones,” “Notting Hill” and “About Time,” “Finding Emily” has all the trappings of a regular rom com, but there’s a Northern English grittiness to it—it’s a bit of a Valentine to Manchester—that sets it apart from the run-of-the-mill comedic romance.
The usual web of misunderstandings, personal complications, grand gestures and last-minute declarations are present, but it gently massages these rules of the genre to make it more limber than the same old. Tropes for the age of social media, campus culture and post #MeToo attitudes are welcome additions and never overplayed.
The film also deftly side-steps the toxic masculinity inherent in some of Owen’s dodgier schemes by framing them as ideas for Emily’s psychological study, and not the behavior of a predator.
The film’s heart and soul is Spike Fearn. Looking like the third, long lost Gallagher brother, he brings a scruffy, heartfelt appeal to Owen. Without an ounce of cynicism, he wears his heart on his sleeve and is a charming, if somewhat clueless focal point for the romantic action.
Also, next time around please give Minnie Driver’s terse and hilarious school dean character a movie of her own, or at least more to do in the sequel.
“Finding Emily” is a little longer than it needs to be but it’s just original and charming enough to be worth a look.
SYNOPSIS: In “Ella McCay,” a new dramedy written and directed by sitcom legend James L. Brooks, and now playing in theatres, the idealistic 34-year-old titular character must juggle family, marriage and responsibility when she becomes governor of her state.
CAST: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Lowden, Kumail Nanjiani, Ayo Edebiri, Julie Kavner, Spike Fearn, Rebecca Hall, Albert Brooks, and Woody Harrelson. Written and directed by James L. Brooks.
REVIEW: A mix of family drama and political underdog tale, “Ella McCay” is a kernel of a good idea with a good cast wrapped up in an over-stuffed melodrama.
British actress Emma Mackey plays all-America go getter Ella McCay. She scored top marks in class, became a lawyer, married her high school sweetheart and unexpectedly became governor of her state when the sitting governor (Albert Brooks) is offered a cabinet position in the federal government.
As she works to secure free children’s dental services, among other pet programs, family drama threatens to undo everything she’s worked to achieve.
In a story about a dysfunctional family, the most dysfunctional thing about the story is the script, written by James L. Brooks, who also directs.
Brooks specializes in television shows (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Taxi”) and movies (“As Good as It Gets” and “Broadcast News”) that effortlessly flip flop between humor and heartache. Those elements are all present in “Ella McCay,” but they feel strained and unfocussed, like puzzle pieces that don’t fit together. The idiosyncratic script veers all over the place, leaping from one contrived situation to another, never finding an overall tone to tie the episodic story together.
As a result “Ella McCay” makes for baffling viewing.
Despite handing in a committed performance as the title character, Emma Mackey battles against overwritten dialogue in a movie that wants to be a character-driven look at life, love and loyalty, but is, instead, a collection of feels, raked up like fallen leaves in the fall, and thrown haphazardly at the screen.
Like the title character, the movie “Ella McCay” wants it all, but succeeds only in proving that sometimes, more is less.
Recently Cailee Spaeny played the wife of one of the most famous musicians on the planet as the title character in “Priscilla.” In her new film, “Alien: Romulus,” a standalone “interquel” set between the events of “Alien” and “Aliens,” she trades her ex-husband Elvis’s Graceland for another weird, otherworldly place—outer space.
In the new film, the seventh installment in the “Alien” franchise, Spaeny plays Rain Carradine, a new style Ellen Ripley, and one of a group of space scavengers fleeing their home planet, a dystopian hellhole run by a company whose ironic slogan reads, “Building a Better World.”
“The company is not going to give us anything,” says Bjorn (Spike Fearn), “we have to take it.”
To avoid working in the company’s mines, a small group, including Rain, her model ND-255 synthetic “brother” Andy (“Industry’s” David Jonsson), her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), mine workers Bjorn and Kay (Isabela Merced) along with pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), set off to rummage parts from a decommissioned space station. But instead of space pods and spare parts, they discover the universe’s most horrifying life form, the Xenomorph.
A horror film set in space, “Alien: Romulus” is a back-to-basics movie that owes a debt to the first two films in the franchise. The first part is all atmospherics and world building, reminiscent of the creeping dread that defined the original film. From the forty-five minute mark—the first Facehugger sighting—director Fede Álvarez amps up the action and the stakes, dispensing the fast-paced intensity of James Cameron’s “Aliens.”
The result is a movie that finds a way to use our nostalgia for the original films as a springboard for some new ideas. Álvarez, along with co-writer Rodo Sayagues, steers the story to a wild final act that stays true to the franchise, but combines sci fi and body horror in an unforgettable, spine-chilling fashion.
Seven movies in (plus two “Alien vs. Predator” crossover flicks) nothing will ever beat the original chest-bursting scene for sheer shock and awe, but “Alien: Roimulus’s” aggressive Facehuggers and Xenomorph are still potent horror images.
They’re iconic in their hideousness, drip acidic blood, and, if that wasn’t enough, force their proboscis down throats to impregnate their victims. Álvarez uses them to unnerving effect, mixing the creatures with a zombie synthetic character, some House of Horrors visuals and enough graphic, gory and grim practical effects to provide a pedal to the metal thrill ride.
“Alien: Romulus” doesn’t have the thematic depth of some of the other films in the series, but it delivers a crowd-pleasing and exciting link between the first and second movies on the “Alien” franchise timeline.
