Three Films Make A Post: A Killer Comedy

Louder!: Can’t Hear What You’re Singin’, Wimp (2019) aka  音量を上げろタコ！なに歌ってんのか全然わかんねぇんだよ!!: I’ve seen and enjoyed most of director Satoshi Miki’s other comedies, but I have to admit, those films did leave me somewhat less puzzled than this one does. This is one of those Japanese comedies that often leave one confused if one doesn’t get a joke (or a whole scene) because one lacks sufficient cultural grounding for it, or because the film’s just frigging weird. It’s certainly never boring – Miki’s incredibly nervous direction alone is proof against that - and some of the things I do indeed get are pretty funny, as some of the film’s more earnest bits (or are they ironically earnest? who can tell?) seemed to be somewhat moving. I’m still not sure what the story of a rock singer (Sadao Abe) with doped vocal cords and a street singer (Riho Yoshioka) who can’t sing other than quiet as a mouse is trying to tell me except that making loud stadium music is better than making soft, intimate one. I am pretty sure it does want to say something, but hey, them’s the breaks.

Adventures in Babysitting (1987): Whereas this PG-13 80s US teen comedy by Chris Columbus is pretty obvious as to what it wants to do and be and why, leading to as fun a time as a film quite this fluffy can be. It’s the kid-friendly version of those 80s and 90s movies about a guy from the suburbs having weird adventures in the Big City (in this case Chicago), just that in this case, the guy is an incredibly charming young Elisabeth Shue dragging a bunch of kids (among them a Marvel-Thor-loving little girl) around. The whole thing is about as deep as a puddle, but as charming and likeable as its heroine, really putting effort into skirting around racism and unpleasantness in tone while not becoming too harmless. Plus, there’s a fun cameo by blues man Albert Collins (leading into an absurd and excellent musical number), and one Vincent Phillip D’Onofrio as (sort of) Thor.

Lying and Stealing (2019): This crime comedy by Matt Aselton that plays out like a heist movie without a proper heist – the thievery committed by Theo James’s character isn’t really interesting enough to be called heists – a bit of romance and just enough of the nasty stuff nobody would want to call it harmless. Aselton’s direction is capable, stylish, but a bit too light in moments that should have an emotional impact, the smaller roles are cast very well (including house favourite Ebon Moss-Bachrach as the protagonist’s bipolar drug-addled brother), and the film’s generally likeable, clever, and certainly not boring.


My problem with the film is that neither James nor female lead Emily Ratajkowski are quite up to the challenge of bringing their characters and their romance to life, and seem to be cast more for their ability to look hot in designer clothes (which they undoubtedly do) than to bring nuance to what they do.

In short: The Magnificent Seven (2016)

While Antoine Fuqua’s remake of John Sturges’s brilliant remake of Kurosawa’s awesome – in the old sense of the word – film is a perfectly entertaining big budget mainstream western kind of thing (a sentence I’m getting used to having opportunity to write again), it is also a bit of a mess.

Fuqua never seems to be able to decide what kind of film he is actually making: is it a fun action adventure? A film all about the exciting but unpleasant violence? A revisionist western that gives people who aren’t white (and if you squint, even those that aren’t male) their due? A film about what violence does to the men habitually committing it? A would-be Tarantino western? The script has perfectly fine scenes belonging to each of these concepts but it doesn’t even make much of an effort to tie them together into a satisfying whole, so the film is always lesser than the sum of its parts.

Apart from this main flaw, the filmmaking is another example of Antoine Fuqua’s position as a director without any visible personality whose movies look and feel as if they might have been directed by anyone technically competent, which is increasingly sad when a guy has directed movies since the early 90s and should have developed something of a style of his own by now. I’m also rather unhappy with the yellowish colour lying over everything here, a colour obsession I thought movies had finally gotten over again; for the Western genre, this is a particularly bad fit, particularly in a film full of shots of grass that’s supposed to be green (or so I've heard).

I’m also confused why the production went with a mostly utterly indifferent score by James Horner and Simon Franglen that only comes alive when it’s directly quoting Elmer Bernstein’s score for the Sturges film? Also about who thought Vincent D’Onofrio’s (who usually can’t do wrong with me) accent was a good idea, and last but not least why, when you go with a Tarantino style talkative neurotic main villain you then don’t take the extra step and give him decent dialogue (well, monologues, really) nor cast someone who is actually good at playing this sort of role?

All this does make The Magnificent Seven sound like a worse film than it actually is. It really is a watchable film, if in a very frustrating manner.