Tag Archives: Edgar WRight

TUNER (Daniel Roher, 2025)

Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Lovely to see Dustin Hoffman on a big screen again in TUNER, almost 60 years after THE GRADUATE (Mike Nichols, 1967), and still bringing life, energy and intelligence to every moment he’s in. His scenes with Leo Woodall are reason enough to see the film. Hoffman, as an elderly piano tuner (Harry Horowitz), crackles, teases, loses the thread of his conversation, falls asleep in mid reminiscence. Woodall, as his orphaned apprentice (Niki White), says next to nothing, listens, humours him, ignores him, does his job, looks at him adoringly with those round puppy eyes of his. The film is smart about letting Woodall have the screentime necessary to respond to Hoffman, without dialogue but facially and physically, to show how at ease and loving they are together. It’s a wonderful portrait of intergenerational affection, which would feel out of place in what turns out to be heist film if it weren’t one of its central pleasures and narrative drives.

TUNER is a high concept film: NIki suffers from hyperacusis, a condition that makes his hearing so sensitive it’s destroyed his career as a piano virtuoso but which also means he can open any safe by hearing alone. When Harry falls ill and the bills piles up, Niki goes to work for some Israeli gangsters. The problem with the film is that it can’t quite decide on its genre, so we also get a  comedy (there’s a running gag about rich clients treating the tuners as all-purpose handymen and asking them to fix everything from wifi to plumbing while ‘they’re at it’);  The film is also a romance (Havana Rose Liu is the student composer who Woodall falls for) and a heist film; all pleasurable on their own.

 

TUNER also has really interesting overall commentary on Jewish culture with Jean Reno as the composer in search of the watches left by his grandparents killed in the Holocaust, the shiva for Dustin Hoffman’s character, the casting of Tovah Feldshuh as Hoffman’s wife – ie part of a history; the warmth and humanity of Hoffman and Feldshuh within a particular New York Jewish culture – then contrasted with the brutality of the Israeli gangsters. Ie. this is a film that has a lot, and it being a lot might be the reason why each of the elements feels not quite up to the best, but each is in itself  a pleasure to see, and certainly the scenes with Hoffman are a delight. It’s the one section I wish the film had lingered on longest.

 

The film has perhaps the best sound design I’ve seen this year, allowing us to understand the soundscapes of the city, the contrast to Niki’s experience of it, and the drama that creates. The sound design is also very good at evoking perspective on that sound, types of sound, distance from source, etc. It’s brilliant work, beautifully orchestrated with the other elements  by director Daniel Roher, whose first fiction feature this is. TUNER has some superficial similarities to BABY DRIVER (Edgar Wright, 2017), a much more successful genre piece which also makes brilliant use of sound. But as you can see from the above, they’re very different kinds of films.  I loved seeing TUNER in spite of its faults.

Bottoms (Emma Seligman, US, 2023)

Uncategorized, , , , ,

BOTTOMS (d: Emma Seligman) is my fourth film directed by a woman seen at the cineplex this week. Amazing. It’s a teen film about sex-mad teenagers desperate to lose their virginity, except the besties at the centre of this story are lesbians. Their idea of getting the girls they want is to invent a fight club, ostensibly to provide safety, sisterhood and community; but really in order to get laid. It all backfires of course. The film sticks to genre – the principal, the cool teacher with problems, the football players, the cheer-leaders, the big game – but mixes it all up with a dollop of all kinds of feminism: ‘who is bell hooks and why is she important?’ is not normally the kind of question asked in the genre. The protagonists Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott have great chemistry and Edebiri is charismatic and true and funny: a potent combination. I laughed a lot but the film proves Edgar Wright’s point that American films have forgotten how to deploy sights and sounds in the service of comedy. All the jokes are driven by dialogue, improv and performance. I sometimes feel like that olden days guy who thought shocking a glimpse of stocking, in that things that would have been thought ground-breaking in my youth now appear regularly. Still, I don’t remember seeing a feminist film with two lesbians as protagonists before. It is really smart and laugh-out loud funny. I enjoyed it very much but still wish it were better.

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 325 – Last Night in Soho

Eavesdropping at the Movies, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Edgar Wright’s highly anticipated psychological horror, Last Night in Soho, reaches cinemas, and we dive into its themes, its visual magnificence, its relationship to the era and environment it portrays… and its problems. It’s impossible not to admire this film for its lush cinematography, impressive special effects, and the best of its performances, but its screenplay leaves a huge amount to be desired, not just in how it conceptualises the world and people it portrays, but also, more simply, how clumsy it is in telling its story, bafflingly dropping entire character threads that seem like they obviously have places to go, and handling at least one secondary character’s entire subplot very poorly. We discuss the film’s dream logic, or lack thereof; its fear of the very lure of the grimy world it needs to show us, and the moralism that accompanies it; how it trades in nostalgia of Sixties Soho, despite being keen to exhibit is dark side; and the thematic simplicity of almost everything – things are good or bad, to be loved or feared, and room for complexity, there is none.

With all that said, it’s still a very enjoyable couple of hours, a discussion piece, and thanks to its fabulous imagery and in particular the performances of Anya Taylor-Joy and Matt Smith, easy to recommend.

P.S. Mike would like to acknowledge that he is aware that in the course of speaking too quickly for his brain to issue timely corrections, he wildly overstated how much the ghostly figures in Last Night in Soho are referred to as “blank” or “blanks”. It happens maybe once or twice, if he remembers rightly, and in passing. But he asserts that nonetheless, their faceless, amorphous, anonymous design and relentless, zombie-like behaviour does make them a fair point of comparison with the Blanks in The World’s End. So nyah.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

 

Hellzappoppin (H.C.Potter, USA, 1941)

hellzappoin.jpg

Thinking about films about filmmaking and/or Hollywood led me to Hellzappoppin. I don’t know why I avoided it for so long. I suppose I thought the humour would be dumb, cheap, low-down, coarse, which of course it is. But it is also very clever with it. It tries to get laughs from practically everything at all times and I often succumbed. It has great audio-visual gags, humour made possible only by the medium itself, something which contemporary comedy directors could learn from.

 

Some examples below:

 

 

As you can see above some of the humour, well done as it is, is cartoonish, talking dogs that comment on talking bears, the leaky suit etc.

But some of the gags are unthinkable without cinema, here above, following from The Invisible Man, making an entire sequence around disappearing tops and disappearing bottoms, and ending the gag with the double exposure. Hellzappoppin was based on a hit Broadway play but the mediu was definitely taken into account for the movie.

‘Ít´s a great picture see how much it weighs.’ Ít´s a movie, we change everything’. The dialogue is brilliant and the visual gags fantastic. See how the pictures talk back, the comment on the story, which is a comment on cinema. A friend said Olsen and Johnson don´t just break the fourth wall, they explode it.

‘There never has been a picture without a story and there never will be a picture without a story’ But there is space and here Olsen and Johnson move through a whole series of spaces in the studio.

There are songs throughout, good ones, and some terrific lindy hopping but then note how the whole Stinky Miller gag is developed here, through writing over the images, then we see the shadow of Stinky leaving the theatre, before the protagonists also draw their own vision of happyness on-screen. Brechtian evokes some of the techniques but none of the pleasures. The film takes pleasure, and makes humour from,  every aspect of cinema, uses the form to make gags with, and even goes beyond it to the projection booth and the audience.

Hellzappoppin is not seamless, there will be elements that will jar. But it is brilliant and made me think of this great video essay by Tony Zhou. Everything that Zhou admires in Edgar Wright´s comedy (and finds lacking in much of the rest of contemporary comedy films) can be found in Hellzappoppin. In spades. Mischa Auer is terrific, and seeing Martha Ray on the rampage after him is a sight to behold.

José Arroyo

hellza2