Awards Season 2019: Screen Actors' Guild (SAG) Awards Winners

Last night (27th January), the Screen Actors' Guild Awards were announced. Here are the film winners:

Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture: 

Black Panther

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role: 

Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Leading Role: 

Glenn Close (The Wife)

Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role: 

Mahershala Ali (Green Book)

Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role: 

Emily Blunt (A Quiet Place)

Outstanding Action Performance by a Stunt Ensemble in a Film:

Black Panther

A couple of interesting results from the night. No surprises in Mahershala Ali and Glenn Close's wins. I do however find it interesting that SAG went for Rami Malek for Best Actor. That, and the Golden Globe win, must put him ahead in the Oscars race. Also, I was pleased to see Emily Blunt named Best Supporting Actress. She's an actress that I like and enjoy watching and it's also good to see A Quiet Place get a bit of recognition. 

Before anyone starts shitposting that the End is Nigh because Black Panther did so well, I want to point something out. The other nominees in the Outstanding Cast category (equivalent to their Best Picture) were A Star Is Born, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Crazy Rich Asians. Green Book, and Roma- two films with very good chances of taking the Best Picture Oscar- were not nominated for that particular SAG award. As good as a film as I think Black Panther is, I would argue that it's the least likely of the eight Oscar nominees to win. 

Our next stop on Awards Season is the Directors' Guild (DGA) Awards this coming Saturday (2nd February).

Review: The Girl On The Train (UK Cert 15)

An expertly plotted, intricate thriller, The Girl On The Train is based on the best-selling book by Paula Hawkins and directed by Tate Taylor (The Help)

Transplanting the story from London to New York, it follows Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), a woman who forms a fascination with a young woman (Haley Bennett) who she sees from the train every day on her way to work. Rachel builds up a perfect fantasy life for the woman. But when the young woman- whose name is Megan- disappears, Rachel becomes embroiled in the mystery. But can we really trust her version of events? Is there more to Megan's disappearance than meets the eye? Could Rachel have had something to do with it?

I'm an absolute sucker for books or films with unreliable narrators- there's something deeply satisfying about a work that can skilfully pull the rug out from under you- and here, we get not one, but three, narrators who aren't telling us everything. As the layers of the story unfold, what we think we know turns out to be wrong. Dead wrong.

There is an absolutely brilliant central performance by Emily Blunt. Rachel is a fascinating, flawed character- the main character, certainly, but definitely no heroine- and Blunt plays it to the hilt with absolutely no shred of ego involved. Rachel looks haggard, eyes sunk, as alcohol and regret make their mark. She is prone to drunken outbursts and blackouts and has a very complicated relationship with her ex-husband Tom (Justin Theroux) and his new wife Anna (Rebecca Ferguson). There's no attempt to soften or mitigate the rough edges of the character. She is presented warts and all, and it's one of Blunt's finest dramatic performances.

Megan is a similarly contradictory character; Rachel's imagined perfect life is very different to her reality. Bennett gets to play many facets to Megan- flirty, vulnerable, brazen, distraught- which all build in to her disappearance. Occasionally, Bennett's performance lapses into cliche but that could be to do with the script. To round out our triumvirate of troubled women, we have Anna. Scared of Rachel and mistrustful of her influence on her ex-husband, all Anna wants is to be left alone to get on with her life. What could have been a stereotypical new-wife-threatened-by-the-old is given nuance by Ferguson's performance and- as the story progresses- we come to realise that perhaps there's more to Anna than meets the eye.

You may think that, being such a female-heavy story, the male characters get short shrift. Not so. Whilst it's true that Luke Evans gets lumbered with little to do other than brood and shout as Megan's husband Scott, the other main male characters- Tom, and Megan's therapist Dr. Abdic (Edgar Ramirez)- are a bit more rounded and each feeds in to the main story. Whilst I have to say I called the twist, it was less to do with any of the performances and more to do with the law of averages.

The Girl On The Train (both the book and the film) have been compared to Gone Girl, and I can see why. There's some similarities- the unreliable narrators, stories told from the female view, moments of shocking violence (although Gone Girl takes the gold on that one)- but this is far from a pale imitation. This isn't a go-in-and-switch-your-brain-off film. It is taxing, especially to keep track of the differing timelines and points of view but if you're in the mood for a dark, psychological, tricksy puzzle-box of a film, this is well worth a go.

Review: 4 out of 5

Tez

Review: Into The Woods (UK Cert PG)

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's fairy-tale mash-up Into The Woods was first produced in 1986 and a movie version has been on the table since the early 1990s. But it's director Rob Marshall (Chicago, Nine) that has brought this musical masterpiece to the big screen.

A vengeful witch has put a curse of childlessness upon a Baker and his Wife. To lift the spell, he must find four fairytale artefacts- the cow as white as milk, the cape as red as blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold- and bring them back in three days' time. Meanwhile, Cinderella wants to go to the ball, Jack has to sell the family cow, and a little girl in a red cape must bring bread to Grandmother's house. All of them must go into the woods... But who will live happily ever after?

Because it has a PG rating in the UK, and is a Disney film, the trailers before the film were all for animated kids' movies. Make no mistake, this isn't a happy-go-lucky, fluffy, kid-friendly musical. It's very dark in places- death, infidelity and darkness abound, especially in the second half of the film- and the adult themes of some of the musical numbers might not be too appropriate for younger children. That said, there's a lot of fun to be had here.

Meryl Streep plays The Witch and is the main focus of most of the advertising (despite the character being very much a supporting one in the grand scheme of things). This is the first time Meryl Streep has ever played a witch, and you can see she's having an absolute ball. It's a high camp performance but she absolutely sells it, especially in the Witch's final song, a triumphant screw-you entitled 'Last Midnight' where she leaves an emperilled band of characters to their bickering. An absolutely delightful performance.

Anna Kendrick (who has proven her vocal talents in Camp and Pitch Perfect) makes for a great Cinderella, yearning for a different life then finding out it's not quite what she had planned. Emily Blunt is great as the Baker's Wife, providing an emotional anchor for most of the film. James Corden is a bit wooden on times as the Baker and sometimes struggles to sell the performance but it's decent enough.Chris Pine channels his inner Shatner to play Cinderella's Prince and has a nice tongue-in-cheek duet with Rapunzel's Prince (Billy Magnussen) called 'Agony' about his love for the mysterious stranger at the ball. However, a man raised to be 'charming, not sincere' can be trouble and his wandering eye soon causes issues.

Finally, Johnny Depp vamps it up as The Wolf, channelling the 1940s Tex Avery cartoons. This is where I run into a problem. The Wolf attempts to waylay Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford, who starts off as a little annoying but mellows as the film progresses) and there are some, frankly, rather pervy comments in his song 'Hello, Little Girl' (especially one about 'scrumptious carnality'). They've cast a 13-year-old girl as Red so the whole thing feels a little bit wrong. Depp earns his 'and' credit, in the film for barely five minutes.  

The film looks sumptuous, so praise should go to cinematographer Dion Beebe, as well as the costume, make-up and production design teams. As an adaptation of the musical, it's quite faithful although several of the musical numbers have been excised, a few roles have been changed (the notable one is the omission of the Narrator, whose role is filled by Corden) and a few of the outcomes have been altered- and some of the deaths made more palatable. The rougher edges have been taken off, but the central message is still there - fairytales are not always nicey-nicey stories, they're often cautionary tales about behaving badly or contrary to societal norms.  They're also quite barbaric (hinted at in the fate of Cinderella's Ugly Sisters who suffer the same fate as the original story). 

On the whole, a few moments of weirdness aside, I thoroughly enjoyed Into The Woods. Sondheim fans will no doubt have an opinion on the veracity of the adaptation, but it's worth seeing for the stellar performances of Streep, Kendrick and Blunt and a couple of damn good musical numbers.

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Tez

Review: Edge of Tomorrow (UK Cert: 12A)

Sometimes, no matter how good a film trailer looks, or if it’s definitely your cup of tea, you go into the cinema not expecting much. Rise of the Planet of the Apes? After the Tim Burton remake, I didn’t get my hopes up. The Amazing Spider-Man?  Expected to see the same scenes from the Sam Raimi films played out all over again, only not as good. The Evil Dead remake? The same film for fans of torture porn. Usually with films your gut instincts turn out to be right, but sometimes you’ll be surprised (I was surprised by how good all three films I mentioned were). After last year’s Tom Cruise sci-fi Oblivion, I wasn’t expecting much from Edge of Tomorrow. Despite being directed by The Bourne Identity’s  Doug Liman, starring the always impressive Emily Blunt, and having a trailer that ticked all the boxes, I sat down at the cinema expecting to struggle through Edge of Tomorrow’s two hours. Instead I was massively surprised to realise early on that I’m enjoying this film; I’m enjoying it a hell of a lot!

Edge of Tomorrow sounds like the safest bet a Hollywood studio could make for a big budget film: aliens, huge set pieces, things blowing up, all happening in this Groundhog Day-style narrative and starring one of the most famous actors on the planet. What makes Edge of Tomorrow stand out is that, while it’s hard not to spot its many influences (The Matrix, Starship Troopers, and just about every war movie ever made), Liman and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie, and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth, have come up with plenty of their own ideas.

In recent years its felt like all Tom Cruise has had to do is run round and shoot people. Here, Cruise gets much more to do. Edge of Tomorrow’s protagonist isn’t a family man or a secret agent, he’s a media consultant; a man who has never fought in a warzone (he joined the US military after his advertising firm collapsed) and whose job it is to glorify war so that more men and women join the army. William Cage is an arrogant, permanently grinning coward. In a brilliantly subtle scene alongside Brendan Gleeson, Cage sinks to new lows as he tries to save his own skin, talking his way out of being sent to the frontline. It’s not until Cage sees the full horrors of war first-hand, and is forced to get shot, blown up and torn to shreds, that he begins to change. Cruise also gets to remind us how good he is at comedy, Edge of Tomorrow doing a lot with the central idea that Cage has to keep dying over and over; Cruise delivering several blackly comic high-pitched screams.

Emily Blunt gives another hard to fault performance. Instead of being the love interest you normally see in summer blockbusters, Blunt is Cruise’s Master Yoda mentor. Always convincing as Rita Vrataski, the human resistance’s poster girl, she is tough, gutsy and driven. It’s not spoiling anything by saying that you get to see the softer side of Vrataski and, while you could argue this is predictable, at least her change is gradual and understated instead of being heavy-handed.

Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth deserve praise for ensuring the film’s Groundhog Day with aliens premise never feels tired. Scenes we watch for the first time have been re-lived by Cage over-and-over: Cage getting into a fight with his fellow squad members and effortlessly dodging every one of their punches, or meeting Brendan Gleeson for a second time and listing off everything he is about to do. You also have the flip side to this; about to fly a helicopter, Vrataski realises that Cage has lived through this moment before. Tearfully, she asks him how many times he has watched her die, Cage struggling to answer.

The only complaint you could throw at Edge of Tomorrow is that, by aiming for a 12A certificate, the film is not as complex or as unflinching as it should be. If Christopher Nolan had directed the film, you can bet there would be plenty of scenes examining what dying countless times would do to a man. How would you feel knowing that, if you die, you can start the day again and, when Cage inevitably gets his mortality back, how does this change your outlook on life? None of this is addressed in the film. If Paul Verhoeven had directed, you would have seen every time Cage was bumped off instead of cutting away. While I’m the first to argue that the imagination adds far more than any amount of splatter, seeing Cage die would have given the film more of a punch. This isn’t a video game Cage is playing; he is in his own purgatory, being killed off time and again.

Liman isn’t interested in making a violent, complex science fiction film; his plan all along was to make a fast-paced, entertaining blockbuster. Edge of Tomorrow isn’t Aliens or District 9, but it is funny, thrilling, with more than enough ideas to make it stand out from the sequels and rehashes that take over the cinemas from May to September. It’s also the best film to appear on Tom Cruise and Doug Liman’s CVs in a long time.

3 out of 5

Matt

Review: The Wind Rises (UK Cert PG)

The Wind Rises is the eighteenth film from famed Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli and is the final film to be directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki, one of the studio's founders and the visionary mind behind such Ghibli classics as My Neighbour Totoro (1988), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Spirited Away (2001). It was nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year, but lost to Frozen.

Taking its name from a line in a poem by French poet Paul Valery ('The wind is rising!... We must try to live!'), The Wind Rises is a fictionalised biography of Japanese aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, who built the first airplane bombers used by Japan in the Second World War. From an early age, Jiro had an interest in flight but was unable to become a pilot due to his poor eyesight. He instead decided to build planes and went on to study engineering at university. He then starts to work for an unnamed aeroplane manufacturer (in real life, Mitsubishi) and travels to Germany in the 1930s to see how German technology was advancing. In 1932, Jiro meets and falls in love with a young woman named Naoko Satomi (whom he aided years before when they were caught in the Great Kanto Earthquake). Their relationship blossoms but there's a problem: Naoko is unwell... It is a fitting salute and a elegant swansong for one of the world's best animators.

There is a choice on how you can see this film: you can watch it in the original Japanese with subtitles, or you can watch an English-language dub of it. I opted for the dubbed version. 

The English-language voice cast is absolutely sterling. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is great as the adult Jiro, whilst there's great support by John Krasinski as Jiro's friend Honjo and Martin Short as their boss Mr. Kurokawa. Emily Blunt gives a wonderfully moving turn as the adult Naoko, and there's a great performance by Stanley Tucci who plays the Italian aeronautical engineer Giovanni Caproni (a real person) who appears to Jiro in his dreams and acts as a kind of mentor to Jiro. These dream sequences are vivid and beautifully done, and it is through these that Jiro often reconciles his desire to create something beautiful, with the fact that his planes will be used as instruments of war. 

Jiro Horikoshi once said "All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful". It is this quote that inspired Miyazaki to make the film. And in the poignant, funny and moving story he's created, Miyazaki has indeed made something beautiful.  Highly recommended.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Tez

Review: Looper (UK Cert 15)

Looper’s premise is this: in the not-too-distant future (how many times have we heard that?) time travel is invented, but it’s outlawed almost immediately. Getting rid of a body in the future is near to impossible – so organised crime sets up the Loopers. Loopers are hit-men  but they are 30 years in the past, before time travel is invented- the future mafia send the victims back in time and the Looper takes care of them and their body in the past. But what happens when your next victim is your future self?

Now this premise intrigued me when I saw the trailer- I asked myself, how are they going to pull that off well, especially when you’re jumping around timelines and raising questions like, the future me will know everything I’m doing… or have done? It’s a great idea, great concept and a new twist on a sci-fi great – time travel. I thought. Unfortunately what you get is a mess of a film. It flitters along at a dull pace, taking far too long to set up a world to only then fail to deliver an exciting story and resolution.

The film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt. Levitt does his best with what he’s got, basically having to imitate a young Willis – under some freaky make up that augments his face to make him look like a young Bruce Willis. Unfortunately, Mr Levitt, relying on the make-up for the role doesn't work. Bruce Willis has never been so clearly taking the paycheck than here – he emotes his feelings of anguish by touching his forehead and looking longingly at his past self – but it just is such a lazy performance. Emily Blunt gives a great performance in a terrible film, her dialogue as a mother who was estranged from her son is just unbelievable – who talks like this? I know – no one does.

I could happily dissect just why this film is so bad – but to do so without spoilers is a nightmare! So to just simply say that this film’s style pallet is eclectic, its grasp of human behaviour is a joke, its plot has more holes than a sieve and the ending of this film is so ridiculous that it actually creates more issues than I can count!

Avoid.

Rating: 1 out of 5

Rhys 

Review: The Five Year Engagement (UK cert 15)

The Five Year Engagement is written, produced by and stars How I Met Your Mother star Jason Segel. After his tour de force on the Muppets franchise and Forgetting Sarah Marshall, how can he better himself? Well, to be honest, compared to those two films, he doesn't.

However what you have here is a funny, entertaining, well conceived rom-com directed by Nicholas Stoller (who re-teams with Segel after Forgetting Sarah Marshall). What's good is the film is genuinely funny and heartwarming without overindulging in the romance. This film takes a fresh take on the rom-com genre – this story starts where most films of the genre end. The film starts with boy gets girl. What is great is the film concentrates on the period after the honeymoon of a relationship – they are a couple who have lived together for years; we see the real problems that arrive in the first years of a real relationship – from money, jobs, self worth, family, children and of course trust.

Segel gives a solid performance as one of the two central characters, as does Emily Blunt. What’s nice here is you believe in the couple’s relationship; you can really see them as a couple. The supporting performances are great here as well, especially Chris Pratt as Alex (Jason Segel's on-screen best friend)– he plays an egotistical, vulgar manchild. However, by the end of the five years, he's grown into a well-adjusted family man. In fairness, that’s what is great about this film – everyone changes over a five year period; it's the truth of life that people change and change again.

The drama isn’t just centred solely on the central couple – the story is their world, their families, their friends, their jobs. This brings a much greater story experience for us, the viewer, when watching the events unfold.

What’s bad, you say? Well there is a very surreal middle act where Segel's character loses himself in what seems to be a depressive state; this is very strange and doesn’t really fit stylistically within the whole film’s style and feels a little indulgent on the star’s part. Also, it’s way too long a film for a rom-com, running at 124 minutes- you could easily shave 10-20 minutes of this running time and still bring home the film without losing anything that’s needed for the story.

Saying that, the film is a solid date movie and, more importantly it’s a solid purchase for your DVD shelf. I would genuinely encourage you to give this a watch, it’s a very enjoyable night out and an honest relationship story.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Rhys