Blu-ray Review: Britt-Marie Was Here (2019)

63-year-old Swedish homemaker Britt-Marie (Pernilla August) lives a well-ordered life of lists, habits, and routines. Dinner is served promptly at six, baking soda is the ultimate problem solver, and everything — including the cutlery drawer — is neat, tidy, and in its right place. Uncomfortable with any sort of deviation from the norm that she's cultivated over the past forty years, in the opening voice-over of actress turned director Tuva Novotny's sophomore film — based upon Fredrik Backman's eponymous novel — Britt-Marie reveals that once a guest helped her after dinner and put her silverware away in the drawer wrong. Speaking of the incident as if it were an insult so great that they might as well have set fire to her living room rug, Britt-Marie informs us that after the cutlery debacle, that person wasn't a friend of hers anymore.

An amusing anecdote that not only summarizes our main character's state of mind at the beginning of the film but also sets its dryly acidic tone, Britt-Marie's reaction to the silverware situation perfectly foreshadows her response when she discovers that her husband Kent (Peter Haber) has been seeing someone else. Introducing herself to the female stranger in the hospital, presumably after their sexcapades caused Kent to have a heart attack, Britt-Marie shows her the door before calmly retrieving her husband's laundry, as is her custom, and then closing the door on Kent herself.

While the cutlery drawer could be salvaged as long as the perpetrator was no longer in their lives, in the case of her marriage, Britt-Marie knows that no amount of cleaning — even with baking soda — will put things back in order. Leaving her ring behind, she embarks on a new adventure when she says yes to her first real job in forty years — the only one she can get — which sends her to the small town of Borg to work as a youth soccer coach.

Not a big fan of the game, which the soccer obsessive Kent viewed as a metaphor for life, Britt-Marie soon falls back on her old habits, settling into the dirty, nearly abandoned youth center, which she cleans from top to bottom in order to put everything in its (new) right place. Unsure which story she wants to tell, Novotny fills the film — which she co-wrote alongside Anders Frithiof August and Øystein Karlsen — with several false starts as our protagonist journeys into various subplots involving friendship, mentorship, and/or romance that never quite pay off.

Introducing us to a handful of wholly original supporting characters, we meet Anders Mossling's sweet natured police officer Sven who, sweet-on Britt-Marie, brings her sweet jam to break the ice, as well as the local soccer obsessive Sami (Lancelot Ncube) whose two younger siblings he raised now play on her team. A character study turned life affirming starting over or fish-out-of-water comedy that soon becomes a romance, it's easily apparent that, unlike Britt-Marie and her utensils, the film's screenwriters don't quite know which plot goes where or what the movie they've penned should ultimately be.

Buoyed by a terrifically earnest, ego-free turn by Pernilla August, who never lets us forget that beneath the brief smiles, there is a woman of icy rigidity, August's chemistry and interplay with her co-stars holds our interest even when the well-intentioned yet underwhelming film does not. Barely developing Britt-Marie's role as a soccer coach, beyond enlisting the daughter of the former coach for help as well as her friendship with a precociously wise beyond her years young player named Vega (Stella Oyoko Bengtsson), the film feels like it's merely checking off subplots on one of Britt-Marie's handwritten lists.

Trying to be everything to everyone and never finding a safe place to land for long, like a spoon facing the wrong direction in Britt-Marie's kitchen drawer, while it's still functional, it's too distracting to look past its shortcomings for long. Overshadowing Britt-Marie at every turn with characters like Sami, Sven, Vega, and more who are far more interesting than our lead as written, because perhaps Novotny doesn't stay in one place long enough for our heroine to come to life beyond the surface level soundbytes of that opening sequence, we fail to connect to her overall plight or the goings-on.

An altogether pleasant if admittedly forgettable trifle nonetheless, though the inconsistent Britt-Marie isn't sure what kind of film it should be from one scene to the next, its affable cast does their best to keep us smiling long enough that we forget about the script that needs to be rewritten right there next to the silverware in that damn cutlery drawer.

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Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

She Wants More - Movie Review Essay: Lisa (1990)

She Wants More

by Jen Johans

Using a breathy voice to read back the license plate owned by the hot older guy that her best friend crushes on to the DMV, Lisa (Staci Keanan) tells the man on the other end of the phone that she wants more info on the man behind "WNTMORE." A trick that the precocious, boy-crazy fourteen-year-old learned by watching Magnum P.I. — which makes her think that she and her friend Wendy (Tanya Fenmore) could be real life private eyes — all we have to do is spend a few minutes with Lisa to discover that this is a girl who wants more, wants much more herself.

The daughter of an overprotective single mother (played by Cheryl Ladd) who was forced to leave her whole family behind when she became pregnant as a teen, now that Lisa is becoming a woman, the florist is determined not to let her make the same mistakes. Having invoked a rule that her daughter isn't allowed to date until she's sixteen, Katherine (Ladd) is unwilling to break it when Lisa and Wendy are invited by classmates on a double date.

Taking Wendy's declaration that everyone's going to think she's weird if she has to wait two more years to date to heart, the lonely Lisa focuses most of her romantic energy falling for and then following unavailable men like "WNTMORE" around, not yet realizing that perhaps such men are better appreciated as mere objects of fantasy.

Gathering intel and a picture of the men along with late '80s heartthrobs like George Michael and Tom Petty to place inside her top secret crush scrapbook, Lisa finds a new object of desire in the handsome, polished Ken doll ready stranger Richard (D.W. Moffett) who she bumps into in the dark. Returning home from a grocery errand for Katherine, Lisa might've had her mother's keychain with the mace ready for her protection but once Richard smiles, she opts to use her charm instead.

"Last night," she tells Wendy, "I met the most beautiful man I've ever seen." Using her wiles once again to track him down, rather than just file away his info in her scrapbook, she grows bolder. Calling him for an anonymous chat, the teenager smooths out the girlish edges of her voice and drops her tone down to a soft purr.

"Hi, Rick. It's been a long time," Lisa begins with confidence since right now, she's the one in control. Continuing to phone the stranger, once Wendy finds out what her friend's been doing, she warns Lisa not to let her guard down but by then, things have escalated enough that we fear she might be too late.

In Gary Sherman's 1990 thriller, we know long before Lisa does that even though her first instinct upon meeting the man was to reach for her charm, she should've gone for the mace instead. Richard, it seems, might be GQ cover handsome but as screenwriters Sherman and Karen Clark reveal as soon as the movie begins, he's a real lady killer in every sense of the word.

In an intriguing link that's never explored as well as it should be, Richard, like Lisa, has a history of stalking his victims from afar and then phoning them, not to flirt as she does, but to leave a message that he's in their apartment and going to kill them. A delusional murderer who sets a romantic stage for each of the slayings in a way that's earned the man the moniker Candlelight Killer, there's a fascinating scene in Sherman's movie where Lisa and Wendy follow Richard, hoping to snap a photo at the exact same time he's eyeing his next target.

What could've been a mystery about voyeurism, attraction, and how quickly and devastatingly an idol can fall for grace a la Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt or Caruso's Disturbia, turns into a veritable Lifetime movie as it continues, once Richard predictably mistakes Katherine for his mystery caller. Likewise, introducing us to Katherine's own secret love interest before vanishing him from sight, we can't help but wonder how much better Lisa might've been if it had compared and contrasted the issues of trust and control in the mother's real relationship with the same points in her daughter's burgeoning faux one.

Although it shortchanges us on real suspense by refusing to let the girls in on the fact that Richard might be the murderer until we've been deposited into a ridiculously fast denouement, the film never fully spirals out of control, thanks to a wholly convincing turn by Staci Keanan who anchors Lisa by conveying complex, multilayered emotions throughout in this, her feature debut.

Revealing too much too soon regarding Richard, when it might've been more interesting if we weren't sure which one of a handful of the girls' crushes was the killer, as a mystery lover and writer, my mind was involuntarily flooded with ideas as to how Sherman and Clark could've turned their otherwise clever script around. In that sense, it's reminiscent of the way that Magnum P.I. spurred Lisa to think outside the box when tracking down a suspect's identity. Even though it doesn't quite work overall, thanks to a spellbinding performance by a wise beyond her years Keanan and a few ingenious plot points that are introduced (before they're sadly buried), it's well worth a look for genre fans.

On the one hand wise about its subject matter, as it prepares to toss its characters to the wolves, Lisa tries overly hard to manufacture melodrama. Going from A to Z at the drop of a hat in terms of Lisa's relationship with her mother, it's admittedly awkward to see it change from friendly and sweet to dubiously sour in an instant before Katherine makes a halfhearted attempt to write everything off on hormones.

But even though the film feels like a museum piece now with its old technology of home phones, answering machines, and no caller ID, it could work just as well today in the Instagram era. Yet, in any setting, Lisa's ideas are timeless, as are the struggles between girl and friend, mother and daughter, woman and man, and stalker and prey.

Conceived by Sherman and Clark, the film definitely understands that — in the words of Megan Abbott's Dare Me — "there's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls," especially when they're as bright as Lisa, they can't wait to grow up, they want more, and they're not afraid to put down the scrapbook and camera to call up and ask for it.

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Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Line of Duty (2019)

"Officer down." The words go straight to Frank Penny's central nervous system. Adrenaline engaged, with his heart going double time since the location of the fleeing suspect is in his direct vicinity, Penny's walk becomes a jog and then a run.

Information ricocheting from ear to ear, when the police officer (played by Aaron Eckhart) catches sight of the suspect's hoodie in front of him, his pursuit ramps up. Following him down crowded streets, through a church, out a window, and wherever the man will take him, in Penny's mind, "officer down" instantly trumps the command "stand down" that comes over the air multiple times as he reports his progress.

And when the extended chase sequence puts two more cops on the ground, Penny knows he's officially done listening. Trying his best to arrest the man when he corners him in an alley, he's forced to draw down on the man instead when the suspect aims his gun directly at the veteran officer and starts to fire. Staring up at Penny in defiance, the man looks Eckhart in the eyes as he dies and says, "ask him, ask him what it's like to lose everything."

A cruel comeuppance to an earlier exchange Penny had had with an inquisitive neighborhood boy who asked him if he'd ever shot anyone which resulted in a silence so long that you just know there's a story there, just ten minutes before this shooting, Penny gave the kid a sly "not today" before telling him it was still early yet.

What was early for Penny then, however, is late for everyone else, which he quickly deciphers when he reports to his former partner turned police Chief Volk (Giancarlo Esposito) and is informed that the man he shot was their only lead to the whereabouts of Volk's eleven-year-old kidnapped daughter Claudia. As if on cue, a video link comes through with temporary proof of life for Claudia, which is set to expire when she does in sixty-four minutes as water begins to fill the glass box in which she's being held.

Turning in his weapon as required, Penny blows off reporting to IA and taking his two day suspension when he finds the suspect's car. Looking to chase down clues like he chased down the perp in order to find Claudia, he gets more than he bargained for when — in need of a car — he acquires an unlikely new partner as twenty-two year old enterprising citizen reporter, Ava Brooks (Courtney Eaton) comes along for the ride.

Livestreaming the entire thing so that director Steven C. Miller's real-time thriller cycles through multiple points-of-view and lenses as people tune in on their devices, the inventively timely if utterly illogical gimmick ensures that Line of Duty continues running at the exact same pace that Eckhart did during the first act's bravura chase.

Striving to keep the energy up while cycling through a bunch of politically correct talking points about police, procedure, and community, although the actors are first rate, Eaton and Eckhart's jokey give-and-take banter feels like it belongs in an '80s buddy cop comedy as opposed to this high stakes drama.

Coming as it does right after Penny has killed a stranger, seen images of an eleven-year-old girl he knows on her way to death by drowning, and had a heated exchange with Brooks about his split second decision to kill the suspect (where he pointed an empty gun at her head on camera), the film's tonal 180 moves fast enough to give you whiplash.

Nonetheless, one of the most impressive direct to digital Lionsgate features that I've seen in recent memory, when Steven C. Miller's ridiculous film works, it's ridiculously entertaining. A truly effective real time thriller that, at times, is on par with Cellular, Line of Duty prevents you from dwelling on how little sense it makes by ratcheting up the tension with jaw-dropping action set-pieces involving shootouts, car crashes, helicopters, fire, and bombs.

Reminiscent of a video game for both better (as it consistently raises the stakes) and worse when it comes to an eventual villain — exceedingly well-played by an against-type Ben McKenzie — who seems to have more lives than Jason Voorhees, it comes as no surprise to discover that the film's screenwriter has a video game writing credit to his name.

Falling back on Gen X action movie cliches while trying to frame them through a contemporary viewfinder, the film features a painfully misguided, homophobic fight sequence with a gay, black body builder named Bunny that — played for laughs — feels like a scene left on the cutting room floor by a smart editor tasked with chopping a mid '90s film from Michael Bay.

Unable to figure out precisely which chord to play, Jeremy Drysdale's script strums along, trying to keep the beat during his otherwise engaging action scenes, and we hear Drysdale's struggle in Eckhart's lines of dialogue. Vacillating between friendly neighborhood cop and hotheaded cowboy, as one of our strongest character actors, Aaron Eckhart tries his best to sell all of the conflicting sides of his character, which never feels more strained than when he morphs into Dudley Do Right and is forced to tell another adult to stay still because a bomb could blow their "basketballs" off.

No stranger to being one of the saving graces of an otherwise average film (or in the same turn, stealing a stellar one), Eckhart fights to stay emotionally true throughout and doubly so when the script's words betray him. And while it's a nice change of pace to have his character partner up with a member of the opposite sex without any kind of sexual agenda, the film never knows quite what to do with Eaton's character and just as Eckhart turns into Mr. P.C., she comes off as a young woke millennial stereotype. Still, an easily likable presence who gives Duty a lift when needed, it's easy to imagine that with the right part, Eaton will do wonders.

Yet even more than the actors, the same can definitely be said for the filmmaker, as throughout, I kept wondering how Miller was able to deliver such a polished, expensive looking actioner on a modest budget. Having worn a number of hats behind-the-scenes from camera operation to editing and beyond in the past, Miller's deft skill helming other low budget Lionsgate pictures like First Kill and Marauders is clearly evident here. It'll be exciting to see what he can accomplish with a little more at his disposal, starting, of course, with better material.

Fighting to keep us entertainingly distracted whenever the naive soundbytes or rapid shifts in tone call too much attention to themselves, Line of Duty swings for the fences, and hits far more than it misses. Playing on our central nervous system, Miller, actor-producer Eckhart, and others ratchet up the tension so that much like Officer Penny, we're more than eager to jog, then run, as we begin the pursuit, and join him on the hunt.

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Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Movie Review: The Bravest (2019)

A fiery Chinese flag-waving disaster movie inspired by the Xingang Port Oil Spill of 2010, The Bravest serves up intense, eye-catching cinematography and incredible special effects, but sadly, little else for us to connect with from start to finish.

Following an exciting introduction to our two main characters after they battle a blaze at a hotpot restaurant that goes tragically wrong, Fire Brigade Captain Jiang Liwei (Xiaoming Huang) is left disgraced and replaced by his second-in-command Ma Weiguo (Jiang Du). It doesn't take long however, for director Tony Chan to put us in the line of fire once again.

Culling from author Bao'erji Yuanye's book Tears Are the Deepest Water, which was based upon interviews with 188 Chinese firefighters, the film trades Xingang (or Tianjin) for the fictional northern seaport of Bingang, where a pipeline explosion threatens to not only wipe out all eight million of the area's residents but also cause catastrophic effects to the environment. As the spill from the blast reaches nearby tanks of crude oil and chemicals, the firemen get to work, putting life and limb on the line as they try to close the two open valves still flowing toward a large tanker.

More than eager to prove himself, perhaps as both a form of penance for losing a man under his command at the restaurant fire as well as a way to confront his new diagnosis of PTSD (which his supervisor told him made him unsuitable for action), Captain Jiang Liwei grabs a smoke before he jumps to it. Fighting to complete 8,000 manual rotations to seal off the tanker for good so that his men's firefight isn't in vain, as the captain tries to withstand the enveloping flames, the men advance toward the blaze, trying their best to contain it even when their water runs out.

Layering other heroics on top of the captain's —  as is often the case with disaster movies — whenever Chan abandons the fire to follow the captain's family in their quest to leave the port and reach safety, the pace of the film screeches to a dead halt. Treating an asthma inhaler like a gun we see early on that's bound to go off later on, we anticipate one of the melodramatic complications facing the captain's wife and son before they even set out on their journey to get the hell out of Bingang.

From a woman in labor to an engaged firefighter couple whose relationship off the clock is used to try to add more melodramatic significance to the roles they play when they're on the job, Yonggan Yu and Chao Wang's predictable script checks off all of the boxes that we would expect as they aim to humanize the proceedings but The Bravest remains stale. Additionally telegraphing events to come with its loud, insistent, bombastically intrusive score, the film makes it obvious which members of the cast will live or die shortly after they're introduced.

Stopping to fight the fires just long enough to give a few rousing speeches about duty and sacrifice, and using every moment available to insert a meaningful military salute to one another, it's clear that the film's heart is in the right place. Yet just when it lets us in enough to care about a character's plight, we leave the scene and immediately jump to another half-baked, underdeveloped subplot.

Preferring to talk at us rather than to us, by the time we get to a key third act sequence where the fiance of the fire inspector is supposed to keep the water flowing to the fires by diving into the sea, despite wanting him to succeed, it's hard to overlook the fact that we have little to no idea what's really going on. Similarly baffled by the number of times the guys just turn their backs to the fire to chat or the way that we go from a harrowing scene where the pregnant lady's water breaks to suddenly assuming they're okay because we're now in a hospital, between the hopscotching edits and the sparse script, The Bravest needs a serious overhaul.

Obviously inspired by both Ron Howard's seminal Backdraft as well as disaster movies of the Roland Emmerich variety, even though we'd love to be more invested in the goings on, when it comes to the genre, storytelling problems are nothing new. So for this new Chinese film, I'll go ahead and translate. As long as you're not interested in pesky things like who the supporting characters are outside of the two minutes we see them onscreen or what they're doing and why — for its claustrophobic, red hot visuals that bring heat to your TV — The Bravest is thrilling filmmaking from a technical perspective alone.

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Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.