David R. Walker

Posts Tagged ‘Himesh Patel’

Don’t Look Up

Director: Adam McKay

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Tyler Perry, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Mark Rylance, Melanie Lynskey, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Himesh Patel

Film Rating 5.5 out of 10

Running Time: 2 hours and 18 minutes

This film is only available to watch on the Netflix streaming service.

Similar to the absolutely disastrous 2019 film Cats in which The Danish Girl director Tom Hooper assembled an A list cast with high expectations, only for the film version of the musical Cats to absolutely flop at the box office and be completely ridiculed, director Adam McKay’s 2021 film Don’t Look Up is as big a disaster as the comet which threatens to obliterate earth and kill everyone including the vacuous media personalities, the egotistical politicians and the general American population encapsulated by a stoner performance by Oscar nominee Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) as Jude.

Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio (The Revenant), Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Cate Blanchett (Blue Jasmine, The Aviator) and Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady, Kramer vs Kramer and Sophie’s Choice) unfortunately fail to lift this disastrous black comedy. Don’t Look Up just proves the theory that Netflix can attract A List stars to act in dreadful films. Next time all their agents should be shot at dawn.

Thankfully I never watched this film in a cinema.

With the exception of director Jane Campion’s excellent The Power of the Dog, Netflix films do not have that much to offer. Let’s face it the streaming service is facing a content crisis, now that everyone is back in cinemas watching Spiderman, Dune and No Time to Die.

Back to Don’t Look Up, while aspects of the script were rather funny, it really just shows how vacuous and gullible the American public are, believing everything they see in the media and on Television. That’s according to Adam McKay’s script and not my personal opinion.

Unlike Adam McKay’s brilliant take on the 2008 financial crisis in the critically acclaimed The Big Short and his even better take on politics in 2018’s Vice, Don’t Look Up falls way short of these two superior films. Even the satire and black comedy is not written with intelligence or an ounce of wit.

Don’t Look Up appears to be a spiralling pastiche of an impending extinction event in which everyone from the crazy politicians embodied by Meryl Streep’s American President Orlean and her ambitious son and chief of staff Jason wonderfully played by Oscar nominee Jonah Hill (Moneyball, The Wolf of Wall Street) to the incredibly vacuous cougar and TV presenter Brie Evantree in the Daily Rip brilliantly played by Oscar winner Cate Blanchett, all of whom seem blissfully unaware of a large meteor heading towards earth and wiping out humanity.

While Leonardo DiCaprio seems to just replicate his anxiety ridden performance in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to a much lesser degree in Don’t Look Up and Jennifer Lawrence looks slightly confused at being in the presence of such big name stars in a film which is essentially going to be watched on an Iphone, unfortunately this deluxe extinct level event fizzles out despite the ensemble cast. Don’t Look Up is everything that genuine cinema shouldn’t be.

Don’t Look Up gets a film rating of 5.5 out of 10 and thankfully one doesn’t need to purchase a cinema ticket to watch this disaster. You can just pause the film and look away.

Tenet

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Kenneth Branagh, Elizabeth Debicki, Michael Caine, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Andrew Howard, Himesh Patel, Jack Cutmore-Scott, Clemence Poesy, Wes Chatham, Martin Donovan

If a man goes back in time and kills his own grandfather then he would never have been born.

That is the Grandfather Paradox and the basic notion of director Christopher Nolan’s stylish and innovative, time-bending espionage action film Tenet set in Kiev, Ukraine, Mumbai and Oslo in Norway.

Besides the mesmerising action sequences, the critical part about Tenet is the clever casting of the son of Denzel Washington, Golden globe nominee John David Washington (BlackKKlansman) as The Protagonist opposite the dashing British actor Robert Pattinson (Cosmopolis, Twilight, Queen of the Desert) as Neil.

Tenet is like Inception but set within the rough estimates of a spy genre, superbly written and directed by Christopher Nolan and featuring an outstanding original music score by Swedish film composer Ludwig Goransson who won an Oscar for original score for Black Panther.  

To describe the plot of Tenet as a paradox is an understatement. It is a carefully constructed set of semiotic images punctuated with some astounding action sequences especially on a Norwegian highway and on an opulent skyscraper in Mumbai.

While the protagonist is in Mumbai, he comes across his Tenet contact Mahir wonderfully played by Yesterday star Himesh Patel, which leads him into the murky world of international arms dealing and he discovers a nefarious inversion machine that can alter both the past and devastate the future.

From the eye-catching hostage scene in an Opera house in Kiev, Ukraine to the final time-bending battle sequence spliced with a rather poignant confrontation by the femme fatale Kat superbly played by Elizabeth Debicki (Widows, The Great Gatsby, The Tale) with her vicious misogynistic Russian arms dealing husband Andrei Sator, played with an Oscar worthy performance by Kenneth Branagh (Dunkirk, My Week with Marilyn, Murder on the Orient Express) aboard a luxury yacht off the coast of Vietnam, Tenet is an exotic, elegant and asymmetrical action film, with an innovative plot that will challenge the viewer to watch carefully.

For sheer originality and perfect casting, Tenet is worth seeing. For incredibly intricate and carefully orchestrated action scenes especially those involving a transport plane crashing into Oslo Airport, Tenet is phenomenal.

After months of being deprived of real original and ground breaking cinema, Tenet is a must see film on the big screen with surround sound and should be a good reason to get back to the auditorium to see this spectacularly complex and clever piece of cinema.

Tenet gets a film rating of 8.5 out of 10 and is highly recommended viewing.

Once again, the multi-talented director of The Batman Trilogy, Dunkirk and Inception, Christopher Nolan does not disappoint.

Yesterday

Director: Danny Boyle

Cast: Himesh Patel, Lily James, Joel Fry, Ellise Chappell, Ed Sheeran, Meera Syal, Sanjeev Bhaskar, Kate McKinnon, James Corden 

Thanks to a preview screening organized by United International Pictures at Suncoast Cinecentre, Durban, I was fortunate enough to see Oscar winning director Danny Boyle’s latest film Yesterday with a screenplay by Love Actually writer Richard Curtis.

Imagine a world without The Beatles Songs? Or a world without Coca-Cola and Cigarettes? Or Even Harry Potter?

This is the premise of screenwriter Richard Curtis’s latest romantic musical comedy Yesterday directed by Oscar winning director of Slumdog Millionaire Danny Boyle and starring Himesh Patel as Jack Malik a struggling musician and Lily James (The Darkest Hour, Cinderella) as his long suffering manager Ellie Appleton set mainly in Suffolk, England.

After an inexplicable worldwide blackout, Jack gets hit by a bus and wakes up missing two teeth and in a sort of alternative reality whereby he soon realizes that this world does not know any of The Beatles songs including Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, Hey Jude, All You Need is Love and Back in the U.S.S. R.

As Jack played with a sort of goofy naivety by East Enders star Himesh Patel starts initially playing a Beatles song to his parents Sheila and Jed played by Meera Syal and Sanjeev Bhaskar (London Boulevard, The Kumars at No. 42), he is astonished that they have never heard of the most influential and greatest pop band in the world, The Beatles. Then Jack has to remind himself that he is living in an alternative universe which distracts him from the real love of his life Ellie who has constantly supported him throughout his struggling music career. 

Lily James is brilliant as Suffolk maths teacher Ellie and she lifts the film from being a completely contrived musical fantasy into a semi-believable cinematic offering which allows director Danny Boyle to use all his artistic embellishments to make Yesterday more invigorating than what it really is.

Yesterday is a 21^st century slightly contrived musical tribute to The Beatles set in the Instagram age of political correctness and diversity where even the likes of singer Ed Sheeran cannot lift the humour in this film with the exception of one funny scene when Sheeran visits Jack late at night at his family home and encounters his irritating yet lovable dad Jed, wonderfully played with comic timing by Sanjeev Bhaskar.

Ultimately, Yesterday is about a lingering love affair between Ellie and Jack as he is seduced by the fame and fortune associated with lucrative streaming contracts in California in the form of a vampish American music manager Debra Hammer played by Kate McKinnon.

Despite the musical tribute to the Beatles and the quirky plot, Yesterday didn’t quite resolve itself as a satisfying film even with some comic moments. Yesterday gets a film rating of 7 out of 10. Recommended viewing for those that enjoy a light romantic musical comedy.