Zack Evans

Film Review: Ready Player One

Published March 23, 2018 By Zack Evans

Reviewed by Zack Evans

Cyberpunk has been with us for quite some time, but it has never quite gone mainstream. Whilst Philip K Dick has been embedded in sci-fi film culture for decades, surprisingly few of the other big names (Sterling, Stephenson, Noon…) have made it directly into the medium, except Gibson’s Johnny Mnemonic, and his Pattern Recognition is stuck in Dev Hell. Instead, cyberpunk has diffused through geek culture in general, and from there leaked into screenplays through influence on, well, everyone.

80s film culture is equally pervasive, and the book Ready Player One finally provided a bridge from geek to popular, through an outrageous mix of the two – and if you need someone to do something outrageously popular with culture, director Spielberg is your man.

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Film Review: A Wrinkle In Time

Film Review: A Wrinkle In Time

Published March 21, 2018 By Zack Evans

Reviewed by Zack Evans

Whether or not the book is a timeless classic, the basic premise of A Wrinkle In Time is certainly the stuff of archetype. Following the disappearance of her father four years ago, Meg Murray, played by the excellent Storm Reid, grows into a Troubled Teenager – she is bullied at school and has a difficult relationship with her mother. There’s a refreshing additional dynamic between Meg and her younger boy genius brother, Charles Wallace Murray, startlingly well played by Deric McCabe.

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Film Review: Murder On The Orient Express

Film Review: Murder On The Orient Express

Published November 4, 2017 By Zack Evans

Setting a movie on a train is a brave move – films in claustrophobic settings are hard work for a screenwriter. Often claustrophobia works because of the focus on the dynamics of a small group, but Murder On The Orient Express does not have this option either, as Michael Green has elected to include everybody from a complex book. Director Kenneth Branagh made it clear from the outset that he was going to rely on cast and production to jump these hurdles, and chose to shoot on 65mm film for bonus marks.

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Film Review: Thor: Ragnarok

Film Review: Thor: Ragnarok

Published October 19, 2017 By Zack Evans

Thor: Ragnarok is different in tone to most other movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (a mere 27 of these now, if you include slated 2018 releases.) Writers Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost, and Eric Pearson have taken the Avengers canon and somehow wrangled it to sit squarely in a Zucker Abrahams Zucker version of the Norse universe – there is an authentic tone to the gods and demigods despite the absurdity. The dialogue and the screenplay both feel like 90s team-written comedy, from before Friends got lazy, and the sight gags and cartoon comedy are straight out of Naked Gun. (None of this writing team were involved in the Guardians films, which have the tone but deliberate B-movie B-grade authenticity.) There are even jokes in the film about mixing canon from Thor and Avengers.

It is relentlessly entertaining – director Taika Waititi has paced it perfectly, and 130 minutes flies by. The onslaught begins almost immediately with a brilliant example of physical comedy, where Thor (Chris Hemsworth) attempts a serious Confrontation With Evil whilst dangling in mid-air chained up and slowly rotating, as if Inspector Clouseau had achieved the godhead.

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LFF 2017: Grain

LFF 2017: Grain

Published October 12, 2017 By Zack Evans

In Grain, cinematographer Giles Nuttgens provides a stunning visualisation of director Kaplanoglu’s dystopian vision, using black and white film shot on three continents, blended seamlessly into bold, harsh landscapes which immediately suggest an odyssey. The City is also a composite of Detroit, industrial German (e.g. Essen), and Konya, Anatolia (This is a Turkish production). These are perfectly assembled into an urban version of a colony ship. The city is now the only civilisation, with the individual nation-states long since abandoned in order to deal with a much bigger crisis – a total lack of food.

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LFF 2017 Film Review: Life Guidance

LFF 2017 Film Review: Life Guidance

Published October 10, 2017 By Zack Evans

This film is about choosing a direction in life and how much help you really want or need; and Life Guidance certainly needs some help choosing a direction. The beginning of the film is essentially an update of Fahrenheit 451, with Alexander Dworsky (Fritz Karl) providing a Montag somewhat less flighty than Truffaut’s version, and his career choice is also a great deal more mundane – he is a futures trader at a faceless finance corporation. So very faceless that they all dress exactly the same way – which is an excellent excuse for Mader to deploy her strong and subtle use of palette to really control the tone of this film.

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LFF 2017: Loving Vincent Review

LFF 2017: Loving Vincent Review

Published October 8, 2017 By Zack Evans

Biography is difficult. It’s tough to fit a life history and useful insight into the subject’s character into 90-odd minutes, and too often films about creatives are simply too long. Loving Vincent neatly solves this problem by wrapping the storytelling around van Gogh’s work itself, capturing both very neatly, and then turning the whole result into a living, breathing painting, put together by a hundred artists working over two years to create 65,000 frames. It took directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman four years of development just to figure out how to make that work, but it really paid off.

Van Gogh is famous for his character flaws, and the film uses and deals with them all to great effect. It cleverly dispenses with the ear thing REALLY early, and gets a few laughs out of it too, neatly avoiding the potential distraction. Aside from the utterly unconventional presentation, the film is essentially neo-Noir, framing the storytelling through the eyes of a close friend’s son, Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth).

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FrightFest Film Review: 3rd Night

FrightFest Film Review: 3rd Night

Published August 28, 2017 By Zack Evans

The dark opening sequence hangs heavily over the rural idyll shown in 3rd Night. Somewhere between B-movie and video nasty, a little girl is running around the woods, with the industry standard grisly event; but the soundtrack is brilliantly disturbing and unearthly, and the pace is well-judged. The nursery rhyme the child is singing drives everything else that unfolds in this movie.

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Author: Zack Evans

Reviewed by Zack Evans

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