[Locke]

+1:

Plus One is cripplingly slow, as its core plot is so very simple. There are two young lovers, one is played by the gorgeous Ashley Hinshaw and the other played by the utterly terrible in every way, Rhys Wakefield. David cheats on Jill for reasons he cannot explain, they break up, but thanks to a party which is "it" this weekend the two lovers cross paths once again.The problem is, that isn't really what the film is actually about.

+ 1 is less than a hundred minutes long, so there is no excuse for how crippling slow the build up is. Pretty much the whole first thirty minutes or so of the movie could be skipped entirely without any impact on the experience, and with the dialogue and acting so awful, I wouldn't even feel bad about skipping it either. Luckily then, when the real movie starts, it gets really really good.

The actual core concept, involving two timelines placed on top of one another, isn't particularly well realised, with a whole heap of logic leaps that leave you degrading your own intelligence - why would you start killing yourself in the past? - and lots of interesting directions for the film that are suggested, but then never actually capitalised on.

But, and I guess a pretty big but, if you let yourself be stupid for a bit, the movie has so much fun with such a simple concept that it ends up being a pretty fun ride. Everything that has happened, and is going to happen, begins to change. And as the pace picks up and up, it becomes increasingly more deliberately nauseating trying to keep on top of everything that is transpiring. It's thrilling.

Even the initial houseparty set up starts to make sense (not the length of that sequence, but the choice of the setting certainly) as it gives them a space the movie can easily control, while still having more than enough to play with to have things go totally nuts. I couldn't really imagine a space that would have worked better for this movie to play out in.

Seriously though, I can't stress enough, how much Wakefield ruins the entire experience. I'm kinda hoping that he was just stoned as fuck on set, and actually isn't the kind of actor the internet turned Kristen Stewart into in their jokes because fucking Christ misery guts. He's so wooden and emotionless he borders on bored, and considering David, over the course of the film, loses the girl he loves (and murders her), has a chat with himself from the past, watches someone get shot and a whole bunch of other crazy shit, the last fucking thing he should seem is bored. I'd suggest he was in shock or something, but he was just as cold and rigid during the happy portion of his life at the start and at the end of the film. He embraces the girl he claims to love in that awkward way you do with a relative you've barely met and are supposed to care anyway. Awful.

Worst of all though is the atrocious special effects. There is no movie magic here, most of the time a person is faced with a double it's a pure greenscreened CGI affair. And this is the only point the movie is genuinely scary, because the CGI used to recreate people is so atrociously bad, the humans look more like monsters.

If you've already seen Donnie Darko and Primer, I suggest watching this. It isn't nearly as good as either of those movies, but it clearly takes huge inspiration from them, so I'm sure fans could find something to enjoy through that.

If you haven't seen Donnie Darko or Primer, what the fuck is your life?

Inside Llewyn Davis:

At its heart, Inside Llewyn Davis is a very touching tale, telling the story of a folk singer whose partner commits suicide. Even though his partner commits suicide, Llewyn Davis refuses to give up on the music and 'just exist' and sets out on a journey to make it. Sadly, the film doesn't go down the Hollywood path, and instead treads Davis into the dirt repeatedly.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but with the naturalistic stylising of the films structuring and pacing coupled with the melodramatic, almost soap opera like pessimism, the film actively stunts its own progression and as a by product, becomes kinda boring.

I mean seriously, someone out there try and justify to me, what the point of the car ride to Chicago was. Sure John Goodman and Garrett Hedlund are both great, but they leave the movie as quickly as they come, with no lasting effect on the narrative. Except their roles aren't fleeting, despite it having no wider purpose on the rest of the film, the car ride to Chicago seems to go on FOREVER.

Even when Llewyn finally makes it to Chicago, it leads to nothing and he just goes home again. I can see what the Coen's are doing here, but even the most social realist of social realism cinema still remembers they are a film, and they still have to carefully steer the proceedings. The Coen's take a backseat so far back it's like they aren't even in the same room, leaving the film to not feel true to life, it just feels random.

I mean don't get me wrong, on a technical level it's exquisite. They seem to have desaturated the film, giving it this almost monochrome look, which along with the harsh weather and the general quality of the places he frequents, seems to capture what is going on inside Llewyn Davis in a beautiful piece of dramatic irony. It's nice to see a film set in the past, that isn't captured by a nostalgic glow.

It is also really enjoyable to see actresses like Carey Mulligan be dressed up as playing exactly to their role, only to then open their mouth and immediately defy all expectations. She is one of the funniest things, in a movie that is surprisingly funny, given its general melancholia. Plus Davis himself is played so wonderfully by Oscar Isaac that you wont even realise it is Isaac.

I don't even know what to do with Llewyn Davis as a character. With a film that has no real trajectory, no real act structure, Davis doesn't really have a character arc. He's basically a bit of an ass at the start, and over the course of the movie we realise just how much of an ass he actually is. But am I supposed to take that as a good thing? I think we're actually supposed to feel sympathy for him. I have no idea why the movie expects us to be sympathetic to a perpetual man child who is his own worst enemy. I certainly didn't care much for him.

I dunno, I guess from all the hype I'm just missing the point or something. To me it was two hours of an asshole moaning and it went nowhere, as it started nowhere. I'll probably go ahead and buy the soundtrack or something, but I can't imagine revisiting this again any time soon.