Film Reviews: Bill & Ted Face the Music | The Devil All the Time | Rocks | Barking Dogs Never Bite | Memories of Murder
Bill & Ted Face the Music (PG) ***
The Devil All the Time (18) ***
Rocks (12A) ***
Barking Dogs Never Bite (15) ****
Memories of Murder (15) ****
It’s been almost 30 years since time-travelling doofuses Bill S Preston (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) last appeared on screen, and if the world wasn’t exactly screaming out for another sequel, the Generation X nostalgia machine has cranked one out anyway. Reuniting Reeves and Winter in the roles that helped make the former a megastar and helped the latter launch a successful career as a documentary maker, Bill & Ted Face the Music is at least true to the goofy, good-natured spirit of predecessors Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) and Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), right down to the way it uses the series’ amusingly non-specific time-travel logic to justify its own existence. As the film opens, for instance, it turns out the slacker duo’s Kiss-riffing heavy metal band Wyld Stallyns hasn’t united the world as predicted. Instead, after an initial flurry of success, they’re now languishing in embarrassing obscurity, the saviours-of-the-world prophecy becoming albatrosses around their necks. But with the universe also starting to destabilise and fold in on itself, their collective ennui proves oddly poignant, thanks largely to the willingness of both stars – but especially Reeves – to embrace the way time’s passage has ravaged their respective characters’ man-child personas. In short, they look and sound a bit weird, and the film almost veers into Charlie Kaufman territory by having them repeatedly confront older versions of themselves as they travel into future timelines in a desperate bid to steal the song they’re supposed to write after it’s already been written because they’re worried they don’t have what it takes to do it in the present. But if this gives the film a curiously melancholic undercurrent, rest assured there’s plenty of silliness, including a subplot in which Bill and Ted’s now 20-something daughters go on their own excellent adventure to bring back the greatest backing band in history to help their dads. What anyone under the age of 40 will make of it is anyone’s guess, but the film’s sincere belief in its own “be excellent to each other” mantra is hard to argue with.
A sprawling, intergenerational southern gothic crime movie, The Devil All the Time is the opposite of comforting, rife as it is with extreme violence, biblical craziness, pulpy melodrama and creative accents as a gaggle of Hollywood A-listers and up-and-comers embrace the hard-boiled spirit of Donald Ray Pollock’s acclaimed source novel of the same name. Pollock himself provides the old-timey narration, its omniscience allowing co-screenwriter and director Antonio Campos (Simon Killer) to intensify the sense of dread as he cuts between different characters and timelines to show the way the sins and traumas of one generation bleed into the next. Though ostensibly an ensemble piece set against the backdrop of America’s transition from the bogus optimism of the Eisenhower era to the emerging chaos of the Vietnam War, the film is tied together by Spider-Man’s Tom Holland, cast here as the son of a traumatised war veteran (played by It star Bill Skarsgård) whose complicated upbringing has given him an Old Testament-style approach to retribution whenever bad things happen to his nearest and dearest. Robert Pattinson co-stars as a preacher with a liking for young girls and there are showy parts too for Jason Clarke and Riley Keough as a serial killing couple with a penchant for photography and exhibitionism. The end result is lurid and pretentious, but entertaining in its own self-consciously depraved way.
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Hide AdRocks sees British director Sarah Gavron follow up the frustratingly tepid and star-studded Suffragette with this rawer and livelier London-set tale of a young British-Nigerian schoolgirl (newcomer Bukky Bakray) trying to keep her and her younger brother’s lives on track after their stressed-out mother abandons them. Having workshopped the script – credited to Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson – with her raring-to-go stars, Gavron is good at both getting authentic performances from her largely non-professional cast and weaving them into a harsh-but-joyous coming-of-age narrative that updates the vibrancy of the French New Wave (there’s a final act nod to The 400 Blows) for a digital age in which young people can take charge of their own stories even as larger societal forces conspire to dead-end their futures.
The ongoing cultural benefits of Parasite’s Oscar haul continue with first ever British release this week of Bong Joon Ho’s debut film Barking Dogs Never Bite (from 2000) as well as a timely re-issue of his long-unavailable breakthrough movie Memories of Murder (2003). Of the two, the novelty of the first makes it the more intriguing. A dark and mordantly funny tale about an aspiring academic driven mad by his neighbour’s yapping dog, it’s of a piece with the extreme cinema of Bong’s South Korean peers Park Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk, especially as it follows its protagonist’s bumbling attempts to dispose of the canine irritation himself. But it’s also possible to spot the seeds of Parasite in the way he uses the setting (a socially diverse tower block with a mysterious basement dweller) to provide a layer of social commentary about the cumulative impact of injustice as it’s passed down the economic ladder. There’s a more direct Parasite connection in Memories of Murder courtesy of star Song Kang Ho, cast here as the lead detective investigating a shocking spate of murders with a Play Misty for Me twist. What initially made this fresh remains so today, with Bong veering from almost slapstick comedy to serious drama as this provincial murder investigation (based on South Korea’s first serial killer case) stops feeling like something out of an American movie and starts resembling something desperately sad and all too human.
Bill & Ted Face the Music is in cinemas nationwide; The Devil All the Time is on Netflix; Rocks is on selected release in cinemas; Barking Dogs Never Bite and Memories of Murder are on selected release and available on demand from Curzon Home Cinema
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