RNZ commissioned me to write a review of Caterpillar – Chelsie Preston Crayford’s debut feature – but have chosen, so far, not to run it. Whether that’s because they don’t like the writing or aren’t happy with the opinion, I can’t be certain.
I won’t excerpt any of it here as they still get first dibs, but seeing as the film opened in cinemas over a week ago the moment may have passed.
Caterpillar is a disappointment when you consider the calibre of people behind it. Preston Crayford is one of New Zealand’s most talented and successful actors, around her mother Gaylene’s film sets since early childhood and an industry professional since her teens1. She’s put together a top team of local talent including Maria Ines Machego (We Were Dangerous) behind the lens, Jonno Woodford-Robinson (Mortal Engines) at the editing workstation and her father Jonathan Crayford (Ruby & Rata) writing the score.
And then there is the formidable shadow of Gaylene Preston herself – mentor and promotional engine, subject as well as object. There’s a Preston-like character played in the film by Australian Marta Dusseldorp. She is Maxine, a filmmaker in early-oughts Wellington. She and her teenage daughter Cassie (newcomer Anais Shand2) share a Newtown villa with Maxine’s mother Huia (Lisa Harrow). There three generations of women live largely self-absorbed and under-fulfilled lives until a tragic medical situation serves to bring them together.
Part of the problem here is that Preston Crayford’s script is undercooked, relying on a central metaphor – butterflies and caterpillars – for artistic weight and tired scenarios (like driving instruction and awkward family dinners) to deliver dramatic weight. I used to manage the Wellington 48 Hour film competition and we used at advise all the teams who were about to off and brainstorm their stories to put aside the first idea they have because there would be a strong possibility that their first idea would be the same as every other bugger’s. That’s what this feels like – lots of first ideas going unchallenged.
Comic relief – in the form of Matt Whelan’s school Shakespeare director – falls flat and I wonder why Preston Crayford felt the need to go so broad when her strengths are clearly in teasing out intimate moments from quality actors. Set in the early 2000s, Caterpillar feels like that’s when it was made.
Check out the poster for In the Grey (either above or to the left). Don’t those two look like the most self-satisfied pair of numpties imaginable? Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal play two private contractors working for debt collection lawyer Eiza González. All three of these actors have worked with director Guy Ritchie before and clearly there is appeal in working with him in the sunny Canary Islands, even there isn’t much to be found in Ritchie’s holey script.
A dodgy Latin American billionaire named Salazar (Carlos Bardem) has borrowed another billion from a New York investment bank with no intention of paying it back. After an attempt to recover the money goes murderously wrong, the case is escalated to González and her crack team – the best of the best, etc. A combination of legal and illegal efforts – hence “the grey” – are required to put enough pressure on to get the debt repaid but it’s not going to be easy.
There’s a lot of talk about how Salazar operates in the shadows and how his dealings are often untraceable but he has his name on an oil rig and owns a private island full of tourists so he’s clearly not all that mysterious.
Anyway, it pays not to fixate too hard on the plot problems. The action sequences are good and the whole “setting up the heist, executing the heist” structure works better than the limp banter between the two leads.
Obsession is our ‘horror of the week’, another debut from a YouTuber who studios hope will bring an audience with them. Curry Barker’s film is a variation on the ‘be careful what you wish for’ trope that goes all the way back to Rumplestiltskin. Nervous lad Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush on co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarette) but can’t muster the courage to tell her. Given the opportunity to make a single wish he asks for her to be into him and, of course, a lack of attention to precise wording means things go flying off the rails big time.
Unfortunately, the moral of the tale is undercut by the delivery which leans in hard on misogynistic stereotypes that are barely saved by Navarette’s star-making performance. There’s a nastiness about Obsession and it seems to recognise that in itself with an ending that acknowledges – too late – who the victim of this story has been all along.
Last Friday night on RNZ Nights, I played a little bit of the closing theme3 for The Sheep Detectives purely so I could tell Emile how good it is and how – despite how unlikely it may seem – everyone should find a way to see it.
A heart-warming talking animal movie – squarely in the Babe tradition – The Sheep Detectives took me a little while to get on its wavelength but once I was? Marvellous. Set in a fantasy version of an English country village, solitary vegan shepherd Hugh Jackman loves his flock and reads murder mysteries to them every night before bed. When he is found dead in the field one morning, the sheep – led by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss – are determined to use the knowledge gained from the books to find the killer.
Critical to the charm of the film is the fact that the sheep – with one sad exception – have the ability to simply forget things that are upsetting or inconvenient. The stellar voicework – Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsay, Patrick Stewart and others – is a testimony to Minions director Kyle Balda and the unanticipated depth of the story must be down to the script4 by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us).
Final thought – Nicholas Galitzine appears to be a kind of contract player for Amazon with all of his big hits coming from that studio. Is that a thing now? Studios having long-term favourites5?
Despite the weirdness of inserting himself into the film as an interviewer, James Cameron proves with Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft that there’s no director alive who understands how to use 3D better than he does. I went in knowing very little about Ms. Eilish’s music and came out, not only headache-free from either audio or the visuals, but having enjoyed a show that is relatively light on spectacle but heavy on connection to the fans.
On a technical level, it’s remarkable that 3D cameras are now light and manoeuvrable enough to be carried hand-held by a 71-year-old man. I was reminded of the potential I felt when I watched the second 3D concert film6 – and only the second digital 3D film I had seen projected in cinemas – U2 3D back in 2008. I recall seeing a shot from behind Bono at the tip of thrust stage in Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of thousands of people stretched out into the distance, and thinking that if that was what I saw when I went to work every day, I might have a bit of an ego, too.
I probably shouldn’t relegate the streamers to the end of these summaries, especially when we are talking about a perfectly nice film with a good heart and nice performances. Remarkably Bright Creatures is based on a bestselling novel and I suspect it will become a Netflix favourite for quite a while.
Sally Field plays an older single woman who is the night cleaner at her local aquarium where she talks to the animals without realising that some of them are watching her, too. Marcellus is a giant squid who narrates this story of loss and recovery with a voice and cynical air courtesy of Alfred Molina (uncredited).
Into this small world comes an itinerant musician (Lewis Pullman) who has arrived in the small town looking for his absent father. Some extraordinary coincidences later, we have a conclusion that prompts a few tears and more than little respect for everybody concerned.
- I’m old enough that one of my university drama student colleagues had a job looking after her when she was a baby. ↩︎
- A newcomer in some respects but as the daughter of oft-seen local actor Erroll Shand, she also doesn’t arrive without some tools. ↩︎
- The music gets cut out of the online version for copyright reasons which is another reason why you should try and tune in live. ↩︎
- Adapted from a German novel, of all things. ↩︎
- Also in the Amazon camp is Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Reacher‘s Alan Ritchson. ↩︎
- Turns out that Hannah Montana was the first. I’d completely forgotten. ↩︎
