LFF 2018: Sorry To Bother You & Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

Sorry To Bother You

dir. Boots Riley, USA, 2018

Sorry To Bother You is rapper Boots Riley's first film, and you have to wonder if he thought it might also be his last, because it feels like he's lobbed every idea he ever had at the screen in case he never gets the chance to use any of them again. It's a wild ride, and much of the madness lands, but it really needs to calm down a bit and decide what it is. Lakeith Stanfield stars as a call centre drone desperate to improve his lot, but when he's offered a promotion he finds himself torn between solo success and sticking up for his downtrodden cold-calling comrades. That synopsis, however, is like describing Donald Trump as the President of the United States: the actual thing is a thousand times less predictable than that suggests, and considerably more insane.

It seems safe to describe Sorry To Bother You as a freewheeling satirical comedy about capitalism and solidarity, but Riley's voice feels too unique to spend all that time and effort on a message as banal as "capitalism is bad". Entwined within that are a wealth of observations about the modern black experience too, and I can't speak to how successful that is, but it doesn't have anything like the laser-guided effect on this painfully white dude that another Stanfield-starring film, Get Out, did. Riley's approach, however, is admirable, in that there isn't really anything else to compare it to (the closest I can think of is Gregg Araki's brand of casual weirdness), and God knows we need more loud voices like that to yell us out of our cultural torpor.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead

dir. Ben Wheatley, UK, 2018

I approach Ben Wheatley's films with an increasing sense of trepidation these days, having come to the conclusion that the emperor's clothes might just be, if not totally non-existent, considerably threadbare at the least. So it was a pleasant surprise to find that, although this one goes to the same place that most of his films do - i.e. nowhere - the journey was a lot more fun than usual.

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is set entirely at a New Year's Eve party where a single, extended family and a handful of friends gather to annoy the absolute tits off each other, as families are wont to do. And that's really about it, except that Wheatley and his cast nail the simmering tension of enforced family festivities with an uncomfortable accuracy. The power politics of familial hierarchies on display are almost Shakespearean, which makes perfect sense when you know that the film's original title was Colin, You Anus, because it's loosely based on old bardy chops' Coriolanus.

If Wheatley's film has a USP, it's the incredible cross-cutting that he and his editor (one Ben Wheatley) use to hop impatiently between no fewer than eighteen characters of more-or-less equal importance, lending a hugely cinematic rhythm to an almost comically prosaic story. The success of that nimble-footed dancing between a diverse cast and their intertwining narrative threads means that Happy New Year, Colin Burstead is basically the Avengers: Infinity War of 21st century British social realism, only with the added bonus of Charles Dance in a twinset and pleated skirt.

LFF 2016: Free Fire

I realise I'm in the minority here, but I'm afraid I still don't get Ben Wheatley. I look forward to each of his films, and every one - on paper, at least - seems like it's going to be The One that grabs me and shows me that the emperor is, indeed, fully clothed. But to me, all six of his admirably original features have felt like promising debuts; calling cards that give notice of a developing talent about to burst into bloom in a massive way. The latest of those, Free Fire, takes this notion so far that it strongly resembles the first film of another independent director who really did grab cinema by the balls and tug hard: set in a disused warehouse populated by a handful of amateur crooks trading gunshots and wisecracks, Wheatley's sixth film screams Tarantino, which is the last thing you'd expect from such a distinctive, unconventional voice.

Things begin well, as a roster of immediately well-drawn characters converge on the warehouse to carry out a weapons deal: Chris (Cillian Murphy) and Frank (Michael Smiley) are IRA heavies buying guns from Sharlto Copley's unpredictable Vernon and Armie Hammer's smooth, cautious Ord; Justine (Brie Larson) is the go-between; Sam Riley, Enzo Cilenti, Noah Taylor and Jack Reynor play the grunts whose only job is to drive the guns and money into and out of the warehouse. Wheatley is now at a stage where he can command a terrific cast like this, and it's that cast that saves Free Fire from monotony at several stages throughout its brief running time. Smiley and Hammer send sparks flying with every antagonistic exchange, Larson is amusingly weary as the woman adrift in a sea of testosterone, and Copley is predictably hilarious - for the first half at least, until his schtick begins to wear a little thin.

When the deal inevitably goes south and the bullets start to zip and zing, Wheatley sets up an hour of real-time carnage punctuated by crackling dialogue and the occasional trademark moment of hilariously sickening ultraviolence: in just ninety minutes Free Fire leaps from Reservoir Dogs to a mercifully-distilled The Hateful Eight, but without the freshness of the former or the canny subtext of the latter. Wheatley deliberately portrays the shootout as scrappy - as, presumably, it would be - but in doing so loses all sense of geography inside his single location, making the experience a frustrating one to follow. And while there's a ticklish sense of fantasy that allows so many people to get shot so many times without being killed (maybe they're Death Proof?), you do begin to wonder if the apparently inexhaustible supply of ammunition will ever run out.

Undeniably stylish (the costumes are to die for) and entertainingly performed, Free Fire is a noisy blast of fun whose echo fades out even before the credits roll. The smell of cordite and the feel of polyester are stronger sensations than anything provided by the story, and in the context of Ben Wheatley's undeniably remarkable career, that seems a shame. He's absolutely still a director to watch, but at this year's London Film Festival two other, less glorified films over which he's had a clear influence - Prevenge and The Ghoul - have burned far brighter than Free Fire.