ALSO SHOWING
Baby Driver (15)
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Shaun Of The Dead/hot Fuzz
director Edgar Wright has created a subversive action movie that remixes all the tropes of the heist film – car chases, shoot-outs, diners, goodlooking criminals doing one last job – into a euphoric, musical-inflected spin on the genre.
The “musical” reference isn’t an exaggeration either. Baby Driver is a blast of pure pop energy. Its characters might not break into song, but they move and groove to whatever beat is playing in the ears of its ipod-carrying protagonist, and Wright cuts the action accordingly: editing gunfights to kick drums, car chases to guitar solos and altering the mood of the movie through brilliant use of its eclectic tracklist, which runs the gamut from the primal stopstart riffage of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to soul classics to Queen’s Sheer Heart Attack album and the Simon and Garfunkel song from which the film takes its title.
That title also pulls triple duty as a reference to the protagonist’s actual name (“spelled B-A-B-Y”), his youthful features (he’s played by baby-faced Mark Ruffalo doppelganger Ansel Elgort) and his occupation (he’s a getaway driver). The music is also integral to the story: it’s Baby’s way of drowning out the tinnitus (“the hum in the drum”) he’s suffered since a childhood tragedy made him an orphan. Since then he’s worked for an Atlanta crime boss called Doc (Kevin Spacey), who is forcing him to pay off an old debt one job at a time. Although the characters aren’t much more than archetypes, Wright embraces all the clichés, transforming them into a heady cinematic fantasy, one that’s fully in tune with the way pop music can transform reality as it takes shape around you. In this Baby Driver is the perfect summer movie.
Okja (15)
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The latest creature feature from Bong Joon-ho (The Host, Snowpiercer) makes a better case for Netflix’s controversial entry into the realm of big-budget filmmaking than the recent Brad Pitt-produced War Machine. It’s a great action-adventure film and a stinging satire of the food industry – all wrapped up in what seems at first like a charming family movie about a young teenage girl’s friendship with her giant pet superpig. The eponymous pig in question – which has been gorgeously rendered in CGI – is actually a genetically modified beast designed to solve the food crisis.
Its Pr-conscious corporate owners (led by Tilda Swinton’s grinning, Blair-like CEO) have concocted a campaign to make this whole enterprise more palatable to the public by lying about its GM origins and engaging farmers across the world to raise these super-piglets to maturity. What they haven’t counted on is the determination of 13-yearold South Korean farm girl Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun) to rescue Okja when the day comes to return her to the US and send her to the slaughterhouse.
What follows is a gleefully anarchic piece of mainstream filmmaking. Like a politically radicalised Steven Spielberg, Bong tugs at the heartstrings while punching us in the gut.
Wilson (15)
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Ghost World aside, Daniel Clowes’ graphic novels don’t seem particularly well suited for cinema, largely because their protagonists feel too misanthropic. The title character of Wilson is no exception. Played by Woody Harrelson, he’s a raging-at-theworld maniac whose late-in-life discovery that he’s the father of a teenage girl sends him on an insufferable journey of self-discovery. It’s episodic, not very funny and the redemptive ending feels far too forced. ■