US : Tuesday 2nd April 2019.

And so Jordan Peele here brings us his highly anticipated and already critically acclaimed American psychological horror thriller film 'US' which I saw earlier this week. Peele also Co-Produced with Jason Blum, and wrote the Screenplay. Following hot on the heels of his previous also acclaimed debut feature 'Get Out' in 2017, the film saw its World Premier screening at SXSW in early March and went on wide release in the US on 22nd March and a week later here in Australia. Made for US$20M the film has so far grossed US$181M and in its opening weekend debuted at US$71.1M, the second best opening for a live-action original film after 2009's 'Avatar' and the third-best total for a horror film after 2017's 'It' and 2018's 'Halloween'. The film has also generated widespread Critical and audience acclaim.

It is the Summer of 1986, on Santa Cruz Beach, and the young Adelaide Thomas (Madison Curry) is out for the evening at the beachside amusement park with her parents. While her parents are distracted, Adelaide wanders off down to the waters edge, and upon returning is enticed into a funhouse. At first all seems relatively normal, until the lights go out, and the place is plunged into darkness and silence. Adelaide begins to whistle to calm her nerves, only to have an unknown presence whistle the same tune right back at her. Then in a hall of mirrors she comes across a doppelgänger of herself, but this is no reflection looking back at her. A short time later Adelaide is reunited with her parents, but is unable to speak.

We then fast forward to the present day and Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke are married couple Adelaide Wilson (the now grown up Adelaide Thomas) and Gabriel 'Gabe' Wilson, who together with their son Jason (Evan Alex) and daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) are en route to their family beachside home in Santa Cruz where they plan on spending some quality family time. Gabe is keen on visiting Santa Cruz Beach later that afternoon and has already made plans to meet up with good friends Kitty and Josh Tyler (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker respectively) and their twin kids Gwen and Maggie (Cali and Noelle Sheldon). Adelaide however, is fearful and anxious about returning to Santa Cruz Beach given her experiences there as a young child, and attempts (albeit unsuccessfully) to dissuade Gabe from the trip. Reluctantly Adelaide agrees and the family drives off catching up with the Tylers at the beach. All is good, until young Jason wanders off to use the toilet. Upon returning Jason is distracted by a man wearing a red jump suit, standing motionless on the sand and bleeding from the hands. Adelaide is distraught about her missing son, and when he returns moments later she chides him, before hugging him. He does not mention the man he saw.

Later that same night, a strange family of four appears in the driveway of the Wilson's home. Initially, they stand there motionless in the moonlight, all wearing the same red jumpsuit, and all holding hands. Their menacing presence lasts for about five minutes, with Gabe becoming increasingly agitated by their presence, to the point where he retrieves a baseball bat from inside the house and threatens them if they do not leave his property immediately.

Within a few minutes the red suited family begin attacking the Wilson family home and forcibly gaining entry. The Wilsons quickly realise that the four intruders are in fact doppelgängers of themselves, led by Adelaide's double, Red (Lupita Nyong'o). Each of them is wearing the same red jumpsuit as the man Jason saw on the beach, and Jason's doppelgänger Pluto (Evan Alex) is wearing a white skintight mask over his head and covering his face. 

Red, is the only doppelgänger who speaks while the others grunt, and she tells the Wilsons the story of a girl who lives a happy life while her shadow suffers. The family is then separated by their opposite selves : Red makes Adelaide shackle herself to a table, Zora is pursued by Umbrae (Shahadi Wright Joseph), Gabe is dragged onto the motor boat he had rented for the duration of their break by Abraham (Winston Duke), and Jason is charged to go off and 'play' with Pluto in a cupboard. 

While chasing Zora on foot, Umbrae is interrupted by a neighbour who has come outside to see why Umbrae is standing on the roof of his car. She jumps down and stabs the neighbour with a pair of gold scissors so allowing Zora to escape. Gabe is able to kill Abraham with his boat's problematical and temperamental motor, while Jason quickly learns that Pluto mirrors his actions almost exactly. Jason removes a mask he has been wearing on and off since their arrival, and in so doing Pluto does likewise revealing that half his face is disfigured by a severe burn when he was younger. He is able to distract Pluto with a magic trick and escape, leaving Pluto locked in the cupboard. Red is drawn to Pluto's cries for release, allowing Adelaide the time to break free. The family regroups and is able to escape on Gabe's boat as Red, Umbrae and Pluto come down to the waters edge to see them motor off into the moonlight.

Meanwhile, at the Tyler household not far away, their house is broken into and the family of four are murdered by their identical selves. The Wilsons arrive expecting to find safe harbourage but are forced to kill the Tyler doubles in what turns out to be a bloodbath using the good old trusted baseball bat, a golf club and a heavy stone crystal ornament. With the Tylers and their doubles dead and blood spattered walls and furniture all round them, in a surreal moment they sit around the dining table eating snacks and turn on the news to see that millions of doppelgängers, calling themselves 'the Tethered', have risen up in their red jumpsuits and committed murders against their real counterparts across the US. The doppelgängers subsequently join hands together to form a massive human chain, which the news channels speculate is some form of protest.

Upon seeing the news, Adelaide takes charge of their situation and suggests that they should get as far away as possible, and drive down to Mexico. The Wilsons drive away in the Tylers' car with Zora behind the wheel. They are attacked by Umbrae, who is launched while clinging onto the bonnet into a tree, by a sudden braking manoeuvre. Adelaide gets out of the car to investigate where Umbrae might be and finish her off once and for all. She discovers the broken body of Umbrae hanging from the branches of a tree and she dies shortly afterwards. As day breaks, the Wilsons arrive at the Santa Cruz boardwalk, where they find their own abandoned car set ablaze. 

Pluto is waiting in front of the burning car and has set a trap to kill the Wilsons by laying a trail of petrol to the Tyler's car, but Jason, remembering that Pluto mirrors his every move, walks backward so that Pluto also steps backwards into the burning car and is consequently burned to death. In all the commotion, Red reappears and takes Jason. 

With Adelaide now giving chase to Red in an attempt to find her son, Zora and Gabe find refuge in an abandoned ambulance located behind the now abandoned Santa Cruz Beach amusement park, through which now runs a long line down to the ocean of red jump suit wearing body doubles all holding hands. Adelaide returns to the boardwalk funhouse and walks through a secret tunnel in the hall of mirrors. This leads to an underground facility overrun by rabbits, where Adelaide finds Red.

Red, with her back towards Adelaide and snipping away at paper stood facing a blackboard states that the Tethered were created by the U.S. government decades ago in an attempt to control the public, but the experiment failed and the Tethered were abandoned in an extensive network of underground tunnels and facilities. For generations, they were trapped beneath the surface hidden from view and without any knowledge of their above ground doubles. All they could do was mimic the actions of their counterparts on the surface until Red devised a cunning and meticulous plan for them to escape, which took a very look time to coordinate and execute. The two fight, with Red gaining the upper hand until Adelaide manages to kill Red with the fire poker she has held onto since the prior night. She locates Jason hiding in a locker and rescues him, returning to the surface to meet up with Gabe and Zora. They drive out of the amusement park avoiding the long line of red suited Tethered individuals all holding hands.

'Us' is a worthy follow up to 'Get Out' and here Jordan Peele delivers a genre bending film that has its roots firmly bedded in home invasion horror at the hands of menacing doppelgängers, thriller, drama and with just a sprinkling of Sci-Fi offering blood and death, just the right amount of humour and edge of your seat action to propel the film to all the acclaim it deserves. As for the meaning behind all of this, well that remains open for discussion long after the credits have rolled and the curtain has dropped. Suffice to say the twin performances of Lupita Nyong'o especially is exemplary as she inhabits two very different characters struggling with who and what they are and what motivates them both to survive their living nightmares. Like 'Get Out' Peele has created another original story that further cements his career as an unconventional Director and a storyteller of repute, and a film that is sure to become a classic. 

'Us' merits four claps of the Odeon Online clapperboard out of a potential five. 

-Steve, at Odeon Online-

What's new in Odeon's this week : Thursday 28th March 2019.

Perhaps if you are a film aficionado living in the US you may well have heard and even visited The Ann Arbor Film Festival, but if you live outside America you could be forgiven for never having heard of said festival. Well, for the sake of the uninitiated, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, now in its 57th year, is an annual film festival held in Ann Arbor in the U.S. State of Michigan, this year running from 26th March through until 31st March. Established in 1963, it is the fourth oldest film festival in North America and the oldest experimental film festival. It has become one of the premier film festivals for independent and experimental filmmakers to showcase their work. Created as an alternative to commercial cinema, the annual week-long festival remains true to its original mission of promoting film as an art form. The Ann Arbor Film Festival also fosters the growth of emerging and established film and video makers. The festival is open to film and video of all lengths and genres, including experimental, narrative, animation, documentary, and genre hybrids. The festival's mission is to underpin bold, visionary filmmakers, promote the art of film and new media, and provide communities with remarkable cinematic experiences.

The festival features experimental, documentary and animated short films in competition ranging from anywhere from one minute in length up to twenty or so minutes duration, of which there are sixteen separate screening sessions over the span of the festival, with each session containing at least six shorts. In the 'Features in Competition' section there is :
* 'LAST DAYS OF CHINATOWN' Directed by Nicole Macdonald and telling the story of Detroit's Cass Corridor, one of the roughest areas in the city for the past one hundred years, is now experiencing a complete overhaul, as long-awaited development finally sweeps the area. Exploring who and what remains in the Corridor, we see how residents survived, how they sometimes didn't, who fled the area and why, as gentrification now redefines the Corridor, long home to the poor and disenfranchised as well as to the artists and visionaries of the city.
* 'CLOSING TIME' Directed by Nicole Vogele, it is 3:00am along the Zhongzheng Road in Taipei. The traffic of a 24/7 society throbs through the metropolis in constant waves. Mr. Kuo and his wife, Mrs. Lin, cook for the city’s sleepless. They work at night and sleep through the days, trying to keep afloat. Their eatery is a pit stop, a place of refuge, a warm bowl of rice. Described as a kaleidoscopic journey that relies on colours, sensations, animals, typhoons, and a dark lilac sky—the materials of life.
* 'WONDERS WANDER' Directed by Shu Lea Cheang this is a location-based mobi-web serial with four fictional episodes set in Madrid exploring the off-the-mainstream nouveau-queer generation that includes refugees, migrants, functional diversity, transfeminista, transfeminism, open family, subversive motherhoods, sustainable living, and the rise of auto-defense practices for self-empowerment.
* 'CABALLERANGO' Directed by Juan Pablo Gonzalez, a family here reflects on a young man’s disappearance in a Mexican village under the watchful eyes of the horse that saw him last.
* 'TWO A.M.' Directed by Loretta Fahrenholz, here Sanna is pitted against an overbearing family of mind-reading 'Watchers'. As a telepathic Police state manipulates social unrest in a city in flames, Sanna attempts to reconnect with her sister Algin, a blacklisted pop singer. On the run from her unpredictably sinister Watcher cousins, Sanna is soon joined by her lover Franz. But just as the possibility of freedom seems finally within reach, a drug-fueled party takes a turn for the worse.
* '<3' Directed by LNZ Arturo and described as a sixty-minute selfie; a coming-of-age story in a technological communications revolution where love gets uploaded, digitally dislocated, unseen, and lost, bit by bit, into an asynchronous Internet landscape.
* 'NOTHING OR EVERYTHING' Directed by Gyeol Kim and set in both the past and the present, two people walk deep into a mountain forest. For these two women born and raised in the city, there is no place more unfamiliar. Here, two people in the present climb the mountain, following two people from the past. The film unfolds with past and present overlapping in the same space, depicting two heartbroken women.
* 'MY FRIEND THE POLISH GIRL' Directed by Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek, here an experimental documentary told through the eyes of Katie—an amateur filmmaker and American rich kid— who is lensing a film about Alicja, an erratic unemployed Polish actress. Set in a post-Brexit London, Katie colonises and disrupts Alicja’s life, mirroring the treatment of migrants in the U.K. at first welcomed, used, and then discarded.
* 'VULTURE' Directed by Philip Hoffman, this film sets its sights on farm animals and their surrounding flora. Static shots and slow-moving zooms follow the grazing animals in their minute interspecies exchanges.
* 'HOW WE LIVE : MESSAGES TO THE FAMILY' Directed by Gustav Deutsch the film undertakes its journey via amateur film recordings, not only producing a community between various people from various places, but also establishing a timeless togetherness, allowing generations of filmmakers to speak to one another and, via the medium of the movie screen, to us.

You can get the whole run down on the Ann Arbor Film Festival at the official website at : https://www.aafilmfest.org/

This week we have five new release movies coming to your local Odeon. We kick off with a live action retelling of a classic Disney animated feature from 78 years ago that tells a modified story but still retains the touchstones of that much loved film about a certain young elephant with an exceptional talent. We then have a change of pace from a second time Director who has already established himself as a master of the genre in this psychological horror thriller about a family invaded by a group of doppelgängers. This is followed by two romantic dramas - the first telling the story of two teenage kids with Cystic Fibrosis who must keep a safe distance for fear of spreading infection to each other, and the second of two teenage kids in WWII Germany who come from very different backgrounds and who fall for each other despite the mortal dangers this puts them both in. We then wrap up the week with a historical retelling of a particular moment of tragedy in English history that ultimately brought about change for good, but at the expense of those who died and were wounded in the process, which ran into hundreds.

Whatever your taste in big screen film entertainment is this week - be it any of the five latest release new movies as Previewed below, or those doing the rounds currently on general release and as Reviewed and Previewed in previous Blog Posts here at Odeon Online, you are most welcome to share your movie going thoughts, opinions and observations by leaving your relevant, succinct and appropriate views in the Comments section below this or any other Post. We'd love to hear from you, and in the meantime, enjoy your big screen Odeon outing during the week ahead.

'DUMBO' (Rated PG) - with this American fantasy adventure film, Walt Disney Studios continues with its live action reimagining of some of its classic animated features that has already taken in 'The Jungle Book' with 'Alladin' and 'The Lion King' coming later this year too. Inspired by the 1941 Disney animated classic of the same name and based on the book by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl, the 1941 film was the fourth animated feature film put out by Disney after 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs', 'Pinocchio' and 'Fantasia'. Costing US$950K to make the film grossed US$1.6M at the Box Office making it the most financially successful movie of that decade for the studio. In 2017, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being 'culturally, historically or aesthetically significant'.

And so to this live action treatment as Directed by Tim Burton. Here the owner of a small and struggling circus, Max Medici (Danny DeVito) enlists Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a war veteran and former circus star to care for a newborn elephant whose oversized ears make him a laughing stock in the already ailing circus. But when Holt's children discover that Dumbo can fly, persuasive and ruthless entrepreneur V. A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) and a French trapeze artist named Colette Marchant (Eva Green) swoop in to make the peculiar pachyderm a star and exploit its talents. Also starring Alan Arkin, the film is released in the US this week too.

'US' (Rated MA15+) - and so Jordan Peele here brings us this highly anticipated and already critically acclaimed American psychological horror thriller film, which he also Co-Produced with Jason Blum, and wrote. Following hot on the heels of his previous also acclaimed debut feature 'Get Out' in 2017, here Peele Directs Lupita Nyong'o and Winston Duke as married couple Adelaide Wilson and Gabriel 'Gabe' Wilson together with their son Jason (Alex Wilson) and daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) who plan on spending some quality family time at their beach house. The family plan on spending this time with good friends Kitty and Josh Tyler (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker respectively) and their twin kids Gwen and Maggie (Cali and Noelle Sheldon), but their peaceful retreat is shattered when tension and chaos erupts with a group of evil strangers, known as 'The Tethered' who look identical to them, arrive to cause all manner of ill will, mayhem and upset most foul. The film was made for US$20M got its World Premier screening at South by South West on 8th March and went on release in the US last week.

'FIVE FEET APART' (Rated M) - this romantic drama film is Directed by Justin Baldoni and centres around seventeen year old Stella Grant (Haley Lu Richardson) who spends most of her time in hospital as a Cystic Fibrosis patient. Her life is full of routines, boundaries and self-control. However, all of this is put to the test when she meets Will Newman (Cole Sprouse), an impossibly charming teen who suffers from the same illness. There's an instant attraction, even though restrictions dictate that they must maintain a safe distance between them - five feet no less. As their connection intensifies, so does the temptation to throw the rules out the window and embrace their relationship. The film cost US$7M to make, has so far recouped US$35M following its release in the US on 15th March and has so far garnered mixed or average Reviews.

'WHERE HANDS TOUCH' (Rated M) - here British Ghanaian Director, Screenwriter and Actress Amma Asante brings us this fictionalised historical WWII romantic coming of age drama film in which 15 year old Leyna (Amandla Stenberg), daughter of a white German mother Kerstin (Abbie Cornish) and a black French-African soldier father stationed in Germany after the end of the First World War, who lives in fear because of the colour of her skin. When she and her mother relocate to Berlin for safety reasons Leyna meets Lutz (George MacKay), the son of a prominent SS officer and a compulsory member of the Hitler Youth, the two fall helplessly in love, ultimately placing both their lives in danger. Seen through the eyes of a bi-racial teen as she witnesses the persecution of Jews and those deemed 'non-pure', the film has received generally poor Reviews to date, saw its Premier screening at TIFF back in September last year, was released in the US in mid-September and has so far taken less than US$70K at the Box Office.

'PETERLOO' (Rated M) - Mike Leigh, that highly acclaimed British Writer and Director of such notable fare over the years as 'Secrets & Lies', 'Topsy-Turvy', 'Vera Drake' and 'Mr. Turner' most recently, here delivers us this British historical drama recounting the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. To put some historical context around the event, on 16th August 1819, a crowd of some 60,000 people from Manchester and the surrounding towns and villages gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester to demand Parliamentary reform and an extension of voting rights. The gathering had been peaceful but in the attempt to arrest a leader of the meeting, the armed government militia panicked and set upon the crowd. As many as fifteen people were killed and up to seven hundred were wounded. The immediate effect of the massacre was a crackdown on reform, as the authorities feared the country was heading towards armed rebellion. The film was screened in competition at the Venice International Film Festival in early September last year, went on release in the UK in early November, gets its US release on 5th April, and has generated largely favourable Reviews. The film stars Rory Kinnear, Tim McInnerny, Patrick Kennedy and Maxine Peake.

With five new release movies this week to tempt you out to your local Odeon, remember to share your movie going thoughts with your other like minded cinephile friends afterwards here at Odeon Online. In the meantime, I'll see you sometime somewhere in the week ahead at your local Odeon.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-