Tuesday, 5 September 2017

A response to Logan Lucky (2017)

This is a response to Logan Lucky (2017)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2017 (19 to 26 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


4 September


This is a response to Logan Lucky (2017)



Channing Tatum and Adam Driver, although funny (as are, despite themselves, the characters played by Jack Quaid (Fish Bang) and Brian Gleeson (Sam Bang)), are not, whatever they may hope, the best thing about the film :

One of the best things about the film is that it can use its pace to tell a tale that makes scant little sense, and then, because that is so¹, has the chutzpah to put two fingers up to us at the end ! (As if that mattered, except that - after a slow start of great excruciation (extrusion ?) - one has been buffeted by Team Logan for more than a quite lively eighty or ninety minutes².)




A man (Joe Bang) chalks an equation, which we can't quite see or follow, for why some sweets and a couple of other domestic ingredients is what his team should trust him with - not only the accent, but Craig also has the presence to carry this scene off...

Though, with the real wall of where they are trying to penetrate replaced by a transparent one, can we understand what they are trying to achieve - or how and why do we believe in it... ?



Wherever we are, and whatever Craig (right) is saying to Driver and Tatum (left) - how can a vessel such as the one that he is holding (even using a differential in aerodynamic pressure) negotiate curved piping such as is shown behind them ?


That is meant not so much as a spoiler, but rather as an invitation to be alive to the fictive power and nature of film in Logan Lucky... (If you're being done over, why not at least know it, or even how it's done ?)






End-notes :

¹ As pictured below, and Tweeted about here... :




² Cell 211 (Celda 211) (2009) [the link is to IMDb (@IMDb)], which screened at Cambridge Film Festival (@camfilmfest) [in 2010 ?] does this to great effect, and not to blind (and deafen / deaden - the score is usually intense, and floods one's sense-data) to a creaky plot. (However, there is just one flaw that one can spot that the film-makers did not address.]


Alberto Ammann and Luis Tosar in Celda 211 (2009)


By contrast, American Hustle (2013) uses razzle-dazzle attrition, so that one is napping by the time that '"the clever bit"' happens (not-on-my-watch stuff).




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)

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