Good Time

You’ll have a hell of a ‘good time’ at the cinema watching this wild hypnotic adrenaline induced crime drama that bleeds off the screen with manic electric energy. The title is ironic as the characters are having anything but a good time in this film by the Safdie Brothers, Josh and Benny, a fresh and startling new voice in today’s cinema.

In competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, Good Time won praise and a standing ovation from many critics for its performances, stylish look, hyper relentless pace, and disturbing but humanizing ambivalent depiction of Queens, New York’s urban underground. 

In the course of a single night, anything that can go wrong, does, and just keeps getting worse for Constantine (Connie) Nikas, played by an unrecognizable Robert Pattinson, a fast talking reckless hoodlum and con artist who leaves a path of destruction in his wake both physical and psychological. He takes advantage of everyone and every situation he comes in contact with, using them to his own single minded purpose. Even his mentally disabled younger brother Nick, (Benny Safdie) a child in a man’s body, is not exempt from Connie’s intense drive to get what he needs to survive.

After Connie coerces his brother Nick to help him pull off a daring bank robbery, things suddenly explode in his face when Nick is captured during a botched getaway and sent to prison. Connie knows that Nick will not survive long in jail without his help, so he desperately tries to raise the bail money he needs to get him out quickly.

Connie is not particularly likeable but he is extremely watchable. What keeps us hooked into the story is the way the Safdie brothers cleverly draw us in with Connie’s innocent sympathetic abused brother Nick who we see at the beginning of the film undergoing a psych evaluation by a community psychologist before Connie bursts in to take him away. It’s for his sake that we want to root for Connie, but only in a way that we might do seeing a panhandler with a loyal dog at his side. We may not want to give money to the beggar but we might for the sake of the dog.

In this dark Scorsesian thriller, there is something seamy about the people and places in the film, and the stylish visual design is intended to further enhance the feeling of depraved dread with a raw, smudged and over saturated color palette. The handheld camera angles are kept tight to Connie’s determined face as he manipulates the various characters he runs into. In this respect the film has a very European cinema verity feel and visual style.

Daniel Lopatin’s otherworldly retro electronic echo acid soundtrack is a throwback to 1970s and 80s musical scores of Tangerine Dream in suspense thrillers like William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (1977) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1981). Good Time is tragic and darkly comic but also mesmerizing as we follow Connie through nocturnal cityscapes from one absurdity to another, staring in disbelief at the crazy decisions he makes. The pulse-pounding score steadily increases the pace, blurring the neon house-of-horrors milieu, and allowing us to keep up with the action. 

I went into the film knowing nothing about it and came out pleasantly surprised at its edgy dark desperate vision and unique exciting perspective reminiscent of Scorsese’s early work, which may not be for everyone. Robert Pattinson’s stand out performance in particular is all-out stunning and more than carries the film with his frantic energy. 

Like a nightmare you can’t escape, Good Time gets under your skin and crawls into your psyche, wreaking havoc wherever it goes. This movie goes and goes without stopping until it just falls off the screen, leaving you wondering, like a bad dream, what did I just experience?

JP

Dunkirk

Dunkirk refers to the coastal town of Dunkerque in northern France, which played a vital role during the early part of World War II in what is known as the Battle of Dunkirk, when British Expeditionary forces, aiding French troops to defend France from Nazi invasion, were overrun and beaten back by the powerful and aggressive advance of the highly organized German army.

Forced to retreat, the British, French, Canadian and some Dutch and Belgian troops were trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk where they were to be evacuated across the English Channel back to the safety of England. With the Germans hot on their heels, the evacuation stalled when ships sent from England to pick up the beaten troops were torpedoed by German U-Boats and the vulnerable troops became sitting ducks for German Luftwaffe fighter planes to pick off at will.

This was the desperate situation that approximately 400,000 exhausted and virtually defenseless soldiers found themselves in for an excruciating 9 days while the English scrambled to make alternate plans to defend and evacuate the beaches of Dunkirk while the Nazis closed in for the kill.

As war films go, Dunkirk offers a stunningly dark and immersive experience that gives us an all-encompassing view of the events as they occur from multiple perspectives cutting between a montage of scenes from the three main theatres of war; the frightening experience of the soldier on the ground, the lonely isolated bird’s eye view of the British fighter pilot flying over the English Channel engaged in aerial combat with enemy planes, and one of the many civilians who made the dangerous journey across the Channel in small privately owned boats to try and help save as many lives as they could from the sea.

Christopher Nolan - Interstellar (2014) – The Dark Knight Trilogy (2005 - 2012), attempts to show specific aspects of the battle from the English viewpoint. We never see the faces of the enemy. The threat is shown only as an unseen relentless force driving young men into desperate situations.

Soon after the start of hostilities in 1940, Europe quickly found themselves completely outmaneuvered and outgunned by a German war machine the size and speed of which had never been seen before. Young inexperienced European soldiers were completely unprepared for the violent onslaught that rained down upon them from the air, ground and sea.

As a survival story, Nolan’s Dunkirk greatly enhances the viewer’s feeling of despair and tension by throwing us into the bewildering battle as the confused and disoriented soldiers must have experienced it without any lead up to the events or character backstories.

Hans Zimmer’s eerie pervasive soundtrack is more like a synthesized screaming of string instruments that you might expect to hear in a horror film. The music has the harrowing screeching quality of a spitfire engine closely careening overhead that’s reminiscent of portions of The Dark Knight (2008) soundtrack.

Nolan’s intention is to give the viewer a visceral experience, making the events at Dunkirk accessible using the large IMAX format which is superbly well suited for putting the viewer in close proximity to the absurd war experience. The epic scale of the film with its vast expanses of beach, troops and sea, and the many threats from air, water and ground overwhelms with stunningly powerful scenes of war and destruction.

JP