Posts Tagged ‘Tina Fey’

A Haunting in Venice

Director: Kenneth Branagh

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Tina Fey, Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Dornan, Riccardo Scarmarcio, Camille Cottin, Jude Hill, Kyle Allen, Emma Laird, Ali Khan 

Running Time: 1 hour 43 minutes

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Based upon the bestselling Agatha Christie novel Hallowe’en Party published in 1969, screenwriter Michael Green adapts the murder mystery for director Kenneth Branagh’s new film A Haunting In Venice starring an ensemble cast including Belfast stars Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill plus Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh (Everything, Everywhere all at Once).

So let’s set the scene: a séance on Halloween at a haunted palace in Venice in 1947. What could possibly go wrong?

Famed Belgian detective Hercule Poirot is lured to another complex murder mystery by the ambitious writer Ariadne Oliver superbly played with dashes of wit by comedy star Tina Fey to a séance hosted by the doomed Opera star Rowena Drake expertly played with a crisp British accent by Yellowstone star Kelly Reilly (Pride and Prejudice, Flight).

The Femme Fatale Rowena Drake has a host of eclectic guests over for the séance in a bid to bring back the spirit of her dead daughter who drowned in the Venetian canal a year ago. Poirot suspects a far more scientific yet murky plot is afoot despite various inexplicable terrifying occurrences and sightings of potential ghosts.

When the psychic Mrs Reynolds appears with a cloak and a Venetian mask, trouble starts brewing as she expertly assembles her guests in a bid to conjure up the spirit of Rowena’s dead child, but tragedy strikes when not one but two murders occur around midnight on Halloween.

Unlike the dazzling Death on the Nile, Branagh choses a more atmospheric look for A Haunting in Venice taking all his visual clues from classic film noir, with dark shots of the floating city and all the allusions to what Venice as a city represents cinematically: forbidden desire, unfathomable motives and beauty which is deceptive and dangerous.

Branagh keeps the action tight and his ensemble cast including Camille Cottin as Oleg Seminoff and Italian star Riccardo Scamarcio (John Wick 3, Burnt) as corrupt policeman Vitale Portfoglio, all perform perfectly in their roles.

A Haunting in Venice is an extremely dark film, making the entire narrative very murky and difficult to distinguish much like the real motives of the murderer. Branagh possibly had a constrained budget compared to the lavish two previous films: Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile as most of this film takes place in the haunted mansion.

Claustrophobic and scary, A Haunting in Venice is tonally brilliant and fortunately saved by some intelligent screen chemistry between Tina Fey and Kenneth Branagh and will appeal to all those that love a stylish murder mystery. Audiences should look out for an entirely creepy performance by Jude Hill as a precocious boy Leopold Ferrier reading the American Gothic writer Edgar Allan Poe while the other kids are trick or treating.

With richly dark colours like black, red and grey, A Haunting in Venice is pure film noir with a creepy twist and gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10.  

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

Directed by: Glenn Ficarra & John Requa

Cast: Tina Fey, Margot Robbie, Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Christopher Abbott, Alfred Molina, Stephen Peacocke, Cherry Jones, Josh Charles

From the directing team that brought audiences, I Love You Philip Morris and Focus, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa bring the Afghan war drama Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, which is military jargon for WTF!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot focuses on the experiences of journalist Kim Baker who swops the tedious life of a New York media office for the dangerous life of a war correspondent in Afghanistan, from 2004 onwards based on her own novel, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan”.

30 Rock TV star and veteran comedian Tina Fey takes the title role and impressively turns in a nuanced, vaguely dramatic performance as Kim Baker ably assisted by a superb ensemble cast including Margot Robbie as a hard drinking cut-throat journalist Tanya van der Poel, Martin Freeman as a snarky Scottish reporter Iain McKelpie and best of all Oscar winner Billy Bob Thornton as the no-nonsense American general Hollanek.

Tina Fey who to date has largely appeared in comic roles alongside Amy Poehler is brilliant as Kim Baker and gives audience a chance to witness her dramatic side. As the emotional and physical strain of remaining in Afghanistan takes its toll, along with media colleagues who double cross her, Baker manages to resist the temptations of falling for her own hunky security detail, the gorgeous Nic, wonderfully played by Stephen Peacocke (Hercules) whilst forming a bond with her Afghani translator and guide, Fahim Ahmadzai brilliantly played by American actor Christopher Abbott last seen in J. C. Chandor’s A Most Violent Year.

Character actor Alfred Molina also makes a hilarious turn as a Westernized Afghani government official Ali Massoud Sadiq who becomes besotted with Tina Fey’s hardnosed journalist.

Besides the decadent partying which occurs in the Ka-Bubble, as the foreigners nickname Kabul, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot highlights with dashes of humour, the difficulties invading Western forces face when dealing with a foreign country and culture so alien to their own, in this case Afghanistan.

What could be gleaned from Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, besides the atrocities involved, is that war is almost like a decadent excursion into a completely different world. The scene in the film where Baker discovers the real reason a watering well is constantly being blown up in an Afghani village points to the larger gender inequalities inherent in war especially when the country being invaded is deeply patriarchal. War itself is demonstrated to be a man’s game and what makes the women in the film so fascinating especially Baker and Van der poel is their fleeting exotic beauty in a country in which the women are entirely covered up, a point so brilliantly made in Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

Whilst Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is not going to win any awards cinematically, it is nevertheless a humourous and mostly farcical take on the absurdities of war, in the vein of Robert Altman’s classic film M. A. S. H. and Mike Nichol’s 1970 film Catch 22 based upon the Joseph Heller novel. What is notable is the media stance on war, whereby despite the annihilation around them, they refuse to take sides but merely show a mirror up to the brutal horrors of this contemporary man-made conflict in a hostile environment characterized by ample vice and little virtue or trust.

Recommended viewing for those that enjoyed Zero Dark Thirty and David O. Russell’s Three Kings.