Review: Tickled (2016)

In between the cinema trips and desperately trying to catch up with Westworld (which I’ve done - yay!) I put some time aside to check out a documentary that I’d seen reviewed on a few blogs I follow called Tickled. I can count the number of documentaries I’ve seen on one hand, so although I was curious to add to the number, I did wonder how interesting it could be without the dramatics of a regular movie.

Tickled was funded by both Kickstarter and the New Zealand Film Commission in 2014, and is directed by journalist David Farrier and his colleague Dylan Reeve. David makes a living from looking into all things unordinary, so when he saw videos online of ‘Competitive Endurance Tickling’, needless to say his curiosity was tickled! Har har har. That’s where the laughs stop though. These videos are far from ordinary, and feature young men bound by their wrists and ankles, and then tickled by other young men.

There didn’t seem to be a sexual connotation about the videos, the young men were clothed at all times, but the ‘sport’ was certainly weird enough for David to want to look into it. The videos were produced by a company called Jane O’Brien Media, which had it’s own Facebook page, so David sent a message asking if he could conduct an interview with either Jane herself or another producer to learn more for his article.

Rather than be welcomed with open arms, or politely turned down, David was instead bombarded with hostile responses, pointing out David’s own sexuality and firmly stating that this sport is a “passionately and exclusively heterosexual athletic endurance activity”. When David persisted with his line of enquiry, Jane O’Brien Media sent legal threats and even flew out 3 members of staff to intimidate David and Dylan.

Really, that’s as far into it as I want to go in this post. This is all most other bloggers wrote about, and honestly, if that alone is enough to get you interested than you’ll find the rest of the documentary absolutely fascinating. The way it had me chuckling at how absurd the sport is to suddenly feeling shocked at what was happening is just a little bit unreal.

As I said, I watch very few documentaries so I don’t feel able to comment on how well it was filmed, edited, etc, but I was hooked from the very first minute right up until the credits rolled. Then I had to sit in silence for about ten minutes while I took it all in. If you’ve already seen Tickled, then check out the Wikipedia page for it, right at the bottom is a section about the response to the documentary from the people involved, and that in itself is quite shocking. It’s definitely a subject that I want to keep updated with!

Has anyone else seen Tickled? If you have it was probably your blog that led me down this rabbit hole! I don’t know whether to thank you or curse you, ha!

Review: Anomalisa (2016)

It felt like a lifetime waiting for this movie to be released in the UK! I swear I would move country just to see movies like this earlier. Anyway. I’ve always been a fan of animated movies, and since my Media course in College, I’ve had a real appreciation for the work that goes into it. I produced a 30 second claymation in class that took 2 months, and boy, does it require a lot of patience. 

Anomalisa (2016) is a fantastically quirky movie that not only took 3 years to create, but it was brought to life thanks to the 5,770 crowdfunders on Kickstarter that collectively raised over $400,000. It follows roughly 24 hours of our main character (voiced by David Thewlis) living his mundane life. When he happens to meet Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), his life looks as though it may change.

I’ve tried to stay away from too many detailed reviews of this movie until I’d seen it myself, but one of the comments that came up often were to do with the fact that it’s so easy to forget that this is an animated movie. Now, that’s a testament to the fantastic work of the animators to create characters and a world that seem so lifelike, but honestly, I would urge anyone to do the opposite, and constantly remind themselves that this is in fact animated. It makes those intricate details that much more fascinating.

Maybe I’m geeking too hard over it, but such simple details like a swinging ‘magic tree’ air freshener in the taxi, or the ice machine in the hotel just had me in awe. Those are things you wouldn’t even think about in a live action movie, but it took hours to film those brief moments. 

This is one I’ll be buying on DVD for sure once it’s released, I think a second viewing will be rewarding. I got really distracted after a while at the fact that every character other than Michael and Lisa were voiced by the same person (Tom Noonan). I tried to tell myself that it was probably down to budget constraints, but I couldn’t shake it from my mind. Of course, it all got explained eventually (and it was a beautifully painful moment) but I definitely missed some details along the way.

There’s one scene in particular that was incredibly difficult to watch, and I’ll try and explain without going into spoiler territory, because this isn’t a complaint in an obvious sense. It’s an intimate scene, and I felt awkward, but not because I’m typically British and things like this make me embarrassed anyway, but the scene was so well done it kind of felt that by watching, I was intruding. Does that make any sense? It’s hard to explain.

The bottom line is, I loved this movie, and would recommend it to others. It’s not for everyone, and you have to be in the right kind of mood. Above all else, don’t try to forget that it’s animated, and appreciate those little details!