Simply Perfect

Admirable film.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The cringe factor is definitely back in New Zealand cinema. This could have been a fantastic story (in fact, the book was.) Betrayal. Blackmail. Dysfunctional characters. Humour. Intrigue. Murder.But somehow it just didn't hold together. The characters were too stereotypical and evoked too much cringe factor (with the exception of Jemaine Clement's Spook, who injected some genuine fun into the film.) The script lacked a vision for capturing the darkness of the themes of the film (or conversely lacked sufficient humour to make up for the lack of darkness.) Overall it was too light hearted for the themes covered in the story - a story of blackmail, revenge and murder. Such a story required a liberal dose of black humour, but the script barely delves into somewhat-grey humour.There are genuinely funny moments. But overall it was a disappointment and a missed opportunity to translate Morrieson's dystopian world to the screen.

Set in a stylised 1930s New Zealand that we wish we'd had, Jason Stutter's PREDICAMENT manages to be both faithful to the book on which its based, the period in which its set and to tip its hat to plenty of movies made since that time (it would be silly to ignore them!).Lonely and awkward (nerdy, in today's parlance) teenager Cedric (Hayden Frost) is delighted to be befriended by burly blowhard Mervyn Toebeck (Heath Franklin), but it isn't long before he's starting to regret inviting the freeloading oaf into his family home. When Mervyn's old chum The Spook (Flight of the Conchords' Jemaine Clement, in a scene-stealing turn) starts hanging around and suggesting voyeurism and blackmail, things get quickly out of Cedric's depth.The film is not slave to a page by page adaptation of the book. It rearranges a handful of key elements from the source novel -- mostly for chronology reasons -- and ventures, with sensitivity and success, into some of the psychology of Cedric's father (Tim Finn) and the tower he's building.The film looks terrific, and is shot with a larger than life verve that captures the period but not without contemporary punch. It rolls along with tawdry fun and plenty of laughs -- particularly when Clement's Spook is playing off Franklin's Mervyn.At times the fluid turns of the plotters' scheme may befuddle viewers unfamiliar with Ronald Hugh Morrieson's novel, but the character colour and unflagging likability of the puppyish Cedric will keep most people engaged until all the strands come together at the end. Stutter's script is a lucid and thoughtful adaptation of a difficult book to adapt; Simon Raby's cinematography is superb; Clement is, as usual, batty fun. Aussie Franklin sometimes has trouble getting long tracts of period kiwi dialogue out 100% convincingly and Tim Finn is, oddly, better when he's being less kooky later in the film ... but the film is satisfying result for a film that's taken a long time to reach the screen and a fitting companion to the Came a Hot Friday and Scarecrow adaptations.

Predicament was a thoroughly enjoyable film. Set in 1930's small town New Zealand and adapted from a Ronald Hugh Morrison novel of the same name, Predicament is a hard film to categorize as it touches on many genres. The overall theme of the film is a crime drama, with a fantastic comedy element woven throughout, which kept the plot intriguing and the characters quirky. What makes the casting and story really interesting is that the main character Cedric (film newcomer Hayden Frost), even when partnered with two fantastic comedy heavyweights Flight of the Conchords Jemaine Clement, and Heath (Chopper) Franklin, never gets lost in the cast or upstaged as the main character. Both Spook (Jemaine) and Mervyn (Heath) provide lots of character personality, features & flaws that Cedric's character doesn't have, which creates an unlikely trio of mischief that never lets up from the opening to the closing credits. All the supporting actors are great too, including kiwi icon Tim Finn, who plays a great character that adds to poor Cedric's woes. I love fun films and that is exactly what Predicament delivers - by the spade full. Amazing sets, cars & costumes all come to life in the rich vivid colourful directing by Jason Stutter.My whole family watched predicament when it opened the NZ film festival, and we all loved the film, including my "tweenage" kids who would have been some of the youngest in the audience, yet they too said it was now one of their favourite films. Predicament is a gem of a movie in that it delivered everything I could want from a film - great story, great laughs, great suspense and set to a fantastic musical score, with a catchy new Tim Finn song "Predicament" that I have been singing in my head ever since.

Ronald Hugh Morrison's novel 'Predicament' is a black comedy, a coming of age yarn of carnal knowledge (involving a schoolgirl), blackmail and murder. Set in the New Zealand in the '30s, the novel is infused with small-town seediness and repressed sexuality. Director/writer Jason Stutter shies away from this, neutering the story into inoffensive blandness, that feels closer to 'The Goonies' than 'Chinatown'.Stutter didn't exactly win the audience over at the gala premiere at the NZ Film Festival when he stated that he doesn't read much because he '...can watch forty films in the time it takes to finish a novel'. Still, adapting local literature has always been the easiest path for the venal to glean a few million dollars out of various funding bodies (did anyone pay to see the undercooked turkey that was last year's adaptation of 'Under the Mountain?). Watching 'Predicament', its obvious that he has no affinity for the material. Thus, his choice for his first 'real feature' gives off the stench of being merely a stepping-stone on his career path.The film is another ho-hum example of simply watching a storyboard filmed. It's a tedious sequence of badly sketched characters bounded in boxes. It highlights all the hallmarks of an amateur with delusions of auterism. "Predicament' is a catalogue of all the laziest contemporary tricks-of-the-trade; from the pointless Cinema-scope lensing (why? because Tarantino always frames in it, of course!), the constant camera movement (crane swoops down at the drop of a hat) and the bland, yet ever-present score (Plan 9 trot out trombones and xylophones), its the hollow artifice of stale technique trouncing the audience to not fall asleep. Never once, throughout all this visual Sturm and Drang does the story connect with its audience.Stutter utterly fails to convey a sense of time and place. He's so disinterested in the morals of the era and the vernacular of time, that at one point a character utters "You better harden the f*** up!". Its a cringe-inducing tip of the hat to the Guy Ritchie school, but not nearly so tragic as an earlier 'homage' (groan!) to 'Reservoir Dogs'. For Stutter, cinema was born in the 1980's. He's a total square, and like so many of his peers, actually stepping outside of the square is not a career option.The director is a 20-something prude. His screenplay performs a literal vasectomy upon the novel. Here is a writer so bereft of balls, that he visualises a sex scene as a pair of female legs kicking the air... replete with off-screen moaning. The material needs a Verhoven, not a shrinking violet virgin. Here is so milquetoast a director, that he climaxes an off-screen decapitation by...tracking into the screaming mouth of the woman who witnessed it. Being hackeneyed is too good for this hack .The worst is saved for last. The novel's climax is a frittered affair, but consulting his preferred bed-side reading tome, (screen-writing guru Syd Field's bible on How-To-Construct-a-Screenplay, perchance?), Stutter- the writer who doesn't read much, 'ties up all the threads' and achieves 'resolution' in the most trite fashion (as dictated by Field's soulless formulae of cliché). It's risible, and how wretched it is, to suffer through the dull spectacle of a director ticking off a check-list -('turning point'-Tick!...) when all one wanted was a for story to unfold or to be mildly entertained. Watching this adaptation is like paying to watch an illiterate spitting on Morrison's grave...after the polite applause died off, (which was well before the kowtowing "Extra Special Thanks to Sir. Peter Jackson..." credit), the audience shuffled out. At these events, the standard response mustered from the unimpressed is a tactful "Well, it wasn't TOO bad...". Yet, after 'Predicament', not a single person I spoke to had anything positive to say. The consensus was that the film never connected, the actors never stood a chance, their characters never came to life on-screen.I predict box office death for this cynically produced, misguided mess.