fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: Cooper Raiff

2022

Oddness abounds…

I did not enjoy this flick, but I do admire it. Or maybe I did enjoy aspects of it, but thought maybe overall it didn’t work, or maybe it worked overall even if it had profound weaknesses.

I start this not knowing what my verdict will be in the end.

On the surface, or with a superficial description, this would sound like a pretty stock standard film, in that it’s about a guy who’s just finished college and doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s no different from The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman’s character didn’t know what to do with himself, except that having sex with Mrs Robinson would work, at least for a while.

It’s also, unfortunately, the same premise as every film with a male protagonist made in America in the last 50 years that doesn’t have guns in it: in other words, white, middle-class ennui, that’s usually overcome with a manic pixie dream girl who makes the protagonist listen to The Shins through her headphones and thus transforms his life into something better, finally.

There is no shortage of these films, and it seems to be a film that every up and coming actor (I’m stressing the point that it’s always (white) male actors who write / direct and star in these movies) gets to make once they get enough money together.

They are sometimes good, sometimes godawful, but they cover a need, I guess.

Well, in this flick, 12 year old Andrew (Cooper Raiff plays the adult version, who also directs) starts off the film by telling a woman at his bar mitzvah that he’s in love with her, even though he’s just a kid, and not a particularly handsome or tall one.

Of course that couldn’t work out, but we get the impression that this need to find love with an older woman is now a feature in his personality, and not a bug.

Ten years later, Andrew is finishing college, and has a girlfriend, but she clearly has a future planned that doesn’t include him, whereas all he’s got when asked what he’s going to do is “uh, follow you around maybe?” which is secretly what EVERY woman wants to hear.

As she leaves for Barcelona, he is forced to move back home, work at a place called Meat Sticks, and sleep on his younger brother’s floor. His mum (Leslie Mann) loves him and loves his silly ways, but she has her own issues, including living with bipolar.

If the film has a series of missteps, this could be the first of a cascading multitude. Her experience of “bipolar” essentially occurs entirely off screen, and ‘only’ amounts to shagging the husbands of people they know within their tight knit Jewish community during these episodes.

Like, okay. What? Right off the bat, the mum asks Andrew to take his younger brother to a particular bar mitzvah, because she herself isn’t welcome there because she shagged the father of the boy whose special day it now is, and the mum’s not too happy with her, even though the entire community seem to be begrudgingly okay with it.

I can’t even start on that. It’s treated as such a throwaway line, so casually that I just find it horrifying.

dir: Russos

2022

Base on a set of books I’ll never read this here latest Netflix Exclusive! movie is apparently the most expensive ever made by a streaming service with the intention of only having it play on a streaming service after a week in the cinemas.

So they were never going to make their money back. No-one is going to subscribe or re-subscribe to Netflix because of a dumb action flick called The Gray Man. They may resubscribe for a movie called The Beige Couch, which is about a demonically-possessed and very messy couch that slowly swallows whole an unfailingly polite Marie Kondo for an hour and a half, but I doubt they’ll do it for this.

Which is not a shame. Though, note to self: copyright the idea for the Kondo-eating couch.

This is pretty generic, but it is not unenjoyable because of that. It’s competent enough. They put the cameras in the right spots. There aren’t any wardrobe malfunctions, people remember their lines, no-one’s moustache falls off mid-diatribe. And in no way is the action genre updated, upgraded or advanced by the existence of this movie.

And that’s okay. The Russo Brothers have made more money than God with their Marvel movies, and you’d think they’d want to do something else with all their cachet and clout. Instead they make the lazy kind of thing you’d imagine someone without ambition or that much motivation would do.

That’s probably quite unfair. Maybe it was a labour of love for them, who knows. The fact that it’s pretty much identical to the last film they produced for Netflix (but didn’t direct) which starred Chris Hemsworth, being Extraction, I’m sure is just a coincidence.

This flick’s description will sound like the plot synopsis of at least 10,000 movies: a jaded assassin who’s very good at his job is forced to kill a bunch of other assassins because of something something and there’s a young girl to protect too.

No-one killed his dog, but they might as well have. Because he’s just going to have to kill everyone, isn’t he?

dir: Robert Eggers

2022

There’s a lot that’s funny about The Northman, at least to me.

A lot of the film is practically in black and white. Not ‘real’ black and white film stock, just colour adjusted scenes to make it almost look monochrome. It’s something the director has done before, like in his last film The Lighthouse, which was all black and white.

I guess that’s not really “funny”, but I guess it makes the colours pop whenever fire is onscreen, or, I dunno, when someone’s chopping off people’s heads.

Another funny thing is that Alexander Skarsgard stars as the lead character Amleth, and Nicole Kidman plays his mum Gudrun. Anyone who watched or heard about that series on the tv called Big Little Lies where she and Skarsgard played husband and wife in an abusive relationship might wonder at how such a thing could come to be.

But then Kidman herself has what I think is the film’s shining moment, which I won’t spoil, but it’s a doozy. And then it all makes sense.

The other funny thing (I swear this is the last time I’ll use this construction), is that this is essentially a retelling of Hamlet, so it’s pretty familiar, but it’s based more on the older Icelandic tale that Shakespeare himself ripped off, with an abundance of more gore. So it’s like someone said “why don’t we make a new version of Hamlet, with buff Vikings and such, but throw out all the pesky cliché words that people are bored of?”

Robert Eggers is becoming quite a feted and respected director, despite the fact that he looks like a Mens’ Rights activist or like someone who’s going to ask you if you’re into cryptocurrencies yet. And yet he crafts a fairly brutal movie which doesn’t pander to mass audiences and leans in to the brutal, supernatural aesthetics of what life might have been like in 845AD.

dir: Domee Shi

2022

I may be about the furthest thing away from a teenaged Chinese-Canadian girl on the cusp of maturity who finds herself turning into a giant red panda whenever she’s emotional or overwhelmed, but I still found a lot to enjoy and relate to in Pixar’s latest foray into the minds and hearts of confused kids and patient, slightly baffled adults.

It feels like such a cop out to say “it’s no Inside Out”, but Inside Out was so great, and this flick is trying to tell a different kind of story in a different kind of way, though no less entertaining, and that’s great too.

It’s working in a different emotional register, and yet it’s also something of a period piece. I didn’t realise the triple meaning of what I just wrote in the last sentence, but I’m not deleting it, not just yet.

Mei (Rosalie Chieng) is a thirteen year old dork living in Toronto, I guess(?) She’s a high achiever academically, has a group of friends, but her first and only loyalty seems to be to her parents, specifically her mother (Sandra Oh). The mum is very much the “tiger mom” stereotype popularised by Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and has been a well-worn cliché in American and even Australian comedy and drama for decades.

In the depiction of multicultural societies and cities, it’s really easy (and lazy) to single out families from Asian backgrounds as exemplifying this idea that migrant parents torment their children into becoming violin prodigies or maths geniuses, because without the threats of violence or the withholding of love / approval / affection, then no kid would ever succeed at anything.

What these stories often leave out in these narratives, whether they’re personal ones or not, is that all sorts of families, migrant or otherwise, have parents with expectations, who range from over-involved and threatening to barely there if at all, and that the kids (who survive) end up as normal people, or geniuses who become fuckups, or fuckups who still go on to live meaningful lives, because not everyone ends up first chair in the orchestra or the Head of Complicated Surgery at Most Expensive Hospital. There’s lots of us in between, and that’s okay.

dir: Tom Gormican

2022

This was terrible to watch, just terrible.

It was so disappointing. I long ago gave up trying to figure out how it was that Nicolas Cage could be so great in certain roles, and so terrible in so many others. I realised that Cage himself didn’t know, so what chance did I have to grasp it?

He plays a couple of versions of Nicolas Cage here, and none of them feel remotely believable, though they both have their sources in things Cage has said and done in the past.

The fictionalised “real” Nicolas Cage struggles to get work, and has an agent played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately (for me), he’s not playing Neil Patrick Harris, or the fictionalised Neil Patrick Harris that guest-starred outlandishly in the Harold and Kumar movies.

No, he’s an agent called Fink, and even he can’t seem to get Cage good roles. Cage even meets with one man movie industry David Gordon Green (playing himself) to try to convince him to give him the lead role in some movie with Boston crims in it, and it’s possibly one of the most painful things I’ve ever seen recorded on film.

I guess the point is, it’s meant to be excruciating. A Cage at the top of his game wouldn’t agree out of desperation to attend the birthday party of some Spanish billionaire (the great Pedro Pascal) who is a super fan of Cage and Cage related media. And yet that is what the script imposes upon him.

Also, to sell how low Cage has fallen, he has an ex-wife (Sharon Hogan) who loathes him, and a daughter (Lily Mo Sheen) who can’t stand him. The script requires that Cage acts like a boorish arsehole to all and sundry, and a drunken fuck-up at that, because none of the set up reflects where Cage actually is at as an actor or as a person / father.

In “real” life he has 6 ex-wives and a bunch of kids, but for our benefit I guess they had to streamline things. He also buys castles, has been arrested for domestic abuse and tries to make as many movies per year as possible. He stars in so many movies per year that I look at the movies he’s made over the last ten years, and recognise only a couple of them.

dir: Josef Kubota Wladyka

2022

This is a pretty grim movie, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. A flick about a woman trying to find her sister who she suspects has been kidnapped and trafficked: There’s no gentle way to tell that story. Even Taika Waititi probably wouldn’t be able to inject such a tale with whimsy or goofy silliness.

Though I say that, and then I remember JoJo Rabbit, and then I remember that anything is possible.

Catch the Fair One doesn’t fuck around, and doesn’t give us a lot to distance ourselves from the horror of what the world, this world, is like. The main character of Kaylee (Kali Reis), is tormented, and so she is tormenting herself. Though she is a boxer by trade, and we watch her train, she isn’t training for the ring, at least in the present. We see some scenes set in the past, before her sister disappeared, and when Kaylee was training to win in the ring, and was something of a champion.

Now she is training in order to be able to take on the viciousness of the world she is forcing herself into, to be able to survive long enough to find her missing sister. She also, bizarrely, trains herself to be able to carry a razor blade inside her mouth without causing herself too much damage.

It helps, I guess, that she has cheek piercings?

That razor, ye gods, it’s grim, but it has a role to play. Like the old saying about Chekhov’s gun – a razor that appears in the 1st act of a movie is going to play some crucial role later in the 3rd act.

But it seems to play more of a role than just that: a tool or a weapon. It kinda feels like Kaylee, or KO as her trainer keeps calling her, deliberately inflicts pain on herself, not just to train, but because she feels like she deserves it.

We aren’t privy to the details of how her sister disappeared yet, but since Kaylee is pursuing her own investigation along the lines of sex traffickers, our strong assumption, like hers, is that her sister was kidnapped and sold somewhere, possibly up north. It’s not entirely clear where in the States this whole story is happening, it’s either one of the northern states or Canada proper.

This is specifically aimed at what is happening to vulnerable women in the States and Canada, and especially First Nations women, who are murdered or kidnapped, forced into sex work, treated like livestock, in this day and age, and the authorities seem to do little either because of the vast scale of the problem, because of racism, or because they actively don’t give a shit about women, First Nations or otherwise.

dir: Sophie Hyde

2022

Well, who doesn’t enjoy a sexy night out at the movies…

Certainly not a film to be watched with the kids around. This flick is pretty much a two-hander, depending as it does on the talents of the two leads, ably played by Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack. Most of the film transpires within the confines of a hotel room.

And it’s a stagey and talky affair. These characters are not in love; there’s nothing romantic about this story. It is about feelings, though, and mostly the feelings one has about oneself, more than anything else.

And of course it’s about sex, but less about the mechanics of it, or the “getting” of it, and more about what it represents to people, as fulfilment, as release, as missed opportunities, or as an excuse to try to shame people.

Thompson plays a woman in her sixties called Nancy. She has decided, after more than 30 years of marriage, ending with her useless husband’s death, to hire the services of a sex professional to do all the things she didn’t get to do over the course of her life. She says, almost with pride, that she’s never had an orgasm before, and is certain she’s never going to, but that Leo (Daryl McCormack) shouldn’t see that as a challenge.

Leo is smooth, smooth as butter, smooth as a recently waxed chest. He knows the roles he needs to play, the archetypes he has to inhabit, sometimes shifting at the drop of a hat, between a fantasy, a therapist, a listener, a masculine ideal or a reassuring presence. He seems perfectly at ease with himself, and with a charming confidence, but it’s a veneer, like everything else.

She regrets almost immediately that she’s taken this course of action, and feels endlessly like she needs to justify herself or finds flaws in what she’s doing, to prevent herself from going through with it. He is constantly assuring her that they won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, her comfort and safety are paramount, but also that she should clearly allow herself to enjoy what she’s paid for.

dir: Kogonada

2022

The future looks pleasant… Easy on the eyes. Very tasteful.

But of course there are still problems, mostly because people are still around.

After Yang is the kind of science fiction flick that people lament doesn’t get made often enough, and then don’t watch because it doesn’t have explosions or guaranteed Hemsworths in it.

It might be set in a brave, new future, but its issues for its characters are still recognisably human ones.

Even if much of the story is about what happens when an android (Justin H. Min) stops working.

There’s a family, made up of Dad (Colin Farrell), Mum (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). She is of Chinese extraction, and the parents, feeling an obligation to have her learn about what they see as her culture and heritage, buy a Chinese android they call Yang (Min), to be like a big brother to her, who can tell her all these facts about China, and teach her Mandarin.

Right from virtually the beginning of the film, Yang shuts down, and can’t be restarted. They try switching him on and off, they probably try to reset him to factory settings. They don’t try whacking him on the side of the head, thankfully.

It’s not that subtle, but the family don’t have a lot of money to throw around, can’t afford to officially get him repaired because, hey, he was purchased in a dodgy deal in the first place. The legit people the Dad takes his Yang to get repaired at can’t do anything, the dodgy guy he takes him to can’t really do anything, but he does find something in Yang’s chest that proves what he suspected all along: that someone was spying on him!

You know, as opposed to the slender black objects we all carry in our pockets or bags that tell all sorts of corporations everything we’ve done, said and searched for on any given day. In their future, though, they are beyond such petty devices.

dir: Adam Leon

2022

The fuck was that about…

I can assure you of one thing and one thing only: No Italian is spoken or studied over the course of this frustrating flick. So if you were hoping for some quality Italian talking and such, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

Italian Studies is something of a perplexing flick, and I think deliberately so. It starts with a scene set in I guess London, where a woman meets some people, they go into a studio, some breathy singers sing some dreampop-y songs, and then she bums a ciggie off of a girl.

The girl asks if the older woman remembers her from New York, from hanging out with some other people, including someone called Simon. Who? Who the fuck is Simon?

But then she says “that must be when I lost my dog.”

It then cuts to New York, presumably to the recent past, as a woman walks her dog to a small hardware store, ties her dog up outside, looks around the store for a while, then wanders off without the dog.

She doesn’t remember the dog, but then, she doesn’t remember who she is or where she’s meant to be.

So a lot of this flick is watching this actor, being Vanessa Kirby, walk around New York. If you like Vanessa Kirby, who you may remember from such films as one of them Fast & Furious flicks, or Pieces of a Woman, the harrowing home-birth-gone-wrong Netflix flick, or from when she played the perpetually resentful and envious Princess Margaret in The Crown, then you might enjoy following her around for an hour and twenty minutes.

I think she’s a fine actor, with my favourite thing I’ve seen her in being a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire filmed at the National Theatre that was recorded and on Youtube for a while during the lockdowns. She played Stella to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche DuBois, and they were all great.

This isn’t as great, but it’s okay. I don’t mind watching flicks where people wander around having mini adventures, especially when they’re low-key but jagged, but not life and death, because it reminds me of the past, when I too walked around cities during the day or night.

That was before all that unpleasantness…

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read was on the summary for this flick on Netflix. Let me get it word-for-word, so that I can convey the absolute horror of these words belonging in the same sentence:

“From the writers of Deadpool based on the George Saunders short story.”

That’s like getting on a flight and finding out that the pilot is going to be Boris Johnston, who despite never having flown a plane before is sure he can do a bang up job.

George Saunders is an exquisite writer of short stories, books, IKEA catalogues - anything he writes is pure gold. Letting two screenwriters, possibly using mountains of cocaine in order to stay motivated, attack one of his stories should be considered a literary hate crime.

I genuinely remember reading the short story this is based on, having picked up Tenth of December back in the day when everyone was buying it but few people were actually bothering to read all the stories inside it. This story, Escape from Spiderhead, stood out as one of the more memorable ones.

Within the story, a prisoner volunteers to be experimented on by drug company goons. The drug reps are unseen, bland, corporate functionaries. Their testing is apathetic, doesn’t care about the crims or their longevity at all, and just about getting results.

Despite being science fiction, obviously, with chemical tech significantly ahead of where we are today, it was less about whether people should be conducting experiments like this on people, regardless of whether they’re crims or not, and more about the limits of what people will accept, will comply with.

In this flick, well, they’ve been given an inch of a good story, and they’ve turned it into miles and miles of opportunities for many, many bad ideas to come to the fore.

dir: Sean Ellis

2022

When this was initially going to come out, probably pre-covid, it was going to be called Eight for Silver. When it played festivals and such it was still called that. But then someone had the brainstorm, the lightbulb moment, the epiphany, and thought "fuck that, that’s too complicated; let's just call it The Cursed".

I think they could have gone one better and called it "How's that Curse I Cursed You With, Cursedy?"

I have lines when it comes to horror flicks, that I am uncomfortable about when they get crossed. It's important to have boundaries, I feel. And while I am generally okay with all sorts of damage and dismemberment, I'm not at all comfortable with having kids as protagonists upon whom carnage is visited. Sure, kids are threatened all the time in action flicks and other horror flicks.

Rarely do they make good on that threat. I think that's partly why I felt a bit aggrieved watching this flick, because they "broke" the social contract of horror flicks that it's okay to put them in peril, but not to actually follow through.

Another of this flick's crimes is that a central part of its story depends on a massacre of a Roma clan, who have the temerity to be on some land that some landlord jerk believes is his. Of course, beyond the supernatural, it is right and proper to make landgrabbing murderers the true villains in anything, whether it's a film or a documentary, but haven't the Roma suffered enough? Such massacres happened for centuries prior to the main "last" time they were slaughtered en masse by the Nazis, but using such a scene - for mass entertainment - worries me a bit, especially with the rise in nationalism / fascism worldwide lately.

Just this week in Britain the Tories brought in legislation targeting the travelers / Roma communities, so can we stop giving them persecution ideas?

Not that I think a fuckwit of Boris Johnstonian proportions would have the time to sit through a deftly-made horror flick like this one.

Even though everyone except the so-called “gypsies” speaks in English and they’re all English (or in the lead’s case, American, I think this is set in France. No-one speaks French, though, which is a relief.

dir: Alex Garland

2022

Men. Manly men. Doing manly things, in manly ways, mostly at Manly beach, the manliest of all beaches.

I have to admit I really didn’t get this flick. I don’t think I understood it, but that’s okay, because understanding is overrated. I enjoyed it, it was well filmed, it had a weird, ominous atmosphere without generally being that horrific. At least until the last section…

There is a woman who is the main character in this flick (so, false advertising, right there). She has recently lost her husband after he struck her and then threw himself off the building they lived in. All because she wanted out of what was clearly not a healthy relationship.

She, being Harper (the great Jessie Buckley), needs some time away, and so rents a stately country manor, in the country somewhere. The landlord (Rory Kinnear) is an odd enough chap, but nothing too worrying just yet. It’s some hick town, very green. No problems here.

If there is a problem, it’s that a naked guy (Rory Kinnear) starts following her about, tries to get into the place she’s staying, and no-one, including the cops, really gives a damn. There’s a male cop (Rory Kinnear), and a female cop, but, confirming the old adage that All Cops Are Bastards, she gives even less of a shit.

Seeking solace in the arms of the church? Well, the vicar (Rory Kinnear) is a right prick as well, blaming her for her husband’s suicide, telling her all the ways in which her wickedness taunts all men.

It’s not for nothing that Harper eats a red apple that falls from a tree outside. For some reason the image keeps reoccurring, not sure why. True, Eve is the first scapegoat in the Bible, but it’s not her fault that men are weak and vicious.

Oh no, you can’t blame her for that. Also, even the young boys of the town are already misogynistic pricks, one of them (Rory Kinnear) calling her a stupid bitch because she didn’t want to play hide and seek with him.

Hang on, in the church, why was there the image of the Green Man from folklore on the font, and why do they keep showing us the image of a Sheela Na Gig, a female gargoyle – grotesque, doing her thing?

What do these pagan symbols of the monstrous masculine and the monstrous feminine have to do either with the price of fish or this film, thematically speaking?

I…have no idea.

dir: Goran Stolevski

2022

Such a title, a phrase, like “you won’t be alone”, it can sound like reassurance, like trying to comfort someone who’s afraid of abandonment, of loneliness, that they won’t be as alone as they fear.

It also, unfortunately, sounds like a promise that’s more of a dark threat: You won’t be alone because I’ll always be around, making sure nothing goes right in your life, and that every time you get close to people, I’ll be there to snuff them out.

It is referred to as a horror film, but “horror” doesn’t really capture what this flick is about. It’s not trying to horrify or scare audiences. Horrible things do happen, but the horror isn’t the point.

In weird ways this is more like a micro-budget Terrence Malick flick with 1 per cent of the budget and 200 per cent of the ambition. There’s a lot told to us in whispered voiceover, because the main character cannot speak for herself. She never speaks for herself out loud, regardless of what form she’s in.

Even though I push back on the genre designation of “horror” in order to avoid pigeon-holing the flick, everything I’m going to write now is going to contradict that assertion.

In some non-descript peasant village in what these days is called Macedonia, but about 200 years ago, a young peasant mother is confronted by a strange sight: a blistered, tormented figure who wants to drink her crying newborn’s blood. This is a monster out of local myth, appearing to this woman, for reals, and all she can think to do is bargain for her child’s life.

This monster, though, who is known by one derisive name (Old Maid Maria), and one descriptor (Wolf-Eateress), sounds like she’s going to be bound by some kind of Rumpelstiltskin-type bullshit, but she really isn’t. And though she agrees to spare the child until she is 16, she commits the first of many horrors by stealing the girl’s voice. Permanently.

The mother, not being very bright, thinks to protect this child by shutting it in a cave, where it pretty much seems to grow alone, neglected, unloved and unmissed by anyone.

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2021

I have wanted to like a film by Paul Thomas Anderson for a long time. I haven’t really thoroughly enjoyed any film of his since Boogie Nights. Parts of There Will Be Blood and The Master were compelling, but in no way did the flicks hang together for me, especially with their demented endings that undid whatever goodwill remained in my heart or head.

I tried watching Inherent Vice, based on, like all his books, an unfilmable novel by Thomas Pynchon, but I could not retain anything that was happening, and I was completely straight and sober, and yet I was still bamboozled, even though 90% of the plot is delivered in voiceover.

Licorice Pizza is an almost artfully disingenuously simple story with little connective tissue between scenes that only works if you like the performances of the central characters, being Alana and Gary (Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman). If you don’t find them engaging, or even tolerable, this will be a well-filmed 135 minute exercise in exquisitely filmed torment.

I don’t remember the early 70s so there’s no nostalgia value for me, but all the same this is filmed to look not just like something from the American early 70s, but to look like it was filmed in the 1970s, with a similar film stock and ‘look’. It’s the kind of thing you expect from Anderson.

Does it ‘help’ to tell the story… I have no idea. Probably not. It depends on what you think the story is. I sat there for over two hours wondering about what I was watching and why I was watching it.

On one level, you could be forgiven for thinking the story is about a teenage boy called Gary (Hoffman) and a woman in either her mid or late twenties called Alana (Alana Haim). Gary is an awkward, goofy teenager, but he is insistent that he has a charming manner. As audience members, we don’t really see it, but some people in the film respond to it, and others don’t. He is variously referred to throughout the flick as a hustler or an entrepreneur, but he never really seems that good at anything.

Alana rejects his every advance, which is probably a good thing, since a relationship between the two of them these days would be illegal, I guess(?) And we never have it spelled out as to why she keeps hanging around with him despite being repelled by him.

dir: Sam Raimi

2022

Errm, this is not the best recent film I’ve seen dealing with the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes in parallel to our own.

This isn’t an entirely bad film. It’s okay. Some parts are even enjoyable. Some parts work really well. Others, not so well.

If you find either Benedict Cumberbatch or the Doctor Strange character insufferable, then you might just suffer through this a lot. If you love either of them, or you like otters, then you might enjoy sections of this flick. If you have liked Sam Raimi movies over the decades, and can watch him cribbing from his own film history to deliver a kind of scrap book / lifetime achievement award to himself, then maybe there might be some sly meta level to enjoy the flick on.

As the latest entry in the Marvel universe, it’s kind of a dead end, or at least something that seems like it’s opening up a wild, new vista, but it ends up slamming the door on itself because, I dunno, it would be too much work otherwise?

The central lynchpin of this flick, which is kinda baffling, is that out of nowhere, after however many films, Dr Strange wishes he had a girlfriend again, being Christine (Rachel McAdams).

It turns out that not only can’t Strange be with her in this universe, but, when he finds out there are lots of other ones, he finds out that he can’t be with her in those universes either.

That’s got to suck. Even if it’s an infinite number of universes, in none of them can he be happy with Christine, or, put differently, there is no universe in which Christine can put up with his bullshit for too long.

Also coming to terms with infinite possibilities still leaving someone unsatisfied, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has decided that killing people is way more satisfying that dealing with her various griefs. She grieves the death of her boyfriend who was a robot, being Vision, but, now stay with me if you never watched the Disney + series WandaVision, she also mourns the loss of her two magical sons, Billy and Tommy, who existed for a brief period of time when she took over a New Jersey town and turned it into a 60s 70s 80s tv sitcom hell on Earth.

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say she was mourning two kids that never really existed, but if you told her that, she would probably kill you quite effortlessly, because she spends most of the film killing powerful people with little to no effort.

She is now so powerful she’s pretty much a threat to life even in other universes.

I just…yawn. Once we peaked with a villain who wanted to end half of all life in the universe, and now it’s like “well today’s villain is okay with destroying multiple universes!” it’s hard to give much of a damn. That goes beyond stakes that mean anything further than shrugging one’s shoulders and thinking “well okay that’s the premise, then.”

(Roudram Ranam Rudhiram Rise Roar Revolt)

dir: S. S. Rajamouli

2022

No, this isn’t a movie about how great the greatest radio station in the world, being 3RRR, is and has been for decades. Instead this is an Indian blockbuster in the Telugu language about how two guys 100 years ago beat up all the British Raj and forced them to leave India.

It’s totally insane, and it goes for over three delightful hours!

I’m not going to pretend that I watched this in a cinema – this was very much a case where Netflix was my friend and not the perpetual enemy to making choices that it usually is.

This film… You have to be in a particular mood, I guess, to watch this and enjoy its over-the-top over the topness. What whole sections capture here is the energy and insanity of the Hong Kong flicks I used to go and watch in Chinatown cinemas way back in the day, except somehow dialed up to a hitherto undiscovered number above “11” on the amplifier.

In no way should this movie be confused with either actual Earth history or Indian history. But it’s very much an anti-colonialist action epic, and I totally support anything anti-colonial, because honestly, empires are evil.

dir: Michael Bay

2022

There’s no two part collection of name and surname that chills the blood like “Michael” and “Bay”. “Michael” and “Myers” can chill the blood too, but that depends whether you’re afraid of the implacable enemy in the Halloween films, or you’re wondering why everything Mike Myers has done since the first Austin Powers has been so unremittingly terrible.

Michael Bay has made some of the loudest and dumbest films in Hollywood history, and whatever his age is, he’s not about to stop now. This is, somehow, a remake of a Danish film, which Bay might have heard about (I find it hard to believe he watches other people’s movies, it seems off-brand), where crims hijack an ambulance in order to flee from the authorities.

I haven’t seen that film, but I can guess quite easily that it is nowhere near as loud or fucking dumb as this flick. But I knew that coming into the experience. It’s a simple bet to take, because nothing can be as loud or as dumb as a Michael Bay flick.

This is not the place to have the argument as to whether Bay is a cancer on the body politic, or the body cinematic. Consider Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys, and the general bombast and dumbness they’ve contributed to our lives and minds. Then there’s the visually incoherent Transformers films, which are somehow even worse. If he’s made one okay movie it might be Pain & Gain, but even then he could barely resist his urges to overedit everything all of the time.

There are no such abstentions here, no urge unfulfilled, no screaming overamped moment held back or resisted. And now he’s adding swooping drone shots to his limited repertoire of “high energy” camerawork.

The premise is simplistic enough such that you’d be finding it difficult to justify as to why this flick needs to be as long as it is. I think it came in someone over two and a half goddamn hours. And all you get for that extra time, since there’s little to argue as to why it couldn’t just be 90 minutes or so, is just more scenes of an ambulance driving around being pursued by the cops, by all the cops of LA.

The implausible bit isn’t that Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers in this movie. The implausible bit is that an ambulance driven by crims through the streets of LA over the course of a very long day could somehow avoid traffic enough to drive more than 20 miles an hour.

This flick is a very simplistic bunch of pancakes, that are a bit overlarded. Only one character has a backstory to justify his actions, but everyone else just is who they are. The Will character fought in one of America’s recent endless conflicts overseas as a soldier, but comes back unable to find work, unable to afford the health care his wife desperately needs.

But he is a Good Man, don’t you know.

dir: Daniels

2022

I don’t just think this is now one of my favourite films of the year thus far, but it’s quite possible it’s somehow pushed aside a dozen other films in my consciousness to become one of my favourite films of all time.

Fuck you, Andrei Tarkovsky! Go to hell, Werner Herzog! Get out of my dreams and into the bin, Stanley Kubrick!

Maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I did enjoy the absolute fuck out of this flick, though.

This is an insane flick seemingly put together by two lunatics who egged each other on and kept saying to each other, possibly while stoned, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and then proceeded to film it.

That kind of anarchic spirit, which, let’s face it, rarely can survive the revision process or the years long production process of an actual film, somehow manages to retain a spontaneous and insane energy in a flick that I don’t imagine was easy to make or understand, especially for the people in it.

But thank you for making it all the same. Michelle Yeoh is generally wonderful in all of the movies she’s made for over 40 years, but she’s rarely the lead. She is definitely the lead here. She is all of the leads here.

The reason that she is multiple leads is that this flick posits that our universe is one of an infinite number of universes, all branching out from all the decisions we make and the ones we don’t make. Every time we make a choice from either a binary of choices, or an array of them, another universe branches off from that choice or from the opposite of that choice.

I’m not going to pretend I understand it on a metaphysical or cosmological level. I’m not even going to pretend that it makes sense or that these jerks were the first to come up with it. It’s obviously not a new idea, but this is their version of it, and they use it to both amuse us, the great unwashed in the audience, and to tell a touching story about regretting the path one has taken in life, and that having taken different paths wouldn’t necessarily have led to any better an outcome.

Evelyn Wang is tired, frazzled, overwhelmed. She moved to the States when young, was cut off from her family, operated a laundromat for years, had a daughter, and that’s about it. All she sees before herself is misery, and all she sees behind her is missed opportunities. Her daughter Joy is gay, and has a loving girlfriend, but Evelyn is too ashamed to admit to her perpetually disappointed father (played by the legendary James Hong) that his granddaughter is out of the closet.

dir: Daniel Espinosa

2022

Another week, another Marvel related extrusion from the Play Do factory.

If you’re wondering how or why this relates to anything to do with Marvel, it’s of the “very stupid” section of their back catalogue, the one that produces those terrible Venom movies; of characters no-one really cares about getting their own films played by people who know better but do panto during the summer break for extra money.

This, however, doesn’t it feel like it wants to or needs to even be anything vaguely connected to Marvel: it’s a dumb and generic vampire movie about a guy who turns himself into a vampire and fights another guy who’s a vampire and then kills that guy and it’s mostly done.

The end. No more to see here. Let’s hope.

What’s almost funny is that this doctor (Jared Leto, ugh) finds these bats, and decides to take their DNA, and put it in himself, and then he becomes like a bat, um, man? There’s even a scene where he stands in a circular glass chamber and the bats fly all around him, and there’s this Hans Zimmer music that sounds awfully like... that other film where a guy has an affinity for bats, and even dresses like one?

This flick is terrible, but not in enjoyable ways, just in generic ways. It’s not particularly horrible to watch, it’s just not that entertaining. Jared Leto speaks with an accent not of this earth, and yet he’s not playing an alien. Watching him simulate what he thinks is human behaviour is almost touching sometimes. It’s like watching a dog play the piano. He gets the idea of human interaction without the specifics that would make it seem like realistic human behaviour.

dir: Ti West

2022

Finally, a decent remake of Texas Chain Saw Massacre. It’s about bloody time.

No, it’s not a literal remake, unlike the appallingly dunderheaded update / remake / sequel / reboot that came out a couple of months ago, but it’s closer in spirit, aesthetics and setting, being Texas in the late 1970s (despite, you know, actually being filmed in New Zealand, of all places.)

X is a surprisingly good film. I say surprisingly because I did not expect it to be such a strong, well-thought out film, horror film or otherwise. And despite being an out and out horror flick, for the first hour you wouldn’t be certain of that, and in the last half hour you’d have no doubt.

The funny thing is, this flick has a theme, or almost a moral. And it’s not the one that “classic” horror flicks from the 1980s had, which is that young people should be punished for wanting sex and drugs and rock & roll, although it’s in parallel to that, in a way.

It’s about how terrible thwarted desire can be, how poisonous to the soul. Thwarted desire leads to mass murder, don’t you know?

A group of youngish libertines in the 1970s decide to travel to the sticks in order to make a “high quality” porno movie. The mood of the era is a dark one, with a heavy, moralising tone cast over everything. The only televisions we ever see have footage of a fire and brimstone preacher damning all us pleasureseekers to hell, droning on and on about how damned we all are for our libidinous, sinful ways.

This crew of travelling pornographers, on the most part, have zero qualms about what they’re doing. There is no coercion, no sadism, none of the callous disregard that generally typifies the “industry”. It’s a group of relatively young people just doing their thing, hoping they can elevate the “art form”, and having a good time along the way.

Is that a fantasy? I guess. It’s like, remember the early bits of Boogie Nights where everyone is having a great time, everyone’s high and there are no consequences to anyone’s actions yet?

dir: June Schoenbrun

2022

We’re not all really going to the World’s Fair. Only the select few.

The rest of us will be left behind, in our miserable isolation, desperately wanting to connect with someone whilst avoiding all meaningful human contact.

Describing this film will be somewhat difficult, at least for me. I am, as many people are happy to point out, quite old. Despite the fact that I try to have an understanding of contemporary stuff in the zeitgeist, there’s so much of it, and some of it is so ineffable, that it’s sometimes hard to grasp whatever the hell the latest thing the young ‘uns are obsessed with is.

I think this flick is about a subset of a subset of internet users who suck themselves into believing conspiracies that are patently untrue, But believing that stuff, no matter how outlandish, is the only way for them to wrest meaning from the chaos that is their existence.

There are pretty much only two characters / actors in this flick. We watch Casey (Anna Cobb) record videos of herself all throughout the movie. I’m no therapist, but I think it’s safe to say she’s an isolated, disconnected teenager, possibly grieving the death or departure of her mother. We never see her father, but we do see her bolt upstairs to her attic bedroom when he arrives home, or yelling at her from downstairs when she’s watching creepypasta horror videos at 3 in the morning at full volume.

I don’t think we see her go to school, or have a single scene with other humans in it. Her one interaction with another person is a skype call with some jerk who’s obsessed with her.

Before those warning bells start ringing, I don’t think this is a flick about the perils of predators on the internet, and what hazards kids face when their loneliness compels them to open up to strangers. It’s not a cautionary tale in the sense that “this could be your kid right now!!!” being sold into slavery or pursued by rapacious Republican politicians.

It’s more nuanced, in the sense that it’s about quite a depressed teen, who may be acting out, who may be disassociating, but who struggles for meaning, for a reason to go on.

And what does that look like in this present age? It’s a kid posting videos of themselves to an audience of nobodies in order to get a handful of likes or views. We’re not even talking about the people who go to insane lengths for subscribers and the like: they’re performing for fewer people than you’d see at an average bus stop.

So we wonder, how much of this is Casey losing the plot mentally, and how much of it is her choosing to buy into this elaborate (and yet absurdly simplistic) “game” called the World’s Fair, where people pretty much recite an incantation, smear blood on their screen, watch a strobing video, and then watch as parts of their bodies or brains start transforming in some way?

dirs: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

2022

If hell, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined in between abusing amphetamines and literary groupies, is other people, then families are a unique form of hell. And to be trapped with your family during a pandemic, well, we keep discovering lower and lower circles of hell all the time…

But imagine if your family, all its members, were immensely talented actors and filmmakers. Well, out of these despicable last few years, you could have made something quite special if you’d really tried.

When I mention that this flick is a family affair, it makes it sound like an amateurish set of home videos. It is nothing of the sort. Before I get carried away – I’m not implying this is the most heartwarming and uplifting movie made since Schindler’s List – I am however trying to say that this is a quite accomplished and pretty well put together horror film made by people who know what they’re doing, and they do it very well.

Yes, on the other hand you could see this as a director’s audition to try to convince metal bands to let the Adams – Poser family make all their next album’s film clips – I can see them making clips for Mastodon or Opeth or Baroness quite easily.

A lot of this flick has that vibe, and not only because the two main characters, Izzy (Zelda Adams) and her mother (Toby Poser) play doom-heavy music with lots of make-up on in their spare time.

They have a lot of spare time. They are a mother and daughter living in rural isolation. They play music, they do foraging stuff, they seem to get along okay, they do arty stuff. It seems like the perfect life if you like that sort of thing. The mum seems to fear… something. Either she’s worried about Izzy straying too far from the property, or she’s worried about something encroaching upon their hillbilly paradise.

Of course I’m leaving out the very beginning of the flick, which shows an array of women trying to hang and burn a woman that looks a lot like the mum, in those pilgrim / witchburning times, and yet it seems like they didn’t get their wish if she’s swanning about in the present age.

Izzy is a teenager, though, and bored, which is a dangerous combination. It seems like she’s never spent time with anyone else other than her mother. It could be because she has some kind of allergy or dangerous immunity condition, but like in real life that’s just some bullshit parents make up to keep their kids obedient.

As is inevitable, Izzy finds some teenagers doing some dumb stuff, and is drawn to them, and knows enough to keep this from her sainted mother. Of course a teenager would want to hang out with other teenagers. No matter how awesome one’s parent / parents are, you seek out peers, to compare, contrast, drink and have sex with etc.

I hesitate to say that it’s natural, as in a natural curiousity and urge, because this film is not about the natural urges all people might possess. It is, after all, a horror film.

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2022

This time that most of us lived through (and many didn’t get to) hasn’t spawned a lot of great films yet. I’m not implying that this is the first great pandemic flick. I’m implying this is the only good pandemic flick.

A lot of flicks have come out, have been impacted by lockdowns and such, have even tried to address this dreadful time, but it’s all too soon, all too lame. The best they’ve managed is some two-handers where a couple of actors yell at each other in a confined space with minimal crew for an hour and a half, never mentioning The War.

Instead of a two-hander, this flick staring Zoë Kravitz, who seems to be in everything at the moment, and is mostly a solo gig. As a shut-in IT worker ‘happily’ working from home during the pandemic, much of the flick transpires in the main character’s apartment.

On her lonesome, except when she occasionally has sex with a guy from across the street. The main character’s name is not Kimi: her name is Angela. “Kimi” is the alternative Alexa – instead of working for Amazon, Angela works for Amygdala, which might as well be called Amazon. Anyone with half a brain automatically thinks they’re talking about Amazon anyway, why bother with the charade, ya timid fucks?

Instead of Bezos drinking people’s blood and fucking their wives, the CEO of Amygdala is the one assuring the public in interview that the in-home voice activated device definitely isn’t harvesting people’s data when people haven’t activated it directly.

Of course, Angela’s job seems to be sifting through conversations recorded by the system for data useful to the company when they have no idea they’re being recorded.

dir: David Blue Garcia

2022

Terrible, just terrible.

Oh wait, I was talking about the current Federal election campaign, which is the worst I’ve seen since the 1990s. One other thing I haven’t seen since the 1990s – the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Is the original film good – does it stand the test of time? I can’t really say. I remember it as a terrifying and very weird film, one that has trained me, Pavlov’s dog-style, to recoil in terror every time I hear the sound of a Polaroid camera taking and printing one of its photos.

This flick, this one I’m talking about here, is a direct sequel to the original film. I am not making this up. This is meant to be the original Leatherface, the original one who chopped up Sally Hardesty’s annoying brother and friends in the original movie. How do I know this? No, they don’t get the original actor who played Sally to take part (she, being Marilyn Burns died in 2014), but she’s played by a nice leathery old lady called Olwen Fouere instead.

The thing is, and I don’t want to sound ageist, but while Sally looks like she can definitely kick some ass and shoot people, she is clearly feeling every one of the years that have passed since Leatherface killed her friends and family, tried to kill her, and failed. She’s the original Final Girl. But all that happened in 1973.

The year now, if you recently checked and marveled at what year this is, since it feels like 10 passed in the space of 3, is 2022. My math skills aren’t great, but that was like 49 years ago. Sally is in her 70s. So, not knowing exactly what age Leatherface was way back then, he is at least in his 70s, perhaps 80s.

Perhaps 90s? Is he an immortally strong chain saw wielding lunatic who derives some kind of supernatural power from chopping up people with a chainsaw, one that allows him to remain strong and impervious to damage? It’s certainly possible, because it’s the only reason I can think of as to why an octogenarian is still so spry.

I know some 80 year olds, and though some are far more active and with it than some people I know in their 40s, they often have difficulty opening cans or getting out of cars or walking without falling over.

dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green

2021

You know, I don’t want to talk about the obvious thing, at least not yet.

I did watch this flick, this long-arsed flick well before those infamous Oscars. And I remember wondering out loud “why does Will Smith like playing these boorish, selfish, blindly stubborn jerk fathers?”

People, we might have an answer.

He previously played the lead (when he was previously yearning for an Oscar) in a biopic about a homeless guy with a kid who somehow goes from sleeping on the floor of a public New York bathroom (with kid in tow) to be a millionaire stock broker because he someone managed to convince a guy that solving a Rubik’s cube meant he would be great at trading. That flick was called The Pursuit of Happyness. That also had remarkably tone-deaf scenes where a monster father is acting abusively towards his kid, but they try to ‘lighten’ the mood with a jaunty soundtrack.

This, well, this is another order of awfulness, and it too is based on a real person.

Then of course there’s the staggering idea that the real hero in Venus and Serena Williams’ rise to the top of the tennis world is really the story of how their monstrous father made it all happen.

Without him… what? The flick never really actually proves what seems like its reason for existing. Sure, there are scenes where Richard Williams, the king of the title, refuses to change his mind about something or farts loudly during a meeting to show how unimpressed he is with what’s being offered, but it never clearly actually proves what it wants to prove: that the only reason Venus or Serena became champions is because King Richard made it so.

dir: Guillermo Del Toro

2021

Ye gods, what a keen and dark flick.

Legendary Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro often makes movies about (older) movies, but rarely outright remakes older movies. This, though based on a book, is a remake of a film from the 1940s.

As well, as much as it might sound like blasphemy to say this, I don’t always like or even get Del Toro’s movies. I love what his crew do visually with the visual language of film, but sometimes, or quite often, I find it almost impossible to connect to the characters.

I didn’t have that problem with what I think was his last film, The Shape of Water, which I watched on a plane, back when that was a thing people did, which won a bunch of stuff. It’s had a bit of a backlash against it since then, but also the last time I mentioned it to someone in a conversation about movies, neither of us could remember the name of the film.

I am not going to have that problem here. This is a masterful, controlled, perfectly realised vision of a Depression-era story about an amoral chancer who thinks he’s too smart to ever pay the price for his deceptions, but he very much gets his comeuppance.

And how. It’s not the first time Bradley Cooper has played a too smart for his own good arsehole (as in Limitless), but this time it’s in the service of a story slightly more grounded in cold reality, or at least a reality closer to recognisable from the 1930s. It’s a hard-scrabble time, everyone’s poor, everyone is desperate for a meal and a few cents. Stan (Cooper), after having some kind of grim experience at some house on fire, stumbles into a circus, and tries to make himself useful in order to have a roof over his head.

It’s the standard travelling circus of that era that is deeply ingrained in our (Western, of a certain age) consciousness: tormented animals, people with deformities or physical differences for audiences to gawk at, and then something much worse.

We forget, because the term has such ubiquity and none of the stigma anymore, but a geek was a particular thing, back in the day. And if we watch the flick, and listen carefully, we’ll learn anew what a geek started off being, rather than a catch-all term for anyone that liked computers and comic books a little bit too much.

dir: Matt Reeves

2022

Something’s in the way, indeed.

I was reading an article recently, which tried to argue, probably successfully, that each time a new Batman reboot / movie comes out, it reflects something about contemporary American society.

Okay, but does that mean the rest of us did something to deserve those ones where Ben Affleck is Batman, and shoots a bunch of people? Was that our fault?

I mention the article, because there’s something probably right but also daftly obvious about such an argument. Of course Batman flicks can be said to represent something at the time they come out, but you can say exactly the same thing about whenever a new Sharknado or Tyler Perry Madea flick or when a new Jackass flick comes out: they all represent something about their “time”, plus how much money they have to play with, and what lazy commentary they’re trying to muster for relevance.

Did Nolan’s / Christian Bale’s Batman flicks say anything beyond how much we miss Heath Ledger? Rich guy fights crime in corrupt city because of childhood trauma. Michael Keaton’s Batman? Rich guy fights crime in corrupt city because of childhood trauma? George Clooney’s Batman? Rich guy fights crime in corrupt city with a costume that has nipples and people lose their fucking minds?

Zach Snyder’s / Affleck ‘s Batman? Batman should be able to kill crims because that’s what awesome guys do in slow motion.

I would like to give Reeves / Pattinson the benefit of the doubt, but so far what they have is a rich, isolated weirdo who wants revenge for his parent’s murder, who wears heavy emo eye makeup not because he needs to, but because he maybe still has a poster of Brandon Lee as The Crow on the wall of his bedroom, and who most people, crims cops or otherwise think is just some weird guy.

The world he fights for is one city, being Gotham, which is somehow trapped in the 1930s in its art deco architecture, 1970s New York for its filth, grimy aesthetics and fashion, and the 1990s for its music. If you don’t believe me, the slowest, moodiest Nirvana song, being Something in the Way, plays multiple times throughout the film, just in case we were going to get excited about anything.

Ooo ooo.

(ドライブ・マイ・カー, Doraibu mai kā)

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2021

This film is a lot. There’s 3 hours of it. It’s mostly people talking. If you’re into that, well, this will be a treasure for you.

If not, the lack of explosions and action could be perplexing. Also, it probably helps if you’re a fan of Japanese dramas in general and the writing of Haruki Murakami specifically.

Taken from his short story collection Men Without Women, Drive My Car also uses elements from some of the other stories in the book, so it’s not a straight retelling of that story.

Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an actor and theatre director. A lot of people not including his wife think that he is the bee’s knees, or whatever the Japanese equivalent is thereof. His wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) is a tv screenwriter, and she has this habit of spinning stories either during or after sex. Though they seem loving, there is a cold sadness somehow sitting between them.

When Yusuke tries to catch a plane but is delayed, and arrives home unexpectedly, he finds that he’s not the only one that enjoys Oto’s bedbound storytelling talents.

He does not confront her, or let on at all. But soon tragedy strikes, and Oto passes away.

At exactly 40 minutes into the film, the opening credits roll. I thought it was, kind of, a joke, but the more I thought about it, it was just a long prelude explaining who these people were, what they had, all before the “story” proper begins.

(قهرمان Ghahreman)

dir: Asghar Farhadi

2021

It’s another great film by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. How does he keep making films so consistently great? I mean that literally, because every other great Iranian director ends up in prison eventually.

If nothing else I would have thought the Revolutionary Guards would have sifted through his films suspiciously for any hint of anti-establishment sentiment, and punished him for it. They always, invariably, find what they’re looking for.

Farhadi doesn’t make it easy for them. He himself says his work is never political, which, everyone else immediately thinks “that makes it even more political than before!”

To a western ignoramus such as myself, well of course I’m not going to get subtle references to critiquing the regime if and when it occurs, but the mere fact that an Iranian flick exists and its main topic is the complexity of life in modern Iran itself is a criticism of how fucking bonkers life is with a theocratic viciously authoritarian state in charge of things.

A Hero has a seemingly simple premise: a guy in debtor’s prison tries to find a way to pay off his debt to his former brother-in-law in order to be set free, and with each minute that passes finds new ways to complicate things and new levels of intricate complexity. Life in Shiraz (not the wine, but the city from which I guess the wine takes its name) is not easy.

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) seems like a happy go lucky type. As soon as he’s out of prison on leave for a couple of days, he calls on his brother-in-law, who seems to be working as an…archaeologist at the tomb of Xerxes? The brother-in-law is Rahim’s conduit to the man who is keeping Rahim in jail.

And that chap happens to be… Rahim’s ex-brother-in-law through marriage. That guy, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), you’d think would have to be some kind of angry jerk for keeping the young, charming Rahim in debtor’s prison for no good reason.

Except that’s not quite the case. While Bahram is angry, and inflexible, he does not trust Rahim’s protestations or honeyed promises about money raining from the sky. And he fears that Rahim will try to do something to stop his sister from remarrying (someone we never see).

I don’t claim to understand the money that’s at stake here, but I think I recall Bahram saying the amount owed, as in, the money he’d given Rahim to pay off a loan shark for a business venture that went sideways was 150 million toman, which works out to around $50,000 in Australian terms.

That’s a fair chunk of change. By some twist of fate, Rahim comes into possession of a handbag with 17 gold coins in it, and hopes that they will discharge most of his debt, and get him out of prison. The problem is, the coins are only worth about half of the debt owed, and Bahram has no interest in being generous.

dir: Chad Hartigan

2021

Just to be clear, this isn’t a review of the really great Australian flick from 2005 that starred Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving of the same name – this is a recent flick called Little Fish, and it couldn’t be more different from the earlier flick if it tried.

This Little Fish is more of a romantic drama about a young married couple, in a world where a condition or a virus takes people’s memories away. I know that sounds just like this world, like with traumatic brain injuries or early onset dementia or a bunch of other conditions that rob people daily of parts of themselves, but the difference here is that it’s happening to hundreds of millions of people of all ages at the same time.

People instantly forget how to do things they’ve known how to do their whole lives. People forget themselves, and the people closest to them, instant strangers. Some memories stick around longer, especially sense based ones, and there’s no rhyme or reason to it, and no way to protect yourself from it or to stop it.

This sounds like the prelude to yet another flick about societal collapse and the apocalypse, but it’s nothing like that. Its scale is small and intimate. We see the changes this affliction brings about, but mostly we’re seeing what happens to two people and those closest to them.

Emma (Olivia Cooke) and Jude (Jack O’Connell) are the main couple, and they are married, and they’re starting to see the effects of the so-called affliction on those around them. And when it starts happening to Jude, forgetting little things, tiny aspects of their shared history, Emma tries to keep him present by endlessly replaying their past, to see which details he still possesses and which are gone.

Can they be retained? Can they come back? Can you still love someone when you’ve forgotten all the moments that lead up to falling in love with them? Is love based on memory, or can you still feel the feeling even if the memories are gone?