Action

dir: Lee Isaac Chung

2024

Genius. Whoever was working in the marketing department for this film, whose decision it was to call it Twisters, you, sir or madam, or non-binary equivalent, are a platinum-plated, stone-cold genius. First movie was called Twister. Do you even reckon they bothered with brainstorming titles? “Uh, Twister 2?”

What about…Twis2er? Twister II, more old school perhaps, or maybe 2 Twist 2 Furious?

Nup. Nope. Twisters. And then when they make the sequel to this, they have the next, absolutely perfect title: Twisti3s. I smell marketing opportunities galore!

Bold, lots of bold choices going into this film. Especially since there’s practically nothing connecting the two films, other than they’re about idiots chasing tornadoes and then getting scared and having to hide from the same tornadoes.

It never occurred to me before, but the perplexity I face watching these special kinds of disaster flicks was somewhat alleviated when I realised, during the ‘intense’ moments in the film, that they’re really not that different from monster / kaiju movies, in that tornadoes are gigantic mindless forces of nature that destroy everything in their path. And when done right, the little people running around admit they have no power over anything, and are at the mercy of a cruel yet somehow indifferent universe. In the bad versions of these stories, the pathetic humans think they are the ones in control, and they can do things to make the bad giant monsters / tornadoes go away.

(Sous la Seine)

dir: Xavier Gens

2024

Shark movies are pretty simple. Sharks eat people. And yet the list of really good shark-based action flicks is pretty short. There’s of course Jaws. There’s The Shallows. Maybe Deep Blue Sea, but we’re tipping over into camp territory here, which leaves us with the deliberate z-grade insanity and inanity of Sharknado, and that’s it. The sequels of even these decent flicks are uniformly terrible, but that’s okay.

The template is set. Sharks still eat people. The person that knows about the shark isn’t believed until it’s too late. And then there’s always the temptation to fuck with that simplicity, which is rarely resisted.

Jaws 4: The Revenge has many jaw-dropping scenes, all for the wrongest of reasons, but, other than the shame of admitting that I’ve watched it, there’s the admission that I carry the cursed knowledge that only this movie could provide audiences.

There’s the (insane, stupid, utterly bonkers) notion that these large sharks can harbour specific malice against particular people and their families. The widow of Chief Brody (Lorraine Gary) from the first two flicks, intones with a slightly manic but also weary tone that it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her beloved husband, it was really The Shark! Which shark, since they killed all those sharks? No, it was the Fear of the Shark that killed him! And now it’s (another large shark, for some reason) again after The Brodys. Because it can somehow track them across the world, having sniffed their DNA, maybe. And it must have its Revenge! Or are they the ones getting Revenge because they somehow killed the hero of the first two Jaws with their Fear voodoo?

Who knows? Not me, and not the makers of any of these movies. Xavier Gens has clearly seen all of the shark movies, as have many of us, and has made one that gets the whole thing right, based on the original’s template. It gets it right even down to the memorable detail of having a mayor be an obstacle to public safety because of a grasping aspiration towards power and financial concerns.

dir: David Leitch

2024

If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you would occasionally see me ask the question “who is this for” or “what is the intended audience for this flick?” Sometimes it’s rhetorical, because I can’t figure it out. Other times I’m making the statement to shame the filmmakers for pandering to a particular imagined section of society.

And if you haven’t read any of my reviews, you wouldn’t have noticed that, and you’re not reading this now, or ever, so, yes, I am talking to myself again.

Other times I ask myself the question while watching a film, and then I figure it out as a painful realisation dawns upon me.

Why you would be using fifty year old KISS songs on a soundtrack, why you would have multiple references to the Miami Vice tv show, why you would even resurrect a tv show from the 80s that this arises from, that starred Lee Majors, why you would then have visual and auditory call backs to The Six Million Dollar Man, which also starred Majors, why you would even be talking about the mechanics of filmmaking and the logistics of stuntwork, and then have an abundance of other references to the ancient times of yore?

And then it hit me, and I felt a deep, deep shame. The audience, imagined or otherwise, was me, specifically me, and other fat movie nerds of my exact vintage.

Much younger people than I, like, my kid’s age, don’t care about movies and don’t know, or get, any references earlier than the late 2000s. People older than me routinely yell “EH?” and cup their hand over one of their ears because they didn’t quite hear what you just said, or they didn’t understand most of the words you used in a sentence. You would say “it was a tv show in the 80s with Lee Majors”, and then they’d think you were talking about Lee Marvin, and start talking about how great he was in Cat Ballou and what a lovely singing voice he had in Paint Your Wagon.

dir: Adam Wingard

2024

I thought it would be “funny” to review Godzilla Minus One, a ‘serious’ throwback take on the genre that reviewers treated like it was Important and Meaningful, and then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which no-one thought was important and meaningful, but does have no Japanese people in it and giant creatures fighting each other which totally don’t exist as a metaphor about scientific hubris or humanity’s place in the universe or anything, for that matter

I set myself these pointless little tasks because it amuses me, and it just makes my life harder for no good reason, but I stick to my pointless and arbitrary tasks, because someone has to…

So having watched the Toho - Japanese retro version, I am now set to review the ‘American’ version, which is from the Chinese film production company Legendary Films.

They could not be more different. I am sure such statements shock and confound the reader. This has far more scenes of giant creatures trashing and thrashing each other, killing probably hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not a big deal anymore? In this world that they’ve put together, which initially mimicked the progression of the Japanese monster flicks by having Godzilla fight more and more monsters, instead has conjured a world where, yes, many of these so called Titans exist, but there’s also this supra-government entity called Monarch that tries to control or nudge the Titans depending on what they’re doing.

You might think their main task would be saving people’s lives but that wouldn’t look as interesting on the big screen, I guess.

And I didn’t really mind, to be honest. These Godzilla versus or Kong times etc flicks have zero regard for human life except for whoever the filmmakers put forward as the representatives of humanity, because tonnes of faceless people die, since the major punch ups always happen in populated areas, but it’s accepted as like the cost of doing business.

If all you want is to watch CGI Godzilla fight CGI King Kong, and then CGI other giant creatures, why would you care about the humans at all? Humans are like puny ants at the feet of these gods.