Action

(길복순)

dir: Byun Sung-hyun

2023

The main character in this flick is called Gil Bok-soon (ably played by Jeon Do-yeon). She is so good at her job as a professional killer that she has earned the nickname “Kill” Bok-soon, despite the fact that, eh, Kill isn’t a Korean word.

But we non-Koreans might get it. We might think “Hey, this Netflix flick has “Kill” in the title, like Kill Bill, or Kill Your Darlings, or To Kill a Mockingbird, I should watch it! At least until I get enough tips on how to kill mockingbirds.”

It would seem that this flick transpires in the same universe as the John Wick movies, in that there don’t really seem to be any cops around, and if they exist, they’re part of the “establishment” anyway. And this weird criminal underworld operates within a strict set of rules.

All assassinations in this world are controlled by MK Enterprises. The person at the top decides who is to be killed, by whom, and how. The “work” is then allocated to the top employees of the various “companies”, as in, gangs of assassins, who then have to create a “show”.

These are the three rules – no children, no stealing work from other crews, and the job absolutely always has to be completed.

I don’t know how much of this is lost in translation, but maybe it’s lots of it. What’s clear is that Bok-soon, (I think?) a middle-aged single mother, is at the top of her hierarchy. She is A-list. She works for the MK of the MK Ent., being the slightly older Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), the guy who effectively rules the entire underworld.

dir: Peyton Reed

2023

The Ant-Man flicks at least previously had the purpose of being lower stakes, a bit silly, a bit goofy, and more comedic than the serious / serious universe ending crap.

Now, no-one trusts that Paul Rudd on his own, with the help of his mates, and occasionally his girlfriend, is enough to carry a flick. Now it has to be him against a multiverse spanning supervillain who, I dunno, wants to control everything. Why can’t he just steal some shit and help people out?

Nup, they have to use his flick to presage the entry of another Thanos-type villain, except this time he’s like the worst person in every single universe, so even if they kill a whole bunch of him / them, there’s plenty more where he came from.

Most of the flick transpires in the Quantum Realm, a realm below the sub-atomic, which is basically considered to be just a freaky looking place where there’s people and strange organisms, and sentient broccoli-headed dudes, but mostly it’s just like yet another planet in Star Wars. Some of the visuals are okay. Mostly it’s just a missed opportunity.

The flick hinges a lot on Janet Van Dyne’s character (Michelle Pfeiffer) not having told anyone about what she got up to for 30 years when she was trapped in the Quantum Realm. It’s been years, but she never thought to tell anyone about how there was a super scary tyrant that she helped rise to power, or that she banged Bill Murray. You would think she would have told someone about that, but then again, maybe she regretted it a tad.

The sex with Bill Murray, I mean, not the tyrant-enabling, but then I’m not completely sure.

dir: Jean-François Richet

2023

PLANE! It’s called PLANE. Not even “THE” Plane. Not even Airplane!

Just PLANE. I would love to know why. I mean, perhaps the motivation or the thinking behind it isn’t that complex. After all, there is definitely a plane in this movie. But someone must have thought “fuck it, we’ll just call it Plane” after arguing for weeks. But why name it after that one object?

There are also other objects, other machines in this movie. At one point a telephone, an old landline, plays a crucial role in the story. I notice they didn’t call the movie PHONE. They could have called it GUN, or Plane Crash. Something simple, something declamatory. I mean Titanic was about a boat called the SS Titanic which sank a while back. They could have called it Boat by that logic.

I mean, this plane has a name too. The Trailblazer 119. No, too complicated, from a marketing perspective, as a title. Too frontloaded. Requires too much thinking. People will wonder what happened to the other 118 Trailblazers before this one.

I mean, what even is a thing? A plane? Is it the object itself, or what it does, or what happens to it? Do we assume that this plane is itself the Platonic ideal of a plane, or the essence of planeness? Or is it a stand-in, a symbol, representing all planes, all possible planes? You know what you are getting when you call a movie Plane. There will be a plane. And you will look at it, and think “that’s a plane, all right. Looks pretty CGI and fake, but it’s definitely a plane.”

Or could they even had been more subversive and called it Generic Movie Title? Now for that I would pay even more good money to see. Snakes on a Plane had snakes on a plane, and classic short film Football in the Groin had a football in the groin, but Plane?

It’s set mainly on a train in Spain while it rains.

dir: Colin Trevorrow

2022

Wow, okay, so some movies have a million things in them and still feel kinda empty.

The first film in this stupid new trilogy had only one good moment in it, which was a strange half second or so where a resort under attack by flying dinosaurs has one guy slowly trying to get away from the monsters even though he’s trying not to spill two very large margaritas that he’s carrying.

That was it. A second or two at most that made me laugh, or possibly chortle, in a film that was probably 13 hours long. The second flick Fallen Kingdom I don’t really remember despite having seen it, but I will guess that about the only good moment was a ruthless capitalist auctioning off dinosaurs getting eaten by said dinosaurs towards the end of the film.

It's that classic moment of “Why, I never thought that I, the smarmy vicious chap releasing face eating monsters into the world would ever ironically get MY face eaten off!!”

This latest flick Dominion doesn’t have a lot going for it despite having 400 main characters and a constant hail of call backs to the earlier films, especially the 1st one. It also brings back Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, again for very little good reason.

But the main chumps of the new trilogy were meant to be Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and either some clone girl or a velociraptor called Blue (Tilda Swinton, probably). They’re here too, but you are asking yourself why these people are here, why any of them are here.

Dinosaurs, now, by the time of this flick, are all over the world, even the cold places. They are not confined to an island paradise or some rich jerk’s palatial estate: They’re everywhere!

But they’re not even the big deal here. The big deal, or the world ending threat is that a very rich fuckhead (Campbell Scott) has genetically engineered monstrous locusts that eat every crop in the world except for the ones engineered by his company Biosyn. His plan is…

What is his plan again? If everyone starves to death then their ghosts will come to his company to buy his grain? Ghost cap in ghost hand? How was that plan going to play out?

Stupid decisions made by billionaires are the bread and butter not only of this entire series of dinosaur films but also of most of the science fiction that comes out these days. The thing is, they’ve completely gone beyond the idea of Olympian arrogance or hubris by the massively wealthy being the cause of their own downfall, to “well, that last billionaire was not rich or smart enough, but I’m sure I’m smart and rich enough to make it work”.