Action

dir: Anna Foerster

2022

Lou is the kind of ovaries-to-the-wall action flick starring an older American tv / film movie icon (at least to me) that you rarely if ever get to see these days.

Many action flicks come out every year. They’re perfect for people who hate too much dialogue or speaking or people reaching out to each other across the emotional divide that seems infinite until it isn’t. Lou is tough and uncompromising, and almost dares you not to like it.

Lou (the great Allison Janney) is a no bullshit, no sentiment woman living on an island in the Pacific North West. She has a dog and doesn’t even really seem to like the dog that much, but she does feed him, usually fresh deer that she kills herself.

With her BARE HANDS. Joking. She shoots them THEN finishes them off.

There is a storm coming to the island (of course). On the news that she spies in a local store, or it might have been the bank, Ronald Reagan is denying that any of the Iran / Contra stuff ever happened, or having any involvement in any of it, which was of course a lie. Lou is looking at the screen like maybe she can melt Reagan with her rage alone. It’s funny, because you get the impression that, for whatever reason, Lou personally knows how much what Reagan is saying is pure bullshit.

It’s also telling us when this is all happening. It’s the 80s. There aren’t a lot of Kate Bush needle drops or Madonna hairstyles or fingerless gloves, or kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a just a time and place with no mobiles, and few ways to get around on an island without a vehicle.

We watch, as the film begins, an entire sequence where Lou, for reasons of her own, digs up something on her property, burns some stuff, writes a letter to someone, then puts the barrel of a rifle under her chin and prepares to pull the trigger. The story then winds back the day leading up to this moment, and shows it to us again in more detail before it progresses any further.

dir: Roar Uthaug

2022

No, it’s not about social media trolls. No, it’s not about the new king of the online trolls, being Elmo Husk. It’s about an actual, honest to goodness giant Troll that wreaks havoc upon the good people of Norway.

This is a film you have seen, if you’ve seen movies, many times before. You probably haven’t seen that many Norwegian movies, but that hardly matters. You have seen movies where a giant creature of some description and some origin wrecks a bunch of shit, kills a bunch of people, can’t be stopped with guns, and only stops right before the end credits, thanks to…something.

It’s easy to call it a monster movie, or, if you think the Japanese should have a monopoly on these kinds of movies, you’d call it a kaiju movie. It’s very much a kaiju movie, except with a giant troll instead of Godzilla.

Because this is a very crowd-pleasing version of this kind of movie, they even say “Godzilla” and “King Kong” a bunch of times. They want you to know that it’s that kind of movie. So they helpfully tell us.

The main character of this flick is a palaeontologist. It’s never good when government officials seek out palaeontologists for anything. Mayhem, and likely murder will ensue. But what I found funny is that something happens that the government can’t account for, they get the palaeontologist on board, ask her opinion, and then go “this chick is fucking nuts”, and then laugh at her.

Why ask the palaeontologist in the first place, you Norwegian rollmop-eating jerks? If you were never going to entertain her ideas, why bring her along?

It’s no good seeing footage of giant footprints and then scoffing when people say “they’re giant footprints”. When you do that, you should know you’re the real villain in the movie, and not the monster.

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: 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.”