Biography

dir: Christopher Nolan

2023

Oppenheimer is everything you expect from a Christopher Nolan film, right down to your ears bleeding because the sound is mixed so loud that you suspect he wants to deafen audiences worldwide just for shits and giggles, or to get back at us for not liking Tenet that much.

Or at least convince them that what they are lucky enough to be watching is the single most important film they’ve watched since the last Christopher Nolan film.

It’s hard to argue that it’s not an important story, in that whatever this Oppenheimer guy did, it changed the world and killed countless people. It changed the geopolitical order and ushered in the atomic age, which was, I guess, a good thing(?) This movie, which is three fucking hours long, makes the case that the man was brilliant, was an absolute pussyhound (I’m sorry, it’s a crass, anachronistic phrase, but I can’t think of a better modern equivalent), and he felt just terrible after helping bring atomic weapons into the world.

At the very least he felt quite conflicted. Ambivalent, even.

Three hours…three fucking hours. I wish I could cleanly and decisively delineate those three hours into three distinct parts. I can’t, really. The whole movie flits back and forth between multiple time lines, because we all know the harshest insult Nolan fears is being called a basic bitch who makes chronologically linear movies with clear timelines.

Not for him. Not for Christopher Nolan. Nuh-huh.

dir: Ben Affleck

2023

A generous way to talk about this flick is to describe it as a mildly entertaining biopic about the guy who put together the deal that resulted in the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe, which changed the game as it related both to sneakers as consumer products and the arrangements basketball stars would have with merchandising companies for ever more.

A less generous approach would be to say it’s a movie about a fucking shoe.

This is Australia. We used to call them runners, no matter their purpose, though I guess the kids of today probably don’t call them that. But, yes, back in the day, whether they were Dunlop Volleys or branded stuff with logos or the knockoffs you got from the Victoria Market, we called them runners, regardless of how much or little running you actually did in them

I’ve never owned a pair of Air Jordans. I’ve never really aspired to own a pair, and, to be more accurate, have rarely been in a position to be able to afford a pair. Taking out a mortgage in order to secure a pair of shoes designed for basketball players, being a sport I do not play, seems extravagant even for me, and I waste money on all sorts of nonsense. But I know what they are. I know of them. Billions of people know what they are. Surely that means they are important, as, I dunno, some kind of cultural artefact?

I mean, I just wrote that, and I’m not really convinced. It’s a thing, a highly sought after thing that has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Nike and millions of dollars for Michael Jordan personally, but so fucking what? Tulips, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, iPods, Harry Potter books, all sorts of useless crap have generated billions of dollars for a select few.

And there’s no pseudo-docos about them. I guess I should be talking about the flick more in line with how Tetris approached the topic, being less about the money, and more about the unlikely result (of besting the combined fury of the mighty USSR and mogul Robert Maxwell in order to steal some computer program from them).

dir: Steven Spielberg

2022

It’s kinda funny that the most successful director of all time has been kvetching and nervy about making a film about his own life for over two decades.

Most directors might incorporate autobiographical elements into their screenplays, especially someone who’s made as many films as Spielberg, thus obviating the need to maybe have to do their own biopics, but, really, there probably isn’t anyone that should have to talk Senor Spielbergo out of anything.

Both Spielberg, and Spielbergo, his non-union Mexican equivalent, have done enough for both cinema in general and the film industry specifically. He should get the chance to shine whatever light he wants on his own origin story. It’s only fair.

It doesn’t necessarily make it that interesting for viewers. For all his achievements, his life story isn’t interesting, perhaps not as interesting as his achievements. It’s, like, the average stuff of life, told with Technicolor brightness and bland, shiny perfection.

But he’s a person, he grew up, he experienced stuff. He had parents. He has sisters. Things happened.

He, being Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in this version, became obsessed with cinema after watching a train crash when his parents took him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. As a nervous, fearful child, recording a toy train crashing over and over again allowed him to feel in control for the first time in his life.

How do I know this? Because Sammy’s mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) specifically sets it out for us, telling her husband (Paul Dano) that it must be the case like the dime store psychologist that she is.

Sammy is off and away, obsessed with movies and movie-making now, to the detriment of any other human relationships around him, but other people aren’t as film obsessed. They’re more fixated on life and love and … that’s about it.

The dad is completely dismissive of his son’s hobby, as he calls it, and it becomes, at least for me, a hilarious illustration of certain parents and their expectations, and how they can never be satisfied.

In real life his dad was called Arnold, but in the flick he’s called Burt Fabelman. You can imagine in life that even later on once his son conquered the world of cinema, if he ever introduced himself to people, and they would ask if he was related to Steven Spielberg, and he replied in the affirmative, you can imagine people going berserk with praise.

And then you can imagine Burt / Arnold muttering, “yeah, but still he’s no doctor.”

dir: Eric Appel

2022

Somedays I’ll take ‘reasonably fun’ over flat out hilarious. And this is fun and silly, and so it should be.

It purports to be a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic, but I’m pretty sure, other than the inclusion of a character called Al Yankovic and the inclusion of many of his songs, none of this really pretends to be about his actual life.

You can look at it two ways (at least, I mean, you’re free to look at it from thousands of perspectives if you choose); In wanting to parody the whole biopic format of famous musicians, they do a parody of a parody, closer to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story rather than Walk the Line, The Johnny Cash story, a film that had Reese Witherspoon playing June Carter Cash actually saying to people “You boys ain’t Walking the Line”.

Which one is the parody, I ask you. Anyway, the other way to look at it is that Al Yankovic the man is not really the kind of person whose life would make for interesting tabloid or trashy biopic fodder. Regardless or despite his success infecting our brains with his catchy parodies in the 80s and 90s, he never let that ruin him the way money and fame, or the pursuit of such, have ruined countless others. At the peak of his success he got married, he’s a Christian, he’s never been a drinker…so that’s about it.

For him and for the screenwriters here, it’s far more entertaining to create an alternative history version of both Earth history and the history of Yankovic’s life and untimely death (he’s still alive, I assure you), one which only occasionally connects with actual world history.

I say this knowing full well that the array of comedians, hacks and actors happy to have tiny cameos in the flick are probably happy to do so out of a) love of Al Yankovic or b) love of attaching themselves remora-like to anything that will see their mugs appear onscreen, but it’s great to see all these shmucks in one place, playing other shmucks of the 80s. There are some entirely surreal scenes where moderately famous stand-ups are playing moderately famous B and C listers of the past. If you know who they are and who’s they’re playing, it’s mildly amusing.

If you have no idea who they are, or who they’re playing (ie. by some unlikely sequence of events you are under 30 and you are somehow reading one of my reviews as well), it will mean nothing, and you’re probably only watching it because you love the Harry Potter books or movies so much you see Daniel Radcliffe in every single thing he’s in.