Biography

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

dir: Jon S. Baird

2023

There are (unfortunately or fortunately) lots of movies based on games, but less movies about the games themselves, or about the creation of those games.

Or, even more boringly, practically no movies about someone desperately trying to get the regional licensing rights for a game. A goddamn game. Contracts and stuff.

Not just any game, though. Tetris, the best-selling and most played game of all time.

I know, I know that something like this should be dull as fucking dishwater. And let’s be honest, in reality, it would be. A documentary about this would probably be pretty fucking dull, even more so than most documentaries are about whatever their subjects might be.

But I think, as inconsequential as this flick probably is, they get the approach right, in that they give us an idea of just how fucking important it was to the people who were involved, who put their entire lives on the line, just to give the rest of us a few hours of amusement.

Plus, it was Tetris what brought down the Berlin Wall and destroyed the Soviet Union, doncha know?

Henk Rogers is not exactly a household name, and nor will it be after this. I’ve watched the film, and read the Wikipedia entry on him, and to me he’s just a guy with a moustache. There are other guys with moustaches. The actor playing him grows a moustache; a nice, solid triangular one. A weird moustache, but most / all moustaches are weird, and I say that as a man who has one, hidden within a goatee/mo combination.

Other than that, what defines him? He’s a guy, played by Taron Egerton, who foresees early that computer games are going to be the next big consumer purchase, back in the 1980s. Being the late 80s at that, he’s not exactly a prescient seer or anything – it’s already happening, and he’s just trying to jump on the bandwagon. All he needs is one great game.

And he sees it, on someone else’s computer, at a different stall at the Consumer Electronics Show that year.

dir: Baz Luhrmann

2022

I would say I’m in two minds about this flick, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. This is a Barry Luhrmann film after all.

His films, at their best, are hysterical, over-edited monstrosities where performances take a distant back seat to hyper-editing and high energy sequences that try to obscure the vast emptiness underneath. All the great costuming and set design, all the impassioned, arch performances are thrown into a blender and shattered into a perplexing array of disparate shards, and then poured out through a firehose onto an unsuspecting and unwilling audience.

That’s overstating things, surely. He has birthed one utter monstrosity into this world, being the film that summarised Australia called, um, Australia, which is so terrible that around its release it resulted in a massive shortage in negative adjective descriptors, because they were all used up in describing the sheer multitude of ways in which it achieved peak terribleness.

And I guess Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge have their fans. Great Gatsby doesn’t have any fans and sleeps very much alone, but is almost worth it entirely for that great shot of DiCaprio raising that champagne glass to the peak crescendo moment scored with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

It’s an insane, overdone, peak cheesy moment done to perfection. Luhrmann has always been better suited to film clips and laundry detergent commercials than he ever could be at long form movies.

What is a movie, anyway? Is it a collection of moments strung together thematically to both highlight individual moments but also deliver an overarching flow that’s meant to congeal in our brains as everything connects together, leaving us with some lasting impressions and feelings about people and places?

This Elvis film, for the most part, is incapable of doing that. It does not want to tell a coherent story about Elvis’s life or about what made Elvis a phenomenon. Only a fool watches a Luhrmann film wanting a coherent anything about anything.

There is a unifying, over-arching connector throughout all of this (it’s over two and a half hours long), but unfortunately that’s part of what makes it such a fucking disjointed slog to get through – the terrible narration of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, ugh), telling us Elvis’s story through the lens of when Colonel Parker started exploiting the poor boy in the 1950s, through to the poor boy’s death in the 70s at the age of 42.

(Ο Άνθρωπος του Θεού)

dir: Yelena Popovic

2021

It’s…strange. My path to tracking down and watching this flick is an odd one. A few weeks ago I watched a Greek film called Apples about a world where people get amnesia spontaneously but still have to get on with their lives, which wasn’t that world-shaking, but had a guy in the central role who was a bit interesting.

And then I saw that he had another film that came out in 2021, and thought that I would give that a go.

It’s actually (mostly, 99 per cent) in English, despite the setting and the nationality of most of the actors. It’s about a Greek Orthodox saint, which I can’t imagine a lot of people who don’t already speak Greek could possibly care about. And it’s set in the 1890s which, I dunno, is it a decade that has a lot of diehard fans? I mean, I know the kids of today are strangely and offputtingly fixated on the 1990s, which I find very disconcerting, especially because I was there, and remember what we did back then, but I struggle to imagine the audience that could exist for something about a religious weirdo from over a century ago.

So, well. Films don’t have to have built-in audiences for my purposes, because I’m not an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or in fact anyone with enough money to invest in icy poles. I care if I enjoy a film or not, and then I think about why afterwards.

There is something compelling about the character study provided here (rather than the biopic aspects). Arvis Servetalis, as Nectarios of Aegina, gives a very committed performance as the saint, played as a man who so completely believes what he preaches that the other members of the Greek Orthodox Church (literally referred to as the Patriarchy, I’m not making that up) fear and resent him. Because he’s not into his faith solely for the accumulation of wealth, and actually wants to help people, however high he rises, he inspires hatred in the other priests because they fear he’ll give the Church’s wealth away to those who really need it.

The film starts off in Alexandria, Egypt, with there being a guy, a priest, well, actually more like the equivalent of a bishop (a metropolite, as he is referred to in the movie), who is beloved by everyone who he comes into contact with, absolutely everyone except, you guessed it, the other priests and metropolites, especially. These men with flowing beards and awesome headgear sit around plotting against him. The main reason is that they fear that, because Nectarios is so awesome, and because so many people adore him, that he’d be a shoo-in to be the next Patriarch of Alexandria.

What is a Patriarch? He’s not just an old guy, or someone’s daddy, or a paid up member of a misogynistic system striving every day to make the world a worse place for girls and women everywhere. He’s like a pope to those who follow the Orthodox faith. The conniving priests dread the idea of Nectarios becoming Patriarch and potentially giving away all their wealth. All their clothing with gold thread in it, which surely was Jesus’s plan all along.