Comedy

Kneecap

Where it says "Based on a True Story" on the poster,
I'm going to have to assume the parts connecting
this film and the real world is that they both
include a place called Ireland, and that's about it.

dir: Rich Peppiatt

2024

Wow. This was like a breath of fresh air.

Well, admittedly, some parts of it felt like familiar, recycled air, with a strong smell of alcohol on its breath, but it was a lot of fun, and a trenchant reminder that Ireland is still an occupied country.

Also, within the context of a film about the attempts by certain Irish people to keep their language (and thus identity outside of the UK) alive, and the repositioning of the Irish Republican movement as an indigenous movement against the occupying British, it’s a fucking funny, deeply political, yet chaotic story.

For all its seeming DIY-zine-handcrafted-mixtape-bedroom recording aspects, there are a bunch of professionals thrown into the mix with the rank amateurs that are the two rascally ‘boys’ that really make up both the narrative and the band known as Kneecap.

And what a pair they are. I should probably mention, this is only the second film I’ve seen that’s mostly in Gaelic, or Irish as they call it to each other here. In other words, it’s subtitled a lot of the time. Because the speaking of their so-called native tongue plays such a big part in the story, and the lads are shown (and we hear them) rapping in Gaelic, it’s safe to say that at least from a viewer’s perspective, if you’re not okay with subtitles, this is not a flick you’re going to get a lot out of beyond the visuals of crazy drug-addled partying and Trainspotting inspired cheeky violence and shenanigans.

Which is, I guess, not much of a problem for me, as a non-Gaelic speaker but who absolutely loves to read subtitles. I’m not sure who the actual target market is for such a flick, beyond Ireland itself, but its argument is mostly a universal one. Well, it’s universal unless you’re actually one of those strange, dead inside people who support the oppressors over the oppressed, colonisers over those striving for freedom or if you stan for billionaires.

As for the music / rapping well, they have a target audience, and I’m not it, since I’m not Irish and I take no drugs whatsoever (in case the peelers are listening in on this one-sided conversation), but I can enjoy people rapping about their lives and keeping it real and falling all over the place whilst smacked out of their heads on coke and ketamine often at the same time.

Into their orbit these fuckups luck upon someone both sympathetic to their cause and who can actually put together some tracks. He’s a teacher who moonlights as a translator when one of the boys gets picked up by the peelers and refuses to speak anything other than his mother tongue.

Rating:

8 stars

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Deadpool & Wolverine

And Death Shall Have No Dominion, not
while there's so much money to be made

dir: Shawn Levy

2024

Shame…shame…shame. I feel like I’ve been paraded through the streets of King’s Landing, much to my eternal regret for my shameful crimes, after watching this amalgam of references loosely aspiring to be a ‘movie’.

Watching and laughing as much as I did while watching this flick only filled me with deep shame, after the laughs wore off. I would almost argue that it was involuntary, as in, against my will and my supposedly rational mind, but that’s pretty much the same every time we laugh. It bypasses rationality and hits us in the centre of our lizard brain, that same part that laughs and then immediately recoils when you giggle at someone walking into something or getting hit in the groin.

I did not expect to ‘enjoy’ this flick, but then I discovered that either they programmed me years ago to enjoy things like this like the Pavlovian dog that I am, or, based on some kind of horrifying download directly from my brain, they figured out how to make something entirely for the very nerdiest parts of my entire being.

I mean, the only way they could have made it more for me is if they actually had references to me, like Deadpool himself saying “yeah, drew, you’re really going to like this next reference, who’s a clever boy?”

The thing is, part of me knows how wrong it is to find Ryan Reynolds and his smarmy antics so funny. It makes me feel soiled, contaminated in so many ways. I tell myself I am old enough not to fall for his bullshit, not to be amused by such lowbrow Freudian anally and orally fixated idiocy, and yet there I am, laughing until tears course down my haggard features.

Rating:

8 stars

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Jackpot!

Who Wants to Murder a Billionaire?

dir: Paul Feig

2024

I thought I was watching the sequel to Idiocracy, but instead of critiquing what decades of neo-liberalism, curdled libertarianism and the dogma of ‘rugged individualism’ has wrought in the States, this cowardly film ends up celebrating it.

Imagine California years from now. Tent cities everywhere, human life is worth even less than today, streets awash in sewerage. Successive Trump governments have bankrupted the country, and the only way the government has to raise money is in an increasingly elevated lottery. No, it’s not a nod to Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery; it’s something much dumber and far more shallow.

Instead of taking its cues from something intelligent or sensible, this flick turns The Purge concept into a comedy, but instead of one night a year being a free-for-all, for the day when the winner is announced, everyone can legally kill the winner and claim the billion dollar prize pool. In the unlikeliest twist on the premise, the murderers aren’t allowed to use guns, though.

Pfft. How un-American, but then California is different from the rest of the States.

This has been going on for a while, so, like when any new awful thing comes along, people adapt. People change according to what is perceived as being the new normal. They just accept that it’s fine.

Rating:

6 stars

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The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

The time to stop watching this movie is before you start

dir: Joanna Arnow

2024

Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.

Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.

Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.

Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.

The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.

Rating:

5 stars

Problemista

Why don't you sponsor this child, for only the cost
of a latte a day, to ensure he gets a better life, in Bushwick.

dir: Julio Torres

2023

Problemista is, I guess, by its very nature, a pretty niche seeming movie, and while I’d never argue that its themes are universal (especially for the mostly whitebread hipster audience that would even make the time to watch such a film), they impact millions of people's lives in the States, but it’s treated here with a comical and deeply absurdist approach that doesn’t detract from its overall message.

What are its overall messages? Well, the first one is that anyone in or around the Arts ‘industry’ is a monster and should be totally avoided at all costs, because they only bring misery to the people around them. That checks out. Tilda Swinton plays that embodiment of the terribleness of arts-adjacent curators/creators/parasites/critics as The Hydra / Elizabeth.

The real message is that the work visa scheme, the pathway to being able to stay and work in the United States, is an absurdist, coldly cruel, convoluted and contradictory nightmare that puts people through hell for no better reason than appealing to voters by saying “we’re tough on immigrants”, as if that’s a good thing. You can’t earn while in this state but you still have to pay about $6000 in fees, in order to get sponsored by someone, but they can’t sponsor you until you start earning, so you have to earn cash money for it to be hidden, and if you get caught or they decline to sponsor you, you’re kicked out anyway.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that would bring Kafka himself to say “this is needlessly cruel dehumanising bullshit.”

Rating:

8 stars

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Drive-Away Dolls

Drive a long way and keep driving away from Florida

dirs: Tricia Cooke & Ethan Coen

2024

I have to admit that I went into this flick a bit annoyed from the get go. The knowledge that Pedro Pascal was in the flick was definitely something that attracted me towards it. Seeing him killed within the first few minutes is… a guarantee that I’m going to be off-put or put off, take yer pick.

Classic bait and switch. Worst of all they seem to reference what was for me one of the most horrific onscreen character deaths in a tv show that I’ve ever seen, being the brutal death of Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones.

Too soon. You don’t get to joke about that, to me. Still hurts.

So. Chap nervously cradling briefcase is murdered, presumably the people who acquired the briefcase have alternative plans for it. Those plans involve transporting the briefcase, and a bag with Pedro’s head in it, to Tallahassee, Florida. Instead of doing so with a modicum of forethought or intelligence, the criminals somehow fuck it up.

Enter our two protagonists, onto the scene. Two friends. One is a confident and assertive lesbian called Jamie (Margaret Qualley) shown cheating on her cop partner as the flick begins. The other is a less assertive, more insecure lesbian called Marian (played by Australia’s Own Geraldine Viswanathan), who isn’t cheating on anybody anytime soon. She is more inhibited, which we know because she wears tight-laced blouses that seem to be strangling her throat.

For…reasons, they end up driving a rental car down to Tallahassee. The car happens to have the briefcase and the head loosely stored in the trunk.

So, is this a comic caper, a violent Tarantino-esque lolfest with pithy dialogue and a score of soon-to-be-classic lines? Or is it a serious crime drama about two completely different people realising how deeply incompatible they are, deciding after much travail to go their separate ways?

Rating:

6 stars

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The Blackening

But you could at least give it a red hot go

dir: Tim Story

2023

I will be the first to admit, and honestly have to be the first to admit, that I am not the target audience for this movie. My opinion about this movie, like all my opinions about anything, are therefore even more important / authoritative than usual (ie. utterly worthless).

I am, however, a fan of movies / pop culture, and in the American context, of Black cinema / African-American cinema. I went into this assuming this flick, ostensibly a horror flick, was specifically about playing with the tropes of horror movies in terms of how poorly they serve African-American characters usually, but what I ended up getting was vastly different.

Tim Story is probably best known for directing Barbershop way back in the day, if he is known by international audiences at all. I am not sure that he would be well known as the director of the pretty terrible Fantastic Four movies, or the very ordinary Ride Along movies, or the terrible *belches loudly* Think Like a Man movies.

So, whatever. I have no doubt he has fans, and that he’s a talented, commercial director, in all senses of the word. He is a very successful African-American director, and he certainly has knowledge and a feel for how African-Americans are portrayed in movies, because he’s in the business of portraying them for fun and profit, and has been for decades.

This flick is replete with references that will fly by most people, I would guess, and I say that as someone who gets the references, but only because I’ve watched everything and remember all the dumbest, lamest trivia from any old tv show you care to mention. I also remember the various controversies that arose with many of those shows, like who got fired and why, and who they were replaced with, because… Well, I don’t really have an explanation for it.

Rating:

8 stars

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Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear - literally about a bear on cocaine, and the
death of irony

dir: Elizabeth Banks

2023

Cocaine Bear is an actual movie that exists. It is about a bear that finds a tonne of cocaine, and really likes eating it and snorting it.

The words “based on a true story” have never done heavier lifting than in the sentence “Cocaine Bear is based on a true story”. Yes, there was once a shitload of cocaine dumped out of a plane. And yes a bear found these packages and enjoyed their contents.

That’s where all similarities between that story and the story depicted here end.

This feels like it should have been called Cocaine Bear? Fuck Yeah! or That Fuckin’ Cocaine Bear!. It should have had Werner Herzog in it, or at least have him doing ample amounts of voice over.

It should have embraced the complete idiocy of its premise and just had a rampaging massive black bear terrorising a city, having been made invincible through its ingestion of a tonne of cocaine, just killing crackers left right and centre.

Instead it manages to not even really be about the bear. It’s about a bunch of puny humans, most of whom get between the bear and more cocaine, and so they suffer the ultimate indignity of being killed indifferently by a bear that just wants more cocaine.

These humans vary greatly in whether they amuse us until the bear comes back, or whether they make us grind our teeth, begging for the bear to come back and kill them so they can shut the fuck up. Isaiah Whitlock Jnr is a cop who wants to find the cocaine, but is more affronted because he tried to get a decent dog, but ended up with a froo-froo Maltese Terrier, which threatens his masculinity way too much. I have no idea why he’s in the flick.

Margo Martindale plays a weird park ranger who flirts with some weird animal activist (Jesse Taylor Ferguson) until thankfully, blissfully, the bear kills them both. I disliked almost every second that they were onscreen, and I love Margo Martindale. She did not read the assignment.

Ray Liotta, Ray fucking Liotta, the original cocaine bear, plays the drug dealer whose drugs were thrown out of the plane and are now giving the bear the high of its life in the Georgia mountains. He somehow manages to look way scarier than the bear. This was his last role before he died; he died literally a week after re-recording some lines in post-production. And that’s pretty shameful.

He should have played the bear. It would have been more convincing to have him wear a costume and growl at people. I feel sad that he’s gone, but, honestly, some people are too terrifying for this world.

Rating:

6 stars

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Triangle of Sadness

Sometimes you watch something and you find that
you're on the side of the sharks

dir: Ruben Ostlund

2022

I did not care for this film one bit. I’m all for films satirising how terrible wealthy people are, but this flick sets up the limpest of straw targets and then throws up all over them.

It’s also way too long. There is no earthly reason why this needed to be 2 and a half hours long.

Maybe if they’d cut down on the footage of people throwing up or pooping themselves, we could have saved some time.

When it happens, it doesn’t let up for about 15 minutes of CGI emissions, people rolling around on the floor, cameras shaking all over the place. It’s almost like the director wanted the audience to feel sick as well.

That isn’t the film’s biggest failing, for me. The film comes in three generous sections. The first introduces us to a very boring couple, being Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean). They could be the most boring couple ever depicted on a screen. They are both models, which doesn’t help, but they honestly don’t do a single interesting thing. Though they do argue about money. They argue long and hard about money. Carl especially resents that Yaya, which is a terrible name for a model, and a great name for a Greek grandmother, expects him to pay for everything even though she makes way more than he does.

And she is, after all, an influencer. He will take photos of her smiling at pasta, but they never eat pasta. I don’t even know why they go to fancy and pricey restaurants when they clearly eat nothing but steamed chicken breast and maybe a sprig of broccolini? How much would that set you back?

But argue they do, and it’s not an enjoyable or entertaining argument. It’s not that they’re airheads. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. They clearly are empty people trying to navigate a strange world, where their only currency is their looks and how many likes they get online.

But who cares. They end up on a luxury yacht full of ugly but very wealthy people. Instead of being the Rose and Jack of this ill-fated cruise, they’re just two more people that don’t belong in a wealthy paradise of older wealthy people telling service people what to do.

It’s meant to be satire, but it doesn’t really feel that satirical. There are moments of such thudding obviousness that it didn’t even register that these people are objects of satire. There’s an old couple whose fortune was made in hand grenades and land mines. There’s a mega-wealthy Russian oligarch who tells people he got rich selling shit. If that isn’t a dig at Jeffrey Bezos, I don’t know what is.

Rating:

5 stars

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The Banshees of Inisherin

In Bruges was way better. And Gleeson was way better
in Calvary

dir: Martin McDonagh

2022

That was all so very Irish.

There’s a bunch of people saying feck and fecking all the time. They all speak with the most Oirish of Oirish brogues. They all pronounce their names and each other’s such that you can hear the Irish Gaelic pronunciation. So it’s not “Patrick Sullivan”, it’s “Pádraic Súilleabháin”.

And it’s not “Colm”, it’s “Colm”. See the difference?

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrell) have been friends for decades. They live on a fictional island off the coast of the Irish mainland, in about 1923, as a civil war rages. There’s no fighting on the island, though, even as the sounds of gunfire and cannons echo across the water.

“Good luck to you” mumbles Padraic to them and himself as he walks down a path and sees flashes in the sky, “whatever it is you’re fighting about”.

One day, the first day that we get to know all these idiots, Colm decides unlike every other day of his life that he doesn’t want to go to the pub with Padraic at two o’clock. This immediately tilts the world out of kilter and portends dark doings ahead.

It’s not just Padraic that’s worried about the fate of the universe: the other village peasants wonder aloud as to what in God’s name is going on if Colm doesn’t want to have a pint with Padraic.

When Colm tells a disbelieving and profoundly confused Padraic that he doesn’t want to spend time with him anymore, Padraic is singularly unable to grasp this new reality, the new way of the world. He spends the rest of the movie doing absolutely everything he can think of in order to restore the world to its previous axis, and Colm stolidly tries to do everything he can, with increasing desperation, to ensure that it doesn’t.

Let’s face it, Padraic is something of a fucking idiot, and after spending two hours with him I can totally see why Colm prefers his own company or the company of others. But in a place as bleak as Inisherin, even Padraic can be given a run for his money in the idiocy stakes. He’s not even the village idiot. That honour is bestowed upon the local policeman’s son, being Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is constantly saying awkward or cringey things in a child like sing song voice, despite no longer being a child.

But it’s a testament to Padraic’s own stupidity that he turns to Dominic for advice on how to win back Colm. Padraic’s determination to either laugh it off or pretend like the break is only temporary pushes Colm to declare that if Padraic speaks to him again, he’ll cut off his own fingers.

It’s meant to be a “what the feck?” moment for those of us in the audience, too. One of the main reasons Colm has given for wanting space, for wanting peace and quiet, for wanting to not have to listen to Padraic’s inane prattle any more, is that he longs for time to himself in order to play music and, most importantly, to write music. He feels like his time on this earth is limited, and that the more of it he squanders with Padraic, the less likely he is to leave behind anything of meaning, beauty or as a legacy.

He plays the fiddle, that’s his instrument, and it’s one for which he needs his fingers and thumbs. But in order to compel Padraic to leave him be, he’s prepared to cut them off, thus rendering himself unable to do the thing he so desperately wants to do.

And still Padraic doesn’t get it. His need to make Colm like him again, his inability to move past it, means both men will pretty much doom each other, with so few alternatives.

Rating:

7 stars

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Comedy

Kneecap

Deadpool & Wolverine

Jackpot!

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed

Problemista

Drive-Away Dolls

The Blackening

Cocaine Bear

Triangle of Sadness

The Banshees of Inisherin

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