Crime/Heist

dir: Christos Massalas

2022

What is this film about…

I’m not entirely sure. It’s maybe about a bunch of people who have ended up as outcasts, of a sort, who gravitate to a mothballed theatre called the Broadway, somewhere in Athens, who get through life as petty criminals.

But that would be a simplistic rendering. The main character is Nelly (Elsa Lekakou), or at least I assume she’s the Main Character because she often shares her thoughts with us, the shmucks in the audience. She seems like she gives zero fucks about anything, but I think that might not be entirely true.

She implies that she is fleeing from a wealthy family, for reasons that are not shared with us, so she doesn’t do what she does, whether it’s stripping or aiding the other pickpockets, for the money, per se. She doesn’t have expensive habits, since her one vice seems to be petrol sniffing.

I have to admit that I was stunned when that was shown, but then I remembered that Greece has been an economic basket case for decades, and then it made perfect sense. If petrol is about 2 euro a litre in Greece, and she only needs to half fill a small bottle, she can get a numbing buzz for a few cents at a time, which lasts days and days.

Please don’t see this as endorsement: I’m still horrified.

When hired goons turn up where she works, and try to manhandle her, a steely eyed grey haired crim called Markos (Stathis Apostolou) knocks them about and “rescues” her. In her voiceover, she relates to us her general luck in getting out of sticky situations: someone always comes along and rescues her, which she is tired of, because for once she wishes she could be the one doing the rescuing.

dir: Robert Lorenz

2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this story 14,000 times before.

An aging hitman decides he wants to stop killing people for money. But then something happens, and he has to kill more people, and then probably dies or stops killing people at least for a while.

Sound familiar? What if I told you it starred Liam Neeson? Wouldn’t you then say “you’re lazily describing every film Liam Neeson has been in for the last twenty years?”

And you would not be wrong. Ever since Taken convinced every middle-aged, middle-class dad that they, too, could torture and kill dozens of criminals if one of their kids were kidnapped, even lacking that special set of skills, Neeson has been the lead in these violent actioners that try to argue that a man in his 70s can still kick arse.

I admit that there are some fit men in their 70s. They shouldn’t be fighting people. They shouldn’t be punching people or kicking them down escalators or anything. They certainly shouldn’t be wrestling with other younger men. They should be wrestling with their consciences, with moral dilemmas, with their regrets.

This steady progression of dumb action flicks that he’s been in, including ones recently that account for his age, and one in particular called Memory where he plays a character with Alzheimer’s, makes you wonder why Neeson is in so many films every year. Why not take a break?

This is not a dumb action flick. There’s very little action in it, and there’s no need for stunt work, or for Neeson to risk throwing his back out or straining himself too bad.

And yet he still plays a chap who up till recently has killed men for money. In Ireland, of all places.

This flick is set in 1975, in County Donegal, so it’s one of those rare instances where a film has characters in Ireland talking about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants.

It’s also a rare flick where the ‘bad guys’ are IRA terrorists.

I mean, I thought they were all saints, serving their noble cause.

dir: David Fincher

2023

This isn’t to be confused with the legendary John Woo flick that introduced the world to the glory that is Chow Yun Fat, and the idea in movies that you could have a protagonist shoot hundreds of people before going to his eternal reward…

Now, of course, everyone gets to do it, but back then, I assure you, it was new, novel, fresh. Hong Kong fresh.

This The Killer is about a killer (Michael Fassbender) who kills people for money. Not for sexual gratification or anything so crude. It’s a purely financial transaction, which he tries to deliver in a professional and efficient manner.

He talks to us constantly, in his head, as he repeats his bullshit mantras about never having empathy or being precise or whatever, and sticking to his own rules, plan instead of improvise, be ready for every eventuality. Except he can’t even stick to his own rules, a lot of the time.

The voiceover is tiresome, but I think it’s meant to be tiresome. Without it, we’d have very little to go on. The killer rarely talks, and when he does, his words are clipped, as if almost painful.

Again, while he comes across as flat, I think it’s deliberately flat. His style is the lack of style he deliberately cultivates. There is no looking cool in a tailored bulletproof suit or swinging around wildly in elaborately choreographed sequences with flashy weapons. The one extended fight scene we get is brutal, close-up, and doled out with whatever household weapons come to hand.

عنکبوت مقدس, Ankabut-e moqaddas

dir: Ali Abbasi

2022

Holy Spider is a movie I have been obsessed with for many months, but not because of anything to do with the movie itself, other than its name.

Every time I saw the name Holy Spider, whether it was on the list of films playing at the most recent Melbourne International Film Festival, or other festivals’ playlists, or mentioned in people’s “Best of” lists for 2022, or in discussions of contemporary Iranian movies, the first and only thing I thought of was “Respect The Rock!”

Respect the Rock is a show that’s been on radio station 3RRR for an absolute age, hosted by Nicole Tadpole, and every single edition of the show has Nicole playing a recording of herself (possibly drunkenly) singing along with a recording of Ronny James Dio singing the song Holy Diver.

Holy Diver, you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea, oh what’s becoming of me?

What the fuck does any of it mean? Who cares? It’s great! Too great to require explanation or understanding.

It’s a legendary song, recorded just after Dio and the drummer left Black Sabbath and formed Dio back, way back in the early 1980s.

What’s it got to do with anything? Nothing, nothing at all.

Got to get away, Holy Diver! Uh uh oh o o dun duh dun duh dun

So every time you see a reference to the title “Holy Spider”, you must imagine it being said loudly, in a metal voice *Holy! Spider!*

All this foolishness… Holy Spider is a bleak, brutal film based on a true story, of an awful man that killed a bunch of women in Iran.

You might say to yourself “well, the vile regime in place kills Iranian women all the time, sometimes just for not wearing a headscarf”, and I would say “Yes, that is true.”

But that’s part of the awfulness that goes along with the story: in an incredibly repressive and entirely misogynistic society such as Iran post-1979 revolution (and, most likely, before it as well), a serial killer of women would be something these morality police or revolutionary guards wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to, especially since he targeted sex workers, and drug addicted sex workers at that.

You would think they would have wanted to promote him to Ayatollah, maybe, but no.

The strong implication the film conveys is that because the higher ups in the regime felt that there were pluses to these killings, the cops on the ground, whose job it is to catch people who commit awful, awful murders, were told to look the other way.