Fantasy

dir: Johnathan Goldstein & John Francis Daley

2023

Nerds. They have infected everything, everywhere, all at once.

So open, out and proud, no longer hiding in the shadows. They even get to make movies these days.

Seeing a fantasy movie with the title Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves would have delighted me once upon a time, because I lived and breathed this nonsense as a teenager. But then an actual movie came along called Dungeons & Dragons back in 2000, and it made most of us realise that we were never going to get what we either wanted or needed, just lame generic fantasy-ish stuff with all the signposts and references, and none of the appeal, with terrible acting to boot. I mean, Jeremy Irons, you’re in a class of your own.

Not long after that, though, the Lord of the Rings movies came along, with vast budgets and vast running times, and the masses liked them, and the nerds thought “maybe they aren’t going to turn all of our beloved childhood stuff into absolute shit”. But it wasn’t just nerds – it was normal people too going along to see the flicks that made them a success. If only nerds went along, it barely would have registered, but the cinemas would have smelled pretty awful.

And now. Now everyone thinks they can make Dungeons & Dragons happen again, I suspect only because of the success of Stranger Things, in which the venerable roleplaying game keeps being played and keeps being mentioned. Other than that I can’t figure out what the impetus was to inflict this “property” onto the world again.

I don’t really think it can happen, because everything from D&D now just looks like a generic fantasy setting, and we’ve had plenty of movies and tv / streaming series set in generic fantasy settings. Now of course it’s just easier to lift directly from the LotRs movies when it comes to what cities should look like, or rampaging hordes of creatures that live underground, but we’ve had no shortage of fantasy franchise crap over the years.

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2022

Honestly, I didn’t hate it.

I thought it would be complete crap, and it was nowhere near as crap as I thought it could be. A trusted work colleague mentioned seeing it, and finding it lacklustre, so my expectations were not sky high.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a masterwork either, but sometimes “not as shit as I thought it would be” sometimes is the closest I can get to a ringing recommendation.

I have no previous feelings about the character of Black Adam, nor can I really understand why Dwayne The Rock Johansson has been obsessed with playing the character for over a decade. Johnson has one mode and one facial expression in this flick throughout, and I am totally okay with it when it’s this facial expression and this mode: bad motherfucker who fucks up anyone who looks at him sideways. He doesn’t have to cajole people or convince them there’s a better way – he can just kill people with a flick of his wrist and minimal effort to do otherwise.

It’s everyone else that’s a bit of a letdown compared to that.

Whatever the fuck exactly that Teth Adam, as they call him throughout the film until the veriest of very ends, is, he spends much of the movie casually killing mercenaries from something called Intergang, a bunch of Scottish, English and maybe, I dunno, Dutch guys who have taken over this mythical Middle Eastern country called Kahndaq. I don’t know where on a map you’re meant to find it either.

Would you believe that five thousand years ago, some shit went down when a slave fought back against his masters, something something a demonic crown, then more something something, five thousand years later Teth Adam wakes up from sleepy bo bos time, and starts killing people.

Except he ain’t killing Kahndaqians – just anyone else that annoys him. These Intergang jerks are looking for the demonic crown, but some natives are trying to stop them from getting it.

Along come the Justice Society. Not, it is important to note, the Justice League. If the League is where virtual gods Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman, the fast guy no-one talks about anymore because of his legal troubles, and Ben “Batman” Lopez hang out, then a significant step down from there must be the Society. The Justice Society, dispatched by always nasty piece of work Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is sent not to take out or disrupt the Intergang, which has been ruling this country with an iron fist in order to extract its natural rare minerals (in this case Eternium. No, not Vibranium. No, not Unobtainium. I SAID Eternium. I’m sure it’s very different from the other ones), but to stop Teth Adam.

dir: Robert Eggers

2022

There’s a lot that’s funny about The Northman, at least to me.

A lot of the film is practically in black and white. Not ‘real’ black and white film stock, just colour adjusted scenes to make it almost look monochrome. It’s something the director has done before, like in his last film The Lighthouse, which was all black and white.

I guess that’s not really “funny”, but I guess it makes the colours pop whenever fire is onscreen, or, I dunno, when someone’s chopping off people’s heads.

Another funny thing is that Alexander Skarsgard stars as the lead character Amleth, and Nicole Kidman plays his mum Gudrun. Anyone who watched or heard about that series on the tv called Big Little Lies where she and Skarsgard played husband and wife in an abusive relationship might wonder at how such a thing could come to be.

But then Kidman herself has what I think is the film’s shining moment, which I won’t spoil, but it’s a doozy. And then it all makes sense.

The other funny thing (I swear this is the last time I’ll use this construction), is that this is essentially a retelling of Hamlet, so it’s pretty familiar, but it’s based more on the older Icelandic tale that Shakespeare himself ripped off, with an abundance of more gore. So it’s like someone said “why don’t we make a new version of Hamlet, with buff Vikings and such, but throw out all the pesky cliché words that people are bored of?”

Robert Eggers is becoming quite a feted and respected director, despite the fact that he looks like a Mens’ Rights activist or like someone who’s going to ask you if you’re into cryptocurrencies yet. And yet he crafts a fairly brutal movie which doesn’t pander to mass audiences and leans in to the brutal, supernatural aesthetics of what life might have been like in 845AD.

dir: Leos Carax

2021

I… well, this was never going to go well for me, though I did have optimism at first, fool that I am.

I liked some songs by Sparks from, um, many decades ago, at least the ones that were covered by other people. So knowing that the Mael Brothers wrote all the music and even appear in the film was…not exactly an enticement, but at least a point of interest. With the Edgar Wright doco that came out about them a couple of months ago, it implies this has been a big year for them. So congrats to them.

I know nothing about Leos Carax other than that he exists, makes movies, and has a cool name. I do remember that he brought out a flick called Holy Motors a bunch of years ago, which had Kylie Minogue in it, but the novelty never proved compelling enough for me to track down a copy and watch it.

It is unlikely that I will be delving into Carax’s back catalogue based on Annette. I can’t say whether it’s a shitty film or a shitty musical or not, because others are better placed to judge such things. What I can say is that I found Annette profoundly uninteresting, unengaging and unpersuasive, and I was not moved by it at all. I’m usually a sucker for these kinds of things, but not this time. So I can’t say “it’s a bad movie”, even though I’m really tempted to. I can say, though, that I really, really didn’t enjoy watching it.

I even find myself fascinated by Adam Driver in general, and he seems to be in almost everything that is made these days, and even that didn’t do much for me here. It kinda almost starts off promising with Driver decked out like a boxer about to start a match, except he’s a stand up getting ready to attack a crowd, the so called Ape of God. He, being Henry McHenry spends his time, so he tells us, trying to kill the audience.

He is in love with an opera singer (Marion Cotillard) who every night dies on stage for her audiences. No matter the opera, because seemingly she plays the lead of a different opera every other night, she dies, because every opera needs some woman to die in the end.

They tell us they are very much in love. We know this because they sing a song that says they are so much in love. In fact, that’s all the song says “we love each other so much” with no other lyrics, and they sing it over and over, even during sweaty, bony, very pale sex scenes. So I guess they must be in love or something.

The other key pointers to what is happening in their lives is some celeb chasing tv gossip program, which cares enough about this famous couple that it would signpost all the important things that happen in their lives: when they get married, when they have a kid, when they go on an ill-advised yacht trip into the middle of the ocean.