Historical/Period Piece

dir: Ridley Scott

2024

In the world of cinema, or at least the chattering amongst film nerds, there have been longstanding jokes about certain flicks that could never, or should never have a sequel. Not the idea that a sequel couldn’t be made, but the far more salient point that it shouldn’t.

Titanic II is one of those jokes, and I remember a flick that actually exists called Hamlet II, with Steve Coogan, which is about how insane it would be to make a high school musical sequel to a tragic play where everyone dies in the end (sorry for the spoilers, but it’s only been out for 424 years or so).

On that pile of things that shouldn’t exist or be contemplated, and yet prove inevitable, you would have to say was the long-threatened Gladiator II. There was talk of a Nick Cave penned script that would have had had Russell Crowe return to the lead role as a warrior who fights his way out of the Underworld and has to kill Christ or something. This script exists. It is available online. All I will say about it is that Cave clearly wrote it when he was still on heroin, of that I have no doubt.

Before I pontificate any further, let me just mention that when the original film came out I thought it was a load of bollocks. I in no way thought it was a good film. So my bold, edgy position that there probably shouldn’t have been a sequel isn’t because I think the original is sacrosanct. It was bullshit then and it still reeks of bullshit now. And yet it had a commanding performance by Crowe as this badass stoic killing machine, who wants nothing more than revenge and death, in that order, in order to rejoin his family in the after life.

You know, like every second movie ever made these days.

dir: Damien Chazelle

2022

Well, that was a lot of film. It was definitely not one of the best flicks of last year, but it was definitely one of the most films of the year.

It’s three hours and 10 minutes long. I pity the bladders of anyone that saw this on the big screen, and didn’t want to miss a thing thinking something important might happen. I watched this in the luxury of my unheated lounge room, perched on the edge of a milk crate, on an old black and white 30cm television, just like the makers intended, just to make the experience really authentic.

I’m not a film snob. I don’t pretend to know more than anyone else about the history of cinema, or the transition of the industry from the silent era through to the so-called ‘talkies’. In fact, it’s info I try to actively avoid, because, honestly, who gives a fuck. But it’s impossible for me to have been watching movies for as long as I have without picking up some reverence for the art form and its history, even if it mostly seems like I only watch movies to kill time and have something to bitch about online.

I daresay Damien Chazelle also has some reverence for American movie history, but then he’s also a big la de da Hollywood film director, and can make and shape his efforts to say whatever it is that he wants to say about it.

And what does he have to say about it? Seeing movies on the big screen is glorious and transcendent. Working in the so-called film industry is like being showered in elephant shit at the beginning, doing okay for a while, and then you get brutally booted just for the fuck of it at the end.

In other words, nothing we didn’t already know, which we’re told non-stop for over 3 hours.

I maybe don’t have any real knowledge of what the 1920s looked like, but I have to say there were very few scenes in this flick where I felt like I was watching something set in the 1920s. And the weird thing about that is that the production goes to extreme lengths to achieve its version of authenticity, at great expense, with a great deal of effort.

And I found pretty much none of it convincing.

Especially, especially, especially…I have to say, the element that was least convincing, this feels so disloyal and unAustralian, but it’s Margot Robbie, I’m so sorry.

She is, again, sorry, she’s terrible in this. I don’t get it, unless the whole point is that she’s playing a terrible actress. She also looks like nothing from that era that I’ve ever seen, like no other person alive in the 1920s. Maybe she’s an alien who’s been kicked off the UFO for being too annoying.

dir: A Coen Brother

2021

For what ever reason, a Coen brother, being Joel, wanted to make a movie all on his lonesome, without his other pesky brother Ethan hanging about. So he struck out on his own, probably out of shame, from people joking for years that he was too afraid to make a movie on his own.

So, with so many of these shameful tears pouring down his face he elected to make yet another version of a Shakespeare play, probably during the peak of lockdowns, and with top tier talent in the lead roles.

I mean, who does Frances McDormand have to fuck in order to get a lead role in a Joel Coen movie?

Probably the director, who happens to be her husband.

I don’t think Denzel has to sleep with anybody, but that’s his business.

The Tragedy of Macbeth looks and feels like homework. I’m sorry. I cannot divest myself of the feeling that I’m doing homework when I watch stuff with The Bard’s original overwritten, bouquet-flowery language. Everything has fourteen different meanings. Everything sounds like it’s being said by people falling down a set of stairs.

It takes a lot, A LOT of concentration to get through it, to not have the mind wander.

I guess I’ve seen as many versions of Macbeth as I’ve seen of Hamlet and King Lear, probably, which means I’ve seen dozens. Chinese versions, Japanese versions, Italian mafia versions, even an Australian gangster version that starred Michael Fassbender.

And I’ve seen a bunch of ‘straight’ versions, period costumes and haughty tones and the like, including the infamous Polanski version from the 1970s. Infamous only because now we know what a piece of shit he was.

The thing is, I have to be honest here, I find the story tedious. I’ve always found the story of Macbeth tedious, no matter the format, no matter the actors, no matter the setting.

dir: Gina Prince-Bythewood

2022

The Woman King is based on a somewhat true story, in that there was a place called Dahomey in West Africa, and there was an all female fighting force called the Agojie, and they fought and won a war against the larger Oyo empire that treated Dahomey as a vassal state.

Oh, and there was a king called Ghezo (John Boyega) who ruled for 40 years.

The rest, as they say, is not history, but fiction. The stirring portrayal of General Nanisca, as leader of the Agojie, is an entirely created character.

Also fictional is the idea that Ghezo, at Nanisca’s urging, stopped selling captives as slaves.

I knew all this going in, but it really didn’t adversely impact on my enjoyment of the flick. Same way that no-one really spends any quality time in conversation pointing out that nothing in Gladiator was historically accurate, or even made any sense. They just liked it when Russell Crowe in his prime was killing motherfuckers dead in the Coliseum.

In that same spirit, the primary attraction of this here flick is that Viola Davis, Academy Award winner Viola Davis, kills a lot of motherfuckers dead in this film, and they all have it coming. Anyone who knows who Viola Davis is knows how cold and mean she can be in a role (her version of Amanda Waller in several DC films including the most recent Black Adam would probably shoot a child in order to somehow get a good cup of coffee), and this is her at her most steely-eyed.

She is such a huge presence in the flick that whenever she wasn’t on screen I was a bit nervous. But she is by no means the only character of note. John Boyega’s role is quite minor, and he plays it quite minorly (and comically, I would argue). It’s strange that this royal personage, someone with supreme power and a massive harem knows that Nanisca could fuck him up at a moment’s notice, so he always has to seem deferential to her. Though she is loyal at all times, she carries herself with an air of “I could eat your face in an instant and no-one would stop me”.

I did wonder at some points why she didn’t kill him and take his place.