War

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

File this under “unwelcome things from the past that resurface and aren’t as shit as one would think.” Sorta like endless covid variants, herpes, or the ex you still owe money to.

I mean, Top Gun is a terrible movie, but it still captured the imaginations and ears of way too many people. Everyone my age or slightly younger still knows a bunch of songs from that fucking movie, even if we never watched it voluntarily, and still knows half of the catchphrases.

This new flick MAVERICK (I feel like it should be in all caps, all of the time) should not exist. The idea that the same guy who did what he did 36 years ago is still at it, at the age of 60, is absurd. The elitist of the elite navy fighter pilots is still the absolute bestest pilot in all of the Americas after 36 goddamn years? I don’t even believe he could read an email whose font size has been changed to 26 point without glasses, and we’re meant to believe this Peter “Maverick” Mitchell still flies better than the rest? His call sign should be changed to Peter “Pan” Mitchell, because this fucker will never grow up.

Not only is he still the greatest, he is still doing that shit eating grin from 36 years ago, and riding motorbikes without a helmet, and generally doing whatever the fuck he wants, despite the fact that the navy hierarchy all loathe him with a passion. The “real” servicemen and women know that he’s the best.

Reviews will tell you that this flick doesn’t have as much of the testosterone-inflected, homoerotic undertones of the earlier instalment. Don’t believe them. This flick still, even with more women in the mix, is still ultimately about the love between men who serve that allegedly great nation. It can’t be sublimated entirely, it can’t be satisfied openly, so instead these preening jocks of all ages rub their metaphorical dicks against each other until there’s some kind of emotional hugging catharsis at the end.

The film goes out of its way to address the manner in which Maverick and Iceman (Val Kilmer), bitter rivals for most of the first film, have been lifelong friends since they swore to be each other’s wingman way back in the day. Iceman, who rose through the ranks and became the commander of the navy in the Pacific, is the only reason the other bitter, older men in the Navy haven’t booted Maverick out.

How did they come to love and respect each other so much? Who knows? They just tell us it’s the case, and we accept it, as the fucking chumps that we are.

And goddamn it if I didn’t tear up at the scene anyway.

dir: Romain Gavras

2022

This film has pretty much the greatest and most thrilling first ten minutes of any film I’ve ever seen or that’s ever been made. If there’s an issue, a serious issue, it’s that the other 90 or so minutes that follow aren’t as compelling as that opening.

It’s amazing, and intense, and a masterpiece of coordination, choreography and cinematography. Of course it would seem like downhill from there.

I can’t overstate enough how amazing it is: It opens with a young chap with a military haircut talking to assembled reporters and rows of cops about the unfortunate death of a teenage boy at the hands of police officers. This is in front of a cop station, and there is a large crowd of angry people, mostly youths, all from the same housing complex, from which the film gets its name. Athena is made up of towers, the kinds of towers that here we call housing commission flats; in Britain council estates; the States call them projects. In France I think they’re called banlieue, which sounds ominous but really just means “outlying suburb”. You know, where they send all the poor immigrants to live.

Just as Soldier Boy speaks to the media, urging calm and restraint in the face of police brutality, one of his other brother’s, Karim (Sami Slimane, utterly magnificent) chooses to strongly disagree. He launches a Molotov cocktail at the police, freaking everyone out, but starting off a plan that clearly he’s been working on since he heard about the youngest brother’s death.

Karim commands other young chaps from Athena in their attack on the police station, stealing weapons, body armour and a police van in order to cart back their hard won loot from the pigs back to Athena.

All of this happens at breakneck speed, and in (what looks like) one glorious single take that ends with the “heroes” standing at the ramparts of one of the towers of the complex, daring the cops to attack, as the film’s title is revealed.

By this point, you kinda feel like it’s their battle, and they’re going to win it.

dir: Jasmila Zbanic

2021

This is some pretty heavy stuff to deal with. This happened in the mid-90s, which isn’t that long ago. For some reason, at least for me, it’s easy to forget that at a time when I was going to gigs and staying up all night arguing about pop culture bullshit with friends drunk out of our minds, there was a war in Europe, and people were being slaughtered just for being who they were.

This is a true story in the sense that there is a town called Srebrenica in Bosnia / Herzegovina, formerly Yugoslavia. And the Serbian army slaughtered a whole bunch of Bosnian Muslims there, for no other reason than that they were Bosnian Muslims.

And there are two armies depicted in this, but only one of them is killing people, and it’s the Serbian one. The other army is made up of Dutch soldiers, some of whom are wearing shorts. Some of them have big moustaches, but mostly they’re not very intimidating. They are there as United Nations peacekeepers. They are running a refugee camp, because the Serbian army has been terrorising all the villages and towns around Srebrenica, and many of those who weren’t killed fled hoping the UN would look after them.

It remains one of the great tragedies of the last half of last century, up there with Rwanda as well I guess.

This flick is so matter-of-fact about what happened, about how desperate these people were to survive, how there was no magical solution, and how the vast majority of them didn’t have a chance.

The main character, as one could guess from the title, which is Latin for “Where are you going, Aida?” is Aida (Jasna Đuričić), who speaks English and Serbian, I guess. She is a Bosnian Muslim, and she has a husband and two grown up boys. She helps as a translator with the peacekeepers, even though she doesn’t speak Dutch, but they do speak English.

When the film starts, after a long pan from right to left of Aida and her family, Aida is translating to the Dutch the concerns of the mayor of Srebrenica, who is worried that the Serbian army is getting ever closer. The Dutch commander assures him that the army won’t enter the town, because they have said to them that if they enter the town, NATO will bomb them. There keep being variations on phrases like “in no uncertain terms” and “this is a UN resolution”, but it ultimately means nothing, and the terrified and angry mayor knows it.

Aida is not a person with power in this situation. The most she is able to do is chat to people in different languages, and try to save her three men.

The Dutch aren’t interested, really, in saving anyone. The Serbian army no longer cares about appearances, as it is determined to get what they think of as revenge. So it’s down to Aida to desperately scramble about to find a way to avoid the inevitable.

dir: Niki Caro

2020

I am not embarrassed to admit that I have sat through and enjoyed the Disney animated movie Mulan a couple of times, in the same way that I’ve watched most of their cheesy products over the years, both with and without my daughter. But now that she’s too old for me to use her as an excuse when I want to watch something, the choice to watch a new version of this tale has to be a more conscious one.

Everything is so freighted and problematic these days. By watching Mulan, and enjoying the pretty visuals and the costumes and the performances, and tearing up a few times, am I supporting the genocide of the Uighur people by the one party totalitarian government of China? Well, probably, I don’t know. I’ve been watching Hong Kong and Chinese films for decades, and I’ve long known that now the government has to approve every script before it goes into production, and virtually every Chinese film, even ones made by Disney, have to toe the party line.

And, yes, the party line is a cruel, inhuman and brutal one. I don’t really have a justification beyond that. I have to hope that, at least from the perspective of the person playing the lead character, and the person directing, being Kiwi director Niki Caro, most famous for Whale Rider all those years ago, their intent with this film, with its predominantly Chinese-American cast (with some major exceptions, being legends like Gong Li, Jet Li and Donnie Yen), is to side-step the political stuff and to tell the ‘classic proto-feminist story of a girl who fights great pretending to be a boy in order to save her dear old dad, the emperor and all of China.

That it is all told within the context of a story that glorifies empires / totalitarian states, and emperors that rule by Divine Right, and obedience to patriarchal structures and such, well, as my daughter handily points out, this is Disney after all. What were we expecting?

This mostly sticks to the script set out by the ‘original’ animated version, doesn’t update it in any way, but wants to use the look and the tropes of wuxia epics to deliver something that looks like one thing but appeals to both a mass Chinese audience as well as a mass American audience.

When you try to make two different people happy, who have two completely different agendas, and you do it in the most ham-fisted and timid way, you’re not going to leave anyone happy.

Of the many names of people who ‘worked’ on the screenplay (the greater the number of names, the shittier the end product, quite often), there wasn’t an even vaguely Asian-sounding surname amongst them, let alone a Chinese or Chinese-American one. Sure, there are Chinese actors, but they are awkwardly singing to an American tune. Thankfully there is no singing in this flick, if that metaphor used in the previous sentence gave you the impression this was going to be a new Chinese Cats inflicted upon the world.