4 stars

dir: Colin Trevorrow

2022

Wow, okay, so some movies have a million things in them and still feel kinda empty.

The first film in this stupid new trilogy had only one good moment in it, which was a strange half second or so where a resort under attack by flying dinosaurs has one guy slowly trying to get away from the monsters even though he’s trying not to spill two very large margaritas that he’s carrying.

That was it. A second or two at most that made me laugh, or possibly chortle, in a film that was probably 13 hours long. The second flick Fallen Kingdom I don’t really remember despite having seen it, but I will guess that about the only good moment was a ruthless capitalist auctioning off dinosaurs getting eaten by said dinosaurs towards the end of the film.

It's that classic moment of “Why, I never thought that I, the smarmy vicious chap releasing face eating monsters into the world would ever ironically get MY face eaten off!!”

This latest flick Dominion doesn’t have a lot going for it despite having 400 main characters and a constant hail of call backs to the earlier films, especially the 1st one. It also brings back Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, again for very little good reason.

But the main chumps of the new trilogy were meant to be Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and either some clone girl or a velociraptor called Blue (Tilda Swinton, probably). They’re here too, but you are asking yourself why these people are here, why any of them are here.

Dinosaurs, now, by the time of this flick, are all over the world, even the cold places. They are not confined to an island paradise or some rich jerk’s palatial estate: They’re everywhere!

But they’re not even the big deal here. The big deal, or the world ending threat is that a very rich fuckhead (Campbell Scott) has genetically engineered monstrous locusts that eat every crop in the world except for the ones engineered by his company Biosyn. His plan is…

What is his plan again? If everyone starves to death then their ghosts will come to his company to buy his grain? Ghost cap in ghost hand? How was that plan going to play out?

Stupid decisions made by billionaires are the bread and butter not only of this entire series of dinosaur films but also of most of the science fiction that comes out these days. The thing is, they’ve completely gone beyond the idea of Olympian arrogance or hubris by the massively wealthy being the cause of their own downfall, to “well, that last billionaire was not rich or smart enough, but I’m sure I’m smart and rich enough to make it work”.

dir: Ben Steiner

2022

Matriarch is sort of predicated on the idea that, damn, mothers can be quite harsh.

I mean, that’s relatable, surely? Some people, even ones that have or had a decent, loving relationship with their mums as adults can still have an array of unresolved or unresolvable conflicts.

Well, a further qualification of this premise is: What if, as an adult, you were a drug addicted fuck up, and the mother you hated was the leader of some weird village sex cult?

This murky, muddled, made for tv-looking horror flick probably has a decent cast, it’s hard to tell. Most of the flick is spent watching the main character ping around like a ball in a pinball machine.

Laura (Jemima Rooper) works for an ad company, and like all people who work in the ad industry, she is doing cocaine constantly and sculling vodka from a water bottle. Though this behaviour isn’t celebrated by the people around her, once we figure out that she hates her mother, we think “oh, she’s like this because of her mum.”

At a moment when it looks like Laura has checked out completely, she wakes up again, but only after seeming like some black ichor / liquid has seeped into her body.

Gross. This prompts her to go back to whatever village she was from to talk with the mother she has avoided for 20 years, played by Kate Dickie.

It’s never explained why the mum, clearly a Scot, and the daughter don’t have the same accent, but I guess it’s immaterial. The mum is, right from the start, making all these clucky noises of concern, but constantly trying to roofie Laura. The movie makes no attempt to hide the fact that Celia, the mum, is constantly trying to knock Laura out and to drag her to a greenhouse.

Laura’s journey is meant to be like “oh, wow, I have a heap of unresolved issues, and maybe if I return home and talk to my mum, and to some other locals, including my ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago, I can resolve some stuff and move on with my life?”

The mum’s journey is “nah, I cannae stand ye and ye haff te fucken die.”

dir: Paul Schrader

2021

Yeesh. Like, I’m sure a lot of other directors fuck up the endings of their films, but holy fuck does this go off the rails.

Although, being honest, it’s not really on decent rails before it falls off of them and into a ravine abundant with mediocrity and yet somehow still empty.

It’s such a shame, because I love Oscar Isaac. He’s usually dependably great in what he does. He does okay for much of the flick, but the film feels so flimsy after a while, giving him a heavily weighted and freighted character who doesn’t really have anything to do and to whom nothing believable happens.

And then he flies back to his home planet, never to be seen or heard from again.

It’s that abrupt. Either they completely ran out of money or they just didn’t know how to end things.

That in itself would be fascinating, in terms of how you can run out of money when your budget is probably miniscule as it is. There are times when Isaac’s character is wearing what I’m pretty sure is Target brand clothing, and there’s no real story reason for it, so the times when he’s wearing decent clothing I’m assuming he’s wearing his own stuff.

There is something serious, something important the flick is trying to do, or at least it’s pretending it’s about serious and weighty subjects. The main character, who tells people his name is William Tell, is a very cold, very robotic person who counts cards at low rent casinos. He’s not trying to make a bundle; he’s just trying to make modest winnings, and then move on.

He doles out his story to us, the audience, by writing in a journal and then telling us things in voice over. His writing is neither profound nor overly revealing, and all it does is imply to us that this very shut down man still has thoughts percolating in that noggin of his.

The weight that he carries is that he was in the military, and was stationed at some place like Abu Ghraib where US personnel, contractors or otherwise, tortured and tormented people for intel, for revenge, for shits and giggles.

He wasn’t one of the victims – he was one of the torturers.

But I guess there’s the argument that torturers can also carry the burden of the trauma they inflicted. There are other flicks, even ones I’ve seen recently, which look at what impact execution has on people, not just the victims, but on society, including those who the state compels to end the lives of others. The Iranian flick I’m thinking of, There Is No Evil, was a brilliant and affecting examination of the topic.

The Card Counter isn’t even vaguely in the same ballpark, at least, not to me. William Tell was jailed for his crimes. He lives a life that seems strange to the observer, but we never really get a sense of why he lives like this, what it means to him, until a character sees one of the odd things he does, being, that he travels from cheap motel to cheap motel and brings his own sheets.

That bit makes perfect sense. But what he does is wrap those sheets around the furniture, and it’s not because of germophobia, which I would otherwise completely understand, but because he needs the space to be monochromatic, to perhaps make him feel like he’s back in jail.

Okay, so he doesn’t feel like he has paid enough for what he did, he needs to suffer more.

dir: Josh Boone

2020

A cursed movie…trying to come out in a deeply cursed year. Every flick that was meant to come out this year can claim to be cursed now, because of, you know, the floating death in the air thing, but this flick was cursed long before the virus raised its ugly head.

The New Mutants, really, didn’t stand a chance. In a normal year it would have been released in cinemas and then disappeared three weeks later, and accountants and jerks in marketing would have argued for a while as to what went wrong, and then everyone including the people in it would have forgotten about it and moved on with their lives.

It could be that audiences don’t care about mutants or X-Men or X-Men-related bullshit anymore, if they ever did, especially when there’s no Hugh Jackman with shiny claws and sideburns involved. It could also be that they’ve had enough of a crack at it, and they could leave this X-Men stuff alone for a decade or two before endlessly rebooting again and again.

When this was put together, they probably thought having Maisie Williams in it would be pretty great. She is, after all, pretty great. She singlehandedly saved Westeros / Game of Thrones, and created a moment of television history that will be remembered long after the dragons and the endless sexual violence are (hopefully) forgotten. And she was great throughout the show.

But this stupid year is the year of Anya Taylor-Joy, who has completely dominated streaming services and television, be it in perplexing chess dramas, in Jane Austen adaptations and virtually everything else in existence, including this standard mutant fare. She doesn’t have to do much other than turn up, so good luck for her.

This is, to be honest and fair, a fairly shitty, shoddy movie, with a bunch of people in their twenties playing teens and trying to get that YA energy, trying to reboot a franchise with new and therefore cheaper characters, and also, inexplicably, trying to make a horror flick with teen protagonists that makes no sense as horror or a teen flick or a new YA franchise.

It’s not all bad, though. Maisie Williams is great. It hardly matters what her character is called, or what she does, or why she has a Scottish accent, or why she’s being tormented by a Catholic-looking priest, which makes no sense if she’s Scottish. I’m just glad she’s here, in the same way I’m glad to see her in anything.