4 stars

dir: Zach Snyder

2023

This is pretty ordinary, but it’s ordinary within what I think of as normal parameters. If any other director made this, whoever saw it would have shrugged, farted, and probably rolled over and gone to sleep without ever thinking about it ever again.

It’s like when some average car company comes up with a shitty new car: No-one other than the people dumb enough to buy those cars will care. But when someone bills themselves as a genius comes up with a terribly shitty car, like, say, the so-called Cybertruck, well, then you have to take especial notice and deliver especial insults / criticism.

People, mainly press hacks or PR flacks used to call Zach Snyder a visionary, but they stopped, several films ago, because the extent of his vision involved shitty CGI, slow motion sequences, and terrible scripts. And anyone can make that without being called a visionary. Plus, they (being Warner Brothers) started noticing that nothing he made actually made money, regardless of how much the fanboys slavered over his crap.

And since nature apparently abhors a vacuum, Netflix threw money at him and said “make whatever crap you want, we don’t care, as long as it’s content.” And, here it is, daddy made you some content.

And what content it is… This is rumoured to be pretty much a script Snyder proposed to the Lucasfilm people as a possible R rated Star Wars flick, with all the Star Wars actual references taken out when they rejected it. So what you’re left with is less a new science fiction space opera epic original intellectual property, and more a “new” generic science fiction IP so generic that it looks and sounds like every other science fiction IP you’ve ever seen. It’s so generic I’m amazed that the characters don’t accidentally talk about using the Force or about mining spice on Arrakis. It’s not just that we’re trained to expect these things and see them everywhere, it’s just that anyone working on anything like this knows what tropes to follow and how to make everything look just so everything is so fucking familiar and comfortable for everyone.

So when I tell you that the first part of the flick occurs on a farm, and everyone’s dressed like they’re in a Western, you won’t be that surprised or shocked. You’ll just think “how visionary! It’s only something I’ve seen twenty or more times in science fiction flicks!”

Also, like me, if you watch this, you will feel delighted every time you hear someone say “we’re just simple farmers” or “he’s just a simple farmer”. How surprised will you be when the “simple farmer” rises up and saves the day? You know, which never happens, expect when it does, like, every time?

These salt of the earth simple farmers grow grain, to feed themselves of course, but also to have a little extra, a little something-something for either trade or to use in times of need. They have a community mostly made up of Aryan poster children. You know, mostly Nordic types. But there are a couple of people there with different complexions. One of them clearly isn’t a simple farmer, because she’s as buff as Sarah Conner in Terminator 2. And she is called Kora (Sofia Boutella).

dir: Niki Caro

2023

The Mother is the very necessary sequel to The Father from a couple of years ago. But instead of a senile Anthony Hopkins battling with unseen forces arrayed against him, we have a Jennifer Lopez with perhaps early-onset dementia fighting against the forces of, I dunno, patriarchy maybe?

Otherwise, the nonsense plot makes very little sense. And we need things to make sense this close to Mother’s Day, yeah?

I mean the flick dropped onto vaunted streaming service Netflix just in time for people to be able to honour their mothers by watching a flick specifically called The Mother.

To not watch it is to spit in your own mother’s face, if not the faces of mothers everywhere.

The Mother of the title is only referred to as “the mother”, but I’m pretty sure her name is probably Karen. Very implausibly, she is a highly decorated and highly important special forces sniper for the United States of America. She gets involved with… I still have no fucking idea, and I’ve watched the thing, but for whatever reasons, she gets involved with a corrupt higher up (Joseph fucking Fiennes) AND some Cuban criminal (Gael Garcia Bernal, in a throwaway role), because she wants to know about some weapons they’re smuggling (or maybe it was exclusive Pokemon cards?). But then she finds out that they’re also smuggling some very dirty looking people somewhere.

I don’t know where. To the States maybe? Smuggling people into the Communist paradise that is Cuba, alternatively? To give them the better life they always dreamed of?

Why is she Special Forces, but also patrolling the famous “wall” at Guantanamo Bay, the one which Jack Nicholson’s overacting in A Few Good Men was trying to protect the rest of America from, AND she’s conducting investigations AND getting pregnant to one of those two men?

dir: David Cronenberg

2022

Who feels like an ungrateful piece of shit? I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit!

What kind of churl doesn’t appreciate a new film coming out from Canadian grandmaster director David Cronenberg? He’s been making great, GREAT films for like nearly 50 years!

I’m not even going to list them. Don’t even look them up. If you know, you know.

Anyway, just to short circuit a preamble that could run for pages, I did not like this fucking film. At all.

And I don’t feel great about it. I am sure the problem is me, and not any part of the film. I don’t like seeing scenes of surgery in this, the real current world that we live in, which only seems fictional some of the time.

In fact, I loathe seeing scenes of surgery. A lot of this film is surgery as performance art, as seduction, as something to do when you’re bored or curious, so even though there aren’t “real” scenes of surgery, and I realise it’s all latex and practical effects and such, fuck that, and ewww.

I mean, after all, what did I expect? This is Cronenberg. He didn’t invent “body horror”, but he perfected its cinematic realisation. This is his fucking bread and butter. To have wanted or expected anything else is a form of unproductive madness.

I don’t know why this seems like it was definitely shot in Greece, definitely during one of the pandemic lockdowns, but it was. Neither Greece nor the pandemic play any part in the story, seeing as it’s set in the future, but it’s hard not to laugh at some of the stuff that happens and wonder if it’s a stylistic choice or a covid protocol.

Viggo Mortensen, whatever my complaints with the flick, does not put in a bad performance. He’s not capable of it. I can’t remember the last time I saw him be less than great in anything he was in, and it’s not about to goddamn happen now, not even in a shitty, ill-considered film overflowing with sci-fi bollocks.

Viggo (yes, we are on a first name basis, thanks for asking) plays a chap called Saul Tenser. Saul, like many people in this future hellscape, is afflicted with a body that spontaneously creates new organs. It is a painful process, but, after all, artists are said to have to suffer for their art.

In this cowardly, old future world, humans have changed. Not because of genetic engineering or choice, or anything. But possibly because of what they’ve done to the environment. People don’t feel pain anymore, in the sense that they don’t feel pain in their skin or limbs (I guess? I never really completely understood this aspect), and they have new organs popping up. Saul and his fellow performer Caprice (Lea Seydoux) perform surgeries (on him) for audiences where these new organs are extracted and displayed for all to see.

dir: Andy Serkis

2021

In any year I’ll see a stack of films. There will be great ones, okay ones, dull ones, painful ones, but rarely will there be actively dumb ones.

Don’t get me wrong: there are plenty of dumb scenes in countless movies, but it takes a special talent / motivation to make a good “dumb” movie. Bad dumb movies are all too easy.

Of the thoroughly dumb ones I’ve seen this year, like the Australian made Mortal Kombat reboot or King Kong Versus Godzilla, this Venom flick is somehow dumber than the rest yet not any more enjoyable because of it.

Plot points and motivations, dialogue and virtually everything people say or do don’t matter in dumb flicks. Dumb flicks skate by all of that by being fun and / or funny.

This wasn’t fun, at least not for me. Tom Hardy as the somewhat lead character doesn’t look like he’s having fun either, but he’s based a career on that, so he’s not going to start looking comfortable now. Throughout this entire flick, and throughout what little I remember of the first one, Hardy’s character of Eddie Brock looks like little more than a guy who desperately needs to find a working bathroom. Alternatively, he has the air of a junkie starting to get the shakes, but they never stop; the shakes and the sweats are eternal.

Within him is an alien symbiote they call Venom, who consistently keeps wanting to eat other people’s heads. They have a very uneasy alliance, in that they fight constantly, though I think only Eddie hears Venom’s voice.

I could wax rhapsodic about how this is an updated version of the duality of the human soul / mind, of the Dr Jekyll / Mr Hyde concept, but even the thought I put into constructing this clumsy sentence is more than the level of thought that was put into the original script. I say ‘original’, because I can hear the deathly “punch-up” moments scattered throughout the lazy screenplay.