5 stars

dir: Joanna Arnow

2024

Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.

Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.

Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.

Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.

The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.

dir: Richard Linklater

2024

I don’t always find myself wondering why a plethora of critics fall over themselves praising a particular movie, because I can usually see the reason. It might be lazy, simplistic reasoning, but I can usually grasp it.

The incredible reviews for this flick, being Hit Man, leave me somewhat perplexed, but in a way that shouldn’t indicate I care that much. I don’t think it really matters, and in a few months no-one will even remember this film unless someone involved goes on an actual kill crazy rampage (which, these people being in the States, is not an impossibility, in fact it’s constitutionally required).

The main statement I’ve seen about this flick is that it heralds leading man Glen Powell with his arrival at some sort of apex level of success or stardom, and, honestly, why do people continue to talk like this? That kind of promotional bullshit should have died a long time ago, long before covid, long before OJ killed his ex-wife and her partner. These people are not our friends.

These relentless shitbags are in it for money and fame. Praising someone to the heavens so that he can become the next Tom Cruise is not something worth doing, unless you get rid of the previous one.

If he were a major acting talent, maybe you could justify all that bullshit, but, I’ve seen him in two films thus far, and as far as I can tell he read his lines well and doesn’t appear drunk on set. That’s not a justification for crowning him the next King of Moomba or anything.

dir: Zack Snyder

2024

If you were a Zach Snyder fan, the only thing better than a year where one of his films comes out is a year in which two of his films come out. So, 2024, a banner year for Snyderfans.

For the rest of us, it’s a second chance to sneer and deride and throw as much shade as can be thrown at a hack of his monumental proportions.

This here film Rebel Moon: The Scargiver is the sequel to that other film that he expelled into the universe, being Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire. No-one asked for these films, let alone sequels and such. I watched that earlier film, more with disbelief than hate, unable to believe that people with millions of dollars at their disposal would make something so generic and so familiar that it would have all the originality and creativity of an episode of Paw Patrol.

This here ‘sequel’ works so perfectly well that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch the earlier film. Watching the earlier film provides the viewer with nothing extra, nothing additional, nothing more illuminating. All the main characters / archetypes get a scene that explains their motivations for fighting the Empire, I’m sorry I meant the Imperium.

They fight the Imperium, and then that’s that, with another implied sequel at the end. We didn’t need that. We didn’t ask for that.

What did we ask for… I dunno. I expected there to be a big battle in the film, and I guess that’s there, the big classic showdown since this is space Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond the Stars. If it doesn’t make sense, well, where’s your sense of adventure? Your sense of whimsy? Has life crushed your spirit so much that you can’t suspend a little bit of disbelief to enjoy a Zach Snyder adventure-fest?

Yeah, me neither. It’s a bit of a chore watching action scenes that ape his own previous movies, staging things like 300 but with one side mostly shooting laser guns, and the other running around with swords and axes. It’s pretty goofy. They belabour the humble farmer stuff so much that you wonder how these Aryan lumpenproles were ever able to survive thus far.

dir: Doug Liman

2024

There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.

I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.

I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?

If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?

Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?

The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.

It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.