5 stars

dir: Dexter Fletcher

2023

Ghosted is the kind of flick that you could make from the deleted scenes from a bunch of other action movies. Plus it very much coasts on the idea that Chris Evans and Ana de Armas make a cute couple, and that having one of the biggest stars of the Marvel flicks play a non-action hero, herb nerd / farmer is fucking hilarious.

Of these multiple premises, there’s only partial truth, or partial success, in any of them. Yes, de Armas and Evans on paper sound like a charming couple, and seemed to have a certain energy in the delicious Knives Out a few years ago, and a great big galoot like Evans as an underpowered shlub sounds funny. And they also starred in an action flick from last year called The Grey Man, though they played antagonists, which left me hoping that they’d gotten Ryan Gosling to play the villain this time, just to emphasise how interchangeable all these actors and components are.

And Ana de Armas, when she’s not playing Marilyn Monroe in the much maligned Blonde, is always playing some kind of superspy, since that’s what she played in the last Bond film, Grey Man last year, and will be playing in the John Wick spin-off Ballerina.

I shouldn’t be the guy saying this, but whatever happened to flicks where people just talk about stuff? Does everyone have to be shooting or punching someone in order to have a career?

In this era where generic spy action flicks, whether the lead character is Melissa McCarthy or Rowan Atkinson, are a dime a dozen, they need something to stand out a bit, because anyone can make them (with cheaper digital effects), especially if they’re only going to show them on streaming services. This flick doesn’t really try too hard to do anything to stand out, which is…fine.

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: Noah Baumbach

2022

I kinda hated this even more than I imagined I would?

I have generally been on board with Noah Baumbach’s bullshit since seeing his third flick decades ago, being The Squid and the Whale. The main reason is that reading “Great” American novels for much of my life means I’ve been programmed to enjoy stuff the vast majority of the world happily lives without. It means I can find amusement or entertainment in rarefied and wry tales of (white) privilege, excess and regret, and the struggles of middle class people wrestling with their own insignificance.

It’s how you are programmed to enjoy reading New Yorker articles or to find their single panel cartoons amusing without ever provoking something as vulgar as an actual laugh. It’s what makes you read Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Caddis, Updike, Franzen and, yes, DeLillo without ever questioning what you’re doing with your life.

It’s why you tell yourself you like Wes Anderson films or the twee aesthetics of Frankie magazine without ever questioning why.

I’ve only ever outright hated one Baumbach flick, and it was called Greenberg, and it starred Ben Stiller as the single most irritating fucker ever committed to screen (until Adam Sandler played Howie in Uncut Gems). By some strange coincidence Greta Gerwig was in that horrifying movie. I think it’s also a coincidence that she’s making babies with the director in between directing and starring in movies.

She’s here as well. Playing a middle-aged woman in the mid-1980s. With a massive perm. Another character calls it “important hair”. Very important.

Adam Driver also plays a middle-aged, paunchy college professor here, also in the mid-1980s. I’m not saying they shouldn’t play middle aged paunchy people, but c’mon, taking objectively beautiful people and making them look like the rest of us is just cruel.

To us, not them. They think it’s a guaranteed path to credibility and awards success.

dir: Phil Tippet

2022

I’ll be honest with you – sometimes I have no fucking idea what’s going on in life or in movies.

Watching Mad God, allegedly a labour of love or a magnum opus or something that this stop motion animator has been working on for 30 years, I honestly had not the faintest idea as to what I was watching.

I know I was watching stop motion animation, which is a trip in and of itself. And I guess it’s ‘good’ stop motion animation? I don’t really know. When I watch something with stop motion, like Henry Selick’s stuff or the stuff put out by Laika Studios, I don’t judge whether I like the movie or not based on whether the stop motion animation is “good” or not.

It just “is”. It’s more the story I’m concerned with. As in, I love Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s not because it’s stop motion animation, anymore that I love certain Pixar flicks just for being digitally animated.

The medium versus the message. Phil Tippet’s deep love of stop motion animation I guess is meant to be the one and only attraction here, because it’s definitely not the dialogue. Just to be clear, there’s no fucking dialogue.

Not a word. There is only two things maybe that give an inkling as to what (maybe?) the story is kind-of about. It starts with an image I’m pretty sure is the Tower of Babel being destroyed, or at least covered in dark smoke clouds, and then a quote from Leviticus saying someone pissed off Old Testament God, so he was going to destroy them and everyone in their tribe.

And then a whole bunch of other things happen. I think they follow some kind of concept or whatever, as if it’s a series of film clips from someone’s concept album – some horrid prog rock band from the 80s or 90s, something with a portentous and pretentious name like Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.