6 stars

(Μήλα)

dir: Christos Nikou

2021

This. Is a Greek film. About a guy. And he really likes apples.

That’s about it. There’s not a lot of subtext going on. Just really likes apples.

Doesn’t, like, love them to the exclusion of everything else. But he does seem to enjoy eating them more than he seems to enjoy eating anything else.

He doesn’t spend the entire film eating apples. That would be absurd, even for an odd Greek film.

But the film is called Apples. So you could be forgiven for thinking the apples are somehow important.

There is a guy here (Aris Servetalis), but I don’t think we find out his name? I don’t think he knows his name, or at least that’s what he tells the people that find him on the bus.

There appears to be, for a film made during the goddamn pandemic, or just before the pandemic, an epidemic, not of people coughing themselves to death with the spicy cough, but an epidemic of sudden onset amnesia. One moment people know who they are and where, and the next they seem to have forgotten everything from before a specific moment in time.

Our sullen guy here is taken to a hospital, and tested and looked after for a while, but there’s no treatment and no cure. People are basically warehoused at the hospital until someone comes to claim them, like they’re lost property. If no one comes, well, they have a program for that.

Our sullen bearded guy is set up in a modest apartment, has some clothes given to him, and a polaroid camera, and money occasionally and physical cassette tapes regularly are delivered to him for his listening pleasure. Of the few things he has, he also has a tape player. How delightfully retro!

He has to listen to the tapes, go out into the world and do what the tapes said to do, and take a polaroid as proof. That polaroid is put into a photo album, and perused by the doctors who seem to break into the apartment whenever they feel like it, admiring their handiwork.

The first task involves going out and asking to borrow someone’s bike, pop a wheelie or two, and then have a photo taken of you on the bike. The guy asks a teenager for his bike, and of course the jerk says no. So he asks an even younger kid, so that he can ride around on an absurdly little bike like he’s Krusty the Clown.

But he gets the photo. The taskings from the cassettes get more complicated, more involved, and start to include other people more. Go to a fancy dress party they said. Go to a strip club, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

dir: Sebastián Lelio

2022

Sometimes, either through listening to a news story, or watching a movie, all you can bring yourself to do is shake your head and go “that fucking country…”

Sometimes you say it about your own country, usually people outside of America just say it about America after another mass shooting, and sometimes you say it about a country you otherwise love but can’t believe how dumb they used to be because of religion.

Ireland. 1860s. Just after the Potato Famine. Grim times.

Grim times compounded by the abject stupidity of a populace in thrall to the Catholic Church.

An English nurse (Florence Pugh) is hired to watch a girl in alternating 8 hour shifts with a nun. She’s not meant to help the girl, or heal her. Just watch her.

The girl they say has not eaten human food in months, and is being kept alive through the grace of God, or Jesus, or magic. One doctor (Toby Jones) even wonders if the girl is drawing sustenance from sunlight, like a houseplant. If the doctors of this village are this fucking dumb…

No nonsense nursey Lib huffs and puffs around the village getting progressively more frustrated with these hicks and their hickish ways. But there’s nothing she can do. The girl is trapped in a double-bind: if she’s revealed as a fraud her family get kicked out of their house; if she’s seen eating food they’re homeless. If she doesn’t starve they’re probably kicked out as well. So whatever she’s doing, she has to keep doing it, or not doing it, until she dies.

This makes for very frustrating viewing. In truth the frustration of the main character in the face of this abject rural superstitious stupidity is matched by our frustration watching two people trapped by the times and circumstance.

It would help if perhaps Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) were more of a sympathetic figure. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the thought and representation of any child suffering is affecting and disturbing, and you’re placed in the position of not wanting that suffering to continue, to end as soon as possible, however that might happen. But, at first, all we can think of is that this dumb girl is doing something dumb for dumb family / religious reasons.

dir: Taika Waititi

2022

Not that it matters, not that the world cares…

I was determined to review this Marvel flick before the latest, current Marvel flick. The difference between them isn’t just intent and timing.

The biggest difference is while the existence of Love and Thunder is amusing to me, seeing as it adapts the storyline where Jane becomes The Mighty Thor, with bulging biceps and all, and wields the magical hammer Mjolnir, the thing is, I don’t really care about it that much as a movie or as anything else.

I care about the sequel to Black Panther for a number of reasons, so that will be a very different review.

This? Well… It’s silly, as we expect most things that involve Taika Waititi to be, but there are levels at which the silliness in his films is charming and enjoyable, and levels at which it is grating and the opposite of fun (which is known as “work”).

Love and Thunder is painful and grating in a lot, A LOT, of its running time. It’s actively painful. The most obvious example of this is the inclusion of two screaming goats as a form of transportation for the core crew on their adventures. It’s one of those gags that, like Sideshow Bob stepping continuously on rakes, is dependent on going for such a length of time that it stretches the bounds of what we consider acceptably funny, past that, to the point where the absurdity makes it even funnier.

The more stuff grates here, the more the goats scream, the more painful it becomes. It doesn’t, at least for me, at least on this first watch, go back all the way back around to being funny again.

Oh, no. Definitely not.

It’s not like I was hungover when I was watching it. Or drunk. I imagine it would have helped.

You may think Thor or Jane Foster are the main characters, but really, there are two other main characters, being Gorr the so-called God-Butcher (Christian Bale), who is in a different movie from Hemsworth and Natalie Portman, and Korg (a CGI pile of rock voiced by Waititi himself).

dirs: Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman

2021

I was excited to see this, having heard a lot about it, and the chance came up during the recent Melbourne International Film Festival to watch it in a cinema, so I went for it.

Huh. I was left a fair bit baffled by the end as to why it has the rep that it has, at least on the festival circuit. It’s reviewed exceptionally well, and, I just can’t see it, whatever it is that everyone else is seeing.

It has been described as an Afrofuturist / gender fluid exploration of contemporary themes and colonisation and its discontents, and that’s all well and good, but what we get for most of the film’s running time is a number of people wearing discarded bits of tech on their clothing, singing the occasional song, having circular conversations about why they deserve more from the bounty the rest of the world has derived through mining their country, and then that’s about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to think about in terms of all the elements shining through the various characters. Some characters die right at the start, to inspire other characters to start moving, and others change gender (and actor, because why not?) for no real discernible reason.

Okay. And this flick is mostly set in Burundi, but all filmed in Rwanda, and it’s nice to watch a flick from Rwanda that isn’t about the massacre in the 1990s that killed so, so many people. That being said, a genocide that killed a million people isn’t something you forget about. It pokes through, here and there, into the narrative. You can’t talk about the extraction of resources from a country like Rwanda or Burundi without talking about the legacy of colonialism or the international appetite for fuelling its own technological progress upwards and onwards at the expense of the people at the bottom who are the ones, you know, mining the stuff and dealing with the environmental devastation afterwards, if they even survive.

This shouldn’t be mistaken for a documentary, or a manifesto / treatise: it’s certainly spells out where it’s coming from, and what people represent. I mean, for crying out loud, most of the characters have purely functional names like Motherboard, Ehlohel (it’s really LOL), Psychology, Memory, both Neptunes, and Matalusa (which is really a combination of “martyr” and “loser”, which ends up being extended further to Martyr Loser King?), but what the aspiration is, the tremendous hope is that all these people can transcend their mortal constraints, both societal and of their own flesh, through free access to technology and music (I’m guessing, since there’s are so many musical scenes, and one of the directors is a musician / composer) to some higher plane that exists beyond the racism and colonialism of our actual contemporary world.

I mean, don’t we all. It would be nice if such things could happen, instead of entrenching existing poverty and structural racism and labeling it economic progress, but what are you going to do? All our new mobiles need coltan. Where are you going to get your new smartphone from every year, if not from the back-breaking labour of the poorest people in countries just like these?