6 stars

dir: Patricia Riggen

2025

In the immortal words of Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, I (occasionally) love trash. I don’t love all trash, because even a grouch has to be picky sometimes, which means I am incapable of watching something like Married at First Sight without whacking myself in the face with a hammer.

But when it comes to movies, especially towards the end of the week, and especially when I’ve been drinking (which only happens at the end of the week), I don’t always feel like a 3 ½ epic about a Hungarian survivor of the Holocaust trying to build buildings in America and dodge the rapist tendencies of a billionaire played by Guy Pearce, or a long slow film about a depressed textile worker in a 17th century factory who finds relief in pricking herself with needles as an important and entirely valid commentary on social inequity and the benefits and drawbacks of alternative medicines.

No. Sometimes I just want to watch Viola Davis fuck people up.

Sure, there’s plenty of movies available where people come to a violent end at the hands of a righteous avenger, but then I heard that a new flick was coming out with Davis as the lead playing an American President pretty much in a Die Hard scenario, saving the day, making quips, giving the baddies what for.

On that count, on paper, I cannot say that this flick doesn’t deliver on exactly those counts. Viola Davis does play the American president at the annual G20 conference, where all the biggest and hottest economies getting together to figure out how they’re going to fuck over the rest of the world, this time in Cape Town South Africa.

She was formerly in the army, so her ability and willingness to kill people is backed up by story detail. It is also, since she’s referred to as a war hero, her ticket to political success in an America that this film imagines isn’t dominated by racist and sexist morons who would rather vote for an adjudicated rapist and 36 count felon whose every business has failed except for the one propping up White Supremacy. In other words, this fantasy realm is nothing like our actual world.

dir: Tyler Spindel

2025

It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.

This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.

This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”

Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.

Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?

Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?

I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.

dir: Timo Tjahjanto

2024

The Shadow Strays maybe is a bit of a return to form, but I have to say, I’m still a bit disappointed.

When I saw The Night Comes For Us a bunch of years ago, I thought “I’ve just watched the most awesome, most violent action film I have ever watched in my life”, and it was true, at the time. What I thought it meant was that the same director would go on making incredibly choreographed, immaculately shot violent actioners that would make the John Wick flicks look like the dull and repetitive pieces of shit that they are.

But what I was doing was limiting and pigeonholing of this director, who clearly wants to make all sorts of flicks, not just hyperkinetic homages to the Hong Kong flicks of the 80s and 90s. He wants to make horror flicks, and comedies, and variations thereof. His flick after The Night Comes For Us was called The Big 4, and, yeah, it was nothing like his earlier masterpiece of carnage. It was disappointing, to say the least.

I think the technical, film criticism term is that it was “so fucking dumb”, and it felt 14 hours long. It took me a year to finish it, an entire year. I hated it so much I couldn’t even bring myself to write a negative review of it, and I live for such opportunities. It was a cartoon, and not in a good way, because none of it was animated.

Being the simpleton that I am, however, when I heard he had a new film out, my heart skipped a beat, my hopes flew sky high, and here we are now, entertain us.

It starts off promising enough. Lots of carnage. Perversely, there’s a whole bunch of ninja like stuff where someone ploughs through a bunch of yakuza, some with swords, some with guns; all are wheat before Death’s cruel scythe. Somehow things go wrong, kinda, and the main person who was chopping up crims willy-nilly is yelled at for stuffing things up by her boss.

dir: Lee Isaac Chung

2024

Genius. Whoever was working in the marketing department for this film, whose decision it was to call it Twisters, you, sir or madam, or non-binary equivalent, are a platinum-plated, stone-cold genius. First movie was called Twister. Do you even reckon they bothered with brainstorming titles? “Uh, Twister 2?”

What about…Twis2er? Twister II, more old school perhaps, or maybe 2 Twist 2 Furious?

Nup. Nope. Twisters. And then when they make the sequel to this, they have the next, absolutely perfect title: Twisti3s. I smell marketing opportunities galore!

Bold, lots of bold choices going into this film. Especially since there’s practically nothing connecting the two films, other than they’re about idiots chasing tornadoes and then getting scared and having to hide from the same tornadoes.

It never occurred to me before, but the perplexity I face watching these special kinds of disaster flicks was somewhat alleviated when I realised, during the ‘intense’ moments in the film, that they’re really not that different from monster / kaiju movies, in that tornadoes are gigantic mindless forces of nature that destroy everything in their path. And when done right, the little people running around admit they have no power over anything, and are at the mercy of a cruel yet somehow indifferent universe. In the bad versions of these stories, the pathetic humans think they are the ones in control, and they can do things to make the bad giant monsters / tornadoes go away.