6 stars

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?

dir: Cooper Raiff

2022

Oddness abounds…

I did not enjoy this flick, but I do admire it. Or maybe I did enjoy aspects of it, but thought maybe overall it didn’t work, or maybe it worked overall even if it had profound weaknesses.

I start this not knowing what my verdict will be in the end.

On the surface, or with a superficial description, this would sound like a pretty stock standard film, in that it’s about a guy who’s just finished college and doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s no different from The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman’s character didn’t know what to do with himself, except that having sex with Mrs Robinson would work, at least for a while.

It’s also, unfortunately, the same premise as every film with a male protagonist made in America in the last 50 years that doesn’t have guns in it: in other words, white, middle-class ennui, that’s usually overcome with a manic pixie dream girl who makes the protagonist listen to The Shins through her headphones and thus transforms his life into something better, finally.

There is no shortage of these films, and it seems to be a film that every up and coming actor (I’m stressing the point that it’s always (white) male actors who write / direct and star in these movies) gets to make once they get enough money together.

They are sometimes good, sometimes godawful, but they cover a need, I guess.

Well, in this flick, 12 year old Andrew (Cooper Raiff plays the adult version, who also directs) starts off the film by telling a woman at his bar mitzvah that he’s in love with her, even though he’s just a kid, and not a particularly handsome or tall one.

Of course that couldn’t work out, but we get the impression that this need to find love with an older woman is now a feature in his personality, and not a bug.

Ten years later, Andrew is finishing college, and has a girlfriend, but she clearly has a future planned that doesn’t include him, whereas all he’s got when asked what he’s going to do is “uh, follow you around maybe?” which is secretly what EVERY woman wants to hear.

As she leaves for Barcelona, he is forced to move back home, work at a place called Meat Sticks, and sleep on his younger brother’s floor. His mum (Leslie Mann) loves him and loves his silly ways, but she has her own issues, including living with bipolar.

If the film has a series of missteps, this could be the first of a cascading multitude. Her experience of “bipolar” essentially occurs entirely off screen, and ‘only’ amounts to shagging the husbands of people they know within their tight knit Jewish community during these episodes.

Like, okay. What? Right off the bat, the mum asks Andrew to take his younger brother to a particular bar mitzvah, because she herself isn’t welcome there because she shagged the father of the boy whose special day it now is, and the mum’s not too happy with her, even though the entire community seem to be begrudgingly okay with it.

I can’t even start on that. It’s treated as such a throwaway line, so casually that I just find it horrifying.