6 stars

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.

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read was on the summary for this flick on Netflix. Let me get it word-for-word, so that I can convey the absolute horror of these words belonging in the same sentence:

“From the writers of Deadpool based on the George Saunders short story.”

That’s like getting on a flight and finding out that the pilot is going to be Boris Johnson, who despite never having flown a plane before is sure he can do a bang up job.

George Saunders is an exquisite writer of short stories, books, IKEA catalogues - anything he writes is pure gold. Letting two screenwriters, possibly using mountains of cocaine in order to stay motivated, attack one of his stories should be considered a literary hate crime.

I genuinely remember reading the short story this is based on, having picked up Tenth of December back in the day when everyone was buying it but few people were actually bothering to read all the stories inside it. This story, Escape from Spiderhead, stood out as one of the more memorable ones.

Within the story, a prisoner volunteers to be experimented on by drug company goons. The drug reps are unseen, bland, corporate functionaries. Their testing is apathetic, doesn’t care about the crims or their longevity at all, and just about getting results.

Despite being science fiction, obviously, with chemical tech significantly ahead of where we are today, it was less about whether people should be conducting experiments like this on people, regardless of whether they’re crims or not, and more about the limits of what people will accept, will comply with.

In this flick, well, they’ve been given an inch of a good story, and they’ve turned it into miles and miles of opportunities for many, many bad ideas to come to the fore.

dir: Sam Raimi

2022

Errm, this is not the best recent film I’ve seen dealing with the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes in parallel to our own.

This isn’t an entirely bad film. It’s okay. Some parts are even enjoyable. Some parts work really well. Others, not so well.

If you find either Benedict Cumberbatch or the Doctor Strange character insufferable, then you might just suffer through this a lot. If you love either of them, or you like otters, then you might enjoy sections of this flick. If you have liked Sam Raimi movies over the decades, and can watch him cribbing from his own film history to deliver a kind of scrap book / lifetime achievement award to himself, then maybe there might be some sly meta level to enjoy the flick on.

As the latest entry in the Marvel universe, it’s kind of a dead end, or at least something that seems like it’s opening up a wild, new vista, but it ends up slamming the door on itself because, I dunno, it would be too much work otherwise?

The central lynchpin of this flick, which is kinda baffling, is that out of nowhere, after however many films, Dr Strange wishes he had a girlfriend again, being Christine (Rachel McAdams).

It turns out that not only can’t Strange be with her in this universe, but, when he finds out there are lots of other ones, he finds out that he can’t be with her in those universes either.

That’s got to suck. Even if it’s an infinite number of universes, in none of them can he be happy with Christine, or, put differently, there is no universe in which Christine can put up with his bullshit for too long.

Also coming to terms with infinite possibilities still leaving someone unsatisfied, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has decided that killing people is way more satisfying that dealing with her various griefs. She grieves the death of her boyfriend who was a robot, being Vision, but, now stay with me if you never watched the Disney + series WandaVision, she also mourns the loss of her two magical sons, Billy and Tommy, who existed for a brief period of time when she took over a New Jersey town and turned it into a 60s 70s 80s tv sitcom hell on Earth.

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say she was mourning two kids that never really existed, but if you told her that, she would probably kill you quite effortlessly, because she spends most of the film killing powerful people with little to no effort.

She is now so powerful she’s pretty much a threat to life even in other universes.

I just…yawn. Once we peaked with a villain who wanted to end half of all life in the universe, and now it’s like “well today’s villain is okay with destroying multiple universes!” it’s hard to give much of a damn. That goes beyond stakes that mean anything further than shrugging one’s shoulders and thinking “well okay that’s the premise, then.”