7 stars

dir: Alberto Corredor

2023

What a strange movie. Imagine your father dying, in a horrible seeming accident, and you find out you’ve inherited a pub from him in Berlin. Berlin! And not even a good pub.

And it’s not even an ongoing business, so you don’t even have to go to the trouble of disappointing the regulars by telling them you don’t want them coming around anymore, and that you want a better class of patrons to frequent the place, not you rusted on day drinkers and shambolic alcoholics. I don’t know if German people put bets on dog races, but it’d be that level of peeps.

And they’d be the types that would nurse a pint for over an hour, because they’re there just for the familiarity, the routine, and not the ambience or the 20 Euro cocktails or the loaded bratwurst.

Maybe you’d meet a local, or a rival pub owner, and after an hour and a half of rivalry and misunderstandings, maybe finally, someone would run somewhere just in time to stop the other from leaving forever, and they’d kiss passionately as the orchestra swells, the music builds (unfortunately it’s oompah oompah polka music with all the tuba you can handle), and the happily ever afters start as the credits roll.

This is not that film. This film is about evil things, not love. This is about grief, with no consolation. And it’s also about how young people with nothing will fall victim to any scam or scheme that will give them even a hint of money for their troubles.

dir: Takashi Yamazaki

2023

And none too soon, finally, the sequel to Oppenheimer.

A joke already old and stale (in 2024), but I felt obligated to go with it anyway.

In a world where the contemporary American version of Godzilla is wary best buds with King Kong as they fight with all manner of giant monsters for the benefit, somehow, of humanity, the Japanese filmmakers, with their OG Godzilla, have chosen to go way back in time, back to the dark days just after the war.

Like they didn’t have enough to worry about…

See, this is a bit fascinating to me. For people who know a little bit about Japanese cinema, especially post-World War II, it’s interesting to see something set just after the war, because in Japan at that time, the Americans were in charge for a good long while. One of the prohibitions they had in place was that Japanese film studios couldn’t make any movies about the war or about just how horrible the reconstruction of the country was. They didn’t want to risk audiences getting riled up with propaganda pieces about how noble the Emperor was, how great his armies, and how unfair it was that the Americans annihilated so many of them.

So that’s one of the main reasons why almost every Japanese flick from the late 1940s – 1950s was generally a samurai era set period piece (chambera, I believe the genre was called).

And then there’s Godzilla from 1954, seventy goddamn years ago.

Everyone and his or her dog has an opinion on what Godzilla represents, but let’s just forestall any more bullshit theorising – obviously the Japanese mindset was horribly impacted by having two atom bombs dropped on two of their cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and then even more over time. Godzilla doesn’t exist, even as a fictional character, without American testing of nuclear bombs (in the original it was ‘hydrogen bombs’, just to please the censors).

Godzilla is the unforeseen legacy of the atomic age. But in this flick Godzilla is the personal nemesis of one guy who was too cowardly to fulfil his mission as a kamikaze pilot.

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…

dir: Martine Syms

2022

Watching this flick made during the covid era set and filmed at a liberal arts college in upstate New York, the painfully obvious fact hit me that it’s impossible to satirise this setting. It’s beyond satire. Everything that comes out of these people’s mouths sounds like they’re taking the piss.

The first ten minutes of the film involve our main character, being Palace Bryant (Diamond Stingily) having to defend her dissertation for her masters in fine arts. The words that pour forth from the mouths of these people sound like an alien tongue spoken by a species who delight in obscuring all meaning in what they say.

Even though it seems like a strange ritual for its own sake, Palace passes, and has completed her MFA. And that’s it in terms of her academic career, apparently. We spend pretty much 24 hours with Palace as she fends off the urgings of her friends to attend a graduation party that night, that she’s meant to be DJing at.

The whole point of the flick would be obvious if I’d mentioned it earlier: it’s not a film about what it was like to finish an MFA from Bard: it’s about what it was like for an African-American artist to attend school at a so-called bastion of liberalism, only to find out they’re just as racist as the Republican Party.

Yee haw. Palace herself seems to barge through life with few fucks given, but the aggressions, both micro and macro, of people who think they’re “allies”, take a toll on her. She is over being at this school (I have no idea what her work is actually like, other than some brief glimpses at the start of some stuff she threw together her work as a sculptor is referenced but not shown), and over being as a fetishized object even by people who are friendly to her.

This sounds more serious that it actually is, because when I say the film covers a day in the life of…, it mostly consists of Palace having conversations with other young people in the barely comprehensible dialect of the youngs, and mostly being plied with drugs. So many drugs! Palace and the people around her take recreational drugs from pretty much 10 minutes after the film starts until virtually the end.

It's meant to be fun, I guess.