7 stars

dir: Jean Luc Herbulot

2021

There is a lot of insanity going on here.

For much of this flick’s length, I felt like I was watching something so cool, so different from anything I’d seen before, something steeped in cleverness and difference, but within a startling cinematic form, from places where films like this rarely arise (not that I would know – I mean that rise to prominence outside of where it was made).

And eventually I came back down to Earth. It’s just a film. As great as the melding of form, function, place, history, cool looking dudes is, and as refreshing as it is for a revenge tale, the way everything is resolved felt unfulfilling.

And yet everything I will say from now on isn’t going to really capture the magnitude of why I found this flick so impressive. I think it will remain hard to explain.

I know nothing about the director, but I know he’s seen some films. He has definitely seen the films (or at least enough scenes from them) of Sergio Leone. And though he’s from the Republic of Congo, and studied and worked in France, he is drawn to telling a very strangely specific story about a trio of guys who find themselves trapped in the Saloum region of Senegal.

The stuff I’m going to write is going to sound quite specific and quite strange, but I assure you most of it is reasonably accurate. The film starts in 2003, during a coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau. A trio of mercs runs around what looks like piles and piles of corpses in the streets, wearing slick grey-silver slickers, wielding weapons. When we see one soldier stir amidst the dead, one of the mercs, with white dreads, blows a powder into his face, knocking him the fuck out.

They proceed to a room where there’s a Mexican drug dealer who has a suitcase full of gold bars, and it seems their job all along has been to extract the racist jerk from this place and take him north to Dakar in Senegal, so he can get back to, I dunno, macramé and drug dealing in his spare time.

I don’t think the mercs were responsible for the coup (in the film, I mean, not in ‘real life’) – though that’s maybe why they’re there to extract Felix (Renaud Farah). As they fly to their destination, the plane loses fuel, and they have to come down in a region of Senegal they think is cursed.

The three chaps, the three amigos, these three Bangui’s Hyenas, are thick as thieves. They never really argue with each other that much, but they do disagree occasionally. Chaka (Yann Gael) seems like the youngest of the three, but seems maybe to be their leader. They defer to him at least. Rafa (Roger Sallah) acts like he thinks he’s the coolest of the trio, but that’s only because his sunglasses, mohawk and machete combination look really, really on point.

Last is Minuit (Ba Mentor), who is some kind of mystic with his massive dreadlocks, but he seems, whatever his propensity and comfort with violence might , is here called a marabout, or someone with the skills to both pay the bills and the power to repel evil spirits and such.

(Madres Paralelas)

dir: Pedro Almodovar

2021

It’s lovely to see Penelope Cruz starring in another Pedro Almodovar movie.

As in, that in and of itself is a good thing. She’s been the lead in many of his films, and it usually bodes well. I still have such fond memories of watching Volver for the first time, and enjoying it so much, and thinking “wow, Almodovar really loves women, plus he’s sorta kinda making up for how terrible thematically and content-wise some of his earlier films were.”

I’m not going to get into it. If you saw the ‘delightful’ 80s-90s Almodovar flicks, you know exactly what I mean.

The themes here are still about what generations of women go through, what mothers go through, what pieces of shit men are in general, but it’s welded to two plots – one’s a melodrama about babies being accidentally swapped, and the other is about the people the Franco fascists butchered at the start of and during the Spanish Civil War. And probably after as well, considering the fact that the fascists won that particular war.

If it appears like what I describe above sounds ungainly or like some kind of ungodly hodge-podge, well, it is, a bit. It’s perfectly well acted, I have seen Penelope Cruz give less than great performances, but not in Almodovar’s films. And she’s fine here, comfortable with the character, comfortable in her skin. I just feel like the screenplay was somewhat half-baked. There are things that happen, stuff that people do, and it doesn’t feel organic to the plot, or to these people, or to people in general, whether they’re Spaniards or not.

The film opens with a photographer called Janis (Cruz) doing what photographers do, with the subject being an anthropologist called Arturo (Israel Elejalde). I can’t imagine why a highly sought after and in demand photographer would be photographing an anthropologist, but then my knowledge of Spanish culture and society is somewhat limited. Maybe anthropologists are the true rock stars of Spanish society.

dir: Richard Linklater

2022

What a movie. As in, how is this even a movie?

Nah, that’s unkind. This animated movie is, as far as I can guess, a version of Richard Linklater’s idealised childhood growing up in the burbs of Houston, Texas in what I like to call the button down Plastic Fantastic era during a time when America thought it could do no wrong, and the space race was going to mean everyone would be living on Venus by 1975 and everything would soon look like the Jetsons.

It was a childhood, based on this flick, typified by being safe, bland and pleasant. The main family as presented and animated here would not have been out of place on the tv itself, perhaps as the neighbours to the Brady Bunch or as the family down the road from the witch in Bewitched or the genie from I Dream of Jeannie. Is it a case of “that’s how it actually was back then?” versus “memory and television combine to transform all experiences into stuff that looks like it came out of a sitcom”?

It’s hard to say. I mean, it would be easy for often great, sometimes not so great director Richard Linklater to say, and he probably has in several interviews, but I hardly want to taint my reviews with actual knowledge from the people that would actually know why something is how it is in a movie they’ve made.

Instead I’ll take the far lazier but much more profitable path of just imagining people’s intentions and motivations, and run with that. That way I can be 400 per cent more opinionated.

This childhood that Stanley (voiced by Milo Coy as the actual boy, but with Jack Black doing the constant narration of a grown up Stanley looking back on his tedious childhood) has, I would guess, was a childhood that many white Americans had during that era, as long as they were of a certain socioeconomic status and background. Culturally, it’s the absence of culture that exemplifies this time and place – everything from where they live to how they live is all about that place as being a tabula rasa – a blank space which was filled in with shiny and new hopes and dreams. The family live in a new development where brand new houses go up in a place outside of Houston.

Who and what was there before these brand new houses?

dir: Fletcher Moules

2022

Entergalactic is an entirely animated movie, and a Netflix exclusive one at that. This is not one for the kids, definitely. Not because it’s beyond them, because the story is a very simple one, but there are some sex scenes, surprisingly enough.

But, this isn’t a flick that would satisfy weirdos or perverts, because that’s not its purpose(?) It’s probably more like a longform accompaniment to Kid Cudi’s album of the same name that came out this year. And he also voices one of the main characters, being Jabari.

Jabari has recently moved into a loft apartment in Manhattan because he’s started a new job with Cosmic Comics, which I’m guessing is like Marvel or something. To date his claim to fame has been spraypainting a character he calls Mr Rager wherever he can on the walls of New York. The task before him is converting Mr Rager into some kind of comic book character.

This sounds fantastical, but, I assure you, it’s not imaginary within the dreamy context of the animated movie. Jabari is a dreamer, but he’s also drunk and stoned a lot of the time, so I guess there’s a fair bit of overlap between the actual and the imagined.

Jabari is a young African-American man in New York, but, thankfully, within the confines of this story, there’s only a small amount of racism he has to deal with, so he isn’t shot by cops for no reason or excluded from too many aspects of contemporary society. He has no money issues either, so he’s doing better than most of us. Also, with his group of friends, life is a constant drug and booze fueled exciting time for which there are no repercussions other than a mild hangover that one time.

He does sometimes have the Mr Rager character appear and seem like he wants to kill him, but this is less a psychotic break and more an opportunity to let an aspect of Jabari’s personality shine through (which kinda seems like self-doubt, or anger) along with the animation.

As for the animation, well, it’s unfair to the animators to say this, but they do a fairly good job aping / ripping off / homaging / appropriating the animation style from recent masterpiece Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, New York never looked this great in animated form, except, um, for the last time it looked this great.