7 stars

dir: Bradley Cooper

2023

Well, hey! Did you want to watch a film directed by Bradley Cooper? Starring Bradley Cooper? Playing a real life person-type person? That isn’t A Star is Born?

Were you desperately curious to learn about the life and times of Leonard Bernstein? THE Leonard Bernstein? As played by Bradley Cooper?

With a big honking prosthetic nose? One so large and honking that it makes him nasally and sound nothing like Bernstein?

Oi, you. Respect the nose, no mocking, no more shenanigans and no more tomfoolery. That nose previously won Nicole Kidman an Academy Award in The Hours where she played renowned writer and river-enjoyer Virginia Woolf. That nose has won more awards than Paul Giamatti.

And clearly Mr Cooper was convinced that this production and that nose were going to win him the Oscar that he covets so much. We are months away from that vaunted awards night, but I am telling you now, Mr Cooper, you ain’t going to win. You have put all your eggs and your nose in the one basket, believing that playing a real person, and a beloved one at that (maybe 50 years ago), would clinch it for you.

But there’s no way you are going to beat Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. That is a biopic. That has long stretches of black and white too, and it’s three hours long, meaning it’s very important. Your film, on the other hand, is only two hours and ten minutes long, therefore it’s not anywhere near as important.

황야
Hwang-ya

dir: Heo Myung-haeng

2024

The title of Badland Hunters is so generic, so unmemorable, that I hoped the actual literal translation of the Korean title was going to be something like “Big Guy punches the Apocalypse”, but it didn’t pan out that way. The literal translation is something like “Wilderness”, which is equally unmemorable.

You can’t always get what you want. But beyond a meaningful title, I didn’t want much. About the most I expected was that South Korean action star Ma Dong-seok would punch some people really hard.

I need not have worried. Even though the action sometimes relies on Nam-san (Ma Dong-seok) chopping some creatures or bad guys up with a scary looking machete, or shooting people with a shotgun (the promo poster for the movie has him aiming a shotgun at the audience, which gave me some pause), but rest assured the filmmakers knew exactly why the audience has come along to this flick: to watch him punch people really, really hard.

I also thought that a post-apocalyptic scenario wouldn’t lend itself immediately to punchy-punchy action. It’s usually supercharged V8 Interceptors and guys with guitars that double as flamethrowers. And, yes, most of Nam-san’s opponents are soldiers with rifles and lots of other guns, which is somewhat unusual, in my limited experience of South Korean flicks. But whenever there’s been too much gunplay, Nam-san’s opponents just seem to forget they have guns, and also politely array themselves so that Nam-san can kill them or knock them out one by one.

Very considerate of them. This flick is kind of insane, but it’s an almost reasonable level of insanity.

Three years in the past, there was a massive earthquake. Like, really bad earthquake in Seoul. It destroyed almost every building except one, which is called The Apartment. I had hoped it was a reference to the Billy Wilder classic The Apartment, which starred Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, but I was just setting myself up for disappointment yet again.

I fully acknowledge that earthquakes can be terrible. They can kill thousands of people. At no stage is there an explanation as to why a bad earthquake ends civilisation in all of South Korea, or the rest of the world such that no-one comes to help during that entire time.

And there really should have been a reference to a catastrophic earthquake devastating North Korea and somehow also improving their quality of life in comparison to what they had before.

dirs: David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani & Mike P. Nelson

2023

The V/H/S franchise has had, I think, 6 entries thus far, and I have to say I think this is the best of the lot of them, or at least of the ones I have seen. I am not a horror film scholar (I shudder to think of what such a person would look and smell like), nor am I paid for my highly valuable insights and opinions on the internet, so I don’t have to be exhaustive in everything I do.

I basically just watch and review stuff that piques my curiosity.

V/H/S/85 succeeds, partly at least, because of the abandonment sporadically of its found footage conceit. I don’t care about the origin of footage – I don’t need for there to always be someone filming stuff (on a bulky and clunky 80s video camera, in this anthology’s context), and someone perpetually yelling at the ‘person’ filming to stop filming before, during and after something terrible starts happening. But by the same token it does add a different energy to what we’re watching sometimes. At other times, the absurdity of someone who’s being shot at or eaten by some horrific creature still managing to keep the camera relatively steady takes you out of whatever you’re watching and tells you you’re an idiot for suspending your disbelief in the first place.

Also, the segments are significantly different from each other, thematically and action-wise, even as they’re linked by a time period, aesthetics and the deliberate ‘corruption’ of the medium, being, the look and feel of degraded magnetic tape video, accumulated in almost a palimpsest of footage recorded over footage recorded over footage. Interspersed between the different segments is an overarching story which I was very dubious about each time it would pop up, which is (deliberately) so cheesy and hacky that it gives off Z-grade direct-to-video, but when I realised that it was a shaggy dog story when I saw the punch line, I do admit to laughing out loud.

It was a brief laugh, dear reader. After all, this is not a comedy anthology. This is horror.

Respect for the fallen.

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2023

The only thing that could make this cumbersome title more cumbersome would be adding “Part 1” to it, which they did, but they’ve since decided to not call whatever comes next “Part 2”, so what even was the point?

It’s common parlance or criticism to rag on the Fast & Furious flicks as being silly, stupid, physics-insulting etc, and they truly are dumb flicks, don’t get me wrong. But the thing is, wow, in long stretches of this flick I was sure I was watching Fast X. They’re practically the same flick and they also end, after 1300 hours, on a cliffhanger. Which is pretty unsatisfying.

At least this one does not have whatever the fuck it is that Jason Momoa was doing in that other flick.

Instead of Momoa, we have Esai Morales playing an antagonist who is always several steps ahead of the heroes, and presumably won’t make a mistake until the final moments of the next film.

As these films get longer and more complicated, it’s important to remember that none of it really matters, and that Tom Cruise playing these characters in his 60s is becoming increasingly less believable. The older he gets, the more he insists on having long scenes of him running, just to let us know he can still run fast.

We get it, Peter Pan, you can run fast.

The ultimate antagonist in this flick, you’re never going to believe it, it’s an Artificial Intelligence that they call The Entity. The Entity knows all and sees all. Anywhere there’s internet, the Entity is there. It knows everything about our hero Ethan Hunt and his band of merry pranksters, and can easily predict their actions and manipulate them weeks in advance.

It’s just so fucking smart.