7 stars

dir: Sean Ellis

2022

When this was initially going to come out, probably pre-covid, it was going to be called Eight for Silver. When it played festivals and such it was still called that. But then someone had the brainstorm, the lightbulb moment, the epiphany, and thought "fuck that, that’s too complicated; let's just call it The Cursed".

I think they could have gone one better and called it "How's that Curse I Cursed You With, Cursedy?"

I have lines when it comes to horror flicks, that I am uncomfortable about when they get crossed. It's important to have boundaries, I feel. And while I am generally okay with all sorts of damage and dismemberment, I'm not at all comfortable with having kids as protagonists upon whom carnage is visited. Sure, kids are threatened all the time in action flicks and other horror flicks.

Rarely do they make good on that threat. I think that's partly why I felt a bit aggrieved watching this flick, because they "broke" the social contract of horror flicks that it's okay to put them in peril, but not to actually follow through.

Another of this flick's crimes is that a central part of its story depends on a massacre of a Roma clan, who have the temerity to be on some land that some landlord jerk believes is his. Of course, beyond the supernatural, it is right and proper to make landgrabbing murderers the true villains in anything, whether it's a film or a documentary, but haven't the Roma suffered enough? Such massacres happened for centuries prior to the main "last" time they were slaughtered en masse by the Nazis, but using such a scene - for mass entertainment - worries me a bit, especially with the rise in nationalism / fascism worldwide lately.

Just this week in Britain the Tories brought in legislation targeting the travelers / Roma communities, so can we stop giving them persecution ideas?

Not that I think a fuckwit of Boris Johnstonian proportions would have the time to sit through a deftly-made horror flick like this one.

Even though everyone except the so-called “gypsies” speaks in English and they’re all English (or in the lead’s case, American, I think this is set in France. No-one speaks French, though, which is a relief.

dir: Michael Bay

2022

There’s no two part collection of name and surname that chills the blood like “Michael” and “Bay”. “Michael” and “Myers” can chill the blood too, but that depends whether you’re afraid of the implacable enemy in the Halloween films, or you’re wondering why everything Mike Myers has done since the first Austin Powers has been so unremittingly terrible.

Michael Bay has made some of the loudest and dumbest films in Hollywood history, and whatever his age is, he’s not about to stop now. This is, somehow, a remake of a Danish film, which Bay might have heard about (I find it hard to believe he watches other people’s movies, it seems off-brand), where crims hijack an ambulance in order to flee from the authorities.

I haven’t seen that film, but I can guess quite easily that it is nowhere near as loud or fucking dumb as this flick. But I knew that coming into the experience. It’s a simple bet to take, because nothing can be as loud or as dumb as a Michael Bay flick.

This is not the place to have the argument as to whether Bay is a cancer on the body politic, or the body cinematic. Consider Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys, and the general bombast and dumbness they’ve contributed to our lives and minds. Then there’s the visually incoherent Transformers films, which are somehow even worse. If he’s made one okay movie it might be Pain & Gain, but even then he could barely resist his urges to overedit everything all of the time.

There are no such abstentions here, no urge unfulfilled, no screaming overamped moment held back or resisted. And now he’s adding swooping drone shots to his limited repertoire of “high energy” camerawork.

The premise is simplistic enough such that you’d be finding it difficult to justify as to why this flick needs to be as long as it is. I think it came in someone over two and a half goddamn hours. And all you get for that extra time, since there’s little to argue as to why it couldn’t just be 90 minutes or so, is just more scenes of an ambulance driving around being pursued by the cops, by all the cops of LA.

The implausible bit isn’t that Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers in this movie. The implausible bit is that an ambulance driven by crims through the streets of LA over the course of a very long day could somehow avoid traffic enough to drive more than 20 miles an hour.

This flick is a very simplistic bunch of pancakes, that are a bit overlarded. Only one character has a backstory to justify his actions, but everyone else just is who they are. The Will character fought in one of America’s recent endless conflicts overseas as a soldier, but comes back unable to find work, unable to afford the health care his wife desperately needs.

But he is a Good Man, don’t you know.

dir: Wes Anderson

2021

It’s impossible to know whether this flick is peak Wes Anderson, or whether his next flick will be even fussier. Each time one of his flicks come out, I think “it can’t get any fussier than this, can it?” and every time I’m wrong.

At this late stage of his career, to expect any different would be foolish.

The French Dispatch’s full title is The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. How you feel immediately after hearing or reading that could impact on your reaction towards the film. If, upon hearing that, you rolled your eyes so hard you might have strained something, or you fought the instant urge to punch a kitten in the face, the preciousness of the ensuing endeavor may be a tad too much for thee.

After all, fans of Wes Anderson films are a special bunch. Like the collectors of Sylvanian Families anthropomorphised unholy animal hybrids or the people who are now drinking their own pee as a coronavirus cure, they’re not like other humanoids. Imagine the kind of person for whom Wes Anderson movies are the best movies they’ve ever seen.

You’re either picturing Wes Anderson himself, possibly wearing a cravat or an ascot, or legions of penny farthing riding, artisanal picklers, waxed moustache baristas or people who crave a gluten free lifestyle despite not being gluten-intolerant.

In other words such a creature doesn’t really exist. And yet those films keep being made, and someone must be seeing them.

Well, I saw this one now, and it’s not only a homage to all things fussy and Andersonian; it’s also a love letter to that other bastion of fussiness and great writing, being the New Yorker magazine. Why the pretense that it’s a French supplement to a Kansas newspaper? I have no idea, other than that Anderson wanted to set this flick in France in a town literally called Boredom-on-Apathy (Ennui-sur-Blasé) because that counts for humour in Wes Anderson World. Though the parallels with the New Yorker are fairly transparent and one-to-one, maybe it’s a reference to The Paris Review as well, which was founded by amongst others, George Plimpton, that silver haired razor wit and raconteur.

Yeah, nah, probably not. The editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr (Bill Murray), is probably even fussier than Wes Anderson himself. There are an array of other editors and cronies, all mostly played by the other hangers on and goons who usually populate Anderson’s films. Familiar faces. Familiar, goofy faces.

Mostly, the flick is held together with a tissue of connections, formatting, impeccable set design, but (mostly) is an anthology of stories, some more interesting than others.

dir: Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jnr

2021

This is a pretty confronting, deliberately unsatisfying film. You don’t see a heap of flicks coming out of the States with First Nations / Native American leads or themes, and you also don’t see ones usually this dark. This isn’t about people reconnecting with family or their past, reconciling the enormity of the crime perpetrated against the native people of the Americas with today’s lived experience, or any of those platitudes.

Reservation Dogs is a recent (and the only one I can think of) tv series with First Nations kids as the leads playing characters living on a reservation, where the realities of their lives are leavened with a wicked sense of human and charming performances. Wild Indian has no such buffers

The brutal opening of the film is set in Wisconsin in the 1980s. M’kwa (Phoenix Wilson) is a young Ojibwe boy covered in bruises. A young Catholic priest at M’kwa’s school tries to gently find out where the bruises are coming from, but M’kwa demurs to say anything. His home life is awful, just awful. He has a father who cannot stand the sight of him, and who beats him just for existing. Bullied at school as well, at least he has his best friend and cousin Ted-O (Julian Gopal) on his side. They hang out, avoiding their parents as best they can, shooting bottles with Ted-O’s dad’s rifle just for something to do.

There’s a blonde WASP girl at their school, from ‘town’, and to M’kwa she comes to symbolise something very desirable and unattainable, and I don’t think it has anything to do with sexual desire. When another student starts dating her, it unleashes a resentment that will end up in tragedy, even if it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

M’kwa feels powerless against his brutal father, though he is tempted to do something drastic and final. You can see him seething at this other boy, a boy who’s done nothing wrong, whose living circumstances are probably not that different from his own. Which M’kwa himself sees, when he resentfully peers through the boy’s window, and he sees him comforting his passed-out mother.

The priest, delivering a sermon, explains what’s going on for those of us who can’t figure it out from what we’re watching. It may seem strange that, considering the people involved, why we would need a priest to explain stuff to us from the perspective of the Old Testament, when M’kwa and Ted-O themselves could tell us how shitty their lives are?