7 stars

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.

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?