7 stars

dir: Yeon Sang-ho

2023

I should lie and say this is the South Korean sequel to Pixar’s WALL-E, whereby a plucky robot tries to save humanity from itself by killing a bunch of robots, and maybe some people too, if it has to, but that’s not going to convince anyone of anything, and could get Disney’s lawyers involved.

Jung_E is a strange science fiction flick from South Korea, but it is interesting. Well, it was mostly interesting, and only to me. And probably to the people who made it.

Despite being sci fi, despite starting with lots of action, this is not an action flick. Sorry to disappoint. It starts with intense action, and then really doesn’t have further action until the last fifteen or so minutes of the flick. So don’t go in expecting action, is all I’m saying. This is not an action flick.

Truth be told I’m not sure what you would call it instead. Maybe a techno drama, maybe a daughter / mother guilt fest. Set some time in the future, the planet has become uninhabitable due to climate change, and these shelters have been constructed off world to house humanity’s survivors. A number of these shelters unite, break away, and declare war on the others, presumably to fight over the scant resources left or about which god is the real one or over wearing masks or something equally stupid. A really cool mercenary called Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) leads these forces against a bunch of robots, but seems to get shot just as she’s about to complete some important mission.

But she’s confused, because after she’s been shot, and she looks down at her fingers, there’s metal and wires where she was expecting blood and bone.

It turns out that this battle is a simulation, that she is a constructed, robotic being, and that she has been cursed to relive her final mission as some kind of South Korean hell-afterlife.

dir: Martin McDonagh

2022

That was all so very Irish.

There’s a bunch of people saying feck and fecking all the time. They all speak with the most Oirish of Oirish brogues. They all pronounce their names and each other’s such that you can hear the Irish Gaelic pronunciation. So it’s not “Patrick Sullivan”, it’s “Pádraic Súilleabháin”.

And it’s not “Colm”, it’s “Colm”. See the difference?

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrell) have been friends for decades. They live on a fictional island off the coast of the Irish mainland, in about 1923, as a civil war rages. There’s no fighting on the island, though, even as the sounds of gunfire and cannons echo across the water.

“Good luck to you” mumbles Padraic to them and himself as he walks down a path and sees flashes in the sky, “whatever it is you’re fighting about”.

One day, the first day that we get to know all these idiots, Colm decides unlike every other day of his life that he doesn’t want to go to the pub with Padraic at two o’clock. This immediately tilts the world out of kilter and portends dark doings ahead.

It’s not just Padraic that’s worried about the fate of the universe: the other village peasants wonder aloud as to what in God’s name is going on if Colm doesn’t want to have a pint with Padraic.

When Colm tells a disbelieving and profoundly confused Padraic that he doesn’t want to spend time with him anymore, Padraic is singularly unable to grasp this new reality, the new way of the world. He spends the rest of the movie doing absolutely everything he can think of in order to restore the world to its previous axis, and Colm stolidly tries to do everything he can, with increasing desperation, to ensure that it doesn’t.

Let’s face it, Padraic is something of a fucking idiot, and after spending two hours with him I can totally see why Colm prefers his own company or the company of others. But in a place as bleak as Inisherin, even Padraic can be given a run for his money in the idiocy stakes. He’s not even the village idiot. That honour is bestowed upon the local policeman’s son, being Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is constantly saying awkward or cringey things in a child like sing song voice, despite no longer being a child.

But it’s a testament to Padraic’s own stupidity that he turns to Dominic for advice on how to win back Colm. Padraic’s determination to either laugh it off or pretend like the break is only temporary pushes Colm to declare that if Padraic speaks to him again, he’ll cut off his own fingers.

It’s meant to be a “what the feck?” moment for those of us in the audience, too. One of the main reasons Colm has given for wanting space, for wanting peace and quiet, for wanting to not have to listen to Padraic’s inane prattle any more, is that he longs for time to himself in order to play music and, most importantly, to write music. He feels like his time on this earth is limited, and that the more of it he squanders with Padraic, the less likely he is to leave behind anything of meaning, beauty or as a legacy.

He plays the fiddle, that’s his instrument, and it’s one for which he needs his fingers and thumbs. But in order to compel Padraic to leave him be, he’s prepared to cut them off, thus rendering himself unable to do the thing he so desperately wants to do.

And still Padraic doesn’t get it. His need to make Colm like him again, his inability to move past it, means both men will pretty much doom each other, with so few alternatives.

dir: Olivia Wilde

2022

Like being told to “relax”, like being told “trust me”, it never works to have dinguses tell you to feel the opposite of what you’re actually feeling.

So, Darling, definitely be Worried.

This modern retread of something we’ve seen a few times already is given a slightly more current update. It is impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, or, let me put it a different way – this film is not unique or complex enough to justify tip-toing around its “big” reveals. So think of this as a review of a lesser movie by M. Night Shyamalan (which means “any movie he’s made since Sixth Sense, which means it has a massive upswelling of twists in order to justify its existence., but the twists themselves aren’t that interesting.

Of course the most interesting and enjoyable part of any film Florence Pugh is in will always be the fact that Florence Pugh is in it. And Florence Pugh is in 90 per cent of the scenes in this movie. It’s her movie. Whatever is happening to her, if we care, is happening to us too.

On that score I cannot discount the flick, because she’s great in everything.

If there’s a problem, it’s that no-one else around her is as convincing, and also this complex, grinding 1950s conformity, wishfulfilling fantasy constructed around her is never really believable. You never feel that anyone could believe it, least of all a smart cookie like Alice (Pugh).

Perfect lawns, perfect modernist houses, perfect sleek and shiny cars, perfect cocktails and perfect sex with their husbands. Perfect heteronormativity as far as the eye can see, but, not perfect uniformity of ethnic or racial non-diversity. We are sold on the image of the post-WWII boom, but there are too many signifiers, too much obviousness that this is not the 1950s.

And if it’s not the 1950s, it must be something pretty bad, mustn’t it?

I was hoping for aliens, but…

Alice has a husband called Jack, played by Harry Styles. In case you don’t know who Harry Styles is, well, I envy you. He’s not a very good actor, or even an okay one, but that is fine here.

It’s especially fine because, when he’s not looking great in a suit and tie, or giving his wife head, and when he’s shown for what he really is, it all makes perfect sense.

His character, with his sometimes British accent, and sometimes terribly unbelievable American accent, is a piece of shit who has trapped a woman who’s way better than him in a horrible and elaborate prison, so he can control her. When she’s out working 30-hour shifts as a surgeon, he’s at home getting radicalised online by men’s rights activist videos and podcasts, wondering why no-one takes him seriously.

So he thought he found the perfect solution. A place, a lifestyle forced at gunpoint upon Alice that she would somehow eventually accept through mindless repetition of catchphrases and a lowering of expectations / consumerist overload.

Sounds like…the old idea of marriage, doesn’t it?

dirs: Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney

2021

Oddness abounds. But it abounds in a manner that I found oddly enjoyable.

Strawberry Mansion probably was made with a budget somewhat lower than what I spent on chewing gum last week, but I would hazard a guess that if they’d been given a massive budget, the flick would not have worked at all. The fact that it looks cobbled together with found objects and jerry-rigged items from out of hard rubbish entirely adds to the movie’s charm.

I don’t know if it adds thematically, but then the movie’s themes are pretty out there as it is.

The film opens with a nebbish-y guy (Kentucker Audley) trapped in an-all pink kitchen, desperately trying to find something to eat or drink. He’s frantic, starving, dying. A knock at the door – a man appears, bearing the gift of a bucket of Cap’n Kelly Chicken and a bottle of Red Rocket cola. The bearer of such bounties, being Buddy (Linas Phillips), tells the other chap that he’s always here for him, and he’ll never let him down. They eat and drink in a disturbingly orgiastic manner.

The nebbish-y guy wakes up. It was all a dream. He checks some machine, because, in this brave new world set in 2035, people record their dreams, and the government imposes a tax on those dreams.

The chap, dapper with his trimmed moustache and natty hat, drives to a Cap’n Kelly Chicken place, and gets a mess of fried chicken, with Red Rocket soda to wash it all down with.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

James Preble is the man, or at least a man, and it’s not just his job just to tax his own dreams, but to tax the dreams of others on behalf of the government. He drives out to a building, one that looks suspiciously pink, maybe strawberry-coloured, though I’m not sure how much of a mansion it is. He has been tasked, as an oneiric auditor (‘oneiric’ means ‘of dreams’ in Greek, that’s how I know!), to audit the dreams of the woman who lives in the mansion.