7 stars

dir: Wes Anderson

2023

It’s okay!

There’s no way to review Wes Anderson films other than to say “If you like Wes Anderson’s fussy oeuvre, you probably will like this!!”. And the corollary absolutely must be true as well, in that haters of Wes Anderson won’t be any more won over by his bullshit here than ever before.

You might think there’s no point saying this stuff again and again with every (new) Wes Anderson review, but it bears repeating, mostly because his composition of scenes, visually fussy aesthetic and strict formalism does not vary from flick to flick, even when the aesthetics themselves and the themes and plots of his movies are significantly different each time (well, as much as is possible for him).

Also, not everyone knows what a film being a “Wes Anderson” flick even means. I find that beyond my own film nerdism, very few regular (normal, well adjusted) people remember the names of directors no matter how many films they watch. They know Spielberg, they know Scorsese, and that’s about it. Hundreds of films come out every year, most people never care about these details.

But I care. Okay, so of all the output this jerk is responsible for, this is as much part of his output as much as anything else is. In no way does it challenge his previous output. If anything it’s even more of a Wes Anderson film than usual: it is, after all, a formal exercise within a formal exercise, a play within a movie, within a play.

What’s the theme… well, stories within stories sounds awfully convoluted, but it doesn’t come across like that. It’s easy enough to follow, if you care.

I think there’s an element throughout the flick about men generally being disconnected from their feelings, leading to conversations between men who are hard pressed to admit how much they don’t care about each other. Or the widower who barely seems able to muster a hint of feeling towards his recently departed wife, and has delayed telling his kids of their mother’s passing for several weeks. He really doesn’t seem able to express anything, and doesn’t seem that bummed out by it.

dir: Ari Aster

2023

You may hear such a title and wonder if the Beau the title refers to is just generally afraid, or whether he’s afraid because of specific things.

Let me just help you out a tad by pointing out that Beau, or perhaps director Ari Aster, are both afraid of a lot of things.

It is really hard to talk about this movie, this long arse movie. It’s exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long, including credits. You might wonder why it’s not easier to say it’s 3 hours long. But you see making the length exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long is just another way for Aster to fuck with the audience.

The Beau of the title, Beau Wasserman, is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is paunchy, middle-aged, balding, and fearful. He is afraid of practically everything, but what he is most afraid of is disappointing his mother. This is 3 hours (sorry, 2h59m) of a film saying “The main character is deeply fucked up because his mum is a monster”.

The audience tolerance for this will vary wildly. This is not the extreme, terrifying horror of Hereditary, where family is a curse beyond your control, or the sly take on Wicker Man-style folk horror that was Midsommar.

No, this is…something else.

Beau lives in the kind of awful New York apartment that you imagine Travis Bickle lived in before shooting everyone at the end of Taxi Driver. Awful, and tiny, in a terrible area where people are screaming constantly, there are corpses in the street and someone called the Birthday Boy Stabber runs around naked stabbing people, and the cops don’t seem to want to stop him.

Beau is about to travel by plane to visit his mother. It’s the anniversary of his father’s death, a man who died before Beau was born, or so he has been told. Beau discusses all of this with his therapist, who asks him if he has any trepidation about seeing his mother, or whether he just wants her to die.

Beau thinks this is an odd question, because the audience thinks so too, but the wise old therapist assures him it’s perfectly normal for two things to be true – that he might love his mother but also want her to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It’s not clear how long Beau has been seeing this therapist, but it’s clear that he’s been talking about his mother for decades.

As Beau returns to his apartment building, he makes eye contact with an entirely tattooed man who ferociously runs at Beau as Beau tries to get into his front door.

We start to wonder how any of this can be real. And what we never get is any evidence that it’s not.

dir: Julius Avery

2023

You can completely not believe in something, and know that it’s highly refined bullshit, and still find it terrifying.

Having been brought up in the Christian faith, and educated at Catholic schools, there are no elements of these stories that are unfamiliar. And I long ago recoiled in horror from the actual, incalculable evils perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, and dismissed the mythological bullshit elements, seeing how the whole edifice was propped up with fear and control, covering hollow lies all the way down.

And yet… Sure, okay, I know this is all hysterical supernatural bullshit, fantasy stuff no more real than anything in the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars…

And yet… I can still find this stuff terrifying. The Exorcist still remains one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, and that’s unlikely to ever, ever change. All I have to do is remember certain sequences and I get cold chills.

There was a scene in a recent, quite stupid movie called Ghosted where the two main characters have a conversation at a set of steps, and Chris Evans’ terrible character tells Ana De Armas “These are the steps from The Exorcist!”, and she’s like “okay grandpa””, but I was like “oh shit those are the cursed steps from The Exorcist?”

I don’t believe in ghosts and demons and such, but there is something about the idea of demonic possession that I find deeply, deeply disturbing. And again, though I don’t for a second believe in possession or exorcisms or any of that fucking bullshit, and also, not all flicks about demonic possession are created equally; when they work I am horrified beyond belief.

Most of the stuff I saw in terms of reviews about this flick dismissed it for a bunch of reasons – demonic possession stories are dumb, or the flicks not horrifying enough, or it’s not camp enough, or it’s too funny, or it’s not comical enough, or Russell Crowe is terrible with a risible accent, or Crowe is really good but slumming in a role that is beneath him.

Those are all takes. They’re wrong, but people are entitled to their takes.

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”