8 stars

dir: Shawn Levy

2024

Shame…shame…shame. I feel like I’ve been paraded through the streets of King’s Landing, much to my eternal regret for my shameful crimes, after watching this amalgam of references loosely aspiring to be a ‘movie’.

Watching and laughing as much as I did while watching this flick only filled me with deep shame, after the laughs wore off. I would almost argue that it was involuntary, as in, against my will and my supposedly rational mind, but that’s pretty much the same every time we laugh. It bypasses rationality and hits us in the centre of our lizard brain, that same part that laughs and then immediately recoils when you giggle at someone walking into something or getting hit in the groin.

I did not expect to ‘enjoy’ this flick, but then I discovered that either they programmed me years ago to enjoy things like this like the Pavlovian dog that I am, or, based on some kind of horrifying download directly from my brain, they figured out how to make something entirely for the very nerdiest parts of my entire being.

I mean, the only way they could have made it more for me is if they actually had references to me, like Deadpool himself saying “yeah, drew, you’re really going to like this next reference, who’s a clever boy?”

The thing is, part of me knows how wrong it is to find Ryan Reynolds and his smarmy antics so funny. It makes me feel soiled, contaminated in so many ways. I tell myself I am old enough not to fall for his bullshit, not to be amused by such lowbrow Freudian anally and orally fixated idiocy, and yet there I am, laughing until tears course down my haggard features.

dir: Damian McCarthy

2024

Oddity is one of the stronger horror flicks to come out this year thus far. It’s still pretty slow, though, and deliberately unsatisfying in its resolution, so take my endorsement with a large grain of slow-cooked salt.

Not that you’re waiting for my blessing as to whether you’ll see this or not.

This is a complex and unsettling slow burner that nonetheless is happy enough to indulge in jump scares when it wants to punctuate something, and punctuate it does. Ye gods. I never pretended to be immune to jump scares, but the mark of a quality one is that even when you know it’s coming, it still scares the shit out of you.

This film also is an indictment of the insidiousness of how Grand Designs has permeated everything.

I have nothing against Kevin McCloud, in fact I quite like the man, as a presenter and as a designer, but there’s no doubt his terrible and terribly addictive show has done more to stoke the fires of property renovation - aspiration than any other show produced by Great Britain ever in its history. It is a horrible show where couples who claim they can’t afford any of what they’re doing somehow find the extra five hundred thousand pounds from somewhere in order to eventually complete their dream home five years later than they thought they would. It is dismal and irritating how well they manage to suck the audience in and get them invested in the works being completed without losing everything (which never happens, because the show is aspirational, after all).

Sometimes the couple’s survive, sometimes they don’t. A lot of them look like they’ve never really appreciated what the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy actually means, or, because they are so goddamn wealthy it doesn’t ultimately matter that much to them. It’s more than just a collection of stones and wood, because, in the man’s own words, “the notion of home is not simply a concept, it’s a place of psychological dependency.”

Rarely does it lead to murder, like it ultimately does here.

(九龍城寨之圍城
九龙城寨之围城
Jiǔ Lóng Chéng Zhài·Wéi Chéng)

dir: Soi Cheang

2024

It brought me a strange joy to watch this movie.

I am not, despite my abject mawkishness and the fact that the slightest thing can bring me to tears, whether it’s a tv commercial or any pet rescue video online, an overly sentimental person. I don’t revel in nostalgia. That doesn’t mean I don’t think of the past, all the time. I am as much a prisoner of the past as the rest of us are.

But I never indulge along the lines of “Things were so much better back *insert unspecified time when you were younger*. The movies were better, the music was better, sex and drugs were better, everything back then was better. If only we could return to…”

With little variation, plenty of things were terrible for plenty of people back whenever you choose to pick. If the music back then was great, I can listen to it at will now. If there were great films back whenever, in a lot of cases I can just stream them at will too. At every time that there was great stuff coming out, there was plenty of absolute crap.

For every great Hong Kong film I ever watched, there were a hundred mediocre pieces of shit that came out as well. I don’t want to return to the late 80s early 90s at all. I certainly don’t want the world to go forty years backwards. Think of how terrible the internet was back then. You want to go back to dial-up modems? Well, do ya?

But even I can’t help feeling a deep nostalgia while watching this flick, which I’m going to truncate to Walled In for the purposes of this review.

The place this flick pretends to be about no longer exists. Unlike the great cities of yore that are nothing but dust now, or infamous places where feet dread to step, the Walled so-called City in Kowloon existed within living memory, for weird reasons, and its destruction is also not that long ago, happening several years before Britain handed back Hong Kong to China in 1997.

It should never have controlled Hong Kong, because, in case you haven’t noticed, colonialism brings misery and wealth-extraction wherever it goes, and is bad. Britain’s control of Hong Kong is especially awful, since its occupation started with the Opium Wars.

You know, those wars where the Chinese said “please, we don’t want that crap, it’s killing us”, and the British Empire said “you will take our opium and you will love it, bitches”, enforced of course through many cannons making many Chinese people be unalived. The remnants of the Qing Dynasty ceded control of that island referred to as Hong Kong, but as a “fuck you” designated an area for there to be a fort and an official residence for an official to sit in his office and glare at them through the window.

(Kuolleet Lehdet)

dir: Aki Kaurismäki

2023

Fallen Leaves is the most recent film from Finland’s greatest ever director. Well, I say that, knowing nothing about Finland’s film industry. There could be way better directors in Finland. But none of them have had anywhere near the level of international acclaim as Aki Kaurismäki. It’s probably because he’s been doing it for forty years or so. It’s possibly because of the quality of his films.

It could be because of the fact that his name rhymes so wonderfully. Aki Kaurismäki. Rolls off the tongue.

He is at least the only one who routinely got played in arthouse cinemas in Australia over the years. If there is a single other popular or critically acclaimed Finnish director, I haven’t heard of them, and I hear about a lot of people from a lot of places. Renny Harlin is the only other one I can think of, and he hasn’t made anything vaguely good in decades. The only other Finnish film I can think of that’s come out recently is that one where the gold prospector kills all them fucking Nazis, which was delightful (Sisu), but that’s only one movie.

My man Aki has been pumping them out since the 80s. Since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, he has been delighting audiences around the world with his cinematic antics. Maybe “delighting” is too strong a term. I don’t know if he’s even that well-known and beloved in Finland.

His films are so strictly formalist and the humour is so droll and deadpan that I don’t even know if they’re really that representative of Finnish culture or sensibilities, contemporary or otherwise. Maybe they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us. Maybe they still think Benny Hill is the pinnacle of human achievement. I don’t know. I actually know some Finnish people, and, I’ll tell you something for free, they think Australians are total yokel hillbillies.

But, and this is a big butt and I cannot lie about it, they are as likely to laugh uproariously at something they find funny, or loudly express themselves about something they care about as possibly anyone else on the planet, so this impression you get from Finnish flicks generally or the whole idea of those Nordic regions about how restrained and expression-less they are is of course bullshit.

Everyone is restrained with people they don’t know. In their own elements, well, they carry on like pork chops or whatever the Finnish equivalent is.