8 stars

dir: Domee Shi

2022

I may be about the furthest thing away from a teenaged Chinese-Canadian girl on the cusp of maturity who finds herself turning into a giant red panda whenever she’s emotional or overwhelmed, but I still found a lot to enjoy and relate to in Pixar’s latest foray into the minds and hearts of confused kids and patient, slightly baffled adults.

It feels like such a cop out to say “it’s no Inside Out”, but Inside Out was so great, and this flick is trying to tell a different kind of story in a different kind of way, though no less entertaining, and that’s great too.

It’s working in a different emotional register, and yet it’s also something of a period piece. I didn’t realise the triple meaning of what I just wrote in the last sentence, but I’m not deleting it, not just yet.

Mei (Rosalie Chieng) is a thirteen year old dork living in Toronto, I guess(?) She’s a high achiever academically, has a group of friends, but her first and only loyalty seems to be to her parents, specifically her mother (Sandra Oh). The mum is very much the “tiger mom” stereotype popularised by Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and has been a well-worn cliché in American and even Australian comedy and drama for decades.

In the depiction of multicultural societies and cities, it’s really easy (and lazy) to single out families from Asian backgrounds as exemplifying this idea that migrant parents torment their children into becoming violin prodigies or maths geniuses, because without the threats of violence or the withholding of love / approval / affection, then no kid would ever succeed at anything.

What these stories often leave out in these narratives, whether they’re personal ones or not, is that all sorts of families, migrant or otherwise, have parents with expectations, who range from over-involved and threatening to barely there if at all, and that the kids (who survive) end up as normal people, or geniuses who become fuckups, or fuckups who still go on to live meaningful lives, because not everyone ends up first chair in the orchestra or the Head of Complicated Surgery at Most Expensive Hospital. There’s lots of us in between, and that’s okay.

dir: Sophie Hyde

2022

Well, who doesn’t enjoy a sexy night out at the movies…

Certainly not a film to be watched with the kids around. This flick is pretty much a two-hander, depending as it does on the talents of the two leads, ably played by Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack. Most of the film transpires within the confines of a hotel room.

And it’s a stagey and talky affair. These characters are not in love; there’s nothing romantic about this story. It is about feelings, though, and mostly the feelings one has about oneself, more than anything else.

And of course it’s about sex, but less about the mechanics of it, or the “getting” of it, and more about what it represents to people, as fulfilment, as release, as missed opportunities, or as an excuse to try to shame people.

Thompson plays a woman in her sixties called Nancy. She has decided, after more than 30 years of marriage, ending with her useless husband’s death, to hire the services of a sex professional to do all the things she didn’t get to do over the course of her life. She says, almost with pride, that she’s never had an orgasm before, and is certain she’s never going to, but that Leo (Daryl McCormack) shouldn’t see that as a challenge.

Leo is smooth, smooth as butter, smooth as a recently waxed chest. He knows the roles he needs to play, the archetypes he has to inhabit, sometimes shifting at the drop of a hat, between a fantasy, a therapist, a listener, a masculine ideal or a reassuring presence. He seems perfectly at ease with himself, and with a charming confidence, but it’s a veneer, like everything else.

She regrets almost immediately that she’s taken this course of action, and feels endlessly like she needs to justify herself or finds flaws in what she’s doing, to prevent herself from going through with it. He is constantly assuring her that they won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, her comfort and safety are paramount, but also that she should clearly allow herself to enjoy what she’s paid for.

dir: June Schoenbrun

2022

We’re not all really going to the World’s Fair. Only the select few.

The rest of us will be left behind, in our miserable isolation, desperately wanting to connect with someone whilst avoiding all meaningful human contact.

Describing this film will be somewhat difficult, at least for me. I am, as many people are happy to point out, quite old. Despite the fact that I try to have an understanding of contemporary stuff in the zeitgeist, there’s so much of it, and some of it is so ineffable, that it’s sometimes hard to grasp whatever the hell the latest thing the young ‘uns are obsessed with is.

I think this flick is about a subset of a subset of internet users who suck themselves into believing conspiracies that are patently untrue, But believing that stuff, no matter how outlandish, is the only way for them to wrest meaning from the chaos that is their existence.

There are pretty much only two characters / actors in this flick. We watch Casey (Anna Cobb) record videos of herself all throughout the movie. I’m no therapist, but I think it’s safe to say she’s an isolated, disconnected teenager, possibly grieving the death or departure of her mother. We never see her father, but we do see her bolt upstairs to her attic bedroom when he arrives home, or yelling at her from downstairs when she’s watching creepypasta horror videos at 3 in the morning at full volume.

I don’t think we see her go to school, or have a single scene with other humans in it. Her one interaction with another person is a skype call with some jerk who’s obsessed with her.

Before those warning bells start ringing, I don’t think this is a flick about the perils of predators on the internet, and what hazards kids face when their loneliness compels them to open up to strangers. It’s not a cautionary tale in the sense that “this could be your kid right now!!!” being sold into slavery or pursued by rapacious Republican politicians.

It’s more nuanced, in the sense that it’s about quite a depressed teen, who may be acting out, who may be disassociating, but who struggles for meaning, for a reason to go on.

And what does that look like in this present age? It’s a kid posting videos of themselves to an audience of nobodies in order to get a handful of likes or views. We’re not even talking about the people who go to insane lengths for subscribers and the like: they’re performing for fewer people than you’d see at an average bus stop.

So we wonder, how much of this is Casey losing the plot mentally, and how much of it is her choosing to buy into this elaborate (and yet absurdly simplistic) “game” called the World’s Fair, where people pretty much recite an incantation, smear blood on their screen, watch a strobing video, and then watch as parts of their bodies or brains start transforming in some way?

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2022

This time that most of us lived through (and many didn’t get to) hasn’t spawned a lot of great films yet. I’m not implying that this is the first great pandemic flick. I’m implying this is the only good pandemic flick.

A lot of flicks have come out, have been impacted by lockdowns and such, have even tried to address this dreadful time, but it’s all too soon, all too lame. The best they’ve managed is some two-handers where a couple of actors yell at each other in a confined space with minimal crew for an hour and a half, never mentioning The War.

Instead of a two-hander, this flick staring Zoë Kravitz, who seems to be in everything at the moment, and is mostly a solo gig. As a shut-in IT worker ‘happily’ working from home during the pandemic, much of the flick transpires in the main character’s apartment.

On her lonesome, except when she occasionally has sex with a guy from across the street. The main character’s name is not Kimi: her name is Angela. “Kimi” is the alternative Alexa – instead of working for Amazon, Angela works for Amygdala, which might as well be called Amazon. Anyone with half a brain automatically thinks they’re talking about Amazon anyway, why bother with the charade, ya timid fucks?

Instead of Bezos drinking people’s blood and fucking their wives, the CEO of Amygdala is the one assuring the public in interview that the in-home voice activated device definitely isn’t harvesting people’s data when people haven’t activated it directly.

Of course, Angela’s job seems to be sifting through conversations recorded by the system for data useful to the company when they have no idea they’re being recorded.