8 stars

dir: James Gunn

2023

Sometimes, the fact that things can end, and end well, is of more comfort than the idea that something could go on endlessly forever.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have long been a weirder, stranger and funnier corner of the Marvel Industrial Complex’s movie output, and with this last hurrah for director James Gunn, they can wander off into the sunset of some other star system on good terms, with each other and with us, the drooling, flipper-slapping-together seals in the audience.

The main reason Gunn is unlikely to make any more of these is that now that he’s one of the CEOs at DC Films, it probably wouldn’t be considered kosher to make films for the enemy. Some agglomeration of spineless executives has decided that if they install Gunn in some important position that it will somehow resurrect the studio’s dismal fortunes so that not all their movies without “Batman” in the title keep bombing.

Whatever it ultimately means, or results in, at least Gunn can say that he’s worked in both comic-book ponds, and made flicks in either capacity that are stamped with his oddball sensibilities and personal hobbyhorses, that definitely weren’t just uniform, undifferentiated products extruded by “The System”.

Which is more than you can say about the last bunch of Marvel movies post-Endgame before this one. It’s nice that this one stands alone, for once.

Guardians 3 starts with Rocket singing along with Radiohead’s Creep as he wanders around one of the main thoroughfares in Knowhere: a cobbled together community housed with the head of a dead Celestial. I don’t know what any of that means either, I’m just a dumbed down AI that jumbles words together like they’re lego bricks, hoping things will work out.

Everyone is putting things in their right place, making everything perfect, just before a flying golden statue flies in and starts beating the shit out of everyone, including Rocket, who is mortally wounded in the fighting.

During this “re-introduction” sequence where each of the returning characters gets their moment, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) is shown to be a total drunk, unable to recover from having lost the love of his life Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in one of the earlier movies, but provoked to confused outpourings due to the fact that a Gamora from an earlier timeline currently exists in their universe; a Gamora who’s had nothing to do with Quill or the other Guardians, and who has never reconciled with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

These Guardians are strangers to her, so she has no reason to even tolerate Quill, let alone give a damn what happens to the rest of them in the hi-jinks that ensue.

dir: Daina Reid

2023

Horror. Purest horror.

That’s what parenting is like, apparently.

Of course people watching this flick will be muttering “Babadook, Babadook” under their breath, but no-one said The Babadook was either the most original horror flick ever nor that it had the monopoly on mad mothers wanting to strangle their kids for reasons in movies.

This flick, mostly filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is ominous and filled with dread right from the start. It’s not just the exquisite cinematography, or the choice of what’s filmed, but the discomforting soundtrack does a lot of the work too. Those cello / double bass slowly bowed strings…

And then there’s all the awful things happening on screen.

It’s mostly a two-hander, with Sarah Snook playing a character called Sarah, and Lily LaTorre playing her daughter. I won’t say the name of the daughter character, because apparently no one is quite sure what it should be.

We already know terrible things are going to happen, because the daughter, while being driven in the car, asks about where someone is who she’s never met, and the mere mention of her name is enough to make Sarah somehow look even paler.

At first the name being said is “Joan, where’s Joan, is Joan going to be there?” referring to the guest list for the daughter’s birthday party. The answer is an emphatic no, because the Joan in question is Sarah’s mum, and Sarah can’t stand her mum, plus her mum is in an old folk’s home. For old folks. Speaking of which, Sarah’s dad, mostly referred to as grandpa, has recently died, and both Sarah and her daughter miss him terribly.

Sarah especially seems wounded by grief at the loss. But there is something far more seriously wrong with Sarah, and wrong with the daughter, especially when she starts insisting that her name isn’t Mia, but is in fact Alice.

Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice? That’s a name to conjure with. Plus there’s a white rabbit that seems to have appeared out of nowhere, who just hangs around ominously in the house, only earns its keep once when it takes a chunk out of Sarah’s hand.

Alice…white rabbit… I can’t tell if we’re through the looking glass or in a wonderland, but this flick is short on wonder, and long on dread. Mia keeps getting injuries, and Mummy Dearest keeps asking her if someone is hurting her, bullying her. Mia keeps shaking her head, but at random times seems to insist she’s not Mia anyway, she’s this other girl.

And Sarah doesn’t want to talk about Alice, because clearly she’s still traumatised by something that happened 30 years ago.

Like always in these flicks, the mum is either a widow or divorced. The ex-husband / still dad (Damon Herriman) is nice enough, but he’s got a new wife, and they’re trying for another kid, and for some reason this really brings out the Shiv Roy in Sarah, who is always either terrified and confused, or profoundly irritated by people trying to bring up the past all the time.

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

dir: Ben Affleck

2023

A generous way to talk about this flick is to describe it as a mildly entertaining biopic about the guy who put together the deal that resulted in the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe, which changed the game as it related both to sneakers as consumer products and the arrangements basketball stars would have with merchandising companies for ever more.

A less generous approach would be to say it’s a movie about a fucking shoe.

This is Australia. We used to call them runners, no matter their purpose, though I guess the kids of today probably don’t call them that. But, yes, back in the day, whether they were Dunlop Volleys or branded stuff with logos or the knockoffs you got from the Victoria Market, we called them runners, regardless of how much or little running you actually did in them

I’ve never owned a pair of Air Jordans. I’ve never really aspired to own a pair, and, to be more accurate, have rarely been in a position to be able to afford a pair. Taking out a mortgage in order to secure a pair of shoes designed for basketball players, being a sport I do not play, seems extravagant even for me, and I waste money on all sorts of nonsense. But I know what they are. I know of them. Billions of people know what they are. Surely that means they are important, as, I dunno, some kind of cultural artefact?

I mean, I just wrote that, and I’m not really convinced. It’s a thing, a highly sought after thing that has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Nike and millions of dollars for Michael Jordan personally, but so fucking what? Tulips, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, iPods, Harry Potter books, all sorts of useless crap have generated billions of dollars for a select few.

And there’s no pseudo-docos about them. I guess I should be talking about the flick more in line with how Tetris approached the topic, being less about the money, and more about the unlikely result (of besting the combined fury of the mighty USSR and mogul Robert Maxwell in order to steal some computer program from them).