8 stars

dirs: John Adams, Zelda Adams, Toby Poser

2022

If hell, as Jean Paul Sartre once opined in between abusing amphetamines and literary groupies, is other people, then families are a unique form of hell. And to be trapped with your family during a pandemic, well, we keep discovering lower and lower circles of hell all the time…

But imagine if your family, all its members, were immensely talented actors and filmmakers. Well, out of these despicable last few years, you could have made something quite special if you’d really tried.

When I mention that this flick is a family affair, it makes it sound like an amateurish set of home videos. It is nothing of the sort. Before I get carried away – I’m not implying this is the most heartwarming and uplifting movie made since Schindler’s List – I am however trying to say that this is a quite accomplished and pretty well put together horror film made by people who know what they’re doing, and they do it very well.

Yes, on the other hand you could see this as a director’s audition to try to convince metal bands to let the Adams – Poser family make all their next album’s film clips – I can see them making clips for Mastodon or Opeth or Baroness quite easily.

A lot of this flick has that vibe, and not only because the two main characters, Izzy (Zelda Adams) and her mother (Toby Poser) play doom-heavy music with lots of make-up on in their spare time.

They have a lot of spare time. They are a mother and daughter living in rural isolation. They play music, they do foraging stuff, they seem to get along okay, they do arty stuff. It seems like the perfect life if you like that sort of thing. The mum seems to fear… something. Either she’s worried about Izzy straying too far from the property, or she’s worried about something encroaching upon their hillbilly paradise.

Of course I’m leaving out the very beginning of the flick, which shows an array of women trying to hang and burn a woman that looks a lot like the mum, in those pilgrim / witchburning times, and yet it seems like they didn’t get their wish if she’s swanning about in the present age.

Izzy is a teenager, though, and bored, which is a dangerous combination. It seems like she’s never spent time with anyone else other than her mother. It could be because she has some kind of allergy or dangerous immunity condition, but like in real life that’s just some bullshit parents make up to keep their kids obedient.

As is inevitable, Izzy finds some teenagers doing some dumb stuff, and is drawn to them, and knows enough to keep this from her sainted mother. Of course a teenager would want to hang out with other teenagers. No matter how awesome one’s parent / parents are, you seek out peers, to compare, contrast, drink and have sex with etc.

I hesitate to say that it’s natural, as in a natural curiousity and urge, because this film is not about the natural urges all people might possess. It is, after all, a horror film.

dir: Guillermo Del Toro

2021

Ye gods, what a keen and dark flick.

Legendary Mexican director Guillermo Del Toro often makes movies about (older) movies, but rarely outright remakes older movies. This, though based on a book, is a remake of a film from the 1940s.

As well, as much as it might sound like blasphemy to say this, I don’t always like or even get Del Toro’s movies. I love what his crew do visually with the visual language of film, but sometimes, or quite often, I find it almost impossible to connect to the characters.

I didn’t have that problem with what I think was his last film, The Shape of Water, which I watched on a plane, back when that was a thing people did, which won a bunch of stuff. It’s had a bit of a backlash against it since then, but also the last time I mentioned it to someone in a conversation about movies, neither of us could remember the name of the film.

I am not going to have that problem here. This is a masterful, controlled, perfectly realised vision of a Depression-era story about an amoral chancer who thinks he’s too smart to ever pay the price for his deceptions, but he very much gets his comeuppance.

And how. It’s not the first time Bradley Cooper has played a too smart for his own good arsehole (as in Limitless), but this time it’s in the service of a story slightly more grounded in cold reality, or at least a reality closer to recognisable from the 1930s. It’s a hard-scrabble time, everyone’s poor, everyone is desperate for a meal and a few cents. Stan (Cooper), after having some kind of grim experience at some house on fire, stumbles into a circus, and tries to make himself useful in order to have a roof over his head.

It’s the standard travelling circus of that era that is deeply ingrained in our (Western, of a certain age) consciousness: tormented animals, people with deformities or physical differences for audiences to gawk at, and then something much worse.

We forget, because the term has such ubiquity and none of the stigma anymore, but a geek was a particular thing, back in the day. And if we watch the flick, and listen carefully, we’ll learn anew what a geek started off being, rather than a catch-all term for anyone that liked computers and comic books a little bit too much.

(قهرمان Ghahreman)

dir: Asghar Farhadi

2021

It’s another great film by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi. How does he keep making films so consistently great? I mean that literally, because every other great Iranian director ends up in prison eventually.

If nothing else I would have thought the Revolutionary Guards would have sifted through his films suspiciously for any hint of anti-establishment sentiment, and punished him for it. They always, invariably, find what they’re looking for.

Farhadi doesn’t make it easy for them. He himself says his work is never political, which, everyone else immediately thinks “that makes it even more political than before!”

To a western ignoramus such as myself, well of course I’m not going to get subtle references to critiquing the regime if and when it occurs, but the mere fact that an Iranian flick exists and its main topic is the complexity of life in modern Iran itself is a criticism of how fucking bonkers life is with a theocratic viciously authoritarian state in charge of things.

A Hero has a seemingly simple premise: a guy in debtor’s prison tries to find a way to pay off his debt to his former brother-in-law in order to be set free, and with each minute that passes finds new ways to complicate things and new levels of intricate complexity. Life in Shiraz (not the wine, but the city from which I guess the wine takes its name) is not easy.

Rahim (Amir Jadidi) seems like a happy go lucky type. As soon as he’s out of prison on leave for a couple of days, he calls on his brother-in-law, who seems to be working as an…archaeologist at the tomb of Xerxes? The brother-in-law is Rahim’s conduit to the man who is keeping Rahim in jail.

And that chap happens to be… Rahim’s ex-brother-in-law through marriage. That guy, Bahram (Mohsen Tanabandeh), you’d think would have to be some kind of angry jerk for keeping the young, charming Rahim in debtor’s prison for no good reason.

Except that’s not quite the case. While Bahram is angry, and inflexible, he does not trust Rahim’s protestations or honeyed promises about money raining from the sky. And he fears that Rahim will try to do something to stop his sister from remarrying (someone we never see).

I don’t claim to understand the money that’s at stake here, but I think I recall Bahram saying the amount owed, as in, the money he’d given Rahim to pay off a loan shark for a business venture that went sideways was 150 million toman, which works out to around $50,000 in Australian terms.

That’s a fair chunk of change. By some twist of fate, Rahim comes into possession of a handbag with 17 gold coins in it, and hopes that they will discharge most of his debt, and get him out of prison. The problem is, the coins are only worth about half of the debt owed, and Bahram has no interest in being generous.

dirs: Jared Bush, Byron Howard and Charise Castro Smith

2021

You may ask yourself: why would a man your age voluntarily subject yourself to a new Disney animated movie, when you no longer have a child of an age where the watching of such films is not only necessary, but mandatory?

Honestly, while I wave my hands at all *this* that’s happening now, the very thisness of it all, the crushing familiarity of where the world is at the moment, I just wanted to feel some delight, some joy, and while such a thing is not always guaranteed by Disney, it has a pretty good track record delivering with its mainline animated efforts.

I watched it, on a night I usually reserve for horror flicks or brutal action monstrosities, because I think my soul needed it, and I was rewarded. Encanto is up there with the “good” recent animated films Disney proper has put out, since it started having to compete with Pixar (before buying Pixar, of course). I don’t yet know if this has the longevity of something like Tangled, Moana or Frozen (I mean, Frozen was a global phenomenon, but no-one talks about Frozen II), but it’s definitely up there.

It does have some catchy tunes, but however great “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is, it’s not going to invade the ears and minds of every reluctant parent the way that “Let It Go” is probably sung even on the outer planets of our solar system.

I also like the fact, love the fact that if you could somehow resurrect Walt Disney himself, and play him the entirety of the movie, he would probably die from shock that an animated movie from the studio he created would have so many people with different skin shades in it, and that they weren’t playing happy slaves on a plantation.

It would kill him all over again, and that’s probably a good thing. We don’t need old racist zombies returning from the grave, craving our brains, money or votes.