8 stars

dir: Jon S. Baird

2023

There are (unfortunately or fortunately) lots of movies based on games, but less movies about the games themselves, or about the creation of those games.

Or, even more boringly, practically no movies about someone desperately trying to get the regional licensing rights for a game. A goddamn game. Contracts and stuff.

Not just any game, though. Tetris, the best-selling and most played game of all time.

I know, I know that something like this should be dull as fucking dishwater. And let’s be honest, in reality, it would be. A documentary about this would probably be pretty fucking dull, even more so than most documentaries are about whatever their subjects might be.

But I think, as inconsequential as this flick probably is, they get the approach right, in that they give us an idea of just how fucking important it was to the people who were involved, who put their entire lives on the line, just to give the rest of us a few hours of amusement.

Plus, it was Tetris what brought down the Berlin Wall and destroyed the Soviet Union, doncha know?

Henk Rogers is not exactly a household name, and nor will it be after this. I’ve watched the film, and read the Wikipedia entry on him, and to me he’s just a guy with a moustache. There are other guys with moustaches. The actor playing him grows a moustache; a nice, solid triangular one. A weird moustache, but most / all moustaches are weird, and I say that as a man who has one, hidden within a goatee/mo combination.

Other than that, what defines him? He’s a guy, played by Taron Egerton, who foresees early that computer games are going to be the next big consumer purchase, back in the 1980s. Being the late 80s at that, he’s not exactly a prescient seer or anything – it’s already happening, and he’s just trying to jump on the bandwagon. All he needs is one great game.

And he sees it, on someone else’s computer, at a different stall at the Consumer Electronics Show that year.

عنکبوت مقدس, Ankabut-e moqaddas

dir: Ali Abbasi

2022

Holy Spider is a movie I have been obsessed with for many months, but not because of anything to do with the movie itself, other than its name.

Every time I saw the name Holy Spider, whether it was on the list of films playing at the most recent Melbourne International Film Festival, or other festivals’ playlists, or mentioned in people’s “Best of” lists for 2022, or in discussions of contemporary Iranian movies, the first and only thing I thought of was “Respect The Rock!”

Respect the Rock is a show that’s been on radio station 3RRR for an absolute age, hosted by Nicole Tadpole, and every single edition of the show has Nicole playing a recording of herself (possibly drunkenly) singing along with a recording of Ronny James Dio singing the song Holy Diver.

Holy Diver, you’ve been down too long in the midnight sea, oh what’s becoming of me?

What the fuck does any of it mean? Who cares? It’s great! Too great to require explanation or understanding.

It’s a legendary song, recorded just after Dio and the drummer left Black Sabbath and formed Dio back, way back in the early 1980s.

What’s it got to do with anything? Nothing, nothing at all.

Got to get away, Holy Diver! Uh uh oh o o dun duh dun duh dun

So every time you see a reference to the title “Holy Spider”, you must imagine it being said loudly, in a metal voice *Holy! Spider!*

All this foolishness… Holy Spider is a bleak, brutal film based on a true story, of an awful man that killed a bunch of women in Iran.

You might say to yourself “well, the vile regime in place kills Iranian women all the time, sometimes just for not wearing a headscarf”, and I would say “Yes, that is true.”

But that’s part of the awfulness that goes along with the story: in an incredibly repressive and entirely misogynistic society such as Iran post-1979 revolution (and, most likely, before it as well), a serial killer of women would be something these morality police or revolutionary guards wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to, especially since he targeted sex workers, and drug addicted sex workers at that.

You would think they would have wanted to promote him to Ayatollah, maybe, but no.

The strong implication the film conveys is that because the higher ups in the regime felt that there were pluses to these killings, the cops on the ground, whose job it is to catch people who commit awful, awful murders, were told to look the other way.

dir: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

2022

This was surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly”, because I expect every new version of a “classic” to be “shit”.

The original book is a dark classic, the Disney flick from the 40s is a classic. There have been so many other versions made as well, most terrible. Even Steven Spielberg made a version, and called it AI, which was one of the worst of the worst.

I haven’t seen it yet, but in the same year that this came out on Netflix, Disney made another version directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Tom fucking Hanks as Geppetto.

I have not found a good review of that flick, cannot bring myself to watch it. I am tired of Hanks as Everyone’s Dad, fucking sick of it. After enduring him in the Elvis biopic, I said “never again”. Is there no one else who can play old man roles in America anymore? How are Wilfred Brimley, or Charles Durning, or Ossie Davis? All dead you say…

This, thankfully, was put together by del Toro, and co-directed by someone who actually knows how to direct stop motion animated movies. del Toro is probably Mexico’s most famous director (outside of Mexico, I guess), who has been wowing and irritating international audiences for decades with his visionary works. I love him in theory, but am often frustrated with the final result of his “masterpieces”.

There is no issue here. He obviously loves the original story, and beautifully incorporated it into actual Italian history of the first half of the last century in a really unique and affecting way, without downplaying the fantastical and emotional elements that made the original story so captivating.

Where the original story is all about essentially a naughty pseudo-kid learning to obey his elders and such, through having adventures that are meant to teach cautionary messages to kids, this story is more about fathers and sons, and how they disappoint each other. Oh and the rise of fascism. But mostly about how fathers and sons may both say terrible things to each other, but they don’t really mean them, and if they just love each other, everything will mostly be okay until someone dies.

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2022

The strangest thing, for me, about the prominence of this film, The Whale, is that despite the awards it’s been nominated for, and all the column inches burned up saying how wonderful it is that Brendan Fraser is ‘back’ after a long time in the wilderness, is that at least around the movie review websites I frequent, I can’t seem to find a single positive review.

And definitely not any glowing reviews. Despite the fact that Fraser himself and his co-star Hong Chau are nominated for Oscars in the upcoming popularity contest in March, almost every review I’ve read says that regardless of the wonderful performances, the film is an abomination and shouldn’t exist.

An academic writer and thinker I deeply admire and respect, whose books I’ve read and enjoyed, being Roxane Gay, pretty much saw the film as an abhorrent personal attack, which also made me dread watching it. No review I read encouraged me to watch the flick.

But watch it I did, all the same. Because… I guess I wanted to know myself.

As a fairly large person myself, yes, it does hurt to see overweight people depicted as monsters, less so in the image itself (from my perspective), and more in the horror and disgust of the people around them voicing their displeasure. Much has been said about how Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is deliberately shown gorging on food, with the accompanying carefully curated sound effects, in order to elicit pity or disgust from the audience.

And then there’s the grotesquerie of his actual appearance, which seems at least to me to be a combination of a fat suit and CGI / digital effects as well, which makes him look like an inflated 600-pound man for whom every breath is laborious and a miracle.

I don’t know what was in director Darren Aronofsky’s mind when he made this, but when I look at his body of work, in which even if there are themes carried through, every film is different, and while cruel things happen to his characters, I didn’t ever feel that he himself wanted to be cruel to them because he hated them and wanted us to detest them. Wow, that sounds weird, written down.

I honestly can’t accept, in my head, that he ‘hates’ Charlie, and wants us to be horrified by him.

Part of me, probably infected by some of Charlie’s surreal optimism in the face of all opposition, feels compelled to think that while he may want us to pity his state and his compulsion to hurt himself through his feeder addiction, he wants us to empathise with him more so.