8 stars

Anatomie d’une chute

dir: Justine Triet

2023

Anatomy of a Fall is an odd film if what you think you’re getting is a crime / legal drama, which would be a reasonable assumption based on how it’s presented. And it won a bunch of awards, so you’d also think, since it’s a French film, that it must be all classy and shit.

But for a French film, there’s a surprising amount of dialogue in English. And the lead character is German. No one else speaks German, so she has to speak French, begrudgingly, and English when she can get away with it.

Which is, like, all of the time. I don’t pretend to know much about the French, but I do know two things: they laugh when non-French people try to speak French, and they pretend not to know English when people try to jabber at them without resorting to French.

And yet everyone seems cool with it, even her eleven year old son Daniel, who speaks no English whatsoever.

Strange vibes. But that’s not what the film is about. It’s on the surface about what happened to cause her husband Samuel to fall out of a window to his death.

On a deeper level maybe it’s about whether, if she did do it, was it an understandable thing to do? If not justifiable?

We spend a lot of time in a French court room, so the profound differences between their model and the ones we have in Britain or Australia are on display. As in another recentish film I watched mostly set in a French courtroom, being Saint Omer, the differences between the adversarial system we have in Australian courts and the inquisitorial system they have in France couldn’t be more stark.

To put it more simply, they say some crazy shit in court which wouldn’t fly in this hemisphere, let me tell you.

dir: Martin Scorsese

2023

Three and a half hours…

Everyone has better things to do than watch three and a half hour films in one sitting. I know some people watched this in cinemas originally, but, let’s be honest: Martin Scorsese himself wouldn’t be able to sit through this flick in one sitting.

How do I know that? Well, if you’ve spent time with men in their 80s, or looked after a man in his 80s, you know there’s no way they’re sitting there for that long without needing help to the amenities at least 3 or four times.

And Scorsese, gods love him, is in his 80s. He has lost none of his abilities as a director telling big, complex stories in the widest, most maximalist ways possible, with the longest possible running times. Of course, this being a true story that focuses on a massive conspiracy of vicious jerks, committing so many crimes including and especially involving so many murders, it’s not unlike the films he’s most famous for, being his beloved mafia epics like Goodfellas, Casino and The Last Temptation of Christ.

You already know if you have the capacity for these late era Scorsese movies. A good bet is if you actually sat through the entirety of The Irishman without napping multiple times.

If so, you deserve a cookie, and you probably already watched this in a theatre. Good for you.

dir: Tim Story

2023

I will be the first to admit, and honestly have to be the first to admit, that I am not the target audience for this movie. My opinion about this movie, like all my opinions about anything, are therefore even more important / authoritative than usual (ie. utterly worthless).

I am, however, a fan of movies / pop culture, and in the American context, of Black cinema / African-American cinema. I went into this assuming this flick, ostensibly a horror flick, was specifically about playing with the tropes of horror movies in terms of how poorly they serve African-American characters usually, but what I ended up getting was vastly different.

Tim Story is probably best known for directing Barbershop way back in the day, if he is known by international audiences at all. I am not sure that he would be well known as the director of the pretty terrible Fantastic Four movies, or the very ordinary Ride Along movies, or the terrible *belches loudly* Think Like a Man movies.

So, whatever. I have no doubt he has fans, and that he’s a talented, commercial director, in all senses of the word. He is a very successful African-American director, and he certainly has knowledge and a feel for how African-Americans are portrayed in movies, because he’s in the business of portraying them for fun and profit, and has been for decades.

This flick is replete with references that will fly by most people, I would guess, and I say that as someone who gets the references, but only because I’ve watched everything and remember all the dumbest, lamest trivia from any old tv show you care to mention. I also remember the various controversies that arose with many of those shows, like who got fired and why, and who they were replaced with, because… Well, I don’t really have an explanation for it.

dir: Alexander Payne

2023

It almost feels like director Alexander Payne and lead actor Paul Giamatti are coasting. Playing to their strengths, working with very familiar scenarios, and putting people in positions that feel like we’ve watched the flick (a long time ago) many times before.

It shouldn’t work, even down to a use of folk music where I wondered aloud “could they not afford a Cat Stevens song for this scene?”, only to have a Cat Stevens song start playing immediately thereafter.

But it did all work for me. It worked beautifully.

It might be set at a posh New England boys school over Christmas, 1970. It might have an intro with old timey studio titles and the (digital effect) of dust and dropouts on the “film” as it starts, but this is a film as old as time itself. It’s about lonely people struggling with grief and loss, finding it very hard to get by in life, forced together by circumstance, in order to learn things about themselves, and come to terms with things.

You know, like every movie that’s ever been made.

However familiar elements might be, it’s still a very strong film. Paul Giamatti playing a curmudgeon? Say it ain’t so! A sassy, straight-talking service industry African-American character who cuts through the privilege and pieties of the main (white) characters? A troubled teen who’s rebelling without really knowing what he’s rebelling against?

I mean…, you could have called it Catcher in the Rye Ice Storm at the Dead Poet’s Society, and only a few people would have batted an eyelid.

If there is a main character who is not Paul Giamatti, it’s Holden, sorry, Angus (Domenic Sessa), whose parents don’t want to see him during the Christmas break. That’s got to hurt. Still, if Angus was the kind of go along to get along chap, one who could make the best of a dire situation, well, he probably wouldn’t be in this predicament if he was a different person. Instead, he’s an isolated jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else.

There are other boys in this unfortunate circumstance as well, it’s not just Angus, but he doesn’t really have the social skills to connect with them, or seemingly the desire to.

Charged with looking after these unwanted, misfit toys is a teacher who doesn’t really have anything better to do over the Christmas break: Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti). He is as loathed by the students as he is by most of the faculty, and he has no life outside of the school.

He hates the students and sees the world as one that hasn’t really improved that much since the Visigoths sacked Rome all those years ago. He teaches ancient history, which means Greek and Roman history, and as such thinks their wisdom is the only wisdom worth learning or repeating.