8 stars

Oddity

The oddities will set us free

dir: Damian McCarthy

2024

Oddity is one of the stronger horror flicks to come out this year thus far. It’s still pretty slow, though, and deliberately unsatisfying in its resolution, so take my endorsement with a large grain of slow-cooked salt.

Not that you’re waiting for my blessing as to whether you’ll see this or not.

This is a complex and unsettling slow burner that nonetheless is happy enough to indulge in jump scares when it wants to punctuate something, and punctuate it does. Ye gods. I never pretended to be immune to jump scares, but the mark of a quality one is that even when you know it’s coming, it still scares the shit out of you.

This film also is an indictment of the insidiousness of how Grand Designs has permeated everything.

I have nothing against Kevin McCloud, in fact I quite like the man, as a presenter and as a designer, but there’s no doubt his terrible and terribly addictive show has done more to stoke the fires of property renovation - aspiration than any other show produced by Great Britain ever in its history. It is a horrible show where couples who claim they can’t afford any of what they’re doing somehow find the extra five hundred thousand pounds from somewhere in order to eventually complete their dream home five years later than they thought they would. It is dismal and irritating how well they manage to suck the audience in and get them invested in the works being completed without losing everything (which never happens, because the show is aspirational, after all).

Sometimes the couple’s survive, sometimes they don’t. A lot of them look like they’ve never really appreciated what the ‘sunk cost’ fallacy actually means, or, because they are so goddamn wealthy it doesn’t ultimately matter that much to them. It’s more than just a collection of stones and wood, because, in the man’s own words, “the notion of home is not simply a concept, it’s a place of psychological dependency.”

Rarely does it lead to murder, like it ultimately does here.

Rating:

8 stars

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Inside Out 2

Too many emotions depicted. All you really
need is Irritation and Hunger.

dIr: Kelsey Mann

2024

You don’t have to tell me, I already agree with you. You’re right: Inside Out didn’t need a sequel. It was perfect as it was, a pristine thing of beauty, something to hold up as evidence that late-stage Pixar could still put out decent flicks long after its heyday.

And yet they made this, it was a massive success, it raked in all the moneys, and Disney execs get to rub even more cold hard cash all over their bodies, and we’re the chumps left crying in our seats or in the gutter.

Fully admitting that, I still enjoyed the flick, and I don’t think it’s a drop in quality at all. Even if it feels a bit unnecessary at the end, it’s okay. The metaphor still holds up.

Hostages as we are to our hormones and our emotions, we continue the story of teenager Riley as seen through the portholes that are her eyes by the emotions that animate her entire being through a control console of buttons, levers and, I dunno, flanges maybe. All the ‘old’ emotions are back, especially Sadness (Phyllis Smith), my absolute favourite, but a growing Riley, who has just hit puberty, finds herself at the mercy of a whole new set of emotions / feelings.

Rating:

8 stars

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Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

This poster is terrible, gives no sense of the flick whatsoever

(九龍城寨之圍城
九龙城寨之围城
Jiǔ Lóng Chéng Zhài·Wéi Chéng)

dir: Soi Cheang

2024

It brought me a strange joy to watch this movie.

I am not, despite my abject mawkishness and the fact that the slightest thing can bring me to tears, whether it’s a tv commercial or any pet rescue video online, an overly sentimental person. I don’t revel in nostalgia. That doesn’t mean I don’t think of the past, all the time. I am as much a prisoner of the past as the rest of us are.

But I never indulge along the lines of “Things were so much better back *insert unspecified time when you were younger*. The movies were better, the music was better, sex and drugs were better, everything back then was better. If only we could return to…”

With little variation, plenty of things were terrible for plenty of people back whenever you choose to pick. If the music back then was great, I can listen to it at will now. If there were great films back whenever, in a lot of cases I can just stream them at will too. At every time that there was great stuff coming out, there was plenty of absolute crap.

For every great Hong Kong film I ever watched, there were a hundred mediocre pieces of shit that came out as well. I don’t want to return to the late 80s early 90s at all. I certainly don’t want the world to go forty years backwards. Think of how terrible the internet was back then. You want to go back to dial-up modems? Well, do ya?

But even I can’t help feeling a deep nostalgia while watching this flick, which I’m going to truncate to Walled In for the purposes of this review.

The place this flick pretends to be about no longer exists. Unlike the great cities of yore that are nothing but dust now, or infamous places where feet dread to step, the Walled so-called City in Kowloon existed within living memory, for weird reasons, and its destruction is also not that long ago, happening several years before Britain handed back Hong Kong to China in 1997.

It should never have controlled Hong Kong, because, in case you haven’t noticed, colonialism brings misery and wealth-extraction wherever it goes, and is bad. Britain’s control of Hong Kong is especially awful, since its occupation started with the Opium Wars.

You know, those wars where the Chinese said “please, we don’t want that crap, it’s killing us”, and the British Empire said “you will take our opium and you will love it, bitches”, enforced of course through many cannons making many Chinese people be unalived. The remnants of the Qing Dynasty ceded control of that island referred to as Hong Kong, but as a “fuck you” designated an area for there to be a fort and an official residence for an official to sit in his office and glare at them through the window.

Rating:

8 stars

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Tuesday

'Parrot of Death' was always one of my favourite Slayer songs

dir: Daina Oniunas-Pusiċ

2023

A film about a dying teenager… It’s not a guaranteed barrel of laughs. I guess there’s this weird sub-genre of YA books adapted to movies about dying teenagers finding love (just before the end), but in general you’d think studios worry the subject matter is too confronting to get bums on seats in theatres.

What about… Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the great Julia Louis-Dreyfus? If I told you she was in it, would that entice you back into the cinema? She has a solid number of post-Seinfeld performances such that you would think a decent person wouldn’t have to mention what she’s most famous for. She’s been great in those Nicole Holofcener movies like Enough Said and You Hurt My Feewings, and there’s her amazing run on Veep.

Her performance is much neater and much more straight-forward here (even as the story becomes more fantastical). She plays the mother of a dying teenager, and she’s pretty much in denial about it despite the constant and unavoidable daily struggle to keep things together. She knows her daughter is dying, but she can’t even talk to her daughter about it, and sort-of avoids her, palming her off onto the nurse who looks after her (Leah Harvey). She has a nurse to look after Tuesday (Lola Pettigrew) during the day, but she spends that time pawning things, hanging out in cafes and sleeping on a bench in a park.

Why? Well, why not?

These are not the characters we first meet in this flick, not really. There’s another character I haven’t mentioned yet who plays the most central role, other than Tuesday. I don’t know if it’s a he, or how they choose to style themselves, but today’s the day you find out that Death Himself or Death Itself is an orange macaw. A parrot. The Parrot of Death (Arinze Mokwe Kene). Born of the void, he has no friends, but he has one task, and that is to visit the dying, wave his mighty wing at them, and then see them ushered out of this world.

He grows large, he grows small as needs be, he is greeted with relief, or hate, or fear, or scorn, but the result is the same.

Rating:

8 stars

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Fallen Leaves

It was the dog what brought them together

(Kuolleet Lehdet)

dir: Aki Kaurismäki

2023

Fallen Leaves is the most recent film from Finland’s greatest ever director. Well, I say that, knowing nothing about Finland’s film industry. There could be way better directors in Finland. But none of them have had anywhere near the level of international acclaim as Aki Kaurismäki. It’s probably because he’s been doing it for forty years or so. It’s possibly because of the quality of his films.

It could be because of the fact that his name rhymes so wonderfully. Aki Kaurismäki. Rolls off the tongue.

He is at least the only one who routinely got played in arthouse cinemas in Australia over the years. If there is a single other popular or critically acclaimed Finnish director, I haven’t heard of them, and I hear about a lot of people from a lot of places. Renny Harlin is the only other one I can think of, and he hasn’t made anything vaguely good in decades. The only other Finnish film I can think of that’s come out recently is that one where the gold prospector kills all them fucking Nazis, which was delightful (Sisu), but that’s only one movie.

My man Aki has been pumping them out since the 80s. Since Leningrad Cowboys Go America, he has been delighting audiences around the world with his cinematic antics. Maybe “delighting” is too strong a term. I don’t know if he’s even that well-known and beloved in Finland.

His films are so strictly formalist and the humour is so droll and deadpan that I don’t even know if they’re really that representative of Finnish culture or sensibilities, contemporary or otherwise. Maybe they’re more sophisticated than the rest of us. Maybe they still think Benny Hill is the pinnacle of human achievement. I don’t know. I actually know some Finnish people, and, I’ll tell you something for free, they think Australians are total yokel hillbillies.

But, and this is a big butt and I cannot lie about it, they are as likely to laugh uproariously at something they find funny, or loudly express themselves about something they care about as possibly anyone else on the planet, so this impression you get from Finnish flicks generally or the whole idea of those Nordic regions about how restrained and expression-less they are is of course bullshit.

Everyone is restrained with people they don’t know. In their own elements, well, they carry on like pork chops or whatever the Finnish equivalent is.

Rating:

8 stars

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The Convert

She is fierce enough to burn a thousand ships

dir: Lee Tamahori

2024

The Convert is set in 1830, and in that place what many (coloniser) people call New Zealand, but the Māori call Aotearoa, so it’s a sad, sorry time before internets and Lynx body spray. It’s also a time of lots of killings and stuff, with the locals slaughtering each other for shits and giggles, and snacks as well, apparently.

And it’s a time when the Brits think all they need to acquire a place from whoever might be there is plant a flag, start building shit, and shoot a defined percentage of the locals at regular intervals.

It’s the only way to keep the rest of ‘em in line. This is also, despite the grimness of the times, well before the so-called Māori Wars that would pit the Brits and certain tribes against other tribes in order to steal all the land, just like God intended. This is the time when they pretend to be polite, but avoid making eye contact with them, in the hopes they’ll just go away or die from chickenpox.

Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) has been contracted to sail out from England and come to this godforsaken outpost of the Empire in order to minister to the (white) townsfolk of Epworth. Epworth (I think?) would be where present day Canterbury would be, on the east coast of the South Island. Even though most of this flick is filmed on the North Island, but anyway.

It’s really hard to fault wherever they chose to point the camera and film stuff. Aotearoa is that place, so stunning, so daunting in scale that it looks like a fantastical place even though it already exists. It serves as the backdrop for epics like The Lord of the Rings movies, but in this context it establishes that this is a forbidding place, where maybe even humans themselves, let alone the Māori or the Pākehā, as they call them, are not really welcome.

Rating:

8 stars

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1369 reads

The Bikeriders

A man, his machine, and the horizon...

dir: Jeff Nichols

2024

Critics (and audiences) haven’t been kind to this film. I am not entirely sure what they were expecting. The film is called The Bikeriders. It has guys riding motorbikes. For that alone it deserves points for accuracy and honesty.

Some reviews have pointed to the fact that there’s not a lot of depth to some of the characters or what amount to their storylines, and to that I say: This film is based on a coffee table book of photographs of bikers from the early to mid 1960s: the fuck were you expecting? Anna Karenina?”

For my money, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I expected. This is a movie. About a biker gang. About the gloriously stupid halcyon early days, and how everything turns to shit later on. Like every story of this type.

And yet I really enjoyed it. Its joys, its charms, are ineffable, mostly, but also, what’s not to like about watching some smouldering hot guys on motorbikes for 2 hours?

Really, there’s only one. Austin Butler has a face so perfectly symmetrical that he can play Elvis, a sadistic Harkonnen, and a supposedly scuzzy biker and no-one bats an eyelid, least of all him. A face that perfect papers over a lot of potential sins, because I am not sure yet if anyone is certain he can act yet. This is not a film for acting that involves people rendering their lines in a believable manner.

This is a movie to be enjoyed for the images conjured for our eyes. Butler, as Benny, lighting a cigarette; Benny outrunning the cops on his bike, and then laughing when he runs out of gas and they catch up to him, Benny nonchalantly telling two jerks in a bar that he’ll die before he takes his colours off; the delight on Benny’s face when he’s rushing into an avoidable fight just because he wants to fuck some guys up.

I think the director knew this would be the strength of the flick, but I’m not sure audiences were ready for it. I don’t know that they’re ready to commit to Butler-mania.

Tom Hardy is in this as well. You might think you don’t need anyone else in the flick if you’ve got Austin Butler for the camera to linger upon as he leans over to play pool, or pops the top off of a beer, but a gang needs a few more bodies.

Rating:

8 stars

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Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Apes and humans, working together, for the greater good

dir: Wes Ball

2024

The names are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean the films are getting shittier. One day they’ll come out with The Movie about the Book about the TV series about the Unincorporated area adjacent to the Subdivision next to the Hill Below the Mountain Upon Which the Fiefdom of the Dukedom to the Empire of the Planet in the Solar System of the Apes that Talk (they don’t have tails), and people like me will still voluntarily waddle along into the cinemas to watch them. And when buying tickets I’ll just have to say, in between shoveling popcorn down my gullet “the monkey one”, and they’ll know which one I mean, unless there’s a Kong versus or x one in the cinemas concurrently.

I thought the three movies that starred Andy Serkis as Caesar, obviously under layers and layers of digital effects, were absolute aces, real good, better than bad. Genuinely, I thought they were amazing, underpinned as they were by Serkis’ magnificent performance as the lead.

Of course, with the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes, and with this flick jumping about 300 years into the future, one in which apes rule and humans mostly drool, Caesar himself is no more. But his name lives on, and some of his beliefs, and teachings, linger.

At this stage of life on the planet, apes live in their tribes, humans are rarely glimpsed, and if they’re seen at all they’re mostly seen as a nuisance, kind of like foxes or possums. They’re not exactly writing hip-hop musicals or social media apps to bully each other with, but they are training eagles to hunt fish for them. Whatever intelligence they got that humanity lost hasn’t translated into using language beyond the spoken, so they have not advanced to a comparable level that humanity was at when it fell. They’re probably at the stage humanity was at 10,000 years ago, at the agrarian stage.

Noa (Owen Teague) is our new audience surrogate, or at the very least our main character. He is the son of the chief, naturally, in a tribe where one’s ability to train eagles seems to be of paramount importance. He is a chimpanzee, like Caesar, and has some leadership qualities. But he has doubts.

He is not the strongest chimp, nor the smartest, and as the son of a chief who isn’t, at the ordained time, able to bring back an eagle egg safely for some bonding ceremony, it looks like he’s cursed to live a life of mediocrity, even as a nepo baby.

Rating:

8 stars

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Augure

Intertwined by powers too great and stupid to contradict

dir: Baloji

2023

The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.

At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.

Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.

The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.

The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.

Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.

A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?

Rating:

8 stars

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In a Violent Nature

Rest easy, sweet prince, you've earned your rest

dir: Chris Nash

2024

This is a very Canadian horror flick.

I know, so many movies get filmed in Canada, pretending to be the States, pretending to be a lot of places, but this flick doesn’t hide its Canadianness at all, revelling in its time and place (north Ontario), using Canadian bands, on the (very diegetic) soundtrack, unashamed Canadian accents and presumably a heck of a lot of Canadians on and offscreen.

This is in service of great evil, this being a flick where a supernatural killer rises from the grave and brutally dispatches a bunch of people whether they deserve it or not, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have a point, at certain junctures.

To say that this flick is mostly shot from the killer’s perspective seems to misrepresent what actually happens, or is shown. It’s not through his eyes that we see all the murder and mayhem transpire: the camera follows, much of the time, from just behind him. We spend a lot of time just watching him walk places, or standing there patiently waiting to see something that means he can start butchering people.

Much of the walking happens in nature. We watch our murdering murderer quietly walk from place to place murdering. Because of this novel setup, what it means is we’re never surprised, really, when our murderer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), murders someone. From the first murder to the last, we know it’s coming, we see it happen, and at times the murderising goes on and on for absolute ages at a leisurely place.

What are we meant to make of this? If you’re a normal person, you are probably neither reading this review nor ever going to watch a film like this. What could be more disturbing to a normal person that seeing horrifying murders of innocent people at the hands of a wordless revenant, in a manner meant to elicit sympathy not for the victims, but for the monster?

To horror fans, well, a flick like this could just be the catnip we’ve been waiting for.

Rating:

8 stars

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8 stars

Oddity

Inside Out 2

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In

Tuesday

Fallen Leaves

The Convert

The Bikeriders

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Augure

In a Violent Nature

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