8 stars

dir: Blitz Bazawule

2023

Musicals. I try to be enthusiastic about them, but honestly, like most people (who aren’t Americans), I genuinely try to avoid them like, well, using the phrase “like the plague” seems tasteless after Covid killed so many millions of people.

So let’s just say I avoid them like the Cats musical they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world several years ago. Case in point, I have tried to sit through Cats multiple times, and I’ve never, ever been able to get through it, even during the worst of the lockdowns.

That was not a problem here. I knew it was a musical going in, and though I’ve never heard any of the songs before, I wasn’t overly dreading the experience.

I am old enough to remember the film when it came out in the 80s, directed by that most famous of African-American directors, Steven Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, and the Empress of the Americas, being Oprah Winfrey, played Sofia.

I… have memories of that movie. I remember my school taking us along to the cinema to see it, which means I was in early high school. I remember being horrified by the scenes of what these days we call ‘intimate partner violence’, which used to be called ‘domestic violence’, which boils down to ‘a piece of shit guy physically abusing a woman’, which makes me sick to my stomach to even type. I have always looked askance at Danny Glover since then, having loathed him (unfairly) for how well he played the role of Mister.

My other memory of watching the original film involves watching it on the telly with my mother, who painfully, wrenchingly related to the scenes of domestic violence, and could transcend her usual racist tendencies to sympathise with the plights of the many African-American women in the story, but drew the line at Celie’s sapphic tendencies, declaring them a bridge too far, condemning everyone involved to hell itself.

dir: Matteo Garrone

2023

Ahem. Usually, when I title reviews, I have the title in English, since I write my reviews in English, and not my preferred language, which would be Ukrainian (Slava Ukraini! Geroiam Slava!), but at the top of the page I tend to have the title as written in whatever language the film was made in, or by, or for.

That would be a confusing thing to do in this instance. So this is a film made by an Italian director, but it’s about the plight of two Senegalese boys trying to emigrate to Europe, and they speak, mostly, Wolof, French, a bit of English and an even tinier bit of Italian.

So I have no idea what language is the “right” one for this flick to be titled in. I’m sticking with the title as written, as this was Italy’s submission to the Academy for Best International Feature Film for 2023 as Io Capitano, and thus it must stay.

I’m not entirely sure if that translates to “I, Captain" or "I am a captain”, or “I am the captain”, or if it’s a reference to the Tom Hanks nauseating thriller Captain Phillips, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least one of those options.

Its relevance only becomes apparent at the very end of the two stressful hours we spend with our protagonists.

And who are our protagonists? Two Senegalese boys called Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall), who are convinced that their fortunes will be made if only they can get themselves to Europe. It doesn’t matter where in Europe, just Europe. They will make big fat wads of money and send it back to their families and also maybe get somewhere with their rapping and musical skills, to the point where white people will fight for their autographs!

dir: Cord Jefferson

2023

American Fiction is a lot of film. I guess it’s lots of two lots; a lot of a family drama, and a lot of a satirical take on the state of, you guessed it, American literary fiction.

But really, what it is, is funny. It’s a pretty funny film. I got genuine laughs out of this flick, and it’s not billed as a comedy. I got more laughs out of this than No Hard Feelings, the recent Mean Girls update or even Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which had to have been a comedy, because otherwise…

In terms of its satirical components, its target is mainly well-meaning “white” liberals who through a mixture of condescension and egotistical imagined empathy end up being more racist towards African-Americans than even the dumbest red-hatted Trump voter. Right from the start as our main character is shown in class at the university where he lectures, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is being castigated by a student because of the presence of a certain word on the whiteboard.

They’re analysing the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. One of those short stories happens to be The Artificial N-----. Now, I don’t particularly love the word either, but it is the short story’s name. Thelonious is African-American, and a writer, and lecturer, and the student complaining, saying that even seeing the word causes her distress, is, for lack of a better descriptor, white. When she persists in her complaints, Thelonious tells her that he got over whatever trauma the word represents, so she could too.

Naturally, she wants to have a word with his manager, being the Karen-in-training that she is, and complains to the university hierarchy. She - let’s not gloss over this, took offence on behalf of African-Americans, including the ones in her class, including her lecturer - when they themselves in that context weren’t offended.

dirs: Nick Bruno & Troy Quane

2023

I have been on a bit of an animated kick lately, and seeing this was an absolutely utterly enjoyable blast.

I think it came out on streaming several months ago, and though I was curious, I held off because there were so many other important things to see, sometimes in black and white, with adult people doing important adult things like murder the indigenous or invent the atom bomb or conduct some orchestra and have sex with hot young guys.

So, with all that important homework / eat yer vegetables out of the way, it means I’m free to watch some enjoyable, actually enjoyable movies for a change.

I tell a lie. This too has been nominated for an Academy award, presumably in the Best Animated category, so I thought I’d watch it now before the stupid awards that don’t mean anything.

I shouldn’t have waited this long. I think my major beef against it was having heard it was significantly different story-wise from the graphic novel by ND Stephenson that it’s based on.

It is different, but it’s not to its detriment, which is not to say that it’s better than the book, but maybe just as good as the book. The main characters are pretty much the same, with the overall premise altered a lot to tell a similar but maybe a more 90 minute movie friendly story?

Unlike the other animated flick I saw recently which probably would have sunk without a trace had it been released in cinemas with a wide release, this here flick Nimona would probably also have sunk without trace, but it would have at least looked fantastic on the big screen. It’s superbly animated and belts along at a cracking pace. Nimona (Chloe Grace Moritz) is a phenomenal character who is or can look like whatever she wants – a whale, a mouse or a people person like person. The world in which this story transpires is kinda like our contemporary world technology wise, if not futuristic, but the aesthetic is knights and lords and ladies and armour and swords and shit like that, but the swords shoot lasers if they want. What even is this setting?