2010

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2010

Hmmmm.

Darren Aronofsky returns to the well that prompted him to make Pi way back in the day, with a different gender in the lead but the same ultimate problem: madness brought on by sexual frustration. In Pi a maths genius can’t get any, and goes mad (or madder) listening to his hot Indian neighbour have sex. In Black Swan, a sexually- repressed prima ballerina called Nina (Natalie Portman) has to go mad in order to access her dark side to become the most perfect ballerina in the history of Swan Lake performances.

With mixed results. In a way, though she’s won’t and shouldn’t get credit for it, Portman did a Christian Bale and starved herself down in order to play this character. She’s already tiny, but here she’s depleted enough here to have that horrible strained look on her sternum where flesh is supposed to be, and now there’s only bone and tendon.

It’s not for me to judge what actors do in the pursuit of money, critical respect and the adulation of the masses. If it’s okay for Bale to do it in every second flick he does, then why not a chick that probably already weighs about 40 kilos anyway?

Yes, yes, women’s issues with body image, yes, yes, negative media images contributing to pressures on actresses specifically and women in general.

dir: Noah Baumbach

2010

Officially the most depressing flick of the year. Worse than a twenty-hour Holocaust documentary. Worse than a dramatic indie flick chronicling the breakdown of a marriage in excruciating detail. Worse than a live action film where the main character is a computer animated dog.

It always gets me when the people designing the posters for films do this, whereupon they put the name of the ‘star’ at the top linking it directly to the main character of the flick they’re obviously in. When they were making those Bourne Identity et al flicks, the posters, which featured a big muscly pic of Matt Damon, often came standard with the phrase “Matt Damon IS Jason Bourne!” as if there were any lingering doubts in the confused populace.

Of course the confusion arises because Matt Damon isn’t Jason Bourne, a fictional character, he’s the actor and soft drink salesman Matt Damon, surprisingly enough.

So when the posters for this dirge of a flick has the same type of phrase, as in “Ben Stiller IS Greenberg”, I don’t have the same pedantic reaction. What I actually think in this instance is that if Ben Stiller actually was this Greenberg person, someone should murder him in his sleep.

Greenberg, as in the sort-of main character in this flick, is like the worst person I’ve ever seen in a movie. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lecter comes across as more pleasant and avuncular. The various versions of Hitler on film come across as less repellent and self-absorbed. Richard Milhous Nixon in the Oliver Stone flick screaming obscenities about Kennedy, blacks and Jews is nicer and cuddlier than this monster Greenberg.

The flick’s other main lead is a woman called Florence (Greta Gerwig), who seems to drop her kit at the drop of a hat. She is meant to come across as some kind of nice and sweet counterbalance to Greenberg’s almost autistic lack of regard for others, but she ends up being just as annoying, though not as unpleasant. She works as a personal assistant to a very wealthy Los Angeles-type, being Greenberg’s brother. I don’t mean personal assistant the way that the term applies to the rest of the world, as in, a person who used to be called a secretary or a go-fer, or a Girl Friday in the office, but in the L.A. contemporary version.

Which is, a person you hire and pay to do the things in organising your life that you don’t have time to do yourself, like walk your dog or pick up your dry cleaning or to do your shopping, and presumably to wipe the parts of your and your family’s anatomies that you don’t have time to wipe because of the freneticness of your lifestyle.

Rich people, eh? They suffer so we don’t have to.

dir: Chao-Bin Su, John Woo

2010

It’s strange, and a little bit embarrassing that I am still as gullible as I am at the age that I am. I saw a clip for this flick during Potato-Head Pomeranz and Old Farmer Stratton’s Movie Show a few weeks ago, mentioned as getting a lot of people excited at some festival, possibly this year’s Venice festival.

A few seconds of people fighting, and a few excitable words from Margaret, and I was somehow convinced that this was the flick of the year, a continuation of the good work John Woo was currently doing (after the success of Red Cliff), and all around another in the exciting high-end line of wuxia (martial arts) flicks that started with Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and resulted in other dazzling entries like Hero and House of Flying Daggers.

And so I bought into all this meaningless hype, as if I was some teenage girl buying Twilight merchandise, or some object Justin Beiber or Lady Gaga might have touched with some part of their anatomy as some point in time.

And what did I get for this emotional and financial investment, in getting excited about this flick and going out of my way to see it? What’s my recompense, my due, my pay back?

Well, it’s given me another chance to write a review. And for that, at least, I should be grateful.

Reign of Assassins is utterly conventional, utterly indistinguishable from literally thousands and thousands of other Chinese / Hong Kong flicks made over the last fifty years, and, as such, really doesn’t warrant any more attention than any other flick. In fact it deserves a bit less, perhaps, for not being exactly as awesome as I thought it would be. People should be punished for letting me down. You’ve been warned.

dir: Gareth Edwards

2010

Monsters. They’re everywhere. Not just under your bed, or bursting out of your closet when you’re not looking, or threatening you on public transport with their odours and with requests for money.

They’re also, apparently, in Mexico, trying to get across the border to the States in order to make some money and eat some quality junk food. These monsters are so terrible that a huge wall has to be built in order to keep them out, away from decent, law-abiding white people.

And then there’s this strange flick some guy made about some actual monsters, as in, giant alien octopi, that have infected Central America with their casual destruction and socialist economic programs.

Clearly, military strongman and certifiable egomaniac Hugo Chavez is the real target here. Whether he is or not, there’s monsters out there, and the going is getting tough.