2022

dir: Goran Stolevski

2022

Such a title, a phrase, like “you won’t be alone”, it can sound like reassurance, like trying to comfort someone who’s afraid of abandonment, of loneliness, that they won’t be as alone as they fear.

It also, unfortunately, sounds like a promise that’s more of a dark threat: You won’t be alone because I’ll always be around, making sure nothing goes right in your life, and that every time you get close to people, I’ll be there to snuff them out.

It is referred to as a horror film, but “horror” doesn’t really capture what this flick is about. It’s not trying to horrify or scare audiences. Horrible things do happen, but the horror isn’t the point.

In weird ways this is more like a micro-budget Terrence Malick flick with 1 per cent of the budget and 200 per cent of the ambition. There’s a lot told to us in whispered voiceover, because the main character cannot speak for herself. She never speaks for herself out loud, regardless of what form she’s in.

Even though I push back on the genre designation of “horror” in order to avoid pigeon-holing the flick, everything I’m going to write now is going to contradict that assertion.

In some non-descript peasant village in what these days is called Macedonia, but about 200 years ago, a young peasant mother is confronted by a strange sight: a blistered, tormented figure who wants to drink her crying newborn’s blood. This is a monster out of local myth, appearing to this woman, for reals, and all she can think to do is bargain for her child’s life.

This monster, though, who is known by one derisive name (Old Maid Maria), and one descriptor (Wolf-Eateress), sounds like she’s going to be bound by some kind of Rumpelstiltskin-type bullshit, but she really isn’t. And though she agrees to spare the child until she is 16, she commits the first of many horrors by stealing the girl’s voice. Permanently.

The mother, not being very bright, thinks to protect this child by shutting it in a cave, where it pretty much seems to grow alone, neglected, unloved and unmissed by anyone.

dir: Sam Raimi

2022

Errm, this is not the best recent film I’ve seen dealing with the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes in parallel to our own.

This isn’t an entirely bad film. It’s okay. Some parts are even enjoyable. Some parts work really well. Others, not so well.

If you find either Benedict Cumberbatch or the Doctor Strange character insufferable, then you might just suffer through this a lot. If you love either of them, or you like otters, then you might enjoy sections of this flick. If you have liked Sam Raimi movies over the decades, and can watch him cribbing from his own film history to deliver a kind of scrap book / lifetime achievement award to himself, then maybe there might be some sly meta level to enjoy the flick on.

As the latest entry in the Marvel universe, it’s kind of a dead end, or at least something that seems like it’s opening up a wild, new vista, but it ends up slamming the door on itself because, I dunno, it would be too much work otherwise?

The central lynchpin of this flick, which is kinda baffling, is that out of nowhere, after however many films, Dr Strange wishes he had a girlfriend again, being Christine (Rachel McAdams).

It turns out that not only can’t Strange be with her in this universe, but, when he finds out there are lots of other ones, he finds out that he can’t be with her in those universes either.

That’s got to suck. Even if it’s an infinite number of universes, in none of them can he be happy with Christine, or, put differently, there is no universe in which Christine can put up with his bullshit for too long.

Also coming to terms with infinite possibilities still leaving someone unsatisfied, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has decided that killing people is way more satisfying that dealing with her various griefs. She grieves the death of her boyfriend who was a robot, being Vision, but, now stay with me if you never watched the Disney + series WandaVision, she also mourns the loss of her two magical sons, Billy and Tommy, who existed for a brief period of time when she took over a New Jersey town and turned it into a 60s 70s 80s tv sitcom hell on Earth.

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say she was mourning two kids that never really existed, but if you told her that, she would probably kill you quite effortlessly, because she spends most of the film killing powerful people with little to no effort.

She is now so powerful she’s pretty much a threat to life even in other universes.

I just…yawn. Once we peaked with a villain who wanted to end half of all life in the universe, and now it’s like “well today’s villain is okay with destroying multiple universes!” it’s hard to give much of a damn. That goes beyond stakes that mean anything further than shrugging one’s shoulders and thinking “well okay that’s the premise, then.”

dir: Michael Bay

2022

There’s no two part collection of name and surname that chills the blood like “Michael” and “Bay”. “Michael” and “Myers” can chill the blood too, but that depends whether you’re afraid of the implacable enemy in the Halloween films, or you’re wondering why everything Mike Myers has done since the first Austin Powers has been so unremittingly terrible.

Michael Bay has made some of the loudest and dumbest films in Hollywood history, and whatever his age is, he’s not about to stop now. This is, somehow, a remake of a Danish film, which Bay might have heard about (I find it hard to believe he watches other people’s movies, it seems off-brand), where crims hijack an ambulance in order to flee from the authorities.

I haven’t seen that film, but I can guess quite easily that it is nowhere near as loud or fucking dumb as this flick. But I knew that coming into the experience. It’s a simple bet to take, because nothing can be as loud or as dumb as a Michael Bay flick.

This is not the place to have the argument as to whether Bay is a cancer on the body politic, or the body cinematic. Consider Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Bad Boys, and the general bombast and dumbness they’ve contributed to our lives and minds. Then there’s the visually incoherent Transformers films, which are somehow even worse. If he’s made one okay movie it might be Pain & Gain, but even then he could barely resist his urges to overedit everything all of the time.

There are no such abstentions here, no urge unfulfilled, no screaming overamped moment held back or resisted. And now he’s adding swooping drone shots to his limited repertoire of “high energy” camerawork.

The premise is simplistic enough such that you’d be finding it difficult to justify as to why this flick needs to be as long as it is. I think it came in someone over two and a half goddamn hours. And all you get for that extra time, since there’s little to argue as to why it couldn’t just be 90 minutes or so, is just more scenes of an ambulance driving around being pursued by the cops, by all the cops of LA.

The implausible bit isn’t that Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II play brothers in this movie. The implausible bit is that an ambulance driven by crims through the streets of LA over the course of a very long day could somehow avoid traffic enough to drive more than 20 miles an hour.

This flick is a very simplistic bunch of pancakes, that are a bit overlarded. Only one character has a backstory to justify his actions, but everyone else just is who they are. The Will character fought in one of America’s recent endless conflicts overseas as a soldier, but comes back unable to find work, unable to afford the health care his wife desperately needs.

But he is a Good Man, don’t you know.

dir: Daniel Espinosa

2022

Another week, another Marvel related extrusion from the Play Do factory.

If you’re wondering how or why this relates to anything to do with Marvel, it’s of the “very stupid” section of their back catalogue, the one that produces those terrible Venom movies; of characters no-one really cares about getting their own films played by people who know better but do panto during the summer break for extra money.

This, however, doesn’t it feel like it wants to or needs to even be anything vaguely connected to Marvel: it’s a dumb and generic vampire movie about a guy who turns himself into a vampire and fights another guy who’s a vampire and then kills that guy and it’s mostly done.

The end. No more to see here. Let’s hope.

What’s almost funny is that this doctor (Jared Leto, ugh) finds these bats, and decides to take their DNA, and put it in himself, and then he becomes like a bat, um, man? There’s even a scene where he stands in a circular glass chamber and the bats fly all around him, and there’s this Hans Zimmer music that sounds awfully like... that other film where a guy has an affinity for bats, and even dresses like one?

This flick is terrible, but not in enjoyable ways, just in generic ways. It’s not particularly horrible to watch, it’s just not that entertaining. Jared Leto speaks with an accent not of this earth, and yet he’s not playing an alien. Watching him simulate what he thinks is human behaviour is almost touching sometimes. It’s like watching a dog play the piano. He gets the idea of human interaction without the specifics that would make it seem like realistic human behaviour.