2023

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?

dir: Robert Morgan

2023

Stopmotion is the kind of flick you could only recommend to die-hard horror fans. I don’t mean people who’ve occasionally seen popular horror films that everyone else sees and think “oh yeah I don’t mind the occasional jump scare”.

No. If you watched this flick and liked it, and recommended it to people willy nilly, you could end up arrested. The most likely reaction would be whoever you recommended coming back to you, slapping you in the face and screaming “what the fuck were you on when you recommended Stopmotion to me? Do you hate me that much?”

They probably won’t speak to you again, either. Maybe you planned it that way?

I don’t know, you’re a complicated person with a lot on your plate. Maybe a 10-year-old’s birthday party wasn’t the best place to play it.

Regardless, this is a very disturbing, very nasty little film, about how working on stop motion animation is so slow and pain-staking that it drives its practitioners mad, absolutely stark raving bonkers. And then the murders start, and that’s not even the worst thing.

This flick is mostly what we would call psychological horror, with extreme body horror thrown in as well. It is, I am pretty sure, intended to make you feel queasy. Every time anyone (me) talks about a movie, of course you have to mention other movies in order to (lazily) give people reference points. I’ve seen a lot of reviews say “it’s like this movie, or reminiscent of that one”, but the one it reminded me the most of, despite having a completely different story, was the great film from ages ago called May, staring Angela Bettis, from way back in the early 2000s.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of May? Well, it’s not much of a reference point, then, is it? Let’s just say I always feel uneasy around any pair of scissors I ever see, thanks to that film.

dir: Ira Sachs

2023

I watched a profoundly stupid film a couple of nights ago (no, not this one here), and one of the many exceedingly stupid moments, doubled, involves multiple people receiving a bullet through a “vascular corridor” or passage, which looks like it’s a deathly wound, straight through the heart

It’s a location so carefully calibrated that if it’s done right, not one but two people get to survive being shot in the chest. A bullet, passing through your heart, that somehow doesn’t kill the person it’s happened to.

I thought of this when I was watching this film here Passages. In fact it’s the only positive thing that’s stayed with me from the entire experience of watching the other movie. To be fair, and I don’t want to be, to the other movie, that idea was ripped off from earlier movies, possibly even the Zhang Yimou flick Hero from over twenty years ago? Fuck!, which had someone ‘pretend’ to kill an opponent with a sword, but who perfectly places the sword stroke such that it looks like a fatal heart wound, but it’s only a scratch.

I’m belaboring the point, but this flick is called Passages, and those other flicks reference a way of giving people mortal wounds through their hearts, and yet the victims keep on living.

Maybe it won’t be a good life, but alive they remain, because of that mysterious vascular passage.

dir: Takashi Yamazaki

2023

And none too soon, finally, the sequel to Oppenheimer.

A joke already old and stale (in 2024), but I felt obligated to go with it anyway.

In a world where the contemporary American version of Godzilla is wary best buds with King Kong as they fight with all manner of giant monsters for the benefit, somehow, of humanity, the Japanese filmmakers, with their OG Godzilla, have chosen to go way back in time, back to the dark days just after the war.

Like they didn’t have enough to worry about…

See, this is a bit fascinating to me. For people who know a little bit about Japanese cinema, especially post-World War II, it’s interesting to see something set just after the war, because in Japan at that time, the Americans were in charge for a good long while. One of the prohibitions they had in place was that Japanese film studios couldn’t make any movies about the war or about just how horrible the reconstruction of the country was. They didn’t want to risk audiences getting riled up with propaganda pieces about how noble the Emperor was, how great his armies, and how unfair it was that the Americans annihilated so many of them.

So that’s one of the main reasons why almost every Japanese flick from the late 1940s – 1950s was generally a samurai era set period piece (chambera, I believe the genre was called).

And then there’s Godzilla from 1954, seventy goddamn years ago.

Everyone and his or her dog has an opinion on what Godzilla represents, but let’s just forestall any more bullshit theorising – obviously the Japanese mindset was horribly impacted by having two atom bombs dropped on two of their cities, killing hundreds of thousands, and then even more over time. Godzilla doesn’t exist, even as a fictional character, without American testing of nuclear bombs (in the original it was ‘hydrogen bombs’, just to please the censors).

Godzilla is the unforeseen legacy of the atomic age. But in this flick Godzilla is the personal nemesis of one guy who was too cowardly to fulfil his mission as a kamikaze pilot.