2023

dirs: Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams

2023

I love that the Adams family exists. I’m not talking about the other one, with two Ds in their name, those ones who are creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and ooky.

I mean the real life family of John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, who make movies together, on the virtual smell of a digital oily rag ie. with no money.

I don’t know how they fund their movies, I don’t know how they paid to rent a Model T Ford or to pay crew, extras etc in anything other than hugs and sandwiches. And I kinda wish someone would hand them a ridiculous budget so they could blow it all on trips to the Riviera and inflatable furniture (is that what rich people buy?)

But I can’t see that big budgets would compel them in inventive and creative ways to create the kinds of flicks they make. I saw and loved Hellbender from a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t get into this flick quite as much, it still has a similar anarchic energy of a movie that doesn’t follow a well-trodden path.

That being said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of probably the only Rob Zombie flick I’ve ever liked, being The Devil’s Rejects. That’s to my shame, not the Adams’.

Set during the Great Depression, Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) travel around with carnie folk and pretty much just murder people. Maggie I think does most of the murdering, Eve takes photos, and Seven looks away because he can’t stand the sight of blood, having seen way too much during the Great War to ever be a normal person again.

And that’s pretty much it. Visually the flick has a whole bunch of scenes of startling quality and composition, just because they’re so different from shots you see in any other flick, perhaps deliberately. Compared to their earlier flick this is much gorier, much more macabre. But there’s also a fairly menacing element to it, and I put it down to both the awkward phrasing of much of the dialogue, deliberately striving to make it sound like words that could have dropped from the mouths of John Steinbeck’s characters, and the almost otherworldly, almost Amish sensibility of working in such a wood paneled period setting.

dir: C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

2023

I was not sure what this flick was going to be like, or what it was about, knowing nothing about it. But now I’ve watched it, and presumably that means I know something about it and have a relevant, informed opinion.

Well. I’m not sure how much I have to say about a flick set contemporarily, shot in black and white, that’s really about matrilineal matriarchal monarchies. I mean, I guess they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still not a decent form of government.

I have to say “in general”, because I would be taking the piss if I implied that the point of the film is that we should all be living in matrilineal, matriarchal monarchies.

This film is just saying that, for these people, of the Iyi village, they need to keep being ruled by a matriarch, because of their connection to Mami Wata, who is a benevolent water spirit / deity who looks after them, thanks to their connection through their Intermediary.

Their Intermediary, sort of like a cross between a priestess and a conduit for Mami Wata’s will, is Mama Efe (Rita Edochie).

While the people believe in Mami Wata, and her earthly ambassador, they give of their bounty to her, out of respect, out of fear, to earn favour. Lots of reasons. And she in turn does…

She does stuff. She is regal, her belief is unwavering, and she does all the rituals they all love. She plays the hits, so to speak.

dir: Michael Mann

2023

Since I’ve gotten to watch and review all of the flicks that were nominated for stuff at the Academy Awards, and the awards themselves have been and gone, now I’m sort-of at the wrap up stage for last year, reviewing the flicks that weren’t nominated for squat, but you can just tell these flicks were sold to their stars by their agents as “you’ll definitely get nominated for this!”

Long way of saying “Oscarbait”. With Director Michael Mann, chronicler of hard men doing difficult stuff without changing their facial expressions. With Adam Driver, who maybe isn’t the biggest chameleon out there, but who definitely delivers intense performances when required.

And what’s it about? Ferrari. Not the car, but the man. Enzo Ferrari.

And what a man. Even wearing pants that he pulls up to his armpits, even in late middle-age, he radiates Italian cool. Sunglasses all the time, night or day, like he’s Marcello Mastroianni, only cooler. He has the poise, the confidence of a man who has faced death behind the wheel of a car going as fast as cars can go at that time, and won.

He’s so self-possessed it’s almost irritating, like, you almost want to do something shocking just to see if he’ll flinch.

After getting up from his lover’s bed, and eventually getting home, his angry wife (Penelope Cruz) fires a bullet from a gun at his head, near his head. He doesn’t flinch.

He’s just too fucking cool to flinch. That doesn’t mean he’s got everything under control, though.

Far from it. His company, the one that makes cars, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, presumably because he doesn’t really care so much about the manufacturing and selling of cars aspect of his business. He only cares about the racing part of his business.

There is a track record that his cars have, that he dreads having his competitors break. If they break it, and they do, well, he has to yell at one of his drivers to drive faster, and get the record back.

If the driver dies while trying to break the record again, well, Enzo is not going to cry any tears over him.

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.