2024

(十一人の賊軍)

dir: Kazuya Shiraishi

2024

11 Rebels joins the illustrious ranks of Japanese period piece katana wielding action movies where a small number of wonderful people fight a much greater force and somehow come out on top but also all still mostly die by the end.

Why, yes, I am taking the piss, but am I exaggerating? Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is literally about seven guys who fight off 40 or so bandits, and win but mostly die. This flick set the template for so many action flicks for decades to come, not just in Japan, that we’re still suffering for it to this very day. Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, itself a loose remake of Kurosawa’s masterpiece, doubled the number of fighters but multiplied the enemy into the hundreds.

And of course I can’t not mention 47 Ronin, which literally has a bunch of ronin get revenge on a lord who dishonoured them, and once they’ve won their epic battle (after four hours of screen time), they all commit harakiri, which is just insane, the most insane thing that’s ever happened in the history of insane things happening. And Japanese people love that fucking story!

This flick has 11 people forced to fight against their will, or against being immediately executed, with the promise of maybe not being executed later if they survive, which they’re not meant to, and it’s all a lie because the sneaky piece of shit who’s really pulling all of the strings needs everyone to be dead anyway.

Everyone thinks they’re the main character in this flick. All of them with the exclusion of one character, being Mizoguchi (Sadao Abe) are profoundly wrong. The young lord who thinks he runs this province is wrong. The smug generals who lead two competing armies are wrong. The de facto and completely unwilling leader of the 11 rebels doesn’t want to be the main character at all, and he gets his wish. The samurai bullying the rebels into defending a key bridge and a key fortress thinks he’s the main character, because he’s a samurai, but guess what, he’s not right either.

They’re all wrong except for Mizoguchi. This is the era in Japanese history where samurai had to shave the middle bit of their heads, so many of the samurai look, to use the culturally sensitive term, fucking ridiculous. Mizoguchi definitely has that, as well as beady, froglike eyes, and is middle-aged, so he doesn’t lop off a single head or limb. But there is no doubt at all that everything that happens for the next two plus hours is because he wills it to happen.

dir: Pedro Almodóvar

2024

Who else was excited by the prospect of watching another film by Pedro Almodóvar, one of the world’s (not just Spain’s) great directors for the better part of the last 45 years? What about getting to watch his first film in English, with two greats in lead roles, being Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, at the peak of their powers? What about that it’s based on a novel by Sigrid Nunez?

Nothing? No-one? Huh.

I remember when this was playing the film festivals, there was this thing called “buzz” about the new film by Almodóvar. And then the flick was screened, and picked up for international distribution, got an award or two, and everyone was very polite about it. It’s like when you have a new article come out, or get something new published, and people are like “yes, that was a thing that happened.” It doesn’t mean it’s bad, or that people are embarrassed to be associated with you. It’s that it happened, they saw it / read it / endured it, it’s over, and now we can get on with our lives.

I don’t actually know why this didn’t connect with more people, unless it’s the issue of the subject matter, maybe in a religious context, but then Almodóvar’s films have never shied away from controversial topics like murder, sexual abuse and violence, intimate partner violence, child abuse, LGBTQI+ themes etc etc. Few (successful, Spanish) directors have opposed the Catholic Church, the religious establishment, the previous appeasers of fascism as much as Almodóvar.

I’m going to stop saying his name now. Maybe he’s not as popular as he was. I mean, I haven’t truly loved his films since maybe Volver all those years ago with Penelope Cruz in the lead role, but I’ve admired his subsequent films, and I admire this one.

I didn’t love it, it didn’t deeply resonate with me, I didn’t love the performances, but I enjoyed it as much as one can enjoy a film about one person who’s dying from cancer and wants to end things before it gets too much worse, and another person who wants to help their friend but can’t handle the idea of death at all.

It’s not a barrel of laughs, that’s for fucking sure, but neither is it a morose or depressing experience either. None of the harsh realities of what being in that state are depicted; it’s more about what a person thinks about, chooses to articulate, or how they make peace with their lives and the people they care about in the time they have left.

dir: Steven Soderbergh

2024

America’s most reliably competent director is back with another reliably competent movie / genre exercise. It’s too much of an experiment to just consider it as a straight haunted house / ghost story flick, but it’s one that aims to tell its story somewhat uniquely, rather than just deliver thrills and/or chills.

Soderbergh has long been his own cinematographer, under the fake name of Peter Andrews this time, which means he’s the one holding the camera during these long, choreographed takes. The slight difference here, is that the ‘camera’ is the ‘presence’ of the title, a presence that observes what’s happening (which is why we get to see it), but is also occasionally sensed by some of the characters.

Nothing indicates why the presence, or ghost, is where it is. It roams through the empty house and settles back into a closet, before doing it all again as a realtor shows a family through the house. The teenage girl of the family is the only one who feels that there’s something wrong, some ‘thing’ floating around observing her, being the camera/ghost. It’s weird.

It’s weird on a number of levels. It’s weird in the sense that she sense’s there’s a supernatural presence there. It’s weird because she’s directing her attention towards the camera, something that never happens in 99 per cent of movies, whereby the unspoken rule is “never look at the camera, and never make eye contact with Tom Cruise”. It’s weird on a third level because it’s almost (at least for me) like she’s detecting that we, as in the audience, are watching her. Like she knows we’re there, and she’s uncomfortable about it, which kinda makes me feel voyeuristic and uncomfortable about it, too.

dir: Titus Kaphar

2024

This is a tough watch. Families, huh?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do.

I’m not going to quote the rest of the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s eternally relevant, yeah, in terms of this being the verse.

I had lovely parents, don’t get me wrong. I was very lucky in that, or should I say I was clearly very entitled to be born to such wonderful people (I somehow earned that honour). And yet I can watch a film like this, about a monster parent trying to reconcile with their adult child, and feel utterly torn in twain.

Your sympathies may be pulled, must be, in the direction of Tarrell (the great André Holland), a man who works as an artist, painting big canvasses, trying to be a loving father to his young son Jermaine and supportive partner to his wife Aisha (Andra Day) who is an artist herself. His art conceals, but not for very long, a tension between a childhood he yearns for and the one he actually had. In the present, and in parallel to Tarrell’s struggles, we see a seemingly homeless guy do his strange homeless things before copping a severe beating. He hobbles to someone who might help him, who does, only until his wife finds out and starts yelling at the visitor as to where all her rings are at. Obviously bad blood there. Best not to ask.

The man is funnelled towards the basement of a hard man who imposes strictures upon this chap, which if they aren’t obeyed, will see him homeless again.

But this man, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), is transformed. He is clean for the first time in a long time, washed and shaven. As such it’s time for him to demand forgiveness from those he has wronged.