2024

dir: Max Minghella

2024

When I randomly found out about a film I’d never heard of, that was made around the same time as The Substance, with similar themes and a body horror aesthetic, only starring Elisabeth Moss and released without much if any fanfare, I was surprised. Astounded, even.

I mean, she’s a pretty big star, maybe not in movies, but she’s been in pretty well known tv series, from Mad Men to Handmaid’s Tale to Shining Girls to some incomprehensible spy series on Amazon whose name escapes me. She’s a somebody, probably better known than Demi Moore was when their two rival films came out. So I was still a bit perplexed.

And then I watched the flick. Now I understand why it was buried.

It’s pretty shit.

That explains it.

Actor Max Minghella, somewhat known, and son of acclaimed director Anthony Minghella, didn’t inherit any of his father’s directorial abilities, because this flick is poorly directed, poorly constructed, poorly shot and put together and not well thought out. It’s a real shame.

Once I realised just how crappy this was going to be, I wondered if they were going to go the “so bad it’s secretly good / deliberately bad because we want it to be a camp classic!” route, but it’s not a camp anything. It’s just unironically bad – bad.

Films and tv series that focus on the insanity of businesses that profit from tormenting women based on their insecurities is a rich, fertile, endlessly renewable resource. We know this because films keep telling us how society only values women for their beauty and their youth, and once they lose those they’re less than worthless and they’re a burden on society. Instead of interrogating the underpinning misogyny inherent in the patriarchal systems that force these expectations upon women, most flicks are content to just go down the “ain’t they vain bitches?” path and blame them for what comes next, which is usually body horror stuff to emphasise the fear of the monstrous feminine.

The Substance was hardly a feminist masterpiece, but what it did do is use its strong visuals to tell a bonkers story not about how far someone will go to stay youthful, but more so how idiotic it would be to create a younger version of yourself through technology and then turn into a hideous mound monster that shoots milk everywhere.

Shell isn’t even as clever as that. The premise here is, an aging actress is bullied into starting a regimen / undergoes genetic manipulation, and for a minute it makes her look a bit younger, but then she starts mutating. Did you ever think there would be side effects to remaining forever young? That never occurred to nobody ever!

Moss plays an actress who’s not getting the roles anymore. She was on a series when she was younger, but now struggles to even get auditions.

It’s because she’s not in her thirties anymore, okay? And maybe she’s not as slender as her heyday on the show Hannah Has a Heart, but she’s still putting herself out there!

What is additionally funny, or at least funny to me, is Elisabeth Moss, multi-talented, multi-awarded actor is actually pregnant playing a role in a movie where agents, casting people, random people on the street are telling her she looks like shit, and she pretty much agrees with them in order to make it believable that she’d undergo this bizarre procedure.

(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.