2024

dir: Alec Tibaldi

2024

So, quite often, because I’ve watched so many films, I often feel like I’ve watched a film before even when I’m seeing it for the first time.

That’s not the same as times when I’ve watched a film and forgotten it, only to watch it again down the track and realise “oh shit, I’ve already seen this.”

Such different circumstances. What I’m actually getting at is that so many screenwriters seem to be starting from exactly the same place.

In premise, and at least initially, this is pretty much the same set up as a Nicolas Cage film I watched a couple of weeks ago, called Arcadian. Except instead of a sweaty, concerned Nicolas Cage bringing up two boys after an apocalypse, we have a decidedly non-sweaty Ashley Judd bringing up two girls after an apocalypse.

Pretty much Ashley Judd is, therefore, playing Nicolas Cage.

In this version of that story, there are no monsters eating people with hyperactive hypermobile mouths, but there is a virus.

A virus, huh? Who could have thought of that?

In voiceover an aunty’s dulcet tones tells her charges of the world that existed before the virus, and of the idyllic place they now live at, one which protects and sustains them, far from the ruins of what looks like Seattle, in a forest.

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.

悪は存在しない
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2024

This film’s title is awfully similar to another film from a few years ago, being There is No Evil, by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, but they are making very different points.

The earlier film is about how terrible the theocratic regime in Iran is and has been for the last forty years, tormenting, executing and terrorising its own citizens for having the temerity to exist and breathe. This Japanese film makes the point that no evil exists, in the natural world. Until maybe it spontaneously pops into existence for brief moments in time.

Mohammad Rasoulof has now fled from Iran, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since, for his crime of accurately representing the barbarity of his home country’s ruling totalitarian regime, he has been convicted of crimes against the state. Ryusuke Hamaguchi probably isn’t facing any such punishment from the Japanese government, mostly because, for all their faults, they don’t execute or convict people for making movies, or for being artists, or for being women.

That being said, I can imagine that there might be a fair few people who would wish this director bodily harm over the way the film ends…

If you’re familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, or his celebrated 3 hour low-key epic Oscar winning flick Drive My Car, you know his films spool out at a leisurely rate. He is in no rush to do anything, ever. He’s happy to plonk a camera down in a spot and have it record acres and acres of footage of stuff happening or not happening, until the batteries run out. Perhaps like in the gargantuan films of Andrei Tarkovsky himself, Hamagushi uses the opening hour or so of a flick to weed out the impatient and the hyperactive from the audience.

Thankfully, this flick is only an hour and 40 or so minutes long, and it practically flies by. In comparison. Only in comparison.

The first ten minutes of this flick is footage of a camera being pulled slowly through a forest, as the camera records the overcast sky through the treetops. A lush orchestral piece plays as an accompaniment, but whatever warmth or comfort it might have provided, the music becomes strident, and almost threatening, before cutting off abruptly. The next twenty minutes or so is spent recording a man chopping wood and filling containers with spring water, chat with a guy about wild wasabi, and then rush to his young daughter when he realises he’s forgotten to pick her up from day care.

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2024

Well. That was… something.

I’m not entirely sure what. I feel like I’ve been tricked by a film again, but I can’t accuse it of a bait-and-switch, because the bait was “hot young tennis players in steamy love triangle”, which was never that appealing, and the “switch”, given the ending, is “absolutely nothing.”

My one point of interest in watching this is that Luca Guadagnino is making interesting films, sometimes with Tilda Swinton, sometimes, like this one, without. I think there’s an aspect of the film that REALLY interested or energised him greatly, which is the relationship between Patrick and Art (Josh O’Connor who is trying to be in everything currently, and Mike Faist), there’s an aspect that somewhat interests him, being the motivations and machinations of le femme athlétique Tashi (Zendaya).

And then there’s… I dunno, a lot of hollow nonsense to fill out the already lengthy running time. This is definitely one of those films that feels longer than what the clock tells you. Though having said that, I wasn’t really bored, but I wasn’t really enraptured either.

This flick tells a story about three people in a non-linear way, having something happen in the “present”, then thirteen years in the past, and then it jumps all over the place with the lynchpin being what’s happening at a low grade tournament in New Rochelle, New York, proudly sponsored by Phil’s Tyre Town. It will then jump randomly weeks before, hours before, days before, a decade again, and you think it’s building towards explanation or meaning, but you realise the revelations of the past don’t really amount to much.

I mean, there’s info we want to know, somewhat. Like, we might be curious as to how and why Tashi went from a world-class player to a coach living through her husband’s success, when she was so driven and fixated on success. We wonder why Patrick is pretty much homeless, despite that charming smile and those sticky-outy ears of his.