2024

dirs: Tricia Cooke & Ethan Coen

2024

I have to admit that I went into this flick a bit annoyed from the get go. The knowledge that Pedro Pascal was in the flick was definitely something that attracted me towards it. Seeing him killed within the first few minutes is… a guarantee that I’m going to be off-put or put off, take yer pick.

Classic bait and switch. Worst of all they seem to reference what was for me one of the most horrific onscreen character deaths in a tv show that I’ve ever seen, being the brutal death of Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones.

Too soon. You don’t get to joke about that, to me. Still hurts.

So. Chap nervously cradling briefcase is murdered, presumably the people who acquired the briefcase have alternative plans for it. Those plans involve transporting the briefcase, and a bag with Pedro’s head in it, to Tallahassee, Florida. Instead of doing so with a modicum of forethought or intelligence, the criminals somehow fuck it up.

Enter our two protagonists, onto the scene. Two friends. One is a confident and assertive lesbian called Jamie (Margaret Qualley) shown cheating on her cop partner as the flick begins. The other is a less assertive, more insecure lesbian called Marian (played by Australia’s Own Geraldine Viswanathan), who isn’t cheating on anybody anytime soon. She is more inhibited, which we know because she wears tight-laced blouses that seem to be strangling her throat.

For…reasons, they end up driving a rental car down to Tallahassee. The car happens to have the briefcase and the head loosely stored in the trunk.

So, is this a comic caper, a violent Tarantino-esque lolfest with pithy dialogue and a score of soon-to-be-classic lines? Or is it a serious crime drama about two completely different people realising how deeply incompatible they are, deciding after much travail to go their separate ways?

dir: Adam Wingard

2024

I thought it would be “funny” to review Godzilla Minus One, a ‘serious’ throwback take on the genre that reviewers treated like it was Important and Meaningful, and then Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, which no-one thought was important and meaningful, but does have no Japanese people in it and giant creatures fighting each other which totally don’t exist as a metaphor about scientific hubris or humanity’s place in the universe or anything, for that matter

I set myself these pointless little tasks because it amuses me, and it just makes my life harder for no good reason, but I stick to my pointless and arbitrary tasks, because someone has to…

So having watched the Toho - Japanese retro version, I am now set to review the ‘American’ version, which is from the Chinese film production company Legendary Films.

They could not be more different. I am sure such statements shock and confound the reader. This has far more scenes of giant creatures trashing and thrashing each other, killing probably hundreds of thousands of people, but that’s not a big deal anymore? In this world that they’ve put together, which initially mimicked the progression of the Japanese monster flicks by having Godzilla fight more and more monsters, instead has conjured a world where, yes, many of these so called Titans exist, but there’s also this supra-government entity called Monarch that tries to control or nudge the Titans depending on what they’re doing.

You might think their main task would be saving people’s lives but that wouldn’t look as interesting on the big screen, I guess.

And I didn’t really mind, to be honest. These Godzilla versus or Kong times etc flicks have zero regard for human life except for whoever the filmmakers put forward as the representatives of humanity, because tonnes of faceless people die, since the major punch ups always happen in populated areas, but it’s accepted as like the cost of doing business.

If all you want is to watch CGI Godzilla fight CGI King Kong, and then CGI other giant creatures, why would you care about the humans at all? Humans are like puny ants at the feet of these gods.

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…

dirs.: Colin & Cameron Cairnes

2024

This is a surprisingly accomplished film, especially for one made in Melbourne. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie made in Melbourne. Love and other Catastrophes? Chopper? The Book of Revelation?

Fortunately or not, none of ‘Melbourne’ or Naarm factors into the story because it’s set in America in the 1970s, and mostly all transpires in or around a tv studio where a “Tonight” type program is being filmed.

The lead in this is Jack, played by David Dastmalchian, who has often played weirdos or psychos or a combination of both, but here plays the charismatic host of a late night program that is suffering in the ratings and doesn’t look like it’s going to survive. Even if you haven’t watched a tonight show lately, or in the last ten years, or even longer, the format hasn’t changed. There’s a host, there’s a sidekick, there’s a band, and there’s a studio audience made up of clapping seals who applaud and laugh whenever a sign lights up telling them to laugh like the mindless automatons that they are.

There’s musical guests, there’s people with animals, there’s probably movie stars and comedians and, I dunno, local celebrities, and it all transpires under the studio’s bright lights and beige / burnt orange / brown set designs.

But since the ratings for his show, which used to threaten Jimmy Carson, but now are scraping the bottom of the barrel, are terrible, he’s desperate for something to change his loser narrative.

Hence, the occult. The show goes to extreme lengths to court controversy, and there’s nothing more controversial, for the time period, than bringing on a teenage girl who says she’s possessed by a devil.

Not The Devil, mind you, but some other low-ranking shmuck who can still do the scary voices and the rotating head thing.

The ethics of bringing out a clearly mentally ill teenager and putting her in front of a national audience, well, let’s remember the time period. Sexual harassment was mandatory, everyone was smoking, even babies in the womb, and no one ever drank water, only spirits, all of the time, apparently.