2024

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

dir: William Eubanks

2024

They say we live in divisive times. That people can’t even agree on the basics anymore. The tiny surges in dopamine levels we’ve been trained to crave via the algorithms of social media apps and the online world means we fight with absolute strangers about the most miniscule of things, just to feel something.

I don’t know if that’s anymore true today that it has been in the past, but I feel almost certain about one thing, and one thing only: Land of Bad is a fucking terrible name for anything, let alone a movie. Flat out fucking terrible.

A movie, an honest to god movie. With people in it. Like, multiple Hemsworths (not Chris, but eh). And Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe. They’re in this movie, and whatever their contributions, with a title like that, how can they feel anything but shame, shame, shame?

Like, I can imagine how someone thought it up, maybe on drugs, not good ones:
“What’s another way of saying ‘You’re in for a World of Hurt’?
- How about, “Land of Bad?”
“Put down that crack pipe, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

Stop drilling, because you’ve struck oil. Paydirt. It almost doesn’t matter what you come up with next, what tedium you will put your audience through.

Starting from that absolute low point, the only direction is probably sideways.

The point of US military thrillers is mostly to reassure American audiences that their military is still the best in the world with all the best tech and weapons and that no-one else should even bother. In this age of drone strikes and satellites spying on people, the point is still, even with that technology, the US is the biggest and baddest, and everyone else sucks.

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?

dir: Doug Liman

2024

There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.

I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.

I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?

If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?

Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?

The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.

It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.