2025

(誤判)

dir: Donnie Yen

2025

Two of my favourite tv shows from the 1990s were Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The West Wing. The longstanding joke viewers of both shows used to bandy about was “one of these shows is a fantasy about a group of competent, funny people who fight evil on a regular basis and win, and the other show is Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

No one really thought The West Wing was an actually accurate representation of life in the Oval Office, especially now that the current occupant is a feces-flinging orangutan, and we finally realise that if the worst people in the world get together, with the worst of intentions, the worst people will vote for them, with hilarity ensuing for the rest of the world, democracy be damned.

But at least it adhered to some real world aesthetics and physics. This here film The Prosecutor is possibly one of the least believable legal dramas I’ve ever seen in my life, and I say that as someone who knows nothing about the law in Hong Kong and how it is practiced.

The funniest, absolute funniest part is that this is allegedly based on a true story.

Ponder if you will this set up. There is a policeman called Fok (Donnie Yen), and he and his fellow cops take down an entire gang in an abandoned, I dunno, factory or something. They take them all the way down, as in, the opening gun battle is spectacular and vicious, even resorting to first person perspective like it’s a shooter. However, even though the boss of the gang is arrested at the scene, and nearly killed a cop (who Fok saved at the last minute, resulting in him being in traction), he gets off because of top notch lawyering.

Fok becomes so despondent at this result that he quits the Hong Kong police force, goes to uni to study law, and then 8 years later becomes a junior prosecutor, because he’s certain he could do better.

dir: Russo Brothers

2025

90s nostalgia doesn’t really do much for me. This flick would seem like it’s aiming for 90s nostalgia, in the way that Stranger Things owes much of its existence and probable popularity to 80s nostalgia, and in both cases it just comes across as lazy consumerist grasping.

I guess I remember the 90s well enough to not need to revisit it through some distorted lens. Yes, I get the references, yes I remember a lot of the music and the films. No, I don’t much care for American advertising. And I still don’t think I’ve ever eaten a Twinkie, so I don’t care about them either.

I don’t think the book this was based on by Simon Stålenhag was centred around 90s nostalgia or any deep love of American consumerism. If anything, it’s main intention was to deliver gloomy, somewhat macabre graphics of an American world falling apart because of a slow-rolling apocalypse due to technology. Giant robots, gloomy landscapes, and a population absorbed into a virtual reality environment that leaves their bodies as husks strewn across a landscape traversed by a teenaged girl and a robot.

Humanity is in decline, a hive mind has emerged, and its intentions are less than benevolent. Drones from a war litter the dying landscape. It’s like The Road, but slightly more techie and with less cannibals.

The Russos take that premise and tries to deliver a Steven Spielberg film, without having the grace to craft anything interesting around that desire. They were somehow given the baffling amount of money of $320 million earth dollars to make content for their streamer of choice, being Netflix. All that money, all the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted, and this is what they made.

dir: Takeshi Kitano

2025

What in the absolute fuck was that?

Okay, okay, nothing justifies such harsh language. I had heard that legendary Japanese director and actor “Beat” Takeshi Kitano had made a new film, and that I could even watch it, if I wanted to, on one of the many streaming services I have access to, being the one that was excreted out by the metastasising, malevolent company owned by one of them there bug-eyed Silicon Valley salamanders…

It’s, I dunno, terrible maybe? Like, not even a half-arsed movie. It’s deliberately kind of a quarter-arsed movie, and I’m not even sure why. I mean, in between its short segments, there are on screen pseudo text messages that are meant to replicate the audiences’ possible mass confusion, with messages alternating between “Did they run out of money?” and “he’s a genius so I’ll trust him”.

You watch the first part, and you think “This is one kind of movie”. And that kind of movie is a low key yakuza flick where an older chap (Kitano) shuffles to a café, receives messages telling him where to go and who to kill, and then he does so. It’s perhaps implausible, but the whole point seems to be because he’s old, younger people ignore him, which literally helps him get away with murders.

dir: Tyler Spindel

2025

It could be seen as something of a strange coincidence that I watched two movies this week about women faking pregnancies. The other film, a Jordanian film called Inshallah A Boy, focusses on a woman who pretends she is pregnant (with a boy) in order to not lose everything after her husband dies. Its point is to emphasise and underline the inherent unfairness and chauvinism of Jordan’s legal system in terms of how it is structured against women, which is the very definition of misogynistic, patriarchal systems in action.

This movie, Kinda Pregnant? It’s purpose is just to remind Netflix audiences that Amy Schumer is still around, and that faking a pregnancy is just a bit of fun.

This seems like maybe an idea Schumer had long before she became a parent herself, that she’s pulled out of a bottom drawer, and handed to Adam Sandler’s nephew, no shit, and said “eh, we’ll just improvise a heap of stuff when the cameras start rolling.”

Why does her character pretend to be pregnant here… for shits and giggles, I guess.

Because she feels left out when her best friend Kate (Jillian Bell) tells her she’s pregnant? Because she sees how well pregnant women are treated on the train, and at Brooklyn cafes? Because she ‘accidentally’ befriends another pregnant woman, and her brother while wearing the fake baby bump, and she can’t afford to be caught out in the lie?

Those don’t seem like solid reasons, or even shaky reasons, but really, would we care if we were laughing at her antics and her comical stylings?

I don’t think, collectively, people would have judged the premise as harshly had they found the film funny enough. That it’s not as strong as Trainwreck, whose main character is an alcoholic and drug abusing fuck up, and is about as entertaining as I Feel Pretty, in which a brain injury leaves Schumer’s delusional character relating to the world the way she imagines a supermodel would, shows that in translating Schumer’s comedic sensibilities into romcom formats, the movies seem to overly rely on complicated conceits in order to give her something to do other than crack jokes. Another way of putting it is there is this strange weaponised self-deprecation aspect that requires the characters she plays to abase themselves horribly for our amusement before making us sympathise with their sometimes horrible actions.