fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson

2022

This was surprisingly good. I say “surprisingly”, because I expect every new version of a “classic” to be “shit”.

The original book is a dark classic, the Disney flick from the 40s is a classic. There have been so many other versions made as well, most terrible. Even Steven Spielberg made a version, and called it AI, which was one of the worst of the worst.

I haven’t seen it yet, but in the same year that this came out on Netflix, Disney made another version directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Tom fucking Hanks as Geppetto.

I have not found a good review of that flick, cannot bring myself to watch it. I am tired of Hanks as Everyone’s Dad, fucking sick of it. After enduring him in the Elvis biopic, I said “never again”. Is there no one else who can play old man roles in America anymore? How are Wilfred Brimley, or Charles Durning, or Ossie Davis? All dead you say…

This, thankfully, was put together by del Toro, and co-directed by someone who actually knows how to direct stop motion animated movies. del Toro is probably Mexico’s most famous director (outside of Mexico, I guess), who has been wowing and irritating international audiences for decades with his visionary works. I love him in theory, but am often frustrated with the final result of his “masterpieces”.

There is no issue here. He obviously loves the original story, and beautifully incorporated it into actual Italian history of the first half of the last century in a really unique and affecting way, without downplaying the fantastical and emotional elements that made the original story so captivating.

Where the original story is all about essentially a naughty pseudo-kid learning to obey his elders and such, through having adventures that are meant to teach cautionary messages to kids, this story is more about fathers and sons, and how they disappoint each other. Oh and the rise of fascism. But mostly about how fathers and sons may both say terrible things to each other, but they don’t really mean them, and if they just love each other, everything will mostly be okay until someone dies.

(An Cailín Ciúin)

dir: Colm Bairéad

2022

It’s a bit funny to me that this flick has been nominated for an award in the International Feature Film category in the upcoming Oscars: An Irish flick nominated for Best Foreign Film. As wonderful as the category is, as nice as it is for some of these films to get a bit more notice out in the world, it always begs the question: “foreign” to what?

Everything outside of America is foreign, but, let’s say a film was produced in the States or Canada, and it was in a First Nation’s language or set of languages, would it be considered a potential Best Foreign Film for a given year? Would a film from Mexico, despite being part of the continent of North America, be considered a foreign film?

Anyway, whatever, this noodling doesn’t change anything, really. This is a lovely film regardless of classification, whether it’s considered foreign or exotic or not.

For a very long time I could not really tell when this was set. I am reliably told by the internets that it is set in 1981, but really, it could have been set any time from the 1960s to the 1990s and it would hardly make a difference. The main point is that there is a young, fragile girl, yes, the girl of the title, and she is very quiet.

Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is fearful and evasive. She lives in a house with a lot of sisters. Mum’s pregnant again and expecting soon. Her Da is a bit of a prick. Actually, he’s a lot of a prick, and a drunken one at that. The house and kids are neglected, the farm is rundown, and Cáit always feels like she’s in the way.

So, yeah, this is very much an Irish movie about Irish people being Irish, but without all the clichés. This has none of the blarney of The Banshees of Inisherin.

dir: Oliver Hermanus

2022

Living, in case you ever needed to know, is actually a remake of an Akira Kurosawa flick called Ikiru, which at the time was translated as “To Live”. It was based on a Tolstoy novella called The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which is nothing like either of the films referred to.

And yet why did I refer to it? Because. I can be a pretentious fuck sometimes.

But none of that matters now. They brought on board that supreme cataloguer of British classism, emotional repression and regret, being Kazuo Ishiguro, to update the story from 1950s Japan to 1960s London. And instead of a dying Japanese bureaucrat realising how pointless his life has been, we have Bill Nighy playing a bureaucrat who lives to make sure nothing ever gets done or ever progresses, until he has very little life left.

I sound off and mansplain crap all the time, and think I know about a bunch of things. I know very little, I’ll grant you. There are so many things that I am so ignorant of.

But I can tell you one thing for free, one thing that is absolutely true, one thing that makes me very much appreciate both of these films keenly, in a way most people would barely ever approach.

I assure you, dear reader, I know plenty about bureaucracy.

The life of a bureaucrat, a cursed thing, to be sure, is only a stand in for these authors, screenwriters and filmmakers, for people who have squandered their lives. None of these people really know what it’s like to be a bureaucrat. They know what it’s like to be the victim of bureaucracies, but not the dark art of the other side of things.

To really grasp the supreme pointlessness of these people depicted, honestly, as good as these flicks are at showing the abject soullessness, the malicious pleasure derived from thwarting the hopes and dreams of others, well, they still barely scrape the surface to reveal the horrifying void beneath.

dir: Steven Spielberg

2022

It’s kinda funny that the most successful director of all time has been kvetching and nervy about making a film about his own life for over two decades.

Most directors might incorporate autobiographical elements into their screenplays, especially someone who’s made as many films as Spielberg, thus obviating the need to maybe have to do their own biopics, but, really, there probably isn’t anyone that should have to talk Senor Spielbergo out of anything.

Both Spielberg, and Spielbergo, his non-union Mexican equivalent, have done enough for both cinema in general and the film industry specifically. He should get the chance to shine whatever light he wants on his own origin story. It’s only fair.

It doesn’t necessarily make it that interesting for viewers. For all his achievements, his life story isn’t interesting, perhaps not as interesting as his achievements. It’s, like, the average stuff of life, told with Technicolor brightness and bland, shiny perfection.

But he’s a person, he grew up, he experienced stuff. He had parents. He has sisters. Things happened.

He, being Sammy (Gabriel LaBelle) in this version, became obsessed with cinema after watching a train crash when his parents took him to see The Greatest Show on Earth. As a nervous, fearful child, recording a toy train crashing over and over again allowed him to feel in control for the first time in his life.

How do I know this? Because Sammy’s mum Mitzi (Michelle Williams) specifically sets it out for us, telling her husband (Paul Dano) that it must be the case like the dime store psychologist that she is.

Sammy is off and away, obsessed with movies and movie-making now, to the detriment of any other human relationships around him, but other people aren’t as film obsessed. They’re more fixated on life and love and … that’s about it.

The dad is completely dismissive of his son’s hobby, as he calls it, and it becomes, at least for me, a hilarious illustration of certain parents and their expectations, and how they can never be satisfied.

In real life his dad was called Arnold, but in the flick he’s called Burt Fabelman. You can imagine in life that even later on once his son conquered the world of cinema, if he ever introduced himself to people, and they would ask if he was related to Steven Spielberg, and he replied in the affirmative, you can imagine people going berserk with praise.

And then you can imagine Burt / Arnold muttering, “yeah, but still he’s no doctor.”

dir: Charlotte Wells

2022

Aftersun is…

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s a flick about a father and a daughter going on a budget package holiday in Turkey. It looks like it’s cobbled together, in sections, from home movies and polaroid photo moments; moments frozen in time. We’re watching it now, obviously, as it’s “happening”, but I think you’re meant to be thinking of flicking through a photo album from a long while ago, and realising, from details you hadn’t picked up, or from someone or something just outside of the frame, that how you assumed things were way back then might have been completely different.

And then we realise that we’re watching the adult version of the daughter looking back on that holiday and remembering / imagining what was really going on.

As far as I know, the title refers to the kind of lotion you put on to sooth sunburn afterwards, after sun exposure, after it’s, you know, too late. Damage is done. It’s not a preventative, it’s some kind of consolation. It probably makes no difference, now.

Sophie (Frankie Corio) and Calum (Paul Mescal) get along well enough, but there’s some awkwardness there. It could be from the fact that Calum is quite young to be her dad, seeing as he’s 30 and she’s 11. It means he became her dad when he was 18 – 19.

He’s also no longer with her mum, for whatever reason they’ve separated, but they’re lucky to spend this week together before she goes back to her regular life.

They hang out, they swim, they chat a bit, there are some odd moments when they interact with others, or when Sophie tries to film her dad with his fancy new camera, but otherwise there’s no major friction between them.

As far as Sophie knows. What she didn’t see back then is what she can see reviewing the trip as an adult, that things were very different than how she thought they were.

dir: Joanna Hogg

2022

I’m assuming that this flick was filmed during the covid years, because, hey, what’s easier to do when there are restrictions than filming one person doing two roles? But I think, considering the director, and considering the greatness that is Tilda Swinton, if you put the question as to whether it was put together during the pandemic, the director might say “What pandemic?”

I’m pretty sure this is exactly what she wanted to make regardless. I can’t pretend that I know that much about this director, since this is the first of her flicks that I’ve seen. You might get a sense of her once you’ve watched this, though.

I say that like it’s a bad thing, but I guess it isn’t. This has the look and the feel of a ghost story, but it’s neither a thriller, a mystery, or a horror flick. Maybe, if I was forced to pigeonhole it at gunpoint, I’d say it was a psychological drama. The thing is, though, a person watching this cold would have no idea what is happening or why until the end, and then the impression you’re left with might be an unfavourable one. It could be the emotional equivalent of the shoulder shrug emoji.

I don’t know Joanna Hogg, so I don’t know if this sounds like an unfair statement about her: I feel like this film is her making a film about how she feels about her relationship with her mother, and that she needs Tilda Swinton to tell her story, because otherwise, who would?

So Tilda plays Julie, a director struggling with writer’s block and unable to come up with her next movie, and Rosalind, her mother. Julie has organised for them to stay at a hotel which, by no coincidence, was previously a house that Rosalind lived in when she was younger.

When I say ‘hotel’, it’s not like the modern version – if you’re old enough to know, the hotel itself doesn’t look that different from the set for Fawlty Towers. With less hijinks, racism or spousal abuse, unfortunately.

We don’t know why Julie only thinks that by hanging out with her mother that she’ll somehow come up with a screenplay, but that’s her plan. Nothing seems to go right, though. Everything is slightly off. They’re the only ones in the hotel, but they still get crap service. Two people work there, one the girl at reception (Carly-Sophia Davies), and a groundskeeper Willy type called Bill (Joseph Mydell). The receptionist glares at Julie, and always pushes back on anything Julie asks for, and she leaves at night (probably 5pm) by climbing into the same car playing earbleed doof doof house music always.

But the absence of people still means something or someone is keeping Julie awake at night. The generally creepy surrounds, the noises coming from upstairs, the poor quality of the hospitality on offer, the wifi being too slow.

dir: Sarah Polley

2022

This is a really powerful, confronting film that I deeply enjoyed watching.

It is also a complete cop out.

My frustration with the latter aspect I’m only going to explain later on, because I am far more positive about it rather than negative. And the negative for me comes from something outside of the flick.

It puts me in a similar position to which The Woman King put me in, where fact and fiction collide to the detriment of us all.

Women Talking is set in what is called a Mennonite Colony. They are not the Amish. They’re a different crowd of luddites and religious fanatics who eschew modern ways because they are of the Devil.

The main difference between these jerks and the Amish jerks is that Mennonite men don’t grow beards. They do use horses & buggies, they don’t use electricity in their homes and barns. And they happily oppress their women as best they can.

The film, this film, is about a terrible crime, a staggeringly horrible crime. I am referring to multiple violations as one crime, because of its enormity. I cannot even believe that this happened. But it did, in our reality. And not that long ago.

This film springs from the reality of what happened, but gives us a response that has nothing to do with reality, as in, nothing that happens in this movie necessarily happened in this Colony. It might have. We’ll never know. But, based on some reporting I read recently, it never actually happened.

I don’t mean the crime – I mean the women’s response to it.

Which is why the film opens with a title card that says something like “This is a work of feminine imagination.” This is what a woman wished had happened after a community of Mennonite women responded to that which is impossible to respond to.

As the film opens, a woman wakes up, covered in bruises and wonders what has happened. The women of this community: young, old, married, single, children; wake up with horrible headaches, and signs of having been raped.

dir: Darren Aronofsky

2022

The strangest thing, for me, about the prominence of this film, The Whale, is that despite the awards it’s been nominated for, and all the column inches burned up saying how wonderful it is that Brendan Fraser is ‘back’ after a long time in the wilderness, is that at least around the movie review websites I frequent, I can’t seem to find a single positive review.

And definitely not any glowing reviews. Despite the fact that Fraser himself and his co-star Hong Chau are nominated for Oscars in the upcoming popularity contest in March, almost every review I’ve read says that regardless of the wonderful performances, the film is an abomination and shouldn’t exist.

An academic writer and thinker I deeply admire and respect, whose books I’ve read and enjoyed, being Roxane Gay, pretty much saw the film as an abhorrent personal attack, which also made me dread watching it. No review I read encouraged me to watch the flick.

But watch it I did, all the same. Because… I guess I wanted to know myself.

As a fairly large person myself, yes, it does hurt to see overweight people depicted as monsters, less so in the image itself (from my perspective), and more in the horror and disgust of the people around them voicing their displeasure. Much has been said about how Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is deliberately shown gorging on food, with the accompanying carefully curated sound effects, in order to elicit pity or disgust from the audience.

And then there’s the grotesquerie of his actual appearance, which seems at least to me to be a combination of a fat suit and CGI / digital effects as well, which makes him look like an inflated 600-pound man for whom every breath is laborious and a miracle.

I don’t know what was in director Darren Aronofsky’s mind when he made this, but when I look at his body of work, in which even if there are themes carried through, every film is different, and while cruel things happen to his characters, I didn’t ever feel that he himself wanted to be cruel to them because he hated them and wanted us to detest them. Wow, that sounds weird, written down.

I honestly can’t accept, in my head, that he ‘hates’ Charlie, and wants us to be horrified by him.

Part of me, probably infected by some of Charlie’s surreal optimism in the face of all opposition, feels compelled to think that while he may want us to pity his state and his compulsion to hurt himself through his feeder addiction, he wants us to empathise with him more so.

dir: Baz Luhrmann

2022

I would say I’m in two minds about this flick, but that wouldn’t strictly be true. This is a Barry Luhrmann film after all.

His films, at their best, are hysterical, over-edited monstrosities where performances take a distant back seat to hyper-editing and high energy sequences that try to obscure the vast emptiness underneath. All the great costuming and set design, all the impassioned, arch performances are thrown into a blender and shattered into a perplexing array of disparate shards, and then poured out through a firehose onto an unsuspecting and unwilling audience.

That’s overstating things, surely. He has birthed one utter monstrosity into this world, being the film that summarised Australia called, um, Australia, which is so terrible that around its release it resulted in a massive shortage in negative adjective descriptors, because they were all used up in describing the sheer multitude of ways in which it achieved peak terribleness.

And I guess Romeo & Juliet and Moulin Rouge have their fans. Great Gatsby doesn’t have any fans and sleeps very much alone, but is almost worth it entirely for that great shot of DiCaprio raising that champagne glass to the peak crescendo moment scored with George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

It’s an insane, overdone, peak cheesy moment done to perfection. Luhrmann has always been better suited to film clips and laundry detergent commercials than he ever could be at long form movies.

What is a movie, anyway? Is it a collection of moments strung together thematically to both highlight individual moments but also deliver an overarching flow that’s meant to congeal in our brains as everything connects together, leaving us with some lasting impressions and feelings about people and places?

This Elvis film, for the most part, is incapable of doing that. It does not want to tell a coherent story about Elvis’s life or about what made Elvis a phenomenon. Only a fool watches a Luhrmann film wanting a coherent anything about anything.

There is a unifying, over-arching connector throughout all of this (it’s over two and a half hours long), but unfortunately that’s part of what makes it such a fucking disjointed slog to get through – the terrible narration of Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks, ugh), telling us Elvis’s story through the lens of when Colonel Parker started exploiting the poor boy in the 1950s, through to the poor boy’s death in the 70s at the age of 42.

dir: Jean-François Richet

2023

PLANE! It’s called PLANE. Not even “THE” Plane. Not even Airplane!

Just PLANE. I would love to know why. I mean, perhaps the motivation or the thinking behind it isn’t that complex. After all, there is definitely a plane in this movie. But someone must have thought “fuck it, we’ll just call it Plane” after arguing for weeks. But why name it after that one object?

There are also other objects, other machines in this movie. At one point a telephone, an old landline, plays a crucial role in the story. I notice they didn’t call the movie PHONE. They could have called it GUN, or Plane Crash. Something simple, something declamatory. I mean Titanic was about a boat called the SS Titanic which sank a while back. They could have called it Boat by that logic.

I mean, this plane has a name too. The Trailblazer 119. No, too complicated, from a marketing perspective, as a title. Too frontloaded. Requires too much thinking. People will wonder what happened to the other 118 Trailblazers before this one.

I mean, what even is a thing? A plane? Is it the object itself, or what it does, or what happens to it? Do we assume that this plane is itself the Platonic ideal of a plane, or the essence of planeness? Or is it a stand-in, a symbol, representing all planes, all possible planes? You know what you are getting when you call a movie Plane. There will be a plane. And you will look at it, and think “that’s a plane, all right. Looks pretty CGI and fake, but it’s definitely a plane.”

Or could they even had been more subversive and called it Generic Movie Title? Now for that I would pay even more good money to see. Snakes on a Plane had snakes on a plane, and classic short film Football in the Groin had a football in the groin, but Plane?

It’s set mainly on a train in Spain while it rains.

dir: Lila Neugebauer

2022

A movie about a depressed Afghan War veteran and a depressed mechanic being a little less depressed when they’re hanging out together? You’d be fighting other audience members to get into the cinema.

This flick could not be more low-key if it tried. It could not be more low-key if it drank a herbal tea with three Ambien while taking a bath. I don’t mean it’s sleepy, I mean just that this flick isn’t big on histrionics or people yelling stuff or changing their facial expressions much.

It’s appropriate to the story being told. It’s low-key, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stakes. I mean, there aren’t any, but it doesn’t feel aimless.

The curious reality about people who go to war, and get wounded, and come back “home” is that dying in war is seen as a mercy, and that surviving brings with it its own dangers. The terrible statistics about suicide amongst veterans at least to me indicate that surviving a war is only the first step in many, in terms of staying alive.

Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), at film’s beginning, is pretty wrecked after surviving an explosion. Even though outwardly she has healed, she suffered a traumatic brain injury which means she walks with difficulty, balance being the issue, but also has difficulty with her arms and hands, with all motor function skills. There’s pain, there’s confusion, there’s the shame of needing help, there’s also the loss of inhibition. When she first meets her patient, saintly carer / nurse (the great Jayne Houdyshell), and hears as to why she got into this line of work, she says to her without thinking “That sounds like a miserable life.”

She thinks, without questioning it, or thinking about the social niceties, that looking after people like her, wounded people like her, would be hell on earth.

It takes a few seconds after she says it, where she looks quietly stunned at what she’s just said, to realise that one shouldn’t tell their carers such things upon first meeting. You should wait a few days at least before you entirely devalue all their life choices.

dir: Ruben Ostlund

2022

I did not care for this film one bit. I’m all for films satirising how terrible wealthy people are, but this flick sets up the limpest of straw targets and then throws up all over them.

It’s also way too long. There is no earthly reason why this needed to be 2 and a half hours long.

Maybe if they’d cut down on the footage of people throwing up or pooping themselves, we could have saved some time.

When it happens, it doesn’t let up for about 15 minutes of CGI emissions, people rolling around on the floor, cameras shaking all over the place. It’s almost like the director wanted the audience to feel sick as well.

That isn’t the film’s biggest failing, for me. The film comes in three generous sections. The first introduces us to a very boring couple, being Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean). They could be the most boring couple ever depicted on a screen. They are both models, which doesn’t help, but they honestly don’t do a single interesting thing. Though they do argue about money. They argue long and hard about money. Carl especially resents that Yaya, which is a terrible name for a model, and a great name for a Greek grandmother, expects him to pay for everything even though she makes way more than he does.

And she is, after all, an influencer. He will take photos of her smiling at pasta, but they never eat pasta. I don’t even know why they go to fancy and pricey restaurants when they clearly eat nothing but steamed chicken breast and maybe a sprig of broccolini? How much would that set you back?

But argue they do, and it’s not an enjoyable or entertaining argument. It’s not that they’re airheads. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. They clearly are empty people trying to navigate a strange world, where their only currency is their looks and how many likes they get online.

But who cares. They end up on a luxury yacht full of ugly but very wealthy people. Instead of being the Rose and Jack of this ill-fated cruise, they’re just two more people that don’t belong in a wealthy paradise of older wealthy people telling service people what to do.

It’s meant to be satire, but it doesn’t really feel that satirical. There are moments of such thudding obviousness that it didn’t even register that these people are objects of satire. There’s an old couple whose fortune was made in hand grenades and land mines. There’s a mega-wealthy Russian oligarch who tells people he got rich selling shit. If that isn’t a dig at Jeffrey Bezos, I don’t know what is.

dir: Michael Morris

2022

This flick is a hard watch, and not only for those who struggle with the demon drink, or those who love or have to live with people struggling with the demon drink.

The Leslie of the title is a fuck up, an alcoholic fuck up, and that’s okay. Lots of us are fuck ups. Lots of us are alcoholics. Some of us are alcoholic fuck ups. Some of us are fuck ups independent of the fact that we’re alcoholics. There are many permutations out there. For every person you might know whose work environment and status protects them from the repercussions of their drinking, you probably know of many more people who lose jobs, families and housing over it. At some time.

And some of them came good, so to speak, cleaned up their act, gave it up completely and filled the hole in their hearts with something else, or someone else. And they did okay.

And others didn’t come good, got worse and either died or stayed worse on a plateau that never gets easier to watch.

It’s depressing to watch, and I imagine even more depressing to live through. The conceit of this flick is that Leslie may or may not have been a fuck up before, but one fateful day when she won a lottery and thought she was set for life, for her and her kid, she thought $190,000 would insulate her from the chaos of life.

Instead she spent it all on booze and drugs, and lost everything, including abandoning her kid.

When we meet Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in the present, she’s getting kicked out of a scuzzy skid row motel, trying to give the kinds of excuses you’re pretty sure she’s tried hundreds of times before.

A reoccurring image throughout the flick is of Leslie consulting this folded up, yellowed piece of paper, upon which she has bunches of phone numbers written down but also with lines drawn through most of them. It’s short hand for “Leslie has burned almost everyone she’s ever known, and there are barely any people left who will even take her call, let alone let her crash at their place.” There's precious few names left.

dir: Eric Appel

2022

Somedays I’ll take ‘reasonably fun’ over flat out hilarious. And this is fun and silly, and so it should be.

It purports to be a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic, but I’m pretty sure, other than the inclusion of a character called Al Yankovic and the inclusion of many of his songs, none of this really pretends to be about his actual life.

You can look at it two ways (at least, I mean, you’re free to look at it from thousands of perspectives if you choose); In wanting to parody the whole biopic format of famous musicians, they do a parody of a parody, closer to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story rather than Walk the Line, The Johnny Cash story, a film that had Reese Witherspoon playing June Carter Cash actually saying to people “You boys ain’t Walking the Line”.

Which one is the parody, I ask you. Anyway, the other way to look at it is that Al Yankovic the man is not really the kind of person whose life would make for interesting tabloid or trashy biopic fodder. Regardless or despite his success infecting our brains with his catchy parodies in the 80s and 90s, he never let that ruin him the way money and fame, or the pursuit of such, have ruined countless others. At the peak of his success he got married, he’s a Christian, he’s never been a drinker…so that’s about it.

For him and for the screenwriters here, it’s far more entertaining to create an alternative history version of both Earth history and the history of Yankovic’s life and untimely death (he’s still alive, I assure you), one which only occasionally connects with actual world history.

I say this knowing full well that the array of comedians, hacks and actors happy to have tiny cameos in the flick are probably happy to do so out of a) love of Al Yankovic or b) love of attaching themselves remora-like to anything that will see their mugs appear onscreen, but it’s great to see all these shmucks in one place, playing other shmucks of the 80s. There are some entirely surreal scenes where moderately famous stand-ups are playing moderately famous B and C listers of the past. If you know who they are and who’s they’re playing, it’s mildly amusing.

If you have no idea who they are, or who they’re playing (ie. by some unlikely sequence of events you are under 30 and you are somehow reading one of my reviews as well), it will mean nothing, and you’re probably only watching it because you love the Harry Potter books or movies so much you see Daniel Radcliffe in every single thing he’s in.

dir: George Johnstone

2023

What to say about another flick about a killer doll. Wait, are there others?

Well, I guess it’s not a massive genre or subgenre of horror. And it’s probably not really a horror flick, although a few horrible things happen.

It’s definitely sci-fi, because a new “thing” is created and, upon gaining sentience or something close to self-awareness, it almost immediately starts killing people. It’s like these people have never seen a movie before.

Or ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

I guess when it’s a thriller where a ‘something’ that’s meant to be inanimate gains some kind of ‘life’ and starts going after people, does it really make a difference whether the doll in question is possessed by an evil spirit, the soul of a serial killer or an AI?

Well, it does make a tiny bit of difference. Some people have long argued that the point of The Exorcist was that Regan, the poor child possessed by a demon, only becomes so because her mother, played by the great Ellen Burstyn, was a bad mother.

It’s a terrible, sexist, misogynist argument, but hey, after all, there are a lot of Catholics in that story, so what else would you expect?

No, what I’m getting at is that the fear they’re tapping into is not that dolls could come to life and kill us all, but that our own shittiness as parents harms kids and even harms experimental androids, turning them into kill crazy psychopaths.

(Ο Άνθρωπος του Θεού)

dir: Yelena Popovic

2021

It’s…strange. My path to tracking down and watching this flick is an odd one. A few weeks ago I watched a Greek film called Apples about a world where people get amnesia spontaneously but still have to get on with their lives, which wasn’t that world-shaking, but had a guy in the central role who was a bit interesting.

And then I saw that he had another film that came out in 2021, and thought that I would give that a go.

It’s actually (mostly, 99 per cent) in English, despite the setting and the nationality of most of the actors. It’s about a Greek Orthodox saint, which I can’t imagine a lot of people who don’t already speak Greek could possibly care about. And it’s set in the 1890s which, I dunno, is it a decade that has a lot of diehard fans? I mean, I know the kids of today are strangely and offputtingly fixated on the 1990s, which I find very disconcerting, especially because I was there, and remember what we did back then, but I struggle to imagine the audience that could exist for something about a religious weirdo from over a century ago.

So, well. Films don’t have to have built-in audiences for my purposes, because I’m not an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or in fact anyone with enough money to invest in icy poles. I care if I enjoy a film or not, and then I think about why afterwards.

There is something compelling about the character study provided here (rather than the biopic aspects). Arvis Servetalis, as Nectarios of Aegina, gives a very committed performance as the saint, played as a man who so completely believes what he preaches that the other members of the Greek Orthodox Church (literally referred to as the Patriarchy, I’m not making that up) fear and resent him. Because he’s not into his faith solely for the accumulation of wealth, and actually wants to help people, however high he rises, he inspires hatred in the other priests because they fear he’ll give the Church’s wealth away to those who really need it.

The film starts off in Alexandria, Egypt, with there being a guy, a priest, well, actually more like the equivalent of a bishop (a metropolite, as he is referred to in the movie), who is beloved by everyone who he comes into contact with, absolutely everyone except, you guessed it, the other priests and metropolites, especially. These men with flowing beards and awesome headgear sit around plotting against him. The main reason is that they fear that, because Nectarios is so awesome, and because so many people adore him, that he’d be a shoo-in to be the next Patriarch of Alexandria.

What is a Patriarch? He’s not just an old guy, or someone’s daddy, or a paid up member of a misogynistic system striving every day to make the world a worse place for girls and women everywhere. He’s like a pope to those who follow the Orthodox faith. The conniving priests dread the idea of Nectarios becoming Patriarch and potentially giving away all their wealth. All their clothing with gold thread in it, which surely was Jesus’s plan all along.

dir: Ryan Coogler

2022

I won’t say that it feels like a missed opportunity. I won’t say that I was bitterly disappointed.

But it definitely feels like something of a letdown.

There was always going to be another Black Panther film; that was a given when the first one made over a billion dollars. That it was such an inevitability even given the death of the wonderful guy who played the Black Panther, is kinda strange, to me.

And I say this as someone who’s read multiple runs of the Black Panther comic, those from the past like Jack Kirby up to Christopher Priest, Reggie Hudlin’s run, and more recently Ta-Nahesi Coates and John Ridley: I am more than comfortable with someone else, anyone else taking up the mantle. Shuri, his sister in the comics ultimately has to take his place, multiple times in different runs, and that’s fine.

It’s just that this very long film, over 2 hours and 40 minutes, isn’t really about the Black Panther or a Black Panther at all.

There are some good ideas buried under all this run time and terrible CGI. Wakanda is, after all, a fictional place. In the story, in the comics, the happenstance fact that a massive meteorite containing a precious metal found nowhere else allowed this one African country to never be conquered by any other nation or to be colonised by the European empires. Wakanda is the Unconquered Realm.

There are no unconquered realms in Africa. There are barely any countries there that don’t bear the scars of colonialism, of genocide, of resource theft, of slavery.

Which is one of the reasons why the idea, the myth, shall we say, of Wakanda is so powerful, so enticing.

And so, as another secret nation we find out about comes into the picture that was almost exterminated by the Spanish, this time, we are introduced to Talokan.

Not Atlantis. Talokan. Mayan people who started being oppressed and found some vibranium, and then disappeared under the waves to live in peace away from the colonisers of the world for about the next 500 years.

(Im Westen nichts Neues)

dir: Edward Berger

2022

It’s not hard to make movies about World War I. It’s hard to make heroic, triumphant movies about World War I. At least, I feel like creative people with brains and working hearts, with any grasp of history or decency shy away from it, based entirely on the films that I’ve seen based on that terrible, stupid war (all wars are terrible, obviously).

The book was written by someone who fought on the German side during the war, survived, and then wrote a book about how terrible fighting in the war was, how senseless, how easily and cheaply lives could end for no benefit or purpose, how much it was the opposite of the patriotic adventure the boys that went off to war thought it would be.

Maybe we can say with some assurance that the writer Erich Maria Remarque hoped his message of the pointlessness of war would prevent further wars in or by Germany. Of course it was one of the first books banned by the Nazis when they came to power.

And then World War II said to World War I: Hold my Oktoberfest stein of beer…

It’s not an uncommon kind of story, being that it doesn’t take much to convince us that War is Hell. But decades of American movies, from a nation that has a very different relationship to the outcomes of global conflicts, have been trying to convince us that War is Hell, But the US of A Still Kicks ASS!!! That kind of mentality, maybe mitigated a bit by war films that came out of the Viet Nam and Iraq Wars which at least have some ambiguity, still predominates and still works with audiences (as Exhibit A, I present to you the staggering success of Top Gun: Maverick).

But this is a German film. Germany still wrestles with its past, with what it did in the last century, as it should and always must in order to prevent what happened happening again. So if this film has a point, it’s that war has no point, and should be avoided at almost all costs.

Tell that to the Russian scum brutalising Ukraine, but I digress.

dir: Yeon Sang-ho

2023

I should lie and say this is the South Korean sequel to Pixar’s WALL-E, whereby a plucky robot tries to save humanity from itself by killing a bunch of robots, and maybe some people too, if it has to, but that’s not going to convince anyone of anything, and could get Disney’s lawyers involved.

Jung_E is a strange science fiction flick from South Korea, but it is interesting. Well, it was mostly interesting, and only to me. And probably to the people who made it.

Despite being sci fi, despite starting with lots of action, this is not an action flick. Sorry to disappoint. It starts with intense action, and then really doesn’t have further action until the last fifteen or so minutes of the flick. So don’t go in expecting action, is all I’m saying. This is not an action flick.

Truth be told I’m not sure what you would call it instead. Maybe a techno drama, maybe a daughter / mother guilt fest. Set some time in the future, the planet has become uninhabitable due to climate change, and these shelters have been constructed off world to house humanity’s survivors. A number of these shelters unite, break away, and declare war on the others, presumably to fight over the scant resources left or about which god is the real one or over wearing masks or something equally stupid. A really cool mercenary called Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) leads these forces against a bunch of robots, but seems to get shot just as she’s about to complete some important mission.

But she’s confused, because after she’s been shot, and she looks down at her fingers, there’s metal and wires where she was expecting blood and bone.

It turns out that this battle is a simulation, that she is a constructed, robotic being, and that she has been cursed to relive her final mission as some kind of South Korean hell-afterlife.

dir: Noah Baumbach

2022

I kinda hated this even more than I imagined I would?

I have generally been on board with Noah Baumbach’s bullshit since seeing his third flick decades ago, being The Squid and the Whale. The main reason is that reading “Great” American novels for much of my life means I’ve been programmed to enjoy stuff the vast majority of the world happily lives without. It means I can find amusement or entertainment in rarefied and wry tales of (white) privilege, excess and regret, and the struggles of middle class people wrestling with their own insignificance.

It’s how you are programmed to enjoy reading New Yorker articles or to find their single panel cartoons amusing without ever provoking something as vulgar as an actual laugh. It’s what makes you read Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Caddis, Updike, Franzen and, yes, DeLillo without ever questioning what you’re doing with your life.

It’s why you tell yourself you like Wes Anderson films or the twee aesthetics of Frankie magazine without ever questioning why.

I’ve only ever outright hated one Baumbach flick, and it was called Greenberg, and it starred Ben Stiller as the single most irritating fucker ever committed to screen (until Adam Sandler played Howie in Uncut Gems). By some strange coincidence Greta Gerwig was in that horrifying movie. I think it’s also a coincidence that she’s making babies with the director in between directing and starring in movies.

She’s here as well. Playing a middle-aged woman in the mid-1980s. With a massive perm. Another character calls it “important hair”. Very important.

Adam Driver also plays a middle-aged, paunchy college professor here, also in the mid-1980s. I’m not saying they shouldn’t play middle aged paunchy people, but c’mon, taking objectively beautiful people and making them look like the rest of us is just cruel.

To us, not them. They think it’s a guaranteed path to credibility and awards success.

dir: Todd Fields

2022

I can’t even with this film.

Atop almost every ‘best of’ list for last year from every critic and reviewer, it’s definitely a case for me of “these jerks are getting high on their own supply and I don’t get it”. This level of groupthink only comes around every other month or so.

There’s also an almost universal consensus that Blanchett will get another Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Lydia Tár, the main character, in case you didn’t know. I personally take it as a mortal insult, because, really, every award should be going to Michelle Yeoh for her heroic work as a depressed mum in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Were there any justice in this or any other universe, it would be so, but this is not a just universe, and never has been.

So, instead, the award will go to the person that does the most acting rather than the ‘best’.

I’m not trying to imply that this isn’t a well-crafted, carefully constructed movie about… whatever it’s about. It is meticulously crafted. It also has one of the most erudite and over-written scripts of anything I’ve heard in a long time. I don’t know if people in the symphonic world talk like this all the time (how exhausting that must be), but I am pretty sure that people wouldn’t be able to communicate like this constantly without wanting to shoot themselves and / or each other.

Exhausting is probably the descriptor that most often comes to mind to discuss how it felt for me to watch the whole film. It’s over 2 and a half hours long. And maybe there are times where the main character is doing something intriguing, but, honestly, she isn’t that interesting to me.

Lydia Tár is like the greatest conductor in human history. She has won every award imaginable, she’s at the top of her game and top of the ‘classical’ music world. She is the maestro in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She has a wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss) who is also first chair / violin at the orchestra, and they have a daughter together called Petra.

Tár has a personal assistant, (Noémie Merlant) Francesca, who does everything down to laundry and is pretty much treated like a trained dog. Sit, heel, good dog – without the ‘good dog’ part. Clearly, Francesca has certain expectations and a certain amount of resentment towards Tár, so they were obviously involved in some way. Yes, I mean sexually.

The entire conceit of the film is based on the fact that this acclaimed, world famous conductor might happen to be female, but she’s just as abusive and terrible as many men have been in the same or similar positions throughout the history of conducting, orchestras, or men. The vast difference here is that she will get a comeuppance, whereas none of the others ever, ever paid the price.

dir: Mariama Diallo

2022

Master is the kind of horror flick that’s not really a horror flick. It feels like someone had what they felt was a trenchant or powerful story to tell, and then someone with money / power said to them “what if you made it into a horror flick / maybe turn it into a trilogy?”

That’s not entirely fair. The horror is there in the story, because something horrible happens to someone, but if this was an episode of Scooby Doo, the captured and tied-up villain at the end, when their mask is pulled off, would be “white supremacy”.

And they would have gotten away with it… wait, they did get away with it, every time.

But there is no mask pulling off ceremony at the end. There’s just certain people realising there’s nothing they can do in the face of overwhelming, insurmountable evil.

The title comes from the fact that one of the main characters is appointed the “master” of a halls of residence at an old university called Ancaster. The university is as old as America, we are told, and everything implies that this place is built on the bones of slavery, despite being in a state that isn’t renowned for its racism, in some mythical place called New England. I was sure that it had to be somewhere like Pennsylvania, but other reviews refer to rural Massachusetts or even that it’s meant to be an equivalent to Yale in Connecticut, where the director herself studied.

Almost all of the faculty and the student body are white. Almost suspiciously, predominately white. So the “master” being appointed, being African-American (Regina Hall), is either ironic or part of the overall project of whitewashing / blackwashing(?) the university’s legacy and paying lip service to current notions of diversity and inclusiveness.

Jasmine (Zoe Renee), from her very first orientation day, is pretty much doomed. Within seconds of appearing on campus she’s pretty much told she’s staying in a cursed room and that she’s going to die because some witch was hung centuries ago and then the first African-American woman to go Ancaster hung herself in the 60s.

dir: Mimi Cave

2022

This film from last year called Fresh is not to be confused with the great film directed by Boaz Yakin in the 1990s called Fresh about a 12-year-old chess playing prodigy and drug dealer just trying to get by in the world.

No, this has less cross-cultural social commentary, and more of a contemporary “what’s up with dating in this app driven day and age, huh?” feel to it.

The first exact 33 minutes of this flick are one kind of film. It’s the purest form of rom com. A young woman called Noa, for some reason (Daisy Edgar-Jones), sickened by and disappointed as well by the men she meets through dating apps, has a chance encounter with a chap in the fresh food section of a supermarket. He’s a bit awkward and self-effacing, but kinda charming and doesn’t give off any creep vibes. She is taking a chance, she knows, but she finds it refreshing to connect with someone without the bullshit artificiality or outright lies of online dating.

She wants, like everyone wants, to skip that early part which goes on and on until the other person reveals themselves to be a complete jerk. Either show you’re a jerk upfront so she can bail, or be a decent person and maybe they can get to know each other?

Steve (Sebastian Stan) doesn’t trigger any red flags yet, but hey, that’s a red flag in and of itself, isn’t it? Doesn’t it just show that he’s crafted his game to the point where women don’t question his motives or wonder why he doesn’t seem to exist online? I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Maybe he just wants to opt out of the online madness / rat race that seems to depress so many people.

And he seems to be a handsome doctor you say? Reconstructive surgery you say?

Wow, and with that disarming smile and massive head of healthy hair?

No wonder Noa says “fuck it”, and decides to trust her gut, and go with what feels right.

dir: Nikyatu Jusu

2022

Nanny comes at a time where it seems to be “of the moment”, or to put it most horribly, it’s very zeitgeist-y. There have been a string of recent novels about immigrant women working as nannies or au pairs and wanting to murder their precious charges (most notably Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby), but this is the most recent I can think of that shoots for (eventually) straight horror, supernatural or otherwise.

It doesn’t really work, at all, but I still enjoyed watching it. Primarily, it’s a visually strong film, and it stars the luminous Anna Diop, who’s mostly worked in television and is best known, at least by me, for playing Starfire in the Titans series. She’s great, here and elsewhere, but…

I think this film knows what it’s trying to say – the immigrant experience, documented or otherwise, compels many women to leave their families or their kids behind, travel to other countries where they sometimes have to look after the kids of wealthy shitheads. This causes a certain amount of tension. You end up lavishing all the love and care that you have in you, onto someone else’s kid, in order to get the money to send back to the people looking after your kid.

But for some strange reason despite being wealthy these rich fuckers never pay on time. And they make insane demands all the time. And the husband tries to fuck you. And the drunken wife resents you because the kid likes you more, and they feel guilty because they’re away from home working or travelling…

This is rich ground psychologically to plant a lot of dramatic seeds from which could spring the stuff of social commentary and / or nightmares. The flick wants to have its cake and eat it too, and I don’t think it earns that paradox at all. At all. Especially because it goes down a certain track that seems unforgivable when the big “reveal” happens at the end.

Aisha (Anna Diop) is in the States in an undocumented manner, meaning that she can’t work officially, and needs to get by with cash in hand jobs. A (white) family with their one precious Rose (Rose Decker) have all sorts of expectations of Aisha. It’s almost like there’s the feeling of entitlement to her time and presence, because she should be so grateful.

There’s oh so many micro-aggressions, but that’s okay, that’s what we’d expect. All of the nannies seem to be from “other” backgrounds, and they are all at the mercy of employees who see them as the exploitable resource that they are.

Aisha sends money back to Senegal, where her son Lamine is. She facetimes him as often as she can, but that can only go so far. I can’t really see that she has any plan beyond earning as much as she can to send back to Senegal in order to allow for her friend to send her son to her in the States. I’m not sure why this is the plan, but this is the plan.

Her employers are as awful as you imagine they would be. The mum (Michelle Monaghan) of course is a nervy tyrant, who somehow appreciates what Aisha can bring to the table for her daughter (being bilingual, she can teach English and French to Rose), but simultaneously resent the fact that this woman gets to spend way more time with her daughter than she does.

And she’s a workaholic / alcoholic whose photojournalist husband (Morgan Spector) fucks everyone he comes into contact with, except presumably his wife. At least he pays Aisha on time, eh? As well as going in for a kiss when the opportunity presents itself.

Bleh. Boo. I boo what you're doing.

dir: Martin McDonagh

2022

That was all so very Irish.

There’s a bunch of people saying feck and fecking all the time. They all speak with the most Oirish of Oirish brogues. They all pronounce their names and each other’s such that you can hear the Irish Gaelic pronunciation. So it’s not “Patrick Sullivan”, it’s “Pádraic Súilleabháin”.

And it’s not “Colm”, it’s “Colm”. See the difference?

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrell) have been friends for decades. They live on a fictional island off the coast of the Irish mainland, in about 1923, as a civil war rages. There’s no fighting on the island, though, even as the sounds of gunfire and cannons echo across the water.

“Good luck to you” mumbles Padraic to them and himself as he walks down a path and sees flashes in the sky, “whatever it is you’re fighting about”.

One day, the first day that we get to know all these idiots, Colm decides unlike every other day of his life that he doesn’t want to go to the pub with Padraic at two o’clock. This immediately tilts the world out of kilter and portends dark doings ahead.

It’s not just Padraic that’s worried about the fate of the universe: the other village peasants wonder aloud as to what in God’s name is going on if Colm doesn’t want to have a pint with Padraic.

When Colm tells a disbelieving and profoundly confused Padraic that he doesn’t want to spend time with him anymore, Padraic is singularly unable to grasp this new reality, the new way of the world. He spends the rest of the movie doing absolutely everything he can think of in order to restore the world to its previous axis, and Colm stolidly tries to do everything he can, with increasing desperation, to ensure that it doesn’t.

Let’s face it, Padraic is something of a fucking idiot, and after spending two hours with him I can totally see why Colm prefers his own company or the company of others. But in a place as bleak as Inisherin, even Padraic can be given a run for his money in the idiocy stakes. He’s not even the village idiot. That honour is bestowed upon the local policeman’s son, being Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is constantly saying awkward or cringey things in a child like sing song voice, despite no longer being a child.

But it’s a testament to Padraic’s own stupidity that he turns to Dominic for advice on how to win back Colm. Padraic’s determination to either laugh it off or pretend like the break is only temporary pushes Colm to declare that if Padraic speaks to him again, he’ll cut off his own fingers.

It’s meant to be a “what the feck?” moment for those of us in the audience, too. One of the main reasons Colm has given for wanting space, for wanting peace and quiet, for wanting to not have to listen to Padraic’s inane prattle any more, is that he longs for time to himself in order to play music and, most importantly, to write music. He feels like his time on this earth is limited, and that the more of it he squanders with Padraic, the less likely he is to leave behind anything of meaning, beauty or as a legacy.

He plays the fiddle, that’s his instrument, and it’s one for which he needs his fingers and thumbs. But in order to compel Padraic to leave him be, he’s prepared to cut them off, thus rendering himself unable to do the thing he so desperately wants to do.

And still Padraic doesn’t get it. His need to make Colm like him again, his inability to move past it, means both men will pretty much doom each other, with so few alternatives.

dir: Mark Mylod

2022

The Menu…The fucking Menu.

It’s a glorious and delightful satire of something that can’t be satirised. You can’t satirise the world of high-end dining. It’s beyond satire, beyond parody. You satirise it only by replicating it.

Admittedly I have never been wealthy enough or entitled enough to “enjoy” the kinds of places where they have 14 course degustation dining or where they throw bits of food onto a table, say some poetry and then expect you to eat it without using your hands even, but I’ve read about it (with awe) and watched some of the shows even mentioned in this flick (like the Netflix series Chef’s Table). It is, to me, insane, the height of insanity.

I have only ever had the honour of eating stuff with foam particles or nitrogen cooled ice creams or desserts coated in gold leaf when it’s been work footing the bill for some obscene conference somewhere, so it’s mostly been against my will, but not at gunpoint.

To someone who grew up working class this kind of stuff seems insane, but I am also a man of a certain age. Once you get to a certain age, unless you’ve been involved in cooking for most of your adult life, your taste buds start to dwindle, you’ve drunk or eaten everything available to most people, so you start craving flavours or sensations of some elevated nature, something beyond what other mere mortals get to enjoy.

You want something more, so the prospect of paying hundreds of dollars per head doesn’t seem as alien, as wasteful anymore. But this is an escalating arms race. Restaurants are no longer restaurants – they are test kitchens or food laboratories. Early in this film the head chef bellows at the patrons “Don’t eat”. They are not meant to be eating – they are meant to be savouring, ululating, trembling with ecstasy, but at no stage are they meant to be just eating. Eating is animalistic, crude, disgusting.

What the highest of high end restaurants like Hawthorn are trying to achieve, is something beyond our worthless flesh.

Chef here is played by Ralph Fiennes, played pretty much exactly as you would expect him to play such a role: a mixture of concentration camp Commandant Amon Göth from Schindler’s List, the subtlety and playfulness of Voldemort from the Harry Potter flicks and the gentleness and curiousity of serial killer Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon.

There’s a bit of rueful sadness as well, maybe. After all, this is the most acclaimed chef in the world.

dir: Colin Trevorrow

2022

Wow, okay, so some movies have a million things in them and still feel kinda empty.

The first film in this stupid new trilogy had only one good moment in it, which was a strange half second or so where a resort under attack by flying dinosaurs has one guy slowly trying to get away from the monsters even though he’s trying not to spill two very large margaritas that he’s carrying.

That was it. A second or two at most that made me laugh, or possibly chortle, in a film that was probably 13 hours long. The second flick Fallen Kingdom I don’t really remember despite having seen it, but I will guess that about the only good moment was a ruthless capitalist auctioning off dinosaurs getting eaten by said dinosaurs towards the end of the film.

It's that classic moment of “Why, I never thought that I, the smarmy vicious chap releasing face eating monsters into the world would ever ironically get MY face eaten off!!”

This latest flick Dominion doesn’t have a lot going for it despite having 400 main characters and a constant hail of call backs to the earlier films, especially the 1st one. It also brings back Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, again for very little good reason.

But the main chumps of the new trilogy were meant to be Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and either some clone girl or a velociraptor called Blue (Tilda Swinton, probably). They’re here too, but you are asking yourself why these people are here, why any of them are here.

Dinosaurs, now, by the time of this flick, are all over the world, even the cold places. They are not confined to an island paradise or some rich jerk’s palatial estate: They’re everywhere!

But they’re not even the big deal here. The big deal, or the world ending threat is that a very rich fuckhead (Campbell Scott) has genetically engineered monstrous locusts that eat every crop in the world except for the ones engineered by his company Biosyn. His plan is…

What is his plan again? If everyone starves to death then their ghosts will come to his company to buy his grain? Ghost cap in ghost hand? How was that plan going to play out?

Stupid decisions made by billionaires are the bread and butter not only of this entire series of dinosaur films but also of most of the science fiction that comes out these days. The thing is, they’ve completely gone beyond the idea of Olympian arrogance or hubris by the massively wealthy being the cause of their own downfall, to “well, that last billionaire was not rich or smart enough, but I’m sure I’m smart and rich enough to make it work”.

(Μήλα)

dir: Christos Nikou

2021

This. Is a Greek film. About a guy. And he really likes apples.

That’s about it. There’s not a lot of subtext going on. Just really likes apples.

Doesn’t, like, love them to the exclusion of everything else. But he does seem to enjoy eating them more than he seems to enjoy eating anything else.

He doesn’t spend the entire film eating apples. That would be absurd, even for an odd Greek film.

But the film is called Apples. So you could be forgiven for thinking the apples are somehow important.

There is a guy here (Aris Servetalis), but I don’t think we find out his name? I don’t think he knows his name, or at least that’s what he tells the people that find him on the bus.

There appears to be, for a film made during the goddamn pandemic, or just before the pandemic, an epidemic, not of people coughing themselves to death with the spicy cough, but an epidemic of sudden onset amnesia. One moment people know who they are and where, and the next they seem to have forgotten everything from before a specific moment in time.

Our sullen guy here is taken to a hospital, and tested and looked after for a while, but there’s no treatment and no cure. People are basically warehoused at the hospital until someone comes to claim them, like they’re lost property. If no one comes, well, they have a program for that.

Our sullen bearded guy is set up in a modest apartment, has some clothes given to him, and a polaroid camera, and money occasionally and physical cassette tapes regularly are delivered to him for his listening pleasure. Of the few things he has, he also has a tape player. How delightfully retro!

He has to listen to the tapes, go out into the world and do what the tapes said to do, and take a polaroid as proof. That polaroid is put into a photo album, and perused by the doctors who seem to break into the apartment whenever they feel like it, admiring their handiwork.

The first task involves going out and asking to borrow someone’s bike, pop a wheelie or two, and then have a photo taken of you on the bike. The guy asks a teenager for his bike, and of course the jerk says no. So he asks an even younger kid, so that he can ride around on an absurdly little bike like he’s Krusty the Clown.

But he gets the photo. The taskings from the cassettes get more complicated, more involved, and start to include other people more. Go to a fancy dress party they said. Go to a strip club, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

dir: Rian Johnson

2022

Anyone who’s followed Rian Johnson’s career knows what a smartarse he is, and now, with so much Netflix money, and nothing to stop him, he is in absolute smartarse mode, plus with a budget that can afford the rights to Beatles songs.

A dangerous combination. I liked Knives Out just fine, no complaints there, but I never really thought I needed a franchise to arise from it, nor did I think necessarily that the Benoit Blanc character played with deep fried Southern accented charm by Daniel Craig needed to come back either. But he’s back, and now he’s kind of the main character rather than being a detective that swoops in and solves a crime at the end to the benefit of the person we think is innocent, and the detriment of the other shitheads.

This is, as well, a flick made during the pandemic which means delightfully setting it on an isolated Greek resort island was probably more of a necessity rather than a need for an exotic locale to tell this pointless story.

As Benoit Blanc helpfully explains to us, at least twice, a glass onion is a metaphor, unlike the actual Glass Onion structure on the island, for something that looks incredibly intricate and complex at first, that ultimately is revealed to be dumb and straightforward. For a murder mystery within another murder mystery, there isn’t much about the actual murders that are a mystery. There’s a murder, and then another murder, and then we find out there was an earlier murder, but there isn’t much of a mystery as to who did what.

The bigger mystery is how Benoit Blanc, world’s greatest Foghorn Leghorn impersonator, got on the island, and why the murderer or murderers allowed it to happen, and went along with it.

The first part is explained, eventually. We see Benoit in a bath lamenting the lockdowns and lamenting not being able to get out there and solve mysteries in person, failing as he is at all these detective games like Among Us or online Zoom Cluedo (with Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury cameoing just prior to their deaths, no less), as his husband (Hugh Grant) informs him that he has a delivery.

A bunch of “winners” in their respective fields have these puzzle boxes delivered to them. Some of them solve the puzzles. Others take a hammer to the box, or have someone else solve it for them.

One is a men’s rights activist online (Dave Bautista) whining about how estrogen has breastified the world, just before his mum whacks him in the head and tells him not to talk back to her. He has a blonde girlfriend who calls herself Whisky whose only objective is to be blonde and influential online.

Another is a scientist (Leslie Odom Jnr), another is a governor (Kathryn Hahn), and there’s one with a clothing line who’s big on Insta (Kate Hudson). And there’s Andi who everyone hates or fears (Janelle Monae). All of these people know each other, and know the person who invited them, being a tech billionaire who owns the island (Ed Norton).

dir: Anna Foerster

2022

Lou is the kind of ovaries-to-the-wall action flick starring an older American tv / film movie icon (at least to me) that you rarely if ever get to see these days.

Many action flicks come out every year. They’re perfect for people who hate too much dialogue or speaking or people reaching out to each other across the emotional divide that seems infinite until it isn’t. Lou is tough and uncompromising, and almost dares you not to like it.

Lou (the great Allison Janney) is a no bullshit, no sentiment woman living on an island in the Pacific North West. She has a dog and doesn’t even really seem to like the dog that much, but she does feed him, usually fresh deer that she kills herself.

With her BARE HANDS. Joking. She shoots them THEN finishes them off.

There is a storm coming to the island (of course). On the news that she spies in a local store, or it might have been the bank, Ronald Reagan is denying that any of the Iran / Contra stuff ever happened, or having any involvement in any of it, which was of course a lie. Lou is looking at the screen like maybe she can melt Reagan with her rage alone. It’s funny, because you get the impression that, for whatever reason, Lou personally knows how much what Reagan is saying is pure bullshit.

It’s also telling us when this is all happening. It’s the 80s. There aren’t a lot of Kate Bush needle drops or Madonna hairstyles or fingerless gloves, or kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a just a time and place with no mobiles, and few ways to get around on an island without a vehicle.

We watch, as the film begins, an entire sequence where Lou, for reasons of her own, digs up something on her property, burns some stuff, writes a letter to someone, then puts the barrel of a rifle under her chin and prepares to pull the trigger. The story then winds back the day leading up to this moment, and shows it to us again in more detail before it progresses any further.