fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

File this under “unwelcome things from the past that resurface and aren’t as shit as one would think.” Sorta like endless covid variants, herpes, or the ex you still owe money to.

I mean, Top Gun is a terrible movie, but it still captured the imaginations and ears of way too many people. Everyone my age or slightly younger still knows a bunch of songs from that fucking movie, even if we never watched it voluntarily, and still knows half of the catchphrases.

This new flick MAVERICK (I feel like it should be in all caps, all of the time) should not exist. The idea that the same guy who did what he did 36 years ago is still at it, at the age of 60, is absurd. The elitist of the elite navy fighter pilots is still the absolute bestest pilot in all of the Americas after 36 goddamn years? I don’t even believe he could read an email whose font size has been changed to 26 point without glasses, and we’re meant to believe this Peter “Maverick” Mitchell still flies better than the rest? His call sign should be changed to Peter “Pan” Mitchell, because this fucker will never grow up.

Not only is he still the greatest, he is still doing that shit eating grin from 36 years ago, and riding motorbikes without a helmet, and generally doing whatever the fuck he wants, despite the fact that the navy hierarchy all loathe him with a passion. The “real” servicemen and women know that he’s the best.

Reviews will tell you that this flick doesn’t have as much of the testosterone-inflected, homoerotic undertones of the earlier instalment. Don’t believe them. This flick still, even with more women in the mix, is still ultimately about the love between men who serve that allegedly great nation. It can’t be sublimated entirely, it can’t be satisfied openly, so instead these preening jocks of all ages rub their metaphorical dicks against each other until there’s some kind of emotional hugging catharsis at the end.

The film goes out of its way to address the manner in which Maverick and Iceman (Val Kilmer), bitter rivals for most of the first film, have been lifelong friends since they swore to be each other’s wingman way back in the day. Iceman, who rose through the ranks and became the commander of the navy in the Pacific, is the only reason the other bitter, older men in the Navy haven’t booted Maverick out.

How did they come to love and respect each other so much? Who knows? They just tell us it’s the case, and we accept it, as the fucking chumps that we are.

And goddamn it if I didn’t tear up at the scene anyway.

dir: David Leitch

2022

It’s coming to that time of year where I try to catch up on some of the more mainstream and mindless crap that’s out there, just so I can pretend I’m an egalitarian man of the people and not the snooty aesthete and shameless snob that I actually am.

In that spirit I decided to watch a flick that sounds made up, as in, a fictional movie within some other movie, but it turns out it’s actually real, with actual actors and all.

Bullet Train is mostly set on a Japanese train, but there are like 3 Japanese people in the movie. Everyone else is from elsewhere. They’re not even ex-pats or people who live and work in Japan for whatever reason: they’ve all been hired / tricked / manipulated into being on the train for whatever reasons.

They are all, mostly, assassins or the kinds of people who hire assassins and ne’er-do-wells to do their rich people’s dirty work for them. There are way too many people in the movie, but most of them die pretty quickly, so you don’t really have to get to know their motivations or their hopes and dreams, or even their names.

There’s Ladybug (Brad Pitt), a reluctant assassin who doesn’t want to kill anymore, there’s Lemon and Tangerine (Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson) who do want to kill people, there’s the Prince (Joey King) who wants to kill everyone, there’s some kidnapped guy’s son (Logan Lerman) who has face tattoos so you know he’s going to die immediately, there’s a guy whose son was flung off a building (Andrew Koji), and his dad The Elder (the great Hiroyuki Sanada, an Actual Japanese Person). And then there’s the head of the yakuza, being, of course, The White Death (Michael Shannon).

Did I forget anyone? Oh, yeah, Bad Bunny turns up as a guy called The Wolf who is so dumb he ends up killing himself, and some lady who poisons people (Zazie Beetz) who, get this, poisons herself.

There are probably more people I’ve forgotten. It’s not a memorable film. It’s the kind of film so convoluted and so pointlessly drawn out that you forget who is who and why they’re trying to kill each other within seconds of a scene changing.

It’s been likened to Guy Ritchie’s stuff post-Lock, Stock, and that’s a pretty damning indictment. I loathe when any director overuses the “well, twelve minutes ago…” flashback to explain stuff happening in real time, only to do it again every fifteen minutes or so. It’s lazy bullshit.

dir: Olivia Wilde

2022

Like being told to “relax”, like being told “trust me”, it never works to have dinguses tell you to feel the opposite of what you’re actually feeling.

So, Darling, definitely be Worried.

This modern retread of something we’ve seen a few times already is given a slightly more current update. It is impossible to talk about this movie without spoiling it, or, let me put it a different way – this film is not unique or complex enough to justify tip-toing around its “big” reveals. So think of this as a review of a lesser movie by M. Night Shyamalan (which means “any movie he’s made since Sixth Sense, which means it has a massive upswelling of twists in order to justify its existence., but the twists themselves aren’t that interesting.

Of course the most interesting and enjoyable part of any film Florence Pugh is in will always be the fact that Florence Pugh is in it. And Florence Pugh is in 90 per cent of the scenes in this movie. It’s her movie. Whatever is happening to her, if we care, is happening to us too.

On that score I cannot discount the flick, because she’s great in everything.

If there’s a problem, it’s that no-one else around her is as convincing, and also this complex, grinding 1950s conformity, wishfulfilling fantasy constructed around her is never really believable. You never feel that anyone could believe it, least of all a smart cookie like Alice (Pugh).

Perfect lawns, perfect modernist houses, perfect sleek and shiny cars, perfect cocktails and perfect sex with their husbands. Perfect heteronormativity as far as the eye can see, but, not perfect uniformity of ethnic or racial non-diversity. We are sold on the image of the post-WWII boom, but there are too many signifiers, too much obviousness that this is not the 1950s.

And if it’s not the 1950s, it must be something pretty bad, mustn’t it?

I was hoping for aliens, but…

Alice has a husband called Jack, played by Harry Styles. In case you don’t know who Harry Styles is, well, I envy you. He’s not a very good actor, or even an okay one, but that is fine here.

It’s especially fine because, when he’s not looking great in a suit and tie, or giving his wife head, and when he’s shown for what he really is, it all makes perfect sense.

His character, with his sometimes British accent, and sometimes terribly unbelievable American accent, is a piece of shit who has trapped a woman who’s way better than him in a horrible and elaborate prison, so he can control her. When she’s out working 30-hour shifts as a surgeon, he’s at home getting radicalised online by men’s rights activist videos and podcasts, wondering why no-one takes him seriously.

So he thought he found the perfect solution. A place, a lifestyle forced at gunpoint upon Alice that she would somehow eventually accept through mindless repetition of catchphrases and a lowering of expectations / consumerist overload.

Sounds like…the old idea of marriage, doesn’t it?

dir: David Cronenberg

2022

Who feels like an ungrateful piece of shit? I feel like an ungrateful piece of shit!

What kind of churl doesn’t appreciate a new film coming out from Canadian grandmaster director David Cronenberg? He’s been making great, GREAT films for like nearly 50 years!

I’m not even going to list them. Don’t even look them up. If you know, you know.

Anyway, just to short circuit a preamble that could run for pages, I did not like this fucking film. At all.

And I don’t feel great about it. I am sure the problem is me, and not any part of the film. I don’t like seeing scenes of surgery in this, the real current world that we live in, which only seems fictional some of the time.

In fact, I loathe seeing scenes of surgery. A lot of this film is surgery as performance art, as seduction, as something to do when you’re bored or curious, so even though there aren’t “real” scenes of surgery, and I realise it’s all latex and practical effects and such, fuck that, and ewww.

I mean, after all, what did I expect? This is Cronenberg. He didn’t invent “body horror”, but he perfected its cinematic realisation. This is his fucking bread and butter. To have wanted or expected anything else is a form of unproductive madness.

I don’t know why this seems like it was definitely shot in Greece, definitely during one of the pandemic lockdowns, but it was. Neither Greece nor the pandemic play any part in the story, seeing as it’s set in the future, but it’s hard not to laugh at some of the stuff that happens and wonder if it’s a stylistic choice or a covid protocol.

Viggo Mortensen, whatever my complaints with the flick, does not put in a bad performance. He’s not capable of it. I can’t remember the last time I saw him be less than great in anything he was in, and it’s not about to goddamn happen now, not even in a shitty, ill-considered film overflowing with sci-fi bollocks.

Viggo (yes, we are on a first name basis, thanks for asking) plays a chap called Saul Tenser. Saul, like many people in this future hellscape, is afflicted with a body that spontaneously creates new organs. It is a painful process, but, after all, artists are said to have to suffer for their art.

In this cowardly, old future world, humans have changed. Not because of genetic engineering or choice, or anything. But possibly because of what they’ve done to the environment. People don’t feel pain anymore, in the sense that they don’t feel pain in their skin or limbs (I guess? I never really completely understood this aspect), and they have new organs popping up. Saul and his fellow performer Caprice (Lea Seydoux) perform surgeries (on him) for audiences where these new organs are extracted and displayed for all to see.

dir: Dr George Miller

2022

It’s a real one.

It’s an unusual film, that’s for sure. Dr Miller has never been a director that’s just made one kind of film countless times.

The same chap who created Mad Max and directed its many sequels, who made family drama Lorenzo’s Oil, The Witches of Eastwick, the two Babe movies and animated monstrosity Happy Feet is also the chap who’s adapted an A.S. Byatt short story into whatever this strange, lush, romantic film is.

It is beautiful, that was the first word that came to mind as I was watching it. It’s visually lush, even if it’s mostly a film about two people sitting around a hotel room, telling stories.

Although, that’s not entirely true: they’re not both people, and more of the film focusses on depicting the stories being told themselves rather than the two beings in the Istanbul hotel room.

One of those beings, played by the supernaturally talented Tilda Swinton, is meant to be a human woman. And a British academic at that. She is a Professor of Narratology, which is a subject I guess exists in the real world but seems like it should only exist in fiction. Similar to Professors of Symbology, or studiers of HotGirlSummer-itis.

She studies stories, and knows all the stories. And she seems to see beings, creatures, people who aren’t really there, but who really seem to be there. We see them too.

Of all the people in Istanbul to stumble upon a bottle that contains a djinn, she is the one it happens to. And once she unleashes the supernaturally attractive and talented creature known as Idris Elba, he begins telling her the kinds of stories she’s been studying from many cultures for many years, in order to convince her to make her three wishes and release him from his millennia of captivity.

It wouldn’t sound like it would be a hard sell, but Alithea is not one for making decisions, or choices.

dir: Sebastián Lelio

2022

Sometimes, either through listening to a news story, or watching a movie, all you can bring yourself to do is shake your head and go “that fucking country…”

Sometimes you say it about your own country, usually people outside of America just say it about America after another mass shooting, and sometimes you say it about a country you otherwise love but can’t believe how dumb they used to be because of religion.

Ireland. 1860s. Just after the Potato Famine. Grim times.

Grim times compounded by the abject stupidity of a populace in thrall to the Catholic Church.

An English nurse (Florence Pugh) is hired to watch a girl in alternating 8 hour shifts with a nun. She’s not meant to help the girl, or heal her. Just watch her.

The girl they say has not eaten human food in months, and is being kept alive through the grace of God, or Jesus, or magic. One doctor (Toby Jones) even wonders if the girl is drawing sustenance from sunlight, like a houseplant. If the doctors of this village are this fucking dumb…

No nonsense nursey Lib huffs and puffs around the village getting progressively more frustrated with these hicks and their hickish ways. But there’s nothing she can do. The girl is trapped in a double-bind: if she’s revealed as a fraud her family get kicked out of their house; if she’s seen eating food they’re homeless. If she doesn’t starve they’re probably kicked out as well. So whatever she’s doing, she has to keep doing it, or not doing it, until she dies.

This makes for very frustrating viewing. In truth the frustration of the main character in the face of this abject rural superstitious stupidity is matched by our frustration watching two people trapped by the times and circumstance.

It would help if perhaps Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy) were more of a sympathetic figure. I mean, don’t get me wrong, the thought and representation of any child suffering is affecting and disturbing, and you’re placed in the position of not wanting that suffering to continue, to end as soon as possible, however that might happen. But, at first, all we can think of is that this dumb girl is doing something dumb for dumb family / religious reasons.

dir: Roar Uthaug

2022

No, it’s not about social media trolls. No, it’s not about the new king of the online trolls, being Elmo Husk. It’s about an actual, honest to goodness giant Troll that wreaks havoc upon the good people of Norway.

This is a film you have seen, if you’ve seen movies, many times before. You probably haven’t seen that many Norwegian movies, but that hardly matters. You have seen movies where a giant creature of some description and some origin wrecks a bunch of shit, kills a bunch of people, can’t be stopped with guns, and only stops right before the end credits, thanks to…something.

It’s easy to call it a monster movie, or, if you think the Japanese should have a monopoly on these kinds of movies, you’d call it a kaiju movie. It’s very much a kaiju movie, except with a giant troll instead of Godzilla.

Because this is a very crowd-pleasing version of this kind of movie, they even say “Godzilla” and “King Kong” a bunch of times. They want you to know that it’s that kind of movie. So they helpfully tell us.

The main character of this flick is a palaeontologist. It’s never good when government officials seek out palaeontologists for anything. Mayhem, and likely murder will ensue. But what I found funny is that something happens that the government can’t account for, they get the palaeontologist on board, ask her opinion, and then go “this chick is fucking nuts”, and then laugh at her.

Why ask the palaeontologist in the first place, you Norwegian rollmop-eating jerks? If you were never going to entertain her ideas, why bring her along?

It’s no good seeing footage of giant footprints and then scoffing when people say “they’re giant footprints”. When you do that, you should know you’re the real villain in the movie, and not the monster.

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

Hive is based on a true story about a woman just trying to get by in this world. The problem is: this fucking world in which we live.

Some parts of this world seem to be easier to live in that others. For Fahrije (Yilka Gashi), the reality is she lives in a part of the world where seemingly the entirety of society is stacked against her, for no good fucking reasons.

I guess it helps to set the scene as to where and when. The where is Kosovo, the when is after the Kosovo War in the late nineties, and the reality is that Fahrije, like a lot of other women, hasn’t seen her husband since the massacres began.

There are a lot of mass graves waiting to be excavated, still. I had hoped there would a time in European history when new mass graves would stop being dug, and yet when you see what the Russians are doing AGAIN in Ukraine…

I despair. I am not as strong as Fahrije. She doesn’t despair, she just keeps moving forward.

She is a Kosovar Albanian. She has two kids to look after, and her wheelchair bound father-in-law. I don’t know why, but she is not allowed to get a job. The society, the community doesn’t tolerate women working or even really spending too much time out of their homes.

This community doesn’t even like the idea of women getting their licences and driving cars.

So, she has no husband to work and provide the family money, but it is also frowned upon for her to work and support her family. Clearly the best thing to do would be for them all to die.

Fahrije is not alone in this predicament. A group of women whose husbands similarly haven’t returned or whose remains haven’t yet been identified, also have no means of support and stop themselves from doing anything that would draw the ire of the menfolk.

It’s paralysing to watch this kind of thing. Someone offers them driving lessons or work, and the women tell themselves and each other “I cannot do these things, they will all call me a whore”. And true to their word, random men call Fahirje and any other woman whores for daring to support themselves and earn a subsistence living.

Everything is slow and agonising in coming, but Fahrije is persistent. Where the other women fear what the community will say, Fahrije sees that lack of choice they are being offered (this charity set up for the women barely has any money for their day to day lives, and there’s no widow’s pension or government help, apparently) as giving her all the more motivation to succeed in her endeavours.

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.

dirs: Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney

2021

Oddness abounds. But it abounds in a manner that I found oddly enjoyable.

Strawberry Mansion probably was made with a budget somewhat lower than what I spent on chewing gum last week, but I would hazard a guess that if they’d been given a massive budget, the flick would not have worked at all. The fact that it looks cobbled together with found objects and jerry-rigged items from out of hard rubbish entirely adds to the movie’s charm.

I don’t know if it adds thematically, but then the movie’s themes are pretty out there as it is.

The film opens with a nebbish-y guy (Kentucker Audley) trapped in an-all pink kitchen, desperately trying to find something to eat or drink. He’s frantic, starving, dying. A knock at the door – a man appears, bearing the gift of a bucket of Cap’n Kelly Chicken and a bottle of Red Rocket cola. The bearer of such bounties, being Buddy (Linas Phillips), tells the other chap that he’s always here for him, and he’ll never let him down. They eat and drink in a disturbingly orgiastic manner.

The nebbish-y guy wakes up. It was all a dream. He checks some machine, because, in this brave new world set in 2035, people record their dreams, and the government imposes a tax on those dreams.

The chap, dapper with his trimmed moustache and natty hat, drives to a Cap’n Kelly Chicken place, and gets a mess of fried chicken, with Red Rocket soda to wash it all down with.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

James Preble is the man, or at least a man, and it’s not just his job just to tax his own dreams, but to tax the dreams of others on behalf of the government. He drives out to a building, one that looks suspiciously pink, maybe strawberry-coloured, though I’m not sure how much of a mansion it is. He has been tasked, as an oneiric auditor (‘oneiric’ means ‘of dreams’ in Greek, that’s how I know!), to audit the dreams of the woman who lives in the mansion.

dir: Christopher Makoto Yogi

2021

I was a simple man. I still am, in a lot of ways. No-one really wants to think of themselves as being overly complicated. But being too simple seems like intellectual laziness.

But enough about me. I Was a Simple Man is pretty much, if you ever decided to sit down and watch it, a flick like no other that you might have seen in your life. The themes, of mortality, of regret, of past and present merging, all that crap, aren’t unique, but there really isn’t another film to compare this to.

I read such impassioned reviews of this flick back in the day, and I was determined to eventually watch it. The one thing about watching this, that meant I started and stopped it many times, was that the main character has a dog, who is often on screen with him.

You might think: so fucking what, old man? How is a dog an impediment to watching a movie, you lazy fuck?

Well, the thing is, if my dog is in the room and awake, the appearance of a dog, or any four legged creature on screen really, means that my dog goes absolutely fucking berserk. And If I’m watching a movie late at night, which I usually am, having the dog go completely fucking berserk is not conducive to sleep for the other members of my household. Or for enjoyable movie watching.

Only recently did I come up with the innovation of piling up couch pillows between her and the telly so that she can’t see the doggoes, even if she can hear doggoes barking.

So, finally, I got to watch the flick the whole way through. Yes, I am stalling for time, how did you figure it out?

dir: Paul Verhoeven

2021

Truly fucked up nun bullshit. Can’t summarise it any better than that.

I am sure this probably would play very differently to someone who is a) a believer, b) Christian, c) Catholic especially, but to me it emphasises nothing more so than how delusional religious types have to be. Or at least how delusional Verhoeven thinks they must be.

I find myself in a curious position with this film, in that I find it almost impossible to give an old letch like Verhoeven the benefit of the doubt, ever, in fact, but especially when it comes to his movies. He has just done too many horrible things to too many people, predominately women, in too many of his movies for it to be a coincidence. Because I read too many pop culture / movie review sites, I am too aware of this perverse attempt to garner consensus at least online to pretend Showgirls is some kind of camp classic, up there with Mommie Dearest, Rocky Horror Picture Show or Hairspray.

I am totally against this – I reject it completely. Showgirls always was and always will be a horrible, boring, misogynistic and thoroughly loathsome movie. These attempts to reclaim it disgust me.

But for the utter trash films that he’s made, like the aforementioned, and Basic Instinct, and Hollow Man, he did make Robocop, Total Recall, Starship Troopers and Black Book, so, I’m torn. I want to condemn him for what I think his work sometimes represents (a tendency and casualness towards exploiting female actors and in depicting sexual abuse and sexualised violence), but then there are those aspects that confuse me, seeing as his other works indicate an awareness of what the use of violence in entertainment means in a societal context, even beyond the visceral thrill audiences may get.

He also has no problem having his actors sitting around naked for hours at a time. I hope they were okay with it.

Now he’s turning his interest towards the use of the visceral in terms of how it applies to religious mania and, more importantly, religious control.

Benedetta has plenty of risqué scenes, plenty of stuff other directors would have thought better than include, but it has strong acting performances and an actual story, such as it is. The point may be to provide Verhoeven with stroke material (while it’s even being filmed), but at least the (simulated) sex on screen has a purpose within the story.

dir: Terence Davies

2022

It seems almost redundant saying that a film made by Terence Davies is a sad one, because…If you’ve seen any of his films, especially his more auto-biographical ones, you know. This one, however, is a biopic, of the life of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden, as the younger version) who fought in and then rejected the underlying premises of the so-called Great War, before he was institutionalised for his disobedience.

He writes to his superiors with exasperated disgust that his betters have been lying to the poor soldiers going off to die, and so they fight under false pretences. As such he rejects their authority in sending him off again, and objects, conscientiously or otherwise, to the war itself.

If he were a poorer man, they might have fucked him up royally for defying the right of Empire to do as it will. But as he is from a wealthy family, well…

Unlike the way those kinds of stories usually go, he was neither mistreated, lobotomised nor electro-shocked half to death. He merely had some chats with a sympathetic doctor (a very gentle and charming Ben Daniels, in a film filled with charming but not gentle people), and meets one of (I think) the loves of his life, being Wilfred Owen (Matthew Tennyson).

The slight, pale Owen, who stutters and seems quite fearful, if we, the audience, know of him, it’s in the context of his famous poetry about just how horrible being in the trenches was. His poem Dulce et Decorum est must have been taught to every school kid throughout the Commonwealth, or at least the schoolboys, back in the 1980s. Or maybe I should narrow it down further to those of us who were taught out of Seven Centuries of Poetry in English…

After they spend a brief enough time together, Owen is deemed to be fit for service again, and is sent off for the purposes of irony to be killed a week before the end of the war.

Oh cruellest fate. If Sassoon didn’t have enough disgust for the war and the Empire beforehand, he has even more cause now.

His chats with the good doctor allow him, in that safe space, to confess to often experiencing the love for his fellow man that dare not speaketh its name, which the doctor himself mentions he has experienced himself. The question is made of how one is meant to live this life in an era where people without enough connections can still be destroyed for it.

Discretion seems to be the key. Also, being rich seems to help.

dir: John Madden

2022

In the long tradition of British films set during World War II, this is yet another prestigious flick pretending that the actions of a plucky group of patriots essentially won the war against Hitler.

No, it’s not The Imitation Game, where Benedict Cumberbatch “invented” computers in order to beat the Nazis’ codes, with the help of a bunch of other people, including Keira Knightley. No, it’s not Enigma, where Kate Winslet and a different group of code breakers at Bletchley Park try to win the war (without the help of Alan Turing or Benedict Cumberbatch) single-handedly.

And it’s not Their Finest, a film from 2016 that conjectured that the actions of a plucky group of screenwriters and filmmakers making patriotic movies during the war changed the nation’s fortunes and turned the tide of the war. Despite ALL of these movies having many of the same people in them.

This is a completely different group of smartarses who take it upon themselves to win the war single-handedly by fabricating British plans to invade Greece, so as to distract the Nazis and make them re-deploy their forces from Sicily, which is the REAL target for the Allies.

The thing is, though, they feel like if they just send a letter to Hitler, with the fake plans, he might not receive it. If they tell his mates they might not give him the message. Plus they might think it’s bullshit, since it is bullshit.

So how best to trick the worst people in human history? Why, put the fake plans in a briefcase and attach it to a corpse, and then drop it off the coast of Spain, of course.

Thank makes perfect sense. No wait, that’s needlessly complicated and would never work.

If there is a villain in this flick, it’s not actually the Nazis, who, despite the fact that Kanye West keeps telling me that Hitler actually had some positive qualities, don’t really factor into it. No, the putative villain is played by Jason Isaacs as Admiral Godfrey. All along, from beginning to end, he is constantly telling the ‘heroes’ that their plan is bullshit and should never work, and will probably get tens of thousands of the Allied forces killed.

dir: Jean Luc Herbulot

2021

There is a lot of insanity going on here.

For much of this flick’s length, I felt like I was watching something so cool, so different from anything I’d seen before, something steeped in cleverness and difference, but within a startling cinematic form, from places where films like this rarely arise (not that I would know – I mean that rise to prominence outside of where it was made).

And eventually I came back down to Earth. It’s just a film. As great as the melding of form, function, place, history, cool looking dudes is, and as refreshing as it is for a revenge tale, the way everything is resolved felt unfulfilling.

And yet everything I will say from now on isn’t going to really capture the magnitude of why I found this flick so impressive. I think it will remain hard to explain.

I know nothing about the director, but I know he’s seen some films. He has definitely seen the films (or at least enough scenes from them) of Sergio Leone. And though he’s from the Republic of Congo, and studied and worked in France, he is drawn to telling a very strangely specific story about a trio of guys who find themselves trapped in the Saloum region of Senegal.

The stuff I’m going to write is going to sound quite specific and quite strange, but I assure you most of it is reasonably accurate. The film starts in 2003, during a coup d’etat in Guinea-Bissau. A trio of mercs runs around what looks like piles and piles of corpses in the streets, wearing slick grey-silver slickers, wielding weapons. When we see one soldier stir amidst the dead, one of the mercs, with white dreads, blows a powder into his face, knocking him the fuck out.

They proceed to a room where there’s a Mexican drug dealer who has a suitcase full of gold bars, and it seems their job all along has been to extract the racist jerk from this place and take him north to Dakar in Senegal, so he can get back to, I dunno, macramé and drug dealing in his spare time.

I don’t think the mercs were responsible for the coup (in the film, I mean, not in ‘real life’) – though that’s maybe why they’re there to extract Felix (Renaud Farah). As they fly to their destination, the plane loses fuel, and they have to come down in a region of Senegal they think is cursed.

The three chaps, the three amigos, these three Bangui’s Hyenas, are thick as thieves. They never really argue with each other that much, but they do disagree occasionally. Chaka (Yann Gael) seems like the youngest of the three, but seems maybe to be their leader. They defer to him at least. Rafa (Roger Sallah) acts like he thinks he’s the coolest of the trio, but that’s only because his sunglasses, mohawk and machete combination look really, really on point.

Last is Minuit (Ba Mentor), who is some kind of mystic with his massive dreadlocks, but he seems, whatever his propensity and comfort with violence might , is here called a marabout, or someone with the skills to both pay the bills and the power to repel evil spirits and such.

dir: Joe Wright

2021

When I first heard they were remaking this story for the nth time, I was like “ugh, no, so unnecessary.”

We have enough great versions of it already. Well, we have two at least. We have the black and white one from 1950 with Jose Ferrer, and the 1990 one with Gerard Depardieu in the lead role, which I remember watching in the cinema, and loved ever since, having bought it on VHS tape(!) and watched it stacks and stacks of times.

And then on DVD and Blu-Ray. What better film could hit the sweet spot for a pathetic “romantic” like me? A guy spends a whole film pining after a woman, sending her thousands of heartfelt, deftly spun letters enumerating all the ways in which he loves her, for her only to find out and return her love seconds before he dies? This is like the Olympics of unrequited love; it’s absolutely perfect!

That way he never actually had to keep her happy, listen to her as a person and relate to her, or argue over who did which chores or whose turn it was to get the baby back to sleep.

At the time (the 1990s) it never occurred to me that what Cyrano does is a terrible thing. Even with his stated all-consuming love for Roxanne (his cousin, I might add, in that earlier version), he is essentially catfishing her into loving a handsome jerk without a thought in his head, who she then spends the rest of her life pining over until… Cyrano shows her he was the seducer at the balcony and the letter writer all along. And then dies, so she spends the rest of her days now pining over someone who could write a mean letter but had a larger than considered average nose.

dir: A Coen Brother

2021

For what ever reason, a Coen brother, being Joel, wanted to make a movie all on his lonesome, without his other pesky brother Ethan hanging about. So he struck out on his own, probably out of shame, from people joking for years that he was too afraid to make a movie on his own.

So, with so many of these shameful tears pouring down his face he elected to make yet another version of a Shakespeare play, probably during the peak of lockdowns, and with top tier talent in the lead roles.

I mean, who does Frances McDormand have to fuck in order to get a lead role in a Joel Coen movie?

Probably the director, who happens to be her husband.

I don’t think Denzel has to sleep with anybody, but that’s his business.

The Tragedy of Macbeth looks and feels like homework. I’m sorry. I cannot divest myself of the feeling that I’m doing homework when I watch stuff with The Bard’s original overwritten, bouquet-flowery language. Everything has fourteen different meanings. Everything sounds like it’s being said by people falling down a set of stairs.

It takes a lot, A LOT of concentration to get through it, to not have the mind wander.

I guess I’ve seen as many versions of Macbeth as I’ve seen of Hamlet and King Lear, probably, which means I’ve seen dozens. Chinese versions, Japanese versions, Italian mafia versions, even an Australian gangster version that starred Michael Fassbender.

And I’ve seen a bunch of ‘straight’ versions, period costumes and haughty tones and the like, including the infamous Polanski version from the 1970s. Infamous only because now we know what a piece of shit he was.

The thing is, I have to be honest here, I find the story tedious. I’ve always found the story of Macbeth tedious, no matter the format, no matter the actors, no matter the setting.

(Madres Paralelas)

dir: Pedro Almodovar

2021

It’s lovely to see Penelope Cruz starring in another Pedro Almodovar movie.

As in, that in and of itself is a good thing. She’s been the lead in many of his films, and it usually bodes well. I still have such fond memories of watching Volver for the first time, and enjoying it so much, and thinking “wow, Almodovar really loves women, plus he’s sorta kinda making up for how terrible thematically and content-wise some of his earlier films were.”

I’m not going to get into it. If you saw the ‘delightful’ 80s-90s Almodovar flicks, you know exactly what I mean.

The themes here are still about what generations of women go through, what mothers go through, what pieces of shit men are in general, but it’s welded to two plots – one’s a melodrama about babies being accidentally swapped, and the other is about the people the Franco fascists butchered at the start of and during the Spanish Civil War. And probably after as well, considering the fact that the fascists won that particular war.

If it appears like what I describe above sounds ungainly or like some kind of ungodly hodge-podge, well, it is, a bit. It’s perfectly well acted, I have seen Penelope Cruz give less than great performances, but not in Almodovar’s films. And she’s fine here, comfortable with the character, comfortable in her skin. I just feel like the screenplay was somewhat half-baked. There are things that happen, stuff that people do, and it doesn’t feel organic to the plot, or to these people, or to people in general, whether they’re Spaniards or not.

The film opens with a photographer called Janis (Cruz) doing what photographers do, with the subject being an anthropologist called Arturo (Israel Elejalde). I can’t imagine why a highly sought after and in demand photographer would be photographing an anthropologist, but then my knowledge of Spanish culture and society is somewhat limited. Maybe anthropologists are the true rock stars of Spanish society.

dir: Lauren Hadaway

2021

Finally, a film that’s honest about the scam that is university rowing.

I don’t know that anyone else was curious about why there are so many people being yelled at as they yank on their oars at 5 in the morning. I have only ever seen these people training when I have, in days long gone, been stumbling home along the river to Richmond after having been up all night.

And I thought it looked like hell twenty years ago. And this film confirms that it’s even more horrible than I thought.

The Novice is the feature debut of director Lauren Hadaway, and it’s a surprisingly confident, disturbing, unsettling and discomforting film. It isn’t too much of a stretch to refer to Whiplash in the same breath as this flick, since both films feature competitive worlds and people going the extra mile (or three thousand extra miles) in order to achieve their ambitions.

Plus Hadaway worked on Whiplash, in her capacity as a sound engineer. This flick is significantly different, in that whatever the main character’s motivations and ambitions were, the key sources of drama were the machinations and actions of the piece of shit teacher who tormented the poor drummer, and made him feel like he had to destroy himself in order to earn the teacher’s respect.

In other words, the motivations, the threats were external. This flick hasn’t been seen by as many people, and isn’t going to get either JK Simmons or the main character here, Alex Dall as played by Isabelle Fuhrman, any Academy Award nominations. But the main dramas, motivations, sources of torment are coming from inside the character study. From inside Alex.

dir: Phil Tippet

2022

I’ll be honest with you – sometimes I have no fucking idea what’s going on in life or in movies.

Watching Mad God, allegedly a labour of love or a magnum opus or something that this stop motion animator has been working on for 30 years, I honestly had not the faintest idea as to what I was watching.

I know I was watching stop motion animation, which is a trip in and of itself. And I guess it’s ‘good’ stop motion animation? I don’t really know. When I watch something with stop motion, like Henry Selick’s stuff or the stuff put out by Laika Studios, I don’t judge whether I like the movie or not based on whether the stop motion animation is “good” or not.

It just “is”. It’s more the story I’m concerned with. As in, I love Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s not because it’s stop motion animation, anymore that I love certain Pixar flicks just for being digitally animated.

The medium versus the message. Phil Tippet’s deep love of stop motion animation I guess is meant to be the one and only attraction here, because it’s definitely not the dialogue. Just to be clear, there’s no fucking dialogue.

Not a word. There is only two things maybe that give an inkling as to what (maybe?) the story is kind-of about. It starts with an image I’m pretty sure is the Tower of Babel being destroyed, or at least covered in dark smoke clouds, and then a quote from Leviticus saying someone pissed off Old Testament God, so he was going to destroy them and everyone in their tribe.

And then a whole bunch of other things happen. I think they follow some kind of concept or whatever, as if it’s a series of film clips from someone’s concept album – some horrid prog rock band from the 80s or 90s, something with a portentous and pretentious name like Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.

dir: Gasper Noé

2022

This is more like what I had in mind when I recently wrote about the small sub-genre of dramas dealing with old people facing old age, and the younger people trying to muddle through looking after them. Films that don’t shy away from how hard old age can be, and how hard it can be to look after such oldies properly.

However, this flick is directed by the same man who 20 years ago made Irreversible, a film so horrific in its content that I don’t even want to talk about it. Since then he’s made complex and almost experimental films that have in no way tried to do what his first two hideous films did (the other one being I Stand Alone, which, again, I don’t even want to talk about), but have been no less provocative.

Of one of those previous films, I will say that the message at the end was “Le Temps Detruit Tout”, or “time destroys everything”. Vortex starts with the dedication: “To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts.”

One should know going in this isn’t going to be cheery stuff. The director himself nearly died in 2020 of a brain haemorrhage, and prior to that looked after his mum who had dementia. So maybe he’s got a feel for mortality, and for the complexities of looking after helpless old people.

The central old couple here are in their 80s, and start off seeming okay. They have a cluttered apartment in the 10th arondissement, in Paris, near, of all places, the Stalingrad train station, and we first watch them having an evening aperitif on the balcony.

“Life is a dream, isn’t it?” she says to him.
- “A dream within a dream.”

Most of the film is shot with at least two cameras, one focussing on Him (legendary Italian director Dario Argento), and one generally focussing on Her (Francoise Lebrun) simultaneously. So we often are watching what’s happening to either of them when they’re in the same apartment or apart. It’s giving us two slightly out of kilter perspectives on something that’s happening right in front of us.

Right from the start it’s obvious she has no idea what’s going on around her, where she is, what she’s meant to be doing, or even who her husband is, most of the time. He spends time trying to find her at the local shops, and clearly this has been happening more and more lately.

Back in her apartment, it is all unfamiliar to her. We watch most of a day proceed (not in real time – it’s a long film but it’s not 24 hours long), and for the majority of that day she has been baffled by everything around her, muttering in half formed sentences to herself. Irritated by photos in which she and other people are captured, but she recognises neither herself nor the other person, and turns them over.

Oh irony of ironies: in her previous career she happened to be a psychiatrist, who would examine and diagnose people going through exactly the kind of dementia that she’s living with now, but, because of the dementia, she doesn’t really get that she has dementia, but she knows that something is profoundly wrong.

dirs.: Scott McGehee & David Siegel

2021

A grim story. A grim family story, one without easy answers, catharsis or readily accessible “closure”.

Life’s just like that, I guess.

I am sure there were always lots of movies above people’s parents dying, about both that end of life care and people trying to resolve the unresolvable. I notice it more, these days, having lost both of my parents now. So I go into these kinds of filmic experiences both with dread and with some kind of eagerness to maybe see some aspects of my experiences represented, or maybe those of my dad.

Let me just say I saw none of my experiences mirrored or reflected here, but that’s not a bad thing. This is such a particular story about two estranged siblings (more so than the dying father), and it’s not even about trying to both provide care to a dying tyrant and argue about stuff that happened years before.

I realise when I watch flicks like this and they leave out most of what it’s actually like to look after a bedbound dying person, that no-one really wants to include those details, because maybe they’re too afraid that it would make the flick too depressing? For the two main people here, luckily for them they have a personal medical carer / attendant to actually do all the work (and it is so much work, believe me please) of keeping a dying comatose person relatively comfortable and clean all day and all night.

The carer tells people to call him Ace (Gilbert Owuor) because his Ethiopian name is too difficult for Americans to pronounce. He is there not only to free up time for the two siblings, being Cal (Owen Teague) and Erin (Haley Lu Richardson) so that they can delay talking about what happened one fateful night 7 years ago, but also they can vent to him / make confession without absolution until they’re ready to confront each other.

They had different mothers, but the same father. Of the father, all we see is his face behind a mask, longish hair, but no apparent life other than what the beeping of nearby machines would imply. He can’t hurt them now, but the wounds he’s caused haven’t healed, and I saw no indication that they ever really will.

It’s not entirely clear cut, but though they are close in age, I think Cal is the younger of the two. He is nervous at the house, and around Erin in a way that takes a long time to understand. We get some idea of why he’s so freaked out at seeing Erin, but not the underlying truth of it all.

What we know is that he hasn’t seen her for seven years, even though he’s been looking. Erin had cut off all contact with him, but not with their father’s housekeeper, Valentina (Kimberley Guerrero), who has known all along but was sworn to secrecy. Valentina has a son Joey (Asivak Koostachin), who is also happy to see Erin, and whom Erin is apparently happy to see as well.

Far happier than seeing Cal.

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2022

Honestly, I didn’t hate it.

I thought it would be complete crap, and it was nowhere near as crap as I thought it could be. A trusted work colleague mentioned seeing it, and finding it lacklustre, so my expectations were not sky high.

I’m not going to pretend it’s a masterwork either, but sometimes “not as shit as I thought it would be” sometimes is the closest I can get to a ringing recommendation.

I have no previous feelings about the character of Black Adam, nor can I really understand why Dwayne The Rock Johansson has been obsessed with playing the character for over a decade. Johnson has one mode and one facial expression in this flick throughout, and I am totally okay with it when it’s this facial expression and this mode: bad motherfucker who fucks up anyone who looks at him sideways. He doesn’t have to cajole people or convince them there’s a better way – he can just kill people with a flick of his wrist and minimal effort to do otherwise.

It’s everyone else that’s a bit of a letdown compared to that.

Whatever the fuck exactly that Teth Adam, as they call him throughout the film until the veriest of very ends, is, he spends much of the movie casually killing mercenaries from something called Intergang, a bunch of Scottish, English and maybe, I dunno, Dutch guys who have taken over this mythical Middle Eastern country called Kahndaq. I don’t know where on a map you’re meant to find it either.

Would you believe that five thousand years ago, some shit went down when a slave fought back against his masters, something something a demonic crown, then more something something, five thousand years later Teth Adam wakes up from sleepy bo bos time, and starts killing people.

Except he ain’t killing Kahndaqians – just anyone else that annoys him. These Intergang jerks are looking for the demonic crown, but some natives are trying to stop them from getting it.

Along come the Justice Society. Not, it is important to note, the Justice League. If the League is where virtual gods Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Superman, the fast guy no-one talks about anymore because of his legal troubles, and Ben “Batman” Lopez hang out, then a significant step down from there must be the Society. The Justice Society, dispatched by always nasty piece of work Amanda Waller (Viola Davis), is sent not to take out or disrupt the Intergang, which has been ruling this country with an iron fist in order to extract its natural rare minerals (in this case Eternium. No, not Vibranium. No, not Unobtainium. I SAID Eternium. I’m sure it’s very different from the other ones), but to stop Teth Adam.

dir: Taika Waititi

2022

Not that it matters, not that the world cares…

I was determined to review this Marvel flick before the latest, current Marvel flick. The difference between them isn’t just intent and timing.

The biggest difference is while the existence of Love and Thunder is amusing to me, seeing as it adapts the storyline where Jane becomes The Mighty Thor, with bulging biceps and all, and wields the magical hammer Mjolnir, the thing is, I don’t really care about it that much as a movie or as anything else.

I care about the sequel to Black Panther for a number of reasons, so that will be a very different review.

This? Well… It’s silly, as we expect most things that involve Taika Waititi to be, but there are levels at which the silliness in his films is charming and enjoyable, and levels at which it is grating and the opposite of fun (which is known as “work”).

Love and Thunder is painful and grating in a lot, A LOT, of its running time. It’s actively painful. The most obvious example of this is the inclusion of two screaming goats as a form of transportation for the core crew on their adventures. It’s one of those gags that, like Sideshow Bob stepping continuously on rakes, is dependent on going for such a length of time that it stretches the bounds of what we consider acceptably funny, past that, to the point where the absurdity makes it even funnier.

The more stuff grates here, the more the goats scream, the more painful it becomes. It doesn’t, at least for me, at least on this first watch, go back all the way back around to being funny again.

Oh, no. Definitely not.

It’s not like I was hungover when I was watching it. Or drunk. I imagine it would have helped.

You may think Thor or Jane Foster are the main characters, but really, there are two other main characters, being Gorr the so-called God-Butcher (Christian Bale), who is in a different movie from Hemsworth and Natalie Portman, and Korg (a CGI pile of rock voiced by Waititi himself).

dir: Richard Linklater

2022

What a movie. As in, how is this even a movie?

Nah, that’s unkind. This animated movie is, as far as I can guess, a version of Richard Linklater’s idealised childhood growing up in the burbs of Houston, Texas in what I like to call the button down Plastic Fantastic era during a time when America thought it could do no wrong, and the space race was going to mean everyone would be living on Venus by 1975 and everything would soon look like the Jetsons.

It was a childhood, based on this flick, typified by being safe, bland and pleasant. The main family as presented and animated here would not have been out of place on the tv itself, perhaps as the neighbours to the Brady Bunch or as the family down the road from the witch in Bewitched or the genie from I Dream of Jeannie. Is it a case of “that’s how it actually was back then?” versus “memory and television combine to transform all experiences into stuff that looks like it came out of a sitcom”?

It’s hard to say. I mean, it would be easy for often great, sometimes not so great director Richard Linklater to say, and he probably has in several interviews, but I hardly want to taint my reviews with actual knowledge from the people that would actually know why something is how it is in a movie they’ve made.

Instead I’ll take the far lazier but much more profitable path of just imagining people’s intentions and motivations, and run with that. That way I can be 400 per cent more opinionated.

This childhood that Stanley (voiced by Milo Coy as the actual boy, but with Jack Black doing the constant narration of a grown up Stanley looking back on his tedious childhood) has, I would guess, was a childhood that many white Americans had during that era, as long as they were of a certain socioeconomic status and background. Culturally, it’s the absence of culture that exemplifies this time and place – everything from where they live to how they live is all about that place as being a tabula rasa – a blank space which was filled in with shiny and new hopes and dreams. The family live in a new development where brand new houses go up in a place outside of Houston.

Who and what was there before these brand new houses?

(L'événement)

dir: Audrey Diwan

2021

I’ve seen many films in my time on this planet. Many of them have been thrillers, ticking time bomb stuff, stop the villain or the world gets it kind of stuff, where the result is never in question.

This flick, Happening, being its English title, is one of the tensest exercises in the format, and then there is no bomb set to explode, no villain to be thwarted with seconds to spare.

The terror induced with the feeling of impending doom is whether young French university student Anne (Anamarie Vartolomei) will be able to figure out a way to legally or illegally terminate her pregnancy before it ruins her life and stops her from completing her literature exams.

Abortion. Let’s not dance around it – she’s trying to get an abortion at a time in France where abortions are profoundly illegal. It’s, as far as I can tell, the early 1960s. Women have only had the vote for about 15 years. During the war, thanks to the Nazis, women were guillotined for providing this necessary and life saving health care to other women.

This is a fictional telling of it, but it’s based on the real story of what author Annie Ernaux, who wrote the book this is based on, and who received the Nobel Prize for Literature about a month ago, went through in order to survive. That the author is still alive, thankfully, and in her 80s now, still writing, is a testament to choices made, and to having the choice to make, that every woman should have.

The majority of the flick proceeds chronologically, starting at about 3 weeks, up to around 12 weeks. Twelve weeks of what, you might ask? Well, of her pregnancy, of course, her unwanted pregnancy.

She sees this unwanted intrusion into her life as a terrible fate worse than death. She and her other friends really want to hang out with guys (and by hang out I mean fuck), but they live in a time when birth control isn’t that reliable, men have never been reliable, and pregnancy generally means the end of your dreams, especially if you have ones based on educating yourself out of your parent’s basement.

Anne has formed some idea of what she wants out of her life, and it doesn’t include dropping a baby before she’s even completed her baccalaureate. As a single unwed mother she’d be relegated to pariah status and likely poverty, you know, just like millions of other women throughout history.

(Pahanhautoja)

dir: Hanna Bergholm

2022

What a Freudian field day for the whole freaking family.

I can’t remember the last time I watched a Finnish film, but I can tell you two things: it was probably by Aki Kaurismaki, the only other Finnish director I can think of, and it was nothing like this. Certainly not as colourful.

This is flat out a horror flick, there’s no getting around it, and it’s a fairly brutal one. Don’t let gentle images of girls and eggs lull you into a false sense of security. It is pretty funny in parts, but I wouldn’t call this a dark comedy or anything like that. It’s way too bright, for one thing.

There is a Mother (Sophia Keikillä), who is an Instagram-influencer monster, a Father (Jani Volanen), a daughter Tinja (Siiri Solalinna) and a son Matias (Oiva Ollila). The son is a boring carbon copy of the father, and the mother does everything in her power to make the daughter into her clone. Everything they do, every way their house looks, has to be Instagram-worthy.

When Tinja competes in gymnastics, there’s none of that “just go out there and have fun” bullshit, or “good job” this or “you tried your best” that. There’s only “win or I will disfigure you” type tough love without the love part.

This can have an effect on a young woman’s development. When a bird flies into the house during one of these White Woman Instagram moments, and punctures Mother’s fantasy, Tinja tries to gently catch the bird, but Mother is all “I’m here for the neck snappings, nothing else”.

This unleashes forces the Mother, the Father, the whole neighbourhood simply cannot understand, but at least it will help Tinja achieve some measure of self-realisation.

Struggling as she is to live up to her Mother’s strict requirements, Tinja gets the opportunity to look after a new life in the form of an egg, from the mortally wounded bird. She protects the egg. She cradles the egg. She puts into it all her rage, shame, anger, jealousy, even as she’s doing her best to nurture it and see it grow.

What hatches is a sight, a sight to behold. I don’t think there’s any CGI involved, it looks like practical, physical effects work. It’s impressive, and kinda sickening, too.

Tinja calls this inhuman bird / child hybrid Alli, after a lullaby, and the ways of feeding it are pretty gross. Alli does need regurgitated food, like all baby birds. But she also likes to feed on blood and emotions. She especially seems to like killing neighbourhood pets and anyone else that pisses Tinja off.

dir: Parker Finn

2022

Smile, despite being extremely mediocre, has been one of the most successful films of 2022. Not just horror films, but, like, all films. And I mean in terms of return on investment versus overall box office returns.

I know, you’re right, no sane person who isn’t paid to worry about these kinds of things would expend any energy thinking about them let alone writing about them.

But then I never claimed to be that sane.

The reason why it makes me shake my head in wonderment is a) it’s mediocre even by the standards of mediocre horror flicks b) it’s quite generic and c) it was 100 times more successful than the main horror flick it rips off, being It Follows.

It Follows, which is a much better horror flick, was made for a fraction of Smile’s budget ($1.3 mill versus $17mill), but made $23.3mill at the box office, versus the $200mill plus that Smile made.

That seems so unfair, but that is the way of the cinematic world. Some films, no matter their dopiness, just hit audiences differently.

This has such a simple premise. People, or some kind of entity, smiling creepily. That’s it, that’s all you need. Much easier to create creepy posters and creepier advertising with people smiling in a manner that would make the Joker uncomfortable.

And before anyone actually emails me after crunching the above numbers, yes, I ran the calculations as well, and it turns out the ROI on It Follows was actually higher than Smile’s, despite it earning 10 times more. So I have no idea what point I was trying to make.

Oh yeah, this shitty film. That’s not fair; it’s not a shitty flick, it’s just not that good.

It does have an interesting premise, to an extent. The main character Dr Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a psychiatrist who works at a psych hospital, and I don’t think she’s very good at her job. We never actually see her, throughout the flick, do anything to indicate she’s good at her job.

But at least we get the sense that she cares about patients in general, that’s a good start. She sees one patient, doesn’t really do anything for him. But the next one that comes in, whose smile graces all the posters for this flick, well, she’s a real peach.

dir: Andrew Dominik

2022

Three hours of this. Three hours of mostly misery.

Blonde is the 2 hours and 47 minutes long fictionalised biopic based not on Marilyn Monroe’s actual life but on a book by Joyce Carol Oates. There is some crossover between the two (Marilyn’s actual life and the book), and then there’s the third filter through which Andrew Dominik wedges the story through his screenplay.

I don’t think anyone over the age of 40 or so will confuse this with actual Earth history. To younger people, who from what I hear don’t ever watch movies anyway, this might become the bible on a person they don’t know and don’t remember. But to the rest of us she’s still a well-known figure from the last century, up there with Gandhi, Hitler, Churchill, Michael Jackson and Big Bird from Sesame Street. An icon. Maybe the icon, or at least the blonde icon of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

To us, just to generalise massively, she was more famous as the icon than she was an actor or a person, as a reference more than for any performance. As an image, through countless famous images, of a certain idea of femininity or sexuality that had nothing to do with her as a person and everything to do with her as a product.

This flick tries to say a lot about the person, as opposed to the icon, to explain her deep sadness, to show us all the many reasons for her deep sadness, and to deliver it in a complicated, visually stunning, musically depressing, very long package that emphasises the psychological over the literal historical.

In other words, a highly stylised fictionalisation intended to reveal the “truth”.

Whatever. The film has a moody, melancholy score from usual suspects (for this director) Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, and uses black and white stock, and every possible film aspect ratio that Dominik had access to, all for the purposes of replicating a ream of famous photos of her with the intention of fleshing her character out by elaborating on the world she lived in, that existed leading up to and following immediately after those iconic shots.

Sorry, I should have mentioned earlier, the main character in this flick isn’t Marilyn Monroe, it’s actually this lesser known girl called Norma Jeane Mortenson (Ana de Armas).

dir: Thomas M. Wright

2022

This is not an easy review to write. It wasn’t an easy film to watch.

I have found with all the death and insanity of the last bunch of years that I really don’t have a lot of love for true crime stuff based on things that have actually happened. Same goes for war films. I find them very hard to watch at the moment.

Horror movies with underground monsters or kill crazy maniacs are fine, but “real” or true stuff is just too painful. This film, The Stranger, is very painful to watch.

It should be. I don’t know if it should have been made. I haven’t sorted through, in my head, the moral and ethical arguments about making a movie depicting the lengths the police went to in order to convict a man for the murder of a child. I don’t know if I should even mention the boy’s name, since the family not only had nothing to do with this production but actively spoke out against it.

Who owns the story? The parents? The boy, which ultimately means the parents? The cops? Does Australian society own the story? And by own I don’t mean who has the right to make “art” and profit from the story. I mean, whose story is it?

I don’t think anyone is comfortable saying that, despite being the main character here, and the subject of that most generic of titles, the man who killed that boy wouldn’t be considered to be the one who owns this story.

And yet it’s all about him, and not the boy.

He is depicted as he is depicted, and instead of being depicted as a monster, he is depicted as a revenant, as something or someone who’s barely there. He is a scarecrow, gaunt, with a scraggly beard. He is almost faded, and only tentatively interacts with the world around him. Other than smoking I have no idea what he even did before he was caught up in this incredible undercover operation.

This is not a deep character study. You will find nor see no reasons to sympathise with him.

dir: Lena Dunham

2022

I don’t know who this exists for, or how it came to exist. It is an unusual thing.

The biggest surprise for me is that Lena Dunham directed this, and it’s actually pretty good. That’s not to minimise Dunham’s talent as a writer or a director: I think she’s quite accomplished at both. It’s just that when you think of a story set in England in the 13th century, you don’t immediately think of Brooklyn’s finest as being the best fit for the material.

Which would be (on my part) a weak and unjustifiable set of assumptions. If nothing else Dunham has made a career of working out through art (and in public) what it means to be a woman in this contemporary world, and as such I guess it’s not that strange that the coming-of-age of her young ladyship at a time when women had even less rights now than the average woman in a Southern American state is a story she has ideas about.

The surprise, if it is one, is that her ideas, feminist or otherwise, are good ones, and serve the story well.

It helps to have a solid performer in the lead role. This isn’t going to mean a lot to people who didn’t watch Game of Thrones, but anyway – that show had a lot of memorable performances from a whole bunch of people, but easily one of the greatest characters and most on point casting decisions was getting Bella Ramsey (with a name like that she already sounds like a GoT character) to play the Lady Lyanna Mormont, head of her house at only the age of 10.

The ”joke”, such as it was, was when people would speak to her, they thought they were talking to a child, but a few choice and pointed words from her would disabuse people of that notion forthwith. This absolute badass would shame men 40 years her senior that lacked even a tenth of her fierceness or her courage, and the way her character leaves this world at the Battle of Winterfell still has me in awe.

The character of Lady Catherine, or Birdy, as she prefers to be known, is not as fearsome, but is just as wilful and determined to get her way. Unfortunately for her, her character isn’t in an epic fantasy series, so she’s not in a world in which a powerful young woman can transcend the strictures of her society with a sharp sword and through sheer force of will.

She is, instead, the daughter of a minor noble, in the town of Stonebridge, and she is of marrying age, meaning she is 14.