fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dirs.: Eshome & Ian Nelms

2024

You call something Red Right Hand, and it comes with certain expectations.

And before you come at me and say “well, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds don’t have a monopoly on the words “red right hand”, plus Cave lifted the phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost” I would say to that “yeah but…”

How can you have a movie called Red Right Hand, and not have the song play at any point of the proceedings? I spent the entire length of the movie wondering “is it going to play now? What about now?”

And it’s not there. Not even a cover of it. Not even an instrumental version of it, or an Appalachian version of it. Not even a bad cover of it. Nothing.

Talk about a bait and switch: you baited me with the title, and then gave me nothing.

Well played, you curs; well played, you bounders.

I don’t remember if they ever expressly say where any of this story is meant to be taking place, but rest assured it’s somewhere meth-ridden and gap-toothed, so it’s somewhere in the South. That famous Southerner Orlando Bloom plays a guy called Cash who just wants to look after his family and live a somewhat honest life down on the farm.

dir: S.J. Clarkson

2024

This is very bad, but, even worse, it’s very pointless.

So bad. How did they trick people into being in this? Did anyone think this was going to be a ticket to stardom and big cash payouts? Well, I’m sure they all got paid very well, but, yeesh, this is woeful.

Madame Web exists in this strange alternate Spider-Man world that doesn’t have Spider-Man in it. There are four movies now in this alternate setting, I think? All four are pretty shitty. Moebius I think exists, if I didn’t hallucinate it, as a very stupid movie, as do two Venom movies, which are also stupid and painful.

And now this. This is an origin story for some hero, I think, who’s blind and in a wheelchair. But before that ‘hilarious’ ending, it’s about characters whose names I’m not even going to use, because it’s too fucking stupid.

So I will refer at least to the actors in this. Dakota Johnson gets a lot of flack for not being much of an actor, or for being a nepo baby (a foot in the door and so much more), but I think that’s really unfair. I’ve never seen nor will I ever see those movies based on the 50 Shades of Grey books, because life is way too short, but I have seen her in a few films where she’s been great. She was great in The High Note, in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and in The Lost Daughter a couple of years ago, so that’s at least three solid performances I can point to.

I can’t blame her for the indifferent work she puts in here, but it really feels like she has no idea why she’s here, and can’t wait to get off set. And this script, ye gods, how fucking pointless.

dir: David Ayer

2024

O Lordy, lordy. Spare me from such terrible times.

This fucking flick – it’s pretty fucking stupid. I guess that’s okay, but it’s almost comically, aggressively average, and grimly humorless to boot.

Jason Statham, once again, plays a guy with all the killing skills, who was content living a quiet life tending to bees, but then something happened and he had to kill about a thousand people in order to get revenge, sorry, I meant to say ‘justice’.

This is not Jason Statham’s first rodeo. He has literally played this role dozens of times already. And he’ll probably play it again for another 10 years before he gets tired of it. Although, honestly, he’s in his mid-fifties already, maybe do something different for a while? Might I suggest beekeeping?

There is something uniquely boring about the way the action is done in this flick. Most of the flick is Statham killing or punching or punch killing people who might as well have been mannequins in a mannequin warehouse. The people behind this flick think they’ve learned new lessons from the John Wick flicks in that they want to see someone besting hundreds of foes over the course of a bloated running time, but this flick has none of the flair or the inventiveness that goes into a lot of that stunt work and fight choreography. They felt they should skip that and just have Staham killing countless faceless minions in dull and grim ways. There is one decent knock-down-drag-out towards the end of the flick between Statham and some one-legged Afrikaner goon, but that’s it.

That’s a few competent minutes out of about a hundred minute movie.

dir: Blitz Bazawule

2023

Musicals. I try to be enthusiastic about them, but honestly, like most people (who aren’t Americans), I genuinely try to avoid them like, well, using the phrase “like the plague” seems tasteless after Covid killed so many millions of people.

So let’s just say I avoid them like the Cats musical they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world several years ago. Case in point, I have tried to sit through Cats multiple times, and I’ve never, ever been able to get through it, even during the worst of the lockdowns.

That was not a problem here. I knew it was a musical going in, and though I’ve never heard any of the songs before, I wasn’t overly dreading the experience.

I am old enough to remember the film when it came out in the 80s, directed by that most famous of African-American directors, Steven Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, and the Empress of the Americas, being Oprah Winfrey, played Sofia.

I… have memories of that movie. I remember my school taking us along to the cinema to see it, which means I was in early high school. I remember being horrified by the scenes of what these days we call ‘intimate partner violence’, which used to be called ‘domestic violence’, which boils down to ‘a piece of shit guy physically abusing a woman’, which makes me sick to my stomach to even type. I have always looked askance at Danny Glover since then, having loathed him (unfairly) for how well he played the role of Mister.

My other memory of watching the original film involves watching it on the telly with my mother, who painfully, wrenchingly related to the scenes of domestic violence, and could transcend her usual racist tendencies to sympathise with the plights of the many African-American women in the story, but drew the line at Celie’s sapphic tendencies, declaring them a bridge too far, condemning everyone involved to hell itself.

dir: Wim Wenders

2023

Like a fair few films that have been nominated for Best International Feature Film this year, I have a hard time figuring out what to actually describe the film as. Is it a Japanese film because the cast is Japanese and they speak in Japanese, and it’s set in Japan? Or, since it’s German director Wim Wenders’ film, does that make it a German film?

Like… when Tom Cruise was in The Last Samurai a bunch of years ago, was that a Japanese movie, since it had some Japanese people in it, and they spoke Japanese, and it was about Japanese history, even though it was in English and the lead was American and it was filmed in New Zealand? Or was it a Kiwi film? Or an American film?

This is a movie about a man who cleans public toilets in the Shibuya district. That’s it. And it was kind of commissioned by the people from the city of Tokyo who built a bunch of public toilets, and presumably wanted to show them off, which is one of the most bizarre reasons for a film to exist. As you might expect the film is not critical towards the toilets as designed or realised.

Also, because it wants to presumably show the toilets in the most positive light, they’re pretty much clean when the cleaner gets to them, which I guess makes the actor’s job a bit easier. They don’t want to gross us out, which is appreciated. I have a weak stomach when it comes to that kind of stuff, and I have a particular terror of public toilets.

None of that was triggered by this unusual flick. Kōji Yakusho is a legend of Japanese cinema. If you have watched only five contemporary Japanese movies, chances are he was in four of them. I remember him from as far back as Kamikaze Taxi way back in the day, but I’ve seen him in stacks of films since then. He can play gentle, he can play ruthless and brutal, but he’s an actor, he’s a man I could watch doing mundane things endlessly.

(Das Lehrerzimmer)

dir: Ilker Ҫatak

2023

Why the fuck would anyone be a teacher, honestly? Not only in this day and age, but at any time in human history?

I cannot imagine a more thankless task. Dealing with these dead-eyed little shits, or, even worse, their controlling and awful parents. They’re either checked out or the worst of helicopter parents, bullying teachers into getting their entitled way for their hideous spawn.

I already thought teaching would be the worst possible profession for anyone, let alone myself, before watching this flick, but now, ye gods. All prejudices confirmed.

It’s just a German flick about a teacher, at a school! This is minor, low-key, low stakes stuff! Yet why was watching this film far more stressful than all the thrillers, all the car chases and all the altercations with police that you can ever possibly imagine. I felt like I was going to have a heart attack for at least 80 per cent of the film’s running time.

This is Germany’s entry in the Best International Feature Film category at the upcoming awards, and it’s a good thing it was nominated, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t have heard about it. It hasn’t had anywhere near the buzz that Anatomy of a Fall has had, or Zone of Interest, but it’s no less worthy because of that.

I would dare the most extreme of cinephiles to get through this in one sitting without needing to take a handful of valium or at least breathe into a paper bag repeatedly.

dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

2023

I remember being amazed at the success of Yorgos Lanthimos several years ago when The Favourite became so feted and popular, getting all the awards and plaudits and … does anyone even remember The Favourite now? I mean, sure, it only came out in 2018, but that feels like a hundred years ago now.

I guess what I found so surprising is that all the weird goofiness of how Lanthimos puts his films together wasn’t enough to dissuade audiences or lose Olivia Colman an Oscar for Best Actress.

And if anyone thinks the path of an idiosyncratic director is to become less idiosyncratic as the budgets get bigger and the casts more A-List, well, I don’t think that’s the path he’s on at the moment. If anything…

Poor Things, if it was watched by a lot of people last year, and if it’s watched by more people on streaming etc this year, will be one of the weirdest flicks many people have seen in a good long while. And that’s not just the subject matter or the frequent uses of fish eye anamorphic lenses that make certain scenes look like they were filmed through someone’s front door peephole.

Maybe there’s a bit lifted from Frankenstein, but I don’t think thematically it has as much in common, at all. Man’s hubris in seeking to be like God by creating life is not questioned here; there’s no cautionary aspect. Our creation here, being Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), is not the monster, even if her creation is a ghastly act of unholy Science run amok.

It’s based on a book, by Alisdair Gray, which I have not read, but looking at the list of books he’s written, he seems like an absolute Scottish legend, and I’d be more than curious to read the one this is based on, as well as the others.

I think the only acknowledgement they make of the story’s Scottish origins is the appallingly inconsistent attempt at a Scottish accent that Willem Dafoe assays playing the character of God(win) Baxter, Bella’s creator. It’s like he starts a sentence and then towards the end of it remembers “oh yeah, I’m meant to be doing an accent” and then throws a big of a brogue over the last syllables. It’s so comical that I couldn’t even tell if it was deliberate on the director’s part, or whether he just gave up.

dir: Matteo Garrone

2023

Ahem. Usually, when I title reviews, I have the title in English, since I write my reviews in English, and not my preferred language, which would be Ukrainian (Slava Ukraini! Geroiam Slava!), but at the top of the page I tend to have the title as written in whatever language the film was made in, or by, or for.

That would be a confusing thing to do in this instance. So this is a film made by an Italian director, but it’s about the plight of two Senegalese boys trying to emigrate to Europe, and they speak, mostly, Wolof, French, a bit of English and an even tinier bit of Italian.

So I have no idea what language is the “right” one for this flick to be titled in. I’m sticking with the title as written, as this was Italy’s submission to the Academy for Best International Feature Film for 2023 as Io Capitano, and thus it must stay.

I’m not entirely sure if that translates to “I, Captain" or "I am a captain”, or “I am the captain”, or if it’s a reference to the Tom Hanks nauseating thriller Captain Phillips, but I’m pretty sure it’s at least one of those options.

Its relevance only becomes apparent at the very end of the two stressful hours we spend with our protagonists.

And who are our protagonists? Two Senegalese boys called Seydou (Seydou Sarr) and Moussa (Moustapha Fall), who are convinced that their fortunes will be made if only they can get themselves to Europe. It doesn’t matter where in Europe, just Europe. They will make big fat wads of money and send it back to their families and also maybe get somewhere with their rapping and musical skills, to the point where white people will fight for their autographs!

(La Sociedad de la nieve)

dir: J. A. Bayona

2023

This is a story like few others. A heroic tale of survival against impossible odds. A level of dedication and bravery like hopefully none of us will ever experience.

And yet…

That it is a true story is the most remarkable aspect of it all. That, of the survivors who were picked up 72 days after their plane crashed in the Andes, most of them are still alive to this day is even more baffling.

But when you mention how they did it…

It’s okay to feel some conflicted feelings about it all. I know I do.

I watched this two and a half hour film, and I enjoyed it immensely, despite the fact that it is about something unbelievably terrible that I can barely mention without feeling ill.

There is something about survival stories that I think we all respond to (well, those of us that can stomach the more grotesque details), because most of us want to survive, are alive, and want to stay that way. And we’re thrilled by the idea of people (standing in for ourselves) sacrificing life and limb in order to keep others safe or alive, whether they love them, are related to them, or not.

The more extreme the environment, the more likely that death will come for all, the more heightened the emotions involved, the more of a vicarious thrill on the audience’s part(?)

And environments don’t get more inhospitable, more extreme that the top of a mountain in the Andes, in the 1970s.

dir: Cord Jefferson

2023

American Fiction is a lot of film. I guess it’s lots of two lots; a lot of a family drama, and a lot of a satirical take on the state of, you guessed it, American literary fiction.

But really, what it is, is funny. It’s a pretty funny film. I got genuine laughs out of this flick, and it’s not billed as a comedy. I got more laughs out of this than No Hard Feelings, the recent Mean Girls update or even Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, which had to have been a comedy, because otherwise…

In terms of its satirical components, its target is mainly well-meaning “white” liberals who through a mixture of condescension and egotistical imagined empathy end up being more racist towards African-Americans than even the dumbest red-hatted Trump voter. Right from the start as our main character is shown in class at the university where he lectures, Thelonious “Monk” Ellison is being castigated by a student because of the presence of a certain word on the whiteboard.

They’re analysing the short stories of Flannery O’Connor. One of those short stories happens to be The Artificial N-----. Now, I don’t particularly love the word either, but it is the short story’s name. Thelonious is African-American, and a writer, and lecturer, and the student complaining, saying that even seeing the word causes her distress, is, for lack of a better descriptor, white. When she persists in her complaints, Thelonious tells her that he got over whatever trauma the word represents, so she could too.

Naturally, she wants to have a word with his manager, being the Karen-in-training that she is, and complains to the university hierarchy. She - let’s not gloss over this, took offence on behalf of African-Americans, including the ones in her class, including her lecturer - when they themselves in that context weren’t offended.

dir: Jonathan Glazer

2023

What is this film?

Whatever it is, it has very little in common with the book by Martin Amis that it’s supposedly based on.

I am pretty sure this is a horror film, one in which you never see the Holocaust itself, but you watch the people ‘enjoying’ its benefits adjacent to it. To be awfully glib, it’s like watching a version of Jaws where you never see the shark, or the shark’s victims, or even go on the water, but you spend all your time with the mayor of Amity Island and his wife, keeping the beaches open for fun and profit, going about their daily routines, looting stuff from the victim’s belongings, living their best lives.

It feels wrong to joke about such things, but all the same, if I’m not too offended, I might just uncancel myself and continue.

I’m not going to go into how the flick starts, because it’s all part of Glazer’s intention to not let us get comfortable at any time, but when there’s actual people on screen, it could be the Von Trapp family on summer holidays from The Sound of Music. The beauty of nature, them with all their super pale Aryan skin, enjoying their time outdoors. Quality family time spent together. No devices whatsoever.

Then they go home. What a nice house, what a happy, comfortable family. Lots of kids, lots of servants to help run the household, keep everything ship shape, gardeners to help in the garden. Nothing out of place, no one goes wanting.

Work / life balance wasn’t a well-known concept during the Third Reich and the Holocaust, but the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps is better placed than most in the messy work of genocide by having his villa located just outside the walls of the death factory. He and his family never have to see the unspeakable, unending, unbelievable horror that is occurring right next door.

But, like us, they hear it, but unlike us, they have to act like they hear nothing at all as they go about their idyllic lives.

dir: Andrew Haigh

2023

A boy loses his parents when he is too young. It arrests his emotional development in shocking ways, gives him a wound he never recovers from.

He may grow up eternally aching for their approval, which he can never get, because they’re dead, so he punishes himself (by keeping himself isolated), punishes others (by pushing them away) in order to somehow make up for that profound lack in his life. It’s a self-made, self-sustaining hook that he cannot let himself get off from.

But enough about every version of Batman that’s ever been made.

All of Us Strangers follows the story of a man called Adam (Andrew Scott) navigating (or not) his way through life, hoping for benediction or a blessing where none is forthcoming. He lives alone in an apartment in a sparsely occupied tower. It might be a new construction, because there’s only one other chap living there on a different floor, apparently.

That guy, Harry (Paul Mescal), tries to connect with Adam, but he’s drunk, and Adam’s not taking visitors. Adam is shy and retiring, and retreats at all times.

He retreats so much that he travels back to the place where he grew up, somewhere south of London. He wanders around old haunts, even to an area that kinda looks like a beat, have to say. And a certain distance away, he spies a smiling, mustachioed man, who seems to know him, or at least like him.

Adam follows him and ends up at his childhood home. It looks exactly the same as the photo he carries of the place. Even has the family car in the same spot, and his little bike.

Mum and Dad are home, looking younger than ever (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell), and welcome him in for a chat. He is astounded to see them, as one would expect, since his parents died in a car crash when Adam was 12, and he’s in his late forties now. He’s older than his parents, somehow.

Given a gift like this by the universe, why would you question it. He takes the opportunity to speak to his parents a little bit about the present, but mostly about the past, the long ago past, the past before he lost them.

dir: Eddie Alcazar

2023

Yeah…nah.

If this had come out 40 years ago, it might have become a cult classic. Since it came out last year, well, it’s just an odd, somewhat pointless pre-emptive artefact.

An old crazy scientist (Scott Bakula) talks about creating something that will give people immortality, if he can just crack it, crack something, some part of the equation.

That doesn’t work. But he has two sons, and one of them grows up to be Stephen Dorff. You remember, Hollywood megahunk Stephen Dorff? He played the villain in the original Blade movie? I’m sure he’s done something since then, though not sure what.

Anyway, he’s still around. He’s still relatively fit. Why shouldn’t he work?

He, too, is a scientist, but he’s advanced the ‘cure’ for aging beyond what his father achieved. It’s a product, called Divinity, and it’s sold in perfume-like bottles to the slavering masses.

It makes men gigantic and throbbing with muscles. It keeps women lithe and wrinkleless.

But either it’s making everyone sterile, or everyone is sterile anyway, because reasons.

Stephen Dorff’s character is called Jaxxon Pierce. When I was watching the flick, I just thought that they were saying “Jackson”, and it did not bother me. But when I looked it up, and saw the two Xs, my heart sank. Because that’s just terrible.

dir: George C Wolfe

2023

I’m all for biopics about relatively obscure but important figures in history. When they’re really obscure then we don’t have a pre-conceived idea of what they should be like.

I guess that’s the main difference between doing a biopic about Bob Marley, as in the recent flick One Love, which seems to be universally hated by film critics, versus something like this flick, being Rustin, which has, at best, been tepidly received, is familiarity.

I go in with no preconceptions, having never heard of the man outside of the context of this flick and the Oscar nomination for the chap who plays the main character. Colman Domingo plays Bayard Rustin like he’s got nothing to lose and like he doesn’t care if we like him or the character or not.

And that’s a good thing. At the start we see that Mr Rustin is close to the prominent people in the civil rights movement, including a certain Reverend, but that for some of the old guard, the power players, like the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock) or Congressman Powell (Jeffrey Wright), don’t like him at all.

And why is that? Is it because he isn’t performing in his job? Is it because he’s not passionate about fighting for the betterment of society through improving the lot of African-Americans? Is it the hairstyle?

Nah. It’s because he’s gay.

(60 Minuten)

dir: Oliver Kienle

2024

This isn’t a review of the venerable current affairs program, because that would be really strange.

“5/10 would not recommend. Exists solely as corrupt tool of capitalist establishment to normalise hideous abuses of corporate class.”

No, this is a brand new German film starring some young MMA fighter playing a young MMA fighter who has to get from one suburb of Berlin to a different suburb of Berlin within an hour.

He’s not a courier, he’s not a delivery driver; he’s just a guy who will get attacked a bunch of times until he nearly gets there.

There is some running involved. This is not Run Lola Run by any stretch of the imagination.

Does…does anyone even remember Run Lola Run anymore? I mean, I guess that was more than twenty years ago now.

Fucking hell. Time flies even when you’re not having fun.

This isn’t in league with that earlier Tom Tykwer classic, either thematically or aesthetically, but it’s hard not to think of it.

dirs: Nick Bruno & Troy Quane

2023

I have been on a bit of an animated kick lately, and seeing this was an absolutely utterly enjoyable blast.

I think it came out on streaming several months ago, and though I was curious, I held off because there were so many other important things to see, sometimes in black and white, with adult people doing important adult things like murder the indigenous or invent the atom bomb or conduct some orchestra and have sex with hot young guys.

So, with all that important homework / eat yer vegetables out of the way, it means I’m free to watch some enjoyable, actually enjoyable movies for a change.

I tell a lie. This too has been nominated for an Academy award, presumably in the Best Animated category, so I thought I’d watch it now before the stupid awards that don’t mean anything.

I shouldn’t have waited this long. I think my major beef against it was having heard it was significantly different story-wise from the graphic novel by ND Stephenson that it’s based on.

It is different, but it’s not to its detriment, which is not to say that it’s better than the book, but maybe just as good as the book. The main characters are pretty much the same, with the overall premise altered a lot to tell a similar but maybe a more 90 minute movie friendly story?

Unlike the other animated flick I saw recently which probably would have sunk without a trace had it been released in cinemas with a wide release, this here flick Nimona would probably also have sunk without trace, but it would have at least looked fantastic on the big screen. It’s superbly animated and belts along at a cracking pace. Nimona (Chloe Grace Moritz) is a phenomenal character who is or can look like whatever she wants – a whale, a mouse or a people person like person. The world in which this story transpires is kinda like our contemporary world technology wise, if not futuristic, but the aesthetic is knights and lords and ladies and armour and swords and shit like that, but the swords shoot lasers if they want. What even is this setting?

Anatomie d’une chute

dir: Justine Triet

2023

Anatomy of a Fall is an odd film if what you think you’re getting is a crime / legal drama, which would be a reasonable assumption based on how it’s presented. And it won a bunch of awards, so you’d also think, since it’s a French film, that it must be all classy and shit.

But for a French film, there’s a surprising amount of dialogue in English. And the lead character is German. No one else speaks German, so she has to speak French, begrudgingly, and English when she can get away with it.

Which is, like, all of the time. I don’t pretend to know much about the French, but I do know two things: they laugh when non-French people try to speak French, and they pretend not to know English when people try to jabber at them without resorting to French.

And yet everyone seems cool with it, even her eleven year old son Daniel, who speaks no English whatsoever.

Strange vibes. But that’s not what the film is about. It’s on the surface about what happened to cause her husband Samuel to fall out of a window to his death.

On a deeper level maybe it’s about whether, if she did do it, was it an understandable thing to do? If not justifiable?

We spend a lot of time in a French court room, so the profound differences between their model and the ones we have in Britain or Australia are on display. As in another recentish film I watched mostly set in a French courtroom, being Saint Omer, the differences between the adversarial system we have in Australian courts and the inquisitorial system they have in France couldn’t be more stark.

To put it more simply, they say some crazy shit in court which wouldn’t fly in this hemisphere, let me tell you.

dir: Sean Charmatz

2024

It is a relief for me to have watched and be reviewing a movie in which Charlie Kaufman has some involvement (in the screenplay), and to not be talking about what a disappointment it is, and how the great promise of his early scripts has given way to current and future dread.

But I can unequivocally say I enjoyed this flick, probably because Kaufman didn’t direct it.

Orion and the Dark is an animated movie aimed at kids, yes, but that shouldn’t stop people from watching it even if their kids are now too old to enjoy them.

Just, you know, watch it on a streaming service, not on your (adult) own in an actual cinema, like some weirdy weirdo.

No kids, no entry. Anyway, this isn’t even pretending to be top shelf animation with broad four quadrant demographic appeal. It might say “Dreamworks”, but I think they handballed most of the work to a smaller French animation studio, which is fine.

I have no background on this but this feels a lot like something that was made during the various lockdowns by people in their bedrooms / home offices. It doesn’t feel like seamless, streamlined pure product pumped out by an efficient machine, and is the better for it.

As such it’s not trying to push the technical boundaries of CGI animation whatsoever. All the quality is in the script and the vocal performances, which I thought were really solid. Especially since they somehow and somewhy roped in Werner Herzog for a brief and baffling moment.

And what is it about?

It’s about a kid called Orion who’s anxious about everything. Absolutely everything. And it’s not just a charming level of neuroticism (if such a thing still exists, or ever existed), it’s a paralysing, crippling level of anxiety.

It’s overwhelming, and it impedes his ability to enjoy life, and it impedes his understanding but exhausted parents, who also don’t get to sleep.

dir: Bradley Cooper

2023

Well, hey! Did you want to watch a film directed by Bradley Cooper? Starring Bradley Cooper? Playing a real life person-type person? That isn’t A Star is Born?

Were you desperately curious to learn about the life and times of Leonard Bernstein? THE Leonard Bernstein? As played by Bradley Cooper?

With a big honking prosthetic nose? One so large and honking that it makes him nasally and sound nothing like Bernstein?

Oi, you. Respect the nose, no mocking, no more shenanigans and no more tomfoolery. That nose previously won Nicole Kidman an Academy Award in The Hours where she played renowned writer and river-enjoyer Virginia Woolf. That nose has won more awards than Paul Giamatti.

And clearly Mr Cooper was convinced that this production and that nose were going to win him the Oscar that he covets so much. We are months away from that vaunted awards night, but I am telling you now, Mr Cooper, you ain’t going to win. You have put all your eggs and your nose in the one basket, believing that playing a real person, and a beloved one at that (maybe 50 years ago), would clinch it for you.

But there’s no way you are going to beat Cillian Murphy for Oppenheimer. Sorry, I don’t make the rules. That is a biopic. That has long stretches of black and white too, and it’s three hours long, meaning it’s very important. Your film, on the other hand, is only two hours and ten minutes long, therefore it’s not anywhere near as important.

dir: Mahalia Belo

2023

Where does it end? For any of us, for all of us? And do we get to start again?

The post-apocalyptic as a setting in television and movies has probably taken over almost every other possible setting or genre trappings, to now be the dominant format for all art forever more.

Usually, though, the reason is zombies and variations thereof. Last year’s The Last of Us was all people could talk about for about 10 weeks, at least the very online people were talking about it. And that had mushrooms as the culprit.

The End We Start From is a tiny bit of a play on words, which probably works on a number of levels. But it’s not really a post-apocalyptic scenario.

A major weather event, which is a euphemism in itself, occurs over and around London. London and surrounds get flooded. As this is happening, a woman goes into labour.

That woman (Jodie Comer) is desperately trying to get in contact with her husband (Joel Fry) and get to a hospital as their ground floor flat starts flooding.

Beautiful baby is born during the flood. Naturally, Noah is suggested as a possible name for him. I think they settle on either Zed or Zeb, not entirely sure.

Well, phew, you’d think the hard part is behind them. A cute anecdote to tell the kid when they grow up.

dir: Paul Schrader

2023

Get this: a recent film about an isolated weirdo who writes in a diary, leads a quiet, austere life and who eventually does something violent.

Have you figured out which movie I’m talking about? Obviously it would make a lot of sense if I were talking about Master Gardener, it being Paul Schrader’s most recent movie.

But let’s be honest, it’s the same plot of every movie Paul Schrader has ever been involved with dating back to Taxi Driver.

More recently he’s made a trilogy of films about men sitting in rooms writing in journals. It seems like he’s really dead-set against men journaling. Like it’s really bad or something. Those three flicks are First Reformed which starred Ethan Hawke, The Card Player which starred Oscar Isaac, and this here film, which stars Australia’s Own Joel Edgerton as a guy who keeps a diary. They are three films about three guys who would rather murder a bunch of people, or harm themselves than ever get therapy or mental health support from anyone. They cannot deal with guilt, or frustration, and so they set themselves apart from the world before they lash out at it, sometimes catastrophically.

Here Edgerton plays a guy called Narvel Roth. Narvel dresses very prim and properly. Always looks very sharp. Always keeps his arms and neck covered. Hmm. Wonder what that’s about.

He is the master gardener of the title, running a very tight ship at some southern estate that you just know used to be a plantation and definitely had slaves at some point.

The owner of the manor is an imperious sort, and Narvel is very deferential to her and her expectations. She is a lethally dangerous sort of dowager duchess called Norma, played ably by Sigourney Weaver.

dir: Joe Lynch

2023

I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t this.

Another example of why it’s bad to have expectations. You’ll always be disappointed if you expect something.

It’s probably better than I give it credit for, it’s just that, wow, it’s a clear reminder that I don’t get to see a lot of flicks like this these days, and, uh, with good reason.

Suitable Flesh is such a tasty title. It held out to me a promise of perhaps Cronenbergian body horror, or something malign and freaky like the early films of Stuart Gordon.

Eh, nothing so fancy or highfalutin as that. This would have gone straight to video back in the day, it has a surprising amount of sex scenes, and I think there was some saxophone playing during those scenes.

I guess the people in this flick don’t mind. They know what they’re in. This has the production values of something from the Hallmark or Lifetime Movie Channel, but with a better cast, to some extent, but very little money. The premise is slightly freaky, and it’s loosely based on a HP Lovecraft short story, but really it’s in the service of a mediocre plot and some fairly comical visuals.

But if you enjoy watching attractive people pretend to have sex, well, there’s plenty of that.

dir: Martin Scorsese

2023

Three and a half hours…

Everyone has better things to do than watch three and a half hour films in one sitting. I know some people watched this in cinemas originally, but, let’s be honest: Martin Scorsese himself wouldn’t be able to sit through this flick in one setting.

How do I know that? Well, if you’ve spent time with men in their 80s, or looked after a man in his 80s, you know there’s no way they’re sitting there for that long without needing help to the amenities at least 3 or four times.

And Scorsese, gods love him, is in his 80s. He has lost none of his abilities as a director telling big, complex stories in the widest, most maximalist ways possible, with the longest possible running times. Of course, this being a true story that focuses on a massive conspiracy of vicious jerks, committing so many crimes including and especially involving so many murders, it’s not unlike the films he’s most famous for, being his beloved mafia epics like Goodfellas, Casino and The Last Temptation of Christ.

You already know if you have the capacity for these late era Scorsese movies. A good bet is if you actually sat through the entirety of The Irishman without napping multiple times.

If so, you deserve a cookie, and you probably already watched this in a theatre. Good for you.

dir: Nia DaCosta

2023

Maybe this flick doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but then none of them really do.

I can’t imagine that there were millions of people clamouring for this. Just a small subset (fans of Captain Marvel and Ms Marvel in comic book form, or the first Captain Marvel movie) of a subset (Marvel comic book fans), and those who enjoyed the mostly excellent Ms Marvel Disney+ series.

But they did it, and so we’re here. For whatever reasons (I don’t remember why, and I only watched the flick yesterday), at the end of the last episode of Ms Marvel, I think Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani) sneezes or something, and Captain Marvel / Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) appears in her place, in her bedroom in New Jersey. How perplexing!

This flick extends on from that, with Kamala, Danvers and Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), who knew Danvers when she was a child, swapping places whenever they use their magical powers.

I don’t know if it’s a great hook or not, in fact, one could argue that it’s a terrible hook, but I guess it’s necessary in order to force the team up they require, which is the three of them working together to save... various worlds including Earth.

The various worlds… there are two other planets that pretty much get destroyed. I don’t even think that constitutes a spoiler, because the movie doesn’t seem to worry about it afterwards either.

dir: Kitty Green

2023

The film festival of “Australians are terrible” continues, except now it’s updated to 2023.

Yes, what I did was recently watch and write about a classic Australian film about people in shitty mining towns being appalling human beings and drinking themselves stupid out of sadism, masochism, boredom and existential dread. That film was Wake in Fright, and it’s about as nasty a depiction of what a lot of true blue, dinky di, fair go, Aussie Battlers were like 50 years ago, and will be 50 years into the future, unless the sweet meteor of Death wipes us all out or that orange pile of earwax achieves the highest office of the land in his country of origin yet again.

And now, The Royal Hotel is the special of the day, the main course of a movie depicting how shitty Australians are (mostly men but women too) to each other but especially to women. Backpacker women. Canadian (allegedly) women. But women, especially.

Two young “Canadians” (they’re really not, but they think everyone hates Americans) party in Sydney like it’s 1999, or until their cash runs out. Visa conditions being what they are, they find work at a remote pub many hours west of Sydney, so far away that it’s South Australia. As far as I could tell there’s a pub, and a mine, and an endless supply of shitty men to hassle them, and nothing else.

Hugo Weaving, playing somewhat against type, since in recent roles he’s been more of a kinder, gentler kind of guy, plays one of the roughest and nastiest types of Hugo Weaving roles that I’ve seen in ages. And he played Agent Smith for crying out loud.

He is abrasive and shocking as the publican, well, shocking to the girls, and he’s not even trying to be that much of a prick to them. Unlike many of the pieces of shit pub owners I’ve come to know and loathe over the years, he’s not even the one directly sexually harassing the female staff. But he does see it as a condition of employment that the girls be pliable and all ‘golly gee oh you’ as they constantly get harassed by the patrons.

The explanation of which beers are which, and how that corresponds to buttons on the register, is a classic piece of workplace fuckery, of something that makes perfect sense to those who know the system, but means absolutely nothing to a newbie.

1971

Jeez, what a bunch of stinking flaming mongrels us Aussies were.

Wake in Fright in no uncertain terms establishes what a bunch of drunks and wasters populated the country before the quality children of the baby boomers came along and improved things immeasurably in the 80s and 90s.

Before that, well, fucking hell. Hell on earth both literally and figuratively. The place the wretched go in order to get their divine punishment.

I wanted to start this review by trying to argue that this isn’t really an Australian film anyway, but I feel like my argument ran out of steam before it started. I was going to argue that a film directed by a Canadian starring a British guy (Gary Bond) and co-starring another British guy (Donald Pleasance) was about as Australian as Madonna trying to do a Queensland accent, or Kylie Minogue trying to do a genteel English accent. But I can’t get past the fact that it’s based on a book written by an Australian author, being Kenneth Cook, who clearly saw how wretched the people of Broken Hill were back in the day. Certainly not now. I’m sure all Broken Hill’s residents are driving around in convertibles wearing monocles and top hats while smoking cigarettes out of fancy cigarette holders.

Or maybe it’s all meth and vaping these days, hard to know for sure.

This flick feels like it’s filmed on an alien planet, even to someone who’s been to these kinds of places, and been thrown out of those kinds of salt of the earth pubs, who’s never spent a cent on two-up or the pokies, but who’s drunk a fair few million pots of beer, and even, to my admitted shame, gone spotlighting and shot at the local fauna.

But even I watch this flick unable to believe what I’m watching, even as I’ve seen this kind of lifestyle firsthand.

황야
Hwang-ya

dir: Heo Myung-haeng

2024

The title of Badland Hunters is so generic, so unmemorable, that I hoped the actual literal translation of the Korean title was going to be something like “Big Guy punches the Apocalypse”, but it didn’t pan out that way. The literal translation is something like “Wilderness”, which is equally unmemorable.

You can’t always get what you want. But beyond a meaningful title, I didn’t want much. About the most I expected was that South Korean action star Ma Dong-seok would punch some people really hard.

I need not have worried. Even though the action sometimes relies on Nam-san (Ma Dong-seok) chopping some creatures or bad guys up with a scary looking machete, or shooting people with a shotgun (the promo poster for the movie has him aiming a shotgun at the audience, which gave me some pause), but rest assured the filmmakers knew exactly why the audience has come along to this flick: to watch him punch people really, really hard.

I also thought that a post-apocalyptic scenario wouldn’t lend itself immediately to punchy-punchy action. It’s usually supercharged V8 Interceptors and guys with guitars that double as flamethrowers. And, yes, most of Nam-san’s opponents are soldiers with rifles and lots of other guns, which is somewhat unusual, in my limited experience of South Korean flicks. But whenever there’s been too much gunplay, Nam-san’s opponents just seem to forget they have guns, and also politely array themselves so that Nam-san can kill them or knock them out one by one.

Very considerate of them. This flick is kind of insane, but it’s an almost reasonable level of insanity.

Three years in the past, there was a massive earthquake. Like, really bad earthquake in Seoul. It destroyed almost every building except one, which is called The Apartment. I had hoped it was a reference to the Billy Wilder classic The Apartment, which starred Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon, but I was just setting myself up for disappointment yet again.

I fully acknowledge that earthquakes can be terrible. They can kill thousands of people. At no stage is there an explanation as to why a bad earthquake ends civilisation in all of South Korea, or the rest of the world such that no-one comes to help during that entire time.

And there really should have been a reference to a catastrophic earthquake devastating North Korea and somehow also improving their quality of life in comparison to what they had before.

dir: Kristoffer Borgli

2023

Dream Scenario seems like it would be something good, something like the good movies people made with Spike Jonze back in the day. Also, it would be either scripted by Charlie Kaufman or someone would be playing a more pathetic version of Charlie Kaufman (or even his more confident twin brother Donnie). In case you, dear reader, are a young person, I am referring to the ancient film Adaptation and…that came out so long ago, now.

It sounds like an intriguing premise: a guy starts appearing in people’s dreams. Not just people who know him, but people everywhere.

The guy is Paul Matthews (Cage): a balding middle-aged professor of evolutionary biology. For once Cage does not overact in this role. If anything, he leans into the sad-sack patheticness of this chap, and plays him as needy, whiny and defensive. You know, like most older people.

People sleep, they dream, and then Paul appears, just standing around, not doing anything. If people are in danger in their dreams, Paul doesn’t do anything about it, or help in any way, or do anything, really. He’s just passively there. Not even observing their suffering. Just…standing around.

How is this happening? Why is this happening? Well, think of some reason, and go with it, because that’s the most you’re ever going to get with regards to an explanation.

Well, will they do anything amusing with it?

Mileage significantly varies between audience members, don’t it?

dir: Christopher Nolan

2023

Oppenheimer is everything you expect from a Christopher Nolan film, right down to your ears bleeding because the sound is mixed so loud that you suspect he wants to deafen audiences worldwide just for shits and giggles, or to get back at us for not liking Tenet that much.

Or at least convince them that what they are lucky enough to be watching is the single most important film they’ve watched since the last Christopher Nolan film.

It’s hard to argue that it’s not an important story, in that whatever this Oppenheimer guy did, it changed the world and killed countless people. It changed the geopolitical order and ushered in the atomic age, which was, I guess, a good thing(?) This movie, which is three fucking hours long, makes the case that the man was brilliant, was an absolute pussyhound (I’m sorry, it’s a crass, anachronistic phrase, but I can’t think of a better modern equivalent), and he felt just terrible after helping bring atomic weapons into the world.

At the very least he felt quite conflicted. Ambivalent, even.

Three hours…three fucking hours. I wish I could cleanly and decisively delineate those three hours into three distinct parts. I can’t, really. The whole movie flits back and forth between multiple time lines, because we all know the harshest insult Nolan fears is being called a basic bitch who makes chronologically linear movies with clear timelines.

Not for him. Not for Christopher Nolan. Nuh-huh.

dirs: David Bruckner, Scott Derrickson, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Natasha Kermani & Mike P. Nelson

2023

The V/H/S franchise has had, I think, 6 entries thus far, and I have to say I think this is the best of the lot of them, or at least of the ones I have seen. I am not a horror film scholar (I shudder to think of what such a person would look and smell like), nor am I paid for my highly valuable insights and opinions on the internet, so I don’t have to be exhaustive in everything I do.

I basically just watch and review stuff that piques my curiosity.

V/H/S/85 succeeds, partly at least, because of the abandonment sporadically of its found footage conceit. I don’t care about the origin of footage – I don’t need for there to always be someone filming stuff (on a bulky and clunky 80s video camera, in this anthology’s context), and someone perpetually yelling at the ‘person’ filming to stop filming before, during and after something terrible starts happening. But by the same token it does add a different energy to what we’re watching sometimes. At other times, the absurdity of someone who’s being shot at or eaten by some horrific creature still managing to keep the camera relatively steady takes you out of whatever you’re watching and tells you you’re an idiot for suspending your disbelief in the first place.

Also, the segments are significantly different from each other, thematically and action-wise, even as they’re linked by a time period, aesthetics and the deliberate ‘corruption’ of the medium, being, the look and feel of degraded magnetic tape video, accumulated in almost a palimpsest of footage recorded over footage recorded over footage. Interspersed between the different segments is an overarching story which I was very dubious about each time it would pop up, which is (deliberately) so cheesy and hacky that it gives off Z-grade direct-to-video, but when I realised that it was a shaggy dog story when I saw the punch line, I do admit to laughing out loud.

It was a brief laugh, dear reader. After all, this is not a comedy anthology. This is horror.

Respect for the fallen.