fresh movie reviews for a socially distanced world

dir: Greta Gerwig

2023

It’s a testament to either the surprising quality of this flick, or the extent of my gullibility, that I actually found myself enjoying this flick despite myself. Well, not despite myself, that sounds like I went in not wanting to like it (like a lot of male critics seemed to make a point of in all their reviews).

Maybe because I’m secure enough in myself, or maybe the content of big budget flicks rarely has anything to do with my emotional state, but for whatever reasons I, as a man, enjoyed this strange movie and didn’t in any way feel like it diminished my inherent awesomeness or took anything away from me, including any of the additional 28 cents per dollar I am usually paid compared to my nearest female equivalent.

Radical, I know. If I had any misgivings about this flick it’s that with people like Noah Baumbach and the actual director, Greta Gerwig involved, it could have made for a horrible experience (for me).

Last time they collaborated, the flick was called White Noise, and it was based on a Don DeLillo novel, and it was a horrible time inflicted on everyone, at nearly three hours as well, and I’m still mad about it.

I had no idea what they were going to do here, but whatever it actually is, it worked for me.

I have already diminished Gerwig’s work here unintentionally: I’m not implying Baumbach secretly wrote or directed anything – she’s plenty talented enough to have already directed a bunch of flicks. They are partners in real life too, so there’s nothing unlikely about them being able to collaborate in the truest sense of the word – incorporating some ideas, discarding others because they might not gel properly.

I have no idea what thought process they went through putting this frankly bizarre film and cultural phenomenon together. I don’t think it was ever guaranteed that this flick was going to succeed as it has, because I don’t think even the most drug addled executives at Mattel or Warner Brothers could have imagined it was going to literally make billions of dollars.

People who I know for a fact weren’t going to cinemas even pre-Covid went to see this flick. My kid, their partner and their friends ALL went to see this flick together.

I had co-workers who went and saw the flick, barely able to articulate how much they didn’t like it or why, and yet the same chumps went and saw Oppenheimer and couldn’t shut up about what a genius Christopher Nolan must be for hours on end.

dir: André Øvredal

2023

How do you do a new movie version of Dracula without telling people it’s about Dracula? You do what they did here, and don’t even mention his name, just like several years ago where Ron Howard made a new film version of Moby-Dick without telling anyone, and called it In the Heart of the Sea.

I would also further go on to argue that a title that generic helps no-one, absolutely no-one. I have a particular dislike for these recent titles for things that are simultaneously very specific and very abstract at the same time.

I am still trying to wrap my head around All the Light We Cannot See. Yes, I get what it means in the context of the story (blind woman in Nazi France, radio waves), but on the other hand, who fucking cares? And we can’t see it, because it’s not light.

That’s a different fight, a different pointless battle to get energised over. The Last Voyage of the Demeter, is a very specific title about a place, being a ship, that presumably never sails again. We are meant to ask ourselves “Um, I wonder what happened to the Demeter and its crew?”

Well, we get to find out, if we can make it through a stylish two hour horror flick. The film starts with the stately, portentous titles that inform us what we are about to watch is taken from the logbook of the Captain of the Demeter, but then it spoils the illusion, the necessary suspension of disbelief, by telling us that it’s a chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

If you’ve ever read it, you would know how different it is from the chapters that come before and after. The gothic potboiler aspects of the rest of the novel are contrasted with the difference in approach that arises from the difference in perspective. Captain Elliot, the captain keeping the log, hasn’t read the preceding chapters, and doesn’t know what’s going on. We know, but it’s a complete mystery to him for most of the chapter.

dir: Anna Zlokovic

2023

Appendage, despite the name, which sounds like a prequel to Boogie Nights, is funny and horrifying in appropriate measure, and works in ways and on levels that Cobweb, the horror flick I saw just before it, never does.

This flick works more on a close-up, bonkers queasy physical level, because at first at least it’s about an anxious and stressed out person physically reacting to all the bullshit life throws up for us on a daily basis. We’re not talking about anything radically inventive or brand new – there are countless movies and stories about people and their darker selves, the shadow self that Carl Jung constantly banged on about; the Jekyll and Hyde nature of humanity.

This flick though…

Hanna (Hadley Robinson) is young, and yet stressed the fuck out. She has a wonderful boyfriend (Brandon Mychal Smith), a job as a fashion designer with an acclaimed atelier, an intense best friend (Kauser Mohammed) that she also works with, and she’s blonde, young and white in America. What could she possibly have to complain about?

Well, you know, sorry to have to mansplain things to you, but however matters may look on the surface of people’s lives, none of that necessarily prevents or alleviates the potential impact of trauma, of depression or anxiety on any individual.

The body keeps the score, or so the saying goes. Hanna’s nervous tics in the face of the instances of frustration or disappointment seem to be escalating, and regardless of her polite and pleasant outward demeanour, her insides are roiling, and she is struggling.

And something seems like it’s growing out of her left side, out of her birthmark.

dir: Samuel Bodin

2023

Cobweb is… less than great, in fact it’s not even close to great.

It barely approaches adequate. Which is a shame. Promising premise devolves into derivative dumbness, like most uninspired horror flicks. Like most flicks, probably.

In the run up to Halloween I will doubtless see a stack of horror flicks, some of which will have Halloween as an element or as a setting. Few will be (I hope) as poorly realised as this one.

Peter (Woody Norman) is a frightened, delicate boy, perfect for a role like this. He has pale skin, gigantic brown eyes and curly brown hair. Yes, he could probably perfectly play a role as Frodo in an inevitable Lord of the Rings remake.

He is (rightly) bullied at school, and his home life isn’t much grander. But whatever happens during the day, his nights are plagued with the inexplicable. He hears a tapping on his bedroom wall, sometimes he hears words being whispered.

His parents aren’t much help. The frazzled, brittle mother (Lizzie Caplan) is high pitched and hysterical even before things go wrong. The father is played by Antony Starr, so anyone who watched the Amazon series The Boys where he plays Homelander knows already that the character will clearly be some version of a charming psychopath.

Less charming, more psychopath. With everything that’s going wrong, Peter suspects that he can’t really trust his parents because, over-protective and violent as they are, they are clearly afraid of something.

One of those things that they’re afraid of clearly should be Child Protective Services, because her fragile Suzy Homemaker bullshit, which never makes a lot of sense since this is set contemporarily and that shit is from the 1950s, isn’t going to cut it. Both parents act like off chops long before there are any reveals, or any reasons given for why they might be acting like this.

The dad especially acts like a barely restrained lunatic right from the start.

dir: Kelly Reichardt

2023

Hmm.

I am not really sure who this film is for.

You could say that about many of Kelly Reichardt’s films, and I’m not saying that to invalidate her approach or sound dismissive. They’re just… idiosyncratic films.

Lizzy (Michelle Williams) is a middle-aged artist. She sculpts figurines, of women.

And that’s pretty much it. We watch her process, watch her sculpting, watch her take her sculptures out of the kiln, sometimes mount them on stands, stare at them with a critical eye, and...

Does a film need to be more than that? I guess it depends on what you expect out of a movie-going experience.

I think, maybe, this film asks a bit much of the viewer.

Set as it is where it is, it is a very low-key look at the everyday lives of a bunch of people. There’s no pretense that there is anything about these people that is that interesting. They just are who they are, and they do what they do.

There are lots of scenes of people either making their art, installing art for exhibition, or talking about upcoming shows, that you might think the flick is saying anything about art scenes in general or the art scene of Portland, Oregon, where this is set. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is a Kelly Reichardt film. She doesn’t tell you what to think about anything. She doesn’t even give you an inkling as to why she was interested enough to make the film about this art scene, because she’s not mocking it (that much) nor is she showing it up for the bunch of pretentious twats that you know must populate it.

dirs.: Daniel and Michael Philippou

2023

Wow. That first five minutes…

This flick starts with a deceptive scene. It has an energy completely different from the rest of the movie. A brother is trying to find his younger brother at a massive house party, calling out his brother’s name, and asking if anyone has seen Duckett.

At least I think it’s Duckett. As one guy yells in response, who the fuck is Duckett? Is that his first name? Why is he called Duckett? It can’t be his surname; why would he be calling his brother by his surname?

These questions will never be answered but will stay with me forever. That whole sequence is a continuous take, and it’s shocking, its climax is shocking, and then the rest of the flick transpires in a different way and in a different register, thank Christ.

And it’s all the better for it. A whole film like the first five minutes would have killed me.

Instead it becomes a much more relatable story about a kid who misses her mum indulging in the supernatural in order to avoid her obvious problems.

I mean, who hasn’t logged on to a Ouija board in a moment of weakness?

Maybe it’s more of a metaphor for disassociation or mental state altering drug use, but within the context of the flick at least, we know all the cool kids are into this latest trend, because everyone’s filming it and making TikToks out of it.

Two siblings have this weird ceramic hand. The experience is, you strap someone to a chair, they hold the hand, and say the fateful words “Talk to me”. Much to anyone’s shock, but not of the people watching this flick, a spirit appears before you. If you then say “I let you in”, for a period of time that’s not meant to exceed 90 seconds, that supernatural spirit inhabits your body, and gives you an incredible experience.

dir: Celine Song

2023

Past Lives, a semi-autobiographical story, is a lot of things to different people. If you want it to be the greatest film of the year, it can be. For you. It’s on a lot of film critics lists already.

The thing is, if you’re going to do that, say it’s one of the best films of the year, you’re really going to have to do yeoman’s work showing to the uninitiated *why* it’s so great.

Its charms, I would argue, are ineffable and hard to grasp. It is a really well-made film, with perfect performances. But it’s realised in such a personal way, one which doesn’t tell us what to think or how to feel about any particular scene, such that we impose our own feelings, our own impressions onto what we’re watching.

The film opens as three characters sit at a golden bar. A couple of voices, perhaps representing us, the viewers, try to theorise as to what’s going on over there. Are the Asian male and female a couple, or siblings, and who is the white guy next to them? An interloper? Why does he look so insecure and unhappy? Why does the female look so happy and energised, with those energies directed towards the other Asian guy, and deliberately physically turning her back on the other guy?

We are going to find out, but we’re still going to wonder. And yet (the woman) looks directly at us (down the camera), as if to challenge us, as if to say “you think you know what their story is, but you have no idea”.

Though it’s called Past Lives, this is not a supernatural romance about people finding each other over the course of multiple incarnations. In truth sometimes we get to live multiple lives even over the course of the one life we’re given.

dir: A.V. Rockwell

2023

Life is hard, whether it’s today or 1994 New York, if you’re an ex-con. Especially if you’ve burned every bridge, and lost custody of your child, who ends up in the welfare – foster system.

A Thousand and One puts us in the unenviable position of watching a character who often does the worst possible thing in a given situation, and still hope that she’ll be able to find a way to get by and get through. It’s a hard balancing act, because she’s a complex character, and she is certain she’s doing the right thing, but most people who do stuff that turns out awful are certain they’re doing the right thing.

Inez (the formidable Teyana Taylor) is just out of Riker’s, and has nothing, and no place to stay. It’s the early 90s, so we have multiple scenes of her using a phonebook to try and call people that might still take her in for a while. At something called a “phone booth”, with that accordion glass door and all.

Drifting back to her Brooklyn neighbourhood, there are as many people who remember her skills with a hot comb, finger weaves and box braids, as remember her for whatever landed her in jail again.

She’s spying on someone in the neighbourhood that she’s likely enjoined by law not to approach, a little guy she calls T (Aaron Kingsley Adetola), for Terry. He can’t even make eye contact with her, but he knows who she is. Life in foster care doesn’t seem to be that enjoyable, which results in Terry spending some time in hospital, which gives mother and son more of a chance to bond, somehow, despite Terry’s constant fear that she’s going to disappear again.

Inez herself is a product of the foster system. I should just call it “The System”. Later on she’ll refer to it as being the reason why she is so hard, so uncompromising, so brittle and fierce.

The boy speaks of his earliest memory, of being abandoned by his mother on a street corner. Inez is stunned, and aflame from this, and embarks on a course of action as unwise as it is heartfelt.

dir: Juel Taylor

2023

I feel like, considering the fact that no-one was ever going to see this anyway, they should have gone with “Oh No! Bro? They Cloned Tyrone!” as an alternate, if not better, title. I mean, it would have been terrible, with all that punctuation, but for some reason it could have been more fitting.

I thought this flick was hilarious. I loved it. It’s one of the funnier flicks that I’ve seen this year, and it’s a shame that it’s been relegated to the relative ghetto that is Netflix. It’s also funny to me that one of the lazier, dumber flicks I watched earlier this year, also on Netflix, also starring Jaimie Foxx, got nowhere near the same heights despite treading familiar genre ground (that waste of time was called Day Shift, in case you’re wondering).

If it feels like an amalgam, an accumulation of Blaxploitation elements, from the cookie-cutter characters, the slinky soundtrack that Curtis Mayfield would have enjoyed listening to (though he would have composed something way more exceptional), and dialogue and performances that wouldn’t have been out of place in flicks from Black Dynamite to I’m Going to Get You Sucker, that's because it is.

And even though it’s set contemporarily, there would be moments where one could be unsure as to whether it’s set now, twenty years ago, or twenty years before that. When Slick Charles yells about winning Pimp of the Year at the International Players Ball of 1995, you feel like saying “but that was 30 years ago bro…”

You might have assumed that the main character, or someone close to the main character, would be called Tyrone. You would be mistaken. If our flick here has a main man, a main character, it’s Fontaine (the great John Boyega).

Fontaine wakes up and goes about his day. He is an archetypal drug dealer. This is his world. It mostly seems to revolve around hassling people for the moneys he is owed, and assessing the dimensions of his empire. Though he does check in on his momma, calling through the door to see if she wants a sandwich.

She’s happy with her stories on the telly. Don’t know why he never opens the door?

dirs: Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson

2023

There is so much going on here.

Visually, this film, like its predecessor, pushes the possibilities of the medium (animation) by not just trying to replicate the aesthetics of the comic book format, but creating entirely new ways of displaying images, action, and the fluid transitions between them for the purposes of telling this story. And, yes, we are all completely getting sick of the multiverse stuff, but this flick manages to be extra-dimensional beyond that as well, having Miles and his mates fight in more than just four dimensions.

It's visually intense but on point, maybe a lot of it is for its own sake but there’s just so much going on, with a kind of go for broke energy, an almost terror of not getting every single brilliant idea represented, that it really asks a lot of the viewer. I’m not sure what the ideal state of mind or being is for watching this. It demands your attention, filling every frame with dense detail, and if you’re not in the right frame of mind I could see why this would be baffling / overwhelming.

And that beginning, my gods.

Miles Morales isn’t even in it for the first twenty minutes. It’s Gwen’s story up till that point. And what a story it tells, as she’s narrating to us, but alternating drumming with a band she quits and fighting an Italian Renaissance version of The Vulture, as well as finding out about some other Spider-Persons who travel through the dimensions trying to fix anomalies.

And there’s the fact that her Peter Parker died on her watch, after trying to get revenge on their version of Flash Thompson, after turning himself into The Lizard, and how her dad thinks she killed him.

Not “she” Gwen Stacy (Hailie Steinfield), but “she” Spider-Woman, the one with the white/pink hood and the ballet flats/Converse sneakers.

That intro is so good, both excellently written and delivered. And yet it’s just a part of a mosaic, one which is perhaps too complicated even for abject fans of the first film or the comic books.

Miles (Shameik Moore) is still only fifteen, and still having to keep his parents happy while he tries to balance school and his superheroics. His parents are all parent-y, so it’s the not unusual shenanigans of having to get to parent / teacher meetings, get celebratory cakes and battle the villain of the week, The Spot (Jason Schwartzman), who makes holes appear everywhere, and maintain his secret identity.

And he has to pine after Gwen, apparently.

dir: Nicole Holofcener

2023

Wah wah you hurt my feewings wah wah

No this isn’t the brutal takedown of contemporary morals and morays, millennial pieties or Gen Z or even Generation Alphas, and their woke sensitivities to not murder asylum seekers or torment endangered species or intersectionality bingo.

This flick is all about middle-aged white people! Being middle aged! And sensitive! With feelings!

Their feelings! Not your pathetic feelings. Their feelings!

If you aren’t familiar with the films of Nicole Holofcener, you may not be that interested in a new one of her films coming out. But if you’re a fan of her flicks, such as Friends with Money, Please Give, Enough Said, and now this one, you’re in for a treat.

Well, as much as a treat as you can expect from these low-key, subdued movies.

Enough Said was particularly enjoyable, not only for another wonderful performance by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but also as a gentle swan song for the great James Gandolfini, who died soon after. Best known for playing a raging psychopath mob boss in The Sopranos, Gandolfini got to go out in style playing a quiet, complex man who doesn’t have to strangle people to death in order to get his feelings across.

Louis-Dreyfus, if you like her, is just the gift that keeps on giving. Best known for playing Elaine in Seinfeld, with each film role and other show that she’s done she’s consistently shown that there’s so much more to her than any of the other hacks on that terribly watchable sitcom (with the possible exception of Jason Alexander, who also always had more depth than the show allowed him to show: Jerry and Kramer on the other hand? Nothing but surface).

This is not that much of a variation on her usual films, in terms of how it feels, rather than the themes. It’s still low stakes small potatoes stuff, but that’s the inherent pleasure of it.

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dir: Lee Sang-yong

2023

This film, with the most generic of titles, is the third in a series.

None of that matters.

Here, at least in a country outside of South Korea, the title is the ineffable The Roundup: No Way Out. The title is purest nonsense. There is no rounding up of anyone or anything. Nothing is rounded up or down. There are no horrible herbicides from Monsanto or Bayer sprayed on any plants during the course of the film. There is no Taking Down or Up of anything either. And there are multiple ways out. It could just as easily have been called The Takedown Roundup Countdown Electric Boogaloo Part Three

None of that matters.

It’s set mostly in Seoul and Incheon, and has to do with Korean and Japanese criminals fighting over some mythical drug, and killing a whole bunch of people, with plot machinations and double crosses and people wanting this or that.

Doesn’t matter.

The lead in this series of films is Ma Dong-seok. His cop character in these films is called Detective Ma Seok-do, which is everyone involved taking the piss. Ma Dong-seok also goes by Don Le, and is somehow one of the biggest stars of Korean action cinema. He was even in that darned Marvel Eternals movie that no-one liked.

The only thing that matters is that Detective Ma, a fat middle-aged guy who wears the same tracksuit throughout the entire film, punches people.

He punches them really hard. He punches them so hard that he can pretty much warp reality with the force of his mighty fists.

dir: Wes Anderson

2023

It’s okay!

There’s no way to review Wes Anderson films other than to say “If you like Wes Anderson’s fussy oeuvre, you probably will like this!!”. And the corollary absolutely must be true as well, in that haters of Wes Anderson won’t be any more won over by his bullshit here than ever before.

You might think there’s no point saying this stuff again and again with every (new) Wes Anderson review, but it bears repeating, mostly because his composition of scenes, visually fussy aesthetic and strict formalism does not vary from flick to flick, even when the aesthetics themselves and the themes and plots of his movies are significantly different each time (well, as much as is possible for him).

Also, not everyone knows what a film being a “Wes Anderson” flick even means. I find that beyond my own film nerdism, very few regular (normal, well adjusted) people remember the names of directors no matter how many films they watch. They know Spielberg, they know Scorsese, and that’s about it. Hundreds of films come out every year, most people never care about these details.

But I care. Okay, so of all the output this jerk is responsible for, this is as much part of his output as much as anything else is. In no way does it challenge his previous output. If anything it’s even more of a Wes Anderson film than usual: it is, after all, a formal exercise within a formal exercise, a play within a movie, within a play.

What’s the theme… well, stories within stories sounds awfully convoluted, but it doesn’t come across like that. It’s easy enough to follow, if you care.

I think there’s an element throughout the flick about men generally being disconnected from their feelings, leading to conversations between men who are hard pressed to admit how much they don’t care about each other. Or the widower who barely seems able to muster a hint of feeling towards his recently departed wife, and has delayed telling his kids of their mother’s passing for several weeks. He really doesn’t seem able to express anything, and doesn’t seem that bummed out by it.

dir: Travis Stevens

2022

A Wounded Fawn is not a predictable film, and that’s one of the things I liked about it the most. It is horror, definitely, but depending on how you look at it, it is less of the supernatural revenge thriller that it may look like, and a more straight-forward look at an awful man, and one of the women that he tries to prey upon.

Meredith (Sarah Lind) is recently out of an awful marriage, and is looking forward to her date with Bruce (Josh Ruben). They’re going away for the weekend, to a cabin in the woods.

The problem is, in the film’s intro, which follows a snooty auction for a piece of ancient Greek sculpture, we watched Bruce murder the successful bidder for the statue, as a weird red owl looking chap looks on.

So, okay, Meredith may be dating a serial killer.

Well, maybe “dating” is assuming a bit much. It doesn’t seem like he’s planning on a long term relationship with Meredith.

The opening speech from the auctioneer explains that the sculpture is of certain avengers from Greek mythology, the Erinyes, or Furies, as they are otherwise known; avengers of wronged women, scourges of those who murder or harm women. Hopefully they go after the manipulators and the gaslighters too. Regardless, right out of the gate, they’re saying that tied to the sculpture is the idea that some force exists in the universe, hinted at in mythology, of divine retribution that apportions cosmic justice.

If only it were true. I so wish it were true.

The reality is, there’s nothing there. Nothing punishes the worst of the worst unless the cops are lucky, and it’s arguable as to how you can get justice on serial killers. Capital punishment seems almost like a favour, and decades in jail seems like a joke.

All we can do as viewers is hope that the piece of shit fucks up, slips up in some way, and gets his just deserts.

Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen, though. Maybe Bruce, too, is powered by the supernatural? I mean, whenever he’s about to kill a woman, a weird humanoid owl turns up, telling him to do it. Then he does it, horribly, jerks off, and then everything’s better in his world as he sets about dealing with the body.

Eww, no thanks, don’t drag us into your sexual dysfunction bullshit.

dir: Andy Muschietti

2023

On the long list of things that exist that perhaps shouldn’t, maybe we’re safe to add this flick without delay. I mean, I could definitely be wrong. In the fullness of time, its worth might spontaneously appear out of nowhere, perhaps creating a context and appeal where currently those things are so profoundly absent.

I am not a betting man, being a shameless addict of many inclinations and permutations, but all the same I would not bet on it.

The sheer, staggering pointlessness of it all…

I watched it asking myself aloud “who the fuck is this for?” at several junctures.

People trained like performing seals by the Marvel Industrial Complex aren’t going to be interested in it, as it lacks colour, decent action set pieces, competent CGI, but in truth many of the most recent Marvel flicks lack that also, especially the ones tackling multiverses or quantum realms and such. Fans of the comic or the TV show with Grant Gustin as Barry aren’t going to like it, because this is a terrible approximation of the character in comparison. I can’t imagine, if there are Snyder-Bros so adamant that Batman V Superman or Justice League were great, ackshually, that they’d be willing or able to defend this, since Snyder didn’t direct it.

Ezra Miller fans? Do they have fans anymore? If people liked them previously for their cinematic performances in such flicks as We Need to Talk About Kevin, or the Fantastic Beasts movies, they may have second thoughts now considering Miller’s extensive legal troubles.

If you’re wondering why I’m playing the pronoun game, well, Miller identifies as non-binary, and as such I am using the plural pronouns not with respect for Miller, but more so for the non-binary community. Call people what they ask. It’s common courtesy, even if they’re crims, and it costs nothing.

The Flash didn’t have to be terrible. I have to imagine a reality where it isn’t a terrible and pointless flick. Somewhere in the multiverse there is a good version of this flick.

Sadly, we don’t have access to that one – we’re stuck with this one.

dir: Lee Cronin

2023

Irish director, with a bunch of Australians, making the flick in New Zealand, setting it in Los Angeles… What could go wrong?

Not much, it seems, because this flick works much better than I thought it could.

It only really doesn’t work if Bruce Campbell is all you care about when it comes to these flicks. And honestly, I love Bruce Campbell, and his character of Ash, and I consider Evil Dead 2 and Evil Dead 3: Army of Darkness to be absolute classics, for different reasons.

And I’m aware of the tv series Ash versus Evil Dead.

But we don’t want Bruce Campbell, at his age (though I have no doubt he could physically do everything required of him) being attacked by the forces of evil still. Let him rest. He’s at retirement age now. Let him play golf, drink pina coladas and relax by a pool. He’s earned it.

So they have to torment a new generation. Of Australians, apparently.

The flick, which mostly works, has strange bookends, strange in the sense that I’m not sure why we needed them in order to allow mentally for the possibility of sequels. We already know that anything that gets made, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Titanic is going to have sequels and prequels and remakes and reboots anyway, we know that going in. Ideas are Intellectual Property that have to have every potential dollar squeezed out of them, so why not. Late stage capitalism isn’t going to milk itself.

Three people at a cabin in the woods. One of them starts tearing the other two apart, while harming herself. What complex set of circumstances could have led to her being in such a place mentally where such things… holy shit she’s floating above the water holding someone’s head, and the very scary looking words EVIL DEAD RISE are floating above her! It must be a cheesy, cheeky horror movie, then.

خرس نیست Khers Nist

dir: Jafar Panahi

2022

So, a couple of months ago, I watched and reviewed a flick called Hit the Road by Panah Panahi, son of legendary Iranian director Jafar Panahi, and made a joke about nepo babies getting gigs they otherwise wouldn’t get except for their successful parents.

Of course I was being ironic, because few directors in Iran since the Islamic Revolution have been punished and jailed more than the father of that director. Now I have a chance to review, or at least talk about, a movie made by that chap’s father, from whom all the nepo glory flows.

I think Jafar Panahi is either in jail currently or under house arrest. Last year he was sentenced to six years in prison. He has been imprisoned, on and off, for ages. The regime doesn’t like it when he makes movies, feeling somehow that their fragile totalitarian state will somehow crumble into dust if people either inside or outside of Iran see his films. But like many of his fellow Iranian directors, when his films win awards or acclaim at film festivals, the regime happily claims credit for their success bringing glory to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

A recent flick he made was called This is Not a Movie, because he was banned by the regime from making movies. So he made something that technically, sort of, maybe, wasn’t a movie, because what else is the man going to do? His son’s out now making awesome movies, so Jafar can’t sit back on his laurels anymore, even if they keep punishing him.

When this flick starts, it’s a long continuous scene, filmed somewhere in Turkey, and it eventually shows a couple fighting over a passport, and how one of them seemingly is going to fly to Europe, and the other is not. But then someone calls ‘cut’, and the actors, and another chap who was previously offscreen, start addressing the camera directly, talking to the director, Jafar Panahi.

dir: Ari Aster

2023

You may hear such a title and wonder if the Beau the title refers to is just generally afraid, or whether he’s afraid because of specific things.

Let me just help you out a tad by pointing out that Beau, or perhaps director Ari Aster, are both afraid of a lot of things.

It is really hard to talk about this movie, this long arse movie. It’s exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long, including credits. You might wonder why it’s not easier to say it’s 3 hours long. But you see making the length exactly 2 hours and 59 minutes long is just another way for Aster to fuck with the audience.

The Beau of the title, Beau Wasserman, is played by Joaquin Phoenix. He is paunchy, middle-aged, balding, and fearful. He is afraid of practically everything, but what he is most afraid of is disappointing his mother. This is 3 hours (sorry, 2h59m) of a film saying “The main character is deeply fucked up because his mum is a monster”.

The audience tolerance for this will vary wildly. This is not the extreme, terrifying horror of Hereditary, where family is a curse beyond your control, or the sly take on Wicker Man-style folk horror that was Midsommar.

No, this is…something else.

Beau lives in the kind of awful New York apartment that you imagine Travis Bickle lived in before shooting everyone at the end of Taxi Driver. Awful, and tiny, in a terrible area where people are screaming constantly, there are corpses in the street and someone called the Birthday Boy Stabber runs around naked stabbing people, and the cops don’t seem to want to stop him.

Beau is about to travel by plane to visit his mother. It’s the anniversary of his father’s death, a man who died before Beau was born, or so he has been told. Beau discusses all of this with his therapist, who asks him if he has any trepidation about seeing his mother, or whether he just wants her to die.

Beau thinks this is an odd question, because the audience thinks so too, but the wise old therapist assures him it’s perfectly normal for two things to be true – that he might love his mother but also want her to shuffle off this mortal coil.

It’s not clear how long Beau has been seeing this therapist, but it’s clear that he’s been talking about his mother for decades.

As Beau returns to his apartment building, he makes eye contact with an entirely tattooed man who ferociously runs at Beau as Beau tries to get into his front door.

We start to wonder how any of this can be real. And what we never get is any evidence that it’s not.

dir: Louis Leterrier

2023

It’s pretty shit, even for this profoundly dumb movie series.

Of course, one has to grade entries in the Fast & the Furious franchise on an incredibly generous curve, but still, by any reasonable measure this movie Fast X is a major fail.

They do give Dom Toretto more screen time than they have in a long while, but… No, it’s nice to see him again, and to hear his endless excuses as to why Brian can’t help or how he just talked to Brian a few seconds ago, and maybe he’s just offscreen somewhere doing something important.

The most important and baffling thing in these films is that any character shown to have died onscreen is eventually revealed to be less than dead. To be immortal. Essentially unkillable. So whenever any scene slows down, and the music gets sad, and they start talking about someone who’s dead in a mournful way, I’m like “The fuck are you doing? I’ll bet you anything that whoever will be revealed at a climactic moment to still be alive”.

And they did it again at the end of this stupid film, when a certain character who died, I dunno, four films ago is revealed to still be alive.

You may think, well, who gives a fuck. You would be right. Why are you always so handsome / attractive, stylish and right all the time? What’s your secret?

Whatever it is, I don’t have access to your level of wonderfulness, the ability to blithely accept the lack of ideas and death of inspiration that the perpetual reuse of old rope and older tropes represents in billion dollar franchises. The GDP of a nation is spent making these films, and they still can’t do anything more clever than “You’ll never believe who they’re going to resurrect NEXT!”

dir: James Gunn

2023

Sometimes, the fact that things can end, and end well, is of more comfort than the idea that something could go on endlessly forever.

The Guardians of the Galaxy movies have long been a weirder, stranger and funnier corner of the Marvel Industrial Complex’s movie output, and with this last hurrah for director James Gunn, they can wander off into the sunset of some other star system on good terms, with each other and with us, the drooling, flipper-slapping-together seals in the audience.

The main reason Gunn is unlikely to make any more of these is that now that he’s one of the CEOs at DC Films, it probably wouldn’t be considered kosher to make films for the enemy. Some agglomeration of spineless executives has decided that if they install Gunn in some important position that it will somehow resurrect the studio’s dismal fortunes so that not all their movies without “Batman” in the title keep bombing.

Whatever it ultimately means, or results in, at least Gunn can say that he’s worked in both comic-book ponds, and made flicks in either capacity that are stamped with his oddball sensibilities and personal hobbyhorses, that definitely weren’t just uniform, undifferentiated products extruded by “The System”.

Which is more than you can say about the last bunch of Marvel movies post-Endgame before this one. It’s nice that this one stands alone, for once.

Guardians 3 starts with Rocket singing along with Radiohead’s Creep as he wanders around one of the main thoroughfares in Knowhere: a cobbled together community housed with the head of a dead Celestial. I don’t know what any of that means either, I’m just a dumbed down AI that jumbles words together like they’re lego bricks, hoping things will work out.

Everyone is putting things in their right place, making everything perfect, just before a flying golden statue flies in and starts beating the shit out of everyone, including Rocket, who is mortally wounded in the fighting.

During this “re-introduction” sequence where each of the returning characters gets their moment, Peter “Star-Lord” Quill (Chris Pratt) is shown to be a total drunk, unable to recover from having lost the love of his life Gamora (Zoe Saldana) in one of the earlier movies, but provoked to confused outpourings due to the fact that a Gamora from an earlier timeline currently exists in their universe; a Gamora who’s had nothing to do with Quill or the other Guardians, and who has never reconciled with her sister Nebula (Karen Gillen).

These Guardians are strangers to her, so she has no reason to even tolerate Quill, let alone give a damn what happens to the rest of them in the hi-jinks that ensue.

dir: Ivan Sen

2023

Limbo. Doesn’t mean much to non-Christian types, as a concept or a ‘place’. Doesn’t mean much to most people, I think.

I think most of us just think of it as being an in-between place. Maybe a place you’re trapped in, maybe forever, maybe not.

Veteran indigenous director Ivan Sen wrote, directed and lensed this flick, and he set it in a fictional town call Limbo. It’s really Coober Pedy, in South Australia (Umoona, in Kokotha language), between Adelaide and Alice Springs, but it might as well be on the surface of the moon, considering how alien it looks in this film.

Travis Hurley (Australia’s Own Simon Baker) is a detective, who for whatever reason has been dispatched on assignment to Limbo in order to go over old information about the twenty year ago disappearance of an indigenous girl called Charlotte. He’s not reopening a cold case: there’s a chance they’re going to reopen it, but they might not. He’s in town driving around chatting tersely with the locals about what happened all those years ago.

No-one wants to talk to him, no-one has any real leads, the only legit suspect from back in the day is dead, the girl’s family don’t want to have a bar of it, so Travis gets nowhere quickly, and resolves to get the fuck out of Dodge.

Until he can’t. He’s trapped too, you see. Sure, it’s for technological reasons (someone trying to steal his car fucks up its onboard computer, which will take several days to replace). Helpfully, the mechanic loans him a cool older car, a Dodge Chrysler, which looks far cooler than the work car when Travis is tooling around Limbo.

Black, long classic car, against a white landscape. Did I neglect to mention that the flick is filmed in black and white? It somehow manages to make Coober Pedy / Limbo look even more alien and inhospitable. It looks more like a set they could use to stand in for Tatooine. Travis’s accommodation, at the appropriately named Limbo Hotel, is carved out of sandstone. Underground. A lot of people, not all, live and work underground, in these caves that are meant to recall various Biblical themes: Sepulchers, tombs, ancient chuches.

Charlotte’s family are trapped too, and have been since the disappearance. Her siblings Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen) were taken away from their mum after, on the pretext that Charlotte’s disappearance was as a result of bad parenting, which fractured them in different ways, leading to their mum’s death. Charlie lives in a caravan, avoiding the three kids being looked after by his sister, having never recovered from losing Charlotte, from being accused by the cops for her disappearance.

We wonder what Travis’ interest is in solving this crime. Well, we wonder until we watch him repeatedly shoot up heroin, and then we don’t wonder that much anymore. Travis himself is covered in mostly crude tattoos as well, and as he alludes to later on, his time undercover in the drug squad left him permanently marked by his experiences. Clearly his superiors don’t know about his heroin addiction, but this doesn’t look like a plum assignment either, so maybe he’s given dead-end scutt-work deliberately.

dir: Daina Reid

2023

Horror. Purest horror.

That’s what parenting is like, apparently.

Of course people watching this flick will be muttering “Babadook, Babadook” under their breath, but no-one said The Babadook was either the most original horror flick ever nor that it had the monopoly on mad mothers wanting to strangle their kids for reasons in movies.

This flick, mostly filmed in Victoria and South Australia, is ominous and filled with dread right from the start. It’s not just the exquisite cinematography, or the choice of what’s filmed, but the discomforting soundtrack does a lot of the work too. Those cello / double bass slowly bowed strings…

And then there’s all the awful things happening on screen.

It’s mostly a two-hander, with Sarah Snook playing a character called Sarah, and Lily LaTorre playing her daughter. I won’t say the name of the daughter character, because apparently no one is quite sure what it should be.

We already know terrible things are going to happen, because the daughter, while being driven in the car, asks about where someone is who she’s never met, and the mere mention of her name is enough to make Sarah somehow look even paler.

At first the name being said is “Joan, where’s Joan, is Joan going to be there?” referring to the guest list for the daughter’s birthday party. The answer is an emphatic no, because the Joan in question is Sarah’s mum, and Sarah can’t stand her mum, plus her mum is in an old folk’s home. For old folks. Speaking of which, Sarah’s dad, mostly referred to as grandpa, has recently died, and both Sarah and her daughter miss him terribly.

Sarah especially seems wounded by grief at the loss. But there is something far more seriously wrong with Sarah, and wrong with the daughter, especially when she starts insisting that her name isn’t Mia, but is in fact Alice.

Alice. Alice? Who the fuck is Alice? That’s a name to conjure with. Plus there’s a white rabbit that seems to have appeared out of nowhere, who just hangs around ominously in the house, only earns its keep once when it takes a chunk out of Sarah’s hand.

Alice…white rabbit… I can’t tell if we’re through the looking glass or in a wonderland, but this flick is short on wonder, and long on dread. Mia keeps getting injuries, and Mummy Dearest keeps asking her if someone is hurting her, bullying her. Mia keeps shaking her head, but at random times seems to insist she’s not Mia anyway, she’s this other girl.

And Sarah doesn’t want to talk about Alice, because clearly she’s still traumatised by something that happened 30 years ago.

Like always in these flicks, the mum is either a widow or divorced. The ex-husband / still dad (Damon Herriman) is nice enough, but he’s got a new wife, and they’re trying for another kid, and for some reason this really brings out the Shiv Roy in Sarah, who is always either terrified and confused, or profoundly irritated by people trying to bring up the past all the time.

dir: Sam Hargrave

2023

Instead of doing something, I dunno, meaningful, like acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which I pontificate (sovereignty never having been ceded), instead I’d rather bring us together and acknowledge that Extraction is a terrible name for a movie and even worse for some kind of proposed franchise. The Extraction franchise? Ew. Nine out of ten dentists agree that “extractions” are procedures that even they don’t like performing, but they’re happy to accept the money for them anyway.

How do I know it’s a franchise? Because against all logic or expectations, by the end of the flick they clearly imply there’s going to be more of these, and they brought in Idris Elba in a small and strange cameo role as some mysterious rep of some agency or group that needs lead hero Tyler Rake’s extraction skills to extract people from various difficult places like the infected teeth that they are.

Tyler Rake is a hell of a name for an extractor. Thankfully he’s played by Australia’s Own Chris Hemsworth. Hemsworth is the Mid Chris. Chris Pine is currently the Good Chris. Chris Pratt is the Bad Chris and Hemsworth is the medium one. I don’t make the rules, I just read a lot of trash mags in doctor’s waiting rooms.

Always waiting. Hemsworth can be charming or funny in other roles. He very much isn’t here. Here he just has to kill all the people that are attacking him, for two hours, and to feel bad about his son dying of cancer.

You might think “but wasn’t that the plot of the first Extraction? Yes, but this time he’s not killing all of Bangladesh to save a drug dealer’s son; he’s killing half of Georgia and then Austria, to save some other criminal’s family (from the criminal’s crime family).

You also may be thinking “um, didn’t the main character get killed at the end of Extraction?” Someone clearly didn’t sit through the credits.

Who would dare leave franchise opportunities on the table by allowing such a charmless character to die?

Look, the Australian SAS need all the positive press they can get at the moment. Just recently their poster boy for courageous bravery was revealed to be a psychopathic liar, bully and murderer. So they need a positive example for recruitment purposes.

Tyler Rake is the embodiment of a highly trained, highly skilled guy who can kill a thousand people, get stabbed, shot and run over a dozen times and still keep ticking along. He’s less an advertisement for the efficacy of the SAS’s training regime, and more just an Australian John Wick killing everyone who comes after him.

dir: Julius Avery

2023

You can completely not believe in something, and know that it’s highly refined bullshit, and still find it terrifying.

Having been brought up in the Christian faith, and educated at Catholic schools, there are no elements of these stories that are unfamiliar. And I long ago recoiled in horror from the actual, incalculable evils perpetrated and covered up by the Catholic Church, and dismissed the mythological bullshit elements, seeing how the whole edifice was propped up with fear and control, covering hollow lies all the way down.

And yet… Sure, okay, I know this is all hysterical supernatural bullshit, fantasy stuff no more real than anything in the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars…

And yet… I can still find this stuff terrifying. The Exorcist still remains one of the most terrifying films I’ve ever seen, and that’s unlikely to ever, ever change. All I have to do is remember certain sequences and I get cold chills.

There was a scene in a recent, quite stupid movie called Ghosted where the two main characters have a conversation at a set of steps, and Chris Evans’ terrible character tells Ana De Armas “These are the steps from The Exorcist!”, and she’s like “okay grandpa””, but I was like “oh shit those are the cursed steps from The Exorcist?”

I don’t believe in ghosts and demons and such, but there is something about the idea of demonic possession that I find deeply, deeply disturbing. And again, though I don’t for a second believe in possession or exorcisms or any of that fucking bullshit, and also, not all flicks about demonic possession are created equally; when they work I am horrified beyond belief.

Most of the stuff I saw in terms of reviews about this flick dismissed it for a bunch of reasons – demonic possession stories are dumb, or the flicks not horrifying enough, or it’s not camp enough, or it’s too funny, or it’s not comical enough, or Russell Crowe is terrible with a risible accent, or Crowe is really good but slumming in a role that is beneath him.

Those are all takes. They’re wrong, but people are entitled to their takes.

dir: Daniel Goldhaber

2023

Wow. This flick isn’t fucking around.

In a trend that is getting more prevalent, film titles are being awfully literal these days. Plane was about a plane, Cats was about a group of hideous cats, and this film How to Blow Up a Pipeline is about how to blow up a pipeline.

I am not advocating for civil disobedience, property damage, or so-called eco-terrorism. If anything, I am a card carrying member of the Establishment that every activist says they are against and every politician pretends they’re not a part of.

In short, I’ve been working for the Empire for decades, so make of that what you will. But I am also a human with eyes and ears, and I look at the inexorable march of time, and the continuous destruction of the environment and the climate, and I can see how so many activists and concerned citizens, tired of marching, tired of holding placards and being ignored or demonised could eventually think “fuck it – protesting isn’t getting the job done.” They know, like a lot of us do, that too many vested interests make too much money from the fossil fuel industry to ever do anything actually against those interests. As such, the markets should be allowed to decide what the oil price should be.

After someone blows up their pipelines and fucks up production, of course.

The activists here are not naïve. They know this action will do little in either the short or medium term. But it’s meant to show people what can be done.

So, given the name, it goes into great detail about the “how”, but there is much made of “why” as well. The “why” is not just about the parlous state of the climate, with its once in a hundred year floods happening every other year, its atmospheric rivers and its wildfires resulting in smoke plumes circling the earth. The “whys” are personal and different, depending on the person.

dir: Marie Kreutzer

2022

I cannot tell you how little I care about the lives of aristocrats, any aristocrats.

Oh wait, I just did. I am no royalist, no defender of monarchies or privilege, let me tell you for free. My feelings towards the divinely anointed and all new fangled tech billionaires or old school robber barons are best summed up by the title of and lyrics to the Motörhead song Eat the Rich, which advocates for a very elegant solution to the eternal question of “how best do we dispense with this bullshit?”

So any and all of my appreciation for any flick should never be construed as an endorsement or support for any of these stratified lies of divine right or superiority-from-birth ideas.

There are, all the same, some great character studies in literature and film arising from depicting the lives of these awful people, make no mistake. Any character study of any historic person is only as powerful as the actor that depicts them, and the writer / director bringing them to life, all the same, whether they be princes or paupers or both.

I have never given much thought to the so-called Empress Sisi (Vicky Krieps) of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire (RIP Sisi and Archduke Franz Ferdinand, rest in power), and this flick is unlikely to cause me to fall down a rabbit hole of finding out everything about her. But I did enjoy watching Corsage, because it’s a very well made film with a luminous central performance by an amazing actor.

Corsage in the context of this flick is not a reference to that strange bouquet or posy of flowers that teenaged American high schoolers are given as a token earning the right to engage in some unseemly and not always entirely consensual activities after The Prom. That is something I know about only through decades of exposure to American movies and television, since it doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists anywhere else (and no I’m not talking about school formals etc).

Corsage here is a reference to the corset that we often watch Sisi being laced into. Of course, those of us who have been watching period piece / Regency bullshit for the last however many years automatically associate corsets as a physical manifestation of the oppression of women, of their enforced subservience throughout history and across society, of the general misogyny and specific chauvinism of patriarchy. Of how it grinds women down, making them smaller, making them lesser, until they disappear completely.

dir: Nida Manzoor

2023

There were only two things this flick needed to entice me in – I heard it was a solid action movie (which is a lie), and I heard it was directed by the woman responsible for the great tv series We Are Lady Parts, about a group of observant Muslim girls in Britain wanting to play in a punk band together.

As far as I’m concerned, give Nida Manzoor all the moneys and let her make whatever the hell she wants. I daresay it will be entertaining.

Polite Society is not what I thought it would be, and that is totally fine. It is much funnier and much sillier than I thought it would be.

And that is absolutely fine too. I am probably not the target market for this flick, and I do not find that threatening or disconcerting at all.

Ria (Priya Kansara) is a bundle of nerves and energy. She very clearly has her life’s path figured out. She trains for, and wants more than anything, to become a stuntwoman, and to fight on screen in the movies.

In the movie’s only implausibility, she writes multiple emails to an actual stuntwoman, being Eunice Huthart, in ways that suggest the prime example of a ‘parasocial relationship’, like where regular humans think they’re friends with famous people just because they’ve got access to them on social media.

Other than that, Ria is totally fine and not at all delusional. I actually enjoyed that element of her one-sided correspondence, because to me it was more a reminder of Jack Nicholson’s character in About Schmidt writing letters to a young boy overseas he sponsors, starting all his letters with “Dear Ndugu”, after which he’d start ranting and raving about people and stuff little Ndugu couldn’t possibly understand or know about or relate to. We got to see it as a welcome example of just how self-involved Schmidt was, not as any comment on Ndugu, who was just a boy, and someone we never see. Though he’s probably A Man now…

She is absolutely going to be a stuntwoman, and her older sister Lina (Ritu Arya), who recently dropped out of art college and seems very depressed, is absolutely going to be a successful artist.

They are from a Pakistani-British background, which carries with it certain expectations, mostly being that, being female in a conservative and overly “polite society”, means they really can’t expect to end up as stuntwomen and artists, respectively.

dir: Kurtis Davis Harder

2023

With a title like Influencer, it’s not unreasonable having some expectations going in to this experience.

All I initially heard was, there’s a film coming out soon called Influencer, and it’s a horror flick. And I was like “Great! Fucking love the idea”, and I made sure that the second it was available on streaming service Shudder, that I would watch the fuck out of it and review it.

And now I have done so. Perhaps I was a little bit over-amped for it.

Perhaps, like with a lot of horror flicks, the mere thought I had that this would be a hard take on the newly discovered species known as the “influencer”, Latin name narcissus maximus, which would, I dunno, get revenge on them by either showing how awful they are and then maybe torturing them? It’s a horrible place to be coming from, I have to admit.

I don’t think (I hope) that I actually wish harm on anyone, no matter how awful they are, because that goes against my beliefs as a Buddhist, but the whole glory of fiction and movies is that maybe there’s some transgression, some schadenfreude that we can be allowed to experience without anyone actually getting hurt.

The film opens with an Insta influencer called, of course, Madison (Emily Tennant), going through the motions at a Thai resort. She’s American, and takes the right photos, uses the right products, says all the right things, but whenever she’s not taking a tortured selfie or taking snaps of food she doesn’t want to eat, she looks sad.

Fuck you for trying to make me feel sorry for some vacuous influencer. Madison is alone, and sad. The resort looks pretty much abandoned. They don’t make a big deal out of it, but I’m pretty sure this was probably filmed in the covid / shutdown era, hence the many scenes of the vacant resort.

dir: Chad Stahelski

2023

Please, no more. That’s enough, thanks.

I have had ample sufficiency. John Wick has, by now - by film’s end - killed everyone that can be killed. There’s no one left. Each film has had an exponential increase in the amount of people he has to kill, and now, well, he’s done. We’re done.

I watched more people die in this flick than died in the entirety of Saving Private Ryan, and that was a WWII movie, in case you forgot, that starts with the invasion by the allied forces of the beaches of Normandy.

But there are deaths, and then there are deaths. Very few of the deaths in this flick matter, except when it’s characters you know or actors you recognise, and you forget them seconds after they happen, because they’re only happening to literally faceless goons.

And yet the mountains of corpses left in his wake…

So if we care at all, we care that the man of the title gets to have his way. He never sought all these people out – they come after him, and he has to defend himself. He only kills those trying to kill him. It’s just that everyone wants to kill him, mostly due to the bounty on his head of several million.

What is money, anyway? It has a siren call that none of these faceless goons can resist, even if Wick’s unkillability is well known. Presumably the assassin characters in this flick that are part of this strange world know that literally thousands of people have tried to kill Wick in the last 3 movies and failed, all mostly having been shot in the face or head, and yet they still keep dreaming the impossible dream and thinking “maybe I’ll be the one to defy fate and the gods”.

And the bounty keeps going up and up. It’s really beyond absurd. “I wasn’t prepared to go after the unkillable super assassin for only $10mill, but I’ll sure as heck give it a go for $15mill!”

dir: Ben Affleck

2023

A generous way to talk about this flick is to describe it as a mildly entertaining biopic about the guy who put together the deal that resulted in the creation of the Air Jordan basketball shoe, which changed the game as it related both to sneakers as consumer products and the arrangements basketball stars would have with merchandising companies for ever more.

A less generous approach would be to say it’s a movie about a fucking shoe.

This is Australia. We used to call them runners, no matter their purpose, though I guess the kids of today probably don’t call them that. But, yes, back in the day, whether they were Dunlop Volleys or branded stuff with logos or the knockoffs you got from the Victoria Market, we called them runners, regardless of how much or little running you actually did in them

I’ve never owned a pair of Air Jordans. I’ve never really aspired to own a pair, and, to be more accurate, have rarely been in a position to be able to afford a pair. Taking out a mortgage in order to secure a pair of shoes designed for basketball players, being a sport I do not play, seems extravagant even for me, and I waste money on all sorts of nonsense. But I know what they are. I know of them. Billions of people know what they are. Surely that means they are important, as, I dunno, some kind of cultural artefact?

I mean, I just wrote that, and I’m not really convinced. It’s a thing, a highly sought after thing that has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Nike and millions of dollars for Michael Jordan personally, but so fucking what? Tulips, Beanie Babies, Cabbage Patch Kids, iPods, Harry Potter books, all sorts of useless crap have generated billions of dollars for a select few.

And there’s no pseudo-docos about them. I guess I should be talking about the flick more in line with how Tetris approached the topic, being less about the money, and more about the unlikely result (of besting the combined fury of the mighty USSR and mogul Robert Maxwell in order to steal some computer program from them).