fresh movie reviews for a good time not a long time

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 sitting.

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.

dir: Tim Story

2023

I will be the first to admit, and honestly have to be the first to admit, that I am not the target audience for this movie. My opinion about this movie, like all my opinions about anything, are therefore even more important / authoritative than usual (ie. utterly worthless).

I am, however, a fan of movies / pop culture, and in the American context, of Black cinema / African-American cinema. I went into this assuming this flick, ostensibly a horror flick, was specifically about playing with the tropes of horror movies in terms of how poorly they serve African-American characters usually, but what I ended up getting was vastly different.

Tim Story is probably best known for directing Barbershop way back in the day, if he is known by international audiences at all. I am not sure that he would be well known as the director of the pretty terrible Fantastic Four movies, or the very ordinary Ride Along movies, or the terrible *belches loudly* Think Like a Man movies.

So, whatever. I have no doubt he has fans, and that he’s a talented, commercial director, in all senses of the word. He is a very successful African-American director, and he certainly has knowledge and a feel for how African-Americans are portrayed in movies, because he’s in the business of portraying them for fun and profit, and has been for decades.

This flick is replete with references that will fly by most people, I would guess, and I say that as someone who gets the references, but only because I’ve watched everything and remember all the dumbest, lamest trivia from any old tv show you care to mention. I also remember the various controversies that arose with many of those shows, like who got fired and why, and who they were replaced with, because… Well, I don’t really have an explanation for it.

dir: Daniel Levy

2024

So, with the new year freshly upon us, I thought in the spirit of new beginnings and optimism, I’d watch and review a movie about a dour group of depressed people navigating grief and loss in their late 30s early 40s.

Why not.

Good Grief is perhaps the laziest play on words you could imagine, while also being a keen Charlie Brown - Peanuts reference that, yes, is mostly about a character dealing with his grief over the recent death of his husband Oliver (Luke Evans).

But really the film is mostly about not dealing with grief.

Our introduction is a delightful Christmas party where Oliver bullies people into singing individual parts for a singalong, except for the one person Sophie (the great Ruth Negga) who he insults by giving her a handcrafted pair of maracas to play, since she is, by all estimations, tone deaf. Oliver is charming and a force of nature, and beloved by all, so it’s triply cruel that mere minutes after saying goodbye to his husband Marc (Dan Levy, who also directs), he is killed in a car accident.

Now, these details shouldn’t be important, but they’re important to me: Oliver was the very successful author of a bunch of books that, considering the economic comfort within which the main character is cocooned in, probably makes him the equivalent of a Suzanne Collins / Rick Riordan YA author, rather than a JK Rowling-level threat to the aristocracy. And, this was very nice of him, he even got something for his husband Marc to do by having him do the illustrations in his books, which are a successful movie franchise as well.

The greater meaning behind it is that Marc had previously been a successful painter, or at least someone who painted. But, for whatever reasons (grief, derr, obviously), he stopped painting after his mother died. And instead of ever doing paintings again, he relied on his husband for work and remodelled the kitchen every time Oliver dropped a new bestseller.

Probably not healthy. And now that his husband is dead, well, Marc doesn’t know what to do with himself, and spends a year not doing anything.

dir: Emerald Fennell

2023

Yikes.

This fucking film…

I don’t know how I feel about this flick. Some parts of it are funny, some are excruciating, some are downright sickening, but I still don’t know how I feel about it.

It is kind of an update on Brideshead Revisited, in that it has the similar initial setup and is mostly set at a grand / ghastly country estate, but they could not be more dissimilar in their themes or resolution. Our Charles Ryder, as in, our wide-eyed non-aristocrat innocent who finds himself hanging out with the landed gentry in this instance is called Oliver Quick. But instead of just being some young guy at Oxford with hopes and dreams, we have Oliver played by blue-eyed psychopath of the moment, being Barry Keoghan.

Since receiving plaudits for his role as the village idiot in The Banshees of Inisherin, perhaps that is pretty much the role he’ll be playing for the rest of his career? Oliver gets into Oxford, but he’s not from aristocrat money, and he’s not a social gadfly. So he’s on the outside, perpetually looking in. Much of the film literalises this by having Oliver looking through people’s windows, and only occasionally looking out of a window, at someone near his window. There’s always a pane of glass / the pain of separation between him and everyone else.

He sees one person to whom others flock, like moths to a flame, being Felix (Australia’s Own Jacob Elordi, who seems to be having his moment), but there’s no way for a nobody like Oliver to get into his world.

As luck would have it, one day Felix has a flat tyre on his bike on the way to class, and Oliver is on hand to loan him his bike instead. It’s less the start of a beautiful friendship and more just an in. Felix is plenty grateful and at least deigns to shine some of his social light in Oliver’s direction. Oliver talks of growing up in poverty and having addicts for parents.

That’s tough, and though it elicits some sympathy, eventually, Felix loses interest, especially since the rest of his friends don’t even want to sit near Oliver due to the stench of being poor.

But hark, is that another tragedy on the horizon? Oliver confesses to Felix that his father has just died, probably due to drugs. Oh, woe is me.

Woe is you, Oli. Why don’t you come out to my palatial estate after exams? Mother and Father would be delighted to meet you. And of course stay the entire summer if you like, it’ll be grand.

dir: Zach Snyder

2023

This is pretty ordinary, but it’s ordinary within what I think of as normal parameters. If any other director made this, whoever saw it would have shrugged, farted, and probably rolled over and gone to sleep without ever thinking about it ever again.

It’s like when some average car company comes up with a shitty new car: No-one other than the people dumb enough to buy those cars will care. But when someone bills themselves as a genius comes up with a terribly shitty car, like, say, the so-called Cybertruck, well, then you have to take especial notice and deliver especial insults / criticism.

People, mainly press hacks or PR flacks used to call Zach Snyder a visionary, but they stopped, several films ago, because the extent of his vision involved shitty CGI, slow motion sequences, and terrible scripts. And anyone can make that without being called a visionary. Plus, they (being Warner Brothers) started noticing that nothing he made actually made money, regardless of how much the fanboys slavered over his crap.

And since nature apparently abhors a vacuum, Netflix threw money at him and said “make whatever crap you want, we don’t care, as long as it’s content.” And, here it is, daddy made you some content.

And what content it is… This is rumoured to be pretty much a script Snyder proposed to the Lucasfilm people as a possible R rated Star Wars flick, with all the Star Wars actual references taken out when they rejected it. So what you’re left with is less a new science fiction space opera epic original intellectual property, and more a “new” generic science fiction IP so generic that it looks and sounds like every other science fiction IP you’ve ever seen. It’s so generic I’m amazed that the characters don’t accidentally talk about using the Force or about mining spice on Arrakis. It’s not just that we’re trained to expect these things and see them everywhere, it’s just that anyone working on anything like this knows what tropes to follow and how to make everything look just so everything is so fucking familiar and comfortable for everyone.

So when I tell you that the first part of the flick occurs on a farm, and everyone’s dressed like they’re in a Western, you won’t be that surprised or shocked. You’ll just think “how visionary! It’s only something I’ve seen twenty or more times in science fiction flicks!”

Also, like me, if you watch this, you will feel delighted every time you hear someone say “we’re just simple farmers” or “he’s just a simple farmer”. How surprised will you be when the “simple farmer” rises up and saves the day? You know, which never happens, expect when it does, like, every time?

These salt of the earth simple farmers grow grain, to feed themselves of course, but also to have a little extra, a little something-something for either trade or to use in times of need. They have a community mostly made up of Aryan poster children. You know, mostly Nordic types. But there are a couple of people there with different complexions. One of them clearly isn’t a simple farmer, because she’s as buff as Sarah Conner in Terminator 2. And she is called Kora (Sofia Boutella).

dir: Sam Esmail

2023

When I hear the words “Leave the World Behind” of course, having come of age in the 1990s, the first thing I think of isn’t the book that this Netflix film is based on, by Rumaan Alam. It is the legendary song by Ride off their second album Going Blank Again, being Leave Them All Behind, which would have been a way better title.

The arguable pinnacle of the shoegaze genre of music, the song and the album were so great in fact, so much of a magnum opus that the band never again achieved anything close to as good, degenerating into acrimony, jealousy, and one of them going over to Oasis after killing time as sub-standard The Black Crowes sound-alikes. The “Britpop” era of the 90s meant everyone thought they should sound like Primal Scream trying to sound like the Rolling Stones all over again.

But that song… my gods, it’s at least up there with the best of My Bloody Valentine, or peak Swervedriver, Slowdive or The Jesus & Mary Chain.

What’s that got to do with this film, you ask? Well, nothing, to be honest.

I just wanted to talk about how much I loved that song, and the shoegaze era, is all.

And they don’t even use it on the soundtrack, which is even more of a shame.

Yet again, in talking about one thing, I am going to talk about a completely different thing. Back when Steven Spielberg made War of the Worlds, an updated Americanisation of the H.G. Wells classic, the point wasn’t to mock the audience by having Tom Cruise playing a blue-collar regular joe, even if it really felt like that, and that they were taking the piss at our expense.

No, no, I assure you, Mr Spielberg is too self-serious for that. The whole point of the film was how little it would take before regular, decent, hard-working Americans turned on each other and started shooting / eating each other. Based on that very pessimistic flick, it would take about half an hour after an alien invasion before Americans started whipping out their guns.

dir: Alexander Payne

2023

It almost feels like director Alexander Payne and lead actor Paul Giamatti are coasting. Playing to their strengths, working with very familiar scenarios, and putting people in positions that feel like we’ve watched the flick (a long time ago) many times before.

It shouldn’t work, even down to a use of folk music where I wondered aloud “could they not afford a Cat Stevens song for this scene?”, only to have a Cat Stevens song start playing immediately thereafter.

But it did all work for me. It worked beautifully.

It might be set at a posh New England boys school over Christmas, 1970. It might have an intro with old timey studio titles and the (digital effect) of dust and dropouts on the “film” as it starts, but this is a film as old as time itself. It’s about lonely people struggling with grief and loss, finding it very hard to get by in life, forced together by circumstance, in order to learn things about themselves, and come to terms with things.

You know, like every movie that’s ever been made.

However familiar elements might be, it’s still a very strong film. Paul Giamatti playing a curmudgeon? Say it ain’t so! A sassy, straight-talking service industry African-American character who cuts through the privilege and pieties of the main (white) characters? A troubled teen who’s rebelling without really knowing what he’s rebelling against?

I mean…, you could have called it Catcher in the Rye Ice Storm at the Dead Poet’s Society, and only a few people would have batted an eyelid.

If there is a main character who is not Paul Giamatti, it’s Holden, sorry, Angus (Domenic Sessa), whose parents don’t want to see him during the Christmas break. That’s got to hurt. Still, if Angus was the kind of go along to get along chap, one who could make the best of a dire situation, well, he probably wouldn’t be in this predicament if he was a different person. Instead, he’s an isolated jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else.

There are other boys in this unfortunate circumstance as well, it’s not just Angus, but he doesn’t really have the social skills to connect with them, or seemingly the desire to.

Charged with looking after these unwanted, misfit toys is a teacher who doesn’t really have anything better to do over the Christmas break: Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti). He is as loathed by the students as he is by most of the faculty, and he has no life outside of the school.

He hates the students and sees the world as one that hasn’t really improved that much since the Visigoths sacked Rome all those years ago. He teaches ancient history, which means Greek and Roman history, and as such thinks their wisdom is the only wisdom worth learning or repeating.

dir: Christos Nikou

2023

Fingernails is an anti-rom com which is still somewhat a rom com. It almost acts as a parody of rom coms, while using the tropes of rom coms to further its belief that love is and always should be inexplicable.

This is the least science-fiction-y science fiction based flick that you could ever watch. There’s nothing depicted that looks like anything that you wouldn’t have seen in the 1980s-1990s. But conceptually we are dealing with a world where people can get scientific confirmation as to whether, as a couple, they are truly in love.

So. If “love” becomes measurable and quantifiable, what does that mean for actual relationships?

In this cowardly old world, when a couple have been together for a while, they go to a place, the Love Institute, and have one of their fingernails ripped off. The two fingernails are put into a machine, and then the machine divines whether the two people are perfectly in love with each other.

Most couples who take the test fail. Get zero per cent. Other couples get a 50 per cent result, meaning one person loves the other more, or that one of them is faking it till they make it.

What this means is, I guess, people who don’t pass the test don’t stay together as couples. People who refuse to do the test don’t stay together, because someone will always doubt the other’s commitment.

And even couples who do the test, and get 100 per cent positive results, well, even they have their doubts.

Anna (the great Jessie Buckley, who is mastering the art of being really good in complicated films that don’t always work) is in a relationship with Ryan (Jeremy Allen White, who most people know as the hot chef guy from The Bear). They’ve passed the test. 100 %. What more could anyone want?

dir: Gareth Edwards

2023

This was terrible on a whole host of levels, and I think I’m one of the very few to think so. How very edgy of me.

It wasn’t terrible to watch, as in, it wasn’t an entirely unpleasant experience watching it. The acting is fine, the action is okay, the digital effects are solid.

It’s just that it’s all in the service of a terrible story, conceptually, and on a bunch of levels I can only barely grasp. I’ve read so many reviews that talk about how fresh and original it is, and I feel like screaming “have you watched any science fiction movies ever?”

Nothing in this flick is even barely remotely original. Everything is cobbled together from other flicks. I’m not even going to list them. Listing them is just me mansplaining and naming the same and usual suspects every time a sci fi flick is made. There are few images from this that I haven’t scene in other movies.

And touting as it does a storyline about humans versus AI, during an era in our own history where society says it’s grappling with the ethical and technological implications of advances in so-called artificial intelligence, the flick not only manages to say nothing new about AI; it manages to say nothing about AI at all.

It’s set, mostly, in the 2070s. So, our future. But long stretches of the flick look like they’re set during the fucking Vietnam War. I am not exaggerating. The fucking Vietnam War.

For reasons that I find hilarious, an African-American man lives with a pregnant generically Asian woman on the coast of a generically Asian country. This is New Asia. Not Thailand, not Vietnam, but New Asia. That’s not me saying it, it’s the movie.

dir: David Fincher

2023

This isn’t to be confused with the legendary John Woo flick that introduced the world to the glory that is Chow Yun Fat, and the idea in movies that you could have a protagonist shoot hundreds of people before going to his eternal reward…

Now, of course, everyone gets to do it, but back then, I assure you, it was new, novel, fresh. Hong Kong fresh.

This The Killer is about a killer (Michael Fassbender) who kills people for money. Not for sexual gratification or anything so crude. It’s a purely financial transaction, which he tries to deliver in a professional and efficient manner.

He talks to us constantly, in his head, as he repeats his bullshit mantras about never having empathy or being precise or whatever, and sticking to his own rules, plan instead of improvise, be ready for every eventuality. Except he can’t even stick to his own rules, a lot of the time.

The voiceover is tiresome, but I think it’s meant to be tiresome. Without it, we’d have very little to go on. The killer rarely talks, and when he does, his words are clipped, as if almost painful.

Again, while he comes across as flat, I think it’s deliberately flat. His style is the lack of style he deliberately cultivates. There is no looking cool in a tailored bulletproof suit or swinging around wildly in elaborately choreographed sequences with flashy weapons. The one extended fight scene we get is brutal, close-up, and doled out with whatever household weapons come to hand.

dir: Christopher McQuarrie

2023

The only thing that could make this cumbersome title more cumbersome would be adding “Part 1” to it, which they did, but they’ve since decided to not call whatever comes next “Part 2”, so what even was the point?

It’s common parlance or criticism to rag on the Fast & Furious flicks as being silly, stupid, physics-insulting etc, and they truly are dumb flicks, don’t get me wrong. But the thing is, wow, in long stretches of this flick I was sure I was watching Fast X. They’re practically the same flick and they also end, after 1300 hours, on a cliffhanger. Which is pretty unsatisfying.

At least this one does not have whatever the fuck it is that Jason Momoa was doing in that other flick.

Instead of Momoa, we have Esai Morales playing an antagonist who is always several steps ahead of the heroes, and presumably won’t make a mistake until the final moments of the next film.

As these films get longer and more complicated, it’s important to remember that none of it really matters, and that Tom Cruise playing these characters in his 60s is becoming increasingly less believable. The older he gets, the more he insists on having long scenes of him running, just to let us know he can still run fast.

We get it, Peter Pan, you can run fast.

The ultimate antagonist in this flick, you’re never going to believe it, it’s an Artificial Intelligence that they call The Entity. The Entity knows all and sees all. Anywhere there’s internet, the Entity is there. It knows everything about our hero Ethan Hunt and his band of merry pranksters, and can easily predict their actions and manipulate them weeks in advance.

It’s just so fucking smart.

dir: Brian Duffield

2023

This flick was an experience.

I went in thinking it was a horror flick. I also went into to it thinking that I wish the filmmakers had the confidence to give this a better title, being There is No-one What Will Take Care of You, the first legendary album by Will Oldham of Palace / Palace Brothers / Bonnie “Prince” Billy fame or infamy.

At least I’m guessing that’s the title they really wanted, but they chickened out. I mean, No One Will Save You is direct, punchy, and accurate, but There is No-One What Will Take Care of You, is plaintive, soulful, lyrical and also passive-aggressive, manipulative, mean-spirited; it could be a lament, it could be a threat. There’s a lot potentially going on there.

Piss-weak alternative.

This film is a marvel, in that it is quite experimental in some ways, even as it seems extremely conventional in others. There is no dialogue between characters in this film whatsoever. Our protagonist, Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever), only ever gets to say one line of dialogue in the whole film. And yet there’s acres of storytelling going on. We are left with no doubt as to what’s happened in the past, and what’s going on in Brynn’s terrible present.

Even though it’s tempting to call this a science fiction film, I think it’s more of a horror film, since Brynn fights valiantly to save herself from an uncertain but probably horrible fate. And yet the other factor is that I want to joke about the aliens from M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs coming back to Earth and figuring out how to tolerate water (on a planet five sixths of which is water), to finish the job they started over two decades ago.

발레리나

dir: Lee Chung-hyun

2023

Ballerina is a South Korean actioner where a depressed looking woman kills a bunch of men for the purposes of revenge, and also because they’re a pile of criminal misogynist arseholes.

This is not unlike many of the South Korean action films I’ve seen over the last few years. In fact, now that I think of it, even when the lead character wasn’t a woman, in at least 3 films I can think of, there was a depressed female co-star who for whatever backstory reasons had access to weapons and skills in order to punish a bunch of criminals.

It seems to be a common trope, but I guess I don’t watch enough South Korean movies to know how pervasive it is. Could just be a coincidence. Could just be that the times where I’m intrigued enough to start watching a South Korean violence action flick, it just so happens to have a depressed young woman wanting to get revenge on a bunch of loathsome criminals.

Maybe it says more about me than it does about South Korean cinema.

The film opens with a scene at a convenience store where a bunch of crims assault and try to rob the attendant. A young woman in a hoodie just wants to buy her can of soup or bag of crisps or whatever, and doesn’t even seem to really acknowledge that anything is going on. Once the shitheads start actively attacking her, she goes into full-blown Wolverine mode and starts tearing them apart with whatever is to hand, despite the fact that they have knives and use a lot of harsh language.

Ok-ju (Jeon Jong-seo) is some kind of former…I’m not entirely sure what. Bodyguard for hire? Security contractor? Often in these kinds of films the person is an ex or current National Intelligence Service agent, someone with serious skills and a sociopathic ability to apply them to…other sociopaths.

dir: Alexis Jacknow

2023

Clock is a disturbing and potent horror flick about how annoying it is to be told you have to have kids when you don’t want to have them.

Honestly, there is no shortage of arseholes on this planet. There’s like 7 billion of them. Soon there will be 8 billion. We are consuming this planet and rendering it inhospitable as we speak. The last thing we need is more people fucking up the joint.

That’s one take a person could make. On the other hand we are told we have these natural biological and evolutionary urges that, were we not to possess them or give in to them, our species would have died out long ago.

Heavens forfend! Sure, we all know the urges to have sex, but thankfully we found ways to make it not always result in pregnancy. But that only counts if you’re not an American woman. If you’re an American woman (or a ten year old child) in a state where abortions are all but outlawed now, you are legally obligated to carry a baby to term even if it fucking kills you.

Sorry, I don’t make the rules, I just recoil in horror from them. Speaking of horror, this horrific flick is horrific not only in what it shows, but in some of the arguments characters have.

There can’t be a form of horror more visceral than horror about pregnancies. There’s nothing that can be more horrifically biological than weaponising those bodily processes against a woman, whether it’s in Rosemary’s Baby, Alien or this here Clock streaming on Hulu.

I’ll leave out mother! because I still have no fucking idea what happened in that Darren Aronofsky movie.

In Clock, our protagonist Ella (Dianna Agron) is perfectly happy not to have children. She is told that she is somehow defective, or wrong, but she just doesn’t want kids. That should be okay, but people in these kinds of stories, and let’s face it in real life too, constantly feel obligated to tell other people what to do. So there’s no shortage of arseholes telling her she’s wrong.

Let the woman be. Let her live her life, and you worry about yours.

dir: Ángel Manuel Soto

2023

It wasn’t as terrible as I thought it would be.

That’s not saying much, admittedly. The new low bar that was created when they released that awful Flash movie earlier this year (unless it was all just a bad dream) means that some things just have to be passable, and have nice people delivering dialogue in an okay manner in order to be pretty good in comparison.

This flick doesn’t have Ezra Miller in it, not even a tiny cameo. Not even a picture of him. So that’s extra points right there. It has a charming and eager young chap in the lead role of Jaime Reyes / Blue Beetle, in the form of Xolo Maridueña. He has a lovely / embarrassing family surrounding him, and truth be told all the best bits of the film are or involve Jaime and his family.

That being said, even with all the elements of Latin / Mexican culture wedged into it, this kind of cultural cringe comedy is as generic as can be, whether it’s My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Fresh Off the Boat or whatever the hell they’re doing here. They say that you can’t be what you don’t see (representation), but I wonder how well they do with representing aspects of Latin culture in specific ways (but generic enough not to alienate the gringos), since I’m not from that culture.

Unfortunately, there’s also George Lopez. George fucking Lopez. If you don’t know who he is, and you haven’t endured his stand-up, or seen him in terrible things, you might think “who is this old man shouting at clouds all the time?” If you do know who he is, well, I feel your pain.

The plot is so generic. The villain, Victoria Kord, played by Susan Sarandon, is so generic and unmemorable that I feel like saying “that’s nice, dear” whenever I think of her on-screen moments. The villain’s henchman is also very generic, in that it’s a shouty chap called Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo), but he at least looks terrifying regardless of what armour he’s wearing.

He’s a mean looking motherfucker, and so always plays mean looking motherfuckers. If he and Danny Trejo had a baby together, it would look like Tommy Lee Jones.

dir: Guy Ritchie

2023

I have no idea why this is called Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, because I don’t think anyone was too confused about whose covenant it is. If Guy Ritchie directed it, and we are reliably informed that he did, then we would have assumed it was his flick called The Covenant.

But isn’t it really The Covenant between the two main characters here? The sacred promise Jake Gyllenhaal’s character makes to Ahmed, his faithful interpreter? The promise to save Ahmed and his family? Guy Ritchie didn’t make this promise to this Afghani interpreter. So why the fuck is it his covenant anyway?

Is it God’s covenant with Abraham, or that with Noah after the Flood, that he wouldn’t slaughter humanity again just for shits and giggles, or the one he made with Jesus that everything would be fine if he just went down to Earth and was a good boy?

Hmm, someone doesn’t seem to honour his covenants…

Of these bullshit semantic games, I never tire of them. Whoever the fuck’s The Covenant it is, this here is a film, that came out this year, set mostly in Afghanistan, to do with men and the promises they make to other men, and the lengths they’ll go to not break their promises.

It's beyond me why Guy Ritchie thought he needed to tell this particular story, but, unlike many of his more recent films, I don’t feel ripped off in having sat through it. At least it’s not just another smug gangster flick set in London amongst the stereotypes with constant flashbacks, at that. He wants to be taken ever so seriously. You can feel it wafting off of the screen. “This is my important film”, he tells himself and his assistant. “This will earn me the respect I deserve.”

“Yes sir, Mr Ritchie, here’s your everything bagel, just as you ordered, with nothing on it”, says the assistant.

“Excellent.”

dir: Antoine Fuqua

2023

I am forced, against my will, to use the American spelling of this movie, though it goes against every fibre of my being.

I also applaud the makers for not going with “Equaliz3r” or “3quilzer” or even “Threequelizer” with some random 3s thrown in.

This is an enjoyable film if, like me, you could watch Denzel Washington pretty much do anything, sit at a table at a café, rearrange the napkins endlessly, drink tea, or watch him huffing and puffing up some steps. That’s the film, for me, watching a man approaching 70 climbing steep steps, and order tea. I don’t really need the other stuff so much.

Of course, that covers maybe 80 per cent of the film: Denzel just doing stuff, and coming to terms with his own mortality.

10 per cent is lectures on the physiology of hummingbirds. Fascinating stuff.

The other 10 per cent is watching Denzel brutally murder people with anything that comes to hand. There are killings so brutal in this that I hope I don’t have nightmares about it.

How do we reconcile these disparate energies within the one character, this strange monk-like man, so peaceful, so deadly? Well, does it really matter anyway?

dir: Maggie Betts

2023

There are no burials in The Burial. I can’t even guess why it’s called such. Sure, it involves funeral parlours, but there’s no specific burial.

Is there a general burial, one symbolising the finality of one’s hopes and dreams finally being put to rest? Is it a reference perhaps to what happens to the Goliath part of this David and Goliath story?

Plus I don’t remember any references in the Bible to how they buried this alleged giant felled by a sling and a stone. Maybe they used a bulldozer, maybe they blew him up like a dead beached whale with dynamite.

I mean, that sounds unlikely, but it’s happened. I’ve seen the footage. You can’t unsee it.

Jaime Foxx, for all his health problems this year, which nearly led to him dying, has put in two very solid performances in two flicks that will only be seen on streaming services. It’s a shame because they deserved to be seen by more people, maybe in cinemas, maybe projected onto the sides of large buildings. The other performance was in They Cloned Tyrone, but this performance, at least for the first half of the film, was much bigger and brasher (despite the fact that he played a pimp in the other film).

Willie E Gary seems like a persona created for a movie or for wrestling, but he is a real alive person who walks this earth and does his preacher / lawyer shtick for reals. Foxx plays him, in court, like a preacher expecting the jurors and other members of the court to yell “Amen!” after any of his statements. In case we didn’t figure it out seeing him in action in court, they also show him in a Black Baptist church firing up the locals.

He is immensely successful as a personal injury lawyer, very wealthy, rich enough to be showcased on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous *ugh*. He is vibrant and full of life, and he has an entire entourage of lawyers to both back him up and to keep things real.

In contrast, Tommy Lee Jones, my gods, age has not been kind to you. He plays the role of Jeremiah O’Keefe, the owner of a bunch of funeral homes way down South in Mississippi. He is a dull, destroyed man, whose bad choices in business are in stark contrast to what a good and noble man he is.

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.