fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dir: Jeff Nichols

2024

Critics (and audiences) haven’t been kind to this film. I am not entirely sure what they were expecting. The film is called The Bikeriders. It has guys riding motorbikes. For that alone it deserves points for accuracy and honesty.

Some reviews have pointed to the fact that there’s not a lot of depth to some of the characters or what amount to their storylines, and to that I say: This film is based on a coffee table book of photographs of bikers from the early to mid 1960s: the fuck were you expecting? Anna Karenina?”

For my money, I got exactly what I wanted and exactly what I expected. This is a movie. About a biker gang. About the gloriously stupid halcyon early days, and how everything turns to shit later on. Like every story of this type.

And yet I really enjoyed it. Its joys, its charms, are ineffable, mostly, but also, what’s not to like about watching some smouldering hot guys on motorbikes for 2 hours?

Really, there’s only one. Austin Butler has a face so perfectly symmetrical that he can play Elvis, a sadistic Harkonnen, and a supposedly scuzzy biker and no-one bats an eyelid, least of all him. A face that perfect papers over a lot of potential sins, because I am not sure yet if anyone is certain he can act yet. This is not a film for acting that involves people rendering their lines in a believable manner.

This is a movie to be enjoyed for the images conjured for our eyes. Butler, as Benny, lighting a cigarette; Benny outrunning the cops on his bike, and then laughing when he runs out of gas and they catch up to him, Benny nonchalantly telling two jerks in a bar that he’ll die before he takes his colours off; the delight on Benny’s face when he’s rushing into an avoidable fight just because he wants to fuck some guys up.

I think the director knew this would be the strength of the flick, but I’m not sure audiences were ready for it. I don’t know that they’re ready to commit to Butler-mania.

Tom Hardy is in this as well. You might think you don’t need anyone else in the flick if you’ve got Austin Butler for the camera to linger upon as he leans over to play pool, or pops the top off of a beer, but a gang needs a few more bodies.

dir: Wes Ball

2024

The names are getting longer, but that doesn’t mean the films are getting shittier. One day they’ll come out with The Movie about the Book about the TV series about the Unincorporated area adjacent to the Subdivision next to the Hill Below the Mountain Upon Which the Fiefdom of the Dukedom to the Empire of the Planet in the Solar System of the Apes that Talk (they don’t have tails), and people like me will still voluntarily waddle along into the cinemas to watch them. And when buying tickets I’ll just have to say, in between shoveling popcorn down my gullet “the monkey one”, and they’ll know which one I mean, unless there’s a Kong versus or x one in the cinemas concurrently.

I thought the three movies that starred Andy Serkis as Caesar, obviously under layers and layers of digital effects, were absolute aces, real good, better than bad. Genuinely, I thought they were amazing, underpinned as they were by Serkis’ magnificent performance as the lead.

Of course, with the ending of War for the Planet of the Apes, and with this flick jumping about 300 years into the future, one in which apes rule and humans mostly drool, Caesar himself is no more. But his name lives on, and some of his beliefs, and teachings, linger.

At this stage of life on the planet, apes live in their tribes, humans are rarely glimpsed, and if they’re seen at all they’re mostly seen as a nuisance, kind of like foxes or possums. They’re not exactly writing hip-hop musicals or social media apps to bully each other with, but they are training eagles to hunt fish for them. Whatever intelligence they got that humanity lost hasn’t translated into using language beyond the spoken, so they have not advanced to a comparable level that humanity was at when it fell. They’re probably at the stage humanity was at 10,000 years ago, at the agrarian stage.

Noa (Owen Teague) is our new audience surrogate, or at the very least our main character. He is the son of the chief, naturally, in a tribe where one’s ability to train eagles seems to be of paramount importance. He is a chimpanzee, like Caesar, and has some leadership qualities. But he has doubts.

He is not the strongest chimp, nor the smartest, and as the son of a chief who isn’t, at the ordained time, able to bring back an eagle egg safely for some bonding ceremony, it looks like he’s cursed to live a life of mediocrity, even as a nepo baby.

(Le Règne animal)

dir: Thomas Cailley

2023

This is an okay film, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that I thought it would be about more than it appears to be, and I think I was wrong on that count.

I started off thinking that the people in the story undergoing changes, as in, the premise of this film is that set contemporarily, some kind of virus or something similar randomly causes people to start changing into animals, that they must symbolise something.

This being set in France, and being filled with French people, I at first assumed the animal-human hybrids probably symbolised immigrants or refugees. And they probably do, at first.

And then as the film chugged its way along, I thought “well, these people are transitioning, from one state to another, from one form to another, transforming, and a lot of people hate them, so maybe this is a literalisation of the pro-trans / anti-trans debate. At least twice conflict / assaults happen in or near bathrooms. But that’s when I thought “nah, I’m reading too much into this.”

This is a flick where some people, no matter how much you love them, grow and change into something unexpected, and, in some cases, dangerous. You can delay it for a while, hide it for a while, but ultimately cannot stop it.

And that’s it, really, no matter how much I read into things just because there are French people involved.

dir: Baloji

2023

The actual title for this in English is Omen, but I went with the French-Walloon title because I didn’t want it to be confused with one of the multitude of Omen horror flicks that are out there in the wild.

At first, as Koffi (Marc Zinga) and his wife Alice (Lucie Debay) travel back to Koffi’s hometown of Lubumbashi in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I wondered if this was going to be one of those many films that’s about someone introducing someone to their family, only for everyone to have a heart attack, and endure hours of culturally or linguistically-based misunderstandings before eventually coming to accept things, and come to terms with things, and everyone hugs in the end.

Even though the form predates the movies entirely, I do selfishly think of it as the My Big Fat *insert ethnicity as required* Wedding format. This film… does not follow that path, to say the least.

The Democratic Republic of Congo seems like… a complicated place. Koffi hasn’t been back home for 18 years, which I’m guessing means he’s in his mid thirties, and has been happily living in Belgium all this time. His pregnant wife Alice, is pretty clearly not Congolese, but she is Belgian, so at least they have that in common. As I alluded to before, they are nervous to meet with Koffi’s family, especially his mum Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua) and his dad Abel (some guy always out of shot, existing only offscreen), and they have good reason to.

The celebration they get to is surprisingly unwelcoming, so I guess it’s not in their honour. Look, I’m a fairly sensitive and paranoid kind of chap, always assuming that I’m the one at fault when misunderstandings happen or when things go wrong – I don’t think people are out to get me: I assume I’m out to get myself. Watching Koffi go through what he goes through with his family, be rebuffed, and then have things go even worse (though thankfully not in a violent sense, though it’s very close to the line) is like every paranoid person’s nightmare. It goes about as bad as one could imagine, and it’s not because of anything Koffi deliberately does.

Yes, a lot of it has to do with the superstitiousness of these people and this place. Rural Lubumbashi doesn’t seem like a place overflowing with appreciation for science or rational arguments. Koffi is doomed before he ever crossed the threshold: for stuff completely out of his control. His mother’s meanness and coldness isn’t explained until late in the film, and yet mostly all of his problems seem to stem from the fact that he has a birthmark on his cheek which these superstitious yokels think means he’s marked by the devil, which is why he had to leave in the first place.

A birthmark? A facial difference? How dumb are the superstitions of these tribal folks?

怪物
Kaibutsu

dir: Hirokazu Kore-Eda

2023

This is a film you watch for twenty minutes and have various opinions about the characters, and their various doings and transpirings.

Then you watch it for another half hour, and have a completely different set of opinions about the same characters, having observed the same doings and transpirings, but from other people’s angles or perspectives.

And then there’s a third or fourth run through of the same events, the same people, again with another vantage point, and then you’re left breathless at what the director has pulled off.

This is like watching Simone Biles perform another never-done-before gymnastics move and make it look effortless. Hirokazu Kore-Eda is the Simone Biles of Japanese filmmaking with regards to getting amazing performance from kid actors, which is notoriously hard.

It is so notoriously hard notorious drunk W.C. Fields once said you should never work with children or animals, and he was probably right, but then again, he was a hopeless drunk.

But this director… he gets such gentle, unprecocious and heart-rending performances from kids. If you ever watched Nobody Knows, way back in the day, about a bunch of kids trying to survive without any adult giving a damn about them, and how that works out, well you won’t be surprised by how things play out here.

dir: Joanna Arnow

2024

Occasionally, a film comes along, and you think maybe you’ve accidentally seen a parody trailer for something so outlandish that it can’t be real. And then you watch it, and you find out that’s it’s not a parody, and it’s something of a horrifying shock. It slowly dawns on you that what you thought was a sketch taking the piss out of arthouse flicks is a full length film, and it’s a comedy that you’re meant to take seriously and laugh at. And that’s when the depression kicks in.

The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed is the second longest title for a movie that I think I’ve ever seen or reviewed, at least this year. Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World beats it by one scant word. But while the latter Romanian film was nearly three hours long, and profoundly nuts, that was a breeze to enjoy compared to this 87 minute film that was agonising to get through. I hate watching videos of actual surgeries, and this film was like watching an 87 minute surgery video, except the patient / victim was / is me.

Excruciating doesn’t even get close to covering the cringing experience I had watching this. Maybe I’m lacking in sufficient maturity. Maybe I’m too squeamish when it comes to the depiction of ‘mature’ sexual relationships between practitioners of consensual BDSM. Maybe my expectation that scenes that start and end should have something happen in between to justify their presence in a film is unreasonable.

Maybe I’m just not on the filmmaker’s wavelength. It’s not that I don’t want to be; I really wish I understood where she was coming from. I’ve read a couple of interviews with her, and what she was going for, but the idea that this, as billed, is an actual comedy, utterly perplexes me.

Maybe if I watched this at an open air cinema on the top of a tenement building in Brooklyn with a bunch of film students or arts poseurs, I might have seen the level upon which this works. As it is, though, I watched it far from Brooklyn, alone, probably with an involuntary look of bemusement on my face.

The director plays the main character here too. That is her right. If she’s going to make a movie, she can cast herself as herself. From beginning to end she delivers almost all of her dialogue in a flat, emotionless monotone that Daria herself would have envied. She is also naked for much of the movie. She’s the only one naked throughout the movie. It’s an almost aggressive level of vulnerability.

(범죄도시4
犯罪都市4
Beomjoedosi 4)

dir: Heo Myung-haeng

2024

Hopefully this has the dumbest title of the year until another Fast & the Furious film comes out. As far as I can tell (which isn’t very far) in Korean this flick is just called Crime City 4. This series has had a bunch of different names applied to it even as the numbering increases, so it has at times (outside of South Korea) been known as The Outlaws and also as The Roundup.

This is, therefore, the sequel to The Roundup: No Way Out, and was released, at least outside of South Korea, as The Roundup: Punishment.

I don’t know why the ludicrousness of this winds me up, but these titling issues are way more interesting than the flick, so maybe that’s why I just squandered all those words as an intro.

If you haven’t watched the earlier flicks, you are unlikely to watch this one or any future instalments based on this review, because it’s not going to be flattering or illuminating. And if you have watched the other ones, or are a fan of Korean films where the main character punches people hard enough to fling them into the 5th dimension, then you could, in theory, get some enjoyment out of this one.

When I watched the 3rd one, which, in my humble opinion, is the best one of the series thus far, I joked that these flicks are insane, and that one in particular, because it presents our hero Ma Seok-do (Ma Dong-seok), as a man who can solve every situation, criminal or otherwise, by punching people really fucking hard. And that it was a film constructed around this concept, such that the force of his punches acted as a kind of multi-tool skeleton key that could resolve any difficulty.

I feel kind of foolish for even having written or said that, because this flick acts as a complete antidote to that previous way of thinking. It’s almost like they actually read that critique and thought “good Lord he’s absolutely right, fellows, let’s rein our bullshit in next time”. I’m not so delusional that I actually think that’s the case, but I’m miffed a bit because this flick is so dull in comparison.

The culprits in the first flick were Chinese gangs. The second flick had Koreans terrorising Koreans on holiday in Vietnam. The third flick had Koreans and Japanese crims doing nefarious shit in Korea, and this fourth flick has Koreans doing crimes and unaliving people in the Philippines. Why the Philippines? Why not the Philippines, you racist?

I really don’t know, it’s not like they spend enough time there to make it worth their while or ours. It’s just a location. They could just as easily have used Werribee or Mt Druitt instead. This flick makes the mistake of thinking we, the audience, want more plot, more technical details and less punching. Or at least I think that’s what the thinking was. Apart from a bunch of people being murderised, most of the crimes that Seok-do and his team of detectives are pursuing have to do with online casinos which is probably about the most boring fucking thing I can imagine a crime / action film to be about.

dir: Chris Nash

2024

This is a very Canadian horror flick.

I know, so many movies get filmed in Canada, pretending to be the States, pretending to be a lot of places, but this flick doesn’t hide its Canadianness at all, revelling in its time and place (north Ontario), using Canadian bands, on the (very diegetic) soundtrack, unashamed Canadian accents and presumably a heck of a lot of Canadians on and offscreen.

This is in service of great evil, this being a flick where a supernatural killer rises from the grave and brutally dispatches a bunch of people whether they deserve it or not, but it’s hard to argue that he doesn’t have a point, at certain junctures.

To say that this flick is mostly shot from the killer’s perspective seems to misrepresent what actually happens, or is shown. It’s not through his eyes that we see all the murder and mayhem transpire: the camera follows, much of the time, from just behind him. We spend a lot of time just watching him walk places, or standing there patiently waiting to see something that means he can start butchering people.

Much of the walking happens in nature. We watch our murdering murderer quietly walk from place to place murdering. Because of this novel setup, what it means is we’re never surprised, really, when our murderer, Johnny (Ry Barrett), murders someone. From the first murder to the last, we know it’s coming, we see it happen, and at times the murderising goes on and on for absolute ages at a leisurely place.

What are we meant to make of this? If you’re a normal person, you are probably neither reading this review nor ever going to watch a film like this. What could be more disturbing to a normal person that seeing horrifying murders of innocent people at the hands of a wordless revenant, in a manner meant to elicit sympathy not for the victims, but for the monster?

To horror fans, well, a flick like this could just be the catnip we’ve been waiting for.

dir: Robert Morgan

2023

Stopmotion is the kind of flick you could only recommend to die-hard horror fans. I don’t mean people who’ve occasionally seen popular horror films that everyone else sees and think “oh yeah I don’t mind the occasional jump scare”.

No. If you watched this flick and liked it, and recommended it to people willy nilly, you could end up arrested. The most likely reaction would be whoever you recommended coming back to you, slapping you in the face and screaming “what the fuck were you on when you recommended Stopmotion to me? Do you hate me that much?”

They probably won’t speak to you again, either. Maybe you planned it that way?

I don’t know, you’re a complicated person with a lot on your plate. Maybe a 10-year-old’s birthday party wasn’t the best place to play it.

Regardless, this is a very disturbing, very nasty little film, about how working on stop motion animation is so slow and pain-staking that it drives its practitioners mad, absolutely stark raving bonkers. And then the murders start, and that’s not even the worst thing.

This flick is mostly what we would call psychological horror, with extreme body horror thrown in as well. It is, I am pretty sure, intended to make you feel queasy. Every time anyone (me) talks about a movie, of course you have to mention other movies in order to (lazily) give people reference points. I’ve seen a lot of reviews say “it’s like this movie, or reminiscent of that one”, but the one it reminded me the most of, despite having a completely different story, was the great film from ages ago called May, staring Angela Bettis, from way back in the early 2000s.

What’s that? You’ve never heard of May? Well, it’s not much of a reference point, then, is it? Let’s just say I always feel uneasy around any pair of scissors I ever see, thanks to that film.

dir: Sam Taylor-Johnson

2024

I think biopics for musicians are some of the laziest flicks that ever get made, and they either end up becoming hits that are adored by audiences that garner their stars lots of shiny awards, or, like this one, almost universally derided travesties liked by no-one.

Because I decided that this was musician biopic week, I watched this and One Love over the course of two nights, one being about Amy Winehouse (obviously, I mean, that’s this one), and one about Bob Marley. Both came out around the same time, both were hated by critics, both made their money back, so at least on paper they weren’t failures.

And yet the critical consensus is that they were both pretty shit.

I don’t pretend my opinion means anything, or that it matters, compared to anyone else’s, if only measured against my other opinions. So when I say that I thought Back to Black was a much better film than One Love, I don’t pretend that it’s going to change anyone’s mind, or that it should. I just really felt that this flick captured a lot more of what made Amy who she was, even in a sensationalistic and somewhat superficial vehicle, than the other flick ever came close to.

And I say this unequivocally – both films probably have solid performances by two solid actors, but neither come close to even looking like the stars they are about. Marisa Abela doesn’t look like Amy, but then I don’t know that she has to for it to work. For me it felt like she embodied Amy in such a way that it gave us more of a sense of her energy beyond what she might have looked like (or sounded like, exactly).

I don’t come to this from the perspective of a fan, because I never bought one of her records, back when that was a thing. I knew of her when she was alive, and knew some of her bigger hits, but never cared that much when she was being savaged in the media for her perceived faults as a singer or a human being, and when she died I noted that she’d died at that terrible age of 27, like many a rock star of yesteryear.

dir: Reinaldo Marcus Green

2024

Hmm. Well. That was a movie.

Bob Marley: One Love is a film about an epileptic hamster living on a musical brick taken from one of the Egyptian pyramids placed on an ice volcano on one of the many moons of Jupiter painted silver and gold, silver and gold…

Nah, I might be fibbing.

It’s about a couple of years in the life of global reggae superstar Bob Marley. And they’re not even the good ones.

I guess, for people of a certain age, not only was Bob Marley a household name for the longest time, depending on your household, but there was also a time when every CD collection had to have, by law, a copy of his greatest hits compilation Legend. I didn’t make the rules, I just abided by them.

Every share house in Melbourne had a copy of it, at least one. These days, of course, there are few CD collections not shoved away somewhere in some dusty corner, and even less share houses in Melbourne. But Legend still gets millions of streams a day on whatever streaming service you can think of. Many of those songs still get played on greatest hits / golden oldie radio every day.

It’s not for me to talk about the man’s music or legacy, because, honestly, who the fuck cares about my opinion about Bob Marley? It’s like, yes I know, no-one should care about my opinions about anything (that isn’t about the sacred and divine medium of cinema!) But, like, I haven’t expressed my opinions about The Beatles, orange juice, the Eiffel Tower, the Mona Lisa or Mount Everest recently, either.

My hot take, by the way, is that they’re all shit / overrated, but that’s by the by, and just between you and me shh don't tell anyone.

Anyone who has listened to popular music over the last forty years has heard all of these songs a million times, so you either like them and are filled with a warm, gooey feeling whenever they come up, or you’re coldly indifferent to them. Which means it’s doubly unlikely that you are reading a review about a film you’ll never watch.

dir: June Schoenbrun

2024

I saw it glow, too. Many times.

This is a complicated and awkward film to talk about. It doesn’t really follow conventional cinematic storytelling structures, and it doesn’t really look like or is set up to be like what we might expect from a movie, any movie. It looks like a low-key, small-scale story about two teens obsessed with a tv show from the 90s, but it’s really about…

I dunno, I don’t really know. This looks like it’s a lot of things, but it always takes us somewhere different.

In its most simplistic rendering, we could say this flick is about two desperately sad and lonely teenagers, who grow up to be two desperately sad and lonely adults. If we were feeling unkind, we could say it’s about two people with severe mental health issues who fixate on a tv show meant to be reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and who start confusing reality with fantasy because of trauma and loss, and because they never get the love or support they needed, they never get to be well-rounded people with integrated personalities and senses of self.

A kinder, more empathetic and thoughtful angle would be to say this is a story about two people born with a sense that there is something inherently wrong either with the world or with them being in it, who try to find the way to live in it less painfully, in a way that allows them to be who they are meant to be, or not.

How mysterious that sounds. It doesn’t play out that way, but there are a great deal of scenes where we are not sure if what we are watching is real or imagined, or feels real enough that even if it isn’t literally happening, we are meant to think it should be(?)

(Πίσω από τις θημωνιές)

dir: Asimina Proedrou

2023

Alas this is not a biopic about the legendary wrestler Haystacks Calhoun, which is a pity...

This Greek film, Behind the Haystacks, which was Greece’s submission for 2024 in the Best Foreign Film category at the Academy Awards (don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t mean anything: every country submits their most critically acclaimed movie from that year, and all but 5 are ignored), starts grim and ends grim, because it begins and ends at exactly the same place, near a lake.

It’s grim up north, on the border between Greece and Macedonia. It is a particularly irritating area for Greece, because there is a state in Greece called Macedonia, and an entire country just outside its borders calling itself Macedonia, which Greece, peevishly, refused to acknowledge as being called that since 1991, wanting it instead to be called “the Former Yugoslavian Republic Known as Macedonia” up until recently. Kinda like that time the musical artist known as Prince changed his name to a symbol in order to fuck with his record company, forcing everyone to call him “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”.

In 2019 there was a compromise that neither country liked resulting in the name change to North Macedonia, which means they’re still both going to keep mewling about it forever.

This flick isn’t at all about two dumb nations fighting over stuff that doesn’t matter to any other sensible person. This flick is about people’s consciences, and a country’s soul.

The film begins with a glendi, a get together of various townsfolk, with food, booze and music free flowing. Some kids wander away from their parents during the festivities and play in the reeds by a lake. And of course, while playing, the kids find some bodies.

These are young children: when they run back and tell some adults, someone sits them down and starts gaslighting them immediately, telling them they didn’t see nothing, and anyway have they ever heard the story about the fisherman who accidentally drowned? Maybe it was his ghost they saw?

Adults are the worst. The point is, the bodies were real, and the vast majority of the people not that far away don’t seem to give much of a fuck.

(Μαγνητικά πεδία)

dir: Yorgos Goussis

2022

You could be thinking, based on the title or the poster, that this could be a documentary about legendary band The Magnetic Fields, but then that’s probably unlikely, because you’re way too smart to make that mistake. And if you were a fan of The Magnetic Fields, you would probably know there was already a documentary about them from 2010 called Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, and you probably watched it since with much enjoyment, and then went and listened to your favourite parts of their epic 3 part album 69 Love Songs.

That’s not what you’re going to get from watching this. If this wasn’t a Greek movie made during the start of the pandemic, you would think it was an American film made during the mumblecore era (2000s – 2010s) with no budget and a recommendation to the actors not to do too much acting in any given scene. Save it all for a screaming match at the end.

Most of the movie, like 99% of it, transpires on the Greek island of Kefalonia, a beautiful place that I’ve actually been to. But none of the point of this flick is to highlight any of that, because it’s not a none too subtle travel advert sponsored by the tourism bureau or anything like that.

If anything the flick is saying “if you’re bored and experiencing existential angst you could do worse than come here”. The whole flick has an experimental vibe, in that it seems like there’s a very loose premise, that the actors came up with their characters, possibly on the fly, and the overall flick has only a loose idea of where it’s going as it’s meandering along, at any given time.

That’s okay with me. I’m one of the few people on this planet films like this are made for. I don’t so much watch something like this thinking “is something interesting going to eventually happen?”, so much as “I wonder what nonsense these two will get up to next.”

dir: Richard Linklater

2024

I don’t always find myself wondering why a plethora of critics fall over themselves praising a particular movie, because I can usually see the reason. It might be lazy, simplistic reasoning, but I can usually grasp it.

The incredible reviews for this flick, being Hit Man, leave me somewhat perplexed, but in a way that shouldn’t indicate I care that much. I don’t think it really matters, and in a few months no-one will even remember this film unless someone involved goes on an actual kill crazy rampage (which, these people being in the States, is not an impossibility, in fact it’s constitutionally required).

The main statement I’ve seen about this flick is that it heralds leading man Glen Powell with his arrival at some sort of apex level of success or stardom, and, honestly, why do people continue to talk like this? That kind of promotional bullshit should have died a long time ago, long before covid, long before OJ killed his ex-wife and her partner. These people are not our friends.

These relentless shitbags are in it for money and fame. Praising someone to the heavens so that he can become the next Tom Cruise is not something worth doing, unless you get rid of the previous one.

If he were a major acting talent, maybe you could justify all that bullshit, but, I’ve seen him in two films thus far, and as far as I can tell he read his lines well and doesn’t appear drunk on set. That’s not a justification for crowning him the next King of Moomba or anything.

dirs.: Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg

2024

What makes me even angrier about this movie is that when I heard that there was a horror flick called Tarot which was presumably about tarot cards, or something, I was actually excited about it?

What a fool I was! What was I thinking?

This will probably be the strangest thing I’ve ever admitted to in a review, in any review, but I actually adore tarot cards. I’ve always loved them. I’m not joking, I collect tarot card packs and have always loved them.

But don’t confuse a hobby / predilection / interest with agreement with the whole fortune-telling / divination bullshit – not for a second have I ever believed in the predictive power of the cards, nor have I ever desperately done a reading looking for Tattslotto numbers or as to where I would one day find my One True Love (turned out it was down the pub).

What I have always loved about the cards is the cards themselves, the images on the cards, the history behind them, the major arcana and the minor arcana, and that, depending on the pack, you can get images filled with explicit or subtle imagery and symbolism, or minimalist ones, or ones that err more on the side of purely aesthetics.

I love them all, from the traditional like the Rider-Waite pack to the more esoteric.

This flick, based on a book I’ll never read, takes tarot cards, the idea and the image of them, and just basically takes a huge dump over their whole existence.

(Sous la Seine)

dir: Xavier Gens

2024

Shark movies are pretty simple. Sharks eat people. And yet the list of really good shark-based action flicks is pretty short. There’s of course Jaws. There’s The Shallows. Maybe Deep Blue Sea, but we’re tipping over into camp territory here, which leaves us with the deliberate z-grade insanity and inanity of Sharknado, and that’s it. The sequels of even these decent flicks are uniformly terrible, but that’s okay.

The template is set. Sharks still eat people. The person that knows about the shark isn’t believed until it’s too late. And then there’s always the temptation to fuck with that simplicity, which is rarely resisted.

Jaws 4: The Revenge has many jaw-dropping scenes, all for the wrongest of reasons, but, other than the shame of admitting that I’ve watched it, there’s the admission that I carry the cursed knowledge that only this movie could provide audiences.

There’s the (insane, stupid, utterly bonkers) notion that these large sharks can harbour specific malice against particular people and their families. The widow of Chief Brody (Lorraine Gary) from the first two flicks, intones with a slightly manic but also weary tone that it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her beloved husband, it was really The Shark! Which shark, since they killed all those sharks? No, it was the Fear of the Shark that killed him! And now it’s (another large shark, for some reason) again after The Brodys. Because it can somehow track them across the world, having sniffed their DNA, maybe. And it must have its Revenge! Or are they the ones getting Revenge because they somehow killed the hero of the first two Jaws with their Fear voodoo?

Who knows? Not me, and not the makers of any of these movies. Xavier Gens has clearly seen all of the shark movies, as have many of us, and has made one that gets the whole thing right, based on the original’s template. It gets it right even down to the memorable detail of having a mayor be an obstacle to public safety because of a grasping aspiration towards power and financial concerns.

(Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii)

dir: Radu Jude

2023

This is a lot of film to unpack.

I can’t say I know much, if anything, about Romanian cinema, having not knowingly ever watched a film from there as far as I know. I know about this director here, and Cristian Mungiu, and that’s about it.

And I know even less about Romania itself. Based on this flick, or these flicks…I am not going to pretend I know anything about Romanian life, but I do have impressions. I have opinions.

The title of this flick intrigued me too much for me to ignore it, and now, after nearly three hours of this experience, I feel like I can talk about it, finally.

There is a lot of driving in this flick, as in, a lot of a camera focused on a woman, being our main character Angela Răducanu (Ilinca Manolache), driving around the city of Bucharest for hours and hours as she tries to make her living. There are also scenes from a Romanian movie from the 1980s called Angela Moves On, about a woman driving a taxi around the streets of Bucharest, interspersed throughout the movie. Both of the leads are called Angela. And later in the movie our main character Angela meets up with the actress who played Angela in the earlier movie, being Dorina Lazar, again playing that character as if she’s a real person.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. I don’t know enough about anything to really know. There are the obvious elements of paralleling of their lives and times onscreen, but there’s also the element that films contemporary Angela in some / many of the same places that 80s Angela drives through or around. And some of it shows how little the place has changed, whereas some scenes are shot in areas where nothing remains due to the depredations of former despot Nicolae Ceauşescu.

dir: Dr George Miller

2024

You’ve got to admit, this is a fine looking movie. Like, I’m not a car guy, in that I don’t salivate over cars or read car magazines or care about them at all, but if I see a fine looking vehicle, it stands out, even to me.

This film just looks amazing. For a representation of an ecologically doomed Australia in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there sure are a lot of bright blues, yellows and deep reds.

And some shiny, shiny rigs.

The people look pretty shiny and weird too. I don’t think any part of this is trying to look realistic. It’s trying to look mythic, and it quite often succeeds.

Since this director has been making Mad Max films since the 1970s, I can’t really fault him for making the same kind of flick again and again, and also, I can’t really imagine anything more pointless than an origin story for the Furiosa character. Her origin story, for all that we needed to know, occurred in Fury Road. She drives cars and trucks real good, she’s missing an arm, she’s mean as fuck and she hates the jerks who rule the wasteland.

That’s all we needed to know. The look of absolute contempt Charlize Theron aimed at most people, but especially at Tom Hardy as some kind of rejiggered Max was more than enough to know everything we needed to know about Furiosa.

But Dr Miller figured there was essential stuff we absolutely needed to know about the past. Backstory to be filled out. Details to unpack. References to reference.

It’s his call, and he is absolutely meticulous about it.

The wasteland is a terrible and unforgiving place, still. But there was one enclave, one green place left, and little Furiosa was from there. A place of abundance. With trees, and peaches, even.

And then some jerk bastards on bikes came along and kidnapped her, prompting her mother to grab her sniper rifle and go off in pursuit.

dir: Jalmari Helander

2022

Now, having watched a film where people skilfully murder legions of Nazis a couple of nights ago, I decided to stick with the theme and watch another film about someone murdering Nazis, except this one is more of a one-man-genocide type of thing, and he never asked for it anyway.

He didn’t start the fight, but he’s going to finish it.

In the last days of World War II, Nazis are fleeing Finland, but they’re also scorching the earth as they retreat, laying land mines and slaughtering innocents just for the fuck of it on their way out the door. A platoon of salty fuckers come across a man who was minding his own business, and try to end him for whatever he was carrying, which in this case happens to be a shitload of gold that he dug up himself.

Nazis, being Nazis, don’t know how to share, or just let people be. So Aatami Korpi (Jorma Tommila) is forced to painfully slaughter these malign idiots one by one.

It’s funny to me that this flick, with a different emphasis and shift of perspective, and a bit of re-writing, could just as easily be a story where a scared, remorseful squad of Nazi deserters are terrorised and gruesomely dispatched by a ruthless, almost mythological monster, picking them off in the dark or through the fog until the last man is left standing, or clutching a bloodied stump.

This is, like all films about World War II currently, indebted openly to fucking Quentin Tarantino, and not only his take on Italian 70s exploitation trash like Inglourious Basterds, but also his reinterpretation / re-appropriation of Sergio Leonie’s spaghetti Western motifs, musical cues, even down to the goddamn fonts (and their colour) used for the onscreen text. It’s, like, I’m sick of Tarantino’s infection infecting everything (which was painfully obvious in Guy Ritchie’s recent The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare), but it’s not ill-used here.

What is the purpose of this movie… well, everyone else gets to make patriotic movies about what badasses they are, why not the Finns? In Aatami, as per the title of the movie, they have the literal embodiment of a national character trait they believe is not only specific to Finns, but that it’s untranslatable to non-Finnish speakers. It’s beyond stoicism, beyond resoluteness, beyond grit and determination. Beyond brutal.

It’s probably a crock of shit, and I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone say something so patronising as “oh, well, this concept doesn’t translate properly into your petty bullshit language”.

dir: Guy Ritchie

2024

Pish-posh fiddle-faddle jibber-jabber chuckaboo collie-shangies toodle-pip dimber-damber nanty narking whooperups.

All those interjections existed before I existed or wrote them down, and they’re actual phrases dating from the Victorian era, when Victoria ruled much of the world, apparently. Somehow, for reasons beyond me, this is the cartoonish level of flimflammery that Guy Ritchie, a Brit himself, chooses to use in order to tell and sell a story about some chaps who gave the Germans what-for, during the war.

It is a completely fake version of Britishness that Brits happily still recreate in truest pantomime form for movies they hope to “sell” to American audiences, predominately.

Everyone’s always asking for tea. People talk about cricket. Characters who would otherwise have working class accents have posh accents, and vice versa. The Germans won’t know or understand what hit them.

That this film is based around an actual thing that happened during the war doesn’t make any of it look or feel any less cartoonish, and that some of these chaps played by Henry Cavill, Hero Fiennes Tiffin and Carey Elwes actually existed. But we’re not meant to mutter “that never fucking happened” under our breaths while watching this movie any more than we were while watching Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds back in 2009.

dir: Alec Tibaldi

2024

So, quite often, because I’ve watched so many films, I often feel like I’ve watched a film before even when I’m seeing it for the first time.

That’s not the same as times when I’ve watched a film and forgotten it, only to watch it again down the track and realise “oh shit, I’ve already seen this.”

Such different circumstances. What I’m actually getting at is that so many screenwriters seem to be starting from exactly the same place.

In premise, and at least initially, this is pretty much the same set up as a Nicolas Cage film I watched a couple of weeks ago, called Arcadian. Except instead of a sweaty, concerned Nicolas Cage bringing up two boys after an apocalypse, we have a decidedly non-sweaty Ashley Judd bringing up two girls after an apocalypse.

Pretty much Ashley Judd is, therefore, playing Nicolas Cage.

In this version of that story, there are no monsters eating people with hyperactive hypermobile mouths, but there is a virus.

A virus, huh? Who could have thought of that?

In voiceover an aunty’s dulcet tones tells her charges of the world that existed before the virus, and of the idyllic place they now live at, one which protects and sustains them, far from the ruins of what looks like Seattle, in a forest.

dir: Moritz Mohr

2024

This film is absolutely brutal and absolutely frenetic and yet still doesn’t entirely work.

I can’t say I had a ball watching it for most of its running time, but at least during the majority of the action sequences I was thinking “damn, these are some incredibly strong action sequences”.

If there is a problem, and I’m not saying there is, necessarily, because after all it’s just my opinion, man, it’s that while a revenge epic with head smashing, limb tearing bone crunching action can be entertaining, something with this much voiceover or narration or anything where a voice is talking this fucking much, is never going to fly that well, no matter who you get in to do the voiceover.

Also, why is the main character a deaf mute?

I’m sure if you asked the screenwriters nicely, they’d say “Well, because…” and then they might trail off, thinking about how they can’t really remember, because they were stoned at the time, but there was some reason they thought it would be cool, and then they realised it would make the flick a headache to make, but then they pressed on because they didn’t want to admit it was a stupid idea.

There is no reason why the Boy of the title is deaf and mute. There is rarely a good reason in any movie to have a character be deaf or mute, unless you’re adding something to give the character obstacles to overcome, or something for the character to come to terms with in order to understand themselves or the people they care about or some other bullshit. Or, you know, casting a person who is deaf and mute, with all that it entails, and the representation it brings.

And to then have a voice as recognisable as H. Jon Benjamin, I mean come on. I have actually read that when the film was first completed and shown at some film festivals, all the narration originally was done by Bill Skarsgård himself. And then either audiences didn’t care or the producers got antsy and thought “let’s bring in a comic-type voice guy and try to make it more of a jokey-larf comedy type thing”

dir: Brad Peyton

2024

Like, did you ever want to watch a whole movie where Jennifer Lopez argues continuously with her GPS / Alexa / Siri for two hours?

Because if you have a subscription to Neflix, all this and more can be bafflingly yours.

This curious lite sci-fi flick has a hero, being JLo, representing humanity, and a villain, Harlan (Simu Liu), representing AI. Don’t worry yourself, the flick goes to absolutely no trouble to define or explain what AI means in this context: all it means is when computers or robots want to kill us.

Like almost every instance of cinematic AI, in this film’s world, an AI that was otherwise docile has a moment and loses its shit, and infects all the other AIs, and they start killing humanity. So it’s Skynet, but instead of the Austrian beefcake of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger representing the AI, it’s the young handsome features of Simu Liu, but with blue eyes, so we know he’s evil.

He has decided that in order to save humanity he has to kill most of them, but leave a tiny fraction alive, to keep as pets, maybe? Anyway, in the middle of some crucial battle he flies off into outer space, eventually to return, we presume.

Twenty eight years later, a woman called Atlas, being JLo, who clearly is carrying the whole world on her shoulders, gets a chance to find out where he is so she can presumably kill him, kill him dead, and save humanity.

She is very distrustful of AI technology, but, wouldn’t you know it, the plot compels her to put aside her misgivings about AIs in order to bond with an AI in order to bring Harlan down. So the vast majority of this movie is watching JLo arguing with someone who isn’t there physically. Because us humans are quite dumb, and nowhere near as smart as AIs, to represent this disembodied AI, we are shown a glowing orb of some description, blue and yellow, sort of, so we know that she isn’t completely crazy and just talking to herself.

What doesn’t help, in terms of not seeming ‘crazy’, is that fucking hairstyle.

dir: David Leitch

2024

If you’ve ever read any of my reviews, you would occasionally see me ask the question “who is this for” or “what is the intended audience for this flick?” Sometimes it’s rhetorical, because I can’t figure it out. Other times I’m making the statement to shame the filmmakers for pandering to a particular imagined section of society.

And if you haven’t read any of my reviews, you wouldn’t have noticed that, and you’re not reading this now, or ever, so, yes, I am talking to myself again.

Other times I ask myself the question while watching a film, and then I figure it out as a painful realisation dawns upon me.

Why you would be using fifty year old KISS songs on a soundtrack, why you would have multiple references to the Miami Vice tv show, why you would even resurrect a tv show from the 80s that this arises from, that starred Lee Majors, why you would then have visual and auditory call backs to The Six Million Dollar Man, which also starred Majors, why you would even be talking about the mechanics of filmmaking and the logistics of stuntwork, and then have an abundance of other references to the ancient times of yore?

And then it hit me, and I felt a deep, deep shame. The audience, imagined or otherwise, was me, specifically me, and other fat movie nerds of my exact vintage.

Much younger people than I, like, my kid’s age, don’t care about movies and don’t know, or get, any references earlier than the late 2000s. People older than me routinely yell “EH?” and cup their hand over one of their ears because they didn’t quite hear what you just said, or they didn’t understand most of the words you used in a sentence. You would say “it was a tv show in the 80s with Lee Majors”, and then they’d think you were talking about Lee Marvin, and start talking about how great he was in Cat Ballou and what a lovely singing voice he had in Paint Your Wagon.

悪は存在しない
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2024

This film’s title is awfully similar to another film from a few years ago, being There is No Evil, by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, but they are making very different points.

The earlier film is about how terrible the theocratic regime in Iran is and has been for the last forty years, tormenting, executing and terrorising its own citizens for having the temerity to exist and breathe. This Japanese film makes the point that no evil exists, in the natural world. Until maybe it spontaneously pops into existence for brief moments in time.

Mohammad Rasoulof has now fled from Iran, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since, for his crime of accurately representing the barbarity of his home country’s ruling totalitarian regime, he has been convicted of crimes against the state. Ryusuke Hamaguchi probably isn’t facing any such punishment from the Japanese government, mostly because, for all their faults, they don’t execute or convict people for making movies, or for being artists, or for being women.

That being said, I can imagine that there might be a fair few people who would wish this director bodily harm over the way the film ends…

If you’re familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, or his celebrated 3 hour low-key epic Oscar winning flick Drive My Car, you know his films spool out at a leisurely rate. He is in no rush to do anything, ever. He’s happy to plonk a camera down in a spot and have it record acres and acres of footage of stuff happening or not happening, until the batteries run out. Perhaps like in the gargantuan films of Andrei Tarkovsky himself, Hamagushi uses the opening hour or so of a flick to weed out the impatient and the hyperactive from the audience.

Thankfully, this flick is only an hour and 40 or so minutes long, and it practically flies by. In comparison. Only in comparison.

The first ten minutes of this flick is footage of a camera being pulled slowly through a forest, as the camera records the overcast sky through the treetops. A lush orchestral piece plays as an accompaniment, but whatever warmth or comfort it might have provided, the music becomes strident, and almost threatening, before cutting off abruptly. The next twenty minutes or so is spent recording a man chopping wood and filling containers with spring water, chat with a guy about wild wasabi, and then rush to his young daughter when he realises he’s forgotten to pick her up from day care.

dir: Alejandro Monteverde

2024

I admit that I’m not the intended audience for such a film, being a filthy maltheist as I am, baptised into a different strain of Christianity, and a full-throated, ‘til-the-day-I-die loather of the Catholic Church.

Just to clarify, a “maltheist” believes that God exists, but that He really, really fucking hates us.

But I still enjoyed the heck out of this biopic, about a formidable woman who strove her whole life to improve the lot of orphans and immigrants, in general, and Italian-Americans, specifically in the 1890s onwards in the States, of all places.

It helps that they get such a strong actor to play this incredible woman. Christiana Dell’Anna gives a stunning performance as a nun who is hated by the Church, by the whitebread Americans, by the Pope, the Archbishop and the Mayor of New York himself. A woman with that many powerful enemies has to be doing something right.

I have no doubt the backing for this flick came from moneyed up conservatives whose agenda, broadly speaking, is pushing Christian nationalistic bullshit (in the American context), which neatly folds guns, red meat, voting Republican at all costs and no matter the candidate all into an appalling burrito of cloddishness, but I don’t care. I honestly don’t care. This film and the central performance, and the way it’s all put together works so beautifully that I don’t care about the intentions of the people behind it, who think telling the story of what a great person Mother Cabrini was reflects positively on American Christians.

It is the sweetest of ironies that the film, as it openly stands, argues the complete opposite. The entire film argues that Mother Cabrini achieved everything she achieved despite the opposition of almost every single man in power, whether within the Vatican, the Italian Senate, the New York hierarchy, and almost every (non-Italian) New Yorker. You cannot have a more anti-Establishment, anti-powers that be, anti-conservative argument than that.

dir: Luca Guadagnino

2024

Well. That was… something.

I’m not entirely sure what. I feel like I’ve been tricked by a film again, but I can’t accuse it of a bait-and-switch, because the bait was “hot young tennis players in steamy love triangle”, which was never that appealing, and the “switch”, given the ending, is “absolutely nothing.”

My one point of interest in watching this is that Luca Guadagnino is making interesting films, sometimes with Tilda Swinton, sometimes, like this one, without. I think there’s an aspect of the film that REALLY interested or energised him greatly, which is the relationship between Patrick and Art (Josh O’Connor who is trying to be in everything currently, and Mike Faist), there’s an aspect that somewhat interests him, being the motivations and machinations of le femme athlétique Tashi (Zendaya).

And then there’s… I dunno, a lot of hollow nonsense to fill out the already lengthy running time. This is definitely one of those films that feels longer than what the clock tells you. Though having said that, I wasn’t really bored, but I wasn’t really enraptured either.

This flick tells a story about three people in a non-linear way, having something happen in the “present”, then thirteen years in the past, and then it jumps all over the place with the lynchpin being what’s happening at a low grade tournament in New Rochelle, New York, proudly sponsored by Phil’s Tyre Town. It will then jump randomly weeks before, hours before, days before, a decade again, and you think it’s building towards explanation or meaning, but you realise the revelations of the past don’t really amount to much.

I mean, there’s info we want to know, somewhat. Like, we might be curious as to how and why Tashi went from a world-class player to a coach living through her husband’s success, when she was so driven and fixated on success. We wonder why Patrick is pretty much homeless, despite that charming smile and those sticky-outy ears of his.

dir: Julio Torres

2023

Problemista is, I guess, by its very nature, a pretty niche seeming movie, and while I’d never argue that its themes are universal (especially for the mostly whitebread hipster audience that would even make the time to watch such a film), they impact millions of people's lives in the States, but it’s treated here with a comical and deeply absurdist approach that doesn’t detract from its overall message.

What are its overall messages? Well, the first one is that anyone in or around the Arts ‘industry’ is a monster and should be totally avoided at all costs, because they only bring misery to the people around them. That checks out. Tilda Swinton plays that embodiment of the terribleness of arts-adjacent curators/creators/parasites/critics as The Hydra / Elizabeth.

The real message is that the work visa scheme, the pathway to being able to stay and work in the United States, is an absurdist, coldly cruel, convoluted and contradictory nightmare that puts people through hell for no better reason than appealing to voters by saying “we’re tough on immigrants”, as if that’s a good thing. You can’t earn while in this state but you still have to pay about $6000 in fees, in order to get sponsored by someone, but they can’t sponsor you until you start earning, so you have to earn cash money for it to be hidden, and if you get caught or they decline to sponsor you, you’re kicked out anyway.

It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that would bring Kafka himself to say “this is needlessly cruel dehumanising bullshit.”

dir: Ira Sachs

2023

I watched a profoundly stupid film a couple of nights ago (no, not this one here), and one of the many exceedingly stupid moments, doubled, involves multiple people receiving a bullet through a “vascular corridor” or passage, which looks like it’s a deathly wound, straight through the heart

It’s a location so carefully calibrated that if it’s done right, not one but two people get to survive being shot in the chest. A bullet, passing through your heart, that somehow doesn’t kill the person it’s happened to.

I thought of this when I was watching this film here Passages. In fact it’s the only positive thing that’s stayed with me from the entire experience of watching the other movie. To be fair, and I don’t want to be, to the other movie, that idea was ripped off from earlier movies, possibly even the Zhang Yimou flick Hero from over twenty years ago? Fuck!, which had someone ‘pretend’ to kill an opponent with a sword, but who perfectly places the sword stroke such that it looks like a fatal heart wound, but it’s only a scratch.

I’m belaboring the point, but this flick is called Passages, and those other flicks reference a way of giving people mortal wounds through their hearts, and yet the victims keep on living.

Maybe it won’t be a good life, but alive they remain, because of that mysterious vascular passage.