fresh movie reviews for a good time not a long time

dir: Lila Neugebauer

2022

A movie about a depressed Afghan War veteran and a depressed mechanic being a little less depressed when they’re hanging out together? You’d be fighting other audience members to get into the cinema.

This flick could not be more low-key if it tried. It could not be more low-key if it drank a herbal tea with three Ambien while taking a bath. I don’t mean it’s sleepy, I mean just that this flick isn’t big on histrionics or people yelling stuff or changing their facial expressions much.

It’s appropriate to the story being told. It’s low-key, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t stakes. I mean, there aren’t any, but it doesn’t feel aimless.

The curious reality about people who go to war, and get wounded, and come back “home” is that dying in war is seen as a mercy, and that surviving brings with it its own dangers. The terrible statistics about suicide amongst veterans at least to me indicate that surviving a war is only the first step in many, in terms of staying alive.

Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), at film’s beginning, is pretty wrecked after surviving an explosion. Even though outwardly she has healed, she suffered a traumatic brain injury which means she walks with difficulty, balance being the issue, but also has difficulty with her arms and hands, with all motor function skills. There’s pain, there’s confusion, there’s the shame of needing help, there’s also the loss of inhibition. When she first meets her patient, saintly carer / nurse (the great Jayne Houdyshell), and hears as to why she got into this line of work, she says to her without thinking “That sounds like a miserable life.”

She thinks, without questioning it, or thinking about the social niceties, that looking after people like her, wounded people like her, would be hell on earth.

It takes a few seconds after she says it, where she looks quietly stunned at what she’s just said, to realise that one shouldn’t tell their carers such things upon first meeting. You should wait a few days at least before you entirely devalue all their life choices.

dir: Ruben Ostlund

2022

I did not care for this film one bit. I’m all for films satirising how terrible wealthy people are, but this flick sets up the limpest of straw targets and then throws up all over them.

It’s also way too long. There is no earthly reason why this needed to be 2 and a half hours long.

Maybe if they’d cut down on the footage of people throwing up or pooping themselves, we could have saved some time.

When it happens, it doesn’t let up for about 15 minutes of CGI emissions, people rolling around on the floor, cameras shaking all over the place. It’s almost like the director wanted the audience to feel sick as well.

That isn’t the film’s biggest failing, for me. The film comes in three generous sections. The first introduces us to a very boring couple, being Carl and Yaya (Harris Dickinson and Charlbi Dean). They could be the most boring couple ever depicted on a screen. They are both models, which doesn’t help, but they honestly don’t do a single interesting thing. Though they do argue about money. They argue long and hard about money. Carl especially resents that Yaya, which is a terrible name for a model, and a great name for a Greek grandmother, expects him to pay for everything even though she makes way more than he does.

And she is, after all, an influencer. He will take photos of her smiling at pasta, but they never eat pasta. I don’t even know why they go to fancy and pricey restaurants when they clearly eat nothing but steamed chicken breast and maybe a sprig of broccolini? How much would that set you back?

But argue they do, and it’s not an enjoyable or entertaining argument. It’s not that they’re airheads. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. They clearly are empty people trying to navigate a strange world, where their only currency is their looks and how many likes they get online.

But who cares. They end up on a luxury yacht full of ugly but very wealthy people. Instead of being the Rose and Jack of this ill-fated cruise, they’re just two more people that don’t belong in a wealthy paradise of older wealthy people telling service people what to do.

It’s meant to be satire, but it doesn’t really feel that satirical. There are moments of such thudding obviousness that it didn’t even register that these people are objects of satire. There’s an old couple whose fortune was made in hand grenades and land mines. There’s a mega-wealthy Russian oligarch who tells people he got rich selling shit. If that isn’t a dig at Jeffrey Bezos, I don’t know what is.

dir: Michael Morris

2022

This flick is a hard watch, and not only for those who struggle with the demon drink, or those who love or have to live with people struggling with the demon drink.

The Leslie of the title is a fuck up, an alcoholic fuck up, and that’s okay. Lots of us are fuck ups. Lots of us are alcoholics. Some of us are alcoholic fuck ups. Some of us are fuck ups independent of the fact that we’re alcoholics. There are many permutations out there. For every person you might know whose work environment and status protects them from the repercussions of their drinking, you probably know of many more people who lose jobs, families and housing over it. At some time.

And some of them came good, so to speak, cleaned up their act, gave it up completely and filled the hole in their hearts with something else, or someone else. And they did okay.

And others didn’t come good, got worse and either died or stayed worse on a plateau that never gets easier to watch.

It’s depressing to watch, and I imagine even more depressing to live through. The conceit of this flick is that Leslie may or may not have been a fuck up before, but one fateful day when she won a lottery and thought she was set for life, for her and her kid, she thought $190,000 would insulate her from the chaos of life.

Instead she spent it all on booze and drugs, and lost everything, including abandoning her kid.

When we meet Leslie (Andrea Riseborough) in the present, she’s getting kicked out of a scuzzy skid row motel, trying to give the kinds of excuses you’re pretty sure she’s tried hundreds of times before.

A reoccurring image throughout the flick is of Leslie consulting this folded up, yellowed piece of paper, upon which she has bunches of phone numbers written down but also with lines drawn through most of them. It’s short hand for “Leslie has burned almost everyone she’s ever known, and there are barely any people left who will even take her call, let alone let her crash at their place.” There's precious few names left.

dir: Eric Appel

2022

Somedays I’ll take ‘reasonably fun’ over flat out hilarious. And this is fun and silly, and so it should be.

It purports to be a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic, but I’m pretty sure, other than the inclusion of a character called Al Yankovic and the inclusion of many of his songs, none of this really pretends to be about his actual life.

You can look at it two ways (at least, I mean, you’re free to look at it from thousands of perspectives if you choose); In wanting to parody the whole biopic format of famous musicians, they do a parody of a parody, closer to Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story rather than Walk the Line, The Johnny Cash story, a film that had Reese Witherspoon playing June Carter Cash actually saying to people “You boys ain’t Walking the Line”.

Which one is the parody, I ask you. Anyway, the other way to look at it is that Al Yankovic the man is not really the kind of person whose life would make for interesting tabloid or trashy biopic fodder. Regardless or despite his success infecting our brains with his catchy parodies in the 80s and 90s, he never let that ruin him the way money and fame, or the pursuit of such, have ruined countless others. At the peak of his success he got married, he’s a Christian, he’s never been a drinker…so that’s about it.

For him and for the screenwriters here, it’s far more entertaining to create an alternative history version of both Earth history and the history of Yankovic’s life and untimely death (he’s still alive, I assure you), one which only occasionally connects with actual world history.

I say this knowing full well that the array of comedians, hacks and actors happy to have tiny cameos in the flick are probably happy to do so out of a) love of Al Yankovic or b) love of attaching themselves remora-like to anything that will see their mugs appear onscreen, but it’s great to see all these shmucks in one place, playing other shmucks of the 80s. There are some entirely surreal scenes where moderately famous stand-ups are playing moderately famous B and C listers of the past. If you know who they are and who’s they’re playing, it’s mildly amusing.

If you have no idea who they are, or who they’re playing (ie. by some unlikely sequence of events you are under 30 and you are somehow reading one of my reviews as well), it will mean nothing, and you’re probably only watching it because you love the Harry Potter books or movies so much you see Daniel Radcliffe in every single thing he’s in.

dir: George Johnstone

2023

What to say about another flick about a killer doll. Wait, are there others?

Well, I guess it’s not a massive genre or subgenre of horror. And it’s probably not really a horror flick, although a few horrible things happen.

It’s definitely sci-fi, because a new “thing” is created and, upon gaining sentience or something close to self-awareness, it almost immediately starts killing people. It’s like these people have never seen a movie before.

Or ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.

I guess when it’s a thriller where a ‘something’ that’s meant to be inanimate gains some kind of ‘life’ and starts going after people, does it really make a difference whether the doll in question is possessed by an evil spirit, the soul of a serial killer or an AI?

Well, it does make a tiny bit of difference. Some people have long argued that the point of The Exorcist was that Regan, the poor child possessed by a demon, only becomes so because her mother, played by the great Ellen Burstyn, was a bad mother.

It’s a terrible, sexist, misogynist argument, but hey, after all, there are a lot of Catholics in that story, so what else would you expect?

No, what I’m getting at is that the fear they’re tapping into is not that dolls could come to life and kill us all, but that our own shittiness as parents harms kids and even harms experimental androids, turning them into kill crazy psychopaths.

(Ο Άνθρωπος του Θεού)

dir: Yelena Popovic

2021

It’s…strange. My path to tracking down and watching this flick is an odd one. A few weeks ago I watched a Greek film called Apples about a world where people get amnesia spontaneously but still have to get on with their lives, which wasn’t that world-shaking, but had a guy in the central role who was a bit interesting.

And then I saw that he had another film that came out in 2021, and thought that I would give that a go.

It’s actually (mostly, 99 per cent) in English, despite the setting and the nationality of most of the actors. It’s about a Greek Orthodox saint, which I can’t imagine a lot of people who don’t already speak Greek could possibly care about. And it’s set in the 1890s which, I dunno, is it a decade that has a lot of diehard fans? I mean, I know the kids of today are strangely and offputtingly fixated on the 1990s, which I find very disconcerting, especially because I was there, and remember what we did back then, but I struggle to imagine the audience that could exist for something about a religious weirdo from over a century ago.

So, well. Films don’t have to have built-in audiences for my purposes, because I’m not an investor, or a hedge fund manager, or in fact anyone with enough money to invest in icy poles. I care if I enjoy a film or not, and then I think about why afterwards.

There is something compelling about the character study provided here (rather than the biopic aspects). Arvis Servetalis, as Nectarios of Aegina, gives a very committed performance as the saint, played as a man who so completely believes what he preaches that the other members of the Greek Orthodox Church (literally referred to as the Patriarchy, I’m not making that up) fear and resent him. Because he’s not into his faith solely for the accumulation of wealth, and actually wants to help people, however high he rises, he inspires hatred in the other priests because they fear he’ll give the Church’s wealth away to those who really need it.

The film starts off in Alexandria, Egypt, with there being a guy, a priest, well, actually more like the equivalent of a bishop (a metropolite, as he is referred to in the movie), who is beloved by everyone who he comes into contact with, absolutely everyone except, you guessed it, the other priests and metropolites, especially. These men with flowing beards and awesome headgear sit around plotting against him. The main reason is that they fear that, because Nectarios is so awesome, and because so many people adore him, that he’d be a shoo-in to be the next Patriarch of Alexandria.

What is a Patriarch? He’s not just an old guy, or someone’s daddy, or a paid up member of a misogynistic system striving every day to make the world a worse place for girls and women everywhere. He’s like a pope to those who follow the Orthodox faith. The conniving priests dread the idea of Nectarios becoming Patriarch and potentially giving away all their wealth. All their clothing with gold thread in it, which surely was Jesus’s plan all along.

dir: Ryan Coogler

2022

I won’t say that it feels like a missed opportunity. I won’t say that I was bitterly disappointed.

But it definitely feels like something of a letdown.

There was always going to be another Black Panther film; that was a given when the first one made over a billion dollars. That it was such an inevitability even given the death of the wonderful guy who played the Black Panther, is kinda strange, to me.

And I say this as someone who’s read multiple runs of the Black Panther comic, those from the past like Jack Kirby up to Christopher Priest, Reggie Hudlin’s run, and more recently Ta-Nahesi Coates and John Ridley: I am more than comfortable with someone else, anyone else taking up the mantle. Shuri, his sister in the comics ultimately has to take his place, multiple times in different runs, and that’s fine.

It’s just that this very long film, over 2 hours and 40 minutes, isn’t really about the Black Panther or a Black Panther at all.

There are some good ideas buried under all this run time and terrible CGI. Wakanda is, after all, a fictional place. In the story, in the comics, the happenstance fact that a massive meteorite containing a precious metal found nowhere else allowed this one African country to never be conquered by any other nation or to be colonised by the European empires. Wakanda is the Unconquered Realm.

There are no unconquered realms in Africa. There are barely any countries there that don’t bear the scars of colonialism, of genocide, of resource theft, of slavery.

Which is one of the reasons why the idea, the myth, shall we say, of Wakanda is so powerful, so enticing.

And so, as another secret nation we find out about comes into the picture that was almost exterminated by the Spanish, this time, we are introduced to Talokan.

Not Atlantis. Talokan. Mayan people who started being oppressed and found some vibranium, and then disappeared under the waves to live in peace away from the colonisers of the world for about the next 500 years.

(Im Westen nichts Neues)

dir: Edward Berger

2022

It’s not hard to make movies about World War I. It’s hard to make heroic, triumphant movies about World War I. At least, I feel like creative people with brains and working hearts, with any grasp of history or decency shy away from it, based entirely on the films that I’ve seen based on that terrible, stupid war (all wars are terrible, obviously).

The book was written by someone who fought on the German side during the war, survived, and then wrote a book about how terrible fighting in the war was, how senseless, how easily and cheaply lives could end for no benefit or purpose, how much it was the opposite of the patriotic adventure the boys that went off to war thought it would be.

Maybe we can say with some assurance that the writer Erich Maria Remarque hoped his message of the pointlessness of war would prevent further wars in or by Germany. Of course it was one of the first books banned by the Nazis when they came to power.

And then World War II said to World War I: Hold my Oktoberfest stein of beer…

It’s not an uncommon kind of story, being that it doesn’t take much to convince us that War is Hell. But decades of American movies, from a nation that has a very different relationship to the outcomes of global conflicts, have been trying to convince us that War is Hell, But the US of A Still Kicks ASS!!! That kind of mentality, maybe mitigated a bit by war films that came out of the Viet Nam and Iraq Wars which at least have some ambiguity, still predominates and still works with audiences (as Exhibit A, I present to you the staggering success of Top Gun: Maverick).

But this is a German film. Germany still wrestles with its past, with what it did in the last century, as it should and always must in order to prevent what happened happening again. So if this film has a point, it’s that war has no point, and should be avoided at almost all costs.

Tell that to the Russian scum brutalising Ukraine, but I digress.

dir: Yeon Sang-ho

2023

I should lie and say this is the South Korean sequel to Pixar’s WALL-E, whereby a plucky robot tries to save humanity from itself by killing a bunch of robots, and maybe some people too, if it has to, but that’s not going to convince anyone of anything, and could get Disney’s lawyers involved.

Jung_E is a strange science fiction flick from South Korea, but it is interesting. Well, it was mostly interesting, and only to me. And probably to the people who made it.

Despite being sci fi, despite starting with lots of action, this is not an action flick. Sorry to disappoint. It starts with intense action, and then really doesn’t have further action until the last fifteen or so minutes of the flick. So don’t go in expecting action, is all I’m saying. This is not an action flick.

Truth be told I’m not sure what you would call it instead. Maybe a techno drama, maybe a daughter / mother guilt fest. Set some time in the future, the planet has become uninhabitable due to climate change, and these shelters have been constructed off world to house humanity’s survivors. A number of these shelters unite, break away, and declare war on the others, presumably to fight over the scant resources left or about which god is the real one or over wearing masks or something equally stupid. A really cool mercenary called Captain Yun (Kim Hyun-joo) leads these forces against a bunch of robots, but seems to get shot just as she’s about to complete some important mission.

But she’s confused, because after she’s been shot, and she looks down at her fingers, there’s metal and wires where she was expecting blood and bone.

It turns out that this battle is a simulation, that she is a constructed, robotic being, and that she has been cursed to relive her final mission as some kind of South Korean hell-afterlife.

dir: Noah Baumbach

2022

I kinda hated this even more than I imagined I would?

I have generally been on board with Noah Baumbach’s bullshit since seeing his third flick decades ago, being The Squid and the Whale. The main reason is that reading “Great” American novels for much of my life means I’ve been programmed to enjoy stuff the vast majority of the world happily lives without. It means I can find amusement or entertainment in rarefied and wry tales of (white) privilege, excess and regret, and the struggles of middle class people wrestling with their own insignificance.

It’s how you are programmed to enjoy reading New Yorker articles or to find their single panel cartoons amusing without ever provoking something as vulgar as an actual laugh. It’s what makes you read Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Pynchon, Foster Wallace, Caddis, Updike, Franzen and, yes, DeLillo without ever questioning what you’re doing with your life.

It’s why you tell yourself you like Wes Anderson films or the twee aesthetics of Frankie magazine without ever questioning why.

I’ve only ever outright hated one Baumbach flick, and it was called Greenberg, and it starred Ben Stiller as the single most irritating fucker ever committed to screen (until Adam Sandler played Howie in Uncut Gems). By some strange coincidence Greta Gerwig was in that horrifying movie. I think it’s also a coincidence that she’s making babies with the director in between directing and starring in movies.

She’s here as well. Playing a middle-aged woman in the mid-1980s. With a massive perm. Another character calls it “important hair”. Very important.

Adam Driver also plays a middle-aged, paunchy college professor here, also in the mid-1980s. I’m not saying they shouldn’t play middle aged paunchy people, but c’mon, taking objectively beautiful people and making them look like the rest of us is just cruel.

To us, not them. They think it’s a guaranteed path to credibility and awards success.

dir: Todd Fields

2022

I can’t even with this film.

Atop almost every ‘best of’ list for last year from every critic and reviewer, it’s definitely a case for me of “these jerks are getting high on their own supply and I don’t get it”. This level of groupthink only comes around every other month or so.

There’s also an almost universal consensus that Blanchett will get another Best Actress Oscar for her performance as Lydia Tár, the main character, in case you didn’t know. I personally take it as a mortal insult, because, really, every award should be going to Michelle Yeoh for her heroic work as a depressed mum in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Were there any justice in this or any other universe, it would be so, but this is not a just universe, and never has been.

So, instead, the award will go to the person that does the most acting rather than the ‘best’.

I’m not trying to imply that this isn’t a well-crafted, carefully constructed movie about… whatever it’s about. It is meticulously crafted. It also has one of the most erudite and over-written scripts of anything I’ve heard in a long time. I don’t know if people in the symphonic world talk like this all the time (how exhausting that must be), but I am pretty sure that people wouldn’t be able to communicate like this constantly without wanting to shoot themselves and / or each other.

Exhausting is probably the descriptor that most often comes to mind to discuss how it felt for me to watch the whole film. It’s over 2 and a half hours long. And maybe there are times where the main character is doing something intriguing, but, honestly, she isn’t that interesting to me.

Lydia Tár is like the greatest conductor in human history. She has won every award imaginable, she’s at the top of her game and top of the ‘classical’ music world. She is the maestro in charge of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She has a wife, Sharon (Nina Hoss) who is also first chair / violin at the orchestra, and they have a daughter together called Petra.

Tár has a personal assistant, (Noémie Merlant) Francesca, who does everything down to laundry and is pretty much treated like a trained dog. Sit, heel, good dog – without the ‘good dog’ part. Clearly, Francesca has certain expectations and a certain amount of resentment towards Tár, so they were obviously involved in some way. Yes, I mean sexually.

The entire conceit of the film is based on the fact that this acclaimed, world famous conductor might happen to be female, but she’s just as abusive and terrible as many men have been in the same or similar positions throughout the history of conducting, orchestras, or men. The vast difference here is that she will get a comeuppance, whereas none of the others ever, ever paid the price.

dir: Mariama Diallo

2022

Master is the kind of horror flick that’s not really a horror flick. It feels like someone had what they felt was a trenchant or powerful story to tell, and then someone with money / power said to them “what if you made it into a horror flick / maybe turn it into a trilogy?”

That’s not entirely fair. The horror is there in the story, because something horrible happens to someone, but if this was an episode of Scooby Doo, the captured and tied-up villain at the end, when their mask is pulled off, would be “white supremacy”.

And they would have gotten away with it… wait, they did get away with it, every time.

But there is no mask pulling off ceremony at the end. There’s just certain people realising there’s nothing they can do in the face of overwhelming, insurmountable evil.

The title comes from the fact that one of the main characters is appointed the “master” of a halls of residence at an old university called Ancaster. The university is as old as America, we are told, and everything implies that this place is built on the bones of slavery, despite being in a state that isn’t renowned for its racism, in some mythical place called New England. I was sure that it had to be somewhere like Pennsylvania, but other reviews refer to rural Massachusetts or even that it’s meant to be an equivalent to Yale in Connecticut, where the director herself studied.

Almost all of the faculty and the student body are white. Almost suspiciously, predominately white. So the “master” being appointed, being African-American (Regina Hall), is either ironic or part of the overall project of whitewashing / blackwashing(?) the university’s legacy and paying lip service to current notions of diversity and inclusiveness.

Jasmine (Zoe Renee), from her very first orientation day, is pretty much doomed. Within seconds of appearing on campus she’s pretty much told she’s staying in a cursed room and that she’s going to die because some witch was hung centuries ago and then the first African-American woman to go Ancaster hung herself in the 60s.

dir: Mimi Cave

2022

This film from last year called Fresh is not to be confused with the great film directed by Boaz Yakin in the 1990s called Fresh about a 12-year-old chess playing prodigy and drug dealer just trying to get by in the world.

No, this has less cross-cultural social commentary, and more of a contemporary “what’s up with dating in this app driven day and age, huh?” feel to it.

The first exact 33 minutes of this flick are one kind of film. It’s the purest form of rom com. A young woman called Noa, for some reason (Daisy Edgar-Jones), sickened by and disappointed as well by the men she meets through dating apps, has a chance encounter with a chap in the fresh food section of a supermarket. He’s a bit awkward and self-effacing, but kinda charming and doesn’t give off any creep vibes. She is taking a chance, she knows, but she finds it refreshing to connect with someone without the bullshit artificiality or outright lies of online dating.

She wants, like everyone wants, to skip that early part which goes on and on until the other person reveals themselves to be a complete jerk. Either show you’re a jerk upfront so she can bail, or be a decent person and maybe they can get to know each other?

Steve (Sebastian Stan) doesn’t trigger any red flags yet, but hey, that’s a red flag in and of itself, isn’t it? Doesn’t it just show that he’s crafted his game to the point where women don’t question his motives or wonder why he doesn’t seem to exist online? I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation. Maybe he just wants to opt out of the online madness / rat race that seems to depress so many people.

And he seems to be a handsome doctor you say? Reconstructive surgery you say?

Wow, and with that disarming smile and massive head of healthy hair?

No wonder Noa says “fuck it”, and decides to trust her gut, and go with what feels right.

dir: Nikyatu Jusu

2022

Nanny comes at a time where it seems to be “of the moment”, or to put it most horribly, it’s very zeitgeist-y. There have been a string of recent novels about immigrant women working as nannies or au pairs and wanting to murder their precious charges (most notably Leïla Slimani’s Lullaby), but this is the most recent I can think of that shoots for (eventually) straight horror, supernatural or otherwise.

It doesn’t really work, at all, but I still enjoyed watching it. Primarily, it’s a visually strong film, and it stars the luminous Anna Diop, who’s mostly worked in television and is best known, at least by me, for playing Starfire in the Titans series. She’s great, here and elsewhere, but…

I think this film knows what it’s trying to say – the immigrant experience, documented or otherwise, compels many women to leave their families or their kids behind, travel to other countries where they sometimes have to look after the kids of wealthy shitheads. This causes a certain amount of tension. You end up lavishing all the love and care that you have in you, onto someone else’s kid, in order to get the money to send back to the people looking after your kid.

But for some strange reason despite being wealthy these rich fuckers never pay on time. And they make insane demands all the time. And the husband tries to fuck you. And the drunken wife resents you because the kid likes you more, and they feel guilty because they’re away from home working or travelling…

This is rich ground psychologically to plant a lot of dramatic seeds from which could spring the stuff of social commentary and / or nightmares. The flick wants to have its cake and eat it too, and I don’t think it earns that paradox at all. At all. Especially because it goes down a certain track that seems unforgivable when the big “reveal” happens at the end.

Aisha (Anna Diop) is in the States in an undocumented manner, meaning that she can’t work officially, and needs to get by with cash in hand jobs. A (white) family with their one precious Rose (Rose Decker) have all sorts of expectations of Aisha. It’s almost like there’s the feeling of entitlement to her time and presence, because she should be so grateful.

There’s oh so many micro-aggressions, but that’s okay, that’s what we’d expect. All of the nannies seem to be from “other” backgrounds, and they are all at the mercy of employees who see them as the exploitable resource that they are.

Aisha sends money back to Senegal, where her son Lamine is. She facetimes him as often as she can, but that can only go so far. I can’t really see that she has any plan beyond earning as much as she can to send back to Senegal in order to allow for her friend to send her son to her in the States. I’m not sure why this is the plan, but this is the plan.

Her employers are as awful as you imagine they would be. The mum (Michelle Monaghan) of course is a nervy tyrant, who somehow appreciates what Aisha can bring to the table for her daughter (being bilingual, she can teach English and French to Rose), but simultaneously resent the fact that this woman gets to spend way more time with her daughter than she does.

And she’s a workaholic / alcoholic whose photojournalist husband (Morgan Spector) fucks everyone he comes into contact with, except presumably his wife. At least he pays Aisha on time, eh? As well as going in for a kiss when the opportunity presents itself.

Bleh. Boo. I boo what you're doing.

dir: Martin McDonagh

2022

That was all so very Irish.

There’s a bunch of people saying feck and fecking all the time. They all speak with the most Oirish of Oirish brogues. They all pronounce their names and each other’s such that you can hear the Irish Gaelic pronunciation. So it’s not “Patrick Sullivan”, it’s “Pádraic Súilleabháin”.

And it’s not “Colm”, it’s “Colm”. See the difference?

Colm (Brendan Gleeson) and Padraic (Colin Farrell) have been friends for decades. They live on a fictional island off the coast of the Irish mainland, in about 1923, as a civil war rages. There’s no fighting on the island, though, even as the sounds of gunfire and cannons echo across the water.

“Good luck to you” mumbles Padraic to them and himself as he walks down a path and sees flashes in the sky, “whatever it is you’re fighting about”.

One day, the first day that we get to know all these idiots, Colm decides unlike every other day of his life that he doesn’t want to go to the pub with Padraic at two o’clock. This immediately tilts the world out of kilter and portends dark doings ahead.

It’s not just Padraic that’s worried about the fate of the universe: the other village peasants wonder aloud as to what in God’s name is going on if Colm doesn’t want to have a pint with Padraic.

When Colm tells a disbelieving and profoundly confused Padraic that he doesn’t want to spend time with him anymore, Padraic is singularly unable to grasp this new reality, the new way of the world. He spends the rest of the movie doing absolutely everything he can think of in order to restore the world to its previous axis, and Colm stolidly tries to do everything he can, with increasing desperation, to ensure that it doesn’t.

Let’s face it, Padraic is something of a fucking idiot, and after spending two hours with him I can totally see why Colm prefers his own company or the company of others. But in a place as bleak as Inisherin, even Padraic can be given a run for his money in the idiocy stakes. He’s not even the village idiot. That honour is bestowed upon the local policeman’s son, being Dominic (Barry Keoghan), who is constantly saying awkward or cringey things in a child like sing song voice, despite no longer being a child.

But it’s a testament to Padraic’s own stupidity that he turns to Dominic for advice on how to win back Colm. Padraic’s determination to either laugh it off or pretend like the break is only temporary pushes Colm to declare that if Padraic speaks to him again, he’ll cut off his own fingers.

It’s meant to be a “what the feck?” moment for those of us in the audience, too. One of the main reasons Colm has given for wanting space, for wanting peace and quiet, for wanting to not have to listen to Padraic’s inane prattle any more, is that he longs for time to himself in order to play music and, most importantly, to write music. He feels like his time on this earth is limited, and that the more of it he squanders with Padraic, the less likely he is to leave behind anything of meaning, beauty or as a legacy.

He plays the fiddle, that’s his instrument, and it’s one for which he needs his fingers and thumbs. But in order to compel Padraic to leave him be, he’s prepared to cut them off, thus rendering himself unable to do the thing he so desperately wants to do.

And still Padraic doesn’t get it. His need to make Colm like him again, his inability to move past it, means both men will pretty much doom each other, with so few alternatives.

dir: Mark Mylod

2022

The Menu…The fucking Menu.

It’s a glorious and delightful satire of something that can’t be satirised. You can’t satirise the world of high-end dining. It’s beyond satire, beyond parody. You satirise it only by replicating it.

Admittedly I have never been wealthy enough or entitled enough to “enjoy” the kinds of places where they have 14 course degustation dining or where they throw bits of food onto a table, say some poetry and then expect you to eat it without using your hands even, but I’ve read about it (with awe) and watched some of the shows even mentioned in this flick (like the Netflix series Chef’s Table). It is, to me, insane, the height of insanity.

I have only ever had the honour of eating stuff with foam particles or nitrogen cooled ice creams or desserts coated in gold leaf when it’s been work footing the bill for some obscene conference somewhere, so it’s mostly been against my will, but not at gunpoint.

To someone who grew up working class this kind of stuff seems insane, but I am also a man of a certain age. Once you get to a certain age, unless you’ve been involved in cooking for most of your adult life, your taste buds start to dwindle, you’ve drunk or eaten everything available to most people, so you start craving flavours or sensations of some elevated nature, something beyond what other mere mortals get to enjoy.

You want something more, so the prospect of paying hundreds of dollars per head doesn’t seem as alien, as wasteful anymore. But this is an escalating arms race. Restaurants are no longer restaurants – they are test kitchens or food laboratories. Early in this film the head chef bellows at the patrons “Don’t eat”. They are not meant to be eating – they are meant to be savouring, ululating, trembling with ecstasy, but at no stage are they meant to be just eating. Eating is animalistic, crude, disgusting.

What the highest of high end restaurants like Hawthorn are trying to achieve, is something beyond our worthless flesh.

Chef here is played by Ralph Fiennes, played pretty much exactly as you would expect him to play such a role: a mixture of concentration camp Commandant Amon Göth from Schindler’s List, the subtlety and playfulness of Voldemort from the Harry Potter flicks and the gentleness and curiousity of serial killer Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon.

There’s a bit of rueful sadness as well, maybe. After all, this is the most acclaimed chef in the world.

dir: Colin Trevorrow

2022

Wow, okay, so some movies have a million things in them and still feel kinda empty.

The first film in this stupid new trilogy had only one good moment in it, which was a strange half second or so where a resort under attack by flying dinosaurs has one guy slowly trying to get away from the monsters even though he’s trying not to spill two very large margaritas that he’s carrying.

That was it. A second or two at most that made me laugh, or possibly chortle, in a film that was probably 13 hours long. The second flick Fallen Kingdom I don’t really remember despite having seen it, but I will guess that about the only good moment was a ruthless capitalist auctioning off dinosaurs getting eaten by said dinosaurs towards the end of the film.

It's that classic moment of “Why, I never thought that I, the smarmy vicious chap releasing face eating monsters into the world would ever ironically get MY face eaten off!!”

This latest flick Dominion doesn’t have a lot going for it despite having 400 main characters and a constant hail of call backs to the earlier films, especially the 1st one. It also brings back Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, again for very little good reason.

But the main chumps of the new trilogy were meant to be Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard and either some clone girl or a velociraptor called Blue (Tilda Swinton, probably). They’re here too, but you are asking yourself why these people are here, why any of them are here.

Dinosaurs, now, by the time of this flick, are all over the world, even the cold places. They are not confined to an island paradise or some rich jerk’s palatial estate: They’re everywhere!

But they’re not even the big deal here. The big deal, or the world ending threat is that a very rich fuckhead (Campbell Scott) has genetically engineered monstrous locusts that eat every crop in the world except for the ones engineered by his company Biosyn. His plan is…

What is his plan again? If everyone starves to death then their ghosts will come to his company to buy his grain? Ghost cap in ghost hand? How was that plan going to play out?

Stupid decisions made by billionaires are the bread and butter not only of this entire series of dinosaur films but also of most of the science fiction that comes out these days. The thing is, they’ve completely gone beyond the idea of Olympian arrogance or hubris by the massively wealthy being the cause of their own downfall, to “well, that last billionaire was not rich or smart enough, but I’m sure I’m smart and rich enough to make it work”.

(Μήλα)

dir: Christos Nikou

2021

This. Is a Greek film. About a guy. And he really likes apples.

That’s about it. There’s not a lot of subtext going on. Just really likes apples.

Doesn’t, like, love them to the exclusion of everything else. But he does seem to enjoy eating them more than he seems to enjoy eating anything else.

He doesn’t spend the entire film eating apples. That would be absurd, even for an odd Greek film.

But the film is called Apples. So you could be forgiven for thinking the apples are somehow important.

There is a guy here (Aris Servetalis), but I don’t think we find out his name? I don’t think he knows his name, or at least that’s what he tells the people that find him on the bus.

There appears to be, for a film made during the goddamn pandemic, or just before the pandemic, an epidemic, not of people coughing themselves to death with the spicy cough, but an epidemic of sudden onset amnesia. One moment people know who they are and where, and the next they seem to have forgotten everything from before a specific moment in time.

Our sullen guy here is taken to a hospital, and tested and looked after for a while, but there’s no treatment and no cure. People are basically warehoused at the hospital until someone comes to claim them, like they’re lost property. If no one comes, well, they have a program for that.

Our sullen bearded guy is set up in a modest apartment, has some clothes given to him, and a polaroid camera, and money occasionally and physical cassette tapes regularly are delivered to him for his listening pleasure. Of the few things he has, he also has a tape player. How delightfully retro!

He has to listen to the tapes, go out into the world and do what the tapes said to do, and take a polaroid as proof. That polaroid is put into a photo album, and perused by the doctors who seem to break into the apartment whenever they feel like it, admiring their handiwork.

The first task involves going out and asking to borrow someone’s bike, pop a wheelie or two, and then have a photo taken of you on the bike. The guy asks a teenager for his bike, and of course the jerk says no. So he asks an even younger kid, so that he can ride around on an absurdly little bike like he’s Krusty the Clown.

But he gets the photo. The taskings from the cassettes get more complicated, more involved, and start to include other people more. Go to a fancy dress party they said. Go to a strip club, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.

dir: Rian Johnson

2022

Anyone who’s followed Rian Johnson’s career knows what a smartarse he is, and now, with so much Netflix money, and nothing to stop him, he is in absolute smartarse mode, plus with a budget that can afford the rights to Beatles songs.

A dangerous combination. I liked Knives Out just fine, no complaints there, but I never really thought I needed a franchise to arise from it, nor did I think necessarily that the Benoit Blanc character played with deep fried Southern accented charm by Daniel Craig needed to come back either. But he’s back, and now he’s kind of the main character rather than being a detective that swoops in and solves a crime at the end to the benefit of the person we think is innocent, and the detriment of the other shitheads.

This is, as well, a flick made during the pandemic which means delightfully setting it on an isolated Greek resort island was probably more of a necessity rather than a need for an exotic locale to tell this pointless story.

As Benoit Blanc helpfully explains to us, at least twice, a glass onion is a metaphor, unlike the actual Glass Onion structure on the island, for something that looks incredibly intricate and complex at first, that ultimately is revealed to be dumb and straightforward. For a murder mystery within another murder mystery, there isn’t much about the actual murders that are a mystery. There’s a murder, and then another murder, and then we find out there was an earlier murder, but there isn’t much of a mystery as to who did what.

The bigger mystery is how Benoit Blanc, world’s greatest Foghorn Leghorn impersonator, got on the island, and why the murderer or murderers allowed it to happen, and went along with it.

The first part is explained, eventually. We see Benoit in a bath lamenting the lockdowns and lamenting not being able to get out there and solve mysteries in person, failing as he is at all these detective games like Among Us or online Zoom Cluedo (with Stephen Sondheim and Angela Lansbury cameoing just prior to their deaths, no less), as his husband (Hugh Grant) informs him that he has a delivery.

A bunch of “winners” in their respective fields have these puzzle boxes delivered to them. Some of them solve the puzzles. Others take a hammer to the box, or have someone else solve it for them.

One is a men’s rights activist online (Dave Bautista) whining about how estrogen has breastified the world, just before his mum whacks him in the head and tells him not to talk back to her. He has a blonde girlfriend who calls herself Whisky whose only objective is to be blonde and influential online.

Another is a scientist (Leslie Odom Jnr), another is a governor (Kathryn Hahn), and there’s one with a clothing line who’s big on Insta (Kate Hudson). And there’s Andi who everyone hates or fears (Janelle Monae). All of these people know each other, and know the person who invited them, being a tech billionaire who owns the island (Ed Norton).

dir: Anna Foerster

2022

Lou is the kind of ovaries-to-the-wall action flick starring an older American tv / film movie icon (at least to me) that you rarely if ever get to see these days.

Many action flicks come out every year. They’re perfect for people who hate too much dialogue or speaking or people reaching out to each other across the emotional divide that seems infinite until it isn’t. Lou is tough and uncompromising, and almost dares you not to like it.

Lou (the great Allison Janney) is a no bullshit, no sentiment woman living on an island in the Pacific North West. She has a dog and doesn’t even really seem to like the dog that much, but she does feed him, usually fresh deer that she kills herself.

With her BARE HANDS. Joking. She shoots them THEN finishes them off.

There is a storm coming to the island (of course). On the news that she spies in a local store, or it might have been the bank, Ronald Reagan is denying that any of the Iran / Contra stuff ever happened, or having any involvement in any of it, which was of course a lie. Lou is looking at the screen like maybe she can melt Reagan with her rage alone. It’s funny, because you get the impression that, for whatever reason, Lou personally knows how much what Reagan is saying is pure bullshit.

It’s also telling us when this is all happening. It’s the 80s. There aren’t a lot of Kate Bush needle drops or Madonna hairstyles or fingerless gloves, or kids playing Dungeons & Dragons. It’s a just a time and place with no mobiles, and few ways to get around on an island without a vehicle.

We watch, as the film begins, an entire sequence where Lou, for reasons of her own, digs up something on her property, burns some stuff, writes a letter to someone, then puts the barrel of a rifle under her chin and prepares to pull the trigger. The story then winds back the day leading up to this moment, and shows it to us again in more detail before it progresses any further.

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: David Leitch

2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Olivia Wilde

2022

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

So, Darling, definitely be Worried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was hoping for aliens, but…

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

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

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

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

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

dir: David Cronenberg

2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Dr George Miller

2022

It’s a real one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Sebastián Lelio

2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dir: Roar Uthaug

2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Zgjoi)

dir: Blerta Blasholli

2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because she’s got no other fucking choice.

dirs: Kentucker Audley & Albert Birney

2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

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

dir: Christopher Makoto Yogi

2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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