fresh movie reviews for a good time not a long time

dir: Gina Prince-Bythewood

2022

The Woman King is based on a somewhat true story, in that there was a place called Dahomey in West Africa, and there was an all female fighting force called the Agojie, and they fought and won a war against the larger Oyo empire that treated Dahomey as a vassal state.

Oh, and there was a king called Ghezo (John Boyega) who ruled for 40 years.

The rest, as they say, is not history, but fiction. The stirring portrayal of General Nanisca, as leader of the Agojie, is an entirely created character.

Also fictional is the idea that Ghezo, at Nanisca’s urging, stopped selling captives as slaves.

I knew all this going in, but it really didn’t adversely impact on my enjoyment of the flick. Same way that no-one really spends any quality time in conversation pointing out that nothing in Gladiator was historically accurate, or even made any sense. They just liked it when Russell Crowe in his prime was killing motherfuckers dead in the Coliseum.

In that same spirit, the primary attraction of this here flick is that Viola Davis, Academy Award winner Viola Davis, kills a lot of motherfuckers dead in this film, and they all have it coming. Anyone who knows who Viola Davis is knows how cold and mean she can be in a role (her version of Amanda Waller in several DC films including the most recent Black Adam would probably shoot a child in order to somehow get a good cup of coffee), and this is her at her most steely-eyed.

She is such a huge presence in the flick that whenever she wasn’t on screen I was a bit nervous. But she is by no means the only character of note. John Boyega’s role is quite minor, and he plays it quite minorly (and comically, I would argue). It’s strange that this royal personage, someone with supreme power and a massive harem knows that Nanisca could fuck him up at a moment’s notice, so he always has to seem deferential to her. Though she is loyal at all times, she carries herself with an air of “I could eat your face in an instant and no-one would stop me”.

I did wonder at some points why she didn’t kill him and take his place.

dir: Ben Steiner

2022

Matriarch is sort of predicated on the idea that, damn, mothers can be quite harsh.

I mean, that’s relatable, surely? Some people, even ones that have or had a decent, loving relationship with their mums as adults can still have an array of unresolved or unresolvable conflicts.

Well, a further qualification of this premise is: What if, as an adult, you were a drug addicted fuck up, and the mother you hated was the leader of some weird village sex cult?

This murky, muddled, made for tv-looking horror flick probably has a decent cast, it’s hard to tell. Most of the flick is spent watching the main character ping around like a ball in a pinball machine.

Laura (Jemima Rooper) works for an ad company, and like all people who work in the ad industry, she is doing cocaine constantly and sculling vodka from a water bottle. Though this behaviour isn’t celebrated by the people around her, once we figure out that she hates her mother, we think “oh, she’s like this because of her mum.”

At a moment when it looks like Laura has checked out completely, she wakes up again, but only after seeming like some black ichor / liquid has seeped into her body.

Gross. This prompts her to go back to whatever village she was from to talk with the mother she has avoided for 20 years, played by Kate Dickie.

It’s never explained why the mum, clearly a Scot, and the daughter don’t have the same accent, but I guess it’s immaterial. The mum is, right from the start, making all these clucky noises of concern, but constantly trying to roofie Laura. The movie makes no attempt to hide the fact that Celia, the mum, is constantly trying to knock Laura out and to drag her to a greenhouse.

Laura’s journey is meant to be like “oh, wow, I have a heap of unresolved issues, and maybe if I return home and talk to my mum, and to some other locals, including my ex-girlfriend from 20 years ago, I can resolve some stuff and move on with my life?”

The mum’s journey is “nah, I cannae stand ye and ye haff te fucken die.”

dir: Kristina Buožytė & Bruno Samper

2022

Vesper. It means evening in Latin, and it’s the first name of the main character here.

It’s the evening of the world, or at least that of humanity. Set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, there aren’t many humans around and most of them aren’t well. Animals are gone, and plant life is abundant, but it’s mutated, and it doesn’t like to be eaten. In fact in a lot of cases it likes to fight back.

I don’t know how many people are left, but out in the wastelands, there’s 13-year-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), her paralysed dad (Richard Brake) who can still communicate with her through a floating drone that looks suspiciously like Wilson the volleyball, her vicious uncle Jonas (Eddie Marsen) and his coterie of cruel, in some cases deformed, kids. He also has genetically engineered humanoid slaves they call jugs. Very disturbing. “They” don’t consider them human, but they’re as human as the other scum oppressing and using them.

Vesper spends all her time looking for viable plants or seeds for food and / or looking after her father’s body, which requires bioenergy power sources. She knows her way around the decrepit world they inhabit, with her father’s voice often barking at her to be constantly vigilant to threats.

The opening titles make reference to genetic engineering, which humanity thought would save them from ecological disaster, actually causing the disaster itself, but in Vesper’s hands her strange form of biohacking or gene manipulation gives her a chance to do stuff that everyone else tells her she shouldn’t do.

dir: Fletcher Moules

2022

Entergalactic is an entirely animated movie, and a Netflix exclusive one at that. This is not one for the kids, definitely. Not because it’s beyond them, because the story is a very simple one, but there are some sex scenes, surprisingly enough.

But, this isn’t a flick that would satisfy weirdos or perverts, because that’s not its purpose(?) It’s probably more like a longform accompaniment to Kid Cudi’s album of the same name that came out this year. And he also voices one of the main characters, being Jabari.

Jabari has recently moved into a loft apartment in Manhattan because he’s started a new job with Cosmic Comics, which I’m guessing is like Marvel or something. To date his claim to fame has been spraypainting a character he calls Mr Rager wherever he can on the walls of New York. The task before him is converting Mr Rager into some kind of comic book character.

This sounds fantastical, but, I assure you, it’s not imaginary within the dreamy context of the animated movie. Jabari is a dreamer, but he’s also drunk and stoned a lot of the time, so I guess there’s a fair bit of overlap between the actual and the imagined.

Jabari is a young African-American man in New York, but, thankfully, within the confines of this story, there’s only a small amount of racism he has to deal with, so he isn’t shot by cops for no reason or excluded from too many aspects of contemporary society. He has no money issues either, so he’s doing better than most of us. Also, with his group of friends, life is a constant drug and booze fueled exciting time for which there are no repercussions other than a mild hangover that one time.

He does sometimes have the Mr Rager character appear and seem like he wants to kill him, but this is less a psychotic break and more an opportunity to let an aspect of Jabari’s personality shine through (which kinda seems like self-doubt, or anger) along with the animation.

As for the animation, well, it’s unfair to the animators to say this, but they do a fairly good job aping / ripping off / homaging / appropriating the animation style from recent masterpiece Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, New York never looked this great in animated form, except, um, for the last time it looked this great.

dir: Ti West

2022

I had mostly been either ill-informed or indifferent to the works of Ti West, up until this year, this fateful year in which a little flick called X came out. From my perspective, it was only a couple of months ago that I was stunned by that flick, made by Americans on a tiny budget in New Zealand during the covid lockdowns.

I was blown away, and thought that was a keen horror flick that was also saying something else, something more, something funnier than I was expecting.

When it was announced that West was making it all into a trilogy, like most movie fans, my heart sank, because I was sure it meant 1 good film and two mediocre retreads, like most film trilogies, but also subsequent films that would make me like the 1st flick even less.

I should not have been so foolish: Pearl is the perfect companion piece to X. I don’t know that anyone left the very enjoyable X saying “I really would love to watch a prequel sent in 1918 about the early days of the crazy old woman who kills bunches of people because she ain’t getting any”, but that’s what we’ve blessed with.

Mia Goth played dual roles in X as both the young Maxine and the wizened and murderous Pearl. Here she’s only playing a young Pearl, but she’s playing her with a full range of emotions and hopes and dreams, and at the amped up level that only youth and sociopathic rage can summon.

The entire performance is at 11. This amp goes to 11. Even in her quiet moments Pearl is suffused with a passion that’s at odds with the world around her. She is, after all, just a simple country Texan girl, living on the farm with her completely paralyzed father (Matthew Sunderland) and a stern and dictatorial German mother (Tandi Wright), dreaming of leaving home and becoming some kind of star on the recently invented silver screen.

The nearby town does have a playhouse that plays movies even. Moving pictures, the kinds with women dancing in cancan lines, it’s enough to give a girl hopes and dreams.

Of course Pearl is not a kid: she’s actually married to Howard, who’s gone off to fight in the war, hopefully on the German side. And she’s trapped on this farm because she has no money, and she doesn’t seem that well educated, and plus whatever her mother says goes, because her word is law.

Until it isn’t anymore. If X had a theme it was that someone being forced to stifle their desires long term, both sexual and otherwise, would result in literal heartbreak for others. If Pearl has a theme it’s that Pearl’s desire to be loved, desire to be a star, will not be repressed. She just wants it too badly.

Even though cinema has barely existed for very long, this one mule town has a cinema, and a projectionist (David Corenswet), and somehow plays movies with sound before such a thing has been invented yet. The kind of movie Pearl loves has girls dancing, like in Palace Follies.

dir: John Patton Ford

2022

Emily the Criminal is one of those titles that’s so straight forward that, if you have a mind like mine (and I pray, for all your sakes, that none of you do), you immediately think means it’s meant ironically. It calls Emily one thing, so she must be the opposite of that one thing?

Nah, she is a crim, or at least the character called Emily in this film named after her has her committing a whole raft of crimes. What the flick takes it time to explain, in painstaking detail, is why she feels like she pretty much doesn’t have any alternatives.

First of all, living in LA must be expensive. Second, being American, she has masses of student loans to repay, and they’re not like the HECS / HELP system we have in Australia whose repayments don’t kick in unless you earn over a certain threshold. Where she is at, no matter how little you earn, they’re taking something out of your pay, and the interest is piling up as well.

Another pesky detail is that she’s done serious jail time for a felony conviction. I’m not judging her, but any potential employer would, and as such any of the jobs she might be professionally qualified for or aspire to, are decidedly out of reach.

So she’s earning minimum wage, in a job where she has no employment protections. When she arks up at a manager who pulls a shift from her arbitrarily, he tells her she’s not even an employee; she’s an independent contractor who doesn’t even have a union shop steward to complain to.

America: a nation built on trying to avoid paying people for their labour and their time.

dir: Zach Cregger

2022

You know, for a lot of this movie’s duration, I was kinda hooked. It’s a horror movie, so naturally there are some terrifying bits.

And then it all falls apart in the end. Which is okay. I can forgive that in many/most horror flicks because they’re notoriously difficult to end in a way which doesn’t either bamboozle the audience or leave it shrugging in a way that could imply the flick will be forgotten before the viewer has left the theatre.

Barbarian is tricky. You think it’s a flick about a certain kind of horror (turning up to an Airbnb you’ve booked correctly, but someone else is already staying there, which is like the most horrific thing I could possibly imagine), but then it digs two levels deeper into layers of hell you didn’t imagine were there, and will probably regret being told about.

If I could humbly suggest that this flick has maybe three distinct acts, the first act, which happens to be the one where we don’t know anything, is probably the best because it doesn’t hurry and it’s delightfully ambiguous.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit, and has booked a stay at a house for the night because she has a job interview the next day. She arrives at night, struggles to get the key out of the lockbox, and then is shocked, shocked I say when the key’s not there. Calls to the help line are obviously ignored. And then she sees that someone is inside the place.

Keith (Bill Skarsgard) is in the place already, and wary as well, but tries to be gentlemanly and solicitous, and is well aware of how everything he says and does could look to someone. Tess is very tentative about coming in to sort everything out, and to figure out whether it’s genuinely a mistaken double booking, or whether something else that’s quite nefarious is going on.

The thing about Bill Skarsgard is, other than being the son of Swedish screen legend Stellan and brother to very famous other Skarsgard Alexander, is that while being a kinda handsome guy, his eyes bug out a bit, and one of them tends toward a slightly skewed direction, giving him, from certain angles, a very unsettling air.

It’s probably the key reason as to why they made him play the profoundly evil child-eating clown Pennywise in It Chapters 1 and 2. So here, in human form, it’s used to give him enough of a reason to keep the wary Tess wary, despite his polite and respectful patter.

Tess agrees that it’s probably not fair for either of them to have to find somewhere else to stay, and he helpfully points out that there’s some medical convention in town, and she’s unlikely to be able to find accommodation elsewhere. First red flag. He does everything to make her feel comfortable, and even insists that she take the bedroom, and washes the sheets and dries them. It’s just that it means, despite it being the middle of the night, she’s going to have to wait an hour and a half before she can crash out. Immense second red flag.

Then, after she uses the bathroom, he delivers an understandable but immensely awkward explanation of why he hasn’t opened a bottle of wine that sits on the table yet, so that she’d know that the bottle was sealed up to that moment and nothing’s been added to it, but that if she doesn’t want any wine he totally understands and maybe she wants a tea instead and…

dir: Halina Reijn

2022

Hmm. Horror comedy about what paranoid and fragile simpletons contemporary too-online Gen Zs are… Sounds like a box office juggernaut…

I wonder at why people feel the urge to try to make generational statements about cohorts of people, unless it’s for the purposes of humour, in which case go for it. It’s just so lazy, and makes the people ‘making’ the statement seem like old reactionaries better placed to yell at clouds instead in their spare time.

I don’t really know what the motivations or impulses were for the people making this: I doubt it’s just a desire to get revenge on some group they despise. Though of course it’s still possible.

There isn’t really anything that specific about it that requires the people to be of a certain age in order to point out some of the annoying things people do these days. People of any age do them. And so this premise, of a bunch of paranoid people trapped in a mansion during a storm, as they slowly get picked off one by one, doesn’t really have anything that novel or witty to say about Insta or filters or identity politics or anything in fact: all it says is that in a harrowing situation, people will do dumb things.

And that’s okay. Instead of making this the kind of flick that would have starred, I dunno, Donald Sutherland, Jude Law, Angela Lansbury, Robert Mitchum, Joan Collins, Kylie Minogue and maybe a wrestler painstakingly working their way through the cast until And Then There Were None…, we have Pete Davidson.

What is a Pete Davidson? Well, he’s not quite a Dean Martin, and not quite a wrestler, but maybe he’s a twitchy meth head in between the two? His character of David doesn’t even own the house these people are partying in: It’s his parents’ mansion.

How emasculating. So he is a trust fund kiddie, and most of the rest of his friends are similarly trust fund kiddies. But only one of them has turned up to the party, with a newish girlfriend in tow, without actually being invited.

Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) has brought her girlfriend Bee (Maria Bakalova) to where neither of them is wanted, only to have the party go seriously south when a hurricane hits.

Ew, maybe they’re in Florida? How gross.

No, they’re not in Florida: Hurricanes happen everywhere now thanks to climate change. What’s important is that they’re trapped, they can’t get out, and most of them will be dead by dawn. That’s how these things work, that’s how they have to go. I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them like the drone that I am.

dirs: Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman

2021

I was excited to see this, having heard a lot about it, and the chance came up during the recent Melbourne International Film Festival to watch it in a cinema, so I went for it.

Huh. I was left a fair bit baffled by the end as to why it has the rep that it has, at least on the festival circuit. It’s reviewed exceptionally well, and, I just can’t see it, whatever it is that everyone else is seeing.

It has been described as an Afrofuturist / gender fluid exploration of contemporary themes and colonisation and its discontents, and that’s all well and good, but what we get for most of the film’s running time is a number of people wearing discarded bits of tech on their clothing, singing the occasional song, having circular conversations about why they deserve more from the bounty the rest of the world has derived through mining their country, and then that’s about it.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot to think about in terms of all the elements shining through the various characters. Some characters die right at the start, to inspire other characters to start moving, and others change gender (and actor, because why not?) for no real discernible reason.

Okay. And this flick is mostly set in Burundi, but all filmed in Rwanda, and it’s nice to watch a flick from Rwanda that isn’t about the massacre in the 1990s that killed so, so many people. That being said, a genocide that killed a million people isn’t something you forget about. It pokes through, here and there, into the narrative. You can’t talk about the extraction of resources from a country like Rwanda or Burundi without talking about the legacy of colonialism or the international appetite for fuelling its own technological progress upwards and onwards at the expense of the people at the bottom who are the ones, you know, mining the stuff and dealing with the environmental devastation afterwards, if they even survive.

This shouldn’t be mistaken for a documentary, or a manifesto / treatise: it’s certainly spells out where it’s coming from, and what people represent. I mean, for crying out loud, most of the characters have purely functional names like Motherboard, Ehlohel (it’s really LOL), Psychology, Memory, both Neptunes, and Matalusa (which is really a combination of “martyr” and “loser”, which ends up being extended further to Martyr Loser King?), but what the aspiration is, the tremendous hope is that all these people can transcend their mortal constraints, both societal and of their own flesh, through free access to technology and music (I’m guessing, since there’s are so many musical scenes, and one of the directors is a musician / composer) to some higher plane that exists beyond the racism and colonialism of our actual contemporary world.

I mean, don’t we all. It would be nice if such things could happen, instead of entrenching existing poverty and structural racism and labeling it economic progress, but what are you going to do? All our new mobiles need coltan. Where are you going to get your new smartphone from every year, if not from the back-breaking labour of the poorest people in countries just like these?

dir: Romain Gavras

2022

This film has pretty much the greatest and most thrilling first ten minutes of any film I’ve ever seen or that’s ever been made. If there’s an issue, a serious issue, it’s that the other 90 or so minutes that follow aren’t as compelling as that opening.

It’s amazing, and intense, and a masterpiece of coordination, choreography and cinematography. Of course it would seem like downhill from there.

I can’t overstate enough how amazing it is: It opens with a young chap with a military haircut talking to assembled reporters and rows of cops about the unfortunate death of a teenage boy at the hands of police officers. This is in front of a cop station, and there is a large crowd of angry people, mostly youths, all from the same housing complex, from which the film gets its name. Athena is made up of towers, the kinds of towers that here we call housing commission flats; in Britain council estates; the States call them projects. In France I think they’re called banlieue, which sounds ominous but really just means “outlying suburb”. You know, where they send all the poor immigrants to live.

Just as Soldier Boy speaks to the media, urging calm and restraint in the face of police brutality, one of his other brother’s, Karim (Sami Slimane, utterly magnificent) chooses to strongly disagree. He launches a Molotov cocktail at the police, freaking everyone out, but starting off a plan that clearly he’s been working on since he heard about the youngest brother’s death.

Karim commands other young chaps from Athena in their attack on the police station, stealing weapons, body armour and a police van in order to cart back their hard won loot from the pigs back to Athena.

All of this happens at breakneck speed, and in (what looks like) one glorious single take that ends with the “heroes” standing at the ramparts of one of the towers of the complex, daring the cops to attack, as the film’s title is revealed.

By this point, you kinda feel like it’s their battle, and they’re going to win it.

dir: Ninja Thyberg

2021

This flick is a lot to handle.

A lot of painful stuff to handle.

Pleasure, despite its name, you’ll be amazed to find out, is really about its opposite. It’s about capitalism. It’s especially about the kind of capitalism that takes people, in this case women, and finds a way to profit from their sexual abuse on camera, in this, the glorious digital age in which we live.

This is no Boogie Nights, delighting us with outlandishly dated hairstyles and funky basslines and the sense that we juuuuust missed out on a really wicked party, while it lasted, before things got too dark and everyone sold out. This film has no illusions about this wretched “adult” business into which people often voluntarily launch themselves into.

I mean, low rent scumbags have been treating women terribly for millennia solely for their own gratification as abusers, but it takes true entrepreneurs to monetise that abuse and turn a profit from it. It’s a process that sees a woman transform from being a person to being a commodity, a malleable object to be contorted and consumed, until she’s got nothing left, and then…

Well, I don’t know. Are we talking about a person, or their image? When their abuse is “captured” on film, either as a photo or a movie, is it “done” at the end of the scene, or is it something that’s reignited every time it’s viewed or played? Is it not as bad if it gets lots of likes?

And what does it mean that abject misogyny is an in demand product?

And before it seems like I’m ignoring the obvious, yes, our main character Bella (Sofia Kappel) actively seeks out this industry by moving from Sweden to LA, specifically to work. There isn’t an abusive suitcase pimp boyfriend forcing her to work to fuel his coke addiction. There’s no reason per se that we’re privy to other than that she wants to make money and get an elevated profile in order to make more money, but other than that…

I think if the film shows anything it’s that even people who think they know what they’re getting into often have no fucking idea what they’re getting into, and that the viewers / consumers have no idea what these people go through behind the scenes and even on camera, and how saying “well, these people consented, we’ve got it on paper” doesn’t really convey the half of it.

Bella wants to make money, and fast, and isn’t naïve about what that would entail, as in, having to be naked on camera, and do things and have things done to her, with the usual kind of finish at the end. As awkward as the initial sex scene is, if anything, it’s just boring and gross. Bella only pretends to come alive right at the end when she’s faking enthusiasm for her own selfies which she posts online in order to get more followers. More followers and hearts means more demand for work, I guess, or better money?

dir: Jordan Peele

2022

Now, I’m just a simple, country movie commenter. I ain’t no fancy, big city film critic, with credentials or qualifications or justification for inflicting my film-related opinions on a largely unsuspecting, and, let’s be honest, entirely uninterested public.

But I knows what I likes, and I liked this here film by Jordan Peele called Nope.

Having said, or at least typed, all those words as a preface already, I’m not going to pretend that I get everything that was going on here, or all the references Peele tries to make, or how they all hang together, and whether it all makes sense as a movie. But what I will say is that whatever flick I thought I was going to watch, it turned out to be something completely different.

Nope contains multitudes of tropes within it, so many references not necessarily just to other films but to the history of the entertainment industry, that when I tell you it’s pretty much a monster movie, you’re not going to believe me. Even the title, Nope, refers to the dumb things people do across a multitude of genres that sees their characters bite the big one. In this flick, at those moments where a character is about to do something stupid, but then changes their mind because they realise how vulnerable to the monster it would make them, they just casually say “Nope”, and do something more sensible.

That’s refreshing, that is. Like a cool, refreshing drink after mowing the lawn in the hot spring sun. Why, yes, that is literally what I did – watched a movie, mowed the lawn before the rains set in, then wrote a review about that movie and about cutting the lawn with an electric lawn mower. I’m going to try to keep both parts relevant and interesting for you, the poor reader.

Of course it would work. What if you were a bunch of characters in a flick, and your main goal wasn’t just to survive, but to capture on film the existence of some kind of creature. But, and here is a tremendously big but that I cannot lie about, what if the mere presence of the creature caused all electrical equipment to stop working?

Hmm., now that’s a conundrum.

And again, what if, now stay with me, what if your family business was raising and training horses, and Hollywood no longer really wanted your horses, so your business wasn’t flourishing anymore?

You could blame a bit of racism:

dir J. J. Perry

2022

This is a pretty dumb film. I still enjoyed it, despite its mediocrity, and in between sighing a few hundred times.

Cobbled together as it is from every vampire movie ever made, almost nothing about it, the performances or the action really stands out that much. And there is almost no novelty to the premise of an LA based war against the undead in which a union, an actual union of vampire hunters labours to save the mindless human denizens of that great city by exterminating these pests who exist in plague proportions who would otherwise prey on them.

If there’s almost something amusing about the premise, it’s that a vampire queen who’s secretly a real estate mogul (which is far worse) is plotting to gentrify the San Fernando Valley in such a way that it’s safe, owned and populated entirely by vampires, and not so much by all those filthy humans.

In this Netflix Exclusive movie, so exclusive and so Netflixy that I cannot imagine a single person subscribing to the service because of it, but maybe a few leaving in spite of it, Jamie Foxx stars as Bud Jablonski, an independent contractor who kills vampires for money. Their fangs are valuable, but only if they’re in good condition, and are over a certain age.

But wait: Bud is down on his luck, having been kicked out of the Union, trying to make ends meet, and trying to convince his daughter and his ex-wife that he’s not a total loser.

Sound familiar? Does it sound like a thousand other films? What if I was to tell you that what it sounds like is exactly what it is, and it plays out exactly as you think it will. The only question remains as to whether it’s enjoyable along the way, if you can stay awake that long.

dir: Andrea Arnold

2021

I think it’s kinda disingenuous to call this a documentary, but then I can’t think of what else you would call it. A woman called Magda Kowalczyk, the cinematographer, follows around a cow for about a year, from about the time she gives birth to one calf, and up to just after she gives birth to a second calf.

Of all that footage, the director Andrea Arnold in concert with 3 other editors, has fashioned a movie that aspires to give the viewer a sense of the experience of not what it’s like to work on a dairy farm in Kent, in England, but of what it’s like to be a cow on a dairy farm in Kent.

That’s a hard task to set oneself. There’s no voiceover, no narrator explaining to us what we’re seeing or what we should think about it. We overhear a bit of conversation between the vet and the workers on the farm about the cow, about how they’re recovering after the birth, that sort of stuff, but if we consider the cow herself to be the protagonist, we have to imagine what she’s thinking and feeling, because she’s not going to tell us.

This probably sounds quite dull. I actually found watching the film quite fascinating to watch. It seems like mighty hard work daily on a dairy farm, but the people working there, mostly young women, don’t seem to find it too onerous. It seems a bit hard on the cows, but we don’t see them being mishandled or mistreated.

We see the birth of the calf, from the beginning, a tremendously gross and sweet moment, where the mother licks the poor thing clean, until it can eventually walk enough to be separated from its mother. The mother moos quite loudly at the calf’s absence, or at the presence of the person with the camera in her stall, and we wonder (or at least I wondered) whether the mother feels the calf’s absence profoundly. She does seem quite upset.

Is that what we do? Do we project our thoughts and feelings onto these creatures, to try to make sense of their existence, but only in ways that are completely self-serving to us? I probably spent 90% of the movie doing exactly that and questioning it extensively.

dir: Dan Trachtenberg

2022

This is the best Predator-related film since the original Predator, and it’s not even a close contest. Every other instalment since that Arnie-starring vehicle has been different shades and levels of awful or unnecessary. The most recent was so terrible I vowed never to see anything Predator related ever again.

Well, I am a man of my word, so this flick being called Prey exempted me from my promise.

It is an excruciatingly simple story: Predator alien comes to Earth, hunts around for a while killing various creatures, works its way up to killing humans, and then only too late realises it has fucked around with the wrong person.

And now it’s time to find out just how badly.

The twist, if such a thing can be referred to as a twist, is that instead of setting the flick in the present, as in our present hellscape of coronaviruses, monkeypoxes and 100 year floods every other week, it’s set in the 1700s in the Great Plains area of what is now called the States.

Wherever it actually is set, wherever the tribal lands of the Comanche are, I have no doubt this was filmed in Canada. You can tell it’s Canada from a mile away. There’s a certain… Canadianness to everything, especially the natural scenery, but also in the way the Predator politely asks people if it’s okay if he yanks out their spines.

All our main characters are played by First Nations people, and their antagonists, when it’s not mountain lions, bears or aliens trying to kill them, are French fur trappers. Makes for a somewhat unique set up. Clear lines drawn between the good and the evil.

The Predator of this movie just does what predators do: comes here, goes invisible, kills a bunch of people and animals, takes trophies, and moves on. Sometimes he rips spines out, sometimes he claims skulls, whatever he feels like in the moment. But our main character Naru (Amber Midthunder) isn’t in it for the trophies, the participant ribbons or the gold star: she is trying to prove to her tribe (really, to her brother) that she too can hunt like the men of the tribe do, and, she’s trying to protect the tribe from a predator unlike any other.

Is it a girl power narrative? Sure it is. And that’s great. At no stage, even when she can clearly see what carnage this mostly invisible creature has wrought does anyone a) agree that she’d make an okay hunter or b) that there’s some invisible alien dude out there butchering animals and people.

Only when it’s too late. Only when they’re seconds from death do they think “I regret belittling Naru. I regret that I didn’t believe her sooner, I have no doubt, since she’s the star of the film, that she will be able to hold her own (and everyone elses) against the Predator.”

dir: Cooper Raiff

2022

Oddness abounds…

I did not enjoy this flick, but I do admire it. Or maybe I did enjoy aspects of it, but thought maybe overall it didn’t work, or maybe it worked overall even if it had profound weaknesses.

I start this not knowing what my verdict will be in the end.

On the surface, or with a superficial description, this would sound like a pretty stock standard film, in that it’s about a guy who’s just finished college and doesn’t know what to do with himself. It’s no different from The Graduate, where Dustin Hoffman’s character didn’t know what to do with himself, except that having sex with Mrs Robinson would work, at least for a while.

It’s also, unfortunately, the same premise as every film with a male protagonist made in America in the last 50 years that doesn’t have guns in it: in other words, white, middle-class ennui, that’s usually overcome with a manic pixie dream girl who makes the protagonist listen to The Shins through her headphones and thus transforms his life into something better, finally.

There is no shortage of these films, and it seems to be a film that every up and coming actor (I’m stressing the point that it’s always (white) male actors who write / direct and star in these movies) gets to make once they get enough money together.

They are sometimes good, sometimes godawful, but they cover a need, I guess.

Well, in this flick, 12 year old Andrew (Cooper Raiff plays the adult version, who also directs) starts off the film by telling a woman at his bar mitzvah that he’s in love with her, even though he’s just a kid, and not a particularly handsome or tall one.

Of course that couldn’t work out, but we get the impression that this need to find love with an older woman is now a feature in his personality, and not a bug.

Ten years later, Andrew is finishing college, and has a girlfriend, but she clearly has a future planned that doesn’t include him, whereas all he’s got when asked what he’s going to do is “uh, follow you around maybe?” which is secretly what EVERY woman wants to hear.

As she leaves for Barcelona, he is forced to move back home, work at a place called Meat Sticks, and sleep on his younger brother’s floor. His mum (Leslie Mann) loves him and loves his silly ways, but she has her own issues, including living with bipolar.

If the film has a series of missteps, this could be the first of a cascading multitude. Her experience of “bipolar” essentially occurs entirely off screen, and ‘only’ amounts to shagging the husbands of people they know within their tight knit Jewish community during these episodes.

Like, okay. What? Right off the bat, the mum asks Andrew to take his younger brother to a particular bar mitzvah, because she herself isn’t welcome there because she shagged the father of the boy whose special day it now is, and the mum’s not too happy with her, even though the entire community seem to be begrudgingly okay with it.

I can’t even start on that. It’s treated as such a throwaway line, so casually that I just find it horrifying.

dir: Russos

2022

Base on a set of books I’ll never read this here latest Netflix Exclusive! movie is apparently the most expensive ever made by a streaming service with the intention of only having it play on a streaming service after a week in the cinemas.

So they were never going to make their money back. No-one is going to subscribe or re-subscribe to Netflix because of a dumb action flick called The Gray Man. They may resubscribe for a movie called The Beige Couch, which is about a demonically-possessed and very messy couch that slowly swallows whole an unfailingly polite Marie Kondo for an hour and a half, but I doubt they’ll do it for this.

Which is not a shame. Though, note to self: copyright the idea for the Kondo-eating couch.

This is pretty generic, but it is not unenjoyable because of that. It’s competent enough. They put the cameras in the right spots. There aren’t any wardrobe malfunctions, people remember their lines, no-one’s moustache falls off mid-diatribe. And in no way is the action genre updated, upgraded or advanced by the existence of this movie.

And that’s okay. The Russo Brothers have made more money than God with their Marvel movies, and you’d think they’d want to do something else with all their cachet and clout. Instead they make the lazy kind of thing you’d imagine someone without ambition or that much motivation would do.

That’s probably quite unfair. Maybe it was a labour of love for them, who knows. The fact that it’s pretty much identical to the last film they produced for Netflix (but didn’t direct) which starred Chris Hemsworth, being Extraction, I’m sure is just a coincidence.

This flick’s description will sound like the plot synopsis of at least 10,000 movies: a jaded assassin who’s very good at his job is forced to kill a bunch of other assassins because of something something and there’s a young girl to protect too.

No-one killed his dog, but they might as well have. Because he’s just going to have to kill everyone, isn’t he?

dir: Robert Eggers

2022

There’s a lot that’s funny about The Northman, at least to me.

A lot of the film is practically in black and white. Not ‘real’ black and white film stock, just colour adjusted scenes to make it almost look monochrome. It’s something the director has done before, like in his last film The Lighthouse, which was all black and white.

I guess that’s not really “funny”, but I guess it makes the colours pop whenever fire is onscreen, or, I dunno, when someone’s chopping off people’s heads.

Another funny thing is that Alexander Skarsgard stars as the lead character Amleth, and Nicole Kidman plays his mum Gudrun. Anyone who watched or heard about that series on the tv called Big Little Lies where she and Skarsgard played husband and wife in an abusive relationship might wonder at how such a thing could come to be.

But then Kidman herself has what I think is the film’s shining moment, which I won’t spoil, but it’s a doozy. And then it all makes sense.

The other funny thing (I swear this is the last time I’ll use this construction), is that this is essentially a retelling of Hamlet, so it’s pretty familiar, but it’s based more on the older Icelandic tale that Shakespeare himself ripped off, with an abundance of more gore. So it’s like someone said “why don’t we make a new version of Hamlet, with buff Vikings and such, but throw out all the pesky cliché words that people are bored of?”

Robert Eggers is becoming quite a feted and respected director, despite the fact that he looks like a Mens’ Rights activist or like someone who’s going to ask you if you’re into cryptocurrencies yet. And yet he crafts a fairly brutal movie which doesn’t pander to mass audiences and leans in to the brutal, supernatural aesthetics of what life might have been like in 845AD.

dir: Domee Shi

2022

I may be about the furthest thing away from a teenaged Chinese-Canadian girl on the cusp of maturity who finds herself turning into a giant red panda whenever she’s emotional or overwhelmed, but I still found a lot to enjoy and relate to in Pixar’s latest foray into the minds and hearts of confused kids and patient, slightly baffled adults.

It feels like such a cop out to say “it’s no Inside Out”, but Inside Out was so great, and this flick is trying to tell a different kind of story in a different kind of way, though no less entertaining, and that’s great too.

It’s working in a different emotional register, and yet it’s also something of a period piece. I didn’t realise the triple meaning of what I just wrote in the last sentence, but I’m not deleting it, not just yet.

Mei (Rosalie Chieng) is a thirteen year old dork living in Toronto, I guess(?) She’s a high achiever academically, has a group of friends, but her first and only loyalty seems to be to her parents, specifically her mother (Sandra Oh). The mum is very much the “tiger mom” stereotype popularised by Amy Chua in her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and has been a well-worn cliché in American and even Australian comedy and drama for decades.

In the depiction of multicultural societies and cities, it’s really easy (and lazy) to single out families from Asian backgrounds as exemplifying this idea that migrant parents torment their children into becoming violin prodigies or maths geniuses, because without the threats of violence or the withholding of love / approval / affection, then no kid would ever succeed at anything.

What these stories often leave out in these narratives, whether they’re personal ones or not, is that all sorts of families, migrant or otherwise, have parents with expectations, who range from over-involved and threatening to barely there if at all, and that the kids (who survive) end up as normal people, or geniuses who become fuckups, or fuckups who still go on to live meaningful lives, because not everyone ends up first chair in the orchestra or the Head of Complicated Surgery at Most Expensive Hospital. There’s lots of us in between, and that’s okay.

dir: Tom Gormican

2022

This was terrible to watch, just terrible.

It was so disappointing. I long ago gave up trying to figure out how it was that Nicolas Cage could be so great in certain roles, and so terrible in so many others. I realised that Cage himself didn’t know, so what chance did I have to grasp it?

He plays a couple of versions of Nicolas Cage here, and none of them feel remotely believable, though they both have their sources in things Cage has said and done in the past.

The fictionalised “real” Nicolas Cage struggles to get work, and has an agent played by Neil Patrick Harris. Unfortunately (for me), he’s not playing Neil Patrick Harris, or the fictionalised Neil Patrick Harris that guest-starred outlandishly in the Harold and Kumar movies.

No, he’s an agent called Fink, and even he can’t seem to get Cage good roles. Cage even meets with one man movie industry David Gordon Green (playing himself) to try to convince him to give him the lead role in some movie with Boston crims in it, and it’s possibly one of the most painful things I’ve ever seen recorded on film.

I guess the point is, it’s meant to be excruciating. A Cage at the top of his game wouldn’t agree out of desperation to attend the birthday party of some Spanish billionaire (the great Pedro Pascal) who is a super fan of Cage and Cage related media. And yet that is what the script imposes upon him.

Also, to sell how low Cage has fallen, he has an ex-wife (Sharon Horgan) who loathes him, and a daughter (Lily Mo Sheen) who can’t stand him. The script requires that Cage acts like a boorish arsehole to all and sundry, and a drunken fuck-up at that, because none of the set up reflects where Cage actually is at as an actor or as a person / father.

In “real” life he has 6 ex-wives and a bunch of kids, but for our benefit I guess they had to streamline things. He also buys castles, has been arrested for domestic abuse and tries to make as many movies per year as possible. He stars in so many movies per year that I look at the movies he’s made over the last ten years, and recognise only a couple of them.

dir: Josef Kubota Wladyka

2022

This is a pretty grim movie, I’m not going to sugarcoat it. A flick about a woman trying to find her sister who she suspects has been kidnapped and trafficked: There’s no gentle way to tell that story. Even Taika Waititi probably wouldn’t be able to inject such a tale with whimsy or goofy silliness.

Though I say that, and then I remember JoJo Rabbit, and then I remember that anything is possible.

Catch the Fair One doesn’t fuck around, and doesn’t give us a lot to distance ourselves from the horror of what the world, this world, is like. The main character of Kaylee (Kali Reis), is tormented, and so she is tormenting herself. Though she is a boxer by trade, and we watch her train, she isn’t training for the ring, at least in the present. We see some scenes set in the past, before her sister disappeared, and when Kaylee was training to win in the ring, and was something of a champion.

Now she is training in order to be able to take on the viciousness of the world she is forcing herself into, to be able to survive long enough to find her missing sister. She also, bizarrely, trains herself to be able to carry a razor blade inside her mouth without causing herself too much damage.

It helps, I guess, that she has cheek piercings?

That razor, ye gods, it’s grim, but it has a role to play. Like the old saying about Chekhov’s gun – a razor that appears in the 1st act of a movie is going to play some crucial role later in the 3rd act.

But it seems to play more of a role than just that: a tool or a weapon. It kinda feels like Kaylee, or KO as her trainer keeps calling her, deliberately inflicts pain on herself, not just to train, but because she feels like she deserves it.

We aren’t privy to the details of how her sister disappeared yet, but since Kaylee is pursuing her own investigation along the lines of sex traffickers, our strong assumption, like hers, is that her sister was kidnapped and sold somewhere, possibly up north. It’s not entirely clear where in the States this whole story is happening, it’s either one of the northern states or Canada proper.

This is specifically aimed at what is happening to vulnerable women in the States and Canada, and especially First Nations women, who are murdered or kidnapped, forced into sex work, treated like livestock, in this day and age, and the authorities seem to do little either because of the vast scale of the problem, because of racism, or because they actively don’t give a shit about women, First Nations or otherwise.

dir: Sophie Hyde

2022

Well, who doesn’t enjoy a sexy night out at the movies…

Certainly not a film to be watched with the kids around. This flick is pretty much a two-hander, depending as it does on the talents of the two leads, ably played by Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack. Most of the film transpires within the confines of a hotel room.

And it’s a stagey and talky affair. These characters are not in love; there’s nothing romantic about this story. It is about feelings, though, and mostly the feelings one has about oneself, more than anything else.

And of course it’s about sex, but less about the mechanics of it, or the “getting” of it, and more about what it represents to people, as fulfilment, as release, as missed opportunities, or as an excuse to try to shame people.

Thompson plays a woman in her sixties called Nancy. She has decided, after more than 30 years of marriage, ending with her useless husband’s death, to hire the services of a sex professional to do all the things she didn’t get to do over the course of her life. She says, almost with pride, that she’s never had an orgasm before, and is certain she’s never going to, but that Leo (Daryl McCormack) shouldn’t see that as a challenge.

Leo is smooth, smooth as butter, smooth as a recently waxed chest. He knows the roles he needs to play, the archetypes he has to inhabit, sometimes shifting at the drop of a hat, between a fantasy, a therapist, a listener, a masculine ideal or a reassuring presence. He seems perfectly at ease with himself, and with a charming confidence, but it’s a veneer, like everything else.

She regrets almost immediately that she’s taken this course of action, and feels endlessly like she needs to justify herself or finds flaws in what she’s doing, to prevent herself from going through with it. He is constantly assuring her that they won’t do anything she doesn’t want to do, her comfort and safety are paramount, but also that she should clearly allow herself to enjoy what she’s paid for.

dir: Kogonada

2022

The future looks pleasant… Easy on the eyes. Very tasteful.

But of course there are still problems, mostly because people are still around.

After Yang is the kind of science fiction flick that people lament doesn’t get made often enough, and then don’t watch because it doesn’t have explosions or guaranteed Hemsworths in it.

It might be set in a brave, new future, but its issues for its characters are still recognisably human ones.

Even if much of the story is about what happens when an android (Justin H. Min) stops working.

There’s a family, made up of Dad (Colin Farrell), Mum (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). She is of Chinese extraction, and the parents, feeling an obligation to have her learn about what they see as her culture and heritage, buy a Chinese android they call Yang (Min), to be like a big brother to her, who can tell her all these facts about China, and teach her Mandarin.

Right from virtually the beginning of the film, Yang shuts down, and can’t be restarted. They try switching him on and off, they probably try to reset him to factory settings. They don’t try whacking him on the side of the head, thankfully.

It’s not that subtle, but the family don’t have a lot of money to throw around, can’t afford to officially get him repaired because, hey, he was purchased in a dodgy deal in the first place. The legit people the Dad takes his Yang to get repaired at can’t do anything, the dodgy guy he takes him to can’t really do anything, but he does find something in Yang’s chest that proves what he suspected all along: that someone was spying on him!

You know, as opposed to the slender black objects we all carry in our pockets or bags that tell all sorts of corporations everything we’ve done, said and searched for on any given day. In their future, though, they are beyond such petty devices.

dir: Adam Leon

2022

The fuck was that about…

I can assure you of one thing and one thing only: No Italian is spoken or studied over the course of this frustrating flick. So if you were hoping for some quality Italian talking and such, you’re going to have to look elsewhere.

Italian Studies is something of a perplexing flick, and I think deliberately so. It starts with a scene set in I guess London, where a woman meets some people, they go into a studio, some breathy singers sing some dreampop-y songs, and then she bums a ciggie off of a girl.

The girl asks if the older woman remembers her from New York, from hanging out with some other people, including someone called Simon. Who? Who the fuck is Simon?

But then she says “that must be when I lost my dog.”

It then cuts to New York, presumably to the recent past, as a woman walks her dog to a small hardware store, ties her dog up outside, looks around the store for a while, then wanders off without the dog.

She doesn’t remember the dog, but then, she doesn’t remember who she is or where she’s meant to be.

So a lot of this flick is watching this actor, being Vanessa Kirby, walk around New York. If you like Vanessa Kirby, who you may remember from such films as one of them Fast & Furious flicks, or Pieces of a Woman, the harrowing home-birth-gone-wrong Netflix flick, or from when she played the perpetually resentful and envious Princess Margaret in The Crown, then you might enjoy following her around for an hour and twenty minutes.

I think she’s a fine actor, with my favourite thing I’ve seen her in being a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire filmed at the National Theatre that was recorded and on Youtube for a while during the lockdowns. She played Stella to Gillian Anderson’s Blanche DuBois, and they were all great.

This isn’t as great, but it’s okay. I don’t mind watching flicks where people wander around having mini adventures, especially when they’re low-key but jagged, but not life and death, because it reminds me of the past, when I too walked around cities during the day or night.

That was before all that unpleasantness…

dir: Joseph Kosinski

2022

One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read was on the summary for this flick on Netflix. Let me get it word-for-word, so that I can convey the absolute horror of these words belonging in the same sentence:

“From the writers of Deadpool based on the George Saunders short story.”

That’s like getting on a flight and finding out that the pilot is going to be Boris Johnson, who despite never having flown a plane before is sure he can do a bang up job.

George Saunders is an exquisite writer of short stories, books, IKEA catalogues - anything he writes is pure gold. Letting two screenwriters, possibly using mountains of cocaine in order to stay motivated, attack one of his stories should be considered a literary hate crime.

I genuinely remember reading the short story this is based on, having picked up Tenth of December back in the day when everyone was buying it but few people were actually bothering to read all the stories inside it. This story, Escape from Spiderhead, stood out as one of the more memorable ones.

Within the story, a prisoner volunteers to be experimented on by drug company goons. The drug reps are unseen, bland, corporate functionaries. Their testing is apathetic, doesn’t care about the crims or their longevity at all, and just about getting results.

Despite being science fiction, obviously, with chemical tech significantly ahead of where we are today, it was less about whether people should be conducting experiments like this on people, regardless of whether they’re crims or not, and more about the limits of what people will accept, will comply with.

In this flick, well, they’ve been given an inch of a good story, and they’ve turned it into miles and miles of opportunities for many, many bad ideas to come to the fore.

dir: Sean Ellis

2022

When this was initially going to come out, probably pre-covid, it was going to be called Eight for Silver. When it played festivals and such it was still called that. But then someone had the brainstorm, the lightbulb moment, the epiphany, and thought "fuck that, that’s too complicated; let's just call it The Cursed".

I think they could have gone one better and called it "How's that Curse I Cursed You With, Cursedy?"

I have lines when it comes to horror flicks, that I am uncomfortable about when they get crossed. It's important to have boundaries, I feel. And while I am generally okay with all sorts of damage and dismemberment, I'm not at all comfortable with having kids as protagonists upon whom carnage is visited. Sure, kids are threatened all the time in action flicks and other horror flicks.

Rarely do they make good on that threat. I think that's partly why I felt a bit aggrieved watching this flick, because they "broke" the social contract of horror flicks that it's okay to put them in peril, but not to actually follow through.

Another of this flick's crimes is that a central part of its story depends on a massacre of a Roma clan, who have the temerity to be on some land that some landlord jerk believes is his. Of course, beyond the supernatural, it is right and proper to make landgrabbing murderers the true villains in anything, whether it's a film or a documentary, but haven't the Roma suffered enough? Such massacres happened for centuries prior to the main "last" time they were slaughtered en masse by the Nazis, but using such a scene - for mass entertainment - worries me a bit, especially with the rise in nationalism / fascism worldwide lately.

Just this week in Britain the Tories brought in legislation targeting the travelers / Roma communities, so can we stop giving them persecution ideas?

Not that I think a fuckwit of Boris Johnstonian proportions would have the time to sit through a deftly-made horror flick like this one.

Even though everyone except the so-called “gypsies” speaks in English and they’re all English (or in the lead’s case, American, I think this is set in France. No-one speaks French, though, which is a relief.

dir: Alex Garland

2022

Men. Manly men. Doing manly things, in manly ways, mostly at Manly beach, the manliest of all beaches.

I have to admit I really didn’t get this flick. I don’t think I understood it, but that’s okay, because understanding is overrated. I enjoyed it, it was well filmed, it had a weird, ominous atmosphere without generally being that horrific. At least until the last section…

There is a woman who is the main character in this flick (so, false advertising, right there). She has recently lost her husband after he struck her and then threw himself off the building they lived in. All because she wanted out of what was clearly not a healthy relationship.

She, being Harper (the great Jessie Buckley), needs some time away, and so rents a stately country manor, in the country somewhere. The landlord (Rory Kinnear) is an odd enough chap, but nothing too worrying just yet. It’s some hick town, very green. No problems here.

If there is a problem, it’s that a naked guy (Rory Kinnear) starts following her about, tries to get into the place she’s staying, and no-one, including the cops, really gives a damn. There’s a male cop (Rory Kinnear), and a female cop, but, confirming the old adage that All Cops Are Bastards, she gives even less of a shit.

Seeking solace in the arms of the church? Well, the vicar (Rory Kinnear) is a right prick as well, blaming her for her husband’s suicide, telling her all the ways in which her wickedness taunts all men.

It’s not for nothing that Harper eats a red apple that falls from a tree outside. For some reason the image keeps reoccurring, not sure why. True, Eve is the first scapegoat in the Bible, but it’s not her fault that men are weak and vicious.

Oh no, you can’t blame her for that. Also, even the young boys of the town are already misogynistic pricks, one of them (Rory Kinnear) calling her a stupid bitch because she didn’t want to play hide and seek with him.

Hang on, in the church, why was there the image of the Green Man from folklore on the font, and why do they keep showing us the image of a Sheela Na Gig, a female gargoyle – grotesque, doing her thing?

What do these pagan symbols of the monstrous masculine and the monstrous feminine have to do either with the price of fish or this film, thematically speaking?

I…have no idea.

dir: Goran Stolevski

2022

Such a title, a phrase, like “you won’t be alone”, it can sound like reassurance, like trying to comfort someone who’s afraid of abandonment, of loneliness, that they won’t be as alone as they fear.

It also, unfortunately, sounds like a promise that’s more of a dark threat: You won’t be alone because I’ll always be around, making sure nothing goes right in your life, and that every time you get close to people, I’ll be there to snuff them out.

It is referred to as a horror film, but “horror” doesn’t really capture what this flick is about. It’s not trying to horrify or scare audiences. Horrible things do happen, but the horror isn’t the point.

In weird ways this is more like a micro-budget Terrence Malick flick with 1 per cent of the budget and 200 per cent of the ambition. There’s a lot told to us in whispered voiceover, because the main character cannot speak for herself. She never speaks for herself out loud, regardless of what form she’s in.

Even though I push back on the genre designation of “horror” in order to avoid pigeon-holing the flick, everything I’m going to write now is going to contradict that assertion.

In some non-descript peasant village in what these days is called Macedonia, but about 200 years ago, a young peasant mother is confronted by a strange sight: a blistered, tormented figure who wants to drink her crying newborn’s blood. This is a monster out of local myth, appearing to this woman, for reals, and all she can think to do is bargain for her child’s life.

This monster, though, who is known by one derisive name (Old Maid Maria), and one descriptor (Wolf-Eateress), sounds like she’s going to be bound by some kind of Rumpelstiltskin-type bullshit, but she really isn’t. And though she agrees to spare the child until she is 16, she commits the first of many horrors by stealing the girl’s voice. Permanently.

The mother, not being very bright, thinks to protect this child by shutting it in a cave, where it pretty much seems to grow alone, neglected, unloved and unmissed by anyone.

dir: Paul Thomas Anderson

2021

I have wanted to like a film by Paul Thomas Anderson for a long time. I haven’t really thoroughly enjoyed any film of his since Boogie Nights. Parts of There Will Be Blood and The Master were compelling, but in no way did the flicks hang together for me, especially with their demented endings that undid whatever goodwill remained in my heart or head.

I tried watching Inherent Vice, based on, like all his books, an unfilmable novel by Thomas Pynchon, but I could not retain anything that was happening, and I was completely straight and sober, and yet I was still bamboozled, even though 90% of the plot is delivered in voiceover.

Licorice Pizza is an almost artfully disingenuously simple story with little connective tissue between scenes that only works if you like the performances of the central characters, being Alana and Gary (Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman). If you don’t find them engaging, or even tolerable, this will be a well-filmed 135 minute exercise in exquisitely filmed torment.

I don’t remember the early 70s so there’s no nostalgia value for me, but all the same this is filmed to look not just like something from the American early 70s, but to look like it was filmed in the 1970s, with a similar film stock and ‘look’. It’s the kind of thing you expect from Anderson.

Does it ‘help’ to tell the story… I have no idea. Probably not. It depends on what you think the story is. I sat there for over two hours wondering about what I was watching and why I was watching it.

On one level, you could be forgiven for thinking the story is about a teenage boy called Gary (Hoffman) and a woman in either her mid or late twenties called Alana (Alana Haim). Gary is an awkward, goofy teenager, but he is insistent that he has a charming manner. As audience members, we don’t really see it, but some people in the film respond to it, and others don’t. He is variously referred to throughout the flick as a hustler or an entrepreneur, but he never really seems that good at anything.

Alana rejects his every advance, which is probably a good thing, since a relationship between the two of them these days would be illegal, I guess(?) And we never have it spelled out as to why she keeps hanging around with him despite being repelled by him.

dir: Sam Raimi

2022

Errm, this is not the best recent film I’ve seen dealing with the idea that there are an infinite number of other universes in parallel to our own.

This isn’t an entirely bad film. It’s okay. Some parts are even enjoyable. Some parts work really well. Others, not so well.

If you find either Benedict Cumberbatch or the Doctor Strange character insufferable, then you might just suffer through this a lot. If you love either of them, or you like otters, then you might enjoy sections of this flick. If you have liked Sam Raimi movies over the decades, and can watch him cribbing from his own film history to deliver a kind of scrap book / lifetime achievement award to himself, then maybe there might be some sly meta level to enjoy the flick on.

As the latest entry in the Marvel universe, it’s kind of a dead end, or at least something that seems like it’s opening up a wild, new vista, but it ends up slamming the door on itself because, I dunno, it would be too much work otherwise?

The central lynchpin of this flick, which is kinda baffling, is that out of nowhere, after however many films, Dr Strange wishes he had a girlfriend again, being Christine (Rachel McAdams).

It turns out that not only can’t Strange be with her in this universe, but, when he finds out there are lots of other ones, he finds out that he can’t be with her in those universes either.

That’s got to suck. Even if it’s an infinite number of universes, in none of them can he be happy with Christine, or, put differently, there is no universe in which Christine can put up with his bullshit for too long.

Also coming to terms with infinite possibilities still leaving someone unsatisfied, Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) has decided that killing people is way more satisfying that dealing with her various griefs. She grieves the death of her boyfriend who was a robot, being Vision, but, now stay with me if you never watched the Disney + series WandaVision, she also mourns the loss of her two magical sons, Billy and Tommy, who existed for a brief period of time when she took over a New Jersey town and turned it into a 60s 70s 80s tv sitcom hell on Earth.

If you were feeling uncharitable, you could say she was mourning two kids that never really existed, but if you told her that, she would probably kill you quite effortlessly, because she spends most of the film killing powerful people with little to no effort.

She is now so powerful she’s pretty much a threat to life even in other universes.

I just…yawn. Once we peaked with a villain who wanted to end half of all life in the universe, and now it’s like “well today’s villain is okay with destroying multiple universes!” it’s hard to give much of a damn. That goes beyond stakes that mean anything further than shrugging one’s shoulders and thinking “well okay that’s the premise, then.”