fresh movie reviews and human wordsmithing while you wait

dirs.: Colin & Cameron Cairnes

2024

This is a surprisingly accomplished film, especially for one made in Melbourne. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie made in Melbourne. Love and other Catastrophes? Chopper? The Book of Revelation?

Fortunately or not, none of ‘Melbourne’ or Naarm factors into the story because it’s set in America in the 1970s, and mostly all transpires in or around a tv studio where a “Tonight” type program is being filmed.

The lead in this is Jack, played by David Dastmalchian, who has often played weirdos or psychos or a combination of both, but here plays the charismatic host of a late night program that is suffering in the ratings and doesn’t look like it’s going to survive. Even if you haven’t watched a tonight show lately, or in the last ten years, or even longer, the format hasn’t changed. There’s a host, there’s a sidekick, there’s a band, and there’s a studio audience made up of clapping seals who applaud and laugh whenever a sign lights up telling them to laugh like the mindless automatons that they are.

There’s musical guests, there’s people with animals, there’s probably movie stars and comedians and, I dunno, local celebrities, and it all transpires under the studio’s bright lights and beige / burnt orange / brown set designs.

But since the ratings for his show, which used to threaten Jimmy Carson, but now are scraping the bottom of the barrel, are terrible, he’s desperate for something to change his loser narrative.

Hence, the occult. The show goes to extreme lengths to court controversy, and there’s nothing more controversial, for the time period, than bringing on a teenage girl who says she’s possessed by a devil.

Not The Devil, mind you, but some other low-ranking shmuck who can still do the scary voices and the rotating head thing.

The ethics of bringing out a clearly mentally ill teenager and putting her in front of a national audience, well, let’s remember the time period. Sexual harassment was mandatory, everyone was smoking, even babies in the womb, and no one ever drank water, only spirits, all of the time, apparently.

dir: Zack Snyder

2024

If you were a Zach Snyder fan, the only thing better than a year where one of his films comes out is a year in which two of his films come out. So, 2024, a banner year for Snyderfans.

For the rest of us, it’s a second chance to sneer and deride and throw as much shade as can be thrown at a hack of his monumental proportions.

This here film Rebel Moon: The Scargiver is the sequel to that other film that he expelled into the universe, being Rebel Moon: A Child of Fire. No-one asked for these films, let alone sequels and such. I watched that earlier film, more with disbelief than hate, unable to believe that people with millions of dollars at their disposal would make something so generic and so familiar that it would have all the originality and creativity of an episode of Paw Patrol.

This here ‘sequel’ works so perfectly well that there is absolutely no reason for anyone to watch the earlier film. Watching the earlier film provides the viewer with nothing extra, nothing additional, nothing more illuminating. All the main characters / archetypes get a scene that explains their motivations for fighting the Empire, I’m sorry I meant the Imperium.

They fight the Imperium, and then that’s that, with another implied sequel at the end. We didn’t need that. We didn’t ask for that.

What did we ask for… I dunno. I expected there to be a big battle in the film, and I guess that’s there, the big classic showdown since this is space Seven Samurai / The Magnificent Seven / Battle Beyond the Stars. If it doesn’t make sense, well, where’s your sense of adventure? Your sense of whimsy? Has life crushed your spirit so much that you can’t suspend a little bit of disbelief to enjoy a Zach Snyder adventure-fest?

Yeah, me neither. It’s a bit of a chore watching action scenes that ape his own previous movies, staging things like 300 but with one side mostly shooting laser guns, and the other running around with swords and axes. It’s pretty goofy. They belabour the humble farmer stuff so much that you wonder how these Aryan lumpenproles were ever able to survive thus far.

dir: Raven Jackson

2023

Just to assert the stonkingly obvious – films are a visual medium. But what about when a film tries to convey something about the senses other than the visual and the auditory ones?

It’s considered a failure, but one of my favourite books and eventual films ever made was Perfume, a beautifully written book by Patrick Suskind, and, to me, a delightful, awe-inspiring macabre movie made by Tom Tykwer. Its great attempt, and perhaps great failure, is attempting to tell a story so centred around the human animal’s sense of smell.

For me to accept that the film is a failure means I have to accept that the book is a failure, and that I cannot do. Just because they tried to tell a story about smell in a visual form doesn’t mean they didn’t succeed. The writer and the filmmaker went to great lengths to convey what they tried to convey, and for some people they got the visceral, transporting sensation across, and for others, they didn’t.

Why in fuck’s name are you yet again talking about a different film, I hear you groan. Well, my point is, this film here All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt tries to tell, in a visual and auditory medium, being film, a story that is mostly conveyed through the sense of touch. In other words, using visuals and sound design to try to convey how something feels, both in an emotional and tactile sense. A grandmother’s hands; a sister’s shoulder; a beloved’s shoulder, a dying fish’s scales, a baby’s head, the feel of dirt in your hand; a hand swirling in water, a mother’s reproach…

That’s not easy. Movies show us what to feel. They often tell us what to feel. We often have characters or voiceovers tells us exactly how characters feel. But we rarely have actors trying to convey something about the tactile sense of how something physically felt at the time. And we almost never have entire films which are about how existence felt for a person at different times in their lives through who they touched and how.

There is no plot in this film, and the chronology jumps around continuously. There’s very little dialogue throughout, and much of the cinematography involves filming people in close up, their faces, especially their hands, their heads, their backs, and how they interact with people or with the world.

dir: Meredith Hama-Brown

2024

This has been an autumn of disappointments when it comes to movies promising something and not delivering. I watched About Dry Grasses in the hope that I’d learn something about dry grasses, but I got nothing on the topic.

Similarly, when I hoped that Seagrass would teach me something about seagrasses, instead I found out just how fucking tedious it must have been to be trapped in this particular family way back in the 1980s.

This flick has had rave reviews at festivals and such, and upon reading some of the most glowing reviews that have ever been expelled onto a Substack platform or a WordPress website, I thought “I should watch this promising sounding Canadian film.”

What a fool I was. The merits of this flick called Seagrass are almost entirely lost upon me.

A family travel to an island resort. The mum Judith (Ally Maki) is grieving the loss of her mother, dealing as one does with feelings of loss, confusion, guilt and disconnection. Her mother was Japanese-Canadian, and was actually interred involuntarily during World War II, which is a reminder that Canada hasn’t always been the beacon for politeness and progressivism that we imagine it to be.

dir: Denis Villeneuve

2024

When they announced that Dune Part II was going to be released this year, I was like “oh, yeah, that” having pretty much completely forgotten about the first part.

Don’t get me wrong, or, get me wrong if you really want, I didn’t dislike the first part, in fact I thought it was pretty good / okay. It seemed pretty faithful to the book, and ignored more of the boring bits and felt somehow expansive and fleet at the same time.

I’ll be really honest with you: At the time when it came out we were in the midst of lockdowns, so anything vaguely good was like cool water to someone dying of thirst. All it needed was cool visuals and nice music, and I was ready to praise it to the high heavens and the lowest hells.

It’s not lost on me, or anyone of a certain age, that Dune is sci-fi Lawrence of Arabia. But even knowing that, and having a liking for desert cinematography, that’s not the only charm or the point of watching this flick.

Because of the built in “white saviour” narrative, this flick, very much unlike the great one from the 80s directed by David Lynch, of all people, worries about its main character being a super messiah, instead of accepting it as an inherently good thing (for our heroes).

What ensues is a narrative in which someone will say Paul (Timothee Chalamet) is the prophesied messiah of the Fremen people, and then someone will say either “no he’s not” or “that’s just what they want you to think, so they can control us” and then “is so”, and then “nuh uh”.

It’s exhausting. It transcends it merely being “meta”, in that the screenplay and the makers anticipating audience reactions to white saviour narratives are constantly signposting that they know it’s a white saviour narrative, and so they try to undercut it or emphasise it (by having the whole messiah prophecy idea being one the arch-manipulators, the Bene Gesserit order, have artificially implanted within Fremen culture), in ways that are very repetitive.

dir: Bryce McGuire

2024

This is a thoroughly unremarkable family focussed horror flick, though competently done. The camera doesn’t fall over, the boom mic doesn’t leer into shot constantly, not too many actors accidentally put stuff in their mouths that they shouldn’t, while the cameras are rolling, at least.

But there was plenty that amused me about the flick, though I don’t know how much of it was intentional.

The opening sequence is confronting enough, yet it kind of ends up being a reworked, pool-based version of the opening sequence from the first It film, by which I mean Part 1 rather than the first time they tried to make it. I’m confusing myself. Whatever it is, it works, I guess, because a child is gone. Gone!

We don’t like to see that. No-one likes it when kids get eaten / captured / drowned, unless they’re absolute sickos. But if we’re going to keep watching a horror flick, and, let’s face it, if you voluntarily started watching the horror flick in question, then, yes, you are some version of a sicko, we’re going to need something more to sustain us.

We might wonder: What got the kid? Was it…something in the pool? Or was it the pool itself?

Is it a haunted demonic pool? Wait, what? An evil pool? That’s the fucking dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Tell me more.

Pretty early on, yes, now is the moment where I completely diverge from talking about a film into some other absolute nonsense, I couldn’t help but think of something from many, many years ago.

dir: Rose Glass

2024

It’s..a lot.

This director’s previous film, Saint Maud was a whole hell of a lot as well, but that was a queasy, intimate, horrific character study about a very troubled young woman (brilliantly played by Morfydd Clark who went from that to playing a ‘young’ Galadriel in The Rings of Power). This is…what this is.

It’s set in the 1980s? It has the trappings, the energy, the aggression of flicks that I can’t even think of, but it’s filtered through a sensibility that is completely unlike whatever flicks we might think of from the era?

I am phrasing all of my statements as questions, because I’m unsure of a lot except for my reactions to the flick. I understand my more visceral reactions to the flick, but I’m not entirely across my intellectual reactions to much of what ensues, or many of the themes that crop up.

And there are some elements, like a bonkers scene of Ed Harris eating a giant beetle, that I have no idea what to do with, at all.

This isn’t a cool crime caper, though it has the trappings of such. This isn’t a Tarantino-esque flick with witty dialogue, obscure facts no-one asked for and eruptions of apocalyptic violence. But this is also an overtly sexual, queer forward flick that disdains the often quoted “male gaze” to replace it with something special, but somehow no less vicious.

This is not a flick intended for mass audiences, maybe, but it’s also swinging for the fences in a wild manner that seems like it could be trying to cover almost everything possible and every genre imaginable.

If there was something cinema / the ‘culture’ was obsessed with in the 80s, it was aerobic fitness, with the accompanying gear, and musclebound hulks like Arnie and Stallone ruling the cinematic roost. This flick imposes the same conceptual aesthetic, but it’s in the service of its two main characters / heroines / villains?

dir: Ava duVernay

2023

Sometimes, adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books get you something like Adaptation: A rare flower of absolute creativity and insanity.

Sometimes, film adaptations of non-fiction, non-narrative books result in something utterly completely unlike the bestselling books that they’re based on. There are virtues and problems to that approach, but what the best way to adapt a book is, is well beyond my paygrade, and I wouldn’t presume to tell other people how best to tell the stories they want or need to tell.

Ava DuVernay has made powerful movies and limited series about the trials and tribulations of African-Americans and Latinos as their lives bump up against the American legal system, which we keep being reassured is completely colour-blind and utterly fair to all, or the civil rights movement, or, in the case of A Wrinkle in Time, something about cool space aunties with more costume changes than Jane Fonda in Barbarella.

That’s probably as obscure a reference as I can get away with without convincing myself that I’m just muttering to myself at the back of a bus.

Origin seeks to adapt Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, but seeks to do so by not only telling the story through a narrative form, with an actor (the always wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) playing the author at a critical time in her life, but tries (perhaps pretends) to deliver on the central thesis of the book’s premise by re-enacting scenes around the world and through history in order to best explain how they all relate, how it’s all connected.

It’s always worrying when you have a scene when two people are talking, and, both of the people speaking in English, and one of the people speaking says “Can you repeat that in plain English?”

You know you’re about to hear a long exposition dump. Adapting books in such a way must be so daunting. It delivers reams of arguments and ideas, and feeds them through other dialogue and conversation that’s about the person and all the stuff going on in their own lives, that doesn’t necessarily reflect the central themes even if they’re tangential.

dir: Rachel Lambert

2024

Rarely do I go on such an emotional rollercoaster as I did with this film.

I started off loving it, loving the heck out of it. I really did.

I feel like such a fool. I feel like someone examined my psyche and watched my many habits and behaviours from a distance, then proceeded to seduce me, and I’ve woken up the next morning with my wallet empty, any valuables gone and my bank accounts drained.

And then I’m left lying on the floor, wondering where it all went wrong.

The thing is, for a sucker to be sucked in, they have to already want to be tricked.

Set in a small coastal town on the Oregon coast, this flick takes its time to show the world that what I thought was the main character, being Fran (Daisy Ridley), lives in. She gets up, walks to work, doesn’t interact with people at work, finishes work, comes home, does a Sudoku or two, eats like a sparrow, drinks a tiny bit, then sleep.

Rinse repeat. When circumstances threaten to require her to interact with people, she deftly avoids it, sidesteps it, does the bare minimum required. When called upon to write in a card for a co-worker who’s retiring, she can’t muster any positive feelings or any words beyond “happy retirement”.

And like the title indicates, she often thinks of herself as being dead. She imagines herself dead in a forest, or dead on a beach, just generally the world without her being alive.

(Bastarden)

dir: Nikolaj Arcerl

2023

After spending time in the Land of Saints and Sinners, via a detour through the Land of Bad, we’ve ended up in The Promised Land, which seems like a nice place to visit, but I’m not sure I would want to live there.

A title like that promises something Biblical, and what this film delivers is a curious and phenomenal looking film about a guy who wants to claim a bit of land and make a go of it no matter the cost to himself and the people around him. But of course there is some rich fuck nearby who doesn’t want him to succeed and does all sorts of awful things to Our Hero and the people around him in order to get his way.

Nothing deters our hero. Played by Danish superstar Mads Mikkelsen, you can pretty much expect just how emotionless and stoic he’s going to be for 90 per cent of the flick while dealing with superstitious serfs or sadistic aristocrats.

If you know, you know. That face of his… So handsome, so cruel. But he is not the cruel one in this flick, though he has his moments.

This flick is set around 1750 in Denmark, at a time when feudal lords own the serfs on their lands, slavery is considered wonderful, and these awful aristocrats rape and murder whoever they feel like with impunity. There is a region called Jutland, which is all moors and heather. The blasted heath. A place where no-one does agriculture. But Ludvig Kahlen is going to do agriculture. BECAUSE HE SAID HE WOULD! And everyone saying “Nu uh” makes him say “uh hu” even more.

He gets some undertaking from some corrupt courtiers that if he makes a go of it and gets a yield, he’ll be made a noble and get a mansion and all sorts of complimentary merch, probably.

And so he starts his journey, with a horse and one tool, and somehow thinks it will all work out.

It seems like lunacy, but the man has been planning this for a while. After a 25 year stint in the German army, earning the rank of Captain, all Kahlen wants is to farm, earn a further title, and then every hardship and slight he’s endured will be worth it. No course runs so smoothly as that.

The local (young, hot) priest (Gustav Lind) takes an interest, and starts helping him out after introducing a young couple he has been hiding from the local lord’s men. Ana Barbara and Johannes bear scars both psychological and mental from their time at Schinkel’s estate, but they are still indentured to him, and legally he still owns them. So they have to work for no pay and hide while on Kahlen’s property.

dir: William Eubanks

2024

They say we live in divisive times. That people can’t even agree on the basics anymore. The tiny surges in dopamine levels we’ve been trained to crave via the algorithms of social media apps and the online world means we fight with absolute strangers about the most miniscule of things, just to feel something.

I don’t know if that’s anymore true today that it has been in the past, but I feel almost certain about one thing, and one thing only: Land of Bad is a fucking terrible name for anything, let alone a movie. Flat out fucking terrible.

A movie, an honest to god movie. With people in it. Like, multiple Hemsworths (not Chris, but eh). And Australia’s Own (New Zealander) Russell Crowe. They’re in this movie, and whatever their contributions, with a title like that, how can they feel anything but shame, shame, shame?

Like, I can imagine how someone thought it up, maybe on drugs, not good ones:
“What’s another way of saying ‘You’re in for a World of Hurt’?
- How about, “Land of Bad?”
“Put down that crack pipe, you’ve got yourself a deal!”

Stop drilling, because you’ve struck oil. Paydirt. It almost doesn’t matter what you come up with next, what tedium you will put your audience through.

Starting from that absolute low point, the only direction is probably sideways.

The point of US military thrillers is mostly to reassure American audiences that their military is still the best in the world with all the best tech and weapons and that no-one else should even bother. In this age of drone strikes and satellites spying on people, the point is still, even with that technology, the US is the biggest and baddest, and everyone else sucks.

dir: Robert Lorenz

2024

Stop me if you’ve heard this story 14,000 times before.

An aging hitman decides he wants to stop killing people for money. But then something happens, and he has to kill more people, and then probably dies or stops killing people at least for a while.

Sound familiar? What if I told you it starred Liam Neeson? Wouldn’t you then say “you’re lazily describing every film Liam Neeson has been in for the last twenty years?”

And you would not be wrong. Ever since Taken convinced every middle-aged, middle-class dad that they, too, could torture and kill dozens of criminals if one of their kids were kidnapped, even lacking that special set of skills, Neeson has been the lead in these violent actioners that try to argue that a man in his 70s can still kick arse.

I admit that there are some fit men in their 70s. They shouldn’t be fighting people. They shouldn’t be punching people or kicking them down escalators or anything. They certainly shouldn’t be wrestling with other younger men. They should be wrestling with their consciences, with moral dilemmas, with their regrets.

This steady progression of dumb action flicks that he’s been in, including ones recently that account for his age, and one in particular called Memory where he plays a character with Alzheimer’s, makes you wonder why Neeson is in so many films every year. Why not take a break?

This is not a dumb action flick. There’s very little action in it, and there’s no need for stunt work, or for Neeson to risk throwing his back out or straining himself too bad.

And yet he still plays a chap who up till recently has killed men for money. In Ireland, of all places.

This flick is set in 1975, in County Donegal, so it’s one of those rare instances where a film has characters in Ireland talking about the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants.

It’s also a rare flick where the ‘bad guys’ are IRA terrorists.

I mean, I thought they were all saints, serving their noble cause.

dir: Alice Rohrwacher

2023

This is the second time in as many months where I have allowed myself to seem extremely pretentious by titling a review I’ve written in English with a title in another language.

I don’t make these decisions, I just have to live with the consequences. The film was released as La chimera, just like Io Capitano was released as it was released internationally a couple of months ago.

Thus, here I am, talking about La chimera, or The Chimera if that little ‘La’ is so distracting.

And then most people would be like “what TF is a chimera anyway” but it won’t be phrased as a question, because they don’t care, and they’re not reading this review anyway, the salty jerks.

What this flick is about, beyond chimeras, is a British guy (Josh O’Connor) who’s in Tuscany for reasons not immediately obvious. Initially he’s just a young, thin Brit in a shabby white linen suit lolling about the countryside despite it clearly being a cold time of year. He is recently out of jail, and returns to a charming little hovel next to the walls of some ancient castle because he presumably has nowhere else to go.

Ancient indeed. This strange flick is not about what you assume it would be about, which is, why did all those people believe that bullshit last year that every (white, middle-class, middle-aged, Westerner male) thinks about the Roman Empire at least once a day, but instead is about a bunch of reprobates who try to eke out a meagre living finding and pilfering artifacts that predate the Romans, being remnants of the Etruscan peoples.

But then in truth it’s not really about that either, I don’t think. It’s possibly more about the main guy Arthur / Arturo’s grief about losing a woman called Beniamina, or the deep connection he still has with her, and the desire to be with her again beyond all else. His affinity for the ancient is really his inability to want to live without her; his ability to find these ancient burial grounds, tombs or shrines arises solely from his longing for Beniamina, or for death.

dir: John Ridley

2024

There was already a film a few years ago called Shirley.

That was about a different Shirley. In that flick, an absolute queen called Elizabeth Moss played legendary miserable author Shirley Jackson, in a complicated biopic with manipulative twists and turns.

This Shirley is played by an absolute queen of the movie screen, being Regina King, playing a pretty interesting woman who strove for political power, called Shirley Chisholm, in a simplistic biopic with no twists and a couple of turns.

It’s a very strong performance, and yet it’s a flick that suffers from a collective desire to avoid some level of embarrassment.

Here’s what I mean: A few years ago, there was a mini-series called Mrs America. It starred Cate Blanchett as I guess the main character, being the both venomous and poisonous Phyllis Schlafly, which focussed on her opposition to the Equal Rights Act that they tried to pass in the States in the 70s. In the series there’s a whole rogues gallery of great actresses playing a collection of famous feminists like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Uzo Aduba played Shirley Chisholm.

I’d heard of most of the women that were represented in the show, and was glad to learn about impressive people I didn’t know anything about. But when there was an episode devoted to Shirley, and the fact she tried to run as the Democratic candidate for President in the 1970s, I was like “how the fuck did I not know about this? Seems like someone should have mentioned it in the vast raft of American material I’ve consumed over the last 40 years or so.”

Maybe I had heard or read about it, and maybe I didn’t take any notice. That’s shameful, isn’t it? The first African-American woman to win a seat in Congress in the 1960s, and who wanted to run for President against Nixon in 1972? Apart from the fact that she should have won (I’m not saying she could have, I’m just saying if we lived in the just universe that the religious claim to believe in, it would have happened), how is that not a story better known?

dir: Michael Mohan

2024

Damn. And I thought I hated the Catholic Church.

I mean, no, there’s no doubt how much I loathe the Catholic Church, but the makers of this flick have an even keener and more creative way of getting back at that august, malevolent institution that’s been treating, amongst so many others, women like crap for millennia.

Don’t get me wrong – I know that other cultures, other religions are just as awful about women, and their perceived status as helpmeets and handmaidens to those that matter (men), if not more so – but, wow, the Catholics refined their misogyny and used the words of God to justify all sorts of fuckery against women right from the get go.

And they’re still fucking at it, don’t forget that the Catholic Churches motto is, in reality, whatever nonsense they preach about the wisdom of St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas, they barely considered women above dogs, writing that women were defective and incomplete men.

Regardless of their veneration of Jesus’s mum, and maybe because of it, their loathing for women was a feature, and not a bug, right from the get go. It’s been used to justify all the awful things that men do to women, but worst of all, the justification for trying to disallow by law women’s bodily autonomy, as in, the right to decide what to do and when to do it with one’s own body.

I had no idea that was even a theme in the flick up until the “turn” happens, and it’s a mighty one, and perhaps, in retrospect, not all that surprising considering the title.

Sister Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy from the States. She is ushered into the welcoming bosom of a convent whose main purpose seems to be looking after the elder nuns who are suffering physically or mentally the ravages of age. Many are on the way out, so their noble task is bringing them comfort until their last days, when they presumably fly on up to heaven and, I dunno, have group sex with Jesus finally.

Is…Isn’t that what they’ve been waiting for? I mean, they’ve been married to Jesus for so long, finally they can get some satisfaction.

dir: Doug Liman

2024

There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.

I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.

I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?

If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?

Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?

The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.

It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.

(Kuru Otlar Üstüne)

dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan

2023

About Dry Grasses contains absolutely no information about grasses, dry or otherwise. Which is probably a good thing, since the flick is a phenomenal 3 hours and 10 minutes long. Three hours and 9 minutes of that running time contain no mentions of dry grasses whatsoever. But in that last minute, in voiceover, our jerk of a main character mumbles some depressing stuff about how no one notices or cares that much about the dry grasses growing on a hillside.

To be fair, as Homer Simpson once wisely intoned, To Kill a Mockingbird contains no useful information about how to kill mockingbirds, which means the book, banned in some states in the US for being too racist, and in other states for not being racist enough, is a textbook case of false advertising.

Damn, what a journey (absolutely nowhere) this dense flick is. Set in the Eastern, quite backwards looking parts of Anatolia, in the country we now all are meant to call Türkiye, a disgruntled teacher called Samet (Deniz Celiloğlu) acts disgruntled for over three hours. He’s not from around here. He resents the backwards residents of this town and their backwards kids. He feels like everyone and everything sucks and is against him.

Although he does seem to have favourites. Upon returning from holidays, he gives a gift to one of his students, being Sevim (Ece Bağci), who I think is a young Kurdish girl in his class. It’s just a little hand mirror, but if your red flag senses are tingling, they probably have every right to.

dirs: Toby Poser, John Adams and Zelda Adams

2023

I love that the Adams family exists. I’m not talking about the other one, with two Ds in their name, those ones who are creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and ooky.

I mean the real life family of John Adams and Toby Poser, and their daughters Zelda and Lulu, who make movies together, on the virtual smell of a digital oily rag ie. with no money.

I don’t know how they fund their movies, I don’t know how they paid to rent a Model T Ford or to pay crew, extras etc in anything other than hugs and sandwiches. And I kinda wish someone would hand them a ridiculous budget so they could blow it all on trips to the Riviera and inflatable furniture (is that what rich people buy?)

But I can’t see that big budgets would compel them in inventive and creative ways to create the kinds of flicks they make. I saw and loved Hellbender from a couple of years ago, and while I didn’t get into this flick quite as much, it still has a similar anarchic energy of a movie that doesn’t follow a well-trodden path.

That being said, I couldn’t help but be reminded of probably the only Rob Zombie flick I’ve ever liked, being The Devil’s Rejects. That’s to my shame, not the Adams’.

Set during the Great Depression, Maggie (Toby Poser), Seven (John Adams) and Eve (Zelda Adams) travel around with carnie folk and pretty much just murder people. Maggie I think does most of the murdering, Eve takes photos, and Seven looks away because he can’t stand the sight of blood, having seen way too much during the Great War to ever be a normal person again.

And that’s pretty much it. Visually the flick has a whole bunch of scenes of startling quality and composition, just because they’re so different from shots you see in any other flick, perhaps deliberately. Compared to their earlier flick this is much gorier, much more macabre. But there’s also a fairly menacing element to it, and I put it down to both the awkward phrasing of much of the dialogue, deliberately striving to make it sound like words that could have dropped from the mouths of John Steinbeck’s characters, and the almost otherworldly, almost Amish sensibility of working in such a wood paneled period setting.

dir: Savanah Leaf

2023

We have been living in an era, for the longest time, where we are told that people need to take responsibility for their actions, that their circumstances are the product of their choices, and that if their circumstances are difficult, well, it’s only because of the bad choices that they made along the way.

IF they struggle and work hard, eventually ‘good’ things will come their way. If something “good” happens to them, that good favour still has to flow from somewhere else, it’s still because of something external to them (the grace of God, the benefits of the welfare safety net system). If something bad happens, well, it’s entirely their own fault.

The ‘logic’ of all this bootstrap nonsense only seems to apply to poor people, though. Poor people are defined as people who don’t have enough money to be shielded from the implications of their choices, right or wrong.

Wealthy people worked hard for what they have, however they got it.

Of course.

Poor people don’t work hard enough and keep making bad choices.

Of course.

Earth Mama is about a woman who can’t get anywhere, can’t get through the difficult circumstances of her life, and her kid’s lives, no matter how hard she tries, because she’s not meant to. She is young, with two kids that have been taken away from her by Child Protective Services already, but she’s also heavily pregnant. The kids were probably taken away because of her previous drug use, which we only know because she keeps being drug tested. There’s an array of requirements she has to adhere to in order to get to spend an hour of supervised time with her kids, per week. And she has to pay child support for the kids even when they have been taken away from her and put in the foster system.

dir: C.J. ‘Fiery’ Obasi

2023

I was not sure what this flick was going to be like, or what it was about, knowing nothing about it. But now I’ve watched it, and presumably that means I know something about it and have a relevant, informed opinion.

Well. I’m not sure how much I have to say about a flick set contemporarily, shot in black and white, that’s really about matrilineal matriarchal monarchies. I mean, I guess they’re better than the alternatives, but they’re still not a decent form of government.

I have to say “in general”, because I would be taking the piss if I implied that the point of the film is that we should all be living in matrilineal, matriarchal monarchies.

This film is just saying that, for these people, of the Iyi village, they need to keep being ruled by a matriarch, because of their connection to Mami Wata, who is a benevolent water spirit / deity who looks after them, thanks to their connection through their Intermediary.

Their Intermediary, sort of like a cross between a priestess and a conduit for Mami Wata’s will, is Mama Efe (Rita Edochie).

While the people believe in Mami Wata, and her earthly ambassador, they give of their bounty to her, out of respect, out of fear, to earn favour. Lots of reasons. And she in turn does…

She does stuff. She is regal, her belief is unwavering, and she does all the rituals they all love. She plays the hits, so to speak.

dir: William Oldroyd

2023

This film… Does it actually exist? Did I imagine it all?

I bet you’ve probably never heard of this movie’s existence. I’m not saying this from the perspective of like a music vinyl snob sneering at someone in a record shop “you’ve probably never even heard of Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, have you?” I mean it more from the perspective that this flick was made in the covid years, was released December last year and then the world acted like nothing had happened.

You know, like sometimes when you’re on public transport, and someone does something absolutely psychotic, but everyone looks away and tries to pretend that nothing happened, because they don’t want to draw the attention or the ire of the lunatic that did the thing?

I imagine that Eileen made negative dollars at the box office, if it was even ever released. I would not even know of the film’s existence if I hadn’t heard of a review from some other film reviewer who feels compelled to review absolutely everything that is ever released.

I understood absolutely nothing about this flick until the very, very end. As in when the credits started, and then I saw that this was based on a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, and then it all fell into place.

I have not read the novel this was based on, which was Moshfegh’s first published novel, but I have read My Year of Rest and Relaxation, so I have some idea of where she was coming from with this screenplay, which she wrote as well (along with her husband Luke Goebel).

But I didn’t twig on to this while watching the flick. If you know of Ottessa Moshfegh’s work, or you skim articles about contemporary literature, you would know of her name cropping up whenever there’s a discussion about “unlikeable” or “unpleasant” female main characters in novels, as in the heavily gendered idea that male characters can be absolute arseholes, and that’s fine, if not desirable, but if there’s a female main character who exhibits the same kind of behaviour or possesses similar character traits or motivations, then it’s unpleasant and icky. Ew, gross. Women have bodies? Ew.

dir: Michael Mann

2023

Since I’ve gotten to watch and review all of the flicks that were nominated for stuff at the Academy Awards, and the awards themselves have been and gone, now I’m sort-of at the wrap up stage for last year, reviewing the flicks that weren’t nominated for squat, but you can just tell these flicks were sold to their stars by their agents as “you’ll definitely get nominated for this!”

Long way of saying “Oscarbait”. With Director Michael Mann, chronicler of hard men doing difficult stuff without changing their facial expressions. With Adam Driver, who maybe isn’t the biggest chameleon out there, but who definitely delivers intense performances when required.

And what’s it about? Ferrari. Not the car, but the man. Enzo Ferrari.

And what a man. Even wearing pants that he pulls up to his armpits, even in late middle-age, he radiates Italian cool. Sunglasses all the time, night or day, like he’s Marcello Mastroianni, only cooler. He has the poise, the confidence of a man who has faced death behind the wheel of a car going as fast as cars can go at that time, and won.

He’s so self-possessed it’s almost irritating, like, you almost want to do something shocking just to see if he’ll flinch.

After getting up from his lover’s bed, and eventually getting home, his angry wife (Penelope Cruz) fires a bullet from a gun at his head, near his head. He doesn’t flinch.

He’s just too fucking cool to flinch. That doesn’t mean he’s got everything under control, though.

Far from it. His company, the one that makes cars, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, presumably because he doesn’t really care so much about the manufacturing and selling of cars aspect of his business. He only cares about the racing part of his business.

There is a track record that his cars have, that he dreads having his competitors break. If they break it, and they do, well, he has to yell at one of his drivers to drive faster, and get the record back.

If the driver dies while trying to break the record again, well, Enzo is not going to cry any tears over him.

dir: Ridley Scott

2023

It’s not like this guy is an unknown; a neglected personage in human history. It almost seems like a hubristic cliché to be one of the most successful directors, commercially and critically in the medium of film, and to then decide in your 80s that you’re going to do a Napoleon biopic.

Like you’ve finally earned that honour. But the thing is, film nerd though I might be, I cannot actually remember there being any other decent films about the Corsican dictator.

I remember chintzy television mini-series from when I was a kid and a prestige mini-series was a Big Deal, for some reason. I remember one clearly with Armand Assante playing the little corporal, and maybe Jacqueline Bisset as Josephine?

I don’t remember if it was good, I just remember that it existed. And that it was more entertaining than this.

And I remember a film with Ian Holm about the last years of the tinpot despot’s life in exile on St Helena, turned into a sweet and mawkish what if? speculative fictional story, which was all right(ish).

And I remember that the Napoleon in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure really enjoyed the water slides at the San Dimas water park.

Like, he *really* enjoyed the heck out of those slides.

Ridley Scott got however much money he got from Apple TV, got Joaquin Phoenix, a fairly accomplished and acclaimed actor he’s worked with before, got access to all sorts of fancy regal places and palaces, and put together a film…

The point of this film… I am not sure, but after 2 hours and nearly 40 minutes, I think the point of the flick is that Napoleon maybe was great on the battlefield (half of the time), but sucked in almost every other measurable way as a person and as a man?

dir: Stephen Williams

2022

Chevalier is a remarkable story about someone ill-served by history (and this film) who nonetheless seems like he was a pretty accomplished guy. The France that the movie is mostly set in is the France of just before the revolution. Marie Antoinette is Queen. Louis XVI is King. They are just begging to have their heads cut off.

France is one of the pre-eminent colonial powers on the planet. Slavery is its great source of wealth. The peoples of the colonies are considered sub-human. Someone who's found his way from the colonies to mainland France is, at this time in history, up to and including the present, going to find it hard to be accepted for who they are beyond their skin colour.

Make no mistake – the France depicted here is the kind of France you’d expect depicted (by non-French people) as in, so deeply and openly racist you’d think this was set in the antebellum South. One of the many points the flick is making is that whatever pretensions France had of being a beacon to the world of culture and refinement, even as it’s on the precipice of a revolution that would eventually reorder all of Europe, it’s a deeply racist place. They will literally have scene after scene of people telling the protagonist that he is seen as subhuman regardless of and in spite of his brilliance and accomplishments.

The film opens (somewhat unfortunately) with a strange scene where a young Mozart is playing to rapturous acclaim in front of a Parisian audience with an orchestra. He asks the audience if they have requests. The audience start yelling out their favourites. A piece is decided upon, something like “Cantata in E major, third movement”, they start playing it, the interloper borrows a violin and competes against Mozart himself, and everyone is just blown away by how much better this other blow-in is.

“Who the fuck is that guy?” yells a chastened Mozart, just in time for the title.

In the list of things that never happened, this never happened the most.

This is a true story, as in the chap that this is all about actually existed, but so many things depicted in this flick never happened, or are unlikely to have happened. One could argue that, considering the racist hostility that existed around and against him and people like him, efforts were made to erase Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de St George from history, so that the scant record for many of these occasions was deliberate.

dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo

2024

Maybe this flick doesn’t need to exist, but I super duper enjoyed it anyway.

Anyone who has watched Stranger Things on Netflix has already seen hundreds of hours of Millie Bobby Brown playing a kickass character who suffers a whole hell of a lot. This flick Damsel has her playing a character who doesn’t have superpowers, but does suffer a whole hell of a lot before she maybe triumphs, or dies in shame.

Either way it requires you to be on board right from the start. And it’s a pretty slow start, let me tell you.

When the movie starts, it’s set in a fantasy / medieval land possibly called Generica which could just as easily be the beginning of Frozen or Brave or any other kind of place where women have long cumbersome dresses and braided hair, and the men are either chubby old guys with long hair and beards, or young ponces. It’s all doublets and curtsying and thees and thous with weirdly dodgy British accents. Even in fantasy realms people have to sound like posh plumy jerks at all times. Even Angela Bassett.

Elodie (Millie Bobby Brown) is a princess from an impoverished realm. She is essentially sold by her father into marriage, to somewhere on an island. Long build up, lots of mystery and ambiguity, and then the other shoe drops (when she is thrown into a pit).

The island kingdom tricks other realms into sending their daughters, they marry the women in a sham marriage, somehow share their blood with them, and then throw them in a pit in order to satisfy the beast that lives below.

It’s a common story, as in, it’s familiar to anyone who’s ever heard or read any stories, ever. The theme of sacrificing people to monsters, gods, volcanoes etc is as old as humanity, I think, considering the place it holds in almost all old cultures’ mythologies. The theme of sacrificing young women for the “good” of society, well, it’s the very definition of patriarchy: women viewed as commodity, and valued in ways that takes none of their personhood or autonomy into account.

And arranged marriages? Well, it’s all about sacrifice, isn’t it?

dirs.: Eshome & Ian Nelms

2024

You call something Red Right Hand, and it comes with certain expectations.

And before you come at me and say “well, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds don’t have a monopoly on the words “red right hand”, plus Cave lifted the phrase from Milton’s Paradise Lost” I would say to that “yeah but…”

How can you have a movie called Red Right Hand, and not have the song play at any point of the proceedings? I spent the entire length of the movie wondering “is it going to play now? What about now?”

And it’s not there. Not even a cover of it. Not even an instrumental version of it, or an Appalachian version of it. Not even a bad cover of it. Nothing.

Talk about a bait and switch: you baited me with the title, and then gave me nothing.

Well played, you curs; well played, you bounders.

I don’t remember if they ever expressly say where any of this story is meant to be taking place, but rest assured it’s somewhere meth-ridden and gap-toothed, so it’s somewhere in the South. That famous Southerner Orlando Bloom plays a guy called Cash who just wants to look after his family and live a somewhat honest life down on the farm.

dir: S.J. Clarkson

2024

This is very bad, but, even worse, it’s very pointless.

So bad. How did they trick people into being in this? Did anyone think this was going to be a ticket to stardom and big cash payouts? Well, I’m sure they all got paid very well, but, yeesh, this is woeful.

Madame Web exists in this strange alternate Spider-Man world that doesn’t have Spider-Man in it. There are four movies now in this alternate setting, I think? All four are pretty shitty. Moebius I think exists, if I didn’t hallucinate it, as a very stupid movie, as do two Venom movies, which are also stupid and painful.

And now this. This is an origin story for some hero, I think, who’s blind and in a wheelchair. But before that ‘hilarious’ ending, it’s about characters whose names I’m not even going to use, because it’s too fucking stupid.

So I will refer at least to the actors in this. Dakota Johnson gets a lot of flack for not being much of an actor, or for being a nepo baby (a foot in the door and so much more), but I think that’s really unfair. I’ve never seen nor will I ever see those movies based on the 50 Shades of Grey books, because life is way too short, but I have seen her in a few films where she’s been great. She was great in The High Note, in Cha Cha Real Smooth, and in The Lost Daughter a couple of years ago, so that’s at least three solid performances I can point to.

I can’t blame her for the indifferent work she puts in here, but it really feels like she has no idea why she’s here, and can’t wait to get off set. And this script, ye gods, how fucking pointless.

dir: David Ayer

2024

O Lordy, lordy. Spare me from such terrible times.

This fucking flick – it’s pretty fucking stupid. I guess that’s okay, but it’s almost comically, aggressively average, and grimly humorless to boot.

Jason Statham, once again, plays a guy with all the killing skills, who was content living a quiet life tending to bees, but then something happened and he had to kill about a thousand people in order to get revenge, sorry, I meant to say ‘justice’.

This is not Jason Statham’s first rodeo. He has literally played this role dozens of times already. And he’ll probably play it again for another 10 years before he gets tired of it. Although, honestly, he’s in his mid-fifties already, maybe do something different for a while? Might I suggest beekeeping?

There is something uniquely boring about the way the action is done in this flick. Most of the flick is Statham killing or punching or punch killing people who might as well have been mannequins in a mannequin warehouse. The people behind this flick think they’ve learned new lessons from the John Wick flicks in that they want to see someone besting hundreds of foes over the course of a bloated running time, but this flick has none of the flair or the inventiveness that goes into a lot of that stunt work and fight choreography. They felt they should skip that and just have Staham killing countless faceless minions in dull and grim ways. There is one decent knock-down-drag-out towards the end of the flick between Statham and some one-legged Afrikaner goon, but that’s it.

That’s a few competent minutes out of about a hundred minute movie.

dir: Blitz Bazawule

2023

Musicals. I try to be enthusiastic about them, but honestly, like most people (who aren’t Americans), I genuinely try to avoid them like, well, using the phrase “like the plague” seems tasteless after Covid killed so many millions of people.

So let’s just say I avoid them like the Cats musical they unleashed upon an unsuspecting world several years ago. Case in point, I have tried to sit through Cats multiple times, and I’ve never, ever been able to get through it, even during the worst of the lockdowns.

That was not a problem here. I knew it was a musical going in, and though I’ve never heard any of the songs before, I wasn’t overly dreading the experience.

I am old enough to remember the film when it came out in the 80s, directed by that most famous of African-American directors, Steven Spielberg, and starring Whoopi Goldberg as Celie, and the Empress of the Americas, being Oprah Winfrey, played Sofia.

I… have memories of that movie. I remember my school taking us along to the cinema to see it, which means I was in early high school. I remember being horrified by the scenes of what these days we call ‘intimate partner violence’, which used to be called ‘domestic violence’, which boils down to ‘a piece of shit guy physically abusing a woman’, which makes me sick to my stomach to even type. I have always looked askance at Danny Glover since then, having loathed him (unfairly) for how well he played the role of Mister.

My other memory of watching the original film involves watching it on the telly with my mother, who painfully, wrenchingly related to the scenes of domestic violence, and could transcend her usual racist tendencies to sympathise with the plights of the many African-American women in the story, but drew the line at Celie’s sapphic tendencies, declaring them a bridge too far, condemning everyone involved to hell itself.

dir: Wim Wenders

2023

Like a fair few films that have been nominated for Best International Feature Film this year, I have a hard time figuring out what to actually describe the film as. Is it a Japanese film because the cast is Japanese and they speak in Japanese, and it’s set in Japan? Or, since it’s German director Wim Wenders’ film, does that make it a German film?

Like… when Tom Cruise was in The Last Samurai a bunch of years ago, was that a Japanese movie, since it had some Japanese people in it, and they spoke Japanese, and it was about Japanese history, even though it was in English and the lead was American and it was filmed in New Zealand? Or was it a Kiwi film? Or an American film?

This is a movie about a man who cleans public toilets in the Shibuya district. That’s it. And it was kind of commissioned by the people from the city of Tokyo who built a bunch of public toilets, and presumably wanted to show them off, which is one of the most bizarre reasons for a film to exist. As you might expect the film is not critical towards the toilets as designed or realised.

Also, because it wants to presumably show the toilets in the most positive light, they’re pretty much clean when the cleaner gets to them, which I guess makes the actor’s job a bit easier. They don’t want to gross us out, which is appreciated. I have a weak stomach when it comes to that kind of stuff, and I have a particular terror of public toilets.

None of that was triggered by this unusual flick. Kōji Yakusho is a legend of Japanese cinema. If you have watched only five contemporary Japanese movies, chances are he was in four of them. I remember him from as far back as Kamikaze Taxi way back in the day, but I’ve seen him in stacks of films since then. He can play gentle, he can play ruthless and brutal, but he’s an actor, he’s a man I could watch doing mundane things endlessly.