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The Gray Man (2022)
A giant trailer of itself
This is a succession of impeccably loud but increasingly incoherent action scenes, basically like 50 trailers of itself glued end-to-end. The plot is a bit like really old-fashioned action movies, but without the talky bits that tried to make sense. Actually it reminded me most of an old 1980s film called Commando, which also had a bulletproof man shooting an entire nation of hapless grunts to rescue a kidnapped lassie from one of the Village People. That film was one of the very naffest things about the naffest of all decades, but even it had more self-aware wit and humour than this.
The Northman (2022)
Not easily classified
A strange animal, this one... On the one hand it's a fundamentally standard basic plot with a very commonly used early-medieval setting and corresponding familiar aesthetic. On the other hand it seems determined to surprise and challenge us, if only by cranking everything up to 12. In an ocean of sword operas filled with beefy men, loud noises, grand vistas and gore, it distinguishes itself primarily by being gorier, grander, louder and beefier than the competition. But it also contains quite a few neat visual ideas which I hadn't seen anywhere else.
Also, unusually for this genre, the mechanics of the plot and the dialogues are deliberately stylized, clearly in reference to the story's origin in Norse literature. I really loved that, but it will irritate those who value "realism" above all else, as if a realistic depiction of 9th century Scandinavian life would make any sense to us.
I was a bit disappointed not to find something of the Shakespearean story's existential despair in the protagonist's character. It would have been a neat touch to work this in, even if it was not present in the original story.
Rat Film (2016)
A disappointing mess
I have no idea what this film was supposed to be about. Some rats are present, both the wild and the lab kind, and Baltimore gets mentioned a lot, but you don't learn anything interesting about rats, Baltimore, or rats in Baltimore. Some lunatics hunt rats with blowpipe and fish them from alleys using bait and tackle (that image is where the film earns a second star from me). Contents also include: superficial musings on segregation; some stuff about forensics training that appears to have been recovered from another project and tacked on to this one to fill out the time; slow-mo shots of fireworks; and lots and lots of rendered footage purportedly from a video game but looking to all the world like Google Earth with 3D switched on running on a low-spec laptop. Baffling.
Erde (2019)
Fantastic visuals and (mostly) fascinating interviews
Extraordinary, awe-inspiring shots of tremendous civil engineering projects, interspersed with simple yet intriguing interviews. In the first six segments (out of seven), the director takes the courageous and unusual decision to let the project workers speak about themselves and their projects. They are all knowledgeable, proud of their accomplishments and of their usefulness to society, but also, to various degrees, conscious of the awesome impact of their work on the natural environment, and thereby somewhat conflicted. I found this all really compelling. Sadly however, in the last segment the film reverts to trite "they are hurting Mother Earth" messaging from protester types, and that is much more familiar and therefore less interesting.
Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President (2020)
The life and times of Jimmy Carter, as told by his rock star friends
Don't be fooled: the film is about 90% Jimmy Carter and 10% Rock & Roll. It's also a hagiography: if Carter has any flaws, or even lacks any known human quality, you won't learn about it from this film. If you are not a fan, I'm sure this will probably irritate you no end. But if, like me, you think that from a moral standpoint he towers over the people who preceded and succeeded him as President, then you'll find plenty of evidence here to support that view.
I thought in the end Rock & Roll got the short hand of the stick. All the necessary talking heads are present, but you are left without much of a feeling that Carter's palling with rock stars was a significant factor in his character, views, rapport with the American public, or even the 1976 election campaign; the only real tidbit comes from the recollection that when he first appeared on stage with the Allman Brothers Band, they were more famous than him. Fine, but then what? Well, he had Aretha Franklin and Paul Simon play at his inauguration, and he had an all star jazz band play for him at the White House, and lots of others came and played, and they all like him - but so what? Perhaps it would have been helpful to take the spotlight away from Carter a little to ask whether musicians in the late 70's were still relevant to the attitude of young US adults towards politics, as they most definitely had been ten years earlier, then speculate on how that might have influenced the 1976 and 1980 elections.
What's most satisfactory is Carter himself - through plenty of footage and long excerpts from recent interviews, he comes across as a man whom you would like to meet, at any age.
Vigil (2021)
One of the also-rans
Competently directed and acted, but the concept was never seaworthy. The show is contrived, with weak writing, uninvolving characters, and hackneyed plot. Every bit of it was unbelievable, from the "submarine interior" sets to the character motivations and plot twists. A doomed attempt to transport a few thriller tropes to an environment that, you feel, would in reality be far too small and tightly controlled to sustain them..
La rage du Démon (2016)
Clever spoof
A clever idea, well executed. At heart it is a spoof of cultural/historical documentaries, with various talking heads (cinema professionals, critics, and the like) earnestly giving their very best expert analysis of largely fictional events in the history of early cinema. They are, for the most part, playing themselves while following a script. Despite this they mostly come across in a very naturalistic way, even though what they are talking about is not just untrue but rather far-fetched, which leads me to think that the director probably let them improvise their own dialogue from detailed notes. However it was achieved, it works.
The film also contains entirely factual segments about the remarkable career of the pioneer director Georges Meliès, well illustrated with an abundance of material, and which effectively function as a real documentary embedded in the fictional one.
Burn Your Maps (2016)
Heartwarming fantasy
This delightful film is a complete fantasy, especially once it leaves its urban setting for an entirely imaginary world of sun-drenched steppes and gambolling goats, full of benevolent, wise, leisured folks who queue up as soon as they are introduced to become our heroes' new best friends and mentors. It's all far too pleasant to be believable, but you would need a heart of the purest mud not to be taken in anyway. For all its wishful thinking, the story achieves the prerequisite for fantasy: it makes you want to know where this place is so that you can move there. The script is also often funny, and the actors are uniformly excellent.
The film has been criticised for not featuring enough Mongolian characters doing authentic Mongolian things, but I think that is missing the point of the story. This is not about actual Mongolia and its people, but about the vast open spaces, exciting and unknown, that open up in front of a nine-year old, just as his parents are seeing their own vistas suddenly shuttered by a personal disaster. This new world is only Asian and exotic in ways that are accessible to the child: grand scenery, semi-free farm animals, people who live in tents, unfamiliar language. But the emotional connections the boy and his mother make while there are, naturally, with people that they could have met in America. On the contrary, it is the other characters, coming over with no expectations, who find answers there to the questions that they did not know how to ask.
1971: The Year That Music Changed Everything (2021)
Too much meaningful context
This series takes on the impossible task of making the musical scene of the early 70's seem boring. It achieves this by drowning everything in context, lots and lots of meaningful, po-faced, excruciatingly important political context, laid on thickly with all the wit and sparkle of a Reverend Lovejoy sermon on Constancy. The problem is that among all the ponderous exposition of the divisions of American society in the Nixon years, for long periods it forgets to mention music at all; and when it finally does, it has a surprisingly narrow focus for an eight-episode documenthon, returning again and again to the same handful of arbitrarily selected acts, several of whom, to speak charitably, are now considered also-rans.
There is not much overarching structure, and no flow to the narrative; random changes of subject, repetitions and non-sequiturs abound. Long digressions on the My Lai massacre (which took place in 1968) and the Manson family murders (1969) are totally off-topic and appear to be nothing but an excuse to show graphic pictures of mutilated bodies. All in all a disappointing effort, which would maybe have passed muster if it had in fact been made in 1971; but the bar for documentaries has been raised a long way since.
Minari (2020)
Won't stay in the memory long
Prettily done but almost aggressively conventional. I've seen this all before, done more or less equally as well.
Inside No. 9: Simon Says (2021)
Inside "Inside no.9" 's comfort zone
Following last week's pyrotechnic, thrilling (if chaotic) comic outburst, this is a retreat into the safe zone for Inside no.9, a straight-down-the-middle effort. It works, for sure: this plot is from a formula which they have perfected over the years. But for me, playing it safe is not the show's main selling point.
Inside No. 9: Wuthering Heist (2021)
Shamelessly clever
Yet another superb episode. As usual the authors get the writing exactly right: deeply original while poking fun at familiar tropes and expectations; challenging and witty, but never obscure or baffling. You don't need to know anything about Commedia dell'arte to enjoy this, but you do have to be willing to learn, pick up hints from the behaviour of the characters, guess and be curious.
The jokes and meta-jokes come in hard and fast - be alert, and keep up! I confess I almost hugged myself for figuring out "Trinidad and Tobago", but a bunch of other -presumably clever- jokes flew right past me. Too bad. This is exactly what I want from this show - the writers stubbornly refuse to assume that their viewers are dumb, or spoilt kids who need to recognise every joke before it's uttered and cannot bear anything that's outside of their reference frame.
The plot doesn't quite land on its feet as satisfactorily as in the very best episodes, which is why I can't give this a full 10.
I Care a Lot (2020)
Well I didn't. I didn't care at all actually.
This starts cartoonish and silly, but sadly cannot keep up this level past the midway point. An embarrassment to all concerned, not least the newspaper reviewers who unaccountably failed to punish this with the cruelty it deserves. I suppose they'd rather simply steal off each other's reviews than actually sit through this (who can blame them), so maybe it took only one practical joker to cause a chain reaction and propel this turd to 60+ on Metacritic.
At least most of the actors realise they're in a crapfest and they gurn and mug accordingly like office workers auditioning for the Christmas panto. But poor Rosamund Pike apparently had not read the script and attempts to play it straight, which only serves to push the cringe factor into orbit.
Seungriho (2021)
A children's movie, not a SF epic
Here is one thing I wish other reviews had mentioned: it's a children's movie (OK, the English title is a clue, but I'd assumed that was just an awkward piece of translation from Korean). It's spectacular and all that, but I challenge anyone over the age of nine to put up with these characters, situations and dialogues for two and a quarter hours without drifting off. If you are above that age, this functions best as background while you are working, doing homework or playing a videogame: it really won't require any of your attention, and the loud noises will warn you whenever there is something on screen worth watching.
La Gomera (2019)
A tale told by an idiot, full of muzak and mild trepidation, signifying little.
I was expecting a rollicking crime saga in an Eastern European setting, but that's not what I got.
For one thing, it seemed a lot longer than 97 minutes, due to the fact that neither storyline nor actors ever rise above a quasi-catatonic state. It's not boring, exactly, and the plot does kind of shuffle along, but the direction and tone are kept deliberately at idle for the entire duration, never allowed to build any momentum. Even the shootout scene looks like no-one's particularly interested whether they get shot or not.
The story is really confusing and rather aimless. You find out soon enough that all the characters are corrupt and unreliable, starting with the hero, and soon everyone is triple-crossing everyone else in a tangle so thick that it's impossible to tell whether it all adds up to a consistent story. I cannot, hand on heart, tell you whether this film has a plot twist in it or not. I could not follow any of the lead characters' motivations, and thus I was surprised time and again by apparently arbitrary behaviour, but I really don't know whether the writers were deliberately trying to pull surprises, or whether the whole thing is just a bit of a gluey mess.
From an aesthetic perspective the film is also unexciting, with a beige colour palette and overused classical music hits on the soundtrack.
For no reason whatsoever, the film gets a coda in Singapore's Gardens by the Bay, to the backdrop of a generic sound-and-light show involving gigantic fake steel trees and more hackneyed snippets of classical music. This scene is rather unnecessary and its location appears completely arbitrary, and I can only surmise this is a piece of particularly inelegant product placement.
Joueurs (2018)
Unnecessary
I just finished watching this, and I would love to review it for you, but I can't remember it.
Synonymes (2019)
Mostly a missed opportunity
On its face it looks like a provocative and interesting film could have been made, throwing a half-tame, disaffected, confused ex-Israeli soldier into the sophisticated, mindful and permanently leisured society of Paris-in-French-Movies (a place not to be confused with either Paris-in-US-Movies, or Actual-Paris where I once lived).
Sadly, the film doesn't find anything novel to explore in this setup. In fact, the central plot strand is a bog-standard, hoary, clapped-out French melodrama trope, as our unpolished, virile, tortured hero meets an artistically minded posh girl with a bland, rich boyfriend. Will they, maybe, fall for each other and have a short wild affair, before his Weltschmertz and uncouth behaviour finally cause her to turn her back on him while hiding a sob? Oh, the suspense.
Around that there are other sub-plots and minor characters thrown in, but few of them can be believed in any longer than it takes them to gaze in the distance and pout (if French), or put someone's head in an arm-lock (if Israeli).
The film is neither dumb nor unwatchable, mostly due to a highly physical central performance by the lead actor who is on screen almost the entire time, but I found it difficult to give it my full attention. The very final scene is a bit of an obvious metaphor, certainly, but it gave me a smile.
Sputnik (2020)
A Russian/English SF cliche phrasebook
Useful if you are looking for a Russian translation of every American SF movie cliché ever written.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)
What happens when you ignore your writer's block and write anyway
This is what happens when you are a good film writer: you can write a scene, natural dialogue, character interaction and all that; and you know a lot of pseudo-interesting things about literary criticism and film criticism; and you can conjure up credible critical appreciation blather about Cassavetes and Debord and such; and you also really, really need to to write your next film now; but for the life of you, you simply do not have the first clue what to write the film about.
Never mind! Throw it all in the pot. Confusing timelines, rambling digressions, constantly changing character names, ages and professions! A dance sequence! Here, look: a creepy basement! A musical number! A film-within-a-film, complete with credits! And don't worry: no reviewer is ever going to risk looking like an innocent who has completely missed the point, or even like the kind of philistine who would even look for a point.
This film is writer's block on screen - it's got good acting and good film-making and even good dialogue writing and everything you need - but it's all in vain, because, as the saying goes, there is no there there. No direction, no point, no idea- inspiration did not strike once, at any point through writing this screenplay, and it shows.
Idi i smotri (1985)
Starts slowly, but builds up to something you won't easily forget
Truly astonishing. Stay with it! It starts quite slowly, and it's a Soviet film which means we get a lot of allegories and long close-ups of the main characters, so if you are more used to Western war films, you might spend the first hour wondering what exactly you are watching; but the second half packs unforgettable sequences one after the other.
Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019)
Arty film that is actually artistic
This is a rare bird: an artsy film that is properly artistic (as well as being, in some small part, about art). This could have done with a little bit of extra weight to the dialogue, but it has a remarkably strong visual identity, both delicate and bright, bringing the feelings of the characters and the hopelessness of their situation relentlessly to the fore and examining them in brilliantly lit scenes. Everything about the film is gorgeous: composition, costumes, cinematography, the one musical interlude, locations. I could particularly appreciate the craftsmanship since the exteriors were filmed down the path from my granny's house and I could recognise the actual rocks that I used to clamber on as a kid; but in the real world, the light there is never as bright, and the sea never as gloriously turquoise as it is in the film.
On the flip side, the two leads did not really convince me that they had as much mutual attraction as is necessary for the story, the dialogue is a little flat, and the film could maybe have been brought in under 1.5 hours, with a little less necking and longingly-gazing, without losing much impact.
Aniara (2018)
Classy existential sci-fi epic
I was very impressed by this; it looks beautiful and is very carefully conceived and made. Most importantly it evokes, from the very beginning, the sense of awe and wonder that I want from my space-travel stories, and the gorgeous, sweeping imagery keeps coming throughout. Complaining about scientific consistency and credibility would of course completely miss the point. The film very quickly throttles any illusions that we might be watching a thriller or a fantasy story set in space. Instead, it comes from that other great tradition of sci-fi epics, the desperate existential puzzler. And here is maybe the flaw - the film doesn't have any great new tricks to pull in that department, no blinding philosophical insights, no brand new take on its themes. So while it is at least always comprehensible, watchable and compelling (unlike other intellectual sci-fi films in the same category), it does play a bit like simply a superior version of several films that one has seen before.
Motherless Brooklyn (2019)
Bloated
This overlong gumshoe story starts fine but lets the pace slow down to a crawl by mid-point; you think that it will pick up in the second half but instead, the plot creeps on and eventually shudders to a stop like a backfiring vintage car. The hero's psychological condition is entirely incidental to the story, but it works OK as an unusual, colourful flourish. Alec Baldwin looks bored but does the job as a regulation bad guy. Nothing in there is egregiously good or bad, and there was probably a decent little 80-minute noir to be made; sadly we get the redundant, asthmatic 150-minute version instead.
Jules et Jim (1962)
So-so melodrama
It's a bit difficult, watching this in 2020, to understand why it's considered to be a landmark in the history of cinema. This is a fairly straightforward love triangle melodrama, with a plot that hinges entirely on the extremely familiar plot device of the irrational, thoughtless, destructive yet mysteriously entrancing woman in the middle. Self-conscious camera and editing gimmicks (freeze-frames etc) may have looked revolutionary in 1962 (although, somehow, I doubt even that). Now they look like the kind of jejune tricks that film school teachers mercilessly kick out of their first year students. There are engaging performances from the male leads, especially Oskar Werner, but poor Jeanne Moreau is given nothing to do except sulk, show her profile and behave erratically.
Dodesukaden (1970)
Wistful and sad
This is a series of vignettes, stories (simple slices of life really) that are related solely by the fact that the protagonists are all neighbours in a slum. Everything is highly stylised: the visuals of the sets and lighting are carefully studied to match the situations and the characters' mood; the stories themselves are simple parables on the impact of love, lust, delusion, despair, addiction, and betrayal. Material poverty is present everywhere but is not the main theme.
The whole is impactful and almost unbearably sad, a film that is difficult to shake off once you are done watching it. It leaves a longing, an inarticulate wish that you could have stepped into the movie and convinced those characters to behave in ways less harmful to themselves and their loved ones.
Despite its length and the apparent improbability of the characters and situations, the film doesn't let go of your attention, helped by some engaging, if somewhat broad, acting and some striking use of colour - you can tell that this is the director that would go on to make Kagemusha and Ran.