Film Words

  It’s hard to say when Nick Cage started playing himself. The seeds of self-reflexivity are already present in his 1987 breakout films Raising Arizona and Moonstruck , where his performances exude a madcap energy that threatens to overwhelm, and probably would have sunk lesser films without the supporting structure and talent to contain him. Certainly by time he appeared in Face/Off ten years later the prospect of Cage playing around with his own on and off screen persona was enough to not only make the film a hit on its release but secure it a place in the pop cult cannon that endures to this day. In the decades since Cage has been more than willing to create cinematic feedback loops out of that uniquely captivating energy, weaponizing and subverting his own myth as Hollywood’s most confounding actor.           The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent uses Cage’s legendary, internet friendly status as its premise, casting the actor as a fictionalised ...

  Everything about The Northman is supersized: the muscles, the action, the budget, and for filmmaker Robert Eggers, the stakes. The Norse epic represents a significant step up onto the worlds stage for a director previously responsible for niche little indie genre flicks, decent hits in and of themselves, but free of the expectations a near $100 million budget will bring. The last ten years have seen many indie breakouts like Eggers suddenly catapulted to box office juggernaut status off the back of just one or two films (Colin Trevorrow, Taika Waititi, Etc) and almost all have lost their creative soul in the process, delivering branded content (TM) studio noted to unintelligible blandness. The supersized risk of The Northman lies in how much it feels like an Eggers film, only bigger. An Eggers film, for those uninitiated, means a semi-mythic period piece dripping with exhaustively researched historical detail, down to the tiniest, grimiest piece of fastidious production desig...

 “Oh, you think darkness is your ally” taunts Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, the last live action solo cinematic outing for Batman, a character we’re so addicted to that we’ve been micro dosing him, in the form of Ben Affleck amongst others, consistently since Christopher Nolan wrapped up his genre altering trilogy of Bat-flicks almost a decade ago, “but you merely adopted the dark”. The quip certainly cuts to the heart of the films Batman has been starring in for the last thirty plus years, starting with Tim Burtons landmark in 1989. That film dimmed the lights and deepened the shadows on a character that had started on screen life as a colourful and poppy children’s hero, most famously embodied by Adam West and his onomatopoeia punching effects. Burton slathered the franchise in gothic, this-ain’t-for-kids attitude and the world took that approach and ran with it.   Batman media has only been getting darker since ’89, as well as grittier and more real (whatever people thin...

 We're in the doldrums folks, time to take a quick look at the kind of studio crap getting released between Christmas and the Oscars this year.    Moonfall Does what it says on the tin. Roland Emmerich has been floundering for some time now as the world grew out of his style of sub-Spielberg disaster porn, but he finds a streak of high camp here that must have caught me in a good mood because I was loving it. The film doesn’t try to hide or excuse its ludicrous premise, instead leaning in to the child’s brain science and conspiracy nonsense with a confidence that charms and delights; it doesn’t want to be taken seriously and I was more than happy to play along. The main cast share that sense of fun, doing sincere evocations of the kind of b-movie performances common in 1950’s films with a fraction of the budget on display here, and never giving in to overly winky parody despite clearly knowing the kind of project they’re in. Patrick Wilson is a standout as a square jawe...

 Gary Valentine is a hustler, a dangerous mix of both teenage and adult confidence, two slightly different qualities that Gary utilises to tear his way through Los Angeles’ San Fernando valley on a one man small business crusade. In a time (the tumultuous mid 1970’s) before home videogame systems or personal computers, Gary channels his boredom into an acting career, a waterbed business, an arcade palace, a romantic pursuit of a woman at least 10 years his senior. The valley he’s tearing through is of course the home of one Paul Thomas Anderson, who’s new film Licorice Pizza stars Cooper Hoffman as the young force of nature.  He is in many ways a classic Anderson protagonist, a relentless con-man, avatar of American capitalism, although at his age he’s not menacing as much as just a menace. Of all Gary’s escapades, it’s that strange romantic pursuit that forms the backbone of this particularly shaggy movie, more a series of memories than anything else. Gary meets and immedi...

 The thing I keep coming back to is that I can’t believe this exists. I have a hard time judging anything Jackson does here because it almost doesn’t matter; It’s The Beatles for crying out loud, The Beatles. What a treasure trove; Perhaps the most intimate and thorough document of the creative process of truly extraordinary artists ever captured. It’s hard to think of a way this footage could be presented that isn’t compelling; then again, Michael Lindsey-Hogg’s infamous whiff of a film somehow proves otherwise.   Mostly the credit lies in what Jackson doesn’t do; no talking heads, very little context outside of the first 10 minutes, leaving in as much raw footage as possible to complicate interpersonal relationships and deepen the personalities of the band. I rolled my eyes when it was announced that the film would be elongated to almost eight hours and presented in three parts, classic Jackson bloat, but it turns out the length is the films greatest strength. Sitting thro...

 Del Toro’s latest is dripping with the kind of prestige that comes when a great filmmaker has just bagged some hefty Oscar gold. Decadent décor and lush cinematography are draped around a cast of acting heavyweights all wearing their serious faces, backed by the kind of (mid)budget that is rare to see for a played-straight drama nowadays. The whole thing feels like a rich chocolate gateau, including the feeling afterwards that there might have been a bit too much of it. The aforementioned prestige stops this from being as lean as it needs to be, as the 1947 version was for sure, with a backstory/framing device for Bradley Coopers protagonist that doesn’t add much of interest, and extra bits of bloat hear and there that drag the pacing to a crawl at times, but there’s a compelling enough idea serving as the narrative backbone that kept me engaged throughout. As Coopers character climes up the rungs of society, from the mud caked carnival with one bath for all to share, to the bou...

 Some more little thoughts... The Matrix Resurrections Lana Wachowski continues to be the most interesting blockbuster filmmaker of the century, bringing back arguably the most visually impressive action franchise in history with an instalment that…has kind of weak action and doesn’t look that good. Genius! Honestly this doesn’t look or move that much worse than most other contemporary blockbusters and there’s definitely intentionality to the choices, but what is the point of a Matrix movie that cant distinguish itself visually. Dumb question; this series has always been jam packed with ideas about who we are and how we live in a world that increasingly seems designed to isolate and commodify us, with each successive instalment interrogating the previous entry and trying to find some new truth, something that the matrix cant take away from us. In Resurrections Wachowski continues to drill down into the core of the series premise, fully aware that 20 years on the original films...

 Brief thoughts on a couple of French films from '21 Annette Carax’s movies have often been exercises in Brechtian detachment, easier to analyse than get emotionally wrapped up in, but almost all of them contain individual moments of pure aesthetic bliss (the boat ride under the fireworks in The Lovers on the Bridge , Denis Lavant running to David Bowie in Mauvais Sang , or playing the accordion in Holy Motors ) based primarily around music, so the idea of a full on Carax musical promises much. It’s therefore both surprising and obvious that Annette finds Carax just as emotionally distant, a yet just as good, as ever.    The way this film plays with artificiality, in the music, the set design, the staging, the way characters perform and lie to each other, represents some of the most accomplished and intelligent filmmaking of the year, with every scene introducing new ideas or deepening themes, often purely visually. The cast, particularly Adam Driver, do excellent wo...

 The effortlessness of Steven Soderbergh is so pleasurable to me. It’s probably his greatest skill, making complex, star studded films with brains and style that glide along so smoothly that they’re often overlooked as quickly as he makes them. You never feel this film straining, and I love it when someone very talented makes hard work look easy, it’s a special kind of thrill. I love most of the super wide, nicely textured cinematography that has bothered some others; again it’s fun watching a filmmaking savant fuck around a bit, and Don Cheadle gives one of the year’s best performances, tempering ambition with desperation and commanding attention amidst a cast designed to get Letterboxed tongues wagging. The narrative game here is nothing that new, a twisty, initially confounding little equation that eventually solves itself into a big “Fuck Capitalism”, a message that has come to dominate most of Soderbergh’s mid to late career, but never feels like its being played for cheap...

  The darkest movie of 1971, and perhaps the most disturbing in the career of the great provocateur Sam Peckinpah, begins with what could be considered the year’s silliest joke. We first meet the newlywed protagonists David and Amy Sumner loading a humungous “Man-Trap” into their car like the Flintstones getting dinosaur ribs at the drive through. It’s a Chekov’s gun so colossal it threatens to tip the car over with its metaphorical heft. “Jeez”, we think in jest, “I wonder if that things going to go off in the third act?” Such an overt piece of tension based machinery clues us in right from the start that this film will end, as most of Peckinpah’s do, in cranked up, brutal violence. What gives Straw Dogs such a memorable and controversial legacy is that this time the violence is uncommonly anti-cathartic; it settles none of the tension built up in the ninety minutes prior, only serving to further unmoor the films point of view in a wold without trust, boundaries, or basic social...

  Nomadland was supposed to be the last of the small independent films Chloe Zhao made before being catapulted into stardom by Marvels upcoming Eternals film, instead it has wound up bringing her widespread attention earlier than anticipated, becoming an awards juggernaut and the favourite to take home best picture at next month’s Oscars. A film like this getting so much attention is unusual, unthinkable in a pre- Moonlight world, although a starring role for Frances McDormand was always going to draw some eyes. McDormand stands alone at the centre of the film, playing a widow who has lost her house in the company town were her husband used to work, and finds herself taking a series of seasonal odd jobs to fund a perilous life in her RV. She eventually falls in with a group of Nomads who teach her the ways of unmoored living in modern America, both the practical daily work and the more difficult task of spiritually coming to terms with your situation. Most of these Nomads are ...

 Just a few words on a couple of good awards hopefuls and a couple of poor streaming releases.  Sound of Metal : Dir, Darius Marder – Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci The best of the recent crop of awards hopefuls, Ahmed plays a drummer who loses his hearing and is forced to adjust to a new reality, leaving his partner/bandmate (Cooke) and joining Paul Raci’s home for deaf youngsters with nowhere else to go. This is stunningly sensitive, well researched and filled with believable humanity from all involved. New director Darius Marder skilfully avoids the saccharine and trite narrative pitfalls that one would expect from a story like this, instead tapping into a universal fear of the entropic ways our bodies begin to fail us, leading to desperate, futile attempts to regain an idealised status quo in our constantly shifting lives.               Minari : Dir, Lee Isaac Chung – Steven Yeun, Han Ye-ri, Youn Yuh-jung, Alan Kim   An utt...

  Right from the opening titles of I’m Thinking of Ending Things it’s made clear you’re going to need to work. The names of the movies writer/director, Charlie Kaufman, and its two leads, Jesse Plemons and Jessie Buckley, are so small you have to lean in and squint to read them. You’ll spend the rest of the movie like that, leaning and squinting, trying to untangle the strands of Kaufman’s latest icy, self-reflexive opus. Loosely adapted from Iain Reid’s 2016 novel, the story follows a neurotic and likely depressed woman (Buckley) who is on a road-trip to meet her newish boyfriend’s parents. Plemons is the boyfriend; David Thewlis and Toni Collette are the folks. That’s basically it as far as plot goes, there’s a long opening section in the car on the way there, a nightmarish dinner with the in-laws, and then a long drive back. The whole affair seems simple relative to the rest of Kaufman’s dense and expansive work, but anyone who’s familiar with the elements at play here knows t...

  The conceit of a bunch of kids in control of institutions designed for adults is a universally fascinating one. It made the novel ‘Lord of the Flies’ into a household name and has inspired the creation of student political groups, model UN’s for example, in schools around the world. Of course to find the idea stretched to its absurd and terrifyingly compelling extreme you must look to America, where every year, in every state, an organisation called The American League runs Boy’s State, a week long camp were about a thousand sixteen and seventeen-year-olds get together to form to faux political parties and hold elections for various offices, culminating in state governor. The idea of hundreds of teenage boys playing mock politics sounds about a appealing as one of the circles of hell, but that’s the pit we’re taken into in the new documentary from Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, which takes its title from the event, Boys State . Specifically, the film focuses in on a handful of ...

With most of the world still doggedly riding the wave of retro nostalgia, an interesting question to ask is how much you can strip away from the generic Stranger Things- esque formula while still making something interesting. What are the minimum requirements for an 80s/50s/whatever mood-piece where a bunch of tech nerd kids discover a world beyond their small piece of Americana? First time director Andrew Patterson reckons you can lose quite a lot, and his impressive debut, The Vast of Night , proves him pretty much right.     The story centres on Fay and Everett (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz) a pair of geeky teenagers beginning to feel like fleeing their 1950s rural south-Texas town. They’re both into science, communications and new technology; Fay works on the town’s switchboard while Everett is a local radio jockey. One fateful night, while the rest of the town is watching a local high school basketball game, they hear something over the airwaves that…well, its ali...

One of the very few criticisms made of Tom Hanks, whose reputation at this point is almost too good to be true, is that his projects are sometimes overly sentimental. Filmmakers can struggle to reign in his overwhelming natural goodness, or else find suitable narratives to surround it, to the point where last year he had to play Fred freakin’ Rogers in order to earn any critical attention.   It’s a little surprising then that Greyhound , the latest Hanks led film for which he also penned the screenplay, is almost totally devoid of anything saccharine or sweet; in fact it’s about as efficient and business like as anything he’s done in years. Adapted from a C S Forester novel, Greyhound focuses on an American supply convoy during world war two as it fends off a series of German U-boat attacks. Hanks plays commander Ernest Krause, who is privately very religious, has a lady waiting back home, and that’s about it. The vast majority of the exceedingly brisk runtime (80 minutes sans...

Back in the halcyon days of 2014 Charlize Theron had the world at her feet. Oscar success was already in the bag and she had proven capable of leading comedies, blockbusters, indie dramas and everything in-between. What would she choose to do given that she had the power to choose nearly anything? Well…become the world’s leading action star of course; hands up who saw that coming?     Between Mad Max: Fury Road, Atomic Blonde and The Fate of the Furious Theron is now the most convincing onscreen western ass kicker this side of Keanu Reeves, and she’s back again this week with the Netflix produced The Old Guard , directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood of Love and Basketball fame.           She plays Andy, the leader of a group of mercenaries who are all basically Wolverine without the claws, meaning they’re indestructible killing machines who sometimes get a bit mopey because they’ve been around so long, the blessing of immortality also being a curse ...

Movies are in crisis, and in the last couple of months Christopher Nolan’s TENET has come into focus as the clear bellwether for an industry that has, understandably, lost any idea of what it’s doing. It makes a lot of sense, especially in the absence of a big Disney release, to use a Nolan film as a kind of grand opening event, given his almost unique positioning as a truly auteur filmmaker who balances explosive populist entertainment with high minded, ideas driven story-telling better than anybody currently working.     The man has become a brand unto himself, with a rabid online legion of film-bro fans (and critics) and an immediately identifiable set of aesthetic and narrative signifiers that have earned him a blank check from Warner Bros for over a decade now. And while many would point to his second Batman film, The Dark Knight , as his major breakout, I think it was his follow-up that truly solidified him as the kind of filmmaker who can dictate the trends of a whole...