"Flow" - Review

A cat finds the water levels rising, and attempts to escape from it. Along the way he meets various animals.

A spellbinding, gorgeous effort, and a more than worthy winner of the Oscar. Had anything happened to that cat, or that Capybara for that matter, I would have hunted down the Latvian government for sport. A beguiling and heartfelt, lovely little film about kindness and friendship

"Marching Powder" - Review

Jack (Danny Dyer) was once a likely lad, a cocky young hooligan big shot with few ambitions beyond getting annihilated off of cocaine and alcohol with his mates, getting into fights, and being a general menace. But now 45, fatter, balder and irrelevant, that may be coming to an end: arrested for a weekend brawl, Jack is given 6 weeks to turn his life around, win back the love of his wife Dani (Stephanie Leonidas) and figure out where he goes from here. Complicating matters are a crippling cocaine habit, toxic loser mates, an even worse father in law, a brother in law fresh from a mental health facility he has to look after, and the possilbe realisation that maybe he just fucking sucks.

It's going to be Marmite: it's a Danny Dyer film directed by Nick Love. Every second word is a profanity, its humour juvenile, crass and vulgar, and it focuses on lads doing lad things. It's not normally my sort of thing: most of Nick Love's work has done well to remain firmly in the 2000s (except that clip of him and Dyer promoting "Outlaw", that's timeless peak "Spinal Tap"), and going back to it is the weirdest British time capsule, even if there's stuff to love and respect about them (except "Outlaw", that is still the bad kind of throwback). Having the film be an older Danny Dyer and Nick Love in a throwback, in this day and age, is actually kind of inspired, and I appreciated that angle of it. I'm inclined to say that I enjoy this, erring on the side of respecting it. For all its faults (it still has that juvenile "lads" sense of humour, and very much wants to have its cake and eat it regard to the "coolness" of drugs and alcohol and the football hooliganism) it manages to have just enough self awareness to work. Jack understands that he is too old for this and is out of touch, and the film keeps reminding us that his "wacky" supporting mates are vile, festering dead ends and toxic rejects from society; and then it will also have few sharper things to say about how the sneering classism and unpleasantness has merely warped and twisted itself into new shells and forms (there's also a great racism joke at an art painting class, deftly showing the "middle class, progressive" racism angle). The sub plot of the "mental" brother in law feels like an afterthought, thought it has a sweet little payoff halfway through (though does keep going after that...), and the hooliganism plotline is a B-plot shadow of previous better versions of it like "Green Street", "The Firm", "The Football Factory" and even a bit of "I.D"; it's almost perfunctory in that regard and honestly could maybe have been cut (though there's a good scene in a pub when a rival comes in looking for confrontation and Jack has to bluff with his barman). I do appreciate that Dani wasn't a mere plot point or hollow empty facsimile of a character, and had actual dreams, ideas and an arc and personality. It's a low bar, true, but still a sign that people have learned that maybe women are people too, and Stephanie Leonidas is great in this. Dyer's excellent too, I've always liked Danny Dyer, here he goes a bit "Filth" and "Trainspotting", with some truly vulgar and funny lines and moments, in between darker asides to the camera and little sprinklings of societal commentary. It's not as dark as something like "Filth" (watch "Filth"), but it doesn't truly need to be: it's trying to be a movie for the lads lads lads football crowd who grew up with Nick Love's stuff. It earns its happy ending in between its swipes and jabs, though the aforementioned vulgar humour and crude mayhem is pure Marmite. It is happy wallowing in and celebrating its protagonist with some honestly good encapsulation of working class nihilism and self destruction.

"In the Lost Lands" - Review

In the distant post apocalyptic future, a witch (Milla JovoWITCH. Eyyyy!) makes her living granting wishes to others. To accomplish one such wish: she ventures forth into the lost lands of yore, accompanied by a mysterious snake-slinging stranger (Dave Bautista) to hunt a shapeshifter.

More hot trash from Paul W S Anderson!
The movie is exactly what you expect from him: a soupy CGI pile of nonsense and madness (Milla Jovovich outruns a Crusader train and kick flips a man in a bus, before using fire to fend off tree-monster people in a power plant) aimed squarely at 13 year old kids with its mish mash of Goth and religious imagery (Jovovich fights with retractable druid scythes, which is cool, and the main villains are a post apocalyptic oppressive church who dress like crusaders of old), and a simple enough story about buddy cops in the wastes leading into an anti-establishment revolutionary tale. It's absolute nonsense, all green screen and cliches, with rather broad performances across the board. And you know what? I'm okay with it. This kind of thing is absolutely harmless, and par for the course with Jovovich and Anderson, an extended form of foreplay where the latter shows off his hot wife (here covered in tattoos and spin kicking people) and the former gets to do what almost no woman over 40 is otherwise allowed to do in Hollywood: be an action movie heroine. It's actually kind of refreshing and good for the eco-system of films in many regards: pure pulpy fun, and Bautista (in between diversifying his portfolio of performances and proving himself to be an excellent actor) gets to play a gunslinging badass for a few weekends. I don't mind it at all. Meet it on its own low brow, pulpy nonsense terms and as one of the works of Paul W S Anderson, and stick around to hear Bautista yell "Bitch killed my snake!".

"Mickey 17" - Review

In the not too distant future, a down on his luck schmuck named Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) is in deep debt to the ultimate loan shark. Alongside his only friend and skeezy business partner Timo (Steven Yeun), he signs up to a colony ship to escape from Earth. But whilst Timo gets recruited to be a pilot, Mickey finds himself enlisted as an "expendable" - somebody whose job is to be cloned and killed again and again to do the dangerous jobs "worthwhile" people cannot be risked on. His adventures in space bring him into orbit with the incompetent science team, the ship's manaical failure of a tyrant Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), his gourmand wife Ylfa (Toni Collette), kind hearted security officer Nasha (Naomi Ackie) and, most troubling, himself (Robert Pattinson), in this satirical tale of class, fascism, capitalism and dehumanising effects of the three.

The follow up to "Parasite" shares more in common with my favourite of Bong Joon-Ho's works: "Snowpiercer" and "The Host" (watch that if you haven't had a chance to already: a fun and different take on the monster movie), in that it leans into science fiction and cute critters, whilst family drama goes onto the backburner it is and military/governmental incompetence at the forefront this time around. It weaves and bobs and dips and dives through various events and genres pretty fluidly, I was never bored: one moment we're having Mickey attempting to survive an ice planet, then it's his previous forms and how he got here, then a relatively sweet relationship with Nasha and the way things work on the ship (hint: they don't. Capitalism doesn't work), before it kicks into high gear and its final act becomes colonialism (summed up with in a literal speech given by Ackie, who's excellent in this) and why it's bad. Its themes are not merely set dressing, they tie into the plot and humour as well: from the shitty printer of Mickey and his constant deaths with no regard for his humanity (he's injected with viruses to create vaccines, and people realise it's cheaper to just kill him and toss him away than bring him back safely in one piece) to the constricting confines of the ship and its cold, mechanical machine invoking "Snowpiercer" and abbattoirs in general. The food and slaughter imagery are good standbys actually, I like them a lot (particularly when Toni Collette comes into it all at the end with her need for "fancy sauces" and seeing sentient beings merely as exotic delicacies, much like how she views people) and the film's performers are also strong to boot. Pattinson is joining the ranks of our Goblin Boys (for reference: Nicholas Hoult, Skyler Gisondo, Billiam Skarsgaard, Johnny Knoxville and Sabrina Carpenter) officially after this excellent turn as the titular Mickey: he differentiates between the two with simple body language and looks, and also brings what can only be described as "Johnny Knoxville energy" to the part, it's most entertaining; Ackie is on a tear between this and "Blink Twice"; Ruffalo plays a delightful send up of grotesquerie and fascists, and the supporting parts are lovely too (Tim Key and Thomas Turgoose are in this!), they all have a lovely moment or too. It's less confined and not as tight as "Parasite", "Snowpiercer" or even "The Host", but its ambition works in its favour and I recommend the movie.
Also it has the funniest dinner party sequence in years.

"Opus" - Review

There is an enigma in the pop world, a celebrated genius who defined the decades, and his name is Moretti. He does neither interviews nor press releases, instead announcing his albums through a VHS release from his agent (Tony Hale) and letting the work speak for itself. This time, Moretti (John Malkovich) is inviting a select group of journalists to experience the album and Moretti. Overlooked aspiring writer Ariel (Ayo Edibiri) doesn't believe the hype, and is along for the ride in this odd commune Moretti has concocted, attempting to figure out when it goes beyond art and becomes dark...

The movie's soundtrack is done by Nile Rodgers: that fact alone absolutely rules. It sounds like something you would believe is the "genre defining" sound of an era, and I would happily listen to this funky stuff for hours on end. The casting of Malkovich is also pitch perfect: he's an actor weird and unusual enough that we believe him as this oddly compelling cult musician but also enigmatic enough to be a compelling mystery in his own right - we don't quite know where he's going and which side of the fence he's on. He really works, especially when performing the bizarre funky music and sexual dances for it. These are bangers.
And Ayo Edibiri is a wonderful straight woman to proceedings: she is drawn into this culty world of celebrity and worship of the "auteur", and is the only one to have read the press releases, the only one to question them whilst her colleagues uncritically absorb it all and relish the celebrity musician's time and efforts: a cute and notable little detail is her mirroring her overbearing boss Stan's (Murray Bartlett) dress sense and being relegated to note taking, whilst also being the only one to actually talk to the people present.
The movie, however, spends too much time stradling twin lanes without committing to one, until it's too late and it falters. We know it's going for a culty atmosphere and there's some excellent horror (a puppet show about Billie Halliday is a personal highlight) including a pretty creative shot of a fight scene with a door, letting the imagination and tension build there; whilst Amber Midthunder (on something of a tear as of late, and I'm excited for "Novocaine") has a fun turn as one of the more intense members of the commune. The fact that Moretti is an eccentric celebrity and recluse makes the reason these star-fucker journalists are staying make sense, and Malkovich is a compelling performer; plus I enjoy the use of the CCTV shots, there's a few spooky parts there. But when it finally chooses to be about the horror and dread angle as everything goes wrong: we've not had a chance to get to know the other journalists. I swear, despite the excellent Juliette Lewis being one of them, I didn't know their names, and they had each had maybe 4 lines iat most? They did their best with the material, but the focus seemed lacking.
But I still err on the side of recommending it, as I rather enjoyed the ending and the ambition.
It ends on a somewhat sinister note about celebrity worship and evolution, and honestly a nice parallel to "Vengeance" and that movie's commentary on society adoring and forgiving criminals and famous people (particularly in today's... climate). Its ambition and reach exceed its grasp for a debut film, but that's refreshing with so many churned out slices of "content" and "product" from studios, and it doesn't always work, but it's a respectable debut from Mark Anthony Green.