Latest Posts
Friendship’s Death
There’s been a slight revival of interest in Peter Wollen’s Friendship’s Death since the London Film Festival chose it as one of the items they wanted to pluck from obscurity by showcasing it in their 2020 Treasures section, alongside films such as The Cheaters, an Australian silent thriller from 1929, and Chess of the Wind (aka Shatranj-e Baad), a 1976 film shining a light on pre-revolutionary Iran. Beside that lot Friendship’s Death – British, from 1987 and starring quantities Bill Paterson and Tilda Swinton – seems a bit of a damp squib, even if it was one of film theorist Wollen’s few directorial credits. A loose description isn’t likely to cause priapic excitement … Read more
The True Adventures of Wolfboy
The True Adventures of Wolfboy. Sounds like it might be a superhero movie – Wolfboy as a junior Wolverine. Or a supervillain movie – a Mini-Me Werewolf. In fact it’s neither. This is the everyday story of a teenage boy covered in hair, lots of it. And before we go any further, yes, he’s tried depilatory products, but the hair just comes back twice as thick. “I’m normal, I”m a normal kid,” says Paul (Jaeden Martell, who was going by the name Jaeden Lieberher last time I saw him, in 2016’s Midnight Special), a 13-year-old bullied by the horrible other kids, cowed into wearing a balaclava, a freak in his own eyes as much … Read more
Love and Monsters
I’ve sat through more post-apocalyptic teen adventure flicks – Hunger Games, The Giver, three flavours of Divergent, Maze Runner etc – and not really enjoyed any of them. “They’re not for you,” a mate at work once remarked. And as I whinged some more about one or other of them, she nodded pityingly towards my greying hair. They’re not, it’s true, but even so I loved Love and Monsters, a post-apocalyptic teen adventure flick that gets by without any hat tips to Ayn Rand – rugged individual against the overweening state etc etc – and sets out its stall immediately with a voiceover by Joel (Maze Runner star Dylan O’Brien) explaining that the … Read more
Train to Busan 2
Train to Busan 2 goes by a variety of names but the one that works best for me is Train to Busan Presents Peninsula (rather than Train to Busan: Peninsula, or plain old Peninsula), because this best encapsulates what the film is: a film from the Train to Busan people rather than another go around on the zombie killer. The original film, a classic, takes place pretty much in one place, on board a train heading for Busan, onto which a person infected with a zombie virus has climbed. While the virus runs riot through the train, its selfish non-infected passengers learn the value of banding together for safety. Outside the train, as … Read more
Above Suspicion
Above Suspicion is the story of one person – an FBI cop who became a killer when his snitch got too powerful – told as the story of another, the snitch herself. It makes for a messy drama that never quite gets its legs under the table and seems to shortchange everyone involved – the real people whose story this is, the actors playing them, even director Philip Noyce, who, having done thrillers like Patriot Games and The Quiet American, and procedural human dramas like Rabbit-Proof Fence, would, you’d think, breeze through something like this. But he’s hampered by Chris Gerolmo and Joe Sharkey’s screenplay, which itself is hampered, I’m guessing, by a … Read more
On the Rocks
A Sofia Coppola movie with Bill Murray as an agent of misrule? Lost in Translation II is the guiding principle of On the Rocks, though “stars” Rashida Jones and Marlon Wayans might disagree. First up, we’re served Jones and Wayans hot and then cold – an opening scene shows Laura (Jones) and Dean (Wayans) in love and hot for each other sneaking away from their own wedding party to take a swim in the pool in the hotel basement. Cut to some years later and Dean arrives home late from a work thing, kisses Laura sleepily and then reacts with surprise when she says something. Was he expecting someone else? She was in … Read more
Charm City Kings
Charm City Kings begins and ends with real-life footage of young men doing outrageous things on dirt bikes and the like – wheelies down the road, mostly, but wheelies done at such speed and with such a degree of virtuosity that you want to see more. Not unnaturally, that’s what I thought I was getting, a film about guys who do wheelies on bikes. And I still thought I was getting that as I was introduced to Mouse (Jahi Di’Allo Winston), Sweartagawd (Kezii Curtis) and Lamont (Donielle Tremaine Hansley), three 14-year-old from the Baltimore (aka Charm City) hood who want to run – and ride – with the big boys. And I continued … Read more
Nocturne
Nocturne is a story about two sisters. Twins. Both students at an arts academy. Vivian (Madison Iseman) is off to prestigious Juilliard soon; Juliet (Sydney Sweeney) isn’t. Vivian has a hot boyfriend; Juliet doesn’t. Vivian plays tricksy pieces by the likes of Saint Saëns; Juliet sticks with safe dependable Mozart. Vivian is feisty and popular; Juliet is moody and a loner. Both seem reasonably accepting of their lot, until a fellow student commits suicide (we see her leaping from an upper floor in a pre-credits sequence), and Juliet comes into possession of a book once owned by the dead student, a book full of spooky satanic drawings with a medieval flavour. Duh, duh, … Read more
Godard Mon Amour aka Redoubtable
Le Redoutable aka Redoubtable aka Godard Mon Amour is another exercise in period spoofing for Michel Hazanavicius, the French film-maker who made his name with pastiches – notably winning an Oscar for The Artist, the faux silent movie having followed two 007 spoofs, the OSS 117 movies. In all three a fictional character was held up for mild ridicule while Hazanavicius and his team sweated the small stuff, getting thousands of details just so in an attempt to conjure a world back into existence. As with the OSS films the period this time is again the 1960s but this time the central figure isn’t fictional, it’s director Jean-Luc Godard, the hippest man in … Read more
Lost Transmissions
Affable, blokeish, pint-in-a-pub, kickaround-in-the-park Simon Pegg. Even when he was playing Scotty in Star Trek he was still likeable Simon Pegg. From talking to someone who worked with him on one of the “Cornetto Trilogy” (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World’s End), he is actually like that in real life. What you see is what you get – smart, geeky, funny, relatable. It comes as a shock to see him acting. In Lost Transmissions he’s a nervy record producer called Theo, life and soul of the party, a survivor of some 1990s band who now lives with his fellow Brit expats out in LA – they’ve made it. Theo is such … Read more
Black Box
There are exceptions, but it used to be the case that apart from blacksploitation, or movies made by and for specific black audiences, you didn’t used to see an awful lot of people of colour in genre movies – like rom-coms or sci-fi, action or horror – except, perhaps, as the guy who dies first. That has been changing for some time, but Get Out and Hamilton seemed to mark a watershed, the arrival of “post-white America” on screen. A black man isn’t a black man, he’s just a man. Black Box, title be damned, sits comfortably in that niche. A knotty identity thriller starring the subtly persuasive Mamoudou Athie as Nolan, a photographer … Read more
The Wolf of Snow Hollow
Young couple PJ and Brianne check in to a holiday cabin. They’re in love. He’s intending to propose later that evening. But before that, they go out to dinner, PJ gets on the wrong side of some local rednecks and things almost get physical. Back at the cabin, while PJ showers, Brianne is attacked and dismembered by a person or thing unknown. When the cops show up, there are body parts everywhere and Brianne’s vagina is missing. That gruesome detail is emblematic of a film otherwise made strictly to a formula, the twist added by writer/director/star Jim Cummings lifting everything onto another plane. This sort of thing used to happen from time to … Read more
