Film Shapes

It's been a while since I've had a stab at gathering some films together based on nation of origin. This time, it's Japan. Enjoy (if you like anime and samurai). 10. Unagi [The Eel] (Shohei Imamura - 1997) One of the first non-Kurosawa, Japanese films I'd seen, this perturbed me a bit but gave me a real insight into films from outside the English zone or Europe. Kouji Yakusho in the lead is a top craftsman too. 9. Zatoichi (Takeshi Kitano - 2003) A first look at Takeshi Kitano, a stalwart of the industry in Japan. He plays the blind swordsman with understated relish and this would have been higher in the list were it not for a Bollywood-style dance number at the end. What the... 8. Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa - 1950) Ah, Kurosawa-san, so glad you could make it. This is my third favourite of his but is still a stone-cold classic, with dozens of imitators and respect-payers since its release. Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura are mint as the ba...

I'll admit to a sense of trepidation going into Bohemian Rhapsody . Queen have been my favourite band since the mid-80s, I guess, and I really didn't want the film makers to fuck this up. So, after a couple of hours of spine shivers and leg jiggles, I can confirm that any impending fuck-up was averted. Much of the thanks for this has to go to the casting director, Susie Figgis. The actors playing the four band members were as close to the actual lads as no mind (Freddie was a tad taller than Rami Malek but that's a small quibble). I actually forgot I wasn't watching Mercury, May, Taylor and Deacon, especially in the concert scenes. Special mention must go to Joseph Mazzello for getting John Deacon's unfussy feet movement down pat. The voice amalgamation was a nice trick too - Malek has said in interviews that it's probably about 90% Freddie that we hear on screen. There's a messy history to Bohemian Rhapsody . It's been knocking around for a decade...

Back to the Windsor Cinema in Nedlands and not much has changed since catching  The King's Speech  in 2010 or 2011. I reckon Merv and I were among the youngest punters there, and we're not exactly gambolling lambs anymore. But this demographic was pretty apt for  King of Thieves , the latest film to explore old spivs getting older and trying to stay relevant. This iteration is based on the true story of the Hatton Garden safe deposit robbery in London in 2015. It stars Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse ('I was very, very drunk') as the geriatric villains who come together at Caine's wife's funeral. A positively pubescent Charlie Cox instigates the gig.  The heist premise of  King of Thieves  has been done before, even factoring in the 'grey pound' aspect. It's not the most original film but it's worth the ticket price just to hear Caine and gang effing and jeffing all over the place. It's...

After initially being a bit ambivalent about seeing  First Man , I decided to give it a chance, mainly due to the goodwill held over from Damien Chazelle's first directorial effort, the excellent  Whiplash . Apparently, Chazelle had been sitting on this Neil Armstrong story since before La La Land and got started after Josh Singer ( Spotlight ) handed over a script. And a pretty prosaic script it is. Thankfully avoiding the trap that many other biopics have fallen into, this shies away from the cradle to grave narrative and focuses on about 8 years of Armstrong's life, from 1961 to 1969. Trim the fat, this is the meat. The main theme of First Man is obsessive drive and this is a watering hole Chazelle likes to return to, as there are obvious similarities to his previous two films. Armstrong's determination to get to the moon is, to an extent, explained by a tragedy that I won't go into here. Accurate or not, it adds a filmic poignancy that works depending on y...

So this whole business started with one of Roly's friends saying he thought You Were Never Really Here was the worst film he'd ever seen. I was baffled. The WORST?? It got me thinking - what do people rate as the worst film they've ever seen? I conducted a short, mostly net-based, survey and the results were intriguing. Putting aside the person who went for a TV show and the one who chose The 1989 Melbourne Cup, they broadly fell into two categories - actually terrible films (i.e. low tech, shit writing & acting, etc) OR average to good films that people had a personal aversion to. Some I'd never heard of - I've only seen 15 from a total of 40, though I may have blanked on one or two due to the abysmal nature of them. There were some odd choices for me -  The Wrestler and  Rain Man are not bad and Fight Club is great but, again, it's all subjective. If I had to watch one of these films that I hadn't yet seen, I'd probably go for The Dungeonma...

I went to the Paradiso in Northbridge with Merv to see  La Ragazza nella Nebbia  (or  The Girl in the Fog) , which is part of the  Italian Film Festival . This was the first time I'd been to the Paradiso in about 12 years and I reckon it's still the best looking cinema in Perth. It appears to have been taken over by the Palace Cinema chain (as opposed to its old umbrella, Luna Palace cinemas) and joins the new Raine Square complex as the two Perth branches. One possibly ominous note - lots of wine glasses, not so many choc bombs. Mmmm, I'll have a glass of gentrification, thanks. Anyway, the film. This is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by Donato Carrisi. This geezer also went and wrote the screenplay AND directed the film. While this might work on the odd occasion - e.g. Tom Stoppard adapting and directing  Rosencrantz and Guildenstren are Dead  - it's usually a sleeveless errand. Carrisi may be a good thriller author but he ...

Saw this as a birthday treat at the Luna (free double pass with the Privilege Card) followed by a sub-par ramen. That's if you're in the camp that thinks 'sub-par' is a bad thing. To be fair, it may be only golfers that see 'sub-par' as a positive. But I digress. You Were Never Really Here (no shit, I just mis-typed Gere as the last word in the title and there's a whole new film!). More digression. I'll count to 39 or something. So, Lynne Ramsey's fourth film after Ratcatcher , Morven Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin certainly continues the trend of gritty realism but with a neat dichotomy. See, I reckon Joaquin Phoenix's character, Joe, would fit uncomfortably into a Marvel or DC film. He's a kind of chav Avenger, with none of the grandeur or witticisms but all of the emotion. Hawkeye with a hammer instead of a bow. And the film rides on Phoenix's bulky, bruised back. He's outstanding in this. The scene of him cracking...

After a few blockbusters and the like, I decided it was time to go off-road a bit so Roly and I hit a cheap Wednesday showing of The Insult at the Luna Leederville. This is only the fourth film to be directed by Ziad Doueiri (he also co-wrote) but he cut his teeth working as a camo with Tarantino. The film takes place in Beirut. It starts with a molehill and ends with mountain. Local Christian mechanic, Tony Hanna, played by Adel Karam, is miffed when a Palestinian Muslim construction foreman, Yasser Salameh, played by Kamel El Basha, fixes his outdoor water pipe without his permission. Tony breaks it, Yasser calls him a "fucking prick" and thus commences an escalating shitestorm of stubborn men, weary women, exploitative lawyers and opportunistic politicians, all waiting for the scab of religion and geopolitics to be ripped off. The story is ostensibly played out as a courtroom drama but there are lots of other things going on here, including misplaced revenge, tired...

This is the sixth Mission: Impossible film with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and only the second to have a previous director at the helm in Chris McQuarrie (the others, in order, being Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird). I enjoyed Fallout , and that's pretty much the same sentiment for all the films in this series. Each one has something better and worse than the others, whether that's an actor, an action set-piece or a shot. My point is that they tend to blend into one another, not necessarily in a bad way. Admittedly, the bonkers-ness of the practical (as opposed to CGI) stunts has seemed to grow exponentially. But that Cruise bastard appears to have aged about 6 years in 22. Plot-wise, it's fairly convoluted. According to McQuarrie, lots of the film was made on the fly. "I'm working on it" (or words to that effect) are uttered throughout the film, reflecting the actual goings-on behind the cameras. Presumably not unusual in films of thi...

It's been nearly two weeks since I've seen this film and I'm as ambivalent towards it as I was right after seeing it. It's not terrible, just mostly inconsequential. I say mostly because there's an angle that slots into the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe that'll become integral to the resolution of the whole Thanos business. No more to be said on that. Anyway, Ant-Man and the Wasp brings Paul Rudd's ant back to the margins of the MCU. This time he's joined by Evangeline Lilly's wasp in a story that focuses on personal themes of closure and never losing hope (or Janet, in this case). The 'ant'agonist (eh, eh?) is a multi-phasic herring really, probably one of the most innocuous baddies in these films. Ghost, played by Hanna John-Kamen, is basically just an obstacle to the mission of retrieiving Michelle Pfieffer's (original) Wasp, Janet van Dyne, from the quantum realm. Well, it all sounds like a lot of old rope, doesn't it? ...

A little trepidation escorted us into screen 6 at Morley's Event cinemas for a morning showing of Solo: A Star Wars Story . This was mainly down to the grizzles I'd been hearing about on-set troubles and mis-casting and stuff like that. Also Ron Howard had been hired to 'fire-fight' the film into shape and finish on time. Safe pair of hands is old Ronnie but not the edgiest. To possibly perpetuate a rumour, it appears the previous directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller (of Lego Movie and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs fame), couldn't quite handle such a behemoth as Solo . No matter, as this turned out to be perhaps my third favourite Ron Howard film (not counting the ones he's acted in, like The Music Man ), after Frost/Nixon and Willow . A specific concern of the grizzlers seemed to be the casting of Alden Ehrenreich as the young Han Solo, first seen getting in and out of trouble on the industrial planet of Corellia. Rest easy, he's fine in this. O...

After Deadpool  had raked in just under $800 million worldwide two years ago, it made perfect sense to have a crack at a sequel. And I think Deadpool 2 is slightly better than the original. Maybe this is because there's less of the TJ Miller riffing, which was intermittently solid but overcooked. In this one, they dialled it back quite a bit, as they did the old blind lady and the taxi driver. All fine characters, and this time, used sparingly. Another reason is the identity of the antagonist. At first, it seems to be Josh Brolin's Cable but then, for story reasons, it kind of morphs into circumstance, I guess. There are several moments when our potty-mouthed hero struggles to keep all the pieces together (metaphorically and literally). In fact, Pool begins to fight more against himself and his 'unkillability', which prevents him from [SPOILER - REDACTED], so you might say Ryan Reynolds' Wade Wilson is the pro/an-tagonist. The direction also seems more assure...

So this, the penultimate episode of the Marvel Avengers series (the third phase at least), is pretty ballsy work. Discretion precludes me from spewing forth on all the stuff that goes on here, but if you don't mind the cat escaping the bag, the podcast below is full of spoilers. I reckon it's safe to say that the ballsiness of the story may well be softened by the end of the 4th film (whatever that may be called). But here, at the midpoint of the two films, misery and desolation rule the roost. Enough said for now. Onto the star of the film - Thanos. This is the guy that has been hanging around in the background for most of the previous MCU films, at least while the Infinity Stones have been in play. He's been referred to, glimpsed, even had a line or two in post-credit stings. But in  Infinity War  he really gets his supernatural funky out down there (apologies to Cinema Prague). Thanos as a universal Malthusian Check is one of the neater conceits in the MCU. In fa...

Monday morning. Kids at school. $10 tickets at the Galleria. All looking good. And then.... Ready Player Wonka. This is Steven Spielberg's latest. It's about a boy, Charlie Bucket Wade Watts, played by Tye Sheridan, who lives in an impoverished rural  urban setting and dreams of being elsewhere. Enter a mysterious, man-child savant with poor social skills and a hugely popular business enterprise. Said fella wants to give away 'the keys to the kingdom' for one reason or another. Loads of people scramble to find the golden ticket keys. Shit, there's even a scene of the protagonists floating in a cylindrical chamber that's very reminiscent of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory . Like most Spielberg films, this is put together with the skills of a professional technician who knows what he's doing and can call upon the cream of the industry to help him. He has some pull, this guy. But also like most Spielberg films, it doesn't do anyth...