Film Shapes

After delay upon delay, Christopher Nolan's Tenet opens in Australia this weekend. It starts with a pumping opera siege and clicks along at a fair old pace, trying to get its premise across and mostly succeeding. John David Washington (from BlacKkKlansman and the loins of Denzel) stars with Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh but the story is boss here, and it's familiar ground for Nolan, dealing with the fiddly intricacies of time. In fact, it seems like he has lifted the structure of Memento and plonked it visually on screen, with the actual end of that film manifested as the big, clunky time inversion turntables in Oslo and Russia in this film. Watch Nolan talk through this blackboard sketch of the 'timeline' of Memento for more explanation. The gimmick of time inversion - backwards walking and driving, bullets flying out of walls into guns, buildings 'unexploding' - is actually quite fun and not too overdone. The combination of for...

For the benefits of brevity, I've consolidated these two Alien films into one block, as I saw both of them back to back at the Luna Monday Double screening recently. I remember Alien more clearly, probably because I've seen it more often and more recently than its sequel. In fact, there were a few scenes in Aliens that I'm pretty sure I'd never seen before, this screening being the Director's Cut version. So, if I'm comparing these two iconic films, I'm still of a mind to say that I much prefer the first one. It's a compact, grungy, flipping scary horror film. Some scenes - the creature stuff, in the main - don't really hold up to today's modern gaze, but back in 1979, I imagine folks were gobsmacked. The famous John Hurt scene is still shocking and the alien's life cycle was a cracking idea for some fun with the visuals, mostly due to H.R. Giger's design work. Sigourney Weaver, as Ripley, holds the whole contraption toget...

Here's a nice little oddity. The fella behind Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat from 1999 has turned out a wacky, violent, comic farce, starring the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin and the excellent Adele Haenel (from Portrait of a Lady on Fire ). Mr. Oizo (or Quentin Dupieux, if you prefer) isn't new to the caper, with a few feature credits to his name, but I wonder if making Dujardin's Georges a novice filmmaker wasn't a bit of a slyly autobiographical flourish. Deerskin is a warped tale of the very male rejection coping mechanisms of exceptionalism and brutality. Dujardin plays Georges as a post-football Eric Cantona physically, and the 'kung-fu', 'seagulls after the trawler' Cantona emotionally. Put simply, he's beardy, violent and prone to philosophical bullshitting. He stays on in a small Alpine town after buying an expensive deerskin jacket, which becomes the third lead of the film. I admit to knowing sod all about fashion, but this jacket he adores...