Film Shapes

Readers be advised this blog entry contains the names of Aboriginal people who have died. This feature documentary from director/journo Allan Clarke aims to bring awareness to the Bowraville murders, still unsolved after 30 years. I have to admit, being a teenager at the time and not living in NSW, I don't remember the case, but the film does a great job of putting you right back there. And it's fucking harrowing. A brief summary - between September 1990 and February 1991 three Aboriginal children, Colleen Walker-Craig, Clinton Speedy-Duroux (both 16) and Evelyn Greenup (4), disappeared from the same street in Bowraville, a small town in northern New South Wales. Not long later, the bodies of Evelyn and Clinton were found in bushland along the same road. Colleen's body has never been recovered.  As the film explains, it was police incompetence, actually racist carelessness, that prevented any thorough investigation, and it wasn't until a high ranking Sydney homicide det...

Reminiscence is a bit of an old wolf in a young sheep's clothing. It tells the story of a hard-bitten, war-ravaged fella called Nick Bannister (Hugh Jackman), who runs a company that extracts memories for people who prefer to live in the past. His partner is Watts (Thandiwe Newton) and they seem to propping each other up, barely avoiding the creditors, until Rebecca Ferguson's Mae walks in, right on closing time, of course. Mae is your typical femme fatale, almost begging for a narration from Frank Drebin - "That delicately beautiful face. And a body that could melt a cheese sandwich from across the room."  Huge Action falls for her obvious intrigues (a little too quickly, but it does tighten the run time) and things are going swimmingly until....she disappears. This is neatly explained by the method Bannister and Watts use to extract memories from their clients, as it cuts from a serenely romantic scene to one of Huge waking up in shock in a water tank, wires and ga...

Well, how to begin? This is a musical drama directed by Leos Carax, starring Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver. It was written by the musicians Ron and Russell Mael, of Sparks fame (?) and.....it's proper hard yakka to watch.  I'll try to open this with the positives. I would watch Marion Cotillard in a remake of the worst film of all time, Grease , so there's a free hit right there. But even she can't save this. Driver is suitably moody and prowly, but he's also fighting a losing battle. Some of the music isn't too bad, coming from the Maels' years of song-writing experience. But again, not quite enough. And a creepy wooden baby? Sure, why not? But....you get the drift. The key problem for me is the medium of the message. Annette has a pretty mundane story, neither here nor there as far as plots go, about a couple who find their careers heading in different directions, leading to emotional misadventure. Hello, A Star is Born , good evening The Artist . In ...

The more time that passes since watching Free Guy , the less inclined I feel to write anything about it. This is a Ryan Reynolds vehicle about the limitless possibilities of an AI character breaking out of a computer game scenario. Or, more accurately, it could have been. Instead, it gives us a very fluffy, fluro-coloured vomit of 'learning', accompanied by some  Deadpool -lite shtick. Come on guys, break out of your rut, don't always be in the background, tell her you love her. Jodie Comer plays Millie, the femme fatale in game and the cheated code writer out of it. Her screen time with Reynolds's Guy is one of the higher points in the film, but her screen time with Joe Keery's Keys is one of the lower points. This may be due to Keery's lack of charisma or perhaps the clearly telegraphed relationship horizon between them, either way, these scenes don't float. Throughout the film I found myself willing it to be more Her , or even Electric Dreams , but gradua...

Who would have thought that just adding the definite article could transform a film from dire to pretty good? That (as well as changing director, script and tone) seemed to be all that was required. James Gunn's The Suicide Squad has rebooted the 2016 (unarticled) version from David Ayers, and the result is the best DC Extended Universe film by a long margin (I'm not including Joker ). Oddly, a few of the actors from the first one return here - Margot Robbie's Harley Quinn, obviously enough; Joel Kinnaman's Rick Flag, less so. Will Smith's Deadshot has been superseded by Idris Elba's Bloodsport, and Elba is fantastic as the jaded, reluctant father figure.  The film seems to start too abruptly, like it's missing an opening reel, until you realise what's going on. The whole introduction sequence is gory, bloody mayhem but the less said about it the better. The nominal plot sees the group quietly invading a South American island nation, in the best histori...