Film Shapes

Here's an enjoyable, tense genre pic that doesn't pretend to be anything more than you'd expect. Beast stars Idris Elba as a doctor trying to reconnect with his daughters on a trip to the African savannah. Potted backstory: he had split with his wife, then she got ill and died, now the kids carry some animosity towards Big Dris. The ever-so-subtle tagline, 'Fight For Family', makes it plain where we're headed. Sure, his kids are ratty with him but a LION WANTS TO KILL THEM ALL. The titular animal is rendered fairly realistically, in fact it's sometimes more believable than the humans. Here is the main issue with the film, but to be fair, it's not a huge problem. I understand we are asked, as an audience, to suspend disbelief in many films, and I'm generally in accord. Occasionally though, the decisions made by characters make an eyebrow raise, even a snort escape, and this happened a few times in Beast . It was just enough to take me out of the film...

Jordan Peele really doesn't flinch from a stoush. His first film, Get Out , took an excoriating swipe at racism and white privilege in the US. His second film, Us , delved into class divides and human rights. His latest film, Nope , takes aim at man's subjugation of nature, primarily for profit. The marketing of this film suggests a creepy, sci-fi alien invasion film, and while this is all accurate, there's more going on here too. Daniel Kaluuya, returning for a second Peele film (after Get Out ), plays OJ Haywood, a trainer of horses that appear in films or TV. His father, Otis senior (Keith David), is killed early doors in a freak accident....or is it? Well, no obviously, it isn't, but life moves on for 6 months before more manure flies. OJ is joined by his sister, Emerald (Keke Palmer), as the Haywood Hollywood Horses business, bereft of the old man's guidance and experience perhaps, begins to flounder. OJ has been selling some of the horses to Steven Yuen's ...

I think this may be a first - here are some words about a 30 minute, made for TV documentary, which I was lucky enough to see (pre-broadcast) at The Backlot cinema. It's called Walking Man and and it's a film about the eponymous bloke who used to walk along Stirling Highway here in Perth for years. I think I'd seen him in the past, definitely many people I knew had, and if you're of a certain vintage, and from Perth, you'd know about him. He was quite the urban (living) legend. But I had no idea that he was actually a bloody good artist and he spent much of his life making art. The film is seen through the lens of the Walking Man, Ross Seaton's relationship with professor Ted Snell, who chanced upon him working one day and asked if he'd be keen on an exhibition. Ultimately agreeing but, sadly, passing away before things could be sorted, the film continues as a sort of jigsaw puzzle, with pieces provided by relatives and members of the public alike. Seaton...

Another rainy day, we're trapped inside with a train set, so a family outing to the cinema was suggested. The film? Lightyear , a spin-off from the Toy Story Pixar franchise, and in my unpopular opinion, it's the best of the lot. I wasn't expecting too much as I'm not a fan of the series and I kept waiting for it to go full cheese or drip feed schmaltz all over the place but this was a fun treat. According to the briefly titled backstory, this is a film that the kid who owns the toys in Toy Story watched, which then presumably drove him to buy the toy Buzz. An that's all there is to link the films. Great. The plot proper begins with a space ship piloted by Buzz deviating to a planet, getting stuck there, and henceforth attempting to get home. In fact, the film powers through a few distinct events that almost fill the three act structure - getting stranded, attempting to crack the hyperspace crystal dilemma, dealing with a robot alien threat - all of which don'...

This fourth Thor film suffers from the old cake adage - yep, too many cakes spoil the broth. While Ragnarok rode its zaniness to the limit, it pretty much relied on that alone to get it over the line. And all the better for it. Love and Thunder attempts to lob a few more tones into the arrangement and it all gets a tad discordant. The loopy stuff is still there but Taika Waititi has added a despair and grief strand of cancer, some loneliness, a splash of familial love, and rinsed it all with existential journeys (both hero and villain). It doesn't mix all that well, very much like my metaphors. Christian Bale, as the villain of the piece, unpacks his Sunday best and gives it full welly, and the litany of Marvel villains that engender sympathy (I'm thinking Killmonger and, of course, Thanos) is burnished here with his Gorr the God Butcher. Once again though, and understandably I guess, they have him vanquished. At least the choice given to him - revenge or love - was better th...