Film Shapes

The Surfer is an Australian/Irish co-production, filmed in the south of WA. If you can get over the premise that Nicolas Cage was born in Australia and gained an American accent after the age of about 15, then maybe you'll go with this a bit more than I did. Cage stars as the otherwise unnamed Surfer, who returns to Lunar Bay (Yallingup) to buy his old family home that overlooked the beach where he used to surf. Upon arriving with his teenage son, intent on having a surf, he find the beach occupied by a gang called the Bay Boys. He's very quickly told to fuck off and that if you "don't live here, don't surf here." After taking his son home, he returns to the carpark above the beach and here's where events start to go off the rails.  The surfer's board is stolen, then his shoes, his car battery dies, his phone battery too, he trades his sunglasses for a pair of binoculars from an old beach bum with a grievance. This idea of him being unable or unwillin...

Two to One (or Zwei zu Eins ) is a true life heist film that holds up a light to the haphazardness of German reunification but is ultimately about fairness and belonging. In short, the main characters are slowly losing their jobs as East Germany prepares to rejoin the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union and her satellite states. Maren (Sandra Hüller) and Robert (Max Riemelt) are having an unemployment party when an old friend of the couple, Volker (Ronald Zehrfeld) returns from years abroad.  Disenchantment in the neighbourhood drives the trio to investigate the strange movement of army trucks to a local underground facility. A distant relative still works there and so is summarily co-opted to help them gain access to the 'bunker'. There they find bags and bags of disused East German marks, very soon to be out of circulation. Disappointed, they grab a bunch of notes anyway, more as a keepsake than anything else. When a door-to-door salesman offers to take the old curre...

Mickey 17 is Bong Joon Ho's third English language feature and it has similar themes to his others - Snowpiercer and Okja - absurdities galore, odd creatures, and earnest entreaties for a steadier hand, socially and ecologically. In contrast, his Korean films feel a little more hardboiled, not as fantastical.  Robert Pattinson plays the titular Mickey as a creepy but endearing loser. He and his areshole mate, Timo (Steven Yeun) are on the run from a nasty loan shark, so they decide to billet themselves on a space-going vessel. Said ship is heading to the planet Niflheim to colonise and propagate the human species. This endeavour is led by a proper bell-end, failed senator Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo) and his foodie wife Ylfa (Toni Collette). The chicken twistie here is that Mickey accidentally signs up as an 'expendable', meaning his body is reproduced every time he dies, but his memories and personality are retained (mostly) and uploaded into a newly printed Mickey. ...

So I was driving back from down south and we decided to fiddle with the radio. A generic FM station appeared and my Gen X ears knew most of the tracks, some ok, some dire. But the thing that prompted me to start this post was that a couple of the songs were clearly linked to films from the 1980s. I began thinking that, as much as it doesn't really happen now (or even much after the end of that decade, with some notable exceptions), this 'movie/song tie-in' was a huge pop culture phenomenon back then. As a massive time-wasting technique, I decided to do a bit of research and try to find the film and song pairing that was the most popular of the era. Box Office Mojo helped with the film's takings, but how to discern a song's popularity? I've had a look at the US Billboard charts and the UK top 40, so we'll see if this goes some way to covering it.  Ultimately, the song that YOU heard on the radio all the time, or watched on MTV (often with the film's actor...

Elyas Flores is a French army veteran, back from a spell in Afghanistan, which has mentally shafted him (we find out later what exactly happened). He's staying in a kind of monitored apartment block but does a runner when his care worker upbraids him for not taking his medicine. A job offer appears at just the right time.  His north African background is a plus in that he's asked to be a bodyguard for a middle eastern millionaire and his family. It doesn't take long for suspicions to arise, or are these all due to Elyas's paranoia? This is clearly the best section of the film. He sees the other security guys handling earrings that went missing earlier. The young child of the family rides her bike out of the mansion grounds and Elyas spots a pair of wronguns on a motorbike. He watches things on the house monitors that don't look legit to him.  But we're soon doubting the veracity of events, even though we've seen them play out. We've become the 'unrel...

It's an opportune time for this film to land, what with attacks on journalists filling the news cycle in recent days. The correspondent in question is Australian Peter Greste, who was arrested in Cairo at the end of 2013 while working for Al Jazeera. Potted history - the leaders of the military coup that ousted Mohamed Morsi want Al Jazeera brought to heel and so they accuse Greste and his crew of being agents for the Muslim Brotherhood, a party affiliated with Morsi. The story plays out as a dissection of the kangaroo court that tried the three men, while also couching Greste's ordeal as a possible payback for his part in the death of a colleague years before. The film, directed by Kriv Stenders, is based on Greste's book about his arrest and imprisonment, The First Casualty , and there's also a credit for Greste as a story consultant, so I think it's safe to assume everything on screen has had final approval from the man himself. It's all held together admirab...