Sunday 24 January 2021
Best Films of 2011 to 2020 - End of Decade Report
Friday 22 January 2021
The Mole Agent
The Perth Festival is showing a bunch of interesting looking films at the Somerville Auditorium on the grounds of UWA. This one, The Mole Agent, runs Feb 1st to 7th. It's well worth a look.
Documentary
makers, like all film makers, are constantly on the lookout for ways to present
their message. The styles available to documentary as a genre are seemingly
limited, which is why Maite Alberdi’s The
Mole Agent seems so fresh. She has chosen to couch her story in the figure
of a genuinely sweet old widower named Sergio. His task is to go undercover in
a nursing home in Chile and report back to a private detective regarding a
client’s mother. And there is the simple genius in the telling of the story.
Rather than staging this as a newsy expose, with lurid details and sensational
confrontations, Sergio acts as a conduit for the very real, very lonely
situations of the residents of the home. His conversations with them are
basically interviews but these are portrayed with the empathy and emotion that
come with sharing a generation.
The film begins with a group of elderly men applying for the job of ‘mole’ and its whimsical nature is immediately clear. These disarming old guys are keen until family responsibilities and a mystification about technology whittle the field down to one – Sergio. There’s an interesting discussion between Romulo the detective, Sergio and Sergio’s daughter, Dalal about duty of care and the legal ramifications of secretly filming in the home. This felt like a peek behind the curtains to the actual making of the documentary and the conclusion of this chat was one of the most touching moments in a film littered with them.
The home,
as depicted here, is dominated by women, many of whom take a shine to the
urbane Sergio. There are some real heart-wrenching scenes – Berta decides to declare
her love for Sergio and is stoic when she is rebuffed. Rubira can’t remember if
her family have visited her or not. Marta has a habit of stealing and wonders
why her mother hasn’t picked her up yet. All of them are suffering in one way
or another.
There are
also moments of warmth, mainly due to Sergio’s affecting ineptitude. He must be
the worst spy in South America, much to the frustration of Romulo. But with his new friends, he’s supremely popular. At one point he’s crowned king of the home, later he’s serenaded at
his 84th birthday party.
It’s fair
to ask how much of the film was genuine and how much was staged but at the same
time this is almost irrelevant as the film succeeds in revealing the lives and
troubles of people in aged care. The resolution of whether the San Francisco
Care Home was guilty of anything pales beside the more pertinent issue of
industrial scale abandonment of the elderly. As Alberdi says, “I would
like people who watch this movie to leave the movie theatre wanting to call
their parents or grandparents. It is an invitation to look within yourself and
ask what you can do better”.
This is a tough one. I can really only come up with Ricky Gervais' TV show Derek (2012-2014), which is set in a nursing home. It's not his best work but it has some nice moments (and some disgusting ones, too).
[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-mole-agent/]
Thursday 14 January 2021
Worst of 2020 - End of Year Report
So for all the shite that occurred in 2020, the films I saw weren't all that bad, just very bland or disappointing. The good certainly outweighed the bad. But here are the 10 worst films I had the displeasure of seeing last year. Don't be afraid but please do avoid.
10. The Gentlemen (2019)Guy Ritchie's body of work has really declined since, well, since the beginning. This is a pale echo of his best days, when geezerism was at its most endearing (if you swing that way). I have a kind of sad feeling that Ritchie's legs have gone, that the best days are well behind him. Even Hugh Grant playing nicely against type and Colin Farrell, hamming up the Oirish, can't salvage this.
9. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)So it seems Bowie was human after all; fallible, imperfect. This film was a real disappointment, hovering around my radar for many years, I finally saw it last year and well, ponderous and dull probably sum it up for me. Let's call it a minor glitch in the Bowie Matrix.
8. Mary Poppins Returns (2018)The first on the list that I can blame on the kids. Emily Blunt toils heroically with the simpering material but can't lift the twee mess from anything other than failed, post-Disney vacuity.
7. Digby: The Biggest Dog in the World (1973)Another attempt to feed the kids some quality entertainment, this sadly didn't pass muster. Building a film around a dog the size of a diplodocus but neglecting any humour, peril or human character development has turned poor old Digby into a damp squib.
6. Men in Black: International (2019)A tired, worn-out franchise, unable to be saved by his-Thorness, Chris Hemsworth, though the cast turn the charm dial up as far as it will go. Same old story, nothing to see here. Move on folks.
5. Hotel Transylvania (2012)Some coked-up movie executive must have green lit this on the premise alone - "Hey dudes, what if the monsters were actually the heroes. Get it? WE'RE the real monsters. It's frickin' awesome, right?" Has the whiff of Sandler about it and the awful musical number at the end just cranked up the vomitometer.
The Rock. Massive animals. Piss-weak gags. Cut and paste storyline. In fact, I've forgotten most of this 'film'. I don't know, maybe that's what the kids want these days. I'll be in my nostalgia vault if anyone needs me.
3. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)
Another Guy Ritchie offering, one which makes number 10 on this list look like Snatch. So very boring, with a wooden lead (Charlie Hunnam) and a handful of better actors wasting their time and ours. Who would have thought that giving old British mythology the Ritchie treatment would have produced such a steaming pile? Every-fucking-body, that's who.
Why? Why was this made? Aside from Liam Neeson, who is still a likeable screen presence (though he seems to be doing everything he can to undermine that), this film is packed with bog-average no-names. And that's not the worst of it. Atomic dullness permeates the screen, 'action' scenes fizzle like wet socks, lines are read like out-takes from some dodgy 80s TV soap. Cripes, it's bloody awful.
1. Shrek 2 (2004)
Ok, I didn't care much for the first Shrek and I only watched this to satisfy the kids (those pesky kids are responsible for FOUR of the films in this list! Won't someone think of the children!?). Shrek 2 is full of post-90s drivel aimed at kids, but through a nudge-nudge, wink-wink prism of borderline smut. Now, I'm not averse to smut, don't get me wrong, but wedged into a PG cartoon? No thanks. The supposed jokes are crap, the voice work is annoying, the animation is headache inducing and the music is wincingly shite, even the Cave and Bowie stuff. It's not often I have to physically massage out a full facial sneer after a film. Fuck off Shrek, you big green twat.
Monday 11 January 2021
Best of 2020 - End of Year Report
Yes, it's been a pretty cruddy year. Many cinemas closed for a bit, and some still are at time of writing. We were luckier here in Perth. There was a gap of around three months between visits to the cinema but I still managed to get to 29 films in the remainder. With streaming sites and more free time than expected, it was possible to see around 140 films in total in 2020. Take out the repeat viewings and there were around 100 films to whittle down to the best 10. So here, in descending order, they are. Fill your sandals, human movie lovers.
10. Archive (2020)One of the films of the Revelation Festival, this is a cracking little futuristic tale of loss and grief in the AI age. First time director Gavin Rothery, working from his own script, serves up a belter.
9. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)And here's another gem from Rev, this a doco on the life of the erstwhile Pogue's frontman. Director Julien Temple must have spent about a year in the edit suite - there's so much going on here. The frenetic pace doesn't allow any time to drift away and the format of 'boozy chats' works especially well with the subject. A craic-er.
8. Dheepan (2015)This film by Jacques Audiard won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and though it's not one of his absolute best, it still manages to say something about the disenfranchised in an entertaining way. It's part social drama, part gang thriller and all class.
7. The Death of Stalin (2017)Weird, very British look at said historical event, this comedy by Partridge alumni, Armando Ianucci keeps an odd grin on the mush for most of the duration. Aside from the murdery bits. Steve Buscemi as Nikita Krushchev? I'll have one of those, thanks.6. Deerskin (2019)
This is one of the films that stayed with me most this year. It is fucking mental. Great turns from Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel, with a jacket as the third protagonist. Bags of fun.5. Collective (2019)
A brilliant documentary from Romania about a nightclub fire and the corruption and misery that follows. Director Alexander Nanau tunes this up like a noir-ish thriller and gives us two heroes to get behind, a journo and a government minister. A fantastic film, a must watch.4. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
I don't usually use the word sumptuous but there it is. This film, directed by Céline Sciamma and starring Noémi Merlant and Adèle Haenel, glides along at its own pace and manages to keep you enthralled as to how things will pan out, all with very little fuss. The two leads are mesmerising and Sciamma shows her sublime talent here.3.Honeyland (2019)A moving, almost hypnotic doco about a wild honey gatherer in North Macedonia. Sounds a bit dull but the 'characters' are intriguing, and tension is built when a wandering family move into her virtually deserted village and eventually try to muscle in on her gig. A quiet masterpiece.
2. Tenet (2020)Christopher Nolan's attempt at saving the cinema industry was all it should have been - big, ballsy, loud and exciting. It was also intricately fiddled, with plot points coming and going and the reverso-confusion stuff almost twisting itself in knots....before it all lands perfectly soundly. The kind of film that leaves you needing a breath AND asking questions.
1. 1917 (2019)I think I knew when I saw this in January that it would take an absolute peach to knock it off top spot. Forget all the talk of the 'one shot' gimmickry, this would stand up as a near-perfect piece of filmmaking, even without Roger Deakins' peerless cinematography. It has one of the best sequences I've seen in films, not just in 2020, but since my birth. Best thing Sam Mendes has done by a long straw.
MANY SPOILERS IN POD!!
Listen to "Best of 2020" on Spreaker.