The Bowraville Murders

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 detective, Gary Jubelin, took the case that a suspect was arrested. And let's be frank here, the fucker is almost certainly guilty. But due to the police neglecting to undertake any sort of forensic evidence gathering, this bloke was acquitted of the crimes. The following years have seen the families of the kids banging their heads against the Australian justice system, with only occasional success. The strength of the film is that it is so current, there's still a lot at stake for these families.

The structure of the film is familiar, with archival footage and slipping chronology graphics, taking us forward here and back there to investigate certain points in the story. A key moment in the retelling was the uncovering of the 'fresh and compelling evidence' from a truckie who encountered an unconscious young man lying in the street, very early in the morning of Clinton's disappearance. I won't elaborate, only to say this was chilling stuff. Where The Bowraville Murders differs from other true crime docos is in the raw emotional scenes, especially of the stoic old dads trying to hold back the tears as they explain events. Aussie fellas don't like to cry but watching a younger guy encouraging one of the fathers to "Keep talking, tell them" was a fair old kick in the windpipe.

At scattered points throughout the film Stan Grant pops in and reiterates Australia's racist past, from colonial days to the very near present. This commentary is cleverly done by having Stan seated in the Bowraville Theatre, where Aboriginal people used to have a separate entrance and seating area. Clarke's film is obviously not a fun watch but it's a pretty bloody important one.

The Bowraville Murders opens at the Luna on Sep 2nd and is also screening on SBS sometime in September.

See (and hear) also:

The procedural aspect (or lack of it) reminded me of season 2 of Mindhunter (2019), created by Joe Penhall and, as this film started life as a podcast, have a listen to S-Town (2017) by Brian Reed of This American Life. 

Reminiscence

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 gadgets scattered around. And here's a good enough spot to highlight the odd dichotomy of this film. The story is as old as the hills but the setting is refreshingly new, indeed futuristic. The world building from writer/director Lisa Joy is excellent, with hints of the film Strange Days and the fine Paolo Bacigalupi novel, The Wind-up Girl. On the flip-side of this are elements of the plot that are lifted directly from Vertigo and Double Indemnity. You can imagine this film in a past life, with Bannister played by Bogie and Mae probably Veronica Lake.

All this might seem a bit muddled but it hangs together well, though it does come across slightly overwrought at times, in keeping with its thematic sources. This is Joy's debut feature and she directs with a confidence that belies her inexperience. Admittedly, she's had as good old grounding, writing on TV shows like Burn Notice and Westworld (which she also co-created with hubby, Jonathan Nolan, brother of Christopher). The cast give it the full welly, Huge and Newton in particular, though Ferguson has her moments to shine as well. Omnipresent Cliff Curtis also has a sizeable role as a bent copper and he shares a tense scene with Huge and a piano (coincidentally, one of his first film roles was in The Piano).

The background of this near-future is impressively painted. Though it's not directly stated, global warming has clearly worsened, drowning many cities and plunging the U.S. - and likely the world - into border wars and a starkly uneven distribution of wealth. Life in Miami has turned nocturnal due to the daytime heat and much of the city is flooded, allowing us to see some fantastically rendered vistas of boats gliding past apartment windows and people walking through streets, ankle-deep in water. This permanence of moisture seeps through the film. Apart from the constant waves breaking against the city walls, water fills the memory tank, scotch is everywhere, an over-flowing glass of water acts as a metaphor for the 'beast with two backs', a train to New Orleans skates across the water (à la Spirited Away), and Huge almost loses his face in a fish tank full of eels. It's a wet film.

Sure, it wears its 1940s film noir influence in full, honking view, especially in some of the dialogue - "Don't say always. Always makes promises it can't keep." or "The past can haunt a man, that's what they say." If you can put up with this iffy homage, you might find a good, old-fashioned yarn splashing around inside.

See also:

There are riffs on the brilliant Chinatown (1974), directed by Roman Polanski, and though Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days (1995) is uneven and tails off at the end, it has some equally great imagery.

Annette

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 'swinging for the fences' (as I think baseball fans might say), attempting a sideways look at the presentation, Ron, Russell and Leos have over-egged the pudding. The pretentiousness seeps out of every pore, as does the boredom, and that's the biggest fault. I can tolerate pretentiousness and wackiness. I can even tolerate boredom. But a marriage of the two? Have away with ye.

Annette opens at the Luna and Palace cinemas on Aug 26th. 

See also (or instead of):

After a great musical? Look no further than Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972) or one of the Astaire/Rogers efforts - Swing Time (1936), directed by George Stevens, might be their best.

SHORT POD BELOW. 

Free Guy

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 gradually had to cop the fact that it was closer to Ready Player One. Imagine my surprise (hello Viz) when I saw that Zak Penn (he of the above Spielberg trash) also co-wrote Free Guy. After minor research it would appear that Penn - and co-writer Matt Lieberman - spend most of their time wallowing in family entertainment guffles like Playing with Fire and Inspector Gadget, so as some funny bugger once said, the plot thins.

The meaty stuff - the NPC (non-player character, look at me, I'm doing some learning) Guy falling for Molotov Girl Millie, even though he's not an actual person, Millie kind of reciprocating, the ethics behind treating the AI with rights and dignity - this is all trampled by the 'feel-good' shit. The Disney swallow of Fox also meant that all Walt's other IPs were fair game for insertion, so we get a bollocks flurry of hat-tips to Marvel, Star Wars and probably other stuff, more alien to me, that I missed. On that note, there were a bunch of irritating game-nerd man-boys behind me in the screening who groaned or giggled when the 'reaction' streamers or vloggers appeared. All way above my head.

A missed opportunity this, but with Penn penning and Shawn Levy directing we probably shouldn't have hoped for too much in the way of clever, witty or original. And they completely wasted their one PG-13 permitted 'fuck'.

See also:

Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is fantastic and the documentary iHuman (2019), directed by Tonje Hessen Schei was frighteningly interesting.

The Suicide Squad

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 historical U.S. fashion, but this is all just a pretext to have the characters bounce off one another and indulge in some suicidal bloodlust. It gets along at a serious click, with nary a slow spot, and each new 'journey' deviation is cleverly titled in seaweed or smoke, or whatever was 'visually' at hand.

The squad is made up of some batty folk. Try these on - a girl who can command rats called Ratcatcher 2 (Daniela Melchior - Taika Waititi played her flashback father, the original Ratcatcher); Polka-Dot Man (David Dastmalchian), a weedy psycho with mother issues who can do strange things with colorful dots; King Shark, voiced by Sylvester Stallone, a perennially hungry land shark; T.D.K (Nathan Fillion), whose sole skill is in his initials (no spoilers here); and Weasel (played by the director's brother, Sean Gunn), who is a human-sized weasel. Incidentally, Weasel's intro was the moment I realised we were in safe hands. Flag has to reassure others about him by saying something like, "Don't worry about Weasel, he's harmless. Well, he's not actually harmless, he's killed 27 children, but you know what I mean...". Simply using the word children, rather than people, for example, makes the scene buzz a bit creepier.

This is also the film that I think deals with Harley Quinn's mental state in the best manner. She's not as lost as she is in her own film, Birds of Prey; and not as leered over as she is in the Ayer's version. Her choices make sense, in a nonsensical way, and the scene of her cutting loose, with a floral explosion accompanying the slicing and shooting, is the barnstormer her character deserves. She also gets the best line in the film (I won't ruin it but it's near the end). 

Gunn's lightly stylish action scenes are ratcheted up a notch from his Guardians of the Galaxy films, primarily due to the excessive blood letting. One set-piece midway through almost pushes it too far but the pay-off was probably worth it. The set-up of having two very similarly skilled members - Bloodsport and John Cena's ludicrous Peacemaker - trying to outdo each other by killing in the 'coolest' way, deflates at the end of this slaughter into a morbid black-comedy cringe.

Themes of solidarity, friendship and responsibility are included but, crucially, not to the detriment of the shits and giggles. Ratcatcher 2 asks King Shark if he would eat a friend, Bloodsport grows into his boss role, Polka-Dot Man comes out of his shell and the lowliest, most despised creatures are also shown to have a purpose. The weighty issue of abuse of power is broached but not until the end and then, not exactly put across with any degree of importance. The old conditional "We know this and if anything happens to us, blah, blah.." trope pops up, but is over so quickly, it doesn't have much time to affect the enjoyment of the film in any concrete way.

Oh, I haven't even mentioned the whopping great MacGuffin that drives the squad onwards. It's suitably weird and formidable but there's still space to paint it as the victim that it clearly is, a kind of 'Echinoderm' Kong. On top of all this fun is the best use of a Pixies song in a film since Fight Club, but it's Gunn, so some cracking tracks should be expected. I've been chewing over the star rating for this but after four days or so, I'm still recalling it with fondness and I would gladly watch it again. Can't say that about too many flicks.

See also:

There are many similarities to Zack Snyder's underrated Watchmen (2009) and why not check out the blueprint for suicide missions, Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967).

SOME ATTEMPTS WERE MADE TO AVOID SPOLIERS IN POD, WITH LIMITED SUCCESS...