Beast

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, sadly.

The director, Icelandic, Baltasar Kormákur, has some pedigree with survival tales, having helmed films like Adrift, Everest and The Deep. He knows his onions in this genre and it's clear in the handheld, anxious camerawork, and the blocking of spaces - in one scene Nate (Dris) and his youngest daughter, Norah (a fantastic Leah Jeffries) are searching a building with an open door in the background, and every pan past said door raises the chills. With this kind of tightened, almost claustrophobic shooting, you're never quite sure where the threat is poised to pounce. Cinematographer, Phillipe Rousselot, also gives us some gorgeous South African vistas to marvel over.

Elba gives a fine display of stoic heroism, Sharlto Copley as his mate, Martin, local 'anti-poacher' is good value (if only to hear that cracking accent on film), and older daughter, Mer (Iyana Halley) is pretty good too. The pick of the performances though is Jeffries - she's quick-witted, emotive ("I have a rainbow of emotions available to me") but not too precocious. There are some character-scaffolding dream scenes that feel a bit dropped in, and the final inclusion of another lion pride draws a long metaphoric bow, but I jumped a few times, was edging to the lip of the seat at others, and that's really all you need from this kind of film. Not outstanding but worth a watch, nonetheless.

Beast opens on Aug 25th.

See also:

Another lion on the rampage film (and quite good too), The Ghost and the Darkness (1996), directed by Stephen Hopkins. And making a tangential link, Rousselot shot the fine Queen Margot (1994), directed by Patrice Chéreau.

SPOILERS IN POD!!

(Film stills and trailer ©Universal, 2022)

Nope

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 Ricky 'Jupe' Park, who runs a cheesy theme park on neighbouring land. It's around this time that the first 'encounter' takes place. Building tension is Peele's forte and he's pretty cheeky here. Each turn of the screw brings a dip of relief at its mini-resolution - a bit of fakery here, a magnified insect there until, at one point, you might wonder if the film will continue this way to the end, with no meat on the tricksy bones at all. More fool you. There's plenty of meat, literally and metaphorically.

Aside from the cautionary memo of messing with wild things, the film has a lovely little sideline in voyeurism. There are a fair few moments where looking is NOT advised, be it to the sky (beware of falling items), in the eyes of performing horses, on surveillance video screens, and especially at....well, you'll see. A cinematographer character, Antlers Holst (gravelly-voiced, Michael Wincott) is even portrayed in his office rolling through rushes of wild animals attacking each other, like a morbid anti-Attenborough. 

Somewhat related to this is Ricky's incredibly macabre sub-plot backstory, where, as a child actor, he witnessed a performing chimp rampage and was perhaps seconds away from a severe mauling. This sequence, which is drip-fed to us (and begins the film) is reminiscent of something Tarantino would cook up to stir the audience, to shock but also to add value in a thematic sense. Top deviating. Incidentally, there's a piece of prosaic iconography here that I can't fathom - we see a victim's shoe, blood-spattered BUT standing on its end, toes up, defying gravity. This shot reappears a number of times, so there's some significance there, I'm just not getting it. Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

After a second act finale of pulse-raising energy and blood-soaked windows, the final furlong of Nope plays out like a dusty, landed Jaws, with driven characters planning the trap (including a great, sappy Richard Dreyfus role from Brandon Perea as Angel Torres); loopy Quint-a-like, Holst, going rogue to get the shot with the dusk light; even a huge rubber mascot standing in for a scuba tank. But the analogy isn't water-tight, as the ultimate motive of the gang switches throughout from monetary gain, to fame-seeking, to revenge, even to planetary altruism (briefly), whereas in Jaws, they just had to kill that mutha of a shark. I suppose both can be seen as territorialism, though I can't see this film maligning aliens for decades as Jaws did for sharks. I might be wrong.

Any minor reservations I carry about story motivations don't dent this enough for me, though. It's superbly structured, tightly edited, beautifully shot (by Hoyte Van Hoytema on Imax cameras for more scope) and, of course, expertly pulled together by writer/producer/director Peele. A word on the cast too - Palmer kicked arse, Yuen balanced his role well (is he a product of his upbringing or a cynical opportunist?) and Kaluuya brings a special kind of naturalistic despondency to his pivotal role. He's excellent, as always.

Nope is social commentary masquerading as blackly comic, horror/sci-fi and, look, you can't say that about too many films. A fine hat-trick from Peele.

See also:

Obvious parallels with Spielberg's CV but Jaws (1975) is mimicked most closely here. I'd chuck in Francis Ford Coppola's, Apocalypse Now (1979) for one character in particular.

SPOILERS FOR MANY FILMS IN POD - TREAD CAREFULLY!

Walking Man

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's work is quite varied - numerous sketches of a mystery woman juxtapose with geometrical shapes, occasional line drawings of animals give way to interlocking, non-representational expressionist pieces. Stylistically, he's all over the place, but that's one of his strengths. We're told by his brother that after working as a teacher for a few years he travelled to Europe to check out the masters. His work seems to be unfettered by any 'movement' strictures, though a lot of it's very linear - and curiously some works are covered in numbers, maybe measurements or deeper mathematical posers? 

Whatever he was trying to get to the bottom of, he clearly had a plan and part of that was to continue producing art. The director, Luna Laure, tells the story as a celebration of Seaton's life as a artist, and the culmination of his work at the exhibition is a testament to him, as well as Snell's drive to give his work the platform it deserved. As Snell said, 'there are so many outsider artists, we just don't know about them.' Here's one mystery solved. 

Special mention to Mat 'Cheeky' Cheetham for a top notch score and Brendan Hutchens of VAM Media (Executive Producer and the guy who kicked the idea off).

Walking Man will be on ABC TV PLUS on Wed Aug 10th at 7:30pm and then on ABC iView.

Lightyear (Me) (Kids)

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't hang about (I guess to fit into a child's attention span window). Buzz Lightyear, as voiced by Cap. Am. himself, Chris Evans, is proud yet riddled with doubt and guilt about his role in getting stuck on the planet - he's more cocksure as a toy in the original films.

There's solid work by Keke Palmer and Taika Waititi as part of a motley crew of unlikely defenders but the pick would have to be Peter Sohn as robot cat SOX - unexpected snickers thanks to this cat, especially its operating noises. There's a sweet connection to Interstellar, relating to the hyperspace test runs, and themes that are often laid on with a heavy duty brick trowel are thankfully applied lightly in this film. It seems to be advocating teamwork, not being too proud to accept help when required and not beating yourself up about perceived flaws - all level-headed stuff from Pixar. 

The final section, particularly the Zurg reveal, was perhaps the most predictable and formulaic but it was handled well enough without going too heavy for kids. Maybe the sci-fi setting was up my specific space alley but I found Lightyear to be cut above most animated fare of recent times. 

See also:

Obviously, Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (2014) shares some DNA, and Andrew Stanton's Wall-E (2008) is another great space Pixar film.

Thor: Love and Thunder

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 than 'Just don't do it, man, we must protect our gods'. Even having Thor 'kill' another god showed there's maybe some room for nuance with Waititi. Just not enough.

There were a couple of moments that raised the film, most notably Russell Crowe channelling Con the Fruiterer in his Zeus role (see below). He's having more fun here than anyone in a Marvel film since Goldblum in Ragnarok. There are some old film references that are nice - the child-catcher's cage from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is cool and the (actual) ship crashing into a planet hints at George Méliès' A Trip to the Moon (bare-faced theft from Dave at the Cinemile here). Natalie Portman and Tessa Thompson are great but watching this made me want to see them in something better.

Sadly, the low points in Love and Thunder outweigh the high. The Korg (Waititi) exposition narration was trite and not as funny as it wanted to be, the super-powered kids segment was too cutesy for anyone's good, there was WAY TOO MUCH Guns and Roses shite (one chord from them is too much), and crucially, Thor's dopey shtick is getting tiresome. Maybe four standalone films for one character is a bridge too far?

See also:

This is a transparent excuse to mention excellent films featuring the two best actors in Love and Thunder. Bale is horrifically great in Brad Anderson's The Machinist (2004), and Crowe is brilliant in Jocelyn Moorhouse's Proof (1991).