Film Shapes

This final film at the Lotterywest Film Season for the Perth Festival is a surprising gem. It combines a great musical opening scene with a fine entrance from Matthew McConaughey. Writer/director Andrew Patterson knows who he's got on his hands here. McConaughey has fun with this role of Amziah King, his first real starring part since The Gentleman in 2019, and in fairness, the film probably wouldn't have been made without him. The story goes thus: a honey maker (or beekeeper, apiarist, professor of bees, call him what you will) is coopted into helping the police identify a stolen batch of honey barrels. After a frankly incredible (in the good sense of the word) honey heating procedure that goes off the rails, Amziah finds himself at cafe, where he bumps into Kateri, a young woman who used to foster with him when she was a kid. A star is unearthed here in Angelina LookingGlass (what a name!), in her debut film role, and the rest of the cast is fittingly grubby and grungy. Kur...

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...

Ho ho, yo yos. Here's my rundown of films in 2024. By my best count I saw 124 films last year, 115 of them new watches (though not necessarily made or released in 2024), and 61 of them at the cinema. Of those cinema trips, 28 were at Luna Leederville , 14 at Palace Raine Square and 10 at the Backlot Perth , with 6 other cinemas making up the numbers. So here are my 10 favourite films from 2024, with a top 5 pod down the bottom... [Click on the titles for links to full reviews] 10. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024) George Miller's follow-up to Fury Road tells us the story of how Furiosa got to where that film started. I reckon this was the best blockbuster of the year, certainly the most entertaining, with one epic action sequence and a couple of fine performances from Anya Taylor-Joy and Chris Hemsworth. Great fun. 9. The Taste of Things (2023) Don't go in hungry! This is a foodie's shan-grill-ah, the high culinary masterwork of the last decade or more. Juliette Binoch...

This documentary has been in the works for a few years, with Covid proving a hefty stumbling block. It focusses on the work of Tenille Bentley, a musician trying to get to the bottom of the healing qualities of sound and music, specifically in the frequency range. Most music these days is tuned to 440 hertz but Bentley and her En Coda Orchestra play at 432. If this sounds a bit vague, it's purely because I'm a tone-deaf numpty and all this musical jargon is beyond me. The split between science and the arts is mentioned and the film aims to integrate these fields. There's a satisfying balance between the scientists and professors, talking about brain waves and neuroscience, and the musicians coming at it from a more experiential, more emotional angle. This is one of the doco's strengths - it doesn't actually preach anything to the audience, it's more about informing and recording research. Another strength is the tightness of the film. Director Dom Giorgi, of Sid...

This is an engaging, relatively fluffy documentary about French filmmaker, Michel Gondry, directed by his regular assistant, François Nemeta. As such, it comes across as a bit of a fawning love letter to a genius. This may sound like damning with faint praise but it's a pretty infectious watch, mainly due to Gondry's sheer likeability. I can't imagine this bloke angry, and it's almost a twist when he marginally raises his voice in one section where he's directing a scene from Mood Indigo . Gondry started his arts career as a drummer in the band Oui Oui, where he made the music videos to accompany their songs. Soon enough, his talent for filmmaking outshone his drumming and he moved on to create clips for other musicians, including Thomas Dolby, Inspiral Carpets, Lenny Kravitz and Terence Trent D'Arby. But it was his association with Björk that propelled him towards stardom, making eight music vids with her, notably Army of Me and Human Behaviour . He was much s...

This is a 'talking heads' documentary about the famous (or infamous, depending on your outlook on life) Scala cinema that operated in London's King's Cross from 1978 to 1993. It's a snapshot of an era - this place was the muster point for a ragtag group of misfits during Thatcher's uncompromisingly nasty reign. There's a fantastic array of interview subjects: actors Ralph Brown (who used to work there) and Caroline Catz; comedians Adam Buxton and Stewart Lee; directors Ben Wheatley, John Waters and Mary Harron;  musicians Matt Johnson (The The) and Douglas Hart (The Jesus and Mary Chain); as well as numerous less well-known folk who attended screenings or worked at the Scala in some capacity.  The celebrity tales are fun but the meat comes from the staff - in particular one pretty tense retelling of a suicide at the theatre. And the building itself, still erect and acting as a nightclub not far from King's Cross Station, is the star of the film. Built ar...

What an oddly brilliant film this is. The Northern Irish hip-hop trio, Kneecap, have a pretty unusual career. According to my brief research, they currently have two studio albums and one feature film to their credit. Not knowing about these lads, I was surprised to find out that they aren't actors - you wouldn't know by their performances, particularly Liam Ó Hannaidh (stage name, Mo Chara). He's a standout. The film gives us a presumably fudged version of the band's origins - Mo and best mate, Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin) have known each other since they were choir boys but it didn't take long for them to embrace the Belfast rave and drug culture, as well as the strong anti-British, anti-RUC feeling among sections of the Catholic community in the north of Ireland. Northern Ireland! North of Ireland! Northern Ireland!  One night, Mo is arrested at a rave and refuses to speak English to the 'peelers' (police), so an interpreter is called in, high school...

Ténor is a rudimentary 'fish out of water', 'clash of cultures' drama, with French rap and opera representing the opposing lifestyles. I guess its claim to fame is the fact that the lead is Mohammed Belkhir (a.k.a. MB14), a rapper who appeared on the French version of irritating 'talent' show,  The Voice.  This is his first film but he looks like he's been doing this for yonks, and if it's really him singing, he certainly got some pipes on him. His co-star is the classy Michèle Laroque - she plays Madame Loyseau, the opera tutor who discovers Antione (MB14).  There's nothing ground-breaking here but Claude Zidi Jr. is only on his third film and he doesn't do too much wrong in the handling of it. The story creaks a bit, especially when Antoine is off-screen, and some of the characters are a bit cliched, in the shape of the tough and thick, yet loving brother, Didier (Guillaume Duhesme) and comic mate sidekick, Elio (Samir Decazza). Antoine is spoi...

Tár is writer/director Todd Field's third feature after the earnest In the Bedroom and Little Children, and this extends his self-initiated remit of homing in on touchy, difficult subject matter. In this film, Lydia Tár is a famous, and famously headstrong, conductor, who is currently fronting the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. She's played by Cate Blanchett in a role that virtually peals, 'Oscar, Oscar, Oscaaaaar.' Blanchett is great, as usual, but she runs very close to, "I'm acting, dahling," at some points - I'm thinking specifically of the on-stage interview session and the lesson at Julliard. That lesson scene is probably where the film sets out it's stall, but I'm still not entirely sure what Field is saying with it. In this awkward conducting workshop class, Lydia gently, then more insultingly, chides a student for not being able to appreciate the music of composers unlike, or antithetical to, themselves - the old 'art' vs ...