Film Shapes

I'll admit to a sense of trepidation going into Bohemian Rhapsody . Queen have been my favourite band since the mid-80s, I guess, and I really didn't want the film makers to fuck this up. So, after a couple of hours of spine shivers and leg jiggles, I can confirm that any impending fuck-up was averted. Much of the thanks for this has to go to the casting director, Susie Figgis. The actors playing the four band members were as close to the actual lads as no mind (Freddie was a tad taller than Rami Malek but that's a small quibble). I actually forgot I wasn't watching Mercury, May, Taylor and Deacon, especially in the concert scenes. Special mention must go to Joseph Mazzello for getting John Deacon's unfussy feet movement down pat. The voice amalgamation was a nice trick too - Malek has said in interviews that it's probably about 90% Freddie that we hear on screen. There's a messy history to Bohemian Rhapsody . It's been knocking around for a decade...

Back to the Windsor Cinema in Nedlands and not much has changed since catching  The King's Speech  in 2010 or 2011. I reckon Merv and I were among the youngest punters there, and we're not exactly gambolling lambs anymore. But this demographic was pretty apt for  King of Thieves , the latest film to explore old spivs getting older and trying to stay relevant. This iteration is based on the true story of the Hatton Garden safe deposit robbery in London in 2015. It stars Michael Caine, Tom Courtenay, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone and Paul Whitehouse ('I was very, very drunk') as the geriatric villains who come together at Caine's wife's funeral. A positively pubescent Charlie Cox instigates the gig.  The heist premise of  King of Thieves  has been done before, even factoring in the 'grey pound' aspect. It's not the most original film but it's worth the ticket price just to hear Caine and gang effing and jeffing all over the place. It's...

After initially being a bit ambivalent about seeing  First Man , I decided to give it a chance, mainly due to the goodwill held over from Damien Chazelle's first directorial effort, the excellent  Whiplash . Apparently, Chazelle had been sitting on this Neil Armstrong story since before La La Land and got started after Josh Singer ( Spotlight ) handed over a script. And a pretty prosaic script it is. Thankfully avoiding the trap that many other biopics have fallen into, this shies away from the cradle to grave narrative and focuses on about 8 years of Armstrong's life, from 1961 to 1969. Trim the fat, this is the meat. The main theme of First Man is obsessive drive and this is a watering hole Chazelle likes to return to, as there are obvious similarities to his previous two films. Armstrong's determination to get to the moon is, to an extent, explained by a tragedy that I won't go into here. Accurate or not, it adds a filmic poignancy that works depending on y...

So this whole business started with one of Roly's friends saying he thought You Were Never Really Here was the worst film he'd ever seen. I was baffled. The WORST?? It got me thinking - what do people rate as the worst film they've ever seen? I conducted a short, mostly net-based, survey and the results were intriguing. Putting aside the person who went for a TV show and the one who chose The 1989 Melbourne Cup, they broadly fell into two categories - actually terrible films (i.e. low tech, shit writing & acting, etc) OR average to good films that people had a personal aversion to. Some I'd never heard of - I've only seen 15 from a total of 40, though I may have blanked on one or two due to the abysmal nature of them. There were some odd choices for me -  The Wrestler and  Rain Man are not bad and Fight Club is great but, again, it's all subjective. If I had to watch one of these films that I hadn't yet seen, I'd probably go for The Dungeonma...

I went to the Paradiso in Northbridge with Merv to see  La Ragazza nella Nebbia  (or  The Girl in the Fog) , which is part of the  Italian Film Festival . This was the first time I'd been to the Paradiso in about 12 years and I reckon it's still the best looking cinema in Perth. It appears to have been taken over by the Palace Cinema chain (as opposed to its old umbrella, Luna Palace cinemas) and joins the new Raine Square complex as the two Perth branches. One possibly ominous note - lots of wine glasses, not so many choc bombs. Mmmm, I'll have a glass of gentrification, thanks. Anyway, the film. This is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, written by Donato Carrisi. This geezer also went and wrote the screenplay AND directed the film. While this might work on the odd occasion - e.g. Tom Stoppard adapting and directing  Rosencrantz and Guildenstren are Dead  - it's usually a sleeveless errand. Carrisi may be a good thriller author but he ...

Saw this as a birthday treat at the Luna (free double pass with the Privilege Card) followed by a sub-par ramen. That's if you're in the camp that thinks 'sub-par' is a bad thing. To be fair, it may be only golfers that see 'sub-par' as a positive. But I digress. You Were Never Really Here (no shit, I just mis-typed Gere as the last word in the title and there's a whole new film!). More digression. I'll count to 39 or something. So, Lynne Ramsey's fourth film after Ratcatcher , Morven Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin certainly continues the trend of gritty realism but with a neat dichotomy. See, I reckon Joaquin Phoenix's character, Joe, would fit uncomfortably into a Marvel or DC film. He's a kind of chav Avenger, with none of the grandeur or witticisms but all of the emotion. Hawkeye with a hammer instead of a bow. And the film rides on Phoenix's bulky, bruised back. He's outstanding in this. The scene of him cracking...

After a few blockbusters and the like, I decided it was time to go off-road a bit so Roly and I hit a cheap Wednesday showing of The Insult at the Luna Leederville. This is only the fourth film to be directed by Ziad Doueiri (he also co-wrote) but he cut his teeth working as a camo with Tarantino. The film takes place in Beirut. It starts with a molehill and ends with mountain. Local Christian mechanic, Tony Hanna, played by Adel Karam, is miffed when a Palestinian Muslim construction foreman, Yasser Salameh, played by Kamel El Basha, fixes his outdoor water pipe without his permission. Tony breaks it, Yasser calls him a "fucking prick" and thus commences an escalating shitestorm of stubborn men, weary women, exploitative lawyers and opportunistic politicians, all waiting for the scab of religion and geopolitics to be ripped off. The story is ostensibly played out as a courtroom drama but there are lots of other things going on here, including misplaced revenge, tired...

This is the sixth Mission: Impossible film with Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt and only the second to have a previous director at the helm in Chris McQuarrie (the others, in order, being Brian De Palma, John Woo, J.J. Abrams and Brad Bird). I enjoyed Fallout , and that's pretty much the same sentiment for all the films in this series. Each one has something better and worse than the others, whether that's an actor, an action set-piece or a shot. My point is that they tend to blend into one another, not necessarily in a bad way. Admittedly, the bonkers-ness of the practical (as opposed to CGI) stunts has seemed to grow exponentially. But that Cruise bastard appears to have aged about 6 years in 22. Plot-wise, it's fairly convoluted. According to McQuarrie, lots of the film was made on the fly. "I'm working on it" (or words to that effect) are uttered throughout the film, reflecting the actual goings-on behind the cameras. Presumably not unusual in films of thi...