Film Shapes

A lucky day off on Thursday, so off to see the much anticipated new film from Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood . Quite a few things to chew over here so I'll start at the middle. Not really, just thought I'd go for a little QT humour....hello? Hello? Hmmm. There's a lot to like about this film and a fair bit not to as well. Let's start with the positives. Tarantino really knows how to get the best out of his actors. Leonardo DiCaprio is great in the role of a fading TV gunslinger who can see the sunset of his career approaching. His attempts to handle this twilight are precious and DiCaprio aces it all. There's an especially mint section where he's playing head villain in an episode of Lancer , directed by Sam Wanamaker (which seems to have actually happened ). DiCaprio's character, Rick Dalton, has been on the turps the night before and he's having some trouble remembering his lines. His over-acting in these scenes and subsequent meltdown i...

Well, it's been almost a month since I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home and I have to admit, I've been dragging my heels on this one. It's not because it's terrible, though it wouldn't be far off the bottom of the Marvel pool. I think it's a deflation factor. Coming so soon after the Endgame colossus, this just didn't grab anything for me. It might also have a bit to do with my antipathy towards the character of Spider-Man. He simply shits me. Tom Holland is a charismatic, winningly gormless presence but sadly, he's not enough to win me over. That said, Spidey in the other Marvel films has been fun and reasonably interesting but in these stand-alones, I'm not having it. There's a case to be made that the best part of this film is the post-credit sting. Not the mid-credit sting, though the return of J.K. Simmons is a good move by the Marvelii. The final sting asks some questions and sets up some tasty possibilities for Marvel's fourth...

Asif Kapadia's newest doco follows Diego Maradona's time at Napoli, with the occasional glimpses of his life before and after. It focusses on this period (1984 - 1991) as this was Diego at his best and, arguably, worst. I've seen a couple of docos and lots of highlights of Maradona as a player but this is the first film I've seen that balances the two sides - Diego AND Maradona. This dichotomy is best summed up by his old fitness coach, Fernando Signorini - "With Diego, I would go to the end of the world, but with Maradona, I wouldn't take a step." Kapadia treats his subject pretty even-handedly, neither fawning nor condemning, letting the visuals and interviews inform the audience's judgement. On the topic on interviews, Diego Maradona , like Senna , relies purely on old footage to tell the story. There are no new 'interviews' aside from audio of Diego and others played under old game vision or news reports. I reckon this technique is w...

Let me begin this by saying I saw the first Toy Story some years after release (maybe around 2008) and I really didn't like it. Couldn't see what all the fuss was about. So when my kids (and wife) proposed seeing number 4 at the cinema, I was reluctant to say the least. Add to this the necessity of seeing ALL the films in the series before the new one because, well, I want to bring them up correctly, and the task bubbled with dread. But, imagine my surprise when I actually enjoyed Toy Story 2 , wasn't too annoyed with Toy Story 3 and, yes, quite liked Toy Story 4 . This was the first film for the kids at the cinema and there's something to be said for watching kids watching films, especially when they're experiencing a completely new environment. The interest dropped off slightly during the talky exposition points in the film but for the action scenes, they were buzzing. For me, this was probably the first 'kids' film I've seen on the big screen...

Black '47 is a revenge western set in Ireland during the Great Famine of 1845-1849. I saw this at the Luna Leederville as part of the Revelation Film Festival a week or so ago. There was even an intro from an actual Irishman, Dr. Enda Murray, who curates the Irish Film Festival. The story follows a young Irish fella who returns home after fighting with the British Army in various exotic climes. He lands bang in the middle of the famine to find most of his family gone, primarily at the hands of the Brits he was fighting for. Needless to say, this shits him a touch. Though this guy, Feeney, played by the Aussie lad from Animal Kingdom , James Frecheville, is nominally the protagonist, it's his supposed nemesis, Hannah, played brilliantly by Hugo Weaving, who is the real star of the film. It's a clever angle that the villainous Englishman, who murders an Irish rebel at the start, can turn out to be the pseudo-protagonist by the end. A hint may have been that the firs...

I caught a screening of Bong Joon-ho's Palme d'Or winner, Parasite at the Innaloo Event Cinemas on Saturday night. This is a dark satire on class distinctions in modern day Korea, and more broadly, the world. It's weird, funny and shockingly brutal at times. The premise concerns a down-at-heel family of four living in a poor neighbourhood of Seoul, who suddenly get a break when a friend of the son passes a tutoring job onto him. Slowly, the whole family manoeuvre their way into this rich household and much of the bite comes from the way the two sets of families interact. Things take a pretty sharp deviation about halfway through the film, which raises the tension, as well as providing motivation for the themes of class and bigotry to come to the fore. The Bong man is responsible for Snowpiercer and Okja , among other films, but from what I've seen, this is his best work. He gets some great performances from the likes of Jo Yeo-jeong as Yeon-kyo, the wealthy, eas...

Turned up at Morley Event Cinemas for a 10:30am screening of X-Men: Dark Phoenix only to be told it was a BYB showing. What's this, you ask? Apparently, it's a Bring Your Baby session. Ohhh no. But in fact, one quiet baby and a potentially scarred 3 year old didn't cause much fuss. The bloody lights were kept half-dimmed, though. No matter, onto the film itself. This has taken a pasting online and in the film press and I can't quite see why. It's not brilliant but it's a clear head better than Apocalypse and surely a few lengths closer to the post than the Wolverine Origins fiasco. There are some well-structured action sequences that elicited a touch of excitement, some of the performances are solid (Fassbender, McAvoy) and the story plays with a couple of meaty themes - mainly abandonment and sacrifice, much in keeping with the earlier (better) films. But, that said, there are some sizeable missteps. A few of the characters' decisions didn't...

Popped down to the Luna in Leederville this morning to catch Mike Leigh's latest film, Peterloo . This is a seemingly accurate retelling of the 1819 massacre that took place in St. Peter's Field in Manchester, where the constabulary and the army waded into a crowd of thousands with sabres and bayonets. The people were there to hear a famous orator, Henry Hunt, call for national suffrage and to put pressure on the government and the royals. 18 of the crowd were killed and hundreds of others wounded. The knock-on effects of this catastrophe on the reform movement appear negligible, though it did bring about the creation of The Guardian newspaper. History 101 over. Onto the film itself. It's around 2 and a half hours long and it feels every minute of that. The build-up to the massacre involves an awful lot of piss and wind with politicians spewing interminable chunks all over the shop, in the (presumably) wanky vernacular of the day. Oh do tell, sir. On the other ...