Three Films Make A Post: No experience necessary.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023): I didn’t think I needed a big budget blockbuster fantasy heist comedy in my life – in general, I prefer my secondary world fantasy with a more serious tone – but John Francis Daley’s and Jonathan Goldstein’s D&D movie is so fun and charming, turns out I do need it. Being a modern blockbuster, it can present all the incredible vistas the probably underpaid parts of the production crew could come up with, and let its merry band of rogues run through it as merrily as this suggests.

Of course, this being a contemporary movie, it’s also about found and assumed family, but it treats that trope so genuinely, it simply works in the proper wish fulfilment manner of such things. Really, the only larger flaw in the film I see is that it sometimes wants a bit too desperately to be a fantasy version of Guardians of the Galaxy, whose greatness it can’t quite reach. But then, that’s not something to be ashamed of.

Kenpei to barabara shibijin aka The Military Policeman and the Dismembered Beauty (1957): This film by Kyotaro Namiki about a military policeman whose approach to mystery solving is rather different from that of his peers solving the case of the dismembered body of a woman who was found in the well of a military base is sometimes listed as a horror movie. However, this is really a very traditional procedural crime movie, just one set in the very problematic 1937, which it never really acknowledges one way or the other on a direct political level. If one can ignore that, this is a typically solid product of Japanese studio filmmaking, a decent mystery, well acted and solidly shot.

Surrounded (2023): Whereas this Western about a cross-dressing black woman (Letitia Wright) in the post Civil War US trying to survive the worst day ever is as openly and obviously political as they get. It’s quite the candidate for a film people will look back at in twenty years or so to see where the cultural mind was at this time. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, and while I find some of the very on the nose, theatrical dialogue sequences about being black a bit much, most of the time, director Anthony Mandler takes care to actually put into action what his characters can’t stop jawing about as well.

There, the film shows itself as a brutal, visually beautifully bleak Western that manages to show everything it is telling as well.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

For the sequel to a commercially (and even critically) successful superhero blockbuster, this is one strange movie. I, at least, would not have expected the film to not just take place in 1984 but actually emulate some of the tone and structure of late 70’s/early 80’s superhero films  (the few there were at the time).

It’s not exactly a tone I’m particularly fond of, and at first the film does feel somewhat awkward - also thanks to the seeming repetition of the only larger flaw of the first film, taking ages to actually get going (later more on that) – but Jenkins is actually going somewhere with the film’s somewhat peculiar tone between faux-naïf and fairy-tale (which does feel a lot like reading “golden age” comics, minus the bloodthirst of those venerable books of often dubious quality) on a thematic level. It is indeed difficult to imagine a big mainstream film renouncing this bluntly and heavily the values (ha!) of the 80s in the West that eventually brought us neoliberalism and a world of other hurt and doing it in any different tone. Pretending to be harmless and a bit goofy is still a useful disguise for a bit of subversion, apparently, even if one is about as subtle about it as a sledgehammer.

Once the film has hit its stride, and a viewer has adapted to the tone (if one doesn’t, one won’t have any joy with this one, I suspect) it actually becomes quite a lot of fun, with action scenes that share the rest of the film’s complete disinterest in pretending to be naturalistic and instead increasingly live in a space of their own imagination. There’s a cheesy and deeply romantic sense of wonder on display in some of the slower moments in between the blockbuster business, Jenkins milking the tone she has decided upon to wonderful effect, turning what to some critics seems to read as “overindulgent” or just plain silly cliché into pure charm driven by the kind of intelligence that doesn’t need to show off in my eyes.

The performances are broad and big in a manner perfectly appropriate to the surroundings, with Gadot still being pretty much a case of perfect casting, Chris Pine giving the impression of genuinely enjoying playing the second fiddle most other films would have their female leads be, and Pedro Pascal repeatedly hitting just the right spot where caricature and real person meet. The only of the main players I wasn’t particularly fond of was Kristen Wiig, but I suspect her ever mumbling, curiously apathetic acting style is simply so little to my taste, I couldn’t say if the performance is any good on a more objective level or not.

On the surface, the film’s plotting can feel rather messy – particularly in a film world where the scripting ideal seems to be of film as a relentless clockwork automaton – but that’s less an actual weakness (alright, the film really could have lost the prologue on Themyscira) than a sign of a film that’s really trying to do justice to quite a few ideas and needs to take some time to do so. And make no mistake, while the presentation here is often charmingly goofy, the script by Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham is neither goofy nor stupid – it’s just not afraid to express its bigger ideas through cheesy dialogue and broad tropes, losing the sort of over-earnest man-face that pushed something like The Joker (aka “ranting arsehole in front of bad versions of all of the director’s favourite Scorsese scenes”) into being a critical darling but winning my heart in the process. Also having a fucking heart itself, which is of course isn’t allowed in proper art.

WW84 is really quite the movie, certainly not an attempt to make the first movie again, but bigger, but the product of filmmakers genuinely exploring the space the superhero genre affords them. That this sort of thing does exist can only be good for what looks to still be the dominant genre of huge Hollywood movies for at least the next half decade to come.

In short: Wonder Woman (2017)

Given the way DC’s movie universe has developed, I wasn’t as hopeful concerning Wonder Woman as some parts of the internet were. It is wonderful to finally have a superhero movie concentrating on a woman, but a female-lead film can of course be just as terrible as one featuring a man. However, only a fool would think a movie’s automatically terrible because it features a woman.

The first twenty to thirty minutes of the film are certainly not promising. They are slow going, with reams of exposition broken up by short action sequences and then even more exposition, with a bunch of fine actresses having basically nothing of interest to do – poor, awesome Robin Wright could as well have been replaced by a computer animation, for all the film does with her. The worst about this: much of the exposition is absolutely pointless, going into needless detail about things the audience could easily learn on the go later on. Most of the important stuff could have been condensed into five minutes.

However, once exposition time is finally over – when the main characters arrive in London, to be precise – Wonder Woman transforms from something deeply mediocre in the typically over explaining way today’s Hollywood is so fond of into a fantastic film that will from now on hardly do anything wrong (apart from some way too naive and on the nose dialogue during the final fight that says out loud what the film already told us in other ways and the random design of the Big Bad). Gal Gadot turns out to be a wonder, not just looking the part but much more importantly projecting it right, not just wearing the costume but embodying what (this interpretation of) the character is actually about - arguably the most important thing for superhero cinema. Compare with Ben Affleck’s Batman who never feels like anything but an overpaid actor in a silly costume striking poses, and you’ll feel the difference. The film’s feminism hits the spot where it is consistently part of the film’s meaning but never feels preachy – this one’s not telling us, it’s showing us, which is always more convincing. In general, the film’s politics are an organic part of it, and indeed of the story it tells.

The action is a wonderful cross of old pulp/serial style high adventure and modern cinematic superhero action, comparable to the first Captain America movie (which I still hold to be absolutely fantastic, sorry Inga) in all the best ways.

Apart from mostly doing a bang-up job with the action sequences, director Patty Jenkins is also great at evoking a sense of place and time. Now, obviously, this is not meant to be a realistic depiction of the Great War but the film’s version of it seems like a place its characters belong in (you could argue Chris Pine’s character would probably have been a lot more sexist in the real world, but then, who wants to see a contemporary version of Wonder Woman going through that sort of shit for the sake of “realism”?) and not just a series of CGI creations.


It’s rather a great film.

Hell or High Water (2016)

Brothers Toby (Chris Pine) and Tanner (Ben Foster) Howard set out to rob the various branches of an exclusively Texan – and pretty small-time - bank in fine low key attempts where nobody will get hurt and they’ll just take in a bit of money from each bank instead of getting greedy and taking risks. Toby’s the straight one of the two, while Tanner has spent ten years in prison after shooting their abusive father in a “hunting accident”. Tanner hasn’t really gotten onto anything looking like the straight and narrow ever since. However, robbing those banks is Toby’s idea and he’s asked Tanner for help executing it.

The brothers’ mother has recently died, leaving the family farm to Toby’s sons in trust. A trust that would be worth quite a bit of money because there’s a nice fat oil deposit on the farm. Not accidentally, the bank owning the family’s mortgage has decided to foreclose on the farm, and now Toby needs money rather quickly to secure the thing nobody in his family ever knew before for his sons: the absence of poverty. The man has a healthy sense of irony too, for just guess which banks he’s hitting with his brother?

Texas rangers Marcus Hamilton (Jeff Bridges) and his long-suffering partner Alberto Parker (Gil Birmingham) are on their trail, Marcus using the case to prolong the time before his retirement as much as possible and to grumpily prove he’s still the cleverest bastard around.

Apparently, if you want to produce a really fantastic film set in Texas, hire a Scotsman to direct it. Well, at least if it is Hell or High Water’s director David Mackenzie, and your dream film is a combination of contemporary actor’s cinema, wry humour, and the portrayal of a quiet tragedy. While he’s at it, Mackenzie also adds a lot of consciously underplayed subtext about the plight of the white working (or very often non-working) class in rural areas to the mix.

In a sense, this is a film very much about people the USA as a whole have left to fend for themselves (to then wonder why they’d vote for Trump’s particular brand of lies, empty promises and blaming the Other), without safety nets (because those are apparently un-American). For most of the characters in the film, soul-crushing poverty is a near guarantee, a state lying before not only them but their children, and their children’s children and so on. It’s not quite as horrible a state as that of poor and lower middle-class blacks, obviously, for at least these people don’t need to be afraid to be shot for their skin colour, but eternal poverty does not look that much more attractive to the people suffering it when an early violent death is out of the picture. In any case, it’s not a state of affairs that’s bound to make one terribly law-abiding, specifically not when there’s a chance to give at least some of one’s loved ones an escape.

While all this is a permanent subtext – and sometimes text – of the film, Mackenzie doesn’t make an American kitchen sink drama out of the material. Instead, this is an often wry and humorous film that is interested in its characters as people and not just as didactic examples. Mackenzie gives the fantastic cast room to breathe, or in Bridges’s case to do his by now probably patented but often surprisingly subtle grumpy old man bit. It’s just that these good, bad, eccentric, tragic, pitiful and infuriating people all have the shadow of economics and of class hanging over them, catching them in a net that turns all their best intentions against them, and turning a film that might have been played exclusively as a funny Robin Hood sort of tale into a tragedy even in those moments when it is funny. Or really, into more than one tragedy. There’s an obvious one of lives wasted and lost but also one of personal ethics crushed under market forces one can’t control and barely comprehend.

Three Films Make A Post: The emotions are real, everything else is questionable.

Wither aka Vittra (2012): Do you like Sam Raimi’s original Evil Dead? So do Swedish directors Sonny Laguna and Tommy Wiklund, so they made this near-remake. Alright, there are a few differences: the possessed aren’t as chatty as those in Raimi’s classic and sometimes act more like zombies, nobody is raped by a tree, all colour has been desaturated out of the picture, and there’s no Bruce Campbell to be found. Otherwise the film keeps rather to close to its big inspiration without ever reaching its energy level nor its air of unbridled creativity, which is what happens when one plays in other peoples’ sandbox instead of building one’s own.

The gore is nice to look at though, and the film certainly isn’t boring.

Black Rock (2012): Katie Aselton’s film, on the other hand, sets out to play the good old game of role and trope reversal with the survival horror genre. The film isn’t interested in being ironic, though, so it’s still very much a highly focused survivalist thriller, but one with added feminist subtext that doesn’t overwhelm the text, and a deft hand at slightly undercutting expectations in favour of better characterisation. The acting by Aselton herself, Lake Bell and Kate Bosworth is fine too, so there’s little here that doesn’t work rather wonderfully. Which is not a daily occurrence in a sub-genre whose tales about thin veneers of civilization breaking down again and again and again can become a bit tiresome.

Star Trek Beyond (2016): Reboot Star Trek the third, this time directed by Justin Lin (who actually manages to shoe-in a motorcycle sequence into the plot) is a very pleasant loud SF adventure movie, containing many a moment of great and loveable silliness, much loud and rather exciting adventuring, various explosions, generally rather stiff acting – basically all the charms I hope for in a contemporary blockbuster. It’s not up to Marvel standards in sudden bouts of humanity or half-hidden cleverness, but it’s far beyond (sorry) Michael Bay style blockbusting by virtue of having an actual flow, a story that makes some kind of sense, and by being actually fun instead of just being loud and obnoxious.

Three Films Make A Post: Based on the Historical Realities

Du rififi à Paname aka The Upper Hand (1966): Denys de La Patellière's crime movie is a sort of retirement home for tired looking old and middle aged actors (Jean Gabin! Gert Fröbe! Nadja Tiller! Claudio Brook! George Raft!), the kind of film that thinks just letting the actors turn their faces in the direction of the camera equals acting performances. What's actually going on is that no one in front of the camera seems even the least bit interested in the film they are involved in, which is somewhat understandable given the been there done that nature of the film's crime plot, and the script's insistence on not developing the plot's few interesting elements in any direction worth following. De La Patellière manages to make the film pretty, but doesn't provide any sense of tension or drama, and also seems to delight in the kind of "witty" dialogue only very few films can get away with. Most of those films have actors actually doing more than coasting on their mere existence, though.

An American Ghost Story aka Revenant (2012): Derek Cole's film could be a fine, low-key ghost story, if a highly derivative one. At least, the core performances by scriptwriter and male lead Stephen Twardokus and Liesel Kopp are never less than decent, often even quite good, the camera work is atmospheric, and the film has a nice, concentrated flow to it. Unfortunately American Ghost Story suffers from a case of Advanced Jump Scare Syndrome that borders on the ridiculous. There's no quietly effective scene of the supernatural the film doesn't ruin by making inappropriate loud noises at the audience in moments that aren't at all meant to be jump scares, no scene that doesn't end up destroying its own effectiveness by shouting "boo". It's nearly like a parody of other films who like their jump scares a bit too much, and feels as if the film were afraid to just let the creepy mood it so desperately tries to build work on its audience, permanently losing faith in its own ability to function without VERY LOUD NOISES. While this technique doesn't work at all to actually make the film scarier, it ruins any mood it actually builds quite effectively, dragging the whole effort down from the at least decent to the nearly insufferable.

Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): I'm more than just a little surprised that this one is the film of these three I actually like, but then surprising me is what J.J. Abrams's movie did more than once: by feeling much more like a Stark Trek movie than the first one, by not just fixing the first film's dubious politics but actually consciously having and using political themes and coherent morals, by actually doing some rather great (or at the very least fun) things with the Star Trek movie it is playing with/off, and by this time around actually having something (though still not enough by far) to do for its female cast members. If the last trend continues, the next Star Trek movie might even see Zoe Saldana's Uhura as an actual female lead instead of a relatively large supporting role for Pine's and Quinto's perfectly entertaining boy's club.

As it stands, the film is still nearly up there with the Avengers or the last Batman or Pacific Rim as a film that fulfils all blockbuster demands on spectacle, yet still has the time and space for human things of one kind of the other. Most of the time, it even remembers the spectacle is there to dramatize the humanity and not the other way around.

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