Flora and Son (2023)

Flora (Eve Hewson), a mostly single Mom in Dublin – the father Kev (Paul Reid) is around but is clearly useless in most regards – can’t really connect with her teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan). She’s not quite grown-up as fully as you’d expect of a proper movie mom, after all, and is rather more abrasive than Hollywood rules allow for being a good mother.

On a wine-driven lark, Flora signs up for online guitar lessons from Los Angeles never-quite-made-it musician Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Not unexpectedly, they do fall in long-distance love, but, this being a John Carney movie, the romantic aspect isn’t everything, so Flora discovers certain aspects about herself through the power of music and their connection that will in turn help her connect with Max.

So yes, this is pretty much a typical John Carney film in its use of romance movie tropes it doesn’t quite subvert but also clearly isn’t feeling slavishly beholden to, where the lovers not getting together in a romantic embrace isn’t actually a sad ending, and where re-connecting a family isn’t part of some kind of conservative impulse to put things back in order, but an example of human connection.

Human connection that in Carney’s films is typically enabled and enhanced through the power of music, or really, the power of songs – in a way where genre and approach matter less than the nearly spiritual way making music together as an act of creativity can connect people in unexpected ways.

This nearly never glides off into the realms of kitsch because Carney also knows that songs do not magically solve every problem, that problems may indeed not be solvable, and isn’t afraid to leave room for characters to grow or screw up after the movie is finished. His sometimes a little abrasive but never cruel sense of humour certainly helps keep things honest as well.

Which makes Flora and Son, like all of Carney’s musically minded movies, the kind of film to watch when you want to feel all little better about humanity without feeling like you’re being lied to - a perfect thing, really.

Three Films Make A Post: The old flesh is dead, long live the new!

Darklands (1996): What starts out as if it could become a considerably interesting piece of post-industrial folk horror (the sub-sub genre still waiting on its day) becomes less and less so the longer it goes on, the film wasting some promising ideas on occult conspiracy by the numbers plotting. On paper highly interesting elements like the connection between a “back to our Celtic roots” right-wing politician and a revived druid cult are wasted on barely competent suspense scenes; the filmmakers clearly didn’t do any research on actual pagan practices and most certainly couldn’t come up with anything exciting on their own. The conspiracy plot only manages to remind one of films who are much better at this sort of thing. There’s really little there apart from the initial promise, this being the first Welsh horror movie or not.

Project Power (2020): On one hand, I really think superhero cinema could use more of Henry Joost’s and Ariel Schulman’s focus on POC characters, and featuring among others a plot line that’s explicitly about empowering a young, poor, black teenager is a fine thing to have in this sort of thing. But the film’s not terribly good at integrating these aspirations into its more typical superpowered business, the action movie parts never feeling actually informed by the rest of the film. It doesn’t help that the film is one of those films that believe replacing superhero tropes with action movie tropes somehow makes its view of the world more realistic, when in fact, it’s just blowing up its body count.

Generally, the film has a bit of a meandering quality, its plot lines taking too long to come together (and I would argue that excising Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character completely would have cost the film nothing but an actor working below his abilities), and the big dramatic beats never quite having the heft the film seems to think they do.

Visually, the Netflix production is a bit of a middling affair where ugly colour schemes meet competent but often slightly bland action.

Ava (2020): Also perfectly watchable but not exactly great (or even good) is Tate Taylor’s tale of a killer for a weird organization with the least believable procedure finding herself in the crosshairs of her own people while also trying to solve some family business I could care less about. The cast – with Jessica Chastain, John Malkovich, Geena Davis, Common and Colin Farrell among others – is great, but the script loves to go through the most generic plot beats available at any given time, leaving these poor people to pretend the way that organization does business (from its boss doing business at his home next to his playing children to the bizarre assassination plans) makes any kind of sense even for an action movie or allude to not terribly interesting backstories.


All of this would be perfectly forgivable if the action were actually impressive, or the family drama all that riveting, but the former is competent (with action-inexperienced Chastain sometimes struggling to go into the action heroine poses) at best, the latter simply not very interesting.

In short: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009)

US soldiers Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) and their team are transporting some frightfully effective new nano weapons made by the company of one McCullen (Christopher Eccleston armed with the Scottish accent to end all Scottish accents) when they are ambushed by a group of masked, futuristically armed soldiers lead by Ana (Sienna Miller) the woman Duke would have married if not for Traumatic Flashback happenings, though for practical reasons, it’s best to call Ana the Baroness from now on.

Fortunately, another group of futuristically armed soldiers – hey, it’s our heroes of G.I. Joe (among them Rachel Nichols, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Ray “Snake Eyes” Park) – swoops in to the rescue at the last moment and manage to keep the Baroness and her men from getting the nanomites (I’m so sorry, I didn’t write the script, though). Duke and Ripcord are eager to join up with the group, and they’ll have important contributions to make once it turns out that McCullen himself is actually behind the attempted theft of his own merchandise, the bad guys attack the Joes secret headquarters, and a lot of things explode while also ninja stuff and mad science happens.

Yes, yes, yes, I know, Stephen Sommers, the worst, did something unpleasant to my childhood, and so on and so forth but honestly, despite my general loathing for most of the films the man has made, I had quite a good time with what was the best movie adaptation of a toy I knew before I watched the sequel, though the film of course generally doesn’t come close to the mad awesomeness of Larry Hama’s classic comics.

Given the film’s toy pedigree and Sommers’s usual modus operandi, it should come as no surprise that G.I. Joe isn’t exactly on the clever side, but then it is based on the adventures of a oh so secret group of soldiers calling themselves G.I. Joe fighting an evil terrorist organization that’ll get official embassies once it has provoked the Joes into accidentally bombing them an island to annex, so I don’t think that’s something I want to blame Sommers for. For a single movie, it’s clearly best to stick with the whole franchise as a delivery system for loud action, explosions, ninjas, bad jokes, and random weirdness, and as such, it’s pretty effective, though I don’t think any of the actual changes the film makes to franchise canon is one for the better.

Sure, the action is not very convincing for most of the time but at least it’s crazy, and unlike the sort of stuff you see in a Michael Bay film, shot in a way that’s actually meant to provide its audience with the appropriate amount of eye candy. Plus, things explode and there are ninjas, underwater bases, mini-mech suites and stuff, so my inner twelve-year-old (and he’s the guy this was made for, I’m positive) was pretty satisfied with the proceedings.

Because why not, the film’s basically infested with actors who are utterly overqualified for the material (apart from those already mentioned, there are also Lee Byung-hun, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arnold Vosloo and Dennis Quaid doing their respective things), most of them seeming perfectly willing to pretend it’s all perfectly dramatic and exciting, some chewing scenery like champs, some doing horrible accents, everyone buying into the silliness around them with perfect dignity, as it should be.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,action,sf,adewale akinnuoye-agbaje,christopher eccleston,joseph gordon-levitt,lee byung-hun,rachel nichols,dennis quaid,sienna miller

In short: The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

After watching the final film of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, I've worked through various pieces of criticism about it, and I have to agree with about fifty percent of it. So yes, I agree this is a perhaps overlong, often overreaching and internally conflicted film. However, I actually think these things aren't bugs here, they are features; indeed they are for me what makes this a great film.

The thing with the film's overreaching, the way it wants to be about three or four films at once (one of them even a superhero version of A Tale of Two Cities) really comes down to what you expect of your multi-multi-million dollar movies: a tight, slick product, or an actual creative endeavour that sometimes won't be able to fulfil everything it tries, but that makes up for the moments - in this case about twenty percent of the time - when it fails with a willingness to go to interesting, sometimes even surprising, places between the spectacle and loud melodrama the blockbuster business affords. In other words, if we as an audience want our mainstream entertainment to take risks, we also have to accept that not everything in it will work out perfectly and slickly, that there will be roughness, but also honest excitement and actual ideas when things work out, which is what happens in about eighty percent of the movie.

The Dark Knight Rises is a film full of conflicting impulses in its narrative, its politics, its emotions, even its concept of heroism; despite being a superhero movie, it's a film lacking moral certainty (especially in the few moments when it pretends to have it). Things here are messy, and clear-cut answers are not to be found; this is about striving and asking questions, and questioning answers which for my tastes fits the character of Batman much better than making him a barrel-chested 70s love god and international adventurer or a grim and gritty psychopath. It's these cracks and the breaks in the film's structure and meaning that truly make the film work for me, its imperfections working as a reflection of the messiness of reality as well as the messiness of dreams.

Despite the remaining prevalence of Michael Baysian crap, it's a pretty exciting time for blockbuster cinema right now, when movies as different and great in their own ways like this or The Avengers can be made and will be watched by millions, movies that have no problems with pushing all the spectacle buttons while still being ambitious and aggressively non-dumb.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,christopher nolan,christian bale,gary oldman,tom hardy,joseph gordon-levitt,anne hathaway,marion cotillard,michael caine,superheroes,sf

In short: Looper (2012)

To say Rian Johnson's handful of films make me inordinately happy would be a bit of an understatement. Part of the reason for the love I've developed for the man's films can surely be found in certain parallels in aesthetic upbringing people in the same age bracket tend to have, but then I know more than enough directors of my general age whose films are the complete opposite of everything I want in my art.

But I've not come to put down vague, possibly made-up directors who happen to make films I dislike, but to praise Looper and Rian Johnson. The film is another one of the bastard children of Philip K. Dick (rule: the best Dick adaptations are those films that aren't adapting actual Dick texts but are influenced by him), and the history of the near-future SF film. The film is full of echoes of films, and books and movies of the past, but - not surprising in a film whose production design so clearly knows how retro fashion works and whose story just as clearly knows that circles need to be broken - never a slave to them; the shadow of the past is there to make the now more visible and give it more resonance. Despite being a film full of influences of the films of the past, it's not a film about those films.

Looper also just happens to be an excellent, finely ironic SF action film, a film about the lengths one has to go to if one wants to break through the loops of violence and destruction either a malevolent universe with a bitter sense of dramatic irony or just horrible luck of the kind that makes existentialist philosophers cry create, a film about the fact that the Bruce Willis-style 80s and 90s action hero has always been a self-centred prick, a timely reminder why Bruce Willis is still playing in actual movies too, while Stallone and Schwarzenegger are only good for The Expendables 2, and the kind of film that really knows where and how to use obscure soul songs and Richard & Linda Thompson.

So it's not difficult to imagine Looper was made just for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,rian johnson,sf,action,joseph gordon-levitt,emily blunt,bruce willis