Three Films Make A Post: A Rian Johnson Whodunit.

RRR (2022): It’s a little wonder the kind of mainstream critics who’d usually spit on an Indian mainstream movies the same way as they do on a Marvel flick seem to have seen the light for S.S. Rajamouli’s latest. It’s probably the cartoonish (yet certainly not un-earned) anti-colonialism, whose treatment of Big, Serious Themes is just as enthusiastically maximalist as everything else in the movie, be it manly friendship or turning historical figures into the mythical equivalent of superheroes. The musical numbers (apart from the flag-waving post-movie sequence that really takes things too far in the nationalist direction for my tastes) are awesome (in all meanings of the word), as are the fights scenes, the melodrama, the CGI (realism can shut it),  and the oversized personalities. If this doesn’t grab you already simply by the virtue of being EVERYTHING at its loudest, but also most charming, then just look at how Rajamouli paces this thing, as if a three hour runtime weren’t a marathon but a damn sprint he – clearly as heroically made as his characters – can keep up for so long without even the slightest of efforts.

Glass Onion (2022): Full disclosure: I don’t actually like Knives Out, despite my huge admiration for everything else Rian Johnson has made. I found it unpleasantly smug in the way certain parts of the “progressive” side of US politics can look from over here (where their reactionary counterparts simply tend to look like fascist assholes), and wasn’t impressed by it never giving a character a second dimension if one was available. This one here, with the same basic politics, does everything right, grounding snarky politics in actual characterisation and much more complex relationships, which does tend to make one’s politics much more convincing. All the while, the film keeps the ease with which Johnson has always juggled plot, humour and a sharp visual eye. The cast is doing fantastic work as well. Hell, even Daniel Craig has toned down his “Southern” accent from rage-inducingly obnoxious to terrible (which is of course the traditional note the detective in a Christie-style traditional murder mystery has to hit).

The Banshees of Inisherin (2022): This tragical comedy about the end of friendship, boredom, depression, places and people that drag everyone in and around them down, as well as the one woman who gets the hell away by Martin McDonagh is the wonder everyone says it is. Funny and sad at the same moment, this shows what are foibles in most of us turn big and toxic in its characters, self-destructive and violent in ways that are grotesque when you think about them but also feel completely natural and logical.

In McDonagh’s usual style, there’s much space left for the actors –particularly of course Kerry Condon, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – where lesser films aiming where McDonagh does might bury them under mawkish or too knowing dialogue.

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.

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Three Films Make A Post: Featuring the Longest Kiss in Cinema History!

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011): Guy Ritchie's second movie about the adventures of a very pulp hero Sherlock Holmes played by Robert Downey Jr. and his especially long-suffering Watson Jude Law shares all the virtues of the first movie, and is therefore pretty much as good as mainstream adventure cinema gets. It's fun, it's silly, it's playful, and so totally divorced from Victorian reality or the self-image of Victorians as evidenced in Doyle's work, it develops something of a subversive edge simply by treating both with as little respect as they deserve yet also with as much - probably more - love as they do.

Bonus points for a Moriarty who doesn't act like a hyperactive twelve-year-old, Noomi Rapace (who would make a pretty great pulp Holmes too, I think) and the most off-handed Reichenbach Falls ever.

The Life of the World to Come (2010): For some reason, this film doesn't appear on Rian Johnson's IMDB page, but this was made by the director of Brick and The Brothers Bloom anyway. It's a one take/long take concert film without an audience of The Mountain Goats (in this case in the form of John and Rachel) performing the whole of "The Life of the World to Come", the (not exactly religious) album on which all songs are titled with bible verses - which honestly is much better in practice than it may sound in theory; a description that fits The Mountain Goats in general.

For the most part, the film consists of the camera shifting position around Darnielle while he plays on the piano or the guitar, providing the film with an aesthetic that is minimalist and - thanks to the long take business - just a bit awkward at times, which again fits The Mountain Goats nicely, for this is the music of a guy who has always been willing to accept and own moments of awkwardness instead of excising them.

I'm too much of a fan of Darnielle (whose music, together with that of the Go-Betweens, Lucinda Williams, Epic Soundtracks, and the Fellow Travellers may very well have kept me sane at one point in my life) to say much about the quality of the music or the performance, except that the film made me cry just a little.

Finalmente… le mille e una notte aka 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972): As a genre, the Italian sex comedy, even in its (in theory) more classy aspect, never did much for me, despite sharing at least the female half of its casts with those Italian genres of the same eras I do love. Their ideas about what's funny and mine just disagree a bit too much with each other.

So I found myself rather surprised when (house favourite) Antonio Margheriti's provoked quite a few smiles and even two or three guffaws from me here. The film's combination of low-brow comedy, nudity graciously provided by actresses like Barbara Bouchet and Femi Benussi (and, if that floats your boat, to a lesser degree actors like Gino Milli and, well, whoever plays the other semi-nude guys), and pretty nice to look at production design doesn't exactly add up to something everyone should see, but the film is a fine enough piece of exploitation for those evenings when something deeper, cleverer or less friendly would be too much. This is also another film that supports my theory of Margheriti being - generally (let's pretend we don't know his war movies) - one of the most good-natured of all Italian genre directors, for there's really nothing nasty about the film, even when the joke's by all rights should feel nasty. I imagine Margheriti as a happy man.

 

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Three Films Make A Post: The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.

The Brothers Bloom (2008): I suspect there's only two ways people can go with this one - either they'll fall in love with Rian Johnson's highly stylized and playful film about lies and stories so good they can become the truth, or they'll call it pretentious and be annoyed by its obvious cleverness. Me, I'll never be found among those saying even a single bad word about a film that can pull off a karaoke version of the Band's "Sleeping".

Man of Vendetta (2010): The directorial debut of Woo Min-ho has most of the qualities I associate with South Korean thrillers: it's as slickly directed as any major Hollywood film, but much more willing to go into really nasty and unpleasant places without needing to wallow in the nastiness more than is necessary. It's acted excellently by a cast that knows the difference between "sparse" and "wooden". It has a script that doesn't feel the need to always add another twist if that twist would be to the detriment of mood and characters, yet still knows and uses all the tricks of its genre.

Still, while I can and do admire these achievements, Man of Vendetta never clicked with me emotionally. It might be that the film's keeping of its child-kidnapping and murdering psycho something of a cipher without backstory makes it difficult for me to be all that frightened of or shocked by him, or just that the "lone civilian fights psycho for his little daughter" format is quite played out, even if its realized this technically proficient. For whatever reason, my admiration never turned into actually caring, and a film that was supposed to have an emotional impact just didn't.

Cyborg Girl (2008): Speaking of movies that don't have the emotional impact their directors seem to want them to have easily leads to this Japanese science fiction comedy romance melodrama (no, really) with Haruka Ayase and Keisuke Koide, directed by South Korean Jae-young Kwak whom you might know from My Sassy Girl. Guy falls in love with a time-travelling android built by his own future self to safe himself from serious bodily harm and a major disaster that is pretty uncomfortable to watch this shortly after the Japanese earthquake. Hilarity, a bit of friendly violence (yay!) and cloying, overly drawn-out sentimentality ensues. And no, there's nothing at all creepy about the film's set-up, at least nothing Kwak (also responsible for the script) knows of. Though the two leads really do their best with what they are given, Cyborg Girl is just too overloaded to get the tears out of me that it wants its audience so badly to cry. I'm perfectly willing to be moved by a weirdly artificial tragedy, but the film's tendency to just wallow in it all the time feels cynical and manipulative where it's supposed to be sad and heart-warming. The here melodrama just feels terribly artificial in all the wrong ways.

 

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