Three Films Make A Post: He's in all of us.

Jungle Cruise (2021): Leave it to the wonderful/wondrous Jaume Collet-Serra to turn the adaptation of a Disney ride with The Rock and Emily Blunt into: a very weird sequel to Werner Herzog’s Aguirre; also a film with various heartfelt and honest feeling scenes about the difficulty and joy of being different; a semi-reworking of moments from African Queen; a weird rip-off of elements of the Pirates of the Carribean movies (rides collide) ; a generic blockbuster that repeatedly breaks all the blockbuster rules only to reaffirm them in the very same scene, and then break them again; one damn thing after another; also, a film that would really rather like to be the Fraser/Weisz Mummy. Then imagine how he managed to actually get Disney to pay for the whole thing.

Is the result a good film? I still have no idea. It is, at the very least, one worth watching, gawking at, and pondering as a perhaps productive but certainly not boring aberration.

Two Trains Runnin’ (2016): Very different, and much easier to wrap one’s head around, is this documentary by Sam Pollard that concerns the parallel quests of two groups of white college boys from the North going to Mississippi to find country blues legends Skip James and Son House, respectively, as well as their quest’s curious intersection with the phase of the Civil Rights movements happening in Mississippi at the very same time. There’s much love and thought for the two great (and complicated) old men and their haunting music the kids eventually found, a thoughtful but not judgmental approach to the racial politics of the musical affairs, and a quiet anger about the larger political world (in which Mississippi – or really, the deep South as a whole functioned as if they were not part of the rest of the country at all). It’s told (as narrated by Common) in a mix of talking heads, period photos and film, charming animation, and an excellent choice of musicians covering appropriate songs, doing the complicated business at its core as much justice as any eighty minute movie reasonably can.

Dead Man’s Shoes (2004): Shane Meadows’s film about a soldier coming back to his home town to kill the men responsible for the death of his learning-disabled brother is stylistically much closer to mumblecore than I can usually stomach. But in its case, this approach doesn’t feel like an attempt to signal authenticity by pretending to be inartistic but provides grounding in life to a story that has elements that feel like a comment on the slasher, on all sorts of vengeance movies and the concept of vengeance itself, and as cruel folklore come to life but is not, and doesn’t want to be an exercise in genre deconstruction.

It’s much more a film about the poisonous way the past can shape the present, of pain and destruction becoming nearly living things, or ghosts, but also one that suggests another way out, at least for some.

Three Films Make A Post: You done the man's time--now you gonna do ours!

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017): Four teenagers in detention are sucked into the video game version of the magical board game Jumanji, where they inhabit the bodies (Dwayne “Still The Rock” Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black and Kevin Hart) of the videogame characters and learn valuable lessons about life while trying to escape. Actually, despite me not being the ideal audience this sort of big budget family adventure was made for, I enjoyed myself quite a bit with it, not just because I’m rather fond of the ole Rock and Karen Gillan but also appreciate Jack Black when he’s not just doing his Jack Black shtick – which he can’t, given that he’s playing a teenage girl trapped inside of Jack Black’s body. The film is also often indeed as funny as it is supposed to be, getting a lot of mileage out of playing with gender roles and self-image (seriously). Director Jake Kasdan does still have impeccable comic timing and does rather well with the CGI action, too, so there’s little not to like here. Well, apart from all those valuable lessons that are presented with all the subtlety of an 80s cartoon.

Smashed (2012): Coming to something completely different, how about James Ponsoldt’s sometimes darkly comic drama about young alcoholic Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) realizing her life of partying with her just as alcoholic husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) is leading her ever closer to a complete breakdown. She is able to begin to start to turn things around but that’s not necessarily good for her relationship, seeing that Charlie’s not at the point where he can even see a reason to begin drying out. Unlike a lot of alcoholic dramas I know, Ponsoldt’s film is particularly interested in the fact that Kate’s life without alcohol won’t magically get better, even suggesting that it’s not going to be happier at all, which gives this less the feel of a feel good movie about a woman conquering her issues, but the more real one of a woman trying to find a way to manoeuvre through life in a way that’s honest to herself and others. Apart from the funny, sad and sharp writing and direction the film recommends itself through a great performance by Winstead (who feels quite a bit more like the alcoholics I know than typical of the genre) and a handful of wonderful support actors.


The Cat Returns aka 猫の恩返し Neko no Ongaeshi (2003): What better way to end this on than with cats – some of them rather on the evil side, some not. Hiroyuki Morita’s Studio Ghibli anime is about quiet schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki) getting into quite a bit of trouble in the Kingdom of Cats after she’s saved the crown prince. Fortunately, The Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada) – whom you’ll remember from Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart – of the Cat Bureau is helping her out in a most dashing way. This is certainly one of the most whimsical Ghibli movies, still carrying one of the core themes of the studio’s output, the growing-up experiences of female teenagers, but mostly seeming to have a lot of fun with imagining the Kingdom of the Cats and all that belongs to it. I found the first act particularly lovely, the sure-handed way it characterises Haru and the true sense of wonder of her encounter with the magical in a very real world. This one’s also teaching a valuable lesson, by the way, but goes about it with quite a bit less fear an audience might not notice than Jumanji does.

Doom (2005)

The (soon to be space) marine squad of Sarge (The Rock), consisting of people will charming nick names like Duke (Razaaq Adoti), Destroyer (Deobia Oparei) and Goat (Ben Daniels), are sent to the Mars science base on a search and destroy mission. You see, something horrible has happened in the genetics lab there, and now hungry things are around you probably wouldn’t want to get back to Earth, nor to the main part of the Mars base.

Odd man out in Sarge’s team is Reaper (Karl Urban), who is basically an intellectual – at least in comparison -l who gave up on these pursuits because of the expected family trauma and is slumming with the psychopaths now. Reaper’s not too happy his estranged sister Samantha (Rosamund Pike) is coming with the group to rescue some research material, but if you think this isn’t the kind of movie that’ll end with a nice bit of family reunion, you’ve never seen a film before.

Of course, before new peace between siblings the gods have put a bunch of genetic mutations that need killing, and the revelation of the fact that mindlessly following orders leads to evil. Go figure.

I know, by all rights, I should be quite set against Andrzej Bartkowiak’s adaptation of First Person Shooter godfather Doom but I do have a heart for Aliens lite movies about shooty guys and monsters running through dark corridors. And that, if you ask yourself this highly important question, is exactly the sort of movie this is.

It’s a bit of a disappointment that Doom keeps away from the insane hell parts of the game series’ basic plot and replaces it with the usual dumb and careless experiments with alien DNA (oh, spoiler), as is the related fact that the more beloved monsters from the game make cameo appearances and most of the monsters our protagonists spend their time fighting are of the usual infected and alien suits type. However, it’s pretty clear something more lavish just wasn’t in the budget, and the film does do its best with the things it can afford, resulting in many a tight action scene, lots of shouting, and a smidgen of blood and goo.

If I say it’s all in good fun, I’m probably again sounding like I’m damning with faint praise, but Doom really is a fine bit of corridor shooter (oh, hi, Doom 3 meet Doom). It’s well paced, and using the genre typical character archetypes well. You wouldn’t exactly call the characters three-dimensional. or the treatment of their types subversive, but they do work well in the context of the film they are in. The script even surprises once or twice by being slightly more clever than strictly necessary. First when it slowly shifts its bad ass protagonist from Sarge to Reaper (a trick that probably worked even better in 2005 when the audience wasn’t used to Karl Urban as a leading man), and a second time when it actually starts to argue that, you know, shooting and explosions is fun and all, but from time to time you should probably think through the ethics of what you’re doing; which isn’t a thing you’d expect to find in this sort of shoot ‘em up film, and is even integrated into the plot well enough it actually works.

I also can’t help but feel sympathetic towards a first person shooter adaptation that includes a perfectly silly and cheesy, yet also intensely loveable, first person shooter sequence; I’m pretty sure Paul W.S. Anderson was quite put out when he saw Doom and realized he could have used over-the-shoulder cam in one of his Resident Evil films (which might explain a certain backwards slow motion scene in one of his RE films as a very particular kind of overcompensation). There’s really something irresistible about a film that uses that sort of scene without really breaking its perfectly straight (if one-liner lined) face for me.

Plus, the violence is fun, fast, and plenty, leaving Doom a much more entertaining piece of cinematic art than I’d been led to believe.

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