GiftsAustralian friend Paul Hix was getting rid of DVDs, I guess, and sent me four Australian selections: Kenny, Rabbit Proof Fence, Breaker Morant, and Gallipoli.
"Accomplishments"
In theaters: Ouija meets Flat Liners, Talk to Me presents us with a creepy ceramic hand that acts as a conduit to the other side, with malevolent spirits following rules well delineated from the start, and teenagers fooling about with it at parties like you know they would. Quite appropriately, there's a monkey's paw element to it - when Mia (Sophie Wilde) wants to reconnect with her dead mother, it's be careful what you wish for, and there's a big question as to what really happened to mom, and whether she's with the angels or the devils now. Ironic endings are in store for our Mia. The creep factor is pretty high, and there's some unpredictability in terms of plot, but I think what actually gives it its extra oomph is the setting. Rural Australia is just distinctive enough that the movie doesn't feel like just another bunch of suburban Californians a stone's throw from the Hollywood sign. Also, mad props to Miranda Otto as the other girl's mom, she's pretty great in this and really deserves a higher profile.
At home: Marketed as John Wick in World War II, the Finnish film Sisu does feature a relentless killer mowing down the opposition, somewhat in revenge (though more often in a "get out of my way" fashion), but the similarities stop there (well, ok, there's a dog, and a Russian nickname for our guy). It's much gorier than a John Wick, and the action style is different. Director Jalmari Helander (Rare Exports) and that same movie's Jorma Tommila as Sisu's subverbal protagonist set up a bunch of gold-hungry Nazis to be bloodily wrecked in a most satisfying way. The way the hero survives and takes on the enemy is often novel, extreme, ridiculous and highly entertaining. There IS an admitted historical source for the protagonist, an assassin who hunted Russians during World War II, but we're strictly in a hi-octane universe where determination keeps you alive under impossible circumstances, unless your Nazi ass deserves to die, and then you're meat for the grindhouse. A bare-bones script, but the film makers find their joy in action gags and sometimes, that's all you need.
The first Shazam film set us up for Mr. Mind, but the sequel didn't have the guts to follow through and instead we get Greek mythology thrown into a blender to the point where it's just using familiar-sounding words, but has no idea what their actual context is. But if I found the movie tedious, it's not so much that as the ill-judged comedy that too often falls flat or at its worse, comes across as obnoxious. The joke about these heroes not having a name because the cowards at the top don't want to use Captain Marvel gets past the Rule of Three and make you feel like this franchise is essentially unworkable for trademark reasons. We also get very CG monsters, an in-story Skittles commercial, a teenage goddess out of some WB show, Mary Marvel with a hangover, cop-outs aplenty. motivations lacking, tonally-unacceptable deaths and yet destruction porn relating to somehow empty buildings (the DCAU has yet to shrug off its Man of Steel problem), execrable slow motion (the DCAU can't help itself), and it's generally hard to keep up the urgency of the situations when characters stop in the middle of tense combat moments to make speeches or tell jokes. Shazam! Fury of the Gods looks like it's trying hard to appeal to MCU fans, but only really manages to be annoying.
While I feel compelled to watch Jack Ryan material, I'm glad Season 4 of the new show brings it to an end (I guess it COULD continue, but that's what they announced). It's never been a bad show, but it's never quite clicked with me. Maybe I just like my spycraft without so much paramilitary gun play, and a lot of this is predicated on the CIA being made up of, like, 5 people. This last season has a rather abstract threat that (as usual) makes the first half a little dull, even though the action and suspense pick up considerably in the back half. There's more of an attempt to include Jack's future spouse Cathy in the proceedings, and there's a big subplot about confirmation hearings, but mostly, after previous seasons going to the Middle East, South America and then Europe, this story goes 'round the world hitting almost every continent, including Asia and Africa. At the end of the run, Jack hasn't really shed his label of cipher and the other CIA people are all more interesting, except maybe new addition Michael Peña, who is a great comic actor, but is just stone-faced and bordering on non-performance as a badass.
The world of Vesper might as well be an alien planet, with its post-apocalyptic biome and lo-fi gene hacking, but it IS Earth, friends, Earth after we done ruined it with genetically-engineered viruses. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) is a 15-year-old girl taking care of her bed-ridden dad in the harsh boonies of this world, too clever for her own good, when their lives are flipped upside down by the arrival of someone from the "Citadel", where the Haves live in comfort and luxury. In addition to the great world-building and image-making, writer-directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper offer a plot that rarely strikes me as predictable. Eddie Marsan is surprisingly threatening as the villainous uncle who is only out for himself. Vesper is a little as if David Cronenberg wrote Young Adult fiction, and if either of those pieces of DNA interest you, you should find something to like here (and I dare say it's smarter than all or most of the YA adaptations I've seen).
Based on a poem by Henrik Ibsen, Terje Vigen (AKA A Man There Was) is a Swedish classic from the silent era, and like a lot of Scandinavian cinema, examines Christian values and means to instruct morally, without however name-checking religion. Terje is a man who loses everything in the British blockage of Norway in the early 19th Century, and later feels a deep need for revenge, which is all well and good when you're just raging at the treacherous sea, but becomes more complicated when you actually meet the British officer responsible for your misery. It's a simple moral fable, enlivened by star and director Victor Sjöström's sea-tossed cinematography - shooting the film is roiling waters off the masts of boats in ways that don't look safe at all. The interstitials are a much too descriptive of the action and you could jettison 80% of them, but perhaps their are straight out of Ibsen and would have been recognized at the time?
I'd like to examine the title of Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath of God, because on the one hand, the mad conquistador of history who went looking for El Dorado and declared independence from Spain thinks of himself as God. On the other, this is about the wrath of an actual God as Aguirre leads his group to ruinous end for having defied the natural order, according to several definitions. The treatment of natives obviously bowled over the natural order, and Man attempting to tame the Amazon is another obvious one. But not to Spaniards of this era. But the story caters to their worldview too, because Aguirre subverts the laws of civilization, deposes rulers, commits heresy. It's Herzog's Moby Dick, a story of deadly obsession, and nevertheless not without humor, some of it from the absurdity of keeping civilized norms alive in that environment. The cast and crew are forced to essentially make the trip down from the Andes themselves, which raises the production values as well. The one I actually feel bad for is the horse.
The original Django isn't just one of Tarantino's inspirations - the song is great and was a perfect lift for Unchained - it's a great down-and-dirty spaghetti western on its own (the English dub isn't, but I've heard worse). This Django is a former Union soldier who walks into a ghost town and its whorehouse trapped between Mexican and former Confederate factions, dragging a coffin behind him. This is a postapocalyptic Old West, a muddy sinkhole of a place where peasants are shot for fun and saloon girls are coughing from consumption. It's striking as all get out. And though you think whole mysterious fast-drawing stranger comes to town and saves it premise is old hat, the movies goes into strange, dark - cool! - directions you're not expecting. Because this isn't the Old West so much as a Purgatory, or possibly even a Hell, where the lead is already dead, and everyone else either wish he was or that they were. Iconic! There's a reason a bunch of older films were rebranded with the Django name to supplement a growing number of new Djangosploitation releases.
In Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff, a governor is exiled for being too nice to the peasants, but this isn't his story. Rather, it's about his family who try to rejoin him, living at the whims of the kindness or cruelty of strangers. The cruellest is Sansho, a slave master who gets his hands on the two kids and tests their ability to follow in their merciful father's footsteps, both literally and figuratively. Human pain is contrasted by beautiful cinematography, nature that doesn't care about the drama (and indeed seems to take a hand against humanity). Is mercy a singularly human trait? The much-heralded final shot is perhaps a reflection of the audience. According to our own attitudes, we might think Mizoguchi is telling us that world is made of cruelty, or that he is being merciful to us and the characters by panning away from their pain, or both, or more. But like most films that are about enduring hardship, my investment is limited, and I'm not entirely convinced the film delivers on the quality of mercy it stresses so much, or something gets lost in translation, perhaps.
Don't ask me to explain the villain's actions, but Action Jackson is a lot of fun and deserves its cult status. I mean, when you think of Carl Weathers, you immediately want to call him "Action Jackson", and I'm sure if the studios hadn't gotten into a game of "pass the rights", it would have spawned one or more sequels. Jackson is a super smart cop who gets into trouble easily, beefy but not invincible (halfway between Arnold and Bruce Willis, and indeed, he fights a lot of the crew from Die Hard here), funny and a ladies' man, but righteous too. But what I most appreciate about the movie is that even the smallest parts have something going for them, some little quirk or moment to make them memorable before they're horribly murdered or shake their fists at Jackson as he rides off. This flick in fact starts on a blazingly cool action-murder and keeps providing cool sequences we haven't really seen in other movies - which to me, is the standard all action flicks should aspire to. Small but crucial role for pre-stardom Sharon Stone, Craig T. Nelson doing martial arts, Biff Tannen telling jokes, Bill Duke as the police chief, and gratuitous nudity, everything you need to keep you entertained (ok, maybe not that last one).
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