Three Films Make A Post: Survival is its own Journey.

Antarctic (2018): A cynic might say there’s not much new for the survival genre in Joe Penna’s movie about Mads Mikkelsen finding himself stranded in the Arctic and starting a dangerous attempt towards safety to rescue the lone survivor (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir) of a helicopter come to save him. But then, this cynic here would say there’s alas very little new in life at all, so I’m not going to criticize a film for making a very good entry inside genre lines. And really, there’s so much to like here, starting with Mads Mikkelsen’s controlled performance that seems utterly believable and has little problem convincing that we are indeed witnessing a desperate man trying to survive without the actor ever needing to lay things on thick. Also wonderful are the nature photography that manages to find the point where a landscape can be beautiful but also utterly indifferent to all human concerns, and a script that is very good at providing Mikkelsen with opportunity to portray the struggle between the desperate need for survival and his better nature.

Police Story (1985): This one’s an eternal classic of Hong Kong action cinema (and therefore even more so of action cinema in general), full of the kind of stunts that aren’t just to be described as “jaw-dropping” but which will make your jaw drop for real, with the typical Jackie Chan mix of low-brow but high physical creativity slapstick and insane action where even less glass remains unbroken than in other Hong Kong films. Was there still sugar glass in Hong Kong after they shot the climax? I doubt it.
If one were a bore, one might complain that the slapstick and the cop on the edge business of the film don’t always flow into one another as organically as they could, but since Jackie’s damn great at both sides of the equation as an actor and as a director, I can’t say I ever cared watching the film. At the very least, both slapstick and action movies are about bodies in motion, so there’s always that most natural of connections.


BOO! (2019): There are some moments of the kind of dramaturgic awkwardness you encounter in films with a budget that’s a bit too low for their ambitions, but there are elements in Luke Jaden’s film about a wavering mixed-race family encountering a supernatural threat that will break them apart even more than anything of what they get up to without it which I found genuinely haunting. There’s something about the way the performances, the notion of how the nightmarish supernatural widens the gaps between the family members and rips open never truly healed wounds, and some just great, memorable moments of horror (even if the special effects are a bit crap) come together that I found more than a little disquieting and sad, and while I’m still not quite sure how and why the film affected me this way, it just might do the same thing to you.