Three Films Make A Post: "Once upon a time …"

House of Darkness (2022): Clearly, I’m never going to connect with anything Neil LaBute does. After all, not everybody is going to rave about a painfully dull and obvious “reworking” of elements of Dracula that tries so hard to be about Toxic Masculinity, #metoo, and so on, it forgets to include anything new or interesting to say about the matter. That LaBute’s approach doesn’t do characters or narrative is a bit of a problem, particularly as he uses so many words to say so few things. Things do tend to become rather tedious when you know what a film has to say after five minutes but it’s going to talk at you for ninety when there’s nothing else to hold onto.

Personally, I find LaBute’s dialogue tedious, dull and painfully self-congratulatory; his mode of satire is obvious, and his general idea of how to shoot a movie stagey and of little interest. Come to think of it, it’s the man’s films, not me.

Alienoid (2022): Where LaBute would never do anything so gauche as to attempt to tell a story, Choi Dong-hoon’s science fiction, fantasy, martial arts, action epic, tells its own in as complicated a manner as possible, shifting pointlessly – unless you’re really into obvious twists – between two main time frames in a way bound to give the film a stop/start feel that’s not exactly ideal for this sort of cinema.

The film also suffers from the fact that its Joseon era South Korean wuxia stylings are much more entertaining and fun than its present day timeline science fiction shenanigans, which are rather dull in comparison. On the plus side, most of the big set pieces set are fun – the final act completely in the olden times even fun throughout – and there’s an undeniable joy at seeing South Korea doing its version of big blockbuster cinema.

The film’s only really inexcusable flaw is that it doesn’t end but just suddenly stops on a cliffhanger in a really annoying way.

The Ecstasy of Wilko Johnson (2015): This post’s high point is quite obviously this joyful, thoughtful and often very funny documentary by Julien Temple which tells the tale of Dr Feelgood’s Wilko Johnson’s diagnosis with incurable cancer that should have left him only a couple of months to live, and his rather uncommon reaction to his death sentence. Because the universe can be that way, there are also various plot twists towards the better.

Through interviews and a collage of material from films and other arts, Temple paints a loving portrait of Johnson not just as a musician but as a person, as an independently eccentric thinker (that’s a good thing in his case), and as an intensely likable guy full of surprises, finding a sense of lightness even in the the tale’s dark moments, without resorting to kitsch or sentimentality.