Is it that time of the year again already?

 Like every year, the stars are turning wrong and I have to go into hibernation for a bit. Our regular schedule will recommence on January, 6th.

Happy Holidays, or whatever tickles your fancy, dear imaginary readers!

In short: Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

Julien Temple’s documentary about the late, great Shane MacGowan uses a kind of collage method to not speak about the man and his work but let him speak for himself. So the film uses archival footage and often appropriately bizarre animation to illustrate the life and times of MacGowan as he tells them through various interviews from different stages of his life, some of which conducted by and with friends with an physically barely there man. The only outside perspective given is from some interviews with members of his family, editorializing doesn’t really happen. Given MacGowan’s tendency to extreme drunken debauchery, I wouldn’t exactly believe anything he’s saying, which doesn’t mean the film isn’t a true portrayal of his life and mind – it’s simply not one I’d believe as a portrayal of all the facts of his life and mind. But the facts aren’t really the point when you’re trying the portrait the core of a human being.

Given the nature of the man and his music, the film is a mix of nostalgia, aggression and sudden outbursts of poetry. It’s also clearly not on board with romanticizing hard living as a necessity for art – there’s an unflinching aspect to its look at MacGowan’s increasing physical and mental decline that leaves no room for that. Pleasantly, this unflinching view is paired with a complete lack of hypocritical moral superiority – talent wasting away and life fading is not treated with judgment here, but sadness for what’s gone and love for what’s still there. Which does turn this into a bit of a heartbreaker for those of us to whom MacGowan’s music means a lot, but that’s only right and proper.

In short: Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls (2023)

Bedraggled and just plain weird burger flipper Marcus (Andrew Bowser) is trying to reinvent himself as occultist Onyx the Fortuitous, following the teachings of YouTube occultist, rock star, and Satanic fitness video guru Bartok the Great (Jeffrey Combs). Onyx, let’s use his chosen moniker, is not very bright.

So he is exceedingly happy when he is one of the five Chosen invited to help Bartok with a ritual that will gain everyone involved immortality. Obviously, Bartok’s plans are mite more sinister than he’s letting on, and Chosen might actually be short for Chosen Sacrifices.

Andrew Bowser’s Onyx etc is a bit of an acquired taste, to say the least. Or really, if one is in the wrong headspace for it and particularly its high maintenance protagonist who never shuts up making noises with his very unpleasant voice, this could be a bit of a chore. Particularly during the film’s first half, Onyx the character is just a bit much, and his “funny” loser shtick never really loses those quotation marks. But then, I’m not a great candidate for appreciating this kind of awkwardness-based comedy at the best of times, and Onyx is really, really awkward. The situation isn’t helped by the sluggishness of the beginning of a film that takes ages to get to its early and most obvious beats.

On the other hand, even the film’s early stages are well shot, and well edited, and, even if you don’t like the tone it is going for, clearly well acted – it featuring Barbara Crampton, Olivia Taylor Dudley and Combs certainly doesn’t hurt, either.

Once the preliminaries were finally through, Onyx actually won me over, though. Suddenly, ideas became silly but clever instead of completely obvious, character relations were rather more interesting than they at first looked, and the film demonstrated a likeable, big heart, while still having fun with movie Satanist clichés. Even the jokes in the later stages hit better – there’s nothing that isn’t funny about a seduction scene in form of a fake Meatloaf video with not-Thundercats.

In short: It’s a Wonderful Knife (2023)

On paper, doing a modern gimmick horror version of Capra’s insufferable, inevitable It’s a Wonderful Life sounds like a grand idea, for its vague politics and Capra’s peculiar world view really could use a bit of an update; plus blood and guts go well with anything.

In the hands of director Tyler MacIntyre and writer Michael Kennedy, this doesn’t turn out to be a worthwhile effort. The film never seems to be sure what kind of story it actually wants to tell, and for the handful of clever, fun or funny moments it squeezes in while not really telling much of one, there are dozens that simply fall flat. Unlike the film this is taking its basic idea from, the dystopic hellscape the town turns into when the slasher isn’t dispatched by our heroine is just too flat – dope smokers are now into crack instead! – and the curious attempt to change the role of our heroine when compared to the non-slasher version of the material neither makes much sense for the plot, nor does it result in anything much worthwhile thematically.

The attempts at doing the “society’s outsiders are awesome; lesbians are great” thing are certainly likeable, but never really come to life more than stating the obvious generally does.

Knife isn’t much clearer in its treatment of its supernatural elements, particularly when Justin Long’s evil mayor also turns out to have some random hypnotic powers or something, for some reason the film isn’t going into and the characters don’t seem to believe worth even thinking about. I can’t help but think rather a lot of things were lost between various versions of the script, and the film this ended up as is some curious undead abomination made from scraps.

Music Monday: Every Year Edition

Concerning the Ad Wars: https://freetubeapp.io/

Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.

In short: Ballerina (2022)

Original title: 발레리나

Our protagonist Ok-joo (Jeon Jong-seo) has a background in the security business Ballerina never really explains but that provides her with all kind of badass abilities. Apart from her close friendship with ballerina/cake shop seller Min-hee (Park Yu-rim), she seems to be virtually friendless, a loner by inclination. One might suspect a traumatic past, what with this being an action movie made in the 21st Century, but the film is never showing us one.

Ok-joo does acquire some acute trauma in any case when she finds Min-hee dead of suicide. Min-hee left a note in which she asks Ok-joo to avenge her, complete with a mildly cryptic hint about what the hell she means with that. Soon, Ok-joo is on the trail of mass rapist, killer, and all-around shitheel Choi (Kim Ji-hoon), who raped and enslaved Min-hee, causing her suicide.

Under normal circumstances, killing Choi would be about an evening's work for Ok-joo, but it turns out he’s just part of a large drug, forced prostitution and murder racket, which makes things rather more difficult for her.

Lee Chung-hyun’s Ballerina is a nice little action movie, with some post-John Wick style gun fu, moments of absurd humour that seem to pop in from a different world than the rest of the film, and the attitude to genre tropes we know and love from South Korean genre cinema: tropes are excellent things, fun and really rather useful, but when the mood strikes, they are also optional.

There’s no large restructuring of the elements of the revenge flick here. Lee’s clearly trying to make an effective example of the form right in the mainstream of the cinematic language of our time for such a thing, just one that from time to time likes to turn things a couple degrees away from the completely straight and narrow, which keeps affairs more lively.

Colour schemes, camera work and editing scream POP! so much I’m pretty sure this is going to be a movie we’ll be able to read as a platonic ideal of how action filmmaking in the 2020s looked when we’re ten, fifteen years in the future. It’s certainly a fun example of its form and style, and though it doesn’t exactly have more substance than is strictly necessary for it to function, it still is a fine time.

Short Film Friday: The Archivists

The Archivists from Timelapse Pictures on Vimeo.

In short: The Killer (2023)

A professional killer (Michael Fassbender) botches an assassination attempt. After his middle-man sends people to his home that brutalize his partner, the Killer works his way up to his actual employer.

There’s really very little plot or direct characterization to David Fincher’s The Killer. Fassbender’s character is highly self-contained – or empty – except for a monologue that very pointedly does not really analyse or comment on what’s going on, even though it at first appear to do so. Rather, the repetitious monologue in his head is just another method the Killer uses not to have to connect with the world, to “stay in the moment” in the most nihilist way imaginable, just as he uses his own private The Smiths soundtrack for the same thing.

Everything we learn about the man’s actual inner life, or what little there is of it, the film shows us via the breaks in his facades, the physical injuries that begin to roughen up his slickness, and the way his actual deeds often are exactly the opposite of what his inner monologue never stops repeating. That this works as well as it does has a lot to do with focus: like the character at his best/worst (performance/morals), Fincher’s direction here is fastidious, neat and tidy, absolutely focussed on showing the things his main characters is not telling by insinuation, while always keeping up the appearance of this being a simple straightforward thriller.

This contrast between what we’re told we are seeing and what we are actually seeing does lend the film a surprisingly strong thread of humour. It’s a pretty grim sense of humour, of course, but that’s the only fitting kind of humour for this sort of thing – there’s something inherently funny about a guy telling himself quite as many lies as the Killer does, and a film presenting these lies with such a straight face, but murder is still murder. There’s some conceptual humour here as well: the Smiths as the best soundtrack to assassinate people to, the way the Killer’s philosophy mixes crap nihilism (the kind of nihilism only good for excusing one’s own shittiness with the shittiness of the world or universe) with wellness lingo that suggests a future influencer career for the Killer are things that not just work as elements of showing us a character but are also pretty great jokes, when you think about them for a minute.

The Creator (2023)

Some decades in the future. Somehow, humanity has developed genuine AI instead of the predictive language modelling that makes the hearts of our tech bros all a-quiver, and created various types of AI people. Following a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles for which they make AI as a whole responsible, the US have declared war on AI, not just outlawing its use and creation at home but going to war with anyone who isn’t quite this fond of what amounts to genocide. Particularly parts of Asia have become home to various ways of organic and inorganic people coexisting mostly peacefully.

Now, the US is officially winning its “war” thanks to a huge orbital weapons platform called NOMAD that hangs over Southeast Asia like the hammer of doom. In truth, NOMAD is the only thing that’s actually winning anything for anyone here, so desperate measures are called for when the mysterious scientific mastermind behind much of the AIs’ successes has apparently developed some sort of secret weapon against NOMAD.

To get at this weapon, a small strike force invades an Asian country that apparently isn’t Thailand anymore where intelligence believes the weapon is created. Because the US also want to finally get rid of its creator, they drag embittered veteran Joshua (John David Washington, giving a perfect performance) back in for his experiences in the area the attack takes place in. Five years ago, Joshua was undercover with the AI people, married to the scientist’s daughter Maya (Gemma Chan), and clearly teetering on the edge of changing sides for good. A botched attack killed Maya and their unborn child, and left Joshua rather unwilling to take part in much more of this.

Now, the military dangles Maya’s supposed survival in front of Joshua like a carrot. During the incursion into not-Thailand – which consists in large part of the US soldiers slaughtering civilians, AI (which aren’t “real” by their definition) or not – Joshua manages to get at the weapon the military is so wild about. The weapon, it turns out, is an AI that looks like a child. Instead of delivering Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), as Joshua will soon call her, to the Americans, he takes her on the run, in the hope she will lead him to Maya. Obviously, he is now hunted by all sides of the conflict.

For my tastes, Gareth Edwards’s The Creator is a wonder of a big budget science fiction film that squeezes in the mandatory amount of – pretty great – action set pieces but stays thoughtful and focussed on the things it wants to say throughout.

Much of the film’s quality lies in the ability of its director to use the spectacular production design and effects to do much of the world-building heavy lifting. Consequently, all the pretty things we are looking at here are not only meant to look cool – though they certainly do – but also fill out all of the details that turn abstract ideas into a living world.

This fits in nicely with the often hyperrealist direction style Edwards uses, putting less emphasis on a sense of wonder than of the film as showing a lived reality where things that should put the inhabitants of its world to wonder and awe are just parts of an often dirty day to day struggle. Because yes, this is the kind of science fiction that’s not just of its time but very much about its time, using echoes of the Vietnam War and all of those military “police actions” that so seldom seem to achieve what they are supposed to, but leave a lot of innocent people dead, to talk about sometimes surprisingly complex ideas about the nature of violent conflict and imperialism.

We still get a proper Hollywood ending where shit blows up, mind you, just one the film trusts its audience to understand in context; it is also one that doesn’t shy away from showing even such things to have a price. We’re meant to cheer in the end, but we’re also meant to understand what exactly it is we are cheering, and what has been lost for it.

In general, the film trusts its audience rather more than is the fashion right now, not just in us understanding the ending, in understanding the parallels of its world to the here and now, but also in understanding the more subtle elements of its politics and how these are part of the actions of its characters. Thus, even the genocidal military people are allowed to make sense as people, and the film never exactly becomes some triumphant thing about heroic rebels struggling against oppression, but emphasises the price in guilt and violence and loss of even the best of ends.

In short: Psychic Vision: Jaganrei (1988)

Original title: サイキックビジョン 邪願霊

A small crew is shooting documentary footage about the idol business, specifically the production of the new single of idol Emi, a song with the somewhat curious title of “Love Craft”. There’s something strange about the song, or rather, the music itself, and the production is soon haunted by minor supernatural troubles that seem to be connected to the melody. Nobody seems to really know who wrote the music, or rather, those few who might know seem rather reticent to tell. Our intrepid female lead reporter does eventually finds out the music was written by a woman who committed suicide shortly after she finished the song, which connects in a somewhat disquieting manner to the strange appearance of a ghostly woman in the background of various shots of the documentary.

Supernatural anger will to come to a head on a production run though for the “Love Craft” music video.

Jaganrei, directed by Teruyoshi Ishii, was POV horror of the fake documentary style before that was a defined subgenre, even though of course far from being the first fake documentary. It is astonishingly good at prefiguring much of what came after in its POV horror subgenre. Ishii creates a feeling of real verisimilitude. From the empty business talk of the suits creating Emi and her image, to the girl’s professional sound bites and fake smiles whenever a camera points her way, the film has a wonderful feeling of authenticity that grounds its handful of supernatural events in a very believable world.

These bits of supernatural business already include a bit of the “blink and you’ll miss it, until we repeat it” tactics that would become so important for later Japanese direct-to-DVD (etc) POV horror, and uses that trick effectively, producing tension with simple (and cheap) tactics without feeling simplistic.

It’s a lovely, short forty-nine minutes of period detail and spookiness, and thus highly recommended.

Music Monday: Prince and Joni Edition

The Equalizer 2 (2018)

Warning: spoilers for pretty damn obvious revelations ahead!

Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is still going about his very particular kind of vigilante business, now spending time as a Lyft driver to observe humanity, and, this viewer can’t help but think, find either some people in trouble, or people he can sadistically punish for making trouble for others.

Helping out the elderly, breaking the bones of rapists and scaring a kid from the apartment house McCall owns straight doesn’t quite make for the needed action quota – these aren’t the 1970s anymore – so one of McCall’s few genuine friends, CIA analyst Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) is murdered. The deed at first appears to be a break-in gone wrong, but McCall soon enough figures out there’s actually a mildly complex conspiracy involved.

Some people from McCall’s intelligence wet work past are channelling their violence in much worse ways then our vigilante does, and Susan stumbled onto their trail. If you’re surprised that McCall’s former best bud and partner (Pedro Pascal) is one of them, you’ve never seen an action movie or thriller in your life.

I really didn’t get along with the first Equalizer movie, a movie that seemingly doesn’t realize that its hero is more of sadistic serial killer than your typical movie vigilante (who are typically already sadistic and murderous enough), and finds him being cruel incredibly cool. Someone seems to have explained things to director Antoine Fuqua in the meantime, however, for the second Equalizer goes out of its way to emphasise McCall as someone who uses violence as a means of protection much more than one of punishment. There’s still a degree of sadism to the way he goes about things but not more of it than is to be expected from a contemporary action movie, and the film doesn’t seem quite so in love with this aspect of the character as the first one was.

Atypically for a big budget action film made in the last couple of decades, The Equalizer 2 leaves a lot of space for emotion and character development demonstrated through calm and curiously quotidian – at least for the kind of person McCall is – interactions between our protagonist and the various people he encounters, helps out, or brutalizes. This does the film and its main character a world of good, because it builds actual relationships between him and the world he inhabits, and so puts effort into selling the good he does as much as his badassery/violent temper. From time to time, the film does stray in the direction of the Very Special Episode here, but thanks to Washington and a fine supporting cast, it never quite gets there.

This looser structure and calmer pace also demonstrate a side of director Antoine Fuqua I didn’t expect – an ability to focus on the important parts of human interactions and a degree of patience and restraint his filmmaking usually lacks. I really didn’t think this particular director had much beyond “able to get along with Denzel Washington” to offer, but turns out that, given the right material, he can make a genuinely good movie.

Even once the action starts, Fuqua eschews his typical showiness in favour of mostly controlled set-pieces that don’t need overwrought editing or obfuscating camerawork and instead draw much of their power from an ability to put the audience beside the characters in what feel like actual physical places, which to me is still one of the important elements of an effective action sequence.

Three Films Make A Post: Now You Will Believe…

Night Skies (2007): Like Manchester, The X-Files have so much to answer for. To wit, this alien abduction thing about an RV full of unlikeable twats getting molested by aliens while the Phoenix Lights are doing their little dance. Jason Connery also pops in as an ex-marine trucker, because why not.

The script is sluggish and dumb, the characters unlikeable but not interesting, and director Roy Knyrim directs like someone who started their career with an Insane Clown Posse video. Admittedly, the big – theoretically gory - abduction and probing sequence is pretty funny, but digging through this much crap to reach that tiny nugget of comedy gold would be cruel and unusual.

Satanic Hispanics (2022): This anthology movie by Hispanic horror directors starts strong with a wonderfully strange piece by Demián Rugna, but after that it continues through tales of boring competence and ill-timed attempts at doing comedy that want to be Sam Raimi but only ever reach the effect of a bad third generation carbon copy. It’s a particular shame because most of these directors – apart from Rugna, Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Gigi Saul Guerrero, and Eduardo Sánchez – have made much superior films.

The Equalizer 3 (2023): But hey, it’s not as if the third Equalizer were any better – it just cost much more money to make. The third movie returns to the unexamined sadism of the first one, the unwillingness to take a long, good look at its hypocritical and self-pitying protagonist, and Antoine Fuqua’s all too typical inability to make a stylistically coherent movie.

Not making any of this any better are showy but uncreative action sequences without flow, weight or a sense of fun, so there’s very little to recommend. Even Denzel Washington is letting the side down with a performance so vain and filled with ill-advised actor business (just take a good look at his use of a teabag during one dialogue scenes), this only needed more shots of pointless and heroic poses to reach Tom Cruise levels of embarrassment.