Three Films Make A Post: A Disgrace to Criminals Everywhere.

Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998): After more than two decades, I’m still not sure if I exactly like Guy Ritchie’s debut movie, but then, I’ve been known to have problems with movies whose main characters are all arseholes and idiots, particularly when  the film they are in appears to loathe them (see also, Thor: Love & Thunder). What has endeared the film to me from the perspective of today is how insanely it is of its time: starting with the piss-coloured non-colour scheme, the showy editing, the post-Pulp Fiction ideas about coolness, and certainly not stopping with its very specific kind of digressive storytelling. As a time capsule, this is about as pure as it gets, and when the inevitable late 90s revival is coming around, this will be one of the aesthetic core texts.

Infinity Pool (2023): I was a great admirer of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, but this sometimes body horrific critique of the late-capitalistic mindset which is here exemplified in extreme hedonistic exploitative tourism doesn’t work too well for me. Often, it appears to be rather too in love with exactly the things it wants to criticize, but my main problem really is how little I found myself caring about anything and anyone in it going through their surrealisted-up version of rich people problems: Alexander Skarsgård’s doing his by now usual “weak man” shtick without ever finding a note from which to empathize with the guy, and Mia Goth’s ultra femme fatale is certainly riveting to watch but also empty of any nuance or humanity. The only actual identifiable human being, Cleopatra Coleman’s Em, is shelved relatively early, and from then on out, the movie is all about rich people being surrealistically horrible. The rather more interesting elements of the film concerning Philip K. Dick-style identity problems never really go anywhere interesting, so I found myself a bit bored by a very well shot film that uses the most obvious metaphorical systems in the most obvious manner.

Re/Member (2022): What would we be without time loop movies? Because you can time loop anything, Eiichiro Hasumi’s example of the form unites some typical YA business with ghosts and the fascination of Japanese pop culture with weird rules. Which does at least lead to a bit of originality, for there are very few movies about a group of teens bonding while time-looping through the experience of searching for the body parts of a dismembered little girl while being hunted by a monster.

The character work is very much like you’d expect in a Japanese teen movie, and Hasumi does tend to lay it on a little too thick in melodramatic sequences, but on the other hand, there’s also a sense of playfulness and fun on display when it comes to changing up the ways in which a group of teenagers might be ripped to pieces, farting around with game rules, or making third act twists entertaining.

Some thoughts about The Northman (2022)

Robert Eggers’s insanely ambitious trip into the world of biggest budget cinema in form of a trippy, high production value Norse vengeance movie that actually convinces me that Alexander Skarsgård can do more than be the hot Scandinavian is really quite the film. It is also, alas, one of those perfectly splendid films I only have a couple of vaguely insightful things to say about, even under my customarily loose definition of “insight”.

Which may have rather a lot to do with how much Eggers does here by aesthetics alone: making a film that as once has the air of an authentic saga (at least the Icelandic ones I’ve read), criticises the very toxically masculine bent these things – as well as its none-Norse themed brethren vengeance movies – tend to have, yet also accepting and respecting how its lead finds religious-spiritual fulfilment in the act of vengeance. Eggers is so much on fire here, even the sort of ambiguity about the reality of the supernatural elements this includes, which would usually annoy me to no end in any movie, becomes fitting and simply works. Sure, the magic here is probably only a result of Amleth’s (and yes, there’s rather a lot of Shakespeare in here, if you care to look from the right angle) state of mind, his ecstatic-shamanistic-pagan religion, and drugs, but it is also absolutely real for him and everyone else in the movie, which makes the question of its objective reality inside the fictitious world of the movie pretty much irrelevant for the characters in it.

I found myself particularly excited by the strong mythic pull of the whole affair, Eggers’s ability to turn what would be cheesy, campy psychedelia in the wrong hands, into something that feels absolutely true to the inner world of the characters. And since one of the film’s main thrusts is its insistence on the inner world and the outer world of any given character bleeding into each other to actually create the world as a concept they inhabit, it’s simply true to the characters’ world as something more intense than history (or the idea of historical accuracy). To me, this feels rather a lot as if Eggers were applying Werner Herzog’s ideas about Poetic Truth the great director uses for his documentaries to narrative cinema; and doing it as well as anybody ever did.

Godzilla vs. Kong (2021)

Up to this point, the Monsterverse US kaiju movies have been rather reluctant to fully and openly embrace their chosen genre’s silliness, playing things more or less dramatic, an approach that has resulted in at least one of the best giant monster movies ever made (that would be Kong: Skull Island, for the barbarians among my imaginary readers), but also in the idea that Kyle Chandler looking as if he had very bad case of constipation makes for an engaging human anchor.

Chandler’s still in this movie, but you might miss him if you blink, for the only human character from the last Monsterverse film this one cares about is Millie Bobby Brown’s Madison, which seems to be a fair assessment of the situation. And while Brown’s subplot here doesn’t exactly make a lot of sense, and suggests that Evil Elon Musk (yup, that’s our human villain) has never even heard of the concept of operational security, or just plain security, it does go through a lot of the sort of conspiracy and weirdness human subplots the non-monsters in a kaiju movie are supposed to go through. With a smile on its face and whistling a merry tune.

The other humans of note are Alexander Skarsgård as the rogue geologist version of Fox Mulder – and the way Skarsgård plays it, he knows he’s Mulder – and Rebecca Hall trying to chat with a very huge gorilla with the help of an honest to gosh Kenny. Well, because we now live in 2021, the Kenny’s actually a mute little Inuit girl (Kaylee Hottle), but that’s certainly an improvement over a little Japanese boy in short trousers. Also eventually involved will be a little trip into the Hollow Earth. That old Fortean chestnut is presented through some genuinely beautiful and bizarre effects, and seems like the logical next step (before the alien invasion I hope for in the next film) for the series to take.

So this time around, those pesky humans do get some interesting stuff to take part in again, but Adam Wingard’s (coming off his terrible Death Note thing for Netflix and the dire Blair Witch swinging) film is pretty clear about what’s the main event (see the title of the damn movie) and goes all in for the big damn kaiju action in lovingly staged fights that lay waste to quite a few pretty cities this time around. There’s a wonderful sense of abandon to those fights, comparable to that phase in the Showa era when the films were becoming sillier but were still using that silliness to put their audience – kids at heart, sometimes in body – in a state of awe and wonder and the sort of giddy excitement that can come about when movies show you something that just can’t be seen in real life (cf., why the movies are better than life) – just with a different style of special effects.

Speaking of those, whoever is responsible for the motion capture and animation of Kong here is an absolute genius, providing personality and weight in spades; only in comparison does Godzilla look like a grumpy old lizard.

In short: Mute (2018)

This Netflix production was apparently a dream project for its director and co-writer Duncan Jones, a film he tried to get made over quite a few years. Watching it, however, I can’t help but think only the wonderfully strange future Berlin it takes place in (which an aside shows to be situated in the same world as Jones’s one perfect movie, Moon), presented as a mix of Blade Runner, today extrapolated sideways and German Shadowrun, was the dream part of the project. At least, I have difficulty imagining a filmmaker’s great dream movie plot would concern a clueless yet violent mute Amish (so he can be conveniently clueless about the place and time he lives in to an absurd degree) dude looking for his girlfriend who seems involved in the usual future noir shenanigans.

While the world Mute takes place in is often fun, as idiosyncratic as a real future, and interesting to look at – and for once in an English language movie features actual idiomatic German (admittedly, it’s a German co-production) – the plot that should lead us through it is rote, told without anything that could hook a viewer emotionally, and moves slowly, oh so very very slowly, for no reason I could make out. Adding some awkward feelings to the boredom is a low-level yet difficult to ignore vibe of homophobia that’s utterly bewildering coming from the son of David Bowie.


The characters moving through this have all the life of stage props. Alexander Skarsgård’s Leo in particularly is probably meant to be a tragic naïf but comes over as totally lifeless, not a man out of time so much as a man too boring to bother with, the actor’s never-ending barrage of would-be soulful glances notwithstanding. In general (and quite a bit of this blog proves it) I have no problem at all with movies more interested in showing a world instead of providing a classic narrative, but the tedious way Jones approaches the narrative that’s there doesn’t actually seem to be designed to show the movie’s world off at all. Unfortunately, what it’s supposed to do and why, I have no idea, and I can’t help but have the impression Jones doesn’t know it either.

In short: The Legend of Tarzan (2016)

I appreciate that it’s rather difficult to attempt to update Edgar Rice Burroughs’s pulp stalwart Tarzan to modern times, seeing that there are quite a few things central to the character that many people today would call “problematic” (many of them even for good reason). As a pulp reader, I’m perfectly fine with a film making heavy changes to these characters if that’s needed to keep them palatable to a non-specialist audience – it’s not as if the process would make the original stories disappear, nor will I be sad to see their racist, sexist etc elements go.

So it’s not in its attempts at updating Tarzan that David Yates’s film fails for me, it’s in the way it fails to update the character to anything interesting. Because this is a major mainstream production, its courage fails the film regularly. While I certainly like the whole “colonialism bad” approach, choosing the Belgian Congo for the plot is ill-advised, because the film really can’t go into the true atrocities committed at that time and place without exchanging being an adventure movie for something much darker, and certainly not anything Tarzan belongs in. Consequently, Legend awkwardly stops somewhere halfway between pulp adventure and horrible truths - shoehorning Opar in for good measure - and just sort of shuffles its feet. And don’t even let me get started about a film that makes various gestures towards giving Jane (Margot Robbie) some agency of her own, only to then let her kidnapping be Tarzan’s main motivating factor.

For Alexander Skarsgard’s Tarzan, you see, is that least interesting kind of hero, a reluctant one who spends much of the first half hour throwing around tragically bored looks. Which is pretty much what I felt during that part of the film, too, what with there about five minutes of something of interest or relevance happening in it. Turns out, stuff actually happening is rather important in an adventure movie. Who knew? Most probably not David Yates, going by the blandly polite, generally uninvolving way he directs action sequences that show little creativity or sense of fun, the truly embarrassing CGI vine-swinging, and the ponderous pacing he gives a film that doesn’t have actually all that much to ponder, and which could use a good kick in the arse.

Keeping to that form, Skarsgard’s Tarzan and Christoph Waltz’s big bad Leon Rom mostly seem vaguely bored, going through the motions but leaving charisma – and seemingly interest in entertaining their audience – somewhere in a different movie. The only actors on screen actually alive are Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury (or George Washington Williams, as the film curiously calls him) and Margot Robbie, but of course, the film doesn’t deign to give them much to do. I could go on here, complaining about a Tarzan film that seems embarrassed about the hero’s traditional dress, his comic relief chimp, and so on, but that would be nearly as tiresome as the film itself is.

The Legend of Tarzan is a mostly tedious slog that really demonstrates how good many of the low budget Tarzan movies were, what with them actually containing scenes of Tarzan having adventures.