Three Films Make A Post: Willie and Kris? You better duck!

Songwriter (1984): Given the very self-serious nature of much of the following body of work of Alan Rudolph, it’s easy to forget he was perfectly able to make this kind of loose music-based comedy – with genuinely effective moments of drama – with Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson playing fictionalized version of themselves who are sticking it to the music industry, while also making up for past mistakes and becoming better persons in the process. If you like Willie and Kris – and if you don’t, you might think about your movie watching choices – this is a pretty joyous affair, simply based on watching guys doing (and singing) what they do (and sing) best; and even one that’s not completely uncritical of the way soft machos like these two tend to treat women.

There’s also a pretty damn great outing by Lesley Ann Warren as possibly up and coming country star - who already has the mandatory alcohol problem – Gilda that’ll end in a very, very Nashville kind of way.

Madelines (2022): The final third of Jason Richard Miller’s indie time travel movie with a lot of murder (or is it suicide?), written by lead Brea Grant and Miller is a pretty great example of lo-tech weirdness, reminding me of nothing so much as weird fiction great Jeffrey Ford’s trips into science fiction – which is a rather big compliment. Alas, to get to the brilliant and effective part of the movie, you have to move through a script so full of holes, even I got annoyed by them. Essentially, to get where it wants to go, the film needs its characters to act and react like no human being ever actually would to basically everything that happens to them; it needs to pretend this married garage science couple knows nobody in the whole damn world but their financier; and so on and so forth.

I only made it through the early parts of the movie at all thanks to the typically charming performances by Grant, Perry Shen and Richard Riehle – which is a bit of a shame given how wonderful the final act is.

Perrier’s Bounty (2009): In Ian Fitzgibbon’s very dark Irish crime comedy, a series of unfortunate events (including a bit of self-defence killing) leads to an unlucky guy (Cillian Murphy), his neighbour, friend and crush (Jodie Whittaker), and the guy’s dead beat dad (Jim Broadbent) having to go on the run from a gangster (Brendan Gleeson), his cronies and various other ne'er-do-wells. This being an Irish comedy, there’s much violence, more drinking, a lot of existentialist philosophy (that’s much funnier than the French version of existentialism), and an ironic sense of the tragic. Most of it is very funny indeed, always interesting, and at times even quite moving. And it’s very difficult to find fault in a movie whose main villain finds his demise because he broke the rule of how to handle dogs as a movie character. Hint: you don’t shoot them, unless they are zombie dogs.

In short: Anna (2019)

I’ve been making fun of Luc Besson for decades now, but despite all of his flaws as a screenwriter, I’ve always taken him for a highly talented director, hell, even writer, just one who tends to be a bit lazier than he should or could be, ambitious in a sometimes self-sabotaging way, and a bit of a goofball. Who couldn’t identify with that? It’s just that most of us goofy nerds don’t get big money to bring our bad and not so bad ideas on screen, sometimes featuring major actors.

After watching Anna, however, I’m not so sure about the writer/director/producer anymore; perhaps some of us have just always cut a lazy hack too much slack and turned him into a misguided talent in our heads? Be that as it may, Anna is a full-grown catastrophe of a movie, featuring a model in the title role who can’t act, supported by a group of pros – Helen “I had a Russian grandmother” Mirren, Cillian “Like, totally American” Murphy and Luke “I am even more Russian” Evans – doing terrible accents who supposedly can act (but you wouldn’t notice), moving back and forth through a plot that is at once bland, tedious, and of course in classic Besson style dumb as a rock. Because this is a bit of a backdoor remake of Red Sparrow (but crap), the film is also full of increasingly tedious plot twists it spends an improbable amount of time explaining to the dumbest person in the audience, killing the little bit of forward momentum a film with an uninvolving story about a character without character traits can have, not once, not twice, but thrice.

Also adding to the pain are modelling sequences (fun fact: no film ever needs more than zero of those), amateurishly staged action sequences that don’t even bother to film around the fact that lead Sasha Luss clearly has even less experience as a screen fighter than she has as an actress. I’m perfectly alright with directors casting their leads on account of their cheekbones instead of their ability as actors/actresses, but directors not named Besson generally put some effort in improving their amateur actor’s game, whereas Anna seems to go out of its way to make the poor girl’s acting look as badly as possible. But then, this is a film that doesn’t get a good performance out of Helen Mirren, so what do I expect?


There’s some in theory half interesting thematic business about female freedom and independence (hello again, Red Sparrow) but that’s more or less completely sabotaged by Besson’s inability to give Anna any kind of psychology, let’s not even hope for any sort of personality. There’s nothing there, really, and unlike with old school Besson, there’s no style to become substance or at least distract from its absence here, leaving Anna empty and not even pretty to look at.

Free Fire (2016)

It’s the late 70s. An arms deal between a group of IRA members (Cillian Murphy, Michael Smiley and others) and a South African arms dealer (Sharlto Copley, playing the part of the most horrifyingly annoying man alive) and his entourage, finagled by an American middle woman (Brie Larson) who really doesn’t have much fun with being a woman in late 70s macho land, goes very wrong indeed. Some, let’s call them “personal issues”, between some of the foot soldiers on both sides escalate into a drawn-out shoot-out and stand-off in a warehouse, and soon, very many characters are bleeding, shooting and cursing. Not always in this order, and quite a bit of dying is involved too..

Free Fire is the film that really decides it for me: Ben Wheatley (and his regular writing and editing partner Amy Jump) is a director that’ll stay with me for the next few decades, making one film that isn’t like the one he made before or the ones before that yet still retains a personal handwriting every year and keeping me happy with it, sometimes making a perfect movie like Kill List, sometimes an interesting effort, sometimes more, sometimes less.

For my tastes (and the Internet informs me not everyone shares my enthusiasm), Free Fire is nearly as good as Kill List, and is certainly the crowning achievement in the warehouse action comedy genre. Of course, if you’ve read that Free Fire is supposed to consist exclusively out of one long shoot-out, you might be disappointed by a film whose characters only start shooting at each other 25 minutes or so in, and which isn’t at all interested in the sort of non-stop, slow-motion gun fu you might expect on first hearing about it. Technically, there’s a one-hour gun battle here, but in practice, most of the characters are wounded more or less heavily early on, so instead of the expected extreme spectacle, this is actually a character piece that delights in having a fantastic cast (there are also Sam Riley, Armie Hammer, Enzo Cilenti, Babou Ceesay and other fine thespians involved) of actual actors playing around with their characters, bickering, cursing, making jokes, and bleeding.

There is still quite a bit of action going around here, though, it’s just that Wheatley makes his job purposefully difficult by staging action scenes between characters who are mostly only able to crawl, slither and sometime hop around for much of the film. That doesn’t just add a sense of the absurd (there’s always a bit of Beckett in a Wheatley film) to the film but also provides the director with the opportunity to come up with action set pieces that aren’t quite like the ones you’ll find in a John Wick movie, and which turn out pretty damn great to my eyes.


As does the temporal and local colour (warning to the overly sensitive: there’s a degree of racism and sexism involved but it is one of the characters and not of the film), the acting (obviously), the photography, the texture of the language and the structure of the editing. Given these standards, that the film we get isn’t quite the film most of us probably expect going in isn’t a bad thing to me. Free Fire, like all of Wheatley’s movies until now, is very much doing its own thing, not too interested in being the film an audience expects rather than the one it should and wants to be.