Three Films Make A Post: Where Will You be When Disaster Strikes?

Benedetta (2021): This much lauded bit of middling nunsploitation just goes to remind me how little I think of most of the films of Paul Verhoeven. Sure, I’ll always have time for Flesh & Blood, The 4th Man and Robocop, but the rest of the director’s career is the progressive version of edgelord crap. This one is mired in the sort of conscious camp that just makes me want to punch something, mostly working its spleen on Christian iconography for the easy Christian baiting points, and showing no actual heart or imagination whatsoever. Don’t get me wrong, Verhoeven does have humungous technical chops – he’s just never using them for anything beyond being the guy at parties who is sneering at everything without ever having come by his cynicism the hard way, by actually understanding the things and people he hates. Why critics continue to lap this stuff up is beyond me.

Tenet (2020): On the other hand, I do think this – one of Christopher Nolan’s lesser reviewed films – is pretty damn great, taking a crazy idea, throwing a bunch of money at it and pretending to make a perfectly straightforward super spy blockbuster. Just that it’s one where the film’s basic tenet leads to fight and action choreography that runs counter to all the rules and regulations of the genre while at the same time trying its utmost to look as if all of this were perfectly par for the course. Which becomes particularly disorienting the more movies of this type you’ve seen and enjoyed.

The plot structure is just as palindromic as the film’s title, equally grounded in the film’s science fictional set-up, and enabling more of the philosophical and formal ambiguities most of Nolan’s films have, if you only care to look at them from the right angle.

That the film also works as a pretty fine super spy movie, if one with a rather confusing plot on first look, just adds to the particular delight I got from this movie.

The Bubble (2022): This mix of Hollywood blockbuster production satire with an ensemble including Karen Gillan and David Duchovny, and Corona pandemic comedy is apparently a rather devise movie. By all rights, I should hate this thing, what with it indulging in my least favourite genre, the film about filmmaking, and being directed by Judd Apatow, whose body of work usually makes me nearly as cranky as that of Verhoeven.

The problem is, I’m rather defenceless against a film which is in turns very funny not just as a Hollywood satire but also as one on modern times and mores, and just plain weird in a peculiarly personal way, and that’s populated by a cast who surf between modes and tones perfectly.

If I were in a nit-picky mood, I’d probably say the film could use to lose twenty minutes or so of its two hours plus running time, but then, even that feels like part of one of the film’s jokes.

Gunpowder Milkshake (2021)

Sam (Karen Gillan) is working for some sort of criminal organization known as The Firm as a hit woman. As all professional killers do, she has a tragic past. Namely, her mother Scarlet (Lena Headey), who also worked as a killer for The Firm, disappeared fifteen years ago, never to be heard from or seen again.

Sam also has the career typical weakness for children (and perhaps the blind, too, though she doesn’t encounter any blind person during the course of the movie, thus I can’t say for sure), so when her newest victim turns out to have a little daughter (Chloe Coleman), she starts on the mandated way of protection, a way which will also lead to some surprising reunions and point towards methods to reconcile herself with her past.

On the way lie many dead thugs, a family reunion, and three awesome aunts -  librarians, traders in weapons and killers played by Michelle Yeoh, Carla Gugino and Angela Bassett.

Navot Papushado’s action comedy (with heavier emphasis on the action) Gunpowder Milkshake is one of those post-ironic, trope conscious movies that never quite seems to want to deconstruct the genre it is working in, making friendly nods and a couple of snarky remarks about the genre conventions it uses but also showing no shame nor embarrassment using them. Which is more than fine with me, seeing as this leads to a movie that seldom feels the need to congratulate itself for its cleverness, nor one that confuses small twists and turns in genre conventions with revolutionary acts. Rather, it uses its small changes and twists as more satisfying ways to fulfil genre expectations, finding the sweet spot where self-consciousness does not turn into self-(or genre-)loathing. Gunpowder Milkshake even does direct quotes from a panoply of classic genre movies well, again using little twists into the right directions to make even those things that aren’t exactly its own, very much its own indeed.

So, like this year’s other, even better, big female-centric action movie Black Widow, the film can be relaxed enough to treat the existence of its female action heroes as a matter of course, celebrating their awesomeness by also making it normal. This doesn’t preclude some mainstream feminist elements, but rather strengthens them by anchoring them in a world where a woman doing action hero things is the new normal and doesn’t need explanation or male approval anymore. Which to my eyes isn’t just all kinds of cool but also a pretty inclusive and practical way to move forward.

Of course, it does help the film’s project that Gillan’s has gotten rather great at that action movie star thing and comports herself very well in the action, the comedy and the drama bits of whatever she is given. She is also assisted by co-stars from a couple of generations before who are all actresses active in various genre spaces only an incel won’t love already, which offhandedly turns this into a film that celebrates some great actresses who have been paving the way for women in genre as a normality for decades.

Gunpowder Milkshake is aesthetically a pleasure, too, mixing super-stylized colour schemes and production design to enable less realistic and therefore more cool action, admitting many a silly and cheesy idea, and staging all of it – with this again wonderfully keeping in genre traditions – with increasing verve and style. There’s also a willingness to be weird on display that parallels the worldbuilding of the John Wick films, but in a way that feels less showy and more organic to me. You can insert my usual sarcastic remarks about Keanu here, too – Gillan and co are certainly the superior action actors (less flailing of arms etc).

In other words: it’s fun, not stupid, and looks great, too.

Three Films Make A Post: You done the man's time--now you gonna do ours!

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017): Four teenagers in detention are sucked into the video game version of the magical board game Jumanji, where they inhabit the bodies (Dwayne “Still The Rock” Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black and Kevin Hart) of the videogame characters and learn valuable lessons about life while trying to escape. Actually, despite me not being the ideal audience this sort of big budget family adventure was made for, I enjoyed myself quite a bit with it, not just because I’m rather fond of the ole Rock and Karen Gillan but also appreciate Jack Black when he’s not just doing his Jack Black shtick – which he can’t, given that he’s playing a teenage girl trapped inside of Jack Black’s body. The film is also often indeed as funny as it is supposed to be, getting a lot of mileage out of playing with gender roles and self-image (seriously). Director Jake Kasdan does still have impeccable comic timing and does rather well with the CGI action, too, so there’s little not to like here. Well, apart from all those valuable lessons that are presented with all the subtlety of an 80s cartoon.

Smashed (2012): Coming to something completely different, how about James Ponsoldt’s sometimes darkly comic drama about young alcoholic Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) realizing her life of partying with her just as alcoholic husband Charlie (Aaron Paul) is leading her ever closer to a complete breakdown. She is able to begin to start to turn things around but that’s not necessarily good for her relationship, seeing that Charlie’s not at the point where he can even see a reason to begin drying out. Unlike a lot of alcoholic dramas I know, Ponsoldt’s film is particularly interested in the fact that Kate’s life without alcohol won’t magically get better, even suggesting that it’s not going to be happier at all, which gives this less the feel of a feel good movie about a woman conquering her issues, but the more real one of a woman trying to find a way to manoeuvre through life in a way that’s honest to herself and others. Apart from the funny, sad and sharp writing and direction the film recommends itself through a great performance by Winstead (who feels quite a bit more like the alcoholics I know than typical of the genre) and a handful of wonderful support actors.


The Cat Returns aka 猫の恩返し Neko no Ongaeshi (2003): What better way to end this on than with cats – some of them rather on the evil side, some not. Hiroyuki Morita’s Studio Ghibli anime is about quiet schoolgirl Haru (Chizuru Ikewaki) getting into quite a bit of trouble in the Kingdom of Cats after she’s saved the crown prince. Fortunately, The Baron (Yoshihiko Hakamada) – whom you’ll remember from Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart – of the Cat Bureau is helping her out in a most dashing way. This is certainly one of the most whimsical Ghibli movies, still carrying one of the core themes of the studio’s output, the growing-up experiences of female teenagers, but mostly seeming to have a lot of fun with imagining the Kingdom of the Cats and all that belongs to it. I found the first act particularly lovely, the sure-handed way it characterises Haru and the true sense of wonder of her encounter with the magical in a very real world. This one’s also teaching a valuable lesson, by the way, but goes about it with quite a bit less fear an audience might not notice than Jumanji does.

In short: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)

If you’re looking for a counter-argument to the idea that the big commercial movie universes suppress all individual directorial expression, the Guardians movies are your most obvious starting point, seeing as their tone and style fit exactly into the oeuvre of James Gunn. Witness the way crude and blunt humour sometimes hide the rather more clever jokes the film makes; or just watch how cynical little asides so often glide into moments of actual human emotion that are just as important for the film as the big set pieces and explosions are. And these are pretty damn important to the film, it’s just that Gunn clearly sees no qualitative difference between the loud and the quiet, the goofy and the clever. Blockbuster cinema here means a film that sets out to fulfil all kinds of different expectations, not to be all things to all people, but because being a bit messy and complicated and rich is what this sort of filmmaking should be about.

One might argue that the film’s thematic concerns about families of choice, of blood and of chance are not the most original ones but I suspect very much most members of the film’s audience will have found themselves involved in one or more of these kinds of families, and can certainly connect to some of what’s going on under the loud, beautiful and bonkers surface; which is more than I can say about these “universal”, important films beloved by mid-brow criticism that are inevitably about the sex life of rich people or academics. Plus, Gunn really doubles down when he uses well-worn tropes – one just has to look at the shape, form and dimension the standard “killing of the father” takes on in this film. It’s big in the best way.


But what really does make this such a wonderful film is how much care Gunn takes with the small things. It’s not just the nearly absurd number of throwaway gags going on in the background (and certainly not stopping with the end credits), it’s how tiny dialogue moments from the first Guardians are given greater meaning (and ambiguity) through just as tiny throw-away lines here, how there’s always a little more going on in every scene than the most direct reading of it suggests.