March 2021
Big screen fare continues to disappoint here in Sydney, and I was generating far too much negativity to share as 2020 closed. However, honesty suggests that we have moved from releasing marginal films from the past to marginal films from the present. Hopefully, it improves from here. Here goes for 2021 so far, plus a few Christmas releases:

Movie: Promising Young Woman
Director: Emerald Fennell
Stars: Carey Mulligan, Bo Burnham, Allison Brie

Carey Mulligan and an interesting soundtrack are worth the admission alone. There is something not quite right, which might be deliberate because discomfort is definitely part of the agenda; it suggests cuts, but somehow the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It might be because this is Emerald Fennell’s feature directing debut, but her concept is sound, and given the warm critical reception we are bound to see more. Trivia wise director Fennell plays Camilla in The Crown, and has written several episodes of Killing Eve, and plenty more besides.
Part revenge, but not revenge-porn, part social critique and part psychological study; this brings forth emotions well, especially empathy for Mulligan’s Cassie. While initially Cassie is baiting men into believing she is fall-down drunk and letting them hang themselves, eventually no-one is spared as an encounter with someone from the past leads to women becoming targets for their failures too. Men, of course, are much more to blame, and the finale is rather off Hollywood, with Cassie not paying enough attention to how Lisbeth Salander of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo handled things.
If you see it, listen out for a strings only version of Britney’s Toxic.

Movie: Chaos Walking
Director:  Doug Liman
Stars: Tom Holland, Daisy Ridley, Mads Mikkelsen, David Oyelowo

This hangs on an interesting idea: a world where men project their emotions and thoughts in a visual and sonic aura called Noise, and women do not. How that has played out on this ‘lost contact’ colony world is gradually revealed and is easily spoiled in detailing the themes, which I will avoid.

Daisy Ridley plays a survivor of a scout ship crash who finds herself in Tom Holland’s male-only community of colonial survivors. Tom has appeared in several films outside of his MCU franchise role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man so you might have already evaluated him as an actor, but Daisy not so much since the latest Stars Wars trilogy came to its ignominious conclusion. She seems to have abandoned the Keira Knightley blink that was part of Rey’s shtick. Mads Mikkelsen provides a typical performance and David Oyelowo’s menacing preacher Aaron is a treat.

The sci-fi ‘stuff’ is limited to the necessary elements: a different physical environment that changes the way people communicate, so do not let that bother you if are not a fan of the space opera genre. Like old school sci-fi this is about social phenomena rather than the energy blaster weapons and spaceships, though they are present, and more about provoking questions than providing a coherent whole. If you can dig that then head along, but this is not terribly strong.

Movie: The Little Things
Director:  John Lee Hancock
Stars: Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto

There is a cleverness to this, but the cast will probably determine whether it is of interest to you or not. I suspect the restrained audience and critical reception to this serial killer mystery has more to do with the conflicted moral questions being examined than the technical failings of the script.

Movie: Wonder Woman 1984
Director:  Patty Jenkins
Stars: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal

The first trailer dropped for WW84 was brilliant with a banging backing track, an instrumental Blue Monday. I started to worry when subsequent trailers were not nearly as good - with little new footage, and poor music selection. Those worries were well founded.

As the first BIG movie cinema released since Tenet this was an important release for the cineplex’s very survival, and it was pleasing to see sold out sessions, even if only half full due to social distancing. Given how many movies I have seen with less than three people in the cinema these last six months, maybe it will be enough just to have a few days like this. Maybe sheer curiosity will carry cinema starved audiences in for a few weeks. Let us hope so because the film itself is largely average, disappointingly so after a strong start. It is worth seeing for the first half, at least, and the young Diana sequence with the Amazons is a treat.Chris Pine is getting better with age, a reluctant admission, and has good chemistry with Gadot, and Kristen Wiig is brilliant. Pedro Pascal is poorly used here in what should have been a good casting choice, probably because Patty Jenkins, director and story writer, simply does not get her own character of Maxwell Lord - presented incoherently here, and not canon (which would be okay if he made sense). Given Jenkins work on Wonder Woman this is disappointing. The back half of the film is a mixture of good scenes with poor and is occasionally boring, though I will admit overall it does not seem as long as its two and a half hours. The soundtrack in parts just is not up to it, something that does not seem to happen in MCU films. To be fair, a second viewing less subject to over-expectation was easily managed.

Movie: Wild Mountain Thyme
Director:  John Patrick Shanley
Stars: Emily Blunt, Jamie Dornan, Jon Hamm, Christopher Walken

Given the cast it was hard to avoid this. Nonetheless, best miss this unless you have a hankering for a minute or two of sweeping visuals of Ireland, or you are hard core about Walken, and your Dad is dying or dead.
The performances are fine, but what may have worked on the stage comes across as ridiculous on film. Drama and romance are promised but the plot’s dramatic premises are too contrived, quite flawed, and having character parts being played by ‘romantic’ leads Blunt and Dornan is a casting error - they are too big for these roles. Maybe one of them might have worked but not both, not in 2021, perhaps in 2011. It is a pity because even in a time as cynical about sex and love as the present there are people trapped similarly to these two in romantic delusions/expectations or despair and self-loathing.

Movie: Summerland
Director:  Jessica Swale
Stars: Gemma Arterton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Lucas Bond, Dixie Egerickx

Gemma Arterton plays “difficult” Alice, who is unexpectedly lumped with a child evacuee from London during World War II. Arterton is particularly good here and, in parts, is paired with Gugu Mbatha-Raw. Melodramatic and sentimental, I still thought it was a small gem of a film, with solid efforts from child actors Dixie Egerickx (The Secret Garden) and Lucas Bond.

Movie: Boss Level
Director: Joe Carnahan
Stars: Frank Grillo, Mel Gibson, Naomi Watts

Everything about this screams that it should be woeful, not least Mel Gibson’s presence, and yet I was well entertained. It is not that Gibson does not have the performance ability of course, but that he has managed to create an extremely limited opportunity environment for himself (witness Fatman and Force of Nature).

While the milieu is a little confused – somewhere between video games and a weird science explanation – the premise is simple enough if you have ever tried to advance yourself through the storyline of a first-person perspective video game. Grillo’s Roy Pulver wakes up over and over to the same violent scenario and needs to determine step by step a way to stay alive and learn how to advance his narrative through various scenes, restarting the whole thing after each failure/death, until he eventually runs into his young son. If you do not have video game experience, then imagine a Ground Hog Day scenario but for an ex-special-forces operator with a contract out for his death, rather than a jaded weatherman. The character growth of Ground Hog Day is fractionally there, eventually, just with challenging action sequences thrown in. If you are looking for some humour and violent action, along with some low-key redemption narrative, this should fit the bill.

Juddy keeps busy consuming cultural media while posing as a student at a major Sydney university, thus shirking real work. He hosts pub trivia, and tutors at said university, for beer and book money.