I’m going to be a bit cheeky today but I hope the original author won’t mind. Today marks the 16th anniversary of the first Some Came Running Blu-ray disc Consumer Guide by critic Glenn Kenny. Some of you may have noticed that the archive is now housed here as the original host (Typepad) shut down last year.

Glenn managed to cover a lot more ground in the years since than I have managed – especially when it comes to the classics – and he continues to produce posts at the new home of Some Came Running.

From that first entry on 8 June 2010, I have chosen a film that connects back to Homicide last week via David Mamet and also has a homegrown connection through the director, Lee Tamahori:

The Edge (Fox): Not remembered as any kind of masterpiece, and noted more these days as the source of a scabrously funny story about Alec Baldwin and his beard than for anything else, this men-who-hate-each-other-but-are-nonetheless-forced-to-face-the-elements-together thriller, scripted by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori before he threw in the towel and turned semi-hack, is well worth rediscovering, and this superb disc is the best available way to do so. It offers an excellent image—fantastically sharp, with very accurate color. The video compression is better than competent: look at the gas lamp flares in costar Anthony Hopkins’ face as he explores an Alaskan cabin in the dark before stumbling into his own surprise party: they have the solidity and reality you’re looking for. True, in some of the aeriel scenes objects do pop against the background in that fake‑3‑D way you sometimes get with overprocessing, but it doesn’t happen all that much and the effect isn’t as disorienting as it is in the legendarily problematic Blu-ray of Patton. Pretty skimpy in the extras department, though, I must say: there are none.— A-

Also featured in Glenn’s first Blu-ray consumer guide (which covered a couple of months of releases): Cameron’s Avatar, a Hong Kong release of the 2006 film The Banquet, Battleship Potemkin, Criterion’s collection By Brakhage, Carlito’s Way, Murnau’s silent masterpiece City Girl, Franco Nero as Django, an A+ restoration of Dr. Zhivago, 1984 sci-fi Dreamscape, Lynch’s Dune, Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, David Caruso in Jade, Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, Lang’s M (#36 in the S&S Greatest films of all time), Minority Report, Out of Africa, Ang Lee’s western Ride with the Devil, Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, Shutter Island, the Criterion edition of Ford’s Stagecoach, Assayas’ “sublime” Summer Hours, late-period Coppola Tetro, Vampyres, Walkabout, and Benicio Del Toro taking on The Wolfman.

None of the images in Glenn’s original posts made it over from Typepad but the words are the thing, aren’t they?

Where to watch The Edge

Physical media: It’s not entirely clear whether the Blu-ray that Glenn writes about here was ever released in Aotearoa. There are quite a few copies listed on eBay.

But there’s always streaming, right?

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland & UK: Streaming on Disney+

India: Digital rental

USA: Digital rental

Further reading

On the subject of Tamahori’s The Edge, I reviewed Alec Baldwin’s autobiography Nevertheless back in 2017 and he had a bit to say on the subject;

Baldwin is surprisingly inarticulate about the art and process of acting. He’s stronger when he’s being generous about talented co-workers but he can occasionally be dismissive too. In the chapter about working on Mamet’s The Edge, NZ director Lee Tamahori’s second Hollywood picture after the success of Once Were Warriors, Baldwin is scornful of Tamahori’s cutting of Mamet’s dialogue – “He does go on a bit” – when that dialogue was one of the reasons he signed on for the role in the first place. The other reason he chose to go to the Canadian wilderness was to work with Anthony Hopkins, an experience he is a lyrical fanboy about.

The post Something to watch tonight: The Edge appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

In the meantime, my attention has been on the commercial cinema and they don’t come much more commercial than a Star War.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly inessential but that inessential nature is also its charm. The very first Star Wars back in 1977 was inspired by the Saturday morning serials of George Lucas’s youth¹ and while some of the stories that have been told since then have attempted to carry greater weight (successfully with Andor, of course), there’s nothing wrong with innocent adventures in space² provided they’re done with energy and good humour..

The big screen instalment of the story of a bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal, Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder) finding a sense of purpose through the accidental parenting of a mischievous young kid (who looks a lot like a certain puppet Jedi from the main timeline) feels about as close as Star Wars has come in along time to those serial roots. It’s episodic – a bit of a road movie in fact – and each stage in the journey results in an unlikely, but satisfying, escape from peril.

Our plucky pair are hunting down the scattered Imperial leadership on behalf of the successful rebellion. A deal is truck by which they return the kidnapped son of the famous criminal Jabba the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) to his family in exchange for important intelligence that the Hutts hold. Except he doesn’t want to go back. Yes, he’s one of the good Hutts.

Writer-director Jon Favreau is clearly having fun by including references to many of his own favourite cinematic set-pieces – some of which would be inappropriate viewing for the target audience here but will delight the adult film fans who have to chaperone them. Including a cameo from Martin Scorsese (as a four-armed fast-food cook) is our first clue and I counted references to Blade Runner, Scarface, Apocalypse Now, Gremlins, the Harryhausen stop-motion monsters from films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and there’s even a nod to the Minions (although that might be inadvertent).

As someone whose first (and only) stage play was about an imagined meeting between Michael Jackson and Benny Hill, I really can’t complain about a film that imagines the unlikely real-life friendship between supermodel Kate Moss (Ellie Bamber) and the elderly Enfant terrible of the art world Lucian Freud (Derek Jacobi). Using the public perceptions of famous people can be a useful short-cut to character for a screenwriter – a platform to build on. In the case of James Lucas’ Moss & Freud, it helps that he has Moss as an executive producer.

And the film is less about art than it is about the conversations that can happen between an artist and model during the arduous process of making the art. Freud’s finished portrait of Moss was not a favourite of either of them but it was symbolic of her escaping the pressures of her stardom, all the tabloid nonsense and the misogynistic world of fashion, and becoming a mature independent woman.

She chose to be naked for the portrait – unlike all those other times in her career where other people made that decision for her.

Daniel Roher is a documentarian who won an Oscar for his film about the Russian opposition leader Alexander Navalny in 2023. He’s now turned his eye to fiction with Tuner (which he co-wrote with Robert Ramsay).

Sleepy-eyed English actor Leo Woodall (excellent in Nuremberg last year) plays a New York piano tuner, apprenticed to ageing jazz musician Dustin Hoffman. Woodall’s character has an affliction which makes him overly sensitive to sound but when you combine that with perfect pitch, you get a great exponent of a misunderstood (and unappreciated) profession.

Working alone one night in the mansion of one of his rich clients, he stumbles across a safecracking – an inside job by the security company. They are trying brute force methods but our hero realises that his ears can help him hear the tiny crackles and pops of the levers as he turns the combination wheel. A new – and more lucrative – career appears in front of him, except he is ill-equipped to deal with the genuine ugliness of the crowd he has fallen in with.

Interesting to me in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on, both the protagonist and the antagonists in the film are Jewish and a “Holocaust watch” is a central bone of contention. In fact, the arrival of that watch signals the moment at the beginning of Act III when a promising film goes flying off the rails due to a ridiculously unlikely coincidence. Very enjoyable up to that point – less so, afterwards.

Speaking of Russian dissidents, Words of War is a worthy British film about the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (Maxine Peak) and the train of events that turned her from a lifestyle journalist at an independent Moscow newspaper to a crusading Chechen War correspondent and then a martyr.

The most interesting thing about the film is current tendency to either let actors use their own accents or to give them regional British accents – perhaps as a way of showing audiences how vast and culturally diverse Russia actually is.

In A Private Life, Jodie Foster shines as a Jewish-American psychiatrist in Paris, letting her curiosity about the death of a patient overwhelm her. Again, Jewishness is central to the story – or is it? This is a film that thrives on misdirection and the audience is encouraged by Foster’s performance to go along with every wrong turn she takes.

Reviewing this for RNZ Culture 101 the other day, I described writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s script as “tidy” which seemed to throw host Perlina Lau who asked me what I meant. I meant that the script gives everyone clear tools and boundaries – nothing wasted and nothing out of place – but it doesn’t have much of a spark either.

Finding Emily snuck up on me, I must confess. It’s one of those rare things – a romantic comedy that is both romantic and funny. It’s also grounded in its sense of place – Manchester – and its characters. You get the sense that everything that happens has actually happened to someone at some time even though when you put them all together the package is completely ridiculous.

Spike Fearn is Owen, struggling musician and sound tech at the local university. One night working at the student union, he meets Emily and they hit it off. She gives him her number but when he tries to send a message the next day, there’s a digit missing. Thinking he has found the love of his life, Owen starts a campaign to try and find the mysterious Emily.

He is aided in this by another Emily (Angourie Rice), a psychology student who sees his quixotic quest as the topic for her thesis – that romantic love is a form of mental illness. You can see where this is headed, I’m sure, but it’s the getting there that’s fun.

Daft and charming in equal measure, Finding Emily should find plenty of admirers over time and also be a decent calling card for the two leads.

Finally, a film that made me laugh more than any other in recent weeks. You know, with celebrity documentaries a lot of the fun is usually down to nostalgia. You remember laughing at something first time around and you laugh again in recognition. Well, in Marty, Life Is Short the clips are old but they play fresh and new and you laugh because they are damn funny. Still.

Martin Short seems to have been around forever without ever being the superstar he wanted to be, but it looks like he’s at ease with that now.

It’s such a pleasure to watch a film about someone so deservingly beloved and to be reminded that if you are decent and fun to be around, people will always want to work with you. Oh, and talented. I almost forgot. Decent, fun to be around and enormously gifted – then people will always want to work with you.

1. I’m reading Michael Ondaatje’s conversations with editor Walter Murch who insists that Lucas was originally down to make Apocalypse Now in the early 70s, but it was all too close to home for the studios while the Vietnam War was still raging. So, instead he decided to take the story about plucky insurgents resisting an imperial war machine and set it in space instead. ︎
2. We enjoyed the TV serial Skeleton Crew which has been described as “The Goonies in the Star Wars universe” – I reviewed it for RNZ Nights a couple of months ago. ︎

The post Recent releases: The Mandalorian and Grogu, Moss & Freud, Tuner, Words of War, A Private Life (Vie privée), Finding Emily, Marty, Life Is Short appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

We don’t talk much about David Mamet these days but for a while he was all the rage.

Mamet regular Joe Mantegna plays Bobby Gold, a homicide detective and hostage negotiator who is on his way to a big bust when he comes across a small-time convenience store murder. Because the victim is the elderly Jewish proprietor of the store and Gold is also Jewish (although non-observing and not particularly interested) his bosses take him off the big case and put him on the local one – to his frustration and disappointment.

But the plot immediately thickens when Gold discovers evidence that the victim had been trafficking weapons for a Jewish group attempting to defend their community from antisemitic violence. Their fervour appeals to Gold, who struggles to fit in with either the police culture or his ethnic background, and he is unwisely drawn into helping them bomb a neo-Nazi centre and break his own code by handing over evidence in the murder case.

Ultimately, he realises that the group’s single-minded, multi-generational, commitment to Zionism (or anti-antisemitism if you want to localise things) might not be consistent with, you know, the rule of law, by which time he’s already dropped the ball on both the investigations he was supposed to be involved with.

Mamet was on an absolute tear in this period, Homicide coming after his first two crackerjack features, House of Games and Things Change. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or that year and is notable for Mamet’s nuanced take on being a Jew in America. His views – shall we say – hardened a lot after 9/11.

Where to watch Homicide

Physical media: In the Imprint Films After Dark Neo-Noir Collection Three boxset along with White Sands, The Crossing Guard, Heaven’s Prisoners, Under Suspicion and Dirty Pretty Things.

Aotearoa: Not currently available online

Australia: Digital rental from Google or YouTube

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel, Hollywood Suite, Crave or CTV (free with ads)

Ireland: Not currently available online

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel or Fubo

UK: Digital rental

Further reading

Glenn Kenny, wrote about Homicide in 2009 for his blog Some Came Running which is now archived on this site:

Of all of Mamet’s self-written feature films, this strikes me as the most thoroughly,well, Mametian in terms of performance style and writing—the flat, almost incantory delivery of dialogue combined with the iambic rhythms and the repetition of phrases: “I’ll find the killer. I’ll find the killer, I swear.” The effect is even more bracing than it was in House of Games, I think in part because House of Games was introducing viewers to an unfamiliar, circumscribed world—the mien of the super-secretive con man—that the viewer had few expectations about as far as behavior was concerned. Much of Homicide takes place in a precinct house and on the street, and the theatricality of the exchanges in these settings we’re familiar with from cop shows and cop movies is bracing, maybe a little alienating at first. But it’s Mamet’s world, and he’s got utter confidence about how things work in it, and the film builds a unique, almost hypnotic power. An unusual picture, a unique picture, one that’s certainly well worth reviving a conversation about.

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The relentless passage of time means that even relatively recent streaming releases are supressed by the algorithm, buried under the weight of the titles that they want you to watch now, dammit.

Even I had totally forgotten about They Cloned Tyrone until it showed up in a site search here recently. I originally reviewed it for the old Substack, back in July 2023:

John Boyega (the Star Wars sequels, Small Axe and The Woman King) plays Fontaine, a struggling drug dealer in a semi-rural Southern location called The Glen. When he is stiffed on his share by a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) he goes to the motel where Charles is lying low, retrieves his money and is then shot several times by a rival in the parking lot.

Imagine everyone’s surprise, then, when he wakes up the next morning in the same bed, and proceeds to do the same things he did the day before. It’s not Groundhog Day – he himself is unaware that he died the previous night until it is pointed out to him.

Fontaine, Slick Charles and one of Charles’ hookers Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) rather reluctantly at first, attempt to get to the bottom of this mystery, which turns out to involve bizarre mind control experimentation and a massive government conspiracy.

It’s played at a fun and furious pace – older viewers might require subtitles – and the direction, editing, art direction and performances all combine to make it a thoroughly entertaining, if ultimately enraging, two hours. To throw back to Slumdog Millionaire, I once said that after seeing that at the Embassy Theatre, every film for the next few weeks felt old fashioned and that’s what I think about this one, too.

The final third isn’t as thrilling as the first two but that’s because the film reveals what it has on its mind. And it’s a lot.

Also in that July 2023 newsletter, the Aussie music documentary John Farnham: Finding the Voice (now available as a digital rental) and another forgotten Netflix documentary, Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, about the Webb telescope project and its mind-boggling images of the galaxy. I suspect that will play slightly different now, after the swingeing cuts made to Nasa under the current regime.

Where to watch They Cloned Tyrone

Worldwide: Streaming on Netflix

The post Something to watch tonight: They Cloned Tyrone appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

RNZ commissioned me to write a review of Caterpillar - Chelsie Preston Crayford’s debut feature – but have chosen, so far, not to run it. Whether that’s because they don’t like the writing or aren’t happy with the opinion, I can’t be certain.

I won’t excerpt any of it here as they still get first dibs, but seeing as the film opened in cinemas over a week ago the moment may have passed.

Caterpillar is a disappointment when you consider the calibre of people behind it. Preston Crayford is one of New Zealand’s most talented and successful actors, around her mother Gaylene’s film sets since early childhood and an industry professional since her teens¹. She’s put together a top team of local talent including Maria Ines Machego (We Were Dangerous) behind the lens, Jonno Woodford-Robinson (Mortal Engines) at the editing workstation and her father Jonathan Crayford (Ruby & Rata) writing the score.

And then there is the formidable shadow of Gaylene Preston herself – mentor and promotional engine, subject as well as object. There’s a Preston-like character played in the film by Australian Marta Dusseldorp. She is Maxine, a filmmaker in early-oughts Wellington. She and her teenage daughter Cassie (newcomer Anais Shand²) share a Newtown villa with Maxine’s mother Huia (Lisa Harrow). There three generations of women live largely self-absorbed and under-fulfilled lives until a tragic medical situation serves to bring them together.

Part of the problem here is that Preston Crayford’s script is undercooked, relying on a central metaphor – butterflies and caterpillars – for artistic weight and tired scenarios (like driving instruction and awkward family dinners) to deliver dramatic weight. I used to manage the Wellington 48 Hour film competition and we used at advise all the teams who were about to off and brainstorm their stories to put aside the first idea they have because there would be a strong possibility that their first idea would be the same as every other bugger’s. That’s what this feels like – lots of first ideas going unchallenged.

Comic relief – in the form of Matt Whelan’s school Shakespeare director – falls flat and I wonder why Preston Crayford felt the need to go so broad when her strengths are clearly in teasing out intimate moments from quality actors. Set in the early 2000s, Caterpillar feels like that’s when it was made.

Check out the poster for In the Grey (either above or to the left). Don’t those two look like the most self-satisfied pair of numpties imaginable? Henry Cavill and Jake Gyllenhaal play two private contractors working for debt collection lawyer Eiza González. All three of these actors have worked with director Guy Ritchie before and clearly there is appeal in working with him in the sunny Canary Islands, even there isn’t much to be found in Ritchie’s holey script.

A dodgy Latin American billionaire named Salazar (Carlos Bardem) has borrowed another billion from a New York investment bank with no intention of paying it back. After an attempt to recover the money goes murderously wrong, the case is escalated to González and her crack team – the best of the best, etc. A combination of legal and illegal efforts – hence “the grey” – are required to put enough pressure on to get the debt repaid but it’s not going to be easy.

There’s a lot of talk about how Salazar operates in the shadows and how his dealings are often untraceable but he has his name on an oil rig and owns a private island full of tourists so he’s clearly not all that mysterious.

Anyway, it pays not to fixate too hard on the plot problems. The action sequences are good and the whole “setting up the heist, executing the heist” structure works better than the limp banter between the two leads.

Obsession is our ‘horror of the week’, another debut from a YouTuber who studios hope will bring an audience with them. Curry Barker’s film is a variation on the ‘be careful what you wish for’ trope that goes all the way back to Rumplestiltskin. Nervous lad Bear (Michael Johnston) has a crush on co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarette) but can’t muster the courage to tell her. Given the opportunity to make a single wish he asks for her to be into him and, of course, a lack of attention to precise wording means things go flying off the rails big time.

Unfortunately, the moral of the tale is undercut by the delivery which leans in hard on misogynistic stereotypes that are barely saved by Navarette’s star-making performance. There’s a nastiness about Obsession and it seems to recognise that in itself with an ending that acknowledges – too late – who the victim of this story has been all along.

Last Friday night on RNZ Nights, I played a little bit of the closing theme³ for The Sheep Detectives purely so I could tell Emile how good it is and how – despite how unlikely it may seem – everyone should find a way to see it.

A heart-warming talking animal movie – squarely in the Babe tradition – The Sheep Detectives took me a little while to get on its wavelength but once I was? Marvellous. Set in a fantasy version of an English country village, solitary vegan shepherd Hugh Jackman loves his flock and reads murder mysteries to them every night before bed. When he is found dead in the field one morning, the sheep – led by Julia Louis-Dreyfuss – are determined to use the knowledge gained from the books to find the killer.

Critical to the charm of the film is the fact that the sheep – with one sad exception – have the ability to simply forget things that are upsetting or inconvenient. The stellar voicework – Bryan Cranston, Regina Hall, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsay, Patrick Stewart and others – is a testimony to Minions director Kyle Balda and the unanticipated depth of the story must be down to the script⁴ by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us).

Final thought – Nicholas Galitzine appears to be a kind of contract player for Amazon with all of his big hits coming from that studio. Is that a thing now? Studios having long-term favourites⁵?

Despite the weirdness of inserting himself into the film as an interviewer, James Cameron proves with Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft that there’s no director alive who understands how to use 3D better than he does. I went in knowing very little about Ms. Eilish’s music and came out, not only headache-free from either audio or the visuals, but having enjoyed a show that is relatively light on spectacle but heavy on connection to the fans.

On a technical level, it’s remarkable that 3D cameras are now light and manoeuvrable enough to be carried hand-held by a 71-year-old man. I was reminded of the potential I felt when I watched the second 3D concert film⁶ – and only the second digital 3D film I had seen projected in cinemas – U2 3D back in 2008. I recall seeing a shot from behind Bono at the tip of thrust stage in Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of thousands of people stretched out into the distance, and thinking that if that was what I saw when I went to work every day, I might have a bit of an ego, too.

I probably shouldn’t relegate the streamers to the end of these summaries, especially when we are talking about a perfectly nice film with a good heart and nice performances. Remarkably Bright Creatures is based on a bestselling novel and I suspect it will become a Netflix favourite for quite a while.

Sally Field plays an older single woman who is the night cleaner at her local aquarium where she talks to the animals without realising that some of them are watching her, too. Marcellus is a giant squid who narrates this story of loss and recovery with a voice and cynical air courtesy of Alfred Molina (uncredited).

Into this small world comes an itinerant musician (Lewis Pullman) who has arrived in the small town looking for his absent father. Some extraordinary coincidences later, we have a conclusion that prompts a few tears and more than little respect for everybody concerned.

1. I’m old enough that one of my university drama student colleagues had a job looking after her when she was a baby. ︎
2. A newcomer in some respects but as the daughter of oft-seen local actor Erroll Shand, she also doesn’t arrive without some tools. ︎
3. The music gets cut out of the online version for copyright reasons which is another reason why you should try and tune in live. ︎
4. Adapted from a German novel, of all things. ︎
5. Also in the Amazon camp is Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Reacher’s Alan Ritchson. ︎
6. Turns out that Hannah Montana was the first. I’d completely forgotten. ︎

The post Recent releases: Caterpillar, In the Grey, Obsession, The Sheep Detectives, Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft and Remarkably Bright Creatures appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Subscriber BF of Twizel wrote in to thank me for the Young Pope / New Pope recommendation last week but pointed out that on New Zealand’s Neon streamer, the show has no subtitles for the Italian language content. What with the problems that people have been having with the new TVNZ+ app, it’s obvious that local streaming technology is struggling to keep up with the global offerings.

Neon is about to lose all of its HBO and HBO Max content to the Aotearoa version of that behemoth so the silver lining there might be that presentation will meet some basic standards of accessibility.

I was checking earlier Diane Keaton mentions last week for that Young Pope recommendation, I stumbled across this rave for a film that is easily (and in my case actually) forgotten.

Australian Phillip Noyce¹ did an excellent job of directing this Apartheid-era story and the review reminds me that I had high hopes for Derek Luke² back in the day:

Returning from the World Cinema Showcase earlier this year is the splendid Apartheid-era political thriller Catch a Fire starring Tim Robbins and (one of my favourite actors) Derek Luke from Antwone Fisher. The film is set in the North Eastern Coal Fields of South Africa in 1980 where all communities live in the shadow of the huge Secunda Oil Refinery. Luke plays apolitical refinery worker Patrick Chamusso who becomes politicised after being accused and tortured over a terrorist attack at the refinery.

He travels to Mozambique to join the ANC and plot the destruction of the refinery, and the overthrow of the hated apartheid system. What he doesn’t realise is that the moral corruption of apartheid reflects itself in real world corruption everywhere and that his movements have been watched by policeman Nic Vos (Robbins).

Catch a Fire is a testament to the many sacrifices of those years disguised as a fast-moving thriller and it works on both levels. Written by Shawn Slovo, herself the daughter of white ANC freedom fighters, the film also takes a sensitive approach (in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation) to the white side of the story, showing the spiritual damage done to them by apartheid. You won’t find many more satisfying (or more beautifully photographed) films this year.

Also in that August 2007 Capital Times review: Diane Keaton and Mandy Moore in the romcom Because I Said So and John Krasinski and Mandy Moore – again- in the romcom License to Wed (“There are two kinds of Robin Williams film nowadays: the serious kind and the crap kind and this is the latter. Krasinsky³ is quite watchable though and I suspect we’ll be seeing a lot more of him over the next wee while – he’s like a young Tom Hanks with a pair of comedy ears on.”)

Where to watch Catch a Fire

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, India, USA, Ireland & UK: Digital rental

1. Noyce’s Graham Greene adaptation, The Quiet American, has just been re-released by Imprint on Blu-ray. I used to own it on DVD and am looking forward to giving it another go soon. ︎
2. Luke may not have reached the giddy heights but IMDb tells me that he is still working pretty consistently. ︎
3. Krasinski’s action hero career continues with a new Prime Video feature dropping tomorrow: Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War. ︎

The post Something to watch tonight: Catch a Fire appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Imagine my surprise to discover that I haven’t shared my February RNZ review of Mona Fastvold’s strange and brilliant The Testament of Ann Lee. Admittedly, I was in hospital for a couple of nights on the weekend it landed in cinemas but still, it’s an oversight I am happy to correct.

It’s a biography of a charismatic woman who – after periods of mistreatment at the hands of the 18th century English patriarchy – channels her faith into the creation of a new religious sect and then leaves for the New World of the Americas, where she believes her ideas will thrive.

Lots of the reviews of the film focus on the remarkable performance from Amanda Seyfried as Ann – opinions with which I’m happy to concur – but my review was more about the ideas: the ideas behind the film and the ideas behind the Shakers’ version of Christianity.

Unlike many churches, the Shakers appear to have restricted their community outreach to recruitment. They didn’t appear to have a culture of service, for example. They started no orphanages or hospitals and, like the Amish, were focused inwards. But made beautiful buildings, furniture, gardens – and coffins.

Fastvold, herself, makes such interesting choices. The physical and vocal expressions of devotion that the Shakers were known for are presented as much more choreographed (by Celia Rowlson-Hall, music by Daniel Blumberg) than spontaneous, but making the film an actual musical serves to reinforce its own theme.

After all, believing in the truth of all that singing and dancing in front of you requires an audience to take a similar leap of faith as the Shakers themselves.

You won’t find many more interesting new films this year, I’m sure.

Where to watch The Testament of Ann Lee

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland & UK: Streaming on Disney+

India: Streaming on Hotstar

USA: Streaming on Disney+ or Hulu

The post Something to watch tonight: The Testament of Ann Lee appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

I also want to apologise to subscribers for the tardiness (and paucity) of this recent releases update. I’ve had a lot on lately – professionally, socially and medically – and I haven’t made it to the cinema as much as I normally would.

Back in 2006, I had just started reviewing for the weekly paper Capital Times and I wrote this about the first The Devil Wears Prada:

When I took this gig I knew there would come a time when I would be asked to review a film for which I was completely unqualified. What I didn’t realise was that the moment would come so soon. The Devil may well wear Prada but this reviewer wears Hallensteins and names like Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik might as well be shoe designers for all I know.

Idealistic young journalism graduate Andy Sachs (irritatingly squeaky-voiced Anne Hathaway) gets a job as 2^nd Assistant to Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep), editor-in-chief of Runway magazine hoping to parlay the position into a job as a crusading social issues reporter at the New Yorker. She soon finds out that fetching scarves from Hermés and slop from Starbucks is not actually journalism though it does approximate it in prestige. The Devil Wears Prada floats comfortably above mediocrity thanks to the exceedingly witty script, nice observations and a performance out of the very top drawer from Streep. It’s worth seeing for her alone.

That conclusion is perfectly apt for the sequel as it turns out. Streep turns in another masterclass as Priestly reveals herself to be a much misunderstood tyrant. Turns out that everyone – even the famously single-minded editor of the world’s greatest fashion magazine – has to serve someone.

Twenty years on, both the media industry and the fashion industry have seen some changes. Fashion is even more reliant on branded accessories and retail – Emily Blunt’s Emily has left the magazine to run Dior’s flagship store – and magazines are now secondary to digital influencer content and journalism itself is under threat. Hathaway’s Andy is laid off from her prestigious newspaper feature writing gig at the same time she is accepting an award for it.

The free-spending media world of two decades ago has gone and now the only example of conspicuous luxury consumption is in the world of the tech billionaires who buy and sell properties like Runway magazine on a whim.

More often charming than not, The Devil Wears Prada 2 does carry a serious message along with its laughs at the expense of the fashion world. Media and fashion are both worlds that skew female and when opportunities shrink the impact is felt unequally. And Streep’s lovely final speech, wistfully saying how much she loves her work, could easily be a personal statement, too.

I’m not normally a fan of documentaries relying on dramatic recreations. My sense is – if you don’t have the primary material to work with, make a proper feature film and be done with it¹. But I totally understand why Tearepa Kahi has chosen the hybrid model for Sgt. Haane, his salute to Te Arawa WWII hero Haane Manahi who led the successful assault on the Nazi stronghold of Takrouna in Tunisia in April 1943. Manahi was nominated for the Victoria Cross by three senior officers but was downgraded to a Distinguished Conduct Medal on the recommendation of an anonymous British officer.

With no footage of the event – and very little that might supply context for it – and Manahi being modest enough that there isn’t even very much of his life afterwards, dramatic recreations make sense. And because the testimony of his (and other Māori Battalion soldiers) descendants is so crucial to understanding who he was and who he became, you wouldn’t want to leave them out of it either. The present day material also helps contextualise Māori attitudes to military service and the (paradoxically) important relationship to the Crown, making the film more than the sum of its unlikely parts.

The recreations (led by Alex Tarrant as Manahi) work best in the quiet moments, focused on the relationships and moods. I felt that the battle stuff suffered too much from war film clichés to be really moving or even to work all that well as drama. Another section involving a present day Tunisian man recounting his version of the events to his own son reinforces the intergenerational themes but are too obviously staged and the energy drops.

Still, it does Manahi’s story a great service and, hopefully, goes some way towards keeping the deeds of these men alive in our collective memory.

Even though I’m not an official fan of the heavy metal band Iron Maiden, I’ll admit that my mood improves whenever a track of theirs shows up on my shuffle and I am very fond of two documentary films in which they appear. Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey is about the music’s passionate fandom and directors Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen then got to follow the band around on the 2008 Somewhere Back in Time to make Iron Maiden: Flight 666.

Maiden now have a proper documentary about their history. Burning Ambition uses their prodigious archive² to tell the story of some lads from starting out in the pubs of East London – furiously resisting the calls form them to embrace Punk – and a meteoric rise to the arenas and stadia of the world. There are a few hiccups along the way but its a fundamentally positive and uplifting story. Even the band members who were kicked out along the journey remain happy for the experience and grateful that they live in a world that still has Iron Maiden in it. And so say we all.

Also reviewed in that October 2006 column: Dwayne (then still “The Rock”) Johnson in Gridiron Gang, “In The Guardian, a big wet tongue kiss to the US Coast Guard, Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher battle it out for the title of Captain Smug with Kutcher winning by a length”, “new-fangled” mo-cap animation thriller Renaissance, C.R.A.Z.Y. an early film from the late Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, The Young Victoria), and the prescient documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?

1. A good example of a film that supports my argument is Bart Layton’s The Imposter (2012) and he has indeed gone on to make dramatic features. I missed Crime 101 in the cinema but it’s on the catch-up list now that it has arrived on Prime Video. ︎
2. There’s a long section about a 1984 tour to ‘behind the Iron Curtain’ Poland which seems to be going nowhere until the band goes looking for an after show drink in Poznań, crashes a wedding party and ends up using the wedding band’s instruments to play Deep Purple covers to a bemused congregation. ︎

The post Recent releases: The Devil Wears Prada 2, Sgt. Haane and Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

I started the newsletter version of this website back in July 2023 and one of the titles that I have always wanted to recommend has been missing in action – until now.

Paolo Sorrentino’s biting religious satire, The Young Pope, originally screened ten years ago but dropped off the Neon streamer in New Zealand along with the sequel, The New Pope (2020). If, like us, you are a little bit tired of the usual streaming diet of space, crime and space-crime, you’ll find that Sorrentino’s Popes provide a striking alternative.

When none of the leading contenders for the role of pontiff can command a majority, a compromise candidate is chosen. He’s young (natch) and American and the powers behind the throne believe that his relative inexperience will allow them to manipulate him into maintaining their lucrative and influential status quo.

Instead, Lenny Belardo from Queens turns out to be strong-willed and surprisingly conservative. Scornful of anyone who puts their own position over service to God, he rapidly becomes a thorn in the side of the establishment and a source of faithful mystery to many ordinary church followers.

But – as you would hope and expect – nothing is quite as it seems and – because this is a Sorrentino production – even the surprises are weird and wonderful.

Jude Law proves to be a real heavyweight as Belardo and he is well-supported by a quality international supporting cast. The late¹ Diane Keaton plays the nun that raised him in the New York orphanage that appears to be the source of his anger and his resolve. The brilliant Italian actor Sylvio Orlando plays the often outwitting (and equally often outwitted) secretary of state Cardinal Voiello, Spanish genius Javier Cámara is the gentle Monsignor Gutierrez and Cécile de France is the Vatican marketing manager.

10 episodes of intrigue, metaphysics and often furious debate about faith and its mechanics later, and we are left with a cliff-hanger that was eventually resolved several years later with a new series (The New Pope) and a new Pope – pitch-perfect perfect John Malkovich.

Where to watch The Young Pope and The New Pope

Aotearoa: Streaming on Neon

Australia: Digital purchase from Fetch

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland & UK: Streaming on Sky

India: Streaming on Prime Video or Lionsgate Play

USA: Streaming on HBO Max

Further listening

I was pleased to be able to recommend both series to listeners of RNZ Nights last Friday, along with the new heavy metal documentary Iron Maiden: Burning Ambition and the 1982 New Zealand tax write-off Battletruck (aka Warlords of the Twenty-First Century).

1. Typing that stopped me in my tracks, let me tell you. ︎

The post Something to watch tonight: The Young Pope & The New Pope appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

I realised talking to Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights last Friday that the reason I enjoy the Architecture & Design Film Festival so much is because the films are all so optimistic.

To start with a blank piece of paper and then draw something on it, and even further, build that thing and make a difference. In today’s gloomy world, I love seeing stories about people who dream of a better way.

The Aurora district of Turin was a down-on-its-heels working class part of town, suffering from the reduction of local industry. A few years ago the Lavazza coffee company decided to build a new head office there and in the process transformed the entire neighbourhood with accessible, sensitive and generous design choices. Not only did they build a beautiful curved (and green) building to house the offices, they converted an old power station into a museum, created gardens with fountains and opened two staff restaurants that are open to the public. One is overseen by Michelin-starred chef Ferran Adrià and the other was designed by Oscar-winning set designer Dante Ferretti.

Nuvola, an Open Project for the City is a short documentary that beautifully shows off the design choices, and also the impact on a community that has been re-energised by the development. After a while, it becomes clear that none of this would be possible if Lavazza wasn’t still a family-owned company – third and fourth generation Lavazzas appear near the end to talk about their favourite aspects of the project. I basked in this film and am now desperate to visit Turin.

The festival is experimenting away from documentary with the selection of narrative features this year, still with a design or architecture theme. The Great Arch (La grande arche) is the story of one of the most awesome pieces of modern design in the heart of Paris. In the early 80s, a competition was held to put a building at the far end of the Champs-Élysées, 4km from the Arc de Triomphe. Little-known Danish architect Johan Otto von Spreckelsen (Claes Bang) somehow won the contest despite having previously built nothing bigger than a church.

Out of his political depth among the Parisian movers and shakers, he fought to stay true to his original vision – a cube with a hole in it – at great personal cost. Surprisingly, the film doesn’t flinch from the realities of huge construction projects, making drama from the choices about marble and glass. The – presumably – digital recreations of the project at various stages of the build are excellently done.

The main reason why there are so many documentaries about mid-Century American architecture is that there is so much archival material to choose from. Jake Gorst’s documentary, Googie, about Californian leisure design – what Emile Donovan called “Jetson architecture” – of the 50s and 60s has lots of film and photosto choose from, as well as access to original drawings and models. It also seems to have an endless supply of historians, archivists, preservationists and enthusiasts on tap and their excitement and joy is infectious.

I didn’t even know that this style of architecture had a name – Googie came from the nickname of the wife of the first client – and now I can see its influence in so many of my favourite films. On the East Coast, diners were drab and rectangular – often old railway carriages – but in California they were all weird angles with giant illuminated signs that reached for the sky. An optimistic architecture, indeed.

The number one job of The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens is to let ignoramuses like me know that the gardens actually exist. Job done, then. It’s basically a brochure for this epic development on the site of the former Hamilton City landfill containing over a dozen rectangles – they are mostly rectangles – inspired by gardens from other parts of the world and other eras. While I’m not sure about the scholarship involved – an Egyptologist acquaintance says to take the historical accuracy of the Egypt garden with a pinch of salt – there’s no denying the craft and care that’s gone into them.

On Culture 101 the other day, I mentioned that I found it strange that the gardens sit beside the Waikato River but have very little relationship to it but the film isn’t interested in anything that isn’t a celebration of the facility or going to sell more tickets.

Stardust: A Story of Love and Architecture is the only film where the designs themselves didn’t grab me. Indeed, despite being an enthralling story of the partnership between Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown – he the intellectual foundation and she bridling at not getting her due as the creative force behind the buildings themselves – every time the film included a picture of one of their constructions my response was simply, “yuck”.

You can’t win them all, I know, but I was surprised at how even my untrained eye can tell that Venturi & Brown’s post-modern, geometrically challenged buildings were bad jokes. Not nearly as much fun as they thought they were and nowhere near as much fun as those Googie California diners.

The festival is currently screening in Auckland and then travels to 12 other locations around New Zealand between now and 22 June.

The Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival has been a staple of my coverage for a few years:

In 2018, there was a film about a Dutch landscape gardener called Piet Oudolf that both the editor-in-chief and I remember fondly.

In 2019, I learned about Bauhaus (and am all the better for it).

In 2022, I was bewitched by the story of The Automat.

In 2023, a film about the architect Richard Henriquez made me want to visit Vancouver very badly.

In 2024, Skin of Glass was the most incredible documentary I saw that year.

And in 2025, I didn’t write the festival up but did talk about it on RNZ.

The post Something to watch over the next few weeks: Resene Architecture & Design Film Festival appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Editor’s note

Apologies for the lack of recent posting.

Two reasons come to mind. The workflow from WordPress to Buttondown does what I wanted but is nowhere near as smooth as Substack used to be. Friction in other words.

Secondly, I have been asked by my three-days-a-week employer to add an extra day. This is very flattering, especially when you include the very nice things they said about me when they asked. Obviously, in this economy, I’d be a fool to myself and danger to others if I turned that offer down, but it does mean fitting these posts in to the working week is even more difficult.

Funnily enough, there’s still plenty of time for the watching of the films and television¹, just not so much for the thinking and the writing. I’ll work something out.

But this is an opportunity to remind you all that there’s no paywall any longer and I won’t hold it against you if you decide to cancel the paid part of your subscription. You can do that via Buttondown.

The third part in David Mackenzie’s unofficial Robin Hood trilogy², Fuze is an entertaining but ridiculous ride. An unexploded WWII bomb is discovered in a central London building site and grizzled Afghan war veteran Aaron Taylor-Johnson is called in with his squad to make it safe. We soon learn that the bomb is a cover for an audacious diamond heist, taking advantage of the plod’s preoccupation with public safety and the ensuing multi-block evacuation.

The question is, how much does Taylor-Johnson know about the plot but it takes a tight 90 minutes and several twists before we find out. Films like this are all about the twists so you can never have too many in my book but Fuze even pushed me to my limit.

Made for the UK Sky channel, Fuze is let down by TV’s assumption that you won’t be concentrating wholeheartedly on the screen. Frustratingly long parts of it are essentially narrated via updates between Taylor-Johnson’s squad and the Metropolitan Police.

The best bit of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is the word “sarcophagus” but the disappointment is that it’s only used twice. Irish horror-auteur Lee Cronin gets his name on the film in case we were tempted to think it was in the Fraser/Weitz or Tom Cruise Mummy universes. It’s not nearly as much fun as either of those.

Cheerful child Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) is kidnapped from the garden of the Cairo house her American parents are living in while dad (Jack Reynor) is a foreign correspondent and mum (Laia Costa) is a nurse. Seven years later, with the remains of the family back in New Mexico, Katie is recovered inside a mysterious and ancient sarcophagus. Turns out she hasn’t just been held hostage, she’s been inhabited by a demonic force (Natalie Grace) that – interestingly – is set on destroying happy families.

The opposite of fun, this Mummy was only interesting because New Mexico is portrayed by Ireland and Egypt by Spain and the demon by some impressive but gross practical makeup effects by Arjen Tuiten (Wolf Man).

I’ve been wondering since I saw it on Saturday whether there is, in fact, any hidden subtext to Antoine Fuqua’s fantasy/biography of Michael Jackson’s first 29 years, Michael. The second shot of the film lingers on the star’s groin (after an opening shot of his feet). Maybe that’s as subtle as it gets?

Utterly inessential – indeed, dishonest – on any artistic or dramatic level, Michael is as sloppy a production as Jackson’s own shows were tight. Back in 2009, I reviewed the documentary This Is It for this very website and said:

This behind-the-scenes documentary, made up of footage intended for “Making of” extras on an eventual DVD plus handicam footage for Jackson’s own personal archive, shows a dedicated bunch of seriously talented people preparing a huge stage show for an audience of demanding fans. However, no one involved is more demanding than the star of the show MJ himself.

But Michael’s screenwriter, John Logan (Skyfall), seems to have been more focused on the paycheque than elevating his film above the level of cliché. At one point, a Motown talent executive watching the Jackson 5 from the wings, approaches the pantomime villain of the story Colman Domingo (as father/manager Joseph Jackson). She hands him a business card and says, “I’ll be in touch.” But how?! She’s given him a card and he hasn’t told her anything about how to get hold of him?

I’ll give credit where credit is due – debutant Juliano Valdi is terrific as the young Michael and I hope whoever is looking after him is aware of the real story behind Michael’s career and is there to protect him from exploitation and mistreatment. Jackson’s nephew, Jaafar, is more than creditable as the superstar but Jackson tribute acts have been ten a penny for decades and doing that right is really just baseline. Impersonating Jackson is one thing – the real achievement was inventing himself in the first place, somehow fusing James Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Gene Kelly and Bob Fosse and turning all that into something that electrifying.

But it’s the complexity of Jackson that’s missing. All of it. Any of it. Maybe that’s how he would have wanted things, but he – and the unfortunate young people who came into his orbit – actually deserve much more.

I was delighted to be commissioned by RNZ to write a review for Exit 8 for the website, mainly because those opportunities are few and far between these days. I’d like you to read the whole thing because I’m quite proud of it and, you know, the metrics matter:

On holiday in Tokyo a few years ago I saw a salaryman tumble down an escalator to the train platform at the bottom. Another man stood above him, as if he might have been responsible. Was there a dispute? Did they even know each other? The man in a heap looked up and made eye contact with me as if to say, ‘there’s nothing to see here’ and then dozens (hundreds?) of fellow commuters walked around or stepped over him on their way to the next destination of their own lives.

In the normally well-ordered world of Japanese public transport you could call the incident “an anomaly” – something that clearly happened but was paid no attention to.

Anomalies like that are the driving force of Genki Kawamura’s fascinating video game adaptation, Exit 8. A commuter on his way to a temp job exits his train at an unfamiliar station. As he heads to the exit, the same four sections of subway repeat in a loop and he learns that his only way out is to solve a puzzle that requires his close attention.

I liked Exit 8 a lot and it deserves to be seen without distractions.

There are good/good films; there are bad/good films; there are also good/bad films and clearly there are bad/bad films. And then there is whatever the hell Greenland 2: Migration is.

The original Greenland disaster movie came out during early Covid and maybe it met the mood of the times because it even got me to change my mind about Gerard Butler, at least for a minute or two. From memory, a comet strikes the Earth, causing an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out all our technology and gruff man of the people Butler has to get his family to safety at a bunker in, you guessed it, Greenland.

In the new film, it’s five years on and fragments of the comet continue to rain down on everyone and nuclear storms make it impossible to spend any time outside without protective gear. The Greenland bunker is no longer safe but there are rumours that the initial crater somewhere in Western Europe has cosmic properties and may be able to sustain life.

So off they go again on an adventure that is far, far stupider than anything else I am likely to see this year. Not one thing about this disaster of a picture makes a lick of sense. It’s streaming on Prime which I should have guessed because whoever makes the commissioning decisions for their feature programming has clearly never seen a film – never even sat next to anyone who has seen a film – but has seen spreadsheets about films.

Further listening

I reviewed Fuze for RNZ Nights two Fridays ago and Exit 8 last Friday night. As usual, the conversation was pretty wide-ranging so you’ll find me also talking about playback singer Asha Bhosle, local indie thriller Blind Panic and Tom Hanks on Apple TV.

On Sunday I appeared on RNZ Culture 101 and provided a sneak preview of my Michael review as well as The Time Traveller’s Guide to Hamilton Gardens and ANZAC documentary Sgt. Haane. Those last two are in cinemas (officially) this week and I’ll write up my thoughts here when that happens.

1. Television is a lovely word, isn’t it? We don’t use it enough. ︎
2. Hell or High Water and Relay are also about crooks with ulterior motives, a heart of gold, or both. ︎

The post New-ish releases: Fuze, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Michael, Exit 8 and Greenland 2: Migration appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

At the end of the credits for You, Me & Tuscany there’s a stern warning that the film may not be used to train any AI model, which would be praiseworthy were it not for the fact that the film itself already appears to be have crawled out of one.

One of those ‘American discovers themselves and finds love thanks to beautiful European country and crazy European people’, it is so tonally inspired by My Big Fat Greek Wedding that it’s creator, Nia Vardalos, makes a cameo appearance to show her approval.

Halle Bailey (The Little Mermaid, The Color Purple, but not the good versions of either of those films) plays Anna, a young woman who is reeling from personal tragedy by making irresponsible personal decisions – to the frustration of sassy best friend Claire (Aziza Scott). Down to her last working credit card, Anna befriends a handsome Italian real estate something-or-other in a hotel bar, discovers that he has fallen out with his family and left his Tuscan village home, never to return. There’s a beautiful villa, just sitting there empty. Why shouldn’t Anna go and live in it for a while until she has sorted herself out? At least, that’s what Anna thinks. Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor) has passed out on the bed thanks to a combination of liquor and jet lag.

It’s not long before Anna is discovered in Matteo’s luxurious home and makes up a story about being Matteo’s fiancée, instantly making his family happy, both at the impending wedding and about the fact that he will shortly be coming home.

Heartthrob Regé-Jean Page (Bridgerton) plays Michael, Matteo’s winemaker cousin-slash-brother. The precise relationship between the two men is clumsily handled, because the filmmakers don’t really want to explain why Michael is black in a white Italian family and why he has an English accent but also speaks perfect Italian, while at the same time they want his handsome black-ness to be notable for Anna and Claire but invisible to everyone else¹.

It won’t amount to spoilers for me to say that Anna melts Michael’s all-business heart – the film eventually lets her sing – and Michael prompts Anna to come clean about the truth of her non-relationship with Matteo. On the way, we get plentiful rich-people consumption porn (including Maserati product placement) and Anna demonstrating her dormant cooking skills to save the day in the family’s restaurant.

A crowd-pleasing film for the easily pleased, there was even some applause at the screening I attended. Maybe for Regé-Jean’s eight-pack.

If that particular version of ‘wounded American healed by Italy’ isn’t enough for you, in Solo Mio Kevin James (Paul Blart: Mall Cop) is jilted at the altar in Rome and persuaded to do the honeymoon vacation package alone. Two other American couples on the same tour try and help him get over things but it’s the owner of the local coffee shop who proves that he has a future.

Mostly maudlin – and with an awkwardly old fashioned attitude to gender – Solo Mio features some teeth-grindingly awful coincidences and an inexplicable cameo appearance by Andrea Bocelli. James has made his mateship with Adam Sandler go an awful long way and his sad sack performance wears thin early on and doesn’t improve. What these women see in his character, I can’t for the life of me work out.

The most interesting things about Canadian horror Undertone are the circumstances of its making. Writer-director Ian Tuason was the solo caregiver for his parents while they were simultaneously dying of cancer during Covid and he turned that experience into a low-budget chiller that he shot in the family home where his parents died.

Podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri) is alone with her comatose mother, hoping that the end won’t be too painful and drawn out. Some mysterious audio files, sent by her co-host, spark incipient paranoia as the fear, loneliness, insomnia, substance abuse along with all the Catholic paraphernalia that surrounds conspires to push her towards – and then over – the edge.

Just as the horror of The Rule of Jenny Pen isn’t the possessed plastic doll so much as the fear of being old, feeble and forced to eat institutional food, Undertone’s horror is of being trapped and powerless watching a parent slowly die.

Until the end when it dives right in to its demonic possession conceit and becomes very unpleasant as a result.

Further listening

I offered up radio versions of these reviews for RNZ’s Culture 101 slot on Sunday afternoon. Listen to my conversation with Braydon Priest and decide for yourself which version is more coherent or entertaining.

1. There’s a bigger article to be written here – by a person of colour rather than myself – about a film that’s acutely aware of race on some levels but studiously ignores it on others. Producer Will Packer has made a career out of making content for African-American audiences but the dramatic implications of Anna’s unexpected entry into this world go unexplored. ︎

The post New releases: You, Me & Tuscany, Solo Mio and Undertone appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

This weekend I reviewed three new release movies for RNZ’s Culture 101 show and they were all so uninspiring that I chose one of most imaginative films of all time for our Saturday night Hollywood at Home watch.

The City of Lost Children, by Marc Caro (design director) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (mis-en-scene), was plucked from the excellent Sony Pictures Classics 30th anniversary UHD box and it looked a treat.

On an abandoned oil rig, a monster named Krank and his hapless companions/assistants attempt to steal the dreams of kidnapped children¹ while a circus strongman and some petty criminal kids mount a come to the rescue.

That’s an imperfect summary of a film that seems to be inspired by everything and yet still be entirely its own. Vast waterlogged indoor sets are supplemented by early digital effects – characters rapidly ageing and fleas delivering a mind control serum work well, the green mist not so much – but its the playful costumes by Jean-Paul Gaultier that really stand out. At one point, Ron Perlman’s red-haired hero uses the wool of his knitted sweater as a way to stay connected to his young partner Miette (Judith Vittet) and it even unravels in an entirely Gaultier way.

Vittet was only nine years old but cinematographer Darius Khondji shoots her superbly poised performance like she’s Hedy Lamarr.

One from the “they really don’t make them like that anymore” department, The City of Lost Children might be about kids and dreams but when the Cyclops cult turn up – eyeballs plucked and replaced by steampunk video cameras – it’s a horror film, but when the screen is occupied by Dominique Pinon’s six hapless clones it’s very much a comedy.

Where to watch La cité des enfants perdus / The City of Lost Childen

Aotearoa: Streaming on the Rialto Amazon channel or digital rental

Australia: Digital rental

Canada: Streaming on Crave or Tele Quebec (free with ads)

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Digital rental from Prime Video

USA: Digital rental

UK: Streaming on the Studiocanal Amazon channel

Further listening

As well as Culture 101 for RNZ on Sunday, I also had my usual fun chat with Emile Donovan on Nights at 8.45 on Friday. To celebrate the achievements of Artemis II, we played a section from Bill Conti’s Oscar-winning score from The Right Stuff and I reviewed The President’s Cake, Man on the Run and alerted listeners to the almost impossibly nostalgic MTV Rewind website.

1. The torment of not being able to dream reminded me of Bi Gan’s Resurrection which I reviewed here. ︎

The post Something to watch tonight: La cité des enfants perdus aka The City of Lost Children appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

I’m one of the critics who enjoyed Kristoffer Borgli’s first English language film, Dream Scenario. For some writer-directors the conceit of a film can be enough and they either don’t interrogate their ideas deeply enough or coast on visual vibes and hope for the best. Luckily, his latest film, The Drama, skates close to being annoying but script and execution conspire to pull it off.

At a drunken menu and wine testing prior to their wedding, librarian Emma (Zendaya), art curator Charlie (Robert Pattinson) and their best man and maid of honour (Mamadou Athie and Alana Haim) who happen to be a couple, get themselves into a ‘truth or dare’ kind of parlour game where each one has to reveal “the worst thing they ever did” to group. No one really likes this idea but no one can back down and Emma’s final revelation proves to be the bombshell that threatens to blow up the wedding as well as the friendships.

The convention here appears to be that reviewers not reveal what it is that Emma confesses to. I’ll play along but reluctantly, as – firstly – it happens quite early on and – secondly – your response to the whole thing relies on it. Suffice to say that nobody handles it very well and Charlie starts to wonder who it is that he’s supposed to be marrying and Emma, in turn, sees that Charlie may not be the most emotionally reliable life partner that she could have found.

There are a lot of interesting things going on – psychological fragility being something of a theme of Emma’s story – but a lot of it comes down to trying to deal with all of this at the same time as organising a wedding rather than preparing for a life together. In situations like this weddings are an event to endure rather than a party to enjoy. A fiery portal to pass through and hope like hell you remember them fondly.

Why does it work when it’s a terrible beat-up of an idea that probably shouldn’t? The best performances that I’ve seen from each of the leads, for a start. Two actors whose movie star-ness means they can often look other-worldly, here look like ordinary people for a change. Somehow you continue to root for them, despite their fuck-ups. Pattinson’s Charlie, for example, is introduced doing something fairly heinous in order contrive a meet-cute with Emma, but he’s such a pathetically bad liar that he can’t sustain it for very long and you end up forgiving him (as she does).

And that’s one of the things the film is about – at what point does something you have chosen not to tell someone become a secret with all of its conspiratorial connotations? At what point do people you love become entitled to every aspect of your inner life? Do they ever?

Bart Schrijver’s The North could easily be titled The Un-drama as the friendship between two men slowly unravels on a long Scottish hike they intend as a kind of reunion. They are heading for a forebodingly named spot called Cape Wrath and on the way they experience all of the extremes of a great ‘trail’. The physical challenge of meeting your distance targets every day, the extreme Scottish weather, equipment failures¹, but mostly their inability to relate to each other as their lives have diverged over a decade.

It’s a beautiful film – and having walked some of the earlier parts of the path myself over 40 years ago I can vouch for its often painful accuracy – but your enjoyment of it may depend entirely on your tolerance for men failing to communicate with each other.

The best film of the week – and I’ll concede that it’s a tight call – may well be the least heralded and that’s a shame. In the spirit of classic films about dangerous and unfair worlds seen through the eyes of children – Capharnaum comes to mind, or even Empire of the Sun – it tells the story of nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), chosen by the school lottery to bake a cake to celebrate the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s 53rd birthday in 1990. This is no easy task as the international sanctions against his régime mean shortages of ingredients and no one around her seems to be taking the task as seriously as she is.

As she navigates a perilous path around the city – sometimes accompanied by her grandmother, sometimes by her schoolfriend and sometimes by her loyal rooster – we see a world of corruption and selfishness. On today of all days, though, it’s good to be reminded that when we describe nations as adversaries – even badly behaved ones – it’s invariably the ordinary people, especially the children, who bear the brunt of it.

There’s one scene in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie involving a sleeping dinosaur and a special raygun that turns characters into baby versions of themselves that I thought aspired to Looney Tunes levels of inspiration and actually made me laugh out loud, but the rest of it is a noisy, colourful mess.

I know it’s going to make tonnes of money but the money really shouldn’t be the point. If you are making films aimed at young folk, you should have some kind of moral compass that guides your storytelling and you really shouldn’t be resolving challenges with – even cartoon – violence.

We’ve been reading a lot during the current omnicrisis about how China is quietly going about leading the world in climate and electrification technology, while we in the west continue to cling to the disappearing old ways. Based on Bi Gan’s Resurrection, we can also add original blockbuster science-fiction to the list of areas where we are being left behind.

High concept and brilliantly realised, the film imagines a world where humans are no longer able to dream, except for one person (known as a Deliriant and played by Jackson Lee). He uses movies projected inside his unconscious mind as a place where he can continue to dream and a mysterious young woman creates four scenarios for them so she can understand what makes him so special.

Hypnotic, vivid, strange and also besotted with cinematic tropes, Resurrection may prove too slow for your own consciousness if you start it too late at night², but if you turn up with the right energy it’s an amazing trip.

Time travel is taken completely unseriously in BenDavid Grabinski’s Hulu/Disney+ comedy Mike & Nick & Nick and Alice, in which a mid-level mob manager (Vince Vaughan) uses the time machine his organisation has inadvertently been financing to go back six months and fix something that is bothering his conscience – himself.

If Vaughan’s brand of deadpan non-acting suits you then you’ll love having two of him but the best things in it are Eiza González as the girlfriend with the hidden depths and Grabinski’s non sequitur laden script.

Man on the Run is a McCartney-approved Prime Video documentary by Morgan Neville about the period of the ex-Beatle’s life when he became an – um – ex-Beatle.

Not quite 30 but one of the most famous faces in the world and also out of a job, McCartney retreated to his Scottish farmhouse and tried to rebuild. He didn’t know what kind of music he wanted to make, he was frustrated by the business and his best mate was on the other side of the Atlantic lying in bed and being sarcastic.

After a couple of interesting false starts, he decides he needs a band again and that he also needs his famously non-musical wife Linda to be in it. This is the most interesting section of the film as he learns to tour again – kids in tow – and takes delight in splitting all the 50p entrance fees equally among the band. They are not quite as delighted as they don’t have Beatles mega-royalties to fall back on.

The second half of the film is less successful as Wings become a global success and we see McCartney turning into the 1980s boring family entertainer that he evolved into. He didn’t emerge from that whole Rupert Bear period, I think, until this century and started being really adventurous again.

As you might expect, Man on the Run looks and sounds great which is a pleasure when we’re being reminded of all those classic Wings singles. The hits may not have been pouring out of him they were during the Beatles days but they were still pretty good.

Comments?

Just like Substack, there are three ways you can leave feedback for us here at F&S. You can reply to the email and that reply will end up in my crowded inbox (to be read only by me). Or you can leave a comment on the webpage below (as reader SD of Auckland did on yesterday’s Animal Kingdom recommendation. Comments show up below the “You may also like” section. Thirdly, you can come to the webpage and click the little .

Editor’s note

As usual, yesterday’s newsletter was written here in the website editor and then sent to Buttondown to be turned into a newsletter. It was there I found a couple of painful typos but only after I was already on the road to my first film of the day. That’s where I learnt how difficult editing Buttondown content is on my tiny little phone screen. I can’t say that we have ironed out all the wrinkles in this new process – handling of images may only be improved by me going up to another paid level of Buttondown – but we are getting better every day.

1. The editor-in-chief wondered how they were able to charge their cellphones. ︎
2. Reader, I draw this advice from life. ︎

The post New releases: Four in cinemas, one rental and two streaming appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

There’ve been a few goodies added to Netflix in Aotearoa New Zealand in the last week. I notice that lots of people are taking the opportunity to watch the documentary about Jacinda Ardern, Prime Minister, which is a shrewd ‘get’ as well as a ‘must see’.

I was pleased that they also added this Aussie thriller from 2010 which allows me to cut and paste my Capital Times review from September of that year:

When the Film Festival screening of Animal Kingdom finished, my companion and I turned to each other and realised that neither of us had breathed for the last five minutes. The tension that had been slowly building throughout the film had become almost unbearable and director David Michôd’s Shakespearean climax was no less than the rest of the film deserved.

Seventeen-year-old “J” (extraordinary newcomer James Frecheville) goes to live with his Gran and his Uncles when his Mum overdoses. The family are more than petty criminals but less than gangland royalty – bank robbers and thugs rather than black economy businessmen. Gran (Jacki Weaver) seems like a nice enough sort, though, and the family pulls together despite the constant pressure from the local fuzz.

But when the alpha male gets shot by rogue cops in a shopping mall carpark, there’s a vacancy at the head of the family and the only candidates are ill-equipped for leadership. Note that I haven’t told you which actors are which in this scenario. Animal Kingdom has about seven genuine “I didn’t see that coming” moments, which is about seven more than most films, and I don’t want to spoil any of them.

That’s not to say that the cast doesn’t deserve mention. Joel Edgerton wasn’t able to demonstrate his gifts in the Kiwi fizzer Separation City last year but is real movie star material here and the great Ben Mendelsohn is absolutely electric throughout. Weaver is a revelation and Guy Pearce (as the good cop) proves once again what a selfless character actor he can be now he isn’t trying to be a movie star.

Before this year’s Film Festival I cracked-wise in these pages that if anything in it turned out to be better than Toy Story 3 I’d be very surprised. I’m pleased to report that Animal Kingdom made me eat my words. I’m not saying that it is the best film of the year but it is in the top one.

Has any reader watched the 2016–2022 American spin-off series (75 episodes!) that David Michôd executive produced. Sailed over my head, I’m afraid but it has a great cast.

Also in that CT review, if you felt like delving in further, Nicolas Cage in Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (“a less winning proposition I haven’t come across in a while”), a lukewarm review of the first film in the Despicable Me juggernaut, Adam Sandler’s self-indulgent Grown Ups, Annette Bening blowing me away in adoption drama Mother and Child and the excellent but now almost forgotten local documentary, Gordonia.

Where to watch Animal Kingdom

Aotearoa: Streaming on Netflix

Australia: Streaming on Netflix or Stan

Canada: Streaming on Crave

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Fubo, AMC+, SundanceNow, Philo or Tubi (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on Studiocanal

The post Something to watch tonight: Animal Kingdom appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

We don’t often get to celebrate New Zealand cinematic achievements in actual cinemas. The last big screen anniversary I recall was for 25 years of Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tail Tale back in 2011.

But this weekend cinema audiences can come together to watch a newly remastered version of a film that the nation absolutely loves – Taika Waititi’s 2016 comedy Hunt for the Wilderpeople, featuring Sir Sam Neill and global megastar Julian Dennison.

I reviewed it for RNZ back in the days when we were making little videos and also – astonishingly – live on Morning Report. It was that big a deal.

Again, check out my remarkable ability to predict the future:

Hunt for the Wilderpeople is destined to be a Kiwi classic. Waititi’s Boy still holds the record for the highest grossing local film, but this new one should threaten that record. I can’t imagine any New Zealander who won’t appreciate the humour, the pathos and the nostalgia of a truly local film.

For screening times, here are the listings on Flicks. If you aren’t able to get to one of those (or perhaps have the misfortune of living overseas), streaming options can be found below.

Editor’s note

Apologies to newsletter subscribers for the giant movie poster illustrations in the new releases edition. I want them to be smaller – closer to how they appear here – but I don’t know how to do that with Buttondown yet.

Also, tomorrow is the start of Easter weekend and I’ll be taking a break from posting until the working week starts again next Tuesday. I will be appearing on RNZ Nights tonight at about 8.40 to talk about Wilderpeople and its impact, Bi Gan’s amazing Resurrection and another local film that made good use of the singular talents of Rima Te Wiata, Housebound on Māori+.

Where to watch Hunt for the Wilderpeople

Aotearoa: Digital rental from Google only

Australia: Streaming on Netflix

Canada: Digital rental

Ireland: Digital rental

India: Streaming on the Sony Pictures Amazon channel

USA: Streaming on Fubo or Tubi (free with ads)

UK: Streaming on MGM+

The post Something to watch this weekend: Hunt for the Wilderpeople appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

The unforgivable cynic in me thought that, if I were the producer of a modest British independent film looking to release in cinemas across America, a scandal revealing my subject matter’s Tourette’s to a global audience at the Bafta awards might prove to be commercially useful, no matter how offensive his verbal tics might be.

That was a mental tic of my own that occurred before I had seen Kirk Jones’, I Swear, and realised that the film does all the hard work of helping audiences understand the syndrome and needs no help from cheap stunts like the one that I imagined.

The subject of I Swear, John Davidson, has been in the real life public eye since he was a teenager but the film wisely removes those complicating chapters – the role of the media in his torment says more about the times than it does Davidson or Tourette’s – so we are left with a story about the impact of the affliction itself and coming to terms with it.

Jones’ film has the look and feel of a Ken Loach picture, aided by the presence of the great Peter Mullan who arrives in the middle to rescue Davidson and the picture from spiralling into helplessness. As Tommy Trotter, the community centre caretaker who offers Davidson his first job, Mullan shows all of us how to behave around people who are different from ourselves and he does it so charmingly that nobody watching should expect themselves to be any different.

Mullan is a national treasure but I suspect that his political prickliness might prevent him getting (or accepting) the knighthood that he deserves.

Robert Aramayo as Davidson gives you the kind of revelatory performance that makes you forget that you’ve actually seen him in a few things before. He disappears into the character of Davidson and films like this need someone to root for – he one hundred percent delivers. I Swear is a very easy film to recommend (and you can hear my review on RNZ Culture 101 here).

Pixar has long ceased to be a reliable supplier of animated masterpieces but there’s still an undeniable visual quality to their work even when the story falls short. The character design in Hoppers is terrific – check out the poster image to my left – but despite a strong central idea, the film itself only drifts to a conclusion.

Mabel (Piper Curda) is a teenage conservation activist who is fighting a lone battle to save her favourite peaceful glade from destruction due to a giant concrete ring road – the kind of infrastructure project that mayors like Jon Hamm’s Jerry Generazzo build careers and campaigns on. Mabel discovers that her college biology tutor is working on a secret project to download (or should that be upload?) human brainwaves into anatomically perfect android animals so she hijacks a beaver (android) and goes undercover to find out why none of the animals are fighting back.

The setup is great and the conclusion is not unsatisfying but the middle is desperately unfocused – featuring a long car chase of all things – and Hoppers fails to live up to its own internal logic too often to really hit the spot.

They Will Kill You is an empty shell. Director Kirill Sokolov has some action-comedy chops but gives you no reason to care about any of it. Zazie Beets plays an ex-con in the city, looking for the sister she abandoned as a child. Based on a tip, she takes a job as a maid in the mysterious building where her sister was last seen. Turns out the job is just a front – she’s intended to be a human sacrifice used by the rich inhabitants to preserve their ghoulish immortality. Can she survive long enough to find her sister and escape both their fates?

The biggest mystery in the whole thing is what accent Patricia Arquette is doing as Maria, the building manager.

Attempting to harness some of the magic of the Paddington trilogy, screenwriter Simon Farnaby has attached himself to another (supposedly) beloved English children’s franchise, Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree.

In terms of the human component, Farnaby has sensibly departed from Blyton’s original model. We follow a modern family – Andrew Garfield is the father, Claire Foy is the mother and I can’t be bothered typing the names of the three child actors – who are escaping the modern world for a ‘good life’ in what the English call the ‘countryside’.

For no good reason, they are advised never to go to the local woods but middle daughter Fran does because she gets an invitation from local pixie Silky (Nicola Coughlan).

In the woods, Fran finds a magic (not terribly faraway, it must be said) tree populated by weird characters and a portal to even more amazing worlds high in the sky.

The big problem with this magic Faraway tree is Blyton. These magical characters might be meaningful if you were a child in 1939 but all feel terribly first-draft here in 2026. The world of the tree isn’t nearly as interesting – or as successfully conceived – as the real world on the ground. Even then, Garfield’s dream of making a world-beating pasta sauce is frustratingly illogical.

The best news is that Michael Palin is still alive enough to be able to cameo. Hurrah for that.

The post New releases: I Swear, Hoppers, They Will Kill You and The Magic Faraway Tree appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

With Ryan Gosling winning plaudits for his star-turn as a junior high school teacher who saves the galaxy, an arrival in my mailbox reminded me of a previous performance by Gosling as a junior high school teacher, one whose problems are much more earthbound.

Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s Half Nelson has just been released on Blu-ray by Imprint Films¹, and it encouraged me to revisit my original review from 2007:

A very welcome return from the Festival is Half Nelson, a beautifully acted character study about a gifted school teacher (Ryan Gosling) with a drug problem and the unlikely friendship he forms with one of his students, played by newcomer Shareeka Epps. They are both lonely and misunderstood and for a short while they make a connection (even if it is mostly unspoken).

Of all the young leading men around at the moment (many of whom also seem to be named Ryan) Gosling is the real deal. It’s no accident that Peter Jackson has cast him as the father in The Lovely Bones despite being about ten years too young for the role. On this evidence he’ll be fine.

I was quite the soothsayer in those days but perhaps it was inevitable that Gosling would be fired from The Lovely Bones for turning up in Wellington with a method actor’s weight gain.

Half Nelson was also a predictor of talent that would be fed into the franchise machine – Boden and Fleck went on to make Captain Marvel in 2019, supporting actor Anthony Mackie is now Captain America and Gosling is making a Star War.

Also in that October 2007 Capital Times review: Paul Verhoeven’s wartime melodrama, Black Book, enjoyable Jamie Foxx vehicle, The Kingdom (I described it as “CSI: Saudi”) and Scarlet Johansson in The Nanny Diaries.

Where to watch Half Nelson

Physical Media: Blu-ray from Imprint Films

Aotearoa: Not currently available online

Australia: Streaming on SBS

Canada: Streaming on Prime Video

Ireland: Streaming on RakutenTV (free with ads)

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Prime Video, Fubo or AMC+

UK: Streaming on Prime Video, RakutenTV (free with ads) or the Icon channel on Prime Video

1. Interestingly, the Aussie website has the release date as 29 October 2025 but it has only just made it across the ditch. With a limited run of only 1500 copies, maybe we are only getting the final few. ︎

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One of the most remarkable changes between the Sight & Sound 2012 chart of the greatest films of all time and the 2022 version was Věra Chytilová’s 1966 comedy Daisies went from not appearing at all to number 28 – ahead of Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

What prompted this re-evaluation? Accessibility, mostly. The 2022 list benefited from many titles by women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ filmmakers making their way to home video and streaming services. Film societies and cinematheques were also taking advantage of restoration and rescue efforts. (The irony that Daisies is currently difficult to find outside of the US and the UK is not lost on me at this moment.)

We watched it over the Christmas break and I was struck by how sixties it was, as if the times were a more powerful influence than the Iron Curtain context or the emerging and frustrated feminism. It’s almost as if a copy of A Hard Day’s Night had been smuggled into Czechoslovakia and secretly screened in dissident’s apartments. But the Richard Lester film was optimistic and fun. Daisies is chaotic and satirical but also cynical and despairing.

Two young women – both named Marie – pledge to live life in service of pleasure but only find emptiness. While authority figures – and the older generation – are lampooned, it becomes clear that the society they are living in has little or nothing to offer them.

There’s one extended and disturbing scene where the girls discover a banquet set at a huge table and they proceed to devour and destroy it. It goes on and on until they are left with no option but to return and try and make it good – broken crockery and all.

The film begins and ends with footage of war, reminding viewers from our distance of how the people of 1966 were still profoundly affected by World War II – materially as well as psychologically. (Tarkovsky’s Mirror from 1975, number 31 in the S&S list, used real war footage for similar reasons.)

The 50 Greatest Films project is my attempt to watch all of the top 50 Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time list before there’s a new survey in 2032 and I have to start all over again. This project started over at RNZ Widescreen and was continued – somewhat haphazardly – at the Substack newsletter.

Where to watch Daisies

Aotearoa: Not currently available online

Australia: Not currently available online

Canada: Streaming on Criterion Channel or Hollywood Suite

Ireland: Not currently available online

India: Not currently available online

USA: Streaming on Criterion Channel or HBO Max

UK: Streaming on BFI Player

The post Something to watch tonight: Daisies appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.

Project Hail Mary presents quite the paradox. There’s so much going on with it that I felt like it could sustain not only one long podcast episode but several¹ – not that I’m in the mood to return to Rancho Notorious just yet – but that all the rich pickings for conversation never quite added up to a film that could love.

The editor-in-chief and I were texting backwards and forwards all day Friday with thoughts, ideas and observations and I can’t say that has happened too often recently after a night at the cinema, but I wasn’t emotionally moved by it the way I was by the films that inspired it.

Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running is a foundation text for me and I’m still destroyed whenever I see the three little robots, Huey, Dewey and Louie, going about their lonely conservation business as their ship disappears off into outer space. The character of the alien Rocky in Project Hail Mary serves a similar purpose – selfless cuteness – but I never got the sense that he was really in mortal² danger or that his desperate sacrifices might be permanent. It’s not that kind of film. It has themes of loneliness, alienation³ and self-discovery, but an uplifting ending is never really in doubt.

Even the existential elemental crisis facing humanity isn’t caused by anything we’ve done down here on Earth. A species of tiny organisms feeding off – and therefore depriving the galaxy of – starlight is just rotten luck and the global conglomerate of space agencies tasked with finding the solution appears – despite boss Sandra Hüller’s lack of faith in humanity’s ability to cooperate – to be coming together productively.

Ryan Gosling is a ‘seat of the pants’ microbiologist, hounded out of respectable science for having the temerity to posit that life does not require hydrogen and oxygen, now teaching at a middle school and attempting to sugar coat the bad news about sunlight to impressionable youngsters. Turns out the box is thing we need to be thinking outside of and he is drafted in to help work out what these little critters are and how they can be stopped before the lights go out all over the galaxy.

The film takes a little while to get to that, however, as it follows the structure of Andy Weir’s novel by backwardsing and forwardsing as Gosling’s character recovers from space-induced amnesia. When we meet him, he’s waking up from cryosleep to discover that he’s the only survivor of an 11-light-year journey to a star that appears to hold the key to our fate. We – like he – are dropped right in it.

Before he can get his bearings, he sees another vessel out of his porthole and comes to discover that his experience is mirrored by an alien – also on the same mission and also alone due to the death of his crew members – and the two of them have to learn how to work together if their mission is to be successful. An interstellar bromance ensues – charming and funny thanks to a typically goofy performance from Gosling and some outstanding puppet character work from the gifted James Ortiz.

A crowd-pleasing, inspiring, smart and deliciously detailed film, Project Hail Mary deserves to make a ton of money – mainly because when the final pieces drop into place at the end you’ll want to go back and buy a second ticket straight away to enjoy how writer Drew Goddard and directors Lord & Miller put it all together..

No Tears on the Field is a local documentary about the world of provincial women’s rugby – a topic already rendered into drama by David Geary’s Pack of Girls in 1991. The novelty is therefore long gone and the successes of our elite players mean the profile of the sport is as high as it has ever been.

Where Lisa Burd’s film shines is in the casting. Focusing on Taranaki club rugby she has found some brilliant characters even if a lot of the drama in their lives has already happened by the time she arrives with her camera. I’m not convinced that the final product justifies the price of a movie ticket but I’m glad that these women are having their stories told.

Further listening (and watching)

I barely scratched the surface of Project Hail Mary with Emile Donovan on RNZ Nights on Friday and we also spoke about Star Wars Skeleton Crew (Disney+) and this delightful YouTube video which was made by combining hundreds of high resolution photos taken by astronaut Loral O’Hara from the International Space Station turned into a slow and meditative journey across North America.

It was also my rostered appearance on RNZ’s Culture 101 on Sunday afternoon and I reviewed No Tears on the Field as well as I Swear and Hoppers, which I will write up here next week when they get their proper cinema release.

1. I’d love to talk to somebody for an hour or more about the genius of casting Sandra Hüller and how she isn’t ((just) there because she’s an Oscar-nominated actress lending gravitas to a blockbuster. She brings something uniquely Hüller to the character of Stratt, making someone that doesn’t have much to say on the page as rich and complex as any of her most famous roles. I literally can’t imagine anyone else in the part. ︎
2. I know, I know – “mortal danger”. ︎
3. I know, I know – “alienation”. ︎

The post New releases: Project Hail Mary, No Tears on the Field appeared first on Funerals & Snakes. Generative AI was not used for the writing of this post/newsletter.