The Watcher 11
Film Reviews for The Holdovers / Greenland / Leave the world behind / The Street Fighter / Divinity / Aquaman 2 / First Spaceship on Venus / The Lesson
The Holdovers (US 2023, Alexander Payne) ★★★★★
Paul Hunham teaches history at a private school in New England where he stays on campus during christmas break to watch over the five students with nowhere to go. When all but one surprisingly take off to a skiing trip, he's left with smartguy Angus and the schools cook Mary who just lost her son in Vietnam.
Alexander Paynes new movie, his first since the overly ambitious Downsizing, is a triumph. As you may expect from the guy who directed Sideways and About Schmidt, this is not a dramedy that explodes in hilarity, but a warm flow of a toned down story which makes you smile, all the time.
It's such a joy to watch Paul Giamattis character evolve from a stiff ass to a, well, likable stiff ass with balls. Every character in this movie is broken for all kinds of reason, we follow sideplots about grief and rejection, have subtle comments on class and failure, while our characters have to navigate the obstacles threwn at them and sometimes, they even master them.
Technically, the movie just looks great, with marvelous camera work and subtle lighting that never gets in the way of the story. The 1970s look authentic and thankfully, the production design doesn't drown the audience in nostalgia or any gimmicks. The movie feels like a very old whiskey that Angus is not allowed to drink, and when Paul finds his courage at the end, it rocks. A fantastic soundtrack with some delightful 70s-tunes is the cherry on top.
The don't make 'em like this anymore, sadly, but thank god we have Alexander Payne reminding us what good movies can be.
Greenland (US 2020, Ric Roman Waugh) ★★★☆☆
Extinction level comet hits earth with Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin and their child running through the apocalypse.
Greenland is a good, realistic depiction of an apocalypse and the resulting chaos, sprinkled with some class comments. Ofcourse you can't film a movie like that without giving it a serious tone, but i just wish not all of the shots were so damn important, weighed down with so so much meaning because oh lord all is ending release us from our sins etc etc. Heavyhanded is the word i was looking for, and it makes the film a bit boring, where it didn't have to be, especially when all things still work out at the end (for protagonists with life saving QR-codes at least).
But besides that heavyhanded ton of meaning, we get a more than solid human extinction drama that lives on both the gripping, suspenseful dread of a family facing this emmerichian doom and the blockbuster images accompanying it. A bit cleverness in the script, maybe an idea or two besides "lets depict apocalypse realistically" would've made this into a masterpiece, but they didn't, so we're left with a good and, well, realistic depiction of the apocalypse. I'm fine with that.
Leave the World Behind (US 2023, Sam Esmail) ★★★☆☆
A couple and their kids rent a big luxury home to spend some holidays outside the city, when a blackout wipes out the internet and ever more mysterious events mount up to... something.
On the face of it, the film works pretty well. It starts building up its mystery with strange stuff happening upscaling the startling events to catastrophic size, supported by cool weird camera moves. The problem is: All the fuzz doesn't pay off. At the end, it's "just" a war, which also means that all the mystery stuff not really makes sense. Animals acting strangely and whole herds stalking people because... signal jamming? And teeth falling out is just an unneriving aesthetic which doesn't mean anything? How would you blare effing loud noise crashing glass in the middle of nowhere if it weren't for an UFO or some supernatural thing or whatever?
But the problems with the film run deeper and are most likely already present in the novel (which i haven't read): The story and it's narrative structure is mythologizing war. Weaponized conflict, initiated by cyber attacks or not, is nothing mysterious. A movie and novel that hides the roots of conflict behind voodoo stuff, enriching it with supernatural fantasy elements, can only be possible in a society that thinks it's invincible to conflict, which then becomes something magical, something out of this world, and the movie says nothing about that in particular. By doing that, the film is aesthetisizing armed conflict and stripping it from all practicalities and real world implications. It uses all the M. Night Shyamalan style markers in the book, and by succeeding at that, it fails at making a good movie about it's own subject, which might be desorientation in an approaching conflict, but we don't really know.
Maybe i get it all wrong, maybe the film wants to comment on people blindfoldingly tumbling into a war scenario. But by emphasizing supernatural elements which ultimately are not there (but somehow are with the animal stuff), it's way too much in love with it's own technicalities, a ton of fancy camera angles and the theme of Friends for being a film about ignorance. This is why, behind it's surface of technical pretty good shots and a lot of tension, there is nothing to see here, an emptiness towards the thing it tries to say something about.
The film is a big headscratcher to me: If it wants to be a supernatural thriller, it fails because of its reveal which looks mundane compared to the anticipated supernatural stuff. If it tries to speak about war, it fails because of excessive aestheticization. If it tries to say something about cluelessness and ignorance, it provides no real conclusion with an unsatisfying ending. This makes this well acted, good looking and well written movie ultimately into an overdirected and hollow, empty experience which says nothing at all.
The Street Fighter (Japan 1974, Shigehiro Ozawa) ★★★☆☆
After freeing a guy from prison, an evil organization tries to hire Karate Master Takuma to kidnap the daughter of a recently deceased oil tycoon. When he rejects the deal, he has to protect himself and the woman from yakuza gangsters and black hat karateka.
The Street Fighter has quite a reputation, even more so after Quentin Tarantino included references to the movie in his script for True Romance, and Sonny Chiba counts as a legend up there with Bruce Lee. So now i have the hard job to tell you that it's just not that good.
It sure has it's moments, Sonny Chiba is a beast in the film, the final fight on a harbored ship in the rain is a classic and we do get tons of split heads, gouged eyes and broken bones. Some of the shots look great even today, and you can see how this movie was an influence of Tarantino all over the place.
However, the true main character in this film is Sonny Chibas face acrobatics being equally if not even more impressive than all the karateka moves. This exaggerated acting can be seen as comedic relief which takes some, but not all of the pain away from the elements that did not age well, namely the sexism in which Chiba sexually licks over the face of his female opponents more than once, the standard overacting in japanese films of the time, some of the more ridiculous, unbelievable action scenes, and I know it's a sacrilege, but it needs to be said: the sometimes tumbling moves of Sonny Chiba himself who often chops down his opponents by little more than touching them very fast.
But for it's time this movie sure was pretty cool and maybe even groundbreaking, being the first to my knowledge to use the today often seen kick-to-the-head-then-zoom-to-xrayed-breaking-skull shot. In that sense, The Streetfighter was an innovator. Taken for what it is, an artifact of cinema history from the 70s, the film sure is a martial arts classic and a must watch.
Divinity (US 2023, Eddie Alcazar) ★★★☆☆
No idea what was going on. A rich guy developed an immortality drug, futurist feminists welcome their new sister and bodybuilders fight it out in experimental architecture photography from the 60s... or something.
For what it is, an experiment in cutting together stylish black and white sequences barely held together by a cronenbergian scifi-plot, it is okay and does have some nice, visually interesting shots. But don't expect the film to make sense, tell a coherent story, or deliver a satisfying ending. It's just surreal images wooshing by, by the end leaving you as clueless as you entered the movie.
It's style over sustance to the max, and though i do like the weird and the strange, in a movie, those should always serve a story to tell, a narrative to follow. Not so here, where narrative structure, the up and down of build ups and climax gets shredded into a beautiful coffee table book about futurist brutalist architectorial images of bodybuilders and scifi-gadgets. If it's your thing watching those for 90 minutes, this movie gonna rock your boat. I think it's meh.
Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (US 2023, James Wan) ★★☆☆☆
Aquaman is king of Atlantis, has a kid now, and Dark Mantis is still mega pissed at him and tries to resurrect some ancient evil overlord. Along the way, tons of fishtalk.
Aquaman 2 is even louder and dumber than the first one, but James Wan likes it that way. It's also very colorful -- very very colorful! -- and if you don't mind loosing a braincell or two from the abysmal dialogue, you might find entertainment in this romp.
Some of this film is really hard to take in as a thinking human being, everytime they let the cheese run wild and fishking and underwater-queens talk in all earnestness about ancient whatevers and Aquaman dropping a tear, i wanted to crawl and cringe under the seat. It's so cheesy sometimes, you have to stand in awe, and no amount of self-awareness will take those painful moments away, and the moment of ironic winks at the audience are too rare to forgive them.
But Jason Momoa one more time knows how to have fun on screen and makes this movie, while not exactly good, at least a somewhat worthwhile time featuring some entertaining and very loud and very colorful sequences.
Besides from that, the film is utterly, remarkably forgettable.
First Spaceship on Venus (GDR 1960, Kurt Maetzig) ★★☆☆☆
In 2003, engineers in a communist utopia discover an alien artifact in the Sahara, debris from a crashed alien spaceship that caused the Tunguska Event in 1908. An international team of astronaut is put together and send them to Venus, where they find the ruins of a demised civilization.
The first scifi movie from east-german GDR-studios DEFA, an adaption of Stanislaw Lems first scifi-book The Astronauts, also known as The Silent Star, is quite a bore. We get incredibly stiff actors speaking their dialogues in such a serious tone, that pretty much everything becomes unintentionally funny, even the message of peace in during the nuclear arms race in the cold war. Ofcourse, the socialist-totalitarian political apparatus of the GDR wanted it's glorious message to be served as earnest as possible, and it burries the whole movie underneath.
The film is, however, worthwhile, besides being the first adaption of a Stanislaw Lem story on screen, for the cool retrofuturistic production design and the FX, which together make this movie at least look good and put it up there with Mario Bavas Planet of the Vampires or Fred Wilcox Forbidden Planet (though the GDR-robot Marax can't hold a candle to Robby the Robot).
If it weren't for the laughable propagandist acting performances, this could actually be a good movie, even when the story feels dated with Lem himself declaring it "a naive depiction of socialist utopia" decades later, and his quirky philosophical takes are pretty much completely absent from his early work. It's a quite good looking, but boring movie for Lem-completists and lovers of retro scifi flicks.
The Lesson (US 2023, Alice Troughton) ★★☆☆☆
Aspiring writer Liam takes the job of tutoring the son of his idol, renowned novelist J.M. Sinclair. Family secrets, betrayal and intrigues unfold.
The Lesson is trying so hard to be arthousy literature drama with some thriller elements, is selling it's near clinical sterility and stiffness so hard as being upper class, it's breathtaking. None of those figures on screen are people. None. Just roles detached from humanity, played by actors giving their best at serving a script super high on itself, so that everytime Richard E. Grant says the word "fuck" on screen, he looks as if he awaits some praise for using such dirty dirty language — Please clap! — and the script thinks it's oh so clever, every time Grant mentions that — "FUCK!" — good authors steal, maybe the most tired cliché in art. The boring emptyness of upper class has never been written better on screen than here, if it just were intentional.
The Lesson is most interesting for how unremarkable it is in nearly every account. The art lessons are the most boring plattitudes, the acting lessons are not there, the lighting lessons are okay, the camera lessons are good and result in some fine imagery, the scripting lesson is bollocks and gives us an ultimately boring story that thinks it is very elaborate for throwing intellectualism against the wall left and right, while nothing sticks and everything just feels hollow. The movie feels so stiff that you can hear crackles from the frames rushing by.
If you want to spend some time impressing your new girlfriend of how artful you are, you can pick this movie, but don't expect the relationship to last very long. Haven't seen such pretentious crap in a while.
have you heard about Scavengers reign`? its a bit like the fantastic planet but way more stories to it. itÄs amazing! also, are you looking forward to dream scenario?