Insidious: The Last Key

The "Insidious" franchise chose some interesting directions to go down as it's continued to produce sequels. While the first sequel was very much a direct follow-up to the original, the third film went the prequel route, and this (possibly) final film of the series continues in that vein (the word "last" is used a lot in horror sequels and it rarely represents the end of the series). And given the first film was a knock-off of Poltergeist, these follow ups have kinda meant that it's very much like we're getting a series of films centered on Tangina, the helpful medium. It's nice that we're getting mainstream horror movies centered on a 70-something actress (well, technically we're getting two since Helen Mirren has Winchester out this week).

This one is particularly about the pensioner-qualifying-medium, because it has her returning to her childhood home to confront a haunting that affects her childhood home - and one that she may be responsible for herself. Accompanied as always by her goofy assistance Specs and Tucker (Australians Angus Sampson and Leigh Whannell, showing that two guys from TV's Recovery can stick around an awfully long time), she discovers there's a lot she's left behind, including a traumatised brother and a couple of secrets ...

Alas, this doesn't quite get there - the Insidious movies have often had somewhat ridiculous mythology, but this one is unfortunately kinda generic and vague rather than flirting with  the more batshit insane ideas that the series has previously played with. There's some interesting monster design, and a couple of spooky bits, but it all ends up rather flat (and concludes in a way that catches up with the first film, not leaving particularly many windows for another sequel to go, but, again, never underestimate the shamelessness of horror movie franchises). I like the idea of this more than I do the execution, unfortunately.

The 15:17 to Paris

This feels like the kinda thing that should be a slam dunk. The true story of three Americans while travelling from Amsterdam to Paris stop a gunman on a train and are awarded the Legion of Honour. But a bunch of poor choices have turned this into a turgid mess of a film. First, casting the three Americans as themselves means you don't have leads who are particularly compelling actors - while they seem like three nice enough guys, everything's pretty much flatly declaimed without much subtext or emotion behind it.

Second - the events that bring us into the movie account for maybe 5-10 minutes of screentime. So there's an awful lot of padding going on - we get the backgrounds on how the three young men met each other at school, followed by the military training of one of them, and chunks of their prior European adventures. And as this goes on it gets less and less interesting - the school stuff has some bonus bizzare casting as comic actors Tony Hale, Tom Lennon and Jaleel White show up as their various teachers and Judy Greer and Jenna Fisher show up as the two white boys' moms (Greer really has been an incredibly wasted presence on screen between this, "Ant Man", and "Jurassic World", none of the wild humour that shows up in her roles on "Archer" or "Arrested Development" have shown up in films). The military training has some goofy moments - concentrating largely on Spencer Stone, his "out of shape" body is clearly a product of wearing loose sweatshirts and as his montage proceeds, he shows off his current more buff look. He comes across as rather petulant when facing minor setbacks in ways that surely can't be intentional.

And then we get a vast set of adventures as the boys traipse through Europe. This feels remarkably like watching someone else's travel videos, where very little of interest actually happens. There's some fairly dire attempts at foreshadowing, as the boys keep on wondering whether they're really going to go to Paris or not, which .. well, we know they will, it's in the goddamn title.

THere's no attempt to give any characterisation or motivation to the gunman, and while the major events are played with reasonable dramatic fidelity, the subsequent legion of honour ceremony is intercut between a recreation and the actual footage.... and the actual footage gives the unfortunate information that, hey, there was this fourth guy, a British man, whose acts have nowhere been acknowledged in the rest of the film.Clearly he did something worth rewarding, but the film isn't going to bother to tell you what that was. Apparently it was far more essential we watch unconvincing flirting in Venice for ten minutes.

So this is a case of weirdly incompetent big-budget film-making. Clint Eastwood may very well have entered the "Alzheimers" point of his career.

Black Panther

The first Marvel movie of the year, "Black Panther" gives us something a tad different - an afro-centric story of a hidden kingdom and how its king decides to engage in the world outside his borders, combined with all the crowd-pleasing fights, stunts, jokes and wonders that Marvel fans have come to accept. And while Chadwick Boseman as the titular superhero is the lead, it's the women who tend to rule - whether it be Lupita Nyong'o as his former (and possibly future) lover, Danai Gurira as his head bodyguard and all-round warrior woman, Letitia Wright as his supersmart inventor sister or Angela Basset as his mother. The villainous ranks have Michael B. Jordan as the main baddie (unusually for superhero movies, he has a pretty well thought out plan, motivation and a generally rounded out character) and Andy Serkis as a bonus one (who's more a free-ranging agent of chaos).

Director Ryan Coogler gives this the usual glamorous sheen of the Marvel film, with a little bit of globetrotting to Busan for a casino confrntation and chase scene, in among the afro-futuristic world of Wakanda, the mythical kingdom where much of the action takes place. There's a strange mix of the familiar and the new here - afro-futurism hasn't exactly been a big movement onscreen before, and while, yes, there are somewhat heroic tropes here (and certainly, there are plot elements that may be very slightly weakened by the fact you've just seen a trailer for Infinity War and know who's sticking around for the next movie), never the less this confirms the Marvel trend towards fast moving, fun and exciting adventures, with just a little bit of a brain thrown in looking at themes of global engagement.

Definitely good solid Marvel fun.

Lady Bird

It's probably a sign of my age that I don't see the set-in-2002 film "Lady Bird" as particularly a nostalgia piece (although the distance between then and now is less than the distance between the release of "American Graffiti" and when it was set) - instead, this feels like a contemporary story about a girl's last year of high school, as she tries to work out her ambitions, her feeling about boys and particularly her relationship with her mother. It's a reasonably gentle story - this isn't something where any great traumas are inflicted on anybody - but this has the general feel of how teenagehood felt to me - sometimes you're awful and sometimes your circumstances feel awful, and you get out of high school alive and only vaguely prepared for what comes next.

The centre is the relationship between Saroise Ronan and Laurie Metcalf as mother and daughter, in that weird middle ground where somehow you're just close enough to someone to be able to completely trigger all their worst instincts. Metcalf is one of those actresses who has very rarely got a big screen chance to shine, and shine she does here. It's absolutely balanced in between affection and frustration, and she gives so much by gesture and facial expression that the dialogue doesn't speak. Saroise Ronan plays Lady Bird on just the right side of insufferability - much of what she does should, objectively, be kinda awful, but somehow it comes through that it comes from inner need and vulnerability rather than ill intent.

There's a vast supporting cast, both solid stage actors and a couple of young-men-on-the-rise, all of whom contribute to filling out the portrait of a lower-middle class teenager. And this very much drew me in with its simple portrait of regular people in that phase of life where nothing's quite certain except that everything is going to change soon.

Happy End

This is where I disclose that, while, yes, there are 157 reviews on here to date, there are areas of world cinema where I have blind spots. For instance, up until this film, I hadn't seen anything by Michael Haneke, up until that film. I was aware of him (films like "Cache", "Amor", "Funny Games" and "The Piano Teacher") but hadn't previously wandered into his world. And I'm not entirely sure I picked the right one to start with.

There are individual scenes here which stick out as excellent film-making - one character dancing in a karaoke bar to "Chandelier", for example, or the rather chilling ending. But there's also a lot of faff around in the middle. There isn't really any development of character, there isn't anything that could be called "plot", so much as a pileup of situations and moments, with a lot of slow dwelling on moments in a way I've got to call unenlightening. This ended up being a film that fell into the "what's all that about" category for me - it feels more like gestures towards making a film than something that's actually been shaped towards any particular result.

So, no, this wasn't for me.

Molly's Game

Aaron Sorkin's directorial debut is largely an extension of his existing screenwriting persona - his recent run of high-powered biopics abut strongminded central characters achieving success at the expense of those around them ("The Social Network", "Steve Jobs"), while also picking up some of the montage skills that directors like David Fincher and Danny Boyle have given his work. Sorkin has a very recognisable writers voice - fast paced, precise, verbose while keeping the words interesting, culturally aware ("Molly's Game" includes references to Arthur Miller, Robert Frost and Langston Hughes) and highly protagonist-focussed.

The difference, of course, is that this time the figure in the centre is female - Jessica Chastain as the woman who parlayed a small job for a hollywood fixer into a high-rolling series of poker games in both LA and New York, only to fall afoul of the justice department when her games got too close to the russian mafia. It's an intriguing story that, although up for a "Best adapted screenplay" oscar, goes past the publication of the source book to deal with what happened afterwards. Chastain is spot on as a Sorkin protagonist - there's no question she knows exactly who she is and exactly what she's doing, and the movie is entirely hers. Supporting cast is pretty strong too - Idris Elba as her lawyer, persuaded there's more to her than simply tabloid fodder, Michael Cera as a snaky hollywood celebrity who uses poker to stoke his ego, Chris O'Dowd as a fumbling player whose inept advances on Molly lead to her downfall, and Kevin Costner as her estranged father, who somehow pulls off a late-movie conversation that should, by rights, be an obnoxious oversimplification of a complex character, and is instead just the right way to resolve things.

This is a solid, clever piece with a kickass role for Chastain and an intriguing story to tell. Recommended.

Phantom Thread

A story about a restrained fashion designer and the young woman who comes into his life, threatening his normal orderly processes, has a very prestigious sheen to it. Day Lewis in what's apparently his retirement role has this kind of uptight intensity down pat, familiar in films like "Age of Innocence" and even his early turn as Cecil Vyse in "Room with a View". Vicky Krieps is the young woman in question, and she starts with simplicity and modesty before unwrapping a far more ranging talent. There's an underlying theme of the relationship between an artist and the people in his life, which makes this somewhat like a higher-toned version of "mother!".

Director Paul Thomas Anderson was a favourite of the 90s and early 2000s, but I gotta say as he's got older I've become more aware of his need to find a screenwriter other than himself. In this case, he's written a film that feels too often like it's treading water - very beautiful water, but still, water. Lesley Manville as Lewis' similarly restrained sister feels like she should at some point do something more than light glowering, but her role never really develops into anything with a point to it - Manville gives it what it needs, but the plot function fails to satisfy, and while sparks eventually start to fly between Lewis and Krieps, it does take quite a while to get there. Still, it's all very lush, from the costuming to Johnny Greenwood's grand orchestral score. So this is pretty and interesting but emotionally kinda unengaging.

I, Tonya

While she's either been marginal in big films or else in utterly awful films up until now, I still have a reasonable amount of affection for Margot Robbie. In the case of "Suicide Squad", the reason the film is awful has very little to do with her, and in the rest of her work, she's largely a marginal figure on a largely male story. "I Tonya" is where she cashes in on all that affection with a legitimately good role in the centre of the film. And she nails it. Trashy but gutsy, her Tonya Harding proves remarkably resilient to the slings and arrows fate has in store for her, whether it be a terror of a mother (played by Alison Janney in a performance that fascinates in her monstrousness), the snotty attitude of the figure skating establishment or her husband who veers between abusive and too dumb to function.

Craig Gillespie's film is largely a vehicle for the performances and the story. There are a couple of fumbles (in particular, in the skating sequences the digital doubling is, alas, very apparent, and the device of multiple perspectives being interviewed on the same events never really gives us much in the way of enlightening differences - indeed, Bobby Carnavale's tabloid journalist is only ever really used in narration). And the differing perspective on a life and story that has otherwise been remembered as old tabloid fodder does give a nice humanising side - again, particularly with Robbie's performance as Tonya. Paul Walter Hauser's deranged fantasist Shawn also steals whatever scenes he's in, as the guy responsible for most of the worst headlines of Tonya's life. I don't think this is by any means a perfect movie, but it's a solid entertainment with a little thematic depth that makes it a decent watch.

Mary and the Witch's Flower

This is from a lot of the animators who used to work at Studio Ghibli before Hiyao Miyazaki announced his retirement - and it captures a lot of the look of those films - lovely scenery, charming character designs and personalities, and a childish sense of wonder at a strange and fascinating universe. But it's a case here where all the ingredients seem right but it never quite jumps up from "charming" to "bewitching" - whether it's the somewhat generic story, the simplistic baddies or the odd pacing which goes from "lackadaisical" to "full throttle apocalyptic" in the last third with no particular gradient in between.

Noting that I have only seen the Japanese dub, not the English dub, which has the advantage of Jim Broadbent and Kate Winslet who may add a few more idiosynracies to a familiar playing out of genre tropes.

Swinging Safari

Stephan Elliot's career is one where it's all been downhill since "Priscilla, Queen of the Desert", or more accurately, a hell of a lot of bumps. In some ways "Priscilla" is lightning in a bottle, a combination of bad taste and strong character arcs, simultaneously shallow and heartfelt, bitchy and sentimental. At the very least, the bad taste is definately back for "Swinging Safari", which could be titled "70s Australian Nostalgia: The movie". Telling the story of three different-classed households in a cul-de-sac and their various interactions, there's a couple of loose threads going through - the filmmaking ambitions of one of the kids, the strained relationships between the parents after a fondue party turns a little suggestive, and the somewhat overly-symbolic whale washed up on the beach.

THe preformances are a little variable, with the bigger names in the parents tending to stick out more - Jeremy Sims as the middle-class dad who's troubled both by his own permissiveness and the permissiveness of his daughter probably scores best, and Kylie Minogue, whose screen career can politely be described as "variable", is somewhat protected by playing an agraphobic who barely talks. It's not so much a comedy that builds as a comedy that comes to a gross-out conclusion (which is to say ... not too different from late seventies early 80s films of the era like "Caddyshack" and "Animal House"). I found it weirdly likeable, even as I can't defend this as great or even particularly good cinema. But then again, I am very specifically a kid of the 70s. So this is very much a "other people's mileage will vary, and a lot of people will hate this" film.

Sweet Country

A somewhat grim western set in the 1920s, "Sweet Country" takes the familiar tale of the murderous native pursued by the authorities and plays it on a wider scale. Warick Thornton started as a cinematographer and he captures the outback in impressive scale, He's also got a pretty solid cast - Hamilton Morris as the farmer who's antagonized by a young war veteran until circumstances force him to take violent revenge, Bryan Brown as the trooper who goes after him and Sam Neill as the preacher who comes on the journey in hope he can stop things from getting too violent. Ewan Leslie as the war vet is, perhaps, a little overplayed (Leslie is a powerhouse stage actor but, at least in this case, he's a little adrift in a character that allows little place for subtlety). 

The film is at its best while the pursuit is underway - Brown and Neill play against each other well, and the images of people chasing through the outback are breathtaking. The ending feels a little flatter and perhaps a little drawn out on its way to a grim resolution. But all in all this is a reasonably solid film.