Film Culture - America Unhinged

This is jam-packed with real spoilers, so if you want to watch any of these films you might want to skip this week's film-fest...

Disappointing Things

Extraordinary film, utterly sumptuous set designs, quite phenomenal acting and a truly wrong thing that does nothing but fantasise about the exploitation of women. It's been a long time since I watched a film that simultaneously repulsed and impressed me at the same time, but Poor Things manages it with consummate ease.

Don't get me wrong, there was much to like about this film and Emma Stone's performance was, at times, unbelievably brilliant, but there was so much that was wrong about this movie that I couldn't enjoy it. It was morally questionable, it was at worse misogynistic and at best chauvinistic and the only character that came out of it with any dignity... actually none of the characters did although Hannah Schygulla probably deserves a mention for being the least offensive. I literally wanted the film to end after about 30 minutes and I don't think it has anything to do with how prudish I have become in later life. I can get the idea that some kind of Frankenstein's monster creates his own monster and I get that that monster as she grows and matures will discover sex, but one would hope that as the character of Bella Baxter becomes more... human, her animalistic desires would become a little less frantic. This is a sexual horror story and if, like I've heard, Yorgos Lanthimos was trying to tell a story about the emancipation of a woman wronged by monsters of science then he missed the part where he shouldn't try to fill every scene with Emma Stones boobs or her vulva.

I think it deserves to win awards but probably for set design (I actually wrote 'sex' design in the first draught which must have been Freudian or just because the film was overloaded with it), camerawork, special effects, maybe some of the acting - Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef were both very good (but culpable) - but Mark Ruffalo was fucking awful, a really dislikeable character badly acted with an accent that wandered all over the shop. Was this because his Duncan Wedderburn was a fraud or was it because Ruffalo isn't good at holding an accent for more than half a dozen words? I can't say. I just thought it was about two hours too long. Yes, the females in the film might have found their own emancipation by the end of it, but they had to endure enough rough and male dominated sex to get there and that made the whole thing feel tawdry, cheap and soiled. 

Fists of Fake Steel

I'm in a quandary, mainly because of spoilers. You see to tell you much about The Iron Claw is to pretty much give it away; however, if you're a fan of wrestling, know anything about the family, or are familiar with the fact this is a biopic (with a character cut from the adaptation for reasons I will presume later) then it won't spoil anything for you. 

This is a testosterone-fuelled example of what actors can do if they work out enough for a specific part, because Zac Efron, as well as Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson - all average size and shaped men - really went over the top to muscle up as three of the 'cursed' Von Erich family - a famous Texas-based wrestling family from the 80s and 90s. They helped turn wrestling into a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry from its roots of, you know, actual proper wrestling and were some of the pioneers who helped form the WWF and make it the spectacle it became, especially in the 1990s. Efron especially must have worked his balls off to get into the kind of shape - that would usually have him shoehorned into a superhero film - as the musclebound Kevin Von Erich - the surviving oldest brother who never really got the breaks his brothers got, but, in the end, probably was the best thing that could happen to him.

This is the story of a group of boys who were driven to extremes by their father, Felix - Holt McCallany, a determined and obsessed former wrestler whose hatred of the sport's governing body made him lose sight of everything else in his desire to see one of his boys crowned World Champion. This is a man who didn't understand what 'family' meant in his relentless pursuit of something he felt was withheld from him when he was a semi-famous wrestler in the 1960s. In the real world the Von Erichs - or the Adkisson family - was a name associated with tragedy and disaster; of Felix's six children only Kevin is still alive; three died by suicide and one from a freak electrocution, while the first world champ died from a ruptured colon in a Japanese hotel room. This might well be a huge spoiler, but it's also the entire film and doesn't really spoil it, at last not until the first death, because the rest follow pretty quickly and you can see them all coming.

Is it a good film? Well, it has the brilliant Jeremy Allen White in it, but it's really Zac Efron's film and despite looking utterly silly - musclebound with a girl's haircut - he just about pulls it off as Kevin, a man depicted as being either very naïve or maybe a little stupid. It's actually a pretty straightforward biopic, which has had a Von Erich son omitted from it - Chris - because they probably figured if you didn't know the story losing so many members of a wrestling dynasty over the space of five years might seem a bit careless; although he did blow his own brains out and that might have been the difference between a 12 and a 15 or 18 certificate. It wasn't a bad film, but equally it wasn't something I can imagine will win awards, despite its current high rating on IMDB. I'm glad I watched it, but I also feel as though it's just over 2 hours of my life that could have been spent doing something less overwrought.

Mistaken Identity

One thing about The Hunt is very clear; it's a film that doesn't try to make its audience think it's anything but a satire. There's a feeling of 'what you see is what you get' going on and it does come across as one of those cheap low budget films that has little or no redeeming factors, but actually it's quite a strange movie that actually does get you wondering at times just what you're watching.

Betty Gilpin - the star - doesn't actually make an appearance until about the 15 minute mark; I'm sure she's there in the background of the opening scenes, but the camera is focusing on two others, who you immediately think are going to be the people this film follows. They are two of 12 people who are gagged and dumped in a field with a large box full of weapons; once the gags are all off someone starts opening fire on them, killing almost half of them in that opening ten minutes. Three get away and over a fence and find their way to a gas station where they essentially walk into a trap and then Betty arrives and from that point on the film takes an altogether different direction. You see the 12 people picked to die have all been identified as right wing conspiracy theorists who said some mean things about some rich woke people - based on a flippant joke made by one of them. The rich bitch running this slaughterhouse - Hilary Swank - makes a joke about hunting right wing wankers at the weekend at her mansion in Vermont and people start to actually believe that is exactly what she and her friends are doing, so they decide to rent part of Croatia and actually hunt these 12 people into extinction.

The problem is Gilpin's Crystal isn't the right Crystal; instead of kidnapping some ignorant red neck, they mistakenly kidnap a former US special forces operative who is very good with her hands and guns and that's when this short but entertaining satire really takes off. Apparently Donald Trump didn't like this film, but I think that was just a Blumhouse marketing ploy - or maybe he didn't like the fact that left and right wing Americans are depicted as complete and utter wankers who all deserve the die? It was co-written by Damon Lindelof - usually a good mark of quality IMHO and while I think the wife couldn't quite get into it, I thought it was actually a clever little piss take on culture wars, the internet and people who use social media as a platform to spout their individualistic bullshit.

Not A Fast Dog

I suppose the most accurate thing to say about this week's Tom Hanks film [have you noticed that since I changed the format of these there's been a Tom Hanks film every column?] is that it's a film about naval warfare. Greyhound is set in 1942, in the mid-Atlantic, just after the USA had been dragged into WW2. Hanks plays a newly promoted naval captain in charge of the eponymous Greyhound - a small warship charged with looking after a convoy of supply ships from Nazi U-boats.

Also starring Stephen Graham, as Hanks's #2, this really is just a war film and it's not really about anything else. You see back in the war, there was an area in the mid-Atlantic called the Pit, which was essentially too far out for the US Air Force to give protection and not close enough to the British Isles to get any from this side either - a kind of black hole where the supply convoys and the ships deemed to protect them were on their own. Hanks's captain has his first command, he's in charge of a crew made up mainly of very young men and he has had no sleep and not eaten anything for 72 hours, yet he has to think on his feet and try and protect his crew and everyone else in the convoy and that is the film. It's set over the space of 48 hours - the time the convoy is in this red zone - and it's split into sections where they engage the enemy. If it wasn't set on a ship in the ocean you'd almost think it was a play, but that is maybe the thing about it; the fact they're sitting in a huge ocean in extreme weather, but they could just as well be in a small box. It's a very procedural drama; probably extremely similar to what this would have been like in real life. If you like war films then I'd highly recommend it; if you like Tom Hanks it's a bit of a completists film, but in general at a tad over 90 minutes it isn't a bad way to spend an hour and a half.

Flabtastic Four

In anticipation of 2025's Fantastic Four (Hah!), I decided to watch Doomed: The Untold Story of Roger Corman's Fantastic Four and the weird thing is I remember the actual film being made because I was news editor at Comics International at the time and was in San Diego in 1993 when we were hearing all kinds of awful things about it.

The documentary of the making of the film is almost as trashy as the actual film because the people involved in the movie had been brought back (in 2015) to talk about it and some of them were sanguine, some of them were self-deprecating and some of them were absolute fucking bonkers, specifically Alex Hyde-White and Joseph Culp (both sons of actual famous actors), although Hyde-White takes the biscuit because he's transmitting from la-la-land with a tin foil hat on. The thing about some of the people interviewed here is that they are clearly in absolute denial despite the fact that by the time it was finished it was more like a badly made fan-made adaptation. Then there's the bone of contention - was this film ever made for a release or was it made for some other reason? Was it essentially a contractual obligation to try and get the film rights retained or maybe sold to someone else, which considering Roger Corman received a cheque for a million dollars for pulling it is probably exactly why it was never going to be an actual film. If you listen to Hyde-White you'd think he was talking about a multi-million dollar Steven Spielberg film mixed with the plot of a Mission: Impossible about how 'barnstormers in blue suits were trying to steal the project'. Culp, who sometimes liked the film and sometimes hated it, depending on what part of the interview you watched, really comes out of this as some kind of 'Do you know who I am?' kind of guy, because, his dad, Robert Culp was somebody.

One thing is sure, there were some pretty enthusiastic people on this film who really wanted the movie to be a success and sound genuinely sad that it never came out. The point here is if you've never seen it, there are clips in the documentary and it was more amateurish than a bad episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers; it's a truly awful film that a bunch of people who have never been in a decent film in their lives try desperately to tell us that despite what we might see this really was a brilliant and underrated movie. The film's director Oley Sassone takes the prize for being the most deluded because he really thinks he did a good job and people are being deprived for not being able to watch it. But hey, all these people wanted to be famous actors or filmmakers and none of them did because none of them were any fucking good at what they did. 

Dazed...

The film Monolith got a really good write up in that paper I dislike. They claimed it was on a similar level to Arrival, which I absolutely loved. However, it was clearly a film made during lockdown; it was a single hander, with every other actor other than the lead on the telephone or in videos. It was about a mysterious black brick or monolith that turns up in people's lives and the woman who has a podcast that begins to look into this odd phenomena.

It become quite clear from out outset that this would be a cheaply made movie with virtually all the action taking place in the journalist's studio; to cut up the monotony, there are shots of her equipment, the outside and assorted stuff floating [not literally] around the house. The journalist receives an anonymous email telling her to contact a woman about her 'brick' and it lurches forward from there until she and us begin to realise there's something odd going on and the journalist has more to do with this than she suspected. In many ways this is more like Annihilation than anything else, but without the inherent oddness and in the end we finished the film and wondered what the actual fuck we'd just wasted 90 minutes of our lives on. There might be a neat little twist in this - it might be aliens (it probably is), but frankly by the time you find out what it is you don't give a flying fuck. Pretentious Wank would have been a much better title.

... And Confused

Considering Monolith has an IMDB rating of 6.1 (now) and the film we watched straight after it has a rating of 4.8 (now) - it was 8 when we watched it and then plummeted like a stone - it makes me wonder if I should take any notice whatsoever of what other people think. I became aware of this movie - Lovely, Dark and Deep from my mate Chris, who doesn't have a good batting average with his recommendations. He posted a trailer up and I was intrigued, so we watched it...

A couple of immediate observations: it isn't a good film, but it also doesn't deserve a 4.8 rating. Movies that get under 5 are usually badly made amateurish rubbish with little or no redeeming qualities; this is a well made film but is painfully slow - and for a 90 minute feature that's not a good thing - and it's not really that scary despite being a horror set in the woods with a sense of eeriness. 

Georgina Campbell plays Lennon, a newly appointed park ranger who is carrying a troubled and guilty past because her sister went missing in the same woods she's now working in 20 years earlier. It's never made clear, but you get the feeling Lennon is looking for answers and the first 40 minutes of the film pan out more like a natural history documentary, but then things get slightly weird; a girl goes missing, her partner alerts Lennon who then informs HQ, who despatch other rangers and a helicopter. It is here that the first strange thing happens; she's told by Jackson (Nick Blood), the guy co-ordinating the search that she has to stay put at the mobile ground HQ. Lennon doesn't like this so ignores her instructions and goes off on her own to find the girl, which she does - huzzah. 

Cue the second bit of weirdness; none of the rangers are happy this has happened, they seemed pissed off that the girl was found. The head ranger makes it clear that Lennon's ranger career is finished and she was going home. Lennon asks Jackson what she did wrong because she found the girl and Jackson tells her it's because she found the girl. This is where and when it starts to try and get scary.

The more I thought about the movie, the more I realised that these two bits of dialogue explain everything that is going on and going to happen and how her fellow rangers are more than aware that Lennon has already experienced tragedy in that forest, so when Lennon gets swept into a nightmare that doesn't appear to make any sense, the viewer is completely non-plussed, mainly because there's very little that's scary or creepy in a supposedly scary and creepy horror movie. But the next 25 minutes is odd but in a quite boring way until, at the end of her tether, she meets the head ranger and asks 'are you real?' She says she is and the next thing is Lennon emerging out of the middle of the lake, gasping for breath and is rescued by Jackson.

The following year, she's back as a ranger again. Jackson is now in charge and the head ranger's missing poster is prominent around the HQ. A week or so into her three month stint there's news of a missing hiker; they all mobilise to find him and Lennon literally stumbles upon him. "Are you real?" He asks and she pauses and then says "No." and walks away. End of film. I can see why people disliked it because it wasn't a horror film and it wasn't scary, but the more I thought about it the more I realised that the opening scene with a sheet of paper with 'The forest demands a body' written on it is what the entire film is about - whatever malevolent spirit lives there demands a sacrifice and if you save the chosen sacrifice you become it and the head ranger saved Lennon by removing the curse from her and Lennon faced with the same choice again chose not to. I'm telling you all of this - spoiling it - because you really don't want to watch it; it's a fucking awfully written film with no pacing and no scares. It's boring, but it does have a clever story that is almost hidden away and lost because of the nonsense around it. Read this review, don't watch the film. This has been a public service announcement. 

Little Things

It dawned on us recently that of all the films in the MCI - prior to 2022 - there was one we'd only seen once, so we remedied that this week. Some fun entertainment to make up for the fact that both the wife and I have suffered badly from the norovirus and needed something as frivolous as an Ant-Man.

I cannot remember my original review of this, there may never have been one and when I did my entire MCU review a few years ago we omitted this because... well probably because we weren't terribly impressed. I don't really understand why to be honest, it's a slight but extremely fun film and considerably better than anything Disney/Marvel have done after Infinity War. It has the right balance of humour over villainy and it sets up Scott Lang well and does a neat trick of tying up Hank Pym's Yellowjacket persona without destroying the 1960s revamp of Ant/Giant-Man too much or badly. There's stuff in it I take issue with but that's more to do with the movie rather than riding roughshod over Marvel history. Paul Rudd makes a half decent Ant-Man and while I've never been a huge fan of Evangeline Lily - I seem to recall having the biggest issue with her first time around, but then again I ... ahem ... lost so much of my life watching Lost I can understand that - she isn't too bad in this. It's a fun film with a simple message and a bit of a switch in direction for the average MCU movie. Yellowjacket reminded me a lot of the new looked Blue Beetle film from DC, which was a dreadful film compared to this and probably explains why new superhero films are destined to all be shit.

From the Archives

As mentioned above, this week has been all about sickness and poo, except to call it poo would be a stretch, but we don't have to go there, although I'm sure many of you have been there yourselves... So, trapped in the lounge while the kitchen is rebuilt, I decided to watch a couple of old films that I hadn't seen for a long time. These films were: Journey to the Centre of the Earth made in 1958 and starring James Mason and Pat Boone. And The Towering Inferno made in 1974 with more famous actors than you can vomit out in 60 seconds, but primarily Newman and McQueen.

Journey pretended to be a Scottish film with Mason and Boone both putting on relatively slight Scottish accents and pretending they were scholars from Edinburgh. It was an unbelievably unbelievable tale that simply made little or no sense and displayed a tonal nature that makes some recent MCU films seem positively sensitive. Add to this the iguanas with fins pasted to their backs, the salamanders made giant by macro camera work and the giant (papier machete) macrolepiota procera (Parasol mushrooms) and you have something that was probably state of the art in 1959 but now looks like a 1970s episode of Dr Who with less care and attention. The denouement is still one of the most extraordinary things ever - four people are saved from the dyed red porridge masquerading as lava by a giant asbestos disc that they ride out of a volcano and land without even a burn in the Mediterranean. The only injury was caused by Boone falling out of a tree in Italy - which is even more surprising as he seemed fine when he picked up a lamb to cover his modesty from a group of nuns and then ran off... To call it bollocks would be wasting eight letters. 

The Towering Inferno is a classic, although a classic of what I'm not sure. It had profoundly poor special effects, pantomime wankers dressed up as villains, stereotypes, OJ Simpson, sexism and inventive ways to die that didn't involve flames or smoke inhalation. Steve McQueen looks like he phones in his role as the fire chief - who literally does EVERYTHING - and Paul Newman is the architect who does everything else, the rest of the cast is just window dressing and one wonders why the hell Robert Wagner was even in it as he did nothing but die. It's on for two hours and 46 minutes and goes nowhere really slowly and considering the fire starts in the first five minutes, it's the Jaws-esque refusal to accept lives might be in danger that is the most remarkable - "we're on the top floor, the fire can't possibly reach us!" It was at this point McQueen and Newman should have just left these people to be barbecued and gone and sat in a bar. There was also the slap-dash and haphazard way orders are given and were be carried out - untrained people risking their lives trying to rescue people while actual firefighters stand around and let these people enter into hell. It's enormous fun if you're a 12 year old Phil, but the 61 year old me just wanted it to end. Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, isn't it.

Next Time...

Who cares? The best thing I've watched over the last ten days was a nine year old MCU film and a rather dull WW2 movie. No wonder we struggle to watch things on the Flash Drive of Doom if new films leave me cold and old films are pretty much a waste of my time, again. I'm not sure who claimed that 2024 could be the greatest year in film history, but I think they were paid a lot of money by someone to say this. I've seen one film released/been made available in 2024 that I think is good - American Fiction and even that had a bit of a disappointing ending. When I did my film and TV blogs there was always the chance that something from either genre would shine through the utter disappointment I feel sometimes about the state of the entertainment industry. I truly believe that peoples standards have just dropped to a level where adequate is the new fantastic...