రౌద్రం రణం రుధిరం Roudram Ranam Rudhiram (aka ఆర్.ఆర్.ఆర్ RRR, 2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. So on the penultimate day of the year I caved to the clamouring voices online telling me that this was a fun film. I’m hardly resistant to popular Indian films either, but I’d hoped it might get a cinematic screening (then again, I’m in NZ, so of course not). It still works fine on the small screen but you can see it’s made for an audience.

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People have been talking up this film all year, and, to be fair, it’s pretty clear why. Watching it is not three hours of your life that you’ll regret, I don’t think. Not that it necessarily does things differently from other big Indian productions I’ve seen (and technically, as an aside, this is not Bollywood but Tollywood as it’s originally in the Telugu language — not that Netflix cares one bit about that kind of fidelity, meaning I had to watch it in Hindi and you probably will too, though it’ll default to English dubbing).

But what it does as a film, it does bigger! And more! And… uh, bigger, have I mentioned that? It is undeniably a lot, and I think towards the end it becomes pretty mired down by some problematic weighting — it has a hard-on for torture like no film since that Mel Gibson one about that guy on a cross, and so I suspect its politics lean rather hard into nationalism. However, at least at the historical level of the film’s plot, we’re dealing with freedom from colonial oppression, and who can’t get behind booing a giddily awful British aristocracy, a group of feckless oppressors delighting in misery, division and bloodshed (except for Jenny; she’s nice).

So, seen as a story about getting out from under the thumb of some bad guys (who are also bad actors), this hits all the buttons and does it with the kind of bold maximalism you come to expect from this kind of production, with gleefully non-naturalistic animal fights (all CGI-rendered), explosions, and some thrilling camerawork. It passes the time quite nicely.

CREDITS
Director S.S. Rajamouli ఎస్. ఎస్. రాజమౌళి; Writers Rajamouli and V. Viyajendra Prasad కె. వి. విజయేంద్ర ప్రసాద్; Cinematographer K.K. Senthil Kumar కె.కె.సెంథిల్ కుమార్; Starring N.T. Rama Rao Jr. జూనియర్ ఎన్.టి.ఆర్, Ram Charan రాం చరణ్ తేజ, Ajay Devgn अजय देवगन, Alia Bhatt आलिया भट्ट; Length 182 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Friday 30 December 2022.

The Woman King (2022)

The full list of my favourite films of 2022 is here but I’m posting fuller reviews of my favourites. This big historical action epic comes from the very dependable Gina Prince-Bythewood, one of the better directors working in Hollywood, and it’s a powerful evocation of an era not much seen on screen.

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Just to kick things off: I really enjoyed this movie, especially as a big screen cinematic experience. It has an old-fashioned sense of an historical epic, albeit about a little corner of African history that isn’t often represented on-screen (primarily because it doesn’t revolve around white heroes or saviours, and surely the time for patriotic stories of European conquests over tribal peoples has long since passed). But it’s curious that this African story is written by two white women; given the other talent involved I don’t think that meaningfully invalidates any positive representation the film can provide, but it might give a hint as to the way in which the film tends towards a platitudinous Hollywood liberal sense of injustice being righted, as Viola Davis leads her Agojie (the so-called “Dahomey Amazons”) as a righteous force dedicated to eradicating slavery.

Clearly there are experts in this history — of which I am not one, nor are many of the online commentators peddling the criticisms to be fair — who acknowledge that the situation was more complicated than it’s portrayed here. Just my cursory awareness of our modern online world leads me to the understanding that it’s perfectly possible for groups of women to come together to actively promote and defend patriarchal systems of oppression, fascism and hate speech. The film doesn’t deny that the Dahomeys were just as involved in slavery as their enemies, the Oyo Empire. So the feel-good roles of Davis as Nanisca, her second-in-command Izogie (the brilliant Lashana Lynch) and young recruit Nawi (an impressive Thuso Mbedu) may not quite reflect real history, but that’s fine by me because this is primarily a film and an entertainment that hopefully leads people to learn more about this historical time and context.

However, whatever your caveats, it’s undeniably a well put-together epic with the appropriate levels of heart-tugging sentiment and brutal warfare action scenes. Gina Prince-Bythewood has come a long way from Love & Basketball and that sweetly saccharine film The Secret Life of Bees with one of the Fannings in it. She made the fantastic Beyond the Lights and her recent foray into action with The Old Guard was the rare superhero film I actively enjoyed, and so she is not short of directing skill, nor is her team lacking in their ability to both capture the location and people (cinematographer Polly Morgan), or the nuances of the acting — and this in particular seems like quite a departure in the type of role Viola Davis is usually seen in, and she surely deserves some awards love for it. There may be all kinds of ways to criticise it, but I admire any film that tries to tell a bit of history we’ve not seen played out before.

CREDITS
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood; Writers Dana Stevens and Maria Bello; Cinematographer Polly Morgan; Starring Viola Davis, Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch, Sheila Atim, John Boyega; Length 135 minutes.
Seen at Light House Cuba, Wellington, Thursday 3 November 2022.

Fast & Furious 9 (aka F9, 2021)

There’s not much more to say, and surely fewer places to go, for a series that mostly eschews even a title these days. The posters call it F9 or F9: The Fast Saga, though I’m pretty sure the film credits just go with the classic Fast & Furious 9, and really does it matter? It’s more of the same nonsense, but it’s part of all of us now, it’s who we are as a culture and a species, it’s world cinema, it’s certainly one of the most inclusive of franchises, but most of all it’s family.

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I think we’ve got to the point in this franchise where now the characters are making metatextual jokes about the film we’re watching (drawing attention to it as a movie, critiquing some of the more ridiculous plot points to each other), which is always the sign of… well usually that something has passed its best-by date (and I can’t imagine many would try to argue that it isn’t at least starting to get a bit stale now, even if you’re a big fan). Everyone is back, everyone you thought was dead, all those actors you’d thought had just been around for the one film years ago, and it’s rammed with surprises for the fans, because everyone having their arm around everyone else and calling them “family” is what this series is about now, and if not for that slender thread of humanity it would all just be tediously irritating (and probably is to some, probably always has been). It’s a soap opera with bigger set-pieces, the biggest set-pieces, just thunderous ridiculousness around every corner. They go to space in a car. It goes on a bit long, yes, but I don’t have a problem with thunderous ridiculousness.

CREDITS
Director Justin Lin 林詣彬; Writers Daniel Casey, Lin and Alfredo Botello; Cinematographer Stephen F. Windon; Starring Vin Diesel, John Cena, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang 강성호; Length 143 minutes.
Seen at Empire Cinema, Wellington, Thursday 17 June 2021.

Black Widow (2021)

I keep saying that I’m not going to any more Marvel movies, because what really am I getting from them? I certainly gave up posting reviews of them up here because they mostly just cover the same sort of arc (fun but empty, and was that bit where they destroyed most of [insert city here] really necessary?). I’m pretty sure I said no more after Avengers: Endgame, and I feel certain I’ve said it at other times too, but here I am, back in again (because, obviously, it’s directed by a woman). I’d sort of forgotten the main thing about the Black Widow character from that final film of so-called ‘Stage Three’ of the MCU (avert yr eyes, but if you care you know already: she dies), but this is a prequel and it largely eschews the other big stars of the franchise, so we get a fairly standalone film, which is I think the best thing about it. So yes, let’s get back into it.

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At a certain level this is more of the usual Marvel sound and fury. Beforehand, I went to the Wikipedia page intending to spoiler myself just for fun but realised that I genuinely didn’t care about any of the characters at that point, so if the film achieves anything it’s that by the end, I did at least feel like there was something there, something to hold onto at a character level. As someone who was introduced to Scarlett Johansson back in the 90s in films like Manny & Lo and Ghost World, there was a little flicker of what she brought to those films, though she’s had a full career, a roller-coaster ride of decisions, so in 2021 the stand-out performer is of course Florence Pugh. She may perhaps be expected to take on Scarlett’s ‘Widow’ mantle in future and if so, it’s a canny choice, because one of the few reasons I consented to return to the cinema to see yet another MCU film was the presence of Pugh (and the director, Cate Shortland, whose style in her earlier, much lower-budget psychological dramas like Somersault and Lore, at times here manages to penetrate through the studio playbook). Of course, there are also the big explosions, the silly fights (there’s a lot that’s silly, both intentional and not) and the crashing of enormous things into the ground, but you’ve got David Harbour for the comic relief (who is very good at that), and some genuinely quite sweet scenes between Pugh and Johansson as sort-of sisters rediscovering their bond. Also, secretly, maybe the whole film is actually an allegory for #FreeBritney; certainly there is a message there that touches on conservatorship, I think, and about alienating women from choices over their bodies.

CREDITS
Director Cate Shortland; Writers Eric Pearson, Jac Shaffer and Ned Benson; Cinematographer Gabriel Beristáin; Starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, Rachel Weisz, David Harbour, Ray Winstone, O-T Fagbenle; Length 134 minutes.
Seen at the Penthouse, Wellington, Saturday 10 July 2021.

醉拳 Zeoi Kyun (Drunken Master, 1978)

I could easily do a week of Netflix films with only original titles (perhaps just romcoms) from the last handful of years, but they do also have older stuff. It’s a bit hit or miss what you’ll get, in fact it’s almost entirely random it sometimes seems, but there are a few ‘classics’ buried in there. For example, old Hong Kong action comedies like this one by Jackie Chan from the late-70s.

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I’ve managed to miss out on most early Jackie Chan (aside from the peerless Police Story) so I figured it was time to catch up with his oeuvre. This film is firmly in the comedy kung fu vein of the kind that used to be mocked (and who knows, maybe still is) for the poor dubbing, but as watched on Netflix the English dubbing only crops up at random periodic moments (in a totally slapdash way; was this the artistic intention?). In any case, it’s a vigorous demonstration of all kinds of martial arts choreography, and very impressive most of it is too, but it lowkey has some character development too, as Jackie Chan’s Wong Fei-hung “Freddy” starts out as a swaggering show-off, making fun of his teacher’s skills before swiftly being put firmly in his place by, first, his aunt and then a moustachioed gentleman “Thunderleg” (Hwang Jang-lee) and so he submits to the training of the title character So Hua (Yuen Siu-tin). In a sense, it’s about Freddy overcoming his childishness and misogyny and this new respect for women (and, obviously, alcohol) helps him wins fights. So it’s silly, but it’s also a filmic Bildungsroman of sorts with a positive moral lesson for our foolish comedy hero.

CREDITS
Director Yuen Woo-ping 袁和平; Writers Siao Lung 蕭龍 and Ng See-yuen 吳思遠; Cinematographer Chang Hui 張海; Starring Jackie Chan 成龍, Yuen Siu-tin 袁小田, Hwang Jang-lee 황정리; Length 110 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Saturday 20 March 2021.

Kung Fu Panda 3 (2016)

Hello! It’s been a while since I posted a non-Criterion review on this site, so let’s jump back in. Cinemas may now be (more) open in certain parts of the world, but home streaming is still A Thing, and probably… always will be? Well, time will tell, but here’s another week of “random stuff I’ve watched on Netflix” because it’s still the most popular option.

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I’d watched the first two instalments (several years ago) and honestly couldn’t remember much of the plot. I wrote little capsule reviews at the time, but they’re not much longer than a sentence and barely convey any information beyond “it was quite fun”. Then again, it’s been a day or two and I don’t remember much of the plot of this one either now, so I don’t think that’s really the key to the trilogy and won’t affect your enjoyment. Basically, it’s about our rotund hero Po (voiced by Jack Black) ‘finding himself’ and discovering his powers and his empathy as part of a quest to defeat a legendary big bad guy, Kai (J.K. Simmons), who has just managed to return to the mortal realm. Po has his buddies and he has his antagonists, and I’m not sure the plot itself is particularly deep but it’s also fairly blandly positive so I can’t really fault it for that, but it’s a good excuse to get together some cute characters and show off the fine animation skills of the DreamWorks artists. I do raise my eyebrows somewhat at the writing team for this China-set film, along with getting notably non-Asian actors to voice some of these characters (Dustin Hoffman as an elderly sage called “Master Shifu”??), especially when they are called on to do an accent — but Jack Black at least isn’t doing that and isn’t really intended to be anyone but himself, and he and the filmmakers make it a likeable enough ride and an excellent conclusion to the trilogy.

CREDITS
Directors Jennifer Yuh Nelson 여인영 and Alessandro Carloni; Writers Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger; Starring Jack Black, J.K. Simmons, Bryan Cranston, James Hong 吳漢章, Dustin Hoffman; Length 95 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Saturday 3 July 2021.

Shadow in the Cloud (2020)

Moving onto another quite different NZ film from the documentary I reviewed yesterday, there’s this. Roseanne Liang is a NZ-born and raised director who made an interesting debut (which I shall cover later in the week) and went on a few years later — presumably it took time to bring the project together — to make this utterly ridiculous B-movie action horror thriller, which I really enjoyed but certainly pulled down mixed reviews.

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I saw the trailer for this and it seemed like something I’d definitely not want to watch. After all, I’m hardly the biggest fan of the lead actor (though she’s been in some good films), and it looked silly. Well, it is silly. It is beyond absurd. But the thing about starting from a place of absurdity is that you can pretty much do anything, and this film goes to places other films don’t, or at least not since that classic era of weird off-the-wall B-movies (the 50s? maybe the 70s). It takes its low-budget constrictions and spins them off into all kinds of things in its taut running time: an intense horror-inflected chamber psychodrama; a film about toxic masculinity in war; an emotional story of domestic abuse and motherhood; an alien film; a WW2 fighter film; the kind of action film where characters climb across the outside of a moving plane; and a bunch of other stuff, although I feel that this much is in the trailer if you’re attentive. And somehow, despite the involvement of screenwriter M*x L*nd*s (who I can only assume contributed the misogyny, though that’s one of the film’s themes, and it’s pretty clear that it’s very much set against it), it all seems to work somehow — or at least it does for me. I can imagine other people finding this just downright bad, but I think it might be some kind of masterpiece. It certainly deserves a release on one of those psychotronic video labels in maybe 50 years as an undiscovered classic.

CREDITS
Director Roseanne Liang; Writers Max Landis and Liang; Cinematographer Kit Fraser; Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Taylor John Smith, Nick Robinson; Length 83 minutes.
Seen at the Light House Cuba, Wellington, Tuesday 16 February 2021.

怪物先生 Guai Wu Xian Sheng (Monster Run, 2020)

Another thing that’s useful about Netflix is it’s where a lot of the films that don’t get big releases in English-speaking countries can find their audience. Whether it’s Bollywood, Nollywood, or East Asian popular cinema, like this Chinese film (or maybe Hong Kong film: certainly here it was only on Netflix in Cantonese, but it looked like a dub). I’m not even sure it got much of a release in its home country, which makes sense given the events of 2020, but it’s on Netflix and if you like this kind of CGI-heavy fantasy adventure, then worth checking out.

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A rather jolly monster-based romp, which I wouldn’t characterise as a kids’ movie (it has some fairly nightmare-inducing stuff at times) but has the sort of polished sheen of one. I’m not sure if the monsters are supposed to represent anything in particular for our protagonist (Jessie Li), but she doesn’t seem to show much spark in this film, perhaps because her character is supposed to be a little ground-down by life. Still, Mrs Lotus (Kara Hui) makes for a good villain and the monster CGI and fight scenes are quite fun, even if the latter takes up a lot of the last part of the film (at the expense of the monsters, who sort of disappear for a bit). I certainly liked it, even if I lost the plot a bit at times.

CREDITS
Director Henri Wong 黄智亨; Writers Fan Wenwen 范文文, Wong, Wang Yahe 王亚鹤, Alex Zhang 张卓鹏 and Disha Zhang 章笛沙; Cinematographers Po Wing Ho [Baorong He] 何宝荣 and Charlie Lam 林志坚; Starring Shawn Yue 余文樂, Jessie Li 李俊杰, Kara Hui 惠英紅; Length 104 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), Wellington, Friday 19 February 2021.

流浪地球 Liulang Diqiu (The Wandering Earth, 2019)

A recent release (to cinemas! I wonder what those are like) has been the French science-fiction film Proxima from the director of Maryland. I’m very intrigued by it, even as I’m rather less comfortable with returning to a cinema, but this week I’m doing a science-fiction themed week. I’ll try to keep them all in a foreign language if I can, but I’ll start with Chinese blockbuster epic The Wandering Earth, which is on Netflix.

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Recently my friends and I have taken to watching a silly, distracting film every Thursday; the week before we watched the baffling, bonkers and honestly quite bad Geostorm, which naturally led onto this week’s choice. It’s a Chinese action sci-fi film that mines, if you will, some of the same rich seam of nonsense, even if it’s all wrapped up in fairly believable scientific hokum about environmental catastrophe (albeit here it imagines that human civilisation actually manages to survive long enough for the Sun to die, which is the real stretch).

I’m not sure what’s specifically Chinese about it, given how earnestly (and successfully, in my opinion) it attempts to ape the form; perhaps it’s the rather dark and morbid cutaways that occur every so often, or the brazen willingness to sacrifice huge chunks of the world’s population in order to achieve the larger goal of survival. Like many a film before it (Armageddon comes to mind, if I’m recalling it correctly, though honestly it doesn’t exactly linger in the memory), it deals with a wearied yet rebellious dad (Wu Jing) who bucks the system (and MOSS, the HAL-like computer system) to sacrifice himself so that his estranged son (Qu Chuxiao) and billions of others may live. There’s also a quasi-Blade Runner aesthetic, the underground caverns recall Total Recall, and there’s a Starship Troopers vibe to the classroom scenes.

I guess I just don’t mind any of this frantic cribbing so much here (unlike in Geostorm), perhaps because it’s in Chinese (I’m a sucker for subtitles), but perhaps because everything is just pushed to ridiculous extremes. Like many, my highlight was the machine gunner who turns his bullets on distant Jupiter when it looks as if all is doomed. In other nice touches, the voice of international politics is French, and the voice of the evil computer MOSS is English. This film is genuinely utter nonsense, but I found myself increasingly drawn into it, even if there were still plenty of times I turned to group chat to ask yet again, “what the hell is going on now?”

CREDITS
Director Frant Gwo 郭帆; Writers Gong Ge’er 龚格尔, Yan Dongwu 严东旭, Gwo, Ye Junce 叶俊策, Yang Zhixue 杨治学, Wu Yi 吴荑 and Ye Ruchang 叶濡畅 (based on the novella by Liu Cixin 刘慈欣); Cinematographer Michael Liu 邁克爾·柳; Starring Qu Chuxiao 屈楚萧, Li Guangjie 李光洁, Ng Man-tat 吳孟達, Zhao Jinmai 赵今麦, Wu Jing 吴京; Length 125 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), London, Thursday 7 May 2020.

The Old Guard (2020)

I’m taking a pivot today from documentaries to feature a very recent release on Netflix, the action superhero film The Old Guard, most notable perhaps for its star turn by Charlize Theron, but with I think quite a lot of hidden depth. It’s an odd outing for a director previously best known for romances like the stellar Love & Basketball (2000) and the equally excellent Beyond the Lights (2014), but a very solid one too.

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I see this is pulling down a good range of opinions, but even as someone who hasn’t always been so thrilled with the comic-book adaptations/superhero genre in the past, I thought it was great, punchily shot and edited and with some fine performances. One could quibble that not all the writing was up to the same standard, but it almost doesn’t matter with supporting actors of the quality of Chiwetel Ejiofor or KiKi Layne. At the heart of the film though is Charlize Theron and her gang of immortals, and it’s a difficult thing to convey hundreds if not thousands of years of existence adequately, but I think Theron pitched it at the right level. The film allowed moments of existential reflection, not to mention moral qualms about resorting to violence — already more than most genre films manage — but they key is in the characters and the performances, I think. Plus it all fit together expertly, and while she may be better known for romances, director Gina Prince-Bythewood shows herself to be a solid action director too.

CREDITS
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood; Writer Greg Rucka (based on the comic book by him and Leandro Fernández); Cinematographers Tami Reiker and Barry Ackroyd; Starring Charlize Theron, KiKi Layne, Matthias Schoenaerts, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Marwan Kenzari مروان كنزاري, Luca Marinelli; Length 125 minutes.
Seen at home (Netflix streaming), London, Thursday 16 July 2020.