Barbie (2023)

Although I can’t in any good faith rank this as one of my favourite films of 2023, mainly because it’s still essentially an advert for a doll, I can also hardly finish off a year in film without mentioning it, as it was undoubtedly still a film I really enjoyed. It got paired in a lot of memes with Oppenheimer (which is also a solid film), but this is very much a fun film by itself and deserves its box office success, though I’m less enthused about the prospect of sequels.

There’s more than enough commentary about the ‘Barbenheimer’ meme (a canny way to link two films released on the same date in most places), but both are films that have a deep well of cameos and surprising appearances by actors that make you feel like that ‘Leo DiCaprio pointing’ meme. That said, this is the film with the jokes, and deeply self-aware jokes they often are too. Of course, it’s still essentially selling a doll but it’s not unaware of that doll’s history (whether controversies over its place with relationship to feminism; or else drafting in the doll’s creator for a slightly odd role from Rhea Perlman, or critiques of American corporate culture with its all white male Mattel boardroom).

Whatever its ideological placement, it remains a delight of a film, though the Barbie World certainly seems far more thrilling than the ‘real world’ of Venice Beach, Los Angeles, and the film feels most alive when it’s there, a riot of colours (pink, primarily) and set designed homes with all kinds of cute little touches, like the arch of her feet, or the way Barbie rolls around as if she’s an actual doll. Selling it so well is the casting of Margot Robbie, who feels so right for the role that it’s easy to relegate her in your mind compared to the more showy performance from Ryan Gosling and the other Kens (most notably Simu Liu), but I think she deserves a huge part of the credit for this working, given the fine line it’s walking. I enjoyed myself, but I also enjoyed the energy of the cinema, which I’ve never seen so filled with people, as audiences seem to be cramming in to see it, and that’s something I can really celebrate.

CREDITS
Director Greta Gerwig; Writers Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (based on characters created by Mattel); Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto; Starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, Simu Liu 刘思慕, America Ferrera, Rhea Perlman, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon; Length 114 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Saturday 29 July 2023.

Poor Things (2023)

Rounding up my favourite films of 2023 with one of my favourites that I haven’t already written about, which only got a preview screening here in Melbourne towards the end of the year (and is due back in cinemas for a full run sometime in the new year I believe). Perhaps I have overrated it in the excitement of seeing a preview, perhaps it is a bit more middlebrow and less challenging than Lanthimos’s previous works, as I’ve seen some critics argue. Clearly it has its adherents and its detractors, like Past Lives. But in that cinema, that first time I saw it, it seemed pretty exciting. I shall have to return for a more sober appreciation next year.

I mean, if you’ve seen The Favourite or The Lobster or any of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films (or the works written by Tony McNamara, including the TV show The Great), you sort of know what general tone you’re going to get, and that can be summed up as “weird”. In the sense that this film is boldly-coloured, luridly non-naturalistic, glamorous and disgusting in almost equal measures, it is no surprise perhaps but the way it’s pulled off feels really sensuously done. It is also somewhat at odds with a lot of the content: there’s quite a bit of sex in this, which feels perfunctory at times, though often funny. Comedy suffuses this film, though it’s not precisely that either. I suppose it’s a Bildungsroman about the growing consciousness of a young woman, who as the film opens is mysteriously throwing herself off London’s Tower Bridge, but after she is resurrected by Willem Dafoe’s mad Scottish scientist figure with the transplanted brain of her unborn infant (Ramy Youssef plays the scientist’s assistant, and his literal ‘WTF’ moment when learning this is also beautifully delivered), she starts to discover the perils and beauties of living.

Emma Stone is going to win awards (I certainly hope she does, if this is not all too weird for most voting juries), and justifiably so, for what is a brilliant and very physical performance (there’s a dance scene that is filled with such joy in movement that it could be an acting workshop). However, the true star, for some physicality but also just for his line deliveries, is Mark Ruffalo, something I wouldn’t necessarily have said of any of his recent film work. There is of course a serious point about the way women are treated by men through history (this has a sort of fin de siècle setting, or just before, which perhaps justifies one piece of dialogue early on, though it’s still an uncomfortable laugh now), but also digs into the moral judgements on sex work and women’s pleasure, amongst other topics, as Bella continues to educate herself throughout the film. But despite the running time, you’re rarely far from a moment of true wonder and delight, or a big laugh, at any point in this film. Perhaps I’m dazzled now; I’ll watch it again, but this is fantastic in every sense.

CREDITS
Director Yorgos Lanthimos Γιώργος Λάνθιμος; Writer Tony McNamara (based on the novel Poor Things: Episodes from the Early Life of Archibald McCandless M.D., Scottish Public Health Officer by Alasdair Gray); Cinematographer Robbie Ryan; Starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef رامي يوسف, Hanna Schygulla; Length 141 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Saturday 9 December 2023.

MQFF 2023: Passages (2023)

My end of year round-up of favourite films of 2023 includes this film from Ira Sachs, a New York-based American filmmaker but who went to France to put together this compelling portrait of a Fassbinder-like Svengali gay filmmaker with the fantastic Franz Rogowski in the lead. It screened at both the main Melbourne Film Festival and again at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival afterwards, where I caught up with it

Sometimes you go into a film expecting one thing but getting another. I knew this was going to have Franz Rogowski being a hot, compelling, difficult man but I didn’t quite understand the ways he might find to mess up his life, repeatedly, and cause such deep emotional pain to everyone around him. That the film of this manages to be quite thrilling, even as it is so affecting and emotionally draining, is a credit to its filmmaker but also to that central performance. Ben Whishaw as his husband Martin plays to his particular strengths in being pushed into the background (anyone would be by Franz’s film director Tomas), and Adèle Exarchopoulos is once again compelling as Agathe, the third person in their relationship (plus she stars in another of my year’s favourites, The Five Devils).

However, this is very much Rogowski’s film, to the extent that perhaps the most devastating scene is one between Martin and Agathe near the end of the film in which Tomas isn’t even present and yet somehow entirely suffuses the scene adding to the pain on both sides that leads to the final rupture that pulls everyone’s lives apart. The film plays with the tension between these private conversations in domestic spaces—the promises both spoken and unspoken—and the noise and clamour of club and bar scenes, of public display, finessing the dynamic between them quite nicely. Even as lives are being completely up-ended, there’s still a quiet, un-melodramatic intensity to the whole thing that’s quite special.

CREDITS
Director Ira Sachs; Writers Mauricio Zacharias, Sachs and Arlette Langmann; Cinematographer Josée Deshaies; Starring Franz Rogowski, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Ben Whishaw; Length 92 minutes. Seen at Village Cinemas Jam Factory, Melbourne, Saturday 18 November 2023.

SFF 2023: Kuolleet lehdet (Fallen Leaves, 2023)

Moving through my favourite films of 2023, this one, the latest from Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki, screened here in Melbourne at the geographically-challenged Scandinavian Film Festival. Look, it’s not me deciding Finland (and Iceland) is in Scandinavia, but perhaps “Nordic Film Festival” just didn’t get the lucrative advertising. In any case, I don’t much care where it screens, but if it does, this is one well worth checking out, and one of his best (and shortest!) films in recent years.

It’s always wonderful to see a new Aki Kaurismäki film. By this point, you can spot them from just a few frames, so distinctive is his framing and colours. This feels somehow even more laconic than some of his other recent films, but it says everything it needs to in this concise story of two people falling in love. It precisely situates them within a stagnant economy of zero-hours contracts and worker exploitation, and a wider geopolitical frisson of the war in Ukraine, which one assumes must feel far closer to home given Finland’s history with Russia. The focus remains on these two people, Ansa (Alma Pöysti) and Holappa (Jussi Vatanen), and though the Holappa has his flaws, primarily a self-destructively depressive personality, the film is generous to a fault and manages to work towards something hopeful. It is, after all, essentially a romcom, if a very specifically inflected one.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Aki Kaurismäki; Cinematographer Timo Salminen; Starring Alma Pöysti, Jussi Vatanen; Length 81 minutes. Seen at the Kino, Melbourne, Saturday 29 July 2023.

Creed III (2023)

I’ve been running through some reviews of my favourite films of 2023, and this sequel (the third in the Creed spin-off from the long-running Rocky franchise) was an unlikely early favourite. However, it’s a real shame that Jonathan Majors has turned out to be such a creep (and convicted abuser) because it somewhat sours this film (as well as his other prominent recent roles), though to be fair he’s not exactly playing a nice guy so that somewhat works. Perhaps this one can hold up.

This is, somewhat improbably, one of my favourite movie series out right now… though okay, maybe not “improbably”, given my deep-seated love for The Fast and the Furious franchise (though that’s a love that doesn’t tend to stretch to specific films, except Fast Five). In fact, I think they share something in finding a dramatic and specifically action-focused way to talk about unresolved feelings between men. That’s nothing new to either though, certainly not to Creed III, as the lineage of great boxing movies is a series of films about men addressing their interpersonal issues through ritualised violence (and not in the sense of encouraging it as a means to work through issues, but as a way to dramatise it on screen).

And so here we have a story of two men who grew up together, then grew apart, separated by prison and the choices both that we make and that are thrust upon us by society, and it uses the ring as a way to deal with that. If I have any hesitations, it’s in the way that Jonathan Majors’s character Damian aka “Dame”, is forced to do a complete 180 on his personality leading up to the climactic fight, though the film does at least allow him the grace of coming back round. Still, I found it quite affecting really, more so than the second film, with some strong stylistic choices from new director Michael B. Jordan and his team, quite aside from just the solid casting of Majors, who’s been a real standout these last few years.

I never go into any boxing movie expecting to love it, but more often than not I do—as is the case here, and perhaps it’s because of how they allow space to talk about emotional issues in a way that’s both exciting to watch and also deeply laden with feeling.

CREDITS
Director Michael B. Jordan; Writers Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin (based on a story by Ryan Coogler, Keenan Coogler and Baylin, itself based on characters created by Sylvester Stallone); Cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau; Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jonathan Majors, Tessa Thompson, Wood Harris; Length 116 minutes. Seen at the Kino, Melbourne, Monday 6 March 2023.

You Hurt My Feelings (2023)

More in my series of favourite films of 2023, ones that may well show up in my end-of-year best-of lists. The new Nicole Holofcener movie, hardly a major heralded film of the year (as indeed her films rarely are), but the sheer level of the filmic stakes for all the characters (very low) and the way the comedy is consistently underplayed really charmed me. I love this kind of thing, though it’s likely to be much more appealing on the small screen.

I love a Nicole Holofcener movie, not entirely unlike the way I love a Nancy Meyers movie. In a way it’s the same thing but for a slightly younger generation which is otherwise almost entirely similar in terms of where and how they live, maybe on a slightly lower budget but it’s not like most of us would notice (these people always seem rich). Michaela Watkins’s character here is even an interior designer, though she sort of loathes it. Nobody is fully happy with their jobs, but none of them, notably, has any real problems in life, except for the way that they could all stand to be better people. Maybe that’s a New York problem, maybe that’s a New York filmmaker problem, I don’t know, but it makes it all curiously low stakes, and there are no stakes I like more in a movie than low stakes. Indeed when a gun is introduced at one brief moment it’s rather a shock. Nancy would never. In any case, the way that all these characters attack their own deficiencies is a game of brutal cut and thrust, and it’s laden with not just acerbic humour but with deeply felt empathy. I was never bored, and I was never not amused, and nothing really happened, but it was all delightful.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Nicole Holofcener; Cinematographer Jeffrey Waldron; Starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tobias Menzies, Michaela Watkins, Arian Moayed آرین مؤید; Length 93 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Saturday 10 June 2023.

Two Animated Films Going Into and Across the Spider-Verse (2018/2023)

I’m still covering my favourite films of 2023, but I realised I hadn’t put a review up of the first film in this new spin-off to the almost interminable Spider-Man franchise, so I’ll do both that and the new one. They share an interest in exploring a multiverse concept (again, not exactly the freshest take in our current cinematic landscape), but whatever my own feelings about superhero films, multiverse films, the character of Spider-Man, and the frenetic pace of animated production, I have really enjoyed both of these entries.

I feel almost surprised that I liked Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) so much, but it had been getting a lot of positive word of mouth. It has a lot of the same busy, almost hyperactive quality that The Lego Batman Movie had (and it has some of the same creative people on-board), but it manages to more successfully pull it all together. It’s still quite exhausting at times, the way it ties all these comic book ideas into a single film, but it does so in a satisfying way that makes sense and seems to honour the source material. For a start, the animation is gorgeous and really does mimic that sense of a comic book on paper (quite aside from the cutesy touches that make that more literal, like speech bubbles and some of the graphical motifs like frames within the frame). But it’s also more open to a diverse range of experiences of a big city like New York, and integrates them into the familiar superhero narrative. At once thrilling, funny and touching, which is a rare enough combination.

I feel like we’ve all been hit hard by multiverse films these last few years, so I confess my interest in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023), a sequel to the film above, was very much not high, until some friends starting mentioning they liked it quite a lot. Like the first film, but somehow more so, it has a fairly bold graphic style, mixing up different comic traditions, often within the same frame, and given that multiverse aspect to it, the finished product can feel exhausting at times in the amount of detail and constant forward-moving action. Those little moments of quiet, where the noise and the plotting just slows down to take in a character beat, are all the more important then in punctuating the fights, movements between universes, timelines, physical manifestations of our titular hero, and the way he’s finding his own place in the world not just as a crimefighting superhero, but a teenage Puerto Rican kid in New York. It’s all pretty great, really, given how easily this could be a confused mess.

CREDITS



Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) — Directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman; Writers Phil Lord and Rothman (based on characters created by Marvel Comics); Starring Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Mahershala Ali, Brian Tyree Henry; Length 117 minutes. Seen at the Curzon Aldgate, London, Sunday 30 December 2018.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) — Directors Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers and Justin K. Thompson; Writers Phil Lord, Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham (based on characters created by Marvel Comics); Starring Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Brian Tyree Henry, Lauren Vélez, Jake Johnson; Length 140 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Monday 12 June 2023.

Two 2023 Films about the Japanese Experience of World War II: Godzilla Minus One and The Boy and the Heron

For my favourite films of 2023 round-up, I’ve put together two Japanese films, released at roughly the same time, that both deal with a similar point in history from a slightly different perspective. Given their generic differences, it’s more surprising the ways that they are similar, and both are among the best of the year.

Godzilla Minus One (2023) is a film that returns in some ways to the original 1954 film ahead of its 70th anniversary, in treating the monster more seriously as a direct link to Japan’s experience of World War II, and upon the dangers and threats of a nuclear age that was opened by the detonation of the atomic weapons there. If Oppenheimer dramatised the creation of that threat, this film grapples with it from the other side, from the perspective of those whose lives were affected by it directly, though it’s careful to also tie in critiques of Japan’s imperialist hubris during the war, in dealing with a former kamikaze pilot (Ryunosuke Kamiki) tormented by his own lack of resolve in taking his own life as he had been commanded to do, weighed down with feelings of shame and working through his own trauma. This leads to quite an emotional journey as he returns to a rubble-strewn Tokyo to find only ruins of his childhood home and memories of the parents lost to the firebombing, connects with a similarly homeless woman and makes a life with her and the infant she’s caring for, to create a new family and possibility of hope amongst the bleakness.

This is in a sense a backdrop to the expected monster story, but it also gives it a depth, in so far as the titular fire-breathing dinosaur is not simply a monster, but an evocation of the dangers of an atomic age that continues to wreak havoc in traumatised post-war Japan. The film is not perfect, and sometimes it lapses into melodramatic histrionics in a way that doesn’t quite match the seriousness of the message, but it’s all handled pretty effectively, plus of course—and this is a key consideration in the genre—the creature effects are pretty spectacular.

In many ways, The Boy and the Heron (2023), the new Ghibli film by veteran animator and co-founder of that studio Hayao Miyazaki, makes an interesting companion piece to Godzilla Minus One (a film I had watched just the day before), in that both deal with a certain national post-WW2 trauma framed from an intensely personal point of view and using allegorical animal figures. Obviously tonally they are going for something different but both have their monsters, though Miyazaki’s film is, as you might expect, somewhat more oblique and deals directly with a child’s experience of loss and trauma (which I suppose makes it more ‘universal’ in a way, though both have their resonances these days, sadly).

It also feels somehow appropriate that the creatures here are somewhat less ‘cute’ than in some of Miyazaki’s earlier films, and the Heron is a rather hideous creation, like a middle-aged balding man with a huge nose stuffed inside the sleek elegant titular avian form. Still, after the plot’s set-up, you are pulled into this world, like the kids in My Neighbour Totoro, and the film only really works if you submit to that journey of wonder (and terror), even if it makes sense more on an instinctual or emotional level; a lot of the plot itself is rather perplexing. It’s beautiful of course, and you can never fault Ghibli’s animation, but it works in mysterious ways at times.

CREDITS



ゴジラ-1.0 Gojira -1.0 (Godzilla Minus One, 2023) — Director/Writer Takashi Yamazaki 山崎貴; Cinematographer Kozo Shibasaki 柴崎幸三; Starring Ryunosuke Kamiki 神木隆之介, Minami Hamabe 浜辺美波, Yuki Yamada 山田裕貴; Length 125 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Sunday 10 December 2023.

君たちはどう生きるか Kimitachi wa Di Ikiru ka (The Boy and the Heron, 2023) — Director/Writer Hayao Miyazaki 宮崎駿; Cinematographer Atsushi Okui 奥井敦; Starring Soma Santoki 山時聡真, Masaki Suda 菅田将暉, Aimyon あいみょん; Length 124 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Monday 11 December 2023.

Past Lives (2023)

The latest in my series of favourite films of 2023, catching up on ones that may well show up in my end-of-year best-of lists. Forget everything else, this was the single film that I think has been the most divisive amongst people that I follow. A lot of critics have been swooning over it (and I really liked it too), and it looks set to get plenty of awards attention, but it feels like plenty have written it off as a sort of ersatz nostalgia-fest with a deeply middlebrow sensibility (amongst other things). Those who dislike it, really really hate it or find it middling at best. I liked it.

I’ve seen some mixed reviews of this latest A24 title, but whatever others’ reservations it is clearly made for me, which is to say, someone who has been an immigrant to another country (although I would certainly hope that it speaks more directly to Korean immigrants to the US, specifically). But it’s also clearly made for me, an enormous fan of the movie Carol (and being produced by Christine Vachon, it has all the imprints of her best directors’ work in its DNA).

The way Greta Lee looks to the camera near the start of the film is very similar to the look at the end of Todd Haynes’s 2015 film, and like it we get to see a key scene in a swanky bar repeated from different vantage points. Ultimately, of course, the identity issues it’s playing with are different, but there’s still a small similarity in the idea that perhaps nothing is going to work out how the characters want it to, and that’s very much more the case here. Still, for those who are attuned to it, there’s a plangent tone to its bittersweet story of people who can never be together, a bit like The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in a way too (another favourite film) if less musical. Anyway, I live for Greta Lee’s saucy and knowing glances in this film, and hey is anyone else talking about the John Magaro-ssance (I need to workshop this phrase) because after those Reichardt films, and a small appearance in the Haynes film I’ve already mentioned, he seems to be on a roll. It’s an evocative work with a delicate dance of disconnection at its heart that I, at least, fell for.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Celine Song 셀린송; Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner; Starring Greta Lee 이지한, Teo Yoo 김치훈, John Magaro; Length 106 minutes. Seen at Cinema Nova, Melbourne, Thursday 24 August 2023.

FFF 2023: Un beau matin (One Fine Morning, 2022)

My series of favourite films of 2023 has already focused on a number that screened at film festivals. This is another 2022 film that was shown at the Alliance Française French Film Festival earlier this year.

Mia Hansen-Løve is a fascinating filmmaker to me, because I think she’s doing something narratively that other filmmakers don’t. And it’s not a flashy thing; it’s almost subliminal the way she constructs these narratives. In her best films (and I think of Things to Come particularly, but it applies to most of them), you watch them and can barely pick out a story as such, because it just feels like a succession of moments of lived experience that accumulate and pile on one other to create a sense of a life, of a series of interconnected lives. It’s often not until towards the end, or even after the film has finished, that resonances start to reveal themselves suggestive of a deeper emotional thread within what we’ve seen.

These resonances are often just small moments in the life of our protagonist—who here is Sandra, a translator played by Léa Seydoux, little vignettes of whose working life (translating conferences, presentations, book lectures, even a silent film) are almost randomly interspersed among scenes from her personal life. Most resonant perhaps are those relating to her ageing father, played by Pascal Greggory, who is dealing with a form of dementia, and who at one point seems—rather inarticulately, perhaps because of his disease—to express a desire for euthanasia. Elsewhere there’s her deceased husband’s old friend Clément (Melvil Poupaud) whose adulterous storyline feels far more conventional, yet the connection shared between them, and his difficulty in leaving his wife, represents almost a stabilising force in her life, a point of narrative coherence that we can intuitively understand given the other big strand of the film is her father’s life, which is decohering in a series of managed care facilities.

Somewhere in there is a balance, but it’s only very slowly that a viewer can take that in, creating an extra narrative richness that would probably be even more rewarding on a re-watch, and such is Hansen-Løve’s great mastery.

CREDITS
Director/Writer Mia Hansen-Løve; Cinematographer Denis Lenoir; Starring Léa Seydoux, Pascal Greggory, Melvil Poupaud, Nicole Garcia, Camille Leban Martins; Length 112 minutes. Seen at the Kino, Melbourne, Sunday 2 April 2023.