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dir: Alexander Payne
I wonder how high up on People magazine's Hottest 100 Bachelors list I am this year...
I was so surprised when this didn’t turn out to be a biopic-documentary about the great punk band The Descendents, from whose ashes rose other punk superstars Black Flag and All, blessing the world with their fast, brutal pop-punk noise, inspiring a legion of teenage boys in Akron, Ohio and Ringwood, Melbourne, to pick up guitars in their bedrooms and then put them down again once they finished their chemistry and engineering degrees.

No. That would have been too real, too awesome. Instead, here’s George Clooney Clooning things up for the rest of us, based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Cummings.

We see, for the briefest instant, a woman riding on a jet ski, who seems very happy. That’s the happiest we’re going to see her, because Clooney’s sonorous voiceover ensures that we will know quick smart that these people aren’t or can’t be happy for very long.

It turns out that the woman we beheld in all her glory is now in a coma, and her husband, Matt King (Cloons) is looking after her, and dealing more so with the fact that he now has to reengage with his family, being two daughters, which he thinks he’s not ready to do. The youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller) is getting in trouble for acting out (by saying ever so rude and hurtful things to other girls), and his elder daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) has her own problems unsuccessfully hidden away at her elite boarding school.

Though he uses and abuses voiceover throughout the flick, Matt’s main problem, and Payne’s intention, as it often is the case with his films, is to point out that even with people living in paradise, which is what a lot of people would consider Hawaii to be, their lives can still suck a bit, and they can do shitty things to each other.

I’m not sure that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone, but maybe it needed to be said. I never really thought life was easier for emotionally distanced people living in a hot, tropical place, because I always assumed the humidity and heat would drive residents into semi-regular alcoholic rages.

dir: Jonathan Levine
Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?
Cancer is a hard sell. It’s okay for those four-hanky weepies they make for the abundance of chick channels on cable, but for a comedy drama with nice, liked actors in it, you have to think a lot of people apart from the creative ones involved would have been a bit leery or at least anxious.

“Who’s going to see this?” muttered one studio executive, tugging on his soul patch and massaging his shoulder where Consuela, his usual deep-tissue masseuse had failed to work out the knot that had been bugging him all week.

“I mean, it’s a bit of a bring-down, isn’t it? Can’t he have, like, a cold or something less depressing?”

“What about lupus?” said his female counterpart, fighting the urge to think about food denied to herself at least until daylight hours were over. “Lupus would play well to 27 to 39-year-old one legged lesbians who like blue blankets, at least that’s what our data shows. What about an earache? No, we don’t want to alienate the people with sore eyelids. How about AIDS? Everyone loves AIDS. That’ll get the, you knows, into the theatres.”

“They have so much disposable income, they’ll buy a hundred tickets each! And we’ll make it in 3D! Perfect! Francine?”, he bellows into the adjoining office at his assistant, “get these Seth Rogen and Will Reiser shmucks on the line, and tell ‘em to change the screenplay to say the main character’s got AIDS. Whaddya mean the person it’s about, Will Reiser, had cancer? If I tell him it’s AIDS he had, then it’s AIDS, or I’ll run his weedy ass outta town on a fuckin’ rail. And Seth Rogen doesn’t get to tell me what to do just because he lost some weight and went all Hollywood. Fuck that Canadian wheatgrass drinking derelict. I’ll send him back to Saskatoon if he doesn’t change the goddamn script…”

And so on, and so on. That’s my pained and convoluted way of saying that while studios put out a fair number of flicks dealing with illness and cancer, they generally err on the side of weepy or stupid, or often two for the price of one. Even the true stories get so mangled that they’re less a life-affirming example we can all relate to, and more an exercise in torment. Apropos of nothing I’m just going to scream really loudly that The Bucket List was a fucking terrible film about two guys with cancer.

Just so you know, that’s how I feel. And a lot of reviewing is about feelings. It’s not about mise en scene and diagetic sound, or thematic complexity and Tarkovskian scene composition. It’s just saying “this film worked for me, because it felt like they got it right.” And I really liked this film. It was touching and sweet, and affecting without being manipulative or treacly.

dir: Steven Soderbergh
Lot of people gonna die
As if germophobes and compulsive obsessives didn’t have it hard enough already.

Speaking as someone who has long been pathologically afraid of germs and contamination (the psych term used to be mysophobia, or, having too much time on one’s filthy, filthy hands), I don’t need flicks like this. I’m already freaked out enough by the prospect of infection that I am the person the scientists lament creating superbugs by using hand sanitiser and giving other neurotics a bad name.

I’m not at the mask or tinfoil hat stage just yet, but, you know, it’s only a matter of time.

Contagion does me no favours, does me no help. It’s almost as if it’s aimed specifically at people like me for whom the horrifying prospect of an epidemic like this, of evil germs finishing off many, many people, is almost too close to home to appreciate. It’s easy enough to handle zombie flicks, where the virus is transferred through biting. Hand washing and ethanol can’t do anything about that. But a bunker mentality and obsessive hygiene could, actually COULD help if this scenario came to pass. And that’s why it hits closer to home. It’s practically goading us with the propensities into indulging them further and falling even further down the rabbit hole.

Conversely, or perversely, actual epidemics that the media and World Health Organisation beat up don’t affect me at all. I’m no more afraid of the spectre of bird, swine or monkey flues than I am of meteorites or werewolves. But when they explicitly spell out in the flick (Kate Winslet’s character does so) the vectors of infection, and how basic they are, my skin crawled, and my stomach lurched multiple times.

Soderbergh does a tremendous job grounding this flick in reality. It’s a what if, but played out as a what if in the real world, rather than requiring sci-fi or genre horror concepts beyond the grim reality of what would happen if a percentage, even a small percentage, of the world’s population contracted such a virus.

The people that try to deal with this outbreak are the characters that are depicted here, albeit by very recognisable actors. It’s the heads of the Centre for Disease Control, the World Health Organisation’s epidemiologists, and the microbiologists whose expertise would, we hope, be our species’ saving grace.

Exploiting the situation are shitheads like an Australian blogger (Jude Law), and a lot of the American population, who seem to go batshit crazy like they’ve watched too many post-apocalyptic flicks. A flick like this, like lots of American flicks, contends that the general population, the great unwashed and nicely washed, are always a bee’s dick away from turning on each other. All it needs is a flu outbreak or a hurricane called Katrina, and the general American population that doesn’t have a panic room or an underground, fully stocked bunker is immediately going to start bashing in the skull of the person next to them in order to feast on the scooped-out goo.

dir: Rupert Wyatt
Join the revolution, or end up as one of their pets
Never has humanity’s downfall been so enjoyable or well-deserved.

Really, could it be a spoiler? Does anyone whose interest perks up at the elaboration on the title not know that, at some point, there’s this Planet, and it’s going to be Of The Apes? That there was a book about it, and a film about it with Charlton “My Hands Are Cold and Dead Now” Heston, and a bunch of other films to lesser success, and then Mark Wahlberg appeared on the scene to fuck things up?

And he wasn’t even playing an ape? How inexplicable is that?

Otherwise, the title wouldn’t resonate, and presumably, the multitudes wouldn’t care. Nah, what we craved, without knowing it, is an explanation; a grounded, believable explanation as to how the Apes came to ‘own’ our Planet, and what ‘we’, being arrogant, hubristic humans, did to allow them to take over.

Lest it sound like I’m being sarcastic as a prelude to ripping the utter shit out of this flick, let me stave off any confusion by bluntly stating the following: this is one of the best big budget flicks of the year. It works on an action level, it works (I can’t believe I’m typing this) emotionally, and it works conceptually as well. I’m not saying it’s a masterpiece, because it’s fairly familiar in plenty of ways. The brilliant aspect is the parts of the flick devoted to Caesar’s rise to power amongst his ape brethren as they get ready to become the dominant primates on the planet.

Yep, the monkeys don’t get shit in this equation. Once the humans are dealt with, anything with a tail will probably be reduced to the status of Lithuanians.

dir: Cary Fukunaga
He looks like he wants to eat her whole
Jane Eyre, eh? Prestige costume drama Oscar bait, eh?

Just imagine all the doilies and lace trimmings and bustles akimbo all over the place.

This just screams of potential audiences climbing over each other’s corpses, desperately trying to get to the box office in order to get tickets to the latest Brontean Blockbuster.

Despite the fact that the book presumably is still all over those high school reading lists for English or English Lit or whatever classes haven’t been cancelled and replaced with Glee-like activities (proudly sponsored by some repellent lip gloss), I’ve never read it, and never seen the dozens and dozens of versions of it that have been expelled onto an unwilling public.

I’d always lumped it in with all that Regency-era frippery like all of Jane Austen’s pap, and always assumed it to be on a par. You know, attractive and spirited but somewhat impoverished young ladies desperate to get married to someone who seems to treat them mean initially, but turns out to be more rad than cad, and who welcomes their spiritedness instead of having them incarcerated in a sanatorium for being hysterical.

Jane Eyre, I know now from having watched this flick, is nothing like that. It’s about an intelligent and spirited young lady who gets multiple raw deals in life through no fault of her own (played by Australia’s own Mia Wasikowska). The story she’s in is a dark and gloomy one, both literally and aesthetically. It is, apparently, more from the Gothic-Romantic literary persuasion, where you could almost mistake it for a tale of horror.

dir: Greg Mottola

Aliens walk among us. And they're very rude
This flick is a perfect storm of nerd signposts and signifiers so nerdish in their nerdishness that it’s akin to watching a table full of Comic-Book Guys playing with their Magic the Gathering cards, drinking Pepsi Max straight from the bottle for an hour and a half.

However, before you suspect that I’m going to go for cheap and easy laughs mocking the indefensible, and an easy pop cultural target at that, let me just say that I am a fairly nerdy person myself (as are all people who obsessively watch movies and complain about them on the tubes of the internets, let’s be honest about it), so the question for me is whether Paul is a tolerable movie because of its nerdiness or in spite of it.

Well, the two are inseparable, really. Since its two lead characters are nerds playing nerds (quite deftly, I might add), and it’s a homage to the science fiction flicks of the 1980s (mostly, though Close Encounters was earlier), and one of its main characters is a CGI alien, you can’t really grade it on its Shakespearean qualities or its Byronic pathos.

Clive and Graeme (Nick Frost and Simon Pegg) are two British nerds who’ve achieved the dream of a lifetime by travelling to the States and going to the Comic-Con event in San Diego. Some people aim high in their dreams, others aim low, but the important thing is to have a dream, I guess, no matter how achievable.

The script keeps throwing up scenes and misunderstandings where people assume Clive and Graeme are gay, and who would be the butch and who would be the bitch, but they deny it, despite the fact that circumstances keep thrusting them together, and the fact that they carry on like a bit of an old married gay couple.

The point is, I guess, that, taking out the gay panic aspect, a lot of longtime nerd friends do sometimes seem like co-dependent little couples, since most women, at least on the big screen, seem to not be able to tolerate the smell of them, at least until the end of the movie. So these desperate, enabling and isolating relationships can kind of exclude other people, and experiences.

dir: Tetsuya Nakashima
Remember the days of the old school yard? We used to bleed a lot
From revenge… to more revenge. This time, we’re doing it Japanese style.

Now, just to get all simplistic, reductive and borderline racist, if the old saying regarding revenge goes that it is a dish best served cold, like sushi, then what this particular director and cast do is take that revenge, like a platter full of sushi, dip it into a tank of liquid nitrogen, and shatter the freeze-burned remains with a HIV-covered sledgehammer.

Man, do they serve this revenge up cold. And, man, do the Japanese hate school kids.

Confessions is a flick where a whole bunch of people confess to each other or to us in the audience in order to tell the story. There are bits where people talk to each other, but mostly people are talking in monologues.

Our first speaker is a junior high school teacher who explains to her class that she’s quitting her job, and why. For the next half hour, mostly she stands in front of the class and talks earnestly but quietly to a bunch of savages who are barely in their teens. They carry on like they’re on the island from either Lord of the Flies or Battle Royale, just with lots of texting involved, but they listen and react whenever she says any crucial element of her story.

For what is mostly a monologue, the editing carries on in a determined but spastic manner, with hundreds of postcard shots, shots of kid’s mobiles as they comment on what they’re hearing, with a constantly moving camera that doesn’t want to allow for the possibility that maybe what’s being told to us is mostly boring.

It’s not, I guess, because what the teacher, Yuko Moriguchi (Takako Matsu) is telling them, and us, is the story of why she’s just infected two of the kids in the class with HIV.

dir: Danny Boyle
Rock and Roll
Whatever problems I might have had with Danny Boyle’s films in the past, whatever misgivings I might have had dwindled to nothing fifteen minutes into this film. In the first few minutes I was worried that I was going to be watching something closer to The Beach or Life Less Ordinary end of Boyle’s oeuvre, rather than the actually watchable, decent end of the Boylian spectrum (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire).

But then something happened at exactly 15 minutes in, and the title flashed up on the screen, and I realised that Aron Ralston’s (played by James Franco) real story had just started.

And oh holy fuck what a story it is.

That it’s a true story, and a very narrowly defined story, based entirely on the relevant 127 Hours in question of Ralston’s life, would almost make you think that telling this story in movie form would be impossible. Telling it well, at least. Telling it poorly would seem to be piss-easy. Telling it so that it’s heroically bad would take real hack skills, some of which Boyle has hinted at in the past.

Instead, they (all the people involved, like Boyle’s longtime writing collaborator Simon Beaufoy, but especially Danny Boyle, but especially James Franco, but Especially Boyle!) make a lot of good, strange decisions in order to make a story about a guy trapped under a rock interesting.

When I say interesting, that’s not to say that there aren’t moments where I felt frustrated and trapped. But imagine how this poor bastard felt! Isn’t it fair that we, too, experience some of that feeling?

dir: David O. Russell
Idiots on parade
David O. Russell is a director not known for sports flicks. He’s known, if he’s known at all, for three things: directing Three Kings, which remains one of the only decent flicks set during the first Iraqi adventure; making a thoroughly stupid flick called I Heart Huckabees; and for a screaming match that occurred and was recorded between himself and Lily Tomlin on the set of that flick.

Mark Wahlberg is best known for having a brother who was in New Kids on the Block, who had a short career as rapper-performer-Renaissance man Marky Mark, and playing John Holmes stand-in Dirk Diggler in Boogie Nights. He is not well known for his acting ability.

Christian Bale is best known for screaming abuse at people on the set of some films he’s been on. And a wicked eating disorder. He’s also an actor, or so I’ve been told.

The three of them, oh, and a bunch of other people as well, collaborate here in order to make a fairly amazingly good film, one which, noting the participants, the location, and what they’re famous for, I couldn’t really have predicted.

Based on the actual lives of actual people, The Fighter chronicles the rise, the fall, the stumbling, then the falling again, and eventual rise of a pair of brother boxers. Which one will triumph is not entirely clear until the end, unless you already know about the people involved and the golden era in which they fought.

The narrative device the flick uses, very successfully in my opinion, to tell the story initially is through a HBO documentary film crew following around someone who was initially a town hero, the Pride of Lowell, Massachusetts. Yes, unfortunately, it means we have to listen to those fucking accents for two hours, but you can’t have everything, after all. We don’t want our movies to be too perfect, do we? Otherwise we’d lose ourselves inside them permanently, never wanting to venture out of the cinema.

dir: Gaspar Noè
Sure, enter the void if you want, but how the hell do you get out?
What a crazy, fucked-up film.

Preparing yourself for a Gaspar Noè film is not something that is genuinely possible. Having seen others of his flicks, none of which I will ever see again, I was determined to not see this flick ever as well. Since I’m reviewing it, well, that means something changed in my thinking, and I’m glad, to an extent, that it happened. Not too proud to admit when I’m wrong.

A friend of a friend who works in the film industry told me she saw the flick at a festival, and that it was quite an amazing experience. Though I knew nothing about her before that day, her thoughts, conveyed to me over a long and boozy conversation on a Saturday afternoon at a local pub, regarding flicks in general (that she’d worked on in New Zealand, being those flicks involving children wandering into a Witch-filled wardrobe and a Jesus-substitute lion called Aslan) and this flick itself intrigued me. They intrigued me to the point where my absolute determination to never again be violated by a Gaspar Noè flick wavered, and over time led to a confident ‘maybe?’

And in the end I caved. I’m not entirely happy with the experience, because, as I should have expected, there are certain sights and sounds in this amazing flick that I wish I’d never seen and experienced, and which alcohol will now have to delete for me (in its usual sporadic and haphazard manner). But overall I think, I hope, the experience was a compelling and affecting one, and thus worthwhile.

Make no mistake: it is a stunning, tedious, amazing, excruciating film. The sounds and visuals are calculated and amped up deliberately to arouse and bludgeon the senses of the viewer. Even the opening credits transport the viewer to a bad place even after only four or so minutes of strobing neon staccato and mania.

And then the drug-addled flick begins. We see everything, almost everything, from the perspective of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), and what isn’t from his perspective directly, is with the camera filming him from behind (in third person perspective, so to speak) , so that he is always either viewing things directly or seeing himself. He is a drug-using drug dealer in Tokyo, who spends the first half hour of this long-arsed flick out of his mind on drugs. We see his very trippy hallucinations, and the droning thoughts in his empty head. He lives with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who cares so very much about him.

dir: I’m not sure, though Banksy is credited.
About time, too.
They call it a documentary, but I don’t think you can take anything that transpires in it at face value. It seems like it’s the story it claims to be, but that could all be bullshit.

After all, Banksy is involved.

The parts that are undeniably ‘real’ focus on street art, which is the contemporary term describing graffiti, or whatever you call it when people paint, spray-paint, creatively deface or otherwise do anything in public which inflicts their eyesores on the general public for a brief period of time.

The thing is, if you’ve seen any of the stencil stuff that’s sprung up in the last ten years, the stuff that looks like it was painted but is really stuck on, it’s Banksy.

Banksy didn’t necessarily do it himself, and in fact it’s very unlikely that he did it in your city, unless you live in London, whereby it’s a possibility. But his stuff, his concepts, his radical juxtapositions and provocations, spread across the world like a virus.

His stuff, and I know how pointless it is saying this, is brilliant. I’ve known of his stuff, living and working as I do in the inner city, where his stuff is pasted over everything, for much of the last decade, but I knew next to nothing about the man. Now, after watching this flick, I know even less.

You might think this documentary documents the life and times of one radical street artist called Banksy, but nothing could be further from the truth. Banksy apparently appears in the flick, in shadow and hooded, with a modulated voice, but how do I know if that’s Banksy?

dir: Jon Favreau
Irony devoid man
Finally, a sequel to a superhero flick! The world is crying out for Part 2s. Part 2s are generally speaking, always better than Part 1s. Part 1s have all the horrible heavy lifting to do in terms of establishing an iconic character’s origins and motivations, which generally makes anything else that happens superfluous.

Part Deuxes only have to refer to those origins in the opening credits, and then it’s all away-we-go. And is thus better because, after all, who wants all that baggage?

Baggage-handlers, that’s who. They live for baggage. Also, customs people, drug smugglers and the thieves that work in airports, they all love baggage.

The rest of us, though, just want to skip the entre and get to the main course.

Iron Man 2 is the rare Marvel Part 2 that extends but doesn’t exceed its initial instalment: of that I mean the current crop of superhero flicks that have been coming out recently which have generally done pretty well with the follow-up instalment. Most people, I think, would agree that Spider-Man 2 was significantly better than either 1 or 3, and X-Men 2 is still the best of four admittedly mediocre movies.

It’s definitely not a better flick than its predecessor, but the important thing is that it’s not substantially worse. That’s the most important criterion, for me. And the fact that it’s still very enjoyable and a lot of fun is icing on the cake. I suspect it’s not going to review as well, but will probably make plenty more money, but I could care less about any of that.