OCEAN’S 8
Given its elevator pitch is ‘like Ocean’s 11, but, this time, with women’, Ocean’s 8 offers a riff on a familiar theme that is both pleasing and utterly uninspired. Here, another band of charming, attractive celebrities team up to stage an ambitious heist, and all the familiar beats of the heist movies — and Steven Soderbergh’s original trilogy — are metronomically hit. Sandra Bullock, playing the never-before-mentioned sister of George Clooney’s old character, is paroled from prison, pledging to go straight. Instead, she heads to NYC, shoplifts and confidence-tricks her way back into a life of transient luxury, then hooks up with old partner-in-crime Cate Blanchett. Bullock’s been stewing in prison, coming up with the score to end all scores; Blanchett needs some sweet-talking, and some sweets, the deal sealed only after she shares a seductive forkful of Bullock’s dessert (cue: queer subtext alert!).
The gang is got-together, introduced with the brightness, briskness, and economy of getting-the-gang-together sequences eternal. Mindy Kaling is a diamond expert working in her family store in Queens, desperate to escape the gossipy Hindi community. Sarah Paulson is a frustrated housewife in lilywhite suburbia who’s still fencing stolen/bootleg goods from her two-car garage. Awkwafina is a skateboarding pickpocket and three-card-monte grifter, a master of sleight-of-hand. Rihanna is a dreadlocked hacker (shouts to Hackers). Helena Bonham Carter is a fallen-on-hard-times fashion designer, in debt to the government for millions of owed taxes. That makes her a perfect accomplice, someone who can dress Anne Hathaway — playing a satirical, winking riff on her own Oscar-winning celebrity persona: insincere, insecure, painfully self-conscious — for the Met Gala.
And, so, we’re off to the ball: this heist to end all heists taking place at “the most exclusive party” in the world. In such, Ocean’s 8 isn’t just a vaguely ‘fashion’ movie, it’s veritable sponcon: glossy magazines (and their editors), fashion houses, jewellery conglomerates, dating apps, and fast-food franchises all getting their products lovingly placed. Here, hoping to steal $150mil worth of jewels is just your regular run-of-the-mill capitalist aspirationalism; and getting to get glammed up in a fancy frock is living the dream.
The ultimate mark, in all this, is Bullock’s ex love-interest, a lightly-stubbled, generically-handsome, very-bland art-dealer played with much blandeur by Richard Armitage; his blandness, hopefully, an inversion of the history of bland trophy-girl roles (though the blandness of Gary Ross’ direction is probably less of a commentary, more just a lack of artistic ambition). It’s heist movie as female-bonding: women making out large, pinning it on some dickwad as they go; the film not just about getting-the-gang-together, but the friendships made along the way.
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It’s light, fluffy, pleasing popcorn-movie fun; almost, in its way, too nice. Heist-movies generate tension through the threat of danger, the chance that best-laid-plans will fall apart. Here, there’s no sense that our heist will be derailed, that the gang will fracture, that the fun will be impinged on. Even when a dogged, insurance-house bloodhound starts sniffing around, he’s James Corden, human embodiment of non-threatening. Which means that Ocean’s 8 is a film about a grand, ridiculous, ultra-complex heist of jewellery worth hundreds of millions of dollars, in which the stakes, somehow, seem low.
HEREDITARY
The source of every paranoia thriller is, really, mental illness. The success of these narratives hinges on sustaining, for as long as possible, unsuredness in the audience: is our main character really in the middle of some living nightmare, in which greater forces are conspiring to make them suffer? Or, are they just crazy? Debutante director Ari Aster doubles down on this idea in his foreboding, freaky, ultimately-funny (Hail Paimon!) Hereditary, dealing Toni Collette’s tortured-artist a hand so loaded it’s no surprise she’s going loco in the possibly-haunted-Gothic-mansion.
On introduction, Muriel’s the very model of repression: her mother’s just died, but she barely feels a thing. When she shows up to a grieving support-group, however, it all comes spilling out: her father was a psychotic depressive who killed himself; her brother a schizophrenic who suicided whilst blaming their mother; and her freshly-departed mum suffered from dissociative identity disorder. Is it any wonder that she — and, in turn, the audience — suspects she’s crazy?
Aster delivers many familiar genre elements: a creepy kid, a dark and shadowy house, jump scares, a foreboding score (from avant-garde saxophonist Colin Stetson), disorienting dream sequences, séances, intimations of occultism. For those genre-fans who want to connect it to the past, the influence of Rosemary’s Baby is palpable. But the greatest gift of his film — aside from its general taken-to-extremes approach — is how long he’s able to sustain its ever-mounting paranoia.
There’s due subtext to this: on climax, Collette is screeching about dead bodies in the attic and demonic possession, and her older-man husband, Gabriel Byrne, is looking at her with patriarchal condescension, this another showdown between doubting male and ‘hysterical’ female. But Aster never pushes this too far. Whilst Get Out turned horror into an on-trend genre for parable and critique, this isn’t Hereditary’s raison-d’être. Instead, it’s out to gleefully fuck with audiences, Aster hoping to tap into the darkness of your subconscious, drill down into all your irrational fears.
UPGRADE
A nasty B-movie blessed with both a ridiculous action-flick premise and a sense of Verhoeven-esque satire/absurdity, Upgrade takes place in a shadowy, noirist, future-dystopian America that’s actually secretly Melbourne (shouts to the Bolte Bridge). It marks a quasi-homecoming for local-boy-made-good Leigh Whannell, who famously went from TV-film-critic to sire of the Saw empire.
Here, O.C. graduate — and Tom Hardy lookalike — Logan Marshall-Green plays an old-fashioned man in a new-fashioned world: a blue-collar mechanic who fixes gas-guzzling vintage muscle cars, oblivious to the world of driverless electric cars and ‘implant’-aided humanity around him. He’s a man’s man, who soon gets laden with that generic first-act action-movie tragedy: a murdered wife.
Left a quadriplegic by the robbery that killed her, he’s offered an experimental, top-secret biotech procedure that’ll get him back on his feet. Instead, the high-tech implant takes on a life of its own: talking to him, inside his head, in a soothing/menacing HAL voice, and offering him not just an ambulant life, but a chance for bloodied revenge. And, so, as Upgrade rattles along at a giddy clip, the AI inside turns LMG into an unstoppable-killing-machine, dispatching bad-guys with gruesome ultra-violence played for splatter-horror lulz.
GRINGO
In his brother Nash’s comic crime caper Gringo, Joel Edgerton clearly relishes the role he’s playing: less the villain of the piece, more just a total dick. This is illustrated via his basketball pick-up game behaviour: never trust someone who calls cheap fouls. Edgerton is a pharma-bro who’s screwing his ball-busting partner-in-corporate-malfeasance Charlize Theron, and screwing over his dutiful, loyal, ultimately hapless underling David Oyelowo. Oyelowo plays the classic put-upon hero of a racket like this: not only is he being played for a patsy by his bosses, but his wife (Thandie Newton) is cheating on him, he’s about to lose his job, and, when he’s sent down to Mexico for a not-particularly-legal medical-cannabis-as-pill deal, he’s kidnapped.
From there, a violent, double-crossing, back-and-forth action-comedy ensues; replete with a host of famous faces (Amanda Seyfried, Harry Treadaway, Sharlto Copley, Yul Vazquez) populating the ensemble. The stereotypical ‘menace’ of Mexico is played up shamelessly, and there’s little emotional investment; but Nash Edgerton’s direction is candy-coloured and brisk, and the actors — Theron, especially — look like they’re having fun. The fun quotient, for viewers, is a your-mileage-may-vary scenario, but I’ve seen plenty of worse two-hour time-killers.
DISOBEDIENCE
There’s an entire sub-genre — represented perennially at queer film festivals — depicting scandalous same-sex attraction in the claustrophobic confines of devout religious communities. The passion, always, is only more enflamed by its forbidden nature! Disobedience is an A-grade variation on the theme: based on a book by Naomi Alderman, adapted by ace Chilean auteur Sebastián Lelio, and starring Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams. They play old flames reunited, after years apart, in London’s Orthodox Jewish community; each actor given a part of depth, conflict, contrast, their behaviour in the narrative’s perpetual present suggesting a whole past we’re never spoon-fed via flashback.
Then and now, they’re in something approximating a love-triangle with Alessandro Nivola, an old homie who’s now McAdams' husband. Befitting his community, he’s also a scholar of the Torah; Nivola role a mixture of equanimity, piety, judgment, jealousy, benevolence, and lust. The trio of in-command actors make the familiar-feeling story pulse with humanity, and Lelio gives them the space, and has the directorial grace, to act their asses off.
But Lelio’s greatest directorial gift, here, is how he handles that enflamed passion. It’s hard to type this sentence with the appropriate resonance, and lack of prurience, but: a huge part of Disobedience’s success comes with its on-screen depiction of sex, capturing its complexity — animality, emotion, thrill, embarrassment, and release at once — in a memorable sequence free from sex-scene clichés or leering male gaze.
THE LEISURE SEEKER
Italian filmmaker Paolo Virzì’s last film, Like Crazy, was a comic lark about a pair of women escaping a mental-health facility and heading off on a wacky roadtrip. From that, he’s now helmed his first English-language film, a comic lark about a pair of seniors escaping the doting care of their children and heading off on a wacky roadrip. Like all old people in movies, they’re about to die. And it’s a baby-boomer swansong: Donald Sutherland (suffering dementia, which is played for laughs) and Helen Mirren (in a cancer wig) head off in an RV, with Dylan, Janis, and Carole King on the soundtrack.
“Our old trips were never this adventurous, were they!” Mirren laughs, at yet another crazy comic interlude they’ve stumbled into. Perhaps it’s in that ‘hilarious’ moment in which she pulls a gun on some hooligans; living out that geriatric fantasy of putting kids-these-days back in their place. Of course, on this trip, they’ve become young again themselves: old people retreating into child-like states, all naughtiness and misbehaviour; roadtrip-takers, as ever, on a journey not just across the country, but into the past. It’s all entry-level stuff, the only interesting idea the implied suggestion that Trump’s MAGA supporter-base is a repository for those suffering senility.
KODACHROME
Speaking of standard-issue roadtrips: Kodachrome sets daddy-issues on a cross-country voyage, in which an estranged father-and-son head to Middle America for the final days of Kodachrome development. Ed Harris, a crotchety photographer, is a dying man wed to a dying format. His perpetually-pissed-off son, Jason Sudeikis, has always hated the Great Male Artist old-man, whilst constantly craving his approval. Set your watch for the emo climax in which dad tells son that he loves him.
Along for the ride is Harris’ assistant, Elizabeth Olsen, who is so telegraphed a Sudeikis love-interest that screenwriter Jonathan Tropper has to apologise to the audience, by way of a Harris monologue mocking the narrative convenience of their romantic set-up. ‘Colour’ is added via endless musical references: Sudeikis an A&R who woos Olsen, in part, via his record collection; Galaxie 500 always a welcome addition to any film, and a comic riff on Live momentarily enlivening the film.
Kodachrome is about celluloid as a dying format, and was duly shot, by director Mark Raso, on 35mm. But there’s not a single interesting thought that digs into this theme; or, an image or approach that justifies being shot on celluloid. Instead, it’s a movie titled after a format that feels as if it’s trying hard to fit into a format. There’s standard story beats, generic emotions, a phony moral stand, and a tasteful/timely/poignant death; this whole cross-country ride smacking of rote Sundance crowdpleasery.
MY FRIEND DAHMER
At its worst, My Friend Dahmer — Marc Meyers’ portrait of the serial-killer in his salad days — is a showreel of facepalming foreshadowing. “God, Dahmer, you are such a freak!” yelps another kid at school. Oh, and how! But at its best, the film undoes such clichés of screenwritten convenience. Based, as it is, on a graphic novel by Derf Backderf —someone who really was Dahmer’s teenaged friend — the story is much more mundane than retrospectively prophetic: showing, merely, what Dahmer was like in school, and how his behaviour only seems significant in hindsight.
In its '70s-midwest-America high-school setting, and its study of outsiderdom amongst social-cliques and nascent stoner culture, My Friend Dahmer carries echoes of Freaks & Geeks. Here, Dahmer (played by Disney tween-pop heart-throb Ross Lynch, happily turning against type) is depicted as someone forever alienated from even the most basic social settings; something hardly unique amongst teenagers. He’s also, of course, someone with a perverse fascination for roadkill, and a dreamlife full of fantasies of fucking Pete Campbell’s lifeless corpse. In moving between the two, Meyers is essentially showing how the lines of reality and perception can blur, but also how evil can grow in the most banal suburban setting.
THE BOOKSHOP
Do you like books? The Bookshop sure hopes so. Its title isn’t a misnomer: it’s literally about a bookshop, and takes so many of its emotional cues from bibliophilia. Emily Mortimer plays a war-widow in some musty British hamlet in 1959, who has the gall to open a bookstore, ruffling the feathers of various locals. Her most loyal customer is Bill Nighy, who’s really stepping out of comfort-zone to play — you guessed it — a charismatic old curmudgeon. Between the pair, there’s a spark of chemistry, along with conversations about hot-new-novels Fahrenheit 451 and Lolita; conversations that echo the many monologues about the wonder of books.
There’s also a twee-as-fuck air, endless omniscient-narrator voice-over, and a precocious moppet with red curls. As always, there’s a contrast between the romanticism for Jolly Old England and a critique thereof. Isabel Coixet —whose long, varied, wildly-uneven career we can’t entirely go into here — uses the bookstore as symbol of intellectual worth, and its female proprietor as totem of modernism. Ultimately, Mortimer’s done in by good old-fashioned small-minded small-town persecution; her demise symbolic of the unwed woman’s place in English society.
GAUGUIN
It’s familiar artist-biopic territory: the drunken, self-destructive, penniless, maligned-in-his day Great Male Artist, splashing paint on the canvas like there’s no tomorrow. Post-impressionist icon Paul Gauguin gets the biopic treatment, here, with Vincent Cassel getting to shed vanity and go in deep as a bearded, bedraggled, syphilitic bohemian living by the smell of an oily rag. In fin-de-siècle Paris, it’s too cold, too cramped, and filled with too many children he sired; so, our titular tyro heads off to Tahiti, in search of warmer climes, greener pastures, and new inspiration. The film is best received as a travelogue in thrall to its Pacific environs, it almost feeling as if humidity and sweat are beading on screen.
But, beyond the locale, director Edouard Deluc tells his story shades so respectful that they come out tentative, an oil painter touched up with liberal bouts of airbrushing. Whilst wandering through the jungle, Vinny’s unexpectedly betrothed to a local girl (Tuheï Adams), who’ll become the subject of some of his most famous, inspired paintings. But Gauguin doesn’t think it worth mentioning that, IRLz, she was 13 at the time (Adams was 17 when she played the role); or that Gauguin nicknamed the hut they shared 'The House Of Orgasm', and brought any village-girl who’d dare inside. Instead, it lets its Colonialist fantasy play out, before slowly sinking into its own version of reality: another Great Man ignored before his time, destroying himself for the sake of art.
MAQUIA: WHEN THE PROMISED FLOWER BLOOMS
If you’ve a thing for animated fantasy-worlds peddling a kind of medieval chic, Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms may be your cinematic event of the season. Maria Okada’s florid animé fantasia — her first film as director — opens in the Clan of the Separated, a kind of white-power fantasia full of gamine adrogenes who spend their forever-young lives weaving luxurious fabrics in tasteful towers. “If you ever meet anyone from the outside, you mustn’t fall in love,” intones an elder mystic, and, sure enough, we know this immortal utopia won’t last. What’s shocking is how quickly it’s razed: the film barely a quarter-hour in before some six-eyed, three-tailed, horny-dragon-ish monsters swoop in and lay it to fiery waste.
Left to wander in the horrors of the human world, our titular heroine — a veritable fallen angel — adopts an abandoned baby, subjecting herself to the trials of motherhood out of only moral certitude. As the years past, he grows up, but she remains her immortal, elfin self. Hysterical melodrama ensues; with life and death and childbirth and maternal sacrifice and wars being fought by competing sides seeking to hold the power of the Clan’s immortality (and good looks, surely). But what’s most memorable is the array of landscapes Okada presides over; from ye olde teeming metropolises to snowy mountains to castle strongholds, each rendered with inventiveness and a sense of drawn joy.
