Watching

As previously mentioned I avoid horror where people do terrible things to each other, because that could happen, and probably does, and I don’t care for jump scares in my old age. This gets through on my sci-fi horror technicality: none of this could happen—I hope at least—so I was free to enjoy the shapeshifting gore from a more… scientific point of view. That thing has organs.

Because the effects are physically there, they hold up better than most CGI (the defibrillator scene especially). Only the odd jerky transition gives their age away. The Morricone score has dated worse than the rubber: that early-80s synth tone sounds way older than it should. The ending hangs brilliantly.

Horror is very much not my thing, but sci-fi horror—even better, space horror—somehow is? Sure, it’s unoriginal and unsubtle, but I’ve always liked it. The mooted director’s cut (that can’t be completed due to the poor condition of the materials) sounds like it would have been quite the experience.

Same territory as TV Glow, a few years further on, and I think I liked it more. Gillian Anderson plays Billy big, with velvet, fur and a Southern draw. She’s great. Hannah Einbinder underplays Kris against her, which is right as two Billys would have been too much. Alex G is back for a third Schoenbrun score, which I’ve been listening to and enjoying for the past few weeks. One of the cues is called ‘Slasher Climax’, which is, well… let’s just say the central theme of this film took me longer to work out than I’d care to admit.

Coming-of-age drama meets Cornish folklore. I loved the combination. Flora Hylton and Joel Sefton-Iongi, both making their debuts, are terrific as Evie and Adam, two pre-teens drawn to a disused tin mine and the knockers said to haunt it. Director Lucy Cohen uses the legend as a way into what the pair share, a missing father each, which she handles delicately. There’s a specific scene in Adam’s mum’s car on the cliffs which is very well done. And it’s a beautiful film: Rachel Clark’s photography is great throughout.

This is our family’s collective vote for best animated film of the last decade or so. Very fun and stands up to repeated watches.

I don’t understand how James Cameron undid so much of what was great about the first film, added a load of stupid new stuff, and it still came out as brilliantly as it did.

Seismic. Sigourney does so much with her facial expressions in the last act. Hadn’t seen it for a few years and it was fun analysing everything Ash says and does.

In the pantheon of 90s Grisham adaptations this one sits in the middle, some way below The Firm. The cast is overstuffed and even 135 minutes isn’t enough to find work for all of them. Voight is good value as Drummond, full of expensive false courtesy, and DeVito might be the best thing in it as Deck, the paralegal who keeps failing the bar. Claire Danes is good too, stuck in a subplot with no route back to the insurance case; the film keeps setting the trial down to go and check on Kelly Riker. The rest is genre-by-numbers, and it’s no surprise I forgot that I’d already seen it until I was a fair way in.

Really quite uncomfortable. Mia McKenna-Bruce is outstanding: in the film’s third act, the camera sometimes lingers on her face for minutes at a time, and they are some of film’s most powerful moments.

I’ve said before how much I enjoy films about institutional cover-ups and the legal and media process of uncovering them. Hadn’t got round to this one until now. My librarian tendencies will show when I say that the best parts are the archive-digging ones: church directories, the euphemisms in the personnel listings (sick leave, unassigned), four reporters slowly working out just how many names that adds up to. Ruffalo gives Rezendes the right kind of intensity. McAdams does things with greater calm but no less well. Liev Schreiber plays Marty Baron at roughly half the volume of anyone else in the room, and makes me wonder why we don’t see much more of him in big-screen roles.

The biblical rain today suggests that summer is over, so my run through a handful or so of John Cusack films ends with it, on the film I’ve seen more than perhaps any other.

Watching Cusack in order suggests some connections I hadn’t gone looking for, mostly around moral compromise and concession. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway concedes his way down one compromise at a time, and pays for it. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out concedes nothing and is ruined anyway. Runaway Jury‘s Nick Easter turns up with the con already written and walks out clean. Martin Blank does the worst thing any of them do, announces he’s stopping, and nobody argues (or even really appears to be listening).

Even the reunion corridor scene (fantastic choreography, btw!) doesn’t hold him to it. Debi refuses every justification he offers, he ends up admitting he got good at the job and then came to like it, and the admission expires the moment the scene does.

Nothing about what Martin does accumulates, or is left owing, which is presumably how I’ve managed however many viewings this is. The film has never once asked me to reach a verdict on a contract killer. I find that… restful, which I doubt reflects well on me.

Starts like the first chapter of a Murakami novel. Mundane daily life set out in patient detail. I was waiting for a talking cat to turn up. Wenders luxuriates in the routine instead. The cassettes, the sandwich on the same bench, the photographs nobody else will see, the tree seedlings.

The second half fills the character of Hirayama in without explaining him. His niece’s arrival nudges the routine sideways; his sister’s subsequent appearance hints at a complicated backstory. When she asks whether he really cleans toilets for a living, the nod he gives back is confident, proud, and tells you more than the tears that follow. The music is great; every cassette feels like a deliberate choice rather than a needle-drop for the sake of it.

A VHS staple, seen a hundred times. I first watched it as a teenager, around the time I was getting into the Clash; given how much of my taste Lloyd Dobler and Martin Blank went on to shape, I’m amazed I never started kickboxing.

I’ve rewatched a bunch of John Cusack films this summer and the running thread has been something like moral compromise. That doesn’t work here. Lloyd has no angle and nothing to trade. It belongs to James Court instead, secretly up to no good and justifying it in a terrible, burdensome way. John Mahoney never lets him stop believing his excuse, right through the prison visit. I miss him a lot. Such a talented actor.

Ione Skye is good, though this is Lloyd’s film. Romantic without ever tipping into sentimentality. The boombox got the glory and the memes but the last scene is the best in the film. The pair of them, future undecided, waiting to take off.

Relatively well reviewed, and I don’t understand why. “A love letter to Hollywood’s golden era”, perhaps, but only for its first half; once the talkies arrive it decamps to fifties sci-fi and a save-the-world blob plot. The references are real enough (Muybridge’s horse, Keaton’s collapsing house front, some Lovecraft) but recognising one isn’t the same as the film doing anything with it. And the voice work is mostly phoned in. Not Jesse Eisenberg, who does well as a robot who appears for no reason. Trey Parker just does Cartman, in a children’s film, because nobody seems to have asked him not to.

Corporate thrillers are my thing, and ones set in broadcasting doubly so. Mann films the CBS half with the tension he’d normally give a heist: lawyers, standards meetings, the slow discovery that the network absolutely, in fact, will fold. His characters keep fucking up their own shit on principle, and I’ll watch that every time. Crowe is very good as Wigand, all clenched jaw and short fuse. Pacino does a lot of stock Pacino, which is fine by me. But Christopher Plummer’s Mike Wallace is the best thing in it, vain and shrewd and a lot better at his job than anyone in the room wants to admit. At 157 minutes it isn’t flabby, though nobody would miss, oh, let’s say, fifteen of them.

Obsession, loneliness and grief, all routed through parochial matters: a visitor centre, a walking tour, a few plaqued rocks that a historically Important man once sat on to think. I don’t quite know what it’s like to build a life around something that disappears overnight, but Peter Mullan’s Kenneth gives me a strong sense of it. It runs with comedy and sadness at the same time rather than alternating between them and, similarly, Gazelle Twin’s score keeps a low hum of unease where otherwise there might be whimsy. A curious little film with lots to like about it, and a last act that goes somewhere I wasn’t expecting, shifting what was in balance more clearly over to one side.

The cultural awareness class demonstrating an appropriate slow dance to Hot Chocolate is the best joke in the film, and it happens in the first five minutes. The deadpan continues after that, but relatively thinly, and I spent much of the runtime waiting for it to come back at strength. Otherwise: humanising; at times uplifting; quite beautifully shot.

I probably watch this a little more than once a decade, often enough to see the clothes date further each time while the motivations don’t really move at all. JD would be on Twitter now, and he’d be annoyingly good at it. Winona looks superb and plays Veronica with more precision than the part needs. Slater’s Jack Nicholson impression is fine once you accept it for what it is. The satire only works because it’s brutal. Its target isn’t school so much as everything school is a rehearsal for. The lines survive brilliantly: “my teenage angst has a body count.”

One oddity. In the final act, I’ve always noticed that a part of David Newman’s score sounds lifted from Super Metroid, released six years later. Still no idea what to do with that.

This review may contain spoilers.

This sat on my watchlist for forever without me knowing anything about it: the plot, the cast, the genre. That served me well. The high concept is the good bit. The score is genuinely unnerving, and the course title cards (breadless bread plate; R.I.P. Jeremy) are funnier than most of the dialogue. Nicholas Hoult is very good as Tyler, whose foodie devotion curdles into something much worse.

But the guests are thin, one sin apiece, dealt with accordingly, and the film never bothers to explain why an entire kitchen would agree to do what it does for its chef’s grievance; “because people worship chefs” is weak. Jeremy is where I stopped extending credit. Margot’s way out—she’s a service worker, therefore exempt—is the same shortcut. Slowik’s complaint is that presentation has swallowed the food; the film proves him right more thoroughly than it means to.

This review may contain spoilers.

Marty Mauser is a confidence man, and the film is built almost entirely out of his energy: when he talks the world seemingly rearranges itself around him. I spent the whole thing wanting him to fail to the point where it coloured my enjoyment of the film.

Some of that is the Safdie method pointed somewhere new. In Uncut Gems, Howard Ratner was unbearable in a similar way, but he was prey: always the smallest man (figuratively) in the room, owing money to bigger ones, hunted through every scene. The sympathy was more structural; you root for anything being chased. Marty has the wind behind him. He gets the components of the underdog (small man, big rivals, sport as the ladder out) while functioning as a predator on everyone within reach. I didn’t enjoy the mismatch.

The consequences do arrive but they’re a little more bureaucratic rather than escalating: too late to enter the Championship because of his own scheming, flying home with GIs because he’s burned his passage, missing the birth of his son. Every closed door in the last act is one he built himself.

And he never seems to notice. He talks his way past each of them exactly as he’s talked his way past everything else, right up to demanding a real rematch with Endo. The confidence man suddenly insisting on the genuine article, perhaps the neatest trick he pulls and, like me, if you aren’t charmed, the one worked on the audience rather than by the character.

Which leaves the recognition nowhere to happen except that final shot: hands clamped over the mouth that ran the whole con, glasses still on, weeping at a baby behind glass in a room full of other people’s children. It’s beautifully played, almost entirely through containment. It’s also the only available location for a humbling the film never dramatises anywhere the camera can see, and the readings I’ve come across all say the same things: trading fame for family, coming to terms, the repercussions sinking in, etc. I don’t agree. He didn’t trade anything. He ran out of options and then cried where nobody could watch him do it. And anyway, who’s to say fatherhood isn’t the next scheme he’s going to try to exploit?

Saw this at the cinema in 1999 and, I think, never since. Memory had filed it as Rashomon-adjacent, with unreliable narrators and contradiction; on reflection the three strands complete each other rather than compete. A different and altogether gentler trick. Mostly it’s a time capsule of faces I then assumed were headed for bigger things: Scott Wolf, Desmond Askew, Taye Diggs. A very young Melissa McCarthy turns up briefly. And obviously Sarah Polley, whose subsequent career rather outstrips the material here. Watchable, propulsive, thoroughly of its moment. And I say that as someone who considers the turn of the millennium to be a few years ago, not twenty-six.

Umpteenth rewatch and the nostalgia has gone recursive on me. Linklater made this in 1993, looking back mid-70s he half-remembered and half-invented. I’m now looking back thirty-odd years to a film that was already looking back, which means the object of my longing is itself an act of longing. Turtles all the way down!

I was reading Svetlana Boym last week and she’d call this the reflective kind of nostalgia: not trying to restore anything, just steeping in the ache of it, aware the ‘76 on screen never quite existed and that my own first watch has been smoothed by the same process. I get older, the film stays the same age.

What holds up is how little happens, and of course how completely that’s the point. It’s a last-day-of-school film where the freedom on offer is mostly the freedom to drive around. Nobody’s having the time of their lives; they’re circling the parking lot waiting for lives to start, which at seventeen is exactly what it feels like.

The boxy aspect ratio squeezes the Alps into a portrait shape, which makes the peaks feel tall rather than wide. It also means the landscape never quite escapes the two men at the centre of it. All perfectly fine stylistic choices yet I still spent the first twenty minutes wishing someone would open the curtains.

Narratively it’s straightforward, and there’s no reward in coming for the plot. Two boys meet in Grana; one leaves, one stays; they build a house together decades later. Directors Van Groeningen and Vandermeersch let it run to 147 minutes and not all of that is essential. The Nepal digressions are interesting but you could skip one and lose nothing. What accumulates instead is a study of class and social mobility working itself out inside a friendship: Pietro’s family can afford to consider adopting Bruno, and that offer is the wound the rest of the film and their friendship circles.

The two of them see the world in completely incompatible ways and understand each other perfectly, which is a harder thing to dramatise than it sounds, and the leads Marinelli and Borghi do it mostly in silences. It builds to something genuinely affecting and it looks utterly beautiful.

Third in the summer’s John Cusack rotation, and the first where he’s actively running the con rather than absorbing someone else’s. Nick Easter arrives with the whole thing planned, and the fun is watching him work rather than watching him decide.

Which makes him the odd one out. David Shayne in Bullets Over Broadway trades his principles away a concession at a time. Buck Weaver in Eight Men Out is ruined for a compromise he never actually made, done for standing in the room. Even Martin Blank, who at least chose his profession, spends Grosse Pointe Blank trying to reverse out of it. (Incidentally: one of my favourite films. Cannot wait to rewatch it.) Here, Easter is the one who got there first, and knew what he was doing when he did.

The film belongs to the excellent Hackman. Rankin Fitch (a name that simply screams “Grisham adaptation”) with his wall of monitors is doing what Cusack usually does: playing it straight while everything around him gets sillier. And, of course, the plot gets sillier by the minute.

Hoffman, sharing a screen with Hackman for the first time in their careers, is somehow given nothing to do. I’ve seen this film before but had very little memory of it, and I suspect that will be the case again should I ever press play once more.

In the early '90s I read Super Play, a Super Nintendo magazine whose staff were unusually well versed in Japanese culture and the parts of it that bled into gaming: anime, manga. Helen McCarthy’s reporting and Wil Overton’s artwork did a lot of the teaching. That’s how I came to the likes of Akira, Fist of the North Star and Golgo 13 fairly young, and how I knew something about what Akira was supposed to mean before I’d managed to see it.

When I finally got a VHS copy of Akira through a subscription offer, it didn’t change my life. I think I found it hard going. What I couldn’t place at that age was Japan’s post-war relationship with technology, and its recurring critique of the abuse of it: nuclear power and weapons, biotech, the running conclusion that humans make irresponsible stewards. As the only nation to have been hit with nuclear weapons, Japan is uniquely placed to warn against reckless use of dangerous things, and by now that warning has practically settled into its folklore. Like Godzilla before it, Akira is folklore of that kind, which is why it survives the specifics of its plot.

Thirty-odd years on, and that reading is obvious. I’ve caught the film once or twice in between, but only now do I see it whole. It’s more violent than I remembered, though I’m a father these days and softer on that sort of thing. The hand-drawn animation has aged into something remarkable, and a good deal more likeable than the computerised work that’s followed it.

The one place its influence never properly landed is the medium that introduced me to it. Akira never got the game adaptation it deserved: an apparently duff Famicom title that never left Japan, and a Super Famicom version I remember Super Play trailing as in-the-works, which came to nothing. The film shaped Cyberpunk 2077 and the genre around it instead. The magazine got me there; the games it covered never quite followed.