Review: Aquaman

In his first appearance in 2017's Justice League, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman made his mark by being the bro-est superhero around. Now he has his own movie, and director James Wan actually dials down his bro-ness – which is pretty much the only thing dialled down here, because this is a film that’s going extremely hard in pretty much every direction. While not all of it works, its failures end up being part of its charm: whatever you think of its extremely loud and fairly dumb approach, it knows the only way to make it work is to commit 100%. 

There’s a real balancing act going on here: even for a superhero, underwater fish lord Aquaman is hard to take seriously, and yet treating him as a joke would be fatal. So this sets out to make him the most normal thing in the film, plonking the hard-drinking part-time superdude into a meandering story that takes in a sad lighthouse dad, seven distinct (and usually bonkers) undersea kingdoms, a royal feud, the title “Ocean Master”, a modern-day pirate bad guy, Nicole Kidman as a trident-wielding mum, killer fish, a desert quest, killer fish men, beach training sequences, dinosaurs just in the background because why not, trash tidal waves, and a racist sea monster – and that’s barely scratching the surface. 

The not-so-secret to Aquaman's success is that while the story is actually kind of flaccid - it's basically a slow race between two Aqua-kings to see who can bring off their scheme first - it's constantly throwing new things at the screen. Over the course of the film Aquaman (AKA Arthur Curry) travels via ute, a regular submarine, an Atlantean submarine, a plane, by foot across the desert, a fishing boat and sea monster - plus he swims around using both regular and super-styles. He fights at least four different kinds of bad guy / creature, has multiple training montages, goes from punching dudes in the head to disrupting an epic fantasy battle, and occasionally drops a servicable one-liner. He's a very busy man.

With all that going on, it's no surprise that this is an uneven film at the best of times. The visuals are often stunning, but the dialogue is serviceable at best (there's a big speech about the difference between a king and a hero that had someone near me groaning), while the fight scenes are always competent but rarely memorable. But what this does get right is the world-building. To date DC's superhero movies have largely taken place in the real world, but this covers everything from futuristic underwater super-cities to "lost world" islands to desert ruins to teeming sub-surface nightmares in a way that still sells them as a (somewhat) cohesive whole.

It's all a bit exhausting, and Momoa's slightly subdued performance occasionally feels like a reflection of how the audience most likely feels at this onslaught of new sensation. But again, the slightly cheesy tone works in the film's favour: it may take it all seriously, but there's enough oddball moments scattered throughout that the tone is never grimly relentless in the way that something like Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice was. 

There's a moment where Aquaman wakes up on a fishing boat while noodlely nautical flute music plays on the sountrack, then he goes out on deck and sees his underwater tour guide Mera (Amber Heard) is actually playing the music on a flute she found; you can't hate a film that finds time for that.

- Anthony Morris

The best and worst of 2018

First, some caveats: I have not yet seen Aquaman, Eighth Grade or The Favourite, some or all of which might possibly sneak into my top ten. I also haven’t seen Gotti, because it didn’t get a commercial cinema release in this country and if we’re going to let direct-to-DVD titles into this kind of list then the worst movies of the year are all going to be things sensible people have never heard of. So these are all titles I saw at a cinema in 2018, otherwise the film of the year would have been Brawl in Cell Block 99 and we could have given up on movies by the end of January.

 

Best films of 2018:

As is often the way, I easily could have listed twice as many films here. While these are in no particular order, just outside the top ten were a whole lot of films, including Roma, Cold War, Upgrade, Won’t You be My Neighbour, Sweet Country, A Simple Favour, Teen Titans Go! to the Movies, First Reformed, The Breaker-Upperers, Juliet Naked and Tully. But this remains my top ten for 2018, for today at least:

*Lady Bird

*Can You Ever Forgive Me?

*Mission: Impossible: Fallout

*The Death of Stalin

*A Quiet Place

*The Boy Downstairs

*Incredibles 2

*Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

*A Prayer Before Dawn

*First Man

  

Worst films of 2018:

There were an awful lot of firmly average films out this year, most of which I’ve already forgotten (not Skyscraper though. Or Ladies in Black. Or all those films with Boy in the title). But all of these films felt like a waste of time at some stage or another: even when they weren’t actively bad it seemed like they’d deliberately made the choice to avoid being good.

*Truth or Dare

*Fifty Shades Freed

*That’s Not My Dog

*A Wrinkle in Time

*Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again

*The Happytime Murders

*Flipside

*Peppermint

*The Predator

*The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

- Anthony Morris

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Review: Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Author Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy) is in trouble. Her last book was a flop, her agent is ducking her calls, she can't make any progress on her next book and she's hitting the bottle pretty hard. Worse, she's not exactly someone whose company people enjoy; when she's fired from a fact-checking gig (for drinking and swearing on the job) it's hard to see her securing steady employment around people any time soon.

When she stumbles across a letter written by Fanny Brice (the subject of her next book) she promptly tries to sell it - only to discover the lack of spicy content means it'll only bring in a small sum. Adding a gag-tastic PS bumps up the price, and soon Israel is forging celebrity letters left right and center, going so far as to collect a range of authentically old typewriters to give her forgeries some much-needed authenticity.

With this boost in her fortunes comes a boost in her personal life, as she makes a friend: Jack Hock (Richard E Grant), a flamboyant and itinerant local character. He comes in handy professionally as well, as a slip up with one letter means she now needs a front to sell her wares for her. But as her forgery career blossoms, just how long can she keep getting away with all this?

Israel may be an abrasive character but this film is a delight, shot through with wry humour even as Israel flails from disaster to disaster. Her agent dodges her calls, then invites her to a party where she's surprised Israel bothered to show up; to retaliate, Israel steals a warm winter coat from the check room and wears it proudly for the rest of the film.

She's harsh to friend and foe alike but the film is careful to surround Israel with people who are worse, from her snobbish, disinterested agent to various parasitical booksellers. The one buyer for Israel's merchandise who isn't a creep becomes something of a romantic interest; Israel's guilt curdles their relationship and gives her lightweight scam some real dramatic heft.

McCarthy's recent comedies have been dubious at best and forgettable on the whole, but here she re-establishes herself as one of America's strongest comedy performers with a performance that's abrasive and compassionate without ever slipping into caricature. Grant is a perfect comic foil in his best role in years, playing a warm-hearted bungler who always means well even when he's letting you down.

It's not just fantasy movies that can take audiences to another time and place: this film's recreation of the literary world of early 90s New York is consistently spot-on - and while that may not seem like a top movie getaway destination, this is so vivid down to the smallest detail that it becomes a place you won't want to leave. This is one of the films of the year.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Creed II

The first Creed felt like a minor miracle, a Rocky movie that reinvented the franchise by tapping into its core greatness even as it brought the story forward into a very different world. Creed II tries something even more difficult: it sets out to redeem Rocky IV, the silliest, most over-the-top (and yet somehow not the worst) film in the series. The result has its flaws, but when it works it takes the franchise’s biggest dead weight and lifts it high over its head.

On one level the story is little more than a series of fights and training montages as Creed (Michael B Jordan) initially wins the heavyweight title against a clapped-out champ, only to find a slick boxing promoter (Russell Hornsby) has a surprise for him: Russian punching machine Viktor Drago (Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu), son of Rocky IV's Soviet killbot Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Everyone wants to see Creed take on the son of the man who killed his father – everyone except Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) – but does Creed really know what he’s fighting for? 

Like a lot of Hollywood genres, the boxing movie is confined by rules so strict the differences between films - and therefore the difference between success and failure - are minor at best. So original this is not, and it doesn't always excel when it comes to the genre's strengths. The fight scenes are good but not great, and the story's predictable arc holds back the film's more interesting characters... who are pretty much everyone apart from Rocky. This is what, his eighth film? And the guy wasn't all that interesting to begin with. 

This eventually figures out a reason why Creed needs Rocky, but the film really doesn't and if this series is to have any real future Creed (who does get a handful of strong scenes with his fiance, played by Tessa Thompson) needs to be established firmly as his own man. That's not to say Rocky needs to be retired, but he definitely needs to be bumped down the roster - this film's biggest flaw is the excess of "and now, let's see what's happening with Rocky" scenes that add little to proceedings.

In contrast, this could have done with a lot more Drago, and not just because Lundgren is a more interesting actor than Stallone. Where Rocky's subplot is about family and fear of failure - because everyone's subplot here is about family and fear of failure; this really goes all in on that side of things and it's a better film for it - Drago is a character that actually did fail and it destroyed his life. 

Now he's using his son to try and regain what he's lost, only his son never had any of that and (despite being a man-mountain killing machine) is fighting for something much more pure. This may say Creed on the poster, but it's the Dragos who turn out to be this film’s bitter, beating (on others) heart.

- Anthony Morris

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Review: The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

There’s a certain kind of Disney film that, given a hundred million dollars, you could probably make yourself. You know the type: after a brief handful of scenes set in a twee version of the recent past (the more English the better) to establish various rote character conflicts almost always involving family (dead parents usually come in handy here), our plucky lead finds themselves transported into a magical fantasy world that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense and can possibly be read simply as a metaphor for our lead’s personal issues. 

Once in that fantasy world - which is almost always vaguely medieval and somewhat rural rather than steampunk urban or, say, Roman - she or he (but usually she) meets a collection of characters – some CGI, some big-name actors in outlandish costumes – while wandering through a variety of lavish yet somehow generic locations. Forests are good but castles are better, and once you throw in a couple of waterfalls or a mountain or two you're pretty much sorted.  For some reason, beaches rarely get a look in.

Now settled in at the castle, because our heroine is either "the chosen one" or some other obviously important figure from the past who is immediately inserted into an (often ceremonial) position of power rather than forced to muck out the stables for the next decade, she rapidly discovers there's some kind of conflict either long-brewing or about to come to a head. But good news! Being the chosen one / daughter of the former chosen one / clearly a magical visitor from a fabled land, she's the one who can restore peace to the kingdom.

Unfortunately the path to peace is being peddled by someone who seems just a little bit too eager to use our heroine's mythical status for their own power-hungry ends, and so before too long it's betrayal time as the good guys turn bad and the bad guys turn out to be plucky rebels / the last remains of the old way of life / just plain misunderstood. Kid, don't trust adults unless they're clearly trying to sell you something.

Now set on the right path, our heroine tools up for the fight in a way that often but not always involves literally using weapons (but only if this provides a kind of ironic counterpoint / "this isn't your parents fairytale" spin on how the heroine is traditionally seen), there's some sneaking around followed by some kind of exciting but strangely un-involving battle or chase sequence that ends when the bad guy is defeated and their army (which was on the point of victory) collapses without them. Hurrah!

Everyone now learns the importance of not being evil or prejudging people or whatever blah blah blah medal ceremony, tearful departure, magic is great, now all my emotional issues are resolved and I am an emotionally healthy adult unless I have to go back for the sequel, merch is on sale in the lobby or online.

If you like that, enjoy this.

- Anthony Morris

Out now: Romper Stomper

 

Watching Romper Stomper, the six part series based on the original 1992 film (out now on DVD and blu-ray), it’s clear the producers - which include the movie’s writer / director Geoffrey Wright - were faced with a dilemma. The original film is notorious for its right-wing politics, but the film itself is more about ceaseless motion and senseless violence than arguing any coherent philosophy. It’s a string of high-energy scenes of action, destruction and dancing (it’s largely structured like a dance movie), loosely justified by some racist slogans and Nazi flags.

But trying to sustain that level of energy and intensity across six hours would clearly be impossible; the film struggles to keep it up for 90 minutes. So instead of following up on the original’s focus on a bunch of manic clowns trashing Footscray largely because they can, this series is all about the politics, presenting a variety of people and groups united by their connection to an aggressive strand of right-wing activism that represents an evolution of the original film's skinhead thuggery.

The film trapped viewers in the world of its skinheads: we heard their music, we heard their views, and everyone outside them was seen as a subhuman target for violence. For some – most notably David Stratton, who refused to give it a star rating when it was covered on The Movie Show – this forced the audience to identify with a group they should despise. For others (okay, me), it was more that by focusing so closely on them, we were made to see their flaws: for all their posing they were simply violent dickheads tearing their lives apart, and anyone seeing anything admirable in these brutal clowns needed to pay a little more attention to what was actually taking place in the film.

Because the series is much more about the politics rather than the thrills (and cost) of physical violence, we have to have balance. So opposing Lachy Hulme’s Blake and his right wing “Patriot Blue” organisation we have the Antifa, a group of left-wing uni students whose mission it is to blunt the alt-right’s thrust into Australian society.

Between them are a small group of Muslim bystanders, people who largely want to live their lives without being targeted by Patriot Blue. But the Antifa are opposed to Patriot Blue first and foremost, which leaves these characters trapped between two warring sides with no-one to stand up for them but themselves.

The idea that anyone watching would be attracted to the Patriot Blue characters is dubious at best. Their leader is fat, impotent, and prone to boring everyone to death at barbeques by reading out “bush poetry”; his pious, Christian wife is equally boring and happy to cast aside her cherished values to sleep around behind her husband’s back. Meanwhile, the Antifa types are generic uni students, which is to say they’re smug, sneering, and heavily pierced. Whoever wins, we lose.

The trouble with dividing these groups into good guys and bad is that the world of Romper Stomper is one of all against all, a violent place where violence rules (it’s notable that the police barely make an appearance in the first two episodes, and their minor punishments are largely shrugged off). Just about every location here, from the streets to a nursing home to a television studio, is shown as a form of battleground where people struggle for dominance.

In this world, the real conflict isn’t between left and right wing activists; it’s between people who are happy to resort to violence and aggression to achieve their aims and those who aren’t. And in movies and television, this simply isn’t a fair fight. Violence is simply more dramatic, more exciting to watch; whatever our feelings about violence in real life, we’re almost always going to find ourselves more interested in watching the people who solve problems with their fists than those who want to talk things out (see also: every superhero movie ever).

So when a series tries to have it both ways – violence is bad; here’s some more violence – you end up with a muddled mess like Netflix’s current series The Punisher. There the lead is a mass-murderer driven to kill and kill again because of the death of his family… but don’t worry, he only kills bad guys and he's really, really torn up about it. The (far superior) comic version (especially when written by Garth Ennis) knows that the real way to add balance to this kind of character isn't some kind of moral waffling, but to show the monster you become when you fully embrace violence: pretending there’s ever a justifiable reason to gun down hundreds of criminals is ridiculous and treating your audience with contempt.

Initially the new Romper Stomper looks like it’s falling into the same trap, with a bunch of bad guys that have to be heroically fought against. And it’s possible this could end on a note of “why can’t we all just get along”, at least in a political sense. But the original film was all about the pure thrill of violence: it might be a dead end that will ruin your life and get you killed, but it’s fun while it lasts. And with this new Romper Stomper the thrill of violence remains – only where the film was all about the physical, this is much more about the emotional excitement of living a violent way of life, of finding meaning in your life from being in a gang and feeling like you’re in a life-and-death struggle, an all-important war where your very way of life is at stake.

Obviously it’s not: Romper Stomper portrays Patriot Blue as a bunch of easily manipulated blowhards living out a pathetic fantasy. But in the same way the film showed how easy it was to be lured into one kind of violent lifestyle, this is doing the same for another kind, showing us a range of people that, for different reasons, thrive on conflict and are willing to push things as far as they can to achieve their goals. Only this time, by showing us the people who suffer because they don't share this love of violence, it may also show us a way out.

 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald

There are a lot of interesting things going on in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. It's just that none of them manage to turn it into an interesting movie. It's been pointed out by more than one reviewer that this is a bridging movie in the Fantastic Beasts series, a film that is mostly setting things up for what is to come. That's clearly true; it's just that it fails to provide a reason why anyone would want more of this incoherent wand-waving.

But we all know why we'll be back. The Harry Potter franchise has built up such massive reserves of goodwill that seemingly nothing - not social media turning on creator J.K. Rowling, not films that are nothing more than blatant cash-grabs, not continuing Harry Potter's story only as a massively expensive stage play - can dissuade the fans. The fact that about 80% of Harry Potter's appeal was that it was a fantasy version of an already romanticised version of high school and Crimes of Grindelwald is a nightmare tale of the worst kind of adulthood doesn't matter; throw in a few brightly coloured scarves and a wand or two and the fans will keep on coming back.

When you're a child in the world of Harry Potter, magic is a gateway to an amazing world full of endless surprises and delights. When you're an adult, you get three shit jobs to choose from - magic cop, magic teacher or magic bureaucrat - and your every waking moment is obsessed with politics involving extremist forces that are constantly gathering and demanding the overthrow of everything the old order stands for. Considering the old order mainly stands for those three crappy jobs, it's not hard to see the appeal of Magic Hitler and his generic cronies.

There's barely a story here. Grindelwald (Johnny Depp, remarkably restrained for late-period Depp and perhaps the best human thing in this film) escapes from magic prison while being transferred back to Europe, hides out in Paris, marshals his forces and eventually gives a rally that is a relatively reasonable and low-key political affair in the Age of Trump. That's one of this film's handful of interesting ideas: Magic Hitler is portrayed as a charismatic and reasonable fellow with a vision that is at least superficially attractive. It's a good thing he signs off on baby-killing in private otherwise it'd be hard to see why he was the bad guy at all.

Everyone from the first film is back plus more, but while they're all extremely busy sadly nothing they do has anything to do with what this film is really about, which is sorting everyone into two sides (well, three - not everyone makes it to the end credits) for the conflict that is to come. Dumbledore (Jude Law) pulls a few strings behind the scenes, but for a film where the only person who can stop Magic Hitler is a much-loved high school teacher this takes itself way too seriously across the board, from the plodding pace and murky colour palette to the collection of doomed relationships and Grindelwald's boringly reasonable evil. Shouldn't magic be more fun?

Previous Harry Potter films always had a good reason for non-fans to stop by and take a look; even the first Fantastic Beasts had a lot of, you know, fantastic beasts. But this is fan service pure and simple, aimed solely at those who'll get worked up by a "canon-breaking" shock twist, and even the brief hints that one of the subplots involving a young powerful wizard (Ezra Miller) searching for his missing past might be a twisted version of the story of one Harry Potter go nowhere. If you want to watch later movies in this series, you'll have to watch this one; beyond that, there's no reason to watch this.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Suspiria

Why remake Suspiria? The original is so distinctive and so successful - on its own terms; if you're a fan of storytelling logic, move along - the idea of doing it over to get it right seems foolish at best and arrogant at worst. So Italian director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name) turns the original on its head: gone are the garish colours, garbled plot and throbbing sense of mystery, replaced by..., well, let's put it this way: if you're interested in office politics within a coven of witches living in a dreary 70s office block, then this is the horror film for you.

 

If that sounds a bit harsh, well... fair call. This is clearly striving for a different effect than the original, and to do so it needs to use different methods to achieve its goals. There's still a Berlin dance academy, only now the 70s setting is highlighted as the divided city is rocked by the fallout from the Baader-Meinhof Gang. The dour nature of the city is well evoked; these are people living in an oppressive place and time.

 

There are also witches, though the mystery that usually goes with them is out, replaced by the aforementioned office politics as Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton) fails to take over from her decaying one-time mentor. That means the continuation of the coven's plan to find a young woman for their sinister scheme - which, if you've been watching pretty much any film about witches or covens over the last three decades will come as no surprise at all (it's basically the same scheme as in Hereditary from earlier this year).

Enter Dakota Johnson's all-American farm girl, driven to cross the ocean by a burning desire to dance for Madame Blanc and the talent to go with it. Soon she's risen to the top, in large part because everyone in her way has either gone insane or (in one case) been crushed by unseen forces in what is easily the most disturbing scene in this film. A link is firmly established: whenever someone steps onto a dance floor, the tension rapidly becomes unbearable.

Unfortunately, off the dance floor the tension barely registers. The original isn't really about all that much but it doesn't really matter because it has style and suspense and sometimes - especially in a horror film - that's enough. Here though, while this definitely has style and occasionally there's tension, the fact that it's not really about all that much is much more obvious. None of these people are real, the situation they are in isn't real, and aside from some obvious analogies this isn't about anything that relates to the real world. 

 

Horror movies can get away with that because they're machines built to scare an audience. This Suspiria though, for all its horror elements and meat hooks and sinister goings-on, never really shows much interest in actually being scary. Without that, it runs out of steam well before an extended and extremely bloody climax that feels more like a shrug than an ultimate expression of terror.

 

Guadagnino's previous films have succeeded in large part because he's a director interested in the minutia of people's lives, the way small details accumulate to create devastating moments. But here the small moments just don't connect to the big events, because this isn't a story about human beings living in a world of human rules and behaviour.  

 

It's no surprise then that the one scene that does really work - where one woman's dancing somehow batters and crushes another woman - is built around the idea of there being an invisible, mysterious yet concrete connection between them. Linking people is what Guadadnino does best: he doesn't do it anywhere near enough here.

- Anthony Morris

 

 

Review: Fahrenheit 11/9

Michael Moore has dropped off the radar in recent years – despite being one of the few left-wing pundits to accurately predict a President Trump – so this documentary has been pitched as his return to the big stage covering the big issues. Which he does: unfortunately he can’t quite figure out how to make an actual movie out of them.

Instead, this is a jumbled collection of various talking points that’s really good at reminding you of what left-wing social media in the USA was outraged about six months ago. That’s not to say it’s solely of use as a historical document, as there actually is a decent film (or television feature) buried under Moore’s mea culpa’s for hanging out with right-wing types for laughs years ago and trips around the US checking in with various fired-up political candidates and school shooting survivors.

Unsurprisingly, this better, buried film kicks in when Moore returns to his home town of Flint, where thanks to political corruption and greed, the drinking water has been toxic for years now with no end in sight. Moore’s anger (mostly at the crooked Republican governor, but also Obama) is genuine, and a reminder that Moore’s best work comes from the heart.

That’s not to say everything else here isn’t heartfelt, just that the anger motivating it is a couple steps removed from what we’re shown. Moore is appalled that Trump was elected and at what his election has stirred up, but his look at what people are doing in response comes across more as a checklist of ways to take action than a story he’s burning to tell.

Moore’s relatively low profile in recent years comes in part because he’s no longer needed: if you want to get angry about the state of the world, social media is a much faster route than sitting down to watch a feature-length documentary. It’s only when he brings something more to the story that this really works as more than just a reminder that there are people – a lot of people – out there pushing back against Trump.

And so we go back to Flint, which Moore does a decent job of linking to America’s wider plight: if this kind of Republican-led corruption can happen here, he says, what hope for America under Trump? But it’s the scale of the awful, avoidable tragedy that lingers. These scenes shine; the rest of the film is a muddle.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Halloween

The original Halloween invented the slasher genre: so long as knife-wielding murder maniacs are profitable, Michael Myers will never really die. So the hook with this particular version of Halloween – one of close to a dozen sequels to John Carpenter’s still chilling original – is that it’s swung a sharp blade real hard and cleared away all the crud. All the other films never happened: this film is the one true sequel. 

Trouble is, this is the second time the Halloween series has pulled that trick (anyone remember Halloween: H20?). And while sweeping away all the other films and everything that came with them (seems Laurie wasn't Michael's sister after all) should in theory set the scene for a whole new round of terror, in this case what that really means is that director David Gordon Green is just doing the first film all over again. 

Once again Michael Myers / The Shape breaks out of a mental hospital; once again he goes on a murder spree; once again he ends up focusing on a member of the Strode family. The big twist here is that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), sole survivor of the first film, has grown up to be a Sarah Conner-style survivalist (ironically, as Myers is basically a supernatural Terminator) who ruined the life of her daughter (Judy Greer who gets one good moment here and it's a great one) with her paranoia. Her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is (relatively) angst-free – but when Myers busts out of a prison bus and comes a-killing, she’s the one that he ends up stalking. 

Sure, it's a retread. But it's been a very long time since originality was something anyone wanted from a Halloween film. Despite an occasionally slightly jokier tone - which is maybe not that surprising as Danny McBride co-wrote the screenplay - that defuses the tension (which is not really required: aside from a handful of sequences, this just isn't all that tense) this focuses on the basics of slasher films and largely gets them right, with a series of decent scares and a couple splashes of serious gore. Nothing here is particularly terrifying, but an authentically creepy opening scene firmly establishes the evil power of what is basically just a man with a knife, while the blank-faced mask Myers wears remains one of the classic creep-inducers of modern film.

The one area where this does equal the original is also the one area where original director Carpenter still has a part to play, as one of the composers of the film's extremely effective score. Moody and jarring when needed, the synth-heavy heightened, unearthly tones are enough to push Green's occasionally uninspired visuals into the realm of nightmare. And that's where Michael Myers does his best work.

- Anthony Morris

Review: 1%

Bikies! They're topical, they're scary, they're misunderstood and up to no good: it's a wonder we haven't seen more Australian movies about them. Then again, maybe people watched that mini-series Bikie Wars: Brothers in Arms from a few years back, because if anything could make bikies look dull, that did it. 1% doesn't exactly forge a new path for the Bikie genre, but it doesn't have to: sometimes a good story well told is enough.

For the last few years Perth bikie club The Copperheads has been run by the relatively thoughtful Paddo (Ryan Corr). He’s got big plans for the club, looking towards a future based on working together with their rival gangs to reap the rewards of organised crime. Two things stand in his way; one is his brother Skink (Josh McConville), whose bungled attempt to move into drug dealing forces Paddo to make a deal with enemy Sugar (Aaron Petersen). The other is Knuck (Matt Nable, who also wrote the script), original leader of The Copperheads. He’s fresh out of jail and keen to take the club back to the old, violent ways he knows best. 

It’s the kind of story that could easily have turned into another gang war saga (and rest assured, there's a bunch of bikie-on-bikie crime taking place here), but first-time feature director Stephen McCallum takes an almost Shakespearian approach to the material, with the rival  leaders more about scheming against each other as they’re egged on by their respective partners (Abbey Lee as Paddo’s ambitious girlfriend and Simone Kessell as Knuck’s regal consort) than whipping each other with bike chains. 

It’s not quite up there with the classics of Australian crime cinema (or bikie cinema: Stone is a very high mountain to climb), and a few of the characters are a little misjudged: for one, Skink takes a little too long to shift from an annoying plot device to a real character. But a gritty atmosphere and a few decent plot twists (plus an ambivalent approach to the bikies themselves) gives this enough of an edge to keep this fast-moving film consistently entertaining.

- Anthony Morris

Review - First Man

Ryan Gosling is just ugly enough not to have to act. A more conventionally handsome performer – Armie Hammer, say, or Jon Hamm five years ago – couldn’t get away with scene after scene of blank expressions: it’d be too much like looking at a mannikin. But Gosling, while obviously a very attractive man, is just the right side of perfection to be both a major movie star and someone audiences can find things in when he’s seemingly giving nothing back.

For most of First Man, not giving back is the point. There’s little doubt that Neil Armstrong (Gosling) was a notoriously private man whose interior landscape was as unknowable as the Moon’s surface - a comparison this film does not avoid making. Which should make him an extremely frustrating subject for a biopic in 2018, at time when even superhero characters are required to have emotional complexity and an ability to speak about their feelings.

So for much of the film director Damien Chazelle indulges in some slight-of-hand, focusing on the general how rather than the specific why. It’s a smart move: his strongest achievement here is weighting down the ecstasy of achievement with the mundane hard work required to achieve it. Here space travel itself is a cramped, rickety, noisy hellride filmed almost entirely in extreme close-ups; few films have done this well at dramatising just how risky flight, let alone flying into space, can be. In space and at home, texture abounds, most of it down-to-earth. Armstrong is told he’ll be leading the flight to the moon in a bathroom; scientists smoke and write on chalkboards; when he’s not careening across the sky Armstrong leads a 60s suburban life full of backyards and barbeques.

The skill and steady authenticity with which this backdrop is painted makes the moments where the film tries to reconcile the 60s view of itself with today some of the films strongest. The moments where it breaks out of the traditional hero’s journey – protest songs about the wastefulness of space travel, the focus on Armstrong’s wife (Claire Foy) dealing with the constant danger of the Moon program and an emotionally absent husband – are when it feels freshest. They’re also, not coincidentally, the moments where the film’s shell of white-collar restraint cracks.

Gosling’s performance sets the tone and the tone is as far from emotional as you can get. Armstrong never lets anyone in – a moment where he briefly mentions his deceased daughter is seen by those around him as a major breakthrough – and while the basics of a personality are obvious (he dislikes boredom, is driven to succeed, did musical theatre at University and is annoyed by Buzz Aldrin’s constant failure to read the room), for much of the film Gosling portrays a man who may or may not be concealing hidden depths by concealing just about everything.

It’s on the moon that all this tension snaps. Chazelle’s earlier film Whiplash ended with an extended drum solo that was both a personal triumph for the lead and a way to release the tension that had been built up in the audience across the course of the film; here the silence and stillness of the moon achieves the same thing. Chazelle finds a way to give us the moment we demand - the point where Armstrong triumphs and in that moment is revealed to be as flawed and yearningly human as the rest of us – without revealing it. The demands of the story are met, yet Armstrong remains a blank slate.

There’s plenty to enjoy in this thrilling tale of the conquest of space. It’s brilliantly made, consistently gripping, and occasionally very funny; it’s an easy peer to previous classics The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, with a hefty dose of 2001’s awe mixed in. At its heart, it’s a very human tale of a man who rarely acted human at all; we can walk on the moon, but it’s knowing what’s inside another person’s head that remains the final frontier.

- Anthony Morris

Review: Venom

The best parts of Venom are the parts you already know are going to be the best parts, aka every scene where Tom Hardy acts nuts. Which is almost but not quite all of his scenes; in one of the many ways in which this movie is slightly smarter than it initially seems, Eddie Brock (Hardy) starts and finishes the film as a perfectly normal and well-adjusted man. It's only every scene in between that he acts like a loopy drunk on the verge of freaking out.

That's because after that first scene he has a confrontation with billionaire (and secretly evil dude) Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) after which he rapidly loses his reporting job and the love of his previously adoring girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams under a distracting wig). After that Hardy plays him as a good-natured dim-bulb drunk; it's a perfectly reasonable character choice.

And then, while researching a tip-off into Drake's scheme to kidnap the local homeless and use them as guinea pigs in a series of lethal experiments, he finds himself with an alien symbote spurting out of his body like living tar while whispering in his head about how much fun it'd be to eat people. That kind of thing definitely takes a toll on a guy. Which is why he ends up sitting in a lobster tank in the middle of a fancy restaurant during lunch chowing down on one of the inhabitants. 

But aside from the many, many joys of Hardy's unhinged performance, Venom is kind of a basic superhero film, a straightforward throwback to the pre-Marvel days when simply telling a "what's happening to me?" origin story was enough to wow the punters. That's not really a flaw; unlike current Marvel characters who come pre-loaded into a complex universe full of references and in-jokes to fill any dead air, Venom (the character) is a throwback himself.

Marvel movies are drawn almost entirely from the early days of the (comic-book) Marvel universe, where Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and Stan Lee were creating super-powered soap operas built as much around characters' relationships and inner turmoil as punching bad guys. But for a while in the late 80s and early 90s Marvel's big guns came from a different tradition. Characters like The Punisher, Cable, Wolverine and Venom were violent antiheroes, loners with minimal supporting casts (Wolverine had the X-Men, but they rarely turned up in his solo adventures) and stories built around looking badass and killing chumps, not angst and drama.

These characters have struggled at the cinema (they're hard-R archetypes in a PG genre), even if Marvel's first movie success - that'd be Blade - was basically one of them. Wolverine only really clicked as a movie in his final appearance (to date); The Punisher never really did. Marvel itself has given up on giving these guys movies, instead putting them in the Netflix corner of their universe. But Venom is a Spider-Man spin-off (he even appeared in the generally forgotten Spider-Man 3), and so now belongs (in part) to Sony. Welcome back to the big screen.

This return is pretty much deserved, even if the film is a sometimes bumpy ride and the extreme violence is largely neutered. On the one hand, there are a bunch of traditional Marvel laugh lines that Hardy has zero interest in selling; on the other, Venom calls Brock both a "loser" and a "pussy" and they're both big laughs. The story is the kind of simplistic series of events where the climax just kind of happens, but Hardy's performance has so much going on that having anything more involved going on would be a distraction.

That said, a bit more logic wouldn't hurt either. At one point we're told a pair of scientists let an alien life-form die because they weren't paying attention; at another a bunch of bad guys are ordered to kill Brock so they decide to take him for a walk out into the woods instead of promptly shooting him safely indoors. Venom bites at least two guys' heads off but we never see it happen; a cute dog and a small girl both presumably die from symbote possession but it all takes place off screen.

But yes, Venom does gets to make out on camera with Hardy. Why wouldn't you want to see this film?

- Anthony Morris

Review: Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot

Gus Van Sant’s biopic of US comedian John Callahan is named after Callahan’s memoir, which is turn is named after the punchline of perhaps his most famous cartoon: a couple of cowboys chasing a villain down find an overturned wheelchair and… you get the idea. It’s a sharp skewering of clichés, the kind of cartoon that’s bound to offend, and this biopic contains pretty much none of that spirit. 

That's not exactly a slam on the finished product. What Van Sant serves up is a warm-hearted and kind-spirited film that finds it in its heart to treat just about everyone with thoughtfulness and forgiveness. Joaquin Phoenix's performance as Callahan does an excellent job of capturing his youthful naivety (though Phoenix is probably past playing 21 year olds, as that's the age Callahan was at his accident) alongside the essential optimism that surfaces once he shrugs off the booze.

As for why Callahan made the darkly funny cartoons that made him famous? Well, this never really digs into why Callahan – a boozehound who became a quadriplegic after a drunken accident – became a cartoonist; it turns out he always had drawing ability but never used it. The shame he felt at being adopted is the reason he gives for his anger and his drinking, but how that shame and anger became comedy remains a mystery.

What we do get a whole lot of is a look at how Alcoholics Anonymous in general, and especially a kooky group of wacky types (led by a blissed-out but 'tough-love' wealthy hippie played by Jonah Hill), helped him straighten out after his accident. Van Sant is a director drawn to this kind of material but he's not great at dramatising it; despite some shouting and insults, much of the group therapy side of things feels generic and rote as Callahan plods through all twelve steps to get his life back on track.

Perhaps it's cynicism, but taking the story of a man who punctured cliche and cheap sentiment and turning it into a feel-good tale of can-do achievement and positive thinking feels like a betrayal of something important, even if the intentions were good. In his personal life Callahan may have been a great guy who found a way to face the world with a smile and good cheer, but he was also an artist; this just doesn't seem all that interested in his art. 

- Anthony Morris

Review: Ladies in Black

By 1959, Sydney's tram network was in disrepair. Lines had been closing down since the late 1930s; despite public opposition, removal of the service was government policy thanks to congested streets, competition from buses and private cars, and a general lack of investment. Deliberately run down and rickety, the entire network - once the largest in Australia and one of the largest in the world - would be gone by 1962.

Sydney 1959 - specifically, the lead-in to Christmas - is also when Bruce Beresford's latest film Ladies in Black is set. It's a sunny, polished, feel-good tale centered on the staff of the high-class department store Goode’s (think David Jones), where the floor staff – named the “ladies in black” – guide the women of Sydney in their fashion needs.

For sixteen year-old Lisa (Angourie Rice), it’s a holiday job between high school and (she hopes) university; for Fay (Rachael Taylor) it’s love that’s paramount (and the Aussie blokes aren’t measuring up); Patty (Alison McGirr) has a man but the spark isn’t there; and for migrant Magda (Julia Ormond) who runs the store's fashion gown department, Lisa is someone she can take under her wing and show the world to – well, the European side of it at least.

The tram Fay repeatedly travels to work on is in perfect heritage condition; if the Sydney trams really were looking that good in 1959 they’d still be running today. But you don’t need to know the real-life state of Sydney trams to tell this is a look at the past through glasses so rose-coloured it’s hard to see much of anything clearly through them. Here controlling dads really mean well, deadbeat husbands really mean well, racism is limited to using the term “reffo” and it doesn’t matter that the Nazis conscripted you to run their railways so long as you have a good heart. Where were those Nazi trains going again?

The mood is pleasant enough, but this near total lack of dramatic tension – if this was what 1959 was really like it’s hard to see why anyone would have rebelled against anything in the 60s – only throws the films other flaws into high relief. The cast can’t do much with their one-note characters but some manage better than others; a basic rule of thumb is the better the 50s outfit the better the character comes across. The constant raising then dismissing of issues gives it the veneer of facing up to the hard facts of mid-century Australia, but the suffocating blandness means just about everything simply… works out.

Girls can go to university (on a scholarship!), sexual issues are resolved with a snuggle, poor people from the country know their place (not in Goode’s), foreigners just mean everyone else gets different food to try, gays are free to perv at hot guys on the beach and Melbourne is a crap town everyone makes fun of. All this wrapped in constant sunshine and stylised gloss that gives this competently forgettable film the look of a tourism video sent forward in an attempt to lure time travellers back to 1959.

Then again, the casting of Shane Jacobson as the kind of knockabout decent Aussie bloke he’s played to the point of cliché and beyond suggests that this really is some kind of tourism video. One aimed at overseas audiences selling them on a fundamentally welcoming and intellectually lively Australia that – much like those pristine 1959 Sydney trams – never really existed.

- Anthony Morris

Review: The Predator

The first Predator works mostly because it's a brilliantly simple idea well-told: a bunch of action movie badasses meet something even more badass than they are. The second Predator is pretty much the same idea only in a different setting and with a bunch of extra junk thrown in, and it only kind of works. The Predator is nothing but extra junk; it does not work.

At first it seems like all the junk is going to be a feature, not a bug. After his mission to rescue hostages taken by a Mexican drug cartel is interrupted by a crashing spacecraft, US Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook) scavenges some Predator technology (a faceplate and wrist band) and mails it back to the US just before he's captured. He also swallows the equipment's remote control so he can crap it out at an important plot point later. Unfortunately he hasn't paid for his post office box in years so the post office dumps his packages on his doorstep where his estranged family take them inside. Their house is later destroyed.

Some people are going to try to tell you that The Predator starts out strong then slowly falls apart, which it does. But they're also going to try and tell you that this films growing narrative incoherence - and make no mistake, this is one of the most garbled Hollywood blockbusters in years; at once stage a dubbed in voice tells us that our heroes (in a helicopter) can track the human bad guys (long gone) by following a brain-damaged alien dog - is the reason why it falls apart. Wrong: as that previous paragraph shows, this film starts out incoherent and does not improve at any stage.

Being a mess doesn't automatically make a film bad, of course. And a lot of the dumber part of the plot can be explained away pretty easily. How does the motley crew of escaped mental patients McKenna ends up leading find a whole bunch of fully automatic military weapons with which to shoot at the Predator? How does Olivia Nunn's scientist - introduced as a biology expert and who cowers naked in a decontamination chamber early on when the Predator tears apart a research lab - turn into someone at least as proficient with military hardware as the rest of McKenna's kill team? It's America: they love their guns.

But this just keeps on piling on twists and developments and messy action sequences with close to no regard to what's happened earlier in the scene, let alone what might make for a good movie. Most of what is consistent is slightly nasty too: there's loads of gore (all of it CGI), the action is almost always just "fire lots of guns before you get sliced up", and this is a movie where literally everyone - including McKenn's on the spectrum pre-teen son - gets at least one human kill. Maybe that's intentional; it is a firm plot point that the Predators are now just coming here to get in some kills before we kill ourselves off.

Writer-director Shane Black usually has a good nose for characters, but here he's way off base. McKenna is a bland action tough guy who's totally forgettable; his motley crew of "Loonies" are initially annoying, then stick around long enough to become the emotional core of the film (McKenna's wife simply vanishes from the story half way through), then get dispatched in slightly mocking ways that make anyone who actually cared about them feel like a chump.

Meanwhile the main human bad guy is slightly memorable yet is given next to nothing to do and one of the stupidest throwaway movie deaths in recent memory, while the Predator(s) are revealed to not really be coming here for sport but then they decide to hunt some humans anyway but it's not a real hunt because they're kidnapping humans now or something. There's a Predator dog who spends half the movie playing fetch. There is now a scientific rationale for the Predator's dreadlocks.

The real problem with these films is that the money is tied up in the IP that is "The Predator", and yet the alien space hunter monster is almost always the least interesting thing about every Predator movie. The less we see of the Predator, the better a Predator movie is; all you really need to know here is that there's more than one Predator, and they don't use their invisibility shields anywhere near often enough.

- Anthony Morris