Review: Lady Bird

Lets get this out of the way: As the awards season gathers pace, Greta Gerwig’s solo directorial debut Lady Bird is in severe danger of being overhyped. Be warned, it’s the kind of modest, indie coming-of-age story we’ve seen a million times. Set in a vaguely nostalgic 2002 and 2003, it’s episodic and stylistically simple, with a guitar-heavy soundtrack. It hits the familiar beats: Prom Night, painful conflicts with parents and falling outs with best friends; the pursuit of popularity, the loss of virginity and the wisdom that comes when grand dreams crunch up against reality. But Lady Bird is written, directed and performed with such tenderness, spiky humour and attention to detail, that it’s a delight to behold.

Christine McPherson (Saoirse Ronan) is a dramatic and somewhat pretentious 17-year-old who insists on being called by the name ‘Lady Bird’. Her kind-hearted father, Larry (Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and actor Tracy Letts), is a computer programmer struggling with depression and unemployment. Her overworked mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf), puts in double shifts as a nurse to support the family and send Christine to a Catholic school, where she’s a merely mediocre student. It’s no wonder that Marion rolls her eyes in exasperation whenever Christine talks about her dreams of attending an expensive East Coast college, far away from the dull but pretty suburbs where they live. (“Sacramento is like the mid-west of California,” Christine whines, just like another discontented Sacramento character this year, Ben Stiller’s Brad in Brad’s Status.) And yet Lady Birdplays like an inadvertent love letter to the humble charms of that very particular place in America.

Read the full review here at SBS Movies.

Review: Black Panther

The introduction of then-prince T'Challa (Chadwick Bozeman) to the Marvel cinematic universe in Captain America: Civil War was the high point of the film. That wasn't really a surprise: one of the things Marvel does best is introduce new characters to its ever-expanding universe, and the already-announced Black Panther movie already had a lot riding on it. But that scene in Civil War held out the promise of two separate things; the Black Panther movie we now have only delivers on one.

With T'Challa's father killed in Civil War, the young prince is clearly next in line to the throne of secretive and super-advanced African nation of Wakanda. It turns out to be a very long line, as it's roughly forty-five minutes into the film before the story finally kicks into gear. Not that what happens before T'Challa goes on the hunt for resource-plundering bad guy Klaw (Andy Serkis with a gun arm) isn't interesting or important; the lengthy sequence where T'Challa has his Black Panther powers (basically super strength and healing powers gained via a magic plant, plus yet another super-suit) stripped from him so others can challenge for the throne pays off later in two different ways.

The best superhero movies are constantly moving forward - dynamism is part of the genre's appeal. Black Panther takes its time introducing everyone in its extensive supporting cast, including T'Challa's ex (Lupita Nyong’o), the leader of his all-female guards (Danai Gurira) and the nation's chief scientist-slash-Q from James Bond-slash-T'Challa's little sister (Letitia Wright). Then there's Forrest Whittaker and Angela Basset as elders, Michael B Jordan as big bad guy Killmonger, and Martin Freeman as the token link back to the rest of the Marvel Universe; the way this film juggles a massive cast and makes them all useful without grinding to a complete halt is one of its more impressive achievements.

Over the last few Marvel films it's become increasingly clear which elements individual directors are allowed to put their own stamp on, and which ones are standardised across the Marvel brand. Interestingly, production design is one area where directors are given somewhat free reign; after Doctor Strange's Inception riffs and Thor's bright Jack Kirby settings, director Ryan Coogler takes Black Panther full Afrofuturist with Wakanda's capital. Together with the large cast, this makes it a location that hopefully we'll see more of in future films.

But while T'Challa's introduction in Civil War promised an opening up of the Marvel universe, pointing the way towards a film with a largely black cast and mostly black creatives behind the camera, it also involved one of the more breathless and thrilling action sequences in the Marvel universe. Unfortunately this doesn't stretch that boundary, instead serving up a handful of standard action sequences before an all-in climax that features a number of decent ideas (combat rhinos!) but also a lot of firmly average CGI-heavy fighting that feels generic in a way much of this film firmly pushes against. The average action is even more disappointing as Killmonger is one of the best Marvel villains to date, a true counterpoint to T'Challa with an evil scheme that actually makes sense as something more than an excuse for drone shoot-outs and fist-fights in the path of a speeding train.

Black Panther does so many things right that it feels mean-spirited to focus on the by-the-numbers elements that increasingly drag down Marvel's films. Where previous films have countered the rote nature of what they're required to do with humor or action, this focuses on world-building, creating a cast and setting that deserve more than a single film. Which is presumably what Marvel intended: action is fleeting, but a nation's story can run and run.

Anthony Morris

My Life in Film: the memoir film review

I'm the first in line to decry the death of the traditional film review. I loathe the clickbait take-down culture that's replacing measured and contextualised film criticism and entertaining consumer-oriented newspaper and magazine film reviews. Sometimes it scares, the frenzied speed with which every new film must be evaluated through the lens of identity politics, often by writers who lack any other analytical tools with which to measure or experience cinema.

But lately I've been enjoying my own kind of non-traditional film writing, revelling in the overt subjectivity and freedom of writing memoir-infused film reviews. My own life and relationships have provided the starting point for essays about films that have touched deeply in one way or another. Perhaps this is a little self-indulgent, but to me it feels like an honest and thoughtful way to acknowledge the intertwining of my life and the many hours I spend watching films, and I try to bring my experience as a traditional reviewer into the discussion so there's a real sense of what the film itself is like - the way it's made and the themes it tackles.

These pieces have been published in Neighbourhood, a monthly arts and culture magazine delivered to inner-city suburbs in Sydney, with a complementary online site.

You can read the three memoir reviews I've written so far at the links below:

Phantom Thread and the Everyday Sadism of Marriage

In which I confess to the occasional urge to kill my partner, and discuss the normal marital sadism of cohabitation, inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson's brilliant dark romance Phantom Thread (pictured above).

Brad's Status and the Anxiety of Middle-Class Parenting  

In which I bemoan the way questions about my son's schooling bring out competitive instincts and basic human fears.

Blade Runner 2049: Does the Ability to have a Relationship Grant us a Soul?

The love story in this film touched me deeply and made me think of my own illicit love affair and the longing to make it 'real'.

Review: Phantom Thread

 Part of what makes Paul Thomas Anderson's films so enthralling - well, maybe not so much Inherent Vice - is that they're almost always primarily about people coping with other people. They're relationship dramas where often the nature of the relationship remains hidden. But with Phantom Thread Anderson seems to show his hand early: this is the story of a bond between a man and a woman, and if it never quite seems fully sexual, matters of the heart are always at the fore.

The 1950s British setting allows fashion designer Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis) to be as stiff and stodgy as possible and still be taken seriously; a decade later and he'd be wildly out of tune with society, a decade or two earlier and to us he'd seem like a joke. As it is, he's defiantly out of style - "couture" is a dirty word to him - while still raking it in making one-off gowns for nervous or vaguely sinister society matrons.

But while his place in the world seems set from the outset, everyone around him is presented in a much more uncertain fashion. His first paramour is disposed of after making too much noise over breakfast; she's disposed of by his secretary / assistant Cyril (Lesley Manville), who we only gradually learn is also his sister. And when, while on a visit to his country retreat, Woodcock meets Alma (Vicky Krieps), he sweeps her into his life without ever bothering - as far as we see - to learn a single thing about who she is or how she came to be working in a small town cafe.

What follows then, is the story of Alma's struggle to become real - to be seen by Woodcock as his equal, and to have their relationship acknowledged as a true partnership. As first she tries to raise herself up, allowing him to dress her and make her part of his world; when it becomes obvious that she's on a path that will never lead to a place by his side, she resolves to bring him down. The twist here is that he welcomes it, accepting her extreme methods as perhaps the only way he can escape from himself - which, after all, is one of the reasons we yearn to fall in love.

If there's a serious flaw in this beautifully made film, it's that by keeping Alma a mystery to us, the reasons why she goes to such lengths to keep Woodcock in her life remain a mystery too. We see her enjoy his company and the life he offers, but we never really get to know her heart - unlike Woodcock, who in his more monstrous moments simply doesn't have one. It's a gothic romance about a woman dashing herself against a rock that lies where her lover's heart should be, but for a romance to work we need access to someone's heart, somewhere in the story.

Perhaps casting Daniel Day-Lewis is enough. He's a joy to watch here - as is Krieps, always convincing as his equal, coming across as a woman who actually does have secrets rather than just a background the film couldn't be bothered filling in - and perhaps the thrill of seeing Day-Lewis enjoying himself as a floppy haired bickering shit is enough to justify Alma's passion. The point here isn't the why, but the how; how in this hermetic, ritualistic world devoted to making objects of great beauty, there can be a place - if only, as it turns out, a secret place, hidden from sight as if stitched into the lining of a jacket - for messy, passionate love.

Anthony Morris