Wicked: Part I

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on November 28, 2024.

(PG) ★★★

Director: Jon M. Chu.

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande-Butera, Jonathan Bailey, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater, Marissa Bode, Jeff Goldblum, Peter Dinklage, Andy Nyman.

"Don't shoot - it's Optimus Prime!"

People love to complain about how there are no original ideas in cinema any more; how most movies today are based on existing intellectual properties, whether they be sequels, remakes or adaptations. It's not an unreasonable complaint. Check out the highest grossing films of 2024 - at the time of writing, the highest ranking original film (ie. not based on an existing IP) this year was IF at #21.

While no one has been levelling this objection at Wicked - most people seem pretty amped to see this story hit the big screen - it's a great example of how existing IPs can get re-born, re-spun and re-tooled to make old stories new again. This is a big-budget blockbuster based on a popular Broadway musical based on an acclaimed 1995 novel that re-interpreted the events of a much-loved 1900 novel.

I haven't seen the stage musical or read Gregory Maguire's book, but The Wizard Of Oz is one of my favourite films, and I treasure the original book. With that in mind, I find the revisionist storyline fascinating, and the characterisations of Good Witch Glinda (Grande-Butera) and Wicked Witch Elphaba (Erivo) intriguing. It's also a joy to spend more time in Oz - an itch that Sam Raimi's forgotten prequel Oz The Great & Powerful scratched somewhat a decade ago.

Wicked is a fun story but it goes on way too long - you really feel its 160-minute run-time. So many of the musical sequences drag on, the worst offender being Popular, which is a fantastic song that could have achieved the same outcome at a quarter of the length, while Dear Old Shiz and Dancing Through Life eventually also wear out their welcome. 

Musically, the highlight is Defying Gravity, an absolute belter of a tune. But am I the only person perplexed by the weird '90s pop-ballad production sound? Of all the eras and styles of music to emulate sonically, why that one?

Erivo and Grande-Butera do a stellar job in the leads, handling the musical numbers with ease, and flexing their dramatic chops equally impressively. Erivo nails the weariness and frustration of Elphaba, while Grande-Butera's cartoonish take on the wide-eyed Glinda is disarming despite the character's self-absorbed nature. Yeoh is also excellent, while Goldblum is perfectly cast as the Wizard himself.

But back to the length. It's an issue because a) the film feels long in places, but b) because we get too much song instead of some much needed plot. A central element of the story is an apparent uprising against one section of Oz society, but we see so little to demonstrate it. There's one bit of graffiti, some mutterings, and a clandestine meeting (with a song, naturally). It's a lot of tell, not show, and it's hardly enough to convince viewers of the large-scale racism purported to have riven Oz.

As with most Oz films, Wicked looks amazing, and it's a fun world to hang out in. Its ideas about the nature and perspective of good and evil are strong, as is its inspection of otherness and racism and fitting in. And, it bears repeating - Defying Gravity is a killer moment. 

It has a heart, a brain and courage, but Wicked spends a lot of time singing and dancing when it could be storytelling. 

Red One

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on November 14, 2024.

(M) ★★

Director: Jake Kasdan.

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Chris Evans, Lucy Liu, J. K. Simmons, Kiernan Shipka, Bonnie Hunt, Kristofer Hivju, Nick Kroll, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Wesley Kimmel, Reinaldo Faberlle.

"Gwar, you say? No, never heard of them. I'll check them out."

The current craze in Hollywood is franchises. Unfortunately this means a lot of films are getting made with the starry-eyed approach of setting up a potential film series, while forgetting to make a good movie worthy of a series first. 

It’s a particularly fatal flaw in Red One, though it's actually just one of many major problems besetting this huge-budget Christmas turkey. The film is so intent on world-building that its story of Santa (Simmons) getting kidnapped becomes unnecessarily flabby early on and never recovers.

It also struggles to nail down who the main character is - another reason for the early flabbiness - with Dwayne Johnson's uptight North Pole security chief Callum Drift battling it out with Chris Evans' douchebag-with-a-heart-of-gold Jack O'Malley for top honours. This isn't necessarily a bad thing - movies can have more than one lead protagonist - but this particular jostling for poll position slows the narrative, and is another reason Red One stalls out of the blocks.

If it's not clear yet, most of the problems in this film are in the early stages, where the filmmakers seemingly choose world-building and The Rock over a sensible narrative structure. Allow me to explain.

Evans' Jack is a type of character known as an "audience surrogate". He's the character that knows as much as the audience knows, and as he is drawn into a new fantastical world or situation, we, the audience, learn how this new world/situation works by watching the audience surrogate learn and experience it. Think Dorothy dropping into Oz, Alice heading into Wonderland, Frodo stepping out of the Shire, or Neo discovering the Matrix exists. For the most part, we know what they know, and we learn as they learn.

In Red One, after a flashback to Jack's youth and a brief scene in a mall, we enter the fantastical world of Santa and his sidekick Callum Drift. We are taken to the North Pole and introduced to a mythological realm that is new to us, filled with giant reindeer, polar bears, elves, the works. It doesn't take long for Santa to get kidnapped (this isn't a spoiler, it's basically the film's selling point), sparking a chase sequence filled with plenty of dubious-looking CG.

Then we meet Jack, our audience surrogate. He's some kind of hacker/private eye/bounty hunter, and has a loose and unclear connection to the kidnapping, but he's very much from the real world (even if he's cartoonishly "bad", thus setting up a painfully obvious arc where he is going to reconnect with his estranged son and discover the meaning of Christmas or some shit).

At some point, these worlds are going to collide. In Red One, that takes way too long to happen. And  when it does happen, we have to go through the rigmarole of watching Jack learn about Santa and the giant reindeer and all the rest of it. Which we already know about. So there is no surprise or tension in Jack's discovery. If it was funnier, maybe it would be excusable, but watching Jack find out that Santa is real and that he's been kidnapped just becomes tiresome because we already know it.

(For a really great example of how bad this needless repetition can be, I recommend Green Lantern.)

By this point we're close to 40 minutes into the film. That's a lot of time to waste with effectively retelling stuff. One can’t help but wonder if the reason for taking us to Red One's mythical world to start with, instead of having the audience discover it while Jack does, is because of Dwayne Johnson’s presence as top-billed star and producer. It would make much more sense to bring his North Pole security chief in when Jack enters the mythological world, but instead we get a first act where Johnson's Callum is the lead character, and then another first act where Jack is the main character. 

(Are you bored yet?)

The film never recovers from there. The momentum is lost, which impacts the odd-couple relationship of Callum and Jack and the general pacing of the film. It also makes it hard for the script to zing, so it's never funny enough, despite the best efforts of Evans. 

It's also painfully predictable. Evans’ Jack is despicable, but in that annoyingly unrealistic way - the perfect-looking alcoholic, who is amazing at his job but shit at being a dad, and we just know where it's going to end up. 

Far be it from me to tell screenwriter Chris Morgan how to do his job - I mean the dude's written seven Fast & Furious movies, including the good ones. And there's likely a fair amount of producer/director meddling involved here to get this weird, bloated, repetitive first act to happen, and the screenwriter is just trying to keep the more important people happy.

But if this is what Red One is, don't expect a Red Two.

Joker: Folie a Deux

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on October 17, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★

Director: Todd Phillips.

Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga, Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Zazie Beetz, Steve Coogan, Harry Lawtey, Leigh Gill, Ken Leung, Jacob Lofland, Bill Smitrovich, Sharon Washington, Connor Storrie.

Coming this year to Netflix - the hit new reality show, Clown Court.

The most surreal moment of Joker: Folie a Deux comes after the credits have rolled and the DC Comics logo comes on the screen and you go, "oh yeah, that's right - this is a film about a Batman villain". Joker was a long way from what you'd expect from a so-called "superhero" movie, but its sequel makes Joker look like Superman 2. 

This is the most un-comic-book comic book movie you could think of it. It's a gritty prison drama, a bonkers courtroom thriller, and a jukebox musical, all rolled into one overlong mess.

Bold and daring, Joker: Folie a Deux is also deluded. It's a ridiculous misfire that takes an awful long time to get nowhere and struggles to say anything coherent along the way.

Picking up about two years after the original, it follows Arthur Fleck AKA Joker (Phoenix) as he meets  and falls in love with fellow Arkham Asylum inmate Harley Quinzel (Gaga). Meanwhile Fleck is preparing for his big day in court for the murders of the five people he killed during the events of Joker. 

Folie a Deux is a reaction, a rejection even, of its predecessor, and I kind of admire that. Much as the first film left its Batman roots far behind, this one is at pains to leave Joker behind. Phillips throws out pretty much everything that made the first film great (except Phoenix's incredible performance), and has made a film that anyone who liked the original will probably hate, especially those dipshits who saw the main character as some kind of hero to idolise.

The truly great thing about Joker was its political and philosophical premise - how does a society make a killer? Here, there is no such fascinating idea to dig into. There are fleeting notions about killer worship and the media, which could be seen as an admirable cinematic reaction to some of the idiotic takes on the first film. But these themes flutter past like bats in the night. 

Amid these half-baked talking points are two stars doing great work on gorgeous sets, captured by great cinematography. Phoenix and Gaga bring complexity to their famous comic book villains, and have fantastic chemistry. Their musical performances are also great, even if there are too many and they go on too long.

Elsewhere Gleeson and Keener are their usual fantastic selves, even if their roles are as thin as the comics their characters never actually appeared in. Steve Coogan also pops up briefly to chew a bit of scenery, though he has the most interesting role outside of Phoenix and Gaga.  

I didn't hate Joker: Folie a Deux - like I said, I kind of admire the film. It takes real balls to not only reject the reactions to the original movie, but to also potentially make a movie that the original audience wouldn't want to see, complete with songs from the '30s to the '60s. So kudos there. But Folie a Deux is an overlong disappointment that wanders along, being mildly interesting without ever being good before hitting a suckerpunch ending that comes too late for anyone to care. 

The Wild Robot

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on October 3, 2024.

(PG) ★★★★

Director: Chris Sanders.

Cast: (voices of) Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O'Hara, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames.

"Fantastic? You're barely Average Mr Fox."

It's ok to cry at films. If you ever needed permission to bawl at a film, I give it to you. Cry your little heart out. God knows I do.

Just about every family film, especially these days, wants to make you cry. But their efforts are often undone by their own smart aleckness - so many CG-animated outings have some kind of fourth-wall-breaking meta-ness to it, or a single character who's there for the wise-crackin' and the wise-crackin' alone, and this tends to undo the emotional core too frequently. I'm looking at you, Trolls/The Secret Life Of Pets/The Boss Baby etc.

By comparison, The Wild Robot is a welcome throwback to a time of film-making when things weren't so smug. It hints at old-school Disney in its big-hearted sentimentality, with a visual dash of old-school Studio Ghibli in its pastel-paint look, and even a touch of The Iron Giant in its story of a robot learning to love. It is many old things wrapped up in something new, and it's a wonderfully uncynical creation.

Based on a couple of kids books by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot is the story of Rozzum 7134 (Nyong'o), a robot that accidentally washes up on an inhabited island. Desperate to fulfil its programming, Roz learns the ways of the local animals and inadvertently becomes the surrogate mother of a gosling.

Beautifully animated, the film buffs out its sharp digital edges with a hand-painted finish. Similarly, it takes its modern robot protagonist and plants it in an old-fashioned story about kindness, purpose and motherhood. There are still the frenetic CG sequences for the young ones wowed by colour and movement, but it's a great mix of a new approach to old approaches.

Nyong'o's voicework is exquisite, evolving as the robot does, while Pascal sounds unrecognisable as a fox, which is the closest the film comes to the token wise-crackin' character. They head an incredible team of voice actors - Hamill, O'Hara, Rhames, Berry and Nighy are all great and perfectly cast.

Best of all is the heart of the film. If you're a mum, take your kids, and feel seen. It's a beautiful ode to parenthood, as well as being about survival, kindness, caring, and teamwork. 

It will perhaps be too sentimental for some tastes - "how many more talking animal movies do we need about finding your place in the world?" some bitter and twisted souls may ask. But open your cold robotic heart and find a home for The Wild Robot.

Alien: Romulus

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 22, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★

Director: Fede Álvarez.

Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu.

"Honey, I'm home."

Somewhere along the way, the Alien franchise fell out of orbit, like a decommissioned satellite.

It was probably around the point where Alien 3 became a mess in pre-production and then again during filming, and yet again in post-production, which just goes to show that studios and producers can always find multiple new ways to fuck things up, often on the one film.

But franchise fans who suffered through the schlocky Alien vs Predator films and the god-awful Prometheus can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Romulus is the Alien film you've been waiting for. It's like Covenant, but shorn of the fat, and replacing the mythologising and philosophising with entertaining world-building and genuine terror.

In a plot that's not a million light years away from Alien and Aliens, Romulus features a group of young people arriving at an abandoned space station, only to find it home to a horde of Xenomorphs. It's only a matter of time before faces are hugged and chests are burst.

Romulus is a balancing act - it wants to be an homage but not a remake, a child not a clone, a spiritual successor and not a ropey re-tread. Thankfully its largely successful in its ambitions. Its tone and look is reverent to Alien and Aliens, and its plot is very close in many ways to those two films in a back-to-basics way that's refreshing after Prometheus and the more bloated elements of Covenant.

 

In Spaeny, so great in Civil War, we have an excellent Ripley proxy, but the show-stealer is Jonsson as defective droid Andy. His character is by far the most compelling of the ensemble, many of whom are merely there to be Xenomorph fodder. Andy gives some much-needed heart and soul to proceedings, and Jonsson's nuanced performance makes him one to watch.

Romulus nails the brief of telling a new story that fits in with the space-horror-action vibe of the only truly good Alien movies (the first two). It's very much connected to its universe, referencing just about every movie in the series successfully (though do we really need to hear "Get away from her, you bitch!" again?). 

You could argue that Romulus is formulaic or that it hews too close to its predecessors, but you could also argue it's a perfect mix of what made the first two films great. There are new scares and old, and once again you will remember that in space, no one can hear you scream.

Deadpool & Wolverine (no spoilers)

(M) ★★★★

Director: Shawn Levy.

Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Morena Baccarin, Rob Delaney, Leslie Uggams, Aaron Stanford, Matthew Macfadyen.

"You could've just paid the man instead of shooting up his shop."

A film's success is often about meeting expectations. A horror movie should scare, an action film should be exciting, a comedy should make you laugh, and a Deadpool movie should be full of a hilarious mixture of ultra-violence and a hitherto unwitnessed level of swearing.

On that front, Deadpool & Wolverine is an incredible success, and really it's all that matters. The Merc With The Mouth is flat-out funny as he rips down the fourth wall while simultaneously kicking it in the dick. Subtle this is not. And the added bonus is that Wolverine is along for the ride (as are a handful of unexpected but very welcome cameos). 

The plot, for what it's worth, sees Deadpool (Reynolds) approached by timeline cops the TVA (as featured in the TV series Loki) with a very special offer that will spare him from the demise of his universe, which has been left unstable due to the death of its "anchor being" Wolverine (Jackman).

Deadpool heads off on a journey across the multiverse to find a new Wolverine to help him save his timeline, which leaves them both trapped in The Void facing off with a dangerous mutant named Cassandra Nova (Corrin).

If you didn't like the previous Deadpool films, don't bother with this. D&W is for Deadpool fans and MCU completists... and that is all. It's filled with enough profanity to kill a nun, and throws its violence around like it's going out of fashion. It's a sweary, bloody gagfest that will have a certain type of juvenile sense of humour in stitches from start to finish. 

It's also full of some marvellous superhero cameos, most of which are set-ups for the kind of meta in-jokes that make Deadpool movies so much fun for those in the know. This is Deadpool's first foray into the MCU (thanks to Disney buying 20th Century Fox), so that meta-ness is dialled up to 11 as the filmmakers get a bigger toybox of characters to play with. And there's a real sense of joy that comes with that - every wink and nod at the audience seems to fill Reynolds with genuine delight.

There's a perverse joy to how insane this is. That Jackman snikts out the Wolverine claws one last time (maybe/probably?) for this immature swear-fest is funny in itself, and the number of high-level cameos being wasted here is gold. Perhaps the only downside is that Corrin's delicious performance as Cassandra Nova is too good for a film that is essentially an endless parade of dick jokes dressed up in spandex.

Similarly, the film really grinds to a halt whenever it tries to talk about its feelings. It's necessary and it's fine, but the gearbox definitely clunks a few times when Wolverine gets the melancholies. On the one hand, it gives the film stakes to fight for, which is important when both your main characters are essentially unkillable and morally ambiguous.  

It's not going to win over new fans, nor is it going to be mentioned in the same breath as top shelf superhero movies like Avengers: Infinity War or The Dark Knight, but it works. It's exactly what a Deadpool movie should be and kudos to Disney for having the brains and balls to let it be that.

Welcome to the MCU, Deadpool.

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on August 9, 2024.

(M) ★★★★

Director: David Terry Fine.

Dirty Pop is now screening on Netflix.

Spot the manager.

I was a grunge kid who grew up worshipping at the altar of alternative rock. In the early '90s, I bought Nirvana albums, and stashed my New Kids On The Block tape in a shoebox, never to be played again. The rules of the era were simple. Alternative music was cool. It was real and it meant something. It was made in garages and bars by real musicians, like me and my friends.

Pop, on the other hand, was fake, plastic, soulless and meaningless. It was the real devil's music, admired by vacuous idiots and purveyed by talentless hacks. It was the sound of capitalism and boardrooms. It was manufactured and therefore entirely meaningless and not real.

Of course, these ideas are naïve and overly simplistic - the reality of the music industry, especially in the '90s and '00s is far more nuanced than this black-and-white mentality that I held so dearly in my teens and early 20s.

But watching Dirty Pop makes me think I wasn't so far off the mark.

This three-part doco series (why isn't just a movie?) digs into the diabolical world of Lou Pearlman, who ripped off "mom-and-dad investors" to the tune of around half a billion dollars to fund his lavish lifestyle and voracious appetite. Oh, and to bankroll NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

This is a story that's been told a few times before, including in the doco The Boy Band Con, which was produced by NSYNC member Lance Bass. But it's a story that bears repeating because it's so crazy, and Dirty Pop repeats it well.

With two Backstreet Boys and a member of NSYNC holding court, as well as a number of Pearlman's former friends and employees, Dirty Pop dives deep into Pearlman's ridiculous ambitions. Their interviews are interspersed with huge amounts of archival footage that keep the story ticking back and forth between the then and the now, but also makes it feel complete and full of emotion.

The ace up its sleeve is Pearlman himself, brought back to life by the power of AI (Pearlman died in 2016). Some will argue that AI has no place in documentaries, but the usage here is intelligent and honest. It takes Pearlman's own words from his autobiography and real footage of the man himself, and uses AI to insert his words into his mouth. It's not misrepresenting Pearlman at all - they're his own words after all - and the doco points out it's doing this every time it does it. 

This aspect of Dirty Pop has been controversial, but it needn't be. They could have used the same words and had someone else read them, or had them appear on screen as text, but instead they put them in the mouth of the man who wrote them. That seems legit to me. It works, it's a cool way to introduce Pearlman's own ideas and voice into the story, and no one is being misrepresented. Get over it.

All that aside, the only real criticism is the sense of repetition that comes from making this three 40-minute episodes instead of a less-than-two-hour-long doco. It's an easy task watching this in one sitting, but the decision to split it up messes with the pacing. There are some questions and details that go begging, and some obvious absentees on the call sheet, but what it's got is good. 

Dirty Pop is great, in fact. It plants its seeds early, letting them grow and bear fruit like a good murder-mystery, and its use of AI is to be applauded. The editing makes the most of its interviewees and tells its story in a compelling way. It will probably leave Backstreet Boys and NSYNC songs humming in your head for days to come, but don't let that dissuade you from checking out this excellent doco miniseries.