The Woman In The Window

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio South West Victoria and Ballarat on May 28, 2021.

(MA15+) ★★

Director: Joe Wright.

Cast: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Tracy Letts, Fred Hechinger, Wyatt Russell, Anthony Mackie, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The birdwatching took a dark turn when she realised they were all tiny robots.

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, itself based on a 1942 short story, has been remade, reinvented and ripped off a couple of times over the years. There's the Christopher Reeve telemovie, the excellent Shia LaBeouf-starring Disturbia, and spoofs in everything from The Simpsons and Family Guy, to Get Smart and The Flinstones.

Now there's this wrong-footed thriller, which is supposedly based on the A. J. Finn novel The Woman In The Window, and not the Hitch classic. Whatever its source, it's based on a similar premise, and doesn't do it justice. While its ideas are okay and its cast excellent, this twisty psychological drama survives on contrivances and convenience, and fails to land a killer blow in its big reveal, instead drifting into unsatisfying horror-movie territory.

Adams plays Dr Anna Fox, a child psychologist suffering from agoraphobia following an unknown incident. Unable to leave her house, she watches her neighbours, including the newly moved-in Russell family. But very quickly she realises something's not quite right with her new neighbours. Or is she just going crazy?

Beware: the trailer has some spoilers, but none of the really big ones.

There are twists and turns aplenty here - some satisfy, many don't - but as they pile up, the film gets less and less convincing. The story and mood goes out the window and Fonzies over a shark eventually, but even before that it's barely keeping its feet on the ground. 

The suspense relies on too many contrivances - a character withholding vital information, the police not doing their job properly, the convenient forgetting of important things - to maintain its level of suspense.  The efforts to keep the audience in the dark eventually give way to frustration, and when the pay-offs don't marry up, the end result is disappointing.

It's a shame because there are good elements, particularly the cast. Adams is amazing, holding the film together with a great performance from the "are they actually crazy?" category. She's mesmerising, and stops the film from being far worse than it would otherwise be. Everyone else is great too, in fleeting turns. Oldman has a few minutes to be angry in, Moore is bewitching in a very small role, and Henry adds some pathos, particular at the film's end.

The script is clunky in places, but there are some good moments. "Let's try this - people who attempt suicide lose the right to joke about it" is a pretty neat line, and is actually delivered by the script's author Tracy Letts, who does a nice job as Anna's therapist. But a stilted conversation between two women trying to keep their secrets over a couple of glasses of red is awkwardly written, and not in a good way. Overall, the whole thing has the feel of a script trying to include bits from another source that people liked, but can't make them fit together in the right way.

Much of the blame falls to Wright. The director (who's given us such great films as Atonement and Darkest Hour, and such utter shite as Pan) makes things look pretty, giving Anna's house a gothic tinge, but he does nothing to elevate proceedings. The big reveal regarding Anna's agoraphobia looks pretty but ends up feeling hokey. Wright can't make the pieces fit with an overarching tone, or fix the contrivances and story holes in the editing suite.

So much talent goes to waste here, particularly Adams' highwire performance. Whether its a clandestine remake of Rear Window or not is almost a moot point. No matter which way this thriller swings its knife, it doesn't cut it.

The Mitchells Vs The Machines

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Central Victoria on May 24, 2021, and ABC Radio South West Victoria and Ballarat on May 28, 2021.

(PG) ★★★★½

Director: Mike Rianda.

Cast: (voices of) Abbi Jacobson, Danny McBride, Maya Rudolph, Mike Rianda, Olivia Colman, Eric Andre, Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Charlyne Yi.

Driving past a school at drop-off time is hell.

Families are weird. Tech is dominating our lives. Parents don't understand their kids. Kids don't understand their parents. 

Roll all that together, sprinkle on some modern meme culture, feed it an adrenal gland, and you've got The Mitchells Vs The Machines - the latest CG-animated masterpiece out of the Lord/Miller mini-empire of CG-animated masterpieces. It's a brash, non-stop Energiser Bunny of a film filled with big ideas but an even bigger heart.

The film follows the very normally dysfunctional Mitchell family on a cross-country road trip until they're interrupted by a robot uprising. The Mitchells soon discover they're the last hope for humanity, which is not great news for humanity.

Director Rianda doesn't do subtle here, and the film is all the better for it. The CG is topped up with a hand-drawn look, that is further added to with a mix of notebook-style jottings, cutaway jokes, and a smattering of video memes. This mish-mash visual styling is part of the frenetic energy of the film, which also stems from its astute comic timing, exaggerated character design, and a plot that rarely takes its foot off the gas as it crosses an apocalyptic America.

But as with other Lord/Miller productions, the visual eccentricities are nothing without strong themes and emotion to go with them - think The Lego Movie 1 and 2, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-verse. and Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Thankfully there is heart to go with the fit-inducing imagery and ugly pug gags. The film's relationships - most crucially the one between daughter Katie (Jacobson) and dad Rick (McBride) - are powerful and feel real, and their as-anticipated conclusions are no less powerful for ending where expected.

Family aside, the other big theme is how tech is taking over our lives, with no better metaphor than an AI uprising. It deals with this in big ways and small - the big being the whole robot apocalypse thing, but the small ways are fascinating and include the mum who wants to put a filter over her family so they resemble the Insta-perfect neighbours, and the Mitchell's inability to converse at dinner time. But it also admits tech can be good, especially in a creative sense - it just needs to maintain humanity at its core.

Perhaps Rianda's only mis-step is casting himself as the youngest Mitchell, the dinosaur-loving Aaron, rather than using an actual child voice actor. It's distracting hearing what it is obviously an adult voicing a kid, especially when everyone else is so perfectly cast and does such a great job. The other characters feel real - Aaron less so. 

What The Mitchells Vs The Machines does beautifully is remain very human, even in the face of monkey memes, slow-mo car crashes, killer robots, and wall-to-wall eye candy. Much like its heroes. 

And by god it's funny.

AFI #34: Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 14, 2021.

This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and I can't stop now until I finish.

(G) ★★★½

Director: David Hand.

Cast: (voices of) Adriana Caselotti, Lucille La Verne, Harry Stockwell, Roy Atwell, Pinto Colvig, Otis Harlan, Scotty Mattraw, Billy Gilbert, Eddie Collins, Jimmy MacDonald, Moroni Olsen, Stuart Buchanan. 

The dwarfs were about to drop some phat beats up in this shizzle.

Of all the films I've watched on this list so far, Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs is the first to appear purely on the strength of what it represents in terms of achievement. Re-watching it more than 80 years on from its creation, the hokeyness of it all and the scarcity of story shine through. Yes, it's a technological triumph of its era, but the supply of character development and plot are as short as the dwarfs themselves. 

But Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs holds its place on this list by being the first to boldly go where none had gone before. Derided as "Disney's folly" during pre-production, Walt Disney's quest to make the first traditionally animated feature-length film pushed him to the brink of bankruptcy as production costs ballooned from about half a million US dollars (roughly US$9.5m today) to US$1.5m. The sheer scale of the project shoved Disney's team to its limits and beyond. Animators were constantly having to "devise and refine numerous new techniques" as they went, according to Allan Hunter's The Woodsworth Book of Movie Classics.

"The drawing boards used in the studio had to be changed to accommodate the larger, more detailed images needed, whilst the development of the multi-plane camera helped to give a greater illusion of depth, augmented by much refined attention to small but telling details like the movement of smoke or rain, and other similar 'special effects' which had not been considered worthwhile in the shorter format," Hunter writes.

This attention to detail, as well as the technological achievements, are still impressive today, let alone in 1937. An early moment in which Snow White looks down into a wishing well and sees her reflection in the rippling water is a classic "how did they do that?" moment. It's one of many brought to life by the Disney team's revolutionary multi-plane camera, which is also used in the many slow zooms that draw us into the world. It's also a key factor in the Evil Queen's remarkable transformation sequence, where the camera spins around her in a trippy and disturbing way. Additionally, the use of rotoscoping for the human characters sets them apart from the dwarfs and animals (and still looks incredible by the way). All these things are the technology serving the artistry, and drawing us into Disney's magical kingdom, which is the real triumph of the film.

As Joshua Klein puts it in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, "there is no way to overestimate the effect of Snow White".

"It not only permanently established Disney as one of the foremost studios in the world but also advanced the state of animation to such a degree that it wasn't really until the advent of computer animation that anyone arguably pushed the form further," Klein writes. 

This is true. Snow White also set the template for the next half a century or so of feature-length animation -  not just at Disney, but at any cartoon company willing to battle at the box office with the House of Mouse. Even in the modern CG-animated era, you can see the influence of Snow White - just look at the likes of Frozen or Moana for the lingering traces of its lineage in the musical numbers, wacky sidekicks, cutesy animals, and sense of animated wonder.

Snow White's power to influence was immediate though. The Wizard Of Oz, released just two years later, owes Disney's big debut a big debt. The darker sequences in Snow White have a similar vibe, and it's even been suggested Snow White's success encouraged MGM to follow through on their journey along the yellow brick road.

But outside of its technological achievements, the film is seriously lacking. Snow White is a rotoscoped plot device, not a character. Her relationship with the prince is non-existent and we know next to zero about her (or the prince for that matter). We only care about Snow White because the dwarfs - who have far more personality - care about her, but even that is a stretch. 

As for the story, it's padded beyond belief. Strip back the sketches, and this struggles to be an hour long. Eight minutes (!) of the film are devoted to Snow White asking the dwarfs to wash themselves before dinner and then the dwarves washing themselves. That's 10 per cent of the running time given over to what quickly becomes a monotonous skit. 

The last 20 minutes - basically from the Queen's apple spell onwards - are dynamite, with real tension, conflict and drama. In fact, any time the Queen is on screen, the film goes up a notch. The stakes are raised and the film has something actually happening that's more involved and intense than dwarves washing themselves.

But Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs is not the best feature-length traditionally animated film of all time. It's not even the best Disney animated film of all time (that's an argument for another day). It's on this list, and deservedly so, because it's the first and perhaps the most influential, and that's not something to be sneezed at.

The Father

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 14, 2021.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Florian Zeller.

Cast: Anthony Hopkins, Olivia Colman, Mark Gatiss, Imogen Poots, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams.

Another wild charades sesh round at Anthony's.

Yep, it's sad. That's what they're all saying about this one, isn't it? Well, they're all right. The end will wreck you.

But what people aren't saying about The Father is how cleverly deceptive it is; about the rugs it pulls out from under you to put you inside the slowly deteriorating mind of Anthony, the dear old dad brought to devastatingly vivid life by Hopkins. Writer-director Zeller keeps the audience increasingly off-balance, yet blends his trickery with real emotion, and it's genius.

The story is simple enough. It's the tale of Anthony and his daughter Anne (Colman), and her struggles to care for him as his dementia worsens. Be prepared - this one is going to hit you where you live.

Obviously, Anthony Hopkins is a legend. He's a god-like master of his craft - watch this excellent breakdown of a single Westworld scene that summarises his greatness. His uncanny abilities are on full display in The Father. He runs through every emotion - some subtle, some devastatingly bold - and always makes the film feel real, despite its cryptic contrivances. From wildly charming to defiantly angry, from lost to funny, from broken to confident, he commands the screen. A posthumous Oscar win for Chadwick Boseman would have been wonderful, but to lose to the great Anthony Hopkins in this amazing role is nothing to be sneezed at. Sorry, Mr Boseman.

Colman is also great in the far less flashier role of Anna, the caring but put-upon daughter. She inhabits the strange place between love and resentment as she tries to help someone who doesn't want to be helped. It's a deceptively tricky role, and she nails it.

The other big star of the film is Zeller's direction. Working from his own 2012 play Le Père (and Christopher Hampton's English translation), he makes the most of disjointed time, replayed scenes, deceptive sets and decor, and his talented cast to keep the audience guessing. It's often confusing, but that's the point.

(Side note: did you Le Père had already been turned into a film in 2015 called Floride and starring Jean Rochefort and Sandrine Kiberlain? No, me neither.)

But for all its trickery, The Father has at its heart real emotions, and powerful ones at that. It fools us in many ways, but it never fakes its feeling. When its gut-wrenching finale arrives, you will be broken. There will be tears. It's unavoidable. But it's the pay-off for a masterfully made film that is a feast for both the brain and the heart, and a work-out for the tear ducts.

Mortal Kombat (2021)

(R) ★★★

Director: Simon McQuoid.

Cast: Lewis Tan, Jessica McNamee, Josh Lawson, Tadanobu Asano, Mehcad Brooks, Ludi Lin, Chin Han, Joe Taslim, Hiroyuki Sanada, Max Huang, Sisi Stringer, Matilda Kimber, Laura Brent, Daniel Nelson, Damon Herriman, Angus Sampson, Nathan Jones, Mel Jarnson, Yukiko Shinohara.

"Ice to meet you? I don't get it."

The old 1995 Mortal Kombat film has enjoyed a re-evaluation in recent years. But as beloved as it is for its cheesiness, fan service and mid-'90s nostalgia, it lacked the one thing that set its video game inspiration apart from most other fighting games - over-the-top, blood-drenched violence.

That's not the case with this R-rated reboot, which unleashes fatalities in all their claret-soaked glory. And - surprise, surprise - the endless and enjoyable fights are combined with a simple but serviceable story that's delivered by a solid cast of B-listers with just enough panache to ensure this version lands its punches and honours its origins.

As with the source material, plot is like a bonus feature on top of the fighting. For what it's worth, the story revolves around bad guys from an evil realm coming to Earth to defeat our best fighters as part of a transdimensional takeover. Among humanity's last hope is a washed-up MMA fighter (and new MK character) Cole Young (Tan), former soldiers Sonja Blade (McNamee) and Jax (Brooks), and wise-guy criminal Kano (Lawson).

Unless they can unleash their secret inner powers before the coming of soul-sucking baddie Shang Tsung (Han) and his minions, our world is doomed.

There's a low bar to get over for video game movies. The main rules are a) stay true to the source as much as is practical without being slavish and ultimately detrimental to the film you're making, and b) try not to ruin it with bad acting or bad writing. It's like doing a good cover of a classic song - figure out what it is about the original that made it great, treat that bit with dignity and respect, and make sure the bits in the between don't piss anyone off. Simple.

Mortal Kombat gets all that right. The script isn't going to win any awards, but it's not distractingly bad. There are a couple of clunky exposition dumps, and a few unnecessary lines straight out of the Captain Obvious School of Dialogue Writing, but largely it works. 

Same goes for the acting. Asano, Sanada and Han add gravitas, Lawson steals the show by swearing a blue streak and injecting some much-needed personality into proceedings, and McNamee is solid (and nails the American accent) as Sonja Blade. No one truly stinks up the screen, despite most of the rest of the cast being there for their butt-kicking abilities alone.

And the butt-kicking is where the film shines. The fights are great, digging deep into the games to pull out the various combos, signature moves and fatalities that made the console classic what it is. The fan service comes thick and fast, but it also makes for dynamic fight sequences that manage to avoid too much repetition. The editing hides some of the lesser fighters' capabilities, and some longer takes with the better fighters in the cast would have been welcome, but in between is a cavalcade of bits being ripped out, torn off, and sliced in half. 

This reboot gets what made the game fun - blood and battles - and it's just smart enough to make sure nothing gets in the way of that fun. 

Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are kinda the same film

 

Twins?

Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are basically the same movie. Kinda.

Hear me out.

Oh, and this contains spoilers for both films so leave now if you don't want either of these films spoiled.

Read my review of Nomadland here.

Read my review of Sound Of Metal here.

Still here? Good.

In a nutshell, both films are about the loss of identity, and the protagonist's quest to find themselves in a a community that exists on the fringe of society. 

Oh, and both protagonists drive and live in cool vans.

The two main characters here - Nomadland's Fern (Frances McDormand) and Sound Of Metal's Ruben (Riz Ahmed) - both suffer profound losses that leave them to try to figure out who the hell they are. 

In the case of Ruben, he loses his hearing. As a drummer, this costs him his passion and livelihood. Up until this point, everything in his life revolved around those things - he lived on the road, going from gig to gig with his bandmate who also happens to be his girlfriend. In Sound Of Metal, we never see Ruben having a life outside of music prior to his sudden deafness.  

In Fern's case, she loses her husband, her home and her job in a short amount of time. Losing all three of these elements in quick succession, as well as the financial situation she's left in, force her into an entirely new situation, effectively wiping out her past life and identity. She hits the road and rolls from job to job, and as Nomadland progresses, she questions where she fits into the world. She gets offers to stay in one spot and seems to contemplate these before ultimately rejecting them.

Fern and Ruben both find a new identity and sense of belonging in communities that survive outside "societal norms". Fern finds fellow grey nomads at the short-term jobs and trailer parks she frequents, eventually joining a whole community in the desert for a while. Ruben is directed to a commune for recovering drug addicts who happen to be deaf.

In these places, they rediscover themselves. Both find new friends and learn about their new lifestyles. 

This brings us to the major difference in these thematic similarities - whereas Fern accepts her new fate and comes to relish it for all its inconveniences and hardships, Ruben rejects it, desperate to reclaim the life he had before. This is demonstrated in the final scenes of both films. In Nomadland, Fern hits the road once more, having visited her former home one last time and offloaded the last of the belongings she had in storage. In Sound Of Metal, Ruben takes off the processors for his cochlear implants and sits in the silence. Up until that point, he has clung to his past life, but in those final moments, he seems to be both letting go of the past and wondering what the hell he's going to do next.

Both directors - Chloe Zhao and Darius Marder - also use their film-making techniques to amplify their themes. Zhao uses the landscapes and cinematography to highlight both Fern's isolation but also the beauty and extremes of her new life. Marder uses sound and editing to get inside Ruben's head and situation, and compare it to the rest of society.

I'm not sure if any of this means anything or matters, but it's interesting to me that two of the big films of 2020 shared such major thematic similarities. It's easy to say that in a shitshow of a year where many people lost so much and so much changed for people, themes of loss and identity would resonate, but the truth is both of these films were in the works long before people started eating pangolins or whatever the fuck happened.

The truth is probably that these are perennially interesting themes to explore because they hit home for a lot of people. And that's why these stories get told, and part of why Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are two of the best films of 2020.

Sound Of Metal

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 7, 2021.

(MA15+) ★★★★★

Director: Darius Marder.

Cast: Riz Ahmed, Olivia Cooke, Paul Raci, Lauren Ridloff, Mathieu Amalric.

"Are you going to eat that?"

Pop quiz: what would you do if you woke up tomorrow and you were deaf? 

That's the intriguing jump-off point for this remarkable film about identity, which is driven by a great performance from Ahmed and is wonderfully sculpted by Marder in his first non-doco as director. From its affecting use of sound to its gripping documentary style, Sound Of Metal takes a powerful story and elevates it even further, making it worthy of all its award wins and more.

Ahmed stars as Ruben, a metal drummer in Blackgammon (based on real life sludge metal band Jucifer). His whole existence centres on living and travelling from gig to gig in an RV with his partner and bandmate Lou (Cooke). When he wakes up profoundly deaf one morning, he is forced to question his very existence.

Sound Of Metal is impressive on so many levels. It's use of sound deservedly won it an Oscar (it also won for editing). The soundscape regularly puts us in the head of Ruben, where everything is frustratingly muffled and confusing. It's such a stupidly simple trick, I can't help but wonder why it hasn't been done before (maybe it has - tell me in the comments), but when mixed with the doco-style of cinematography, you quickly forget the story isn't real.

(Sound Of Metal and Nomadland are kinda the same film by the way.)

The use of actual members of the deaf community helps convey that realism, as does the ferocity of Ahmed's performance. Aside from learning how to sign, how to drum, and pulling off an utterly convincing American accent, Ahmed is in the zone here. He delivers the anguish, bewilderment, frustration, and heartbreak of the role to perfection, but also conjures up joy and hope in between. It's an immersive and holistic performance worthy of accolades, and delivers on the promise Ahmed has consistently shown since his breakout in Four Lions.

He's backed up by Cooke's under-rated turn as Lou, and Raci's Oscar-nominated role as the leader of a deaf community. Both are excellent, especially Raci, whose final scenes with Ahmed are heartbreaking.

Marder's bold directorial choices around the performances, the use of sound and the doco-style approach pay off in spades. Sound Of Metal is a great example of the film's techniques helping take the story to another level. By putting us in Ruben's head, it strengthens the theme of loss of identity and the difficulties in letting go of the past, and makes the character's hardships hit harder than a metal drummer on a snare.

Nomadland

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio Ballarat and South West Victoria on May 7, 2021, and ABC Central Victoria on May 10, 2021.

(M) ★★★★★

Director: Chloé Zhao.

Cast: Frances McDormand, David Strathairn, Linda May, Charlene Swankie, Bob Wells.

The view was great but the food and service were lacking.

Is Nomadland the best film of 2020? That's basically the only question that bears consideration for most people. 

"Best" is such a hard thing to quantify, but by many markers, yes, Nomadland is the best film of 2020. It's the most honest, heartfelt, saddest, poignant, and pointed film of that strange, strange year. In a non-pandemic-infused year, it would have hit even harder. It would have shone a spotlight on a forgotten populace of modern America, and made good Americans think about what their nation does with its elders who didn't fit into the economic brackets in which retirement is an option.

Instead, a lot of older people died, the nation was torn in half like a wet newspaper, and there were bigger fish to fry beyond the fate of grey nomads working in beet factories, rock shops and Amazon warehouses. 

Nomadland is the story of one of those grey nomads. Fern (a remarkable McDormand) is a refugee from a dead town, who roams the country from job to job in her van, joining a similar wave of old folks making ends meet in a nation that has forgotten them.

Many of the people asking if Nomadland is the best film of the year will be disappointed. This is always the case, but the fact it's largely plotless and moves at a gentle pace will leave many cold. But it's a quietly powerful story, beautifully told, that tugs on heartstrings and pokes at tearducts. It's a poetic portrait of an ignored demographic, and a study of grief, memory, letting go and finding yourself. In Fern, we have someone who doesn't know where they fit - much like fellow best film Oscar nominee Sound Of Metal, Nomadland is about a search for identity. 

(In fact, Nomadland and Sound Of Metal are kinda the same film.)

Fern is lost in her own country. Having tied herself to a man and a town that no longer exist, she has to strike out on her own to find herself. Along the way she discovers an impressive collection of very real people - Nomadland is largely filled with non-actors. Zhao's decision to use real members of the nomad community is limiting in one way, but hits deeper in another. It means the performances are unpolished, but there's a documentary edge to makes the reality of the situation shine through.

But as much as Fern is lost, she's finding herself and actually enjoying the process. McDormand paints Fern as socially awkward and isolated, but somehow also friendly and not against hanging out with people. She's simultaneously battling the elements and revelling in the openness of the wilderness. It's an unglamourous role - what was the last Oscar-winning performance that involved shitting in a bucket? - but it feels miraculously real. 

Zhao's gentle examination of life on the fringe is gorgeously shot. Along with cinematographer Joshua James Richards, she captures a beauty amid the hardship, and makes the landscape another character in the film, as well as a thematic tool that amplifies the isolation of Fern, but also the wonder of the world she has chosen to travel through.

In the shitshow of 2020, Nomadland, for all its sadness and swipes at modern society, is a triumph of human spirit in a strange way. People will keep coming back to this film for years to come because its messages and themes are timeless. Zhao's success is wonderful, welcome and deserved.