Movie, music and TV reviews by Matt Neal, a Rotten Tomatoes-accredited ABC Radio film critic (also an author, musician, journalist and all-round okay guy).
This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio South West Victoria and Ballarat on June 25, 2021.
(M) ★★★
Director: Justin Lin.
Cast: Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, John Cena, Nathalie Emmanuel, Jordana Brewster, Sung Kang, Vinnie Bennett, Finn Cole, Michael Rooker, Helen Mirren, Kurt Russell, Charlize Theron, Thue Ersted Rasmussen, Anna Sawai, J. D. Pardo, Lucas Black, Bow Wow, Jason Tobin.
Welcome back to the world of The Fast & The Furious, where family is everything and the laws of physics mean nothing.
The rhythm and style of the franchise is well established now - Dominic Torretto's gang of super-spies use their mad driving skills to save the world from a crazed villain. There will be impossible stunts and impassioned pleas about the importance of family. All that really changes is the levels of insanity the film-makers will drive the car-related action to.
The MacGuffin this time around is Ares - a tech weapon that can take over any computer anywhere once its uploaded to a satellite. Old friends will reunite with Dom (Diesel) and co to find the two pieces of Ares before the baddies do, while old foes and a blast from Dom's past will try to stop them.
You're either on board with the F&F series by now or you're not. Since Fast Five's deliberate re-positioning of the franchise as a series of motorised heists, it hasn't looked back, revving its engines in more daring ways with each instalment and blazing a trail through the box office as it goes. Here we get landmines, magnets and space travel thrown into the mix of a film that is otherwise indistinguishable from F8 and F6.
All that really matters is whether it works, and it does for the most part. It feels petty pointing out the illogical, impossible physics-breaking stunts that pepper the film - that is part of the F&F charm. A car swinging across a crevasse on a rope? Sure, that's F&F! What's less forgivable is the bloated backstory and the too-many sepia-toned flashbacks, or the hard-to-believe plot moments, such as how a couple of characters stumble upon the most cryptic of clues to find their lost friend in a massive city like Tokyo.
A tiredness is creeping into the crew too. Paul Walker's absence is keenly felt because he provided a nice balance to Diesel's Dom, and it's left to Ramsey (Emmanuel) and comic relief characters Tej (Bridges) and Roman (Gibson) to lighten proceedings and provide a bit of spark. Mirren's almost pointless cameo is also great, but most of the characters feel ill-defined.
F9 is very much a same-same entry in the F&F universe. Not terrible, yet not as exhilarating as F5 nor as passionate as F7, it feels very much like a tipping point in the series. Something special is needed in the franchise to rev it up once more, otherwise it will just continue to plod along until it runs out of fuel.
This is a version of a review airing on ABC Radio South West Victoria and Ballarat on June 25, 2021, and ABC Central Victoria on June 21, 2021.
(PG) ★★★
Director: Craig Gillespie.
Cast: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Tipper Seifert-Cleveland, Emily Beecham, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Mark Strong, John McCrea, Kayvan Novak, Jamie Demetriou, Andrew Leung.
The new Massive Attack album.
Do we really need to know the origin of 101 Dalmatians villain Cruella de Vil? The same question could be asked of any baddie prequel, whether it be Star Wars Episodes I-III or Joker or Maleficent.
But if it works, it works. The Star Wars prequels worked intermittently, and Joker succeeded because it examined the social forces that could create such a person and wasn't too focused on being part of Batman's world. Similarly, Cruella works best when it's not beholden to a bigger franchise, and instead offers glimpses of a far more exciting non-Dalmatian-related movie.
A perfectly cast Stone stars as Estella, the woman who will become the dog-skinning villainess. A harrowing turn of events leaves Estella as an orphan who falls in with fellow street urchins Jasper (Fry) and Horace (Hauser). As they eke out a living in '60s and '70s London, Estella strives to accomplish her dream of becoming a fashion designer, but to do so may require her harnessing her inner baddie, which her mother nicknamed Cruella.
Buried beneath a so-so origin story that's too mature for the younger kids who love 101 Dalmatians is a fascinating tale of fashion industry rivalries battling it out at the dawn of punk. Estella going head-to-head with the equally devious Baroness (a perfect Thompson) is reminiscent of The Devil Wears Prada, perhaps unsurprising given Aline Brosh McKenna worked on the scripts of both films.
But this is when the film is at its best. With its Vivienne Westwood punk/goth costuming, an overloaded soundtrack featuring The Stooges and The Clash, and a brash "we are the youth!" attitude, Cruella is, at times, a riveting inter-generational culture war.
This is not the whole film though, and when it slips back into franchise mode and focuses on creating Cruella the dog-skinner, it is a lesser film. Everything feels more laboured, the story loses its sparkle, and you start to wonder who this film is aimed at because, let's face it, creating an iconic villain is not all rainbows and puppies. You need a certain amount of darkness, and for things to not turn out well for the puppies.
The costumes, set designs and production design are outstanding, as are the performances and the general hyper-real vibe of it all. But in between are frustrations, such as some unconvincing CG dogs, an era-breaking score, a distractingly overloaded soundtrack that's like someone hitting skip on Spotify every minute, and the difficulty the screenplay has in keeping Cruella sympathetic while simultaneously plotting her path to villainhood.
Like someone forced to wear an oversized coat, the prequel requirements of Cruella hide a better film. This spotted coat doesn't fit the interesting person buried inside it.
Cast: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Tony Roberts, Carol Kane, Paul Simon, Janet Margolin, Shelley Duvall, Christopher Walken.
Queues. Am I right?
First things first. Yes, you have to separate the art from the artist. If you don't, you're doomed to miss out on a lot of great stuff, and that list seems to get longer every day. The art didn't do the bad thing. Whether the art is good or not is the important thing, right?
Anyway, I'm not here to talk about the sins of Woody Allen. I'm here to talk about how Annie Hall remains one of the funniest movies ever made.
It's also a bold rule-breaker that takes rom-com tropes and gives them a shake. The guy doesn't get the girl, the couple spend more time fighting or apart than actually together, our "hero" is a flawed mess of complexes, and the whole relationship is dominated by a subtext of psychological issues that ultimately doom it. This is not your typical opposites-attract Will-They-Won't-They, capped off with kiss in an improbable location or under improbable circumstances. Bizarrely, it's far more realistic, despite taking a fantastical approach to the material.
While it's not the first American rom-com to undermine the genre - that credit likely goes to The Apartment - it's perhaps the most influential of the not-so-rom rom-coms. Its impact can be found in everything from When Harry Met Sally to High Fidelity to 500 Days Of Summer. But the real legacy of Annie Hall is that its influence extends beyond its own genre.
Allen's direction employed a kitchen sink's worth of 'meta' trickery - bold directorial elements rarely seen before in an often anodyne genre. His alter-ego Alvy breaks the fourth wall with regularity, subtitles and split screens are employed to wonderfully comedic effect, long takes abound, the timeline is fractured, characters visit themselves in the past, and even the Evil Queen from Snow White makes an animated appearance alongside a cartoonish Alvy. It's daring film-making, and it's part of what made the film such a hit with other directors, including William Friedkin, Harold Ramis, Rian Johnson and Rob Reiner.
But this cinematic rule-breaking is not just for rule-breaking sake. Every single one of these tricks serves either the story or the character or gets a big laugh or, more often than not, all three.
And that's the other thing about Annie Hall - it's hilarious. Nearly every line is a laugh-out-loud winner or a fantastically droll absurdism. Out of context they don't work, but in the moment they're incredible examples of comedic screenwriting. "You're using this conspiracy theory to put off having sex with me", "Touch my heart with your foot", "We can walk to the kerb from here", and "Don't knock masturbation - it's sex with someone I love" are among the many highlights, although my all-time favourite is the jaw-dropping darkness of "My granny never gave gifts - she was too busy getting raped by the Cossacks". That's next-level cringe comedy, decades before the likes of David Brent, Alan Partridge and Larry David.
What's incredible about Annie Hall is its origin. Like that other great film of 1977, Annie Hall was saved in the edit. An amazing array of fantastical skits and a whole murder-mystery plot were left on the cutting room floor, as the film was whittled down from a sprawling three hours to a lean hour-and-a-half. Leaving out half the jokes meant only the good ones stayed, but more importantly the heart of the story became the failed romance between Alvy and Diane Keaton's titular dream girl.
Keaton is dynamite in this, deservedly winning an Oscar, and Allen, who was besotted with Keaton, is smart enough to let her have her moments. When she sings in a nightclub, the first time is played for laughs, but the second time, the camera stays on her and lets her shine, making sure the audience loves her like Alvy did. The meet-cute scene after the tennis match where she wears the now-iconic black hat and waistcoat and tells the going-nowhere story about George and the turkey is totally adorkable, and perfectly filmed - we fall for Annie, just as Alvy is doing the same thing. Film Magazine's Ryan Gilbey, in his summation of Annie Hall in the mag's 100 Greatest Films edition, cites "the magnetism of Keaton, la-di-dahing all over the place in her waistcoats" as one of the film's best assets.
Allen has derided the film as a disappointment in part because of the editing suite reworking of the story, but concedes it was a turning point. The film moved him away from the broader, sillier comedies of his early years and saw him edge closer to the emotional weight of his favourite directors, such as Fellini and Bergman. Karen Krizanovich, writing in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, called it "Allen's coming of age", noting that while his earlier films such as Bananas and Sleeper were "both extremely funny, neither has the emotional resonance or the zeitgeist-catching relevance of Annie Hall".
It's also the point where Woody Allen the writer/director became Woody Allen the caricature. Alvy is pretty much every lead character in every post-Annie Hall film Allen made, whether he plays the character or not. He's the highly sexualised and super intelligent funny man who stereotypes everything with snide, judgmental put-downs, all the while crippled by his own self-sabotaging jealousy, self-centredness, "nebbish" persecution complex, hypocritical nature, and his sad, middle-aged manipulativeness. It's a hard character to like - only his sense of humour and the fact that most of us relate to at least one of the items on his shopping list of psychological issues saves him from being insufferable. He's remarkably relatable, which seems almost impossible. It's the greatest trick of Allen's career, and it's one he's played time and time again.
Throw in a great one-liner from Jeff Goldbum, a scene-stealing Christopher Walken, the marvellous Marshal MacLuhan moment, Truman Capote's cameo, and an hilarious Shelley Duvall, and there is so much to love, admire and enjoy about Annie Hall. Incredibly, it's also important and groundbreaking at the same time. As Film Magazine's Gilbey put it, "Comedy didn't begin with Woody Allen, but it wouldn't be what it is without him".
But I was wrong. It suddenly occurred to me while watching this finely made sequel that A Quiet Place does have something to say about the time we live in. In two or three decades time, we will look back on this and see beyond the "high concept... delivered with minimal fuss and maximum impact" and find there was indeed a thematic depth tucked beneath the surface.
A Quiet Place and this excellent follow-up tap into a genius and genuine fear - that we fear to live in silence. In a world of social media, inane chatter, the endless news cycle, and everything all of the time, there are no doubt innumerable people who live in fear of the silent world A Quiet Place portrays. No talking, no phones, no music, no inane Tik Tok/Insta/Facebook/etc videos - for many, this is indeed a nightmarish existence. You could also argue that there's a psychological bent to this; ie. that "living in silence", unable to speak out lest you get destroyed by evil creatures, is no way to live.
Picking up where its predecessor left off (after a brief flashback to "day one" of the alien invasion), Part II finds the Abbott family searching for a new home, which leads to a dangerous cross-country trek where any sound they make could get them killed. And they're trying to do this with a baby.
The central conceit of aliens that hunt via sound is still scary as hell, so even when A Quiet Place Part II feels like a re-tread of its predecessor, you're still on the edge of your seat. There's an inevitable sequel looming here too, so the sense of completeness of the first film is missing too, but these are minor quibbles.
What worked in the first film works here. The tension wrought by the silence is immense, the sound design is beautifully dramatic, returning composer Marco Beltrami's discordant score is perfect, Krasinki's direction is confident, and the story finds ingenious ways to make the "silence vs noise" thing fresh.
The cast is also, once again, excellent. Blunt spends much of the film torn between fear and desperation (her husband Krasinski really puts her through the wringer) but what really shines through is she is a mother almost destroyed by grief but desperately holding it all together for the sake of her kids. She is Most Mothers, turned up to 11. She's the urban legend mum who gains superhuman strength in the heat of the moment to lift a car off her kid. Blunt makes all this believable.
The real star is Simmonds, who shone in the first film, but truly blossoms here. Seeing a deaf heroine is a beautiful and powerful thing, but this is no token, hollow gesture. Regan is a great character who sees a hole in the family and an opportunity to be a leader and a saviour. It's a wonderful performance to go with such a nicely written role.
This sequel can never feel as fresh or as groundbreaking as the original, but it lives up to the high bar set by its predecessor. A Quiet Place Part II mines the same territory, but still finds gold.
