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Reviews
Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)
Brilliant genre-blending cinema
A Chinese family in America is disintegrating over the stresses from a strained marriage, generational differences, and looming tax issues with their small business, all overshadowed by the spectre of unfulfilled dreams. When the boundaries keeping the multiverse apart begin to collapse, however, all possible narratives begin to not just bleed together, but collide with spectacular effect - both cinematically and narratively.
This film reminded me of all the great reasons for being a cinema reviewer - not least opportunities like this, to get to see wonderful cinema before almost everyone else - and then write and publish exhortations to SEE THIS FILM!!
Not just for the spectacle - which is considerable - but also for a wonderful, heart-warmingly, human story of love and misunderstanding, that will have tears in your eyes even while you are laughing in disbelief at some of the colossally humorous and wickedly painful pratfalls that populate this enigmatic sci-fi-slash-martial-arts flick.
The cast were absolutely splendid and I loved absolutely all of the characters - however I will make special mention of both Stephanie Hsu, who was able to demonstrate a massive yet seamless range all within the same shot - in multiple scenes - and Jamie Lee Curtis, who brilliantly pulls off what is without doubt the strangest character portrayal of her career.
This is the best film I've had the opportunity to review in quite some time and I'm very keen to see how it fares in the awards season.
Bottom line: I thoroughly recommend you see this film, so you can decide for yourself whether it's worth the second viewing I know I'll be making.
Departure (2019)
Shame for such a promising cast
Just rubbish... gave it two episodes but I knew about 10 minutes into Ep1 that it was doomed.
Archie Panjabi fan notwithstanding...
Hva vil folk si (2017)
A Story from the Frontline of The Cultural Divide
This is a haunting story of a young woman seeking a balance between love for her family and her desire to live a normal life in her adopted country. In telling the story of Nisha, an immigrant walking the cultural tightrope between her Pakistani heritage and her home outside of Norway's capital, the film is a strong, unblinking statement about the imminent savagery still menacing women and girls who won't conform to the imported, conservative cultural values and behaviours their parents strive to maintain, amid the economic benefits they want from affluent liberal modernity.
The Leisure Seeker (2017)
A celebration of life at one of its significant junctures
Fugitive, 70-something grey nomads John (Sutherland) and Ella (Mirren) dust off their old Winnebago for one last trip, to visit the Florida Keys and the home of Ernest Hemingway. John is a retired literary professor and Ella has always wanted to take him there. Their disappearance scares the hell out of their grownup kids who, while pleading with them on the phone to come home, vacillate between respecting their wishes and calling the cops on their irresponsible parents.
THE LEISURE SEEKER is an at times funny, at times poignant, perhaps even confronting but also very real tale of what's waiting for us all as we near the end of our respective journeys. The film is a study of 'memento mori' and a pretty honest exploration of the gradually diminishing range of options as age and failing health catches up and overtakes even those not quite ready to call it a day.
Although it evoked a strong emotional response from the reviewing audience, it didn't feel either glib or particularly dark or depressing. Rather, it played as the celebration of a family's unembellished life and their enduring and at times conflicted love for one another.
Frantz (2016)
Innocence is the first casualty of war
It's 1919, immediately after World War I murdered of so many of Europe's young. In a small German town, the mysterious appearance of flowers on the grave of a young German soldier ignites the curiosity of his grieving fiancé, Anna (Beer) who finds them. When she tells the dead boy's shattered parents, they connect the flowers to the young Frenchman, Adrien (Niney), with whom the doctor had refused to speak because of his bitterness about the loss of his only son.
The story that unfolds is a fascinating vignette of side-by-side civilisations in the wake of incomprehensible barbarity perpetrated by and on each other's children, at the behest of their parents.
This is a massive story, elicited via the fascinating device of a haunted young man's search for redemption and a young girl's ability to contemplate it. The settings, costume and characters, coupled with the use of sepia film tones are highly evocative of the era and I felt utterly immersed in the enormous insanity of that four year crime, in whose shame-riddled aftermath the world was desperately trying to pretend there was a normalcy to which it could ever return.
Samsara (2011)
A vivid, sensual exploration of the viewer's relationship to the world around them
The use of speed to hasten and slow down the objects, events and processes documented guide the viewer to really both objectify and acknowledge what's being recorded: whether it's the sun across the Methuselah Tree or the butchering of pigs in an Asian slaughterhouse. While it wouldn't be accurate to say Samsara hasn't got an agenda, the viewer is nonetheless forced to respond by the absence of voice over and any kind of titling. While a feast for the eyes and ears, its experiential interface is quite blatantly in each viewer's own mind and heart, in the midst of his or her own values and prejudices and must be likewise responded to internally. I would say that no two people would respond the same way to it.