Well the big screen fare has been disappointing here in Sydney, with major releases limited to Tenet, and a lot of sub-standard films being foisted on an audience starved for choice. Here goes:

Movie: Tenet

Director:  Christopher Nolan

Stars: John David Washington, Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, Kenneth Branagh

Go see this, even if you don’t want to. If it does not see box-office then cineplex movies may well be done for 2020.

This is a Christopher Nolan ‘Inception’ style film that requires your best suspension of disbelief, so buy that beer or wine on the way in. Complex story, interesting performances, great visuals, awesome stunts, moody soundtrack. The latter is surprising given it’s created by the guy who screwed The Mandalorian. Just don’t pull too hard on the loose threads and go with the flow.

Washington, Debicki, Pattinson and Branagh all impress with good chemistry.

I will, however, never understand how people spend tens of millions on movies - in this case $205M - and yet put rifles in the hands of extras who have no idea how to hold one when firing, and then let them play soldiers. FFS.

Movie: The Broken Hearts Gallery

Director:  Natalie Krinsky

Stars: Geraldine Viswanathan, Dacre Montgomery

Almost everything negative you could say about rom-coms set in New York could easily be said about this: formulaic, cliched and trope ridden. It has its own charm though, and if you need a reminder of the value of a loyal squad and the need to keep yourself open then this will suffice.

I must pay Geraldine Viswanathan here, and the rest of her career. Versatile.

Movie: The Secret Garden

Director: Marc Munden

Stars: Dixie Egerickx

Pushing 110 years old, children’s classic The Secret Garden has been made into umpteen movies and TV series.

This somewhat reimagined version is not for the purists. The modernisation extends to placing it in the late 1940s, around the time of partition, and softening the image of the dead parents which alters orphaned Mary’s impetus for psychological growth significantly. I mention this because I think these factors have more to do with the film’s lacklustre critical and audience response than the movie itself. If you’re just here for nostalgia then there is your caveat, but if you are new to this then I think you will find this a fairly solid film, with the CGI being effectively used to demonstrate the ‘magical’ properties of the garden and Dixie Egerickx’s Mary engaging. This also applies if you enjoy seeing new interpretations, and you would be otherwise bored introducing TSG to a child.

Beyond the critical experience, there is not a lot here for adults, even for fans of Colin Firth and Julie Walters, and even less for cynical teens.

Movie: An American Pickle

Director:  Brandon Trost

Stars: Seth Rogen, Sarah Snook

Whimsically amusing and better than the 5.7 IMDB rating. This was apparently the first HBO Max release.

Seth Rogen plays the two lead roles here and if you dislike him that might be too much, but he does a good job - for once not over-schmucking it. The tropes are a little worn, but the film engages throughout.

Movie: The New Mutants

Director:  Josh Boon

Stars: Maisie Williams, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Heaton, Blu Hunt

Smashed by critics, this film was caught up in reshoots with characters left on the cutting room floor, and it smacks of the desperate search for box-office using second string comic books. Nonetheless, if you enjoy the genre, and X-Men in particular, this is not hard to watch given the lack of current competition.

The Breakfast Club meets The Shining apparently. Possibly worth a look if you are interested in seeing what else Maisie Williams (Arya in GoT) can do, or Anya Taylor-Joy. Catch the trailers and if they don’t grab you at all then you can give this is a miss.

Movie: The Eight Hundred

Director:  Hu Guan

If you are not watching Chinese patriotic cinema then you really should be. In 1937 an army warehouse is used to stage a last-stand in Shanghai fending off the Imperial Japanese Army for a few days directly opposite the British concession. This is a fascinating film at the political level, though you might need some prior exposure to relevant history and politics to see it that way. It is very long and suffers the typical surfeit of sentimentality that afflicts these types of film, so it can only be recommended as a war film with that caveat.

The first question is “How was this even made?” given it’s about a Nationalist Chinese battle. The answer lies not just in this well predating the final split between the KMT and CCP but in the complex political situation presented by a battle that takes place just across the river from a theoretically inviolable foreign concession which provides endless fuel for propaganda.

On one side of the river there is a flourishing, wealthy entertainment district with casino, nightclubs, neon lights and a slew of foreign press while on the other side part of a German trained and equipped Chinese division, along with a few Shanghaied farmers, fight desperately to survive. The interplay between the two sides of the river is the real focus of the film. This is that high school history about the second Sino-Japanese War and the League of Nations demonstrated at ground level. Sifting the various levels of political symbolism, from the subtle to the overbearing, and perhaps even subversive was fascinating to me, but so was the human drama and study of motivations.

Movie: Trolls World Tour

Director:  Walt Dohrn, David P. Smith

Stars: Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake, Rachel Bloom

JT, Mary J Blige, George Clinton and Anna Kendrick had me thinking that I should give this a whirl given the absence of other viewing. Look, it is not terrible, but I wouldn’t dream of subjecting a child to it so...nope.

Movie: Saint Judy

Director:  Sean Hanish

Stars: Michelle Monaghan, Leem Lubany, Common, Alfred Molina

Yet another not new film, a 2018 festival release, being trotted out by Hoyts, and yet again with a prior box office take well south of $1M. That’s worldwide.

Michelle Monaghan plays actual immigration lawyer Judy Wood in a worthy film about her supposedly precedent setting case that changed the interpretation of asylum law in the USA. This is “human rights” lite for those who pretend to care, but half watchable if you are bored witless in semi-lockdown. The usual sentimentality: struggling single mum, young son going off the rails a little as she works her arse off going broke, client with harrowing story requiring asylum (but you know - beautiful, and they might as well have frosted the edge of the screen for the “back there” part).

Movie: Peninsula (Train to Busan 2)

Director:  Sanh-ho Yeon

Stars: Dong-Won Gang, Jung-hyun Lee, Re Lee

Train to Busan was a 2016 Korean zombie flick and it has been showing lately presumably because this ‘sequel’ was coming. It was well regarded but a relatively complete film, so the sequel is not so much a sequel as just set in the same milieu.

Initially we see a few scenes involving other survivors doing the outbreak, then a very clumsy talk show discussion lets us know we’ve advanced four years - and our main character having escaped is now tempted to go back. It is when our hero meets survivors that Peninsula morphs into a mash of Walking Dead, Mad Max and something like Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift which for a time is cracking fun.

Mostly this is nonsense with far too much sentimentality, but in terms of diversion and the complete dearth of good new films it might be worth it for the moment if that sort of ridiculousness can float your boat.

Movie: Force of Nature

Director:  Michael Polish

Stars: Emile Hirsch, Mel Gibson, David Zayas

Mel Gibson and Emile Hirsh owe me the $24 I paid to see this alone on the extreme screen. It seems that the audience has cottoned on to only second-rate films being “released” at the moment, and therefore only big screen addicts like me are turning up.
A relatively accomplished cast make heavy work of this heist film which seems to have all the ingredients but never gels.

Movie: The Secret: Dare to Dream

Director:  Andy Tennant

Stars: Katie Holmes, Josh Lucas, Jerry O’Connell

Forget about the book, not that I’ve read it, and however you feel about the kind of magical thinking it promotes. You can just watch this as an entertaining “choice between” romance, self-adjust the thin layer of “attraction” thinking to just being positive, and it is just a charming story starring Katie Holmes.
If you’re looking to problematise it, you will, at least as easily as the critics did.

Movie: Unhinged

Director:  Derrick Borte

Stars: Russell Crowe, Caren Pistorius, Gabriel Bateman

This mess stars Russell Crowe as a vengeful, suicidal loser - determined to wreak as much carnage and hurt as he can before he gets checked out. Maybe that’s your thing, but otherwise feel free to stop there and skip the rest of this, and the movie.

For some unknown reason there is an opening titles collage of pseudo news footage and commentary, maybe in case you missed the last 30 years and were unaware of the term “road rage”. However, the first scene clearly shows that Rusty’s ‘The man’ character was already ‘unhinged’, so you too might sit there wondering “Why?” for the rest of the film. Perhaps the intended moral is don’t honk because maybe your honking a pilled-up murderer, rather than don’t honk because there is more than enough aggression in the world as it is, and you might tip someone over the edge.

The best thing going for the film is a relatively quick 90-minute time frame, but otherwise it is poor. Almost nothing is seamless, the seams show and worse, itch. I guess if you don’t drive and have no personal understanding of violence this might fly, but even for B grade thriller it is all rather over-contrived. Even with Crowe, this feels like it would not have a box-office release if not for Covid-19.

Movie: Where’d You Go, Bernadette

Director:  Richard Linklater

Stars: Cate Blanchett, Billy Crudup, Emma Nelson

This is an 11-month-old Amazon production. Based on the best-selling book, this takes a very different approach (apparently, I have not read it - but I’m alerting you). Cate Blanchett is Bernadette and you need your star to be in your movie most of the time usually, so that is how they played it for the film. Blanchett is playing to her strengths here and picked up the Golden Globe nom in the nonsense Musical or Comedy category. This is supposedly both comedy and drama, but really a melodrama with comedic moments.

Film Bernadette is a brilliant architect, married with a teenage daughter, whose life has devolved, and the film shows the what of this, but poses as a mystery the why. Eventually the wherefore is revealed, leaving the “where to now” to be sorted out in a surprisingly tense conclusion. I have a soft spot for difficult, thwarted and suppressed people so I had no problem letting this develop - you may not have the patience, but I thought the pay-off well worth it.

Juddy keeps busy consuming cultural media while posing as a student at a major Sydney university, thus shirking real work. He hosts pub trivia, and tutors at said university, for beer and book money.