"This Film Should Be Played Loud"

A lot shaggier and lived in that I would expect from a Happy Madison joint. This forgoes the temptation to be mindlessly broad and gross-out most of the time, instead staging a character comedy of duelling families – one jewish, one black – around the tried-and-tested template of a wedding farce. It works! I buy this cast in these roles (everyone always forgets that Buscemi is a Sandler regular) and the whole film feels busy in a good way; busy with personalities, busy with gags – both verbal and physical. It’s always moving, with writer director Robert Smigel favouring a roaming handheld camera to keep all the chaos barely contained with some genuinely inventive staging here and there where it counts. A touching moment between Sandler and Rock, for example, is played out while the two are in chairs being hoisted in the air by a mass of party guests.

As fine as Sandler is here, he can’t help but skew himself a little bit off centre, employing one of his slightly exaggerated voices to appear just a blip more animated than would be if playing the role as himself. It’s as if Sandler is afraid to just be himself in his own comedies, but this could also be a desire of his to search for something more specific. He seems happy to give himself over to people like Baumbach but always bends towards heightened character work in his own movies where, I’m guessing, he has total freedom. So perhaps that’s merely the muse he enjoys chasing.

All in all this was a lot more enjoyable than it had any right to be. I used to keep up with Sandler’s movies religiously but drifted off when the going got tough. Recently I’ve been curious to go back and fill in all those blanks, if just to chart the trajectory that got him here. Heard some moderately good things about Sandy Wexler too. The low-key stakes and specificity in the portrait of a dysfunctional jewish family pays off. More like this please Sandman!

Watched on Netlflix

Cute effort from Hallie Meyers-Shyer who can’t help but remind you at every turn that she is absolutely her parents’ daughter, though parts of this seem to be enacting a fantasy imagining what life would be like if she was Paul Mazursky’s daughter instead of Charles Shyer’s. Which…sure! I’m just echoing what most have already said but this world of upper-class lily-white privilege soon becomes unintentionally suffocating. Most of the characters here are just perfect smiling LA headshots reading lines instead of feeling like flesh and blood human beings. Fine, but also not.

Watched on Netflix

I much prefer Yorgos when he’s working from within his own demented imagination – this is very much a director-for-hire job, though as far as career moves go you could certainly do a lot worse – but I’m nonetheless impressed with how brazenly he inflicts his fingerprints onto this material. The stylistic choices constantly sent me crosseyed and baffled, but in a good way. The wide array of lenses, fish-eye included , are deployed with enough punkish abandon to leave your mouth agape and the darker, transgressive thematics are a wonderful fit for his particular brand of perversity.

And yet Lanthimos wisely stays out of the way of the writing for the most part, letting the performances run amok to rightfully become the centre of attention. Coleman, Stone and Weisz are all delightfully catty and cruel, offsetting the rigid trappings of the period costume drama – and Lanthimos’ usual cold eye – like a lively rush of blood to the head. Just as every swig of hard liquor comes with a burn, this certainly gets a little long in the tooth during the last hour. While I can’t say I wasn’t happy to see it end, the film’s last stylistic gambit in that final overlaying of shots twists the knife just enough to ensure you leave the film puzzling it over rather than starting to forget it. It’s not often you see an Awards contender that looks and sounds this fucking strange.

Watched at the cinema

I love how golden and warm this feels. The filmic equivalent of wood crackling in a fire. Lowery submits to Redford’s charm and legacy, creating a swan-song for him that is apt if slightly pandering. It’s refreshing to see a movie which is content with being merely nice. There’s a version of this film that could turn into a golden years bandit Unforgiven, but Lowery never betrays his own wholesome sensibility, delivering a shaggy-dog downfall story which refuses to become a bummer. The scenes between Redford and Spacek are lovely and further proof we need more movies focused on ageing faces and wisened cadences. The 16mm photography is essential too, giving the imagery the texture of sandpaper, a texture Redford himself also embodies. The whole film fizzles with rapscallion charisma. A “Dad Film” for when your Dad becomes a Grandad. The fact this clocks in at around 85 minutes before credits is the icing on the cake. You aren’t likely to come back to The Old Man & The Gun with regularity, but you’ll certainly cherish whatever time you spend with it.

Was not expecting this to be so perverse and uncomfortable but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s performance – embodying the kind of strange and troubling yet utterly fascinating woman she has revisited throughout her career – is wholly riveting. Sara Colangelo’s vision of Lisa’s unfulfilled life is so specific, we constantly see her in the potholes of her life – wordlessly existing in her own mind while nobody is around – that tell us everything by saying nothing. It’s unsettling to see this obsession morph her from a worn-down blur into a driven and calculated force. A conflicting film through and through that is more viscerally unnerving than most so-called horror movies. Very curious to see how much of this is down to Colangelo and Gyllenhaal’s invention and how much originates from the Israeli film it’s based on. Either way, this certainly strikes a nerve. One of the best performances of 2018.

It’s unusual for a film from the low-budget realm, especially of the horror/comedy variety, to have such an ambitious and silly high-concept. Like, you could make a pretty nuts n’ bolts slasher movie set in a shopping centre with the title Chopping Mall and probably make your money back. But no, the filmmakers decided to go that extra mile and make a movie about a mall policed by freakin’ killer robots to hang their slasher shenanigans onto. It’s so silly, but certainly entertaining.

There are mad splashes of OTT gore you’ll be thankful for (exploding heads!) and a welcome roster of familiar character actors – Barbara Crampton, Dick Miller – to perk you up when things get a bit too routine. The film doesn’t betray the potential of its location either with plenty of tooling up of mall appliances wielded as artillery against the killbots. I’d say it cribs royally from RoboCop but it predates that flick by a good year. Who knows, maybe Verhoeven just really loves Chopping Mall? Absolutely the kind of wacky genre mash-up you’ll watch and want to tell your friends about immediately.

Watched on Amazon Prime.

Somebody just hook these Shaw bros. movies up to my veins like an IV drip. Mighty Peking Man is man-in-rubber-suit nirvana. Blatantly pillaging plot and set-pieces from King Kong, Tarazan, Godzilla and any other lucrative property that made money in the West, the film still feels unmistakably Eastern with its loopy chopsocky action and helter-skelter plotting, so preposterous it’s hard to actually stay sane while it all unfolds.

The low-fi filmmaking is endlessly charming too, utilising everything from miniatures and rear-projection to wirework and firework-like squibs and explosions. This is like a kid’s toy-box suddenly electrified into action by a lightning bolt of genre life-force. By the end, the entire film practically explodes from all the lunacy and excitement. A knockabout riot!

Watched on Amazon Prime.