Kimi (2022) - Movie Review

 

Of all the filmmakers who tried to persist when COVID made its initial devastating impact on the film industry, Steven Soderbergh always felt like the one who was the most primed and ready for it. In 2011, he and Scott Z. Burns basically predicted COVID itself with Contagion, and in 2019, he and Tarell Alvin McCraney gave one hell of an analogy for how much streaming and decentralisation would need to fill in the gap once lockdowns started happening in High Flying Bird. Between his place as a vanguard of independent cinema, and his championing for availability of both product and production, given his use of consumer-grade smartphones to film High Flying Bird and Unsane, he is a cinematic voice that seemed destined to thrive in this environment.

The Bubble (2022) - Movie Review

The words ‘satire’ and ‘irony’ can put some strange ideas in people’s heads. Under the right circumstances, they are the bedrock for attitudes behind some of the greatest works of art across many mediums. But under the wrong ones, they’re just an excuse for utter laziness. The Internet is basically a carwash that scrubs all manner of context from whatever is placed on it, and in that scrubbing, there is all manner of satirical humour that operates under the impression that, if you just admit that you’re lazy or just being a dick, that magically makes it okay and “the point” of doing so. But it’s one thing when the average layman tries their hand at something like this, which is usually embarrassing but nothing more than that; it's quite another when Hollywood money is being thrown at it.

Songbird (2021) - Movie Review

Making a film intrinsically about COVID-19, while COVID-19 is still a thing and still a danger to public health, isn’t an inherently bad idea. All art is reflective of the era in which it was made, and film is no exception; knowing how much the pandemic has fucked up the industry in regards to getting work done and released, working around the conditions involved shouldn’t automatically be seen as a bad thing. I’m not saying that exploiting the situation for profit isn’t shady as all fuck; just that not every production in this space should be seen as such. At least, not until it proves itself to be in that vein.

After what happened with Locked Down, I went into this other film set during COVID lockdown (in a roundabout way, which I’ll get to) with far lower expectations. Other than hearing a fair bit of negative press about it since it first released in the U.S. in December, I’ve resigned myself to the notion that Host was going to be a rare example of a film made in extraordinary circumstances that was itself an extraordinary work of art. I’ve been seeing the word “tasteless” floating around a lot in discussions about Songbird, hence my little spiel about the supposed ethics problems with making a film about a pandemic while said pandemic is still happening, so I was ready for the worst of it. And while that's unfortunately what I got, it wasn't in the form I was expecting.

Locked Down (2021) - Movie Review

I was raring up to like this movie quite a bit just from genre association alone. A rom-com/heist flick made and set during COVID lockdown, after films like Host proved that there’s pathos to be wrung out of the timeliness, with a plentiful cast of actors I’ve grown to love over the last few years; what could possibly go wrong? Well, in short, just about everything, but I’m not exactly in the mood to show this thing the mercy of brevity.

Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) - Movie Review

As much as the whole in-character interviewing shtick has grown somewhat stale in recent years, I’d be remiss if I didn’t reaffirm that Sacha Baron-Cohen might be one of the only comedians alive today who can pull that shtick off. Indeed, his feature-length depiction of Kazakh reporter Borat Sagdiyev remains one of the greatest mockumentaries of all time, as graphic as it is bitingly hilarious. And in an odd showing of how heroes show up just in the nick of time to save the day, Baron-Cohen has delivered a follow-up to that classic in what can reasonably be called the best time possible.

Host (2020) - Movie Review

At last, after many months of jealously hearing from friends about how cool Shudder is, it has finally made it to Australian screens. That means all manner of exclusive content on the service is now open for reviews, so I might get around to reviewing Kuso or One Cut Of The Dead at some point. But for now, though, we’ve got something very special to look at. A film that I believe will go down as the film of 2020, both because of how much of a snapshot it is of this point in history, and because it’s just that fucking brilliant as a film all on its own.