Smoking Causes Coughing (2023) - Movie Review

Look, I need something lighter after the last film. Something short, something funny, something weird, and hopefully, something not as heavy as Martin Scorsese calling out genocide. So I decided to check this out mainly because of its oddball title, oddball poster, and oddball premise of a team of French superheroes named Benzene, Methanol, Nicotine, Mercury, and Ammonia, otherwise known as the Tobacco Force.

Where it gets weirder is that the central idea of this film (I think?) is indicative of why I decided to watch it in the first place.

The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar And Three More (2023) - Movie Review

Not content with merely releasing one film this year that explains just about every structural and thematic quirk in all of his other films with Asteroid City, Wes Anderson also put out a series of four short films on Netflix, adapted from short stories written by Roald Dahl: The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar, The Swan, The Rat Catcher, and Poison. And y’know what? I could review each of these individually and call that two days of my month-long blogathon done, but fuck it; let’s review all four of the buggers in one go.

The House (2022) - Movie Review

 

Yep, still on an animation kick, and this is a real beauty here. Put onto Netflix back in January, this is a three-part anthology film all about the titular House. This is another situation where the use of stop-motion specifically does a lot for the storytelling all on its own, as putting emphasis on tangible textures and physical objects makes a tighter connection between the audience and the setting that these stories fixate on. It also makes each story’s more horrifying aspects sink in even deeper.

Here Out West (2022) - Movie Review

Even from an early age, prejudice along the lines of race or ethnic background never made much sense to me. Not because I’m any sort of profoundly enlightened individual or any such ponce like that; it’s more the result of what I understand to be the cultural makeup of where I was born and where I have spent the entirety of my life so far: Australia. It is, and I say with all the love I can muster for a geographical location, a mongrel nation. A former prison colony that has since become a hub for all manner of multicultural communities and existences, from the indigenous population that the ‘settlers’ fucked over, to our umbilical cord connection to Europe as a British colony, to our proximity to the rest of Asia. Our national identity (well, the parts of it that aren’t a result of our criminal ancestry) doesn’t make sense if not through the context of being the product of basically everywhere else on the planet, just filtered through the kind of laidback attitude that can take a word that is among the most visceral in the English language (cunt) and find a use for it in pretty much every single conversation.

And for as much as I understand how fraught that history of multiculturalism is, as we don’t have the best history when it comes to white Australians interacting with other cultures, that kind of ethnic melting pot is one of the reasons why, for all its faults, I still fucking love this country. And it’s one of the reasons why this particular film, an anthology co-produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hits me right where I live. Almost literally, since the title and its setting are in Western Sydney, not that far from where I reside and work.

The French Dispatch (2021) - Movie Review

This might be the first time I’ve been apprehensive about reviewing a film, not because of the film itself, but because I doubt I’d be able to improve upon what a certain other critic has already said about this feature. And here it is: A piece written by Aussie critic Grant Watson that might be the best review I’ve ever read for any movie. The act of critique is built from one’s unique perspective on art and the environment that fosters it, and while I certainly have my own thoughts on this film, part of me is kind of jealous that I wasn’t able to come up with something that all-encompassing on the subject. So, basically, in addition to forcing this write-up through a haze of molten summer brain, I’m also having to fight back the first time I can recall having writer’s envy over another reviewer’s work. I might as well be a character in a Wes Anderson film myself.

The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs (2018) - Movie Review

 

As someone who has gone on record about being rather lukewarm with both the Coen brothers and the entire Western genre, this review is going to prove a little tricky. Doubly so because we’re dealing with an anthology film, the kind of fare that doesn’t exactly lend itself well to cohesion. There’s gonna be duds, there’s gonna be winners, and even then, that’s if you’re lucky; most of the time, it’s a collection of middling stories that wouldn’t be able to warrant a separate release, much less stand on their own alongside each other. Well, with all three ducks lined up in a row, I am thankful to report that this turns out good. Like, really damn good.