After Yang (2022) - Movie Review

A film that gets described as a “metaphysical science fiction drama” in its Wikipedia page is like a siren call to me. And the story attached to it certainly doesn’t disappoint from that perspective, exploring what happens to a family when their adopted son passes away. Well, not so much ‘passes away’ as he shuts down and won’t turn back on, as this is set in a near-future where a company exists that basically sells artificial siblings wholesale, and said child (the titular Yang, played by Justin H. Min) is a ‘technosapien’ that couple Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) originally bought so that their other adopted child Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) had someone she could learn about Chinese culture from.

Dick Johnson Is Dead (2020) - Movie Review

We need to laugh in the face of death. It’s something we all have waiting for us wherever the road happens to stop, and it’s the kind of terrible but inevitable event that humour was designed for. Comedy is many things to many different people, but for me, it’s how we deal with the worst that life has to offer, up to and including its end. It’s a way of coming to terms with what we must come to terms with, and learning to take things on the chin so we can carry on with however much of our lives we have left. It’s the kind of morbid cheek that I have spent most of my own life embracing in one form or another, and it’s why this documentary really stuck a chord with me.

The Amazing Johnathan Documentary (2020) - Movie Review

The discourse surrounding films tends to isolate documentaries from basically every other kind of production. Sure, there are mockumentary hybrids that blur that line, but overall, people expect a degree of facticity from documentaries that isn’t normally expected (or at least expected as much) of fiction or even fictionalised versions of real events. Considering how the nature of filmmaking involves a certain element of constructing reality in its very process, that facticity isn’t always guaranteed or even aimed for. But every so often, a documentary takes this idea on-board and basically turns into its own statement on what makes a documentary qualify as such.

Collateral Beauty (2017) - Movie Review

Every couple of years, Will Smith looks at an empty place on his mantle and decides that he wants to fill that space with an Oscar. With that in mind, he goes into full-blown Oscar bait mode and stars in a vehicle meant to give him that acclaim. Unfortunately, up until this point, it hasn’t worked out for him yet. He’s gotten a couple of nominations for Best Actor, most recently in 2006 with The Pursuit Of Happiness, but he has yet to win one. Given the whole media furore over Leonardo DiCaprio’s similar position until his inevitable win for The Revenant, I don’t hold much stock in this need for this particular brand of validation, but nevertheless, he ends up bringing this side of himself to the screen every so often… with very little success, even ignoring the obvious intent behind it all.

I personally have a liking for some of his works in this style, like Seven Pounds and even last year’s Concussion, but there’s a very deliberate and manipulative air to most of them that ultimately make them fall short of their lofty ambitions. Then again, this is something that befalls an awful lot of Oscar hopefuls: They spend so much time trying to tap into some form of emotional complexity that the Academy loves so much, but they don’t spend enough taking a step back and realizing how those emotions are being presented to us and how insensitive it can get. And oh boy, nothing in recent memory embodies the term “insensitive” quite like today’s film.