I’m not sure what I was hoping to get out of this. I mean, it’s a cheesetastic rom-com with a very specific audience that I am in no way a part of; even with my usual willingness to watch just about anything, I went into this mainly as just a means to get out of the house for a bit. But as I sat in that cinema, completely alone, I came face to face with a film that managed an admittedly impressive gambit of being both unfathomably boring and infuriating to sit through.
There’s an easy joke to be made about there being yet another Batman movie in cinemas right now. And while it’s certainly true that the Dark Knight can be quite oversaturated, both on the screen and in the comics, that’s largely the result of just how versatile he is as a character aesthetic. Some put emphasis on the psychological edges of his choice to be a Bat-man who regularly fights insane asylum escapees, like in Grant Morrison’s Arkham Asylum. Others focus more on the tragedy of that existence, where he’s fighting an endless war for a city he knows far less about than he realises, like in Scott Snyder’s New 52 run. Others still frame him as the father of a family of crimefighters (something that has taken on a literal dimension in recent years thanks to Damian Wayne), finding a substitute for the family he lost when he was a child, like in Marv Wolfman’s A Lonely Place Of Dying.
It’s stuff like this that can keep a pop culture figure fresh even after eighty years, and it’s part of the reason why I have and likely always will look forward to seeing a new take on Gotham’s protector. I had next to no apprehensions about this thing from day one of hearing about it, as Robert Pattinson has gone from strength to strength in his post-Twilight script picks, and Matt Reeves has some exceptional work under his belt with War For The Planet Of The Apes, as well as Cloverfield and Let Me In. And thankfully, all of that talent pools into something that… well, there will always be a debate to be had over where this sits alongside past efforts, but it most assuredly stands out from the pack in a number of ways.
Medicine At Midnight is a weird-ass album. I love the hell out of the Foo Fighters (Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace is one of my favourite albums from any band), but hearing them go into full-on DFA-style dance-rock was quite jarring. It’s like a midway point between a standard late-period Foos album and a Bee Gees cover album, which the Foos also released just a few months later under the name ‘Dee Gees’ (it’s called Hail Satin, and it’s surprisingly good; Dave can hit those high notes). For a former post-grunge band rubbing up against disco, it’s certainly not as embarrassing as Nickleback’s She Keeps Me Up, and even in the larger spectrum of aging post-grunge, it’s a hell of a lot better than whatever the fuck Aaron Lewis is doing nowadays, but it’s still very odd. To paraphrase a YouTube comment under their cover of You Should Be Dancing, it shows the Foos entering the “because we fucking can” phase of their career.
I bring all this up because, even with all that in my head beforehand, the most interesting aspect of Medicine At Midnight isn’t on the album itself. Rather, it’s to do with where Grohl and company recorded the thing. They shacked up in a 1940s mansion in Encino, Los Angeles, where, according to Grohl, weird shit kept happened. Like, ‘this house might be possessed’ kind of weird shit. They had to sign an NDA with the house’s owner, so they’re unable to get into their own supposed filmed evidence of this stuff, but basically, the Foos’ softest record to date was recorded under some pretty metal circumstances.
And from that background, the spores for this film came forth, with a script based on Dave Grohl’s experiences and the band itself starring as fictionalised versions of themselves. Hell, the main shooting location is the Encino property this all originally took place in. I had next to no expectations going into this, but out of respect for both the Spheres and Dave Grohl himself as the nicest guy in rock, I was definitely curious to see what kind of production could spring out of such an idea. The end result of it all, however, is confusingly muddled.
Might want to have a stiff drink on hand for this one, because this is going to be a difficult film to write about, much less read about. This is a Bosnian film (another first for this blog’s coverage of international cinema) set during the Srebrenica massacre, which involved the slaughter of over 8000 Bosniak Muslims at the hands of the Army of Republika Srpska. And unlike more recent films like Beanpole or Hive (which also looked at Serbia’s history of war crimes), the story isn’t being told in retrospect. Instead, it is told from the point-of-view of the titular Aida (Jasna Ðuričić), a teacher who also works as an interpreter for the United Nations, who finds herself in the middle of the events that would lead to genocide.
I have been eagerly looking forward to seeing this movie and reviewing it. Hell, I’ve been itching for the chance to talk about its director for quite some time. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven has one of the most fascinating, if not outright legendary, filmographies of any cinema creative I’ve come across. After some modest successes in his native Holland over the ‘70s and early ‘80s, Verhoeven moved to the United States and had one hell of a hot streak. RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers, and Hollow Man, all one right after the other over the course of thirteen years. This is why I love auteur theory: So many of the idiosyncrasies in those films suddenly make a bit more sense once you realise they’re from the same mind.
And after a brief return to the Netherlands for 2006’s Black Book, he has since settled down in France where he put together the immensely uncomfortable (and I say that as someone who sat through Una and The Nightingale) Ella. For as much as I can appreciate the characterisation in that film, it also shows a darker side to Verhoeven’s iconic lack of taste that is not easy to sit through, and not exactly for the best of reasons. As someone with a serious admiration for the man’s work at his peak (Showgirls isn’t a so-bad-it’s-good movie, it’s a legitimately great film, and I will die on that hill), I was truly hoping that his latest wouldn’t be more of the same unpleasantness. And indeed, this is quite a different beast from the likes of Ella.
Well, Universal sent me to another preview screening, and even though I have some… uncomfortable history with the director behind this particular feature, I’ll admit that I was actually quite hopeful that this would turn out good. The last three write-ups I’ve done on the works of Joe Wright have been, in a word, disastrous. Pan and The Woman In The Window are so amazingly bad that they almost reach genius from the other side, and Darkest Hour ultimately didn’t pan out because it came out too soon after the similar (and superior, at least to me) feature Churchill.
But over time, I’ve at least made peace with the fact that these films exist, as the bread of that turd sandwich is the result of Joe Wright trying to work outside of the classically-minded, accessibly-presented, ‘ideal for high school classes studying the original text’ framework that made up the bulk of his filmography pre-Pan. They were failed experiments, but experiments nonetheless, and as soon as the trailer for his latest reached my attention, I was hoping he’d make a comeback by reminding audiences why his debut with Pride & Prejudice made as big a splash as it did: The man is talented, if given the right story to work with.
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.
