Friday reviews for 28 July 2023

They Cloned Tyrone (Taylor, 2023) is on Netflix, John Farnham: Finding the Voice (Stockell, 2023) is in theatres and Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine (Gal, 2023) is also streaming on Netflix

The Black List is an annu­al sur­vey of the most pop­u­lar unpro­duced scripts in Hollywood – the scripts that exec­ut­ives love but for some reas­on can’t fin­ance or put into pro­duc­tion. It’s at the same time a pos­it­ive endorse­ment of the cre­ativ­ity under almost every rock in Hollywood and an indict­ment of an industry that is increas­ingly unlikely to take chances on that creativity.

Often, a script will escape the Black List and become an actu­al film – some­times a suc­cess­ful one. Presence on the list is, in itself, a form of pro­fes­sion­al endorse­ment. Argo, The King’s Speech and Slumdog Millionaire were all on the Black List at one time or another.

Which leads me to They Cloned Tyrone – a film that draws on too many influ­ences to be truly ori­gin­al but that is made with such deli­cious aplomb that it feels like you are watch­ing some­thing very fresh.

John Boyega (the Star Wars sequels, Small Axe and The Woman King) plays Fontaine, a strug­gling drug deal­er in a semi-rural Southern loc­a­tion called The Glen. When he is stiffed on his share by a pimp named Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx) he goes to the motel where Charles is lying low, retrieves his money and is then shot sev­er­al times by a rival in the park­ing lot.

Imagine everyone’s sur­prise, then, when he wakes up the next morn­ing in the same bed, and pro­ceeds to do the same things he did the day before. It’s not Groundhog Day – he him­self is unaware that he died the pre­vi­ous night until it is poin­ted out to him.

Fontaine, Slick Charles and one of Charles’ hook­ers Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) rather reluct­antly at first, attempt to get to the bot­tom of this mys­tery, which turns out to involve bizarre mind con­trol exper­i­ment­a­tion and a massive gov­ern­ment conspiracy.

It’s played at a fun and furi­ous pace – older view­ers might require sub­titles – and the dir­ec­tion, edit­ing, art dir­ec­tion and per­form­ances all com­bine to make it a thor­oughly enter­tain­ing, if ulti­mately enra­ging, two hours. To throw back to Slumdog Millionaire, I once said that after see­ing that at the Embassy Theatre, every film for the next few weeks felt old fash­ioned and that’s what I think about this one, too.

The final third isn’t as thrill­ing as the first two but that’s because the film reveals what it has on its mind. And it’s a lot.

The first ses­sion of John Farnham: Finding the Voice this morn­ing had three attendees. This review­er and a couple who pro­fessed to be huge “Johnny” Farnham fans and who told me they expec­ted to be sign­ing along to all the songs.

As it hap­pens, they did not fol­low through on this prom­ise, I think because the film became pretty absorb­ing pretty quickly and that it becomes clear that the happy-go-lucky 60s pop idol Johnny Farnham is the least inter­est­ing ver­sion of an often-reinvented performer.

Told in first-person talk­ing head style – some con­trib­ut­ors are voi­ceover only for reas­ons that become appar­ent later on – we learn that Farnham had huge Australian suc­cess too soon, nev­er quite learned to cope with it, and then took anoth­er 20 years to emerge from that repu­ta­tion to become the per­former he was destined to be.

Without ques­tion – at least to my mind – the finest male pop voice in Australian his­tory, Farnham’s pipes are the high­light of the pic­ture, even when he’s ill-at-ease with the mater­i­al or the dis­ap­point­ing state of his career. And, like a Farnham per­form­ance, the film eases gently into its work before soar­ing to an emo­tion­al climax.

It’s also the story of a monu­ment­al friend­ship – Farnham and his best mate and man­ager Glenn Wheatley. Wheatley always tried to look after Farnham, to the extent of put­ting him in the phe­nom­en­ally suc­cess­ful Little River Band only to have the rest of the band kick him out because he was soak­ing up too much atten­tion. It would be anoth­er five years before Wheatley would mort­gage his house to pay for the record­ing of the Whispering Jack album – fea­tur­ing You’re the Voice – that made Farnham a glob­al superstar.

And it was all done without a con­tract. Beautiful story, beau­ti­ful friend­ship, lovely guys. For a while it seemed as if this film wasn’t going to fol­low the com­mon Aussie rock bio­graphy path of sub­stance abuse and a tra­gic end but then life has a way of inter­ven­ing in your story, even if it waits until the last minute.

The James Webb tele­scope is the biggest single pro­ject Nasa has ever engaged in. At a cost of nearly ten bil­lion US dol­lars and a devel­op­ment time­frame of over 23 years, the num­bers being ban­died around in Unknown: Cosmic Time Machine, the new Netflix doc­u­ment­ary about the lead-up and launch of the incred­ible device, are mind-blowing.

Before this film, I was aware of Webb’s pre­de­cessor Hubble and had thought that Webb was just a big­ger and bet­ter ver­sion. Well, it is, but it’s also a lot fur­ther away – at the moment approx­im­ately 2,700 times fur­ther away which is in itself mind-blowing.

And, also mind-blowing, it is a time machine as – thanks to the speed of light – it is look­ing back at events that occurred bil­lions of years ago, reveal­ing details about the form­a­tion of galax­ies, not to men­tion the loc­a­tion of many more that we were pre­vi­ously unaware of.

While the sci­ence is – how shall I put this – mind-blowing, the film is less so. There are no cam­er­as aboard trans­mit­ting foot­age so the most dra­mat­ic moments after launch are anim­ated reen­act­ments. I could also do without the reli­ance on social media mont­ages to demon­strate to the view­er how amaz­ing it all is. The facts are doing a decent job of that on their own, thanks.

I would like to take this oppor­tun­ity to thank every­one who has signed up so far, espe­cially those who have chosen to become pay­ing sub­scribers before they have to. It is very gratifying. 

I’d also like to thank those of you who have com­men­ted – Doug, Tui – and encour­age you to provide feed­back and join the con­ver­sa­tion. I haven’t quite worked out how to use the Notes fea­ture to keep the dia­logue mov­ing but I expect that is in our future.

Have a great weekend.