Friday reviews for 11 August 2023

When I pre­viewed Asteroid City for RNZ back in those far off heady days BF (Before Festival), I sug­ges­ted that its greatest pleas­ures may well be unlocked by fur­ther viewing.

Well, I haven’t had an oppor­tun­ity to do that yet but I have been replay­ing a lot of it in my mind and I am determ­ined to see it again soon­er rather than later.

I have a feel­ing that Asteroid City is deep­er than than most oth­er Wes Anderson pic­tures but that depth of feel­ing is obscured by the usu­al lay­ers of self-consciousness, irony, detach­ment and mis­dir­ec­tion. Techniques that many of us real humans are prone to.

Set in the 1950s, Asteroid City is about a dis­par­ate group of guests at a mini-festival in the desert cel­eb­rat­ing young sci­ence prodi­gies. At first they are trapped togeth­er because of the con­ven­tion, the prize giv­ing and the speeches, but then they find them­selves con­strained by the gov­ern­ment, determ­ined to keep the lid on an unex­pec­ted ali­en incursion.

The story is also a story itself. A Broadway play being recre­ated in front of our eyes by the ori­gin­al cast, a lay­er of dis­trac­tion that allows for some con­sid­er­able fun at the expense of self-important theatre makers but also asks us to con­sider who and what the story is for.

It goes without say­ing that, after elev­en fea­tures as a dir­ect­or, you will already know wheth­er Mr. Anderson’s work is your cup of tea of not. He is def­in­itely mine, but cal­ib­rate your own feel­ings accordingly.

Oh my word, the logos! Every single frame of Gran Turismo (amus­ingly auto­cor­rec­ted as Grant Truism who I ima­gine to be an Australian op-ed writer for a Murdoch news paper), every … single … frame is sat­ur­ated with cor­por­ate identification.

Of course, this is the world of motor­s­port for you. If a com­pany could find a way to tat­too its logo on to the inside of your eye­lids it abso­lutely would. But if you thought that Barbie was all about product place­ment, have I got news for you.

As befits a film set in the world of fast cars, Gran Turismo is a heav­ily stream­lined ver­sion of a true story. Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe from See) was not, in fact, the first sim play­er to gradu­ate from the GT Academy to real race cars, he wasn’t even the second, but he has been the most suc­cess­ful, still racing pro­fes­sion­ally in Japan.

Gran Turismo, the game, does not advert­ise itself as a game. It is a sim­u­lat­or, attempt­ing to recre­ate as accur­ately as pos­sible the phys­ics of racing real cars on real cir­cuits. Nissan and Sony got togeth­er to see wheth­er the evid­ent skills of the top sim drivers could be rep­lic­ated in the real world and GT Academy was born.

I get the desire for accur­acy in these sorts of games. I’m a Fifa EAFC play­er, myself, and the pleas­ures for me in the game are as much about the annu­al updates than it is the game play, which I mostly suck at. This story is the equi­val­ent of someone like me get­ting a tri­al for Wellington Phoenix.

Considering its lim­it­a­tions, Gran Turismo is enter­tain­ing enough. Neill Blomkamp’s dir­ec­tion dur­ing the race scenes keeps the adren­aline at an accept­able level but the best aspects are the per­form­ances of Dijon Hounsou and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell Horner as Jann’s par­ents and David Harbour as coach/race man­ager Jack Salter. They all do a job of ground­ing what they can of this story but Harbour, espe­cially, brings a resigned real world-wearyness to it that’s always welcome.

Published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was one of the first mod­ern nov­els, telling the story through a mix of diary entries, news­pa­per art­icles and – in the case of the Demeter – the Captain’s log of the jour­ney taken by 50 crates of Transylvanian dirt from Eastern Europe to England.

It’s a great tale to hang a hor­ror off. A single loc­a­tion with no escape, a mon­ster on board tak­ing out the crew one by one, safety in sight but seem­ingly impossible to achieve.

One prob­lem is that we pretty much know how it all ends – the film does not pre­tend oth­er­wise – but Norwegian hor­ror spe­cial­ist André Øvredal does do a good job of keep­ing up the sus­pense even if the end product felt a bit overlong.

It’s an old fash­ioned hor­ror, as befits the source mater­i­al, and doesn’t attempt to drastic­ally rein­vent either the form or the mon­ster itself. Plenty of prac­tic­al hor­ror effects are on show and Dracula him­self is more closely related to the Max Schreck Nosferatu ver­sion than the suave rich Counts of oth­er films.

The inter­na­tion­al cast is good with some famil­i­ar char­ac­ter act­ors on show, includ­ing Liam Cunningham from Game of Thrones and David Dastmalchian (still on big screens in Oppenheimer). There’s a lead role for Corey Hawkins (Dr. Dre in Straight Outta Compton) and he’s good apart from an occa­sion­al wobbly accent.

Requests? Reader MC of Mt. Victoria has been heart­ily recom­mend­ing that we watch Justified (2010−2015) on Disney+ and I am also very keen to watch the sequel series Justified: City Primeval which landed a few weeks ago.

But … six sea­sons. Anyone want to chime in with sup­port for this sug­ges­tion? It’s a big commitment.