Asteroid City, Gran Turismo and Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter are all in cinemas
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.
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