Friday reviews for 18 August 2023

Last Film Show, Jules, Strays and Monolith are new in cinemas, Heart of Stone is streaming on Netflix and Red, White and Royal Blue is on Prime Video

A few weeks ago I wrote an art­icle for RNZ arguing against the com­mon cinephile opin­ion that 35mm (or 70mm or IMAX) film was inher­ently super­i­or to digit­al presentation.

I stand by this. Empirically speak­ing, there’s no longer any jus­ti­fic­a­tion for the con­stantly deteri­or­at­ing pic­ture qual­ity and envir­on­ment­al waste­ful­ness of film in cinemas. To argue oth­er­wise is just the same ana­logue fet­ish­isa­tion that sees people pay twice the price for music on vinyl, only to play it back on a tinny bluetooth plastic turntable.

Watching Pan Nalin’s Last Film Show, though, I got one of those “are we the bad­dies?” moments because the romance of film is as strong in this pic­ture as any I’ve ever seen.

Set in 2010, it’s the cine­mat­ic coming-of-age story of young Samay (Bhavin Rabari), a rapscal­lion determ­ined to wag school at every oppor­tun­ity in order to indulge his love of cinema and his curi­os­ity about its technologies.

Thanks to his mother’s won­der­ful cook­ing, Samay is taken under the wing of pro­jec­tion­ist Fazal (Bhavesh Shrimali) and he becomes determ­ined to take his exper­i­ments with light back to the tiny rail­way vil­lage where his fath­er makes tea for passengers.

Last Film Show is stun­ning to look at – pho­to­graphed by Swapnil S. Sunawatne – and writer-director Nalin’s influ­ences are all on show. Malick, Coppola, Kubrick, Tarkovsky are all ref­er­enced with rev­er­ence up there on the screen, but also the great Indian dir­ect­or Satyajit Ray, whose debut Pather Panchali seems to be the mod­el for Samay’s home, fam­ily and landscape.

Landing beau­ti­fully in the sweet spot of my tastes and interests, Last Film Show is an abso­lute charm­er and a whole­hearted recom­mend­a­tion. Sessions are lim­ited so it will need some seek­ing out.

If any oth­er act­or turned in a per­form­ance like Ben Kingsley does as Milton in Jules we would be talk­ing about awards con­ten­tion but, for some reas­on, we are so used to his sheer reli­ab­il­ity we risk tak­ing him for granted.

Milton is a seni­or in a small Pennsylvania town, liv­ing alone, occa­sion­ally see­ing one child (Zoe Winters from Succession) and estranged from the oth­er, his memory is slip­ping occa­sion­ally and the dis­trac­tion of a fly­ing sau­cer crash­ing in his back­yard and an ali­en on his couch are prov­ing to be extra unwel­come distractions.

Neighbours Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (very funny Jane Curtin) dis­cov­er his secret and try and help him keep it.

79-year-old Kingsley is fant­ast­ic and the film is full of lovely moments and rarely goes in quite the dir­ec­tion you think it will. Count your cats when you get home.

Strays shouldn’t be my cup of tea at all, but I found myself laugh­ing inap­pro­pri­ately at times, in spite of myself.

Will Ferrell is the voice of Reggie, a naïve little ter­ri­er who believes that his oafish owner’s attempt to get rid of him is just an exten­ded game of ‘fetch’. Finally lost in the big city, he enlists the help of Bug (Jamie Foxx), Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park) to help him get home.

A deeply filthy gross-out par­ody of those Homeward Bound type films, Strays is even­tu­ally just as sen­ti­ment­al as the films whose pee it is tak­ing and maybe that’s why I ended up not hat­ing it. I cer­tainly laughed out loud when Dennis Quaid turned up.

In the South Australia indie Monolith, Lily Sullivan plays a dis­graced journ­al­ist reduced to pro­du­cing a pod­cast about mys­ter­i­ous phe­nom­ena. An anonym­ous tip sug­gests the exist­ence of mys­ter­i­ous black bricks that cause the pos­sessor to exper­i­ence dan­ger­ous hallucinations.

Holed up in her par­ents lux­uri­ous house with only her pod­cast­ing gear – and a pet turtle – for com­pany, the des­per­ate journ­al­ist becomes obsessed and the mys­tery lands closer and closer to home.

The house is too big – and the lakeside grounds too vast – for it to be truly claus­tro­phobic, and the voices on the oth­er end of the line are where the drama is for too long, but the slow psy­cho­lo­gic­al unrav­el­ling is well por­trayed by Sullivan and dir­ect­or Matt Vesely.

Ultimately, though, Monolith is a set of restric­tions in search of a bet­ter story. 

Watching Heart of Stone the oth­er night, my wife described it as “anoth­er world tour of screen sub­sidies” just as the pro­duc­tion arrived in Iceland (after stop-offs in Italy, London, Portugal and Morocco).

This appears to be a strategy for Netflix with their tent­pole pro­duc­tions: travel the world to glam­or­ous loc­a­tions, blow a lot of things up, and try and make Gal Gadot an actu­al thing. This may be work­ing for them in terms of instant eye­balls but it isn’t work­ing cre­at­ively. Despite all the budget and star power, Red Notice, The Gray Man and Heart of Stone are all just pound shop Mission: Impossibles and it’s deeply depress­ing to con­sider how much money has been spent on films that lit­er­ally no one will remem­ber in six weeks time.

Gadot plays an under­cov­er agent for a mys­ter­i­ous organ­isa­tion called the The Charter, cus­todi­ans of a giant super­com­puter with the power to (almost) pre­dict the future. When it looks like that com­puter might fall in to the wrong hands, Stone – for that is her name – must take on her former ment­or or risk the fate of the world.

One final obser­va­tion: after train roof fights in the new Indiana Jones and the new Mission: Impossible, as well as the wan­ton destruc­tion of European trams in The Gray Man and Heart of Stone, its clear that the absence of decent rail-based pub­lic trans­port­a­tion is the reas­on why the big block­busters don’t come and shoot in New Zealand. There’s a chal­lenge for the next government.

The open­ing scenes of Red, White & Royal Blue are so excru­ci­at­ing that my usu­al view­ing com­pan­ion gave up and I had to watch the rest myself a few days later.

Luckily for me – and for the film – that dire, tin-eared, try-hard, meet-cute was not rep­res­ent­at­ive of where things would go.

An LGBTQ+ ver­sion of The Princess Diaries is one way to describe it, except that it is a good deal more frank about what intim­ate rela­tion­ships between grown-ups actu­ally entail and sur­pris­ingly sens­it­ive about what com­ing out in the spot­light might be like but also how con­strained our two cent­ral char­ac­ters are in all the aspects of their lives.

Based on a best-selling BookTok-beloved nov­el, Red, White & Royal Blue is about the bur­geon­ing rela­tion­ship between the son of the American pres­id­ent (Taylor Zachary Perez) and the “spare” prince of England, grand­son of the King (Nicholas Galitzine).

The book star­ted out as fan-fiction and the film as not much more than fan-service for lov­ers of the book, but that isn’t the end of the world, espe­cially when the film settles down, doesn’t try too hard to cre­ate trailer-friendly moments and lets the two leads get on with their own chemistry.

Strays is in wide release in cinemas now, Jules is in select cinemas, Last Film Show has very lim­ited ses­sions and Monolith even few­er. At least in Wellington, the suc­cess of Barbie and Oppenheimer are put­ting a squeeze on screens.

Heart of Stone is stream­ing on Netflix and Red, White & Royal Blue is treat­ing on Prime Video.

This week’s review is ded­ic­ated to Jim Ahern, Paramount pro­jec­tion­ist dur­ing my co-ownership, and someone who knew plenty about get­ting light on a screen.