Friday review: 15 September 2023

A Haunting in Venice, Blue Beetle, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, Building Bridges and Flyways are all in cinemas; You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is on Netflix

Once upon a time, my high school went to Stratford-Upon-Avon to see an RSC pro­duc­tion of The Merchant of Venice. It was an even­ing show so we had the after­noon to amuse ourselves.

Walking around the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, I saw Kenneth Branagh on the ter­race out­side the green room, in full Henry V regalia, hav­ing a quiet smoke dur­ing the mat­inée inter­val and for a moment our eyes met.

I men­tion this only so you know that Ken and I go way back.

Branagh has always been an impres­ario as well as an artist – in the mold of his hero, Laurence Olivier – and by attach­ing him­self to the Agatha Christie com­pany he has found a fran­chise that he can really make his own.

A Haunting in Venice is his third out­ing as Christie’s mous­ta­chioed Belgian detect­ive Hercule Poirot and not only is he really start­ing to settle in to the part but he’s also stretch­ing out as a dir­ect­or now, too.

Wide angles and dutch angles abound in this adapt­a­tion where, typ­ic­ally, every­one has an angle of their own.

Poirot is liv­ing in secluded retire­ment in Venice. The emo­tion­al toll of all those murders has finally told but an author of detect­ive stor­ies (Tina Fey) per­suades him to wit­ness a séance in order to either expose the medi­um (Michelle Yeoh) as a fraud or finally acknow­ledge that there are phe­nom­ena bey­ond his suf­foc­at­ing rationality.

Christie fans will be famil­i­ar with the arc of the story, if not the spe­cif­ics of this one – based loosely on a late Christie nov­el not pre­vi­ously adap­ted for the big screen.

It’s Branagh’s dir­ec­tion that elev­ates this above the pre­vi­ous two and the relo­ca­tion of the story from English coun­try house to Venetian palazzo gives him plenty of scope for spooky atmospherics.

He even res­ists the tempta­tion to give him­self too many linger­ing, misty-eyed close-ups.

A day­time double-feature of Blue Beetle and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem reveals the debt they both owe to Spider-Man. Blue Beetle because it’s about a work­ing class youth get­ting spe­cial powers from a creepy crawly thing and TMNT because it has taken the free­dom of anim­a­tion offered by the most recent Spider-verse films and run with it. It also con­tains a soundtrack full of old school hip-hop needle drops includ­ing De La Soul who fea­tured in Spider-Man: No Way Home.

Winning the charm con­test is DC’s Blue Beetle. I was unfa­mil­i­ar with the char­ac­ter but evid­ently it has a ven­er­able his­tory, going back as far as 1939. This reboot acknow­ledges that his­tory but brings it up to date.

An ali­en device resem­bling a scarab falls into the hands of young LatinX Jaime (Xolo Maridueña) and decides that he should be the new host of all its powers. 

This brings the young man into con­sid­er­able con­flict with glob­al mul­tina­tion­al mil­it­ary tech­no­logy man­u­fac­tur­ers – and real estate gentri­fi­ers – Kord Industries and its ruth­less CEO Susan Sarandon.

It’s rare for films like this to con­cern them­selves with any­thing like polit­ics but this one has a wel­come aware­ness of issues like class, racism, migra­tion and even American mil­it­ary inter­fer­ence in Latin America.

Jaime’s fam­ily are appeal­ing – except per­haps for the one decent-sized star in the group, comedi­an George Lopez who soon out­stays his wel­come – and the details of their struggle street lives are well drawn.

In the end, though, the film falls back on the usu­al mix of guys in flashy suits CGI-flying around punch­ing each oth­er and also sends some mixed mor­al mes­sages. “I’m not a killer,” Jaime says when he first gets into a fight but the canon-fodder Kord sol­diers all seem pretty dis­pos­able by the end.

There’s an awful lot of car­toon viol­ence in TMNT: Mutant Mayhem – the fights prob­ably go on too long to keep very young view­ers engaged but this reboot doesn’t appear to be aimed at kids at all in any case.

Written by the Superbad duo of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (with oth­ers), it seems to be for the now-grown fans of either the ori­gin­al com­ic books or earli­er reboots. There’s plenty of uniron­ic self-referentiality going on here which can get pretty wear­ing but it does look great. It’s dir­ec­ted by Jeff Rowe who made The Mitchells vs. the Machines, a bright spot in the dim uni­verse of Netflix animation.

Despite a raft of celebrity voices in the cast (includ­ing John Cena, Paul Rudd, Ice Cube), the best per­form­ance is from Jackie Chan as Splinter.

New Zealand is such a small place that it shouldn’t be sur­pris­ing that when you meet a high-flying law­yer, innov­at­ive farm­er, ama­teur racing driver, ori­ent­al art col­lect­or or lefty peacen­ik, they all turn out to be the same person.

Bill Youren was all of those things and more and we should be grate­ful that he was also an ace arch­iv­ist. John Christoffels’ doc­u­ment­ary Building Bridges: Bill Youren’s Vision of Peace is made up almost entirely of 8mm film and fam­ily pho­tos shot by Youren over many dec­ades, help­ing paint a pic­ture of New Zealand life from the 30s to the 70s.

While I was utterly absorbed by the time cap­sule, the film is more con­cerned with Youren’s polit­ics and New Zealand’s long and hon­our­able his­tory of anti-war and nuc­le­ar free cam­paign­ing. It’s easy to for­get as we approach anoth­er lurch to the polit­ic­al right, that a great many New Zealanders have wanted us to have an inde­pend­ent (or at least non-aligned) for­eign policy that pri­or­it­ised peace.

Now it feels as if all our prin­ciples are up for grabs if someone thinks there might be a quid in it for farmers.

The abil­ity of some spe­cies of shore­bird to migrate many thou­sands of miles every year – con­tin­ent­al dis­tances – is kind of mira­cu­lous, if you think about it. 

In the new Australian doc­u­ment­ary Flyways we get to see just how mira­cu­lous it is – and how glob­al bird cit­izens need glob­al sup­port if they are to con­tin­ue existing.

Full of lovely images and dis­arm­ing facts – god­wits can shut down half their brains while they are fly­ing instead of sleep­ing – Flyways makes clear how per­il­ous the migration/breeding pro­cess is and how threatened the eco­sys­tems are that these birds rely on.

Thanks to hero sci­ent­ists that are finally man­aging to tag and track these wily creatures we are start­ing to under­stand the routes they take and which import­ant loc­a­tions we need to pre­serve so the cycle can con­tin­ue. The answer is ‘pretty much all of them’.

Wetlands, man. Seems to be the answer to almost every envir­on­ment­al ques­tion nowadays.

Finally, to Netflix, where Adam Sandler has been com­fort­ably enjoy­ing his exclus­ive pro­duc­tion deal since 2016.

The latest fruit of that arrange­ment is the young adult nov­el adapt­a­tion You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah. This is a fam­ily busi­ness now as wife Jackie and kids Sadie and Sunny all take part. Indeed, Adam is just a sup­port­ing act­or in this pic­ture as 15-year-old Sunny takes the lead.

She’s Stacy Friedman, pre­par­ing to become a woman in the eyes of God (and her com­munity), along with her best friend Lydia (Samantha Lorraine). A mis­un­der­stand­ing over a boy means the two fall out, threat­en­ing to ruin their dream Bat Mitzvahs.

Strikingly frank about some aspects of teen­age girl­hood – and much more suc­cess­fully inhab­it­ing its cul­tur­al world than My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 last week – YASNITMBM is some­times very funny, often heart­felt and this review­er senses that it will be very pop­u­lar with the age group it represents.

Editorial note

When I was writ­ing these reviews for the Capital Times back between 2007 and 2013 I was proud to say that I watched everything and I assumed that’s what I would do this time around.

However, two films have come across my path in recent days that I simply don’t want to cov­er. One is a doc­u­ment­ary about a New Zealand mixed mar­tial arts star and the oth­er a ‘doc­u­ment­ary’ about the Parliament protests of 2022, sup­posedly from the point of view of the protestors.

The first I don’t want to watch because I don’t care to wit­ness people fight­ing in cages, no mat­ter how uplift­ing the back­ground story might be.

The second because I don’t want to give oxy­gen to that corner of the polit­ic­al spec­trum. They’ve done enough damage.

In the old days, it would nev­er have occurred to me that there would be films in cinemas that I would con­sider so objec­tion­able in advance as to ignore them com­pletely but here we are.