Friday new releases: 8 December 2023

The Boy and the Heron, Next Goal Wins and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé are in cinemas

After I came out of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron yes­ter­day I texted this mes­sage to the fam­ily chat:

Don’t read or listen to any­thing about Boy and the Heron before watch­ing. Not even from me.

This is excel­lent advice when it comes to get­ting the most out of the film but it presents some­thing of a chal­lenge for this news­let­ter. I’m going to make a list of obser­va­tions that I hope are help­ful but that do noth­ing to spoil reveal any of the sur­prises that are in the film. There are many.

• This is the fourth excel­lent film released recently by a dir­ect­or who is in their 80s but this the only one of the four that seems to be per­son­ally informed by age and age­ing. A dream­like remem­brance of things past, if you like.

• The film is set dur­ing World War II and – even dur­ing the fantasy sequences – all the char­ac­ters are hungry.

• The open­ing sequence feels like a nod to Grave of the Fireflies, a Ghibli film made by Miyazaki’s col­league Isao Takahata, released on the same day as My Neighbour Totoro in April 1988.

• It’s clearly a film that could have been con­ceived and made by no oth­er dir­ect­or than Miyazaki.

• Visually, it feels inspired by Miyazaki’s love of Europe and European archi­tec­ture and the European tales that he has adap­ted in the past: The Borrowers (which became Arietty), Tales From Earthsea (actu­ally dir­ec­ted by Miyazaki’s son Goro), Howl’s Moving Castle.

• It com­bines the weird, often night­mar­ish, qual­it­ies of Spirited Away with the real­ist­ic con­text of The Wind Rises.

• In fact, it does a won­der­ful job of show­ing how fine a line there is between dreams and nightmares.

• While there is a lot of visu­al inven­tion – and cute­ness – I don’t think this is a film that chil­dren will get much out of.

• From memory, there are no Ghibli cats. Lots of dif­fer­ent kinds of bird, but no cats.

• The final scene – the final shot – is as dev­ast­at­ing a per­son­al state­ment as Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. It stunned me and – even though I gen­er­ally stay through the cred­its – I couldn’t move for sev­er­al minutes afterwards.

I’m going back to see it again on Sunday, that’s how much I loved this film.

When I’m con­fron­ted by a remake or an adapt­a­tion of an earli­er work, I try and think of the two things as being cof­fee and instant cof­fee. They may share a name but they are dif­fer­ent bever­ages and mak­ing com­par­is­ons between them is pointless.

So, I went in to Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins determ­ined to put out of my mind the excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary of the same name that inspired it. It deserves to stand on its own merits.

At least it would, if it had any.

The tale of the American Samoan foot­ball team, their rehab­il­it­a­tion fol­low­ing the greatest defeat in inter­na­tion­al foot­ball his­tory to Australia in 2001 thanks to the arrival of a hard-bitten pro­fes­sion­al coach, who in turn sees his own rehab­il­it­a­tion thanks to the play­ers and the people of the island, is a great story and told straight it could have been a real crowd-pleaser.

But Waititi can’t tell it straight. He has to embel­lish and insert him­self into it. He adds cheap jokes that come at the expense of the people he is try­ing to cel­eb­rate and he basic­ally sells out every­one involved.

I’m usu­ally a sup­port­er of Waititi and see his wild ton­al vari­ations as a fea­ture not a bug of the sys­tem but Next Goal Wins doesn’t land enough of the laughs to jus­ti­fy the approach that he is taking.

It feels rot­ten to cri­ti­cise a film that centres Pasifika people and cul­ture to a glob­al audi­ence for the first time, a film that also stops to patiently explain – and respect­fully por­tray – fa’afine and gender diverse people to a mass audi­ence but I’m afraid that’s what I have to do.

Such a missed oppor­tun­ity but I sup­pose we must be grate­ful that it exists at all and that vet­er­an Pacifica per­formers like Oscar Kightly and Dave Fane are get­ting to show their work on a Hollywood scale.

Next Film Wins, maybe?

If you’ll for­give me, and because it’s not online any­where in text form, I’ll re-use my review of the Beyoncé con­cert movie from RNZ’s At the Movies this week:

Still in the world of pop music, but def­in­itely not steal­ing or drain­ing any­one else’s tal­ent because she has more than enough to go around, is Beyoncé Knowles-Carter who – like Taylor Swift – has put a filmed record of her extraordin­ary Renaissance con­cert tour on big screens around the world.

It’s not quite the same as Swift’s Eras tour that came out about a month ago. This is more like a doc­u­ment­ary with long per­form­ance seg­ments inter­spersed with behind-the-scenes foot­age from the pre­par­a­tion, rehears­als and the shows,  and with extra little digres­sions into her fam­ily and a Destiny’s Child reunion.

I appre­ci­ated that Ms. Knowles-Carter wanted to spot­light the oth­er cre­at­ive col­lab­or­at­ors and the hard-working crew. It takes hun­dreds of people to make a pro­duc­tion like that and I’m always curi­ous about what makes mod­ern show people tick – there are no people like them, as the old song says, they smile when they are low.

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And the great diva her­self has enough self-knowledge to admit that there are three ver­sions of her in the film: the wife and moth­er; the hard-as-nails busi­ness­wo­man employ­ing all these people. And the extraordin­ary force of nature that appears when she walks on stage. Even she doesn’t quite know where that comes from.

Unlike Swift, who looks like she might have stepped out of the audi­ence, just one of you ordin­ary folks who – shucks – had a bit of tal­ent and got lucky, Beyoncé is like a god walk­ing among us. Someone who can dic­tate that her shows are a ‘safe space’ for the alpha­bet people who make up so many of her fans. Someone who’s digit­al alter-ego is entirely made of chrome and shoots lasers from her nipples. She demands awe and it’s easy for an audi­ence – includ­ing your humble cor­res­pond­ent – to comply.

But the film fails to wrestle with many of her con­tra­dic­tions. She boosts – and is adored by –many of the most mar­gin­al­ised sub­cul­tures that mod­ern life has to offer but charges them a for­tune to be in her pres­ence. Her shows are tech­no­lo­gic­al mar­vels, and they bring so much joy to so many, but I’m not sure that fly­ing back to Cannes in a private jet after every show is all that sus­tain­able, you know, long term.

Missing in action

There are a few films in cinemas at the moment that are play­ing baff­lingly lim­ited ses­sions and that has meant that I can’t get to them in time for this newsletter.

Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, the bio­graphy of Leonard Bernstein, is only play­ing one ses­sion a day at Coastlands in Paraparaumu (of all places) so it looks like that will have to wait for its Netflix debut on 20 December.

Dicks: The Musical had a few more ses­sions but they clashed with both of The Boy and the Heron and Next Goal Wins yesterday.

I didn’t even real­ise until this moment that John Woo’s Silent Night was screen­ing in Upper Hutt and Miramar.

The haphaz­ard way that films are being released now makes plan­ning dif­fi­cult and exe­cu­tion some­times impossible. But we sol­dier on.

Further reading and listening

I was up early this morn­ing to chat to Corin Dann on RNZ’s Morning Report this morn­ing about my soon-to-be-published guide to Twelve Films of Christmas. It’s always good to get in to the stu­dio and see how the rest of the saus­age gets made.

Yesterday, I pos­ted a think piece about the price rise for Neon and Sky Sports that was recently announced by Sky TV. I’m plan­ning an end-of-year sur­vey on the state of stream­ing and phys­ic­al media before we get to Christmas.