Monday new releases: 24 June 2024

Mark Cousins is one of the smarter people in the film world and this post on X (formerly Twitter) is a good example of get­ting straight to the point:

I have my own ver­sion of that rule: remem­ber to review the film you are watch­ing, not what you think it should have been. Stay in the moment and try and con­nect to a filmmaker’s inten­tions rather than your own pref­er­ences or taste.

The three ques­tions I try and remem­ber to ask when review­ing are these:

• What is the film try­ing to say?

• How well does it say it?

• Was it worth say­ing in the first place?

I’m mostly good at doing that, I think, but recently found myself respond­ing neg­at­ively to a film because of the noise around it, rather than tak­ing it on its own terms.

That film is Richard Linklater’s Hit Man which received a great response at its Venice première in June last year – evid­ently it was a real crowd-pleaser with pre­dic­tions that it would be a hit with audi­ences look­ing for an adult-orientated com­edy. It’s the kind of film – mid-sized, sexy, sur­pris­ing – that has been thin on the ground lately.

Then it was bought by Netflix, with their spotty rela­tion­ship with put­ting their films in cinemas. This annoyed people who believed that it would work bet­ter with crowds than at home, and that bypassing a decent cinema release was doing the film a disservice.

So, by the time the film dropped a couple of weeks ago, I was – as a fan of Linklater and of grown-up comedy-thrillers gen­er­ally – fairly well primed to enjoy it. Then, when it failed to blow me away the dis­ap­point­ment was that much greater.

My wife, how­ever, enjoyed it a lot. “It’s very enter­tain­ing, what’s your prob­lem?” she said as I hemmed and hawed after­wards. “It wasn’t the film I’d been prom­ised,” I said, which really meant it wasn’t the film that I wanted.

The gap between hope and real­ity is clearly my prob­lem not the film’s, so I’ve spent a few days try­ing to wrestle with the real­ity of it and work out why I didn’t enjoy it as much as oth­er people.

My first – and biggest – prob­lem is Glen Powell as psy­cho­logy pro­fess­or and under­cov­er New Orleans police con­sult­ant Gary Johnson. I do not buy what Powell is selling and haven’t since he moved out of the ranks of the sup­port­ing play­ers – where he was mostly for­get­table – to movie star. Someone – not least Powell him­self – is work­ing very hard to make him a very big thing but I sense the cal­cu­la­tion of it all and find myself resisting.

There’s a self-consciousness here and just put­ting him in dif­fer­ent wig and cos­tumes – he mas­quer­ades as dif­fer­ent killers for hire in order to entrap those that would seek their ser­vices – doesn’t turn him into Peter Sellers.

His on-screen spar­ring part­ner is much bet­ter. Adria Arjona plays a pro­spect­ive cli­ent who Johnson falls for and she’s a live wire – unpre­dict­able and in the moment.

Anyway, maybe my response was con­di­tioned by Netflix pre­ju­dice – I have had some very aver­age exper­i­ences with their films – and if I had seen Hit Man with a packed, excited, fest­iv­al audi­ence I might have enjoyed it more. But, on a Saturday night on the couch, it was decent enough enter­tain­ment but not the answer to anyone’s prayers.

No expect­a­tions is the best way to enjoy the Australian doc­u­ment­ary, The Road to Patagonia. It starts with a car crash that grabs you by the lapels and demands that you pay atten­tion. Once it has that atten­tion, it becomes mul­tiple dif­fer­ent films over the 90-minute run­ning time: a travel doc­u­ment­ary, surf movie, love story, anthro­po­lo­gic­al study, spir­itu­al jour­ney, eco­lo­gic­al treat­ise and cam­paign for con­ser­va­tion. Amazingly, it does all of those things really well.

Matty Hannon is an explorer – in more ways than one. Realising that a dead end desk job in Melbourne was giv­ing him depres­sion and anxi­ety, he decides to sell everything he owns and go and find him­self on an epic jour­ney to exper­i­ence the best surf breaks on the Pacific coast of the Americas, from Alaska in the north to the south­ern tip of Latin America in Patagonia.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

He thinks that being alone in the wil­der­ness will help sort his head out but it turns out that oth­er people – friends and lov­ers – are more import­ant than he real­ised. Also, that horses and rivers can be people, too.

The Doc Edge fest­iv­al is play­ing at the moment but this film isn’t part of it. In fact, it’s bet­ter and more sur­pris­ing than any of the films I pre­viewed for it.

Animation is the only thing close to provid­ing guar­an­teed box office at the moment. Garfield is still doing well, Inside Out 2 is already going gang­busters and on track to make a bil­lion dol­lars for Disney/Pixar (and opens in Aotearoa on Thursday) and filling the gap in between is Despicable Me 4, the sixth in the exten­ded fran­chise from Illumination Studios.

Co-written by The White Lotus’s Mike White – he also co-wrote this summer’s Illumination hit Migration – the film sees Gru (Steve Carell once again) and his fam­ily forced into hid­ing when his high school nemes­is, Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) escapes from top secur­ity vil­lain prison.

Some of the tar­gets in this film feel a bit soft, and the fun­ni­est parts are still those bloody Minions, but there is some excel­lent anim­a­tion, espe­cially a ‘Just Dance’ routine intro­du­cing a new char­ac­ter, aspir­ing vil­lain Poppy Prescott (by Joey King), and her cat.

I do wish these films for kids wouldn’t rely so much on ‘punchy’ viol­ence to resolve their stor­ies, though. I know there is a long and respect­able tra­di­tion of car­toon viol­ence but I think we should be smarter than that now.