Queer, Grand Tour, A Minecraft Movie and Project Fiftyone are in cinemas and Broken Rage is streaming on Prime Video.
The nice thing about the first three movies in the newsletter today is that you can’t really describe them by comparing them to other films. They are that rare thing these days, novel.
The first actually comes from a novel – or at least a novella. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer is based on William S. Burroughs’ semi-autobiographical book from 1985 and I was surprised at how weird it got. The transgressions that it is most interested in are more the chemical rather than the sexual ones. It’s also more romantic than I was expecting it to be.
Daniel Craig, well and truly throwing off the shackles of Bond, plays Burroughs stand-in William Lee, a dissolute American writer in exile in Mexico where his “proclivities” are more acceptable. There, he drinks a great deal, picks up men in bars and maintains a modest heroin habit.
He becomes besotted with a handsome young American, Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a serviceman on shore leave and a man whose own proclivities are flexible. Lee is electrified by the thrill of the chase but the consummation, disappointingly, comes as a result of over-indulgence rather cupid’s arrow.
Knowing that he is unlikely to persuade Allerton to stay by his side for love alone – or perhaps not having the self-confidence to try – Lee cuts a deal. Take a trip with me to South America, where there may be more drug-fuelled adventures to have, and you’ll only have to have sex with me twice a week.
One of Lee’s problems, as he himself owns up to, is that he is independently wealthy which means he has no discipline and little grasp of reality. In Ecuador, with supplies of junk much harder to obtain, he hatches a plan to explore the jungle looking for a psychotropic experience that will open up a world of telepathy – a way, I think, for Lee to connect intimately with people that he finds so difficult in the real world.
Shot entirely in the Italian studio wonderland of Cinecittà, Queer is beautiful to look at, and often terrifically weird. Craig is brilliant as the forlorn writer, desperately lonely and destined to remain so.
I tried to review Miguel Gomes’ Grand Tour on RNZ last Friday night and, as I suspected, got into a tangle trying to describe it. It’s a story of colonial escape in which British bureaucrat Edward (Gonçalo Waddington) runs away from his job in Rangoon (Burma in 1918) so that he doesn’t have to marry his fiancée who is just about to arrive from London. He then makes his way across Asia – from Singapore, through Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and China – pursued by the indomitable Molly (Crista Alfaiate).
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The neat trick here is that the scenes featuring actors are all shot in European studios, and these very English characters all speak Portuguese making for some cognitive dissonance on my part, and the Asian exterior sequences are all shot as contemporary documentary, meaning that the travelogue component is much more a European perspective on today’s Asia but from a no-less mystified cultural perspective as Edward and Molly’s.
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Then, half-way through, the story goes back to the beginning and we see all these events through the eyes of Molly, whose story becomes a much more tragic one.
The Orientalism feels a bit old fashioned but is still worth watching. The reoccurrence of karaōke as Edward travels seems notable but my favourite sequence is the slow-motion of Vietnamese scooters navigating their way around an impossibly busy roundabout to the sound of Strauss’s Blue Danube waltz. Kubrick would be proud.
Grand Tour is also the second film this week that features cock-fighting.
It wasn’t easy finding a ticket to A Minecraft Movie yesterday as multigenerational fans of the video game came out en masse to celebrate it. If cinema is to survive, it must be a habit that starts in childhood so, on that basis, A Minecraft Movie is doing the Lord’s work.
I greatly appreciated the silliness of this film as the jokes arrive so thick and fast that the ones that don’t quite land don’t much matter. Much kudos here goes to Jack Black who has never been more “Jack Black” meaning that everyone else has to meet that energy level or risk disappearing off the screen entirely.
Local viewers will also appreciate the Huntly-ness of it all – it’s supposed to be Idaho but so little effort has been put into that transformation that it’s a running joke of its own.
I was very impressed by local documentary Project Fiftyone, in which a Muslim couple try and make some good come out of the horrific 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks by raising money for microbusinesses in Afghanistan. Microloans are a common way to help get people out of poverty but Islam doesn’t do that whole ‘interest’ thing so these 51 people were gifted small amounts of money to start a very small business.
There’s so much that’s interesting here. The Muslim experience in Aotearoa. A journey of redemption and recovery for someone whose faith brought him back to the right side of the tracks. What happens to these businesses – and the family of the filmmakers – when there’s a sudden régime change and the Taliban are returned to power in 2021. The chance to see another side of a country that has been reduced to cultural caricature over time (turns out that scarves are an all-season product that you can sell from your karachi or handcart). The way an entrepreneurial spirit can be unleashed in some unlikely people but that luck also plays a part in sustainable business success.
I’ve decided that Broken Rage is a practical joke played by the deadpan director Takeshi Kitano at the literal expense of Amazon and Prime Video – and possibly the audience, too. But it’s a good one!
A little bit like Grand Tour, Broken Rage tells the same story twice. Takeshi plays an ageing hitman, assigned jobs by a mysterious local mobster called Mr. M. Apprehended by the cops, he is given a choice – go undercover and bring down a local drug gang or spend the rest of his life in jail.
The first half tells this story relatively straight – Takeshi’s character is a talented and dedicated assassin and the kills are suitably violent. Then we go back and watch the same story but with a different vibe entirely – slapstick comedy with Takeshi playing a hapless version of the killer and a bunch of yakuza who settle their differences playing a game of Musical Chairs. If you find yourself wondering what the heck is going on, don’t worry you will be joined by the rest of the audience texting in their bemused comments.