Priscilla, Argylle and Riceboy Sleeps are in cinemas, Society of the Snow and The Greatest Night in Pop are on Netflix
The most notable thing I took away from Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 autobiography, “Elvis & Me”, is how much feeling is involved. Not emotional feeling – although there is a bit of that – but tactile feeling, material feeling.
It opens with a close-up of Priscilla’s bare feet walking on pink shag pile but from then on you get the sense that as an audience member you can feel it all – mohair sweaters, green baize blackjack tables, taffeta.
Coppola has always had a sense of the importance of stuff – it says more about the owner or wearer than we give it credit for – but it seems to reach new heights here.
Priscilla was fourteen-years-old when she fell into Elvis Presley’s orbit while he (and her family) were stationed in Germany in the Army in 1959. They were both children, except that Elvis was already 24.
Priscilla, the film, follows a linear trajectory from those first meetings, through flirtation and relationship to marriage, motherhood and then divorce.
It could have ended up a traditional biopic – and leans that way at times – except that Coppola’s eye for illuminating detail and Cailee Spaeny’s exquisitely calibrated performance keep bringing us back to a young woman (like Marie Antoinette in Coppola’s 2006 film) who has become trapped by a life of luxury and frustrated by unknowable rules.
Paradoxically, by foregrounding Priscilla, the film becomes more insightful about Elvis than any recent film. Improbably tall Australian actor Jacob Elordi gets the voice right and we’re mostly spared any attempts at recreating him in performance. We just the get the mercurial, petulant, needy and insecure version of him.
Like Elvis’ life, the final third of the film is uneven and unhappy and by the time we get to 1971 it’s clear that Coppola shares Priscilla’s view that its better for all of us if we just leave Elvis behind.
Argylle has been out less than 24 hours in Aotearoa and already the stink from the rest of the world has reached here. I didn’t hate it as much as I have hated previous Matthew Vaughn films (i.e. a lot) and it’s a big expensive mess, to be sure, but there’s a sliver of something original in Jason Fuch’s script.
For a few years now, the phrase “An Apple Original” indicated that there was going to be a level of taste involved in a production but Argylle is now a counter-factual, a brand damaging exercise for all involved (except Mr. Vaughan).
Bryce Dallas Howard is Elly Conway, an anxiety-riddled cat-lady who is also the author of a series of phenomenally successful spy novels featuring the titular secret agent Argylle (played in the recreations by Henry Cavill, whose charm the film overrates considerably).
The books are extremely popular in the espionage community, it turns out, because they have a habit of eerily predicting real world events. Competing organisations now want her to write the next chapter so they can steal a march on their enemies.
I won’t go into more detail because the plot twists are the reason this movie exists, suffice to say that despite being overblown, overstuffed and over-confident, there are two sequences near the end that are actually quite novel – my wife calls one the “Hello Kitty Boss Brawl” – but then it adds another twist and another long set-piece by which time we are all ready to go home.
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Early in the film, Conway has a book event at a small Colorado mountain town and I think I am safe in predicting that this will be the only time that Matthew Vaughn will make it to Telluride.
Anthony Shim’s Korean-Canadian drama Riceboy Sleeps made a trip to multiple international festivals in 2022 and 2023 (including the New Zealand International Film Festival last year) and is now emerging in local cinemas.
A little bit like last week’s selection A Thousand and One, it is a multi-year story about a single mother fiercely protecting her young son but the relationship between them fraying anyway. This is also a migrant story – from Korea to Canada in the 90s and early 2000s.
Until I watched Kore-eda’s Broker the other day, I didn’t know how common it is for unwanted Korean babies to simply be left on doorsteps and then raised in orphanages.
That’s the beginning of the story here, too. So-Young (Choi Seung-yoon) was raised an orphan and then left with a small child when her partner dies, all before the film starts. Illegitimate children in Korea are denied citizenship so she packs the boy up and they move to Canada for a better life.
The film piles it on pretty thick from there but I did appreciate the cinematography by Shim and Christopher Lew – long takes, a gently mobile camera and Kodak 16mm film grain. It looks great and the changes in aspect ratio showing the passage of time are really well done.
But the story, autobiographical or not, was just too relentlessly tragic for me.
Plenty of tragedy in Society of the Snow but a remarkably uplifting ending too.
It’s the second cinematic version of the famous “Miracle of the Andes” story about the Uruguyan rugby team who crashed in the mountains on their way to Chile in 1972.
Turns out the notorious cannibalism story is only one of many ghastly aspects of the affair as only 16 people (out of the original 45) survive for over 70 days in the beautiful wasteland separating the east and west of Latin America.
One of the most traumatising pieces of cinema I’ve ever seen was Bayona’s recreation of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in his 2012 film The Impossible and the crash sequence here is incredible – and incredibly difficult to watch.
The screenplay (by Bayona, Bernat Vilaplana, Jaime Marques and Nicolás Casariego) doesn’t shy away from any aspect of the challenging material and also helps delineate all of the many characters, helped by the casting of relative unknowns from Spain Uruguay and Argentina.
On a technical level, this is one of the best films I’ve ever seen. Stunning practical effects, seamless digital VFX, extraordinary Atmos sound mix, Oscar-nominated hair and makeup. The fact that all of that skill is in the service of such a great story makes it a ‘must watch’ in my book.
Just so you know, I’m not totally immune from the algorithm and when I switched on Netflix last night and saw this one promoted at me, I couldn’t go to bed until I’d finished it.
Perfectly calibrated nostalgia for my generation, The Greatest Night in Pop is a terrible but accurate title for a documentary that you can show your kids to persuade them how talented 80s music stars actually were. Michael Jackson was clearly a phenomenon and we get to see why.
A combination of recut footage from the four cameras that recorded the entire recording session for “We Are the World” with talking head memories from some who were there (there are self-effacing turns by Lionel Richie, Huey Lewis, Bruce Springsteen and many others), the film is very well edited portrait of a particular time and place.
I’d like to highlight some of the talent that was there who we don’t remember so well – James Ingram, Kim Carnes, Kenny Loggins and Steve Perry from Journey all make you stop and say, ‘Wow! You could really do this.’
Also, if you ever find yourself suffering from social anxiety, trust that you will never look as uncomfortable as Bob Dylan did that night.
