Friday new releases: 26 April 2024

The Fall Guy, Robot Dreams and Before Dawn are in cinemas; Anselm is streaming on DocPlay

On 20 April, in Atlanta, there was an acci­dent dur­ing the shoot for the forth­com­ing Amazon/MGM film The Pickup (which stars Eddie Murphy).

I heard about it from this story in Indiewire a couple of days ago, just as I was organ­ising my tick­ets to The Fall Guy. The story tells us there is video of the acci­dent and that video was pub­lished by the New York Times:

In the video (via NYT), you can see an armored truck pulling up along­side an SUV and then swerving into it, lead­ing the cars to drive off the road and into grass. But the armored truck then rolls on top of the SUV, with both vehicles fully flip­ping before land­ing upright. The video con­cludes with a person’s body hanging limply out of the armored truck door.

I’m not going to link to the NYT story or to the video. I’m not a ghoul.

But it is a remind­er that, des­pite all the laffs in The Fall Guy, stunties (and the crew that work around stunts) take ser­i­ous risks by going to work every day.

Early on in the film, Gosling’s char­ac­ter (Colt Seavers) has turned up at the Sydney loc­a­tion, jet lagged and coffee-deprived, expec­ted to do a dan­ger­ous stunt involving rolling a car sev­er­al times on a beach.

“It’s the wrong sand,’ he says. It’s too soft and he won’t have the con­trol he needs. He sug­gests wait­ing until early the next day when the out­go­ing tide will have com­pacted the sand and the whole thing will be much safer. (This seems like the kind of detail that dir­ect­or, and former stunt­man him­self, David Leitch, would know all about.)

But his stunt co-ordinator (Winston Duke) – bul­lied by the First AD (Adam Dunn) because they are los­ing the light – per­suades him to go ahead any­way. It’s early in the film, Seavers is recov­er­ing from a broken back, and there’s a little bit of dread as the eighth bar­rel roll is com­pleted, the car is des­troyed, and we wait for that all-important thumbs up to emerge from the wreckage.

The Fall Guy is a fantasy, but it’s a fantasy that its makers would like us to think has some ground­ing in real­ity. Director Jody (Emily Blunt) would cer­tainly have to believe that the dread­ful science-fiction epic that she is shoot­ing in front of the Sydney Opera House is great art, oth­er­wise why would she both­er? Producers are ruth­less. Stars are egot­ist­ic­al and not very bright. Personal assist­ants are ambitious.

And stunts make the world go round, even as they are being usurped by deep digit­al fakes and face replacement.

Seavers has been brought out of igno­mini­ous valet park­ing retire­ment to loc­ate the Sydney where­abouts of the star he used to double for, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson). Producer Gail (Hannah Waddingham from Ted Lasso) is wor­ried that he is in with a bad crowd and that there may be drugs involved. First-time dir­ect­or – and Seaver’s ex – Jody must not know that her star is miss­ing as she’s under too much pres­sure already.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

This is a decent premise – five sea­sons of the ori­gin­al Lee Majors TV series sug­gests good bones – but this film doesn’t quite have all the con­fid­ence that it needs. The chem­istry between Blunt and Gosling comes and goes – excel­lent when it’s present – and the big set pieces often go on too long.

There’s a plot point that requires us to believe that 43-year-old Gosling got his first stunt job on Miami Vice which fin­ished shoot­ing 33 years ago.

And the dénoue­ment is the tired old Scooby Doo trick of get­ting the vil­lain to con­fess while they have a live micro­phone attached to them. I expec­ted better.

Robot Dreams is a very sweet little film about a dog (named “Dog”) who lives in an anthro­po­morph­ised 1980s New York City.

He’s lonely and sees an ad on late night TV for a kit­set robot com­pan­ion, so he sends away. This robot is the per­fect friend and Dog’s life is trans­formed. But a trip to the sea­side goes wrong and the robot is stran­ded, unable to move, just as the sum­mer sea­son is end­ing and the beach is locked away.

For a year we fol­low Dog’s attempts to res­cue his new friend, con­tras­ted with the con­tents of Robot’s ever-hopeful imagination.

As time goes on, any expect­a­tion that they will be reunited recedes and the story becomes one of new begin­nings and mov­ing on. Except, you nev­er really leave that first love behind, do you?

Sadly, there’s a second-hand qual­ity to Before Dawn, an inde­pend­ent hon­our­ing of the Anzacs at the Somme, made by Western Australian prodigy Jordon Prince-Wright.

Levi Miller is Jim, a young ranch-hand, per­suaded to enlist by his excit­able mates. Over the next couple of years, the mem­bers of the group that sur­vive find their inno­cence swal­lowed by the Western Front mud.

Despite all the mud and the blood, there’s still a sense that the film is too clean, too full of hand­some drama school grads, their stor­ies too obvi­ous. It’s sin­cere, though, I’ll give it that.

The great German artist Anselm Kiefer (now an Austrian by cit­izen­ship and a Parisian by res­id­ency) has been the sub­ject of two tre­mend­ous films about his life and work.

Back in 2010, Sophie Fiennes (one of the fam­ous Fiennes) made Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and it was one of those matches between film­maker and sub­ject that sparks insight and delight. Fiennes shot that film in glor­i­ous widescreen and Kiefer’s huge deli­ri­ous out­door sculp­tures looked like scenes from the end of the world.

Now, nearly fif­teen years later, there’s anoth­er film­maker inspired by Kiefer to reach for the top of their game. Wim Wenders’ Anselm was ori­gin­ally in 3D and you can tell that every gen­er­ous com­pos­i­tion yearns for the extra depth the format offers.

This is a great example of that phe­nomen­on where I read about a film and hope that its going to fea­ture in the New Zealand International Film Festival, only to dis­cov­er that it played last year (in 3D!) and I missed it. This hap­pens to me a lot and I’m one of those people who really does try to pay attention.

Wenders and Kiefer are con­tem­por­ar­ies, roughly the same age, and Wenders has a remark­able abil­ity to render the long sweep of Kiefer’s career with no talk­ing heads, some archive foot­age and a small num­ber of dra­mat­ic recre­ations, and illu­min­ate what we are here to see – the art.

We rarely get to exper­i­ence art with that kind of ambi­tion here in New Zealand and in this film there are ware­houses full of it. Anselm is a remark­able, ser­i­ous and dis­cern­ing documentary.