Friday new releases: 31 May 2024

Freud’s Last Session and The Garfield Movie are in cinemas, Great Photo, Lovely Life is streaming on Neon and Atlas is on Netflix

Apologies, once again this Friday new releases edi­tion of the news­let­ter is late.

In mit­ig­a­tion, I did spend 90 minutes this morn­ing inter­view­ing the guy who designed the Battletruck in 1982 and much of the rest of the time has been spent respond­ing to birth­day greetings.

As a remind­er, next Monday is a pub­lic hol­i­day in Aotearoa/New Zealand so there will be no daily recom­mend­a­tion. Normal ser­vice will resume on Tuesday.

Freud’s Last Session star­ted life as a pop­u­lar stage play and Matt Brown’s adapt­a­tion (with the script col­lab­or­a­tion of play­wright Mark St. Germain) often feels bound by those constraints.

Don’t get me wrong, two people talk­ing in a room for 90 minutes can be riv­et­ing – on stage or screen – but only if the con­ver­sa­tion goes somewhere.

Sigmund Freud, fath­er of psy­cho­ana­lys­is and one of the great ration­al minds of the 20^th cen­tury, is marooned in North London after escap­ing the Nazi occu­pa­tion of his beloved Vienna. On the day that World War II breaks out, he con­jures a meet­ing with an Oxford pro­fess­or who has writ­ten a book pro­mot­ing Christianity.

Freud is one of the loudest athe­ists in the world – sev­er­al times in the film he describes reli­gion as “child­ish super­sti­tion” – but he is dying of can­cer, Hitler wants his race to be exterm­in­ated, his daugh­ter is in a rela­tion­ship he doesn’t approve of and his beloved dog can smell the tumour and doesn’t want to be near him.

He’s clearly always been fas­cin­ated by reli­gion – his ‘den’ is full of rel­ics and arte­facts – but he has always thought of it as an example of our sub­con­scious needs con­jur­ing con­scious thoughts. But in this time of exist­en­tial crisis, is there some­thing more?

Or does he just want to spar with someone?

The fic­tion­al con­ceit of the film is that the Oxford don con­cerned is the great lit­er­ary Christian, C.S. Lewis, who is about to embark on the series of war­time lec­tures on faith that would make his name, before pub­lish­ing a fam­ous series of children’s books about a land called Narnia.

I wish the debate between them had been more inter­est­ing but it devolves too often into the kind of argu­ments I was hav­ing with my born again friends at high school. How can a lov­ing God cre­ate a world that has such suf­fer­ing in it? How does one explain cre­ation itself, if not at the hands of a creator?

There are moments when each char­ac­ter shows that their pos­i­tion isn’t abso­lute – some doubt is shared equally between them – but thanks to ego, those doubts go mostly unacknowledged.

Where the film gets much more inter­est­ing is the rela­tion­ship between Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and his daugh­ter Anna (Liv Lisa Fries). Psychoanalysed by her fath­er when she was young­er – surely an eth­ic­ally ill-advised move – he refuses to accept her sexu­al­ity and allow her lov­er (Jodi Balfour) to join them in the house. Only male homo­sexu­al­ity is explic­able in his psy­cho­ana­lyt­ic­al worldview.

Hopkins remains a remark­able screen pres­ence at the age of 86 but this isn’t one of his best recent per­form­ances – there’s a little giggle that he does to punc­tu­ate a speech and it feels too famil­i­ar, too much like ‘busi­ness’. Goode, though, knows enough to hold his own by not try­ing to compete.

I heard Brown, the dir­ect­or, inter­viewed by Susie Ferguson on RNZ the oth­er day and he asser­ted that the film does not take sides in the debate between Christianity and athe­ism and that he wanted audi­ences to be able to make up their minds.

That would be fair enough if a com­pel­ling case for either was actu­ally made but it doesn’t quite get there. What it does do, is show us two men star­ing into the abyss of death – Freud because of age and Lewis haunted by the trauma of World War One – and know­ing that they have to face it alone.

While many you were wail­ing and rend­ing your gar­ments dur­ing the New Zealand gov­ern­ments’ annu­al budget announce­ment, I was avoid­ing it by watch­ing the latest reboot of the Garfield fran­chise and, on reflec­tion, I feel like you got the bet­ter of that par­tic­u­lar deal.

The Garfield Movie (not to be con­fused with Garfield: The Movie from 20 years ago) feels exhausted from the very begin­ning. The script is tired, the anim­a­tion is deriv­at­ive and why would you pick Chris Pratt as a char­ac­ter voice when no one would be able to pick it out of a police lineup?

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

It feels like every pro­duc­tion decision is simply the first thing that some­body thought of. I’m as big a fan of Ted Lasso as the next man but was it zeit­geisty enough to be raided for two cast mem­bers? With an Apple Christmas spe­cial, a star­ring role in The Fall Guy and now a fea­tured voice in Garfield, surely Hannah Waddingham was the big win­ner out of that show.

Even Samuel L. Jackson as Garfield’s long lost fath­er, Vic, feels like he’s phoning it in and that nev­er happens.

Great Photo, Lovely Life is one of the most con­front­ing and dis­tress­ing doc­u­ment­ar­ies I have ever seen. The title comes from the hand­writ­ten descrip­tion on a fam­ily photo dis­covered by film­maker Amanda Mustard as she goes through the boxes of pic­tures, home movies and videos record­ing her Pennsylvania fam­ily over nearly sixty years.

Of course, it wasn’t either of those things. Mustard is on a quest to try and under­stand how it could be that her pop­u­lar grand­fath­er, Bill Flickinger, could get away with sexu­ally abus­ing dozens of young girls – includ­ing mem­bers of his own fam­ily – for decades.

The film opens with Mustard and her moth­er Debi, vis­it­ing Bill in his rest home in Florida. They ask him about what happened and, frankly (you think), he tells them. But there’s instantly some­thing self-serving about his account. I wish I’d got­ten help, I’m so much bet­ter now, and then the gut punch, They wanted it. Girls as young as nine.

As Mustard’s invest­ig­a­tion goes on she reaches out to hun­dreds of Bill’s chiro­pract­ic cli­ents and gets responses from so many grown women with stor­ies to tell from their child­hoods. Only a couple are pre­pared to talk on cam­era but their testi­mony is devastating.

But it’s the role of the fam­ily in these crimes that is so hard for Mustard to take – and for us to watch. Her grandmother’s Christian require­ment to ‘stand by her man’ even to the extent that she turns a blind eye to the abuse of her own grand­daugh­ter is inex­plic­able but, I sup­pose, all too common.

The num­ber of people in this film who insist that vic­tims need to for­give their betray­er because “that’s what God asks” is dis­pir­it­ing in more ways than one. It’s God that Bill relies on to appor­tion judge­ment for his crimes. He doesn’t believe that he should be pun­ished in this life because the worst is yet to come, but that’s no com­fort to his victims. 

Like a great hor­ror film, Great Photo, Lovely Life shows us that some­times the mon­ster is already in the house.

Sometimes I think the mis­sion of these Friday updates – which is to sur­vey the biggest and most prom­in­ent new releases in theatres and online – has been fatally com­prom­ised by how crappy most stream­ing block­busters are. I watched the $100m sci-fi Jennifer Lopez vehicle Atlas this morn­ing and I really don’t want to have to do that any­more. Happy birth­day to me, indeed.

I’m glad that there are so many people being employed and everything, but these films (e.g. Rebel Moon, The Tomorrow War, The Gray Man, etc.) are sap­ping whatever joy I have left in this busi­ness. And, like Sigmund Freud in Freud’s Last Session, I am real­ising that life is too short.