Friday Reviews for 7 July 2023

The new Indiana Jones film kicks off with an ener­get­ic romp around (and on top of) a mov­ing train. It’s a flash­back to a peri­od of Indy’s life that we have heard about in the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – as an agent for the OSS at the end of World War II attempt­ing to save price­less antiquit­ies from the Nazis – and it serves two pur­poses. Firstly, to intro­duce the object that will give the film its title. Secondly, to remind you that you are watch­ing an Indiana Jones picture.

Harrison Ford (and the vil­lain Dr. Voller, played by Mads Mikkelsen) are digit­ally de-aged for the sequence – more suc­cess­fully than when the same tech­no­logy was employed for The Irishman a couple of years ago. I think this is because it is an age-appropriate stunt­man doing most of the actu­al walk­ing, run­ning and climb­ing rather than the 80-year-old Ford. No mat­ter how many wrinkles the com­puters could remove there was no dis­guising the fact that De Niro’s Frank Sheeran in Scorsese’s film had an old man’s pos­ture – bow-legged, back-braced, care­ful where he put his feet.

When the exten­ded flash­back is over and we return to Indie’s present day the mood becomes much more sombre. Jones is asleep in his under­wear in front of the tele­vi­sion, in a shabby New York apart­ment, a whis­key bottle by his side. Today he is offi­cially being retired from his job teach­ing archae­ology at a dead-end Manhattan col­lege and he is being replaced as an American hero by three fresh-faced young astro­nauts, recently returned from the moon.

And this is where the film gets inter­est­ing. Apart from some noisy inter­rupt­ive and over-extended set-pieces, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny becomes less of an Indiana Jones pic­ture than a Harrison Ford one, an exten­ded depress­ive med­it­a­tion on the losses – mostly inev­it­able but some self-inflicted – of old age.

There are moments in the film that I think are con­scious remind­ers of oth­er Ford per­form­ances from his hero­ic hey­day. I think I saw nods to Polanski’s Frantic, cer­tainly to The Fugitive, maybe even Air Force One. I don’t think Ford has been stretched enough as an act­or dur­ing his monu­ment­al career. He and his dir­ect­ors have been able to rely on his screen cha­risma, his goofy mag­net­ism and – in his youth – his physicality.

But here he looks like an act­or who is determ­ined to play the full­ness of this char­ac­ter for the first and last time and he man­ages to be, at times, quite mov­ing. I cer­tainly had a tear in my eye at the end.

The action sequences in Dial of Destiny are at their best when they adhere to the ori­gin­al DNA of the series, those old Saturday morn­ing seri­als that Lucas and Spielberg were inspired by. Physical rather than digit­al. Stuntmen rather than avatars.

The films have also always been love let­ters to British stu­dio crafts­man­ship, those tech­ni­cians who were able to turn any hunk of poly­styrene into a Himalayan dive bar, an Alpine castle or an under­ground Hindu temple. I was pleased to see, then, that the interi­ors for Dial of Destiny were shot at Pinewood in England, where they belong.

Stallone’s Rocky gets a few shoutouts in Sébastian Tulard’s Sugar and Stars (aka À la belle étoile) which is mak­ing a quick return vis­it to cinemas fol­low­ing the French Film Festival. Ambitious young pastry chef Yazid (Riadh Belaïche) has a best friend who loves that film and who ref­er­ences it often dur­ing Yazid’s rise from an unprom­ising child­hood in a foster home to the World Pastry Cup championships.

It helps that Belaïche has a bit of the young Stallone about him in terms of looks and he even seems to dress the part.

The film is an intriguing mix of Loach-ian social real­ism and European gastro-porn. There’s enough amaz­ing food to make your mouth water but it also does not shy away from Yazid’s dif­fi­cult early years and his chal­lenge to be accep­ted by an industry that had no reas­on to believe in him.

Based on a remark­able true story it appears to hew closely enough to the truth that we end up with bit of a ten­sion defi­cit dur­ing the final com­pet­i­tion sequences where the most dra­mat­ic thing that hap­pens actu­ally occurs to anoth­er team.

I went into Joy Ride with low-to-no expect­a­tions, largely because I hadn’t actu­ally heard of it or the film­makers (writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, dir­ect­or Adele Lim) before this week. Well, what a pleas­ant sur­prise! (I say ‘pleas­ant’ sur­prise because it made me laugh and even brought a little bit of depth to pro­ceed­ings, not because everything that hap­pens in the film is actu­ally ‘pleas­ant’.)

Audrey (Ashley Park) and Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends since child­hood, largely because they were the only Asian kids in the small American town where they lived. Audrey had been adop­ted from China into a white fam­ily and Lolo’s par­ents run the only Chinese res­taur­ant in town.

Alienated from her lan­guage and cul­ture, Audrey is giv­en a chance to recon­nect to her roots when the law firm she works for sends her to Beijing to close an import­ant deal. With no Chinese lan­guage to speak of, she takes Lolo along to trans­late and they are joined by two oth­er Asian-American friends: K‑Pop fan Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and act­ress Kat (Stephanie Hsu).

Unfamiliar with the drink­ing cul­ture of Chinese busi­ness­men, Audrey makes rather a mess of things and the only way she can repair the dam­age is to find her birth moth­er and present to the high-minded cli­ent that she is from an authen­t­ic Chinese family.

Even more R‑rated hijinks then ensue on their jour­ney to the hin­ter­land so Audrey can recon­nect with her roots. Co-produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, Joy Ride closely resembles their 2007 pic­ture Superbad in that some­where under the sexu­al innu­endo, flat­u­lence, drug mis­use and bad lan­guage, there is a film – and char­ac­ters – with real heart. We laughed a lot and were not unmoved at the end.

When I decided to bring this column back from the ashes – involving see­ing every film com­mer­cially released in Wellington each week – I had for­got­ten that would involve sit­ting through garbage like Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth film in a series that star­ted in 2011 and has been abso­lutely print­ing money for hor­ror spe­cial­ist Blumhouse ever since.

Because Patrick Wilson is in this movie (he also dir­ects) I was under the mis­ap­pre­hen­sion that this was actu­ally a Conjuring film and kept won­der­ing when Vera Farmiga was going to turn up. A dis­ap­point­ment on every level, then, The Red Door is a limp exten­sion to a fran­chise that may once have been scar­ily nov­el but now just rehashes tired old jump-scares and takes its plod­ding time doing it.

DocPlay has just premiered All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, the Academy Award-nominated doc­u­ment­ary from last year about the American pho­to­graph­er Nan Goldin and her cam­paign (with oth­ers) to have the bil­lion­aire Sackler fam­ily pay for their role in the opioid crisis that has killed hun­dreds of thou­sands of American since their intro­duc­tion of the highly addict­ive paink­iller OxyContin in 1995.

One of the tac­tics used by cam­paign­ers to draw atten­tion to the Sacklers was to focus on their high pro­file art phil­an­thropy which saw their name on dozens of museum build­ings around the world – arts-washing at its most egregious.

It would be iron­ic if – after all the Sackler’s so-called com­mit­ment to these insti­tu­tions – their greatest actu­al con­tri­bu­tion to the arts were to be inspir­ing Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about them, “Empire of Pain”, the TV adapt­a­tion of that book, Dopesick, and this documentary.

The film isn’t just about opioids and addic­tion though. Director Laura Poitras art­fully weaves three dif­fer­ent strands of Goldin’s life togeth­er, show­ing us the par­al­lels between the human neg­lect that allowed the opioid crisis to rage unanswered for so long, the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s that took so many of her friends and col­leagues, and the sui­cide death of her older sis­ter in 1963.

In all these cases, soci­ety chose to pri­or­it­ise mak­ing mor­al judge­ments on people who were suf­fer­ing rather than the harm reduc­tion that would save their lives and Goldin (and the film) make the case that that choice rep­res­ents its own form of immor­al­ity. Highly recommended.

Finally, Netflix has just pos­ted a new anim­ated fam­ily film in time for the school hol­i­days and it is enjoy­able and thought-provoking in equal meas­ure. Nimona is a story of pre­ju­dice and for­give­ness, look­ing for­ward not back, and ques­tion­ing ortho­doxy. All good stuff for the kids today to be watching!

The film is set in a futur­ist­ic city still run on medi­ev­al prin­ciples. Knights pro­tect the realm from the mon­sters that every­one is cer­tain lie in wait for them out­side that city walls. But the knights ride around on robot horses or in fly­ing cars and the cit­izenry is just as absorbed by the con­tent on their screens and their deadend jobs as we are here. As long as the mon­sters nev­er actu­ally show up, what is there to worry about.

For the first time in his­tory a knight qual­i­fies who is not from the nobil­ity. Ballister Boldheart (Riz Ahmed) is also gay and in the closet which will become import­ant later on, but not before he is framed for the murder of the Queen and sent into hiding.

Feisty red-haired teen Nimona dis­cov­ers him and encour­ages – nay, bul­lies – him into going into battle for the truth. She is very per­suas­ive and – voiced by Chloë Grace Moretz – often very funny. She is also a shape­shifter – a super­power that gets her both into and out of trouble.

I’ll leave it to you to dis­cov­er where the alleg­or­ic­al ele­ments lie but suf­fice to say there a few and that this film might be a use­ful prompt for some mean­ing­ful dis­cus­sions between young­er mem­bers of your fam­ily and their parents.