Memoir of a Snail, Red One, Saturday Night, Suddenly and Here are all in cinemas
Weeks where I’m producing and hosting At the Movies can get very confusing for me. Which films did I review for the radio last week? Which ones am I reviewing this week?
After a quick audit, I can confirm that Robert Zemeckis’s Here was in At the Movies last week and (barring any disaster) Memoir of a Snail and Saturday Night will feature this Wednesday. Meanwhile, I talked about Suddenly on Friday night with Emile Donovan on Nights so if you prefer listening to reading those links might help.
Memoir of a Snail is a melancholy little gem from Australian animator Adam Elliot, who made Mary & Max back in 2009. If you told me that he’d been working on this new feature non-stop since then, I would totally believe you because the painstaking detail of the stop-motion animation is there for all to see.
It’s the story of twins, Grace (Sarah Snook) and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who are separated by Child Services when they are orphaned when their paraplegic former street performer father passes away. He was also French, a stop-motion animator and a lover of the Luna Park rollercoaster – an example of the vivid character detail the film offers, matching the crammed visuals.
Grace and Gilbert end up at separate ends of the Australian continent, each desperately missing the other but trapped by foster-circumstances that conspire to keep them apart. While Grace eventually forms a best-friendship with the extraordinary octogenarian Pinky (Jacki Weaver), Gilbert suffers under the oppressive yoke of a family of evangelical orchardists.
Constantly surprising, consistently delightful and creatively absurd, Memoir of a Snail is about how we can let life tie us up in knots and how hard it can be to break free from them.
The first Christmas film of the season arrived this weekend and, even though my screening had plenty of kids watching, I don’t know if I’d be recommending Red One to young audiences any time soon.
JK Simmons is Santa Claus, powerful enough to run the entire North Pole complex on his own personal energy aura, but for some reason he needs a pseudo-military security detail led by someone called Callum Drift (Dwayne Johnson). All that hardware fails to prevent Saint Nick from being kidnapped on the day before Christmas Eve, prompting a worldwide search featuring the unwilling participation of Christmas-hating hacker Jack O’Malley (Chris Evans).
It seems that Evans learnt the wrong lesson from the success of his wonderful one-note performance as Captain America for Marvel, choosing the one-note option rather than the wonderful option ever since. Johnson is much better as the cynical “too old for this shit” right-hand man.
The interesting freshness that Red One brings to the table is the idea that Christmas has become corrupted by the very existence of a “naughty list” – O’Malley is a Level 4 Naughty Lister – and that the original conception of a day in which all children are loved unconditionally has been lost. Drift is determined to retire because there are now more people on the Naughty List than not, and he can no longer see the good in what he’s doing.
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What makes this one hard to recommend is the over-reliance on violence for its solutions – even if it’s just Hollywood violence. It follows the super-hero movie structure of big set-pieces in which the villains are vanquished with punching, kicking or technological weaponry. It’s very smashy which doesn’t feel very much like Christmas to me.
Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night is a Saturday Night Live sketch spun-out to nearly two hours. Purporting to reveal the chaos of the final 90 minutes leading up to the television debut of the famous comedy-variety show, its goal appears to be to burnish the legend of pioneering producer Lorne Michaels (who has had 40 years worth of smoke blown up his derriere already and really doesn’t need any more).
Michaels (played by The Fabelmans’ Gabrielle LaBelle) has been asked to throw together a live late night television comedy show for NBC and has chosen to populate it with anarchic, unreliable, ego-centric, performers – and some women. What he comes to realise as the evening disintegrates is that NBC is using him as a bargaining chip with the network’s biggest star, Johnny Carson, and that failure is absolutely a possible option.
I’m not sure how much audiences that are unfamiliar with that era of Saturday Night Live will get from this picture, as the breakneck speed offers little in the way of respite, and the endless parade of characters are defined mainly by the quality of their impersonations rather than being recognisably whole human beings.
Incidentally, Matt Wood as the volatile John Belushi spends a great deal of the film in the famous bee costume, wearing a beanie with ping pong balls on springs as antenna – an identical looking beanie, ladies and gentlemen, to the one that Grace wears all the way through Memoir of a Snail. And in a further coincidence, JK Simmons from Red One turns up in Saturday Night to play Mr. Television, Milton Berle.
Suddenly is a French film for grown-ups about a couple on a round-the-world yachting holiday who decide to take a bit of a detour to visit a remote island where they can see Antarctic icebergs up close. After sheltering from a storm for a night, they emerge to discover that their yacht has disappeared along with all their gear, no one knows that they are there and the only protein on the island belongs to a colony of penguins.
The incipient cracks in their relationship are, of course, put under even greater pressure and a few twists come along to raise the stakes even further – should you decide to buy them.
As I mentioned earlier, I reviewed Here on RNZ last week and you can listen to the whole thing at the new At the Movies podcasts page. Here’s an extract. (TL/DR – I’m one of the few critics who liked it.)
The film is told from one single physical position – the corner of the living room of a modest middle-class house in suburban Pennsylvania – but jumps backwards and forwards in time to show us the different people who inhabited that space in different eras.
The main family we follow are traumatised heavy drinking salesman Al (Paul Bettany), his hardworking wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), their children, including thwarted artist Richard (Tom Hanks) and Richard’s girlfriend and then wife Margaret (Robin Wright). The digital de-ageing that allows those two to play their characters at all stages of life didn’t bother me as it has before. Perhaps the time for that technology has come. Either way, there’s no time to dwell on it because we are constantly in temporal motion even if we aren’t in physical motion.
Perhaps because I don’t have an unsentimental bone in my body, I bought right into the conceit of the thing and was reminded of Malick’s THE TREE OF LIFE. HERE isn’t remotely spiritual in the same way but it has similar detachment from the concerns of story and more interest in the emotional truth of family lives and relationships.
This is a production that has made me angry for some reasons and delighted me for others. I was enraged – still am enraged – at the feeble and simplistic publicity campaign that extends no further than the reunion of the cast and creative crew behind FORREST GUMP, a film that is less beloved 30 years on than its makers might believe.
The publicity fails to adequately acknowledge that the film is based on a ground-breaking graphic novel by Richard McGuire, that the visual techniques – the drawing of boxes on screen to show action in different time periods, for example – is straight from McGuire’s imagination. The book has already been an inspiration for different technological advances – an early interactive graphic novel for Apple, for example, and in 2022 a virtual reality adaptation premiered at the 2020 Venice Film Festival.
But the film itself delighted me and I’ll happily watch it again.
