Holiday catch-up
Editor’s note
Apologies that this is out later than usual. I have been waiting in vain for RNZ to fix a bug in their podcast system that would allow last week’s At the Summer Movies audio to be posted online. It’s still a skeleton staff there so it hasn’t been fixed yet. Hopefully, the system will be working better on Wednesday when the next batch arrives.
Greetings from a soggy and cold Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington as the perfect movie watching weather continues.
Firstly, thank you to those subscribers who took advantage of holiday gift options or special offers to upgrade to the paid level (even though there was nothing new to read for a couple of weeks). All of us here at Funerals & Snakes are very grateful.
While the newsletter was on a break, the content machinery was still in effect as I have been producing special holiday episodes of RNZ’s At the Movies. I’ll link to those here, in case you missed them. There was also a fair amount of viewing for pleasure with family and houseguests and I tried to keep track of that with the Letterboxd account.
Better Man (Gracey, 2024)
Watching Better Man, I could see parallels between Williams and other British pop acts. In the recent documentary about Sir Elton John, Never Too Late, which is on Disney+, Sir Elton talks about the troubled relationship he had with his father who disapproved of his choice of career and who never even saw him perform. In the recent Nick Broomfield documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones (which is on DocPlay), there’s a yawning, yearning, gap in Jones’ emotional makeup as he desperately wants approval from a father who remains unreachable.
The relationship between Williams and his dad, the man who introduced him to show business but then left the family to pursue his own dreams, is the core of the Better Man story.
Like Sir Elton and Jones, Williams filled the gap with sex, drugs and booze. Sir Elton and Williams recovered but Jones never made it.
And Williams’ competitiveness means he has overstuffed his life – like his music and this film. He chose the pop star dream and then dialled all of the aspects of it up beyond 11 – even the torment, the addiction and the selfishness – because there is no such thing as “too much” in Williams’ world.
Anora (Baker, 2024)
This is where things start to spiral out of control and what was an enthusiastic, but slightly unusual, romance turns into something of a nightmare. Vanya’s parents get wind of this arrangement and call Toros (the brilliant Karren Karagulian), their Armenian fixer and the person who was supposed to keep Vanya on the straight and narrow. He is most displeased as he has to leave his granddaughter’s christening and go over to the house and sort things out.
ANORA turns into anarchic farce at this point as Toros and his henchmen try and regain control over a situation that is rapidly spiralling beyond them. Every twist from this point is genuinely unpredictable but firmly grounded in the rich characters that Baker has created. Vanya turns out to be unreliable under the tiniest amount of pressure. The Armenians are ill-equipped to deal with the force of nature that is Ani and her insistence – contrary to the evidence – that her marriage is a love-match for the ages.
Mufasa: The Lion King (Jenkins, 2024)
Director Barry Jenkins made the film MOONLIGHT in 2016, winning three Oscars, which he followed up with the magic-realist slavery story THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD for Prime Video in 2021. He’s the real deal, one of the best we have, but – apart from the obvious craft on display – MUFASA is clearly a paycheque gig. Disney is in charge and you’d be hard pushed to find his fingerprints on it.
Except maybe one thing and that’s the importance of intergenerational storytelling – Mufasa’s tale is told to his grandchild Kiara by the Pride Rock mystic and shaman mandrill Rafiki (voiced once again by the great South African actor John Kani).
It’s important that Kiara (played by Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy Carter) knows about her whakapapa, because it is by knowing what connects us to our past that we are able to navigate our future. Intergenerational fracture and disconnection is a theme that shows up in other Jenkins pictures and it provides what you might describe as “echoes of resonance” here, even when its being played for laughs.
Paddington in Peru (Wilson, 2024)
For too much of the middle of the film, the urgency drops and the gag about Banderas playing the dream versions of all his own ancestors starts to wear thin, but I am pleased to report that Paddington in Peru does manage to bring everything home and even coax a sentimental tear from this grizzled old hack.
I think it’s easy to take for granted that films aimed at children will always have a positive message and that audiences might emerge from the theatre keen to become better – more generous, kind and forgiving – people but it’s not always the case. Sonic the Hedgehog 3, which I also saw this week, is entertaining enough, I suppose, especially with Jim Carrey back as the villain and the villain’s grandfather, but it lacks the innocence that Paddington has. Far too many of Sonic’s challenges are solved with punching and kicking and, to be honest, I don’t think that’s a helpful thing to be sitting kids down in front of.
And it’s never something that Paddington would reduce himself to, not when he has a perfectly good stare.
A Real Pain (Eisenberg, 2024)
[Eisenberg]’s written something that is very funny and at the same time deeply moving and his own performance has a lot to do with that. He’s the straight man to the force-of-nature that is Kieran Culkin as Benji and the fireworks of that performance are nothing without them being reflected in the eyes of a loving but disoriented cousin.
Culkin displays the verbal dexterity that we came to know in four seasons of Succession, but he goes to even greater depths here. I would say that it’s a star-making performance except that Culkin’s relationship to the acting profession is such that stardom is probably the least desirable outcome imaginable. He almost dropped out of this film two weeks before shooting started because he didn’t want to be away from his young family, but I have to say that their sacrifice is very much our gain.
(No audio or text yet, sorry)
All We Imagine as Light (Kapadia, 2024)
These are women whose stories are rarely told on screen at all, let alone with such grace and such tenderness. Mumbai has a population of over 12 million people and there’s a ruthlessness about life there. Prabha, Anu, Pravaty and their friends do their best to maintain a social and professional community but it’s only when they leave the city for Pravaty’s home village, over 350km away, that they truly become themselves.
Director Payal Kapadia is, famously, the first Indian woman to win a prize at Cannes – All We Imagine as Light won the Grand Prix in 2024 – and the film leans on her documentary experience to provide angles and framing that reflect the bustle and complexity of this world, but the interior lives of these women is what I found most impressive.
In a much-criticised move, the Film Federation of India decided not to submit All We Imagine as Light as their selection for the Best International Feature Oscar, despite all the accolades it has received and the fact that it would have been a clear frontrunner.
In addition to all of that, as a household we maintained our usual Christmas Eve tradition of watching Arthur Christmas on Blu-ray (13th year running for some of us!) and chose to screen the “pretty fuckin’ unappreciated” Die Hard 2 rather than the original as our Christmas night session. This went down pretty well with the first-timers watching and I reckon it holds up pretty well for something so knowingly derivative.
Boxing Day night I rented the original The Lion in Winter from my US iTunes account – it’s still not available here in Aotearoa – and that one hadn’t aged quite as well as I expected. It’s entertaining and witty and Hepburn’s performance carries almost all the emotional weight, but the
Earlier on Boxing Day night we watched the new Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl on BBC iPlayer (now available on Netflix everywhere except the UK). That became a victim of seasonal over-indulgence as all four viewers in this house confessed to falling asleep for a period in the middle, despite enjoying the first act. Perhaps W&G should go back to being a tight half-hour rather than feature length?
After Boxing Day, my fatigue at being the person choosing the night’s entertainment overcame me and I opted out. The rest of the home viewing since then was a household blitz-binge of Shrinking on Apple TV+ (which I caught out of the corner of my eye most evenings while I dozed or scrolled my phone but found pretty entertaining nonetheless) and interminable terrible football matches from England and Australasia. It has been an unrelentingly dismal season for West Ham and Wellington Phoenix fans and I am both.
Coming Up
Normal “recommended by me” service will resume tomorrow but for the next few weeks new releases will be reviewed first on RNZ and then summarised here a few days afterwards.
For this Wednesday’s At the Summer Movies, I’m hoping to review Conclave (in which Ralph Fiennes tries to keep a papal election on track despite the intrigue raging all around), Robert Eggers’ interpretation of Nosferatu, Almodóvar’s Golden Lion winner The Room Next Door and – if I play my cards right – I can also include Clint Eastwood’s Juror #2 which went straight to video in New Zealand and Australia shortly before Christmas.
