Distinctly conservative treatment of a not so conservative subject, that of Saúl Armendariz, aka Cassandro an exotic wrestler based in El Paso and famous in Mexico.
In ‘lucha libre’ exotic wrestlers are those who are more flamboyant and perhaps feminine in their approach to the sport and the costumes they wear. Roger Ross Williams gives us a straightforward look at how Saúl changed from being a runt-like loser in the lucha libre circuit to creating the character of Cassandro, who attracted the hitherto conservative and homophobic crowds with his Liberace styled outfits and a certain Juan Gabriel ability to reach the public.
We get to see the close relationship with his mother Yocasta (Perla de la Rosa) who brings him up as a solo mother, and his secret relationship with another wrestler called El Comandante (Raúl Castillo) who is closeted.
His coach, Lady Anarquia (Roberta Colindrez) is instrumental in helping him take the step up into the big league
Gael Garcia Bernal takes on the brave job of bringing this character to the screen and does so effectively adding another important performance to his cv. It is his caliber that adds to the overall film that didn’t uplift me or set me alight but was of some interest to see.
And lucha libre has zero appeal to me. The screenplay is standard and the overall mood rather sober for the topic.
A throwback to the era of disaster movies in many ways, this is a film about storm chasers in Texas and neighbouring states trying to get as close as possible to the centre of supercells, thunderstorms which have rotating wind uplifts and can produce tornadoes. This 2022 film is made on a cheaper scale than the old blockbusters like Twister or the tsunami films but even with the CGI it is quite exciting in the four parts of the movie where the protagonists get stuck in the middle of the supercell.
Quite why you would pay to go a tour to get close to one I can’t understand but there you are. Canadian Herbert James Winterstern in his first full-length feature gives us the story of William Brody (Daniel Diemer), a teenager whose father Bill was killed ten years before by such a storm.
William is secretly fascinated by the storms too despite mother Quinn’s abandonment of the practice after her husband’s death. Roy (Skeet Ulrich) Bill’s partner at the time sends William a copybook used by Bill and this motivates the boy into leaving his Florida home and heading to Texas to hunt Roy down and join in the fun.
Besides which, he has some sort of tracking machine to test out that his parents had been working on before Bill died. Roy now runs tours for Zane, but using the Brody name.
Zane, played with delicious cynicism and smarm by Alec Baldwin rips both his employees and tourists off but William manages to get in on a tour and experiences the worst a storm can bring.
Meanwhile jittery Quinn (Anne Heche) sets off in pursuit of her son in the company of William’s possible girlfriend (Jordan Kristine Seamon).
Most of the dialogue parts are either a) follow your dream talks. b) don’t do anything stupid talks or c) technical explanations regarding Supercells.
Neither the screenplay nor the acting is up to much. Diemer has presence but is no great actor, Ulrich and Heche are adequate and Seamon has little to do with pretty dire lines.
Baldwin hits the right notes as a meany with the actor clearly seeing the funny side.
Decidedly it is the storm, the action and photography by Andrew Jeric and Corey Wallace that rule the day in a modest but watchable movie.
Fair Play. (L to R) Alden Ehrenreich as Luke and Phoebe Dynevor as Emily in Fair Play. Cr. Sergej Radovic / Courtesy of Netflix
Debut film by Chloe Domont. Got much better reviews than public acceptance. Hardly surprising as it is not a very pleasant watch.
The setting is a hedge fund in New York run by a ruthless character Campbell (Eddie Marsan). It’s full of rather immature men who think they are a cut above the rest of society because of their skills at buying and selling sharing. In the team are Emily (Phoebe Dynevor) and Luke (Alden Ehrenreich) who are a couple but not out in the company as relationships between staff are not encouraged. All goes well until Emily gets a promotion. While she tries to push for Luke with her boss, a move that is not regarded well as Campbell does not like him, Luke starts to feel resentful at being looked over. Time goes on and Luke seems to want to sabotage Emily’s career but it is not so clear and the relationship begins to suffer. She gets a car every morning and he has to take the subway. There is a sexual tension as well as they don’t have sex any more. Eventually, there are some melt down scenes and a finale which is strong and not especially enjoyable where the very point of consensual sex and/or rape prove to be very hard to determine.
Certainly, the atmosphere is toxically macho and Luke is no saint but I’m not sure Asystem too. There are aspects of the film that I found unrealistic. When they have their final clash, it is at a party full of friends and family and nobody intervenes. Emily’s mother is seen as totally obsessed with their engagement and seems unable to sense that her daughter is unhappy and some of the scenes in the company seem more like people sitting around enjoying melt downs rather than helping colleagues through the issues. Maybe that approach is what really happens.
Dynevor is the star of this film and proves to be a bright new talent (whose real-life mum is a dreary long-timer in the soapie Coronation Street). Ehrenreich has a more difficult role and acquits himself well and Marsan is making a thing of creepy rather unpleasant characters.
As a film it’s probably best regarded as fodder for gender rights courses. While it reminds us of Fatal Attraction, Wall Street and The War of the Roses I found it all rather too dark and lacking in something extra to attract me.
An unusual debut film by Julio Torres who appears on Saturday Night Live and directs, writes and stars in this work. He plays Alejandro Martinez, an El Salvadorean seeking a work visa in the US and to be employed as a toy designer.
His mother (Catalina Saavedra) brought him up creating an imaginary world with models and toys and now he feels he can contribute to a company in the US. Sadly, he cannot get a job like this and is employed by a cryogenics firm until they sack him. Through this he meets an extraordinary woman, the partner of an artist, Bobby Ascencio (RZA) who has frozen himself for posterity.
She is Elizabeth, played with gusto by the great Tilda Swinton, with a fiery red hairstyle and a combative approach to everyone. No sooner does she enter a restaurant than she’s off-side with the staff. Elizabeth needs help to locate Bobby’s works and then curate a show and she sees Alejandro as a support in this and Alejandro thinks she could help him with sponsoring his visa application.
The film shows the bumbling push-me pull-me relationship between them as they try to achieve their goals with comments on art, creativity, the meaning of life and the immigration process all mixed in together. It has its own individual touch and some moments of humour. Swinton is a delight in a role we are not accustomed to from her.
Torres is more of an acquired taste. He is credible as a sort of lost nerd but his individual scenes lack oomph. A little editing could have been good. Wrapping up the whole show is a rather nice narration from Isabella Rossellini.
A pleasant enough film with some wacky moments (Craigslist?)
I have to admit that I am in two minds about this movie. As a throwback to 90’s romantic comedies it is a very polished work albeit totally derivative of other films and of course of Much Ado About Nothing, the Shakespeare play with a not dissimilar plot (lovers pretending to hate each other). The 90 minutes pass by attractively, with the major part of the action taking place around Sydney. A perfect film for a wet afternoon. It has had good ratings among the public and surprised with its uptake.
On the other hand, there is something overly calculated about the film borrowing as it does and being a pretty unrealistic fantasy.
Bea (Sydney Sweeney) has a one-night stand with Ben (Glen Powell) a man who buys her a coffee in a Starbucks like place so that she can get the key and use the toilet (this is a new and illegal move on the part of some coffee shops – denying the public the use of the facilities). The whole set up is contrived but not impossible. Then Bea sneaks out on Ben, but soon realizes that she really likes him, doubles back and hears him slagging her off to friends in a sort of macho boast. End of romance.
As these things tend to do (!), they end up crossing paths 6 months later when Bea’s sister gets married to Pete’s sister, Pete being Ben’s best friend. They all troop off to Sydney for the wedding and the sparks between Bea and Ben are so noticeable that the family and friends all conspire to push them together which neither have any intention of happening. But then, they decide to go along with the ruse and play at being lovers just to get the family off their backs. A number of rather orchestrated faux pas ensue. All very harmless fun conducted by beautiful people in a stunning environment and with no money issues. Harbour Rescue also seem happy to spend time and money helping them sort out the romantic tangles. Not, I’m sure.
At the end of the day, even though there are one or two funnyish moments it doesn’t have the sharp humour of Joy Ride or any really creative touches. A weak running joke on Tasmania is as old as it gets and the script in general is poor. Bryan Brown as one of the doting Dads comes off best among the support acts, Dermot Mulroney has a thankless part and Rachel Griffiths is also doing what she can with an unattractive character (Bea’s bossy mum). Ga-ta as Pete makes little sense and Charlee Fraser as one of Ben’s ex-girlfriends is one of the few interesting extras. Don’t even mention the Aussie surfer and what the parents thought paying for Bea’s ex Jonathan to come long for the ride is unclear. The actor seems to have no idea what he is doing there.
Sydney gets excellent photography and a total sales job as a potential wedding destination even if hill and sea are stapled together unnaturally and the Harbour Bridge and Opera House are done to death.
Sweeney is an up and coming star and has the blonde looks and figure to hold the centre but she is pretty predictable as an actress and has just two expressions. Powell has only one, a squint-eyed frown. But they are not supposed to be the comic distractions in the end but the cute lovebirds who don’t know it.
Given all of this it is surprising how watchable it is.
Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Ashley Park as Audrey, Sherry Cola as Lolo, and Stephanie Hsu as Kat in Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel
A year ago we had an Irish film of a similar name with Olivia Colman. This couldn’t be much different. Directorial debut by Adele Lim who scripted Crazy Rich Asians this has much the same mood and involves a road trip to China and Korea by 4 female friends. Audrey (Ashley Park) is a hotshot lawyer who was adopted by white parents from China as a child. Now, she is returning for the first time for business. Lolo (Sherry Cola) is her childhood friend accompanying her. They will meet up with Kat (Stephanie Hsu) who is a star actress now in China and the fourth and incongruous member of the group is Deadeye (Sabrina Wu). In the rather far-fetched script Audrey has to prove her Chinese heritage to win a contract so she sets off to find her birth mother.
On a train they end up nearly getting busted for drugs, get rescued in the wilderness by a basketball team they then proceed to bed, Audrey gets fired, they pretend to be a K-Pop band and finally Audrey finds family of sorts in Korea. A final scene back in the USA shows how they move on from all this a year later.
Joy Ride. Photo Credit: Ed Araquel
What works here? It’s a pacy movie full of jokes, which are not all funny but do raise a laugh on many occasions. The actresses are natural comedians and it is a joy to watch the way they act. Parks surprised me with her versatility and Cola was a star in Shortcomings. Their energy is also vital to help us believe all the implausible plot twists such as becoming a K-Pop band called Brown Tuesday.
You may not be so keen on the scatological references, the pussy numbers (Cardi B and other musical influences are found here) and some of the Asian jokes seem more like a clichéd stand-up comedy routine than anything else. And of course it is good to see a comedy propelled by Asian women showing it can stand up against the best.
May December. (L to R) Natalie Portman as Elizabeth Berry and Julianne Moore as Gracie Atherton-Yoo in May December. Cr. Francois Duhamel / courtesy of NetflixMay December, Charles Melton as Joe Yoo. Cr. François Duhamel / Courtesy of Netflix
Todd Haynes directed movie that stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore. Based on a real story in which a 36-year-old woman had an affair with a 13-year-old boy, went to prison for it and then later married the boy and had children with him.
Haynes transfers this to Savannah Georgia 20 years later. Gracie (Moore) is a busy member of society with 3 kids of college age and is still married to her young man Joe (Charles Melton), who now breeds monarch butterflies and has some minor job.
Gracie has a catering business whose customers support her through pity. Along comes Elizabeth (Portman), a TV actress researching the role she is about to play, that of Gracie at the time she met Joe when he worked at a pet store she was managing. Elizabeth seems the height of tact and appreciation but her questioning of the family, Gracie’s ex and the grown up children they had and other members of society seems to put the marriage under strain.
Joe is now 37 and facing empty nest syndrome apart from actually beginning to question if this is what he really wanted. In short he is starting to grow up. Gracie is a control freak and perfectionist who can’t be easy to live with and her children all seem pretty keen to get away asap.
A slightly odd film in some ways as it is a psychological portrait of a family and the actress herself and not exactly plot driven.
Portman does a very convincing job in the lead, Moore is solid as always in a part that she has played before while Melton surprises in the quiet way he conveys all that is going on underneath. Samy Burch has received plaudits for his screenplay good but not wonderful. Soap opera music fills the background to 90’s effect.
Watchable, professional but nothing out of this world.
French director Claire Denis has quite a reputation in her homeland and in various other parts of the world too. Her latest work even won a major prize at Cannes and here we have it. Stars at Noon keeps with her interest in foreign climes and is an adaptation of a book about an American journalist stuck in Nicaragua in the first Sandinista period who hooks up with a mysterious British man. Together, the two plan to flee the country crossing the border into Costa Rica. Denis locates the current film in the recent present. The Covid pandemic is still present and restrictions are being sporadically enforced. The film was shot in Panama to stand in for Nicaragua and the sticky damp decaying tropical atmosphere is beautifully captured.
Trish is played by Margaret Qualley, a rather spoilt and unthinking American who clearly thought she could do more as a foreign correspondent than she has been able to. She is unknown, too young and no one wants to buy her stories. Her passport has been retained, she is sleeping with an older politician who pays for her board and is under surveillance from the military. Apart from that, she has the arrogance of the American thinking that she needed only name her country and doors will open. Qualley takes a shallow and unlikeable character and actually makes a decent fist of the job helped by her attractive looks.
Joe Alwyn plays Daniel, the Brit, clad in white suits like a throwback to Graham Greene and mysterious but also empty. We quickly twig that he is not a businessman but some sort of spy. As the movie progresses, rather vague hints at political power plays are dropped but nothing is ever fully clarified.
One hour forty minutes of time is taken up setting the scene, watching the protagonists have sex, drink copious quantities of beer, whisky and rum and generally get thwarted in doing anything. Finally, they are obliged to leave the city and head for the border and the film wakes up a little. Benny Safdie as a CIA man almost steals the film with his cameo but that too fizzes out. Music by Tindersticks is good and photography by Eric Gautier catches the mood but overall I found this film to be a real slog. The characters remain on the surface partly because it is a political thriller but it means we can’t connect. The thriller side is minimal and the threats are predictable and boring rather than creating excitement. The love story is damp and unconvincing. The political intrigue which could have been really interesting is left as vague.
A disappointing effort from Denis who has the resume to produce something much better than this dragging feast.
Martin Scorsese moves out of New York to Oklahoma 1920 where a series of murders of Osage people occurred. Based on a true story published in a 2017 book, he tells the tale of one family in the centre of this scandal. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo di Caprio), a rather slow ex-serviceman is taken under the wing of King Hale (Robert de Niro) a local Oklahoman farmer who acts as a sort of lord of the manor and boasts of how generous he is to the local Indians.
He soon finds Ernest a wife, Molly (Lily Gladstone), a full-blooded Osage woman. Why all this interest in the Osage? Well, this tribe was able to hold ownership of the land on which oil was found making them instantly very rich.
Some of the white folk were determined to reclaim this wealth by marrying into Osage families and then killing off their members so the title to the land ended up with the widowers or the children. So, it happened with Molly’s family and we see how her mother and sisters die in different ways and Molly herself becomes increasingly ill but not before delivering 3 children.
Eventually, and after a petition to the President made by Molly herself, Washington sends down a team to investigate headed by Tom White (Jesse Plemons), a precursor of the FBI. The last part of the film involves his investigation and the subsequent trials.
In keeping with recent Hollywood history of the last 20 or so years, this is a dark film showing us the shadow side of the US. Hale and Burkhart and their male colleagues are greedy colonialists who will stop at no evil to get their hands on more money. All with a veneer of respectability and a righteous belief that they deserve it. In the same way as they treated the blacks.
So, expect no light moments in this movie, it is relentlessly grim. And this is where its main problem lies. 3 and a half hours of dark gloom, however worthy the subject matter is, subtracts from the overall quality of a movie and even a name like Scorsese can’t get around that. Either you make a mini-series or you edit. Scorsese doesn’t stint on the details, the settings, the staging, the costumes are all so well done but it just goes on too long. At 2 hours I was ready for the end and still had 90 minutes to go!
Another aspect that detracted from the film in my humble opinion was the lack of the Osage people’s side. We get a respectful handling of the people and some dialogue in their language but the focus is much more on the crimes and the white men than what the victims felt about it all.
Having said all that, it is a pleasure to watch De Niro and Di Caprio at work. The former gives us a really nasty type who oozes charm for all the wrong reasons and Di Caprio does a good job at depicting a character who gets increasingly lost and uglier as the film progresses.
Jesse Plemons, John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser have fairly small appearances later on and Scorsese even appears at the very end.
Holding all this together though is a superb performance by Lily Gladstone. She is the moral centre of the film, a role without so many words but with all sorts of conflicting feelings well expressed by this indigenous actress.
So, I have my reservations about some things, especially the slow pacing and extreme length but Killers is a film that I will recall for a long time to come.
One of the blockbusters from 2023, this Chris Nolan film is indeed a throwback to the mega films of yesteryear. A biopic about the man who invented the atomic bomb, Nolan takes subject matter that is not the easiest and is quite dense in detail and gives us three hours of compelling cinema. It helps that a truckload of Hollywood stars are present. I suppose the great value of this film is to see the context in which Oppenheimer worked and the twin fears of anti-semitism and communism present in the world and driving the process.
Nolan uses quick editing and a complex series of flashbacks to present the material which I found relatively easy to follow. The combination of the race to build and test the bomb subsides in the last part into government inquiries and commissions which are interesting in themselves as is a meeting with President Truman.
Cillian Murphy is everything you would expect in the lead role. Slightly manic, intelligent, gifted but aloof as well, his is a convincing portrayal. Robert Downey Junior does some of his best work ever as Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission and Matt Damon is very solid as a military supervisor.
We also have, among others, a cameo from British TV actor Tom Conti, now 80, as Albert Einstein. Great to see him back. On the female side Emily Blunt does more than she should with the thinly written role of Kitty Oppenheimer and chameleonic Florence Pugh spends much of her screen time naked as the lover.
Other features are the music by Ludwig Goransson and cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema both of a high standard.
This would not be my favourite film of the year on subject matter alone but I recognize its quality as a Hollywood production that sets very high standards and as such are a pleasure to watch.
passionfilm 