Review: RESIDENT EVIL

Bryan is a courier and he's late to deliver an organ for transplant to a hospital. On the way out and home he's accosted by a staffer who offers a very good payday on an emergency job. Bryan takes it. It's about to be a weird and rough night, to say the least. Welcome to the world of Resident Evil where the action is always on and lethal. I'm not going to describe the plot as it's too easily spoiled and this is one film this year that everyone who wants to be constantly engaged should see.

I'm of the demographic that should be into video games but I never caught the bug. In fact, I was such a wild larrikin back i' the day that I'd frustrate many a fellow student by refusing to play my side of whatever the game was by my opponent more than once who would angrily start playing for me. So, I neither know the game nor any of the movies made from it in the 2000s. What I knew about this film was Zac Cregger, writer and director.

I thrilled to his debut Barbarian with its constant switching and expert atmosphere. I stayed intrigued during Weapons. I didn't care about the video game origins of this one as I knew I'd be getting something that played to convention but welcomed its audience into its cleverness. Zac Cregger is clever. His comedian senses allow perfect timing of jolts and just the right amount of humour to extend tension. No jump scare or threat is without construction, however subtle, everything is earned.

This is a non-stop action movie but if you want subtext think of how every story with a rapid mutation plot is a story of reproduction. Bryan starts his journey with a flunked response to his partner's rightful demand to address their pregnancy. The phone call is interrupted by bad weather conditions which adds another point of anxiety to the already tense one of him getting through to deliver the package which probably is a life or death situation. And then you get the monsters.

Austin Abrams takes us with him on this nightmare ride and his Gen Zed exasperation endears him through every scene. He knows just about nothing but has to be ready for just about everything which stretches his responses from the kind of lifelong bystander to main character energy that (this is Zac Cregger) itself carries costs and hazards. If a video game is a voyage through puzzles and demands for alertness then that's what this is (for a comfortable ninety minutes) but it still feels a lot warmer than it needs to. As a moment of cinema this might even end up being my favourite movie this year, an nail biting actioner drawn from a console diversion. I think I like it even more for all that.

Review: IT ENDS

Four recent tertiary graduates pile into a car and set off, following directions that start diverging from expectations. When they stop to get their bearings they are attacked by a crowd of people who have come rushing out of the forest. Getting away, they try to work out what is happening. The petrol is down to a quarter tank but isn't emptying. No one is hungry. The road just keeps on keeping on. Allegory for life or just a weird tale for Gen Zed?

Alexander Ullom's debut feature plays it lean, giving us plenty of time to digest the various guesses by the friends as to what has become of them and how they might best act to end it or cope. With four clearly distinct characters who act consistently but are never types as an allegory would more typically have them. They are, however, all still young with various levels of ambition, newly hatched from the education mill that has packed them with prescribed values like school lunches. 

I was reminded of tales like YellowBrickRoad or The Blair Witch Project for the depiction of lost people whose youth and energy can lead them to both decisive action or self-binding confusion. And I was also reminded of the film of Ionesco's Rhinoceros, with its challenge to the normal world from the wilderness of alternatives. 

The young cast make a lot out of talky but still spare action and dialogue and manage to hold the screen without falling into tiresome repetition. This despite the single forward motion and the constant setting of forest on either side of a road that they must accept might be eternal. 

There is little more to say of this film without spoiling it but I will register my admiration of such a minimalist approach that yet compels questions of its outcome. I really didn't not guess the ending but wasn't surprised to know it. 

Some who see it might dispute its status as horror but I think that along with those other examples I mentioned, the lack of control in a confusing environment that threatens life and limb (a kind of gore-free Romero zombie movie) provides a constant, slow burning dread. Add a fine electronic score, in there, too.  I'd definitely call it horror. And good.

Review: THE INVITE

Music teacher Joe grinds his way home and collapses on the floor of his apartment to find out that his frantically tidying partner Angela has invited the loud-sex couple from upstairs over for nibbles and drinks. The ensuing argument is interrupted by the appearance of the other couple who take the sounds of argument in their stride. Two couples, one almost estranged and the other open and engaged. There's a lot of working out to do. That's the film. 

No, I'm not being dismissive. The awkwardness of the beginning gets ironed smooth by candid talk and the spirit of sharing which replace it with a constant tension. This needs nuanced performance to work as its sheer verbosity will need a lot of care. Director and actor Olivia Wilde steps up and mostly succeeds in giving us an ensemble piece that charges along. The actor in the director knew, also, that the way to making a talkfest work is a lot of physical action; not big, just supportive.

Where this gets strained is in an uneven hand with techniques like overlapping dialogue. While this can suggest confusion and add tension it can also be frustrating to view and distracting. From His Girl Friday to The Thing From Another World, contrapuntal speech should compact information and suggest urgency. Here, it enhances awkwardness risks vagueness and alienating chaos. The other factor is the score. Apart from some needledrops, the music in this film consists of harsh stabbing bowed solo strings that spike up as a kind of dialogue helper. The effect is disruptive, informationally noisy. It is never welcome.

What keeps saving The Invite is performance. It's a quartet that responds to an expert handling by a quarter of it. Seth Rogan's bitter Joe is ready to flee the scene for life until he hears what Pina and Hawk are into, the hard nut of his resentment of his life takes a lot of battery until the promise of responsibility-free hedonism appears. Pina, a sultry and sullen Penelope Cruz, and Hawk a masking Ed Norton who seems forever on the point of breaking, think of their activity with more of a new age leaning. Finally, there is conductor Olivia Wilde herself, frenetic, alert, hankering to trust something beyond the slow plunge into formlessness that her life has become. 

In earlier outings like Booksmart and Don't Worry Darling, Wilde had a tendency to overplay the comedy, pushing it toward a kind of Ken Russell psychocamp. That is mostly done here through the score and her own performance as Angela but what happens is that it fits perfectly into The Invite. Soon after, she would present a more tempered and naturalistic expression of it in I Want Your Sex under Greg Araki's direction. In place, among the other three distinct personae, her Angela provides a square-completing corner.

From the off, this reminded me of the kind of late 'sixties sex comedy. Taking its cues from recent French and Italian cinema, Hollywood affected a controlled explosion of risque issues-based movies, cleansed with the likes of the previous decade's aging stars like Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine. If one pops up on a streamer, give it a spin. Wilde's cinephilia makes this stagey fare a movie rather than a theatre piece as the various spaces in the house are used to strong effect.

The Invite works despite its moments of overplay like the score and counterpoint dialogue and it works because the cast make it work. The issues harboured by the couples might seem spare but their handling that reveals vulnerability and fear through fine acting craft brings the whole thing home. I have not seen the Spanish original but will now hunt it down. This is a comedy that works best if you do some work but it will be work well done.

Review: PENNY LANE IS DEAD

Penny has just got into Uni after all that schooling and gets two best and oldest friends down to her family's beach house for a weekend of celebration. Just the girls, Toni and Amy. Then Kat turns up. The wild girl who, as Penny's cousin, demands to join them, offering a commemoration of a cup cake for each. We've already seen her making these and we know that the icing isn't just vanilla. Penny crashes and the others put her to bed in her own room. Then there's a knock at the door. It's Kat's loose canon boyfriend, his worryingly older companion Merrick and the unknown quantity Rodowsky. Maybe they do just want to use the phone. It's 1986 and they don't have their own. 

This is Mia Kate Russell's debut feature and feels like it. High production values, solid performances and good action choreography cannot turn messy writing into cinema. As a home invasion story, we need establishment of characters, some inner conflict and then the hold off as the invaders negotiate with their captives before the big showdowns. Don't look at me, this is genre cinema and I don't make the rules. 

Here, we have Penny and Toni finally admitting their attraction to each other is deeper than classmate, Amy's probaby lifelong trauma recovery, and Kat's chaotic anger at everyone she's ever known. We also get the hazardously unstable trio of bad boys balanced by a pair of good boys who are kind of off screen until the story needs them. You get the issue? It's less a stressful standoff than a writer's chessboard in a game against herself.

The first half hour contains almost everything in the plot and the rest is just elongation of that: the bad guys enter and then variously argue with each other or act impulsively with either no consequence or major plot shifting violence. But then we know so little of these people that it's hard to care for them even at the point of death. By the hour mark the film feels more like one and a half hours old and the final half hour is stretched to snapping until some very ill-advised plotting suddenly appears. 

Home-invasioners need careful tension to be played with an expert bow. If there is anything to be had from ennui in the process it should add to the plot's frustration, not transferred to the viewer as a waning care. I will, give props to Tahlee Fereday for her Toni. Toni is the best written and has most agency out of the original trio and her Joan Jett tough girl offering keeps what remains workable of the movie ... working.

Of less importance but annoying to one of my vintage is the parade of anachronisms. It's 1986 because no one has mobile phones. Apart form one or two instances, the needledrops are more like 1976. By 1986, The Angels track that opens the film had already garnered its cheeky audience response which would have played much better than the seventies original. Then again, that might have been a permission that didn't land. No one exchanged a low five with anyone else and (though this might have been for a potential US market) people didn't apply for college now or then in Australia, but Uni. Of the girls only Kat looks like she gets her fashion sense from mid-80s magazines, the others could be, as they are, from now. (I did say this was of less importance.)

I think there's enough here to form a promise of what Russell can deliver. The market has changed and the new barbarians of cinema are charging in from years of YouTube training, literate, cheeky and effective. It's not just the old guard that has to mind that.

Review: WHISTLE

A group of school friends come across an ancient artefact, a Mayan battle whistle that suggests it can summon the dead. One of them, at her boyfriend's goading, blows it. At this stage we've already seen people die horribly after doing this and now it's up to the chums to work it out and do something about it. The closest thing to a spoiler I'll give is the second act revelation that the inscription on the side of the grim object doesn't mean summon the dead but summon your own death. People who blow this whistle meet their deaths but accelerated. If they die of heart failure at seventy that's how they are going to go at seventeen, with their future selves delivering the bads.

I didn't go to the cinema to see this as it looked like yet another late '90s style teen horror with a decent budget and low level scares. Between Scream and its clones that had a good three years before The Blair Witch Project made them irrelevant. While there has been a return to this format with outings like Thanksgiving and Clown in a Cornfield, I just didn't want to sit through another. Add online movie hire and a quick argument-settling choice, we landed on Whistle, come what may. So, how does it do?

As for new themes or tints, a little queerness minus judgement is a welcome addition but by now long established in the genre. Mostly, it's tropes added for a purpose-built unit. However, if you consider how the heyday of the slasher movie was composed of a continual loop of tropes and is now evaluated as a good old day, what fault this film for doing the same. It's greatest debt is to the Final Destination series in which, title by title, a group of friends was stalked by death having cheated it in some way. What Whistle adds is a personal touch where the future death visits the young, leaving the question of fate against potential of the youth. It's not much but it does work.

The cast is up to scratch, led by the charismatic Dafne Keen who binds all behavioural and narrative gaps with promise. The cast is typically more solid than the writing and the direction. We meet the weirdo religious psycho who is also a drug dealer and his persona goes from kindly alpha to bad guy in a few lines of dialogue and believably but we have already clocked him singling out heroine Chrys in the opening school morning scene. His character, eventually, little more than a plot device for the final act, providing stakes that it doesn't really need. But what are we expecting, Ingmar Bergman?

What really brings this one up beyond the level of serviceable is some solid art direction and well crafted kills and, really, if you can't sail through a genre piece on those two features what are you doing in front of this one? It works. You will forget it the next day but it helped the pizza and beer go down and ended under two hours later.

Viewing notes: Whistle is no longer in cinemas but can be hired online or watched as part of a Prime subscription.  

Review: I WANT YOUR SEX

Artist and gallery owner Erika hires generationally timid Eliot on the spot and soon reveals it's because she wants him for sex, dom and sub BDSM. This is framed by Erika as a kind of job perk and Eliot, wading sluggishly through a loveless and near sexless relationship, acquiesces. This only gets more complicated until the big third act showdown which changes everything  ... or does it.

What feels like an early '70s sex comedy produced by High Hefner but dragged ragged into the twenty-first century could easily look like a cake (with too much icing) of workplace assault and exploitation to the Eliots in the audience but that's the point. Director Greg Araki, like, me has no skin in this inter-generational gundown. He's an X (I'm a Jones) which is also part of the fun. And fun there is with Millennial Erika morphing from Ice Empress to sourmouthed dominatrix in her journey of terraforming Eliot's low social-skilled Zed boy who is by necessity as comfortable admitting his masturbation while in a relationship as he is pretending that the relationsihp itself has any substance. 

If you cannot see beyond the depiction of an abusive power game and that your recognition of that aspect is essential to your seeing the comedy, then this film is not for you. Araki doesn't shy from the darker side of the situation by trowelling on the wit: Eliot is fully aware of the unethical imbalance and calls the abuse what it is; he just likes the perks of it when they do come. Would this work if the genders were reversed? This is tested, in a way, by the threesome scene towards the end of the second act in which roles and points of atraction are so dizzily confused that it threatens a few disintegrations. You are, in other words, invited to speculate about gender roles while within this specific reversal. This is so well served by the pace and performances that you can enjoy the counterpoint of thinking what-ifs along with following some fast paced storytelling.

Performances? Olivia Wilde's always-on screen is dizzying in its caprices, declaring a loud paradox one minute and then crumpling it into the bin as nonsense the next. Her energy constrasts with Cooper Hoffman's listless timidity that masks fists of frustration. Araki is clever enough to mete this out so that it doesn't just lead to a climactic explosion in the finale. He has a more complex plan in mind which you'll get to.

Araki fills his screen with thick neon swatches and neo-pop art cheek. Interventions of other genres trade screen time with sudden breakouts of animation which look like the kind of thing that is leading YouTubers to cinema auteurism. Araki doesn't have to do any of this but in this more conventional narrative style that he must adopt to bring off this central conceit, it also feels like a little nod to the auteurs of his own generation, Natural Born Killers-era Oliver Stone or Wes Anderson: it doesn't feel like he's claiming the interventions for himself.

The satire Velvet Buzzsaw from a few years back did something similar using the contemporary art world and, while it had some genuinely funny ironic scenes, never quite outran its own quest for cleverness. I Want Your Sex does work because the cleverness is split between the affectations of the characters and the overall wit of the tale: it's made funny to be funny, all else is collateral. That means that the willing audience shall be the winner.

PS - if you're reviewing this for anything online and need a picture, DO NOT search for the title, even if you add every qualifier from cast crew, date, production company etc. I finally found the image I used by removing the title. 

ARTHUR @ 45 (SPOILERS)

Arthur Bach is the son of the American aristocracy and is drinking himself into oblivion. He is on course to wed in an arranged marriage to a woman he has no love for. One day he sees Linda shoplifting and saves her from arrest by playing his public persona card. Finally meeting a woman after his own quirky heart, he starts seeing the possibility of happiness. When he tells his father, the cranky old one percenter threatens to cut off from the family fortune if he doesn't go ahead as planned. With no employability, knowing only the constant recourse to alcohol, he agrees. He is haunted by Linda. Hmm, how to play this?

Steve Gordon's comedy from the days where a song could be commissioned for a movie and top the charts, is one of those cases where you see the point in historical context but struggle to keep with it now. Now? Even the '90s with things like the depressing Leaving Las Vegas, would can the idea. While it's clear that the people around Arthur find him embarrassing or outright disgusting, there is still a lot of wiggle room for Dudley Moore's performance to keep his character from sinking. A fraction of his wisecracks still land, most come across and smug and downpunching. Though the latter are more authentically the product of intoxication, they are delivered to feel identical to the better lines (which seem written). 

This is the thing about the film overall that would make it feel uneasy to anyone who hadn't seen it back in the '80s. Alcoholism just does not fly as a comedy trope now, let alone the most immediate feature of the titular character. The statement I began with might have sounded like I was describing a severe and brutal film. The progress of this one, predictably has Arthur find his way out of trouble with the guide of true love. The detail that he is zonkered when he makes his stand for independence at the end provides a necessary closure to his character. We've seen him care sincerely for his long suffering manservant Hobson, while sober and qualifying as OK. To then damn the torpedos at the showdown suggests that, if he hasn't got the drink under control, he now has reason to get it there. A lot depends on Moore's affability and continued run of bankability at the time. I think of how this failed the similarly positioned Johnny Depp in The Rum Diaries and how that one was made by the director that made the last stand in drunken charm decades before in Withnail and I. By the time of The Rum Diaries it felt as dry as a hangover headache.

As his centre of gravity, Linda, Liza Minelli shines, providing a solid proletarian bolster against Arthur's miasma. All of her lines, written to perfection, land hard. Her scenes feel too few. John Gielgud as Hobson is the wit whose lines never fail. He is having a ball as the misanthropic servant whose main service has been as Arthur's truer father figure. Against the energy of Minelli and the constant chaos of Moore, his is the turn most viewers will recall. And then they report his death without giving it its own scene. Did they shoot it but cut it? 

One performance that probably did get obscured by its surrounds is one that really struck me this time. Arthur proposes to his arranged fiance amid a game of slow conversational tennis in which one player is serving with a bouncing ball and the other with bricks. Jill Eikenberry's turn as a devoted future society wife playing out this essential ritual of it, the popping of the question is done with what increasingly appears to be a chilling determination, delivered with a flinty, unbroken assurance. Arhtur can joke all he wants, once she and the family ecosystem get him, his breeding mechanism will suffice. It could be from a Cronenberg movie.

Does it work today? Are you prepared to look around the drunk act or consider it loveable for its time, and watch as Arthur is forced to commit to showing decency when it's important? Anyone who has been that embarrassing drunk or has known at least one will struggle with this. It's what makes this movie feel like something from the '60s and did back then. With alcohol related atrocities in the news and Gen Zed reputedly drifting away from the drug, I can only wonder if this is a title that can only ever be nostalgic to an vanishing viewership. Arthur does still carry charm, it's just that feels like it needs a filter that completely undercuts it.

Viewing notes: Arthur is available on Kanopy (four points for some reason) and is out of print as physical media in Australia.