- Hostile Witness Film Review -
Honest, personal, anti-bandwagon reviews.
Sometimes cruel, always fair. Click the links for the full reviews.
Sometimes cruel, always fair. Click the links for the full reviews.
10 Cloverfield Lane (2016 Dan Trachtenberg)
Random chick ends up in a dodgy survivalist’s basement as an intergalactic (you bloody well know it’s an alien scenario so don’t bother clutching any spoiler pearls) invasion begins, forcing her to choose between ducking fallout for a decade or busting her way back into whatever reality awaits. Full disclosure- we weren’t expecting much from that dusty premise (JJ Abrams shit: the eyeroll is implied) and if we hadn’t been so hard up for a Friday night watch we would never have bothered. |
Sherpa (2015 Jennifer Peedom)
As a New Zealander, I feel a particular edge to the criticisms of the Himalayan climbing industry’s exploitation of Nepal’s tribal porter contingent. Hillary's famous ascent of Everest, his lifelong commitment to charitable work in the region and the calamitous dismantling of New Zealand's own labour protections pertain directly to expedition companies replete with Kiwis. So it was chilling indeed to watch an expat rationalise his duplicitous treatment of Nepali labourers, given the price the latter have already paid to maintain their stake in what is effectively the only game in town. |
Narcos (2015 Chris Brancato/Carlo Bernard/ Doug Miro)
You’ve probably been swatting away the buzz around this Netflix series for a while now but don’t let that positive word of mouth put you off. Narcos tracks the rise of Pablo Escobar from shitkicking cash-n-carry pirate to head of the world’s premier blow cartel and the personal prerogatives that dragged Colombia to the brink of sociopolitical collapse using an unusually digestible blend of unvarnished fact and folkloric embellishment. |
The Big Short (2015 Adam McKay)
It’s long been obvious to any thinking person that the 2007 economic clusterfuck was the inevitable flowering of a diseased system. The Big Short makes excellent use of this organic metaphor, following a handful of American investors along the sub-prime food chain, delineating the mechanisms that allowed both the housing market to face-plant and those investors to bet on precisely that outcome. On paper the thing is one and a half hours of everything that bores and displeases me; bro ensembles, splainin, Ryan Gosling, coke weasel shit, forth-wall riffs and pube-twisting cameos. |
Basic Instinct
Watched Basic Instinct (R calls it Budget Instinct but still ogles it with me) again last night. I get this peculiar occasional thirst for it even though I consider it both baffling and theoretically repugnant. Subjecting oneself to BI for the hundredth fucking time is like eating all three remaining pieces of monster lemon cheesecake, even though you already have the sugar shakes and they would have fit comfortably in the fridge as you well know. |
Knight of Cups (Terrence Malick, 2015)
Sometimes you just have to drag your lazy brain away from Godzilla for the 567th time and force it to contemplate something a little more demanding. We weren't breaking our necks trying to watch Knight of Cups because... you know... Terrence Malick. We acknowledge the challenge he poses to the casual viewer, happily declare ourselves Malick apologists and didn't think it was really possible to be ambivalent about his work- a shiny badge of honour in our estimation. |
Star Wars: The Force Awakens (J.J Abrams, 2015)
I’m old enough to remember the original original SW release; I wasn’t jerking off to its awkward, nonsensical, sexless juvenilia back then and I'm not jizzing my pants over the prospect of more, so yeah, I think it's fair to say this is a disinterested assessment. Despite all the screechy fangasms, SW:TFA is just a lukewarm rehash, repackaging the first trilogy into a contemporary launchpad for the endless instalments to come, cleansing the central concepts of their less palatable nerdscurf whilst pandering to the infamous conservatism of the fanbase with a truly stunning lack of creativity. |
Deadpool (Tim Miller, 2016)
Why don't I just say what I really mean and tell you this tiresomely self-referential, five-year-old internet meme/microwave dinner with the plastic melted into it type-thing bored the everliving shit out of us? It really, really did. Ryan Reynolds is blessed with the comic timing of a dugong, killing jokes like they're a fucking threat to his family; maybe it's just that I'm not a sheltered fourteen year old boy but I found the alleged darksided humour dated and embarrassingly harmless. If the writing did occasionally get there, very few spontaneous smirks survived Reynolds' insecure bugfuck delivery. |
Everest (2015, Baltasar Kormákur) Even if you're profoundly disinterested in the technical achievement it represents, Everest's fantastically pin-sharp and gin-clear cinematography is the best reason to watch this otherwise pretty standard disaster/survivor yarn dramatising portions of Rob Hall and Scott Fischer's fatal 1996 expeditions. That, and Jason (Zero Dark Thirty) Clarke, who I had no fucking idea was Australian although that does explain his decent Newzullindish (not sure why our idiom seems to defeat virtually everyone; it's just a flattened affect, off-British variant, ff's.)
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Sicario (2015, Denis Villeneuve) I was crossing all the toes and fingers in anticipation of this one. Sadly, Sicario isn’t as good as you’ve probably heard, which gives me no pleasure. If it had preserved the clean procedural tension of the opening half hour we would have been fine, but from the moment the camera started to linger on an overkill number of corpses decomposing behind drywall a cheesy, manipulative flavour kicked in and it was a downhill drag from there.
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Hostile Witness Film Review Recent Documentary Rodeo
Amy (2015, Asif Kapadia) / Dior and I (2015 Frédéric Tcheng) / The Emperor’s New Clothes (2015 Michael Winterbottom) / All of Me (2014 Alexandra Lescaze) / Artifact (2013 Bartholomew Cubbins) / The Armstrong Lie (2013 Alex Gibney) / That Sugar Film (2015 Damon Gameau) / About Face: Supermodels Then and Now (2013 Timothy Greenfield-Sanders) / 20 Feet from Stardom (2013 Morgan Neville) / Inside Job (2010 Charles Ferguson) |
Madame Bovary (2014, Sophie Barthes) In many ways, life really is an Unlikable Olympics, wherein every stripe of twat and derp gets in your face, and then you die. Flaubert was right about that, and about us largely being volunteers in our own tours of miserable duty, but I flip flop as to Madame Bovary’s absolute entitlement to canonical status and am thusly unusually amenable to the arguments posed by each new interpretation.
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San Andreas (2015, Brad Peyton) Dude. There's like these science people and they, I don’t know, detect shit and they’re detecting lots of whatever that shit is and like all this stuff happens something something faulty, and then earthquaking, like, everything in California is fucked because it's the superquake, the one where California just like goes boom into the Atlantic or some shit and there’s this other science guy and he’s on that... that dam, you know, the old one, you know, that really big one, and then there's the earthquake, right and that shit is just gone like boom.
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Southpaw (2015, Antoine Fuqua) From the moment Jake busted out all that bug-eyed mugging in that generic Vegas ring, I knew which way this thing was headed despite the initial industry buzz. Gyllenhaal is such a naughty pony; though we often enjoy his performances, he has highly questionable, even wilfully bad taste in projects, regularly plunging from the heights of Donnie Darko and Nightcrawler into steamy poos like this one.
Jake is Billy the heavyweight champion who came up hard; his supportive wife, loving daughter and luxe estate complete him. |
Ex Machina (2015, Alex Garland) Ex Machina begins with some unspecified dweeb winning some unspecified online competition and getting airlifted to a remote Ikea-type deeply impersonal development facility where Oscar Issac the Unpleasant Genius needs someone to challenge his latest beta AI consciousness. Or does he? I'll stop right there because the premise and your ultimate opinion of this yarn are heavily reliant on your unassuming receptivity. It's enough to say that there are all kinds of timely dick-yanks about Google, R&D culture, device dependancy, gender stuff, human contact deficits etc, and all that is cute and worthy.
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Only Lovers Left Alive (2013, Jim Jarmusch) Jarmusch is a polarising mofo but love him or hate him, I think we can all agree that there are worse things to be. He is a greatly beloved slacker mascot and an Ornament of the Other Way, and I for one have enjoyed his shit for most of my adult life. That’s not to say I’m a JJ apologist- I walked out of The Limits of Control, for instance, and sometimes want to drown Down By Law in a puddle- so it’s still safe to consider this an actual critique.
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Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2014) So, Birdman. A visual ouroboros, an infinity loop through the muertos colours, infernal passages and moments of surreal exultation that is the neurotic middle aged mind and its buckshot-tattered ego. There is so much muscular excellence to recognise and ponder. Stunningly ambulatory direction and a welter of technical superlatives? Check. Chowder-chunky script? Passive-aggressive obscurity and incisive performance? Yep. Interesting fuzzy demarcation and a shitload of surgical-grade intergenerational metacritique? Super grown-up admissions about the shabby unspoken pointlessness and delusionality of it all? In spades.
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Exodus: Gods & Kings (Ridley Scott, 2014) Oh Christian Bale. I love thee well but you done fucked up by taking that cheque. Everything you heard about this gigantic pendulous fupa of a thing is true; the monolithic multilateral offensiveness, new and exotic forms of hammery (intentional and unintentional) inexplicable miscasting (quite apart from the blatant racism of their selections, also- Joel Edgerton: ha ha); I could go on until you begged me to stop.
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A Most Violent Year (J C Chandor, 2014) A Most Violent Year reminded me that both Issac and Chastain probably went to very expensive performing arts schools. Like, constantly. Their slightly malfeasant NYC fuel oil distributors circa 1981 were so thickly redolent of their credentials that I had difficulty distinguishing this thing from some sort of advanced performance module, and from that observation you can possibly guess the trifling nature of my response. The film is fascinatingly academic to the point of perversity, eschewing lowbrow hooks like its fucking life depended on it.
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Big Eyes (Tim Burton, 2014) Big Eyes gave me a sinking feeling from the moment Elfman’s inevitably cheesy, prescriptive score strutted out over visuals that were already wobbling between twee and undercooked. That eye-roll proved prescient and things went downhill from there. While it’s not difficult to delineate how, it’s much harder to ascertain why; the facts of the matter are certainly absorbing. Frustrated artist and struggling divorcee Margaret (Amy Adams) meets engaging fantasist Walter (Christoph Waltz) and is sucked into his appropriative hustle, surrendering and finally reclaiming her creative identity.
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The Imitation Game (Morten Tyldum, 2014) For a biopic, The Imitation Game sure as hell knew how to ballroom dance around a subject without ever making meaningful contact. Most literate adults are already aware of the whole Alan Turing / Enigma encryption / gay and persecuted / Bletchley Park milieu blah blah etc. etc., and if you number amongst them, don't expect to be goosed with any stunning insights or novel interpretations.
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Dirty Wars (Richard Rowleycor, 2013) Despite its generic title and relative lack of fanfare, Dirty Wars sets itself apart in a genre obsessed with embedded access by mining the sinister lack of scrutiny enjoyed by one of the American military's most reprehensible tentacles, JSOC, or Joint Special Operations Command.
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Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy, 2014) While contempt doesn't begin to describe my reaction to what masquerades as dramatic social commentary these days, there is just so much dingy misanthropic gold in Nightcrawler that all notions of voyeurism are subverted. Jake Gyllenhaal and his tadpole stare are Lou, the low-ball sociopath who takes up chasing lurid footage on spec for local LA news stations (if it bleeds, it leads etc), accompanied by Rick, his hapless apprentice. As his professional stock rises Lou butts heads with veteran rival Bill Paxton and courts Rene Russo's Nina, sleazy editor and principle client, until his drive to capture footage shifts from the reactive to the creative.
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Whiplash ( Damien Chazelle 2014) Whiplash. A gifted jazz drummer attempts to negotiate the demands of an American university studio band, battling his father’s deadweight legacy, his own expectations and the punishing whims of a dictatorial instructor.
It’s a familiar scenario and not the kind of thing I would usually drag myself across town to see due to prejudices I will presently enumerate, but then, you know… universal acclaim, etc etc. |
American Sniper (Clint eastwood, 2014) The title says it all, really, doesn't it? Uninspired, tone-deaf, witlessly pedestrian; if American Sniper was a puppy, it would crawl in a circle, not that such considerations would ever halt an oscar campaign.
When precis tell you who they are, believe them: Kyle the Murican gets mad at all the spooky foreigners blowing up his homeland for no reason, dammit... |
The Two Faces of January (Hossein Amini, 2013) When their grift goes bad in 1960's Greece, two grand-touring shysters (Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen) find themselves reliant on another wayward American (Oscar Issac) to get them out of the country, their tenuous association tightening into a fatal tailspin. |
Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013) Sounded promising, didn't it? Unhappily, Snowpiercer is a really awful hackneyed, explosive techno-shart of a thing that just does not work, on any level, and reminded me why I've never been a fan of Mod Asian cinema's penchant for 'whimsical' arbitrary bullshit.
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Under The Skin (2013 Jonathan Glazer) Sometimes the endless potential of strange fiction is a garden, rampant and fertile, and sometimes it is a featureless void, deprived even of convention’s drab landmarks. That you see either one or the other is down to the eye of the beholder as much as the nature of the material presented, which is why critical judgements can be dismissed as subjective and even biased opinion. Sometimes opacity and absence are intelligent devices and as welcome as any immediate, spectacular disclosure.
Dallas Buyers Club (2013 Jean-Marc Vallée) Sigh. Those obligatory Oscar watches, eh? Dallas Buyers Club isn't something I was gagging to wrap my corneas around. I'd already formed an opinion, scraped like gilt with my magic mental teaspoon (I trust that thing implicitly) from the reactions of others and let's just say the result hadn't frogmarched me to the cinema. But in the interests of this review I swept the old intellectual desktop clean and gave it a chance.
Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011, David Gelb) Documentaries. If you watch them as often as we do, you've probably been burnt by the fake hype and masturbatory/flea circus productions that tend to infest the genre and may well be averse to the prospect of yet another hand-held omphaloskeptical exposition. I take an extremely dim view of anything that brings the idiom into disrepute and subject them all to one criteria- is it informative and absorbing beyond the constraints of its subject matter? Whether you are specifically interested in the topic to hand or not, Jiro Dreams of Sushi surpasses this requirement.
Out of the Furnace (2013, Scott Cooper) Ever sat down to a movie you've heard nothing about, full of exemplary talent and a premise that's not too played-out? You know- that feeling of pleasant, hopeful expectancy- you're settling in, the opening shot's going okay, cue music... then a song starts wheezing away over the top of it all and it dawns on you. You're experiencing a taste-level indicator and the arrow's pointing downwards. That first whiff of corn.
Inside Llewyn Davis (2013, Joel & Ethan Cohen) What do you tell someone about a Cohen Brothers movie? You'll love it, trust me. Not at all formulaic. Action packed. Stuffed to the gills with loveable rogues. That would be a pretty universal no. Ever met someone who can articulate precisely why they pay to see one? Again, no. Even so, what I'm about to say is tantamount to blasphemy- Barton Fink and No Country for Old Men bored me more than anything, I think them overrated and the prospect of more Cohenic genius feels... like being invited to spectate hot sex between two people I dislike. Ambivalent.
A Hijacking (Kapringen) (2012, Tobias Lindholm) This smallish Danish film caught my eye a year or so ago in the course of reading someone else's praise of recent Scandinavian productions. I wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiment that something's going very right up there, particularly with the Danish stuff and A Hijacking is a great example of whatever concerted and judicious process is taking place.
Melancholia (2011 Lars Von Trier) I've had dreams so like this promotional image for Melancholia that I almost have to move my head to pull my eyes away from it. And so it was with the film itself. So yes, I am probably guilty of excessive identification at the expense of any critical faculty. But do you care, because I dont. At least it's not Antichrist, jesus... reviewing that was like chasing a greasy razorback through ten fucking acres of blackberry.
The Gatekeepers (2012, Dror Moreh) Knowing next to nothing about Shin Bet and the reality of the Israeli security complex, we decided to take a punt on this documentary simply because it promised straight talking from the horses' mouths. With unprecedented access to a half-dozen or so of Shin Bet's recent heads of operation, The Gatekeepers asks some confronting, impolitic questions about the political, moral, practical and philosophical realities of the Israel-Palestinian situation as it stands. These are hard, hard men who've looked down the barrel, year in, year out, and what they have to say was not what we expected from instruments of a pretty fucking ruthless intelligence machine. Good production values, a brisk pace and a largely impartial, humanist, few-holds-barred approach make this essential viewing for anyone with a brain and a social conscience. It was an Oscar nominee. We found it on iTunes, so you probably can too. Primo.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013 Martin Scorsese) If this review seems a little disordered let me admit that I'm not inclined to compose it with any more care than Scorsese did his movie, so if you're feeling shortchanged, write to Marty. Lemme fart the plot into your hand; broker-guy gets rich ripping off his fellow suburbanites with a B-Team of unlikely associates and together they launch into a typically Scorsese douche-o-rama with a side of lippy broads, free-flow blow and frantic materialism that inevitably sloughs into legal entanglement/inevitable philosophical take-home across the shallow arc of the central protagonist's adventures. Deep breath.
Gravity (2013, Alfonso Cuarón) If you've had one ear flapping in any direction in the last three months you've already heard more than you possibly cared to know about Gravity. Big dollar feature, popular stars... mmmokay. Might be a rainy afternoon prospect. Then cue the boring, embarrassingly reiterative interviews, the suspiciously uniform hype, and interest begins to wane. I'm losing my wood halfway through the trailer programme these days and had remained pretty unmoved by the excerpts that seemed to send every other punter on the planet into conniptions. All that desperate, panicky scrabbling just reeked of... something... overcompensation, perhaps? That's it.
Hostile Witness Film Review: Game of Thrones, seasons 1, 2, 3 & 4 Alliteration is perhaps the most noble of all literary embellishment and metaphorically speaking, it is the tinsel stuck to Santa's sweaty balls, so let's do this in the spirit of xmas.
Patriarchal pudenda-pounding poltroons pontificate profusely, pointless peregrinations pestilentially prolonged per pedestrian parameters. Wearisome wenches wither winsomely within whiny fuck it, nobody cares.
You're welcome.
Patriarchal pudenda-pounding poltroons pontificate profusely, pointless peregrinations pestilentially prolonged per pedestrian parameters. Wearisome wenches wither winsomely within whiny fuck it, nobody cares.
You're welcome.
Elysium (Neill Blomkamp 2013) We loved Blomkamp's grungy opus, District Nine, and prayed hard for other auteurs to run with the direction it seemed to provide to a genre mired in pointless visual noodling and suicidal plagiarism. But when I saw the first trailer for Elysium I complained that it looked too familiar. That's not really a legitimate criticism, at least not one that I'd tolerate in regard to my own work, having come to the (stunningly obvious) conclusion that worthwhile oeuvres are constructed over time, are necessarily self-referential and expand upon themselves according to the value of their fundamentals.
Pacific Rim (del Toro 2013) I will sit sucking down empty calories while dinosaurs fight aliens with the best mouth-breathers in the game, so this critique is not about pitching any lofty elitist trajectory. It's just that Pacific Rim sucks arse, so much so and on so many levels that it's difficult to know where to begin, but let me do so by aiming a roundhouse squarely at del Toro's puffy chops. Anyone who still thinks Guillermo's some kind of wünderkind needs to account pretty robustly for the misfired, piss-weak tripe he's squirted out since Pan's Labyrinth (which was overrated anyway). He shares his searing lack of taste with Jackson et al, that other bastion of seemingly unimpeachable nerdmanship and together they fap all over contemporary speculative cinema in a godawful binary orbit.
World War Z (Marc Forster, 2013) Having stood at the edge of the hater tsunami aimed squarely at World War Z (as expressed by my fanboy nephew- he was livid) I did hold some pity in my stony little heart for Brad Pitt's poor old production. Just a little, mind you; internet tales of on-set dickwars and studio incursion while the budget spun out of control had me walking in the opposite direction while the wee fillum flopped in its afterbirth, seemingly doomed. Then I remembered; industry commentators are often completely full of shit, which is why I review in the first place. It's the lying I can't stand.
Man of Steel (Superman) (2013 Zach Snyder) Superman. My attitude toward the phenomenon is encapsulated in its entirety by the immortal words of Vivian- cornflakes. Cornflakes, cornflakes cornflakes cornflakes, cornflakes. From this, the perceptive reader might surmise that I don't much care for the Man of Steel, and they would be right.
Having no Supercredentials to speak of, I subjected myself to this spectacle in company with my 16 year old nephew Purple, a hawkish Superfan who had keenly anticipated the reboot despite the fact that "Superman's a bitch who doesn't really kill people" and Snyder's gorey proclivities had him shaking his head from the start.
Having no Supercredentials to speak of, I subjected myself to this spectacle in company with my 16 year old nephew Purple, a hawkish Superfan who had keenly anticipated the reboot despite the fact that "Superman's a bitch who doesn't really kill people" and Snyder's gorey proclivities had him shaking his head from the start.
Anna Karenina (2012 Joe Wright) As a story, Anna Karenina has always seemed like something I have understood imperfectly, and I've never been entirely sure why. I grasp the gist, I get the social and political context, I feel the Female pain, I hear the class strata grinding and admire Tolstoy's command but I cannot love it for the life of me. So I'll admit to that small prejudice. Less inexplicable is my loathing of both Knightley and Wright's previous work, because well, you know... they suck a big cock, generally speaking.
Let the Right One in (2008, Tomas Alfredson) When you loathe virtually every convention stacked around the genre you are working in, stumbling across anything else demonstrating the same disinclination is a joyful and almost surreal experience. This is the test to which we should subject every story- does it transcend the genre ghetto? Will it confound the pedant? Horror is one of two things in the known world that can melt categorical and cultural boundaries like nitric acid and yet it's scorned by the lit. snob and ring-fenced by a powerful clade of its own devotees, to the detriment of all.
Samsara (2011, Ron Frike) I am relatively conservative in my choice of viewing pleasures, being old enough to know what I'm likely to appreciate and cynical enough to winnow out a lot of dross, and I had reservations about the concept of Samsara. While few of us welcome two long hours of shitty dialogue, what cinematic veteran can imagine a work so transcendent that it simply did not require verbal elucidation of any kind? (The New World almost got there, lol.) I'm still open to the possibility, but I do not consider that it was realized in this instance.
Antichrist (2009 Lars Von Trier), in defence of. Von Trier's incoming Nymphomaniac prompted me to think about his back catalogue and ponder his peculiar genius at some length (fair warning). He provokes such lavish scorn from so many directions and I do know why; the public likes their weirdos humble, charming, unassuming, mannerly, and most of all, grateful. Sort of like Tim Burton, that cheeky little scamp (dry heaves).
The Great Gatsby (Luhrmann 2013) The Great, flat Gatsby. The film and not the book, which I barely remember as a watery thing from high school; suffice to say that Eckleburg's wire-rims struck me only as one of the most awkward, budget appropriations ever duct-taped in retrospective panic to a greasy narrative skid. I see what you did there, F Scott Fitzgerald. But anyways- Luhrmann's filum. If you're asking me, Baz's graph started with a short, sharp uptick and has been on a slide since Romeo & Juliet. Strictly Ballroom was cute enough and certainly brave, R&J a classic but Moulin Rouge was bad (sunk by Kidman's candle-faced ineptitude) Australia awful (ditto) and Gatsby is... it's not even... it's just... I don't even know if I care any more. I'm still pulling on my arse-kicking boots, though.