Wednesday 30 December 2020

Films 2020



A comedy of errors, Beasts Clawing at Straws charts the incremental progress of an article of hand luggage - a designer bag stuffed with cash stacks, originating from a dodgy life insurance pay out. The film, based on a novel by Keisuke Sone, allows writer-director Kim Yong-hoon to sketch out a variety of greedy patsies, each brimming with the boundless energy and bad decisions of the unexpectedly wealthy. Along the way, the coveted hold-all briefly comes into the possession of Jeon Do-yeon's Yeon-hee, the madam-cum-muscle for a hostess club. Yeon-hee represents a cooler head in Beasts, a life-long scammer willing to play up to a variety of interpersonal roles - from doting girlfriend to wise mentor - in order to stake a claim. In a film full of excitable amateurs, Yeon-hee displays a detached expertise, quickly calculating her perceived standing in relation to her temporary partner then moulding their relationship in ways designed to exploit their calamitous underestimation. 





The tragic, untimely, passing of the brilliant Chadwick Boseman intensifies an ache already felt in Spike Lee's often unflinching Da 5 Bloods. The film, in part an examination of the devastated psychological landscapes imprinted by the Vietnam War (told with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre action-adventure scaffolding), pivots on memory - particularly those of the men who survived Boseman's commanding officer, Stormin' Norman. The waking recollections of these elderly men - vignettes told without substitute actors or sandpapered avatars - present Norman in adoring terms. He is both ageless and perfect, the star that this disparate, disintegrating, platoon orbits around. In death, Norman represents everything the proxy war conflict took from these soldiers. Not just their youth but their agency; the confidence, or ability, to overcome momentary selfishness or, at their lowest, craven impulses. In the minds of these men, Norman towers. A revolutionary holy man who held stick-up sermons to an always enraptured audience. 





A horror film located in a very specific sociocultural moment, Host charts the rapid disintegration of a socially distanced, video conference séance after one participant - you know the type, thinks they're hilarious - completely fails to take the dead contacting seriously. Writer-director Rob Savage, working with co-writers Gemma Hurley and Jed Shepherd, build their fairground ride out of the pressures and disappointments inherent to this once-removed form of telecommunication - specifically, how it expands a sense of personal disconnection. The central friendship group clearly has factions and sub-groups; straining niceties in the face of the louder, lairier, participants who bubble up and overwhelm this carefully curated spooky Zoom. When calamity arrives, the punishments are varied and overwhelming, completely disproportional to crimes committed and predicated on the swirling tension of an empty background space waiting to be filled. 





Brandon Cronenberg's Possessor traffics in cruelty, using a massive technological leap to explore discordant interior desires, specifically those that revolve around curdled ambitions. Whatever kind of person Andrea Riseborough's Vos was before she embarked on her homicidal career path is irrelevant, she's a communicable idea now, one focused around plunging a knife into a lawyer's throat or the amount of pressure required to shatter a billionaire's jaw. Vos swims on the periphery, initially drunk on the power and immunity her hijacking missions provide, later a fading passenger in a brain-wipe link-up that has overstayed its welcome.






Promare's use of 3D animation is novel, at times closer to the kind of blocking and arrangement seen in sixth generation video games. Armoured up characters in Hiroyuki Imaishi's film prowl with the same deliberate gait seen in supernaturally themed releases - the creeping marionettes of the early 2000s, a style of ambulation currently out-of-fashion following the interactive industry's decision to fully embrace motion capture. Lio Fotia, the high commander of the mutant Burnish, is introduced wrapped in an ink black battle plate. Once cracked, a childlike face oozes through the damage - a snarling cherub, very much in the style of manga greats such as Osamu Tezuka or Mitsuteru Yokoyama. This is what Promare offers: a fluid, expert conversation between classic and futuristic visual techniques. The harsh polygons of computational smoke and flame effects sit perfectly alongside figures that betray a fitful, human, expression.






Writer-director Steve McQueen and co-writer Courttia Newland's Red, White and Blue brings a generational dimension to the real-life activism of London Metropolitan Police Officer Leroy Logan. The film initially proposes a divergence, with the academic Logan forgoing a promising career in Applied Biology to pursue institutional change in a racist police force, much to the frustration of his Jamaican-born father, Ken, a frequent target for white, uniformed, bully boys. John Boyega's Leroy and Steve Toussaint's Ken spend the majority of the film at odds; simmering together in silent, but palpable, disagreement - Ken resenting his son for what he contextualises as a form of betrayal. Ken is portrayed as difficult throughout Red, White and Blue, particularly when he clumsily engages with the women in his family. He's opinionated and disinclined to peace-making but it's this forthrightness that powers his son - a ground floor personality trait that allows Leroy to stride into the lion's den, chest out, then shout down the snivelling cowards who deface his locker. 





Director Masaaki Yuasa and writer Reiko Yoshida manufacture up a beautiful sense of breeziness with Ride Your Wave, a film that plays to the romantic strengths that Yuasa displayed (between the rending) in 2018's Devilman Crybaby. Without giving too much away, the film charts the relationship between Hinako Mukaimizu, a shy surfer, and Minato Hinageshi, a confident but disarming firefighter. Their love is sincerely and unselfconsciously sketched, the duo bonding on their journeys to the beach and their mutual affection for a sing-song chart hit. Hinako and Minato's connection is portrayed in passionate, if not necessarily physical, terms; the pair long for each other, accepting their new partner as the missing piece of themselves. Wave has an ache to it, even before fate intervenes.





Christopher Nolan's temporal thriller Tenet has so much to tell you that it affects an aggressive posture, detailing conversations with the crisp clip of a fist fight. The film is, essentially, Nolan's science fiction take on a James Bond film (or perhaps more accurately, an Ian Fleming novel) with entropy inverted invaders subbing in for the usual megalomaniacs. The concept of rewinding calamity provides Tenet a genuine puzzle to decode, allowing Nolan access to briefing scenes that do not run on the staid explanations of atomic bomb defusal or cyber-security blather. Entertaining a similar sense of trespass to the 1960s Bond films, Tenet's central spy forces his way into simmering social circles, accessing Kenneth Branagh's monstrous Sator through Kat, the estranged wife he tortures (Elizabeth Debicki in a role that oscillates between underwritten and pivotal). John David Washington's unnamed CIA agent may eventually stray into the disconnected realm of the all-knowing but the discombobulated-but-game energy present in the film's early passages is reminiscent of George Lazenby's performance in On Her Majesty's Secret Service - a creeping sense of arrogance informed by narrow successes. 





The tension between expectation and desire rendered as a feature-length panic attack. Benny Safdie and Josh Safdie's Uncut Gems is pure momentum, tracking Adam Sandler's Howard Ratner, a gambling addict who willingly hurls himself deeper and deeper into impenetrable, tail-gobbling, basketball spreads. Despite nothing but set-backs, Howard never loses an assailed sense of optimism, babbling away in shrieking SNL tones, clad head-to-toe in expensive, baggy, sweats. Howard is your typical, hectoring, Sandler character, possessing a face fixed in a leering perma-grin with an outlook geared only for terminal indulgence. Unlike Sandler's 90s smash comedies, Uncut Gems traps this gibbering maniac in a realm of pure hostility. Howard is punished and pummelled, chewed up over and over again for failing to shut the fuck up and fall in line. Absolutely brilliant. 





An escaped man thriller that does not labour under the delusion of flight. Hu Ge's Zhou Zenong represents criminality as a fading tremor, the leader of a small group of motorcycle thieves who operate amongst a grumbling, and ultimately treasonous, co-op. Diao Yinan's The Wild Goose Lake traps its subjects in and around a decaying waterside town notable for labyrinthine food stands and paddling sex workers. Following the shooting of a policeman, a case of mistaken identity, Zhou goes into hiding, prolonging his capture so he can send word to his estranged wife to grass him up for the reward money. Navigating an underworld now teeming with stomping soldiers and swarms of undercover (and underglowing) policemen is Gwei Lun-Mei's Liu Aiai, the bathing beauty selected to be Zhou's contact. Like Zhou, Liu operates from a position of defeat, grasping at fleeting pleasantries rather than seismic, romantic, change. 


Also liked:

Alone // Away // Bad Boys for Life // Beastie Boys Story // Bill & Ted Face the Music // Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn // Borat Subsequent Moviefilm // Burrow // Emma // His House // The Invisible Man // Lamp Life // The Lighthouse // Lost Bullet // Lupin III: The First // Martin Scorsese's Quarantine Short Film // New York New York // Out // 1917 // Puparia // Rocks // The Secret Garden // She Dies Tomorrow // Soul // Superman: Red Son // Time to Hunt // Trip to Greece // Underwater // Wonder Woman 1984 // You Cannot Kill David Arquette

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