Irish Wish

(PG) ★★

Director: Janeen Damian.

Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Ed Speleers, Alexander Vlahos, Ayesha Curry, Elizabeth Tan, Jacinta Mulcahy, Jane Seymour, Matty McCabe, Dawn Bradfield, Maurice Byrne.

"You did leave the park brake on right?"

I was expecting this to be utter shite.

It wasn't. 

It was still shite, but it wasn't total irredeemable shite. 

So praise be to St Brigid for small mercies, I suppose.

Built around the lingering star power of Lindsay Lohan and some pretty bits of Ireland, this paint-by-numbers rom-com is destined to become a rainy hungover Sunday go-to for those who desire a brain-off love buzz. And that is all.

Lohan plays Maddie, literary editor to star writer Paul Kennedy (Vlahos). Her unspoken crush for Paul festers in the lead-up to Paul's wedding back in Ireland, sparking Maddie to make a wish to a mischievous St Brigid (Bradfield). The wish sees Maddie become the bride-to-be, but a handsome photographer (Speleers) puts a kink in her Irish wish.

This is as poorly directed and sloppily written as you would expect. The magical twist of the wish is set-up in a rushed and haphazard manner, despite the film having ample opportunity to establish it earlier. Characters don't talk or act like real people. There is an entire subplot involving Maddie's mum (Seymour) that is presumably included only to beef up the run time because it adds zero to the film -leaving Seymour on the cutting room floor could have been saved her the embarrassment of being in this. It would have been the humane thing to do.

The film even looks off in places, and doesn't do Ireland justice. Too much of the story is stuck in a mansion set and some sections feel like we've stumbled into Disney's version of Ireland. For a film called Irish Wish, it doesn't capitalise on the promise of its title. There's one moment where a character is driving his convertible and makes a comment about the scenery to another character and the film doesn't cut to a shot of the scenery. In Ireland. Is this a travelogue rom-com or not?

So what saves it from being utter shite? Ed Speelers. He manages to make the dumbest dialogue work, and his chemistry with Lindsay Lohan is sparkling. Speeler's performance pulls Lohan up to his level when they share the screen. Lohan can obviously act, but it's only when she's sharing the screen with Speelers that we get to see that.

Irish Wish isn't going to win any awards, except for maybe a Razzie or two, but at least two of its leads give it a craic.

Wicked Little Letters

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on April 4, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★

Director: Thea Sharrock.

Cast: Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Anjana Vasan, Timothy Spall, Joanna Scanlan, Gemma Jones, Malachi Kirby, Lolly Adefope, Eileen Atkins, Hugh Skinner, Paul Chahidi, Alisha Weir.

The things people do these days with their hair is shocking.

Swearing is great. It's fun. It's probably good for you. It's also frequently hilarious.

What's great about the swearing in Wicked Little Letters, aside from its inventiveness and humourousness, is that it's a metaphor for the repression and oppression of women. In post-WWI Britain, where women can't vote and are frowned upon for pretty much everything, letting loose with a few vulgarities can say so much, as it does in this charmingly potty-mouthed dramedy.

Colman is Edith Swan, the eager-to-please church mouse who cares for her ageing parents in between receiving vulgar letters that are offensive to her Christian sensibilities. Her enraged father (Spall) summons the constabulary, and all fingers point to the letter-writer being their neighbour Rose (Buckley), the unwed Irish mother next door. 

Based on a remarkable but little-known true story, the film is a colourful snapshot of British life in the 1920s, complete with its misogyny and repression. Much is made of Littlehampton's "woman police officer" (Vasan), who was a real person of the time and a convenient part of the film's core message around female oppression.

It will come as no surprise that Colman is fantastic as Edith Swan, the "good girl" of the piece, but also brilliant is the effervescent Buckley as the "bad girl". Both deliver their performances with believability, wit and empathy, with Buckley threatening to steal the show in the flashier role.

A great array of side-characters fill out proceedings, led by Spall's sneering father and Vasan as the plucky officer struggling to stay afloat in a pool of shallow men. There's not a performance out of place, except for Skinner's, whose lines as a dim-witted cop land awkwardly.

The only downside of Wicked Little Letters is its contrived ending. It pulls together its plot strands, particularly the relationship between Buckley's Rose and her daughter (played by Weir), into a slightly mawkish and far-too-convenient scene, and does the same with its climactic capture of the culprit by moving all the key characters into a single location. History can be a tricky thing to turn into a working narrative, and the efforts to do so here feel overly simplistic.  

But it's not enough to write off Wicked Little Letters. For the most part, this is a ferociously funny comedy that uses its foul mouth to tell a spicy tale of subjugation.

Oppenheimer

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on March 7, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★★

Director: Christopher Nolan.

Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Jason Clarke, Dylan Arnold, Tom Conti, James D'Arcy, David Dastmalchian, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich.

"Why yes - we do look dashing in black and white!"

What's left to be said about Oppenheimer that hasn't been said already?

It won all the awards, and deservedly so. While I would've loved Poor Things to have pulled off a surprise best picture win at the Oscars, this was Oppenheimer's year. In 2023, Barbie won the memes, Oppenheimer won the awards, and Barbenheimer won our hearts. 

Oppenheimer is Nolan's best film since Inception. It's easy to wonder why Nolan hadn't won a best film or best director Oscar before now, but his greatest films never fit the Academy Award mould - Memento was too early in his career, Inception was too actiony, and The Dark Knight was too superheroey. The Academy was basically waiting for him to get the formula right, and Oppenheimer does that. Here -have an Oscar or seven.

In case you've been living under a rock, Oppenheimer is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy), the father of the atomic bomb. It details his quest to develop the A-bomb through the Manhattan Project, his complicated relationship with his two great loves (played by Blunt and Pugh), his grappling with the destruction his genius wrought on a predominantly innocent populace in Japan, his later anti-nuke campaigning, and the post-WWII efforts in the US to besmirch his name. 

Nolan squeezes all of this into a propulsive three hours. If I have one criticism, it's that Oppenheimer rarely takes a breath - Ludwig Göransson's score is relentless, giving every scene the feeling like its meant for the trailer. There are few quiet moments in this film. There are just some moments that are less intense than some other ones, but only by comparison.

This is not a big deal, and I'm exaggerating slightly, but this is actually why Oppenheimer never feels like three hours long. When the Manhattan Project test is successful and the US bombs Nagasaki and Hiroshima, you might look at your watch and wonder what's left to tell, but the film never stops being compelling.

It would be easy to attribute this to the subject matter, but it would also be very easy to make this dull.  The script, adapted from the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, sings every step of the way. Nolan even makes the dry physics entertaining with dazzling visualisations of things that I can only assume are dry physics.

Nolan's insistence on doing things the old school way - practical effects, big-arse film cameras - feels a bit like making things unnecessarily difficult for yourself in a digital age, but there's no disputing how good it looks, so maybe Nolan's on to something. Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has always made things look amazing, going back to Let The Right One In, and this, his fourth collaboration with Nolan, looks stunning.

And then there's the cast. There are no weak links. Murphy is immersed in Oppenheimer, chain-smoking his way to utter believability. Downey Jr, Blunt, Pugh, Damon, Hartnett etc are all as great as they usually are. It's no surprise how great this cast is, nor is it a shock that their performances are top notch.

Nolan is a great director and this is up there with his best. It's the bomb.

Sorry.

Force Of Nature: The Dry 2

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on February 22, 2024.

(M) ★★

Director: Robert Connolly.

Cast: Eric Bana, Anna Torv, Deborra-Lee Furness, Robin McLeavy, Sisi Stringer, Lucy Ansell, Jacqueline McKenzie, Tony Briggs, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Richard Roxburgh, Kenneth Radley, Ash Ricardo, Archie Thomson.

"Welp, that's it. I'm fucking lost."

Eric Bana is a good actor. Chopper - amazing. He does great comedy - check out The Castle and Funny People. He's a solid Bruce Banner, a memorable Star Trek villain, and has worked with Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and Joe Wright.

So why do I find him so underwhelming as Aaron Falk in The Dry movies? 

The novel of The Dry is a modern Aussie genre classic - a near-perfect crime novel that was turned into a half-decent movie of the same name. The film's biggest downside was Bana's weirdly flat performance. It's the same in the sequel Force Of Nature, although here he's joined by an equally disappointing Jacqueline McKenzie (another hugely talented actor). 

The pair combine to play an unconvincing cop duo called in to help find a group of women lost in the Aussie bush on a corporate retreat. Each woman has a secret, leaving the cops to wonder what is going on out in the fog and ferns. 

In The Dry, it's Falk's personal connection to events that amplifies the classic story and provides an emotional core. That's missing from the novel of Force Of Nature, but the attempts here to shoehorn a subplot involving Falk's past are confusing, distracting and, well, terrible. 

Indeed, when the film leaves the flashbacks of the women lost in the bush, it suffers immensely. Force Of Nature is a movie of two halves. The half led by Bana and McKenzie never reaches the heights of the other half, led by Torv and Furness.

This superior half is filled with intrigue and emotion. Torv, so great in The Newsreader, makes Alice wonderfully complex - sometimes likeable, sometimes hissable. She's a standout, but along with Furness, McLeavy, Stringer and Ansell, they make their characters feel like real people in a truly dire situation, unlike Bana and McKenzie's Falk and Cooper, who never connect as cops.

Force Of Nature looks great (a few weather inconsistencies aside) and makes the most of some superb location shoots. But the story sits unevenly - its additions to Harper's plot are awkward, and its investigation plot never rings true.

A third and fourth book exist, but it remains to be seen whether they'll be made. I'm not holding my breath.

Damsel

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on March 21, 2024.

(M) ★★★

Director: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo.

Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Ray Winstone, Angela Bassett, Robin Wright, Brooke Carter, Nick Robinson, Shohreh Aghdashloo.

"M'lady, your scaffolding is showing!"

What if the Knight In Shining Armour didn't rescue the Damsel In Distress, and said Damsel had to do her own arse-kicking?

That's the central premise of this surprisingly brutal revisionist fairy tale, which flips a bunch of fantasy tropes on their heads and gives us a dragon-battling heroine who definitely doesn't need a Prince Charming to save the day.

Brown is the titular princess, married off to a handsome prince (Robinson) to save her people, but who finds that wedded bliss is fleeting thanks to a hungry dragon with a taste for royal blood (the actual blood of royalty, not the band).

There's not a lot going on in this fractured fairy tale, but what it does, it does well. Even though the End of Act I Twist is visible from a mile away, the film doesn't take too long getting to it, and from there Damsel straps on its sword and rides into the breach with conviction and a single-mindedness that's impressive. It's only when the film drifts into imagined flashbacks and impossible knowledge that things get off the track, but for the most part it sticks to flipping the script on ye olde Damsel In Distress cliche, and makes it work.

Brown more than holds her own as the resourceful princess unwilling to go down without a fight. The script doesn't make her out to be superhuman, and Brown imbues her with the right mix of determination and fragility. In a fantastical world, she remains believable and empathetic. 

She's the shining light in a strong cast, with Winstone, Wright and Bassett all doing well with what are essentially bit parts in Millie Bobby Brown Versus The Dragon. As for the Dragon, voiced with menace by Aghdashloo, she's an interesting character. The CG is occasionally ropey, which is a let down, but at least it doesn't come off as yet another Smaug clone.

But that's the point here - to not do the things the other fantasy stories do. Somehow it still feels familiar, and the story is either thin or focussed, depending on how you look at it, but it works. Damsel certainly isn't the first film to flip a fairy tale with a feminist rewrite - Tangled and Frozen come to mind - but it does it in a way that is satisfying and true to its intentions. There's certainly a lot more third-degree burns and charred corpses in this one, too.

Damsel isn't going to win any awards, but there are far worse fantasy films out there.

Poor Things

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on March 7, 2024.

(MA15+) ★★★★★

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos.

Cast: Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Willem Dafoe, Ramy Youssef, Christopher Abbott, Suzy Bemba, Jerrod Carmichael, Kathryn Hunter, Vicki Pepperdine, Margaret Qualley, Hanna Schygulla.

"But why does the Lion not simply eat Dorothy?"

Way back in the early days of this millennium when I was a wee cadet journalist, one of the elder journos, who was always ready with a useful piece of advice, warned me off using the word "unique".

"It's one of the most misused words in journalism," he explained.

"It literally means 'one of a kind', so don't use it when you just mean 'different' and 'uncommon' - only use it when something is truly, literally 'unique' and there is nothing else like it."

After all these years, I feel I can finally use the word "unique".

Poor Things is a unique film. 

It's a steampunk coming-of-age fairy tale, mixed with an occasionally disturbing commentary on the patriarchy and a frequently hilarious exploration of morals and social conventions. It's bizarre, it's laugh-out-loud funny and it's wonderfully weird, yet it's also thought-provoking and confronting. If that's not unique, then I don't know what is, and I fear I will never get to use the word.

Poor Things is the story of Bella (Stone), who is the result of a morally dubious experiment by mad scientist Godwin Baxter (Dafoe). Having spent her entire life inside his lab, Bella is whisked away by a hedonistic cad named Duncan Wedderburn (Ruffalo) and begins a strange journey of self-discovery in a challenging world.

There is so much to admire about Poor Things. It often looks and feels like the love child of David Lynch and Terry Gilliam, but that's selling it short. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan give us fish-eye lenses, odd angles, plenty of zooms, pinhole views and every other weird trick they can think of to throw us off balance and show an unfamiliar world in which they can present some sadly familiar problems. It's wonderfully unsettling, and makes the incredible sets and stunning production design even more otherworldly.

Equally otherworldly is Stone as Bella. Her journey from infantile naivety to mature self-awareness is strangely powerful and powerfully strange, and Stone never misses a step along the way. It's a physical role, almost robotic in places, but Stone never stops finding the humanity in the absurdity.

Ruffalo is also excellent as the bon vivant brought to his knees by Bella. His is an equally flashy performance, and Ruffalo shows off his knack for over-the-top comedy as he chews his absurd accent and the scenery at the same time.

Poor Things is proof that there is room for weirdly wonderful cinema in this world. Fans of Lanthimos already knew this, but his latest gives us heart that such unique and inventive film-making can find a home among a wide audience.

Argylle

This is a version of a review airing on ABC Victoria's Statewide Mornings program on February 8, 2024.

(M) ★★★

Director: Matthew Vaughn.

Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O'Hara, Henry Cavill, Sofia Boutella, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Samuel L. Jackson.

Cat bomb, deployed.

Sometimes a tiny little thing can ruin a movie for you.

Maybe it's the casting of a particular actor, or a single plot point, or even the look of a costume or special effect. Maybe it's a single horrible line of dialogue.

In the case of Argylle, it's the use of The Beatles song Now And Then.

Firstly, I quite like this song. I adore The Beatles, perhaps more than any other band, and I got chills hearing their final single when it was released in November, 2023.

But that's the problem - it was released in November, 2023. And the characters in this film, which is presumably set in the present day (nothing tells us otherwise) say that it's their song, because it has soundtracked their life together. Which is impossible.

And for some reason, this shits me enormously. Because, let's face it, Vaughn could have chosen any one of a squillion songs released long before 2023, but instead he picked this one. It doesn't matter that it's The Beatles' Now And Then - it could have been Doja Cat's Paint The Town Red and it would have annoyed me just as much. And this incongruous decision stands out like dog's balls, dragging me (and maybe other people) out of this otherwise enjoyable film.

It's a small matter, but I really wanted to address it before pointing out that this is an otherwise solid film, very much in the vein of Vaughn's Kingsman movies. It's a hyper-stylised and occasionally absurd spy movie, with a sparkling sense of humour and snappy dialogue, delivered by a strong cast.

Yes, it gets bonkers... and then even more bonkers... and then even more bonkers again, and you are either along for the ride or not. Much like Vaughn's direction, there are no half-measures here for the audience.

Argylle is the story of Elly Conway (Howard), a shy spy novelist whose life is saved by real-life spy Aidan (Rockwell), dragging her into a world of espionage that bizarrely mirrors the plots of her books. How is this happening and who can she trust?

Howard and Rockwell are great as a kind of screwball couple bouncing from one kinetic action sequence to the next. In between, we see flashes of an under-utilised Cavill as Conway's fictional hero Argylle, while Cranston chimes in as a memorable villain.

While obviously not to all tastes, Argylle is ridiculous yet fun. It goes perilously close to jumping the shark so many times and the twists pile on awkwardly but it's half the appeal. Unfortunately it does drag on too long, as if two stories have been wedged together in fear of not getting a sequel greenlit.

Some iconic-looking sequences linger in the mind, but so does that poor song choice. In 10-20 years it will make sense, and maybe those iconic-looking sequences will actually be iconic. But for now, this overlong oddity is a flawed minor joy.