White Noise (Noah Baumbach, 2022)

Following on from 2019's more straightforward and surprisingly poignant Marriage Story, here Baumbach decides to throw absolutely everything into the pot, so the basic set-up of an overly loquacious family of an anxious academic, his wife with a secret and their cleverclogs children is overlaid with an ecocatastrophe, parallels drawn between Elvis and Hitler, right-wing conspiracy theorists, religious and philosophical musings about the nature of death, sensations of déjà vu, ADHD, the cult of self-medication, modern information overload and mindless consumerism. Amongst other things. The influence of late '70s Woody Allen, Baumbach's self-professed biggest one, is clearly still there, most particularly in the preponderance of rapid-fire intellectualising conversations that veer wildly from topic to topic, but by now Baumbach  has decided to try to cover everything. The overall result is definitively the white noise of the title, so mission achieved in a sense, and the sheer audacity is quite something to behold. While the flitting may grate at many junctures, it never stops being watchable. This is considerably helped by the director casting his stalwart regular, a quite unrecognisable Adam Driver, in the role of the middle-aged father.

In short, cinematic Marmite. Which I like.

7/10

Three Thousand Years of Longing (George Miller, 2022)

It's safe to say that the directorial career of George Miller has been an eclectic one. Mad Max and all its sequels, Lorenzo's Oil, Babe: Pig in the City and now Tilda Swinton as a professor of narratology who releases the djinn Idris Elba from a bottle she buys in Istanbul, and then we're off with him telling his story over the last 3,000 years, quite clearly aiming to convince her to make the three earnest wishes that will set him free for good that while she insists that she is perfectly content with her life.

The tales he tells, all set in the Middle East and illustrating human desires, folly and cruelty, are somewhat overburdened by the opulent visuals, but the interplay between Swinton and Elba is captivating, with her accusing him of being a trickster as in all classical stories about djinns and him retorting by effectively questioning her very humanity. Certainly an uncommon premise for a romantic fantasy, it's chaotic as a whole, but the two leads hold it together.

6/10 

Eternals (Chloé Zhao, 2021)

The MCU takes its 26th outing to deal with characters less known to the general public, a bunch of superpowered immortals tasked with protecting Earth from their scheming counterparts. A two-and-a-half hour bombardment of the usual flying, zapping and fighting ensues, with oodles of utter hokum vaguely linked to mankind's mythology. It's both dependent on a good cast for the viewer's goodwill and also wastes them, so all there really is to keep you going is some pretty cinematography and a few nuggets of novelty such as the first superhero fight to take place at Camden Lock. And this, highly incongruously, from the director of the arthouse hit Nomadland, surely only here for a fat pay cheque. Meh.

4/10

Everything Everywhere All at Once (Daniel Kwan & Daniel Scheinert, 2022)

 

Seven Oscars is a compelling argument for at least giving a film the time of day. Unfortunately, Everything Everywhere All at Once is quite possibly the worst example ever witnessed of how meaningless the Academy Awards really are. The grounds for the awards are, firstly, blatant tokenism: the lead characters are all Chinese Americans and the film vaguely gestures at saying something about the immigrant experience. Then it cashes in on the faddish, currently massively overused notion of alternative universes, with Michelle Yeoh's protagonist jumping in swift succession from one to another, gathering resources from the lives of each of her parallel selves while being pursued by her moody daughter who has done the same. Interspersed with all of this is switching constantly between any novelty medium or genre you can name, including martial arts (of course), animation and puerile comedy, lest those with zero attention spans get bored or anyone twigs onto the fact that it really has nothing to say. But Academy voters cannot admit to being confused, so it has to be plauded as being a virtuoso work of diverse genius, encapsulating the 'everything' promised by the title. And naturally there's also a reassuringly feelgood ending, with the whole philosophical life lesson ending up as 'be happy with what you've got', after nearly two and a half hours frenetic sensory bombardment. Yes, it's visually imaginative, but when that serves no purpose, it's nowhere near enough.

4/10

Prospect (Zeek Earl & Chris Caldwell, 2018)

 

An odd little fish, this. In the age of mega-budget FX-heavy sci-fi blockbusters, it's highly uncommon for indie filmmakers to venture into the genre at all, let alone the extraterrestrial future subgenre. Nevertheless, we're asked to take on faith that the characters of Prospect, a father and daughter looking for treasure, are on a biohazard-filled alien planet and not just the American national park which it was filmed in, and their spaceship and tools, which would have looked dated even in the 1970s, somehow got them there.

So the film has to fall back on plot, performances and dialogue, and while there are no surprises in terms of how the story turns once the protagonists' venture quickly heads south, is just about stands up on the strength of the latter two aspects, particularly a pre-The Mandalorian Pedro Pascal as smooth-talking chancer in the mould of Tom Hanks in the remake of The Ladykillers. It's at least diverting and proves that there is still hope for sci-fi aspirants outside the big studio system.

5/10

Bullet Train (David Leitch, 2022)

One should take exception to Hollywood plundering a Japanese novel with Japanese characters in a Japanese setting and populating it instead with American stars, as they commonly do, but it's hard to imagine that a wholly authentic native version of a plot just about assassins on the Shinkansen trying to do away with each other could be all that enjoyable. Casting Brad Pitt as the lead, a hitman coming back to work from a protracted spiritual retreat, is a scream, proving once again that his greatest aptitude actually lies in comedy, just as in the case of his pal George Clooney. And the able cast around him are given stacks of choice lines and personality quirks to work with too,  such as one of them basing his whole judgement of people on Thomas the Tank Engine. Of course the numerous deaths on the way are as as Grand Guignol as anything, but they are inventive enough to slot neatly into the comedy. An unexpectedly guilty treat, provided you are sold on the idea of Snatch put into a blender with Kill Bill and Burn After Reading.

6/10 

Dune: Part One (Denis Villeneuve, 2021)

 

Well, as seen in the outcry by Tolkienistas over the Rings of Power TV series, spraying real ale into their cardigans over each tedious detail of the author's painstakingly crafted world skipped in favour of making the story actually dramatically work on screen, so too did Lynch's condensed 1984 version of Frank Herbert's muddled work draw the fire of obsessive fans for mining the source for the outright weirdness therein and jettisoning the chaff. Villeneuve takes a much more cautiously reverential approach, so the end result is, as with his Blade Runner 2049, something more ponderous than its predecessor, relying heavily on entrancing visuals and a brooding atmosphere.  With the story of the novel only half told in two and a half hours, the second part will naturally follow soon and will not be unwelcome, given that it does represent an antidote of sorts to all the pervasive hyperactive sci-fi around, but Herbert's saga hardly has the legs to sustain a franchise that runs beyond that point.

6/10