ftalker Reviews

The Fabelmans (2022)

FORWARD TO THE PAST

[6/10 · 27 April 2024]

The fundamental problem with Steven Spielberg's movies is that they are essentially designed as self-therapy for a childhood marred by his parents' divorce. This was most evident in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), ET: The Extra Terrestrial (1982), Empire of the Sun (1987) & Catch Me If You Can (2002) in which absent fathers and/or dysfunctional families play a key role.

Spielberg's persistently-neurotic nostalgia means that his movies are not focused upon a passion for story-telling, but a need to find closure for his unsuccessful struggle to understand both his parents and, inevitably, himself.

The problem with art therapy - as Carl Jung discovered - is that it seldom produces great art - only self-indulgence instead of self-awareness. If one cannot get beyond trauma, trauma is all that one has to offer others. And it is a certainty that most people have met such people, including ourselves, whom cannot get on with their lives and merely regurgitate their suffering in hopes that the world will sort-of admire them for their honesty.

Woody Allen is the classic example of this navel-gazing tendency since his body of work does not show any genuine maturing away from his generally pessimistic, narcissistic & nihilistic world-view. But, he just happens to be funny, so he can get away with it. When Mr Allen tries to be serious, however, he is resolutely off-putting and unable to express anything really complex about the human experience.

Similarly, Steven Spielberg (like Cecil B DeMille) can produce great visual and escapist entertainment which has little to say about humanity; explaining why Spielberg's movies never matured since he remains mostly fixated upon largely-meaningless big-budget spectacle which desperately apes David Lean. But, in Lean's case, he never forgot the characters and their motivations for a single moment of screen time because his action told the audience about the characters and weren't just there to keep the audience awake in-between dialogue scenes.

With The Fabelmans (2022), Spielberg is still unable to tell us if his great passion in life is storytelling, as such, or merely being someone devoted to re-creating himself as the person he wishes he really were from the safe, emotional distance of the mediating camera-lens - his means of avoiding unresolved issues from childhood.

The performances are excellent throughout, but the characters are psychologically-thin and, therefore, emotionally-uninvolving. Part of this comes from the fear of revealing too much about oneself in public and the fact that the Spielberg family is really not all that interesting. Had it been anyone else's childhood, would this film have ever been made?

Mr Spielberg has never really grown-up as a man and this explains a good deal about his great facility with child actors. But it also explains the large decline in his popularity and relevance as a cinematic storyteller and why he is now reduced to flogging-the-dead-horse represented by the last two Indiana Jones' movies.

Steven Spielberg can't stop making movies and retire because he would still be faced with the trauma that every child goes through when their parents divorce. And this is what he wants to avoid because resolving it might mean facing the fact that he is nothing more than a one-trick-pony film director and nothing more than a hack.

Keep It Up Downstairs (1976)

SEXY GIRLS; DIRE COMEDY

[4/10 · 3 February 2024]

A desperately unfunny film featuring some very sexy women and classy actors wasted in an underwritten story set in an English country-house.

The production values and the costuming are excellent for such a low-budget movie, but these do not adequately compensate for cringe-making and vapid humour. There are absolutely no valid statements to be made about human sexuality in this British sex-comedy despite its claim to being a sex comedy.

All that the audience gets instead is a White culture of sexual repression, male insecurities & the inevitably-resulting sexual desperation - especially among the largely-unsatisfied women. To make things worse, the film insults its audience by treating them as if they were also just as love-starved.

There is no real sense here that sex is a means to an end - just an end in itself - since all of the characters are either scared of sex or see it as something you get from someone else rather than something you share with them. And where's the fun in that?

Crack in the World (1965)

WHAT'S THE CRAIC?

[6/10 · 28 December 2023]

Impressive-looking movie with excellent special-effects compromised by terrible, expository dialogue which does not provide any kind of engaging emotional drama.

The actors do their best but their parts are so underwritten that the love triangle here comes across as pure soap-opera.

The underlying story here of scientific and technological over-reach leading to global catastrophe remains topical but is never fully unexplored. Perhaps there is a reason that the Earth's magma-core is shrouded by a thick mantle which only a fission bomb can penetrate? Yet only one of the characters in laboratory coats here in the whole wide world ever suggests that drilling through this protective layer might have deleterious and suicidal effects for the planet.

Super Hybrid (2010)

SILLY HORROR

[4/10 · 24 September 2023]

Weak characterisation, poor editing & no necessary sense of ever-present dread hurt this movie immeasurably.

The actors are all fine but it is hard to care for their characters when they are so thinly-drawn and possess no grounded motivations for their relationships with one another.

Overall, there is no compelling reason for this film to exist. It offers no social commentary on the existence of the automobile, where on Earth the shapeshifting monster came from (& what it's purpose is) and why something as hard-to-manoeuvre-in-small-spaces as a motor car could ever truly be seen as threatening, scary or in need of being hunted down like a wild animal in an underground car park.

Hawa (2003)

GHOSTS NEED REGULAR LOVING, TOO

[4/10 · 2 April 2023]

Remake of "The Entity" (1981) with borrowings from "The Shining" (1980) and "Poltergeist" (1982).

This one is far too long for its content, which does not delve deeply into the family dynamics which dominate the early scenes. These dynamics are then not convincingly resolved at the film's end - especially regarding the sexually-creepy nature of the heroine's dying father.

Why have a rapey ghost in a soapy melodrama only then to clearly state that the ghost is not her father involved in some kind of personal sexual vendetta against the lead? Outside of a whodunnit, this red herring mostly invalidates and trivialises all of the setup, as if the movie-makers, themselves, were scared (on behalf of the audience) of the unavoidably-dark corners of the neurotic human-psyche into which such incest-laden emotional delvings would inevitably lead.

Tabu was a very good choice for the lead role, here, and she carries the film well; while doing her best with a limited role as an under-written mother-of-two.

Ultimately, "Hawa" doesn't really amount to anything more than a series of set-pieces revolving around an alternately vengeful-then-horny poltergeist whom kidnaps a child for no real reason other than to provide for an admittedly slap-bang ending.

Sputnik (2020)

FORWARD TO THE PAST

[8/10 · 19 March 2023]

Unusual film-genre hybrid which looks like it might be an ordinary horror-movie, given the general cinematographic and psychological doom-&-gloom of the entire proceedings, but which is actually a suspenseful science-fiction conspiracy thriller.

The conspiracy here is that old movie-chestnut about any government automatically-desiring to weaponise a recently-discovered alien creature, à la mode de The Andromeda Strain (1971) or Alien (1979).

The well-titled "Sputnik" (Russian for 'travelling companion') is shot-through with references to the main characters' past and is even set in the Soviet Russia of 1983. In this way, the Soviet Union becomes a metaphor for a past which must be laid-to-rest in order to ensure any kind of viable future, but which is often stubbornly not allowed to die in its very-real affect upon the film's present.

From a Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder-stricken cosmonaut abandoning his son in an orphanage to join the Space Race; a brilliantly-intuitive psychiatrist raised in an orphanage, herself; &, an extra-terrestrial symbiote unknowingly-brought back to Earth, the physical and emotional connectedness of these characters is shown in a low-key manner; eschewing jump-scares and focusing on their inter-relationships, value to each other, their personal weaknesses & their intellectual strengths.

The psychiatrist here actually develops a somewhat-maternal relationship with her cosmonaut patient and even with the creature, itself; despite it literally needing the bodies of other animals to survive, thrive & grow - and in spite of the cortisol produced in human brains (resulting from a quite natural fear of the sputnik's behaviour) being its sole form of gory nourishment.

The birth (& rebirth) scenes are superior to the one in an obvious movie-progenitor like Alien (1979), since the idea isn't just immediately thrown away and is actually central to the underlying theme of healthy parenting.

The male host survives each rebirth and we are left with a salvageable-yet-substitute family-unit; albeit one presented as a recurring nightmare since the creature only appears while its paralysed host sleeps. And yet this particular family is as ultimately- and as potentially-destructive of all families as is the child-murdering convict briefly seen at the secret military-facility early-on in the film; hinting at what usually goes wrong in dysfunctional families.

The structural problem with this movie is that the flash-backs to the psychiatrist's orphaned childhood are unclear. She had difficulty walking, was inevitably obsessed with running shoes & yet somehow now walks fine. Her cure is implied to be the result of a spinal operation; while her being in the orphanage in the first place is never explained.

These flash-backs conflate the son of the cosmonaut she is treating with herself as a child, since the former has been abandoned in an orphanage by his guilt-ridden father. This subjective dramaturgical-confusion somewhat spoils an otherwise subtle and clever drama by partly-disturbing its suspense and pacing.

As always, Oksana AKINSHINA is a standout performer, surrounded by men whom are either quite cowardly or extremely cynical, à la Sigourney WEAVER's situation in Aliens (1986). She heads a talented cast whom make the most of admittedly-underwritten roles, yet all of whom help to create the moodiness of the oddly-dank, curiously-underlit & dungeon-like atmosphere of a secluded scientific/military-facility deep in the middle of nowhere.

AKINSHINA's feminine charisma helps propel the narrative in the way that a male character could not, since she is not prone to much leaping-into-action, but to intellectual introspection and emotional nurturing, instead - especially in being the only character to attempt to form an emotional bond with the alien.

A somewhat bleak yet satisfying ending makes this movie about good, responsible parenting a winner - especially since it was directed with great confidence by first-time feature-film director Egor ABRAMENKO.

The Arrival (1996)

DEAD ON ARRIVAL

[4/10 · 17 March 2023]

Unsophisticated propaganda for the dangers of climate change disguised as a mish-mash of science-fiction, suspense, horror & conspiracy thriller.

This movie does not do particularly well at any of its genres; making it a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-none since it cannot decide what it primarily wants to be.

None of the actors does anything interesting with their admittedly thinly-written characters; leaving the audience to focus on wondering what is really going on amidst the long trail of death-and-destruction related to a mysterious, coded radio-message from outside the solar system.

We don't really care for any of the characters; making two hours pass slowly.

The Entity (1982)

LAYING A GHOST

[8/10 · 17 March 2023]

Above-average horror movie which alternates between a psychological explanation of the events depicted and a para-psychological one.

First, we are presented with an oddly-lascivious ghost whom repeatedly rapes the heroine (brilliantly played by Barbara HERSHEY) in her imagination, but with real bruises to substantiate her claims - yet no police involvement?

We are then told that the heroine's parents were sexual perverts, that she has an Electra complex, that she wants to have sex with her handsome teenage son and there is even an implication that her psychiatrist is getting too personally-involved in her case. HERSHEY's sex-appeal makes these sexual implications of the plot all-too-believable.

There is an ideological battle here between those whom believe HERSHEY's character to be an hysterical female troubled by deep-seated sexual fears against those whom believe the entity stalking her is tangible and real. This is resolved in a slightly underwhelming ending which is deliberately left ambiguous.

Underpinning the sexual tension is a feminist allegory about a woman's proper place in Western society and the necessarily-sexist and misogynist incubus - with poltergeist tendencies - being a metaphor for the gender oppression of women in Caucasian and Jewish cultures.

The writing here is first class and everyone involved offers convincing performances which very much helps the suspension-of-disbelief in a somewhat bizarre tale allegedly based on a true story. And the Dutch angles the director Sidney J FURIE loves to use actually add to the melodramatic sense of emotional disorientation rather than potentially irritating or bemusing the audience.

What "The Entity" lacks is a musical score that is less insistent on getting your attention than the somewhat grating one presented here, coupled with a motivation for the sexual behaviour of the entity which rises above the merely lecherous.

Flawless (2007)

PRETTY FLAWLESS

[8/10 · 2 November 2022]

Not entirely credible but beautifully-acted -written & -shot diamond-heist caper.

The movie is filled with anti-mercantilist political points about greed as a substitute for genuine trade and the fact that capitalism in the West is little more than a facade for a rigged system designed to benefit only a few Caucasian males. This all made me root for the central character as he attempts a convoluted revenge against the world of global corporate exploitation-for-profit.

The clever twist in the middle of the film is quite surprising and forces you to reassess what is really going on here. All of which helps enforce the point that there is more to life than an all-too-necessary materialism.

Beat the Devil (1953)

"MALTESE FALCON" PARODY

[8/10 · 16 February 2021]

Subtle spoof of adventure thrillers that - on the surface at least - appears very much an example of the movie genre being spoofed.

Once you realise that the movie has no real hero nor heroine, you can sit back and enjoy the first-rate actors pretending to be characters pretending to be otherwise than they are. (This makes it also something of a satire on the Hollywood film-production system and its combative egos, sexual perversion & illegal-drug abuse.)

Into the Night (II) (2020–2021)

WHITE PANIC: "Airplane" Without the Jokes

[6/10 · 20 December 2020]

The usual post-apocalyptic nonsense from Caucasians which, despite being logically and melodramatically absurd, still oddly remains emotionally compelling.

As always, the fictional apocalypse is seen through White people's eyes, as if only their lives mattered. Actors of Colour behave mostly as if they were White; revealing how uninsightful White writers are regarding differing or different perspectives. The analogue-to-reality here is that the current White obsession with the end of the world in their fictional media (zombies, aliens, climate change, resource exhaustion, etc) is really a pre-occupation with the cultural and economic decline of their particar ethnic group, especially when compared with the current rise of the Han Chinese in the twenty-first century.

However, the best thing about this series is that the behaviour of the White people here is most likely extremely accurate in terms of how strangely they would behave in such a scenario in real life. One only has to witness modern-day Caucasians in the West, panic-buying toilet paper and publicly protesting against wearing face masks in the middle of an infectious-disease Pandemic to see this clearly.

Instead of working together to solve common problems, what we see here are people working hard to undermine each other with ego games and threats of violent assault - even when this could mean their collective deaths. There is, after all, little point in threatening the life of the only person who could save them, when no-one else could take his place in the cockpit of the plane flying them out of the danger zone.

The plot holes in this production are fairly large and include continued electricity-generation without anyone to operate any power stations (eg, street lights still working), some people surviving when others die for no explicable reason - including pets - when understanding how they managed to survive more than 24 hours could help the other survivors to live longer. But the actors save the day (especially Mehmet KURTULUS) as they are able to get beyond the mediocre writing to present more the writers' intentions than what is immediately-apparent from their actual dialogue.

In fact, these performers somewhat deftly define their clearly-differentiated characters to present often-subtle depictions of human greed, stupidity, self-centredness, neurosis, self-pity, panic & self-sabotage. The only problem here is that over the six episodes of series one, few of them ever really develop enough beyond the two-dimensional writing wherein every character has a secret flaw; making it difficult for them to overcome their psychological problems except for the intervention of good luck in the form of lazily-expedient writing.

Tenet (2020)

PALINDROME

[4/10 · 6 December 2020]

Christopher NOLAN has run out of ideas. He now has to resuscitate concepts that are twenty years' old in order to keep his career going rather than retire from being a creative himself and then to produce the works of the next generation of film directors.

The rampant egomania and intellectual arrogance here is emotionally depressing and distinctly un-entertaining as we witness an above-average talent reduced to hack work.

The characterisation is poor, the ideas ridiculous and the cast not always well-chosen. But the biggest problem is a script which gives little for the actors to do to enable them to breathe life into their characters. This lack of any possibility for audience identification leaves us with a psychologically-barren spectacle which occurs for no really-valid reason.

A waste of time.

Human Nature (2001)

SIMULTANAGNOSIA

[8/10 · 16 November 2020]

Very funny movie about a White culture so neurotically obsessed with social conformity that social behaviour becomes largely a pretence in which observing others becomes a form of social control wherein everyone is watching everyone else for signs of non-conformity.

In this scenario, personal relationships are inevitably faked, with a concomitant preoccupation with physical appearance and smart dress - along with emotionally-repressed behaviour. The characters know whom they are and what their actual natures are, which tell them what to do, yet most are openly resentful and overtly jealous of anyone courageous enough to actually love themselves for themselves - no matter the potential for social censure.

The funniest parts of the movie concern affectionless upbringings which leave many of the characters with a great difficulty in creating meaning in their lives and, thus, any kind of personal fulfilment. They become physical adults yet remain emotionally-immature in repeating the same psychologically-conditioned and emotionally-conditioning mistakes of their parents. Only the ethnic-minority characters have any genuine and expressive sense of life for us to contrast with the idiosyncacies of the White ones.

Underneath all of this simmering self-alienation is a desire for the kind of impassioned sex which helps us to understand ourselves with greater clarity and others with greater insight. Rhys IFANS' hilarious attempts at sexual congress with objects and strangers (which lead to mild electric shocks administered by the disapproving and his subsequent immersion in the world of prostitution) makes this point brilliantly. But the focus of so many of the characters on science, as opposed to intuition, as a means of self-realisation means few succeed at developing a full sense of their own humanity.

Despite it being as sexually coy, this movie is an eloquent plea for the essential humanity of humanity, which still does not endeavour to explain why White culture is so enamoured of the emotional repression shown here.

Revolutionary Road (2008)

NOT LISTENING; BUT TALKING

[8/10 · 7 November 2020]

The existential problems of White people are here shown to lead to functional neurosis; meaning being able to function politically, but never personally. This is especially emphasised here given that the only obviously-certifiable character (played by Michael SHANNON) is more sane in his understanding of the world than anyone else (albeit that his response to his own insights is decidedly anti-social).

White people's problems-with-living are inevitably passed-on to their children as they also, in their turn, seek to achieve the meaning, the identity & the value largely absent from a culture superficially-addicted to materialism. But this central theme is not fully-explored, save for the lead (played indifferently by Leonardo DiCaprio) working in the advertising business - which he hates for its essential phoniness. But what in his family made him that way, we might well ask? And why is his response to it so weak?

Thus, no solution to the problems of the two central characters is ever presented, except the pointlessness of running away from one's problem when they will never run away from you. The best that the wife (played by the always-superb Kate WINLSLET) can do is to procure an abortion so that no more suffering people are brought into the world.

That White people lack the courage to be themselves explains a lot regarding their higher rates of, for example, suicide, depression & loneliness. They are thus reduced to acting-out their lives (while never truly living them) according to stage-plays written by others, regardless of self-esteem or whether or not those others have their best interests at heart; ensuring that they never actually achieve any self-interest or self-esteem. (This is exacerbated by the fact that Caucasians are also taught to be morbidly fearful of other cultures even if they could learn something from those cultures to their advantage.)

This essential phoniness regarding one's relationship with oneself and regarding that with other people can only lead to bitterness, frustration & resentment at the resultant fear of social ridicule, ostracism & censure. Being different to other White people and, thereby, running the risk of psychological suffering for not confirming with their limitations and fears - albeit, paradoxically, conformity with those with whom one can never be friends with anyway precisely because of the difference.

The insightful writing is good, but the 1950s suburban milieu is largely pointless since the issues discussed here would be true in any White ghetto at any time during the last 500 years. Still, the acting performances generally excellent - particularly Kathy BATES in a supporting role - but where are the true revolutionaries? Not here!

Arthur & Merlin (2015)

Arthfael & Myrrdin

[8/10 · 21 December 2015]

The best King Arthur film - ever - played with all the necessary conviction.

A quest for each man to achieve his purpose and identity - in relation to his aptitudes - against the delusion that one can only achieve when one is ready, since one can never know when this might actually be until one actually tries.

All it lacks is a compelling exploration of the political conflict between the old, pagan gods and the new Christian ones, that it implies is central to any abstract understanding of the culture depicted and the non-material reasons one might have for defending it.