Tag: UK

Review: One to One: John and Yoko

Is there a millimetre of Beatles footage left that hasn’t been explored? Arguably the most documented band in history, John Lennon alone has been extensively diarised in Imagine, Gimme Some Truth, and countless others.

Yet as Peter Jackson proved with almost eight hours of The Beatles: Get Back, sometimes a shift in perspective makes all the difference. Michael Epstein’s LennoNYC already covered the icon’s time in New York with Yoko Ono, but here Kevin MacDonald and editor Sam Rice-Edwards not only unearth previously unseen (and unheard) footage from the lead-up to the 1972 One to One Madison Square Garden benefit concert, they also manage to frame Lennon and Ono as products and symbols of a divided America at a cultural crossroads.

In the early 1970s, Lennon and Ono moved into a small Greenwich Village apartment for 18 months. The way they tell it, they watched a lot of television. MacDonald and Rice-Edwards lean into this anecdote, intercutting newsreels, commercials, and pop culture ephemera with concert footage, interviews, and audio recordings. The effect is that we’re there with them, watching America flicker by on the box. In doing so, the filmmakers contextualise Lennon and Ono’s activism, arguably reframing their prolific output as reactive to this cultural saturation.

At times the quick-cut archival clips verge on the excessive, but the method feels deliberate: a kind of sensory overload that mirrors the media landscape Lennon and Ono inhabited. One especially affecting sequence features footage from Willowbrook State School, where an impossibly young Geraldo Rivera exposed the horrific treatment of children with intellectual disabilities. It’s this segment that led directly to the One to One concert.

Like Johan Grimonprez’s The Soundtrack to a Coup d’État (2024), ONE TO ONE makes use of on-screen text for phone conversations, offering Lennon obsessives a treasure trove of transcripts. Conversations with David Peel and fellow activists are among the highlights, though one surreal aside involves Ono’s efforts to acquire live flies for an installation piece.

Did the world need another Lennon documentary? Probably not. Will fans discover brand-new revelations? Unlikely. And yet, MacDonald and Rice-Edwards carve out new emotional ground, particularly in rebalancing the Lennon/Ono narrative. Ono is finally given a voice equal to Lennon’s, portrayed not as a disruptive force, but as a fierce, feminist, proto-punk artist whose own griefs, especially the search for her estranged daughter, are present throughout.

By the same token, the filmmakers make some very conscious choices about what not to include, sometimes leaping between years without narration and very deliberately curating songs from the concert that fit the story. In these moments, the burden shifts to the viewer, our cultural knowledge is expected to fill the gaps.

At times, the squabbles between musicians and activists border on the absurd, like Bob Dylan refusing to tour until A.J. Weberman apologised for, among other things, rummaging through his garbage on camera. But these scenes ground its icons in human moments. And maybe that’s the point: this was just a couple living through a moment in time.

2024 | UK | DIRECTOR: Kevin Macdonald | EDITOR: Sam Rice-Edwards | CAST: John Lennon, Yoko Ono, David Peel, Allen Ginsberg | DISTRIBUTOR: Sydney Film Festival 2025, Madman Entertainment | RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 4-15 June 2025 (SFF 2025)

June 9, 2025
Review: The Brutalist

Don’t bother searching for László Tóth. Like Lydia Tár before him, he’s a figure of considerable renown who exists solely within the bounds of an intense piece of fiction. Yet THE BRUTALIST, directed by Brady Corbet and co-written with Mona Fastvold, is firmly anchored in the concrete realities of a century’s worth of history, drawing inspiration from real-world architects and designers.

Corbet deliberately disorients the audience from the outset with an intense sequence of jarring shots, reminiscent of the climactic scene in The Childhood of a Leader (2015). These striking visuals introduce Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor László Tóth (Adrien Brody) as he arrives at Ellis Island, the Statue of Liberty looming above the immigrants.

Tóth’s version of the “American Dream” follows a familiar path. Labelled onscreen as ‘The Enigma of Arrival’, it sees architect Tóth move to Philadelphia to stay with his cousin, Attila (Alessandro Nivola), and help with his furniture business. Unable to bring his wife, Erzsébet (Felicity Jones), to America right away, Tóth faces mixed fortunes. Coupled by a descent into heroin addiction, he’s left in charity housing and working construction jobs. At least until he catches the attention of Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a wealthy and volatile industrialist.

Van Buren commissions Tóth to build a multi-function community centre near his estate. The second act of the film, “The Hard Core of Beauty” traces the construction project and the parallel unravelling of the architect. Following the arrival of his now wheelchair-bound wife and mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), Tóth increasingly feels the glares of his outsider status as a foreigner in a rich white world.

Like the building Tóth has designed, THE BRUTALIST is ambitious in both size and shape. At 215 minutes, Corbet’s film mirrors the titular design movement: like a massive concrete structure, it may initially appear daunting, indulgent, or even unapproachable. Yet by presenting its characters in their rawest forms, the film’s deliberate pacing invites the audience to invest time and uncover the understated elegance within. Make no mistake—THE BRUTALIST is beautiful and transfixing. Over three and a half hours in Tóth’s world pass in the blink of an eye.

By shooting on VistaVision film and using cameras from the format’s heyday—a process Paramount pioneered but abandoned after just seven years in the 1950s and 1960s—Corbet crafts his film with the very materials of the era it depicts. The result is a series of jaw-droppingly beautiful moments, captured in the characteristic fine-grain of the format. Even the 15-minute intermission is a deliberate nod to tradition, serving not just as a bladder break but as a pivotal thematic shift.

Likewise, the stellar cast—completely reassembled between the film’s 2020 announcement and final form—feel less like performers and more like documentary subjects. It’s a running joke that Brody has spent much of his career in the Second World War (The Thin Red Line, The Pianist), but here you would believe it. Brody carries the weight of his character’s trauma and grief in every contorted expression, a survivor in every sense of the word.

In Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote that legacy is planting seeds in a garden you never get to see. Tóth actively refutes this, literally constructing a monument to past traumas and claiming ownership of his own legacy. (In a playful nod, the credits roll to La Bionda’s 1970s disco hit “One for You, One for Me,” driving the point home). As the film’s closing moments remind us, “No matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” THE BRUTALIST is one hell of a destination.

2024 | USA, Hungary, UK | DIRECTOR: Brady Corbet | WRITERS: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold | CAST: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy, Stacy Martin, Emma Laird, Isaach de Bankolé, Alessandro Nivola | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures (Australia), A24 (USA) | RUNNING TIME: 215 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 23 January 2025 (Australia), 20 December 2024 (USA)

January 17, 2025
Review: Bird

Sometimes you go to the cinema to simply watch a story. Other times, you’re entirely transported into someone else’s world, walking a few miles in their shoes, feeling their heartbeat. That’s always been the superpower of Andrea Arnold, who returns to squat flats after taking us on a sublime journey in American Honey.

In BIRD , 12-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) lives with her single dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), in North Kent. Bug’s impending marriage to his relatively new girlfriend, Debs (Joanne Matthews), pushes Bailey into increasingly rebellious territory.

Much like Arnold’s Fish Tank, BIRD explores complex relationships between youth and distracted parents, which become even more tangled with the arrival of a third party. Here, instead of the Fassbender figure, the role belongs to the enigmatic Bird (Franz Rogowski), a free spirit in search of lost parents who takes Bailey on a journey to unexpected places.

Rogowski’s Bird has an impish touch; his understated performance creeps up like an emotional body blow. He arrives on a strong wind like a modern-day Mary Poppins, often see perched on rooftops and balanced on fences. His presence coincides with major life changes for Bailey, and were it not for his interactions with other characters, we might be left wondering if he’s really there at all.

Meanwhile, Keoghan’s Bug is Bird’s polar opposite—he loves as big as he parties. Covered head to toe in tattoos, he’s rough around the edges and his attempts to bridge the gap between Debs and Bailey are well-meaning but misguided. His financial plan is selling drug slime from a toad. Yet we still get the sense he’s trying to do the right thing. (Plus, his karaoke may do for Blur’s The Universal what Saltburn did for Murder on the Dancefloor). The backstory between him and Bailey’s estranged mother (Jasmine Jobson) is never fully explained, but we know Bailey continues some form of relationship with her stepsisters.

Ultimately, the film is driven by young Adams’ singular performance, and it’s rare to see a story that feels as grounded yet as magical as this one. Regular collaborator Robbie Ryan, also often Ken Loach’s cinematographer, deftly balances the harsh realities of the characters’ lives with moments of miniature beauty and small miracles.

BIRD is, at times, a confronting watch with raw emotions on full display. Arnold’s willingness to push boundaries in telling this modern fable makes its peaks all the more soaring. It’s a grand piece of magical realism and unquestionably one of the year’s best.

2024 | UK, France, Germany, USA | DIRECTOR: Andrea Arnold | WRITERS: Andrea Arnold | CAST: Nykiya Adams, Barry Keoghan, Franz Rogowski, Jason Buda, Jasmine Jobson, Frankie Box, James Nelson-Joyce | DISTRIBUTOR: Mubi (USA/UK), British Film Festival, Mushroom Studios (Australia) | RUNNING TIME: 119 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 8 November 2024 (USA/UK), 6 November 2024 (British Film Festival)

November 13, 2024
Review: Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan’s epic biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, arrives with a moment of quiet contemplation. It’s immediately followed by a literally explosive assault on the senses, coupled with textual reference to Prometheus. In these few moments, Nolan signals how he intends to go on, framing a life like the series of chain reactions that haunt its subject.

Given the vein of quantum mechanics that runs through both OPPENHEIMER the movie and the man, it makes sense that writer/director Nolan tells this story in a nonlinear fashion. As such, we do not start at the beginning, as Nolan takes us back and forth between a private ‘trial’ of Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy), his complicated and hostile relationship with Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), and the development of the first atomic bomb.

If it already sounds mildly obfuscating, it’s because it is – and quite deliberately so. After all, it’s Nolan’s brand at this point. On one hand, there’s a straight line from Oppenheimer’s early days – where he is “troubled by visions of a hidden universe” – through to the establishment of his physics career, the Manhattan Project, the development of the bomb, and the furor over his connections to communism after the War.

Almost like a series of jump scares, Oppenheimer’s glimpses of that hidden universe make animalistic leaps at the audience. These are moments that blast us with the sound and fury of the inevitable mushroom cloud. It’s a testament to the practical and in-camera work of visual effects supervisor Andrew Jackson (who won the Academy Award for his work with Nolan on Tenet) — not to mention the thunderous sound design — that you can virtually feel the heat emanating from the screen.

This all culminates in the first test detonation in New Mexico. Following a literal ticking time bomb motif, Ludwig Göransson’s enveloping score mixes with the unnerving twitch of a Geiger counter as the fateful moments approach. The cacophony of noise goes chillingly silent during the Vishnu moment: as Oppenheimer becomes Death, destroyer of worlds, there is an odd calm. The tangible blast that follows is both literal and political.

Nolan doesn’t conveniently end his film there. After all, the audience knows how this all turns out for the nuclear arms race. Nolan traces Oppenheimer’s attempts to halt the development of the H-Bomb and nuclear proliferation, a public stance that saw him pilloried as a communist. For the more chronological recent sequences, Nolan and regular cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema take a literal black and white approach, one that’s almost documentary in nature. This isn’t always as dramatically successful as the first two thirds of this gargantuan story, but it’s never anything less than fascinating.

Murphy doesn’t so much play Oppenheimer as embody him. When he dons the familiar hat and pipe, it’s as much a ritualistic act of putting on a costume as one of Nolan’s superheroes. Given that we are constantly reminded of Oppenheimer’s genius, including his relationship with Einstein (Tom Conti), both of his main antagonists (and sort of collaborators) are bureaucrats. During the war, it’s Army man Leslie Groves, played by Matt Damon in his most confident performance in some time, that pushes at Oppenheimer from a place of respect. Strauss is his antithesis, taking any minor slight as a declaration of war.

The two women depicted in this environment – Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) and his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) – fare less successfully. Both have stories that feel biopic worthy in their own right, although at various points both feel like supporting objects in Nolan’s hands. Only Blunt really has a strong agency in the final moments of the trial, and is perhaps the one voice in the narrative that can confidently tell the lead to pull himself together.

OPPENHEIMER isn’t a film you watch but one you experience. It may not all work, with those leaps and bounds backwards and forwards through time potentially requiring a few watches to get one’s head around, but that scarcely matters. As with Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, Nolan has built his opus in the middle of the cinematic desert and it’s up to us to take it from there. Just like its subject, it may take us years to fully appreciate the impact of its detonation.

2023 | USA/UK | DIRECTOR: Christopher Nolan | WRITERS: Christopher Nolan | CAST: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 180 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 20 July 2023 (AUS), 21 July 2023 (US/UK)

July 20, 2023
007 Case Files: Cold (Fall)

Bond. James Bond. In the 007 Case Files, join me as I read all of the James Bond books, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.

If we were to compare the various Bond writers the way we do the actors portraying the spy, then John Gardner is probably the Roger Moore of the bunch.

Sure, Gardner’s tenure spanned Moore, Timothy Dalton, and the start of Pierce Brosnan’s run. Starting in 1981 with Licence Renewed, he has to date served as the longest writer on the series, longer than even Ian Fleming.

He is revered and affectionately mocked in equal measure by fans, mirroring the mixed sentiments Moore elicited from cinema audiences. Like the actor’s portrayal, he could be action-packed and technical, sometimes awkwardly sexy, and often with tongue planted in cheek.

So, with his final novel COLD (aka COLD FALL), first published in 1996, he releases what is arguably his most ambitious and complex novel of the run. Depending on where you are in the world, the two different titles for this book reflect either the US or UK market. Yet it’s the former that retains something closer to Gardner’s vision, splitting the novel into two books: “Cold Front” and “Cold Conspiracy.”

It opens with the explosion of a plane on the Dulles International tarmac, so this was perhaps not my best choice to start reading as my own flight was boarding. It results in the death of one of Moneypenny’s close friends, but also Bond’s former love interest, the Principessa Sukie Tempesta (from Nobody Lives Forever).

So, Bond is even more surprised to encounter Sukie on the run during his investigation. Pages later, she’s apparently killed (again) in a car accident. After teaming up with US agents, Bond finds that there is a vast conspiracy between the hitherto unknown (to Bond at least) criminal Tempesta family and the extremist group COLD (Children of the Last Days) led by retired Army general Brutus Clay. In their initial encounter, Bond comes out on top during an exciting helicopter battle.

The second half of the book picks up five years later, with the gap filled by earlier novels Never Send Flowers and SeaFire. COLD and the Tempestas are apparently trying to overthrow the US government, so the US government hires Bond to drop in and take them out. No prizes for guessing who causes COLD’s fall.

COLD is a divisive entry in the Bond canon. On release, Kirkus Reviews called it “a junk Bond: clumsy, predictable, and utterly lacking in…elegant insouciance.” A quick environmental scan of the various Bond discussion forums sees opinions split down the middle, with very strong feelings in either direction.

Yet it’s hard to dislike something as unabashedly over-the-top as this. M’s kidnapping, which seems to be habit forming for the old man, reveals that Bond views him as something of a father figure. The aforementioned helicopter fight is genuinely gripping. Perhaps it is only the climax, where a few too many coincidences have to be believed, makes the denouement feel alternatively rushed and lacking.

Still, after 15 years of writing Bond, Gardner grabs the opportunity to take one final stroll through his own universe, reminding us of his distinctiveness from Fleming. Getting a chance to revisit some of his own characters, and maybe rewrite their fates a little bit, he leaves us with hints that the incoming M is a woman. Thus, the transition to GoldenEye, which Gardner adapted a few years earlier, becomes canonical. Gardner is free to exit stage left.

With COLD, the Gardner era comes to a close – but it’s not the end of the Bond continuation novels. He would be succeeded by Raymond Benson, who had previously written the non-fiction The Bedside Bond Companion (1984). Still, Gardner brought a style that few would say has been repeated. It was bold, occasionally unsuccessful, sometimes forgettable, but always full of charm and action. It was, in other words, Bond. James Bond.

James Bond will return…in Blast from the Past.

January 30, 2023
Review: This Much I Know to Be True

“I’ve retrained as a ceramicist,” explains polymath Nick Cave. He is taking filmmaker Andrew Dominik on a tour of his 18 small statues based on the life of the devil. “Because it’s no longer viable to be a touring artist.” Speaking in London during the height of the pandemic, THIS MUCH I KNOW TO BE TRUE is an attempt to provide fans an intimate gig in the absence of live shows. Yet the final film is so much more.

Dominik, who previously collaborated with Cave and Warren Ellis on The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and the bittersweet One More Time with Feeling, rapidly focuses this new film on the performance. It’s immediately transcendent: as the darker ‘Spinning Song’ segues into the tender ‘Bright Horses’ (both off the 2019 Bad Seeds album Ghosteen), a choir is revealed in minimalist but otherworldly backlighting.

The somewhat stripped back approach, contradictorily multi-layered thanks to Robbie Ryan’s sumptuous photography, allows us to soak up the lyrics while getting to observes Ellis and Cave at work. It’s a privilege if ever there was one. If you’ve ever been to a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds performance, you’ll know it’s a bit like going to a revival with some added jingle jangle from the bells of the chapel. This film is more like being in the front row of a warehouse performance, one where it isn’t unusual to see Marianne Faithful — albeit now dependent on an oxygen tank — turning up for a spoken word passage or two.

The spell is briefly broken about an hour into the film, when Dominik takes us back to Ellis’ apartment. Ellis explains some malady that has happened with his television, as he proudly shows off his copy of Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium. Of course, my favourite moment is Ellis yelling “Holy fucking shit: look at this desktop, Robbie!” It’s a nice Australian beat (from the affectionately labelled ‘Warz’) in the middle of an art piece that could otherwise be taking place in its own pocket of space-time.

Domink allows more of these timeouts between songs in the back half of the film, as Cave and Ellis describe each other’s styles and the sometimes frustrating differences that coalesce into music magic. Cave speaks passionately about the Red Hand Files, a site where people can ask Cave anything (and do) and he responds with a staggering amount of kindness and heartfelt wisdom.

“I’m much happier now than I used to be,” concludes Cave, having found a sense of meaning not directly connected to his work. His fans should be too, as Dominik’s film conclusively demonstrates why Cave and Ellis are even more in tuned with the zeitgeist than ever. Here is film that is newfound joy made tangible.

2022 | UK | DIRECTOR: Andrew Dominik | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Robbie Ryan | EDITOR: Matthew C. Hart | CAST: Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Marianne Faithful | DISTRIBUTOR: Trafalgar Releasing, SXSW 2022 | RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11-20 March 2022 (SXSW)

March 18, 2022
Review: Breaking the Code

It begins with a naked man standing casually on stage. It’s a moment of intimacy that lets the audience into a private world almost immediately. It’s one of many in this recent production of Hugh Whitmore’s BREAKING THE CODE, the fascinating and often tragic tale of computer science pioneer Alan Turing.

Originally staged in 1986 and later made into a TV film starring Derek Jacobi, Whitmore links the early cryptographic activities of Alan Turing with his attempts to come to terms with his own homosexuality. On the one hand, we see a man who has theoretical ideas about computers that are well ahead of their time. As he struggles to make people understand their meaning, the War Office directs his brilliant mind to cracking Germany’s Enigma Code.

For the last few years, the New Theatre in Sydney’s Newtown has run a terrific program of plays coinciding with the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras. While the weather constantly threatens to literally rain on our parade, director and production designer Anthony Skuse has followed director Matt Nagle’s Angry Fags and Beautiful Thing with a minimalist and affecting interpretation of Whitmore’s play.

Three different actors — Ewan Pedley, Harry Reid and Steve Corner — not only play Turing at different stages in his life, but as the various selves that he becomes for other people. Pedley, for example, is a stargazing and frustrated optimist who first shares his sexuality with school friend Christopher (Dallas Reedman). Later, it’s the older Corner who plays it much closer to the chest as his relationship with Ron Miller (Igor Bulanov) becomes known to police detective Detective Sergeant Rimmer, played by Jason Jefferies.

Meanwhile, it’s Reid who plays Turing during the War years that has to play the most complex balance. Reid throws down a confident façade, filled with the self-assuredness of his own mathematical genius. He begins a working relationship with Pat (Bridget Haberecht), one of the few people who understands his work. Turing keeps her at arm’s length despite her declarations of affection, something he is frank about being unable to return. On the other hand, we see an intimate love scene with Nikos (Dallas Reedman), played completely nude and communicating with each other across language divides.

Staging is minimal, with other characters acting just as much like a chorus. Two women play Turing’s mother (Leilani Loau and Jess Vince-Moin), with the elder version commenting on the younger’s decisions and vice versa. Less successful is the live singing coming from off-stage, from a performer who seems to have no other purpose than to pepper anachronistic covers of 80s pop tunes into a sparse production that already resonates with its light staging. Martin Portus is also excellent as the real-life Dilwynn Knox, imbuing the role with equal parts pomposity and pathos.

In 1999, Time Magazine named Alan Turing one of the most important people of the century. Last year, he was unveiled by the Bank of England as the face of the £50 note. His legacy is so strong that it is possible to say that everything from the writing of this review to your reading of it can be traced back in some way to Turning’s pioneering computer science. While the play might be seen as another tragic narrative in LGBTQIA+ history, its presence during the 2022 Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is a timely reminder of the struggles the communities have enduring and continue to fight despite the many positive outcomes in more recent decades.

2021 | UK | DIRECTOR: Anthony Skuse | WRITERS: Hugh Whitmore | CAST: Naomi Belet, Igor Bulanov, Steve Corner, John Grinston Bridget Haberecht, Jason Jefferies Leilani Loau, Ewan Peddley Martin Portus, Dallas Reedman Harry Reid, Jess Vince-Moin | PRODUCTION: New Theatre, Newtown | RUNNING TIME: 140 minutes incl. interval | RELEASE DATE: 11 February – 5 March 2022 (Performance viewed: 4 March 2022)

March 9, 2022
007 Case Files: Brokenclaw

Bond. James Bond. In the 007 Case Files, join me as I read all of the James Bond books, encompassing Ian Fleming and beyond. For Your Eyes Only: there’s spoilers ahead.

After a brief diversion into the film world with an adaptation of Licence to Kill, official continuation author John Gardner returns to his primary James Bond universe. Although the end of the Cold War has arrived, and MI6 is on the lookout for new threats, Gardner uses BROKENCLAW as a vehicle to travel back to the age of Ian Fleming. Unfortunately, he brings some of the cultural baggage back with him.

As seems to be the tradition, Bond begins this outing with a threat of resignation. Instead of just accepting it and ending the series, M sends Bond to British Columbia for some R&R. Bond becomes intrigued by a charismatic man named Lee Fu-Chu, described as a half-Blackfoot, half-Chinese philanthropist. He’s known as ‘Brokenclaw’ due to a physical deformity in his hand.

Bond is later ordered to go to San Francisco and investigate the kidnapping of two scientists working on a submarine detection system and countermeasure known as LORDS and LORDS DAY. Bond goes undercover with CIA agent “Chi-Chi” Sue to discover that Brokenclaw Lee has been working with the Chinese government in this nefarious plot.

“Go off to California. They’re all mad there, so you’ll be in good company.”

Although they were completely unrelated, it’s really interesting to see that both this and Permission to Die – the graphic novel from writer/illustrator Mike Grell that appeared around the same time – both take place in British Columbia and involve early warning missile systems. Both throwback to an earlier era, a natural reaction when another one is coming to an end and, unfortunately, they both contain a dose of racial and cultural stereotyping.

As one can imagine with a villain who has Native American and Chinese ancestry, especially one whose name is synonymous with his handicap, Gardner engages in a fair bit of ‘othering.’ Although there is speculation that Lee himself is playing into myths around his biracial ancestry, it’s mostly Gardner (referring to Lee as a “kind of half-breed”) who does very little to elevate Lee beyond early Fu Manchu models. It’s exacerbated by a climax in which Lee and Bond fight with bow and arrows and compete in a tortuous ordeal based on the Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony. It’s a simplification and appropriation of a traditional ceremonial trial that Gardner groaningly compounds by drawing comparisons between “the old brutal ways” and the modern “reservation Indians,” ignoring an entire history of colonialism in-between. We guess Bond is keeping up the British end, after all.

It’s worth considering Brokenclaw in the tradition of other Asian villains like Dr. Julius No. While Gardner stops short of calling anybody a “Chegro” (as Fleming did in 1958), he gives him henchmen with names like Bone Bender Ding while following Fleming’s Dr. No model in every other way. Brokenclaw even has a visible handicap, just as No sported insect-like metal mandibles for hands. “There are times when I don’t know whether to be inscrutable and mysterious or play the noble savage,” observes Lee, while revealing that Gardner only envisages these two possible roles for Lee’s mixed ancestry. Thankfully, Chi-Chi is no Honeychile Rider. Bond is put in his place at least once by Chi-Chi, when he says “You Chinese are so inscrutable.” Chi-Chi quips back: “I’m an inscrutable American, Captain Bond.”

George Catlin, The Last Race, Mandan O-kee-pa Ceremony, 1832, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Joseph Harrison, Jr., 1985.66.507

Speaking of American attitudes, there’s a weird critical thread against the United States and anything vaguely new (or at least Gardner’s version of new). M at one point objects to Bond’s “constant use of these odd American terms” (in reference to calling someone “a bit of a flake”). Bond later has to explain “the American phrase ‘real soon’.” Welcome to the crazy days 1990? What’s even stranger is that this isn’t the first time the issue has cropped up in Gardner’s books. While it is presumably some good natured ribbing from across the pond, it also comes off as quaintly out of touch.

If we attempt to paddle out of these messy cultural waters, the same ones we’ve always had to wade with Bond stories, we’re still left with an odd beast of a book. It’s story set in the immediate post-Cold War era that recognises the significance of Tiananmen Square democracy protests, deals with nuclear submarines, and has sub-plot about the collapse the dollar — but literally ends with bows and arrows. Gardner is almost aggressively traditional here, which might have been a reaction to a film franchise that was at a crossroads. So, when he next penned the character, he drew on his own military background for a very different approach to the character. More on that in the next instalment of the 007 Case Files.

James Bond will return…in The Man from Barbarossa.

February 18, 2022
Review: Resident Evil – Welcome to Raccoon City

The Resident Evil films have been many things, and this reviewer will freely admit to turning off all critical reasoning when writing about them. Yet by the time Resident Evil: The Final Chapter was released in 2017, the often massive scale of the action films had well and truly run out of steam.

Which is why RESIDENT EVIL: WELCOME TO RACOON CITY exists. Director Johannes Roberts, known primarily for pitting humans against sharks in the 47 Meters Down series, does something we haven’t seen in a Resident Evil film for quite some time. He rips it back to its horror roots.

From the opening scenes set in Raccoon City Orphanage, we meet a young Claire Redfield and her brother Chris. There Claire meets Lisa Trevor, a child subjected to the experiments of Umbrella Corporation’s Dr. William Birkin (Neal McDonough). Years later, the adult Claire (Kaya Scodelario) returns to town amidst some strange occurrences and an impending evacuation.

Harking back to its survival horror video game origins, primarily 1998’s Resident Evil 2, much of the action takes place in and around the Raccoon City Police Department (or RPD) and the remote Spencer Mansion. As the STARS Alpha team, ostensibly led by Chris (Robbie Amell) – and consisting of Jill Valentine (Hannah John-Kamen), Richard Aiken (Chad Rook), Brad Vickers (Nathan Dales), and Albert Wesker (Tom Hopper) – look for their fallen comrades, rookie cop Leon S. Kennedy (Avan Jogia) and hair-trigger chief Brian Irons (Donal Logue) hold down the RPD.

On some level, this film is a series of references and callbacks to various games. From zombie dogs to throwaway lines about Jill sandwiches, much of this is designed to elicit squeals of delight and screams of terror in equal measure. Yet it’s never anything less than an intense siege film in the vein of Assault on Precinct 13. So, while much of it ultimately sets up potential future films – and the rapid cutting back and forth between locations may give you whiplash – it cracks along at a pace and serves up some gory throwback action.

Utilising Maxime Alexandre’s skilled photography to create something that’s atmospheric and always visually interesting – not to mention genuinely creepy too. Set in 1998, pagers and a Palm Pilot are part of the plot-driven set-design. The music of Journey and 4 Non Blondes are used for comedic effect. Yet Roberts and Alexandre still take the time to let fog linger on the mansion’s lights, or frame the characters in gorgeous stained glass windows, before seeing them devoured by a hideously mutated monster. It’s all backed by a literal ticking clock, adding an extra level of tension.

Even with all the fanservice, existing devotees of the games and films may still feel like there’s some pieces missing. The visual fidelity aside, some of the casting may not match the well-established in-game characters. Still, the obligatory mid-credits sequences points to the future of the franchise, it’s only a matter of time before someone’s coming at Leon with a chainsaw. No raccoons were harmed in the production.

2021 | USA, Germany, UK | DIRECTOR: Johannes Roberts | WRITER: Johannes Roberts | CAST: Kaya Scodelario, Hannah John-Kamen, Robbie Amell, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing (AUS) | RUNNING TIME: 107 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 9 December 2021 (AUS)

December 9, 2021
Review: No Time to Die

In October 2005, Eon Productions announced the casting of Daniel Craig. As the sixth actor to take on the role of James Bond in their successful film series, the announcement was not immediately embraced. Anti-fan sites launched campaigns that foreshadowed more commonplace social media assaults a decade later. Yet after Casino Royale was released in 2006, the critics were (mostly) silenced. Now, after 15 years and five outings, Craig’s self-contained saga comes full circle in a satisfying conclusion.

Picking up sometime after Spectre, Bond and Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux) are hanging out in Southern Italy in extramarital bliss — until things go boom. Feeling betrayed, Bond leaves her on a train and disappears. Five years later, when an MI6 scientist is kidnapped, it’s unveiled that M (Ralph Fiennes) has been involved in the development of a programmable bioweapon with deadly accuracy. It gets into the hands of Safin (Rami Malek), a terrorist leader with ties to Madeleine’s past and his own agenda.

NO TIME TO DIE wastes very little of its time setting the scene before plunging us into the action. Opening with a gloriously shot prelude sequence that plays like a wintery horror western, the pre-title sequence involves an explosion, a bike chase and a bullet-riddled Aston Martin. It’s an acknowledgement of the things that make audiences turn up in droves, continually escalating through a kinetic Cuba sequence (with a wonderful cameo from Ana de Armas) to the inevitable secret lair showdown.

Yet more than anything, it’s about character. Not since George Lazenby’s short-lived stint in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service — a film that is referenced several times in this outing — has the notion of Bond been so thoroughly interrogated on screen. It’s there overtly, of course, in the presence of Nomi (Lashana Lynch) as the inheritor of the 007 mantle during Bond’s retirement. Yet in the film’s final act, where Safin characterises their dichotomy as “two heroes in a tragedy of their own making,” the film directly address who James Bond is when you strip away the armour.

The rest of the cast is impeccable, with only a handful of new friends joining a cast of familiars. Lynch is unquestionably the standout of the new faces, a capable equal for Bond and an indicator of where the series can go from here. Indeed, good money will be contributed to the Kickstarter that teams up de Armas and Lynch in a buddy spy film.

If director Fukunaga’s film stumbles, other than in the field of judicious editing, it is in the development of the villains. A key sequence featuring the return of Christoph Waltz as Blofeld is an excellent coda to Spectre, although it’s at the expense of the ostensible primary villain. Malek has a surprisingly small amount of screen time in the 163 minutes we spend in 007’s orbit, and we learn little beyond his appropriation of Japonisme as an aesthetic. Similarly, most of Seydoux’s progression seems to happen offscreen.

Is it territory we’ve seen partially covered before? A little, especially when you compare it with Skyfall. Is it way too long? As the longest film in the franchise history, undoubtedly. Yet as Daniel Craig’s last outing in the tux, it earns every inch of its blockbuster presence. As an unabashed fan of all things Bond, it satisfied a core part of my being while allowing me to bid farewell to arguably one of the greatest portrayals of the character in his 68 year history. So, yes, it’s a farewell of sorts, but you can always count on one thing: James Bond will return.

2021 | UK, USA | DIRECTOR: Cary Joji Fukunaga | WRITER: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Cary Joji Fukunaga, Phoebe Waller-Bridge | CAST: Daniel Craig, Rami Malek, Léa Seydoux, Lashana Lynch, Ben Whishaw, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Christoph Waltz, Ralph Fiennes | DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures | RUNNING TIME: 163 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11 November 2021 (AUS)

November 10, 2021