Recent releases: Disclosure Day, Masters of the Universe, Backrooms, The Christophers, Scary Movie and Glenrothan

Holy macar­oni, this has been sit­ting in draft for a while. So long that at least one of these titles is now on a stream­ing ser­vice and I don’t think any of them are still in cinemas¹. Let’s see how much of these I can remember!

How lucky are we that we get to see the greatest film­maker ever to do it still work­ing in front of us? Classical music? Mozart’s been dead for cen­tur­ies. Painting? Rembrandt knew a thing or two but we’ve got all we are ever going to get from him. But in cinema, Steven Spielberg is still pump­ing them out at the age of 79, still mak­ing hugely enter­tain­ing but highly per­son­al works that make bril­liant use of all the tools that he has in his toolkit.

Disclosure Day is more overtly per­son­al than most Spielberg films. He gets a story cred­it (reg­u­lar col­lab­or­at­or David Koepp punched it up into a screen­play) and that story returns him to his end­less fas­cin­a­tion with the ques­tion, are we alone in the universe?

Whistle-blower Josh O’Connor has a back­pack full of evid­ence that the gov­ern­ment – and its shady cor­por­ate allies – have kept the exist­ence of ali­ens secret for dec­ades so that we can exploit their tech­no­lo­gies and exper­i­ment on their physiology. As O’Connor tries to stay one step ahead of the Feds, TV weath­er presenter Emily Blunt (a career best per­form­ance) is receiv­ing mys­ter­i­ous trans­mis­sions straight into her nog­gin, allow­ing her to read, under­stand – and most cru­cially – empath­ise with the people that she meets on her own jour­ney to find out why she has been chosen to receive this gift.

It’s a propuls­ive chase movie and every epis­ode shows off Spielberg’s tal­ent for visu­al storytelling – some of the chase scenes reminded me of his debut fea­ture, The Sugarland Express back in 1974 – and it builds to an emo­tion­al cli­max where Mr. Spielberg gives the big pay­off to a char­ac­ter we have only just met – “NBC Anchor” played by Courtney Grace. A bravura cli­max².

You can hear my audio con­ver­sa­tion about Disclosure Day with Perlina Lau for RNZ Culture 101 here.

Backrooms starts out unset­tling and ends up unsat­is­fy­ing. Prodigy Kane Parsons has expan­ded his web series about aban­doned urb­an interi­ors and their poten­tial for night­mare into a fea­ture that tries to wrap a nar­rat­ive around his dis­turb­ing images, but he’s a much stronger image maker than he is a storyteller. At least for the time being.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays the own­er of a fail­ing strip­mall dis­count fur­niture store, dis­ap­pear­ing into an alcohol-fuelled world of bit­ter­ness and frus­tra­tion. Investigating some flick­er­ing lights, he dis­cov­ers that his base­ment con­tains a portal to some mys­ter­i­ously sur­real rooms that even­tu­ally become pop­u­lated with creatures from his own sub­con­scious. His ther­ap­ist (Renate Reinsve) finds her­self being tor­men­ted by these char­ac­ters, much as she was in their ther­apy sessions.

While Backrooms has joined Obsession as one of the break­out box office indie hor­rors of the year, I found myself want­ing more than a 90-minute meme, no mat­ter how visu­ally strik­ing it was.

I watched Backrooms on the same day as Masters of the Universe and was sur­prised to find the lat­ter got more inter­est­ing the more I thought about it while the first one got less so.

Travis Knight’s reboot of the toy fran­chise adven­ture plays to the story’s weird strengths rather than try­ing to over­come its weak­nesses and is decent campy fun as a res­ult. I’ve heard people say that it reminded them of the anim­ated series more than the 80s Dolph Lundgren fea­ture but as I have seen neither of those, I can­’t com­ment. What did come through is a respect for the wildly inap­pro­pri­ate ima­gin­a­tions of the toy design­ers – char­ac­ters named Meckaneck and Fisto, for example – and the way that chil­dren would play with them. It reminded me a bit of the Lord Business aspects of the Lego Movies – a child’s fantasy brought to live with action figures.

Amazon con­tract play­er Nicholas Galitzine³ leads the ensemble – fun­ni­er as He-Man than as the stranded-on-Earth fish-out-of-water Prince Adam – and Jared Leto chan­nels Terry-Thomas as arch-villain Skeletor.

Ed Solomon was a writer on one of the most invent­ive sit­coms of all time, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Now, 40 years later, he’s writ­ten a screen­play that on the sur­face is less innov­at­ive but is pre­cisely … pre­cise enough to give a crafts­man like Steven Soderbergh plenty to get his teeth into.

Mostly a smart two-hander show­cas­ing the con­trast­ing styles of Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen, The Christophers deliv­ers scene after scene of insight­ful and amus­ing drama.

McKellen is, I sup­pose, a former artist. Is that an appro­pri­ate descrip­tion for a paint­er who no longer paints? Does he remain an artist forever, even if the actu­al work has dried up? He makes a liv­ing trad­ing on the notori­ety of his past work, record­ing birth­day mes­sages for fans. His chil­dren (James Corden and Jessica Gunning) are con­cerned that he is frit­ter­ing away whatever they might expect as an inher­it­ance. Relatively tal­ent­less them­selves, a final pay­out from the great man is their last best hope.

All that’s left is a final series of his most fam­ous works. The Christophers are tender por­traits of a former lov­er but that rela­tion­ship ended in such a way that the final run of Christophers were nev­er fin­ished and lie unloved in the artist’s gar­ret. If he were to finally pull his fin­ger out and com­plete them, they would surely be worth millions.

But the grumpy old bug­ger will do no such thing. The chil­dren hatch a plan to steal them, have anoth­er artist fin­ish them and them hide them away to be “dis­covered” after he dies. This is where Ms Coel comes in. A thwarted artist her­self, with a tal­ent for imit­a­tion, they ask her to become his assist­ant, secure the Christophers and spir­it them away and fin­ish them.

Except that McKellen’s artist is too canny and too unpre­dict­able for that plan to go smoothly. A sat­is­fy­ing caper from begin­ning to end.

I reviewed The Christophers for RNZ Nights and you can hear my con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan here.

Parody movies like Scary Movie (aka Scary Movie 6, a name which is more accur­ate) are by their nature hit-or-miss. What inter­ested me watch­ing it was, which bits worked and why. The fran­chise has been returned to the Wayans Brothers⁴ who star­ted it nearly 30 years ago

One of the not­able out­comes of this reversal is that the Black humour (as opposed to the black humour) has much more bite to it than the rest which feels very tired. The film comes alive when it leans in to the top­ic of race. Interesting but not enough to make me think about it again for nano­second after I click send on this review.

I reviewed Scary Movie in the same Culture 101 seg­ment that fea­tured Disclosure Day.

Brian Cox has been on a lot of film sets in his time but Glenrothan is the first where he has had the dir­ect­or’s chair to sit in. He also acts as Sandy, head of the fam­ily dis­til­lery in pic­ture post­card west of Scotland. At first glance you think he is play­ing his usu­al cur­mudgeon but the arrival of his estranged broth­er Donal (Alan Cumming) from a multi-decade American exile reveals that there is much more to both their stories.

Donal left when their moth­er died, driv­en away by the con­stant bul­ly­ing of their fath­er. But it was Sandy who really needed to leave and when he’s beaten to the punch, he reluct­antly stays to mind the busi­ness, des­pite the fact that Donal was the whisky blend­ing genius.

Glenrothan is a neat little por­trait of two broth­ers find­ing their way back to each oth­er with the help of Shirley Henderson’s much put-upon dis­til­lery man­ager and Donal’s daugh­ter (Alexandra Shipp). When this turns up on one of your stream­ing ser­vices, give it some of your time. I don’t think you’ll regret it.

I reviewed Glenrothan for RNZ Nights.

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1. At least not in Wellington. ↩︎
2. “Bravura Climax” could be my drag name. ↩︎
3. He has been in sev­er­al Prime Video movies includ­ing The Sheep Detectives, The Idea of You, Red, White & Royal Blue and Cinderella. ↩︎
4. Or more accur­ately, the Wayans fam­ily as the name Wayans is all over the cred­its for the pic­ture. ↩︎