By Ben Wheeler
There’s still time to catch three exciting films on in Fiji cinemas this week- but make haste!
One Battle After Another
This is Paul Thomas Anderson at his finest, drawing on his previous efforts with hints of There Will Be Blood and Magnolia here, Licorice Pizza and Punch Drunk Love there…
It is bound to dominate come Oscar season. And there is still time to catch it here in Fiji on the big screen where it looks magnificent and has already had an unseasonably long run, and is clearly popular with local audiences.
It’s easy to see why: it is probably his most generically exciting film yet, with action sequences and car chases that will take your breath away, and intensely beautiful characterisation and performances. Plus the symbiosis he currently enjoys with Johnny Greenwood (who scores the movie) is truly something to behold.
In the opening minutes Teyana Taylor walks purposefully across a flyover and the music swells and peaks as we cut to the makeshift immigrant detainment centre below. And this is all before we get to what this film is all about. Can we ever change the world for the better? Can we challenge structures of power? And what techniques are acceptable? And what happens when those structures of power close in on you?
And this is just the first 30 minutes as we follow the French 75 in their campaign to blow up a world full of inequity. The film is littered with contemporary issues, despite being based on a 40-year-old story set in Reagan’s America – plus ça change, eh? We then skip forward 15 years for the meat and bones of the movie and see what original French 75-member Ghetto Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio) – who has gone into hiding with his now teenage daughter (Chase Infinity – an amazing newcomer) – is up to when his past catches up with them.
Smoking weed, drinking and watching movies seems to be the answer. There’s something about Leo in this role that is wildly refreshing: the eternal man-child both in his professional and personal life forced to deal with the fact that he’s an actual grown up. Watching him stumble around and try so hard to get himself together is pretty rewarding in itself, but the stellar cast that surrounds him is something else.
Regina Hall and Junglepussy are incredible as revolutionary crew members, along with the whirlwind that is Teyana Taylor! Sean Penn and Benecio del Toro are incredible support cast members, bringing hilarious diametrically opposed physicality to their roles.
I have been an educator for over two decades and the mainstay of any of my lectures and classes has been to find subjectivity through questioning the world, critically engaging with structures of power, and challenging them where necessary. With all this swimming around my head, all three times I have been to see One Battle After Another its 170 minutes has flown by, each scene and chapter seamlessly assembled and connected to the whole. It may be my film of the year, or come a close second to Sinners, which I now need to watch again.
Viva la revolución ✊✊✊
PREDATOR: BADLANDS
I have to admit I was a little worried about the idea of a Yautja (the race of Predators on which this much beleaguered franchise focuses) as the protagonist of the new Predator: Badlands move, but by gosh Dan Trachtenberg’s has made it work.
The director of three Predator films now – Prey and Killer of Killers – keeps shapeshifting giving us Indigenous American Feminism, anime that set your pulse rocketing and now, most unbelievably… a buddy movie?
And it totally worked for me, on a bunch of levels: first the characters of Dek and Thia are believable and the performances are strong from Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and Elle Fanning. Second the world-building is next level – visually stunning, coherent, and linked with the recent iterations of the Alien franchise from Fede Alvarez (Romulus) and Noah Hawley (Earth).
Thia is a Weyland Yutani droid out doing what the Company that first shot Ellen Ripley into space for a date with a xenomorph does. The posturing evident in this film, “for a better world” “for the good of humanity” has chilling parallels with rhetoric being deployed around the idea that nuclear testing could return to the Pacific .
The good news is that we may be getting an Alien versus Predator movie that isn’t hot trash. Huzzah!
Until then, the central problem of both the Alien and Predator franchises – that their monsters can sustain multiple re-treads of the same old story – has been resolved through more complex relationships between the Yautja and the Xenomorphs here and in Alien: Earth, even if they are facilitated by synthetics of one sort or another in each.
But this in itself poses yet more questions about what it is to be human.
BEAST OF WAR
It’s a war movie, but a shark movie; it’s gruesomely violent and hilariously funny; beautifully shot out on the big blue. It channels Jaws in so many ways, of course, from straight up shot homage to the whole thing echoing Quint’s Indianapolis story.
A tight (sub 90-minute) movie that knows what its audience wants and delivers in spades, keeping things moving at breakneck pace whilst looking beautifully stylish.
Win!
