Mark Twomey

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The Phoenician Scheme

A stronger entry than Asteroid City, but it’s smaller scale than The French Dispatch. It’s a three-hander film where the interplay of three characters drives the narrative.

Benicio del Toro gives a charismatic performance as magnate Zsa-Zsa Korda. A shrewd entrepreneur of strategic foresight who is amoral. But he’s a striver, and he’s so likeable that even enemies who want to see him dead can’t help but like him.

Liesl, Korda’s 21-year-old estranged daughter played by Mia Threapleton is the morality absent in the Korva genes. Threapleton plays the role of a pipe smoking trainee Nun deadpan and it works. She has moments where she looks like her mother, Kate Winslet. That passes when she pulls a knife on someone while giving them a dead eyed stare down.

Michael Cera is an actor who can set my teeth on edge, but he gives a marvellous performance in this as a bug loving academic, Bjørn Lund. He has a Nordic accent that I’ve heard in person and the comedic intonation is spot on. While del Toro is the standout of the picture, Cera is a close second.

What’s the story? It doesn’t matter. The Korda fortune will either continue for generations or it’s riches to rags for the family. Our three characters go off and their adventure decides the outcome.

It’s a tight 105 minutes, and I appreciated it didn’t overstay its welcome. I’ll watch this again when it gets a home release.

When The Going Was Good by Graydon Carter

I finished reading Graydon Carter’s memoir “When The Going Was Good” last weekend. Committed to getting the most value out of the least amount of personal effort, he succeeded. Carter’s lazy ambition is impressive. I couldn’t guess to how many hours of the week he spent eating at some work related event. The man’s social battery appears endless.

 

The book, true to its title, recounts the magazine industry’s fall from influence and subscribers. Tech’s peak: TikTok boasts of free workplace wine. In publishing before the 2008 crash, it was how many months a writer may need to spend living at the Beverly Hills Hotel to cover a courtroom case.

 

Regardless, the title “When the Going Was Good” reflects some current tech industry sentiment. If AI holds even a quarter of the promise hyped, a lot of executive types in tech will pack a cardboard box the way executive types in glossy publications had to. Having destroyed so many industries, AI will speed up tech's self-cannibalization.

Until Dawn

Horror movies done well are cheap to make, pack in viewers and make much more money than they cost. The good ones leave an impression. Neither "Death of a Unicorn" nor "Drop" left enough of an impression for me to write a review but Until Dawn is different because it doesn't try to adapt the source material. It does its utmost to ignore as much of the source material as possible.

The basics are there. A group of young adults find themselves stuck in a house over the course of the night. They need to survive until dawn. When they don't, the night starts all over again but their physical and psychological wounds start to accumulate.

The video game is a butterfly effect simulator where your choices lead the protagonists down different story paths. The movie is a haunted house slasher flick with supernatural aspects. The movie director, Shazam's David F. Sandberg, has a horror background and knows better than to try and shoehorn in six hours of video game plot into a 90 minute movie.

What Sandberg has made from a video game story of young adult guilt and psychological disintegration is a smartphone era slasher movie. It doesn't try to be a young adult drama, though young adult drama sets the plot in motion. Choices do have consequences. But there's nothing here about someone's choice leading to these consequences. Are you looking for answers? You're not getting any in this movie. Enjoy the jump scares.

Jump scares are things Until Dawn does well and it looks good though you can feel how cramped the budget is through the limited number of locations. The practical effects are gruesome in a way that will please horror fans. The jump scares I mentioned before keep the tension up from the opening scene right until the end. The cast are capable but not memorable except for Peter Stormare does his usual great work of playing that unsettling Peter Stormare character we've seen in other movies.

This is a trash movie that I'd watch again only if they announced a sequel. Should you watch it? Probably not. But did this movie leave an impression? Yes it did. It was very well made for a B-movie horror flick.

The Monkey

This movie is a surreal and absurd look at death. Deaths so terrible that sometimes you can only laugh. It doesn’t make you uncomfortable, nor does it look to hit you with jump scares. It’s a typical cursed MacGuffin movie that knows its to be laughed at no matter how high the body count gets.

 

Yes, the clock work driven, drum playing, malevolent looking toy monkey of the title is evil. But the monkey itself is a means. The main character gets bullied in school by a gang of girls. Girl cruelty is different to boy cruelty, but here they are cruel in a way that boys are to one another. He’s hurt and wants to hurt the source of his school problems. The monkey doesn’t make the main character turn the key in its back. It makes sure it is around when he might consider turning the key. Whatever happens after the key turns and the drumming starts, happens.

 

The deaths, when they occur, are bizarre, sometimes nonsensical, and often hilarious. There’s unexpected and expected torrents of blood. Immolation. Explosions. Decapitation. There’s even a death in a sleeping bag that doesn’t involve the hockey masked killer, Jason Vorhees. Which is a change because sleeping bag murders are a Friday the 13th thing.

 

This is a 90 minute dark comedy that falls apart in the third act but ends strong. For those wanting a slasher movie that speaks to their inner teenager, last week’s release, Heart Eyes, might be a good choice. For your fill of ludicrous death scenes, there’s a new Final Destination on the way. But if you want to laugh at death and have death laugh with you, go see The Monkey.

The Gorge.

Two charismatic leads can carry a lot. Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller are two charismatic leads and the burden they carry is the flimsy story of this movie.

There is a mist filled gorge somewhere where two concrete observation towers face each other from opposing sides. Opposed geographically and politically. Each tower has a top tier shooter responsible for maintenance of the automated defences preventing what is in the gorge from escaping. These lethal maintenance people are not to have any contact with each other.

Before the first hour has passed, romance blossoms across the divide. It is a movie about distance and communication. It’s Sleepless in Seattle with snipers facing the stuff of nightmares.

Not that there’s any real threat. The lethality of Taylor-Joy and Teller’s characters is clear from early in the movie. Indeed, it is what is in the gorge that should worry about them. Shootouts and explosions in the second half precede a predictable finale; however, the film remains an interesting distraction.

This is one of those mid-budget genre movies Hollywood used to send to movie theatres on a weekly basis. A simple story with effects and explosions that would entertain you for two hours and then send you on your way. But mid-budget movies were risky with making a profit. Streaming saved this type of movie because tech companies have goldmines of money and millions of customers to entertain.

Here we have an action director who is comfortable with what, in places, is spotty CGI delivering a picture worth a watch for its leads. If you want a romance-action mashup movie that will show you the headshots but will tastefully blur out the sex, this is the movie for you. If you are looking for anything else beyond that, this offers nothing.

The Last Dangerous Visions. Edited By Harlan Ellison.

By the time I had read Harlan Ellison’s work, his talent had deserted him. A lifelong career isn’t guaranteed, but watching one’s career fade must be a terrifying, waking nightmare. The Last Dangerous Visions, the irrevocable part of a once ground breaking trilogy of short story collections, explains why the talent evaporated and for those 60 pages it’s worth the read.

In this book, I found two interesting pieces under glass in a museum of the mediocre. Short story anthologies are like that, but "Dangerous Visions" was a career making anthology for emerging writers. It was such a success its sequel, “Again, Dangerous Visions”, had established authors knocking on the door to get their story in. This third book has none of the cachet of the first two and, as Straczynski points out, some people he reached out to did not want their work included.

Focusing on the key essay by Straczynski, Harlan’s long time Sancho Panza, Ellison’s crushing bipolar disorder explains but doesn’t excuse the worst of his behaviour. You empathise with the man, reading of projects large and small he was not capable of writing beyond a handful of pages. The unfinished pile of stories for the planned three volumes of The Last Dangerous Visions, few of which seem to have had written introductions even after 50 years, must have been a cacophonous failure blaring from the filing cabinets in his writing room. Like The Tell-Tale Heart, but this was the murder of stories bought but not published.

A Night At The Opera by Robert Wissner was a stand out story to me. When you realise the author was 24, you can’t but acknowledge that hard work alone isn’t enough, there has to be talent. The various single page Intermezzos got me thinking beyond the page. Besides that? Most of this left me unmoved, and I will forget it.

“Dangerous Visions”, a relic of the 60s, will be available in paperback at local bookstores for as long as there are bookstores. I have a copy that I reread a few years ago and still enjoyed it. If you see it in paperback, pick it up and see if it resonates. Its direct sequel “Again, Dangerous Visions” has some solid stories, but it’s a bloated book that needed a stronger editor. Ellison was a people pleaser to the right sort of people, other writers and Hollywood stars. His audience was not the right sort. He could say no to the audience until he dropped dead but couldn’t turn down a poorly written story from a friend he had or wanted to make. I dropped “Again, Dangerous Visions” into a book collection bag soon after finishing it. As for “The Last Dangerous Visions”, if you want to read it, see if it’s available at your local library and take it out as a loan.

As readers, we owe authors nothing more than they owe us. You buy a book or not and you get a book or not. Even if you are a fan, that’s where the contract ends. Of the Dangerous Visions series, only the first anthology is worth the exchange between author and reader. And as you’ll read, Harlan was at the pinnacle of his talent while working on the first and best of the series.

Wolf Man

Vampires one week, werewolves the next. Unlike the highly cinematic Nosferatu, Wolf Man is merely a good-looking streaming movie. It could be psychological scarring from Covid, but monstrosity because of disease has taken root in the mind of horror writers.

In fiction, lycanthropy has been everything from a pact with the devil to a supernatural curse, but here we return to the idea of it as an illness. This is a movie where the werewolf is neither calculating nor 8 feet tall on two legs with a great coat of computer generated hair. Here instead it is rabid, deformed and has lost comprehension of humanity.

There’s some majestic Oregon scenery here. The practical effects used for the werewolf look great. Not only is that cheaper than doing it with CGI, but it’s a throwback to Lon Chaney Jr. as The Wolf Man. With practical effects, wounds fester quickly, bones break with satisfying crunches and if the actors can disgust you they’ll try to. The 1941 movie has a more satisfying story, though both movies focus on parent and child relationships.

At a lean 100 minutes, the film doesn’t overstay its welcome; its simplicity makes it suitable for second-screen viewing. Horror movies when they hit at the box office can make studios a fortune because the cheap ones are the best ones. They do less well on streaming. This is that. I can see it generating a tidy profit at the box office and then stalking off into the wilds of the streaming forest. You might only glimpse it again at the edge of your vision while scrolling through your viewing recommendations.

Nosferatu

There’s a silver undertone to this movie that reminds me of vintage black & white film stock. But then everything about this movie is looking to remind you of something vintage. Once again, a couple opposes a personification of evil. A misshapen, diseased creature of catastrophic power.

Of the other times I’ve seen Nosferatu told on screen, this couple is the best looking. Genetic super lottery winners, who I’m sure have real people's problems, but the only problem we are concerned about here is the murderous Count Orlok. The copyright holders had control of Dracula when the original Nosferatu was made. So here we have a Count Dracula knockoff called Count Orlok, with Jonathan called Thomas and Mina called Ellen.

Thomas and Ellen are a convincing team. Imagine making a movie where the husband isn’t an inept weakling, and the wife isn’t a five and a bit feet tall super human ass kicker? Though knowing the beats of the story before I went into it and this movie follows those beats, I liked it when Thomas and Ellen shared scenes. You see them struggle together. It’s better than any stated love they could say they have for one another.

I can put many comparisons to F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979), both of which are available on BluRay, aside, but this version is too long. Herzog turned in a one hour 47 minute movie. Murnau’s is about 81 minutes. This movie is two hours and twelve minutes and the story doesn’t support that running time. Scenes where nothing much happens run too long. There’s only so much of the audience’s time you can burn as you create atmosphere.

Now, the atmosphere is gorgeous to look at. Scenes where Thomas arrives at the crossroads and the Count’s driverless coach picks him up are like a gothic storybook you’d enjoy reading. Ralph Ineson’s baritone voice has a texture that adds to the movie alone. But trimming 20 minutes would have strengthened the movie.

You can watch this one at home if you’re going to do so in 4K with HDR. It’ll look better than it does in the movie theatre. This has very dramatic lighting that had me checking when I could get it on 4K disc with Dolby Vision. We’ve long passed the point where the dim 2K images projected onto a cinema screen are the best way to experience movies. I want to go see a self-emissive screen the size of a cinema screen showing me 8K movie experiences I can’t get at home yet.

If you need to get out of the house and want to see a beautiful and grotesque story you’ve seen before, Nosferatu in the cinema will do that for you. But if you want to see it at its absolute best, watch it at home in the dark with 4K and HDR.

This movie reminded me that movie theatres were never competing with streaming. They are competing against modern OLED TVs. The TVs are winning, so ditch the projectors and go for a wall of moving light with the best sound and good seats.

The Godfather Part II (4K UHD)

If you want to tell a good story about a man, show him fail. He can recover but there needs to be a journey into darkness. Part II of the Godfather trilogy is Michael Corleone’s journey into darkness.

By the end of the movie he’s lost his wife, his mother, the trust of his adopted brother and his last brother by blood. His enemies are dead by their own hand or by his. But Michael has failed. He destroyed his family.

In flashback, the film portrays his father committing crimes to provide for others. What is the point of sitting atop the most powerful crime family when there is no one to take care of? As great as the original Godfather movie is, Part II is a movie with a grander sweep. We’ve seen the principled thug of Brando’s Vito Corleone and now we get the icy rage of his youngest son.

The opposition also steps it up. Years ago when I first saw Lee Strasberg’s performance of movie antagonist Hyman Roth, I didn’t get it. I thought he was miscast, but actually, I lacked the life experience to appreciate his good casting. Roth sprawls. He’ll project dominance by folding a leg over the arm of a chair. He’ll lay on a couch in pyjama bottoms, chest hair exposed as a recovers from a health scare, and explain to someone in logical terms how close to danger they are. In these scenes he’s soft spoken, he’s direct, and he’s menacing.

More important, he’s smart. Not because he has every possibility mapped out. But because he adapts when the unexpected happens. A setback for Hyman Roth is an opportunity for him to try another line of attack. As one of the few remaining first-time mobsters, this skill has served him well.

When Michael and Hyman are together, it is clear their world is too small for both of them to thrive. This starts out a fact of business and then gets personal. What follows is a well lit, well shot and great sounding set of moves, countermoves and executions.

The 4K movie on UHD disc is a full screen HDR10 presentation with clear Dolby TrueHD 5.1 sound. There’s a remastered monaural track if you want to hear it as mixed for cinemas back in 1974. I found the picture to be crisp, with good brightness and nice film grain.

Michael Corleone has more to lose in the Godfather Part III. But for your time it is the second Godfather movie that tells the best story of the three movies.