Category Archive: FILM
Valley of the Dolls (Jacqueline Susann, 1966)
In 1945 Anne Welles is a prissy but astonishingly beautiful young woman who will do anything to get away and stay away from her small home town. She trips in, all nice and fresh, to New York and immediately gets a job with a marvellous legal firm that specialises in managing movie stars’ contracts. Her new friend Jennifer North is astonishingly beautiful too but most importantly she has SENSATIONAL KNOCKERS. Everyone admires her boobs. The brain dead but astonishingly beautiful singer she marries wants to drink from them (vomit). The sensitive upright senator she is later engaged to calls them…
Continue Reading →Barbie (2023 Dir. Greta Gerwig)
One of these three plays Barbie in the eponymous movie. No, not that one, not her either. That one. I know!? Weird, right?
Not the least weird thing about the ‘Barbie’ film is the casting. Margot Robbie is just not…Barbie enough…but she does invest the role with a certain joie de vivre and that’s something. Our Barbie (‘Stereotypical Barbie’) lives in a lovely dollhouse world where all the Barbies party and sort of wander about doing physics and stuff. The Kens don’t do anything and are deeply stupid. (Our Barbie’s Ken’s job is not surf lifesaver, as so many people mistakenly believe. His job is ‘beach’). Fittingly, Ken is played by Ryan Gosling, but it might as well have been Ryan Reynolds or…
Continue Reading →Oppenheimer
(Directed by Christopher Nolan) (2023) On 16 July 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a test site named “Trinity”, in New Mexico, USA. It went so well that, on 6 August 1945 at 8.15 am, the US tried it on an actual city: Hiroshima. A blinding flash shot over the city, and then some 100,000 people were vapourised. The morning turned dark; a priest, Father Kleinsorge, wandered in the garden of his mission, dazed and bleeding, to see his housekeeper, Murata-san, crying out “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai!” (‘Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!’).* Of course, President Truman’s…
Continue Reading →She Said
(2022) Yes, it’s all ‘She Said’ in this tedious, overblown 90 minute polemic from director Maria Schrader. Anything ‘he says’ is misogynistic and stupid, ipso facto, because the speaker is a man. The scene is set early on with gratuitous Trump-bashing. Then whispers about Harvey Weinstein’s predatory behaviour are heard and leapt upon voraciously by our female reporters (they are, apparently, the only ones doing a real job apart from, possibly, Anderson Cooper who is also on to it, (no surprises there)). Everyone’s aghast. The ‘casting couch’ is such an evil and new concept (but only to be expected). Weinstein…
Continue Reading →Triangle of Sadness
(writer and director Ruben Östlund) (2022, Foxtel) In the 1988 movie Funny Farm, hapless writer Andy Farmer (Chevy Chase) is asked whether his novel in progress is comedy, action or adventure. He replies, gleefully: “It’s all three”. Triangle of Sadness is a dreadful melange too and there’s nothing to be gleeful about. It’s a bore. Östlund didn’t know if he was making a gross-out, social satire, or survival movie. It is, in fact, a poorly executed scramble of all three, mixed with a bit of luxury yacht-and-model-porn. Östlund puts a stereotypical bunch of wealthy cruise-goers on board the SS Minnow…
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