David R. Walker

Archive for October, 2022

Black Adam

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra

Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Pierce Brosnan, Qunitessa Swindell, Aldris Hodge, Noah Centineo, Sarah Shahi, Marwan Kenzari. Bodhi Sabongui, Henry Winkler, Djimon Hounsou, Viola Davis

Film Rating: 7 out of 10

Running Time: 2 hours and 4 minutes

The Spanish director of Jungle Cruise and The Commuter, Jaume Collet-Serra assembles an interesting cast for his first foray into the Superhero universe with his new film Black Adam featuring Dwayne Johnson (Hobbs and Shaw, Jungle Cruise) in the title role.

In a fictitious Middle East looking country named Kahndaq, which is meant to resemble Egypt, an ancient god named Teth Adam was re-awakened after 5000 years. However Teth Adam as a God is out for revenge and brutally unleashes the power of the Gods with no mercy.

When Adrianna Tomaz played by Sarah Shahi and her son Amon unleash the power of Teth Adam soon the Justice Society is re-assembled by Amanda Waller played again by Oscar winner Viola Davis (Fences) to go and investigate what this new god is and whether he can become a superhero.

The Justice Society consists of a fascinating mix of superheroes from the debonair Dr Fate wonderfully played with panache by former Bond star Pierce Brosnan (Mamma Mia, The Foreigner) to Hawkman played by Aldris Hodge (Hidden Figures); from the beautiful Cyclone played by Quintessa Swindell (Granada Nights) to Atom Smasher played by Noah Centiano who all arrive on Kahndaq to fight it out against an angry Teth Adam also known as Black Adam.

While the Justice Society and Black Adam battle each other in a visually spectacular scene, they really need to focus on who the real enemy is: Ishmael, a descendant of the first king of Kahndaq and leader of intergang, played by Marwan Kenzari (Aladdin). As the Justice Society and Black Adam start aligning their objectives, Adrianna’s son Amon superbly played by Egyptian Polish actor Bodhi Sabongui is kidnapped by the Intergang.

While the storyline of Black Adam is convoluted, director Jaume Collet-Serra makes the film visually spectacular grounding the film firmly in the fantasy superhero genre with excellent special effects and spell bounding action scenes.

Dwayne Johnson is likeable as Black Adam, although the superhero mantle does sit quite wearily on his head, making his casting choice questionable. However, Johnson is such a megastar that audiences will come to see him in anything.

Certainly entertaining, Black Adam is a bizarre and lavish fantasy action adventure filled with multiple superhero’s, zombies and crazy gods and gets a film rating of 7 out of 10 and audiences must stay for the very end to see a cameo appearance.

Great Freedom

Director: Sebastian Meise

Cast: Franz Rogowski, Georg Friedrich, Anton von Lucke, Thomas Prenn

Running Time: 1 hour 56 minutes

This film is in German with English Subtitles

Please note this film is sexuality explicit and contains images of drug use

Austrian director Sebastian Meise’s intensely explicit homosexual prison drama Great Freedom won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and is held together by two powerful performances by Franz Rogowski who plans renown homosexual Hans Hoffman and Georg Friedrich (Narcissus and Goldmund) who plays fellow prisoner and frequent drug user Viktor.

Hans is imprisoned under paragraph 175 for being homosexual when in post-war Germany homosexuality was criminalized. Even though Germany has been liberated by the Allies at the end of World War II, paragraph 175 still remains law and Hans tries to survive in prison by doing sewing and occasionally snatching brief sexual liaisons with younger gay men in prison, specifically played by Anton von Lucke as Leo Griese and Thomas Prenn as Oskar. However, the precocious Hans is for ever in trouble often being sent to solitary confinement.

Soon Hans befriends his cellmate Viktor who is so called straight but despite their different sexual preference, a bond of loyalty and love begins to form within the claustrophobic environment of a men’s prison in post-war Germany.

As the years pass, Hans manages to free the younger men including Leo and Oskar, however he remains in prison with Viktor until the revision of paragraph 175 in Germany in the early 1970’s. After Hans and Viktor’s relationship intensifies, the revision of paragraph of 175 allows Hans to go free.

As Hans realizes his new freedom and explores the sexual permissibility of 1970’s Germany he is forced to make a difficult choice. Great Freedom is a tender and explicit look at love in an impossible time and chronicle’s a struggle for equality for the LGBT community at a time when any deviant lifestyle was subjected to scrutiny and strict criminalization.

German actor Franz Rogowski is brilliant as the beautiful Hans Hoffman, an imprisoned gay man who bares all in an exceptionally provocative performance which makes such American portrayals of gay men in films like Milk or Brokeback Mountain positively tame.

Rogowski is superb as a stoic sexual deviant Hoffman in a world which was completely against him and made his life extremely difficult. The ending of Great Freedom is clever in it’s ambiguity supplanting a social crime with an actual one.

In a similar vein to the excellent Kiss of the Spiderwoman, director Sebastian Meise’s brilliant Great Freedom is a provocative gay prison drama involving a fight for equal rights and an unbridled passion between two lovers fuelled by suppressive captivity. Great Freedom gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is recommended viewing especially for the LGBT community.

Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

Director: Anthony Fabian

Cast: Lesley Manville, Isabelle Huppert, Lambert Wilson, Alba Baptiste, Lucas Bravo, Jason Isaacs, Christian McKay, Freddie Fox, Ellen Thomas, Roxanne Duran

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Running Time: 1 hour and 55 minutes

This film is in English and French with subtitles.

Oscar nominee Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread) returns to the world of 1950’s fashion in the delightful remake of the 1992 Television film Mrs Harris Goes to Paris based on the novel by Paul Gallico and stars as a London cleaning lady Ada Harris.

Upon finding out that her beloved husband was declared dead while missing in action in World War II, Mrs Harris receives a War Widow’s pension pay out from the military and through a series of fortunate events saves up enough money to tell her friend Violet Butterfield played by Ellen Thomas and her male friend Archie played by Jason Isaacs (Hotel Mumbai, A Cure for Wellness) that she is going to Paris to buy a Christian Dior haute couture dress worth 500 pounds. This is 1957 in London, so that was a tidy sum to pay for a frock.

As the title suggests, Mrs Harris does indeed go to Paris to the eccentric and complicated House of Dior run by Madame Colbert wonderfully played with panache by Oscar nominee Isabelle Huppert (Elle) and soon makes friend with the young and dashing account manager Andre Fauvel played by Emily in Paris star Lucas Bravo (Ticket to Paradise). As Mrs Harris soon discovers everything at Dior is not what they seem, despite the gorgeous gowns and the glamour. The fashion house is in economic decline and needs to attract a new set of clientele.

With her forthright and street smart attitude, Mrs Harris soon gets her beautiful dress while disrupting the House of Dior and warding off the overtures from the fussy but debonair Marquis de Chassagne played by French actor Lambert Wilson (The Matrix Resurrections, 5 to 7), while realizing deep down that she will eventually have to return to her life as a cleaning lady and deal with her posh employers including Giles Newcombe played by Christian McKay and Lady Dant wonderfully played by Anna Chancellor (Four Weddings and a Funeral, The Dreamers).

Extremely well cast with both British and French actors, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris is a delightful film about a woman fulfilling her dreams while gaining a beautiful dress and finding a place to eventually show off that gown with the real man of her dreams. Lesley Manville is exceptional as Mrs Harris downplaying the role to perfection while making Mrs Harris believable and more significantly relatable.

The young actors Lucas Bravo and Alba Baptiste provide some eye candy, while the Dior gowns steal the show particularly the infamous dress which makes international headlines.

If viewers love an excellent feel good film, then watch Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, its light enough not to be taken too seriously but strong enough to make a lasting impression as it subtly makes comments about industrial action, class relations and high fashion.

Mrs Harris Goes To Paris gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is highly recommended viewing.

The Worst Person in the World

Director: Joachim Trier

Cast: Renate Reinsve, Anders Danielsen Lie, Herbert Nordrum, Hans Olav Brenner, Maria Grazia Di Meo

Film Rating: 7.5 out of 10

This film is in Norwegian with English Subtitles

Best Actress Winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, Renate Reinsve is superb as the troubled millennial Julie in director Joachim Trier’s quirky and bizarre episodic film The Worst Person in the World, Norway’s official entry for the 2021 Best International Feature Film category at the Oscars.

Renate Reinsve is Norway’s version of British actress Keira Knightley both in looks and acting style. Reinsve plays an indecisive young woman Julie in contemporary Oslo who frequently changes career paths as often as she changes men.

However, the film focuses on a formative four years in Julie’s life as she begins a more serious relationship with a much older cartoon artist Arkel played by Anders Danielsen Lie. As Aksel introduces Julie to his friends in his age group, most of whom have children, the conversation turns to whether the couple would like to have children. At the prospect of Julie settling down with a much older man and having kids, this idea freaks her out and Julie promptly gate crashes a very hip party in central Oslo where she meets a man her own age, the handsome and muscular Ervind played by Herbert Nordrum.

Julie in between navigating the complicated relationship with her family and watching her own relationship with Aksel disintegrate, she begins an affair with Ervind and much Aksel’s shock, she unexpectedly breaks up with him. This leaves Aksel utterly bereft and lonely. This makes the selfish and indecisive Julie possibly the Worst Person in the World, a sort of Wildcat who is against any form of domesticity.

Julie and Ervind move into together and she thinks nothing more of her older ex-boyfriend besides seeing his controversial fame increase on Norwegian TV chat shows. After Julie accidentally bumps into one of Aksel’s friends Ole played by Hans Olav Brenner who tells her some distressing news about Aksels health, she reaches a cross roads in her life as she re-evaluates her relationship with Ervind while making some critical life choices.

The screenplay of The Worst Person in the World is excellent and the entire episodic film is held together tightly by a riveting performance by the ravishing Renate Reinsve. Director Joachim Trier’s Woody Allen like social comedy set in contemporary Norway is filled with angst, drama and many loose ends that leaves the viewer wishing for some form of cathartic release, something which Scandinavian film makers are not known for delivering.

The Worst Person in the World has a great title, a superb central performance and a cracking sound track but unfortunately as an episodic film some scenes could have been edited out especially the weird trippy sequence in the middle. The Worst Person in the World gets a film rating of 7.5 out of 10 and is entertaining, but not brilliant.

Do Not Hesitate

Director: Shariff Korver

Cast: Joes Brauers, Spencer Bogaert, Tobias Kersloot, Omar Alwan

Film Rating: 7 out of 10

Running Time: 1 hour 31 minutes.

This film is in Dutch with English Subtitles.

Venezuelan born director Shariff Korver brings a taut military drama to the big screen in this well-edited razor sharp drama Do Not Hesitate about three young Dutch army soldiers who are left in the desert during a foreign peace keeping force that goes wrong. The setting could be Afghanistan, but the actual location where the film was shot is probably in Greece.

The soldiers, Erik, Roy and Thomas played respectively by Joes Brauers (Quo Vadis Aida?), Spencer Bogaert and Tobias Kersloot land up in an unpredictable situation when a young boy comes into the site range and demands the return of his goat which was accidentally killed.

The immaturity of the soldiers combined with macho bravado of trying to keep sane in an isolated location slowly brews over as the try to deal with young boy played by Omar Alwyn. As the three soldiers are left to guard a military vehicle by themselves in alien territory, the situation regarding their food and water deteriorates along with the relationship between all three, with Erik trying to lead and Roy and Thomas always at odds with his commands. As they are all so young themselves, possibly in their early twenties, and without the guidance of wise council, they do not handle the situation with the young boy very well, as the prisoner becomes increasingly vocal even though he does lead the soldiers to drinking water.

From the opening sequence of Erik playing the drums loudly in his parent’s home before he goes off to the military, to the bizarre closing sequence at a nightclub in Crete, whereby all three soldiers decompress, the reality of what they have done sinks in even though they are bound by a fraternal secrecy often formed in the masculine world of the military, where civilized rules don’t apply. Jose Brauers is excellent as the leader Erik.

Director Shariff Korver fortunately keeps Do Not Hesitate engaging, taut as a wire and completely filled with anger, potential violence and remorse. Even in one of the penultimate scenes all the young soldiers remain silent when question by a military appointed psychologist.

There is omniscient danger in Do Not Hesitate but the most violence comes from the three soldiers, whose pent-up rage is eventually released.

Do Not Hesitate was the official entry from the Netherlands to be considered for the Best International Feature film Oscar for the 94^th Academy Awards in 2022. Do Not Hesitate gets a film rating of 7 out of 10 and is a worthy improvement in contemporary Dutch cinema. Recommended viewing for those that enjoy a Dutch version of Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War.