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Reviews
Outlaw Johnny Black (2023)
Not A Comedy, Not Much of a Western
Outlaw Johnny Black calls itself a "spiritual successor" to the infinitely superior Black Dynamite, but despite having the same creative team, that couldn't be further from the truth.
Despite starting out with potential, Outlaw Johnny Black immediately devolves into mediocre filmmaking which highlights a very cheap look and doesn't capture the visual style of a western movie, whilst its long runtime and slow pace ensures that it drags on. I could forgive all this if the film found the time to be funny in between, but with an obsession on revering in the western films of yesteryear without having the actual knowhow on to make a good western film itself, it seems that the filmmakers actually forgot they were making a comedy this time around. I wasn't laughing, I wasn't excited, I was just downright bored. And despite my best efforts, I couldn't make it past the 40 minute mark and have no intention of returning to do so.
A massive letdown after the brilliance of Black Dynamite.
Pignorant (2024)
When you thought you knew it all, Pignorant shows how much more there is
I've been off animal products for nine years. I thought I'd gained a full perspective on things after seeing Earthlings and Cowpsiracy, but Pignorant delves in so much deeper, particularly into the political factors supporting animal abuse.
Joey Carbstrong confronts audiences with some footage that remains shocking even to viewers that have seen copious amounts of animal abuse before. The pigs being abused by slaughterhouse workers and the investigation into how the RSPCA has continuously defended it as "Humane" in the UK makes for a powerful message. Joey's passion has been channeled into something competently assembled and narratively powerful, and it's easily the best documentary I've seen in a long time.
The Last Video Store (2023)
Misguided Clerks Fan-Fiction
I ended up watching The Last Video Store for no other reason than the fact that I confused it with an identically-titled horror film that came out the very same year. Rather than watching the horror film I was hoping for,
The Last Video Store is rife with overly artificial and tacky dialogue, non-sequitur gags, long periods of awkward silence relying on the soundtrack to fill the empty space, outdated character stereotypes and a complete absence of anything genuinely funny.
For a movie reliant entirely on people talking instead of things actually, you know, happening, an abundance of punishingly dull dialogue between awkward and unlikable characters. This movie comes across as Clerks fan-fiction that doesn't have a clear realisation as to why Kevin Smith's movie worked. His movie was funny, the conversations were interesting and the characters were believable, and none of that is present here.
The cast give it their best efforts but their performances come across as very amateur, the lines they're handed aren't ever funny and director Brian Vining seems unwilling to acknowledge these limitations, instead insisting on letting conversations and takes linger on for excessively long periods of time. The "story", if you could call it that, slags along without a particularly likeable protagonist. In fact, it's hard to find a particularly likeable character in the film. All in all, I got one hour through the movie before I realised that I'd just confused it with another movie and then switched it off.
This film was clearly a labour of love made with the best intentions, but I felt no love for it and it did not achieve the best results. It's a credit to the filmmakers that they got this movie made, but they just didn't find enough material to wring out of the single-location setting or to go beyond overused romantic comedy cliches when the chance for more commentary on changing times and the deterioration of the old fashioned video store was right there.
The Emu War (2023)
About as funny as Gallipoli
I'd initially heard about The Emu War when seeing a post made by Aaron Gocs on Instagram, and the idea of seeing the fair dinkum Aussie comedian in a gonzo comedy about soldiers fighting bird puppets sounded like something with greens potential. For the sold out audience around me, it seemed that the film reached its potential as they all giggled away. But I sat at the back of the cinema waiting for the film to find a rhythm to its madness or a single joke that landed, and it never happened.
There is a point in the beginning exposition of The Emu War that might lead one to believe that we're in for an affectionate reimagining of The Dirty Dozen. Alas, the four (yes, only four) "elite" soldiers sent into enemy lines to tackle the emus head on are dropped into the film without giving the audience time to meet and get to know them. A number of haphazard flashback "gags" are jammed in there to give each of them a brief, unfunny backstory, but it rarely comes across as anything more than lazy. And that's because it is. The Emu War is, despite the best and sincere efforts of everyone involved, one of the most fundamentally lazily written films I've seen in a very long time.
The entirety of The Emu War is the same joke repeated again and again. It's not a particular joke; it had a different setup and punchline every time. But every single time, the gag is "let's tell an unintentionally unfunny gag which is so dumb and lowbrow that the audience will appreciate the irony". There is an etiquette to this kind of humour that The Emu War does not have a grasp on. The audience around me consistently erupted with laughter and had a great time, but
In The Greasy Strangler, the juvenile sense of humour was offset by the film's artistically woven assault on the concept of good taste. And in the notorious terrible but ironically enjoyable Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, the general concept of a buddy pairing between Rambo and one of The Golden Girls against the backdrop of a police procedural is so ridiculously out of place that it hit an interesting note for me. The Emu War hit neither of these notes, largely because despite the sincere efforts of the filmmakers, it seems like an improv comedy group decided to frantically pull out the most juvenile gags they could and stuffed it onto the page. The last time I saw a movie try to wring out a feature length screenplay from this low a standard of writing, it was in a film called Disaster Movie. Being the disaster that it was I turned off that movie about 30 minutes in. I thought directors Aaron Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer had retired from filmmaking because nobody was interested in funding their juvenile, pottymouth and ridiculously lowbrow films anymore. But if they migrated to Australia, evidently Screen Australia would throw money around to see their kind of vision brought back to cinemas.
Of all the lowbrow misfired attempts at humour in the film, there was one in particular that took me off guard. It was a scene where the characters decide to have an impromptu orgy to... somehow escape from a prison, and the filmmakers have decided to actually blur out everyone's genital region. Surely there are a hundred other ways to choreograph and shoot a scene like this so that you don't have to resort to, you know, literally blurring a film to remove any slight facade of a fourth wall having ever existed. And yet just like every other point in the script, the creators took the lazy route.
The Emu War doesn't have a script. It doesn't have a story. And for the majority of the time, it doesn't have much in the way of production values either. It has and endless surplus of dialogue which the filmmakers seem to think are jokes, many of which are flashbacks seemingly designed to distract from the fact that the story is absent and bereft of movement. I could forgive this all if the movie was funny because it aspires to be a comedy more than anything, but minus two or three moments of Aaron Gocs' natural charismatic delivery, I couldn't find a single thing to write about. Maybe one day I'll see a film that knows how to better use his talents, but that day is not today.
To its credit, the visual effects in The Emu War are pretty decent. And the on-the-nose use of practical puppetry was one of the highlights for me, particularly in an era where people all too often over-rely on CGI. And the cast give it a very sincere effort, even if the material they're working with isn't pristine.
It's one thing to make a film, and it's another to sit in the audience and criticise it. But films typically have narrative, script and storytelling etiquette to go with them. Those are three things, among many, many others, which are completely absent from The Emu War. I haven't seen an Australian comedy so unfunny since The Very Excellent Mr Dundee, a movie I hold in so much contempt that I would call it the worst Australian film ever made. I don't have that same contempt for The Emu War because it's a silly little film made by a bunch of people who just wanted to have a good time, but I didn't have anything close to a good time watching it. And I just couldn't in good conscience summon the strength to recommend it to anybody. It was a harmless little Australian movie and I was surrounded by people who enjoyed it. Alas, when I exited the cinema and was asked what my thoughts were, all I could say was "Gallipoli was funnier".
Time Addicts (2023)
"Synchronic" Fan Fiction
I caught a screening of Time Addicts at Monster Fest this October. I saw a film which was lovingly crafted by people with a true passion for cinema, and a movie that was, for the most part, very technically proficient. The cinematography in particular was particularly solid, though the occasional shot did linger for too long a time. And the cast did a very strong job making their characters reasonably believable.
Unfortunately, I also saw a film which agitated me in a number of ways, and most of this came down to the screenplay.
Time Addicts is a film which tries to balance a real Aussie sense of humour with another attempt to be a serious thriller about drug addiction, paranoia and time travel. The film plays out very seriously but every line of dialogue is overly aggressive in its effort to be comedic banter and never feels like an organic line of dialogue, even with a cast that play it off very naturally.
In a respectable effort to keep the film contained to a single location, Time Addicts drags out its scenes for too long at a time and stretches its thin premise for a long time and often with a very slow pace. As such, the momentum never really feels like it kicks off. It often feels like writer-director Sam Odlum saw the 2019 time travel movie "Synchronic", another movie about a drug that makes people travel through time, and thought to himself "I would tell that story differently". He has some decent ambitions and exhibits sense of visual style in doing so, but he fails to find the narrative momentum to make a compelling story out of it. Time Addicts is certainly not a predictable film as it goes in a number of directions one might not anticipate, but I found it was often directions that were too ridiculous for me to believe on any level, even in a story where I can suspend disbelief enough to accept a drug that creates time travel. Whilst Synchronic explored way more possibilities, and naturally had a higher budget to allow it to do so, Time Addicts constantly had me very aware that we were inside a single location in the present day, and not in the past or the future as the story would want you to believe. And with very few characters in the story, the empty backgrounds of the same reused house were constantly on display. I respect that this film wanted to make use of a single location, but I ultimately wasn't captivated enough by the story or the script to take my attention away from this.
Ultimately, the biggest problem lies with the protagonist, who is ironically and unironically the antagonist of the film at the same time. Charles Grounds portrays Johnny very believably, even too believably for a character whose dialogue is inorganic and desperate to be funny. He was so believable that he actually reminded me of two people I've met in life my life, let's call them "Luke" and "Trevor". Luke was a paranoid meth addict I knew and eventually began to despise for his constant mistreatment of my friend whom he kept in a toxic relationship. And like Trevor, Grounds' character Johnny drags his girlfriend into the entire ordeal of the movie through his selfish habits. Supposedly, I'm meant to have a fraction of concern for his well-being. But like his real life counterpart "Luke", why should I care about this guy? He's selfish and genuinely unlikable as a person. If anything, I should want him to suffer at the hands of the drug dealer threatening to sever his thumbs. And I do. If Charles got his thumbs cut off in the first ten minutes of the film, then I'd be a happier person. Instead I sat through a lot of long, slow sequences where he was the only one talking, or one of the visibly few characters in the universe of the film. But the real issue came from the fact that every line of dialogue he said felt like it was meant to be the punchline in an episode of "The Big Lez Show" without any sense of believability, or genuine laughter. The audience around me chuckled quite a lot and enjoyed the sense of humour, so there is certainly an audience for it (and it was a sold out theatre too, so it was an inspired and large audience) but I wasn't that audience. I honestly just wished he would shut his drug-induced mouth. That's the same thought I had about my friend "Trevor" the last time he took three tabs of Acid. I just wished he'd shut up, but to his credit there was at least a rhythm to what he was saying, something that Johnny was lacking. Johnny is a poorly written character with a great actor who makes him so believable that it's often unbearable, but to have him written to be so intentionally unlikable and have him constantly say dialogue so artificial and annoying that it's like a cheese grater to the ear, it was not a comfortable experience to have to sit through a feature length runtime trapped in a cinema with him.
Ultimately, I failed to see the film all the way through. About halfway through, poised between remaining in a cinema with a character I couldn't stand and a movie that barely moved, I made the decision to get up and leave. I tried my best to see it through, but I didn't want to spend any more time with an agitating drug addict that would neither capture my sympathy nor make me laugh at any point. I wanted to support the filmmaker because he showed a lot of merit as a director and a knack for keeping a budgetary production as one with solid technical flare, as well as for the fact that it's not fair to judge a film completely unless you've seen it all the way through. All that being said, without a protagonist I could bear to be around I just found myself wanting to get out of the cinema quickly, no matter how many times I said to myself "just give it a chance".
Time Bandits is definitely a step in the right direction for Sam Odlum and I look forward to seeing where he goes from here. With more attention to tonal balance, likeable characters and believable dialogue, I can see his full potential blossoming into something great. I hope his sophomore effort takes everything that worked about this film and grows in a number of ways I felt this one came up short.
Bullets for the Dead (2015)
There are very little Bullets for the Dead in this movie
I respect the filmmakers for working around budgetary limitations and crafting a film with decent production values and solid performances.
But for a zom bie western film there is very little cowboy action or zombies actually in the film, rather an abundance of overly familiar character drama which never develops into anything substantial or meaningful. After a promising start, Bullets for the Dead quickly dips into being just another forgettable horror-drama which squanders a premise ripe with potential.