Life in One Chord (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Life in One Chord (2025) – M. Gordon

Shayne P. Carter is probably best known for leading the Flying Nun band Straitjacket Fits in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, as singer/guitarist/songwriter.  They were part of a New Zealand music scene (along with the Chills, the Clean, the Bats, the Verlaines, etc.) that became popular in the college radio scene in the US while I was a d.j.  I don’t think I ever saw them live back then but I admit that they weren’t my favourites from the scene, tending toward something more dramatic, possibly like arena rock (if Flying Nun could ever reach that scale), which wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. That said, songs like “She Speeds” and “Hail” were on heavy rotation in my world.  I didn’t know them at the time but Carter’s earlier band, the DoubleHappys, fit my indie-rock mold better (I discovered them later). Perhaps the difference was in Carter’s collaborators, trading bassist and songwriting partner Wayne Elsey for David Wood (bass) and Andrew Brough (guitar/vocals), retaining drummer John Collie. Tragically, Elsey had been killed while on tour, falling from a train in Carter’s presence (they were both only 21), which had a traumatic impact and affected Carter’s life as well as his musical direction.  A moving single, “Randolph’s Going Home” (in collaboration with Peter Jefferies), was Carter’s way of paying tribute to his friend and documenting the tragedy.  Later, Straitjacket Fits got signed to Arista Records before imploding and subsequently Carter founded Dimmer who have had continued success in New Zealand.  In 2019, Carter published his autobiography which inspired filmmaker Margaret Gordon to track him down to make a film out of it.  Like many Kiwis, Gordon has spent time in Melbourne and has contacts with some of my friends who were drawn to collaborate on the film (Reece Sanders worked on motion graphics and Simon Wright helped with some editing, I think).  When the producers struggled to afford to pay for the music rights for some of the clips, I contributed $50 to their kickstarter campaign (and have my name in the credits – is this a conflict of interest for this review?). Although I didn’t get to see the film on the big screen when local shows happened here last year, I did see Carter’s solo show at the Northcote Social Club (which was great). I also bought his solo album from 2016 (Offsider) on bandcamp, which is a stark piano-based affair, an instrument Carter apparently taught himself for this release (recommended!); he’s also recorded with an orchestra, provided accompaniment to stage performances, and generally taken artistic challenges and risks rather than played it safe.  I finally had the chance to watch the film on Amazon Prime last night and, having spent the last year refamiliarizing myself with Carter and his music, I found this a deep and moving experience.  He’s an amiable character, funny and self-deprecating despite his success. Beyond the music (which is well-documented here from the early Dunedin scene to beyond), Gordon’s film takes us into Carter’s personal experiences growing up half-Maori/half Pakeha (European), feeling that he didn’t belong in either culture.  Since he didn’t feel comfortable reading passages from his memoir aloud for the film, he recommended NZ newsreader Carol Hirschfeld to do this instead, an odd conceit but well explained (and which also informs us a bit more about Carter’s character and the walls of defence he has erected, which may also include his humour). At any rate, I am pleased to say that the doco is never less than engaging, finding a way through editing, music, graphics, found and shot footage (visiting old haunts), and carefully chosen talking heads (archival and new) to flesh out Carter’s story and the adjacent stories of his bandmates and other scenesters (he volunteered as a carer for Chris Knox after the latter’s stroke!). This is a film and an artist that you should definitely check out!  I’ve been re-evaluating Straitjacket Fits and Dimmer now in this new enriched light.

No Other Choice (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

No Other Choice (2025) – C.-W. Park

I was very enamoured with Park Chan-wook’s previous film, Decision to Leave (2022), a hazy film noir romance that felt like an ode to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).  Now his new film takes a Donald Westlake novel (The Ax, previously adapted by Costa-Gavras, to whom this film is dedicated) and turns it into a dark comedy about our era of industrial transformation and the mass layoffs it is creating.  Man-su (Lee Byung-hun) works for a large Korean paper company that is taken over by an American corporation that promptly sacks a chunk of its workforce including Man-su.  An expensive present from the company (an eel dinner) foreshadows the pink slip.  The film then follows Man-su and his family, including his wife Miri (Son Ye-Jin) and two children, Si-one and Ri-one, a possibly autistic cello prodigy and a typical teen getting himself into trouble, as they cope with the disaster. The family struggles to make ends meet (Miri goes to work as a dental assistant) and with the bank about to foreclose on the family home, Man-su hatches a desperate plan to ensure that he is the prime candidate for any job opening at other paper companies (there seem to be quite a few).  The film takes its time as Man-su identifies his competition and builds up the courage to take them out. Of course, it’s messy, and Man-su creates too many clues and loose ends for the police to follow -- but director Park revels in the opportunity to create eccentric characters, stage some magnificent shots in beautiful colour (kudos to cinematographer Kim Woo-hyung), and basically let things get weird and goofy.  Lee Byung-hun holds it all together with a charismatic performance (rightfully nominated for a Golden Globe). Another highlight in Park’s already excellent oeuvre.

Bugonia (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Bugonia (2025) – Y. Lanthimos

For some reason, I haven’t checked in with director Yorgos Lanthimos for quite a while (last time was The Favourite, 2018), so I missed his two previous collaborations with Emma Stone. After watching Bugonia, also starring Stone, I think I’m going to need to go back and catch up.  To be honest, I wasn’t certain that I would like this one.  I mean, “conspiracy theorists who kidnap a CEO because they think she is an alien” sounded either too facile or trying too hard to be weird. So, the film had to work hard to convince me – and by the time it was done (with those amazing freeze-frame shots), I was convinced.  Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis play the conspiracy theorists, none too bright, but Plemons (playing “Teddy”) is clearly obsessed while Delbis (playing “Don”) appears to have some sort of disability and is more ambivalent (and not lacking in empathy). The film plays out sort of exactly how you think it would – CEO denies being an alien but tin-foil-hat guys persist.  Yet Lanthimos keeps adding extra details and the cast fully inhabit their roles, going for broke. To say that this production pushed things as far as they possibly could is probably an understatement. Weird, but not only for weirdness’s sake – there are some deeper themes here about corporate greed (of course), the destruction of the environment (particularly bees – which relates to the ancient Greek origin of the film title) but also about power’s need for victims (even the cop-babysitter evokes this) and the merry path to hell that we humans are currently traversing… Perhaps this could be read as one big cosmic joke but the final moments arrested that thought. Highly recommended.

The Mastermind (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Mastermind (2025) – K. Reichardt

I guess I lost track of director Kelly Reichardt since the pandemic but I have enjoyed all of her films that I’ve seen (particularly Old Joy, 2006, and First Cow, 2019). With The Mastermind, Reichardt has brought her technique and themes to the heist drama. (It is always hard to know whether these arthouse directors choose to make genre films to attract a wider audience, for commercial prospects, or because, like many of us, they are truly fond of the genres). The setting is Framingham, Massachusetts, circa 1970. Reichardt and her team (including longtime cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt) use film stock and camera techniques to evoke films shot in this period (gauzy, washed-out colour) alongside pitch-perfect art design and set-decoration and costumes (furniture, cars, buildings, shirts, dresses, etc.).  The plaintive jazz soundtrack by Rob Mazurek lends an emotional note to the proceedings even when some scenes are scored only by extended drum solos. The plot centres on Josh O’Connor’s failing carpenter/architect/art-school graduate, married (to Alana Haim) with two young sons, who concocts a plan to steal some abstract paintings from the local art gallery with a couple of local guys/friends. Reichardt takes us step-by-step through the caper and its aftermath in true slow-cinema style, allowing viewers’ awareness of the genre to fill in some of the gaps in the plot as she hones in on a character study of O’Connor’s “mastermind”. Rather than using other characters to psychoanalyse him, Reichardt allows O’Connor’s actions (and the little bit of context we glean about him and his past) to help viewers to draw their own conclusions. The film concludes, with Vietnam War protests on TV and on the streets, with a sort of sudden ironic joke and no denouement (possibly one could see 2/3 of the film as a long long denouement, I guess!).  Slow but always absorbing.

Weapons (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

Weapons (2025) – Z. Creggar

Ostensibly narrated by a primary school girl from whatever small town in America the film takes place, lending a fable-like quality to the proceedings, we begin the tale with the key mystery to be solved: on one particular school day, all of the students in one classroom (save one) fail to turn up to school (in fact, they each left their houses at 2:17 AM and disappeared). Distressed parents focus their anger on the class teacher, played by Julia Garner. The film is divided into three parts: Justine’s story (the classroom teacher), Archer’s story (one of the parents, played by Josh Brolin), and Alex’s story (the one boy who did show up for school, played by Cary Christopher). Everyone is desperate to understand what happened to the missing children – and, of course, to find them. Amy Madigan, playing Alex’s Aunt Gladys, was nominated for a Golden Globe for best supporting actress for this film but did not win. To say any more would be criminal but I left the film thinking about the Brothers Grimm (and although I was hoping for a strictly supernatural film, I did wince on a few occasions that involved some violence and gore). Worth a look (if you dare)!

The Phoenician Scheme (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Phoenician Scheme (2025) – W. Anderson

I will have to watch this one again, having only seen it on my trans-Pacific flight to the USA on the tiny back-of-the-seat screen (possibly with an airline crash edited out).  However, even with these conditions, I’m confident that this is director Wes Anderson’s best feature since The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). Although I enjoyed them well enough at the time, Asteroid City (2023) and The French Dispatch (2021) felt like a letdown. Here, Benicio del Toro stars as businessman Zsa-Zsa Korda, who may have a shady past and also the target of various attempts at his life (possibly leading to multiple airplane crashes, all survived). He is trying to put together the financing for one last engineering feat, which involves visiting a series of former business partners around the globe. Along with him are Mia Threapleton playing his daughter Liesl, now a nun, to whom he plans to bequeath his estate, and Michael Cera playing Bjorn, a tutor hired to teach him about insects. The characterisations (including from the many, often familiar bit players) are sublimely eccentric. Although not scaling the droll comedic peak that Grand Budapest conquered, Phoenician Scheme offers many amusing moments as Korda seeks to eliminate “the gap” in his financing. As could be expected, the art design, set decoration, and music (Alexandre Desplat, plus curated classical and jazz selections), are highly stylized and exquisite.  Recommended, particularly if you’ve more or less given up on Wes recently.

 

One Battle After Another (2025)

 ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

One Battle After Another (2025) – P. T. Anderson

Time may not exist very clearly in Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest (and greatest?) film, which begins in an era where Weather Underground-styled activists are attacking the authoritarian and anti-immigration actions of the current US government and then fast-forwards 16 years to another timepoint where, uh, not much has changed, except the revolutionaries have aged and the authoritarians have tightened their grip.  Sounds serious (and topical) but this is a comedy … and an action film, complete with car chases.  In fact, the film script (also by P. T. Anderson but indebted to Pynchon) had been gestating for 20 years, starting with Anderson’s desire to extend his range with those car chases.  That he does.  However, the comic-book broadness of the characters here (specifically Sean Penn’s Colonel Steven J Lockjaw and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson) doesn’t feel too far afield from Anderson’s other Pynchon adaptation, Inherent Vice (2014), with a similar goofy vibe. But One Battle After Another is Anderson at the top of his powers and fearless in his willingness to “go there”. Surprisingly, this may also be Leo’s greatest performance ever – and certainly his funniest – as he bumbles his way through the action as a past-his-prime substance-addled/depleted former rebel, now paranoid stay-at-home single dad to Chase Infiniti’s mixed-race teenager, who both get dumped into a neo-Nazi operation to cleanse America.  Benicio del Toro plays a welcome role as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a karate instructor who helps Bob out. Indeed, there are a variety of excellent character turns here from faces familiar and not (Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall, Eric Schweig, more) that heighten the kaleidoscopic experience which still, in the end, stacks up as an action movie/thriller with a not-so-disguised political theme (and call to action). Highly recommended!