Vale Gene Hackman, dead at age 95

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Vale Gene Hackman, dead at age 95

28 February 2025

The American actor, who retired in 2004, and whose many credits included Young Frankenstein, The French Connection, Unforgiven, and my personal favourite, The Birdcage, died yesterday in Santa Fe, in the U.S. state of New Mexico.

Hackman was found at his home along with his wife, Betsy Arakawa, and their pet dog. While the cause of death presently remains unknown, police said there was immediate indication of foul play.

Update: police now believe the circumstances of the deaths of Hackman and his wife, are suspicious and have stepped up their investigation.

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film, Gene Hackman

Next up: the James Bond sequel trilogy and Bond villain origin stories

24 February 2025

Long time producers of the James Bond films, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have agreed to sell the decades old film franchise to Amazon. The new arrangement gives the tech giant full creative control, and Amazon has already indicated they intend to “move beyond the franchise of the James Bond movies”.

Who knows exactly what that means at this stage, but looking at what happened to Star Wars, after series creator George Lucas sold the sci-fi saga to Disney in 2012, probably gives us a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Good luck 007.

I gave up on the Bond films years ago. I think 2012’s Skyfall was the last one I went to a cinema to see. I never made it to No Time to Die, the Daniel Craig finale, which was released in 2021.

But Bond had stopped being Bond a long time ago. Indeed, the entire premise belonged to a bygone era. The barely plausible Bond had ceased to be relevant. Even Roger Moore, who portrayed the fictional British intelligence agent seven times between 1972 and 1985, once told late Irish–British broadcaster Terry Wogan, he thought the character was ridiculous:

“Bond films are so outrageous, the stunts are so outrageous,” Moore told Wogan. “Everything is beyond belief.”

In a way though, the slapstick nature of the earlier films was a big part of their allure. The stories were a bit of light-hearted, if fast paced, escapism. Efforts in recent decades to make the series darker, and grittier, to appeal to a new, and wider audience, seemed futile to me. Why not retire the James Bond films all together, and create a brand new character, and story arc, instead of rehashing something that’s decades old? But this is a point I’ve made before.

It’s not like there’s a shortage of new stories to bring to the big screen. That, however, is clearly not the way Amazon sees the situation. As with Star Wars, they know there’s a ready, nostalgia craving audience, waiting to see whatever new Bond offerings are forthcoming.

I take Amazon’s desire to “move beyond” will see movies, TV shows, video games, and graphic novels, among other things, based on other characters — from what will no doubt become the Bond universe — assuming centre stage in stories of their own. With nary a glimpse of Bond in sight. I don’t know, some of this stuff might be ok, but maybe it won’t.

Good luck 007 fans.

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entertainment, film, trends

Intercepted, a Ukraine war documentary by Oksana Karpovych

19 February 2025

Ukrainian film director Oksana Karpovych’s documentary, Intercepted, which features phone calls between invading Russian soldiers and their families in Russia, has one of the starkest trailers I’ve seen in a long while.

Phil Hoad, writing for The Guardian, described Intercepted as chilling, and compelling:

Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

Becoming Led Zeppelin: the first ever authorised documentary

17 February 2025

Becoming Led Zeppelin, trailer, a documentary made by Irish-British filmmaker Bernard MacMahon, is screening in Australian cinemas at present, and tells the story of the English band’s first two years, from 1968 to 1970.

I listened to their 1971 rock classic Stairway to Heaven — one of their many compositions — and I have to say, they don’t make them like they used to. I doubt anyone could make them like they used to now, even if they wanted to.

Oh to be a rock and not to roll…

Were David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin right about Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network?

12 February 2025

American actor Jesse Eisenberg played Meta/Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network, David Fincher’s 2010 dramatisation about the founding of Facebook. The screenplay, written by Aaron Sorkin, was based on Ben Mezrich’s 2009 book, The Accidental Billionaires.

Despite being part fiction, Zuckerberg was not impressed with his portrayal, saying Fincher and Sorkin were only accurate with his wardrobe. Think the hoodie, and those fuck you flip-flops.

For those who have not seen The Social Network, the now Meta CEO comes across as a brash, arrogant individual, who has virtually no regard for authority, and little respect for anyone other than himself. Particularly women, and the people he called friends. But Zuckerberg’s upset was understandable; few people would relish being presented in such a light.

Perhaps Fincher and Sorkin recognised that by way of one of the final lines in the film, delivered by Marylin Delpy (Rashida Jones), a lawyer acting for Zuckerberg, who said: “You’re not an asshole Mark, but you’re trying so hard to be one.” In other words, Fincher and Sorkin were trying to give a young Zuckerberg — as someone who’d become a little too obsessed with his ambitions for the the fledgling social network — the benefit of the doubt.

Some of Zuckerberg’s recent actions however may have removed any doubts. Revising Meta’s fact checking and content moderation policies, and scaling back the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) recruiting programs, among them. Some people may be thinking Fincher and Sorkin had nailed Zuckerberg’s character from the get go.

Even Eisenberg, whose portrayal of Zuckerberg was, I thought, pure class, seems to be of the same opinion. Speaking recently, while promoting his new film, A Real Pain, Eisenberg said he didn’t want to be thought of as being associated with the Meta CEO:

These people have billions upon billions of dollars, like more money than any human person has ever amassed and what are they doing with it? Oh, they’re doing it to curry favour with somebody who’s preaching hate. That’s what I think… not as like a person who played in a movie. I think of it as somebody who is married to a woman who teaches disability justice in New York and lives for her students are going to get a little harder this year.

Chestnut, a film by Jac Cron with Natalia Dyer and Rachel Keller

11 February 2025

Recent twenty-something finance graduate Annie (Natalia Dyer), who’s about to leave Philadelphia and move to Los Angeles for work, meets Tyler (Rachel Keller), and Danny (Danny Ramirez), who seem to be a couple, at a bar one evening.

But neither Tyler nor Danny seem sure they’re a thing, and their ambivalent feelings for Annie only muddy the waters further. Do they have designs on Annie. Or do they not?

No one seems to know. The only certainty being Annie, Tyler, and Danny enjoy slinking endlessly in and out of one bar after another, in the middle of the night.

Chestnut, trailer, the 2023 debut feature of Los Angeles based American filmmaker Jac Cron, struggles to figure out where it is going or what it’s trying to say. But maybe that’s the point, for is that not the plight of many a twenty-something?

The Teachers Lounge, a film by Ilker Catak, with Leonie Benesch

3 February 2025

The Teachers Lounge (AKA Das Lehrerzimmer), trailer, made in 2023, and directed by Ilker Çatak, is a cross between a (kind of) psychological thriller, and a (kind of) whodunit, set in a German elementary/primary school. I kid you not; the tension is palpable.

A person unknown has been stealing small quantities of money from bags and wallets left in the school’s staff room, and idealistic young teacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), controversially attempts to uncover the identity of the thief.

Carla’s efforts to solve the mystery may be well intentioned, the presence of a would-be burglar in their midst both irritates and unsettles her colleagues, but you know what they say: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

That’s not a knife: iconic Australian film Crocodile Dundee gets recut

3 February 2025

The knife, the editing room knife, has recently been taken to ocker Australian film Crocodile Dundee.

Producers deemed the slapstick comedy — that swept the once Sydney Harbour Bridge rigger, and television personalty Paul Hogan, to big screen fame in 1986 — to be out of touch with the expectations of contemporary movie audiences. This necessitated a number of “considered edits”, says Garry Maddox, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald:

Updating classic films can sometimes upset fans — there was a ruckus when George Lucas had Han Solo defending himself from bounty hunter Greedo rather than firing the first shot in a 1997 special edition of Star Wars — but the long tradition of creating new versions includes Francis Ford Coppola with both Apocalypse Now and The Godfather Part III and Ridley Scott with Blade Runner.

Scenes from the film — set between the Australian outback and New York City — where Mick Dundee, AKA Crocodile Dundee, gropes a cross-dresser in a bar, and later a woman at a party, have been removed, while others have been extended. The re-edited version of the film is to be called Crocodile Dundee: The Encore Cut, and will henceforth become the standard edition of the story.

The chances of aliens coming to Earth are a trillion to one, but still they come

30 January 2025

Has Earth, and the solar system, been the subject of visits from extraterrestrials from elsewhere in the cosmos? How else to account for the numerous flying saucer, AKA unidentified anomalous phenomenon (UAP) sightings, of, in particular, the past eighty years? I guess it’s possible visitors from deep space have been our way, at least once in the last several thousand years, drawn here in the knowledge that Earth is capable of hosting intelligent life.

But, any long distance travellers would have to be “very, very lucky”, says Anders Sandberg, of the Future of Humanity Institute, at the University of Oxford, speaking to Peter Brannen, a writer for The Atlantic, in 2018. Very, very lucky to have survived as a species, in an unsafe universe, rather than having somehow circumvented the laws of physics to reach us, that is:

“Maybe the universe is super dangerous and Earth-like planets are destroyed at a very high rate,” Sandberg says. “But if the universe is big enough, then when observers do show up on some very, very rare planets, they’ll look at the record of meteor impacts and disasters and say, ‘The universe looks pretty safe!’ But the problem is, of course, that their existence depends on them being very, very lucky. They’re actually living in an unsafe universe and next Tuesday they might get a very nasty surprise.” If this is true, it might explain why our radio telescopes have reported only a stark silence from our cosmic neighborhood.

The Age of Disclosure, a documentary made by Dan Farah, posits however that extraterrestrials have indeed visited. At least one person whom Farah interviewed claimed to have seen alien beings. There’s the suggestion of a massive cover up. I won’t dwell on that point, but will say this story sounds like the scoop of the century, maybe the whole of recorded history.

Why then not take it the media? Why make us pay to see a film to learn the truth? Can’t someone who’s in the know just call a news conference and spill the beans instead?

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documentary, film

Megalopolis, Reagan, among Nominations for 2024 Razzie Awards

29 January 2025

Borderlands, Joker: Folie a Deux, Madame Web, Megalopolis, and Reagan, a biopic about the late United States President Ronald Reagan, are vying for the coveted $4.97 gold spray-painted statuette, in the worst picture category of this year’s Golden Raspberry, AKA, Razzie awards.

Recipients in all Razzie’s categories, including worst picture, will be announced on Saturday 1 March 2025, the day before the Oscars, on what is surely the film industry’s night of slights.

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awards, film, humour

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