The Big Empty

Air Doll (2009) - Kore-eda Hirokazu Kore-eda's Air Doll appears to be tackling the modern society's illness - urban loneliness and soullessness, the themes explored by by other prominent Japanese auteurs of its time, namely, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Sion Sono and Shinji Aoyama, with Korean actress Bae Doona (Linda, Linda, Linda, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Host). The result is a mixed bag.

Adapted from a manga, about a blow-up sex doll, Air Doll is an odd choice for Kore-eda in his mid-career, because he had always been regarded as a Ozu's heir apparent with his gentle, life affirming, if not death obsessed films. It concerns a middle-aged man living alone with his sex doll (Bae), named after his ex-girlfriend Nozomi, as a companion. He talks to her and bathes her and has sex with her. While he is out working as a waiter at a restaurant, Nozomi comes to life and walks around the town. She even gets a job at a video rental store. People around her are unbothered by her demeanor or she has seam lines around her body. With her big eyes and blank expression, Bae approaches the role with pure wonder and innocence of a new born child.

Nozomi's accented Japanese narration serves well as an inanimate object which came to life and just gained a heart. Walking around and meeting people, observing and experiencing human conditions, she learns that there are others out there that compliment you and complete you to have a full life, that people need one another. She has an accident at the job and punctures her arm and deflates and her colleague Junichi (Arata) puts a plastic tape on her arm and blows air back into her navel. The romance begins. He says she and he are not unlike. He feels empty inside as well. He says many feel that way. She then experiences heartbreak, realizing that she is someone else's mere substitution.

She even tracks down her maker (Joe Odagiri). He philosophically explains that human life is both sad and beautiful. But when all is said and done, we are either burnable (humans) or unburnable (sex dolls, because of environmental restrictions) garbage. Yes, once it gets dark, it never lets up.

The film is closer to Spielberg's A.I- Dark yet saccharine. There are secondary stories of other characters we get only glimpses of, and don't quite resonate as it should. Air Doll is not quite the right fit for genteel filmmaker.

Use Your Illusion

The Last Movie (1971) - Hopper After the success of Easy Rider (1969), a movie which defined the counterculture/hippie generation, the Universal Pictures gave Dennis Hopper a carte blanche to make a new movie, fully expecting another hit with the youth audience. But what they got was jumbled, incomprehensible mess, a movie only a heavily drugged, highly egotistical Hollywood actor could dream of. The Last Movie has all the hallmarks of an ambitious and masculin epic possible-only-in-the-70s' feel to it - the exotic locations (shot in the high mountains of Peru), large sprawling cast including thousands of local extras, grand theme (film aping real life aping film) and recalls more successful, better articulated films of its day- Aguirre: the Wrath of God, El Topo, Heaven's Gate, The Days of the Locusts, etc.

The film 'loosely' tells the story of a Hollywood Stuntman Kansas (Hopper) doing stunt work on the set of a Hollywood western production, directed by Sam Fuller, up in the Andes. After the production ends and everyone goes back home, Kansas remains and shacks up with a local girl, Maria (Stella Garcia) and dreaming of having a good life - a house on the hills, with a swimming pool perhaps. His real motivations to stay is never clear.

In the meantime, there is a cult-like local group, unhealthily influenced by the presence of a Hollywood production, starts reenacting a movie production of their own, with cameras, lights and boom made out of sticks and firecrackers, and using real violence because they don't understand that the filmmaking process is fakery. The local priest (Thomas Milian) is not too pleased about it. It's a devil's doing, he says.

Kansas with his friend Neville (Don Gordon) try to suck up to Anderson, a rich, sleazy business owner and his bored lusty wife, for their expedition to find gold, and gets tangled up in sexual escapades, much to the distress of Maria.

As Kansas gets swepted up in the locals' 'movie production', he really gets hurt and is bedridden. But is it his drug filled imagination or is it real? With the non-linear narrative and no definite ending, it is up to the audience to decide.

Studded with appearance by Hopper's friends - Peter Fonda, Fuller, Kris Kristopherson, Toni Basil and the like, and heady with the metaphors for filmmaking, the US cultural colonialism and jump cuts and "scene missing" title cards, The Last Movie is full of grand ideas and stunning scenery (shot by László Kovács) but doesn't come together coherently. Panned by the critics, and its failure at the box office pushed out Hopper to an exile from Hollywood for a dacade after this film.

Dance Across the Rio Grande

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (2026) - DaCosta Okay. Any movie that features Ralph Fiennes playing Duran Duran records and dancing and singing along is worth the admission. I admit that. But is this sequel to the projected trilogy of the 28 franchise worthwhile, other than Fiennes' presence? The thing is, Alex Garland is a terrible writer. I always hated his over-dramatic, yet simple world view. I hated the ending of 28 Days Later, which started the whole franchise. I always thought the Boyle/Garland combo is bad news - no amount of style is gonna make up for its terrible, shallow premise.

Garland has shown time and time again that he is incapable of making an entertaining film. His attempts at Hollywood action movies are marred by his extremely limited and stupid world view - it doesn't matter whether he is adapting from another source, his writing always ends up clunky, awkward, full of sound and fury that signifies nothing. But now with The Bone Temple, it's Nia DaCosta, a prominent and highly capable director behind The Candyman reboot, which I enjoyed a lot.

Seeing this is the second film of the planned three, the clunky plot is somewhat forgivable. And DaCosta handles it well with the visuals. The Bone Temple begins promptly where the previous one left off. Our young protagonist, Spike (Alfie Williams), is now one of the Jimmys in the ruthless Jimmy Gang, headed by track suit wearing, parkour practicing, satan worshipping Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell, last seen as a hick vampire in The Sinners). Growing up watching Teletubbies and believing his pastor father was a satan who foresaw the zombie apocalypse, Jimmy with his handful of feral little Jimmies, runs around the zombie ravaged the countryside of northern England and kills bunch of survivors in the most gruesome way BECAUSE HE IS A SATANIST.

ON THE OTHER HAND, WE HAVE DR. KELSON (Fiennes), who is a sage-like survivalist who builds towering open air ossuaries to remember the dead and believes the virus infected zombies are curable. SO THOSE ARE THE TWO CHOICES YOU HAVE IN POST ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE. GET IT??! AND OF COURSE, THERE WILL BE A CONFRONTATION OF THE TWO! All you have to do is say the premise of this franchise out loud and hear how ridiculously stupid you sound. See, this is why I hate Garland's writing.

There's always unintentional campy humor in Garland's writing. Fiennes goes along with it and makes the most of Dr. Kelson's eccentricities: his rendition of pumped up satanic rockstar act while blasting Iron Maiden is gold. But then again, we had to content with our young hero being reduced to a passive wimp throughout the whole film. Why do zombies not attack each other if they see uninfected as monsters? However scientific it pretends to be, The Bone Temple is not the movie that explains these gaping holes in the premise, but punches some more new holes instead.

Wildly uneven, but ten times better than its predecessor, The Bone Temple only exists to serve as a stepping stone for the third movie that links back to its original which came out in 2002, which made Cilian Murphy its breakout star. But this is all Ralph Fiennes. Me, an unabashed Fiennes fan, have no complaints.

Solidarity

The Black and The Green (1982) - Bourne In december of 1982, a group of Civil Rights activists from the US visited Northern Ireland, organized by the H Block Committee, an anti-British/loyalist group in Northern Ireland, named after the notorious H shaped jail cell blocks which saw 10 Irish republican prisoners died of the hunger strike a year before. This is the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This fact finding mission was to support and show solidarity between African Americans and the Irish people under British colonial rule. The roadblocks figuratively, and philosophically are present - how do you reconcile the racism of Irish Americans against blacks in the states? How do you reconcile the MLK's teaching of non-violence with armed struggle of the Nothern Island? For these Civil Rights activists, the trip is a self-reflection and teaching moment as well. They are grilled by an Irish journalists on their knowledge of the situation at hand and understanding of the context of the Trouble, but warmly received by people of Belfest and Derry.

St. Claire Bourne, founder of Chamba Mediaworks and unsung hero of documenting African American life in the 60s and 70s, records everything matter of factly with the help of Jean Carey Bond, a journalist who accompanied the trip as one of the delegates. She narrates the film.

This short documentary is a gem. It speaks of the past solidarity that existed internationally and we need more of this in these crazy times. "If opression exists anywhere in the world, then the entire world is unsafe." Happy MLK day everyone.

Bad Math

Orwell: 2+2=5 (2025) - Peck Disappointing. First off, I am a big fan of Raoul Peck as a filmmaker. His astute observations both in his narrative and non-narrative films always rang true and powerful to me. But with his new overproduced (produced by Alex Gibney and distributed by NEON- both I'm less fond of) Orwell documentary, he connects the dots while ignoring others, ends in conclusion with the old saying "people have power", which in this terrible world we are living in, doesn't land as powerful and hopeful as before but almost sounds naive. I have to admit, after attending the rally against the ICE raids and everything else, I was feeling hopelessness taking over and we are fighting the battle already lost and as if feeling like I was just going through the motions, like an old habit. Yes, with Trump in power with all the craziness that he is inflicting on the world every day, Orwell's predictions of the dystopian future seems tame.

The film's whole narration is from Orwell's own words - letters to his friends and family and excerpts from his diaries (narrated by Damien Lewis). Peck starts promisingly with Orwell's background; his days as a policeman in British colonial India and how it shaped Orwell's view - the injustices of the oppressors and indignities of being oppressed. His acute description of the British class system - his family was 'middle class' pretending to be upper class and therefore the middle class disparaged the poor. But this important thread never resurfaces ever again as he juxtaposes the various film versions of his work - Animal Farm and 1984 and the past and present reality - dictators, the rise of ultra right conservatism across the globe, the atrocities in Rohingya, El Salvador, Ukraine, Gaza, January 6th and so forth.

Yes, the surveillance state and media disinformation campaign he foresaw came true. But the dignified portraits of 'everyday people' doesn't hold the power as it might have had decades ago. I don't know, maybe I am jaded and giving in to hopelessness. I will still go through the motion as that's what I know. So see you at the next demonstration?

Evolution of Zombies

We Bury the Dead (2024) - Hilditch At this point, the zombie genre is done to death and there's no chance that someone will come up with a fresh take on the genre. Or so I thought until I watched the Australian film We Bury the Dead, by Zak Hilditch and starring Daisy Ridley. And it's a decent one, carefully avoiding the pitfalls of the genre trope and being too sentimental.

The premise is that an American military sonar/soundwave bomb experiment detonated in Tasmania and wiped out the people/animal population of the island. It affected the brain cells. The south side of the island is codoned off as the middle part is still burning. But there are reports that some of the people who fell dead are coming alive and the military is deployed to execute them on site because first, they are not the same anymore, and over time they become violent.

Ava (Ridley) lands on the island as a volunteer for the body recovery effort. But the real reason is to go to the south of the island, where her husband went to the work retreat. After encountering some undead, who seem to be more cognizant than she initially thought, she teams up with a young man with a chip on his shoulder, Clay (Brenton Thwaites) to head down south with a motorcycle. They witness the pure hellscape at the epicenter of the military experiment that took place, encounters a creepy soldier who has other plans to revive his pregnant wife and barn full of chained zombies and escape.

The fun part of the film is when Ava and Clay get to their resort destination and let their inhibitions go and just start enjoying their surroundings. Ava and her now dead husband had a big fight and he apparently was having an affair. Hilditch foregoes all the drama and genre traps - We Bury the Dead is not a tearful, love-conquers-all story nor time-ticking virus containment story. It's a fresh take on the genre and more down to earth relatable film- because all the characters are motivated by somewhat selfish, personal reasons rather than heroics that require self-sacrifices.

We Bury the Dead is sufficiently creepy and scary, but also thoughtful and funny. It has more common with what George Romero's hinting at with his zombie series over decades - that zombies have grown consciousness and acting more like humans and humans regress to zombie states.

Endless

Ariel (2025) - Patiño Argentine actress Agustina Muñoz (seen in many of Matías Piñeiro's films playing various Shakespearean characters), is on her way to Azores in mid-Atlantic in the Spanish-Portuguese co-production staging of Tempest. She is supposed to play Ariel. But when she gets to the volcanic island, she can't get in touch with anyone. Her phone keeps telling her that no such numbers of her contacts exist and everyone on the island is speaking lines from the Shakespear plays while doing their daily chores - shopping at the supermarket, pumping at the gas station, etc. Agustina understandably gets very annoyed by everyone who's acting as if in trance. Then she meets Ariel, played by Spanish actress Irene Escolar, and finds out that the inhabitants of the islands are all characters from the bard's various plays, acting out their plays from beginning to end. At sunset, they must finish their plays and the next day, they start anew, playing the same characters over and over again.

Irene, who has no knowledge of being a real-life actress, is thrown into an existential crisis after Agustina sowing the notion that Ariel shouldn't just follow Prospero's orders because the character's a rebel and they all need to chart their own destiny. In the meantime, Agustina is trying to get out of the island to no avail. She is resigned to help Ariel to finish off the rest of the plays around the island - Hamlet, Tempest, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliette, etc. There is even a Becket character marooned there - because he landed on the wrong island (Becket's characters' island is the next one over this one), walking around alone, mumbling Becket lines.

Lois Patiño, a Spanish visual artist/filmmaker, plays around with the idea of 'life is a stage', with his trademark crossfades with multiple images and static frames breaking up to reveal what's behind the images we are seeing. At one point, the characters, instigated by Augustina, openly question the role of 'creator' and plan to steal Prospero's (and in turn Shakespear's) book and destroy it and write themselves their own destiny and question the man behind the camera even, by breaking the 4th wall.

With stunning Azores' backdrop and his signature color tinted images, Patiño creates another hypnotic, dreamy film that is both thoughtful and whimsical.