Recent releases: The Mandalorian and Grogu, Moss & Freud, Tuner, Words of War, A Private Life (Vie privée), Finding Emily, Marty, Life Is Short

Normally at this time of year I would be ser­en­ad­ing the French Film Festival and was giv­en the oppor­tun­ity to pre­view a bunch of titles but really was­n’t feel­ing the love this year. They need no assist­ance from me, how­ever, and I’ll gladly revis­it the ones that return to cinemas later on, hope­fully with fresh eyes.

In the mean­time, my atten­tion has been on the com­mer­cial cinema and they don’t come much more com­mer­cial than a Star War.

The Mandalorian and Grogu is utterly ines­sen­tial but that ines­sen­tial nature is also its charm. The very first Star Wars back in 1977 was inspired by the Saturday morn­ing seri­als of George Lucas’s youth¹ and while some of the stor­ies that have been told since then have attemp­ted to carry great­er weight (suc­cess­fully with Andor, of course), there’s noth­ing wrong with inno­cent adven­tures in space² provided they’re done with energy and good humour..

The big screen instal­ment of the story of a bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal, Brendan Wayne, Lateef Crowder) find­ing a sense of pur­pose through the acci­dent­al par­ent­ing of a mis­chiev­ous young kid (who looks a lot like a cer­tain pup­pet Jedi from the main timeline) feels about as close as Star Wars has come in along time to those seri­al roots. It’s epis­od­ic – a bit of a road movie in fact – and each stage in the jour­ney res­ults in an unlikely, but sat­is­fy­ing, escape from peril.

Our plucky pair are hunt­ing down the scattered Imperial lead­er­ship on behalf of the suc­cess­ful rebel­lion. A deal is truck by which they return the kid­napped son of the fam­ous crim­in­al Jabba the Hutt (Jeremy Allen White) to his fam­ily in exchange for import­ant intel­li­gence that the Hutts hold. Except he does­n’t want to go back. Yes, he’s one of the good Hutts.

Writer-director Jon Favreau is clearly hav­ing fun by includ­ing ref­er­ences to many of his own favour­ite cine­mat­ic set-pieces – some of which would be inap­pro­pri­ate view­ing for the tar­get audi­ence here but will delight the adult film fans who have to chap­er­one them. Including a cameo from Martin Scorsese (as a four-armed fast-food cook) is our first clue and I coun­ted ref­er­ences to Blade Runner, Scarface, Apocalypse Now, Gremlins, the Harryhausen stop-motion mon­sters from films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and there’s even a nod to the Minions (although that might be inadvertent).

As someone whose first (and only) stage play was about an ima­gined meet­ing between Michael Jackson and Benny Hill, I really can­’t com­plain about a film that ima­gines the unlikely real-life friend­ship between super­mod­el Kate Moss (Ellie Bamber) and the eld­erly Enfant ter­rible of the art world Lucian Freud (Derek Jacobi). Using the pub­lic per­cep­tions of fam­ous people can be a use­ful short-cut to char­ac­ter for a screen­writer – a plat­form to build on. In the case of James Lucas’ Moss & Freud, it helps that he has Moss as an exec­ut­ive producer. 

And the film is less about art than it is about the con­ver­sa­tions that can hap­pen between an artist and mod­el dur­ing the ardu­ous pro­cess of mak­ing the art. Freud’s fin­ished por­trait of Moss was not a favour­ite of either of them but it was sym­bol­ic of her escap­ing the pres­sures of her star­dom, all the tabloid non­sense and the miso­gyn­ist­ic world of fash­ion, and becom­ing a mature inde­pend­ent woman.

She chose to be naked for the por­trait – unlike all those oth­er times in her career where oth­er people made that decision for her.

Daniel Roher is a doc­u­ment­ari­an who won an Oscar for his film about the Russian oppos­i­tion lead­er Alexander Navalny in 2023. He’s now turned his eye to fic­tion with Tuner (which he co-wrote with Robert Ramsay).

Sleepy-eyed English act­or Leo Woodall (excel­lent in Nuremberg last year) plays a New York piano tuner, appren­ticed to age­ing jazz musi­cian Dustin Hoffman. Woodall’s char­ac­ter has an afflic­tion which makes him overly sens­it­ive to sound but when you com­bine that with per­fect pitch, you get a great expo­nent of a mis­un­der­stood (and unap­pre­ci­ated) profession.

Working alone one night in the man­sion of one of his rich cli­ents, he stumbles across a safecrack­ing – an inside job by the secur­ity com­pany. They are try­ing brute force meth­ods but our hero real­ises that his ears can help him hear the tiny crackles and pops of the levers as he turns the com­bin­a­tion wheel. A new – and more luc­rat­ive – career appears in front of him, except he is ill-equipped to deal with the genu­ine ugli­ness of the crowd he has fallen in with.

Interesting to me in a way that I can­’t quite put my fin­ger on, both the prot­ag­on­ist and the ant­ag­on­ists in the film are Jewish and a “Holocaust watch” is a cent­ral bone of con­ten­tion. In fact, the arrival of that watch sig­nals the moment at the begin­ning of Act III when a prom­ising film goes fly­ing off the rails due to a ridicu­lously unlikely coin­cid­ence. Very enjoy­able up to that point – less so, afterwards.

Speaking of Russian dis­sid­ents, Words of War is a worthy British film about the murdered Russian journ­al­ist Anna Politkovskaya (Maxine Peak) and the train of events that turned her from a life­style journ­al­ist at an inde­pend­ent Moscow news­pa­per to a cru­sad­ing Chechen War cor­res­pond­ent and then a martyr.

The most inter­est­ing thing about the film is cur­rent tend­ency to either let act­ors use their own accents or to give them region­al British accents – per­haps as a way of show­ing audi­ences how vast and cul­tur­ally diverse Russia actu­ally is.

In A Private Life, Jodie Foster shines as a Jewish-American psy­chi­at­rist in Paris, let­ting her curi­os­ity about the death of a patient over­whelm her. Again, Jewishness is cent­ral to the story – or is it? This is a film that thrives on mis­dir­ec­tion and the audi­ence is encour­aged by Foster’s per­form­ance to go along with every wrong turn she takes.

Reviewing this for RNZ Culture 101 the oth­er day, I described writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski’s script as “tidy” which seemed to throw host Perlina Lau who asked me what I meant. I meant that the script gives every­one clear tools and bound­ar­ies – noth­ing wasted and noth­ing out of place – but it does­n’t have much of a spark either.

Finding Emily snuck up on me, I must con­fess. It’s one of those rare things – a romantic com­edy that is both romantic and funny. It’s also groun­ded in its sense of place – Manchester – and its char­ac­ters. You get the sense that everything that hap­pens has actu­ally happened to someone at some time even though when you put them all togeth­er the pack­age is com­pletely ridiculous.

Spike Fearn is Owen, strug­gling musi­cian and sound tech at the loc­al uni­ver­sity. One night work­ing at the stu­dent uni­on, he meets Emily and they hit it off. She gives him her num­ber but when he tries to send a mes­sage the next day, there’s a digit miss­ing. Thinking he has found the love of his life, Owen starts a cam­paign to try and find the mys­ter­i­ous Emily.

He is aided in this by anoth­er Emily (Angourie Rice), a psy­cho­logy stu­dent who sees his quix­ot­ic quest as the top­ic for her thes­is – that romantic love is a form of men­tal ill­ness. You can see where this is headed, I’m sure, but it’s the get­ting there that’s fun.

Daft and charm­ing in equal meas­ure, Finding Emily should find plenty of admirers over time and also be a decent call­ing card for the two leads.

Finally, a film that made me laugh more than any oth­er in recent weeks. You know, with celebrity doc­u­ment­ar­ies a lot of the fun is usu­ally down to nos­tal­gia. You remem­ber laugh­ing at some­thing first time around and you laugh again in recog­ni­tion. Well, in Marty, Life Is Short the clips are old but they play fresh and new and you laugh because they are damn funny. Still.

Martin Short seems to have been around forever without ever being the super­star he wanted to be, but it looks like he’s at ease with that now.

It’s such a pleas­ure to watch a film about someone so deservingly beloved and to be reminded that if you are decent and fun to be around, people will always want to work with you. Oh, and tal­en­ted. I almost for­got. Decent, fun to be around and enorm­ously gif­ted – then people will always want to work with you.

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1. I’m read­ing Michael Ondaatje’s con­ver­sa­tions with edit­or Walter Murch who insists that Lucas was ori­gin­ally down to make Apocalypse Now in the early 70s, but it was all too close to home for the stu­di­os while the Vietnam War was still raging. So, instead he decided to take the story about plucky insur­gents res­ist­ing an imper­i­al war machine and set it in space instead. ↩︎
2. We enjoyed the TV seri­al Skeleton Crew which has been described as “The Goonies in the Star Wars uni­verse” – I reviewed it for RNZ Nights a couple of months ago. ↩︎