February 6th

Wild Things

Food Club

Wrong Turn

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom - Netflix

A wonderful variety for your delectation this week. Eco-warriors showcased in an important doco, romance and food in Italy, slasher/horror suspense,  and a Netflix film that is up for a couple of Golden Globes already. 

Wild Things
Dir: Sally Ingleton

Length: 88 mins

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/458941927

© Potential - a vital campaign run
by dedicated activists

This important doco traces a year on the front line of environmental activism in Australia. Among other campaigns, it focuses on the fight to oppose logging and save the Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania, the efforts to stop Adani from building a coalmine in Queensland, and the school strikes aimed at getting government to take action against climate change. The film features excellent archival footage that retraces Bob Brown's successful opposition to the damming of the Franklin River, combined with profiles of those dedicated people who today are putting their freedom on the line to oppose the Adani coalmine and Tassie logging. The maturity of the young schoolkids spearheading their generation's fight for their future is impressive, and I hope this film will not just preach to the converted, but be seen by those skeptics who need a wake-up call.

4 - highly recommended

Food Club
Dir: Barbara Topsoe Rothenborg

Length: 100  mins

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdppl5Fnmys

© The Reset Collective - childhood friends battle
growing old as a woman.

Vanja, Marie and Berling have been friends since childhood. Now they are in their sixties.  Berling has remained single, living as if she were still young, Vanja is mourning her deceased husband, and Marie has just found out her husband of 40 years has left her for another woman. They head off to attend a one-week cooking class in Puglia, Italy and what transpires there redefines each one of them. On the one hand this film is fabulous, in that it handles head-on various issues that can beset women at a certain age. One the other, it is so predictable and at times saccharine sweet that it is almost sickly. Each character is a bit of a cardboard cut-out of "a type", and the cooking instructor so archetypically Italianly handsome it beggars belief. But . . . there are moments that feel very authentic, tackling aspects of ageing and female friendships often overlooked, that it's probably worth a look. It's light and fun, and the food looks mouthwatering, so make sure to eat before you go.

3 - recommended

Wrong Turn
Dir: Mike P Nelson

Length: 109 mins

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDdGpjjtq-o

© Rialto - aagh! we should never have strayed
from the trail

In 2003 Alan McElroy wrote the script to Wrong Turn in which hapless victims were stalked by monstrous mountain men. In the subsequent five sequels, variations on this theme, many featuring mountain-dwelling cannibals, emerged. Now in 2021 McElroy reboots his original with a twist: six young hispster friends go on a hike in the Appalachian Mountains. After meeting the requisite intimidating rednecks in the local bar, and then being warned (of course!) not to wander off the trail, they do just that and frightening things start happening. Jennifer's father (Matthew Modine) gets worried after he hasn't heard from her, and sets out to find her. If you need a total distraction from life, this one will fill you with nail-biting terror, and enough blood and gore to fill a hillbilly's truck. It is replete with all the tropes that make this sort of film into its own special genre - but nevertheless manages to keep one in plenty of suspense. The modern twist is that the new baddies are a secret sect calling itself The Foundation, a group from pre-Civil War days, living a barbaric and primitive existence, and believing that  when America falls they will found the new order. Hmm - prescient?  

?? - highly recommended for lovers of slasher horror - otherwise a maybe for gore-averse viewers

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
Dir: George C Wolfe

Length: 94 mins

Streaming on Netflix

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ord7gP151vk

© Netflix - adapted from a play, this is
one not be missed for lovers of music and history

Larger than life, blues singer Ma Rainey (Viola Davis) travels from her home in Georgia to record in Chicago in the early 1920s. The recording studio is the scene of much dispute over musical arrangements, payments, and the role of the black man in a white man's world. Based upon August Wilson's play, this impressive movie recreates an era, pays homage to a real-life legend of the blues, and examines issues of race relations still relevant today. Davis is jaw-droppingly powerful in her performance. Chadwick Boseman as Levee, the womanising ambitious trumpeter, turns in his career best, which sadly was his last. Knowing he was dying at the time of filming makes some of his monologues all the more poignant. The music is wonderful, the story intriguing, and the cinematography impressive (especially the gloom of the studio vs the Chicago brightly-lit exteriors). The director's modernistic style, combined with the writer's excellent dialogue, elevates this film above the average. With Davis and Boseman up for Golden Globes, it's something well-worth watching.

4 - highly recommended