by Oscar O’Sullivan

Slow week guys. College huh? Yeah this guy gets it.

Monday – That They May Face the Rising Son

A new Irish film about a writer and his wife living an idyllic life in the countryside, the story suffers from one major flaw, that being, the leads are incredibly boring. Neither of them has much of a direct role in the story, instead bearing witness to the lives of their elderly neighbours. The wife especially feels more like a prop than a character, drifting around the house while her husband goes out into the world and gets most of the work done. There is a brief pretence at giving her something to do when she is confronted early on with a choice between staying in Ireland or returning to London to save the gallery she runs, but her dilemma is never mentioned again until the last ten minutes of the film, her decision made without the audience being in any way privy to her thought process or emotional journey. The cast of supporting characters carry the picture, even if their folksy, wisdom-laden way of talking verges on parody. It’s a beautiful movie and not at all dull by any means, but it does fail to penetrate any of it’s ideas, leaving it largely as a string of pointless vistas and some amusing scenes of dialogue. We never find out if our hero figures out what his next novel is about, and the film never reveals what it was all about either. 6/10.

Thursday – Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Refreshing my memory in advance of the newest entry, Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just as energising now as when I first saw it in 2011. One of the first pieces of focused, critical film writing I ever did was a review of this film I wrote in secondary school. I don’t know if I still have it, but I remember it was the first time I seriously thought about the themes and intentions of a film, and writing that review unlocked a new layer of respect for a film I had already enjoyed for it’s surface-level aspects. This is, I think, the true value of criticism. To reflect on and deepen your understanding of art, rather than consuming and discarding it. The effects are showing their age a little, and James Franco is disastrously poor in the lead human role, but this is otherwise a perfect film to me, a 9/10.

Saturday – Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

This was until now the only Star Wars film I had only seen once. For May 4th, it felt like it was finally the right time to confront this film once more. Has nearly five years of distance done anything for the last theatrical Star Wars film? Yes, it’s made things worse. Perhaps the single most corporate, soulless, visibly mis-managed film released during the franchise boom of the 2010s. The most visually unappealing film in the entire Star Wars franchise (and that includes Solo‘s dismal lighting), with a truly unforgivable script where every line of dialogue and story beat is an explicit reaction to complaints made online by entitled nobodies. If there was ever proof that fans of Star Wars shouldn’t be allowed to make Star Wars stories, this is it. The same cast that elevated The Force Awakens with their infectious enthusiasm are now sleepwalking to the finish line, jaded by online harassment and unable to hide their disappointment in the material they’ve been saddled with for their final outing. I’m never going to watch this movie again because it has nothing to offer as a viewing experience besides disappointment. A monument to hubris. 1/10, irredeemably rotten to its core.

Sunday – Zatoichi and the Chess Expert

Zatoichi has done it again. Director Kenji Misumi, responsible for the original film and the delightful Fight, Zatoichi, Fight, clearly understands the core appeal of the character. This entry feels like something of a greatest hits montage for the series so far (Zatoichi befriends an aloof samurai, hits the road, scuffles with yakuza, rejects yet another romance and performs his signature dice trick on two separate occasions), but is also one of the most vibrant, constantly surprising stories yet. The goalposts of the adventure are constantly shifting and evolving, with multiple overlapping motivations pulling our hero this way and that. All the while, Zatoichi is at his most affable, with no reservations about helping others, and also no patience or mercy for his enemies. When he once more ends this adventure by setting off alone into the wilderness, it’s one of the affecting goodbyes in a long string of them for the blind swordsman, as the pleading cries of the woman and child he’s been protecting echo after him until he’s gone even from our sight. At least the audience can take solace in the fact that we’ll see him again on some other escapade, the same as he ever was. There’s something almost comforting about that regularity, a familiarity that makes even the weaker entries a pleasant evening with a charming friend. This is far from a weak entry, indeed, a 10/10 adventure even, perhaps the best in the series thus far.