Hindsight: A 2022 Cinematic Retrospective

Everything Everywhere All At Once

This is one of those ones where I recognise why people liked it without fully connecting with it myself. I didn't quite engage with the film's message, for whatever reason, as much as I enjoyed the jumping between different realities and the general engagement with the idea of hopelessness. Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu and Ke Huy Quan are all great in it, though.

Glass Onion

I recommended Knives Out back in 2019, and it's reasonable to say that Glass Onion also gets a review of "It was good and I enjoyed it." It's not as good as the previous, and at times it feels a bit like Rian Johnson was on autopilot making a Rian Johnson film, but the performances, especially Daniel Craig's, carry it. It's just at the point now where Johnson would be more subversive by not subverting our expectations — but maybe that would in itself be too predictable.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

Perhaps the most amusing idea behind this film is that while it's essentially a film about Nicolas Cage's memelike status in modern internet discourse, Cage himself apparently doesn't really get it and had to be persuaded to do the film. His presentation as a partly absent father is a bit lazy, and I think the ending in which he turns the experience into a film of its own is also a bit lazy, but the chemistry between Cage and Pedro Pascal is consistently entertaining to watch and the film is always at its best when the two of them are simply getting up to mischief. It probably needed less actual plot to drive it than it had.

The Menu

Probably my favourite film of 2022, this was an interesting take on "classy horror" or psychological thriller supported by some strong performances. Anya Taylor-Joy is effortlessly sympathetic and Ralph Fiennes is chilling and tragic. Perhaps its message is a little overblown, but it's one I would easily recommend.

The Banshees of Inisherin

A highlight of 2022, this dark comedy drama about two 1920s Irish friends who have a meaningless and increasingly bleak falling out over nothing significant (one arbitrarily decides one day that the other is too boring and stupid to be his friend) is a memorable reflection of the harm of feuding and pride. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson both give simultaneously amusing and tense performances, and the cinematography of the idyllic landscape against the madness of the feud is striking. It's hard to say anything beyond recommending it, even divorced from any subtext about Irish civil conflict and the extent to which it comments on it.

Halloween Ends

While still not great, this is arguably the best of David Gordon Greene's questionable trilogy of Halloween legacy sequels, perhaps suffering most from the fact that it barely needs to be a Halloween film. Laurie Strode and Michael Myers himself don't really need to be in it; on the other hand, I think it would have been more effective if Corey had been set up earlier in the trilogy. This would have been an ideal role for, say, the character of Allyson's boyfriend or one of her other friends. It does something mildly interesting with Halloween Kills' heavy-handed message about how communities create their own monsters by having Corey channel Michael's murderousness, but it's undermined somewhat by still insisting on a final confrontation between Laurie and Michael at the end. By the low standards of the Halloween sequels, and with some amusing nods to Halloween III being "the one without Michael Myers", it's possibly one of the better instalments.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

As a big fan of Weird Al and a reasonable enthusiast for Daniel Radcliffe I was looking forward to this, and it's funny and at times clever if not as uproarious as it might be. By parodying the spate of rock biopics of the preceding years and twisting the facts so that, for example, Al dates Madonna and Beat it is a parody of Eat It, the film is essentially the film equivalent of a Weird Al song. It obviously suffers from being produced during the pandemic, with a small cast and some awkward editing, but I still found it reasonably entertaining. It's not as good as UHF, but making a Zucker Brothers-esque comedy like that these days is probably practically impossible.

Im Westen nicht Neues

All Quiet on the Western Front is one of my favourite novels, and I also hold the 1930 Hollywood-produced Best Picture winning adaptation in high regard. This new adaptation is perhaps too heightened for my taste, with a flair for the over-dramatic. The majority of the action plays out in the last four days of the war for enhanced tension, rather than over four years, and culminates in a pointless pre-Armistice attack not found in the novel. Nonetheless it is vivid and harrowing, and the friendship between Paul and Kat still grounds a great deal of it. While not, in my opinion, the best adaptation of the novel, being perhaps too concerned with the politics of the Armistice (something entirely absent from the novel), and arguably missing the novel's point, it's still probably one of the best First World War films of recent years, being certainly superior to Sam Mendes' 1917.

"Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny"

It's going to be my lifelong curse that whenever I talk to people about Indiana Jones I have to say "but I actually like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It's not a good movie, but..." And it's hard, perhaps even impossible, not to talk about Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny without talking about Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, especially because, to my surprise, it's perhaps more of a sequel to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull than it is to any of the other films in the series. But Dial of Destiny, as the first (perhaps only) Indiana Jones film to be made after Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm, feels very much like "the fourth sequel" much as Crystal Skull was "the fourth prequel", i.e. Lucasfilm's return to their secondary property after making a bunch of controversial Star Wars films, with all the associated expectations. And the utter loathing people apparently feel towards the, in my opinion, at times meek but never especially objectionable Kingdom of the Crystal Skull was similarly reflected in the leadup towards Dial of Destiny and all the baggage that Lucasfilm has newly acquired with its 2015-2019 Star Wars project. There's even a similar time gap between the release of Revenge of the Sith (2005) and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) as there is between those of Rise of Skywalker (2019) and Dial of Destiny (2023), pandemic-related delays notwithstanding. I'm not a fan of the Star Wars prequels, nor of the sequels, despite, controversially, having a soft spot for about half of The Last Jedi. Yet in 2008 I was excited for Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and I enjoyed it, and I still do. On the other hand, I was pretty nonplussed about Dial of Destiny. Despite the fact that I think he lost it a long time ago, not having Spielberg directing was one cause for concern, and I have to admit that the casting of Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who I see as a bit flavour-of-the-month the same way Shia LeBoeuf was in 2008, made me apprehensive. It was hard to get excited when I felt like I was just getting Indiana Jones fan fiction.

This is normally the point at which, unexpectedly, I might announce that, having gone to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with m'colleague, I loved it. But I didn't. I thought Dial of Destiny was too long and often boring, with sloppy editing, low-energy direction in a number of moments, and a reluctance to get into its character work until the second half suggestive of Disney lacking confidence in the project and having either done reshoots or filmed additional material to increase the running time.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny isn't bad, per se. But it's not good. There are the ideas and the potential for a good film here, but it's all too slow and lacking in energy to be anything more than mediocre. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, whatever its faults, in my opinion doesn't drag. You might find it stupid and annoying, but I never find myself thinking "how long is this going to take?" There are multiple parts in Dial of Destiny when I found myself thinking "I'm bored", "this is taking too long" and "when's Marion going to show up?" (the first two  being much like I felt the first time I saw The Last Jedi, as it happens). If thirty minutes were edited out of this film and a number of shots tightened up to improve their pacing it would make a big difference, but I suspect that the problem is at a production level. At its heart the film should be driven by the relationship between Indy and Helena, but probably because of studio executive insistence on this, that and the other being inserted into the story, it struggles to do this clearly until probably an hour into the film. That doesn't mean they don't have early scenes together, because they do, but in those scenes she's presenting a false face to Indy to try to trick him into giving her what she wants, and thus the real relationship isn't established until significantly later.

This is the first point at which I've mentioned Indy himself, which is possibly because on this point I really don't have anything to complain about. Harrison Ford is (unsurprisingly) the best part of the film. He's obviously always enjoyed playing Indiana Jones - I suspect he brings a good deal of himself to the part, and feels comfortable in the role - and his age is no impediment to the strength of his performance; the screen lights up whenever he appears, which fortunately is most of the time despite what people feared about Helena stealing the show (which she doesn't). Kingdom of the Crystal Skull gave Indy a happy ending, perhaps a schmaltzy one, depending on your perspective. Indy found a son he never knew he had, reunited with Marion, and got married. Now it's 12 years later, Mutt's dead, he and Marion have separated again, and despite clearly not having lost his passion for archaeology Indy's been clearly nudged into retirement. Gone is the cozy post-middle-aged Indy of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, who lived in the same comfy house upstate as he did in Last Crusade and still worked on an old fashioned sandstone campus. Now he lives in a small apartment, puts whisky in his morning coffee, works at a dreary postmodern 60s Manhattan college and grouses at kids listening to the Beatles early in the morning. How did Indy end up here? It's explicable, of course, but feels very much like Dial of Destiny saying "this is what old man Indy should really have been like": not the leafy tenured existence of Crystal Skull but a man out of time clinging to the past. Crystal Skull certainly made some attempts to address this, particlarly with Indy juxtaposed to a mushroom cloud and being accused by paranoid FBI agents of being a Soviet turncoat, but this is more personal.

The problem with all this is that it all just takes far too long for this stuff to be addressed properly. It isn't until the sequence on the boat before the dive, probably well over an hour into the film, that Indy talks to Helena about Mutt and Marion, Marion herself doesn't show up until the very end, and a subplot about Indy's friendship with Helena's father gets somewhat dropped after a flashback about halfway through the film. Sallah comes back but this mostly feels like a nostalgic nod because he didn't get to appear in Crystal Skull. It all feels messy and competitive with different screenwriters bringing different ideas, or perhaps Disney executives mandating certain things be added. It feels doubly strange because the Mutt and Marion stuff wouldn't exist without Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and yet this almost feels, as I said above, like it's trying to respond to or even provide an alternative to Crystal Skull, to say "this is old man Indy done right". This film wouldn't exist without Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and yet it almost feels, perhaps fittingly given the plot, like it's intended to replace it.

The plot, like everything else, is a decent idea not fully realised by the screenplay, editing, action choreography, or some combination of these things. German physicist Jurgen Voller, played well but with wearying typecasting by the ever-reliable Mads Mikkelsen, wants to find the lost "Archimedes Dial" to identify a time fissure that will allow him to travel from 1969 to 1939 in order to kill Hitler such that a more competent leader might bring Germany to victory in the Second World War. It was very predictable that in an effort to appeal to the nostalgic that Indiana Jones would fight Nazis again, and by having a Werner von Braun type in that role the Moon Landing backdrop makes sense. My one issue with this is that all of the Moon Landing, Operation Paperclip and general Space Race, Cold War and Vietnam War stuff feels so perfunctory that it's almost not worth it being included, almost like the filmmakers wanted to do something with it but were scared of evoking the very overt 1950s dressing of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull; as such, once the film extricates itself from Manhattan, it doesn't particularly feel like it's set in 1969 at all, instead being just another Indiana Jones adventure in which he fights Nazis for a good chunk of it, with Indy just happening to be old. That is, until it isn't, and it again becomes about Indy feeling old and like he screwed up his life, and Helena having to prove to him that he shouldn't just let himself die in 212 BC.

I will admit that the bizarre ending, in which the overconfident Voller brings himself, Indy, Helena and his men not to the eve of the Second World War but the middle of the Second Punic War, and in which Indy meets Archimedes himself, is refreshing for the sheer novelty value of getting to see a period of history very rarely realised in modern blockbuster cinema, even if there's a lot of uninteresting CGI. Voller's plan going disastrously awry and his realisation that he's made a terrible mistake are true to the series and satisfying to watch, and Mikkelsen plays the whole thing very well. I also like that (contrary to how a lot of people seem to be interpreting it online) the Archimedes Dial isn't itself a time machine and doesn't open up time portals or something, it just detects them, with an appealing element of predestination. I similarly appreciated that it wasn't another Biblical artefact, with this being playfully nodded to in the opening when both Indy and the Nazis are initially more concerned with the Spear of Longinus, which turns out to be fake.

But it all just takes so long, becomes so repetitive, especially with Indy and Helena twice having to steal a comically small vehicle to pursue or outrun Voller, and at times feels like it is taking place in indistinct CGI world, that I found myself never being effortlessly entertained. The opening de-aged sequence, which is about twenty minutes too long, seems to very much take place in the same video-game state as the much-disliked Jungle Cutter sequence from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Waller-Bridge is perfectly fine as Helena but it just takes too long for us to really get to know her and for her relationship with Indy to properly develop, and that's what it all comes back to. For a film that's all about moving forward, not getting lost in the past, not giving up and letting obsession or regret consume your life, it takes a hell of a long time to get there. And that's frustrating because, a bit like (some of) the Star Wars sequels, it feels like it could have so easily been better but that Disney, somewhat paradoxically, didn't have the confidence to make a good film and opted to make a mediocre one instead.

 

I'm prepared to change my mind upon rewatch, and rewatch I will, because this is, after all, an Indiana Jones film starring Harrison Ford, even if it is glorified fan fiction. But I'm almost inclined to say that "mediocre" is in some respects too high in terms of praise and that the film's editing and pacing issues are so egregious as to quite possibly ruin what could have otherwise been a perfectly good sequel. I was fine with Kingdom of the Crystal Skull being the last one. If you weren't, maybe this will be a more satisfying conclusion. If only it could have concluded about half an hour earlier.

"Coffee Talk 2": First Impressions

It's a clear sign that I'm getting soft in my old age (or, rather, my thirties) that Opinions Can Be Wrong has become a place where I'm not using my increasingly infrequent posts ranting about how my favourite childhood TV shows have been revived badly or how stupid people on the internet are and am instead waxing sentimental about characters in an Indonesian visual novel. Coffee Talk, by Toge Productions, which released in 2020 and which I played in early 2021, is one of my favourite games of the last couple of years. That's probably for two reasons; one was that it was a game about going out and meeting people that I, like lot of people, first played during the isolation periods of the Covid-19 pandemic. The other is probably that a number of the characters were regulars, and one was a writer who came to the titular coffee shop to write fiction, just like I used to when I was a regular at a Sydney bar that closed when the pandemic began. Coffee Talk is a visual novel about making drinks for the customers in an urban fantasy Seattle that come to your late-night café, chatting to them and listening as they chat to each other. You have no control over what your character says: this isn't an adventure game or an RPG. You only have control over what drinks you serve them. Serve the right drinks and you might make their lives a little better and make it easier for them to communicate with each other. Throw in pleasing pixel art, ear-catching lo-fi music and a generally relaxing tone and, while the writing occasionally came across as a little naïve, the atmosphere was practically perfect for what it was trying to be.

 

It felt natural that there should be a sequel to Coffee Talk. It's the kind of premise that could be continued more or less indefinitely, with characters coming and going. I think for a long time there'll be places where people looking for good drinks and good conversation will go to spend a little while. Thus it wasn't too much of a surprise when Toge announced in mid-2021 that the game would have a sequel. Since then I was waiting patiently but with fairly constant anticipation, as the game was delayed from a 2022 release to 2023 and the Indonesian game development scene was shaken by the untimely death of Mohammad Fahmi, the first game's creator. I played the Coffee Talk 2 demo when it came out, searched in vain for whether anyone had uploaded the trailer and demo's lo-fi rendition of a classic Erik Satie piece anywhere, and wishlisted the game when its "Coming Soon" page went up on Steam. When the day finally arrived, after initially thinking "I'm not sure I'm actually excited", I found myself counting down the hours for it to release.

So far I'm four hours into Coffee Talk Episode 2: Hibiscus and Butterfly, and I think I'm about halfway through the game. However, I don't want to wait until I've finished the game to get some thoughts down, and I don't want to rush through it. One thing I noticed fairly early on is that while the visuals are still of the same style, and the music is by the same artist, and still excellent, something felt a little different. Coffee Talk 2 doesn't have the same writing team as the first game; this is, apparently, unrelated to the passing of the original creator, who from what I've read had not been closely involved in the sequel's development. While many of the characters' voices are brought over very well, and largely feel like an evolution of who they were before, it does feel different. The barista player character, in particular, feels a lot more bubbly and a lot less uptight than in the first game, and there's a rather more frequent use of exclamation marks in the dialogue which, for a game without voice acting, rather affects the tone.

This, as it turns out, isn't a bad thing. I have to admit that there was a point on one of the game's early days, the third I think, in which the game came close to losing me, when it was focused on the new character Amanda, the extraterrestrial sibling of the fan-favourite alien character Neil from the first game, who now calls himself Silver. This almost seemed too much like fan fiction of the first game to me, too much of a "wouldn't it be funny if this happened next." However, the game quickly won me back when on the next day it drew a little attention to the slight change in the characters' voices, intentionally or otherwise, and generally I think it feels as if the characters' continuation makes sense from where they were at the end of the first game, and that the new writers cared about the first game's characters (if, sometimes, a little too much, throwing in a few too many nods to continuity).

 

The one thing that really stands out is the absence of Freya, the main regular from the first game, who is said at the start of this sequel to be out of town. Freya was by far my favourite character in the first game, probably because she reminded me a bit of myself. I know from the trailers that she shows up at some point (I'm guessing she'll come back from her trip on the final day), and she's still the first character to appear when you start up "Endless Mode" to experiment with making drinks, so I recognise her absence, as conspicuous as it is, to be an intentional device, and one that was probably necessary to give this game a bit of a different feeling. As such, ultimately I think this was an effective choice on the part of the writers. Freya was such a major presence in the first game that she almost had to be moved to the peripheries here in order to create space for some new stories. In this regard, however, it's worth noting that the game will probably make a lot more sense to people who have played the first game, as almost every character from the original shows up in the sequel and there are actually only a few new faces.

So far I think Coffee Talk 2 is a decent sequel. By its nature it can't be as fresh as the first, and at times the writing isn't always entirely a natural continuation of the original game, but it's doing a pretty good job so far. Back in 2021 I tried to write a review of the first game that I never published because I felt like I was unable to say anything that other reviews hadn't already said. Perhaps after this I'll see if it's worth doing any kind of holistic retrospective on the two games and the general idea of a sequel written by new authors. In the meantime, I think I have a good few hours of Coffee Talk 2 to go, and I have to say if anything it's just nice where I don't feel like I have to force myself to pace myself but nor do I feel unmotivated to play a little more each day. So far it's all pouring out quite smoothly.