Stream and Stream Again

  Where to Watch: YouTube (free) ***1/2 This review will probably contain spoilers. I don't know - I haven't written it yet. If you're the kind of person who cares about that sort of thing, I recommend you go and watch the movie before reading this. I give it my seal of approval, it's free in various editions on YouTube, and really there are a lot of worse ways to spend an hour and change. But, truth be told, if you're reading this blog you're probably the sort of person who is already inclined to know a bit about Caligari , and so you probably know the twist endings (both the awesome one that was originally intended, and the puzzling and only mildly successful one that got tacked on after the producers got cold feet). So in the end I'd recommend you read on. This movie came out 105 years ago, for God's sake. I feel like that's well past the statute of limitations for spoilers. The first thing anyone talks about with Caligari is the mise-en-scene . A...

Where to Watch: Plex (Free) ***1/2 I've never been huge on Westerns. I think a lot of this is because of two things. The first is that, as a kid, we drove from New South Wales to Kalgoorlie. As a result, for many years, I fucking hated the desert. The second is that a lot of Westerns deal with the American psyche and the myths Americans  tell about themselves, and as an Australian I've never felt much of a connection to them. Also, as a kid, I just thought watching a bunch of stoic guys shoot eachother because of a land dispute was really boring. Older and wiser, I've come around to this sort of film. But I still prefer the outliers - Westerns that challenge or tweak the standard formula. Your Johnny Guitars , your True Grits . That sort of thing. And The Gunfighter definitely does all that and more.  Describing the plot might make The Gunfighter sound somewhat generic, but it's important to bear in mind that a lot of what it did was pretty new for the times. You'v...

Where to Watch: YouTube (Free) **** Nikolay Gogol is best know in the west for his scathing satirical work Dead Souls . And he did write a lot of that sort of thing. However, he was also something of a Romantic, and in Russia as elsewhere that meant fairy tales. And I do love fairy tales. I had already seen one film based on a Gogol fantasy, the utterly charming Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka , and so when I heard about Viy I was pretty excited to track it down. Thankfully, Mosfilm made that pretty easy by deciding to put a bunch of their more acclaimed films up for free on their YouTube channel. So you can now depress yourself by watching Come and See whenever you want! Thank heavens the war in the Ukraine didn't put a stop to that. The story of Viy takes place in the Ukraine (hardly surprising, since Gogol was Ukrainian). And unlike Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka , it's actually a pretty dark horror film. Of course, this is Gogol we're talking about, and so while thi...

Where to Watch: Prime ***1/2 The cinematic equivalent of a warm hug, My Old Ass is a charming and intelligent low-key fantasy that manages to tackle a few pretty hefty issues without ever harshing your buzz.  The premise is pretty brilliant. On her eighteenth birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her two closest friends take a boat out to an island in the lake on the shore of which their tiny community is located. Once there, they proceed to brew up a pot of mushroom tea and get high. Now, these mushrooms are of mysterious provenance, possibly South American or South African, and the girls proceed to trip hard. Ro and Ruthie have more typical movie drug trips - full hallucinations and the like. Elliott, however, doesn't really feel any effects. Then she turns around and finds her 39 year old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her. The pair have a deep and meaningful conversation, and Old Elliott warns Young Elliott to stay away from guys named Chad. Of course once Young Elliott s...

**1/2 Where to Watch: Prime (rental); Google Play (rental) Approaching forty as I am, I've started to succumb to the temptation of nostalgia. So I thought it might be a good idea to revisit a film I have fond memories of watching as a child. Now, I am not one of those people who has an inflated opinion of their tastes as a child. I saw Battlefield Earth in theatres. I thought it was totally awesome and rented it several times when it came out on VHS. I'm pretty sure if you had asked me when I was 10 what the funniest movie ever made was I would have said In The Army Now .  The Golden Child is a movie I watched one hot Brisbane night in 1995 while suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis. I remember thinking it was both pretty cool and fucking weird. I also remember getting kind of confused by the end and possibly falling asleep. As it turns out, my impression of the film on rewatching it falls pretty much in line with my first, except that I would downgrade "pretty cool...

These days, there's more content available than anyone knows what to do with. People gripe about something or other not being available to stream, apparently having forgotten the dark days of the pre-high speed internet era, when if you missed a show on TV it was gone forever (or, at least, until it was rerun at one in the morning twenty years later), and where film fans were stuck in the position of either paying a small fortune for a shoddy DVD or VHS cassette or even (gasp!) resorting to piracy instead.  The modern streaming landscape being what it is, we've finally reached a point in Australia where I can discuss the sorts of films I actually enjoy without resorting to crime or bankrupting myself. I mean, Ms .45 is now free to stream on Plex! There's Shudder, too. So I thought, why not start a blog dedicated to discussing films (mostly genre films, as that's mostly what I watch) that are available to stream legally in Australia. Hence the title of this blog, which ...