Here‘s a short piece on Tom Hardy from Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, one that finally articulates my feelings towards the British actor, i.e. clearly competent but rarely plays a compelling character, and mumbles his way through most roles in a way that makes Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now sound like a perfectly articulated gentleman.

My first impression of Hardy was in The Dark Knight Rises, and it wasn’t a good one. While I’ve warmed slightly to his portrayal of strategic brute Bane upon repeat viewings, at first glance he is a poor substitute for Heath Ledger’s iconic, brilliant take on the Joker from the previous film, and seems determined to put on a decidedly nonthreatening voice that is barely comprehensible through the mask the production team stuck on the lower part of his face.

To make matters worse, the next thing I clearly remember seeing him in was Dunkirk, another Christopher Nolan film in which he mumbles incomprehensibly into a mask, and one where he can barely be heard over the sounds of gunfire and his character’s Spitfire engine. To be fair, this may have been more of a problem with the sound mixing than with Hardy himself.

Then came Venom and the less said about that the better. Although I could understand him in his role in that film, I’ll give him that. Unfortunately, the film was too crap to fully appreciate this. I’ve dipped into his back catalogue here and there since, and I fully agree with Gleiberman in his assertion that Locke was Hardy’s best role, in which he plays against type as just an ordinary guy trying to make his way in the world, dealing with his life shattering around him over the course of a film-long road trip. He’s magnificent, facing up to the challenge of holding the entire film on his shoulders admirably.

Hardy seems determined not to take these kind of emotionally expressive roles, though. He likes the physical ones in which he can grunt or mumble into a mask and generally let his body do the work for his mouth. Given the potential glimpsed in Locke, I think this is a massive shame, but it is not for me to decide what roles he takes, and perhaps it is nice to have an A-list star who doesn’t conform to the Hollywood charisma norm. I just wish he could be subversive in a way that was still engaging to watch.

The best role that he’s ever had in mumbling mode was Mad Max: Fury Road. The titular part seems tailor-made for him; man of action and of few words. Plus, it helps that he’s not the main character (that role is taken – arguably – by Charlize Theron’s Furiosa), so he doesn’t have to carry a whole lot of emotional weight on his shoulders. Basically what I’m saying is, I’d like to see him take more roles like Locke, but if he’s committed to the TDKR kind of character, at least make it something like Fury Road.

A new Scarface remake is incoming, apparently. It seems like whenever Hollywood runs out of original ideas they decide to throw some money at a remake of Howard Hawks’ 1932 film.

They did so back in 1983 with Brain De Palma’s version, starring Al Pacino in perhaps his most iconic role.

And now they’re doing it again. I agree that it seems unnecessary, and also an extremely difficult task given the long shadow cast by De Palma’s rendition. On the bright side, it does have some talent behind it. Luca Guadagnino of Call Me By Your Name and Suspiria (another remake) fame is set to ‘develop’ the project is rumoured to direct, and the screenplay is penned by (and this was most exciting) Joel and Ethan Coen. Any new Coen brothers film, even one they didn’t direct, is always a cause for excitement. Plus, I’ve been a bit concerned lately that the bros. had gone their separate ways given how Joel is making The Tragedy of Macbeth without Ethan, so I’m happy to learn that the filmmaking duo that has given us more than one masterpiece is still a duo.

• (if you didn’t read last week’s entry in this series, all of the short films that were meant to premiere at this year’s cancelled South by Southwest are currently streaming online for free and I’ve vowed to get through as many as possible)
• The first SXSW short film I watched was Sleep Paralysis, directed by William Tran. It had its moments, chiefly its brilliant final shot, but it lost me a bit with its simplistic characterisation and occasionally questionable acting, and it doesn’t quite reconcile its first half with its last, thematically or narratively. I think this was a high school production though, so props to them for making something semi-competent. I chose it first simply because the titular affliction has always been interesting for me. It didn’t win any awards from the SXSW jury.
• I then watched Heat, a dark comedy from the Netherlands directed by Thessa Meijer. It was part of the Midnight Shorts program and was fantastic. It had a great sense of dark humour, impressive visual effects and a stunning aesthetic. I don’t have a bad thing to say about this one and I highly recommend you check it out.
• After Heat I jumped back to another high school short, in this case Alex directed by Wilson Jones. This had a couple of problems (some of the dialogue was a little on-the-nose) but ultimately the character work and themes are strong enough for me to be able to say that I quite liked it. This is the most culturally important SXSW short I’ve watched so far – recommended.
• The first documentary of my home-based SXSW was Unveiled, directed by Sofia Bajwa, another high school short that recieved a Special Jury Recognition award. It’s a solid doco exploring an important cultural issue in a way that is mostly impactful. The only downside is that it had some poor audiowork at times and some of the editing was a little misjudged.
• I also managed to watch a feature this week: Michael Mann’s excellent 1995 thriller Heat (not to be confused with the SXSW short that I just wrote about). It was a great film with fantastic performances from Robert De Niro and Al Pacino and very well-directed action scenes.

• As for the news….
• Just as I was thinking it was bit of a slow news day on Tuesday, Sony announced that it’s pushing back a bunch of its summer releases to early 2021 – Morbius, Ghostbusters: Afterlife and Peter Rabbit 2. This might seem like overkill at first glance but it might actually be smart to take their movies out of the now-overcrowded late 2020 arena where they can’t possibly compete.
• They’ve also delayed Greyhound, with no new release date yet, Uncharted (like that’s ever coming out), an untitled Marvel-based movie and the 2021 film Fatherhood, which has moved from early to late in that year, presumably to clear space for the three 2020 refugees.
• At this point, the only big movies really left in summer are Top Gun: Maverick, Soul and Tenet, but I wouldn’t expect them to stay there for long.
• Edgar Wright announced another film. Maybe get Last Night in Soho (one of my most anticipated 2020 films) and your unnecessary Baby Driver sequel out of the way first, mate!
• Contagion is still king of the world as far as movie-watching goes.
• Twitter blew up because someone spotted a visible modern water bottle in Little Women. I imagine that this was intentional in a Marie Antoinette kind of way. If not, someone should get fired for that.
• Amazon Prime is streaming the SXSW features!… only in America.
• Disney snagged some release dates later in the year and early next year for their bigger films: Mulan is now happening on July 24th (sounds a bit brave to me – will the virus really be over by then?), Black Widow on November 6th in the Eternals spot, which in turn pushes that film back to February 12th next year, and Shang-Chi to Doctor Strange 2‘s spot and so on. Apart from the over-confident Mulan date, this all sounds pretty safe. Perhaps Mulan is going to be a streaming release a la Onward?
• Speaking of delays, The French Dispatch has been pushed back from July to October. I’m so happy about this: we all know this film’s going to be a banger, and putting it in October will give it serious awards buzz. This is now a probable Best Picture nominee.
• David F. Sandberg has taken quarantine as an opportunity to make a short horror film called Shadowed, reminding me that I should stop sitting around and make some shorts while I’m stuck at home. I haven’t got a chance to watch it yet, but it’s available here.
• To update you on some loose threads from last time:
• No, I still haven’t found The Host for free on YouTube yet.
• I read a couple pages of Spike Lee’s Jackie Robinson before completely forgetting about it. I’ll try harder to finish the screenplay this week.
• And that concludes this week’s Weekly Round-Up.

• I’m always on the look-out for good film blogs, so you can imagine my excitement when I stumbled upon harlequinade’s Cinematic Corner, a witty and entertaining website with an aesthetic that’s right up my alley. She’s on a temporary hiatus at the moment but I’m sure she’ll be back soon and I’ll be able to follow the blog in real time rather than just reading past posts. Her best work is in her series ‘Rambling Fridays’, wherein she… rambles on Fridays. I loved this idea so much that, being a filmbro with no morals, I decided to wholeheartedly steal this idea and its format. At least I had the decency to not steal the title, and set my series on Mondays rather than Fridays.
• I’m just a bad person, really.
• To be fair, I wouldn’t really call myself a filmbro, at least going by the definition in the Urban Dictionary. Sure, I do love Jurassic Park and The Dark Knight and I have been known to award more than one Quentin Tarantino film five stars, but I have never once said that Logan should have won Best Picture, and I’m not obsessed with the MCU.

• Between remote learning and generally being unproductive, the only film I’ve watched this week was The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King yesterday. It was absolutely a five-star banger.
• My viewing of RotK concludes my three-week first-time watchthrough of the LOTR trilogy, and I have to say it deserves it’s place among the pantheon of great movie trilogies.
• Well, Return of the King was the only feature film I watched this week. I did also have time for a classic 12-minute spoof from 1978: Hardware Wars. It was one of the first if not the first spoof of Star Wars and it’s genuinely funny, as well as clearly made with love for that original film. You can watch the short on YouTube here.
• Speaking of YouTube, my current quest is to find Bong Joon-ho’s 2006 South Korean monster flick The Host on there. I have been told several times (not least by Karsten Runquist in his Movies to Watch While Self-Isolating video) that it is available for free on YouTube. I can attest to that, but the two uploads of it that I’ve found so far have both been distinctly lacking in English subtitles. One was in Korean with Hindi subtitles, and the other was Hindi-dubbed with Korean subtitles. I could just rent the film on the same website for $4.99, but I’m committed to the quest now.
• To finish off the ‘I recommend YouTube videos to you’ portion of this post, The Oscar Expert posted his super-early predictions for the Supporting Actor/Actress categories at the 2021 Oscars. I imagine the slew of COVID-19 related delays will throw a spanner in the works of his predictions.
• As far as news goes…
• Netflix said that the shutdown of most of their productions due to the coronavirus won’t affect their output until the end of the year. This is more than a little concerning to me as my most-anticipated film of the year, David Fincher’s Mank, is no doubt heading for a release date around that time. Hopefully it’ll be able to maintain its schedule.
• Woody Allen released his memoir. I will refrain from commenting on this development to avoid controversy.
• The most entertaining part of my week was watching people recreate film scenes through the newly-released Animal Crossing game.
• Definitely sign this petition to protect VFX artists during coronavirus.
• Edgar Wright gave us his one hundred favourite comedies via Letterboxd. I added a couple to my watchlist.
• Warner Bros. finally bit the bullet and delayed four of its upcoming releases; Scoob!, Wonder Woman 1984, In the Heights and Malignant. Only WW84 has a new date, August 14th.
• After producing his comedy list, Edgar Wright challenged Rian Johnson to offer his own genre-themed recommendations. Johnson reciprocated in his much shorter list of musicals from the 1970s – a pretty niche genre.
• David Fincher surprised a bunch of quarantined film students with a Zoom lesson – what a legend.
• Mailchimp is streaming 75 of the short films that were meant to premiere at this year’s cancelled South by Southwest here. Don’t let the lacklustre web design put you off – be a good Samaritan and support these filmmakers. Now that I’m stuck at home I’ve started getting into short films more and hope to watch a few of these over the coming weeks/months.
• Stuart Gordon, director of horror cult classic Re-Animator among many others, died aged 72.
• Film critic Kenneth Turan left the Los Angeles Times after many years of service. He’s a great writer and his departure from the newspaper truly marks the end of an era in film criticism. Funny story: he was one of the few critics who panned Titanic back in the day. James Cameron saw this and, seemingly unable to take the smallest bit of criticism among a sea of praise, had a tantrum and called for Turan to be fired. Turan rolled his eyes and soldiered on.
• George Miller is apparently still pushing ahead with his planned prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road focusing on Furiosa. Don’t know if she needs her own movie – she’s basically the main character of Fury Road anyway. Still, it’d be cool to get another instalment in this revamped franchise, and apparently Miller is eyeing Anya Taylor-Joy for the role of the younger Furiosa, which is really intriguing since Taylor-Joy hasn’t done a role with the ferocity of the character before.
• Another film is going straight to VOD on April 3rd after a brief run in theatres – this time indie abortion drama Never Rarely Sometimes Always from Focus Features. I’ve heard good reviews so I might be compelled to check it out depending on the price of the rental.
• Sony Pictures Classics (bit of an unwieldy name) turned its nose up at the prospect of sending its movies to VOD or streaming, however. On one hand I applaud this show of solidarity towards theatres, but on the other it doesn’t seem like a stable business decision right now.
• Ellen Page released a documentary about environmental racism on Netflix. It’s called There’s Something in the Water. Seeing as I have nothing better to do, I might give it a geez.
• Finally, Spike Lee released an unmade script of his called Jackie Robinson. As you can imagine, it’s about the famous black baseball player of the same name. Lee was in production on this biopic before being kicked out in favour of Brian Helgeland, who turned it into 2013’s formulaic 42. I’ll try to read this this week and review it in my next Weekly Round-Up.
• And that concludes the Weekly Round-Up for this week.

Pixar’s Onward retains its number one spot from last week, though it suffered a drop of over 70% in box office; after making around $50 million last week, it grossed a little under $11 million this weekend. This puts the animated fantasy film significantly below both Pixar’s last film, Toy Story 4, and the studio’s last original film, Coco, which had grossed $239 million and $110 million at this point, respectively. This puts Onward on a pretty even playing field with Pixar’s only comparable disappointment, The Good Dinosaur, which managed a mere $77 million at this point in its lifetime. The lack of competition due to coronavirus-related delays may work to Onward‘s favour, but it is equally possible that it could be swept up and drowned in this immensely disappointing box office season.

Leading the new arrivals this week is Vin Diesel comic book movie Bloodshot in second place. Despite its high placement on the weekend top ten, it is ahead of #3 by only $63,000 and made just $9 million, a not-great start for a film with a reported $45 million budget and pretty bad for a comic book movie. I don’t expect this to make its money back.

More successful is the new arrival in the #3 spot, religious love story I Still Believe. It managed to gross $9 million, sending it well on its way to recoup its $12 million budget. Especially with so little competition and its domination of the niche market it caters to, expect this Christian romance to be in the black before long.

At the #4 spot, The Invisible Man stays strong in its third week, adding another $6 million to its total domestic gross, which currently stands at a sizeable $64 million against a $7 million. In the current coronavirus climate, this has got to be one of the most profitable movies of 2020.

Establishing something of a monopoly on the top five, Universal and Blumhouse’s controversial satire The Hunt takes fifth spot. It would seem that its Trump tweet-related delay from last year has not largely added to or detracted from its profitability as it opens to a respectable but not amazing $5 million against a $15 million budget. With Universal’s current scheme to release the film for rental on VOD within the next week, I might expect this one to drag itself over the break-even line but I wouldn’t bet on much profit.

Outside the top five, blockbuster Sonic the Hedgehog refuses to die as it earns another $3 million in its fifth week, with its domestic total currently sitting at $146 million. Since it has made almost $200 million more internationally, this is sizing up to be one of the few big hits of 2020’s first half, sitting comfortably at #2 on the worldwide box office for this year.

Meanwhile, R-rated sports drama The Way Back struggles through its second weekend at #7, adding just $2 million to a total gross of $13 million. With an estimated budget of between $21-25 million, it is shaping up to be something of a flop for Warner Bros. despite favourable reviews.

Coming in at #8, Harrison Ford and CGI dog story The Call of the Wild makes another $2 million in its fourth weekend with a total domestic gross of $62 million. This sounds great until you consider that this film cost $109 million to make. No, I don’t know why they give such large sums of money to such random movies either.

At #9, Anya Taylor-Joy period drama Emma rakes in another million dollars to reach a domestic total of $9 million in its fourth weekend. This does sound worrying but when you factor in international box office it’s sitting at a solid $25 million, which I’d imagine would be close to covering its budget, which I had trouble finding a number for. Like The Hunt and The Invisible Man, Universal will be bowing it out of theatres soon in favour of a currently more profitable VOD release.

Rounding out the top ten is the strange box office powerhouse that is Bad Boys for Life. In its ninth weekend it earnt itself another million dollars to add to its $204 million domestic gross. Worldwide, it sits at $419 million, comfortably the highest grossing film of the year thus far. Your guess is truly as good as mine as to why its managed to rake in so much dough, but I’d imagine that it has something to do with the inadvertently great time in which it was released; opening to a desolate January market and then sailing through into an equally sparse coronavirus crisis. Whoever at Sony decided on this threequel’s release date deserves a hell of a raise.

Out of the top ten is Birds of Prey, dropping to #11 with a total domestic gross of $84 million. With a COVID-19-caused VOD release planned for the near future, it is likely to stay around this number.

The César Awards – basically the French Oscars – happened today, and I have almost nothing to say about them, save for the Best Director category, which seemed like an elaborate prank on the #MeToo movement and any cinephile with half a conscience. Roman Polanski won the award for his latest French film, An Officer and a Spy, which is about a wrongly-convicted prisoner – bit of wishful thinking, if you ask me. For the uninitiated, Polanski was charged with sexually assaulting a thirteen-year-old in 1977. Upon hearing that the judge was going to give him 50 years in prison (which sounds reasonable to me), he did a runner and ended up in France, where he’s stayed for the past forty years. Clearly overseas being a paedophile isn’t as big a deal as it is in the United States, because since then he’s directed (by my count) thirteen films, the most well-known of which being The Pianist.

Side note: I should probably add at this point that I do believe in separating the artist from the art form. I’m not going to stand here and deny that Harvey Weinstein produced some great movies, that Kevin Spacey turned in some excellent performances and Roman Polanski directed some bangers. However, giving a film with questionable people involved Best Picture (i.e. valuing the overall work over any one contribution) is quite a different kettle of fish from singling out the questionable person and giving them a Best Director award all for themselves, which is where my issues with this lie.

An Officer and a Spy (or J’Accuse, as it’s known in France) has failed to materialise in the United States (or in Australia, for that matter), so very few English-language critics have gotten to give it a geez. It’s a similar situation to that of A Rainy Day in New York, the 2019 Woody Allen film that didn’t get a release outside of Europe and Asia.

Side note: I was on a plane last December and saw Rainy Day on its in-flight entertainment. I briefly considered watching it so I could come back to my Aussie cinephile friends and brag about watching a movie that they couldn’t legally see, but then I realised that I honestly couldn’t be arsed to sit through a Woody Allen film where the main character is named ‘Gatsby Welles.’

Like I said, the French don’t seem to mind Polanski’s questionable life choices, and so his film picked up twelve nominations at the Césars. Tensions were already riding high given the large mob outside protesting the nominations (Polanski, star Jean Dujardin and producer Alain Goldman didn’t come to the ceremony, with Goldman citing the reason being ‘an escalation of inappropriate and violent language and behaviour’ directed at Polanski. Maybe Goldman should have considered the inappropriate and violent language and behaviour Polanski directed at Samantha Gailey – just a thought) and the fact that Officer and a Spy had already picked up two awards that night, including one shared by Polanski for Adapted Screenplay.

The reaction to Polanski winning Best Director was pretty hilarious. Barely anyone applauded and a bunch of people (including Portrait of a Lady on Fire actress Adèle Haenel) walked out. As you can imagine, this result did not go down well with the protesters outside.

Thing is, this win for a man who has been a known sex offender for forty years isn’t even the strangest award that Polanski has won since 1977. At least the Césars are foreign. In 2003, the Academy Awards – part of the same country that had been trying to arrest Polanski for nearly three decades – awarded Polanski the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist… and nobody batted an eyelid. What the hell?

The only conclusion that we can draw from these events is that awards season is a strange and loopy time of year.