I’ve watched 12 films this week, half of those are for the podcast, either being Frankenstein or Skydiving films (unfortunately none are both, answers in the comments if you know of one). I’ll mostly skip past those, my thoughts are documented elsewhere, there is a full review of Drop Zone on my letterbox if you’re interested, but be forewarned I mainly talk about my sisters cat.

I do want to mention Young Frankenstein, I was meant to save this for later in my ‘stein adventure but I caved, I needed intentional comedy. The movie holds up so well, it’s gentle, funny and comfortable to watch. Gene Wilder’s Frankenstein is one of the more endearing I’ve seen so far, although I’ve only seen ten. I think it might be the perfect hangover movie too, but I’ve not seen a Mel Brooks movie that isn’t.

I’ve been looking for something like The Pope’s Exorcist, my standout from last week. Which led me to The Rite, a 2011 film starring Anthony Hopkins, with Rutger Hauer, Ciarán Hinds and Toby Jones along for the ride. Colin O’Donoghue plays a rookie priest who’s lost his faith and is sent for exorcist training in Rome, which is apparently a real thing. He finds Hopkins and becomes a combination sceptic/prodigy/sidekick to his experienced, confident exorcist. From there the film kinda blunders around it’s core premise, we’re to believe that O’Donoghue is having a crisis of faith and that the existence of god (more accurately the devil) is in question. But the film keeps showing us supernatural events, so there isn’t any question: in this world the devil is real. So the main character just seems like a fool, and his eventual reaffirmation of faith a foregone conclusion. His barely missing the various signs of possession starts to feel like comedy, like he’s going to look away for a moment and miss someone’s head spinning in the background. I think if you want to do the crisis of faith thing you can’t have halloween store contacts and cgi skin conditions. It’s just too obvious. It’s especially frustrating because Hopkins is fantastic. His performance is subtle and it’s begging for a less obnoxiously obvious film. I just wish that we got to see it.

In turn The Rite led me to Instinct, another Anthony Hopkins film, this time Cuba Gooding Jr. is the sceptic/prodigy and it’s based on some bad philosophy book. The film is largely a framing device for a series of conversations between Gooding Jr and Hopkins, with the latter having gone crazy because gorillas live in harmony with nature. Over the film Hopkins ‘teaches’ Gooding Jr that society is bad and was largely a bad idea, while presenting no alternative. At the end he runs away back to the Gorillas he was living with, and Gooding Jr goes on to not change in any meaningful way. This was a film I should have stopped watching and wish I never had watched. It’s faux philosophy, wrapped in a film that’s only standout element is a series of Gorilla suits that were made by Stan Winston. They’re quite literally indistinguishable from the real animals and I just assumed that they’d shot with actual Gorillas, so that was cool. The rest was bad.

This cacophony of failure left me searching for serenity in a place that always delivers, cave diving ‘disaster’ documentaries on YouTube. I even found a feature length one, Dave Not Coming Back. Spoiler alert they don’t do the Touching the Void thing where one guy isn’t in the documentary and you think he’s dead but then he suddenly shows up in the interview footage, Dave did indeed not coming back. Cave divers are nearly exclusively white middle age men with apparently nothing to live for, they’ve completed capitalism early so they’re prestigeing. What I’m here for is the thrill and story of true crime, but without the guilt for exploited victims and horror of glorified killers. Cave divers being the one group of people it’s hard to feel sorry for. In this adventure the titular Dave dives deeper than anyone has before in a cave, finds a body, returns to retrieve it and dies in the attempt. The documentary is hollow and meandering, It’s this weird combination of people looking and sounding very concerned about cave diving, but then throwing themselves into it. The white middle age men talk about it like a compulsion no one else can understand, their wives and Dave’s widow talk like they’ve had all the arguments, that talk of the pointless danger of the hobby falls on disinterested ears. I think is the first cave diving doc I’ve seen that addresses that side, the tired and hurt families of these thrill seekers. I don’t think that story is well told here, but it is at least tangentially addressed. I think telling the mechanical story of what happened, where everyone was, how it went down, it’s just such an easy and natural option. That the real loss, the pain and worthlessness of the event is lost. No one wants to hear why some 50 year old accountant took up a suicidal hobby, nor do they want to hear what happened to his family after the inevitable happened. They only want the gore in between.

Ip Man is what I recommend this month, starring Donnie Yen and packed with martial arts and politics, it was really was a perfect watch. It’s in that ‘enhanced’ true story genre and it’s one of the ones where there’s an extended slideshow at the end with pictures of the actual guy. Ip Man was a martial arts grandmaster born in 1893 and lived an extraordinary life, the film focusing on just part of that. Starting just before the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and really getting going during it. Yen conveys so much though the way he fights; in the earlier peacetime scenes he is restrained, a fierce opponent but a fair and sometimes jovial one. Once he’s seen the injustice and brutalisation of the occupation he himself is brutal, his style evolving into uncompromising rapid-fire punches and kicks. This progression, along with his strong acting performance, really lifts the film up. He just has the presence of a grandmaster too, of someone on top of their game. There are a lot of sequels to this, I’m looking forward to getting into those, they come similarly highly rated. Overall a delight of a film, with wonderful action and pacing.