Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Director – Matty Hannon – 2022 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 90m

****

A keen surfer and former ecology student from Australia sets out on a motorbike journey from Alaska down the West coast of the Americas to Patagonia – out on digital on Monday, July 28th

The family of Australian moving picture diarist Matty Hannon moved around a lot during his childhood. He left home as soon as he could, and studied ecology at university, where he became fascinated by the book Shamans of Mentawai about tribes living in Indonesia’s Sumatran Islands. A keen surfer, he went out to one of the islands, rode the incredible waves, embraced a simple lifestyle and felt he’d arrived in a utopia where people lived in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. He began to wonder if by concentrating on data in his studies, he’d been missing something. He stayed five years, from age 21-26.

On his return to Melbourne, he was hit by culture shock. Everything was commodified. He sat at a computer for work. He was now in a culture that referred to its people as consumers, where national success was measured in terms of how much they bought.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

The Road to Patagonia

Directed by Matty Hannon
Certificate 15
90 minutes
Released 27 June

In his mid-20s, former ecology student and keen surfer Matty Hannon returns to Melbourne, Australia. For five years, from age 21 to 26, he has lived alongside one of Indonesia’s Sumatran Island tribes, a utopia where people live in harmony with nature, assigning spirit gods to rivers and mountains. And then there are the waves.

Melbourne hits him with culture shock; a culture that refers to its people as consumers, where national success is measured in terms of how much they buy. Depression is common. Hannon records his response in this documentary as he gets out, takes a tent to Alaska, then… on his motorbike… travels down the West Coast of the Americas to Patagonia… [read the rest in the Issue 4 – 2025 edition of Reform]

[Read my longer review for this site here.]

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Categories
Features Live Action Movies

The Monkey
(2025)

Director – Osgood Perkins – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 98m

****

An automaton monkey found by two twins causes horrific deaths to people around them – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 21st

This sets its tone early on with a framing story in which a junk store owner is asked by mild-mannered, bespectacled protagonist Hal (Theo James, who also plays his twin brother Bill) to take a clockwork monkey off his hands, insisting that the object, whatever it might be, is not a toy. The store owner is sceptical. More fool him, because he is about to undergo one of many sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths of which the film offers a gorehound’s smorgasboard.

Other notable characters include their mum Lois (Tatania Maslany from Woman in Gold, Simon Curtis, 2015; Eastern Promises, David Cronenberg, 2007), Hal’s estranged son Petey (Colin O’Brien from Wonka, Paul King, 2023) and Petey’s stepfather Ted (Elijah Wood from The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson, 2001-3).

This Stephen King adaptation comes from the school of horror films which are, basically, an excuse for staging a series of sudden, gruesome and unexpected deaths. Inventiveness is high on the menu, provided you accept that killing multiple people in unique and spectacular ways can be said to be inventive.… Read the rest