Review of 'Wild Nights with Emily'

Biopic with jumbled timeline about poet Emily Dickenson...some good knockabout comedy lesbian and straight sex scenes (no actual sex, just a lot of fooling with crinolines), and nicely filmed, but a bit boring if you don't really care about Dickenson or the mid-C19th American literary scene. Few actual wild nights.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Minari'

Somewhat shapeless and occasionally boring film about Korean immigrants trying to make a life as farmers (and chicken sexers) in rural Arkansas.

It mainly avoids the usual cliches about immigrant life, but doesn't have much to put it their place. It just sort of meanders on, until the moment of redemption when the family comes together at the end.

Recommended by someone as one of the best films of the year, can't see why. Watched via informal distribution, laptop, VLC and Chromecast.

Review of "Don't Look Up"

Everyone is reviewing this and taking positions on it - does it help the climate change movement or not?

Well, it's clever and funny, though often too painful to watch. The Trumpesque White House, the Bezos-like billionaire with his insane plan to mine the comet for resources (and escape ship for when this fails), the trivial talk shows where the scientists try to reach the public...it's all much too true to be enjoyable. It also satirizes pop-star climate activists...Ariana Grande is really great in that role, and perhaps the movement as a whole. And scientists who find it hard to communicate, and liberal media who will speak truth to power if it works for their click-throughs...

I didn't need a happy ending, but I didn't find anything to take from it except despair. I wasn't comforted by the stoical and even religious way that the main characters end up facing the impending destruction of the planet. I'm also a bit miffed that whenever Hollywod tries to dramatize climate change, it has to dramatize it...making the disaster into a sudden catastrophic event where we all go together when we go, rather that a boiling-the-frog process that will eventually kill everyone, but will kill poor and brown people first. It's much harder to represent the latter, and the fact that Hollywood doesn't try makes it harder to get that across.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'The Spy Who Dumped Me'

Much more fun that I was expecting! Some of the reviews complain that the film tries to cross too many genres...spy movie, thriller, romcom, buddy movie...but actually it makes a good job of this. The action scenes are better than the ones in James Bond films, the plot is a bit shaky but no worse than other spy/terrorist-baddies films. I was reminded of 'Salting the Battlefield', only this is way better and makes more sense. And unlike other Americans-go-to-Europe films, it has chosen some good locations and filmed them well. I especially liked the opening scenes in a junk market in Lithuania, and it really made me want to go there.

Watched on All4.

Review of 'Carousel'

Rogers and Hammerstein's second musical together, and I don't remember any of the songs from this, except 'June is Bustin Out All Over' and 'You'll Never Walk Alone' - the latter is sung twice, near the end and then right at the end. It's a 'dead person allowed to come back to Earth for one day' sort of story, with most of the time spent on the backstory of the dead man - note that the frame for this is a sort of heaven, but without any religious trappings...the deceased spend their time polishing stars, and the whole place is presided over by a bureaucrat called The Starkeeper.

There are some tremendous dance numbers with better dancing than I remember from lots of Hollywood musicals. I looked up the background on Wikipedia, and it turns out that it's lifted from a Hungarian original set in Budapest, which is interesting in itself. It's set in Maine - perhaps if I was American I'd recognise the accents, which seemed a bit odd.

Rather spoiled by the last five minutes of the final return-to-Earth sequence, in which the male lead lashes out in anger at his now 15-year-old daughter. Later she tells her mother (the dead man's sweetheart and wife) that she felt the hit but that it didn't hurt, and the mother says dreamily that if someone who you love hits you it doesn't hurt. From early we know that he beat his wife - whenever anyone accuses him of beating her he belittles it and says 'hit', with the implication that it only happened once. If that isn't a justification and romanticisation of male violence and abuse against women, then I don't know what it is.

Chatting afterwards I realised how many carousel scenes there are in films!

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of 'The Unforgiveable'

Really good emotional film about children separated from their birth sibling by adoption, and coming out of prison, and also being working class in America. Sandra Bullock is really good as a woman who comes out of prison and tries to reunite with her baby sister, to whom she has written for years but never received any reply. Lots about trauma, that rings true from my reading about this subject at the moment.

Resisting spoilers, but it's a long but good film.

Set in a grim looking Seattle - I think I remember some of the grimmer places from my work trip there, when I spent a lot of time walking around, and realised that it's a very small place. Didn't notice then that the street signs were in English and Chinese - perhaps they weren't then.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of 'Desperately Seeking Susan'

The 1980s film where Rosanna Arquette plays a bored suburban housewife (yes, that's what she calls herself, and how the blurb describes her) who follows the rendezvous of wild-at-heart urban coolster Madonna and her punk musician boyfriend Jim, who stay in touch with each other via personal ads in the New York Mirror.

The film seems to be from a world not unlike our own, but sits on the other side of the pre-internet chasm. There is no internet, no mobile phones (just great big chunky corded ones, and payphones, and answering machines)...and personal columns in local newspapers, in which people place ads in person, by filling in paper forms and handing over cash.

I note in passing that Rosanna Arquette won the award for 'best supporting actress' for this, even though she is the central character...it's her story, and she's on screen much more than Madonna, who barely acts. But hey ho, Hollywood. Just remember that if you are tempted to take any interest in the awards. I note also that Rosanna Arquette doesn't really act very well, and that she was never in much else.

Watched on BBC iPlayer via Chromecast and smartphone app.

Review of 'Trance'

Creepy and quite violent thriller, but well plotted and filmed - well, Danny Boyle, it's going to be good, isn't it? Hypnosis, false and unreliable memories, and so on. Set in London, but few recognisable establishing shots...I think I caught a glimpse of a familiar building once. Lots and lots of interiors with very shiny surfaces and moody lighting, and shots through narrow gaps. 

Watched on All4, which recommended this to us...I think the first time it's done that.

Review of 'Black Orpheus'

I set out to watch this mainly because it's the source of 'Manha Da Carnival', which I sometimes play on the trumpet. The song barely features at all in the film - the Orpheus character sings it once to a couple of small boys who think that his playing makes the sun rise. 

That said, it's a mainly interesting film with a lot about the life of a favela in Rio, and a carnival crew. It includes some reflections on the role of carnival in working-class Brazilian life (as a sort of bread-and-circuses distraction), and on the modernity and otherwise of Brazil...lots of the scenes where modern buildings are presented or used as backdrops are sinister, especially the hospital and morgue to which Orpheus goes to try to rescue Eurydice. 

There's also a powerful depiction of a candomble ceremony.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and VGA cable - the Chromecast didn't want to play this one and its audio track and subtitles at the same time.

Review of 'The French Dispatch'

Some of Wes Anderson's films are great, and some aren't. This is one of the latter. It's beautiful, and that makes its failure as a film all the more depressing. It's like some beautifully wrapped present with nothing inside the box. It's a collection of stories, tied together through the theme of a fictionalised American magazine and its writers in an imaginary French town. And none of the stories have enough of a plot, or enough engagement with the characters, despite the beautiful cinematography and the good but stylized acting. I'm sure there are lots of clever allusions and homages to the greats of French cinema, but I didn't get them and it wasn't enough for me.

Watched via informal distribution, laptop and Chromecast - VLC quite happy to play this one.

Review of 'Germania' by Simon Winder

Well, I liked this almost as much as Danubia, but not quite. It's beautifully written, and good on some parts of the history, but as it gets closer to the close - which he takes as 1933 - I think it becomes less good. In particular I think he's bad on the shortcomings of Weimar and the defeat of the German revolution at the end of WW1 - having read Sebastian Haffner's "Failure of a revolution: Germany 1918-1919", I can't see the treachery of the Social Democrat leaders the way Winder does. There was a chance, in 1918-19, that the other Germany could run things now, in a way that was utterly diffeent from what the conservatives and the military had done before. And Ebert et al blew it, even with the popular support that they had. 

And once I'd noticed that, I started to notice other things that I didn't like quite so much...it's good the way he emphasises how much of the familiar had just collapsed for so many Germans in the Weimar period, but I think he downplays the continuity with pre-war Germany of the politics of the right (were the Nazis such a break with traditional German politics and culture?) and over-emphasises how much the Nazis stole from the left, so that it's almost as if they were a rogue variant of socialism rather than a traditionalist, business-backed variant of extreme conservatism.

So still lots in there to like, particular about art and architecture, and music and literature, but some things to not like so much.

Review of 'Bad Times at the El Royale'

On the surface a much more conventional crime/mystery/thriller movie, but actually really interesting and multi-layered. I can't stop thinking about this...I'm reading reviews and analysis of the symbolism and other elements in the film. Five strangers check in to a motel on the California-Nevada border in the late 1960s, and we get their backstories as well as a complex plot in which they all become differently entangled.

Lots of references to 1960s cults, politics and fabulous music...BTW, I noticed that in The Rest of Us the daughter is reading 'Helter Skelter', and in this film there's a Manson-like cult. Must just be a coincidence, or a reflection of how deep that runs in the American psyche.

Lots of violence, but it's never comic-book or enjoyable. Hard to say more without spoilers, so really just get this one and watch it.

We watched in on All4 but it's gone from that now, I think

Review of 'The Power of The Dog'

Really powerful, beautiful film - nice to know that there are still some really good ones being made. Atmospheric, menacing without any actual violence, fabulous acting and great cinematography without any gimmicks. Lots about suppressed and not-so-suppressed male homosexuality and toxic masculinity. Now I can't wait to read the book, though I will have to because I have so many other books stacked up waiting to be read.

Just wondering - it's set in 1925 Montana, so Prohibition is in force, but it doesn't actually seem to be. They are serving spirits in the hotel, cocktails at a party with the Governor, and Kirsten Dunst's character is drinking herself to death without a bootlegger in sight. Is that what Prohibition was actually like outside the big cities?

Best film watched on Netflix for years.

Review of 'The Rest of Us'

Quite good Canadian film about...well, it's not that easy to summarize. Successful divorced children's book author discovers that her ex has died suddenly, and then the women for whom he left her is suddenly broke because the now-dead husband was concealing his dire financial situation...and the bitter, broke widow and her sweet young daughter end up moving in with the author and her grumpy disaffected teen daughter.

It's well acted and nicely done, and though you couldn't call it enjoyable in a feel-good sort of way it's compelling enough to watch. Heather Graham has graduated nicely from so-nubile sexpot to still-attractive but fading divorced wife.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Kick-Ass

Superficially enjoyable, with nods in the direction of liberal sensibilities, but actually a more or less fascist film. Nerdy comic book fan Dave decides that he will live out his fantasy of being a superhero and fighting crime, but despite the suit he's still a nerd so he gets stomped and hospitalised after he tries to take on a pair of thugs. Then he's rescued by a father-and-daughter crime-fighting superhero combo who are much, much better at violence than he is - their whole lives are dedicated to training for violence and the acquisition of weaponry.

There's plot, and teen stuff (his nerdy mates convince the gorgeous girl at school that he's gay, and she wants him for a Gay Best Friend even though she wouldn't look at him before), and lots and lots of violence - real splatter stuff, made slightly easier because it's supposed to be comic-book. But really it's almost snuff-grade, and there are no problems that can't be resolved with the application of sufficient force, violence and weaponry. The film's sympathies are entirely with the use of more and bigger guns, and the more skillful use of them. Our (anti)hero's moment of redemption, when he finally steps into his own power and authority, comes when he uses a really big machine-gun enabled jet-pack.

Oh, and the villains are all caricature Italian-Americans in a way that would be grossly unacceptable if they were say Jews or Chinese.

Watched this on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Human Traffic

There's a lot that's annoying about the film...the sound quality is poor, so that I kept turning the volume up but there's music track playing over a lot of the dialogue. There are annoying 'arty' techniques of characters speaking to the fourth wall and so on, and spoof documentary inserts. 

But it's also sort of likeable. It's a bit like Trainspotting, only with MDMA rather than Heroin at the centre. So the culture and the drug itself is more benevolent - the scene is mainly quite nice with lots of hugging of strangers, and good-looking young people dancing ecstatically (well, obviously). The five young people at the centre of the film are a bit messed up, but mainly in the way that young people are - one is jealous when his girlfriend interacts with other men, one is anxious about his sexual performance, and so on.  

For the most part it doesn't imply that they are messed up because of the drugs, and there's a nice insert from an actual stand-up comedian saying that he used drugs, he enjoyed it, and it didn't mess up his life or his career. But the young peope are all existing rather than thriving, in dead-end jobs or no jobs at all, and not on any ladders - career, property, whatever. There's a strong suggestion, amplified in the long shots over drab Cardiff at the end, that taking drugs and raving is a perfectly sensible response to the grim dullness of everyday life...and the young people seem to mainly understand that it relates to period in their life, and that it's not something that they will do forever.

The most miserable scenes in the film are in the post-party weed smoking session, where everyone is tired, ratty and paranoid. 

Obtained via informal distribution, watched via a USB stick stuck in the back of the smart TV.