A German drama based on 1942 novel by Anna Seghers about a German concentration camp survivor seeking passage to North America in Nazi-occupied France. The movie adapts this story but plays it out today. We are never really told what the political background is, just that refugees are being rounded up by police and taken away. The only way out is with a valid visa.
Man, I loved this. Tsangari is considered part of the "Greek weird wave," with Yorgos Lanthimos, and has worked with him quite a bit even, but her approach is very different. She touches on some of the same themes sometimes, but she's much less overtly surreal, and much more humanistic.
I was trying to figure out what I like so much about this movie, and I think a lot of it is that she doesn't fabricate over the top drama out of everything. A lot of movies and other media manufacture conflict by blowing simple human interactions way out of proportion, so every little misunderstanding, awkward interaction, or minor disagreement or insult has to lead to some huge dramatic conclusion. As though characters, even close friends and family, are constantly at odds right under the surface. (This is one of the big things I like about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies, too.)
Tsangari's other big movie I loved was Chevalier, which takes that theme from a different angle, where the competition and conflict is played for absurdity, and I thought it was one of the funniest movies I'd seen in a while. I probably already recommended it, but I'll recommend it again right now.
Barry Lyndon with Ryan O'Neal. It deserved the cinematography Oscar it got. It drags occasionally but mostly is good. I remember the first time I saw it. In the theatre there were a bunch of early teen kids who had been abused. They were seeing it as part of a school event. When Barry Lyndon canes Lord Bullingdon, and Bullingdon says "I will kill you if you ever lay hands on me again." they broke into loud cheers.
Has anyone seen the latest Spiderman movie, Far From Home?
Am thinking about going to see it. Sure it's earned over a billion dollars and holds a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I trust you guys before all that hype.
Has anyone seen the latest Spiderman movie, Far From Home?
Am thinking about going to see it. Sure it's earned over a billion dollars and holds a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but I trust you guys before all that hype.
Man, I loved this. Tsangari is considered part of the "Greek weird wave," with Yorgos Lanthimos, and has worked with him quite a bit even, but her approach is very different. She touches on some of the same themes sometimes, but she's much less overtly surreal, and much more humanistic.
I was trying to figure out what I like so much about this movie, and I think a lot of it is that she doesn't fabricate over the top drama out of everything. A lot of movies and other media manufacture conflict by blowing simple human interactions way out of proportion, so every little misunderstanding, awkward interaction, or minor disagreement or insult has to lead to some huge dramatic conclusion. As though characters, even close friends and family, are constantly at odds right under the surface. (This is one of the big things I like about Apichatpong Weerasethakul's movies, too.)
Tsangari's other big movie I loved was Chevalier, which takes that theme from a different angle, where the competition and conflict is played for absurdity, and I thought it was one of the funniest movies I'd seen in a while. I probably already recommended it, but I'll recommend it again right now.
So I trusted you and got the DVD. And I agree: brilliant movie! This could have so easily been over-sentimental but it wasn't! And while it's not a Lanthimos movie, he is in it. Which is cool.
My brother just recommended me this, and it's really good. It's less than 15 minutes long, and I found it on YouTube. It's in Swedish with French subtitles, but there's a comment an English translation if you watch it on YouTube.
Once it came out on DVD, I pushed Midsommar to the top of my queue because it's probably the movie I most wanted to see from this year.
It's pretty stunning, and it's going to stick with you for a while. I was going to write a lot more, but basically, this is the kind of movie that tells you where it's going to go, and the joy and horror is seeing how it's taking you there.
The novelty of this movie is that almost all of the disturbing imagery is all in the light of day. It's all creepy pagan Swedes, folk art and subtly distorting images.
I usually don't care for modern horror because it relies too much on jump scares and other cheap tactics, but Midsommar seems like the sort of film I'd enjoy. I think I'll have to watch it at some point. (Also still on this list: Get Out. My only excuse for not having seen this one yet is that I simply don't watch a ton of films these days. And the forthcoming film with Janelle Monáe, Antebellum, looks like it may also be my kind of horror film, though I still don't know too much about it.)
At any rate, I just came back from Knives Out, and it's one of the best films I've seen in a while - not that I really expected Rian Johnson to disappoint me. I'll try to keep this vague to avoid any spoilers, but due to the type of film it is, it's very difficult to talk about it without saying something that might spoil someone, so I'd advise anyone who's interested in seeing it to go see it first - ideally without reading anything else about it at all - and then read the rest of my review.
The writing is superb. The Agatha Christie comparisons are obvious and well merited; it's the sort of film where it's impossible to rule anyone out as a suspect until the resolution, and there are cleverly deployed flashbacks that reveal more of the story, causing audience expectations to turn back on themselves. Subverting audience expectations is, of course, a Johnson trademark, and I suspect it's a large part of the reason The Last Jedi caused such a divisive reaction, but here it's in the context of a genre where such misdirection is pretty much mandatory. Even by the standards of the whodunnit genre, though, Johnson excels at this kind of storytelling. Daniel Craig's Benoit Blanc, with his obviously French name and his exaggerated accent, is a conscious homage to Hercule Poirot, and the scheming, backstabbing upper-class family at the centre of the mystery could have come straight out of any Christie plot you care to name.
There are plenty of touches, though, indicating that this is a film made in 2019. Although he is never mentioned by name, the shadow of the forty-fifth president* of the United States looms large over the entire film, with several characters arguing over his immigration policy and a central character's family in fact being undocumented immigrants (a running gag is that none of the Drysdale family knows which country she is from: various family members refer to Ecuador, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil as her country of origin. We can probably rule out Brazil because she speaks Spanish with her family; the actor herself is of Cuban and Spanish descent, although she uses neither accent for the film when speaking Spanish, and if her family were Cuban in particular then they intrinsically would not be in danger of deportation). Although all the deceased patriarch's offspring pride themselves on supposedly being "self-made", one of them, a real-estate mogul, in fact received a loan of a million dollars from her father. And so on.
There is sharp, incisive class commentary throughout the film, which is fitting for this style of whodunnit; Gosford Park is another obvious point of reference here which has no doubt been cited by plenty of reviewers before me (not to mention by Johnson himself), though there are some contrasts as well. The film makes fantastic use of foreshadowing, and the plot structure is so elegantly constructed that it deserves comparison to Thomas Pynchon's plots (which, to be clear, I intend as the highest form of compliment). In fact, Blanc claims that his form of detection is inspired by Pynchon's magnum opus Gravity's Rainbow, though he also claims that no one has ever read it (Johnson himself, in point of fact, has read it twice). The film also takes inspiration from Hitchcock at times; it actually (intentionally) digresses from the structure of a traditional whodunnit into a suspense film for part of its running time, before snapping back into a whodunnit for the ending. Both transitions are performed well without feeling forced.
Other aspects of the film are as strong as the writing. I find it difficult to single out cast members for their performances because (1) all of the cast members are great and (2) citing reasons why could very easily spoil aspects of the plot, but I will cite Chris Evans in particular for a spectacular playing-against-type performance in which he steals nearly every scene. There's also Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Don Johnson, Christopher Plummer, Toni Collette, Frank Oz... just naming the cast members is probably enough. The cast works well together as an ensemble, ably playing off each other's performances. You can tell that many of them are having a fantastic time in their roles as well. The film is beautifully shot in (mostly) a gorgeous house with fantastic choices in costuming. The soundtrack, by Johnson's cousin Nathan, is tasteful and fitting, and the choices in incidental and diegetic music are superb as well.
Oh, and did I mention it's frequently hilarious? Some of the humour seems to be the result of the cast's rapport with one another, as Johnson has acknowledged that quite a few of the jokes were ad-libs by actors (though I'm sure he wrote plenty of them as well).
Johnson has said that, if this film does well at the box office (and thus far, it has), he may make a sequel. I'm in for it.
I'm half tempted to continue this review with more direct commentary on the plot within spoiler tags, but I want to wait until the film's been out for a bit longer before I do so, mostly because there are so many twists I want to preserve, and I know some people who've read this far might be tempted to click the spoiler tags without seeing the film first. The twists perhaps aren't as inventive as the ones in, say, Murder on the Orient Express or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (mostly because Agatha Christie already used pretty much every imaginable twist ending and in fact invented a lot of them), but you still won't see a lot of them coming, and the ending probably won't be as satisfying if you know they're coming the first time you see it.
Anyway, I strongly recommend this film. I haven't felt this good coming out of a cinema in a while. In fact, I feel tempted to go see it a second time before it leaves theatres, and I rarely do that. I just don't know when I'd have time.
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
I saw 1917 yesterday and loved it, despite entering the cinema disgruntled that the first showing I wanted to attend had been sold out and I had to come back two hours later. (I literally can never recall that ever happening to me before. I found out after leaving the cinema that 1917 has dethroned The Rise of Skywalker at the box office; I might’ve been less surprised had I known that.) It might help to think of 1917 not as yet another war film, but as a (non-supernatural) horror film that simply happens to be set during a war. There are far more scenes that occur during the lead-ups to, and aftermaths of, battles than there are battle scenes per se, and the antagonist isn’t always the opposing soldiers.
I can’t really say much about the plot without spoiling a major development that occurs about halfway through, but the film itself is a rare counterweight to François Truffaut’s statement that it’s impossible to make an antiwar film because film makes war look exciting. The characters’ experience in this film (as I’m reliably informed is the case for soldiers in real life) is primarily one of long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. For the audience, it’s primarily just terror, though moments of levity and human kindness do appear. The main characters demonstrate valour and heroism throughout the film, but one of its central themes is how dehumanising and utterly pointless WWI was, and another is how little the war’s commanding officers even understood about conditions on the ground. I can’t imagine anyone seeing this film and then wanting to ship off to war.
Thomas Newman’s score and Roger Deakins’ cinematography are almost reason to see the film by themselves. The usage of long, continuous tracking shots, far from being a gimmick, helps solidify the terror, as it frames the narrative within a sense of real time: the characters are given a time-sensitive mission, and the camerawork helps keep the passage (and urgency) of time central in viewers’ minds. The one understandable complaint I can see people having about the film is its dearth of women and minority characters (there are a few of both in brief supporting roles, but I must emphasise that all supporting roles in this film are brief: apart from the two leads, only one character even gets two scenes), but it’s set on the front lines of WWI, so I’m willing to forgive that – there are certain historical settings where we wouldn’t expect many women or minority characters.
Anyhow, it’s a great film; go see it if it’s your sort of thing. I don’t want to say too much more about the story, but you’ll probably see few more effective narratives on the futility and dehumanisation of war this year, or possibly any other. I think it’s up there with Knives Out as the two best 2019 films I’ve seen (I’m not willing to make an apples-to-oranges comparison as to which is better, and I must make a caveat that I haven’t seen too many 2019 films).
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
... but it’s set on the front lines of WWI, so I’m willing to forgive that – there are certain historical settings where we wouldn’t expect many women or minority characters.
It's rarely depicted but WWI saw many non-white troops in Europe. The entire British Empire sent troops, including many from India, Africa and the Caribbean. France recruited extensively from Africa. The US army fielded African American soldiers.
A Japanese horror/comedy. This starts out as pretty typical horror conceit - a director who is out of control won't stop filming even though the crew is being attacked by zombies. You're better off not knowing more than that because it's more interesting to guess.
I watched this, and about 1/3 of the way through, I thought, "how are they intending to fill out the rest of this movie?" Then I found out. You also won't know why this is a comedy until about then, too. Let's just say that everything that seems weirdly off in the first 1/3 is explained.
I probably rated it higher than other people might, because
My daughter is in her last semester in college, and the father/daughter dynamic in the last 2/3 really affected me.
My favorite film thus far in 2019, Jojo Rabbit is a powerful anti-hate satire. Funny, but smart enough not to let the Nazis get off the hook, with a storyline that takes the audience to some deeply poignant and serious moments. Heartfelt, hilarious and witty to the extreme, Taika Waititi's unique, graceful film could have gone horribly wrong in the wrong hands. Luckily, what we have is a cinematic gift.
Been pretty lucky with the Shudder films so far, I also watched Deathgasm another horror comedy.
We start the movie with Brodie, a metalhead teen, taken in by his aunt and uncle in a sleepy rural town. He winds up being an outcast in the town until he meets up with Zakk at the record store. They cause mischief and start a metal band (Deathgasm, naturally) with a few more of Brodie's outcast friends.
The real trouble starts when Zakk discovers a legendary rocker is holed up in the outskirts of town. They wind up with some music sheets, which turns out to be a black mass that summons demons when performed. Of course, they perform the music, and the town goes to shit.
It's a bit gory, and not really scary at ll. It does a decent job of being sympathetic to our main metalheads while still poking fun at them.
This was a pleasant little fun of no big importance, but I enjoyed it.
This is a low budget horror from Francis Ford Coppola - his directorial debut under Roger Corman's production.
This starts out as a weird little family crime drama. A scheming woman's husband dies of natural causes, but she will be cut out of the inheritance if he dies before his mother. She dumps him in the pond, invents a business trip for hubby, and starts working out how to get the already frail mother to die quickly as well. The only problem is, in the middle of her scheme, she meets up with the wrong side of an ax. The movie then pivots to a slasher/murder mystery.
Sort of a mystery - I was 75% certain I knew who the killer was. There are only two real suspects, and the more obvious choice is the killer, even with all of the attempts at misdirection.
So, this movie has been on my "to watch" list for decades. I first saw the pivotal scene on a Saturday afternoon "creature feature" as a child. I only remember that one scene. I think I was required to turn off the TV and do chores or something and never finished the movie. I knew the name because it was announced during the commercial break. Ever since then, the memory of this scene would bubble up, and I'd go looking for it. It's hasn't been easy to rent or buy. This time when I searched, it was streaming on Amazon.
It's short, a bit creepy, and tense. For what it was, I quite enjoyed it.
I concur with The Man and The Spammer: 1917 was amazing and Jojo Rabbit was just the right amounts of funny, sweet and sad. I thoroughly enjoyed and recommend both.
Saw 1917 last night and was very impressed with it. At around 20 minutes in I was mildly annoyed with the continuous shot effect as it is tiring and seems somehow pretentious. But I appreciate how the exhaustion you feel after 2 hours of that immerses you even more and makes you feel like you ran alongside these guys.
'Tis my new year's resolution (besides all the usual ones such as bringing people down less often) - to attempt to watch 150- 200 films this year, 75-100 of them new to me. Not all in the cinema, obviously.
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