Popular Reviews
Cuties aka Mignonnes
The day I watched Cuties, 24 September 2020, it had 21,348 votes on the IMBD user ratings. 16,355 of those were one star reviews. And then I remembered that the film been caught up in one of those social media shitstorms, with its distributor the focus of a #CancelNetflix campaign. The overall 2.7/10 rating looked like the result of an orchestrated hit. The campaign against the film drew support from across the political spectrum, though a trawl of Twitter suggests a lot of its supporters were outraged social conservatives. So much for Cancel Culture (a series of unrelated memes bundled together and then mis-sold as an actual culture) being an unsavoury aspect of … Read more
Sylvie’s Love
The remarkable thing about Sylvie’s Love is actually how unremarkable it is in many ways. It’s a white-sliced, white-picket-fence melodrama of a sort that once might have starred a Joan Crawford. Except it’s black rather than white people playing all the parts. That shouldn’t be remarkable, nor should stories about the black middle classes, but it is and Eugene Ashe’s drama knows it’s doing something different in its deliberately old-fashioned, “they don’t make them like this any more” way. Tessa Thompson plays Sylvie, the young woman who works in her daddy’s record store but really wants to get a job in TV. Nnamdi Asomugha is Robert, the tall, dark and handsome saxophonist who … Read more
The Golden Glove
Should a serial killer movie sympathise with its killer? The Golden Glove (Der Goldene Handschuh) comes perilously close to going all-in with real-life killer Fritz Honka (Jonas Dassler), who killed four women in Hamburg between 1970 and 1974 and then hid their body parts in his attic. Grim, seedy, sleazy, disgusting, vile, the negative adjectives have piled up in discussions about this undoubtedly brilliantly made movie. I’d go for “pitiless” or “cosmically ironic”. More verbosely, it’s a cool exercise in the manipulation of the human tendency to imprint (like a duckling for the first “mamma” object it sees on hatching) suggesting the omnivorous writer/director Fatih Akin has been watching Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy … Read more
Persona
Ingmar Bergman beat Mr Spock to the mind meld. Persona, Bergman’s masterwork about one person’s identity merging with another’s, debuted in August 1966. The Vulcan psychic control technique first saw light of cathode ray in November of the same year in the Star Trek episode Dagger of the Mind. We’ve heard plenty from Mr Spock in the intervening decades, increasingly less from the once intensely voguish Bergman. But for anyone wondering where to go to get the full Bergman hit in one short, sharp dose, Persona is that place. The film follows a famous actress Elisabet (played by Liv Ullmann), suddenly an elective mute, and her nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) on a journey … Read more
Happiest Season
Gooey, sentimental Richard Curtis movies are the template for this wannabe starring Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis as Abby and Harper, a romantically linked couple going back to Harper’s parents’ for Christmas. Being a mainstream movie about homosexual love – Lesbians, Actually – these young women are not in-your-face dyke-on-a-bike Sapphics but nice young women who just want to be accepted for what they are. Neither is heroic – Abby’s parents are dead and so she never had to come out to them; Harper has never told her parents. And that’s the hook on which this film hangs. Is Harper going to fess up and simultaneously re-apprise them of the identity of her … Read more
Burnt Offerings
1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it. There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end … Read more
Zero Fucks Given
Zero Fucks Given, or the similarly blunt Rien à Foutre in the original French, sometimes also goes by the title Carpe Diem, in parts of the world where fucks actually are given about rude words. No matter what you call it you get the same thing: a detail-rich portrait of the life of the flight attendant, and smuggled inside that a sensitive drama about a young woman whose life is emotionally as up in the air as her job. Don’t worry too much about the sensitive drama bit. You could almost ignore it – though it eventually brings plenty to the table – and still be mightily entertained by this film by Julie … Read more
The Avengers: Series 6, Episode 32 – Get-A-Way!
The penultimate Avengers episode actually goes right back to the early days of this series’ production run. There was over a year between the completion of Get-A-Way! in February 1968 and its transmission in May 1969. It’s one of the ones produced (or started, at any rate) by John Bryce, whose short-lived attempt to take The Avengers back to some version of realism never really had enough time to gain traction before the old team of Clemens and Fennell were reinstated. Invisibility (realism?) is what Get-A-Way! is all about. Invisibility at a high-security prison for enemy agents, run as if it were a monastery – the warders wear habits (again, realism?) – where … Read more
Viva Zapatero!
After a slew of documentaries from the US, not least Michael Moore’s prodigous output, here’s a reminder that Europeans can make political documentaries too. Viva Zapatero! is a pop at Italian prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi by Sabina Guzzanti, whose politically satirical TV programme was axed by Italian state broadcaster RAI for being “political” – after legal pressure was applied by rival media outfit Mediaset (proprietor: Silvio Berlusconi). Guzzanti then goes further and accuses RAI of being stacked with Berlusconi stooges, effectively his employees. Should a public service broadcaster be headed by political (ie Berlusconi’s) appointees? Of course not. Though precious few in Italy have had the balls to say so, such … Read more
Jellyfish Eyes
Jellyfish Eyes starts out looking like a cute ET story and winds up being more a rampage-and-destrcution, Godzilla kind of thing. In between it gets most of the big things right. It’s Japanese, from 2013, and is the only feature film so far directed by Takashi Murakami, who is more a TV producer, though he has directed a number of shorts, among them promos for Billy Eilish and Kanye West, both obviously fans of Murakami’s style of animation. Jellyfish Eyes is not an animation. Not entirely, anyway. It’s a live-action story of a kid with no daddy (how often do kids stories feature absent dads?) who moves to a new school/town/life with his … Read more
Fanny and Alexander
Fanny and Alexander won four Academy Awards at the Oscars in 1984 and was the first foreign movie to have done so. No foreign movie has ever won more and Ingmar Bergman’s film has only been matched twice in the years since – by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Parasite (2019). At the time it was the most expensive film ever to come out of Sweden and was designed by Bergman to be his last, a grand autobiographical flourish to explain the man behind a remarkable run of astonishing movies as the director started to look back at his accomplishments. With that autobiographical aspect in mind, and armed with the knowledge that … Read more
My Bollywood Bride
Rom-coms are all about the journey and not the destination, so they say. If that’s true, then mark My Bollywood Bride down as a trip in an overheated vehicle, with terrible scenery outside and fellow passengers you’d kill yourself to be away from. The boy-meets-girl plot sees Sex and the City’s Jason Lewis as a writer who meets an Indian babe (Kashmira Shah) in California, and then woos her, unaware that she’s a big Bollywood star. Until, that is, he heads off to India to see her again, and immediately cops an eyeful of her smiling down at him from a big advertising hoarding at the roadside. My Bollywood Bride scores some points because … Read more
