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Mickey 17

2025-05-02 by Steve

Well Bong Joon Ho’s Snowpiercer didn’t quite work, and nor does his Mickey 17, and for pretty much the same reasons. Small stuff – great; world building – great; political satire – gruesome. It’s Robert Pattinson in the lead, vaguely back in the sort of fantasy territory that made his name (I mean Harry Potter and Twilight), as an “expendable” in a dystopian future where humanity is fleeing Earth, heading out towards the brave new world of Niflheim on board a spaceship. He’s the living equivalent of a crash-test dummy, the one sent in to check things out whenever a new situation arises. Is it poisonous, will it eat us, will it cause our flesh … Read more

Poor Things

2024-04-062024-03-25 by Steve

Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to The Favourite, is an act of restitution to Emma Stone, who was the best thing in that movie and yet lost out at awards’ time to Olivia Colman. Queens (as Colman was) trump upstarts. Stone does not lose out this time (in between writing and posting this, she has won the Best Actress Oscar). She is not just the focus of the movie but increasingly its purpose, once Lanthimos’s huge arm-sweep of influences and genres have bedded down. It’s Frankenstein meets Alice in Wonderland in a world styled by Jan Svankmajer and Jonathan Miller (both did Alice movies), Bertrand Bonello at his most decadantly fin-de-siecle (see House … Read more

13 Going On 30

2023-10-292013-11-29 by Steve

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 30 November Thriller released, 1982 On this day in 1982, Michael Jackson’s album Thriller was released. As I write, it is the biggest selling album of all time. And with unified collections of music now a “take it or leave it” item displaced by technology it is likely to remain so. Thriller has sold around 60 million copies worldwide (estimate) and continues to sell. It was Jackson’s sixth solo album, his second as a mature artist in charge of his career, and because Jackson had renegotiated his royalty rate with his record company only the year before (after the success of … Read more